Lestrades_Game

 Into The Odd   Look at this book, it has these stupendous art house collage on its cover and strewn across the interior. It looks like a coffee table book or something you’d find in the back room of Ye Old Rare books shoppe. I wanted this book, it got it and now I am disappointed. A microcosm of our consumer society right there.   In to the Odd contains three things; a rule set, an adventure and some setting material. Two of these things are ok, but perhaps slightly miss the target, one is awful.   The rules system: There has been a trend in modern indie RPGs to take the husk of 70s D&D and strip it down to the essentials. The 70s game was many things, it was a resource management game, it was a maze exploration game, it was a combat game, it was a push your luck game and it was an improv encounter solution game. In to the Odd says this last element, the encounter shenanigans, is the game. The actual game rules are a few paragraphs on two pages. Ea...

  Vaults of Vaarn – Leo Hunt ~2022   The following table tells you most of what you need to know about Vaults of Vaarn, an indie TTRPG released in limited edition hard back in 2022-23. The underlying chassis of the game is Ben Milton's  Knave rule set, a riff on D&D basic and modern gutted down to 7 pages of tables and a core system. My general view with short page count games is you get what you include pages for. You can strip down the rules but situations that occur regularly in game will need to be bridged by the GM and players. In short I think the modern trend of ultra-light games is with a few exceptions ill judged. Vaults of Vaarn is an exception for two reasons.   First it is loaded with great tables. Tables that bring its dying earth Vancian, Wolfe-ian setting to life more than any pages of background or lore could (why do people like lore so much?). Long-time RPG fans might say this looks like Gamma World, or even Metamorphosis Alpha, and the...

With the rise of the Old School Renaissance (OSR) has come the rise of Fanzines and Magazines. I've had a read of Fight On!, Gygax Magazine, Footprints, & Magazine, Nod Magazine, Knockspell, Crawl!, AFS, and Metal Gods of Ur-Hadad. In this post I’m going to give a quick run down and critique of each of these. Fight On!; I start with Fight On! because its my favourite and I think probably the best. Edited by IG with the help of Calithena and others, this fanzine gives you between typically 80 and 130 pages devoted to Old School roleplaying mostly focused on D&D Basic and OSR games that use a similar rule set.  About 70% of the content is material such as dungeons, cities, monsters or adventure hooks you can drop straight into your game.  Of particular note is the material from Gabor Lux who writes these vivid heavily appendix N adventures. There are on running features such as community mega dungeon that is added to with each issue. The other 30% or so is opinion...