The Anomalous Subsurface Environment

I have run this and it’s good. The Anomalous Subsurface Environment is a science fantasy megdungeon placed in a post apocalyptic world of crazy wizards, dinosaurs, ancient technology and magic. It’s a quintessential old school renaissance American D&D product. It borrows heavily from the aesthetic of Thundarr the Barbarian. Or so I’m told. I’m British and we never had Thundarr over here but chat with American OSRist and they’ll rave about it. Or it’s potential.  I don’t know many folks that still heavily rate stuff that was on TV when they were children. 

So ASE 1 is setting, gatehouse level and level 1. ASE 2-3 is, surprising no one, levels 2 and 3 of the dungeon. This is unfortunately where the science fantasy weirdness ends for now. My own players are on level 3 currently. While I have tried to piece together a level 4 of my own crafting for them to explore, it transpires that I suck at and borderline hate mega dungeon design. So that probably won’t be happening. I consider this a shame because if any more ASE was published I would lap it up and run it to death, like it was one of the many henchfolk who have met their demise in the dungeon and been unceremoniously thrown from a cliff, dubbed Fall-hala by the PCs. (Does waving a lighter around while you dispose of someone’s body in a local beauty spot constitute a ceremony? If so, unceremoniously is unfair)

Mega dungeon play in the ASE and of itself has a lot to recommend it. It’s episodic. We finish most sessions in town so if there’s a rotating cast of PCs then it doesn’t matter.  There are factions. The PCs can engage in all sorts of diplomacy or just exterminate them and take their stuff if they prefer. The trap and puzzle rooms have been a massive source of planning and scheming between sessions, in some cases for weeks on end. One particular room involved a large group of PCs and their small army of henchfolk barricading dungeon corridors and excavating a wall while fighting of legions of random encounters to get at an elusive pile of silver pieces. Good times. 

Henchfolk have played a pivotal role in the campaign for their valuable skills as hit point soaks for actual PCs. And also one player is now playing one of her former henchfolk after her first PC was eviscerated by a troglodyte matriarch with a double barrelled shotgun. There has been several dramatic henchfolk massacres, notably while fighting cornstalk mean on the mountain outside the dungeon; and battling the necromantic midgets, and their undead allies, in their tiny throne room.

This is not a dungeon of drow and orcs but of screeching eyeless freaks and cannibal morlocks. There are murderous clowns and towering great mushrooms. Strange oracles and synthetic life forms. There is a healthy dose of the weird. A PC has been turned green, one has had their gender altered multiple times and there is a whole load of stuff included because the designer thought it was cool. Flying head from Zardoz (I have his minions manifest as different aspects of Sean Connery) a weird robot Sasquatch thing (I don’t know what it is but there’s a mini of it,) Lion men from Thundarr and more crazy wizards than can easily be counted. This gonzo but done well. Bonus fact, PCs fear clowns. I don’t know whether it’s IT or the one out of poltergeist but middle aged nerds have absorbed enough negative clown media to be actively scared of them, when all they want you to do is attend the Anomalous Subsurface Circus and have a good time....

Preparation required to run this is limited. Just reading the module really. I did spend some time working on a party that the PCs were invited to which was well worth it. They hired a carriage, brought in a tailor to make their outfits, Stacy the halfling had her hair done. It was cool. However the low prep aspect is why I started running this. During the height of the pandemic with a lot of time on my hands I was able to maintain four games a week including two that I was running out of my own head. Having an already sketched out mega dungeon was a massive boon for Thursday nights as it required me to do very little other than show up on time with my dice, fully clothed and have my internet on.

I like it a lot and I wish Patrick Wetmore would write more of it.

Beyond the Wall

 Beyond the wall is good. It’s aims are to create a game that emulates the fantasy of Ursula LeGuin or Lloyd Alexander. So Earthsea and Prydain. Both good choices for inspiration in my humble opinion. While at heart it’s a B/X clone it has a number of additional things going for it that I really like. 

Beyond the Wall is designed to be brought to the table with zero prep. I’ve run it twice with this exact amount of prior work and it’s been great at the table. 

Character Generation is achieved by means of playbooks and involves collaboration between players and GM to build the PCs home village. Basically each playbook is a set of random tables that tells you something about your character and allows you to add a location or NPC to the village map. It’s cool. It immediately ties the PCs to one another through pieces of shared history and to the setting because it’s their home and they are helping create it. You get packs like Young Hunstman or Witch’s Aprentice or Assistant Beast Keeper. 

Meanwhile the GM gets a scenario pack, also a series of tables. This allows the GM to tie into the players ideas by populating tables with the NPCs and locations they create and rolling for a series of events that take place in the build up to the scenario as well as the contents of the scenario itself. The scenario pack also gives you a few useful bits like monster stats and suggestions for how to use them and also a big list of thematic names (which is always handy.) Included in the main book are a few scenario packs such as The Angered Fae or The Witch’s Mistake. 

In a series of rolls and about an hour you should have characters ready and a scenario prepped and a collaborative world built. Well, it’s a village but it’s pretty much the world of the PCs because they are young heroes starting out on an adventuring career.

I’ve run Beyond the Wall twice, intending to use it in the manner it suggests. So we sat down over a Google meet session and did characters and a scenario pack. It took two sessions of two hours to resolve the mystery of the Angered Fae but we also created the PCs and their village and I did no work outside of the sessions. So a success for Beyond the Wall. 

