REAL D&D!

Continuing the Disagree-A-Thon, today we have Matthew, who wants to disagree about what D&D even is...

So Matthew said:

"Fans of modern D&D (3e+) don't actually want or even like D&D - they just want a generic fantasy game to play make believe with."

And I said:

So the first question is: how would you define "D&D"?

M:

For me, D&D is a specific game where adventurers go into dangerous places to earn riches and power in a largely indifferent (or perhaps slightly malicious) world.

Z:

And do you think of that as "Matthew's version of D&D" or do you feel that definition has some rational claim to be The D&D?

M:

I don't think of it as Matthew's version of D&D. Matthew's "D&D", or more realistically, Fantasy Roleplaying Game, when I started, quickly developed generous sets of ability scores, multi-classed humans, paladin/ranger/magic-users, shadow flame ninjas, muppets, +8 weapons, chocobos, and narratives. There wasn't a huge chance component in what you would find or encounter unlike D&D by its written rules. Looking back, for me, to say it was D&D was more dishonest than my friend's Rifts game where you can play a Timelord or Amberite in Phase World but at least you're still playing in the greater Rifts setting and not ignoring systems. Meanwhile, D&D itself has a specificity. The world is humancentric. There are limitations to what PCs can do and PCs have to scrape by and weather the storm of fortune to obtain the game's objectives - treasure and power. The worlds D&D emulated in prior editions had this rigid foundation to build upon which more than a handful of people wanted to toss out. I hope this makes sense.

Z:

It all makes sense but it doesn't answer my question:

"do you feel that definition has some rational claim to be The D&D?"

What makes one definition of D&D special, primary, "more real" etc?

M:

Yes. I think the definition (D&D is a specific game where adventurers go into dangerous places to earn riches and power in a largely indifferent (or perhaps slightly malicious) world) I originally proffered has a rational claim more than just my preference. The rules laid in the earlier books support this. Throughout the '80s and '90s, I would always run into people either amending the rules OR adhering to the rules but no one questioned that level limits, class restrictions, random encounter tables, and level draining undead were D&D, they just claimed it was unfair or at best arbitrary. Now, experience rewards in 2E muddies this by making treasure experience optional and replacing it with story awards but that just undermined how the game was meant to be played and also highlights how the game was being shifted to suit people who wanted something else.

Z:

So, just to clarify and not argue (yet) your position is:

This is a "realer" definition of D&D because it is the definition the game had in its earliest incarnations.

Correct?

M:

Yes. I cannot argue against that.

Z:

Ok, so, I'd say two things:

1. D&D as originally conceived seemed to me already two things, on day one. One was Gary and Dave saying "This is rules for making fantasy campaigns, I'm pretty open to you all adding things, I myself have taken a melting-pot approach to what's in the game, it's got some Tolkien, some Vance, other stuff,  whatever, do what you want" the other one was Gary and Dave running their own games with their friends and producing material that, consciously and unconsciously, had a narrower focus on a specific kind of desperate-adventurer play like what you decide, at least in the beginning. Early materials all show this dichotomy (like almost all RPGs) between "What this game is meant to enable" (a large canvas) and "What I think to do with it at home" (a smaller one).
2. I don't see any linguistic advantage in using the phrase "D&D" or "real D&D" when you mean, more precisely "D&D as originally conceived". It takes longer to say, maybe, but it is more precise. For example: it condenses what took us 4 email exchanges to establish down into one phrase. Saying "Y'all aren't playing D&D as originally conceived" may not be as FUN as saying "Yall aren't playing D&D" but it explains to everyone listening what you're saying and that's kind of the point of language, right?

M:

Fair points all around. I should have been more specific. Are we still in disagreement about something?

Z:

I guess not.

Thanks for writing in!

M:

No problem. It was a pleasure!

Hey You Know What's Fun That You Did Not Know Was Fun?

It was with trepidation that I opened Deadly Fusion. What a terrible cover. Unremembered, unloved, seemingly unread and unreviewed, and not even having DC Heroes’ usual snappy trade-dress, that terrible cover-art it looks doubly off-brand. Was this review just going to be a string of jokes?

It was not. Despite everything, Deadly Fusion turns out to be a really interesting module, and I’d hope to see more things like it or inspired by it.

