Urban Fantasy Fridays: NightLife (1990)

 NightLife is a game I have had on and off for a number of years. I only ever owned the core rules and the Magic book. I never got a chance to play it, but it is a game we talk about every so often in our Elf Lair Games meetings. The game is quintessentially early 90s. It's filled with blood, dark, and dirty streets, and where you get to play the monster. Vampire: The Masquerade may have done it better, but NightLife gave it its all a year earlier.

NightLife is set in New York. A strange New York that is sandwiched between the movie Warriors and the First World Trade Center bombing.  A city that is hot and perpetually at night. Something like Dark City meets Nightbreed.

NightLife

by Bradley K. McDevitt, L. Lee Cerny, Walter H. Mytczynskyj
1990, 1992 Stellar Games, 256 pages.

Much like Beyond the Supernatural, NightLife is wonderfully crunchy.  Character creation is a prime example. Roll 4d10 for the eight attributes: Strength, Dexterity, Fitness, Intellect, Will, Perception, Attractiveness, and Luck. Then there are another twenty d10s to put toward your skills. And there is a lot of them. It is very much an RPG of its time in that having a skill for something matters, and you will find them for everything from firearms and martial arts to pharmacology, manuscript illumination, seduction, and even skateboarding. Honestly, it already feels like the heart of this game is a cyberpunk game gone horror, splatterpunk. This will not be the last time I feel this while going over the rules.

The underlying system is simple enough. Your attributes and skills yield a percentage, and you roll under on percentile dice. A 20 in a given skill denotes you are competent at the everyday task without needing to make a roll; it is only when things get difficult, or you are under pressure, that the dice come out. Character generation can be a bit of a time sink, but once you are in the game, the central mechanic is not hard to grasp. 

The art is very early 1990s punk style. Cool for the time, but looks a bit dated by today's standards. To be fair, one of the creators, Bradley K. McDevitt, has his own stock-art service, and his stuff is great. I have used his art many, many times in my own work. So, to me, despite its age, the art is very much a "draft" of what I consider "urban horror art." Later on, the artists for Vampire: The Masquerade and WitchCraft RPG would help define this style in my mind. But credit where credit is due for starting here. 

The Kin

What sets this apart is that you do not go after the monsters. You are the monster. Like I mentioned above, it covers similar ground to Vampire: The Masquerade, but the tone here is less Anne Rice. 

The supernatural types refer to themselves as the Kin, leaving ordinary people with the rather condescending title of "the Herd." The book has seven varieties of Kin: Vampyres, Werewolves, Ghosts, Daemons, Wyghts, Inuits, and Animates. They all have their Edges, or powers, and the traditional Flaws of being a monster. The Magic sourcebook also adds Witches to the mix.

Vampyres are of the old school. Give them sunlight, garlic, a wooden stake, running water, or holy objects, and they will be stopped. They turn into bats, mist, and wolves. These vampyres are more akin to Dracula than Lestat, but his DNA is in there as well. Werewolves change shape. Ghosts are the dead with unfinished business. Animates are your Frankenstein’s monsters and golems. Daemons are extradimensional and have been magically put here. And Wyghts are unpleasant undead affairs that siphon the youth from their victims.

Then we have the Inuits.

Well, yes. This is where the game’s age shows, and not in an endearing way. The handling of Indigenous spirits under that moniker is something I would either not use or rewrite. 

Edges, Flaws, and Humanity

You have Edges, the supernatural side of things. Some are common, some are for a particular Kin. Claws, telepathy, weather control, possession, invisibility, speed, and armor are among the options. But the cleverness lies in the price.

That price is Humanity.

Humanity is not merely a morality stat on the sheet for the GM to levy punishment with. It is a resource to be spent. 

Your monster can do some very cool things, but they are the very things that erode what is human about him. That is a fine mechanic. There is a built-in temptation in the rules. You can have more power, but how much of yourself are you prepared to put on the line?

It goes both ways. High Humanity can make you functionally human. Let it drop, and the character becomes more visibly monstrous, his weaknesses more pronounced. Lose too much Humanity, and now your character has become a true monster and an NPC. I like this idea. The World of Darkness games made this idea their central thesis; other games have a form of this as well. NightLife wasn't the first to do this, but they did do it well.

The City at Night

An urban fantasy needs somewhere for its denizens to put down roots, and NightLife gets that. Not just a crypt or a haunted house. We are talking clubs and bars, record stores, and warehouses. Back rooms and street corners. The sort of places for showing off, making bad decisions, and hearing what is going on. You could say nightclubs are the heart of the game's culture. Style is everything, as is the right music and the right clothes. The book is so preoccupied with fashion that a modern retrospective put it best: in NightLife, a gun can sometimes look like the more economical option than a proper wardrobe.

Then there are the particular modifiers for a fight on the dance floor. That's about as much of a NightLife rule as you will find. I can't think of another game that does that.

Do not mistake this for Gothic horror moved to an urban environment. This is urban horror. The monsters are of the city; they have their neighborhoods and their enemies three blocks away; they have favorite clubs, and they listen to the music. It is easy to see why the comparison to The Warriors holds up.

New York is as much of a character here as it is a setting.

The supernatural is divided into factions and gangs with differing views on humanity. You have the Commune, which is content to let Kin and humans coexist, or the Complex, which would rather control and make use of them. The Morningstar Corporation will undermine society with its wealth and politics, while Red Moonrise is far less subtle and has no qualms about terror and slaughter. And if one wants to be hunted, there are human outfits like the Van Helsing Society and Target Alpha who know the Kin are out there. In short, there is always someone to have a go at. NightLife anticipates as much.

There is some wonderful worldbuilding here that sadly went unnoticed at the time.

Putting the Splatter Back in Splatterpunk

This is no subtle affair. The rulebook will tell you exactly how big a wound is from the damage taken. A Kin can take some horrific injury and come back for more unless put down in a certain way. That kind of durability is what lets the game live up to its splatterpunk side.

Shadow of the Vampire

One cannot help but compare this to Vampire: The Masquerade. NightLife came first in 1990 with Vampire behind it in 1991. They share the d10s, the Humanity stat, the urban backdrop and the same sort of player characters. Yet the tone is worlds apart. NightLife is punk where Vampire is Gothic. It is all about the leather jackets and the loud music, the blood on the wall, and the monsters having it out in the alley behind the club. There is plenty of angst to be had, but also a motorcycle chain and a switchblade.

In NightLife, everyone is Clan Brujah or Tremere.

What do I get out of NightLife? More than one might expect.

I am fond of the way it treats Humanity. It is not a passive number for the GM to judge by. Your very existence as a supernatural puts your connection to humanity at risk. I can make a lot of use of that.

I also appreciate the Kin being a single culture. Vampires and werewolves do not need to be in separate societies that never cross paths; they can be in the same faction and have the same enemies. Very fitting for an urban setting. They can still hate each other. Fight in gang wars or even have an uneasy alliance. Same with the other types here. 

The factions are fine, though I would not use them verbatim. What interests me is the concept: supernatural beings at odds over how to deal with ordinary people, and those differences turning political or violent.

But the thing NightLife offers above all is a sense of place. The supernatural has to be somewhere on a Friday night. It may sound foolish, but a community is only convincing when there is a bar they all know, a record store open till two in the morning, a diner where the night staff won’t remark on odd patrons, and an alley to settle scores. I put that to work in NIGHT SHIFT.

For example, in my 1990s sequel to Jackson set in Chicago, Faye Thorne, now calling herself Fiona Voss, runs a record store called Muse. Muse is where people (and not-people) congregate and hear things. Even those who would not normally work together can be found across from each other because they both know it is safe ground. 

And that is what NightLife does best. It is not a matter of monsters hiding in the city, but of them having a life in it. The distinction is important. The vampire has a band he likes. The daemon has a drink with an old friend. The ghost knows her way in. The werewolf has friends and enemies and the clothes and the neighborhood to prove it. The supernatural is not in town for a visit. It lives here.

