This Is Why D&D With Porn Stars Was Necessary

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Last night I read the strangest comment I have ever seen.

But then, given all the stupid people I now know who got mad about this blog, and all the stupid things they've done since, I guess it's to be expected.

Transcript:

Joe Reiter

Men vs. Women

I never, from day one as a dungeon master did I let any female player character dress differently in armor than the men. Sure, perhaps there armor may be shaped a little different to accommodate them better, like Roman commanders had formed brest plates. But I never allowed the fantasy skimpy chain mail broads running around like they just got gang raped by rust monsters. Never liked the look 🤣

Zak Smith

Are you saying when a female player said what she was wearing you'd sometimes go "No, sorry, you can't wear that?"

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Joe Reiter

yes

2m

Zak Smith

That's one of the strangest things I've ever heard in my entire life.

1m

Those of you familiar with a world full of chatty gamestreaming, OnlyFansing e-girls and hot girl cosplayers bragging out what big nerds they are may not remember this but when I started this blog it was a remarkably common belief that girls don't play RPGs and all the ones that do were part of an online Indiegaming monocult of concerned mothers dedicated to stamping out boobplate.

I disagreed with that, everyone in my game was living proof it wasn't true and we said that on the internet and while a lot of people vocally agreed, all of them got called names about it until they agreed to lie about rape. Now many of them have decided they were wrong but are still scared to admit it.

This is because we live in Hell.

Meanwhile:

In our game the sea elf player formed a dreampop band called Seafoam and they played a benefit show for refugees from the war nobody knows the party itself started. 

The catgirl rogue opened on fiddle, rolled a 1, got in a fight with the crowd.

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Almost Every Argument About Indie Games For Almost 20 Years

God They Loved Their Indie Games

I once got dinged by the moderators on a popular general RPG forum for saying only that Death is the New Pink--a post-apocalyptic adventure RPG--is better than Apocalypse World--a post-apocalyptic adventure RPG.

This isn't one of those situations where someone describes an internet interaction second-hand in a way such as to make the other guy seem absurd--it was literally the entire content of my one-sentence comment. "This game is better than that game". 

The mods' argument for the punishment was "Zak, you know most people here like Game 1 and it will make them mad to say it is not as good as Game 2, so upsetting them by disagreeing with their taste is bad". (Details available via request in the comments, because, unlike said forum, I do not have a formal rule against asking for proof.)

This does not encapsulate everything bad about RPG discussion on the internet, but it does encapsulate everything uniquely bad about RPG discussion on the internet. The thing that makes the internet worse than real life.

On A Review of Fair Play

We fast forward now to many years later and we move entirely out of the cloister of the online RPG scene. To this weekend in fact.

A woman wrote a review of Fair Play from her feminist POV. It's a card game designed to point out (the obvious and true fact that) the average married mom does much more domestic work than her husband. It echoes misgivings about the game written by other women on much bigger platforms.

You can just go read it, but I'll pull out a few quotes for convenience:

That’s another point I want to make. Fair Play is ideal for one particular type of husband: a guy who genuinely wants to help his wife with more things, but doesn’t know where to start (the kind of guy who says “Just tell me what to do.”) This type of guy, ideally, will not think the game or any of the cards are stupid. It’s not ideal for men who think the concept of invisible labor is stupid, or men who go into the game with skepticism.

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This game is also not ideal for men who are already aware of all the tasks in the household. This wasn’t something Mr. CHH (the reviewer's husband) and I would have bought if I wasn’t writing about it, because even though my husband was sassy throughout the process, it’s obvious that he’s already pulling his weight around the house and wasn’t shocked by the existence my tasks

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I will say I should defend Fair Play against a rumor about two particular cards. From a previous critique of Fair Play (by someone who had researched it, but hadn’t actually played it) I was under the impression that there was a card for social media and a card for tracking interior decor trends. I felt that both of these were obviously frivolous, but there’s more to the story. The “social media” card actually refers to kids’ social media and managing kids’ friendships. The “interior decor” card isn’t about scrolling Pinterest; it’s about the purchasing of furniture, but presumably the tracking of trends is part of that. Funny enough, my husband took the furniture card. But here’s where I also think male-coded labor should have been separated: what about the person assembling furniture? This takes up a lot of time and effort, and for many couples the person assembling furniture doesn’t fall to the same person who buys the furniture. I also wanted this separated for selfish reasons: I am usually the one who assembles furniture.

