Commentary And Review On the Free OSR Product - Decahedron Magazine #2 From DwD Studios

 Grab It For Free Right Over
HERE

This is a free issue of Decadron Magazine which seems to support an old school D100 rpg system. But let's be realistic here for a moment and put it right out there that this material can easily be converted over to your favorite retroclone system with little fuss or muss. This is issue two of this publication by DwD studios and its pretty jammed with old school content that can easily be used for any number of retroclone style  games. 

Within issue you'll find:

• A great cover by Peter Szabo Gabor of Eastern Raider Games.
• A spotlight on Andrew Collas, an active member of the forums at dwdstudios.com.
• The Gaming Table: we all love d100 tables, and this one article gives you no less than three tables to use when scoring a critical hit or failure on your foes.  Caution - some of these are deadly!
• Character Backgrounds: a series of tables you can roll on to learn some nifty things about your character... you get the normal stuff like age, height, weight, hair and eye color.  But you also get neat tables like "reason for adventuring," "Where you grew up" and "childhood conditions."
• Home Brew: Every GM has his own way of doing things.  Since our game is supposed to be heavily GM-centric, where a strong GM role is required, we thought it might be a good idea for some of you to share your home brew rules with other GMs.  In this article, Karlen Kendrick shares a method he uses to help give the players a feeling of ownership over the setting by use of "truth cards."
• Hamlet of Gnaw Bone: A pretty detailed little village in the Reinaris Barony, built by rebels and outlaws.  It's a great place to launch a party of adventurers!  Complete with a few plot hooks to get you started.
• Trading Post: GMs have a lot of work to do when maintaining the fun adventurers their players must embark on.  Why should they do ALL the work?  Contained in this article are items of usefulness, from the mundane to the magical, ready to be put to good use in your campaign.
• Caer Urdak: Three days due east of Stavengaard, in an area of the sea that is supposed to be landless, there is an island.  Shrouded in mist, and not much bigger than Lor Warren, Caer Urdak is home to the enigmatic Dragon-kin.  Bred by the ancient grand dragons, it is their sworn duty to guard the secret resting place of their creators.
• A sweet map of a village, complete with surrounding farmlands and even what appears to be a forest settlement of elves?  Make of it what you will - as always the back cover of this issue has a free map for you to use however you want.  You GMs need all the help you can get!
  
  
  Commentary & Review 
   We see a pretty good and solid mixed bag of material for the old school DM to use right across the board. There's a real overview here and this stuff can easily be used for a wide variety of styles and applications for your old school games.
  Things I loved : The Hamlet of Gnaw Bone - This village is a perfect genric piece of old school usefulness that can be used for both an old school OD&D or AD&D style game. Also it could be adapted to your favorite science fiction game as a possible encounter middle ground piece. 
• Trading Post:  this is one of those articles that might spark a DM's imagination or as a piece that has players taking more of a share of the character burden. Its a well written and more then slightly interesting piece. 
• Caer Urdak: This piece might turned into a nice little science fiction or science fantasy encounter piece that could be used as a bridge gap encounter for either an Xplorer or Stars Without Number style game into a fantasy piece. 
• The Map of the Village is a nice round out article for this gaming magazine - A map of the Village is useful and great for designing a new little old school fantasy piece or as a possible science fiction retro clone encounter piece. 
  All in all this isn't a bad little  free download and makes a good solid useful little addition for a quick old school pick up game. Many of these articles could easily be converted over to Mutant Future or as fodder for any post apocalyptic game as well.