Back in the OSR!

I haven't really been following the OSR since the release of Swords and Wizardry Complete. Part of that is my extreme fondness for DnD 5E, which is essentially everything I was trying to do in a neoclone. Additionally, part of it is also the vibe of the community when I was last a part of things, there was more drama than I was comfortable with and I had a negative interaction with a prominent member of the OSR community, that was thankfully, kept private.

Yes, I still enjoy SW Complete, Labyrinth Lord, and Lamentations of the Flame Princess, but I've been living pretty happily with DnD 5E.

However, I recently heard about THE BLACK HACK from Gold Piece Publications and David Black. After picking it up, I've fallen pretty hard for it. Its possibly the most streamlined version of the Original Role Playing Game I've ever come across, and it's COOL and FUN.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying any of the OSR games I've mentioned aren't those things, its just that THE BLACK HACK is BOTH of those things.  I'm even developing my first OGL product for it and its already been a huge pleasure communicating with David Black.

Additionally, I discovered Beyond The Wall And Other Adventures by Flatland Games and John Cocking and Peter S. Williams, which I had overlooked because of it's use of the term Playbook. Sadly, I associated it with Apocalypse World/Dungeon World games and their ilk, which may be great games for other people, but I don't have the interest in learning a whole new lexicon of game terms (it's not 1993 anymore) or ways to play. Beyond The Wall's Playbook is essentially a Life Path tool for rounding out your character and creating bonds with other characters at the table. I'm really hoping to test it out soon with my kids.

The whole experience has even got me thinking about finishing 1st Age, my hybrid of 13th Age and Labyrinth Lord, for publication.

I guess everything Old School is new again?

A to Z of Grave New World 2016: E is for Elsie

Welcome to a Grave New World, where humans rub shoulder to shoulder with the monsters from folklore.

E is for Elsie the Ohio River Monster.

Sightings of Elsie go back to the Iroquois long before european settlers found the area and have always been especially prominent within several miles either direction of what is now Cincinnati, OH and Newport, KY. Elsie is believed to be a corrupted version of a an Iroquois word meaning "sprit serpent". She was officially added to the National Cryptid Repository in 1961 and was given special protected status in 1968, after several drunken mobsters in Newport unloaded two tommy guns at her.

Elsie has been positively identified as a neoplesiosaur, a fairly common cryptid species that is extremely long lived and indigenous to lakes and rivers all over the world, including Loch Ness in Scotland and Lake Champlain in the Northeastern U.S. 

Cryptozoologists, still have numerous unanswered questions about the creatures, especially their ability to disappear, sometimes for decades. Dr. Ashon Lagat of Kenya has been studying the creatures for over thirty years and claims to have consulted a redcap named Tumult who says that the creatures have several spiritual qualities to them and that they transcend humanly's understanding of animals, in the much same way sasquatches do. While Dr. Lagat does not fully embrace Tumult's information, he has not ruled it out.

Meanwhile, on a clear day, keep your eyes out for Elsie.

A to Z of Grave New World 2016: D is for Diablo Night

Welcome to a Grave New World, where humans rub shoulder to shoulder with the monsters from folklore.

Diablo Night is celebrated on June 23rd each year. It became a national holiday in 2000 and also celebrates the summer solstice.

Originally known as Midsummer, Diablo Night became a popular slang term for it in the late 1990's.

It is an important celebration for many psychics, witches, occultists and therianthropes. AND has become the central holiday in the inhuman community, with some treating it as a chance to share their heritage and come together out of solidarity.

However, in the last ten years, it has become the most violent day in the entire nation. The increasing violence sadly, focuses upon inhuman on inhuman crime. Some of the older entities simply shrug and note that it has been this way for centuries, but a vocal minority points to manipulation by our government though social media and planted personnel to divide their community and reduce their population.

Last year, five prominent inhuman activists were abducted from their homes in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia and then taken to a barn in Portsmith, Ohio where they were decapitated by Silas Ludlum Courtney, a ghoul from Indiana; Tresto Ky'Em, a troll from Kentucky; and Restex Wv'Kay, a troll from West Virginia. 

This crime led to allegations from Everett McCoy, the nation's leading inhuman rights leader and founder of the American Association of Immortals, to openly claim that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had manipulated Courtney, Tresto, and Restex into the murders as part of Project: Harbinger, an operation designed to turn the human populace against inhumans and eventually repeal the Alderman-Goldberg Act.

