Have you seen this monster?

What has 4 arms, 3 eyes 3 bat-like ears, and a purple tongue?
I don't know. What?
I don't know either, but it's eating your henchman!

This is an old (pre-1980, I think) figure from Archive minis. I've seen it listed as part of their Runequest line and separately as just another fantasy monster. It has multiple names attested to in the record: the Phoboflores, the Gootchy Gobbler, the Gootchy Goupe, and the Goochy Goop. I love, love, love the silly muppet quality it possesses.

What I have never seen is any RPG stats for this beast. Is it in a Runequest product somewhere? I am not an expert on RQ by any means. When I first discovered this thing many years ago I made up stats and replaced one of the entries on my Arduin-style wandering monster charts for levels 1-3. (Which reminds me, I need to finish up the other levels...)

Anyway, sans official stats it would still make a pretty darn good "What the hell is that?" figure, a concept I described in this old post about the Fantasy Monsters set from Pinnacle Products.

of course he does

The Bunny

There's a variety of board games where, at any given time, there's one special player. This is common in games with multiple rounds where the order of who goes first each round changes, but there are other instances, such as the Encounter Player in Tom Wham classic Mertwig's Maze. In that game what monster shows up is the choice of the Encounter Player. After one play from your hand of monsters (or if your adventurer token encounters a critter) you pass the Encounter Player duties to the next player on the left. To keep track of who is supposed to play a monster card next, there's a special card (labeled "Encounter Player") that sits on the table in front of current Encounter Player. But lots of other games need to mark one player as the "activating player" or whatever. Often this is done with some plastic tchotchke or token.

I used to play boardgames once a week with my brother-in-law Jim and a couple of dudes named Bruce and Al. Bruce and Al are a couple of real old school mofos. As I recall, they were founding members of the University of Illinois wargames club and the original organizers of the local con. And Al bought a copy of OD&D at Gen Con the year it came out and turned the campus nerdos onto RPGs. In a side room in Bruce's basement is monster wargame that recreates the European theatre of WW2 at the battalion level. The two of them started playing this beast more than 20 years ago as a playtest. I'm pretty sure the publisher went out of business many years ago with the game unpublished, but last I knew they still play a turn or two some weekends.

So even as a grown-ass man with a job and a wife and a kid, I was still the snot-nosed newbie among these guys. For months one of the things that mystified me about these guys was the fact that, whatever game we were playing, these guys always referred to the equivalent of the Encounter Player as "the bunny." This practice mystified me, but I never asked because I was usually too busy trying to get the gist of whatever weird boardgame we were playing that night. Often, everybody else at the table had played it a bunch and it was new only to me, so I was always playing catch-up. Still, I would dutifully pass "the bunny" to the next player when instructed to do so. Finally, one night we played some train game (Santa Fe something?) and it all came into focus. The special token in whatever-game-it-was happened to be a little wooden steam engine token that, when stood up with the front of the train pointing to the sky, looked a helluva lot like a little black rabbit.

The reason I am bringing this up this dumb anecdote is because some days I wonder if some D&D groups could use a bunny at their table. What often happens in a dungeoneering expedition is that one player, the most energetic, motivated, and/or charismatic, tends to make the majority of the decisions, like whether to turn right or left at a T intersection. They become the de facto Caller. I sometimes call this person the Quarterback because if you metaphorically give them the ball they will try to do something with it. Not every player does.

But I think you could draw out a few more active players if there was something like a Bunny. If the Caller role passed after every combat or something like that. Everybody takes a turn leading the party. Maybe use a little skull as the marker.

What a sweetheart

Wednesday was the office holiday party. We had a nice lunch with some sliced ham and smashed potatoes. Then we did a white elephant gift exchange where my colleague Cliff ended up receiving the glass vase he had tried to fob off on someone two years ago. I guess we all know what he’s bringing for a present next year.

We usually end the festivities with some sort of parlor game. I brought a trivia game I wrote as a one-off thing for a family reunion a few years back. It’s one part pub trivia, one part game show. And the questions were designed to be pretty hard, so every time you got one right you’d feel like a superstar. Both times I have run it now folks had a good ol’ hootin’ and hollerin’ time.

Yesterday a colleague came to my office looking super serious. They wanted to take a moment to apologize for their behavior during the trivia game. It seems they thought that their occasional objections, editorial comments, and general rowdiness had crossed some sort of line. I assured them that no apology was necessary and they left satisfied everything was copacetic.

Meanwhile I’m sitting there thinking Oh my sweet summer child, I’ve been dealing with problem players since before you were born. If you were misbehaving I didn’t even notice it.

