I have a new side venture...

...pandering to hipsters!

Earlier today the idea for this t-shirt popped into my head unbidden. You can really buy one, if for some reason you wanted to.

Shatnerday: new Shatner sitcom

I had heard that Mr. Shatner was in talks to do a show based upon a Twitter account called "Shit My Dad Says" but I didn't know it had goe anywhere until Clovis pointed out this clip on Cinerati.

William Shatner, on a sitcom, based upon a Twitter account.  Maybe Leibniz was right and we really do live in the best of all possible worlds.  Or maybe just the weirdest.

damnedest dream I've had in a while

So I was at this high tone party in a refurbished brownstone.  It was the kind of upscale affair where celebrities were all over the place.  I distinctly remember the fashion wonk from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy sitting on the kitchen counter surrounded by a rapt audience of party-goers, expounding on his opinion that the brioche did not go with the wine.  Which is pretty weird, since after I woke up I had to go to Wikipedia to look up exactly what the hell brioche is.  Turns out it's bread.

Remember Pat Stevens?  She was a talk show hostess that Nora Dunn played on Saturday Night Live a few times in the eighties.  I always liked Nora Dunn.  Anyway, Pat Stevens walks up to me holding a frou-frou cocktail with an umbrella and starts gushing about all the wonderful people at the party, rattling off a long list of names.  I've never heard of any of these people, so I nod politely.

All of sudden these french doors fly open and in march this bunch of Hell's Angels, moving in diamond formation like the secret service use when surrounding the president.  And who is standing in the center of the formation?

I yell "Ronnie!  Aren't you dead?!" and he replies "I'm Dio, baby!  Dead don't matter to me!"  He then hands me this bar of silvery metal, maybe four inches across, eight or nine inches long, with a thickness of less than half an inch.  Inscribed on one side are Egyptian hieroglyphics in three colums, with these pre-Columbian glyphs done in relief in the spaces between the columns.  Kind of like this:

So I ask Dio what this is all about and he just smiles and says "Figure it out!"  That's when I woke up.

Oops! Read Languages.

I'm doubly embarrassed that I omitted Read Languages from yesterday's list of 1st level MU spells because A) I had the OD&D spell list right in front of me and B) it was Read Languages that got me thinking about this subject.  What can I say?  I'm an idiot sometimes.

Anyway, I consider Read Languages a pretty awesome spell.  I know the internet is full of awesome people who speak multiple languages, but I'm not one of them.  I struggled with French in high school and college.  At one point I could read well enough to fumble my way through Sartre and Voltaire, but I'm sure I've lost that and I never was sufficiently fluent to speak the tongue.  I'm pretty sure I passed my final conversational exam because I was almost twice as big as the instructor and he was kind of a nervous little guy.  Linguistics as a field fascinates me, but I just seem to have no talent for learning new languages.  I can't whistle either but that doesn't bother me as much.

So Read Languages is pretty much a miracle effect to me.  Athanansius Kircher, one of the awesomest geniuses to ever live, couldn't crack the code for Egyptian hieroglyphs.  Minoan Linear A and Olmec and many other ancient scripts remain undeciphered to this day.  But here's a spell that instantaneously allows you to read all of that stuff and the Greek and Roman classics and the original Bible texts and Nietzsche in the original German and all the other written works of humanity.  Boom.  One spell gets you access to any document put in front of you.  If a magic wish fairy could give real-world Jeff access to a single first level spell, this would be at the top of the short list.  It's a totally awesome spell and unlike Burning Hands it won't result in me going to jail for setting jerkasses on fire.

Of course, like the issues with the Light spell I outlined yesterday, Read Languages only helps if your DMs world allows it to help.  If this spells is going to count for anything, we need more rune-stones, love letters, diplomatic correspondence, roadsigns, inscriptions, etc.  And they need to be in something besides Common.

The Awesome Power of the 1st Level Magic-User

Some days I think the existence of fireball and wish blinds us to the simple fact that first level magic-users kick ass. Here are some brief thoughts on the eight spells any M-U in OD&D can cast.

Detect Magic - Not every magic sword will glow like a lightsaber when drawn from its scabbard. That stick could be a magic wand or a conductor's baton. Is our ally cursed or charmed (see below)? You find a pool of water in the dungeon. Care to find out it's enchanted after you wade into it?

