Goodbye Wessex, hello outer space

Tonight's tabletop game is going to be the last Wessex game for a while.  I don't know if anybody has noticed or not, but I haven't run my Monday morning game for a couple weeks now.  School has gotten kinda hectic and I've needed my Monday mornings for homework.  I don't know when I will next run an online game.  It may be a spontaneous thing, with those of you on Google+ at 4:30am my time getting a "Hey, anyone want to play a game of ______?"

Meanwhile, I'm going to pitch to my Wednesday group a few session of Traveller.  I've long wanted to run Adventure 4: Leviathan, which involves giving the party command of a big merchant explorer and sending them into an unknown subsector.  Since it's a commercial interest providing the ship the scenario is an interesting hybrid of Star Trek's exploration/first contact ethos with Traveller's more grubby economic bent.

Thanks to all the super-cool players who made the Caves of Myrddin/Dungeons of Dundagel a hoot.  That dungeon still has a crapload of unexplored nooks and crannies (whole levels, in fact), so I will probably return to it some day.

DDG monster list

There been some chatter among some old school bloggers about the cool possibilities of a campaign world where the Fiend Folio is the primary monster book.  I still think that's a super-nifty concept.  As an alternative, what would a campaign's monster list look like if we focused on the non-unique monsters found scattered through the various pantheons in Deities & Demigods?  Here's the list:

Average Knight of Renown (Arthurian Heroes) - basically a fighter level 8-10 with social clout
Knight of Quality (Arthurian Heroes) - fighter 10-13 with clout
[By the way, my research for the Wessex campaign suggests that in AD 1140 England's population was maybe 2 to 3 million total (Wessex itself was probably less than a million.)  And there were maybe 2 or 3 thousand knights.  So these guys would comprise about 1 in 1,000 of the populace.]
The Pack of the Wild Hunt - 8 hit dice spooky dogs
Spirits of the Air (Chinese Mythos) - 11HD, 8' tall dudes with wings and tusked monkey heads, neutral in alignment
Byakhee (Cthulhu Mythos)
Cthuga's Flame Creatures (Cthulhu Mythos)
Deep Ones (Cthulhu Mythos)
Great Race of Yith (Cthulhu Mythos)
Mi-Go (Cthulhu Mythos)
Primordial One (Cthulhu Mythos) - a.k.a. Elder Thing
Shoggoth (Cthulhu Mythos)
[You haven't lived until you loosed a couple of Shoggoths on your PCs.]
Flame Snake (Egyptian Mythos) - Tiny 1 HD fire-breathing snakes that guard treasure and hate the gods
Minions of Set (Egyptian Mythos) - black-clad jerkwads who can turn into giant scorpions, snakes or bears
Air Maiden (Finnish Mythos) - basically Lawful Good winged valkyries with Princess Leia hair
Cyclops, Greater (Greek Mythos) - the good ones who make magical weapons and stuff
Cyclops, Lesser (Greek Mythos) - Gronks with rocks
Marut (Indian Mythos) - invisible wind spirits, pretty kick-ass too
Clakar (Melnibonean Mythos) - winged apes!  hot damn!
Dharzi Hunting Dog (Melnibonean Mythos) - bloodhounds with hawk heads
Dragons of Melnibone (Melnibonean Mythos) - brief write-up of how these beasts differ from standard D&D dragons
Elenoin (Melnibonean Mythos) - extraplanar naked berserker ladies with sharp teeth
Grahluk (Melnibonean Mythos) - extraplanar ape men who hate the Elenoin
Mist Giant (Melnibonean Mythos) - four armed weirdos made of mist
Myyrrhn (Melnibonean Mythos) - hawk people, like in Brian Blessed in Flash Gordon
Nihrain Horse (Melnibonean Mythos) - magic horses kinda like the ones they ride in Krull
Oonai (Melnibonean Mythos) - shapeshifters that turn into various monsters to kick your ass
Vampire Trees (Melnibonean Mythos) - pretty much what it says on the tin: trees that want your blood
Vulture Lion (Melnibonean Mythos) - cool-looking wingless griffon variant
Astral Wolf (Newhon Mythos) - ghosts of wolves who starved to death
Behemoth (Newhon Mythos) - killer whales with stumpy legs
Bird of Tyaa (Newhon Mythos) - extra smart ravens that will put poison on their claws
Devourer (Newhon Mythos) - alien wizards who will sell you useless junk
Ghoul, Newhon (Newhon Mythos) - cannibals with transparent flesh
Gods of Lankhmar (Newhon Mythos) - grumpy mummies who serve as the local gods of the city
Leviathan (Newhon Mythos) - basically a kraken or giant squid
Snow Serpent (Newhon Mythos) - white-furred snake

Salt Spider (Newhon Mythos) - giant spider that lurks in salt swamps, can spin webs and its strange feet allow it to walk on water, quicksand (quicksalt?), etc.

