5 Hours of Fun And Items Which Aided In Its Generation

Cameraman Darren decided to switch from the old dwarf fighter to a half-orc ranger. He went with the two melee weapons schtick--so I got to use this guy.

And I thought...Finally. You do a tv show and they send you a dual-wielding half orc miniature and you wait your whole life with breath bated to use it and then the day comes and its like Christmas on the Fourth of New Years.

Now being a ranger and all he wants to know:

"Do you have a random animal table?"
"Of course I have a random animal table."

(Mostly ripped from Telecanter. The boldface animals are for more Metal biomes.)
65...

"Your animal companion is an ice monkey, oh ranger of Vornheim."

And I have a monkey mini...
I am getting to use a monkey mini to represent a monkey.

Who can front on the splendor of that?

No one.

Now where are we...

In a random fortress of course. (Automated version here.)

Good thing I included those goblin options.

So when last we left the ladies they were in the fortress gatehouse, Frankie was a pile of rocks, Connie was injured and Mandy was frankly appalled by their rash and heedless behavior.

Cameraman Darren the half orc rolls up (with monkey) and the goblins promptly lock them all in the barbican and murder holes open up in the floor.

So then that's a whole thing. Including Darren trying to use a Weekend At Bernied dead goblin as meatshield. I 20'd him twice thank to this extremely large d20 Satine got me. Here modeled by Mandy and Stoya in a photograph entitled "While You May Cast A Sly and Indulgent Eye Upon That Very Large Die, I Myself Am Somewhat Abashed By Its Blue and Rubbery Proximity" ...

Jeff RientsJun 26, 2012

+2

My wife thinks your giant inflatable die is hilarious.

Zak SmithJun 26, 2012Edit

+6

SHE IS WRONG IT IS SERIOUS

Huge Ruined ScottJun 26, 2012

Are you sure that's a 20-sider? Or are you counting the insides of the faces?

Zak SmithJun 26, 2012Edit

+1

Is this some advanced topographics problem or are you honestly asking how many sides my giant d20 has?

Huge Ruined ScottJun 26, 2012

I'm unduly skeptical of its icosahedronal properties

Huge Ruined Scott Jun 26, 2012

This is the point where I leap up and down exuberantly, shouting "SHOW ME THE TWENTY"

Zak SmithJun 26, 2012Edit

Wow. You win today's new vistas in hardcore groggery contest.

ColeJun 26, 2012

the Lanny Poffo in me wants to say "i believe you mean icosahedral "

Huge Ruined Scott Jun 26, 2012

+1

I judge all claims of polygonal Platonism with suspicion

+coleThe Blassy in me wants to say "I'll rap you with my cane, you pencil-necked geek"

Zak SmithJun 26, 2012Edit

+1

The upshot here is you gents have more other gents in you than I generally considered consonant with typing competently. Color me impressed.

Huge Ruined ScottJun 26, 2012

Like late-era Kylie Ireland, I can contain multitudes

Zak SmithJun 26, 2012 (edited)Edit

She plays D&D. Or some kinda RPGs. Has Jack Vance and Fritz Leiber paperbacks in her house.

Which house has now passed to some whole other porn person who threw a 4th of July party and here for no reason other than I was at it is a NSFW picture from said event.

Also a palm tree caught on fire. Which was pretty fucking album-cover looking from formerly-Kylie-Ireland's roof.

Note: the giant inflatable blue die is really fun. Way more fun than it should be. You can roll it just by throwing it up in the air with a little backspin and letting it fall next to you, but the great bit is everybody gets to see it slowly click into place, and it rolls kinda slow so it's like "Ok, if I roll a 6 or better you're dead..." "Oh....ohhhh...nooo...whoa!" Like that big wheel on Price is Right. A definite serious tension builder. Recommended.

Yes, I am saying that replacing an essential game-mastering tool with a pool toy conforming to neither spindown nor standard-pattern numeration may significantly improve your game. California Uber Alles Dice Nazis Fuck Off.

Where was I? Oh yeah, in a murder hole beneath a barbican shooting crossbow bolts at my players.

As well I should be.

If all that wasn't enough business to be going on with, someone kept lowering these lobstery guys...

...with boiling kettles of volatile exploding mutagenic alchemical goo on their backs down into the gatehouse. They then they crept implacably at the PCs.

Demonstrating smartness, everyone ran. There was an exciting and confusing sequence where Mandy ended up with a dog inside her body (Remove Curse..thank you) Cameraman Darren's metabolism went aurumvoracic and Connie fell through the floor. Then: further goblins.

Slaughter and death happened for a while until the bossgoblin shows up and is all "Hello, you're killing all my peoples why?" (Translated from the goblin, which is backwards. Like: "Why aren't you killing everyone, you not-jackwads.")

