Frequently Asked Questions About The Compendium

So lots of people have questions about the Compendium! Here's a newer flip-thru video:

 Here's the details of its contents.

Apparently many people are thrown by the fact this 400+ page book is free! And still available--but only until the end of the year.

Basically all you have to do is join a bunch of social media sites I describe and be active on them. You are under no obligation to talk about me or the book, just be there. (This detail seems often missed.) This helps there be a lower proportion of psychotic trash internet people in RPG spaces. Or, if you don't wanna, pay 1000$. (Some people did that.)

Email me for details: zakzsmith AT hawtmayle dawt calm

Many people (including some in charge of internet platforms named) had the appropriate response:

Many were shocked and alarmed that people wanted this book.

Adam Muszkiewicz asks:

No, Adam, if you don't wanna get on social media, the Compendium is 1000$, not 100$.

That's my VenMo, Adam

Also Adam, what does "subverting social media" mean? 

Will aka "Rivetgeek" asks:

Uh, Rivetgeek, California--where I live and have successfully sued--is noted for having particularly strong Anti-Slapp laws. It's the first state that comes up when you Google "strong anti-Slapp laws". Anti-Slapps have been brought against me and they lost because I am not Exxon and some gamer who lies about abuse in my field to my potential allies, business contacts and customers is not a random member of the public, they're committing textbook defamaton. Or, as they call it in the UK trade libel.

I've been a defamation plaintiff longer than I went to art school at this point. Don't play internet lawyer with me.

On Something Awful, Malcolm Sheppard asks his fellow goons:

They're....not getting paid Malcolm. And they don't have instructions to post anything other than whatever they want.

I am not sure you understand the concept of "obedience". You're such a rebel.

On the same site, Dwarf74 asks:

It says "I am very sure nobody is going to do Zak's posting obstacle course, because it's a whole lot of work, and it's all stupid".

Actually so far lots of people have. Enough that: 

After
(click to enlarge)

The folks who want The Compendium helped take this blank map and turn it into a crowdsourced dungeon on our discord. 

Before

Email me if you want it: zakzsmith AT hawtmayle dawt calm. We're working on a hexmap now.

And it's weird you call it an "obstacle course" because we all know guys like you are on this many sites and you post all the time.

Over at RPGGeek John Whyte asks:

He feels it is "highly unlikely 7 people paid 1000$ for a book". You're right, it is highly unlikely because it's now 10 people. Well, one is in the middle of Western Unioning and one is on the fence, so 8 officially.

John: if you want proof--please do ask! I am happy to provide it.

John Whyte also wanted the Case Number of the case where this happened to his fellow New Zealander:

It's Civ-2021-044-169 District Court North Shore Registry, John! Thanks for asking!

The other sleuths over at RPGGeek are also shocked to hear one of my friends who helped me check misinformation on their thread has the same IP address as me. I guess they don't know that in big cities lots of people have the same IP address and also: my players who hang out with me know about your smear campaign. You've been doing this for six years, John. They go to court and talk, under oath, about how you guys lie.  Of course they're gonna defend me online.

Claytonian asks:

Clay, I think you made a mistake, the Terrible Take contest was a contest--contests aren't mandatory! If you thought you had to enter, then I'm super sorry. Please contact the office for a free fruitcake.

As usual, the OSR Discord is an endless source of fascinating questions!

mtb asks:

"I am not sure why if you have non-psychotic trash internet people as fans you need to worry about other communities filled with psychotic trash internet people who are not your fans?"

mtb, the reason is just because you are not in a community doesn't mean they can't... I don't know, say, smear people outside their community on the Internet for example?

I would've thought that would be a pretty obvious reason to worry about said communities.

TDF Asks:

So TDF from the OSR Discord thinks Miss A is fake?

Dear TDF, it's Zak!

Hi! I can see you! You read my blog!

If you think she's fake: email me (zakzsmith AT hawtmayle dawt calm) and ask for proof! I can introduce you--I can, in fact, show you all our messages going back for years! I can show you pictures of her!

Please see a therapist.

