Nestled along the banks of the river known as "The Great Source", stands the mighty fortress City of Verbosh. Built ages ago by the great "Lord Verbosh I", who founded the great and noble, royal line of Verbosh. A line of great kings that lasted until the birth of Verbosh II, whose first great act was to lead his proud legion into "The Battle of Dead-end Canyon"; where they were overwhelmed by a host of Kobolds fully half their number. From there on, the line of Verbosh went steadily down hill. Verbosh XXI managed to lose the family castle and holdings in a game of dice. This proved to be the high point in Verboshian history.
Verbosh, by Paul Nevins and Bill Faust, is one of my favorite Judges Guild products, ranking right up there with Rat on a Stick and Unknown Gods. It's a mini-setting for OD&D, bigger than the Keep on the Borderlands and its environs, but smaller and less complete than a full-on D&D world. In 76 pages you get the eponymous city, a wilderness region of respectable size (maybe 2,000 x 2,000 km or so) with lots of encounters, several smallish dungeons, some ruins and another whole town. Though designed for the original boxed set and its supplements, the statblocks could pretty easily be used with most successor products with no real difficulty.
The humor in the opening paragraph shines through much of the rest of the product. I find Verbosh to be utterly charming. It's tone and mid-range scope (bigger than a standard 32 page TSR module, smaller than a complete setting) was one of Asteroid 1618's direct inspirations, along with the original Arduin trilogy and the aforementioned Rat on a Stick. If you wanted a ready-to-go set-up where you could pull a fantasy campaign out of a hat on a moment's notice, you could do a lot worse than Verbosh and your favorite version of D&D.
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Posts
I never have read Unknown Gods ...
ReplyDeleteSix word review: The Fiend Folio of deity books.
ReplyDeleteIn addition to the kobolds, the other priceless bit is the thieves trying to dig their way under the castle, selling Demon Destroying Dirt for 1 copper piece a bucket with a money back guarantee. That's worth the (still low!) price of the product.
ReplyDeleteHi Jeff,
ReplyDeleteCool! I love the entry color piece.
It must really suck to have your army destroyed by a Kobold force half their size...
Shalom,
Maksim-Smelchak.
Six word review: The Fiend Folio of deity books.
ReplyDeleteOooh. Compelling six-word review, given that the Fiend Folio is still my veryveryvery favorite crittery book (even edging out the AtWM volumes).
It must really suck to have your army destroyed by a Kobold force half their size...
Especially pre-Tucker :)
Six word review: The Fiend Folio of deity books.
ReplyDeleteFour more: Vidmor, God of Bees!
I've never read a copy of All the World's Monsters, but my bud Pat once ran an adventure where he used monsters out of it. That was a hell of a good time. When DriveThruRPG first opened the fact that they carried all three volumes almost overcame my reluctance to deal with DRM technology. That and Pocket Empires for T4.
ReplyDeleteThe DRM tech disturbs me even less than the DriveThru PDFs tend to be nothing more than hasty "pirate scans" with unproofed OCR running behind the image to provide 90% searchability :(
ReplyDeleteWhich is to say, I don't mind so much that there are people selling amateur-grade PDFs of that sort ... What I mind is that it means, for many titles, that there will never be a proper top-to-bottom digital edition created, since the rights are snapped up/incentive is reduced.
Sigh.
I love the players that trade their coin for Verboshian money.
ReplyDeleteGets 'em every time.
Sorry. I like my fantasy dark and grim. I've never been a fan of the 'humor' found in Judges Guild products. I'd be an even bigger fan of Verbosh if it had less 'funny bits'... a halfling thief whose burps cause earthquakes, please! Still, it is packed with a lot of quality content. It's well worth finding if you can get past all the goofiness. Maps are iffy too...
ReplyDelete