I had Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson’s Titan: The Fighting Fantasy World when I was a kid. If I may Grognardia for a minute, I have to say that I didn’t think much of it when I was a kid. For some reason I perceived it as a pretentious challenger to D&D’s dominance. Now I see that it’s a loving D&D pastiche, with orcs, elves, and D&D off-brand monsters like Tua-suo and Dvorgar. It’s not pretentious at all. It’s enthusiastic, and very charming. I’ve already stolen a few ideas for my D&D game.

One of the most charming things about the book is the art. Like the content of the book, most of it looks like it would be at home in an 80s TSR product. One of my favorites is this painting of the world’s fantasy metropolis, the City of Thieves:

Perhaps more useful in a game is this sideways map of a wizard’s tower. It’s presented as the home of a friendly wizard, and it isn’t immediately useful in that context. But as a dungeon it would be tops. It reminds me of Jeff Rients’s vertical dungeons. It looks like it would be great fun keying each one of these rooms – though it is a little linear, I’ll admit. And because it’s so detailed, you could actually simulate a character making a search check by having the player find an item – possibly folding or covering parts of the map so that only one floor could be searched at once.

It would also be a kick-ass tower to give to one of the PCs as their home base.

Finally, here’s a nice Russ Nicholson critter for your collection:

Why is that one guy pouring from his cup into another cup? Don’t goblins care about GERMS?

This entry was posted on Monday, April 22nd, 2013 at 10:00 am and is filed under fluff/inspiration, other systems, RPG Hub. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.