Buried Secrets of Stonehell, a Review

Stonehell Dungeon Supplement Two: Buried Secrets, 20-page PDF, $2.99 from Lulu 

A good review should answer one simple question: is this product worth my time and money? I'll give you the punchline before the long wind-up for Michael Curtis' recently-released second supplement to Stonehell mega-dungeon: yes. Hell yes.

For sure, it's a rare occasion that I actually buy, let alone use, a published adventure these days. It's not that I consider myself such a master of the difficult art of crafting an adventure that I don't need a little help now and again. Nor is that I have some high-falutin' ideological trip in favor of homebrewing. (I steal elements like a fiend from a manic range of sources and have had great fun with refs that run mostly modules.)

It's just that no matter how much I may enjoy reading a particular author's work I have a hell of a time making the squares fit in the round holes of my campaign. With all the work of filing off the serial marks, reworking contexts, familiarizing myself with reams of detail, and blending it all into the sandbox enough that the players would buy it's existence, I invariably feel that I was better off just writing up the damn thing from scratch in the first place.

I suspect I am not alone in this.

Curtis' work is consistently the rare exception. From his Dungeon Alphabet to last year's release of the first five levels of his megadungeon, Stonehell, he seems to be one of the few gaming writers that truly get his cranky, quirky DIY ref audience. We don't want to drive the car off the lot--and perhaps trick out details like spinners—we want kits of varying levels of completeness that will help us build the thing from the bottom up in our garages.

It sounds counter-intuitive that a published mega-dungeon product could fit this bill, but it does. Using a two-page riff off the blog-vaunted haiku one-page dungeon format he created a product that hit a sweet spot for me: enough detail and flavor to find much to borrow while reducing the running details to a manageable stripped-down level.

For sure you could play it straight as one-big stand-alone campaign dungeon straight out of the box, or you could—like me—look at each of the level's one-page map quadrants as custom sub-levels I can blend directly into a level or two of my own creations.

The highly distinctive flavor of each of the quadrants only enhance that modular, plug-in and play value for me. I felt like I hadn't bought a book of a large dungeon that I would read and discard, but a useful collection of 20 mini-dungeons (and several above ground locations).

The new supplement expands on this collection nicely with three new adventuring areas, two designed to be outlier areas topside of the dungeon and another as a sub-level. All three can easily be separated and plugged into most old school D&D campaign worlds with little to no work.

[Mild spoilers ahead. Be warned.]

The format is mostly similar to the parent product. Layout is clean and crisp with lots of text-heavy bang for your buck (in fact, no interior art at all). The three areas are presented with the same one-page maps, but the text room descriptions stray from Curtis' terse two-page limit. None of the descriptions are longer than three short paragraphs (which is right on the line of my own tolerance level) and do allow for presenting a few unusual situations and puzzles.

Content wise, I enjoyed all three areas. The vermin-ridden, lost-cult caverns of Nest of Ortogg struck me as the strongest entry of the bunch, followed by the debris-choked (with a science-fantasy twist) environs of Modnar's Cellar. The Sanctuary of Chtonia is a little on the light side in terms of it's content (which likely makes sense given it's role as a possible safe-space sub-level), but is bolstered by a well-presented, interestingly-motivated duo of NPCs that dominate the area.

Adding more value to the product is the continuation from Stonehell of adding new monsters, spells, deities, and magic items custom tailored to each area. All three areas nicely have these curve balls.

All in all a nice addition to my gaming table. For frugal GM's, Stonehell's first supplement can be downloaded for free here.

Hill Cantons Forecast: Keyboards & Bathrobes to be America's Next Top RPG

You heard it first here, folks, but I predict that this hot new game from Doc Grognard will be sweeping the OSR by say 10:20 pm tonight. Hell, I've already played it three times today and never even changed out of my flannel pajamaramas.

On a more serious note, if you haven't already, you should check out Doc G's work on a Fantasy Traveller, a topic near and dear to my own heart.

Non-holiday (i.e. not-so lazy ass) posting to resume tomorrow.

They Say It's Your Birthday

Today I celebrate the second anniversary of my 39th birthday here in the labyrinth.

Who says blogging is an exercise in narcissism?

Free Crimefighters RPG Download

A little bird told me that you can freely and legally download Crimefighters, the 17-page (how's that for rules lite?) pulp-era rpg from 1981 I mentioned yesterday. And since little birds and the Internet are both always correct you can find it here.

Also Happy Thanksgiving one and all. 

Weird Adventures, Justice Inc. and Gamer ADD

I came late to Trey from Sorcerer's Skull party for his forthcoming pulpy game supplement, Weird Adventures. Rest assured though that I'm staying until he shouts at me to get down off his table and calls me a cab.

Since early this summer he's been busy pumping out a visually-rich, highly-imaginative stream of posts that explore the high weirdness of his pulp-era fantasy world setting.

With nice spins on old archetypical character classes familiar and dear to many of us who play older edition D&D (“Tough Guy” for Fighter, “Man of Faith” for Cleric and such forth); a Femme Fatale table stand-in for the infamous “Random Harlot” DMG table; and a host of other stylized goodies I am likely to not only buy when it comes out—but actually run it.

That last statement is not one I make lightly as it entails breaking a vow I made when I started my current tabletop Hill Cantons campaign; namely that I wouldn't succumb to that abrupt, semi-frequent urge to jump ship to other systems and campaigns. I have noticed with approval others on the blogosphere making similar vows and I generally have agreed with the notion that the most fulfilling gaming often comes through the long-lasting, nuanced fun of running a consistent campaign.

