Browsed by
Category: Games

The Hobby Shop Dungeon, by Benoist Poire and Ernest Gary Jr. Gygax

The Hobby Shop Dungeon, by Benoist Poire and Ernest Gary Jr. Gygax

The Hobby Shop Dungeon Marmoreal Tomb Campaign Starter

The Hobby Shop Dungeon, by Benoist Poire and Ernest Gary Jr. Gygax is a marvel to behold.

One can utilize these books and maps for years — a complete setting loaded with maps, histories, set pieces, dungeons (arguably a mega-dungeon), wilderness, factions, heraldry, unique monsters, unique magic items, and adventure hooks abounding. It is quite a feat and an enormous labor of love.

Poring through it all, I’d say my favorite parts are the heraldry (very Greyhawk in spirit), the wilderness and dungeon maps, and the Prismatic Maze (sounds very Vancian).

I’ve assembled some photos from the box set below for you to enjoy. You can order copies from Troll Lord Games or from Isle of Games.

Read More Read More

Steamed: What I’ve Been Playing (December, 2023)

Steamed: What I’ve Been Playing (December, 2023)

Happy Christmas and Merry Holidays!! Whatever works for you, let’s be a little kinder to our fellow humans. This world needs it more than ever. Yeesh.

I really do need to get back to doing a ‘Year-End at Black Gate World Headquarters’ post. The one I completed may be my all-time favorite BG post (which I’ve written). I’ve started two others, but they petered off.

I talked about Fortnite last week, which I really enjoy playing with my son. I’m good – he’s excellent.

Wanted to talk about a couple other games I played this year. I spent more hours on Elder Scrolls Online than anything else. I got burned out and am taking a long break, but it’s easily my favorite MMO, supplanting Age of Conan, with Lord of the Rings Online the other one I really like. All three have terrific lore, but ESO’s game play, and graphics, stand above.

Here are a couple others that might appeal to the Black Gate crowd.

Merry Christmas!! I really do need to get back to doing a ‘Year-End at Black Gate World Headquarters’ post. The one I completed may be my all-time favorite BG post (which I’ve written). I’ve started two others, but they petered off.

I talked about Fortnite last week, which I really enjoy playing with my son. I’m good – he’s excellent.

Read More Read More

Seven Things I Think I Think (December, 2023)

Seven Things I Think I Think (December, 2023)

With the holidays being so busy and such, Ten Things I Think I Think only has seven entries this week. I’m sure it won’t ruin your Christmas. 🙂 So away we go…

THE BLACK COMPANY IS AN ENDURING CLASSIC

I’ve read Glen Cook’s The Black Company, all the way through, at least three times. It’s about a mercenary company that roams far and wide in a dark fantasy world, varying on the scale of ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys.’ I don’t do Grimdark, but it’s commonly cited as being a foundation of the genre.

Audible had a HUGE sale the start of December, and I picked up almost the entire series on audiobook, at less than $3.50 a book. That’s a pure steal! I listen to audiobooks during my drives, and during my work day. Even as I type blog posts. My mind is good at multi-attention. I wouldn’t have time to read/re-read all the things I listen to.

I’m on book four, and this remains one of the best fantasy series’ I’ve ever read. I feel that the last two books are kind of disappointing, and I slog through them. We’ll see if that’s the case, listening to them. But overall, this is terrific. The latest book, Port of Shadows, is set during the original trilogy, and I am going to read that later this month. But as a whole, I highly recommend The Black Company. Fletcher Vredenburgh did a superb deep dive into the whole thing, over at Black Gate. I also LOVE Cook’s Garrett, PI series, which I wrote about here. Just a great writer.

Read More Read More

A High-Tech Sandbox: Transhuman Space by David Pulver

A High-Tech Sandbox: Transhuman Space by David Pulver


Transhuman Space (Steve Jackson Games, March 29, 2018). Illustrated by Christopher Shy

In the 1990s, I made a big decision about tabletop roleplaying gaming: Rather than coming up with my own rules for running games, I ran campaigns using published systems. Some of these used my own original settings; some borrowed settings from published fictional or dramatic works, either as adapted by game publishers or in my own adaptations; and some used published original game worlds. I hardly ever used a setting more than once. But one that I found worth coming back to was David Pulver’s Transhuman Space, a setting for Steve Jackson Games’ game system GURPS.

As its name suggests, Transhuman Space was a science fictional milieu. Tabletop roleplaying has had a lot of these, going back to the classic Traveller, first released in 1977. For a long time, most of them built on the premises of what might be called classic science fiction: The stories of Old Wave authors such as Poul Anderson or Frank Herbert, and of later hard science fiction authors such as Larry Niven, or of the original Star Trek. That is, they were about aliens, robots, supermen, interstellar travel, time travel, parallel worlds, and psionic abilities, singly or in combination.

Transhuman Space does have robots, though they’re quite different from Asimovian robots. But it avoids all those other classic story elements. It has space travel, on an interplanetary (but not interstellar) scale, with human inhabitants from Mercury to the Kuiper Belt — but also with many machines that don’t need life support.

