Old Judge's Guild supplements

[beermotor]

Okay, y'all, since we did a post on best TSR modules...

Best system-neutral/generic supplements by Judge's Guild (or another publisher, if you're so inclined) to be used w/DCC...?

GO!

[ZenDog]

Well, Tegal Manor, Caverns of Thracia, and Dark Tower are considered amongst the best JG adventures. I like the not so well known Illhiedrin Book. There are a ton of useful supplements that can be dropped into most campaigns with a little tweaking things like the Frontier Fortress of Kelnore, the book of treasure maps, and of course the Ready Reference sheets can be handy too.

[beermotor]

Thanks, the only thing out of that list that I have are the Ready Reference Sheets... they did seem kind of useful, bunch of random tables. What do you like about the Illhiedrin book? Are the castles/caves supplements worth getting?

[ZenDog]

What do you like about the Illhiedrin book?

I like that it's a low level caper/heist type of adventure. The players are after the book for a powerful patron, but so are bunch of other factions. The action is also spread out across a mixture of civilisation, wilderness, and dungeon. As written it doesn't look that obviously spectacular, but the potential for mayhem is there in the bones of the thing.

Are the castles/caves supplements worth getting?

The books of castles, and supplements like them (book of islands, book of villages) didn't really appeal to me personally because I'm happy to come up with that sort of thing on the fly. The frontier forts, and treasure maps are useful though. I also like the portal supplements (Torsh I think). Don't know about the caves.

[themightyeroc]

Judges guild book of Unknown Gods and Tegel Manor has proved invaluable to me so far in my ongoing DCC campaign. I agree that the modules Caverns of Thracia, and Dark Tower would be good fits as well.

At some point I intend on using the City State of the Invincible Overlord as well.

Wondrous Relics is a pretty cool book of Major magic item / artifacts that could serve as central plot pieces for some very App. N style adventures.

Don't forget that pretty much all the Judges guild stuff is available in PDF form at rpgnow, and for what it could cost you to track down live copies of some of this stuff you might as well get the PDF.

[beermotor]

I picked up the castles, villages, and treasure maps books today via rpgnow, plus Temple of Ra Accursed by Set. The supplements look awesome for the tables alone, particularly the heraldry one.

[GnomeBoy]

I have played the GG-published version of Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor -- and I think it would be a great several sessions of DCC, using either the 3.5 version, or (I assume) the original.

I'd say more, I don't want to be guilty of spilling spoilers.

[beermotor]

Yeah I have an old copy of that module, too, plus Verbosh, the Corsairs of Tallibar, and the Fantasy Cartographer's Fieldbook.

Verbosh is pretty cool, a large city with some stuff going on with the sewers and nearby points of interest. Like all JG stuff it needs scaling, though, but it's really easy to crank out some basic stats for stuff in DCC, I'm finding... almost all the stuff I've made for the L1 conversion has been right before the party encounters it and I just kinda wing it and write it down in my printed-off module margins. I'm quite proud of the un-dead DCC "ghouls" and "ghasts" that I made, they stayed relatively true to the originals but with DCC-ified attacks and draining abilities. The bear-bugs are quite a bit different from the bugbears, though.

Hmm... interesting... "J"oseph "G"oodman... "J"udges "G"uild...

COINCIDENCE?!?! I THINK NOT!

[finarvyn]

I was a Judges Guild subscriber from almost day one of the company's existance and still own most of my original products from the era.

The City State of the Invincible Overlord has long been my go-to city map. I've used it as Greyhawk, Lankhmar, and even once a space port in a Star Wars game. One thing to watch out for, however, is that levels of NPCs are often somewhat random. The barkeep might be a 6th level retired fighter, for example, and picking a fight in his bar could have some surprising consequences.

Thunderhold (and Sunstone Caverns) is another early product I like. It's a small walled dwarven village with dungeon below.

Tegel Manor (basically a haunted house) is another from that era that I think is pretty well done. Most of the early JG products are designed in a way where you take their skeleton and add stuff to it to customize it and make it your own, and I think that TM is one of those which needed more monsters along the way. Again, as in many early JG products, you might find an orc in one room and a demon in the next so players need to be wary or they can get destroyed in a hurry.

Dark Tower and Caverns of Thracia are large-scale modules. Both are excellent but were written as AD&D products instead of OD&D so I didn't own them back then. Had a great time as a player running through both, however.