Who Is This?

Last time I drew something I couldn't identify and asked what it was, the answers y'all left were a lot of fun. Let's do it again.

Click the picture to make it bigger.

The Real Goblin Palace

This is a sketch of the goblin palace the girls are exploring in the filmed campaign--a working palace dungeon (with shades of "Greater Crazy Wizard" dungeon) . It's pretty closely based on an actual historical palace--in order to make sure the rooms have whatever chamber-to-chamber logic one might reasonably expect. Most of these things are in there somewhere. Rooms in the goblin palace generally appear where their analogues are in the real-life model--I believe, for instance, that the fungus room appears where a formal garden in the real palace is.

Gold star for you if you can guess what building I ripped off.

What's THIS for...?(Village of Hommlet)

So I'm going to talk about the classic module Village of Hommlet. (Thanks for sending it, Troll & Toad.)

Mandy, hunting around for a module to run:

"I'm not going to read this--because it's called The Village of Hommlet."

Also, it has a ten-year-old in bellbottoms and a pink cape on the cover.

Now maybe Mandy is a soulless, decadent, Hollywood sophisticate but, seriously, I feel like the name of the place you're adventuring in should be at least as evocative as the name of real-life place you actually live in. Later modules err equally in the other direction, but there's quite a lot of nominolinguistic turf between "Village of Hommlet" on the one hand and "Doomcrusher Forge" that one might profitably ply.

Someone will no doubt bring up Metropolis and the City of Townsville and how they like the whole "stuff is comforting and normal and is then disrupted by horrible weirdness" paradigm, but I don't care, it's a dumb name. Especially because it tells the potential used-classic-module buyer nothing they need to know and is deceptive because the packaging is the only thing about the module that is dumb. So people who want dumb will be sorely disappointed.

My reviews here are written from the point of view of explaining what's actually usable in the thing--especially to people who've never read them before and have no nostalgic attachment to them--mainly because I myself personally find it hard to get this kind of information about game stuff.

Most reviews of modules I read are like "Oh, yeah, remember this? My party loved the giant hog-monster!" or "Full of (great stuff/total bullshit) (buy it!/avoid it like the plague)!"

The Village of Hommlet is particularly hard to find out anything genuinely useful about before you go hunting for a used copy. Here's what you can find: it's a sandbox. It's a town. It's called "The Village of Hommlet".

These are not lies.

(Here's something people often forget to mention: there's a dungeon in it. Not tiny, either--thirty-odd rooms.)

I can see how this is frustrating to the would-maybe-be-purchaser of this alleged-from-his/her-P.OV. classic module, especially since the packaging is so exquisitely uninspiring.

Anyway...

Substancewise, I'm going to be as fair and un-nostalgic and even-handed as I can and judge the Village of Hommlet according to the ranking system I laid out here. Only I'm going to be sort of lazy and general about it rather than counting the points because Village of Hommlet is actually pretty good and so gets lots of points and I'm not actually insane enough to go through it and add them all up.

Size

-You get one point for each thing described.

Village of Hommlet gets lots of points for things, especially considering how short it is. 16 pages plus maps and about 20 things per page--mostly places and NPCs.

Clarity at High Speed

-You lose that point if you tell me anything about it that could just as well have been randomized or made up on the spot by anybody with a brain, like: "the church doors are eleven feet high and made of oak."

Arguably maybe losing points here but not really. All the villagers have some meager savings and all these savings are squirreled away in some given location in their house or on their person. The locations are better than me having to make up a place for every wheelwright to hide his loot (what am I paying Gygax for, otherwise?), but the actual amounts aren't. 36 g.p. 12 s.p. Great, thanks! However, these amounts take up so little space that you lose no time because of them.

You lose a point if you explain the function of a thing when I already know what it does. Like if you say "the Cathedral of Chuckles is the center of the worship of the Great God Chuckles" you're wasting your space and my time.

The Village of Hommlet beats out nearly every major-publisher module I've ever seen in this regard, with Gygax clearly writing in his "this is a game for adults" phase here.

Although the entries are still written in paragraph form rather than (my preference) telegraph-esque code (Farmer. Cheese. Wife ugly.) so highlighting is necessary. Also, some non-primitive graphic design could've clarified things further, but that obviously wasn't going to happen. Not perfect, but very good on the efficiency front.

Map

-0 points if there's a map that's keyed with only numbers or letters referring to paragraphs spread out across the supplement. Five points if it's keyed with the names of places and/or some sort of distinctive shape telling you what something is just by looking at it. Twenty points if the spread with the map manages to both locate a place and encapsulate most of the important things I need to know about each location.

5 points for a workmanlike job on the map. Also, I'm tempted to include a bonus here since it's the whole Village and everything is keyed--every single place in the Village is on the map and every place on the map has info about it.

Character

-You gain a point for adding a descriptive detail that affects the style of the thing. That is: creates some sort of shift in the idea of the thing by its mere presence. For example: telling me the church is shaped like perfect sphere, or an antler, or is made entirely of leather, or is a monolithic grey streaked with long dark stains from centuries of rust and rain.

Not a lot of points for character in the Village of Hommlet. It's the standard D&D town, although maybe that's unfair since it's also The Standard D&D Town. The Inn of the Welcome Wench might garner a few character points for its name, and the mouth-watering food descriptions.

I'll also note here that there's a nice drawing of the exterior of the dungeon that actually gives the PCs an idea of where and how they could enter it and what that would entail and so is clear and detailed enough to count as more than just flavor-fluff and which is the kind of thing I always appreciate.

Adventure Fuel And Completeness

-You gain points for adding distinctive features to things that create playable depth --information, "adventure seeds", mini-challenges--to a thing you've created...

Well, everybody does have treasure--that's adventure fuel right there. The main events here are: some of the townspeople are spies for various factions and there's a dungeon. The spy/NPC thing is a pretty good bang-for-your buck in terms of small-details-generating-big-adventures, but there's not a lot of variety in the adventure hooks provided. Spies and suggestions to go to the dungeon (and the off-screen Temple of Elemental Evil) are mainly what you get here. Nothing terribly exotic, but all very self-contained, which is cool.

Style

Five points for each part of the basic premise of the city that is actually interesting. i.e. "The City of Charneldyne is a bustling metropolis at the heart of the orcish empire" would get 0 points, whereas ""The City of Charneldyne is a bustling metropolis at the heart of the orcish empire and is built entirely from the bones of slain foes" will get 5 points.

I'm sure I'll get flack for this, but I am awarding no points for this. There's a village, it's near a dungeon. Ok, congratulations, you're playing D&D. Your mileage may vary.

Subjectivity

Twenty points if the setting as a whole is actually interesting. Like Viriconium.

Neither gain nor lose points either way if it's just basically a medieval place.

You lose twenty points if it goes out of its way to be uninteresting, like Stamford, Connecticut.

Neither gain nor lose points here.

However, I feel like the Village needs some bonus points for never ever being stupid. The town is described soup-to-nuts and has nothing stupid anywhere in it. Also: the dungeon is a few sessions worth of action and also has nothing stupid anywhere in it.

That is a truly unique situation for a published module. This is possibly simply because the VoH takes few aesthetic risks--it takes less chances, so it's going to be less likely for something to strike an off-chord. However, there's something to be said for a module whose beat is steady enough that the DM can add his/her own horribly dissonant notes without clashing with existing ones.

In other words, the VoH is the kind of thing that can be altered at will without fucking up any of its internal logic--which is nice.

The workmanlikeness of the setting is everywhere evident. It is a reliable piece of module-ation and I feel like there's something a little unfair about completely condemning it for not challenging fantasy-gaming tropes it, in itself, helped to define (village, wenches, ale, dungeon, giant spider, you die, etc.).

Value

Divide the number of points by the cost in U.S dollars of the setting.

This is a tough one: on the one hand, a used VoH costs, on average, about twice as much and has half as many pages as a comparable modern module.

On the other hand, that low page count is actually a blessing if you want value-for-time rather than value-for-money. There's no wading-through-padding here and the density of information-per-page means the module doesn't send you flipping page after page trying to find some information that may or may not be there. Most of the NPCs are taken care of in three lines of text.

The Battle of Styrofoam Cup Bridge

So we had this siege.

The strategy played out thiswise:

Before the party even showed up at the fortress, the undead army (mostly outside the fortress) had managed to take the northernmost tower.

As you can see, the party took 300 of their 500 troops and placed them at the other end of the bridge connecting the rest of the fortress to the tower, joined those troops and began their attack there.

The girls had the remaining defenders (200) spread evenly out across the whole fortress. (Entrances to the fortress are picked out in pink. Those little mousetrappy things are catapults.)

So then the party started charging across the bridge, with their troops in tow.
___________
DMwise, the thing then is to figure: ok, assuming the party's doing this then what does the Death Knight or necromancer in charge on the other side do?

Obviously, the guys on the north tower defend themselves, and that's where most of the action the PCs could actually see takes place--the Battle of Styrofoam Cup Bridge.

Meanwhile however, we got the other 900 undead outside the fortress. What'll they do?

They could just let the tower guys try to hold the tower, if they do, great, if they don't, they can just stay on the ground and keep starving the inhabitants, but if the PCs realize the undead army's not moving then they can bring all their troops to bear on the north tower and the skeletons will probably lose that position pretty fast and all for nothing.

So the skeletons attack some of the castle entrances in order to draw off some of the defenders.
They go for the west gate because if they break through, then they pincer the party and the rest of the bridge attackers, and for the east gate because it's waaaay on the other end of the city/fortress, so it's hard to transfer troops over there.

