Boxing Things Up and Beyond in December

 The day after Christmas, Boxing Day, the second of three Christmas Days in Germany, my RPG clique has pulled it off. Despite some fatigue from video facing because of the Viddos over the last few months, we've finished two of 2020 campaigns and "piloted" one for 2021. The vid-face syndrome was occurring because lack of real life tabletop outlets from our normal conventions. Mind you, we are very used to on-line events-- where we don't need a lot of formatting and still use manual dice and draw maps and pictures.

I was able to conclude my Killing Hitler for my Red Bat die-hards last Tuesday (22.Dec). My agents of SEWA 66 (Society of Extra Weird Affairs 1961-1970), traveled through southern France and into Gambia chasing aging Nazi mad scientists. They encountered old men in wheelchairs that could turn into werewolves and chased WWII submarines down the River Garonne. The climax involved lasers glancing off of glittery purses and exploding space ships. 

Iron Curtis wrapped up his ICONS campaign in the alternate universe, The Black and White World, just tonight. Sadly the Crew, not the Scrap Pile, destroyed the whole thing using that world's very own cataclysmic plot device, the Chrominator of Doom, on itself. If you've never seen a moon made of cheese suck in its colonies and a flat world of the Map of Earth crumble upon itself to form a sphere, you should game with this GM to get a taste of it.


About two weeks before either of these, I started my '21 Icons-Supernatural campaign, Scraps of Magic: Mythos. I have written about how our gaming group was really developing the mystical superhero hero milieu, well it's starting to coagulate and shape into some serious high urban fantasy here. Hopefully the trend of curious bypassers stopping in to play continues. They helps avoid the Vid-Face during these Viddos.

As we, well me at least, will be breaking for the month of January because of the big life move and all, I hope to get started on my Mythos in earnest and get my Gonzop  dabbles running as a lively campaign. And Iron Curtis has not satisfied his thirst for something Scrap Pile for our superhero RPG subculture.

13-Page Worlds now 50 Cent Wonders

 Yes, Trent-Vor. Yes. I am still working on Red Bat: Playtested settings and T&T scenarios. I have six lined up, even roughly formatted, while I decide on how much help like say for editing and illustrating. Now I know most Batty buyers don't mind if it's just me doing the post production, but when it comes to illustrations I suck. When it comes to editing, I can barely type in English despite my creative affliction. I am still trying to up my game and if failing thinking of outside ppl to help while budgeting for them.

I have six of these so far needing refinement. See. I am working.

 
The "13-Page Worlds" has evolved into "50-Cent Wonders" as I usually can't keep the settings down to thirteen pages. And there is this currently amorphous need to revamp a web page just for Red Bat. Sorry they're taking so long, but things are going.

Older, Lazier GMs: Comic Book RPG and Rule Debating

In the days where the Rona wolves savage our lands for their dark Viddo bat-kings by attending family Thanksgivings, my play-groups have boiled down to close and familiar friends. I haven't had the chance to lay bear-traps at conventions where hapless attendees get dragged into my events, giving me the exercise of dealing with strangers and invigorating my somewhat shotgun-pellety creativity. Before of late. I have been a guy that often writes entire worlds for single shots as well as campaigns. Since then, my notes for a scenario in practice has turned into a the background for entire campaigns.

Using other people's systems, like our ICONS groups, is advantageous for this. Before, I compiled pretty complicated "Yes/No" charts to follow as to not be narrative-driven but to maintain a pace for the session. Screw pacing among friends, my friends will wonder if I have a fever. Well yes, I do, but not yet hallucinating. I am kind of sitting back and letting rules and PC tangents take up sessions.  People arguing about mechanics has allowed me to single-line in a few NPCs, some vocabulary (items, groups, and external factors). 

Is it all X-Mas Fudge? Naw. But there is cocoa.

What I worry about is the tone of the events of the session not the action per se. When my players get to some place when some narrative is required, that is when I bother to do the bedazzlement. I just go into more detail on my one-line entry in my notes, often typing the new details into the notes at the breaks in play. Still pacing is important, despite what OSR fans say, the convention tried and true form of "Intro-Event-Recoup or Event-New Obstacle-Climax-Outro" works just fine.

Efficiency from experience; or expedience because of exhaustion?  That is the question and the answer is both. But a good game is still it's own reward for me as a GM and the players around me.

Autmunal Awesomeness

 All Saints Day, the hangover of Summer's end harvest festivals comes rolling in. Appropriately in my region, the mild fall weather is giving into the mix of snow and wetness, driving any revelers from the ditches of their drunken stupors into the church pews and back into the humble abodes. Snow could be very well on the way. Where if one listens they can hear the howl of winter, as the cold front moves in.

Pumpkin Spice and Awesome Sauce

With a little help from some friends.

My own Halloween works didn't make it into Elder Tunnels Halloween this release. Everything I started working on just became too large and too intricate to be wrapped into a ready to scenario for a quick zine. Naw, Guys like Werdna, Scott Malthouse, and JerryTel, Jerry Teleha can do the 14-17 thousand worded scenarios with enough detail and atmosphere without needing to draw out a whole world from the GM.

I have been more into Autumn than just the Samhain-spectacular. While the RPG group has been focusing on the superhero story line and our crises on multiple worlds, my own notes have been on the focused on the time periods where everyone dressed up like people on oatmeal boxes. You know the pirates and wagoneers that used pikes and muskets to spread religious love and harmony throughout Europe and the New World. Where witches were burnt at stakes and slaves were all the rave, because indentured servants had rights. A more horrifying than Halloween but still muskets mixed with magic i 

Contract Law not World Creation

Ah yes, original Dragonlance

So I hear Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman are suing Wizards of the Coast for like 30 million US because they as authors cannot finish a newly started project set in the Dragonlance setting which they designed. So why aren't the folks at Hasbiro just firing everyone at the D&D shop? The complaint shows how incompetent the WOTC staff is as well as how, well, let's say, smart the authors are.

In this age of brand-based literature, the phrase "D&D" is going to sell something to somebody. There is a two-fold problem for the business majors spoiling our hobby in this. As Nick (last name unknown at this time) at the Complex Game Apologist points out, WOTC selling any world setting does not really help out the bottom line of a publisher that is not the creators of said setting. But at the same time the bean-counters among them take a look at the sales of sublets of D&D and see their original sales, so they cannot let those titles go. Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Planescape  and a few other non-sellers in following years come to mind but don't have the energy to type.

