Tombs: Fantasy Made Mortal...

So Gregorius 21778 has released The Tomb of Ferkhat the Dreaded for Blood of Pangea, complete with an excursion into an Egyptian-inspired burial. We love tombs, the pastime adores them (even while heroes perish therein), and with Halloween, a celebration of ghosts and dancing skeletons, it's a great time to list the reasons why:

1. DEATH. It's the bitterest fact of life. We mourn our loved ones and recognize, in a largely supressed way, our own inevitable demise. It's scary to contemplate.

2. THE UNDEAD. Death is bad enough without the insult of rotting corpses (or worse) to ensnare the living with gruesome aplomb. Not content to wait for time, these fearsome  abominations, reminders of mortality made terrible flesh, hasten to speed death, and in the worst way possible. Death, and the dead, are the ultimate foes...

3. TRAPS (AND CURSES). Setting necromancy aside, fantasy crypts come equipped with dangerous traps and sometimes (working) curses to defend against plunderers.   

4. TREASURE. You can't take it with you; but boy, people try. Crypts are filled with worldly goods, glittering treasures enough to entice avaricious adventurers. Fantasy interments represent our mortal conundrum. Undead are the fear of death, clerical miracles the denial thereof, and vast riches our need to live on despite a certain demise...

Which is to say: the best gaming, even the gonzo variety, speaks to something essentially and irrevocably human. And heroic. A psychologist's plaything, since facing death made terrifyingly real and snatching a temporary respite from the inevitable so nicely encapsulates our situation. It's why we love Halloween. And tombs. They're fantasy made mortal.

Red Ochre & Ruins: The OSL Returns...

Well, there's an Open Supplement License for Epoch, allowing those so inclined to publish original content for the game. Interested parties can visit our website for all the details, discovering a whole new medium and joining the many excellent publishers doing exactly that with our favorite roleplaying products. We can't overstate how much we love seeing what everyone's doing with our stuff. Next to designing, it's probably our favorite part of publishing, and the great people at Ethereal Games came through in short order...

Enter Red Ochre & Ruins, the first OSL release, and the first expansion period, for our prehistoric Epoch. Now Ethereal Games, the creators of Wyrdwarden for Mydwandr, really gets us and the spirit our games try to embrace, and this one's no exception, building on Epoch's premise in every way possible. This starts with the basics, adding new clans taken from history, including the primitive Upright Folk (homo erectus) and the Lost Ones, time travelers stranded (beyond all rescue) in Epoch's universe.

The implications are many, as lost moderns come with clothing and valuable technology, including, among others, dynamite and futuristic space suits (there's an astronaut option for those desiring an alternative experience). With an emphasis on narrative, this doubles as guidance for the referee regardless of where a campaign ends, and despite its slim 19 pages, still covers extensive territory. From shamanistic rituals grounded in anthropology to hungry carnivores (both real and imaginary), this is a tasty buffet of great ideas...

In total, Red Ochre & Ruins includes the following additions:

New clans and backgrounds, with new equipment and special crafting rules.

Atlatls, reptile hides, and shamanistic rituals granting power over death.

Historically grounded beasts and a new exceptional foe to challenge the party...

Plus rules for regressive future campaigns and a starting map of Scarra!

Exploiting a series of easy to read tables, Red Ochre & Ruins delivers some first-rate content ranging from the distant past to far-flung future, all in a single universe of prehistoric adventures. Whether planning a strictly historical simulation, the vanilla stone and spell offered by the core rules, or post apocalyptic gameplay, Ethereal Games delivers something busy referees, inspired by the game's potential, might readily enjoy. Anyway, we liked its approach and think that Epoch enthusiasts, players and referees alike, might agree...

A New Epoch: Stone and Spell...

Why does fantasy have to be medieval? It doesn't, and our hobby provides numerous examples (Call of Cthulhu comes immediately to mind). Great stuff; but why not shine that light backwards towards a prehistoric world complete with enormous dinosaurs and our ancient ancestors? Ridiculous, we know. They didn't coexist, and that's the epic fantasy part of this primal experiment. And keeping that going, let's add archaic shamans with genuine magical powers (and animal totems) waiting at their command... 

The result would be Epoch: A Game of Stone and Spell, inspired by actual history but suitably embellished with a combination of human misunderstanding, including the fanciful dinosaurs of B-movie fare, and the magic our progenitors almost certainly practiced for a game unlike any previous offerings. It's a system years in the making (but only very recently possible), and we're delighted. Readers can expect our customary d6 simplicity, although minus the mechanical safety net for the OSR's famously greater lethality.

Everything's dangerous. The characters are dangerous. Their enemies are dangerous. Even the earth below (and sky above) is dangerous, but have courage. Clever parties can work together to survive, leveraging their skills against dinosaurs and megafauna, cunning humans and powerful ravaging spirits. Advancement enables greater challenges, which sometimes includes intelligent saurian foes and/or advanced time travelers, although individual referees can decide for themselves the trajectory of their personal campaigns...

Anyway, there it is. A childhood assembling Aurora Prehistoric Scenes models and admiring the stop-motion artistry of the great Ray Harryhausen got us here. But so did roleplaying dragons and wizards. Fortunately, prehistory, with its evolving human lineages and enormous foes to challenge fantasy's deadliest, delivers similar, and arguably more heroic, results as humanity's first-ever struggle to survive. With a few creative liberties, Epoch, newly available from Drive-Thru RPG, has everything needed to make its world your prehistory.

A Twisted Tale of the Tongue...

nce upon a time, when yours truly was a much younger DM, I planned what was supposed to be your standard town-next-to-the-dungeon affair. Problem was, real-world time was running out. We were kids with curfews, after all, with less than an hour before the world froze in place until our next session. They’d gotten to the town in question, when someone decided to ask about the place. Fair enough, and it was just the sort of thing to fill half an hour. I put on my improv hat and got to work spinning a tale off the top of my head into the party's receptive ears...

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There was a country fair. With tents. Peddlers. And a menagerie of exotic monsters for the amusement of the townsfolk. Out front, there was a firedrake tied to a wooden stake, secured with a length of rope. Now understand, all of this was window dressing. Flavor text for the coming adventure. I didn’t expect the players to actually engage, which was a mistake of epic proportions from the perspective of my plans. Someone had the Untie cantrip, and the rope was history. I’d retroactively declare the latter as being enchanted to keep the monster docile, but the result was the same. Said firedrake ran riot in the town.

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Tents burned. People died. The menagerie was released upon the unsuspecting villagers. And the party? They quietly departed with their best it-wasn’t me nonchalance. What was supposed to be a bit of fluff to make the setting more interesting had become something all too real. My cause wasn’t lost, however. I recycled the dungeon, miraculously relocated to another village, and we all had a good laugh about it. But it was an object lesson in how anything said about the setting becomes a material reality, and ones your players will absolutely exploit. So ends my little tale of the tongue. 

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What was supposed to be some throwaway lines to describe a village was too tempting for its own good. My tongue led me astray, and I followed because it was fun spinning such a colorful yarn on a weekday night. I mean, what could possibly go wrong in 30 minutes? Apparently, the destruction of an entire town for starters. In a spoken-word theater of the mind, words are divinely empowered. But was it really so wrong? We had fun. And we got one of those memories that sort of pays for itself. If gaming isn’t about that, I can’t imagine what it’s possibly for. Anyway, end of story. See everyone next month...

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