Sure, we all love books and maps for inspiration… (BTW, check here and here for some great maps!)

But did you ever think of book plates as inspirational for a game? I sure as heck didn’t. And yet, there’s this great post that does just that – covering bookplates from late 1400s to the late 1800s through the 1900s. Amazing artwork simply declaring that a particular book belongs to a particular person.

Take for example, the beautiful scroll work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – basically a coat of arms worked into a book plate. I have to wonder if an enterprising GM could work a book plate into a book found as part of a treasure as a clue… Or if some strange magic might work its way to lure a reader to another dimension…

Anyway… I’d encourage you to peruse the collection on the linked page – the book plates are amazing, as are the maps at the other links. True inspiration!

–Fitz

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Recently I watched the new documentary Dungeon Masters that featured a GM who managed to kill his whole party simply because they were dumb enough to charge into a Sphere of Annihilation… And it got me thinking.

Over my nearly 30 years of playing RPGs, I’ve encountered a variety of GMing styles. Everything from being adversarial to strictly hands-off “see what happens”, from lockstep “don’t go off the path” to “wow did we just roleplay a NPC-NPC conversation for the last 45 minutes?” They all have a place, but I have to wonder if it’s a progression through which most GMs work through in their gaming careers.

At the beginning of the cycle is the newbie GM and at the end is the battle-hardened GM…

When I was young and just starting out in RPGs in junior high, the GMs I played with were mostly focused on the critical path. Whether it was a pre-written module we were going through or something they had thrown together, we focused on getting the job done. It was less about roleplaying and more about roll-playing at that point. Combat was everything on both sides of the table.

In high school and college, we started getting more into playing the characters. Combat was still important, but less so. We became enamored with the collaborative effort within the party. But our GMs started to diverge a bit. Some were interested in the all-important story, pushing combat to something that only happened rarely. Some were focused on trying to kill players, which made the players more apt to simply trying to defeat the GM’s nefarious schemes.

After college, wow there have been even more extremes. In one Vampire game we played, I swear the GMs (it was a boyfriend/girlfriend pair where one typically played and the other GMed) simply wanted to hear their own voices. However, we were really able to focus on character development to the max. And in one game I GMed I lost control of a game simply because two players became more dominant than I was.

Now I haven’t GMed for a while – at least nothing more than the occasional playtest or one-off adventure. But my goal would be to offer a focused sandbox that gave enough wiggle room, but could accommodate combat and roleplaying in equal amounts. I’d probably sway more towards the roleplaying than roll-playing these days, but there are plusses and minuses to both approaches.

The odd thing to me is the advent of RPGs on the computer in the last 25 years. Everything from Bard’s Tale and the Gold Box games from SSI/TSR to World of Warcraft and Neverwinter Nights… none of them have managed (beyond Planescape: Torment maybe) to capture the roleplaying/storytelling aspects of the tabletop roleplaying experience. As such, when new folks want to try playing tabletop after playing CRPGs, they tend to focus on the roll-playing combat aspects more than anything else and have to work through all the things the rest of us who started with tabletop years ago went through…

Anyway… Where are your GMs in the continuum? Where are your players on that same continuum?

–Fitz

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People who play roleplaying games sometimes get a bad wrap. We get accused of practicing witchcraft or blamed for the suicides of individuals with mental illness, when all we’re doing is getting together to pretend we’re someone else for a while and hang out. “It’s a game, people” seems to be our regular response to this controversy, but that doesn’t stop some folks from trying to stop creativity and free thinking by banning books.

The Dungeon Masters is a new documentary from director Kevin McAllester (You’re Gonna Miss Me) that shines a light on the lives of three gamers – Richard, Scott, and Elizabeth. Though not typical of those people I’ve met in my nearly 30 years gaming, these three present a unique cross section of roleplayers from across the country.

Each of the three subjects of the documentary is involved in roleplaying games such as Dungeons & Dragons. D&D was introduced in 1974 by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Now on its 4th edition, it has spawned two feature films and hundreds of books. Games such as D&D provide a creative outlet for thousands of imaginative and creative people around the world to escape the realm of the mundane and experience the fantastic for a time.

