Day 3 of the Kickstarter, and all backers now get a companion volume, The Tourist’s Guide to the Six Worlds, as a free pdf.
I’ve added four high-tier Dragon Reward levels to help fund the project quickly and grow the Guide.
Read about it here
I’ve just got this from my mate Dave McAlister who runs Fortifier Games
If you’re looking for a TTRPG adventure for Halloween I have two that you might be interested in:
Both are half-price until 1 November (no discount code required).
In my mind, Labyrinth Lord was one of the first wave of OSR games in the late 2000s/early 2010s, along with OSRIC (AD&D), Swords and Wizardry (OD&D) and Basic Fantasy (early D&D using D20). It was the first retro-clone, a faithful replication within legal limits of the Basic/Expert style of D&D from the 80s, that I ran, all the way back at Furance 2010 twelve years ago! So it was my reintroduction to playing the World’s Favourite Fantasy Game back in the early 2010s. Its licensing model greatly inspired me to get off my arse and start writing stuff for publication.
While I’ve not run it since that brief glorious game at Furnace or engaged with it much in recent years, I took a hard pass when they did a very reasonable Kickstarter for a revised edition, I was slightly worried when the Goblinoid Games website went dark a couple of months ago. I get it all the B/X kids are going crazy about Old School Essentials, and its clean, clear presentation with lashings of old-school style art, but man this is our old friend LL.
Turns out that I need not have worried. Creator/author Dan Proctor has taken some time out to reflect and regroup and a proper 2nd edition of Labyrinth Lord is coming out next year.
Labyrinth Lord powering the fun
At the time of writing, we are about to enter the last day of funding of the From the Shroud #3 which is a Crypts and Things/OSR zine, as part of Kickstarter ZineQuest 4. The zine is now fully maxed out content-wise as a 64-page full-colour zine. It will have sixteen tales of cosmic horror, each featuring a different alien Other World, the demonic Others that live there and adventure ideas.
The campaign also funded a second twenty-three-page zine, Mancuria an fantasy version of my home-city Manchester, an OSR sandbox setting that every backer will get a copy of.
These are two terms that are bandied around lots when it comes to the Old School Renaissance (OSR),
A quick Google looking for a definition of Cosmic Horror, sends you straight towards HP Lovecraft and his Mythos. The rather nihilistic idea of alien beings, and their incomprehensible actions being the source of alarm and anxiety, rather than blood and gore. To be fair that’s were I came in with the term, with the Games Workshop printing of Call of Cthulhu (2nd edition + Companion with all manner of new art, in a lovely hardcover instead of a bunch of pamphlets in a box which was the US Chaosium offering at the time). Actually, I was more interested in the idea of using it as a Gothic horror game, since rather than Lovecraft I had been brought up on a diet of Hammer Horror films, with a dash of the bizarre and creepy 70s/80s British TV Series Tales of the Unexpected (which sometimes went into the realms of the supernatural). I didn’t really get Cosmic Horror until I read the work of Lovecraft’s peer Clark Ashton Smith a couple of years later. CAS is the master of dry, almost sarcastic, delivery of “oppps man has wandered into an encounter with the supernatural almost outside of his comprehension, and suffers badly because of it”. I personally think he’s a much better writer, than Lovecraft, and he certainly got across the sense of how to use Cosmic Horror effectively.
Weird Fantasy? Again a quick Google brings you to a broad church of pulpy, supernatural, dark fantasy, swords and sorcery, titles and stories, that have their origins in the 1920s with the familiar circle of HP Lovecraft, CAS and Rober E. Howard. For me as a Brit, brought up on a quaint diet of Tolkien and CS Lewis, it means anything that is genuinely strange and somewhat dangerous by its very nature. Moorcook’s Eternal Champion stories (Elric, Hawkmoon, Corum, Von Beck among others) which I drank deep off in my teens come to mind in a happy way here.
Both flavours are covered by the zines I’m offering as part of the From the Shroud ZineQuest 4 Kickstarter.
From the Shroud #3, is cosmic horror in a big way. The Tales that describe the adventures on Other Worlds and their alien inhabitants are the first proper look at the genre that has previously been heavily mentioned and referenced by some of the otherworldly fiends that are the monsters of Crypts and Things. Now I give Crypt Keepers (C&T GMs) a bucket full of ideas to inflict upon their players, whose characters now can visit the worlds beyond the Shroud.
The nearly funded second zine, Mancuria covers Weird Fantasy. It’s an alternative history take on 21st Century Manchester, with an airpunk theme, with flying airships, steam-powered weapons, and dangerous elements in the form of a zombie workforce that sometimes gets hungry, visiting barbarians on unicycles and pirates who prey on the airships.
Both zines are available on Kickstarter now until Monday 29th August.
Live now on Kickstarter as part of ZineQuest for two weeks until Mon, August 29. Fully funded within an hour, currently smashing through stretch goals, From the Shroud #3 is a zine focusing on the cosmic horror of the Other Worlds for Crypts and Things and other OSR/Fantasy games.
From the Shroud issue 3 on Kickstarter until Mon, August 29.
Also, everything that I’ve done for Crypts and Things, including previous issues of the zine, is available as an add-on, so it’s a great way to either catch up with the releases or get into the game.
I’m not big on awards and over-the-top hyped reviews, since I like to quietly go about my business with D101 Games, but I was greatly satisfied when I opened DriveThruRPG.com this morning checked my section, and saw that Crypts And Things had gone Platinum 🙂
Behold, I and author Dr Mitch chat about Beyond Dread Portals for a good forty minutes over on D101 Games YouTube Channel.
Coming to crowdfunding over at gamefound.com later this year. Join our email newsletter to receive notification when we go live.
DriveThruRpg.com is having a big sale on D&D stuff which finishes tomorrow. Its all pdfs, but its a good chance to check stuff out for a very very low price since titles are discounted up to 40%.
D101 Games has a selection on the sale, and Crypts and Things is 40% off.
There’s also a number of Brtish OldSchool Renaissance (BOSR)on sale
The Midderlands, Monkey Blood Publications fantasy take on medieval Britain, with the expansions is listed.
Cthulhu Hack 1st ed. Not specifically a version or even a take on D&D, I suspect this is listed because its derived from the The Black Hack. A new edition is incoming, but I’d still recommend it.
Scott Malthouse’s take on fantasy British folklore, published by Osprey Games, is also in the sale
If you re after old UK TSR stuff, that’s all in the sale.
Personal recommends from this long list, U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh (1e), Fiend Folio, UK2 The Sentinel (1e) and its sequel UK3 The Gauntlet (1e), and UK 6 All that Glitters (an all time favourite of mine).
