This is a booklet which allows players to build/convert characters from the PC cultures used in The One Ring 1st ed which didn't get carried over into the core rulebook for 2nd ed. That's a nice touch from the new publisher.

I have most of the TOR line in physical copy. IMO the designers and publisher desverve huge props for making this game. Not only is it a great game and the best attempt in RPGs to emulate the specific feel of Tolkien's work, the presentation is fantastic and only adds to the immersion into Middle Earth. 1st ed also did this well, and while the 2nd ed has a very different aesthetic, I can't say either one is better than the other. What I can say is that the producers of the game in both editions have avoided that trap of trying to "modernise" Middle Earth or to make it about current year political messaging. They've let Middle Earth be Middle Earth, authentic to itself, and that's a joy to behold.

Hail of Fire comes across as a game written by a slightly disgruntled player of Flames of War. The cover uses the same image from the battle of Stalingrad that FoW uses on its logo, the weapon ranges are as per FoW, the basing suggestions are basically FoW and the terminology of teams and units will be instantly familiar to FoW players. Additionally, the author suggests using army lists produced by "other games", Hail of Fire being very minimalist in that regard, so FoW army/theatre books are an obvious source of these.

Hail of Fire is certainly FoW-like in its simplicity and level of abstraction. However, it addresses the main criticism many gamers have of FoW, the IGOUGO activation system by using a system of action points. These are diced for openly each turn, but each player also has a hidden pool of Hero points to use as well, so there is an element of fog of war in that you're never sure exactly how many units your opponent will be able to activate. Play alternates, spending these points and passing play back and forth until all are spent. One thing I really like is that units can be reactivated in a turn, if/when play is passed back to you, allowing players to push forward on certain areas of the board at the expense of others rather than just have every unit activate equally every turn. One caveat is that you must only play with honest players since the Hero point die is rolled and spent secretly from the opponent - avoid played Hail of Fire with cheaters!

The game also randomises movement, on a 2d6 roll - gun teams move the lower result, infantry the higher and vehicles the combined total with adds for being on roads. Simple and intuitive.

Another interesting mechanic is the use of Received Fire Points. Basically a unit taking fire is marked as having done so, but the result of that fire isn't resolved until the owning player attempts to activate the unit during his own turn. So the unit might be unaffected, suppressed or destroyed but until you try and activate them you don't know. This works really well and adds real tension to your choice of where to spend your limited resource of action points.

Not only is Hail of Fire clever, it is so without being complex which makes play move along at a good pace and leaves room for house-rules without messing up the core system should you wish to do so.

For a PWYW of $0.00 I think Hail of Fire is a steal - so why not tip the author a dollar or two and have a go!

EDIT - After writing this review I saw there was a newer version of the PDF. After downloading it, I realised I've been playing and reviewed a version of the rules that was 4 years old and a number of changes have since been made.

Maze Rats is top. My first RPG expereince back in the early 80's was Tunnels & Trolls and I've had a soft spot for it ever since, and this has prejudiced me in favour of short and simple rules.

Maze Rats is really short, and digest size to boot when printed out. Character creation is a breeze, literally a 5 minute job and the game is chock full of all sorts of random tables to flesh out the game world. The randomness even runs the magic system where magic using characters get one spell per day of a randomly determined title, and then decide what it does during play. I love this.

The other thing I love, and which is a surprise in Maze Rats seeing as the author's other game, Knave, is an OSR game, is that it isn't D20 based. Rolling a single die, 20 sided or otherwise, has always felt too swingy for me with exactly the same odds of rolling a 1 as a 20 or a 13 or whatever. Maze Rats uses 2D6 giving results a pleasing bell curve. The default target number is high encouraging players to be creative and play dirty in order to get advantage and a more realistic chance of success in their actions.

Short. Lots of randomness. Minimalist character sheet. Crazy magic. Not D20. Everything about Maze Rats is a winner.

My first ever RPG experience was playing Tunnel & Trolls back in the early 80's. I've always had a soft spot for its simplicity, lack of pretension and slight goofyness. It's my "go to" fantasy RPG but although I still have twp different editions from those bygone days, for a current day gamer the game is harder to source; the 40th Anniversary edition made the terrible mistake of betraying T&T's cheap-and-cheerful ethos by being a huge expensive hardback and it's OOP now anyway; second hand copies of any edition on eBay go for stupid money thanks to nerd hoarders so that the only real solution is getting a PDF of the classic 5th edition from DTRPG and getting it printed out.

