Hero System 6th Edition Dethroned by Grimtooth as "Game most Likely to Stop a Bullet."

I picked up a copy of the Silver-Foil leatherette cover, 620 page edition of Grimtooth's Ultimate Traps Collection. The book is larger than all three D&D 5E manuals combined. It looks larger than all of the Grimtooth's books it holds within, combined, probably due to thicker quality pages than the originals? It looks terrifyingly large.

This is a glorious collector's edition, and worth it to secure the special silver/gold goil version with 160 extra pages of content, including Traps Bazaar and Grimtooth's Dungeons of Doom. It remains suitably generic (although in the back are some notes on AD&D and T&T conversions for some bits), but note that Goodman Games also released a special module 87.5 for Dungeon Crawl Classics titled Grimtooth's Museum of Death, so if you want the totally complete Grimtooth experience not even the massive Ultimate Grimtooth's Traps book will cover it! Sadly the DCC module does not offer DT&T conversions, but it's easy enough to extrapolate DCC into DT&T mechanics (hint to any DT&T fans out there: if you love DT&T, I can promise you that you'll also enjoy DCC, which covers a very similar aesthetic and gritty fantasy-meets-high-weirdness feel that DT&T does).

The big book is $80 MSRP but I found a copy for $64. It's worth $80 though, so if you want to have the final, definitive resource on dungeon delving traps, find a copy.

Grimtina is actually in this module, with a terrifying chainsaw. She's like Harley Quinn if Harley were the love child of Hades and Ereshkigal.

Grimtooth Traps Collection Kickstarter

Goodman Games is doing the Grimtooth Traps Collection as a Kickstarter. This is a 460 page compilation of all the original Grimtooth's Traps books from Flying Buffalo back in the 80's, complete with the original content, which was built for easy use in any system under FB's Blade/Catalyst line of products. From the sounds of it there may be some extra Dungeon Crawl Classics content in there as well. A hardcover will set you back $50 or a softcover is $35.....or you can do like I do and wait patiently for the actual July 2015 release to buy a retail copy. In this case I think Goodman Games has a sterling reputation for timeliness so I am sure we can count on the release being pretty close to on-time.

Watch the video, it's well worth it!





As a total aside, does anyone remember the cartoon illustrations of Michael von Glahn? He did work for some of the Grimtooth books,  as well as other products such as the Murphy's Rules cartoon in Space Gamer and he also illustrated (at no cost) for my old fanzine The Sorcerer's Scrolls. Michael did one of the best maps I ever owned for my original campaign world back in the day, too. I have been out of touch with him for all these years, and he doesn't have an internet presence, either....which can mean nothing, I've learned, other than that some people are very good at staying off the grid. If Michael is still out there I would love to reconnect.

Grimtooth's Traps Compilation from Goodman Games

Did you know about this? I sure didn't, until wandering over to Goodman Games to see what was new for Dungeon Crawl Classics, that is....my proclivity for collecting DCC modules has reached a fever pitch as I plot ways to either actually run DCC at some point or convert the modules to D&D 5E....because frankly it wouldn't be too hard, and the spicy zip that DCC brings to weird fantasy is well worth the effort.

Anyway, it looks like Flying Buffalo has joined in an unholy union with Goodman Games to produce a definitive hardcover collection of all the Grimtooth books, as originally presented with no alterations (such as was done with the Necromancer Games' D20 edition).

This absolutely MUST be on my game shelf.

Dungeon Crawling, Classic Style

I finally have DCC deluxe in my grasp, along with modules 66.5 (stuck in the big black book), 67 and 68. This is one of those rare tomes that evokes a sense of "game manual as art" aesthetic in me....something that rarely has happened before (Nobilis might be the last time I felt a game book truly qualified as art). It is also extremely well written and engaging. It's not often I start on page one and then proceed from there like a "real book"....for the first read-through anyway, I find I don't want to jump around randomly like with most RPGs, I want to absorb this thing sequentially.

I may phase Pathfinder out on one of the nights. Right now Wednesdays are all Pathfinder but we're moving in a week or two to a Pathfinder/4E split, rotating between the two so each has an ongoing bi-weekly campaign. On saturday the split right now is 4E/C&C. I may either boot Pathfinder on Wednesday night or 4E on Saturday night (but give it a few sessions for a nice mini-campaign, first) and then slam them with DCC.....this is a game that demands to be played.