Re-introduced me to wargaming, really love this stuff, wished I got more people to play it with. Awesome and different way to wargame with a special focus on narrative and infinite verticality.

I really wanted to give this collection of tools a higher score, as I think there is a lot of great bits of information in here that is worth seeing, and it would be an excellent supplement to any weird urban setting like Eberron, Curse of Strahd or Blades in the Dark. I personally found the tool interface iteslf to be a bit clunky and so a lot of the information was not as accessible to me as I was looking for, but for someone more tech saavy than me, these could be a great addition to their game.

Recently, I soloed my way through The Cradle of Madness. It is an interesting D & D adventure for characters of levels 3 to 8. I turned it into a level one adventure. It can be found in Dungeon Magazine issue # 87 (archived on the internet). The two systems I used to play it were #1 Deathtrap Light Preview (24 pages and free). It is not a complete game (for example, there are no rules for combat). So, I combined it with #2 Ordure Fantasy a six-sided die system (19 pages). The solo engine that I used was Loner (12 pages and free). The three documents (not the magazine) are available at DriveThruRPG.

My five characters picked up the quest on the first day. Owen wanted his daughter to be rescued from the Nightmare Syndicate. A ransom needed to be paid. Owen and the characters went to the designated spot on the second day and the fight was on. The characters let one fighter live and gave the ransom money back to Owen. They then followed the wounded fighter through the wilderness. After a giant beetle encounter they arrived at the ruined keep. They had some problems getting in there. So, they decided to “lay siege” and force them out when they needed supplies. On the sixth day three fighters came out using a “new” bridge. The PCs killed them, entered the keep, and then went down the stairs. They had to get past three traps, four guard dogs, and more bad guys (cultists). After some looting, they ran into the daughter Lyza who was obviously pregnant and in love with some cleric guy. Well, my characters were not going to interfere with that. So, they headed back to town (a quiet trip) and gave Owen the bad news. Will this play out differently when you give it a try?

An excellent set of very detailed generators for generating characters, locations, conflicts and details for a wild and wonder-filled fantasy city.

The d6 Demiurge is a solo engine with seven pages and it can be used for any RPG game system. I am familiar with quite a few solo engines, so, here is my review. The good – it contains nineteen d6 charts. It does work, I soloed my way through a free Pathfinder adventure with it. The bad – this needs either a keyword list or a way to generate keywords. (These words generate different types of encounters by interpreting the results).The ugly – the layout is not attractive at all. So, since this a free/pay what you want product and it works, I am going to rate it a four out of five stars.

Inspiring cover. But the content is a near-settingless collection of random tables. Also, it turns out it's just D&D. That's too bad.

It's just a D&D OSR of B/X but with 5e's Advantage/Disadvantage rule...in spaaaaace! I am disappointed. I was hoping for something original as the cover art suggested.

Ordure Fantasy is a simple, easy toto learn, yet suprisingly robust RPG. Best suited for pick up games, but capable of supporting a short campaign. The mechanics revolve around rolling low on a d6. Combat is quick and simple, with PCs rolling all the dice. However, for my money, what I really like are the several pages of random charts, helping to inspire adventures, monster creation, and world design. There are no rules for running nonhuman characters, but that isn't really what this game is about. There is no bestiary, but there are rules for creating monsters.

The book itself, is 19 pages, simply laid out with beautiful minimalist artwork.

I bought this on the strength of Star Dogs and it is a genuinely pleasant surprise with a profoundly different tone. The d6 system is very simple but entirely original, with some variation in effect and target numbers. The classes are traditional in concept but somewhat re-imagined in their capabilities. Many random tables are built into the game, providing rich atmosphere and direct purpose, as well as generating encounters and opponents. It strikes an ideal balance for me between old school gameplay and freeform storytelling.

The overall vibe, particularly with the provided monsters and the content of the tables is fairly serious, rather surreal and definitely weird fantasy. Though there aren't any horror mechanics per se, the game is lethal and the tone disturbing, though not overly dark. Despite the easy system, it feels capable of handling far deeper, far stranger and far larger storied campaigns. I'm thinking more Lord Dunsany or Clark Ashton Smith than Tolkien.

The artwork is perfect and I believe Matthew Adams, scattered simple conceptual pieces to evoke and inspire. I especially like the character illustrations, each a single item to represent the class, a talwar, a tome, an arbalest and a censer.

I expected to find a light-hearted "beer and pretzels" dungeon romp (though it can do that) but instead I found a deeper and more thoughtful game under 20 pages, a simple but solid system to wrap a world around or to spend one very wicked night with my weirdest friends. I absolutely love it and I hope the publisher offers a POD option.

