All of D101 Games pdfs are in DriveThruRpg.com Christmas in July sale.
So that means 25% off Crypts and Things, OpenQuest, River of Heaven and The Company, and all the adventures/supplements for those games, until the end of July.
I’m currently a big fan of Glyn Seal’s The Midderlands, which I previewed in an earlier post., which is currently on Kickstarter.
Ok if it reaches its funding goal of £12 k (and it’s already over halfway there at the time of writing), I will produce a 5-10 page conversion document. This pdf will allow you to pick up and play the Midderlands (which already uses Swords and Wizardry) with Crypts and Things, that all Midderlands backers will receive. The Midderlands is a vile and dangerous Weird Land that fits in with the whole vibe of Clark Ashton Smith’s Averoigne Stories, whose tales of weird fantasy set in a fictional province of medieval France, which was a significant influence on Crypts and Things nastier side.
The document will contain sections on:
1. Characters. How to take C&T’s core character classes and drop them in the Midderlands. New Lifepath tables to reflect both characters from the Midderlands and the Savage North and Tame South from outside its borders. New Life path tables for classes to take into account the career opportunities in the Midderlands.
2. The Midderlands is a feast of creatures, but I will also give notes on Fiends from Crypts and Things that you can drop straight in with ease.
3. Rules modifications for C&T, for example, the corrupting effects of Gloomium and the threats to characters’ sanity the land presents.
Just to be clear, I’m not getting paid for this. I’m doing this because it’s an excellent setting/creature/adventure book that’s got me all excited to do a conversion doc that lets me run it when the book comes out.
So if you are a Crypts & Things fan I hope I’ve given you a little bit of an incentive to go check it out and if you like what you see back it.
25% off Summer Sale at D101 Games Web store, for two weeks, closes Sunday 16th July 12 am GMT.
Amongst the items on Sale!
P&P is free to UK residents.
Just finished a very raw, very rough draft of The Furnace, one of the scenarios that is going to be the scenario book The Tournaments of Madness and Death, for my mate and esteemed Crypt Keeper Julian Hayley who will be running it on Sunday afternoon at UK Games Expo.
Its been a hard process, taking a scenario I ran as my return to D&D a good seven years ago. Pulling out of my brain, looking at the scraps of notes and scans of maps (which I dumped entirely as too fiddly), and trying to make something that to be honest ran much better in reality due to some cracking players (Tony Murray-Clay and the Leicester Lads) than the mess that was on the paper.
I’ve no doubt Jules will makes it his own and rock it hard, and I’ve learnt a lot from writing it up, with lots of ideas about what makes a Crypts and Things scenario tick and different from all the other dungeon crawl games out there. Ideas that will make it into The Tournaments of Madness and Death which is meant to have an article about writing/running C&T adventures for one shot conventions.
Glad to get it done, but man does it need a very hard edit before I let it loose on you uncivilized savages 🙂
If you too are feeling nostligic here’s the series of posts I wrote about the Furnace when I ran it at Furnace Convention (hence the name) in 2010.
The presence of a villainous sorcerer is fundamental to a good Swords and Sorcery tale.
While the setting of Life and Death, the post-magical apocalypse setting of The Shattered Lands, is very low magic in keeping with genre expectations, the bad, mad and downright dangerous to know are out in force as antagonists in the books collection of adventures.
Bilgen, is very much your young unpleasant black magician in training. He’s very much modelled after obnoxious wanna be sorcerers I met in my real life student days. Petty smelly types who call other people “norms” or “mundanes” taking great pride in their knowledge of Magick without ever really doing much. Bilgen has a handful of spells that make him useful to the bandit chief, who also is deluded and thinks he’s a powerful Merchant Lord, and allows him to terrorise the local peasants.
Tel-Kar-Nath is the real deal. He is a sorcerer who is fit to be the player character’s nemesis and is a worthy adversary. He’s been a powerful court magician in a previous life whose machinations brought down reality, been imprisoned in hell for his crimes and is now back a monstrous thing with a psychotic personality.
Tel-Kar-Nath talks in a deep monotone about the joys of death. The finality of it all and the absolute power-mastery it brings. He is more than happy to demonstrate his power upon a hapless captive. However he does not attack the characters directly…
If they attack him, he uses his magic to evade and escape and his zombie followers to hold them off. He is more interested in playing the role of the enigmatic magical master than dealing with the characters, whom he believes are beneath him.
The King in Chains was once a sorcerer of immense reality blasting potential like Tel-Kar-Nath, but is now a husk of his former power. He has been brought back into being as an undead creature, by a ruthless Necromancer who uses him as a magical power source and channel for raising more Zombies. Even in this half-dead state there’s something that realises that this isn’t a good state of affairs and who knows what vengeance it will wreck if the player characters ever loosen those chains.
The Chained King by David M. Wright
Life and Death is a collection of four adventures that make up a mini-epic tale of a struggle against the forces of Undeath in a world recovering from a magical apocalypse. It is a conversion of an existing OpenQuest adventure, for Crypts and Things and other Class/Level based Fantasy RPGs with all new art by David M.Wright (the artist who illustrated Crypts and Things in its entirety. Its currently been worked on for a release later this month.