So why did WOTC enter into contracts with Weiss and Hickman? Is it because Dragonlance would sell massively? Maybe it was the stars in their eyes, before they got all distracted by the Alt-Right VS the SJW marketing ploy to keep sales increasing among people that have high levels of interest in gossip if pathetic bank accounts. It was because of the glamor of superstar-ed-ness or something or another I suppose. So industry savvy authors contract with a butt of sly-kids without the skills of a bar-tender, baker, or candle-maker into getting out their WOTC-owned title's magnum opus. The sly-kids, now in their 30s-60s, get befuddled at all the stuff that they find controversial and then start doing contractually illegal crap. Spend money much for no reason? Yeah? Good. They've got practice for the next phase of things.

And if it's about the diversity quota, why isn't WOTC incorporating people like Milton Davis, Elois Lasanta, or Mark Hunt? My list is limited but there are so many others. People that have designed, marketed, and sold their own games to other people not made up markets. Let them handle the business end and then later indulge in their own bits of world building. Instead the cast and crew of the publishing organ seems to made up by, based off their past works, to be more infatuated with maudlin sexuality and depression not gaming.

At the same time, we could very well see Hickman and Weiss get full control of their created work. How well it does without hype from Hasbiro's petty cash account, we'll see. I am sure a year's rent will get paid though. Then whoever is running D&D shop for Hasbiro can heartbreaking buy up the brand again and let future widget-producers type up stuff for the title.

Two Worlds this Week: meh you already know them

 

Still working on Sevven

 

The middle Bronze-Age-ish world setting of Sevven is getting worked on. I have released the reigns to let it go gonzo, like say Dark Sun, more so than historical folklore, This has come about after I read Blood & Bronze by Johan Nordinge and Olav Nygard with others. As a serious Mesopotamian fan, I admire their work but see the compromises the authors made to develop a world for coherent play and trying to get some action that isn't ethnic groups warring and ultimately slaughtering each other. So Sevven, Luxxe, and Bugge are getting a bit more infused with magic and beings more of regional than pulled off of murals. 

Right now the cosmos around the Fifth World is being worked out. Readers of the short-lived DC comic Claw the Unconquered will be familiar with the Nine Worlds. Four realms of light, four of darkness; and a middle one-- a fifth one if you will.  Still it might have some serious Blue-hair atmosphere worked in so players can get some sword-axe action going on. 

Yes you've seen this one before.

The "Stragea Isles" ecology (it's so pretentious, even I can't stop it) is coming along nicely as well. Trying to keep this setting, which is rather vast in my head, from spilling over too much from thirteen pages. Adding some art will take up even more page space, but we'll see how it works out. 

Sometimes Just Stop Typing

So I am like rebranding a whole RPG system that I never published into a 13-Page World (mini-game/setting for Red Bat) . So at 3:30 AM I am in the middle of a paragraph and I can't do it. I start going through the handy print copy of base rules. Still not much help, my imagination racing more than my note taking fingers can do. And then...

Plan out the Character Sheet! WALLAH. Six pages done.

Not one of the everything you need on the Character Sheet things, but really helpful at a roadmap for progression.

'The Boys' Totally Ripped Me Off

Pictured above is anyone raised by 1990s comic fans.

I am talking about the TV series. I couldn't tell you about the graphic novel. I am just not into reading comic books that are basically for people that hate comic books. But on the great 3 by 5 media, I can take the subgenre of dysfunctional super-powered heroes and misunderstood villains. That is only an episode at a time, if they are as great as this show. Maybe it's my Catholic upbringing turned into an Atheist that needs to feel guilty about sex and liking fantasy, just a degree less than the protestant world just wanting to hate everyone else... I digress.

Now I don't go around composing anti-superhero themes when doing superhero themes. I instead sit around and come up with the why and how of superhero worlds that aren't based on bad interpretations of Greek mythology and mediocre art (looking at you 90s comic fanboys). So I am not saying the show ripped me off about that. Now when Giancorlo Esposito, loved his work since The Usual Subjects, as Stan Edgar talks about the founder of Vought Industries, I ran downstairs to my blue filing cabinet and found my three-key lock had been broken into. Rifled through was my files from the Scrap Pile superhero RPG world.

In my fictitious world, around 1890, an Austrian mad scientist came up with the formula of MUT-8. This Professor Johann Von Rohung was the inventor. His formula would at first be closely guarded as he'd try and enable all the wrong side of history with super-powered edges over the forces of goodness, freedom, and the North American way. By the middle of WWII, Doctor Wrong, as he liked to be called, realized that the totalitarians were just not as capable as the democrats. So he started selling his product with a select few, mostly autocrats. Those dictators would of course be indebted to gangsters so they'd share the secret sauce as well. 

Now the developed nations of my world noticed what was going on as early as the 20s. Their law enforcement agencies, as well as their military complexes, needed to get a handle on these super-creeps and monstrosities wrecking havoc on their hometowns, so they started their own "super serum" usually derived from obtained samples of MUT-8. Unfortunately though like most of Wrong's victims, most people undergoing the infection could not overcome their basest and petty instincts once they had "super powers" making them at best uncontrollable but more often diabolical. Still once in a while a hero or two would emerge.

Ironically it was when, in my game universe,  MUT-8 made its way into the more indigenous population of areas, there would be an increase of people being able to resist becoming selfish-degenerates. Many becoming what would could be called superheroes to fight the super-villains around them. These capable individuals would have a normal person's distrust of other people's authority and be resistant to organizations trying to control them. This would be the rise of the vigilante super-powers from the 40s onward. Most recently, the Scrap Pile groups from the Lake Mohawk cities (namely Beta City up to Tripod City), have arisen as super groups that utilize both deputized supers and the vigilante elements to combat super-criminals.

So you might not see the connections immediately but trust me they are there. Still the show is awesome. The Boys talks about the compound being spread throughout the world. I just take my frame a little further back and the situational "Superhero" starts to fall into place, given a generational shift every time.

It works.

