Cafe Obscura

Probably not that far off the mark

2011-12-20T09:19:00.000-05:00

Weird gaming dream from last night - a friend had just been to the FLGS and had picked up not only a 1st edition Dungeon Master's Guide, but the most recent edition of D&D (not the Fourth). I picked up the new DMG, which had a dark purple cover with maybe ogres or something on it, and flipped through it - it was nice, glossy, heavy paper, but it was the same illustration as the cover... OVER AND OVER. Nothing else! The friggin' CREDITS and title page didn't even show up until something like page 53. I do believe I made some snarky comment about how much the 1st Ed DMG had covered by page 53, which is about all I remember of that scene.

Still, from the overproduced monstrosities WotC has published... I could see it happening.

My CAS Thing

2011-12-11T14:51:00.002-05:00

Since I seem to be not working on it at the moment, and have no idea when I'll get back to it, this is what I've gotten so far for my Clark Ashton Smith/Dying Earth mashup I mentioned previously:

(The "world" is many millennia old; this is a riff off the old idea of "dying civilizations" - the entire race of humanity suffers a sense of mass ennui; everything worthy has already been done, every possible form and statement of art has been explored and abandoned, every frontier has been conquered long ago, and all that remains is a slow collapse into apathy and death - the Dying Earth without the dying Sun, Hyperborea and Zothique crossed with more than a dash of Tekumel-eqsue conservatism and cynicism.)

Mordiggian, The Charnel God, is the deity of the city of Zul-Ba-Sair, a ancient and dark conurbation of black granite and obsidian in the center of The Continent. Mordiggian's temple squats in a square at the city center, a massive truncated pyramid of grey stone, where all the dead of Zul-Ba-Sair are delivered by Mordiggian's silver-masked priests. This temple is the only religious site in the entire city; Mordiggian tolerates no other gods within his domain. Mordiggian's priests regularly travel throughout The Continent, seeking to expand The Charnel God's influence.

To the east of Zul-Ba-Sair is the red marble necropolis of Pavan-Dhul, the domain of the Kingdom of Ghouls, from which the Ghoul King Zhandeb sends his people out to plunder the tombs and crypts of The Continent, especially the ancient city of Yill further to the west of Pavan-Duhl. Unfortunately, Yill is a legendary repository of powerful artifacts, attracting many adventurers, most often to their dismay as they discover the Ghoul Kingdom lays claim to the flesh of all intruding on their domain - which they extend as far as Yill itself.

Yill was once a thriving city hundreds of years ago, but is now desolate, the tall towers empty, the population apparently having committed mass suicide for unknown reasons. The bodies lie, well-preserved, in great mausoleums, on sandstone biers carved with mysterious glyphs which apparently are an appeal against re-animation.

To the South lies the large human city of Eldarvoron, a decadent sandstone mess of sybarites worth little more than a convenient place to sell loot - or to relieve someone of an overabundance of wealth. Trade there is brisk in luxury foods, fine fabrics, gems, slaves and recreational pharmaceuticals. An unusual law requires the wearing of masks during trade - the particulars being very formal and regulated.

The Return of Shelly-Welly

2011-12-09T20:18:00.003-05:00

You know, back last time critiqued Shelly Mazzanoble and her columns on Why ~~Johnny~~ Shelly Can't Play 1st Edition, I made a comment about how I hadn't had any exposure to her previous writing so I couldn't really say if her account of the birth of Majeka Magicsmacker was representative of her writing or not.

Mirable dictu, I'm poking around the Internets this afternoon when what should I happen on, but another blog post looking at Shelly's work from a feminist perspective - and, OMG I had no idea of the trail of dead neurons her writing has left.

For one, the "gosh I can do this didn't we all learn something" air of those columns was, apparently, Shelly's standard writing style:

The thing that really bothers me about this is that almost every one of Shelly’s columns seems to follow the same formula, and that always starts with Shelly being adorably and/or humorously insecure about some facet of playing D&D. This then leads into neurotic and sometimes irrational attempts to wrestle with the insecurity in which a humorous result is achieved and a lesson of some sort is said to have been learned. Only it’s not learned, because the same insecurities pop up again and again and again.

Another seems to be that the "clueless ditz Shelly" appears to be her standard personality in her writing, even from over a year ago.

To wit:

Hmm. When did I get wizard’s escape? Oh yeah, I have a shield. I double-checked to make sure this character sheet said “Tabitha Sparkles”. (April 2010, Confessions of an Overwhelmed Duckling)

“When Herteus gets to here,” Chris said, pointing to the square I just passed through, “a large green blob falls from the ceiling and tries to attack”. Hmm. Didn’t I just approve some banner ads that mentioned something about wearing protective headgear? (May 2010, An Overwhelmed Duckling Part 2)

Ten minutes later, I hadn’t finished my cup of peas, but my unaligned female elf thief was in my arsenal. Holy moley, I did it! I made a character using a book and a pencil. (December 2010, Arcana Lang Syne)

With my two gargoyles, remaining minions, and one dragon waiting in the wings, I realized the importance of placement. I was kind of throwing minions out there willy nilly and kept forgetting the gargoyles could make better distance by air than ground. Aeon had a minion and a gargoyle marked. Anwar was bloodied, and I was overlooking opportunity attacks at every corner. Dungeon Masters have a lot to keep track of! (July 2010, Canine Encounters Part 2)

“What if the dragon is susceptible to tickling, and if the adventurers tickle him he laughs so hard he spits out puppies? Unharmed, of course.”

New DM shook his head, then started mumbling things like help me, please make it stop, I don’t think we’re in D&D anymore. (June 2010, Canine Encounters)

Then it hit me. The talking. And not just the “What are you having for dinner tonight” or “Would you rather have eyes in the back of your head or a giant lizard tail” table talking I’m used to. This was relevant talking. Like important to the game talking. This was – gasp! – roleplaying!

I know what you’re thinking: “This is D&D, you big dummy!” But maybe you don’t remember my irrational fear of roleplaying and playing D&D with people who are: 1. Too serious. 2. Jerks. 3. Really good at roleplaying.

This is why I usually create characters that are too sullen or naive or too apathetic to talk to strangers. (October 2010, Last of the Mojitas)

New DM has exacted the ultimate revenge! “He’s on vacation?” I whined. “He’s supposed to be helping me with my encounter!” Technically he did help, as you might remember from last month’s column. But that was a month ago. You can’t expect me to remember everything he said about traps and tactics. I can’t even find my notes. (July 2010, Canine Encounters Part 2)

Um. How... not overwhelming. And not surprising, either. (And, yes, her 4e character is indeed named "Tabitha Sparkles". *gag*)

So what's the conclusion on Shelly from the feminist perspective?

Now do I think that Shelly Mazzanoble is all of these stereotypes? No. I think that Shelly is being used by Wizards to try to broaden their appeal to women. Only their marketing department doesn’t really understand how to speak to women without being off-putting, insulting, and patronizing. So as a result, you get Shelly-the-character’s Fluffy Adventures in D&D is Also For Girls Land.

This pisses me off. It pisses me off because I don’t want the neurotic, fashion-obsessed, passive, please-decide-things-for-me, d&d-has-numbers-and-is-haaaaaard character she portrays herself as to represent me as a female player. In her columns, Shelly frequently refers to herself as Player In Chief. This implies that she is somehow representing players of D&D, which is what I am violently against. I desperately, vehemently, passionately want to be disassociated from pretty much everything Shelly’s columns say about women. Shelly-the-character doesn’t represent me or any of the women I know who play D&D, or even any of the women I know who play roleplaying games that aren’t D&D. Not at all.

For that matter, if Shellykins is actually viewed over there as "Player In Chief", it doesn't at all reflect well on WotC or RenFest D&D, regardless of gender. Not at all well.

Games I just don't get

2011-12-07T18:13:00.000-05:00

Ever have this problem? I've got a handful of RPGs that I really, really WANT to like - and yet I can't get my head around them.

Encounter Critical: I grew up in the Seventies. Sid and Marty Krofft shows, Marvel comics, Thundarr The Barbarian. Yet I can't seem to get into the headspace of EC. I can't seem to "get" the fine line where stupid shades over into awesome. Is it thinking like a sugar-hyped 12-year-old? Is it just running with whatever you come up with and not caring if it makes sense? Maybe I'm having trouble being Not Serious enough.

Unknown Armies: A big one with this is what I need to be reading/watching/listening to to get thinking along UA lines. It looks rather like The Dresden Files by way of Reservoir Dogs, but is that where it's coming from? A Laurel K. Hamilton book re-written by Philip K. Dick?

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Now, I'm not stupid. I can figure out attacks or opportunity, I can do my own taxes, I've created more than one character for Rolemaster, I can remember a lot of background stuff for Tekumel. So why the hell do I have so much trouble keeping the various categories straight? Crinos? Lupus? Full moon, partial moon? I look at this stuff and my brain shuts right down and says "Non serviam!". Why?

Glorantha: The rules aspect of Runequest I have no problem with, apart from the unnecessary complexity of hit locations. But the world - where the hell do you begin? Where do I start learning about Glorantha and the Lunars and Pavis? Multiple game systems don't exactly help, either. Where's the Gloranthan equivalent of The World of Greyhawk Folio? I have the same problem with Tribe 8 - where the hell do you start?

GURPS anything: This is a special one, as, being a long-time fan of both The Fantasy Trip and its descendant GURPS, I get the rules and the mechanics. More complicated than I'd like, too many damn nit-picky skills, but on the whole I could cope with it. If it weren't for the books. Something about the art in the books, or the Steve Jackson writing style, the encyclopedic approach to subjects, or the typeface - whatever it is, I just find myself not giving a damn after about five minutes. Spaceship Zero and Stars Without Number get me all antsy to roll up characters and invent situations - GURPS Space just makes me go "Meh." and go looking for my copy of Human Occupied Landfill.