And regardless of the Kin, they all need somewhere to buy the new Inkubus Sukkubus album. 

My Jackson Kids: Chicago 1992

This campaign does not have a name yet. Nor is it even very well defined. I just know this. Like my real kids, my Jackson, IL kids will grow up and move out at some point. Some end up in Chicago in the 1990s. Why Chicago? Why not! I LOVE Chicago. 

Among the PCs/NPCs I'll work with, there will be Larina, Faye/Fiona, Roderick Morgan, and Moria Zachary. There will be new characters too, but the players will create those. 

Fiona, Larina, and Moria, Chicago 1992

And...that is about all I have for that campaign! Really. I have some other idea involving the Maxwell Street Market and other things I loved about Chicago in the 1990s, but this notion is in it's infancy. 

So I am trying out a lot of different ideas. Namely, this campaign is an attempt to move from Modern Horror (Jackson, Sunny Valley) into Urban Fantasy. The horror is still there, but it isn't the same sort of thing.

So, for NightLife, I started with the core book and create a character who fits. I considered turning one of my Jackson kids into a ghost, but in truth I just couldn't bring myself to do that. So instead, I am using a character and keeping her more or less as is. Then I grabbed a copy of the magic book and created twom more characters.

Edited to Add: In my online research, I see that there is a book for NightLife called "America After Dark." I didn't really have the time to buy a copy. Though maybe I will grab it later on since it covers the time period when I was living downtown. In truth I should assemble all the RPGs and supplements that cover Chicago sometime. Especially if I get this Chicago game off the ground.

Moria Lucille Zachary

Race/Kin: Daemon
Age: 21

Abilities
Strength (STR) 23
Dexterity (DEX) 34
Fitness (FIT) 27
Intellect (INT) 26
Will 21
Perception (PER) 27
Attractiveness (ATT) 27
Luck 19
Magic Ability (MA) -

Base Hand-to-Hand (HTH) damage 4
Max Humanity 80
Humanity 36 (40)
Survival Points 46

Edges and Flaws
All Kin
Armor 5, Aura Sight 27, Claws 27, Danger Sense 27, Drain 27 (diet: Human or Animal Life Force), Speed 34

Kin Specific Edges
Alter Form 21, Body Control 27, Flight 27 (true form only), Telepathy 26, Travel 21

Flaws
Substance Vulnerability: Flint, Holy Relics, Fire (double damage), Command: Majestic Daemonic

Skills
Combat Skills
Pistol 41, Streetfighting 52

Archaic Skills
Kin Lore 37

General Skills
Alertness 34, City Knowledge (Chicago) 32, Disguise 30, Language (English) 30, Persuasion 31, Psychology 33, Seduction 31, Stealth 57, Streetwise 42, Theology (Catholic) 32

Occult Skills
Occult Knowledge 34

Connections
Bar Bouncer, Bartender, Police Detective

Money: $13,000.

Moria is great for this. Plus, we haven't seen her in Jackson for a while, so it has a nice "what the hell are you doing here?" vibe. I also like the idea that the girl who was considered dangerous in Jackson is just mildly threatening here in Chicago. 

Larina Stephanie Nichols

Race/Kin: Human, Witch
Age: 22

Abilities
Strength (STR) 15
Dexterity (DEX) 28
Fitness (FIT) 25
Intellect (INT) 35
Will 34
Perception (PER) 34
Attractiveness (ATT) 30
Luck 21
Magic Ability (MA) 30

Base Hand-to-Hand (HTH) damage 5
Max Humanity 100
Humanity 48 (50)
Survival Points 46

Edges and Flaws
All Kin
None

Kin Specific Edges
None

Flaws
None

Magic
Shadow Paths, Deflection, Escape, Magic Sight, Vibes, Word, EMT, Lighter, Open

Skills
Combat Skills
Knife 31, Pistol 27, Martial Arts (Judo) 42

Archaic Skills
none

General Skills
Alertness 39, City Knowledge (Chicago) 38, Driving 31, First Aid 34, Language (English) 35, Language (Greek) 35, Language (Latin) 35, Persuasion 37, Psychology 43, Research 48, Streetwise 31

Occult Skills
Library Research (Magic) 48, Talismanic Magic 40, Herbal Magic 40, Occult Knowledge 44

Connections
Bar Bouncer, Bartender, Police Detective, Elder Kin

Money: $8,000.

Larina only lives here during her undergraduate and Master's degrees, from fall of 1987 to Spring/summer of 1993. I have her going on other adventures in 1993 that correspond to her Chill 2nd edition period and flowing into her WitchCraft RPG time. Whether those games involve the same "mirror shard" of Larina or not, I don't know yet. But for now, this is Larina in 1992.

Fiona Voss

Race/Kin: Human, Sorceress (near Kin)
Age: 22

Abilities
Strength (STR) 20
Dexterity (DEX) 24
Fitness (FIT) 28
Intellect (INT) 34
Will 46
Perception (PER) 30
Attractiveness (ATT) 34
Luck 20
Magic Ability (MA) 35

Base Hand-to-Hand (HTH) damage 4
Max Humanity 80
Humanity 30 (Soul Burn)
Survival Points 48 (36 in stored spells)

Edges and Flaws
All Kin
Drain 28 (Fiona "recharges" herself by going out)

Kin Specific Edges
None

Flaws
Substance Vulnerability: Metorite iron, salt (she makes up for it with hot peppers)

Magic
Black out, Shadow Paths, Deflection, Escape, Hotwire. EMT (white), Dispel Magic (white), boombox (white), Binding (black)

Skills
Combat Skills
Pistol 28, Streetfighting 32

Archaic Skills
Kin Lore 40

General Skills
Administration 42, Alertness 36, Business 44, City Knowledge (Chicago) 42, Dancing 29, Driving 28, Fashion Sense 34, First Aid 38, Intimidation 50, Leadership 54, Musical Style (Goth/Alternative) 46, Profession (Record Store Manager) 46, Research 38, Security Systems 39, Stealth 29, Streetwise 56

Occult Skills
Occult Knowledge 42

In many ways, Fiona has become my standout NPC in my Chicago games. 

Larina is a human witch; Fiona is a near-kin Sorceress. I opted to go in this direction so I could see the differences between the two magic types in the Magic book. Fiona is still recovering from her near Hag-conversion. So her magic feels more like a Kin than Larina's coven magic does. 

So, I want to talk about the differences between Jackson-era Faye and Chicago-Fiona. Same girl, different experiences. In some ways, Fiona becomes more Fiona in NightLife. Faye hated high school, and she hated (hates) Jackson. She flees first to UIUC and then to UIC, but it isn't college or university academics that give her life. It is Chicago. Here is a giant city filled with strange new people, and she LOVES it. 

I get it. I remember leaving class one summer night and looking out at the city from a Blue Line L station and just being in awe of how beautiful it was. In my mind, Faye saw the same sight, but where I was in awe, she fell in love. Faye embraced Chicago in such a fundamentally deep way. From that moment on, she was never, ever going to leave.

NightLife also gave some great ideas for Faye/Fiona regardless of what game system I might use. She works till close at Muse (before she owned it) and then goes out to clubs that would have been too dangerous for a girl in her 20s to go to by herself, but she is a powerful sorceress/witch. She dances until 3 am, eats Thai food or whatever is still open (lots of places), and turns around and goes back to work the next day. 

While all of this is wonderful for Fiona, it is the start of Fiona and Larina growing apart. They still remain close; you can't erase that. But they are setting their sights now in different directions. 

Jackson to Chicago

I did not set out to create another campaign this month. I certainly don't need another campaign. But somewhere along the way I followed these kids out of Jackson and into Chicago. By 1992 they are no longer kids, and the supernatural isn't something hiding beneath their hometown anymore. It has neighborhoods, jobs, stores, clubs, politics, and a social life. I don't know what I am going to do with that yet. For now I am calling it Chicago 92. I suspect I will be coming back to it. 

