A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement Gregorius21778: Almanac of Animated Skeletons

Gregorius21778: Almanac of Animated Skeletons is a role playing game supplement published by Kai Pütz a.k.a Gregorius21778. The supplement comes in two versions, one for Labyrinth Lord and one for Lamentation of the Flame Princess.

This comes as two eight-page PDFs from DriveThruRPG for $0.50, but was received for free as part of a special offer. One page is the front cover and half a page the front matter.

About this supplement has some introductory text on how it features 20 variants of the animated skeleton, in order to make encounters with such a little more interesting.

Next is a stat block for a standard skeleton, followed by the descriptions of the 20 new types. These have a wide variety of new abilities, including such as skeletons made from the bones of a werewolf (still confers lycanthropy, but doesn’t require silver to kill because it’s, well, already dead), those made from lich bones (tricky to obtain), those formed by sacrifices in fire that do burning damage and many more.

The final page is To Raise the Dreadful Dead, which has information on what needs to be done to raise the new skeletons. Some are variants on animate dead and some require new material (including a living sacrifice).

Gregorius21778: Almanac of Animated Skeletons in Review

The PDFs lack bookmarks and, although short, have enough different skeletons that navigation would be improved by them. Navigation could be better. The text follows a single column format and a number of minor errors were noticed. The most notable error was in the Labyrinth Lord version, where the page containing skeletons 18-20 was before the one having skeletons 14-17 (EDIT: This has now been fixed). There are a couple of stock black and white images. Presentation is okay.

There isn’t a huge amount of difference between the Labyrinth Lord and Lamentations of the Flame Princess variants, but it’s useful having two separate PDFs. The material should also be easy enough to adapt to other OSR systems. This is a nice collection of variants on the skeleton that could come as a shock when encountered; many do not look that different but they have different, and sometimes dangerous, powers. They are less likely to be a challenge to higher-level characters but will probably be far more of one to lower-level characters than the regular skeleton, especially as the abilities could easily come as a surprise. Gregorius21778: Almanac of Animated Skeletons is a very inexpensive supplement and can be found by clicking here.