I said in a previous post that I was disappointed with the content of FO! 13. Don't get me wrong - there are always great articles in the magazine and I've used a lot of the stuff from issues 1-8. One of the best parts of T&T is that it is easy to convert material from other games to it, even on the fly, and you can make it as complicated as you want. Due to the ease of early D&D to T&T conversion, especially, I've run a bunch of FO! material. My disappointment here comes from the desire to see a lot more T&T specific material in the magazine. Luckily the T&T community is served by a growing number of blogs and Elder Tunnels. The loss of Trollszine is sad and probably unnecessary.
So what exactly is in FO! issue 13, T&T-wise? I won't go into all of the graphics that are tributes to Ken, nor his quotes at the beginning of the mag. These are all familiar to longtime fans. The vast majority of the issue is still devoted to old school D&D, and I won't delve into that here other than to say check it out. There are some interesting ideas and several (10?) adventures to loot. Let me go over some of the T&T articles though.
Variant Kindred by Age of Fable: attribute modifiers for more kindred, including three for Tekumel. Some of the kindred have special abilities or brief descriptions.
Battle School by KSA: mini-solo for warriors.
The Lost Expedition of Martin Hidalgo by Andrew Trent: A tale of the three survivors of this adventure, statted for T&T, and two monsters encountered thereupon. A clever idea.
An ad reminding us that KSA will be at OSRCon in Toronto 8.10 and 8.11.12 (so will Ed Greenwood and James Maliszewski). Finally, a Con I might be able to get to.
Tricks & Treats for Tunnels & Trolls by Andreas Davour (of the Omnipotent Eye) and myself (with a sidebar by Calithena): this one has 7e houserules, new monsters, new talents, magic items, and combat saves and tricks. Something for everyone, I should think. Plus one of my monsters and a magic item have matching art. It is funny...I was encouraging the trollspawn to write something up and submit it. They asked what they could do, so I said keep it simple: monsters, magic items, or talents would be good. Then I made up several things off the top of my head as examples, quickly ran to type them up, emailed them to Iggy within an hour, and there you go. The trollspawn wrote up ideas, but failed to edit them, and so they were never submitted. Shame. They have been groomed on fantasy and gaming since birth and the oldest (13) may understand game mechanics, et cetera, better than me.
Mythal by Calithena: a setting, but also ideas on how to make a paladin and berserker work in T&T.
And there you have it, besides the pictures, cartoons, and KSA quotes.
I am also feeling a bit let down by FO#13. It's a great mag, as always, but the content is not what I hoped for.
ReplyDeleteBut, it's just a fact that the T&T community don't care. They didn't submit things, so there was less to print. I kept reminding people to submit and nothing was submitted. Sad, but true. There's simply more life in D&D fans.
Still, FO is amazing and every issue I pick up is a great source of ideas. I'm proud to have been published there, in great company!
I hear what you are saying. Based on all of the hype I saw, I expected the issue to have way more T&T content. I'm not sure if the T&T community doesn't care. Maybe they are just still burned by the OP incident and unwilling to submit material they fear will be stolen. Plus there are way more D&D fans than T&T fans, so perhaps comparing the two is apples & oranges. It would be an interesting study to compare the number from each group who actually release material.
ReplyDeleteWell, yeah the OP incident have had some serious effects, but I kind of hoped that people would still care for some outreach. I think part of the OP problem still is that core people don't think it was that bad and are implicitly still giving support. Whatever.
ReplyDeleteThere is a old school revival/revolution/whatever and I guess I hoped more people would want to get involved. There are more D&D fans than most any other game can muster, that's part of the game. I am getting myself involved and having fun, more power to us, eh? ;)
Euch, that was excellently bad prose. Anyway, you get my point.
ReplyDeleteI understand your point. I also fear that you are right about people still supporting OP. I have to think that he would stop ripping off people and selling "T&T" material if people weren't buying anything.
ReplyDelete