Despite being dead broke, the wife and I are going to San Francisco for a few days. The blog will lie a little fallow, and I won't respond to anything until the new year.
So happy new year to one and all!
Monday, December 28, 2009
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Hawk the Slayer
Hawk the Slayer is a classic of bad 80s fantasy, and is available for rental from Netflix. I recently watched it again for the first time since the 1980s, and found myself remembering just how much this film seemed like most games of D&D I played or DMed in high school (and even into college.) I have to say that Jack Palance's scenery chewing still entertains me, as does Crow the android Elf. And the terrible effects seem more charming than cheesy to me, but that could just be old age playing tricks on me. (I must admit, though, that the realization that Hawk has gone on to become Christian Shephard on Lost does make the experience a bit more surreal.)
What impresses me most about the film, though, is its unblinking sincerity. The terrible acting and script are buoyed up by a dedication to this film as if it were Citizen Kane, which isn't far off from what I see as the style of the best RPG campaigns I have played in. Frankly, if I can get a game to feel as entertainingly and devotedly cheesy as this, I consider that a victory in DMing.
What impresses me most about the film, though, is its unblinking sincerity. The terrible acting and script are buoyed up by a dedication to this film as if it were Citizen Kane, which isn't far off from what I see as the style of the best RPG campaigns I have played in. Frankly, if I can get a game to feel as entertainingly and devotedly cheesy as this, I consider that a victory in DMing.
Friday, December 25, 2009
A Merry Christmas
For those of you who celebrate Christmas, either as a religious or secular holiday, merry Christmas.
We are having a rather spartan time at the Easterly household, trying to conserve or tiny amount of cash for our brief San Francisco vacation, but we are soon going to visit the combination of my wife's family and in-laws, which will be about 40 people (and that's only because my wife Sheri's four brothers won't be there. If they were there with spouses/partners and kids, we would be looking at another 14 people at this shindig...) It will be a hoot, I'm sure.
There's a good chance I will spend a chunk of time playing with my niece and talking to my brother in law about possible methodological choices for his M.A. thesis, but I'm hoping for some time just relaxing and celebrating time with loved ones.
May your day be filled with peace, love, and maybe some games.
We are having a rather spartan time at the Easterly household, trying to conserve or tiny amount of cash for our brief San Francisco vacation, but we are soon going to visit the combination of my wife's family and in-laws, which will be about 40 people (and that's only because my wife Sheri's four brothers won't be there. If they were there with spouses/partners and kids, we would be looking at another 14 people at this shindig...) It will be a hoot, I'm sure.
There's a good chance I will spend a chunk of time playing with my niece and talking to my brother in law about possible methodological choices for his M.A. thesis, but I'm hoping for some time just relaxing and celebrating time with loved ones.
May your day be filled with peace, love, and maybe some games.
Fiend Folio Friday
This week's fiends fit into the theme of subterranean bird-men. It was thanks to the Planet Algol blog that I even began thinking of the Dire Corby again. Fearless subterranean pack-hunting bird-men with rock-hard claws and a tendency to shriek "Doom! Doom!", the Dire Corby is a random bit of monstrosity that mechanically looks more or less like any other humanoid.
Likewise, the armored Hook Horror shares many of these traits, but in a larger, mute, and hard-to-surprise package. Though not intended to work together, they seemed to be pieces of similar design, both having flocks of scary humanoid birdiness with twin rending limbs, both emitting creepy shrieking noises, and both being high on the gonzo "WTF" monster list.As a teen, my question was always why the heck such things existed in the game world. They seemed silly to me then, but now I see them as potentially alien and surreal, real horrors that hunt the halls of an alien and terrible underworld.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Next Steps....
Blair at Planet Algol has more than once noted that I should think of putting together an Adventure Path for Savage Swords of Athanor, a thought I have left to stew in the back of my head for a while. Of course, given the general wisdom in the Old School community that upholds the sacred status of sandbox settings, I think that doing something like this will revoke what little OSR cred I might have, but the idea isn't such a bad one. But my concerns about this plan revolve around two issues: writing adventures, and setting up a fixed path.
The former is a tough thing to consider. There are some good adventure writers out there — for instance, I like Melan's wacky adventures, and I like James Raggi's moody and stylistic pieces. But I have always run games off loose notes and vague ideas of the future. I don't plot out ten games in advance, I write up some ideas, run a game, and adjust. The idea of plotting out an adventure path is, well, weird.
