Project Oasis, written by Joseph Bloch (Adventures Dark and Deep, Castle of the Mad Archmage) and self-published through BRW Games, is a 36-page PDF campaign supplement for Mutant Future and Apes Victorious, both being post-apocalypse (PA) games by Goblinoid Games.

Set 1000 years after the Devastation, it is a “kitchen-sink” style setting, containing all the themes and ideas from a wide spectrum of early PA literature, film, and television, focusing on the materials developed in the 1970s. Planet of the Apes, Ark II, Omega Man, Logan’s Run, Twilight Zone, Mad Max – it’s all here in a fantastic melting pot that gives you an entire continent of possible adventure.

The two-page introductory section explains the basics of the world and how it came to be; speaks of technology and geography; and gives some basic guidelines for the kinds of campaigns the setting is designed for (very different from many modern PA settings, due to the strong influence of the middle-era of the PA genre). Details are brief, but give a game master more than enough material to get started.

We then get to the meat of the booklet, the 22-page gazetteer. This covers every major power in the PA setting, a mix of stone-age savagery to high-tech insanity. Virtually every kind of PA trope is covered in this, with lots of opportunities for a game master to start a campaign in exactly the kind of setting he wants, then move the adventure on to other regions. There are ape realms, human-friendly, human-neutral, and human-enslaving; there are high-tech mutant realms hidden under wastelands, low-tech mutant wilds, human-mutant cooperatives, and mutant-power domains; there are hidden high-tech cities of wonder where the people are dedicated to recovering what was lost, high-tech cities of wonder where the people are kept in dystopian decadence, and there are low-tech kingdoms dedicated to keeping things exactly the way they never really were in chivalrous glory. And that’s just for starters!

I’m being a bit nebulous here, as I believe that it would give you, the reader, far greater joy to discover the world of Project Oasis on your own, rather than have me list off the regions chapter and verse.

Two things I will discuss are "Project Oasis" itself and the inclusion of adventure hooks with each region. First, Project Oasis is not simply the name of the book, it is also a major faction in the PA world. Project Oasis is a very high technology organization, operating from a secret base, that seeks to bring the world back from savagery (echoes of Ark II, Earth II, and Planet Earth); to this end, they send out teams of adventuring types to help uplift goodly domains and bring down or stall villainous ones. This provides an excellent hook on which the game master can hang her campaign, as it enables player characters to travel all over the continent (and beyond) with as much technological support as the game master wishes them to have at the time. Second, each of the region entries has three adventure hooks included, at least one of which deals with Project Oasis and how it, and its representatives, might interact with the peoples and powers of the region. So the book itself, as mentioned in the introduction, really gears play toward a Project Oasis-based campaign, though myriad other options are readily available.

The volume finishes with three short appendices, two dedicated to new monsters (one for Mutant Future, the other for Apes Victorious), and the other a listing of inspirational material. The new monster sections include everything mentioned in the work that was not otherwise found in Mutant Future and/or Apes Victorious, each section covering the same monsters. The list of inspirational material provides most of the books, films, and television shows you would need to read or watch to better understand the setting. Personally, if you have no experience with the middle-era PA genre, I’d watch Ark II, the Planet of the Apes movies and television series, and the Logan’s Run movie and television series; these give you a complete overview of the relevant material and, most especially, style of the genre.

Finally, there is the continental map. Created using Hexographer, it shows the relation between the new geography of the continent and all the various regions, including cities, major towns, ruins, and other notable locations. The only problem with it is that I have not been able to find a scale for the map anywhere on the map or in the book… I think it is 30 or 40 miles per hex?

The upshot of the review is that this is the best PA campaign setting on the market today, if you are into the middle-era PA genre. If you aren’t, well, get on the bandwagon! The PA middle-genre provides you with all the action, adventure, seriousness, and wild and wacky wahoo you could ever want out of a PA setting, and this book distills it all down for you. Project Oasis plus Mutant Future and Apes Victorious can provide literally years of PA adventures. With Project Oasis Joseph Bloch has presented the PA gamer community with a PA campaign “Greyhawk Gazetteer” upon which to build and develop their own campaigns.

Project Oasis is a book I wish that I had written. And really, I can’t give it better kudos than that.

Five out of Five Stars

This is an excellent series of critical hit and fumble tables. It maintains the simplicity that is the hallmark of 5E, while adding a level of depth that the core critical hit rule is lacking. Unlike many other critical hit systems. which seem to break the rules of the game, it also easily integrates the core Advantage/Disadvantage system of 5E to great advantage and thus can be added seamlessly to pretty much any campaign.

I also like how balanced the results of the table are, such that the player can actually choose the critical hit, both enhancing the player's agency in her combat resolution and allowing for situational-based criticals (rather than often odd and misplaced critical results).

Five stars!

