RPG Supplement Review: The Dungeon Alphabet by Michael Curtis (2009, Goodman Games)

Of all the bizarre supplements on my bookshelves, Michael Curtis's The Dungeon Alphabet is simultaneously one of the weirdest, smallest, and yet most useful. Hardbound in the tradition of the classic Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks of yesteryear, bearing a $9.99 cover price, it's all of 48 pages long...but what pages they are!

Fantasy gamers of the grognard variety will thrill to the interior artwork by some of the artists most responsible for the early aesthetic the Dungeons & Dragons product line: Erol Otus, Jim Holloway, Jeff Easley, Jim Roslof and others fill the borders, margins, white space, and even full pages with their illustrations. This is a busy tome!

The text itself is just what the title promises. Delivered in a storybook, "A is for Altar, B is for Books" style, Curtis comes up with a dungeon-inspired word for all twenty-six letters meant to inspire game masters to populate their underground lairs, creepy crypts, and dangerous depths with all kinds of unique, interesting, and downright odd set dressing. Each letter choice is accompanied with charts, tables, and options that allow the designer to pick from or randomly determine the properties associated with each incarnation of that element.

Some of these charts are quite simple. "E is for Echoes" offers up 6 options for messing with your PCs (and players) using reflected sounds. Others are lengthy. "B is for Books" gives 100 choices for interesting titles that could be found moldering away on shelves -- particularly amusing is entry 48: The Grand Book of Lists by Junba the Pretty -- but it also gives sixteen options for potential special properties of found books as well, everything from covers inlaid with gemstones and hidden maps to poisonous ink that can kill the un-gloved peruser and the previous owner's soul trapped within. Still others are complex. "A is for Altars" offers a triple-columned table, each column containing twenty different properties, that can be diced for to determine the material used in the altar's construction, its shape, any particular adornments (candlesticks, chains for restraining victims, bells, etc...), and potential special properties. All this ensures that no two altars the party encounters, even within the same underground temple, are alike unless the GM specifically decides.

The Dungeon Alphabet is an example of what makes exceptionally useful content: it's campaign-agnostic, contains no hard rules, and despite its short length contains something that any self-respecting GM can import into his or her own game. It's useful even for games that aren't traditionally associated with delving through dungeons. Consider the usefulness of the entry on altars for a Call of Cthulhu session, the entries on statues and rooms for set dressing in a modern-day mansion, and the usefulness of the traps entry for just about any game where the players are exploring unfamiliar settings. There was even a revised third printing produced in 2012 which added eight additional topics to the twenty-six already on display. Holy cow! To quote the famous infomercials, "NOW how much would you pay?"

Well...let's talk about that for a minute. The first printing sold for ten bucks, and the revised third printing bumped the price up to twenty, but it's, uh, gotten a bit more expensive since then.

Now, assuming you aren't interested in dropping nearly one hundred frigging dollars on the Amazon marketplace, you can always try eBay. Copies don't pop up that often, as this is apparently a highly-sought supplement, but you should still be able to score a copy for between $20 and $40 if you're patient.

I can't close this review without once again mentioning the phenomenal artwork found within. I don't want to spoil it for everyone else, but this Jeff Easley piece that appears towards the end is such a perfect example of how awesome a job that old school pen-and-ink look did for setting the mood. It even depicts a fiendish trap you could unleash on your own players not described anywhere else in the text. Look at this beautiful, twisted rendering:

Maybe think twice before you gather those scattered coins, eh?

I cannot recommend The Dungeon Alphabet to prospective buyers enough. Its 48 pages of content hold more potential, delight, and imagination than some books double or even triple its size. Whether you're looking to recapture some of that classic First Edition feel for a later-edition campaign, or just want to relive the glory days of the hobby when 'dungeons' obeyed no rules save for a demand to be memorable no matter what, this is Michael Curtis's love letter to the olden days where imagination ruled the day and reality took a back-seat to the fantastical. Four dozen pages have never offered up so much promise, potential, and pure, unadulterated fun as they do here.

'F' is for 'Five Stars!