* * *

Through September 7, use the code ROLLDICE to get $6 off any purchase $25 or more at Noble Knight! Also, August 10 marks the start of their online Free RPG Day event – for every $15 you spend, you can get one FRPGD product for a penny, so be sure to snag some swag!Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord!If  you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going!Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!Available on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, SoundCloud, Spotify, YouTube and your favorite podcast clients.Send questions, comments or corrections to info@vintagerpg.com.Follow Vintage RPG on Instagram, Tumblr and Facebook. Learn more at the Vintage RPG FAQ.Follow Stu Horvath, John McGuire, VintageRPG and Unwinnable on Twitter.Intro music by George Collazo.The Vintage RPG illustration is by Shafer Brown. Follow him on Twitter.Tune in next week for the next episode. Until then, may the dice always roll in your favor!

The post The Arduin Grimoire appeared first on Vintage RPG.

For instance, an 8-page piece detailing an example street gang of Arduin called the Black Rabbit Gang, including their turf and bios for all 15 of the juvenile delinquents. Or the introduction of Rogue magick, which is a set of utility spells that any non-magic user character can have access to given the proper criminal background (Arduin always used an ability-score derived magic points system in addition to the traditional D&D memorization/level mechanic, so all characters have a mana pool, even if most can’t access it for  anything). I imagine most folks hated this, but I kind of love it. There is also lots of stuff on alchemy, different sorts of spider silk and a pretty hefty system for running gladiatorial bouts.

I think the thing I like most about Arduin is the lack of pretense on Hargrave’s part. You really get the impression that all of this stuff is coming directly out of his game sessions, willy nilly, as they happen. He and his players were coming up with such odd stuff constantly, then filtering it through a thoughtful process of codifying it for outsiders, but never fell into the trap of worrying about whether it seemed cool enough or even made any kind of sense. Hargrave just rolled with it and put it out there. I suppose that is a sort of naivety or guilelessness, but I like it. 

The post Dark Dreams (1985) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

This is the first of the Arduin Grimoires published by Dragon Tree Press and marks a significant step up in production value. Though still digest size, it is square bound and, most importantly, boasts actual layout and typesetting on the inside. This is a great relief to the eyes (though the glued spine of my copy makes me uneasy – I feel like I am going to open it one day and be faced with an explosion of flying pages). 

Despite the aesthetic improvements, this is my least favorite of the Grimoires. It feels very “more” for the sake of “more,” with the bulk of the book being given over to new spells and magic items. There just isn’t a lot of weird stuff to hook onto here, compared to the earlier books. 

One thing of particular interest is the three page essay on how to be a good player when joining someone else’s ongoing game. The vast majority of this advice boils down to “don’t be a dick,” which is good! No one likes a jackass. But there is an undercurrent here that centers the game master as the ultimate power and authority. Ownership of the game is firmly the GM’s, not the players. There isn’t anything wrong with this outlook, I guess, but it definitely contrasts with the prevailing philosophy of collaborative fun I see in contemporary gaming. 

Oh, and this is no longer intended as a D&D supplement – it is an expansion of the 1980 Arduin Adventure rules (which are still pretty derivative of D&D), so prepared to be slightly confused again as to how everything works. 

Oh, I guess there is one really weird thing here: the new monster called Falkynor. Also known as a Luck Dragon. Also known as a direct rip-off from Neverending Story. 

The post The Lost Grimoire (1984) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

First off, we finally have rules for playing Phraints, humanoid insect warriors that are repeatedly mentioned as playable in the previous books, but without any indication as to how play them. I’d wouldn’t be surprised if you told me that they directly inspired D&D’s Thri-Kreen. 

Second, we finally get stats for the energy weapons used by the Techno class, which cements Arduin’s commitment to a strong flavoring of science fantasy, two years before Expedition to the Barrier Peaks saw print. 

Third, we can see a lot more of Hargrave himself coming through. An illustration towards the back of the book is entitled “Attack of the Kill Kittens,” which gives you a sense of his humor and to the overall uncompromising nature of his games (though, considering his claim in Skull Tower of having killed over 480 player characters in four years of running his campaign, I suppose that shouldn’t be a surprise). You also get a sense of what Lawrence Schick meant when he said that Arduin is “unencumbered by good taste,” thanks to the illustration of a topless, axe-wielding woman warrior captioned “Shardra the Castrator.” As ever, your mileage will vary. 

Oh, Runes of Doom also reveals Hargrave’s preoccupation with demons, with 13 pages dedicated to new infernal entities of all stripes. I am sure he’d have been pissed had he lived long enough to see TSR remove devils and demons from D&D. 

The post Runes of Doom (1978) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

This is organized (or, disorganized) along the same lines as the first book, collecting a potpourri of new classes, spells, monsters, treasure, rule musing and helpful random tables. Hargrave’s combat system gets increasingly complicated here (which, it was already complicated). This volume also gives us the clearest look at the world of Arduin, through a capsule history and a list of tavern and inn names and locations (but no other context, frustratingly). There are even thoughts on best practices for running a game and dealing with problem players. It’s a lot. 

But let’s discuss the experience of reading these books. For one, they are the same size and basic aesthetic as the OD&D supplements, clearly intended to be seen by players as usable with that game (something that, along with directly cribbing some material in the first volume, drew the ire of TSR). Unlike the original D&D books, though, the zine vibe is much stronger. The print is typewritten and reduced and the whole thing feels, well, photocopied. It is actually hard on the eyes to read. Despite this, the books feel fuller and a bit more professional, probably because the art is of a higher quality – Skull Tower even keeps a couple of the original Erol Otus illustrations, an artist I believe Hargrave can take credit for discovering. 

The overall effect is one of glimpsing directly into the late 70s RPG scene (for better AND worse – there are lots of cool ideas but also some crappy, sexist ones too, like the “female attributes” chart that translates measurements into Charisma bonuses and penalties), but one outside the well defined nostalgic boundaries of Dungeons & Dragons. D&D has always sucked up all the RPG oxygen, but Arduin proves that there was always a wider, weirder world out there under the D&D substrate.

The post Welcome to Skull Tower (1978) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

Because these books are named after Hargrave’s fantasy world, I kind of expected a primitive sort of sourcebook, but no, they are just a collection of house rules. While they are organized around how they work in Hargrave’s world, and there are many things implied by the rules (the Techno class, for instance, and their use of sci fi technology), we don’t ever get a clear picture of the lands of Arduin in the Grimoires (not unlike the Greyhawk supplement, honestly). But that’s OK, because the rules? Pure gold. 

While the book never explicitly says so (for legal reasons, obviously), the rules are intended as modular expansions to the original white box D&D. Even knowing that, though, doesn’t make parsing them very easy – Hargrave is constantly referring to a mountain of material, only portion of which is in any given book. The “How to Play the Game” section is largely devoted to the mechanics of overland travel. I needed to get through all three volumes of the Trilogy before I had a handle on things to the point I could probably incorporate them into a game. 

There is so much, I don’t really know where to start. How about new classes? We’ve got Merchant, Psychic, Barbarian, Rune Weaver, Techno, Medicine Man and Witch Hunter. We’ve got piles of new treasures, monsters and spells. We’ve got musings on alignment, modified approaches to character creation and combat and a gloss of the 21 layers of hell. And charts! So many random charts! For mist generation, for fumbles, for character special abilities (some good – natural mechanic! – some bad – bad liar!), for traps. 

If Arduin Grimoire isn’t the clear precedent for the idea of OSR rules hacking, I don’t know what is. 

The post The Arduin Grimoire (1978) appeared first on Vintage RPG.