AS&SH first impressions

[slithy]

After seeing Jeff's "Rats in the Walls" in Knockspell #4, I bought the PDFs for AS&SH. Very impressed with the simple, concise rules, the look and feel of the game and the artwork.

Most recently, our group has been playing AD&D 1st ed. I showed the player's book to everyone and they are quite taken with it. We are going to convert everyone's characters in the next week or two and start playing AS&SH.

As we like our tablets, I shall persuade everyone to fork out $10 for their own copy of the rules. No option for a players-only PDF though? (Not that I think $10 is too much money, I just don't want the players to have access to Things Players Are Not Meant to Know in the DM book!)

Hard copies of the rules would be nice, but shipping to the UK is very expensive ($50 for the boxed set and $60 for postage!) Any plans for a UK distributor? Or what about a print on demand option?

Any plans for a colour map of Hyperborea (PDF)?

I am looking forward to seeing how AS&SH plays, so I'm sure I'll be back with some more comments and hopefully some contributions in the near future.

[mabon5127]

Welcome Slithy! Let us know how the conversion and first adventures play out!

Morgan

[blackadder23]

Welcome!

Before I bought the boxed set, I printed out the two rulebooks from the PDF and had them spiral bound at an office supply store; the binding cost a couple of bucks for each book (not sure about the UK). They'll be very useful for the table and my lovely boxed set won't get damaged.

[machpants]

There is a player's guide in print, I wonder if it is offered in PDF?

[mabon5127]

Apr 10, 2013 20:21:41 GMT -6 blackadder23 said:

Welcome!

Before I bought the boxed set, I printed out the two rulebooks from the PDF and had them spiral bound at an office supply store; the binding cost a couple of bucks for each book (not sure about the UK). They'll be very useful for the table and my lovely boxed set won't get damaged.

Not to mention as I get older the larger print is easier to see.

My pdf prints are the work horses as well.

Morgan

[mabon5127]

Apr 10, 2013 20:25:09 GMT -6 machpants said:

There is a player's guide in print, I wonder if it is offered in PDF?

Currently not. The entire game is $10 so the barrier is pretty low. The gazetteer is good for the players to read anyway and its in the Refs book.

Morgan

[Ghul]

Hi slithy, and welcome to the forum!

Apr 10, 2013 16:18:18 GMT -6 slithy said:

After seeing Jeff's "Rats in the Walls" in Knockspell #4, I bought the PDFs for AS&SH. Very impressed with the simple, concise rules, the look and feel of the game and the artwork.

That's nice to hear! I've had a lot of fun running Rats in the Walls at cons, and it's always interesting to see the different choices made. Glad to hear you like the game so far! Establishing that look and feel was integral to the process.

Most recently, our group has been playing AD&D 1st ed. I showed the player's book to everyone and they are quite taken with it. We are going to convert everyone's characters in the next week or two and start playing AS&SH.

Well, I love AD&D of course, but I'm also happy to hear that your group is willing to take a shuffle step to the side and try out the AS&SH game. Keep us in the loop over here on how it goes!

As we like our tablets, I shall persuade everyone to fork out $10 for their own copy of the rules. No option for a players-only PDF though? (Not that I think $10 is too much money, I just don't want the players to have access to Things Players Are Not Meant to Know in the DM book!)

Presently there is no Players' Manual PDF, because it is included in the $10 deal. Because it is not all on the same PDF, I would think you could simply say, "You can open the Players' PDF, but don't open the Referee's PDF." Of course it's in poor taste for a player to look up a monster during the game, I agree. Anyway, I'll give your idea some thought.

Hard copies of the rules would be nice, but shipping to the UK is very expensive ($50 for the boxed set and $60 for postage!) Any plans for a UK distributor? Or what about a print on demand option?

I think Noble Knight Games has a workaround for cheaper UK shipping, and you can get the print game through them. Presently there are no plans to hook up with a UK distributor; in fact, this project remains so small that we do not have US distribution yet.

Any plans for a colour map of Hyperborea (PDF)?

None presently, but I have thought about it for future printings.

I am looking forward to seeing how AS&SH plays, so I'm sure I'll be back with some more comments and hopefully some contributions in the near future.

That sounds great! I look forward to hearing from you.

Cheers,
Jeff T.

[blackadder23]

Apr 11, 2013 10:56:32 GMT -6 Ghul said:

Of course it's in poor taste for a player to look up a monster during the game, I agree.

