Quote from: SHARK on December 28, 2024, 09:29:05 AMGreetings!

Melan, good sir! Could you expand upon and go into more detail about your assessment of Zak S's Vornheim book? I think it is interesting how this book is proclaimed as all that and a bag of chips--and yet, for many, the landing impression seems distinctly uninspired and mediocre.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

It is a book of four main things: design techniques, random tables, the setting itself, and the adventures.



The design techniques - the main draw - are flashy gimmicks which are ultimately parlour tricks. They seem wild and different because they are not how things were being done before, but they do not produce something substantially better. For example, it offers a technique to generate street systems on the spot by drawing a bunch of intersecting numbers on the page. Is it a workable method for drawing a street-level map? Yes, but so is scribbling quasi-random things on a piece of paper. Die-drop tables are a similar concept. You chuck a bunch of dice on the table, and read their relative positions and sides as a sort of landscape. Can it be used to create a complex, interrelated system? Yes, but it is only novel insofar as it uses a slightly different way to get oracular results. The real innovation here is using oracular results (random rolls or "found" patterns) to serve as a source of inspiration. That's the foundational innovation, and these techniques are specific applications of it.



Consider another example: two charts that are, basically, things that could be replicated with simple random rolls on a table, but are presented here with a gimmicky technique and a piece of art. It isn't any more original, it is just a more annoying way of doing something than something put together in Microsoft Excel. It's different for the sake of being different.

The random tables are more useful. They cover things like what you can find when you find a body, random omens, random aristocrats, and so on. The results are maybe a bit too wacky (e.g. a random magic effect that turns one of the caster's eyes into a spider that scurries off), but they set the tone of the setting. But many old-school people have made fun, eccentric tables, they go back to the Precambrian with Ready Ref Sheets and the DMG, and Matt Finch turned them into an art form in the Tome of Adventure Design. The really great random tables are those that build deep associations and make connections in your mind. These tables are closer to lists of concrete ideas - fine, but they don't stand that tall.

The setting, including the adventures, is modern urban fantasy based on stuff like Perdido Street Station and maybe Viriconium (I honestly don't know this corner of fantasy very well). It is original in the sense that old-school D&D hadn't done a setting like this before, although, to be fair, it hadn't done an adaptation of the World of Darkness either, because it just wasn't what old-school D&D was about (and no, it was not just about endless clones of Keep on the Borderlands either, which tends to be the reflexive accusation). This is basically the equivalent of doing a different genre with the usual game, which is something gamers have done forever (I knew someone who ran an AD&D dungeon crawl with Cyberpunk2020 back in the mid-1990s, so he was before his time). It seems a bit haphazard for me; more a collection of disparate elements than something with a powerful central theme. I think Towers of Krshal, which came out around the same time, did this concept better, with more poetry and imagination despite being a lot more bare-bones. But that's arguing about taste, really.



The adventures are quite bad. Once you peel away the high-concept premise and the scrawly art used throughout the book, they are simplistic affairs made up of a few rooms and random stuff. The encounters are mostly elementary stuff with a fancy reskin. You can see it in the medusa example posted above: simple door trap, simple descriptive room, medusa statues, Ye Olde Sadde Tragedie Roome with an alarm, a dining room, a bathroom, and so on. It's all surface over basic bitch dungeon encounters. There is a random table to determine where the medusa is located, which is just filler (it is reproduced twice for no good reason). This is crap.

Old-school gaming has produced tons of excellent adventures - tons of junk, too (oh man!), but this is one of the areas where it is head and shoulders over the rest of gaming because the good stuff is really good, and there is solid, honest craft to be found there. The adventures in Vornheim are just a fancy coat of paint hiding this absolute nothing. This seems to be a pattern with Zak's later work too, since Red and Pleasant Land relies in the same sleight of hand while being even more underwhelming in its scenarios.

Ultimately, this is not a "bad bad" book - that would be different. But it is really style over substance, and its substance is very light. Which is what makes it mid.

Thank you for that post. It has shown me that I'm really not at all interested in Vornheim. I'd have been very disappointed had I paid money for that shit.

Quote from: Candide_In on December 23, 2024, 12:37:43 PM

Quote from: Melan on December 23, 2024, 02:51:01 AMIt is very mid.

