Am I the only one who wishes there was writeup of the redhead fighter in the Lamentations of the Flame Princess Grindhouse box?
Also: Vornheim. Yes, please more. of. this. Whatever the graduate school equivalent of senioritis is, this put me off the deep end. Three more weeks until I can play and post regularly again.
Hopefully there will be more Vornheim-compatible table keys. I know I’ll be making some.
Ha ha look at Mister Smartass Creeping Doom using the alphabet meme. Shut up.
I just ordered the LotFP Grindhouse and the Vornheim Book from the Princess store. The PDF’s are coming down as I write this, but I am unlikely to get a chance to read them in depth for a week or more. I got the gardening society discount, but the shipping charges still gave me some sticker shock. I recommend getting together with friends and pre-ordering together if at all possible. I’m sure the rates reflect the costs fairly, I just mention it so you know ahead of time.
Any blogger out there looking for some search engine love should review them ASAP and get linked to from the LotFP blog. It’s been the number one search term to get to this site since August last year.
Also: Just got Fight On! number 11 last week. Lots of duck jokes this week, since it’s dedicated to Greg Stafford of RuneQuest fame. On page 7 is a class writeup of the Sword Priests of Humakt that I like enough to work into my upcoming campaign and two solid adventures. I like this one but really loved issue 10, which included a huge barbarians and dinosaurs archipelago setting that I’d love to play in someday.
My RSS reader is full of A is for A________ posts today. Next it will be the Bs. I might have to stop reading for a month. I appreciate the Old School spirit, gents, but this is too much.
This bardo is the one between having no time at all to post and lots of time. Just a little maybe once a week if I can steal it.
Just some thoughts:
LotFP Grindhouse pre-orders start next week. You don’t need to tell me that. Let me tell you what excites me about this one: Not the art, although that will be great (and completely high-shelf material at my house). Not the perfect binding and larger fonts, although that is also a BIG plus.
It’s these four rules modifications: Spells have been realigned to pit priests against mages on a law vs. chaos axis, elves are as alien as they can be for a PC race, demi-humans advance in their racial abilities and the silver standard replaces the gold standard.
The first and second are similar to thoughts I have posted here in the past (not original thoughts on my part, so no, I am not claiming any credit or influence). The last I have done before and will continue because gold should mean something. The third I think will make demihumans more fun to play.
I went by the HBO Store in Manhattan and got to take a gander at the Game of Thrones costumes and props on display.
Alex started a wiki to let us list our favorite stuff. I am very much behind this. I think the OSR is past the point where it needs a hub for the best of our content, rules and articles. As I finish up school, I hope to be able to help establish some aids for collecting this material and archiving it (with permission of course). I’m thinking of metadata standards and other stuff that we have (rightly) felt was too complicated and unnecessary in the past but that we need to consider. I’ll be posting about that in May.
It seems like it’s about time for another internet blowup.
I played my first >1e D&D game tonight. It was Pathfinder. I was the only person there who had not only not played Pathfinder, but the only one without a complete character. A couple of fortunate dice rolls put my monk out of commission for the first combat, which game me time to figure out my feats, equipment, languages and learn the skill system. I definitely sat back and watched but next session I’ll be much more active (although still pretty closed mouth, in-game). I am trying to be very aware of my own biases going into this game.
Two cool ideas I saw in Pathfinder (that might exist elsewhere, what do I know?). They have a god much like two-face, with worshippers who create and worshippers who destroy. And gnomes start to fade into nothingness unless they manage to entertain themselves. Love that.
Still thinking about elves, dungeon dogs and a few gods. Looking forward to getting a Flame Princess campaign going this summer.
Thanks for bearing with me through these ‘fluff’ posts.
One thing I was just wondering today was why dogs aren’t a part of more adventure parties? I want to write something about how players could use dogs, but I don’t own a dog and haven’t for many years. I don’t think I can just come out and write this up without some input.
Would players get too attached to their character’s dog? Would the inevitable death of a dungeon dog be too disturbing? I’ve seen people react more to a dog being killed in a movie than a person.
It just seems to me that humans have had dogs along on almost every pre-modern endeavor as companions. Any opinions as to what breeds of dogwould make a good dog in a dungeon adventure?
I was thinking:
OK, so I was catching up with all of last week’s OSR discussions and discover Zak’s fantastic post that I am sure you have all read by now. I think it’s a fantastic distillation of what I’m going for in the future. Not as aggressively as some, but nonetheless…
I don’t have a long post in me about it yet. But I will recount a situation where I felt I’d found the weird around a gaming table.
I ran Death Frost Doom last August for a bunch of old school gamers from the New York Red Box. A great bunch of guys, btw.
