Realms of Crawling Chaos

I've been reading the newly released Realms of Crawling Chaos all morning.

Dan did a tremendous job on this book. I love that he paid little attention to the existing RPG material, and instead went back to exhaustively mine the original Lovecraft stories. There's no artificial sanity mechanic, but the weird details in the book give referees plenty of ammunition to genuinely creep-out players. Check this:

This ritual requires previously prepared essential saltes. The magic-user calls on the attention of Yog-Sothoth, and harnesses properties of time and space to bring back the dead from their essential saltes. The success of the revivification is completely dependent on the state of the body from which the saltes were prepared. If saltes are prepared from less than 51% of a body, the ritual will bring up an unidentifiable mass of flesh that only lives for moments.

Or this:

[...] it should be noted that anytime an Outer One tank is found, the occupant will have no brain. The body is surgically altered to allow it to survive without the brain, but the brain may be in an altogether different galaxy or dimension.

There are some books that I admire but never use in play. Realms of Crawling Chaos isn't one of them. It's packed full of goodness that's easy to drop into any campaign. And the PDF is under $5. Go buy it!

The Book of Imaginary Beings

Despite the fact that Jorge Luis Borges is one of my favorite writers, I had only briefly flipped through The Book of Imaginary Being at the library. I recently noticed that Borges' bestiary appears on the inspirational source material list at the back of the Moldvay basic book, so I grabbed a copy to see what material could be appropriated for gaming. The book contains over a hundred entries for monsters, each entry 1-2 pages. For a quick bit of general inspiration, pull it off the shelf and read two or three entries at random. There are also many specific details that could profitably be stolen for your games. I found these, for example, in three random entries:

• the shaft of a griffon's feather makes a marvelous bow
• angry villagers who slay a monster might have it taxidermied and prominently displayed to visitors
• the dots on tortoise shells are treatises about the cosmos

If you've never read any of Borges' fiction, I strongly recommend it. His stuff isn't strictly fantasy, but it certainly falls under the heading "literature of the fantastic". Start either with the Everyman's Library edition of Ficciones or one of the out-of-print Giovanni translations. Unfortunately, the widely available Andrew Hurley translations are discouragingly stilted.

B/X Companion initial impressions

The mailman delivered my B/X Companion a few minutes ago. The cover art by Brian DeClercq is beautiful. It has a nice old-school feel without being a slavish imitation of Erol Otus's B/X covers. The book is 64 pages in length, not counting the table of contents and index printed on the inside cover, and formatted in two columns. It's 8.5" x 11" saddle stitched, so it's slightly taller than the B/X books. The book covers levels 15-36. Of course, demi-human advancement is capped below those level, but the book includes material useful for all classes, such as information on domain rulership. As one might expect, the greatest number of pages are occupied by new spells, monsters, and magic items. There's also rules for siege combat, a new Bard class, and adventuring on other planes. I'll post more about the B/X Companion again after I've spent a couple of weeks with it, but the my initial impression is that it's a good buy. I'll leave you with this example to wet your appetite:

"Craft Device: this is the thief's ability to construct elaborate traps of mechanical nature. Cost and time to construct will need to be decided by the DM (similar to construction of magical devices). Thieves use these devices to protect their hideouts, though they may build them for others at a price. Failing the craft roll by more than 10% means the device was not constructed correctly, and all the time, money, and components are wasted. Failing the roll by 10% or less indicated the thief successfully created the device, but is himself the first victim of the device as he sets off the trap!"

Lamentations of the Flame Princess

I had pre-ordered Lamentations of the Flame Princess from Troll and Toad, and it arrived yesterday. It's a nice, hefty little box set. I'll post a review in the next few days.