Vintage RPG

Woses of the Black Wood (1987) is the first of two MERP modules I happened to pick that are set in the same region, Eryn Vorn, a wild forest on the south coast of Eriador, near the mouth of the Brandywine River. In the game (I’ve no idea of Tolkien mentioned the region in his writing), the rough country on the forest outskirts is home to some scant humans with some Welsh cultural flavor. The woods themselves are the refuge of a population of Woses, Middle-earth’s answer to the Medieval idea of the “Wild Man,” hill-dwellers who live an uncivilized life mostly in secret. Then the cape, with its many rocky islands, is the haunt of pirates. As a setting for adventures goes, it's pretty good.

The first scenario is yet another haunting. So many MERP adventures involve spectral figures and what to do about them! This, however, is the first I’ve encountered that involves what I’d consider a typical haunting where the point is to lay the spirits to rest in a somewhat typical, real-world fashion. I have a desire to stick this basic plot in my West Marches campaign to see if the pretty simple real-world solution is naturally obscured or complicated by the fact that it is happening in a fantasy world (the ghosts in question were being tormented by a demon, who was recently released, accidentally, by now-dead dwarven adventurers). I like this one quite a lot. 

The first scenario leads into the second: one of the ghosts was tormenting a girl in the settlement who plugged her ears to block out the spectral whispering. Free now of the ghost, it’s discovered she has injured her hearing in a way that only the local hermit herbalist can heal. Unfortunately, the demon from the first scenario has taken up residence in the herbalist’s house and hi-jinx ensue.

That these nicely interlocking mysteries give way to a dungeoncrawl in the third scenario is somewhat disappointing. The dungeon itself is large and dangerous and there are at least three factions — an undead Wose sorceress and her legion, a Wose party exploring the complex with the aim of resettling (most of the group is neutral but they are led by an evil sorceress) and a renegade troll warrior. The mix is interesting and complex, and any confrontations are further complicated by traps and the narrow confines of the dungeon. I just wish it was more like the previous scenarios.

Brigands of Mirkwood (1987) is an alright adventure that gives players a new, interesting base of operations and then pits them against regional problems. The hub is Straytown, an enclave of seedy operators in Mirkwood. Sort of a rustic, frontier town, lined with corduroy roads and full of opportunities and danger. A bit like Lankhmar, really.

The first scenario is a check-out-the-neighborhood kind of jam, where a scholar requires the players to purchase a book on his behalf. Some light hi-jinx ensue, but for the most part this is a sightseeing mission. The second scenario has the players raiding the guild hall of the rogues, which is basically a Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser scenario. I’m not complaining. The final scenario pits them against the local mage, who is the primary power in the town. He’s also in league with Sauron and has a castle, of course. That’s a fairly straightforward assassination, but disappointingly, his removal likely leads to the dissolution of the whole settlement, which is a shame.

We'll be back. But not before a nice, long vacation.

After just shy of 363 episodes in eight years, the Vintage RPG Podcast is going to take a hiatus. For lots of reasons, many of which we explain in this episode (along with some general kvetching about the state of the contemporary internet; that article about ad calls on news sites can be found here, hat tip to Robert McNees). But honestly, mostly, a vacation sounds nice. We'll be back in a couple months. We're even planning on sending a couple virtual postcards.

Until then, sign up for the for the Vintage RPG Newsletter, still going out ever Friday afternoon.

Join the Vintage RPG Discord to while away the days until our return.

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Gates of Mordor (1987) is an adventure module for MERP. It doesn’t seem to set a time frame, but I think it is ostensibly set before the fall of Minas Ithil, which makes sense, since the opening action involves the wineries in fertile lands extremely close to Mordor. Normal people wouldn’t live there after the ring wraith’s transformed Minas Ithil into Minas Morgul, but I can see foolish ones doing so while the city was still in possession of Gondor.

The module boils down to orc problems. They massacre a winery and some other sites and the players are meant to wipe them out. There are some complications and such, but that’s the basics. The orcs linger at the winery searching for hidden treasure, which is interesting (they know it is hidden in water, but there are a lot of local water features). The second scenario involves killing orcs holed up in an abandoned tower, which is pretty to the point, though made more interesting due to the involvement of some NPCs. The final scenario…is also pretty by the numbers: finish off the orcs and their leader. The leader is cool, the werewolf sorcerer Gaurhir.

