A Review of The Into The Odd rpg System For Your Old School Post Industrial Campaigns

I received the Into the Odd Rpg as part of a Christmas gift haul that a friend brought over to my place on Christmas eve.Into the Odd – 48 pages of postindustrial adventures, horrific hazards, and cosmic meddling, written by Chris McDowall.  This is a horrific little romp through post industrial ruins and there's lots of down in the dungeon survival horror action in forty eight pages. There's an extremely active community on G+.
GRAB IT RIGHT HERE

Into The Odd  by Chris McDowall. and company is about as minimal OSR dungeon and ruin exploration as you can get. This is what a third wave OSR title looks like and yet it owes very little to D&D on the whole. It has everything you  might need under one cover and even has its own campaign setting baked right into the book. Everything from the ground up is quick and fast survival horror with a old school  style twist but its not. Here's the overview from the website.  "Into the Odd contains everything you need to create a character and explore an industrial world of cosmic meddlers and horrific hazards. This is a fast, simple game, to challenge your wits rather than your understanding of complex rules.

You seek Arcana, strange devices hosting unnatural powers beyond technology. They range from the smallest ring to vast machines, with powers from petty to godlike. Beside these unnatural items that they may acquire, your characters remain grounded as mortals in constant danger.

The game is 48 pages, containing:

Original artwork from Jeremy Duncan, Levi Kornelsen, and others.

The fastest character creation out there, getting you playing as soon as possible.

Player rules that fit on a single page, keeping a focus on exploration, problem solving, and fast, deadly combat.

The complete guide to running the game as Referee. From making the most of the rules to creating your own monsters and Arcana.
Sample monsters, arcanum, traps, and hazards"
This is a very well done game and there is a lot to recommend it if you a.Don't have time for a ton of the old school crunch and b. want to set up a campaign where David Lynich meets Dickens for tea and your adventurers are staring down occult cosmic dread in the middle of a dungeon.  So what makes the game so great? Well its pretty much less prep time then you might have for other old school rpgs. The take down for a campaign might be as long as players and the DM might like. Over all I liked the game and might run a game or two but this isn't going to replace my old school games weekly games. This is a great game for pick ups when you want to run something really different and need an old school replacement. Mick Reddick

over on Google plus has written a great little gem of an adventure called Tom Foolery that has some great concepts in it.
In addition there are some sold fan support materials in the form of  Odditional materials

which is well worth the time and energy for download for the sheer genius of some of the ideas in the book! I would definitely throw the folks at Lost Pages a few shekels for this genius download.


Why I like Into The Odd, it creates sound occult and weird  reasons for adventuring and makes whole of play and solid ruin exploration far more dangerous then many would expect. It does this with a style and grace of game design that I don't see too often. On the whole a great little game to have as part of a DM's tool box! five out of five for Into The Odd

Review & Commentary on The OSR Monster Resource - Chthonic Codex - Cryptic Creatures By Paolo Greco For Your Old School Campaigns

I'm finally fighting my way back across this pile of OSR material to review and give proper due to some of the great titles that I've been wanting to access. A great example of this is the Chthonic Codex - Cryptic Creatures book by +Paolo Greco.

This is one of those monster titles that's been out for a long while and I've never gotten a chance to look over this book and boy I'm glad I did. To understand why I like this book is to really understand that like False Machine and other indie OSR material. This is especially true of the material that Paolo Greco has come out with. This book is like someone reached into my imagination and pulled out the half demented magical university that was situated someplace in an alternative Italy where the professors have incredibly outrageous accents. This entire book is written from an in game world perspective with easy to understand and straight forward rules for each monster. There isn't a ton of BS and fluff because the entire product actually is the fluff and the layout is clear, concise, and yet spare while being attractive. You get a bunch of in world material that you could flesh out and blow into your own take on Paolo's world. Why? Because this book's perspective unlike other monster manuals draws you in as the reader.
A sample of what you get in this book is stuff like this;
"To resist the vexing environment and wanton aggression covenants and congregations were formed. Eventually the Schools of Magic were founded; as they started accepting apprentices a greater influx of young, foolish and ambitious students came to the Hypogea. But conflict continued. Many schools were destroyed, together with their immense knowledge.
The Five Great Schools left joined in a Conspiracy, to find strength through numbers, to keep their friends close, and to keep their enemies even closer. Together they elect the Grand Sorcerer of the Valley of Fire, to lead them through the Dark."  The man is very good at painting a mental picture so you can spare yourself the headache of actually loading the back end of your campaign adventures.
Monsters range from this nasty piece of work to the far more sublime horrors that wizards create.