Water Cobra (Newhon Mythos) - poisonous aquatic snake with chameleon ability

Fossergrim (Norse Mythos) - sort of male dryads who are attached to waterfalls instead of trees

Valkyries (Norse Mythos) - like Bugs Bunny in that one opera cartoon

That's forty critters, which sounds to me like plenty with which to build a campaign world.  The knights suggest a standard pseudo-medieval feel but based on the number of the winged creatures on the list I'd want to make sure that cloud islands and/or floating cities figured prominently in the setting.

The DDG would also be a great place to get all your magic items from.  Open the book to a random page and there's bound to be a god with some sort of ridiculous item you can borrow.

OA event charts

The subject of random event charts came up on Google+ last week and I thought this might be a good time to look at the yearly, monthly and daily event charts from the original Oriental Adventures.

Most of the annual events look like they would work in nearly any campaign.  An isolated realm might not have an actual ambassador visit, but some sort of outsider VIP could become a factor to the game.  Tsunamis might need to be replaced if your campaign is entirely inland.

 Note how the monthly events are skewed based upon the annual event.

The daily events don't directly connect to higher level events, rather they are a function of the party's location.  I like how in Rural areas 15% of all encounters are with ordinary bandits or criminals.  "Special" on the court indicates someone in the party receives a message from their lord with some sort of mission or instructions.

There's not really much on these charts that won't work in an occidental setting.

Meet my racer! (NSFW)

Since my FLAILSNAILS pc Donnal MacDonnal is off fighting a war in the Hill Cantons, I decided to make a new guy to participate in Richard's Carcosan Wacky Races.  I used these weird Carcosa chargen charts made by some sadist who hates players. This guy below has not been approved tot play yet, so consider him a first draft.

Oogah was kicked out of his tribe of naked ultraluddite cannibals for using a stick as a tool.  He still hasn't adapted completely to modern Carcosan society and its use of the strange technology known as 'pants'.

This is Oogah's ride before his mechanic tricked it out.  It's a standard model Carcosan motor-trike with radium-emission headlights.  Snoo added jet fins for aerodynamic stability, a rusty old hand-crank gatling gun, a buzzsaw armature, an infernal engine that burns the souls of cute little bunnies and a cup holder.  She calls the complete vehicle the Hate Beast.

This is Snoo, Oogah's grumpy mechanic.  Her turn-offs include long walks on the beach, cute little bunnies and riding on motorcycles behind naked savages.

complete versus sufficient

For years I was of the opinion that the D&D Rules Encyclopedia was the best everything-you-need-in-one-book version of the game ever produced by TSR.  It has lots and lots of stuff: Classes beyond the BX 4+3 in both core and prestige varieties, rules for play up to 36th level, craploads of monsters, an optional skill system, weapon mastery rules, the War Engine mass combat system, maps of the Known World of Mystara, rules for becoming Immortal, etc, etc, forever and ever Ah-men.

But at some point I turned a corner on wanting all that stuff spelled out for me.  Nowadays I think Dr. Holmes's rulebook is the shiniest one-book approach to D&D that TSR put out.  Why?  Because it is woefully incomplete.  There's just enough D&D there to play some D&D and hardly anything more.  The rest of it is on the DM.  How do the gods work?  What does the world look like?  How do I run a whole war?  I'm not sure I want my D&D corebook answering those questions for me anymore.  The Rules Cyclopedia is still a great book.  I'd call it a star in the crown of TSR.  But I'm pretty sure it's way more D&D than I'll ever need.

Wizardly Wednesday plays hard, fair

This is Dizzy the Hun.

He is a wizard.

He was present at the secret origin of the superbeings known as KISS.

He is from Latveria.

No foolin'.

here's a thing I made

Click for a bigger if not necessarily clearer version.

I call this thing the Orrery of Sarpedon.  Sarpedon is a Saturn-like ringed gas giant in the center of the concentric circles.  The concentric circles are the orbits of Sarpedon's moons, with the partial arc showing the closest approach of a rogue moon in a particularly eccentric orbit.

Let's say that Sarpedon is in the habitable zone of its star so we can posit a science-fantasy/planetary romance style D&D campaign set on moon E, the next-to-outermost of the regular circles.  That orbit corresponds vaguely to Titan's orbit around Saturn.

In lieu of keeping strict time records and tracking orbits at the beginning of each session you can roll d4, d6, d8, d12, d16, d24 and d100 to place the moons in position around Sarpedon.  If two or more moons are placed in orbit segments that line up, like say a4 and b6, then you have a Conjunction of those two moons.  This allows for all sorts of astrologically based magical effects, like the moons in the Dragonlance books.  If the Conjunction is with moon E, the campaign homeworld, then the other moon(s) involved loom extra large in the sky and it's called a Close Approach.  Moon G becomes involved in these celestial shenanigans only when the d100 roll comes up between 37 and 68.  The rest of the time that moon is just a distant point of light.

If you feel like doing the extra work, you can advance each moon on a daily basis as time passes during the session.  Personally, I'm liable to forget to do so and would probably just reroll whenever I remembered that time had passed.

I've been thinking about this concept for a long time.  I finally made a draft of the chart in the wake of the recent death of Moebius, who would be one of the inspirational artists for a campaign set on Sarpedon E.