(This is a post from my new blog Spear! Fang! Raygun!)

Spear! Fang! Raygun! is my RPG sandbox-style of swords, sorcery, super-science, dinosaurs, and heavy metal. It’s also my special snowflake of a campaign setting, born of amalgamating late ’60s  Hanna-Barbera cartoons, such as The Herculoids, Space Ghost, Birdman, The Galaxy Trio, and Mighty Mightor), with a dash of Land of the Lost; the multiplex evolutionary path of the Barbarian Hero trope across Sword & Sorcery, from Conan to He-Man, Cohen to Korgoth, and Fafhrd to Thundarr, among others; and a smattering of all sorts of things that fill my brain, from the psychedelic to the quasi-mathematical.

My goal in creating Spear! Fang! Raygun! was to pull away from the bland Tolkienisms of standard fantasy RPG fair while keeping the spirit of the “old school” mode of play. Some might consider it a bit on the “gonzo” side of things, and while it may seem absurd to some degree, Spear! Fang! Raygun! is an inherently consistent, unironic world. In tone, it is neither glib nor “meta”; Spear! Fang! Raygun! is campy, but not cheesy. After 20 years of playing (mostly DMing), I decided it was high time to create a setting that felt authentically mine, built from the sources that most inspired me, and one that was, above all else, fun to play.

If all of this sounds right up your alley, then I think you’ll agree.

Over the next few months, or possibly years, I will be posting free-to-access setting information for Spear! Fang! Raygun! with the first post providing overview of the Forlorn Plateau, the campaign’s continent-sized sandbox, closely followed by rules for playing the setting’s primary, human race/species: the Barbaric, Pantless Atlanteans. I’m hoping to provide these content-filled posts twice a month with some WIP info scattered between.

I’ve been running Spear! Fang! Raygun! for over year with my home group, and after saving their fellow Barbaric, Pantless tribesmen from the clutches of Goolaag (subterranean octopoids) slavers in the Inflamed Badlands, retrieving that holy relic of Castle Grimskull known as Crom!’s Riddlebox, entering into said Riddlebox, which turned out to be a tesseract prison for servants of the Null Titans, being transported to 1980s NYC as it came under attack from a kaiju, returning to the Forlorn Plateau (their home dimension) just in time to take part in the final battle of barbarian civil war, then carousing for a few months before Castle Grimskull itself is taken by robotic collectors in service of a mysterious being known as the preserver, pursuing the bots into the Grand Hyperborean Upland where they take part in a training montage at the Golden Dome Dojo while… Well, you get the picture.

We’ve been having the time of our gaming lives. I hope you will, too.

And here’s the crew from my campaign:

From left to right: Myrn (shaman of Crom!), Cleavehilda (a giant sexy cave amazon), Frax! the Taller (ranger of the Tyrannokiller tribe), Rok (giant pillbug companion), Borgoth (a riddlespeaker’s assistant from Castle Grimskull), Darkaar (Goolaag assassin), Gruul (monk of the Golden Dome Dojo), and Fly Stargroove (dimensional transient from the Funkiverse)

(Additionally, this project would’ve never seen the light of day, as publishable content or homebrewed campaign setting, without the abundant influence provided by the writing, campaigns, and artwork of Do-It-Yourself RPG creators like Jason Sholtis, James West, Dyson Logos, Chris Kutalik, Jeff Call, and Trey Causey, as well as the Dungeon Crawl Classics game, which changed how I approached my games entirely. I will have probably, liberally and questionably appropriated more than a few ideas from them over the course of putting this all together, so I thank them and apologize greatly.)