Shipped: Ashes Without Number

My Ashes Without Number Kickstarter book has shipped, and the PDFs are here. What a fantastic game, another in the outstanding ...Without Number series of games from Kevin Crawford. This one is post-apocalyptic, and it has generators and campaign ideas flowing out of every page. This one outdoes so many other end-of-the-world games, or it can be used right alongside them as the world creation system.

And the rules are the same as the other games in the series, so there is nothing new to learn here, and it all works just as you would expect. The one-page rules summary is back, and this is one of the easiest games to play and teach. The system is also compatible with any set of B/X rules, so you can pull up Old School Essentials classes and monsters, and drop them right into your games.

Any of the games. Science fiction. Cyberpunk. Fantasy. And now, post-apocalyptic.

No websites for character creation are needed, which is a relief given what we are going through with 5E. I'm tired of paying for character creation tools and digital books for character creation sites.

It is a fantastic book, and I can't wait for the hardcover to get here.

What is next...? I know Stars Without Number lacks the new combat rules introduced in Cities and is one of the older games in the line, so is a refresh coming for that? Are we getting another genre? A "double-oh" game set in the classic era of spies? A Noir or gangster game? An eldritch horror game? A vampire and werewolves modern-world horror game?

This is one of the best series in gaming, and a few beautiful hardcover books can replace an entire library of lesser games, and work with anything OSR you have on your shelf.

The world is an endless place...

Mail Room: Tales of the Valiant, Game Master's Guide PDF

Look at what the Kobold Press store dropped into my account today.

Wow, flipping through, this has everything I wanted in a GMG. This is up there with the all-time greats of game master guides, and it feels like it was directly inspired by the Grandaddy, the AD&D 1st Edition DMG. Classic random generators? Random dungeons? Monster and rule options? Magic item tables? Monster creation? Subclass creation? Campaigns? GM advice? It goes on and on!

It has everything. I am so lost in this.

Sorry, D&D, but this is a game-changer. You've just been outdone.

This is epic. Blown away.

One Million Magic Items

This is an excellent PDF to pick up for games like Dungeon Crawl Classics; since that game assumes magic items are supposed to be unique, and the game does not come with tables for anything other than swords, this PDF gives you a nice set of tables to generate Diablo-style items for DCC. Two notes:

This is for D&D 3.5 edition, so you must make a few adjustments to the items to work in DCC. These are trivial changes, and you can either swap ability scores, give a save bonus, or just make up a DCC-specific bonus if something does not work well. Some modifiers and damage resistances seem high (+10 competency bonus or +10 to skill checks), and the damage resistances of 10 to 30 points seem high, so you should halve those bonuses and resistances across the board, so YMMV.

I haven't played enough high-level DCC, so they may be okay. D&D 3.5 is close to DCC, but the modifiers are slightly lower across the board.

The number 42 in every table is omitted as an in-joke. Some reviewers pointed this out as a problem, but if I roll a 42, that means this is a DCC item, bonus, or ability that it modifies. So this in-joke gives me a DCC-specific result to give bonuses to luck or luck regeneration, spell burn, patron rolls, spell checks, dice chain results, or any other DCC-specific rule or numeric value. I can give a weapon a condition add or immunity. So, the 42 result on every chart is a highly-desired DIY DCC result, making the charts even better. A 42 on an item type? Roll on the level-zero character equipment chart and have a magic chicken that gives +1 STR and allows the holder to read and understand any language.

The Warrior's Chicken of Comprehension is born.

I like random items since they force players to determine how to use them and which character should benefit most. That chicken could go to a fighter., but the fumbles may be epic, with a missed axe swing cutting it in half. Or it could go to a more social character who doesn't need the STR but would use the language comprehension well. Or give it to a thief to listen in on enemies and then have the thing cluck at the wrong moment.

A final note: don't grow too attached to your magic items. In DCC, you should never get too attached to your gear; a magic weapon can fly out of your hand on a fumble and fly off a cliff, magic armor can be disintegrated by an acid attack, and a patron could flat-out ask for a great item as a repayment for a favor. A god could be appeased by sacrificing that great item, too, so they can be 'burned' for debt repayment.

