Chthonic Codex is a great resource to either add to any campaign, or to build your own campaign around it. I'm using the Chthonic Codex implied and explicit setting for my campaign for about three years now, and it works well.

But this is not your typical lexicon style world book. The books themselves are artefacts of the game world and may reflect the convictions of unreliable narrators. But you get a bunch of unique monsters, a number of spell schools, various atypical magic items (for example the Hungry Idols: easy to make, relatively powerful, but also terrifying in their demands), and a number of generators for your own maps of environs and catacombs ...

The implied setting is inspired by greek/roman and medieval european ideas of how the world works. I strongly recommend it!

(Re-posted from https://oliof.blogspot.de/2017/06/quick-review-macchiato-monsters-zero.html)

Macchiato Monsters ZERO is a hack of hacks (Black Hack and White Hack, neither of which I know myself). It has some nice mechanics that a both tight and loose, comfortable in a word. The game is complete, has some nice mechanics (I like the death-spirally/doom-clocky risk dice, and the roll all the dice fast equipment generation method). I guess some people will take umbrage with the single-die-roll-combat resolution (players roll and do damage on success/take damage on failure), but I guess that is more about how that feels ... Dungeon World players might feel right at home.

The recently added Extra Shots has a number of referee facing tools that uses the resource die mechanic to have semi-dynamic encounter / event tables: The worse the circumstances, the lower the die size, the worse the result. It's nice that in the current work-in-progress the extra shots each fit one page.

There are also some in-progress die drop tables which are another bunch of tools for quick off-the-cuff prep in the macchiato-fantasy, which is described as "borderlands style" (i.e. exploration of dangerous mostly unknown area, plus safe havens/points of light to return back to).

The map generator deserves extra mention because it is not purely random but somewhat procedural. This promises somewhat more natural looking maps.

Macchiato Monsters is probably the system I will use for short-notice games (at conventions or similar). I am also seriously considering mashing it up with Wonder&Wickedness for a Principalities of Glantri vs. The Grand Schools of the Hypogea spinoff of my current campaign; i.e. Make Total Destroy with Nuclear Powered Lich Mages discovering Hypogean Mana Tar ...

I never much was a fan of adventure modules dealing with christmassy stuff, but this one is very good. Maybe it is because it does not try to be funny. Set in real-world 1882 it is a very nice game for a gang of esoteric investigators (and if all you have are the free Lamentations of the Flame Princess rules which are eminently for 17th century fantasy, this module provides all you need to create your own set of esoteric investigators).

Yes, this is grisly, and it explains why these days Christmas sometimes is not as jolly as a time as we would like it to be. And it gives the characters a fighting chance to stop Christmas from being something even worse for the world.

Contains great art by some of my favorite artists, old germanic myths, even older gods, a graphical demonic creature generator, good maps and an adventure full of suspense!

Go get this. If you pay for it, you are honoring the work by giving for a good cause. Do that, too, in the spirit of the season.

This 48 pager is the closest to a steampunk game I would think captures the idea of rottenness and oppression of industrialization without demonizing technology itself — all the bad things come from what people do and want, and not the implements they use.

The first half or so of the book is rules: Character generation and equipment (2 pages), another page of rules for saves (all kinds of checks), a tiny but tight combat system, half a page about advancement, one page about companies and war, and three pages of sample arcana, weird magical or magitechnical or technomagical items that people hunt after; an example for play that conveys the style and themes that the game supports, and a couple pages devoted to the game master, including general advice, sample monsters, traps and hazards. The official world description fills one page, but we get 10 pages of a sample location, a region, and a small settlement which illustrate more of what the game is about — matter-of-factly, without being preachy.

The last third of the book is filled by the aptly-named Oddpendium, a collection of tables that allow you to quickly generate Into-the-Odd content but also serves as a condensed way to show more setting details, without getting overly verbose.

In terms of Old-School games, I consider Into The Odd somewhat of an outlier as it's pretty much setting infused with rules. I'd have a hard time saying what I'd use from this book in other games —no wait, that's a lie: The arcana are pretty nice and could spruce up about any game, unless you shy away from ray guns or black hole generators or portal guns. The rules, sparse as they are, seem to be a tight fit for the kind of setting or at least the kind of adventures the setting of Into The Odd seems to beget.

