[Fanzine Focus XVII] Extinguish the Sun Vol. 2

On the tail of Old School Renaissance has come another movement—the rise of the fanzine. Although the fanzine—a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon, got its start in Science Fiction fandom, in the gaming hobby it first started with Chess and Diplomacy fanzines before finding fertile ground in the roleplaying hobby in the 1970s. Here these amateurish publications allowed the hobby a public space for two things. First, they were somewhere that the hobby could voice opinions and ideas that lay outside those of a game’s publisher. Second, in the Golden Age of roleplaying when the Dungeon Masters were expected to create their own settings and adventures, they also provided a rough and ready source of support for the game of your choice. Many also served as vehicles for the fanzine editor’s house campaign and thus they showed another Dungeon Master and group played said game. This would often change over time if a fanzine accepted submissions. Initially, fanzines were primarily dedicated to the big three RPGs of the 1970s—Dungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest, and Traveller—but fanzines have appeared dedicated to other RPGs since, some of which helped keep a game popular in the face of no official support.

Since 2008 with the publication of Fight On #1, the Old School Renaissance has had its own fanzines. The advantage of the Old School Renaissance is that the various Retroclones draw from the same source and thus one Dungeons & Dragons-style RPG is compatible with another. This means that the contents of one fanzine will compatible with the Retroclone that you already run and play even if not specifically written for it. Labyrinth Lord and Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay have proved to be popular choices to base fanzines around, as has Swords & Wizardry.

Extinguish the Sun is a fanzine published by Apollyon Press, best known for the somewhat underdeveloped Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay supplement, On the Shoulders of Giants. The inaugural issue presented a pair of settings, one fantasy, one post-apocalypse, that were worthy of further development and detail. Unfortunately, Extinguish the Sun Vol. 2 develops neither of the settings, but does at least announce that the ‘Knights of the Road’ setting will instead be developed and published by Necrotic Gnome Productions, an Old School Renaissance publisher best known for the Wormskin fanzine. Instead, the second issue, published in August, 2018, presents a wholly new setting, one which seems timely considering the imminent release of both Cyberpunk Red and Shadowrun, Sixth Edition.

‘Fulminations of the Cybernetic Punk’ reskins the rules of Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay to present a Cyberpunk setting in just sixteen pages. It provides four new Classes, a simple equipment list, a guide to the Matrix, and a setting. Unfortunately, it is missing one element which makes Extinguish the Sun Vol. 2 a complete roleplaying in and of itself, but we will come to that… Making use of just Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay’s Rules & Magic, it mixes and matches various parts of character design to present four new Classes. So for example, ‘The Mercenary’ uses the ten-sided die for its Hit Dice, saves as an Elf, and gains Experience Points as the Specialist Class. Notably, ‘Fulminations of the Cybernetic Punk’ uses the Skills system from Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay to model the various abilities of three of the four Classes rather than giving specific abilities. So The Cyborg is given access to five skills—Guidance (navigation and digital mapping), Knowledge (encyclopedic), Vision (thermal, X-ray, et cetera.) Maths, and Strength (raw), each rated between one and six, and each working whenever the player rolls under the skill. So, instead of adding to the Cyborg’s base Strength attribute, the player is rolling it and improving it as a skill.

The other Classes are just as simple. Thus, The Lowlife has the skills of Acquisitions and Offloading, the first for finding and acquiring goods, services, and employment, the latter for selling or getting rid of things. The Phreak has latent psionic abilities which enable him to plug into the Matrix via a data jack and so explore computer systems with his mind. The Phreak does not have any skills or abilities as such, but rather this one ability to connect to the virtual world. The Mercenary differs though, focusing on abilities rather than skills. Each Mercenary has a primary weapon, a secondary weapon, and a special ability to reflect a fighting style. So a Mercenary with a Monosword primary weapon, Unarmed combat secondary weapon, and the Martial Arts Special might be a Ninja-style assassin, but replace the Monosword with the Pistol, and the Mercenary becomes a bodyguard. Take pistol, baton, and the Savage Special which increases weapon die types and the Mercenary might be a murderous enforcer.

Curiously, although ‘Fulminations of the Cybernetic Punk’ comes with an equipment list, what it lacks is cyberware. Instead, it subsumes these elements into the characters, most obviously in the Cyborg Class, but also the Phreak Class. The Matrix where the Phreak mostly operates is described as a mass of interconnected nodes, each node designed and styled by its owner. Some are designed as rooms and complexes of rooms, but secure areas it is suggested are like ‘dungeons’. Although all Classes can access the Matrix, here the Phreak comes into his own, having more—if virtual—Hit Points and a greater bonus to hit, though really, perhaps the Class should also have been given proper Specialist skills to reflect their larcenous intent inside the Matrix.

