Review: The Flayed King

Tim Shorts published this short adventure small in physical format for Swords & Wizardry appreciation day 2015. The hand crafted DIY print run was 50 copies and I was lucky and happy to receive one! The pdf is available for free at RPGNow.


Like the previous GM Games' S&W appreciation day product, The Mini Manor, The Flayed King is very dark adventure.


The whole packet from the map to the content is straight forward. You experience the content of the room whether it tries to kill you or is a light puzzle. This is not a problem, as the booklet is tiny. This is easy to throw in the middle of a campaign and leave it behind. Great for "hey I wanna run and check this out" gaming.


The rooms are interesting, magic items good, no christmas calendar random monsters, and The Flayed King is horrible, weird and brilliant! Well thought... thing.


Only thing I was missing from the beginning was the catch. First sentence(s) should give some idea(s) why and how adventurers start this dungeon. You can pick easy catch from The Flayed King himself and few other if you try, but I always appreciate when authors include their own ideas in their products. This tiniest flaw doesn't make the product any worse, though.


If you like horror and a little gore, this is great! If you don't like graphical content, this might not be for you. Gore is in good taste, though and Tim does great stuff so you might concider.

And the illustration by Jim Magnusson is very good!


Still reading? Now go to appreciate some good Swords & Wizardry content by always awesome Tim Shorts!

[Review] Oubliette #9

Oubliette is an OSR zine of 22 pages available in pdf format (RPGNow) or in print from their blog. Also compilations and all kinds of other stuff is available at Lulu.

Compatible with Labyrinth Lord makes it easily cross-compatible with almost any old-school system out there.

Fun fact is, that I didn't know what oubliette meant before I bought this zine!

"An oubliette is a form of dungeon which is accessible only from a hatch in a high ceiling," Wikipedia educates me.

How it looks? I don't have a print copy of this and I only read it with my 5,2" mobile phone, but the format and layout sits the phone's screen nicely! Artwork is very good and zine-y through the file and layout is excellent, especially for aforementioned reading format.

Content is great. In mere 22 pages there's packed all kinds of material like an dungeon, a location, new familiar for Magic-Users, new spells, items and a monster (linked to aforementioned location).

This issue doesn't seem to follow a theme, but the variety of material is refreshing. As a zine entries are short, so you don't have to make too many adjustments to make them work in your campaign or setting. Just open a page (or two) and throw the material in!

There also is a trinket called "D20 Hit Point String Generator". Basically you roll 1d20 and check the table for hit points for creatures of ½HD to 2HD. Fun exercise, but I don't see rolling 1d8 once or twice for monsters. Would be cool to see similar for higher HD monsters, too!

Summary. New to this zine, I was positive surprised. I do like zine format of material. Zines have a great variety of material for your pleasure to read and maybe to use. Zines are great small rpg snacks you can easily and quickly digest without digging too deep on the topic. Oubliette is not an exception of this premise and delivers fun old-school material. Also the material is good, too!

In near future I need to check out other Oubliette issues and I encourage also you to check out this zine!

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Get it from RPGNow.

Temple Of Greed now available in PDF and POD

Within the Temple of Greed avaricious adventurers will find no monsters, but tricks, traps, and treasure.

Are they greedy enough to take the challenge and salvage the now-forgotten treasure? Or do they die trying?

Welcome to Temple Of Greed

Dungeon module written by: Daniel "Thaumiel Nerub" Neffling

"Keepers of the Watching Squirrell" written by: Edward Lockhart

Cartography by: Dyson Logos

Border illustration: Jeff Russell

Layout: Shane Ward & Thaumiel Nerub

Text Editor: Tim Snider

PDF: $1.70

Softcover B&W book (with PDF): $4.47

Get it here:
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/146415/Temple-Of-Greed

Thaumiel is doing Patreon! This is WIP picture of first content

I started Patreon campaign. You can support me create OSR material. Feel free to visit my page and read what is in my mind.

https://www.patreon.com/cryptofdoom

You can start supporting me with $0.10 per piece! When Patrons have supported me to create enough material, it will be published as POD zine-kinda-supplement-thingie. But that's future.

This is WIP illustration for my very first Patreon powered One Page OSR content. BEARRIES!

Ikiseutu, one-page-dungeon contest 2015

This is my submission for One Page Dungeon Contest 2015!

You can download the PDF HERE!

The fools of Aprilstown

Aprilstown is a small and remote village of farmers and few traders. Once a year, in the first day of the spring, they have a big festival. The purpose of this festival is to please the God Of Random to keep the spring coming and to keep the cold spell in spring away. The reason why they don't sacrifice to the goddess of spring or weather, is unknown. Maybe they think that as spring is unstable it is God Of Random to be blamed.

During the festival the chief of Aprilstown, uses his sacred Springcrystal granting special powers for the foolest of the village (INT and WIS total score under 10). This special power is an ability to cast one random first level Magic-User spell during the festival.

The villagers think, that if a fool casts random spells for his own, possibly silly intentions, the God Of Random will be pleased and the spring continues to arrive.

This years fools are:

William, who has been a little slow from his birth, is hard worker at a farm. But he hates that cow who always runs him down the fields. This year, William cast Magic Missile at the cow. The rest of the week William will spend in stocks thinking what he'd done.

Samantha is a funny lass, usually pulling pranks on everyone. She's tried almost every possible work in the village with no success. She always makes more prank than is useful. She found Floating Disc under the table of the festival cake to be hilarious. But the villagers were prepared, so luckily they had another more delicious cake hidden in town hall.

Gilbert, twenty years ago returned the patrol against orcs badly wounded and wasn't the jolly old himself from there, cast a Protection From Evil on himself. At least one night he could enjoy the festival and not worry too much or see the nightmares he encountered.