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Teratic Tome
by John M. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 12/08/2013 21:02:18

I found the horrifying monsters in this supplement to be quite refreshing. Gone is all the polish that I disdain. I receive visceral responses from my older, seasoned players when they see these things. I love that.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Teratic Tome
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Roll XX
by Joel B. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 12/02/2013 00:00:00

I find this to be an extremely useful tool for GMs. Rather than just being tables of random items or encounters, they're collections of IDEAS that can be easily incorporated into any game setting or system. This book has broad categories (Fantasy, Horror etc..) which is an added bonus. I heartily recommend it to any storyteller who'd like to have some handy, quick reference and inspiration material.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Roll XX
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Bad Myrmidon
by John M. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 12/02/2013 00:00:00

Many, many creative things to use as a DM. Worth every cent. And also Love for Mandy.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Bad Myrmidon
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Roll XX
by Paul B. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 11/25/2013 13:49:19

I really do like this book for its ease of use (clean presentation, genre breakdown and PDF bookmarks!), its cheek ("Really, it says you're facing pornographic magic... Blame the dice, dude"), and its price (I paid a tad below average for it, and now I'm sorry that I didn't have a little more to put into this!), but MOSTLY I like it for the fact that Roll XX is an idea that I've wanted to make for myself I-don't-know-how-many times, and yet I never did... Now I don't have to!

For a couple of bucks, this book is going to be a tremendous addition to my gaming table, no matter what kind of games I might be playing!



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Roll XX
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ViewScream, 1st Edition
by Arnold C. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 09/17/2013 14:19:16

Mindblowing fun. This game is played entirely in character, from the initial impact to death of the crew. It's challenging, and at times a little exhausting, but you will get plenty of opportunities to switch your camera off and take some time to collect yourself (and listen in to what other people are doing.)

Also, there's plenty of advice in Rafael's "10 Commandments of ViewScream" to help anyone make the game memorable and awesome. He's a very good conversational writer.

(The following is true for all of the scenarios in the book) Each of the characters has things that they need from the other people, but they also have attitudes and secrets on their sheet. That's the most clever part. You may be betrayed, or someone might give their life to help you, and you won't know until it's happening.

Each time I've played, even the same scenario, I've been surprised by the places people will take the characters they are given.

Do yourself a favor: watch some videos, or grab a group and try this one out. Only some of you will survive. What will you do to be one of them?

You can watch a full game of the first scenario here: (there may be some minor spoilers, but I won't say which details are predetermined and which are not)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8ZoV4dfrz4



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
ViewScream, 1st Edition
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Roll XX
by George P. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 08/23/2013 19:11:32

my problem is that is not this bad but seriously find a friend and throw this at them. This is free so checking this for nothing will not hurt you.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
Roll XX
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ViewScream, 1st Edition
by Josiah B. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 06/20/2013 20:17:15

I usually am not a big fan of diceless systems and larps, but I will say I love the idea behind this game.

Personally I love the utilization of the technology to provide the atmosphere of isolation.

I have not played a game yet, but I may definitely adapt the system to one of my regular games.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
ViewScream, 1st Edition
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Teratic Tome
by Rich F. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 06/17/2013 09:05:08

The short summary: this book is great if you like tentacles, chitonous claws/exoskeletons, and exposed human female breasts, doubly so if you like two or more to be present on the same creature. Otherwise, not so much.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
Teratic Tome
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Teratic Tome
by Steven S. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 05/31/2013 20:02:33

The long version, as pulled from my first Phylactery of the Unvincible Stevillord ( http://www.nerdtitan.com/2013/05/27/phylactery-of-the-unvincible-stevillord-1st-edition/ ):

The copy for this product starts off “This enchiridion of entities should only be used by DMs inclined towards malfeasance, sadism, and base wrongdoing” and it is precisely spot-on. Only $2.62 as of this writing, this may be the best few bucks you have ever spent on an RPG product.

Geared for the d20/OSR crowd, Teratic Tome can be used for just about anything– even as an inspirational guide for what to throw into fantasy fiction. This book is old school in tone and presentation, and with only a single page of explanatory text, this manual of monsters kicks off right away and does not fuck around. Things get real right off the dire bat with the Acronical and don’t let up until Zombie, Verminated. In between all of that are some of the most interesting and downright evil creatures my eyeballs have ever barely not popped out of my head, screamed, and ran away from, well, screaming.