A World a Week: The Gonzop Saga

 In this past year's tradition, after a couple of days at work where I have some time to write, I come home and throw an RPG session at the players. This time around it is my Million and Half A.D. campaign, now entitled Gonzop. In this FFFFRPG (Far, Far Future Fantasy RPG), the players get to explore being a Kindred, or a species from the time: the Nimby, the Imby, the Baggers, the Bods, and the Mods. I left out the Roons (walking raccoons), Boons (walking baboons), and the Squiditch (land exploring squids) because I knew they would be too cute to resist for whoever showed up.  Only Iron Curtis and Peryton showed up, which is not a bad thing. The three of us have gelled into the experimental core of our gaming clique, while the hardcore but slightly more fans of this or that type of RPG setting show up often enough to make the roll-call. So we explored playing out:

The Nimby- kind of the "masters" of the world some 1.5 million years from now. The species is not the toughest or smartest of all the species around, but they are tougher and smarter than most nearby them. Working as family-communal bands they form nations and hold the best territories for their themselves. Hence the name derived from "Not in my backyard".
Curtis played and elderly one, a "drag", named Tequila. Mature beyond the sexuality of earlier Nimby incarnations (doll, dryad, and druid... drag), but something of a brave, kick-ass ninja-monk. He's 111 years-old in an expect two century long life.

Mod-Skeezer- Mods are my nod to hybrid species of the ultimate, if prototype for post-human RPG, Gamma World. Mods are deliberately modified humanity gene pools for long lost reasons from over a million years ago that are still kicking around. I had a whole list of weird mutants and at the bottom almost as an afterthought, I listed mosquito people. An homage to China Mieville, I guess, or a subconscious means to shooting myself in foot because once Robin (Peryton) heard that option she had to have it.
Oh Pery has a way with names, I actually love this one. Zzazzri  is mosquito-head version of a Luke Skywalker. That is if Luke was a she, lived in a swamp that had the climate of the Mississippi basin around Tennessee, and was the worst hated species in the known universe. Still she comes from an established Plastic-Cooking plantation, complete with blood slaves and not too many robotic plastoids, family in the Big Swamps, and wants to see the bigger world.

We roleplayed out a starting scenario. Tequila got to survive a dirigible crash but at the cost of losing precious cargo. The cargo was being transported from the Dome-Gnome abodes of Dome Home back to his homeland of Worlock in the High Valley. Zzazzri got her swamp person on and established the Skeezer accent-- it sounds like Star Trek Discovery "Klingon" (We call them Space-Prunes) which means speaking behind a bad make-up mask. There was some gritty blood-thirsty related violence occurring between the PCs (Robin CRIT-Failed an SR) but they got over it quickly. Now it's time to find the lost manifest.

Gonzop is a place where six months out of the year is March in the American Midwest, three months August, with a February period thrown in for the rest. While an ice age has covered up the worst of the Anthropocene, the bits of it are not too far from the surface. Technology is advanced, but the species of humanity, because they all are humans (humans that often eat those not of their direct species), are only a few thousand years out of that ice age. On top of that other species are starting to gain sentience as well.

Are the variant off-spring of humanity the wave of the future or echos or a species family about to go extinct? I have no idea. I doubt the campaign will come close to answering that. I just wrote the sentence to spice up my concluding paragraph. But this setting is going to rock.

A World A Week: the Islands of Stragea

 

 This setting is nothing new, just refined and still cool. So on the world of Elder, about ten days travel, eastward, with favorable winds, from Athebes, are the islands that make up Stragea. Made up of thousands of islands, with sixteen of them being very large. They are a mixture of a group of oceanic islands and corral islands thrown together. Marine biology aide, it they occur in a spot of the world that has been rather hard to get to by the humans of the Marshoom and Akog continental conglomeration over the last three millennia so here be the odd stuff for fantasy roleplaying.

Now like many a GM/Author, I have been working aquatic adventures for a time now. Unlike most, my little housebrew of rules work awesomely. I have been working on this stuff for a while now. Meanwhile in other scenarios I have been working on scenarios dealing with other atypical environments for the average FRPG-minded adventure gamer tabletop. That means places like aerial spots, high mountain, active volcanoes, and swamps. I suppose, I have covered cliffs, ravines, and beaches in what I think of as my "Gravity Salad" pieces (ask my T&T crew about those). Overall,  I love PC discomfort. 

In case you, seated reader, haven't noticed, I also like species. Kindred, races, costume-suggestions, or what has one, I dig the non-human sentient beings. As more of a fan of Larry Niven than Tolkien, my folks are fitted into these differing sorts of environments. I like to think that once again, I really enjoy PC discomfort. When it comes to Stragea, I move from my other love of just putting weird heads atop human bodies to going.. well, just alien. Giant squids that can walk on land and like to make themselves look as humanoid as possible because, they want to fit in. I won't even go into my fantasy kin tribute to tuna fish; the fishes not the canned meat. At the same time, there are plenty of aerial and treetop dwelling creatures that can use some coverage in fantasy adventure works as well.

From the Middle then Up-and-Down-wards.

The Otgan- Okay, otter-people. Why try harder when you're hit perfection?  Seafaring humanoids that are equipped to live in water. From temperate to warm waters they travel in tribes and to places where the fishing is easier for them it is than sharks.

The Kuda- These barracuda-styled humanoids only come to bother surface and surface-breaking peoples when they are forced to. When they do though, they are something to be feared. The basis for my Kodoan spacefaring species.

Muckra- Incorporeal intelligence that can assume forms made out of swamp muck to fight against or adventure with humanoids.

Gremlins- Semi-corporeal beings that resemble goblins when young and then turn moth-man style entities when mature. They enslave harpies and other flying species using their telepathic powers.

So while the Islands of Stragae evolved into the perfect underwater scenario over the years, they have resumed being my Petri dish of all sorts of things. I don't want to go too much into detail here as this world is this close to publication and usual creator paranoia creeps in, but the various bits have been published before in my works as well as others where I am credited.

WHAPing Bats

 So the RPG sessions continue. 

