jimbo update

zak update

 

In case you missed it, check out the new article on Zak. Of special interest to me are two items: 

Smith was never charged with any crime but responded to the resulting online harassment by successfully suing those who made and repeated Nagy and company’s allegations five times in five countries. As of a decision in October 2025, Smith has successfully prevailed in these defamation suits in the US, New Zealand, Canada, Australia and Switzerland (“while having a pentagram tattooed on my jaw,” Smith adds mordantly) including a verdict in August against Morbid herself. [emphasis mine]

-and-

[Dr. Clio] Weisman likewise found that none of the harassers could provide any links or screenshots to the incriminating or harmful things they claimed Smith posted online. 

Although Weisman attempted to de-circulate her article and the attached interview clips soon after publishing (once the gamers she interviewed began to focus their attention on her), Artillery’s reporting (including access to the full sixty-hours of audio interviews) confirms all of her factual claims about Smith and his accusers. Despite this, attacks against Smith continue, especially on sites dedicated to gaming.

Sixty hours of audio! Dang! That's a lot of material. 

the latest vileness

So notorious reprobate Venger Satanis has a new kickstarter for the latest installment in his Cha'alt setting.

Pulp-Drenched Cities of Cha’alt continues Venger's expansion of his personal gonzo game setting. I tend to view his stuff as on the opposite end of an axis from James Raggi's "thoroughly historical, but fucked up" approach. The whole spectrum is full of interesting possibilities, but some of them are mutually exclusive.

Tomb of the Blind and Deaf Dead

 

So the cat is out of the bag thanks to Tobias Schulte-Krumpen, who posted the above image to the Lamentations of the Flame Princess facebook group. I have a new publication out from LotFP. This is another "Weird Crusher" mini-adventure intended as bonus content. In this case my Tomb of the Blind and Deaf Dead and Leo Ruotsalo's Dr. Franco's House and His Possessions are currently only available in the Altar of Madness/Music of Ericha Zann slipcase. Whether or not James Raggi has more copies that will become available later, I don't know.

Fun fact: this is the fourth short thing I have written for Raggi based upon him pitching me a short idea to build on. Obscene Serpent Religion 2, The Octo-Planetary Blade, and The Golden Chicken of King Koraz all began life with James having some sort of vague concept and him needing some chump to make that thing. In this case, the idea was Hey, Jeff, you know that old Italian horror movie The Blind Dead?

I hadn't seen it and didn't immediately recognize the name, but I knew it through stills and horror trailer compilations.

Anyway, I was thinking the other day "What if those guys were deaf as well?"

So I turned that thought into a mini-dungeon. I know I'm not the best adventure writer out there, but I suspect that he's reached out to me multiple times because I can both hit a short deadline and I can take editorial direction without pitching a fit. Most of the time, at least.

At the time of this writing, there are only 12 copies left of the Altar of Madness/Ericha Zann four-pack-disguised-as-a-two-pack in James's online store.

wherefore art thou Sharkseid

 So I posted this guy on my facedbook:

With the following explanation:

Found this fellow among a collection of Jack Kirby concept art for cartoon pitches that went nowhere. I didn’t find a name for him, so I call him Sharkseid, the aquatic cousin of Darkseid. Coloring by me.

I am delighted by this fellow, but then I am a sucker for nearly anything by Jack Kirby. In the comments on facebook cool guy Christian Conkle floated the alternate name Deepseid. That's a much smarter name, IMHO.

The fact is, I had actually considered calling this goofball Deepseid. I went with Sharkseid because I decided that I wanted shark in the name, which I thought was important given the little shark silhouette on his chest. I also thought it was a more clever but less stupid name than the third option I considered. For this third option I would have swapped the grey and purple portions of the coloring job and called him Shark Thanos. That's a level of stupid comparable to the indie wrestler Blue Kane:

The joke name Blue Kane works because it is the least clever way of expressing what this guy's gimmick is. I thought Shark Thanos would be equally funny, but I couldn't pass up the minimalism of the Dark/Shark change. It's almost like there is a continuum here:

<stupid>Shark Thanos------------Sharkseid------------Deepseid<clever>

There's some sort of lesson in that, maybe.