Author Rafael Chandler weaves an astonishing web of pain amercements for gleeful Gamemasters to throw at their players. Aberrations, undead, fully whatthefuckisthat class creatures… Like the multi-stage Farrago, which is the gaming equivalent of chucking your player’s characters into a woodchipper. The Farrago is “universally hated by all life forms, it is killed on sight by nearly every intelligent being that encounters it; still, no one knows where the entity comes from, or why its worms are found in every part of the world” and if it’s left long enough, it turns into an HD 30 “nightmarish melange of arms, legs, limbs, heads, mouths, and randomly placed eyes and spines” reeking of eggs and vinegar.

The art of Teratic Tome is an excellent assortment from a variety of talented sources. It really does read like the vicious Monster Manual you always wanted. Well, if you wanted a vicious Monster Manual and listen to a LOT of Slayer. This book is laid out in stunningly simple-but-effective fashion and is easy to look at and read.

If I have to pick a gripe, it’s that this book needs bookmarking in PDF. The one I bought didn’t have it, anyway. Really,that’s my only complaint. It’s all in alphabetical order, and scrolling through the two-column format, 120-page book is a breeze. [[UPDATE NOTE: This was corrected, so this gripe is thankfully worthless now-- huzzah!]]

This sucker gets 4.5 Baconlich Kings out of 5.

The short version: This monster manual will kick your ass. Not for kids, and not for wimpy players or GMs. Get your badass on and get this book.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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SlaughterGrid
by Steven S. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 05/31/2013 19:56:27

The long version, from my latest Phylactery of the Unvincible Stevillord ( http://www.nerdtitan.com/2013/05/27/phylactery-of-the-unvincible-stevillord-1st-edition/ ):

Since I loved the Teratic Tome, buying Rafael Chandler’s SlaughterGrid for $6.66 was an absolute no-brainer.

Also aimed at the d20/OSRIC/OSR crowd, the copy for this dread folio on this starts off with “Created by genocidal halflings aeons ago, SlaughterGrid is a strange and gruesome dungeon, avoided by all save the bravest or most foolhardy of adventurers.” And after reading through it, I would say this copy is quite correct. Upon opening the book (or PDF, in this case) I was treated to bookmarks– 1 point to Victory. Within the opening pages, Mr. Chandler has a list of all the songs he listened to whilst creating this product. It’s full of deliciously dark metal, black metal, death metal, and industrial metal music. By no means do you have to listen to that sort of music to enjoy this offering, but it certainly helps into understanding the tone.

Speaking of tone, Chandler’s tone throughout the book is rather casual. It’s akin to the tone James Raggi IV takes in his Lamentations of the Flame Princess products. By this I mean it’s irreverent, witty, and pretty damned funny. Oh, and dark, too. There really should be an official “grimdark” genre nowadays, as it would make advertising/cataloging this newer breed of RPGstuff easier to deal with.

Self-described as “pleasurably vile”, SlaughterGrid takes no prisoners and takes absolutely no shit when it comes to PC-murder. There’s really too much to go into in a spotlight feature like this, but the ad-copy high points are:

-An 18-area mini-hexcrawl to start you off -A three-level dungeon with 55 encounter areas -32 new monsters, including stygiacs, gold-whores, progenitors, and necro-otyughs -Weird treasure, dangerous magic items, and unpleasant surprises -Rules for thieving abilities, schemes, and weaponized monsters

Now that you’re processing the above, I will add that SlaughterGrid, of course, has some incredibly fucked up denizens (surprise!). Not only that, but everyone who dies while tromping through the SlaughterGrid ends up being resurrected through the Ovum, and they can garner “malformities” through this process. Eventually, such malformed resurrected adventurers will end up as something horrible. The table for resurrection results are deliciously awful.

Then there’s the gold-whores. They take your gold. It sucks. The more gold you have, the more gold-whores that appear. This makes having gold a bit of a problem. Actually, a lot of seemingly normal things in an adventurer’s life is a problem in the SlaughterGrid.

Art-wise, it’s a bit sparse, but what art there is fits very nicely. I would have liked more images for the monsters but illustration isn’t cheap, and Chandler’s elegantly non-complex layout and charmingly no-frills presentation doesn’t suffer for it. Also, the maps provided more than makes up for it. Furthermore, as a student of How to Font Properly, SlaughterGrid gets points for having very effective font usage.

Overall, this 48-page PDF is worth every goddamned penny.

It does have a few small editing gaffes, but otherwise it flows like diabolical honey and is one of the few adventures I’ve picked up in recent years I want to try out on an <strike>unsuspecting</strike> eager group.

I will grant this 4.5 incredibly well-deserved Baconlich Kings out of 5.

--

The short version: I absolutely love this product. Should be hilarious mayhem to unleash on your players. Especially if you tell them nothing in advance. Please not that SlaughterGrid is NOT for children. It's an 18+ product. Enjoy!



