Banners

You may think that I'm overly obsessed with the branding of banner images, and that's certainly a fair criticism. Getting excited about putting what is basically Word Art in GIMP and adding a lens flair is probably kind of silly. But there you have it. Here's the final banners for all modules that I'll be "working" on for the foreseeable future.

Clicking on them to bring them up will not only make them bigger but also put them against a dark background, so you can see them against both dark and light. I'll also officially create the tags for all of these now; I've had DFX for some time. EFX is now retired, to be replaced by HFX, then we've got HMX, LTKX, SOX and WWX.

And I've got to decide what (if anything) to do with my Space Opera X blog. When I was only going to do the two, it made sense to keep them on separate blogs. Now, probably not so much.

Sigh.

Modules

As promised, here's the titles. Espionage X, Old West X and Cthulhu X have all hit the road and are no longer under consideration.

First, the horror ones.

I can redo Eldritch and Macabre slightly; the drop shadow goes just off the image, and the text is bold, which doesn't look quit as good. I don't think. I'm undecided. None of these names is striking me as the clear favorite on seeing them as banners. Sigh.

Next, weird west.

I think I'm leaning slightly towards Weird West X, but we'll see. If nothing else, it at least has a different acronym than Dark Fantasy X.

How about the espionage techno-thrillers?

I'm honestly leaning towards License to Kill X right now. But I do like both of the other options quite a bit.

Just for completeness' sake, here's the ones that weren't under discussion:

I think I need to redo Space Opera X too. The drop shadow is a bit cut off on the right. Same on the bottom of the big X of High Fantasy X.

Sigh. That's what I get for doing them fast and then looking closely later.

Halloween and Modular Game X updates!

Although I don’t do it every year anymore, I’ve pulled out a few of my Midnight Syndicate and Nox Arcana albums. These used to be the same band a long time ago. Joseph Vargo joined Midnight Syndicate, gave them some direction and vision, and they put together the first of their Gothic albums, which 15 years or so ago I was finding out about because they were for sale in Halloween stores. At the time, there were only about four or five Nox Arcana albums, which are now up to a good three times that many or more. They mostly sound the same; when Joseph Vargo split and formed Nox Arcana, he started making his own versions of the exact same type of music. In fact, he’d often seem to piggy-back on what Midnight Syndicate were themselves doing—responding to Midnight Syndicate's Dungeons & Dragons album with Blood of the Dragon on the same themes, and MS's Vampyre with Transylvania, etc. 

It seems like there was a lot of drama between them; lawsuits and all kinds of things. It’s clear that Vargo was the talent and direction that made Midnight Syndicate what they were, but it also seems clear that they quickly tired of him personally and wanted to keep doing it without him. Like many modest talents, I presume that he was kind of a prima donna or narcissist. They seem to have been content, more or less, with doing what they were doing for a while without reference to him, except that of course they were continuing the direction that he set them on. Vargo’s own band, Nox Arcana, which is now a band of just him, was much more prolific over the years, easily doing three times the output of MS. To be honest, I’m not 100% sure that this is all that impressive, as one thing that you will pretty quickly notice if you listen to a lot of this stuff is that it all kind of sounds the same and is very repetitive. His attempts to make thematic distinctions between albums are somewhat half-hearted; no matter what they all kind of have the same synthesized beat, in varying tempos, a lot of ghost choral effects and Gothic haunted house organs, and music boxes and out of tune pianos, etc. Your very typical Halloween music sounds. There’s some real gems in the collection, but mostly they all run together. When I listen to too much of either of these guys, my mind just wanders. Which is fine; actually, probably that’s its whole purpose. Maybe you’re not really “supposed” to listen to the music so much as soak it in as ambiance while doing something else, like reading, writing, or walking through a haunted spook alley attraction or Halloween party or something. 

Except that, curiously, Nox Arcana’s works aren’t often very good for that. He has the annoying habit, at least to me, of including a few tracks where he recites this pretentious and kind of hoaky poetry or other “moody” spoken parts, which really make it difficult to focus on what you’re reading or writing when they start. If I can remember which ones they are, I remove them from my playlists. 

There was just a brief window where such stuff had a place in the market, I think; but now there are so many talented people putting their stuff out there on Youtube and Spotify that these guys now seem kind of quaint in comparison. And, of course, if musicality is important to you, you'll do better listening to scary movie soundtracks like the one for Woman in Black or End of Days or Alien: Covenant. I don't recommend any of those as movies, per se, but I certainly recommend their soundtracks.

Anyway, I’ve been listening to some of this stuff, as we approach the Halloween season. Like Al Jourgenson says, though for me every day is Halloween. I’m always in the mood for creepy, melancholy music, veiled, or not so veiled horror themes and ghost stories, and spooky décor. I don’t intend to stop just because November 1st rolls around. 

Also; after coming up with my titles for the modules yesterday, I decided I didn’t really like a lot of them. Cthulhu X is not supposed to be just be for Lovecraftian horror; in fact, I’m more likely to do ghost stories and other more “Gothic” horror, so I want to rename that. Not sure to what. Bloody Horror X? Macabre Horror X? Macabre X? Eldritch Horror X?

I’m going to change Old West X to Weird West X or Dark Frontier X, and probably change Espionage X to Spy Craft X, Spy Hard X, Techno Thriller X or License to Kill X. I’ll add banners for these; once I see them, it might be easier to decide which titles I like. The horror one is the one I’m struggling with the most. Horror X just isn’t enough, but I’m not sure what to add to it. Maybe simply Dark Horror X, although that seems kind of superfluous, since horror is by definition a dark genre. I dunno…

In any case, for most of these modules, I mostly just need to reorganize and scan/edit stuff that I already have in order to do this, so this is a relatively easy task. It’ll take some time, but it won’t be difficult. I’m excited about the possibilities.

Also, since I adopted the X moniker, partly because X is your typical variable in algebra, partly because of the connotation of the X-files and the old 90s game Conspiracy X, and partly because of Racer X, the mysterious character from Speed Racer who I thought was really cool when I was 6-7 years old, I adopted a new Spacer X image for my youtube channel and stuff generally. I’m going to use at least one of these as the cover image for Modular Game X too.

Modular Game X

I kind of like universal systems. The reason for this is that frankly, I don’t really like systems that much. So what I need a system to do is 1) meet the basic requirements of tone and mood that I have, or at least be easily modifiable with simple house rules to accommodate a range of tone and mood, 2) have a universal task resolution mechanic so that I’m not actually concerned much about the system, because I know that there’s a consistent mechanic that I can apply no matter what is happening in game without having to look something up, and 3) be robust and flexible enough to cover any genre or campaign that I would conceivably want to run.

Universal systems have a long history in the industry, even though my exposure to them is relatively more limited, because TSR didn’t ever do them. When TSR wanted to do new genres, they wrote completely different games that had no compatibility between each other or with their flagship D&D. So, for instance, we got the completely unrelated games of Star Frontiers, Boot Hill, Gangbusters, Top Secret, Gamma World, etc. Chaosium developed a system for RuneQuest that they later adapted to every other game that they did, on the other hand, backdooring their way into a universal system in the form of Basic Roleplaying (BRP), a skill-based percentile roll-under system. GURPS was developed a bit later specifically to be a one size fits all system, although like BRP was originally based on a fantasy game, The Fantasy Trip. I don’t hear much about GURPS these days, but that may be as much a factor of where I hang out in online RPG space as much as anything else. GURPS had, at least briefly, a lot of good notoriety as having released so many different types of setting and source books that you could do all kinds of things with it.

More recently, Savage Worlds seems to have gained a fair bit of steam as a generic engine that many settings, including third parties have used. It may be more my style than d20 at least in some ways, but my main go-to for generic engines has always been d20 Modern. I’m not actually super interested in playing d20 Modern again, but I’m remembering why I loved it once upon a time. Some twelve or so years ago, I was still remarking on how wonderful I thought it was that such a thing existed. And I still believe that, although I no longer believe that the very clunky and chunky d20 system is the right answer for me. D20 Modern was saddled with one of the least interesting names ever released (I guess Basic Roleplaying is arguably worse) as well as one that isn’t really accurate. But I don’t know that d20 One Size Fits All really works, just because it’s more accurate. Back in the day, I used d20 Modern for a number of things; I played in more than one campaign or game that were actually modern spy/supernatural thrillers, kind of like a more action-packed X-files (obviously right up my alley) or even almost Cthulhu-like. As an aside, I also have the d20 Cthulhu book. It’s a great book. Probably my favorite single game book, actually. But it’ superfluous. You can do everything it does already with d20 Modern.† I also ran, a few times, even, the classic Dark•Matter scenario "Exit 23" with d20 Modern several times as a one-shot convention game. D20 Modern had two official settings released for it; Urban Arcana, which was just "modern D&D" and which wasn’t super interesting, honestly, and Dark•Matter, which was a reworking of the classic Alternity setting, which was pretty popular. But there were a number of campaign models that were kind of like Cliff’s Notes of settings, as well as the various Polyhedron minigames that were all based on d20 Modern, showing that you could do sword & planet, giant combat robot piloting, Raiders of the Lost Ark style pulp adventuring, X-files or Cthulhu like supernatural investigation/horror, and even groovy Josie & the Pussy-cats or Scooby-doo inspired Hanna-Barbera 70s hijinks. (Literally. Hi-jinx was the name of that minigame.) d20 Future also essentially brought space opera Star*Drive and Star Frontiers to d20 Modern, and d20 Apocalypse plus the Omega World minigame brought Gamma World and other gonzo post apocalyptic stuff too. (Or less gonzo, if all you want is more The Road Warrior.) d20 Modern could do it all.

I’ve decided that it would be cool to create the X-game. A generic version of DFX that could, by layering in different modules, become Dark Fantasy X, Space Opera X, High Fantasy X (formerly Elemental Fantasy X), Old West X, Cthulhu X, Espionage X, or whatever else I wanted it to be. It’d be the rules-light equivalent that I always wanted to d20 Modern. And, ironically, all d20 material would be pretty much useable without even needing conversion right at the table as is, so any spells, monsters, or whatever can be used if I need them right off the bat. All of the m20 stuff would also be useable as is; I just have a few more abilities and skills than most m20 games, but otherwise, my system is almost identical. The differences are down to tone and mood rules, which could all be modular. I'd have a base rules game, similar to DFX but shorter, since it wouldn't have magic, equipment, most of the monsters & other foes listings, or the fantasy races, sanity, etc. and then the specifically DFX stuff could be a module, along with all of those other modules, which would be house rules and additional material that made it work for the setting or genre or tone. For example Cthulhu X would also need sanity rules, while Space Opera X would need cyborg equipment and spaceships, etc.

The banners below aren't meant to be exhaustive, I could potentially add a Gangsters X, a Cyberpunk X, Musketeers X, a Pirates X, or even a Like Zoinks X... although I have no immediate plans to do any of those. I may not need to; by the time I get to Pirates X, I may have so many appropriate rules already in place that there's no point in calling it out, for instance. But again, the point is I can do anything I ever want to with this game. It will, in time eclipse DFX, and DFX will be a module within it, but only one. 

I feel like this is a little bit of a crazy change of direction for me to go with this, but at the same time; it won't actually be too hard given that so much of the material is already there, I just need to reorganize it. And when it's done, holy cow, the possibilities!

† A lot of people seem to struggle with this idea. But, there’s classes! Levels! High power! Frankly, this is stupid. Wizards of the Coast have been pretty up-front that even in D&D almost nobody plays characters higher than 7th level, and hardly any campaigns ever get into that range. If this is true for D&D, it should be even more true for Cthulhu. And if you’re only playing at low levels and low power, just because it’s d20 doesn’t mean that it’s high powered. That’s idiotic. If you play at 1-2 level, your Cthulhu d20 characters are actually lower powered and more fragile than BRP Cthulhu characters. If you play at around level 3-5 or so, you’re in the same range. If you’re playing at level 6+ and are complaining about how powerful your characters are, you have only yourself to blame.