Mail Room: Labyrinth Lord 2E PDF

I like Labyrinth Lord, and it is good to see them back for another edition. The OGL is gone from this version, and we have one of the originals back. The game is not a strict copy of the original rules; it adds a few new races and tweaks a few things, which is interesting. The game is finally getting its own identity and flavor. This is taking BX as a base and moving on from there, without feeling it needs to pull in 1E material. This is the new king of the BX starting point games, where the 1E stuff is not essential, and the game should feel more like a 1E base.

A shout-out needs to go to the extremely close Basic Fantasy, a BX clone that hits all the right notes for many, and it uses a modern ascending AC system while being free to download and play. I can see how many would say "juststick with this" instead of supporting yet another BX clone, since the market already has quite a few of them.

Where Dragonslayer does more of a BX and 1E mix, Labyrinth Lord keeps 1E out of the game and just does its own interpretation of a BX ruleset. Dragonslayer is a nice and solid alternative as a replacement for the old Labyrinth Lord Advanced Fantasy, where we started to see 1E monsters and classes enter the game. Dragonslayer uses the 1E hit point scale, with fighters being a d10 hit die instead of a d8.

Dragonslayer is a fantastic game, well worth supporting and playing, and this is the king of mixed BX and 1E content, where you have the stuff from 1E, but a simple BX framework to play with it all in.

If you do not want to go with the full complexity of an OSRIC or For Gold & Glory, and you want to keep the base experience simple, and you want the 1E additions, then Dragonslayer is the perfect game for you.

Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy (now out of print) did a near-perfect BX implementation with no changes. When you start to fold in Advanced Fantasy, you lose some of the elegance and simplicity, and some of the classes (fighter) need quite a few mods and optional rules from the Carcass Crawler zines to feel worth playing. I see how OSE, to some, feels all over the place and needs a bit of tweaking to become fun, and the extra material required keeps it from being a one-book game.

OSE is currently experiencing an identity crisis and needs to find its focus. The revision next year will sort things out, and they make a few more changes to Advanced Fantasy to pull in some of the material people want, and to up their game to become a great one-book game.

On that "one book game" scale, I would rank these as follows:

1. Dragonslayer
2. Basic Fantasy
3. Labyrinth Lord 2E
4. OSRIC and For Gold & Glory
5. Old School Essentials

On my personal preference scale? I am a fan of 2E, but Dragonslayer hits a lot of the right notes for me, too.

1. For Gold & Glory
2. Dragonslayer
3. OSRIC
4. Old School Essentials
5. Basic Fantasy
6. Labyrinth Lord 2E

On the "Does this game have bards?" scale, from no to yes, we get:

1. Dragonslayer
2. OSRIC
3. Labyrinth Lord 2E
4. Basic Fantasy
5. Old School Essentials
6. Shadowdark
7. For Gold & Glory

I bring up bards since the class feels like it has an identity crisis, especially in old-school games. In a classic dungeon crawl, where the party fights to keep quiet, what use is a class that makes the most noise? Even the base book of Shadowdark skips the bard. In newer games, there is a tendency for the class to be the default choice for players who want to be disruptive or don't care about the game, and there is a flippant nature to them that reduces the seriousness some tables desire in gameplay.

And I have played bards for decades and see this too, so I am not a hater, but someone who is generally concerned that the bard class has lost its way. I am not a hater, and I see the confusion and how some lean into this class to disrupt the game. Sometimes they are illusionists, other times healers, other times combat mages, and yet other times they feel like the "default town class," and nobody knows what role a bard fills.

As a result, you see a lot of old-school games drop the bard altogether, and even core-book Shadowdark does this. They do have it as an expansion class (as well as the ranger), but they do not feel like "core book" classes, and there is a reason they are not in the base book.

Design meets the focus of the game, and some classes get dropped since they are distractions to the core experience that the game tries to deliver.

So Labyrinth Lord 2E comes in as a BX+ game, rebuilding the basic game with a simple core but not feeling it needs to add any 1E content. It is closest to Basic Fantasy, which is a game very close to a modernized BX, but with strong ease-of-use features. Labyrinth Lord 2E adds new elements to the mix, so it is a fork of BX that maintains compatibility with BX. Some would want to stick with Basic Fantasy, Dragonslayer, or the 1E/2E clones over supporting another new BX game.

