New Year, Who Dis?

 It's been almost a year since I last posted in this blog. Does it have any point anymore? Should I just set it aside and let it die? I don't know. Maybe I'll figure out an answer by typing words in this box.

It's not like I've been doing a lot of gaming. I played in a Call of Cthulhu campaign which was a run through the classic Masks of Nyarlathotep adventure/campaign. That was fun, with many gasoline explosions, dynamite explosions, 'splosions, 'splosions, 'splosions. Soon, I'll be playing in a Chronicles of Darkness game, as a high school history teacher who has a yearning for adventure and a burning desire to prove to herself that the paranormal exists. I have a couple of games I want to run in various states of preparation, but lacking a group or venue to play them with or in. I keep considering getting and learning Foundry VTT for GURPS, but that is both a fair amount of money and a serious commitment of time; not even to mention that I have other games than GURPS I'd like to run as well. Perhaps I'll just give up on the idea of using maps and automated tools over the internet and play on Discord, or maybe vanilla Roll20. We had plenty of technical problems getting just the Roll20 videoconferencing feature to work reliably, though.

Now there's the whole OGL 1.1 kerfluffle going on. In the end, I think it's probably for the best that people are giving up on it. Now, we can openly speak of Mind Flayers and Umber Hulks again, no longer constrained by the terms of a peace treaty that WotC offered to settle the T$R/They Sue Regularly wars of the '90s. It seems that they want to return to those days, which they should already know they are doomed to lose. You can't copyright procedures or rules. And good luck telling computer game publishers that you're trademarking "hit points" or "levels". Those ships have long sailed into the public domain. People not even involved with WotC have gotten nervous, but there's no way to revoke a contract that you aren't any party to, so WotC has no say in what happens with other companies that chose to use the same or similar language in their own contracts. Cepheus Engine remains safe, as far as I understand it (though I am not, myself, a lawyer). Still, people should probably switch to a better Open License, like CC BY 4.0.

I've spent time watching anime this past year. Such a fount of creativity, much more so than the really constrained and conventional shows on regular or even streaming TV of the US and UK and related regions. My top five of the last year were Bibliophile Princess, SPY×FAMILY, Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury, SHADOWS HOUSE (second season), and MADE IN ABYSS: The Golden City of the Scorching Sun. MADE IN ABYSS, particularly, is quite amazing fantasy that I can't recommend highly enough, and the anime so far consists of a first season, a movie that serves as a connection between the first and second seasons, and of course the second season, subtitled "The Golden City of the Scorching Sun". There is also a manga, which is the source material. I'd also recommend Requiem of the Rose King, which is loosely adapted from Shakespeare's Richard III with much added queer romance, and Urusei Yatsura, a remake of the '80s sitcom that gave rise to Teenagers from Outer Space and so served as a brilliant launch pad for Mike Pondsmith's career (not to mention, the creator, Rumiko Takahashi, has a tendency to create series after series that would each constitute the highlight of an entire career for anyone else). Speaking of Mike Pondsmith, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is also a great bit of anime from the last year. Includes one of my favorite voice actors, Aoi Yuki, if you watch the Japanese dialogue version.

This season of anime has a lot of interest for me, so much that, for the first time in years, I'm probably not going to be able to watch every series that caught my eye. Aoi Yuki has a role in Spy Classroom, which has resemblances to Princess Principal and perhaps Assassination Classroom, the Urusei Yatsura remake is ongoing, The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Genius Young Lady had a remarkable opening episode, In/Spectre is finally getting its second season, Chillin' in My 30s After Getting Fired from the Demon King's Army was recommended to me by someone who knew I liked Banished from the Hero's Party, I Decided to Live a Quiet Life in the Countryside (please do not fault me for these unwieldy, overdescriptive titles, they are currently fashionable in Japanese fiction) so I'm giving that a go, NieR:Automata Ver1.1a sounds interesting, and there are no less than three new fantasy series that caught my attention, Giant Beasts of Ars, Kaina of the Great Snow Sea, and The Fire Hunter.