In terms of background, ‘Fulminations of the Cybernetic Punk’ describes a world dominated by five mega-corporations, a world of extreme haves and have-nots, and so on. This is a fairly standard Cyberpunk world, one in which the player characters are freelance mercenaries, perhaps working for the corporations, perhaps cultural-counter terrorists, perhaps both. 

Unfortunately, what ‘Fulminations of the Cybernetic Punk’ lacks is an adventure. It suggests that a heist in the Matrix is a replacement for the dungeon of other Old School Renaissance roleplaying games. How exactly that works is not quite explained, leaving the Game Master to develop the idea herself. To really pull the ideas of ‘Fulminations of the Cybernetic Punk’ together, it would have been good to see an example of a dungeon as heist works… Instead, what Extinguish the Sun Vol. 2 gives is an interview with Daniel Sell of the Melsonian arts Council. Now it is a decent interview, interesting and informative, but it does not make the issue, instead it brings it to a shuddering halt, such is the abrupt change of subject.

Physically, Extinguish the Sun Vol. 2 is nicely laid out with art, which although cartoonish, gives it a singular look. There is plenty of potential in ‘Fulminations of the Cybernetic Punk’ and it is an interesting attempt to do a Cyberpunk with a retroclone, it is just a pity that the author does not complete it with an adventure, making it all but ready to play, instead leaving the Game Master with more effort than is really necessary...

[Fanzine Focus XV] Extinguish the Sun Vol. 1

On the tail of Old School Renaissance has come another movement—the rise of the fanzine. Although the fanzine—a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon, got its start in Science Fiction fandom, in the gaming hobby it first started with Chess and Diplomacy fanzines before finding fertile ground in the roleplaying hobby in the 1970s. Here these amateurish publications allowed the hobby a public space for two things. First, they were somewhere that the hobby could voice opinions and ideas that lay outside those of a game’s publisher. Second, in the Golden Age of roleplaying when the Dungeon Masters were expected to create their own settings and adventures, they also provided a rough and ready source of support for the game of your choice. Many also served as vehicles for the fanzine editor’s house campaign and thus they showed another Dungeon Master and group played said game. This would often change over time if a fanzine accepted submissions. Initially, fanzines were primarily dedicated to the big three RPGs of the 1970s—Dungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest, and Traveller—but fanzines have appeared dedicated to other RPGs since, some of which helped keep a game popular in the face of no official support.

Since 2008 with the publication of Fight On #1, the Old School Renaissance has had its own fanzines. The advantage of the Old School Renaissance is that the various Retroclones draw from the same source and thus one Dungeons & Dragons-style RPG is compatible with another. This means that the contents of one fanzine will compatible with the Retroclone that you already run and play even if not specifically written for it. Labyrinth Lord and Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay have proved to be popular choices to base fanzines around, as has Swords & Wizardry.

Published in May, 2018, Extinguish the Sun is a fanzine from Apollyon Press, the Old School Renaissance publisher best known for the promising, but ultimately underdeveloped supplement, On the Shoulders of Giants. Where that supplement set out to be a fully rounded out book, the first issue of the fanzine is much more of a creative exercise, offering content for two settings, but really without anything in the way of context or explanation. Indeed, the sixteen-page, all-paper inaugural issue comes without an introduction or any idea as to which retroclone it is written for. It really consists of two halves, the first describing a dark, dystopian fantasy setting without any mechanics, the second a Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic setting.

The first setting is ‘The City in Chains’, a walled-off city at the heart of the empire that serves as the seat of the King Eternal who maintains a vigil from his sealed tomb inside his mausoleum-palace. Closed off and forgotten by outsiders, regarded as a living catacomb by those who remember it momentarily, it is ruled inside by noble generals who have descended into epicurianism and decadence and whose interests are twofold. First, in the war machines that their feuding engineers can build, and second, in the finest and newest dishes that their chefs—chefs blinded long ago to prevent their attempting to poison the Generals—can concoct using just their senses of smell and touch. Of the rest of the city’s inhabitants, most have been reduced to serfdom and near starvation by the ruinous rates levied by the all-powerful Taxmen—each a judge, jury, and executioner in one, mostly in the moss and fungus they grow and harvest on just about every surface. In between them, the Priests appear to do no more than bring theological comfort to the Generals.