Hold Portal - Knowing the bad guys can't get to you, even for a few turns, is golden in retreat situations.  And you want to really mess some NPCs up?  Lure them into a house, hold the portals and set the joint on fire.  Here's another one: a pit with a hatch is just more flooring while its held.

Read Magic -  Worthless scrap of paper or wish scroll?  Only the magic-user knows for sure.  And the OD&D version specifically mentions that this spell can be used on items.  And when you think about it, this spell is the gateway to real ultimate power; all other MU spells flow from this source.

Protection from Evil - Here's an easy way to really piss off an enchanted creature: stand in a doorway with this spell cast on yourself.  The creature can't get past you to your non-protected allies, who can then leisurely ready their oil flasks, scrolls, etc.  Heck, with 6 turns to work with, they might even be able to take an alternate route to the creature and attack it from behind.

Light - I think almost every DM goes a lot easier on the subject of lighting than they should.  I know I do.  If we handled torches and lanterns in any realistic way this would be one of the most popular spells ever.  You ever try lighting a lantern without matches?  How about making an accurate map by torchlight in a drafty catacomb?  I think those tasks are approximately one bajillion times harder than we usually run them.  And even if you don't want to be a dick about lighting all the time, drop the party into a pool of water and all their normal light sources are suddenly useless.

Charm Person - In OD&D this spell lasts until someone successfully casts dispel magic on the victim.  Think about that for a minute.  If there is a single MU1 in the campaign world then you pretty much can't trust anyone that might fail a save vs. spells.  Smart MUs will probably pick one or two choice victims in any area.  Charm too many and you run the risk of a random dispel magic catching one.

Sleep - Get out any old module, the low level kind that comes with a base area like a small town.  Look at some of the entries and ask yourself how many of the homes and business would be vulnerable to a single sleep spell.  That master burglar plaguing the area isn't a high level thief.  Dude's a pipsqueak first level magic-user who peaks in the window, throws sleep, then casually makes off with the tea service and the jewelry box.

welcome to Dane's world

This is one of the several "Hey, I could totally run a campaign here!" maps I've seen on Strange Maps, but Dane accidentally went and used it for his new D&D 3.5 campaign.  Last night Dane indicated the party was starting in a small town between Labrador City and English Lake.  You can check out my character, Polymachus, son of Therion, right here, as all I did to make his charsheet was open up a new Google document and cut-and-paste from the Hypertext SRD.  Having just re-read the Iliad and Oddysey I decided to play a spearchucking Achaean hero, so my dude is from the Black Peninsula of the Mediterranean Kingdom.  Meanwhile Carl is playing a nerdy wizard, Charles made up a halfling cleric and Dane's buddy Troy showed up with a rogue that he made using the DDI character building software.

We were quite a ways through the session before the rest of us figured out that Troy was kicking so much ass because he brought a 4e character to a 3.5 game.  I initially thought he was so awesome because my dice rolls had been so pisspoor and I was standing in the front taking damage more often that his rogue was looking better off by comparison.  Seriously, the dice were pissing me off last night.  In the first fight I roll a natural '1' in 3 out of 4 rounds of combat.  And it only got marginally better after that.  There seemed to be a big hole in my rolls between the numbers 7 and 14, with way more results on the botton numbers.  But when he revealed that he had 15 hit points at first level the skew became obvious.

Despite the frustrations of not being able to hit friggin' normal, non-giant, non-magical rats I still had a good time.  Danes a newbie DM, but I thought he pulled off running the game with flair and sound judgement.  And the rest of the gang are a hoot to play with.  Troy is welcome in my game any time, though I might double check his charsheet beforehand.

Shatnerday: intense!

Tanga deal of the day: 4e DCC

Tanga.com's deal of the day is eleven Dungeon Crawl Classics for 4e, cost $40 including shipping.  Get 'em while they're hot!

