This piece of cardstock vibrates with the essence of gaming. The artisanal paper is hand-made from classic adventures, damaged well-played modules and leaves collected from 330 Center Street in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. For those who don’t know, 330 Center Street was the home of Gary Gygax and is the birthplace of Dungeons & Dragons. The world and gaming were forever changed from this modest little home.
The leaves were collected, cleaned, destemmed, then soaked for months to make the fibres pliable enough to be added to paper. Tears were shed as classic adventures and sample printings were pulverized for the pulp. These adventures and leaves were then hand-pressed to create this one of a kind card stock that carries the essence of gaming in every cell.
Lloyd Metcalf, Art director of Gary Con and CEO of Fail Squad Games collected the leaves, made the paper, and finally adorned each piece with thoughtful art in archival ink. Each drawing is intended to bring the essence of classic Dungeons & Dragons and RPGs to everyone who holds it.
Since the first piece was created, it has come to be believed that dice resting on this paper are imbued with the luck and adventures of legend. Is it possible that a roll in a game might somehow be altered by the will of all the heroes of center street, and the uncountable nostalgic adventures that were had with the paper that was recycled into this one little square?
I will have a very limited supply of these, all artwork is unique and different to each piece. Whatever I make will be for sale in the online store CLICK HERE to get yours now!
After this original batch nearly sold out, I started making the next round out of a Classic Dungeon Masters Guide.
This week all Fail Squad Games paperback modules are just $10. Even the full color specials – Time to clear the shelves and make room for new stuff!
Lands of Lunacy, 1E, 5E, All print module adventures are just TEN BUCKS this week! Some of these won’t be back once they are sold out, so grab them all while they are on sale.
Go to the store and get them in your basket now!
*All except Those Dam Goblins*
You can find the all at the FSG online store.
Some hellhounds have escaped their domain in the Lands of Lunacy (or a small island on the Elemental Plane of Fire). One of Brimfire’s (a fire giant) hounds discovered a jewel that opens a portal to the Prime Material Plane, and the hounds are wreaking havoc hunting and terrorizing the mortals.
The newest adventure to hit the virtual shelves from Fail Squad Games. a 6 page, full color Interlude adventure. BECMI / Labyrinth Lord rule set – for just $3.00.
Don’t have $3?
Join the Fail Squad Games Guild and get it for half off – ($1.50). Just pop up to the upper right hand section of the site and sign up now.
Click here to pop over to the store now.
Thank you for supporting Fail Squad Games, there are plenty more fun adventures, free stuff, and games to come!
~Lloyd M (worker Goblin)
FSG is adding a “Free Stuff” page to the site. As time allows it will get new additions, tools, NPCs, Monsters, Pregens, and encounters to add to your adventures. All focused on old school gaming. This will be a place to add tic-bits to your game that are unique, unusual, and helpful for un-prepped DMs (The story of my life). Being an under-prepared DM was one of the core reasons I started creating adventures and supplements!
Expect – BECMI, Labyrinth Lord, OSRIC, 1E type of material, not to mention Lands of Lunacy and other slick stuff to keep your players off-guard.
Bookmark the page HERE also don’t forget to “subscribe to blog” at the bottom of the page so you won’t miss anything.
For some real up-coming treats, sign up for FSG exclusives at the top-right of the page.
I love electronic gadgets, tablets, and laptops, and they are handy for gaming. Searchable PDFs of modules, supplements, rule books, the E-version of RPG books are everywhere and usually quite a bit cheaper than the print version. It seems like a no-brainer to bring them to the table. Does this mean print books are becoming obsolete?
Pronoun Note
The male pronouns (he, him, his) are used throughout this book. We hope this won’t be interpreted by anyone as an attempt to exclude females from the game or to imply their exclusion. Centuries of use have made these pronouns neutral, and we feel their use provides for clear and concise written text.
As a young teen / preteen reader this made perfect sense to me. I accepted this and never understood why girls or women would feel any twinge of issue with anything about the game. Ok, I could kind of get the chain mail bikini thing, even back then. but hey, images of Elise Gygax sold me the book IN a chain mail bikini!