D&D is traditionally a table-top roleplaying game, meaning that a Dungeon Master (DM) or Game Master (GM) leads a group of players, each with their own Player Characters (PCs) on an adventure in a make-believe world. Games like D&D provide a structured, yet open-ended, set of rules so that everyone plays fair and doesn’t just start changing the rules as they go. PCs have characteristics to define their strengths, weaknesses, and abilities. And the players, in a way similar to actors on stage or screen, describe their characters’ actions and speak for them.

Scott is a gamer seeking a way to provide for his wife and son through his hobby as opposed to his job as an apartment complex manager. But as most of us with the same dream have learned one way or another, that’s tough to do. As a result, he spins the imagination he uses for gaming into a fantasy novel and tries to get it published through an agent.

Richard’s life is a little different. A reservist, he spends most of his time thinking about GMing his weekly roleplaying game sessions. GMs basically control everything that the player characters see in the game – from the rest of the population of a town or city to the monsters and even the weather. And Richard seemed to take a very adversarial approach to his games – going so far as to kill all the PCs in the game when they went into a Sphere of Annihilation and obliterated themselves, which put a strain on his group that bled even into the next group Richard GMed.

And Elizabeth is a different case all together. She, even more than the others, likes to inhabit her characters fully to the point where she dresses up as a Drow (Dark) Elf with face paint, a wig, and a costume. Elizabeth also plays World of Warcraft on the computer and enjoys Live Action Role Playing or LARPing with other individuals who like to wear costumes and wield fake weapons to get further into their own characters.

Where all of these people fall down a bit is with personal relationships outside the game. Scott’s wife seems to be the main breadwinner of the family while he chases his dreams of being a famous author and having a successful cable television series. Richard’s dedication to running his game meant less time to spend with his wife and within his church. And Elizabeth went from relationship to relationship seeking someone who would accept her as she is as a person and not just as a character.

Though I understand that overall there’s a positive message to the documentary that shows that change is possible for these people and they can mend fences to gain stronger relationships, I’m concerned that it portrays all gamers as socially dysfunctional, damaged individuals disconnected from the real world.

In my own personal experience as a gamer, I have spent time with many different types of people. And yes, there have been some odd folks like the guy who was occasionally on acid or the self-professed Wiccan. But for the most part, they’re just normal people. Most of the gamers I’ve met since college have had jobs, relationships, and are as ordinary as anyone you’d meet on the street. Some, like myself, even have families and still find time to game.

So the documentary seems skewed to me towards the more extreme ends of “normal” gaming behavior. Are there gamers who behave the way the people in the documentary do? Yes. But I can without hesitation say that I’ve never met anyone who tried to run their own cable television show.

Quality-wise, the documentary is very well shot. Most is in widescreen, with older video clips worked in here and there. In addition to the film itself are many outtakes that didn’t make their way into the final cut. I can honestly say that 99% of them would have made the subjects of the documentary seem even more unusual or crazy than they already do.

If you’re a gamer, I would strongly suggest you check out The Dungeon Masters to see how our hobby is being viewed in this case. The documentary provides an unflinching glimpse into the realities of these three lives and how they try to balance their hobbies and real life.

If you’re not a gamer, but know someone who is – I would encourage you to watch this documentary with them so they may provide a different perspective on gaming in their own lives. Use The Dungeon Masters as a starting point for a conversation about roleplaying – not the end.

But either way, I’d encourage you to check out The Dungeon Masters when it’s released on DVD August 3, 2010. For more details, check out the info page at Antidote Films here.

This article first appeared at BlogCritics.org here.

–Fitz

p.s. If you want to pick up this DVD when it’s released, check it out below:

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Thankfully, there are many creative, artistic people who have created maps for us already. The Kingdoms of Kalamar: City Map Folio from Kenzer and Company provides more than 30 detailed maps to use for inspiration or in a Kingdoms of Kalamar campaign. From the full color map of Kalamar presenting the region where all these cities are located to the gorgeous interior black and white maps, there’s plenty here to salivate over from cartographers Craig Zipse and Clayton Van Sickle III.

