Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Commentary On The OSR Resource - The Wizard's Inheritence By Cedric Plante For Your Old School Campaigns

So yesterday I stumbled upon a fantastic little resource that just came out from the pen and mind of Cedric Plante called the Wizard's Inheritance. This is a one hundred magic  illustrated guide of  items found within a wizard's mansor or tower. The whole product is system neutral and its illustrated throughout. The pdf is free on google drive and the book is only three dollars but is it useful? Clocking in at just twenty four pages this book is about as useful as it gets! Seriously you've inherited a collection of weird magic items for reasons. The whole thing is done in Plante's weirdly wonderful artwork and don't let the compactness of the book fool you.


The Wizard's Inheritance!
Free web version:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_ogKTnp49LkbF8zZ1ZZcnE4UFU/view?usp=sharing
On LuLu:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/cedric-plante/the-wizards-inheritance/paperback/product-22378751.html

The book basically gives a dungeon master cart blanch to work his party of adventurers over with whatever plot hooks, artifacts, sinkers, and adventure doodads he's been aching to spring on them. With a price tag of only three dollars on Lulu this one is a steal. This one book has everything that can keep a retroclone game going for months and months. The party of adventurers will be going through the collection of weird artifacts for months of game time as well trying to separate the good, the bad, the useful and the terrifying. The best part is that its up to you as the DM to decide how you want to spring this on the players.
According to the intro to the Wizard's Inheritance:


And this is exectly what you get a selection of items of weird aspect and magical significance that you'll have to handcraft into something exotic, dangerous and OSR slick as hell. The choice on how to do it is going to be up to you as the DM to choose your favorite edition or retroclone system to handle the whole affair. Personally the artwork is very good a weird mix between the cartoon awesomeness of Adventure Time and Rick & Morty; of which I happen to be a huge fan. So more points right there for that. This a perfect hook for a near clone like Dungeon Crawl Classics where a solid hook and idea makes or breaks a continuing game of DCC. With the holidays coming up there's plenty of opportunity to add this one in as a Halloween or even a Christmas themed adventure location or set of ideas. The book is really that flexible. Even more so because of the weirdness of it, this book could work as a way of hooking a group of Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea by having the wizard of the piece actually be a retiring adventurer. This enables the book to serve a primer for some of the magic, sword and sorcery action, and high adventure of the Hyperborea setting through the magic items, souvenirs and other relics from the wizard's adventuring career. But there's far more to it then simply a one note idea, here the book can easily serve as a weird hook for a game like Lamentations of the Flame Princess or even Labyrinth Lord. The cartoon choice of artwork works in the book's favor in my humble opinion. Look go pick the PDF up and have a blast adapting it to your own OSR campaign. This book works on a lot of levels and pushes all of the right buttons and because you can preview before buying its a win/win in my book.

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