A Session's Worth

So, what's "a session's worth" of stuff?

Now, we all know that one trip to the shield-polisher with the funny accent could end up as a session's worth, and, hey, if so, excellent. But assuming--as I do when writing and adventure--that the PCs are just gonna burn through every obstacle and smell no roses, how much do you need just to get through a day?

I pretty much do things a day at a time--throw enough down to keep the girls busy for a night, probably leaving some danglers, repeat the next week. So I'm often wondering: what's the minimum I can do today and still have D&D in every direction and no improvising. (Not that mind improvising, but I like scheming more.)

I threw together a dungeon (all crawl, no NPCs) a few weeks ago on an hour-and-a-half notice that, barring any outbreaks of outside-the-box genius, would have to break down to something like: 1 minor mystery room, 1 or 2 simple, shortish fights (party split two ways and did both of them), 1 major mystery room, 2 fights of varying degrees of complexity, one with tricks thrown in. I don't remember the layout and it's too hot in LA today to get up and look but I'm guessing it was 12-15 rooms.

So--assumign you want to plan everything ahead, and if you figure you might get an all rock no talk day, how much do you figure is a session's worth of material?

Some Random Odds & Ends

-Austin Osman Spare: One of my Cthulhu players clued me in about this guy. A real-life CoC character. Artist. Wrote grimoires. Pictures drove people insane. Beloved by notorious dictator.

-When Keith was in town we went to Aero Hobbies and he picked up some hit-location dice. I kinda wish I had, too. I love random die charts, but I like dumb gimmicks, too. Especially dumb gimmicks which replace having to find one more random chart.

-Then I thought: they have games with decks of custom cards and the whole game is in the cards. Someone should make a game with custom dice where the whole game is in the dice. No numbers, just story-parts. People I don't know or like would love it.

-That idea TM me, today.

-Mandy's on an epic medieval Chinese movie kick right now. In "The Emperor and the Assassin" a handful of guys roll a big (6-9 foot diameter, I'd say) iron ball up to a door and use the ball to knock it down. Does anybody out there know if this thoroughly rad and seemingly terribly impractical form of battering ram was ever used historically?

-P.S.

"..so that when all our kids are born Venusians we will understand them"

If I told you that this article where William Burroughs writes about Led Zeppelin and talks to Jimmy Page contains--to my mind--a great deal of RPGable material including a detailed discussion of sonic death rays would you care or would you just be like "Holy fuck! William Burroughs writing about Led Zeppelin and talking to Jimmy Page!"

Either way, you really should stop reading this and go read that.

Please Do Let Me Know If This Ever Comes In Handy...

Random Contemporary Object--roll D20*:

1-Hertz Rent-a-Car receipt.
2-Homemade post-apocalyptic car model.
3-Right leg of translucent orange Gamera toy.
4-Cookie tin full of cash, keys, cell phone, change, etc.
5-Fuzzy pink headphones with embroidered skulls
6-2 triple A batteries--Duracell
7-ipod in pink case
8-Empty Netflix envelope.
9-2 jelly jars.
10-12 mugs, 1 white, 11 black
11-Blue glass
12-Unidentified cosmetic in tube.
13-2 bottles of nail polish--1 gold, 1 white
14-Brand X newspaper
15-jar containing change and various pens
16-Top of apricot container
17-1/2 empty Dr Pepper bottle
18-4 jars of paint--blue blue red yellow
19-Digital camera, Canon
20-Empty box of raisins

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*Based on extensive research made by sitting here and looking at my coffee table.

I Don't Know How YOU Do Interviews But...

...Keith Baker's sleeping on our couch tonight, so if you've got anything you're dying to know about Eberron or whatever, lemme know and I'll try to subtly work it into the conversation.

Your RPG Museum

So Alexis has been talking about putting together a sort of database/museum/wiki/library of the best DIY D&D stuff--both in terms of rules and setting materials.

Not all the stuff, just the best stuff. So I'm wondering what such a resource would consist of.

My very simple request for today for y'all is:

"Give me a link to at least one on-line DIY RPG resources you have found to be useful in creating a game."

This should be, if possible, something that you actually used.

You are NOT allowed to link to any commercial product, to a novel, to any .pdf longer than 3 pages, or to anything I--or anyone else reading the comments--can't immediately read from the comfort of his or her home computer right now. You also can't link to anything you yourself wrote or to anything on this blog (though that's sweet and thanks if you were planning to), since I already know about everything on this blog.

This list helped me write up a random book table--which, yeah, I use, since snakes are books, and also I liked the throwaway rule about how owning a book on a subject helps with knowledge checks on that subject.

