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Back to Forgotten Realms stuff I actually like. This is Cult of the Dragon (1998) and it follows in the footsteps of the black-bound FOR-series of sourcebook highlighting important groups and organizations in the Realms, like the Harpers book.

The cult was one of Ed Greenwood’s main villains in his home campaign and they were detailed in a great article in Dragon Magazine 110 (1986), which marks the first time the dracolich got game attributes (I should note that undead dragons appear in Pillars of Pentegarn and, sort of, in White Plume Mountain, but they aren’t dracolichs). The cult basically makes dracolichs as a way to both subjugate dragons and benefit from their power. For a long time, the cult was run by a lich called Sammaster, but I am pretty sure that, unlike every other evil magic-user in the Realms, he’s actually permanently dead now; the cult still works toward world domination, but in decentralized cells. Reminds me a bit of the cults of Tzeentch.

The cult specializes in undead and dragon hybrids and, probably, undead dragon hybrids. So, the monster section has some good stuff. And some bad stuff: I didn’t need a mantidrake, but at least then the wings make sense. Glenn Michael Angus provides all the interior illustrations and he’s an excellent, gritty choice. His line work has a heavy metal spirit that’s suited to the subject. Is the Cult of the Dragon metal? How can you even ask?

Classic Clyde Caldwell on the cover. Bit of a shame it’s cropped down to a medallion. Here’s something ironic: the sorceress here marked the moment I shook off the assumption that wizards need to wear robes. Because she’s wearing pants! A Clyde Caldwell woman in pants! Amazing.

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So, I’m getting rid of a lot of stuff. A collection needs that, to be pruned down, so that it can grow more effectively. Ask any librarian: one of the most important parts of their jobs is figuring out what books to get rid of. When I started collecting for serious, I had a rule about D&D: no ultra rares, nothing after 1999. I own later stuff that I like, of course, but I wasn’t collecting it. Recently, though, I’ve decided to add a new rule. I find Forgotten Realms terribly dull, so I will no longer be collecting it.

FR14: The Great Glacier (1992) is a great example. Look at that Robh Ruppel cover! What a great cover! What a great name for a place. Let’s check the table of contents. We have: History, Geography, People, Flora and Fauna, Places, Personalities, Snow Baby: An Adventure and New Monsters. Exactly one of those chapters piques my interest, and when you flip to the back, you get Snow Dwarf, Snow Dog and Behir Variant. “Snow Baby: An Adventure” sounds like a schlocky kid-and-pet movie you’d see on the Hallmark Channel. The rest of the chapters could be ripped from a school text book. All the pages are printed over parchment texture, so it isn’t even easy to read. I’m psyched that Scott Rosema got paid for the 20 minutes work he put in on the illustrations, though.

This is boring. Forgotten Realms almost never delivers on the promises it makes. But that cover is so good, and I want the rest of the book to measure up to it so bad, that I have kept this boring thing around for years. But not any longer. Honestly: whatever ideas popped into your brain looking at that cover? They are at least as good as the pedestrian stuff inside.

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You bring a suitcase with your clothes, and an empty suitcase for all the crap you're gonna buy. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Stu sifts through the gigantic pile of stuff he bought at GenCon, including The Sutra of Pale Leaves for Call of Cthulhu, Age of Vikings, Bunny Borg, Kala Mandala and one zine that arrived while he was away, Tiger's Figure Folio.

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This is it, my last post about a first edition D&D product. I’ve covered them all, now. Wild. [Update: this is a slight fib, a couple things have slipped the net and will appear here in 2026, but when I wrote this in 2024, I thought it was 100% true.]

This is FR6: Dreams of the Red Wizards (1988). Coupled with the title, the wizard in this Clyde Caldwell cover painting sure seems like a creepy voyeur. Valerie Valusek provides the interiors, most of which are fairly unexciting. The temple of Bhaal is nice and I guess the gnoll with the whip is cool, but it’s weird that the gnoll has the title of constable? Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.