 

Anyway, Jack Kirby rules.

like an influencer, but stupid

Among the new releases from James Edward Raggi the Fourth's dark fortress in Finland is The Music of Ericha Zann, Jimbo's misanthropic take on the bard class. I quite like it, but I enjoy a certain amount of uncontrollable background mayhem in my games that not every ref goes for. Obviously, the primary influence here is H.P. Lovecraft's short story The Music of Erich Zann. James says so in the intro.

But I think I can take a little credit here as well, thanks to my Dillhonker City campaign. It all started in the Halls of Tizun Thane, a classic adventure written by Albie Fiore and published in White Dwarf magazine #18 (1980). James was running a fighter named Graham and stole a necromancer's wicked black plate armor. He wanted to impersonate one of the bosses in order to get by the guards. 

This was a seminal moment in the development of Graham as a character, as he has spent the rest of his career trying to be a necromancer despite having no spellcasting abilities. And he's been surprisingly successful in his attempts to invoke dark powers and bring doom upon the land. At least part of this success has been due to the Necromantic Tuba he found in a sewer dungeon underneath Dillhonker City.

An early experiment of one Zembrok the Music Magister. The tuba was intended to initiate the Resurrection of the Dead, thereby immanentizing the eschaton. It didn't quite work as hoped, but it was still capable of animating nearby corpses as zombies and skeletons. A die roll is made each time it is used, with a roll of "1" indicating a malfunction and every number higher than that animating more and more dead. A roll of "6" zombifies every corpse in a 2.5 mile radius. 

This last effect has happened twice in the campaign. The first time the party was still in the sewers and emerged into Dillhonker City in a full scale undead panic. Slorm the goblin cleric negotiated with city officials for his faith to be officially recognized in the city in exchange for clearing out all the rampaging deados. The second time was in the Lost City of the Dwarves, which used to be a nice place to visit. Now it stinks less of dwarves and more of death.

I've played with James for a couple of years, read much of his work, watched his videos, and collaborated with him on some projects. I think he's on the same vector as some of the Romantic poets: he likes to follow an idea to the limits of reason or good judgement and then take that idea one step farther. Not out of malice, but out of curiosity. Sometimes the results are nonsense, but sometimes they are sublime. 

So anyhoo I think I can take a little slice of the credit for James's chaotic new approach to the bard. Buy The Music of Ericha Zann and maybe get yourself a Broodmother Skyfortress, too. I hear that one is pretty okay, too.

Zembrok the Music Magister is currently working on a kazoo that creates black holes.

IMPORTANT: Becami of Systematica reminds me that it was her PC, not Jim's Graham, who initially recovered the Necromantic Tuba from the sewers of Dillhonker. According to her notes the other treasures included a penny farthing bicycle as well as a wooden box containing a black lace hanky, quill, vial of ink, and a comb, and a chess queen (black). IIRC the rest of the chess set could be found in another room that went uninvestigated. None of these items were magical.

I come from the land of the ice and snow

 

So I got a wild hair and created 81 pages of demographically accurate random birthplace charts covering every hamlet, village, town, city, castle, and citadel of the northern third of the Wilderlands of High Fantasy setting.

Part 1 of 3, I guess?

Fight On! number 16 is out.

The new issue of Fight On! has been out for a bit. You can get copies via drivethru or lulu.

I haven't finished reading my copy, but I'd like to recommend "21 Lessons Learned After
Running 100 Sessions" by Attronarch and my friend Becami's dungeon "Seven Gates &
Fifty Dog-Faced Men." Also, I love the little map on page 87.

Check out this fashionable fellow.

I was looking at the Tunnels & Trolls stuff on the ebays and stumbled across this guy. I love his visor, though I think it would be better if it was painted candy apple red. This guy was part of the second Dragon Lords line from Grenadier, blister #69 (nice), Troll. Sculpted by Cliff Linton.

More monsters need interesting accessories.

Latest Releases Now Available from the US Webstore + YEAR END SALE!

I assumed they ate grass or herbs or something like that.

 from "Ten Days in the Arena of Khazan" by Ken St. Andre, Different Worlds #7

Broodmother Skyfortress by Jeff Rients - Review

Hârn Orcs are Wee Rascals

So I've been revisiting N. Robin Crossby's Hârn setting, a cool sorta low-magic medieval world that been around since the 80's. Hârn has its own system, HârnMaster, but no mechanics appear in the setting book. I know Jimbo Eddy Raga-ma-tazz numero 4 thinks early modern Europe is the ideal setting for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, but I think lowkey gritty Hârn would work pretty well. So much so that I am currently converting many of the weird spells in HârnMaster to LotFP.

You can hardly do a medieval fantasy setting without some sort of kneejerk self-differentiation from Tolkien and one of the ways Crossby does this is with the orcs. Orcs are also called Gargun in Hârn and they are so, like, totally different from Jirrty Wirrty's bad boys. I will not give most of the details here, but one way they differ from D&D and Games Workshop orcs is that they are tiny little bastards. Here's the five subraces of Orc/Gargun in scale with (mostly) normal adventurers.

The second guy from the left is a Gargun Kyani, the second smallest of the five subraces. They are noted as perhaps slightly less malevolent and slightly more civilized than their cousins. So in my hypothetical LotFP/Hârn mash-up they replace the halflings, which Hârn lacks.

Patty Gurdy - Brighter Days Come (Official Music Video, Tavern Album)

a strange, strange journey

 

So this here is a Destroid Tomahawk. Destroids are land-based mecha used by UN forces to fight alien invaders in the anime Macross, which was release in the United States as part of Robotech.

This is the edition of BattleTech that I played back in the eighties. That is not a Destroid Tomahawk. It is a Warhammer BattleMech. As I understand it, the company that licensed Macross to make Robotech then licensed the rights to the images to some of the mecha to the nice people at FASA. Through the same deal FASA also licensed some mecha designs from other shows, particularly Crusher Joe and Fang of the Sun Dougram. I knew none of this as a kid. Some of my favorite mechs looked exactly like some Japanese designs, but I didn't know why. It didn't matter much to me and my gaming crew.

FASA approached Ral Partha to make miniatures for the game, which they eventually did to great success. But the folks at Ral were hesitant at first, like maybe they weren't sure if a license of a license of a license would hold up in court. This makes sense to me, as it was not long after Task Force Games was making a lot of money off of Star Fleet Battles, which existed off a sublicense of Franz Joseph Designs license to do the Star Fleet Technical manual book. Was their litigation over that or merely the threat of litigation? I can't remember. Either way, I would've been skittish at that time as well. But as I said, Ral Partha balked initially and instead released a line of Macross knock-offs. The figure above was listed as the BattleAxe. It preserved the two key elements of the Warhammer/Tomahawk design: honkin' big cannons where the lower arms should be and a shoulder-mounted missile pack. (Later the real deal Destroid designs were released by Ral.)

Things got tricky once BattleTech was a smash hit and they wanted to do a Japanese language edition. The cost to license the Macross images in Japan was undoubtedly prohibitive, as it is essentially a license to print money. So they redesigned all the mechs for the Japanese edition. I find many of the redesigns to be flat out gorgeous.

Which is why I was delighted to discover that a 3-D modeller is selling STL files of about a dozen of the Japanese redesigns. Check em out!

Garth Ennis & Jacen Burrows unleash BABS!

Garth Ennis sends up fantasy? Sounds like fun.

