What, already?
Yes, I promised to go onto a game-buying fast until I bull through some of the games I have already purchased. But a large box arrived from the folks at the North Texas RPG Con down in Irving, Texas. Each year, they present the Three Castles Award. Candidates are submitted and reviewed by a committee of several wise, sage, heads. For the past few years, my colleague Steve Winter and I have been among those wise, sage heads. We read, we review, and we vote. At this point I don't know who the winner is, but if you disagree with my comments, you can yell at Steve, since he'll be down at the convention.
There are also a couple things that have come over the transom, and one that was purchased from my local shop, but first off, let's look at the nominees for the Three Castles.
Denizens of the Blood Sands, a Science Fiction Bestiary by Zac Goins, RPG Ramblings, 56-Page digest-sized hardbound, 2025, Three Castles Award Candidate. This is a nifty little monster manual in full-color, designed for Old School Essentials version of D&D, and packs a lot of potential for "sword-and-planet" style settings like Dark Sun or Empire of the Petal Throne, as well as post-apocalyptic settings like Gamma World (in all its variable rule sets). There are desert dwellers and host of lost technologies rolling around here, along with mutations in the desert (This year's crop of candidates has a LOT of mutations in it, for some reason). I found it charming.
Dark Visions, ALSO by Zac Goins, RPG Ramblings, 86-page digest-sized hardbound, 2025, Three Castles Award Candidate. This is a third-party expansion for Shadowdark. Our Monday-night RPG gang is playing Shadowdark right now and having a good old time with it. And Arcane Library, the publisher of Shadowdark, has been very accommodating in letting others use their system and trade dress (the way it looks). The Shadowdark layout is normally clean and clear, and ditto here. This volume primarily builds off the idea of cults, both to the major gods of SD, but adding seven "lesser" gods who are the centers of cult worship. Cults look like they are smaller, more zealous, and more violent than your standard-issue religions. Three new classes are introduced (one cultist, two anti-cultist), along with new spells and two adventures (a third is mentioned, but available separately). Some of the mishaps for cult-spells are career-ending (1d4 limbs melt off the bone, for example), so caution is advised.
Meet Yer Maker by Eddie Bartlett, The Long Con Press, 32-page squarebound, 2024, Three Castles Award Candidate. Early in the age of RPGs (1987), TSR published Treasure Hunt, an adventure for 0-level adventurers (the adventure you have before you decide to be an adventurer). This type of adventure as been embraced in recent years as a "gauntlet" or "funnel", where you throw potential PCs without much differentiating abilities into the maw of danger and those that survive get to go on to 1st level. Sort of expanding the character-creation minigame into a full-fledged game. Anyway, this one kicks off with a Old Western start and goes elsewhere from there, and its very difficult to say you're avoiding spoilers without sending up a flare that spoilers exist. So I'll stop there.
Forgotten Tomb of Acererak by Troy Alleman and William Henry Dvorak, Cannibaal Publishing, 72-page squarebound, 2024, Three Castles Award Candidate. This is distributed through the DM's Guild, which allows access to D&D trademarks in exchange for a healthy cut of the take. In this case, the author is presents an entry-level adventure in Greyhawk featuring the legacy of the S1 - Tomb of Horrors bad guy, the lich Acererak. This particular tomb was Acererak's starter home, which they started digging, discovered something nasty, and hied off to quieter corners of Oerth. You mission (as an entry-level individual) is to locate the tomb and find out what scared Acererak off. And its a solid adventure, very much in the old school Greyhawkian style, and brings in cavefolk and the Flan goddess of nature, Beory. The presentation is solid and clean, and gives you a excellent jumping off point for adventures. If you use the DM's Guild (this writer does not), this is the sort of thing that's really worth checking out.
Nebulith by Zak S. with Alex Hopson. Lamentations of the Flame Princess, 298-page digest-sized hardbound, 2025, Three Castles Award Candidate. Lamentations of the Flame Princess has a weird Jekyll/Hyde nature, in that it can produce extremely high-quality, RPG-dense material as well as cringy edgelord stuff. An example of the former from Last year it was A True Relation of the Great Virginia Diastrum. This year it is Nebulith, a beefy Asian (Okinawan) adventure setting that feeds into the weirdness that LotFP does so well. The Nebulith is a volcano magically halted mid-eruption, so it is a huge frozen stone cloud hanging over the island of Awa Nikko, and serves as the "dungeon" for this setting. The setting is rich in lore, changing the euro-centric LotFP rules to adapt to samurai, ninja, and martial arts. This is the first Asian-themed product I've read that beats out the venerable Oriental Adventures from TSR. I love the art, I love the lore, I love the game design. My big challenge is that the graphic design is pretty but often involves hand-drawn lettering and 8-point type, which is hard on these ancient eyes. Worth reading, even if the reading is slow.
The Music of Ericha Zann by James Edward Raggi IV, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, 32-page digest-sized hardbound, 2025, Three Castles Award Candidate. This is the flip-side of LotFP - transgressive, hard-edged, and uncompromisingly bizarre. This sort of thing is much more of a descendent of such ancient and now-mostly-forgotten tomes as Arduin Grimoire, where you turn things up to 11 and don't think about what tomorrow would bring. Anyway, it's a rethinking of the Bard class, not as the high-charisma, social creatures they've evolved into in D&D, but rather as a controllers of cataclysmic cacophony and madness. Their songs rend the world. rip the dimensions, and tear the flesh, and have the potential to destroy your campaign in a single roll. The art shows bards wrecking havoc with alpine horns and triangles, and yes, that is a maiden with a trombone on the cover. And it definitely shows the personal opinions of the designer right on the surface. Music has a lot of interesting ideas within the slim volume, but I would not allow it near my table.
And for other recent arrivals:
All the Cardinal's Men by M. Bill Heron, Nightfall Games, 128-page hardbound digest, 2025, Kickstarter. This is a sequel to the excellent Call of Cthulhu adventure Musketeers vs. Cthulhu from a few years' back, the story continues with the Courts of Chaos seeking rule France from behind the scenes. In this case, you get to play members of the Cardinal's Guard, who are the opponents (perhaps "frenemies" is a better term) of the Musketeers in the original Dumas books. Your mission - rescue king and cardinal from the clutches of Chaos and save France!
DIE the Roleplaying Game Quickstart Edition by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans, Image/Rowan, Rook, and Decard,52-page saddle-stitched softbound, 2025, Midgard Comics. A while back, I read the first issue of the comic book (also by Gillen and Hans), and was not charged up enough about it to continue. The idea (and this may be familiar) was of a group of gamers who suddenly find themselves in the fantasy campaign they played as kids. So in the game you're playing a real-world persona who finds himself in a fantasy world. Sort of like the D&D Cartoon where the Dungeon Master is a bigger jerk. The quickstart itself feels influenced by Powered by the Apocalypse, and lays out the characters, the basics of combat, and a short scenario. I gotta say, it doesn't move me towards picking up the full game, but it was good checking it out.
The Howl of the Chimera by Albert Estrada Zambrano, Shadowland Games, Boxed Game Set with 212-page hardbound volume plus handouts, 2025, Kickstarter. The content of this one is really tough to talk about without providing clues and spoilers. Action takes place in a country estate where ... well, spoilers. There's a lot going on here, and a lot of background information. The set is a deluxe box containing huge hardbound book in addition to a collection of handouts (which is good, since handouts tend to go to the four winds in my office. Its a lot of material for a scenario they say should run only 4 hours or so, but it is very well presented.
And the winner of the Three Castles Award is: To Be Revealed.
More later,