[Fanzine Focus XXXIII] The Chaos Crier, Issue #0

On the tail of the 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 DM 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 be 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 and Old School Essentials. However, other fanzines serve as a vehicle for direct support from the publisher.

The Chaos Crier: An Aperiodical Zine for Black Sword Hack and Other Swords & Sorcery Games, is like the name suggests, a supplement for Black Sword Hack. This is the adaptation of The Black Hack, designed and published by The Merry Mushmen, to emulate the fantasy tales and style of the Eternal Champion—Elric, Corum, et al, by Michael Moorcock.

The Chaos Crier, Issue #0 was published as part of the Kickstarter campaign for the Black Sword Hack. It is a dense, black and white affair, which really provides two items—a pair of scenarios. In the process though, it also details new monsters and a new threat, a dark and evil cult, and a complete city. There is here, enough content here for multiple sessions of gaming, all of which can easily be slotted into the Game Master’s campaign. It opens with Alexandre ‘Kobayashi’ Jeanette’s ‘A Sky Full of Swords’, the first of the two scenarios in the issue. It is a tale of greed and death, as the Player Characters come across the town of Pardesh, where a group of miners have gathered as meteorites crash to the ground in them. The meteorites contain cold iron, each enough to make a brittle weapon that inflicts maximum damage on ghosts, spirits, and the undead, but also enough to make plenty of coin if sold. There is tension in the town because a local astronomer did not warn the townsfolk, but she complains that they did not pay her for the information. If the Player Characters save her from a possible lynching, she might tell them where the next cold iron meteorite will land, but that has its own problems. ‘A Sky Full of Swords’ is a nicely balanced affair, offering a session or two’s worth of play, in which the Player Characters will need to tread carefully as throwing their weight around could get them into trouble.

The two articles that follow specifically support the issue’s second scenario, but can easily have a wider influence upon a Game Master’s campaign. All three are by Olivier ‘Nobboc’ Revenu and all three are of a Lovecraftian bent. ‘The Sons of Dagon’ (also known as The Deep Ones) is a treatment of H.P. Lovecraft’s amphibian fish-like creatures, which gives stats for the Hybrid, Deep One, and Deep old One, as well as detailing the horror of the life of the Hybrid. This is followed by ‘The Black Sun of the Deep’, a nihilistic or apocalyptic faction or cult which serves the forces of Chaos by proliferating the earlier detailed Sons of Dagon, and hiding behind a façade as a conventional cult dedicated to a sea god. It is favoured by sailors and fishermen, the latter benefiting from the bounteous catches of fish. The primary means of spreading its influence is by abducting healthy male Humans, using them as part of their effort to spread their Hybrids, and breeding and substituting them for ordinary Human babies. Full stats are provided for Black Sun cultists, Templars, Deep Infiltrators, Priests, and so on. All of which as the Sons of Dagon appear in the scenario that follows.

‘The Darkness over Nijmauwrgen’ presents a complete city and scenario for the Player Characters to explore. Sat in a cleft on the coast with a reef just off the shore, Nijmauwrgen is a port and fishing city that has fallen into the clutches of the Black Sun of the Deep cult. Designed for Player Characters of Second to Fifth Level, they may be drawn to Nijmauwrgen by a request for aid by Alcantor of Zysifus—who appeared in the scenario, ‘The Blood God’, in the Black Sword Hack—or they might even be hired to find him by the Black Sun of the Deep cult. Other hooks are provided, but for the most part, the scenario is plotted around Alcantor’s desperate need to find a lost weapon. What the Player Characters discover in the free-state city is a port known for its abundant fishing, the sullenness of its inhabitants with their bulbous eyes, scaly skin, and webbed hands, gloomy by day and worse by night, its streets bustling by day, but empty and haunted by night by ghastly fish-eyed creatures that come from the harbour and skulk in the long shadows. There is a distinct Dutch feel to the city, especially in the names used for possible NPCs, each of the various forty or locations being described in some detail, with the two places important to the overall plot being fully detailed. This is backed up with a big table of events and encounters and events during the day, and a smaller table for during the day. Then to push the plot along, the scenario adds an ‘Anonymity Die’, a Utility Die which is rolled whenever the Player Characters investigate and ask questions that might attract the attention of the Black Sun of the Deep cult. As it is rolled and stepped down, it brings the Player Characters ever closer to being hunted and it also triggers other events too. It is a clever timing mechanic. Overall, there is a lot for the Player Characters to do and explore in Nijmauwrgen even they do not engage in the actual plot. In preparation, the Game Master is advised to give ‘The Darkness over Nijmauwrgen’ the one single, thorough read through, and then run from the page as it goes along. However, she does decide to run it, the combination of the Eternal Champion meets H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ is gloom-laden, fish breath delight.

Rounding out The Chaos Crier, Issue #0 is ‘Shanizar’s Bazaar’, also by Olivier ‘Nobboc’ Revenu, adds a strange establishment down a dead end street, where the voice of the proprietor can guides the shopper through his merchandise, weird and wonderful, like the Mantle of the Stars, a shimmer cloak of stars as good as any armour—under the night sky only, and a Ceramic Parrot capable of repeating everything said to it in the last hour. Shanizar offers other services too, but at a much, higher price. Then on the last page is Tales of the Dull Lotus #247, James V. West’s comic highlighting the worst that runic weapons have to offer…

Physically, The Chaos Crier, Issue #0 is ably presented. It is busy in places, but artwork is excellent.

The Chaos Crier, Issue #0 is a very good first issue of ‘An Aperiodical Zine for Black Sword Hack and Other Swords & Sorcery Games’. It provides excellent support for the Black Sword Hack and every Black Sword Hack Game Master should have this, and The Merry Mushmen should definitely publish more like this.

[Fanzine Focus XXXIII] The Kalunga Plateau – Issue 1

On the tail of the 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 DM 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 be 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. Then there is also Old School Essentials.

