Lure of the Liche Lord.
My god, what a book.
First, I pine for WFRP2E, or Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play, 2nd Edition. This game was what any OSR, balls-to-the-wall RPG should be, and its parent company collapsed and sold it to Fantasy Flight. Alas.
But LotLL... I've played D&D for years; for so long I've got gray in my beard legitimately. There's a whole ton of really good dungeon crawls, but they're all, one way or another, silly. From magic morphing fungi to crashed alien space ships, there's always something, somewhere, that breaks credulity. There's a moment where you sit back and snicker, or self-consciously tell your players "Don't laugh."
And lets be honest. S2: The Tomb of Horrors is amazing, but it is markedly silly. Awesome, but you have to suspend at hefty portion of disbelief.
This one isn't like that. Every trap makes sense. Every monster is a phenomenally scary as the next. Every wicked thing that will blast your character's sanity to ashes feels utterly within the scope of the world. Warhammer's a bad world. So bad there's often no redeeming qualities to anything going on. Wahammer doesn't give a fuck if you live, which makes surviving an adventure thrilling in a way I've never felt in other games.
These days, when I run games, I run variations on FATE Core. Using the inimitable Brennan Taylor's "Tower of the Serpents" as a model, I can create the sword and sorcery I want, the worlds of Fritz Leiber and Robert Howard and tales where magic isn't copied into banal lists.
LotLL lands firmly there. An imposing trek to a distant land, a struggle against a foe too nasty for death to take, and a race against mortal enemies that might actually be worse than the evil of bygone ages.
To any GM, my advice is to take this book, read it, and use it to make the best damn dungeon crawl you've ever run.
Find it here:
http://drivethrurpg.com/product/64293/Warhammer-Fantasy-Roleplay-2nd-Edition-Lure-of-the-Liche-Lord
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