Like TSR did with their Marvel game Mayfair seems to have decided to let their superhero adventure modules be a place where designers got to experiment with mutant formats and ideas. When you look at old fantasy, horror and sci-fi adventures you see the beginnings of things we still see all the time today—normal scene-chains (sometimes expanding into scene webs), and location-based sandboxes. This isn’t one of those. Like Marvel’s Secret Wars and Nightmares of Futures Past, Deadly Fusion spawned no descendants, and that’s a shame.

New adventure formats are rare, and not enough people complain about it.

Deadly Fusion is called a “match play” and what that means is it’s for two people who both take the role of player sometimes and GM sometimes, specifically here:

-Using one of two books, one player GM’s the other player—as Batman—going through some scenes in Gotham City investigating a plot which eventually leads to the Joker.

-These scenes alternate (every two or three) with the Batman player acting as GM (using the other book) to get Superman through some scenes in Metropolis investigating a plot which eventually leads to Lex Luthor.

-That's most of the adventure. But then for the last section both players then stop and begin reading: the two separate books become separate Choose Your Own Adventure style books with paragraphs ending in choices for their respective characters—you go to the numbered paragraph and read the next thing—with the possibility of skill checks and fights along the way.

-Then the characters (and their players) re-unite fight or talk or both, and then make some decisions together, then finish the Choose Your Own Adventure thing to see what happens.

It’s super weird, and not perfect—especially the end—but surprisingly well-done. The whole thing is enabled by a few interesting techniques:

-First: limiting information. The two-book format, the investigation structure, plus the fact that the two investigations are separate for most of the game gets rid of the problem of the GM-player’s metaknowledge getting in the way of being fair. The Batman character doesn’t have enough information to figure out anything about Batman’s mystery while reading Superman’s and vice versa. The game doesn’t quite stick the landing at the end but it offers some intriguing tools which could’ve probably been leveraged to do it, which we’ll see below.

-Using superheroes. Superheroes don’t much sandbox: if Lois is in trouble, you go save Lois. This allows the GM to be sure that if the PC survives, they’re going to get to the next scene eventually without too many railroad nurses or nudges. 

-Using specific characters: Both of these scenarios wouldn’t work if you had a PC with telepathy, but, no: you have Superman, you have Batman. This allows the creation of very specific scenes and challenges and for the game designer to anticipate—with a fair degree of certainty—the range of outcomes. It also has some fun side-effects, as we’ll see.

You can start to see right away some of the barriers to this kind of adventure catching on, the main one being: this isn’t the kind of writing that can arise organically from normal RPG play. Unlike a typical adventure module or even a ruleset, this kind of match-play requires one person to set it up—including dropping in hidden information for both sides—and then to hand it over to two other people and not participate at all in the resulting game. It has to be a product. It isn’t the kind of thing that’s just an extension of what a GM might make at home for their own campaign.

Also: it’s not re-usable. You play once and pretty much it’s used up. And it requires two GMs. I think in the internet era, however, this could be a very good fit for, say, two RPG internet friends to play on Zoom.

So, the details:

Good

-Great scene: Batman has to interrogate a pawn shop guy behind bullet-proof glass named Gus Rogers. Gus isn’t especially crooked but he thinks Batman’s an idiot and makes fun of him, which seems like a fun thing to roleplay. When the scene gets to the breaking point, Gus runs off, if Batman pursues him he ends up in Crime Alley and has to deal with a My Parents Are Dead flashback. This is the kind of thing you can only do if you are playing an established character and the module really plays it for all it’s worth.

-When Batman gets to the docks ““straddling the littered sidewalks, overweight sailors seasoned with equal parts saltwater and rum, stagger about and decry their sorry plights” then ask batman for a drink. If he gets rough he has to fight

lol

-Because he actually isn’t the villain behind everything, when Batman meets the Joker the Joker’s confused and thinks he’s been drugged and taken to the Batcave. This is a good way to make the Batman player interact with the Joker instead of just immediately punch him.

-The real villain in the end is Brainiac—who wants to blow up Metropolis and Gotham. In the final scenes, if Batman or Superman loses their fight to Luthor or the Joker, then the player takes over Luthor or the Joker and they have to foil Brainiac, because their city is at risk, too—I love that.