On swords, sorcery, dungeons, dragons

I think genre is one of those concepts that's handy in passing conversation but slippery when you try to look at it too closely.  At the surface level of "does this have swordfights and magic spells?", Mr. Raggi is entirely on the ball in calling D&D swords & sorcery.  Meanwhile Mr. Paladin in Citadel points out how easily the basic assumptions of the S&S genre can be undermined in play.  In actual day-to-day life I have no problem describing D&D to a newbie as something like "You play Conan, I play Gandalf.  We team up to fight Dracula."  On the other hand, ascribing any genre to such a wide-sweeping vehicle as D&D makes about as much sense as declaring that a clarinet is a jazz instrument.  Sure, you can get a crapload of Dixieland out of the thing, but it can also play a zillion other kinds of music.  I mean, have you seen the entirely awesome new pdf Terminal Space?  It's friggin' OD&D in outer space, man.  And you roll a new 3d6 stat for your PC called Tech Level.  If you roll low enough you get to play a cave man in outer space! Put that in your genre and smoke it!

So yeah, D&D is a swords & sorcery game.  That's a handy thing to say.  But at some fundamental level it makes no sense, just like pretty much every other oversimplification we use in our daily lives.

RE: fighting craziness with jerkiness

In case you didn't know, today is Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. I'm all for freedom of expression and against the violent responses to recent artistic depictions of Mohammed. But I'm not sure giving the finger to the extremists is a sufficiently good reason to offend the religious sensibilities of all the nice, normal, non-crazy-go-nuts members of the faith. I'm pretty confident the violent fundamentalist Muslim nutjobs don't speak for all of Islam in the same way that the Westboro Baptist Church doesn't represent the mainstream of Christian thought.

So no cartoon Mohammed from me today.

Ladies and gentlemen... Mr. B, the Gentlemen Rhymer

Big thanks to BigFella of Saturday Night Sandbox for turning me on to this guy.

Check out these debonaire fellows.

Remember these guys?  Back in the 80's Marvel Comics decided that Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor and Captain America needed a makeover.  In the world of comics there's an old editorial maxim that "every comic is somebody's first".  Any GameBlog readers start reading comics with one of these versions of the heroes?  Were you confused or annoyed when the dudes above were reverted back to their previous design?  I'm curious.

Some people are taking the recent elevation of Mike Mearls to head of D&D Research & Development and this EN World "acceptance speech" of his as a signal of 5E getting under way.  I'm not sure that's really the case and I see no point in arguing the possibility one way or another.  5E will come when it comes, no matter what the entrails say prior to the event.  I just want to take a moment to respond to the hope, already expressed by a few, that 5E will step back from the more recent editions and go back the The Way Things Used To Be.  I'm not one of those people.  I'm not particularly keen on the idea of a self-consciously Old School new edition of D&D.  My favorite edition has already had its turn in the sun.  Maybe each new generation of D&D players deserve a version of the game that speaks to them.  WotC shouldn't turn its back on the current player base to satisfy the needs of the old fart brigade, even if we really do outnumber the 4e kids 16 to 1.

Really, all I want out of Wizards at this point is for them to get their heads out of their asses sufficiently to resume PDF sales and/or offer their back catalog as print-on-demand titles and/or produce a 'classic' retro boxed set. Marvel and DC have realized there's money to be made in old material, as the pile of Marvel Essentials on the shelf behind me attests.  Are RPG fans really that much stupider than comic fans, that we wouldn't be able to navigate between the D&D equivalent of Amazing Spider-Man, Ultimate Spider-Man and Marvel Adventures Spider-Man?  I don't think so.  We all pretty much made it out of the 'AD&D vs. Basic/Expert' era intact. +10 nerd points for the first guy to mention that the Hulk was grey in his first few appearances and the green version is actually the update.

a simple pleasure

Sometimes I just dig a picture of someone giving the business to a dragon. This one is the official coat of arms for an administrative district in Poland, found via Wikipedia's "Random article" button.

your cowboy game needs this

If you run a wilden west game or something like Victorian-era Cthulhu, then you totally need to get a copy of Barkham Burroughs' Encyclopedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information 1889. Not only is this baby one of the best oddball reference books I have ever seen, but it provides an interesting perspective on the aspirations of the middle class in late 19th century America. Want to flesh out a dude from back East? Here's a great place to start.

There's so much haphazardly crammed into these 148 pages, it's pretty much the Dungeon Masters Guide for magnificently mustachioed white anglo-saxon protestants. (Speaking of W.A.S.P. and cowboys, 'Blackie Lawless' would be a fabulous name for a bandito.)

