I have often thought that I was not doing a horror/old-school/vampire/witch sort of blog I'd be doing a Star Trek one. I am that obsessed. Thankfully for me there already is a great blog that does Star Trek and Doctor and more; TARDIS Captain.
Even so, I can't help but be excited for all the great new Star Trek heading my way.
Here are the previews of all the upcoming Star Trek shows on Paramount+.
I am very excited!
Quick one today. I got some great pre-Halloween goodies in the mail today.
Up first, my Kickstarter package of Chromatic Dungeons from Roderic Waibel and Izegrim Creations.
The game is split between a Basic rule set and an Advanced rule set. Unlike the games these take their names from there is 100% compatibility between the two. You can start out Basic and move to Advanced. Stay in Basic with bits of Advanced or move back and forth as you desire.
The game is rather fantastic and I can't wait to give it a full review.
This is not all I got this past weekend.
I got some "Candy Corn Dice" from Ice Cream Dice and to go with them a "Candy Corn Witch" mini from Hero Forge.
The witch was supposed to be a "Pumpkin Spice Witch" but her hat is very much candy corn!
Yes. That is a PSL in her hand and the cup has a bat on it.
I am ready for my Halloween games!
So why not add some more work on top of it all!
I was rereading the Fiend Folio the other day as inspiration for my books and it dawned on me that we never got, despite an abundance of monsters, a Fiend Folio II.
So I was looking over all my magazines and thought there could be enough monsters. Between White Dwarf #2 and #75 there are about 380 total monsters. Some of those are already part of the Fiend Folio's 188 monsters. If I needed more I could even use Imagine Magazine's 50 or so monsters.
What is my awful idea?
I'd like to put together my own Fiend Folio II.
This is obviously not for publication or profit. Just so I can have it sitting on my desk. I keep my Lulu-made "orange spine" Fiend Folio on my desk as my "working" copy. This would be the same. I already used the cover depicted above for my Lulu pod. So I'd need something different by Jeff Easley.
Again. This would just be for my own benefit, but I would want to re-write it all to make it flow better. Much like Turnbull did with the FFI.
It sounds like a really fun project. More to the point it sounds like something fun to have.
I know there is a so-called "Fiend Folio II" to be found online. It just collects the various Fiend Factory articles into a single PDF. Not really what I want.
Trouble is, something like this will take some time to do, time that I could be using to get the Basic Bestiary out. Unless of course doing this gives me better insight into how to do better monsters.
The day job was crazy today! Didn't get my last post in for Norse Week, so I thought I'd throw in a Friday Night Videos for it!
So what are Viking Songs?
Glad you asked!
Well, maybe not Viking songs exactly, but certainly ones that want me to play a Viking/Norse-themed game.
So up first, the most Viking song there is.
Is this a Viking song? No. But the band, Saga, always makes me think of the TSR Mini-game Saga, and that is good enough for me.
Do you know who does know about Vikings? The British. And who better to tell us about it than Iron Maiden.
Ok. So. This song is not at all about Vikings, not even if you try REALLY hard. But it is a song Saxon and I dig it.
Sabaton is a Swedish symphonic metal band that pretty much only sing about Vikings. I want to include them here too since I feel my "Norse Week" might have weighted too heavily on Norway.
Let's not forget the haunting "If I had a Heart" from the series Vikings.
Skol!
Lots of talk about lists. Red ones, Green ones, Yellow. Talk about Neutral zones or somesuch.
While it should be obvious I'll restate it for those in the back.
Adjust your buying preferences accordingly.
It is June 1986 and what came to be known as the Dragon Wars had begun in my campaign world. My regular DM had graduated and was preparing to go off to the Air Force. I was concentrating on getting in as many math and science classes as I could prior to going off to college. It was an interesting time.
I remember sitting down in the Pavilion at Nichols Park in my hometown reading over this issue. It seemed to be filled with great things. I am happy to report that my memory lives up to reality.
Before we get into the magazine proper let's take a moment to marvel at this cover by Kevin Davies, The Vanquished Cavalier. Likely one of the top 10 covers in my opinion. And it is art you can buy for your own projects.
Kim Mohan discusses the 10th Anniversary of Dragon Magazine here, noting that there will be less hoopla now than in Issue #100. Future anniversaries will have a bit more "pomp."
Letters cover the topics of the day, namely more revisions of the Ranger. Seriously has anyone EVER been happy with the Ranger?? One letter asks if the Electronic Eye is ever coming back and we told that yes, a computer-based column is back in this issue. I was quite pleased with this. I had just bought a new computer, a Color Computer 3 but they never covered games for it. Backed the wrong horse that time, but I can't complain. Like the Old-School Revival for D&D there is an Old-School Revival (of sorts) for old computers.
