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Relive Four Decades of RPG Glory with The RPG Book

Relive Four Decades of RPG Glory with The RPG Book

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The RPG Book (Future Publishing, June 2022)

If you’ve spent time browsing a well-stocked magazine rack recently, you’ve probably come across Future Publishing’s popular Bookazines.

These are fat, oversized special editions of some of their popular titles. Future Publishing, based in the UK, produces dozens of magazines, including PC Gamer, Retro Gamer, SFX, Prog, History of War, Total Film, Edge, Play, Maximum PC, and many others. Some of their recent Bookazine releases include Ultimate Retro PC Collection, The Ultimate Guide to Fantasy Gaming, The Story of Zelda, The Book of Mario, PC Hardware Handbook (4th Edition), Battle of the Bulge, and about a zillion more.

I recently saw an ad for their Bookazine The RPG Book. The cover price is $19.99, but it’s currently available for only $11.99 (including shipping) from their online portal MagazinesDirect.com, so I ordered a copy. And I’m extremely glad I did. It turned out to be an entertaining and informative read — and a terrific intro to the very best computer role playing games of the past four decades.

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Gary Con Report: A Virtual Tour of Black Blade Publishing

Gary Con Report: A Virtual Tour of Black Blade Publishing

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Allan T. Grohe Jr. in the Black Blade Publishing booth,
a mobile pilgrimage site for old school gamers

Gary Con! The tiny annual gathering that grew out the impromptu gaming event at Lake Geneva’s American Legion Hall after Gary Gygax’s funeral in March 2008 has now been going strong for fifteen years, and has grown into my favorite gaming convention. I attended Gary Con II in 2010 (my photo essay coverage of that ancient event is here), and was frankly astounded at how much it reminded me of the early days of Gen Con (which also took place in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin). Gary Con is a celebration of the life and work of Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, and it has become the most important annual gathering for old-school gamers.

Gary Con XV is usually held across four days at the end of March, and this one took place March 23-26th, 2023. I made the one-hour drove across the state border into Wisconsin to attend on Saturday, March 25. As usual, I spent most of my time at the con wandering the fabulous Dealer’s Room, taking in the amazing volume of new and upcoming gaming releases.

One of the highlights of Gary Con every year — perhaps the highlight — is Black Blade Publishing’s magically overstocked booth, run by the friendly and knowledgeable Allan T. Grohe Jr. The booth contains half a dozen tables positively groaning under the weight of hundreds of products from dozens of exciting companies. Here’s a virtual tour of the booth, with over a dozen photos, and some of my most exciting finds.

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Step into the Shadowdark … you might like it

Step into the Shadowdark … you might like it

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For those who don’t know about the Open Game License “incident” from earlier this year, it’s too complicated to lay out in an introduction, so go look it up, then come back to this article.

Crazy, right? Despite Wizards of the Coast walking back a lot of what they were going to do, players and game designers alike are giving serious thought into whether or not they want to continue playing with this game system. While many are sticking with 5th Edition (5E) Dungeons & Dragons, others are looking into something completely different, including games that simulate the 1st Edition rules (known as Old School Renaissance or OSR). Which puts Kelsey Dionne at Arcane Library in the perfect time to release her long-awaited Shadowdark game, since it combines the fan-favorite elements of 5E and OSR games.

While it might seem like Shadowdark was rushed into production to capitalize on this sudden interest in alternative game systems, the truth is that it’s been several years in development. After the OGL crisis, Kelsey Dionne had to re-work some of the mechanics so that Shadowdark didn’t resemble Dungeons & Dragons too closely, but this just results in the game now looking more like her own unique thing (a similar situation is occurring with Gavin Norman’s also long-awaited Dolmenwood game). There are still the usual 6 character traits, armor class, and hit points. But complicated encumbrance rules are now replaced by a simple gear slot mechanic (you can carry as many items as your Strength score). The magic system looks like the traditional Vancian system used in every version of Dungeons & Dragons, but now it’s limited by a spell mishap table (similar to what you find in Dungeon Crawl Classics). Darkvision has been completely eliminated as an option for player characters, making those torches far more important and the threat of losing your light source far more intense (since ALL monsters can see in the dark). …

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The Return of Lone Wolf by Joe Dever

The Return of Lone Wolf by Joe Dever

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Lone Wolf Definitive Editions, Volumes 1-3 (Holmgard Press). Covers by Alberto Dal Lago

Joe Dever started playing Dungeons and Dragons in 1976, barely three years after the first copies appeared in game shops in Lake Geneva. In 1984 he published his first Lone Wolf solo fantasy game book, Flight from the Dark; it became an international bestseller and launched a publishing phenomenon. By Dever’s death in 2016, the Lone Wolf series had been translated into 18 languages and sold over 12 million copies.

