Monty Haul A 5th Edition ‘Zine With a 1st Edition Vibe MARCH 2020 Vol 1 #0 TABLE OF CONTENTS Welcome to Monty Haul: Do You Kids Want Snacks? 3 Critical Hits: An Alternate System 9 Familiars: An Old School Compromise 14 Interlude: My Balkanized World 18 Cleric Domains for City Campaigns 22 The Divine Archeologist: A Rogue Archetype 27 New Backgrounds for your City-State 35 The Noble House Random Generator 58 Written by Mark Finn Artwork by Henry Justice Ford (Cover), Richard Dadd (9), Albert Robida (14, 27, 64), Arthur Rackham (15-17, 34), Howard Pyle (22, 24, 42, 69), Hans Baldung Grien (26), Elizabeth Shippen Green-Elliot (29, 33), Paul Gavarni (37), John Tenniel (39), Hans Holbein (40), Kenny Meadows (58, 61, 62), John Pettie (43), Henry C Selous (46, 50, 54), Louis Rhead (48), John Gilbert (47, 52, 57), G.F. Sargent (61), William Winter (66), John Jackson (engraver, 71), and a few talented printmakers from over a hundredSample years ago whose names are sadly lost to the vagariesfile of time. DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, D&D, Wizards of the Coast, Forgotten Realms, the dragon ampersand, and all other Wizards of the Coast product names, and their respective logos are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast in the USA and other countries. All other original material in this work is copyright 2020 by Mark Finn and published by Monkeyhaus Design Works. Sample file Welcome to Monty Haul Do You Kids Want Any Snacks? Part 1: A Little background Okay, so, I’m making a ‘zine. Again. My name is Mark Finn. I’m a writer and an editor from Texas. I’ve written a lot of things: comics, radio plays, short stories, novels, and even non-fiction. I wrote Blood & Thunder: the Life and Art of Robert E. Howard, and it was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 2007. In fact, when it comes to Robert E. Howard, I’ve done a lot of work over the past two decades. A lot. If you’ve read any of the Dark Horse Comics Conan collections that Kurt Busiek or Tim Truman wrote, I worked on those. If you read Dark Horse’s Robert E. Howard’s Savage Sword, I wrote the El Borak story and intro. If you have any of the Wildside Press REH collections, I wrote introductions for five of those books, and several intros for other volumes, from various publishers. Most recently, I was one of the REH experts hired to work on Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of, the rpg from Modiphius, where I wrote for the core rulebook and also the Conan the Thief sourcebook. Before all of that; before the biography of Robert E. Howard and all of those essays and introductions and REH scholarship, before comic stories for DC and Dark Horse and a bunch of indy publishers and the horror and fantasy short stories and the modern-day fantasy novels, and the humorous historical fantasy boxing stories, before Clockwork Storybook, Sampleeven before the black andfile white indy comics, and the ‘zines, and Tales of the Elvis Clones, I was a gamer. Part 2: Products of My Imagination I started, like just about everyone else my age, with Dungeons & Dragons, 3 and over the years, I’ve owned and played a dizzying array of games with a wide circle of friends and acquain- tances. D&D was a part of my creative DNA, one of the first set of tools I had for creating stories and figuring out how to tell them. My D&D experience was heavily col- ored by what I was reading at the time: aside from Robert E. Howard’s Conan (duh!), there was Fritz Lieber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories, Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone, Robert Aspirin’s Thieves’ World shared-world anthologies, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Stephen Brust’s Vlad Tal- tos stories, and even historical fiction like Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, Howard Pyle’s illustrated stories of Robin Hood and King Arthur, any- thing even tangentially related to epic fantasy, heroic fantasy, or mythol- ogy and legend. Back then, we didn’t know how invaluable a reference Appendix N would be; to us, they were just the books we were reading. Along the way, AD&D (as it was called back then) gave way to Call of Cthulhu, Villains and Vigilantes, Top Secret, Justice, Inc. GURPS, and a host of other RPGs, all designed to simulate and recreate specific storytelling genres. And while I’d moved away from Dungeons & Dragons, I always kept up with what it was doing. By the time I was ready to introduce my niece to D&D, 4th edition had been out for a while and 5th edition was poised to launch, just in time for the 40th anniversary of the game. I was curious; there were things about 4th edition that I didn’t like. But runningSample the game with my kid brother and our niece reallyfile scratched an itch that I had been having for a long time. I bought the 5th edition Players Handbook while cresting the runner’s high of the media blitz. Around that time, a group of my employees were talking about playing the game, but they didn’t know how to run it, and would I consider playing with them? That was the excuse I was looking for. 4 Part 3: Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss I dove back in with gusto, and right away, I could see that fifth edition was kind of like D&D’s Greatest Hits. They took all of the stuff that worked from previous editions, and built a couple of simple systems to govern it all, and presented it as the new and improved D&D. And you know what? It works. Oh, it’s not a universal a system, and it lacks many of the infinite (and frankly unmanageable) options from 3.5, and it’s certainly less tactical than 4th, and much more power-balanced than 1st edition, but I think those are features, not bugs. Specifically, what this system does very well is simulate playing Dungeons & Dragons, in its own genre. It’s broad enough to encompass a number of different campaign styles, and it’s flexible on the back end, for DMs, and malleable enough on the front end for players to have a lot of (but not an infinite amount of) choices. And I knew it was good, because right away, my brain started popping; ideas for backgrounds, archetypes, feats, all specific to my campaign’s needs. Stuff like that. There’s not been a game I’ve played since 1984 that I didn’t tweak in some way. House rules were just a part of playing D&D, and that thinking carried over into other games. If you don’t like the rule, don’t use it. If something doesn’t work for you, change it or get rid of it. We are, and have always been, the architect of our worlds. And that is a good thing because I have never, not ever, warmed to the Forgotten Realms. Not backSample then, and not now. TSR tried file really hard to make that their de- fault setting for D&D, but there were too many of us who grew up campaigning in the World of Greyhawk and all that setting 5 encompassed. Greyhawk was a medieval/Middle Ages frame- work, and we got to put our own weirdness onto it. The Forgotten Realms already had the weirdness baked in for us (and in the begin- ning, it wasn’t really that weird). So, no, thank you. I have always thought that the Forgotten Realms was a little too “generic fantasy” for my tastes; a setting that tries to be all things to everyone and in doing so, ends up being not much for anyone. Maybe it’s gotten better in three decades, but I just can’t bring myself to pull that trigger. I still needed a world for this new game, though. Before I sat down with the kids to play, I made the decision to import my old campaign setting into 5th edition. This was easier said than done, because it was mostly world history and stories. I had to create a new map because the old one I had used lo, those many years ago *cough*Greyhawk*cough* was not mine and I had a vague idea of maybe writing some of this stuff down and eventually publishing it. Thus was born the World of Thera. Part 4: IT! COULD! WORK! Initially, it was unapologetically a first edition world. That meant none of the third edition weirdness; no Tieflings, no Dragonborn, etc. You couldn’t initially play an elf or a dwarf or a halfling, either. Humans only. I know, I know, this makes me a terrible person. But my group grew up watching PeterSample Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and I didn’t want those file elves and that dwarf to be the template for what they were doing. I’d spent years in the 80’s separating out the most Tolkien-y bits of AD&D in order to make elves and dwarfs that were a little more edgy, a little less avuncular, and way less interested in yukking it up with a bunch of shaved apes. 6 Then I caved in a little bit. I made the decision that those exotic and need- lessly complicated races would just live in another part of the world, one less infested with men such as the ones who were eking out an existence on the main continent of Thera.