I was supposed to be at Dragonmeet today (like every other gamer in the UK, from what I can gather by my Google Plus feed), but since I can’t walk much I stayed home.
And guess what arrived?
Pretty much everything!
Into the Odd – 48 pages of postindustrial adventures, horrific hazards, and cosmic meddling, written by Chris McDowall (check out their blog for a veritable smorgasbord of free support material). Delve into the ruined undercity, explore lost islands, find uncanny Arcana. This is a fast, simple game, to challenge your wits rather than your understanding of complex rules. Reviews here, here, here, here, here, here and here. By the way, Odditional materials (a fanmade compendium) will be released the next week or so on RPGNow.
Adventure Fantasy Game R10 – years ago I was about to write a clone, but then got smitten by some ideas by Sham, so with his blessing I wrote Adventure Fantasy Game instead. AFG is an original, non-clone Old School game, in its tenth revision. Simple, d6-based game mechanics. 5MORE Resolution System, skills improving with use. Mana-based magic. Characters improve by Plundering, completing Accomplishments, or by actually trying to do stuff, as flexibly as you want. No clerics, no XPs, no accounting, no memorization or other legacy rules, but still compatible with Old School material pretty much without conversions.
AFG can be used by itself or as an ensemble of hacks for other retroclones. Contains also bunch of original spells and “The Temple Beneath the Harga Volcano”, a 15 pages sandbox campaign featuring cannibals, terrorscarabs, exploration, a marginally active volcano, inhospitable grumpy locals, glaciers, a giant or two and whole lot of heads on sticks. Plus Squid Templars of Cthulhu. Character sheets by the always excellent Jason Sholtis. The new revision consists mostly of corrections and small fixes, and it’s printed on better paper.
But you can get the first two chapters for free: it’s all you need as a player.
The good news is that, as always, if you bought it already you get free updates. If you have a download link you should be able to get the updated files in a few days. Same if you bought it on RPGNow (you’ll get an email notification). Everyone else, send me a mail.
Wonder & Wickedness – Brendan of Necropraxis’s fame wrote a new magic system where all spells have no level and are accessible to casters of any level, plus magic shields and a new exciting ways to project magic to do damage that gets rid of those dozens of madlibbed fire/ice/acid-ball/bolt/cloud (Malevolence). He then wrote seven new schools of sorcery, 56 new spells to be used with the new mechanics (but also with your Into the Odd/D&D/AFG game, of course) and, for when spellcasting goes really badly, 84 magical catastrophes. He then designed 50 new unique magic items, and they are all unique, like this:
The Gossamer Mantle of Irapoden
Irapoden’s mantle is a grey cape of the finest gray silk that is exceedingly light but never stirs in any breeze. It hangs on the shoulder as sludge, and almost seems to drip in movement rather than flow like cloth. When the hood is pulled low, the wearers shadow animates and detaches, becoming a loyal servant. The shadow has the strength and fortitude of four men, and remains ambulant as long as the the cape’s wearer does not move. The shadow may be called forth no more than once per day, but if slain will never return, no matter the illumination.
All the interior art is by Russ Nicholson. Yes, that Russ Nicholson.
Reviews here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
Pergamino Barocco, Paperback edition – Roger had a brilliant idea. RPG supplements about spells and magic are usually awfully plain lists of descriptions of spells, all crammed up in as few pages as possible and seemingly written in the driest way possible. You always wanted your spells to be in a book that looks like a spellbook, feels like a spellbook and illustrated with arcane imagery.
So we put some effort into it and he wrote and designed and I did the layout and some tinkering with the presentation and a leporello book came out. Well, an entire edition of them.
But since it gets really time consuming and therefore terribly expensive, we also made it into PDF and paperback. A review of the (now unavailable) leporello edition is here.
Lost Pages 