Like Being Read To From Dictionaries

It's time to start writing your 4e retroclones!

2012-01-09T09:31:00.001-07:00

My prediction, regarding the post D&D IV world, is that all of that radically different stuff (you know, the things that made it "not D&D anymore") will be shed for 5e, resulting in a second wave of reactionary malcontents (like us), the 4e-gnards. Or whatever.

Anyway, now that it's Officially Too Late, I'll mention an idea I had about why 4e was so different from D&D. It's video games, obviously. Most of them take their character advancement rules from D&D--if everybody had spent millions of hours playing Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy, like I did, then D&D itself is not interesting anymore, so if it's to be a brand in its own right it needs to be something besides that common DNA that makes up the bulk of video games.

Of course, D&D is much more than moving around the pieces of your character's abilities skill and powers, much more than inventory management, but the all-important exploration, discovery and improvisation aren't as visible looking at the rules. Ironically, I think 4e is lacking in those elements because of all the playing time taken up by the tactical miniatures game at its center.

Whatever your feelings about D&D V, every one of you Blognards should sign up for the mailing list for the open playtest and do what you can to make The New Game a retroclone too!

Welcome to the Year of the d12

2012-01-04T11:11:00.000-07:00

(So it begins: With my first post of the year I announce my first game purchase of 20d12 is a used copy of T1 The Village of Hommlet from Amazon. $6.89.)

I don't have a $3 or $4 Wednesday entry for today, but I do have opinions on two gaming related products. First Ralph Bakshi's Wizards. Which, besides being among the inspirations for Gamma World had an RPG (in think) based on it:

My review of the movie, in short: P.U.

I think this movie stinks from top to bottom. It doesn't work on any level: its simplistic theme amounts to the not-exactly-novel idea that Nazis are bad; it's ugly, of course, but that is Bakshi's style, and there are cartoon nipples on the screen at all times, but even this fails as titillation (pardon the pun) because the movie doesn't, apart from a few coy suggestions, try to do anything sexy with the near-nudity other than flatly display it.

I haven't liked anything I've seen by Bakshi (as a kid I thought his Lord of the Rings was unwatchable, though this essay by Some King's Kent did give me motivation to reconsider it) but this trailer, for another movie I should really have watched by now, does look appealing:

And I have to respect his sentiments as he expressed them at the end of the A.V. Club I linked to above:

"There's no reality to Hollywood. The fees they pay directors are obnoxious, the money they spend on movies could feed entire starving African... I mean, fuck 'em. I made a few bucks and got out. I don't want to spend the rest of my life with those people. They're disgusting people, and you can quote me on that. There's a lot of great talent there, but it's no place I wanted to spend much time. I'd rather spend time with Rembrandt and Goya at home. They're better company than those schmucks who never read Lord Of The Rings."

The second gaming opinion of today is about the GameScience 5-piece Zocchi Pack I bought from Gamestation via Amazon. Remember in my last post when I said I totally didn't have to buy these funky dice . . . The smallest print on the back of the package warns "A mold-point blemish is to be expected on each die as a result of the casting process." And they ain't kidding. One face on the d24 had a lump on it that would seriously affect the die's rollability, which is kind of ironic for a dice company that subtitles itself Precision Gaming Dice and crows endlessly about the "true-ness" of their (rather unattractive and expensive) dice. They do advise you of the mold-point blemishes where you can read it before purchase (I don't believe the message was included in the Amazon listing, however), so that's fair play, but what about the lines that blemish that faces of all the dice? I don't know what causes them or what they're called, but I know I've never seen them on any other dice in 25 years of fiddling with dice on a regular basis. Granted, it's been mostly the same dice during that time, but it was still an unwelcome surprise. Again, I could easily have seen the blemishes before purchase if I had bought them from a store, so that will be my lesson for today: SUPPORT YOUR FRIENDLY LOCAL GAME STORE.

d24 Reasons You're Destitute at Level 0

2011-12-29T09:36:00.002-07:00

You know, I was very excited about the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game (uh, which was news back in the Summah) because it claimed to be a return to pulp roots, and because Joseph Goodman's posts about reading Appendix N were inspirational. (I hope inspiration keeps--I still haven't cracked the spine on any of those books I bought during my transport of 'inspiration' except The Dying Earth.)

I'm less excited now that I've, finally, with all deliberate speed, read some of the public beta rules. My impression so far is that it's D&D 3e with a bunch of clunky funk on top. I don't like, in an Olde Schoole leaning product, the Will/Fort/Reflex save system (remind me to post about saving throws, or direct me to someone who has abstracted the bonuses by class in OD&D and Holmes and such). And I don't like ascending AC--don't you know Delta's Target 20 system is objectively the best? And I don't like that it uses the Zocchi Funky Dice--even though I like the idea of polyhedral funk, I don't want to have to buy them. Which I don't have to do, but you know I'm going to, right?

But I like the art a lot, the funky spells business looks neat (and a giant headache), and the Level 0 funnel is worth a try.

All of which leads me to today's table. When your DCC RPG characters start at level 0, they have an occupation but at the same time no possessions. Maybe that's how it was in the Fake Middle Ages, but it seemed odd to me that one would be employed but own nothing, so I jotted down this table. I made it d24 because I was feeling the funk, but now that seems self-contradictory. Oh well.

d24 Reasons You're Destitute at Level 0

1) Cursed (witch, sorcerer, prophecy, ill-starred?)
2) Hornswoggled & Scammed (maybe it was too shameful to report to the Law)
3) Runaway (reset starting age to adolescent)
4) On the Lam (state the nature of your crime __________)
5) Shunned & Ostracised (race, color, creed, plague?)
6) Run Outta Town for Dalliances (is the mayor's daughter compromised?)
7) Employer Eaten (wolves, snakes, spiders, teenage hyenas?)
8) Taxed Outta Hearth & Home (swear you're paid up?)
9) Robbers, Highwaymen or Burglars
10) House Burned Down (did you lose family too?)
11) Prolonged Illness (feeling much better now?)
12) Caught Being a Cheat (who'd you rip off?)
13) Slander & Rumors (how far does your Bad Reputation stretch?)
14) Horse or Ox Went Lame (did you shoot it? This ain't the Wild West!)
15) Bad Investment (like Mark Twain and the Paige Compositor)
16) Foolish Generosity (get some, give it away--at least you have good friends, right?)
17) Drank It All Up & Pissed It Away (I'll bet you've got some good enemies)
18) Spendthrift (you just bought shit, but where did it go? Probably ate it.)
19) Never Had Nuthin' To Begin With
20) Mine or Well Ran Dry (both might cause a village to disappear)
21) Injured on the Job (and no TV commercials telling you how to get money for it.)
22) Got on the Boss's Bad Side (or the Boss's Spouse's)
23) Crops Failed or Supplier Vanished (might be the same as #20)
24) Your Trade Is Banned By The Goddam Gubmint

$3 Wednesday: The Sanctuary Ruin

2011-12-28T10:57:00.000-07:00

The Sanctuary Ruin, the excellent first module from Ludibrium Games, isn't exactly new: Grognardia reviewed it in October of 2010 and Tenkar's Tavern reviewed its sequel, Ironwood Gorge, in February of this year (there are also video reviews on Youtube, but I didn't watch those), but it is good enough for me to spend some time with it now. Sadly, it seems that Ludibrium Games has been dark since the beginning of the year and only those two modules from the Blackmarch series and one more separate 1st-level adventure, Kingmaker, have been produced. I would like to see more work from Eric Jones, as The Sanctuary Ruin is first-rate.