Stuff you can easily swipe for your game:


Sample business letters (p26-27) - for capturing the proper tone when providing a lead to the PCs via correspondence

Detecting counterfeit money (p32-36) - usage obvious

How to be handsome (p39-41) - dubious cosmetic advice to inflict on lady-type NPCs

How to make artificial gold (p43) - also how to tell the stuff is fake

Business law (p43-44) - i.e. ways to trick the PCs

Durability of a horse (p46) - practical numbers for hauling cargo

Certain Cure for Drunkeness (p47) - iron sulfate, magnesium, peppermint and nutmeg.  Who knew?

Twenty Choice Dinner Menus (p49-50) - Invite the PCs to a fancy dinner party, roll 1d20

Value of Old American Coins (p51) - Treasure!

And the list goes on and on.  There are lots of home remedies and recipes to puzzle over, some obviously incomplete  (e.g. how long do you bake this cake?).  I've made the pickled eggs several times, much to the chagrin of most of the folks I've foisted them upon.  The "Themes for Debate" section gives a good sense of the concerns and goings-on of the day.  The title of the last section is "Twenty Thousand Things Worth Knowing", which takes up all of 18 and a half pages.

Seriously, this is one of my all-time favorite books.  It just oozes this lovely combination of audacity and quaintness.  You remember how at the end of the 1960 film version of The Time Machine they notice that the protagonist took three books with him when he left to re-educate the Eloi?  Barkham Burroughs' tome simply has to be one of the three.  The universe wouldn't make sense otherwise.

I adore my hardcopy, but you can check out an electronic version on Project Gutenberg.

Hi Ho Shatnerday!

Who was that masked man?

Internet Hivemind: Activate!

Below is an email from a Gameblog reader.  Can anybody help here?

Jeff:

I've been approached to join a AD&D 2E game and wanted to play a dwarven rune caster. I remember there are published rules regarding runes and rune casting in 2E, but cannot for the life of me remember where. I've long since (unfortunately) disposed of all my 2E materials.

That sounds like something one would find in either a later Complete book or some Forgotten Realms supplement, but that's just a guess on my part. Back in the day group used the first four Complete books (Fighter, Mage, Cleric, Thief) and not many other supps.

Lootin' the Toons

Inspired by Sniderman's Thundarr Thursdays, I'm kicking off a new irregular feature called Lootin' the Toons, wherein I provide some D&D-type stats for something from one of the approximately five billion cartoons my daughter and I have on DVD.  We'll kick things off with the first episode of the classic series Scooby Doo, Where Are You!, entitled "What A Night For A Knight".

LUNATIC ARMOR OF JAYM

This dark grey/black platemail with matching red-plumed helmet ought to be a big hit with all the anti-hero types. Not only does it protect as plate +2 but the user may surprise foes as if wearing non-metal armor. Mutli-class thieves and similarly sneaky characters may even Move Silently at no penalty. Unfortunately, the spirit of Jaym, the original owner of the armor, haunts the suit. Each month on the night of the full moon there is a 1 in 6 chance the armor goes on a rampage (treat as a wraith but AC 1). Anyone wearing the armor will be unharmed by the haunting, but they will be helpless to watch as the armor forces them to slaughter the innocent.

FACT: Scooby Doo has some of the best dungeons on TV.

One other bit from this episode that I have used in a crapload of dungeons over the years is the Secret Door Disguised As A Sarcophagus.  Dig it:

I could probably do a lengthy series just stealing stuff from decades worth of Scooby Doo episodes. But since I've also got the Superfriends, Planet of the Apes, Johnny Quest and the animated Star Trek series, why limit myself?

Car-Go Cult

Surely some GM can use this pic for a post-apoclyptic game.

Q: What's the difference between an NPC and a monster?

A: NPCs have names, backgrounds and motivations.

This week I was looking through the Keep on the Borderlands when I thought to myself "Hey, lazy ass.  You need to finish fleshing out the inhabitants of the keep."  Then it dawned on me that none of the inhabitants of the Caves of Chaos have much in the way of detail either.  Dave Hargrave used to urge his readers to take a troll to lunch.  That's a lot easier to do if instead of plain ol' "Troll (32 hp)" the DM is equiped with "Ignatz the Troll (32 hp), an excellent fisherman, a pariah among his kind because he actually gets more nutrition from the bounty of the sea than man-flesh.  Willing to trade smoked herring for any wine or beer the party has on them.  Seeks some sort of magical aid to assist in the wooing of a nearby mermaid".

