Maildrop & some recent debates

Have received some post new year stuff
Im going a bit slow on shopping for a while 

Seeing a few ppl say skills are not old dnd enough and not part of oldschool. Personally I would have quit dnd 5 years earlier if skills were not in OA & DSG & Cyclopedias/Gazetteers and gone onto BRP sooner. You can still roleplay and use logic to solve problems without skills but I find them handy shortcuts that speed play and repetitiveness. Im happy to say good roleplaying can replace many roles but you don't want to roleplay every shop every secret door search and I like things my character can do that I cant. I don't LARP because I don't want to be a disabled old man in a game. I'm fine with less fanatic players wanting to shorthand boring procedures. And I would like to roleplay someone with abilities I don't have and don't understand. Sometimes they can be used to cap knowledge a character might not have like a geologist whose every character is more knowledgeable than Gemstar the crystal wizard created to especially know everything in the game about gems that the player thinks are pretty rocks they cant remember names of.

Fighting Folk of the Haven Isles 💓💓💓💓
Amazing, enjoyable and funny classic Brit grunge fantasy. For the Midderands setting and is basically subclasses that are easy to apply to many pre-1st ed old-school retroclones. A companion to the excellent Folk Magic of Havenland but bigger. You should read both. Charming, and weird and will make campaigns more interesting. A great way to do subclasses and not create whole new classes. Is possibly less useful for the 5th ed version of the setting? Even if you don't want to bolt this onto a setting or some of these there are so many rich games design weird ideas in here that are inspiring. Having Dionysus cult woman berserks was genius and so many other gems. One of the most fun reads and a good KS campaign.

Raiders from R'Lyeh From The Tideless Sea💓💓💓💓
A titanic effort detailing shipping in the dawn of the 20th C in incredible detail. Frankly, I prefer these layouts to CoC7 and like that it is still playable to Cthulhu gamers. I would rather play this than Orient Express (overblown, too many monsters, too Clive barker, bad use of mythology). The tv shop 1899 would fit in this in fact any game with retro liners would benefit. Even some of the detail here would even help design a space liner or a dungeon on a vast hulk at sea. Its the penultimate work of gaming on these ships with fantastic effort and great use of historical photos. I like the mythos in B&W rather than digital fake ageing coffee table books which are often harder to read. Has elaborate tables for sailor cultists' tatoos which is fun. While I'm less and less likely to play Cthulhu I would find uses for this for lots of settings and has lots of great history and ideas. Of all the ridiculously fat RPG books of last few years this feels the densest and best designed. I also like character sheet like a crew personnel form. Will take me months to read over 540 pages. Possibly one of most satisfying KS projects I've backed.

Necropolis💓💓💓💣

It's very good and very pretty with a great monster section. My biggest gripes are its a bit overwritten and lots of detail on the art of locations but lots of empty rooms. I prefer simpler maps, text and story but for this style of computer game walkthrough maps at least indicate the room's individual decor and has a point. I am enjoying reading old modules and good modern oldschool clones is its a brief read and ready to run. The density here seems intimidating and often what is happening is quite simple. It skips on setting detail and gods which is good and bad but a reasonable decision. I recommend the castles and crusades egypt book but also other Iron Crown rolemaster egypt book and gurps egypt are probably the best ever and palladium one is worth a look for monsters). It is pretty linear adventure really and feels more like a 5th ed product than a retro style game. I have a bunch of egypt stuff I could be using in future so I will use some of this, especially the monsters. The design and colour are very nice and dense in content. I found it cheaper for the book and post via Drivethrough RPG than other places and prices varied lots. 

G2 The Lonley Lighthouse for Mythras Classic Fantasy 💓💓💣💣
Wow, so I quit BRP as my no1 game about 2012 as I started this blog and my retro d&d homebrew. And then they made a version of BRP based on classic fantasy tropes that is interesting. Then it was released as a Mythras product and made even more realised and it has ideas to steal for any homebrewer. Then they made old-school style modules that look like old dnd but inside is Mythral layouts, maps and a few possibly fantasy wilderness scenes illustrated. One reason I quit BRP was the huge stat blocks and easier to improvise or mod in DND without adjusting location HP or changing a stat which altered a few % on a skill. I quite like Openquest as a simple fantasy BRP and Magic World as having own flavours. So this is a weird product for me. Value wise it was slow to post and I don't like the paper with a similar stock cover which takes away from the cover style a bit. The text reads ok but a bit modern.  It outlines factions and characters straight up. We get a hexcrawl in a dutchy and a coastal area you could slap Sinister Secret Saltmarsh onto. By pg 14 we are onto adventure chapters. Its simple yet detailed but not confusingly overwritten. It gives problem-solving options also for consequences. It has an area called saltmarsh to explore and some barrows. Then a lighthouse and fish folk and smugglers. The last section is movement, encounters, and monster stack blocks (modest for a BRP game and simple). It is better value for a BRP-based game as sections of stats at back will be not so handy. For a person willing to convert on the fly it is a ok coastal starting area for adventurers and you could easily add extra sea-themed stuff here. It has some ok locations and NPCs and factions but its a bit dry and low magic mostly. It's an oddity to see a RQ clone cloning oldschool gaming in part. It does that but probably not enough nods to oldschool gaming or the gonzo fantasy embraced by its more interesting products. I will probably stick some of this in my Anglerslund adventures.