I really love the artwork by Christopher Stanley, because it sets off the game world and brings you into it. There's a feeling that this a world on the edge and you've just walked through the door while university is almost in full panic mode. If your expecting Harry Potter's universe, absolutely forget it! This is the world that would have burned Harry's corpse, created a display for the ashes, then put them in some back corner to be used for a demon summoning later. The world of Hypogea is a world of wizards who do whimsical and yet highly unpleasant things, this is a place where the academics have run amok and can cause all kinds of havoc to those around them. Yet, they keep training more students in the craft! Meanwhile, there are monsters in the countryside and scheming from the shadows just waiting to rip your face off. The bearowl is a good example of the sort of weirdness that lurks on the fringes here. If your looking for a monster manual turned up to eleven, then this book isn't for you as a dungeon master.

Constructing adventures around this book's setting is very easily done. Everything is laid out with the creature descriptions, minor histories, and character NPC's who are quietly whirling through the descriptions and set pieces of the book. And that helps to not only set the tone but deriatives the monsters presented in this book. This isn't the AD&D Monster Manual instead this an OSR European flavor monster book. What do I mean by that? Its all about the voice of the author and designer spoken through his creations.
This is a very European monster book with some incredibly richly imaginative creatures and horrors being discussed here. The author intelligently lays everything out the feet of the DM while giving a guided tour of his campaign world through his monsters yet sparking the imagination again and again. I'm actually very good with this approach, having grown up with Italian academics and such. This book clicked with me big time. Why? Because this book is  the opposite of Lusus Naturae  From Neoplastic Press. Which is not a bad thing at all. The material in this book is the breathy world weary civilized student of academia guiding you through his world. While Lusus Naturae presents you with the monsters and flavor in the form of a tool kit. Both are creature tool kits in their own right but they simply take vastly different approaches to their monsters. What's really cool is that both of them can easily be used together but that's a whole other article for another time. One of the things that liked about the Cryptic Creatures book was the fact that I found myself being drawn to it again and again over the last day or so. This is always a good sign to me as a DM. I found the flavor of the text sinking into my imagination's skin again and again. This is a book about people from a Renaissance style of world who sit around salon style in a guild hall or other place and discuss the dangers and progression of their magick. All of the while plotting to steal the magick of one another yet at the same time giving hospitality and errant tasks for adventurers. Yet there is bits and pieces of mechanics that can add just that little extra push over the edge for an OSR campaign. Take for example the Cephalopods and their Lost Empire, here's a nice group of nasty schemers who can be quietly and nicely inserted right into the back end of a campaign to throw a wrench into player's ideals of whose behind the scenes.

This is a monster book that makes me want to take the location of the university in the book, the NPC's inferred by the setting material, & the monsters then drop them whole cloth as well as all into a campaign! That's right, especially some civilized older city region right where the PC's have to go, this is the type of place that the PC should experience through the NPC's of Cryptic Creatures. Now if that's not a recommendation for getting this book I don't know what is. This is a book that is worth your time, patience, and gaming skill, the author has created a quality product even as a PDF and I look forward to reviewing more of his material in the future.

