South of the Mega City - B1 In Search of the Unknown Christmas Post Apocpalytic Mash Up ( !?) Session Report

 Over the Christmas holiday we got a chance to get together & the players wanted something fast & dirty to play. Now since over the Christmas holiday we've been messing around with some Lamentations of the Flame Princess rpg supplements. But the players wanted something meaty & solid to sink their teeth into but short. Now there was a dog eared copy of an old campaign not  with me & we were all pretty much into the Christmas spirit. So this session was run like a Con game from the ground up. The party is called into the small Mexican town of Mesa Verda by  Father Pluatos after the appearance of a strange castle & lands one Winter morning. He had originally called in a Judge inquistor & co to investigate.  He hasn't heard from them in two weeks. Yes that's right last night I ran B1 In Search of the Unknown modified into a gonzo post apocalytic adventure. I used Swords & Wizardry to run this little debacle because it was the only thing on my hard drive at the time.  There was also the fact that we had access to the B1 Insearch of the Unknown Sourcebook available here from the Zenopus archives site 

What the players didn't know was this was the return of one of the party's most hated villains Papa Marvin Slayer. Papa is a necromancer of a really nasty disposition whose got a hulking  double hit poiny juju zombie half orge body guard named Riley. Riley has killed off four PC's in the past and he fancies himself a full on metal head/biker. Papa raised the Caverns of Quasqueton & then punched into a post apocalytic reality. Now the players wanted a mix of D&D & post apocalytic types. And then it was Mad Max style combat. Thankfully there's a few resources that I happen to know out on the internet. My buddy Dave Miller did OSR Vehicle Rules. And also  Mega-City One Vehicles (OSR) And no none of the player's PC's were going to end up with a Lawgiver!  So the party came face to face with Pig Faced orcs armed with machine guns & cars! 

Otherworld Miniatures Orks frpm here. 

The party had to think, move, & sneak by them to get into the works and then rolled a couple of grenades out into pizza. And the explosions finished most of the pork. The party ran into the corpses of the psi judges & the inquistor along with his adventurer back ups. The corpses were being fed on by trogoldytes. This time it was a bit of hand to hand with these scavengers. 

The party spent way too much time with the corpses & then it was wandering monster time. A small group of six skeletons in full armor made the party really hit bricks because they were intelligent, & fought more like Deadites then normal skeletons! 

And this fight took up a great deal of the evening! And so we have to continue this another night.
Where will things go from here?! Who knows stay tuned! 

Resources from the Osr Library

OSR Vehicle Rules (My take on them)

Mega-City One Vehicles (OSR)

The Doom That Came to Mega-City One (OSR Dredd/Cthulhu Mashup)

Review & Commentary On The Free OSR Science Fantasy Source Book - Planet Psychon & B1 In Search of the Unknown free source book

So I've been working from home for the past three decades of my entire life & there's nothing new per say. We're just going through the motions of dealing with the usual issues of decontaminating, living, etc. like everyone else. But one thing that came up in my feed was Chris Tamm's free material for free OSR down loads from the Elf Maid & Octopi blog.   Now I've been meaning to cover on this blog was his OSR Planet Psychon book for a while now. Basically Planet Psychon is an 2018 acid zoned OSR science fantasy setting  book that can be added into any old school or science fantasy game. Pay attention to the following. Grab every single book that's on the Elf Maid & Octopi blog download page.



  Planet Psychon  has a lot going on here.  It clocks in at two hundred  forty four pages of old school weirdness & space madness setting material. All of this takes place within the nine planets of the solar system warped in the candy coating of Seventies Science Fantasy goodness.
This thing is a jam packed closet of material on all of the nine planets.   Planet Psychon  has every thing but the kitchen sink thrown into its bowels. It has everything from mutations, encounter tables, background tables, full on mini encounters, etc. Its a glorious OSR mess of a book.  I mean this in the best way possible. There's little editing, a shot gun blast of OSR goodness, & a lot of editing is needed but its free & totally usable.
What system could it be used for? What OSR  system couldn't it be used with  Planet Psychon
 Let's see Gamma World any edition, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Mutant Future, the TSR Buck Rogers game, Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea,  & yes especially Venger Satanis's Cha'alt.



Between Chris Tamm's Planet Psychon , Space Book, Stone Age Sorcery, & the GAMMA AEON compilation you've got a very weird OSR or Mutant Future post space apocalypse campaign to keep your gaming group going for years! 

If Chris Tamm's  OSR material is used with let's say B1 In Search of The Unknown by Mike Carr then the dungeon master could have his players on their toes for years. Add in  B1 In Search of the Unknown free  source book & you'll keep your gaming going for years with a Science Fantasy blend. 

