Ostensible Cat

So, I'm the kinda guy who likes quirky stuff. I listen to 70's and 80's punk and protopunk and postpunk. I like to watch Ray Harryhousen movies. I thought Amazon Women on the Moon and UHF are hilarious. I love indie and experiemental comics by guys you've probably heard of like Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar and stuff by guys you might not have heard of like Brad Jones and Archer Prewitt. So why am I telling you all of this? Because Vornheim by Zak S. Of I Hit it with my Axe and Playing D&D with Porn Stars fame has put together a quirky little city supplement called Vornheim: The Complete City Kit . Vornheim is a slim, hard back book published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess (James Raggi). Vornheim is digest size with b&w interior. The cover has a removable dust jacket that has a map of Vornheim on the inside and a set of instructions to use the charts on the front and back covers of the book. Yeah, pretty much every surface is designed to be us

So, Vornheim is one of those products that is not the usual RPG book. I feel like it deserves something a bit different. The key of Vornheim is to actually USE it in crafting your adventures. Zak S has put together a unique experience from city building. So after spending the day in Padova at the botanical gardens and looking at street art, I came home to my grill - my demense to read through Vornheim ( check out my wife's blog for my Vornheim read through ). Vornheim is not a big book. Only 64 pages. But you know what? Those 64 pages are packed FULL. And so is the cover. And the Dust jacket. Random tables and charts, strange characters and locales, and snakes as books. Brilliant. "But I'm not here to bore you with that," to steal a quote from the book. No, I'm going to actually use this tool to build a city and then review the book based on the experience. At any rate, based on the read through, this is great stuff. But being a good read and a use

Charnel Crypt of the Sightless Serpent: An Adventure in Hyperborea by Jeffrey P. Talanian and North Wind Adventures is an adventure for characters level 4-7. Having appeared in Knockspell originally, the adventure in its stand alone incarnation is specifically aimed at the Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea but is easily utilized with any old school D&D or derivative system. Weighing in at sixteen pages with the map on the inside covers and the OLG taking up part of page 15, this module packs a lot into a small package. The B&W cover art is by Ian Baggley and is very well done in a painterly style depicting he sightless serpent as well as the other main antagonist, the necromancer Ivgah. Ian has a piece on the back cover depicting a skull half buried in earth with a centipede crawling out of the eye socket. My. Baggley’s work is first rate and he does have a few more pieces inside. They are all well done and convey the feel of the module very well. Well d

I’ve always been a really big fan of the 1st Edition AD&D G series modules. As a kid, they pretty much summed up everything that excited me about AD&D. And I’ve always felt that along with demons, devils, and dragons, giants are pretty damn kick ass antagonists. It was with a bit of surprise when I came across Sanctum of the Stone Giant Lord by R.C. Pennell. Not aligned with any of the clones, this module aims to be the next installment for AD&D G series modules. Weighing in at twelve pages with a monochrome cover (note, this is the Advanced Fantasy Adventure module labeled GS1 not the later G4 version), it certainly has the right looks and feel of the early printings of the giant series. The Later G4 version (I have the 1st anniversary edition) weighs in at 16 pages. In the original series, the individual modules themselves were small in page count but packed with giant bashing goodness. While both versions cover the same ground for the most part, there are definit

Skull Mountain is a Labyrinth Lord Adventure by Jeff “Bighara” Sparks with art by Andy ATOM Taylor and Steve Zieser and published by Faster Monkey Games. The module is 36 pages long with illustrated player handouts taking the last two pages. The adventure is aimed at 4-6 characters of level 4-6. Disclaimer: this is not a play test review (unfortunately for me). There have been a lot of old school style modules coming out for the past few years. Most of those have been for AD&D 1e/OSRIC. It seems recently, B/X D&D/Labyrinth Lord has been gaining quite a bit of momentum. I’ll admit to being caught up in that wave to some extent. This is the first module geared toward Labyrinth Lord that I have picked up. The main attraction to me was the draw of the adventure being based off the wonderfully evocative skull map found in the back of the Holmes Basic D&D book. This adventure fleshes that map out and makes it into a fully realized adventure site. Of course there are mo

Coninued directly from my last post: The next section is devoted to monsters and treasure of Athanor. This section runs from page 18 through 34. There are quite a few dinosaurs in Athanor along with a few familiar creatures such as the Anhkheg, dragons, and stirges. The rest are creatures unique to Athanor such as the tunnel stalker which is a large slug-like creature with a mass of tentacles with barbed stingers that it uses to attack prey. Overall, there are 32 monsters detailed. Next up are some technological artifacts from the ancients. Here you’ll find things like laser and needler guns as well as things as a technological invisibility cloak. The rest of the section details summoning and binding elemental spirits and random encounter tables for each terrain type. The next major section is dedicated to describing the campaign world of Athanor. Here you’ll find what you’d expect such as a history, climate, and religions. The city-state of Zamora is also detailed with a ma

Considering the 77th birthday of Flash Gordon was the 7th of January, it seems rather appropriate to do a review of Savage Swords of Athanor. Granted, Savage Swords of Athanor is rally more in the vein of say John Carter than Flash Gordon, you’ll get the idea. So without further ado, let’s begin. Savage Swords of Athanor Rules Supplement and Campaign Setting for Swords and Wizardry White Box is by Doug Easterly. I picked my copy up at Lulu for $8.00 USD. Digest sized and weighing in at 64 pages, Athanor fits in nicely with your S&W White Box books or even better, your OD&D little brown books. The first page is the title and credits while the second page is a table of contents and introduction. The final page is given over to the open game license. So for those of you who are sticklers for that sort of thing, the rest is all devoted to the game itself. The front cover depicts a very nice silhouette cut out of what appears to be some pteronadons and an iguanadon in front

I finally got around to posting my Rating Scale for Reviews for anyone that is curious as to what completly subjective and capricious reason I assign my ratings. Check out the link in my header bar. Don't look for me to go thrashing products as that is not really my style. However, not everything is rainbows and lollipops so if I don't like something, I'll state that as well.

