wearestormcaller

There is tranquility in Chaos. Not everyone fears the storm. Part of the We are Adventurers Collective  Wallpaper by Brandon Morgan

[vintagerpg]

Thomas G. Aylesworth’s Servants of the Devil (1970) is from the same series as Vampires and Other Ghosts, and like that book it is full of large art reproductions and flare for pleasing graphic design. But where the former book is breezy and light, this one is a sober evaluation of the folklore of witchcraft and the use of the same as an excuse for murder and torture by the churches and governments of Europe and elsewhere. It’s nice to see Aylesworth struggle to be impartial. Any semblance of that falls way pretty early. By the time he mentions Nicholas Remy, the judge who sentenced hundreds of “witches” to burn to death in a span of 15 years, Aylesworth’s anger is pretty apparent. Toward the end of Remy’s life, he was plagued by guilt, not for the deaths but rather because he spared some of the children who came before his bench. What a shit.

Anyway, after that point, Aylesworth is pretty clearly horrified by the persecution of witches. He leaves some room for the existence of witchcraft as defined by Margaret Murray, that is, as a survival of a pagan religion dedicated to a mother goddess. He does this, it seems, because of the absence of evidence either way. As for the diablery described by the witch hunters, he appears deeply skeptical. In all, it’s a rather bracing indictment of cruelty and hysteria.

After sketching out the practice of Wiccans and other harmless witches, he ends with “There will never be another period like that of the witch hunts with its hysterical persecutions and tortures and executions. Or will there…?” Ever the optimist was Mr. Aylesworth.

[shardanic]

Final goddess of Veilen:

Telasa: the Goddess of Flux

[prokopetz]

Predictions for Dungeons & Dragons under Hasbro's management in the coming years:

Uma Musume style horsegirls introduced to the Forgotten Realms; setting's lore revised so that they've always been there.

Advancement rules now stipulate per-session XP bonus based on lifetime D&D Beyond purchase history.

Compendium of exclusive feat trees for specific gender and sexual identities. Bisexuality receives no feats of its own, being mechanically implemented as "half gay"; the resulting synergies are disgusting.

Editorial error in revised Dungeon Master's Guide accidentally refers to Dungeon Masters as Hasbro's employees.

"Noble savage" coding of barbarian class walked back, refocused on European folkloric touchstones such as the Ulster Cycle; all barbarian characters become Irish stereotypes.

AI-based DM service trained exclusively on work of Ed Greenwood launched; withdrawn a week later citing "guiderail issues".

Expanded discussion of navigating player expectations frames "not showing up at all" as a valid playstyle.

Dragon-blooded sorcerer subclass revised to state that one of the character's ancestors was "very good friends" with a dragon.

[applepieandcupcakess]

there should be a rule that it has to rain at least once or twice a week

[vintagerpg]

Woses of the Black Wood (1987) is the first of two MERP modules I happened to pick that are set in the same region, Eryn Vorn, a wild forest on the south coast of Eriador, near the mouth of the Brandywine River. In the game (I’ve no idea of Tolkien mentioned the region in his writing), the rough country on the forest outskirts is home to some scant humans with some Welsh cultural flavor. The woods themselves are the refuge of a population of Woses, Middle-earth’s answer to the Medieval idea of the “Wild Man,” hill-dwellers who live an uncivilized life mostly in secret. Then the cape, with its many rocky islands, is the haunt of pirates. As a setting for adventures goes, it's pretty good.

The first scenario is yet another haunting. So many MERP adventures involve spectral figures and what to do about them! This, however, is the first I’ve encountered that involves what I’d consider a typical haunting where the point is to lay the spirits to rest in a somewhat typical, real-world fashion. I have a desire to stick this basic plot in my West Marches campaign to see if the pretty simple real-world solution is naturally obscured or complicated by the fact that it is happening in a fantasy world (the ghosts in question were being tormented by a demon, who was recently released, accidentally, by now-dead dwarven adventurers). I like this one quite a lot. 

The first scenario leads into the second: one of the ghosts was tormenting a girl in the settlement who plugged her ears to block out the spectral whispering. Free now of the ghost, it’s discovered she has injured her hearing in a way that only the local hermit herbalist can heal. Unfortunately, the demon from the first scenario has taken up residence in the herbalist’s house and hi-jinx ensue.

That these nicely interlocking mysteries give way to a dungeoncrawl in the third scenario is somewhat disappointing. The dungeon itself is large and dangerous and there are at least three factions — an undead Wose sorceress and her legion, a Wose party exploring the complex with the aim of resettling (most of the group is neutral but they are led by an evil sorceress) and a renegade troll warrior. The mix is interesting and complex, and any confrontations are further complicated by traps and the narrow confines of the dungeon. I just wish it was more like the previous scenarios.

