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Here are a couple of items that I missed out on reporting due to my recent vacation and last week having gone completely to crap for me. Better late than never, says I.
1) We all know RPG Pundit as one of most spectacularly polarizing figures in the world of RPG jibba jabba. But now he's a published game author as well. Thanks to that cool cat Clash over at Flying Mice Games, Forward... to Adventure! is available in print from Lulu and as a PDF from RPGnow. Pundit's design goals were to create a newbie-friendly game that was all about the action, and based upon getting an eyeful of one of the drafts I think he hit the mark dead on.
2) Dammit, I was gone for Silly Template Week! Did you miss Silly Template Week also? Then head on over to Neitherworld Stories and start reading here! Stuart has a killer knack for whipping up little mechanical treats, and these templates are some of his awesomest work to date.
An Unrelated Note to Folks I Hang Out With: I need to free up some space in my way-cluttered game room. If you have ever lent me a book or whatever that I haven't returned, please shoot me an email. I am terrible at remembering such things. Heck, if you gave me a something that you want back, don't hesitate to speak up. Or if you just want something in my collection that I don't really need, I won't be offended if you ask. I might say no, but I won't be upset. Doc Rotwang, send me your mailing address and I will send you my copy of Starfaring. Kathleen, Josh can have my copy of Field Guide to Encounters. Don, you want my Starter Traveller?
CHILI CHEESE FRIES BURRITO!!! 
Green Thirteen (the Space Winnebago below the Y-Wing) is an old prototype of a Y-Wing variant that never made it into production. Based upon the slightly more successful 5-person courier variant of the Y-Wing, the BTL-D2 Y-Wing was an attempt to turn a non-frontline modification of the Y-Wing back into a fighting vessel. It didn't quite work out. But beggars can't be choosers, and the Alliance needs every ship it can muster.
So the wifi connection at the resort went down after my last post, but my family and I are now safely back in the Land of Lincoln. The bar at the resort we stayed at had a few videogames in the back corner. My daughter and I fell in love with one of these games, a snowmobile racer called Arctic Thunder. While Elizabeth loves racer games of all sort, most of them do little for me. But Arctic Thunder is seven shades of awesome. The little saddle-type seat you sit in is equipped with rumble technology and the accelerator being on the handle bar means that my daughter can completely operate the game herself. She can't reach the gas pedal on most arcade race games. But the real joy of Arctic Thunder is in its sheer over-the-top gonzo-osity. For your choice of racers you can play an extreme sports enthusiast, but you can also select a superspy or a gorilla. Possible race courses include normal places like the Swiss Alps but also a haunted forest, a lost city in the Himalayas, and a post-snowpocalyptic Washington, D.C. In short, you can play an ape-man piloting an atomic snowmobile through the Oval Office. No lie. I have done this myself. Turns out Arctic Thunder was released for the Xbox a few years back and you can bet your bippy I'll be tracking down a copy.
So Wisconsin seems just a little bit weird to me. Part of it is that the state has hills and forests, whereas I'm used to the vast flat farmlands of Illinois. Hills and mountains are awesome, but they always strike me as a little unnatural. Another factor, no doubt, is the cheese shops and fireworks emporiums that you can find on practically ever street corner. We don't have either in Illinois, and seeing a giant statue of a mouse eating a wedge of cheese every few blocks is just odd. But I really think the thing that set off my weird-ometer the most was the gift shop at the resort. They had all the usual touristy crap that you expect from such a place. But they also had two bottles of Heinz 57 steak sauce. No ketchup. No mustard. No barbecue sauce. No other condiments at all, and precious little else that would assist in the making of a meal. But for $2.50 you could buy one of two ten ounce bottles of Heinz 57. I just don't get it. It's like going to the library and finding a live aardvark filed among the encyclopedias. I almost bought one just to prove to myself that they were real.
I can't make up my mind which of these Pendragon covers I like more.
Anybody ever seen a copy of Time Drifters? Undead cowboys and time travel sounds like an awesome mix of crazy crap. John H. Kim has an encyclopedia entry on this one. He notes that despite promising sci-fi adventure, the "basic game" is set entirely in the old west. According to Shannon Appel's awesome indices, issue 30 of White Wolf magazine contained a review.
I'm not a big fan of backyard wrestling or the extreme style it poorly apes. Too much blood, too many props, and not enough proper grappling for my tastes. And many of the wrestlers have no sense of ring psychology or match storytelling. But five bucks for a new wrestling game was too cheap to pass up. The make-a-wrestler section delivers pretty good results. The wrestling engine is a bit over the top (no surprise there) but does allow for some technical holds and reversals. And much of the terrain in the various fighting venues can be destroyed. You can Irish whip a mofo into a plywood shed, shatter the shed, then pick up the plywood and beat the dude with it. I hate that kind of wrestling in real life, but as a video game where no one really gets hurt? Good times.
