Random Links for Friday 7/10/2020

It's Friday, here are some posts I saw this week that I wanted to share.

- My book was unlocked, finally, in the PDF Challenge. So $3 gets you Dungeon Fantasy 21: Megadungeons and 11 more PDFs.



Throw an additional $96 into the pile and get $125 to spend in Backerkit for more GURPS stuff, such as:

GURPS Martial Arts
GURPS Martial Arts: Gladiators
GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 12: Ninja
GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 15: Henchmen
GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 1
GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 3: Born of Myth & Magic
GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Treasures 3: Artifacts of Felltower
GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Denizens: Barbarians
GURPS Low-Tech Companion 2: Weapons & Warriors

- This caption made my whole day better:


"I so hoped that one of the portraits would show his ancestor, Frank."

If you need me to explain Frank Drebin . . . you might have the wrong blog.

- A commenter named Vinemaple made a terrible, terrible pun of a "harmless" monster for his gaming. And I love it. Look out, it's a red lert! And a brown lert is a very different thing if you work in a building with a kiddie pool. Just saying.

- I still like treasure tables. Blog of Holding opines on which ones are good.

- I've been meaning to share this - I was toying around with this hoard generator and came up with an Apparatus of Kwalish. I've never used one in my game:



At least the scroll will help you keep fire elementals from burning it to pieces.

- Speaking of fire, the crew is not going through the "Icy Gate" on Sunday. One of the players most keen on going there is not going to be able to make it and joining in play might be very difficult. So they've pushed that off until next delve and are sorting between two options for Sunday - raiding the orcs overland, or investigating the Orichalcum doors with the key in tow (I ruled they could get it from Dryst, as a special case.)

- Editing later - if you want your bard to play some different musical instrument, try some of these - this is a film by The Hu, a Mongolian throat-singing metal band. The four main guys look like someone's PC portrait minus the swords.

Random Links for 1/8

- Tim Shorts put up a nice post on playing with who shows up for game. As someone who is still running a "pickup" style of game eight years after starting it, I say he's right.

The Constant Reshaping of Campaigns

In fact, it's not a survival strategy, it's a strategy to thrive. We have more players now because you can just pop in when you can.

- Star Schlock looks like a lot of fun. There is a website now, too.

- Elfmaids & Octopi has a nice post with creepy signs The Old Ones lived here before you showed up to adventure.

Random Thoughts for Friday 6/15

Just a few random gaming thoughts for Friday.

- I can't wait to use the GURPS rules for influence rolls on PCs for PC vs. PC social skill rolls in my DF/DFRPG game. It's a-coming.

- I'm way behind on my mini painting. I've had a little more free time, in theory, but in practice I've used it for extra study, extra sleep, and doing extra chores. I will try to get the rest of my orcs painted ASAP so I can deploy them against the players when they finally decide to solve that.

- I need to make a copy of the Black Reaver story by Brand the Magician from the Rolemaster Companion for a handout. It's the front page cover of my DF GM Book - a binder of printed DF PDFs for quick reference.

- I'm slowly working my way through the updated Dungeon Alphabet. It's really enjoyable, but again, work-related reading and study has been taking priority.

- While I'm okay with large groups of PCs, I may need to either rule that past X PCs, there are no non-Ally NPCs available for easy recruitment (except possibly specialty hirelings), or apply a per-character penalty to appearance rolls. So if Raggi is 12- for a 5-man group, he's 8- for a 9-man group, etc. Might be a good way to allow for appearances without overwhelming the GM. I'll need to think that over more and post some rules ideas based on it.

Dungeon Alphabet / Monster Alphabet - arrived!

These arrived today:




I've had the PDFs for a while, but I wanted to read these cover to cover hardback. Now I can start!

Dungeon Alphabet 4th printing Kickstarter

Way back when, I got a copy of the Dungeon Alphabet. It really helped rekindle my interest in playing some Dungeon Fantasy, running a dungeon-based game, which eventually led to making a megadungeon, converting Keep on the Borderlands to GURPS, and starting a long-active campaign.

Several printings, including an expanded one, have come and gone. But I noticed this up on Kickstarter:



It's significantly expanded. Plus, the pricing is quite good for me. The price worked out to $17 for a physical copy, PDF copy, and shipping. That's not bad at all - if I found the hardback for $17 in a store with a free PDF download I'd grab it. So I backed this.

