A Review of Black Pudding: Heavy Helping Vol I

The first four issues of J V West's OSR zine, Black Pudding, are collected in the Heavy Helping - classes, adventures, monsters and all kinds of other content for dungeon-crawling fantasy games. The result is a thoroughly enjoyable resource compendium and reference book, set apart by its playful art, engaging style and consistent sense of fun.

The world of Black Pudding is one of classic sword and sorcery gaming, caricatured to almost parody levels. Barbarians are everywhere, all of them muscle-bound and/or voluptuous. Monsters are strange and otherworldly, with too many eyes and unpronounceable names full of Zs and Xs.

If this sounds like too much cliche for you, fear not. Black Pudding makes it work.

The book is split into several sections, so I'll do the same with my review, giving my thoughts on each in turn - but as we go I'll also be using each section to talk about the book as a whole.

Sheets

We begin with a collection of OSR character sheets, some for Labyrinth Lord that would work in pretty much any B/X-esque ruleset, and a few smaller ones for DCC characters.

Like almost all the art in this book, these are are hand-drawn black-and-white cartoons drawn by the author. The sheets manage to present unique and creative designs - one has you taking notes on an idol based on the cover of the AD&D player's handbook - but they still fulfill their practical purpose.

Classes

These for me are a highlight of the book. I could roll a d20 to select one of them - there's a table for doing just that later on - and I'd be excited no matter the result.

The tone for this section, and indeed the rest of the book, is set with the first entry. The Barbaribunny is an anthropomorphic rabbit with all the battle instincts and bloodlust of Conan himself. We also get a giant mole, a luchador and a goth wizard.

There are some slightly less left-field options, such as the Shield Maiden, but each one has an attention to detail that make them concise, flavourful, and intriguing. And not only are they all illustrated, but on many pages the text itself is also hand-written, giving a wonderful DIY feel and, here's that word again, sense of fun.

Now might be a good time to bring up the bawdy sexuality that runs through this book. It's only a subtle theme, never overt or even close to pornographic - I wouldn't bring it up at all if it weren't an anomaly among most generic RPG content, which is either blandly chaste or hypersexualised edgelord nonsense.

If the many cartoonish illustrations of busty amazon warriors didn't clue you in, the text itself will - this book fucks. The Chainmail Chick, for instance, gets an AC bonus when wearing that infamous fantasy trope, the chainmail bikini, and has various class abilities dedicated to using her wiles and beating up enemies who lech over her. See also: the Witch's magic just flat out works better when she's naked.

These things are obviously a matter of personal preference, but I'm thoroughly impressed with how sexuality is handled in this book. There's a healthy mix of pantomime innuendo and straight-up sex appeal, but none of it ever feels exploitative or unjustified. It's all deliberately over the top and in good taste, like a dungeon-crawling burlesque show.

Items

A few pages of magic swords and spell books with their own short lists of brand-new thematic spells.

These are fairly mechanically focused, with +1s or Nat 20s or 1-in-6 chances of this, that and the other. I personally prefer a more "fluff"-based (and therefore system-neutral) approach with magic items and spells, but these are solid options and will definitely make your players feel powerful.

The Glittering Tome of the Silver Sage is a nice idea, with spells based on various aspects of silver: reflection, killing lycanthropes, even a "silver tongue". I'm just not sure that, for example, the silver tongue spell needs to interact with any mechanics - it changes the caster's CHA to 19 and causes a save v Spell, minus the caster's CHA mod. The first sentence, which says that "the caster's words sound true even if they are false", is enough for an OSR spell.

This is perhaps my only pressing criticism of Black Pudding's content. It's a book of hacks, of mechanics and statblocks, and it manages to make them engaging almost effortlessly, but with its resolutely old-school stylings none of the fiction is anything we haven't seen before.

Thankfully though, I don't think Black Pudding needs to be groundbreaking at all - because it does what it wants, and it does it well.

Monsters

The Black Bestiary is full of wacky creatures, very much in the vein of classic monster manuals. The Binoculon and Orgthool fit right in with the old-school feel of beholders and otyughs, perfect for dungeon crawlers who think they've seen everything.

If those kinds of monsters are your bag, this book is worth the price on its beasties alone - there is an embarrassment of riches here. Oh, and this entire section is hand-drawn and hand-written. It's delightful.

My personal favourite critter is probably the Angel Mama, a fiend from goblin folklore who turns slain gobs into shadow-men and commands them as a little army of attendants. I can't wait to spring her on a batch of players who thought they'd seen the last of those pesky goblins.

Who am I kidding, I'll end up using most of these. There will certainly be a Yomgarf in my next adventure.

Meatshields

Or "hirelings", if you want to be fancy.

Not only do they come with a mercifully concise statblock and inventory, all the info you'd need to run them, but each has their own pay rate, and a different likelihood on whether or not that pay can be haggled down. 

There are... over 50? of these guys, and each gets their own illustration (plenty of curves on display, of course, plus a few bulging loincloths). The personalities come across in the cartoons, but also in the single-sentence quips of backstory and a fun little feature that lists each hireling's turn-ons and turn-offs. These manage to be both cute little asides and practical information for the GM who wants to play them.

It's the only hireling resource I've ever read that's made me want to use them, and the only one I think I'm likely to ever need.

Adventures

Not enough content for you yet? Black Pudding doesn't skimp on the adventures. There are 7 fully illustrated and mapped adventure sites - a few dungeon crawls, a couple less traditional locales and a mile-wide hex.

Each seem easy enough to read and run, with information clearly presented around the map like a keyed diagram. It's very One Page Adventure Contest, and indeed most of these are a single page, though there's enough content packed into them that you could easily get a whole session from each. Great for one-shots.

As of writing this, I've run the first one-page dungeon, the Buried Temple of K'Lixtra, and it's been well received. This is a deadly module in an unapologetically old-school style, but it isn't trying to be anything else, and it works well.

I don't think any of these adventures are particularly groundbreaking in design, but I don't really care. They're well written and I'll be glad to have them on hand to throw at my players the next time a good old dungeon is needed.

House Rules

As it sounds, a compendium of house rules for OSR systems. Individually they represent hacks and add-ons for your system of choice, but the section is so exhaustive that you can, as I have, use this as a rulebook and run a game from it wholesale.

The content here is dense, but clearly displayed and simple as pie to use. Character creation as written is a ton of fun, with optional tables to flesh out a character in minutes with a background, appearance and other gameable minutiae.

Also included are takes on the OSR classic classes, from Fighter, Thief and Wizard to Clerics, Elves, Dwarves and Halflings, each one managing to feel fun and engaging despite the fact that you've probably seen most of this a hundred times before.

Whether or not you like this section will depend on whether or not you like your house rules as they are, but there's just so much here that there's no way you won't be able to find something you'll want to use.

tl;dr

This book is at once a collection of various disparate but intriguing homebrew elements, and a self-contained OSR starter set all on its own. The Heavy Helping is just that, jam-packed with content that's both unapologetically classic and utterly charming in tone.

The book reminds me a bit of bands like funk duo Chromeo - bear with me here. Those guys aren't trying to be groundbreaking, they're 70s through and through, almost to the level of parody; light-hearted, affectionate riffs on the classics. They know what they want to be, and that's old school, but presented with so much of their own style and swagger that they earn their place among fresher, more contemporary sounds.

What I'm saying is: you owe it to yourself to get your hands all sticky with Black Pudding.

T&T Adventures Japan (review/readthrough)

I came across something pretty intriguing in my FLGS this weekend.

I'm often talking about my love for Japanese TRPGs, and bemoaning the fact that so few of them get translated and make it over here. There's a wealth of creativity going on in that design space.

So from a low shelf, a flash of brightly coloured katakana text caught my eye.

T&T, Tunnels and Trolls, is not a Japanese RPG; it was published by Flying Buffalo in '75 as a more lightweight, lighthearted take on D&D that was most notable for its solo play adventures. It was quickly translated and actually came to Japan before D&D did.

