You may have noticed that Fabled Lands Publishing has been releasing a few chapbooks lately. First we had Headcases, a compendium of bodiless horrors to chill the blood of the staunchest adventurer. Then Dealing With Demons, the fondly remembered series from White Dwarf back in the 1980s.
And now there's The Only Way Is Narnia, a parody one-shot that we ran on the blog a while back -- but that version was only for GURPS 4e, while the new edition also has stats for D&D 5e, Basic Role-Playing, and Powered by the Apocalypse.
If Not-Narnia doesn't tempt you, what about a sci-fi/Arthurian mash-up with a feminist flavour? That's The Girl King, also based on an old blog post but now with Dragon Warriors stats and some luscious Aubrey Beardsley illos. You might like to dip into an infiltration-&-heist adventure from the Vulcanverse books: The City of Bones. Then there's The God in the Bowl, a locked room murder mystery with inter-party tension, inspired by the Robert E. Howard short story. Monster Hunt is a rumbustious old-school creature fest. The Fall of the House of Missal is one of the scenarios that Oliver Johnson and I wrote for Games Workshop's never-published Questworld book more than forty years ago; the adventure appeared on the blog ten years back as "Sweet is Revenge" but we've now converted it from RuneQuest to Dragon Warriors. Or we've got Kwaidan, a spook-infested Bushido adventure from White Dwarf #47 but now with Dragon Warriors rules.
This is the perfect time to try the chapbooks because tomorrow (May 1st), for one day only, they're completely free. Get them here.
Also tiptoeing out to the bookshelves without any fanfare have been some colour hardback editions of selected gamebooks. So far we've got The Temple of Flame, Once Upon A Time In Arabia, and Down Among The Dead Men.
Just one more thing, as Columbo used to say -- Dagon Warriors (sic) is now available on Kindle. At 80 pages it's a bit big to call a chapbook, so let's say it's a mini-RPG. This is a completely self-contained reworking of the blog post and scenario that you may have seen here, but now with all the rules needed for running Cthulhu-style investigative adventures in the 1920s and 1930s.
Are there any other gamebooks for which you'd like to see a collector's edition? Or other scenarios or topics that would make a good chapbook? Let us know in the comments.
Hi Dave
ReplyDeleteWhat a wonderful offering! Are they available only on Kindle or are there any other ebook versions? I don't have Kindle and would love to get these to play.
Cheers
Nick
They are only on Kindle for now, Nick -- mostly because the process of putting PDFs onto DriveThruRPG is so arduous given their 1980s-style interface! But don't give up just yet. You can get the (free) Kindle app for your desktop or phone, and read the chapbooks that way, or (since the books don't have DRM) you can download them and convert them to PDFs using something like Calibre.
DeleteIn fact it turns out to be a lot simpler than I thought. You don't need a Kindle desktop/mobile reader, nor do you need to convert the files using Calibre. Amazon now allow non-DRM Kindle books to be downloaded as PDF or EPUB.
DeleteFantastic! I will do just that.
DeleteI should probably also add that my backers on Patreon get free PDF copies of most of the chapbooks, and lots of other goodies besides. Also that Dagon Warriors is on DriveThruRPG in PDF form despite my reluctance to wrestle with their clunky interface.
ReplyDeleteOh, and while I'm adding editorial notes, let me give full credit for the original idea of 'Dagon Warriors' to John Hagan, master of the creative pun.
ReplyDelete