When did I start Game Mastering? Right away to be honest.
It would have been with the D&D Basic Set edited by Tom Moldvay. I am sure I ran my younger brother and sister through some adventures. I know I had made my own dungeons then and still have a couple of the maps. One, in particular, had a red dragon in one room and a green dragon in another. No idea how they got through the doors.
I would like to think I got better.
As always I will be following my rules for these reviews.
PDF. $1.49. 7 pages. 1 page cover. ½page OGL. 5½ pages of content.
This PDF gives us what I consider the "usual bag" of options for the Pathfinder Witch class. NOTE that is not a slight on this book or even a bad thing. It is very, very often exactly what people want.
There are 10 new Patrons with their bonus spells. There are 10 new hexes as well.
There are three (3) new archetypes as well. These include the Devoted Witch (I might call this a Divine Witch or Witch Priestess), Green Witch (largely the same as mine in feel), and the Storyteller Witch which is a lot of fun. It is closest to my "Good Walker" witch.
So for just under $1.50 you can get all of this. Not at all bad really. If you need some new witch options then this is a good choice.
I took advantage of the latest Christmas in July Sales at DriveThruRPG to get myself some Print on Demand deals.
I wanted a new Dragonlance hardcover to replace the one my son absconded with when he was little. I have also been wanting copies of City System and A Paladin in Hell for a while now. Cult of the Dragon and Minsc and Boo's Journal of Villainy are gifts for the aforementioned son.
While that was getting printed and shipped to me my youngest was 3D printing my Sagarassi minis.
They are a little hard to see, here is a close-up.
Yeah, still a little hard. Here is what they will look like painted.
I am pleased with how the prints turned out.
Ok. This one is up for some debate.
D&D and its variants of the time were all my "First" RPG. I played them like they were all one game.
My Second RPG?
That one was a bit fuzzier. I know where I bought it though. It was from the Mail Order Hobby shop. I know this because I am sure I bought them both at the same time because they were not available at my local book store.
It was either Chill or Traveller.
For my "street cred" I will say Chill, but in my gut, I think it was Traveller. I do know that I did not get a chance to play either of them until much later in life.
I still rather enjoy both games.
Incantations from the Other Side: Spirit Magic
PDF. $9.99. 38 pages. 1-page cover. 1 credits page. 1-page table of contents. 1 page for OGL and index. 34 pages of content. Landscape page orientation (sometimes this cuts off art).
As always I will be following my rules for these reviews.
This book is divided into four major sections, each with a different author from the cover. Each covers a different type of magic.
The Spirit World by Scott Gable introduces us to the book and the three types of spirit magic we will cover here.
Vodou by Scott Gable. This is our first and is familiar by name. It involves working with various spirits, the Loa, many listed later in this section. There seems to be some campaign setting specifics here. This is not a surprise because in our world Vodou, Vodun, and Voodoo are very location specific. This is mentioned in a sidebar here.
There are some new spells, but beyond that there is plenty of information on how these spells are supposed to be used. This section will not replace any of the works of say C.J. Carella on the subject, but it works great for Pathfinder.
The Middle World by Uri Kurlianchik. Covers the magic found in the tales from Russia and the Slavs. This includes a number of "House spirits." Again we are treated to some familiar names; the Leshy, the Domovoi, but here they are spirits and not fae creatures exactly. Here we also have a few spells associated with the various creatures.
The Arcanum by Clinton Boomer. Lastly we have the Arcanum. This one covers "Starry Patrons" but there is a solid "from beyond the stars" feel to these. You can read these as Lovecraftian horrors, but they seem more aloof and alien even than that.
This book succeeds in giving us a very different felling magic system that still works with the rules of Pathfinder. Since the publication of this book there have been more book on magic for Pathfinder, so it would be interesting to see how this works with these new works.
The art is full color and quite good.
For this review, I am considering both the PDF from DriveThruRPG and the hardcover version I bought back in the early 2000s.
In the the 2 years since the Monster Manual was printed the designers of the 3rd Edition game had gotten a lot of feedback from players and also have seen the designs that other monster books have been able to do. They knew what the players and the DMs were saying about monsters. So the MMII has two overt purposes. The first, and the obvious one, is give us more monsters to use in out games. The second, and likely more helpful one, is to help clarify how the monster stat blocks are used and can be altered. I want to discuss the second one first.
The first section of the book covers the monster stat blocks. How to read them and what sorts of details you are likely to find in them. This is largely similar to the list to the MMI but there are a lot of additions, like the table of typic creature damage types by type and size. Each creature type is broken down into what makes that type different than the other types with much more detail than in the MMI.
There are new guidelines on advancing monsters. This really is the reason to get this book. It expands greatly on the rules and lets you know how to do it with an example.
On the back side of the book, there are also new templates to apply to monsters to make other monsters.
In the middle, we have the reason that most people pick up the book, the monsters. There are over 130 monsters listed here and some are new, others are old favorites.
We get some 1st Ed. MM1 favorites like the banshee, the catoblepas, the sylphs, the water weird (though now expanded into elemental weirds), and ixitxachitls. There are a good number of Fiend Folio monsters too in the hook horror, grell, death knight (as a template), meenlock, dune stalker, Son of Kyuss, and needleman er needlefolk.
The Daemons return, but this time they keep their 2nd Edition name of Yugoloths. Actually, I am good with that. Yugoloth always was cooler sounding than daemon anyway. There are more demons and devils too and even some weird Lovecraftian beasts like the Moon Beast and more.
This addition to the Monster Manual line feels like it was more completing the MMI than it was a second book. I consider it a must-have book for any 3.x DM with even a slight interest in monsters.
The art is great throughout and you can see the design is leaning into what will become known as "dungeon punk" later on.
Is this one of my favorite monster books? No. But it is a great work-horse book that has great designer information and a few really great monsters on top of that.
That one is a little harder to figure out. I feel like that in the late 70s and early 80s D&D was all over the place. I knew of it as far back as 77 or 78. I didn't read any of it until 1979 though.
I borrowed the Monster Manual from my classmate Geordie Herald. I got a copy of Holmes' Basic from someone. My first real DM was Jon Cook.
In truth, there was this critical mass of D&D in my town in the late 70s. I DO remember I almost didn't get involved with it due to my interest in video games. But reading mythology and "The Hobbit" and watching all sorts of horror movies I think made my involvement in the game at the time rather inevitable.
All roads lead to the Keep on the Borderlands it seemed.