Jackson was about discovering the supernatural. Chicago is starting to look like it will be about living with it.

Final Word

NightLife will not replace NIGHT SHIFT on my table. NIGHT SHIFT is just a far better fit for what I want out of a horror RPG. But I would not have NIGHT SHIFT in my hands now if it hadn't been for the nightclubs and streets of NightLife. 

I intended to explore how a single campaign idea could be viewed through the lens of different games; I ended up with much more than that. I got so much out of these games that I think I'll do a proper retrospective later. Likely next month. 

Witchcraft Wednesday: The Threefold Goddess Tradition

 With Advanced Witches & Warlocks, I have had in mind a certain goal: to give the witch traditions the weight of actual occult practice. I do not want it to be a matter of "this witch has fire, that one has healing." There is more to it than that; it is about how one comes to terms with magic and divinity, with their coven, the world, and the self.

In pursuit of that, I have been drawn back to an old friend of my witch material, the Triple Goddess.

"Maiden, Mother, Crone" by Ben Honeycut

For some time now the Maiden, Mother and Crone have served as my way of putting the threefold form of the Goddess into words. It is a familiar shorthand that says something essential about the craft. Yet as I put in the work on Advanced Witches & Warlocks, I came to see that this was no longer an idea or conjecture to be just a background notion. It could stand as a tradition in its own right.

Hence The Threefold Goddess Tradition.

It is not to be confused with a neo-Pagan convenience or the simple equation of witches worshipping Diana. Nor is it only a Triple Moon affair, though the moon holds center stage. What I am building is a framework, both magical and theological, by which a witch can make sense of many goddesses and many kinds of magic under one sacred pattern.

So I am going to steal a LOT from the Christian Trinity. Consider the contradiction:

The Goddess is the Maiden, the Mother, the Crone.

And yet the Maiden is not the Mother, nor the Crone the Maiden. All are the Goddess.

There is no problem with that. The point is precisely there. I am perfectly happy with contradictions.

I call it the Threefold Sign. One might be tempted to take the logic of the Shield of the Trinity diagram – where each is God but not the other, and apply it here. And the logic would hold up. But the visual language would be off. This is not Christian theology in a black dress with a moon pendant. It is witchcraft and requires a witch’s symbol.

So we use something on the order of a triquetra, or three circles interlinked. In the overlap of two you will find their mysteries touching; where the three come together is the Mystery of the Goddess herself, beyond any name.

Some covens will inscribe the words Maiden, Mother, Crone in those circles. Others will put the names of goddesses there, or three moons (crescent, full, dark), or perhaps three ravens, three keys, three wells. The symbol is meant to instruct the initiate that while the Goddess is whole, her faces are not to be conflated. The Crone is not simply an aged Mother, nor the Maiden a young one. They are distinct, they are complete, they are divine. They are unique and they are unified. Like I have said before, I like my gods messy.

To treat it as a puzzle is to miss what is happening. It is a mystery for the witch to enter into.

The most usual expression of the tradition, of course, is to honor the Goddess as Maiden, Mother and Crone. 

One might call the Maiden the start of things. She is the first step and the new moon, the road left untraveled. She is the huntress and the girl in the woods, the rebel and the initiate, the question put to you that no one wishes to hear. There is a danger in her youth; she is not without power but is perilous in her becoming. The Maiden is the threshold and the keeper of the threshold. Through her there is deeper understanding of the beginning. 

The Mother represents fullness. Think of the full moon, the hearth, or the field. She is the queen and the lover, the teacher and the protector, the witch at the coven’s heart. She has the power to create and to bless, yet do not mistake her for being soft. Those who consider the Mother harmless have never been on the receiving end of a mother defending her young.

Then there is the Crone, the ending and the memory. She is the waning and dark moon, the graveyard and the crossroads, the winter and the final spell. She is the truth from which there is no escape. Feared for what she knows and honored for what she remembers, she is the keeper of ghosts and curses and all final wisdom.

In concert they are the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth. It is a cosmology I have used for a very long time. Witches do not tend to view death as some sort of reward or punishment; to them it is part of the great turning, along with rest and rebirth. The Crone is not an end to the story so much as the one who readies the soul to start over. This is also the same reason why my witches can't be raised from the dead.

I have found a particular utility in what I term the Lunar Mask. In my campaign notes, there was a moon-priestess who came to see a deeper pattern in the goddesses she revered. She did not forsake her faith, but understood her goddess to be but one aspect of something older and more complete.

For Advanced Witches & Warlocks I cannot employ deity names from other published settings, though I have no need to. Our own real-world mythic structure is far superior. So for the Lunar Mask I have settled on:

Diana as the Maiden. The crescent moon and the silver bow. She is the wild wood and the fierce independence of the untamed, the arrow in the dark and the way into the forest.

Selene as the Mother. The luminous presence and the dream-giver. She is the tide of blessing, the lover, the full moon shining down on everything.

Hecate as the Crone. The torch and the key, the ghost road and the witch-night. She is the figure at the crossroads where the living must make their peace with the dead.

This serves as a clean substitute for the triad in my own play and is more broadly useful for the book. It also allows for a clear delineation between the larger tradition and individual covens. One coven may give its honors to Diana, Selene and Hecate; another will have different names for the same Threefold Goddess Tradition.

The Triple Moon Goddess Heresy

I find the notion all the more compelling here.

During a recent campaign discussion, I put forward the concept of a priestess who makes an unsettling discovery: the moon goddesses of her world are not distinct and unconnected powers as she has been taught. Rather, they are three aspects of some deeper lunar enigma.

The temples would call it heresy. The witch calls it revelation. One has to make that distinction. This is no case of a goddess making a thunderous appearance to confirm you are right, nor is it a tidy prophecy. It is a matter of scholarship and risk, of intuition and ritual. The priestess will pore over old songs for matching symbols or spot the same moon-shape in the carving above a long-forgotten door. She hears how a forbidden hymn in one temple is answered by the orthodox prayer of another. She starts to think the line drawn between the goddesses is not so much false as it is incomplete.

That is the sort of heresy I have for my witches. Where a cleric is content to uphold the temple’s version of the truth, a witch wants to know what the temple has left out.

In this way the "Triple Moon Goddess Heresy" can be made to work for the Threefold Goddess Tradition. It is not something every coven must accept, nor does it have to be true in every campaign. But it puts a fine tension on the tradition. For the Threefold Goddess is not simply a matter of old women in the woods with their rites; there is a dangerous theology to it. A witch-priestess might look at three rival temples and tell them they are all correct but have no idea why. That is very much in keeping with a witch.

Beyond the Moon

I am inclined to stick with The Threefold Goddess Tradition as the name precisely because I do not want to confine things to moon goddesses alone.

There really is no better symbol for the witch than the moon. It is the perfect sign in that it can change its shape and yet remain itself; it vanishes and comes back again. It is the ruler of tides, night, magic, madness, and fertility.  The connections are so deep and so ancient I'd be a fool to fight them.

But the Threefold Goddess is a bigger entity than the moon. Other covens will have their own triadic powers to honor her with. A Brigidine coven might see her in poetry, healing and smithcraft, three flames to one fire. Or a Morrígan coven in battle, sovereignty and prophecy, which is to say three ravens and one fate. A Hecatean coven could honor her at the road, the threshold and the grave; a mystery cult as maiden of descent, mother of grain and crone of the underworld. A coven of fates may view her as Clotho the Spinner, Lachesis the Measurer, and Atropos the Cutter. 

They are not the same coven, and they are free to disagree, even to charge one another with misapprehending the Goddess. Again, I have no objection to such contradictions when it comes to divinities. If anything, it gives the tradition an older, more vital feel.

The Daughters of Aradia

This also provides a good home for the Daughters of Aradia, a tradition I have been working on. I had considered them a tradition of their own, and they can still be, but this fits well enough. I have come to the view that they are better suited as a sub-tradition of the Threefold Goddess, or perhaps a coven of some power and mystery. In any case, their take on the threefold pattern is not the same as the Lunar Mask.