The second time I ran it, our scheduled session of Alien wasn’t ready for the table for IRL reasons so I offered to run BtW at short notice. Again I turned out a scenario pack, the Opened Barrow, and we used the same characters from the prior game, which was by now months in the past. I did add a new player and it was simple to get them to roll on their tables alone to generate stuff for their character and the village with one minor alteration (PCs get a bonus from one of the other players’ seated next to them at the table playbook so we determined this randomly instead.) Again I did no prep. I already had a lot of stuff to tie into from the previous game. One PCs ambiguous romantic involvement with another, now absent, PC’s betrothed. The absent PC now having gone missing in game plus the stuff from the scenario pack and I had loads to work with. Another couple of sessions worth it turned out. So for filling in at the last minute I was very happy with it. 

I’d like to run a full campaign of this at some point as there are campaign tools in the “Further Afield” supplement that also look very handy indeed.

On The Isle of Dread

The Isle of Dread is my favourite old D&D module. This isn’t a review, it’s a self indulgent nostalgia post. My copy of the Isle of Dread arrived one Christmas along with the D&D Expert set. You see I was getting quite good at D&D by this point and Basic no longer applied. I was definitely more of an expert. If you weere a child of Mentzer Basic like me then there was no module included in your Red Box, just an intro adventure in the DM’s book. However once I had the Expert Set I owned an honest to god real module, and it was good too.

Let me tell you of the days of high adventure... and dinosaurs

If you’re not familiar with the Ise of Dread it’s a hex crawl set on what amounts to Skull Island from the King Kong films complete with pirates, lost civilisations and dinosaurs. This type of pulpy, sword and sorcery adventure is exactly what I want from my D&D games. The only thing really missing from this is a gargantuan ape of some kind.

I ran this in 2017 in the bar at Dragonmeet for about six hours. I could’ve gone way longer but people had trains to catch. I did tease the presence of a huge albino ape but the PCs never actually met one. Instead they befriended the cat people, fought with the spider possessed locals (in a slight change from the original text I made the Aranea fist sized, mind controlling spiders that rode their human slaves as mounts), were on the receiving end of a triceratops rampage and loads more.

What this module delivers is encounter tables and adventure locations. Some are simple lairs but there’s a proper dungeon on Taboo Island too. Exploring the Isle is enough fun on its own but it’s possible to add whatever you like to this framework, develop the various factions, go pulp adventure crazy. I mean the cover to my copy (the orange one) has a Viking, a mongol warrior and a wizard fighting a T-Rex. That’s some good D&D right there. Throw a few five room dungeons in there and you’ve got the makings of a short campaign.

This is, for me, where D&D games shine. Play styles are exactly that and you can do anything with almost any game and it still be a good time. Pulp sword and sorcery is retro D&D all day for me though.

Dreamlands D&D

Amongst grown up game players there is often great nostalgia for a time when we used to ride our bikes around to our friends’ houses and play RPGs all day and night. As adults this type of gaming is often lost to us as so called responsibilities eat up so much of our time. As a result, scheduling regular RPG sessions with the same group can be challenging. In the extreme.

This being the case, I’m always interested in framing devices for games that allow drop in and out play such as the famous West Marches or  the Flailsnails model. My own Grim North game was by, I hesitate to say design... means of fortunate accident known to function this way. New options are always welcome in this regard, who knows when they may come in handy.

Over the winter I had chance to read Ben L’s excellent zine Through Ultan’s Door which depicts a dungeon in his campaign world derived from HP Lovecraft’s Dreamlands. Up until this point I was not familiar with those works. Upon reading Ben’s zine I immediately consumed “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” and was captivated.

The Dreamlands: Legit D&D as fuck

For I had found, probably a hundred years after everyone else, a perfect framing device for drop in D&D (or the other role playing game of your preference.) As dreamers the PCs need only to breach the wall of sleep in order to partake in fantastic adventures that are limited by only the imagination. Everyone knows that dreams are flighty and inconsistent, fantastic and often bizarre. PCs enteringvthe lands of dreams could easily move from one fantastic episode to the next withoutt there being any break in the verisimilitude of the campaign. If Dave and Andy can’t make it this week because they’ve got parents night or karate class, it is easily explained by their PCs fading back to the waking world and they can slot back into whatever is going on once they return to the land of dreams.

Judge this by its cover and try and withhold your joy...

I feel like I could go on at length about this, and I might, but I see the land of dreams as a Matrix like environment. Not every dreamer has enough control over their dream state to be an adventurer. Some dream mundane dreams of carpentry and scribe work. Others dream themselves fantastic heroes or terrible villains. Creatures from nightmare, self aware dream beings, gods and devils abound. Essentially anything goes as you pass from one dream realm to another. Want to run a series of unrelated modules? That’s fine. Slumbering Ursine Dunes to Deep Carbon Observatory to the Isle of Dread is no drama. Want to have some sort of over arching meta plot for the PCs to thwart? Well, I urge that you don’t, we prefer the emergent stories we get from playing old school rogueish games around these parts but if that’s your thing then have at it.

This has got legs in my opinion... Remind me to tell you about the Tavern at the End of the Multiverse some time too.

Fast and Dirty Review of the Teratic Tome

Looks familiar no? Good cover.

This is a bestiary of unusual creatures for your OSR games. It's stated for OSRIC but that just means minimal or no conversion to the OSR rule set of your choice.

Included are a variety of nasties, many of which are unique individuals but they're all a bit left of field compared to the straight up Monster Manual. I particularly like the Pontiff, which are a race of Alien-like religious zealots and the Audience which are blind but a floating mass of mouths on stalks that speak various spell effects. Not unlike a certain tyrannical floating sphere with a lot of eyes...

The art is excellent throughout, especially if you like female monsters that are half spider, half naked chick. In fact there are a lot of topless terrors depicted in this book, and the horror themes of a lot of these beasties means it might not be suitable for younger players. However if naked girl demons with razor sharp teeth and tentacles where their genitals should be is your bag, then crack on.

I like it, it's different, the monsters are creative and unusual but still useable, and at pay what you want on DriveThruRPG you can't argue with the price.