Reviews: Christmas Presents 2022

Sablemage

Demi-God
“You always say you don’t want anything for Christmas,” my son said, “But I’ve noticed that if I put scotch in front of you, you drink it.”

And right he is, so I left Christmas with two more bottles of single malt than when I entered. But I also used the money from my last editing commission to buy myself a few goodies…

Falkrest Abbey


This was reduced to $1, and one of the authors is someone whose past work I deem worthwhile, namely Giuseppe Rotondo (Gold and Glory and other games), so it was a no-brainer really.

It’s an OSR adventure for 1st-3rd level PCs, in which they explore a ruined abbey containing valuable items, monsters (including several types of undead) and chess puzzles. My intent is to use it in the City of Serpents campaign, but we’ll see how that goes.

Falkrest Abbey

One Shot in the Dark


I bought this for something like $1.50, as a way of putting something in the tip jar for Tale of the Manticore, a podcast I enjoy immensely.

It’s actually quite a nice little dungeon crawler, with ultralite rules and a randomly-generated three level dungeon to explore. Clearly inspired by BX D&D, but otherwise unrelated to that game or the podcast. Apparently works well as an introduction to the genre for children, though I haven’t tried that.

One Shot in the Dark

The Persephone Extraction


A campaign for Night’s Black Agents in five adventures; the main plotline is pleasingly close to Dracula’s plan in my own game so I shall adjust it to suit. Also comes with another adventure called The Mechanism.

Like all Pelgrane Press NBA adventures, this is well-researched, cunningly plotted, and uses a different type of vampire with new supernatural sidekicks. It was the most expensive purchase, at about $15, but also the largest; the group is currently averaging 1-2 sessions per adventure, so this should keep them going for 9 sessions or so, and it will lead on nicely from The Zalozhniy Quartet once I’ve tweaked it a bit.

The Persephone Extraction

Risk Mitigation


And then the news about WotC updating their Open Gaming Licence broke. The debate is still going on, and it’s mutating rapidly.

Whatever happens, I think there’s a significant risk some stuff I want will disappear, so as a contingency measure I looked over my wishlist and brought forward the purchase of three items: The Old School Essentials Rules Tome, The Waking of Willowby Hall, and Cepheus Deluxe Enhanced Edition. I don’t know when, or if, those will get reviewed or played; I’m just mitigating a risk.

I also backed up all my purchases to date on an external hard drive; companies have taken down their PDFs before, and even after they were reinstated, I didn’t get mine back. So now I have trust issues.

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