‘The City in Chains’ can be used in several ways. From the inside, it is a dark, dank dystopia, one ready to be filled with conspiracies and uprisings. From the outside, it is a city of mystery and secrets, one that is perhaps slipping out of memory and into myth. How exactly any player characters get in is left up to the Game Master to determine, as are any reasons for them to visit. There is perhaps more to be developed in this fashion for ‘The City in Chains’ as a setting, but that will have to wait for future issues.

The second half of the fanzine is devoted to ‘Knights of the Road’, essentially a Mad Max-style setting. Whether caused by natural disaster or the gods reigning down lightning—nobody can agree upon the cause—it left a world where the survivors know that power is found in the car and the gun. It supports the setting with two Classes. One is the Librarian, someone who wears his books as a coat and fascinated by the written word comes to recognise the scent of paper and eventually set up a library himself. The other is The Marksman, a master of firearms who eschews armour and possesses an ancestral armour and by increasing the difficulty of any shot can perform stunts such as Sharp Shot, Headshot, and Ricochet. Problematically, both new Classes are somewhat underdeveloped, and where the Marksman is instantly playable with strong abilities, the Librarian is not. The Class does not address what benefits having access to all of these books give a character. Perhaps it should be some kind of knowledge bonus, minor from memory, major with study of the right volumes? Further, the Marksman is supported by stats for firearms, all black powder weapons, their use limited by there only be one tribe capable of creating black powder.

Rounding out Extinguish the Sun Vol. 1 is ‘Vehicles’, which presents rules for driving and designing vehicles, including bikes, subcompacts, and more. Making a manoeuvre requires a ten-sided die roll, plus Dexterity bonus, to beat a target number, whilst vehicle design involves purchasing and fitting Upgrades like Autopilot and Mounted Cannon, the number limited by the slots each vehicle type has. It is fairly simple and fairly obvious in terms of its design, although the inclusion of Autopilot suggests that some electronics have survived the apocalypse.

Both ‘The City in Chains’ and ‘Knights of the Road’ have scope for development, enough that would fill all of the pages in this first issue of the fanzine. There are whole settings here waiting for the author or Game Master to turn into something more and craft something playable. ‘The City in Chains’ would have benefited from some hooks and ‘Knights of the Road’ from more Classes and better Classes, as well as more idea of what its world is like.

Extinguish the Sun Vol. 1 feels somewhat ramshackle in terms of its presentation. Which is fine, for this is an amateur production, an exercise of the imagination, a floating of ideas. What this first issue offers is potential, with ideas to be developed rather than immediately brought to the table, though too few of them. Extinguish the Sun Vol. 1 is really just a first step, but future issues need to step up if they are to become more than just potential.

Lost on the Gods

Published by Apollyon Press, LLC, following a successful Kickstarter campaign, On the Shoulders of Giants is a setting sourcebook for use with Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying and other Old School Rennaisance retroclones. It presents an intriguing setting, four new Classes, associated spell-like abilities, a short bestiary of strange beasts, a location ready for adventure, and more, all illustrated by Scrap Princess, the artist whose artwork has graced the pages of other titles for use with Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying, most notably the Ennie Award winning Veins of the Earth and Deep Carbon Observatory.

The setting for On the Shoulders of Giants is not the body of one dead god, but twelve. In ages past, the twelve gods of the Greek pantheon—Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite, Hephaestus, Hermes, and Dionysius—warred against each other over the imperfections they saw in one another, and one by one they died at the hands of their fellow gods until only Apollo lived. In anguish at what he had wrought, Apollo stabbed himself in the heart, and he too, died. Their divine caracasses did not remain inviolate however, and from their bodies were born maggots and as these maggots feed upon the godly flesh, they first formed mannish faces, before transforming into men, each with behaviours and attitudes born of their source flesh.

In time these men learned to make their way on the bodies of these gods. They farm the maggots for food and crafting materials; they draw the gods’ blood from their giant veins and distil, filter, and separate into humours for use in draughts and potions; they extract bone marrow and harden it with fire to make arms and armour; they take god-flesh and smelt it into metal or grind it into a paste; and they seek out the organs of the gods for the untold riches they might hold—although the stomach is known to be home to daemons!