Now attacking a castle isn't easy, as everybody knows, but the skeletons do have overwhelming odds--at least in the beginning. So while the PCs and their troop square off 300 to 100 up north, there's 450 skeletons on the east gate and 450 on the west gate--each facing less than 100 defenders (it took a while for the party to decide to hustle everybody over to the gates).

The odds are still pretty decent for the defenders, but you have to take into account the fact that arrowfire isn't especially effective against skeletons and other bony undead.
So anyway, up on the north bridge, the party is more-or-less kicking asses and taking names. Mandy and a helpful carrion crawler (long story) blocked up the middle of the bridge, Kimberly ordered the archers up onto the styrofoam cups so the skeletons couldn't sneak around and leap cup to cup, and Connie figured out that the floating tattery guy can only be hit by magic weapons.

On the other fronts, though, I'm rolling dice and the skeletons are making steady progress at the gates. They rolled surprisingly well.

After a few rounds, the invaders were charging into the east tower, (there was fighting in the stairwells) so the girls decided to pull all their east side forces back to the base of the bridge (there's a blue circle there) so the skeletons would be out in the open and they could shoot at them with the catapult. (Not sure how the people who live in the city felt about that move, but oh well, that's what happens when you put PCs in charge. Goddamn drifters, no respect for property rights.)

Here are some casualty markers Reaper sent us:
So the thing is--all goes well for our heroes as far as what's in front of them--but things are looking distinctly gruesome everywhere else.

Time is a big issue in this kind of fight--a combat round is 6 seconds in-game. But the idea of the PCs getting updates from the other fronts every 6 seconds is preposterous. (And they can't see the others very well.) On the other hand, a combat round is about a half-hour real-time of moving and deciding and rolling (twice that when Frankie is playing) so if you limit the arriving update couriers to, say, one a game-minute, that's still basically one update per session (I limit full-on rolling on the battle of styrofoam cup bridge to the party and anyone immediately ordered by them--mostly only folks who can fit on the bridge, so it's only about 10-12 pairs of enemies per round.)

At that rate the strategy element in the rest of the fortress is so slow that it's invisible to the PCs., which means it's barely part of the game. I split the difference on the side of "easy" vs. realism at one update every 4 rounds.
Everybody's been pretty busy the last 3 weeks (every porn parody on earth--including Batman xxx--has decided they need to hire KK since she won Best Actress) so we haven't played in a couple weeks.

Nobody knows exactly what that boss skeleton in the armor on the horse is up to. He's been hanging back. Find out soon though, I figure.

Maybe You Saw It Coming, But If You Did, You Didn't Tell Me

See full-size here.


Dealing with the plumber and rolling Gia Jordan's character today--real post later.

The Alphabetical Monster Thing Available As A .pdf...

...you must be shitting me. No fucking way.

The whole thing is available right here in friendly HTML, with no download bullshit, no file-size issues, no compatibility issues, no waiting around to flip to the next page. Seriously, you want a pdf? When you hear music you like do you go "That was awesome, but can I get it on wax cylinder?" Plus the originals have all the peoples' comments with their ideas about monsters, many of which were brilliant even if I never did get around to saying it.

My Relationship With The Z Monster Is Complex

All the monsters-Z.

If your name starts with "Z", you quickly learn in school what an unlikely and unpopular letter it is. Do all children identify with the first letter of their first names? Do Davids feel for "D"s and Steves feel for "S"s? It was obscurely depressing to learn, when I was 8 or whatever, in The Phantom Tollbooth, that the reason nobody used "Z" was it didn't taste very good.

Anyway...

Zombie

There's only one "Z" monster--and, like the name "Zak", zombies became popular in the last decade. They are, in many ways, a symbol of that decade, and, like all popular monsters, a symbol of what people at that time feared in other people. So I wrote about them when discussing the Zeroes in my last book:

In movies, zombies were the most popular monster. They are unusual, among monsters, for being inferior to their victims and winning only by weight of numbers, and for having no brains, but wanting to eat them.

Night of the Living Dead is a really good movie, so is that one where they're in a shopping mall but man oh man am I sick of zombies. I think I'll be ready to hear about them sometime around 2020.
_____

In hopefully unrelated news, Frank Frazetta died today. Considering the recent weirdness with his family and his illness and his possibly going and fucking up his old paintings, this may not be the worst news (he hasn't been all there, apparently, for years) but it is a good time to remember that he was very very good, and did things with lush color and movement that no other artist ever had before, in any genre or at any time, and that it was worth having all those dead-eyed, sallow skinned, constipated, overrated Italian Renaissance painters and fiddly, brown-obsessed 19th century Orientalists if it meant that one day the bloodline would result in Frazetta. He was the Muad'Dib of the main Western line of painting and, along with Vermeer and Velasquez, is one of the few things that justifies its existence.