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Basically she's saying:

I can see the noble thing this game is claiming to do but this game is not doing what it said on the box for us (subjectively). And it is not doing it because it failed to notice some important stuff (objectively).

This is basically every critique I wrote of every Indie-scene game outside the OSR since 2009, both here on the blog and anywhere else RPG discussion was to be had.

Basically...

It made people mad. So mad they eventually decided to lie about rape in order to make it stop, which is about as bad as a reaction can be, really, not to mention illegal.

Why was the reaction so bad? For so long?

None of them have ever been able to defend their reaction in detail in real time. If placed in a position to do so, they are always immediately conciliatory and apologize. (And, of course, in the more extreme cases of freaking out, when they sue or are asked to testify in court about the more extreme expressions of their distaste, they crumble--five times and counting.)

Like Fair Play, the conversation about game design didn't matter because these games were on the right team. Apocalypse World was supposed to be good because it was by Vincent Baker and did degrees-of-success in a way indie gamers could understand and Blades in the Dark was supposed to be good because it removed the awful cognitive burden of having to think of a plan and Dungeon World was supposed to be good because it wasn't D&D and Adam Koebel was so unproblematic and Fate was supposed to be good because Evil Hat said progressive things (and definitely didn't only pay 3 cents a word) and anything Olivia Hill or Ash Kreider made was supposed to be good because they were persecuted on the internet and etc.

Broadly, like all the people who are somewhere on the internet defending Fair Play, they felt (did not think, but felt) that any game that claimed to promote progressive values probably did, and:

• That any game by a personal online internet friend should be promoted just out of chumminess and self-interest, 
• That anyone being in any way negative about their games was probably evil because from the other team,
• That there was no point in thinking deeper about any of it because there isn't a person in front of you to make it obvious you're ignoring those deeper things, and
• There would be social and perhaps financial rewards for publicly attacking anyone perceived as an enemy. 

This last idea was accurate.

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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It Will Be Here, It Will Cost 0$, And Then It Will Be Gone Forever

The hardcover, full-color, 8.5x11", 400-page Compendium is now available. Until Jan 1. Then it's gone. And it costs 0$.

Fifteen years in the making, it includes:

-All of the illustrated Cube World material--fully re-designed to be easier to read, cross-referenced, with notes, including adventures in Voivodja, The Southern Daimyos, The Peacock Isles, Drownesia, Nephilidia and more.

-Dozens of pages of unpublished new material.

-The entire aborted Violence In the Nympharium scenario--re-laid out, redrawn, and deluxified

-An entire illustrated megadungeon--with dozens of levels--which my players have been in and out of for the last 2 years. Designed to be the be-all-end-all dungeon of its kind, with every kind of cool dungeon monster and environment represented in its dozens of levels.

-New completely crawlable maps of the chivalrous continent of Broceliande. Likewise--my players have been in and out of here for the last 2 years.

-Tools and tables to use all of this stuff.

That is--it basically has all the material for my campaign that isn't in another published book, everything in all the Cube World pdfs, and more.

Email me if you want it: zakzsmith AT hawtmayle dawt calm.

Also: The Cube World pdfs are no longer available (aside from the unillustrated utility ones like Book of Jerks)--all that material is now only available in the illustrated Compendium.

None of this will be on sale after January 1st.

And all you pirates--this will not be available as a pdf. It's available in this hardcover only.