Traveller: Oh, god, Classic Traveller. Oh I love this game. I had/have scads of stuff, from the entire Book collection to classic Adventures like The Kinunir and Leviathan and Expedition To Zhodane. I used to sit up late nights during the summer, watching MTV (back when they actually played music videos) and rolling up Traveller sectors. And then I start thinking about the scale involved and how accurate the worlds are and details about flora & fauna and world histories and it just frigging overwhelms me. I'm trying to relax and think more of worlds in terms of Cliches, like in RISUS, but it's hard to turn around years of attitude.

Damn straight, I'm jumping off that bridge

2011-12-02T00:02:00.002-05:00

Oh, the siren call of the jump-on-the-bandwagon-'cause-you're-too-tired-to-post... umm... bandwagon. Or something.

Anyway, here's to having more than one post this month.

I Am A: Neutral Good Elf Druid/Sorcerer (3rd/2nd Level)

Ability Scores:

Strength-9

Dexterity-10

Constitution-11

Intelligence-14

Wisdom-13

Charisma-9

Alignment:
Neutral Good A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment when it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.

Race:
Elves are known for their poetry, song, and magical arts, but when danger threatens they show great skill with weapons and strategy. Elves can live to be over 700 years old and, by human standards, are slow to make friends and enemies, and even slower to forget them. Elves are slim and stand 4.5 to 5.5 feet tall. They have no facial or body hair, prefer comfortable clothes, and possess unearthly grace. Many others races find them hauntingly beautiful.

Primary Class:
Druids gain power not by ruling nature but by being at one with it. They hate the unnatural, including aberrations or undead, and destroy them where possible. Druids receive divine spells from nature, not the gods, and can gain an array of powers as they gain experience, including the ability to take the shapes of animals. The weapons and armor of a druid are restricted by their traditional oaths, not simply training. A druid's Wisdom score should be high, as this determines the maximum spell level that they can cast.

Secondary Class:
Sorcerers are arcane spellcasters who manipulate magic energy with imagination and talent rather than studious discipline. They have no books, no mentors, no theories just raw power that they direct at will. Sorcerers know fewer spells than wizards do and acquire them more slowly, but they can cast individual spells more often and have no need to prepare their incantations ahead of time. Also unlike wizards, sorcerers cannot specialize in a school of magic. Since sorcerers gain their powers without undergoing the years of rigorous study that wizards go through, they have more time to learn fighting skills and are proficient with simple weapons. Charisma is very important for sorcerers; the higher their value in this ability, the higher the spell level they can cast.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

Wow. I'm not really surprised at my classes - my longest-running PC was a druid, and I've always been partial to spell-slingers - but an Elf? I've had people assert that I'm much more Dwarf than Elf. Or Hobbit, maybe - I've had more than a few times where I'd have rather been at home with a cat on my lap and a good book than doing whatever I was doing at the time. Elf? Huh. What the hell, I get to multi-class.

Let's see - I get 4 Druid orisions and 2 1st Level spells, and 6 0th and 4 1st Level arcane spells. (EDIT: Cripes, what a haul! 3rd edition PCs are so frickin' spoiled!)

Druid: 0:Create Water, Cure Minorx2, Guidance, Light
1:Produce Flame, Charm Animal
Sorcerer: 0:Prestidigitation, Light, Ray of Frost, Resistance x2, Read Magic
1:Magic Missile x2 (AUTO-HIT, baybee!), Disguise Self, Comprehend Languages

Screw Skills & Feats. I ain't bothering.

And I get 120gp to purchase starting equipment. Whee!

Taking the silly seriously

2011-11-14T21:59:00.005-05:00

I've been working on a OD&D campaign environment for a few months (a very classic D&D kind of world named Hopsill, with a few unique tweaks) and quite frankly I'm getting burned out on it.

So for some inexplicable reason I get it into my head to fashion a Clark Ashton Smith - meets Dying Earth kind of world; millenia old, decadent as all hell, lots of ancient relics with portentous names, everyone cynical & rogueish, lots of weird cultures, picaresque up the wahzoo. Yoink stuff directly from CAS and play with it, such as Mordiggian the Charnel God and his dog-men priest things fighting a war against the Kingdom of Ghouls over rights to the recently dead. No elves, dwarves, or hobbits; throw out the majority of typical modern fantasy monsters in favor of a more sword & sorcery assortment like semi-sentient ape-things, giant spiders/snakes/scorpions, oozing tentacled elder horrors and like that there. Maybe describe it as Geoff McKinney's Carcosa without the overtly sci-fi aspects and less potential squick, maybe.

But what system can I run this creation with? OD&D? Naw, not the right feel, I think, even though Carcosa is written for it. But it has to be rules-light; I don't want game mechanics overriding setting material, so not Rolemonster or AD&D or Runequest or such. The idea is to make the game part as transparent as possible so I'm required to spend time on inventing cool situations and NPCs.

I've taken a look at Dead Simple Fantasy; not quite sure about it for some reason. Maybe because it has skills, which I dislike. Microlite74 and Microlite20 are out for the same reason as OD&D. I love Tunnels & Trolls, but that seems too lighthearted for this.

So I decided, Gobbs help me, to use Dinky Dungeons.

Oh, I can just hear the invective now. "What? Dinky freakin' Dungeons? When you said T&T was too lighthearted? What the flipping farquar are you thinking, Pere?"

Well, I mean - follow my logic here: it's 90% a serious, complete FRPG system. Drop Fuzzy Winkers (and Dwarves and Elves), and you have an ultra-ultra light set of rules for which it's a mere bag of shells to write stuff for. The full rules are only 22-some-odd teeny-tiny pages total - probably would fit on one side of a 3x5 index card, with the other side for a bestiary and maybe a list of magic treasures. Or maybe a PocketMod, even. No major reworking of the spell system is necessary, as you only have a handful of spells and those are so generic they'd fit in in almost any fantasy universe: Charm, Harm (Fire), Illusion, Light. Rename Bards as "Holy Men" or some such, make their spells Prayers, and drop Shadowwalk in favor of "Healing Prayer" (heals 1d6 damage, costs 2 SP). You could keep track of an entire adventuring party if need be on one sheet of paper. And 3d6 is the absolute most you ever need to roll. How could I not use it? How could I not take this game with a silly name seriously?

I mean, it's not like I'm considering converting World of Synnibarr to RISUS. Then again... hmmm... Talking Raccoon With Bazooka (4) and Cyborg Guy (3) against Flying Bear With Laser Eyes [5]... hmmmmmmmmmmm...

The "O' Stands for "Organic"

2011-10-05T08:23:00.004-04:00

Okay, I may just be talking out my ass here, but In My Humble Opinion I think I've realized what the OSR is all about, what defines what it is.

PREMISE: The OSR is organic.

There are, I think, three aspects to an organic quality in old-school RPG'ing: Achievement, Neoteny, and Serendipity.

What do I mean by "organic"? Well, it's like growing tomatoes in your garden.

ACHIEVEMENT: You've planted this tiny seed in the ground and it's grown into a vine bursting with tomatoes. Tomatoes YOU have grown. No one else. It's a sense of accomplishment, and, of course, you have to regale friends and co-workers with stories of how delicious those tomatoes are, all the more for the fact that you grew them. And maybe give some away. Delicious tomatoes! Try 'em!

Achievement comes from both writing stuff (which is partly why OSR blogs are full of "LOOKIE WHAT I DID!") on the DM side, and in nurturing a character on the player's side. OD&D characters can die like flies, which is no biggie since you just take forty-five seconds and roll up "a relative" and have him wander out of the forest into the midst of the party and go from there. But when you do get that fragile Veteran or Medium or Acolyte up to Second Level, there's a sense of having accomplished something.

It's like Zak pointed out awhile back:

That "Riddles In The Dark" effect is why I like the Old School approach to plot and character and epicness and awesomeness.

Which is: you start with none of those things. You start by sucking. You start by sneaking. You start with one hit point. You start with no plot. You start anonymous and meaningless and arbitrary. You have three torches and a short sword and whatever armor you can afford and no feats or skills in a dot on a hexmap hitting another dot on a hexmap.

From the DM side, think about all the stuff that grew (organically!) out of OD&D and those three lil' books - not only the D&D gaming worlds like Greyhawk and Blackmoor and Arduin but entire other universes like Tekumel. Out of something that looks like typewritten notes in the back of someone's folder! That's achievement.

NEOTENY: Playfulness, creativity, innovation. You design your own tomato garden; nobody else has one exactly the same, even if you're working out of a book from the library. That plot is unique and what you do with it is your choice. Just tomatoes? Or maybe lettuce as well? Stick some peas in there somewhere? Nobody's going to come along and slap your wrist and say "NO THAT IS NOT THE RIGHT WAY".

OD&D was like that. Shared worlds? Hell, there were barely shared rules. Every DM ran into something he had to rule on, and the accumulation of individual house-rulings made the D&D campaign over here entirely different than the campaign over there. Over here robots and machine guns, over there pure fantasy. Over here, PCs kicking Odin and Loki's asses; over there, rugged Conan-esque swords & sorcery. Even the rules themselves mutated; use the "to hit" tables as written or come up with your own alternative? Do I want to be limited to +5 as the best enchantment on armor or weapons? Here's my "spell points" system so I can get rid of that Vancian crap. There's a detailed set of magic research rules (from The Dragon #5, reprinted in Best Of The Dragon #1) which I still marvel over, particularly the "The Sorcerer's Memorial Enchanting In Distress Rules". I have no idea if I'd use them in a campaign; they look severely broken. But I'm sure someone did. And they weren't "broken" for his world.

