howdy

Found this HeroMachine-made character on the ol' hard drive, file dated May '07.  I'm not sure what led to this guy's creation. "What if the Phantom Stranger was a cowboy?" perhaps.

quick artifact book update & query

Work continues on the artifact book. Submissions are now officially closed. Sorry if you missed the window of opportunity!  It looks like the final work will have 40 artifactish magic items.  Two contributors included illos and I've got three more volunteer artists lined up.  Not every item will get an illustration, but plenty of them will. 

IMPORTANT: If you are the contributor who sent in the illo below and two others, please resend your text.  Somehow I ended up with the three pics and no item write-ups.  Please accept my apologies for this ineptitude and email me at jrients at gmail dot com.  Thanks for your cooperation.

(Man, I can't wait to find out the deal with this claw!)

Encounter Critical webring

This is the closest thing you'll ever see to an official webring for the bestest game that was never written in the 70's but should have been.

• Official EC webpage
• Encounter Critical message board type thing - chock full of stuff, including free PDF of the rules
• Cumberland Games & Diversions lulu store - buy the print edition

Blogs with EC material:

• No Signal!
• Jeff's Gameblog
• Encounter RISICAL!
• The Polyhedral Dicebag
• I Waste the Buddha with my Crossbow
• Malevolent & Benign
• Mike's Amazing RPG Fun Pad
• Hyperspace Gremlins of Racine, WI
• Official Mesmerators of the 65th Quadrant non-link memorial
• God City Sandbox
• Guy-Wires
• Planet Algol
• MORE&BIGGER LOOT!

Other related links:

• EC PC generator
• The Lexicon of Vanth - wiki-based expansion of the sample setting from the rulebook
• QUIZ: Which Encounter Critical character are you?
• Play report: Legend of the Evil Schemer part 1, part 2
• Play report: Glory of Zoombaba!
• Play report by EC illustrator Dave Insel.

If you find any other pages with EC material, please post a link in the comments or email me at jrients at gmail dot com.  Thanks!

Best in town/best around

Here's a worldbuilding technique inspired by the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Spongebob Meets the Strangler".  SpongeBob and the Strangler are shopping at Barg'n-Mart and the Strangler wants to get SpongeBob someplace quiet to throttle him.  But our hero won't budge from the paper towel display because he can't make up his mind whether he wants the product advertised as the Best Paper Towel In Town or the alternative, the Best Paper Towel Around.  It's a great episode as the Strangler (who is, obviously, already a maniac) works himself up into an absolute frenzy of frustration as SpongeBob obliviously meanders through the banal chores of a typical undersea day.  I have to avert my gaze when it gets to the part with the cleats in the eyeballs though.  Depictions of eye injuries more graphic than an eyepatch make me wince.

Anyhoo, here's are some simple questions you can ask yourself when building a setting for RPG shenanigans:

Who is the best wizard in town?
Who is the best wizard around?

Come up with a name, maybe a level and an alignment, and an additional fact or two.  Here's an example.  The campaign is set in the County of Winshire, with action often taking place in the small town of Midwich.

Didymus Ashlar, greatest spelljockey residing in Midwich, MU6, Lawful, improbably huge handlebar mustache, owns a wand that shoots rust monster lasers

Drayton the Reprobate, most potent wizard native to the County of Winshire, MU11, Neutral, knows the name of every dryad and river-nymph from here to the sea for exactly the reason you are thinking, owns half interest in a vineyard somewhere in Goatswood Valley

There's a bazillion variations you can work off of here.  Instead of "best" substitute "worst" or "most infamous".  Instead of wizard go with "knight" or "priest" or "magic sword" or "sleazy tavern".  For background material ask yourself "Who was the greatest wizard/thief/king/belly dancer of the past millenium?"  Etc., etc.  Ad infinitun ad astra.  YMMV.  90210.

Once you've got at least a dozen or twenty of these sorts of things written up you can then create a die chart labeled "Interesting People, Places & Things" that you can roll on whenever you need some inspiration for a scenario.

Another thing you can do is break out your random reaction chart and make a couple rolls to see how Didymus and Drayton get along or how interested Drayton is in finding the greatest grimoire in the land.  A few pregenerated relationships like that will make life interesting for the PCs as they slowly work their way through your list.  "Help you?  Everybody knows you're allies of that upstart prestidigitator Ashlar!  That son of a sea-hag owes me 500 gold pieces I loaned him ten years ago!"

video blog: kiddie books

Heh.  I said "walk don't run" when I meant the opposite.

Last week I wrestled with how to make an interesting video on Dave Hargrave's Arduin Grimoire and I came up blank.  So I decided to skip that altogether and move on to another topic.  I think I'll talk about Arduin in a non-video blog entry later in the week.  Here are a couple maps scanned from Post's An Atlas of Fantasy.

Barsetshire, setting of a half dozen Victorian novels by Anthony Trollope and maybe 40 less known works by 20th century author Angela Thirkell.

Aar, World of Deneb, from the Captain Future series of pulp adventures set in the way out future of 1990.

Shatnerday: happy to be alive

From "The Ultimate Computer".  You'd probably have this same dumb grin on your face if you had just saved everyone's lives by betting on a space commodore's reluctance to kill.

here's a campaign idea to steal

The Antillian Colonial War - 1827

This one requires that we first postulate the existence of Antillia, that mid-Atlantic island—mythical as Atlantis—with which cartographers decorated their maps until well into the nineteenth century. Given an Antillia, what colonial power might be tempted to intervene? Any number would do, but since we are dealing with a mythical isle, I prefer a plausible, but mythical, European power. Let’s say, therefore, that Harold Godwinsson triumphed at Hastings, defeating William the Loser. Given this, we find in the first quarter of the nineteenth century not a Great, but what might be called a Lesser Britain, represented by the Kingdom of Wessex.

Now, let them colonize Antillia—at their peril!

The above quote is from "Up On A Soapbox" by Samuel Gill, Dragon #34, page 14.  Mr. Gill spins out several other alt-history ideas for wargaming, but this one is my favorite.  Somebody could spin this into a nice little gaslight fantasy/steampunk sort of affair.  Make the inhabitants of Antillia into technologically backwards elves, orcs, etc. and Bob's your uncle.  Here are a couple of antique maps of Antillia to get the ball rolling:

Looks like Antillia was drawn with a T-square in this one.

That must be Vinland in the far west.