About Lands of Legends!

Lands of Legends is a series of five zines designed to assist you in both prepping and running hexcrawl, sandbox, open world campaigns with classic fantasy OSR games such as Old-School Essentials, Labyrinth Lord, Sword & Wizardry and the various simulacra of the Original, BECMI and B/X editions of the classic fantasy role-playing game.

It was successfully funded in February 2021 as part of ZineQuest3 on Kickstarter, with over 200 backers in two weeks.

How?

Each zine contains 100 Special Areas and 100 Unique Encounters, with both categories sorted by terrain type (forests, mountains, cities, swamps and so on) and organized as d10 tables.

Special Areas are designed to help you create an engaging sandbox setting, where every mountain, swamp, island, forest, city, desert etc is unique and interesting.

Unique Encounters are designed to be used straight away while playing, and offer interesting and story-enhancing situations. No more boring random monsters! Have your group face unforeseen hazards, interesting NPCs, and puzzling situations during their travels!

Five Zines?

The Lands of Legends series includes five volumes:

Lands of Legends - Mundane focuses on the commonplace situations and everyday accidents, imbuing your campaign with the fresh breath of a living world! It suited for low magic settings, and can be used with just about anything you want to run.

Lands of Legends - Grim focuses on the darker, grittier nuances of fantasy games, and is the perfect fit for campaigns that explore grimdark, gothic, horror themes.

Lands of Legends - Fairy is the perfect book to enrich your campaign with the enchanted prodigies of the fae, bringing back the sense of wonder into the game, with magical places and events that are true to the spirit of the fairytales and folktales roots of the fantasy genre.

Lands of Legends - Holy makes the Gods -benevolent, whimsical, indifferent or cruel- an active power in your campaign world, along with their priests and prophets, crusaders and champions, and a whole lot of omens and portents to challenge your players.

Lands of Legends - Primeval is the tool to unleash the raw, prehuman, tumultuous forces of primeval civilizations and antediluvian elemental chaos into your campaign, enhancing a brutal Sword & Sorcery vibe! 

The five zines series totals at 500 Special Areas and 500 Unique Encounters!

The PDF version features:

• Full color, bookmarked PDF
• Printer-friendly/improved accessibility version via layers that can be turned off

Each volume is also available in a Print-on-Demand version:

• 6x9" reversible book so that you have Areas on one end, and Encounters on the other, which is printed upside-down!

Some Reviews:

"Whether your adventurers are traveling to civilizations, deserts, forests, fresh waters, jungles, mountains, hills, plains, valleys, seas, islands, swamps, marshes, or wastelands there’s plenty to find and experience among the Lands of Legends!" - Cannibal Halfling Gaming

"Lands of Legends – Mundane is plain and simple in appearance, but its content is anything but. For the Game Master wanting ideas or inspiration, there can be no denying that Lands of Legends – Mundane is rich in both. Plus the fact that it can do both inspire world building and encounters gives Lands of Legends – Mundane a pleasing versatility to both the inspiration and the ideas." - Reviews from R'lyeh

"Do you like random charts? Then these books are for you. These entries are unique and engaging" - Thac0 blog

"The sheer level of creativity that went into these zines is staggering. Beautifully designed and incredibly well-executed" - Welcome to the Deathtrap blog, reviewing Lands of Legends Mundane & Grim 

"I have been amazed with just how much creativity goes into these zines; they always stun me. But this one has been a cut above. If you are looking for new locations, cool encounters, and want a divine twist on them, this will gave a few things you will want to steal." - Welcome to the Deathtrap blob, reviewing Lands of Legends Holy

"Incredible creativity. I have said this of the previous volumes of Lands of Legends, but I am again staggered by the level of creativity that has gone into the creation of Lands of Legends: Fairy." - Welcome to the Deathtrap blog, reviewing Lands of Legends Fairy

"If you like running sandboxes, hex crawls, or need some inspiration for the setting you are prepping, you really can't go wrong with Lands of Legend” - Tenkar's Tavern

Sounds good? Check it out on Drivethru!

About Infinigrad The Weird City Toolkit

Infinigrad: The Weird City Toolkit by Michael Raston (the author of Ordure Fantasy and the cool old-school sci-fi game Star Dogs) is a very unusual product. Why? Because it's neither a PoD nor a PDF (for the most part).

It is also part of the larger Infinigrad project which revolves around a fascinating, weird city setting, where the player characters are Guild Dogs, i.e. desperate mercenaries/troubleshooters that work for ancient, power hungry guilds.

