Basically this.
https://lotfp.substack.com/p/new-books-now-available-lotfp-year
James and Yannick and Glynn and Matthew are all good at what they do (I worked with them).
Order some good stuff, get some good stuff for free, I can't think of a better deal.
James describes it as "Zak's best work". Also as something that you, the audience, should buy as soon as possible.
And here's why.
Remember that book about fantasy Okinawa that was in the works for the past couple years?
Well, it's here now.
And it looks gorgeous. And soon (like, today or tomorrow) available from LotFP European webstore, and also at Ropecon and Gencon.
FPW is one of my favourite authors, ever. If you just count those who are alive tomorrow, he's definitely in top 3.
The Keep was one of those books that defined fantasy to me. And then I discovered Repairman Jack, and the idea of an urban mercenary who is forced to fight the unnamed horrors from the pages of Secret History of the world was cool. And there were bits of real life in the stories that made them better - the dirty secrets of modern "psychics" and cults.
The Upwelling is the penultimate book that he had written.
The last one should come out this autumn.
It's like those tales about master swordsmiths who create their finest blades before retiring forever. The Hidden duology is F. Paul Wilson's last.
It might turn out to be his finest.
Anyways, you can now buy The Upwelling, first book of The Hidden.
And keep your eyes open for the second book, Lexie.
That's pretty much it, folks.
DEMON CITY can now be bought, both in printed format and as a PDF.
I've had the PDF for some time now, and I'm really happy with how it's designed.
It's pure poetry, in the sense that it's strange, follows its own rhyme and reason, and has a really high information to volume ratio.
For example: explanation of how to play takes a couple pages, and it's presented as an "Actual Play" situation. The players make decisions, forget about stuff, remind each other about the stuff, and face the consequences. It's very comprehensible and fun to read.
Character generation is smooth and bright.
The art is gorgeous. It's Zak Smith at his best, and Shawn Cheng also at his best. Linda Tirado added to it, too, text-wise.
There's a bestiary of sorts - descriptions of the many kinds of monsters and horrors and what they do.
There're adventure seeds presented as movie posters, which is a great way to do this thing.
There are rules for how to play monsters as PCs if you're into it, and frankly, who's not into it?
My favourite part of the game is, like I always say, how easy it is to play it in the Here and Now. We played it in war-torn Ukraine, as members of local territorial defense unit who are called upon to investigate stuff that the police has no time or desire to deal with, and it felt very natural, the real bits of the city around us naturally flowed into the game. Later we played it online and the game took place in LA and it still felt natural and living.
It's a great game.
You should get it.
So this is the thing that I made.
What's it good for?
The Collection contains 30 magic items that I wrote up, more or less original. Some are weapons, some are clothes. Most are weird. Some are almost definitely cursed.
The items in the Collection are grouped into five categories. When you need to quickly and randomly give your players some unfamiliar magic loot, roll a d6 a couple times, and there you go.
The Collection was designed to be useful at a physical gaming table. So if you print it out on both sides of a Letter-sized page, and fold it along the marked folding lines, it should look like a booklet or bookmark, call it what you like.
Here's me using it as a bookmark for Zak's Compendium.
And then there's the Generator on a separate page, in case you need to quickly whip up some new magic item. You'll need a d4, or, if you want to randomize it more (and/or despise d4s), a d4, d8 and d20.
I playtested it, it's fast and efficient, and comes with four curses that can fall on whosoever picks up the magic item. It's compatible with LotFP and, I suppose, any other OSR game and old school D&D. If you like it but something doesn't fit your game, let me know and I'll think of something to fix it - or hack it yourself, which is the proper way.
You can buy it for whatever price you want in here.
Have a good game in the new year.
Among other things, we playtested a game of space western.
While the obvious secret ingredient is "playing with good and fun people", there are also some mechanics that made the game fun.
Like:
Setting the playground. A desolate world where everyone you meet is a survivor with some specific talents and possessions that helped them stay alive, and the scars left by their day to day struggles; and every location has some meaningful features that can be used to your advantage or disadvantage.
And:
Picking the toys. Every item that the PCs can have in their saddlebags is meaningful. You can pick simpler things and have slightly more of them, or just one-two really fancy trinkets.
Also:
You have your gun, your knife, and your robot horse. Each is personalized. No six-shooter in the world is like yours. They all have special features and flaws.
Plus:
The stats and skills, which are an effective fusion of D&D and Demon City.
And finally:
The showdown dueling rules. A deadly game of "rock-paper-scissors", only more nuanced and flexible.
My character's life was, in the end, saved by his trusty magnetic boots.
And Gooseman was his name.
In case you didn't know, Zak is taking down his Cube World adventures that are available from his Store. They'll be gone after this year ends.
Instead, he suggests this.
The Compendium that has all the Cube World stuff and then some.
Hardcover.
Efficient.
Beautiful.
I mean, look at this.
So if you, like me, want this, you have until January 1st to write to Zak and to ask for it.
Sweet.
The latest adventure in Zak's Cube World series is simple and elegant like a snake. It's about snake people.
No stepping on the snake, please, thank you.
It has cool monsters; interesting treasure that's both valuable and useful; secrets and traps and puzzles; a map that has all the information you need right on it; an explanation of how all the snakes are books and what kind of books and how they can be read and who knows about it; and with it, you also get the latest edition of Cube World Bestiary and Random Treasure Table.
Like the rest of the Cube World, it's compatible with LotFP rules, or you can hack it and use with the game you're playing. After all, system doesn't matter.