Carson Asks:

Carson, what are you smoking? Cases? There's only one case where you cold have "read" anything in the public record about my personal life--and I won that one--the other two have no public documentation except:

and (most recently):

Bearer of a Demented Ass Asks:

Click to enlarge--its kinda long

and then asks...

So, this is your theory of what should happen:

1. When someone in your community lies on the internet, we should let that go

2. We keep letting it go so they eventually lie about something real important, like rape

3. You spread that lie all over the internet

4. Their victim loses everything because of the lie

5. The victim meekly accepts this, then begins a new life as a right-wing pundit 

6. If they don’t do that and instead point out that you lied and try to get their life back, you call them a narcissist

Go fuck yourself.

Hey everybody else: get a book.

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This Is Why This Has Lasted Six Years

I just got this last week.

It's from a friend who saw my ex- and I every week. As usual, we stayed friends after and she didn't believe any of the bullshit, but she moved upstate a few years back.

You can't make this shit up:

 

Everyone who wanted to spread this bullshit took spreading it very seriously. Everyone who knew it was bullshit, well, the nicest way to say this is: they're somewhat less dialed-in.

I would say I don't know whether to laugh or cry but I don't do either any more.

There's no lesson here, we're all fucked. Happy Holidays.

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PC Backgrounds Only Faster

One thing I initially liked about 5e was the skill list--it seemed like a reasonable compromise between all PCs of a class seeming to have identical skillsets (old school) and "Use Rope"-level useless granularity. A few of them felt superfluous (Investigation f'rinstance) but it was basically ok.

The Background system in 5e, whereby a player has a race, class and then a secret third thing they used to do was interesting especially if you have an established world like I do because everybody's bringing a little more meat to the table. I also works well if you often have newbie PCs played by newbie players mingling with 10th-level, 10-year veterans rich in lore.

Being fairly old-school by inclination, however, I did not like how long character generation took--especially for new players, for whom I do not like to create the impression that the game is more complex than it really is. Backgrounds seem the worst culprit here: everybody creates race, class and stats, I can do the modifier math for them, and picking spells and weapons is fun. It starts to feel stupid when rattling off the background list though--so here's what I do:

When running The Zak Hack I just ask "What did your PC do before becoming a (wizard/fighter/thief etc)?" they usually have an answer right away. Then I give them 2 skills they don't already have implied by the job and some useful job-related trinket and move on. (Demon City handles this via the "Occupational Skill" which in turn is influenced by Call of Cthulhu NPCs who all have their own job as a %ile skill, like "Gravedigger 78%").

For example last session my pal Devin made a half-elf wizard and he said he used to be a plumber so I gave him a choice of (pick 2) Persuasion, Perception and Sleight of Hand, plus a guild letter of introduction and some tools.

Then the only question was what are elves doing with plumbing but let's be real, for elf cities the fountain budget alone is staggering.

There's A Very Simple Explanation for All This (reader participation time)

 

Game day yesterday. Got to use the Compendium (get yours today!) for the first time since it arrived in the mail, which was fun and convenient...

...the players found a Dealer In Fine Silks in a cage held by some toad demons in the megadumgeon. They were escorting him back to Port Gobelins after finding him in a cage only to find (after a very dramatic archery contest--thanks dice) that Port Gobelins was besieged on all sides by warriors of chaos.

Since the dungeon originally began at Port Gobelins, they then took him all the way back to the dungeon, reverse-traversed it and popped up back where they started over a years ago, inside the city under siege.

But Here's What I Need Your Help With...

The real chaos came when these long-suffering adventurers, after many battles and negotiations, arrived back in the besieged city and rolled on the Carousing Table. This was the last action of the evening, and here are the results:

-Bleezy the Sea-Elf wizard has a massive hangover (the least of it)

-Bob the Ranger was turned into a pig by a witch on account of lewd advances. (He got better. Bleezy has Remove Curse in old school and in 5e this only lasts an hour, so either way it was temporary).

