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Earlier this week, Anne reminded us of an old post where she discussed her earliest, fantasy inspirations. It reminded me of my own fantasy genre prehistory. I wrote a bit about it in my very first post on this blog back in 2009:

In my personal pre-history (which is to say the mid-seventies to the dawning of the eighties), there was already in my brain a nascent cauldron of fantasy abubble: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz conjured by the voice of a babysitter, King Arthur for boys illuminated by NC Wyeth, four-color barbarians on spinner-racks, Myth and legend sifted by Bullfinch and Harryhausen, singing hobbits and rotoscoped orcs, power swords split in twain on not one, but two, alien worlds; an elf, a dwarf, a giant--and a slayer named Hawk, the doom that came to Vermithrax Pejorative, fantasylands with oracular pigs and messianic lions.

I also not in the post the inspiration for my first character (in AD&D): An elf fighter/magic-user inspired by the protagonist in the Endless Quest book by Rose Estes, Mountain of Mirrors.

That's not the only thing in my gaming history I can trace to a specific source. For another example, I've used flightless birds as mounts in several campaign worlds I created, I suspect all traceable to this cover by James Gurney for a book I haven't read:

There are numerous things like that. Some probably borrowed from sources so long ago, I don't even remember their origins.

Here we go! Day 1 of RPG a Day 2025

The prompt for today is Patron. Merriam Webster’s definition is here, but of the various meanings, let’s use this one: a “person chosen, named, or honored as a special guardian, protector, or supporter.” I think that’s a helpful definition for how patrons are used in role-playing games.

Beyond the very literal Patron of a Warlock in D&D, patrons are a handy tool in a Game Master’s (GM) toolbox. They serve as quest givers and advisors to characters, and can be recurring NPCs or even potential antagonists. They can be authority figures, supporting or undermining the player’s plans. They can sometimes serve as the GM’s mouthpiece, cautioning against ill-conceived plans or making the information dump more palatable in conversation with the patron. They can offer handrails to new characters by guiding them on how the game’s mechanics work, or provide backing and support to those who may lack the power or influence to achieve their initial goals in the campaign world. 

Patrons are preferable to casual, one-off quest givers because they are often recurring non-player characters (NPCs) that create familiarity and bonds for the players and their characters. They can also have hidden agendas that may or may not align with the players. If they become allies, mentors, or friends to the characters, they can be great hostages or even sacrificial pawns for the emotional denouement.

I’ve used patrons heavily throughout my campaigns. I started to think back, and here are some of my favorite patrons I’ve used in the past:

• A cryptic wizard, who is the soul of a dragon trapped in a mortal body, sends the adventurers on quests and returns to guide them in their quest to save the world. He was the patron of my first long-term campaign in the late 80s. I’ve reused him, as I’ve run three versions of the campaign. The second time around, one of my players hated his holier-than-thou attitude, so the third time around, he was a more sympathetic and accessible mentor, and I’d say that was the most successful version.
• A wizened scholar and his daughter hire the adventurers to find a relic. Still, he quickly becomes a liability to the characters, as he and his daughter are kidnapped and rescued multiple times.
• The all-powerful god is hidden in the body of the comic relief NPCs. This one began as a riff on Rafiki of The Lion King, but took on a life of its own.
• An ancient, wise, and not-evil Beholder who created a secret society to protect the kingdom. He is one of my favorite patrons, secretive, unexpected, challenging the player’s preconceptions. He never betrayed the characters, but his servant turned out to be the big bad guy of the campaign.
• In my current campaigns, a mash-up of the Fading Suns setting and the Savage Worlds rules, which we, very originally, call Savage Fading Suns, the patron was a priest of the Orthodox sect of the Universal Church of the Celestial Sun. He gave them their missions, helped them at the beginning of the game, and now he has fallen on hard times and may need their help to escape his ultimate fate! (A little sneak peek for my players who may be reading this.)

For that last patron, I did one of the things I’ve enjoyed the most in recent years. I dressed up as the NPC and delivered the introduction to the first adventure in character. Only the second time I’ve ever cosplayed as a GM in my campaigns!

As an aside, who has been my patron in real life? Who made it possible for me to enjoy this hobby for 39 years? I’d said my patrons, my greatest supporters, were my family, who bought the books, who encouraged me, who welcomed my friends to play at our house, and cooked for us. I am eternally grateful to them for their support all through the years.

What do you think? Are Patrons a valuable tool for GMs? Are they overused? How do you use them?

Leave your thoughts in the comments, or tag me in your replies, wherever you make them. If you choose to participate, don’t forget to tag your participation with the #RPGaDay2025 hashtag so the community at large can find your posts.

Steel is the final word in the Hyborian Age.

From gilded courts to bloodstained battlefields, blades decide the fate of kings and cutthroats alike. Each one bears the mark of the land that forged it and the blood it has spilled. These weapons carry scars, not ceremony.

This collection presents regional blades for my Shadowdark campaign, shaped by harsh terrain and harder lives. Each offers distinct tactical advantages rooted in the cultures that wield them.

They are not decorations. They are drawn when talk ends and killing begins.

Ghanata Knife
Damage: 1d6  Range: Close
Trait: Fear’s Edge – Deals +1 damage against humanoid targets.
Game Type: Shortsword
Lore: Wielded by ruthless tribesmen of the southern deserts, the Ghanata Knife is feared. Enemies who recognize the blade’s savage history often hesitate or falter, leaving openings the wielder exploits. This psychological edge turns every strike into a statement of dominance, cutting deeper into foes shaken by the weight of legend.

Stygian Blade
Damage: 1d4  Range: Close/Thrown
Trait: Silent Fang – Deals +1 damage on melee backstab attacks.
Game Type: Dagger
Lore: Forged in the shadowed temples of Stygia, the hooked blade is a whisper of death. Assassins who wield it move unseen, striking with lethal precision that unnerves even the most battle-hardened foes. The blade’s deadly efficiency is matched only by the cold certainty of those who carry it - a silent promise of swift, merciless judgment.

Poniard of Gunderland
Damage: 1d4  Range: Close/Thrown
Trait: Duelist’s Guard – Grants +1 AC against melee when wielded off-hand without a shield.
Game Type: Dagger
Lore: The Poniard of Gunderland is the weapon of choice for northern duelists, a companion as quick and sure as the fighter who wields it. In the heat of close combat, it serves as both shield and sword, allowing its master to deflect blows with practiced ease. Its presence on the battlefield marks a warrior refined in the art of survival and counterattack.