In the scheme of Forgotten Realms staple villains, I’m more interested in the Zhentarim than I am the Red Wizards and, despite being penned by RuneQuest co-designer Steve Perrin, they don’t really leap off the page at me here. They have always struck me as low-rent riffs on Robert E. Howards Stygians and, though Szass Tam has a cool name, his status as an arch-lich bent on conquering his neighbors just doesn’t fill me with dread. Not that Forgotten Realms NPCs have time to interact with players, what with all their rivalries with other NPCs taking up all their time. He probably gets more interesting after his god Myrkul bites it. I will say, though, that his one interesting thing was that he looked like a normal person and it is sort of a bummer that recent incarnations of him just have him looking like any old lich. In fact, I would say that one of the few appeals of the red wizards at this point was that their vibe was sort of “charmingly evil grandfather” with all the stereotypical wizard garb, just, meaner. Remember that asshole Edwin from the Baldur’s Gate games? Looked like a boring wizard, except you could tell he was an asshole because he filed his nails to a point and had a nose ring. Bring back villains who are just douchebags rather than conduits for cosmic energy or whatever, would ya? The head tattoos are a later invention and honestly, are a little too cool.

Where was I? Oh, the gnoll. His name is Hargun Skullnuckle. Constable Skullnuckle to you. He’s the chief of police in Bezantur. It goes without saying, probably, that he’s corrupt and also a member of the Thieves Guild. This is perhaps the best distillation of Thay: a place where gnolls are cops.

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This is the stuff right here. Monsters are the best, so it stands to reason that Usborne’s All About Monsters (1977) is the best in the series. It follows the same format as the previous volumes, mixing scary tales with just enough scientific rumination to make it seem to be a plausibly “educational” book. Except, you know, with buckets of blood.

Highlights include a bloody-mawed Minotaur, a bloody-mouthed T-rex, a bloody-mouthed werewolf, Grendel about to tear a fool in two and John Lambton pretty much drenched in claret. A lot of the art in here brings an intensity that anticipates what’s on display in the Rodney Matthews-illustrated mythology books Usborne in the mid-’80s (though those books are bloodless, as far as I can recall). I genuinely found this book scarier than the ghost book as a kid because it impressed upon me the fact that monsters would probably eat me.

The real star of the show, though, was a two-page spread at the back of the book titled “A Dictionary of Monsters,” which was an alphabetical list of all the cool monsters, most of which weren’t present in the main book, accompanied by one-line summaries. Never underestimate the power of a list, especially in the hands of an already monster-obsessed pre-teen boy. I most definitely employed this thing at the library and in conjunction with my Monster Manual and any other monster books I had to hand. This is the sort of thing that inspires a kid to bring a notebook and a pen with him on family outings so he can list every single monster he can think of rather than listening to whatever the adults are talking about and then, 30-something years later, compel them to write a whole book on monsters. They should put warnings on these things.

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Everything I said about Adam Allsuch Boardman’s An Illustrated History of Ghosts is just as true of his earlier book, An Illustrated History of UFOs (2020), and perhaps doubly so, as he succeeds in making UFOs just as cool as ghosts. Which is not to say that UFOs are uncool, but rather that ghosts are just that cool (monsters, of course, are miles cooler than both, and I hope his forthcoming urban legends book is a stealth monster book for this reason [Update: it sort of is!]).

I read them out of order, so to me, Ghosts sets up a question — why are ghosts so important to us? — that Boardman seems to answer in UFOs. I have always known the UFO phenomenon really took off (ugh, pardon the pun) in 1947, but I didn’t realize that the Spiritualism craze was winding down around the same time, marking the end of a period of unprecedented interest in ghosts and the possibility of an afterlife. I also didn’t realize how similar the accounts of ghost and UFO encounters play out, and how the language around the research of both phenomena is essentially interchangeable (and also how singular encounters of both seem to uh…clearly influence later encounters). Almost as if, as the world changed, so did the nature of the Unknown that humanity craves.