A hungry troll could eat that chicken.

You will always find another piece of random junk later from these tables, so don't worry about it. I have had games where if you touched a magic item on a character, the player would quit the game. It felt like cutting off a character's limb to make 'all gear paid for' and was part of the reason we loved Paranoia so much.

It is all paid for.

Nothing the characters possess is sacred.

Everything is on the table.

And the replacements for all the junk you lose, burn for favor, and stupidly lose in fumbles are on these tables. Once everything is expendable in a tabletop game, the freedom you feel is like no other and worth experiencing.

Castles & Crusades: Player's Handbook 7th Edition (FREE)

 https://www.trolllord.com/tlgstore/#!/Players-Handbook-7th-Pr-Digital-FREE/p/89198209/category=11639170

Got a great deal today, the 7th Edition C&C Player's handbook PDF is free! Go grab this and check out the best modernized version of classic fantasy gaming out there today.

Swords of Cthulhu

BRW Games has been killing it lately. I am a massive fan of the underappreciated Adventures Dark & Deep, and this is an excellent "alternate future" AD&D-style game. If you want the high-level OSR game, there are very few AD&D clones out there to fill the need, and this is in my top four:

• Swords & Wizardry
• Castles & Crusades
• Adventures Dark & Deep
• For Gold & Glory

Today the PDFs for the Swords of Cthulhu dropped for Kickstarter backers, and this is one of the best Lovecraftian OSR resources out there. You can also get the PDF on DriveThruRPG today, which is fantastic.

This is a great resource for any OSR Lovecraftian game, valuable for fantasy, pulp, modern, or sci-fi games involving the twisted magic and worlds of the Old Ones.

Amazing Pathfinder Humble Bundle

Check this out:

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/paizo-pathfinder-bundle

$354 of Pathfinder books for $15? Granted these are PDF copies, but wow, what a deal. Up the price to $25 and you get a physical copy of the Pathfinder Beginner box AND all these PDFs.

$1 gets you:

• Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook
• Pathfinder Roleplaying Game GameMastery Guide
• Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Digital Beginner Box
• Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Player Character Folio
• Player Character Folio
• Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Advanced Class Guide
• Pathfinder Roleplaying Game GM Screen (digital copy)
• Pathfinder Adventure Path: In Hell's Bright Shadow (Hell’s Rebels: 1 of 6)

$15 gets you the above, plus:

• Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Ultimate Magic
• Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Ultimate Campaign
• Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Ultimate Combat
• Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Bestiary 2    
• Pathfinder Adventure Path: Dance of the Damned (Hell’s Rebels: 3 of 6)
• Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Inner Sea Poster Map Folio (digital copy)
• Pathfinder Society: Year of the Sky Key Scenario Mega-Pack (with 23 adventures)

Pay more than the average (currently around $17), and you get the above plus:

• Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Inner Sea World Guide
• Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Strategy Guide
• Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Bestiary
• Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Ultimate Equipment
• Pathfinder Society Scenario 7-01: Between the Lines
• Pathfinder Adventure Path: Turn of the Torrent (Hell’s Rebels: 2 of 6) 
• Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Advanced Player's Guide

Pay $25, and you get all of the above, plus a physical copy of the excellent:

• Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Beginner Box (Physical Copy - shipping not included)

Wow. An amazing amount of roleplaying goodness for this cheap of a price with a leading system? If I didn't have all of these already I would be jumping all over this.

This is Huge: D&D 5.0 Goes OGL

Wow, check this out:

http://media.wizards.com/2016/downloads/SRD-OGL_V1.1.pdf

Yes, D&D 5 just went OGL. Amazing stuff, brave, and they deserve a huge round of applause for this (if all the OGL necessities are in place, I haven't read everything yet). They also have this site:

http://www.dmsguild.com/

...a place where fan-produced Forgotten Realms content can be sold and published. Very nice, and this I didn't expect. Kudos for the openness and publishing model for this locked-up setting (I understand why they want to keep this setting closer to them and have approval of products), and this is cool. Kudos again.