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100 Places to See (Right) Before You Die

We all like lots of things. We all have so little time on this blue-green ball.

So this book should be published:

100 weird fantasy one-shot or mini-campaigns in different worlds. With good pictures and rules-variations for each, written so you can start with any Old School system, modify it slightly and run it for a bit--then go back to your endless D&D campaign or your life, whichever of those you currently have.

Each is like 2-4 pages long, with everything you need to get it going, at least for a few sessions

Here's what I have so far*:

-The Field of Cloth and Chaos

It's an old-fashioned Arthurian jousting-and-melee tournament but every knight is a mutant champion of some weird god. Mutation rules, cool armor and weird mount options. Riding vortex zebras in bone-plate. Gambling, intrigue, death.

-You’re Eating Maggots

It's the 30 years war but you're all vampires going to negotiate with this other group of fancier vampires. Paris, Vienna, Budapest. Lace. Rapiers. Subspecies rules. Blood drugs. Actual 30 Years War politics.

-The Kaiju Must Die

Modern-era. One GM, one player plays the kaiju, the other players all play important PCs trying to stop the kaiju: scientist, reporter, general, alien invader, etc. If a non-kaiju dies they're immediately replaced with another person in another position and it keeps going til the kaiju is dead or has destroyed the city. Kaiju generator rules, city map with destruction mechanics.

-Veteran of the Psychic Wars

A vast post-apocalyptic Moebius desert and you are mutants roaming the plains feeding on psychic energy and using martial arts with sticks wearing cool jumpsuits. Scavenging, weird items, psionic rules, telepathic psychedelic sarlacc monsters.

-The PVP Maze Game that Everybody Liked

This is what I used to run at conventions when too many people wanted to play. Basically there's two teams of regular 1st level fantasy PCs and a randomly generated index-card maze between them. It's usually the most fun in the world. Index card templates, items, traps, rules for pvp, simplified chargen. 

-Iron Horse

Inexplicably wild-west-themed future with robot horses, cyborg bounty hunters, alien gunsmiths. You must bring in 3 outlaws, each weirder than the last, dead or alive. Lots of gun lore, horse "breed" hairsplitting, minor mutations and prosthetics.

-Short-Lived New Flesh

Mechs but old school so there's Evangelion-esque body horror and sanity mechanics. Everyone is mentally and physically attuned to their mech. Also hit-location and partial damage rules so you are like hitting the other guy over the head with your own severed particle-cannon-beam arm while they try to cut through your armor with a giant sawblade. Awesome mech-building rules.

-Undermanned, Outgunned

You are pirates on a 17th century pirate ship. Things have gone poorly and you are low on supplies, powder, food, freshwater and everything else. Luckily(?) there are 4 ships in the area, including a merchant vessel, a warship, and two rival pirate ships. There's also a small island fortress. To survive you'll need to raid what you need from these sources--the order will matter, so this first then that's easier, etc. Ship combat rules, more detailed ship info than standard, etc.

-Rogue Traitors

This is just like Undermanned, Outgunned but you're space pirates. I will draw cool space pirates.

-Hunt The Black Riders

Ok the black riders in the 160th-17th century were basically like knights in full plate carrying pistols--several pistols because they didn't have 6-shooters then. This is a historical fact. There's a whole cavalry unit of them coming to reinforce the enemy. Your PCs have to stop them. Nice, detailed map of the area and the battle, details on the forces and timetables. 

-Defenestrator

It's still the 30 Years War but this time it's player-vs-player. Every player is a different country and has access to 1 of 3 PCs at a time--an assassin, a diplomat, and a spy. You all have separate hidden goals during a peace conference. Fog-of-war rules, some maps, a few scenes ready-to-go with powder-kegs strewn liberally around.

-Cobalt Reach

Heavy metal magazine sci-fantasy. Lasers, blue dragons breathing lightning, jungle mutants, Bakshi. Like this.

