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by Lowell Kempf

I first came across Sterling E. Lanier’s Brigadier Ffellowes in Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere. To the best of my knowledge, that was the only place I’ve ever heard of the character but rereading that book made me decide to look further.

The stories had been collected in two volumes: The Peculiar Exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes and The Curious Quests of Brigadier Ffellowes. From what I can tell, the second book had a much smaller print run, but I was able to find the first one.

And, as I was reading it, one story seemed quite familiar. With a little bit of research, I realized I had read ‘His Coat So Gay’ in two different anthologies edited by Gardner Dozois, Horses and Sorcerers. It makes me wonder where else some of these stories might be hiding.

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The Brigadier Ffellowes stories are club stories with the British brigadier telling fantastic tales at his New York club. No matter the topic at hand, one of his experiences ties into it.

The club or pub story genre is an old one. I think you can make a convincing argument that Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales has at least one foot in the genre. Apparently Lanier cited Lord Dunsany’s Jorkens stories as an inspiration.

What struck me about Brigadier Ffellowes’ stories is that they are quite serious in tone. A lot of club stories are flat out comedies and I feel like all of them have some whimsy. While some of Dunsany’s Jorkens stories are serious, some of them are just plain silly. The Neopolitan Ice is about him drunkenly passing out in a dish of ice cream!

When looking at reviews, more than one reviewer described the stories as weird stories, as in the pulp magazine. I can definitely feel a pulp vibe and I’d also describe them as horror stories. I think weird, pulp and horror pretty much covers it.

I found the stories to be very much a mixed bag. Some of them, ‘His Coat So Gay’ about the brigadier getting drawn into the wild hunt or ‘Fraternity Brother’ where he stumbles upon a fairly peaceful modern enclave of Neanderthals are quite good. ‘The Kings of the Sea’ feels downright Lovecraftian.

(Pause… yup, Dozois reprinted that one in his Sea Serpents anthology. That’s why it was familiar! Dozois loved these stories!)

Others are pretty weak. The Leftovers is literally Ffellowes getting chased by Paleozoic man and nothing else. A Feminine Jurisdiction is downright sexist. And there’s plenty of casual racism throughout the stories, although the brigadier is often the most clueless character.

Every review I looked at mentions the last story in the first collection, Soldier Key. It’s about an insane cult that worships a giant hermit crab. Part of me is impressed by the audacity of the concept but I have to admit, the way it’s handled is too ridiculous to be scary or creepy. It’s pretty original though.

Ultimately, I felt that the anthology was a mixed bag. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the strongest stories have been reprinted in other collections but that the book itself has gone out of print.

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by SeaofStars

$25.00 for RPG Item: Wrath & Glory Battle Maps: War Zones
Condition: New
Location: United States

by sdonohue

Legendary Druids is a 2022 release from Legendary Games and is intended for use with Pathfinder Roleplaying Game (1st Edition). It was written and illustrated by masters of their craft.

Presentationi
This is available in both a PDF and softcover versions. The softcover is 40 pages, perfect-bound. The colors are in full color on sturdy stock while the interior pages are full-color on matte paper. The editing is good and the pages have an appropriate amount of white space interspersed with many illustrations.

Content
This book is designed to provide the druid with additional opportunities for diversity. It starts by presenting the Legendary Druid which is a slight re-imagining of the basic Druid. The key changes are the addition of Druidic Circles and Druidic Talents.

Choosing their circle makes a big impact on the druid: it provides additional spells for their spell-list, access to some circle-specific talents. and access to some specific abilities. There are a total of 14 circles and they typically take several paragraphs to describe. One unique association is that the character's appearance or demeanor ay changes based on their circles. At first level, the legendary druid gets a natural bond which provides yet another way to customize your druid character.

The book ends with a list of favored class bonuses, each of which is usable by any race. There are also a half-dozen new archetypes.

Evaluation
This book provides a lot of ways to make druids more flexible and to adapt them to take on different roles in a typical campaign. The book also provides some information on the culture of Druids, including the hierarchy of the Druidic circle and it's impact on the lives of it's members.

There is a cornucopia of options for druids and they are all pretty well-balanced. As I read it, I recognized druids I'd seen who tried to play in different ways and were thwarted by the rules. Non need for that with this tome.

by bryce0lynch

By Brendan Barnett
Self Published
Generic/Universal
"Lower Levels"

If legends of the Golden Gargoyle are true it could mean infinite wealth for any who possess it. Trouble is, nobody has a clue where to find it. That is, until a goblin falls out of the sky with a pouch of gold dust and a map to a hidden cave, high in the mountains. What you can make out amongst the blood splatters is very promising.

This forty page adventure uses sixteen pages to describe eight rooms in a low-conflict cave full of goblins. It’s meh, mostly because it uses forty pages to describe eight rooms in a low-conflict cave full of goblins.

Great looking little pdf. And I assume print book? Nice cover. Pretty little isometric map inside that is itself an art piece, like you might see as a two page special insert in Dragon or Mad Magazine. Nice illustrations and a layout style that looks pretty with its use of word color and boxes and highlights and so forth. And not garish, in spite of its use of pinks and purples. Nice accomplishment there!

Did you want to buy a coffee table book? Cause this is an awfully nice looking coffee table book.

It’s just real hard to take this seriously as an actual adventure given the page count to encounter ratio. Forty pages. Eight rooms. In spreads, of course. What is it that the designer wanted to do? DId they want to write an adventure or did they want to make a great looking book? Room one. This is all of the text on the first page of room one: A large rectangular chamber. In the centre a stone gargoyle statue sits atop a tall pillar with the word ‘umop’ roughly carved into it. The word ‘uado’ is scratched above each of two sealed stone doors to the north and west. The ceiling (30′ up) is covered in spikes. The floor is littered with broken bones. Searching the floor yields 10gp in assorted coins and a silver ring (40gp). It bears the image of a human figure immersed in a river.” There’s some line breaks in there. The second page has open and down in normal and reverse print. Yeah, the words are mirrors and one opens the doors while the other does an anti-gravity. Two fucking pages. Two fucking pages for this. And this is the norm for the adventure. Simple rooms, spread out over two pages.

We can, I suppose, ignore this. We can simply accept that the designer decided two pages per room. What we get, then, is eight (or nine, for an A/B room) are some relatively simplistic rooms. The interactivity here is basic. I’m pretty sure there’s one ‘fight’, with Vampire Kinght[sic] Armour. Nobody present really cares that you are nosing around in the caves. I can’t help but think that this could have been much better i it were larger. The goblins, cultists, bats, tomb, all with zones in the dungeon, expanding the thing to something with more going on and room for the adventure to breathe.

The language used, for the room descriptions. Is rather plain. A large rectangular room. THis is not the height of language use to evoke imagery. The exception is the isometric map. It’s a pretty great art piece, harkening back to all of those Bat Cave and Hall of Justice isometric pieces from comics, or, the Starship Warden piece I have hanging on my call. Very evocative, but not exactly something you can run from. (There is a more traditional map as well, to run from, the isometric piece not being the most clear on room connections.)

I can’t say it’s true or not, but it certainly FEELS like the isometric map was the starting point of this adventure. As if it were created and then the rooms followed on. Like the adventure, proper, was secondary to this and/or inspired by the art piece. That doesn’t have to be bad, but in this case the adventure just doesn’t feel worked enough.

It remains interesting to me the many ways that the various subcultures produce bad adventures. Starting from bland, or assembly line, or wordy, or mini combats, or rote, or art, or layout, or, or, or.

https://pocket-sized-perils.itch.io/grotto-of

This is $5, Aussie, at Itch.io