The Forum covers the lament of the time, this too much Greyhawk in the pages of Dragon and the Unearthed Arcana. I remember all of this. Oh to have those problems now.
Our first article is from Ed Greenwood and it is a classic in my mind. The Cult of the Dragon not only introduces the titular cult, it also introduces us to the Dracolich. Re-reading it now I find it interesting that the genesis of this article comes from Dragonlance. Well, the Realms Boxed set won't be released for a little yet. The article was an early favorite of mine and I spent a lot of time comparing this article to the classic Blueprint for a Lich from Best of Dragon Vol. II. I really respected what Ed was doing here. Rereading it now I am still marveling at how good it still is. I might need to incorporate this into my games somehow. The cult migrated from Krynn to Toril and then to the rest of the multiverse. This is of course the best thing to use in a Dragon article; finding something and making it work for your game.
Up next are two articles that would make up a One Man's God: Norse Mythos, Part II. The two articles came to the Dragon offices at the same time so they decided to run them both.
The first is For Better or Norse: I Equal time for the members of the Vanir by Joel McGraw. This one covers the Vanir gods. Of personal interest, we get Angur-boda, Grid, and Gullveig are all described variously as witches. There are also stats for Njord, Mimir, Nidhogg, and Utgard-Loki the "star" of the first Norse myth I ever read. Honestly, these should be glued into my D&DG. Again none of these would really be considered AD&D demons.
Next is For Better or Norse: II New Descriptions of Some Old Favorites by Carl Sargent. This one gives us some updates to the Norse gods found in the D&DG. Featured are Niord (spelled differently this time), Frey, Freya, and Loki. Loki gets the biggest change, going from Chaotic Evil to Chaotic Neutral. I felt at the time this was a good change. I still do, but now I have a greater appreciation of the myths and the character. Again, I wish I could paste this one into my D&DG.
An ad for one of my favorite Near-D&D products of all time, the Arcanum.
Another Ed Greenwood article is next and it is one only Ed can do; All about Elminster. I went from being mildly annoyed by Elminster (here) to outright dislike, to rabid dislike (2nd Ed), to acceptance (3rd ed) and even a begrudging like (now). The article is actually rather fun. Elminster is a 26th level magic-user. The article also includes some new spells which is expected. I am not sure how these compare to his 3rd Edition stats. Since my issue is falling apart anyway this will go into my Forgotten Realms boxed set.
The Role of Computers is up for it's debut. Examples are given for the Macintosh computer, arguably the most advanced machine at the time.
Leonard Carpenter is up with Dragon Damage Revisited. This revises the damage done by dragons from the Fiend Folio, Monster Manual II, and the gemstone dragons. This very conversation came up the other day online in talking about 1st Ed dragons. You can see how across the editions they made dragons more and more powerful. These numbers look pretty good, I'll have to dig up the first in the series and see what their logic is.
Our centerpiece adventure is The House in the Frozen Lands by James Adams. I always thought this was more tied directly to the Norse myths, but I think that was only my memory. The adventure is for 6-10 characters of 4th to 8th level. If nothing else there are some good ideas of the types of encounters one can find in an arctic environment. The adventure always looked interesting to me since it didn't feel like a dungeon crawl.
TSR Previews lets us know what is coming out in July and August of 1986. I remember buying REF2 Character Sheets and then taking them to college where I ran off 100s of copies at Kinkos on different colored sheets. In fact, I still have some. Those sheets outlived both TSR and Kinkos. I had never heard of some of the board games here, but I did find listings for The BROADWAY Game and The HONEYMOONERS Game. Nothing though in my quick search for The PARAMOUNT Game.
The fiction section is The Wizard's Boy by Nancy Varian Berberick. I didn't read it, but Berberick went on to write more novels and short stories including a few Dragonlance ones for Wizards.
Moving on to the Arēs section.
Knowledge is Power by John M. Maxstadt gives us a skill system for Gamma World. This looks like it is for 2nd Edition GW, but I will admit I am not knowledgeable on the differences between 2nd and 3rd.
There is a bit on underwater action in Star Frontiers from William Tracy in Going for a Swim. I am pretty sure that I never had characters go underwater ever in SF. Space yes, sea no. BUT that all being said there are some good ideas here that are useful to most games. This includes getting "the bends" and movement and other hazards. The article really does read like a 20th-century point of view rather than a futuristic one. I would assume that a culture capable of FTL flight had worked some of these other issues out as well.