 

UPDATE 

Commenter Spwack asked for a copy of the game. Here you go. Let me know in the comments if you spot any errors in the questions & answers.

cheap Cha'alt

RPG naughty fellow Venger Satanis, peddler of "Neo-Quasi-O5R and Vintage Demon Laser Sleaze", is running a sale on his three Cha'alt hardcovers. Details here.

Not this guy.

Wizardry still has some magic

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is an old computer dungeon crawler. It's not the oldest, but it's the first I know of that let's you generate and manage a whole party of adventurers. I never played it back in the day, but I recently found a playable version on archive.org. Here are some tips if you want to play there: 

1. After clicking to begin, hit S for Start Game, then enter.
2. You'll need a manual, particularly for spells. Here's one of several pdf versions online.
3. I don't think you can save and come back to this archive.org version. I basically just kept the tab open for a week or so until the game crashed on me. Consider this the test drive version. If you like what you see, you'll have to get an emulator and all that junk to really play it.

Here are my newly minted 1st level characters in their first dungeon fight. I love the froggy look of the kobolds.

I was doing pretty well on level 1 of the dungeon. Got a bunch of people to second and third level. The first fight on level 2 resulted in this delightful screen:

I want to share an image from the manual with you:

That's the entire world of the first Wizardry game. Although obviously a limit of the early machines the game was built and played on, I find the compactness of the design absolutely delightful. In fact this image is one of the inspirations of my old Vaults of Vyzor campaign. (I just played the game for the first time last week but I read the manual years ago. I read old CRPG manuals for the same reason I will peruse fantasy heartbreakers: I'm looking for ideas to steal. Speaking of which...)

A CRPG this early in the history of the genre is going to have more quirks than a fire sale at the discount quirk warehouse outlet. One of them is that when you make each character you are given the option of setting a password for the PC. If you assign a password you will later need to enter it in order to take a PC out of the roster and add them to your party. In the far future of 2022, where everyone has a computer in their pocket and every appliance can connect to the web, this is utter nonsense.

But back in 198x, this allowed a single copy of Wizardry on a single machine (say, the one PC in the school library or the IBM desktop owned by the old man of your rich friend) to work as a multi-player gaming experience. Imagine 6 people crowded around a single machine, each entering their password to add their character to the party and taking turns at the keyboard. When your PC's turn comes up in combat, you tell the keyboard jockey what to do. Anybody have any experience playing this way?

And now, a thing that should exist, if it doesn't

Which leads me to this idea: everybody here familiar with the JackBox family of computerized party games? You can play them gathered around a smart TV or computer, but each player uses their phone as their interface devise for secret information fun. Or people can play remotely. There should be a D&D-type party game built along these lines, a simple command structure for each PC, input via player phone, while the dungeon map and critters appear on the big screen. Does this exist? If so, please let me know in the comments. If not, please someone steal this idea!

the OSR as a subject of scholarly inquiry

The other day I was wondering how Nicholas Mizer was doing. He played the elf Celumir the Bald (I hope I'm getting that PC name right) in my first FLAILSNAILS campaign, the one set in Wessex. If I am recalling correctly, Nicholas was the one who solved the Mystery of the Blue Lobster.

Around that time he did a crowdfunding campaign to raise some funds for his PhD research on tabletop RPGs. Out of the blue last week it occurred to me that I wanted to see what had come of that.

First of all, I found his dissertation. So congrats on finishing, Dr. Mizer. Also, he has a book out now, which I am going to try to convince my school library to buy.

I also found a couple academic articles Nicholas authored and a book review that was interesting to me professionally (Turns out there's an edited volume with chapters on RPGs and education. I smell a new faculty workshop in my future.). I forwarded a co-authored piece on an economic game to my buddy who teaches behavioral economics. He was pretty stoked, as the piece had been published in an anthropology journal and he had not seen it before.

Nicholas's 2014 article "The Paladin Ethic and the Spirit of Dungeoneering", published in The Journal of Popular Culture, is a really compelling piece. The conclusion contains what I suspect is one of the first mentions of the Old School Renaissance in an academic journal. 

Now I was down the rabbit hole. I decided I needed to know if there were any more recent articles about the OSR. I found one, "Old School Renaissance as a Style of Play" by Tommi Brander of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The analysis is a little bit water-is-wet to anyone who actually plays old school style, but water-is-wet research is important. Playing isn't the same as documenting for the outside world, after all.

Anyhoo, I thought you all would be interested in who from the scene is cited in the article:

author	work
Alexander, Jason	Jaquaying the Dungeon at the Alexandrian
Baker, D. Vincent	The Seclusium of Orphone of the Three Visions (cited as example of a failure to understand OSR as a style of play)
Blacky the Blackball	Dark Dungeons (Am I right in thinking this is a Rules Cyclopedia retroclone?)
Bowman, David	article on the entourage approach in Open Game Table anthology
Brockie, Dave and Pittman, Joe	Towers Two
Cone, Jason	Philotomy's Musings (cited multiple times)
Crawford, Kevin	Godbound
Finch, Matthew J.	Old School Primer (multiple citations)
Kemp, Arnold	Goblinpunch post on "rulings not rules" being insufficient
Lynch, Bryce	tenfootpole review of Seclusium
Maliszewski, James	2009 escapist article on the history of the OSR
Maliszewski, James	"Time in the old school campaign" from Grognardia
McDowell, Chris	Into the Odd
Melan	seminal dungeon mapping post from ENworld & dragonsfoot
Milton, Ben; Lumpkin, Steven et al.	Principia Apocrypha (cited multiple times)
Princess, Scrap and Stuart, Patrick	Fire on the Velvet Horizon
Raggi, James Edward IV	Guide to Adventure Writing in Open Game Table anthology
Raggi, James Edward IV	Lamentations referee book (the old one from the boxed set)(cited multiple times in article)'
Raggi, James Edward IV	Lamentations player's hardback
Schroder, Alex	blogpost comparing Seclusium to Moldvay dungeon stocking
Strejcek, Brendan	Necropraxis article on the R in OSR
Strejcek, Brendan	Necropraxis article on OSR Attributes
Strejcek, Brendan	Necropraxis article on his OSR survey
Strejcek, Brendan	Necropraxis article on OSR survey participation
Stukey, Randall S.	Microlite 75 (cited as a possible alternative approach to OSR play)
Tuovinen, Eero	multiple story-games.com forum threads about D&D (cited multiple times)

There are some pretty rad people on the list above. I am, of course, jealous. These are only the old schoolers mentioned in the piece. (Also appearing: Vincent Baker.) 

What is a little more alarming is the amount of GNS in the article. John H. Kim, Brian Gleichman, Ben Lehman, and especially Ron Edwards are cited in this regards. Brander uses the threefold model to analyze old school play, which is totally legit to me. What concerns me is that a non-specialist, even an academic who studies mainstream D&D for a living, could easily conclude from this article that GNS and the associated people are part of the OSR.

But to circle back the the beginning: nice work, Nicholas!

TURN by Traverse Fantasy

Many moons ago Brendan over at Necropraxis wrote a very smart blogpost called Overloading the Encounter Die. Marcia B. of Traverse Fantasy took the concept, expands it a bit, and remediates it into a threefold pamphlet called TURN. Since both original post and pamphlet are super short, I will not summarize them here. Although I found Brendan's idea to be very good at the time, I never implemented it. I'm not sure why. But in pamphlet form as TURN, I find it much more compelling. As in, I want to make it standard for my next dungeon campaign.

Some ideas just need the right packaging to speak to some people, I guess.

Traverse Fantasy also has a restatement/reinterpretation of OD&D called Fantastic Medieval Campaigns, but I haven't read it yet. Also, I discovered while writing this post that Marcia B. has a Traverse Fantasy blog and this post is an absolute winner.

The Orcs of Asgard

I've talked about Asgard Miniatures a few times in the past. They used to run great full page ads in Dragon back in the day. I'm fond of several of their 25mm adventurers, particularly the Looter, their half-elf, and their magic-user. The latter is actually wearing a backpack and has some coiled rope. Not enough dungeoneering minis are properly equipped like that.

Today I want to talk about their amazing line of orcs, sculpted by Jes Goodwin. He went on to do big things with Citadel and Games Workshop, but his vision of orcs do not align with Warhammer big green goons half-inspired by the Incredible Hulk. Check these dudes out:

 

Many of the figures of the line are hunched over. Between that and their long, disproportionate limbs, you get a real inhuman vibe off of them. Yet their faces are at least as expressive as any human mini of the era. These orcs are uncanny not-quite-men. 

 

Some of Goodwin's orcs are bent so far forward so as almost to be prone. Tolkien's idea of orcs as degraded elves almost radiates from these poses. Yet they also possess a weird suppleness. It's almost sensuous, like the serpent in Eden.

These pictures are from thevikingforge.net, which seems to be selling the Asgard fantasy line at 1980's prices. Of course, the website design looks like state-of-the-art 1992, so it may just be hopelessly out of date.