Deep thoughts aside, I think UFOs also excels because Boardman has so much more material to work with — there are so many ship and alien variants! His style seems perhaps slightly more suited to the curving mechanical lines. I have to say, outside of The Vast of Night, I don’t find UFOs or aliens to be a concept that is scary or particularly awe-inspiring. But many of Boardman’s illustrations of UFO sightings have a numinous quality I find unnerving and ominous. There is a stillness in his work that benefits his subjects. The feeling reminds me a bit of descriptions I’ve read of the experience some folks have being in proximity to standing stones and other neolithic monuments.

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So, I replaced the other two books in the series — Ghosts and Monsters — a couple years ago because I loved them so much the covers fell off. All About UFOs (1977), however, is the original copy, bought from the Ontario Science Center for $4.95 CAD (what a deal!). As you can see, it looks like someone slept on it. For a year or two. There is barely any binding left. And there are other marks of time (we’ll get to those in a second).

Same as the rest of the series, this is a mix of serious-faced accounts of UFO phenomenology mixed with a liiiiittle bit of actual science and some pop culture cross-over (I enjoy the appearance of the Klingon warship in particular). It also has some guidance for hunting UFOs and, helpfully, faking UFO photos. There is a UFO report form. Which I filled out, when I saw the UFO I insisted was a silver “hot dog + mohawk.” It was a passenger plane, folks, traveling along a well-established route in the sky behind my house, where thousands of other passenger planes have flown. But the imagination can be strong.

I also love that I highlighted the hell out of this book. You would think I was highlighting the important stuff, but when you highlight this much stuff, you’re kind of defeating the purpose.

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This is An Illustrated History of Ghosts (2022), by Adam Allsuch Boardman. Mr. Boardman is also a fan of Usborne’s All About Ghosts (I know this because a little illustration of the book appears in the bibliography in the back). Obviously, he is a fan of many other ghost books, but opening this thing for the first time was accompanied by such a firm feeling of…camaraderie? I struggle to describe in a way that doesn’t invoke Tod Browning’s Freaks. One of us, one of us. It was strange, but not unpleasant.

This is a much better and more thought-out overview of the subject than the Usborne book, honestly. Of particular note is the connection Boardman makes between hauntings and the Spiritualism movement. Which should have been obvious, probably, but years of pursuing ghost stories for their own sake really muddies the matter in my brain, and made this book into a powerful revelation about why we seek and see ghosts. I’ll get into that more on Thursday though, because it is even stronger in Boardman’s follow-up.

Boardman’s art is straight-up fantastic. His style is fairly minimalist, concerned with flatness, color and design. He’s a graphic genius, really. The imagery is just, astoundingly rich, not just as entertaining images, but also as information delivery systems. As in comics, the art is just as important to the overall story here as the words. It’s very painstaking, I think, for his process, but makes for a light and insightful experience for the reader. You learn nearly through osmosis.

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This is All About Ghosts (1977), one of three books in Usborne’s World of the Unknown series. I got them at the Ontario Science Center (RIP?) on a family trip circa 1988 or so (all the copies with this cover that I’ve seen claim 1977 as the publication date but don’t account for what was certainly many printings; the series had a covers refresh in the ’90s and then reverted to the original design a few years ago, with the addition of an inset advertising forewords by new authors). Of all the books about ghosts that I devoured as a kid, it was my favorite by a large margin.

There are probably a few reasons for this. First, I love the house art style for the series (Shared with the three-volume 1979 Supernatural World series, which also has a volume on ghosts). It reminds of science books (perhaps, because of some Usborne science books I have). Except cooler, because there are a lot of transparent, cloaked skeletons and just a hint of the British flare for the grim and gritty. There is a lot of art, in fact, making the text breezy and easy to read. It managed to be spooky, too, and provided a how-to guide for amateur ghost hunters (boy, my gran sure was annoyed when I dusted her definitely not haunted guest bedroom with flour to detect fake ghosts). Honestly, though, it might just be down to that amazing illustration of Black Shuck (that dog don’t give a fuck).