Right now, I'm playing in a 4e conversion of the 3e big-ass adventure Red Hand of Doom, and I often feel that part of the game has involved us looking for the right clues to follow the plot, and those portions of the experience have sucked. And RHoD isn't a terrible railroad-y adventure (like, say, all of the original Dragonlance modules), perhaps even less so than the venerable classics of the Slaver series or even the Against the Giants series. Before I even think about this, I may need to consider classics like the old TSR U-series modules as well as Bad Axe Games' Slavelords of Cydonia to get some inspiration before even considering anything else.
If I do this, I suspect the final product will be a bit more sparse and open-ended than, say Paizo's Age of Worms or Rise of the Runelords and more like old TSR modules.
The former is a tough thing to consider. There are some good adventure writers out there — for instance, I like Melan's wacky adventures, and I like James Raggi's moody and stylistic pieces. But I have always run games off loose notes and vague ideas of the future. I don't plot out ten games in advance, I write up some ideas, run a game, and adjust. The idea of plotting out an adventure path is, well, weird.
Right now, I'm playing in a 4e conversion of the 3e big-ass adventure Red Hand of Doom, and I often feel that part of the game has involved us looking for the right clues to follow the plot, and those portions of the experience have sucked. And RHoD isn't a terrible railroad-y adventure (like, say, all of the original Dragonlance modules), perhaps even less so than the venerable classics of the Slaver series or even the Against the Giants series. Before I even think about this, I may need to consider classics like the old TSR U-series modules as well as Bad Axe Games' Slavelords of Cydonia to get some inspiration before even considering anything else.
If I do this, I suspect the final product will be a bit more sparse and open-ended than, say Paizo's Age of Worms or Rise of the Runelords and more like old TSR modules.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Savage Swords of Athanor on Lulu
Well, I finally got off my tuchus and put Savage Swords of Athanor up for sale on Lulu. A lavishly un-illustrated 64 pages of A5 saddle-stitched goodness, you can order SSoA as a print item for $8 US or as a PDF for $2. A perfect stocking-stuffer for yourself.
While you are on Lulu, you can also look to add the latest issue of Fight On! magazine (I'm still waiting for issue 7 in the mail), Rob Conley's Supplement VI: The Majestic Wilderlands, or one of the fine products from Mythmere Games. Feel free to add your own Lulu purchase suggestions in the comments, because I want to share love with other people publishing their own stuff through Lulu....
While you are on Lulu, you can also look to add the latest issue of Fight On! magazine (I'm still waiting for issue 7 in the mail), Rob Conley's Supplement VI: The Majestic Wilderlands, or one of the fine products from Mythmere Games. Feel free to add your own Lulu purchase suggestions in the comments, because I want to share love with other people publishing their own stuff through Lulu....
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Some cheap plugs
In which I plug some particularly inspiring blogs I think you should be reading. I have two current favorites that have made for regular entertainment:
- If you enjoy what I do, read Planet Algol. Not only is Planet Algol my top referrer of readers (even above direct links, the RPG Bloggers site, Jim Raggi, and Jeff Rients), but it's a rollicking read that I regularly raid for ideas (and it seems Blair returns the favor, too, which only seems fair.)
- Ancient Vaults and Eldritch Secrets is a constant stream of interesting spells, monsters and magic-items, but his ongoing tales of a morally questionable band of adventurers and their equally questionable rivals is a sheer joy. At first, I missed out on the awesomeness that this blog is because I skipped what I had assumed to be par-for-the-course annoying game fiction, but boy was I wrong. What's wrong with you? Why haven't you gone there already!
Friday, December 18, 2009
Fiend Folio Friday
One of my personal favorites was always the grell. Why? Well, it was a levitating brain with a crapload of paralyzing tentacles, a big beak, and an inexplicable resistance to electrical attacks. I mean, look at that picture. That's the stuff of I-ate-pepperoni-pizza-just-before-bedtime nightmares. There's no point to a giant brain, and no way to figure out what the hell it's doing here. It's a deadly, freaky death-brain, man. And it attacks you 11 times a round, paralyzes you, and then rips the hell out of you the next round. What is there to explain?
