Nebulith and the New Red & Pleasant Land Are Now Available

Last week I was talking to James (in a conversation that will soon be available) and I said "Well you can have the conservative argument against free speech or you can have Black Sabbath and the OSR made its choice long ago." 

Today Ozzy's dead. He created some of the only important art that was also actually good in the history of the world. The party in Hell tonight will be the greatest since the Fall of Man.

In other news, kids, there's product.

Here's a video:

Nebulith is a new far-eastern setting, several years in the making, with all the things that implies: martial arts, samurai, ninjas, katanas--but also a lot of twists brought to the table by my collaborator, Alex Hopson, who wanted to make a setting based on his home, in Okinawa--and based on a very cool idea: a miles-high plume of smoke from one of the island's volcanic peaks has been frozen into stone, colonized by creatures, and that's where a massive dungeon is. Alex enlisted native Okinawan friends and his wife's family (locals) to help keep us honest about Okinawan culture.

Personally, I worked hard on two things in particular :

First, to present samurai, ninjas, martial-arts et al with genuine new playable depth but do it in a way that did not complicate the game past what old school players want in an exploration-heavy game where a new PC can fit on a 3x5 card. To this end I made a lot of random level-up tables (like this --and what's in Frostbitten and Mutilated and Red & Pleasant) and designed modular rules which made wu-xia style combat blend into standard old school play.

We playtested the new classes (Samurai, ninja, pirate, karate master, kijimuna hunters--Okinawan elves-- and the local spellcasting women of Okinawa--the Yuta) against western equivalents in a series of extremely fun playtests and it seemed to work out very well.

The second challenge was to make the characters, cities, dungeons, castles and creatures of our little world of Awa-Nikko look as badass to you as it did in our head.

I hope I managed it.

As for Red & Pleasant Land--it's the Alice-In-Wonderland-But-Vampires setting which sold so many copies it was the first product to get Lamentations of the Flame Princess out of debt and won so many awards the people mad about it all decided to lie about rape. I decided to sue some of them and that worked--at which point Molly at Fierce Ponies decided to reprint it.

These are uncompromised works, both made with absolutely no attention to what the market wants or whether it'd please anyone else. We made the books we wanted to for the games we want to play.

If you support them loudly and in public, we can keep doing that.

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We Talk About Carcosa, Realms of Chaos, Book Design, Record Collecting and more

James Edward Raggi IV, owner of Lamentations of the Flame Princess and I made a video--the second episode of "Educating James"--we start out talking about the relationship between his record collector mentality and the design of LotFP books and move on to talk about a bunch of other game and game-adjacent things.

00:00 Intro 00:46 James’ Record Collector Rant 04:17 Vornheim As Zine 06:08 James Vs The Human Race 11:04 On Fancy Game Books (including Carcosa) 17:05 Zak’s Favorite Fancy Books (Including Realms of Chaos and Mayfair’s DC Heroes) 23:38 On Book/Product Design (including Nebulith, the LotFP core book, Vampire: The Masquerade, Deities and Demigods, AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide) 33:50 Design and Characters (including Seclusium of Orphone) 41:16 Vibes 44:34 James Talking About Vinyl 46:07 More Book Design (including Outcast Silver Raiders) 47:59 Fascination (including Warhammer Fantasy and TSR UK) 50:43 Keep on the Borderlands modules 54:26 The Hobbit Movies 58:00 The One Thing James Hates (more about record collecting--and tunnels) 1:00:53 Coda (including Akira Kurosawa’s Ran)

The next episode will be spicy--we argue about free speech.

D20 D&Dables from Kirby's Thor

This isn't the first time I've stolen D&Dables from Thor. Which makes sense--it's been published once a month for like 50 years. Today we go back into the early days of Jack Kirby's Thor...

1. This awesome map. South is Earth? And check the bottom right--did you know Asgard had a mall?

2. A crypt containing Merlin. Or whatever powerful wizard. Of course he wakes up when it's opened, but consider this: he doesn't. The PCs open the crypt, they see its a powerful wizard, totally undecayed. And they're covered in valuable and powerful grave goods and...do they dare touch anything? Will that wake Merlin? Maybe they should just walk away? Maybe touching him inflicts a curse? That's ten minutes of watching players freak out and argue with each other, minimum.

3. Speaking of curses, when was the last time someone inflicted a Midas touch on one of your PCs? Everything they touch is gold? Or stone? Or tar? Anything so long as it would be very inconvenient if your armor was made of it.

4. This is a good plot. Stick this jerk on your hexmap:

5. What does it look like once the PCs are sold to the trolls?

6. Here's a weird problem you can give an order of paladins. Maybe it's a curse on a PC that they can never harm any living thing, maybe its a group of hostile knights who are mad at the PCs for swatting flies:

7. Good idea for a magic item: it can slice a hole in space allowing the atmosphere of one place to appear in another:

8. We all know that satyrs and centaurs love to frolic in the glade but when was the last time you actually had a party see them dong that?

