Venger Satanis is having his own convention again, in Madison, Wisconsin on July 21-23. The funny thing is, I will be driving through Madison on the 22nd, but I don't have time to stop to play anything.
(Of course, I might not find it to my taste if I did stop, as it is advertised as "non-woke." I don't consider myself woke, but I rarely find myself on the same page as folks who get themselves worked up about "the wokes".)
 |
| Please do not invade his section of the dungeon until Undead Steve has had his morning coffee. |
 |
| Stanky the Elf has all 8s for stats, a magic wand, and terrible fashion sense. |
So I just finished the English translation Konrad Schmid's Genesis and the Moses Story. I give it a strong recommendation to anyone who would see 6 untranslated ancient Hebrew words and 5 footnotes on page frickin' 1 and go "that's my idea of a good time." Not much of it is gameable unless your game is set somewhere between the 8th and 5th centuries BC. But the section on Hellenic reception of the Pentateuch had some nifty stuff about Moses and Abraham being identified by Greek scholars as wizard guys. Here's my favorite bit game-wise:
James removed the identifying information when he posted this tweet thread to facebook. A tweet is a public statement, so I don't see any reason to do that.
Even when I am not a fan of the work itself, I have nothing but admiration for people who try to make a go in the RPG industry. You really have to bust ass pushing the boulder uphill to pay the bills. That's why I find it problematic as fuck that a small game company (it's just two people, as far as I can tell) would decide after the fact to rob a freelancer of the credit they are due. It seems like the message that sends to future freelancers is that Leyline are willing to do the same if, at some point, the publisher decides that they don't like you. I dunno, maybe I'm being a crazy lefty worried about the rights of a worker in the face of corporate ownership.
"Corporate ownership" is a harsh term for a two-person garage band of a game company, but I stand by it. After all, they could have dropped the editor without pushing them into the Leyline Press memory hole. They could have stood by them and said "Hey, freelancing is hard and you got to take work where you can get it sometimes." Or they could have said, "We know our editor has some fucked up stuff in their credits. We know they have a gig with that bastard James Raggi right now. Some cowards and cheapskates are urging us to drop our editor like a hot potato. But we can do better. We've decided to help them shake off these bad gigs by hiring them full time/throwing more work their way/paying a better rate. That's how you improve the RPG scene, by investing in better outcomes." Instead, they chose the Hasbro Wizards option.
The first tweet of the thread is a fascinating artifact, by the way. If I was teaching a composition class right now I would build a lesson around it. Why the choice of the preposition "on," for starters? What does it mean to work on LotFP as opposed to for or with? Is this word choice the result of a clumsy attempt to come in under the character limit, or is something else going on here? Does Leyline Press even know what a Lamentations of the Flame Princess is? Hard to tell with that "on" in play. Maybe they are just replicating the rumor mill at several removes from anyone who has actually read any of LotFP's output.
Furthermore, it's a sly rhetorical trick to not explain what is wrong with LotFP but to immediately juxtapose it with "other problematic works that have received widespread critique for bigoted and other harmful issues." This creates an association between the two in the audience's mind, whether true or not. This is one of the tricks that venues like Fox News use to convince folks that mainstream democrats like Joe Biden are pinko commies. So, well played. I guess.
While I've got my teaching hat on, I would deducts points from this piece for its reliance on the term problematic. Better yet, I'd send it back for revision. Here's my comment from James's facebook post:
I regret the day problematic escaped out of academic discourse and into the wild. In grad school problematic meant "hey, this looks kinda fucked up, so we should slow down and pay attention to it and figure out what it means." Nobody slows down on the internet. Nobody tries to understand.
The way problematic is used in public now seems to be "this is fucked up and I am running away from it." Which is fine, I guess. Language changes over time. But it seems to me that what liberals have achieved with problematic is the same sort of politically self-serving bastardization that the right has applied to the term "woke."
And this is going out on a limb, since I don't really know what the "other problematic works" are, but I will hazard a guess that they have sustained criticism but not much in the way of actual critique. Criticism is about the critic's agenda. "The magic deer in Blue Rose promotes the fantasy that authoritarianism can work and is therefore bad" is a criticism based upon my personal politics. Critique is based upon the creator's agenda. "Broodmother Skyfortress lacks an extended example of how to apply the various re-skinnings offered as options, and thus fails its avowed project as an introductory module" would be a critique.
