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

just wanted to save this old twitter thread

Spent the today & yesterday learning the Reacting To The Past curriculum, basically What If College Was Roleplaying Games. Good stuff. But at the final Q&A I saw a lot of the newbies asking the same sort of misguided questions that people ask before they DM the first time.

A ton of questions came from a place of fear--fear of failure. They wanted to be in total control of the game and everything to go perfectly the first time they tried it. This is exactly the route to psyching yourself out of running a game.

You've got to leave some loosey-gooseyness in your game and you've got to risk something. It's okay if the first try flops. It's okay if the players run roughshod for part of the game. We learn by doing, not by planning for all contingencies before we act.

I'll admit that I'm lucky in that I started young and was too stupid to know how much I sucked at DMing at first. For adults, the second game is often a bigger challenge then the first, because session 1 inevitably falls short.

So you blame yourself and feel embarrassed and drop the whole project. It's okay to feel those feelings, but you've got to push through and try again. You can do it. It just feels weird because of weird social pressures that have nothing to do with you.

Phantastic!

 

So I was poking around Moby Games, looking at old Commodore 64 games, as I am wont to do from time to time. Today I was checking out Phantasie II. I never played this one back in the day. The only SSI titles I was into were Wizard's Crown and Curse of the Azure Bonds. But Phantasie II is part of the ecosystem of importable character games, so I have some curiosity about it. Overall, I mostly played Ultima III & IV, the first couple of Bard's Tales and the first Might & Magic. I just plain missed Phantasie series.

But I wanted to show you a screenshot I stumbled across. I think it nicely illustrates a couple of small but important points about play.

I wonder how many people named their CRPG wizards Fizzban back in the day. 

This is a top down dungeon exploration view, which I am not normally a fan of in CRPGs. I generally prefer 3D first-person view when computer dungeoneering. 

But what I want to talk about here is the text. "Fizzban hears monsters. Go back?"

What's happening here is important. The party is given an opportunity to engage the monsters or not. Player agency is a critical component of play. But equally important in this moment is the principle of information control. The DM needs to give enough information to the players to make a choice. However, that doesn't mean the DM is under any obligation to give the players all the information. "Fizzban hears monsters" may be a little sparse for tabletop play, but the principle behind it is sound. 

After all, what do monsters in general sound like?  (For a cool example of the different sounds monsters can make, go to youtube and watch some clips of the old Atari 2600 game Crypts of Chaos. I quite like the sound effect used by the one-eyed slimes.) But the point remains that the DM doesn't say "You hear 14 orcs with glaives and one orc sergeant in platemail with a broadsword and mace in the next room." Players get to make a choice based upon best available information, not a complete snapshot of the situation. Sometimes that info is inadequate or just plain wrong. But you have to make a choice anyway. Nobody said adventuring was easy.