"In poor taste" is right. I don't allow rulebooks of any kind at the table, because I think they're distracting and it's not fair to the other players (or me! ) to constantly have to update people who weren't paying attention the first time. I'm convinced that my ability to run players through an adventure at a very brisk clip (I've had a party clear three levels with tricks and traps as well as monsters and NPC encounters in under five hours) is largely due to eliminating distractions like rulebooks. Plus I use a caller. ;D

(When running a game, I often wear a shirt I had printed that reads "THE FIRST THING I'LL DO IS KILL ALL THE RULES LAWYERS". Once players see that, they usually grasp that the rulebooks will avail them nothing, and so they don't really miss them. I always have the rules in case someone really, really must look up some spell or ability during play. But I don't encourage it. Players only have a relative handful of abilties and spells for any given character, so they really ought to be able to remember them IMO. If not, write them down!)

Anyway, welcome again slithy. Do you plan to play in the Hyperborean setting or another one? If you're playing in Hyperborea, you'll probably want to have your players read the gazetteer section of the referee's book. It will save you the trouble of explaining all that stuff! Then you can get right to playing.

[slithy]

I decided to print the Players Manual PDF: I printed it as three separate volumes and perfect-bound them with my homemade book-binding jig and some PVA glue. It looks well and hopefully will not fall apart. (I originally made this jig to bind my MSc. thesis, but I tested it on the four Yggsburgh supplements, so AS&SH is not the first of Jeff's works that I have printed and bound at home!) Anyway I shall still persuade my group to buy their own copies, you deserve the support!

Apr 11, 2013 11:31:17 GMT -6 blackadder23 said:

Do you plan to play in the Hyperborean setting or another one? If you're playing in Hyperborea, you'll probably want to have your players read the gazetteer section of the referee's book. It will save you the trouble of explaining all that stuff!

We started in the village of Restormel (Judges' Guild), which has some plot hooks based on HPL's "The Lurking Fear". I was aiming for a weird fantasy feel for this game, which I think is why AS&SH appeals. I had located Restormel in Greyhawk, so that has determined initial choice of races, faiths, etc. But it shouldn't be too hard to move the action to Hyperborea when it's time to move on from Restormel: perhaps Tizun Thane's mirrors; an ocean voyage that gets blown off course; or something involving a silver key...

[Ghul]

Sounds like some exciting stuff in store, slithy! Keep us in the loop on how things progress. Tizun Thane's mirrors, oh my!

Cheers,
Jeff T.

[slithy]

So we have converted everyone's characters to AS&SH and that went very smoothly (I had to give the 2nd level Druid a concession that she still gets the same spell allocation as in AD&D but that was the only house rule). Combat played out very well, the AS&SH mechanics are simple and easy to resolve.

We are part of a University games society, and this weekend was a 24 hour event--I'm not really up for all-nighters, but we set up a table and played from 6pm to 2am. I had printed out and bound the player's handbook in 3 volumes; a few people (not part of our group) came up and had a look at them. Noone had heard of AS&SH but when I tried to explain it they asked if it was like Savage Worlds. I don't know, as I've never played that system. Anyway there was some interest! We have a convention in June called Q-Con (which I am led to believe is the biggest in the UK) so that may be an opportunity to spread the word.

[blackadder23]

By all means spread the word!

Savage Worlds is a point buy system somewhat similar to GURPS, Champions, and the White Wolf games. Personally I don't see much resemblance to D&D-inspired systems like AS&SH, but opinions may vary.

[odysseus]

Not really willing to start a new thread and as I intend to keep on topic...

So I discovered AS&SH with the Ennies nomines list. I might have seen its cover here and there in some forum but it might surely have been at a time I wasn't interested at this OSR thing. Anyhow, I've been now for a couple of month (might be cause of my reading of those Conan novels) but to be honest, I was more interested in the modules than in the systems and games itself. I tried to read OSRIC and such but, as I've never played D&D other than the 3.5 ed. (which might explain why I tended to keep away from anything WTC or TSR ), the nostalgia wasn't there to help me reading through all those hundreds of pages of pure rules.
Anyway, pondering my votes for the Ennies, I ended up on the AS&SH site, read it through, liked what I saw and got myself the pdf.
I was quite surprised by how easy it was to read and how, despite being quite crunchy, it never became a bore to read. So I read it through and found myself wanting to run it and going back to it from time to time. Now I'm thinking throwing away my other fantasy RPG, which being high fantasy (let's call this game EarthD. or E.Dawn to keep it anonymous) doesn't suit anymore (and I'm not even touching its system).

What more surprised me is that, what I found most Old-School about AS&SH was its Weird Tales references and not its system.

And that was my two cents about how I liked my first OSR game.

[Ghul]

Thank you for sharing your story, odysseus. I'm delighted to hear how you found the game and how it resonates with you. That's fantastic. Cheers! ~Jeff T.