I should probably add that anime isn't a perfect dreamland of endless creativity. There is plenty of convention there and potboiler series are not exactly uncommon. I can't bring myself to watch hardly any series that is billed as "isekai" at this point (some exceptions include InuYasha, The Executioner and Her Way of Life, The Saga of Tanya the Evil, The Vision of Escaflowne, and Ascendance of a Bookworm), anything described as shōnen causes me to reevaluate any interest I might have had, and even my beloved mahō shōjo stories have sort of bogged down into endless repeats of Pretty Cure (with some notable exceptions—the latter being much better than you might expect) or start off strong and then collapse. This season, outside of Pretty Cure (Delicious Party♡Pretty Cure is coming to an end and Hirogaru Sky! Pretty Cure is getting ready to start), there isn't even a single magical girl series, unless you really stretch the definition. At least there is a second season of Tokyo Mew Mew New to look forward to next season.

Back to gaming, I find myself with a renewed interest in Fading Suns, and both Barbarians of Lemuria and Majus are on my shortlist of games I'd run. I'd really like to run a GURPS Voodoo: The Shadow War game, though rather than train a new group to that system I'd rather run Majus. If I were to run GURPS at this point, it would either have to be players who already know the game or else start off with a run-through of Caravan to Ein Arris as a means of teaching the game, starting with a stripped-down set of rules and adding more options as the journey across the desert continues. I still need to go through that adventure and adjust the characters, as it was converted at an early stage when 4E was still operating under the assumptions that governed 3E. As a result, the characters are extremely over-skilled for their descriptions, with mere bandits (to pick one example) wielding weapons at a level of skill more suited to highly-trained commandos. It's like running across 8th level fighters—level title: "Superhero"—everywhere.

That last reminds me, too, of the old City-State of the Invincible Overlord. I've been thinking about that product a fair amount. The idea of "city as dungeon crawl" is one that holds a lot of sway in my head. However, both because that product's copyright is currently owned by a less-than-savory person and because it was always operating under some odd assumptions as to the demographic makeup of its setting, I would rather create my own version, one where there are perhaps fewer shopkeepers who qualify to run their own domain and attract a body of troops, even where not every noble is given a class and level. It would also give me a chance to refine some of the mechanics (I'm not fond of rolling for one type of encounter in the even turns and another type in the odd turns, for example, maybe use a d12 instead of a d6, with type I, general city, encounters on a 1 and type II, local neighborhood/street, encounters on a 2 each turn). I am still interested in the "crapsack city" feel of the CSIO, too, which is not something I am seeing in other city products I've seen under development lately. Maybe I should write an entire post on the "city as dungeon crawl" idea sometime.

Well, I don't think I've come to any conclusions about the future of this blog now, but I do seem to have come to an end of things to talk about at the moment. Maybe I'll write more before another year has passed.

Everything Has Changed!

The boom town is in hex 2409, Stonehell in 2207.
Hex 1816 contains the nearest city-state.

OK, not everything. I have changed the game I'm running. I've gotten tired of trying to balance long GURPS combats and non-combat sessions, so for now I'm just going to run an unholy mix of Delving Deeper and White Box Fantasy Medieval Adventure Game, plus a bunch of stuff I like. I'm going back to some kind of basics with it. The starting outdoor map is the Outdoor Survival map, though I also have vague plans to use Rob Conley's Blackmarsh even though I'm not yet sure where it hooks up to the classic map (and I seem to recall that it does connect to a couple of the Points of Light maps, which means I need to pick those up at some point). The game involves characters who have come to a boom town near Stonehell Dungeon in order to make their fortune.