What impressed me the most was the little details. Though the maps themselves have few labels or legends, anyone familiar with maps appearing in RPG adventures or books over the last 30+ years will instantly understand what they’re looking at… from rivers and roads to walls, buildings, forests and plains. Seeing how buildings flow around obstacles such as major roads, rivers, and docks can provide fodder for the most inquisitive player to explore…

And each map provides a small summary of pertinent details such as the city size, longitude and latitude, type of government, as well as major alignments, races, and size of the population. Also included is the name of the ruler (or rulers) of the city – such as with Baneta… “ruled by wizard Lakaran the Twisted under figurehead Lord B’Pareso.”

I did find it very difficult (impossible in some cases) to find a particular city on the full color map at the beginning of the book. It would have been nice to perhaps broken the bigger map into smaller regional maps to simplify finding them in the larger context. I also found it interesting that every single map in this collection has a wall or other defensive structure completely surrounding the heart of the population. Though I can see having walls around some portions of a city, I can’t imagine that building one around a population of 20,000 people can be cheap or easy to maintain.

That said, the Kingdoms of Kalamar: City Map Folio (first published in 2004) offers GMs tons of inspiration for their own campaigns and worlds. Who knows what dangers may lurk in these literally thousands of city streets ripe for the picking? Definitely worth the $6.99 as a PDF from DriveThruRPG.com.

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In the most recent campaign we’re playing semi-monthly (scheduling has been an issue), we’re working our way through Paizo’s Second Darkness Adventure Path with our GM Mike. We decided to go with a module vs. a homebrew adventure because of the time sink homebrew worlds/adventures happen to be. The trick is that with a module, there’s still some personalization that has to go on or you end up with a cookie cutter campaign that doesn’t work in all circumstances.

For example, take my druid – Etsy Grobb Postlewaite, or just “Eg(g)” for short. Egg is a little dude who wanders around with a rather large dog at his side all the time by the name of Nyet. Nyet happens to be large enough for a gnome to ride into battle, which aids his speed (short legs don’t go fast) quite a bit. Egg loves exploring caves and being underground – there’s just something about being small and hanging out with burrowing animals that seems to go go hand in hand.

So how the heck did he end up helping to run a casino with his elven wizard friend Elhand and a bunch of NPCs? He’s like the proverbial fish out of water (especially since until his recent advancement to level 4 he was unable to swim!)…

In all my years playing Dungeons & Dragons I have never played a Druid. And though I’ve played numerous gnomish NPCs over the years, I have never played a gnomish PC. So this was a bit of a change for me. That said, his Neutral Good alignment has presented me with a bit of a challenge…

Have you ever had to play the party conscience? Egg’s good friend Elhand is a bit of a mess when it comes to social situations and always keeps his interests front and center, which works well considering his low Charisma and his Chaotic Neutral alignment. Though Andrew plays him a bit like a used car salesman, I think it works as far as the character’s stats go. That said, he makes some… questionable decisions from time to time if you ask Egg.

Most of the NPCs and Elhand want to kill anything that stands in their way, while Egg feels the need to try and protect those beasts only doing what they can to protect themselves. Now, if an animal attacks and wounds a member of his party, Egg concedes that the critter should be dealt with quickly and humanely. But if an animal has attacked and missed or not attacked at all, why should the party do harm to the critter?

This attitude puts Egg squarely at odds with the “protect the party” mindset and has really made me wonder about animal rights activists in our own world. Are they in the right to cause bodily harm or harm property or possessions to prove their point? I don’t honestly know. But it’s firmed up my own position as far as cruel behavior to animals goes.

Part of the Hippocratic Oath states that doctors should “do no harm.” I would amend that for my druid character to say “do no harm unless absolutely necessary.”

Does that help Egg become something other than the party conscience? Heck no. But it seriously makes it easier to play him as a character.

Now let’s add a small wrinkle.

The man the party was working for at the casino turned on them and tried to have them killed. In fact, he eventually killed the thief NPC who’d been an integral part of the group since the first session. Why did this individual turn against them? Greed.