Finally, can I just say that I find it problematic (in the academic sense) that the Leyline Press blog contains a fic with openly stated themes of "grotesque body horror, torture, dehumanization, bestiality, pregnancy, sexual situations, and non-consent?" Can we talk about that? It feeds into my (admittedly paranoid) theory that liberals believe that you can create any kind of fucked up art that you want, so long as you are willing to make your own personal identity as a victim part of your artistic persona. If James wrote and published the exact same text, would he be put on blast? I suspect so.
Anyway, the LotFP sale is still a thing. There's never been a cheaper time to form your own opinion about what Raggi chooses to publish.
Some dipshit from some game company I never heard of was talking smack about Lamentations of the Flame Princess, so James did what James does in these circumstances: he sells more stuff. From now through the 16th, every LotFP title is only $1.25 on DriveThru. If you don't already own a copy of my award-winning adventure Broodmother Skyfortress, there's no better time than now to buy one.
One of the greatest compliments a player can give me as a DM is to express confusion of a sort.
Like the session where the party encountered a dungeon room that was a 1970's office full of clerks and secretaries and middle management types, except they were all bugbears. Zak said something like "I can't tell if this originally appeared in the crappy old module or if it is something Jeff added for his own amusement." I'll take credit for the suit-and-tie clad boss bugbear's two-handed sword +1 bearing runes in Old Bugbearese that spell out 'complaint department', but as for the rest? I'll never tell.
Or this week when Bec's PC saw "a crow or something" fly away from the old abandoned church. She was stumped. "I can't tell if that is integral to the plot or if you just made that detail up."
I suspect that the ability to seemlessly move between the module's nonsense and my own personal nonsense is the result of two tendencies:
Title(s): Grimoire of Par Kaar, The Blue Book of Waaz
Language(s): Demonic, with some marginalia in Smadj
Period: The chaotic days of the Wizards of Old.
Author: The obscure wizard Par Kaar, with some additions by an unnamed apprentice of his and margin notes by a later hand but in the ancient hieroglyphs of a nearly-forgotten language.
Blasphemy: The world is a bit like a planetary turducken, with a second, smaller world inside it, and a third, even smaller world insider that one.
Spells:
Range: 30 yards + 10 yards per level
Components: V, S, M
Duration: Instantaneous
Casting Time: 1
Area of Effect: One creature
Saving Throw: None
Author: Peter Gourlay <gourlay@slais.ubc.ca>
This spell creates a stream of sharp stone shards that unerringly hit their target. The stones inflict 1d4 + 1 points of damage. For every three levels gained, the wizard inflicts another 1d4 + 1 points of damage. This spell is the earth elementalist version of the magic missile spell, and protections against that spell are also useful against Slivers of Stone. Slivers of stone has the same limitations as magic missile. The material component of this spell is a handful of stones, which must be thrown at the target.
Level: 4th Area Effected: 30' diameter. Number Effected : All within 30' diameter. Effects: Blast of sheer pain. All within go insane with pain for the number of turns less than 20th level they are. Range: 120 feet. Save negates.
Note 1: The spell name and the title of the book have different spellings of the relevant wizard's name. Par Kaar/Par-Kher is inconsistent in his spelling practices in general.
Note 2: There may have been more spells in this spellbook at one time, but the last 33 pages have been scribbled over by either a mad man or a really determined toddler. Nothing can be gleamed of the secrets written on these defaced leaves.
Forest: One of my younger players changed his name after the group lost three PCs to the Sky King.
Image from another discord shows user name Jordan (Fuck You Jeff Rients).
2 laughing so hard I'm crying emojis.
That Dark Sky: In the nice way?
Forest: Just salty lol
Spider Minstrel: What, only three?]
This is the first actual play report I have seen of the Sky King being awakened, so bravo to Jordan and his group.
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.
The party made a nonagression pact with the hobgoblin commander ("boss") and agreed to avoid the hobgoblin/orc areas of the level.
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.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:
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.
 |
| James notes that herbivore would do half the damage listed above. |
This time reading that section reminded me of another weight-related D&D items, the article "How Heavy is My Giant?", which I read in Best of The Dragon, volume 1. It includes this handy chart of average weights for human-types of various sizes:
Since people are animals two, we can put these items together and get the totally unofficial LotFP hit dice and damage for big gronkos, like so:
I was poking around archive.org as I am wont to do from time to time, when I stumbled over a file called "Brood Giant." It turned out to be a .stl file, which is what one uses for 3D prints. A cat who goes by the moniker cobra-surfer made a model inspired by the baddies in Broodmother Skyfortress! Dig it:
 |
| "Put up your dukes, bucko!" |
In this venue I haven't talked about the Zoom game I have been running for a while. The game started as a little pick-up dungeoneering affair with Zak S. and James Raggi. The first batch of sessions focused on exploring the Halls of Tizun Thane, from White Dwarf #18 (1980), written by late great Albie Fiore.
 |
| I colored this illo to share with the group. |
Zak had an existing goblin cleric/thief from some old game and another character I forget and James made a pair of LotFP characters, so we started very FLAILSNAILSy with a mishmosh of rules in play. It was during this phase of the campaign that I was relying heavily on my homemade Remedial Underworlds & Unicorns Dungeon Bastard's Quick Ref, though I didn't use all the charts in that booklet. Near the end of this adventure we gained our third player, a friend of Zak's also in LA.