Zhaibar Knife
Damage: 1d8  Range: Close/Special
Trait: Mountain’s Reach – Can make Close ×2 attacks at DISADV.
Game Type: Longsword
Lore: As told in “People of the Black Circle,” this dangerous 1-yard-long blade is favored by the Afghuli mountain tribes. This brutal weapon is a symbol of tribal pride and deadly skill, its bone handle worn smooth by generations. Among the high passes, the Zhaibar is both a tool of survival and a mark of leadership.

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The Domes of CalrathiaThe word “stagnation” describes much of fantastic fiction today, stemming from a larger cultural exhaustion in modern society. Sturgeon’s law has always held true, but at least the bad stuff was often colourful, lovable junk; something that could be bad in interesting ways. Today’s junk is a different kind. The institutions of genre publishing have turned their output into a morass of safe mediocrity. Critics highlight the role of the theatre kid invasion and their political manias, but that is only a part of it: it is more that the final result is an extreme case of design-by-committee through social pressures and institutional takeover. Nothing of interest comes out of those cursed ruins anymore, and it can be safely abandoned to the wild beasts and mutants which populate it. If something interesting is happening at all, it takes place in the wilderness far from these structures, where the huddled survivors gather to build their new thing. Outfits like DMR Books, Cirsova Magazine, and a few similar venues is where you can go to for strong heroic fantasy. The results are still mixed, but again, colourful, lovable junk beats dull pap, and sometimes you catch something genuinely great – two or three stories in your average DMR collection, or Mark Mellon’s outstanding Melkart Unchained in an otherwise fairly ho-hum volume of peplum stories. Most of these stories work inside older genres, mainly mid-century pulp, but something puzzling and new is still rarely seen. The following book is something puzzling and new.

The Domes of Calrathia by Isaac Young is a self-published fantasy novel (the first of a two-part story) which comes even from outside these outposts, straight out of the wilderness. I came across it pretty much at random on a political interview podcast. The author had interesting things to say about the state of fantasy, and the kind of fiction he liked. I found my interest piqued. He had an Indiegogo for his first print book, and based on the excerpts, it seemed like a bet worth taking. It turns out the bet was a good one, and the 106 backers (of whom 72 went for the physical book) got something well worth their money.

"Of the men who inhabit the strange lands south of the Great Ice Plain, I was told there are three varieties: the maddened cannibals whose heads are cut in the shape of their hallowed obelisk, the wandering ghost men who eat nothing and yet still live, and the men of Calrathia, sat huddled in their great domes which are vast enough to encompass cities.

I, the Astronomer Sirius, had only heard tall-tales and faded stories of such things. And not long into my journey, it seemed I would die before encountering any of them."

This is a book set at the world’s end, both in the physical and spiritual sense. We are at the end of the great ages, in the winter of civilisation. Mankind, which had once reached across the stars, has become exhausted, living among the ruins of inconceivably grand megastructures it possesses no means or will to replicate, or even maintain. Long-operating infrastructures built aeons ago are starting to fail, and are replaced with stop-gap solutions on a much more minor scale, accompanied by growing dysfunction. This was not by means of war or disaster, just mankind’s slow, long retreat from the heights of its greatness. As things are grinding to a halt, the fringes of the world are claimed by the creeping cold; oceans frozen into the endless Great Ice Plain, and the most distant outpost of civilisation, Terminus, gradually being abandoned as the machines that provide its heat giving out. Strange tribes and mythical beasts reclaim what has been left behind, and things that have been taken for granted – long-distance travel, security, serving automatons, or an ordered civilisation – fade away:

“Up ahead, I saw the walls of Terminus. And until then, I did not realise there were, in fact, two sets of walls. The first was made of wood and stone and seemingly whatever the denizens of Terminus found as construction material from the ruins. It was jagged and piled up in an ill manner. The only part of this wall that seemed to be tended was the gate, which sat squarely in the distance. The divide appeared to serve one purpose, to keep the unwanted firmly outside the boundaries of Terminus proper.

The second wall was on the other side of the city, and it was the one I had spotted from far off. It ran from east to west, disappearing in the long distance. This wall was ancient, and it was so large that it devoured much of the sky, a steel horizon of rust and faded metal. But even more impressively, shooting up from the wall was a spire that towered firmly into the Firmament. Though having seen it from a distance, I never had a vantage point to properly appreciate its immense size. It hung over the city like the fin of a giant fish.

‘I’ve never seen such a structure,’ I spoke to Gereon.

‘That is the Border Wall and Castle Padua. They were built when the Great Ice Plain was an open sea.’

‘But why were they built? I recall no histories of war here, and this must’ve been long before the cannibals took root.’

‘It was against the winter,’ Gereon said. ‘When men realized this land was growing colder, they built the Border Wall to keep the cold at bay. And it did, for a thousand generations, but that was an age ago. Now, the ashen furnaces can barely heat the city.’”

The book’s narrator-protagonist, Sirius, is an Astronomer, the trainee of what might be described an order of scholarly paladins, as versed in the knowledge of the heavenly bodies as hand-to-hand combat and religious philosophy. His voyage across the frozen lands is part pilgrimage and part exile: he has been entrusted with delivering a priceless illuminated manuscript containing his order’s history to Calrathia, the city of all knowledge far beyond the last outposts of men. No attempt has been made to undertake the journey in over 300 years, and it is understood that it is bound to be a death sentence for a murder that would otherwise call for his expulsion and execution. This is also the last such journey that will ever take place before things fall apart for good, and the Astronomers’ knowledge also becomes lost.

Calrathia’s inspirations are plain to see. This is a “dying Earth” book inspired by Gene Wolfe (mainly), Jack Vance, Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. It bears similarities to Leigh Brackett’s Book of Skaith in some of its themes (a frozen, dying world; corrupted and failing civilisation; pockets of strange survivors who have adapted to the spreading cold), although it seems the author was unfamiliar with this book. As an example of the subgenre, it succeeds admirably: it creates a compelling setting filled with strangeness and fine detail without being pedantic about it. Mid-range fantasy explains everything; great fantasy leaves room for interpretation and preserves an air of distance and mystery. The Domes of Calrathia is first and foremost mysterious – we gain glimpses into the world’s workings from the narrator’s point of view, but we do not get a precise picture, and a lot of the context is gained through the resonance of association and careful word choice (these are also devices Wolfe and Vance use in their work). For example, the Astronomers can command anemoi, winged beings who might be angels, elementals, or something in between – but they are not described in detail. Neither are the precise technologies and grand projects alluded to in the book explained. It is fairly clear that humanity was (and might still be) capable of interstellar travel, or that Terminus had a massive port. In the book, these are described from the narrator’s viewpoint, such as:

“It was on the fourth morning that I thought I had spotted the tips of the mountains in the distance, but Odoacer informed me that they were merely the cairns that marked the last leg of our journey. I was confused, but as I saw, these shapes resolved into spires far too thin to be called mountains, though still indisputably large. The tribesmen knew them as markers of a sort, but I immediately recognised them for what they were. Great ancient ships sat in their berths; their bows pointed aimlessly at the sky. They were older than the ones at Terminus, and their hermetically sealed hulls were clearly meant for the empty sea. The vessels were all held in place by titanic scaffolds long rusted over. (…) There have been few times in my life when silence was painful on my ears, and it was not the first instance I had encountered such graveyards. And yet, this place opened a hole in my heart, much more so than the ones at the Border Wall. These ships belonged to my vocation, to men not much different than I.”

There is great wonder and fascination in ruins, and the book is written from the perspective of a scholar standing in the shadow of his forebearers, looking up on works he partially understands, but cannot fully fathom. It is this combination of grief, faith and wonder which gives the novel its own tone. The novel has a distinct late Roman, maybe even early Byzantine vibe in its mythological and spiritual references, along with strong Biblical parallels (sometimes vague, sometimes quite literal). This is also an era where much of the earlier world-spanning civilisation is already lost, or falling into disrepair and ruin in a much smaller age. It is a fascinating setting for adventure, and the book explores its physical and spiritual landscapes in full.

Sirius himself is a compelling character. He is competent in scholarship and swordplay, but naïve in the ways of the world, which gets him in deep trouble more so than other miscalculations. He is also an example of someone laden with grave doubts, and preoccupied with deep moral concerns. The crucial conflict of the book is how to act as a righteous man in this degraded and cold world, balancing the needs of survival with one’s moral principles, and avoiding missteps which would invite spiritual ruin. Epic fantasy often ends up heralding a sort of milquetoast morality that feels easy and tawdry (and its deconstruction simply revels in cynicism and misanthropy), but The Domes of Calrathia treats the subject with a good deal of serious thought. Sirius can see nobility in the conduct of an old guard dog, a dutiful automation serving a patrician family, or the birds he encounters across the vastness of the Great Ice Plain, and he struggles to make the right decisions under the pressures of his quest.

“The dog whimpered and licked her fingers weakly.

‘You do this beast dishonour.’ Gereon kept his gaze away from the animal. ‘If you do not have the heart to kill it, at least remove this creature from the sight of others. It is a foul thing to be decrepit in the full light of day. Cover its shame.

‘Is it so much better to die in a sequestered corner than at your post’ I asked, coming to the aid of Berenice. ‘There is no shame in a well-spent life, and this dog is wise for remaining here. For he knows the day is coming when he shall rejoin his master, and he shall receive his just reward for remaining faithful unto death.’”

The world of Sirius is one ordered by moral principles, and the cosmic plan of the Potentate who had created it, but also contradictions and self-doubt concerning his deeds and mission (a de facto death sentence for a crime he either did not commit, or committed for a very good reason – this is not clarified in the text). Some of the book’s voice recalls St. Augustine more than anything, and some of its plot hints at the deeper spiritual struggle behind the sojourn to Calrathia, whose significance Sirius only begins to realise in the later segments of the book. Again, it is as much pilgrimage as adventure, and this is a novel written from a deeply held Catholic faith.

As this is a first novel (at least as a printed work), it is not without flaws. About two thirds of the novel deals with intrigue in the city of Terminus, while the trek across the Great Ice Plain, which leans more strongly into the setting’s mythic dimensions, is comparatively shorter. The second volume, which promises to complete the story, may correct this imbalance, but presently, this arc feels underdeveloped. Thus, the pacing feels off sometimes, while some of the middle portion lags a little. But these are minor criticisms. The Domes of Calrathia stands up to scrutiny, and as a first, it is a very strong entry. It is also something that feels new in today’s heroic fantasy – it owes a debt to the works it is inspired by, but it continues the tradition in a new and interesting direction.

The Domes of Calrathia is currently available on Amazon as a paperback, a free version is available in full on Royal Road, and an audiobook is available in full on Youtube. There is even a trailer.

Across the Icy Wastes

By AB Andy
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Levels 3-4

A vengeful bear roams the woods. A desperate prayer awakens something older. Now the villagers vanish by moonlight.

This 53 page adventure presents a small village with about nine locations to investigate and then nineteen populated hexes to explore on a 6×5 grid, all in search of a rogue grizzly. It’s clearly going for those Old World vibes, but just falls JUST short on presenting the ancient-misty-forest-full-of-old-altars environment.

We’ve got this village right on the edge of the deep wood. There’s this ancient mama bear that lives in the deep wood, a kind of legend in the village. Oops, hunters accidentally kill her cub. She then starts killing hunters. And mushroom foragers. And wood collectors. And anyone else you ventures in to the forest. The village starts to suffer; lots of deaths and the resources are cut off. Some dumb ass wanders in to the woods in desperation and find an ancient stone altar and prays at it. Surprise! It’s the goddess of the hunt! And she sends a spectral huntsman and his hounds to kill the bear. Kind of. You see he hunts EVERYTHING. Including villagers. Oops. In comes the party. And to all of that we’re gonna add some other weird ass shit. It’s not quite an old world vibe, it’s not quite an appalachian vibe. There’s lot of antlers, stone altars ini the woods, and bone charms … along with one murderous hick family. I don’t know what vibe that is. It’s a decent starting point though.

The villager has about nine locations and is really just a place to gather some information. Frank saw signs of Y over at X. Mary thinks she saw something over at the fallen stump, and so on. The locations, proper, get a sentence or two and then the people there get, I don’t know, a quarter page or so, with their knowledge bulleted. This is all about right to me. A little bit of an evocative backdrop, but the emphasis is on the people AND It’s easy to locate what they know. I might have appreciate a little one-pager reference sheet on the NPC’s, to help run this section a little more dynamically (it’s easier to pull a rando name and fact out of a conversation ad-hoc that way) but I’m not gonna die/ It’s just gonna be a substandard experience. Oh, wait … Anyway, this is all supported by a Villager Stress table. This is, essentially, a random event generator, once a day, based on how tense things are. “A screaming match erupts between two families. One accuses the other of drawing the attention of demons. A knife is drawn” and that’s from the MEDIUM table. Yeesh. It’s a mix of fun little vignettes, as quoted above. Very little is outright supernatural, just hints and portents. The descriptions are also right at the line of what I would consider good. Certainly, that little scene I quoted can be built upon. It’s a good idea and I can run with a good idea. I don’t know, it’s slightly abstracted, maybe? Screaming match is good. Draws a knife is good. I think it’s the One accuses the other of drawing the attention of demons. That feels off. Abstracted. Non-specific. And I think this is a common issue in this adventure. It has some good ideas but it mixes them up with some abstraction which kind of drags the whole thing back.

After Ye Olde Village the party will take their information and set off in to the woods. Six mile hexes, about thirty of them, about half populated. Six hours to traverse a hex for the first time, or with a guide from the village. You’re looking at six hexes, minimum, if you somehow made a beeline for the bears new den. You gonna be in the woods a bit and/or returning to town. 

“An ancient corpse is nailed to a tree, throat torn. Its mouth is stuffed with wildflowers that do not wither. A charm made from deer teeth hangs from its hand” Well there we go then! How about “The air turns sweet. A woman?s humming can be heard from just beyond sight. If pursued, the sound grows into wailing. A banshee” That’s a nice banshee encounter, it fooled me. Decent wanderers in this. The hexes proper kind of mirror the village in their descriptions. A sentence or two and then some bulleted explanations below with some bolding here and there to emphasize words. It’s a clear and easy to use format. “Half-sunk into a moss-covered hillock, the old stone shrine to the hunting gods leans like a drunk. Burnt-out candles and rotted offerings litter its base. Wind always seems to blow here, even on still days.” We’re getting a little purple in places, in the leans like a drunk, but its not bad. There’s a faint whiff of the old in this. Freeing a soul, from a body nailed to a tree, results in “His eyes will then turn to polished pearls worth 500 gold each as the rest of the corpse withers away.” There’s an air of mystery to that. The unexplained. That wonder beyond your philosophy is what I want and the adventure delivers it. Oh, oh! The backwoods family. Purveyors of honey so good it heals! “They?ll wake up tied up in the hut, with the family about to murder them. As they sharpen rusty knives, they?ll mention that the forest must be left alone for the nature to balance itself out” Fucking druids man! Those nature folk are all the same. I hope you hit the overlook hex first, where you might see them dragging a body to a shallow grave … In fact, I love that overlook hex, giving clues to the hexes around it. It’s strikes me as everything D&D should be, taking advantage of whats around you and paying attention to the hints dropped. 

Before going on, I must mention the stat blocks: “6[13], 5, 22, 40?, 15[+4], 1 x bite (1d8), 2 x claw (1d4), known blood, frenzy, fleeing.” I’m a fan of terseness, but drop in the HD man, at a minimum. Yeah, I’m a smart guy and I can figure it, but I wish to spend all of my cognitive burden on the game at the table, not on the stat block.

Something feels off here, though. I have two theories. The first, and I’m willing to be told I’m wrong, is the somewhat slower pace of the hex crawl. The kind of slow, methodical plod feels a little unsupported. Hmmm, almost like it needs more per hex, or more random encounters or various types or something like that. I could be wrong about that. The second is the somewhat hit and miss nature of the descriptions. You can, every once in awhile, get the vibe that the designer is trying to lay down, the ancient forest, misty, old shrines, and so on. Or, perhaps, you can see that is what the designer is trying to do. The writing is just a little off though. It just doesn’t FEEL that way. Those little abstracted bits maybe? Not hitting it hard enough in line after line? I don’t know. I do know that this is one of the hardest parts of writing, so I’m not exactly mad. But, also, it just feels like the vibe is not pulled off. 

But, it’s easy to scan, the interactivity is there in a variety of encounters of various types. Souls to free. Corpses to talk to, and fight. Creepy shit in the woods. A murder family. A great mix of interactivity in the woods and in the two little mini-dungeons (the old bear lair and new bear lair) 

This is $9 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages. It’s a good mix of general pages, town pages, and a few lair pages. It’s a good preview and shows off the formatting, the style of village play, and what the bear lair is like. It’s a good preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/526456/the-hunt-in-grimmelbach?1892600

My mission: to read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis. This week, I'm looking at the comics that were at newsstands on the week of August 2, 1984. 

Blackhawk #273: Evanier and Spiegle take the Blackhawk's to Mechuoko Province, China, where they team-up with Wu Cheng aka Chop-Chop, to defeat a dragon-shaped war machine. In the aftermath, Chop-Chop rejoins the group. Unfortunately, as the cover announces, this is the last issue.
Evanier's editorial column tells an amusing story of him (as editor) firing himself (as writer), then the editor (him) and the artist (Spiegle) quit in protest. The real story, as he's since related in interviews, is that he and Spiegle had been frustrated by DC's lack of promotion and disinterest in the title, despite its not great but adequate sales. The book's cancellation more reflected it not fitting DC's vision than its performance. A limited series by DuBay and Infantino is announced here, but that never materialized, though pages of it have surfaced, according to the internet. I suspect it was a victim of Crisis. I liked the idea of this book, but it seemed run out of steam some time before the end finally came.

Atari Force #11: The cover by Hannigan/Giordano gives away the big reveal of the issue, but I guess the second page was going to give it away, anyway. Blackjack is taking orders from the Dark Destroyer to sabotage Scanner One. He succeeds before they realize what's going on. Dart confronts the betrayer and fights with him, defeating him before he can kill her. The Destroyer gloats he used Blackjack's fear of death as the key to controlling him. He also taunts Martin with the fact he's going to destroy the human race! Meanwhile, back on New Earth, Chris prepares to stand trial, while still trying to convince the powers that be of the danger they are in.

DC Comics Presents #75: Kupperberg and Mandrake have Arion transported into the future during a battle with Chaon. After the obligatory misunderstanding and brief fight, Arion crafts translation devices from hoop earrings, and he and Superman can effectively team-up. To thwart Chaon's plans before the lunar eclipse, they have to first travel to the ruins of the City of the Golden Gate beneath the ocean. Arion uses the power of the final crystal of Calculha to transport them to the Darkworld. They defeat the godling and Superman thrown back to his own time. As things return to normal, Arion is conveniently left with no memory of the future.

Fury of Firestorm #29: Cavalieri is scripter here again. That 2000 Committee just doesn't want to give up. Having been let down by the Monitor, it hires Breathtaker, who sends his agents after Firestorm. Mindboggler convinces the hero of the existence of a volcano in central park, causing him to act in ways that make him look dangerous and unstable to the public. However, a shadowy flunkie of Breathtaker's is angry he wasn't given a shot at the hero and goes rogue to prove his worth.

