sweet!

After a lot of searching on the internet I was finally able to score a copy of the official Encounter Critical Atari game.


(The space pirate ape is a panel from an old Legion of Superheroes issue. The whole thing was put together with this doohickey.)

Cinder and the Normal Man

From my notebook of OD&D house rules:

Levels

A 4th level Fighter is a Hero indeed, an adventurer worthy of a bard's praise. Veterans of many wars may never reach such lofty heights. In fact, nearly all people encountered will be Normal Men and Normal Women of 1 Hit Die and no levels, including many knights and hereditary nobles.

Similarly, most of the clergy at the various temples are Normal. In the safeties of civilization some so-called Patriarchs may be nothing more than Normal Man ecclesiastical bureaucrats. The ability to Turn Undead is generally considered a sign to expect great things from a young acolyte.

Even the Magic-User Guild has its share of Normal type people, forming a body of almost-apprentices who work as assistants to various higher grade MU's. About 1 in 6 such assistants have some minor skill with spells. See below.

1) Can cast a first level spell per week.
2) Can cast a first level spell per month.
3) Can cast a single first level spell once per day. (E.g. only understands a single spell)
4) Can Overcast 1/day as MU2 but -2 to the overcast roll.
5) Can write scrolls twice as slowly as an MU1.
6) May research spells at double cost or assist others in such research.

The basic deal is that in my low-level oriented setting having even one level in an adventuring class is a Big Honkin' Deal. The town guards? Almost assuredly Normal Men. The king's vizier? He may not be a wizard, but instead just a really clever dude with one hit die.

The last three items on the d6 chart for assistant magic-users were written under an earlier draft of my house rules for MUs and don't make a lot of sense outside that context. Still, I think you can get the general idea.

one more pic

While looking around for yesterday's Willingham pics I found a black & white example of Roslof's wicked awesome kobolds.

These guys are the more-than-half-starved remains of a kobold tribe pushed out of their territory by the Slavers. They subsist on raw fish as they've lost both the ability to make fire and access to their traditional hunting grounds. All kobolds are puny by design, but compare this duo to the healthy specimen from the Monster cards. I think those blotches suggest some sort of untreated disease, or perhaps they've lost scales in those places due to malnourishment.

Willingham by request

Back when I posted a couple of cool pics by James Roslof some readers expressed interest in seeing some old Bill Willingham D&D art. Here's what a quick flip-through of the ol' game collection produced. First up, some color Willingham art that appeared in the AD&D Monster Cards set.



Next, two pieces from module L1, The Secret of Bone Hill.



In module X1, The Isle of Dread, Willingham depicts some of the new monsters that appear therein.

(I love the way that phanaton on the right is taking one right in the kisser.)

(Is it just me, or is the dude in the cape checking out Red Sonja's ass?)

Now let's look at some of Willingham's interior illos for the '81 D&D Basic set. I often rave about Erol Otus's contributions to this book, but several other great artists did great work in it, too.

Man, I love this illo.

I find this troglodyte to be much more menacing than its counterparts in the original Monster Manual.

The stats for pixies and rust monsters appear on the same page. I love how this piece neatly sums up the anything-can-happen spirit of the game. "Crap! Tinkerbell and the armadillo monster have teamed up to kick our ass!"

And here's Willingham's work on the '81 Expert Set.

Those three adventurers are awesome. I don't know who owns the hands in the foreground but these Expert level PCs are going to ruin his day. The shaven-headed MU seems to be about to cast two different spells at once (check out the different special effects surrounding his hands). And that guy's eyebrows are beyond belief. His eyebrows are more badass than some whole characters. Because of this illo as a kid I sometimes wondered if some elves had ram's horns growing from their temples. How awesome would that be? And that dwarf has the same wicked eyebrow look. Notice he has no beard but sports a supersweet moustachio. And I like how he's sorta casually holding that blade. Like next round he's just going to saunter over to Mister Hands and coolly shiv him.

Again with the overwrought eyebrows.

I really dig this basilisk. The smooth skin, the slinking pose, and the huge blank eyes kinda creep me out.

That the 3E iconics got their own line of novels but this guy didn't is a crime. Hell, that mustache should have its own action figure line!

Finally, some vampiric shenanigans from the back cover of module A4, In the Dungeon of the Slavelords.

If I was a vampire, I wouldn't dress in a way that exposed my left breast. I wouldn't want to give people with wooden stakes any ideas. You know what I'm saying?

Quote of the Day

In my LATEST phase, I feel that character background should be 25 words or less, and the GM's world background should be 500 words or less. The GM may have more information, but all the PLAYERS get is 500 words or less.

After all, George Lucas only needed 83 words to introduce players to HIS universe.

93 words if you include

"A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..."