"Um...(drip drip)...we wanted...information about the mcguffin."

"And you didn't just ask why?"

"You attacked us!"

"Was this before or after your vampire snuck in here on a pterodactyl and started just randomly dispatching all known motherfuckers in my house?"

"Ummmm..."

"Yeah. Ok, here's a map to the fortress of the Ferox The Incinerator the ancient maximum size blue dragon whose got the mcguffin. Get the fuck out."

Given a choice of route between the Glowruins and The Toadland, Connie decides the Glowruins because of the name makes her think it'll be cool. Everyone's like Ok.

(This session's group dynamic is:

-Frankie will, if left unchecked, sneak up and backstab anything that looks remotely like a short sword would fit in it.

-Connie, if left unchecked, will keep poking things until something checks her.

-Although nominally the leader by dint of superior experience and paying attention when I blather on about setting details, Mandy doesn't really enjoy being a boss. More an amused babysitter, really.

-Darren has a certain veteran-gamerly laissez faire that occasionally flops over on its belly and trots up to the front to lead by example when he senses the dice rattling deathward.

It's a pretty good dynamic, all told.)

Therein they happen upon a pair of goblins riding a lobotomized troll and collecting radioactive goo.

Connie and Frankie are about 2 seconds from trying to murderhobo them when Cameraman D steps down and pulls the whole "We mere humble dumb travelers come in peace please don't fight us" and Frankie consoles herself with just quietly stealing all their stuff during the parlay.

Then like 8 other things happened with a vampire and pigs and deathmetal Meazels and I got to be all "The mountaintop beneath the Palace of Ferox The Incinerator looks like this...

..." ooooh Roger Dean. And then I rolled about a million times on these tables and these and there was more dragon reconnaissance and goblin punching but I have a headache so ok.

Next session: Assault On The Dragon Palace! Or maybe just Looking At The Dragon Palace And It's Pretty Scary And Going Somewhere Else!

Magic Cigarettes and Pterodactyls

( Click to enlarge if you're all "What does that say?" )











Notes:
*Pig balloon.

*Backward-talking goblins


*Cobalt Reach

*More Cobalt Reach

*Magic Cigarettes

I Highly Recommend You Do this Thing

Consider these words:

You know what your crapsack campaign world needs? Giants made out of sharks and elephants, lurking in a haunted house in the clouds, ready to jump out of cyclopean shadows and murder your PCs right in their stupid faces.

Have you considered them?

In these times of plush Hello Kitty Cthulhus, it doesn't take much to make a wild gonzoboast, but it takes true grit and wit to see it through to its logical conclusion.

There is a man who can do it and you, in all likelihood, know him.

He is Jeff, of the eponymous Gameblog.

Jeff's Gameblog is the DIY RPG blog. Without the example Jeff set--"Hey, you can just play whatever and play it however and think and then write about it and be fair to people and then people will come and talk to you about it and that'll be cool" none of the DIY D&D scene would exist in its current form.

If you like anything about this blog, the community that supports it and talks to it, any of the blogs on the blogroll, the Google + RPG people, I Hit It With My Axe, Vornheim, The Dungeon Alphabet, Grognardia, the Old School Renaissance in general, or are in any way appreciative that there is a way to talk about games on the internet without diving into a toxic suckpit of angry rules lawyers smacking each other over the head with memes from video games you never played, thank Mr Gameblog.

And now this world class GM, famed rulemonkey, clever lad, drunken master of game-design theory and all around Master of Leisure is now finally writing an adventure for actual cashmoney.

And it's called Broodmother Sky Fortress which is like the most metal name for an adventure since Death Frost Doom.

Even if you are not sure if you want a giant made out of sharks and elephants, you can be fairly sure you do want what will no doubt be one of the most impressively engineered chunks of dungeon in the sad and embarrassing history of the published RPG module. The implied humble brag at the heart of Jeff's bio:

Jeff Rients received the 1981 Basic D&D box for his eighth birthday and he's never been quite right since. A regular contributor to Fight On! magazine, a fixture at his local nerd conventions and a general purpose weirdo, Jeff is perhaps best known for his long running blog, the imaginatively titled Jeff's Gameblog, where his greatest contributions to the hobby may be rules for getting your PC into trouble while drunk or his theory that all RPGs are Retro, Stupid and/or Pretentious.

.

..is true. All those dice on the brain have not produced a prickly internet uberdork but a guy who knows people and knows games and knows how to get the two to work together in a real way. Which is who you want writing a module.

When you tell someone like that it's finally time to put it on paper and that people are going to fork over legal tender for it, they tend to take it seriously and go the extra mile to produce that module the way they always hoped it would be.