As with most things, I'm usually a bit late to the party and my perusal of Geffrey McKinney's Carcosa is no exception. In fact, there are many reviews out there already on this one supplement and I was a bit reluctant to do an essentially superfluous review. Mr. McKinney's work has brought about some strong reactions and controvery. In fact, due to the number of reviews, I'm going to take the incredibly lazy and seriously egregious breach of any sort of tact or class route and link back to Korgoth's review on dragonsfoot here so that I can lay the basic ground work and expound upon it because that review pretty sums up most of my thoughts on the matter. Did you finish reading yet? OK, good, let's continue. Let me go ahead and say that I want to completely avoid any of the morality agrguments surrounding the supplement and investigate its merrits as a gaming supplement. Carcosa really impressed me with some of the things it brings to the table, namely new

It’s snowing outside and warm and cozy inside. I’ve got some hot spiced wine brewing on the stovetop. What a perfect time to kick back with an OSR book and do some imaginatin’. I have a rather large read pile that I am slowly picking my way through. However, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I got a few more things to add to the pile. The first thing I grabbed really has grabbed me back. I’m talking about Exquisite Corpses: A New Kind of Monster Manual for Old School Role Playing Games by Stefan Poag. Where to start, where to start… the book itself is digest size 5 ½” x 8 ½” with a spiral binding and a glossy, heavy card stock cover weighing in at 91 pages. Normally I wouldn’t get too much into the physicality of the product, but it is important here. You see, when Mr. Poag says that this is a new type of monster manual, he really means that – at least compared to the other compendiums of monsters out there. The binding actually plays an important role which I’ll get to in

Matt Finch's Eldritch Weirdness Compilation Books Three to One is an accessory for Old School stle fantasy RPGS. IIt is fairly generic, so it is not a problem to adapt it to OSRIC, Swords and Wizardry, Labyrinth Lord, or what ever your particular favorite Old School game of choice is. The print version of the books weighs in at 23 pages (of which pages 22 and 23 are given over to the OGL licensing info). While it may seem a bit light on the page count, it does pack quite a punch in giving DM's something to think about when it comes to using magic in fantasy games. Presented in reverse order, the three books present three different subject areas. Book one (the last in the compilation) presents a bunch of new spells for use in a fantasy campaign. I tend to agree with Matt, tht spells are usually one of the least interesting magic topics, being something of a recipe to be followed to gain a certain effect. There are some pretty imaginitive spells none the less. I really l

The Old School Renaissance (hereafter OSR) has spawned quite a bit of hobbyist gamers into becoming RPG designers, pundits, publishers, etc. This is nothing new. The hobby has pretty much had folks that have created their own additions, house rules, divergent systems, etc since the inception of the hobby. And even with the seemingly cyclical “sky is falling” doomspeakers that always seem to predict the end of the hobby, it is precisely because of the very inherent grass roots nature of the hobby that no one will ever to be able to effectively kill it. As the hobby has grown over the years, the flagship title or the game that stated it all created by Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, has gone through several iterations; morphed beyond the original concept; become an industry success and a darling in the public eye as well as almost disappearing totally due to financial mismanagement and being reviled by many as a gateway to all kinds of alleged aberrant behavior. But quietly, the origin

A few months back, I ordered "Tales Designed to Trizzle Volume 1" which collects the first four issues of the aforementioned comic book by Michael Kupperman and published by Fantagraphics Books. The opening foreword by Robert Smigel sets the tone for what is to follow with the opening line of "I have diarrhea so I'' be brief". Tales Designed to Thrizzle is essentially an anthology of odd humor strips by Michael Kupperman. Some of you may be familiar with "Snake 'n Bacon" which I understand was on the Cartoon Network. This is where Snake 'n Bacon originated. For real. Stories and shorts about "Sex Blimps and Sex Holes", Bambifpow Jackson, Modern Chimp-Barbering Romance, and many many more. I for one, love this kind of humor (I loved Space Ghost Coast to Coast which has much of the same sort of humor). The artistic styling is reminiscent of magazine adds from the 1920's through the 1970's. There are many short sight

On a whim, I was browsing through the graphic novels on Amazon and happened across "The Imposter's Daughter" by Laurie Sandell. I got the Kindle version "which is a little hard to read on the Kindle 2 because of the small size. I have to admit, 1) I'm fairly new to the indie comics scene so when I select something it is usually on a whim. I'm not part of the indie intelligentsia and I am rather isolated from any other comic readers. 2) Since I am an American and live in Italy; I pretty much have to stick to Amazon and other online sources for my reading selections. I'm not apologizing or making excuses, just wanted to frame how I choose my reading material. Having said that, reading through the blurb on Amazon, the premise hooked me right away. Essentially the memoirs of a girl/woman and her relationship with her larger than life father. I shouldn't say just larger than life, I mean her father pretty much crafted himself into a family folk her