The God With No Name

“Once a vast primordial sea creature, the God with No Name slept and was buried under the salt and silt as the earth dried around it. As Dwarves came to mine the salt centuries later so too did they unearth the slumbering giant and its formless shadow child, the Void Doppler. Still, the pure and valuable salt lies here as temptation to any who would dare to venture so deep.”

I make it a habit to always provide spoiler free reviews here at TheRatHole.ca, but since there is no “back cover” I’m going to deem that introduction blurb as “not a spoiler”. 

This adventure, the God with No Name, is bare bones, system agnostic, adventure in the Old School Renaissance/Revival (OSR) style. It is one of several such adventures available from Leyline Press, printed in a rather unique fashion. It is printed on an A3 page (roughly 11”x17”)folded in 8 with a cut between the middle two sections allowing the whole thing to work as a booklet. On one side you have the cover, followed by five pages of room-by-room detail. When you unfold the whole thing, the inside pages are a simple grid map of all the locations. The other half is any specific stats and info that couldn’t be ported in or substituted out from any other rule system. For example, the   is a creature unique to this adventure and so its stats and abilities are all included. There are also rumours that the Players might hear leading up to this adventure, tables for certain randomized events, etcetera. 

[Editior’s Note: After this review was written I discovered one of Leyline’s other mini adventures is specified as being written for the Old School Essentials ruleset, which is effectively a clone of the original D&D. The God With No Name is not labeled as such, but OSE is just a specific OSR brand so I’m mentioning it without re-writting everything else here.]

Part of the point of this adventure is that it is incredibly straightforward to run. An experienced GM with a good knowledge of OSR creatures and rules could probably pick this up and run it with almost zero prep work. A GM with less experience will probably want to take a bit more time, to find appropriate stats for the encounters. In most cases, these are intentionally left as CREATURE and leaves you (the GM) to figure out where that info might come from. I could 100% run this as a Starfinder adventure with very little trouble. The only trouble and that is a relative term, is the Big Bad  ’s info. 

Let me stop and give a very short TTRPG history lesson for readers here who may not know about OSR. The term OSR generally means a style of game that derives its rules and/or “feel” from early roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. They are usually less focused on being flashy or having a rule for every situation, and more focused on challenging players by using their ingenuity to overcome potentially unbalanced challenges. The movement started picking up steam in the early 2000s as the internet became more common and online forums or websites like DriveThruRPG made it very simple to distribute small scale periodicals and content. To a certain extent, this also leads to a sharp decline in the physical ‘zine movement that we are now seeing a resurgence of. 

Back to the redacted Big Bad. The biggest challenge is that the stats go right back to having a THAC0 score. I’m not giving you another history lesson, you can grab a drink and google what that is. The short version is that it may take a bit longer to look up the acronyms and create a suitable conversion to a modern system. That’s the double-edged sword for a lot of OSR games, very easy to slip between systems, except when it isn’t.

I love what Leyline Press has going with this. I would never play it with an OSR system, but it would be great to port over to just about any modern fantasy or sci-fi game system. That’s the beauty of having such a skeletal adventure, and I this is a great skeleton to pull out of the [game] closet sometime.