Under this arrangement, Diana is the Moon-Mother and wellspring of witchcraft; Aradia the Daughter, the liberator and teacher sent out into the world; Hecate the Crone, holding the night roads and what power is hidden from view. It is a more pointed and politically charged stance for the Daughters of Aradia. They are not simply moon witches but agents of resistance, secrecy and teaching. Their myth holds that mortals were given witchcraft to stand up to tyranny as much as to bless and heal. 

Do they get along with witches of the Lunar Mask of Diana-Celene-Hecate? Some might, others might think their way is right, and the other is a dangerous cult of apostates. Can't wait to have some arguments at my table on this. 

You will not find the quiet feel of a lunar coven of seers here, yet there is no reason both cannot exist under the wider umbrella of the Threefold Goddess Tradition. That is the kind of thing I am after in Advanced Witches & Warlocks. A tradition should be specific enough to give rise to strong covens and rivalries, but broad enough to serve as the basis for many characters and adventures.

Using This in Advanced Witches & Warlocks

For the purposes of the book, I would make the Threefold Goddess Tradition one of the principal ones. Mechanically, its witches are adept at divination, protection, healing, charms, dream work, transformation, curses, and dealing with spirits. There is a synthesis and mystery to their power that you do not get with the rigidity of the High Secret Order, the wildness of faerie ways or the grimness of the Daughters of Baba Yaga.

Their special abilities ought to reflect the threefold nature:

• The Maiden for courage, movement, discovery and warding off fear.
• The Mother for fertility, guardianship, healing and the protection of the coven.
• The Crone for prophecy, spirit speech, death-wisdom and defense against necromancy.

When a witch of this tradition reaches a certain level, she can call on the hidden center of the Threefold Sign. Not as Maiden or Mother or Crone but as the Goddess in her Mystery. It should be a rare and potent thing, bound up with the moon or some rite of initiation. Her highest Occult Power.

It also provides good material for roleplaying. A Threefold witch might be a midwife in one village and a forbidden priestess in the next. She could be put in the position of having to defend herself against accusations of heresy or syncretism, carrying three holy symbols and declining to offer clerics who want clean doctrine any explanation.

That is how I want to set witch religion apart from the clerical sort. Clerics have their temples and orders to serve their gods. Witches come to the divine through bloodlines, signs, dreams, and the mysteries of the coven, things that do not always conform to temple law. Witches are not just clerics with better fashion sense and killer eyeliner.

In the end, the Threefold Goddess is not three, nor is she one in any simple way. She is the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone. The moon is merely the sign by which we have learned to know her.

Three circles. One mystery.

Links

• Gods of the New Game
• Nothing Like The Sun...
• OMG: Greek (and maybe Roman) Mythos, Part 3 Hecate
• One Man's God: Syncretism and the Gods
• One Man's God Special: Syncretism Part 1, The Gods of Faerûn
• Review: N5 Under Illefarn: Bad Moon Rising
• Witchcraft Wednesday: Étaín Moonshadow

Ravenloft: The Horrors Within

We are back in Ravenloft. Again.

And honestly, I am happy to be here.

I have talked about Ravenloft a lot over the years. A lot. I have covered the original I6 adventure, the 2nd Edition boxed sets, Realms of Terror, Domains of Dread, the 3rd Edition Ravenloft books, and into the 5th edition era with Curse of Strahd, Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft, and more. Ravenloft is one of those settings I keep coming back to, not because I have to, but because it keeps speaking my language.

That language is Gothic horror.

More specifically, it is Universal Monsters, Hammer Horror, Dracula, Dark Shadows, foggy roads, terrified villagers, cursed castles, and vampires who are more than just another entry in the Monster Manual. That has always been part of my Appendix N. So when I first encountered I6 Ravenloft, it was not just another AD&D adventure to me. It was D&D finally doing something I had always wanted it to do. It wasn't Tolkien. It wasn't Conan, or any of the other books and tales people assume we read before encountering D&D. It wasn't the usual dungeon crawl. 

It was a Hammer Horror film with dice. It is what I always wanted from D&D.

Count Strahd von Zarovich mattered because he was not just a vampire. D&D had vampires before Strahd (hello Belgos), but Strahd was different. He had a history. He had a motive. He had a personality. He had a castle, a village, a tragedy, and the sheer theatrical arrogance to make the whole thing work. He was intelligent, ruthless, and absolutely convinced that his own damnation was someone else’s fault.

That is Ravenloft. Or at least, that is the beginning of Ravenloft. 

The setting has changed many times since then. And really, if you have been reading this blog for any amount of time, you know all of this. But...It became a full AD&D 2nd Edition campaign world. It got its own boxed sets, its own domains, its own dark mythology, and eventually its two 3rd Edition and 3.5 Edition versions. It came back in 5e with Curse of Strahd, and then in 2021 with Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft. Every edition has changed it, sometimes in ways I liked and sometimes in ways I had to think about for a while. But I have always believed that Ravenloft can survive reinterpretation. Horror does that. Dracula gets remade (and remade and remade). Frankenstein gets remade. Werewolves, ghosts, witches, haunted houses, and cursed families all get remade. Every generation gets a new set of horror classics to call their own. 

Ravenloft follows suit.

That brings me to Ravenloft: The Horrors Within, the new Ravenloft book for the revised 2024 Dungeons & Dragons rules. Or 5.5e. Or D&D 2024. Or whatever we are all calling it now.

This one is interesting because it is not really a replacement for Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft. It is more like the book Van Richten’s Guide needed beside it.

Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft was a book of ideas. The Horrors Within is a book of things to use at the table.

That difference is everything.

I liked Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft. I still do. I know some people wanted it to be more like the old 2nd Edition setting, with the Core, political borders, domain histories, and more of the classic campaign setting structure. I understand that. I love those books too. But I also said at the time that Van Richten’s Guide was doing something useful. It was not trying to rebuild old Ravenloft exactly. It was treating the Domains of Dread as a horror toolkit for modern 5e.

That worked for me.

It gave us Gothic horror, folk horror, body horror, cosmic horror, dark fantasy, ghost stories, psychological horror, and all the other nightmare flavors Ravenloft can support. It gave us advice for building Domains of Dread and Darklords. It let Ravenloft become more than Barovia and a few neighboring spooky countries. It also gave me the tools to build my own Darklord and my own domain, which I did with Darlessa, my Vampire Queen.

But Van Richten’s Guide also had gaps.

The biggest one was obvious: almost no Darklord stat blocks.

I understood the design philosophy. A Darklord is not just a monster. A Darklord is the dark heart of a domain. They are not always meant to be fought. Sometimes defeating them means surviving them, understanding them, resisting them, or escaping the story they have built around themselves. That is all true.

But this is still Dungeons & Dragons. 

Eventually, someone will say, "I attack Strahd." 

And then you need rules. I mean...sure, why not, they are going to lose, but let's roll some dice.

That is where The Horrors Within makes its strongest case. The new book gives us 17 Darklord stat blocks. Strahd. Azalin Rex. Lord Soth. Hazlik. Viktra Mordenheim. Chakuna. Ebonbane. And yes, Cthulhu.

I will get to Cthulhu in a bit.

The inclusion of Darklord stat blocks immediately changes the usefulness of the book. It means the Darklords are no longer just concepts, villains, or tragic centers of gravity. They are table-ready. They have mechanics. They can face the party, haunt the party, hurt the party, and hopefully do all of that in a way that reflects their curse.

That last part matters. A Ravenloft stat block should not just tell me how hard the villain hits. It should tell me something about why they are damned.

• Strahd should not be just a vampire with a better cape. (Though it is a cool cape.)
• Azalin should not be just a Greyhawk lich with a Ravenloft address.
• Viktra Mordenheim should not be just a mad scientist NPC standing next to a flesh golem. 