-Horg the half-orc wizard has offended a local military officer (no small thing in a city under siege)

-Tor the half-ogre barbarian has offended the court wizard (I didn't know Port Gobelins had a court wizard)

-Horg has woken up in bed with the court wizard

-Tor has burned down an entire district of the city and everybody knows (again, no small thing during a siege)

So here's my thought:

While the Carousing Table is a mere chart and the PCs were too black-out-drunk to see any plot or narrative connecting these six events, I am sure there is one. And I am sure it is the seed for next week's adventure.

So, here's the contest:

What happened last night? What Coen Brothers-esque dominoes fell that explains all of this? How does it lead to intrigue in the next session. Best answer gets some free RPG pdf of mine that they don't already have.

If you need background, Port Gobelins is here, on the coast:

...and it looks a lot like Venice and there are little masked goblins running around pretending to be children:

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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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Megadungeon Map

click to enlarge

The players find this somewhere in the megadungeon, showing how the areas connect, where the Gate of Six Keys is and where the keys are.

Awful Green Things In The Dungeon

After many months of being like Oh man I gotta do that, my friend recently dug up the copy of Awful Green Things From Outer Space that he first played as a child--originally printed in Dragon Magazine in 1979 and with the chits originally glued to little pieces of linoleum or something by some 12 year old of his acquaintance back in the day. 

To be quick:

1. It rules.

2. It is highly D&Dable.

So the basics are this:

-There's a ship (above)

-There's little counters for Player One: Crew members with what a gamer will recognize as different Move, Attack and Health stats who can move around the ship.

-There's little counters for weapons they can pick up (pool cues, knives, stun guns, cans of rocket fuel, etc) which have different characteristics.

-There's little counters for Player Two: Aliens who invade the ship starting in a random location. The aliens start as eggs, then become babies, then become adults--all 3 stages with different stats.

-They fight.

If you are familiar with the Warhammer family of games, you may recognize all these elements from the Warhammer 40k-derived game Space Hulk, where one side plays Genestealers (Alien alien knock-offs) and one side place Terminators (big guys in oversized extra-cool space marine armor).

Space Hulk replaces chits with miniatures (cool improvement) and replaces the map-ripped-from-Dragon-Magazine with a board full of cardboard tunnels you can make yourself (cool improvement), however, unless Space Hulk has been upgraded since I've played it lacks the one super-cool thing that makes Awful Green Things really special and replayable:

Weapons are scattered all over the ship when the aliens invade--and each one has one of a variety of totally random effects. Everything from a blaster to an electric fence can do one of about a dozen things and you don't know which until you use it on an alien.

Some do a ton of damage, some do almost none, some shrink the aliens, some grow the aliens, some make the aliens burst into tiny fragments which then grow--it's scary using weapons but you will lose if you don't experiment with them. It makes for a new experience every time.

There's later editions and an expansion game for Green Things--I don't know if they added "randomly teleports you to another room" or "turns out the lights in the corridor no-one can see" to the weapon effects, but they should.

Smear Math for Morons

 One very weird thing I've noticed when people discuss the smear campaign is people saying these two thing, often in the same breath:

• lol Zak is so cancelled we sure destroyed his life lmao!
• lol Zak is suing people saying he lost millions, what an idiot lmao!

Now, if you're not a moron (and it should go without saying that anyone participating in the smear is a moron) you'll realize these are basically opposite statements.

If you smear someone and so completely destroy anybody's ability to earn a living doing their job as long as there's an internet, you've likely cost them over a million dollars. That's not about me specifically, that's anyone.

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The math:

Let's say you, like me, live in California.

Minimum wage is 16$ per hour.

That's 128$ per day.

That's 3,840$ per month.

That's 46,080$ per year.

Assuming the person lives a minimum of 30 more years and (like most artists) never retires, that's 1,382,400$.

That's assuming no inflation and just using minimum wage--and I did make more than minimum wage.

(Just for the development of I Am The Weapon alone, I was making 3000$ per month before the smear. If that less-than-minimum-wage figure seems high remember I'm contracted for all the writing and all the illustration. If you would like the documentation on that--just ask. This is also in every court record. I also had two projects in development with LotFP at the time--Bards and Violence in the Nympharium. Both of those included a cash advance and then I make a percentage after. Or ignore all these numbers and look at how much the artists and writers make on literally any mid-tier indie RPG kickstarter.)