SERENDIPITY: Oh boy. Oh boy, oh boy. There are quite a few tomatoes on that vine. Didn't expect that. Can 'em, cook 'em, freeze 'em, hand them out to people on the street. "HERE, HAVE SOME DAMN TOMATOES!" The family starts complaining about the proliferation of gazpacho and marinara sauce and tomato salad. I just freakin' planted some damn tomato seeds. Who knew?

On the gaming side, us OSR types sure do love our random tables. Whee! Tables! Monster encounter tables, monster building tables, "stuff in a wizard's workshop" tables, random NPC tables, tables tables tables. Give me a bunch of tables and a couple appropriate dice and I'm a heppy, heppy "kat".

So are we really a bunch of morons whose only defense for a Vampire with a cow's head and three red dragons in a 10x10 foot room is "I ROLLED IT ON THE TABLE!"? No, please.

The tables are there for inspiration, which is why most of them shouldn't be used at a game, but before. (Which is a problem I have, as evidently others do, with the was-going-to-be-great DCC RPG. Although, you could just roll up a list of random results before the game and consult it when a spell goes wrong, I guess.) The dice are there to show you something you might not have thought of on your own, due to personal bias, gaps in experience or whatever. It's like opening a lil' Christmas present - what will I get?

There's also the quality of the unknown to Serendipity - the thing of "Hey, I didn't know it could do that!" q.v. the first time a new player runs into a Wand Of Wonder or a Bag of Beans or and Amulet of The Planes - or, better yet, one of those sweet artifacts from Eldritch Wizardry. Whee, a +5 Holy Defender sword! Only, why does everyone else's magic items keep getting drained...? And why are the hirelings so pissed at me?

OD&D was highly organic on all three counts. 3d6, in order, your M-U starts out with 1d4 hit points and a rusty dagger, 1st level Clerics get no freakin' spell. But keep on with it and pretty soon the Sorcerer is throwing Fireballs and the Cleric's doing Raise Dead. Achievement. Neoteny? Hell, you're barely given a set of rules, for Kord's sake! DM or player, you're going to have to innovate to get this thing working properly. Serendipity? What the hell can I do with this character that I rolled up? What's that magic sword that I found do, exactly? Hell, one of the very first articles about D&D, 'way back in Strategic Review #1, was Gygax's solo random dungeon generator. I also think of Paul Montgomery Crabaugh's "random monster" tables from Dragon #10 - which, he points out, are presented specifically to keep a sense of mystery about monsters for players who know 'way too much about the rules.

First Edition AD&D was organic - it kept the limits on beginning characters, but started the ossification of the rules, ideally in the name of convention games but possibly because someone at TSR - Gygax, whoever, - thought they needed a better rein on what was being called "D&D". But Serendipity - yowza! Just take a look at the back of the Dungeon Master's Guide - random tables out the wazhoo, including a reprinting of the solo dungeon generator. And they gave you this shit in a core book! Man!

Second Edition I don't have a lot of knowledge about, but it seemed to be less on the organic quality - you had a lot more options, but the rules seem to have ossified further. This was also the golden age of shared settings - Dark Sun, Planescape, Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Mystara, pseudo-Greyhawk, Ravenloft. Which were great and all, but someone else was doing the universe-creating. And (as far as I know) all the cool tables were dropped from the back of the DMG.

Third Edition - even less organic, what with forgetting about recommendations for building your own world as opposed to gaming in one of their pre-made ones like XCrawl, Eberron, or Forgotten Realms V2.0. Achievement, meh - creating a character became a lot more complex all of a sudden, meaning instakill poisons and energy drains got nerfed. And the magic item list lost its cool artifacts in favor of "official" artifacts, with a list of "official" powers and drawbacks. And no more random tables in the back of the DMG.

Renfest D&D - hell, it's nigh impossible to die because that has been decided as "Not Fun", everyone is awesome from the start so Achievement becomes just BECOMING EVEN MORE AWESOME, the magic items are in the Player's Handbook for crissake, we've even disposed of wandering monsters, and there aren't any more secrets or surprises because that might inhibit taking full tactical advantage of one's situation. Lists of "magic items I want to get next level"! JESUS! You might still have the Neoteny, though that's pretty much it. And with an "official" character generator, that's that much less opportunity to write your own rules; give characters healing potions instead of healing surges, limit powers, that kind of thing.

So there you go. "That is the theory that I have, and which is mine, and what it is too."

Why can I not let this go?

2011-10-04T08:39:00.004-04:00

Jeebus Crispies, I keep thinking about Shelly's dumbass article. I keep realizing things I should have commented on before. (Not so much fridge logic as fridge headdesk.)

* I initially thought DM Chris was sending the group through "Against The Giants", as his setup sounded a lot like the setup for the Steading, which is why I was thinking of cave bears, I guess. But would you really want to try to go through a epic cycle like that with Majeka Pootmaker and friends? Hand-holding and leading by the nose and stage-whisper-prompting the whole way? Which leads me to:

* It couldn't have been The Steading 'cause Chris mentions up front that drow were involved. BIG OLD-SCHOOL NOT-SPOILER: Drow are behind the Giants' attacks on civilization in "Against The Giants". The PCs are expected to winkle this fact out from tiny clues during the assaults on the giant holdings - things like "Eclavdra". But, again, assembling clues and noticing things that don't make sense would have been totally wasted on Giggles McCoy and company.

* Here's an old-school biggie: DM CHRIS DID NOT HAVE THEM MAPPING. He was drawing the maps for them. And I suppose that's yet another concession to the 4e dungeon prima-donna mentality; could you see Ms. Dungeon Tiles sitting still for "You see 30 feet in front of you and the corridor turns off to the West; there's a closed door 10' away in the East wall"?

* Shelly is all impressed about how she was "role-playing" when the grand total of the RP'ing she points out was her and the others doing funny voices. Cripes, you dolts, there's more to it than that! I submit Shelly really did more roleplaying when she had Majeka Headacheinducer gadding about the Underdark with a wine glass full of Merlot in one hand. Which is something, given what little I know about Majeka, I can assuredly see her doing. ("wine glass". JEEZUL!)

* Sudden realization: I was going to make a comment about "buying a leather mug" as opposed to Durinsbane crystal or whatever Makeja's wine glass was made of... and it struck me: these brats want Ren-Fest D&D. Tee hee, pay your $25, wander around the Underdark, have some turkey leg on a stick, watch the show, and go home with some loot. And goddamnit, that's exactly what 4e is all about - no risk, no danger, no inconvenience, no subtlety, no challenge worse than trying to find an ATM so you can pay for the quartz-crystal necklace you want. Oh, look out, here comes Mr. Gnoll The Rat-catcher!

Hell, that's what I'm calling 4e from now on - Ren-Fest D&D.

Which is the problem I have - I don't have a problem with the Ren-Fest; I've gone and had a good time. It's fun. BUT - it's artificial fun. You know exactly what you're going to get - shows, dealers, food on a stick. It's going to the mall with a veneer of pseudo-historicity about it.

Oppose that to going to a gaming convention and finding someone in the dealer's room with a whole load of cheap old RPG stuff, or wandering into a group playing some game you've never heard of before and sitting down to something new, or pulling out a copy of Microlite74 and a handful of teeny d6s in the green room and running an impromptu dungeon-delve. It's impromptu, unplanned, organic. Which is what OD&D and the OSR are to me. I think I want to return to this point later.

EDIT: Oh, for fuck's sake, of course the names of Majeka Prootwaddle's companions sounded old-school - they're cribbed from D2: Shrine Of The Kuo-Toa! I know I may have my old-school license suspended for not realizing that before, but it's been ages since I read the Canon as far as modules go, and I'm sitting there minding my own bid'ness and suddenly I see Fage The Kexy and Shab Heanling and Darg Blonke and I suddenly realize those names have been forever demeaned by being abused by a couple of Ren-fest D&D brats who have to be told how to explore and think that funny voices are the be-all and end-all of roleplaying. Pfeh.

So we've got three High Gygaxian names, and Majeka ShakeyerMoneymaker, who He-Man and She-Ra would have responded to with a *facepalm* and a "Y'see, sweetie, you really need a better name... like the Sorceress! She's called the Sorceress, f'crissake! Not Kerri Krystalwand!"

Tee hee! D&D is hard!

2011-10-02T11:12:00.004-04:00

You know, I'm in danger of losing my union card for "Grumpy Grognards and OSR Curmudgeons Local 358" for my gross lack of slagging 4e aka WOTC's Folly, so, with a hat-tip to Greyhawk Grognard for inspiration, I'm going to eviscerate these pieces of fluff from The Coastal Mages, by one Shelly Mazzanoble. (Mind you, I've never read anything else by her, so I don't know if these articles are representative of her output... but if they are, it doesn't say much for WOTC.)

Auspiciously, it starts out with whining about How Different Things Yoosta Be and how did people Back Then ever survive blah blah blah:

“What’s a library?” we asked.
Naturally, we old-timers began to trip down
memory lane with our walkers and canes, rehashing
how rough it was back in our day. No GPS, no digital
cameras, no Glee!
“Back in my day I actually had to get up to change
the TV channel,” I said. “What a pain that was.”
“Back in my day I had to actually push a vacuum
around the floor,” Laura said. “Can you imagine life
before Roomba?”
“Back in my day, I had to roll up a D&D character
with a pencil and paper,” Chuck said, pressing pause
on his iPod Shuffle. “And do my own math.”
“Ew!” I said. “How old are you?”

Okay, that's pretty dismal, supposedly not knowing what a library is, but, trust me, it gets worse.

Shelly then proceeds to express disbelief at the idea of D&D without tiles and minis, wondering how you could possibly ever take proper tactical advantage of your fighting environment space if you didn't know which 5' square everyone occupied. The word "imagination" is briefly mentioned, but quickly dropped for more whining, this time about character death (oooh, ick!).

