Minotaur Quarterly Issue 6 : Heroes, Horrors & Hyperborea

Mazes & Minotaurs is a game I have been following for quite a while now. I am glad to see that I am not alone, as the game has gotten quite a bit of attention, especially in the OSR community. Recently I stopped in at the M&M website to see if there were any updates I had missed, and to my delight I found a new edition of Minotaur Quarterly had been published, so I wasted no time in downloading it.

Further reading revealed that this newest edition (Issue 6: Heroes, Horrors & Hyperborea) provides a toolkit for running sword & sanity style games with the M&M system. The material struck me as a kind of tribute to the Triumvirate of Weird Tales, with many obvious references to the works of H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard. Presented are the northern barbarian races of the mythic lands of Hyperborea -- Galleans, Cimbrians and Thuleans, which read as proto Celtic/Norse/Germanic tribes. Other races introduced (this time for NPC use) are the Blue Men (Picts), the Children of Ymir (giants), as well as a variety of undead. A bestiary of new horrifying creatures is present, complete with game statistics. There are also several entries for deities that obviously parallel many of the Lovecraftian entities: the Dark Mother (Shub-Niggurath), Astor (Hastur), Yoxothos (Yog-Sothoth), just to name a few.

Overall I am very excited about Issue 6 of Minotaur Quarterly. The adventures presented look top notch, and there is a lot of sanity bending crunch packed into the pages that enhance the core game system. All this, and with no price tag attached!

I have to give Oliver Legrand a lot of credit for designing such a great game, and giving it to the roleplaying world for free. His dedication to the project is obvious with the massive amount of supplemental material he has offered. For those who have never checked out Mazes & Minotaurs I can’t say enough to urge you to do so immediately, and do others a favor by urging them to do the same.