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| Front Cover by Aaron Arocho |
Judges Guild products were not on my radar back in the '80s, probably because my game store was Toys 'R' Us*, so I have only been catching up with their offerings in the past year or so. (Happily, during this time, a flood of them has reappeared in the second hand market.) So I knew nothing about Geoff Dale's Inferno until the recent post by James Maliszewski. (My reading of OSR blogs was more irregular two years ago when Brunomac wrote about the module.) I am very excited to get my hands on a copy of this reworking of Dante's first four levels of Hell. There is a revised pdf of it on RPGNOW. Sadly, it is not available for Print-on-Demand, and the pdf is highly priced in my judgment, so I'll hold out for a print copy. If you follow the link above to Grognardia to learn more, check out the comments. Geoff Dale weighs in there, and he sounds as thoughtful as he is creative. It sounds like he is also working on finishing the Inferno and writing a Gazetteer of Hell, which is exciting. Talk about perseverance! Gamers and mythopoets of all kinds who have not read Dante's Inferno will do themselves a favor by remedying this deficiency. I'm a religion scholar and not a scholar of the Italian language, but perhaps an attractive copy like the affordable B&N hardback, along with some aids of note, commentary, and illustrations (famously, Gustave Dore's and William Blake's) would help folks to get into it. I haven't played video or computer games in years, but this certainly tempted me. Anybody played it?
In parting, here is some hellishly good free reading. Readers of the blog likely know that I am a fan of J. Matthew Stater's Land of Nod, and in particular, his fantasy Asia, Mu-Pan. As if that wasn't enough, he had to turn his sights on another one of my favorite settings to contemplate, Hell. I pointed out some of his initial posts over a week ago, but characteristically Matt keeps cranking them out. I find his numbering of the posts a little confusing, but he's added a tag, so keep up with his infernal posting here.
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| Back cover of Dale's Inferno in the original Judges Guild version. |
* Yes, young folks, there was a time you could get all TSR's stuff at Toys 'R' Us. Those of us who grew up in the 70s/early 80s lived in a magical time.
