In the Shade of Greatness

Some works I've had the luck to recently edit

The Roaring Age; Block, Dodge, Parry; Wilderlands; and Chaos Crier #1

One of the pleasures of working as an editor in the RPG space has been getting to intimately experience texts that I might not have seen on my own—and getting the chance to appreciate these works page-by-page, line-by-line.

I've recently had the luck to edit four very different works, three of them based on games with a lineage going back to Into the Odd but taking that in three different directions. I can wholeheartedly recommend each of these, and in this post I want to quickly describe why I think you should check them out.

Taking horror forward by going backward

One of the most popular horror systems in the OSR space is Liminal Horror, a modern horror game based on Yochai Gal’s Cairn. Jack Edward, a friend of mine and one of my favorite GMs, decided to adapt Liminal Horror to use it to run classic Call of Cthulhu adventures, and in doing so, I think he improved the game and gave it powerful tools for long-term campaign play.

The result of his work was The Roaring Age. If you’re a Liminal Horror GM, I highly recommend checking it out—and in fact I recommend checking it out even if you aren’t. Odd-likes are some of the most versatile game systems out there, and Jack has added some tools for horror games you should check out.

Advanced Cairn and Dragons

If you’ve spent any time in the Cairn-o-verse, you’ve undoubtedly heard of Block, Dodge, and Parry, by Lars aka Dice Goblin. It’s a toolkit for expanded player and GM options for playing Cairn. I had the good luck to work on the editing of the version that he recently published in PDF and print.

BDP, as its name suggests, expands the options for combat in Cairn (while keeping combat relatively quick), but it also provides tools for all other aspects of the game, from social conflicts to character improvement to magic. If you like Cairn but want a bit more crunch, check out BDP. (The SRD is entirely free.) Part of what makes it such an easy game to recommend is that while it does work as a complete game, it is also designed to be used simply as a toolbox. The different pieces can be used separately, so you can add the things you want and not the things you don’t.

Over the edge of the wild

With Tolkien as the inspiration for so many people playing RPGs, it’s surprising that there haven’t been more games that have managed to capture the feel of Tolkien. If you want the feel of LOTR, a lot of people swear by The One Ring, and I wouldn’t necessarily gainsay them.

But what if you want the slightly less rigid, more open feel of the 1937 version of The Hobbit, where there wasn’t a ton of lore behind every stone but there was an immense amount of magic? Bilbo’s ring was an interesting magic ring, goblins weren’t orcs, and elves were funny people in the woods. And what if the licensed Tolkien games feel like they don’t quite capture the magic of LOTR either?

In those cases, I’d recommend Wilderlands, written by Edward Edwards. (A link for physical copies is at the same link.) It takes the chassis of Cairn and adds Tolkien-esque elements that add both flavor and mechanical differences. Songs both emphasize the importance of song in Tolkien while also giving your PC more survivability than a standard Cairn PC, while not really adding crunch.

One thing I really love about the game is the backgrounds for PCs that give a GM an easy burst of inspiration about how to complicate a campaign. Almost all of them are both suggestive but also easy to use to draw the PC toward new adventures—and maybe create some conflicts in the party.

The game also includes an adventure that manages to not just have a dungeon for exploration but also sets up the kind of moral conflict that Tolkien gave Bilbo in The Hobbit. It’s a great example of how to make RPGs about more than dungeon-crawling.

More chaos for your black sword

One of the most strikingly designed and enthused over new games in the past year or so has been The Black Sword Hack-Ultimate Chaos Edition, a redesign and expansion by the Merry Mushmen of Kobayashi’s swords-and-sorcery game. That game, which is full of flavor and tools to make a game feel like a Conan or Elric adventure, came with the zeroth edition of an associated periodical, the Chaos Crier.

Recently I had the pleasure of proofreading Chaos Crier #1, which adds a wide variety of material for The Black Sword Hack, including taking GMs and players back to the fan-favorite city of Nijmauwrgen, from Chaos Crier #0.

(Somewhat annoyingly, the quick turnaround time of the Merry Mushmen meant that I’m only credited on the website, not in the issue itself, but such is life. I just wanted to point this out in case you’re wondering where I disappeared to.)

The quality of the Merry Mushmen’s work is well-known, and if you’re a Black Sword Hack player, this is an obvious purchase. One thing I’ll point out is that some of the character options in this periodical could significantly widen the tone of the games you might play with the system, including giving more options for classic fantasy archetypes. But it also doesn’t skimp on the weird fantasy.