More LotFP Reskin Contest Results

When I thunked up this contest I included a category for art appropriated from other sources so the non-drawing inclined could join in.  But I only got one entry, so hail the winner, my buddy Kirk.  Let's check out his submissions:

Calling attention to the airship lurking in the vehicle price list is a great idea.  Raise your hand if you missed that LotFP included airships as a canonical mode of transport?  I missed it.

If you're going to swipe your art, choosing a fun source like the Order of the Stick is aces in my book.

So, Kirk, congratulations on your victory by default, Heinz Doofensmirtz's favorite kind of victory.  Since Jonas selected the Boxed Set Bonanza, you may pick from one of the following grab bag prizes:


The Hardbound Hoard
The Minibox of Mystery
The Preposterous Miscellaneous


Pick one and I'll bring it to Wednesday night's game.

Wizards as Holmes Basic monsters

I woke up this morning thinking it might be neat to imagine what wizards might have looked like if they were written up as a foe in the monster section of the Holmes edit of D&D.  Here's what I came up with.

Wizard


Move: 120 feet/turn     Alignment: variable
Hit Dice: 4     Attacks: 1
Armor Class: 5     Damage: 1-6 points
Treasure Type: E, S, T


Wizards are semi-human spellcasters whose abilities exceed that of normal magic-users.  They have 2d4 first level and d6 second level spells available to them, as well as d4 strange powers beyond the normal spell rules.  50% of all wizards have some sort of aberrant appearance that reveals their inhuman nature.  Most wizards have d6 unusual minions, such as demonic imps, a hunchback, robots, a super-intelligent horse, etc. 

Why do wizards have AC 5?  Because they're wizards.

Behold, Ragnar!

This delightful drawing, by Adam Thornton, should have been party of Wednesday's judging but got caught in the spam folder.  Sorry Adam!

To avoid this problem coming up in the other categories, you might want to send me a follow-up email if your name does not appear on this list: Kirk Hess, Craig Brasco, Felipe Budinich, Jennifer Weigel,   Will Routsalainen, Michael Brough, Brett, Scrap Pruncess.

Broodmother Sky Fortress videoblog

If what I'm saying here makes sense, please consider pledging for the Broodmother Sky Fortress crowdsourcing campaign.

LotFP art contest judging, part 1

Okay, time to "judge like apes!" as Milk & Cheese once said.  I challenged readers to grab the totally free no-art version of the main Lamentations of the Flame Princess rulebook (available here) and fill in the blanks with less gore-tastic art.  Or at least differently gore-tastic art.  Today we'll look at the first category, original art by total amateurs.  A couple of entrants might be cross with me because I pushed them into the judging Pro-Am category, but come on, suck it up.

Anywhere, check out some art.  Click to embiggen.

First up is Tim Schaeffer.  What appear to be Sathar (from Star Frontiers) dissecting humans is a great choice of subject matter for the "Is the Character Suitable?" section.  It fits in well with the general grimdark horrorcore tone of the actual LotFP art, which is kind of the opposite of what I was looking for in this contest.  The examining table on the left looks a bit like a lobster tail, which I can't decide if I like or not but I'm pretty sure wasn't intentional.  Also, why are those dudes wearing underwear?  Either this is a soulless inhuman dissection room or not.  For the integrity of the scene those dudes' johnsons should really be on display.

Paul of Blog of Holding did great work here.  A British imperialist and a Japanese imperialist meeting makes a great illo for the languages section.  You know some shit is gonna go down there.  And the illo in the lower right corner is a great concept.  I love the dude with the map taped to the inside of his shield!  I think some of the shading got a little out of control though, as it looks to me like the area around the torchbearer's hand should be lit at least as much as the map.

The last entry in this category is from Jonas Mustonen and I am eating this cartoony style up.  Simple lines suggest so much here.  And look how just some exclamation marks and frowny faces show so much expression on those monsters.  And that stop sign cracks me up.  The other two entries are very entertaining, but I have to give the award to Jonas.


Jonas, you get your pick of one of the following boxes of game stuff:


The Boxed Set Bonanza
The Hardbound Hoard
The Minibox of Mystery
The Preposterous Miscellaneous


Shoot me your preference and your mailing address and I'll try to get to the post office by the end of the week.

Jeff salutes: Graham Staplehurst

I don't really know anything about Graham Staplehurst other than his credits: Robin Hood (the Rolemaster/HERO sourcebook), Angmar, Minis Tirith, Phantom of the Northern Marshes, Gates of Mordor, as well as White Dwarf articles stretching from #18 to #93, including all of these MERP articles:

Issue #64 - "The Dawn of Unlight: A MERP/AD&D Scenario in the Forest of Mirkwood"
Issue #73 - "Star Spray" - another MERP/AD&D dual stat
Issue #77 - "A Secret Wish: An Adventure for MERP and D&D"
Issue #79 - "Where and Back Again? Or, Starting a Middle-earth Campaign"
Issue #87 - "Taurëfantô" - also MERP, set in Mirkwood
Issue #89 - "On Ealden Byrgen" - actually a Robin Hood adventure
Issue #93 - "Letters From A Foreign Land: Multi-System Adventure for 3-5 PCs"  Purportedly statted up for WFRP, MERP and Call of Cthulhu!

Back in the day I got Robin Hood when it first came out.  I recall thinking it was pretty dang good, but without orcs and wizards I didn't see much reason to run it for my game group.  I think that's the big problem with medieval historical games in this hobby: they can feel like D&D Minus.  Still, Mr. Staplehurst did great work with the material.