Gem at Damage to an unresisting target is always Massive wrote a cool post about the xenomorphs from Alien and the Thing from that film based on Who Goes There?, and made up monsters with Demon City stats based on those two horrible extraterrestrials. Gem is very methodic with their approach to horror films and games.
Stygian Muse wrote a review of my doggy adventure which you can buy at J. E. Raggi IV's PDF store at Drivethru. I feel flattered.
Raggi himself uploaded a video where he talks about how the owners of D&D change the language in the books and why it is not a good idea. It's worth watching.
There's an Australian cartoon called "Bluey" and it's excellent, some of the episodes say more about tabletop roleplaying than some shows about tabletop roleplaying. Also, an episode of this cartoon was banned by Disney because it's about a male anthropomorphic dog pretending to be pregnant as he plays with his daughters, and that's offensive to someone?.. Anyhow, it's on Youtube and it's great.
So this book, something that I wanted for a long time - a fantasy roleplaying game set in a place heavily influenced by Japan, so you can have samurai and ninja and yokai hanging out and doing what they usually do, - The Nebulith is coming.
It's LotFP compatible, mostly, because there are some new things. It has new character classes that are interesting and challenging in their own ways. It has a special mechanic of how magic works for one of those classes. It has martial arts moves - a lot of those. Each school is different, each is effective in its way, each is interesting.
And check out Zak's gorgeous art.
Now I want to play a ninja and I don't even like ninja that much.
I have tried playtesting, it is fun, unless you are stupid and your game sucks. Then it is not.
Some notes on online playtesting:
Printing out the notes you have helps a lot. While electronic documents are easy to edit and have search options, when you have a printed out page, you can see it all. It helps to find stuff that you want to find.
Having a blank piece of paper helps. I never have one when I play. I make notes and draw maps on the other side of my printouts, character sheets, uncut paper minis, and that's suboptimal.
When making a map it's a good idea to keep one sheet for a map and the other for notes. While it's good to write stuff on the map when you're making a module, when you're actually playing, it's more convenient to put a number or a symbol on the map and write the note on a different sheet, rather than make your corridor squirm around the "GIANT SPIDER HERE!" text.
My attention span is short. After three hours of playing I start cutting out paper minis in worrysome quantities.
Also, cutting off a head of the paper mini that looks like the monster you've just killed is amusing for the party.
We crawled through a Nebulith (soon to come Okinawa-themed LotFP-compatible book) adventure. The new character classes are seriously cool. I liked how the professions worked in Usagi Yojimbo game, and these are doing a similar thing, only better.
And it's always nice to meet an NPC that you know and like.
P. S.
"So the floor is lava?"
"Yes".
One combat round later: everyone is in lava.
Two combat rounds later: everyone checks if you can swim in lava.
There's a lot I wanted to write about, but I didn't. Because a) real life demands some action, It's nicer and more fun than what I did in my old life, but still time-consuming.
And b) some of my favourite people in the hobby asked me to do some work, and when this happens, you don't say "But I want to write something for my blog".
Can't say what's it going to be but it should be good, if I manage to finish it.
But meanwhile, some nice things.
I've thought about making a table for LotFP that's all about drugs, magical drugs, creepy drugs, drugs that make you stronger, drugs that make you weird, etc. While I was thinking about it, Zak went and made one.
I think using it for side effects of magic potions will be interesting. Instead of a d6, roll a d100 and use Zak's table for the specific effect.
Going to playtest it with the Playing D&D In Ukraine gang as soon as we get together and roll some dice.
So it was like this.
James Raggi, in his wisdom, decided to make a free adventure for Gencon to go with the LotFP catalog. Since he had a lot on his plate (he brought, like, ten books&booklets to Gencon? New stuff, and also reprints? A lot, anyways), he decided to get someone else to write the adventure.
And when I suggested myself, Raggi thought I have a funny name, and it would look good on the cover of the LotFP catalog.
The rest is history.
James Raggi came up with the name and the general idea of a dog in distress. Yannick Bouchard made a kickass cover picture. Tom Cadorette did a great job on editing, and Glynn Seal made it all look prettier with the cartography and layout.
Besides the abovementioned people, I want once again to thank Sandra, just because; the playtesters - Alvur, Cerne and Kisa, who are still Playing Tabletop In Ukraine; Zak at Playing D&D With Pornstars who dragged me into the crazy world of tabletop roleplaying; Jeff Rients at Jeffs Gameblog for showing how much fun a crafty DM can have; and Becami Cusack at Systematica who helped and supported, and together with Sam Cusack helped me make the drafts of maps.
Anything that's wrong with the writing is completely on me.
I have only bought one of these so far (and written another).
Have a look, maybe it'll drive you to buy something nice.
It's funny, sometimes quite disgusting, and all in all very Raggi.
Please buy everything. Especially the Black Chamber and Broodmother Skyfortress.
This is one of the coolest things I've seen in RPG books.
It looks good. It looks interesting. You know how there's art that looks nice, and you admire the technique and the composition, and then there's the art that makes you think "woah, I wish I could just step inside".
The second kind is D&D-able art. And that's what Zak does here.
Imagine living in a town underneath this huge frozen-in-place explosion cloud.
Imagine climbing it to see the weird creatures living there, and to look for treasure - or certain doom! Probably both!
Check out more of Zak's art for the new book here.
The funny thing about Demon City is... well, there are many. I firmly believe that it's the best horror RPG ever made. Anyhow, a funny t...