Apparently the Japanese market embraced it - I'd imagine the solo play element as well as the fact it only uses d6s were boons to a fledgling roleplay scene - and it's still popular there to this day. They run a magazine that includes adventures, "replays" and other stuff.

This book is a collection of materials from the first three issues of that magazine, translated into English and published in a one-off magazine-style booklet, along with a "mini rules" version of the core book.

... I mean, that's pretty fascinating, right? I dunno. Maybe it's just me. I hadn't heard about this anywhere, so it took me by surprise. I was just browsing, but I had to pick it up!

This isn't going to be an in-depth review, but I'll skim through the book and point out things that got my attention.

pics taken with my phone, can only apologise. Digression: even with my toddler-level Japanese I can tell that the text above the logo reads "Tunnel THE Troll Magazine", not "Tunnels and Trolls". An old quirk of translation? Is Tunnel a character? Mysteries abound.

First off, this is a breezy little 60-page paperback. There's a full, weighty tome of rules for T&T's current "deluxe" edition, which the book makes reference to, but it shreds those core rules down to the essentials for this introductory version. The rules themselves only take up only a couple of pages actually, which makes me wonder why the full book needs 200+.

Also noteworthy: the game is still published by Flying Buffalo, and the original designer from the seventies, Ken St. Andre, edited this book and is still writing content! I don't think there's any other company from that era that's still running, still producing the same product line and still has the same designer making the game? That's pretty cool.

when she says "Berserk is my favourite anime"

We open on a manga story of some game characters having an adventure. These comics are called "replays" in Japan and are hugely popular - rulebooks normally begin with a huge pagecount of story, told through pictures and reported text, of an actual game session.

The culture around replays is a big part of TRPGs in Japan. The print industry is still chuggin' along there, and it's how a lot of folks find and consume new media, with replays fitting in nicely in your local bookstore's manga section. Some core books are basically just story, with a few pages at the back of "here's how you can do that yourself" rules. Sometimes replays become their own series - anime like Record of Lodoss War started as actual play reports.

This manga is clearly more focused on introducing the reader to the game than being a story, which is to be expected. The character conversations are all very meta - I wonder if there's a humour to this that gets lost in translation.

The translation and tone seems very kid-friendly - not what I'm used to in RPGs so I was a bit disarmed at first, but I warmed to it. The whole book has that tone and I think it's valuable in context, since kids are going to be picking this up off the shelves like a comic book.

The art is also fun, it's like manga meets old D&D art.

ah, a wall of text, tables to roll on and paragraphs about what a saving throw even is. familiar territory for the RPG fan

The rules themselves are scant, but functional. The layout is a bit haphazard, and this isn't really a functional artefact for the gaming table - we're lead through character creation in a rambling, roundabout way. Helpful for reading and learning, maybe, and the friendly tone leans into the kid-friendly aspect I mentioned. But it doesn't make for a great reference book.

The editing is also slack - one part refers the reader back a few pages to another rule (by implication only!), but the rule being referred to is only mentioned as one that's left out of this mini rules edition.

The rules themselves are decent. Roll for stats, you have 8 of them which seems excessive but the game makes use of fairly well. There are "kindreds" for being an elf, dwarf or fairy, which give stat buffs and debuffs, and the three standard classes. Classes are done really well: wizards get spells but can't use weapons well, warriors are great with weapons and armour but not magic, and rogues aren't good or bad with either, they just have to work it out themselves. No builds or level up bonuses.

A big thing is that bonuses are the whole attribute: it's not "16 STR means +3", it's "16 STR means +16". The larger number ranges seem unwieldy at first, at least to me as someone who's more familiar with newer, tighter systems, but the logic is sound and the maths behind it all is solid. The whole game is tied up in those attributes as well: you level them up individually by spending XP, and take damage to them instead of a Hit Point pool. It's all very neat, in a slightly endearingly clumsy way, if that makes any sense.

Magic works on a kind of MP system, only the MP is one of your attributes, which again is nicely neat. The spells are standard old school dungeoneering fare, with adorable names in the vein of Japanese TRPG Ryuutama. They have a nice amount of flavour and some even have shenanigan potential, something I've talked about before as being a spell's most valuable asset.