I knew Celebrity Deathmatch was going to be awful when I bought it. The real questions were how awful and in what ways. Answers: unbelievably awful and like the show but even worse. Still, any game where I can play Mr. T and beat the hell out of Marilyn Manson can't be all bad. Not that I loathe Marilyn Manson or anything, but Mr. T dropping the A Team van on him as a finishing move just seemed so right.
I've been meaning to get this game for years, ever since Old Man Murray did those two awesome interviews with the head of the all-Croatian design team. It's the only first person shooter I've really wanted since that time I nearly wrecked my academic career playing Doom when I should've been studying for finals. So far Serious Sam is fun and stupid in all the right ways. I swear to Grodd, it's like the Rifts of first person shooters.
When you look at this cover, what kind of game do you imagine underneath it? Some sort of horror comedy romp, perhaps? Instead you get one of the most whacked-out D&D variants I have ever seen. In fact, I would go so far to say that this cover is so inappropriate as to somehow be a transcendentally perfect match for the insane contents.
9. Mystery Author
Look back up at that cover for a sec. Notice that it says "by Dragon's Byte". If somewhere in the text there's a clue to the identity of this mysterious entity, I have yet to find it. My buddy Pat proposes that the game could be a group effort by an old BBS. Some Googling turned up a Dragon's Byte BBS in Salinas, California run by some dude named Ric Vittum and another such operation out of San Francisco adminned by a 'WildCat'. There was Sheboygan 'Dragon's Byte' BBS as well. Any readers remember any of these BBSes? UPDATE: James Mishler reports that none of these BBSes were the Field Guide's authors.
Starting as early as Dave Hargrave's excellent Arduin Grimoire the hobby has a tradition of trying to pass off D&D house rules as a complete RPG. But for a game that encompasses two 110 page volumes, the Field Guide has some pretty glaring holes. Nowadays you can maybe get away with publishing an RPG with no equipment list, but back in '82 that was a pretty big deal. And I'm baffled by the lack of any spells. The chargen section is chock full of strange spellcasting classes, but there's no spells for them to cast! I cast nothing in particular at the darkness!
This product was originally advertised as the Marvelous Mystic Missive of Mighty Meek and Magical Monsters, though it was never published under that name. I suspect that what started purely as a monster book (volume 2 is little more than 600 monster entries) was expanded at the last minute into a full-fledged RPG. Except someone along the way forgot that a complete game needed to be, well, complete.
7. Play a Bear!
Many of the nearly 200 insane PC races in Volume 1 of the Field Guide are drawn from various bodies of myth. One of those sources is the folklore of the Blackfoot tribe of Native Americans. Apparently their mythology ascribes humanlike intelligence to bears. So you can play an absolutely ordinary bear with a standard adventuring class like wizard or acupuncturist (see below). Here's a hint: don't choose a class that relies heavily on weapon or tool use.
6. Random Levels
For random NPC generation you roll d100,000. NPCs are first level only on a roll of 00001 to 00011. Rolling a 99,992 or higher gets you a 17th level NPC. Most NPCs are 4th level, because any roll of 27,282 to 63,642 gets you that result. I love this chart. I want to use it in other class and level games. Hell, I'm tempted to let my players roll on this chart for replacement PCs in my current 3.5 game.
5. Kitchen Sink Classes
Every good gonzo D&D variant has a wild assortment of nonsensical classes and Field Guide to Encounter is no different. Let's just run down the list quickly: Acupuncturist, Amulet Maker, Astrologer, Bard, Cleric, Crimson Seeker (a psi warrior type), Demonist, Druid, Elemental Wizard, Fighter, Frost Wizard, Geo-Sage, Healer, Historian, Houri, Kabbalist, Magus, Martial Artist, Merchant, Necromancer, Ninja, Ronin, Sailor, Shadow Walker (psi thieves), Shifter, Smithie (elemental wizard/warrior hybrid), Thief, Tracker, [Animal] Trainer, Translator, Venefic (assassin), Warrior (a fighter who specializes in brute force even more than a regular fighter), White Wanderer (psionic/wizard hybrid). Whew!
