Heart Attacks and Other Fun

So... I had a series of small heart attacks (I didn't know that's what they were) culminating in a massive heart attack back in September (on 09/11, weirdly), which has resulted in me re-thinking a lot of my life.

With regard to hobbyist pursuits, I'm dedicating real time and effort to running some RPGs again, before I'm shuffled off the mortal coil. First up: 

Faerûn Through a Glass Darkly

You all know Faerûn, but not this Faerûn. This Faerûn is different. Darker. Stranger. This is the Twilight Zone. The Outer Limits. Tales From the Darkside. Step into another realm. A realm of the strange and surreal. The weird. The dark and the dangerous. This is Faerûn Through a Glass Darkly. A truly forgotten realm. 

Built on a chassis of the original Forgotten Realms first edition box set, Faerûn Through a Glass Darkly is an episodic “acid fantasy” campaign of high weirdness. Revisit an old favorite through a new lens!

Faerûn Through a Glass Darkly will be run using Advanced Labyrinth Lord (a D&D Basic/Expert clone) with additional content from James Spahn’s Class Compendium and Petty Gods (by numerous authors). 

Ideally, I’ll be running this at The Yellow King in Colorado Springs, but due to health issues compounded by the current national health crisis, I may have to run the game on Discord (I have my own server set up for such, complete with dice bot and a free VTT solution). 

Expect to see more information on this here, soon-ish.  

Glory Road Roleplay

I'd like to take a moment to sing the praises of a small-press game currently available on DriveThruRPG. Glory Road Roleplay. While I haven't run it and the presentation does leave something to be desired, the mechanical bits are really neat in that they provide a good degree of verisimilitude* without complicating things too terribly much.

C.J. Carella (yes, that C.J. Carella) provides a foreword calling out what he liked about the game (and what he stole from it for what would eventually become Unisystem). Read the foreword via the full-size preview on DriveThruRPG (I've provided a link to the product listing below). 

It certainly isn't a game for everybody, but if you like things such as different weapons being treated differently in combat and a good, original, magic system (which I personally find the lack of to be THE biggest weak point in modern fantasy RPGs), then you might want to give Glory Road Roleplay a look. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/218159/Glory-Road-Roleplay-Core-Rules

*I'm aware that it's cool to hate on verisimilitude now in certain circles, but I still like game design in pursuit of the appearance of realism every now and again. 

Reality Knights: A Free RPG

So, somehow I ended up with some supplements for Torg, but not the core rules. And I didn't have the money to buy the core rules so, instead, I wrote some. With extra murder. you can download them, here, for free: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1T8leHqKQH42T3NvsbGG4xSERpbsHZxF3/view?usp=sharing

The Fixer: A New Class for D&D 5e

So, if you're into techno thriller fantasy (or want to get into it), this will probably be right up your alley. The Fixer is a new class for 5e authored by my friend and sometime business associate, Jim Pinto (who you may recognize from his days at AEG and, specifically, for his work on The World's Largest Dungeon, 7th Sea, and other games during his time there). And it'll set you back less than $3 (US)! 

The Fixer at DriveThruRPG

Praise for Exalted Funeral

Many of you already know what Exalted Funeral is (and if you don't, I've dropped a link below), but what you might not have known is that Cristin of Exalted Funeral is a customer service dynamo! 

TLDR: Due to an error with a shipping label (notably, the program used to generate the label didn't encode my name or street address in the bar code, which is what the USPS uses to sort mail), a package with my copy of Death Robot Jungle was almost irretrievably lost. 

Enter Cristin!

With literally two hours on the clock before the post offices closed, she managed to suss out the error, track down my package, and make arrangements for the USPS to let me pick it up after hours. Disaster averted! 