It is good to see an old friend return so strongly.

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.

Mail Room: Ashes Without Number

I received my hardcover copy of Ashes Without Number the other day, and I am impressed. This is another amazing game from Kevin Crawford, easily an equal in greatness to the others in this series. This is a post-apocalyptic sandbox game that can be played three ways, with a few examples of each listed:

• Mutant Wasteland: Gamma World, Fallout, Mutant Epoch
• Deadlands: The Walking Dead, World War Z, I am Legend
• After the Fall: Aftermath, Twilight: 2000, Mad Max

Sine Nomine games are B/X compatible, so any adventure, monster, module, rules expansion, class, spell, gear, treasure, race, or other thing from any old-school B/X style game will drop right in. Want to borrow a bugbear from Old School Essentials as a mutant monster? It works; just give it a random mutation or two and call it something different - a furred bog-beast. Want that +1 sword to be an ancient nano-tech "ever-sharp blade," go right ahead. Want to port in an OSE drow racial template as an undercity "dark dweller?" Go right ahead. Want a monster from Swords & Wizardry or Adventures Dark and Deep? The books are there to pull from. Want that healing potion from OSE to be a super-science medical nano-injector? Reskin it and use it.

Your games have a massive amount of compatible resources to draw from.

And the games are compatible with each other, so you can borrow weapons and vehicles from Cities Without Number, sci-fi gear from Stars Without Number, magic powers from Worlds Without Number, and anything else you heart desires.

And those games can pull from the same resources, too, so OSE and any other B/X style game is an expansion for any of these games. Take an OSE giant mantis and make it an "alien mantis monster" for Stars Without Number, and throw a mutation on it from Ashes Without Number. That is what attacks the landing party in the away team shuttle and pins them in a nearby cave, so they can't return to the ship.  Now they need to fight the monster or explore the cave. There is your adventure, start it in media res and get playing.

Want fantasy races, magic, and monsters in a Cyberpunk setting? Use OSE and Cities Without Number, and there is a fun B/X-style Shadowrun game for you. It all just works. Want those same fantasy races in a post-apocalyptic setting, where the old world and new collide and destroy the world? Use OSE and Ashes Without Number.

And the charts in this game can create an entire world to play in. This is one of the best value and imagination resources in gaming, as it is infinitely usable with the game in the book or your own favorite game in the genre.

The highest recommendation: this one needs to be in your library if you enjoy the post-apocalyptic genre.

Mail Room: Caverns of Thracia Legendary Adventure DCC

Caverns of Thracia has finally arrived, and good thing the books aren't damaged since this came in a half-split-open box, and the shipping left a lot to be desired. You rolled a critical failure there, Goodman Games, please do better next time! They were severely behind on all their shipping, as evidenced by the three or four update emails I received over a few weeks.

Considering this was a Kickstarter, I expected more care in shipping an order this expensive. Usually, I have no problems with their shipping, and the books are always well-protected. I will update people on the shipping of my orders and see if this is a new problem or just a one-time thing.

The entire adventure and island remind me of X1, The Isle of Dread, only less islander culture and King Kong style adventure, but with more Greek-style ruins and serpent people. The structure is the same, a hexcrawl lost island with a dungeon as the climax. I would still love to see a Goodman take on the classic King Kong jungle expedition, more than the original film that terrified audiences in the black-and-white era, with giant monsters fighting and a doomed expedition (funnel) trying to make it to the ruins.

You get more here in the Caverns of Thracia than you do on the Isle of Dread; the island, only described in the original adventure, is given a map, and there are plenty of places to fill in your own dungeons and adventures. The booklet that came with the Kickstarter is a good campaign overview and base, along with a nice expansion area for waterborne adventures.

I will need to break out my copy of Labyrinth Lord as my +1 Game for ships and naval combat rules. These two games were made for each other, so I am not complaining. This game and Mutant Future are indispensable add-on games for DCC and MCC for me.

I also got some of the adventure collections in hardcover, and those are nice to have. Besides the shipping, I am happy. I can't wait to see what the next Kickstarter from them brings!