Our second adventure was an obscure old dungeon from Judges Guild with three authors and not much going for it despite that fact. I ran Tizun Thane because I wanted to have a go at what is often considered a classic. This second adventure I ran for the opposite reason; sometimes I like to try to make the most of a dungeon that I find subpar. I think that went pretty well.
This second dungeon came to a conclusion a little early one session. Also, it was a successful enough outing that Zak was looking to start wrecking havoc on the campaign world status quo. The problem was, we didn't really have a campaign world up until this point, only a couple of dungeons.
But I hadn't counted on Zak asking me my own damn 20 questions. In the moment I couldn't resist just making up all sorts of stupid bullshit answers, so now the game is set in just about the stupidest campaign world I have ever seen. Judge for yourself. Here's the ongoing campaign world doc. So that's the world the players find themselves in now.
Along the way we picked up a couple of new players, Bec in Texas and Simon in Ukraine (as I understand it, he's located pretty far west in the country, relatively distant from the fighting). Bec's playing the first dwarf PC in my own games who made use of my How to Name a Dwarf charts. Simon is playing a LotFP specialist/bard with a penchant for perverse activities such as washing with soap. The main party are currently exploring a wizard's tower that has been engulfed by a very large, very slow slime monster (a One Page Dungeon I've been wanting to play for ever).
Last week only Bec and Jimbo could make the game, so James got out his back up PC and Bec whipped up a quick magic-user. They went on an adventure inside the mind of a madman, another One Page Dungeon. Bec's new MU was the first in the campaign, and we're using the MU rules in Vaginas are Magic!/James Raggi's Eldritch Cock. To make the campaign spell list, I started with my huge custom MU spell lists from the Vaults of Vyzor days and smooshed them together with the official LotFP spells and any other LotFP magic I had handy. I've been slowly adding other spells to my list, with the goal being to have every third party Old School MU spell on it. Or at least every spell appearing in everything I have a copy of. When Bec rolled her PC's three starting spells, there were 913 spells available. As of my last updating of the list, I now have 1,315 spells on it.
So that's my current game.
Mausritter is a fantasy role-playing game in the neighborhood of Bunnies & Burrows and the Redwall novels. Neither of those are my normal bag but I can see the appeal of playing a cute little mousey with a sword. My good buddy sarkos pointed me towards it and after a quick glance it has at least two things referees for other FRPGs could borrow:
1) Card/tile based encumbrance tracking. This is easier to show rather than tell, so I'll share an image from the Mausritter website:
 |
| Frog Detective! |
 |
| Elizabeth requested I make an image of her, so I decided she would be Princess of the Space Ninjas. |
 |
| You know what is really fun? Dressing skeletons in outfits. |
 |
| Also requested: Strong Bad. |
 |
| Anybody else remember the Thumper from the Spider-man segment on The Electric Company? That show had the best spider-villains. |
 |
| I am a bird-centaur with a scorpion tail and goblin ears. Why do I exist? |
Had a weird but almost coherent sci-fi dream last night. Here are some ideas that might be worth stealing for someone.
A long distance space war starts as the result of a first contact gone wrong. Little is known about the alien race Earth is fighting. Apparently one dying eyewitness described them as "goopy."
They may be smarter than us. In order to try to end the war, they built a computer than can translate what we say into meaning in their own language. We can't do the same, so they understand us better than we understand them. This computer acts as a go-between but also allows the Earthicans to learn about their enigmatic foes by asking it seemingly harmless questions.
The one thing the people talking to the diplomat-computer were able to figure out was how differently the goopy approach to mathematics is. Goopy number theory isn't based on quantities like 1, 2, 3... but rather on rotations. Although they have their own squiggly symbols for them, the goopies count pi, pi/2, pi/3,.... Their idea of infinity is closer to our idea of the infinitesimal, as they count towards zero. I don't know if any of that makes sense, but that was my dream.