My favorite thing about this book is the two-page spread on Pluckley, the “village with a dozen ghosts.” I very much wanted to visit, as I figured the local demographics ensured an encounter with a phantom, but only a couple of the dozen hauntings listed seem to have any basis in folklore that pre-dates the publication of this book. The village eventually got a Guinness world record as the most haunted village in Britain, and appeared on several paranormal shows. I like to think all that supposed spookiness started in this book…

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Once again, Stu journeys to the biggest tabletop gaming convention in the US. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, Stu reports back from GenCon 2025. How was the train? Did he survive his panel? Did he play any games? Did he make it back without having to take the bus? Listen to learn the answers to all these questions, and much more!

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Sky Point and Vivane (1995) is the final Earthdawn box set and it offers some radically different opportunities for play than the rest of the line to this point. You can tell just by looking at Stephen Hickman’s cover art, which looks a bit like something out of Metropolis, that this isn’t the familiar Earthdawn. A somewhat smaller artist pool is on duty inside: Tom Baxa, Joel Biske, Kent Burles, Jeff Laubenstein, Larry MacDougall and Mike Nielsen.

Three books, two maps and a booklet of handouts. Book one details the portions of the city of Vivane inhabited by natives of Barsaive. Book two looks at the quarters reserved for Theran citizens. Book three is dedicated to the region around the city, as well as the Sky Point platform, the aerial fortresses above it and the slaving city in its shadow.

All of this makes up the lone outpost of the odious Theran Empire in Barsaive. Most folks in the province are loyal to the Dwarven kingdom, though the Therans claim the whole thing belongs to them. They’re a bunch of sorcerous, slave-holding assholes though, clear villainous types who, if I recall correctly, had a really rough go of it during the most recent Scourge. So, while Vivane looks nice, I guess, it looks nice in a very “cover of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead” kind of way. I see the appeal of having a city to explore in contrast to the dangerous wilderness and the corrupted kaers, but not Vivane. I wouldn’t want to live there. I wouldn’t want to visit, unless I had an army at my back and some mobile guillotines, you know? What power the Therans have is built on the backs of slave labor. Let’s have an exercise in violent, fantasy justice.

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Now Parlainth: The Forgotten City (1994)? This is the stuff.

OK, so, magic in Earthdawn is sort of tidal, for lack of a better word. At high tide, the borders of reality grow thin and the Horrors come to rampage. This is called a Scourge and it happens periodically, to the point that societies have safeguards, like the kaers — subterranean, magically sealed cities that populations hole up in for the duration, which often last several centuries. Parlainth was a massive city that didn’t want to ride out the Scourge in the usual way. Rather, their mages transported the whole city to another dimension, then magically erased all memory of the place from the world in hopes that the Horrors wouldn’t find it. But the Horrors did find it, and killed everyone there, but then found that they too were trapped. They got bored and angry and created servants to amuse them until one day, Parlainth reappeared in the regular world. Full of monsters. But also full of treasure.

The city has been explored to the point that a walled settlement has been established at its entrance (similar to the way Pavis fronts the Big Rubble). A meaty portion of the book details this settlement, Haven. Rather than exhaustively detailing the ruined city and its catacomb system, the purpose of each district is broadly sketched, with encounters, traps, adventure hooks and other points of interest explained but the execution of scenarios involving those pieces left to the GM. A lengthy section dedicated to adventures doesn’t provide adventures, but rather a methodology for creating adventures using the pieces laid out in the city section. It’s a novel approach, and exactly the sort of think I’d expect a young Robin D. Laws to tinker with.

The box is full of amazing art — Joel Biske, Steve Bryant, Liz Danforth, Newton Ewell, Earl Geier, Alex Heller, Jeff Laubenstein, Larry MacDougall and Mike Nielsen are all present. Geier, again, inks out some nightmares. There are a lot of examples of architecture, statuary, murals and friezes throughout, almost always with sinister aspect. In their boredom, the Horrors re-decorated during their imprisonment, using their auras to corrupt existing Theran art. Nice, creepy touch. Cover by Led Edwards, which is always a good decision. It oozes mystery and danger.

