#redmond simonsen

[oldschoolfrp]

BattleFleet Mars: Space Combat in the 21st Century, SPI's game of military and ideological war between the monopolistic Ares Corporation, backed by Earth's industrial might, and the rebellious Martian Republic allied with colonies on the larger asteroids and the Moon (Redmond Simonsen box art, game design by B E Hessel and Redmond Simonsen, with development by Greg Costikyan, 1977)

[oldschoolfrp]

Ad for the Dragonslayer boardgame, Ares magazine No 11, SPI, November 1981.  The map of Urland is based on Skye where the final scene of the movie was filmed.

[oldschoolfrp]

Voyage of the BSM Pandora, rules design by John H Butterfield and Edward J Woods, graphics by Redmond A Simonsen, included in Ares magazine No 6, SPI, January 1981.

Voyage was the prequel to SPI's The Wreck of the BSM Pandora from Ares No 2.  Wreck had the biological survey mission's crew chasing various escaped specimens around their ship.  The map sheet for Voyage packed a lot onto one page -- a small interstellar map and 8 planet surface maps for two scales of movement and exploration.  The rules included over 200 numbered paragraphs describing planetside encounters with alien specimens that the crew could attempt to capture and return to their ship.

This illustration seems to be another SPI reference to the Dawn of the Dead poster, this time with the player character as the looming head and the danger in the foreground.

[oldschoolfrp]

The party battles a pack of dire wolves on the 2nd level of the Citadel of Blood, from SPI's Ares magazine no. 5, November 1980.

Citadel of Blood was a fantasy dungeon crawl based on Greg Costikyan and Redmond Simonsen's game DeathMaze, with new rules by Eric Smith plus some background and characters from Costikyan's Swords and Sorcery.  Citadel of Blood added a new specific goal -- defeat the evil mage X the Unknown and destroy the Hellgate hidden somewhere in the citadel.  Like DeathMaze the game used randomly drawn counters to build the dungeon as the party explored.  This made the game ideal for solo or coop play without a gamemaster.

Citadel had several memorable game mechanics.  Characters with magic abilities had 3 different levels of magic power linked to the 3 suns; the amount of power available was determined randomly when the adventure began.  The 2-sided dungeon counters made it possible to expand the layout fairly smoothly, and a relatively long game still fit in a small space.  The magic mirrors could predict the future by revealing how many new counters to draw before placing the Hellgate.

The randomness of the dungeon could result in the occasional easy victory or TPK, but it was quick to set up and could be replayed many times with different results.