I have not so many experiences in ttrpg. Can you advise me ttrpg book about running a city? This book must be printed not so long ago so I can buy it.

I meant to answer this some time ago but here we are.  I'll leave this here in case you someone else comes along who wants this answer.

Citybook series from Flying Buffalo is a great series for urban fantasy gaming as well.

The all around best book for running a city in an RPG is Night City for Cyberpunk 2020 by R. Talsorian Games.  It's still in print and you can buy the PDF.  It's well written and fun to read aside from being a game source book.  As is, it's a city guide to Night City  with a lot of things to really flesh out the feel of being in a city.  It doesn't have any random tables nor is it fit to drop into a fantasy game, it's a great place to start when looking how to present an urban area to players and to what types of thing PCs would run in to.

City Builder - A Guide to Designing Communities from Skirmisher Publishing is a great resource for old world preindustrial cities.

I've put together some random tables culled from books like Vornheim, the fabulous Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar boxed set, ideas from (the sprawling dark carnival that is) Richard Pett's Crooked City, RPGPundit's books, City Builder (Skirmisher), Orbis Mundi (Philip McGregor), and some remarkably well drawn scenes from the historical fiction of Karen Maitland (e.g. Company of Liars, The Ravens Head, The Owl Killers). Also I like to take real historical events or scenes from medieval Britain - e.g as described in the very accessible books of Geiss & Geiss (e.g. The Medieval City) or in the amazing medieval murder maps by Cambridge University (London, York and Oxford), which can me found here:

https://medievalmurdermap.co.uk/maps/

I've really enjoyed collecting everything i liked, dumping what I don't, and adapting and inventing for my setting, making lists of things like: (a) sights, sounds, and smells in the city, (b) random events by district, (c) tavern interiors - to give a better sense of place, (d) shopkeepers and vendors, (e) people's appearance and personalities - easily googled and assembled from scratch, (f) people's names, etc. I also made a list of Random Sights and Events in village and countryside - by season - using Geiss & Geiss' The Medieval Village.

I love this book, a sandbox, illustrations that speak to me, inventiveness, an important part of OSR and my Christmas present!

Quote from: Green Demon on January 02, 2025, 09:46:44 AMI've put together some random tables culled from books like Vornheim, the fabulous Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar boxed set, ideas from (the sprawling dark carnival that is) Richard Pett's Crooked City, RPGPundit's books, City Builder (Skirmisher), Orbis Mundi (Philip McGregor), and some remarkably well drawn scenes from the historical fiction of Karen Maitland (e.g. Company of Liars, The Ravens Head, The Owl Killers). Also I like to take real historical events or scenes from medieval Britain - e.g as described in the very accessible books of Geiss & Geiss (e.g. The Medieval City) or in the amazing medieval murder maps by Cambridge University (London, York and Oxford), which can me found here:

https://medievalmurdermap.co.uk/maps/

I've really enjoyed collecting everything i liked, dumping what I don't, and adapting and inventing for my setting, making lists of things like: (a) sights, sounds, and smells in the city, (b) random events by district, (c) tavern interiors - to give a better sense of place, (d) shopkeepers and vendors, (e) people's appearance and personalities - easily googled and assembled from scratch, (f) people's names, etc. I also made a list of Random Sights and Events in village and countryside - by season - using Geiss & Geiss' The Medieval Village.

Thanks for this link, it's great !

Yeah, no probs. An odd resource that may not be that well known outside of historian circles. I came across it whilst looking for old street maps of Great Lunden and for some images/ info on the ancient, weird London Bridge - for a game set in Dark Albion. i found an amazing Wordpress blog which had a lot of interesting historical stuff, including links to that resource.

Quote from: Melan on December 30, 2024, 06:18:33 PM

Quote from: SHARK on December 28, 2024, 09:29:05 AMGreetings!

Melan, good sir! Could you expand upon and go into more detail about your assessment of Zak S's Vornheim book? I think it is interesting how this book is proclaimed as all that and a bag of chips--and yet, for many, the landing impression seems distinctly uninspired and mediocre.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

It is a book of four main things: design techniques, random tables, the setting itself, and the adventures.



