Review & Commentary The 'Pay What You'd Like' OSR Pulp Adventure - The Paranoia Pit From Griffon Publishing Studio For Your Old School Campaigns

I love Twenties thru Fifties perhaps into Sixties  pulp role playing and its my second love right after DYI D&D. For this set up I highly suggest that you visit David Bay Miller's OSR Library. There your going to find a ton of OD&D/Swords and Wizardry modern resources including Firearms rules, equipment, PC classes,etc. all that can easily fit this module/adventure for free.

Right now on to the Paranoia Pit! This is a ten page free or pay what you'd like adventure set during the heyday of the forth age of exploration during the 1930's or so.
The set up is classic monster movie or Saturday matinee serial fare, 'The heroes fly to a remote island (close
to the Japanese Mandate) noted in pencil on the chart. An executive of the Standard Oil
Company provided the coordinates when he contracted the heroes to run cargo to a fiveman
 survey there; the information is considered proprietary and therefore not on any established maps.'
Yes, I already know that this an attempt to sell the author's rpg the Heroes of Rura - Tonga. I say more power to him. He's offering a free pdf adventure and there are number of titles also available for pay what you like purchase. This is part of an island hopping campaign style of adventure role playing. Now where have I seen that idea before?Oh yeah!

So you've got the perfect set up for any number of OSR game adventures. Now I've heard some folks using this adventure for a Call of Cthulhu style game adventure and other friends of mine have run this with Lamentations of the Flame Princess using David Bay Miller's OSR add ons.
The module puts your PC's right into the heart of a weird pulpy supernatural happening and adventure style that emulates a few early pulp era conventions. This isn't a bad thing at all. And we get a bit of a preview of Rura-Tonga and its environs.
So there's also a preview of the 'Any System Key' in there as well, this is rules lite conversion tool for your post and premodern games. Not too bad if this is the rules set that your aiming for.
So what can be done with "The Paranoia Pit"? Well what can't really? This adventure could with a bit of work be used as a jump off point for a series of dungeon explorations as you as the dungeon master place a small dungeon or ruin of a forgotten Pacific people some place on the island and its environs. Its really not a badly done little package for setting up for an investigative style series of occult  adventures in the tradition of Indiana Jones . I really don't want to give away too much of the plot of this short set up and dive into adventure. As a pulpy modern Lovecraftian adventure  The Paranoia Pit has the potential to act as a spring board into a full blown modern occult campaign. There are a number of retroclones rpg systems that could work for taking this adventure to the next level. We'll get into some of those coming up in another blog entry soon. I'd give the Paranoia Pit an even four out of five stars as a free jump off point for adventuring into the pulp era and lifting the veil from your player's eyes!
 

Commentary & Review Of Schweig's Themed Dungeon Generator From Griffon Publishing Studio For Your Old School Campaigns

Once again I'm really late to the party on this title, Schweig's Themed Dungeon Generator From Griffon Publishing Studio  This is a 'pay what you' title that basically allows the Dungeon Master to set the parameters of the dice, the dungeon & room elements and generate an entire dungeon easily almost effortlessly. Almost is the key word here. This application takes some practice and getting used to this is not a short cut at all for generating a quick paint by numbers dungeon. Instead this a two page generator that allows the DM to fill in their own details and create a dungeon or even a campaign.


Basically this is an application piece that can be filled in with elements to create either solo adventures or full blown campaigns. But its very much an exercise in dungeon design and patience as it is in execution. Its not bad at what it does but I was hoping for a bit more variety in the product piece. Its good, its solid but it needs something more in the finally dungeon design that it spits out. This is a good piece of work if you like A. designing your own dungeons and B. like to design them with regularity to fit an over arching campaign ideal. Basically if you want to create a DYI D&D world with solid themed dungeons that fit together like puzzles this is a product that could work for you.


Overall this is a good product that can help to fill in a gap point for a dungeon master looking to create central themed dungeons. The fact is that this is a plug and play product that generates the parameters and elements that you want in the world that your creating. This is going to give you exactly what your looking for. In other words garbage in and garbage out within boundaries of dice and numbers. This isn't a bad thing at all but does create some challenges for those who are easily frustrated and don't want to spend the time it takes to create dungeons in this manner. If your expecting speed and quickness this isn't that style of product, this is one that assumes intelligent design from the ground up. Your elements and ideas are stuffed into two pages and churned around into a dungeon of  your own creation.
There is another possible use for this style of dungeon generator, Schweig's Themed Dungeon Generator could be used to create massive solo dungeons. These sorts of generators have appeared from time to time in the Eighties and Nineties but I haven't seen too many of them as of late. Schweig's Themed Dungeon Generator could be used to create sprawling complexes of this style and generate enormous locations to run through for solo play. Simply add your own monsters and go to town!
Because of the generic nature of Schweig's Themed Dungeon Generator it could be easily used to generate weird or completely strange science fiction or science fantasy locations for post apocalyptic or weird science fiction dungeons or ruins. There are a myriad of uses for this product. The problem is the uniformity of these creations unless that's what you the dungeon master are  looking for.


So is Schweig's Themed Dungeon Generator good or bad? Well, its sort of hard to say, to really snap this product into a test would take a solid half an hour to two hours to generate the styles of dungeon worlds that I personally like there's plenty of room for improvement and ideas within this product but it needs a bit more time in the oven to really shine in the light of day for a dungeon master to get the maximum utility. That being said if you like this sort of from the ground up approach to the creation of your own adventures and dungeon locations within them. Then grab this one and go for it.