The Kalunga Plateau – Issue 1 is the beginning of a ‘Lost World’ setting, detailing a plateau only whispered of lying deep in the southern jungles, Classes for the tribesmen atop the plateau and the surrounding area, Invocations, and a scenario designed to get the Player Characters up onto the plateau itself. ‘The Kalunga Plateau’ opens with an overview of the plateau and some rumours with which the Game Master can seed her campaign. ‘The Setting’ explains a bit more, that the Plateau was once home to an alien civilisation whose presence was destroyed when an enormous sphere hit the planet. The sphere still remains, buried deep in the earth under the plateau that its impact threw up. What ruins remain are regarded by the current inhabitants of the Plateau as having been built by the gods. It then quickly settles down to present the first of three new Classes.

‘The Hunter’ specialises in the hunting and trapping of animals to feed the tribe. It gains points in the skills of Climb, Stealth, Bushcraft, Booby Trap, Sneak, and Tame. The latter is used to domesticate animals, whilst Bushcraft is used to handle survival in the jungle. The Hunter inflicts increased damage as the Class gains Levels, reflecting greater skill at killing creatures cleanly, and gains greater skill when working with fellow Hunters. ‘The Shaman’ can recognise the divine aura of another Shaman, makes for a poor combatant, and can conjure Invocations, such as Animal Spirit, Heal Wounds, Sleep, Feel the Evil, and so on. These are detailed separately in ‘Primal Invocations’. ‘The Combatant’ is the tribal warrior, which gains an attack bonus and can use all weapons. All three Classes are simple and straightforward, with the Hunter being the most complex. If there is an issue with the Classes, it is that they do not offer much in the way of choice to differentiate between one Player Character and the next. ‘Experience’ lists options for gaining Experience, such as killing dangerous enemies and creatures, surviving attacks, and exploration. ‘Gear, Weapons, and Coin’ gives a list of the prices for various items in the South Kingdoms, although without naming actual kingdoms. That and their details are promised for The Kalunga Plateau – Issue 2.

Almost half of The Kalunga Plateau – Issue 1 is dedicated to a single scenario, ‘Journey to an Unknown Land’. This is designed to get standard type Player Characters from their ‘civilised’ lands of the north to South Kingdoms and from there into the jungle and up onto the Plateau. It presents several hooks to get them interested and then details the journey south to the Last Sip Inn. With the help of a guide—who exacts a high price—they can then follow the Bone Road to the Plateau. Once atop the Plateau, they are first chased by a tyrannosaurus rex and then rescued by a tribesman. His tribe will offer refuge, but in return for gaining its trust, the Player Characters must perform a task for its shaman. They must recover an artefact from the nearby Cave of Pain. It is a fairly deadly dungeon, linear, but if the Player Characters succeed, they will gain the trust of the tribe and be released to explore the Plateau further. Likewise, the adventure is linear itself, without any room for the Player Characters to do anything other than follow the plot.

The Kalunga Plateau – Issue 1 does not really achieve what it wants to do. Essentially, there is not enough attention paid to the Plateau itself and too much attention is paid to getting Player Characters from elsewhere to the Plateau with the linear and limited adventure, ‘Journey to an Unknown Land’, whereas attention is paid to Classes, native to both the Plateau and the surrounding jungle, which cannot be used in conjunction with the rest of the content. It leaves the first issue unfocused. For example, only the one monster—the tyrannosaurus rex—is given for atop the Plateau, the rest either being in the cave of the adventure or on the route to the Plateau. Then the description of the Plateau never amounts to more than an overview, so that the Game Master is never really given a good feel for it.

Physically, The Kalunga Plateau – Issue 1 is well presented. The artwork and the cartography are both decent. The fanzine is overwritten and slightly heavy going.

As a first issue, The Kalunga Plateau – Issue 1 is disappointing. There is good content within its pages, such as the Classes—despite their limitations, and the Invocations for the Shaman, but the rest feels randomly chosen so as not support the other. Fundamentally, the inclusion of the adventure, ‘Journey to an Unknown Land’, was a mistake. It could and should, have been saved for a later issue, when perhaps the author can focus on getting the Player Characters from elsewhere to the Plateau. Instead, that space could have been better devoted to developing and presenting the Kalunga Plateau as a playable addition for the Game Master’s campaign. Perhaps this will change with The Kalunga Plateau – Issue 2.

[Fanzine Focus XXXIII] Black Pudding #7

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 showcased how another DM 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 be 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.

Black Pudding is a fanzine that is nominally written for use with Labyrinth Lord and as of Black Pudding No. 6, for use with Old School Essentials as well, so is compatible with other Retroclones, but it is not a traditional Dungeons & Dragons-style fanzine. For starters, it is all but drawn rather than written, with artwork that reflects a look that is cartoonish, a tone that is slightly tongue in cheek, and a gonzo feel. Its genre is avowedly Swords & Sorcery, as much Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser as Conan the Barbarian. Drawn from the author’s ‘Doomslakers!’ house rules and published by Random Order via Square Hex, Black Pudding’s fantasy roleplaying content that is anything other than the straight-laced fantasy of Dungeons & Dragons, but something a bit lighter and not a little tongue in cheek, yet still full of adventure and heroism. Issues one, two, and three showcased the author’s ‘Doomslakers!’ house rules with a mix of new character Classes, spells, magic items, monsters, NPCs, and adventures, whilst four also included the author’s ‘OSR Play book’, his reference for running an Old School Renaissance game, essentially showing how he runs his own campaign. Issue five included a similar mix of new Classes, NPCs, and an adventure, but did begin to suggest a campaign setting, which six also continued as well as containing its owning wilderness area for the Player Characters to explore.