This is an amazing and flavorful resource for running space opera games. You can create aliens species, nebula, planets, outposts / spacestations, and interesting NPCs. I've only started to use this to run a campaign, but my players are having a great time with this. I've used it to create a not-hard scifi setting, an outpost of slums and fancy high-rises, on a planet covered in toxic gas and acid pools, and crystal-horned crocodile-looking things that, when domesticated, are used as mounts. The PCs need to kidnap a muscician whose consciousness is stored inside his robot 'butler', but the NPC generator has given me someone else to try to foil their plans.

The tables are great, and the ART is FANTASTIC! Crescent-moon-headed aliens with energy two-handed swords??? YES. Crescent-moon-headed mecha? YES. There's not a ton of art within but what there is has been a great inspiration to make fantastical science fiction content.

This is effectively a system neutral book with 56 pages of random charts, tables and generators. Highly recommended to anyone running a soft sci fi game.

An Endzeitgeist.com review

This module clocks in at 19 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page ToC, leaving us with 17 pages of content, so let’s take a look!

Okay, so, this does not subscribe to a single OSR-system per se; instead, when ability scores are required for an NPC, the pdf suggests just rolling 1d6 – 3d6 to spontaneously determine ability scores for saves. HD of monsters are randomized: d4HD@d6, for example, means that the creature rolls a d4. Then you take that result times the die indicated after the “@” to determine HP. Each HD = +1 to attack/hit. The pdf assumes ascending AC. “Testing “ e.g. “WIS” is not explained, but it is evident that rolling under the ability score is the way to go. No default movement rate or morale is given. In short: This assumes ability score-based saves akin to 5e, as well as ascending AC, and a direct 1:1-correlation between number of HD and to hit values.

Once you’ve understood that, conversion to most customary OSR-games should be simple. The pdf bolds rules-relevant components, which makes parsing the module rather simple. Two hand-drawn artworks of specific individuals are provided. Each NPC/monster has a motivation noted (NICE!) under “Wants:” Unfortunately, AoE-attacks, such as a cloud of sleeping dust, has no range/area noted.

The module comes with a hand-drawn, colored map that uses color to differentiate between e.g. closed and open doors, and we get them all on one page, as well as in larger versions for the respective levels. The maps are functional, but nokey-less version is provided, and the maps sport no grid, which can make getting a grasp on the dimensions of the compound a bit tougher than necessary.

The respective levels actually have entries for individual doors – you roll e.g. a d4 and get a brief description – awesome! Not so awesome – some doors are trapped without a means to discern that beforehand...which is usually one of my pet-peeves. That being said, for the genre, this kinda makes sense. Presentation of individual rooms is handled via bullet points, with underlined segments providing the details at one glance. Random encounters are provided

Beyond the module, the pdf also includes a fully mapped suburb of Infinigrad (same complaints regarding the map); what is Infinigrad? I’m glad you asked! Picture a ginormous planar metropolis, an infinite sprawl, less Sigil or City of 7 Seraphs, and more of a Bas-Lag-like moloch of a city. The genre here is definitely fantasy-punk, and I mean that in the best of ways. Indeed, if you enjoy the weird and the notion of a planar metropolis, Infinigrad is a great recommendation – I’ve been using the material the author provides to expand e.g. the City of 7 Seraphs and make it more grimy/gritty and strange. How cool is Infinigrad? Let me give you two examples of stores you can find on Leoptera Shores:

“Vac Maz, Oily stone golem, offering the hire of a semi reliable flying device he stole from his ex master.”

“Cecckz, creamy white beetle man preacher, clicks and clacks and causes congregation to sway in ecstatic stupor”

Come on, that’s awesome! There are more ideas in these brief descriptions than in many comparable chapters of other supplements!

Genre-wise, this is a low-level module of a genre we almost never get to see – it’s essentially a Shadowrun/infiltration in a fantastic context. The PCs are assumed to be Guild Dogs (In my City of 7 Seraphs version, guilds serve the parities, just as an aside), i.e. semi-legal troubleshooters.

And this is as far as I can go without diving into SPOILERS. Potential players should jump ahead to the conclusion.

… .. .

All right, only referees around? Great! So, the PCs are hired by Ovos Pool on behalf of a wealthy merchant names Equis Jud, with Ovo being an eyman. What’s an eyman? Picture a humanoid whose head is a ginormous eye, with an amulet of lips hanging from his neck, doing the talking. Ovos wants the PCs to infiltrate the compound of the elfs and taint their memory water.

