Biblyon Broadsides

Gods & Monsters news and old-school gaming notes.

Gods & Monsters Fantasy Role-Playing

Beyond here lie dragons

Fight On! 7 is out (and I’m in)

Jerry Stratton, December 12, 2009

The latest Fight On! is out—issue 7. Look on page 29 for Song of Tranquility by yours truly. There’s a great drawing by Mark J. Allen of a frozen mountainside covered in dead things. I made the maps in Inkscape, so if you want to play around with the maps, I’ve uploaded them here as Inkscape files.

If you order over the holidays, enter HUMBUG for a 10% discount. (Update December 13: I just heard that HOHOHO gives a 20% discount.)

This issue looks like a lot of fun, as usual. I haven’t read it through yet, but if you buy it for one thing buy it for the Mutant Future Wandering Harlot table.

BTW, speaking of old-school, while looking up old Dragon authors recently I discovered that I have an entry on Acaeum too, for the three Dragon Magazine articles I managed to get accepted back in the eighties. (Fortunately, Dragon rarely included author photos.)

If you’re looking to bundle up your purchases to save on shipping, also consider The Story Games Names Project and Stonehell Dungeon. I’ve already talked about the Names book; I finally ordered a copy myself about a week ago, and it arrived on Monday.

Stonehell is interesting. It’s very much the old-school, specifically Judges Guild, style of short, simple, tiny entries per encounter area. There is no flavor text. Normally I’m not a big fan of that style, as much as I enjoy reading the adventures, I can’t run them. But Michael Curtis takes this style and combines it with the one-page-dungeon style to make it much more useful. He provides a complete overview of each section on two facing pages, making it easy to see what’s going on in that area. When the players reach a new area, you need only take a short break to re-read the two-page description and then to re-read the two-page map/key.

Each level has two facing pages describing the overall level, with shrunken versions of the maps for that level. Again, all on just two pages. Each level is divided into separate areas. Each area consists of a two-page overview, and a two-page map and key. The overview contains the basic premise of that area of the dungeon, as well as any special creatures and magic items.

Four pages per section, plus two extra pages per level. And 131 pages of this. It’s huge, and it’s the first huge dungeon I’ve ever seen that I’d be comfortable running. I mean, I love Castle of the Mad Archmage, but it’ll be a long time before I feel comfortable running that sprawling mess.

So. One. Buy Fight On #7. Two. If you’re missing any other issues, buy them. And three, if you need to fill out your order, take a look around. There’s a lot of cool stuff there.

The Names/Stonehell package arrived on Monday in the pouring rain—we got about a quarter of our annual rainfall in one day and the box soaked up most of it. The box was soggy, and bent when I picked it up like a rotten pumpkin. But Lulu’s plastic wrapping kept the books safe and dry. They were in perfect condition. (The pizza sauce that spilled all over it was, I’m afraid, my fault.)

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