Bad

-After explaining the format, both the “Batman” and “Superman” books start with a fake article about getting energy from cold fusion and shouldn’t. There’s no reason the GM needs this information and I can see it spoiling some surprises and challenges for them when they take on the player role—I wonder if someone higher-up asked for this to be put in at the last minute to make it easier to understand the technological plot points that come up later

-They also have a page up front saying what the hero knows about the other hero and about The Joker and Lex Luthor. Like the fake article, I don’t think this serves much purpose except to tip the module’s hand as to who the villains are, but y’know, LotFP hadn’t invented profit-share-modules yet so a freelancer’s gotta hit that word count. (The author's read Dark Knight Returns--Batman thinks Superman’s “patriotism prevents him from making the most of his abilities”.)

-There’s also a place to “Use this section to (secretly) mark your answer to the offer made to you by the Joker/Luthor during Encounter Eight” —to keep it secret from the other player/GM. Nice idea, it shouldn’t be in this part of the book because, again, tipping the module’s hand. You don’t need to know you;ll meet the Joker or Luthor this early.

-A lot of indulging in that mainstream RPG vice: endless statblocks for normal people. Lois Lane has an Aura of 2. Did you know that? I like this bit 

Most notable about Lois are the conflicting aspects of her remarkably resourceful intelligence and her unerring ability to fall directly into deadly criminal schemes.

 Fair.

Also I don’t completely remember what "Aura" is but it has something to do with personality and mystical oomph I am 100% sure Lois has more of it than fucking Jimmy Olsen. Also featured: Cat Grant (who I, who have read almost all comic books, barely have heard of), Margaret Sawyer (who I have never heard of) and Officer William Henderson (ditto). They each get a column of descriptions to themselves but no picture at all, which seems like the opposite of what you’d want had anyone but the writer given a fuck about this module. A lot of the personality information they’re trying to get across so the GM could role-play them could’ve been gotten across in one picture or—better yet—a comic panel where they’re saying some characteristic catch-phrase

-They do some railroading they could very easily have avoided. They basically offer nursing and nudging options to get PCs to move to the next scene, but since DC Heroes offers xp for all kinds of things, the module could easily make it like “If the player correctly follows the clue, they get Hero Points, if Jimmy Olsen has to point it out to them, they don’t”. You lose something for not solving the challenge, but it doesn’t affect the module’s ability to take you to one of the next scenes. Since this is primarily a superhero game (so about role-playing and fights) rather than a detective game (about the convolutions of solving or not solving various riddles on time), and it obviously requires the two players to submit to the unusual format in order to be playable, I think this is a good compromise. Also: Hero Points are a spendable xp stat, so if you don’t solve shit yourself, it does legitimately affect your game later, which is nice, without having to write an endlessly branching octopus module to account for every twist the story might take.

-The Choose-Your-Own Adventure doesn’t quite work. Obviously it’s less fun to have the two friends, after having been talking to each other throughout the game, have to go off separately and do homework—and, more than that, the choices they have to make don’t really offer an interesting range of options or involvement with the mechanics. However, it really seems like some of what they did with each player having information the other didn’t could have been used in another way to make a more interesting and surprising climax. The cover shows Superman and Batman about to fight—which they probably won’t—but I think it would’ve been worth railroading the heroes into fighting if they could’ve made it into an interesting wargame with some secret info on both sides. Or, better yet, ended with them both fighting something that has pre-programmed surprise moves like "In round three, whoever last interacted with Brainiac gets their brain transferred into a pig" etc.

Weird

-In Batman’s endless statblock, perhaps as a deliberate choice, Batman is not carrying “omnigadgets” as he is in the normal DC Heroes rules from this era. Omni-gadgets are a (great) catch-all rule which allow gadgeteering characters to pull out until-then-unexpected pieces of equipment like shark repellent, which is pretty true to the genre. It makes sense that for this adventure, what Batman’s carrying is standardized, like: this is what you have to work with on this day in Gotham. There are also traces of DC Heroes designer Ray Winninger’s maniacal “quantify fucking everything in rules terms” ethos with Batman’s miniature camera described as having the “Recall” power at 3 with the limitation “Only Recalls visual information” instead of just saying it’s a fucking camera. The cassette recorder has Recall: 10 for some reason.

