New Release - Escape from Miklagard (OSE)

I need to confess. My To Be Reviewed Pile continually grows, and with "life happening" all around me, I expect it to keep growing. It isn't just a physical pile either, it co-exists with the digital world of PDFs. There simply is a large amount of gaming material hitting the market and not enough time in my already busy days to do proper reviews.

Instead, I'm going to highlight some New Releases and put a small spotlight on some items that I feel deserve some attention.

The first title to be highlighted in this irregular series of posts is Escape from Miklagard for OSE. What I really like about Escape from Miklagard it is essentially a hex, or more accurately, point crawl in an urban environment. Urban hex crawls / point crawls are how I like to run urban adventure sessions, as they literally give your party free rein to explore and take initiative. There is nothing worse than an urban railroad of an adventure.

The fact that it is a low-level adventure - it actually states it is for beginning characters, is a blessing for me, as I usually run Swords & Wizardry Light at conventions. I will need to see if Escape from Miklagard is adaptable for convention use, as I don't recall ever playing in an urban environment in a convention game session, and it would make for a nice change of pace.

Alright, the more I look at this, the more I want to do more than just give it a quick glance and put it back in the To Be Reviewed pile. That's definitely a good thing.

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.

DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.  You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Anchor, YouTube,  or wherever you listen to your podcast collection. - Tenkar  

Bundle of Holdling - Cornucopia 2023

Sometimes when you bring together random games as a bundle, you find some stuff that really interests you. Then, you see it has a Powered by the Apocalypse title and you cringe ;) That just happened to me with the Cornucopia 2023 Bundle over at Bundle of Holding.

I'm actually interested in most everything in this bundle aside from World Wide Wrestling. There, I said it. I hate wrestling and I detest the Apoc Engine with a passion. 

Adventurer! In time for the American Thanksgiving holiday, we present this all-new Cornucopia 2023 Bundle, our eleventh annual offer of top-quality tabletop roleplaying game ebooks. For just US$14.95 you get all four complete rulebooks in our Starter Collection (retail value $68) as DRM-free ebooks, including the swinging superspy dimension-hopping RPG Agents of Concordia; Apollo 47 Technical Handbook by Tim (Thousand Year Old Vampire) Hutchings; The Design Mechanism's Casting the Runes, a GUMSHOE game based on the ghost stories of M.R. James; and Scratchpad Publishing's create-your-own-world superhero RPG Spectaculars.

And if you pay more than the threshold price of $30.35, you'll level up and also get our entire Bonus Collection with four more hit games worth an additional $84, including the cinematic action-hero extravaganza Outgunned from Two Little Mice (Broken Compass); Chris McDowall's newly revised Into the Odd - Remastered from Free League Publishing; Unbound, the universal system from Rowan, Rook & Decard (Spire); and the 2022 Second Edition of World Wide Wrestling, the Apocalypse Engine game from Nathan Paoletta.

 

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.

DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.  You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Anchor, YouTube,  or wherever you listen to your podcast collection. - Tenkar  

Kickstarter - Knock! Issue 4 (OSR Zine)

There are zines, and there are ZINES! KNOCK! is a ZINE!

KNOCK! issue 4 is ready to go to press, just waiting for you to pledge. You know the formula: no theme, all mean. Once again, we've cobbled together a bric-à-brac of game design insight, random tables, rules suggestions, monsters, classes, maps, adventures… the lot. We've also added a short series (12 pages) aimed at post-WotC meltdown 5E refugees (or just your friends who you’d like to bring over to the adventure gaming side of the divide). 

The book is 212 pages (A5 format:  5.9’ x 8.25’, slightly bigger than digest size) in beautiful full colour, printed on quality paper (coated 130 gr, with a cover on coated 300 gr) by Olivier's neighbours in the South Basque country.

The KNOCK! Issue 4 Kickstarter is about 17 bucks in PDF and 29 bucks in Print plus PDF.

I gotta admit, I love my KNOCK!s.

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.

DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.  You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Anchor, YouTube,  or wherever you listen to your podcast collection. - Tenkar  

PWYW - Dragon Warriors RPG

I remember seeing Dragon Warriors advertised in Dragon Magazine in the mid 80's, and damn but if it didn't look good. I could never find it here in the States, and then I found Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, which consumed me for a while and satiated my desire for a British Fantasy RPG.

I never did forget Dragon Warriors, though, and purchased the PDF a number of years ago on DTRPG. I never gave it the proper read-through, but the core rules are now PWYW and there is a free solo adventure for it, Hunt on the Borderlands (which was released today) (edit - did I mention the solo is hyperlinked? Well it is). I snagged the hard-cover Print copy of Dragon Warriors for 20 bucks plus shipping. Not bad at all!

Enter a world of magic, folklore and danger. Here, superstition covers peoples' lives like autumn mists cover the moors, and terrifying monsters with bizarre powers lurk in the shadows. The king is a weakling, barons scheme against each other, and lordless knights, back from the Crusades without the honour or riches they were promised, roam the countryside in search of adventure - or prey.

Ruined castles and barrows are the lairs of the supernatural, or newer, more sinister masters. Labyrinthine underworlds lie forgotten below ancient temples and city cellars. The dark places of the world hold riches for those who would search for them, and the keys to great power, and death.

These are the Lands of Legend, and they need heroes. Brave knights, courageous barbarians, cunning sorcerers, mystics trained in the powers of mind and body, sword-wielding warlocks, elementalists who command the fabric of reality itself, and assassins trained to bring death to the deserving. All these will be your comrades on the path to glory - and perhaps your enemies too.

Will you accept the challenge of Dragon Warriors?

