you are the grimoire

 

I found this meme on the tumblrs. If you find yourself the DM in this situation, I strongly recommend not taking the time to look up the spell description. Instead, just make some shit up. Change the spell effect every time it is cast until the player looks it up themselves.

found during a google image search

click to embiggen

 

the hobgoblin's map

 The X is where the party encountered the hobgoblins, killing 5, routing 3, and capturing the hobgobbo sergeant. The arrow indicates stairs up to level 1. The corridor labeled "monsters" indicates where the hobgobbo enemies reside, including some undead, some sort of black cats, wererats, and an unknown invisible killer.

The party made a nonagression pact with the hobgoblin commander ("boss") and agreed to avoid the hobgoblin/orc areas of the level.

pledge allegiance

Booty and the Beasts is a 1979 monster and treasure book from Fantasy Art Enterptises. Art by Erol Otus, text by Otus, Mathias Genser, and Paul Reiche III, A pdf of this book has been floating around for a decade or more. As you can see from the dude on the front cover, some of the stuff in it leans more sci-fi than fantasy.

Anyhoo, the last page of the text (other than the inside back cover add for the Necromican, the spell book from the same outfit) is an illustration of the flag of the United Empire of America:

For a while I wanted to see what a color version of this flag would look like.

I'm just guessing at the colors here. Some combination of red, white, and blue seems like a no brainer. The texturing used by Otus suggests a non-white color for the small stars. The central star lacks that texture, suggesting a different hue. I went with yellow since ol' Sol is a yellow star. Here's an alternative take:

Here's another take that less resembles the flag used by Japan in WWII. Not sure which I prefer. Anybody got any other ideas?

something less than complete success

My first attempt at 3-D printing came out a little rough. It's supposed to be a 1/7000 spaceship on an integral hexagonal flight stand. My buddy Pat got good results on his rig, so I know the design isn't the issue. The tiny peg structure connecting the base to the ship snapped off with just a little hamfisted handling, but maybe that wouldn't have occurred if there were fewer supports obscuring what I was doing.

 

Maybe I'll try the same printer set-up but with a larger scale vessel.  

How tall is my brood giant?

In a comment to last Sunday's post, Zak asked about how the beasties from Broodmother Skyfortress matched up to the math I was doing there. He did not like my answer, saying "The Broodmother giants are WAYYY bigger than 21 feet iirc". I'm not so sure. This cover art from Ian Maclean looks at least in the right ballpark to me:

 

 

Did I specify in the book an actual size? I don't remember doing so. I'll have to go back and check. However, I do know that the original logic of the broodmother and her kin was the following: AD&D Cloud Giants, but they are Elephant-Centaurs and also Sharks. (Also the broodmother is the Slurm Queen from Futurama, but that's not important here; I'm wanting data on a typical brood giant.)

 

This morning I had a lengthy exchange with ChatGPT to try to find out what an 18' giant body on a bull elephant would come out to height wise and how much that body would weigh is it was made of dense shark flesh. The answer we came to was 28 to 29 feet tall and a weight between 11,200 and 12,300 pounds. This puts the brood over the top of the scale of Raggi's animal chart.

If you'd like to see the ridiculous conversation that led to these conclusions, here's a transcript.

AI and Dragons

AI tools like ChatGPT has the whole educational system in a kerfuffle right now, so this post technically counts as work for me.

And here's GPT-4 getting all sorts of things wrong about Broodmother Skyfortress.