I am only doing my straight up Red Bat campaign "Killing Hitler" which is pretty much Wobble Lite these days. I am toning things down with 60s-style spy motifs, werewolves, and space stations in orbit in 1966. Totally old hat, I say to you "sheesh." See how I avoided a sentence fragment there? I've outlined about seven scenarios in what I call the SEWA '66 milieu. The Society of Extraordinarily Weird Affairs, first appeared in a steampunk couple adventures written by Mike Larsen, Monk, which he'd submit for me to publish. Precocious much? So I had to develop a game system for them, namely the forerunner to my current Batty one. It was TAG: WHAP (Tom's Adventure Gaming: Wildly Heroic Action Pulp). So far the Steam-60s are proving to be a lot of fun, let's see how many of the scenarios we get through as this group gels. Might be a campaign book or a 13-Page World by the end of things.

At the same time, an iteration of our superhero campaign has started gaining steam after a couple introduction scenarios. The GM, Iron Curtis, has been indulging in some of very personal fancies which we as players have been sidestepping for the most part. A group favorite, Baron Karza' is turning into Scorpious from Farscape, giving romantic advice to one of the PCs. Cage Fight Night? My PC, Clone (Batman/Manhunter homage), turns on the fire sprinklers. By the way I've grown to hate cage fighting in Canadian-produced TV sci-fi/fantasy shows almost as much as the obligatory torture episodes since 9/11. Ten-story monster, approximately the height of the "70s 'Zilla," versus giant robots, we come up with plans to do it without the mecha-suits. One player quit the session when it became obvious we had to have at least one giant robot to win the fight, He came back to watch the saga unfold though-- there is a lot of... emotionality(?), well at least comfort in the years-old club that we have going.

This is usually the time where I focus on new products not role-playing, but with GenCon's cancellation it has needed to happen. Keeping up on the skill keeps the product release in perspective.

Why Super-Heroing

A lot of people don't do superhero RPGs. This has always struck me as odd, as most RPG devotees that I know are avid comic book readers regardless of age. Maybe it's because of the loss of glitter as players have to sort through the rules in the various systems as they construct their own super-powered personas? There they are shifting through the pages as the process probably starts to feel like the homework that they were were trying to avoid by reading the escapist literature in the first place. Never forget the fact that the other role-playing settings can already fulfill the wonder of the basic adventurer having special abilities to the average person that are awesome in comparison. Along those lines being a murder-hobo is not a sign of villainy, surely that last fact can't hurt. Maybe they just don't think that they would look good in spandex and the cape looks clumsy.

But there are some perks for those that do the superhero thing.

Being that superhero
There's the version where the players get to be their special picks from a comic book line. Using whatever RPG rules system that is preferred the players get to be big name figures, such as Spider-Man, Jessica Jones, Blue Beetle, or say E-Man. Alternately the GMs get to write a comic book series that is usually the purview of billionaire nephews and publisher's favorite nieces. Note: to the one day big business comic book writer and illustrator; if you want to break into the business, have your dad buy the company.

For the more creative types, there is also the chance just to live in same world as Superman or Thor without being drawn by Jack Kirby. Clever GMs, like myself, will fill up double tables at big conventions letting people roleplay flatfoots in the world of Capes. That is especially true of Gotham City. While street level superhero drama is iffy for TV and big movie productions for RPG sessions these are blockbuster events.

The story that must be told
A lot of my fellow ICONS players and GM come from a group  that used to buy, read, and then try to write their own comic books as teenagers. Using their own takes on a superhero, sometimes a villain, they expand upon the experiences of the early days using an RPG campaign as the basis for that. I have used filling in the blanks of my online RPG experiences with City of Heroes in the Aughts to write up mini-campaigns for the same group.

The casual observer seeing the characters mentioned, often illustrated, may indeed be like, "That's a copy of..." but to the Player, it's probably a heartfelt homage. That is if it's not a totally different character that just looks similar to whomever the other person is thinking of.

The hangups are not really a hangup
The biggest drawback that I can think of for the superhero RPG genre is the writing of it. If the author-GM goes deep it becomes a lot of paragraphs in between fist fights. And to keep the fist fights interesting, there needs to be goofy NPCs with powers often based on puns.  Then as the GM, you just can't help but start writing background material again. 

Suddenly within every climax there is about four to six minutes of expository dialogue between kicks and punches as the heroes and villains are doing the twists, dancing with toys. Everyone around the table is paying attention and having to remember to swing when their turn comes around. The GM is suddenly Jack Kirby crafting an epic. 

For some reason, I am getting the feeling that other people feel somewhat similar to the way I feel about the Comic RPG. It could just be a fad around the corner waiting for GM-authors to make some fat stacks (up to 30$ a bundle) to get into. I know I have about thirty-fours years of notes to start typing up.

The Expanse and My Near Space

No. Spacers: Near Space is not a homage to The Expanse TV series or the books that it is based upon. While I've responded to the emails specifically, I think the three out of fourteen that posited that assumption indicate a trend that I want to address. Besides the content being written up mostly in the early Aughts (2000-'10), I have tried for a much more fantastic look and feel to the universe of a solar system filling up with people and drama. My buddy Smiles in Austin Texas and his "Iska Dawn" campaign setting, unpublished, back in the late 80s and Robert Zubrin's The Case for Mars has a lot of influence on the background science mentioned but no. No Expanse.

While I love the watching the show, well except for the fourth season, it's actually a little too simplistic SF to be classic nuts and bolts space. Imagine me, the guy that does rocketships versus little green men, calling a well-budgeted show and paperback series by an established writer too simplistic to be called hard sci-fi (err SF, since the inception of FM radio). It's not out of character for me so take that for what it's worth.

I have some definite ideas what constitutes hard sci-fi versus pulp. I love both and Near Space, while being pulpy, it had a lot of reading of science while it was being conceived and roleplayed in. The science of the show while incorporating bits of real life, like pharmacology and astrophysics, is like reading a magazine in a office waiting area. The politics of the worlds are comic book at best. But it it's space battles sure make you the viewer want to join the military though doesn't it?

Sorry guys, but Mars will always be a white elephant. The population will always be too small to be a real power regardless of its status with Earth.  The Belters will be more likely to be running officious shake downs on private spacefarers than be a coming together as a randy band of pirates. Ships won't have to "flip and burn" because the energy source which provides propulsion can be vented to different engine ports. And ship engineers will know how to create centrifuge in all but the smallest vessels. That is at least in my estimation of things.

