Busy Week, But Nothing to Show For It!

Been a busy week here at The Other Side HQ.

Got a new project I am working on that I think is fantastic and I can't wait to get it out to you all. No spoilers yet.

It's also near term start for me and I had to completely rewrite an entire Biostats course from the inside out. Still, don't have my videos for it.

But not all is work over here.

My youngest son got some really nice accolades this morning in our annual Parent Teacher conference.

He got his gaming club off the ground and it's been running great! 

They are playing D&D 5th edition and some board games.  I plan on donating one of my copies of Dungeon! to the group.  Connor, my son, already bought enough dice with money he made for the entire group to all have their own set.

They have about 25 kids they are the most ethnically and gender diverse group I have ever seen.  Pretty cool really.  The state of the hobby could not be in better hands in my mind.

TBBYANR: The Wasted Lands

Whoa. A Best Blog You Are Not Reading post? 
Yes!  This is a feature I wanted to bring back for 2019 to give a shout out to some lesser know, lesser read blogs or at least ones people may not talk about much.

Today I want to feature a blog that has been around forever, out there doing his own thing.

Jason Vey runs the Wasted Lands blog

Now I have known Jason for years.  We worked at Eden together, worked on the Buffy RPG at the same time.  He playtested my Ghosts of Albion for Eden I playtested his All Flesh Must Be Eaten books for Eden.  I playtested his Spellcraft & Swordplay retro-game and many other games.
So we have been working together for nearly 20 years really.

Among other things Jason also is the author/designer of the Amazing Adventures game from Troll Lords and did a lot of work on various Castles & Crusades projects.  So he has a solid game design reputation and CV.

The Wasted Lands is his deep dive, scholarly work into older editions of D&D, in particular, OD&D and AD&D first edition. 

He covers a lot of OD&D topics.  In fact I bought my white box OD&D 5th printing off of him because he had an extra.
He covers AD&D First Edition, he is now up to Part 45 of his read through of the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide.
And more recently he did a long series of posts on Psionics in the OD&D and AD&D games.

And today, much closer to our shared roots, he posted stats for the cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer for OD&D.

Jason is also something a legitimate Robert E. Howard and Conan scholar.

So do yourself a favor and check out his blog. Start with what I have linked above and don't ignore his Star Wars posts.

Monstrous Monday: Fiend Folio POD

More Old-School mail call from the weekend.  Two boxes from different printers for some Old School joy.

I will admit it, it's not a popular opinion, but I love the Fiend Folio.  I goes back to the time when I was just getting into AD&D and I equated everything British/English as being better than American. (In many ways I still think that!)

So imagine my delight when I saw that the Fiend Folio on DriveThruRPG was now offering a Print on Demand option.  So, of course, I had to get it.  It was soft cover only, but I thought it would work nicely next to my Games Workshop printing softcover Monster Manual.
I was not wrong.

Other than one is a hardcover and the other is a softcover it is very difficult to tell them apart.

Even the interiors compare well.

Compares well to the mini version out a few years back (I guess a "few" now means 20).

Around the same time I ordered this I found a mock-up of an "orange spine" version of the Fiend Folio made by R Nelson Bailey.

A little bit of Lulu legerdemain and I now have something from a parallel universe.

I didn't get the cover perfect, but that is fine really.

The interior of this one looks pretty good too.

My next project needs to be a Fiend Folio II.

Kickstart Your Weekend: Gods, Monsters and Superheroes

A couple of good ones today.

First up is a tactical miniatures game with some fantastic looking minis.

Theosis: Godslayer

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dreamcraftgames/theosis-godslayer?ref=theotherside

This one has some really awesome looking minis.  I know nothing about the game itself, but that is fine.  It looks cool.

Yes. That is a 120 mm base.

It looks fantastic and ending soon.

Also ending soon is a new supers game and I do love Supers games.

Sentinel Comics: The Roleplaying Game

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gtgames/sentinel-comics-the-roleplaying-game

This one looks really fun and I like the art. The game play looks pretty easy to pick up as well.