Read More Read More

Science is Sorcery

Science is Sorcery


Bloodstone (Warner, March 1975). Cover by Frank Frazetta

“Kane’s power is that of science, not sorcery — although with elder-world science, the distinction becomes blurred. But then, to the untutored minds the distinction is difficult to grasp, for this lies in understanding the forces at work, and in the laws they obey. For example, to produce a deadly sword to wield in battle, a master smith will use secrets of his craft to smelt choice iron into steel, forge steel into tempered blade, then balance, hone and haft the blade to the best of his art. Similarly, a wizard may utilize the secrets of his craft to forge a sword of starfire and incantations. Both swords seem magic to some club-swinging apeman, such as legend places on lands unknown to our civilization, but clearly one is born of science, the other spawned by sorcery…”

—Karl Edward Wagner, Bloodstone

In the hobby of tabletop role-playing games, the influence of J.R.R. Tolkien looms prominently, and the reason for this makes perfect sense: By the mid- to late 1960s, Tolkien fever (i.e., fervent esteem for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings) was reaching epic proportions, fueled by the mass market release of affordable paperbacks published by Ballantine Books. “Frodo Lives!” became a counterculture slogan on buttons, bumper stickers, and T-shirts. In the form of graffiti, it was spray-painted in subways and under bridges. Wargaming enthusiasts of the American Midwest were not immune to the hypnotic effect of The Ring, and in one wargame, called Chainmail (Gygax and Perren, 1971), a 15-page “Fantasy Supplement” in the back of the rules proved to be a primary progenitor of the world’s most popular tabletop role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons.

Read More Read More

The RPG Rundown is your Home for Lively Discussions of Your Favorite Games

The RPG Rundown is your Home for Lively Discussions of Your Favorite Games

YouTube is the place for serious gaming discussion these days. It’s not all fake Marvel trailers and dance clips. With the right connections and a little investigative spirit, you can find a thriving community where old-school gaming is very much alive.

Well, it worked for me, anyway. Mostly because one of those quality connections was Dave Munger, Black Gate‘s original site engineer and the man who wrote the first two posts on this very blog, way back in November 2008. Dave tipped me off to the RPG Rundown, a YouTube channel that covers tabletop role playing games. The lively and entertaining discussions there include new game reviews, industry news, player tips and info, and broader conversations on the very nature of role playing.

Read More Read More

Call of the Sea: Cosmic Conundrums

Call of the Sea: Cosmic Conundrums

You begin your adventure on the white shore of a beautiful Tahitian isaland.

Call of the Sea is the first title for Out of the Blue, a new game company working out of Madrid, Spain. It had a limited release at the end of 2020, and went worldwide across all consoles in 2021. For a debut game, Call of the Sea is an impressive achievement, and Out of the Blue have set themselves a pretty high bar to follow.

Billed as a puzzle game with adventure elements, Call of the Sea evokes the head-scratching joys of Myst, Quern or The Talos Principle, and flavors the brew with Lovecraftian elements that take the form of Easter eggs rather than eldritch horrors that have to be engaged. In fact, there is no confrontation at all in the game, you will be utterly alone for the entire experience save for some flashbacks and the occasional glimpsed beastie in the waves. Despite the origins of the story, the game is relatively horror-free, relying instead on an atmosphere thick with dread and some excellent sound design, so this is a recommended outing for the more timid game players among us (myself included).

Read More Read More

The Remarkable Pathos of Vlad Dracula Tepes

The Remarkable Pathos of Vlad Dracula Tepes

Good aftevenmorn (whensoever you read this article),

When last speaking of video game to series adaptations, I left off one extremely brilliant adaptation. This was for two reasons. The first was that it was an adaptation into an animated series, which means a great deal more improbable things would work due to the medium that made adapting a little easier. The second was, shamefully, I completely forgot it existed.

I am, of course, talking about Castlevania.

Read More Read More

Inspired by the Weird Fiction of Clark Ashton Smith: Castle Amber by Tom Moldvay

Inspired by the Weird Fiction of Clark Ashton Smith: Castle Amber by Tom Moldvay


Castle Amber
(TSR, 1981). Cover by Erol Otus

Castle Amber (aka Château d’ Amberville) by Tom Moldvay (RIP) is a classic D&D adventure that I first enjoyed as a player at age 10 and later as DM. Published in 1981 by TSR, Castle Amber has a wonderful cover by Erol Otus, and excellent interiors by Otus, Jim Holloway (RIP), Harry Quinn, Jim Rosolf (RIP), and Stephen Sullivan (he did the maps, I’m assuming).

I didn’t appreciate it as a youth, but this module was largely inspired by the weird fiction of Clark Ashton Smith — specifically his Averoigne Cycle of stories, which were set in a fictional counterpart of a province of France. Smith called this part of Southern France “the most witch-ridden in the entire country.” Smith has been a huge inspiration to me in my own RPG work, and I never tire of rereading his poetry and fiction.

Read More Read More

The Greatest City in Fantasy: Lankhmar, City of Adventure by Bruce Nesmith, Doug Niles, and Ken Rolston

The Greatest City in Fantasy: Lankhmar, City of Adventure by Bruce Nesmith, Doug Niles, and Ken Rolston


Lankhmar, City of Adventure
(TSR, 1985). Cover by the legend Keith Parkinson

I would like to round out my posts on tabletop RPG city supplements with my personal favorite: Lankhmar, City of Adventure, which is the home of Fritz Lieber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Published in 1985 by TSR for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, this book was written by Bruce Nesmith, Doug Niles, and Ken Rolston. The cover art is by the legend, Keith Parkinson, and the interior art is by the great Jeff Easley. Cartography by Geoff Valley, Curtis Smith, and Tracy Hickman.

Wow, I don’t know where to begin with this one! I absolutely adored the fiction of Fritz Lieber, devouring his Lankhmar works and even some of his sci-fi at a young age. Lieber was a friend of Gary Gygax, and he was among a handful of Gygax’s favorite authors. Thus, I think it’s important to note that the content of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser tales was incredibly inspirational to Gygax, and this comes across in the tone and themes of D&D — which essentially is a melting pot of fictional inspirations. My point is, you can’t simply look at this supplement as a fictional property that was adapted to the D&D game, because the DNA of Lankhmar was already embedded in D&D to begin with.

Read More Read More