Of course sometimes the players just want to slaughter nameless orcs.  I'm not against that sort of thing.  One of the great things about RPGs is that you can let your id go on a little romp and no one gets hurt.  And I don't see why you can't have both approaches in the same campaign.

Shatner versus himself!

Big thanks to my good buddy Pat for the link!

so, hey. 3.5.

Dane, one of the awesome players in my Wednesday night game has threatened to run some Dungeon Crawl Classis-fueld D&D 3.5 this summer.  I got rid of pretty much all my WotC-type D&D stuff awhile back, keeping only Rappan Athuk and anything with the words "Judges" and "Guild" on the cover.  So I told Dane that any character I made would be based entirely on the Hypertext SRD.  Nowadays when I flip through that website I ask myself why I've never seen an old school SRD.  Being able to download a free PDF copy of Swords & Wizardry or Labyrinth Lord is rock solid awesome, but at some point mimicking a prior media form is counterproductive.  Like how you gain nothing by limiting a TV or movie production by limiting the action to what will fit on a theatre stage.

Anyway, I got to daydreaming about what kind of character I'd like to play in Dane's hypothetical game.  Most of my first ideas were stuff that could be played in any edition ("Hey, fighters are awesome.  Also: wizards.") or fairly obvious stretches ("Half-elf paladin whose fairy blood and mission from God pull him in different directions").  But I've got two ideas that I wouldn't normally think to try under a TSR edition.

1. A halfling sorcerer who works through pipe-based effects.  Fear my smoke rings, mofos!
2. A commoner.

I'd really like to try the second option just to see how far I'd get while totally sucking, but I'd probably feel guilty about not pulling my weight.  Anyone out there try playing a commoner in a party of mechanically competent characters?

growing into the awesome

I'm told it's easy to get the impression that all the old school bloggers are grumpy old men who hate anything that Wizards of the Coast does.  This is not entirely true.  We have a few grumpy young women as well.  Also, Wizards has produced so much D&D material over the last decade or so that one is bound to find some good stuff in there if you don't just dismiss it all out of hand.  For example, I still kinda like the Template as a systematic way to give multiple disparate monsters a similar theme.  Many individual templates were pretty sucky though, such as the Fiendish template.  One would be hard-pressed to find a more boring way to mechanically express the idea that this particular monster has the brimstone taint of hell about it.

Another concept where I like the idea but not the execution is the magic swords and junk from Weapons of Legacy.  A chapter with a similar topic also appeared in the 3.5 version of the Unearthed Arcana.  I'm told by my sources that Earthdawn and the French rpg Bloodlust also covered similar ground but I've got to give WotC credit for getting me thinking in this direction.  The basic idea I'm digging on is giving low-level PCs a magic item that starts out weak but grows as the PC levels up.  Rather than constantly feeding PCs a slow diet of more powerful magic swords, you give them a single sword that grows with them.

I like the idea but not Wizards' execution of it.  First of all, both WotC versions require the PC to sacrifice game mojo (by taking levels in a stupid prestige class and/or dumbass feats) to make their trinkets pokevolve.  Nertz to that.  Second, the items grow in a systematic, preplanned way.  That's the exact same thinking that put me off chargen as a source of fun.  It makes every time I level up a PC in 3.x seem as enjoyable as doing my taxes.  Maybe you enjoy tax planning and keeping all those receipts, but I greatly prefer taking the standard deduction and getting on with my life.

Here's how I'd handle a Weapon of Legacy.  First start out by assuming that any magic weapon found in play with just a bonus (i.e. a plain ordinary sword +1, axe+2, etc.) is a dormant weapon.  Enchanted in a bygone age, these weapons sleep between periods of activity just like dragons.  Awakening them requires that they be found by an heroic personage (someone with levels), named and used.  Upon the heroic personage gaining a level, the player gets to roll to see if some of the dormant power within the weapon becomes active.  This would involve a huge-ass random die chart, of course.  If a new power becomes available, the PC is expected to give the sword an epithet.

