What is going on here?

As reported previously the totally legitimate journalistic venue that is Jeff's Gameblog will be sending a reporter (i.e. me) to cover Gen Con this year. Today I decided to do a little research on the exhibitors, so I would know where to go to get to the Old School Renaissance Group booth and to see if any other exhibitor might interest me. Here's the map and exhibitor list I found.

You know what is bugging me about that list? More than half of the exhibitors don't have anything listed for a website. These people need to get with the program. If you think you're big time enough to go to Gen Con, get yourself a dang website.  I shouldn't have to hunt down info on your company, for crying out loud.  (And if you sent Gen Con a company URL when you signed up but it's not listed, get them to correct the file.)

PS - If any Gameblog readers are going to Gen Con and maybe want to meet up for lunch that Saturday, let me know.  At this stage I literally have no plans beyond pestering whoever is running the OSR Group booth followed by wandering aimlessly about, mouth agape like a slack-jawed yokel.

Edit: I just remembered one other booth I need to stop at.  Inkwell Ideas.  That guy is awesome.

patrons & power

One of the neatest new mechanical toys in the Dungeon Crawl Classics rpg is the rules for magic-users invoking and pacting with demonic patrons.  I haven't done much with them yet, except for a little messing around with a patron in a Gary Con playtest, but I think that conceptually they might be the best new Gygaxian Building Block since the codification of the Feat and the Template in 3E.  I'm all for allowing magic-users to deal with the devil in exchange for more raw power, but I think the patron rules in the beta have two flaws.

1.  Building a patron from scratch looks like hard ass work.  For the full monty treatment you need an Invoke Patron results chart, 2 or 3 new patron-themed spells (in a game where designing new spells is non-trivial), a Patron Taint chart and a Patron Spellburn chart.  Putting that all into spreadsheet fields, that amounts to almost eighty individual blanks you need to fill.  At that point what should be wicked fun starts to look like homework. The prospect of starting on my first custom patron gives me the same feeling I got from trying to make high-level NPCs from scratch in D&D 3.5.  That's not a good thing.

2.  Even though I don't want to add one more item to my checklist of crap need to make a new patron, the patron write-ups should specify the an Agenda for each patron.  From a DMs point of view there's no juice in making a deal with the devil unless the devil is in it for something.  I've found that coming up with ideas for new patrons is a snap, especially when I've written a crapload of demon-themed custom spells.  But unless the patron has something concrete they are trying to achieve in the campaign world there's just no point in putting him/her/it into play.

Mr. T and unidentified jerkwad

Actually I've been following Seanbaby since back when he regularly updated his website.

check out this crazy hag!

That's a Meargh, the sterile matriarch of a clan of Fimir, the beaked, cycloptic, reptilian giants of early Warhammer Fantasy Battles and WFRP.  I didn't really know these weirdos existed until I read a mention of them here.  A few minutes of research revealed that they were intended to be the WFRP equivalent of Runequest's Broo, a signature "Holy crap! That's messed up!" critter, if you will.  The Meargh is the only female Fimir in the clan, so this race reproduces by impregnating human females.  Like I said, messed up.  One of the notions in the back of my head for my Wessex campaign is that human expansion is causing an extinction level crisis in monsterdom, so I may use just one sad, lonely Meargh, all the menfolk of her race long gone.

question re: lack of group

This morning I'm just feeling curious about folks who don't have a gaming group at the moment.  What do you perceive to be the main obstacles to getting a group up and running?

Deeces

My birfday was last week and my wonderful wife got me some funky Zocchi dice.  Those are the crystal blue and red ones in the bottom of the pic.  I ordered the 2d7 and a precision edge d30 to complete the set.  It's a little weird that for all his patter about the superiority of his precision edge dice, Colonel Lou only sells d7's as round-edged, pre-inked jobbies.

I inked these dice with an extra fine Pilot brand silver paint pen.  I first tried using a black ultra fine Sharpie, my usual inking tool, but it just didn't show well with these translucent dice.  Unfortunately, I wasn't used to working with a paint pen and made a bit of a hash of it.  The extra paint ought to wear off with use.  One of the d24 has the largest sprue flaw I've ever seen in Gamescience die, such that I feel I'm going to have to sand it before I use it.  The other d24 is just fine, though.

The other dice are Koplow and Chessex blanks.  I've had blank d6's for years.  The blank d8, 10 and d12's I got last weekend in Bloomington, IL.  My excellent local game store, Armored Gopher Games, chose not to participate in Free RPG Day.  Something about not liking the terms for getting the goodies.  Anyway, I really wanted the freebie Dungeon Crawl Classics module and I was going to Bloomington anyway, so I swung by Gryfalia's Aerie to get it.  I only had about 2 minutes to visit their new shop, but it seemed like a nice place.  They had some blank dice on display, so I got some.

The d6's and d8's at the top of the picture are slot and zowie slot dice respectively.  The rules for gambling with slot dice are in Appendix F of the original Dungeon Masters Guide.  The basic deal is that payouts are made against two cherries and anything else or three of a kind, with a sliding scale topping out at three cherries (36:1 payout) for the d6 variety or three crowns with the eight siders (100:1 payout).  I made a set of slot dice once before and they were a big hit with the players, but the ink wore off.  So this time I sprayed the dice with a clear acrylic.

The other dice are attempts to make cheap substitutes for some of the weirdo Zocchi dice.  I plan on using the real deal Zocchi dice myself, but buying enough for everyone at the table seemed costly. The d6's are d3's marked with Roman numerals.  The d10's are labeled 1 to 5 twice.  If I had been thinking I would have put a plus sign on half the numbers, so they could also work as regular dice.  The d8's have a red letter 'R' for reroll instead of an 8.  And the d20's double as both d14 and d16.  Four faces on each are blank.  The fifteen and sixteen are red, to remind you to only use them if rolling a d16.

Revenger cover art

You might remember Melee Resolution from their somewhat successful album Conquer, Withdraw, Surrender or Die! This one is the Resolution's rare self-released EP from their garage band days.  I vaguely recall reading somewhere that the original drummer for MR did the cover design because they couldn't afford to get a professional.  Four of the five tracks are exactly the sort of mess you'd expect from a new metal band trying to find its own sound: a mish-mash of derivative crap with growly vocals I can barely parse.  Maybe if I could find the lyrics online somewhere then track three, "Night Prey", would make some sort of damn sense.  All I can hear is absolute nonsense broken up occasionally by obviously wrong stuff of the "pardon me while I kiss this guy" variety.

The last song on the disc is the whole reason I tracked down a copy of Revenger: a cover of Kiss's "Rip and Destroy".  This is the alternative lyrics version of "Hotter Than Hell" that the evil Kiss robots sing to start a riot in the cult classic movie Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park. The vocals on everything but the chorus are  nearly inaudible, but the playing on it is much better than the other four tracks. Since they come off better playing someone else's song, I think at this stage in their career Melee Resolution's main problem was figuring out how to write original instrumentation. Mixing their sound properly so people could actually hear the lead singer wouldn't hurt, either.  Still, not completely terrible for a self-made first effort.