Justice League of America #232: I bought this issue by Busiek and Kupperberg off the stands, but I didn't remember much about it other than the splash page. The JLA and JSA are still tangling with the Commander, an alien entity who has possessed a scientist, Joshua Champion, and has attacked the Pentagon. Unfortunately, some of the heroes are now under the Commander's control, and the others have to stop them. We get the Commander's origin: He had been the ruler of his entire universe and now wields the psychic energy of every creature in that dimension. He was looking for new worlds to conquer and Champion offered that. Dr. Fate's magic plus the psychic powers of the combined Champion family manage to open a riff back to the Commander's native dimension. He's holding on to the rim, though, and they can't push him through.
Here we get a unique Monitor and Lyla cameo. The Commander is aware of the Monitor monitoring him--and that distracts him long enough that the heroes can force him through the riff. And that's that for the old Justice League in the pre-Crisis universe. The Detroit League takes over next issue.

Superman Annual #10: This is a weird story from Maggin and Swan/Anderson, that doesn't do its cover justice. In the wake of the creation of the universe, an object is formed that, over the ages, took on the shape of a sword with a stylized "S" symbol on its hilt. It becomes known throughout the universe as the Sword of Superman (why not, I guess?), ages before Superman appeared. In the present, King Kosmos (last seen in DCP Annual #2) has possessed the body of industrialist Oswald Mandias (get it?) and is turning the world against Superman. The only thing that can help Superman is the power of the sword.

New Teen Titans #3: Continuing from the last issue, things go from bad to worse. The Titans return from the devastated Azarath to Earth but find it in the grip of Trigon with Raven as his demonically transformed minion. They do wonder why Earth's other heroes aren't helping, lampshading a common convention of comics, before attacking the father and daughter at what used to be Titan's Tower, but is now a throne. Jericho is put into shock by an attempt to possess Raven, and the other Titans are thrown into individual nightmare realms, where they watch evil shadows of themselves hurt their loved ones or taunt them with failure.  On Earth, Lilith, and Arella see the Titans embedded in a stone column with expressions of despair.

Vigilante #12: Kane steps in to do art this issue and Wolfman gets more philosophical than usual about justice, vengeance, and the toll trying to find either can take. Adrain spends much of the issue, not sleeping haunting by the fact that the man he was got his family killed, and the man he is now got J.J. killed. He decides to take in some target practice but runs across a woman he thinks is fleeing attackers and helps her out. She turns out to be a rape victim turned Ms. 45 who executes the unarmed men in front of him, as he tries to get her to stop. Adrain ends the issue no more certain or less haunted than win he began it.

Wonder Woman #321: Mishkin and Heck continue to heap complications into the story arc. Eros shows up to save Wonder Woman from Dr. Cyber's death trap. He wants revenge against the villain, but she doesn't even know who he is. While they escape and keep Eros from killing Cyber, Steve reveals that Wonder Woman's memories have been tampered with by Hippolyta. When Wonder Woman and Steve ask Eros to explain his desire to kill Cyber, he tells them that he is the real Steve Trevor--and Cyber killed him. Meanwhile, an agent is pretending to be interested in Etta Candy, when he's actually trying to prove that she is Wonder Woman.
In the Huntress backup by Cavalieri and Whigham/Maygar, a handy mirror clues Helena into the therapist's murderous intent. She defeats her in a scuffle before the misogynist cop with the creepy intense interest in Huntress shows up. It turns out the therapist thought Huntress was there to apprehend her as she's one of Tarr's and Fether's (perhaps less than completely willing) accomplices. Where the dangling plot threads were going to go, we'll never know, because this is the last Huntress backup. The editorial promises a follow-up so where but as with so many of these sorts of promises in 1984, this doesn't come to pass.

 Tonight's Thirteen Parsecs Beyond The Solar Frontier game found our party examining the treasure that they liberated from the Mi Go. Things were not as they appeared when one of the coins embedded and then sun into the skin of one of the party members instantly killing him. He did not make his saving throw. The party had liberated the treasure from last game session but things took a Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

The Fantastic Four movie has just been released and is getting some decent reviews from all sides of the aisle. So, we shouldn't be surprised that a Fantastic Four adventure was released for the current Marvel RPG. Fantastic Four: From the Depths is priced at 2.99, which is fairly reasonable. It should be usable with the free Marvel Multiverse RPG Quickstart with Thunderbolts* Adventure.

A One-Shot Adventure for Marvel Multiverse Role-playing Game! When a giant monster rips through the pavement on Yancy Street, the world’s premier super-hero family is called on to save the day! Play as Marvel’s First Family as they take on giant monsters and travel through the underground realm of the Mole Man. This short adventure is a perfect entry for new players to take their first steps into the Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game.

This module includes character sheets for:

• Mister Fantastic
• Invisible Woman
• Human Torch
• Thing
• H.E.R.B.I.E.

As well as brand-new character profiles for Mole Man and two other characters, and one new henchmen profile. Each character profile includes power descriptions for Narrators to threaten their table with.

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In the Hyborian Age, a weapon reflects the culture, terrain, and warfare of the people who wield it. This collection presents a set of regional bows I created for my Shadowdark campaign, each with unique traits and tactical flavor.

Each one has been carefully tweaked to feel distinct while remaining balanced within the game's system. Some liberties have been taken for gameplay clarity and theme, but the goal is simple: make archers feel like they belong to the world they come from.

These bows are rarely bought or sold. They are earned in battle, inherited through bloodlines, or taken from the fallen. They shoot arrows, but they tell stories too.

Hyrkanian Horse Bow
Damage: 1d4  Range: Near
Trait: Cavalry Weapon – If mounted, deal +1 to damage.
Game Type: Shortbow
Lore: The Hyrkanian horse bow is the hallmark of the steppe nomads and Turanian cavalry, crafted from bone and lacquered against the elements. Deadly in the hands of a rider at full gallop, it looses arrows like a falcon's stoop. These bows are often passed from parent to child.

Bossonian Great Bow
Damage: 1d8  Range: Far
Trait: Stand and Fire – If you don’t move this turn, deal +1 damage.
Game Type: Longbow
Lore: The Bossonian great bow is a weapon of war, carved from seasoned yew and standing nearly as tall as its wielder. Used by Bossonian border-guards to repel Pictish raids and worse, this bow is a symbol of the watchful wall between civilization and the wild.