So, if you've been thinking about ordering from Exalted Funeral, do it. You won't be disappointed with their products or their customer service. 

https://www.exaltedfuneral.com/

Wonderful, Weird, Stock Art Resource

If you're a small-press publisher creating RPG content and need some wonderful, weird, stock art with a no fuss commercial license, check out these great offerings from Yuri Perkowski Domingos at DriveThruRPG: 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/16014/Yuri-Perkowski-Domingos

Front Range Warlock Rules (Free D&D Hack)

As some of you know, I've commercially published a couple volumes of house rules for OD&D (1974) and some free content for other editions of D&D. Well, some of that stuff is no longer available due to behind the scenes moving and shaking, but here are the bare minimum house rules I use when running older editions of D&D.

Some of these "rules" are just good common sense rulings that can be used with pretty much any RPG, while others are specific to earlier editions of D&D (but, with some work, can be used with newer editions of the game by enterprising DMs). 

Anyway, get 'em here: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mBeK9mgI1SMeIQdyRSAXPKWTTPEOCwvr/view?usp=sharing

Five Words v3: A free RPG

Five Words is something that I initially wrote and released in 2018, then again under a CC license in 2019, and here it is again! This time, although the rules remain almost unchanged, I've added some art and reintroduced the fantasy setting from the 2018 version (omitted in the 2019 release). It's easy to adapt, plays fast, and has actually been play-tested! Plus, y'know, free. 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=11up4uqIuoDZQocaOEW7GYm3sY2lLCaXW

Who Are Adventurers?

My friends and I have talked a bit about this at length. 

Many fantasy roleplaying games assume "adventurer" as a profession (even if just implied) and, to one degree or another, "adventurers" as an important cog in the machine that drives the setting's economy. What they don't often do is ruminate on who adventurers are and why they do what they do.   

I theorize that adventurers are either desperate folks, fearless folks, or foolish folks. I mean, if you look at adventuring as a profession in the context of most common fantasy settings, what reasonable person would pursue that life?  

The risk of being a professional adventurer is high and, while rewards can be earned, there are absolutely safer, more lucrative, professions in most such settings. A jeweler, money lender, or even just a shrewd merchant, for example, probably earns magnitudes more money than your typical tomb-looting vagabond - and without risking their lives on a daily basis. 

So.

Desperate folks. Everybody needs to eat. Even in fantasy land, this is a given. If you don't have any marketable skills and haven't inherited a business or monies, you have to make money somehow. Anybody can loot a grave or raid a tomb. People have historically engaged in such activity in our own world for similar reasons. This is understandable. 

Fearless folks. Daredevils do exist. People who indulge risky activity purely for the associated thrill. This is slightly less understandable because, in my opinion, it's not entirely rational. Ostensibly, the greater the risk, the greater the thrill, which is why these folks would rather wade knee deep into a horde of hungry undead than, say, climb a mountain. Such people are, to my mind, dangerous. 

Foolish folks. Everybody knows at least one fool. These are the folks who just don't do the math and have visions of fame of untold fortune in their heads. And maybe they'll prove me wrong, but in my experience, such folks either end up dead or not substantially better off financially at the end of their career as a professional adventurer than they were at the beginning. Fame and fortune are, on most days, fleeting at best. 

So, who is your adventurer? A desperate man or woman who has mouths to feed or debts to pay? A thrill-seeking daredevil who seeks out adventure for its own sake? Or a foolish person seeking to enrich themselves in what is quite possibly the riskiest way possible? And what does examining adventurers through this lens imply for your setting? 

Some food for thought.  

