This is "a variety of resources for running freeform tabletop games" by Michael Raston of The Lizardman Diaries. Anyone who has tracked this blog for a while will have seen me plug Infinigrad and other pieces of genius scattered across the Lizardman Diaries blog. This book is a handy compilation with some of the best of those.
Bigger and slimmer than I expected - 56 pages of A4 in the soft cover I got off Lulu. The art is Michael Rastons trade mark out-of-copyright mashups. I respect the mans patience in searching up his source material and hacking it all together. A long time advocate of 'take your inspiration from an image', his works have always had a certain aesthetic that has tended towards the baroque in previous publications (A Blasphemous Roster being first to mind) but here I like how there is a clean seperation between the content and the tables making the crunch more accessible.
So what do you get in here?
First we get 2 pages of Kontext Spiel d6 - universal freeform rules
Next 18 pages of Generic Room Stocker - random tables
Next 11 pages of A Land of Peace and Rot - a setting as tables
Then 19 pages of Super Hero RPG - a supers game
Lastly 4 pages Freeform Skirmish Referee - a wargame
Opening with the Kontext Spiel rules - 2 pages in 3 columns each, essentially one page on 'how to play RPGs' in a very condensed form, another page of character creation and conflict resolution. One page from the Generic Room Stocker also serves as the character generator. This is all light and loose, enough to govern a game but definitely relying a lot on the DM to make the calls.
Next we have the generic room stocker which is worth getting the book for on its own. A third of the book with generators for places, what is in the room, atmosphere, ornaments, inhabitants, traps, devices, tons of stuff. This is the type of content that made me a fan of the Lizardman Diaries in the first place - nested and interwoven spark lists with real variety in them to tumble you out of your creative ruts and set alight the fires of creativity. This is the author at his best putting universal tools in all our hands. I built a whole campaign off the previous generation of generators in the Blasphemous Roster, I can see these getting a similar amount of hard use in session prep and at the table. This is going to be bookmarked and within easy reach from here on.
A Land of Peace and Rot is a setting built as random tables - a dreamscape, an enchanted island or a demi-plane - any of these could be ways to integrate it to your table - beyond playing directly as standalone. The list of sample PCs could be also be NPCs. We get a quasi-hexcrawl map with six chunked out regions, each of which is keyed and described and gets some of the authors trademark mashup art. Beyond the initial six locations we get generators for continuing to explore which again provide more cool tools. These all lean towards the dream-like, abandoned and weird flavourwise but certainly could help with the fantasy hinterlands.
Next the Super Hero RPG opens with 4 pages of rules, introducing how to do super powers within lightweight d6 gaming and then tables and tables of powers, appearances and backstory to create your super hero and more tables to generate story arcs, factions, places missions and twists! Whether or not you want to run Supers games, all these random tables are great fodder for anything being run in a contemporary plus/minus setting. Could also feed Cyberpunk missions, space colony anything, back to steampunk and gas-lamp fantasy with a little pruning. More tools!
Lastly we have - Freeform Skirmish Referee - a light wargaming ruleset. Again this relies a lot on the referee making the calls on difficulty based on descriptions of the units involved and their own best judgement but this could well fill a niche out there. I am far off my turf commenting on how this freeform wargaming ruleset stacks up against other options out there, I will defer judgment to others but certainly a nice addition and I have been watching games of this play out across the authors twitter so people are getting mileage out of it.
In short, with this book and a couple of d6's you have everything you need to build and run fantasy or super hero RPGs or wargames. Even if you decide you hate the concept of light weight systems and d6s are a tool of the devil, the thick slice of random generators in this book are well worth having and I can see this going in beside my d30 Sandbox Companion and Worlds Without Number on my reference shelf.
You can get it on Lulu or other items from Gorgzu Games on DriveThruRPG
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