Piece of the Action details organized crime in Paranoia. This is another one of those articles that would later get Wizards of the Coast into trouble with the Dragon CD-ROM. It is copyrighted 1986 by the author Ken Tovar.
Gamers' Guide gives us our small ads. I love looking at this even if I know most, if not all, these places have long since closed up shop.
One thing though. Lou Zocchi's ad mentions he is selling the original Deities & Demigods with Cthulhu and Elric. No shock there, but there is also a mention of the BROWN cover Monster Manuals that are the same of the current Blue cover. What is he talking about here? Does he mean the original 1977 cover versus the orange spine? That is the only thing I can think of to be honest.
Convention Calendar gives us the happenings of Summer 1986. None were close to me.
Dragonsmirth, Snarf Quest, and Wormy follow.
Gamers of a certain will go on and on about how great Dragon was in the early 80s. And to a large part I agree, it was great. But the late 80s and even into the 90s Dragon was great as well, for different reasons. The first 10 years of Dragon captured the hobby in its early days and its DIY attitude, which one of the big reasons people loved it AND the same attitude that drove the early days of the OSR. Dragon entering its second decade was a more polished magazine and the article quality had improved. DIY was still there, but not the gritty DIY of the 1970s and early 80s. Still, I find a lot in these pages, 1986 to 1996, that I find very useful and more to the point, things I would still use today.
I have long been a fan of the AD&D 2nd Ed. Historical References books. I have used the Celts one over and over again with many different versions of D&D and I have been pleased with it. The scholarship on these is a bit better than the Deities & Demigods, but I attribute this to a better budget and more space to explain what they were doing.
Also, the focus was a little different. The D&DG took myths and tried to fit them into the AD&D framework. The Historical References took the myths and described how to play an AD&D game in that world.
It's Norse Week so let's start at the beginning with HR1 the Vikings Campaign Sourcebook.
HR1 Vikings Campaign Sourcebook (AD&D 2nd Edition)
For today's review, I am only going to consider the PDF version of this book from DriveThruRPG. I lost or sold back my original in one of my moves or collection downsize. I will mention details from the physical book as I remember it, but my focus is on the PDF for the details. In most cases the material is 100% the same, the difference coming from the fold-out map, which is separate pages in the pdf.
HR1: Vikings Campaign Sourcebook (1992), by David "Zeb" Cook. Illustrations by Ned Dameron and cartography by David C. Sutherland III. 96 pages, black & white with full-color maps.
The first book of the Historical Reference series covers the Viking raiders of Scandinavia. It is not a separate game world per se, since it deals with Pagan Europe after the fall of Rome, but it is a fantastical Europe where dragons fill the seas, troll-blooded humans walk among us, and somewhere out there in the wilderness, a one-eyed man wanders the land.
Chapter 1: Introduction
This chapter covers the very basics, starting off with what people usually get wrong about the Vikings. These guys are not Hägar the Horrible or even the interpretations of Wagner. They do point out that "Vikings" are also not really a people, but a lifestyle that some people engaged in.
This section also covers how to use this book, specifically how to use this book about Vikings and the history of their raids with the AD&D 2nd Rules. We get into more specific details in the next chapters.
Chapter 2: A Mini-Course of Viking History
Starting with the raid at Lindisfarne in 793 CE the book covers a very basic history of the Northmen's lands, the lands they raided, and their culture and history. The focus here though is through the lens of an AD&D game, not a historical introduction. The book is clear on this.
Details are given, with maybe extra focus on England and France (though they are not called that yet) but that is fine. There is a very nice timeline running across the top of the pages of this chapter that is rather handy. The time period, roughly 800 to 1100 CE agrees with most of the scholarship on "Viking History" so that works fine for here as well.
There is a nice list of settlements and cities the Vikings targeted. Not a full list, but it gives you an idea of how much of Europe, Northern Africa, and even parts of Asia the Vikings would roam.
There is a page or so of suggested readings. Likely the best at the time. The chapter does set you nicely to explore these ideas further.
Chapter 3: Of Characters and Combat
Here we get into game writing proper. We start with what races you will find in a Viking-themed campaign. Obviously, we are talking mostly humans here. Humans can gain a "Gift" something that makes them special such as "Rune Lore" or "Bad Luck" or even a Seer. There is a new "race" the Troll-born. These are stronger than average humans due to troll-blood in their veins. They get a +1 to Strength, Constitution and Intelligence but a -1 to Wisdom and a -2 to Charisma. They have Infravision and are limited to 15th level in their classes. They are not born with Gifts.
