Isle of Sedra Kickstarter

 My good friend Douglas Cole over Gaming Ballistic has launched a new Kickstarter for his Isle of Sedra setting. It is written for Old School Essentials. Along with the setting, there are several adventures available including solo adventures.

Douglas is also a third-party publisher for Steve Jackson Games's The Fantasy Trip and supports that RPG's long history of solo adventures. He has converted many of his TFT products over to Old School Essentials so fans of the classic editions of DnD can enjoy them as well.

Isle of Sedra Kickstarter.

Best Supporting Actors for Old School Essentials

Douglas Cole, over at Gaming Ballistics, is in the last 24 hours of his latest Kickstarter campaign, "Best Supporting Actor". In the spirit of AD&D's Rogue Gallery, this compilation of NPCs is designed for use in your campaign for OSE or any classic D&D edition.

Best Supporting Actors for OSE

What sets Doug's work apart is his experience with SJ Games' The Fantasy Trip. TFT, both in the past and today, has a tradition of presenting interesting NPCs in a simple and easy-to-use format. With this Kickstarter, Doug applies his experience with TFT to one of the OSR's more popular systems, Old School Essentials.

You will be getting 172 distinct NPCs each with their own illustration

Additionally, you have the option of getting a set of cards with the illustrations and stats printed on each.

Appreciate any support you can give to Doug and his efforts

Old School Solo Adventures for Old School Essentials

 The Fantasy Trip by Steve Jackson Games has a long tradition of offering solo adventures like Death Test. When Douglas Cole of Gaming Ballistic secured a 3PP license for TFT he and his authors continued that tradition with their own series of adventures.

Now he and his team of authors did the work into making these adventures compatible with Old School Essentials. Given that OSE is a hop and skip from a dozen other classic editions and close clones these adventures can be used by a wide variety of OSR systems. 

He has started a Kickstarter to fund the printing and final work on these adventures.

Old-School Solo Adventures

I was given Til Death do Us Part to try and I found it fun and interesting to play out. Its replayability is good as there are multiple paths with multiple outcomes to explore. I think leveraging the TFT community's experience with solo adventures  is a great idea and will create a fun niche for classic edition hobbyists to play with between sessions and campaigns.

GURPS Nordlond Bestiary Kickstarter

Douglas Cole of Gaming Ballistic is having another GURPS related kickstarter. This time it is a bestiary for his Nordlond setting for the Dungeon Fantasy RPG. Nordlond as setting is centered around the culture of Norse Vikings. Normally a RPG supplement like this is fairly setting specific. Some of the creature that Doug has preview have norse origins. But he also repurposes many common DnD style fantasy monsters give them a viking twist. Making this work useful for expanding the number of creature the referee has for a Dungeon Fantasy or GURPS campaign.

Doug explains it best.

The Dungeon Fantasy RPG is purposefully generic: It is Powered by GURPS, after all. The Norðlond setting is not generic, borrowing from the literary tradition of the Viking culture. The sagas of looting, pillaging, and raiding for wealth and fame made a natural match for a game with a tag-line of “Smash Evil for Fun and Profit.”

Even with that in mind, the monsters here can be—and should be—repurposed and transplanted to other campaigns. Many of them are thinly disguised transplants from other cosmologies anyway: The nautamaðr is clearly based on the Minotaur; the Blóðughúfa, or “bloody hat” is the redcap, a fixture of Northumbrian folklore, perhaps derived or parallel to the Irish fear dearg, meaning “red man,” said to wear a red coat and cap.  Animals—normal, giant, and dire—don’t require any work to move between campaigns. Much as the player characters pillage loot, GMs should pillage the worked examples here to make their lives easier when running games in any campaign.

My view that this type of work for GURPS needs to be support and encourage. GURPS is great as a toolkit however it needs the same range of support as other similar types of RPGs for referee who don't have the time to sift through all the options. The Nordlond bestiary helps a lot with this.

The Nordlond Bestiary also has a enemies section of NPC characters to use in a campaign.

Nordlond Bestiary and Enemies

Some Fantasy Trip Goodness

Douglas Cole at Gaming Ballistic has a new kickstarter up called More Perilous Journeys.

It is a collection of five adventures for The Fantasy Trip RPG by SJ Games. Like classic DnD, the Fantasy Trip is a minimalist RPG that focuses on labyrinth i.e. dungeon adventures.

In addition to his work on Dragon Heresy (a DnD 5e variant), and Dungeon Fantasy RPG (GURPS). Douglas also been supporting the Fantasy Trip along by publishing materials from several different authors. He built quite a team putting out great material for TFT coupled with a high production value as you can see from the cover below.