The Cellars of Castle Keep

We've just updated The Cellars of Castle Keep to clean up the PDF and to ensure a more consistent formatting.  And for those who don't know, this book is #1 in a series of modules for Pits & Perils entitled "Basement Adventures" in honor of their primitive ancestry and old-school leanings (amateur fun)...  

Quite literally, adventures cooked up in someone's basement on a clunky old typewriter back in 1976!

There was something magical about these early games, because the amateur production was ACCESSIBLE.  This was something anyone with a working typewriter (still state of the art in the 70s) and a good imagination could do.  And it really invited ANYONE to be a part of the hobby, which was altogether exciting.

But these games also left MUCH TO THE IMAGINATION, with lots of writing, but fewer pictures, so when you read the word "orc", it was invariably YOUR ORC you pictured.  It was just like those early Tolkien books with the original art that said everything while still not giving anything away, which was enigmatic and fun...

These early homebrew products made this,
at the time very young, blogger feel grown up!

It also made this eleven year old feel really grown up to see all those words and to form mental images.  These crude, primitive books literally invited young people to grow up - and showed them TRUE respect by expecting them to partake on adult terms! 

For the time being, Basement Adventures will also be the primary vehicle for expanding the game, for each contains one or more exclusive spells, enemies, or new magic items.  In fact, The Cellars of Castle Keep has two new enemies and rules for insect and animal swarms (yuck).  All in true P&P fashion...

Furthermore, while each adventure truly stands alone, they can be taken in order to form an overarching narrative, although individual referees can place additional encounters in-between.

One challenge of supporting a game like Pits & Perils is that it doesn't take long before the supplements start turning the system into the very thing we were trying to AVOID.  That is, too many supplements inevitably start to crowd out the referee and beat them to the punch.  We don't want that...  

We're attending KantCon this weekend (25 July 15) to run a P&P event, but rest assured we'll be back to continue this, and while we aren't ruling out another supplement entirely (Robyn has something up her sleeve), Basement Adventures will definitely continue!