Red Tide

[Crusty One]

Has Anyone had a look at Red Tide yet from Sine Nomine. I wish to know more of this product.

[bathwizard]

I found the publishers' home page here http://www.sinenomine-pub.com/ and the Red Tide book looks interesting, a non-conventional sandbox setting for Labyrinth Lord.
I first googled Sine Nomine and came up with a number of gospel choir links, nice but definitely off-topic for this forum.

[Crusty One]

Right then, bought the PDF last night. Love it. Uses some of the ideas from Stars Without Number for generating details for a sandbox game. The setting is crazy and eclectic like all the best D&D settings but seems to have a real sense of melancholy and loss about it, almost like Middle-Earth whilst being about as far from Tolkien's creation in its surface details as it's possible to get.

I really like this product.

[Brutorz Bill]

Are there new races in it, or just tweaks of the traditional ones?

[Charlatan]

Yeah, I'd like to know that too.

[SineNomine]

The races are largely riffed off of B/X standards, though most of them are tweaked to mesh with the setting. I decided to take seriously the "demihumans are human subspecies" angle- elves, dwarves, and halflings once were humans until their particular relationships with the divine led them in rather different directions.

Mechanically speaking, dwarves didn't get any changes, though they're a lot better at beating in the skulls of celestial creatures than other races. They've a racial heritage as godslayers, so they're able to maim celestial devils and pernicious tulpas at 8th level, whereas fighters aren't able to start hurting such entities until 16th, and most people can't even begin to hurt beings like that unless they've got some suitably mythic conjunction of magic and special weaponry.

Halflings are also quite mechanically similar to LL's standard, except that they've got a racial immunity to normal sources of fear and a +4 save versus magical varieties. This isn't a case of a kenderish obliviousness to danger; they simply don't panic or break in the face of peril. In the Before Times, the ancestors of the halflings refused to have anything to do with the divine, and as the halflings were unawed by the light of the gods, they aren't intimidated by any lesser thing, either.

The elves have the largest mechanical tweak. Whereas the ancestors of the dwarves fought their tyrannical goddess and the ancestors of the halflings ignored the appeals of divinity, the ancestors of the elves wanted to surpass the gods. The race-wide ritual they performed to accomplish the feat did not work out quite as intended- instead of sublimating their fleshly bodies into immortal spirit, they managed to bind their spirits to their material forms. While beautiful, unaging, and graced, elves can't escape the material world; when they die, their souls are reincarnated in a new-born elf, with partial memories of their prior existences. The fact that their souls are bound to their flesh also makes magical workings difficult for them- humans use their souls to focus the geomantic powers involved, but elves have to channel that same energy through their flesh, an excruciatingly painful process that limits the maximum amount of force they can wield. Still, every elf is at least theoretically capable of wielding magic, unlike the 1-in-500 of normal humans.

This bonded-soul condition sometimes goes awry when a reincarnating elf finds himself reborn in a human child's body. The spiritual friction between an incarnated soul and a body that was never meant to contain that energy makes it impossible for the elf to use conventional magic- but it also leaves the fabric of reality weaker and more mutable around these elven "Scions". They develop specialized powers that are less flexible than magic, but are more closely tied to their own peculiar nature. These "wyrds" develop as the Scion gains more experience; a young Scion might be able to cause reality to forget his location briefly, teleporting twenty or thirty feet once a day. A 10th level Scion might be able to rewrite reality so an ally's failed spell simply works anyway, assuming the subject can't resist the changing of their personal continuity. Other wyrds include such abilities as being able to create objects that exist only for them, distorting space so as to appear next to any person they've seen within the past half-hour, or the ability to make a round's worth of outrageous action appear totally reasonable to onlookers in a fit of collective dream "logic".

Aside from these standard races, there are also the Shou, who are the local interpretations of the goblinoid tribes of orcs, bugbears, goblins, and hobgoblins. They've the racial special class of "Shou Witch", and certain special bonuses in fighting the Red Tide, as a consequence of their peculiar origins.

It was a lot of fun to write the sourcebook up, really. One of the strengths of working with a retroclone game like Labyrinth Lord is that it's so amenable to spot tweaks and adjustments. There's enough of a corpus of material that you have some benchmarks as to what abilities are or aren't appropriate, but there's no overarching framework that you have to obey in order to insert a mechanical variation.