This is clearly a Batman influenced by the Dark Knight Returns era, described as “…a callous and obsessive veteran of a dark and malignant war”. 

-Superman’s statblock: No super-ventriloquism it’s a cover-up. 

-Information on what Superman knows about the Joker, Luthor and Batman (“as ruthless and violent as any proclaimed hero to have ever lived” which seems a little extreme considering Superman lives in a world where Lobo and Brainiac’s son have had their own comic book for a year, but whatever).

-Joker— Motivation: Psychopath. Occupation: Psychopath

-Commisioner Gordon is only one point tougher than Jimmy Olsen I call bullshit.

-Now the adventure begins with the Superman player GMing the Batman player as Bruce Wayne in the mansion: You see the bat-signal but also, to let you know about a separate incident, Alfred tells you that he saw one of the alert buttons blinking while he was dusting the Batcave. Is that really how that works? 

-The map of Gotham City (above) does not look like any map of Gotham City I’ve ever seen.

The current canonical map—which looks like Manhattan only fat and drunk—was drawn, I think, by Eliot R Brown (the guy who did the technical drawings in DC Who’s Who and Marvel’s OHOTMU as well as all those Punisher comic pages where it’s just pictures and technical specs of his guns) for the No Man’s Land storyline.

The current canonical Metropolis looks like Manhattan sideways and, likewise, does not look like the Metropolis in this book.

-The read-aloud text is very purple.

Superman: “The city is a beacon of hope to the teeming millions, representing all that is good and true of the American dream.”

Batman: ““Every single inhabitant of this decaying borough at once envies your strength and hates you for it.” “The store itself reeks of a mingled stench of aged sweat and gun oil.”

I’m going to say something strange: I think the read-aloud text is good in this module. I usually hate read-aloud text but a thing like this where you and a friend pretend to be Batman and Superman is probably best played in a spirit of slightly ironic indulgence (after all, if you play too seriously you just have Batman just call the rest of the Justice League as soon as he sees trouble). Ham it up, read to each other. You don’t have 4 people waiting to start arguing about how to cross the orc moat—I could see it working.

-There’s a minisystem for computer hacking where basically different levels of security have more digits and the better you roll the more of those digits you get for free and the rest you have to guess. It’s a nice idea but the game doesn’t really show why having to brute force the remaining numbers is bad. In theory it’s a time-sink but since, unlike a typical dungeon, the game has no random encounter there’s no particular reason not to say “Ok, I try every digit starting with 1, then every digit starting with 2…”. It would’ve worked fine if they’d put a ticking clock in there.

Now I've said already "Someone should make one of these" and, fine, in writing this I twisted my arm.

I'm getting to work writing and drawing one now. More later.

Grow Up

Ok, this started as a jokey post because when I saw people were again complaining that Monte Cook put out a pricey game (200$ or something) I went on twitter, searched the name of the game--"invisible sun"--and tried to figure out who these people were who suddenly care so much, and did that...

...and that was going to be the whole blog post. That's chapter one.

---

Chapter two is I went back to work and I was listening to an episode of the Wait, What? comics podcast--they were talking about labor rights for comics creators.

There were repeated failed attempts to unionize comics in the '60s, the '70s and the '80s--they all failed for the same reason a lot of fun, creative industries fail to unionize--if you give your boss any shit, there are millions of other people dying to do your job for half the money.

The '90s in comics didn't have a big push to unionize--instead the superstar creators at Marvel (Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, and, yes, the much-maligned Rob Liefeld among others) went and formed their own company.

Monte Cook Games was essentially an Image Comics-style move: Monte had gotten a reputation working in D&D, he'd taken a look at what companies were offering and was like "Nah, screw it, I'll form my own company". This is a fundamentally different track from the one trod by Indie gamers (and indie comics)--he made a name for himself with the majors and built that name up as a source of value before striking off on his own. A world where "Monte Cook" on the cover means as much to nearly as many people as "Shadowrun" is a world where the creator has as much power as the moneymen.

If you've only ever been a comics' fan, you're probably going "Lol Spawn" right now. If you know anything about being a creator, though, you know what Image meant in terms of changing the face of the industry. And that split in consciousness drives a lot of what goes on in games.

