Category Archives: Spotlight

Countdown to Carcosa

I have been trying to avoid posting more than once per day, but I have already broken my rule once today for the recent Oubliette 7 announcement. So I might as well break it again, right?

Also sprach JimLotFP:

…the Carcosa book is going to be right almost as thick as the Grindhouse box…

That sounds fantastic. This is by far the OSR product I am most looking forward to right now.

And:

More than that, Eero (design/layout guy for the project) linked every hex on the maps (and the room numbers of the Fungoid Gardens map) so clicking on it goes straight to the entry in the body of the book.


I’m particularly excited because I missed the original release (being blissfully unaware of the OSR at that time).

Oubliette 7

Free from RPGNow “for a limited time” (original announcement here).


I haven’t read the whole thing cover to cover yet, but it served nicely as my breakfast reading. Some highlights:

  • The Pareto Principle applied to RPGs.
  • Black Blade advertisement about Monsters of Myth. I thought physical copies were no longer available (Lulu no longer sells them). I sit happily corrected.
  • Extensive set of replacement dungeon random encounter tables (with precalculated hit points).
  • Short adventure in the sword & sorcery mode (for Labyrinth Lord characters of level 3 to 5): Tomb of the Snake King. This looks really nice.
  • The 10-foot pole: variations on a theme.
As always, the art is really the differentiator. Worth checking out for the visuals alone.



The Big Purple D30 Rule

My set of 5 d30s arrived last week. I’m thinking of adopting The Big Purple D30 Rule:

Once per session each player may opt to roll the Labyrinth Lord’s big purple d30 in lieu of whatever die or dice the situation normally calls for. The choice to roll the big purple D30 must be made before any roll. The d30 cannot be roll for generating character statistics or hit points.

Sham’s Cover to Cover

Here is an index of Sham’s wonderful D&D Cover to Cover series. I couldn’t find a sequential list of the posts on Sham’s site, so I made one myself. If you have any interest at all in 1974 OD&D, you should read this. I’m about halfway through the posts myself. My content notes below are not reflective of all the subjects that the 3LBBs cover; they are a summary of what Sham is discussing in his posts.


Sham’s own introduction:

D&D Cover to Cover
Being a series of articles in which the author reads the indelible words of Gygax and Arneson as presented the Original Collector’s Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, published by Tactical Studies Rules. Beginning with Men & Magic, and concluding with The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, the author will consider those earliest passages, adding elucidations and interpretations along the way for your consideration.

Men & Magic

Part 1 Forward
Part 2 Introduction
Part 2B Introduction
Part 3 Scope
Part 4 Recommended equipment: outdoor survival (board game), chainmail (game rules), imagination, 1 patient referee
Part 5 Preparation for the campaign
Part 6 Characters: fighting-men, magic-users, clerics, dwarves
Part 7 Characters: elves, other types, alignment, changing class
Part 8 Determination of abilities; bonuses and penalties thereof
Part 9 Languages
Part 10 NPCs, equipment, experience tables, class stats
Part 10B Basic equipment and costs; the cross and religion
Part 11 Alternative combat system
Part 12 Saving throw matrix
Part 13 Spells table, turning undead, evil and chaotic clerics
Part 14 Explanation of spells (pages 23-34), 1st level: read magic, read languages, protection from evil, charm person, sleep
Part 15 Explanation of spells, 2nd level: levitate, phantasmal forces, invisibility, ESP. 3rd level: hold person, dispell magic, fire ball, lightning bolt, slow spell, haste spell
Part 16 Explanation of spells, 4th level: polymorph self, polymorph others, remove curse, confusion, charm monster. 5th level: contact higher plane, cloudkill, feeblemind. 6th level: anti-magic shell, death spell, geas, move earth, control weather
Part 17 Explanation of spells (clerics), 1st level: cure light wounds. 3rd level: cure disease. 4th level: cure serious wounds, turn sticks to snakes. 5th level: dispell evil, raise dead, create food, the finger of death. More on anti-clerics.
Part 18 Magical research, books of spells
Part 19 Conclusion
Part 20 Conclusion: discussion of reader comments

