Human by day, Dungeon Master by night.
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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…