So point is I have no idea really what'll be in this, but I'm very excited to see it.

So yeah, go do that.

It's part of metalhead gamer and experimental marketing enthusiast James Raggi's Whoa That's Crowdfunding A Lot Of Adventures At Once, There, Jimmy campaign.

(Other parts of it that caught my own personal eye include: An adventure by one of my very favorite DIY D&D monster drawers,Aeron Aelfrey, Vincent Baker, author of arty games about Mormons and stuff, finally putting his considerable talent for crisp prose behind something I might wanna read, an adventure by the dude from GWAR, (yes, that GWAR), a module to be illustrated by D&D With Porn Stars very own Satine Phoenix, some promising looking bits from spiffy gamer illustrators Rowena Aitken and Kelvin Green, as well as adventures from The Dungeon Alphabet guy and some guy named Monte Cook.)

So ok.

A Vital Issue That Affects The Entire DIY Gaming Community

Y'know, as much as I have grown to appreciate the DIY D&D and Old School game bloggers over the years, it's important to keep it real and raise a flag when you see something has gone wrong.

And this is one of those times. The community has really dropped the ball on an issue of genuine importance and it's time to take stock of how this happened and make sure it never happens again:

Why the fuck is nobody talking about Gammarauders?

Seriously, look at this:

There's no excuse for the lack of engagment here.

Seriously?

Really?

Where exactly is the accountability here?

As the box clearly states: "They're monsters, they're machines, they're here". But are they? Where exactly? Where's the Old School Renaissance's much-vaunted dedication to inclusivity and visibility on this?

There is a postapocalyptic, TSR-made, hex-based, mutant kaiju game with cyborg kangaroos in it that's so retrostupid it makes Lysistrata look neosmart and no-one sees fit to comment?

W.

T.

F?

How long can we continue to ignore a game that was to Gamma World as Adeptus Titanicus was to Warhammer 40,000? (And if that sentence didn't make any sense to you then we know where to lay the blame.)

It's high time we take a look at ourselves. And at a giant turtle that brought a gatling gun to Pride.

Badwrong Wheel--East

So we continued playing Burning Wheel incorrectly this week in the Exotic East.*

Click to enlarge my Exotic Burning Notes:

Burning Personae

A. Lady Oborozuki (young witch/acupuncturist) (Mandy Morbid)

B. Impetuous Lotus Peril (deluded noble) (Zak)

C. Eye-Shaking King (sad elf) (Cole)

D. Sagei Takahachi (loyal retainer) (Michael)

Burning Notes

E. (you have to imagine all of Wheelmaster Harald's dialogue in a...sort of...halting...but precise...eurovoice)

Harald: "So, in Burning Seas all of the seas are burning."

"That makes total burning sense."

"The clarity. It burns."

F. These are the experience point notes. Why did I put an "F" here? Who cares? I got xp for killing some ghosts. Like you care.

G. Oh, I defeated them with Calligraphy. In Burning Wheel you can bring in any skills that you can justify to add to your roles. (Or at least in Badwrong Wheel you can.) Anyway I patiently explained to these ghosts that their 300-year-old tragedy was totally like enshrined forever in the memory of the people of the land of rain and blossoms because the very ideogram we use for "tragedy" actually includes their family name. So they should totally stop psychically attacking me because I like understand their pain and aiding the Impetuous Lotus clan in spreading order and civilization to these benighted lands is totally getting their guy in the big house. I got an extra die and they totally bought it.

H. Shaking Eye King kept singing the song of predicting the weather, which in BW mechanics means he can actually decide the weather and he kept picking Torrential Downpour. At one point Takahachi was all

(gruff samurai voice) "Exalted Eye King, can you not make the weather more pleasant?"

SEK: (limp wafting drama-elf voice) "I do not control the weather, I merely predict it. I ask the season what it may bring."

Impetuous Lotus Peril: (Zoltar from G-Force voice) "Liar! I saw you picking!"

SEK: "I do not pick the weather, my player picks the weather, it is an extradiegetic mechanic allowing...."

ILP: "Silence elf! There is no significant difference between traditional role-playing game mechanics and those popularized in recent years which enable enhanced player control over the narrative! The Sublime Imperial Grandmaster of the Impetuous Lotus will have none of your divisive tribalism!"

Then we all laughed and smiled.

Because life is good and playing games wrong is really fun.

Burning Analysis:

Thus far the idea that everybody is a little bit the GM is totally holding true and one consequence of this is every player has to be careful not to spotlight-hog. It's pretty easy, at least so far, to have somebody do almost nothing for an hour--the whole ghost-fight was like just me and Cole. I mean, I'm sure some people are into just watching the theater-of-it kind of storygamingness but I think this particular campaign we here are playing with these people is going to be more fun the more people we can get into the mix at once.