Monsters & Treasure

Part 21 Monster reference table, hostile & benign, monster categories
Part 22 Bad guys: men, gnolls, trolls, giants
Part 23 Dead guys: skeletons, zombies, ghouls, wights, vampires
Part 24 Mythological: manticoras, hydras, chimeras, wyverns, dragons (size & subdual)
Part 25 Myth. (cont.) purple worms (“lurk everywhere just beneath the surface”); Fairy tale: centaurs, dryads, dwarves, elves, rocs
Part 26 Otherworldly: invisible stalkers, elementals, djinn, efreet; “great power demands great caution”
Part 27 Clean-up crew: ochre jelly, black pudding, green slime, gray ooze, yellow mold; “nuisance monsters”
Part 28 Mundane: large insects or animals; other: cyclopses, juggernauts, living statues, geletinous [sic] cubes; robots, golems, androids
Part 29 Treasure types, tables, probabilities, swords, armor, miscellaneous weapons, rare magic weapons, potions
Part 30 Scrolls, maps (“Maps constitute 25% of all randomized items from the ‘any’ category”)
Part 31 Magic swords: intelligence, powers, egoism, alignment, bonuses
Part 32 Armor (“Armor Class is not only defined by the armor worn, but also defines what armor is worn”) , magic shields
Part 33 Potions: giant strength, longevity; rings: three wishes, delusion; wands & staves: paralyzation, staff of striking (“a 1974 beat-stick”)
Part 34 Miscellaneous: medallions of ESP, protective items; elven cloak & boots; non-protective helms; gauntlets of ogre power, girdle of giant strength
Part 35 Magical items’ saving throws (limiting magic item proliferation), artifacts (powerful aligned magic items)
Part 36 Conclusion: “This IS the Holy Grail of RPGs, and it deserves attention and its truths need to be brought forth, that they might stand on their own merits.”
Part 37 Conclusion: discussion of reader comments
The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures

Part 38 Adventure styles, sample dungeon cross section, “the campaign is also the world which emerges from these adventures”
Part 39 The underworld, dungeon size, sample dungeon level
Part 40 Tricks & traps, distribution of monsters & treasure, maintaining freshness

Silver Blade Adventures

The Silver Blade Adventures blog is written by Matthew James Stanham, who is also one of the coauthors of Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea, an old-school RPG under development. The blog is relatively low volume, and is made up of articles and reviews of OSR-friendly published products. The reviews are useful, but for me the real gold is in the articles, each of which ruminates on a game trope or rule (and usually includes a link to a document which compares how the aspect under consideration is treated by the various versions of TSR D&D and popular retro-clones). I just finished reading these from beginning to end, and I’m sure I will revisit them, especially the comparative historical analysis documents.
Reordered chronologically:

[Article] Orcs’ Nest
[Article] Dragon Men

Further, his right sidebar “Blogs” widget contains one of the better lists of influential OSR bloggers. I’m not familiar with all of them, but based on the (excellent) work of the ones I do know, by association I’m confident all of them are worth investigation. I can’t link to the widget directly, but here is a snapshot in time:

John Adams * Tavis Allison * Greg Backus * Jolly Blackburn * John Bingham * Joseph Bloch * James Boney * David Bowman * Joseph Browning * Stephen Chenault * Daniel Collins * Jason Cone * Robert Conley * Matthew Conway * Michael Curtis * Mike Davison * Thomas Denmark * Nicolas * Dessaux * Kyrinn Eis * Matthew Finch * Robert Fisher * Jeff Grubb * Mark Hall * Ken Harrison * Christopher Hogan * Scott Hoover * Jimm Johnson * John Laviolette * David Macauley * James Maliszewski * Moritz Mehlem * James Mishler * Jeffrey Preston * Daniel Proctor * Anthony Ragan * Victor Raymond * James Raggi * Jeff Rients * Wayne Rossi * Matthew Schmeer * Alex Schroeder * Michael Shorten * William Silvey * Matthew Slepin * James Smith * John Stater * Randall Stukey * Patrick Wetmore

Mr. Stanham also maintains an excellent collection of links to published OSR materials at this Dragonsfoot Thread: Publishers & Products.

Semper Initiativus Unum

I have really enjoyed reading through Initiative One recently. It’s a great little blog that unfortunately seems to have been inactive since September of 2010. Even when it was active, it was not very high volume (38 posts 2008 – 2010), but just about everything is worth reading. It has a wonderful historical perspective on OD&D; I read it from cover to cover.

(Aside: I’ve been pondering writing a scraper script that would transform Blogger blogs into epub format documents to make it easier to read them chronologically and offline. There are so many high-quality OSR blogs to catch up on, but Blogger does not make it very convenient to read blogs in that way.)