Wait, what? Oh, yeah, should have mentioned that: Elfs here? They are brainchest elfs! Blank-faced and bare-chested, with rippling, brain-like timorous growths on the chest. They live forever, but forget everything every 100 years or so to maintain their sanity – memory water is used to “reset” them and produce memory spheres to prevent the loss of the accumulated knowledge. This process btw. involves weird worms that are fed with meat…these are not nice elfs…

The compound of the elves is organic, almost like a biotech greenhouse, with strange plants, moths and their weird tech; fumes can intoxicate nonelfs, and the strange creatures do not take kindly to the presence of non-elfs in their compound. The 3-storey-tall building comes with a note on patrols and a TON of things to interact with and screw up – the compound rewards casing the joint, but it also is obviously assuming that the PCs, at one point, will have to escape. The main adversary and commander of the facility is super-deadly, and attempting to murder-hobo through this module is not something I’d recommend.

To give you an example of a room:

1. Moss carpet room. Stone pipes snake from east wall to west wall. D6 Nightmare Moths lurk on ceiling.

• Stone pipes curve up in the center of the room and are crested by a round, grated misting device. Green mist puffs from the device. • All non elfs must test CON when entering green mist or fall asleep for d6 hours (at which point ceiling dwelling Nightmare Moths will feast their prone bodies). • Pale roots dangle from ceiling. • Stairs down.

This is all information you need to know; it provides weird stuff to interact with, danger, and a unique atmosphere.

Conclusion: Editing is good for an indie-offering; I noticed a few typo-level glitches, but nothing that impeded my ability to run this. Layout adheres to a one-column no-frills b/w-standard, with some nice hand-drawn drawings and public domain artwork used. The cartography is full-color, but lacks scale and player-friendly versions. EDIT: The pdf now comes fully bookmarked! Yeah!

I should not be half as excited about Michael Raston’s Guild Dogs adventure as I actually am. The complaints about the lack of player-friendly maps alone would usually suffice to sour me somewhat on it.

But I absolutely ADORE this module. The eymen, the weird elfs, the strange compound with its even stranger plant/fauna-tech-things, the strange plants – this module elicits something I rarely encounter, a jamais-vu. It is exciting, fun, and oozes creativity. Its focus on a Shadowrun/Cyberpunk-ish action-infiltration is amazing. I want MORE of this. I want so much more of Infinigrad, and I’d pay serious bucks for a full book or campaign of this quality and imaginative wealth. I genuinely love this!

Now, I can’t bestow my highest accolades on this module, courtesy of the few formal shortcomings, but guess what? This is PWYW to boot! That makes this easily one of the most unique, awesome little PWYW-scenarios you’re bound to find out there. Seriously, get this, leave a tip. The author frickin’ deserves it for the amazing material and vistas here. My final verdict, considering that this gem is offered for PWYW, will hence be 4.5 stars, and this gets my seal of approval. Can we PLEASE have more? Pretty please?

Endzeitgeist out.

An Endzeitgeist.com review

This massive toolkit clocks in at 73 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page ToC, 1 page back cover, leaving us with 69 pages of content, so let’s take a look!

So, first of all, this is a toolkit I didn’t realize I wanted. I love me some weird planar metropolis; whether it’s Sigil, the City of 7 Seraphs or some other place; I love Bas-Lag, and I enjoy the outré weirdness of, let’s say, the assumed settings of Troika. Infinigrad, in a way, is a ginormous such metropolis, one sprawling on a planar scale, and it just makes sense in such a context to have the city controlled by a plethora of guilds both strange and wondrous. (As an aside, in my interpretation of the City of 7 Seraphs, I have made the guilds essentially subcontractors of the parities.) Infinigrad’s assumption is that the PCs serve the guilds as Guild Dogs, a kind of fantasypunk shadow/edgerunners, and in the so far only module in the setting, the PWYW “Pollute the Elfen Memory Water” this cool concept is executed exceedingly well. It should be noted that this book can be used as an infusion of nonstandard fantasy aspects in your regular fantasy game – you don’t have to embrace the entirety of Infinigrad’s assumptions to use this.

So, first thing you need to know: This is peak indie roleplaying game design in many ways; the book straddles the realm of art, courtesy of the expert use of public domain images and sentences that look like they have been cut out and put inside; in many ways, this reminded me of my first use of Burroughs’ cutup technique with Naked Lunch, just…well, coherent. The entire book feels like a massive collage. This might strike you as pretentious at first glance, but once you realize that the functionality of the book is never compromised by the aesthetics, that feeling will go away. This is very much a book intended to be used. It is a tool.