• Goblins are going to be influenced by Jeff Rients, especially the "What Are the Goblins Doing" table and the "Goblin Door" table.
• I'm adding a Death & Dismemberment chart, specifically the one by Norman J. Harman, Jr. at Troll & Flame. I'm going to be crueler, however, and say that Clerical magic can't heal Death & Dismemberment damage directly. You just have to wait for those broken bones to knit.
• I'm using psionics, with the Basic Psionics Handbook from New Big Dragon.
• I like the concepts behind Courtney Campbell's On the Non-Player Character: Solving the Social Trap, so I'm using that. As a side note about those, it's a good supplement. Courtney has the right to price it however. In my opinion, though, it is worth $10 for the pdf, and it would be worth $15 for the print version. You could stretch the print price to $20 if you were the kind who doesn't worry too much about prices when buying your gaming materials, and you would probably not be sad about it. Unfortunately, that does mean that, again in my own opinion, the DTRPG pdf is overpriced and so is the print version. Sometimes the print one goes on sale, though. Note that I do link to all three there, and I don't have any code that gives me a cut. Take them or leave them, it is a good supplement, but not as good as Courtney apparently wants to price them at.
• I'm changing out the spell list for Magic-Users to be the one from Delta's Book of Spells. It's more deliberate and I like the aesthetics. The only stumbling point for me is the inclusion of Magic Missile, but that's not really a big deal.
• I've added the material components from AD&D 1st edition to the Magic-User spells, and tapped Dragon magazine #81 for the expansion on how to handle those. Clerics won't use material components, however.
• I'm mainly using Delving Deeper, but I like the classes, experience progression, and single saves from White Box Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game (which is, as you probably know, the same thing as Swords & Wizardry: White Box), except that I prefer the Cleric and Magic-User spell progression from DD. I also vastly prefer the dual classing method in DD.
• I'm using a silver standard, replacing all references to gold pieces with silver pennies. I'm also using classic duodecimal coinage: four copper farthings to a penny, 12 pennies to a shilling, five shillings to a gold crown, four crowns to a pound, a pound and a shilling to a guinea. Only farthings, pennies, and crowns have actual coins, the others are notional units of account.
• I'm incorporating a version of encumbrance by stone. In my system, there are coin weights, item weights, and stone weights. 100 coins equals an item and five items equals a stone, but round up for number of stones carried. Characters can carry up to Strength in stones, with more weight reducing their movement rate.
• There are other classes in other regions of the setting, and Clerics and Magic-Users are mainly only found in the local region. Some of the classes I know about are Dragonriders, Mystics, Monks, Shamans, Illusionists, and Druids. Players will not be able to start as any of these, however.
• I'm using the skill system from Savage Swords of Athanor. Sadly, you can't get that in print these days, but you can find the pdf in various places. Look at Scribd or something. EDIT: I was reminded by Sully that you can find it from Doug Easterly directly in the "Game Files" menu on the right side of his old blog.
• I'm going to use Doug Cole & Peter V. Dell'Orto's "Grappling Old School" system, which was published in The Manor issue 8. I think you can still get it at Gothridge Manor?
• I want to use a morale system, and the one in Rules Cyclopedia works well. I'll probably have to make Morale scores for some monsters, but that's not really a big deal.
• I have a couple of other House Rules, which I've written up.
• Alignments are Holy, Neutral, and Chaotic, but there are also other alignments out there. The players will not be able to choose those yet. Clerics must be Holy (or a similar alignment) and Magic-Users and Thieves may not be Holy. The vast majority of people are Neutral.
• Around 1 in 20 people have a class and level.
• Characters gain experience for spending money (1xp per sp spent), defeating enemies (100xp per hit die or level), converting NPCs to the character's religion (100xp flat), or a number of other means, probably taken from Pendragon's tables of Glory and Insight. Players may take advantage of the carousing rule, letting money spent carousing count double for experience (that is, it counts as spending money and then it also counts as carousing). I'll probably allow Holy aligned characters to gain xp by donating money to the Church, and Chaotic or Neutral ones to spend money on sacrifices, but those shouldn't be as beneficial as carousing.

So, that's fun. I wanted to do as little worldbuilding as possible, to do most of it as needed at the table, but I can't stop myself. Still, I've managed to not do all that much this time. I still haven't really named it. I know that there are six city-stats that collectively call themselves the Wilsur City-States, that they lie along a river valley, and I know the main structure of the Tetradic Church, which is one of the few that has Clerics. I know that Clerics are not always Priests, that sometimes they are holy people outside of the hierarchy of the Church, and that the Church is not very happy about that situation.

Top 10 Gaming Products

Over at Dyvers's blog, he's asking for lists of our Top 10 favorite gaming items of all time. To simplify things, I limited this to RPG items for my list. Anyway, here goes…

10) The Arcanum, Second Edition.

This is probably the best Old School set of published variant rules for D&D. It is well thought-out, addresses many of the problems perceived in D&D at the time, and keeps the things that make the game simple and quick, such as character classes and advancement through collecting treasure and defeating foes. It does include options for the more problematic things that would later get incorporated, such as experience bonuses for "role-playing" (without bothering to define that), but not many. Finally, it includes a simple skill system, armor that reduces damage, spells that aren't forgotten (but are limited in number of castings per magic user per day), and other simple, obvious fixes that would eventually become nearly standard in gaming. Ahead of its time, while still retaining the best of the origins, this remains one of the best rules systems in general.

9) This entry has been removed. I cannot continue to support the game that was listed.

8) Lords of Creation.