The Howling Tomb (2025) is a little adventure for characters level 2-3. I backed it during ZineQuest 2025 and also got Lair of the Bog Lich (2025), a level 1-2 adventure. I wasn’t expecting that! But they make a nice pair.

These are lo-fi zines and I like it. Folks often complain about how zines have gotten so fancy. I don’t mind fancy chapbooks being called zines, especially since quality pre-press and printing have become more affordable (or, at least, they were, for a minute there). But at the same time, I really dig a stripped down, no-nonsense zine. These are little black and white jams, six pages each, on nice paper but no cover stock. It gets the job done.

The job is providing OSR-ish adventure! Lair features art by Simone Tametta and has players investing why villagers are sleepwalking into the swamps, never to be seen again. Clearly, a monster is at work, in this case a Bog Lich, which is less like an Acererak and more like Ted Sturgeon’s It, which I dig. More muck monsters in D&D, please! The Howling Tomb features art by Melotyca, I quite like the forlorn cover. The scenario is the six-room tomb and the source of the howl is a colorful opponent whose nature I won’t spoil, since it’s not in the title of this one.

I don’t think there is a whole lot I can tell you about The Painted Wastelands (2024) that you won’t get from the cover and the other art reproduction. This is very much an exercise in leading by the visuals and, baseline, if you pick up the book only for Tim Molloy’s art, you’re still getting a bargain.

It’s more than that, though, of course! It’s a hex crawl for Old-School Essentials, an exploration of a small part of a larger dreamworld, where people speak a strange new language and where traveling from one place to the next is as much a matter of will (applied in a new skill called Lucidity) as it is movement. The world is rich and strange. There are dangers (there are always dangers) but much of the interesting stuff emerges from the world and a desire to see it. There is a robust commerce in the Wastelands, many merchants to visit, many vending machines to peruse. At the start, players find a skull that helpfully acts as a tour guide (shades of Planescape’s mimirs) and I think that sets an immediate tone that pushes away from combat as a default pursuit. It’s nice. The fact that one of the two new classes is “cat” also reinforces this (at a high enough level, they can travel to other realities by jumping high enough; the other class is a dream mage, the oneiromancer, and they pale a little compared to the cat, honestly).

A lot of clear inspirations that I see. Clark Ashton Smith looms largest, maybe, especially his Zothique stories. Moebius’ comic work. Maybe the Remnant series of videogames? Luka Rejec’s work, especially how he mixes fantasy, psychedelia and 20th century machinery, is a close cousin.

Molloy’s art is the star, though. It’s colorful and intricate. His line work is bold without becoming overly cartoony. The world he creates is very designed, by which I mean there is an internal consistency in his visual language that reinforces the world. There’s also a curious stillness, like everything is moving in slow motion (like a dream!) but also in a way that prevents me from feeling that I’ve gotten all the details (like a dream!). No matter how many times I look at these images, they seem new.

Since we’ve already done some random table books this week, what’s one more? This is The Doomed Stronghold (2025) a zine about making, adventuring and living in unusual castles, keeps and fortresses. Every entry is brief to the point of terseness, but also full-to-brimming with inspiration.

Who wants a castle when they can have a petrified ark run aground in the desert? Or a coastal stronghold shaped like a conch? Why have opponents equipped with catapults when they can have flying lizards bombarding a castle with eggs that send serpents against the defenders when they shatter? Why have a normal disaster when a beanstalk can hoist the keep into the clouds? You get the idea — you’ll get tons of ideas!

The Gardens of Ynn (2024) does for outside what The Stygian Library does for inside.

Before we go on, I have to explain that my maternal grandfather was a gardener, and because of this (and its relative proximity) we visited Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania quite frequently (the Wyeth museum is nearby, which explains that particular obsession as well, I think). When I was little, these trips were mostly confined to the sprawling greenhouse, but at some point, when I was about 11, we were there in the autumn and I explored the grounds for the first time in my memory. The greenhouse is on a rise overlooking a fountain garden in what I now understand is a mix of Italian and French influences, but at the time was just entirely magical. Made with a porous sort of concrete, the fountains were stained, cracked, eroded and covered with lichen, making the decorative grotesques even more so. Particularly the back area, where a dry, forlorn pool was choked with brown leaves and lined with broken statuary. It seemed, and continues to in my imagination, like the setting for something.