Back in the early 80s after the first couple years of seeing only my first RPG love, D&D, I went on a rampage of gaming promiscuity. Any game my piece-rate allowance could afford I bought and we played for about 1-3 months before we stopped returning her calls and jumped on to the next game. In quick succession there was Traveller, Boot Hill, Top Secret, Bushido, Champions, Runequest, Gangbusters, and Star Frontiers (only one date, sorry with the last two). Many lawns were cut in these years and much manic play entailed. Not one of those campaigns was as fun as that first long D&D one. 

So why even think of breaking that vow, right?

Well, mostly because the very last game, I purchased before drifting out of the hobby for two decades felt like “the one that got away” (to stretch that belabored imagery once again). Justice Inc. was a great, if quick-to-fade-away game put out by Hero Games in 1984. Though mechanically it was essentially the same Hero system cookie-cutter (and thus unremarkable), it's 1930s-oriented pulp source material hit a nerve with me.

The boxed set came with a nice Campaign Book that was not only devoted to the usual run-of-the-mill period detail, but more excitingly to a 20-page run down of all the sub-genres of pulp fiction in that time period. It inspired my first real gaming-literary fever run (now something quite familiar). That summer in the mid-80s, I pored through used bookstores and musty libraries to find Doc Savage and other pulp novellas.

A few other things fueled this sudden mad infatuation: the afternoon runs of old, syndicated news reel-like shows from the 30s on a failing Dallas UHF channel; a brief fling in 1981 with Crimefighters, a free RPG shoehorned into Dragon Magazine #47; and the release of a wonderful JI supplement, Lands of Mystery.

That last bit deserves a bit more attention as I think it is one of the best campaign supplements I have ever read. Rather than just selling you a pre-packaged setting whole cloth or mundane world-building suggestions (that you could likely better get out of a geography, history, or folklore textbook), it read more like a system-less literary guide to the whole genre of Lost Worlds ala H. Rider Haggard and Edgar R. Burroughs. Instead of just trotting out cardboard NPCs there were lists of all the archetypes for characters in these campaigns from the Great White Hunter to the Callow Youth. Suggestions on how to present lost world campaigns with varying genre convention bits were explored in customizable, yummy detail.

Alas for all this love I never actually played the damn game. Soon after designing a crazy-quilt setting that pitted island-hopping boat-plane flying heroes against the perils of shadowy cults, flying saucers, dinosaurs, Cthuloid nightmares, vine-choked lost temples, etc. I just simply walked away from the hobby for a good long time.

Thus why I wait by the phone. Patiently.  

Tékumel's Other Underworlds and Pre-TSR Rules: Jeff Berry Encore

The best interviews are like great conversations they start before the first published question sees the published light of day—and often continue after with the popping of neurons stimulated in the follow-up.

Since some of you asked all polite like, I couldn't resist sharing a little more of said follow-up with Jeff Berry, so we have a short encore from our Twin Cities friend today. Jeff has some recent news to share on his own blog about the launch of a second public foundation to preserve the historical legacy of decades of EPT gaming. Check it out here.

I won't let the cat out of the bag, but later today I start the interview process with another great early (and time/energy generous) pioneer. I think readers will be in for a treat when we put the thing to bed later this week.

Hill Cantons: Looks like people are hungry for more detail on the underworlds. Any other interesting details to add? Did y'all spend time exploring other underworlds? How did these compare to Jakalla?

Jeff Berry: I could go on for pages and pages about Jakalla's underworld; there was that much stuff. I don't want to do the book here, but several of the areas do stick out.

One is the big Temple of Vimuhla up in one corner of the map; it's surrounded by a deep moat, with is full of other- planar flame, and you have to cross a wide esplanade to get to the front gate. Needless to say, the temple guards can see you coming, and it's very hard to get in there. The Temple of Hry'y has a big stone head that you can get into and deliver 'divine speeches' to the worshipers below - provided that the temple priests don't catch you at it! The Temple of Chiteng has a small prison, with a few important people in the cells who are worth rescuing, but the guards and guardians are thick as flies on a melon.

There's a section of tombs where the loot is very good, but the devices that protect the entrances require a lot of puzzle-solving. Beyond those, the tomb guardians themselves are no push-overs and can wipe out a party if one isn't really careful. Lower levels are more challenging; the Garden of the Weeping Snows is in a class by itself, between the pale Legion's armored troopers and the recondite powers of the Undying Wizard Nyelmu. Jakalla's underworld is right up there at the top of the heap, danger- and reward-wise.

We also explored the underworlds in Tu'umnra, Fasiltum, Bey Sy, Chochi, Dlash, Hekellu, and one or two other places. Tu'umnra and Hekellu are the best documented, but Fasiltum was the most interesting. Bey Su was a major plot line of Phil's, so I don't want to say too much about that one...

HC: What were the pre-TSR publication rules like? They were pretty close, if not identical, to the original D&D rules or were there major quirks already?

JB: EPT, both in the published and manuscript versions, was in effect an edited and play-tested version of the original D & D. Both Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson were very impressed with Phil's rules, as in a lot of ways they were cleaner and easier to use then the three-book set was.

The mimeographed manuscript of EPT was much heavier on the information about the world-setting, and if published today would be squarely in the “sword and planet” genre rather then the 'swords and sorcery' genre.

There was a bit more 'hard science' there, which Phil edited for various reasons in the published version. Gary Gygax also asked Phil to modify some of the terms and game mechanics to make EPT more compatible with D&D, as there was a concern at TSR that gamers might not be able to handle having different game mechanics like percentile dice rolls vs. lots of polyhedral dice rolls.

I also think Gary was the reason why EPT used the “good/evil” dichotomy instead of Phil's preferred “stability/change”. Both Dave and Gary were big fans of the “keep it simple, stupid” principle, and I got the impression from both of them when I talked with them that they thought that most gamers wouldn't be able to appreciate the finer points of the “greyscale” of Phil's “change/stability”, and would be better of with their own black and white concept of “good/evil”.