I could kind-of see Into The Odd to be used as an alternate future setting/game on top of your average fantasy game. It's close enough to be a parallel universe that you could get to through any of the many portals of the Kefitzah Haderech (also a Lost Pages product), because it's weird enough to find something lost from another world, or to hide in there because you probably won't stick out much.

Also, Into The Odd has good ongoing support by Chris on his blog (http://soogagames.blogspot.co.uk/)

This book is, at it's core, a collection of articles from the author's blog (http://www.necropraxis.com/). It's an alternate magic system for classic fantasy games.

At it's heart lies the idea of level less magic, as demonstrate in a writeup of 84 spells in seven spell schools. In addition you will finde rules about learning magic, magical sigils required for and/or caused by spellcasting, magical duels and fumbles, as well as a small collection of magic items. You can take either of these elements and add them to your own favorite system, or use Wonder&Wickedness wholesale to replace / add one.

I like the idea of magical sigils a lot; and while the spell schools are described as optional their use is recommended; not only because of the rules for spell specialists, but because the spells are listed according to their schools.

The spells themselves require some interpretation, which allows their use in different kinds of campaigns. Spell duration, range and area effects are only given in rough approximations, which allows their use without resorting to map and ruler; if you do like map and ruler there is enough guidance to come up with some clear numbers.

While the spells are clearly inspired by the classic set of D&D like spells, they deviate far enough that they hold their surprises for people that intimately know the old spells. The differences are less subtle than, say, Lamentations of The Flame Princess' spells.

The layout is simple and legible, I had no problem using the PDF on a 7" tablet. There are a few illustrations which are related to the content close by.

I recommend this book for all who like D&D like rules and haven eye open for new expressions of old concepts.

To quote the foreword: "This is another fantasy adventure game. Does the world need another one? Of course!"

AFG is a simple game written to give the basics of a ruleset to allow adjudication of adventurous tasks, magical effects, and making combat deadly. This is represented on 108 A5 pages. Little space is wasted on graphics, which are a mixture of public domain woodcuts and some custom work for this book

The second page features a section titled How to start quickly, which is half as long as the thank-you note that follows it. Yet it gives you references to the pertinent rules and what you need to read to get the core of the game: 2 pages for tasks, 10 pages for character generation, half a dozen spells, 2 pages for combat, 6 pages for experience. So we're left with 90 pages uncovered. Those are divided between some notes on traveling and adventuring, a handful of sample cults to follow or thwart (in approachable one-page write ups), and 25 pages about magic.

For those who've seen my review of Chthonic Codex: The magic system is about the same —which comes as no surprise — but the Chthonic Codex one is a bit more bespoke to fit the peculiarities of the Hypogea under the Valley of Fire, whereas the one in AFG is open for personalization. Having read these books in the "wrong order" it's easy for me to see how to peruse the magic system in a concrete setting and I appreciate it more now than I remember when browsing it the first time around.

The systems provided allow for several ways for characters to improve: The level independent improvement of tasks (skills) and saves, leveling up by bringing treasure troves to safety (i.e. big treasure guarded by dangerous things), and accomplishments, which are in-game achievements by the characters that allow them to either gain levels, get some bonus to a stat, or unlock the next tier of levels. The idea of accomplishments reminded me somewhat of The Shadow of Yesterday's keys, but they are mostly optional: To reach the highest level available, you need to hit accomplishments four times during the career of a character, and if you play them that long it should not be difficult to argue that one or the other accomplishment was successfully attained. The included sample setting (as does the Chthonic Codex) provides examples of settings-specific ones which allow either the players to express what their characters are after to the aspiring DM to sketch out typical long-term goals in their campaign and attach some mechanical weight to them. The fourth accomplishment is only necessary for what Paolo calls endgame accomplishments where characters can reach truly epic levels of renown and power. But don't be deceived: You can still be killed off by an exploding volcano or eaten by a goat that is under the gigantism spell and suffers from voracious hunger (there are fewer goats in AFG than in Chthonic Codex, but you find them here as well, for example with the cruel and icky magic item scapegoat, which is a goat sewn into a sack).