4. "Ints"
Some games use a specific term to refer to all intelligent species. I like "peoples" or "folk" in fantasy games. Traveller uses "sophonts", which sound cool. Field Guide to Encounters uses "Ints", which is short for "intellgent species". That term trips me up every time I encounter it.
3. Manitou Combat
"Manitou Combat is a form of mental combat where the souls of two people actually engage each other on a slightly higher plane. During the combat, the two combatants' bodies remain rigid and neither will move until the battle is over."
In my mind's eye this plays out the way Professor X sometimes throws down with fellow psychics. Astral bodies, invisible to others, conjure up ectoplasmic weapons and armor and knock each other around. The absolute coolest thing about Manitou Combat, apart from the name, is that anybody can be taught to use this exotic fighting method. Two Historians arguing over 3rd century doily design could take their argument to the astral plane.
2. Mandatory Apotheosis
Two classics in the field of gonzo gaming, SenZar and World of Synnibarr, make achieving godhood one of the major goals of play. At least one PC achieved demigod status in Hargave's original Arduin campaign. All of these games (and the less gonzo but still awesome Mentzer version of D&D) make becoming a god an epic adventure, possibly the most difficult adventure of your PC's career.
Field Guide to Encounters, on the other hand, posits godhood as a natural consequence of standard D&D type play. When you achieve 20th level your are summoned by the gods and offered a position in their ranks. PCs not wanting to become gods must talk their way out of the honor. Why would you want to do that? Because the influx of deific energies kills 95% of new recruits. The survivors may then pick out their own sphere of influence and join the ranks of the gods. The text notes that the gods settled on this form of conscription as a way of replenishing their ranks. It seems that high level adventurers would eventually make their kind extinct otherwise.
The only other game I know that does forces godhood upon successful PCs is Lords of Creation. LoC doesn't use the term 'god', but the whole PC advancement system is basically a low burn to deific power. Field Guide is much more abrupt and jarring. One day you're a 19th level Translator and a few xp later you're either dead or a newly minted god.
1. Killer Breakfast
Field Guide to Encounters has one of the greatest/craziest monster sections in RPG history, ranking right up there with World of Synnibarr and Element Masters. The lion's share of volume 2 is dedicated to the monsters, at eight critters to a page for 76 pages! Each one gets its own little illo, too. Many of these creatures are standard fantasy fare, most of which are attributed to various mythologies or fantasy novels.
But a not insignificant fraction of the included monsters are just plain crazy-go-nuts. There's the "Car-Rot", a golem carrot that will stab you with it's pointy end and inflict a rotting disease. And 2 meter tall living cigarettes that do d8 damage by blowing puffs of smoke at you. And giant coffee cups that burn their victims by pouring out their contents. Then there are the Tinkles, a class of monster that generally looks like a Tribble with little eyes. They come in a bewildering number of equally crazy variants. The Shoo Monster is a harmless relative of the Intellect Devourer. It has no attacks and leaves whenever someone says "shoo!" to it. And then there's the Toast. Imagine a piece of toast 2 meters tall, with arms, feet, and a little face. Burnt Toast is given its own listing. It's AC is better than regular toast.
Martinglass on the Judge's Guild message boards rightly asks "Do people WANT to see Conan fight breakfast foods armed with tridents?" Now, I wouldn't want to read a Robert E. Howard story where something this stupid goes down. But in a roleplaying adventure? Hell yeah!
RANDOM HARLOT SUB-TABLE, 1st edition DMG
01-10 Slovenly trull
11-25 Brazen strumpet
26-35 Cheap trollop
36-50 Typical streetwalker
51-65 Saucy tart
66-75 Wanton wench
76-85 Expensive doxy
89-90 Haughty courtesan
91-92 Aged madam
93-94 Wealthy procuress
95-98 Sly pimp
99-00 Rich panderer
What kind of artist puts his signature on a boob?
BACK COVER
This one perfectly captures the spirit of the game.
STARGATES
"Because we all know everything is cooler with big creepy eyes!" - Melan, yesterday.
Space Arabs!
SEX IN THE YEAR 2700
I really feel for the girl. In the game the Slishi are the main enemy of humanity. Also: Holy crap! Tentacle sex!
MISCELLANEOUS
I swear this exact ship appears in Tom Wham's Planetbusters.
In the future many spaceships are piloted by brains in jars.
Bodies still wear out but brains can be preserved for much, much longer.
That's roughly half the illos in the game. I picked out the ones I liked best to scan in and share. Personally, I totally dig this art. It's a cartoony throwback to the disco-fueled era of drugs and one night stands. Unlike a lot of stodgy sci-fi game art, Hogan's pieces are fun!
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