A good Darklord stat block should say, mechanically, "this is what obsession looks like when the Mists have finished with it."

That is what I want from this book.

The structure also feels different from Van Richten’s Guide. The 2021 book gave us a broad survey of many domains. The Horrors Within focuses on 16 featured Domains of Dread. That means some domains from Van Richten’s Guide move to the margins, including Bluetspur, I’Cath, Richemulot, and The Carnival. That will disappoint some people. It disappoints me a little, especially with Bluetspur, since I liked seeing Ravenloft stretch into alien horror.

But I also understand the trade-off.

Ravenloft domains need space. They are not just countries. They are moral nightmares. A good domain needs a central sin, a Darklord, a curse, a population trapped in the consequences, and enough adventure material for the players to discover all of this the hard way. If focusing on fewer domains means those domains are more playable, then I can live with that.

And there are some interesting returns here. Sithicus and The Shadowlands bring back older Ravenloft material, including the sentient blade Ebonbane and that dark Arthurian fantasy mood that always sat well in Ravenloft’s broader horror geography. Darkon also gets more attention through Azalin Rex and Castle Avernus. That feels right. Azalin has always been one of Ravenloft’s most important figures, second only to Strahd in many ways, in my opinion. If Strahd is Gothic obsession, Azalin is intellectual arrogance, undeath, failed escape, and the refusal to admit that the cage may exist because of him.

That is Ravenloft, too.

The new player options are also very much part of the 2024 rules structure. We get seven subclasses: Reanimator Artificer, College of Spirits Bard, Grave Domain Cleric, Hollow Warden Ranger, Phantom Rogue, Shadow Sorcery Sorcerer, and Undead Patron Warlock. We get Dhampir, Hexblood, Lupin, and Reborn as species. We get backgrounds like Haunted One, Mist Wanderer, Investigator, and Spirit Medium. We get Dark Gifts rebuilt as feats.

The Reanimator Artificer also feels perfect for Lamordia. The Hollow Warden Ranger sounds like something that has spent too much time walking where the Mists are thickest. The Grave Cleric, Phantom Rogue, Shadow Sorcerer, College of Spirits Bard, and Undead Warlock all feel like they belong in this setting. Ravenloft player characters should feel like they have already been touched by something before the adventure begins.

That is where the Dark Gifts come in, and here is where I have my first real concern.

In Van Richten’s Guide, the Dark Gifts were strange, flavorful, and often story-heavy. They felt like bargains, curses, supernatural inheritances, or evidence that something had reached into the character’s life and left a mark. They were not always balanced perfectly, but that was part of their charm. Ravenloft should not always feel perfectly balanced. Sometimes the Mists give you exactly what you asked for and then make you regret the wording.

In The Horrors Within, Dark Gifts are rebuilt for the 2024 feat system. That makes them easier to understand, easier to balance, and easier to run. It also risks making them feel a little more like game widgets and a little less like curses. You know players will look to these as "rewards" and ignore the horror elements.

That is the trade-off of this book in miniature. It is more usable. It may also be a little less haunted.

The example that really sticks with me is the shift in how something like Symbiotic Being works. In older forms, that kind of gift depended on the relationship between the character and the entity inside them. The horror came from the story. What does it want? What does it whisper? What happens when you resist it? Now, by all accounts, the trigger is much cleaner and much more mechanical. Roll a 1 on a d20, and the thing stirs.

That is easier to run.

It is also less personal.

Now, I am not saying this is bad. New DMs need usable mechanics. Players need clarity. The 2024 rules have a design philosophy, and this book is clearly built to fit it. But Ravenloft is a setting where the messy parts matter. Horror is often found in the exception, the strange edge case, the thing that does not behave like the rules say it should.

So I will use these new Dark Gifts, but I already know I will be adding some of the old narrative teeth back in. Even if it means grabbing some older AD&D 2nd Ed material.

The Tarokka material, on the other hand, sounds like exactly the sort of thing I want. The Tarokka deck has been part of Ravenloft since the beginning. In I6, the Fortunes of Ravenloft gave the adventure replayability and mystery. In Curse of Strahd, the Tarokka reading became one of the defining ritual moments of the campaign. It is one of Ravenloft’s best props because it tells the players that fate is not abstract here. Fate has cards. Fate has a voice. Fate may be cheating.

The Horrors Within appears to give the Tarokka deck more mechanical weight in navigating the Mists and interacting with the domains. I like that a lot. That is exactly the kind of old Ravenloft idea that should be made more central, not less. If the Mists are the roads of Ravenloft, then the Tarokka should be one of the few maps that matters. 

Of course, in Ravenloft, even the map can betray you.

I also picked up the new Tarokka deck as well. I'll discuss that later on. 

The Haunted Bastions are another very 2024 idea that actually fits Ravenloft better than I expected. The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide introduced Bastions as a form of player stronghold or home base. In a normal campaign, that can mean a tower, keep, workshop, temple, or guildhall. In Ravenloft, that same idea becomes much more interesting.

A home in Ravenloft should never feel completely safe.

A gothic manor, a lonely chapel, a cursed observatory, a half-reclaimed castle, a witch’s house at the edge of the woods, a laboratory in Lamordia, or a sanctuary surrounded by Mists: all of these work as Haunted Bastions. But they should also come with a question.

What does the house want?

That is the Ravenloft version of a Bastion. Not just a base. Not just a reward. A relationship with a place that remembers things you wish it did not. I have been thinking a lot of places lately and what sorts of "things" they remember; geography as occult memory. This is the Ravenloft version.

The adventures are also a major point in this book’s favor. The Horrors Within gives us one-shot adventures tied to the featured domains. This is exactly the sort of thing Van Richten’s Guide did not do enough of. That book made me want to run Ravenloft. This one seems designed to let me run Ravenloft with less prep. Well...not that I need much prep for Ravenloft these days.

But it still matters.

I know I am an old-school guy. I like weird maps, strange presentation choices, moody boxed sets, and books that feel like forbidden travel guides. But I am also a working DM. A working DM appreciates ready-to-use material. Give me the Darklord. Give me the domain. Give me the map. Give me the adventure seed. Give me the monster stats. Then I can do the rest.

The maps are part of that. Van Richten’s Guide had evocative, conceptual maps. They helped define mood. The Horrors Within leans harder into tactical, full-color, VTT-ready maps. That is not always my preferred style for Ravenloft, but it is useful. And usefulness counts.

This is also where I think the book resembles Domains of Dread in a modern way. Domains of Dread was a late 2nd Edition Ravenloft hardcover that gathered the setting into a more complete reference. It was not the beginning of Ravenloft. It was a summation. The Horrors Within feels a little like that for 5e and 5.5e. Curse of Strahd gave modern players Barovia. Van Richten’s Guide gave them the new conceptual framework. The Horrors Within gives them the operational version.

That is a good place for it to sit.

Now, about Cthulhu.

I am not opposed to cosmic horror in Ravenloft. Ravenloft has always been able to absorb different forms of horror. Gothic horror is the foundation, but the setting has room for mad science, ghost stories, mummy curses, slasher stories, folk horror, dark fantasy, witchcraft, haunted mansions, and yes, cosmic dread. Bluetspur already pushed Ravenloft toward alien horror. Lamordia has always had Frankenstein. Har’Akir has mummy horror. Sithicus has tragic dark fantasy. Ravenloft is not one horror story. It is a machine for making horror stories.

So, Innsmouth as a Domain of Dread? I can work with that. I think.

Elder Things, Mi-Go, Nightgaunts, and Shoggoths? Fine. Those are usable monsters, and I can absolutely see them crawling, flying, or oozing out of the Mists.

Cthulhu as a Darklord? That is where I pause.

Not because Cthulhu is too powerful. Power levels in D&D are always negotiable. The issue is conceptual. A Darklord is trapped by their own sin. The domain is a prison built around their desire, failure, crime, obsession, or refusal to change. That is intensely personal. Cosmic horror, at its best, is impersonal. The universe does not hate you. It simply does not care.