Clerical Work: Specialty Priests of the Raven Queen for D&D 5th Edition

RAVEN QUEEN
GRIMM

Prerequisite: Cleric with the Death or Knowledge Divine Domains.

You serve the Goddess of death, fate, and winter, tending to those who have come to their end.

Thanks to your devotion, you gain the following benefits:

• When your attack drops a creature to 0 hit points, you or a creature within 30 feet may spend one hit die. You may not use this ability again until you finish a short or long rest.
• When you roll a 20 on an ability check, attack roll, or saving throw, you gain 1 luck point. You may not use this ability again until you finish a long rest. If your luck point is unspent it is lost during a long rest.
• You have cold resistance.
• You learn the ray of frost cantrip.

A to Z of Grave New World 2016: C is for CRYPTID

Welcome to a Grave New World, where humans rub shoulder to shoulder with the monsters from folklore.

CRYPTID is currently the biggest rock band in the world. It's fourth album, Wave Motion Gun, is set to drop at the end of April.

The band's members are all local to the Greater Cincinnati area and have been together for nearly nine years. Every year, they return to their home town to perform a special Halloween concert at Bogarts in the University Village section of Cincinnati, Ohio.

The band is comprised of Alita Van Damme on vocals, Kris Potter on lead guitar, Alice Potter on bass guitar, Kirby on drums, and Theresa Meadowlark on keyboards. Kirby replaced their original drummer, Larry Pyle who overdosed on heroin right after the band recorded it's debut album, Sorcery and Super-Science. CRYPTID grew out of Van Damme and the Potter siblings' high school band, RACE BANNON.

Alita, who is a documented psychic that has the gifts of astral projection and telekinesis, writes most of the band's songs with her best friend, Alice. Theresa Meadowlark is a dhampyr, a very rare offspring of a vampire and a human, the twenty-nine year old refuses to talk about her father in interviews. Several news agencies claim her mother, Maria Holden, was raped by Earl Cranston, a vampire who was killed in prison after being convicted of four sexual assaults when Theresa was four.

CRYPTID rose to prominence on YouTube and has been masterful in its use of social media for self-promotion. They have been a transforming force in human/inhuman relations in the last five years and have become a voice for the current generation. Van Damme was even Time's Woman of the Year in 2014. 

While on their first World Tour, the group was invited to meet with the legendary Baba Yaga in Russia and even held a private performance for egyptian political advisor, Pharaoh Ptolemy XIV of the Ptolemaic Dynasty. However, the group was briefly detained and accused of espionage while in China. The Chinese government claimed to have proof that Alita and Kirby used psychic talents to spy on a classified fighter jet in development. The Chinese produced photographic proof of the band spending at least three days off in the vicinity of the project. Tense relations between the U.S. and Chinese government persisted for over a week before the band was suddenly freed and escorted to plane waiting to take them immediately back to the States. The incident caused the cancellation of close ten performances in the pacific rim.

Last year, Rafael Casper, a columnist for the Washington Post, published Discovering CRYPTID: An Expose On The Best Intelligence Gatherers in the World. Casper's sources provide him with numerous leaked documents showing that Alita had C.I.A. training and that Kirby, was planted in the band by the Agency. The expose claimed Kirby is a talented telepath and necromancer and even insinuated that the band's original drummer, Larry Pyle, was murdered. Most damning was proof by the Chinese government's own Dragonspeakers, who are generally considered the most well trained psychic corps on the globe, of both band members using their talents and a copy of the settlement the U.S. offered China for the security breach.

While Casper's book has remained a bestseller, his expose has simply amplified the mystique surrounding CRYPTID and cemented their popularity.

A to Z of Grave New World 2016: B is for The Brownstone

Welcome to a Grave New World, where humans rub shoulder to shoulder with the monsters from folklore.

The Brownstone is social club on 8th Street in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The club was founded to offer a place to share and study theosophy in 1883 by Ramona Roebling-Taft and her brother, Tad Roebling. It became a sanctum for the psychic twins, Lana and Lora Dunlap and the romanian vampire, Cezar Sala, soon after and eventually became the preeminent center for occult study in the Midwest by 1886.

By 1889, the rooms above the club became the home for Tad and Cezar, who had fallen in love, which infuriated Ramona's husband, Oscar Taft. While the Roeblings has more money than the Tafts, Oscar managed all of their money and the only reason he didn't cut Tad off completely, was due to fear of the family name being drug through the mud.