Black Pudding No. 7 continues in the same vein as Black Pudding No. 5 and Black Pudding No. 6, containing a mix of new Character Classes, a few monsters, and expanded descriptions of Yria, part of the ‘Doomslakers’ campaign. The issue, though, begins with four new Classes, whose quality varies. The first is the ‘Rat Bastard’, the offspring of Wererat and Human parentage. Treated like a Chaotic Thief, the Class has the ability to shift into a Wererat and use a Claw and Bite attack, but takes extra damage from silver. The Class also has a strong sense of smell, is naturally stealthy and sneaky, including being able to escape bonds and cages. The Turncoat ability forces the ‘Rat Bastard’ to betray everyone if offered more money than the Class is currently receiving… The ‘Rat Bastard’ is intentionally evil/Chaotic Class, suitable for NPCs, most obviously, but also for a campaign where the players are playing evil/Chaotic Classes. If the ‘Rat Bastard’ has a role in certain campaigns, the role of the remaining three Classes is uncertain except for sillier or gonzo campaigns. The ‘Iggy’ Class is a crude, shirtless risk-taking brawler whose ‘Lust for Life’ random, jerky battle dance gives him Armour Class bonuses despite being able to wear armour on his head and legs, make unarmed attacks, steal weapons and use them, and whilst he is partially immune to mind-affecting sleep and spells and all manner of intoxicants, he throws himself into danger, often harming himself in the process. The ‘Flamer’ is an Angel, but on fire, which inflicts fire damage, including the Magic Missile-like Fireburst, block damage with a Fire Shield, can Fly daily, and is, of course, immune to fire. Unfortunately, the ‘Flamer’ incinerates any armour not magically designed for it, has a chance of melting any weapon it uses, and can take double damage from the cold. The Class essentially feels like the Human Torch from the Fantastic Four. Lastly, the ‘Eyeball’ is a walking, talking eyeball, with sight-based abilities, such as being able to read any scroll and spot hidden and invisible things, plus it has the Thief abilities of Sneak, Pick Locks, and Pick Pockets. It suffers penalties in bright light though. It is intentionally a humorous Class, but really all three—the ‘Iggy’, the ‘Flamer’, and the ‘Eyeball’—are pieces of humour rather than necessarily humorous Classes. Their inclusion in any game would change its tone and it would have to be a specific type of campaign, gonzo and absurd, that they would work in.

The five new monsters in Black Budding No. 7 are quick and simply presented, with abilities and their minimal background details, all delivered as a series of bullet points. They include the ‘Rocky’, ‘Grave Crusader’, ‘Dracowisp’, ‘Tyrano-X’, and ‘Queen of the Dark Light’. The ‘Rocky’ and ‘Dracowisp’ consequently feel underwritten because their descriptions do not give them a role, whereas the ‘Grave Crusader’ is an Undead protector of burial sites. The ‘Tyrano-X’ is a Tyrannosaurus Rex-type creature, but intelligent and whose eggs are used in potions and royal breakfasts, so their eggs are hunted, even though one egg per nest poisons the eater. The ‘Queen of the Dark Light’ is a villainous sorcereress, who relishes in the shadows, maintains a coven of witches to serve her, is protected by Shadows, can summon Zombies, and so on. Both the ‘Tyrano-X’ and the ‘Queen of the Dark Light’ are given a full page each—the ‘Queen of the Dark Light’ on an appropriately black page—and so are given more detail, even if only mechanically, that the Game Master can more easily bring into her game.

Half of Black Budding No. 7 is devoted to ‘Yria: A Black Pudding Gazetteer’. It primarily focuses on the five cities of one region—Darkmirth, Frimmsreach, Kanebok, Seapath, and Summertop—with the spaces in-between filled in with rolls on the accompanying ‘d66’ table. These are only given thumbnail descriptions, whereas the individual cities and their environs are given a page each. Darkmirth is described as being ruled by a one kind king whose mind has been lost to the darkness of the Shadow Shrine and black sword in hand, demands the city be made black… Seaport is perched on a cliff over an angry sea and behind a mountain range, but the protection of the god, Krolton, the Blazing Heart, ensures it offers a safe harbour and posterity for the incredibly wealthy guilds and merchants. Underneath lie broken layers of the sewers and older cities, infested and haunted by creatures and monsters that lurk deep within. Here there is opportunity for adventurers to delve deep and find work in a city dominated by guilds—merchants, thieves, and assassins.

‘The Mythos of Yria’ present the pantheon of gods worshipped across Yria. How Mother Nest, the Moon, screamed and birthed life into the world over and over as the Black Wing, the great bird of death, swooped down and snatched it up again and again from around Nexus, the World Tree. The twelve gods are described in detail, including each one’s physical form, how it is worshipped, the requirements of its clerics, what is seen when standing in its presence, and what are the portents of its coming… This the Worm Witch, Mother of 100 Dooms takes the form of a medusa with worm hair, her robes tattered and old, her belly swollen with child, silver mirror eyes, surrounded by one hundred children, each one a monster. She is worshipped in foul festivals of feasts of worms and rotten meat, child sacrifice, and worse… Her clerics must carry and eat worms to know her mysteries, carry daggers, smell disgusting, and summon worm-like monsters daily. Her Alignment varies between Neutral Evil and Chaotic Evil, and standing in her presence is to smell her foul breath, see her black fingernails, and hear her hissing rasp, whilst surrounded by wriggling worms, skittering creatures, and nausea. The portents of her coming include flowers wilting, hordes of bugs, food rotting, the Moon clouding over… Each of the twelve gods is detailed in similar fashion, in each case, adding to the richness of the Yria setting. There is a brutality to all twelve of these gods that suits the Swords & Sorcery genre.

Physically, Black Pudding No. 7 adheres to the same standards set by the previous issues. So plenty of good, if cartoonish artwork to give it a singular, consistent look, accompanied by similar cartography. As with previous issues of the fanzine, the potential and obvious problem with Black Pudding No. 7 is that its tone may not be compatible with the style of Dungeons & Dragons that a Labyrinth Lord or Game Master is running. The tone of Black Pudding is lighter, weirder, and in places just sillier than the baseline Dungeons & Dragons game, so the Game Master should take this into account when using the content of the fanzine.

In terms of quality, Black Pudding No. 7 really divided in two. So, whilst it starts poorly with the four Classes, three of which are unlikely to see a lot of use in any game, the other half, consisting of ‘Yria: A Black Pudding Gazetteer’ and ‘The Mythos of Yria’ which together present a world and help bring it alive. Here there is scope for the Game Master to expand the world and make it her own by developing adventures for it and bringing it to live through play. A starting adventure or two would not go amiss in one of the locations detailed in ‘Yria: A Black Pudding Gazetteer’, perhaps in the pages of Black Pudding No. 8, but Black Pudding No. 7 really does provide a good introduction to the author’s home campaign of Yria.