But in spite of the hideous drawbacks, the siren call of primitive stone-knives-and-bearskins gaming calls to Shelly:

But still . . . there is always something about the
way people wax on about the earlier editions of D&D,
and I’m not entirely sure it just has to do with a time
before microwaves and YouTube. (And yes, kids, there
was a time before microwaves and YouTube. Shut up.)

GAWRSH A TIME BEFORE YOUTUBE HOW COULD IT HAVE BEEN SO!?!

*ahem*.

Anyway, Shellly's willing to try this "feerst ee-deeteeon" stuff, even though she claims to not even own a pencil, so she sits down with her DM and rolls (EGADS WITH DICE AND EVERYTHING) up a new M-U, "Majeka Magicmaker", which Chris-the-DM says is "a very 1st Edition name". Hee hee, names were so silly back then! (Gleep Wurp the Eyebiter would kick Majeka's ass from here to the Barrier Peaks.)

Then we got a problem with henchmen - Shelly's sheet has a spot to list 'em, so in typical spoiled brat 4e mode she, of course, insists on having them:

“I totally want a henchman,” I say. “How do I get
one?”
“You’re not getting any henchmen,” Chris says.
“Not in my game.”
“But I’m entitled to them,” I explain, pointing to
the box on the character sheet.

and authority-figure DM Chris folds like a PocketMod:

Chris knows me pretty well, so in the interest of
time he offers a treaty.
“Fine. You can have henchmen, but they’re not
coming on the adventure. They have to stay home and
tend to the garden and draw you a bath and plan your
wardrobe or whatever. Let’s move on.”

Then, after we ASSIGN 3d6 rolls to Majeka's stats (3d6 six times in order evidently being a little too iron-man for comfort) we haz another OH CRISIS moment with D&D Barbie:

“Get your percentile die.”
“I have no idea what you’re asking me to do.”
He hands me the die that I’ve kept in my bag for
six years and never once rolled.
“For real?” I ask. “I always wondered what that
thing was for.”

SNERK.

And then we get the requisite "OMFG I can only cast a spell once a day and the monsters might hit me and ruin it ohmigod ohmigod that is just so unfair".

Throw darts? Use a sling? Hurl flaming oil? Oh, lordy, lordy, Majeka Magicfarter couldn't be expected to think of options like that! That's just so un-magicmakery!

And Armor Class back then was just so complex! DM Chris has to consult a chart to calculate AC, whereupon Shelly ends up with an AC of 2. (TWO? For a M-U? Cripes, and she's complaining) ? And much further whining ensues about how arbitrary a number it is and why is it so low and what she needs to hit someone and it's all so complicated and blah blah blah blah. I dunno, ten-year-old kids could cope with THAC0 and descending AC back in the 80's; I have no idea what Shelly's problem is. Maybe the Red Bulls she's been knocking back have actually been Potions Of Stupid.

By the way, we find out Majeka Nosepicker is 8th level. You know, just one goddamn level before name status, one level away from being able to "retire" to found her own stronghold and craft friggin' magic items. But this is just too weak for Shelly! *sigh*

Anyhoo - Part 2, and the ~~vapid~~ valiant adventuring party is off to do adventuring stuff:

I am Majeka Magicmaker, an 8th-level gray elf
magic-user. To my right is Laura, aka Shab “Shabulous”
Heanling, a 12th-level half-elf thief. Mark, to my
left, plays Darg Blonke, a 7th-level gray elf fighter, and
Chuck rounds out the group as Fage the Kexy, a 7th level
gray elf cleric.

Eeyurgh. What's with all the elves? Was there a delver's recruiting drive in Lothlorien or something?

And ohgod ohgod ohgod right away we start in with the "how do we know what our tactical advantage is?" crap:

“We don’t use maps either?” Laura asked.
Chris shook his head.
“Or Dungeon Tiles?” Mark asked.
“Are we Amish?” I asked.

and then Shelly does a lame "Who's On First" ripoff:

Before we began, he instructed us to pick a party
color, to which I immediately shouted, “Teal!”
My group stared at me with heads cocked and eyebrows
raised.
“What?” I asked. “I’m trying to channel the 80’s,
and teal was a very 80’s color. I had about four zillion
mock turtlenecks in teal, because it went great with
my peacock eyeliner.”
“It’s still a good color for you,” Laura said.
“Thank you!”
“He said ‘caller,’ ” Chuck offered. “Not color.”
Oh . . . right . . .

Oh, forcrissake, we didn't use 'em BITD either, so I have to conclude this was yet another example of "let's parody the typical 1st edition AD&D experience" bullshit. Yawn. Gygax was a big fat guy with a beard, you know. Tee hee.

And it's crisis time yet again as the heartless DM throws the PCs into the adventure head-first, without allowing time for the reading of proper boxed text or establishment of detailed back-stories or anything important like that:

We can’t just begin. We need answers first!
“Where are we?” Laura yelled.
“Who are we?” Mark asked.
“Tell us what is going on!” I shouted.
Chris shushed us. “Calm down. Let’s first get you
in initiative order."

AAAAHHH YOU HEARTLESS BASTARD YOU'RE DEPROTAGONIZING THEM!

By the way, evidently Shelly-welly knows damn well what a library is:

Oh, yes. Order. Organizing feels good and is the
best way to calm a potentially riotous bunch of rabble.
Every time we attend a library show and give out free
books, we always make the teachers and librarians
form a line. If there’s one thing they like almost as
much as free books, it’s self-sorting. (And if there’s
one thing they like more than free books, it’s crudités
and wine, but that’s another story.)

Ha, ha. Yes. Urm.

Twit.

It's at this point DM Chris seems to realize just what circle of The Inferno Minos has dropped him into:

“Hello?”
“Wait, are we playing already?” I asked. Usually
we line up our minis on the edge of the playmat to
signal it’s game on.
Everyone shrugged. Chris sighed again. Apparently
DM ing in 1st Edition is very taxing. “Yes, you’re
playing. Tell me what you’re doing.”

Yes, Shelly, I'm sure it's the taxing quality of 1st edition DM'ing that's his problem.

I was heartened to notice it wasn’t just me who had
trouble grasping the lack of in-game physical representations.
Man, we are spoiled.

No shit, Sherlock.

But DM Chris keeps on trying to get these blithering yahoos to THINK, as futile an endeavor as that appears to be:

“Okay, okay,” Chris said, scribbling something on a
piece of graph paper. “I’ll start. One of the townsfolk
gave you a map that looks like this.”
His drawing shows a corridor about one square
wide and six squares long.
“So we’re just . . . there?” Laura asked. “Alone?”
“I don’t know,” Chris smiled. “Are you?”
“Isn’t that something you would tell us?” Mark
asked.
“Isn’t that something you would notice if you were
looking around?” Chris prodded.
We gave Mark encouraging nods, guessing this is
something our caller might be able to find out.
“Yes.” Mark spoke with an authority appropriate
for a caller. “We are looking around. We are trying to
. . . see stuff.”
“Did you bring a light source?” Chris asked.
Oh, jeez, nothing slips by this guy. This is worse
than trying to return something to Best Buy without
a receipt.

At this point I don't know about Chris, but I'm cheering for the monsters.

(So what exactly do you do about light sources in 4e?

Oh, I know - THE SUN SHINES OUT YOUR FRIGGIN' ASS. Brats.)

So Shelly wants her damn 5' squares, and she's not going to let this go:

“You know what would work really well?” I asked.
“Dungeon Tiles. I have some at my desk. Want me to
go get them?”
“No,” Chris said, pointing at me to sit down.
“You’re seeing exactly what you would see with the
amount of light you have.”
I was pondering the strangeness of making our
fantasy game so realistic when an unfamiliar voice
came from my right.
“Shaaaaaaaabulous is claaaaaaaaaustophic.”
“What’s happened to your voice?” I asked Laura.
Mark nodded sympathetically. “Dairy bubble?
Happens all the time.”
“Oh, no,” Laura said in a weird, affected, half-
British, half-theater-snob accent. “This is how
Shabulous talks.”
Chuck’s eyes got all wide. “Are you roleplaying?”
“OMG, I think I am!” she said.

GRRRRRRR WANT CAVE BEARS TO EAT THEM NOW NOW NOW

“Did our light source go out?” I asked. “Because
I’m not seeing anything helpful here.”
“You have to say that in Majeka’s voice,” Laura said.
“That’s why you can’t see anything.”
Mark agreed.
Okay, so they’ve both lost their minds, but hey, I
was a theater major. The problem is, I wasn’t a very
good theater major, so the only accent I can do is that
of the Count from Sesame Street. I use it for everything—
Italian, Southern, Elvish.
“Majeka looks up once, twice, three times. Ah, ah,
ah. And she still can’t see anything.”

RABID TROLLS. RIDING CAVE BEARS. WITH +5 GLAIVE-FAUCHARD-RANSEUR-GUISARMES OF IDIOT SLAYING.

We braced ourselves, because without the map
and the minis (and yeah, yeah, I know I’m harping on
this but it was new to me!) it really did feel like I was
stuck in a dark, dank dungeon with a flimsy spellbook
and some friends who speak with weird accents
and giggle uncontrollably.

RABID FIRE-BREATHING TROLL SHAMANS CASTING CLOUDKILL AND METEOR SWARM RIDING TARRASQUES WITH I.B.S. RIDING ANCIENT MAGIC-USING RED DRAGONS WHO HAVE HAD A VERY BAD DAY AND ARE LOOKING TO TAKE IT OUT ON SOMEONE.

Then, thank Kord, the drow show up to save us:

Chris continued. “Out of the darkness you see
three creatures rushing toward you.”
“You said they were trying to get away,” I said.
“Guess not.” He rolled more dice and concluded
that Fage had been clubbed over the head for 6
damage.
Okay, so far 1st Edition seems like it’s just the DM
doing lots of stuff to the players.