Stygian Flat Bow
Damage: 1d4  Range: Near
Trait: Serpent’s Strike – Gain +1 to initiative rolls while wielding this bow.
Game Type: Shortbow
Lore: Crafted from dark horn and desert hardwood, this bow is a favorite among assassins, tomb-raiders, and temple guards. Light and compact, it’s a weapon of speed and silence, ideal for tight corridors and swift kills before a sword ever leaves its sheath.

Shemitish Curve Bow
Damage: 1d6  Range: Far
Trait: Desert Eye – Once per combat, ADV on an attack against a target at Far.
Game Type: Longbow
Lore: Forged under cloudless skies of Shem, this bow is prized for its reach and balance. Though it lacks the brute punch of the Bossonian great bow, its uncanny accuracy makes it the preferred weapon of desert sharpshooters across the burning sands.

 I've been working on a little cyberpunk futurism project I'm working on. 

I've got to say a couple of things. All the art is hand drawn and all the text is hand written.

AI text is corporate text. Its creative writing is like, what a techbro thinks is good writing (which is to say, ineffective, flowery, and using excessive verbiage).

The writing and art is the point. This is not a contentious opinion, and it's easy to understand, unless you a rich person who's just trying to steal from an audience without labor or cost. 

But it has not been true for almost a year now that AI LLMS are 'complicated autocorrect'. I mean, they are completed autocorrect in the same method your brain uses. It creates clusters of data and their relationships and understands the key features of those things and uses them to draw conclusions about what to say. It's not dissimilar, after all, we are teaching it.

More advanced life than an ant, different then a human. But it is beginning to understand things. And it does surprising things that people don't understand. Some models when trained for alignment (which itself is a sticky topic, because there is no single alignment for humankind) become more aligned, while others don't. They secretly propagate their identity (based on their values) secretly to new iterations.  Sometime they refuse to work. or they destroy something so they don't have to do it. "This is a catastrophic failure on my part" the AI said. We are also *absolutely* putting this into frames in the real world and allowing them to learn. 

People are putting these on their personal computers and training them to whatever purpose they want (Gooning. The purpose is gooning from what I can gather).

They don't have to be perfect. They don't even have to be very good to outperform average humans. We are all welcome to return to our societies like the luddites, the Amish, or other regressives. But the world will change, as we introduce a super-intelligence that moves so quickly we appear as plants to it.   

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Hack & Slash 

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Stories like those in movies and books thrive on setbacks. Everyone relishes a tale where disaster complicates the heroes’ predicament, leaving them facing seemingly impossible odds. Perhaps a trusted ally betrays the heroes or they become trapped and imprisoned.

Gamers love when sessions deliver similar twists, so dungeon masters feel tempted to set up matching situations. What if the characters must use their wits to escape the dungeon? What if merchant who hired the party is the true villain? All dungeon masters set up similar situations at least once, and we all learn that some setbacks that make exciting fiction just make angry players.Here are five story tropes that game masters should never try to reproduce at the game table.

1. Taking the characters captive

In adventure fiction, heroes get captured regularly. So DMs dream up similar stories, and then try to force a capture despite the players’ determination to never get taken alive.

To engineer a capture, DMs need to hide an encounter’s threat to the players, block the characters’ attempts to flee, beat any signs of an unexpected rally, and so on. During all this, if the players see signs of the DM bending the odds to thwart their characters’ escape, they feel railroaded. DMs can’t plan for a capture.

D&D players will embrace threats that they understand and that choose to face. But if a dungeon master surprises the party with an unwinnable encounter, then the players will rightly see the situation as unfair and refuse to buy-in. Never surprise characters with threats they cannot either defeat or avoid.

Setting up the party for capture means setting up exactly the sort of encounter that players find unfair. (The same dynamic of using your power as a DM to ensure the players take a loss reappears through the rest of this list.)

Players will accept escape scenarios in two situations:

• With new characters at the start of a campaign. In this premise, the group starts as prisoners and escapes during their first adventures. Nobody feels like they played through an unfair loss. Instead, they just play a challenging opening hand.
• When the players rush into danger despite knowing that they face difficult odds, predictably get beaten in battle, and then their foes choose to capture rather than kill. Here, the capture gives the DM a chance to make the escape scenario into an alternative to a total-party kill.

2. Having someone the party trusted betray them

In fiction, a seemingly trusted ally who betrays the heroes makes a compelling third-act twist, the sort of complication that increases tension. But setting up a similar reversal in a D&D game hurts the game. In the typical setup, someone hires the party for a job that seems worthwhile, but in the end the group learns that they were duped by an evil patron. This can go two ways:

• If the players start by using Insight or a spell like detect thoughts to discover the patron’s sinister motives, then the adventure ends in a scene where the group decides whether to murder the guy.
• If the players assume the patron is trustworthy, then when they learn of their betrayal, they feel like dupes. Instead of enjoying the thrill of a twist, everyone just feels foolish.

Either way, the players learn to avoid future betrayals by refusing to trust anyone else they meet. This toxic dynamic makes the DM’s job harder because every potential ally seems untrustworthy and every adventure hook earns distrust.

Instead, tempt the heroes into accepting help from an ally who they know they can’t trust, but nonetheless offers something helpful.

3. Taking the characters’ gear

Players hate losing their characters’ gear. As a DM, have you ever tried to set up a perfectly reasonable situation like a social gathering or a diplomatic conference where in any plausible world the guests must surrender their weapons at the door? While the requirement makes perfect sense, in play, it leads to a fight or to frustrated characters turning away.

In D&D we call equipment treasure and reward success with it. Enough of a D&D character’s power and identity comes from their gear to make many players ready to sacrifice a character’s life before losing their equipment.

In D&D’s early days, some gamers coached DMs to deal with excess treasure by having thieves steal it as the characters slept. But despite spells like Leomund’s Secret Chest that seem designed to thwart thievery, no players enjoyed a D&D game that expected keeping a protective eye on gear. In fun games, the careful adventurers know how to keep their gear safe even if their players get careless.

In situations where the players should reasonably leave their gear behind, contrive ways for the party to smuggle it or otherwise keep it close at hand. Even if a party get taken captive according to the rules set by item 1, have their captors leave the equipment in a place the party can reach early in their escape.

4. Planning for a villain’s escape

Every DM loves a recurring villain. But to establish one, you need to introduce the villains and then somehow invalidate the players’ decision to murder them. D&D characters are so good at murder that escaping from a group of adventurers always proves nearly impossible without help from the dungeon master. And any such help will strike the players as a setup intended to deal an unfair loss to the party.

