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Gods & Monsters Fantasy Role-Playing

Beyond here lie dragons

Fight On! 10: The Eudora Welty edition

Jerry Stratton, November 14, 2010

At 138 pages, Fight On! 10 is not the biggest issue—issue 3 maintains its record at 144 pages—but it’s still pretty big. Even though I got a contributor’s PDF as soon as it came out, it’s still taken me forever to get through it1. I’m very sympathetic to those (who, oddly, include the editors) who think the mag should be limited to 88 pages.

Still, there’s a lot of cool stuff here. The big draw is the second half of Gabor Lux’s Khosura. This installment covers the Undercity and is twenty-four and a half pages of ymmu m’kurza sìrkomplexuma.

There are also a handful of one-page adventures, including a one-page hex map of a river valley by Lord Kilgore. It is filled with interesting one-sentence things to find, that the GM will need to flesh out if the characters follow up on them.

James Mishler has a nice Lost World setting, presented as a series of islands with an Oceanic flair. This would be a great place to stick the dinosaur jungle from issue 9 if you don’t already have dinosaurs in your game. It includes both an overview of the areas—such as “Grul-Dek Lan, the Burning Waste” and “Sul’Aar-ras, the Plains of Mist”—and a hex map with key, such as “0408 An Ichthyosaur hunts these waters”.

As usual, there are a couple of random tables, including a “Moldvay-esque Adventure Helper” with such entries as “Portal to a parallel earth opens! GM Choice where it leads. Nazis are probably involved.”

Geoffrey O’Dale has another plug-in dungeon locale. This one is a toll bridge across an underground chasm. It is, of course, guarded by trolls—but that’s not all. This is a tough military-style adventure if the characters decide not to pay the toll (and it could be tough even if they pay).

There’s a fantastic overview of the Moulin Rouge—in Las Vegas. I know it’s fantastic because I ran our game through it about a year or so ago. It’s the reason I received a contributor’s PDF! There’s nothing in it tying it to Gods & Monsters, so you should be able to use it for any fantasy setting if you’re into multi-dimensional or time travel adventures. This was part of a series of adventures inspired by Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, which reads to me like someone’s D&D game.2

Chris Robert does the City of the Ancients for Fight On!’s The Darkness Beneath megadungeon, as a Carcosan mystery. It would work just fine on its own if, as I do, you enjoy the very strange.

Finally, since this issue is dedicated to Tom Moldvay, it includes a Moldvay retrospective. Paul Stormberg provided “Everyone is here to have fun”, which was apparently slated to appear in Dragon Magazine before Dragon went under.

Incidentally, this is the first issue that doesn’t have custom art for the back cover3, instead using an advertisement. But since the advertisement is the amazing front-cover art from Lamentations of the Flame Princess, I have no problems with it. That is one of the best fantasy covers I’ve seen on game or book.

  1. I started this review exactly one month ago: October 13.

  2. Specifically, it was with Song of Susannah that I just gave up trying to make our game not look like I stole it from the Gunslinger’s world.

  3. Well, technically the first issue also didn’t have custom art for the back cover—it just had a blank back cover.

  1. <- Isle of Mordol
  2. Tractor Feed Kerouac ->