Until now...

M!M! 2nd edition is basically T&T but with monsters as the PC's instead of the heroes. Perhaps the monsters are the heroes and the heroes are the monsters? How metaphysical! The mechanics of the game are identical to T&T, the spells still have silly names, the approach to gaming is still loose and fun and the layout is both retro styled and easy to read.

Ken St Andre no longer owns the rights to T&T itself. Pease God that Rebellion, the new owners, don't screw it up, but if they do then M!M! remains in Ken's hands to give players the authentic experience of the world's 2nd ever RPG.

Now, if Ken was a true "troll" he'd ready a Monsters! Monsters! Heroic Supplement to release on the same day as Rebellion's version of T&T. Perhaps he could go even further by calling it by the game's original name of Tunnels & Troglodytes, thus retaining "T&T" once more for himself.

I can't remember how I came across this RPG set in mythological Mesopotamia, but any game with a historical setting is an easy sell for me.

This is a relatively short digest size staple bound booklet (in its print incarnation which is only available on Lulu. I contacted the publisher who then gave me a freebie code to get the pdf from DTRPG) with the rules, a short dungeon-crawl style adventure and some flavour text about the setting. The latter is inspiring but a bit thin on detail so anyone who knows nothing about bronze age Mesopotamia will probably need to visit the library to flesh the setting out to game-able dimensions. What really does sell the setting and atmosphere is the internal artwork which is FANTASTIC. I don't think any new material for the game has appeared in some years now, but even a short setting book utilising the same artist (Rich Longmore) would be a real gem.

The core mechanic is this - you have six stats with a value 3-12 and a derived value 1-4. For a skill check you roll a dice pool equal to the derived value and count 5s and 6s as successes. More successes means a more triumphant result. For saving throws you roll a D20 and compare it to the relevant stat's raw value. Equal or less is a save, over is a fail. There are skills which derive from your stats which can be used to influence rolls.

The game uses six character classes, of which two are magic users. The magic is quite interesting - the Mystic uses the narcotic effects of the black lotus to gain extra sensory powers, and the Seer utlisies "bone salts" to conduct his sorceries. Spell lists are very short for both.

Combat is done by using derived skills - Use Force and Hurl/Shoot. Damage dice explode for critical hits. Shields improve your defence rating, armour proper soaks damage but runs the risk of being destroyed when it does so.

This is definitely a rules light game, and even setting light due to its short length. However, a competent GM with an interest in the history of the time can really make Blood and Bronze an exciting and unusual gameing experience for the players. Despite its compact size the game is flavourful and inspiring. The intent is for a "sword and sandal" low-magic type game where most antagonists would be human, with monstrous foes rare and powerful - much like the original Conan stories or Ray Harryhausen movies. One thing the game could have profited from would be a bestiary of creatures distinct to the mythology of the time and place.

The only downside for me was the writers' insistence on referring to player and GM as "she" in all the rules examples. This is a bit jarring and bad English usage, unless they really are suggesting only women can play the game. Still, it's only a minor annoyance and shouldn't detract from anyone's decision to buy this excellent and overlooked game.

This is a tricky one to review - I really like RPGPundit as a, well, as a pundit, and subscribe to his YouTube channel. I thought Lion and Dragon was fantastic, a really good re-imagining of old school D&D in a genuine medieval setting. The L&D magic system is really great.

Old School Companion is a mixed bag. It's basically a collection of stuff from the RPGPundit's regular "...Presents" series of PDF products. I can't quite make up my mind if the content if this book is basically inessential, or if it just doesn't really fit with my personal DM style/game requirements.

There are some new classes and crit tables - these are decent, especially the Archer class as a variant of the original Fighter. Some of the info about the clerical order is also useful, even if like me you use Catholic Christianity as the basis for your game's religion rather than L&D's "official" Sol Invictus cult.

However, a lot of the content of the book seems, while interesting, not really a lot of use. There's a lot of material about real world magic like the Goetia and tarot and so on. This is all correct (the Pundit knows his occult) but I can't really see it being much use in game, the original L&D magic was pretty comprehensive and if you wanted to know about the Goetic demons there are plenty of places online you can print off a list of them. Similarly with the tarot - i can't imagine having a fully detailed tarot session in game, you'd just hit the high points that were relevent to the adventure and crack on. But then again, maybe that's just me. I know about the occult as well, so for someone without that background all this might be gold.

I have a similar problem with some of the mundane stuff towards the back of the book about costs of housing, travel times and so on. In my games, this kind of stuff is never really that important and while I expect it's well researched it just doesn't really seem to justify the page count to me. I am aware though, that as an Englishman, a lot of this "medieval authentic" stuff is just stuff I know from being English and growing up in England and having an interest in history. For an American reader, for example, this sort of information could be exactly what they need.

So there you go. The book is nicely designed and put together (although not as nicely as the original L&D book which was something special), but what you get out of it is probably dependent on your baseline knowledge of history and the occult, and how much crunch you like in your games. But the Pundit is still a top chap so I'm still giving it 4 stars.

This is quite a tidy one-shot adventure, ideal for new players as it has investigation that isn't overly complicated, combat that can be challenging but isn't necessarily deadly, a mystery to solve and !!SPOILERS!! an unexpected betrayal by a key NPC.

It's set in the usual CoC 1920's New England, I transplanted it to London without any trouble. The only caveat I have is that it needs an edit as some of the dated events which the mystery is based on don't quite marry up and there's occasional text that needs parsing with common sense, any decent GM can deal with it easily but even so, it's not a free product so it shouldn't have that issue.

"Crom laughs at yuh 4th Edition!"

Barbarians of Lemuria - a game that comes from an age undreamed of, between the sinking of Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas! A game of man-sized fantasy where elves, orcs and dwarves dare not tread.

BoL characters are defined by their chequered pasts - thief, pirate, gladiator, etc. - if you can convince the GM that some previous career is relevant to your roll to perform a task then you get to add those points to your roll. Simple and it encourages character based play and avoids the munchkinism of feats. Combat and tests against attributes work in the same way. Achieve a Legendary Success and see your enemies driven before you/cut down in bloody swathes.

One clever genre innovation is that experience is awarded only after the player narrates how his character blew all his loot and is once more down to his last few coins, trusty blade and thirst for adventure. BoL encrouages you to play a sullen northern barbarian, a savage jungle tribesman or cunning desert nomad and play it to the hilt. There's no place here for treehuggers like elven rangers. BoL characters trust only their wits and cold steel.

BoL splits the skulls of all other fantasy games to the teeth with a single, savage blow. A simple system that effortless recreates a specific genre leading to swift, exciting play.

Substance - 5 - Finally a system that does sword and sorcery properly. Comes with a default setting based on Lin Carter's Thongor books but easily transposed to Hyboria or Valusia.

Style - 3 - Some art, like the cover, is nice. Some isn't. Simple, but readable, interior shows its amateur origins a bit too clearly.

Although I've been in the RPG hobby since the early 80's I was never keen on D&D itself, so that the whole OSR thing largely passed me by. However, I do enjoy RPGPundit's blog and YouTube videos, and appreciate his barbed mockery of the SJW entryism current in the RPG hobby. So I decided to buy Lion and Dragon as a gesture of support.

Of all the Pundit's games L&D appealed to me the most because of his pitch of it being “medieval authentic” with a magic system based on actual occult tomes. I flatter myself that I know a lot about medieval England and Europe, and I dabbled in occultism as a youth. So either L&D would be right up my alley, or I'd have the knowledge to identify over eager self-promotion on the Pundit's part.

Physically the hardback book I received is a quality product. The design of the book makes a virtue of the publisher's relative lack of funds compared to larger RPG publishers. Rather than trying to compete with a slick, highly produced design style, they've made use of a lot of suitable public domain art, old etchings, woodcuts, illustrations from old editions of occult books, as well as some commissioned pieces which are in a similar style. There's quite a lot of art, and it all looks good, and the simplicity of the layout and design recalls a Victorian or Edwardian design aesthetic, which while anachronistic for the C15th, does fit the game's attempt to be authentic to a real world past.

The mechanics of the game are obviously derived from old D&D, but tweaked to give a game which is set more in the real medieval world rather than the modern-day-in-medieval-fancy-dress which has always been the assumed default in D&D. One of the things I always disliked in D&D's class-and-level system was how characters quickly become superhuman, their inflated hit points allowing them to shrug off an axe full in the face from a great big orc. L&D starts characters at level 0, advancement restricts HP inflation, and there's a nice table to roll on for permanent physical wounds. It's not as tidy a nod to realism as d100/Runequest, but in terms of a D&D based game it's great stuff.