 The sourcebook is a free jammed packed piece of OSR goodness with all kinds of old school awesomeness. Its available for download in the fifth paragraph down with the words "Demos Sachlas (paleologos of Dragonsfoot) has assembled a mighty B1 Campaign Sourcebook (link is for pdf download; linked here with permission), which is subtitled "a collection of original work and material gathered from the pages of Dragonsfoot and elsewhere on the internet". Since I don't have permission to host the link, go to the Zenopus Archives & you won't be sorry.

GRAB IT RIGHT HERE
Special Thanks To The Zenopus Archives & Elfmaids And  Octopi blog 

Holmes Dungeons & Dragons Sunday & Seventies Cyclopean Orcs

If your new here welcome aboard! Last night I was prowling around the Zenopus Archives and a bit of information on the artist known as Fangorn aka Chris Baker cropped up. Especially his famous dragon  illustration from the Fiend Folio! But the speculation is that this was supposed to be the cover of the U.K. Holmes Basic  edition of Dungeons & Dragons!


Suddenly the quest of our fighter battling the wives of the cyclops that I used to stare at for hours from the U.K. edition of Holmes Basic as a kid makes sense! The wizard & two fighters kicking cyclopedian orc butt are the same party from the Fiend Folio artwork. Everything in the artwork matches the adventure locations in the sample dungeon of the U.K. Holmes set. There is a fantastic thread on Dragonfoot.org that goes into lots of details about the Cyclopean horrors of Holmes.



But these monsters were so popular that Games Workshop made a cyclops miniature based on these dungeon horrors;
"
A minor find related to this thread. On the left is a Cyclops miniature by Citadel, FF-14 from their Fiend Factory. The photo is from a 1979 article about GW in Military Modeling magazine which can be read here. On the right is a crop of Fangorn's cyclops from the UK Basic rulebook (full artwork in this thread on the previous page), published in Dec 1977. It's a dead ringer, and the Citadel line debuted in Spring 1979 (source), so it looks like the mini was designed based on the artwork. "

Zenopus77 goes into a whole break down of the dungeon ecology & stats for these things; "The original source for the depiction is the UK Holmes Basic rulebook, published in Dec 1977. It has two pictures with cyclops creatures - see the post on the previous page of this thread. The first is on the title page, and is an analog of the art in the US, so the cyclops seem to be stand-in for orcs. The other picture doesn't have an analog, and shows a larger cyclops that the Citadel mini is based on - perhaps it is meant to be an ogre? There are no cyclops described in the text, which is identical to the US version.

In White Dwarf #5 (Feb/March 1978) there is a column, Monsters Mild and Malign by Don Turnbull that is a precursor of Fiend Factory. In this issue he describes monsters from the US zines, including the The Dungeoneers and Alarums & Excursions. A Cyclops is mentioned (HD 12, AC3, MV 12, Attacks at -2 due to cyclopia, 5d12 damage, treasure type E + 5000 GP), but this is probably unrelated to the artwork since it was created in the US.

The Citadel Miniature of the Cyclops is from 1979 and must be based on Fangorn's artwork since it is so close in details.

Finally, in White Dwarf #21 (Oct/Nov 1980) there is a whole Fiend Factory column based around Cyclops, a mini-wilderness scenario called "One Eye Canyon". This includes a Cyclops write-up by Albie Fiore with artwork by Russ Nicholson that looks just like the second Fangorn cyclops & the mini."

"Albie Fiore's Cyclops is HD 6, AC 6, MV 12, AL CE, TT M x10 (individuals), D (lair), AT 3 (at -1 due to cyclopia, -2 for missiles), D 1d6 x 2 (claws), 2d6 x 1 (bite), SA hypnotic stare as AD&D spell hypnotic pattern for 6 rounds, range 6", one individual per round, can only affect a character one time, SD +2 on saves vs illusions. Cyclops live groups of 2-20 with any group of 10+ having a leader with 7 HD, +2 to hit, +3 damage. The write-up is almost a whole half-column so there are many more details on their habits etc.

So, to me it seems that Fangorn's artwork led to the Citadel mini, which then led to the full White Dwarf write-up."
Now I don't usual copy & paste this much material but I'm really excited to actually find out more about these iconic characters. But what's Chris Baker been up too since he drew & created these characters for U.K. Dungeons & Dragons? Well, after stumbling around the interwebz I happened upon this great interview with Mr. Baker done by Wicker Girl. It goes into his career, what he's been doing in the film industry, & more. There's some excellent material there.

So in the meantime things have not been stalled out on the Holmes Dungeons & Dragons front!

Meanwhile it seems whist I've been away from the Zenopus site he's been busy putting together the Holmes reference 2.0 document. This thing is eighteen pages packed with everything Holmes! 

All credit for this goes to Zenopus '77 for all of the great information!