As a product, it is a bundle of automated tools for quickly generating details for fantasy urban environments, and is totally system neutral. Such tools come in the form of four HTML files which open up in your browser. The package also includes an "Introduction" PDF and a "Map Maker" PDF.

Let's see how these tools work.

The first is the Job Generator. Here's three screenshots of what you get clicking each button:

A fairly standard adventure generator, this is meant to produce inspiration for missions and adventures for guild dogs inside the Infinigrad city. Definitely designed to be used while prepping, but could also be used for GMs who enjoy running impromptu games. In both cases, if you don't like one of the results you just click the relevant button until you get something you can work with.

The second tool is the Building Stocker. This one has lots of buttons, and definitely they are not meant for you to push all of them all the times: they are there to be pushed when needed. Here's three screenshots with all the buttons pushed:

Lots to be found there. This could definitely be used for most location-based adventures, dungeons, etc. to stock lots of rooms.

The third tool is the Guild Dog generator. This one produces a systemless player character with interesting quirks. Here's three dogs:

As you can see from the third image, things can get pretty weird.

The fourth tool, named Suburb Generator, is the meatiest. It is divided into A LOT of sections, actually making it a collection of several generators. Here's what you can find, with sample results:

So much stuff in there! These can be very useful to create a really weird city and to run city adventures.

The Suburb Mapper PDF file is a more traditional tool with three gridded tables that require you to roll two dice (column and row), and the results are simple sketches of roads sections, building shapes, and building interiors, respectively. It's a bit strange that these tables have not been translated into another HTML tool, and the reason is because the results are images instead of plain text.

The last file is the Introduction to Infinigrad. This is a 2-page PDF with a short but very evocative text describing the past and present of the city, the story of its Guilds and how their conflicts shaped (and almost destroyed) Infinigrad.

So how is it? Well this is the type of thing we've seen in many OSR products through the years: tables and tables for generating lots of content, but this time it is not a book or a PDF (for the most part, at least). For GMs used to have an electronic device at the table, this might prove very handy. 

I must say I'd love the HTML files to be a bit more flashy. Experimenting with some fancy font and colors might make it look more appealing. Not that the substance would change! All in all, I love random generators and I would recommend trying Infinigrad to anyone fascinated with weird settings and city adventures.

About In the Shadow of Tower Silveraxe

 In the Shadow of Tower Silveraxe is one of the 'zines that were crowdfunded on Kickstarter during ZineQuest3. It's written and nicely illustrated by Jacob Fleming.

It comes as a stapled, A5, 64-page, black and white 'zine, with a nice color cover and a color regional map at the end of the 'zine.

It is a sandboxy adventure module for Old School Essentials, meaning you can play it pretty much as is with most OSR games, especially with OD&D, BECMI and B/X retroclones.

I've just read through it and I must say I'm absolutely happy I backed it! You may consider this a must have, if you and your players enjoy adventures with a really old school feel and gameplay (warning: this may include high lethality!). There is no predetermined storyline, you have rumors, locales and factions, and it's up to the players to explore and interact with the region, its dungeons and its denizens.

Silveraxe describes the Gemthrone Wilderness, a small region with the following details:

- brief history of the area

- description of the four local factions (dwarves, elves, bandits, and a tribe of cyclopean creatures called Goltheks)

- 16 adventure locales (9 dungeons, 3 settlements, 1 special forest, 1 special lake, 1 mage tower)

- player handouts (3 treasure maps)

What's cool about it?

In 64 pages, you get A LOT of gaming, with enough information to play for months. No pointlessly long descriptions and backstories, just the functional details that you actually need, such as NPC motivations.

The region, dungeons and factions are frequently interconnected with rumors, clues and pieces of information (such as treasure maps) that will push clever adventurers to explore on and on.

The dungeons are cleverly designed and nicely mapped. They are quite small (7 to 33 rooms), which I like because that means most of them can be cleared in one session, usually have non-linear exploration (i.e. players can find multiple paths), and include at least one engaging situation, puzzle, trap, or secret, and often more than one in the case of larger dungeons.

The first printing, which I received as a Kickstarter backer, has some very minor editing flaws, but other than that, it's an awesome supplement with an excellent gaming/page count ratio.

After the Kickstarter, it is now available HERE in PDF, or HERE in print, if you want to check it out.

If you are into Old School, don't forget to check out my Lands of Legends 'zines designed for OSR hexcrawl/sandbox campaigns!