 

How Did This Chicken Leg Get on My Plate?

The mysterious so far...

Our recurring waitress, Matilda, name changed to protect the innocent, is pregnant with her first. She is an attractive woman with honey-blond hair and angular features, works too many hours. Some time before noon Caed and Rodney has lost two tubes of toothpaste. They were even in a different bag than where the former swears that she packed them. She being an honest upstanding person, I have to believe her. Then at 4;14pm, the power went out for up to thirty seconds, in the entire hotel. This was after we had been to see the Point Pleasant downtown area, which I will refer to as Mothman Plaza.

That out of the way...
Peryton was finally corralled into starting to run the Middle Earth Adventures for Cubicle 7. It took her two hours get over her avoidance complex and things really got going. The D&D-heds assembled got their D&D on and Robin schooled them on Tolkien baby. I was impressed with the game mechanics and how it reflected the tone of the books myself.

Then Bathrobe

The rain has allowed us the excuse to slip into our own minds and game books.

 My lungs need some walking motion and non-air conditioned ventilation so I am pulling up maps now. All the makings of a Mothman Crawlspace project.

I don't wear slippers

What Is In a Border

From the partitions of 80s Germany to the seamless road trips from Colchester, England to Prackhow, Poland, in the 90s,  I draw a bit of energy from borders. I found this energy somewhat characterized by books like House on the Border Lands and Clive Barker's Weave World which I read in the 80s. Travel is how I look to find that energy these days, sometimes stumbling into a border every now and then.

On borders, the locals have more in common with their neighbors than the border makers off in the center of that particular namesake's capital. As the consummate outsider, I look for things like traffic patterns on Sunday because of local liquor laws in places in Toledo, Ohio, Point Pleasant West Virginia, and northwestern Arkansas. Sort of like "On the Seventh Day, they rested. That is unless they crossed the river where hooch was still legal." Back in the day in Europe, every day was Sunday east of Darmstadt so to speak. Jeans could indeed get a person a slightly used, about a hundred thousand miles, car if you had the right passport just as a Levi's ad in the 80s on TV advertised. Really adds to a visitor's experience to witness people working around arbitrary restrictions on this or that. For the locals, it was any given week of the year while knowing that some things outsiders just wouldn't understand, because of say State Sales taxes or international import restrictions.

This has resulted in my two worlds, reality and the fantastic spilling over into the other. Role-playing creations having a lot of detail, which I won't call realism, that are more prose than poem in the tradition of fantasy. It can also give some head-in-the-clouds whimsy while making my way through the real world which has me looking deeply into every thing I see a local person do or say-- this can be helpful as well as harmful on any given day. But for writing RPG material it always works.

When it comes to this trip there are many convergences. Not only do two states, of the American United States, meet; Columbus meets Charleston (WV); Detroit meets "the Old South;" and folklore meets pranksters speaking in terms of differing worlds. While it's all fun and games until a bridge collapses, a sense of humor is prevalent. Ins the right mindset, one can step from a mindset of strong, down to Earth industrial-mindedness into the other-worldly just by driving down a couple off-highway local roads.

This trip to east Ohio and northwest West Virginia has been anticipated since about 'o7. We just never made the time. Heck it took GenCon shutting its doors because of the arrival of the first Horseman marking the start of the End of Times, even, before my gaming clique got serious about coming here. Now in Point Pleasant, err Gallipolis, the gang is hearkening back to Middle Earth where the Shire ends blends into Bree-Land. We're even sneaking like a bunch little beings, goblins more so than hobbits, using too many "u"s and hyphens in our written language to be accepted as locals.

Near Space: Distancing Included.

On Sale Spacers!

I have been re-reading a lot Spacers(TM): Universe material for the last couple of weeks.  It seems multiple things have been going on during this creative impulse that sometimes bordered on a job, but always turns out to be as fresh and fun as decent party someplace interesting,  are coming into play. I am an optimist. Between news, literature, S-F, the Bible, porn, real books, and propaganda, I've been reading a wagon load of material and the viewpoints that come along with them. Luckily I haven't slipped into the trap of polarity and nihilism.

In Spacers (TM): Near Space,  90% of the clunky writing describing the future of a humanity that measures itself in terms of a solar system, is about representation. Since the late 90s, I have moved beyond equality in terms of race, sexual fixation, and political stance. I was at this space mentally, while in college and the US Army on two continents to begin with, in 1989. What has happened to the rest of the world is their own fault.  I wrote "While the world circa 350 years from now seems Utopian, that actually is not the case. People are still self-serving and often work against one another. Privilege and opportunity are meted out by location and family more often than by need or merit. Incorporated interests still strive to exploit the resources available to them and then deprive those not part of their franchise. But things are still a whole lot better for all the human population than ever before. Speaking of population, that population is bigger than ever and only getting bigger. This could explain why space exploration and colonization is bigger than military arms – overcrowding without starvation just gets people adventurous." long before Clinton was out of office, let alone before Jodie Whitacker was a Dr. Who, I was on about what is humanity and where is it going, I was optimistic about expansive endeavor.

The fantasy of electricity only obtained from fossil fuels for mundane tasks, like learning to read and heating shower water, always kind of bugged me. As we see these days it is easily proven wrong. While advocates of the Newt McGrimace blue-suits tell everyone how solar and winds can't do this or that, the impoverished world, according to the media, is doing just that. They just happen to be selling their successes to China to sell to the USA ascproducts for 400%+ profit. Since the start of the current plague times of Covid-19, we've all started noticing, "hey why don't we have solar panels and wind turbines everywhere since 35% of everybody is mostly unemployed these days?"

Still for all my griping, sales are up and the perfect time to release, Spacers (TM): Near Space.

The Incredible Heaviness of Randomness

As illustrated by the random dungeon generators at the back of AD&D DM's Guide and the need for an entire Monster Manual to create a quick run, effortlessly random scenarios are not an easy thing to achieve. But the work is worth it.

A little bit of structure

And while random charting has been a thing for at least a decade now, it was going on before. Still a level of detail prevents too much variation from session to session. This is especially helpful when the sit-downs may months or even a year apart from one another.

Making the sausage.

The product in hindsight.

