I supported the kickstarter as well, because I'm a Lankhmar nut.  I'm looking to pull ideas out for my Lankhmar/AS&SH games I run at cons.

Mike Curtis did a pretty good job, overall.  Better than the treatment Slade "I don't think he ever read the books" Henson did for 2e-era TSR, or the hackjob mongoose did on it.

under_score wrote:

Goodman Games ran a kickstarter last year for a setting book and adventures based on Fritz Leiber's stories.  Although the print release has been delayed, the pdfs were released to backers a few months ago and I finally got the chance to look over them a little.  The city guide for Lankhmar in particular interested me as a useful tool for fleshing out Khromarium.
The city guide gives a brief history of Lankhmar.  The city has stood for over a millennia, with the current inhabitants having settled around the ruins of ancient towers and stone temples.  They paid homage to the inscrutable gods depicted there and the city has been able to flourish.  In Hyperborea, those ruins were the old city of the Hyperboreans and the temples introduced the barbarian races to the worship of Xathoqqua.
After the history is a description of the government and guilds of the city - only a handful of the nearly 100 trade guilds are named, leaving plenty of room for development.  There is a section on Crime and Punishment which uses DCC's Luck attribute - I'd change this to a Charisma check.
After this it gets into descriptions of the eleven districts of the city.  Each is given a short description, a few notable landmarks, and an Interesting Events table to spur some adventure seeds.  This is all system neutral and would only need swapping out of some religion and culture names to fit into Hyperborea.
There is a 6 page folio of important characters from Fritz Leiber's stories statted up for DCC which is the least useful section for an AS&SH game, but it's a pretty small portion of the book.
Lastly, there are lots of tables for creating neighborhoods, streets, and buildings in the city which should be useful in any large city setting.
I've been reading over Rats in the Walls and Other Perils and Lankhmar complements it perfectly to fill in the docks around the Silvery Eel or the neighborhood of that dilapidated building of the Brazen Bull, and any entanglements with the Thieves' Guild that may occur from stealing the Lamia's Heart will benefit from Lankhmar's infamous Thieves' House.

Patiently waiting......I really prefer books so I have not delved into the setting as yet.

It's good to hear there's usable stuff in it, under_score! I am very cool on DCC products overall and rarely find them useful to my game, but this might be worth picking up in print once it's in the world. Thanks!

Last edited by Handy Haversack (3/19/2019 8:28 am)

This will probably be sacrilegious again given my previous posts about Jack Vance, but Fritz Leiber was never a writer I got into. I read lots of the Lankhmar stuff and just found it dull.  Like reading knock-off buddy Conan stories or something.  That being said, I'm always game for re-skinning supplements for other games, especially city settings, which I have trouble designing myself.

And Vance certainly trumps Leiber

Brock Savage wrote:

under_score wrote:

 This is all system neutral and would only need swapping out of some religion and culture names to fit into Hyperborea.

This is good news. I had always planned to use a reskinned Lankmar to fill out Port Zangerios. 

This is a great idea.  I have avoided using Zangerios a lot as I wasn't sure exactly what to do with it.  Lankhmar sounds like a good choice. 

fireinthedust wrote:

I'm in the opposite boat:  I *love* the buddy-Conan genre that Leiber uses, but find Vance gets a bit... wordy? Too into the aristocratic drama, so to speak, and not enough fun.  I have to finish his work, though, so I'm open to more. I do like the spells as he uses them, that's fun, so... (shrug).

It's been a while since I've read Leiber, but I do recall liking the Lankhmar series, and have quite a few of the D&D supplements for it (which I'll use "one of these days"). WRT Vance I guess it depends on how much you enjoy logodexterity (TM), and keeping a dictionary handy... I had the chance to ask him one time how he knew all these obscure, obsolete words: did he keep a dictionary nearby while writing? He simply pointed to his temple. 

Reminds me of the Ink and Incapability episode of Blackadder the Third where our hero has a run-in with Dr Johnson and his newfangled English Dictionary...