Where does greed fit into the natural balance of the world? It doesn’t. Animals by nature are not greedy unless you count certain apes or chimpanzees who may mimic human behavior.  So how do you integrate the concept of greed into the philosophy of “do no harm unless absolutely necessary”? That’s what Egg is dealing with now. Human behavior.

And though I feel that Egg the gnomish druid has no real chance of becoming comfortable running a casino or in the world of greedy or corrupt people, it’s going to be interesting to see if his Neutral Good alignment slowly shifts to True Neutral to better reflect a karmic balance in the world, or even to go so far as Neutral Evil to reflect the fact that people simply don’t rate as high in his books as animals and nature…

Has anyone else toyed with the idea of a druid in society? How did it work out? Leave comments below!

Thanks for reading this ramble…

–Fitz

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The kobolds are back with another amazing collection of twelve thought-provoking and informative essays from some of the best designers and writers creating roleplaying game material today. The essays cover everything from the simple question of “What is Design?” and work through contentious topics of creativity, craft, and how to recover when things don’t go well. Anyone who’s tried to write professionally understands the power of the blank page, rejection, and the unforgiving and untapped potential of any great idea you can’t quite find the words to express, but it’s a rare treat to get advice from some of the stars of the roleplaying game industry to address those problems. It’s nice to know the kobolds care.

As someone who aspires to be a game designer and writer, I find that rules are hard for me and settings are relatively easy. So as I perused the pages of the guide, I found myself trolling for tips and tricks to simplify my rules process and make finishing projects more of a reality than a wish. With that in mind, I will avoid talking about each essay in depth and instead focus on a couple that I found particularly helpful.

Wolfgang Baur has worked on some of my favorite gaming projects over the years, from the original Planescape line at TSR to adventures for Alternity, Call of Cthulhu, Pathfinder, and a whole lot of D&D. He’s edited the Kobold Quarterly, Dragon, and Dungeon magazines and is the publisher and founder of Open Design – a collaborative game design company. Oh, and in his spare time he publishes the Kobold Guide to Game Design series.

Baur’s essay “What is Design?” tries to define a term that doesn’t lend itself well to a definition unless you have context on your side. In this context, he defines it as “its own discipline, but it always borrows and builds on other modes of creative work.” What does that mean in terms of roleplaying games (RPGs)? It means there has to be a balance between rules and setting. When they are out of balance, you can end up with a less than fun experience for your gamemaster (GM) and his or her players, which may cost you fans or customers. Rules must be focused on the setting and the setting must keep the rules in mind at all times. It’s a balance I know I’ve not yet achieved in my own games.

The other essays build on Baur’s beginning, covering the similarities between designing RPGs for the computer and for the tabletop; the basics of combat systems; the power of a good design, hook and dastardly plot; and the fun and heartbreak inherent in collaboration and any creative enterprise. Each essay is lovingly crafted by a master in RPGs today who knows what they’re talking about.

The other essay that really got my attention was “Basic Combat Systems for Tabletop Games” by Colin McComb. As I said earlier, system design is my Achilles’ heel. McComb manages to explain, in a Q&A-type of format, what you need to know about attack systems, who attacks and when, how things like area of effect attacks affect a group of targets, how to measure the consequences of combat through permanent or temporary damage, and so on. He then lays out a sample system using his own rules (minus stringent playtesting) to show how the questions can help you come up with a working system. The practical aspect of the article provides a ton of hints and help to avoid the common problems that plague beginning system designers (like myself).

Colin McComb was involved in 2nd Edition Dungeons & Dragons, but helped create one of my favorite settings for that edition – Planescape – and even helped with two of my favorite computer games of all time – Planescape: Torment and Fallout 2.

Rob Heinsoo has been involved with the 4th Edition of D&D and seems to have written half the sourcebooks that have been published so far. He’s the force behind the D&D Miniatures game and its first nine expansion sets. And if that’s not enough, he’s worked at Daedalus Entertainment, Chaosium, and A-Sharp in the 1990s.

Ed Greenwood is simply a legend in the gaming industry. Not only is he the author behind the Elminster Series, including Elminster: The Making of a Mage and Elminster’s Daughter, but he’s written hundreds of articles about gaming and continues to GM his own campaign. Where does he find the time when he’s typically writing three novels at a time?