Then when sitting down with the group that knows your every move and habit as a GM/author, from many, many, many times before; things don't have to be stressful. You aren't even certain where you're going. But the details line up, a suggestion of a plot gels with a roll of a couple dice, and the players have some ideas as to where they would like things to go as well. Things usually work out just fine.

A habit that I have as this sort of GM is to make notes keeping track of improved milieu from everybody at the table. This is both a good and bad thing. The continuity keeps the player's happy. When I have a change of mood, I still have to incorporate that pesky detail from earlier. The benefits though, PCs engaging in my universe using my own thoughts from three sessions ago, just means I can take my foot off the gas of cobbling stuff together and just worrying about the pacing.

Spacers: Really Big Space

I often ask myself, why am I doing Spacers(TM), then I find my loose notes somewhere. With my RSF (rocket-ship fantasy) where randomness was an important part of the exploration of new locales something about keeping things in denominators of six works in astronomical mapping.
Earth as 3.3.3 not Tri-Zero
"Zed Three" just couldn't happen, unless Earth was not the center of the universe. I didn't know back in the mid 90s if this was math, but for using 3D6 as D555 while doing your own take on Ken St Andre's Starfaring random sector generation, you get three dimensional areas where the PCs aren't looking down at a map.  I wasn't improving on his rules, I just didn't have access to the rules book I had received as a newsletter back in 1981. As a group we started referring to sectors as beach balls, and the star systems/powers within them as ping-pong balls to baseballs to basketballs. Bring the "6,6,6" results into the same place and that's where the Spacers ('OMG what a great name for delvers in a space-based SFRPG!' I thought) started.

1997- Don't want negative integers? Make the map a sphere.

With about eight different campaigns, the beach balls of the universe started to be filled out. Luckily two, then three, then four, then back down to three, then back up to four players would stick with me throughout these campaigns. So from rocketeers hunting down greys and space pirates, things would change into "Big Space" or "War Star" (Star Trek meets Battlestar Galactica), which as group was referred to "Really Big Space." We'd step back into the pre-Big days, and hang out in the solar system with a lot of cyber-punk elements, which is the "Near Space" stories from o8 'onward. Then I'd go nuts and bolts every now and then with Star Push but usually at conventions. We never had to do a Star Wars, that niche was filled by New Khazan  which was officially for T&T. 

Really Big Space. The really big beach ball that wrapped around six beach balls circa '06.

If you've got War Star as a title, you need navies right?

With a couple of artists helping me with species and ships, things are starting to come together. Just takes three decades to get things lined up.
 

Bursting at the Seams

In the bare and desolate world that is Plague Planet 2020, I sit and gaze upon my monument to human folly in the face of everyone's demise.  Like the oil companies having to spend money to barrel up product because of a lack of demand, my warehousing facilities are overwhelmed because I cannot attend conventions this summer. And with Weird Realms going into the ethereal realms of the Great On-Line, I can't think where to hawk them or give out at tabletop sessions. A pile of fifteen books. 15 books at one corner of our coffee table/ TV viewing banquet hall. Where will the Japanese tourist put their microwave dinners while touring the vast halls of Peryton Publishing International now?

Now I've sold almost five times that amount of product online since May. But OMG the storage crisis that I am enduring.

This OSR V Orc Thing Is Dumb

The picture appeared on my thread with the statement, " This clearly presents a problem...Have your players ever stumbled upon orcish women and children? I have mixed feelings about it. I really don't want orcs to be sympathetic in any way. I want the players to feel like they can slaughter them in the thousands and not feel bad about it." While it's a nice piece of art and a naturalistic style of depicting a green-skinned humanoid who is so evil that toting around twenty pounds of skulls while lugging her kids around, it does evoke some empathy in most viewers. We all dig skulls and like to look at big breasts, right? Luckily she's still lugging along the ankle-biters reminding us how vile ork-kind can be. I mean I can almost hear the hiding wizard conjuring a cloud of poison gas to cleanse the world of this marketplace in some sunny and warm, far off location.

Apologies to the artist of this picture, it wasn't attributed.

I am not going to once again go into how this sort of deeper fantasy has been around since about two minutes after LotR was first released.  The guy promotes what he calls "OD&D" which I assume means "Original D&D" where in the games, and OSR which is where I expect this level of question to come from. I sat through plenty of sessions where DMs wouldn't allow the PCs any sense of heroism let alone any foe to have anything interesting about them besides number-crunching. It's that once again, a self-appointed aficionado of roleplaying with the letters "O","S", and "R" attached to their name is telling the rest of us that there is a problem with other people's imagination.

Look if someone else has a take on fantasy that you're uncomfortable with, I suggest that you do some soul searching and figure out why it makes you uncomfortable. The rest of us have already answered the question what it is that we like about rpg sessions and fantastic literature. Sometimes we're into what being another species is like when humans aren't cleaving them from helmet to cod piece.

A World a Week: Zark

If you mixed Runequest into Gamma World, but were using Tunnels and Trolls rules, you'd have Zark's basis just about right. So like this world is only about seventeen years old. It is a little vision gaming (the kind you do through creative brainstorming) that Pery and I do on long trips to and from NW Arkansas and Cleveland. The intensity of each session varies but the hand notes continue to grow. On this last trip, Red Bat: Playtested has come out and despite getting little moneys, as I released it for free to previous buyers, I got a couple perks. A really nice rating, and the freedom to get started on my 13-Page Worlds.
No seriously, I have scores of pages written, or typed, for many settings up just waiting to be slightly touched up and released onto an unsuspecting world. So barring some superhero descending upon my mad-Jungian psycho magical science laboratory, a lot of the "worlds a week" material is going to be coming out. The quality of the illustrations is by ME, but the price will be worth it. The setting will have something for the casual reader, whom I assume will be an experienced roleplayer, to use in their own games.

So like Zark is a very nonTolkien-Based fantasy setting to say the least. It just might be post-apocacalyptic, but the disasters were so long ago that the science now is just mumbo-jumbo. One can take the PC Kin from T&T 7plus edition and scrap it. Here we have turtle-heads, armadillo-people, and even vulture humanoids.  That's not all, the Og (Og-men, She-Og, and Ogres), are all over the place. Meanwhile the reptilians are moving in from the west, expanding their Empire of Quirk.