Overall, not bad. I don't know how T&T played in previous editions but this seems fairly similar to some modern OSR-style games in the way it takes elements of play from older systems and slims them down. It's a little jumbled, but nicely light and comprehensive enough to run with. I'd play it.

For GMs, there are treasure tables and monster stat guides, kind of. Roll difficulties are codified, rather than just being "uh, GM picks a number that sounds about right". It's a decent start, which I suppose is all they were aiming for.

oh no! that's me!

There are a bunch of adventures in here! A tiny starter one, a solo play one, and another GM-ed one that seems designed to lead into a campaign. All these adventures are written by the Japanese publishers and designers, and have been translated specially for this product.

They're decently written, a little railroady but a solid start for a new GM. There are nice moments where the adventure sets up an obstacle and just sort of goes "yeah, doesn't look good for the players, does it? they'd better work out what they're gonna do, hadn't they?" which is a good lesson for new GMs. Again, this would be such a great little physical thing to give to a kid.

The starter adventure is cute, very short but inventive enough, nicely self-contained and surprisingly lethal, which works in its favour. There's a strong old-school sensibility running through things here. I haven't played the solo adventure so I haven't looked through it but the setup is intriguing enough that I want to at least give it a shot. It reminds me a lot of old Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, in article form. And the campaign-starter is serviceable, again with a fun premise.

It's essentially standard fantasy. There's nothing groundbreaking in here, but that's fine. I'm maybe selling it a little short here in fact, since I'm used to reading adventures from blogs that blow my mind with every random table entry - while there isn't much going on here outside of goblins, witches and trolls, the adventures at least use those elements in fairly engaging ways. The players get shrunk and can fall into a goblin's kitchen through the extractor fan. It's not going to win any awards, but it's more interesting in a few pages than Lost Mines of Phandelver is is many more.

there's a flippin' mail-order catalogue at the back where you can get adventures and dice and fridge magnets! kawaii~

And the witch, by the way, looks very classic cartoon with her green skin, but it turns out that's just makeup to hide the fact that she's from a cannibal race with skin like glass. The adventure text specifically says that perceptive characters will notice this by being able to see into her throat when she opens her mouth to speak. There you go, there's some New Weird for ya. Not bad.

Oh, and one cool thing that's noted when the manga characters come back at the end: in this world, every magical creature is as sentient and intelligent and varied and "boring" as humans. It's a small thing, but it gives the game both a sense of fairytale fun and sets up a game world where "I stab the orc" isn't going to be anyone's first port of call. Makes me think of The Hobbit, where Bilbo talks to the trolls and listens to the spiders and all that. Very cute, very gameable.

what more do you need in your elfgames?

Well, that's about all that stood out to me at first glance. There's a decent amount packed here, and while it's nothing that's going to revolutionise the gaming scene, it's a fun little product that's worth the price, especially as a gift to any youngsters in your life who are fantasy fans.

It's also got me yet more enthused about the role of zines, pamphlets and other shortform media in RPGs. I shared a cool twitter thread on G+ the other day about this, and it's been on my mind since. After picking this up, along with the Dungeon Crawl Classics starter set which is a magazine-type thing, I'm sold.

Shortform is cheaper than a tome on both producer and consumer, easier to carry and use, great for light rulesets and, if you're good at what you do, you can stuff a few pages full with a whole lot of goodness. I'll be announcing a little project of my own fairly soon, and I think a booklet format is the way to go :)

Songbirds RPG "Review" (Read, Rambling Musings Thereon)

"Songbirds" is a kinda OSR-adjacent fantasy game based on Into the Odd.

I hesitate to call this a review, as I haven't played the game (yet). But having read it I wanted to write about my thoughts. Turns out I had a few... this is long. There's a tl;dr at the bottom.

The game is pay-what-you-want so give it a look if you like the sound of it, and pay for it if you enjoy what you find. (Always, always support independent creators.)

Oh and no one asked me or paid me to write this, I guess that's a thing that needs mentioning?

