Dark Sun for 2010

Although I'm not a 4e player, I have to admit that I'm kinda excited about the recent announcement, coming out from GenCon, that Dark Sun is going to be the new setting for 2010. I might even buy it, even without having the game itself!

I don't actually know that much about Dark Sun really, but the concept intrigues me greatly. Perhaps not surprisingly; when I start describing my favorite homebrew setting ever, Dark•Heritage, I very often get told by folks that it sounds like Dark Sun. Since I never knew much about Dark Sun, if that's really true, then it's a rather exciting convergence. In the original "Campaign Classics" issue of Dragon magazine, the authors interviewed the original setting developers, and the Dark Sun guys said that Dark Sun used Barsoom as a basis for the setting, rather than Middle-earth. That probably explains the similarity; a fairly dried out, tired world full of alien creatures.

Of course, that also could imply that my setting and Dark Sun only superficially resemble each other at a high level. That's probably true. In any case, I'm excited to see what Dark Sun is really and truly all about. So far, most of what I know about it I learned on Wikipedia.

Also; that appears to be Wayne Reynolds artwork for the cover. I love Wayne Reynolds.

In Search of the Trojan War

I just watched the 6-hour BBC miniseries In Search of the Trojan War (again) which, while nearly 25 years old now, still is mostly accurate and most of the conclusions narrator slash amateur archeologist and historian Michael Wood presents are amongst the accepted mainstream hypotheses nowadays. Personally, my favorite episodes are the last two; the ones that put the putative historical core that formed the basis for The Iliad in historical context of what was going on in the eastern Mediterranean, Aegean and Asia Minor regions between about 1300 B.C. and 1180 or so B.C. (the Trojan War being dated to roughly 1250 B.C.)

Wood presents an intriguing scenario; a patchwork of Empires (the so-called "Great Powers Club") of the historical near east include Egypt, Hatti, Babylon, Assyria, Mitanni and possibly the Achaean Greeks as a member on the northwestern fringe, with a number of other powerful city-states that serve more as clients, vassals and occasionally rebellious kingdoms with pretentions to greatness, including Amurru, Arzawa, the Assuwa Confederation, Israel, etc.

The last decades of the Bronze Age are characterized by inter-Imperial "cold wars" which occasionally flared up into real battles. With the exception of the famous clash at Qadesh, in which Hittite and Egyptian forces fought directly, this was often mostly done by these empires offering up sacrificial clients; Egypt and Babylon (and later Assyria) encouraged and supported rebellions of client states in the Levant, and Greek interference on the west coast of Asia Minor (including, perhaps, the historical core of the Trojan War itself) caused a possible conflict with the Hittites, as reported in the "Tawagalawa Letter" recoved on clay tablet from the Hittite archive at Boğazköy in present day Turkey.

Of course, this appearance of vibrancy was perhaps a bit of a sham, because a few decades later, the infamous Bronze Age collapse occured. The Mycenean palace civilization was thrown into ruins, and Greece entered a 500 year dark age. The Hittite kingdom completely disappeared, to be subsequently nearly completely forgotten for thousands of years, and the Phrygians (probably of Balkan origin) later rule over their territory. Almost every city state from the Dardanelles to the Nile was destroyed. Egypt kept the best records of the time, recounting numerous battles with the displaced "Sea Peoples"; of mysterious extraction, they appear to be entire displaced populations looking for places to settle.

When the dust cleared, the Hittites were gone, the Myceneans were gone, the Mitanni were gone, the Philistines and other foreign populations were settled into new lands, and the so-called Iron Age was in full swing. Greece later emerged from its dark age as Classical Greece, Asia Minor's culture and ethnic make-up was completely changed, the Levant and the Phoenicians/Canaanites had almost completely replaced the Greeks as the Mediterranean naval power, and other vast changes in societies throughout the Near East had taken place.

I bring this up, because going through Deadhouse Gates, which I'm currently reading (only about 20-25% complete so far) has made me think that this same basic plot outline would make an absolutely fascinating story arc for a long, fantasy epic of the type that Erikson writes. Twist the geography a bit so it's not immediately recognizeable, make all of the various entities unrecognizeable culturally and linguistically, and you've got a skeletal outline of an incredible fantasy epic; the story of the fall of empires.

Great stuff. I think history also provides great fodder for "fantasization" in the form of the history of the Tarim basin, but that's a post for another day...

God in the Bowl

I read the second trade paperback from Dark Horse's Conan series. This one features, mostly, "The God in the Bowl" one of the slightly slower, yet more interesting Conan stories told, about a murder investigation. It bears a striking resemblance in some ways to Howard's version of the famous Sherlock Holmes story, "The Adventure of the Speckled Band."

Kurt Busiek and Cary Nord continue to impress with this volume. The rest of the book is taken up with some original stories, including the first encounter of Conan with sorcerous arch-nemesis Thoth-Amon, when Conan thwarts his attempt on the life of a more benign sorcerer, Kalanthes, the High Priest of Ibis. An all new character, Janissa, is introduced, who is kinda Red Sonja like in some ways, although much darker in nature and background. She's a really interesting character, actually, that I'd like to see more of.

One thing that Busiek (and Co.) really get is the Lovecraftian horror vibe that is actually quite integral to the Conan canon. Thoth-Amon (and the Hyperboreans before him) are shown as completely amoral predators who don't fear to let loose any kind of horror whatsoever in pursuit of their goals.