It's presentation makes it a joy to read--it looks as good as any OSR release I've seen (I haven't seen this year's two big ones from Jim Raggi yet) and better than many. My impression is probably helped by the simple layout and the attractive illustrations--and the absence of the embarrassing pieces that every OSR release seems to have at least one of.

As for the content, I do have to agree with Grognardia's assessment that "Unfortunately, what Eric Jones got right is something lots of other people have gotten right repeatedly since the dawn of the hobby" but I want to add that The Sanctuary Ruin makes up for its rather dull familiarity by being very well designed. The encounters are interconnected in simple ways that I imagine would greatly aid referees who are using it for those games when they haven't got time to write their own adventures. Many in the blognardosphere say (and prove it by publishing their own!) that they can write their own adventures and don't need to buy them, but there are plenty of other points of view: there's no shame in admitting that I'm not sure I could write an adventure as good as The Sanctuary Ruin, and there's no reason to assume that every referee would prefer to write their won adventures. I mean, we all buy adventures right?, and many of us love them.

I'm a recent convert to the Old Ways, in case you're just joining us: I haven't refereed or played The Keep on the Borderlands or The Village of Hommlet, and I really only started playing D&D for reals in the 3e era, so my perspective is much different from the Old Guard.

To recap, I think The Sanctuary Ruin is very well done, if too familiar, and I'll consider running it the next time I want to start a new campaign in OSRIC or Labyrinth Lord or LotFP or even D&D. I want to buy Ironwood Gorge and Kingmaker (which might be the subject of the next $3 Wednesday, given its price) as well, and anything else Eric Jones should publish in the future. Maybe I should send him an e-mail.

I should also mention that I found The Sanctuary Ruin on the sidebar of Gothridge Manor (um, I had already bought it, it turns out, but never read it. That's about par for the course.) I think his "Gaming Purchases" list is a great resource--especially, for someone looking or $3 or $4 dollar modules to review--and I want to make one of my own for 2012, if I can figure out how to do it. Thank you, Tim!

Three-or-Four Dollar Wednesdays!

2011-12-21T10:09:00.002-07:00

Do you have a comic book habit? Well, you should. New comics are delivered to a shop near you (if you're lucky to live in one of those quanit bourroughs that still hosts those brick-and-mortar relics of the Age of Handicraft), so go there today and buy something.

Meanwhile, I propose to seek out one new OSR product in the, perhaps rather narrow, $3-$4 price range, the price for one new 20-page comic floppy, every week and snatch that sucker up. There's a slim change I'll even review it, though it seems odd to review an adventure without running it, even if that is de rigueur* round these parts.

Up this week is The Blasphemous Brewery of Pilz by Dylan Hartwell, the Digital Orc ($2.99 at RPGNow). It's been reviewed already by How To Succeed in RPGs or Die Trying, (who was involved in the module's production) Tenkar's Tavern (where I learned about it) and B/X Blackrazor (which I learned after buying it--good thing JB gives a positive review, I was worried for a second that this was a whole nother Sacrosanct Games situation.) Also, JB's review is nearly as long as the module.

Here's what I think of it: While the premise of the Blasphemous Brewery is hard to believe, and the illustrations give the module a homemade appearance, the game material itself is good enough that I consider my $2.99 well spent. It details, in brief, two-or-three-sentence entries the rooms of three small dungeon locations, which are pretty standard fare but work together to flesh out a mini-setting, aided by some details of nefarious elves, several NPCs with useful personality descriptions, and a couple of cool new monsters (I particularly the magical spiders--they even look really cool in Hartwell's illustration). Oh, and a very deadly artifact. I think it's a pretty good adventure and I might consider adapting it for Gamma World 7e (that's the D&D IV version, yeah) becaus ethat would also be blasphemous. My review isn't much, so be sure to read the three I mentioned above, and get to know the Digital Orc blog, which seems to have many useful links to OSR tools that I wasn't aware of.

*Oh, de rigueur means 'strictly required by etiqutte'. I thought it meant 'customary'. Pretend I wrote 'customary' up there. Have I ever mentioned that I love dictionaries?

Remember when Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were in Wonder Woman?

2011-12-20T10:47:00.000-07:00

In Issue #202 of the first Wonder Woman series (a new series started at #1 in '87, I guess):

(image taken from mycomicshop.com--go there and buy stuff)

I hate to admit it, but I haven't read any Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, except two aborted attempts to read The Snow Women. I know there's some kind of difference between the gods in Lankhmar and the gods of Lankhmar, but that's the extent of my knowledge. Therefore, I will begin my reading of this seminal contribution to pulp fantasy and the D&D hobby with this no doubt exemplary entry in the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser canon: a Wonder Woman comic from her Dig This Feminist Kung-Fu '70s period.

Don't forget to buy Weird Adventures today

2011-12-16T12:22:00.003-07:00

Hat tip to Chis Sims via Twitter for bringing this to my attention--which is sure a weird way for me to find out about a product from From The Sorcerer's Skull. Or maybe not--I read Chris Sims's Twitter all the time.

Anyway, Weird Adventrues by Trey Causey. Buy it. I did.

Here's the product desription from Drive Thru RPG (which is also the immediate source of the above image):

Weird Adventures is a setting where traditional rpg fantasy meets the Pulp era. It's a world where hobogoblins hop trains, gargoyles nest on art deco skyscrapers, and celebrity sorcerers hawk cigarettes on the radio.

Doesn't that just sound swell?

2011: the Best Of

2011-12-09T10:11:00.001-07:00

Twenty-Eleven wasn't just the year when I stopped blogging, it was also the year during which I consumed some pop culture in several media. What was the best?

Oh, and it looks like few of these things actually came out in 2011. What can I say, I'm slow.

Best RPG product: Anomalous Subsurface Environment. It's the dungeon I wanted to write.

Best Videogame: Skyrim, big surprise.

Best Movie: How to Train Your Dragon (I submit that this is the best D&D movie ever.) I also liked Bridesmaids a great deal, if you must have somethign from this year.

Best Wedding: Me and K.

