Campaign Commentary - Gods, Monsters, Demons & More With An OSR Twist

Today has not been a good day & apparently I'm supposed to be upset about it. I'm not at all. Instead over the weekend I was stuck doing repair work & trying to make the best of it. So instead I was doing reading, research, & reaching into the stacks here at Casa De Fabiaschi. Mostly I'm doing this for my Godbound rpg setting that I've been working on. I stumbled upon two very good OSR blogs for good for different reasons. Bob Something's blog The Ametuer Dungeoneers has a ton of great OSR & Godbound resources. The second blog  that I've looked at was Tales From the Thief of Whispers & man there are some excellent adventure ideas, monster conversions, etc. Really killer stuff on a whole other level of OSR goodness. In the meantime I've been looking through & flipping through my copy Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition's Deities & Demigods.



I'd recommend buying a copy from Drivethrurpg but that copy doesn't have the Lovecraftian Mythos & Elric pantheons in it. There are several patheons that I'm looking forward to using in this upcoming game campaign. One of the things I started thinking about is how the Elric patheon is put together in the book especially Arioch. Arioch is everything about the Meliborean's decidence & excess rolled into one rather nasty diety from the Moorcock's Multiverse Wikia; "Arioch, Lord of the Seven Darks, Knight of the Swords, Lord of the Higher Hell, et cetera, is one of the most powerful Dukes of Hell.

Arioch is the patron of Melniboné and has a personal relationship with Elric, who was the first emperor to summon him to the plane of Earth in a long time. He is sophisticated and highly intelligent, though possibly insane, and he usually (but certainly not always) appears in as an amazingly beautiful youth, usually with blonde hair.

Arioch is one of the three Sword Rulers along with Xiombarg and Mabelode.

Lord Jagged, a Denizen of the End of Time, once took the form of Arioch to manipulate Elric. It is implied that Jagged and Arioch may be one and the same."

Jeff Dee artwork used without permission 

 He's the appitimy of a parasite god feeding on the souls, society, past & future of the Melnibonéan race. He's one of the god damn Sword Rulers whose earned every idota of the Choatic evil alignment. There's a very good thread called Copying over AD&D Creatures for Godbound. 
Now I spent a good chunk of my weekend going over White Wolf games Exalted Rpg first & second edition. Jesus what a hot mess of a couple of table top rpg  systems they were. Let me grab the Rpg.net review qoute here (even though I can't stand the site, it does summerize my feelings about both editions of Exalted); "Basically, Exalted is a good game well-presented, with a number of minor-ish flaws which could be fixed, and a serious omission in the shape of the antagonists chapter. It’s crunchy and high fantasy and as such won’t interest you if you’re not interested in either of those things, but it does what it tries to do quite well."

 

Yes, I do think that there's plenty of stuff in there worth saving but its gonna take a clever dungeon master time & a bit of effort. But let me go on record as saying that I think that the Exalted were a bunch of complete & utter bastards who should have been hunted down to a man & woman. You may have noticed a copy of Scion in there from White Wolf Games as well & its also a terrible hot mess. Fortunely, someone else also saw this & went to do a ton of work on the game for me. But,but what about Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea surely your not giving up on one of your favorite games. Not at all, notice I mentioned  the Melnibonéan race earlier. Well Clark Ashton Smith figures into this.. As Arioch as to the Melniboneans so too do we see the cycle of the Great Old Ones in Clark Ashton Smith's Hyperborean cycle. These gods permetated every strata of the Hyperborean society, religion, and all their works;

• Coming of the White Worm, The (1941)
• Door to Saturn, The (1932)
• House of Haon-Dor, The (1989)
• Ice-Demon, The (1933)
• Lament for Vixeela (1953)
• Muse of Hyperborea, The (1929)
• Seven Geases, The (1934)
• Tale of Satampra Zeiros, The (1931)
• Testament of Athammaus, The (1932)
• Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles, The (1958)
• Ubbo-Sathla (1933)
• Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan, The (1932)
• White Sybil, The (1932)

And this brings me to the OSR  Humble Bundle which is currently being offered on thier website. At first there doesn't seem to be anything in common with what we've been talking about but that's where your dead wrong.

Crypt of the Science Wizard,Creeping Cold & many of the AS&SH adventures are exactly the sort of  ending of cycles of life & creation that I've been talking about. Each of these marks a point in the history of their campaign setting where divinity & heroism is needed so that destruction & evil don't take the human or near human race down. Not only can the modules & adventure offerings from Troll Lord Games & North Wind Adventures be converted over to Godbound. But they can be used to punch the players in the face with the fact that all races & seasons have their time including gods. Actually especially gods!