Also:
Noisms 25 word description of his Yoon-Suin setting: Tibet, yak ghosts, ogre magi, mangroves, Nepal, Arabian Nights, Sorcery!, Bengal, invertebrates, topaz, squid men, slug people, opiates, slavery, human sacrifice, dark gods, malaise, magic.

Always seems to me a marvel of precision and concision, and has helped me think about what different places in my campaign should be like.

Oh, and P.S...
it's Wednesday...

The 4 Horsemen Need Not All Ride In The Same Direction

Testing the hypothesis, Day 3...

Mandy and I are reading "Plague Peoples" by William H. McNeill.

Now any fantasy setting worth its salt has a Plague Lord or Pestilent Armies or whatever, but--to me at least--these have always seemed like moody, creepy, fun, but basically one-note villains. What desireth the Plague Lord? For people to have a disease and then be dead. Sweep across the land, infect, etc. The PCs job is mostly just to stop them from doing that while trying not to catch whatever whimsical ailments the DM has rigged up to fill out the Random Failed Constitution Roll Chart.

McNeill's thesis, however, makes me reconsider. He points out that the long-term survival of a disease depends not on killing every motherfucker but rather reaching a sort of equilibrium with the population of host organisms.

In other words: to a disease, humanity is not prey, but cattle, and you don't eat all your cattle at once, lest it fail to breed.

Seen this way, a Plague Lord or an evil cleric of the Plague Powers or Father Nurgle or a sentient disease or whoever has a rather interesting combination of motivations. For example, a pro-disease villain would desire the formation and maintenance of cities. Diseases love cities, especially medieval ones. So your plaguey villain might be just as interested in protecting the heroes' home as laying waste to their countryside (at least for a season or two).

To see the other Machiavellian possibilities here, imagine the four classic Warhammer Chaos Powers: Nurgle--the plague god forms easy alliances with Khorne, the war god, because invasions spread infection--however when war threatens to annihilate a whole city, Nurgle betrays Khorne. Likewise, Nurgle would ordinarily be inclined to look very kindly on Slaanesh--lord of depravity--however, if this depravity starts resulting in a miscegenated gene pool with disease-resistant hybrid vigor, then doublecrosses await. And, ordinarily, Warhammer suggests Nurgle opposes Tzeetch, god of intrigue, magic, and change--but they might temporarily team up to encourage some mass migration or displacement of people whereby all those virgin unimmunized bloodlines are exposed to alien pathogens.

And the disease god loves civilizations--chains of communicating cities--but will balk when these civilizations start producing minds that conceive of sanitary and medical advances--Nurgle backstabbed after collaborating with Thoth.

Point is, your Lord of Illness, via his or her earthbound evil-cleric and cult-leader representatives, can be a schemer at the highest and subtlest level. And the role-playing and deal-cutting and what-would-this-NPC-do calculations are pretty easy to figure once you start thinking: Ok, which result here would result in the most stable conditions for the spread of disease. A mysterious hooded figure agrees to fund our artifact-hunting expedition to the Jungle of Blue Leopards? Excellent!

___

More ideas came earlier in the day when a pal called up about maybe playing Paranoia. Thinking about it, I figured: I can fit this into the TMNT game. I came up with...


Alpha Complexe Soixante-- it used to be Montreal. Now it's like the Godard movie Alphaville + Alpha Complex from Paranoia. Everyone is sentimental, speaks French, and is trying to kill everyone else for reasons no-one can quite understand. Mass executions look like pieces of weird performance art. People smoke in noiry stairwells and commit suicide.

I also figure, in a D&D context, the same mix of ennui and inexplicable, enigmatic internecine warfare could easily be a hallmark of goings-on in Vornheim's neurotic sister city, Bellet Osc.

Then I took a short Google Image Search holiday and found out about Guild Wars designer Daniel Dociu...
I figure the cathedral at Vornheim looks kinda like this.
Sweet jesus this is awesome. This is either what Japan looks like in my D&D or in my post-apoc TMNT setting--depending on which campaign goes east first.

Then I figured, what the hell, might as well collect a few more pictures...
Interzone-Marioworld 1,001-1. Pointed arches, addictive mushrooms, sentient turtles with typewriters embedded in their shells issuing obscure orders to agents of nameless sects. Hallucinations, moths, junkies, dream viruses. All attempts to pursue the elusive Princess Scheherezade Peach result in endless recursive adventures for she is always in another castle.

Red Meridian. I found The Road a disappointment so Red Meridian is what I was hoping a post-apocalypse imagined by the guy who wrote Blood Meridian would look like. I think it's in Eastern Europe.