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.

Swords and Planets: a Review of Red Planet RPG

The “Sword and Planet” genre appears to be in a full-bloomed mini-revival these days. Paizo devoted an on-going series of re-released classics and one need only toss a virtual rock at many old school gaming blogs these days to hit some kind of exploration of these science fantasy themes (my own exploration of Tekumel is part and parcel of this trend).

For all that energy, I am frankly puzzled by the fact that we haven't seen a profusion of sword and planet-styled games (to date that is, there are some highly-inspired OD&D supplements and works in progress). Thus I was very pleasantly surprised to receive a few weeks back a package containing a  handy set of Barsoom-flavored RPG rules from my fellow Texan and old school blogger Clovis Cithog.

Like many old schoolers, I'm a perversely difficult audience when it comes to new rule sets. I love innovation--especially when it tends to pare down complexity, help amplify a literary theme, or provide interesting game-play situations--but tend to be stubbornly conservative and, dare I say, lazy when it comes to new game mechanics. A stripped-down D&D platform with chrome and other tricked out bits bolted on top works for me far more often then not.

Red Planet is fortunately such a beast. Weighing in at less than 70 pages and with tried and true core features like archetypical classes, level advancement, similar attributes, familiar combat mechanics, etc. I liked the fact that I could read through it and feel like I could run a successful game with it in a few days time.

It's with the crunch that the game has it's best moments, however. First of all, Clovis makes no bones about situating the game in not just some Mars but THE Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs fame. Given my own interest in respectfully exploring the public domain works of pulp fantasy I appreciated how he weaves in the right amount of flavor and setting information as a tribute to Burroughs' work without it feeling like a regurgitation.

Character generation is fun and simple with players selecting or rolling from the major sentient races of Mars: Red, Green, Thern, Black Pirate, Yellow, or Exotic. (Interestingly there are no John Carter-like outsiders here.) Each race has a preferred class (called “vocation” in the rules) and can only play a small handful of classes outside these.

The classes are a also fun and setting-appropriate range. Troopers are thoat-mounted fighters and Warriors more of the typical fighting man type. Criminals are more assassin than thief, a choice that seems to be pretty consistent with the material. Scientists are the technology users who can employ relics and have access to inventions. Extras seem to be the jack-of-all-trades class that reminds me a little of the prosaically-named Classic Traveller “Other” career.

The inclusion of a spell-casting Priest class is an exception to the rule about staying close to the source material. Their introduction seems a bit awkward to me given the near-absence of religion and magic in ERB's work. Clovis acknowledges himself the dilemma and allows for a GM to ignore or restrict the class and spell-casting rules.

Combat mechanics are a simplified d20-like system with ascending AC and an interesting 2nd-edition AD&D-ish division of effects between four categories of weapons: blunt, piercing, slashing, and energy. Rules exist for the wide range of relic and strange tech items one could employ in combat.

Rules for fliers are among my favorites in the game and remind me some of the great Space 1889 subsystems of yore. What Barsoom would be complete without PCs blasting, grappling, or ramming one in each and every adventure?

Level advancement has some interesting quirks. PCs start at 2^nd level and there are no experience points as such. Instead at the end of an adventure a player rolls a d6 in which an attribute, skill, or level is increased. Personally I am still too wed to the quantifible bean counting that comes with exp. Systems, but I like the nice randomized pay-off system that reminds me of the fun of leveling up in first edition Gamma World.

All in all a nice little system worth picking up. Distribution is pleasingly personal, contact Clovis over at Jasoomian Dreams. For $10 he will send you a copy and a free copy for a friend to boot.