I really enjoyed the earlier version, and I think I'll get enough enjoyment out of the new one that I'll get my money's worth. Ultimately I've learned I vastly prefer reading tables to rolling on them - I'm a roll and re-roll until I like what it comes up with kind of person - these were fun and idea-provoking table entries. It's worth checking out to see if it's worth it for you as well.

Three World/Dungeon Building Links

So you want to build a world or a dungeon? Three (okay, four) posters are doing exactly that right now in very different ways.

Crowd-Sourced Building

Douglas Cole is getting a crowd-sourced world build going for Dungeon Fantasy. Want to design part of it? Take a look.

GURPS Hexworld Challenge

Slow Dungeon Building

Matt Riggsby is building a DF dungeon bit by bit:

The Occasional Dungeon

It's much like the approach of Castle Triskelion.

Build As You Play

Justin Aquino is posting about something I prefer to do - build as you play.

World Building as we Play

In the post is a structure of what to decide firmly ahead of time, and what the players bring to the table through character generation, and what gets built afterward. Justin is really big on systems - systematic approaches to solving gaming-related issues of design, play, and organization. I tend to be more loose about it all, but having a system you can replicate and share is a good thing.

Things I Like: Bad Guy Rosters

One thing I really like in adventures, especially published ones, is a bad guy roster.

I mean a full-out list of who, what, and how many. Especially if it's done in a tick-off fashion so I can mark down casualties and changes as I go.

WG4 The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun does a great job of this. You have a full-on roster of all of the organized bad guys in the dungeon. You know how long it takes for them to reinforce the front, where they come from, and so on. This makes running a battle in the dungeon very easy.

I called out UK2 The Sentinel and UK3 The Gauntlet for doing this well in a large battle, although they also do an inside-the-fold monster list that serves a lot of the same purposes.

Some modules do it a little less effectively. They might only list monster stats in one area, but not the numbers and locations for the pre-set ones.

The former, I like a lot.

This is something I'd like to see in more published adventures.

I've done the same - put all the bad guys on a spreadsheet, print it out, and cross them out as they die or put notes about where they've moved to. It makes restocking and reinforcing much easier - you know at a glance what's left and where. I've done it for the orcs, lizard men, draugr, bandits, etc. in my current game, and I'll do it again for large encounters or groups spread across multiple areas. If a module doesn't do it, it's worth doing yourself.

Door Week Continues: Door Minis III (& rules)

Yes, it's still Door Week here at Dungeon Door Fantastic. Tired of doors yet? Probably.

But I did find a perfect set of miniature doors, including double doors, that open and close.

The bad part is there were a one-off Kickstarter and the creator doesn't seem to be making any more right now. Grr! "Now" is critical, because a) I'd like doors sooner rather than later and b) there might be a birthday involved.

Here are those doors:

Griffin Tamer Studios



And this video has a nice review, although you really don't want to breathe so close to the mic pickup like that.

So yeah, perfect doors, except I can't get them from the creator. eBay and Amazon.com turned up blank. Double Grr!

Enough Door Minis!

What, you don't love reading about door minis?

Even if you do, you're probably sick of just looking at doors. How about opening them?

First here is a roundup of some posts I did about doors before:

Opening Doors in D&D - How to turn the "open doors" roll into a "roll over" ST-bonus-based roll.

Secure Doors in my DF Game - How I keep doors from just being battered down.

No Roll "Muscling Through" in DF - How I do door opening in GURPS DF with only one roll, not a contest. I use the smoothed penalties, myself, and we roll only if I've determined the door is locked or stuck. Doug will hate this, it has a ST roll. But it works really smoothly in play and is consistent with the rules in DF2.

Second, here is a piece of new gear, just for reading this far:

Swords & Wizardry
Crowbar - 2 gp, 5 lbs. Two hands. Gives a +1 to opening door rolls, or extends your range by 1, depending on the rules you use. May affect rolls to lift portcullises or gates (GM's discretion.)

More Doors & Cardboard Heroes Stairs

Some perusing around found me some doors. A fair amount of pictures in this one, so it's all behind the More tab.

Sell me on Fractal Mapper 8.0

Fractal Mapper 8.0 is on sale for $10 on RPGNow.

Fractal Mapper 8.0

I've checked it out, and checked out some of the videos. It looks very cool.

But I don't really need a world mapper so much as a good tool for mapping dungeons, caves, etc. - one I can use to blow them up and print them as sectional battle maps, even.

How is it for that? I haven't found a tutorial showing it being used to create either hex-based or square-gridded dungeons. Does such a tutorial exist, and if so, where?

Thanks!