This book, taking place mostly in Nemedia, shows Conan approaching the more "classic" parts of the setting, away from the far north that featured in volume 1, although, like vol 1, it's heavily based around an actual Howard story that's told extremely well. In fact, in some ways, this recreation of Howard's story is better than Howard's original.

d20 Freeport Companion, part 1

Although I haven't read the entire document yet (see my discussion of reading gaming PDFs below) I've read a fair chunk of the d20 Freeport Companion, a book that I almost didn't bother with. I'm kinda glad I did; I expected it would mostly stat up NPCs from the systemless setting, and while it did indeed do that, that took much less space than I thought, leaving room for a number of other things that I found quite useful. Let me review the sections that I've read individually. Ignoring the Introduction and whatnot, which I did read, but which isn't worth reviewing. As a quick aside, note the change in title of the document; I bought (and have) the d20 Freeport Companion. Because of the change in the d20 license, this is now renamed the 3rd Era Freeport Companion and the image I grabbed from Green Ronin reflects that. It does not use the d20 license (and, in fact, can't) but the OGL only. They've also created a nifty badge that kinda looks like the old d20 logo, but which says 3rd Era to identify it. Nice move.

Races in Freeport: The first chapter is relatively short, and mostly describes how the various D&D races make up the population of Freeport. There's little mechanically in here; stats for races already exist in proper D&D products and aren't repeated. There is a sidebar for a gnome variant; a militaristic, hard-nosed gnome variant, and then there's stats for the azhar which are essentially fire genasi without the LA +1. I'd like to see this same treatment applied to the rest of the planetouched races, actually. I really like the concept of tieflings and aasimar, but the LA +1 mechanism is a hassle.

Classes in Freeport: There are a number of alternate classes that the book proposes as well. A lot of people dislike alternate 20-level classes, but I actually quite like them, and I want a lot of them. The more there are, the more likely that I can get the character I want without baggage and assumptions that I don't. The classes presented here are the assassin, the corsair, the monster hunter, the noble, and the survivor. Most of them are interesting and a useful addition to a player's toolkit, but all of them are more focused than the PHB classes, and that works against some of them.

The Assassin is basically a variant rogue. It's got rogue BAB and HD, two good saves, an ability that's similar to sneak attack (but not quite---doesn't work in flanking positions) and an a la carte menu of abilities similar to the rogue's list, but different. Frankly, I'd rather see this as variant abilities for a rogue rather than as a unique class; I really liked the idea of a core assassin class, but I found the application of it feeling superfluous. In almost all cases, I'd rather just have a rogue, with a few of the class abilities here ported over or converted to feats.

The Corsair occupies the same space and niche as Complete Warrior's swashbuckler class, but with a slightly more nautical bent. I like it better, actually, although a canny GM might want to swap out a class ability or two in a non-nautical setting. It's also got a sneak-attack-but-not-quite ability; actually slightly better than sneak attack, because it works in one more situation (attacks for non-lethal damage.) In the case of both this class and the assassin, I think the new ability was superfluous and adds unnecessary complexity. Sneak attack as is is already good enough.

The Monster Hunter is an interesting class; kinda ranger-like, but focused very, very specifically on the favored enemy concept, taking that idea and driving it to be an entire class. Realistically, some of the options will almost never be used (a campaign in which taking favored enemies of oozes or plants, for example, has got to be extremely rare) and a few monster classes actually provide benefits that always work (I'm especially thinking of fey; there's no reason not to max this one out because its general utility is so good) but otherwise, I found the concept intriguing.

The Noble is to the aristocrat NPC class what the fighter is to the warrior NPC class, and oddly enough covers much of the same space as a bard, except without spellcasting. It's a support class that makes everybody in the group better with some abilities, makes enemies less competent, and has a lot of chances to shine in non-combat roleplaying situations, since they're suave, persuasive and imperative by nature. This is a nice take on an old concept; several other d20 games have had noble classes (Star Wars, Wheel of Time) and several other settings have had takes on the noble as well, occasionally under different names (Sovereign Stone, Dragonlance, Rokugan). I like this take on it, though.

Finally, The Survivor is an alt.monk that isn't so supernaturally flavored. As such, it's not likely to ever be a favorite class of mine (I'm not a huge fan of the whole concept of the monk) but I'll probably like it better than the monk itself. I think the defender from Midnight is probably the last word in this space, but I'd like to lay the survivor and the defender side by side and see which one I like best.

Madness in Freeport: Given that Freeport features an awful lot of Lovecraftian influence, it's perhaps not surprising that it also features a Sanity mechanic. Unlike the open content Sanity mechanic released under Unearthed Arcana, this isn't merely a porting of the Cthulhu mechanic, it's actually a native d20 mechanic, and one that's simpler than its predecessor. Basically it works by having character accrue "Madness points" that are, usually, detrimental (although in certain circumstances it's not necessarily bad to be a little crazy.) Typical D&D mechanics can remove them (higher level cleric spells like heal, although lower level spells like calm emotions can make you temporarily immune to the effects of your madness points.)

It's a little complex to introduce, but anyone who's ever played a Cthulhu-themed game will tell you that it's part of the fun to have the risk of growing insanity looming over your character. Plus, it's still less complex than any of the alternatives I've read.

