Having completed its month-long world tour, from Chicago to London via Tokyo, the errant 'zine I was awaiting has finally arrived today.
Posted on October 24, through some bizarre aberration of the US Postal Service, my copy of Joshua Burnett's Them's Monsters left that country via O'Hare airport in Chicago, then disappeared for a time before showing up in Tokyo, Japan,.
It was finally flown to Heathrow Airport in the UK, where it wound its way to its destination (my home) this morning.
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| Not the most direct route - but it was tracked, so I could follow it! |
Was the wait worth it, you ask?
Why, yes, it was.
This 44-page mini monster manual includes just under 20 new weird and wonderful critters, as well as a new playable race of beetle people, a couple of comic strips (which, themselves, feature monster stats) and a one-page 0-level funnel.
All this is beautifully illustrated by the writer himself, the amazingly talented Joshua LH Burnett.
Many of the black-and-white drawings are full-page, making them easy to hold up to players to show what they have just encountered.
I'm already particularly keen to find a way to throw a Terrible Infant (a giant human baby, twice the size of an elephant, with wailing fanged mouths in the place of eyes) at my players.
And the real kicker is that I'm not even particularly a fan of Dungeon Crawl Classics, the old school system this 'zine was written for, but I love much of the material that the game's hugely talented - and eager - fanbase puts out.
As a game on the edges of the OSR, it's very easy to convert DCC material to other systems inspired by the earliest iterations of Dungeons & Dragons.
A product of February's Zine Quest 2 drive on Kickstarter, a pdf of Them's Monsters is available from DriveThruRPG.