Harald the Burnmaster stuck in the following rule from another game for the witch/acupuncturist which is a pretty decent fortunetelling mechanic, in his words:

"My augury rule is to give the prophet bonus dice to distribute on attempts to reach the stated prophecy on a successful prophecy"

_____

*Dear Eye of Pedantry: Yes, it's a terribly problematic phrase. We're all real broken up about.

Martin and Shy Guy

So I was talking to people and thinking about this Martin essay.

In it, I basically lay out this hypothesis that the reason why alotta the people who prefer newer, more focused, game designs with really clear "this-is-in/this-is-out" rules do so is because they are kinda socially awkward and so they like that these games put stuff into rules rather than relying on the players and GM to socially negotiate stuff like "Ok, well how much detail do I have to go into to describe how I am tying some iron spikes together to make an impromptu fish-hook and can I trust you that you'll rule fairly on that?"*

I'm thinking mostly of the ones who are so attached to these kind of rules they can't figure out why anyone sane wouldn't want them.

Now I'm realizing I didn't fully think something out there:

I think it's not necessarily that (or only that) some socially awkward people like rules-as-written because they're kinda technocratic thinkers who like technocratic solutions. It may also be--and feel free to let me know how you feel here-- that these gamers are painfully shy people who see social confrontation in itself (regardless of the subject or stakes) as pretty scary and as something that kinda hurts. Or that at least takes a few of their hit points to do.

If you're them a game demanding (or just implying) that changes to standard operating procedure be socially negotiated is kind of offensive in itself. Like I want to play a leopardperson and I have to ask? And I don't have the rulebook to back me up? Fuck. That is in itself the game kind of harassing me.

In other words, to Shy Guy, the group assuming something as a default constitutes a sort of de facto pressure to go along with it.

"GM's discretion" is a problem not (or not just) because you don't trust the GM but because putting your 2 cents into that discussion is socially risky.

Further, if you were Shy: the Content As Written of any gamebook becomes extremely important (way more important than any DIY D&D person could instinctively understand) because not going along with the assumptions of the game will require some social negotiating and social negotiating hurts. (As opposed to being neutral or even fun, like it is most of the time for most of us because we're talking to our friends--or at least people with common interests--about a topic of common interest.) If there's a scary idea in that gamebook or a rule you don't like, that is going to be way more of a problem to negotiate away if you're a shy person. Shy guy doesn't even want to go near having to ask exactly how rituals in this Carcosa game are going to be handled.

If you're shy "expectations" (of all kinds) are not just things you blandly steamroll ten seconds into the first session, they're things it will cost you something emotionally to violate.

And if you are Shy and assume most gamers are like you (and maybe they are)(and which a Shy Guy or Gal could easily assume because if you're really shy you may only want to play with other shy people or may end up mostly playing in organized things with strangers) then wanting to play a game might seem to you like--of course--wanting to play the standard game. Because changing rules is hard and painful and who would wanna do that?

It might also explain why people get So. Fucking. Angry. about games with some mechanic or setting bit they don't like. If the game has lizard-dogs you are gonna have to confront someone or have lizard dogs, if a game has Vancian magic you are going to have to confront someone or use Vancian magic, if a game has paladins as merely a splatbook class you are going to have to confront someone about it being a splatbook class. It's all scary.

(Things I'm not saying:

Shy= Focused Design Fan

or the contrapositive of that

Not Shy=Not Focused Design Fan

or

Shy=Not Traditional Game fan

or the contrapositive of that

Not Shy=Traditional Game fan

I'm saying:

Vociferous Badwrongfunists Who Will Shit On Things That Aren't Focused Designs and Don't Understand Their Appeal constitute a subset of Shy People and that their Shyness may explain this part of their behavior.)

Now since I am really really not Shy Guy and neither are my players (they sure as fuck let me know when they don't like something), I am aware how far out on a limb I am going. I am aware how many assumption I'm making and how I haven't tested any of them.

Again: all this is a guess.

So I am asking you all.

Does this make sense? Does it match your experience?

And if you are the shy person and I have missed something crucial, please see this as a serious attempt to figure out what that is. I apologize in advance for my ignorance.

_____

*As I said in the original essay, there are lots of reasons to like newer rules. This is just about one of those reasons and about the vicious partisan zeal with which some people advocate those reasons.

____

What's Up In Cobalt Reach

Ship just landed after narrowly escaping being incinerated half-way to port.
The girls decided to go to Cobalt Reach. So I'm deciding what exactly is in Cobalt Reach, and taking the group's temperature.

What I got so far...



(Of course, it's a plot she mainly created, so she doesn't have much trouble following it.)