The design techniques - the main draw - are flashy gimmicks which are ultimately parlour tricks. They seem wild and different because they are not how things were being done before, but they do not produce something substantially better. For example, it offers a technique to generate street systems on the spot by drawing a bunch of intersecting numbers on the page. Is it a workable method for drawing a street-level map? Yes, but so is scribbling quasi-random things on a piece of paper. Die-drop tables are a similar concept. You chuck a bunch of dice on the table, and read their relative positions and sides as a sort of landscape. Can it be used to create a complex, interrelated system? Yes, but it is only novel insofar as it uses a slightly different way to get oracular results. The real innovation here is using oracular results (random rolls or "found" patterns) to serve as a source of inspiration. That's the foundational innovation, and these techniques are specific applications of it.



Consider another example: two charts that are, basically, things that could be replicated with simple random rolls on a table, but are presented here with a gimmicky technique and a piece of art. It isn't any more original, it is just a more annoying way of doing something than something put together in Microsoft Excel. It's different for the sake of being different.

The random tables are more useful. They cover things like what you can find when you find a body, random omens, random aristocrats, and so on. The results are maybe a bit too wacky (e.g. a random magic effect that turns one of the caster's eyes into a spider that scurries off), but they set the tone of the setting. But many old-school people have made fun, eccentric tables, they go back to the Precambrian with Ready Ref Sheets and the DMG, and Matt Finch turned them into an art form in the Tome of Adventure Design. The really great random tables are those that build deep associations and make connections in your mind. These tables are closer to lists of concrete ideas - fine, but they don't stand that tall.

The setting, including the adventures, is modern urban fantasy based on stuff like Perdido Street Station and maybe Viriconium (I honestly don't know this corner of fantasy very well). It is original in the sense that old-school D&D hadn't done a setting like this before, although, to be fair, it hadn't done an adaptation of the World of Darkness either, because it just wasn't what old-school D&D was about (and no, it was not just about endless clones of Keep on the Borderlands either, which tends to be the reflexive accusation). This is basically the equivalent of doing a different genre with the usual game, which is something gamers have done forever (I knew someone who ran an AD&D dungeon crawl with Cyberpunk2020 back in the mid-1990s, so he was before his time). It seems a bit haphazard for me; more a collection of disparate elements than something with a powerful central theme. I think Towers of Krshal, which came out around the same time, did this concept better, with more poetry and imagination despite being a lot more bare-bones. But that's arguing about taste, really.



The adventures are quite bad. Once you peel away the high-concept premise and the scrawly art used throughout the book, they are simplistic affairs made up of a few rooms and random stuff. The encounters are mostly elementary stuff with a fancy reskin. You can see it in the medusa example posted above: simple door trap, simple descriptive room, medusa statues, Ye Olde Sadde Tragedie Roome with an alarm, a dining room, a bathroom, and so on. It's all surface over basic bitch dungeon encounters. There is a random table to determine where the medusa is located, which is just filler (it is reproduced twice for no good reason). This is crap.

Old-school gaming has produced tons of excellent adventures - tons of junk, too (oh man!), but this is one of the areas where it is head and shoulders over the rest of gaming because the good stuff is really good, and there is solid, honest craft to be found there. The adventures in Vornheim are just a fancy coat of paint hiding this absolute nothing. This seems to be a pattern with Zak's later work too, since Red and Pleasant Land relies in the same sleight of hand while being even more underwhelming in its scenarios.

Ultimately, this is not a "bad bad" book - that would be different. But it is really style over substance, and its substance is very light. Which is what makes it mid.

Greetings!

Thank you, Melan! Your analysis is excellent, my friend! I have the Vornheim book, and I must entirely agree with your own assessment. I can't say I was in any way impressed with the book. My impression is that the book is a disorganized, scribbled mess. The artwork is also completely unappealing. The book's usefulness as a tool at the table left me feeling disinterested. The book remains then somewhere on one of my bookshelves, unused since.