Although the game makes explicit the social order of the medieval world, including gender roles, I was slightly disappointed that the setting wasn't actual medieval England but a fantasy simulacrum Dark Albion, the subject of a previous Pundit book. However, transferring the content to the real medieval world would be easy for any GM with the right background knowledge. This is made easy because Albion is very close to a real medieval nation, which comes through especially in the magic system which is the real gem of the book. Clerics work miracles, all of which are strongly of the sort associated with actual saints and their relics in the middle-ages, and Clerics are assumed to be agents of a monotheistic faith which the book calls The Unconquered Sun but can easily be run as the Catholic church. It occurs to me that an L&D game with the players as Clerics during the protestant reformation would make an interesting campaign.

Wizards no longer blast Magic Missiles around with abandon. The L&D magic system is based on ritual, and is drawn heavily from magical beliefs of the time, when alchemy was science and what we term “supernatural” was seen as just one aspect of an all-encompassing natural philosophy. This is the Magic User as Faust, or even Roger Bacon, rather than Gandalf. The magic section is both extensive and fascinating, and clearly well researched – I only discovered after ordering the book that Pundit classes himself as a practicing occultist and it shows. Although my copy of Abramelin is long since gone, it is obvious from the magic system in L&D the Pundit knows his stuff.

I suppose the best compliment I can pay this game is that I actually want to run it, despite my historically lukewarm attitude to D&D. The powering down of characters, real world societal assumptions, and especially the excellent magic section, make L&D the D&D the teenage me really wanted – if only Pundit had worked for TSR circa 1983 my RPG life might have been very different!

Honesty up front - I helped proofread the rules. But I offered to do that because I like them.

Victory Decision Raid is 90% the same game as regular Victory Decision, so if you're a player of that game then this version of it will be very familiar. The main difference is that rather than activating whole sections of troops, now you are activating individual soldiers, so that the game is focusing on the squad/section itself rather than the platoon.

Because of this it plays on a smaller area, 4'x4' is recommended, although I played a few games on a 2' x 3' table without issue. Because each side is only half a dozen or so figures the table doesn't get crowded.

As with regular Victory Decision, activation is a dice roll modified alternate activation, with the activated figure being able to perform 3 actions - move, shoot, assault, etc, in any order the player likes, and usually as many times as he likes too, so move - move - shoot, or shoot - shoot - shoot, are legal combos. Apart from a new overwatch order there are no reactive moves, like the parent game, but somehow with Victory Decision you don't miss them. I can only think that it's the triple action activations which somehow manages to remove the need for reactions.

The combat mechanics are very straighforward, although the suppression mechanic of the main game has been replaced with four "health levels" - ready to fight, stunned, wounded and dead; stunned and wounded give figures negative modifiers and limit their available actions, although figures can be rallied back to ready to fight.

The game includes vehicle rules, which are just as straighforward and intuitive as the infantry rules. Unlike the parent game where army lists are an extra purchase, Raid contains fairly exhaustive lists for Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union and the USA, hence the high page count for such a straighforward game. There are plenty of options to cover different small arms. One thing to note is that, unlike some skirmish games, an infantryman is an infantryman. By which I mean that you don't customise each figure with different stats and special rules, like Nuts! or the Song of Blades family; there are special rules but if you have, say, five regular US infantry each of those five will likely be the same in game terms. I much prefer this as I find keeping track of individualised figures to be a pain.

Raid playes very quickly and intuitively. It's not a hard core WW2 infantry combat simulation, but a quick and interesting game which plays with authentic WW2 flavour. There are WW2 projects I'd like to dabble in, but I don't want to go the whole hog and paint 30+ figures and support weapons and vehicles, etc. Raid means I can paint 6 or 8 US Paras, for example, and scratch that Band of Brothers itch.

All the rules on 1 page - well, kind of. There are a couple of supplemantary pages of "advanced"! rules. Daisho is a rules light RPG of swashbuckling samurai adventure which has almost no connection to historical Japan and takes its inspiration from bloodthirsty samurai movies where swiftness with a blade is more important than knowing the history of the shogunate or the intricacies of the tea ceremony.

And its none the worse for it - the game almost demands a breezy, devil-may-care approach. Everything is done off a single d6 roll, combat can be deadly but the game advises if your character bites the katana to simply roll up a new one and rejoin the adventure. You also get 6 adventure plots for your money of varying quality - the one about the secret ninja school is the best.

For the price even if you only play the game once you've gotten your moneys worth and you'll probably play more than that - a crisp little beer and pretzels rpg for when you need to scratch a Far Eastern itch.