I’m very late for 2017, but as I did in January 2017 I’m posting a list of RPG books I acquired last (calendar) year.
| Swords & Wizardry – Complete 3rd Printing (Kickstarter) | January | OSR | |
| The God that Crawls | February | LotFP | |
| Vornheim: the Complete City Kit | February | LotFP | |
| Slügs! | February | LotFP | |
| Broodmother Sky Fortress | February | LotFP | |
| Blood in the Chocolate | February | LotFP | |
| Veins of the Earth | June | LotFP | |
| Isle of the Unknown | June | LotFP | |
| Vaginas are Magic | June | LotFP | |
| Aethera Campaign Setting | August | 3PP | |
| Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund Charity Bundle | September | OSR | |
| Starfinder Core Rulebook | November | Starfinder |
That’s an awful lot of LotFP books! They are by far my favourite publisher of TRPG books. That’s despite the facts that I haven’t run much LotFP, most of the books haven’t been used directly and I find them to be a little darker in tone than my group generally enjoy. LotFP books are always superbly written, full of inspirational ideas and art, usually contain at least one or two neat little mechanical bits you can lift into your own game and are produced to much higher standards than any other TRPG publisher on my shelf. I enjoy reading TRPG books, I enjoy reading LotFP TRPG books the most.
I can’t recommend Vornheim and Broodmother Skyfortress highly enough. Zak has a very interesting home campaign setting which you can borrow ideas from even if you don’t use the content directly, but the real value of Vornheim is all of the neat tricks for running a city without preparing the entire thing in advance. Similarly for Broodmother Skyfortress – it’s a great adventure that you can either run or borrow from, but arguably more valuable is the final 50 or so pages of the book which are a series of articles to help a GM run an OSR style campaign. Many reviews I’ve read refer to it as a the closest thing to an OSR DMG and I can’t disagree with that sentiment.
Blood in the Chocolate is an excellent adventure site. It would work really well as a low-level, or even initial, hook for a campaign or as a convention game. Veins of the Earth is both a fantastically weird and rich campaign setting as well as a toolkit for running games underground without overly complex mechanics. I’m increasingly favouring TRPG books which are both sources of inspiration and toolkits for particular styles of play. LotFP produces several fantastic books in this vein.
The Aethera campaign setting book finally arrived late in 2017, a project I backed on Kickstarter in 2015. A lot has changed since then. I don’t think I’ll ever run a campaign in that setting but there’s some cool artwork in the book and I’m sure I’ll read the lore sections at least, as they are what originally attracted me to the Kickstarter.
One of the things that changed since I backed the Aethera book is that Starfinder was both announced and launched. I’ve been slowly working my way through the Core Rulebook and writing up thoughts as I read (first impressions, flavour, character options). That kind of stalled when I hit a particularly crunchy section of the rulebook, I will get back to it when I’ve worked through some of the other books in my collection, or sooner if my group shows interest in the system.
Both the S&W bundle (for backing the 3rd printing on Kickstarter) and Harvey Relief bundles of content are largely unread. I find reading from a screen much more work than reading from paper, so anything that I have in print will immediately trump a PDF. Even if it’s highly regarded material such as Slumbering Ursine Dunes (in the Harvey Relief Bundle).
That’s all for 2017, the 2018 list is already looking to be longer…