So if Cthulhu is a Darklord, then the book has to answer the Ravenloft question: what is the curse? What does Cthulhu want that the Mists deny? How does the domain torment him? What personal horror makes him fit the same metaphysical structure as Strahd, Azalin, Mordenheim, or Soth? We asked the same questions in the later 2nd Ed era, when Vecna ended up in Ravenloft. How can the Mists contain a God?

If the book answers these questions, well, I am interested.

If not, then I will use the monsters and leave Cthulhu where he belongs, dreaming in R’lyeh.

My oldest and I talked about this a lot since we picked up our copies. He is going to say this is just a Star Spawn of Cthulhu with delusions of godhood. I like that idea. I am still on the fence. 

Plus. Shouldn't it be Dagon? Dagon was the central mythos figure around Innsmouth.

This is the larger issue with importing cosmic horror into Ravenloft. It has to be translated. Ravenloft is not just a spooky multiverse junk drawer. At least it shouldn't be. It has its own moral and metaphysical logic. Evil leaves stains. Sin becomes geography. Desire becomes prison. The Dark Powers do not merely punish you. They arrange the world so that you can keep proving you deserve the punishment.

That is what makes Ravenloft different from other D&D horror. That is why the Darklords matter. That is why the domains matter. That is why the Mists matter.

There is also the broader production context. The Horrors Within arrives during D&D’s new "Season of Horror" approach, and it comes after a period of visible change at Wizards of the Coast, including the departures of long-time D&D figures Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford. I do not want to overstate that in a product review, but it is hard not to notice. This book feels like part of a new publishing rhythm: more programmatic, more integrated with D&D Beyond, more tied to digital tools, maps, accessories, and seasonal branding. The newer 5.5 books even look different. 

That is not inherently bad, but it is different.

Ravenloft used to feel like something that escaped from the shadows of D&D. Now it is a coordinated product line with digital bundles, map packs, accessories, and mechanical integration into the 2024 rules. That is the nature of the game now. The question is whether the horror survives the repackaging.

So far, I think it can. BUT, (and this is an all capital but) it has to be negotiated very carefully.  

There is one more rules issue worth mentioning, though perhaps more as a side note than as a central part of the review: the Hexblade problem. The 2017 Hexblade Warlock was famously front-loaded. It gave Warlocks, and multiclass Paladins and Sorcerers, a very strong reason to take a one-level dip. The 2024 rules absorbed much of that melee Warlock identity into the base Pact of the Blade. That left the Hexblade with an identity problem. If every Blade Pact Warlock can do the signature Hexblade thing, then what is the Hexblade now?

The answer seems to be to move the Hexblade closer to the idea of a sentient magic weapon and a curse-bound warrior. That is more Ravenloft-friendly in flavor, honestly. A cursed blade with its own will is exactly the sort of thing that belongs in the Domains of Dread. But it also shows the larger issue of adapting legacy 5e material to the 2024 framework. Some old mechanics no longer have the same niche. Some old subclasses need a new reason to exist.

That is not really a flaw in The Horrors Within, but it is part of the same design moment. The 2024 rules want cleaner baselines. Ravenloft wants strange exceptions. The tension between those two impulses is all over this book.

So, where does this leave Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft?

Still useful.

Very useful, in fact.

I would not tell anyone to throw it out. Van Richten’s Guide is still the better book for understanding the 5e conception of Ravenloft. It gives you the broad view. It gives you the horror genres. It gives you the domain-building advice. It gives you a sense of Ravenloft as a modular horror engine. It is the book I would hand someone who wanted to know what modern Ravenloft can be.

The Horrors Within is the book I would hand to someone who wanted to run it this weekend.

That is the cleanest comparison.

Van Richten’s Guide tells you why Ravenloft works. The Horrors Within tells you what to roll. Both are useful. And they work well together.

For my own games, I suspect I would use both, and then still pull from the Black Box, Domains of Dread, the 3rd Edition Ravenloft book, Curse of Strahd, and whatever else is sitting on my Ravenloft shelf. Ravenloft has never been one book for me. It has always been a shelf. A haunted, but well-traveled, shelf, naturally.

If you already own Van Richten’s Guide, do you need The Horrors Within?

• If you are running Ravenloft with the 2024 rules, probably yes.
• If you want Darklord stat blocks, yes.
• If you want ready-to-run domain adventures, yes.
• If you want VTT-friendly maps, updated player options, and more monsters, yes.

If you only want the broad setting lore and horror advice, then Van Richten’s Guide may still be enough.

For me, though, the appeal is obvious. I want the Darklords. I want the Haunted Bastions. I want the Tarokka to matter. I want to see what they do with Sithicus, The Shadowlands, Castle Avernus, and Innsmouth. I want to see whether the monsters feel like Ravenloft monsters, not just horror-themed stat blocks.

As I read this in detail, I want to see whether this book remembers the most important thing.

Ravenloft is not scary because the monsters have more hit points. Ravenloft is scary because the monster used to be a person, and somewhere deep down, maybe still is. That is the horror. That is the tragedy. 

And that is why we keep going back into the Mists.

A Note about the "New" Format for 5.5 Books

Hasbro/Wizards has made some slight changes to the format of their "setting" books. I saw it in the Forgotten Realms ones and see it here now in the Ravenloft one. It is actually pretty good. I like what they have been giving us concept-wise. Backgrounds, history, new sub-classes, some spells, monsters. It is like getting the 2nd Ed Boxed set experience without the product bloat that was one of the reasons for TSR's death. 

I am not saying the books are perfect, and sometimes I still disagree with some of the content choices (see Cthulhu above), but I can't fault the way these are put together.

WotC's publishing schedule has slowed, but I'd still love to see some Mystara content in this format. I think 5.5 and Mystara would work well together.

Plays Well With Others: Witchcraft Wednesday Edition, Part 1 Old-School

So when I was working on The Left Hand Path - The Diabolic & Demonic Witchcraft Traditions there were some other OSR books I thought would be fun to suggest. Not for compatibility, or even "must buys" but for their general coolness and because I often used their material alongside my own when playing my Old-School games. 

In the end, I decided not to put them in the book in Appendix N style because I didn't want customers to think they need to buy these other books (though many should buy them and most of you likely already have). Also, I didn't want a book excluded because of time, space, or my forgetfulness.

So instead, I am going to post them here. The reviews are below, but like I said, I think you all know these. 

This is not an exhaustive list. Nor is it just a list of favorites. I have plenty of favorites. These are a subset of products that work great with my various witch books or ones I like to use with them. The key here is that they work well with my various witch books. None are needed to play with my witches, but all have something about them I really enjoy. Often compatible classes, spells or something else I enjoyed. 

I am not including complete rule sets or adventures in this post. Just extra material I use alongside my witch material in my Old School games. 

These are in no particular order, save how I remembered to add them. 

The Basic Illusionist

The one thing you can say about the entire OSR Gestalt that despite it all there is still a sense of community and of giving back. Case in point, The Basic Illusionist.

The Basic Illusionist is the brain-child of Nathan Irving and was first seen during the S&W Appreciation Day Blog Hop.

Before I delve into the book itself. Let's take a moment to look at this cover. Seriously. That is a cool cover. I am not sure what made Nathan Irving choose this piece ("Beauty and the Beast" by Edmund Dulac), but I love it. The title works seamlessly, like they were meant for each other. The woman in the foreground is no longer the "beauty" but she is now an Illusionist.

Ok. So the book is overtly for Swords & Wizardry, but there isn't anything here that keeps you from using any Original or Basic-inspired system. I know it works out well in Labyrinth Lord and Basic D&D and it really should work well in ACKS, Spellcraft & Swordplay or any other system. Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea might be a trick, but they have an Illusionist class already.