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
SlaughterGrid
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SlaughterGrid
by Shane O. [Featured Reviewer] Date Added: 05/19/2013 11:29:42

I really didn’t want to go back here. When I reviewed the Teratic Tome, I mentioned that I was going to need some time to recover from the twisted works of the sinister fiend Rafael Chandler. These few months have not afforded me the requisite recuperation necessary, and yet with the release of his first adventure – the unsubtlely-named Slaughtergrid – someone has to step up to warn the role-playing world about the horrors found herein. As no one else has done so yet, it falls to me.

The book – which has amusingly changed its titular game system to Gateways & Golems – opens with, of all things, a soundtrack. Actually, “soundtrack” is the wrong word, as these were the songs (a hundred or more) the author listened to when writing the material, rather than being music keyed to specific areas in the game. That said, this is probably the first real warning of what you’re going to get here, as showcased by listings of November Doom’s “They Were Left To Die” or Deicide’s “Hang In Agony Until You’re Dead.”

A brief backstory is given for the module, and this is where I think Chandler’s sense of humor shows through brightest: the backstory in several places utilizes random tables to determine elements of what happened. For example, the immediate need to enter the dungeon is because (Table 5) entered and haven’t been heard from since.

There are some notes given on running the dungeon. At first these are the usual fare of random encounter tables and how much experience and treasure the PCs can expect to find if they survive. However, things start to become more complex when notes are given regarding the use of thieving skills (alternate if the percentages mean rolling high or rolling low), your chance of tricking the monsters (make a roll opposed by their Intelligence score), weaponizing ooze monsters, etc.

The fun here begins when you read the section on what happens when you die in the Slaughtergrid. See, the dungeon that is the Slaughtergrid was once a gigantic animated statue of a naked woman, used as a war weapon. It’s long since fallen apart, however, leaving only the anatomically-correct pelvic and lower-torso areas still intact. Leaving aside the issue of entering the dungeon (and yes, it’s exactly what you think), when you die in the Slaughtergrid, the dungeon will immediately give birth to a clone of you…though this involves rolling on the mutations table, which I can assure you you do not want to do.

A map of the general region around the Slaughtergrid is given, which I found to be a pleasant surprise. Divided into hexes, there are no rules for travel times or surprise given. Rather, each hex is simply given a paragraph of description. These are, in keeping with the themes of body-horror, mostly encounters with creatures intent on committing violence, often sadistic, on other creatures, often the PCs. For example, the Monocerous in hex 502 is looking for a virgin to impale so that it can devour said virgin’s genitals. The PCs can either bring it one in exchange for information about the nearby areas, or fight it.

The Slaughtergrid dungeon itself is a huge three-level dungeon, spanning several dozen rooms. Each room is given about one to three paragraphs description, all of it generalized for the GM (in other words, there’s no “boxed read-aloud” text). Most also have several bullet points describing the most noteworthy features of the rooms.

Personally, I didn’t care for the bullet point format here. I found it slightly off-putting for its offhanded style of notation. While it’s never difficult to put these notes into the proper context for their room, the lack of narrative context here makes them feel like they were designer’s notes added as-is, rather than trying to put them into a more naturally-flowing narrative. It’s a comparatively minor point, but it feels jarring to read.

It’s in the dungeon itself that the adventure lets loose in all of its mutilated glory. Here we get all sorts of foul creatures and circumstances, like the NPC who, when starving, committed suicide, was reborn, and then went back and ate his old body. Or the torso of a previous adventurer that’s been hollowed out and put on display. Or the polyp-gate that, when passed between, causes you to eject a random internal organ while having a vision of someone you love suffering a long and painful death.

The artwork, I should mention, is fairly sparse here. There are only a handful of drawings, all black and white, but all depict some of the more shocking scenes from the dungeon, such as an orc being tortured by a draugr (undead creature), the Progenitor (the “final boss” of the dungeon, which is a creature that’s largely a composite of horrific sexual imagery), and my personal favorite, Kaiva Grey-Nail, the living example of what happens if you die and are resurrected in the Slaughtergrid too many times (it’s hard to tell that she used to be human).

Following the dungeon proper, a small set of NPCs (or, if you prefer, replacement PCs) are given, along with some oddly-extensive tables for names (divided into those for commoners, nobles, and royalty).

The monsters used in the adventure are given last, and this is no small thing. There are over thirty monsters here, all of them new. However, I felt that their novelty was somewhat undercut by the lack of illustrations of any of them, and that their descriptive text was reduced to a handful of bullet points. I couldn’t tell you what a stygiac looks like, for example, or what it does or anything similar. Just that if it hits you you’ll be cursed for 1d20 minutes from 1d6 different curses. Given how awe- (and nightmare-)inspiring the Teratic Tome was, it’s keenly palpable that these creatures aren’t quite living up to the same level of terror, even if they are primarily meant to be taken in the context of the dungeon.

