Ill doings in God's country

Dragon Warriors' 40th anniversary won't pass unnoticed as long as Red Ruin Publishing have anything to say about it. They've just released the seventeenth book in their series of DW adventures, and it's one of the best. The Curse on God's Acre is a 500+ section gamebook by David Donachie and Paul Partington:

Deep in the fertile countryside of Chaubrette, you find yourself in the isolated valley known as God's Acre. Here the sturdy locals grow wine and keep sheep — but all is not as it seems. A pernicious evil haunts the lanes and narrow fields.

Revealed at first in scraps of children's songs, in the blank stares of straw dolls, in the animals masks lurking in the shadows, in the tangled entrails of a murdered woman. Mysterious evil has the valley in its grasp and is squeezing ever tighter.

Special rules for dread and exhaustion add to the sense (for me, anyway) of a blending of Clark Ashton Smith's eerie tales of Averoigne with the straightforward secular horrors of The Wicker Man. But to make any such comparison is to sell this atmospheric and original adventure short. The Curse on God's Acre is a memorable solo scenario that deserves a place in every Dragon Warriors player's collection. You can pick it up for as little as $1 if you're hard up, and the artwork alone is worth more than that, so grab your copy now.

Games that gloomviles play

If that picture rings a bell, you may have an eye like an A.I. but you'll also appreciate that gloomviles from an early Golden Dragon gamebook have found their way into the latest issue of Dragon Warriors magazine Casket of Fays. This issue has a sandbox campaign (my kind of game, that) set on the moors, magic items, creatures, adventure seeds, and a feature on the games that characters (not players) enjoy in the lands of Legend.

And while you're on DriveThruRPG don't fail to pick up Paul Partington's latest Dragon Warriors gamebook Scourge of the Shadows. It's a 480-section adventure set in Ereworn and, like Casket, it's absolutely free.

Also, though it's not related to Dragon Warriors or Fabled Lands, don't forget to check out the Kickstarter for the third Legendary Kingdoms book, Over the Bloo-- no, I mean Pirates of the Splintered Isles. Open world gamebook adventure, except with a party of characters instead of a single PC. You can get a sense of what it's like from the playthrough here: