Ultimate GM kit

A shipment from Amazon arrived today, and I'm now pretty much done with my GM kit. Here it is, in all of it's "glory":

The backbone of the kit is the canvas vintage backpack, obviously. Everything else goes in there. Behind and to the right is my GM screen. I still need to print out my inserts, but that'll only take me a few minutes. In front of the GM screen is my metal dice bag. The bag is lambskin, of course, but all of the dice within it are metal dice sets, in velvet cloth bags in which they came, so they don't bang against each other too much and get nicked and scratched. Next to the black leather metal dice bag is my blutooth speaker, which I can now take and play some music at my session. The brown leather bag next to that is of metal pirate coins, which I use as tokens for Heroism Points. In front of that is a pleather fancy pencil case, with several mechanical pencils, nice erasers and extra led tubes. You can also see the little wood and brass dice cup with a lid, my home made dice tray (sadly, the pleather insert is a little bit bubbled; I didn't do a good enough job gluing and weighing down the liner. You'll also see in front of the dice tray my other dice sets in their various bags (three of which are leather, one is pleather.) I have one more dice bag where I have a bunch of mismatched dice and some cheaper plastic coins, but I probably won't take that with me. Finally, the blue book is one of my my leather bound journals, where I can take notes on the campaign.

Also not shown are the little leather journals that I have that my players could use to take their own notes in, or a wooden mug or cup that I'd drink out of for more flavor (both literally and figuratively) and a printout of my game in a folder—because, again, I haven't taken my pdf file up to the other computer where the printer is (the wireless on that printer never seemed to work, and I didn't care enough to figure it out. We print things so rarely.)

I could always get rid of most of those dice. I have may more than I need, obviously. But I like them, and I may want to let my players borrow a set if I'm playing with people who may not have their own dice (or who may have forgotten them.)

UPDATE: I'll probably rip out the lining of my dice tray and replace it with some adhesive-backed upholstery PU leather, or something like that. Or maybe I'll just try spray adhesive and reglue the existing pleather. I'll need some new blades for my hobby knife, though, to make sure I get a good trim to the correct size to fit well. That's part of the problem too; cutting it with scissors just didn't really do the trick.

Dark Fantasy X blog and banner

At one point, I had decided to create a new blog to talk specifically about Dark Fantasy X, and I created the blog https://darkfantasygamerx.blogspot.com. My thought at the time was, I guess, that I hadn't been talking about it much here and why not separate it? However, whatever I was planning on using this my original main blog for never materialized, so I'm talking about Dark Fantasy X here. In spite of the fact that the title doesn't really work anymore, after my renaming of the setting and game, I still feel like this is the most sensible place to talk about it. I won't delete the darkfantasygamerx blog, but I probably will use it very infrequently, and I may even migrate it to a discussion on Space Opera X and SWTOR, since I have more posts about that there than here recently. 

I also don't think that I can rename this blog without it being a pain in the butt and causing all kinds of confusion, so I don't want the URL to change.

But I thought a tongue-in-cheek banner chance highlighting the hostile takeover of the blog by subject manner originally slated to go elsewhere would be fun. I have the original Dark•Heritage text, which was no longer accurate or relevant, and I slapped "Fantasy X" over the "•Heritage Mk. V" stuff. However, rather than just taking the old file, I thought I'd retype it to make it more clear. 

I had a pleasant surprise when I did; the • symbol in the font that I choose renders as a big "Cthulhu Lives" banner, like so:

While that's not what my original banner looked like, I didn't care; that was pretty cool, and appropriately topical, honestly. If I'd known that, I might well have used that font from the get-go for my banner for Dark•Heritage. 

Anyway, you can see it up top, but here's the new banner here too:

And for reference, here's the original Dark•Heritage and Dark Fantasy X banners. I might yet re-add the subtag: fantasy - horror - madness. Or I might not. 

Final word on the OGL, now with clickbait title and Midjourney art slidehows!

Maybe. Probably. I doubt that there will be any reason, even academic curiosity, for me to talk about the OGL debacle anymore.

While the "win" of Hasbro saying that they will add the 5e SRD into CC, and that they will not attempt to cancel the OGL 1.0a sounds good, here's what we did not win:

• What about the 3e SRD? No word. I presume it's not going into CC, or being addressed at all. Don't trust that it will still be available, and the OSR, for instance, is largely based on that SRD. Of course, maybe it doesn't really matter. I'm not super familiar with 5e, but I presume you could engineer an extension of it that still meets the needs of anyone using the OGL to create, say, an OSR game.
• So they're not trying to revoke the OGL. Now. But they do not back down from their claim that they can. And I strongly believe that they will not extend their OGL to 6e compatibility. And they'll probably try it again. Maybe that doesn't matter since the 5e SRD is now CC, but maybe it is. Lots of people made products and still make products that aren't based on the 5e SRD.
• Their "morality" police claim was not touched. As I've said plenty of times in the past, neither Paizo nor any other third party company (except maybe a handful of OSR companies) seems to be concerned about it, probably because they're all woke cultists too. It's unfortunate, because this is the most alarming part of the whole debacle, even if some are unable to see it. I think there's a lot of naiveté about this issue, even among sensible Leftists Lite. They presume that anything overtly racist or whatever is what they're talking about, but given that simply representing reality as it actually is comes across to SJWs as point and shriek racism, they can use this clause to block anybody that they want by finding anything that they decide is inappropriate. Even if the day before nobody in the world thought it was inappropriate.
• 6e and their video game inspired monetization plans are not likely to have been significantly impacted. At most, WotC is accepting that there will be a loss of some current players who will stick with older editions and third parties, but they no doubt deem that loss acceptable because they expect in influx of monetized players in the 6e ecology.

I think, as I said before, that the pressure from the fans and third party publishers probably had relatively little impact on WotC's decision. And the monetization of the players and the "walled garden" strategy still continues. And for those idiots who still run around talking about the difference between the "suits" and the "developers"; I'll remind you that it was the developers in that cringy 6e launch trailer talking about all of the things that it'll be doing. The developers are all in on the 6e strategy too. Maybe they have misgivings about it, maybe they'd rather have a traditional RPG business model... but if so, they're not saying so, and they're contributing to the 6e business model.

AI Covers

I know that the whole issue of AI generated art is a hot topic right now, and that there's a court case trying to prove that AI art is derivative and therefore somebody somehow is owed money for it. That seems like a real stretch to prove in court, but then again, our courts are notoriously corrupt, unpredictable and injust, so who knows what will happen. In any case, I'd been playing around with Midjourney for a while already, but I obviously hadn't been using the right prompts. Here's some potential new covers for Dark Fantasy X, all of them much better than the crappy one that I had in place already. Most of them feature vampires, but I'm kind of in a vampire mood lately as I prepare for CULT OF UNDEATH, where they will feature prominently. 

Undead

I've been playing around with making wights in Hero Forge. It's been fun. I've got plenty of undead, actually. Here's a selection of some of them. This will be good as I finish up CHAOS IN WAYCHESTER and start thinking more about CULT OF UNDEATH which must follow. 

A barrow-wight with a hook hand.

A land-wight

Blind pirate wight

Pirate wight

Not originally meant to be a wight, but I actually think it works better as one. Maybe I'll add glowing eyes too, but maybe not.

An older library wight. The eyes actually aren't working for me anymore.

My original attempt at a wight. It still works, but I like my newer ones better.

Some liches, of various provenance. Some of them are old ones that I made, others are ones I found in the library. I actually haven't made any new ones recently, but some of these are still good enough to work.

This one looks cartoonish to me now. I should probably get rid of him.

This is fine, but I don't know that it looks like the lich archetype exactly.

A real classic. I wish I could take credit, but it's a library lich.

This one too. I like the poncho look, which is a trick with a hidden extra arm and a banner.

Maybe a little too over-the-top Dark Lordy, but not bad. Reminds me of Disney's interpretation of the Horned King from Lloyd Alexander.

One of the real classic library liches.

I have lots of vampires too. Some of them I've made, but many are library grabs.

Classic Dracula look

Classic Nosferatu look

People forget that when Jonathan Harker first meets Dracula he's rather old and wizened, and needs to feed regularly to regain his vigor; which is why he wants to relocate in the first place. I have several older, withered vampires

Ugly vampires, barely stepped up from ghouls.

A couple of Orlock/Nosferatu style vamps

Very classic Hammer film Dracula

A militarized vampire king

A count Strahd interpretation, including the original module cover art coloration and lighting. Quite a nice work of art, I say. (Library. I'm not responsible.)

Couple of classic vampire renditions

This shirtless vampire gladiator always struck me as weird, but I can't bring myself to get rid of it. Even if it's a weird idea, it's well done.

One of my early nosferatu style efforts.

Old Draculas

A named character that I'm already planning for CULT OF UNDEATH.

Some mummies and a few other assorted undead.

Hammer Film mummy

Undead knight of some kind

Ghost killer

Actually, the pirate LeChuck from a rather silly video game. It's a cool image, though.

Ghost Rider in the Sky

A couple of attempts at a ghost

Very classic fantasy mummy. Could almost be a Tomb Kings character.

I dunno. Some kind of undead rider.

Clearly modeled on Ankh su Namun from The Mummy

Basic skeleton archer

Another ghost

I dunno. A foreigner undead. 

After the success of Game of Thrones, winter undead are all the rage.

Two angles of a wraith

Derf, who does Hero Forge tutorials, made this undead cultist. Couldn't help but grab it.

Not exactly undead, but at least a Necromancer.

A Nizrekh ancient one. I haven't actually thought about what that is yet.