Old School Magic by Charles Rice is a 29 page supplement for the Old School Reference and Index Compilation (OSRIC) which, for those of you not familiar with the OSR, is an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons retroclone originally written by Matthew Finch. Old School Magic expands on the OSRIC magic system by presenting a breakdown of magic levels from low to high, new ways of implementing spells, new magical archetypes, and new spells.
Skull Mountain by Faster Monkey Games is a 36-page adventure module for the Labyrinth Lord Roleplaying Game. This is a review of the PDF I purchased from RPGNow. It uses a two-column, right-aligned layout with a clean, readable font. The font is fairly small, which means a lot of content is packed into its 36 pages. The writing is clear and the editing is good (I actually can’t recall any typos).
Divine Foes is a short PDF supplement for the Divinity system. The layout is a simple 2 column affair with a good sized font and no real art save for a background design on the pages themselves. The pages are designed to look old and faded, with a vaguely arcane symbol imprinted in the centre. While I like the virtual aging of the pages, I’m not a fan of the background image. While subtle, it draws my eyes away from the text and makes the PDF more challenging to read than it needs to be.
Lovecraft based games have been around for over two decades now. The first Role Playing Game came out in the 80’s and many editions of the game have graced our shelves ever since. From the initial percentile based based system that still stands, to the Monte Cook version of the game that attempted a D20 system conversion with not terribly good results and now, the Gumshoe System that rules Trail of Cthulhu, and it does it admirably.
DEATHWATCH is the newest Warhammer 40K Roleplaying game from Fantasy Flight Games, taking players into a whole new realm in the ‘Grim Darkness of the 41st Millenium’. Following on from their succesful DARK HERESY and ROGUE TRADER titles, DEATHWATCH now gives players the chance to play the super-soldiers of the Imperium: the Space Marines.
By Paco G. Jaen The black clouds of war are gathering, and evil flocks to their thundering call! While seeking
ION Guard ICONS Edition is a sourcebook for the ICONS RPG put forth by Colin Chapman and Radioactive Ape Designs and covering a section of the supers genre that never seems to get enough support: The cosmic hero subgenre.
ders of this blog already know, I’m not a big fan of the current direction of Dungeons & Dragons, an opinion I’ve held sincebefore the release of D&D IV. I was happy enough with the early days ofD&D III, but my mood changed for the worse around the time that v.3.5 was released, kicking off a quest of exploration that eventually landed me where I am today.
Cold City, from Contested Ground Studios, is one of the most innovative RPGs I’ve played in a long time. I was first attracted to it by its setting, namely Berlin in 1950, at the beginning of the Cold War. It mixes the suspicion and politics of the early Cold War with the ‘weird science’ of an alternative WW2, quite a popular trope these days.
Many magazines have tried in the past to make an impact in the gaming market for many many years. Most of them have perished either for lack of readership (though I doubt that very much) or lack of revenue (getting hotter!) or simply because the owner wanted to make sure they had complete control over the contents and wanted to go fully digital (no prizes for guessing here!).
That has left the market for those of us who like to read on paper as well as on screen very starved!
Enter Kobold Quarterly. And what an entrance it is!
