Jump to content

THE SPIDER GOD'S BRIDE


Trifletraxor

Recommended Posts

the-spider-god-s-bride.jpgThe Spider-God's Bride is a collection of ten blood-red sword and sorcery adventures, inspired by the pulp era tales of Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. Venture in the footsteps of Conan the Cimmerian, Satampra Zeiros of Uzuldaroum, Imaro of Nyumbani, and other fabled thieves, reavers and slayers!

By Morten Braten. Available for pre-order.

Ef plest master, this mighty fine grub!
b1.gif 116/420. High Priest.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 months later...
  • 1 month later...
  • 6 months later...

There was a comment on the Mongoose forum that they had lost the author but just replaced him/her. I seem to remember it's now tentatively rescheduled for July but I could be wrong.

How do you lose an author ? I mean , do you take him ( or her ) to a bar and just forget to pick them up on the way out......

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I believe it's currently in proofing according to the Mongoose site. Probably going to the printer next week with the PDF available then.

I think the issue was that they were using a third party to do the changes for Legend and the people doing the changes dropped out twice before the finally got someone to finish the job.

Nigel

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...

Cursed, perhaps, by the spider god itself? Hmmm. What did you do with that white jade amulet you "found" in the Yucatan? =|

Just teasing. I was impressed by Legend's portable small format and reasonable price when I saw it at my local game shop. On the other hand, it was so small and so plain it sort of got lost among the larger, more garish game books.

Edited by seneschal
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...
  • 2 weeks later...

I bought the PDF and just read through it.

It is VERY good. VERY evocative of the Conan type stories without being too much of a rip off of those same stories.

There is also a VERY good section on how to adjust Magic for a S&S type setting.

I have a low-magic setting that I have been slowly working on to convert to D100 and this book will be my guide.

I very much enjoyed it and look forward to running some of the adventures.

This book and Legend: Blood Magic are prefect together and set up a dark S&S setting very well.

Very much recommended.

My friends call me Richard. You can call me Sir. ;)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 weeks later...

I bought the PDF and just read through it.

It is VERY good. VERY evocative of the Conan type stories without being too much of a rip off of those same stories.

There is also a VERY good section on how to adjust Magic for a S&S type setting.

I have a low-magic setting that I have been slowly working on to convert to D100 and this book will be my guide.

I very much enjoyed it and look forward to running some of the adventures.

This book and Legend: Blood Magic are prefect together and set up a dark S&S setting very well.

Very much recommended.

I hope it does well because I like Xoth and the original campaign from Xoth.net (even if it is d&d), but I find the conversion quite poor. I completely agree Blood Magic is a perfect fit for the campaign - all the more strange that it is not used or referenced anywhere in the conversion.

There are so many odd things about this book as a conversion. The substance of the adventures and the setting is still good, but you can find that in the original, the whole thing seems underdeveloped and a real missed opportunity. The stat blocks are physically big on the page but don't flesh out the characters, primary antagonists are given the sparsest of treatment in comparison to the original, because approach of the conversion is to strip away magic and magic spells some of the 'villains' of the adventure set pieces come out as workaday low-skill sorcery apprentices who are difficult distinguish between - did I just read the third sorcerer in another adventure with exactly the same 2 spells as the last two? yep, I just did. Low-magic seems almost no-magic here.

The art work seems arbitrary and actually stops part way through - after page 36, no more illustrations except maps. OK the maps are definitely better, I am not a fan of battle-board style squares on maps but this is possibly the one instance where there has been some development over the original.

The conversion author/s (uncredited) does not seem to understand combat styles - if there are 4 weapons listed, yep, you get skill percentages for 4 combat styles. This isn't a criticism of the author Morten Braten and from reading the Mongoose forums this can't have been fun for the publishers if they kept losing conversion authors, but wow, this was disappointing. Apologies for ranting, I just got it today and have been reading it this evening. I wouldn't get this without also getting the original from xoth.net.

Edited by Bilharzia
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have to agree. It was a poor conversion and I'm not even sure whoever did it even had the Legend rules, let alone read them. The TSGB appears to be using the MRQ1 version of Sorcery, and as Bilharzia said the weapon skills are MRQ1 version too.