Now, if you’re familiar with the PWYW “The Transient Bazaar”, you can picture, to a degree, what you’ll get herein – a ridiculously mighty generator, where page upon page of tables to determine the components of the guilds in detail – from modus operandi to realms of expertise.

The SCALE is what sets this apart. You get 10 pages of expertise and forename tables, and guild examples are provided as well. Like the Transient Bazaar, this supplement also makes use of the cool visual generator idea, where essentially collages of public domain images, codified in grids, allow you to get instant inspiration. This way, you determine guild member looks, how the base of operation looks, and combine it further – these instances once more cover a wide array of pages.

The book also presents a massive job generator that covers, once more, page upon page of targets. “Haunt a target or replace it with a ghostly copy” – now that is an interesting task for the PCs! “Cause target to grow to enormous size”? Heck yeah, why not! We also have desirable actions covered, job locations, and dangers at site – and the combination is genuinely better than what I’d be able to convey with this review. This also extends to the rewards. Beyond that, a room layout generator is included alongside a brief dressing table.

Conclusion: Editing and formatting are top-notch; I noticed no serious hiccups. Layout is ART – 2-column collages with public domain art in the back, blended and combined in an effective manner that serves to enhance the overall, unique feeling of this toolkit. I printed it out, and I strongly suggest you do that as well (though it’ll be BRUTAL on your ink/toner) – or get the print copy. I don’t yet own the print copy, but I will get it. EDIT: The pdf now comes fully bookmarked, so getting pdf-only? Now a valid strategy! :D This is meant to be USED, and as such, I really suggest getting a physical iteration. It just makes the process swifter.

Michael Raston’s blasphemous roster is frickin’ amazing. It has all the hallmarks of artpunky indie RPGs, with its aesthetics, its genuinely novel ideas and sheer density of cool notions. And at the same time, it maintains its serious focus on functionality. This is a capital letters TOOL, and yet, it feels unlike e.g. all of New Big Dragon Games Unlimited’s excellent D30-toolkits. Why? Because it is genuinely FUN to use. This book is at once a thoroughly USEFUL book, and at the same time, a genuinely FUN book to flip open and use, time and again.

In short: This is one impressive beast of a book. If you have at least a small place in your heart for the vast fantasy metropolis, for the punk aesthetic, for the indie production that has an art-budget of exactly zero, you’ll absolutely adore this book. I genuinely consider this to be one of the highlights I’ve come across in the last couple of months. The generator not only delivers factions and quests, it does so in a manner that genuinely makes me, more often than not, contemplate how I’ll execute them – because I want to. If you’re tired of standard quests and factions, this’ll be a breath of fresh air. Heck, even if you don’t consistently use this, adding one or two guilds from this book to your regular fantasy setting’s city or region will make it feel fresher, stranger. Need a weirdo neighborhood? Use this.

The lack of bookmarks costs this a star for the pdf version, but in print? Full-blown masterpiece. 5 stars +seal of approval, and though this was released in 2018, I only now got around to reviewing this; hence, this gets a nomination as a candidate for my Top Ten of 2019. We need more Infinigrad.

Endzeitgeist out.

An Endzeitgeist.com review

This supplement clocks in at 31 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page ToC, leaving us with 29 pages of content, so let’s take a look!

So, first of all – this is an Infinigrad supplement, i.e. one with planar fantasypunk aesthetics; that being said, the place makes perfect sense in the context of e.g. subterranean environments of the weirder kind, or less traditional fantasy settings. The supplement does not subscribe to a specific OSR-rules system per se, instead electing to follow a general point. As in other Infinigrad supplements, HD are randomized, and each HD is supposed to be the equivalent of +1 to hit. When attribute checks are relevant, the supplement champions just rolling 3d6 to quickly determine attributes. The baseline HD of NPCs is d4HD@d6, so 1-4 HD, with each HD = d6. AC is ascending. NPCs tend to note special abilities as well as desires they might have. Navigation-wise, the pdf is internally hyperlinked. EDIT: The pdf now has bookmarks! A map of the suburb is provided, though it does not have a scale – it’s more about giving you an idea of where things are in relation to each other. That being said, the scratchy, hand-drawn style of the map did have some appeal to me. The map is featured twice – once with the landmarks on the opposite page, once with the keyed buildings hyperlinked on the opposite page.