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
In Defense of Genre Mixing
I'm not sure how we got to a point in the gaming world where the idea of having science fiction elements in a fantasy setting have gotten to stick in the craws of so many people. I think people have begun to see the big fantasy fiction umbrella as two totally different reals of Fantasy and Science Fiction, as if they are wholly separate. I blame the slew of Tolkien imitators who have become so influential in the years since the 1970s, if only to have a nice scapegoat. The growth of heroic fantasy and of the publishing industry has certainly taken the gonzo excesses of Sword and Sorcery and filed them down to neater, cleaner forms, but also seem to have made an industry where the new formulas are much less interesting and fun to me than the old ones. (And longer -- when did we decide that every new fantasy novel had to be 500 pages and the first book in a trilogy/pentad/gazilliad? What happened to short, fast-paced individual novels and novellas?)
I was watching Krull the other day (it's available on Netflix for instant viewing), and found myself compelled by its mix of semi-renaissance garb (the other part of the semi- seemed to be 80s hair band costume), sci-fi villain, and moments of actually solid plotting and writing buried in the general mess of a movie that seemed to have major script re-writes and cutting room edits inflicted on it at the last minute. It's a hot mess of a film, but one that fits a long-lost sense of mixing mythical, magical, and science fiction elements into a single piece where all of the elements seem part of a (sloppy) whole. All that, mess included, strikes me as the heart of what a good RPG campaign looks like.
It seems to me that part of the fun of gaming has always been the weird, chimerical nature of individual campaigns, stealing from a variety of sources and putting together something new and ideosyncratic around the DM and the players. It's like a sort of living collage of found media, and the enjoyment of the campaign often comes despite the incoherence of the process, because the sum of the parts is much less than the whole experience at the table.
I was watching Krull the other day (it's available on Netflix for instant viewing), and found myself compelled by its mix of semi-renaissance garb (the other part of the semi- seemed to be 80s hair band costume), sci-fi villain, and moments of actually solid plotting and writing buried in the general mess of a movie that seemed to have major script re-writes and cutting room edits inflicted on it at the last minute. It's a hot mess of a film, but one that fits a long-lost sense of mixing mythical, magical, and science fiction elements into a single piece where all of the elements seem part of a (sloppy) whole. All that, mess included, strikes me as the heart of what a good RPG campaign looks like.
It seems to me that part of the fun of gaming has always been the weird, chimerical nature of individual campaigns, stealing from a variety of sources and putting together something new and ideosyncratic around the DM and the players. It's like a sort of living collage of found media, and the enjoyment of the campaign often comes despite the incoherence of the process, because the sum of the parts is much less than the whole experience at the table.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Four Major Campaign Villains for Athanor
While it's possible to just do a game of exploration using the Athanor hex map, or to do a long-term dungeon crawl in the Undercity below Zamora, my play style is more to create a campaign where players can actually face a big villain and develop their own sense of a larger purpose. And, frankly, I haven't had a group yet where that wasn't something that they responded well to, even when I was running AD&D 1e back in the early 1980s.
So, in order to provide some room for that kind of gaming, here are four ideas for the Big Bads behind major plots on Athanor. Personally, I would use at least two of these ideas, if not all four.
So, in order to provide some room for that kind of gaming, here are four ideas for the Big Bads behind major plots on Athanor. Personally, I would use at least two of these ideas, if not all four.
- The Witch Kings of Ylum: A handful have survived, locked in deep tombs, as liches. If awakened, they will work on awakening still other witch-kings and strange sorcerous armies of undead and worse.
- The Machines of Aquila: a handful of intelligent and semi-intelligent doomsday devices created by the Empire of Aquila as part of its war on Ylum survive. Seeing the use of magic in the world at large, these machines think Ylum has managed to win the war and, if awakened, these machines will begin to purge the world.
- Mysterious Alien Civilization: Survivors of a crash in the Starfall mountain, the vaguely reptilian, grey-skinned aliens are masters of strange technology. They are amoral, ruthless, and dedicated to conducting experiments on all life in order to find a wy to extend their own.
- The Lords of the Moons: Selune is home to a civilization of alien creatures that live under the surface of the moon. Looking like large jellyfish with brains floating in their centers, the Selunians have powerful psychic powers, advanced technology, and spacecraft. They are served by a race of pale, primitive bird-people with iron-sharp claws called the Corbin. The other moon, Miera, is home to several mechanized, idyllic dome cities in good repair, populated by gold-skinned, pampered urbanites with no ability to survive outside their cities, and no knowledge of the past. The Selunians use them as food, and have built a religion around sacrifices of Mierans to Selunians. There is a problem with the Selunians' food supply, and now the Selunians are beginning to raid Athanor.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Redrawn campaign map.