Next, we cover the changes to the Character Classes from the PHB. Fighters on the whole tend to be unchanged as are Rangers and Thieves. Classes not allowed are Clerics, Paladins, Druids, and Wizards, though specialty mages are allowed if they are Conjurers, Diviners, Enchanters, Illusionists, Necromancers. While this could be a negative for some I like the idea of limiting classes for specific campaigns. Two new sub-classes of the Warrior are added, the Berserker and the Runecaster. Both do pretty much what you might suspect they do. The berserker is actually rather cool and while the obvious roots here are the barbarian and berserker monster from AD&D 1, there is enough here to make it work and be interesting too. Runecasters know runes as detailed in the next chapter.
The "forbidden" classes can be played, if they are outsiders.
Lip service is given to the detail that the Vikings were predominantly men. Though new archaeological finds are casting some doubt that they were exclusively so. This book does give some examples of how warrior women were known. They emphasize that player characters are always exceptional.
There is a section on names (including a list of names), homelands, and social class.
In the purist AD&D 2nd ed section, we get some new Proficiencies.
This covers Rune Magic. An important feature of Viking Lore. What the runes are and how to use them in AD&D 2nd Ed terms are given. A lot of these are minor magics, say of the 0-level or 1st-level spell use. I personally don't recall them being over abused in games, but they are a really nice feature to be honest.
Chapter 5: ...And Monsters
Monsters are discussed here, starting with which existing monsters can be used from the AD&D 2nd Monstrous Compendium. Following this some altered monsters are given. For example, there is the Gengånger which is a zombie with some more details.
Dwarves and Elves are given special consideration, as are trolls and giants.
There is not however any "new" monsters in the AD&D 2nd Ed Monstrous Compendium format. We will get those in the Celts book, but that is next time.
The section is split with a "centerfold" map of Europe.
Chapter 6: Equipment and Treasure
Vikings were Vikings because of the treasure they sought. They also had the best ships in Europe at this time. So let's spend some time with these.
We start with a section on money. For the game's simplicity, these are reduced to a couple of systems. Coins are usually categorized by make-up and weight. There is some good material here really and something that most games should look into.
Treasure covers the typical treasures found. Also, treasure was a central piece of Viking lore; it was how chieftains paid their men, it was what they stole from others, and it was also how they were paid off NOT to steal. Some space is given to Magic Items as well. This is an AD&D game after all. Some "typical" magical treasure is discussed and some that are not found at all. A few new items are also detailed.
Chapter 7: The Viking Culture
This chapter gives us are biggest differences from a typical AD&D game. For illustrative purposes, we follow a young Viking, Ivar Olafsson, in a year of his life. Now I rather liked this because it gave me a character situated in his life and culture. While it is not the most "gamble" material it is good background material.
There is a section on Social Ranking and a little more on the role of Viking women. I think after 6 seasons of watching Katheryn Winnick kick-ass as Lagertha in Vikings, this section will be read and cheerfully ignored. That is great, but this bit does talk about, and support, the image that Viking women had it better than their counterparts in the rest of Europe.
We also get into the sundries, quite literally; Food, drink, homes, farms, and trade. There is a section on religion with lots of nods towards the AD&D 2nd Ed Legends and Lore.
Chapter 8: A Brief Gazetteer
AD&D 2nd Ed is celebrated not really for its advances in game design or rules, but rather the campaign worlds. This book, and this section, in particular, is a thumbnail of why these celebrations are merited. Or, as I call it, just give me a map! This section is more than a map and maybe not as much as the famed Mystara Gazetteers, but the relationship is not difficult to pick out.
This covers, rather briefly (as it says in the title), the lands the Vikings would roam to. And there are a lot of those! In addition to the lands of Europe, Africa, Asia, and yes even North America, we get the fantastic worlds of the Vikings. If I had done this book this would have been Chapter 2 or 3 at the very least. This chapter is all too brief in my mind.
We get a longship design at the end and in the PDF what was the fold-out map.
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So in truth a really fun resource. The AD&D game material is there, but this book could be used with pretty much any version of D&D or even many other games. 3rd Edition/Pathfinder players might lament the lack of Prestige Classes, but the Rune MAgic section can be easily converted to a Feat system. 5th Edition Players would need to work the Berserkers into a Barbarian sub-class/sub-type, but that would be easy enough.
It is not a perfect resource, but it is really close. I am really regretting selling off my physical copy now.
