u/CorneliusFeatherjaw2

Probably a year or two ago by now, back on my previous account before Reddit decided it had suspicious activity and permanently locked it (still no clue what that was about), I had posted on here asking if anyone could explain to me a reference in the Arduin Grimoire to a "Singer" class that I couldn't find anywhere else. Since then, I have come in possession of scans of several early fanzines and have finally found the origin of the Singer class. It was created by Dan Pierson and its writeup appeared in two parts split across issues 1 and 2 of Alarums & Excursions, with other contributors' reactions and homebrewed revisions and variants of it appearing intermittently in subsequent issues. As many commenters on my original post speculated, it was indeed an early version of the bard, and in the first issue is even given bard as an alternate name for the class.

On an unrelated note, the writeup in issue 1 contains this gem of a typo: "Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast..."

I posted a while back about my new zine, Monster Closet, when I first announced the project, but given that it was on my old account before I got locked out of it due to Yahoo deleting my backup email due to inactivity, I decided to post about it again and use it as an excuse to put out another call for submissions.

Monster Closet is a PWYW zine which accepts contributions from readers and then each issue features an adventure making use of all of that issue's submissions. The zine focuses primarily on new monsters but magic items, spells, races, classes, and rules additions/subsystems are all acceptable as well provided they are not too overpowered. Also, if you think of another category beyond the ones I mentioned and can make a good case for it I'll consider it. Some guidelines: all submissions must be for 1e AD&D; monsters should include their XP value; magic items should include XP and GP values; races should include what classes they qualify for, their level limits for each class, adjustments to thief ability percentages if applicable, and racial preferences; and classes should include what races qualify, maximum levels for qualifying races, level titles, and whether they can use oil and poison.

Post your submissions here, PM them to me, or email them to me at monsterclosetzine@yahoo.com. Submitters will be paid $5 per submission if the issue sells $50 worth of copies.

(Please ignore the typo in the title; Reddit won't let me edit it. No, My1e is not the name of some software)

Just click the link above, click the green flag, and then press space or click/tap the screen to generate a random treasure without having to break out your physical dice. It can be adjusted for different dungeon levels or set to a mode for rolling monsters' treasure types for wilderness lairs. The magic item list contains items from the DMG, UA, OA, The Book of Marvelous Magic, and Bottled Wonders of the Decanter, with more on the way, while spell scrolls include spells from the PHB, UA, Dungeonland, Isle of the Ape, and obscure OD&D 3rd party supplement The Necromican. There are a few features left to add for full functionality, such as a blacklist for excluding certain magic item and spell sources and sliders for adjusting the percentage of Occidental, Oriental, and technological items to be generated.

I have written a program to randomly roll for potions, which I plan to use for an upcoming adventure. It currently contains every potion ever published by TSR unless the Encyclopedia Magica is missing some. My next step is adding potions from 3rd party products, fanzines, and retroclones.

A while back I had a silly idea to run a convention game, or maybe a play by post game, that is completely randomized. The dungeon levels would be generated using the DMG's random dungeon tables, the monsters and treasures will be randomly picked from tables including every OD&D, AD&D, and even tangentially related 3rd party or OSR book I have a PDF of, and the races and classes of the PCs would be similarly chosen. So, I started work on writing a generator that would pick legal race/class combinations from the ever-growing list of options, and after way too much time invested in such a dumb idea here is the result: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1255871837/

A few possible PCs:

• Mandalorian Yakuza
• Silver Dragon-Blooded Alchemist
• Halfling Warlock
• Brownie Idiot
• Pixie
• Rattlesnake Bard
• Ice Age Wood Elf Jedi Knight
• Gold Dragon Jester
• Neanderthal Merchant
• Humbaba Aeronaut
• Half Dwarf/Melnibonean Artificer

Does this sound useful? Well, probably not. But interesting at least? Would anyone be interested in that kind of game? I can't imagine it working as a campaign for long, but maybe as a beer & pretzels game. Or maybe at least someone can find some other creative use for this very strange random generator.