Tom Moldvay was given free rein when Avalon Hill was making a desperate attempt to remain relevant in a market increasingly moving toward roleplaying games, and he came up with this. In what may be the most gonzo setting ever, the whole of reality and alternate realities is opened up to play. The player-characters are given maximum freedom for advancement, hoping to eventually be able to achieve the status of Lord of Creation and create their own settings, alternate worlds, and so on. Along the way, they might learn magical powers, acquire cybernetic enhancements, fight dragons or robot soldiers, even travel into the poetry of William Blake. Seriously, one of the alternate world settings is derived from the poetry of William Blake. There is nothing cooler than that in gaming. Since the very next session could take players into the Nine Worlds of Norse mythology, an alternate world where Boudicca was not defeated by the Romans, or a crystal forest hiding crustaceous humanoids guarding a staff of power, the game was wide open for anything, and was able to handle it with cleverly designed (though, to be fair, occasionally difficult to understand) rules systems that still felt a lot like D&D.

7) Adventures Dark and Deep Bestiary.

There have been a lot of monster books over the years. None of them has been as good as this one, which includes every creature from the AD&D monster books (less, of course, the ones that WotC has reserved for itself as "product identity" - though those have been replaced by versions created to be effectively the same but with different names and physical descriptions, as many people have been doing). Mr. Bloch did not stop there, though, creating a whole batch of creatures of his own design to add in. Among them are the Faeries and their Sidhe Courts, which are some of the best things to come out of the OSR movement (which is not to take anything away from the many, many wonderful things which that movement has produced). I love this monster book more than most, and of course it is easily used with any compatible game.

6) World of Greyhawk Boxed Set.

What can I say about this that hasn't already been said? It is exactly what (A)D&D needed in a setting, with an interesting balance between the idea that would later become known as "Points of Light" and the clash of Kingdoms that drives medieval wargaming. As people have looked at this over the years, the cleverness built in has only become more apparent, adding pathos to the unfortunate direction taken by subsequent products in the line. Including everything from amazingly euphonious, yet still absurd and camp, names to interesting factions and organizations, there is more implied adventure in any one area of the setting map than some settings have in their entire worlds. Topped off by that amazing Darlene map and some really helpful random encounter tables, there is little else that a DM would need to run a wide-ranging campaign for years.

5) Pagan Shore.

I love Pendragon. It is among the best roleplaying games, and one that I wish I were able to play more often. I'm personally most fond of the Fourth Edition rules, but I'm not a fanatic about any of the editions. Whatever, though, the one book in that game line that rises above anything else is this one. Giving a description of a society that is as alien to most modern-day gamers as the Aztecs, but doing so by building the cultural differences into the rules, players will soon find themselves approaching the mindset of the Iron Age Irish. There are a few quibbles to be had, but almost all of those have been addressed by people online, such as a discussion of how to incorporate the actual legal systems of Iron Age Ireland into the game in a way that is neither intrusive nor overwhelming of the adventure parts. It really does work, too. It doesn't hurt that I have a deep and abiding love of the Irish culture and very often want to play a character from whatever the closest analog is in the game world.

4) Flashing Blades.

Despite being one of the most popular settings for adventure fiction throughout the years, the 17th century has seen remarkably little treatment in roleplaying games. One of the earlier (but not the earliest, by any means) games to address that period was Flashing Blades. Marrying a relatively simple game system to a detailed and deep social climbing system, the game calls forth the ambitious swashbucklers and supports that style of play with rules that encourage such behavior without privileging "story" over game play. I'm fairly certain that the only reason this didn't do better than it did is that it didn't have a magic system. Of course, there is little way to include such a thing into a game of this subject, so that is not surprising at all. That said, it might have done it well if the next product on my list had come out a little earlier.

3) GURPS Voodoo: The Shadow War.

This was a game I didn't know I needed until after I got it. At the time, I was simply addicted to GURPS, so I was picking up just about everything that came out. When I got a look at the magic system, though… Look, up until I saw this, I was of the opinion that the RuneQuest magic system was the best one around - and don't get me wrong, it is excellent in many ways that have still not been matched by most games - and the one in Fantasy Wargaming was a glance at what might have been possible had it undergone more development. This one, though, hit every button of what I wanted in a magic system. Mages are not walking artillery pieces, they are subtle (except for the ones who aren't). Magic isn't just wave-wave-BOOM, but a process of conjuring spirits in smoky temples that are kept in the back rooms of Curandera shops and sending them out to do one's bidding. Yet, it still makes this all a part of an adventure game. Some magicians are Spirit Warriors, letting themselves be ridden by powerful Lwa who can do so much more than mere human beings can. The setting was, at the time, very nearly the only one on the market which dealt with race in the Americas in a relatively mature fashion, and was a surprise in that most, or even all, of the players' characters would be black.

