We Won The 3 Castles Award (Again)

 Like Red & Pleasant Land before it, Nebulith, our Japanese-themed LOTFP book, just won the prestigious (and very heavy) Three Castles Award.

This award is extra cool because the award jury tends to be composed entirely of game designers from the early days of the hobby, the Red & Pleasant Land jury was David "Zeb" Cook (of the original Oriental Adventures), Steve Perrin (Runequest), Dr Dennis Sustare (as in Chariot of Sustarre), James M Ward (Metamorphosis Alpha), and Steve Winter (Nightmares of Future Past, etc). 

Winter, Sustare, and Grubb, were on the jury this year, along with Allen Hammack (of TSR's Slave Lords series), and Ben Burns (Call of Cthulhu and Savage Worlds)

Grubb, who wrote a lot of classic stuff including the Marvel Super-Heroes (FASERIP) RPG and Al-Qadim and Spelljammer, had this to say about Nebulith:

The Nebulith is a volcano magically halted mid-eruption, so it is a huge frozen stone cloud hanging over the island of Awa Nikko, and serves as the "dungeon" for this setting. The setting is rich in lore, changing the euro-centric LotFP rules to adapt to samurai, ninja, and martial arts. This is the first Asian-themed product I've read that beats out the venerable Oriental Adventures from TSR. I love the art, I love the lore, I love the game design.

So, that's very cool!

If you haven't got it, its available here and here.

If you ask about it and anyone gives you static, it's because of this and this.

Stunning and Insane: New Reviews of Nebulith (and Red & Pleasant Land)

Audrey Cusack did an in-depth review of Nebulith and the recently re-released Red & Pleasant Land.

On Nebulith:
"All in all, Nebulith is a triumph, and a fantastic comeback to Lamentations for Zak. His whittling away at Cube World really paid off here, and I honestly can’t recommend the book enough. "

On Red & Pleasant Land:
"This book is batshit fucking insane."

Here is a video review of Nebulith (with flip-thru) from Foxxof RPG.
"Nebulith, which is insane."

And another video review that focuses just on the physical book. I think he said "stunning"?
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"I Have No Other Role-Playing Book That Looks Like It"

 

15 minute review of Nebulith by a German dude.

Notes:

-He's very kind. He says it looks like nothing else and smells nice and is a cool setting so that's cool and it is basically a glowing review so I shouldn't complain.

-"It feels like an artifact out of that culture"--Oh good! It took a lot of research, handcrafted trickery and multi-hour phone calls with Molly, the graphic designer, to get us there so I am glad that mission was accomplished.

This is an original, pre-graphic-designed
page from the bestiary

-The monster entries are hard to read. A little. That's kindaaaaa unavoidable in my opinion once I decided to try to make it look like an artifact out of that culture because I had to find a way to write in standard English-language text that didn't look out-of-place using Japanese Edo-period style graphic design. I made funny stick-letters. If anyone finds a better solution to writing modern English while feeling like old Japanese I will happily hand the crown to them. One could argue that I should've prioritized readability over aesthetics but most of the monster entries are not terribly complicated, so I made a choice. A giant bat is a giant bat, most people using this book know what to do with a giant bat and will just look at the book for confirmation.

-"Many of these classes are designed in a way that facilitate teamwork". Again, glad someone noticed.

-Flip through and decent summary if you're looking for that.

-He says the classes are hard to convert if you don't use LotFP. That is weird to me because they are things like "Ninja have shuriken style: The ninja can throw shuriken at up to 4 guys for d4 and, if successful, the next attack (by anybody) on a target hit by these shuriken will get +2 to hit" which converts to basically any D&D-derived system so idk. But what is easy for one person is difficult for another so yeah.

-He points out that if you strip away the superficials that you can use the martial arts abilities for Eurofantasy-style fencing schools. I'd say this is 100% true but also point out that these abilities do make combat take longer--which we considered appropriate to a wuxia-focused setting but piling them onto a slightly more exploration-focused game like you'd expect in a vanilla Western setting might not be everyone's cup of tea if you want fast-and-dirty, Godfather-baptism-scene life-or-death fights. 

-The fact that the introduction pages become 2 pages you never need to read again once you use the book is a weird take since this is a pretty standard thing in an RPG book this thick and a pretty minor inconvenience but being German has a price I guess.

-I do love the efficiency of the review itself. I find most videos like this barely watchable.

-"It comes with its own tone and style I honestly haven't seen anywhere before". Thanks!

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Nebulith and Red & Pleasant Land Are Now Available in the US, Happy Halloween

Here is the Nebulith in the US webstore. 

And Red & Pleasant Land is here.

"The most beautiful game product I've ever seen"

The legendary Tim Kask--first editor of Dragon Magazine, publications editor for TSR back in the day and all-around old school legend did a rare--and pretty gushing?--video review of our lil game book we just released.

“One of the most extraordinary products that I have ever seen in all my years in the game business...It defies just about every precept of good publishing and yet it is probably the prettiest, the most beautiful game product I’ve ever seen”.

One of the guys who invented the hobby just said our take on it was as good as it gets. I don't know what else to say after that? Go buy Nebulith?

