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.