And the Gold Ennie for Best Supplement Goes To...

By now you've probably heard the good news, but just in case you haven't...

 

Barkeep on the Borderland won the Gold Ennie for Best Supplement in 2023! 

 

Video of the awards ceremony is below. The Best Supplement segment starts at 2h 50m 20s, and the announcement of the gold winner starts at 3h 00m 36s.

 

 

Congratulations first of Charles Ferguson-Avery and Alex Coggon at Wet Ink Games for winning the Silver Ennie with Into the Cess & Citadel. 

 

I also wanted to thank and congratulate everyone else who worked on Barkeep. This was a very large project, and I contributed a small part of it. I'm proud and honored to have been on this team.

 

Once again, big thanks to WFS of Prismatic Wasteland for originating the project and including me on the team.

Thank you and congratulations to the other co-authors - Ava Islam of Permanent Cranial Damage, Ben L of Mazirian's Garden, Chris McDowall of Bastionland, emmy verte of Spooky Action at a Distance, Gus L of All Dead Generations, Luka Rejec of Wizard Thief Fighter, Marcia B of Traverse Fantasy, Nick LS Whelan of Papers & Pencils, Ty Pitre of Mindstorm, and Zedeck Siew. 

 

Ava, Nick, and Ty also helped edit. Gus and Luka also provided art. KT Nguyen proofread and did layout.

Thank you and congrats as well to all the other artists who worked contributed to the book - Acid Lich, Amanda Ho, Artie Esquire, bertdrawsstuff, Caleb Nelson, Conor Ricks of Mighty Spark!, DemiDevilQueen, Emiel Boven of Lizard Mail, Guy Pradel, Hodag of No Foes No Traps, Keny Widjaja, Norn Noszka, Sam Mameli of Better Legends, Sam Miller of Save vs Worm, and torthevic.

Hurray for us all!

Barkeep on the Borderlands & the Brazen Boulevardier

The last time I wrote about Barkeep on the Borderlands, it was but a young Kickstarter with dreams of fully funding, and my own involvement was merely the future promise of an as-yet unmet stretch goal.

 

But since then, Barkeep has been released! It's available in print, and pdf, and it has a map! And coasters!

 

And even more exciting, it's been nominated for an Ennie award for Best Supplement!

 

That means that you can help Barkeep win an Ennie, by voting before the election closes on July 23rd.

 

 

Brazen Boulevardier logo by Caleb Nelson

 
My own contribution is a single pub for Barkeep's pubcrawl - The Brazen Boulevardier. The Boulevardier is a refuge for emigres from the Elemental Plane of Fire, who fled to the Material Plane to escape the Tyrant of Ashes and Tears, whose anhedonic regime forbids happiness and pleasure generally, and specifically alcohol, meat, and sex. 

 

The Tyrant is based somewhat on the laws and aspirations of various real-world theocrats, though it's not modeled closely on any particular regime. It's also based on my own struggles with depression, especially when I was younger.

 

As you might imagine, visits to the Boulevardier can get pretty spicy! If you play Barkeep on the Borderland, I hope you'll stop by. Just watch out for those phoenix-women!

 

I want to thank WFS from Prismatic Wasteland for involving me in this endeavor, Ty Pitre from Mindstorm for his editing and project management, and all the artists, especially Caleb Nelson, who designed the Brazen Boulevardier logo, and illustrated one of my favorite possible encounters.

 

 

And if you're reading this before July 23rd, please remember to go vote for Barkeep on the Borderlands for Best Supplement!

My Book Review Blog - The Lunar Flaneur

Over the past year and a half, I've been writing reviews of all the books I finish and posting them to a private social media feed. 

As part of my ongoing attempt to get myself back into blogging regularly, I've copied all my reviews so far over to a public blog. I'll be updating it regularly as I continue to read and review.

 Please enjoy! The Lunar Flaneur

Blog5 on Tape - Type5 of Re5ource5

The fifth season of Nick LS Whelan's excellent Blogs on Tape project is well underway, and I've been fortunate enough to be included again this year!

Big thanks to Nick for his ongoing curation, preservation, and publication efforts, and for including me in his vision of the best of the blogosphere!

You can listen to the episode at Episode 121 - Mechanics for Resource Management Part 3: Types of Resources, and you can read my original post here.

And remember to check in on Nick's work at Papers & Pencils and Blogs on Tape.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Over the summer, I got really depressed. I've had major depressive disorder for more or less my entire life, and I mostly have it well-managed, but sometimes it grows out of my control. Summers are often worse, for whatever reason. And of course, the general state of the world has worsened, downgrading from this-is-fine-dot-png to not-great-bob-dot-gif, in ways too numerous to mention, which isn't the cause of my depression, but certainly doesn't help either.

While I was depressed, I took a hiatus from blogging. I'm feeling better now, but it's been difficult to restart all the things I stopped doing during the most difficult time.

In March, shortly before my absence, Josep Torra of the Tirant lo Dau blog contacted me about translating my essay Landmark, Hidden, Secret into Catalan and publishing it in a zine. This easily makes LHS the most famous thing I've ever written. The zine is available on itch.io as a free pdf, and there's an inexpensive print option on Lulu. Josep's translation of my writing is on pages 81-86.

Tirat lo Drac 2022

Then in June, Chris McDowell also promoted Landmark, Hidden, Secret. It was tip #2 in his Bastionland Broadcasting episode "Preparing for an RPG Session - 3 Small Tips". The section that mentions me starts at around the 23 minute, 30 second mark.

 

 

 

 

Over the summer, my regular online gaming group met somewhat sporadically. Peter from Fantasy Heartbreak Workshop acted as the dungeon master, and ran us through Axo's Dungeon - which turns out to be quite a work of OSR collaboration, put together and keyed by Paolo Greco from Lost Pages, using geomorphs hosted on Dyson's Dodecahedron and Stonewerks, with updated art provided by Of Dice and Djinn. We used Peter's SKROP rules, which is his house ruled mashup of the GLOG and D&D 5e, and the game took place in his Owl Light setting, a science fantasy moon orbiting a Jupiter-like gas giant.

We started the campaign looking for human Reavers who'd been kidnapping villagers in a remote lake district, and found the dungeon on an island in lake. Inside we met an affable and nervous priest of Cthulhu, who wished to promote moderate worship of the Great Old One, but not so much worship that it might trigger madness in the worshippers or risk disturbing Cthulhu from his eternal slumber in any way. We also found a whole hoard of Reavers in a tenuous alliance with the Squid King and his Cephalopod army.

The dungeon has a lot of corridors and passageways, giving us an almost Metroid-like experience of rapid exploration. We rescued the Slug Witch from the Slug King, provoked a war between the Reavers and the Cephalopods that decimated both factions, and rescued the imprisoned villagers. Peter was amazed that we managed to navigate the dungeon so effectively to find the things we were looking for. I was amazed that our various disguises and stratagems actually worked and got the two armies to nearly wipe each other out. It was maybe my most efficacious campaign ever, in terms of accomplishing my character's goals during the game.

 

Axos Dungeon by Lost Pages

 

 

 

Recently we've started a new campaign with me as the referee. Ever since the new edition of Into the Odd came out, I've been wanting to run someone through the expanded version of the "Iron Coral" dungeon. Originally only a single level, it now has three! I actually ran the original as a DCC weird western adventure site, which I called "The Irontown Corral", but this is my first time running it using I2TO.

Peter and Leighton have just found an entrance to the second level, so I'm excited to see what happens next! So far Peter's Prize Breeder and Leighton's Sky Trooper have found 6 jars of "Dr Bronzeworthy's Fantabulous Frictionless Ball Bearings" and a very valuable crystalline sphere, thanks in part to some help from a couple of assistants that I rolled up using the Burnboss and Courier failed careers from Benign Brown Beast. (In the likely event of character death, the assistants will get promoted up to full player character status.) In the next section, I'm hoping they'll delve into territory none of us has seen yet.

The Iron Coral frontispiece by Johan Nohr

 

So that's how I spent my summer. Feel free to share what you've been up to in the comments!

Lighthouse at Shipbreaker Shoals

An adventure I wrote, Lighthouse at Shipbreaker Shoals, has just recently been published! The pdf is available now at DriveThruRPG, and a print edition will be available soon at the Goodman Games webstore. 

Earlier this week, I appeared on the Maw of Mike podcast to promote the adventure. I thought I should also take the opportunity to talk here about my design process. 

Before the pandemic, in a time that now feels like it belongs to a different era of history, Stephen Newton, author of a half-dozen DCC modules and publisher of Thick Skull Adventures, reached out to me to write an adventure for him. This was my first time being commissioned to write an entire adventure.

Stephen's pitch was that this new adventure would take place in the same setting as Attack of the Frawgs and The Haunting of Larvik Island, and should serve as an optional bridge between the two. 

I agreed that I was interested, and started brainstorming possible ideas. I read Fawgs and Larvik, as well as several reviews of them, both positive and critical. I noted a few things that ended up being relevant to the final form of the adventure. 

The first was that Stephen's other two adventures were set in a fairly realistic medieval environment with most of the weirdness coming from the monsters who were invading it. So I decided that whatever I wrote should be grounded in an interesting, but essentially ordinary structure that could exist in the real world. I initially thought of the brewery that gets introduced in Frawgs, but decided against that because of the second thing I noted, which was that the first adventure is set in the characters' hometown, and the second takes place on a distant island. 

So I thought that whatever I wrote should give the newly ascended 1st level characters, who'd just survived a Zero Level Funnel, a reason to leave home and a reason to go onward to the islands. This led me to decide on a coastal adventure, with the beach as a kind of juncture point between the landlocked village and islands surrounded by sea. Thinking about things that happen right on the coastline that might motivate people to travel outside their hometown for the first time, I hit upon the idea of a lighthouse in trouble. 

cover art by FRK Pyron

 

What should be the source of the trouble? Well, Larvik begins to introduce the cosmology of Stephen's gameworld, which, without spoiling the details, involves a elderly sea god and some sibling rivalries between his children. Making one of the children a spiritual protector of the lighthouse, and the other two the source of the monsters, turning the battle for the site into a kind of proxy war in the squabblings of childish divinities, sounded promising to me. I also double-checked with Stephen to make sure I'd gotten my understanding of his gameworld's theology right. 

In retrospect, by this point, the adventure was shaping up to be much more of a prequel to Larvik than a sequel to Frawgs. So I had my site, and I had my source of danger. Now it was time to decide how they were interrelated. In keeping with the setup of the other two adventures, I decided that the lighthouse had gone dark because of an incursion of weird monsters. That would be a worthy reason for newly forged heroes to come investigate, and if the trouble at the lighthouse is being caused by gods who are also related to the problems on Larvik Island, then the players both have a reason to go off and learn more about them, and Larvik is slightly enriched by providing more background on the gods of its setting.

At this point, I free associated a bit. One episode of the show Connections, which I'd watched recently at the time, talks about the history of lighting technology. Limelight was was on the first really bright lights that people figured out during the Industrial Revolution. It was never widely used in lighthouses, but it theoretically could have been. Limelight is named that because chemical compounds containing calcium are often called lime-something, for example, limestone. A form of limestone is what makes the famous White Cliffs of Dover so white. Now, it turns out that limelight works by burning something called quicklime rather than limestone - but it was easy enough to set aside the inconvenience of that detail and imagine a lighthouse set on some white limestone cliffs, and to imagine that the lighthouse uses a magical lantern that burns limestone as fuel to make an impossibly bright signal beam. All this was inspired by reality, but since no one who's not a chemist or construction worker has heard of quicklime, it's slightly easier to understand than the truth.

Also in the news around the same time, for whatever reason, was something about hagfish and their fascinating slime. I can't remember why hagfish were considered newsworthy at the time, but what matters for the adventure is that (a) hagfish vaguely look like worms, or even more vaguely, like dragons, and (b) hagfish slime looks just like water until you try to touch it. The idea of a giant hagfish as the climactic encounter for the adventure appealed to me very quickly. You can see the beast up there on the cover. The fact that the effect of the hagfish might be invisible until you investigate it closely appealed to me as a possible source of mystery to investigate.

And so the adventure I ended up writing is structured as a kind of mystery. It's a crime scene, and as you explore it, you find out information about the victim, and you discover evidence in the form of signs and portents that show you what kinds of monsters the gods sent to commit their crime. Because the perpetrators are godlings, and because it's D&D, some of that evidence is quite dangerous to the investigators. Since there are two gods, there are two kinds of incursion, and although the Barnacle Bear is inspired more by the appearance of the character Doomsday from DC Comics than it is by actual barnacles. It functions as a mini-boss of the site, and you can see it in the art below.

As I built the adventure site, I thought about making a fairly realistic map of a lighthouse and lighthouse keeper's house and estate, and I thought about how to make each "clue" different and interesting. What might happen in the well? The kitchen? How would these monsters be affected if the lighthouse keeper had a sauna? Both the big monsters have vulnerabilities that you can learn about by investigating the estate. I added a turnspit dog to the kitchen, both because it was another interesting thing I'd learned about on Connections, and because it tells you something interesting about how the lighthouse functions. 

The climactic encounter is something I'm proud of, and involved a lot of back-and-forth with Stephen to get right. But if you've been wondering for the past couple paragraphs how a party of 1st level characters stands any chance of defeating a dragon, the answer is that there are clues about its weaknesses in the adventure, and I wrote explicit GM advice about what to do if the players try to act on those clues. You definitely won't win just by swinging your sword at it - it's much too big and powerful. But there are ways to hurt it badly, to maybe defeat it, or at least drive it away. But if you don't learn enough from the investigation - or think quickly on your feet during the battle - then your 1st level characters probably will die. And since they were fighting a seemingly overwhelming opponent, I hope those deaths will feel appropriate. Victory is possible, but it's not guaranteed.

interior art by FRK Pyron

One last thing I want to note is the reason that Stephen is listed as doing "additional writing" and not just "editing" or "publishing" on the cover. Stephen's editing was invaluable. This was the first of a couple projects where I've really, REALLY benefited from having an editor with a keen eye for quality who has noticed my weakest areas and pushed me to do better. But in Stephen's case, he also stepped up and added some of his own writing to a couple places that most needed it. 

At the beginning of the adventure, I'd written a table of interactions between the party and the townspeople of Sagewood. It was essentially just a rumor table with a bit of advice and an extra piece of equipment for each standard character class. Stephen expanded it into more of a roleplaying opportunity. 

My idea for the magic lantern was - aside from the fact that it could burn rocks as fuel - a little lacking in terms of seeming all that magical, and it didn't particularly have a role to play in the final fight, except that ideally you'd want to keep it from getting destroyed in the fracas. Stephen rewrote it to be a real artifact, something truly important and precious. Both those inclusions make the overall adventure stronger and better, and I'm glad that it looks the way it does now, instead of how I wrote it.

My Brilliant Friends - A Conversation with WFS of Prismatic Wastelands and Barkeep on the Borderlands

My friend and Bones of Contention coauthor WFS is kickstarting a pointcrawl adventure called Barkeep on the Borderlands. I got added as a coauthor thanks to a successful stretch goal, and most of the Skeleton Crew will also be writing bars for the crawl, along with OSR luminaries like Chris McDowall and (potentially!) Luka Rejec.

As the final weekend of crowdfunding approaches, I chatted with WFS to ask him some of his inspirations and his feelings about real-world barcrawling.

 

 

Anne - So Barkeep on the Borderlands and the Raves of Chaos are obviously inspired by the widely owned, widely played, and widely criticized D&D adventure, The Keep on the Borderlands, and the Caves of Chaos adventure site. There have been a couple of interesting responses to the original Keep in the last few years. Alex Damaceno's Beyond the Borderlands zine and Greg Gillespie's Forbidden Caverns of Archaia spring to mind immediately.

You've actually written before about your thoughts on Keep, but if you'll indulge me, why did you decide to make your barcrawling adventure a kind of response to this classic?

WFS - Many of my best ideas begin their lives as puns, which was the case with Barkeep on the Borderlands. I typically have a few score ideas swirling around in my head at any given time, and in this instance two of those combined. On the one hand, I had been rereading some classic modules and found The Keep on the Borderlands very interesting - as evidenced by my blog post you referenced. On the other, I was nostalgic for a simple pre-pandemic pleasure that I had taken for granted, which is hopping from bar to bar with a band of friends. Somehow the two ideas slammed into each other and I thought of two puns, both the title “Barkeep on the Borderlands” and the more descriptive subtitle “a Pubcrawl Pointcrawl.” From the title alone, I felt like I had a lot to work with. 

I think combining two disparate elements into a cohesive whole is a really helpful creative exercise. It’s why the spark tables in Electric Bastionland are so genius. You have to figure out how the two ideas fit together and come up with something totally unique. For Barkeep, I had to figure out how a pubcrawl fit into the world presented by Keep on the Borderlands.

Anne - And why do you think it's such a popular adventure for people to respond to? Is it just that it was included in Holmes' Basic Set at a key time? Or is there more to it than that?

WFS - I don’t think one can discount its inclusion in the Basic Set, the gateway for so many into the hobby, but there does seem to be something special about the adventure itself. After all, they replaced In Search of the Unknown with The Keep on the Borderlands for a reason. And I think it is because the adventure is itself so basic that made it so useful to early gamemasters and so beloved. It has all you need for the core game loops of D&D: a starting town, a surrounding wilderness and a dungeon filled with monsters. 

But just as important as what it includes is what it doesn’t include. There are no proper names in the module: people are just called the Priest, the Castellan or the Taverner. The political environment is just a sketch: the Keep exists on the border of some civilized land to the west and untamed wilderness to the east (which sounds like the classic West Marches in reverse), but there are no details you might get in later products that tied themselves to Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, etc. The motivations of the monsters and cultists in the module are also hazy at best. And all of this blank space allows for the gamemaster and player to project their own ideas onto it! After I wrote that post on the module, I heard back from a lot of people how they interpreted it differently, like viewing the chaotic bandits as a scouting party of some evil human empire to the east, or deciding to raid the Keep instead of the Caves of Chaos, or playing the adventure straight as Gygax seems to have intended. The Keep on the Borderlands’ flexibility to contain all of these competing narratives and motivations is its abiding strength.

Anne - I'm curious to know your thoughts on a recent drinking trend. How do you feel about amaro? I know that Brad Thomas Parsons is not single-handedly responsible for the rise of bitter Italian liqueurs, but he is more or less single-handedly responsible for getting me into them. I read his books, Bitters and Amaro, and that convinced me to try them, and from there I've just kept trying new bitter flavors.

WFS - I am really not up on any of the latest drinking trends; I prefer to stick more to the classics, old fashioneds, negronis, whiskey sours and the like. I have had a few amaro spritzes, but didn't find them particularly revolutionary. 

In terms of trends, I am of course aware of seemingly every brand getting into the hard seltzer business, but I'm not too keen on them. Something in that vein that I have enjoyed, however, are the Finnish Long Drinks, which to my understanding actually contains gin. It's no gin & tonic with a splash of St. Germain, but if I'm at a tailgate and everyone is chugging beers, it's probably my canned drink of choice. Any amaro drinks you'd recommend?

Anne - I actually would say the negroni is a good starting point! It's pretty easy to experiment with y swapping out one ingredient to see how you like the taste with a different spirit, or another liqueur instead of vermouth. Campari was my first amaro, then Aperol, then I discovered you can mix them, and by now, I've tried maybe a half dozen others.

I actually thought of White Claw and its cousins as a trend, but I almost never drink them, myself. Somehow almost all the ones I've tried have had a metallic aftertaste. That might just be a quirk of my palette though.

WFS - That’s exposes my ignorance - I didn’t know Campari was a type of amaro. I need to get on your level.

Anne - Admittedly, until I read the Amaro book, I didn't know the word, let alone any examples! I think bitter flavors have become more enjoyable for me as I've gotten older.

Okay, last question. Looking beyond Barkeep on the Borderlands, you named your blog for a campaign setting, the Prismatic Wasteland. You've mentioned before that Luka Rejec's Ultraviolet Grasslands was one of your inspirations. But could I ask you to pop the hood for a moment, and ask you to talk about another inspiration? What's something I could read or watch or listen to that would help me understand a part of the Prismatic Wasteland? And how does the source relate to the final product?

WFS - I’ll give you three, one being a science fantasy book old enough to be on the original Appendix N, the second being a children’s TV show, and the third is another classic D&D module - I have range. 

So the first (and potentially somewhat obvious) answer is Dying Earth by Jack Vance. The stories of the Dying Earth take place amidst the decay of an untold number of decadent civilizations but the stories are about wizards, and monsters and magic. However, what is understood as magic is really the ritual tinkering with ancient sciences and technologies that are no longer understood. This all rings true for the Prismatic Wasteland setting as well.

But the Prismatic Wasteland is bit less dark than the Dying Earth, which while light at times is not always so. I describe the Prismatic Wasteland as whimsical post-post-apocalyptic in genre, which aligns more with my second influence, Adventure Time. Adventure Time was a show that ran on Cartoon Network but garnered a following of adults due to its sense of humor. While it can read as just pure gonzo fantasy at first (with talking animals and a kingdom full of candy people), over the course of the series, it is revealed that the world is the way it is due to a series of apocalypses, and the remnants of the older civilizations, humanity included, are scattered and scarce.

For the third inspiration, we’ll move away from science fantasy and the Dying Earth genre entirely. The Isle of Dread is an adventure for B/X D&D and is only a few years younger than The Keep on the Borderlands. It is also one of the first adventures I ever ran. I have always preferred its flora and fauna (which includes dinosaurs) to the typical pseudo-medieval stock in most D&D settings and adventures. The Prismatic Wasteland setting is similar, but with a more science fiction spin: it takes place across an entire continent, which was terraformed by an advanced civilization to be the ideal vacation resort for an intergalactic populace. But now the island’s many spas, mega-malls, amusement parks, high-end dining and other amenities are unrecognizable, derelict versions of their former selves. And the AI-enabled robotic animals that were designed to be capable of reproduction run wild from the amusement parks in which they were once contained. I call these creatures “animaltronics” and they do include dinosaurs. So I guess I would be remiss in not also listing a fourth inspiration: Jurassic Park.

A book, a TV show, a TTRPG adventure and a movie. How’s that for a variety of sources!

cover art by Sam Mameli

 

My Weird & Wonderful Interview with maxcan7

At the start of the year, or maybe it was the end of the last one, maxcan7 of Weird & Wonderful Worlds messaged me to ask if I'd like to participate in his ongoing interview series. I agreed, and in the last couple weeks we found a time to sit down for a chat.

That interview has now been released!, and you can read it here.

Thank you to maxcan7 for the opportunity to participate in this project, and for the chance to talk about myself and my views on the online RPG scene.

My First 6 Months with Bones of Contention

About six months ago, I announced that I was joining the Bones of Contention blog. Although this has been one of my least productive blogging years, I did manage to get a few posts in.

 

 
 

Dungeon Dioramas - In the Light of a Ghost Star & Earth Expedition One

 

For my first post, I decided to review one of the first adventures put out by the prolific minimalist Nate Treme. In addition to a careful reading of the gamebook, I was able to base my review on some actual play experience with my regular Friday night game group. This one also features something that I hope I can still make a somewhat regular feature of the column, a section where I put the procedural adventure generators in the book to work and run them through their paces by generating an entire setting.

 

 

Cryptic Signals - Mausritter, Anomalous Subsurface Environment, Honey in the Rafters, Doodle Champion Island Games

 

One of the interesting things about Bones as a blog is that we have multiple authors. The Cryptic Signals series of posts tries to use that to offer a series of short vignette reviews of several different game books. I went ahead and organized this one, and wrote two of the reviews, including for the Pokemon-like browser game Google released to celebrate the 2020 Summer Olympics. My review of Mausritter included another test of adventure generation procedures.

 

  

Dungeon Dioramas - Night Land

 

When I wrote my Ghost Star review, I mentioned that I had been hoping for a setting like William Hope Hodgson's Night Land, which led Trey from From the Sorcerer's Skull to recommend this Night Land to me. Aside from the name and the basic premise of a weird, futuristic land stuck in eternal darkness, this adventure doesn't borrow much from Hodgson, but I'm still glad I read it. 

I feel like mentioning the book in my first two columns makes it seem like I'm obsessed with Night Land, and I'm sure I'll review more science fantasy in the future, but I promise that every column won't be about how another game designer has failed to sufficiently remind me of Hodgson.

Cryptic Signals - Dissident Whispers

This was our most thematic Cryptic Signals so far, and to be honest, I liked that so much I hope more of them will have some sort of unifying theme. I picked my second favorite review from the book. I didn't review my favorite - yet - because I don't want to pigeonhole myself as only writing about Mausritter. I'm hopeful that we'll do another batch of reviews from Dissident Whispers though, and if we do, I'll be sure to review it then. The process of writing my three "mini reviews" so far makes me wonder if I'm constitutionally incapable of writing an actually short review, but it is good practice reining in my tendency to wordiness.

Dungeon Dioramas - Root Quickstart & Pellenicky Glade

My last review of the year looks at the free, public materials for the upcoming Root roleplaying game. I backed the Kickstarter, so I have the pdfs for the full game, but I wanted to base what I wrote on the parts that people can actually play. I wished I could have included this year's Free RPG Day adventure, but I didn't pick it up in person, and the pdf still isn't publicly available. 

I'm glad there was an adventure to review though. It could be tempting to fall into a trap of just reviewing rulesets, but I think the most interesting part of this project is looking at the more actionable advice that shows up in adventures. I want to note that Root actually has a small system for procedurally generating the campaign area, but I didn't bother testing it out, precisely because the availability of pre-written villages makes the random generator to create them less important.

Index of Reviews by Title

My final contribution to Bones for the year was to make an index of the reviews so far. For next year, I hope to use my Cryptic Signals entries to highlight some zines that I think have done something interesting, but that maybe don't rise to full review status. I also hope to try out the Folie a Deux format that Gus and WFS pioneered. I think they're another good way to use our numbers, and I have a couple already tentatively lined up. I just need to come out of my shell enough to get them written.

Blogs on Tape 4 - Resources 4 All

Nick LS Whelan has started the fourth season of his Blogs on Tape podcast, and I'm honored to have one of my posts included as the first episode of the new season!

You can listen to the episode at Episode 89 - Resource Management 2: Defining Our Terms, and you can read my original blog post here.

Another round of big thanks to Nick for the entire Blogs on Tape project, and for including my work in it!

Bones of Contention

I recently joined the Skeleton Crew of a new blogging enterprise - Bones of Contention.

  

The overall goal of the blog is to serve as a repository of reviews written by a group of people who have at least somewhat similar taste in RPG adventures.

Individual motives for participating probably vary from person to person. My motivation is to take a closer look at the kind of adventures that interest me most, to understand how they work, and to think about how they could be improved.

My initial plans are to focus on adventures that use procedural generation, and to look at some of the new "heartwarming" rulesets that are being released. I may expand my list as I go. These are things I've been meaning to look at more closely anyway. So for me, joining Bones of Contention was originally mostly  an excuse and a motivation to actually go forward with that intention.

That said, I think there's something valuable about creating a miniature community of reviewers, and I'm curious to see how our tastes will evolve over the course of the project. Will they converge? Will they grow apart? Will any of our reviews produce valuable aesthetic or game-design insights? I'm excited to find out.

You can read the introduction, and meet the other Skeleton Crew members, here.

The Class Alphabet for DCC RPG

  

The Class Alphabet for DCC

 

In spring 2016, David Coppoletti reached out to me and a couple dozen other DCC fans on Google+. He had an ambitious idea - a sourcebook of 26 character classes for Dungeon Crawl Classics. Sometime in fall or winter 2020, David's idea appeared as a finished book, The Class Alphabet for DCC RPG. You can read Raven Crowking's review here.

I was convinced by David's G+ pitch, and wrote the Knave. Later, due to the logistical challenges of managing the contributions of so many collaborators, I ended up a second class, the Cyber-Zombie.

The Knave receives, I think, the single longest class write-up in the book. My goal was to combine the various Jacks of fairy tale and nursery rhyme, characters like Liane the Wayfarer and Cugel the Clever from Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories, the Fool from Neil Gaiman's Books of Magic, the imagery of playing cards, and the tarot. I was also experimenting with the limits of the "you're no hero" writing style; I described Knaves as being nasty in a way that almost makes me uncomfortable to reread. The Knave class is so long because there are four fully described sub-classes based on the suits of playing cards, each subclass has its three Mighty Deed of Arms equivalents they can learn, there are 22 spell-like effects based on the major arcana of tarot, and also, yes, because of long-windedness on my part.

The Cyber-Zombie was my attempt to create a class that you can only start playing after your previous character has died. I was definitely inspired by Terra Frank's three undead classes from the first Gongfarmer's Almanac. As a Cyber-Zombie, you start out at whatever level your old character was, and you retain a remnant of your old class powers, although reduced from before. Cyber-Zombies also get upgrades. I based the possible upgrades on Super Metroid and Mega Man X, and on the Centurions cartoon series. 

The other authors in the collection are a veritable Who's Who of DCC fans and publishers - including Reid San Filippo of the Crawling Under a Broken Moon zine and the subsequent Umerica sourcebook and adventure series, Diogo Nogueira of Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells and Solar Blades & Cosmic Spells and plenty of other projects, and plenty of other names that you might recognize from their contributions to The Gongfarmer's Almanac, their participation in various DCC podcasts, their DCC blogs, or other gaming publications.

It's a pleasant surprise for me to see The Class Alphabet finally out. This was one of the first times I was invited to contribute to a collaborative writing project. Quite a lot has happened in my life, and in the world, since David first approached me. I'm very happy to see that he was able to realize his goal.

The Forgotten Rites of the Moldering Dead

 

The Forgotten Rites of the Moldering Dead

 

Donn Stroud invited me to contribute to a sourcebook of tables for generating undead monsters for DCC, The Forgotten Rites of the Moldering Dead. The end result is something quite similar to Stroud's Lesser Key to the Celestial Legion. But where Lesser Key focused on angels and celestials, Forgotten Rites is about all types of corporeal undead, and all sorts of graverobbing adventures.

I wrote some of the entries about undead animals and some of the longer adventure seeds. I also contributed to some of the tables for creating a unique encounter with a specific undead monster and for finding treasures by digging up graves. Donn did the lion's share of the work on this project, writing at least half the book himself, as well coordinating the involvement of all the other contributors.

If you've been wanting something similar to the Libris Mortis for DCC, you will probably be pleased by Donn's book. It's not really meant to be used "straight through" - it's more like a reference you could consult if you know you want to use this undead or that undead, but you want to do something to make the encounter a bit different than standard.

Blogs on Tape 3 - Encumbrance is Bliss?

Nick LS Whelan continues to convert a curated selection of rpg blog posts into audio files for the Blogs on Tape project. I'm a fan! Admittedly, my opinion here is biased by the fact that he's just recorded a third episode reading aloud one of my posts.

My third appearance is Episode 82 - Mechanics for Resource Management: Part 1, The Easy Way. You can read the original entry on my blog here.

My writing previously appeared on Blogs on Tape in Episode 71 - Should We Start Numbering Hallways on Our Maps? (original entry here) and in Episode 47 - Campaigns I Want to Run: Dungeons & Decorators (original entry here).

 

Once again, big thanks to Nick for his ongoing contribution to the rpg blogosphere! You can also check his How to Help page if you want to support this project.

I Shall Destroy all the Civilized Stretch Goals!

I previously mentioned that I will maybe be writing a DCC patron, depending on the result of a crowdfunding campaign.

The campaign is Joshua LH Burnett and Leighton Connor's adaptation of Fletcher Hanks' golden-age comics into a DCC setting with multiple adventures, titled for the villains of one of Hanks' strips, The Leopard Women of Venus.

At the time I'm writing this, the campaign has about three days left. It'll end early morning on Thursday, November 21st. The campaign has received enough pledges to fund, and barring a catastrophe, in the next 72 hours it will receive enough pledges to commission Stephen Poag, who's art has become almost synonymous with DCC and the OSR more generally.
 

Josh and Leighton also hired TSR luminary Erol Otus!

 
Josh recently ran one of these adventures at Acadecon in Ohio, and he published a summary on his own blog. I'm reprinting it here, along with a photo of his judge's map.

"The adventure started with the gathered zeds receiving their mission from Forecastle J. MacBeth, leader of the Humanoid Coalition and my favorite NPC. The party needed to cross through the dangerous jungle to a crater where an alien spaceship had crashed 72 hours previous. They were to salvage what they could from the saucer and find out what had happened to the previous retrieval team."

"The trek across the jungle was treated like a dungeon, with paths connecting to various clearings. No need to overwhelm new players with wilderness-crawl rules right out the gate, I figure. The party encountered a shrine to Fantomah, got the jump on some Martian scouts, fought a deranged Flying Saurian, and avoided the deadly Venusian Bees. Little-to-no casualties at this point, thanks to luck and sound tactics."

"When the party arrived at Gorgon’s Gorge, things started to turn. Three giant flaming claws smashed, squeezed, and burned several members of the party before they were destroyed."

"Eventually the party found the wrecked saucer and set to exploring it. The radium miner’s geiger counter let them avoid the ruptured core at the center of the craft. The Martian cafeteria seemed promising until mutated slime puddings dropped from the ceiling killed several of their number. The sadistic surgical robot the oversaw the bio-lab also managed kill some of the players before getting scrapped. The Martian barracks were the most deadly of course, as a cadre of Martian pikemen and gunners winnowed down the PC party. When they party eventually decided to examine the saucer’s power core, the co-mingled monstrosity that was once two members of the original team killed several more PCs (It had three attacks!). At long last, the PCs managed to rescue the two survivors from the original expedition and were able to call in MacBeth for an extraction. Of the 18 level-zeroes that started the adventure, only seven made it out alive. That’s what I call a good funnel adventure!"
 

A view from the judge's vantage point.

 
There's another stretch goal still waiting to be funded, and that's the one that determines whether or not I'll be hired on to the project. I remain optimistic, but I thought I could improve my chances by talking about what you'll get if I get involved.

My potential contribution is a patron that plays an important role in the Venus of LWOV, but who could also fit in to a campaign for Mutant Crawl Classics or Crawling Under a Broken Moon. If hired, I'll be writing a patron to act as the leader and benefactor of the Science Robots.
 

Science Robots by Diogo Nogueira

The obvious starting point is going to be Fletcher Hanks' own comics. I was able to read the first collection, I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets, through my public library system. Unfortunately, all the Space Smith comics are in the second compilation, You Shall Die by Your Own Evil Creation, so I'll need to ILL a copy straight away. I'll also want to see what Josh and Leighton have written about the Science Robots.

But I do a few ideas of my own already. I know that for some people, the idea of robot immediately conjures up images of Forbidden Planet or Lost in Space or Robot Monster, but personally, I'm much more inspired by Stanislaw Lem and Star Trek ... and by the delightful Futurama homages to them both.

Stanislaw Lem's Star Diaries are among his funniest short stories. They're the voyages of his naif spaceman Ijon Tichy, as he blunders from one situation he's too foolish to understand to another. In "The Seventh Voyage" for example, he basically re-enacts the plot to Timecrimes, minus the horror and the sexual violence, simply because he's too arrogant and too dumb to get out of his own way.

In "The Eleventh Voyage" an Earth government sends Ijon to spy on a robot planet. He wears a suit of armor that disguises him, and consults an instruction manual on robot society to help fit in. In the end, he discovers that all the actual robots rusted away long ago. The entire robot society is made up of spies in costumes, all of whom are too frightened of being caught out as imposters to notice that their neighbors are just playacting too. It's a really powerful condemnation of the Soviet government, and a veiled call for citizens to realize that they're not alone, and to democratically overthrow the one-party government. Aaand, it's a great inspiration for what the Science Robots might be like!

Futurama actually got a couple episodes out of "The Eleventh Voyage" - both Fear of a Bot Planet, where they travel to a robot planet where the incompetent government of robot elders has all the robots spend all day ritually hating humans as a distraction from their crippling lugnut shortage, and Insane in the Mainframe, where a human is misdiagnosed by a robot psychiatrist as being a malfunctioning robot, and eventually comes to believe it.

Meanwhile, you can't have a society of robots without a giant supercomputer to rule over them. I mean, okay, you caaan, but why would you want to? One of my favorite things about Star Trek is that Captain Kirk has basically two go-to moves to solve any problem. The first is to seduce an attractive woman, and the second is to make a computer go crazy. And in one notable instance, the woman is a robot, and when he seduces her, that makes her computer brain go crazy. Maximum Derek Kirk! In case I thought I was alone in noticing this, nope, other fans have dubbed this the "induced self destruction" phenomenon. Kirk's third go-to move, incidentally, is the double axe handle punch that apparently his stunt coordinators thought was the most futuristic looking fight move possible.

My favorite giant computer episode of Star Trek was the one that for some reason needed to remove Spock's brain from his body to act as a processor. That one was called, um, checks notes, "Spock's Brain". Futurama has their own giant computer episode, "Amazon Women in the Mood", where it turns out that the giant computer is actually just a robot hiding behind a giant facade, and the robot herself is at least as fallible as the people she governs.

The point being that I imagine the Science Robots are directed by a giant supercomputer, that may or may not be what it appears. It's certainly vainglorious, hypocritical, and despite a possible vulnerability to children's logic puzzles, a deeply illogical entity. The Science Robots themselves probably have profoundly inaccurate misconceptions about humans, and might have a few armor-wearing humans living as members of the Robot caste of their society.

Now, you might say "but Anne, what if the Science Robots are ruled by a GOOD computer?" Let me remind you that the Robots keep humans as chattel, and routinely uplift selected humans to act as military units by injecting them with irradiated cat blood and giving them flamethrowers to wear as hats. While the entity who makes this decision MIGHT have good intentions, and be better than its deeply horrible neighbors, it is certainly NOT a paragon of military strategy or any other virtue.

So those are my personal touchpoints, beyond the works of Fletcher Hanks and the previous writing by Josh and Leighton. If you back the Kickstarter and my stretch goal gets funded, this is the sort of thing you can look forward to from me. You can also look forward to 175-page comic-book sized campaign setting with two other patrons, two introductory adventures, and a plethora of art by OSR luminaries for all your classic dungeon-crawling enjoyment!

I am become Strech Goal, destroyer of crowdfunding campaigns

Joshua LH Burnett (Bernie the Flumph) and his writing partner Leighton Connor have announced a Kickstarter campaign for a DCC setting and adventure Leopard Women of Venus!

The whole thing is inspired by a comic by Fletcher Hanks, one of the really gloriously weird artists from the Golden Age of pulp comics. You can see a sample page below:
 

 
The setting and two (or three! stretch goals!) adventures are all based in a science fantasy Venus where there's a pile-up of squabbling factions, including the Science Robots, and their defenders, the titular Leopard Women. To find out more, though, you should read the sales precis on Kickstarter, or look at the free preview.

I've admired Josh's writing before, and enjoyed playing in a couple of his adventures, so I'm excited to be involved in this project.

There's also an exciting list of other collaborators! In addition to Josh and Leighton as the lead authors, the artists include Erol Otus, Matt Kish, Bradley K McDevitt, Evlyn Moreau, Diogo Nogueira, Juan Navarro, James V West, and Joshua LH Burnett again. Fiona Maeve Geist and Steve Johnson are editing.

The project funds at $3000, adds art by Stefan Poag at $3500, adds me at $4000, more art at $4500, and a third adventure at $5000.

You can get the pdf for $15, print-on-demand and pdf for $20, and the above plus pdfs of Josh's two previous zines Sanctum of the Snail and Draugr & Draculas for $30.

This is a project that will likely appeal to fans of DCC, Golden Age comics, gozno science fantasy, and Josh's previous work.

If the project hits its second stretch goal, I'll be writing a mysterious and secret new DCC patron, whose identity will no doubt be revealed later as part of a canny marketing strategy! You can see some of my previous patron writing here. Until then, you'll have to be content with seeing Stardust the Super-Wizard and Fantomah the Mystery Woman of the Jungle become DCC patrons on Venus.

Blogs on Tape 2 - Hallway Boogaloo

After a summer hiatus, Blogs on Tape is back!
  

  
And, I'm honored to report that the most recent episode was a reading of one of my blog posts. This is the second time something I've written has made it onto Blogs on Tape, and I couldn't be happier.

You can listen here to Episode 71 - Should We Start Numbering Our Hallway Maps? and read the original post here.

You can also go back and re-listen to Episode 47 - Campaigns I Want to Run: Dungeons & Decorators and re-read that original post here.

Big thanks to Nick LS Whelan for the work he put into these two episodes, and for the whole Blogs on Tape project!

CRAWL-thulhu

My friends John Potts and Todd McGowan have just published the second issue of their DCC zine - CRAWL-thulhu!

Zine by John Potts, Art by Todd McGowan

I was a playtester and a volunteer proofreader for issue 1, and I wrote a couple sections of issue 2. John and Todd worked as partners with John doing almost all the writing, editing, and layout, and Todd providing all the art. Because John has decided to retire following the release of issue 2, I'm going to be the lead author of all future issues.

CRAWL-thulhu issue 1 introduces advice for running a Lovecraftian campaign using Dungeon Crawl Classics. It replaces the Luck score with a Sanity score, has rules for Sanity loss due to encountering elements of the Lovecraft Mythos, has a list of 1920s occupations for zero-level characters, and has a complete adventure "A Horrible Day at the Dunwich Fair", which I've played through twice.

CRAWL-thulhu issue 2 introduces a skill system for mystery investigations in DCC, has six 1920s character classes, rules for spellcasting and magic, some death & dismemberment style tables I wrote for recovering from insanity and near-death, and offers more advice for running Lovecraftian campaigns using DCC.  

(And I should note, the tables here are different from the death & dismemberment table I wrote for DCC earlier. They're tailored to the horror genre and the modern setting in the same way that my original table is tailored to DCC's regular setting.)

Zine by John Potts, Art by Todd McGowan

 
So if you like DCC or Cthulhu or both, you might like to take a look at what my friends made!

My agreement to take over writing in the future was very recent, so at the moment, I don't have any answers about what will happen to the Discerning Dhole Productions imprint, or what will be in the contents of future issues. I'm sure I will shamelessly advertise here when issue 3 is ready to be released. In the mean time, CRAWL-thulhu issue 1 and issue 2 are available for you to enjoy!