You can say what you want about Invisible Sun, but the fact is Monte Cook Games is charging what its charging because it's trying to get himself and his freelancing friends who were sick of the usual immense dick-around in RPGs paid while still putting out a product that does new things for those who get their hands on it. You don't have to see it as heroic, but you do have to give it credit as something that actually worked, in a field where 95% of solutions don't.

Monte solved the problem of giving a handful of creative people a non-nightmarish working situation while (unlike most indies and fellow D&D-grad Robin Laws at Pelgrane) still giving you the consumer a blue-sky game fully-supported in hardcover by graphic design, bits and bobs, and art by someone who doesn't eat paste. If Invisible Sun were the only game MCG made you might have reason to complain--but it isn't, it isn't even their most popular game, so you don't. Three or four Monte Cook games that you can afford sitting on a shelf next to one you can't is a small price to pay for the basically unprecedented situation of RPG freelancers not being treated like cattle that happen to be able to estimate probability curves.

---

From the point of view of capital vs creator, it's kind of amazing the degree to which the purse-string holders in the industry have succeeded in repeatedly rallying supposedly woke fans into taking their side in every controversy: when the Drama Club aren't complaining to a multimillion-dollar parent company that Mark Rein*Hagen's dynastic vampires are too important to be left in his hands, they're complaining to WOTC that the current edition needs to reflect their taste because the idea of a GM changing rules on their own is too frightening to contemplate, or arguing that the most exploitive wages in the industry are a price they're happy to pay as long as the owners make the right noises, or that the Open Game License was bad because fans being able to make content on top of a lingua franca system means they don't re-invent the system-wheel constantly and thereby drag themselves up by their own bootstraps. There's also the ridiculous refrain, when an uptight reader sees something that bothers their sensibilities "God, just having an editor could have solved this" blandly assuming (as no dissident has ever assumed) that the godlike and objective hand of technocracy would inevitably be on their side.

It's time to take a look at who the Drama Club system--whereby people with no track record of ever making anything including sense decide to have an emotional Take and then every single author in indieland from Dungeon World Guy to Slutshame Girl delivers a Take on that Take while their more anonymous friends snipe at the creators at the center of it--actually serves:

• It's certainly doesn't serve the targeted creators. Nobody learns much from libel, the Monte Cook people aren't at home nodding sagely at reading "MCG hates poor people" from people who wouldn't dream of engaging them with, like, words in English.
• It also doesn't serve the creators who gin it up. Evil Hat's predicament proves the age of indie self-promotion via bad faith criticism is over.
• It doesn't serve the chicken littles who get it started. The whole point of their schtick is they're able to get their Bad Takes repeated because nobody remembered how stupid and wrong their last take was, because nobody remembers who they are. If I told you basically Brie Sheldon and Sean Dunstan started this whole "Invisible Sun prices are bad for people" thing off you'd go...who are Brie Sheldon and Sean Dunstan? These people will never go away because they are too obscure to suffer consequences. But, unaccountably, they still have friends. At least online.

The only people ever served by Drama Club system are companies who do nothing but own the intellectual property--a world where fans view creators as replaceable children who need to be smacked into line in order to deliver the most risk-averse product available is exactly the one they want.

As left as they claim to be, the Drama Club's preferred mode of activism has nothing to say on the subject of creator-rights or fair pay for the people who pump out the stuff they love. Their complaints are far more about their fears and hopes about ways an entertainment ideas they've bought into--be that D&D or Rifts or the concept of roleplaying itself--can be weaponized to influence people to agree or disagree with them.

There's probably a good reason for this disconnect between creators and fan-agitators: They've had completely different experiences in life.

Drama Club fans have had their brains so completely renovated by RPGs that they've decided to spend their entire lives yelling at other people on social media about how they should be.

Creators that have made games that have had anmarked influence beyond their friend group, on the other hand, realize the hard limits on the ability of games to influence people in predictable ways. Even when they're sympathetic to fans' sense of ownership, pretty much no good creator is on the same wavelength as the Drama Club. There's no real communication between these camps--even the most successful storygame creators repeatedly admit they don't really have a back-and-forth with these kinds of activist-fans and just go "Ok, you've been Heard" and pat them on the head.

And there's little reciprocation either--if most dramafans are no more willing to demand their favorite creators be able to work under sane conditions any more than porn fans are willing to swear off using tube sites, why would creators feel like they owe these people jack or shit?