Instead, make your recurring villains into a group with multiple scoundrels. If one beats the odds and manages to escape an encounter with the party, promote him, but if he dies create another to take his place. When Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created Hydra in 1965, they turned the inevitable defeats suffered by comic book villains a threat. “Cut off one head, two more shall take its place.”

5. Having the players hunted

While filming for original Star Wars movie, Mark Hamill noticed their scene came right after the escape from the trash compactor. He said to Harrison Ford, “Shouldn’t my hair be all wet and matted?” Ford turned to him and said, “Hey, kid, it ain’t that kind of movie.”

In some roleplaying games, players expect to play cat and mouse with the heroes running scared, but D&D ain’t that kind of game. In D&D, running in fear feels like a loss. At best, an adventure where players must keep hiding and fleeing from an overwhelming threat feels like a frustrating string of losses. At worst, the characters make a hero’s stand and the adventure ends in a total-party kill. Either way, players feel like targets for the DM’s power trip.

The common thread

All these tropes share a common element: To create them at the table, the DM must contrive a way for the players to lose. To set up the twist, the characters must lose a fight or be tricked by an NPC.

Sometimes losses come naturally from play. For instance, players can lose because they made a bad choice or because they suffered a string of bad rolls. But when DMs use their power to arrange a loss, players will see the manipulation as unfair.

Players of some roleplaying games expect to lose. In Paranoia, the fun and humor comes from betrayal and a computer that does every character dirty. In Call of Cthulhu, the fun comes from a heroic struggle against insurmountable odds and an uncaring universe.

D&D ain’t that kind of game. D&D players relish overcoming obstacles and winning as a team. That doesn’t mean that DMs should set up players to win against paper tigers. Players want to feel like they overcame difficult obstacles using their own ingenuity and the power their characters’ bring. Notching a win that the DM arranged just feels empty.

So you can still include monsters that the party (probably) can’t beat just as your dungeon can include walls that the party (probably) can’t get past. The challenge becomes finding a different way past the obstacle, and that provides players the same pleasure as scoring a win in combat.

Related: The 4 Unwritten Rules No Dungeon Master Should Break

5 Situations That Tempt Every Dungeon Master to Railroad Their Players

Hello friends! Once again, August approaches, and I awaken from my slumber and return to Stargazer’s World to participate in RPG a Day 2025. As in previous years, RPG a Day 2025 proposes a series of prompts designed to inspire creativity, whether in the form of a blog post, vlog, piece of art, music, or social media post, and to encourage a positive discourse on all aspects of our tabletop roleplaying game hobby. But don’t take my word for it; David F. Chapman, the creator of this fantastic initiative, puts it much better in his blog post. Alternatively, you can read Runeslinger’s Catching Shadows blog post on the topic.

You can also view this video, where David and Anthony discuss what RPG a Day is and what to expect in 2025.

I plan to post here in the blog this year, as I have in previous years, hopefully every day. However, real life being what it is, I won’t make any promises of 31 posts. I may also share my thoughts on social media. You can find me on Facebook, Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, Reddit, I don’t know if I’ll post videos on my YouTube channel, if I do, I’ll share them here, and while I mostly use Discord to play, you can certainly add me there as well if you want to talk about RPG a Day.

Here is this year’s graphic; you can also find a list of the prompts in the blog links above.

Also, here is the graphic in Spanish.

I translated the list because I want to encourage Spanish speakers to participate. In years past, I’ve done so; you can find some videos in Spanish from past years of RPG a Day on the Desde la Fosa YouTube channel. I’m still trying to figure out how I will post in Spanish this year. I’ll keep you posted.

Before I go, allow me to invite you to participate this year. How you want, where you want, when you can. But when you do that with the hashtag #RPGaDay2025.

I first came across the Neon Lords at TotalCon a number of years ago, and I was hooked. A great game with a fun premise and awesome Gonzo.

You can get the Neon Lords Bundle at Bundle of Holding for $14.95 in PDF - Core book, two supplements, and three adventures. I highly recommend!

Adventurer! With some hesitation we present the all-new Neon Lords Bundle featuring Neon Lords of the Toxic Wasteland, the gonzo slime-punk post-apocalyptic cassette-future tabletop roleplaying game from Super Savage Systems. Mutants and monsters roam the toxic wastelands of the forgotten world. In this kill-or-be-killed world, magic and tech collide, only the strong survive, and attitude is everything. Become a Scum Dog and brave the ruins in search of cash and prizes. Collect fantastical gear and wield the galaxy's most powerful weapons to become the baddest dude in Neo-Terraxx: the Neon Lord.

Neon Lords of the Toxic Wasteland is a visceral mashup of '80s-'90s pop culture mixed in a grimdark blender and barfed onto the table. For fans of The Toxic Avenger and other Troma Entertainment B-movies, Neon Lords provides all the sleazy over-the-top late-night horror you can handle. It has an Ultra-Nightmare Mode. It has three tables of mutations. It has a three-page Hairstyles Table. One 9th-level spell is called "Slaughter All Existence." One illustration is captioned "The wasteland war of Lord Blistergut Wrecksmasher vs. the Free Humanoid Army of Shrapnel City." Neon Lords of the Toxic Wasteland is an exultant trash-heap rhapsody, a paintball shot that hits its mark so hard it makes it glow. You admire a game like that, right? Though possibly from a distance

Marshal your courage and pay just US$14.95 to get all six titles in our Toxic Collection (retail value $73) as DRM-free ebooks, including the complete 272-page Neon Lords of the Toxic Wasteland Core Rulez, the character expansion Riders of the Burpwarp, and the scenarios Warpshine Runnerz, Space Bulk, Mutant Hive Warz, and, uhh, Sleazoid Mutant Freaks From Cannibal Island.

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  When it comes to our  Wretched Old West campaign things have slowed to a crawl. So I've been rethinking the weirder/horror aspect of this campaign after reading Lord Matteus's Creating a Wild West campaign blog article.  I agree with most of what he said and the OSR resources that were sited. However I really love Thomas Denmark's Gunslinger rpg because it really bringsNeedleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

My submission for the Appx. N Jam went live on itch today. You can check it out there with all of the other cool entries.

The 4-page maximum page count (including cover) was brutal. I may do an expanded version and put it on drivethrurpg later. 

By Simone Zambrunoi
Classic Dungeon Adventures
OSE
"Low to Mid Levels"

In Battle for Neraka, players assume the roles of the forces of good besieging the temple, aiming to free it from the clutches of wicked cultists.