Unlike most other fantasy solo gamebooks — such as Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s classic Fighting Fantasy titles, Steve Jackson’s fabulous Death Test and its sequels, Tunnels and Trolls adventures like City of Terrors, George Dew’s excellent Legends of the Ancient World, and others — the Lone Wolf books could be played separately or back-to-back, as individual chapters in an epic solo campaign spanning 32 books.

Before his death Dever substantially rewrote the opening book Flight from the Dark, expanding it from 350 to 550 sections. The publishing company he founded, Holmgard Press, has now reissued the first five titles in hardcover Definitive Editions in the UK, and will be releasing paperback editions of the original gamebooks with brand new cover art — and all the original interior art by Gary Chalk — in the US on January 3.

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The Only Devil Book You’ll Ever Need: The Book of Fiends – A Malefic Bestiary for Fifth Edition by Robert J. Schwalb

The Only Devil Book You’ll Ever Need: The Book of Fiends – A Malefic Bestiary for Fifth Edition by Robert J. Schwalb

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The Book of Fiends (Green Ronin Publishing, March 8, 2022). Cover by Svetoslav Petrov

It’s a cliché to say that a good role playing campaign is like a satisfying fantasy series, packed with realistic characters, compelling action, and vivid settings. It’s more accurate, I think, to say that truly great role playing shares an essential ingredient with the best fantasy. I mean, of course, that it’s all about the villains.

Want to keep your players coming back, clutching well-worn character sheets and eager for action? You need challenges worthy of their time, and you won’t get that with the same generic dragons week after week. You need truly malefic opponents with legendary skills, cunning agendas, and awe-inspiring magic at their disposal.

There are some terrific resources out there to help you craft really memorable villains, but for my money the best one on the market is The Book of Fiends by Robert J. Schwalb, with Aaron Loeb, Erik Mona, and Chris Pramas. It’s a massive 254-page tome filled to the brim with inventive and truly original infernal menaces for Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons. There isn’t another book published in the last five years I’ve drawn from as heavily for my own game as this one. I don’t care why kind of RPG you play, The Book of Fiends will up your game.

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Adventure in a Nightmare-fueled Landscape: Deadlands: the Weird West

Adventure in a Nightmare-fueled Landscape: Deadlands: the Weird West

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Deadlands: the Weird West (Pinnacle Entertainment Group, April 2021)

Kickstarter completely transformed board gaming a decade ago, and over the last few years it has thoroughly reinvigorated role playing as well. It’s the de facto launch platform for the hobby gaming industry these days, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change any time soon. I’ve been playing RPGs since 1979, and in all those years I’ve seen countless new and innovative game systems fail because they couldn’t grow beyond a small but dedicated fan base. Kickstarter has brought those systems a whole new lease on life — and an explosion of new content.

Deadlands is fine example. Created by Shane Lacy Hensley and published by Pinnacle Entertainment Group in 1996, the horror/steampunk game was a huge artistic and creative success, easily one of the most talked-about RPGs of the 90s. Talk wasn’t enough to keep it alive though, and for long stretches of the last 25 years the game has sadly been unavailable.

In 2017 Pinnacle stuck a toe in the waters with a reprint of the 1999 edition, Deadlands 20th Anniversary Edition, funded by a crowdfunding campaign. Emboldened by that success, last year they tried something much more ambitious: Deadlands: the Weird West, a massive box set containing a complete system relaunch using the Savage Worlds core rules. Deadlands‘ small but loyal fanbase enthusiastically rallied to support the new Kickstarter campaign, and it blew through its $10,000 goal, with 4,973 backers pledging a whopping $568,636.