2) AD&D 1E Dungeon Masters Guide.

Obviously this was going on my list somewhere. It has been, and rightly, lionized over and again, so I don't really feel the need to add to that general acclaim. Suffice it to say that there are few books out there which include as much useful advice, and none which include the density of advice and actually useful charts per page. Admittedly, one must get used to the writing style, which has been described as "High Gygaxian", but for myself I grew up on it and miss that idiosyncratic voice in gaming. Even if D&D isn't your game, you will almost surely find something of value in here, even if it's just to learn that there is a difference between jasper and onyx or discovering a passel of different terms for "prostitute". This is one of the most recommended books in gaming history, and it is for good reason.

and coming to the pinnacle, what could be better than the DMG?

1) MegaTraveller Boxed Set.

OK, I know that it is rife with typographical errors, mistakes, and other problems that gave this game the nickname "MegaErrata". Still, the first game I chose myself was Traveller, seeing that little black box in the bookstore that served as my first dealer of gaming products, and finding out that it had a book all about starships. Now, all these years later, having played or learned seven (or more, depending on how one counts it) different editions, I have come to the conclusion that this is the edition that did everything closest to right. It retains the flavor of the original game, while still fixing the problems inherent in the original design. It is compatible enough to use the supplementary material for the classic game, but can also make use of a great deal of the material written for T4 or T5 with only minimal conversion, and material for TNE with a little (a lot, actually) more work. Outside of the errata problem, the only disappointment about this game is that it was cut short before being finished, due largely to whatever happened with Digest Group - for example, only two of the alien races (plus two extra human cultures beyond the default one) of the default setting were ever converted to its specifications. The only edition which came as close as this one to perfection has been the Mongoose edition, but I have my own problems with that one.

Did You Miss Me?

Two and a half months since I've posted anything here, and for some reason I think that there will still be people reading it. Maybe I'm crazy. Anyway, I've got a couple of things that I wanted to mention, gaming-wise, and so I'm going to post about them now.

First off, I looked in my mail today, and found a neat little packet from Tim Shorts of Gothridge Manor and GM Games. It was an envelope containing the spiffy adventure (originally a one-page dungeon) called "Where is Margesh Blackblood?". It's available in PDF form at RPGNow for "pay what you want", so you could run right over there right now and get it for free, or for a buck or two, or for a hundred dollars if you wanted to pay that much for it. It's a quick little bounty hunt for a wayward bandit. I love Tim's adventures, even the simple ones like this one. Well, simpler than some. There are some neat twists here that will probably have the players questioning their characters' motivations. Or not.

I am still thinking about how best to really review Traveller5. For a quick one-liner, though, I am sad to say that I am not entirely happy with it. Still, it's got some really good stuff in there.

I was recently nudged back toward working on my Top Secret retroclone. I opened the file, but didn't really get anything done. We'll see how that goes. Most of my other projects, such as the WRG Ancients-based RPG, have pretty much been abandoned. A major exception is the MegaTraveller retroclone idea, which I have modified into a version of that edition adapted to my own SF starfaring setting.

People who have been paying attention to that Goodreads widget down there toward the bottom of the right sidebar will have noticed that I have been reading Stephen King's "Dark Tower" series of books. This is my first time reading them. When I finish the one I am on, I am going to go ahead and read the eighth one (The Wind Through the Keyhole) rather than going on to the fifth one. I am told that this is the intended order, and that King only wrote the fifth-seventh ones first because he wanted to finish the story before he dies (the car accident that almost killed him kinda kicked him in the ass to do it quickly). I'm a little bit surprised that I have never seen a gaming version of Mid-World. I like it, though it is substantially different than my own "sixguns & sorcery" setting.