Now, I am publishing again and so that income's not all lost, but that's only after having successfully sued three people who smeared me.

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And here's probably the main thing seem to forget or not realize:

RPGs isn't my main job, I've never claimed it was. I am a painter. I paint paintings for a living that people are supposed to buy. That is my job and was long before any game stuff I did ever existed.

Just because the people who smeared me were themselves in RPGs doesn't mean that I only lost RPG work. You'd have to have brain damage to think that only people in games noticed your smear campaign. All that work disappeared as well.

This is all in the article Dr Weisman wrote (missing audio here).

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And, of course, on top of that, destroying someone's reputation doesn't just destroy their income, it destroys their entire life.

And the non-monetary damage to their life is undeniably worse than the loss of income.

Since death is preferable to my current situation, if you're me, basically this cost me however much my entire life is worth. That's a price higher than any dollar amount. The only reason I am sticking around is the very slim hope it gets undone.

Again: this isn't special. I assume you think your life is worth a lot to you, too. If someone offered you a million dollars to die, you probably wouldn't take that deal.

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There are a lot of things that are really obvious about the situation the hatemob created that seem to be lost on everyone talking about it online, this about money is just one of them. But it fits in a blog entry so there you go.

If you lie about someone being a felon and put it all over the internet and that person's entire life is working in public, you did way more than a million dollars worth of damage.

It's not about me being special, that's just life.

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How To Fix Everything

This is a really interesting article about how some people managed to talk like adults about a piece of art they didn't like. Whether or not you like their solution: it appears they came to a solution that made a variety of people who disagreed but who all cared happy.

Basically, they solved this thorny public art problem by not allowing drive-by comments.

Without fail, people arrived at these events primed to make public comments, only to be surprised when they could not find a formal body to make a speech to, as there were only small-group conversations to join. They didn’t want to spend their time having to speak and listen at human scale. Indeed, listening, in small groups or one-on-one, over long periods, tried the patience of some participants. But it also bled out the cursed public discourse that had surrounded the issue for so long—exhausting those who had just one point to make and no interest in connecting or communicating, only in winning.

They point out that the usual process--people lining up to give a speech to an assembly of other people (most of whom were also there to give speeches) was tried and, as usual, didn't work. 

It's worthwhile thinking about how many online platforms are basically that: someone who will monologue but is not expected to engage getting access to a big audience of people who all want to engage or, themselves, monologue. Forums are like that, Twitter is like that. (People who write blogs but don't answer the comments are like that.)

And it's worth thinking about which kinds of people thrive in specifically those environments--people who have a deep belief in one-way communication and not being fact-checked. People who are twitter-famous or familiar forum-faces but not well-known as creators tend to be, basically, righteous trash.

So that's that.

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Anybody curious about court news with Gencon--it's on appeal to the higher court now. If you didn't see that coming you haven't been paying attention.

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Three Kinds of Mystery

Ok, there are three kinds of mystery in stories--

Classic 'What's Gonna Happen?' Mystery (diegetic mystery)

This is a mystery to both the audience and the main characters in the story: They are wondering how events will play out (or, in the case of a Sherlock-Holmes-style-mystery have played out). What will happen to Jack, Wendy, and Danny in the Overlook Hotel is a 'What's Gonna Happen?" Mystery, as is who framed Roger Rabbit? and who did the murder on the Orient Express and what will happen when we have these two couples swap wives. It's often the basic engine of the plot.

This happens in RPGs all the time.

WTF is Going On Mystery? (temporary narrative mystery)

This kind of mystery is created not in the story but by the way of telling a story. These are things that are not immediately known to the audience but are understood by the characters involved and we only learn them by following the story. Nearly every first line of a first-person novel involves this mystery (Who is narrating? What kind of person are they?) It was the best of times and it was the worst of times? For who? In the first scene of Pulp Fiction where we see Jules and Vincent talking in a car about the Royale With Cheese we don't know who these guys are. We don't know what they're about to do. We don't know where they're going or why. These are WTF is Going On mysteries. When Luke Skywalker first talks to his aunt and uncle about Ben Kenobi, we don't know who that is yet. These are temporary narrative mysteries--things kept secret by the writer until they want you--the audience--to find out.