Getting into the book now, we have 34 pages (with cover) on the Illusionist class. The book starts off with a helpful FAQ. Personally, I think Nathan should also put that FAQ on his blog as a page so everyone knows why they should get this. The Illusionist class itself is in S&W format, but the only thing keeping you from using this in any other Basic or Advanced Era game is a table of Saving Throws. Copy over whatever the Wizard or Magic-user is using in your game of choice, and give them -1 bonus to saves when it comes to illusions. The Illusionist gets a power or feature every odd level, but nothing that is game-breaking when compared to the wizard. The Illusionist trades flexibility for focus in their magical arsenal. There is even an Illusionist variant class called the Mountebank. Which is more of a con artist. How does it compare to other classes of the same name?

One of the best features of the book is a guideline on illusionist magic and how to play with illusions. Great, even if you never play the class.

What follows next is over 150 Illusionist spells. Many we have seen before and come from the SRD. That is not a bad thing. Having all these spells in one place and edited to work with the class is a major undertaking. I, for one, am glad to see them here. Spells are alphabetical instead of sorted by level. A list of conditions ported over from the SRD is also included. I like that personally. We all love how the older games and the clones play, but in our zeal, we tend to forget that 3.x and later games did, in fact, have some good innovations and ideas; this is one of them.

We end with a couple of monsters and a two-page OGL statement.

Really, this is a fantastic piece of work and really should be the "go to" document if you ever want to play an illusionist.

Since this book was released I have had a chance to try it with various systems. I can say it works great with S&W, Basic D&D, AS&SH (when used with their own illusionist class) and even AD&D.

B/X Companion

The Game We Never Got.

One of the things I like most about the OSR are the products that don't give me things I already have, but things I have always wanted or never knew I needed. B/X Companion is one of those products.

The product I think I have been waiting for for close to 30 years. Sure, I have had books that have covered the same ground, and books that made this book obsolete, but somewhere, deep in my psyche, there is still that 12-year-old version of me wishing he could take his cleric to 15th level.

The B/X Companion does not disappoint. If this isn't exactly how it was going to be, then I'd be hard-pressed to know what it would have been. I am reading through it all now, and I am purposefully NOT comparing it to the BECMI version of the Companion rules.

The cover, of course, is very much part of the original scheme. The three principle characters, the fighter and the two wizards (or maybe she is a cleric, that could be a "light" spell, though she has a torch too) stand in front of their followers. They braved the dungeon, the wilderness, and now they are ready for the next adventure. So are we.

For those of us who grew up with the Moldvay/Cook Basic and Expert sets, the Companion book feels very familiar. The layout is similar, the flow is similar, and even the art has a familiar feel. If you own the Basic or Expert books, then finding something in the Companion book is trivial. I turned right to the character rules and took a glance at all the tables. Yes, sir, they run from 15 to 36, just like promised. Clerics still top out at 7th-level spells, but eventually they get 9 of them. Wizards still go to 9th level, and get 9 of those too. Fighters get more attacks per round (as they should), and thieves get more abilities.

There are plenty of new spells here. Many look like they take their inspiration from the products that came after, the Player's Handbook or the D&D Rules Cyclopedia, but nothing is an outright copy. It does have the feel like Becker sat around one day and thought, "What are some good spells, and what level should they be.

There are new monsters and advanced versions of some others. The Greater Vampire nearly made me laugh out loud as I had done the exact same thing after reading and playing the Expert book for so long. My Greater Vampire was a photocopy of Ptah from Deities and Demigods with some fangs drawn in. I never claimed to be an artist. The monsters all are appropriate for the levels, though a few more in the 30 HD range might have been nice, but not really needed.

The BIG additions here, though, are the ones that were most "advertised" back in the day. “Running a High Level Game” is great advice for ANY edition of the game. 

Related is running a domain and running large armies. Battlesystem would later give us these rules for AD&D, but here they are much simpler to use. Again, this is something to consider for porting to other versions of the game.

I loved the new magic items and can never get enough of them. I also liked the part on the planes and how it is totally left up to the design of the DM. How many people out there will re-invent the Gygaxian Great Wheel for their B/X/C games?

Companion to Basic/Expert Rules. Obviously, this is where it works the best. But there is something here that I don't think others have tapped into just yet. Companion makes the Moldvay/Cook rules a complete game. With these three books, you now have a complete D&D game. The only thing really missing is a "C1" module or maybe a BXC one.

Companion to Labyrinth Lord/Basic Fantasy. The new Becker Companion owes a lot to Labyrinth Lord (LL) and Basic Fantasy (BFRPG). While not directly, these two games showed that there is a market for "Basic" styles of play. Both LL and BFRPG take the modern 1-20 level limit for human classes. Companion is 15 to 36. So some adjustments need to be made. There are a few differences in how each of these books calculates XP per level, and how they do spells. But nothing so complicated that a good DM couldn't figure out.

If I were playing a LL/BFRPG game, I'd go to 15th level and then switch over to B/X Companion for the next levels to 36. OR even go to 20 and use B/X Companion as a guide to levels 30 or even 36.

Frankly, the homebrewiness of it all has me very excited for anyone who has decided to throw their lot in with "Basic" D&D.

Final Tally, I like this book. A lot. It makes me want to pull out my ratty Basic and Expert books and play Moldvay/Cook era Basic D&D again. In the mean time, I think I'll just have to satisfy myself with converting some D&D 3.0 or 4e characters over to Companion, just for the fun of it.

One of the best of the OSR ethos; to give us something we never got but really wanted. Likewise, The Complete B/X Adventurer is also great.

Theorems & Thaumaturgy Revised Edition

Theorems & Thaumaturgy is a Free product. The book itself is 66 pages (standard letter) with text and art that immediately remind you of the old Moldvay Basic books.  If you have The Complete Vivimancer, then you have an idea of how the text and art look.   To me, the art is like psychedelic art-nouveau meets Elric.  In other words, perfect for a magic book in my mind.

There are three large sections (Classes, Variant Classes, and Magical Tomes) and an Appendix with nine sub-sections. Like old-school Basic the new spells are all listed with the classes.  The book is designed for use with Labyrinth Lord Advanced Edition Characters, but really it can be used with any sort of "old-school" game.

The new Classes are the Elementalist, Necromancer, and Vivimancer.  The Vivimancer is, of course, detailed in a later book, but he gets his start here.  The classes do pretty much what you would suspect they would do.  The Elementalist uses elemental forces, the Necromancer deals with the dead and undead and the Vivimancer.  Each class has a good number of new spells (250 in all!) to make using them feel different than your normal "magic-user". Each has spells from 1st to 9th level.  All the classes use the Magic-User XP, to hit and saving throw tables, so whatever system you use, you can just use that to put them on the same footing as the Magic-User.  While I like the simplicity of this and it helps make the "subclasses" feel like a part of the same Magic-user family. I would have liked to have seen some powers or something for each class.  After-all they are sacrificing spell flexibility for what?  Power? More variety of spells in their chosen field?  I think I would have given them a couple of bonuses at least.  But that is fine, these rules are flexible enough to allow all sorts of edits.

For the variant classes there is the new Fey Elf race.  This elf is closer to the faerie origins of the elf.  The class taken by these elves is the Sorcerer.  This class is similar in idea to the D&D 3.0 version; a spontaneous spell caster with magic in their blood.  The sorcerer has a couple of new spells and a modified list of spells they can cast.  There is an alternate version of the Illusionist as well. This version has a few more spells and has 8th and 9th level spells.

The final section is all about magical tomes.  It includes a bunch of unique magical tomes with new spells. The books' histories are also told and which classes are most likely to get use out of it.

The vivimancer gets expanded in its own book, too. 

Magical Theorems & Dark Pacts

Magical Theorems & Dark Pacts (MT&DP) is an Old-school reference for all things Magic-user. The book is designed with what I call "Basic Era" in mind, so the rules from right around 1979-1981, where "elf" is a class, not just a race. Overtly, it is designed for Labyrinth Lord. That being said, it is still compatible in spirit with 99% of all the OSR and books from that time.