---

RPG freelancers will probably never unionize, and while solutions like Monte going solo or the profit-split deals LotFP and DIY RPG have made are a workable substitute, they rely on a very tenuous proposition: fans accepting that a creator has value in themselves, and in RPGs they're frankly loathe to do that. Fans write house rules, run games, and know what they think is cool: they think that gets them half of the way to being a game writer and they're not wrong. But until you finish that trip yourself you can't picture how many rations you'll need or how many random encounters there are along the way.

Monte Cook is one version of a sustainable future in a scene with almost none. Until you find another maybe don't be a pissy little twerp about it.
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Trash RIFTS

You know Rifts?

art by jez gordon

Originally: dope setting of post-apocalyptic intergenre chaos, incomprehensible rules. Now: same dope setting but kinda not evolved much, rules by noted sexual harasser?

So we need better rules.

This is Rifts for high-trust RPG environments like FLAILSNAILS, home games etc. Play with a GM you like.

TRASH RIFTS

When in doubt, resolve things as your D&D of choice.

Stats: 

3d6 6 times.
Assign them to stats. What stats? ANY STATS YOU WANT TO INVENT
But if you invent a stat the GM thinks is stupid then you lose the stat and the number--no replacement.

So: Strength, Psi power, Wizardry? Fine. You put a 17 in "Winning"? Meh sorry, you lost that stat.

If it turns out you need a stat for something and don't have it? You suck at that. You have a -3 modifier to it.

Instead of hit points:

Hits come off a random stat.  Two stats at zero and you're unconscious.  Three and you pick up a terrible wound.  Four zeros you're dead.

(This rule is Jeff's idea.)

Skills:

You get 10 skills, they are each linked to a stat and work like that stat + your Level. Right now that's +1.

What skills? ANY SKILL YOU WANT. This is a good opportunity to world-build--if you get "Technomancy" congratulations you just put technomancy in the setting.
But, like stats, if you invent a stupid skill the GM doesn't like--in the bin. No replacement.

Items:

Items: you get 2d6 items, you must be able to carry them and find a picture of them in a Rifts book. They cannot be a unique artifact. Once rolled, you will lose d6 random ones.

No repeats.

Specials:

You get d4 Special things. Mutations, innate powers, spells, claws, vehicles whatever it is that makes your kind of race/class interesting.
Again: if you invent a stupid one, the GM can veto it.

Skin: 

Whatever you like. If it's stupid, the GM is allowed to reskin you into a pre-existing Rifts base class (psi-stalker, cyberknight, etc) of their choosing.

----------------

Here's the first ever character for Trash Rifts, made by Jeff Gameblog:


Skizzo McGirk, drifter Stats Dumb Luck 16 Charm 13 Ingenuity 13 Deftness 13 Brute Force 11 Common Sense 9
Skills Drive Wicked Cool Land Vehicle (Deftness) Jury-Rig Stolen Equipment (Ingenuity) Punch Goon (Brute Force) Avoid Automatic Gunfire (Deftness) Lay it on Thick with the Ladies (Charm) Survive on a Scavengers Diet (Brute Force) Make Promises You Can Actually Keep (Common Sense) (I may veto this one) Recruit Banditos for Daring Raid (Charm) Turn Death into a Fighting Chance For Survival (Dumb Luck) Sneak like a Fucking Ninja (Deftness) Specials Flunked out of Skull Boy officer school but still knows a lot of their protocols and procedure Used to run a bloodmobile on the Mexican border - friendly with several draculas Never met a drug he didn’t like Parselmouth Equipment Vibro-Claws (if you think I’m going to pass on a small chance to be Megadamage Wolverine, you are crazy)
--------------------

And one by Geist.