[Fanzine Focus XXXIII] Tales from the Smoking Wyrm No. 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 showcased how another DM 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 be 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 and the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game from Goodman Games.

Tales from the Smoking Wyrm No. 1 is a fine-looking fanzine which provides long-term support rather than immediate support for use with the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game. This is not say that none of its content is not of use or even useless, for that is very much not the case, but rather that it requires a bit of effort upon the part of Judge to work it into her campaign. In fact, all of content is detailed, interesting, and worth reading. Published by Blind Visionary Publications in 2020, following a successful Kickstarter campaign, Tales from the Smoking Wyrm No. 1 also strays into the territory of the Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game – Triumph & Technology Won by Mutants & Magic, if only a little. In the main, Tales from the Smoking Wyrm No. 1 is very much a fanzine for Dungeon Crawl Classics.

Tales from the Smoking Wyrm No. 1 opens with ‘The Paladin’. What this does not do is introduce the Paladin as a Class for Dungeon Crawl Classics. Instead, it presents a means by which any other Class—though ideally a martial one—takes on the role and responsibilities of the Paladin. The article though, begins with a history of the role and Class in fantasy and fantasy roleplaying, from its origins in Supplement I – Greyhawk, all the way up to The Gongfarmers Almanac 2017 and DCC Annual, along the way taking in Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions and Elizabeth Moon’s The Deed of Paksenarrion and Legend of Paksenarrion. It is nicely done, pleasingly informative, providing plenty of background and context before it details the Third Level Spell, Investiture, which is cast upon the candidate, who if it is successful, gains limited Cleric Class abilities, including Lay on Hands, Invoke Deity, and Turn Unholy. Invoke Deity is a spell-like effect which can grant the Paladin greater protection or even enable him to unleash blasts of divine power. Included also is a table of Investiture Trials that the potential Paladin must undertake. What this does is open up the possibility of a Player Character taking up a stronger religious role in a campaign setting other than already suggested by the Cleric Class and is nicely done.

The fanzine takes a darker turn with the inclusion of ‘Cthulhu’ as a Patron. Like any Patron for Dungeon Crawl Classics, this includes a table of Patron Results, which are fantastically invocative. For example, a pale emerald mote appears and emanates a glow surrounding the Invoker and everyone nearby, the invoker designating a target within range, who is grabbed by several tentacles as a sacrifice. The invoker gains a bonus to his next spell check and multiple targets can be designated to gain a bigger bonus. Unfortunately, using this inflicts patron taint upon the invoker, and there is a table for that and the effects of Spellburn, most of which involves taking on the cast and form of Great Cthulhu himself. To this are added the spells, Summons of the Deep, which summons bands of Deep Ones, Breath of the Deep, which inflicts drowning upon targets (or the ability to breath water upon a willing target), and Form of the Deep, which if successful, grants insights into the mind of Cthulhu himself. Cthulhu as a Patron should not necessarily work, the possibility being that the Elder God be reduced to window dressing and little in the way of flavour, but ‘Cthulhu’ invokes a sense of dread in worshipping him and enforcing the fact that doing so is not always beneficial and even it is, has its downside. This is nicely judged between its flavour and its effect and would make a great addition for an NPC cultist or in a really eldritch campaign for the Player Character Cleric. The inclusion of two extra ‘Appendix N Suggestions’ is an added bonus.

‘Cullpepper’s Herbal’ is the first in a regular feature in issues of Tales from the Smoking Wyrm. In game, it consists of the notes of famed herbalist, Willhomeena Cullpepper, whose bibliography is given too. Two herbs—Aconite and Adder’s False Tongue—are described in no little detail, including uses that the parts can be put to, including means of healing and poisoning. There is a lot here to research and use, but the level of detail requires work to include it in a campaign. For the herbalist Player Character or the Player Character in need a cure though, this is useful content.

Tales from the Smoking Wyrm No. 1 takes a weirder turn with ‘The Silver Ball’. This is a device, a floating silver ball, invulnerable to almost all forms of damage, that just appears in a dungeon and absorbs a Player Character. It may or it may not return the Player Character, but the likelihood is that he will be changed when returned. There are tables for strange memories and physical changes, as well as surprising items which might be ejected from the Silver Ball. It can be used as a random encounter, a way to account for a player not being present at a session, or even a way to deliver a new Player Character deep into an adventure when no other method makes sense. As a recurring motif, even though its effects upon play are often humorous, the players and their character could come to hate it as it seems to appear at odd times, haunting their adventures, and so on… Almost equally as odd is the addition of the ‘Telepathic rat’, which is drawn from Mutant Crawl Classics. There is even a chance that the one that latches onto a Player Character is actually a miniature Giant Space Hamster, but all have a quirk and a minor special ability that can benefit the Player Character and possibly the rest of the party too, such as the urge to groom all of the party members, who if they accept it, gain a bonus Hit Point back when resting due to the lack of vermin infesting both them and their clothing.

‘Rites & Rituals Part I’ expands upon the use of magic and rituals in Dungeon Crawl Classics. The primary way in which a ritual differs from a spell is that it has its own action die rather than using the spellcaster’s. This can then be modified by using circles of both casters and followers, sacrifices, rare ingredients, accepting Corruption, and so on. This is simple and straightforward, but the two sample rituals—Rites of Schlag-Ruthe, which creates a dowsing device for magical sources of power and Dark Phylactory, which creates one or more vessels to protect the caster’s soul though at the cost of corruption—are detailed and complex, but add to play rather than impede it. That said, Dark Phylactory is in general, better suited to use by an NPC, whereas a Player Character can use Rites of Schlag-Ruthe as well as an NPC. Either way, the elements required by the spellcaster to perform a ritual will add to play, whether that is the Player Character collecting them or the Player Characters tracking an NPC who is collecting them to their own ends.