--oldgeezer, a.k.a. Gronan of Simmerya a.k.a. Mike Mornard a.k.a. Mister I Played In The Original Blackmoor, Greyhawk and Tekumel Campaigns

AGJ #1: Mishler responds

In the comments to my review of Adventure Games Journal #1 a lot of people expressed dismay at the price of the mag. I have to admit that, given the prices, I probably wouldn't have bought a subscription had James not sent me a review copy. Anyway, here's what Mr. Mishler has to say about the price:

Hi guys! Sorry I've not replied earlier; I still don't have Internet access at home yet (this was written at the local library).

The price I think is reasonable. 48 pages per issue for $12 isn't bad when you realize that there are only two ads (both house ads) and save for the cover and the index/OGL page, everything is content. Compare that to any classic Dragon magazine and you will see that there are at least the same, if not more pages of content. Also realize that Dragon was subsidized by ads, while AGJ is not, so the full cost must go to the consumer.

As for printing, it is damned if you do, damned if you don't. I print at a Print on Demand printer, which means that the number printed can be very low, but the per unit cost is rather high. I cannot print at a standard printer, as to get even a half-decent discount I would need to print thousands of units, and the market just isn't that big anymore.

You can also compare it to the Paizo products. 96 pages for $19.95 from them; yes it is in full color, but again, they go through standard printers and print tens of thousands at a time, getting a much, much greater discount than I ever could. It is a matter of scale.

As for the subscriptions, a 3-issue sub actually includes three issues of the magazine and three issues of the campaign installment (the Judges Guide for the various Wilderlands settings) plus free maps and other goodies and discounts on non-sub products. So the $84 cost is actually $14 per unit, and that includes shipping and handling (all products are bagged and boarded and sent First Class Parcel). The 6-issue sub is even a better deal, at $144 or $12 per unit (six magazines and six installments). Essentially shipping is free for a 6-issue sub.

Subs are not offered at 50%+ discounts because, again, there is no subsidy from advertising. Print media is dying because of a lack of advertising; that's what killed Inquest, not to mention many, many other magazines and newspapers. And the gaming industry is even worse for advertising. Without that advertising, the full costs must be passed on to the buyer.

That's why the cost is so high on a per-unit basis. As a final thought, when you look around and say, "But so and so sold a 48-page product for only half that!" look to where that company is today... likely, they are out of business, as they were not charging what they needed to in order to make their product profitable...

Thanks for taking the time to respond, James. Some people are wondering about making AGJ and/or the campaign installments available as PDFs. What do you think of that idea?

Quadrant 65 needs dice!

Rondo is the foremost Mesmerator of the 65th Quadrant. He's the only guy I know running an ongoing Encounter Critical campaign and he's having a contest to see who can send him the oddest or ugliest die. Dude wants authentically crappy or weird dice for his EC game. First prize is a scratchy copy of Kiss's disco-tastic album Dynasty.

Most serious Kiss fans seem to hate Dynasty and Kiss's disco experiments. Fortunately, I'm not a serious fan. I've had Dynasty on the ol' Amazon wishlist for years, so I gotta try to win this thing. Rather than send Rondo one or two sucky dice, I've put together a care package for his campaign. Whether any of these dice trump the competition isn't really that important to me. Hell, I don't even own a turntable. I mainly just want to support the guy's efforts to party like it's 1979.

• One Fudge die (two blank sides, two "+", two "-"). I keep one of these with my D&D dice. Sometimes I roll it behind a screen alongside a normal roll and add or subtract 1 from the results. "The goblin hits you for zero points of damage."
  
• One blank d6
• One round d6 (weighted so it can actually produce results)
• Two uninked/partially crayoned light blue d20's, from D&D Expert sets of yore
• One uninked/partially crayoned light blue d8, also from an Expert set
• Eight wooden dice with letters instead of numbers, swiped from some old word game of my folks.
  
• One transparent d20 marked 0 to 9 twice, from my buddy Dave's old MERP set
• My spare black d24
• A uninked beige d20 marked 0 to 9 and +0 to +9. Came in my original Call of Cthulhu boxed set. Two digit numbers hadn't been invented yet.
  
• An uninked d8 with some red creeping crud on one corner
• A paperclip
• An orange speckled d12 with orange numbers, nigh-unreadable under anything less than ideal lighting conditions
• Various crap d6's
• Marbled pink d12. I love this die but sometimes if you love something you have to set it free.
• Oversized blue d12
• d6 with different colors on each side instead of numbers, plundered no doubt from a children's game
• A cyclops with a ray pistol
• A rather nice marbled blue d6. Found it on the game room floor after a run and nobody claimed it. Except for the pink d12 above, marbled dice don't do much for me.