The book itself is 6"x9", black and white interior, and 161 pages. So, for a "Class" book, there is a lot here. There are 5 Chapters covering Classes, Spells, Magic Items, Monsters, and a section on using this book with the "Advanced Era" books (and their clones), along with an Introduction and OGL page.

The introduction covers the basics. What this book is, what it is for, and its very, very open OGL declaration.

Chapter 1 is the heart of this book, really. It details 13 magic-using classes. The two core classes, Cleric and Magic-User (Wizard), and 11 new classes.

From the product page: Cleric (warrior-priests) Wizard (classic magic-users with 10 levels of spells) Elven Swordmage (elves from the core rules – arcane warriors) Elven Warder (wilderness elves, guardians of their kin) Enchanter (artists, con-men, and masters of… duh… enchantments) Fleshcrafter (twisted magic-users that work with flesh) Healer (compassionate and tough hearth-healers) Inquisitor (ecclesiastic investigators and master intimidators) Merchant Prince (elite merchants with spellcasting support) Necromancer (you know exactly what these guys do) Pact-Bound (magic-users who sell their souls for power) Theurge (divine casters who learn from liturgical texts) Unseen (thieves with an innate knack for magic)

Clerics are as you know them, but Magic-Users are now Wizards (since everyone here is a magic user) and they get 10 levels of spells. The "Elven" classes replace the "Elf" class in the book. The others are as they are described, but there is more (much more) to them than re-skinned Magic-Users (not that there is anything wrong with wrong that). The classes are re-cast with many new spells, some powers (but nothing out of whack with Basic Era) and often different hit-dice and altered saving throws.

Nearly a third of the book is made up in these new classes.

Chapter 2 covers all the spells. Spells are listed alphabetically with class and level for each spell noted (like newer 3.x Era products). There are a lot of spells here, too. Many have been seen in other products, but some are new. In any cas,e they are a welcome addition. This section makes up more than a third of the book.

The last three chapters take up the last third or so of the book. Chapter 3 covers Magic items. There are 28 new magic items with these spellcasters in mind. Chapter 4 covers some magical creatures. These are monsters listed in many of the new spells for summoning. There aren't many, but they are needed. Chapter 5 is the Advanced Edition conversion materials. It covers HD changes, racial limits, and multi-class options.

So what are my thoughts? Well, you get a lot of material in 160+ pages to be honest. At 10 bucks, it is a good price. For me, it is worth it for the classes. Sure, we have seen variations of these over the years, but it is all here in one place, and they all work well together. The spells are good. At first, I balked at 10th-level spells, but really, they are, for the most part, other people's 9th-level spells, so they work for me.

The magic items are nice, but for me the value is in the classes and the spells.

Who should buy this? If you play old-school games and enjoy playing different sorts of Magic-Users, then this is a must-have book. If you are looking to expand your class offerings or even add a few new spells then this is also a good choice. Personall,y I think it is a great book and I am glad I picked it up.

So many classes and spells here, including another necromancer and a healer. One of the main reasons I have never felt the need to complete my necromancer and healer.

PX1 Basic Psionics Handbook

I love Basic-era gaming. Basic/Expert D&D was the first D&D I ever played. Even when I had moved on to Advanced D&D, it still had a strong Basic feel to it. So I was very, very pleased to hear about +Richard LeBlanc's new psionics book, Basic Psionics Handbook. If you have been reading his blog, Save vs Dragon, a lot of what is in the book won't be a surprise, but it is all great stuff. Even then there are things in the book that are still a treat and a surprise.

The book itself is 58 pages (PDF), with a full-color cover and a black/white interior.

The book covers two basic (and Basic) classes, the Mystic and the Monk. Both use the new psionic system presented in the book. The system bears looking at and really is a treat.

Overview. This covers the basics, including how psionics is not magic and how attributes are used. It's a page of rules that slot in nicely with the normal Basic rules. The basics of psychic power, including Psionic Level and Psionic Strength Points (PSP), are introduced.

Mystics are next. Mystics in this case are more molded on the Eastern philosophy of mystics, not the clerical sub-class-like mystics I have detailed in the past. Though through the lens of Western thought. That's fine this is not a religious analysis, this is a game book. This class helps builds the psionic system used in this book based on the seven chakras. Chakras divide the psionic powers into broad groups; something like the schools of magic for spells. As the mystic progresses in level, they open up more and more chakras. Each chakra has seven Major Sciences and twelve Minor Devotions, similar to the old AD&D rules (but not exactly the same, so read carefully). This gives us 72 devotions and 42 sciences. That's quite a lot really. As the mystic progresses they also earn more PSPs and more attack and defense modes. They are the heavy hitters of the psionic game.

Monks are the next class. Monks really are more of psionic using class in my mind and to have them here next to the mystic is a nice treat for a change. Everything you expect from the monk is here. Unarmed attacks, no need for armor and lots of fun psionic based combat powers. The monk does not have the psionic power the mystic does, but that is fine it is not supposed to. It does have a some neat powers from the mystic's list. One can easily see a monastery where both mystics and monks train together, one more mental and the other more physical. The monk has plenty of customization options in terms of choice of powers. In truth it is a very elegant system that shows it's strength with the mystic and it's flexibility with the example of the monk.

This is very likely my favorite monk class.

Psionic Disciplines detail all the powers of the chakras. It is a good bulk of the book as to be expected. There are not as many psionic powers as you might see spells in other books, but this is a feature, not a bug. Powers can be used many times as long as the psychic still has PSP. Also many do more things as the character goes up in level.

Psionic Combat is next and deals with the five attack modes and five defense modes of psychic combat. The ten powers are detailed, and an attack vs. defense matrix is also provided. The combat is simple and much improved over it's ancestors.

The next large section details all the Psionic Monsters. Some of these are right out of the SRD but others are new. Personally, I am rather happy to see a Psychic Vampire. Though it is not listed, I assume that these creatures are also undead and are turned as if they were vampires.

Appendix A deals with something we abused the hell out of, Wild Psionics. At two pages it is the simplest set of rules I have seen for this sort of thing. Also it looks like something that could be ported into ANY version of D&D including and especially D&D 5.

Get out your crystals, Appendix B details Psionic Items. Again, short, sweet and to the point.

Appendix C: Psionics and Magic is a must read chapter for anyone wanting to use both in their games.

Appendix D: Phrenic Creatures turns normal creatures into psionic ones.

Appendix E covers Conversions for Monsters from LeBlanc's own CC1: Creature Compendium.

Appendix F details how to convert any monster into a psionic one.

We end with a a couple pages of collected tables and the OGL.

Bottom line here is this is a great book. Everything you need to play psionic characters and add psionics to your game. Personally I am going to use this to beef up The Secret Machines of the Star Spawn which I also picked up today.

I have played around a lot with various forms of Psionics. For now, this is the one I use most often.

Carcass Crawler: Issue Two

I am a fan of anything B/X and OSE in particular. This zine for Old-School Essentials gives me two elves and some new snake-cult monsters.

Carcass Crawler: Issue Three

I have lots of variations on Dragonborn and Tieflings, but these are good. 

Old School Magic

This is an update to The Alchemist also by Vigilance Press. For another buck, you get more classes, another 23 pages, and a better-looking layout. A good deal if you ask me. The alchemist is very much like the one from the previous product. Like the alchemist supplement, I might do a multi-class with this alchemist, either as an alchemist-artificer or an alchemist-sage.

The other classes include the artificer, conjurer, elementalist, hermit, holy man, naturalist, sage and seer. Plus, there are some new spells that I rather like.

Old-School Psionics

Designed to be a new psionics system for OSRIC this book introduces the Mentalist class. Powers are divided out among disciplines going to 7th level. Powers are treated mostly like spells, but that works well for adding into OSRIC. Also some psionic monsters are detailed including my favorite (and worth the price of the book) the Doppleganger as a proper psionic monster. 22 pages including cover and OGL. Very nicely done.

Another great set of psionic rules.

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I have some other posts with adventures and monster books coming up for the future.