My feelings about D&D 5 have just went up very much. I liked the system, but I always had that question of a locked-up D&D 4 type game, or some variant of a closed-up license, but this is an amazing turn of events.

Thank you Wizards. You deserve a huge round of applause and accolades for bringing the OGL back to D&D. It's the year 2000 all over again, and we are about to see some amazing stuff from third party publishers.

Well played, and you guys rock.

UPDATE: Here is a site describing what you can and can't do, and where certain materials should be published. It is pretty nice of them to provide a marketplace and lay things out so clearly:

http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/systems-reference-document-srd

Fantasy Age 1.1 PDF Released

News flash, they just released the version 1.1 of the Fantasy Age PDF. It looks like they just made some minor errata fixes, but I sure do like having PDF update notices delivered to my in-box.

Paizo, take note. This is cool. Unless I messed up some setting somewhere. And oh yeah, Fantasy Flight and that Star Wars RPG, please, please PDFs!

On second thought, now my Fantasy Age printed book is out of date. I give up.

Still, this is cool. Props for entering the digital age, Green Ronin.

Pass the Book?

We have both the Legend RPG and the $1 Legend PDF available over at RPGNow. Which one do we use more? I can't say we have even opened the softcover book yet.

The PDF? On my tablet and phone, and each chapter is printed out and stabled together in handy booklets. We could even have more than one copy of the character creation chapter printed out so more than one player can reference it when building characters.

You don't know how nice it is to be able to hand someone the skills chapter, someone else the character creation chapter, and keep the combat and adventuring chapters open to pages and ready for use. It's like someone has revolutionized our gaming experience, and I just can't force myself to go back to the hardcover "single user" soft or hardcover book way of doing things again.

And if the character creation chapter ever gets worn out, ripped, and stained I do not care at all, as I can always print out another copy. That isn't so easy with a $50 hardcover. I also have these on a secure and private little place in cloud storage so I can access them anywhere I go. My D&D 5 books? On my shelf, at home. With a PDF, if I have Internet access and optionally a printer I can play.

I like collecting things, and I like collecting books. I like the feel of them, and I like reading them. As I collect more, it gets harder to justify new ones. And for playing with them? I collect, so I always worry about them getting damaged - and many are. But PDFs? PDFs don't get damaged during play. I can collect a lot more PDFs than I can books. And PDFs are way more useful during play. So much so I find it hard to play games that aren't on PDF.

Now there is a limitation to all this. 1,000+ page games need not apply for my PDF good feelings and excitement, as those are way too huge to print out and own in a usable form with just the PDF. I like short, tight, simple games where more of the rules are in a core 64-128 page form, and easily printable and dividable into sections. I feel PDFs for larger games are only good for reference material or online reading, as printing out the spells of even basic Pathfinder would take reams of paper and be a nightmare to use at the table. Even though I have many Pathfinder PDFs, they are not as useful as PDFs of shorter and simpler games.

So there is a sweet spot for PDF games. Short enough to print out everything and organized enough that dividing the book up makes sense and allows players to pass chapters around as needed. The future isn't the traditional coffee-table RPG book collection for our groups, it is taking the form of a smaller, lighter, and easier to use and play with set of electronic documents that can be used how and in the forms we want to use.

D&D Classics: Every Edition on Sale!

Very good news from Wizards and the great guys at Drive Thru RPG. It seems like every edition of D&D is now for sale via PDF up at the www.dndclassics.com store. Not all the core rulebooks are up yet, but there are sections for Basic/Expert, 1E, 2E, 3E, and yes, even 4E - and some of the releases are old, out of print rulebooks. This is a great thing, and brings Wizards back up to the times in our tablet and smartphone world. The prices are great too, plus regular sales, very cool.

This is a positive step, and one that is very welcome. Credit where credit is due, thank you Wizards and the team out there for making this happen.

I shall repeat the call for some of the classics as PDFs as well; such as Star Frontiers, Top Secret, Gangbusters, Gamma World, and all the old TSR greats. You are doing an incredible job with the store guys, keep it up, and they deserve our support. Get out there and play these as well, they deserve to be seen again by new players and new faces!