Review: Moleskin Maps Series

By Matt Jackson
Published by Chubby Monster Games
Price: Pay What You Want

The Moleskin Maps books contain nothing but maps, and lined sections for detailing those maps.

Each map comes in two sizes. One is a "One Page Dungeon" style version. This consists of 3.5" x 4.5" copy of the map in the corner, and a series of lined boxes to fill in vital information - Background, Key Locations, GM Notes, up to 4 Wandering Encounters, and 2 bits of Treasure.

The second map size is a full 8.5" x 11" version, suitable either to mark up as the GM, pass out as a treasure map to the players, or further blow up for use as a battlemap.

All of the maps are gridless and freehand. Notations are in Old Gygaxian - S for secret doors, smaller and smaller hash marks for stairs down, rectangles for doors, etc.

Each of these products has 11 maps in this style. They are a mix of caves/underground locations, campsites, and villages/towns.

Since these are "Pay What You Want" you can pay $0.00 and download them for free, but then always go back and pay some more when you realize how cool they are. (I won mine as a prize, so I feel less morally obligated to do this - but I'll cheerfully give Matt Jackson money for other stuff based on these.)

I highly recommend checking these out. Personally I'm not a huge fan of gridless maps - it's harder for me, as the GM, to describe stuff without clear measurement markings on them. But they are very attractive, and it's worth it for me to just dig out a ruler or stick an overlay on the GM's copy. The price point can't be beat, the quality is high, and they're so attractive you'll find yourself want to start filling in the sheets just as you flip through.

For more reviews, check my Reviews page!

Calculating stair/level depth?

Does anyone have a quick tool (or guideline) for knowing how to determine how deep a staircase takes you, or how long it would need to be in order to go down X depth?


For example, I have stairs on level 1 that go down to level 2. It's a straight set of stairs, and I'd like there to be 20' vertical distance between level 1 and the floor of level two. How long does that set of stairs need to be with a reasonable rise and run?

And then, say, I have another set of stairs on level 1 that go down to level 2, but now they stop halfway and then have a landing and then double back. How long do these need to be?

I've found some rise/run calculators on carpentry sites but I'm finding it hard to figure out how to use them. Anyone have a quick-and-easy calculator or reasonable guide, if not an easy to use tool?

I've already plotted out my dungeons, but if I can fix them depth so it's consistently correct that would be lovely.

GURPS tools I like: Gemstone and Spice generators

I've been stocking my megadungeon with monsters, and now I'm filling in treasures.

A couple tools have really come in handy:

Collective_Restraint's Spice Generator and Gemstone Generator.

Both are automated versions of the tables from Dungeon Fantasy 8: Treasure Tables.

I've been using them a lot and they really speed up the process of making treasure. I just need ones for, well, everything else in the book. I'd really love a whole series of tools like that based on DF8, or even a giant horde generator. DF8 is chock full of good stuff but you do end up page-flipping a lot making up treasure. That's cool when you're doing a special item or five but not when you're making up bunches and don't actually care much about the basic contents.

My one suggestion (also sent to C_R) is that it would be handy if I could click the sizing buttons afterward, so I could, say, roll up a spice and decide it's not enough, I want 2x as much, without having to hand-figure it. For spices that's easy, but for gemstones (which are valued based on a formula that weights larger stones' values) it's far from trivial.

Megadungeon Stocking

I've made a lot of progress on my megadungeon - Felltower aka Grak Yorl aka the Boneyards.

- As I mentioned before, I whipped up a rough "stocking table" based on the broad DF power categories outlined in DF2 - boss (individually tough monster, a threat one-on-many), worthy (tough as group, a threat many-on-many), and fodder (weak, a threat many-on-one). It's not perfect, not yet, but it's not bad so far. It's done well giving me interesting results in terms of monster spreads across the three and a half levels I used it on. Since DF doesn't actually label monsters with boss, worthy, or fodder (generally), I need to use judgement on what is what. But that's easy enough. If my notes say Worthy, I plunk down tough enough critters to make a challenging fight for the players, and I don't need a table to tell me which ones. I'd only re-roll on it anyway, because I'm like that.
I did find a way to ensure I get to use Bruno's prefixing table though, because it's awesome and uses stuff I helped write up and want to use extensively in this game.

- I wrote down my results directly on my maps. Like I've mentioned before, I make a master sheet and then photocopy it. I took one more copy and called it a Stocking Sheet, and I write the die roll results from my random stocking table, monster power levels, trap locations, etc. onto this map. I can mark the hell out of it and then make a "neat" copy for actual play.

