Christopher Allen and Shannon Appelcline At Skotos Tech Are Saving Up To Buy A Prius, I Guess

Two months ago this blog had its (and maybe any tabletop RPG blog's-) most plussed post since Blogspot started having plusses.

That was the one pointing out that, despite the fact that although RPGnet, the easiest-to-find RPG discussion place on the web, consistently picks moderators who cry misogyny and social decay every time they see a stray bra strap and are eager to bounce any member who disagrees with them, 'Net's parent company--Skotos Tech--seems more than content to make money off openly sexist ads.

So have they cleaned up their act? Let's take a look at today's front page…

It's especially charming how it looks like her head was cut out of a whole other Barbie and stuck on at the last minute.

Is this as blatant as the summer's "For Men Only" ad? Mayyyybe not.

Is this the kind of picture the RPGnet moderators would be lining the fuck up to complain about if it was slapped on the front of a White Wolf or WOTC RPG product instead of the front page of the RPG forum they romp on? No doubt.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that if allowing tacky dipshits who can't draw to advertise soundtracks with blurry nipples makes RPGnet money, Shannon Appelcline and Christopher Allen, the Skotos guys, are cool with that, and if allowing prudes to vent and play King of the Playground also makes RPGnet money, then Shannon Appelcline and Christopher Allen are cool with that, too. 

Guys: let us know when you've made enough money that you can afford to have your contribution to the hobby match your values. Or anybody's. We'll wait.

(What are we buying? Season tickets to the Cubs? New grill? Can't wait to hear about it!)

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Joesky Tax:

Here, I drew some monsters.

they get bigger when you click on them

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Don't Hold Your Breath...

Click to make waaaaaay bigger

...but Patrick and Kirin and I are working on turning this map into a dungeon.
It's got like 200 rooms, we already wrote them up, just working on editing, stats, using digital formatting to make the walls and doors obvious at a glance.
The place with the dots are where the text will go.
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It Continues To Rage Across The Country In A Variety Of Forms

Partisan

This form of pole arm is basically a spear--often with an ox tongue blade--to which a pair of small axe heads were added below the dagger blade. To the thrusting stab of the spear was added the defensive use of the side axe blades and their cutting/penetrating potential. Later versions of the partisan yielded a gradual change in the axe blades, so that they became almost unrecognisable as such. Typical of this is the Bohemian ear-spoon, a form of partisan where the axes have been changed to serve as piercing spikes (primarily to be used against plate armour) with a ranseur-like function.

-Unearthed Arcana

Rancor


Rancors were large carnivorous reptomammals native to the planet of Dathomir. They were usually born brown, but in special circumstances, such as the mutant rancor, jungle rancor, and the bull rancor, their color may have differed. Although found on other worlds such as Lehon—where they were brought by crashed starships—Ottethan, Carida, Corulag, and Felucia, those from Dathomir were said to be stronger and more intelligent than others. They have been used for many things, ranging from mounts for the Witches of Dathomir to pets for crime lords such as Jabba Desilijic Tiure to being a source of food, and as a means of entertainment by dropping someone into its pit.

-Wookiepedia

Partisan Rancor

The Partisan Rancor has insinuated itself into every level of daily life in the country and feeds on the fears of a deeply divided polity. The Partisan Rancor can trap friend and foe alike into adopting  uncomfortable positions in order to survive in their home districts. It's difficult to listen to, day in and day out.

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Government shutdown got you down? Were you waiting for Health and Human Services to deliver that vital Random Encounter Table to keep your game alive?

Don't worry! DIY D&D picks up where government fails, providing you with the essential services you need to continue hitting your friends with rods, staves, and wands-- the Secret Santicore is alive, kicking and wholly immune to the Partisan Rancor that has paralyzed the nation.

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Out The Fucking Door

It's been over a fucking year since James was like I'm suddenly struck by the idea of putting a young blonde in a blue dress on the cover of an adventure I'd call "Eat Me," and I told him I'd write it.

It's allegedly time to start the graphic design, meaning the document I just turned over is almost, probably, I think, maybe the final draft of A Red And Pleasant Land.

It's got...