Best Book: All Clear by Connie Willis (it's the second half of the story started in Blackout, and it probably came out in 2010). It gives more of sense of beingn transported to the past than Stephen King's otherwise very engaging 11/22/63 (which I'm 70% through).

Best Comic Book: Wonder Woman #1 by Azzarello and Chiang or maybe it should be Habibi by Craig Thompson, if it wasn't so detatched from reality.

Best Board Game: 7 Wonders . . . it's fantastic, if not from 2011. I bought a few games that came out this year, like Sun of York and Sekigahara (though those might be reprints.) I'll have to let you know how I like them . . .

And since the only value of a list like this is that it might draw your attention to something you missed, I hope that you'll share your own list, maybe even in the comments below, but on your won blog is good too.

I hope to be here more often in 2012--hey, I may even start up an Old School campaign again!

And there's no Best Music category because I don't really listen to new music. What can I say, I think I'm old. Oh wait, I'm really digging the new Megadeth:

Star Trek: Transporter Network Installation and Repair

2011-10-04T11:45:00.002-06:00

I just noticed that the transporter has a number of implications that the various series don't focus on even though it seems they would be rather conspicuous in their effects on Federation culture.

First, even given a presumably limited range, the transporter implies that instant teleportation--which I dimly recall being at the top of GURPS Ultra-Tech tech levels--is already present in the Kirk era, but apparently no one has noticed. What I mean is, with a network of transporter relays, ships are probably unnecessary for travel between settled locations of Federation space. So, that's the first seed of my new campaign setting: A team of transporter relay installers, out of the frontier. They would need a ship, but probably not a fancy one. Tradesmen in space!

Second, I don't have episode citations, but there's one in The Original Series in which a person's transporter-code self is stored in a belt for later retrieval, and one early in The Next Generation in which Picard is restored from an archive copy of his transporter-code self. This means both that immortality has been achieved and personal identity, at least in terms of being a single enitity, is now outmoded. That is, there doesn't seem to be any obstacle to making infinite copies of yourself forever. So, Starfleet officers should probably be issued Immortality Belts with the ability to 'beam out' copies of themselves in the event of death--and away teams should probably just be made of copies (avatars, even) of the ablest bodies for the mission at hand.

Third, this is not related to transporters, but the Doctor of Voyager and his emitter raise the possibility of rouge holograms, so: Haunted Hulks. I'm sure the galaxy is just filled to the gills with space stations overrun with horrid fan-fictiony holograms endlessly murdering teeming copies of Wesley Crusher's loin-clout-clad barbarian-self as he tries to rescue a gender-swapped Picard-in-distress from the Traveler-beast.

So, what do all of you know about these ideas appearing in the various series--and novels, comics, etc.?

Here's what's inspiring me lately [Beware of Swears]:

2011-07-08T11:42:00.002-06:00

From a piece by Abhay Khosla on Savage Critics:

Those first six pages of KIRBY GENESIS are a laundry list of things I am most snide about in Big Two comics right now. Until… until the Kirby characters show up. Then, all that shit stops, and the comic turns into a blast. Because it’s a COMIC BOOK again. Suddenly, there’s no time for Jay Baruschel and his shitty life because some lady is screaming out “You’re in the presence of a Galaxy Green Apprehension Squad.” Yay! And the lady from the Galaxy Green Apprehension Squad doesn’t look like Pam Grier– she looks like a fucking comic book character instead! Yay! No more attempts at pretending to be hip and young just by doing nothing else but imitating SCOTT PILGRIM. Yay! There are still caption boxes but now they have things like “An unknown codex, found in a viking treasure hoard on the Orkney Islands in 1914” in them. Proper comic book bullshit! Yay! Old comics values save us from shitty modern comic storytelling! Yay!!!

It's not the polemic against modern comics that appeals to me--lord knows I read plenty of Thoroughly Modern superhero comics--but rather the idea of "proper comic book bullshit."

That's what I strive for in my creations, I think--it's why I love Angel being turned into a Muppet (and making that a not-so-rare curse in my D&D games), and Robert Kirkman's excellent new all-ages comic Super Dinosaur, and superheroes that transform my saying a magic word and being struck by lightning (that's both the Captain Marvel and He-Man families at the top of the list).

And it's why I'm tickled by my new idea for The Vanisher, a ray that makes you SMALLER THAN TIME. The Vanisher is believed to have caused the disappearance of the Diamond Amateurs, a band of hapless adventurers. The band was lost to history but they did not vanish; rather, they were shrunk at a metaphysical level. The Vansher happens to be located near the 'hulk' of an earwiggle spacecraft, the generation ships of the Virusmen, and the Diamonds have been there for centuries, SMALLER THAN TIME, and thus undinted by its ravages, fighting the good fight against the Virus Menace. Or something.

Did You Ever Know That You're My She-Ro?

2011-05-18T11:01:00.000-06:00

She-Ra's name never made any sense to me--sure, there's the She to correspond to He-Man, but how does Ra correspond to Man?

There's no connection to the Egyptian god or the Reiner Knizia game named after him which was published long after She-Ra was produced so why even bring it up?

I suppose it has been obvious to most the whole but I only figured out just now that it's She-Ro as in Hero, but with a feminine (in Spanish anyway) ending.

But let's not discount the influence on She-Ra's theme (are you singing She-Ra! She-Ra! right now?) of this Allen Toussaint song, as recorded by Betty Wright:

If you like it, do seek out Toussaint's performance of it at the 1976 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, say on this CD.

d30 Magical Mishaps

2011-04-08T09:07:00.003-06:00

These are the thirty Officially Recognized Classes of Magical Mishaps for which students at the Academy of the Imperial Science (of Bonham, the Three-Lobed City and Seat of State of the Republic of Aalor) are trained in their Emergency Response courses.

I thought I might note how each of these mishaps would affect EVERY SINGLE OD&D SPELL but after copying out the 1st-level spells from Delta's Book of Spells I decided I'll just play Risus. So, the rule is whenever you use a sorcery cliché (or some such) and the dice come up 13 you have to take a mishap roll. There will less chance of mishaps if the 13 result is a success.