9. Here's another challenge for PCs like the paladin thing--defeat the living statue without damaging it because it is a sacred symbol to the locals.

10. Portal to the home of the gods, hidden in the land of the giants.

11. Mountain marauders seeking a mighty item in a ruin rumored to contain demons.

12. Not quite ordinary paralysis or "hold"--your feet are just stuck to the floor.

13. Magic axe that can slice a hole into another universe.

14. A Shadow Chamber. Love a Shadow Chamber.

15. Wind Giants in a nameless land. 

16. This Celestial Chess game is cool and the chess pieces are clearly some D&D guys.

17. The Tower of Telescopes?? Each one surely sees in a different way. 

18. The enemy lies on the far side of the Boiling Plain!

19. A plot to suss out suspected treachery: It is announced that a warrior of the court is banished and must now roam unprotected. Whoever plans to ambush them is the traitor.

20. The Queen of the Giants is normal-sized and hot.

Alright, thanks for stopping by, catch you again in a few galacto-days!

Four-Color Fantasy

I've been thinking a lot lately about a kind of art that usually doesn't work. Specifically, full-color comic-book fantasy, especially from the 20th Century.

What folks generally think of as "classic" old school RPG art--like Russ Nicholson and David Sutherland--is related but it isn't this kind of art. Usually classic Old School is black and white and the pen technique is tuned to be in black-and-white--it is full of textures that would interfere with the sense of movement in a comic book. When old school art's in color it's usually painted. 

Either way it avoids the central problem of rendering fantasy or historical scenes in ink and reproducing that inky color on a midcentury comic book printing press--they have a real tough time with realistic colors. There's a reason superhero comics beat out fantasy, westerns, romance, war, horror and noir comics and quickly dominated the comics medium--the heroes' bright costumes looked a lot better in cheap reproduction than the subtler palette needed for more realistic work

A key figure in the development of this kind of art was Hal Foster, who did Prince Valiant.

Despite Foster's legendary ability to render in ink, the colors still give this a chintzy, cheap feel. Something in the human brain just knows this isn't right--and its not just the pink rocks. Compare that to a random (and equally luridly-colored) Spider-Man panel:

Spidey's bright costume heightens the entire scene, and somehow the blobs and tangles of quickly-rendered trees make more sense. Like watching an American movie set in France where everyone speaks English--once you've mentally accepted the major deviation from reality, the rest follows. Superheroes look right in this printing process in a way that other genres took a lot more effort to pull off. 

There were exceptions, of course, but they required either very judicious use of color or an audience willing to suspend disbelief.

If you saw Schwarzenegger's Conan wearing that bright blue shirt you'd laugh so hard they'd ask you to leave the theatre, but nearly every fantasy character in comics wore some version of that.

Some of you may remember the official TSR D&D comics--the insensitive way they handled the color of armor, leather, flesh, steel and all the other things you've got to include in a fantasy comic wasn't the only reason they sucked, but they sure didn't help:

But anyway, I'm not interested in the bad stuff, I'm interested in the good stuff--the art by people who managed to overcome the limitations of the medium to produce a new, weird kind of fantasy art not seen before--and not seen much since either.

First up: Esteban Maroto's rarely-seen Wolff with two F's, who managed to maintain this psychedelic palette through several installments published in a variety of magazines.

Charles Vess has done some work for official D&D and he did a Sabbath album cover, and some of this more recent work has a soft post-computer-coloring palette. However he did some cool Thor-adjacent stuff in Marvel Fanfare which fits the 4-Color Fantasy vibe to a T:

A hallmark of this kind of art is monsters done in all one bright psychedelic color. Here's a page Vess did back in the day for DC Challenge:

Alex Niño did a strip called Captain Fear in the '70s, later taken over by Walt Simonson:

Tom Sutton:

Michael Kaluta on Madame Xanadu:

Gil Kane on the sci-fantasy Star Hawks--which was only in color on Sundays:

Rafael Kayanan has graduated to doing martial arts and broody pictures of Conan, but he and the colorists on Fury of Firestorm back in the '80s took any opportunity to go in a fantasy direction, even though the comic was superhero book:

Walt Simonson's Thor was as much superhero and sci-fi as fantasy and the coloring was never unique, but it did manage to consistently avoid embarrassing itself, the figures always looked like they were the color they were on purpose:

Last and definitely not least, probably the most well-known example in the genre, Barry Windsor-Smith's full-color self-colored version of the Conan story Red Nails from Marvel Treasury:

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