Well, yeah, when you're insisting on having your wine-swilling idiot characters wander around the Underdark with no light sources and the collective INT of a befuddled Gelatinous Cube.

But then, mirabile dictu, the stopped clock is right for once today, the blind pig finds an acorn, Hell freezes over and Majeka Pooflinger actually does something intelligent:

Let’s see what’s in Majeka’s spellbook.
I chose wall of fire and tried to describe my actions
to Chris as well as I could.
“I’ll cast this . . . back there . . . where the rest of
the drow priestesses and friends presumably are, in
hopes it will erupt into a giant wall of flames that
keeps us separated.”
Instead of the usual “Are you sure you want to do
that?” he says when I’m about to do something strategically
dubious, Chris looked a little dejected as he
nodded and said, “Go ahead.”
And get this: Not only did it work and do 23
damage to everyone caught in the blast, but it was
truly a good, strategic move.

And then the others unload a ~~can of whoop-ass~~ delicate pint jar of inconvenience on the three poor helpless drow and, just like that, the game is over with. Woot. I guess.

What was that, like thirty minutes? Sheesh. Just try getting through the first round of combat in 4e in thirty minutes. These morans had no idea what they were doing and yet managed to get a ways underground and fight an entire melee in that time.

In the cheese-loaded tradition of other comic endeavors from the 80's, we finish out with An Uplifting Message:

“I can’t believe how much I enjoyed that,” I told
him. “I feel like I was way more into it than usual.
Like my D&D just got more real.”
My mom always said there was a fantasy world in
my head. I thought she was only referring to soap-opera
characters and stuffed animals.
“See what happens when you’re forced to pay
attention?” he said.
I did, but more important, I was beginning to
understand what all those boys in the 80’s found so
appealing about D&D. The danger, the excitement,
the adventures as big as your imagination would let
them be. Seeing is believing.
Or, in this case, not seeing is.

And knowing is half the battle! Or not knowing. Or something. Gag.

I guess this was all intended to be funny, in a kind of oh-so-ironic hipper-than-thou Kewl Kidz way. I guess. 'Cause I don't see the funny.

There was an article back in The Space Gamer #48 called "The Balrog And The Finger Of Death", by W.G. Armintrout, about a battle with a Balrog with painted miniatures on a battlemat, as opposed to the old-old-old days of D&D and an epic battle against a pair of Balrogs and a last-minute Finger Of Death spell that pulled the delver's asses out of the fire. The older game was the one that they remembered and talked about, because it was the more involved one - the one where they used their imaginations to envision these monstrous creatures moving through "the cloying darkness". As Armintrout put it:

So what's the point of these two stories? Simply this: last week we pushed some lead figures on a plastic map and played a game inside a dungeon; but against those balrogs many years ago I had an adventure! One was just a game, the other was an experience.

Which says exactly what Shelly does, except without the condescension and patronizing and snickering at the poor deprived barbarians who had to struggle along their games with their wildly complex charts and character sheets and graph paper, in the dismal shadowy past before Dungeon Tiles and full-color hardcovers and Twitter buffs.

And said it back in 1982. You know, back when we played D&D wrong, before WOTC came along and showed us the full potential of the RPG experience.

Snerk.

GRAAAAAAHHHHH

2011-09-11T23:07:00.003-04:00

I wish to hell I had the kind of drive and dedication to gaming that I see in, well, every other freakin' RPG blog out there.

Burned out, I am. Devoid of creativity. The magic has gone out of Stars Without Number and I am back to fantasy RPGs, but all I can do is re-edit text files of Microlite74 and OD&D and Tunnels & Trolls. I can't do anything WITH them. I look at the stuff I've printed out for Mythic and I feel uninspired; I look at my collection of T&T solos and it's just all "meh". I pull out my copy of Palladium's Weapons & Armor with the idea of converting it into a system and I can't decide which system to use. Maybe I should convert the Arduin Grimoire books to Microlite74... bahh, what the hell for?

Why am I not PLAYING any of these systems? Why am I fiddling around with fonts for PocketMod versions when I should be rolling up characters and going on adventures? I've bought the Mythic GME and T&T solos and saved tons of random creation resources from blogs... why am I dicking around re-sorting the files in my "RPG" folder when I should be USING them?

Too many systems to choose from? Lack of self-confidence? A feeling of not having enough time?

I have no idea. But it's FRUSTRATING.

Spacefarers Guide to Freakin' Disappointment

2011-07-16T22:23:00.004-04:00

Awhile back I managed to acquire a copy of the old generic-SF supplement Spacefarer's Guide To Alien Monsters, which I seem to recall having actually seen on the shelf back at Campaign Headquarters in Rochester NY circa 1982 or so.

It's pretty much old-school standard, with spare layout, cheesy art and color only on the covers. There's a neat conceit, though, in its background exposition; that these beasts had been distributed, as pets, as show animals, as hunting quarry, as a potential resource, or entirely by accident, among various worlds by an earlier stellar empire, which means the chronically overworked GM needn't invent a entirely new ecosystem every time the PCs land on a new world. At worst you might want to re-skin the lava snakes encountered on Parcellus Secundus while using the stats for the lava snakes from Erigea IV.

So! I took this tome in hand, and proceeded to sit down and translate a selection of the beasts detailed therein to Stars Without Number. And things were going really well for a while, and I was having a good time, and then I got up to the "C"'s and, well, noticed a couple problems.

To start with, there seem to be very few "odd" creatures, things which could be adapted to different environments than Terran-standard. I guess it makes sense in SWN, where most environments generated will be Terran-standard, but what about Frozen or Burning worlds? What about exotic lifeforms for methane/ammonia worlds or chlorine atmospheres?

Second problem is related to the first - the creatures are too "animaly" - cats, dogs, squirrels, bears, tigers, snakes etc. etc. "oh, but THIS cat has six legs and dark blue fur!"

Third, 90% of the damn things are poisonous. I realize this isn't OD&D instakill poison (and if it were, using this book would mean an awfully short campaign) but look at the parallels in our environment - there are very few venomous animals, mostly reptiles and invertebrates, and the platypus is the only mammal I can think of that uses poison. (Oh - shrews as well.) There's a few that also use psionics of various types. Meh, I dunno - it just doesn't sound right given the background of the SWN universe.

Fourth - EVERYTHING IS FREAKING OUT TO KILL YOUR SORRY ASS. It's all like Deathworld in here, f'crissakes. "Oh, look, kitty, nice kitty kitty" and BAM you're stunned by a telepathic blast and the cats begin to feed on your helpless form. Don't go near that bush; it's going to fire razor-sharp darts at you. Even the herbivores are ready to trample you into the dirt if you look at 'em wrong. Apparently nobody though of including non-aggressive creatures - which I suppose makes sense, given that the title is "Alien Monsters", but didn't even the Monster Manuals include some harmless "normal" creatures that weren't there just to score XP off of?

Fifth, and this is the big one, it's SO DAMN REPETITIVE. One aggressive multi-legged bear I can do, but from A-G there are three different variations! At least two different spiders that ride something made from their silk (one a balloon, one a kite) and drop on their prey from a height. Two different plants in just the "A"s that shoot spikes/arrows. Venomous rodents. More spiders, poisonous of course. Yet another poisonous snake. Killer frogs. Yet another solitary diurnal hunter that will attack anything regardless of size! Evolution is different 'round these parts!

I dunno. I'm up to "G" and I'll probably continue, but it's getting harder and harder to get excited about these beasts. What I'd really like to see is a collection of just plain alien creatures, like, say, the creatures from Starflight II. In fact, I may go and do that; stat up those creatures - Wandering Chandeliers, Scaly Blue Hoppers, Stinging Cones and Pop Berry Plants seem to fit into SWN well somehow.

EDIT: Holy CRAP, there's a SECOND multi-legged bear in the "G"s! Two of the damn things in one letter! And there's a whole selection of ameoeba-things in the same area. LAAAAAAAAAME.