Giles De Rais MK 2
Summoner Low Cunning: 10 Willpower: 8 Social Competence: 6 Violence: 10 Self Esteem: 6 Luck: 12 Summon (Luck) Compel Obedience (Low Cunning) Barter (Social Competence) Argue (Self Esteem) Dodge (Luck) Avoid Consequences (Luck) Lie (Willpower) Smash Someone in the Teeth (Violence) Know About Demons (Low Cunning) Communicate with Ghosts (Willpower/Social Competence) Items: Summoning Gear Skull Bedecked Body Armor SMG Megadamage Samurai Sword Demon summoning tome Splurgoth Staff
Special: Immediate Comprehension of Written Word Psionic Manta Ray Mount

art by shawn cheng

And one by me:

Slith —serpent mutant Stats Agility 15 Cleverness 12 Investment in this situation 8 Reassuringness 7 Lifting thingss 7 Noticing stuff 6 Skills Clossssse combat 16 Sneaking 16 Fixing things 13 Tending woundsss 13 Hunting beastss 16 Pilot things 13 Sabotagery 13 Grappling 8 Seek Bargains 8 Scavenging 7 Equipment Pair of vibro katanas Specials Chameleon Skin Regeneration Congealing spit (medical) Grappling bite


Rift on.

OSR Domination Progress Report

Preview Edition of Luka Rejec's Witchburner Adventure . Luka did the best One Page Dungeon and it looks to be a nice Warhammer-style adventure a little off the beaten path. Full of interesting NPCs. And....I won't give it away. But it's got a good twist.


Murder Snackers:

A new OSR D&D podcast...

Our aesthetic ideal is The Eric Andre Show plus Hard to be a God plus I Hit It With My Axe. Episodes will never have ads, will never be longer than an hour, and will always contain vulgarity, disregard for plot, and whimsical acts of pointless violence.

Vertical Slum is no joke. A weird sci-fi city in exotic detail featuring "The God Who Dreams in Pillars and Is a Boy" "The God Which Pulses Quivers And Collecs" and more. A bit like Carcosa meets Vornheim?  I'm liking it and trying to figure out how to adapt it for my game. And I dig the character sheet.

Someone's doing a solo run-thru of Maze of the Blue Medusa on YouTube--she's got some interesting solo mechanics.

In Cute Twitter News, our party's Angry Goth Rogue is also the werewolf on Curious Creations of Christine McConnell and cosplayed Domino which lead to Gail Simone having a double take:

Goliath's Head (Annotated)

Note: This post has gotten Redditted so that, of course, means stupidity.  A lot of harassers are trying to use it rhetorically (and repeating easily refuted bullshit) to suggest that pointing out actual, real abuses in the indie scene by harassers like John Harper, etc are just some minor interpersonal beef.  The links to what people did to deserve being called out are in the text. Address it if you like a working RPG internet, there's a lotta eyeballs on Reddit. Also, definitely hit the report button. You can't have a healthy RPG scene if bullshit isn't immediately and constantly shut down.

So if you haven't heard the news, this is a fairly accurate summary of Friday's annual Ennie awards for achievement in RPGs at Gen Con:

OSR annihilated.

This isn't just a post about how awesome that is--I also want to talk about what that means, because, contrary to popular belief, it doesn't mean fuck-all.

The Judges and the System

The Judges' spotlight awards--awarded by Ennie Judges to things they personally thought were worthy--give us a good idea where the committee's heads were at:

Eloy Lasanta, Carol Darnell and crew won one for the Pip System--definitely deserved, especially considering Eloy's hard push to expand diversity in games (he also won won last year)--and Eloy gave a nice speech. (Also another on behalf of a friend for Best Free Game.) A few other judges nominated games I knew nothing about--which was cool. That is: they didn't nominate any licensed mainstream backwash or indie-game hipster Usual Suspects. The chatter online often obscures people who are working hard and not talking about it in places that echo enough.

....and two awards in a row went to OSR/DIY RPG folks, starting off with Judge Reece swearing aggressively and entertainingly into the livestream and going on for quite a bit:  Fever Swamp by a team including Luke Gearing, Andrew Walter, Daniel Sell, Christian Kessler and Jarret Crader and Operation Unfathomable by Jason Sholtis of the Hydra Collective. With extensive shoutouts by winners to a lot of OSR peeps and blogs.

Now these judges, I've heard, caused some sort of fracas behind the scenes where the Old School/DIY RPG-philic judges were accused of being mouthpieces directing undue attention to the barbaric and unruly OSR which somehow gamed the results.

I'll be the first to point out that the system of judge-choosing seems less than perfect and kind of electoral collegey (the judges talk about their fave games and give their real names, we vote for judges based on that) but this is important:

All of this year's indie darlings were also on the ballot in one place or another this year as well as every single major publisher in games (except WOTC and Fantasy Flight, who I think didn't submit). Once nominated, The People are just straight-up allowed to vote. And it was a slaughter.