Joel Philips’ ‘Onward Retainer’ is a classic comic strip about the retainer in the fantasy roleplaying games. It is nicely drawn and touches upon several well-known jokes about that style of play. Although not too original, it is nevertheless amusing.

Penultimately, ‘What is the Smoking Wyrm?’ is the belated editorial in the first issue of Tales from the Smoking Wyrm No. 1. It provides a potted history of roleplaying and roleplaying games, which flits around a bit, but basically makes the point that the fanzine builds on what has before, comparing the flowering of the fanzine in the twenty tens within the Old School Renaissance and since the publication of Dungeon Crawl Classics, with that seen in the late nineteen seventies following the publication of Dungeons & Dragons. This is a fair point, but the editorial is lengthy and overwritten in comparison to the rest of the fanzine, making it feel self-indulgent if only a little. Lastly, ‘Wyrm Words’ is a crossword puzzle of Gygaxian words.

Physically, bar the editorial, Tales from the Smoking Wyrm No. 1 is well written and the fanzine as a whole, has high production values. The artwork is good throughout, and the front cover echoes the illustration from the Dungeon Master’s Guide for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition, by Dave Trampier, which is based on the Street of the Knights on the Greek island of Rhodes. This is an illustration that the fanzine will return to again and again for its front covers.

Tales from the Smoking Wyrm No. 1 is a solid first issue. It has some excellent content, but this is content that will have to be worked into a campaign, rather than simply added and brought into play immediately. For the Judge that wants to add depth to her Dungeon Crawl Classics game, Tales from the Smoking Wyrm No. 1 has material that will help her do that.

[Fanzine Focus XXXIII] Mutant High School

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. Another popular choice of system for fanzines, is Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game, such as Crawl! and Crawling Under a Broken Moon. One aspect of Crawling Under a Broken Moon is that it is designed to be played using the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game and not the Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game – Triumph & Technology Won by Mutants & Magic, despite it presenting a post-apocalyptic setting. Not so Mutant High School.

Mutant High School is a fanzine inspired by The Toxic Avenger, Class of Nuke ’Em High, Weird Science, et al—and although it does not list it, at least tonally, the roleplaying game, Teenagers from Outerspace, published by R. Talsorian Games, Inc. Published by Goodman Games, Mutant High School is set in No-Go City, some time in the near future. Formerly the city of Fresno, California, the radioactive waste capital of North America, an earthquake burst the underground storage tank for the waste, causing a geyser to erupt and shower the inhabitants in mutagenic goo that not only mutated every single one of them, but also made them sufficiently toxic themselves that any encounter with them who is not already mutated, has a chance of mutating them. So, the authorities swept in, locked down the city, built a wall around it, and with the enactment of the ‘Maximum Extreme Disproportionate Response to Emergent Mutations Act’—also known as the ‘MEDeR’M’ act—strictly controlled access to the city, with guards in hazmat suits on the walls and the ever-present buzzing of surveillance drones. Both internet access and mobile connection have been severely curtailed. Since Ooze Day, the former Fresno has been dubbed No-Go City or the Mutant Quarter.

As a consequence, the inhabitants of No-Go City have to get by on limited resources and information access. Which includes its students at Bullroar High School. For example, with no other high school to compete against, Coach Phelan, a Plantient strain of the coffee plant, has set up rival teams. Elsewhere, the inhabitants of No-Go City have been forced to recycle over and over, including turning vehicles into rough and ready jalopies (or rickety rides), cloths and so on, whilst there is a thriving black market—if the smugglers can get it past the guards and the roly-polys (or robo-police, who only have an occasional chance of identifying No-Go City inhabitants as actually being human!)—for almost everything else. Alternatively, the inhabitants have access to their own homegrown drugs, including ‘27/7 Dust’, a potent stimulant, and ‘Telepathashish’, a telepathic weed that is sentient and encourages everyone nearby to say, “Just say yes”.

In terms of characters, a player takes the role of either a Mutant, Manimal, or Plantient, but not Pure Strain Human, who is a high school student. Otherwise, Player Characters are normal, First Level rather than Zero Level, and instead of rolling for Background, a player rolls for Archetype, such as Band Geek, Goth, or Punk. This provides some equipment and a special ability. For example, the Motorhead starts play with a rickety ride, a piecemeal toolkit, and +1d on all attempts to repair automobile and small engines. Besides their mutations, each Player Character is also ‘Best in Town’ at something, making them stand out, whether that is a specific form of attack, using a mutation, a skill check, and so on, and possesses a ‘Cool Mutation’, a mutation that makes them physically stand out even more, but which does not provide any other detail.

Since the inhabitants of No-Go City have the misfortune to live there, they are prone to bad luck. Instead of Fleeting Luck as per Mutant Crawl Classics, the inhabitants and thus the Player Characters have ‘Oozing Luck’. Gained for rolls of natural twenty and good play and lost for rolls of natural one, Luck in No-Go City tends to either stick around or ooze away. It can actually go below zero and impose a penalty to the Player Character’s Luck attribute. The use of Oozing Luck is tied into the ‘Mute-Guffin’, which is badly named because it is not a silent ‘guffin’, but rather an NPC with an agenda that is connected to the one of the Judge’s storylines. A Player Character can earn a point of Oozing Luck for successfully identifying the ‘Mute-Guffin’ and for successfully supporting the ‘Mute-Guffin’, but lose a point if the ‘Mute-Guffin’ is identified incorrectly. There is an option suggested for the opposite of a ‘Mute-Guffin’, the ‘Anti-Mute-Guffin’.

Running to just sixteen pages, there is still a lot of background in Mutant High School, covering studying and exams, find equipment, the wall surrounding the city, and various factions in and outside the city. Inside the city, ‘The Church of the Burbling Redeemer’, a law-abiding new cult lead by the mutant fusion of five interfaith council members who preach the beneficence of mutating slime and want to spread its effects beyond the wall; the sheriff and his Robo-Polys in near constant conflict with the criminal motorcycle gang, the Ultras; and the ‘Toxic Truthers’, outsiders who refuse to believe in Ooze Day and its effects, and resent not being able to walk about the twenty-five square miles blocked off by the wall as every true patriot should be allowed to do. Some even believe that the toxicity of No-Go City will cure all manner of ailments, which is why big pharma is denying them access!