***

Character & Party Creation

The first page of Game Rules is the basics of character creation, which takes up one page. This makes me happy. There's even a list of item prices on the same page - you could just print this bit out and put it on the table in front of your players, it's all the basic stuff they'll need outside of class abilities.

Character creation itself consists of rolling for stats, of which there are 3. You then have a few more story-focused things you need to decide for your character - all of which offer a basic example to use or a table to roll on, instead of making it up yourself.

I should point out here that so far, this is pretty much exactly what I want from a system, and even the stuff I'm less immediately keen on doesn't give me any cause for concern, because it's so brief and easy to use or bypass.

The suggested fluff for your character is: "What you say you are", "What you don’t say about yourself", and "What you actively hide about yourself". Every sample NPC in the GM's section has these questions answered too; they seem quite useful in that context especially.

Next page: your party is a "Gang", and every player has a role. I do something similar for my 5e game - people can be the mapmaker or take notes on story or make diary entries. It's always nice to see this stuff codified in a game, giving players meta roles to latch onto that are obviously and directly important.

There's then some narrative stuff about your gang and what your characters mean to each other, which is... ok? I could take it or leave it. A table or something here might feel more approachable, though potentially restrictive.

Your gang is in 100 gold pieces of debt. This is good.

Classes

Each class has one major ability that gives them some kind of advantage in play. One big ability per class, that's your "thing". No builds, no paths. I really like this kind of design (I'm using it myself for a thing), and it's a strong fit for the OSR feel of the system.

Some of these classes might be more "powerful" than others, but "power levels" in that D&D 3/4 sense aren't something the game concerns itself with greatly, so that's ok.

The flavour of some of the classes is just fantastic. You can be an Immortal, which means you can't die - until you're bested in single combat, then you die and the person who killed you becomes Immortal instead. Another instant fave of mine was the Princess, who sends half of all the money they earn back home to their village, Pokemon Gen 2 style. The village can then grant you gifts of appreciation, and sends care packages every day. It's all kind of on-the-edge-of-narrative-gaming-but-not-quite, and I feel like I could get used to it.

The Class section is also where one of the most interesting sides of the game comes into play, which is the Player/Character separation. Some classes demand actions or information of the Player, not the Character.

For example, if you're the Drunken Master class, you can get combat benefits by you the Player drinking alcohol. The Storm Caller gets a magic power depending on what the weather's like in the real world as you play.

I can absolutely see why this might put some people off the game instantly - we're here for Immersion dammit! For me though, the concept is intriguing. Songbirds successfully does something through its rules that very few games ever do, at least not well. Reading this book, I can picture the game being played at the table, and I can tell how and why these rules might be fun. It might not sound like much, but that's about the highest praise I can offer a game I haven't played yet.

Art

As the book continues, we get a full page art spread with a small text box giving level progression rules. I think now's a good time to talk about the art.

Sara Kipin is an artist whose work I've admired for a short while now, and her work on Songbirds is fantastic. There's a roughness of line and a watercolour feel, combined with an attention to shape and geometry in places that mingle beautifully on the page. The book switches between black and white, full colour and some more muted palettes, but the whole thing feels consistent.

This is very clearly Artwork, not just design or concept art. Some pieces feel more like traditional illustrations, even tapestry or stained glass. These are things which modern, mainstream books like the 5th Edition rules do once or twice but not nearly enough.

It might have been nice to see more of player characters interacting, or doing things together, rather than these single-character images, but I can live without that.

There are also battlemaps by Dyson Logos, which are characteristically clear and practical.

..."OSR-Adjacent"?

It's a term, far too vague to be useful, that I've been using in my head to describe some things I'm working on, and it fits here. I'm not sure of the author's age, but I've found it to be a fairly generational thing - people who like the OSR style of play, but, having not grown up with D&D or even D&D byproducts (coming fresh into the RPG scene in the last few years) feel no compulsion towards some of its legacy elements.

Again, I can't speak for the author as I don't know them or their work prior to this, but Songbirds seems in keeping with this (read, my) approach to the DIY scene. In the same way that the OSR looks at old school gaming and slays a few sacred cows in order to present a fresh, updated and ultimately very new experience, this "OSR-adjacent" thinking (I need a better name), presumes no cow to be sacred, only situationally nutritious.

