Kickstarter Spotlight: Swords & Wizardry Complete Rulebook 3rd Printing

TREASURE and glittering gems; dark places beneath the earth where monsters dwell; magic circles, pentagrams and pentacles; runes of evil import, and iron-banded doors of mouldering oak; wizards of vast power, living in their isolated towers above black seaside cliffs; great-horned demons in their bloody lairs; massive stone idols with jeweled eyes and hieroglyphic pedestals, carved in the distant eons before the young civilizations of humankind; strange and glowing orbs, floating in the air above rusted metal grates leading to deeper levels of the underground passageways…

It is about flying carpets and cursed blades, about hooded priests gathered for unspeakable rites in their forgotten temples; it is about adventure and about perilous undertakings, forcing back the evil creatures of Chaos from the borderlands of embattled civilization; it is about battle-scarred warriors and deadly sorcerers…

Over on Kickstarter a new printing of Swords & Wizardry from Frog God Games has appeared. This printing they are thinking of the problem of women in OSR (old school revival) gaming. Here's their take:

Given our goal of making the game more accessible, we hired – through Stacy – talent that coordinates with the goal. We asked Stacy to put together an all-woman team not as a societal goal, but because she had the chops to assemble the kind of team we wanted. This isn’t a “pink” edition of the rules. It’s the more-accessible next printing that we are targeting toward the mainstream market. It has always been our goal to get the open-ended rules of 1974-78 gaming into the mainstream, and this is our objective here. We think that Stacy’s team has hit this goal out of the ballpark, and we think you’ll agree.

I think it's a great goal and the new cover looks like a great, modern take on the genre:

The interior art and page borders stay true to OSR in general.

Why should you pick up Swords and Wizardry? It's a very very close clone of D&D first edition, the game that people played in the 70s and 80s. You can play classic modules and many OSR products like Barrowmaze, which I picked up in the recent Kickstarter, and I'm really excited to read over the winter.

Swords and Wizardry Complete is like playing D&D 1E with all the supplements. So you can play an Assassin, or Ranger. At $35, this project is a no brainer for fans of simple fantasy roleplaying games.