Rounding out Mutant City High is a set of descriptions of various events that happen in No-Go City and an adventure hook, ‘Prom Night’. There is just about enough here to help a Judge get a mini-campaign started.

Physically, Mutant City High is decently produced, as you would expect for a release from Goodman games. It is lightly illustrated, but everything else is well explained, although the background does come after the rules for character creation, so that does read oddly, at least initially. A map of No-Go City would have been useful.

Mutant High School offers an alternative to the post-apocalyptic future of Terra A.D. of Mutant Crawl Classics. On one level it reads an alternative roleplaying setting of the nineteen eighties, but there is contemporary strand to it that effectively makes Mutant High School a Lockdown-era roleplaying setting, although one seen through a weird and wacky lens. Mutant High School packs a lot into its scant few pages, its combination of the weird and the familiar making it easy to develop further content for by the Judge, but really Mutant High School deserves more than just the one issue of the fanzine and even its own supplement.

[Fanzine Focus XXXIII] Pregame Lobby Issue #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 and Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game. Some fanzines though, do traditional fantasy, but not in the way that you might expect.

Pregame Lobby Issue #1 is a fanzine for .Dungeon – an alternate reality RPG. Published by Project NERVES, .Dungeon is a storytelling game which plays around with ideas and conventions behind the play of a MMORPG, using this to help the players build and explore a shared experience of playing in a shared play space. The conceit behind Pregame Lobby Issue #1 continues that of .Dungeon as a MMORPG in that it moves the online game from a beta test and into full release, presenting the space onscreen in the game where the publisher can gives updates about the game, a player can find other players, and so on, before leaping into the game’s first event. So there is a ‘Your friend’s list’, a list of your friends that are playing and what their current status and an introduction to the game’s launch event quest. This primarily focuses upon the release of a new play area, ‘Snowbleak’, and even carries the warning, “Don’t fast travel to Snowbleak”. Snowbleak is also a hexcrawl in terms of the pen and paper roleplaying and it turns out that the village and its surrounds atop the wintery mountain are infested with zombies. Zombies that are very difficult to kill! At every server reset, a fresh blanket of snow drops onto both mountain and village and every day at 12:01 Pacific Standard Time, all of the surviving zombies get up and make a co-ordinated attack on the village. The problem is that it takes a lot of co-ordinated damage—for which the players/Player Characters—are going to have to work together to inflict. If they succeed, the zombie is removed from the server, but if they fail, the zombie just gets up again. Worse, if a player/Player Character loses all of his Connection (to the server)—the equivalent of Hit Points in .Dungeon—he will not only die, but a zombie will rise in his image, thus increasing the number of zombies blighting Snowbleak!

As a hexcrawl/region to explore, Pregame Lobby Issue #1 includes a PVP Arena, a cave home to a roaming boss monster, a couple of NPCs to encounter, the location of Snowbleak, and a table of random encounters. The ‘PVP Enabled Dueling Arena’ allows an aspect of the MMORPG to be brought into the traditional roleplaying, which the latter traditionally avoids, and that is player versus player combat. Or rather, the conceit of it. For whilst ‘PVP Enabled Dueling Arena’ includes tables to generate players to face in the arena in .Dungeon, these are, of course, not Player Characters in the traditional roleplaying sense. In this way, Pregame Lobby Issue #1 continues the conceit of .Dungeon. Several NPCs are detailed, including Colossus, a roaming Boss monster which the players/Player Characters can persuade to help them if they know how.

Snowbleak—variously described as a city and a village in Pregame Lobby Issue #1, but definitely a randomly generated settlement from pre-beta best known for the ease of the beginning quests in and around the area. All that seems to remain is a few buildings around a river crossing, inhabited by those NPCs who not yet been driven out by the zombies. The descriptions do feel underwritten, in particular, it would have been useful to have included a Quest or two that the players/Player Characters can undertake. That said, there is plenty of scope for the Game Master to develop these and further content in and around Snowbleak, including on the backside of the mountain, given a cursory description in its own region/hexcrawl at the back of the fanzine. Pregame Lobby Issue #1 is rounded out with a list of cheat codes for .Dungeon to further enforce its conceit.

Physically, Pregame Lobby Issue #1 eschews the landscape format of .Dungeon, but not the bold colours and bitmapped style font for its titles. The layout feel perfunctory, but the artwork throughout is excellent.

Pregame Lobby Issue #1 is both a lovely little supplement for .Dungeon and slightly disappointing. It does feel underwritten, as if there should be more to the location of Snowbleak. Some of that is due to the conceit, that .Dungeon and thus the region of Snowbleak is a MMORPG and their play is not as demanding or as involving as a traditional pen and paper, tabletop roleplaying game typically is. However, .Dungeon – an alternate reality RPG is actually played as a traditional pen and paper, tabletop roleplaying game, so the details and the involvement required are greater. Ultimately, Pregame Lobby Issue #1 provides a good introductory setting for .Dungeon – an alternate reality RPG, but the Game Master will probably want to add her own content to flesh it out further...

[Fanzine Focus XXXIII] Carcass Crawler Issue #3

On the tail of the 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 DM 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 be 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. Then there is also Old School Essentials.

Carcass Crawler is ‘The Official Fanzine Old-School Essentials zine’. Published by Necrotic Gnome, Old School Essentials is the retroclone based upon the version of Basic Dungeons & Dragons designed by Tom Moldvay and published in 1981, and Carcass Crawler provides content and options for it. It is pleasingly ‘old school’ in its sensibilities, being a medley of things in its content rather than just the one thing or the one roleplaying game as has been the trend in gaming fanzines, especially with ZineQuest. Carcass Crawler #1 focused on Classes and Races alongside its other support for Old School Essentials, whereas although Carcass Crawler Issue #2 does provide new Races and Classes, it instead focuses on general support for the Player Character and playing Old School Essentials. Carcass Crawler Issue #3 continues the fanzine’s thread of providing new Classes for Old School Essentials.