Look at this adorable little pink demon! The first one of these I encountered almost kicked my ass. Nearly all the monsters are cute as heck despite being deadly.
The developer says the game takes about 8 hours to play through. I spent a wee bit over ten to complete the game, but I am not very good a video games. But I enjoyed those 10 hours. A couple of the dungeons were a bit too twisty and the mini-bosses more grindy than I like, but overall I recommend Fateful Lore to any casual dungeoneer.
 |
| True Fact: The last phone game I gave a crap about was Snake on my Nokia. |
I am going to quote myself from an unrelated kerfuffle in 2005, with one edit:
Also, the fact
that one or more decision makers at White Wolf WotC actually thought the
first policy was okey-dokey and that the customers wouldn't react still
leaves me a tad bit uneasy. "Yay! Coke decided not to put dogshit in
their beverages after all!" is not exactly a cause for celebration. Why
didn't anybody at the Coca-Cola company understand the blindingly
obvious fact that no one wants to drink dogshit?!?
FULL DISCLOSURE: I was comped a copy of this game and I played in one of the playtest sessions.
 |
| I think that says Encounter Critical. |
This is the question that Venger Satanis's new Encounter Critical III demands an answer to. At first, I thought the answer was "No, duh." But consider how many changes have been made to D&D and how many settings have come and gone. Even with all the various changes over the years, the spirit of the game somehow remains.
That's kinda my conclusion with ECIII. In the S. John Ross Hank Riley and Jim Ireland original, Vanth is only a "sample setting." There's no real reason you must keep Vanth, Venger's setting Cha'alt (an Arrakis/Tatooine/Arabian Knights mash-up) works just as well. Hell, I ran a short Encounter Critical campaign set on Tatooine several years ago.
And as much as I like the intentionally arcane and fiddly mechanics of the original game, that's not everyone's bag, baby. Christian Conkle's Challengers of Vanth keeps the setting but swaps in the fast and functional Mörk Borg rules light d20 adaptation. Venger also has a light touch d20 approach here that looks quite functional to me, even slick.
 |
| What my mind's eye sees every time someone mentions Mörk Borg. |
But Jeff, without the setting and the mechanics, what is left of the original EC in Venger's version? Well, for one thing, there's nearly all the weird races and classes from the original, albeit in streamlined d20 format. Venger also adds some new races. I quite like the Banana-Man, the Cereal Spooks, and the cyclops from freakin' Krull. One of the fun things about EC is that you can play all these weirdo race/class combos.
 |
| In the valley of the shadow a booberry attacks! |
What might go too far for some is the sleaze. I thing Venger makes a pretty decent argument for why his brand of self-professed sleaziness intersects with Encounter Critical, so I am just going to quote the forward:
Remember, Encounter Critical supposedly came out in the late 70s. There’s something I’m about to call “sleaze inflation” or “sleaze-flation” that should help explain. What seems innocuous now was not so back in the 1970s because our culture is progressive – it’s progressing towards degeneracy. Back in the days of bell-bottoms and flower-power, a mutation such as “strange sexual gifts” was pretty damned sleazy.
By today’s standards, “strange sexual gifts” is the title of a book handed out at your local library during story-hour. Gamers wouldn’t even raise a current-year eyebrow. If you want the same punch today that Encounter Critical had (or would have had) back in the 70s, you’d have to really go for it... ramping up the blue language, explicit details, and depraved ramifications (wink wink, nudge nudge).
Basically, what I’m trying to say is that Encounter Critical has always been sleazy (you just didn’t know it). Furthermore, I learned my decadent ways from reading Encounter Critical. I LEARNED HOW TO BE SLEAZY BY WATCHING YOU, DAD... uh, I mean... Encounter Critical.
This sort of thing is, of course, a matter of taste. ECIII is naughtier than I normally get in my own games, but in general I'd rather be the most vanilla guy in a room full of freaks than hang out with the puritans.
Here's a few things individual items I want to note about the new ECIII:
So would I run ECIII? Yes, if I had players requesting it. Would I play it? Again, yes, but I am not breaking down any doors to do so. Is this game a betrayal of the true fans of EC? Hell, I dunno and it doesn't even really matter since there were never more than like 16 people super into the original. Would someone who didn't know the original game get the wrong impression of EC from ECIII? Almost certainly, but I think it would be the right kind of wrong impression.
If you like gonzo games or if you consider yourself a connoisseur of retro stupid roleplaying products, you could do a lot worse than dropping 10 bucks on Encounter Critical III.
Posts
All Comments
.JPG)