Want to see how it plays?  Grab the Sentinel Comics: The Roleplaying Game Starter Kit on RPGNow/DrivThruRPG.

Featured Artist: Iren Horrors

Todays featured artist is some I have been stalking for a while because I absolutely love her art.

Ksenia Svintsova, aka Iren Horrors, is an artist from Obninsk, Russia and she has a great witch-punk style that I love.  She describes her style and art as "Dark, gothic, witchy illustrations" so of course, I am going to notice her!

Honestly, there is not a single piece she has done that I don't 100% love.

I think I need that one on my wall as a print.
https://society6.com/product/triple-goddess1216191_print?sku=s6-8947550p4a1v45

And there is at least ten times more this amount that I love.  In a perfect world I'd get her to do the art for a witch and horror-centric D&D 5 book.

You can find Iren Horrors online at:

• Twitter, https://twitter.com/Iren_Horrors
• DeviantArt, https://www.deviantart.com/irenhorrors
• Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/irenhorrorsart
• Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/irenhorrors/
• Society 6, https://society6.com/irenhorrors
• VK, https://vk.com/irenhorrors

Please check out her sites!

Dungeons & Dragons: Stranger Things Edition

I woke up and saw this on my newsfeed this morning.

So far I have only seen this at Entertainment Earth and Amazon.
https://www.entertainmentearth.com/product/stranger-things-dungeons-dragons-roleplaying-game-starter-set/hse3702

https://www.amazon.com/Hasbro-Stranger-Dungeons-Dragons-Roleplaying/dp/B07G5X6N5P

https://comicbook.com/gaming/2019/02/13/stranger-things-dungeons-dragons-starter-set/

But I hope my FLGS will have it.

I think it looks great, and if it can get some more people into our hobby then fantastic.
Think of all those people watching Stranger Things and wanting to get into or back into D&D.

It is for 5th edition, but that is the current edition and the one they are most likely to find things for.

This will be a good chance to try out my Zoomer archetype in a perfect setting!

NOW I have already heard cries of "selling out" may I remind you of these:

D&D has been "selling out" since the early 80s and no one was more aggressive in the pursuit of licensing agreements than Gygax himself.

Review: Realms of the Crawling Chaos

One of my favorite Old School books has been Realms of the Crawling Chaos by Goblinoid Games.  It's a nice blend of both D&D Basic-era (via Labyrinth Lord) and the mythos of H.P. Lovecraft.  We get a little bit of Call of Cthulhu and the Cthulhu Mythos from Deities & Demigods.

Available as a PDF and softcover for years it is now out in hardcover for backers of the Advanced Labyrinth Lord Kickstarter.

The book looks fantastic, as to be expected.

The hardcover book is 60 pages worth of material and deals with running a Lovecraftian-inspired game of horror fantasy.
A few new races are introduced for a Race-as-Class style game with notes on other classes to use in an advanced game; Sea-Blooded, Subhuman, White Ape and White Ape Hybrid.

Next, are some new magical formulae and some new spells all based on various Lovecraft sources. Enough to sprinkle into various dammable texts for the players to find AND then really get into trouble with.

We come to the monsters and all the old favorites are here. Comparing them to other sources of similar monster will give you plenty of differences in stats, which is a good thing really. Players who are familiar with other books should not have knowledge their characters do not.

A small section on Eldritch Artifacts, a staple of many of Lovecraft's mythos stories.

And finally a section on Psionics which differs from other books/games.

We get some appendices on Eldritch tomes and an artifact generator.  Appendix 3 covers the use of these psionic rules in Mutant Future. And Appendix 4 covers the stories and books used.

We end with the OGL section.

If I have one complaint there are no rules for sanity or madness. A fair staple of many Lovecraftian games.

The book is awfully fun and is full of great ideas.  If you are a fan of Labyrinth Lord and Lovecraftian tales then I would most certainly grab this.

For me, this is has been the "missing" part of both my BlackStar game and War of the Witch Queens.  I say "missing" but I have had the PDF forever.

This is actually a HUGE part of my BlackStar game.  This plus Starships & Spacemen So I am going to talk a little about in the frame of reference of that game soon.