Here's a pic of some painted Asgard orcs I found just googling for additional photos:

With those poses I can readily imagine the lot of them lurching forward like Gollum or the feral boy in the Road Warrior flicks. Also, I love the choice to use human skin tones here! I've often fantasized that--if I ever got into Warhammer Fantasy--I'd paint up an ork army in Caucasian skin tones just to troll my opponents.

a major network in BX

 

Elf and dwarf PCs in BX D&D begin play speaking three monster languages each, as shown on the chart above using arrows with solid black lines. That means you are taking away a class ability if your campaign doesn't include those monsters (or, say some books or inscriptions written in their tongues).

The BX write-ups for four of these six monsters mention other monsters. These are the monsters in the blue boxes.  The red arrows with the dotted lines indicates belligerence.  The purple arrows with dashed lines indicates that these creatures figure into the gnolls' reputed origin story. The orange arrows with dashed and dotted line points to a buddy that sometimes hangs out with the monster.

It is my opinion that these relationships define the core monsters of a by-the-book BX campaign. Well, these folks plus the undead (so the cleric has something to turn).

An Old Conundrum

If dwarves "hate goblins, and will usually attack them on sight" (B35) and goblins "hate dwarves and will attack them on sight" (B36), then why does every dwarf PC start play fluent in goblish? This is a question I have taken too seriously off and on for 40 years now. (Related question: If a PC party has six PCs and one of them is a dwarf, will a wandering group of 5 goblins automatically attack?) 

The first answer I landed on back as a kid was that dwarves liked insulting goblins in their original tongue and found it handy for interrogating goblin-prisoners.

The second answer I arrived at back when I started digging into OD&D and Chainmail: The quotes above are holdovers from the early fantasy miniatures campaign. I.e. these "attack on sight" indicators are meant for masses of troops in battle. If one side brings dwarves and the other side brings goblins, don't expect to be able to control those troops. They'll be too busy annihilating each other like matter and antimatter. The rest of the time there may be tensions between the two peoples, but they don't automatically boil over into hostilities.

My most recent answer builds on the second: Demi-humans and humanoids interact peaceably a lot more than I suspected as a kid. That's why elves and dwarves speak so many humanoid tongues. But recently something horrible has happened between gobblefolk and dwerpeople. This bad blood is new and raw. Determining the source of this rage will help you shape your campaign.

circumnavigating Miskatonia

So for the past couple of days I've been playing Minima, a tiny homage to the early installments in the Ultima series built for the PICO 8 environment. You can play this game in your browser, which is how I've been doing it.

Yesterday I attempted to finish the game, but the tower of the villainois Faxon repulsed me. I needed some time to think through what I missed earlier in the game, so I decided to hop in my ship (acquired from pirates, of course) and start mapping out the continent of Miskatonia. Here's what I've got so far.

That blank spot in the middle can be filled in with some overland travel. The little bit of land in the southwest is an island only a few tiles bigger than shown, as I visited it earlier in the game. The main issue with completing the map will be the volcanic archipelago with Faxon's tower. It's somewhere in the ocean out of sight of the coast, in the southeast I think. But the map wraps around both east-west and north-south, so you could put it darn near anywhere so long as it shows the right number of squares to the mainland.

Given the large amount of open water around the continent, I suspect that the overland map is actually slightly larger than the 64 tile x 64 tile map of Sosaria, the setting of Ultima III. Which feels wrong. Miskatonia seems a lit smaller. But Sosaria had a much higher land to water ratio. And heavy woods and mountains don't block line of sight in Minima, so you can see much farther in many places. Also, the tiles are literally smaller in terms of the number of pixels used. 

UPDATE:

The browser-based version of Minima may be a tad unstable, as it crashed on me and lost my save game. 20 levels down the electronic drain. What can you do? But I was able to finish the land map.

I keep forgetting to mention this.

Many moons ago Settembrini, Germany's foremost old schooler, ask me for some material that could be translated into German for the gaming periodical Abenteuer. I sent him a level of my old Wessex dungeon all typed up and an entirely new piece on a magical soda vending machine.

I really dig Betty Baindl's illo of my dumb idea.

DriveThruRPG has the PDF of the issue, if you are interested and can ready German. In all probability, the Gabor Lux material is oodles better than mine. 