Songbirds even mixes in narrative elements like referring to parts of sessions as Scenes and Episodes, which for this cow metaphor would be... I dunno... quinoa or something. No Vancian magic, no spell lists. Magic is straightforward and creative, using a system of syllables similar to the indie one-page mech game Newtype. Highlights of OSR play are cherry-picked and used to great effect (we get a Carousing table!), but there's no sense that a List of Things to Put in Your Fantasy RPG is being followed. You get equipment lists with prices, but they're pared down further than even LotFP's brilliant inside cover tables.

Combat

Combat occupies a very specific level of crunch. There's a lot more here than, say, Maze Rats, but it doesn't approach nearly the complexity of 5th. It still feels very 5th, though? More so than anything else in the game. I doubt I'd use everything here if I ran a session, but I suppose it's nice to have it to fall back on.

Fave bits here: The Death rules offer more potential in three simple options than most systems I've run. The entirety of Plane combat (this book has planes!) takes up about 50 words and is both mechanically solid and evocative.

Other Bits

I can feel this beginning to turn into both an in-depth analysis and a lofty-minded piece about the OSR in general, neither of which I would wish upon anyone. So I'll skim over some other parts of the book that stick out to me:

- It is specifically mentioned that you roll to avoid danger, not to just do stuff. Thank the Lawd. Yet another thing that aligns with how I run games and write rules.

- Vices are mentioned a few times, and there's a simple little rule or two you can use for things like drug addiction that seem like they'd work well in play.

- There's a flat cost to living each day in-game. In fact, more than a few mechanics link back to the idea of monetary cost. This is good in many ways (better than 5th Edition's piles of gold) but I feel like not paying enough attention to money might upset some game elements, which is not a situation I want to be in.

- Anyone can start worshipping a thing and be its "Cleric", that's cool.

- There's a whole section for Dream Quests that you can go on while you sleep off the effects of some huge battle or important event. You hunt an animal using random tables to set up the encounter, plus there are strange, real life consequences for succeeding or failing the Dream. That's Good Shit.

- There's a calendar and characters have birthdays, which is something I wrote about on my first post here.

- The GM's section is thorough and gives good material without being prescriptive. The material also does a job of conveying the implied setting, which I'm enjoying.

- This game stats monsters like 5e wishes it could stat monsters. I want to homebrew baddies for this system straight away. The statblocks and accompanying info are a bit more in depth than most OSR statblocks though, so I can see prep being a bit more work.

- Magic Item samples are solid. You get more of the Player/Character separation mechanics here, which are just great. As far as normal items, it's all very classic OSR, all good stuff.

- Just the level and inclusion of Flavour throughout is *chef kisses fingers*

- There's a mechanic for making friends which I almost glossed over but is hugely elegant. I'm not completely sold on how it would work in play, I'd like to try it though.

- There are different types of damage, one for each Stat it would appear. But the Damage section of the rules only lists one, with the other mentioned in passing in some other sections. Are the others highly situational? When are they used?

- One thing I haven't mentioned much are the GM resources. There are a healthy amount of them and they seem useful, but I'll have more to say about them once I've actually run the game.

Stacking?

Ok so I have to put this somewhere. There's a stacking mechanic, kinda like Dread? But with a set of polyhedrals? I think? It's mentioned a few times in passing as a variant resolution option for certain subsystems, but never codified in one place.

Don't know if I'm being dumb, but while that seemed a fun concept, it wasn't presented in a way that made me feel I could understand or make use of it.

Gimme That tl;dr

In short, I like this game a lot. I feel a certain... kinship, almost, to the design and intent. It needs a good proofread, and I suspect some more playtests, but it's professional enough that I wasn't put off by its presentation. It's generic enough that it fits in with other fantasy DIY games as opposed to hyper-specific storygames, but even so the tone and setting are still the big hooks for me.

Obviously these impressions are all very personal. No game is for everyone, but if you like my stuff I have a feeling you could have fun with Songbirds. I'm going to try running it some time soon myself, I'll post results here if I do.