The new spells seem to be written using MRQ1 Rune Magic, despite there being no Rune Magic skill provided for any of the NPCs, let alone any of them using these new spells. What magic is available is an unholy mess of sorcery and rune magic (e.g. Disruption, Protection), both of which seem to be expected to be manipulated by the Sorcery Manipulation skills (despite mechanical incompatibility). What half dozen or so spells are provided are repetitive, unimaginative and provided at such low skill that it is severely reduced in effectiveness, for example Palsy at 42% which can only affect locations with 5HP or less (and some casters have it at a lower skill). Some of them don't (as far as I'm aware) even exist in MRQ1, MRQ2 or TSGB (e.g. Silence).

I cannot tell if all the referenced monsters exist in Legend (since I don't own a copy of it), but I have the distinct feeling a few of them are D&D leftovers... and I'm pretty sure I saw a D&D Magic Item in the text too. And the converting magic to S&S is a straight copy-paste from the D&D version.

Sadly, all the potential for making sorcery weird and scary was lost. As was the chance to insert some very true-to-genre Spirit Magic. Added to the loss of characterisation, TSGB was a lost opportunity. I sincerely wish Matt had let me do the conversion whilst I was still working for Mongoose, but the project was buried until well after I left. So we have yet another example of flawed conversion, which doesn't even manage to convert it correctly to a version of the game two revisions old!

What really surprises me, is that nobody apart from Bilharzia has spotted the problem or raised a stink about it yet...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I hate so say it Bilharzia and Pete Nash are correct. I was so looking forward to this book and had it on pre-order for over a year. When I finally got my hands on the pdf and browsed through it. The world and setting stuff is ok but as they mentioned the stat conversion to Legend is just flawed. I can't see me using it as is without further work. Especially the magic on the NPCs leaves a lot to wish for.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Having been doing a bunch of conversion work from older D&D modules and an occasional one using 3e/3.5e material I can tell you that the best way of converting anything to Legend is to know those rules well. I've been working hard on tribal shaman types to use in place of users of magic in humanoid (orc/goblin) societies. Turning a bugbear "shaman" who uses clerical and mage spell into something appropriate is easy if you have a good handle on spirit magic/spirits and convert some of their 'spells' into Common Magic or the results of spirit magic. Converting mages is relatively simple as I use CM for the lower level stuff without doing any sort of direct conversion spell by spell and adding some Sorcery for higher level 'spells'. Clerics are equally simple with an Exorcism, Dismiss Magic or Spirit Block taking the place of their ability to Turn Undead (Skeletons and Zombies are animated by magic and many other undead are spirits of one form or another).

If you use spells that were written up in many of the Glorantha books published for RQII as well as those for Legend then there is a lot of extra potential to work with.

Here's one I did earlier :-)

Kwairno, (AC 9; MV 12”; MU 4; hp 9; #AT 1; D by weapon, spells; S9, I15, W11, D15, C9, Ch 10; AL LE).

Kwairno wears a ring of free action and carries a wand of negation (5 charges). Kwairno’s spells are:

First level: friends, magic missile, read magic

Second level: stinking cloud, web

1st level friends = Dominate (human) (Sorcery), mm = multimissile, mobility for the ring

2nd Level stinking cloud = Smother (Sorcery), web = Holdfast (Sorcery)

wand of negation = CM Countermagic 2 in wand recharges in 5 minutes for Kwaimo (2MP for Magnitude 1 = 4 MP cost drawn from slave mongrelmen

CM - So Multi missile cast on her dagger to start with, a wand with Countermagic 2, Mobility

Sorcery spells - Dominate (Human), Smother, Holdfast

I made her seasoned (350 skill points) with 76% in CM, 80% in Sorcery and 66% in Manipulation.

The biggest issue I find with Legend is that there are inconsistencies between the various materials - Enchanting in Arms is different to Enchanting in Blood Magic. The material for Spirit Magic is all over the place. I've had to drag material from RQII, S&P and the free Spirit Magic PDF to get a good handle on it.

BTW Pete, if the monsters aren't in RQII Colisseum then they aren't in MoL. I don't think anything was added and some that should have stayed were removed even though they weren't Glorantha specific.

Nigel

Nigel

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...