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Speaking of Barsaive, here is the Barsaive box set (1993), a welcome treatment of the lands players will live in and explore in most Earthdawn campaigns. Of the box sets, it’s probably the most needed but also in some ways the least interesting.

Inside: two books, one for GMs, one an in-world document for use by players (cute that the designers thought players would read 120+ of setting material). I have several sheets of reference cards and a couple pieces of an incomplete cardboard sextant, but I am missing the map. My box set has the screen and the Gamemastering Earthdawn booklet jammed in there, though, so probably a wash, all things considered.

I find the player book doesn’t hold my attention. It’s not a snoozefest like a Forgotten Realms region sourcebook — there are tons of cool/scary/goopy ideas here. But the player-facing nature of the text makes it all squishy for me. None of this is necessarily true, you know? As GM, I can accept and subvert that as I wish. I mean, I can do that with the GM material, too, but that text has some weight and intention to it that I often find missing in ’90s player stuff. The GM book is annoyingly brief. The tastiest bit is the long section on NPCs of the region, which gives lots of usable details for scenarios. The secret societies chapter comes in second.

As ever, the art is what keeps me coming back. A lot of very scary Earl Geier in here. He would take the prize except I can’t stop looking at Laubenstein’s character portraits. Also inside are Joel Biske, Steve Bryant, Liz Danforth, Jim Nelson, Robert Nelson, Mike Nielson and Tony Szczudlo. Blas Gallego did the cover and I think it nicely captures the ruined overlands and the creeping menace of what I presume is a cracked Kaer settlement or pre-Horrors structure.

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The thing I said yesterday about Earthdawn’s pool of artists being a good excuse for the existence of additional books? Goes double here, because monsters. This is Creatures of Barsaive (1994). David Martin is the cover artist (I think those are jungle griffins). Interiors, we have Kent Burles, Joel Biske, Earl Geier, Jeff Laubenstein, Larry MacDougall, Jim Nelson, Robert Nelson and Mike Nielsen. Laubenstein is the stand-out here for me, I feel like he comes out of the Russ Nicholson school of All The Details.

Sort of an odd mix of creatures. There are many that are recognizable from myth, legend and other RPGs. The chimera and manticore both have wings, boo! There are a lot of critters that seem just to the left of mundane expectation, big cats, wolfy things, a snow badger? Then there are entirely original monsters that are, for the most part, twisted horrors. I’m here for these. Like the Krillra, which is basically a hunting horror, flying around, eating horses. And the globberog is cool, a sticky blob creature that glues corpses and trash to its body for armor. And, I mean, OK, despite the wings, that Laubenstein manticore is dope (his harpy, though, is not).

All the entries are written in an in-universe style, so full of lore. Each comes with an adventure hook, too. A solid monster book.

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To my knowledge, the first companion books for RPGs were put out by Chaosium starting in 1983 for most of their games — Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer both got two! They were collections of mostly random stuff that appeared in magazines, some material good, some forgettable (lotta doofy songs and such in the Cthulhu Companion). In the ’90s, when it became fashionable to publish big, one-volume rulebooks that contained all the player, GM and monster info under one cover, the idea of the companion book changed a bit. Then, they usually contained additional character options, lore and rules that couldn’t fit in the main book. They gave proof to the lie that everything really was under one cover. Off the top of my head, Vampire: The Masquerade (both regular and GURPS), Pendragon, Fading Suns, Underground and Chill all got this sort of companion book, and likely many more besides. Most of the time, I find them rather dull; Pendragon and Fading Suns are notable exceptions in this regard, as is Earthdawn!

In 168 pages, the Earthdawn Companion (1994) expands the limits of possibilities that were presented in the core book. The core classes get seven new levels of disciplines. There are more spells, talents and guidance for threads (though, you could put a full 300 pages out on threads and I’d never be confident that I understood the system). There are also rules for playing questors (sort of wandering embodiments of the Passions), Earthdawn’s gods, and a new faction, the Lightbringers, who are dedicated to destroying all trace of the Horrors.

