Fen Orc on the Ruined Tower of Zenopus

Fen Orc is relatively newish but very productive blog I'd recommend to any fans of this one. Per the sidebar, like many of us of a certain age, the author "got into D&D back in the '70s with Eric Holmes' 'Blue Book' set". Early on Fen Orc got my attention with a review (perhaps the first!) of my mini-dungeon, Beyond the Door to Monster Mountain and a look at the Legacy of Zenopus. 

Fen Orc has also been hard at work on material for you to use at the table, including a compilation of scenarios, the Fen Orc Almanac, which are compatible with Holmes Basic/Blueholme, and also a 2nd level for the Zenopus dungeon, Beneath the Ruined Wizards' Tower, which is pay-what-you-want on Drive Thru RPG.

I meant to highlight this earlier, but back in March, Fen Orc wrote an almost poetic review of The Ruined Tower of Zenopus. Here is a lovely excerpt:

"Two bucks buys you 18 pages, faultlessly formatted and a beautiful cover painting (Thomas Cole’s 1838 Italian Coast Scene with Ruined Tower) that seems to symbolise the whole project: the crumbling tower is the monument of Holmes’ Basic D&D; the idyllic shepherd tending his flock in the shadow of the tower, that is Zach; the little boat out among the islets, that’s us, wondering if we should put ashore: in a moment the shepherd will stand up and wave to us to drop anchor. There’s treasure here, you see, that Zach knows about, in a place long neglected."

Read the full review here:

The Ruined Tower of Zenopus by Zach Howard

We are entering the post-modernity of roleplaying games. The author is dead. How quaint it is to look back on the modern era (the 1970s and '80s) with its assumptions about authorship and ownership, of texts with single discourses, of official 'canons'. It's not like that now, what with retro-clones and open gaming licences and Old School Revivals.

Click on the "RTOZ review" label below to find more reviews of the Ruined Tower of Zenopus

The Ruined Tower of Zenopus is available on DMs Guild