Without spoiling DFD, I can say that there is a place in the game where things behave very strangely but do not seem to use magic in the sense that people have come to understand it. It’s quite a shocking moment for the players, who have a lot ahead of them at that point. One of my players was convinced that he’d run into an illusion of some sort and kept trying to disbelieve and then doing things that would let me justify him disbelieving. And they had no effect.
I can’t speak for that player 100 percent, it did seem to knock them back a bit that something wasn’t behaving by the logic of AD&D/OD&D that we’d been accustomed to for quite a long time. Most of the party seemed intrigued, but they were also very cautious at that point.
I don’t think it frustrated anyone or made the game less fun–in fact it seemed to make it more fun. We are at a point where the rules have been around for so long that situations that suspend them put players into that “weird” valley.
Taking people out of their comfort zone without completely abandoning the rules might be another path to the weird.
When I started this little project, it was meant only to entertain me. It seems to have entertained a few others. I certainly didn’t expect any sort of audience and I never would have guessed that my most popular articles would be about clerics and halflings.
Let me tell you about the Old School....
The most popular post by a wide margin has been my review of the Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Role Playing boxed set. There has been constant interest in that review since I wrote it. I take it as a sign of interest in what OSR and especially what James Raggi is doing that people are still getting here via googling his game. Looking back at it now, it’s really not a very good review. It was rushed and I’ll admit there was a desire to be one of the first reviews out there. Looking at the boxed set now, I’m still impressed. The “princess box” will be my ruleset of choice when I next DM.
While the LotFP review is still the most looked-at and most googled post, the biggest one-day post was my piece on hobb -er halflings. I wanted to make the hobbits into the nightmare that some people see immigrants to be. In this case, they do take over wherever they settle and the thought of legions of halflings with spears or pikes amuses me to no end. This was a throwaway piece when I started writing it, but in the campaign world in my head, they might be one of the most important features.
Another popular post was a simple idea: mages will become liches after a certain age or level. This seemed to be popular with the folks who hang out at reddit’s rpg community. I’m far from done with mages.
I rarely play clerics, but I seem to have posted more about clerics and their gods than any other subject and as a topic, they are the most popular. The most popular post in this series concerned a goddess of despair that is empowered by the harm her followers do.
Before I wrap up this meta talk, I want to recommend two sites to you that I am sure I do not need to. If you are reading this, you are surely reading them. If not, you should be. First is Ancient Vaults and Eldritch Secrets. Bat puts out a new item, spell, monster or whatnot every day. Holidays and blizzard days too. Each entry is a quality piece and begins with a short setup with a recurring cast of characters. The man has a work ethic and he’s done this enough to get really good at it. You’re my role model, Bat. Now when are you going to publish?
The other site, Swords and Dorkery also needs no introduction. Mike’s presence here as a recurring commenter gave me the first notions that there was anyone visiting this site more than once and for that I must thank him. He participates more actively in the blogging community and has gathered some of his best materials into downloadable files.
To wrap up the navel gazing…
So far, the blog is still dong what I wanted it to do: get me to sit, stretch my imagination and write RPG material for later use. That some people have found it worth reading and perhaps used something in their games is very gratifying. I hope I can keep my personal goal in mind and not get distracted by the number of readers or page views I get. This next year, I hope to post more often, even when extremely busy as I have been this fall.
I wish everyone a great 2011 and I hope we all get in as much gaming as you want.
Happy New Year!
I posted a while back that the classic computer rpg Planescape Torment was available on Good Old Games for ten bucks. Since then they added both Baldurs Gate games, the two installments of Icewind Dale and Bioware’s Neverwinter Nights for ten bucks each.
The games are DRM-free and include the manuals in odf, soundtrack audio files and all the expansions. Gog uses an emulation layer so you should have few technical problems running them in XP, Vista and W7. But don’t quote me on that last bit–check their support forums.
Zak asked for everyone’s ideas late Friday night and said he’d put them all in the sandbox. I posted a short paragraph about the Ettin I’d retooled a while back. Lo and behold, it turned out to be the big combat of the session. To be clear, it was his interpretation of my short idea that took them on, not any monster of my own devising.
Nonetheless, I post this because I find it gratifying that someone had fun with one of my ideas and specifically Zak and his crew. It was this post on Zak’s blog that inspired me to start writing my ideas down for you (all three of you). His posts exemplify the kind of creativity and fresh thinking about the game that I hope to develop by doing this.
Seems to me a lot of ancient and medieval thought and energy, and really human endeavors for a long time concerned:
How to create gold,
How to have a male child,
How to get spices so food would not spoil,
How to get enough to eat.
I don’t see much if that in published adventures, settings and whatnot.
Ok enough talk. Time to do something about it.