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Some Notes on Stokely's Birthday Game, Demon City and (mostly) Nebulith Now That Its Out

Good morning. 

Stokely's LOTR Birthday Party

Stokely wanted to have a Lord of the Rings costume party for her birthday so I put together a party game for it: Basically I used miniatures and other D&D stuff to make a Candyland-style game board with two pieces (goblin, hobbit) and the way each team/piece advances is do what's on a series of index cards. They had things like: 

-Arm wrestle The Balrog (Lisa)—if you win go ahead 2, if you lose go back 1.

-Describe in detail how you would slay a dragon. For each guest who says your plan is good, move forward 1 point, maximum 3 points.

-Get a snack. Share it with other guests at the party without using your hands (or theirs). You have two minutes. You move forward 1 space +1 per guest who shares with you, maximum 3 spaces.

Etc.

This was a simple game but easy for guests to tune into and out of, so it worked. Stokely was really happy how the party turned out so feel free to adapt the basic idea for any porn-star-birthday/LOTR cosplay parties you run.

Weapons and Demon City

 

Saw Weapons the horror movie by Zach Cregger, the former sketch comedy guy who also directed Barbarian. 

I liked it and it's a very Demon City movie in that it has a whole ensemble cast, different kinds of normal people with different kinds of normal skills, participating in investigating the Horror each in their own way--and not in a typical "there's four of us on this camping trip, oh no now we're getting chopped up!" way. And the way it ends is awesome and totally something a PC would do.

The Party in The Peacock Isles

In our home campaign, the party landed in The Peacock Isles (fake India) and took on Nassim's Sleepless Army--a convoy of drug addicts on elephants. The party was clever and (after a lot of arguing) trapped 150 bad guys and their elephants and took them out with no casualties without even a tense moment EXCEPT when one of the party members started looking for some of the mind-control crystal meth on the ground and immediately, mid-fight, snorted it just out of sheer role-playery. Despite everything he seemed surprised that it immediately meant he was mind-controlled by the bad guy. Luckily/unfortunately somebody else had a Remove Curse right there.

Nebulith Notes

Now that people actually can get their hands on Nebulith I'm seeing the first impressions (they seem to like it) and so I know there's an actual audience for behind-the-scenes notes on it. So here goes:

-There's a really good Samurai Film Festival right now at Alamo Drafthouse theatres, and there's like 20 of those in the US so if you live near one, enjoy! Three or four of the movies on Nebulith's recommended reading/watching list are playing between now and early September--I just got to see Lady Snowblood on the big screen last night and it was like drinking angel blood straight from the vein.

-Obviously the name of the book isn't Japanese. Alex came up with the idea of the volcanic cloud that froze into stone as the main Crazy Idea in the setting and I came up with the name for it (nebula latin for mist/cloud and lith being stone). He liked the new word so much he wanted the book to be named that. I wanted something more Japanese-sounding because I wanted people who might get it to, like, know that was the idea--it was Japanese. I knew agreeing on some other name would take forever so I gave in.

-James Raggi, the publisher, says this is his favorite of my books because in addition to everything else, it gives a sense of how ordinary people really live there. For the record, I hate the (two-page) section on ordinary life in Awa Nikko because I do not care. The last thing I want to hear about is what ordinary village life is like and all the research revealed it is exactly as boring as every samurai movie makes it out to be. Any GM who can't make up a regular village and any player who is mad that the details of a regular village aren't correct are people I want nowhere near me. But, its only two pages.

-I am also aware that there's a contingent of gamers (Prince, for instance) who seem almost hell-bent on being a caricature of conservatives in an '80s movie who not only get mad when things are creative in RPGs but will actually say it like that. Not "this isn't creative its just bad" but "I literally don't want creative things" Here is one example:

A fantasy idea in a fantasy game? This must mean its gonzo, yikes! How do I even run this?

They like the old TSR products that take 30 pages to tell you that in the Eastern-Europe-based setting people dress like Eastern Europe and eat things you might find in Eastern Europe. It is God's own mystery why any of these people are near this hobby but ok.

They may really like those two pages.

-A lot of what we did here was me looking at the old Oriental Adventures and going "Ok, what didn't work here?". Zeb Cook, the author, was on the committee that gave me a Three Castles Award and I loved his book for introducing me to the kappa and the hengeyokai and all that jazz but in terms of gameplay it wasn't an epic leap forward from what we already had. I looked at each part that was supposed to feel different in a chanbara, martial arts epic or Asian myth than it did in my conception of a Western dungeon crawl and tried to tweak and shove until it got there.  The martial arts were problem one: in OA they just feel like more numbers without much more flavor added.

-Lots of people have right away said the book looks good. Thank you thank you it took three years. Most people haven't gotten a chance to play yet but once you dig in, I think the main exciting part, which won't be obvious until you play, is the classes and martial arts.

Inexperienced gamers might be looking at them and going "Ok, I see a ninja, I see a flying kick, so far so expected..." but if you actually know your way around an Old School game you'll notice how they work differently than both standard OSR characters and 5e-style ones.

