Modular: Adventuring in Dangerous Terrain – Frog God Games’ Perilous Vistas
Back in 3rd Edition D&D, there were five supplements that fell under the ‘Environmental Series’ category (I’d argue it should only be the first three, but I don’t make that decision):
- Sandstorm: Mastering the Perils of Fire & Sand (Bruce R. Cordell)
- Frostburn: Mastering the Perils of Ice & Snow (Wolfgang Baur)
- Stormwrack: Mastering the Perils of Wind and Wave (Richard Baker)
- Dungeonscape: An Essential Guide to Dungeon Adventuring (Jason Buhlman)
- Cityscape: A Guidebook to Urban Planning (Ari Marmell & C.A. Suleiman)
It’s not uncommon to hear one of those books cited as a favorite by players from that era. They gave Dungeon Masters lots of material to incorporate into their adventures. Necromancer Games (who you read about here, right?) added to the concept with Glades of Death (a wilderness book) and Dead Man’s Chest (sea adventuring).
The concept has been continued by Frog God Games (surely you read this post about them!) for Pathfinder, Swords & Wizardry and 5th Edition D&D under the moniker, Perilous Vistas. Along with an updated Dead Man’s Chest, there have been four releases so far, all written by Tom Knauss:
Dunes of Desolation (Deserts)
Fields of Blood (Plains)
Marshes of Malice (Wetlands)
Mountains of Madness (Mountains)
The fifth installment, Icebound (Frozen Wastes), is in the works!
The general idea is that if the Dungeon Master wants to infuse some atmosphere and environment into the adventure, these supplements provide a myriad of options. Sure, they can just have the party get to the abandoned fort in the desert, or have them uneventfully move through the mountains to the deserted abbey or the monster-infested dwarven hall. Some folks like to just get to the dungeon crawl and start hacking away. That’s fine.
There’s a paradox in the nature of a dictionary of monsters. The medieval bestiaries at least claimed to be compendia of actual knowledge. But books like Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero’s Book of Imaginary Beings (Manual de zoología fantástica) and perhaps even Katharine Briggs’ Dictionary of Fairies are only superficially rational collections of information. Though alphabetised and cross-referenced, the logical framework’s a way of presenting wild fantasy and dream: basilisks and baldanders, brownies and banshees, sylphs and sphinxes. The Monster Manual, and the role-playing handbooks it inspired, take this contradiction to a new level — detailed statistics for each creature described along with the avowed intent of inspiring new stories featuring the legendary or imaginary entities. Quantified, numerically precise, the monsters in these enchiridia still crack open the inside of the head, driving readers to imagine worlds big enough to hold dungeon-dwellers and dragons. Rupert Bottenberg’s Fourscore Phantasmagores is the newest volume of these wonders for gamers and monster-lovers of all stripes, presenting, as it says on the cover, “A Gathering of Grotequeries for Gapejaws and Gamemasters.” And, conscious of its predecessors, the book’s a rich source of inspiration; a grimoire seeding new myths.