And Monte Cook… What can I say about Monte? When 3rd Edition D&D and the d20 system came out, he was one of the three principle designers behind the efforts. And since then, with his own design studio Malhavoc Press, he’s managed to create several award-winning products such as Monte Cook’s Arcana Evolved, Ptolus, and the Books of Eldrich Might. In my opinion, he has one of the most unique voices among the game designers of today.

If you’re a GM, a game designer, or a RPG player interested in getting into the design side of how to create your own games – you can’t find a better introduction than The Kobold Guide to Game Design – Volume III: Tools & Techniques. These 96 pages will provide infinite food for thought and hopefully save you some pain and suffering along the way. I certainly have a lot to think about now…

As a final note, I think that kobold on the inside cover is up to something… don’t you?

Article first published as here on Blogcritics.org.

–Fitz

p.s. Be sure to pick up all the Kobold Guides at RPGNow:

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Have you ever noticed that advertising people are totally in love with fonts to express their messages? Have you ever wondered why? Ok, me either. I typically tune out commercials and skim past ads in magazines and on web pages… But I recently saw a couple of posts about typography that made me do some thinking…

Where do fonts come in handy in gaming? It’s a simple thing in most modern word processors or drawing packages to select one of the typically hundreds of installed fonts on a system. And if you’re like me, you’ve probably collected even more over the years. Then again, maybe not – I’m kind of weird.

Just off the top of my head, I came up with a few ideas for where to use fonts:

• Though developing entire languages is often impractical, sometimes a font can be a cheap substitute… and if you’re consistent, you can use the same font for any pages/notes/letters your PCs find in a particular language so they KNOW – “oh! this is in Draconic and I don’t read it, so I’ll have to give it to Bob, our scholar…”
• Wingdings is a simple enough way to encode a message so it takes some enterprising player a while to decrypt a particular encryption, but not so difficult that it becomes tedious. A little homework for your players is sometimes a good thing.
• I’ve seen runes (Viking, Gothic, Celtic, hieroglyphs, cuneiform, etc.) that can make VERY cool ancient scripts if you’re in a hurry.
• And if you combine the font/language idea with the runic idea, you can end up with a Rosetta Stone of your own that allows a scribe among the party to know how to translate from a particular long dead language of runes to one of the languages they know and then translate from that to common…

Really the ideas are endless. And of course fonts make printed documents look better too. [grin]

So back to those web articles that prompted this… they’re on the Smashing Magazine website in a couple of parts – “The Beauty of Typography: Writing Systems and Calligraphy of the World” and “The Beauty of Typography: Writing Systems and Calligraphy, Part 2“. Though Smashing Magazine deals with the art and technique of website design, these two articles provide amazing insight into the art behind a particular typography system that transcends the web.

If you’re interested in fonts, typography, or want to tackle the daunting task of creating your own writing system for a game – I’d encourage you to take a look at those two articles for inspiration. They have amazing details on Asian, European, Hebrew, and other forms of writing. Definitely worth taking a look anyway.

How do YOU use fonts or typography in your games? Leave a comment and share your ideas!

–Fitz

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Characters are rarely just numbers and words on a page. There’s more to them than that more often than not.

So why not ask your character, on paper or out loud, a bit about themselves? Consider it an interview. I’ve done it for characters in my pale attempts at writing fiction (had a long talk with a serial killer once that unnerved me a bit). But what do you ask?

There’s the usual stuff psychobabble stuff like:

• What was your mother like?
• Where did you grow up?
• Who were your friends? Your enemies?
• How was your relationship with your father?
• When did you realize you wanted more for yourself than an average life? (Most characters lead extraordinary lives.)
• Why are you here?

