This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we look at Lords of Creation, my pick for the weirdest RPG ever made. Maybe. Designed by Tom “B/X” Moldvay, it’s one of the first multi-genre RPGs and it marked Avalon Hill’s (failed) first foray into RPGs. And, best of all, it is full of decisions that are just absolutely perplexing. A real testament to how easy it is from RPGs to get to the outer reaches of the bizarre.
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After listening to y’all I skimmed through the .pdf scan of the Lords of Creation, and I gotta say, all these illustrations are so good! So many of these would make killer tattoos. That snake woman was terrifying!
Billman is so good, I wish I knew more of his stuff. And yea, I can totally see like, all of his work as tattoos!
Billman did some comic books, and then some children’s books, and last I could find of him he was doing commercial art. He was another Akronite and the art and writing for Omegakron is littered with real places and references.
Omegakron had a sort of afterlife. In 2012 a bunch of Akron bands made a soundtrack for the fictional movie “Nova Akros” and the CD was given away for Record Store Day in Akron. I did a little research on this and you can hear the rest on an episode of This Old Dungeon from 2022 or so.
I love that the story just keeps getting weirder. Omegakron the Album is a twist I never would have seen coming.
Ah, 2021.
https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-qi8q4-f76acb
A local Akron record shop teamed up with a local record label to create an album “inspired by” Omegakron.
https://patternbased.bandcamp.com/album/novos-akros
Truly wild!
Hell yeah, John Brown was right! He should be in more RPGs.
The Body of John Brown: The RPG, coming soon to Kickstarter
Thank you for this. Loved this game. Ran two gaming groups through the published modules. A Holy Grail of mine are the unpublished modules in the series. Always wanted to know how the story ended.
Loved the shoutout to Jorune. (Another one I ran.)
And yes, I still have my copy of the complete Powers and Perils line. Unplayable. Took us hours to create characters. That was enough for us to not continue.
The presence of Cyrano de Bergerac in The Horn of Roland reminds me that Tom Moldvay also wrote a standalone module called The Future King. Players could be Bruce Lee, Cyrano, and several other historical figures, including either Nostradamus or Galileo? From what I remember the plot centered around the return of King Arthur as the title suggests. I wonder if it had any relation to Lords of Creation. Maybe one of the unpublished modules would have had a similar plot.
It was published by a game shop in Kent Ohio called Spellbinder’s and I remember seeing it there all through the 1990s for like 5 or 10 bucks. They had dozens of copies on a rack. The previous owner of Spellbinders (which is now closed) is still selling the module but for like 60 or 70 bucks. I’m not enough of a completist to be tempted but I wonder if the system in it is similar to one of Moldvay’s other games.
Oh man, now I need this…but not for 60 bucks…