Human by day, Dungeon Master by night.
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 thing about Demon City is how rememberable it is. I haven't played Demon City in years. When I thought about converting the Hickmans' OG Ravenloft to it, it took me a couple minutes of lazy thinking to recall how the stats, the skills, the "classes" (motivations,…
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. And more about it here.
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…
Fact: Ursula Le Guin was one of the great ones. That goes without saying. Fact: Le Guin's magic in Earthsea is cool. It is very non-Vancian mechanically (in the D&D fire-and-forget meaning), but also very Vancian in the mood (wizard of the Dying Earth desperately try to recover lost spells, out of which only about a hundred are still known; wizards of Earthsea spend years finding out a single word…
Last weekend I was at Terminal City convention, hosting some Lamentations of the Flame Princess games. Tried out Becami's adventure, The Black Chamber , which turned out deadly but not before I unleashed some creative spellcasting violence. The Referee, Austin , wrote a bit about this year's game and a bit about last year's game that I ran, you can read it at WatcherDM . And maybe buy some stuff…
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…
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…
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…
Go get some Lamentations goodness.
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.
I'm thinking about the USA election, and I'm thinking about Ukraine, and I'm remembering how the "Berkut" snipers shot journalists in Kyiv in 2013, and of course I remember Linda Tirado. And here's an article, an interview with her . She's crazy and beautiful. And here's a story she told a couple days ago. I don't know how long she can live like this. Brain's a tricky thing. There's not much…
I don't know if there's anything that can be added to what Kelvin posted. I can only repeat it.
Jeff Rients quoted this on his blog. And it got me thinking about stuff that we're playing. The Dragonlance campaign that we hacked is more or less over this issue, the elven princess has two brothers, there are male and female evil generals, dragons, gods, all of them have names. Switch them around and not much will change, although I like the idea of a female Death Knight lusting after an elven…
If you're on Gen Con, check out this year's LotFP free catalog. Because there's something awesome in there. Let's hear from James E. Raggi IV.
Thanks to everyone who bought All Dogs Go to Hell , it's now a silver bestseller on DTRPG. Yay! Yaaay. To celebrate this, I'm going to make pizza. I'd invite y'all to have a slice but I don't have enough for everyone, sorry. Instead, I'm going to publish a little thing that I've been working on (with some vital help from my friends). I dunno if I'll make it a pay-what-you-want on DT or put it…
So here's Zak's new book, collecting his artworks from 2000's and until today. Twenty years ago the Orange Revolution halted the totalitarian usurpation in Ukraine. Today things are quite horrible, but art is still art. I've ordered it already, but it'll take some time to get it from Europe. Personally, I like this spread. Something in the colour scheme appeals to my Ukrainian patriotism. The…
I never got to know Linda Tirado in person. I learned about her after she, a journalist, was shot by a cop. I read what she posted on Twitter back when it was still Twitter. I saw a fighter, a strong and loving person who knew what real evil was and despised it, and never stopped fighting against it. She's dying. The rubber bullet shot by the policeman caused too much damage. The world will be a…
I don't know the Pendragon games too well, all I know is that there's an interesting mass combat mechanic, and now there's this new edition of Pendragon and the mass combat is not there. Or it's not there yet, or it was never meant to be there, I dunno. People are strange. Genndy Tartakovsky plans to make an animated heist comedy about frog brothers. Sounds awesome - Genndy, animation, frogs,…
I've known people whose lives were destroyed because someone lied about them. Some of them lost everything and recovered. Some of them died. When you live in Ukraine after 2014, that's how it is - you see propaganda directed straight against you, you learn that a bomb exploded at the apartment of someone that you know, you talk to people and you see hungry monsters in their eyes when they repeat…
As you probably know, Mike Mearls used to work on D&D. Now Chaosium decided to hire him. And people who lied about Mearls when he worked on D&D, and never stopped lying, are now putting extra effort into telling lies. Specifically, there's a completely made up story about Mearls "giving Zak S a list of people to harass". How can we know that it's completely made up? Because people who spread it…
We're still stuck in Spidernesti, so this is what I mean when talking about "land". What is the deal with my cleric's religion? Kiri-Jolith is a good god of war. Kind of Athena, only male and without an owl, I suppose? Sounds kind of lame in comparison, frankly. Where can we go to buy standard equipment? The economy is currently in ruins thanks to the whole land being cursed. Maybe the local elves…
"The House of Stars became the House of Spiders". That's the line from Tanis's secret journal that the heroes managed to decipher. And the druidess really, really wanted more spiders. Which is how the elf, dwarf, and two kendergirls found themselves at the borders of Silvanesti, greeted by none other than Porthios, far from everyone's favourite elf. Now, I must say that Tracy Raye Hickman put a…