From publisher blurb:
Essential Gamemastering Information!
The Blackmail tome was "essential gamemastering information" for Judges to navigate the myriad of situations players will encounter exploring the campaign multi-verse. It has been nearly 5 years since Knights of the All Mind and Blackmail, in conjunction with the S.R.D. of the All Mind, were assembled for judges of groups utilizing "modern" accouterments of The World's Most Popular Role Playing Game with the idea to recapture a sense of how the older version of the game rolled out from the late 1970s West Coast, San Francisco Bay Area hot bed of 3rd party supplements and gonzoed house rules.
I set out to publish a set of digest size booklets, Knights being the first, because that "digest"-booklet was most similar in shape to the old TSR supplements. Unfortunately, because I set aside the "new" old rules in a separate booklet, and that the generic standard rules were in an additional 4-booklet set, it wasn't always clear where to look for what rule.
This new work combines various home brew rules with the Open Gaming License "System Reference Document" into a single reference, a unified rulebook for judges that does the work of walking in old school attribute checks along with racial and class abilities where skills and skill points used to tread.
The impact of using these ability checks was to speed up gameplay. However, several other unbalanced idiosyncrasies are added such as Random Mutations, Arcane Spell Bungles, and Divine Intervention, that stack this version with broken grittiness.
Also a complete directory for the magical items is included, so this tome is indeed all a judge needs along with Vacuous Grimoire Volume One to play.
Taken together, this new venture hopes to continue "wild west" flavor from this pastime's classic age while being compatible in an unbalanced fashion with more modern gaming devices.
Also included is a 1-page Character Checklist for game judges to keep track the important attributes for each member of a gaming party. Many a barroom brawl has started from remarks about purple hair... (also comes in handy when a player forgets or loses a character sheet)