- I then started to circle natural groupings. Maybe this Worthy monster surrounded by Fodder is their leader - or maybe they've just cornered it after a long hunt. Maybe these Worthies are near the Boss because they're protecting the guys up the hall from its predations. Maybe these lone fodder are looting a room, either having come from the surface, the same level, or the depths to find loot. I haven't yet defined the "what" of these monsters, but where I have an idea I wrote it on the map. The circles let me visually see where and how things interact.
A few traps, randomly placed with the B/X or DMG methods, suddenly became connected to monsters - these were placed my those monsters as "border" protections, those to pen in that critter in the room, and this one is a hunting trap meant to gather up food.

- Speaking of traps, I've got a rough idea for a random trap table, too (for GURPS, naturally), and I'm going to give that a spin on my levels next. It should be easier than mulling over what's appropriate. I'm very inspired by Zak S.'s idea that instead of statting up one location/encounter/whatever, you make a table that'll do that any time you need to. I do spent more time on the table, balancing it out, than might be strictly necessary, but I'm an author and maybe I'll find a way to publish it. Then it needs to be great - so I treat every table generation as writing rules for publication and playtest.

- I also made a quick list of minis I have and want to use, and monsters from many sources (DF2, Lands Out of Time, DFA1, DFM1, AD&D books, my Rolemaster books) that I'd like to use. It's not complete, and I write on it just as notes, not a definitive pick list.

- Finally, I've started to write down all of the details on the map and jot them into some kind of organized form suitable for play. The monsters will go into a spreadsheet, army man marshalling style (something I've used very successfully in the past with large groups of PCs and NPCs), and also into a printed group of sheets so I can flip to them easily for additional details.
The actual dungeon will ultimately be digital.

So far so good!

Mapping my megadungeon

I've been busy mapping Felltower aka the Ruins aka Grak Yorl ("the Boneyards" or "the Black Fortess" depending on who you ask).

I've printed my own graph paper because I didn't like the scale on the pads I already had. I've been busy; my requirement is to draw at least 1-2 rooms on the page every time I look at an unfinished map, and every morning and evening. If I bring the map with me to work on between classes or whatever, I make myself draw a few more lines on it. That way it's begun to fill out pretty quickly.

One thing is, I hate all my own maps. Seriously, my maps always look cruddy to me when I finish. Neat, well-drawn (or well-enough-drawn), but somehow sucky. Like the end result doesn't match the vague image in my head of what it should be.

Now, I'm not a big draw-and-erase kind of guy. I keep working at at, because ultimately quantity of finished rooms and stocked monsters will trump design. It doesn't matter so much if the dungeon isn't the most functionally and architecturally perfect place it could be. The players won't see the whole thing even if they map 90%+ of it. This section kinda sucks? Too bad, make the next section better. Those rooms will have monsters or not, treasure or not, tricks and traps or not. Onto the next section! Good enough is good enough.

But man, I look at it and I think it's a mess. This happens with my old dungeons - I look at stuff I did for other games and think, okay, this is also a mess. With one exception, where I really had a great idea, ran with it, and was able to keep it a cohesive whole from one end to the other. But it's not that big (a mere 8 or 9 levels, depending on how you count, and not very wide) nor very portable to this game.

One good thing I did is a sideways map of the main levels, and quickly sketch on paper the "idea" of the levels and the entrances and exits. That way I don't have to decide on the fly how many egresses and entrances there are, just place them.

Anyway.

Are there good guides to mapping dungeon levels? I've looked at a few more generic ones, but hints that would stop me from drawing too-easy transits to the bottom levels and nonsensical stair arrangements would help. Ones that give me an idea of how many rooms I might want, or which direction doors normally open, or ideas for forestalling "we always go left" and so on. Just hints on execution rather than planning. I have a plan, even if it's not a perfectly realized whole. It's help with, okay, so if these are storerooms, what's a good way to lay them out - that kind of stuff.

Review: Vornheim

I feel compelled to link this in this review: DriveThru RPG Bans All Future Titles from Zak S. Read it before you purchase this.

Vornheim


By Zak S.
64 pages plus dustjacket (but dustjacket is filled with charts from the book, the inside covers are printed, and the front and back cover are game tools)
6” x 8.5”
Published 2011, by Lamentations of the Flame Princess
$17.50

Vornheim is a supplement on city adventures written for class and level, old-school roleplaying games. It’s roughly half supplement on the city of Vornheim, central city in author Zak S.'s D&D game, and half city building kit. The intro and back cover claim "you can use it to build your own city, even in the middle of a game." Let's see how it measures up.