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Solo Adventures on Grim Worlds: Modiphius’ Five Parsecs from Home and Five Leagues From the Borderlands

Solo Adventures on Grim Worlds: Modiphius’ Five Parsecs from Home and Five Leagues From the Borderlands

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Five Parsecs from Home and Five Leagues From the Borderlands (Modiphius, 2021 and 2022). Covers by Christian Quinot

Modiphius Entertainment was launched in 2012 by husband and wife gamers Rita and Chris Birch to publish Achtung! Cthulhu, a game that remains near and dear to my heart (you know anything featuring Nazi supervillains, Cthulhu, and roleplaying is going to get some love in these quarters). But in the decade since they founded their unassuming little gaming company it’s captured the attention of the entire industry with a litany of innovative and exciting titles, including Coriolis: The Third Horizon, Alien RPG, Forbidden Lands, Star Trek Adventures, Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of, and much, much more.

Their newest releases, Five Parsecs from Home and Five Leagues From the Borderlands, may be their best yet — at least for product-staved solitaire gamers like me. These are finely crafted solo adventures games with rich narrative campaigns that allow you to explore exotic locales, earn experience and level up your team, find exotic gear, trade, and even upgrade your starship or hideout. They’re the most exciting solitaire gaming releases of the last few years, and that’s saying something.

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More From Pathfinder’s Lost Omens Setting

More From Pathfinder’s Lost Omens Setting

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Since Pathfinder Second Edition is a complete revamp of the Pathfinder rules system, they have balanced supplement releases that focus on the rules with those that provide Second Edition expansions of their Lost Omens setting on the planet of Golarion. That setting has been explored in depth by Paizo for over a decade, in supplements for D&D 3.5 that predated the release of Pathfinder First Edition, so they have a large foundation to build upon with new setting material for Second Edition.

While some of those – like Lost Omens: Gods and Magic and the Lost Omens: World Guide – have had a lot of mechanics that can be incorporated into game play, their main focus is narrative, providing setting information that Gamemasters can use in planning out a story set in the world of Golarion. Their two most recent supplements in the Lost Omens line have focused a bit more on the narrative.

In Absalom: City of Lost Omens (Paizo, Amazon), the emphasis is on a single city. The “city at the center of the world,” Absalom is the largest, most cosmopolitan city in the entire Lost Omens setting. A variety of adventures and scenarios have been set there, including the entire Agents of Edgewatch (Paizo, Amazon) adventure path, so there’s no shortage of previous material for them to draw on in this 400-page tome about the city. …

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Galactic Magic for Starfinder

Galactic Magic for Starfinder

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Since its inception, Paizo’s Starfinder RPG has been a science fantasy game. The deep melding of magic, science, and technology is built into the setting from the foundation, and classes like Technomancer and Witchwarper really exploit a mystical connection with scientific and technological knowledge. One of the major deities, Triune, is deeply tied artificial intelligence and computer technology. Many of the rulebooks released for the series have included magical devices and new spells.

Despite all of the emphasis on magic, though, Starfinder has not previously had a supplement fully devoted to magic. They’ve had a variety of technology-focused supplements like Armory, Starship Operations Manual, and Tech Revolution.  (Tech Revolution, it is worth reminding people, introduces mechs into the game. Seriously, look into it.)

The drought of magical supplements finally ends with the recent release of Starfinder: Galactic Magic (Paizo, Amazon), which sets the stage to add mystical flavor to the game.

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Guns and Gears in Pathfinder Second Edition

Guns and Gears in Pathfinder Second Edition

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I recently covered Pathfinder‘s exploration of the magical arts in my review of their Secrets of Magic rulebook. At the more physical end of the spectrum, the Guns and Gears supplement explores the role of firearms, clockwork devices, and other forms of impressive technology from the Pathfinder world, including the introduction of rarer classes into Pathfinder Second Edition: the Inventor and an update on the Pathfinder classic Gunslinger class.

With this book, they’ve definitely recognized that these two mechanical systems are in many ways very different, and might have very different audiences. While some might want a character to walk around with a gun, they aren’t interested in going full steampunk (or even clockwork punk) by incorporating this level of technology into the game setting on a regular basis. On the other hand, a player might want the technological aspects of steampunk, but feel that the firearms themselves don’t fit with their play style. As such, they book really splits these two sets of rule systems apart, so you can use the portion of the book you want to as see fit, or adopt all of these rules for your game. …

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