But how about some not so obvious questions… A recent article by Alicia Rasley at WritersDigest.com brought up 9 interesting questions to ask… Here’s a few from that article…

• When you walk into a party, what do you notice first? The mood? The people? The decorations? The things that need to be fixed? The background music? The food on the buffet table? Whether or not you fit in?
• Do you usually notice problems around you? What is your response? Do you write an angry letter to the editor? Shrug and move on? Analyze what’s wrong and how to fix it? Take it as evidence that the world is falling apart? What about problems within yourself?
• Are you more interested in the past, the future or living in the now?Are you one to keep holiday traditions? If you had to move tomorrow, how long would it take you to make new friends?
• How do you decide if you can trust someone? By experience with this person? First impressions? Intuition? Do you test the person somehow? Or are you just generally disposed to trust or not to trust?
• Are you a deliberate, careful speaker, or do you talk without thinking first? Do you use slang, or do you use diction your old English teacher would approve?

I think these are interesting questions to ponder on a quiet evening or afternoon. Any extra tidbits you learn about your character makes it more interesting to play in my book. It’s those little things that sometimes make a huge difference.

Where does all this lead? Hard to say. You might write up a small biography for your character that you can pass along to your GM. You might simply compile a list of adjectives to remind yourself about your character’s personality and quirks. This could even be useful for a GM trying to further define the party’s arch nemesis or discover the motivations behind a local lord who thinks the PCs should be tossed out of town on their rumps…

What do you think? Have you spoken with your characters recently?

–Fitz

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In my career as a gamer, at least since college, I’ve had a thing for playing insane characters. I thought I’d share some of those characters and how I dealt with their crazy behaviors.

The first time it happened, my character in a Call of Cthulhu game went crazy with a Tommy Gun and managed to murder all but one member of his team because he thought they were monsters. And it felt good. Not the killing part – just cutting loose of all rational thought for a brief moment. He just snapped and went insane based on the rules of the game (aka “missed his save”) and I went with it.

That moment led to my playing of a Malkavian in a Vampire: The Masquerade campaign who was more than a little loopy. He liked having rules for everything. So if, in the course of an adventure, he encountered a situation that lent itself to a new rule, he’d add it to the list. Suffice it to say that living by those rules was a bit of a challenge at times, but a welcome one. The simplicity of the insanity was the key.

And more recently I played a rogue in a campaign that shifted rules a couple of times (from the freeform Hero to a thief in D&D 3.5e). The game was set in a world much like our own during the time of the Roman Empire. Didius (or “DC” as he came to be known – short for Didius Cato) was an escaped slave. And he had a bit of a thing about slavery.

If DC encountered a situation where a slave was being treated unfairly… For instance, on the auction block in a crowded marketplace… There was a chance he’d go a bit nuts and do what he could to change the situation. I’d roll a die and basically decide if he would (even number) or wouldn’t (odd) flip out based on the result. During one session, he basically slaughtered a number of guards as he worked to free a line of slaves being sold.

Somehow he managed to survive. But again, the simplicity of the insanity is what made it fun. He had a trigger (seeing slavery) and no willpower to speak of (thus rolling to determine his action). Sometimes he managed to contain himself. Then there was the rest of the time…

So if you haven’t played a crazy character, I’d encourage you to try it at least once in a campaign. As a GM, it’s easy to slip in a NPC teetering on the edge of rational thought. As a player, sometimes it’s less easy – but talk to your GM and give it a go.

If you have played crazy characters, I’d love to hear about them. What were they like? How did they come about? What guidelines did you use for bounding their nutty behavior? Leave me a comment below or drop me an e-mail at fitz(at)moebiusadventures(dot)com.

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Ever since college when I actually started having the extra money to do so, I’ve been drawn to game stores and hunting for unique supplements. Adventures, gazettes, simple collections of maps – each has its own attraction for me. As such, I have ended up with a wide variety of books, pamphlets, and PDFs that each holds a particular fascination.

Open Design’s recent release of Sunken Empires: Treasures and Terrors of the Deep encompasses the perfect storm of history, art, and implementation that makes a supplement not only a useful tool for gamemasters to terrorize their players from time to time but a great read as well. From the forward by David “Zeb” Cook to the chapters on dealing with the deep and its denizens held my attention to the very end, which is a rarity in any supplement.

Beginning with Cook’s introduction – “A History of the Aboleth” – I felt I was being let into a tomb of previously unknown horrors. I honestly can’t recall if I’d heard of the Aboleth as a creature prior to reading Sunken Empires, but now I know it has a place in the occasional nightmare realms players may find born of my own freakishly random firing neurons. The story of how the creature came about provided crucial clues to crafting hooks and monsters without filling in absolutely all the details – leaving the rest to the players encountering such vile critters.

