Thursday 1 April 2021

[ZINE] Echoes From Fomalhaut #08 (NOW AVAILABLE!)

Welcome to Castle Sullogh!

I am pleased to announce the publication of the eighth issue of my fanzine, Echoes From Fomalhaut. This is a 52-page zine dedicated to adventures and GM-friendly campaign materials for Advanced old-school rules, with cover art by Stefan Poag, and illustrations by Denis McCarthy, Graphite Prime, and the Dead Victorians.

The first adventure in the zine takes players to the shores of the Twelve Kingdoms, a cold land of rival petty kingdoms and strange wonders. Here stands Yrrtwano’s Repose, a ruined manor house whose walls now protect an entire village. Lord Yrrtwano’s time has long passed, but he sleeps under the manor still, and the great hunter is said to slumber most uneasily! This is a dungeon adventure with 15 keyed areas, for levels 3-4 (my players brought a small company of NPC knights to share the glories and the dangers).

The sullogh are coming! The zine’s titular scenario, Castle Sullogh, was the penultimate adventure in our Isle of Erillion campaign. This woodland ruin had stood in its place from the beginning, just within reach, but always too formidable to tackle until the adventurers had no other choice left. It is suitable for levels 5-9 (much depending on the party’s approach – ours was repelled pretty badly on their first foray, and had to turn to more careful infiltration on subsequent tries), and covers 55 keyed areas, including buried secrets, the quarters of three powerful witches, and the halls of the murderous sullogh who were brewed for murder!

This issue also describes the western half of the lands of Thasan, “beyond the City of Vultures”. Arid wastelands dotted with tiny pockets of lush vegetation lie next to deep blue seas where islands hide weird inhabitants and unknown dangers, and two great empires, one ancient and sinful, one recent and fanatically pure, clash over parched wastes devastated by ancient catastrophe. Venture into the dreaming ruins of Zangul and shadowy Korlag Thyr; walk the Road of Iskarades, and try your guile against the wily masterminds of Virkat and its great Judgement Machine! Great phantasms and jewelled palaces await – and therein lurk beauty, strangeness and death in equal measure. This is a large hex-crawl describing half of one map sheet with 103 keyed and briefly described locales (which is where our games were located).

Long time in the making, Echoes #08 is a larger than usual issue, with a double map sheet: one of them a splendid players’ colour map of the Isle of Erillion, courtesy of Istvan Boldog-Bernad, who made it in Wonderdraft. (He also played Armand the Scumbag, human assassin, in our campaign.) The other sheet contains GM’s maps: one of Castle Sullogh, and one of Thasan and its strange lands.

The print version of the fanzine is available from my Bigcartel store; the PDF edition will be published through DriveThruRPG with a few months’ delay. As always, customers who buy the print edition will receive the PDF version free of charge.

Map sheets, booklet, and UVG dice


10 comments:

  1. Looking forward this!
    Jon S

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  2. And I've just missed it with my order. :) By the way, can you share any progress with Helvécia? I'm thinking of ordering it as well but if it's near, I'll probably wait and order both together.

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    1. The game is in production, and might be released late April or early May - if the stars are right. I will post a more extensive announcement post and a preview once I am through shipping the first wave of Echoes orders.

      Do note that the boxed set will always have to ship on its own. It weighs just below 2000g with packing materials, and that's the heaviest the Post is willing to carry as a letter (before shipping is essentially doubled).

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    2. Can't wait. Hope it will be in A5 format.

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    3. It is A4, similar to Castle Xyntillan (but 204 pages), with "Ammertal and the Oberammsbund", a similarly formatted hex-crawl guide / adventure supplement for two cantons (72 p).

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    4. A4 is not my cup of tea in general, but Xyntillan is excellent, so, can´t say I'm not intrigued.

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  3. Do you have a name for the greater Kassadia/Erillion/Twelve Kingdoms setting?

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    1. Ho! Can of worms there. I shamefully admit I do not have one yet. Everything I have thought of has sounded false, while it has been easy to make up toponyms for it on the local level. I try not to force the issue until inspiration strikes.

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  4. Waiting, in pain and misery, for mine to arrive.

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  5. The color map is just lovely, thanks again Melan.

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