Fight On! 7 is out (and I’m in)
The latest Fight On! is out—issue 7. Look on page 29 for Song of Tranquility by yours truly. There’s a great drawing by Mark J. Allen of a frozen mountainside covered in dead things. I made the maps in Inkscape, so if you want to play around with the maps, I’ve uploaded them here as Inkscape files.
If you order over the holidays, enter HUMBUG for a 10% discount. (Update December 13: I just heard that HOHOHO gives a 20% discount.)
This issue looks like a lot of fun, as usual. I haven’t read it through yet, but if you buy it for one thing buy it for the Mutant Future Wandering Harlot table.
BTW, speaking of old-school, while looking up old Dragon authors recently I discovered that I have an entry on Acaeum too, for the three Dragon Magazine articles I managed to get accepted back in the eighties. (Fortunately, Dragon rarely included author photos.)
If you’re looking to bundle up your purchases to save on shipping, also consider The Story Games Names Project and Stonehell Dungeon. I’ve already talked about the Names book; I finally ordered a copy myself about a week ago, and it arrived on Monday.
Stonehell is interesting. It’s very much the old-school, specifically Judges Guild, style of short, simple, tiny entries per encounter area. There is no flavor text. Normally I’m not a big fan of that style, as much as I enjoy reading the adventures, I can’t run them. But Michael Curtis takes this style and combines it with the one-page-dungeon style to make it much more useful. He provides a complete overview of each section on two facing pages, making it easy to see what’s going on in that area. When the players reach a new area, you need only take a short break to re-read the two-page description and then to re-read the two-page map/key.
Each level has two facing pages describing the overall level, with shrunken versions of the maps for that level. Again, all on just two pages. Each level is divided into separate areas. Each area consists of a two-page overview, and a two-page map and key. The overview contains the basic premise of that area of the dungeon, as well as any special creatures and magic items.
Four pages per section, plus two extra pages per level. And 131 pages of this. It’s huge, and it’s the first huge dungeon I’ve ever seen that I’d be comfortable running. I mean, I love Castle of the Mad Archmage, but it’ll be a long time before I feel comfortable running that sprawling mess.
So. One. Buy Fight On #7. Two. If you’re missing any other issues, buy them. And three, if you need to fill out your order, take a look around. There’s a lot of cool stuff there.
- Song of Tranquility map files (Zip file, 1.9 MB)
- The maps for the Song of Tranquility in Inkscape format, as well as a randomizer for the hypercube.
- Inkscape
- “Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor. Supported features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.”
- Fight On!
- “Fight On! is a journal of shared fantasy. We are a community of role-playing enthusiasts unified by our love of the freewheeling, do-it-yourself approach that birthed this hobby back in the 1970's. We are wargamers who write our own rules and fantasists who build our own worlds, weekend warriors sharing dreams of glory and authors collaborating on tales of heroism and valor. We talk, paint, draw, write, act, costume, build, and roll dice in service of our visions.”
- The Fantastical Art of Mark Allen
- Browse around his web site for some great drawings. He really does dead well.
- Story Games Name Project: Jason Morningstar (paperback)
- This paperback makes finding culturally-appropriate names on the fly a breeze. If you use vaguely historical cultures and your players often agonize over character names, you’ll find this book invaluable.
- Stonehell Dungeon: Down Night-Haunted Halls: Michael Curtis (paperback)
- Looks like a lot of fun, and takes advantage of the sparseness of old-school adventures to make it easier to get a bird’s-eye view of the adventure.
- The Society of Torch, Pole and Rope: Michael Curtis
- “The adventures of a prodigal DM attempting to return home.”
- Big Damn Archmage
- Jeff Rients reminds me of the Castle of the Mad Archmage that I keep meaning to link to.
- Acaeum wiki: Jerold M. Stratton
- Works by “Jerold M. Stratton”
More Fight On!
- Fight On! old-school gaming zine
- An amazing new resource for old school games—and that includes Gods & Monsters.
- Fight On! 9 PDF for $4.00
- Fight On! issue 9 is on sale for $4.00 in PDF format for a limited time.
- Fight On! 10: The Eudora Welty edition
- Fight On! 10 is dedicated to Tom Moldvay, “Lord of Creativity and Adventure Ace”.
More old school renaissance
- Nothing will be restrained from them, which they imagine to do
- Figuring out stuff from “the times before” is hard to do.
- North Texas RPG Con 2016
- NTRPG Con is a relatively small gaming-only convention focused on old-school games.
- Do not miss Petty Gods!
- This is a tome worthy of the gods—and that’s what it is. A tome of gods usable much as a tome of monsters, placing these petty gods—what Gods & Monsters would call spirit gods—around your sandbox’s map.
- Old School Cool
- Since I first made Gods & Monsters public over ten years ago, there’s been a groundswell of support for “old-school” D&D games. Since Gods & Monsters is compatible with adventures for original D&D and AD&D, it’s also compatible with adventures for most of these new games.
- Lamentations of the Flame Princess indie publisher
- James Raggi is producing some great stuff, easily usable with Gods & Monsters.
- Three more pages with the topic old school renaissance, and other related pages
The Names/Stonehell package arrived on Monday in the pouring rain—we got about a quarter of our annual rainfall in one day and the box soaked up most of it. The box was soggy, and bent when I picked it up like a rotten pumpkin. But Lulu’s plastic wrapping kept the books safe and dry. They were in perfect condition. (The pizza sauce that spilled all over it was, I’m afraid, my fault.)