 

time to get weird

for the Encounter Critical fans

Random Vanthian Adventurers Tattoos (d100)
1	A 5th dimensional leprechaun holding a tankard of ale in one hand and flipping the bird with the other.
2	A Beautiful Gjenie Emerging from a Bottle
3	A Broken Sword Captioned WE REMEMBER
4	A club-wielding cave primitive smashing a robodroid, captioned BRUTE FORCE
5	A Grey Alien Holding An Ice Cream Cone
6	A Grimacing Goblin Carrying an Anarchist Bomb
7	A Hand Where Each Fingertip Is A Creature Head: Cobra, Goat, Lion, Eagle, Dragon
8	A Mushroom Cloud with the Caption OVERKILL WORKS
9	Ace of Spiders
10	Amazon in Black Leather Armor Wielding Lizard-Hide Whip
11	An Astronaut Among the Phoenix Asteroids
12	Anarchy Symbol
13	Ankh
14	Bat with a Goblin Head
15	Battlestar Pegasus
16	Bee Girl Stinging an Orc
17	BEEBLEBROX FOR GOD-EMPEROR
18	BLOOD & GLORY in classic Klengon, slightly misspelled
19	Bottle of Saurian Brandy
20	Bozo the Clown as a balrog
21	Butterfly with Dracula Head
22	Centaur that is Part-Fembot, Part-Motorcycle
23	Chainsaw Sword with ABSLOM DAAK FAN CLUB on blade.
24	Chess Knight
25	Clock Face Showing that it is 13 O’Clock
26	Cobra
27	Colonial Warrior Insignia
28	Cosmic Starchild
29	Crossed Swords
30	Cyclops/Satyr with a Unicorn Horn
31	Denebian Slime Devil
32	Devil Girl in a Skimpy Maid Uniform
33	Devil in a Three Piece Suit Carrying a Briefcase
34	Earth Directorate Flag
35	Eightball
36	Eightfold Arrow of Chaos
37	Eye of Horus
38	Eyeball with a Fiery Comet Tail
39	Eyeball with Batwings
40	Flying Saucer
41	Frothy Mug of Ale
42	Godzilla Arising From the Sea
43	Gremlin Smoking a Cigar and Holding a Sawed-Off Shotgun
44	Griffon
45	Grim Reaper on a Surfboard
46	Hammerhead Shark
47	Hooded Executioner with Bloody Axe
48	Hourglass Gripped by Skeletal Hand
49	Hula Girl with Medusa Hair
50	Infinity Symbol
51	KEEP ON TRUCKIN’ with the Usual Art
52	Kraken Attacking a Castle
53	Martini with Tiny Skull Instead of Olive Captioned IT’S ALWAYS 1700 SOMEWHERE
54	Mermaid with Skull Face
55	Mime Impaled on Stake
56	Mirror Ball Captioned DISCO LIVES
57	Mushrooms Growing from a Skull with the Cryptic Caption LIFE OMEN
58	Open Treasure Chest Full of Jewels Captioned LOOT FIRST, ASK QUESTIONS LATER
59	Orc Jester
60	Pair of Numbered Dodecahedrons
61	Peace Symbol
62	Pennyfarthing Bicycle with the Number 666 Imposed over the Larger Wheel
63	Pentagram
64	Pyramid on the Back of a MegaTurtle
65	Radiation Symbol
66	Rebel Alliance Starbird
67	Remember Alderaan on a Banner
68	Ringed Planet
69	Sabretooth Tiger with Caption I HATE MONDAYS
70	Scorpion
71	Scuttling Crab Captioned with Short Word in an Unknown Alien Script
72	Serpent Entwining a Black-Bladed Dagger
73	Sigil of the Galactic Psi Knights
74	Skeleton Playing Pinball
75	Skull & Crossbones
76	Skull with Batwings
77	Smiling, gap-toothed lad captioned WHAT, ME WORRY?
78	Snail But Its Shell is a Spiral Galaxy
79	Space Amoeba Engulfing a Planet
80	Spiral Galaxy
81	Stylized Atom
82	Teddy Bear Holding a .38 Special
83	The First Hundred Thousand Digits of Pi in Nearly Microscopic Numbers
84	The Formula e^iπ+1=0
85	The God Huron Smiting a Smog Monster
86	The Hook and Cross, enigmatic sigil of the Cult of the Azure Clam
87	The Letter Omega
88	The Magic Word MWOWM in Gothic Letters
89	Three Crucified Robodroids
90	Two Planets Colliding
91	Tyrannosaurus
92	Unicorn
93	Unicursal Hexagram
94	Vorpal Bunny with Blood Dripping From Fangs
95	Vulkin Centaur Armed with a Phasic Rifle
96	Vulkinian IDIC Symbol
97	Winged Dragon
98	Wizard Giving Two Thumbs Up
99	Wooky Bodhisattva in Lotus Position with Third Eye Open
100	Yin Yang