Jessup Games

So, some of you may have noticed that I dropped Swords and Wizardry from our listing, and added in a campaign setting for Tunnels and Trolls.  Some of you may be saying- what gives?  Don’t you want to support the hip and new OSR community?  Don’t you wanna?

And I realized- not really.  The part of the OSR that appeals to me (dungeon crawling, etc) I’ve always done with Tunnels and Trolls (at least when I run games…I’ve played countless 2nd and 3rd and 3.5 D&D, and I loved playing them…but as a game master, I prefer Tunnels and Trolls).  And I thought, you know what?  T&T needs more love.  Especially when it comes to going old school.

And that’s what I’m doing.

So, what is this new product going to be like?  Well, Sarsurath will be a highly weird, super surreal, epic fantasy campaign setting. The core book will be designed to be like a travelogue, written by a brave explorer who had stumbled onto this world and must quickly escape to come back home.

The world od Sarsurath is one of very few humans.  Those humans that exist in Sarsurath are slaves, mystically summoned from earth and forced to work as magical manservants. The writer of the Sarsurath core book will be one Danial Abrahms, who was exported from earth to the faraway planet during his dreams in the summer of 1890.  His adventures and explorations will be the chunky fluff of the text, with stats for everything he finds placed in easy to find notes along the pages.

The world itself is more Dying Earth than Tolkien, with ancient technology powering a lot of the magic. The humanoid kindreds on the planet will range from the very strange (four foot tall insectoids) to the slightly strange (elvish creatures with four arms), with a lot of anthropomorphic kindreds scattered about.

Magic is psi based (like in all versions of T&T), with the magic user memorizing complex images known as Sigils.  Once the image is memorized, they can cast the spell at any point by remembering the sigil. They buy pieces of paper with sigils written on them from the magic guild in order to learn and cast spells.  Spells are never forgotten (no Vancian system) although the more spells a mage knows, the higher of a chance they have of going completely insane.

Magic users who have been trained from birth have had what is known as the sorceral tubes placed into their skulls.  These look like neon glowing vacuum tubes sticking out of the skull, and allow a mage greater concentration when it comes to memorizing the spell sigils.  Rogue wizards do not have these tubes placed in their skulls, and thus don’t have the advantage.

All in all, this should be a very interesting and unique project.  I will keep you updated. It will be for T&T 7.5, but will be backwards compatible to 5.5-5.0 editions.