Fantasy Random Table: 100 Things To Be Found In An OD&D Cabinet Of Curiosities

2011-07-14T22:12:00.003-04:00

100 Things To Be Found In A OD&D Cabinet Of Curiosities
1. Dried fish
2. Geodes
3. Tiny scenes carved into seashells
4. Preserved skins with unique tattoos
5. Maps
6. Pickled organs in jars
7. Dwarven marital aids
8. Fulgurites created from magic lightning
9. Miniature scenes in wooden boxes
10. Carved unicorn horns
11. A collection of pinned and sorted insects
12. Giant spider fangs
13. Mummified bugbear paw
14. Odd-shaped bottles containing colored liquids
15. Fossils
16. Roc feathers, 10' long each
17. Levitation organ from a Beholder
18. Tanned basilisk skin
19. Gorgon scales
20. Seeds from various plants
21. Dried shrieker spores
22. Bracelets elaborately woven from copper wire
23. Kobold tribal fetish masks
24. A scale model of Castle Morihennon, made entirely from dried noodles
25. A complete skeleton from a displacer beast
26. Finely carved amber beads with untranslatable symbols thereon
27. A softly glowing elf-stone
28. A set of stony gargoyle wings
29. Carved wooden gnomish drinking mug
30. Watercolor paintings by Tserminis Mul, a local Lawful dragon
31. Cockatrice feathers carefully sealed in a glass vial
32. Coral jewelry made by mermaids
33. A magically preserved Giant Squid, tentacles outstretched
34. A box made of dark wood whose grain shifts almost imperceptibly, with silver fittings
35. The key to the above, fashioned from a single piece of peridot
36. A sample of the writing of the ancient Bhaskhan Empire, carved into a slab of black granite
37. Ceremonial masks worn by priests of the religion of The Old Faith
38. A preserved remorhaz leg
39. Rust monster antennae
40. The skull of a doppleganger
41. A collection of hell hound teeth, sorted by maturity
42. Fourteen different kinds of bird beaks, showing adaptation to various feeding methods
43. Gilded fruit
44. A rose carved from magically preserved ice
45. Seedpods of the black uriquot tree, covered in razor-sharp spines
46. Orcish tribal banners
47. Dragon scales, sorted by age
48. The baleen from a specimen of Yesod's whale
49. Horuhz stones
50. Manticora spines
51. An entire miniature copy of the Annals Of Goroth, written in green ossiq ink with a brush made from a single mane-hair of a sphinx
52. Psycho-art of the Grey Elders of Arn
53. A band consisting of trained insects, complete with tiny flutes and drums, actually playing music
54. Ma'a-huriot teeth
55. A portrait of King Ablemarle V, made out of chips of semi-precious stone
56. Grotesquely failed attempts at creating homunculi, preserved in crystal jars of cloudy amber fluid
57. A jeweled walking stick of dark, almost black, wood
58. A taxidermied sahaguin
59. Physicker instruments
60. A gold cup that softly plays soothing music when filled with wine
61. A dissected and preserved brain mole
62. Demon soulstones
63. Holy symbols of The Zezz
64. The animated leaves of the Arisiol tree, waving as if blown by a breeze
65. Malianar sticks
66. Knotted counting strings
67. Shrunken orc head
68. A love charm, made of twisted blades of grass and red hair
69. Ancient brass and bronze coins
70. Elvish funereal decorations
71. Dwarven burial money
72. An oil painting of the 53rd Layer of The Abyss, done on the flayed skin of a Type 2 Demon
73. Huge quartz crystal
74. A miniature gilded lute
75. A minotaur skull carved with portentous glyphs
76. An empty reinforced case claiming to contain an invisible stalker in stasis
77. Feathers from pegasi, hippogriffs, and griffons
78. A sealed vial of dried Yellow Mold spores
79. Stirge snouts
80. A vampire's coffin (empty, fortunately)
81. A stone from the Plane Of Fire, burning constantly
82. Elaborately embossed silver practice sword
83. The cauldron of a Secret Order Witch
84. A burnt-out Wand Of Fireballs, made from carved oak capped with red crystal, singed on one end
85. Empty alchemist's poison bottles
86. Seashells of every color of the spectrum
87. Treant leaves
88. A stone with a mummified human arm embedded therein ( a seriously failed attempt at a blind Teleport)
89. A frost giant molar
90. A strangely twisted sculpture made of dark unbreakable glass
91. A crystal tree, life-sized, with tinkling green crystal leaves, actually growing and putting out delicate yellow crystal flowers and green crystal fruit
92. A helmet fashioned from a giant crab shell
93. The sting from a purple worm's tail
94. The phylactery of the destroyed lich Vul-Marister Xerielatos
95. The Book Of Unlife
96. A full set of caudal scales from a elder salamander
97. A plain clay jar, larger on the inside than on the outside
98. An painted wooden puppet, 6" tall, speaks and moves on its own
99. An iron grate with crossbars which seem to pass through each other
100. a crystal vial of perfume from the Dryads of The Gold Forest

Fantasy Random Table: 17 Heists for the Brave and Daring

2011-07-11T20:29:00.002-04:00

17 Heists for the Brave and Daring

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2011-07-07T20:26:00.004-04:00

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“PUT THE POWER OF A DRONE IN YOUR POCKET
Jealous of the cool toys AMI and TDW get to play with? Ever wish you had your own missile-equipped drone on station, waiting to take out Bad Guys? Now you can, with UFO Ltd's new Condor™ personal drone! Controlled by an ultra-portable miniature command module that fits easily into a shirt pocket, the Condor™ is able to fly within a 100 mile range and stay on-station up to 5 days, soaring the winds like the long-gone bird its name shares. And when it comes time to put the hammer down, nothing says 'mega-damage' like UFO's Hunter Hawk™ missile, laser-guided to millimeter precision by your command, rated at 85% 'sure-kill' even on boosted targets by Urban Hunter Quarterly. The UFO Condor™ personal drone, available exclusively at mall*mart.”

(Footage of President Milkovich's assassination) "One high-explosive round can ruin your whole day. That's why you need Uncle Raptor's Beehive™ armor, the only civilian-market personal reactive armor! Beehive™ interfaces with your pack to detect incoming rounds and deploy our patented Angry Hive™ reactive rounds, blasting those pesky bullets before they blast you. And Angry Hive™ rounds are inexpensive and easily replaceable, even while Beehive™'s being worn, meaning you don't need to sacrifice on protection for one moment! Uncle Raptor's Beehive™ armor – Uncle Raptor's always got your six!"
(played at 10x normal speed) "WARNING: Reactive rounds may present a danger to nearby soft targets; caution is advised when deploying reactive rounds in public areas. Use of Beehive™ with packs other than Shellfish US SuperPack version 5.67 or newer may cause premature deployment of reactive rounds; Uncle Raptor Industries is not liable for damage or injury caused by use with unapproved hardware.”

(NOTE: The legal case Braithewait v Sweeney's Olde Fashioned established the precedent for severely speeded-up disclaimers, the defense successfully arguing that as long as the disclaimer was played in full, it didn't matter what speed it was at, because the technology the average person had access to enabled them to slow it down if they wished)

The Onomastikon

2011-07-04T10:54:00.003-04:00

I don't know about you, but one of the worst things about creating a PC/NPC is coming up with a name. Fantasy games or far-future SF games you have an out; you can make something up and run with it and hope it doesn't sound too stupid. But what about more modern-day RPGs? How do you come up with a valid name for a particular background?

Kate Monk's Onomastikon to the rescue. "Onomastikon" means "Dictionary of Names", and that's exactly what it is, sorted by region (America, Africa, Europe, Pacific).
Each category then has pages for general regional history, names of historical rulers, and given and surnames.

So suppose I need a Soviet-era Russian name. (Not necessarily a good example, as this is one of the pages on the server that's semi-broken, but you can still get there.) Click on "Former Soviet Union", go to "Russia", and from there it's obvious. And so I get Daniil Maksimov Kossakovsky.

The only thing better would be working this all into some kind of random table system where you wouldn't need to pick, just roll. But it's incredibly freakin' useful as it is, anyway.

Random Languages

2011-07-02T13:04:00.002-04:00

Table to pick a random language for modern-day RPG-ing:

RANDOM LANGUAGES (1d100)
1.!Kung
2.Afrikaans
3.Ainu
4.Akkadian
5.Albanian
6.Aleut
7.Arabic
8.Armenian
9.Azerbaijani
10.Balinese
11.Basque
12.Belarusian
13.Bengali
14.Berber
15.Breton
16.Burmese
17.Cantonese
18.Catawba
19.Cheyenne
20.Choctaw
21.Coptic
22.Cornish
23.Cree
24.Czech
25.Danish
26.Dutch
27.English
28.Esperanto
29.Etruscan
30.Filipino
31.Finnish
32.French
33.Gaelic
34.Galician
35.Ge'ez
36.German
37.Greek
38.Gujarati
39.Gullah
40.Hawaiian
41.Hebrew
42.Hindi
43.Hittite
44.Hmong
45.Hopi
46.Hungarian
47.Ibo
48.Icelandic
49.Indonesian
50.Inuktitut
51.Irish
52.Italian
53.Japanese
54.Javanese
55.Kannada
56.Kashmiri
57.Kazakh
58.Khmer
59.Korean
60.Kurdish
61.Lakota
62.Laotian
63.Latin
64.Limburgish
65.Lombard
66.Maltese
67.Mandarin
68.Manx
69.Maori
70.Maya
71.Micmac
72.Mongolian
73.Nahuatl
74.Ojibwe
75.Oriya
76.Pashtu
77.Persian
78.Polish
79.Portuguese
80.Quechua
81.Russian
82.Sanskrit
83.Sicilian
84.Somali
85.Spanish
86.Swahili
87.Swedish
88.Tagalog
89.Thai
90.Turkish
91.Uigur
92.Ukrainian
93.Urdu
94.Vietnamese
95.Volapük
96.Welsh
97.Xhosa
98.Yanomami
99.Yiddish
100.Zuñi

It's 2021 and the dream is dead.

2011-06-28T20:38:00.007-04:00

Meh, perhaps a word or two about the Underground RPG is in order for the 99.9% of those who have no idea what the game's about.

The setting: the USA, 2021 A.D. a satirical semi-mutable semi-comedic Crapsack World where corporatism has run rampant, the government has gotten out of almost everything except monitoring the public, wars are fought not by states but by mercenary corporations, the concept of an armed society being a polite society has gone right out the window, and the average person is more concerned with what happened last night on Vidnet than, well, pretty much anything.

Independent mercenary companies fight the USA's wars, using "boosts", enhanced humans with superpowers (gained from research into a crashed alien craft) who have been put through a virtual-reality system in which they lived a four-color comic... only to be rudely awakened and shipped off to the latest Third-World hellhole battlefield to protect American interests, i.e. interests of American corporations. (The canonical example in the book is the Paraguayan War, fought over access to grazing land for raising cheap beef for fast food.) The boosts then return to a country that's less than happy to see them, having no place for their abilities and being embarrassed by their presence, basically leaving them to fend for themselves once out of service. One of the few jobs boosts are suited for is security, which is fortunate since the proliferation of firepower on the streets has left most cities as battlegrounds where the guy with the bigger gun (or at least the bigger ammo magazine) prevails.

Grunt work is done by "pre-frontals", naturally lobotomized artificial humans created by the fast food giant MacRaney's when they figured out it would actually be to their net profit to create these beings and then sell them MacRaney's hamburgers.

A new Cold War exists between the USA, China, and "Neo-Deutschland", a revived German empire with a bastardized version of Scientology as its national religion. A level of casual racism exists in American society towards both China and the N-D, of a kind not seen since the worst days of WWII, which is probably the only way the American public can be motivated to care about foreign affairs at all.