One hallmark of good writing is very careful control of this kind of mystery. A lot of lackluster writers tell you where you are and who everyone is right away and so waste a lot of the potential of this kind of mystery.

This one is rare in RPG sessions, since the whole point is players need to know enough of their characters' POV to make decisions.

Eternal Mystery (mysterious-vibes mystery)

This is a mystery that never gets answered in the story. It can overlap with the other two, but also not. The point of this mystery is that it is never revealed and is part of the vibe. The lady or the tiger? What's in the Pulp Fiction brief case? Why is a guy in a bear suit giving some dude a blowjob in the Overlook Hotel? Why does Agent Cooper keep dreaming of a dwarf? These things just are. They make the situation seem mysterious but will not be revealed in the story.

This is a bread-and-butter device in pulp storytelling and so is all over RPGs. 

Some notes

• One thing sequels often do is take something conceived as an mysterious-vibes mystery and turn them into a temporary narrative mystery. In the original two seasons of Twin Peaks Agent Cooper keeps talking to a "Dian" on his tape recorder and that's just a thing he does. In the much later Season Three, we meet Dian--she's Laura Dern. Lovecraft stories are full of this--we hear a mysterious reference to the Pnakotic Manuscripts or Necronomicon in an early story and its just meant to be a mysterious name, but then in some later story (occasionally by another author) it is revealed what that thing is. The big alien "space jockey" in Alien had this done to it.
• One element of stories called "surreal" is the deliberate piling up of the second two kinds of mystery: we get a load of details and we don't know which are actually things that we need to pay attention to because they resolve and which are just weirdness. This tension is part of the excitement in these kinds of stories but if the proportions aren't right it can make someone check out because the mysteries begin to feel "hollow"--that is, there's no reason to wrestle with them.
• You can also pile the first type of mystery onto these two to make a Twin-Peaks-style mysterious mystery story mysteriously told, but unless you take care to highlight the first kind of mystery's importance (as Twin Peaks did by reiterating the question "Who Killed Laura Palmer?") the audience may not ever realize there is a plot to uncover.
• The massive part of the appeal of RPG campaigns is that everyone feels a great sense of the first kind of mystery as a campaign begins--unlike so many stories we don't who will live or die, how long the story will last, or often even what it will be about. We know more about a movie from its trailer or a book from its jacket than we do what will happen in a campaign with our characters--even if we know all about the characters at the start.

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Hell Sent Me Back

I'm back publishing games with Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Details about all that here.

Right now there's an adventure available at Gen Con--In The Night Fortress. It is free at the LotFP table booth 2937.

I've playtested it a few times and I kinda love it, because it has a central problem to solve that can be got past socially, magically, with combat,  with trickery or a bunch of different ways, but is weird enough that it will probably require all three.

Y'know how the tooth-sacrifice door that James wrote in Death Frost Doom was cool because every time you ran it you were like "I wonder how they're gonna get a tooth..."--well this adventure is kind of all that way. Kinda accidentally. It's very much a "Oh how are they gonna do this?"adventure.

I am very happy with it.

Also it has cheetahs. They were fun to paint.

So, yeah, there will also be some new LotFP stuff from me. Big stuff? Yeah.

One more funny piece of news:

Remember Fiona Geist from Dr Weisman's article? The one who said in the audio that she wanted LotFP to go bankrupt and she'd buy it for pennies on the dollar and then had that whole rant about how her co-harasser was a jerk?

Well she just walked up to James and Gen Con and was like "Hi!". 

Not like "I'm so sorry I was in that whole hatemob and then admitted it on tape" just "Hi!".

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There's A New Zak Book Available for Pre-Order

I have a new art retrospective book coming out now available for pre-order. The price will jump in a few days, so if you're interested, best to grab one soon. It covers the last 20 years of art.

With essays by Ana Finel Honigman, Anuradah Vikram and Eileen Townsend.

Link and info here.