This table probably requires more referee interpretation than it should. (That's weasel-talk for Some of these result just don't make any sense.) I wrote it that way just so it would be a list of Latinate nouns-derived from-verbs. Are there eggs involved? Happy Easter!

d30 Magical Mishaps

Reversal
Inversion
Diffusion
Dispersal
Dilution
Sublimation
Diversion
Contusion
Expansion
Contraction
Explosion
Expulsion
Efflorescence
Mitosis
Fission
Recursion
Amalgamation
Ignition
Conjugation
Truncation
Lactation
Ovation
Absorption
Replication
Deferral
Extension
Inundation
Adumbration
Coronation
Bifurcation (roll twice more ignoring 30's (or not--see Recursion (#16) above))

Then you'll want to see who or what to apply the effect to:

Target

Caster
Intended Target
Other Target (among the people and/or monsters nearby)
Spell in Caster's Mind
Spell in Caster's Spellbook
Spell not in caster's mind
Original spell itself
The general area

(So I guess I'm playing Risus with D&D-type spellcasting. Yes, I believe that's correct.)

d30 Potion Containers Besides a 1 oz. Flask

2011-03-17T11:50:00.002-06:00

You know, I always picture a flat-bottomed flask, or a round bottom flask, of more like 12 oz. Or 16, if this orange juice bottle beside me is to be believed.

d30 Potion Containers Besides a 1 oz. Flask
1) Intravenous drip bag (but you can bust it open and drink it)
2) Snortable powder (go ahead and extrapolate to all the recreational drugs here)
3) Hypo-spray
4) The Old Fart's Clever Air-Bulb Invention (or Pepe Le Pew atomizer)
5) Candy (say, Pop Rocks--or chewing gum)
6) Pharmaceutical pill capsule or little paper pouch of grains
7) An ingenious replica of a dove's egg
8) Pop-top aluminum can
9) Bladder or other organ sac
10) Lick-and-stick tattoo
11) Eye drops, ear drops or inhaler
12) Wax cylinder (to drink) or scented candle (to burn)
13) Laser pointer to the eye
14) Whole body of a tiny bird (or mouse)
15) Pickle or other queer fruit
16) Ear funnel (for warm oil )
17) The Very Eucharistic Host of the Body of Mazirian the Magician
18) Subcutaneous microchip
19) Skin (or face) cream
20) Hair tonic
21) Lipstick (I hear ladies use lip gloss or something nowadays)
22) Dissolving square of film (on the tongue, or one of those fortune-telling fish)
23) Just stuff a bee in your ear
24) A tiny tornado in a glass cube that spins in your palm (that's from Bravestarr, ep. 26)
25) Blow smoke in a soap bubble and then eat it
26) Spice flakes (take with food)
27) Magical cheese
28) Spores of a puffball fungus
29) Muscular pink earsmoke released by the breaking of a chicken bone
30) Deep whiff of a nosegay

And, the inevitable: a suppository. I do apologize.

Etymonday: Crannogs and Conlangers

2011-03-14T11:03:00.000-06:00

First, let me say Hail and Welcome to my new Thralls! I hope I can occasionally write something of some interest to you.

A now, a flash from the past:

(source) (I hated this game so much, but you know I'm going to buy it again.)

Re-reading A Game of Thrones I encountered this word 'crannog' which I guess I never looked up last time, because I didn't have any idea what it meant. (Here's the American Heritage version, via Wordnik: An ancient Irish dwelling or fort built on an artificial island in a lake or marsh.) So, no surprise it's an Irish Gaelic word, a welcome addition to the small family of Gaelic words in English: crag, leprechaun, shamrock, whiskey, bog, gob, brogue, cairn, loch, phoney, smithereens, and apparently, spunk. Go here and here for more.

While perusing the wikilands for infos about the HBO Game of Thrones production, my wife learned that a Dothraki language has been created. This, along with the event with the creators of Klingon and Na'vi we went to down to the college, prompts me to share with you all something that likely comes as no surprise: I have tried my hand at making up languages.

First, it was some Elven, back in '89. Inspired by The Lord of the Rings, yes, but also the Elven words in the Dragonlance Chronicles. I remember one from those books, shalafi, but all I remember from my own is the possessive suffix, -ki. All my notes from those days are long gone, he said through a sniffle.

In the Nine-Tays I wanted to write a noble-savage type books about orcs--I wanted to call it "soft-science fiction" because it would be all anthropological. Yeah, I'm kind of embarrassed for me too. Call it confessional time. Anyway, the lead was named Gorak Nannak-klu, the nannak-klu being the Orcish for "demon-heart" and the Gorak just sounding cool, despite being a real-world name. Google wasn't a thing back then. As for the language I origianlly wanted it to have creole prototype grammar (for the minimum work for me) but I also wanted it to have infixing, so then I gave up.

Not that I think that's very interesting. What I am interested in is YOUR made up languages. What languages have you made up? How long before you realized it was a huge Tolkien-esque diversion from anything useful in playing the game it was probably intended for? How deep are you in conlang? What do you know about the Language Creation Society? I promise not to ignore your comments this time!

Hot Elf Dude Welcomes You To The OSR

2011-03-10T08:46:00.002-07:00

(Pic from: http://www.dreamdollsgallery.com/roberttonner/2010/lordoftherings.htm)

For an explanation of what's going on with this post, try here at the Underdark Gazette.

Meanwhile, a d30 Table:

d30 Unnatural Character Origins

I'm from a planet where everyone has my super-power
I'm from Middle America in the '80s
I used to be a turtle
I'm you, but from the future
I'm your father, but from Earth 11 where all the genders are reversed
I feel asleep a thousand years ago
My home planet exploded
I was born of the love of a moonbeam for a dewdrop
I woke up in a vat of goo
I started life as a gray cube found on a dusty shelf
My parallel universe collapsed with this one but somehow I'm still here
I was raised by snakes
I'm evolved from a simian species from the literature of your choice
I'm evolved from an insectoid species from the comic book of your choice
This is actually just my larval form
This isn't my body and I want my body back
This isn't my body and its owner wants it back
I'm a super-intelligent gorilla brain--I just took this body because I liked it
I'll be a god again once I find my trusty whatsit
My father is the Sky God and he will acknowledge me just as soon as he sees how great I am
I'm a stone robot
I change shape every 28 days, but it's not really my call
I'm a freakishly intelligent squirrel
I'm a figure from an enchanted painting
I'm a snow wife
I'm a mermaid who sprouted legs (I might have a debt with the Octopus Lady)
I used to be a toy
I haven't always been a toy
I may look like an elf but I'm a flower quickened by starseed
In my village we all breed like Mogwais so it's hard to tell us apart

A Costumery Etymonday

2011-02-07T09:34:00.000-07:00

Before we begin, an aside: I have determined (based solely on my rigorously anecdotal evidence) that Proust, his novel I mean, is lengthy and absorbing enough for one to become addicted to it--but if that happened to me--and I'm not saying it did--would that be a bad thing? Speaking of addiction, I brought you here today to talk about what I only too late realize is a TV trope: the mad scientist. We were watching The Magnetic Telescope episode of the Fleischer Superman series (1942) wherein the villain is this cat: And The Lady posed a great question: See how he's dressed? That's how Mad Scientists dress, of course, like chefs without the floofy hat--just look at Dr. Horrible. (source) But why do they dress that way, and how long have they been doing it? TV Tropes mentions Dr. Frankenstein and Rotwang as early representative of the type. Rotwang is from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, a thing well in the region of my ignorance, but look at this photo gallery here, he dosn't seem to wear the now-traditional costume, but he's not far off: So Rotwang is 1927. Dr. Frankenstein is of course much earlier, in 1818, still pretty much the 18th century so there's no way he was described as dressing that way--but Frankenstein, apart from the monster's Universal Monster ubiquity, is well in the well of my ignorance as well. And only now I make the connection that wizards are the medieval version of Mad Scientists, and Mad Scientists are the electrical age version of wizards. Anyone have a page citation for the R.E. Howard story where a sorcerer refers to what he does as science? Can anyone antedate the white-coated Mad Scientist costume from 1942 (the date of the above Fleischer Superman)?

