A humorous, slightly gonzo deconstruction of all the crusty old Lankhammar tropes around thieves guild and also sewers filled with wererats. A fun diversion that's enjoyable to read and attached to a large sewer/dungeon map with reasonable interactivity, faction intrigue and a pleasing lack of directed narrative. A fine bit of classic adventure design.

Kowolski's work is usually top drawer, and Price of Evil is no exception. A procedural haunted house generator that uses cards to produce both layout and contents of grim, creepy abandoned mansions stuffed with ghosts and tragic history. Like all procedural generation tools the individua content tends towards the short and evocative, with a fair amount of work for the GM 'designing' the adventure still to prepare - but its excellent and flavorful, sticking well with the haunted mansion themse. A book worth reading through if one has any interest in procedural adventure design, or wants to run a haunted house adventure.

A clean modernized retroclone of the 1981 Molday Basic/Expert set. It doesn't make changes, but it has a nice muber of explanations and notes that make it a great introductory rule set for people that expect a different play style. For a free starter, it's complete, well illustrated and utterly sufficent to start running adventures.

It's certianly lovely, a piece of inspiration design, and the world building is very effective for creating a crapsack world riven with black magic suspended above the flames of damnation by a single thread cluthced in a demonic claw. As a system it's a fairly standard ultralight with its roots in early D&D - like Knave, ITO, Black Hack, Maze Rats etc. Mork Borg is even a decent one, and if one is wedded to that playstyle it supplies evocative imagery, tables and detail to fuel improvisational play. It also lacks meaningful spatial exploration and dungeon crawl mechanics - like most of its class of game - which means that Mork Borg may sometimes emulate a classic dungeon crawl game, but will tend towards encounter and scene based play simialr to modern editions of D&D with far less tactical combat. It may not be the right thing for my preferred play style, but its certianly worthwhile and stylish!

The Hidden Tomb offers a fully realized adventure in the classic D&D vein with thoughtful characterization and intriguing variety from its hooks through the traps and obstacles in its final keyed locations. An adventure of reasonable size and complexity it's an example of classic design from the G+ period of old school design well worth a look.

Incredibly flavorful ultralight early 20th/late 19th century fantasy without the dubious gloss of steampunk. This free version is fully and wonderfully illustrated and lacking nothing to play the game. While the system is exceedingly simple, with rule focused on abstracted high risk conflict and flavorful character generation, even this free edition does extensive and inspiring world building. Indeed, quickly generated characters with intriguing background and strange variety seem the primary player facing feature of Electric Bastionland and are delivered with a great deal of rich detail while the streamlined mechanics recede because of their spare and efficient design.

Strange monsters. Not sure I'd use this book as I write my own beasties, but it's a fine example of a monster manual that goes a bit far - tells strange stories about a strange setting through the medium of dreamlike terrible beasts. Even if you don't intend to use its content, it's worth a look for new ideas about what an RPG monster can be and how they might work beyond being punching bags full of XP. I suspect the prcing here is to discourage PDF purchasers, as I'm pretty sure the book is meant to be print only?

Sailors of the Starless Sea is one of the early DCC adventure and it captures the spirit of the game very well - a swords & sorcery 0-level funnel with dreadful man beasts and chaos gods all with the bright poppy gloss of DCC. A wonderful introduction to the DCC game and its aesthetic.

Mothership is great, sure it's a quick, ruleslight space horror game, but as a product it's also very well designed. A masterful use of layout and brevity to create an easy to learn and play system with a fair bit of depth.

It's 1st edition Pendragon. Even if you don't want to play a game about Aurthurian romance this edition of Pendragon is the ur text for genre emulation based roleplaying, and it still does an amazing job.

There's a lot in this. It's all slathered in wonderful art and poetic writing. At the core there's a regional sandbox with solid faction conflict and memorable, well characterized NPCs.

Let's talk about the aesthetic though. Silent Titans is weird, in a good way. Not candy colored Vancian psychedelic weird, or slavish copy of Planescape weird, but a deeply personal seeming archly malicious British satire weird. This is the Screaming Lord Sutch of Rpg settings and it might be hard difficult to grasp without a certain understanding. For all that it's extremely playable, but seems to demand considerable commitment to its world. Even if it offers ways to insert it in a larger more typical campaign, Silent Titans aesthetic is powerful and alluring enough that it's likely to take over from whatever Tolkien pastiche one might have been running.

Causey is one of the best stylists to come out of the mid-aughts blog scene, though he seems underappricated for his considerable contributions, and Strange Stars is full of style. Like most of Causey's works (Weird Adventures comes to mind) this is a setting, sadly systemless, that takes an underutilized fictional genre, here dayglo post-human pop space opera, and offers a unique appraoch to it. The art and layout are top notch and polished, while the content is wonderful background and inspiration for any space opera game.

At this point Gates of Gann is a classic. It may not have the usability aides of some newer works, but it's a wonderful science fantasy adventure, better then most of the early TSR/Greyhawk works of the 80's. Dense, complex and large, Gates of Gann delivers a classic dungoen crawl environment with an enjoyable slightly gonzo gloss.

A fun little ruleset for alien invasion campaigns, or basically the film Aliens. Nice rules for firearm based combat and morale. The art has a lovely 1990's amatuer computer game aesthetic that fits great with the source material.

Consistantly strange and far more frightening then most adventures that claim the horror genre, The Bloodsoaked Boudoir is a simple drop in encounter and lair that would work for any game with a vaguely gonzo aesthetic. A puzzle encounter focused around a single dangerous sorcerer/lich creature the adventure centers roleplay, negotiation and problem solving and delivers a consistantly well designed play experience.