Carcass Crawler Issue #3 describes five new character Classes and four new Races. What this means is that it follows standard Old School Essentials rules in that it allows for ‘Race as Class’ as well as supporting the separation of Race and Class as per Old School Essentials: Advanced Fantasy. ‘New Classes and Races’ by Gavin Norman opens with the first of its new Classes, the ‘Beast Master’. This Class gains a number of loyal animal companions equal to its Level, can identify tracks, and can come to understand the speech of animals and communicate with them. Essentially, this is a Class is going to see the Player Character controlling a pack of animals for various purposes depending upon the animal. Exactly what each animal can do is going for the player and the Game Master to decide. The ‘Dragonborn’ is the first of the four ‘Race as Class’ options in the issue and the first which harks back to an earlier edition of Dungeons & Dragons, in this case, Dungeons & Dragons 3.5. The Dragonborn has a breath weapon and partial immunity according to its draconic bloodline, and so on, and is generally similar to the Dragonborn of Dungeons & Dragons. The ‘Mutoid’ is the first of two radically different Classes. It consists of a demihuman with randomly determined mismatched body parts, such as Beast Ears for improved hearing and Spring Legs for a leap attack. The Class has several Thief skills, plus Mimicry, and can eventually set up a secret lair and start a Thieves’ Guild, but in general, are shunned by society. The second radically different Class is the Mycellian, a humanoid mushroom who can emit a spray of Fungal Spores—either pacifying or hallucinogenic, grow in stature increasing its unarmed combat damage and natural Armour Class, and relies on telepathy for communication. Once a Mycellian reaches Sixth Level it can found an underground stronghold and create a fungal zombie as a minion. The Mycellian is a pleasingly personal take upon the mushroom men-style monster of Dungeons & Dragons. The last of the new races is the second to be obviously drawn from a previous version of Dungeons & Dragons, this time from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition. The Race is the Tielfling and it has Fiendish Heritage, Fiendish Appearance, and a Fiendish Gift, typically a spell or resistance. It also has the power to Beguile with its words and knows the Thief’s stealth skills.

These are all a nice selection of Classes, presenting the Game Master with plenty of choice in terms of deciding what Races she has in her campaign and she is given advice to that end. All five Classes though are presented in the standard two-page spread for Old School Essentials, making them highly accessible. Four of the ‘Race as Class’ Classes—Dragonborn, Mutoid, Mycellian, and Tielfling—are in turn presented as Races. This enables their use in combination with a Class as per Old School Essentials: Advanced Fantasy.

Also by Gavin Norman is ‘Expanded Equipment’. For Adventuring Gear, this adds thing such as the bucket, magnifying glass, sledgehammer, and more. Weapons & Armour lists padded armour, furs, studded leather, banded mail, and full plate, so encompassing the wider range of armour found in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, whilst new weapons include bastard sword, blackjack, blowgun, bolas, and more. These also have weapon qualities, like Entangle for the whip and Versatile for the bastard sword, which can be used one-handed or two-handed. Overall, it expands the range of equipment and options available to a campaign and the players and their characters.

Donn Stroud pens ‘Woodland Monsters’. This is a bestiary of eight creatures. It includes the ‘Bracketfolk’, humanoid bracket fungi who live in families on a single tree; ‘Burlbug’ are gnarled nocturnal, and territorial simians who howl when disturbed or annoyed and like to collect gems; the ‘Corpse Vine’ is a carnivorous plant that hangs from trees and pulls up its victims to constrict and slowly digest them, tempting them with prior victims turned into twitching corpses; the ‘Ghoul-Stag’ is a horrible decaying corpse of a deer animated after the bite of a Ghoul; the Skull Spider Nettle is a mobile carnivorous plant which occupies skulls and scuttles around injecting its spores into its victims using its lashes; the ‘Spell Croaker’ is a giant tree frog infused with magic as a tadpole, which can randomly disgorge a spell, whilst the ‘Spell Croaker Tadpole’ is the immature form, which flies around disenchanting magical items and spell-casters; and lastly, ‘Stick-Children’ are insects which cover themselves in branches they saw from trees with their mandibles, giving them a humanoid appearance. There is a good mix here which the Game Master can pick and choose from to populate the woodlands in her campaign.

Lastly, Gavin Norman gives advice on monsters in ‘Creating Monsters’. It is a very straightforward piece, suggesting that the Game Master begin with tweaking or re-skinning an existing monster rather than starting from scratch. However, if that does not work in the given situation, it guides the Game Master through an eight-step process, looking at factors to consider at each step. This starts with the imagination and then goes through Hit Dice, Armour Class, Movement Rate, Attacks, and Special Abilities before calculating Derived Stats and taking into account any final details. To be honest the article is one the like of which has been written again and again about Dungeons & Dragons-style monsters and their creation. This does not mean that the advice or the article are poor. In fact, this is a useful article which lets the Game Master look at monsters from another angle.

Physically, Carcass Crawler Issue #3 is well written and well presented. The artwork is excellent.

Carcass Crawler Issue #3 feels as if it is capping off a trilogy that comprises a character Class compendium for Old School Essentials. Indeed, Necrotic Gnome could present all of the Classes and Races to appear in the pages of the fanzine and it would be a serviceable supplement providing further options for player and Game Master alike. Hopefully, future issues will contain fewer new Classes and open up the otherwise excellent support for Old School Essentials that Carcass Crawler provides to wider content. That said, Carcass Crawler #3 is a solid issue and its Classes and monsters are interesting and the fanzine continues to be an enjoyable old school-style publication.

[Fanzine Focus XXXIII] Crawling Under A Broken Moon Issue No. 3

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. Another popular choice of system for fanzines, is Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game, such as Crawl! and Crawling Under a Broken Moon. Some of these fanzines provide fantasy support for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game, but others explore other genres for use with Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game. One such fanzine is the aforementioned Crawling Under A Broken Moon.

