Quote of the Day

The quote below from the Fat Gregor material in Critical Miss, issue 8 has haunted me since I first read it.

D&D is about quests for glory and riches; WFRP pretends to be the same, but in fact is about the PCs' day-to-day fight for survival in a universe that hates them. If you don't finish each adventure worse off than when you started it, your GM is doing something wrong.

--James Wallis

3 Little Things

Occasionally I try to convince myself that I can write. Here are the products of one of these feverish periods. The structure I wrote in is called nanofiction. Click here for more information on the form. This first piece was inspired by a throwaway line in one of Ken Hite's Suppressed Transmissions.

A Cockatrice in Shropshire

Three rustics had been petrified and then the old vicar was turned to stone. A passing burger recommended the services of a certain witch. The woman was summoned and charged with disposing of the monster. With a handful of corn and earnest clucking she led the beast into the bog. It was never seen again.

These next two are actually backgrounds for two PCs from a short-lived Palladium Fantasy campaign.

A Young Man Seeks His Fortune

When grandma died the bastard knew he had to leave the farm. He had grown fat and lazy under her wing. Before they finished weeping over her grave he stole what he could and fled. A cruel deed, but he knew they hated him. He and his big belly would take on the world together.

The Sea Puppy

His first voyage turned out to be his last. He did his best to help out around the ship when he was able but proved himself to be useless in a fight. He couldn’t blame the captain when he was discharged once they made it into port. After all, what good is a seasick pirate?

RANDOMLINKAGE!

Kate Monk's Onomastikon (dictionary of names)

Atomic Rocketships of the Space Patrol

I'm tempted to put one of these on my car.

Spheres, a sci-fi rpg setting

If you're Senator isn't on this list you should maybe be asking why. Dammit, Obama, where were you?

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Vintage neckties fashionable again?

Today I stopped by Carrie's, a local retro-retailer, over lunch. One of my personal affectations is an enthusiasm for vintage ties (particularly skinny 50's ties in black, red, or silver) and Carrie's is my principle supplier. When I first started shopping there in the mid-90s a tie cost two bucks. Later the price mushroomed to three dollars american. But this afternoon's visit led to the discovery of a premium vintage tie rack, with prices starting at $10! One tie was listed for 25 dollars! Surely there must be some hipsters out there somewhere with vintage neckties encircling their collars. How dare they bite my styles!

Fortunately the ties on the little carousel rack still only cost 3 smackers and I found a trio of likely suspects to bring home.

Con Game: Dragons of Ancient Days

This is my OD&D project. The basic idea is that the deeper one goes into the adventure, the further you travel along the OD&D publishing timeline. Encounters in the wilderness surrounding the dungeon will use the original Chainmail rules. Exploration of the ruins above the dungeon (an ancient, crumbling castle on a hill, of course) will use the 1974 boxed set. The first dungeon level will use Supplement I: Greyhawk. The next level will use Blackmoor, and the third level will use Eldritch Wizardry. I don't think I'll need more than three levels, but one could add the Arduin Grimoire material for the 4th level and the later Arduin trilogy books for levels 5 and 6.

Adding monsters and magic items the deeper one goes ought to be a cinch. The real tricks here are that the rules change. Blackmoor has hit location tables, for example. And Eldritch Wizardry has an inexplicable alternate initiative system. And the players will find that their characters change, too. The strange either/or multiclass system of OD&D gives way to the more recognizable format still largely used today. Wizards will find their spell lists very short initially. Thieves won't even exist until level one of the dungeon! It will be an odd play experience, to say the least.

"Okay, you descend the stairs into the dungeon. Here are your new character sheets."

"Hey, my hobbit fighting man is now a halfing thief!"

The Venturi Cluster

Regular readers may recall my post last month regarding the deep fantasy/eclectic fantasy spectrum. Since writing that piece I have begun to suspect that science fiction games have a similar dimension. On the ecletic end is Star Wars (with its cantinas full of rubbery aliens) and Star Trek (with its spatial anomaly of the week), while on the deep end might be found more staid sci-fi like Classic Traveller's 3rd Imperium setting. I don't think the distinction here is as great as the difference between Harn and Eberron, but I hope you can still see what I'm talking about.

The Venturi Cluster is the name of my new foray into a space opera setting of my own. My intention is to lean closer to the 3rd Imperium side, but to not go quite so far. I need some rubber suited aliens and planetcrushing superweapons to make a sci-fi setting really sing to me. Rather than start a new blog doomed to inactivity (cough, 6 Islands, cough) I figured I could just work out some of the details here. Basically, the V Cluster is meant to be a space setting roughly on the order of magnitude of the Spinward Marches, but with the following differences:

• Although meant to be compatible with Classic Traveller (especially Books 1-3), it owes no particular allegiance to the 3rd Imperium setting.
• The setting should also be largely compatible with Savage Worlds, SpaceMaster, and Mekton Zeta. Some functional compatibility with Star Frontiers would be nice as well.
• Instead of Traveller's 'mainworld' approach to stellar mapping, I am interested in spacemaps with actual stars and such on them.
• GURPS Aliens is to serve as my primary resource for the major races of the Cluster.
• Unlike the Spinward Marches, the Cluster will be largely isolated from the rest of space, at least for the historical eras in which actual play would occur (see below).
• The basic shape of the Cluster is taken from the old Avalon Hill boardgame Amoeba Wars, allowing Cluster-wide wars to be fought on that mapboard.
• Other board wargaming would be supported, particularly Starmada and non-canonical BattleTech.
• Different eras for the Cluster would be outlined for different uses. For example, full on Mekton Zeta robot throwdowns would be reserved for a single period in history. That way adventures could be run without giant mecha. Similarly, psionics could be a Big Deal in one or more periods, but be unknown or supressed as 'mind wizardry' in others.
• Star systems will have a Z coordinate. The basic shape of the cluster will be a flat disc, but it won't be perfectly flat. Stars in the center of the Cluster can have a Z rating of up to +5 or -5 lightyears from the Cluster baseplane. At the edges the variance drops off to +1 to -1.
• For the most part, FTL travel and communication will be as described in Traveller, but hexes on the subsector maps will be one light-year apart. This means that travel in the Cluster will be 3.25 easier because Traveller hexes are measured in parsecs. A jump-6 drive can take you 19 hexes! I'm considering introducing a "jump-1/2" drive that allows travel to adjacent hexes.

That's a quick rundown of the basics of the Venturi Cluster. Next time I'll talk more about my approach for building the stellar cartography using a "from the ground up" approach.