This is my husband, his name is Wife of Blacksmith

 

my favorite thing from MERP 2E

MERP (Middle-Earth Role Playing) is one of my favorite fantasy rpgs that sits outside the "fully compatible with D&D" space. Don't get me wrong, you can introduce a MERP PC into a D&D game and make it work, or use a MERP module in your D&D campaign, but it requires more effort than something written for Castles & Crusades or HackMaster or other alt-D&Ds.

I played first edition MERP when it came out and greatly enjoyed it. In a test run with my buddy Dave as GM an ordinary cow kicked my first level elf's scrawny ass (which is totally realistic, if you've never pissed off lifestock). In a solo adventure I got lost in a cave and ended up merked by the first orc I encountered. When it was my turn to run, a combination of combined arms tactics and good die rolls allowed the the players to slay trolls and barrow wights by the skin of their teeth. Then they ran into a evil wizard that TPK'ed the party with a single fireball spell. Somehow, after that, I managed to convince everyone to play Call of Cthulhu instead. That campaign also ended in a TPK, following an encounter with Tsathoggua.

When the second edition of MERP came out I never bought the rulebook. A quick flip-through suggested that it was almost the exact same game, but with the order of the sections reshuffled. Certainly, the later modules seemed completely compatible with the earlier rules. However, a pirate electronic copy of the 2nd ed rules came into my possession recently and I was able to find a very cool addition to the rules, table ST-12, the Spell Use Risk Table.

The upshot of this chart is that every time a spell is cast, there's a chance that it results in the forces of the Enemy taking notice of the caster. The level of bad guy attention varies widely by four factors:

1. The relative safety of the location the spell is cast in.
2. The level of activity of the Enemy, as reflected by the Age the campaign is set in.
3. The riskiness of the individual spell cast. More on that below.
4. The die roll. Note that this is an "open-ended" d100 roll, meaning any result on the dice of 96 or higher prompts and additional percentile roll, which is added to the prior roll.

Every spell in the MERP 2e book is rated for RF (Risk Factor) associated with it. Low level, low impact spells can come with a RF as low as 1 or 2, but big flashy spells like firebolts and lightning balls come with Risk Factors as high as 40 or 50.

Riskiness in spellcasting is not new. In D&D, saving throws often ruin a wizard's scheme. Many systems, including MERP, require some sort of die roll for casting to succeed. Casting spells in Call of Cthulhu often costs sanity points. I quite like the overcasting and fumble rules that James Raggi introduced in Vaginas are Magic! Fellow fans of Douglas Bachmann's article "Believe it or not, Fantasy has reality" (Dragon #40) will recall that, in his system, every spell cast has a small chance of upsetting the World Balance, possibly resulting in things like blizzards, plagues, and earthquakes.

But a system where each spell cast has a chance of tipping off the bad guys? I quite like it. The only analog I can think of is the psionic rules in AD&D1, where every use of a psionic power or psionic-like spell has a chance of attracting the attention of something off the psionic wandering monster chart. A LOT of ordinary spells qualify as psionic-like and the chart is full of powerful monsters. Literally the first time the cleric casts Cure Light Wounds could result in Demogorgon showing up to kick everyone's ass. It has never, ever made a lick of sense to me.

But this MERP chart? I totally get it. The result is that the further you go into enemy territory the less you can safely rely on magic to save your sorry ass. Sending a couple sneaky halflings on the ultimate quest actually makes a lot of sense under this system.

FYI thydungeongal

As I get older and grumpier the tumblers is the only social media site I can stand to be on for any length of time. Tumblr has its problems (terrible interface, TERFy moderation, among other things) but I still find it entertaining.

Anyhoo, I just wanted to mention that if you are on tumblr and a reader of this blog, then you should consider giving thydungeongal a follow. Her recent analysis of % in Lair is super on point. She also has the rightest opinions on Rolemaster I have ever seen, in so far that all those charts increase the chances of any action to go horrifically, comedically wrong. Good times.

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