This is so simple yet works so well. I just used it with complete newbies who wanted to try to roleplay but were intimidated by crunch, and it was a blast. Intuitive and encourages players to let roleplaying take the lead over maths. It is so low-prep, fast and frictionless!

It's easily hackable. We used it with MUNE, no GM, google picking the numbers and a video game setting familiar to us all (Elder Scrolls) but I am looking forward to using it with game mastered one shot adventures that look appealing but are not worth everyone learning the system for, as well as solo roleplaying.

The one page printable booklet was super handy in getting everyone on board and playing, and reassuring in its tiniess.

We plan to try out FATE Accelerated character traits for a slightly more complex character building in the future.

Recommend the GM/facilitator watching some of the Youtube playthrough to see it in action.

What cool art, a clever scenario and simple enough to follow for Travel-size players, each encounter gives examples of the numbers to hit and motivations for the NPCs and how they operate.

Quick and clever mechanic. Very much a GM based system but with a lot of player agency to do anything. The printable, foldable booklet included is one of the more innovative ways to take this system with you anywhere.

This is one of the most elegant "we're bored in the car and are losing our minds" game I've ever seen. This is SO going with us on our travels.

86 pages of which 79-80 pages are the content.

A rather enjoyable book of strange and even stranger mutants.

More art work of the mutants would have been better, to give the MM (Mutant Master) some good descriptions to the players. Some of the art work is quite good.

I give 4.5/5 for this menagerie, and would have given a full 5/5, but, not many depictions of all the 'monsters', and some of them seem too strange.

I like this on reading. A medium-sized, very-strongly-themed dungeoncrawl with the potential for faction play with several different groups of (evil) cultists showing up after the players enter. Creative treasure, particularly interesting consumable magic. One nearby probably-hostile settlement briefly sketched. The separate player-facing map is quite appropriate: of high enough resolution & detail for oldschool play; fancier than dungeonscrawler output, but not as unreadably cluttered or illegibly shaded as you find with a lot of commercial 5e maps. The "Continuing & Concluding the Adventure" section isn't an explicit timeline but it has a really nice spread of discussion of faction goals & possible evolutions, ties to nearby parts of the world.

Downsides: really verbose, hints of quantum ogres (the competitive factions explicitly scale with party level), and perhaps a bit too on the nose with the elemental theming - the vast majority of the native opposition is "two mephits of (appropriate quasielemental subtype)".

I'm not sure about the skill checks - there sure are a lot of them, but then players having advantage on knowledge checks from their background ought to be really common, so there's not too much information hiding or "roll to make progress", and the range of physical DCs seems reasonable.

Nits: both the terrain map and the dungeon map in the book have critical material in the center of the page - which means it's cut by the "gutter" of the book layout, and thus really hard to read. Art is really mixed stylistically and varying in quality, so for every piece I'd be happy to show my players there are two I wouldn't.

The 4/5 rating assumes you're playing Swords of Kos or a generic anything-goes D&D setting. I'd give this only 3/5 in any of the other pseudo-Greek settings - the shrine is particularly wedded to a Gygaxian inner planes and the Swords of Kos cosmology, and there'll be a lot of work to drop this in another world cleanly. For example, Arkadia has four great titans, but they don't line up so cleanly with the elements, there's not a lot of support for paraelemental lesser titans, the geographic associations of the titans are different which pushes one to rearrange the dungeon, redrawing the map; this in turn suggests replacing at least some of the mephits, etc... Even less of a clear fit for Theros or Thylea.

Preliminary review; will update if I can get my players to head toward where I've dropped this into the world map.

I found this source book was really useful. It's versatile and detailed with a lot of encounters and adventure hooks that you can either use in the campaign provided by the book or pull out to use somewhere else. The Ancient Greece theme was really fleshed out and would be great for using in that setting, but you could also re-theme a lot of it to your own setting and still have it work great. I especially liked the Cave of the Tables of Knowledge as a really cool mini dungeon that I plan on using for my next game.

A really clever, inspiring idea, but a lackluster implementation.

A book trying to serve multiple goals: fantasy fiction, campaign inspiration / example, an actual setting. It certainly doesn't seem to really address the first goal; it's adequate for the second, but not useful; and as for the third, as one might expect, it's quite dependent on real-world Greece, with a bit of the authors' Swords of Kos setting for flavour.

The entire book has a grey backround image behind the text on every page; coupled with long passages in italic font this makes for difficult reading. It's an inexplicably poor choice to make a book that's not meant to be read? There's padding, repetition, and leaden writing in places; it looks like the author has an outline for "information I need for every settlement", filled that in, then tried to directly convert to prose; the result is not as usable as a bullet list or outline would be, but has all the plodding prosody and interest of a teenager's mechanical essay-writing.

I want to use something like this idea of a pilgrimage route in one of the 5e greek settings (Theros / Arkadia) and will update this review with notes if I can pull it off; it'd be a neat way to add a bit of sandbox and worldbuilding around some of the adventure paths that have been published for them. It also makes me think it'd be awesome to work on something resembling one of the medieval Christian pilgrimages - Campostela or Canterbury, perhaps. Is there something that would fit for Beowulf? In any case, it's going to take careful work to adapt to whatever game world society/theology one is working with.