And Brandon Hodge takes things from there, weaving a storyteller’s spell upon the reader and introducing them to the aspects of Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu from tales both ancient (Plato’s tales of at Atlantis) and relatively recent (H.P. Lovecraft adapting Mu into the Cthulhu mythos). Hodge then takes it a step further to create the lost city of Ankeshel and the modern cities of Upper and Lower Cassadega now exploring the submerged ruins and learning a few of Ankeshel’s mysteries.

After that, he provides all an enterprising GM would need to torture entertain his or her players with hints of powerful artifacts and spells from the distant past just waiting to be discovered by an enterprising band of adventurers. We have the half-merfolk Maerean peoples working both above and below the waters as well as new paths for other races and classes… I was particularly fascinated by the description of how Monks are entranced by undersea ruins – “drawn by the promise of lost knowledge and paths of enlightenment cultivated by ancient civilizations.” I’d not considered monks in that light before and yet I may start doing so…

Chapter 3 provides not only equipment for adventures daring to explore the sunken ruins, but by what they may find. The lure of lost technology provides not only interesting magic items, but the almost Steampunk-influenced weapons of a much more advanced race. And the weapons don’t disappoint… rifles that fire magically-created ice slivers, methods of crowd control, and even a magical/mechanical method of duplicating a Dispel Magic spell. Very creative items indeed.

Spellcasters aren’t forgotten either, with new spells provided for Bards, Clerics, Druids, Sorcerers, Wizards, and even Rangers. The Druid spells provide water-related magical effects such as Barnacle Armor, Wall of Water, and Calm the Waves. I was a bit disappointed by the small number of Ranger spells (there are only two) and wondered if as a GM I might consider creating additional powers for those adventurers used to prowling the underwater wilderness. Of course the Sorcerer/Wizard list was the most impressive, including more than 30 new spells for those classes.

The list of new magic items was definitely fun to peruse… Though I felt like I needed a much bigger bankroll to be wandering the aisles for many of the items costing 10,000 gold pieces or more. Even so, as a fighter who wouldn’t want a heavy steel shield shaped as a writhing squid that 3x a day could try to disarm your enemies!

If you plan on running any adventures in the split city of Cassadega, Chapter 5 is a must read. It provides much needed guidance on how to handle different levels of parties adventuring in or near the sunken ruins. Though that discussion is little more than a page, it provides answers to many of the problems parties may encounter if they are outmatched by the environment they find themselves in. Hodge goes so far as to provide random encounter tables for the coast and the underdeep that would scare the heck out of me as a player. Everything from plant life trying to kill you to a shoggoth waiting to devour you and your party as an hors d’oeuvre.

Lastly, Chapter 6 provides a description of the many critters you may encounter above or below the waves in these areas. Everything from a Bone Crab to a Wharfling Swarm (described as a huge number of hairless underwater raccoons with needle-like teeth) and aquatic variants of other creatures such as a Needlefish Swarm (a variant of Bat Swarm), a Slick (a Black Pudding variant), or a Giant Trilobite (variant of a Giant Centipede). And then of course there’s the Aboleth… I certainly wouldn’t want to encounter one in a dark, submerged alley.

Honestly, I was very impressed by Sunken Empires. It provides enough “crunch” for an enterprising GM to take it and merge it into his or her own game world quite easily. And if done right, a GM would have potentially years of gaming to explore all the dark corners of the Ankeshel ruins. I did find a few typos here and there, but nothing earth shattering that prevented my understanding of the content. And the artwork for the book was amazing from Malcolm McClinton (awesome cover art), Thomas Cole, Hodge himself, Pat Loboyko, and Hugo Solis.

If you’re looking for a new supplement and you think you want your players to get wet, scared, or both – I’d encourage you to check out Sunken Empires from Open Design and Brandon Hodge. Look for it at Paizo Publishing, RPGNow, and Kobold Quarterly!

This article first appeared at BlogCritics.org here.

–Fitz

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