If you’re a fan of Neoplastic Press, you’ll find Slaughtergrid to be the fulfillment of the promise made by the Teratic Tome. The horrific monsters there none too subtly offered adventures based around themes of torture and mutilation; here we have the first such adventure to do just that. Whereas the monsters in the TT had the potential to ravage your PCs, here that potential is actualized. This adventure says “a meat grinder for level 2 characters” on its front cover, and it means it.

I’m giving the adventure four stars only because those bullet point notations irked me. In the dungeon they were mildly annoying, but for the monsters at the end the sheer minimalism of their presentation was a bit too much. I applaud that a mini-monster manual was included here, but if that’s going to be the case, it should be more than stat blocks and a bullet point or two.

Having said that, the dungeon, as well as the environs, is a panoply of horror just waiting to be unleashed on your characters. Those who venture into the Slaughtergrid will find gratuitous levels of perversity and evil waiting for them, where even death is no escape from the horror. It’s almost elegant in its depravity, and will leave its mark on your PCs, one way or the other.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
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Creator Reply:
I truly appreciate the review, Shane! Damned decent of you. Point taken about the bulleted descriptions -- that's not an idea I'll pursue in my next dungeon. Quite gratifying to see that all this brutality was well-received. I must say, this is the kind of review that compels one to work even harder on the next project. A thousand thanks!
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Roll XX: Double Damage
by Sean F. [Featured Reviewer] Date Added: 04/11/2013 16:38:31

SEAN'S PICK OF THE DAY: Another one of those excellently cool "random tables to help the GM" books. These are such fantastic ideas! I like Newplastic Press's "Questions with Answers, and More Answers to Enhance" approach.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
Roll XX: Double Damage
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Teratic Tome
by Casey J. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 02/27/2013 16:11:33

This has to be one of the most refreshing monster books ever published. The book is laid out very well with excellent artwork. Reading the monster descriptions conjures up all kinds of interesting and horrifically entertaining scenarios. Definitely worth every penny and more. I'll definitely be putting this to good use. The only thing that is missing from the book though is bookmarks. That is a necessity when trying to look up monsters quickly. Other than that, this book is stellar and I highly recommend it to anybody who has a love for monster tomes.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Teratic Tome
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Creator Reply:
Thanks for the kind words, Casey! I've added bookmarks -- great idea! Best regards, Rafael
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Teratic Tome
by Timothy B. [Featured Reviewer] Date Added: 02/20/2013 17:05:12

The Teratic Tome is an "old school" monster book for OSRIC or any old School "Advanced" version of the game. What do you get? Well a lot. Let's start with some of the things that others have not all mentioned first. This book is 100% OGC. So if you want to use one of these horrors in one of your products go right ahead. Just abide by the OGL. There are a lot of reasons why you might want to use these monsters too. They are some of the most original horrors I have seen outside of indie horror games.

The layout and feel is evocative of those "monster manuals" of old. It does quite a nice job of it too. The art though is much better than what you would have seen circa 1980. The art varies in style, but all of it is quite good. Now is a good time to point out that the art and the monsters they depict are not for the faint of heart. There is a lot of "body horror" here. The grotesque mixed with the commonplace or even the erotic. The feeling is more Clive Barker than H.P. Lovecraft and I think that was a great direction to go.

Truthfully I would have picked this up for the demons and dragons alone, but there are 120 pages worth monsters here. Even the halflings are evil little buggers in this tome.

If you like horror and new creatures, and your players can handle it, then this is a great monster book. If you like horror and monster books in general, then this is great to have as well.

Plus who can argue with a $6.66 price tag?

Who should not get this? I don't know really. I mean I am not going to use any of these creatures in my games with my kids. So that does lessen the utility for me, but I can still use some ideas. And that is just as good.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Teratic Tome
by brianna S. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 01/29/2013 19:04:37

Teratic Tome is one of the few monster manual style books I've purchased, and there are quite a few reasons why I did. First and foremost is the monsters within are terrifying - haunting and thrilling, skin-crawling and nightmarish, but few have cliched, stereotypical stories. These monsters have life in them - the smells, the sounds, and the motivations of these creatures is detailed and gives a fuller world to build scary stories and bad dreams off of. The art is awesome, and it feels right even when it's just so, so wrong. I fully recommend Teratic Tome, even if you're just looking for some inspiration!



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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