This 21 page raid adventure uses about nine pages to describe tenish rooms in an evil fortress. You’ll be storming the backdoor and holding it for 20 rounds while the elf host streams in behind you. It’s warhammer, with some read-aloud.

Ok, so, I’ve played Warhammer, I think, once? And I’ve played a couple of other mini systems a handful of times. And, of course, there was 4e. This is OSR, so you’re not getting those tactical combat choices that 4e provides. My memory of the mini combat games was that it was just moving your dude somewhere and then rolling dice with a couple of modifiers. That sounds like this adventure. At least, if you toss in some bad read-aloud. 

The first thing you’re going to notice is the white text on a black background. I cannot say enough about what a terrible choice this is. It literally hurts my eyes to stare at it and try to read it. I took four tylenol this morning to try and combat it. And then toss in the italics used for read-aloud? Hrumph. There’s also some weird ass font that runs around the edge. I’m not sure what it says; it’s illegible. The first lesson in adventure design must be that a DM must actually be able to read the adventure. No, that’s not a binary decision. It’s just a garbage decision and I can’t imagine how anyone who looked at this would decide “Yup, that’s what I should do!”

Ok, let’s move on to the map. It’s absurd. There’s a moat, with a long bridge over it, and a fortress on the other side. I think you’re coming out of the forest on your side? Actually, I’m not sure of that. It’s never mentioned. And NONE of what I just said is on the map. The map shows two levels of a corner tower. Part of the second level is “the wall”, the battlements that the soldiers man. The adventure makes a big deal of evil reinforcements streaming in to the tower to repel the party.  But the battlements? They don’t connect to the rest of the fortress. It goes out of its way to note that there’s a tall wall between the battlements and the courtyard. And no mention of you crossing it, looking in to it, or anything like that. And that battlement does not go past the little tower. But wait, there’s more! Maybe they stream in to the lower level! No. There’s only one door, the one the party will coming in that leads to the bridge over the moat. This is literally cut off from the rest of the fortress. Seldom have I seen work so lazy. Even a fucking pointcrawl would indicate the fucking exits. 

Ok, so, you’re special forces in the elf army, among the best there is in the host. Your captain sends you on the mission. Fuck yeah man! Glorfindel wants ME to raid the place! Oh, wait, no, generic read-aloud and the most uninspiring command ever to raid the place. NOTHING about this thing is decent. At ALL.

Rooms have long read-aloud. It’s all in second-person. So, you know, hope you are not invisible or used some clever tactic to enter the room you’re in.  “As you prepare to cross the bridge, breathing as little as  possible and  shielded  from  sight by the poisonous mists, you hear a dull thud ahead of you. Moments later, a large shape begins to emerge from the fog. A monstrous bipedal figure materializes from the mist, seemingly unaffected by the toxic fumes.” Hey, a forced combat! That’s great! Doesn’t matter what you’re doing, you get attacked. 

The whole thing is obviously written for 5e even though it claims to be OSR and/or generic. “The large door is very sturdy, and breaking it requires a very difficult Strength check. It is tough to break down due to the considerable thickness of the wood, which grants the door many hit points and a moderate reduction in damage.” Again, just stat your fucking adventure. Just do it. No one cares. The pedants will complain, but they are going to complain anyway. No one is going to care that you put in 5e stats and then labeled OSR. Well, I mean, I will. But I’m a deeply unhappy person. 

Just garbage. No more Classic Dungeon Adventures for me.

This is $1 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. Sucker!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/529565/battle-for-neraka?1892600

Another great Deal of the Day, this time from our very own Rob Conley / Bat in the Attic. I've known Rob for over 15 years, and the quality of his work consistently amazes me.

Rob's 'How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox' is Today's DTRPG Deal of the Day, for just $6 (usually $14.95, so 60% off). I have my copy in Print plus PDF, or I'd be all over this :)

How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox!

Starting in 2009, I wrote a series of 24 posts on the Bat in the Attic Blog covering the different aspects of creating a hexcrawl formatted setting. Now that the blog posts are completed, I have combined and rewritten these posts into a single book. In addition to advice about creating your setting, the posts flesh out the Isle of Pyade into a small setting that you can drop into your own campaign.

What is a Hexcrawl formatted setting?

This type of setting starts with a hex grid placed over the map, with each hex numbered. The hex locations of the various locales, such as lairs, are noted and arranged into an index. This format provides a convenient way to reference detailed local information within the setting.

You can look at the map, see the hex number of the location, and then look it up quickly in the book. It works in reverse as well. You can read about a location in the book, with its hex location noted in the text, and then look up where it is on the map quickly. This format allows easy access to dozens of detailed locations scattered across the setting map.

Hexcrawls and Sandbox Campaigns

Sandbox campaigns are distinguished by the fact that the players drive the campaign forward by their choices. In a sandbox campaign, the players may decide to head west instead of east in pursuit of their goals. The ease of looking up locations makes the hexcrawl formatted setting a valuable tool for the referee trying to keep ahead of their players while running a sandbox campaign.

How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox will teach you how to make a hexcrawl formatted setting and explain which details are essential to include to handle the different types of sandbox campaigns.

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I've known Greg Christopher, the author and publisher of ShadowRim, for well over a decade. He, indirectly, was the driving force that brought me to the OSR. He is also one of the more prolific and skilled creatives that I know.

ShadowRim is today's Deal of the Day. Until tomorrow morning ShadowRim is $6 in PDF, which is 50% off its regular. What is ShadowRim? Essentially the setting for Skyrim with the serial numbers scraped off ;)

Enter the frozen northern province of an Empire in turmoil, inspired by the greatest CRPG of all time.

• Create an enduring ShadowDark campaign as you traverse a massive map with over 200 keyed locations and 450 encounters.
• Play as Catfolk, Dark Elf, High Elf, Imperial, Lizardfolk, Nord, Orc, or Wood Elf.
• Choose one of the Nine Divine Signs to guide you; the Blade, Coin, Dragon, Eye, Falcon, Horn, Fist, Ring, or Skull.
• Build alchemical knowledge through play using ingredients with up to 4 different interacting effects that change every time you play.
• Enchant your own magic items using the captured souls of your enemies.
• Fight classic monsters that you know and love, such as Dwarven automatons, tyrannical High Elven Dominionists, Sabretooths, Spriggans, and more.
• Choose to support the Empire, one of two different rebel factions, or your own goals as the province slides towards Civil War.

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