Example: 

DM:  Inside the treasure chest you find 250 gold pieces stamped with the image of a long-dead king and a silver-hilted sword in an ancient scabbard of cracked leather.
Tom: I start filling my pack with gold.
Bob: I grab the sword and draw it from its sheath with a flourish.
DM: You feel an eerie power course through your sword arm.  It's a sword +1, dude.
Bob: I will name you... Doombringer!
Tom: Way to rip off Moorcock, dude.  Heh.  I said Moorcock.
Bob: Shut up.  Okay, howzabout Kings-Gift, since we're stealing some dead king's treasure here?
DM: I like both.  Kings-Gift sounds vaguely Old English, like I would believe a sword found in Beowulf would be called that.  But I'm always for more doom in the campaign.
Bob:  Doombringer it is, then.
Tom: I saw Beowulf in the theater.  Those wrist crossbows were rad.
DM: Part of me wants to smack you.  The other part likes wrist crossbows.

Later that session:

DM: Okay, that's four dead ogres split five and a half ways, or 291 XP each, 145 for the henchman.
Bob: Ding! Ding! Ding!  I just leveled up.  How's life as an elf, Tom?
Tom: Grumble, mumble.
DM: Bob, roll to see if Doombringer gains additional powers.
Bob: What do I roll?
DM: I don't know.  This is just an example and Jeff's still working out the details.  Let's say you rolled +2 damage versus a recently slain foe of your choice.
Bob: Awesome!  We're still in the Ogre Hills, right?  I'll take it versus ogres.
DM: Excellent choice.  To gain access to this power you have to give it an epithet.
Bob: What's an epithet?
DM: An additional name/title that someone or something goes by.  Like Chicago is the Windy City or Batman is called the Darknight Detective.
Tom: I know!  You can call your sword DJ OGA KILLA.
Bob: Right.  Because I've always thought of my paladin as a thug rapper.  Still Ogre Killer is sort of in the ballpark, isn't it?
DM: Ogres-Bane?
Tom: The Og-sterminator!
Bob:  Ogre Slayer.  My sword is now Doombringer, the Ogre Slayer.  Fear me, vaguely gigantic cave-men of the Ogre Hills!

Later Bob's paladin and Tom's elf fall into a pit and die.

been a while since I did one of these...

Varlets & Vermin - great new free PDF full of low level monsters

The Diary of Jack the Ripper - transcription of the hoax that made the news a few years back

Denebian Slime Devil - I'm pretty sure one of the Arduin books or something like that has stats for one of these

Lords of the Middle Sea - need a map for your post-apoc campaign?

I Am Not A Gamer - Roleplaying Games, Cultural Artifacts, and Self-Identity

How did this get into distribution?

Seriously, what the hell is going on here?

source

fear the Solymi

So over the past week or so I've been reading the Iliad as translated into English prose by 19th century poet Samuel Butler. I spent a fair amount of time back in college with Richmond Lattimore's poetic translation, as I minored in Classic Civilizations. But I've been meaning to get around to re-reading the Iliad ever since I bought a set of the Britannica Great Books series over a decade ago. Those babies ain't gonna read themselves.

Anyway, book VI mentions in passing the three great deeds of the hero Bellerophon, who got a write-up in the original Deities & Demigods.  Bellerophon's deeds include defeating the Amazons, slaying the Chimera (which Butler describes as a fire-breathing 'goddess' with the head of a lion, the body of a goat and the tail of a serpent) and fighting the "far-famed Solymi".  No explanation is given for what the heck a Solymi is.  A quick googling suggests 'Solymi' was the name given to a tribe of people, but I decided it needed to be a variant chimera.

SOLYMUS

# Encountered: d2 (d4)
Align: Chaos
Mv: 120' (40')
AC: 4 [15]
HD: 9
Attacks: 2 claws (d4+1/d4+1), bite (d10), gore (2d4)
Save as: Fighter 9
Morale: 9
Treasure: XVII - F

The solymus (pl. solymi) is a magical hybrid creature with the body of a lion, the head and tail of a great serpent and the horns of a wild goat or ibex.  Thrice per day a solymus may vomit forth a glob of poison 5' in diameter, which may be directed at one foe or two standing side-by-side up to 50' away.  Those attacked by the poison glob may save versus breath attack to dodge it, otherwise they suffer 3d6 poison damage.

Total Eclipse of the Shatner