Ynn appeals to me because in many ways it delivers on the promise of that autumnal discovery. Here is the garden I somehow felt was behind the garden. Where the insects are unfamiliar, where the day is twice as long and where spending enough time among the strange plants can turn you into a fae or a vampire. Or worse: Ynn fell to ruin because it was infected by a memetic virus called the Idea of Thorns, and vectors for infection remain. If it were to spread to the mundane world, the result would be disaster.

This is at least the second version of The Stygian Library (2024); there was definitely a hardcover prior to this (I know because I owned it) and it is within the realm of possibility that a softcover, zine or PDF version was released prior to that (possibly all three). My rooting around has proven inconclusive. This edition was put together by Soul Muppet to match the clothbound revision of The Gardens of Ynn (see tomorrow’s post!) and it’s a notable improvement over the previous hardcover. In addition to being a lovely, properly bookish object, some layout issues have been resolved and the book feels much more usable (though this might be a trick of my memory).

It very much lives up to its subtitle: “a dungeon for bibliophiles.” It’s another place, accessed through a mundane library, archive or bookshop of requisite size, where someone has died. If the proper door can be found, players can enter into what is essentially an endless indoor space lined with books where, periodically, locations of interest can be found.

The Library is created on the fly, using tables to determine the next point of interest, as well as random events and encounters. The deeper the players go, the stranger the library becomes. Color coded librarians carry out their duties. Strange creatures lurk. Wondrous books wait to be found. I hesitate to say more. The material drifts effortless between darkness and whimsy and there is just so much to discover that I’m frankly a bit in awe of Emmy Allen’s creativity.

There was a period of time when I kept discovering these little bits of Planescape flotsam, basically Planescape material in all but name, across the later TSR products. Stuff like Guide to Hell. TSR Jam 1999 (1999) is maybe the strangest of these, because it contains an actual branded Planescape scenario a year after the brand was retired.

The whole book is strange, honestly. It collects scenarios from the Adventurer’s Guild project from the RPGA, which basically produced prequel scenarios for upcoming products and were only playable at participating game shops. It was sort of adjacent to the Living City games. None of this is the product of a game jam, which is what I initially thought. An annual scenario jam would be pretty cool, though.

There are seven scenarios jammed into this thing. The Forgotten Realms one involves the Cult of the Dragon. The Greyhawk scenario is a fetch quest for some dwarves. The Ravenloft scenario is an agonizingly complicated thing that pits the players against a vampire and a fiend (there is way too much going on in such a short space). There’s a mind flayer-centric scenario (the prelude for the release of the Illithiad, I presume) that has the players join a group of Githzerai who aim to hunt the fiends. It’s fine. The Planescape scenario is a bizarre re-enactment of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky poem. I don’t honestly know how to feel about it.

  There’s also a scenario for the Saga System of Dragonlance that I can’t really parse, but takes place underwater, so it probably stinks. An Alternity scenario rounds things out, and has players taking part in an absurd diplomatic wargame.

No clear credits for the interior art. If I had to guess, I’d say Hannibal King did the Planescape work, Glen Angus the mind flayer scenario and Carol Lyon’s signature is visible in the Forgotten Realms art. I think Mike Vilardi is responsible for the Alternity adventure (he’s a mainstay for 2E WEG Star Wars, so a good pick) and I think Arnie Swekel did the Dragonlance, though it’s a bit more zip-a-toned than I expect from his work. Sam Wood and Brian Snoddy would be responsible for either the Greyhawk or the Ravenloft, but I don’t recognize their names or work to be able to guess which is which.

Gadzooks, this is The Gates of Firestorm Peak (1996) and what a mess!