The last 30 pages of the book present a random monster generator, a sample adventure location introducing the cephalopods (which also mentions a hungry idol for the first time, an idea that gets expanded well in Chthonic Codex: Mysteries and Mystagogues), a region to explore around the adventure location, as well as a way to drastically change the region by triggering a cataclysmic event (and ideas how to trigger it).

I'm pretty convinced that I like AFG more after having read Chthonic Codex than I did before. Some of the text in CC is lifted directly from AFG (i.e. the basic explanation of the 5MORE system and the basic magic system rules), but I think that's good: I don't need to refer back to a book I might not have bought to understand the basic mechanics. It's pretty clear from the sparse math-paper-design of AFG compared to the simple-but-more-individual-design of CC, as well as some of the writing that Paolo grew as a writer, layouter with his works. Do not take this as strong criticism though: One of the reasons I worked through the Lost Pages books so quickly is their single-column layout with legible fonts that work very well on my aging seven inch tablet (and I read a good quarter of AFG on my smaller phone screen without struggling as well).

I would recommend AFG for it's clean core engine and —as I said before for Chthonic Codex — a game with a european feel to it.

I think I managed to miss out mentioning on the "simple and advanced combat systems", the curious but interesting magic items, secret fighting techniques, and other details that are the meat on the bones of AFG. Please forgive me, and if you're interested, take a read yourself (-:

A very nice classic supplement. It shows how much you can pack into 64 pages.

This new file is superbly scanned, with full OCR and aligned pages, and much more readable than the original PDF that was available for a while. While the genre may seem bland these days, the tactful description of the various churches of Traldara and Karameikos (beholden to the same pantheon, but interpreting it much differently) still sticks out as me as an eminently playable but differentiated treatment of human religion.

This plus B10 Night's Dark Terror can easily provide dozens of sessions using the original D&D rules. If you're bored by the next big epic thing, this might be just the right thing to get you back to the ground.

The Blue Rose Companion adds a lot of stuff that should have been in the core book. Unfortunately, it's almost all rules and all the added background info is intertwined into the descriptions of other things, for example the Heroic Roles, which give some info in the Background sections.

The Companion is mostly useful for people who think the magic system in the core book is lacking. There are new Arcana, and a Ritual system that makes things like Aldis City much more believable. Also very interesting are 'Advanced Arcana', new uses of old Arcana. Especially interesting are ways to prevent telepathic characters from snooping other's minds without consequence.

The extended Bestiary add's Blue Rose specific information about the OGL creatures as well, which helps using them in the right context.<br><br> <b>LIKED</b>: Art and Layout are of the same quality as the core book. As a line extension, this is a great product.<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: Too many rules, not enough background.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Very Good<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Satisfied<br>

A very nice collection of beasts, ready to use in about any fantasy campaign on a D&D bend. I especially like the variant on the squidheads.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Very Good<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Satisfied<br>

I bought this to get some more information on the exarchs of shadow in the Blue Rose setting. Some useful info is in here, especially the art is evocative.

Probably useful in d20 campaigns if one wants to give the whole demon topic a twist.<br><br> <b>LIKED</b>: the art<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Very Good<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Satisfied<br>

A useful collection of files and forms to plan a Blue Rose campaign. Obviously usable for other kinds of games, especially the True20 line.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Very Good<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Satisfied<br>

Bought for nostalgic reasons (still fond of Star Wrs d6), and not disappointed. I have yet to find a group to try this out with. <br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Very Good<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Satisfied<br>

Again, a high standard release from Green Ronin. I am looking forward to the 2nd Ed. printed release. The promise of a drop-in campaign addition is quite true. They have a backstory which I don't like completely, but it might be interesting for other GMs.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Excellent<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Very Satisfied<br>

A nice improvement over the first issue of the line, which I would give 3 points. Interesting villains, graphics fitting the genre, and quite well to read<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Very Good<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Satisfied<br>

A solid basic set of rules. Although I dislike d20, I like this alot.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Very Good<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Satisfied<br>