On the Shoulders of Giants offers four Classes—the Conspirator, the Corpse Worker, the Prize Fighter, and the Witchdoctor, each of them quite simple. At each Level, the Conspirator gains Planning Points which he can use in an adventure to modify the results of the twenty-sided die, roll twice for damage and take the best result, and reduce damage taken on a point for point basis. When a Planning Point is spent, the player has to explain what he did before the start of the adventure in order to prepare for such a situation. This is a nice and simple mechanic, allowing a player to add to the narrative. The Corpse Worker extracts vital memories, the four humours, and more from the bodies of the dead gods, supplying Witchdoctors with ingredients for their experiments and more. Corpse Workers are skilled in Climbing and Architecture as well as being hardier and having good Saving Throws.

Prize Fighters are bruising fighters and can withstand the Witchdoctor’s ability to graft limbs more easily than others, but they cannot take much in the way of punishment. Witchdoctors research and conduct Experiments using reagents and ingredients mined from the bodies of the gods. Some thirteen Experiments are described in On the Shoulders of Giants, for example, Bloodletting involves humours being sprinkled on an open vein to actually heal someone (though there is the chance it may inflict more damage); Pick Up the Scent requires the use a nose which will twitch in the direction of the intended quarry; and with Viscous Membrane, a phlegm-coated leather scrap can be turned into an impenetrable barrier for a few rounds. It should be made clear that Experiments are not spells, but rather vile tests and procedures using godly ingredients.

By default the only available Race in On the Shoulders of Giants is the Human-like men transformed from maggots born of bodies of dead gods. It is suggested that depending on what body a maggot was born from, certain residues might carry over and influence certain attitudes and behaviours. For example, someone born of Artemis would know great precision and accuracy, but have skin possessing a silvery sheen, whilst those born of Hera are loyal to a fault, but wrathful when betrayed. Oddly, there are no bonuses or penalties provided for these, especially when it would have been easy for the author to provide them. Indeed, the Game Master can easily create them himself. For example, a man born of Hermes, who values and takes great pride in physical prowess, might gain a +1 bonus to physical actions, but a -2 reaction towards anyone who does not.

A few monsters are detailed in On the Shoulders of Giants, such as the stomach-born acidic Daemons who slide out of the noses of the gods to offer binding contracts which exchange baubles and trinkets in return for men’s souls; Flesh-eaters are men who have been transformed into mindless husks after having consumed far too much god-flesh, but who can recover if allowed to gorge on adequate food for days and days—some cults force initiates to undergo this process to prove their devotion; and Sky Squids, tentacular creatures that will convey those who ride inside them to the body of another random god. This is in addition to a set of tables for creating random monsters. In terms of specific settings, the supplement describes ‘The Gray Pools’, an adventure outline. A Gray Pool is a site where a god’s brains have seeped to the surface through his shattered skull, the liquid having a variety of results when consumed, including psychic powers. An NPC or two who possess an interest in controlling such sites are also described as are some adventure ideas. Rounding out On the Shoulders of Giants are appendices providing a bibliography, conversion of the four Classes to The Black Hack, the Maggot Farmer as an NPC Class, and a table of names.

Physically, On the Shoulders of Giants is decently produced, a somewhat thin, if sturdy hardback. The writing is decent, but the artwork is fetchingly grimy and menacing.

Now the idea of adventurers plundering the body of dead gods is nothing new. After all, Malhavoc Press published a supplement devoted to it for use with Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition in 2002, called Requiem for a God. But living on the gods and mining them is an interesting idea and suggests possibilities aplenty. Unfortunately, as intriguing a setting as presented in On the Shoulders of Giants actually is, the supplement fails to do two fundamental things. First, it fails to  answer some very basic questions. Who lives on the bodies of the twelve gods, what peoples, what towns, and so on? What do they do? Where are the bodies of the twelve gods located? How can outsiders get there—a possibility suggested in the text? What do adventurers—or the player characters—do on the bodies of the twelve gods? Second, it sets up some interesting facts and then utterly fails to support them. So if the Conspirator is the brains behind daring heists and organisations, then what heists and what is he stealing, and what organisations? Where does the Prize Fighter fight and what for? If some cults force feed initiates godflesh, what are these cults and what do they want? And more importantly, where is the rest of On the Shoulders of Giants with these answers?

As it stands, this supplement is incomplete or unfinished. Either way, as much as a setting based on the dead bodies of the Greek gods is rife with possibilities, On the Shoulders of Giants fails to flesh out its setting, leaving the Game Master to do the development work and answer some very basic questions that the author should have done. It is a book of ideas rather than the setting it should have been.