Speaking of my own settings, Tim Brannan over at The Other Side has given us his own version of Appendix N. I think that's a neat exercise, so I've done up my own, as it would currently be. Like Tim's, mine will also include particularly interesting movies (I'll list them after the books, though). I make no apologies for the fact that I include a couple of westerns, and even an SF title or two. I am, however, going to avoid non-fiction and gaming books for now:

Books:

• Asprin, Robert L.: "Thieves' World" series (editor)
• Burroughs, Edgar Rice: "Barsoom" series
• Cherryh, C.J.: THE DREAMSTONE and THE TREE OF SWORDS AND JEWELS (particularly as published together and slightly revised under the title THE DREAMING TREE; can also be found together, unrevised, as ARAFEL'S SAGA)
• Herbert, Frank: DUNE
• Holdstock, Robert: "Mythago" series
• Howard, Robert E.: "Conan" stories
• L'Amour, Louis: THE HAUNTED MESA, THE WALKING DRUM
• Lee, Tanith: "Flat Earth" series, THE BIRTHGRAVE, et al.
• Leiber, Fritz: "Fafhrd & Grey Mouser" series
• Lovecraft, H.P.: "Dreamlands" stories
• Martin, George R.R.: "A Song of Ice and Fire" series
• Powers, Tim: ON STRANGER TIDES, et al.
• Sabatini, Rafael: CAPTAIN BLOOD, THE SEA HAWK, et al.
• Smith, Clark Ashton: "Zothique" stories, "Averoigne" stories, et al.
• Tolkien, J.R.R.: THE HOBBIT, "Lord of the Rings" trilogy
• Tremayne, Peter: "Sister Fidelma" series

Films:

• Cat People (the original, though the remake is not terrible) and Curse of the Cat People
• Conan the Barbarian (it is not Howard, but Milius's magnum opus is still an intriguing fantasy film)
• The Dark Crystal
• Dead Man
• Dragonslayer
• Excalibur
• Eyes of Fire (sometimes called Cry Blue Sky)
• Fire & Ice
• The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and the other two "Man With No Name" films
• Heavy Metal (the Taarna sequence)
• John Carter (like Conan, above, it is not the original, but it is still a good science-fantasy film)
• Krull
• Labyrinth
• Legend
• Lord of the Rings trilogy
• Pale Rider
• Pirates of the Caribbean series
• The Princess Bride
• Princess Mononoke
• The Secret of Roan Inish
• Spirited Away
• Star Wars (the original, now called "Episode IV", is an excellent fantasy adventure story with coming-of-age themes)
• Unforgiven
• The Warrior and the Sorceress
• The Wicker Man

There you go. I don't know if I'm back in the sense of regular posting, but I hope to at least post a little more often than I have been.

Metal!

Brass six-sider prototypes! The actual
dice will be laser-etched, they say.

A couple of people have mentioned it, and I want to add my voice because it looks pretty nifty, and I like nifty things. There's this Kickstarter which is set up to manufacture a bunch of metal dice, precision engineered. I mean, who wouldn't want steel dice? Or frickin' magnesium dice! I mean, that is pretty damned spiffy. The people who play Victorian adventure games that don't want brass dice? I don't want to meet anyone that lame. You can get them by the set of seven (d4, d6, d8, d10, d10 tens digit, d12, d20), by sets of d6, or by sets of d10. The aluminum dice are the least expensive, at $70 for a set of seven, but they go down to $40 for a set of 6d6 in aluminum (or even less for a single d20 in any of a variety of metals, if you get in pretty soon).

Think about having a set of titanium dice. Those would last for-frickin'-ever. Of course, they'd also run a chunk of change ($160), but they're precision machined and you'd never need to buy them again.

So, they're like Zocchi dice, but without the flash and they're made of metal so they'll never chip or crack (and no bubbles inside to throw them off). Stainless steel dice, copper dice, bronze, brass, magnesium, aluminum, titanium. Man, I wish I were rich, so I could get those titanium dice. Those would be sweet. I'll probably get the brass six-siders, for use with Space 1889.

\m/ METAL! \m/

Gameable Fiction

I've been spending most of my reading time these days with George R.R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" series. I was introduced to the setting through the excellent HBO adaptation, but quickly decided to read the books as I was sure that there was deeper content, and more of it. I was not disappointed.

