There was a time when I doubted this day would come. After many years of silence, followed by further years of teasing, the revised edition of HackMaster is finally on Kickstarter. The game that started with its fourth edition and left behind the number with its fifth, now jumps immediately to XXV. This isn’t the edition’s number, though. The authors are celebrating the game’s 25th anniversary, which is the best possible time to dust it off and revamp it. They also went with pretentious Roman numerals, just so the industry knows they are smarter and cooler than everyone else. I mean, come on Wizards, calling your edition 5.25 or 5.5 is lame. What’s 5.5 supposed to be, a price tag? It’s still more than I’m willing to pay for anything released by you…

Sponsored content! Ever since The Shadows of Luclin expansion was released for EverQuest, I’ve been fascinated by lunar adventures. Being the casual player I am, I have never reached Luclin, but I did incorporate the idea into my Terminus and Eremus campaigns. When Kabuki Kaiser approached me with a copy of his hex crawl adventure, Fly Me to the Moon, I couldn’t say no. His approach to moonwalks, though, is very different from the science-fantasy adventures I’m used to. Fly Me to the Moon describes a fantastic landscape deeply rooted in the Moon as it lived in people’s imagination before the cold reality of modern science and spaceflight sucked the fun out of it.

Sponsored content! By the end of last year, I realized that I hadn’t been reading much fiction lately, so I ordered a bunch of sword & sorcery and science fiction novels that will probably end up collecting dust once I lose momentum. While doing so, a thread popped up on Reddit’s r/SwordandSorcery sub, where Richard Fisher offered the first three responders a free issue of Savage Realms Monthly. All he asked in return was a review. Needless to say, I volunteered.

I expected Chaosium to forget about Basic Roleplaying: Universal Game Engine after releasing it under the ORC-license, leaving its future entirely in the community’s hands. Fortunately, I was wrong. While there isn’t a deluge of new products for the system, since its release BRP got a Gamemaster Pack, a Quickstart, and now the titular Creatures book. The website says Age of Vikings belongs under the BRP line too, but that’s bullshit, that game should have been called RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Iceland. But I digress.

This year’s Cauldron Con was hit by the winds of change. Not only did the event move from the beautiful but cold Schloss Hohenroda to the cozy and rustic Hofraithe Park in Rosenthal, but it was also only three days long instead of four. What’s most important is the con’s spirit, though, which remained the same: it was all about celebrating the various iterations of old-school Dungeons & Dragons. And of course Chainmail! You can’t have Cauldron Con without a huge table with green cloth and dozens of miniatures on it, waiting in neatly ordered lines for their demise.

HackMaster 5e is the greatest game ever developed by humankind. It says so in the introduction of the Player’s Handbook, and they are goddamn right. Ironically, the game started out as a joke: it was a parody of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons from the pages of the Knights of the Dinner Table comic strip. KoDT started its run in Shadis and is nowadays published by Kenzer & Company, but it also appeared in Dragon. When Wizards of the Coast released their Dragon Magazine Archive, they reprinted the strips without anyone’s permission.

June starts strong with Kickstarter campaigns. Right on the coattails of OSRIC comes another big and important OSR project. Robert Conley has proven with his past works that he knows a thing or two about sandboxing, and now he is gathering funds to release his magnum opus, The Northern Marches. If you need a setting with huge-ass hex maps or want to fill the Wilderlands-sized hole in your heart after giving up on Judges Guild, look no further.

It’s refreshing to finally play a game I’m invested in instead of running it. Yesterday, one of my friends ran a session of Dragonbane in Drakborgen. Dragonbane is the latest edition of Sweden’s national fantasy RPG, Drakar och Demoner¹. Drakborgen is a third-party module for Dragonbane based on a classic Swedish dungeon-crawler board game of the same name². We dusted off last year’s pregens we used for another Dragonbane one-shot, and I pulled another pregen for myself, so our party ended up with Aodhan, the human elementalist; Sir Dagobert, the mallard knight; Jürgen, the human fighter (that’s me!); Krisanna, the halfling thief; and Orla, the elf huntress.

Mark your calendars for the 6th of May; that is the day when the Backerkit campaign for the new edition of OSRIC starts. In case you’ve been living under a rock, OSRIC is a damn fine retroclone of AD&D1e and also one of the founding fathers of the whole OSR movement. Given that it will turn 20 next year, I can’t imagine a better way to celebrate than releasing a newer, prettier, revised, more accessible edition.

Welcome to the new and improved Vorpal Mace blog! Following a long break, I finally sat down to write a post on my old blog. I stared at Blogger’s interface for a while, then said: “fuck this shit, it’s time to move on”. After exploring other options, I embraced my inner software developer and decided to cobble together my own trash heap using GitHub Pages. I spent more time experimenting with styles, comment plugins, and web analytics platforms than I’m willing to admit before ending up with the current site. It’s ugly, but it’s mine. I’ll keep tinkering with it whenever the mood strikes, so expect more changes in the future. To top it off, I bullied my dear friend Vesper into drawing me a logo, so I can truly feel special.