Good maps and Liz Danforth’s illustrations are always a highlight. Angus McBride on the cover. Love the composition and the movement, especially enjoy the carved stone faces (they remind me in the slightest way of Arthur Machen’s “The White People”) but I don’t love the choice of making the Woses look like Neanderthals. I don’t hate it, either, but I think there is maybe a better visual solution.

[vintagerpg]

There is text in Woses of the Black Woods that seems to indicate that the set of scenarios is called “Pirates of Pelargir.” After some confusion where I thought the book titled the same name must be a reprint, I realized that this was actually just a typo. But, since I haven’t tackled Pirates of Pelargir (1987), I figured I would wrap up the week with it. You gotta listen to the omens.

Or, maybe not? This is a puzzling MERP module. The first adventure is “hire onto a ship as guards” and it ends with “get attacked by pirates.” Win or lose, the second adventure is “look for the pirates” and the third is “having found the pirates, raid their implausibly gigantic base.” None of this is bad, but it isn’t terribly MERPy in feel. There are quite a lot of moving parts with NPCs and personal agendas that are actually quite interesting, though. I kind of wonder if maybe the real problem with MERP was that it was burdened with Middle-earth? But then, this wouldn’t fit right in Shadow World, either. It’s odd.

Very nice sea battle painting by Angus McBride on the cover. Jim Holloway inside, who I never really love in MERP, which adds to my ambivalence to this module maybe.

[vintagerpg]

Behold, the front cover of my forthcoming book on the idea of the dungeon, Down Down Down! Pre-order (and the full wrap-around cover) coming late summer, release in December. Hype copy from Strange Attractor Press below:

Tune into chthonic clamour, subterranean shrieks, and abyssal ambience, as writer Stu Horvath channels hypogean imaginaries from ancient religious writings to the most contemporary of indie roleplaying games in Down, Down, Down... forthcoming from Strange Attractor Press this Winter. Surveying the dungeon, the cavern, and the dimly lit grotto as spaces of play and projection, Down, Down, Down is both a work of literary analysis and pop-cultural criticism. Richly researched and edited, this unique anthology assembles an encyclopaedia of texts intended to furnish the imaginations of both the game master and general reader alike. Stu is the author of the phenomenal Monsters, Aliens & Holes In the Ground: A Guide to Tabletop Roleplaying Games from D&D to Mothership, MIT Press, 2023, and the omniscient brain-in-a-jar behind one of our favourite online archives, the inhumanly enormous Vintage RPG. Wraparound cover art (yet to be fully revealed) by the always eldritch Shoggoth Kinetics aka Lucas Korte (whose work you may have seen gracing the cover of the Shadowdark TTRPG).

[vintagerpg]

Raiders of Cardolan (1988) doesn’t really continue the threads of Woses of the Black Woods, but it sort of sits next to them. It would be nice to intertwine the two, as I think the overarching problem here is much more interesting in its resolution than the dungeoncrawl of the last. This time we’re dealing with a different Wose cultural group, some dissolute “Petty” dwarf necromancers and a force of corsairs from Umbar who are working for the Dark Lord. The larger scheme is to destabilize the region for invasion.

The players get involved when they are tasked to collect a bounty on the head of a Wose usurper who has turned brigand, which puts the players in league with the tribe of Woses who oppose him. Once that is resolved, they must further aid the Woses in ousting the corsairs from a ruined fortress on the southern cape. This boils over into the third scenario, where the pirates have holed up in the underground fortress that is also occupied by the necromancer dwarves. Both, ideally, need to be rooted out. None of this is as good as the first two scenarios in the previous book, but it is more cohesive and there is a greater sense of purpose in the climactic dungeoncrawl.

Daniel Horne cover featuring some of the piratiest pirates I’ve encountered. Very much of the Howard Pyle school. Do they feel MERPy? Not at all. Do I care? Also, not at all. Liz Danforth does the interiors, some fun ones here including the tomb and the flying frogs (!). Also, just, I love how colorful MERP books were willing to be. Purple and yellow!

[vintagerpg]

Brigands of Mirkwood (1987) is an alright adventure that gives players a new, interesting base of operations and then pits them against regional problems. The hub is Straytown, an enclave of seedy operators in Mirkwood. Sort of a rustic, frontier town, lined with corduroy roads and full of opportunities and danger. A bit like Lankhmar, really.