Socialites & Soirees: A free RPG

What if the Original Fantasy RPG had been more focused on social parley than flashing blades? Well, this little RPG takes that idea and runs with it. I wrote it over a weekend this month. It's short, simple, and free. Get it here: 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1QQYWo4HzwaAHZtXUGgcbTQlxb7sW3SKX

Simple Six v03: A Public Domain Fantasy RPG

I originally wrote this back in early 2019. This is the latest revision, complete in two pages. I haven't play-tested it over the course of a long-term campaign, but it holds up well in short, focused, play sessions. Anyhow, here it is for your gaming pleasure - and released to the public domain, so you can modify it however you like, for fun or profit! 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ORtCvgxJe4YuWMQW4Tz79nUJfFAzYPmY

Badassitude: A free RPG

This is a free RPG about men and women of extraordinary mettle, complete in two pages. It's inspired by Snake Plissken (though possibly Solid Snake, as well). Enjoy! 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=18RfHleW48Sulu3dqA8IGZ_t9SVBuLRTs

Excuses

I'm still working on a review for The Dark Peaks: The Festival of Swords and You Got a Job on the Garbage Barge. These are coming along s-l-o-w-l-y (but they are coming). The last two weeks have not been great mental health weeks, but I've been trying my best to get these reviews written!  

This morning, in the grip of depression (sorry, I know that's not very positive), I retired my Twitter account after a week of shit Twitter (I'm aware that's not positive, either) and no real outlet to deal with the accumulating stress.

But!

I'm on the road to recovery and, now that I won't be obsessively sifting through tweets, I'll have plenty of time to devote to this blog, reviews, and positivity in general (there's the positivity).   

The Merchant's Heart (Review-ish)

This isn't a proper review, nor even a capsule review. I did, however, want to say some kind words about this adventure module. I purchased it awhile back and was reminded of it this morning when a person whom I follow on Twitter was asking for short adventure recommendations that could easily be dropped into a Victorian Era city setting. This qualifies. And it's quite good. 

Make no mistake - this isn't an intricate adventure full of subtle nuance. It's short, to the point, and brutal. It isn't fancy, but the price is right and it's a simple mystery that can be dropped into any crapsack setting without much work. The mechanics are couched in D&D-isms, but it's simple enough to convert it for use with any system, using those mechanics as guidelines. 

So, check it out, here: 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/267950/The-Merchants-Heart

First Things First

I want to kick off the real content here with a couple of capsule reviews, but I'm waiting for my new e-reader to arrive in the mail (assuming that the USPS hasn't lost it, as it is already running one day late and not returning new tracking updates). So, I'll give that a few days, after which you can expect the first review (or two). 

I have three games/game things in particular that I'd like to talk about. First, Beta Maxx X: Supernova Edition by Andrew Chirgwin of Halfling Caravan Games (I've been meaning to talk about this since last month, but I had to sell my old e-reader). The Dark Peaks: The Festival of Swords by Kieran of the Dark Peaks (because they politely asked). And, finally, You Got a Job on the Garbage Barge by Amanda Lee Franck. 

So, keep am eye out! 

And so it begins...

Hello! 

As some of you know, I was once a "professional" ttrpg reviewer. I made money reviewing ttrpg products for various outlets, was responsible for organizing and structuring RPGNow's original Staff Review program, and did occasional consulting work on products for other publishers. Then I gave all of that up. 

Since then, I've been creating and selling my own little games, mostly for fun, rather than profit (although I've been incredibly blessed to work with fellow creatives in that capacity). I recently contributed to Thorn: City of Kings with Jim Pinto, which uses a highly modified version of my own FIST System. 

I very recently got back into doing reviews - also for fun, not for profit. I have a pinned tweet over on Twitter that is dedicated to "One Tweet Reviews" where I basically say nice things about games that have impressed me (I did write one review about a game that disappointed me). 

This blog will be dedicated to positivity in ttrpgs. 

I will post short reviews here of products I like and do my best to boost the signal of fun and positive products put out by incredible indie publishers. 

To clarify: I will not spend energy here talking about games I don't like, calling out creators who are "missing stairs" in our hobby (or their supporters), attacking other bloggers, etc. 

This isn't that kind of blog. Which will probably come as quite the surprise to some of you who follow me on Twitter, where I can be quite angry/shouty. I'm trying to do better. I'd like to see more sites dedicated to praising worthy products and creators. I've been told I should "be the change I want to see" so I am. Right here. 

Thank you for joining me on this journey.