BaconSalt - Because everything should taste like bacon.
A Most Merrie and Illustrated History of the Gunfight at the OK Corral
Players of the game "&" - an editorial
The Guide to Gold Key Star Trek Comics
Book of Beings - someone get this guy a Lulu account!
Space Frontier
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Among other things, we playtested a game of space western.
While the obvious secret ingredient is "playing with good and fun people",
there are also so...
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Posts
Mmmm... Bacon. How far have we developed technology. To only now develop a bacon flavored seasoning salt. This is a product to which its day has come! Revel in the glory of the master condiment! Its kosher too, so our jewish freinds can enjoy that savory bacon awesome!
ReplyDeleteOne of my favorite lines from a cookbook went along the lines of "There are very few foods that can't be improved by wrapping them in bacon and broiling them on a pick."
ReplyDeleteAnother argument is that the dungeon is illogical. ...if you can accept the notion of magic, monsters, gods and demons why in the nine hells is it impossible to accept that these things can take place in a fiendish maze underground?!
ReplyDeleteThat is a terrible, terrible rationalization. Nobody, even in fantasyland, invented magic. Same thing for most monsters not named "Owlbear." (And really, whose idea was that?) They're fictional ideas, but they're context -- the stuff that's there by whatever bizarro world you happen to be playing in.
Dungeons, on the other hand, represent a lot of manpower -- if fictional manpower -- in construction. There's no one guy you can walk up to in Greyhawk and say "Seriously, why the hell would you invent Trolls?" It's another matter to have someone you can walk up to and say "Exactly how many months did you spend building your gigantic underground home? And why then did you make it impossible to traverse by adding ridiculous traps all over the place?" Unless you've got an army and (or possibly of) slaves, it's pretty tough to justify the idea of some guy walking out into the middle of nowhere in the desert and proceeding to construct an elaborate subterranean cathedral for him and his one henchman to hang out in.
That, and pretty much extra distance between us and owlbears is good in my book.
Personally, I don't attempt to look for rationality in the dungeon.
ReplyDeleteFair enough, and in a campaign that didn't seem to take much seriously, I'd be fine peppering the land gratuitous temples, castles, crypts, and so on and so forth. But in any sort of a serious game, I don't see a need for a place that says "This is a world that makes a certain amount of sense, except for *here*, *here*, and *here.*
ReplyDeleteI can handwave the question of "Why is this here?" a few times. I can do the same for "Why are they [random monsters] here?" as well. But lacking any sort of solid answers, this line of questions eventually ends up at "Why are we here?" The first time, that means the PCs. The next, just the Ps.
Dude! I Love the BoB drawings! Hes pretty darn good! I Downloaded his Monsterious tomb II, its great!
ReplyDeleteGreat find!
I don't see a need for a place that says "This is a world that makes a certain amount of sense, except for *here*, *here*, and *here.*
ReplyDeleteEvery fantasy world I've ever encountered (in RPGs, novels, comics, films, or simply created as worldbuilding exercises) can fairly be described in exactly those terms. Every fantasy world is sensible up to a point and nonsense past that point.
And every gamer has their own nonsense threshold and many have their specific pedantic sticking points ... I've met/chatted with gamers who can suffer any kind of ecological nonsense but can't bear geology that doesn't recognize plate tectonics. I've met gamers who can swallow any kind of behavioral silliness but can't take a world seriously if a culture's weapon technology is circa 1350 while their armor tech is more like 1530. I've met gamers who don't blink an eye at a Roc/Rukh carrying an elephant off to eat, but who bristle at the very suggestion that a human with angel wings should be able to fly. I've met gamers who believe a fantasy world's credibility is ruined by guns and cannon, but who also expects seagoing vessels to be multi-decked affairs from the latter days of fully-rigged ships.
I could name dozens more from memory, and find hundreds more with a non-intensive Googling :)
Every fntasy world makes a certain amount of sense, except for or *here*, *here*, and *here.*
We just all have our own threshold for nonsense, is all, and sometimes it's not so much a holistic threshold as it is a specific sticking-point.
For my own money, any discussion of logic (or the lack of it) in a fantasy world is a fetish exercise best limited to the company of those who share your particular kinks :)
In regards to the level of "realism" in a D&D campaign world, I like to note that I've never yet found one player who complained it was "unrealistic" when their character found a +3 magic sword, or a wand of fireballs, or a sack full of diamonds that give you a permanent +1 to all your ability scores if you eat one of the diamonds, or some such nonsense. If something magic and fantasitcal helps the PC's well then that's just par for the course. Well if magic can help the PCs - weakling peons in the grand scheme of things- don't you think other beings in the game world are going to use it as well? How did this megadungeon get here? All of the following are perfectly reasonable answers:
ReplyDelete1. Giants built it long ago
2. It came through a dimensional rift.
3. A wizard did it.
4. Nobody knows.
I think the last one especially is a perfectly good answer to give. If something exists, people can accept it and deal with it whether or not they have any sort of understanding how it works.
How did the Grand Canyon get there?
How were the pyramids built? The Great Wall of China? The Easter Island statues?
There are lots of big, wierd things in our real world. People come up explanations for them that fit what we think "the rules" of the world are. If I went to the Grand Canyon and saw Elves chasing pixies around and stuffing them into bags of holding, I'd be open to a lot more other explanations for how the canyon got there than "a river wore it out over a REALLY long time".
Re: Book of Beings; check Dragonsfoot. I think they published a PDF version. I'd love to see a hard copy - maybe OSRIC would be a way to do it legally.
ReplyDeleteYeah, Dragonsfoot published it. There's a link on the BoB front page. I am seriously considering printing out the whole thing and getting it bound at a copy shop.
ReplyDelete