Mail Room: Comes Chaos

Comes Chaos is a fun book. This campaign adopts a "corruption of the land" style, similar to Warhammer FRP, but with a B/X-style spin on its entire structure. This is not "WHFRP in D&D" but more of its own thing, presenting a system of chaos mutations, monsters, magic, and hexcrawl mechanics for any B/X-style game.

The game also features a corruption system that can impact player characters, induce chaos mutations, and draw them into madness and darkness. The game also features four "chaos entities" that function similarly to Dungeon Crawl Classics patrons, and an optional section of the book enables the creation of evil campaigns. The "evil campaign" in this book could end terribly, and result in your "chaos champion" displeasing their chaos lord, gaining too many mutations, and being turned into a giant flesh-blob monster, and being lost to the game forever as a creature NPC.

There are chaos spells and magic items for use as character, NPC, or villain items. There is a bestiary too, and different chaos lords dislike others, so there is a fair amount of inter-chaos battling and backstabbing. The book can be inserted into any campaign world, a random hexcrawl world, or used to seed a new campaign.

The book also details how the corrupted chaos lands spread, and how bastions of civilization ward against the land's corruption - until the city falls to corruption, which means lots of roleplay, intrigue, and hunting chaos cults in cities to fend off the decline and decay of civilization.

This book, plus Old School Essentials, gives DCC a run for its money. Not in the "fun factor" of DCC and all the crazy dice, along with the super-heroic characters, but in a campaign simulating how corruption crawls across a game world and slowly destroys it from within. Anyone can be corrupted, and even entire cities and kingdoms can fall. While DCC has "magic is corruption" on a personal scale, it fails to extend that to the larger campaign setting and cause permanent change in the world.

This book gives me that missing piece.