MYSTHEAD APPENDIX N / BEYOND THE WALL

This is for those random persons who enjoy reading about other people’s TTRPG games. Here’s a look at all the material that went into the recent game my group and I finished*. Expect a lot of links to wikipedia pages.

THE RULES USED

Beyond the Wall

We use all the Beyond the Wall material to date. Its roots are as a retroclone of D&D, but it welds on bits from AD&D (race and class) while keeping the rules loose enough. I’d love to see it overlap more with more narrative games like Dungeon World and Five Torches Deep. Also since BtW leans into YA Fantasy for its inspiration I could easily see another table mixing it up with Monster Hearts. For what it’s worth, BtW’s version of the Banshee has one of the best save or die mechanics.

The one bad thing about the rule set is that it’s scattered across multiple books. Personally, I’d love to see an omnibus “Rules Cyclopedia” edition published some day. Through Sunken Lands (the latest iteration of the rules) does this somewhat, but TSL has a different vibe. TSL is bronze age sword & sorcery, and not the high medieval YA fantasy we wanted.

OTHER GAMES & SUPPLEMENTS

• Dolmenwood: For the vibe more than the particulars, although I did lift the Haunted Abbey from here and tweak it.
• Harn: I’m a fan but have little time for its level of detail. Doesn’t stop me from pillaging it for names and lore, especially its pantheon.
• B10 Night’s Dark Terror: One of the greatest D&D modules. A good story and mix of wilderness and dungeon adventures.
• The Gazetteer Series of D&D products. Again, it’s less the details and more the names and site tags.
• Carse and Midkemmia Press’s Cities supplement

MOVIES

Some provided plots, others only atmosphere.

• Night of the Demon: The cursed parchment, the hypnotism scene, the congenial devil worshiper, and the arrival of some inescapable doom at a certain time.
• The Old Dark House: Nobody scares like Brother Saul!
• Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Every fantasy game needs a backwoods clan of cannibals. My players rightfully called me out when I gave them southern accents.
• Phantasm: It, like my game, is stitched together from whatever seemed weird/cool at the moment.
• Harold & Maude: Maude’s the model for the elderly shield maiden having a fling with the party’s wizard.
• The Mummy // Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Do you need links to these? Both do a great job blending fantasy and naturalism. Okay, The Mummy doesn’t but the action’s fun and the props are bulky. It leans gracefully into the yakety sax.
• Rankin & Bass’s Tolkien and The Last Unicorn movies for their cute but grotty weirdness and because they’re deeply imprinted in my brain.
• Those Passolini Trilogy of Life movies set during the Middle Ages/Renaissance did similar imprinting from a different direction.
• Spaghetti Western // Hammer Horror // Shaw Brothers movies all mashed together and left to ferment and link mycelia. In my opinion these three genres meld very well together.

BOOKS // AUTHORS

• The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books by way of spoof covers.
• Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar stories
• The Innkeeper’s Song by Peter Beagle
• The Book of Goblins by Alan Garner (Yallery Brown!)
• One Thousand and One Nights (Especially that story where Sinbad gives a piggy-back ride to an awful man.)
• The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson
• Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti
• The Wizard of Earthsea series by Ursula K. LeGuin
• Chaucer’s Knight by Terry Jones
• Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli in His World by Erica Benner

OTHER STUFF

• Early American Serial Killers and Mississippi River bandits like the Harpe Brothers.
• Every European folklore page on Wikipedia. I would try Stargazey pie.
• Cherry picked bits of Medieval/Early Renaissance History.
• Cape Ann.

*It’s not done, but we reached a good pause point and I wanted to take a break and other people wanted to run games. The goal’s to come back to it before the end of the year.