Monday 7 May 2012

Chaotic Caves for Basic Fantasy RPG


I was going to tag this onto the previous post regarding Lulu codes and recent purchases but perhaps it warrants it's very own post. :)

I forgot to mention another recent purchase from Lulu, which I'm enjoying flipping through, is The Chaotic Caves by J.D.Neal.

Written for the Basic Fantasy RPG, it's essentially very easy to adapt to B/X D&D, AD&D and clones of (etc.).  Chaotic Caves is a part rewriting of, and homage to, the caves complex (and the Keep -but now it's a "Manor") from B2's Keep of the Borderlands.  The difference here is that no extra dungeon room "stocking" is required - it's a complete product - unlike it's D&D predecessor which was an "introductory" packaged with the purple D&D Basic Set.

J.D.Neal has done a marvellous job of recreating -something which is rather unfashionable these days-  a low level dungeon primarily inhabited by low level humanoid monsters.  Excellent. :)

The book is well written, well presented, with player maps, pre-gen characters and a handful of old-style b/w pictures.   The Lulu copy I bought has a shiny black cover with a narrow spine - much preferable to my usual fair of stapled paper print-outs. In this way, JN1 The Chaotic Caves is a perfect shelf neighbour to my copy of Morgansfort.

The manuscript text ("JN1 The Chaotic Caves") is free to download, like with many of the Basic Fantasy products from here, but I like to treat myself to these texts in bound form - They make better nighttime reading for me in book form.  Since the Basic Fantasy writers and publisher are not motivated by profit, the prices of all of the Basic Fantasy books on Lulu are super-low.

Perhaps some pressure should be brought to bear upon Gonnerman and Neal to release JN2 Monkey Isle through Lulu as well. ;)

Other Basic Fantasy titles on Lulu (thumbnail links):

 


Shiny print-on-demand rulebooks and adventures

PDF and Open Office docs - free to download.

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Make mine .... Basic!

1 comment:

  1. Pressure? No pressure needed. JN2 on Lulu is definitely in the plans... it just needs another proofing pass or two, and some layout cleanup. Watch for it!

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