PCs get some martial arts abilities. A few come with your class, but the majority are random depending on your class and/or the martial arts school you choose. As explained in the text, they're mechanically not much different than finding a magic item--you have a special thing that you can do in a fight. 

The abilities are intentionally not mathy and tend to involve a lot of either-/or- mechanics: Ascending Technique lets you extra-fuck-with anyone nearby that an ally has already hit, for instance.

At first or second level, they're just nice to have but whatever. At higher levels however, they begin to stack, like, now you're hitting people more than once per round, now you do an additional effect each time you hit them, now your ally has an effect that they can trigger because you knocked over the bad guy, etc.

Add to this the Yuta (local medicine woman) class which has ritual abilities like the Yuta's curse (anyone who attacks you gets a form of open-ended but limited curse of your own design) and the combats in this game go absolutely nuts.

In playtests, they consistently feel like they give a level of dynamism (you're up, you're down, you're grappled, you're inside-out, you lost your sword) and surprise that goes beyond the usual old school while avoiding the bean-counting of 4e-style tactical combat and the winner-is-the-one-who-talks-most style some indie games fall into. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised, but you may have to roll some dice to do it.

Alright bye.

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Nebulith and the New Red & Pleasant Land Are Now Available

Last week I was talking to James (in a conversation that will soon be available) and I said "Well you can have the conservative argument against free speech or you can have Black Sabbath and the OSR made its choice long ago." 

Today Ozzy's dead. He created some of the only important art that was also actually good in the history of the world. The party in Hell tonight will be the greatest since the Fall of Man.

In other news, kids, there's product.

Here's a video:

Nebulith is a new far-eastern setting, several years in the making, with all the things that implies: martial arts, samurai, ninjas, katanas--but also a lot of twists brought to the table by my collaborator, Alex Hopson, who wanted to make a setting based on his home, in Okinawa--and based on a very cool idea: a miles-high plume of smoke from one of the island's volcanic peaks has been frozen into stone, colonized by creatures, and that's where a massive dungeon is. Alex enlisted native Okinawan friends and his wife's family (locals) to help keep us honest about Okinawan culture.

Personally, I worked hard on two things in particular :

First, to present samurai, ninjas, martial-arts et al with genuine new playable depth but do it in a way that did not complicate the game past what old school players want in an exploration-heavy game where a new PC can fit on a 3x5 card. To this end I made a lot of random level-up tables (like this --and what's in Frostbitten and Mutilated and Red & Pleasant) and designed modular rules which made wu-xia style combat blend into standard old school play.

We playtested the new classes (Samurai, ninja, pirate, karate master, kijimuna hunters--Okinawan elves-- and the local spellcasting women of Okinawa--the Yuta) against western equivalents in a series of extremely fun playtests and it seemed to work out very well.

The second challenge was to make the characters, cities, dungeons, castles and creatures of our little world of Awa-Nikko look as badass to you as it did in our head.

I hope I managed it.

As for Red & Pleasant Land--it's the Alice-In-Wonderland-But-Vampires setting which sold so many copies it was the first product to get Lamentations of the Flame Princess out of debt and won so many awards the people mad about it all decided to lie about rape. I decided to sue some of them and that worked--at which point Molly at Fierce Ponies decided to reprint it.

These are uncompromised works, both made with absolutely no attention to what the market wants or whether it'd please anyone else. We made the books we wanted to for the games we want to play.

If you support them loudly and in public, we can keep doing that.

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Making Fake Japanese Prints By Hand

 

If you haven't heard, I'm working on a new Asian-themed project, The Nebulith. This is a video I made showing how I hand-print the bestiary pictures to make them look like old Edo-era Japanese prints.

The Nebulith is Coming

The LotFP-compatible Nebulith project is coming soon.

We are laying it out as we speak.

The accordion sketchbook where I draw it out

The bestiary part is done in the style of
an Edo-era book--thanks to Molly
of Fierce Ponies for making my hand-printed
pages cleaned-up and readable

Karate master PC smacking a giant sword-tailed gecko

A sample dungeon, from the lower Nebulith

another sample dungeon, mid-Nebulith

Pterodactyl w/royal palace guard

Chiru-gwa, vampire geisha of Zakimi Castle

A scientific study of the Nebulith

wrote a ninja class for this game

The Collar, a hive of scum and villainy

Did I mention the ninjas?

city of tengu goblins in the Nebulith

archer of the White Deer Dojo

cloudscraper fighting a giant mantis-man

a couple of successful adventurers

ninjas sneaking past a samurai in full armor

hellbender chilling, no cell phones just vibing

a shot of the hand-printed book, with
the armor-class stamp

the island is based on Okinawa, so lush af

an adventuring party getting ready
to earn some xp

mutant boonie dog

manta

some adventurers addressing a
tengu infestation

four official karate schools in the book

including the Hokuzan-ti or "Beast Style"

more down in the depths of The Collar

an adept of the Chuzan-ti or "Assassin's Style" plies his trade

Erez, one of the playtesters, drew 
the action in the playtest

The Hidden King (left), giant half-moon spider (right)

npc bad guys

map of Awa Nikko