Move over, Mind Flayers, there's a new cosmic horror in town (from 60 years ago)

2010-12-27T16:39:00.000-07:00

THE BRAIN BATS OF VENUS (!)

I learned about this from the new book The Horror The Horror (which, in my copy at least, seems to have a 3-D verso. and by my copy I mean the one purchased by Boise Public Library and awaiting processing on my desk.)

But you can read the whole story here.

Never in my life have I seen anything so awesome as this:

2010-12-23T13:45:00.000-07:00

Moby Dick and the Mighty Mightor

Alex Toth is now the object of my worship. Kids in the '60s had all the raddest stuff. When oh when can I buy Mighty Mightor, The Herculoids and Shazzan on DVD?

Tennyson: "The Kraken"

2010-12-22T12:36:00.001-07:00

(Picture not related at all)

Well, I'll be danged--this ain't half bad:

The Kraken
~Tennyson

Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

Remind you of anyone?

Some commentary (on the Tennyson poem, not HPL) here.

source: Golden Age Comic Book Stories, as usual

Tuesday Reviewsday: What He Said

2010-12-21T11:50:00.000-07:00

Here's a review that contains pretty much everything I wanted to say in my never-written-review of Sacrosanct Games's "product."

http://gamingallover.blogspot.com/2010/12/what-it-is-something-unholy-stirs.html

Here's the gist of Higgipedia's review, in case it's just too much trouble to click through to Gaming All Over the Place:

This is seriously the most poorly written and edited RPG product I have ever paid money for. Do not go anywhere near Something Unholy Stirs.

Rest In Peace, Captain Beefheart

2010-12-17T16:54:00.000-07:00

http://www.avclub.com/articles/rip-captain-beefheart,49232/

"Tonight there'll be ice cream. Ice Cream for Crow."

Phreaky Friday

2010-12-17T10:43:00.000-07:00

Don't miss the unearthly creepines of this (large) collection of John Bauer fairy-tale images at Golden Age Comic Book Stories:

Look, it's called 'When Mother Troll Took In the King's Washing'!

(http://goldenagecomicbookstories.blogspot.com/2010/12/john-bauer-1882-1918.html)

You can totally buy the original book here.

Late on Etymonday: The Canting Crew

2010-12-13T16:43:00.000-07:00

My favorite lexicographer, Erin McKean writes in the Boston Globe about a reprint of a slang dictionary from 1699. Look in the title of the original for "Canting Crew."

Go directly to the web-version of the book here at archive.org.

Get a copy of Gary Gygax's book The Canting Crew at Amazon or Noble Knight Games.

And here's something called The Rhymes of the Canting Crew from around 1536.

Beholder Tadpoles

2010-12-10T11:20:00.000-07:00

You know what I think? I think beholders have a tadpole stage in which they float around, wriggling tails downward, taking in the world around with their one combination eye-mouth.

I'm pretty sure they metamorphose by sweet-talking intelligent thralls (abetted, naturally by their burgeoning charm person rays) into building them secure nests.

Ahh, there's a similar idea already in the canon--it didn't know mind-flayers used tadpoles, but apparently you can use them to mash them up with beholders:

Witness the mindwitness (that's kind of a crappy name):

(source)
You can get d20 stats for it here. Scroll down about 55% of the page.

And I finally discovered The Annex. Their beholder article is here.

They don't seem to have an article on Lickitung, however. For that, visit Bulbapedia here.

P.S. Leave it to Google Image Search to teach you that anything can be naughty, even something as innocent as this guy:

d30 Special Effects for Teleportation

2010-12-09T09:14:00.002-07:00

d30 Special Effects for Teleportation

BAMF!
Swirling Black Cloud of Kirby Dots
Cyclone of Light
Column of Thrumming Glitter
Black Flash
Thunder & Lightning
Whisper of Wind
Ecto-Goo Residue
Shimmering Golden Oval (portal)
Two-Dimensional Window (portal)
Crack of Wooden Bat
Ping! of a Bell
Tingling Shockwave
Shower of Sparks
Ninja Log
Needle-Across-The-Grooves Screech
Zing! of Heartstrings
Angelic Harp Glissando
Flickering Multi-Colored Geometric Lozenges
Starburst of Citrus
Stretch & Streak Upward
Dissolve in Waves
Melt Into Floor
Turn Inside-Out Along 4D Axis
Snatched Up In The Strand Of The Ethereal Spider
Swell Up And Pop Like A Greedy Tick
Fold Up Into A Box
Unspool In Strips
Corkscrew Into Self
Jump Up One's Own Bum

Whimsey Wednesday

2010-12-08T09:23:00.000-07:00

A One-Fisted Table (roll d4, d6, d8, d10, d12):

Dwarf (and Gnome) Beverages

While I by no means mean to conflate the cultures of these two distinct and sovereign cultures and races, the facts of biology seem to have granted to each similar palates and proclivities, causing their dietary preferences, at least in the realm of drink, to be quite alike.

Basic Ingredient (d4)
1 Root or Tuber
2 Fungus (including Lichen)
3 Mineral
4 Grubs

Method of Preparation (d6)
1 Stewed
2 Pickled
3 Fermented
4 Pureed ("nectar" consistency)
5 Distilled
6 Infused/Steeped (as in tea)

Effective Dosage (for a dwarf) (d8)
1 Whiff
2 Thimbleful
3 Ladleful
4 Mug
5 Flagon
6 Bottle
7 Gallon
8 Not Intoxicating

Body & Mouthfeel (d10)
1 Fizzy
2 Effervescent
3 Biting
4 Clear
5 Weak
6 Thick & Soupy
7 Gritty
8 Chunky
9 Turgid (or clay-like)
10 Creamy

Nose (d12)
1 Piquant
2 Foul
3 Floral
4 Eggy
5 Heady
6 Acrid
7 Smokey
8 Earthy
9 Metallic
10 Wet Doggy
11 Talc
12 Dank

And here's a link to a cool games review site called Drunk Dwarves.

And here's a drunk dwarf that somebody put on Deviant Art:

Oh yes, and here's a place where you can find a Twelve-Step Program in your area.

Skunks & Monkeys

2010-12-07T11:58:00.000-07:00

Do you know what's awesome? Skunks and Bees are awesome.
I pobably should have gone with "skunks and bees" for the headline, huh?