Of course, we all know that the series has been adapted as a roleplaying game (though to be sure, I don't know very much about the game and how well it adapts the material; it seems to me that HârnMaster would go a long way toward developing the feel of the setting, with some work adapting the terrible and exotic magics of Martin's fantasy). There are a few other literary settings that have been adapted by specific roleplaying games: Tolkien's Middle-Earth, Vance's Dying Earth, Moorcock's Melnibone and some other Eternal Champion material, Lovecraft's Cthulhu stories, Niven's Known Space, Fleming's James Bond (though perhaps that was more an adaptation of the movies), Constantine's Wraeththu, Herbert's Dune (twice, though only once officially), Butcher's Dresden Files, Zelazny's Amber, along with a very few others. This doesn't include those settings that were mere supplements for other games, such as Thieves' World, Wild Cards, or Adams's Horseclans. There are even a few, such as Howard's Conan, that have been adapted more than once. In addition to those, there are some movie and television settings that have seen adaptations, like Star Wars (three times so far!), Star Trek (more than three times, depending on how you count it!), Firefly, Babylon 5, and so on.

However, there are some settings of fiction that have not been adapted to roleplaying games, and I am not sure why that is. Eddings's Belgariad, Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen, Butcher's Codex Alera, Burroughs's Barsoom (well, it sort of has, but not really), Lee's Flat Earth or Birthgrave, Donaldson's Thomas Covenant, Brooks's Shannara, and so on. Some of them, I can understand if the rights have issues or are otherwise difficult to secure, but the popularity of such as Malazan or Shannara would seem to have caused someone to go through the effort.

What settings do you most want to see turned into freestanding roleplaying games? Which would be better off as a supplement for an existing game like D&D/Pathfinder, GURPS, BRP, or whatever?

Dammit, Joe!

I was hoping to make it out of the year without supporting another gaming Kickstarter. Spears of the Dawn was supposed to be it, the last of them that I would support at least until the Car Wars Kickstarter kicks off next year. But nooooooooo. Along comes Joseph Bloch, of Greyhawk Grognard fame, with his Adventures Dark & Deep project. As he puts it:

"Adventures Dark and Deep™ is an attempt to explore what the world's most popular role-playing game might have looked like if its creator had been allowed to continue developing it, rather than leaving TSR in 1985.

This work is based on extensive research into Gary Gygax's public statements about his vision for the next edition of the game, using the game's 1st edition rules as a jumping off point. It's not a retro-clone, but an entirely new game with a very familiar feel."

Having seen Mr. Bloch's writings on the history of the hobby, I trust that he's done a fine job with figuring out what Gary might have wanted to do with a second edition of AD&D, and so I am looking forward to seeing this project and helping it to be as well-made as possible. The Kickstarter is just to get good art for it, as the game is going to be published regardless. The rules are already written and playtested, so it's just a matter of getting the thing to look pretty.

Anomalous Subsurface Environment

One of the best science fantasy megadungeons out there, Anomalous Subsurface Environment, has just had its second and third levels released. You might want to get it. If you don't have the first level yet, you should probably get that one too. I mean, demonic clowns, ray guns, dungeon elementals, what's not to like?

Anyway, I ordered my copy to go along with the first level, which I already have. It should be here in a week or two. There are PDF versions, if you're the sort of person who can stand that.

Swords & Sorcery

I've been looking at the upcoming setting product Tales From the Fallen Empire, which looks really interesting to me. I love that it takes inspiration from the fantasy films of Roger Corman, such as The Warrior and the Sorceress and Deathstalker, as well as the more traditional sword & sorcery fiction of Leiber and Howard. The only thing I'm not so intrigued by is that it is going to be for Dungeon Crawl Classics. Now, I've not got much against that game, but it's just not likely to be one that I am going to pick up. I've already got a couple of class/level games that treat sword & sorcery topics well enough (I'm talking about D&D and S&W, as well as The Arcanum), and I haven't seen anything that really compels me about DCC.

Anyway, I discovered this setting when I was googling around for information about The Warrior and the Sorceress, and found a thread on one of the RPG boards about it where it was mentioned that one of the classes in the setting (the "Wanderer") was inspired by the Order of the Homerac from that film, or specifically by David Carradine's character in it. It got me thinking, though, about what specific movies and fiction I'd want to use as inspiration for a swords & sorcery setting, staying away from the obvious ones like Conan the Barbarian and the works of people like Howard or Leiber.

The Warrior and the Sorceress is a no-brainer. There's a lot of implied setting there that can serve as inspiration. Similarly, Deathstalker is pretty neat. There are some interesting ideas in Fire and Ice, which is pretty much what happens when you take Frazetta's art and make it into a setting and story. The "Taarna" sequence from Heavy Metal has a lot of inspirational imagery and concepts, and the "Den of Earth" sequence has a few ideas as well.

