[Musings] Back in Black

Welcome to a different, darker shade of the Simple Blogger theme. It's probably the most overused theme, but I guarantee it will be better for your eyes when you open up the Vorpal Mace blog from your phone in the middle of the night.

Summer is on the loose, and it got pretty serious here this year. I already got a T-shirt tan just from walking to work, and the temperature within the flat goes easily above 30 °C if we aren't careful. Summers is also expensive. Even if we don't travel anywhere with the kid arriving in two weeks, there are some Kickstarters and new releases to drain your funds.

A few familiars from the first Rise of the Minons Kickstarter.
Don't hang out with wizards who have friends like these.

Even if I had to put my Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay preparations on hold, I can't say no to the next Dunkeldorf Kickstarter campaign: The Kingpin of Dunkeldorf. I'm not here for the thugs though (except for Lenny, he is a musthave), but for the witch hunters and mutants. While there are some great witch hunter and mutant minis available from other Oldhammer manufacturers, their numbers are still dwarfed compared to the variety in greenskin and dwarves.

Paul Smith of Creative Sculpt Studio has barely finished his Random Dungeon Encounters! campaign, he is already pushing another project forward, called Rise of the Minions 2! I have the entire lineup from the first batch, and they are some absolutely characterful little buggers that are a joy to paint. This is also a good opportunity to get some of his earlier sculpts. I was thinking about sitting this one out, because Paul said he has plans for champions of Order (a true niche among Oldhammer manufacturers), but that modron, mini-Cthulhu, and demon fish are hard to resist. Also, another Moonfaced Horror! You can't have enough Moonfaced Horrors!

Goodman Games also started their long-awaited DCC Dying Earth Kickstarter campaign. While I absolutely adore Vance's work and have high hopes that Goodman Games will do justice to the source material (just look at the contents of The Primer of Practical Magic: curses, manse-building, magical associations!), $50 with shipping will be a bit much for now. I'll be the first in line when it comes out next September, though.

And as usual, Venger is back again, with Cha'alt After Dark, going full R-rated with the sleazy stuff. What's more interesting for me though is that he got his hands on Encounter Critical, the best garage-made science-fiction fantasy rpg from 1979 (published in 2006). Cha'alt conversion with cheap black & white illustrations and typewriter text when?

The most important OSR news (probably of the year) has absolutely nothing to do with Kickstarters though. In fact, one of the best thing about it is that you don't have to risk your money on a Kickstarter campaign, and wait months or years to get the final product. Helvéczia - Melan's picaresque fantasy RPG - is available, right now. You can get it as a hefty boxed set, or a single rulebook. 

That's all for now. Some unknown guy called Unknown asked for some DCC RPG resources in the comment section of my last post, which were lost when I rebooted the blog in 2016. Expect some of those soonish.