In trying to rewrite my Athanor materials for self-publication on Lulu, I decided to redraw the campaign map. Here is what I have, done in photoshop:
Scale: 6 miles per hex.
Map key:
Scale: 6 miles per hex.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
A Maudlin Post for the Holidays
The combination of the holidays and perusing my original AD&D books sends me back to Christmas, 1981. The previous summer, I had become enamored of playing AD&D with friends, and was playing every week. I was deeply obsessed, which I suspect many of you would identify with, even though I didn't even have a Player's Handbook.
That Christmas, I had a stack of goodies under the tree: the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide, the Monster Manual, the Fiend Folio, Deities and Demigods, boxes of official minis from Grenadier, a set of dice, and a set of D&D character sheets-- easily over 100 dollars worth of merchandise which, I realize in retrospect, was a huge cost to my mother. Probably more than we could really afford, actually.
I still have the books and most of the die and even had the figures up till a few years ago, and played using that rule set up through college before moving on to other things. My mother never understood my roleplaying hobby, but she saw it as a passion, and she nurtured it when she saw a spark of something good in what I was doing. She even used it to motivate me to excel in school, to write, to create art, and to keep growing as a person.
She was a clever woman, my mother. This January will be nine years since she passed away, but some days it seems like it was just yesterday that I was opening the packages my mother left for me as if I had found the greatest treasure of my life.
That Christmas, I had a stack of goodies under the tree: the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide, the Monster Manual, the Fiend Folio, Deities and Demigods, boxes of official minis from Grenadier, a set of dice, and a set of D&D character sheets-- easily over 100 dollars worth of merchandise which, I realize in retrospect, was a huge cost to my mother. Probably more than we could really afford, actually.
I still have the books and most of the die and even had the figures up till a few years ago, and played using that rule set up through college before moving on to other things. My mother never understood my roleplaying hobby, but she saw it as a passion, and she nurtured it when she saw a spark of something good in what I was doing. She even used it to motivate me to excel in school, to write, to create art, and to keep growing as a person.
She was a clever woman, my mother. This January will be nine years since she passed away, but some days it seems like it was just yesterday that I was opening the packages my mother left for me as if I had found the greatest treasure of my life.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Finding my way in all this stuff I have created.
As the quarter comes to a close and leaves me to spend a winter break cuddling up with Bourdieu and Foucault to find a way to develop an theory of cultural and personal resiliency that explains how marginalized students create agency and places of resistance within culturally hegemonizing forces (can you tell I'm a graduate student?), I also find myself with relatively more time to work on Athanor.
I think that with Athanor, I am not interested as much in pure hexcrawling sandbox play (though I have been working on material for hexcrawling in Athanor) and I don't really find megadungeons as compelling (and I have maps for that at least). Instead, I want to find a way to "map" out interesting social settings, roleplay opportunities, and chances for adventure. So I have been thinking about the kinds of thing that feel like they are part of the right genre:
I need to put this stuff together into a set of possible encounters and come up with a relationship between all the pieces.
And then, I need to stop thinking so much about it all. Maybe run a game.
I just got my Google Wave invite. At some point in the near future, I'll have to start recruiting players. Right now, I need to do present a pilot study for my dissertation, revise my written report for the quarter, and then take a long nap.
I think that with Athanor, I am not interested as much in pure hexcrawling sandbox play (though I have been working on material for hexcrawling in Athanor) and I don't really find megadungeons as compelling (and I have maps for that at least). Instead, I want to find a way to "map" out interesting social settings, roleplay opportunities, and chances for adventure. So I have been thinking about the kinds of thing that feel like they are part of the right genre:
- Love interest of the hero kidnapped, heroes must pursue.
- Pursuing villains into ruins filled with terrible monsters.
- Weird science gone amok in the hands of a mad scientist.
- Intelligent but barbaric alien war-bands.
- Averting war between kingdoms.
- Sky-pirate raids.
- Death-traps.
- Gloating villains.
- Villains who are actually guardians of a secret history of Athanor.
- Exotic locales.
- Strange fauna.
- Getting lost far from home.
I need to put this stuff together into a set of possible encounters and come up with a relationship between all the pieces.
And then, I need to stop thinking so much about it all. Maybe run a game.
I just got my Google Wave invite. At some point in the near future, I'll have to start recruiting players. Right now, I need to do present a pilot study for my dissertation, revise my written report for the quarter, and then take a long nap.
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