-Scheherezade

Arabian Nights style PCs rescue a princess from a spooky palace in the desert. A really nice little enchanted dungeon with magic teleportation pools, long shadows, alabaster columns. Then when you rescue her the roles all change and so does the dungeon--next week a different player is the GM and everything's in a different place.

-Cannibalworld Cannonball 

It's a post-apocalyptic car future and you are in a race across the United States. Build a car like you build a PC, and there's tables and maps for procedurally generating your route and what you find along the way from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon. If the Dennys staffed by kitchen androids hasn't been sacked by mutant coyotes yet you might find food, and if that last explosion wasn't the pump you might find gas! Also of course all the other drivers know they will win if they kill you and that's not against the rules.

-Leopard Society

Post-apocalyptic subsaharan African plain with motorcycles and wild animals. 

-Ultramassive and Unexplained

Tables for generating explorable planets, derelict ships and other big dumb sci-fi objects  and the PCs who go see what's up on them. Probably compatible with the other sci-fi PC ideas in the book.

-The Avant Guard

It's World War I and are you on the front lines? No you are not. You are working for the secret service using your subtle but fascinating secret abilities to investigate and disrupt the enemy's use of bizarre new art techniques to undermine freedom worldwide. Paintings that ensnare innocent souls, sculptures that warp space and time, works of theatre none can behold and live! Only the mediums, spoon-benders and psychonauts of the Avant Guard can defeat such perils!

-Red and Pleasant War

One of you is the Red King, another is Countess Elizabeth Bathyscape, your weird vampire armies head to battle tonight. A skirmish wargame with army list rules for all the Red and Pleasant creatures, playable with chess pieces and playing cards.

-Warlords of Carcosa

Like that but Carcosa. Your army will probably includes some robots and some horrible summoned thing. Including a battlemap with strontium lakes and a mobile magnetic storm.

-City-States of the Beast Coast

A wargame with these guys.

-The Stars My Lamentation

Sword-and-Planet swashbuckling with ships of null-gravity oak and solarsilk sails. Same classes, basically, but rules for shipbuilding and airless, low-gravity combat.

-Kill The First Giant

Frazetta barbarians and maybe a sorcerer or two in mythic times have to go and kill the first giant to ever be born. What is its weakness? What exists on primeval earth that can even kill it? What dangers will you meet on the way? Depends what you roll on the charts!

-Once Upon A Time In Hell

A very contained, very stylized Weird West, utterly devoid of any rootin' or tootin'. Like if Cormac McCarthy let Lovecraft write a couple chapters of Blood Meridian after watching Dead Man. Character generation alternating chance and choice producing interestingly varied PCs including home state, Civil War service and rank (if any), specialty, scars, psychic trauma, liquor preference.

-Fuck That Game Mothership, People On That Game Lied About Rape

Ordinary people go to space and what they find is death and horror and the uncanny. But instead of being made by a bunch of people who wrote fan letters for years to the guy who wrote Vornheim then tried to frame him for a felony it's just written by the guy who wrote Vornheim. And drawn by him.

-Mad Mex

You play ad men selling mechs to both sides in a post-apocalyptic Mexican border war. Is your duplicity discovered and you must desperately flee for your life through the dust and fading sun of blood-colored afternoon alleyways? Of course, señor.

-The Worst Of All Possible Worlds

Nazi-occupied Neu York, modern day. Because the Japanese invented mechs. It's a street-level superhero game and you're freedom fighters. Like this. Rules for superhero powers bolted-on to old-school mechanics, nice map of occupied Manhattan, stats for the Weremacht et al.

-Are You Not Entertained?

Gladiator setting. Detailed personal combat rules with a kinda rock-paper-scissors system where you choose block, parry, dodge, feint, strike, etc to make small-scale fights long and interesting.

