Fight On! #9: The Crawling Hand Edition
Oh, man, I love crawling hands. And I love dinosaurs. The latest Fight On! has them both, although I provided the dinosaurs. Kelvin Green provided an awesome illustration of your players running from a dinosaur. It’s like Land of the Lost• with fantasy weapons. And there’s a very evocative cliffside by William Buckland, too, that makes me wish they had room to make these bigger.
This one is dedicated to Paul Jaquays, and includes an interview with him covering his time just before working for Judges Guild through his leaving TSR before it folded, as well as working in computer games before and after that. The interview was conducted by Ciro Sacco and Allen Varney.
I’m waiting for my print copy to read things through closely, but here’s what I’m seeing at a clance:
- There’s a strange-looking dungeon called The Hobgoblin God’s Crown by James Quigley that looks interesting, for levels 3-5.
- An even stranger-looking dungeon called The Contemptible Cube of Quazar, by Jimm Johnson and Jeff Lynk, for levels 4-6. It has the most intriguing map I’ve seen on a dungeon yet, I think.
- Caverns of the Beast Mistress, by Tavis Allison, inspired by, and connectable to, Paul Jaquays’s Caverns of Thracia.
- They’re pushing through The Darkness Beneath, with the twelfth-level Blasphemous Shrine of the Tentacled God by Jeff Rients.
- Fiction. I have never seen a gaming magazine do fiction well. I’d like to say that the only exception was The Neo-Anarchists Guide to Everything Else, but, frankly, we didn’t do fiction well either. So I don’t have high hopes for this, but, as I said, I haven’t read it yet. (And that said, I am looking forward to Weird Enclaves and Black Pits, their separate fiction project.)
The front and back cover on this issue excels. You can see them both in the preview at Lulu.com.
Clocking in at 116 pages, Fight On! continues to be well worth getting if you’re looking for inspiration for your game.
- Allen Varney, writer and game designer: Allen Varney
- “I’m an American freelance writer and game designer, currently living in my longtime home of Austin, Texas. My published work includes the current edition of the classic 1980s roleplaying game PARANOIA, six books, three boardgames, nearly two dozen roleplaying game supplements, contributions to several computer games, the fantasy novel Cast of Fate (TSR, 1996), and over 300 articles, reviews, columns, and stories.”
- Fight On!
- “Fight On! is a journal of shared fantasy. We are a community of role-playing enthusiasts unified by our love of the freewheeling, do-it-yourself approach that birthed this hobby back in the 1970's. We are wargamers who write our own rules and fantasists who build our own worlds, weekend warriors sharing dreams of glory and authors collaborating on tales of heroism and valor. We talk, paint, draw, write, act, costume, build, and roll dice in service of our visions.”
- Jeff’s Gameblog: Jeff Rients
- “Farm boy who wanted to grow up, go to the Academy, and join the Rebellion. That didn’t exactly work out.”
- Kelvin Green’s Website: Kelvin Green
- “Kelvin Green is an award-winning artist and writer, based in Brighton, on England’s allegedly sunny south coast. His comics work includes stories for The O Men, Paragon, PJANG! and Solar Wind, and his art has been featured in publications such as Fight On!, the Basic/Expert Companion for Dungeons and Dragons, and the science fiction game Boarding Action.”
- Land of the Lost: First Season•
- Looks like they’ve made Land of the Lost available by season. So now you can see the Sleestak in chronological order!
- Paul Jaquays
- “Paul Jaquays’ early career is best defined by his designs for RPG adventures like Dark Tower and Caverns of Thracia for Judges Guild and Griffin Mountain for Chaosium. As eventual Director of Game Design at Coleco, he had a hand in nearly every video game coming out for ColecoVision and the ADAM Computer.”