The Beast of Jelin’s Mire

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• I believe at this stage it would be worthwhile to crowdfund a sort of phrenological atlas of the fandoms of various retroclones so we can map the deterioration as it progresses down the lines from the sacred to the infernal. Note here that the entry point appears to be Lotfp, whose fans, while still possessed of the broad foreheads and aquiline noses of healthy rpgplayers, exhibit the excessive hairyness, blubbery lips and underdeveloped chins that are precursors to a descent to a lower form of being. I had believed the Troika and Cairn fandoms were furthest along the path of degeneration, indeed it is difficult to believe that any mortal clay, no matter how profane, could more then such disorganization, and yet the Natural World, with its all but infinite catalogue of wonders and horrors, continues to amaze. We have here the first instance of Homo sub-Troika sub-Sapiens. The Homo has herein a profound double meaning. Notice how the creature, even while in the act of composing an adventure for fantastical roleplaying, an act that has nothing to do with the phallic or reproductive drives, is unable to control its debased and lustful impulses, causing them to intrude upon an activity that should be entirely separate. The traditional hierarchy of mind over body, already a departure from the wholeness of being wherein the mind and body are unified by a profound awareness of the sacred, has herein been inverted further, producing not individuals, but rather atomized parts with only rudimentary personality traits, enslaved to lower instinctual forces that manifest themselves in a chaotic, dionysean and superbly homoerotic fashion.

• Love how the postscript to the review is basically "dear woke hivemind, plz no cancel me".

  • Look, we all know there are roving bands of people on the Internet with pitchforks and torches, but if an OSR product has sweaty goat man sex in it, *no one* is going to burn down your blog just for pointing it out.

    People who want to buy that stuff will. People who don't, won't.

    That last paragraph endeared you to neither one of those two groups. It's embarrassing. You already wrote three or four sentences of word salad in apologetic preempted defense. So cringe.

    You're my hero, Bryce. You write these three times a week without fail. You're amazing.

    Fuck the haters. Be yourself.

    Keep writing these reviews—and keep them OSR—and I'll keep buying you half a martini at the bar every month.

• So happy they finally came out with a more LGBTQ friendly supplement for Zweihander! I have tried introducing LGBTQ+ characters many times before but the original ruleset would always cause them to contract various wasting illnesses or expire from malignant tumors as a result of accumulated corruption points within a session or two.

• So ... 2E mindset and furries. Two horrible tastes that taste even more horrible together.

  I suppose it was inevitable.

• I I for one am just grateful the octopus with hands isn't also described by it's sexuality. Real show of restraint there. But really, this reeks of fanfiction disguised as adventure writing.

• This supplement could not have come at a better time. Ever since we started using the previous Zweihander sourcebook Open Borders: Diversity In A Grimdark Age, our LGBTQ+ characters would frequently get beaten up by packs of roving moon-god worshipping Ratmen youths that started to show up in every major hommlet and city, forcing our characters to adventure in the country-side.

• Gygax was doing gay better than this decades ago- Lareth the Beautiful down there with all his opal necklaces... Rufus and Burn shacked up together, just look at 'em... and he never felt the need to spell it all out for us. They just were.

  • It took me decades to catch on to Rufus and Burne. It was only in the 20-teens that I happened to see again the old illustration of the two of them, one wearing pink leather armor with sculpted abs and I finally got it.

  • Are you fucking serious? Gygax representation was terrible, it was the stereotype of effeminate homosexual typical of his day and age. You can’t do much worse than that

    • Really? Kind of depends on how you play them, don't it? Nothing in their T1 description screams "effeminate stereotype" to me...more like "successful adventurers that will kick your newbs' asses if trifled with."

      Jeff Dee's illustrations is typical of all his work, which is very much comic book super hero style (see Villains & Vigilantes for other examples). Regardless, that's not how Gygax represents them in his text.

      Now Lareth the Beautiful (OTOH) is more of the hipster/metro- type that was recruited right out of his frat house into the Very Bad Cult thing...

• I wish someone would write an actual good LGBTQ+ focused Warhammer adventure about an Imperial knightly order based on the Sacred Band of Thebes or maybe just wizard hook ups gone wrong.

  Instead there's this.

  It's like some guy asking you back to his place to look at their original Tom of Finland prints only to show you a ceiling plastered with Sonic the Hedgehog inflation erotica.

  • And yet, the difference is one of degree only. Once the doctrine of 'Love is Love' is accepted, no moral position can be taken to substantiate the inherent disgust one feels at yet another piss-orgy goatmen dungeon.

    Your desire is wrong, probably. The element of 'gay' in and of itself has no value to the adventure and the philosophy that it is shorthand for runs counter to most of WHF's themes. The people that want to put gay in Warhammer are much more concerned with gay then they are with Warhammer and as such they are likely to succeed at the gay part but fail at the Warhammer part. They have no passion for and no understanding of the thing they are trying to gentrify. This is a recurring theme.

    • If there's one thing you can count on this site for it's homophobic word-salad!

      Is this Prince or Kent?
      Is there a difference?

      • You misspelled 'its.'

        • In English "its" is used for the possessive, while the common contraction of the words "it is" is "it's".

        • The mutant also seems to grapple with other complexities of the High Speech. "If there is one thing to count on this site for it's...[...]"

          The critical verb is 'to count on' not 'to count.' If there is one thing to count on this site its? Does it mean if there is one thing we can count on and it is this site? Or does it mean we can count things on this site?

          Regardless, nothing a firm thrashing with the riding crop and banishment to the Radium Mines won't fix.

  • "Wizard hook ups gone wrong" should be a whole line of adventures. So many great examples in the S&S genre (Theleb K'arna from Elric immediately springs to mind).

• I have no problem with gay characters in D&D but no freaky sex please

  And no I don't consider sex freaky just for involving 2 people of the same sex. I'm talking about the sweaty goat man threesome shit

• Zweihänder is probably the weirdest mutant in traditional gaming. A grim and perilous Warhammer clone whose author and fandom seem to detest everything that makes Warhammer Warhammer. It is, indeed, like a Wild West RPG whose audience hated guns, booze, horses, and cigars. This explains the present module.

  • The adventures for Zweihander have been underwhelming, to put it politely. Escape the Noose has promise, although the themes are covered better in the 2E WFRP fan offering The Nine Virtues of Magnus the Pious. There are some covering very adult, some might say distasteful, material. The Saint of Bruckstadt is a much stronger treatment. There are also a few railroads, wasting decent premises.
    And yet WFRP has a (deserved) reputation for excellent adventures.

  • "It is, indeed, like a Wild West RPG whose audience hated guns, booze, horses, and cigars."

    But, they really love chaps and cowboy boots and cowboy hats!