-Winter in the Abbey

A simple premise: a knight or two, a cleric, some thief, and a few sanity mechanics in a very gritty and very low-magic world are asked by the prior to investigate something. Something has gone awry in the abbey. And it is cold and quiet and uncertain and then it is the most mindbending horror. But let's do it exactly right this time. Exactly right.

-Biomechanecrozone

Dungeongcrawling through an absolute wall-to-wall Gigercube. A catalogue of Gigerthings you find on the blacksilver Gigerwalls, stalactating from the Gigerceilings, reaching up from the Gigerfloors and dripping from the Gigerarches.

-Stingraiders

You are sea-elves with ragged dark eyes. You seek submerged secrets in wrecks and the drowned results of sunken civilizations the deep dodging seademons and sharkmen. All kinds of details to make the politics and complexities of underwater society and geography interesting instead of just like not that interesting like it usually is.

-Operation Hourglass

All the players are multiclass wizard-thieves or wizard-thief-fighters and work together as usual but, despite being able to communicate are all in different eras. They are all spies in different wars at different times working together to prevent some chronomantic catastrophe. One is in World War 2, one is in the Napoleonic Wars one is in the 30 Years War, etc. They need to make sure certain things happen at certain times. Quietly. A very specific scenario with relevant maps, timetables and NPCs.

-I Want My Scalps

It's a few hundred years ago. You are Jews. The pope is a dick. You're going to kill him. Everybody plays a thief/rogue/specialist and you need to make a plan.

-The Time of Jewelled Tusks

You control a small army. Skirmish strategy set in medieval India with Lots. Of. War. Elephants. Also magic--and maybe a tiger or two. From the subcontinent that brought you chess. 

-The Future Is Not Yet Written 

Ok, so:

1. You take the players' current normal-game PCs.

2. You posit them as 20th-level PCs.

3. You send them on what their Last Quest might theoretically be.

Several suggestions for the apocalyptic foe, stakes, and battleground upon which this Dark-Knight-Returns-esque conflict might take place.

-Frost Raiders of Nephilidia

You are a raiders in insectlike, jewel-eyed, insulated masks investigating the cold half-drowned land of Nephilida, with its various amphibious vampires, from the black-armored knights to the decadent Queen herself. Dare you take the jewel from the demon's eyes? Rules for the special gear of the raiders and the Nephilidian tarot.

-War Magic 

Every player rolls a 20th level magic-user, they are each randomly placed in a small but lovingly-detailed kingdom, you have to try to kill each other and the last wizard standing wins.

-PurgePurgePurge

Near-future city, target, sewer system, codes and access nodes, cool motorcycle, optional cybernetic enhancements, floorplan, DNA, AI, betrayal, eldritch wild-card let loose. Trouble, broken glass, neon, darkness.

-Death Before During And After Dishonor 

Samurai wargame. Use your house's resources to build your army including yokai summoned with LotFP spells, fight on a little battlefield designed just for this, each player is the general of a chosen section of army. Timetables of the movements of the enemy revealed when its time or when your spies find out.

-The Garden of Forking Paths 

A mazelike dungeon. One PC, several players. Control of the PC starts with the first player. Each time the PC decides to go this way instead of that a second identical version of the PC controlled by the next player makes the other choice. This continues until there as many identical PCs as players, all making different choices. They cannot meet or retrace their steps, but they must still work together with their alternate selves to survive and solve the maze.

-Claw of the Annihilator 

No-self-control high-dark-fantasy mini-adventure. PCs play max-level dragonriders, archliches, archers with nine-arms and 4 bows, that kind of thing. They challenge the gods on a uniquely-designed alien terrain with a full minigolf course worth of chaotic effects. 

-Meaningless Homicidal Loci of Suffering

A player-vs-player where each player gets a PC and a section of the dungeon to control. They decide which monsters are there, which traps where, etc. Their PC can only travel in the other players' parts of the dungeon. Dungeon and options for each section provided, natch.

*I left out a lot of ideas that might fall under "modern horror" because basically they were already within the remit of Demon City.

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