Yeah, it was that bad. As an adult, and an RPG producer in 2018 re reading the text, even I find it distracting as an aging white male. It really is that bad. Come at the text as if you were your daughter reading the book and it sheds a little light on it. Let’s look at a paragraph, there are so many, but I’ll just pick ONE. Rules Cyclopedia page 7
A Magic user is a character who wields magic. He has little or nothing in the way of fighting ability, and in the early part of his career he has little in the way of magical ability either. But as he gains in experience, he becomes a powerful character and can wield powerful spells. The magic user’s prime requisite is his intelligence.
For that one paragraph a masculine tense is used SIX times. there are only 61 words in that paragraph! Only the very first sentence doesn’t reference the magic user being male. This paragraph isn’t a cherry picked exception in the book. It’s a standard example of the text.
I know what you are thinking, “Oh dammit! another article by a ‘Social Justice Warrior'” or some such crap. Please, stop right there. This is an article by a long time gamer and a publisher of games and most importantly a DAD to a young woman who likes to game. I am writing this article mostly as a father, secondly as an author, and thirdly as someone who wants everyone to game at my table.
I wanted to write, but the texts I read with the gender pronouns seemed the only logical way to build a sentence. When I first started writing in the genre, I recalled those excusing paragraphs, but something didn’t sit quite right. There were growing pains in the gaming world and a number of solutions came up.
So how would the sentence above read if published in a Fail Squad Games module today?
A Magic User is a character who wields magic. They have little or nothing in the way of fighting ability and in the early part of their career have little in the way of magical ability either. But as the magic user gains in experience, they become a powerful character and wield powerful spells. The magic user’s prime requisite is intelligence.
It takes about 15 minutes of thinking when you first start writing this way. It makes more sense, the text actually reads smoother when written this way. It is more “clear and concise written text.” The Game master is either “GM, they, their”. Why assume he/his/him at all? After about 1,000 words in, this is the natural way to write and when you read gendered text it’s almost painful. I cringe when I see new authors in the RPG genre writing this way.
Characters with a gender are of course referred to as their gender in the game, it’s a simple, easy thing to do that makes your product better.
All through this, there are women who loved the game so much, they let this slide. Even when the rules set their maximum strength less than their male counterparts. I always found this troubling and in poor design even as a teen player.
Here’s to you for sticking with the hobby. Here’s to you for gaming through in an instance where, if the tables were reversed, I doubt many – if any- men would be left standing. I salute your strength of character. I salute you for your love of the game and some who changed perceptions from the inside out. I also humbly apologize for anything you have endured to get here. I love BECMI, truly love the game. I love AD&D, all its authors, artists and contributors. I don’t like this one aspect of it and what it has done. It was absolutely not necessary to write this way. It is my job as an inheritor of the hobby to fix it.
I will still play the games. I will ALSO continue to produce gaming supplements for the old systems and their clones. I WON’T be using that language in any Fail Squad Games product. I hope I can invite those who aren’t on board, to get on board. You’re on a sinking ship if you think you MUST write he, him, his a half-dozen times in a brief paragraph of 60 words.
This isn’t the chain mail bikini debate. I know Tarzan, Conan, Red Sonja, and Caldwell’s babes. This is a pronoun debate. A simple change in literary thinking that improves our hobby as a whole. As a young reader, I didn’t realize what this does to a line of thinking. As an adult dad, I do. As they say in Goonies, “This is OUR TIME! Down here!”
This is OUR time. We are inheriting this hobby from the previous generation. it’s time to fix this. With a couple of minutes of thought, any text can be written without the he, his, him bit. I don’t care that it was used my Shakespeare, Defoe, or any others for centuries. It’s not an excuse to use it now. It’ REALLY is not an excuse to purposefully use it in a hobby that wants to be inclusive. If anything, gaming incorporates the disenfranchised and this language should be something that our hobby leads the way in changing.
I welcome your comments below. If you think you must write with gender *fight me* I’ll rewrite your example text.