The Evils Of Illmire

After watching several videos praising it, I decided to grab a pdf copy of The Evils of Illmire. The adventure was written, produced, and features layout by Zack Wolf. There are several artists featured in the adventure, but my personal favorite is Jack Badashski. The plot centers around a a dangerous wilderness and a backwoods town under peril caused by a sinister cult. The original version was 72 pages, but Zack has updated it a few times. The current version is 125 pages. The rules are written for Old-School Essentials, but can be easily ran with other systems. You get pdf monster conversions for Dungeon World and Swords & Sinister Spells. Personally I might use it for my next 5e game. 

Honestly though, it's not just an adventure. It's a "mini-mega" hexcrawl. Sixteen hexes are presented. The descriptions give you all you need, including encounter charts. There's also a variety of environments. From swamps to forests to mountains, there are a variety of dungeons and sites to explore. Each of these encounters is presented with a Dyson Logos map. Parties can interact with mantis folk, froglings, a witch, a giant king, and the Observer (who's definitely not a beholder). There is a directory of personalities and a hand plot and connection list. While I'm sure a party will eventually leave the 16 hexes, honestly you could have an entire campaign take place in Illmire. Once rid of the cult, the town would make an excellent home base. 

So it's pretty obvious, I really liked this adventure. While I only have the pdf at the moment, I will either print it out of pick up a print copy at some point. You can get the pdf and print on demand on DriveThru RPG. At the time of this post you can get the pdf cheaper on itch.io. The pdf comes with quite a few extras, including maps, artwork, and thematic character sheets.

Threadbare Kickstarter

Post-apocalyptic teddy bears? Patchwork action figures? Righteous lost sock explorers? Misfit frankentoys? This all sounds awesome to me.

Threadbare RPG is a a kickstarter for a stitchpunk rpg. It uses the popular Apocalypse World engine.

You might be asking what stitchpunk is? I did. It's handcrafted anarchy. Remember the strange but beautiful movie 9? It's the best example of threadpunk I can find.

The game seems like a lot of fun and honestly pretty kid friendly (despite the sort of creepy artwork). It's only 15 dollars for a full color pdf  and black and white soft cover. I'm going to back this one in hopes that I can talk my boy wonder, Grayson into playing. I think this will be a cool gateway tabletop for him.

Rat Queens Tabletop

Well folks, it looks like I'm going to need to learn to love Dungeon World. Last month Rat Queens writer Kurtis Wiebe tweeted that he's working on a Rat Queens rpg with Adam Koebel. You can read it here. Wiebe says it's using Dungeon World guts and Koebel is one of the creators of the system, so it sounds cool to me. While I don't know too much about Dungeon World, I've read good things. Narrative heavy games can be fun. They definitely make some of the outlandish feats that the Queens pull off easier.

Both of the above scenes would take way too many rolls to do in D&D or Pathfinder, which slows down the action. Yet from what I'm reading, Dungeon World could handle it with little problem.

Has any one played Dungeon World? If so, what do you think about it?