Freeport Bestiary: There's a smallish bestiary of new monsters and stuff to face. In fact, there's quite a few entries, although they aren't described in much detail. I was a bit spoiled by the Creatures of Freeport supplement (a PDF that I have read) and all the detail it lavished on its entries; this was more MM format; just the stats and a quick summary of how it works. Some of the stuff is Freeport specific---Howard-esque serpent people, burnlings, etc. but other stuff is merely nautical of pirate-themed fun stuff, like brass monkeys, blemmyaes and shadow serpents. All in all, this kind of stuff is always useful, but then again, I've also got so much of it that I feel overwhelmed by options when looking for critters against which to pit my PCs.

In another post, at some point, I'd like to review the prestige classes, the skills, feats and magic portions of the book, and the included adventure, which will pretty much get all the content reviewed.

One final note, for those who care about this kind of thing (I don't, usually, but then again, I don't publish)---the book is very generous with its open content. Almost the entire book is open content, with the exception of the adventure itself and the proper names of the NPCs. The Section 15 of the OGL document is also very long, although I question whether or not it really needs to be. I think Green Ronin has habitually put most of their entire catalog in the Section 15 whether they actually took any rules from every given product, or not. That means, they also have to put everyone else that was quoted in the Section 15 of every one of the products listed in their Section 15. This trickle down effect has caused there to be at least 50-60 line items in the section 15. Not important exactly, just curious.

Gaming PDFs

At one point, about a year or two ago, I went on a rash of gaming PDF purchases. It seemed liked a good idea at the time; instant delivery, reduced cost, ability to copy and paste, etc. However, I've since found out that it doesn't really work for me. So now, I'm sitting on a fairly big pile of PDFs that I don't use and in most cases, haven't read.

Maybe it'd be different if I had a laptop. As it is, I only have one computer where it's reasonable for me to read them, and that computer is shared. In other words, most of the time I want to use it, my wife or my kids are on it. In addition, it's in a room where distractions abound, and it's difficult to get through long stretches of computer text. And, I just find the format is not conducive to long reading. Books composed of shorter, discrete sections (like monster books, for instance) work better than most other types, but in general, even they're harder for me to use.

However, I've decided to make a concerted effort to better see what I've got on PDF, and read at least sections of many of them. To check them out for posterity, and possible utility in my own game. So, I've recently been reading many sections of the d20 Freeport Companion. This was truly an impulse buy, brought about shortly after my acquisition of The Pirate's Guide to Freeport which is an excellent resource, but which is completely systemless. At first, I was content to let things remain that way, since the way I play doesn't demand a lot of system support. But, like I said, when I got caught up in my PDF acquisition frenzy, I got that one. Turns out, it has a number of pretty nifty things in it. My next post will be a review of portions of the d20 Freeport Companion, most especially the new classes, the races chapter, and the madness chapter, with a few other comments thrown in for fun.

Kids' D&D, session 2

I sat down with Alex and Spencer for about an hour again this weekend. Their character, Bendek the sorcerer and Ormando the ranger, checked out their new digs on the edge of Sandpoint, slept for the night, had breakfast and went out on the town to see if there was any sherrifing work that needed doing.

Sure enough, a young man came running into town saying that he was attacked on the old forest road, and he had to flee, leaving his brother and their entire crop of turnips for the season on the road. Ormando and Bendek hefted their weapons and jogged off into the northern forest road.

Road was a generous description; it was a very narrow set of two ruts, overgrown in the middle with grass, and shadowed by looming trees that grew just to the side of the path. It didn't take long to find the cart, sitting in the middle of the road. There was blood sprayed on the side of it.

It was eerily silent here. No birds or animals made any sound. Ormando caught sight of some footprints; booted ones and also bare, human-like prints with long claw-like toenails. Following the tracks, about 50 years into the woods he found a body lying facedown in the ferns. When he turned it over, it groaned. The kid's brother. He was still alive. They bandaged him up, but he was mostly delirious. Ranting about "the wrong people" while they worked, he didn't give them much to go on, but certainly creeped them out. They hauled him back to the cart and put him down carefully on top of the turnips.

That's when something attacked them. It looked like a person... kinda... except that it was very emaciated, had pale, grayish skin that was shrunken around its wiry muscles like a mummy, had glowing red eyes, and long teeth and claw-like nails. It clawed at them, and Ormando could feel poison seeping through his veins. Bendek tried to put it to sleep magically, but nothing happened. He changed tack and blasted it with a magical missile attack. Ormando slashed at it with his sword and axe. Another one loped out of the woods, making their case more desperate. They finally managed to bring the first one down, but now Bendek lay on the ground paralyzed by the poison of the creature's claws. Ormando fought well, but soon found himself feeling faint.

Bendek finally managed to shake off the paralytic effects and kill the creature with a well-placed spell, and then he had to bandage up the unconscious Ormando, load him on the cart along with the farmer (and the turnips) and the strange bodies of their assailants, and carry them slowly out of the forest.

In town, the brothers were reunited happily, and the two sherrifs were given complimentary bowls of chicken soup and told to take the rest of the day off, while their companion Jeffers took care of them while they convalesced.

They got a clue or two. The assailants were identified as guards that were with a merchant wagon that came through town about a week ago, before heading up north to try his mercantile luck up there. When they were in town, they looked like normal people, not weird semi-vampiric undead things. They were told that the merchant who had employed them was a frequent passer-by throughout the region, and they could expect him to come through again within a few days, after doing his usual rounds of the villages in the area.

Next time...

I dunno. Any ideas?

Conan and the Frost Giant's Daughter

I didn't have this on my "What I'm Reading" sidebar, but I have also been reading the trade paperback collection of Conan stories by Darkhorse Comics, volume 1. Kurt Busiek is the writer, and Cary Nord is the penciller. Darkhorse made a stylistic decision to not ink the Conan stuff, which actually looks really good. It gives the book a slightly rougher, almost unfinished look to it, which reminds me somewhat of Frazetta's style. I've seen other books done that way (such as the Wolverine trade paperback Origin pencilled by Andy Kubert, but it doesn't have quite the same feel to it.) Cary Nord just has a better style for Conan, I think.

The best part of this is that not only does Cary Nord dig the Frazetta style, but Kurt Busiek is a brilliant writer who gets Howard better than any pastiche writer to date, in my opinion. The centerpiece of all of the trade paperbacks is an adaptation of one of Howard's actual stories, but the other stories, and framing elements and transition pieces feel seamless with them. The Howard story here is, naturally enough, "The Frost Giant's Daughter" but the opening segment, with Conan making friends of a sort with the Aesir amongst whom he's traveling, and the follow-up story of Conan enslaved by the Hyperboreans, works brilliantly as well.

This Conan isn't a dumb jock like the movie version, and he isn't a heroic figure, like past pastiches have often painted him: he's a surly, moody barbarian. He's got some nobility of spirit, but he's also a scary man in a lot of ways. The setting, too, has a ripe Howardesque, sword & sorcery feel to it. It's decadent, it's brutal, and it's sleazy.

Although I'm not adding them to my sidebars, I'm going through the next 4-5 or so trade paperbacks again---I own the first four, and I've got the next two coming via Interlibrary Loan. So, if I throw in a quick and dirty review (like this one) don't be too surprised.

Hawk and Fisher

I was puttering around Amazon, when my recent re-encounter with drnuncheon's Freeport Story Hour reminded me to check out Hawk and Fisher. drnuncheon himself considers them to be a significant influence on the scenario (at the very least, the paradigm of a male/female team of Watch members patrolling the worst beat in a thoroughly corrupt fantasy city was cribbed from those novels, which is a great take on Freeport, by the way.) A number of months ago, I had picked up Swords in Haven at Borders, which is the first three Hawk and Fisher novels republished and repackaged in a single volume by ROC Trade Publishing, a division of Penguin that focuses on the fantastic.

I haven't read it yet, because I've got a very long list of "To Read" books that I own. I'm barely crawling through the two books that are currently works in progress as it is, what with the summer schedule and all.

However, I saw the second volume (Guards of Haven), collecting the original books four through six, for $.03 on Amazon, via a used book seller. In Like New condition. (By the way, S&H was $3.99. Total bill, $4.02. I've bought a fair number of books where the price itself was essentially nothing, but the S&H was twice or more what actual shipping would be. I suppose it's a decent way to offload catalog of used books. Shrug.) So I ordered it. I'm also going to shortlist the first Hawk and Fisher book to read immediately after I finish the Steven Erikson doorstop novel that I'm reading now.

Freeport Story Hour

"Story Hours" are an interesting phenomena, particular to ENWorld, the premiere website and discussion forum for Dungeons & Dragons (yes, I prefer it to the official discussion forums on the Wizards of the Coast website.) It's an interesting concept; the whole "let me tell you about my campaign" writ large. Because the web as a forum is only semi-sensitive to audience reaction, it's possible for people to say an awful lot about stuff that you wouldn't be able to in regular conversation. Huge info-dumps, even. This is how the "story hour" idea started; people wrote and posted logs of their games; what happened, in blow by blow detail.

This later "multifurcated", if that's a word, into a number of styles. Some people use story hours as fairly sparse shorthand for what happened. Some people elaborate with recitations of dialogue, NPC vignettes, and other things that make the form more closely resemble "regular" literature. Some people are very strict about only including exactly what happened in game. Others are writing long after the fact, and are recreating from vague memories the details of the game in broad strokes.

In any case, a "market" for "story hours" developed at ENWorld to the point where a subforum was created specifically to cater to them, and some story hours have become big draws for the site.

One that I've always enjoyed is drnuncheon's (that's the guy's username, anyway) Freeport Story Hour, a recitation of a playthrough of the original third edition Freeport Trilogy, and an interesting exploration of the setting, and urban fantasy gaming in general. In fact, when I've been asked (and it's come up a few times) how to do a successful urban fantasy campaign, one of the first things I do is point them to this story hour. It's a great example of a successful campaign set in a fantasy urban environment, where the adventures take place (often) within the city itself, instead of out in a "dungeon" somewhere.

The story hour is also very breezily written; it settles into a more of a "semi-novel" style, with dialogue and good descriptions of action, and relatively few intrusive "gameisms" in the narrative. After starting out as more of a game log, anyway. The author then does go on in other "out of narration" posts to give some interesting game info too. I could recommend a number of story hours (I've always been partial to barsoomcore's various efforts (of Scratch Factory fame) for instance, and I've yet to meet anyone who didn't like jonrog1's or PirateCat's story hours) but for today, drnuncheon gets the honors of being recommended. I strongly suggest you check out the Dr.'s efforts.

Sadly, ENWorld has been going through a bit of a server crisis of some kind, and response time is fairly slow. Nonetheless, I recommend opening a spare window and get it to start loading. They might still have the tool to download the thread as a text file; that seems like the best way to go.

Here's the link. Also, check out the picture below of the Freeport Trilogy (combined and updated to 3.5 version) by Wayne Reynolds.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/story-hour/103-drnuncheons-freeport-story-hour.html

Peter Mullen

Peter Mullen is a practicing (and teaching) artist who has clearly been inspired by Erol Otus, and has an online gallery that shows very keenly that inspiration.

I think it's kinda fun. I'm not a huge Erol Otus fan; it's a strange sort of very simplified and stylized kind of art that actually is easy to mistake for "amateurish" if you don't know what you're looking for; certainly it's a rejection of more realistic or detailed art styles.

However, I think the gallery linked below is kinda fun. It's got a very nostalgic feel to it, and there's technical proficiency there alright; you just have to know what you're looking for to see it in the interplay of light and shadow, and composition.

http://www.freewebs.com/mullenart/art.htm

I've put one of my favorites up as a sample; a black and white pencil (or chalk; the resolution isn't high enough for me to be sure) image of an astronaut on the moon encountering the skeleton of a prior astronaut half buried in the lunar dust. A very intriguing concept, and very well composed.

Surprise party I missed

This last weekend, I was invited (secretly, by the wife of a friend of mine who lives a few hours away) to join them for a surprise birthday party. Unfortunately, I had prior committments related to my oldest son and his Scout Camp, so I couldn't go. However, the reason I mention this is because I also anticipated that when I get together with this guy, some awesome gaming will ensue. He's already a legendary GM, with a legendary setting under his belt, and the two of us are remarkably of a similar mind and tastes when it comes to almost everything gaming related.

And that, plus the post I made last really reminds me how important it is to find folks with whom you mesh if you want to have a good gaming experience. When I first starting playing D&D again, back in the first year or so that 3e was in print, I found a group of guys more or less my age by advertising at a Wizards of the Coast retail store (none of which still exist, I believe, although that's neither here nor there.) At the time, I was happy with that; we did some decent gaming, and it was fun to try out the new system that I otherwise probably wouldn't have been using. However, I didn't really mesh well with these guys gaming wise; I got along well enough with them otherwise, but what I wanted from the game and what they wanted didn't really intersect very well. Plus, I had to drive really far to get to the location in which they gamed. When my third kid Alexander was born, that was a good excuse for me to drop out and not end up coming back. Plus, around that time, my wife overheard some folks at church mention D&D, and the next thing I knew, I was involved with another group that was much closer to home.

This group and I also initially thrived; we got along very well as friends, but... again, I found out fairly soon that our gaming tastes were not very compatible. They tended more towards traditional high fantasy, where I was moving more and more towards a low fantasy, sword & sorcery, dark fantasy or even horror vibe. Albeit with a swashbuckling flair. Plus; they had terrible follow-through; I don't know how many abortive campaigns we started only to have them fizzle without any conclusion.

Around that time, I was stumbling into the group that I have now; a group of guys (and one lady). And while I don't know that we're all on the same page gaming wise either, at least we seem better able to rotate through styles and allow other folks to get what they want from time to time. In most respects, this is the best gaming I've ever had with these guys, and I'm glad that we all came across each other.

Now, in an ideal world, I'd find people with my exact tastes, and distance would be no barrier. The guy who's surprise party I had to miss (sorry, dude!)? He'd be in my regular group. Along with a bunch of other people spread throughout the globe who've demonstrated that we're on exactly the same page gaming wise. One way to attempt this is play-by-post. Sadly, I've only had limited successes with this medium, but with the right people, it seems a viable way to game. It's not really the same as face-to-face gaming at all, but it can still be fun.

The secret of a successful Pbp is one that I don't know for sure how you can gauge upfront though; you need people who are very actively engaged, who post regularly, and who help keep up the momentum. I've seen from sad experience that the GM cannot drive that kind of thing on his own. It simply doesn't work. Also, players who post a lot, but who do absolutely nothing to drive the game forward are also a bit deceptive (not on purpose!) in that it seems activity is going on, but in reality, the game isn't happening. I think it's a lack of social cues like you'd see in face to face that cause this problem, but you need a few people who are willing to take decisive action, who are anxiously engaged in the game, and who are willing to see it through and not lose interest after a few weeks or months. Keeping the pace up in a Pbp is very difficult indeed.

My current Pbp, which is stalled due to technical issues at the site where I run it, is basically "run" by two of the players. Most of the players are fairly active, but two of them are the ones who "drive" the game by acting decisively. I think without them, the game would really have floundered, so to you two: my hat's off. Thanks!

The art of running a game

I was recently involved in an online discussion (unexpected and bizarre virtual slapfight is a better description) about the role of a gamemaster (GM) in a roleplaying game. The discussion sparked from a comment made about Tracy Hickman and the old Dragonlance modules, which are notoriously "railroady" modules, i.e., if played as written, they are really only allowed to unfold in a single way. Many (if not most) players dislike playing in such an environment, because being told that strategies they might come across arbitrarily fail because they're not the "golden" ones that the author and/or the GM anticipates and "writes" ahead of time is not very fun. I've been on the recieving end of a railroad at least once that really comes to mind, and it kinda sucks.

Anyway, I made an offhand comment following a description by one guy that those modules sucked and that it was the module's fault. I firmly believe that it was the GM's fault, and here's the reasons why.

When someone takes on the role of the GM, they also take on the responsibility voiced by Harry Truman: "The buck stops here." The GM is always responsible for what happens at the table. He can't blame a lousy module, because one of his prime responsibilities if presenting a good game to the players. This means, at a minimum, adapting the play experience to what the players want, but ideally it means screening and modifying the plans for the session. A module that's clearly a railroad with a group that doesn't like railroads (i.e., most groups) needs to have the railroady aspects jettisoned and the GM needs to allow other methods of reaching the conclusion of the module.

My own philosophy, not that I'm suggesting that this is the "best" merely what works best for me, is to read modules and adventures with an eye towards taking vignettes; interesting locations, encounters, NPCs and concepts, but recombining and "kitbashing" them together into my own creation that best suits the needs of my campaign.

Japanese people are weird...

On the off chance that you didn't already know that, or don't believe it, check out this trailer for RoboGeisha. Coming soon to a Japanese theater. Probably not near you.

Dungeons & Dragons

Someone who read my profile and was struck by this line: "It so happens that I'm not a huge fan of D&D per se, but that type of game is what we're talking about here. " asked me, reasonably I think, why I cared about Dungeons & Dragons then. The context here was a discussion about the "OSR movement" (which I'll post on at some other time because that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish) in which I guess it was questioned why I should "care" about discussing D&D when my stated opinion is that I don't necessarily even like it.

Well, that's a fair question. Maybe I should give a quick and dirty "RPG autobiography." That way you can see where I'm coming from and what I'm up to when I talk about RPGs.

I started off very young (2nd or 3rd grade, so it would have been... 1979 or 1980 or so?) I had a friend, who's house I really liked to go to because he was kinda spoiled and had a complete collection of the Kenner Star Wars toys. This was before The Empire Strikes Back came out, so, again... confirmation on the date. That movie came out in May of 1980. He also had a copy of the Dungeons & Dragons boxed set (don't know which one) and he attempted to run me through a scenario. I say "attempted" because, frankly, I was much more interested in his Death Star Playset than I was in this game he was trying to get me to play. It didn't "click" with me yet.

Not too long afterwards, though, I "got it." I actually picked up (or was given, more likely) the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Guide, and reading through that book finally made me understand what the game could be all about. I had always been a fan of the fantastic: mythology and fantasy, and now here was a game where you could take on the role of one of those fantastic heroes and go... do cool fantastic stuff. That said, I still only sporadically got a chance to play; that friend with all the Star Wars stuff? He moved away. I didn't know anyone with D&D anymore, although I saw them at bookstores, department stores and the hobby shop down the street from me, and flipped through them every chance I got to absorb what I could of the ambience.

A few years later, in late elementary school, middle school and junior high, I had some friends who played and were also fantasy fans. We'd lend each other books, argue about who was cooler between Tarzan and Conan; Tolkien or Lloyd Alexander, and... we played D&D. For the first time, I was able to take the concept I liked and run with it. About this time, Endless Quest, TolkienQuest and Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks were out too, so I ate through those at a voracious pace.

However... I quickly became disaffected too. The whole paradigm of what characters did in D&D; the obsessive searching of empty rooms in bizarre "dungeons", the focus on killing for treasure and experience... that didn't resemble at all the fantasy stories that I loved, and which was the whole reason I was so fascinated with the promise of fantasy roleplaying. There was an awful lot of strange arbitrariness in D&D too that really rubbed me the wrong way. I also tried out lots of other games, mostly the TSR ones like Star Frontiers, Top Secret, Boot Hill and others, but eventually I kinda fell away from gaming as I advanced into my High School years. I was still friends with these same guys and still saw them, but they got distracted by the other pleasures of being a teenager too. I don't know if they also were disaffected by the way D&D was structured or if I was unique in that regard, but in any case, I left D&D in the mid-80s, well before Second Edition came out, and didn't look back for a long time. Other than a handful of looks on the shelf at the bookstore to see what was going on with the hobby from time to time.

In the mid-90s, three things happened more or less together which changed my attitude on gaming substantially. The first was that I discovered the White Wolf games; Vampire and Werewolf. I was instantly caught up in the excitement of playing in this innovative (well, it seemed like it at the time) setting, and I hate to say it, but the pretentious "storytelling" vibe also appealed to me too, seeming to eschew all of the things that I had disliked about my D&D experience, and crafting a roleplaying game expectation that was more in line with my tastes. I eventually became equally disaffected with White Wolf, but at the time, it was a tremendous influence on me.

The second thing that happened was that, while in the apartment of a friend of mine doing something (I forget what) I saw a boxed set of Top Secret S.I. in his room. This led to a conversation about gaming, and later to a session or two. With adults. Gaming with adults, who apparently had similar tastes as me in what we wanted from the game (a happy coincidence that at the time I had no idea how wrong that could have done) was such an improved situation from the junior high gaming I'd done years ago, that I really could see how my gaming ideal; the one that I left the hobby because it seemed unrealizable, was perhaps realizeable after all. One of the other guys had been big into Traveller, so I picked some of that up too, and my own copy of Top Secret. And I started buying Werewolf books. Mostly to read, but I did use them on occasion, too.

And the third thing that happened was that I discovered the nascent internet. Now, I could read news, essays and arguments on the old Usenet forums and private messageboards about gaming. I even tried my hand at playing in a play-by-email game or two.

These three things together meant that I rediscovered gaming as a viable hobby and never once looked back. That doesn't mean that my gaming was necessarily all that good. I was in grad school, working full time, married, having kids, and otherwise very busy. The guys I gamed with were also getting married, graduating and moving away, going on internships, working long hours and studying even longer hours... in short, our gaming was good when it happened, but the schedule was infrequent and irregular. None of us in those days looked at D&D.

In June 2000, I finished my MBA and took a full time job, moving across the country for work and taking my young family with me. This was about the time that Third Edition and the OGL came out. I found this movement fascinating, and now with a regular schedule (which meant time) and a regular largish paycheck (which meant disposible income) I jumped back into D&D again. Third Edition initially seemed to have addressed many of my concerns; the system was now robust enough to handle a variety of tasks that the older editions either ignored or handwaved away poorly, and much of the arbitrariness was taken away. I felt for the first time that I could play D&D the way I had always wanted to. When d20 Star Wars and Wheel of Time came out, I came to see the possibilities of the system as a whole (although I also remarked that Star Wars and Wheel of Time were, after all, not too far removed in tone from D&D). When d20 Call of Cthulhu came out, I finally agreed that d20 could do anything I needed it to. In fact, the d20 Modern game seemed designed specifically to facilitate just that.

Cracks in the seams started showing themselves, though. 3.5 came out. What? I just bought this stuff, and now you want me to rebuy it for a few minor changes? Well, a lot of the changes weren't minor. Or, at least they weren't few. But they weren't necessarily improvements either. Some of them were, but some of them clearly took a step backwards. This helped me to start seeing things without the rosy glasses of excitement in the moment. d20 wasn't necessarily that great of a game after all. It didn't work well across the entire spectrum of levels. Higher level d20, especially D&D, was in fact very tedious and difficult to play. I realized also that a lot of folks didn't play the way I did; I took to heart the motto "tools not rules" and used the rules of the game in ways that suited me, not bothering to nitpick and double check every single skill check DC and crap like that. Other people found the game very difficult because of the arcane web of rules that governed every possible thing you tried. I didn't; like I said, I ignored a lot of rules unless it looked like it'd be fun to use it, and played fairly fast and loose, and so did my group, but I can see the merit in the problem anyway.

The inherent D&Disms also started to really bother me after a while. Magic was everywhere. As prestige classes, feats, items, monsters and spells proliferated, I found many of them trite and silly. The whole tone of the game started to wear on me. The game didn't play well "cinematically"; without a battlemat, it was difficult to run a decent combat. This is when I realized that, although it had been flexible enough to allow me to play the games I wanted to, it really was designed around a "back to the dungeon" concept; a paradigm that drove me away from D&D in the first place. Again; D&D didn't resemble anything I had ever read or would want to; my whole problem with it in the first place.

However, this time rather than give it up, I decided to roll up my sleeves and find a way to make d20 work for me. It wasn't really that hard; if I don't like high level play, I can avoid it by keeping my games at low and mid level. A few house rules, most of them cribbed (rather than designed by yours truly; a talent I do not really possess) from Unearthed Arcana and third party publishers banged the inherent setting that the mechanics implied into something much more palateable to me. A few other more drastic optional house rules reduced the need for so much magic all the time, and in fact did away with some of it.

The modular and moddable nature of d20 came to the rescue, and while what I prefer to play has a passing resemblance to D&D as written, it's really also got some very notable differences to the point where a few people have said that it's some other d20 fantasy game altogether.

I'm OK with this. I've made my peace with d20. Rather than continue to look for the mythical "Holy Grail" of gaming systems, I've got one that I can use for almost any game I could possibly imagine wanting to run, with only a minimum of fuss to customize the system for the game in question. There's still a few things I don't really like about the system, but I shrug and live with them. They're not dealbreakers for me anymore. Not only that, the positives outweigh the negatives in this case; I can swallow a few things I don't like in order to get the stuff that I do.

So, when Fourth Edition was announced, and it immediately became clear that backwards compatibility with my d20 stuff wasn't going to be a high priority, my interest in it waned to a mild academic curiosity. I had no interest in actually adopting those rules any more than I had any interest in adopting the older rules that drove me away from the game in the first place. Could I make them work for me? Sure. I'm a much more experienced and tested gamer now; I know what I like, I know why I like it, I know how to get the experience I want from any game. But why bother? I had a game that already did most everything I wanted; why would I want to start from scratch rebuilding it, to arguably not even be any better off than I already was?

That's where I am right now. I've run, in the last year, three D&D games, but only one of them really resembled "standard" D&D very much. I played in another long-running D&D campaign, Age of Worms, and everybody involved was ready for it to be over I think when it finally was. Right now, I'm in a BRP Call of Cthulhu game, and enjoying the change of pace.

But, I find that I also crave D&D. In spite of the problems I have with it, I find that I've got a strange love/hate D&D relationship. I want it. Even if it turns me off to play it too much. So, my house-ruled game, that's almost D&D 3.5, is after all my favorite game after all; the one that I most prefer to run and that I most wish someone would run for me.

Pillars of Creation... gone?!

The so-called "Pillars of Creation" is one of the most popular images from recent astronomy, and probably one of the best known Hubble images taken. I've included it in this post. Right there, to the left, see?

The Pillars of Creation are actually dark clouds of gas and dust, similar to Bok globules, found in the Eagle nebula. The Eagle nebula itself is a bright cloud of gas and dust, so... same basic concept, just lit up like a Christmas tree and superimposed over it are the dark fingers of "The Pillars."

However... a recent Spitzer telescope wide view image of the Eagle Nebula shows that a shockwave from a supernova is moving through the nebula. Because the Eagle Nebula is 7,000 light years away, we can still see the Pillars, but this would suggest that they were swept away and destroyed by the shockwave 6,000 years ago, and we're just waiting for the image of that to travel the last 1,000 light years to Earth so we can see it.

That's the weirdest thing about looking into space; you're also looking backwards in time. What we see 7,000 light years away is what was there 7,000 years ago... not now. I can't recall off hand any science fiction stories that have made hay with that concept; once you get out into space, it's suddenly different than what you see on earth because of the things that you can't have seen yet. It'd make for a great story concept, though.

Modular D&D Setting

A while ago, I started a wiki specifically to contain modular fantasy setting elements that I found I was re-using frequently in any D&D (or other) fantasy game that I ran. The first one I attacked was the hobgoblin empire that I used to use frequently, but I also have a pantheon page, a linguistics and language page, and others. Coming soon is a vampire kingdom, based on an idea on the Wizards website that accompanied their Open Grave release.

Anyway, it's far from complete, but there is enough content on the wiki that I feel comfortable officially "opening it up for business" so to speak, as the rest of the content gradually starts filling in.

http://modular-dnd-setting.wikispaces.com/

The "crown jewel" of the wiki---so far, anyway---is a reasonably complete module on a hobgoblin empire. Just a few more pages to post, and a map, and you've got a kingdom all set and ready to run.

Frank Frazetta tribute

I've been a big fan of Frank Frazetta for many, many years. I mean, heck; what fantasy fan my age wouldn't be? He's a classic himself; and he's illustrated most of the classics of the genre, back when they were going through their late 60s early 70s revival, and he's an extremely talented artist to boot. I mean, he doesn't necessarily reproduce things accurately (which of the two would you guess is supposed to be the "red Martian" in the painting below? Would you believe... both of them? Well, the guy is half red Martian half Earthling, anyway. Also; good grief, how many moons is Mars supposed to have, anyway?) In fact, in terms of detail, he pretty much just skipped it. But the vibrancy of his paintings is impossible to deny. The sense of action, of tension, of passion and power; he really makes fantasy come alive in a way that no artist before or since has done. He's been often imitated, but those imitations have always been inferior to the original. Much like Tolkien, I think his work is a kind of stand-alone work that subsequent artists would do well to distance themselves from rather than copy; any copy will be compared to the original, and not favorably.

Pbp update... no update

Well, Circvs Maximvs, where I run the "Demons in the Mist" play by post game, is still running so erratically that it's been impossible to actually make any progress on the Pbp. This has been the situation now for... oh, almost a week.

Very frustrating.

Scary hot women

For some reason, I've always been drawn in fantasy fiction to the notion of a very powerful, very beautiful, yet very evil woman. Maybe it goes back to my life-long love of Disney's Sleeping Beauty and the well-done prototype of--not a Dark Lord, but a Dark Empress--Maleficent. She's the real deal---a self-proclaimed "Mistress of All Evil" and, apparently, viewed as "the most powerful and sinister of the Disney villains" and the end scenes of Sleeping Beauty are amongst the darkest and grimmest that Disney ever produced (with the possible exception of The Black Cauldron which was otherwise a very silly movie, sadly.)

More recently I've been captivated by the fictional character of Dorotea Senjak, i.e., "The Lady" of Glen Cook's Black Company fame. Although in her case, her kinda sorta reformation was a key character development issue away from many of the very traits that made her so fascinating. Although the fact that it was--at best--a kinda sorta reformation makes her merely more human rather than less interesting. I mean, she still massacred the priests of Taglios because they stood in political opposition to her, after all. Hardly the actions of a "hero."

The reason I bring this up is that I was browsing the Pathfinder blog recently, and snagged this image; the young Queen of Cheliax, a powerful kingdom that is, essentially, a devil-worshipping theocracy (at least as I understand it; the more detailed book isn't out yet.) In part because I'm fascinated with the concept of an overtly evil-themed society and the adventure possibilities inherent therein, and in part because of a superficial resemblance to some of those earlier Dark Lady archetypes that I've liked so much in the past, I've been more excited about the release of the Cheliax book than I have been about many of the Pathfinder Companion books, as well as being a little disappointed that it's being covered in the shorter Companion line rather than the Chronicles line, which would be twice as big. Although, plenty of other Cheliax themed source material has come out from Paizo, albeit in disconnected form, in other products as well.

Pbp woes

I'm trying to have a thrilling finale to my Pbp and things keep conspiring against me. My timing was terrible; I started the fight right before leaving for vacation for two weeks, I've been swamped with work ever since getting back, meaning I can't move very quickly, and now the website on which I run the game has been running agonizingly slow the last several days, making the thought of trying to update the game painful to even think about.

It's times like this that make me almost want to swear off Pbps as a viable medium... except that at other times, I've had some rather remarkable success with the idea. There's no denying that it's been frustrating at times to try and make the medium work for me, though.