Friday Encounter: Lost Spellbook

Here's a simple encounter that can fuel further developments in the campaign, and potentially give rise to a recurring adversary for the PCs. It is suited to any environment - in a dungeon, the wilderness, on the road, or possibly even in a town (such as in an alleyway somewhere). To best make use of this encounter, there should be at least one wizard in the party.

One way or another, the party should come across a discarded spellbook somewhere - either cast aside haphazardly, or guarded by some sort of trap or guardian. If a wizard can retrieve the book, and possesses the necessary spell slots and components, they will have access to whatever spells were recorded in its pages and can prepare and cast them.

To make this encounter the most fun, you should plan it in advance so the book contains spells that the wizard in the party does not already know, but that would benefit their character or play style (use your judgment here). This will expand the list of spells at their disposal. Incidentally, this is something I think DMs should do more of to tie PC advancement into the world - why have your players just pick new spells on leveling up when they can find them in books, or learn them from mentors? To make things really fun, include some spells that require spell slots the wizard doesn't have access to at their current level - this will provide an incentive to the player to pursue advancement so they can use their new spells, and gives them something to look forward to.

However, there is always a catch - and the spellbooks of unfamiliar wizards are not things to meddle with so lightly. The spellbook is attuned to its original user - although they may have misplaced it once, as soon as a different mage begins to draw power from the pages, the enchantments written into the book will alert its original owner to its current whereabouts, and that owner will surely be unhappy with something as priceless as a well-crafted spellbook containing years of study falling into the wrong hands.

This is a great way to introduce an rival magic-user to the campaign - ideally, one more learned and powerful than the PC wizard in order to provide some tension (and to explain the presence of higher-level spells - and again, to give the player something to aspire to!). I've deliberately left this open-ended so you can develop an antagonist suited to the PC in question. Their pursuit of the book can easily provide fodder for multiple adventures. They might send their servants after the party to try and retrieve the book, or inflict the PCs with curses or other obstacles. Sooner or later, though, they'll inevitably want to seek the thief out face-to-face for a battle of magical prowess!

The Year of the Gazetteer: A Retrospective

Click here to enlargee

With the Year of the Gazetteer behind us, I'd like to think back on how much it has done for this blog in the last twelve months. We went from averaging about two and a half posts a month in 2022 and 2023 to having at least 10 a month, with 2024 having 149 posts - my most productive year by far. I created 13 hex maps (counting Ochsebad) of various regions in my long-running Lunar Lands setting, which has hosted almost every campaign I've run since middle school - altogether detailing 33,543 hexes and 229,233 square miles of setting. That's an area a little smaller than Madagascar if smushed together, although the areas are not contiguous. I also wrote several articles, including lore, adventure hooks, and homebrew game material, that detailed different parts of my setting, fulfilling the purpose I made this blog for in the first place but never knew where to start with. Keep your eyes out for a Lunar Lands index in the future, where I will catalogue this material.

I learned a couple things along the way. Originally, I intended to use three-mile hexes for every map - I'm inclined to agree with Mythlands' points about this scale - but as I expanded beyond Switzerland-sized Lescatie I realized that it would just be unfeasible to keep making maps in that scale on a regular basis. After the undertaking that was Togarmah, I realized that even doing six-mile-hex maps of many regions was too big to do in detail, and most of the maps are only partial segments of their respective regions. Nevertheless, I still think there's more than enough to last a good few campaigns. Maybe some day I'll go back and fill in the gaps with hex maps of the remaining areas, but for now, it's a project I'm quite satisfied with.

Out of all the maps, the one that's gotten the most attention has been that of the Freikantons, which has sat in my list of most popular posts for some time now. I suspect this comes from its links to Ochsebad, which I submitted for the Summer Lego RPG Setting Jam at DIY & Dragons, realizing how I could contribute to both projects (which was a lot of fun!). Or maybe bitches just love the Old Swiss Confederacy. Who knows.

From here, I want to go from a big success (at the time of this writing, my post on terrain rules for combat is still my biggest success) to what I consider my biggest failed experiment. This didn't happen last year but the year before, but back then, I wrote a post about how the setting of the anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica would work well for an OSR campaign. I still think that, but I'm sad to say I don't think that's a campaign that will ever see the light of day. Though the post brought a lot of attention to my blog - even making it onto the OSR subreddit, somehow - a lot of the discourse there made me realize that there is not a lot of overlap between why I enjoyed Madoka Magica and why everyone else did.

I should note that I got into the series very early on in its run, I believe the day it blew up online as soon as the third episode aired (if you know, you know), and at that time, there had not been much in the way of character development; what drew me in was the interesting and very gameable setting and magic system, which seemed like it was going somewhere. I thought that setting would lend itself well to OSR gameplay. However, most of the reception I got was about how OSR systems don't model interpersonal dynamics well, despite me stating this was the aspect of the series I found the weakest. What I realized was that it's been over ten years, and most people now know Madoka Magica for the character-driven show it ended up becoming. I found the setting interesting but the characters unlikeable, whereas the fandom generally finds the characters likeable but the setting uninteresting (or at least unimportant). Nowadays, anyone wanting to play a game in the Madoka Magica universe is probably going to expect a depressed lesbian psychodrama instead of the horror-infused dungeon-delving sandbox about grappling with the limits of your own humanity I wanted to run, and that isn't really the kind of campaign I would be interested in running.

Anyway, I bring all of this up because this experience has taught me absolutely nothing.

Art by Martin Rodriguez

2025: The Year of the Barbarian

Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.

- Robert E. Howard

Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.

- Arnold Schwarzenegger

Gee, if only I was a half-naked, super-ripped dude who could solve every single problem with one blow from his enchanted blade, THEN maybe I could get some gasoline and a lower interest rate on my home loan.

- Misterkitty's Stupid Comics

Lately, I've gotten deeply into a specific kind of fantasy. Sword-and-sorcery blood-and-thunder barbarian hero pulp heroic fantasy. The likes of Conan, Kull, Red Sonja, Fafhrd, Thongor, we can offer an honorable mention to Dave. While barbarians in the Lunar Lands tend to look more like ancient Celts or Germanics, I can't deny that I don't love myself a good Frazetta or Vallejo mighty-thewed warrior, in its own context.

I've been getting into not only 30s barbarian pulp, but also 70s barbarian comics, a surprisingly deep genre that Trey at From the Sorcerer's Skull has written plenty about. He's even done some writings of a game meant to emulate that milieu. I have him to credit for introducing me to Arak, Son of Thunder, which would have gotten into the Lunar Lands Appendix N had I not discovered it so recently and had there not been other, longer-standing influences to include It got me thinking of how I could do something like that myself - and, in particular, there are a few settings I've looked at that I feel would lend themselves well to such an approach. Neither are my own creation, but both I feel tap into the well of sword and sorcery goodness in their own ways.

One is a setting from the second big wave of pulp fantasy that I find incredibly gameable, and which has had a much bigger influence on the tabletop RPG world than many people realize, most likely due to its (in my opinion undeserved) bad reputation. The other is a setting I have talked about here on the blog several times already, one which, despite its association with another popular comic artist (to the point where most people overestimate how much involvement he had in it), I think would shine with a reinterpretation in the Mighty Marvel Manner under the theoretical pen of Roy Thomas. I intend to explore each of these in a forthcoming series of posts.

I'll still be posting the occasional Lunar Lands lore, of course - but we'll take a detour that will ring in the Year of the Barbarian! Stay tuned for what's to come!