Review & Commentary On The OSR Magic System - Wonder & Wickedness From Lost Pages For Your Old School Campaigns

So I finally got a copy of  Wonder & Wickedness From Lost Pages  for review from a friend of mine. The pdf is well worth it even though it clocks in on a eighty four page count, this book is packed with lots of OSR style magic options. The lost pages blog is one that I've been quietly following for years. And it's really nice to see this system in the flesh. There are a ton of options on the table with this book from an OSR occult stand point. Right out of the gate this book presents magicians & wizards with another option, your PC begins with three spells.
"Sorcerers begin with three spells, determined randomly. New spells must be discovered in play. An intelligence check or similar roll is required to learn a new spell. If this check is failed, the spell may never be learned by the sorcerer. This rule makes each sorcerer's complement of spells somewhat unique."
Simply,easy, without any sort of middle system screwing around when it comes to the occult goings on. This is an approach that we'll see repeated throughout Wonder and Wickedness. At the center of Wonder and Wickedness is the idea of levelless magic and adding in many elements of occult flavor to expand upon the traditional D&D system. Wonder and Wickedness does this surprisingly well! The magic dueling system, maleficence rules, spell mishaps, magic items, & spells all can be dropped seamlessly into an OSR or Old school system game. The wizards in this book are dangerous folk, shunned by normal good people and with good reason. Magick is dangerous, far from normal and really horrid at times. Just the way I personally like it.

These spells are without the traditional restrictions on level and have a rather unique feel, there is excellent artwork throughout the product that adds to it without distracting from the magick nature of it. The spells are excellently laid out with common sense and there's a balance of power about them. The rules for wizard duels are classic and give the wizard a sense of power and expands the role of the wizard three fold. Wizards are not simply spell throwing plasma casters, they have far more subtle power because of these optional rules. But its the tone of the spells that gets me. They have consequences, dangerous and mysteries about them build into the background. There's a sense of the free form & danger in these spells that adds a little more substance to too them.


We get a number of disciplines and specializations that spells are divided into the following specialties are available in this product:
- Diabolism
- Elementalism
- Necromancy
- Psychomancy
- Spiritualism
- Translocation
- Vivimancy
These aren't another re skinning of the various spells from OD&D or Swords & Wizardry, in many cases this is a complete reworking of the spell with dire and dangerous consequences. This is actually the way it should be. Magick is dangerous and can be unpredictable. For example instead of the usual 'light' style spells your PC wizard summons a 'gleam'.
Gleam
Conjure a hovering magical spirit of radiance that does not
shed heat, does not require air, and is not doused by water. A
gleam per level may be summoned and the illumination of each
is similar to torchlight.
Gleams may be directed to bedevil enemies, which will cause
temporary blindness if a saving throw is failed as long as the
spirit remains engaged

Once again everything is laid bare for the dungeon master to use or discard this system and material as necessary. Personally, I believe that this book is very necessary for a campaign to grow in occult scope in the way that Wonder & Wickedness lays out. This straightforward no nonsense yet mystical approach is seen in the treasures and wonders that this book lays out. Many of these treasures and relics feel like they came straight out of the Fighting Fantasy books of yore.But in good way not the way seems like hey the author cracked open his old books and copied XYZ treasure. These feel mythic and legendary like something that would come around in an adventure once or twice a campaign. Use these sparely is my advice to the Dungeon Masters out there.

The Necromancy chapters are some of my favorite bits in Wonder & Wickedness. This chapter gives a dungeon master flavor, a sense of the forbidden and weird like something from an old radio program of ghosts, ghouls and ghasts. There is spell list after spell list like this. If your into DYI dungeons and dragons and not afraid to experiment with your players and your world's occult background then grab this book.

Are there downsides to this book? Yes there are a few in my humble opinion. The first is the fact that Wonder & Wickedness isn't a whole secondary magic system into itself. The breath and scope of the work makes me want this occult and spell system separate from the Vancian system itself. This opinion of mine dovetails into the second thing that bothers me about Wonder & Wickedness  folks may pass this wonderful gem of a book by because they're not willing to take the risk to try this system or its contents. This whole product is designed to seamlessly piggy back right into a campaign or old school rpg system  for some really nice magical options. I can see using this system with a DYI D&D campaign built entirely around Wonder & Wickedness. Five out of five with a few very minor quibbles.