The real catnip though, is that 168 more pages of rules needs illustrations, and more illustrations by the Earthdawn pool is nothing to complain about. Especially Janet Aulisio. Also on tap (no clear credits) are Joel Biske, Steve Bryant, Earl Geier, Jeff Laubenstein, Larry MacDougall, Darrell Midgette, Robert Nelson, Mike Nielsen, Tony Szczudlo (who did the cover as well) and Karl Waller. Really only missing Tim Bradstreet to complete the ’90s RPG set.

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Speaking of blood, this is Eat the Reich (2023).

I love conventional campaign play, but more and more, the things that get me really, really excited to read and play are short run games that are attempting to convey a specific experience. The cinematic scenarios for Alien and the SMS RPG Alice is Missing both come to mind. But now, holy cow, Eat the Reich.

You’re vampires. That’s a broader umbrella than you might expect but, you’re all monsters that eat people. And you’re air-dropped into Paris with one mission: to drink all of Hitler’s blood. Bonus: you get to carve your way through ranks of nazis in the ulta-est ultraviolent way possible on your way from Point A to Point B. Characters are pre-generated and aim to satisfy a range of individual play styles. The system is a fast, hard-hitting, high-powered dice-pool system designed make players feel incredibly strong and the nazis extremely squishy as they traverse (and destroy) points of interest on the way to their goal. And that’s the entire experience; three two-hour sessions of glorious nazi annihilation. Inglorious Basterds wishes it was this good.

Yes, it’s bombastic, cathartic wish-fulfillment and self-described propaganda and I have zero problem with it. It’s a joy to read — Grant Howitt’s prose makes the act of reading rules bizarrely entertaining. Few, if any, RPGs have this amount of zip. Will Kirby’s consciously excessive art ties it all together. There’s heaps of personality in every portrait, more than enough to fuel play for a pre-gen for a couple sessions. The book practically glows with an unholy magenta radiation.

And I know, they set out to deliver this very specific experience, and I shouldn’t expect more. But in the back, Howitt suggests several ways to hack the game. Go after Mussolini and Hirohito (the latter suggestion bears the header “HiroEATo”)! Team up with George Orwell against Franco! End the war, go back to the UK and drink Winston Churchill! I would pay good money for all these books.

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For some reason, I feel like Super Blood Harvest: The Bloodship Returns (2023) pairs well with Across a Thousand Dead Worlds, though I am hard pressed to put my finger on a reason why. Sometimes it’s just like that, you know?

Bloodship is the work of Dirk Leichty and is the sequel to Super Blood Harvest (2020), which I adore. The original was presented, in a sort of meta way, as a videogame on paper, and the same is true here, with the initial rules section featuring setting menus and such. Like NES-era sequels, this one is both recognizably connected to the original while also being wildly different — here the Sword Princess and her companions are fighting to rid the Rocket Kingdoms of the space vampires, where in the original the events took place on our own moon and Mars.

The scenario itself is presented in three parts — the Blood Bath, Floating Platforms and Tower Maze — which are connected, sort of, by Exteriors. Each has its own vibe (the Tower Maze, for instance, is cold and dimly lit) and the players proceed through them by navigating a number of maps (they feel like screens, though, keeping the videogame feel). All of this is presented in Leichty’s deliriously garish isometric art. I love how at a glance the pages are bewildering, but once I look at them closely they become simple to parse. The rest of the book is filled out with monsters and treasures. The final page offers a method for scoring, which lends a sort of improbably re-playability (presumably using different “settings”) to the proceedings.

I love it. It isn’t as wildly boundary-pushing as the original (though at least part of that feeling for me comes with my increased familiarity with Leichty’s art style so YMMV) but I think it is far easier to parse for play. I also like the rules (which I think are a slightly tweaked, lighter version of Dirk Rules!, but I cannot find my copy of those to confirm, alas).