The political scene in the United States consists of three parties: the Republocrats, who do pretty much nothing; the Plutocrats, who act in the interests of the rich and corporate; and the National Anti-Socialists, who are so far right that Rush Limbaugh would look liberal by comparison. (Limbaugh is actually Vice-President from 2000-2008, with President Darryl F. Gates.)

Among the offerings on the 4000-channel Vidnet are Combat! Combat! Combat!, edited footage of battlefield mayhem with color commentary; Big Mean Animals Tear The Crap Out Of Each Other, a nature program; Vigilance Team, an action-adventure starring computer reconstructions of Father Charles Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy, G. Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, and Edwin Meese; and Bang, Bang, You're Dead, basically nothing but sloppily edited-together porn and battle footage, minus even the effort of a miniscule plot.

The most popular fast-food chain serves human flesh, which is okay since you're allowed by Federal law to will your body to them after death. Certain types of violent terrorism are protected free speech, while most political speech must be licensed by the government.

The PCs are members of the boosted, left high & dry after mustering out from their units to live in this mess as they will, with only the political resistance group The Underground as a hope that things can ever be changed for the better.

And that's not even mentioning Channel Zero, the gang-run tourist trap on the Moon, the corporate sponsorship of Constitutional Amendments, food made from sewage sludge, the Neo-Vatican, Systematic Overthrow and The Cracker Brothers, Estro-Gin, the Armenian Cola Wars, the Atomic Kennedy, the New Primitivism, cyber-celebs, bio-drives, semi-sentient robots, Space City™, the "ronnies", soma-vids starring long-dead Hollywood actors & actresses, the Lightbringer Disaster, the L.A. Police Strike, or Paste™...

It's 2021 and the dream is dead.

Or is it just sleeping...?

...and the obligatory sweet tea

2011-06-26T10:17:00.003-04:00

We're sticking with cannibal cuisine; this time we're taking a look at how the Big Two position themselves in the South and in general:

Tastee Ghoul changed their menu slightly for the South, rolling out in mid-2011 what they termed their "Magnolia Menu" featuring Long Pork Cracklins and Bubba-Q (available with mustard-based or tomato-based sauce) and, of course, sweet tea as standard for all restaurants - the South being the fattest section of the U.S. has worked to TG's advantage, allowing them to use rendered human lipids for all their deep-frying "for that personal taste you've come to expect from the 'Ghoul!" - Commercials produced for this promotion are very “psychobilly” retro, featuring ghouls in pompadours and gals with poodle-skeleton skirt

Recently Tastee Ghoul has adopted, particularly in the South, a distinctly "urban" ad campaign, calling themselves "The 'Ghoul" or even "the TG":
(sexy Southern belle voice: “C'mon down to the TG, where the food's always fresh and the fun's awaitin'! This week's special is a Bubba-Q sandwich on real Texas Toast, the TG's famous fries, cooked personally as always, and a large Candy Cola™ or sweet tea, for only $70! The TG – open every day but Sunday! Are YOU a people person?”)

Sweeney's, looking to brand itself as more upscale, released an advertising campaign based around "Titus Andronicus" complete with Edwardian-era-dressed actors and faux Shakespearean dialogue (Saturnius: "'Tis indeed a meal fit for an Emperor!") - Sweeney's has sponsored a Shakespeare Revival for just this purpose, releasing pamphlet-sized summaries of the various plays and sponsoring 4-minute videos for high school audiences, concentrating mainly on violent and suggestive aspects

Sweeney's also promoted a remake of the play Titus Andronicus itself in 2013, notably altering Shakespeare's tragedy into a comic farce while retaining most of the violence of the original; the rape of Lavinia is missing, though, to make it more acceptable to community standards (in Sweeney's version she is only beaten and mutilated), and, of course, the meat pie Titus serves proves splendidly popular and, far from a massacre at the end, they all settle down to dinner:

(Tamora: My sons! Where are they?
Saturninus: Go, fetch them hither to us presently.
Titus: Why, there they are, both baked in that pie,
Whereof their mother daintily hath fed,
Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred.

[Tamora tries another slice.]

Tamora: Holy frajole! My sons are delicious!
Saturninus: You must give us the recipe, my boy!)

[Re-enter attendants with Aaron.]

Aemilius [holding Aaron]: Pray, Lucius, put aside that lovely pie
And give sentence on this execrable terrorist wretch,
That hath been breeder of these dire events.
Lucius. Set him breast-deep in earth, and famish him;
There let him stand and rave and cry for food:
If any one relieves or pities him,
For the offence he dies. This is our doom:
Some stay to see him fasten'd in the earth.
Aaron: Uh-oh! Rooks rike I've been a BAD, BAD BOY! No pie for me!

[All laugh.]

Aemilus: C'mon, you little BoBo! Let's get you buried in the earth!)

In addition, the part of Aaron is not played as a Moor but as a weird Yellow Peril version of a Mongolian warrior (dressed in hides, waving a saber, slanted eyes, mangled “L”s and “R”s)

(Aaron: A speediuh course than ringering ranguishment
Must we pursue, and I have found t' pat'.
My rords, a soremn hunting is in hand;
T'ere will the rovery Loman radies tloop:
T' forest warks are wide and spacious;
And many unflequented prots t'ere are
Fitted by kind for dismembelment* and virrainy:
Singre you t'it'el, t'en, t'is dainty doe,
And stlike her home by force if not by words:
T'is way, or not at arr, stand you in hope.
Chiron: The hell are you talking about, you crazy Chinee?
Demetrius: Duh, dude, he means “do her in the woods”!
Aaron: Ah, so! No shit, genius!
Demetrius: Awesome advice, my man. We're off to do this thing!
Chiron: Huh huh huh, “wood”!

*Note: the word “rape” was taken out in response to outcries at the original from NAS representatives, and replaced with this less violent and offensive term.)

Cannibal cuisine

2011-06-23T21:00:00.003-04:00

I remember some review of Underground on RPG.net that was severely dubious of the whole Tastee Ghoul thing. Here's more of my stuff, this time concentrating on that particular aspect of the game and how I see it in-universe:

Far from the lurid popular picture of Tastee Ghoul and its competitor CC companies (the preferred industry term) having on-site meat lockers full of dismembered corpses, CC companies utilize a system more akin to the older fast-food chains in which a central “slaughterhouse” and packaging system pre-packs supplies for each franchise and distributes them by region. (After all - did the old fast food places of the 20th Century have sides of beef hanging in the back room? Of course not!) The central distribution system enables the standardization of portions and also has the benefit of distancing employees and customers further from the source of the food, which proved very important early on when the concept of cannibal cuisine was still being established nationwide, though working the line in a processing facility can be stressful, for which reason it's usually reserved for undocumented immigrants and pre-frontals - Admittedly this has made the system a bit more inefficient since the centers must rely on outside sources and a certain unpredictability of material... but one of the further advantages of processing off-site is that each center can quickly ship material to stores in regions that are running low on raw meat, and a stock can be built up to cover short periods (there's quite a brisk business during the holiday season, for example). Nonetheless, there are always urban legends floating around about mysterious disappearances in the inner cities, and there's always the suspicion that pre-frontals are being used as "filler" material when stocks run short - the NAS is particularly concerned about this, every now and then going so far as to call for CC restaurant boycotts, i.e. “Sweeney's: Dump The Cro!” or “Tell TG: 45 is Not Enough” - other lurid stories center around failed genetic enhancement projects, battlefield casualties, and botched operations

The CC industry though prides itself on the fact that all its material comes from voluntary MacMurtry Act donations, touting the careful quality inspection "that insures only the purest, most healthy meats are used in preparing our products" - corners are indeed cut but for the most part the CC processors stick with "MacMurtry material" as it's known, leaving such potentially contentious sources as children alone... however Tastee Ghoul has been in negotiations with MacRaney's with respect to cloning technology, hoping to further supplant their stocks with “decerebrated clone material”. Were the NAS to find out, it could go very badly for both companies, public popularity notwithstanding.

“How exactly did the CC industry come about? How is it possible that eating human flesh, once considered so taboo as to be unthinkable even if starving, has become an industry worth over $3 trillion? One might point to the popularity of Millie's in New York City, where, beginning in 1997, the burgeoning population of Manhattan homeless were served for an elite, select clientèle, or one might look to the so-called “white pork cookhouses” in Chinatown, where Asian gangs provided raw material for meals for unsuspecting tourists, but the prime motivator in popularizing CC was a Vietnamese immigrant named Sach 'Mr. Bookman' Duc Trinh, the Roy Kroc of cannibal cuisine... in 2003, after being confronted by a gang of toughs who accused him of eating cats and dogs, Trinh, in a burst of rage, reportedly responded with ' I eat shit? You goddamn Americans would fucking eat each other if someone sold it to you!' ”
Meat Is Meat: A Cultural History of the Cannibal Cuisine Industry by Dan Fleigel, © 2022 University of Chicago Press

Grand Re-Opening

2011-06-21T09:30:00.003-04:00

The coffee's hot, the pastries are fresh, and there's so much RPG stuff floating around my hard drive I could just post crap from there for the rest of the year.

So let's get it going with this bit I wrote for the Underground RPG:

"There it is. Paste™." he says, thrusting the small yellow canister with black biohazard symbols at me. I instinctly shy away; this is, after all, the chemical that dissolved the Compton Riots into a generic mass of biological goo.

He notices and laughs. "Aw, shit, can't do nothin' to you like this!" He fits it to the end of the Paste™ Projector and raises his binoculars to sight on the deer, placidly grazing, no idea what waits it. He gives a slight breath - there might be the word "wuss" quietly spoken. Having gotten the distance to the animal, he keys it in on the gun's pad, takes a deep breath, and fires.