Dragon Warriors is a classic fantasy roleplaying game, originally released in 1985-6 by Corgi Books, relaunched in 2008 by Magnum Opus Press, and now published by Serpent King. This rulebook contains full details for creating characters and all that players need to adventure in the Lands of Legend. It also holds information on over 110 different monstrous species, 192 spells from four different schools of magic, and more than 80 unique magic items, artifacts and relics, as well as sections on jousts, crime and punishment, disease and madness. There's advice for novice Games Masters and players, suggestions for building your own game-world tailored to your tastes, an introductory scenario to begin your adventures in Dragon Warriors, and much more.

 

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.

DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.  You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Anchor, YouTube,  or wherever you listen to your podcast collection. - Tenkar  

Kickstarter - ToD1 Lair of the Silver Rings - RPG OSR adventure module

A starting adventure in the old-school style. Written for OSRIC or your favorite OSR game system - with a 5e compatible version too!

I'm always interested in peeking at new publishers of old-school material. You just never know if one is going to strike lightning in a bottle.

ToD1 Lair of the Silver Rings Kickstarter looks interesting. Priced at 5 bucks in PDF, and 15 bucks in Print plus PDF (with 5 bucks shipping in the US), I would say this adventure is competitively priced.

This adventure takes the characters through a series of encounters into a dungeon complex and on to a corrupt noble's manor. Both areas are fully detailed in old school style blue/monochrome maps with more detailed colored versions available in the 5e version.

The module is designed to be easily inserted into an existing setting. It takes place in a city which can be any city you decide. However, proper names are given for them under the full story Appendix where the details of the full campaign are provided. 

While the intended hook and direction of the module has the two locales set in a city, you could feasibly drop them anywhere. They could even be used separately as different one-shot adventures.

The module layout is designed to emulate the old school style and is setup for ease of use. The encounters and overall flow of the dungeons are in the same vein as the old school modules with the encounters having been tested but not always balanced. Although, the 5e conversion is tweaked with more balanced encounters.

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.

DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.  You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Anchor, YouTube,  or wherever you listen to your podcast collection. - Tenkar  

Bundle of Holding - Sly Flourish

 

I used to think Sly Flourish releases were overhyped. Then I picked up The Lazy Dungeon Master, and I was hooked. 5.95 for three of Sly Flourish's DM self-help books? You simply can't beat that price. You get 4 more books of content, and 4 books of art, for a bit more than 20 bucks. Damn good deal!

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.

DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.  You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Anchor, YouTube,  or wherever you listen to your podcast collection. - Tenkar  

Been Thinking About a New D30 Table (Just since this morning.....)

One of the reasons I agreed to be a regular guest poster here at the Tavern is because I was advised to push myself a bit out of my comfort zone creatively and having to post on a schedule here is a big part of that....therapy(?). I have found, however, that the regular schedule....knowing that I have to post something on Sunday tends to kind of "hang out" in the back of my mind, causing me to see a lot of things through the lens of some OSR gaming. Ok...so some HackMaster gaming too, but I'm not trying to go there today.

Because this last week was Thanksgiving, and Black Friday, I'd been thinking of community celebrations and even mercantilism.....BUT I'm not going to share any of those thoughts that had been on my mind for a couple of days.

As I'm sitting down to perform this weekly duty, my home smells absolutely-effing-delicious, savory even. A buddy had gifted me a venison leg roast and I needed to get that thing out of my freezer and into my crockpot. It's been cooking since this morning and won't be ready for several hours more. The smell has been making my stomach grumble and my mind has been churning as well.

This venison was shot locally and it's been a while since I've dined on wild game. It got me thinking about hunting on the trail, in game of course. The earliest mention of foraging or hunting for food I can find in D&D is from back in 1983, specifically in the Expert rules (page 21 if you want to see for yourself). Of course I think it's a little too simple (TL;DR move 2/3 rate for the day and only a 1/3 chance of finding food). The next mention is in the 1986 Wilderness Survival Guide (page 53) and I won't bother to summarize it here because it's way too cumbersome. Holy crap, the foraging and hunting rules went from two small paragraphs in Expert to over three pages of content in AD&D.

First off, I'm definitely going to have to create a d30 Hunting/Foraging table that falls somewhere between these two extremes. Not sure I knock it out in a week (I have stuff going on this week) but it's officially on my to-do list. I've got some ideas.....

First off, I think the rules for foraging are a little light...period. Mostly because the simple side of the equation includes not just foraging for vegetation, but also meat from small game. I like the time cost personally, but I think 1/3 success rate, generically, is too low. Don't even get me started on the WSG data. Holy crap, it's way too complicated and success rates are abysmal.

I really think that both sets of these rules are a bit skewed, presumably due to current ideas of foraging/hunting, especially in more densely populated areas that make up the majority of the US. When you're talking about a less populous fantasy world, I think small game has to be in abundance, probably to recockulous levels sometimes (read some frontier/early American accounts....bison herds to the horizon or flocks of birds that took days to pass overhead). Factor in the plethora of monstrous humanoid species and just, well actual monsters that populate the various encounter tables. Tons of monsters, if not apex predators, tend to be towards the top of the food chain and in order to be towards the top, well, there has to be a substantial base. 

While I get that there would be background vs. environmental factors (like an Elf underground), the average PC probably has a much more...rural(?) background than we as players do. Foraging for food wasn't so much a "thing", as just a minor aspect of life in general. It's much harder to forage as a thing these days (illegal in some places, overharvesting, etc.), but it still exists. In an environment rich with wildlife, there should be a corresponding increase in edible vegetation as well (you know, stuff my food eats).

Anyway, as I typed earlier, I've got me some ideas......hopefully they will coalesce well.