Speaking of Taarna, there's the story sequence of Arzach and Legends of Arzach by Moebius and Lofficier.

An unusual source which might be interesting is the boardgame Dark Emperor from Avalon Hill. The idea of an immortal necromancer coming back from the land of the dead with the Lord of Vampires and the Goddess of Fear to conquer a decaying empire is an interesting one. The unusual geography (it is based on a landscape of meteor strikes and the resulting round seas instead of plate tectonics) is neat, too.

Tanith Lee's Tales From the Flat Earth books are amazing. Vaguely Arabesque fantasy with a darkly modern perspective, like fairy tales told by a madwoman. She's also writing a couple of new ones, so soon there will be seven volumes or more, with the upcoming two to be published in 2014 and 2015.

Richard Tierney's Simon of Gitta stories are a wonderful mix of sword & sandal, sword & sorcery, and Lovecraftian themes, rationalizing the heretic Derleth's ideas with those of Lovecraft through the interpretation of Gnostic theology, but a lot more entertaining than that sounds. Most of the stories are collected in the Chaosium collection Scroll of Thoth, and the others are found in the novel The Drums of Chaos, one story in the Chaosium collection The Azathoth Cycle, and one story (originally published in the magazine Crypt of Cthulhu) online here. There's also a novel titled The Gardens of Lucullus, which is part of the cycle, but very hard to find at the moment. Loosely connected, the movie The Silver Chalice was an inspiration on this series of stories, as Tierney has said that Jack Palance's portrayal of Simon the Magician is how he envisions the main character.

What odd sources would you use for a sword & sorcery setting?

Zines!

There are now two print zines out there, plus a one-shot zine/module. This is a good thing.

There's Loviatar, of course. Christian's zine is excellent. Currently, much of the space is being taken up with a hex-by-hex publication of a hexcrawl for D&D type games (specifically statted for B/X, and so directly compatible with Labyrinth Lord and BECMI, but also good for most other D&D-based games with more or less conversion).

And there's now Dungeon Crawl. I don't know what this one is like yet, as I've only just ordered the first issue. Looking forward to it!

There's also the estimable Zogorion, Lord of the Hippogriffs. A one-shot zine/module, I highly recommend this short adventure, statted for Swords & Wizardry, but obviously an easy conversion to any similar rules. Nominally for levels 3-7, I don't recommend that any players approach it as a hack-n-slay opportunity.

AD&D 1E Adventures And Stuff

So, WotC is reprinting the 1st edition of AD&D. That's pretty cool, but what do you do with it? Adventures are very helpful to the Referee, and there exists a list of adventures for AD&D 1E that are in print. You can see that list, with links, here. You should get the word on this list to everyone you know. They'll thank you. Even if they aren't a gamer. Don't bother linking back to me, unless you really, really want to (but if you want to link back to me that much, you should do it for something that I actually did, not a pointer).

Um, I found a place that sells pads of 17"x22" graph paper, from 4 squares/inch to 10 squares/inch. A pad of 50 sheets is less than $20, a pad of 100 less than $35. They have all sorts of other useful tools, too, like mechanical pencils and other sizes of graph paper, and they ship by UPS. (One downside: they require orders of a minimum $20 before shipping.) Check 'em out.

Hopefully, I'll have some actual content soon. I've been working on some templates for the GURPS Greyhawk project, which I should be putting up in the next couple of days.

eBay As Distribution Scheme

I had a busy weekend. Hope yours was good.

Over on Loviatar, christian is talking about how his new zine is available on eBay. This seems like an interesting idea to me, and a nifty way to distribute zines in general. It made it easy for me to just dip into my Paypal account and pay for a copy. Reminds me of going into the local (Seattle) lefty bookstore and picking up punk rock zines in the '80s. Go in and impulse-drop 50 cents for a couple of badly-xeroxed, handmade magazines, probably put together at someone's office job working for a lawyer or nursing home. Of course, the price has jumped a bit, since it isn't badly-xeroxed on a work copier and inflation has made prices change a bit in the intervening quarter century.

Useful? Perhaps

Jeff Rients linked to nearbygamers.com, which seems like it could be valuable. Anyway, that's my profile there.

Since we are losing our local game stores (though a new one just opened in my town), it's getting more difficult to find players. Tools like this should prove valuable.