Review: the Dungeon Alphabet by Michael Curtis

Last night I got the, much anticipated, Dungeon Alphabet in the post. I opened the box, took it out and straight away started reading. First off, is the Art the caught my eye. But, I am like that. I had known that Erol Otis was the cover artist and was hoping to see some of the interior art by Mr. Otis as well. I saw that...and some of the other art I realized began to seem familiar to me. I noted the almost runic signature on one of the pictures...Roslof. Holy Crap! I also saw some artwork that was eerily like Easley...yep it was. These were all new works by folks who did art for the game back in the day. To this was added an admixture of new favs like Mullin. Amazing. Like LotFP said...I half expected to see Trampier and Jeff Dee. Fantastic.
After I pried my eyes away from the pretty pictures I got into the meat of this Alphabet. It is chock full of ideas. Each entry has a little discourse about that entry and what it means. The entry title is more or less either a specific dungeon feature, such as D is for Doors. Or, when its not a specific feature it stands for a concept like W is for Weird or Z is for Zowie! After the discourse there are sometimes charts that give the reader a few ideas, like: 6 different kinds of Fungus, 100 titles of books, different uses of echos and funny noises. The charts could be used as is, or be used as seeds to come up with your own cool ideas. The point is to get people thinking outside the box when it comes to Dungeon Design. And this product does this in spades!
So there it is. This book has beautiful and evocative art work...by both modern and classic old school artists (I still maintain the the OSR is for a large part an aesthetic movement...but others might disagree.) Its a hard cover, well bound with good paper. Its packed to the gills with ideas and information. Here's the one thing I haven't mentioned yet...its only $9.99! At that price there is simply no reason that every enterprising OSR DM should not have a copy of this book. Seriously people!