An amusing monster with a fun theme. I did notice a few minor hiccups in the stats (a reference to "hellcart" proficiency and to Will saves), but nothing significant.

One of the best pieces of one of the most underrated books of 1st edition, Skirmisher's rules on alcohol & intoxication are some of the best rules mechanically and narratively I've seen in the system. The more you drink, the more charsimatic you get, and eventually the more numbed you are to pain. But, if you fail the save the buffs flip to penalties, and the more you're drinking, the harder the save becomes. It turns beer into a literal social lubricant and eventually a pool of temp hp, so your bottle of old law is now this big bottle of temp hp, but with the risk that you could end up blacked out and soiling yourself if you go too hard. It's amazing and at the cost of ale being so cheap in standard it creates a whole new dynamic for using it as a tool both in the dungeon and out.

At this cost, it's a total steal.

And if you like this, think about picking up Insults & Injuries, the book where this is from is a gem, and there's still so much from that book worth mining, particularly the Bone Breaker rules.

And if you want to hear me talk more about that book, check it out here as part of my Best of 3rd Party list, alongside some other amazing candidates.

https://supinearcanum.blogspot.com/2019/07/pathfinder-prologue-best-of-3rd-party.html

You walk into an empty room... ugh how boring! Now your GM can spice things up on the fly! Some great fun ideas in this book for sure.

This is a comprehensive and adaptable resource for keeping your top tier party feeling inspired and motivated. There are Epic Boons for particular classes, heritages, backgrounds and alignments and the useful introduction gives inspiration on how to use the concept of Boons to best effect in your campaign. Players can use this book in negotiation with their GM to decide which Epic Boons will suit their character's development and storyline and even develop their own Epic Boons as well. Many of the Boons will shape the character dramatically and at top tier that can be great to suddenly shake things up and have new traits, feats, skills and challenges to explore and come to grips with; when I showed it to my 11 year strong veteran group most were excited by the options to keep developing and challenging their characters. Anything that inspires continued character and campaign evolution in the top levels is always going to be a win in my book, boons are a great concept and Epic Boons picks up that torch and runs with it to bring some fresh and inspiring ideas to the game.

"Welcome to “100 Oddities for a Vampire Lair,” the seventeenth entry in Skirmisher Publishing’s popular and bestselling series of system-free sourcebooks dedicated to inspiring rich stories and spicing up encounter areas with exciting curiosities!

“100 Oddities for a Vampire Lair” draws on the long spanning multicultural tradition of Vampire myth-telling across the world and, of course, the plentiful body of literature and films that feature them. This supplement is dedicated to the places where Vampires lurk and focuses on the horrors that accompany the denizens of their lairs and provides enough detail on each to bring them to life (so to speak). "

“100 Oddities for a Vampire Lair,” is a system agonistic tool kit from Skirmisher Publishing for dressing up your adventures or old school encounters. Vampires are the focus & one thing to remember is that vampires can be some of the most dangerous thinking NPC monsters in old school games. These undead can come in many varieties. The Ravenloft campaign setting for Advanced Dungeons & Dragon 1st & 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons have weaponized the vampire. Here we have “100 Oddities for a Vampire Lair,” which helps to dress up a vampire's lair within 18 pages with a handful of dice. “100 Oddities for a Vampire Lair,” is a great addition for a DM's tool box for creating a vampric NPC villain's base of operation. And for a classic dungeon master there's the Dragon magazine article from The Dragon October 1979 #30 'Good Evening' By Lenard Lakofka .

Reference photo taken from Wayne's Books.

“100 Oddities for a Vampire Lair,” works really well with the Dragon magazine article from The Dragon October 1979 #30 'Good Evening' By Lenard Lakofka for creating base or lair, contents, and even perhaps secondary options for adventures & encounters. So not only can “100 Oddities for a Vampire Lair,” be remote lairs & adventure locations but also lairs in modern cities or fantasy city locations. “100 Oddities for a Vampire Lair,” goes fast & loose enough to be used with a wide variety of rpg products. So if we want to take the route of the Call of Cthulhu rpg with “100 Oddities for a Vampire Lair,” then there's another Skirmisher Publishing product we can use their classic 'Mythos Society Guide to New England'. Which goes into the history of vampires in Rhode Island.

Is there another OSR use for “100 Oddities for a Vampire Lair,” to use this book to generate vampire lairs with Elf Lair Publishing Night Shift Veterans of the Supernatural Wars.

“100 Oddities for a Vampire Lair,” From Skirmisher Publishing is agonistic set of tables & reference pieces that brings that brings home the idea that home & lair are easily the central point of an old school & modern encounter. You can use “100 Oddities for a Vampire Lair,” From Skirmisher Publishing to dress your dungeons or modern encounters. Its easily worth the down load! Thanks for reading our review.. Eric Fabiaschi Swords & Stitchery Blog Want more OSR Content?! Please subscribe to https://swordsandstitchery.blogspot.com/

another in the 100-of lists. Not all gold but full of fun ideas.

A very good product for the price. Highly recommend it as it is easialy slatted for any campaign.