I've seen and own far superior books and supplements. I'm mind-boggled at what all the proclaim for Zak S. has been from all of these people. All of the slobbering about how "Brilliant", "Artistic", and "Hugely Talented" Zak S. is for Vornheim and his other works seems to me to be grossly exaggerated and overblown. Vornheim's disorganized, scribbled presentation has left me with zero interest in purchasing anything else written by Zak S. I even sought to dig deeper into the tables and such within the Vornheim book, thinking perhaps beneath the disorganized and scribbled mess, there was this much vaunted "Brilliance" or at least a solid, and strong practicality and usefulness. Alas, that effort and hope were to no avail, as the actual mechanical resources are thoroughly uninspiring.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: BadApple on January 02, 2025, 03:53:42 AM

Quote from: Candide_In on December 23, 2024, 12:37:43 PM

Quote from: Melan on December 23, 2024, 02:51:01 AMIt is very mid.

I have not so many experiences in ttrpg. Can you advise me ttrpg book about running a city? This book must be printed not so long ago so I can buy it.

The all around best book for running a city in an RPG is Night City for Cyberpunk 2020 by R. Talsorian Games.  It's still in print and you can buy the PDF.  It's well written and fun to read aside from being a game source book.  As is, it's a city guide to Night City  with a lot of things to really flesh out the feel of being in a city.  It doesn't have any random tables nor is it fit to drop into a fantasy game, it's a great place to start when looking how to present an urban area to players and to what types of thing PCs would run in to.

So many of those Cyberpunk 2020 books were SO good. Night City is a phenomenal sourcebook that can easily be milled down for useful ideas and concepts to drop into any game or setting with minimal work.

thinking bout those books makes me want to pick up some of the cyberpunk RED books and see how things are going now, but something tells me they won't stand up to Night City and the others.

Quote from: BadApple on January 02, 2025, 03:53:42 AM

Quote from: Candide_In on December 23, 2024, 12:37:43 PM

Quote from: Melan on December 23, 2024, 02:51:01 AMIt is very mid.

I have not so many experiences in ttrpg. Can you advise me ttrpg book about running a city? This book must be printed not so long ago so I can buy it.

I meant to answer this some time ago but here we are.  I'll leave this here in case you someone else comes along who wants this answer.

Citybook series from Flying Buffalo is a great series for urban fantasy gaming as well.

The all around best book for running a city in an RPG is Night City for Cyberpunk 2020 by R. Talsorian Games.  It's still in print and you can buy the PDF.  It's well written and fun to read aside from being a game source book.  As is, it's a city guide to Night City  with a lot of things to really flesh out the feel of being in a city.  It doesn't have any random tables nor is it fit to drop into a fantasy game, it's a great place to start when looking how to present an urban area to players and to what types of thing PCs would run in to.

City Builder - A Guide to Designing Communities from Skirmisher Publishing is a great resource for old world preindustrial cities.

Thank you for your examples!

Even though some of the books are hard to find in print, I will try my best to study them to compare them with Vornheim. They don't look very good, of course, but I hope that the content will make my fantasy campaign richer and more unusual.

"Trust me when I say "cover to cover" that means literally the front cover has a die-drop table to generate enemies on the fly, whereas the back-cover is used to drop a dice for every enemy combatant to quickly roll for attacks." I've read a number of reviews of different products that rave about the use of the front and back cover as if this is something really amazing. I don't get it. Maybe its because I normally use PDF now but it seems an odd thing to rave about.

Quote from: Candide_In on December 23, 2024, 12:37:43 PMI have not so many experiences in ttrpg. Can you advise me ttrpg book about running a city? This book must be printed not so long ago so I can buy it.

I was also not a fan of Vornheim, and instead recommend these RPG books as design resources:

- TSR's Outdoor Geomorphs: Walled City at https://www.greyhawkonline.com/grodog/gh_geomorphs.html#city
- A rather nice city generator map, at https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator
- 1e DMG Appendix C city encounter tables
- Cities from Midkemia Press (a new 4th edition was released recently; I plan a comprehensive review for a 2025 blog post):  https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/457904/cities-4th-edition
- Gabor Lux's The Nocturnal Table at https://emdt.bigcartel.com/product/the-nocturnal-table (is complimentary to use with Matt Finch's City Encounters)

For my other favorite city supplements (as settings/adventure environs), see the rest of my list at https://grodog.blogspot.com/2018/05/these-are-few-of-my-favorite-things.html but the above ones are specific to designing cities, rather than pre-designed cities and sets of city encounters.

Allan.