Hex Mapping Part 5: Things That Grow

With the coastline, mountains, and rivers placed, we’re set to drop in everything else we want. And you probably want most other things. Granted, on an island this size, it’s probably not reasonable to include both arctic ice-sheets and tropical jungles. Still, snow-capped mountains surrounded by tropical jungle is certainly feasible, as are the sorts of rain forests you find on the coast of the Pacific northwest creeping up towards tundra. If you really want it, you can probably find a way to make it happen.

Why go to such extremes? It’s not really necessary, but you may want to be able to drop in things you pick up. Death Frost Doom kinda requires a frozen landscape to work in, though a good, tall mountain might work. N1: Against the Cult of the Reptile God works best if you have a swamp. B4: The Lost City could be dropped in a jungle, but the feel is decidedly desert.

Besides, endless days of nothing but forest get dull. You want to keep things fresh and interesting. Varied terrain also makes picking a route more interesting. Traveling down the river is faster than cutting through the hills, but if you do that, you might miss something interesting. And maybe that river doesn’t go where you want to go.

Before we start plopping terrain, a word about climate. Right now, in the tropics, the prevailing winds, and the rains they push, move from east to west, and in the temperate regions they go the other way. This is what creates all the moisture in the Amazon as the rains that don’t fall over the jungle are forced to dump their moisture when they run into the Andes, while the Pacific coast of California is rich and fertile while the other side of the mountains is a desert.

But the world was not always as it is today. The Sahara was once a lush forest. Ferns once grew in the soils of Antarctica. If climate’s a useful tool for you, use it. Some people feel climate is a good framework to use when the blank hexes grow too daunting. Otherwise, feel free to chunk it.

Let’s start with hills. Hills often appear alongside mountains, the way big wrinkles in a blanket might be surrounded by smaller ones. They’re also a good excuse if you have a river that suddenly zigs or zags abruptly. Put some hills at that point, and the river is flowing around the higher terrain, always choosing to flow down and never up. If you put in any lakes, maybe a series of hills caused the water to back up until it could flow through a saddle in those hills.

Marshes and swamps usually occur alongside rivers. Basically, the land is low and you get what would be a lake if the depression was deeper. Or the river meets the sea and the separation between earth and water becomes muddled. If you put in one of those deltas we talked about last time, the land around it is probably pretty marshy.

Could you have marsh next to desert? Sure. It’s easy to imagine something like the salt marshes outside Lankhmar along the edge of a desert, or maybe even as the dividing line between desert and sea.

Since I’ve said my island is tropical, I’m going to put lots of thick jungle on the eastern half. I’m declaring the western half is mostly savanna. Putting the PCs’ base near the dividing line in the north gives them an interesting choice almost immediately: dense rain forest or open grasslands?

But this is a fantasy world, not just Hawaii writ large. Normal terrain is good and all, but if you can, you should absolutely drop in some really cool fantastical bits of terrain: rivers of lava, rocks that float in mid-air, columns of stone that have been hollowed out to be the homes of gnomes, landforms that are actually giant creatures, mammoths’ graveyards, magically warped terrains, groves of treants and dryads, burning hellscapes, great plains teeming with carnivorous plants, yellow brick roads, rainbow bridges, gumdrop mountains, towers that shift between different dimensions, tesseracts, enchanted forests, eternal storms, ancient standing stones, radioactive wastelands, crops of magnetic crystals, and other cool ideas I’ve never even dreamed of yet, but that I hope you’ll share with me.

In that spirit, the southwestern portion of the island is a strange landscape of poisonous ash coughed up by the volcanoes. Living there will be difficult without magic or specialized gear. In this strange dust and ash, giant mushrooms have sprung up into dense fungal forests. Perhaps colonies of myconids tend them, and sorcerers lurk in the shadows, collecting rare and potent reagents for their potions and spells.

I'm not touching the spot in the middle, our mysterious plateau, just yet. Still not sure what I want to put there, but there's no rush on that score. As rorschachhamster pointed out on Monday, that lake really is just crying out for an island in the middle, isn't it? But first, I think I want to decide what my major populations on this island are going to be. We'll tackle that on Friday, if all goes well.

Hex Mapping Part 4: Mountains and Subdivisions

As promised, today we’re talking about mountains. Now that we have our coastline defined, we can chop up our big, flat island into more digestible chunks. Mountains work really well for this purpose because they are both a physical boundary but also permeable. Mountain slow you down, but they don't stop you necessarily.

This makes them useful for the players as internal boundaries inside the island. And they work well for the DM because mountains have frequently served as cultural boundaries in the real world. The Alps marked the boundary between Italy and Gaul just as the Pyrenees mark the boundary between France and Spain. Mountains work better for this purpose than rivers because rivers are facilitators of mobility instead of inhibitors. Rivers encourage motion; mountains discourage it.

So the players will use our mountains to define geographic subdivisions of our island. We will encourage this behavior by using mountains to separate cultural and racial groups.

More about that later. Right now, we just need to chop up this big Island into more digestible bits. So I'll go ahead and slap down some chains of mountains radiating from the center of our island out towards some of the points.

(If you wanted to, you could extend these mountains out into the sea as islands. You can see this sort of thing in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. But keep in mind we want to encourage our players to stay on the island and not give them small, tempting distractions just offshore. So we’ll stop our mountain chains well short of the coast.)

As you can see, I've chopped my island into six sections. Some are a little big, especially the ones on the eastern side, so I'll probably want to vary the terrain a little bit over there. The northern section is the smallest, so I'll probably make that the "safe zone" of civilization. Finally, I put a ring of mountains in the center of the island. This is going to be our mysterious and difficult to reach plateau. It's perfect for a “lost world” teeming with dinosaurs, ancient lost civilizations, or crashed spaceships à la Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. I have no idea yet what I'm going to put there, but that's okay. We're still only just getting started.

Now that we have mountains and the coastline defining our highest and lowest spots, we can put in rivers. Assuming your world works under the same general principles as ours does, water will flow downhill. Find some likely spots, and draw some squiggly river lines heading towards the coast. Rivers tend to do one of two things when flowing from a mountain to the sea; they either separate into smaller rivers, or merge into bigger rivers. If you want some massive artery like the Mississippi or the Amazon, have lots of rivers flow into one. If you have a good fan-shaped piece of coastline your river can fan out into a delta like the Nile.

Don't go too crazy with the rivers. Not every nook and cranny of your coastline requires a river flowing into it. On a map this size, a handful should serve you well. If you've already located what you consider to be choice spots for civilization, go ahead and put a river by that. Communities love rivers. But we'll get to those later. We've still got to finish our geography first.

Movie Review: The Black Shield of Falworth

In the reign of Henry IV of England, all is not well with the realm. The king is ill and leans more heavily by the day on the Royal Council to govern. The Royal Council is full of plotters and schemers who think nothing of raping a young peasant or flogging their serfs. The king’s son, Hal, is a drunkard with no serious concern for the welfare of the nation. Everywhere is villainy promoted and the common folk downtrodden.

But this is “Merry Olde England” in a Hollywood film from the ‘50s, so this state of affairs cannot continue. Indeed, not everything is as it seems, especially the hot-headed young peasant Myles and his sister Meg. Their parentage is mysterious, and is somehow wrapped up in black shield bearing a rampant red griffon.

If you’ve got Amazon Prime, “The Black Shield of Falworth” is a free “rental” for you via livestream. If you’re at all a fan of this sort of movie, period pieces made in the middle of the 20th century, you’ll likely enjoy this one. Historical accuracy is not a big point in these flicks, and while there are a few nods towards it in the clothing, it leans more on Shakespeare than Froissart. But there’s romance, action, derring-do, jousting, and a grand melee in the end.

Tony Curtis isn’t quite playing the same character here that he plays in “The Vikings” though their circumstances are quite similar. Myles is light on his feet and quick with his fists. He never walks when he can run and never goes around when he can vault over. If this were a Jackie Chan flick, we’d be saying he’s showing off, but Curtis fills the movie with so much energy it’s hard to complain. Interestingly, if the folks attempting to recreate real medieval martial arts are correct about how the fighting actually happened, this movie might be the most realistic ever; it’s full of grapples, throws, and disarms.

Otherwise, while absolutely charming, this movie isn’t a must-see. The plot-and-counter-plot of the principle factions keeps the movie moving at a good clip but isn’t nearly as interesting as the romantic elements or Myles’ quest to learn his origins. Curtis almost makes the fights seem too easy; the battles entertain, but don’t dazzle. It’s a fun way to while away a lazy evening, though, and if you’ve got Amazon Prime already, the price is certainly right.

Hex Mapping Part 3: Hittin' the Beach

Ok, so three posts into this and we’re finally ready to whip out the hex paper! First question is, how big should our map be?

We want lots of room for exploration, clearly. If you’re running an "open table" sort of game, as West Marches is, where you’ll have lots of groups running around, you’ll want both lots of room to explore and multiple directions to explore at a time.

(The actual, hex-less West Marches game was probably a lot smaller than this, since Mr. Robbins encouraged navigation by landmarks. That sort of play encourages a much more intimate knowledge of the terrain than a hex map will usually give you, and six miles is a huge distance if your landmarks are things like unusual rock formations, big trees, or sinkholes.)

Just to pick a dimension at random, saying that our map takes a full month of travel to cross from one end to the other sounds good, yes? Since we’ll want a wide array of terrain types, let’s say we can expect people to move at an average pace of 12 miles per day. That comes to a map that’s 360 miles (30 days x 12 miles) across. If we simply square that, we’ve got an area of 129,600 square miles.

How’s that square with the real world? Well, it’s a hint more than 150% the size of Great Britain. That should be more than big enough to give us all the adventure we need, at least for the first few levels.

360 miles is 60 hexes (360 miles / 6 miles-per-hex). We’ll start a bit bigger than that, since we don’t want to just create a simple, square plain. I also want a bit of a border because I’m going to draw an island.

“Here Am I, Your Special Island”
Why an island? Islands work great for hex-crawling games. First, they give the area of play a solid and unequivocal boundary in the sea. When the PCs reach the ocean, the players know they’ve reached the edge of the map. At the same time, it’s not an insurmountable barrier; players can buy boats and sail outward to new lands if they get tired of the starting area (or if it gets too dangerous for them).

Plus, I never did get around to adding anything to the Seas of Os’r project, so...

When starting a new map, it’s generally a good idea to start at the bottom and work your way up. Most times, that means sea level and your coastline. Coastlines generally come in two flavors: soft and rocky. The Texas gulf coast, for instance is soft, the beaches sandy, the land clay. So you get a nice, smooth coastline, with long barrier islands just offshore.

The other option is rocky and that usually means jagged, like the fjords of Finland or Denmark, though it can mean smooth, like the cliffs of Dover. In either case, you’re likely to end up with lots of little islands off the coast, but not the long, delicate barrier islands of a soft coast.

Since I’m going with an island, I’m thinking volcanoes. And I’m thinking tropical, too, because I’m kinda on a tropical kick just lately. So we’ll start with something a bit softer, like Hawaii and its collection of shield volcanoes. Saving the volcanoes for later, here’s the coastline.

Just one big island. Why? Because we want the coastline to signal to the players, “Hey, this is the edge of the map.” We want to encourage them to explore the island as much as possible before they hop on a boat and head for the horizon. Still, dividing our island into clearly recognizable sections is a good idea for all sorts of reasons. We’ll do that next week as we swing to the other extreme, jumping from sea level to maximum elevation when we place our volcanoes and mountains.

UK map from the CIA's World Factbook. Satellite image of Padre Island, TX from these folks. They have lots of great pics of geological formations of all kinds, so be sure to explore. My map was done in Hexographer to save y'all from having to decipher my pathetic chicken-scratches.

Hex Mapping Part 2: Scale

Cook’s Expert D&D says you should divide a character’s per-round movement by 5 to get the number of miles they can travel in day. At 120’ a character can move 24 miles in a day, but most groups will have someone down at the 90’ movement rate, and that would slow them to 18 miles per day. This isn’t unreasonable, as the Roman legions were thought to be incredibly fast at a speed of 20 miles per day, while Charlemagne's armies (which relied on ox-drawn carts to carry their gear and food) generally averaged just 12 miles a day. So a small band of heroes, on foot and over level ground, should be able to cover nearly 20 miles per day, especially if they’re exploring and mapping as the go.

Cook also recommends hexes that are six miles across. This works pretty well as it has our heroes crossing three or four a day. There are some other issues to keep in mind as you’re picking your scale.

One is sight distance. You don’t want the PCs to be able to see all of a single hex, especially if you’re going to be using wandering monster rolls. You may want lairs, camps, or even just the critters themselves to not be seen the first few times the PCs move through a hex (which helps explain why they’re suddenly popping up now that the dice say they should). Six-mile hexes mean each hex covers a bit more than 36 square miles. (Actually, it's a bit more than 30 square miles, but that doesn't throw us that far off. Thanks for catching my math-oops, JD!) That’s a lot of terrain for bandits or bears to hide in. Or even a castle if you need to drop one in after the fact.

Another question to consider is just what you can fit in a single hex. According to the medieval demographics calculators at the Domesday Book, a town of 5,000 people covers 83 acres, which is 0.13 square miles. Lots of room to lose small towns or villages (or orc camps) in a 6-mile hex. London in 1200 AD is assumed to have had a population of roughly 25,000. The Domesday Book page gives us a size of 412 acres, which is 0.64 square miles. At that same time, Rome was assumed to house 9,000,000 people. That may be too large for the Domesday Book page, and it returns a size of 148,258 acres or 231.65 square miles. That comes, very roughly, to 6-and-a-half of our 6-mile hexes. Paris’ population in 1200 was 110,000, which the Domesday Book page says should have covered 1,813 acres or 2.83 square miles, which fits comfortably in our 6-mile hex while still clearly dominating it.

The 6-mile hex works great for a muscle-powered world. If you want a world where people travel by jet-cycle, or live in massive cities like Tenochtitlan (possibly 212,500 people in 5.2 square miles not counting the greater metropolitan area) you might want to expand the size of you hexes. If, however, the world is full of dense jungles and tiny villages, a smaller hex (maybe 3 miles across, roughly a league) might be more appropriate.

UPDATE: More praise (and better math) for the six-mile hex at "The Hydra's Grotto."

Art by Ivan Constantinovich Aivazovsky and Alberto Pasini.

Book Review: The Knight of the Swords

In those days there were oceans of light and cities in the skies and wild flying beasts of bronze. There were herds of crimson cattle that roared and were taller than castles. There were shrill, viridian things that haunted bleak rivers. It was a time of gods, manifesting themselves upon our world in all her aspects; a time of giants who walked on water; of mindless sprites and misshapen creatures who could be summoned by an ill-considered thought but driven away only on pain of some fearful sacrifice; of magics, phantasms, unstable nature, impossible events, insane paradoxes, dreams come true, dreams gone awry, of nightmares assuming reality.

There are those who say that proper Sword-and-Sorcery is heavy on the swords and light on the sorcery. No elves, no races of goblinoids, spells are rare and magical talismans rarer still. If these folks are right, Michael Moorcock doesn’t write much Sword-and-Sorcery.

The Knight of the Swords is the first book of Corum, one of the incarnations of Moorcock’s Eternal Champion. If you like the Elric stuff, you’ll likely enjoy Corum, who kinda straddles the line between the dour emotional instability of the last emperor of Melniboné and Hawkmoon’s Saturday-afternoon-serial do-gooder-ism. You’ll notice a lot of overlap between Corum and Elric: both are the last of their kind, non-human champions living in human worlds of barbarism and cruelty. Moorcock’s misanthropy is on full display here.

I’d heard that the Corum tales were based on Celtic legends, and I have to admit, for that reason, I kinda avoided them. In truth, they are based on Celtic legends the way most movies are “based” on books; a few tropes and a nod or two out of respect to the original authors and their fans, but little more. “Inspired by” is probably a better description. This isn’t the story of the Tuatha de Dannan dressed up in Moorcock’s prose; Corum is a thoroughly Moorcockian protagonist, and his quest is full of the wacky and random happenstance we expect from Moorcock: encounters with fishing giants, errant knights who fly on giant silk kites, nations eager to embrace their doom, treacherous sorcery that is, in spite of all, necessary for survival, and villains who have been central to the tales of other Moorcock stories. In short, you’ll find the usual treasure-trove for any GM short on ideas who doesn’t mind a slightly hallucinogenic bent to their adventures.

If you’re already a fan of Moorcock, and you haven’t picked up Corum, I can recommend The Knight of the Swords without reservation. It’s spot-on Moorcock. If you’re not a fan, you could do much worse than start with this one, but I’d recommend the first of the Elric stories over this; they’re both better and easier to find.

Sexualing the Male: You’re Doing it… Er, Well, They’re Doing It

So I’m sure everyone’s seen the vertical banner ads for El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron. It’s pretty much poster-perfect for one method of sexualizing the male: bare midriff, wide-spread thighs, thrusting groin in tight, bulging jeans. Very much the Chippendale’s Guys Do Final Fantasy.

This really highlights the challenge of sexualizing the male figure for hetero female consumption. I imagine there are, indeed some women who will find this attractive, though I’d imagine it might actually discourage them from buying the game for fear of slut-shaming by association. Or maybe not, since Fabio covers don’t seem to have slowed down the purchasing of romance novels even a bit.

Still, it seems to me (not having access to sales figures, scientific polls, or other actual data, but when has that ever stopped me from making vague and wild assumptions?) that this sort of thing appeals more to gay men than hetero women. There’s a bit of bishi in this guy, though, so maybe that’s part of the point? A direct appeal to gay men becomes a sort of back-handed appeal to straight women? I could see that working.

Here in America, I’m pretty sure most will just write the look off to bizarre Japanese-isms. The story behind the game, as reported by Newbreview.com, certainly won’t discourage that view:

Based on the not so well known book of Enoch, the game places you in the role of Enoch, who has been tasked with battling seven fallen angels that aim to destroy humanity with a devastating flood.

Apparently, the anachronistic acid-wash jeans are a gift from a not-yet-fallen Satan, who also enjoys chatting on his cellphone while watching you smack around the minions of the Fallen.

Hex Mapping Part 1: Whys and Wherefores

Chatting with a friend about Scott’s recent discussion of hex maps at “Huge Ruined Pile” it was pointed out to me that there’s really not a good, step-by-step description of how to use hex maps in a game. Yeah, the reaction you likely just had was the same as mine, but trust me, there’s a heck of lot we take for granted. The early versions of D&D did such a poor job of explaining what it was about that lots of folks thought nothing about removing EXP for treasure, wandering monsters, or not tracking the passage of time.

So, just to be complete (or anal, take your pick), I’d like to go through the process here of building and using a hex map, integrating it with creating and running a campaign. I’m going to try not to skip stuff and take it for granted, but if anything is unclear or just vague, feel free to call me out on it.

WHY?

First off, why hex maps? They most likely came down to RPGs from a boardgame called Outdoor Survival (AKA “Nobody Survives Outdoors!”) in which your piece would be plopped into the middle of a wilderness area mapped on hexes. Hexes are superior for this purpose because they offer a lot more flexibility in movement compared to squares. Hexes do make a few measuring issues more complex, but we’ll get to that much later. But largely, they remove all the brain-breaking issues of attempting to reconcile diagonal movement that plague squares.

Now, you could just toss hexes entirely, but like square grids for dungeon maps, they do help organize and simplify mapping for you and your players. This is vital if you’re doing a hex-crawl style game like a West Marches campaign. Keeping things nice and regular simplifies everyone's lives. Especially since a hard-core hex-crawl is going to do all sorts of things to mess with the players’ maps already.

WAIT, WHAT?

I guess I should back up here and explain what I’m talking about. A hex-crawl is like a dungeon crawl without walls. You’re outdoors, moving from hex-to-hex, mapping the wilderness, fleeing from (or occasionally fighting) monsters, and looking for treasure and dungeons to loot. Players can (and will) move in any direction. The big challenge for them is judging how far they can get on their supplies (and, in this case, supplies mean hit points and spells as much as they mean food and water). Misjudge the issue, and they could end up expiring before returning to safety.

The fun is the joy of exploration, of overcoming the open-ended challenges of natural terrain, logistics, and risk-to-reward balancing. It’s not for everyone, and some are just as happy to go straight from the tavern right to the dungeon (Ptolus is largely based on this simplicity). But it adds a whole new dimension to your typical dungeon-based play that offers players all sorts of extra flexibility and choices, and generally, that’s a great thing in an old-school game.

Next time, we’ll talk about scale and terrain.

UPDATE:And it’s just been pointed out to me that the original West Marches game didn’t use hexes! Xp Ben Robbins apparently felt that hexes make people think they’ve fully explored an area when they’d filled in the hex. True, but I’ll stick by them; they make all sorts of things much easier. We’ll get into more detail on this later.

Farewell to Waldenbooks

Call me slow, but I just realized that Borders going belly-up means all the Waldenbooks are closing too. That hits a little closer to home.

It's not that I have actually been in a Waldenbooks in quite some time. However, when I first got into D&D, Waldenbooks was my primary source. Corpus Christi had a great hobby store in Leisure Time Hobbies, but that was halfway across town for me. Even by bike, it was ridiculously far away. They had a huge selection of RPG and wargaming goodies and I always love to visit, but visits were rare.

Trips to the mall were much more common. It was the ‘80s, and in a very real way the mall became the social hub of the city. At first, we only had one, Padre Staples Mall. It only had one bookstore, narrow, long Waldenbooks with shelves that seemed too narrow even for a skinny kid still in elementary school. But it was at this Waldenbooks that I discovered TSR’s modules and the Sorcery! quartet of Fighting Fantasy books.

When Corpus got a second mall, Sunrise Mall, it also got a B. Dalton store. In spite of the fact that the store was about the size of modern-day mall chain bookstores, it was huge in comparison to the Waldenbooks. A more open layout allowed for a magazine section that was much easier to browse. It was there that I purchased most of my Dragon magazines. It was also the source of other Fighting Fantasy books, TSR's Endless Quest books, and a veritable horde (or should that be hoard?) of science fiction and fantasy novels. My family made regular trips to the mall, where we would dine at the baked potato place or the Greek restaurant, and then spread out to visit our favorite stores. I would invariably head straight for the B. Dalton and would frequently spend the hour or two at that single store.

Eventually, Waldenbooks opened a store in Sunrise Mall as well. It may have been the floor plan or the location, overlooking the mall’s plaza-like center, but it seemed bigger and more open than the B. Dalton. I remember being thrilled to see a standup display for the second Dragonlance novel there, as well as various Infocom and Ultima computer games. It's also where I first got to flip through the second edition players handbook.

It's also the first place where I saw the gaming section both shrink to a tiny corner and then eventually get locked up in a cabinet. That last was painful: not only could I not easily look through the new modules, but it implied very unpleasant things about my hobby of choice.

Hearing about the demise of Waldenbooks is not nearly as shocking as hearing about the demise of TSR, but it is another nail in the coffin of my youth. It's not likely to touch me personally. Borders had already closed the big box bookstore nearest me and I didn't get my gaming stuff there anymore anyway. But I do have to give Waldenbooks some credit as the first place that really made gaming available to me.

UPDATE: I'd forgotten about Mr. Brannan waxing nostalgic himself for his membership in Waldenbooks' Otherworlds club.

What I'm Seeing in the "John Carter" Trailer

Al at "Warriors of the Red Planet" isn't very happy with the trailer for "John Carter." He suggests an equivalence with this trailer for "Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time."

I'm not seeing it.

Yes, there is a similarity in pallet and action beats. Both sport sleeveless Caucasian heroes wearing lots of brown leather and scraggly hair cut at jaw-length. The Prince of Persia trailer also promises an epic good time. The music is, in fact, epic, with full orchestra and moaning choir throbbing beneath a narrator whose first words are "Legends tell..." which I'm thinking is the new "In a world…” only a bit more specific to genre flicks. What follows is a mix of high-flying adventure with lots of acrobatics and humor based on a sultry beauty with a mischievous grin teasing a clumsy-tongued hero. If you've seen the movie (I did and thought it was fun) then you'll note it is a great trailer; it tells you exactly what to expect in the movie.

The John Carter trailer is a different beast entirely. It's a much more somber affair with its pulsing piano riff that creates a musical backbone that runs through the entire trailer. It begins not with epic vistas, but with gray, rainy streets and the announcement of a death. Even when the scenery does become epic and the music swells, it grows more discordant, uncertain, even broken. There is not a single moment of comedy in this trailer; John Carter's princess never smiles, and when she speaks, she speaks of death. All of the action beats are fraught with peril. They are not our hero triumphing, but moments of tension: burning hulks, shadowy figures stepping into a gloomy room, our hero outnumbered on the edge of a precipice, our hero being chased by seven riders, the Princess armed with a sword facing down a thark with a rifle. Danger, tension, and impending disaster. No rollicking good time here.

Maybe I'm reading too much into the music and the pacing of this trailer, but there is an undercurrent of pathos here. Yes, that does work with the books in which Barsoom is a dying world. But I'm also getting a sense of brokenness from John Carter. I suspect his history as a veteran of the Civil War is going to be more than simple backstory explanation for his skills as a rider, swordsman, and soldier.

I have been impressed again and again by the writing skills of the Pixar crew. It's one of the things that gives me hope for this movie. However, they do seem to fall into a pattern of creating empathy through pain. There is something broken about all Pixar protagonists, whether you're talking about toy cowboys, retired superheroes, junkyard robots, or geriatric dreamers. I suspect we'll see the same from John Carter.

I Am Heartbroken

From io9's behind-the-scenes report on the "John Carter" movie:

What about the nudity? Will the everyone be running around in leather thongs?

No. They will, however, be running around in just-as-sexy leather chest plates, and elaborate head dresses and flowing Middle Eastern garb (specifically for Dejah). But no, this will not look like a heavy metal album cover, sorry.

Well, phooey!

On a more serious note, I am intrigued. Most of the reports give you what you expect now: comments about making it like a period flick about a period that never really existed, how the entire crew are life-long fans of the IP, about how the hero is "broken" and the heroine is "strong" and so on and so forth. You've read it a billion times before.

But the trailer isn't what I was expecting. Sure, it's got your basic action beats, but there's no throbbing X-ray Dog music, but... well, here, see it for yourself.

So yeah. Lots of fun-looking world-building going on, but very little red in the palette. The characters are horribly overdressed, but is anyone surprised by this? It's not as bad as I feared it would be. There are guns, airships, thoats, tharks, and JC himself can leap, er, well, modest buildings in a single bound. I see action and romance and adventure. I'll quibble about the costuming and such, but sure, looks like they have a fun movie on their hands. I'll be looking forward to it.

Battlepug!

This is cute and silly and not entirely safe for work.

New Expectations: the Electric Boogaloo!

There have been a few interesting articles lately written about electronic gaming. Stewart, over at Strange Magic, has decided to take a peek at the casual computer game market. There must be something in the water; I've lately been poking at MUDs and I know Oddysey is thinking she might finally ascend a character in a rogue-like.

Stewart makes the point that the"kick in the doors, kill everything, take their stuff" style is an extremely popular mode for computer games, but bears only a passing resemblance what most of us know as classic RPGing. Oddysey, for her part, knew rogue-likes before she played in the Doom & Tea Parties game, but says she really didn't know dungeon delving.

It's interesting to consider the expectations we bring to this hobby. The first-generation of players were modifying wargames or board games like "Wilderness Survival" (a.k.a. "Nobody Survives in the Wilderness"). These were very much games and rather abstract ones at that. This generation were the ones who built the game based on scarce resources, logistics, and challenges to the actual players’ abilities to map.

When my generation arrived on the scene, our expectations were based on “Choose Your Own Adventure” books and the promises that this game was like being the main character in your favorite story. And these stories were heavily influenced by myths. Sure, the occasional swaggering hero plowed through his enemies, bloody sword in hand, but you were actually more likely to encounter clever, thinking heroes like Brust’s Vlad Taltos, Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, or Piper’s Lord Kalvan. And so our games are full of lateral thinking, logic puzzles, and more intimate spaces than the mega-dungeon.

(And you can see, I’m sure, why someone like Maliszewski would see this as the Silver Age, deviating so sharply as it does from his preferred epoch of gaming.)

After that came 2e in the wake of the first gaming inspired novels like the original Dragonlance trilogy. This generation of gamers really pushed the story aspects of the hobby. They flocked to White Wolf's banner when they unveiled their Storyteller system because it promised a more story-like experience. (And their disappointment led to the creation of the Forge and an entirely different branch of RPGs.)

Now we are seeing players in the hobby with expectations created by computer games. You could almost see it as a backlash to the story-focused games of yesteryear and a return to a more abstract and game-ist style. I don't think that's what we’re seeing, though. I think we're simply saying a new generation of players coming at the game with new expectations set by how they first experienced fantasy.

The only constant, of course, is change. (And maybe hit points.) Greg Christopher linked to a GDC seminar by Raph Koster on making social games, like Farmville, more social. Mr. Koster was, at one time, the chief proponent of MMOs as virtual worlds. His record in that business is spotty at best. It's interesting to note how his experiences there are affecting the way he approaches the new social games. If Mr. Koster is correct, and social games are made more social on his model, the next generation of gamers are going to have radically new expectations for tabletop RPGs.

Fantastic (and Completely Real) Caves

Check out the sculpted azure caves of Patagonia.

Pro5nostications

Al over at "Beyond the Black Gate" is musing about what 5e will look like. I'm in agreement with sinclair’s opinions stated in the comments. Hasbro will license the table-top game to a 3rd party (won't be Paizo, since that would mean killing the Pathfinder goose which lays for them golden eggs) while retaining the "all-important" IP (which nobody has managed to monetize successfully). Some time afterwards, they'll possibly take another stab at licensing computer games.

Exactly what form fifth edition will take after that will heavily depend on who picks the game up. However, this hobby is chock full of "lessons learned" from the past. Most of this conventional wisdom is a load of hokum. Remember when everybody knew that boxed sets had killed TSR? The current conventional wisdom is likely just as accurate, and just as firmly believed.

So, in spite of the company that wins the rights to the pen-and-paper version of D&D quite probably having gotten their start as an OGL d20 company, they will probably adhere to the belief that a glut of substandard third-party material killed 3.0. Whatever licensing agreement we do see will likely fall somewhere between the OGL and its ugly 4e sibling. We'll also likely see stronger adherence to the traditional assumed setting of the game; the Gygaxian Great Wheel of the cosmos will return, as will the nine-fold alignment system and things like that.

We'll also almost certainly see the threefold hardback core of the game be continued. After that, though, things get interesting. I think everybody has just about realized that continuously publishing new core books is just splatbooks on steroids. Your game becomes unplayable a lot more quickly and players stop bothering to keep up. Still, it appears you can get a three-or-four-year good run on this model. If that's all you're interested in, then you’re golden.

What are the other options? WotC attempted an online subscription model. It didn't work, but that's in large part because they fumbled the launch. However, that strategy requires skills and knowledge that most gaming companies don't possess. Whoever wins the license won't have the resources of Hasbro and will likely be looking for a much cheaper strategy. (Unless it’s White Wolf. But I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one.)

I suspect that what we will see will steal a page from Paizo's success. We’ll have our core three books, one or two splatbooks a year, and something that looks an awful lot like the monthly Pathfinder product. It may be a bit more magazine and a bit less adventure module, but it will likely combine the successful formula of serial adventures, serial fiction, new monsters every issue, and high production values.

That being the case, we can expect the new rules to emphasize “long-term” play with characters advancing a level every two sessions or so, getting something new every level to play with, and campaigns lasting roughly a year. One-off play will likely be discouraged and it's doubtful we'll see any sort of organized play.

Likewise, I see the use of miniatures being downplayed. That business model hasn't flown for anybody yet. With it will vanish nearly all the positioning mechanics of 4E. Combat will be extremely abstract and simple. I suspect that we won’t see 4e’s exceptions-based rules, either. The result will look a lot more like 3e, but probably even simpler than that, with a stronger emphasis on combat and streamlined statblocks that don’t eat an entire page.

Unfortunately, I'm not expecting anything revolutionary. The game will continue to focus on combat, it will continue to use hit points and armor class will continue to be about how hard it is to hit. The game will continue to use classes and the core is likely to drop the Dragonborn race. Balance will be based on the set-piece combat encounter, and every class will be mappable with MMOG standards of class design. You'll still earn most of your experience points from killing things. In spite of this, I expect lots of appeals towards old-school nostalgia.

Singing Bird Pistols

It's amazing what can be done with simple gears and a wind-up spring.

The Right Tool for the Job

So lots of comments about shields and armour and weapons.

The thing about Western Europe was, they were constantly evolving their weapons and armour to outdo their neighbors, or last year’s models. The corollary to that is, every weapon was specifically built to handle a particular job. Sure, some were modified farm implements, but they kept being used because they proved to be useful.

Those polearms with all the hooks on them? Great for dragging enemies off their horses.

Polearms with hammers and axeblades on them, as well as maces, are great for mauling armour and concussing the folks inside with their heavy blows.

Single-handed swords suck at penetrating heavy armour, but are great against lightly armoured (or, even better, unarmoured) targets, where those long, sharp edges can leave really nasty gashes.

The axe, favored weapon of Richard the Lionhearted and Robert the Bruce, was a compromise between the two. The bearded axe could be hooked around the edge of a shield so you could pull it out of someone’s hands, or just jerk them around with it.

The flail could get around the shield entirely.

And so on. Different tools for different jobs. How do we model this in D&D? Not well, I’m afraid. Gygax’s weapon-vs.-armour-class table was one stab at it, but as I understand it, even he didn’t use it. The other options I can think of require rewriting the combat rules entirely, and end up looking something like the table-crazy Arms Law from Rolemaster.

Carts, Horses, and the Arrangement Thereof

Over at “The Sky Full of Dust” they’re designing an RPG! It looks like a fun project. Mr. Forster has started his exploration of rules by poking at stats. I think he might have things a bit backwards, however. Yes, stats, if you chose to use them, will form the bedrock of your game and its mechanics. But, exactly because of the central place of stats, you might want to leave them as the last thing you nail down solidly.

I'm going to use an example from wargaming. When designing a wargame based on an historical battle, exactly what features you focus on depend upon your interpretation of what happened in the battle. The battle of Hastings is a great example for this. The old story of the Battle of Hastings was that Harold’s army was all tuckered out after marching all the way north to York to fight Hardrada’s Viking army at Stamford Bridge before marching all the way back down south to fight at Hastings. Under this model, the most important attributes are the resilience, morale, and rested-ness of your troops. The game is strategic and probably solo with the player taking on the role of Harold and trying to do as little as possible to thwart the Vikings in order to leave enough troops in good enough condition to stop William.

A more current theory about the battle says that the deciding factor was matériel, the Norman use of combined arms and mobility versus the Anglo-Saxon static shield wall. This is a much more tactical view of the battle, in which the placement of troops, the layout the terrain, and individual unit statistics become vital. Balancing the resilience of the shield wall, the long-range harassing affect of archers, and mobility of cavalry in statistical form is central to modeling this sort of battle.

But there is also a third view of the battle. At one point in the fight, word spreads that William has been slain. Hearing this, William removes his helmet to show his fleeing warriors that he is in fact alive. His soldiers rally, and William notices that parts of the until-then impenetrable shield wall had broken loose to chase his fleeing soldiers. The shield walls quickly reformed, but it gave William a clever idea. After a few more feints, his soldiers faked being routed. Sections of the shield wall broke off to chase down the fleeing Normans, but were themselves surrounded and wiped out by prearranged ambushes. With the shield wall fatally compromised, the Normans are able to chop it up and wipe it out piecemeal.

If you want to model this view of the battle, you’re less worried about some sort of rock –paper-scissors balancing act between infantry, cavalry, and archery, then you are about the command presence of officers, the obedience of the troops, and the morale of individual units.

The same holds true for RPGs. A game about slaying vampires and finding a date for prom ought to have very different stats from a game about exploring dungeons. Mr. Forster has decided to limit himself to just three stats, boiling them down to only those immediately useful in combat. But now what is he going to do about adjudicating those abstract languages rolls? Does everyone have the same chance of knowing a language? Or is it based on class? I could certainly see reducing things down to a single stat measuring mental strength which would handle learning languages, resisting spells, and similar issues. But if he's making the game I think he's making, there's a good argument for stats beyond those used in combat.

And what sort of combat does he want? To-hit rolls and hit points work great, but they're not the only option. What about a combat system based more on unit tactics, shield walls of hirelings or hired goblin skirmishers? In that sort of the game, charisma could be far more important than individual stamina. On the other hand, a game in which combat is specifically designed to only take up a limited number of decision points might not need hit points at all. Instead, the vital combat stats might be which schools of combat your character has mastered (di Grassi versus drunken boxing or somesuch).

You can start with stats and have everything flow from that. But to my mind, it makes more sense to decide what sort of structures you want in your game and then design your stats to support those. The stats are the bedrock of your game, and as such, go a long way to not only defining what the PCs are like, but also what your game is about. Having a solid idea as to what both the players and the PCs will be doing in an average game session can go a long way to helping you decide which stats you need.

Ack! Nearly Forgot!

Tomorrow is FREE RPG DAY!

If you're in the Austin area, it looks like the place to go is Dragon's Lair. (Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Tribe is taking part.) If you're willing to drive a bit further north, however, Jeff Dee will be demoing Villains & Vigilantes at Rogues Gallery!

Art by Jeff Dee, and used without permission or any claim of ownership. But since I'm advertising his demo, I figure he won't mind too much.

Shields and Turtles

Oddysey is continuing her hate-on for the shield! Ok, seriously, she brings up some good points:

My understanding of older styles is that shields were mainly used when the sword was a heavier weapon that didn't allow for much finesse, and in large, well-trained units where each individual soldier's use of the shield contributed to the defense of the unit as a whole.

The "heavier" comment generally isn't true (most were actually lighter than the bastard swords she discusses in the previous paragraph) but the large unit stuff is. Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible to speak about medieval European swordsmanship because they kept changing things all the time. Vikings used shields in large part because most Joe-vikings didn't have body armour (and they did shield walls). Most mounted knights wanted shields because being on horseback made it hard to protect their left side. That lasted until the armour got good enough that the shield became redundant. The Spanish sword-and-buckler dude used his shield to get past the wall of sharp pointies surrounding a formation of pikemen so he could get to the soft, stab-able center. The story of medieval European arms and armour is one of constant flux and innovation, as warriors adapted their kit to the foes they expected to fight.

I think Oddysey nails it here, from a gaming perspective:

The main reason I think D&D doesn't favor shields remains that split between offensive and defensive strategies, and honestly it's a pretty good one -- more offense means shorter combats, and shorter combats means more time for the parts of the game that I find actually interesting.

A game with valuable defensive strategies is a game of interminably long combats. Low-level fights against weak armour tend to be pretty snappy; but pit your 2nd level fighters against guys in plate and be prepared for a whole lot of dice rolling: miss-miss-miss-miss... And that's in a fight where the only real defensive choice is which armour you put on before the fight starts. Imagine how ugly it could get if the goblins could form a shield wall or a turtle? I've often considered building a combat system around the rock-paper-scissors of thrust-parry-feint, but again, that sort of focus just makes combats take longer, and that's not at all what I want in my gaming these days.

Art by Albrecht Durer.

For Helium!

At last! A teaser poster for "John Carter of Mars" once called "A Princess of Mars." Not bad. I like the feel of the design the lettering creates. But what's this? Disney is putting their name on this? Hmmm... Before "Pirates" that would have scared me spitless. After pirates... maybe it can work?

Kill it With Fire!

Timeshadows writes:

That shit is just as wrong, and more-so, today, in this age, than it was in more Victorian years of my own lifetime.
--Not only that, it's *Fucking Stupid* for a Niche of a Niche hobby trying to find new players --players who haven't bought into the Cannibal Corpse mindset, that is.

Is that /so/ *Fucking* hard to understand?

Since she’s the dissenting voice in this so far, I figured she deserved a proper, longer response. Though I have to admit, I’m not sure I understand her argument.

My father played one, maybe two sessions of D&D with me after I got the Mentzer Basic box for Christmas. He never forbid me to play the game, and even encouraged my interest in it, but he never played it again himself. The game, quite simply, was too violent for his tastes.

RPGs are all about violence. The latest iteration of the “gateway game” has a huge miniature combat component to it, and just about all the other rules are tacked onto that. The world of computer RPGs is even worse; the mmogs that allowed you to bake bread or play music in the tavern are all but gone, driven out by those that focused on grind-tastic combat.

I hope we’ve buried the old canard about women not liking violence in their RPGs. These games are largely about violence, violence against women and men and children and animals, self-inflicted violence and certainly undeserved violence. Even if orcs spawn from pods by the power of the mystic underworld, even if those orcs never make it to the surface to attack the towns and cities the PCs use as home-base, the threat of violence against women is always lurking in the background.

And don’t try to feed anyone any lines about how violence against women drives away women. There have been far too many examples to the contrary for that to be convincing.

Now, you might have an argument when it comes to graphic depictions of violence against women, a la Cannibal Corpse. Though, honestly, you also might be able to just stop at “graphic depictions of violence” and leave it at that. The dripping-intestines thing does appear to be something that primarily appeals to guys (though not exclusively) and I don’t have any market research handy to back that up. I just haven’t seen anyone else jump on that bandwagon for a product targeted primarily at women.

But, as far as being “wrong,” I’m afraid it’s all bathwater and no baby; if you want to purge the hobby of violence against women, you’ll have to purge the hobby out of existence. And you’ll be tossing out most entertainment appealing to women as well. I’m not sure why it’s more important now than in the past (America, at least, is far less dangerous today than it’s probably ever been) either.

As for my father, eventually we did play a few home-made RPGs in later years, sci-fi games focused on things like planetary geological surveys and collecting animals for study. We had fun, but good luck selling that sort of game to RPGers today, male or female.

Pardon Me if I Offend

My younger readers can be forgiven for having a blasé attitude towards music. I imagine it's hard to conceive of a time when it meant something to be a fan of Billy Idol, George Michael, or Madonna. I feel the same way about the Beatles or Elvis; what the heck was all the fuss about?

Things are different now, however, and in a very interesting way. Back then, you could be both offensive and acceptable. Sixth-graders could dress up like KISS and air guitar in an official school production.

Hell, you could sing "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer" in an official school function.

This was a different age. Public intoxication was frowned upon, but not illegal. You could go to a public park with a picnic and drink a beer. Whether or not a restaurant or bar allowed smoking was up to the owner. Democrats and Republicans could discuss politics together without ending friendships.

It wasn't that there were no rules; the rules were just understood to be flexible. You could break them. You could get in trouble for breaking them. But it was also generally understood that most rule breaking was not a threat to society at large. It was also generally believed that a healthy society could stand to be offended every now and then. Many even assumed that such occasional offense was healthy.

I am not going to argue D&D's popularity was largely based on any dark reputation. (I will, however, argue that Saturday Night Live stopped being funny when it stopped being offensive; there's a reason the Lonely Island bits are much funnier than the rest of the show.) I will argue the travails of D&D's dark past, where it was assailed by “angry mothers” and decried as witchcraft, are overblown. Yes, some mothers and other relatives did snatch away books and burn them at church meetings. But not in any significant numbers. You can still find first edition books floating around the used-bookstore economy. There was no great purge, and I don't recall Gygax being subpoenaed to appear before a congressional hearing.

The truth is, nobody gives a damn what we do in our little hobby anymore than you give a damn for what model railroaders paint on the sides of their boxcars. Understand that most moralistic condemnation, when it rises to the level of media attention, is mostly just a good old-fashioned shakedown. You and I don't have enough money to make the effort worthwhile.

Most of you have no idea what happens in my games. I imagine some of you would be horribly offended. I am, without a doubt, a "lawn-crapper." So are the guys at Paizo. So is James Raggi.

In the Doom & Tea Parties campaign, most people are assumed to be bisexual, slavery is practiced by nearly every culture, and human sacrifice, while rare, is certainly not unthinkable. Am I making a statement in my game? Not really. These are just tools to create interesting situations for us to play with. Most of these issues are less personally offensive to me than the idea of acquiring wealth and power through home invasion, murder, and piracy. And everyone who enjoys D&D knows that those create interesting situations that lead to fun.

If the stuff I bring up in my games, or that Raggi and Paizo publish, offends you, I shudder to think how you will feel when you discover what your sister was reading when she was twelve.

Art by William Hogarth.

Combat in Play-by-Post

Play-by-Post isn’t my favorite form of gaming. In fact, I’ve kinda avoided it for a few years now. Partly this is because the games always end up collapsing, and it’s usually in the middle of a combat when someone just stops posting and the whole thing grinds to a halt.

Still, PbP has a lot to recommend it, especially in terms of the wide availability of players and GMs, and its low-impact requirements for participation. It’s just that the usual, extremely granular combat systems of most RPGs don’t suit it well. They create a continuous series of bottlenecks that are fatal to the momentum of a game.

Even old school D&D, with its very simple back-and-forth style of combat can get bogged down as you wait for players to declare their actions, then wait for the DM to report the results. But D&D’s combat serves an important purpose. It allows combat to be exploration by other means. Is this a monster we can beat? Are we dishing out enough damage to it? Is it dishing out too much damage to us? Does fire harm it more than steel? What about magic?

This is why resolving an entire combat in a single roll is a sub-optimal solution as well. It doesn’t give the players time to react, or a chance to learn anything about their foe.

The compromise between efficiency and interaction would be, I think, three decision points. Chatting about this with Oddysey, she suggested a flow of initiate, adjust, and follow-through for these three decision points (though she didn’t actually use those words). The first decision point is initiating the combat and possibly setting the stakes. The GM responds to the player’s initial actions, leading to the second decision point: press ahead or adjust tactics? The GM lets the players know what happens in either case, and that sets up the final decision point: go for the kill, or cut your losses and pull out.

In this case, I’m thinking efficiency does not necessarily mean brevity. At the table, many small, iterative actions make sense. That sort of thing is death to a PbP game, however. Complexity, both in the actions of the PCs and in the descriptions of the results from the GM, is probably a virtue here. If it takes five minutes to resolve and describe an action, that’s just fine in a PbP when you can find your five minutes at any point of the day. This detail and complexity can also give the players more to work with as they make their choices. Do they screen with their drones and drive a wedge of capital ships into the enemy line? Form their own line of battle and duke it out with heavy graser cannons and torpedoes? Or do they curl into a defensive ball and shield their more vulnerable ships from the assault? A more detailed, tactical view, I think, would work much better in this sort of game than a simple, “I attack the nearest goblin.”

Art by Hippolyte Bellange.

So Fox Hunting is Immoral, but this...

This is ok?

I think it may be time for a bit of that vaunted "fierce moral urgency" here!

Scenery on the Cheap

Yep, trolls are thrifty bastards (that is to say, cheap). And I'm not much into miniatures anyway. But if you're, say, rooting through the underhive, searching for heretics to purge, and you do enjoy using miniatures, you might wanna check out this guy's paper scenery and such, more than suitable for use with your favorite 28 mm miniature plastic-man-dudes.

Of especial note, you might be interested in his IKUBE liveable habitat modules, control panels and warning labels, and rather familiar-looking cargo ship.

It's all free, but I suspect he wouldn't mind a tip or two on his paypal account if you find his stuff useful.

Fantastical Draught Animals

Elementals: only the Earth Elemental looks like a winner here. Air can be great, but your stuff will be whirled about violently, the Water Elemental will soak things, and Fire? Only if your cargo can take the heat.

Insects: renowned for their amazing strength. Easily led, as well; you just sprinkle a trail of guiding goo on the ground in front of them, and they’ll go wherever you lead them. Also, may be able to climb even vertical “slopes” and some may be able to fly.

Giant Flightless Birds: nothing says you’re not in Kansas anymore more better than these. Carrying capacity tends to be not as good as a horse, though they may be faster in a sprint.

Giant Frog: amphibious, but on land, your stuff will arrive well-shaken from all that hopping.

Giant Lizards: tough, strong, and possibly omnivorous, so easier to feed. At dinosaur size can carry insane amounts of cargo. Generally not terribly swift, however, and might not be good for much when it gets cold enough to snow.

Giant Snakes: possibly amphibious. Will need to avoid the frozen wastes, due to being cold-blooded.

Giant Turtle: it’s slow, and it’s already lugging around that giant shell, and it has the same cold issues as other reptiles. Still, if you need the added protection of the shell, I suspect there’s nobody better.

Roc: can supposedly fly off with fully grown elephants or serve as mounts for storm giants, so these are your go-to critters for heavy lift. Keeping them well-fed may be a challenge, however.

Spiders: how much they can carry depends on their size. Plus, can go up vertical walls, and might even weave their own packing/belaying material.

Wyverns: flying, but nasty, vicious, and just how much can they carry on the wing? Probably better for courier services. Ditto for hippogriphs, gryphons, pegasi, and similar winged critters.

Art by Charles Theodore Frere.

Ethiopian Healing Scrolls

More images and the general method of their use here. Related images here.

"No Soliciting"

Check out these amazing monasteries, perched high atop natural pillars, in Greece. Surely, the secrets of the World Before might still be safe in one of these places?

Twisted Cheetos

The other day, Zak wrote:

Attitude one:

Like pre-modern art, the game is like a window into another world. Just as brushstrokes and picture frames are considered necessary but distracting elements in a traditional painting, dice, rules, Cheetos are necessary but distracting elements in the game. Whatever can be done to limit their hold of the mind of the player and promote pure immersion is appreciated.

And that describes my games fairly well. Aided by the fact that nearly all my play is online via text-chat these days, I strive to make the rules fade into the background as much as possible. Setting and character become the primary focus, and the trappings of play fade into the background. And there is nary a cheeto-orange fingerprint on any of my gaming books.

And yet, while Zak is clearly a proponent of “attitude two,” I love Vornheim. Sure, I wince a bit when Zak extols the virtues of letting players know that such-and-such an event is the result of random generation, but when it comes to building a world that is both insane and hangs together, Zak is a master.

I’ve never played with Jeff, but I get the feeling that, at his table, mutant plant doxies engaging in fishslapping contests with wookies is crazy-wacky-ha-ha fun. Nobody looks deeper into what’s going on, or what it means. They just enjoy it for the gonzo fun that it is.

I don’t get that feeling at all from Zak. Sure, it looks like playful gonzo on the surface, but... There are three adventures included in Vornheim, and while all give only a cursory brush at the details (Zak’s stated goal is very much to supply tools and raw materials in this book so that you can build your own things with them, and the adventures are very much in that spirit), those details invoke a chain of connections all through the work. In one, the seemingly random nature of the architecture is a clue as to the nature of the place. The villain of another appears on a random encounter table later in the book. Other random encounters invoke long-lost friends, clowns driven by a sense of justice, ancient festivals, mysterious watchers, capers-in-progress, or domestic disputes.

And many of them are just freaking bizarre! Ok, sure, you’ve seen the stuff on his blog that’s disturbing, right? You know about maggot nagas, nephilidian vampires, and hollow brides. This book is full of stuff like that. Zak dribbles more creativity and inspiration on page 3 (territories surrounding Vornheim) than most books manage in their entirety. And that's a pale shadow of page 7 (oddities in Vornheim). And much of it hints at darker unpleasantness. As Zak says a handful of times, the results of certain actions depend “on how goth the campaign is.” Other actions can result in drastic transformation of the gameworld, kinda-sorta similar the infamous possibilities of Raggi’s Death Frost Doom.

Frankly, I don’t understand how Mandy Morbid sleeps at night after playing in Zak’s game. Maybe the cheetos keep it light and fun, but in the right hands, some of this stuff could easily be the stuff of nightmares.

A Slow Boat From Finland

So I had my copies of Vornheim and the LotFP RPG: Grindhouse Edition sent 2nd class. Oops. They just arrived today. (The t-shirts I got as presents for folks arrived first.)

I haven't had the time to read 'em yet, but yeah, Vornheim is crazy with every available surface turned into a gaming aid. It's wild and looks like fun.

The Grindhouse edition of LotFP is a huge leap in quality over the original version. The books are thicker and more solidly bound, there's more art and the layout is a lot better. You could tell that Raggi had a larger budget to work with, and a much better idea of how to get what he wanted in the books. The rules look the same, but these books will be a lot easier to use at the table, and nobody is going throw their back out lugging these around. If for nothing else, I applaud Zack and Raggi for their attempts to slay the giant, cumbersome, unwieldy coffee-table gaming book. ;p

Thor Review

So I’m watching "Thor" and, as you know from the end of the Iron Man II, Mjolnir is stuck in a crater in a desert in New Mexico. When we first see it there in the Thor movie, a man gets out of a beat-up pickup truck, climbs down into the crater, and, seemingly bemused by this odd object in the ground, tries to pull it out.

And I’m thinking, “Huh, that looks like JMS.” And while I have no idea if that was him or not, I wasn’t surprised to see Straczynski has a story credit on this flick.

Combine JMS with Branagh and you get “operatic.” I swear, I kept waiting for someone to break into an aria. The motivations are bigger than life, and just as murky. The gestures are grand. And the plots are twisty, complex things. During the movie, you’re thinking, “Wow, how many moves is Loki thinking ahead on this?” After the movie, at the fridge, you’ll be thinking, “Oh, wait, how many moves was Odin thinking ahead on this?” Loki is clearly Odin’s son, perhaps even more than Thor is.

The scenery and costumes fit. Huge, soaring, grand, and over-the-top. No winged helmet, thank the gods, but Loki is sporting his wild, sweeping horns before the end. Natalie Portman proves her acting chops when she calls the Thor costume “a good look” and you almost believe she means it.

It’s all insane, wild, over-the-top… and it works. If you’ve enjoyed the other Marvel flicks, you’ll enjoy this one, maybe even more. Its visions of the land of the gods and the land of the frost giants are wonderfully baroque. And then they manage to make it not look utterly ridiculous when it shows up on the streets of rural New Mexico, maybe by pointing out just how ridiculous it is.

And that’s part of the fun. One minute it’s all realms and kings and the sacred oaths of warriors, and the next its slapstick humor, mostly at Thor’s expense. It’s an amazing combination, the juxtaposition both humanizing the God of Thunder and keeping the film from being too grandiose. The film needed to be about 15 minutes longer (Loki’s motivations needed more teasing out, I think, and we needed the SHIELD folks to more actively earn Thor’s respect) and we don’t get nearly enough of the Warriors Three Plus One. Still, things are nicely lining up for The Avengers. Captain America is looking better by the day, and to see these characters all brought together for a massive crossover movie, well… If they can pull off another flick at this level of quality, it should be a barnstormer.

Ladies of India

Waaaaay back in '09, in utter shock I posted a link to an article about extremist Hindus who wanted the ladies of India to behave in a more restrained and decorous manner.



I'm happy to report that such sentiments are apparently being ignored.

Go India!

The High Cost of Gabbing

I don’t want to seem to be beating up on –C, because that’s not my intent at all. There’s some neat stuff on that blog, and I hope it garners the author what’s desired. And mulling over responses to my last post, I realized something that should have been obvious to me from the get-go about this.

Folk wisdom to the contrary, talk isn't always cheap. The truth is, -C, by charging in commentary for his work, was asking too much. If your readership is a bunch of college students with lots of time on their hands but always strapped for cash, yes, exchanging words for words is a more than fair trade.

But the bulk of the OSR is clearly old farts with jobs. And families, and interests outside of gaming. Thoughtful, insightful, and useful commentary, forget full-blown critique, is hard. Sometimes I can whip up one of these blog posts in a quarter-hour, 20 minutes. And I'm a professional. I imagine most folks can take the better part of an hour easily to write, massage, and post 300 to 400 words.

That’s time that could have been spent ensuring the next promotion, landing a new client, or in any number of ways that actually put jingle in your pocket. It can actually be cheaper, as well as easier, for you to pay $10, $20, or even $40 for gaming materials then to spend (there’s a reason that’s the word to use there) a half-hour commenting on them.

Time is money, and the older we get the more expensive time tends to be. This is why building a community is harder than acquiring customers. Folk wisdom also tells us that the customer who complains is worth their weight in gold, because most will simply stop buying from you and never tell you why. Feedback is awesome, but incredibly hard to get, even under the best of circumstances.