It’s not Bruce Cordell’s fault, really. This scenario was commissioned as a showcase for the 2.5E Player’s Option Rules (Combat & Tactics, Skills & Powers and Spells & Magic) and it’s a compelling argument to never use them. Amusingly, the villain is a wizard corrupted by outré forces, expressed by the fact that his spellcasting uses magic points. I don’t think that’s intended as commentary, but I’m taking it as such anyway. Thankfully, all this stuff is optional and can be completely ignored. It takes up a ton of space, though.

Without all that bunk, you’ve got a pretty solid, lengthy and icky dungeon crawl. The idea is that the titular gates only open once a generation when a particular comet is in the sky. The father of one of the player characters went in 27 years ago and never came out, so, well, go and get him. The outer reaches are a pretty standard, if very dangerous, slice of the Underdark populated primarily by duergar. Deeper, the party finds horrors from the Far Realm have seeped in. In fact, this is the first published appearance of the Far Realm and some of its nasty, Lovecraftian inhabitants. It would go on to become a key locale in later D&D editions, and particularly for the Eberron setting. Aside from extradimensional monsters, there’s some more conventional horrible stuff in dungeon as well. I particularly dislike [complimentary] the fountain, which Arnie Swekel illustrated just to drive home how disturbing it is.

Swekel was a good choice of artist for this, he is like a latter-day Russ Nicholson who excels at illustrating player character types in their death throes without making it too disturbing. The Jeff Easley cover ties the action to the Player’s Option books, but feels somewhat out of step for the more horror-oriented tone inside.

This is Labyrinth of Madness (1995), which Shannon Appelcline tells me was considered S6 at the time of its creation (unlike Dancing Hut, this is slightly more apparent because it includes an illustration booklet a la Tomb of Horrors et al). It’s a complex, extremely difficult dungeoncrawl intended for the highest-level characters. The goal is to break the power of the Labryinth’s inhabitants (a cult of yuan-ti and, ultimately, a mad titan) and rescue the imprisoned soul of a paladin (who, amusingly, didn’t meet the suggested level minimum for the dungeon).

The dungeon is full of old school assholery (though not on the level of Tomb of Horrors). Lots of traps and deadly puzzles. Lots of “clever” tactics for classic monsters. For instance, trolls in one of the very first encounters wield long poles with glass bulbs at the end — in the bulbs are black puddings that are released onto a target when the glass shatters on impact. There is also a walking suit for beholders, which predates I, Tyrant by about a year.

Two additional wrinkles are more modern. The architecture of the dungeon is decidedly three-dimensional, which cuts against player expectation (dungeon design in generally is usually “flat” for lack of a better word) and honestly makes running it seem a bit more challenging than I like. There is also a unifying puzzle involving 20 sigils that must be found and activated in order. Sigils bind to characters and allow them to see objects and situations that are keyed to the associated symbol. If a character doesn’t have a sigil associated with a door, for example, that door simply doesn’t exist for them. Same for a book or magic item and so on. This is also a pain in the neck to account for while running the game, just a layer of really complicated information to constantly manage, but I also really like it. I might not have implemented it on so large a scale, but I enjoy the revelatory quality it imparts and the levels of interaction it opens up.

All in all, a worthy end to the S-series adventures. And if you don’t want a hell dungeon, it’s easy enough to dial down the difficulty, another facet I appreciate.

The Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga (1995) is apparently intended to be a new and fifth installment in the S-series of scenarios (begun in 1978 with Tomb of Horrors). That’s according to Shannon Appelcline, who sites the TSR Triviathon as his source. I have a strong desire to not learn anything more about a thing called the TSR Triviathon, so I am content to trust Shannon in this. [Just kidding, I bought a copy, you’ll see it here in 2027.]

Baba Yaga, of course, is a witch from Slavic and Russian folklore dating to the mid-18th century. She sometimes flies around in a gigantic mortar (using the pestle to steer) and lives in a chicken-legged house. For modern audiences, she is probably best known in her true aspect as part of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy universe, or as an incongruous nickname for the assassin John Wick. Her hut has been kicking around D&D as an artifact since Eldritch Wizardry but this is the first time she appeared in an official D&D product (though she appeared previously in Dragon Magazine, most notably in a scenario by Roger E. Moore).