My campaign meant for 3rd through 6th level of a couple adventure gaming systems takes place in the areas between Sulta and Pring. An area known as Stur-Ag. The group just may be headed to the shores of the Ippsalayian Seas and maybe beneath them.

The Fifth World: Tawwashu

The map below was drawn in the darkness of a parking lot rather quickly, while I was trying to layout a tales worth of events located in that place after having typed it up. Between the typing and the map drawing, it was one hour and about twenty minutes. An area from a river bed to eroded set of hills almost two hundred yards above the areas where the river flooded in this valley. Some five kilometers from east to west, where about eight hundred humans and dwarves dominated over about 1,400 intelligent ("Speaking") living beings. To the overlords' bemusement the number of beings that show up weekly is growing by the handful almost weekly.   

What I didn't know that that the water creases in the paper that I drawing on would work out to such a wonderful topographical map of the area of game play that I was running.

Little did I know that where the side of my hands would crease the paper as I worked the "sandbox of play"  into such a topographical map without elevation lines.  You see, while I was busy picturing concentric, if irregular, elevation lines from the riverbed outward, on the left, into the rolling to jagged hills from upper left to lower right; the paper's creases would reflect the ridge lines within any certain elevation.
Now my players did not notice but while they were living out the soap opera starting before them, I knew exactly where they stood while things were going on.

Maybe I am too old Army. Maybe I was watching a map fill up in front of me while my role-players phoned it in. The delusion of a guy that knows how to call in artillery and provide security, while the actors before me performed characters discovering themselves in a RPG setting that isn't commonly published by better known games.

The Characters being:
Alanthea (a time traveling Delver from way off Peakvale)
Horex (Ironman Curtis trying out T&T for the first time)
Wunn (Jack's T&T character from Athebes)
Zhree (Shelly's crash test dummy for the campaign)
Tuu (My NPC after Wunn showed up) (1,2,3... get it)

Sometimes you just have to sit back and hate the players, but love the Characters. Follow us into Irkalla.

Getting Out and Meeting People

In the time when everybody can do a quick web search on their smart phone, I still am one of the few that tries to rely on memory when meeting people, even when my smart phone is a pocket away. I don't know why really. One of the reason's why is because of a long history of making major faux pas. I mean dudes, I am in my wet-brained fifties so why stop now?

A tale of the RPG-historic past, the two Daves. I am always mixing up Dave Hargrave and Dave Arneson. Even when I have met and chatted with them both. Sometime back in early 80s, maybe it was '79, I met Hargrave in Texas  and all I could remember was parchment works that I picked up, I just knew it wasn't Chainmail, so I complimented him on his Blackmoor work. His face turned stormy and he would not make eye contact for the rest of the small S-F convention. Pity because I had copies of his Arduin Grimoire and Runes of Doom a bike ride away, that I would've paid the two dollars to get signed when I saw his booth later.

About 25 years later in Indiana the wife was getting her Blackmoor book signed by Dave Arneson, and I told him how I really liked the "Trilogy." After some chit-chat we clarified that I was confusing Hargrave's parchment bound books with the parchment of Blackmoor. Luckily I was familiar with Don't Give Up the Ship and knew of the mythical Strategos. I am glad that I kept my mouth a little shut because until last night, I thought that Strategos had been published by SPI in the 70s.

Despite that tale, and more than a few others, I am glad that I don't go around being all-informed on exactly what the other person that I am talking to is doing or has done. Because when it works there is an honest connection with the semi-celebrity that I am talking to. And when it's bad things don't usually fall to pieces. This is especially after I hear too many names from this or that blogger or YouTuber and their particular relationship with this or that other blogger or YouTuber. Then there are the Twit Wars, that read like nice Mexican soap operas from afar but rarely are worth watching the sausage being made up close.

An example of how this worked out well for me when I had a drink with David Carradine, whom I knew was. I had bought him a scotch the day before because I liked his work in Kill Bill and he was at my side of the bar.  James Bamber(?), whom I did not recognize until Monk told me later, walked up. I suppose he walked over to us because things were so low key he must've thought I was safe if not somebody important. For twenty minutes of my life, I was bored chatting with TV show actors while my friends were just amazed half a restaurant away.
Truth be told, had I known I wonder if I had the balls to propose producing a T&T movie with them as leads. I mean I've had a script sitting in some manila folder in the work office since '99. I mean Carradine as the wizard Khazan and Bamber as my square-jawed protagonist? That would've been one heck of a Sci-Fi Channel (pre-Sy-Fy days) Saturday night movie for sure. I am sure it would've happened. As always, I just hadn't read everybody's social profile while sipping scotch and talking about the heat.

Maybe I should try harder? Nah. Sounds like work and this is supposed to be fun.

Luxxe (AWaW: 5th World)

A BRAND NEW ACRONYM So like follow-up A World a Week posts are now AWaW. That alone is worth its own blog article. Unfortunately this posting is going to be cluttered up with stuff about the Fifth World campaign I happen to typing up and stringing together. Sorry to be such a boor.

So The Lands of Luxxe
The city-state of Sevven is actually the focus of where the PCs will be starting out, but this regions placement on the map and where I tend to take pictures from while at my work desk, has made it the prominently noticed feature on the drawing. At the same time, Salway's hogboglins figure are apart of the area's dominating cultures, so Luxxe it is

 " The Oldest City of the Fifth World. This is where the civilization began according to the inscriptions around its sixteen city gates. It is also the largest of city-states of Beast Men that still remain on the surface of the planet.

Luxxe came together when the economic benefits of slavery versus just eating the captives started to take hold among progressives...Then during the Splash things changed. While these lands were spared everyone drowning, the world around them would never be the same."

The city-state is ruled by a Council of Elders. These are usually the leaders of the city's different factions that tend fall along species lines and their affinity to one another. 

" ... The Lizard Queen

This crocodile-headed woman is the leader of the Hissers, a coalition of reptilian humanoids that make up over half of the population of lands of the city-state when lumped together...

Armed Contingents:

Amphibian Corps- The main manpower and attack troops of the Luxxe Navy. They are often led by the Lizard Queen in major battle.

Man Bear-Pig

Mannu-Barpigg is from the hogboglins of the swampy lands of Wuldbe to the west of Luxxe. He is the city-boy of these clans as well as the leader of many of the pig-faced humanoids that dwell in the city...