I really like how buildings are presented: We get a read-aloud paragraph, and then a bullet point list that makes sense in sequence: First the obvious/lower storey content, then the less overt information. NPCs and faction-names are bolded for easy referencing, making the parsing of information simple. If you are one of the people who are particular about wanting your descriptions terse and evocative, this delivers. Unlike many comparable supplements, the book, in spite of this terseness, manages to retain a genuine sense of wonder and atmosphere. This is easily one of the most pronounced strengths here. It should be noted that this place can be easily grafted onto e.g. a planar metropolis like Sigil or the City of 7 Seraphs, or it could be used as a stand-alone environment.

The book comes with a custom random encounter table, a custom reaction table, and a 20-entry rumor table. We also get 20 male and female sample names.

Okay, that out of the way, this environment is best experienced without prior knowledge, so consider this to be a SPOILER-warning for players. If you’re not a GM, please skip ahead to the conclusion.

… .. .

All right, so, this suburb is essentially a sprawling, former sanatorium, sprawling alongside a mountain range, with its whispering winds bringing messages, ostensibly directly from the gods. The place is choked with winged statues, but these indeed are the calcified remains of angels, their bodies conserved in perfect forms with the help of occult rituals. As a consequence, making angel statues can be deemed a subversive act/crime, and the suburb’s guards, the protectors of the wind, certainly won’t take kindly to that. Angels in this place are bereft of the connection to the divine, described as having annoyingly good looks and beatific sneers. There are also mutant angel factions – the first of these would be the savage storm angels, who seek to clear the suburb, and the other one would be the halfhere angels, who know the secret of turning corpses of angels to stone. There also are two fully realized angel gangs here – one being the disaffected angel youth led by a mysterious entity, the other being a mute, masked group – which ties in with the second leitmotif of the suburb.

The splendor of the angels and beauty of the place is sharply contrasted with the “scaled men”, humanoids devolved and turned lizard-like by an infectious curse that can and will potentially affect those they assault – including angels, who obviously consider it to a be a horrid tainting of their forms. An enormous dome of wrought iron cages a black, scum-coated lake, trapping the scaled ones – at least that’s how it looks like. On the stairs of silk, infested, beaked men held by chains beseech the visitors.

We can find workshops for plant-based augmentations, workshops of healing (and damaging) crystals, black marble towers containing banks (fancy a heist?), storm angel smiths crafting experimental weaponry, and more – each place herein is interesting in some way, and indeed, basically begs you to use it. I can’t picture any group of adventurers, any GM, confronting this place without being inspired in some way.

If that’s not the case, the book does come with a quest-hook generator – roll for a verb, an objective, and a reward – and go from there. A table of 8 complications may also be found, and we get a pretty huge dressing table for angels – you roll d6 to determine which of the 6 tables you’ll use, then a d10 – yep, 60 frickin’ entries. Green hair, with flowers budding. Red wings, blood dripping from them. Hairless and with an elongated pate and pink halo. These are genuinely diverse.

If you’re such a sucky map-drawer as I am, you’ll love the building interior map page, which makes you roll d8 and d12 – you can roll dice to create the layout as you go, or print a couple of copies of this page, and then cut them out and combine them. Or you can use it just as intended. There also is an interior dressing generator – 4 columns, 12 entries each. Finally, if you want to spontaneously determine how NPCs relate to each other, there’s a table for that: D12 for an adjective, d12 for the relation.

Conclusion: Editing and formatting is very good on a formal and rules-language level, particularly for such an indie offering. Layout adheres to a one-column b/w-standard, with public-domain based artwork on borders. This was subtle, but I liked it – the different styles of architecture used for borders manage to underline in a subtle manner the atmosphere of this place. EDIT: The pdf now has bookmarks! :D

Michael Raston’s expedition to this suburb of Infinigrad is inspiring in all the right ways. The atmosphere evoked is genuinely unique and managed to elicit a sense of jamais-vu I get to see rather rarely these days. It’s not artsy, mind you; you can take and run it as such, but this is most assuredly a game-focused book that wants to be used. It’s not navelgazing, nor is it pretentious in the slightest. As a whole, this managed to make me feel like I just stumbled into a weird crossing between Planescape or the City of 7 Seraphs, and a pre-cataclysmic Dark Souls or Demon Souls, like a version of Latria’s towers prior to falling. A sense of danger is ever present, and the contrasting of harsh leitmotifs is pulled off in an excellent manner. And this pdf is ridiculously inexpensive. 2 bucks. Seriously? Totally worth at least (!!) thrice as much! Considering the excellent bang for buck ratio, this does get 5 stars + seal of approval. If you enjoy unconventional fantasy environments, get this!

Endzeitgeist out.

I have gotten tons of use out of the location generators in this; populated whole city neighbourhoods; a great idea-sparker when you need to create districts, or whole towns on the fly - would recommend heartily!