Here's a link to an article titled "The Bee-Eating Proclivites of the Striped Skunk."

My friend has at his desk right not a US government publication about beekeeping that is lavishly illustrated with painted bees--even green bees. I had never even seen a green queen bee before either.

Click this delectable bejeweled bee to browse an Etsy shop that I wish I had the money to plunder.

Good lord! Here I was in love with the idea of a Skunk Monkey and I see there's already a Skunk Ape roaming the southern United States. Still, watch out for Skunk Monkeys when wandering in the Valleys of the Crash.

The Echt-Etymonday

2010-12-06T09:10:00.000-07:00

Echt.

This is a word I came across--for the first time in my life, I believe--in a 2003 New Yorker article in which Alex Ross claims that the Lord of the Rings movies, as an exemplar of their form (movies) transcend the source, as an exemplar of their form (novels). Here's how he put it:

"The books tell a fantastic story in a familiar style, but the movies transcend the apparent limitations of their medium in the same way that Wagner transcended the limitations of opera."

I'm not much of a judge of movies, so Ross may be right. Nothing can be higher than Tolkien in my interior life, so I can't really judge the novels fairly either, but I didn't like the movies much--but I haven't even seen The Return of the King, maybe when I finally get around to watching them I can appreciate them as great achievements in moviemaking and a worthy adaptation of the book I love the most.

Lords of light! Is that old news or what? Almost as old as our word echt (which Ross used as a prefix: "echt-Wagnerian," or something. He seems to like the word quite a bit.)

It means 'genuine' or the Real Deal. Here's the etymology, from Wordnik: 1.German, from Middle High German, from Middle Low German echte; akin to Old High German ēohaft, customary.

The NOAD 2e tells us it was borrowed into English in the early 20th century--so we're lucky it wasn't replaced by "liberty" during the War Years, like in liberty cabbage.

(source)

Freebie Friday

2010-12-03T08:54:00.000-07:00

Here's Freeb, the Free Bee:

It's actually a comic from Natalie Dee, so go check that out.

So, you know you can get the E.R. Burroughs Mars novels for free, right? Okay, only four of them turn up at Project Gutenberg, but I got like 13 last night for my new Kindle (Thanks, Kelly!). Not Fighting Man of Mars, though. This is suspicious. (oh, here it is on Gutenberg Australia.) Fighting Man of Mars has 'fighting-man' right there in the title. Anyway, once you've got all the free E.R.B you can stand, I want every one of you to buy Warriors of the Red Planet when it comes out.

Huh, Goodreads just turned me on to someone called Alan Burt Akers. He any good? He wrote a god-awful lot of books, so that can't be good, but they've got hella rad covers like this:

(source)

And this one, despite the cruddy scan:

(source)

So what's this about Freebie Friday? I don't know, I mean, what do we need that for? Everything in the OSR is free. Go check out the Free RPG Blog.

Dropping the [Die] for the First d30's Day

2010-12-02T12:51:00.000-07:00

Here's a product I didn't know about:

(source) Also check out 30-Sided Adventure and Other Tales and 30 Sided Character.

This concerns me mainly because I had the idea to create something similar: 30 d30 tables for use in the Torture-City of the Blue Gloop Super-Scientists, my aspiring megadungeon (which is really hardly a regular dungeon), that I'm presently running with LotFP:WFRP, though I'm may be switching to Sorcery & Super-Science (or maybe even Traveler!) depending on which way the PCs go next.

And the idea for the d30's Day Thursday was that I would present a 30-item table, such a 30 Basic Body Forms For Alien Corpses or 30 Special Effects for Ray Guns and Other Energy Weapons--but I'm not going to get to that today.

So I'll just plug a few things:

Check out Knightvision Games and their brand new first PDF, the Labyrinth Lord adventure Path of the Delver.

I didn't read these as a kid, but I probably will now--reprints of the Fabled Lands gamebooks.

And, I'm late to the party again, but here's the greatest RPG tool ever created: Abulafia, the Random Everything Generator.

Whimsey Wednesday: The 20 Awesomest Animals, Ranked in Order of Awesomeness

2010-12-01T11:06:00.002-07:00

Octopus
Vulture
Bat
Ape
Spider
Lion
Snake
Bear
Scorpion
Shark
Crocodile
Wolf
Eagle
Elephant
Sloth
Porcupine
Skunk
Boar
Bull
Horse

Now what you do is roll 2d20 and mash up the two results and you can generate all the classic monsters of myth (uh, except the ones with people in them, I guess.): 13+6=Griffin, 3+11=Dragon. Yeah, I just stated that a dragon is a mash-up of a bat and crocodile.
Double Octopus is where an octopus has eight tentacles with octopuses at the end of them. That is as awesome as God, who is an Octopus With a Beard at the Center of the Galaxy.
Double Bear is a bear at both ends.
Now, you'll want some alternates, for skin changes and such. (I always liked that the monsters in Dragon Warrior were usual just different colored rehashes of lower-level monsters. Some say it's a weakness of the game but I was always charmed.)

(source)
Alternates In Awesomeness

or Squid, Cuddlefish*, Nautilus
or Ostrich
just Bat
or Monkey, obviously
or Tick
or Any Great Cat
or Eel Mmm. Barbecued eel.
or Wolverine, Badger, Mongoose
or Lobster, Centipede, Earthworm
or Piranha 3D
or Monitor Lizard, Gecko
just Wolf. Okay, maybe Fox
or Owl, Crow, Stork (check out the jabiru. Rad!)
or Hippo, Walrus, or Just Really Big
or Human
or Hedgehog, especially if drawn by Doris Matthäus
or Lemur, Pangolin
or Ram, Goat, Tapir
just Bull, but maybe Elk or Moose
not particularly awesome, but: unicorns, centaurs, hippogriffs, seahorses.

*sure, it's supposed to be 'cuttlefish' but, c'mon!
So, what I rolled just now is Vulture Bear. The obvious thing would be a skin-change of the Owlbear, which is still pretty awesome for all of its obviousness.

Hey, a new webcomic!

2010-11-30T13:08:00.000-07:00

Check it out--it's only a few days old. It's got CROCODILE MEN.

www.destructorcomics.com

(Meanwhile, holy heck, did Grognadia's link to that article about 20 old words obsolete (and pudify!) my whole Etymonday enterprise or what?)

A Pudifying Etymonday

2010-11-29T10:56:00.000-07:00

Pudify.

I adopted this word on Saturday but discovered too late that it didn't appear (at least in this particular form) in any of my desk dictionaries--not the New Oxford American (3rd ed.--alack! I didn't check the 2nd ed., but left it in exile under a bookcase in the coldest corner of my living room); not the Merriam-Websters Third New International, not even the Shorter Oxford English. I didn't find it on Wordnik either, and I still haven't bothered to google it.