The Setting

Vornheim is an ancient city of high and twisty towers and alleys and bridges and tunnels. It’s sitting on a cube-shaped world made of petrified demon flesh riddled through with dungeon tunnels. Snakes are books, and people can learn to read snakes to learn their knowledge. Nearby cities are ruled by strange governments with even more bizarre rulers.

The setting is very Dying Earth-like. This is a compliment, because that’s hard to pull off. The decadent, ancient cultures, decaying atmosphere, and bizarre oddities (pet snails, exotic creatures, misanthropic monster schemers, arcane and strange laws and superstitions) make it a perfect Dying Earth city. It feels like what if Mega City One was filled with folks from the Empire of the Petal Throne and then dropped into the Dying Earth. Cugel would get in a lot trouble here but he wouldn’t stand out. If you aren’t running a city of Vancian decay, well . . . it’s going to stand out a lot. This isn’t meant as criticism, just commentary. I may plunder Vornheim for its systems and tables and a setting bit or two, but I’ll probably save the entire setting itself for a more DERPG-like world than my current one.

The book does detail out some major locations in the city, both for more high level interest (the big library, for example) and more prosaic concerns (the home of a nasty NPC you can rob or otherwise molest). These figured examples can be dropped in anywhere.

The Kit

The book’s claim is that it’s a kit for city adventures. It sure is. You can sum up the process in the phrase “drop some dice on the book.” The PCs want to find a specific location in the city? Drop some dice on the book - one die represents where the PCs are, the other where the location is. A quick system for generating streets and hazards lays out the path there. Random encounter tables (complete with connections between encounters) give you stuff to have happen on the way. You go from “Hey can we go to a fur trader’s shop?” to how to get there and what happens on the way in under a minute. An even quicker system lets you price out goods without looking them up. An even faster system lets you lay out the floorplan of buildings, both crazy Vornheim-style tall towers and more bland generic fantasy ones alike. The book promises to “show [GMs] how to make 30 floorplans in 30 seconds” and it delivers. It’s a toolkit that comes with a figured example in the form of Vornheim instead of a city book with some tables.

One interesting idea is that you can roll on the book cover for combat results or to generate levels, HP, and Armor Class for NPCs. This means you can grab a handful of dice (one per NPC, or one per attack) and drop them on the book. You do an up-down-left-right lookup to numbers and hit locations written on the edge and there you go, that’s how the attacks go. Or what level the NPC is and how many HP per level he’s got. And so on.

I have no idea how it would work in play but the idea looks great. Certainly the other tables/pages are clearly awesome and a few test runs made me right at home with them. I especially liked the pages for filling a neighborhood with businesses with a dropped handful of dice, the floorplan shortcuts, and the table of aristocrats and their distinguishing traits (Including things as varied as “Always tells to truth” to “Fears to touch the ground” and even weirder/cooler results I won’t spoil). Even the NPC tables feed into each other: each NPC has a direct relationship with the next NPC down, so you never generate someone in a vacuum.

So can you generate this stuff in play, without slowing things down? I think so, yes. It’s fast and easy, and gives you enough to go on to put adventure in the PC’s paths without writing yourself into a corner.

There is a nice little section with player’s notes, so you get feedback on what you’ve seen in the book from the women who played in the campaign. That’s the first one of these I’ve seen in an RPG book. It’s as if those “how the PCs fared” sections from Gary Gygax’s adventures were written by the players instead, in daily speech instead of swords and sorcery style war story writeups.

Further advice on city adventurers in general is scattered about the book. One piece I especially liked was that adventures in town generally mean breaking the law, so the law has to further the adventure not bring the game to a screeching halt. Another reminds you that the PCs can just leave a city if the risk-to-reward ration skews against them, so it’s important to make the city worth staying in, even in the face of those laws and difficulties.

How is it for GURPS?

Since that’s what I play, let’s talk about how this supplement is for GURPS 4e Dungeon Fantasy.

It works pretty well, actually. You can’t use the neat roll-on-the-book feature for combat for GURPS, or at least not easily. It would probably take less effort to just design a new one for GURPS than to retrofit. Additionally, many of the suggested systems need a d4, and many tables need d20s and percentile dice (two d10s in my day) in addition to the usual d6s you’ll use for GURPS.

Most of the creatures, spells, and NPCs have no stats, just descriptions, so they are pretty easy to generate in GURPS. It’s not like having full DnD style stats would help much, and the lack doesn’t hurt it.