The hut, of course, is bigger and weirder on the inside. It “dances” across the multiverse by plane-shifting periodically. When it arrives in player’s world, some strange things happen. A young girl begs them to bring a doll to her sister, who is imprisoned in the hut, the ghost of a fortune teller wants them to go in to find a stolen tarot card and a wizard who has information they need has disappeared, likely inside the hut. Thus enticed, the players likely go exploring. Once inside, while tending to their task, they might find an emergent story involving Baba Yaga’s attempt to capture Death. Or they might not. The witch might never cross their path! It’s an interesting set-up and while the bizarre quality of many of the rooms often beggars belief in that gonzo, old-school way, the whole thing hangs together pretty convincingly.

I have to admit, the Fred Fields cover painting for The Lost Shrine of Bundushatur (1998) doesn’t inspire much confidence. The adventurers look like college kids LARPing in hoodies and bedsheets at the university library. The ghost being both in front of the chair and behind the shelves really throws off the composition for me. The name Bundushatur is asking a lot as well. Too much? Maybe.

Anyway, this is one of the many latter-day “generic” D&D modules, indicated by the black trade dress, that were not bound to any particular campaign setting. By 1998, independent TSR was dead and Wizards of the Coast had not yet sold to Hasbro;  there was a general sense of return to an older mode of design, as in A Paladin in Hell. Lost Shrine is a little different because it actually was old, originally written in 1987. It was resurrected as a larger push to get little-seen RPGA adventures in front of a wider audience (the RPGA logo on the cover started popping up a little earlier in 1998 and would return here and there until 2E wrapped up).

As the other cover branding indicates, this is primarily a dungeoncrawl into shrine of Chaos. It’s a relatively small space, made larger-seeming in its reality subverting weirdness. The idea is to go in, find the twelve parts of the chaos key, assemble it and use it to destroy the place. Bold to assume the players aren’t in the sway of Chaos, really. There are lots of shrines to Chaos lords and goopy monsters and interesting environments (an MC Escher inspired staircase is a highlight, as is the room with 50 tiny, hostile skeletons).

With the exception of White Plume Mountain, I can’t recall another D&D adventure quite so, uh, enamored of the work of Michael Moorcock. The chaos key is his eight-pointed cross, there’s a sword meant for a champion of chaos, there’s the many chaos lords and the winged apes and other stuff that seems lifted directly from the Elric and Corum stories. I don’t mind! But it does seem somewhat incongruous since D&D already had a supply of powerful agents of Chaos and I know, deep down, none of these lot will ever be heard from again.

I covered Adam Allsuch Boardman’s previous Illustrated Histories (Ghosts, UFOs) last year alongside my Usborne World of the Unknown books (a natural pairing, as Boardman seems at least partially inspired by them). This is his latest: An Illustrated History of Urban Legends (2024).

Now, of course, I wanted the third volume to be all monsters, but urban legends is really a better fit for Boardman’s series, the previous two of which position their paranormal subjects as sort of…external manifestations of the human desire to understand that which is beyond our understanding. That’s very close to the idea, too, which I keep bringing up in these monster-related posts that humans have a keen desire for the world to be more interesting/magical/mysterious than it seems to be. In unguarded moments, we seem to indulge that desire almost unconsciously. And that’s where urban legends emerge from.

A wide range of topics is covered here, from cryptids, to conspiracy theories to weird animal encounters to the sort of horrific rumors like the one about the girl whose hair gets infested with black widow spiders at the salon or the ol’ mouse in a Coke bottle yarn. These things, in isolation, couldn’t seem any more disparate, but together in the tapestry of Boardman’s book, they create this modern mythic landscape. Go read the book and I suspect not only will the stories seem more familiar than you expect, I bet they feel a little more true, too.

And they are, just not in the boring real-world way. They’re telling us something true about our anxieties, about the modern world, about how we fit, or don’t fit. And the conclusions we all draw are probably entirely different, person to person.

Anyway, even if you don’t buy my existential ramblings, Boardman’s art continues to be sublime. Super clean lines, super straight forward compositions, but he manages to often imbue them with a heavy sense of dread or mystery despite their visual clarity. I think, as I believe I mentioned before, this is because of the sense of stillness or quiet in his work. I think that generally, quiet sets citizens of the modern world on edge.