Uh, but they did all have the likely root word: pudency which mean 'modesty' and comes from Latin pudentia, a form of pudere, meaning 'to make or be ashamed' which I take to be the intended meaning of today's word as well--so this post is another riff on my Shameful Bits post from ages past.

I think somebody ought to write up pudify as a cleric spell. Sort of a specific, limited charm person or cause fear--and here I apologize for referring to the spells not by their canonical names but by generic equivalent phrases. Except that charm person is the proper name.

Here's a picture of Thomas More confronting Cardinal Wolsey (because we're reading Wolf Hall in my book club). I'm not sure which is pudifying the other, but I'm sure there's plenty of that going on.

I found it here. He found it here. The painting is by Vivian Forbes and dates from 1927.

I'm a Member of the Society!

2010-11-27T18:50:00.001-07:00

The Pembrooktonshire Gardening Society:

You can probably blame the hat on the Holiday Hoedown I'm playing tonight with ASD.

Of Weredog and Man: The Predator Domesticated

2010-11-26T09:51:00.000-07:00

Wolf and Man have ever been rivals, and though we still respect and fear the wolf in its primal state, it is not our species that has become a million different mockeries of itself, that fawns and pants over the other in absolute idiot loyalty. No, that is the state of the Dog.

Likewise, Werewolf and Man have always had an even closer relationship, the mooncurse bringing the fear of nature red in tooth and claw directly into yourself and losing yourself in it. It's a Klein bottle scene.

But just as with the Wolf, Man triumphed and made of a killer a pet, there now can be found, everywhere humans live, a domesticated race of Weredogs--floppy ears, spotted coats, slobbering friendliness and all. When the moon is full the Beast overtakes them and they become Man's Best Friend, and their human mind can only guess in horror what was done in their metamorphosed body while they were exiled from it. Did they sniff the behinds of house cats? Like the hand of a weakling wizard? Beg to be let out to answer the call of the wild?

The only answers will be half-recalled scraps of dreams. This bestial state is rather like the cat's eyes trance that sometimes overcomes Thuderan cat-people and Mongonese Lionmen. Thus, the weredog is a playable race upon the Mutant Earth.

Could these be the dogmen described by Marco Polo? Sure, why not.

(from Wikipedia)

Let us all give thanks for moustaches

2010-11-25T08:37:00.000-07:00

us.movember.com

Welcome to Whimsey Wednesday!

2010-11-24T10:13:00.000-07:00

Long ago, a beloved blogger called Sham shared with us a set of Whimsey Wine tables for Arduin that he'd made in his youth, some 25 years ago. I still have never seen Arduin, but I was inspired--positively possessed-- by the idea of whimsey wine, and the idea of having several tables of madness always on hand behind the screen--and that's a practice I follow nowadays in my Mutant Earth LotFP:WFRP game.

Today I begin a weekly series exploring some application of randomness that I can use to further my mission of maximal ridiculousness in roleplaying. I suppose that can also be know as the principle of Awesome/Stupid. Also, I realize now that roleplaying may not really need any additional randomness.

My example this morning comes through a few clicks on Stumble Upon in the subject of mythology, leading to Godchecker, whose tagline is "More Gods Than You Can Shake A Stick At." They sell a Cafe Press mug with that on it, anyway. That doesn't remind you of Grognardia's current book project does it?

And the idea I have today is Godnappers. It could be a WEG Ghostbusters campaign--or hey, even the setting of that Ghostbusters retroclone that doesn't exist--just imagine that the GB's got ahold of some serious mystical incunabulae, souped up their proton packs with gamma-ray-generating-Americium (I don't know why--just, gamma rays are cool, okay?),

found themselves a Stargate to Olympus, and started napping up all the gods they could find. Or maybe that's what the bad guys did, whatever floats yr boat.

And how's that for half-baked? Incidentally, that's the other byword for my refereeing style.

Here's a picture of my moustache, from a couple weeks ago when I was roasting a goose or two (hence the hairnet) (I cannot explain the shirtlessness, however):

There's still plenty of time to donate for the benefit of the Prostate Cancer Foundation and Livestrong.

The Techno-Magical Crowdsourcing Nightmare, Again

2010-11-23T20:01:00.000-07:00

You can feel it coming, can't you? The day when the whole world is wired together and thinks as one planet-sized consciousness, the day any wish can be made deed with the speed of thought and the all the resources of the planet behind it.

More "information" they say is generated in a second--or a minute, it hardly matters--than one human can consume in a lifetime. That's waste! That information is fuel. Fuel for the interstellar colonial civilization we are destined to become.

In the meanwhile, consider that the chatter among those 10 billion simultaneous-minds will be just like Twitter and the comments threads of blogs, so be prepared for rival factions crowdsourcing instant monster factories and sending said giant robot monsters to duke it out upon the ruins of all the cities and museums and schools and libraries.

What will YOUR team's giant robot monster look like?

Oh wow--this image tickles some deep, long-undisturbed memories. I must have seen it once when I was very young. Read about it here.

Introducing Etymonday

2010-11-22T13:21:00.000-07:00

Gretchen Rubin advises that a blogger should post every day if they want to . . . I'm not sure what the result is supposed to be--I only remember the injunction to post every day. So here's my first attempt at a weekly feature: Etymonday.

This feature will be my attempt to locate a good old word that you might want to use to add some old-world-type archaic class and charm to your referee narrating--and read to you from a dictionary about it. For the first word I decided to pick up a copy of The White Company by A.C. Doyle--a book that dumbfounded me 10 years ago with the amount of words I had never seen that were in it--and read until I encountered a word I (still) didn't know.

(You can go here (Project Gutenberg) and try this experiment yourself. And go here (Golden Age Comic Book Stories)to see some stunning N.C. Wyeth illustrations for it.) Like this:

It turns out that I had to skip several place names--I may not be familiar with the names, but I probably won't find them in a desk dictionary either.

Anyway, the first word of the Etymonday series: saltern. Here's the sentence it appears in, if you'd like a taste of some stately prose: From the vineyard and the vinepress, from the bouvary or ox-farm, from the marl-pits and salterns, even from the distant ironworks of Sowley and the outlying grange of St. Leonard's, they had all turned their steps homeward. (I probably should have looked up 'marl-pits' and 'bouvary' as well.)

And here is what the New Oxford American Dictionary (2nd Ed.--my new 3rd Ed. is at home) has to say: "a set of pools in which seawater is left to evaporate to make salt," and it come from Old English sealtærn 'salt building' the original use denoting a saltworks.

Saltworks? That's rad. Do you suppose goblins like salt? What if some sort of negotiation/mass slaughter had to be worked out with the goblin saltworks so that the peaceful/genocidal villagers could deal with an infestation of Slugmen From Out Of Space? (The slugmen have slime-rays.)

