House of Dogs Issue One

 House of Dogs is the "Mongrel Journal" of Theory and Practice for Role-Playing Games and is a unique piece of rpg content. Weird Realms sent a copy to me with my copy of Inferno Road: Plague Edition. Instead of presenting a lot of new crunchy content, this one is full of reviews and thought pieces about rpgs (as well as some interesting artwork).

The first of these treatise is on the Tomb of Horrors. Written by Adam Thornton this one discusses the various versions of the adventure and equates them to music albums. There's a lot of thought and humor in this one. 

David Shugars gives us an article about Gardens of Ynn. While I've never heard of this OSR point-crawl before, I really want to pick it up now. The article is a discussion of hexcrawls and point crawls and how Ynn is a fantastic wilderness adventure resource.

David Wilke gives his thoughts on Wonder & Wickedness by Lost Pages. That tome presents a new no-level magic system in the vein of Eldritch Cock and Vaginas are Magic!. While I've not read W&W yet, after this piece, I want to check it out. It makes magic unique and dangerous. 

Luke Gearing has a brief reflection on Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play 1st Edition.

Shugars has a second piece with a discussion of the Whitehack. He primarily focuses the game's innovation that he thinks is the most impressive, the auction. He briefly explains the mechanic and then gives some examples.

Peter Webb discusses an infamous trap from James Raggi's Fuck for Satan. Not a whole lot to this one, but if you've read the adventure, he's talking about Eye of Many Eyes.

The volume ends with the Tomb of Whores by Adam Thornton. You read that correct. This is a frat guy take on Tomb of Horror ran by by the author. You might get a giggle out of it, but was for me.

I liked House of Dogs. Sadly, I think it only had one issue. While looking around the web, I can't find much on it. That's a shame, because I liked this. I'm actually thinking about talking to some of my other blogger and publisher friends and maybe creating a zine that does something similar.