For a gun the Projector makes almost no noise at all. A quiet *tump*; the deer's ears perk up, but it doesn't move. The canister sails over the bushes towards the deer and I crouch down behind the bushes. I can't watch what happens next, and that makes him laugh again. I hold my breath, but the only sound is the wind through the trees.

"Shit, not like it's a big deal," he says as we walk around to see the results.

There's nothing. Nothing at all, not a deer, not grass, not weeds, nothing for a 10 foot circle. If I got on my hands and knees and sifted through the earth - were I capable of walking any closer to the spot - I know I would find no insects or worms. The Paste™ has done its work, dissolving everything organic into a wet mass that quickly soaked into the ground and - thank God - dissipated.

I can't think of what to say. "And - and why?" I gesture at the bare circle. "No meat, no trophy, nothing. Those canisters are expensive and hard to obtain - what was the point?"

"Point?" He spits. "No 'point', mister."

"But WHY?"

"Shit, 'cause I can!"

-- "Hunting with 'The Nooge'", by Roy Krone, Nation magazine, August 2023

Jack Vance

2009-07-16T07:14:00.004-04:00

A friend of mine just sent me an article from the New York Times on Jack Vance, one of my all-favorite writers.

Vance, who is 92, says that his new book — a memoir, “This Is Me, Jack Vance!” — will definitely be his last. Also arriving in bookstores this month is “Songs of the Dying Earth,” a collection of stories by other writers set in the far-future milieu that Vance introduced in some of his first published stories, which he wrote on a clipboard on the deck of a freighter in the South Pacific while serving in the merchant marine during World War II. The roster of contributors to the collection includes genre stars and best-selling brand names, among them Simmons, Neil Gaiman, Terry Dowling, Tanith Lee, George R. R. Martin and Dean Koontz.

The title of his autobiography is fitting, reminding me of a line somewhere in one of the Dying Earth stories where someone expresses doubt about the protagonist's abilities and receives the retort "But I am Cugel!"

The least surprising revelation about Vance - for me, anyway? This on the list of his literary influences:

the light comedy of P. G. Wodehouse, his literary hero

Ever since I started reading Wodehouse (unfortunately late in my life, in just the last ten years or so) I've felt there was a distinct influence of his on Vance - the writing styles are just too similar sometimes. It's nice to have that confirmed.

I suppose it's just best though that Vance's literary hero wasn't Harry Stephen Keeler. :)

Burnout

2009-06-22T22:41:00.004-04:00

Oh, god... for all the enthusiasm from the previous post, I'm bereft of ideas. Mental desert. Blasted plains.

Elaine, I'll be blunt. I'm burnt out. I'm fried. My mind is as barren as the surface of the moon.

I have no idea what does this. Phase of the moon? Time of year? Alignment of major stars? God it's frustrating.

Oh, hey, *giggle* let's see some pictures!

DICE DICE DICE yes I had these, in these very fugly colors. I sawed the d12 in half and tried to make metal dice in shop class! EPIC FAIL

HAIL TEH BEER FAIRY!!!11

The hell with Goosebumps and Harry Potter - imagine finding THIS on your school library bookshelf. Like I did.

Need I mention that that cover has haunted me ever since?

Kitteh haz drinked teh brown water! Nau kitteh stay 'wake ALLLL NIGHHT run from room to room for no apparant reson!1

...um, as opposed to what?

Margo! Boxcar Saturn!

heh... fun!

Tune in next time when I may actually have content that doesn't involve laziness!

These things happen

2009-06-07T22:11:00.004-04:00

ARGH! I'm sloughing off on assembling my proto-Traveller universe, thanks to the RPG known as Underground. I had originally bought the core book for half-price three or four years ago, and while it never was really inspiring I've always had a certain affection for it.

That was, however, until I read Ways & Means, the Washington, D.C. sourcebook for the game, written by the immortal Robin Laws. Suddenly it all clicked for me - it's a bloody great satire! - and I've collected pretty much everything that was published for this sadly short-lived system and have been reading it enthusiastically.

It's an artifact of its time - the mid 90's - and while certain references are now seriously dated other bits are fresh as a daisy. It's certainly not a "future history" by any means so much as a pitch-black satire on the values (and lack thereof) of the American people, culture and corporations. It's acid-edged humor with violence so seriously over-the-top it becomes more hilarious than disturbing and tastelessness so tasteless that it becomes flavorful.

Underground seems largely unknown even on the Internet - a few passing references on Wikipedia, a couple lukewarm reviews of the main book on RPG.net, and that's pretty much it. Hell, Human Occupied Landfill has more internet presence than Underground.

Let me see if I can rectify that...

Paint & glue not included

2009-05-29T08:10:00.007-04:00

One thing about SF universes in RPGs I've always had a problem with (and fantasy also, to a certain extent) is what life is like for the common folks - the ones who don't go gadding about the galaxy fighting alien menaces and discovering new worlds. I understand that the PCs are the stars of the show, and attention should be on them, but what's going on in the background to round out the universe?

I was particularly thinking of this last night - I picked up Judge's Guild's Maranatha-Alkahest Sector and there's a list of rumors and events in the back, tailored to the planets of the Sector. One of these involves a PC who has taken to sitting underneath a tree with a sack lunch and reading, and in the event he's interrupted by a group of religious disciples who wish to use that spot for a small ceremony. (If the PC moves, he gets a subsequent benefit with local merchants.)

I want a SF universe like that to game in, one where even among stellar empires one can still pack a PB&J in a brown paper bag and read in the shade. Where kids, like Nikki Vorsoisson in A Civil Campaign*, enthusiastically show off the plastic models they've built of starships to the PCs. The game FTL: 2448 did this kind of thing well, with an aside in one of the examples of play about confiscating the keys to the ship's shuttle from one of the more troublesome crew. And really, it isn't a bad idea to have a set of keys for a ship like that, especially when you'd need to worry about security while it's parked in a docking bay on Mars.

Oh, I know it's not "futuristic". I'm probably harkening back to things like doing starship navigation on a slide rule in thinking this way. It's the FUTURE, after all!

But you want to maintain a link between us and them - between the world we live in every day and the world of the Third Imperium on Sylea in 5976 A.D. And, in my opinion, little touches, little mundanities like paper newspapers, sack lunches, starship trading cards and plastic models of Gazelle class X-Boats go a long way to creating that link and making the future world one you can imagine people actually living in.

* You know, there's not one Traveller adaptation of the Vorkosigan novels out there? Oh, I know there's one either just out or forthcoming soon for GURPS... but I mean - GURPS? *shudder* the black hole of roleplaying where ideas get trapped in huge statblocks, bad artwork, and the necessity of buying at least three out-of-print sourcebooks to run any given game. Oh, and something about the writing style that sucks the fun out of gaming. I dunno, maybe Fourth Edition GURPS is different.. maybe.

Fun stuff

2009-05-28T19:49:00.003-04:00

Well, all the locations of planets have been established, the starbases for each have been rolled, and now it's the slow process of rolling 2d6 over and over again. Yes, I could use the computer and generate the whole thing in seconds, but there are still certain things I can do with manual dice rolling that you can't do as easily on a computer.

For example, in rolling the last couple sections of space over to the left (which will be the "frontier" proper) I tried, instead of 2d6, rolling 3d6 and keeping the higher two, which skewed the numbers more towards the top end of the scale - exactly what I was looking to do. Similarly in rolling tech levels for the planets at the other end, the more urbane long-settled ones, instead of 1d6 I'm using 2d6 keep the highest result. Again, numbers skewed to the top of the scale, which is what I'm looking for.

Yes, I COULD write and debug a program that'd do that... but it's so much simpler (if more tiring to the die-rolling arm) to do it the "hard" way.

EDIT: Well, I suppose I could "cheat" for the rest of the worlds... or just appropriate UWPs from non-canonical sources like Ley Sector and Glimmerdrift. Hmm.

I just looked over the completed map

2009-05-22T20:06:00.007-04:00

good god, what have I got myself into?

EDIT: That's it up at the top there, all 29x51 hexes. It sure as hell seemed like a good idea at the time...

If you'll notice there's one world established already on the map at what'd be 0102; the actual paper map already has all the worlds located and I'm starting to roll for starports, which is turning out to be interesting.

Back to basics

2009-05-20T22:40:00.004-04:00

It was probably around this time of year in 1981 or so when I got on my bike, rode miles and miles across Monroe County to a hobby store in Pittsford, NY, then rode back home to Henrietta where I settled down in the back yard with my purchase - the original LBB edition of Traveller.

I'd probably been RPG'ing for about five years by then, having played in a D&D group that met at a store in Fairport (a story for another time!) and having bought the blue-book edition of Basic D&D - the one with the cool dragon on the cover. I think Traveller was the first game that made me realize you could do more than just fantasy with roleplaying, and a pair of dice later I was rolling up characters and subsectors and having a blast. (I still remember staying up 'way late on summer nights, watching MTV and rolling up planets for "The Terran Confederation".)

It's been an off-and-on thing over the years, as all of my hobbies have been, and I've just rediscovered Traveller and the fact that it too has an Old School fan-base, much like that of D&D.

And so I've been inspired by reading articles at COTI and re-reading the original Traveller books, to the point where I fished out one of the big blank hexsheets I bought years ago for wargaming (and never used), sat down with it last night, and started to mark off every hex I rolled a 1, 2, or 3 on 1d6 for. There's a hex directly at the center of the sheet which will be "Home", whatever it gets named, and then about the equivalent of eight subsectors around it, with adjustements to starport rolls the further out you go. Basically a "Pocket Empires" kind of thing - the expansion of a race of humans (not necessarily Terrans!) back out into a galaxy after a Long Night, encountering modified humans and long-lost cultures. And if I'm a lot older and greyer than I was the first time I did this - what the hell.