-A setting with a war, meals, croquet, spatial distortions, time traps, gravity problems, looking-glass magic, puzzles, marmalade, warpigs and vampires

-4 monarchs and their retinues

-80ish pictures, about half in color

-Half a dozen maps

-Customs of Voidvojda

-Advice on campaign structure and running NPCs

-Further reading/listening/watching

-A new character class and A new spell

-47ish new monsters, statted, described and illustrated

-The Heart Queen's Castle (like 84 keyed rooms)

-The Looking Glass Palace (a 54 room dungeon)

-3 more sample locations with like 20 keyed areas each

-Quick rules for:

...characters with inherited rank

...characters controlling armies

...duels, duelling injuries and the duelling code of Voivodja

...PCs navigating mass battles

...mounted combat

...handling henchmen, familiars, etc in large battles

-Random tables for:

...adventure hooks

...random animals

...Drink Me's  and other anonymous gifts

...backgrounds for characters native to the setting

...random NPCs

...random events for lands at war

...stupid Wonderland conversations

...random intercepted communications

...another I Search The Body table

...instant location generation

...random objects

...random weird dungeon rooms

...relationships between NPCs

...NPC motives and hooks

...figuring out where characters that missed a session have been
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The Masticators

The Masticators are pair of carnivorous quadrupedal demons from the 453rd layer of the Abyss.

They have three attacks per round, immunity from ordinary weapons, reflect magic 70% of the time and are appalling in a variety of other ways none have lived to record.

Luckily, they are currently entrapped within a pair of panther statues on the south end of a black jade bridge in the Arcology of Cyanotica Bast and there's no reason they'd ever get free unless another demon offered an elf some wine and the guy elf went "Do you have anything stronger?" and the demon reached into his own mouth and pulled out a steaming goat skull filled with some pustulent liquid and the elf went and drank it, causing his arms and legs to fall off and the party tied him up and took him outside by the bridge and decided to pour mutagen in the elf's mouth and the elf rolled on a d1000 table for 6 mutations and in the course of becoming a regenerating, magic-immune, crested, golem-demon-lord with a fear of shoes also acquired a (d1000...) hatred of (d4 roll...see: Animals table, d100 roll...) panthers and immediately went and attacked the otherwise harmless but unnerving pair of statues and freed them.

But, seriously, what are the chances of that?
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I was the page from yesterday's calendar crumpled at the bottom of the waste basket

We killed a naga with burlap sacks in Rappan Athuk yesterday, and one in Qelong, with fire, the day before.

The story keeps going for those characters, but I could happily stop there.


Thanks Wikipedia Entry On Raymond Chandler:

In his introduction to Trouble Is My Business (1950), a collection of twelve of his short stories, Chandler provided insight on the formula for the detective story and how the pulp magazines differed from previous detective stories:

The emotional basis of the standard detective story was and had always been that murder will out and justice will be done. Its technical basis was the relative insignificance of everything except the final denouement. What led up to that was more or less passage work. The denouement would justify everything. The technical basis of the Black Mask (a pulp Chandler worked for) type of story on the other hand was that the scene outranked the plot, in the sense that a good plot was one which made good scenes. The ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing. We who tried to write it had the same point of view as the film makers. When I first went to Hollywood a very intelligent producer told me that you couldn't make a successful motion picture from a mystery story, because the whole point was a disclosure that took a few seconds of screen time while the audience was reaching for its hat. He was wrong, but only because he was thinking of the wrong kind of mystery.

This was what I took a lot longer to say a long time ago here when I was talking about how "story" in a classic RPG was episodic (but still a story) and "story" in allegedly story-centric games was classic drama.

The "standard detective story" Chandler talks about is built on the classic drama--the end gives meaning to what came before: intellectually--the (single) puzzle is at last solved--and morally--the characters final actions tell you what the whole thing meant.

In a Chandler story, whatever meaning there is, it's right there in the words on every page.
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Foreclusions

Temporal distortions in Voivodja very occasionally result in situations where outcomes precede the actions that caused them by several days. For example, a Dragoon Lieutenant may find herself in command of mercenaries that have not yet been hired, or a man may be sick on account of a custard he has not yet eaten. These premature events are known as foreclusions and can be immediately identified as such because they are accompanied by a quick moist crackling sound, as of batter frying.

Once a foreclusion occurs the foreclusion itself cannot usually be undone, but the presumed cause of the foreclusion (which will not yet have happened) can be prevented by making it impossible for the original presumed cause to occur and organizing a new causal event which would result in the same foreclusion--or at least one matching every observed property of the foreclusion.

  For instance, in the second example above, the gentleman's actual custard could be stolen before he ate it and he could be cursed so that whatever came out of his mouth turned into semidigested custard when exposed to air. If one discovered a foreclusion featuring a child crying over her dead mother, one could prevent the death by ensuring the mother's safety and then simply telling the child her mother died.  If the foreclusion featured the child explaining she'd seen her mother drown, then one could still stymie fate by protecting the mother and then dressing some otherwise unuseful woman convincingly in the mother's clothes and a wig and drowning her after inviting the child to watch.

From the upcoming A Red And Pleasant Land
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