Rock & Roar Lauches! Shadowdark and OSE Bestiaries Based On Classic Rock/Pop/Metal & More

“Rock and Roar”–our next crowdfunding project has just launched!  Check it out, get more samples, and watch the super-fun spoof video on the Kickstarter page. The project is an OSR bestiary with creature concepts based on classic rock/pop/metal & more song titles and band names.  The project offers two books–one with stats for Shadowdark, and the other has the same monster concepts and art but with stats for Old-School Essentials (OSE, a faithful B/X or early D&D clone).

Many of the creatures just use the song title or band name–the concept isn’t further related to the lyrics or band. Some have a couple of homages such as an ability’s name matches a song lyric.  And a couple have several of these nods.

Each book will have at least 50 monsters, plus appendices for a fun setting map with locations like “Fields of Gold”, “The Great Wide Open”, “Stairway to Heaven”, “Small Town”, etc.; Magic Items like a Glass Tiger and Rolling Stones; NPCs such as “Roxanne” and “Johnny B Goode”; and lists of alternate spell names such as “Wrapped Around Your Finger” for Charm Person.

The book format/size is A5, about 1/2 a US Letter page–similar to the Shadowdark and OSE books. Each monster gets its own page with a short backstory/ecology, stats and abilities, and charts of alternate powers or idea generators (like ways to replace a character’s eye if the “Eyes Without A Face” sucked it out). And the layout of the book is more interesting than a standard 1/4 page image in the corner and 2 columns of text–but not too distracting. Our “Bricks in the Wall” has the bricks as the background with the mortar separating the text blocks on the bricks. Here is a sample Shadowdark creature followed by a sample OSE creature: