Love a monster book. This is Monsters of Myth & Legend (1984) for Mayfair’s Role Aids line of D&D sourcebooks. As the title tells you, this is a collection of monsters drawn from mythology. Four groupings of them are tied to specific cultures: Norse, Irish, Greek, Chinese. Two other draw broadly from the myths of people living in large regions but which belong to many distinct cultures: native American and Aboriginal Australians. The mix is pretty solid. I particularly appreciate the monsters from Australia, which are often overlooked in this sort of thing — and even here, I can think ..read more

This is Dragons (1986 second edition, originally 1984), part of Mayfair’s Role Aids line for Dungeons & Dragons. I am sure its existence has nothing to do with Dragonlance, right? RIGHT? Oh, wait, no, there is a dragonlance right there on the cover. And “Dragonlord” is giving off some big “legally distinct from Dragon Highlord” energy. I dig the tie-in with Grenadier’s Dragonlords (which was what they renamed their D&D line after TSR dickishly pulled the license in order to fail at producing their own miniatures) and the dragon of the month club. The sourcebook section is great. It ta ..read more

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with Gavriel Quiroga about his new game, Black Rainbow Society. A sequel of sorts to Hell Night, this game doesn’t feature players in the roles of fiends from hell, but rather normal humans grappling with the knowledge that there is more to existence than the mundane world (a staple theme of ’90s RPGs, many of which are clear inspirations here). Gavriel brings his signature intensity to the project, with heaps of random tables, gnarly zine art and buckets of blood. Now on Kickstarter! * * * Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Grou ..read more

Gamesmen of Kasar (1982) is a gamebook for Tunnels & Trolls. I swear, when I picked these, I was just picking cool covers, I wasn’t like “here, let me pick all the weirdest, most artificial T&T gamebooks I can.” Yet, here we are. This one is perhaps the strangest T&T gamebook I have delved into. There is a mysterious compound where adventurous sorts can go in and play the Game, sans any equipment (SEE? Always with the taking away of my sweet stuff, what’s the point of having it?). Inside is a gauntlet of deadly challenges. If you survive, you get your weight in gold as a prize. Ho ..read more

Sea of Mystery (1981) is an interesting Tunnels & Trolls solo. The concept is pretty straightforward: you get on a boat, looking for adventure and, generally, it finds you. In practice, this is essentially another teleport dungeon like Deathtrap Equalizer, its just that the meandering whims of the seabound life obscure the mechanisms a little better. As I said, you get on a boat. From port there are a number of short adventure paths to follow, some silly, most extremely deadly, one surprisingly horny (I did not realize until this batch of T&T solos how horny this game is, generally ..read more

Sewers of Oblivion (1982) is a sort of sequel to my favorite Tunnels & Trolls solo, City of Terrors, in that it takes place under that city. You get mugged, you get pitched into the sewers, and voila. I guess that is one way of limiting your starting equipment. It’s kind of funny that you are expected to take solo characters through gamebook after gamebook, getting more and more stuff, but the later books recognized how impossible it was to balance for all these potential magic items, so they went to greater and more improbable lengths to take all your kit away at the start. The muggers, y ..read more

This is Deathtrap Equalizer Dungeon, the second Tunnels & Trolls adventure module, and one that saw several printings. The first two pictures are from the spiral bound 1977 edition, the second set of two from the revised 1981 edition. It is cool to see both the Flying Buffalo production value increase and to see how Liz Danforth’s skill as an illustrator evolved over the four years between the two versions. I said adventure module, but really, this is an adventure gamebook meant for solo play. It is, I believe, the first “teleport” adventure, in which a quest master—in this case the demon ..read more

Tunnels & Trolls is the second RPG (give or take), and like D&D, it was born out of a legendary dungeon built by the game’s creator as a sort of testing ground: Ken St. Andre’s Gristlegrim. Like Castle Greyhawk and Blackmoor, Gristlegrim has never been released to the public and, according to St. Andre, the original no longer exists. That makes Bear Peters’ Dungeon of the Bear the oldest extant T&T dungeon. Originally released in three parts in 1979, this 1982 edition collects them all and puts them under Michael Stackpole’s Castle Ward. Before I go on, I should note that unlike m ..read more

At the very end of last year, Bryan Ansell, a man who played a pivotal role in the world of tabletop games, passed away. To understand just how important Ansell was, this week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we chat with Timothy Linward, Wargamer staff writer and author of the forthcoming Grimdark: A Very British Hell. Tim walks us through the early days of Citadel Miniatures, his rise to prominence at Games Workshop and his role in shaping the various flavors of Warhammer that emerged during his tenure from 1985 to 1991, culminating with Realm of Chaos. We also nearly spin off into a tangential ..read more

What a Fucking Nightmare is the name of the latest album by the English street punk band The Chisel. It’s also the name of the opening track, in which music drones and front man Callum Graham repeats the words with increasing agitation until the wave breaks into the first real song of the album. I have a t-shirt with the slogan emblazoned on the back. It seems like a motto for modern living and pops, unbidden, into my mind with an alarming frequency. Today, for instance, I was looking at Chaosium’s late ‘80s and early ‘90s Call of Cthulhu books and I thought, “What a fucking nightmare.” Why? I ..read more