By This Axe Has Launched!
My New Kickstarter is an OSR Sourcebook for Dwarves
It’s time to delve deeply into adventure, and discover the secrets of the dwarves. BY THIS AXE: The Cyclopedia of Dwarven Civilization has just launched on Kickstarter.
In this tome you will find the secrets of the great and proud race of dwarves, compiled, codified, and curated for use in your favorite old-school fantasy role-playing game. With the Cyclopedia, you get:
200 pages of lore and rules bounded in a stitch-bound hardcover and PDF edition
A full-color painted cover by Michael Syrigos
A full-color interior layout with selection of color and B&W interior illustrations
Compatibility with Old School Renaissance RPGs such as ACKS, OSE, LL, and LOTFP
By This Axe is organized into ten chapters:
Chapter 1, Introduction, details the audience, purpose, and approach for this book.
Chapter 2, Dwarven Lore, provides an overview of the ethnicity, physiology, language, and customs of dwarves. It is narrated from the point of view of a sage in the world of the Auran Empire.
Chapter 3, Dwarven Characters, explains how to roll up a dwarven character in any one of six racial classes, including the craftpriest, delver, earthforger, fury, machinist, and vaultguard.
Chapter 4, Dwarven Templates, provides eight pre-generated templates for each character class in this book. Using these templates, you can easily make your vaultguard a highborn lord, your machinist an apothecary, or your craftpriest a reliquary guardian.
Chapter 5, Dwarven Earthforging, details a new style of magic, wielded by the earthforger class, whose innate talents have allowed them to channel the power within materials to reshape their form.
Chapter 6, Dwarven Automatons, presents rules for designing, building, and repairing clockwork and steampunk-type machines. The section includes over 20 example vehicles, objects, and other automatons to act as examples for the build process and/or to include in your game as items to encounter or use, or as blueprints in treasure hoards.
Chapter 7, Dwarven Domains, explains how your dwarven characters can establish themselves as rulers of domains and realms, with rules for agriculture, urban settlements, vassals, garrisons, and more.
Chapter 8, Dwarven Mining, expands the rules for domains to include mining for precious metals and quarrying for stone. Special rules for “delving too deep” allow your dwarves to greedily hunger for gold - risking potentially dire consequences.
Chapter 9, Dwarven Mycoculture, details the secret methods of mushroom farming used by the dwarves to feed their vaults and brew their marvelous ales and beers.
Chapter 10, Dwarven Relics, offers a catalog of over 35 rare and powerful dwarven relics, artifacts, and antiquities that might be guarded in sacred reliquaries, wielded by dwarf lords, or re-discovered in lost vaults and deep and hidden places.
The Cyclopedia of Dwarven Civilization was written for three groups of gamers:
Judges (gamemasters) who are creating and running fantasy campaigns using any of the Old School Renaissance (OSR) systems who would like to add more depth, variety, and verisimilitude to their dwarves. If you’ve thought to yourself, “if only I better understood the per-capita productivity of dwarven mushroom farms, I could more easily simulate the siege of Dragon’s Tor,” this book is for you.
Players who are participating in an OSR role-playing game campaign who would like to test out some new character classes and gameplay experiences. If you find yourself saying, “I wish my dwarf could build a steam-powered tank to delve through a mine while high on berserker-rage-inducing mushrooms,” then this book is for you, too.
Gamers who just really love dwarves. If your ringtone intones “Baruk Khazâd! Khazâd ai-mênu!” when anyone calls, if you cultivate a chest-length beard with battle-braids, if you prefer to drink your bread in mugs, if you’ve been forging a battle axe over your stove during lunch hour, then this book is for you above all.
On the other hand, if you’re a willowy archer with pointy ears who lives in the trees and has a name like “Lithaniel Silverleaf of the Rose,” please move along. The precious secrets in this book aren’t for you, and I had to swear a solemn oath before all of the great ancestors that I’d never allow an elf to buy this book. Halfling buyers will be approved on a case-by-case basis.
By This Axe was designed with our own Adventurer Conqueror King System™ (ACKS™) in mind. ACKS is a set of rules for fantasy role-playing derived from the old “Red Box” fantasy RPG rules released by TSR in the early 1980s. It shares many mechanics with other Old School Renaissance (OSR) games built on the same chassis, such as Old School Essentials™ and Lamentations of the Flame Princess™. What differentiates ACKS from its brethren is its focus on the “domain game,” in which high-level characters rule realms and wage war at large scale. If you are a longstanding ACKS player or judge, all of this will be familiar to you, and the whole book will be immediately useful without any conversion required.
However, you don’t have to own a copy of ACKS to make use of The Cyclopedia of Dwarven Civilization. ACKS only makes up a small percentage of the fantasy RPG market, and we want to share our love for dwarves with all of our other stout and bearded friends. Therefore, we’ve made great efforts to ensure that By This Axe is easily compatible with other OSR role-playing game systems built on the same chassis. There's an entire conversion guide included in the book. Using the Cyclopedia with your game of choice is as easy as killing kobolds with fireballs.
So pick up your battle axe, mount your war-bear, comb your beard, and head over to Kickstarter!