The awards may not represent total democracy, but they do represent what people were moved to support more from the multiple choice options given them.

Let's see, in detail, how that went...

-Scenario from Ontario wins Best Electronic Book, making for the funniest thing all-night:James Edward Raggi reading a short speech written by Zzarchov Kowolski and Kiel Chenier. They've both GMed me and I liked it and they deserved it.

-Hot Springs Island by Jacob Hurst and co (which my group is currently running) won gold for Best Adventure beating oversized and conscience-free indie giant Green Ronin.

-The genuinely useful Hex Kit by Cecil Howe beat Shadowrun and Paizo for Best Aid/Accessory.

-Frostbitten & Mutilated got more than any one product (EDIT: oh wait, the Delta Green RPG got 4 as well) and I was Mr T-ing around with ones for Best Interior Art, Best Monster/Adversary, Best Setting, and Best Writing beating Monte Cook Games, Green Ronin, and Starfinder (in their case: three times). (I thanked a lot of people but, to my eternal shame considering how design-reliant the book was, graphic designer Luka Rejec. Sorry Luka. Those speeches here, here, here, and here. I was actually not drinking yet: this is just how New Yorkers talk. I got very drunk later though so don't worry.)

Sometimes you're the duck.

-In the case of Writing and Setting, I am happy to say Chris Spivey's excellent Harlem Unbound got two golds over my two silvers along with several immediate offers of employment, (his heartfelt acceptance speeches right after mine in those links up there) and Harlem artist Brennen Reece also picked one up for best cover.

-For Product of the year, Daniel Fox's Warhammer do-over Zweihander beat not only Starfinder and Star Trek, but the extensively-talked-up-and-advertised sure-thing-shoe-in Blades In the Dark from axis-of-indie-shitheadedness John Harper and Evil Hat. Zwei also took Best Game from Blades and fellow indie-darling Red Markets. Speeches here and here.

-Paizo's Starfinder was nominated for 8 things and got only one: a Silver to the OSR's Glynn Seal/Monkeyblood's Gold for his cartography in Midderlands.

-Monte Cook Games was nominated for three and got none.

-The only thing Green Ronin got was a silver for a Critical Role tie-in.

-Evil Hat got only one thing, Best RPG-Related-Product for a licensed card game.

-All the other indie darlings involving harassment-clique members that were nominated got totally stiffed, except a podcast--Fear of A Black Dragon (they had puritan hatemonger Anna Kreider/Wundergeek on their parent podcast, the Gauntlet, they still haven't removed the episode or apologized).

-Cthulhu franchises picked up whatever the OSR hadn't nailed down--Chaosium won Silver Fan Favorite Publisher which meant we got to see arguably-greatest-living-game-designer Greg Stafford go up and make a speech then WOTC got Gold and...nobody went up.

Moral of the Story

1. Nearly all of these losers from big companies were produced by multiple authors.

2. Nearly all of these losers from big companies sold more copies than the DIY products that beat them.

3. The people who bought them generally heard about them online--the same place they would've heard that they were nominated for awards...

4. ...and yet, once they purchased or Kickstarted these Goliaths, they didn't really care about them enough to throw support behind them when they went up against the Davids they vastly outsold.

Like Dylan Moran's mom once said: It doesn't matter how big the other fucker is, they all have a neck. 

The "neck" in this case is talent. No matter how big your game or your license, there is still--somewhere in the gears of the machine that produces RPGs--a need for people who actually can do things better than other people. That's why people like Kenneth Hite keep getting hired up and down the street year after year.

Is Fever Swamp going to outsell Starfinder? Of course not. But are the people who made Fever Swamp quite possibly on their way to positions where they get paid more than anyone on Starfinder--either as an indie making a fair cut of a smaller profit or as a respected hired-gun wooed by a big company? Fuck yeah. People who won this year have gotten business offers almost immediately. And business offers mean you can keep avoiding your day job.

So, good luck to y'all making your thing. I hope you beat me next year--it'll be hard 'cause Demon City'll be out by then, but, again, I would be happy to lose--I have enough of these already and a pair of day jobs I happen to like.

And, for this year... thanks!