TL; DR: These Goblins Won’t Kill Themselves (TGWKT) is a fun, one-shot dungeon delving adventure in the classic, humorous style reminiscent of the early days of fantasy gaming. If you liked Keep on the Borderlands and the April issues of Dragon, this is right up your alley…

In Short: TGWKT is a fantasy adventure module written in a classical style; that is to say, it deals with a fairly standard type of adventure (Seek the Treasures Lost in the Bad Guys Lair), and to this it adds a heaping helping of another classic element – humor. TGWKT isn’t anything new – it evokes the same style of adventure classic in TSR modules in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, down to Gygaxian naturalism, flavor text, puns, and in-jokes. But for this reviewer, that is very much a feature, not a bug. Much like In Search of the Unknown, Keep on the Borderlands, and Horror on the Hill, it is a light dungeon crawl adventure, suitable for play in one to three sessions. So if that is what you are into, it will be right up your alley.

The Look: TGWKT evokes the classic look; most of the interior art by Dave Peterson would be at home in any classic OSR style adventure. The art mostly depicts scenes and characters in the module, so you can print those separately to show to your players. The maps are simple, but well done and utilitarian. The font is simple and easy to read. Flavor text is in bold. Like many of the old modules, it’s not fancy, but it works, and unlike a lot of modern works, it won’t kill your printer cartridge to print it up to have a paper copy at the table.

The Feel: TGWKT definitely falls within the “classic punster” or “tongue-in-cheek” style of adventure; the fact that it is the first in a series of adventures taking place in the “Lands of Igpay” should give anyone reading the cover fair warning of the style of play expected. It feels like something one would find as an insert in a classic April issue of Dragon Magazine. However, while the adventure certainly works well with the humor style of play, if that’s not your thing, the core elements can also be used with a more heroic style of play with minimal work. Minus the humorous elements, TGWKT fall solidly in the “heroic fantasy” style of play, with a dash of Faerie style (as Igpay is a “land apart” from the character’s normal homeland).

The System: TGWKT uses a generic system, much like the various Eldritch Enterprises adventure modules that Clark has published with Frank Mentzer, Jim Ward, and Tim Kask. This is really a non-issue; most of the monsters can simply be lifted from whatever system you are using by simply looking for the monster name or a similar type in your core rules. A little conversion might be needed on the fly, but even for an inexperienced game master, the conversion needed is minimal.

The Adventure: The characters, removed from their own natal lands, somehow end up in the Land of Igpay, a fairy-tale land where the Elves have been at odds with the Goblins over an unfortunate misunderstanding. Elven heroes put a stop to the Goblin War some time ago, but now the Goblins are back, and the Elves today have no defenses, being pacifists. Thus they offer their treasures to the adventurers if they will go into the Goblin caves and rout out the enemy, or at least, return to the Elves their lost weapons of power so that the Elves can once again defend themselves. After a short wilderness trek, the adventurers must delve into the lair of the goblins, where several fearsome tricks and traps await, in addition to the martial menace of the goblins. There is also a lead-in to the sequel, though this can be ignored if the game master simply wants to run the adventure as a one-shot.

Some of the traps in the module are outright lethal… which again, to this reviewer is a feature, not a bug. So if you do not like the “Save or Die” style of gaming (or worse, the “No Save and Die” style), you might need to tone down a few things.

NB: Back when TGWKT was originally released, Inner City Games sent me a complementary copy of the PDF to review. As they have now released the sequel Why Are We Here? These Things Are Already Dead! I was reminded of TGWKT and went to find it to finally write the review… and discovered that at some point in the previous year, I had lost it in a purge of my computer. So I went and bought a copy of the PDF in order to review it.

Labyrinth Lord is hands-down the best classic B/X retro-clone/simulacrum system available; the only way to get a closer experience to the original Moldvay/Cook is to buy the original Basic and Expert books!

When you add in the material from the Advanced Edition Companion, the overall game plays more like the "Best of the LBBs" than Advanced D&D, which I feel is a definite feature, not a bug. The two volumes together have everything one needs to play for decades of campaigning.

Even with all the improvements in the new, 5th Edition of D&D, Labyrinth Lord is the best way to introduce young players to fantasy role-playing. As with the original, the system is clean, simple, and easy to understand, yet leaves wide vistas open for the imagination, on the part of the player as well as the Labyrinth Lord.

Every page of the Creature Compendium is filled with pure awesome. And at less than a penny per fully-illustrated creature, New Big Dragon's Creature Compendium delivers value like no other product on the market today.

Whatever your flavor of Old School, the new Creature Compendium supports it, with bells and fireballs on...

Whatever your campaign style, you will find a plenitude of creatures in this volume to populate your campaign. Or you might even be inspired to create a whole new campaign setting based merely on the monsters found in this volume.

The art is gorgeous Old School style black and white line art, and would fit in nicely along with the works of Sutherland, Dee, Otus, Roslof, and Willingham. With the layout style, I felt like I was reading a supplement for the old Moldvay/Cook edition published by TSR in their heyday.

The only way this product could have been better is if it had even more creatures! But now, that would be greedy, wouldn't it? As it is, this is among the best ways you will ever spend $2 for a game product... it would be a deal even at the full retail of $5.95.