The systems for running city adventures, making up prices, and generating random encounters and NPCs will work without any need to convert them. The advice is all systemless, so it holds up no matter what. PC is a 4th level ranger? Great. PC is a 275 point DF wizard specializing in attack spells? That works too. City adventures are city adventures.

Rating:
Content: 5 out of 5. If there is something missing from this book that you need to run city adventures, I don’t know what it is.
Presentation: 5 out of 5. Cool art, easy to read text, awesome ideas about using all available space down to the page edges as gaming tools.

Overall:The book is a bit costly at $17.50, but it’s really worth the price if you can scrape up the money. It’s a great tool for urban adventures, and I can see using it for any fantasy, science-fantasy, or even dark science-fiction game’s cities.

FWIW I got my copy from IPR. They were excellent, especially when I needed customer service after Paypal decided to be stupid. Solution: Keep buying from IPR, but not using Paypal.

Review: The Dungeon Alphabet

Periodically, I'm going to review stuff on this blog. It may be old stuff I found and liked a lot, new stuff regardless of whether I liked it or not, or anything in between. I'm going to try to err on the side of stuff useful to anyone in any system, but it really depends on what I find!



The Dungeon Alphabet
by Michael Curtis
Goodman Games 2009
$9.99

Dungeon Alphabet is a system-neutral sourcebook for old-school style dungeon crawling games. The book's central idea is the alphabet, with a dungeon-themed word for each letter of the alphabet. It runs from "A is for Altar" to "Z is for Zowie" (okay, some are a bit of a stretch) and the other 24 letters in between.

Each of the 26 entries has some introductory text discussing why the term fits in dungeons and how it fits. This text is well written and gives you a really inspiring sense of why you need altars, undead, statues, or jewels in your dungeon. Next is a very old-school style element: random tables. Each entry has a table with a corresponding bit of text attached to every random result. These range from random book titles for "B is for Books" to different forms of gold for "G is for Gold" and the strange effects of drinking from the titular bodies of water in "P is for Pools."

Some people might scoff at random tables, but this is a great way to either leave bits of your dungeon up to the universe or just inspire you. A quick roll on the Altar table might give you something to inspire your own version, or you could just stick with what turns up. For folks running a system heavy on the random generation side (say, white box D&D), it'll fit right in. For folks running systems that pretty much demand you decide what you want and then build it, this might be new. Or old - very, very old school. I'm just amused to no end, and I'm going to get a d30 just to use with a table or two in this book.

Speaking of dice and system neutrality, "system neutral" does need to be clarified a bit. While The Dungeon Alphabet will work for any dungeon-based fantasy game, it is really "any class and level system neutral" instead. You are expected to have a full range of polyhedral dice (including a d30) and there are lots of references are to going up or down a level or otherwise reference classes. So while it'll work best for games like OD&D and its clones, it will work just as well with a non-class and level system such as GURPS.

The entries are generally excellent. The only weak entry, in my opinion, was K is for Kobolds - with a die roll for unique kobold tribes. While it does have a reference to "Tucker's Kobolds" and a Jim Holloway illustration, it just felt merely "good" in a book full of "great." I know many low-level types cut their teeth on kobolds, and I'm not averse to using them myself, but are they that interesting that they need an entry? Or that boring-yet-required that they need an entry to spice them up? In either case the entry works, it's just not as strong as true gems like the lever table, the random book titles, or the creepy table entries for "Y is for Yellow."

The book is lavishly illustrated and the art is generally good. Some of the art is excellent. It is awesome beyond words to see "Erol Otus '09" on the front cover, but the goodness doesn't stop there. The illustration fo "L is for Lever" is so Paranoia-like that you could swap hapless clones for the hapless adventurers and it wouldn't need a single other change. There is the Holloway piece mentioned above, a few good setpiece illustrations showing the letter in action ("V for Vermin" and "U for Undead" work especially well).

Rating:
Content: 5 out of 5. None of the alphabetic entries are wasted, all of the table entries are meaty adventure seeds, hooks, or just answers to player's questions.
Presentation: 5 out of 5. Not even counting the Erol Otus cover, this book is well done. The text is easy to read and clear, the tables are equally easy to use, and the book is attractively illustrated.

Overall: This is a book I wish I'd written, and I'm sorry I took so long to find it and buy it. Outstanding stuff, and any dungeon fantasy GM (from OD&D DMs to GURPS DF GMs) can make use of this. It's better for a class-and-level, gold-and-dungeons game, but it'll work for any variation of fantasy world underground delving for treasure. Highly recommended.