Previous Posts about Life and Death Zarth Edition
Life and Death Zarth Editon – cover by Jon Hodgson
I freely admit that I have a thing for the Undead in the same way as some fantasy gamers have a big thing about orcs and other green skinned monsters.
Rather than splurge on the various Zombie RPGs that have come out since the 90s, I’ve always channeled my love of these undead through my own adventures. My upcoming re-released Life and Death Zarth Edition, for Crypts and Things and other OSR RPGs, really is my fantasy tribute to the films of George A. Romoro.
This first Zombie is encountered in the second adventure of this four adventure collection. He is recently deceased, like the rest of the Zombies encountered in the old Sorcerer’s Tower that forms the basis of Dust of Eternity, and like a cruel joke his previous personality and some memories linger in his now dead body. The Dust of Eternity is a low-level introductory adventure, but one I intended to show the principle of Monsters are People too even the Zombies who normally lack a personality. The inspirations came from the fact that I had recently been playing Bioshock – where in the the sunken city of Rapture its inhabitants have been turned into mockeries of their formerselves by the use of biogentics, yet still remember their former life and go around moaning and lamenting about the humanity and relationships they had lost.
Young Zombie by David M.Wright
The idea of a dead civilization that choked to death on its own evil practices thousands of years previously has always tickled my fancy. The third adventure Dead Pot Country explores this theme as the adventurers venture into dried up river valley and wander through the ruins of a once glorious civilization. A civilization that buried its dead in large pots in fields surrounding its main city…a practice that leads to minefield of danger when the undead inhabitants of said pot burials come back into the light of day.
Pot Burial Zombie by David M.Wright
I always liked the idea of Zombies as victims and embodiment of a viral plague, and this theme is played out in the final adventure, Life and Death, where the city of Miraz is in the grip of a plague whose victims are resurrected as shambling undead like the one pictured below. Miraz is in many ways is an ancient Mesopotamian city state complete with mudbrick houses and even a Ziggurat which is home to the God-Tyrant of the city. The plague is symptomatic of the collapse of order that the city is undergoing when the adventurers arrive in the city. Not only has the Tyrant lost control of a third of his city to the plague, but his sons are at war with each other and a rebellion amoung the peasants is brewing.
Plague Zombie by David M.Wright
Life and Death Zarth Edition is currently in the final phases of production and is due out April/May this year.
Got an idea for a short adventure or article for Crypts and Things?
With the success of the first issue of From the Shroud I’m looking for articles and adventures of no more than 10 pages in length for a second issue. In the first instance you should send a synopsis of what you intend to submit to me at newt@d101games.com.
Payment is a print/pdf of the issue your work appears in.
From the Shroud Issue one is available in pdf form from DriveThruRpg.com
The Crypt Keeper by David M. Wright
Since the kickstarter I’ve planned to support those heroic and enthusiastic Crypt Keepers who run games at conventions, at their local gaming store and online, with a Disorganised Play Programme, of support documents, and a library of ready-made adventures.
Well we are now open for business. If you backed as a Convention Champion or Hero on the Kickstart you would have got an update about this and the Tournaments of Madness and Death book.
If you didn’t back the kickstarter but want to join the Graveyard Shift, drop me a line at newt@d101games.com
I’ve thrown a hard cover copy of Crypts and Things +two runners up pdfs at Tenkar’s Tavern , the outstanding News blog covering a good chunk of OSR stuff daily, for their annual OSR Christmas giveaway.
To get in with a chance with winning simply go over to the Tavern and comment on this post, sometime within the next 48 hours 🙂
So here we go, hot on the heels of the main rule book comes this short, fun A5 zine, which is currently in layout.
This is the content’s list:
Achievements. A short system that sits alongside the experience system to reward characters for things they have done in their adventures, making them memorable events and useful benefits.
The Secret of Skull Hill. A short adventure of mystery and otherworldly delights featuring the schemes of an alien parasitic race and their attempts to reunite the body and soul of their host god.
By their Master’s Dark Command. The sad and short lives of Sorcerer’s apprentices revealed, and the useful things they become after death detailed.
Exotic Liquid Relief by Neil Shaw. Is your character bored with quaffing bog standard Blackmire’s Best whenever they need to regenerate 1d6 Hit Points? Well Neil Shaw provides details of a variety of brews to make your character’s life more varied and interesting.
Generic Life Events. This table is if you are overwhelmed by the sheer number of Life Event tables in the main rule book or simply after a OGL version you can base your own efforts off.
Useful Items of the Kindly Ones. Minor magical items left behind by the gods who used to care about Zarth.
Things to Find in Great Pots. A short random table for the harried Crypt Keeper for that inevitable moment when the players ask “so that pot you mentioned just now, what’s in it?”
Tea Party of Doom. A short encounter somewhere in the dark dismal woods with a crazy immortal Alchemist who has been playing with the psychoactive toads and their potential to provide tea.
Here’s the cover by David M. Wright
