A BARGAIN AT HALF THE PRICE.

I picked this up when it was in the ConTessa discount bundle... actually, I picked up the ConTessa discount bundle just for this, and all the other cool stuff that came from it was bonus.

Either you dig the Patrick Stuart/Scrap Princess aesthetic or you don't - jagged lines, evocative-yet-vague descriptions of fantastic beasts... there's no real statblocks here to speak of, just crazy zine-style paste-ups of weird stuff with weirder descriptions attached.

I don't know what'd possess you to drop a cool grand on this thing, but it's definitely an interesting thing as inspiration and as an objet d'jeu...

It's a campaign setting! It's a bestiary! It's a whole new way to handle magic in your campaign setting! It's a low-calorie dessert topping! It's Chthonic Codex!

The DIY/manapunk aesthetic of Lamentations of the Flame Princess meets Potter-style wizard school shenanigans. The closest RPG supplement I can think of to the Codex is GURPS: Illuminati University, another book about students at a ridiculous university where hoary old traditions hold sway but limitless power and ineffable weirdness wait in the wings.

You get a couple of things suitable for plugging into any OSR-type campaign:

1. About thirty new monsters, ranging from animated blobs of magical tar to origami golems to animated lecterns made from and powered by the corpses of dead apprentice wizards.
2. Multiple new schools of wizardry, including the old standbys of "necromancer" and "fire wizard" but also some more interesting options like astrologers and artificers. Includes spells, research rules, etc.
3. Pages upon pages of random charts to generate locations, quests, magic items, and the like.

If you're like me, and wanted to build a campaign world from scratch by bolting together a bunch of Weird OSR content that appealed to you, this is a must-get. The magic system is fantastic, the creatures are clever, and the general aesthetic of the thing is entertaining.

About the only real issue here is that the layout is kind of weird - bestiary up front, magic schools in the middle, everything else kind of shotgunned here and there.

What if D&D was the game of choice in the 80s 'zine scene?

That is the question asked and answered by BROKEN SYSTEM. The cut-n-paste, crude photocopy aesthetic perfectly fits the gonzo content inside. Every single page has at least something worth using, from mysterious creatures to weird events to bizarre character motivations. It's officially "14 pages" with one being a front/back cover, one being blank, and the remaining 12 actually being two half-pages, each a complete creature/environment/event/weird thing. I kind of want to actually print it out and staple it together and have it on my shelf as a physical manifestation of the ideas and aesthetic being set forth on the page. I might have Kinko's do this for me, for authenticity's sake.

I think I paid fifty cents for this - I would GLADLY have paid several times that had I known what I was getting out of it.

If you're into the vibe put down by Scrap Princess, False Machine/Patrick Stuart, Goblin Punch/Arnold K., Zak Sabbath, etc?

This is your jam. This is also extremely my jam.