Imbricated Interests of a Ludic Ghoul

    That's right everyone, I decided to finally pull the trigger. Tickets are on sale here and are very limited, so you'll want to be quick off the mark!   This is  GrellCon , our first attempt at getting together a small-ish group (around 75 individuals) interested in old-school D&D, which in this instance specifically refers to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons , Original Dungeons & Dragons , and Basic/Expert Dungeons & Dragons  as well as any of the relevant retroclones.    Taking place in the historic Stanley Arts halls in South-East London, all games will be run on the 1gp = 1xp principle to ensure we're all on the same page and to maximise playing time over three gaming slots! The con on the Saturday will be preceded by a social meetup event on Friday details of which are pending.   Any questions do let me know - I'd love to see you there!        

Better late than never eh? Not too many compared to some years, but Animals Without Backbones and Incarnations both took me a long while. Definitely worth it, the former was some of the best stuff I have read in ages and the perfect Carcosa monster manual...love the style of the old Pelican non-fiction books. Also if you have any interest at all in classic death metal or grindcore you owe it to yourself to get the Scott Burns book. Fiction's not really stuck with me this year. Nothing truly blew me away apart from Shea and Grudova. The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) - Katie Mack Spanky - Christopher Fowler Engines of Desire - Livia Llewellyn Polyphemus - Michael Shea The Coiled Serpent - Camilla Grudova Herne The Hunter #4: The Vulture's Shadow - John McLaglen Hawk Mountain - Conor Habib Herne The Hunter #5: Apache Squaw - John McLaglen Beware! - Richard Laymon The Doll's Alphabet - Camilla Grudova Entangled Life - Morton Sheldrake The Scott Burns S...

What are blogs and itch.io for if not to puke out dubious hobby projects for free?  This is the 20 page Crematory Ash-Can version of the ridiculous ruleset I cobbled together to run an eight player OD&D game with mutated undead in the Necropolis28 world last year . It's a one-shot prep document that got way out of control. Inspirations include early Gamma World , the Arduin Grimoires , and of course the independent undead skirmish miniatures game Necropolis28 . Includes tweaked combat rules and 56 blasted Gifts from the schools of undead magic, Blood/Bone/Plasm. I uploaded this as a way of procrastination while doing my taxes. It can be grabbed here . Enjoy!

I bodged the map together on the morning of the game before work. Sepia toning = instant credibility Last night at the Iglootree Shop in London I ran the first of our MYSTERY RPG sessions, in which we take something weird off of the shelf and let members of the public play something unknown - and are hopefully as surprised as we are. For this session I selected the game HAMMERS: Bell Book and Candle Edition by Sivad's Sanctum aka Jon Davis (no not that one ), described as "A Playtest of Horrific Old School System Tools". The System Hammers is one of the strange little games that have cropped up in or adjacent to the Thinking Adventures Discord server. The server generally has a focus on old-school gaming in new directions - many of the rules tinkering there uses OD&D as a basis and Hammers is another of these 'sort-of OD&D' type games, though it wears the influence very loosely while it pulls piecemeal from many (many!) other contemporary indie ...