A New Thing for your Crypts

Crypts & Things remains my favourite old school ‘pseudo-clone’. (The new edition is perhaps somewhat more entrenched in its default setting than I would like, but nonetheless it’s overall a marked improvement over the earlier edition.) So I was delighted to learn that D101 Games is producing a new fanzine for the game entitled From the Shroud. 

According to D101's blurb, the initial issue includes:

• Achievements. A short system that sits alongside the experience system to reward characters for things they have done in their adventures, making them memorable events and useful benefits.
• The Secret of Skull Hill. A short adventure of mystery and otherworldly delights featuring the schemes of an alien parasitic race and their attempts to reunite the body and soul of their host god.
• By their Master’s Dark Command. The sad and short lives of Sorcerer’s apprentices revealed, and the useful things they become after death detailed.
• Exotic Liquid Relief by Neil Shaw. Is your character bored with quaffing bog standard Blackmire’s Best whenever they need to regenerate 1d6 Hit Points? Well Neil Shaw provides details of a variety of brews to make your character’s life more varied and interesting.
• Generic Life Events. This table is if you are overwhelmed by the sheer number of Life Event tables in the main rule book or simply after a OGL version you can base your own efforts off.
• Useful Items of the Kindly Ones. Minor magical items left behind by the gods who used to care about Zarth.
• Things to Find in Great Pots. A short random table for the harried Crypt Keeper for that inevitable moment when the players ask “so that pot you mentioned just now, what’s in it?”
• The Tea Party of Doom. A short encounter somewhere in the dark dismal woods with a crazy immortal Alchemist who has been playing with the psychoactive toads and their potential to provide tea..

Good eldritch stuff! In addition to Crypts & Things, the material looks useable with most other 'old school' D&D-ish games, including of course Swords & Wizardry (from which C&T draws many of its rules).

And sorcerers: if you’d like to submit something to a future issue, here is the dark knowledge you’ll need.