Crawling Under A Broken Moon Fanzine Issue No. 3 was published in in October, 2014 by Shield of Faith Studios. It followed on from Crawling Under A Broken Moon Fanzine Issue No. 1 which introduced the post-apocalyptic setting of Umerica and Urth, and Crawling Under A Broken Moon Fanzine Issue No. 2, which added further Classes, monsters, and weapons. The setting has, of course, gone on to be presented in more detail in The Umerican Survival Guide – Core Setting Guide, now distributed by Goodman Games. The setting itself is a world brought about after a rogue object from deep space passed between the Earth and the Moon and ripped apart time and space, leaving behind a planet which would recover, but leave its inhabitants ruled by savagery, cruel sorcery, and twisted science. Crawling Under A Broken Moon Fanzine Issue No. 3 is direct and simple. It contains three articles, one the means to create Player Characters for Umerica and Urth, the second a scenario for them to play, and the third a bestiary. What the Player Characters created by the first article in the pages of the fanzine will be is Zero Level characters and they will be used to play is the Character Funnel in the second article, which will be populated by the contents of the third.

The Character Funnel is a signature feature of Dungeon Crawl Classics, a scenario specifically designed for Zero Level Player Characters in which initially, a player is expected to roll up three or four Level Zero characters and have them play through a generally nasty, deadly adventure, which surviving will prove a challenge. Those that do survive receive enough Experience Points to advance to First Level and gain all of the advantages of their Class. Creating such Zero Level Player Characters is the point of the first article, ‘Radioactive Wasters’. For this, each player rolls four sets of attributes, birth augers, and lucky rolls as normal for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game, but then rolls for Occupation, Race, and Random Equipment for each Zero Level character. So the Player Character might end up being a Biker with a Length of Chain and a Leather Jacket as his equipment, wandering around the post-apocalyptic world of Umerica, equipped with an insulated thermos, a cast Dutch oven, and a citronella candle. He can also be Human, Elf, Dwarf, Halfling, Mutant, or Robot, although this is optional, and the Game Master will need access to Crawling Under A Broken Moon Fanzine Issue No. 2 for details of the Mutant character Class. Apart from perhaps wanting a bigger table of equipment, ‘Radioactive Wasters’ does exactly what it supposed do, which is to provide the means to provide Player Characters suitable for the Character Funnel and provide background details for Player Characters in the setting in general.

The second entry in Crawling Under A Broken Moon Fanzine Issue No. 3 is much longer. ‘The Mall Maul’, as its title suggests, is a scenario set in that most classic of post-apocalyptic American settings—the mall. After all, think of the films, Logan’s Run, which is filmed in the Apparel Mart at the Dallas Market Center, and George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, where the survivors hole up in a shopping mall following a zombie uprising. The mundane setting of the scenario means that it feels not too dissimilar to that of ‘Rite of Passage’, the scenario found in Gamma World, Second Edition. The background to ‘The Mall Maul’ is that the inhabitants of the village of Neuqua finds themselves in a desperate situation. Due to a mixture of bad decisions and bad weather, the village lacks the sufficient resources to pay tribute it owes to a nearby settlement. With nowhere else to go, its leaders suggest that they turn to the one last place they have not yet scavenged, but have to date been warned against venturing into and nobody has ever returned from exploring—a nearby ancient mall.

Designed for a party of sixteen to twenty-four Zero Level Player Characters, ‘The Mall Maul’ is two things. First, it is a big dungeon, running to some forty or so locations on the upper level and another seven on the lower level. The mall is occupied by two factions. One is the inventively named Mallocks, whose aversion to bright light means they rarely leave the mall and who are very good at laying traps and handling bugs to use as weapons and as part of their traps. The other are the Pigtipedes, boar-like creatures with a hundred legs and a voracious appetite. They are not the only denizens of the mall, but in the main, the Player Characters will be facing a mixture of traps, bug-traps, and bugs, as they rummage through the ruins. The aim for the Player Characters is not to confront the denizens and monsters, but to scavenge enough goods and items to be able to pay off the tribute owed by their village. This will take a lot of work, especially for Zero Level Player Characters, and only become harder as they sustain loses from the traps and encounters in the mall.

The mall also has its secrets—or rather, one secret, and another which the Judge could develop if she planned to use ‘The Mall Maul’ as the starting point for a campaign. The adventure is rough in terms of its plotting, what with the set-up of the bad decisions upon the part of the leaders of the Player Characters’ village and there being no means for the Player Characters to interact with any of the monsters, bar one. There really are no NPCs in the adventure and no other to get through bar exploration and combat. The author does have some fun with the design and naming of the various stores and outlets in the mall, which does add a certain ‘tongue-in-cheek’ tone to the scenario, though in places, the Judge is left to determine various effects and the like.

The third entry in Crawling Under A Broken Moon Fanzine Issue No. 3 is ‘Twisted Menagerie’. This presents the five monsters that appear in the previous ‘The Mall Maul’. Thus there are full stats for the Mallocks, Pigtipede, Trapdoor Toadspider, and the Vendibeast, the latter a soda vending machine distorted into a predatory engine of hunger and rage, which although difficult to kill, actually contains several cans of soda pop that each have a different potion effect. The big monster in ‘Twisted Menagerie’ is the Theszolokomodra, an ancient multi-dimensional being who might hinder a Player Character or help a Player Character depending upon how he interacts with it. There is a possibility that Theszolokomodra could become a Patron for a Player Character. However, details of Theszolokomodra as a Patron are detailed here, but in Crawling Under A Broken Moon Fanzine Issue No. 4.

Physically, Crawling Under A Broken Moon Fanzine Issue No. 3 is serviceably presented. It is a little rough around the edges, as is some of the artwork, but overall, it is a decent affair.

The problem with Crawling Under A Broken Moon Fanzine Issue No. 3 is that much of its contents have been represented to a more professional standard in the pages of The Umerican Survival Guide – Core Setting Guide, so it has been superseded and superseded by a cleaner, slicker presentation of the material. Unfortunately, the roughness of the presentation is joined by the roughness of the scenario, and the Judge may want to tailor it to suit her campaign and play style rather then leave as is. Nevertheless, having a first adventure in Umerica, especially a Character Funnel—and tough Character Funnel at that—is a bonus.