#role aids

Friends, our time with Mayfair’s Role Aids line of D&D supplements is rapidly coming to an end. It’s been a wild ride! There is some terrible crap and some works of sheer genius (many of the latter are criminally overlooked), and honestly a surprising trend of beating TSR to the punch. It was a good line, all in all, and I will miss it.

This is Arch Magic (1993), one of the very last Role Aids box sets. It is an ambitious product. That’s fucking Dave McKean doing the cover art, a clear acknowledgment of how the ’90s had changed the aesthetics of RPGs. The interiors are all Roger Raup.

There are lots of things inside, which divide into two piles. The first is source material that seeks to push D&D magic far past the standard power levels into the astounding. This box wants ultra high level spells (reaching to 15th level) to inspire awe and I think it mostly works, at least on a conceptual level. The sample spells are suitably muscular. Enslave the Sky, for instance, gives the caster control of the weather, the ability to fly and active surveillance of any creature out under the open sky. There are new wizardly abodes, rules for grimoires and incredibly powerful new artifacts (like the Singularity Engine, which can make anything).

Friends, if there is one Role Aids product you should have on your shelf, it is this box set, Realms of Fantasy: To Hell and Back (1993). I have had it on my shelf for a while and kind of paid it no mind, partly because of use of a colored Doré engraving from Inferno just makes the thing seem so generic. Especially as it came out in the shadow of the very Vertigo-esque Role Aids sub-line, Demons, which was a far glitzier series of box sets. But this is the one. Pure gold. Probably my very favorite Role Aids product.

Inside are two primary books, by the late, lamented Nigel Findley. The first essentially translates Dante’s Inferno into game terms, from the first circle to the ninth. The second half of that book presents Dis, the city of hot iron, in fairly vivid detail. Grade-A stuff, distinct in character from and very much anticipating Planescape, which was still a year off.

The second book is perhaps even more interesting, because I simply didn’t expect it. Here we have profiles of other realms: Atlantis, Avalon, Faerie and, most intriguing, Selene, the city of vampires. The first trio adhere, essentially, to what you expect, with just a little bit of spice added by Findley. The fourth though, was a complete surprise, based on a vampire novel by Frenchman Paul Féval, one of three he penned decades before Stoker’s Dracula. I have never heard of this before and it is so exciting: in the original novel, the city is made of black jasper and situated near Belgrade, but normally invisible to mortal eyes until Ann Radcliffe (yes, the author of The Mysteries of Udolpho) and a band of unlikely allies lay siege to it in order to rescue a kidnapped friend. I need to read this ASAP.

Denizens of Og (1993) has my favorite cover, I think, of the Monstrous Compendium-style books for the Demons line of Role Aids. This is Mike Nystul’s third and final volume of demons. Like a Tootsie Pop, three is how many demon compendiums it takes to get to Nystul’s Tootsie Roll center, or something. Cover art here is Daniel Gelon, interiors are all Tom Sutton. There is no creepy dedication in this one.

This is Denizens of Verekna (1993), the second Monstrous Compendium-esque supplement for the Role Aids Demons line. I have the title page for this one — Mike Nystul wrote it, Corey Barba drew it, including the cover. The book is, weirdly, dedicated to Jennifer Connelly, citing that scene in Career Opportunities (1991) as an important inspiration. I don’t buy it.