Armed Contingents:

The Rooters- Currently led by General One-Eye Two-Tusks, this is one of the major gangs of the city-state as well as the main enforcers of the Slavers Guild.

The Gnome King

A large footed Hob that is a tenth level Wizard and the accepted chairman of the Gnomes’ Consortium. “Gnomes” is the term for shorter humanoids in Luxxe. This commonly means goblins, hobs, piltdowners, and many others, sometimes including the ratlings and frog folk...For half a century, the Hob has been able to keep profits growing and therefore staying in charge.

Armed Contingents:

Hoard Hordes-The cutest band of little cut-throats ever.

First Wizard of the Wizard’s Guild Lume-Incarnate

The mortal avatar of the Wizard-God Lume. He is a capable Wizard as well, being eleventh level and all. He is the head of the city-state's Wizards Guild. He is often taken to be the king of humans in the lands of Luxxe...

Armed Contingents:

Tower Guardians- These are very much feared soldiers throughout Luxxe. More than a few of the organizations movers and shakers are horned-helmeted Orcs. Those that aren’t orcs are sadists or masochists that really like a lot of discipline.

K-Earth, The Rebel Wizard

Being born...before the Splash, this fourteenth level Wizard is immortal has a storied past. He sought to abolish slavery. The other rulers of his homelands thought that he has gone too far and declared him “the Rebel.”

Armed Contingents:

Swampers- Folks that speak proper Luxxe but do not like slavery. Often persecuted so they stick to more isolated parts of the lands.

And then there are neighboring territories of Lake Glittertop, the Dawn Swamps, and the area of Wuldbe. I'll go into them a later.

A World A Week: Fifth World, The Delta

So it was a really slow night at work last night. So slow I was chatting up people on my ancient flip phone looking to chat. Of course, Monk, a fellow night-shifter was there. So while talking about things, he found a convention that he wanted to attend as Adventure Gaming bruders. Rich coming from him as he always is "done with gaming" every couple of years, but hey I appreciate the inconsistency as I really like gaming with him. Of course where he wants to go is noted for its "Old School"-ness. I was a bit blank on any response. Monk then said, "We could run TnT which is old school I hear."
So after about fifteen more minutes of discussion, I am running T&T again, but only 7th edition and its as bronze-age as well as gonzo as I want it. Here's my fifth T&T start-up world and about twelfth  campaign source in forty years.

The Three River Delta

Good convention FRPG games come from a mixture of GM-timing, nifty idea (usually meaning title), and thought-out but understated world. Welcome to the last part of that equation, The Fifth World. This world, sometimes called "Sevven," is the fifth out of nine worlds where the lords of light and masters of chaos duke things out.  The city-states of Luxxe and Sevven have been antagonizing each other for about seven hundred years now. A third city-state, Buggle, has arisen in just the last couple of centuries, where the ant-heads have developed a beachhead on the above ground world.

There is a whole lot going on here because I have more than a few notes from many, many years of working on this or that about this RPG setting. If I am going to be running Our Game again, I might as well get it all out there, because I suspect there will be storms and pratfalls ahead so let's make it worth my time. By the way did I ever mention that I like to adventure while I game? Stomp the ticks out of your boots already.

So let's talk indigenous sorts.

Thanx to Jon Salway for getting me a little more in-depth than I usually do. People that have known me for a while will recognize various "critter-folk" while most OSR folks that are on about which gay orcs that they would date or marry will be rather shocked (SHOCKED) to say the least.

Orcs- Humans in the service of Orcus, the Ugly. Early on they decide that they are barbarians and start wearing horned helmets. They work their way up through the ranks of deplorable folks. With enough horrible things done, they get taken to a temple of Orcus and get possessed by a demon. Wallah, thank the PC for the service, pity no one cares.

Goblins and Hobgoblins- "Orks" originally spawned by Orcus when he captured elves and mutated them into these beings. Goblins are short and like to wear spiked-helmets while hobgoblins like to wear NAZI uniforms. They are not fated to be evil, but can really relate to evil ways of doing things. Many overcome their backgrounds and get Real OSR aficionados all worked up with their profile pictures at dating sites in the ethersphere.

The Og- Neanderthals. The males can't speak beyond grunts and whimpers and are called "Og-men." They are noted for their amazing strength. The females can speak and craft magic and are called "She-og". It should be noted that the She-og often speak about the Og-men as if they aren't in the same room when they're standing right there.

Umanity- A mixture of humans and other species that try to work towards being humane. They appreciate the benefits of understanding each other languages almost as much as they appreciate math with its ability to quantify how much grain is available before people start starving.  They also have developed some of the best stuff ever like cotton, fishing nets, metal tools and weapons, plus the sail and wheel. They write a lot of stuff down in languages that other people around them can understand. It is said that because of this "literacy" the Wizards Guild cryptic communications comes easier to them than most.

The Beast Lords- People of their time, this collection of hybrid species helped shaped the cosmos into what it is today. Oddly enough, they are not all that appreciative of change.

The Ogrish- The ogres and the piltdowners. Ogres are male Og that not only speak and have psychic powers, they tend to be giants. No one with og blood within them can refuse an Ogre that is taller than themselves.
Piltdowners are goblin-sized ogres that are as strong as humans or hobgoblins twice their size. 

After the Splash
This is the Fifth World. When the Great Flow separated the cosmos, the struggle between between Light and Chaos formed the Nine Worlds.

The city-state of Luxxe is the oldest city in the world. It is here where the Beast Lords consolidated their holdings when the rest of the world around them changed. They gathered their boats and created navies that would block the cities of the lands when they choose to try venturing out into seas. It is from the vast Wuldbe swamps around them that the Council of Luxxe enslaves its minions.

Sevven a former trading post for Luxxe, has been its own capital for almost 700 hundred years now. Its three cities, Lagash, Girsu, and Nina, have proved themselves to be the new power of the world. Here Unmanity thrives against the forces of regression. Still its challenges are no where near defeated.

Not understanding the struggles of yore, the ant-heads of the Hives, came onto the surface lands from below. There they founded Buggle. Made up of many species, like Sevven, but its insect-like overlords are more than willing to eat its denizens to expand its profitable territories.