The first scenario is a check-out-the-neighborhood kind of jam, where a scholar requires the players to purchase a book on his behalf. Some light hi-jinx ensue, but for the most part this is a sightseeing mission. The second scenario has the players raiding the guild hall of the rogues, which is basically a Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser scenario. I’m not complaining. The final scenario pits them against the local mage, who is the primary power in the town. He’s also in league with Sauron and has a castle, of course. That’s a fairly straightforward assassination, but disappointingly, his removal likely leads to the dissolution of the whole settlement, which is a shame.

Another Angus McBride cover, so baseline great. It isn’t one of my faves, though and it doesn’t really seem aligned with the module the way most of his other MERP work is. I like that little lizard guy tho. Interior art is again by Jason Waltrip. Much of it is rather cartoony. Like, Disney-level cartoony. Which is an unusual choice. Not a bad one, necessarily, but unusual.

[vintagerpg]

Gates of Mordor (1987) is an adventure module for MERP. It doesn’t seem to set a time frame, but I think it is ostensibly set before the fall of Minas Ithil, which makes sense, since the opening action involves the wineries in fertile lands extremely close to Mordor. Normal people wouldn’t live there after the ring wraith’s transformed Minas Ithil into Minas Morgul, but I can see foolish ones doing so while the city was still in possession of Gondor.

The module boils down to orc problems. They massacre a winery and some other sites and the players are meant to wipe them out. There are some complications and such, but that’s the basics. The orcs linger at the winery searching for hidden treasure, which is interesting (they know it is hidden in water, but there are a lot of local water features). The second scenario involves killing orcs holed up in an abandoned tower, which is pretty to the point, though made more interesting due to the involvement of some NPCs. The final scenario…is also pretty by the numbers: finish off the orcs and their leader. The leader is cool, the werewolf sorcerer Gaurhir.

Jason Waltrip did the interiors, some of which are quite nice, others don’t do much for me. Nice Angus McBride cover. That orc is effed. And then that dude is probably effed. That’s a lot of orcs!

[vintagerpg]

We'll be back. But not before a nice, long vacation.

After just shy of 363 episodes in eight years, the Vintage RPG Podcast is going to take a hiatus. For lots of reasons, many of which we explain in this episode (along with some general kvetching about the state of the contemporary internet; that article about ad calls on news sites can be found here, hat tip to Robert McNees). But honestly, mostly, a vacation sounds nice. We'll be back in a couple months. We're even planning on sending a couple virtual postcards.

Until then, sign up for the for the Vintage RPG Newsletter, still going out ever Friday afternoon.

Join the Vintage RPG Discord to while away the days until our return.

Join the Vintage RPG Patreon (West Marches game starting again soon!).

Keep up with Hambone specifically on his own newsletter (newsletters are the cool new thing!).

[vintagerpg]

The Howling Tomb (2025) is a little adventure for characters level 2-3. I backed it during ZineQuest 2025 and also got Lair of the Bog Lich (2025), a level 1-2 adventure. I wasn’t expecting that! But they make a nice pair.

These are lo-fi zines and I like it. Folks often complain about how zines have gotten so fancy. I don’t mind fancy chapbooks being called zines, especially since quality pre-press and printing have become more affordable (or, at least, they were, for a minute there). But at the same time, I really dig a stripped down, no-nonsense zine. These are little black and white jams, six pages each, on nice paper but no cover stock. It gets the job done.

The job is providing OSR-ish adventure! Lair features art by Simone Tametta and has players investing why villagers are sleepwalking into the swamps, never to be seen again. Clearly, a monster is at work, in this case a Bog Lich, which is less like an Acererak and more like Ted Sturgeon’s It, which I dig. More muck monsters in D&D, please! The Howling Tomb features art by Melotyca, I quite like the forlorn cover. The scenario is the six-room tomb and the source of the howl is a colorful opponent whose nature I won’t spoil, since it’s not in the title of this one.

These are both snappy scenarios fit for being dropped into any campaign. They’re a buck fifty for PDFs on itch.io, what are you waiting for?

[vintagerpg]

I don’t think there is a whole lot I can tell you about The Painted Wastelands (2024) that you won’t get from the cover and the other art reproduction. This is very much an exercise in leading by the visuals and, baseline, if you pick up the book only for Tim Molloy’s art, you’re still getting a bargain.

