A Brief Note on Charnel Crypt of the Sightless Serpent and other musings

I have not been as constructive with my blog posts lately as I’d like to be. It has quite a bit to do with all of the projects that I’m working on. That is not a bad thing, it just limits the amount of time I have to post more than just a few passing notes. In that vein, I just wanted to say that I recently received my copy of Charnel Crypt of the Sightless Serpent today by Jeffrey P. Talanian and North Wind Adventures. I eagerly flipped through and so far, I’ve been highly impressed. For a small press endeavor, the production values are very good. I particularly enjoyed the artwork by Ian Baggley. I think the cover depicting the sightless serpent is suitably creepy and conveys the feel of the module. While I’m only a few pages in, the descriptions are flavorful and extremely well done. This weekend, I’ll make a more thorough read through and give a complete review. I really appreciated Jeff’s handwritten note of thanks. I’m really excited about Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea. I think 2011 promises to be a watershed year for the OSR and hobbyist game developers. It seems that instead of just doing pastiche of 70’s and 80’s D&D stuff, we are now seeing some really creative ideas and I think Jeff and the gang at North Wind are going to have some really cool stuff in store for us.

Back to the project front, I’ve been crafting a small two or three level adventure for my son Bear’s new Halfling adventurer and friends to explore. I’m really wanting to play to the halfling’s strengths to make this a fun adventure for him. Bear has been enjoying the Hobbit immensely. Something I’d like to convey to my son in adventures is that bashing in the door and slaughtering everything in sight isn’t necessarily the best approach. Sure, there are some folks that play that way, but I’m not really into playing that way with my six year old. What I really want to stress is the wonder of exploration, problem solving, and critical thinking (and a few combats). I’ve put in some tricks and traps, hidden passages, and that sort of thing. I’m pretty excited to run Lightning Bolt the Halfling through it.

Basalt Keep has been getting some of my attention as well. It is a bit slow going writing out the room descriptions and encounters and this is a big adventure (160 keyed areas). So it’ll probably be a little bit before I get all the way through it. But it’s enough that I’m actually working on it and it will get done.

Well, that’s it for now. Happy gaming!

Comments

  1. netherwerksJanuary 26, 2011 at 1:21 PM

    Thanks for pointing this adventure out, we'll have to take a look at it. God luck to Lightning as he takes his first steps into the dungeon as well!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Neurodiversity and Dragons - the adventure begins!

Image
  Tl;dr: Kia ora all! I don’t often post much about my personal life, but as a parent of two neurodiverse teens, I reckoned that I’d post some of my experience in gaming here on our journey. My daughter was diagnosed with autism almost a year ago and my son is dyslexic/dysgraphia with ADHD like presentation. Both are incredibly bright and very different from each other (my son has lots of friends and is very bright and gregarious if also very lazy while my daughter is very retreating and shy but incredibly driven and motivated). They both love fantasy and fantasy literature, movies and gaming has been a way for us all to connect. Though often what works for one, doesn’t necessarily work for the other. This brings me to my point, I am working on trying to best accommodate the needs of my neurodiverse daughter and include her in an experience that she very much wants to participate in, but often feels frustrated and overwhelmed by. This is an introduction to our journey so far.   For s
Read more

More Thoughts on my Campaign System

So, I’ve been thinking of my campaign world again and my magic system a lot lately. I’ve been reading a lot of Michael Moorcock’s Elric Saga and the Hobbit (what a strange dichotomy!) and they have both influencing my thoughts on magic systems. I’m becoming more and more intrigued of having only a single “class” and everything else being a trapping of that. For my campaign world, I’m steering towards an everyman approach were you purchase “disciplines” as you advance to create different character types. I’m not really interested in creating a whole new retro-clone system per se, but building on top of either the Labyrinth Lord or Swords and Wizardry White box. For what I have in mind, the S&W Whitebox might make even more sense. So I’m thinking that the normal adventuring type guy would have a base d6 hit die. You’d have some starting amount of experience to spend on disciplines to start down the road of customizing your character. So for instance, if you wanted brawny fig
Read more

I like pie!

Cyclopeatron made an interesting blog post which I tend to agree with. Most conent posts don't get responses but opinion posts do. I've noticed the trend in my own blogging as well. There is some incredibly interesting content being generated out there in OSR blog land. I think folks tend to react more to opinion pieces because no one really wants to 1) either say your stuff sucks on a blog post or 2) only say "that's cool man". I tell you what, I cherish the "that's cool man posts", it at tleast let's me know folks are paying attention. As to the your stuff sucks, well those are OK too as long as they tell me why they think my stuff sucks so I know how to try and improve it. At any rate, I like pie. It even tastes better when I had to kill an orc to get it ;).
Read more