I've got two of his White Dwarf adventures, "The Dawn of Unlight" and "Star Spray" and I think they are pretty excellent.  Each takes an incident in the Silmarillion and explores its ramifications in the age of Bilbo Baggins, giving a real epic turn to the PCs activities.  Another virtue of both is that they're short, maybe 3 or 4 pages each, but easily expandable into large arcs with suggestions how to do so.  And in "Star Spray" there's a side quest where you try to capture a live wooly mammoth for a circus.  How sweet is that?  The only thing that may annoy some is that there's a little bit of the Big Important NPCs The Players Are Supposed To Watch In Awe, but they all have stats so if the party really wants to backstab them they can.

Any other Graham Staplehurst fans out there?  How are his full-blown MERP modules?

Additional: While researching Mr. Staplehurst I came across a MERP article in White Dwarf written by someone else.  Martin Veart's "Up and Coming: A Look at Levels in Middle-Earth Role-Playing" in issue #80 sounds intriguing.  With MERP rating a typical orc warrior as level 3 to 5, I've always wanted to see an explanation for what a first level adventurer represents.  Are you a kid at first level?  I remember one MERP session where our entire party was routed by a single grumpy orc.

Jim Raggi is the craziest

I swear to Grodd, every time I hear of Jim Raggi's lastest scheme for his Lamentations of the Flame Princess publishing outfit I think to myself "dude's finally gone off his rocker".  A boxed set RPG in this day and age?  Publishing suicide.  Update Carcosa as a flashy hardbound?  Who needs a deluxe version of a niche little weirdo product like that?  Crowdsourcing a hardbound version of the LotFP main rulebook?  Who the hell is going to kick in on that?  (Me and several other people, it turns out.)

Hell, just starting a new game company is a pretty crazy ass thing to do, much less "Hey, I don't really speak the local language, but I think I'll start a publishing outfit in Finland anyway."  It's like he's always charging headfirst into some wall but instead of hitting it and crumpling, he leave's a Raggi-shaped hole as he smashes through.  He continues to give the one-finger salute to the haters who want him to fail.

Raggi's plan for the month of July is to crowdsource nineteen different modules from nineteen different authors with nineteen different artists assigned to the project and then shepherd to publication all the individual products that get funded.  Madness.  If anyone but Jim Raggi proposed it, I would say it was an impossibly stupid thing to try, but clearly the man has an established track record of making awesome things happen.

Below is a list of all the people involved, with links to their individual campaigns.  You can see how the funding is going for all the individual projects by checking out this page.

Escaping Leviathan by Aeron Alfrey

The Seclusium of Orphone by Vincent Baker (art by Cynthia Sheppard)

Strange and Sinister Shores by Johnathan Bingham

Towers Two by Dave Brockie

The Unbegotten Citadel by Monte Cook (art by Eric Lofgren)

The House of Bone and Amber by Kevin Crawford (art by Earl Geier)

Of Unknown Provenance by Michael Curtis (art by Amos Orion Sterns)

Machinations of the Space Princess by James Desborough (art by Satine Phoenix)

Horror Among Thieves by Kelvin Green

We Who Are Lost by Anna Kreider

The Land that Exuded Evil by Cynthia Celeste Miller (art by Rowena Aitken)

Pyre by Richard Pett (art by Michael Syrigos)

I Hate Myself for What I Must Do by Mike Pohjola (art by Joel Sammallahti)

Broodmother Sky Fortress by Jeff Rients (art by Stuart Robertson)

Normal for Norfolk by Juhani Seppälä (art by Rich Longmore)

Poor Blighters by Jeff and Joel Sparks (art by Mark Allen)

The Depths of Paranoia by Jennifer Steen (art by Jason Rainville)

Red in Beak and Claw by Jukka Särkijärvi (art by Jason Rainville)

The Dreaming Plague by Ville "Burger" Vuorela (art by Juha Makkonen)

There's a lot to take in here: Michael Curtis, author of Stonehell and The Dungeon Alphabet; Cynthia Celeste Miller, who will always have a place in my heart for writing d12-based RPG rules; Vincent Baker, of Dogs in the Vinyard and Poison'd fame but who I always think of as the guy who wrote kill puppies for satan; James Desborough, who featured heavily in the latest internet ragefest I got sucked into on Google+; Mike Pohjola, author of the Turku Manifesto; and Dave frickin' Brockie, a.k.a. Oderus Urungus of GWAR!  Hot damn!

And I'm on this list, too, with cool guy Stuart Robertson suckered into doing art for my project.  My module is called Broodmother Sky Fortress.  Titles for projects are not my strong suit (hence Jeff's Gameblog, one of the least interesting titles ever), so I have to give Mr. Raggi credit for helping me tighten up the name of the adventure.  I would have gone with an X of the Y Z sort of arrangement.  He suggested that was played out and that of all the possible title ideas I pitched him the words Broodmother and Sky Fortress were the strongest.  Here's the elevator pitch for the adventure:

You know what your crapsack campaign world needs? Giants made out of sharks and elephants, lurking in a haunted house in the clouds, ready to jump out of cyclopean shadows and murder your PCs right in their stupid faces.

So over the course of the next couple weeks I'll be talking about the basic concept behind Broodmother Sky Fortress, what I'm trying to accomplish, some old modules that got me thinking along those lines and why Stuart Robertson is a kickass choice for the illustrator this adventure.  I'm told video clips make for better crowdfunding campaigns, so expect a few videoblog entries.

In the meantime, if you are already onboard with Broodmother Sky Fortress, please go pledge.