It’s more than that, though, of course! It’s a hex crawl for Old-School Essentials, an exploration of a small part of a larger dreamworld, where people speak a strange new language and where traveling from one place to the next is as much a matter of will (applied in a new skill called Lucidity) as it is movement. The world is rich and strange. There are dangers (there are always dangers) but much of the interesting stuff emerges from the world and a desire to see it. There is a robust commerce in the Wastelands, many merchants to visit, many vending machines to peruse. At the start, players find a skull that helpfully acts as a tour guide (shades of Planescape’s mimirs) and I think that sets an immediate tone that pushes away from combat as a default pursuit. It’s nice. The fact that one of the two new classes is “cat” also reinforces this (at a high enough level, they can travel to other realities by jumping high enough; the other class is a dream mage, the oneiromancer, and they pale a little compared to the cat, honestly).

A lot of clear inspirations that I see. Clark Ashton Smith looms largest, maybe, especially his Zothique stories. Moebius’ comic work. Maybe the Remnant series of videogames? Luka Rejec’s work, especially how he mixes fantasy, psychedelia and 20th century machinery, is a close cousin.

Molloy’s art is the star, though. It’s colorful and intricate. His line work is bold without becoming overly cartoony. The world he creates is very designed, by which I mean there is an internal consistency in his visual language that reinforces the world. There’s also a curious stillness, like everything is moving in slow motion (like a dream!) but also in a way that prevents me from feeling that I’ve gotten all the details (like a dream!). No matter how many times I look at these images, they seem new.

I bet it feels like that in play, too.

[dariakonnova]

Pridefall Thank you for commissioning me!

[vintagerpg]

Since we’ve already done some random table books this week, what’s one more? This is The Doomed Stronghold (2025) a zine about making, adventuring and living in unusual castles, keeps and fortresses. Every entry is brief to the point of terseness, but also full-to-brimming with inspiration.

Who wants a castle when they can have a petrified ark run aground in the desert? Or a coastal stronghold shaped like a conch? Why have opponents equipped with catapults when they can have flying lizards bombarding a castle with eggs that send serpents against the defenders when they shatter? Why have a normal disaster when a beanstalk can hoist the keep into the clouds? You get the idea — you’ll get tons of ideas!

The zine has a good look, too. It’s a little Mork Borg-y, but in a restrained, collage-y sort of way. I find lately that I enjoy pseudo-Medieval fantasy art in RPGs, because it usually mixes “simple” with “weird” in a way that I find accessible. Or maybe usable is a better word, as I can use these images easier in fortress building than I can some super cool realistic illustration. They also have a tactile aspect that marries nicely with a hand-made zine like this. And I just straight up like the super-saturated color and the way the images all look like color photo negatives. That’s not an aesthetic choice I thought I’d see in an RPG zine like, ever.

[vintagerpg]

This is at least the second version of The Stygian Library (2024); there was definitely a hardcover prior to this (I know because I owned it) and it is within the realm of possibility that a softcover, zine or PDF version was released prior to that (possibly all three). My rooting around has proven inconclusive. This edition was put together by Soul Muppet to match the clothbound revision of The Gardens of Ynn (see tomorrow’s post!) and it’s a notable improvement over the previous hardcover. In addition to being a lovely, properly bookish object, some layout issues have been resolved and the book feels much more usable (though this might be a trick of my memory).

It very much lives up to its subtitle: “a dungeon for bibliophiles.” It’s another place, accessed through a mundane library, archive or bookshop of requisite size, where someone has died. If the proper door can be found, players can enter into what is essentially an endless indoor space lined with books where, periodically, locations of interest can be found.

The Library is created on the fly, using tables to determine the next point of interest, as well as random events and encounters. The deeper the players go, the stranger the library becomes. Color coded librarians carry out their duties. Strange creatures lurk. Wondrous books wait to be found. I hesitate to say more. The material drifts effortless between darkness and whimsy and there is just so much to discover that I’m frankly a bit in awe of Emmy Allen’s creativity.

The only thing I can think of that seems to capture a similar tone is Electric Bastionland. Which is interesting, because Alec Sorensen illustrated both. I find I like his work here a smidge more, if only because I understand libraries more than I understand bastionlands, so the illustrations seem more grounded to me. I love his mind flayers, er, neurovores!

[vintagerpg]

Two legendary artists, one head-to-head infernal adventure. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, two of the most metal artists around, Arik Roper and Skinner, chat about The Black Spire Pact. That's a player-versus-player gamebook by Max Moon and Janaka Stucky, with Arik illustrating the wizard book and Skinner handling the demon lord. We also talk about art, fantasy, games, life, hallucinogens and more in a lengthy, rambling chat. Buckle up!