After a supposed demonic possession and volatile exorcism in which Lana Dunlop perished in 1891, the club began to quickly lose favor in the waning days of the occult fad that had moved through the U.S.

While The Brownstone remained open, by 1896 Tad had passed away due to pneumonia, with Cezar refusing to ruin his beloved's soul with the taint of his vampirism.  This caused Ramona, in a feat of pique, to demand the vampire leave her city and made her sell the establishment, soon after. 

It remained open as a public house, passing through numerous owners until 2002.

In 2011, as part of the cities efforts to renew the downtown scene, Cezar bought the building and decided to draw on upon The Brownstone's theosophic heritage, his vampirism, and a renewed era of monster chic.

Since then, The Brownstone has become all the rage and has drawn attention from famous humans and inhumans, alike.
With luminaries such as supermodel, weretiger, and ecology activist, Isha Jain and Dr. Emeril Lake, a favorite guest of Oprah Winfrey, who has spent the last two decades researching a cure for vampirism.

Rumors even claim that the vampire, Cezar has been reunited with his lover Tad, now a ghost haunting the sight.

A to Z of Grave New World 2016: A is for the Alderman-Goldberg Act of 1979

What if the legends we've handed down to each other since the dawn of time were true? What if the folklore that seems to cross continents and cultures is real? What if we discovered that the United States of America was formed due to the help of supernatural beings seeking to escape persecution in the Old Country? What if our Civil War was fought because the werewolves in the North had a score to settle against the vampires in the South, going back to the days of ancient Egypt? What if the vampires, werewolves, ghouls, ghosts, trolls, and fey turned out not only to be real but demanded equal rights as citizens of these United States of America?

You would have a Grave New World, indeed.

While the Inhuman Movement had been rolling since just after WWII, it took Leslie Alderman (R) of Kentucky and David Goldberg (D) of Rhode Island until 1979, at the end of President Carter's term to grant them equal rights passed through Congress. Though many fail to remember that the newly elected President, Ronald Reagan had co-starred with Edward "Bonzo" Theron, a werechimpanzee, in two films, who was viewed as soft on the Inhuman issue.

The Act extended full rights to "inhumans" and solidified decades worth of activism and even blazed the trail for the "monster chic" of the 1980's that swept the nation.

Gone were the days of "monster hunters" yanking "vamps" out of basements and dragging them into the sun, to slowly, agonizingly burn in it's brightness. Or hunting your nephew with bullets melted down from Granny's silverware (and finding out too late that it wasn't real silver). Inhumans or the mortally challenged, as some of the diehards preferred to be called, wanted a vampire or werewolf on every street and at least two haunted houses. Thankfully, their numbers were much, much smaller than that.

The U.S. had slowly adapted to the notion that things not only existed but could be reasoned with and just wanted to have a normal life. Most of them, anyway.

But the inhuman community had quite a bit of work to do, as well. While they had been heavily policing and harshly enforcing assault and murder by any of their own, they had to make sure that no one crossed the line in these early days. And they had to fully cooperate with the authorities, the same types of organizations that started inquisitions and even pressed them into their wars. To compound the situation, the movers and shakers of equal rights found out how difficult it was to introduced change, when some of these beings were centuries old, with strongly held practices and grudges.

As this crucible of true freedom, fear of real monsters, and a brand new era of (un)life, liberty and pursuit of happiness heated up, two superstars for the inhuman population burst on the scene.

Veronica Jefferson was outed as a werejaguar weeks after her sophomore album, Moon Over The Atlantic, dropped. Veronica was exposed by a fundamentalist Christian organization, known as the Sentinels, who were highly critical of Veronica's pop hits, such as "Night Shift" and "Hard Workin' Lady". Sadly, Veronica's own aunt, Vera Sinclair, a founding member of the Sentinels revealed her secret. Shockingly, this merely accelerated Jefferson's rise to stardom and she became a major sensation starting in 1981.

In 1984, a vampire named Robin Leach was cast as the host of the reality TV show, Lifestyles of the Rich And Famous, he was chosen for his voice with little regard about his status as an inhuman. Somehow the mix of the filthy rich and Robin's gallant pronouncements mixed into a blockbuster hit. By the second season of the show, Robin, now "America's Favorite Vampire", was spotlighting the exclusive sanctums of some the world's most powerful inhumans and gaining bigger and bigger ratings.

By the mid to late 80's it was cool to be rich and a monster and that scared the shit out of the people in power.