Here's a blog (http://thisplaceissacred.blogspot.com/) that I found when I Googled 'slugmen from out of space.'

And here's an image from something called piranhaquasar.com, which might just be NSFW and maybe even morally repugnant, but, you know slugmen.

Why did no one tell me there was a new edition of the Oxford American Dictionary?

2010-11-16T14:28:00.000-07:00

Go look at it here.

I like the sound of the new format--but who am I kidding? I'd like any new dictionary format (expect maybe "online").

And who can turn down 6 months free access to the Oxford Dictionaries Online? Almost everbody, I know.

Anyway, I'm very exited about this big blue book bolting even now to my doorstep, even if it does look like my favorite lexicographer, Erin McKean (of Wordnik), is no longer on the title page.

You know who had a great moustache?

2010-11-12T12:48:00.000-07:00

(source)

Proust.

Go here to donate to the Prostate Cancer Foundation and grow a mo.

It's Mo-Vember On My Face!

2010-11-01T09:58:00.000-06:00

Hey, Kids!

I'm pledging to grow a mo ('stache) for the month of November. Not only is this a chance for me to act ridiculous in public, it's a stunt to raise awareness of (and funding for relief of. . .) prostate cancer (which, you'll recall, was the bane of my Spiritual Master, Frank Zappa).

So, if you'd like to donate to this hairy cause, please follow the link by clicking the Great Moustache itself:

I'll be back periodically with shots of my ugly mug to mark my progess. So stay away for that!

Copy Book, in advance of NaNoWriMo

2010-10-28T11:34:00.000-06:00

From the first page of The Golden Bowl, by Henry James:

"If it was a question of an Imperium, he said to himself, and if one wished, as a Roman, to recover a little sense of that, the place to do so was on London Bridge, or even, on a fine afternoon in May, at Hyde Park Corner. It was not indeed to either of those places that these grounds of his predilection, after all sufficiently vague, had, at the moment we are concerned with him, guided his steps; he had strayed simply enough into Bond Street, where his imagination, working at comparatively short range, caused him now and then to stop before a window in which objects massive and lumpish, in silver and gold, in the forms to which precious stones contribute, or in leather, steel, brass, applied to a hundred uses and abuses, were as tumbled together as if, in the insolence of Empire, they had been the loot of far-off victories."

Why am I making you read James at this late hour (it's a quarter to lunch where I'm at)? Well, mainly it's because I love James's sentences, but with this there's the added element of inspiration. For my NaNoWriMo novel, Tickle Arms, about the visit of a two-armed stranger to the insular, provincial Valley of the Crash, I plan to write in a pastiche of James's particular fustian. I hope it will give my gonzo sword-and-planet-and-mad-science setting the right kind of Space: 1889-type--decidedly not-punk steampunk--vibe. Is it Edwardian? My British history is quite spotty.

Meanwhile, I hope all of you male-types will consider participating in Mo-vember, the moustache-growing-for-prostate-cancer-fighting event that I learned about through The Art of Manliness.

Here's some inspiration for youse (from The Art of Manliness):

What, there's a 15 in 15 going around?

2010-10-20T08:58:00.001-06:00

Okay, I'll blurt out the games as quickly as I think of them.

D&D (BECMI) My first exposure to D&D was a Moldvay red book I found at the dump, but Mentzer was the game I pored over in my pre-teen years.
Dangerous Journeys--Mythus This was the first game I refereed for multiple sessions (for more than one player, Erik).
Angband I wish there weren't so many video games here, but I'll never regret my time spent with this one.
Super Mario Bros. 2 I bought this with my paper route money in '89.
Gemfire (SNES) I always wanted to mock up a boardgame version of this--viola: Runewars did it for me.
Final Fantasy "II" (SNES) I got really wrapped up in the story of this, at least twice. "You spoony bard!"
Puerto Rico This was my first euro-game. The first of hundreds.
D&D 3X I ran my first real campaign under these rules and it was a good time. So good I almost miss the 900 cubic feet of books I got rid of a couple years ago.
Swords & Wizardry-->Labyrinth Lord-->LotFP:WFRP This is where I am now, and the OSR is like the best thing in gaming ever.
Carcassonne The euro-game I've played the most of, though I rarely play it anymore.
Games Workshop Combat Cards I just loved the world implied by the pictures of the minis and their names. I didn't know about Warhammer Fantasy Battle as a tween, so this was the best I could do.
The Mutant Earth '89 This was a game I invented when I was 13, to allow my brother and friends to play mutant turtles and mutant badgers and robot bikers. It will soon be resurrected (again!) for my LotFP:WFRP game.
The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker I just love this game--the sounds, the graphics, the sailing.
Sid Meier's Civilization I did nothing but play this in at least one of my Accelerated Independent Study hours in '93-'94.
Magic: the Gathering Ah, thousands of cards. Thousands.

And now I'll add in some comments.

Here's a cool artist you should know

2010-10-15T11:04:00.000-06:00

You probably already do, if you have ever browsed the stacks of your local library where the Burroughs Mars novels are shelved.

It's Mahlon Blaine (1894 1969). Here's the first illustration that appears in the 1974 Canaveral Press edition of A Fighting Man of Mars:

And here's where I found it (and you can find the rest of his illustrations for that book there as well).

The illustrations are dated '62, so I just imagine that it was creepy weirdness like this that inspired all the psychedelic heads to make all that acid rock music down in San Francisco and over in Canterbury.

Why did we stop saying 'anon'?

2010-10-12T12:05:00.000-06:00

And why do I not know how to punctuate a sentence like that? It's different in the UK (and in the Englishes of elsewhere) than the US, no? Bah.

But why don't we just start saying 'anon' again. Think of the children--they're going to have to read Shakespeare and his ilk eventutally, so can't we do them a solid and just make sure they know what 'anon' means BEFORE they encounter it, say in The Merry Wives of Windsor?

Whoa. I was looking for a Shakespeare quote and I found this thing on Random House.com that says 'anon' is still in use in British English. Good show, old chaps!

I'm fairly certain it's not in use in American English, at least not in the Far West, since I didn't really know what it meant and I think I'm reasonably knowledgeable about my native language.

Anyroad--I shall write again anon. (But not really very soon.)

Three Tickle Arms to Embrace Your Ears

2010-10-08T14:29:00.000-06:00

If you follow this link to A Seasonal Disguise's MySpace, you can hear the three songs form our demo/EP 'Tickle Arms,' which is a preview of the forthcoming (for nearly a year!) album Waterfowl of Eastern Canada.

(from the website for the Tickell Arms of Whittlesford, Cambridge, England)

If you come down to the Neurolux tonight at 6:00 (you'll need a Promenade wristband) we'll totally give you a 'Tickle Arms' CD--with hand printed lino-cut art and a print version of a post from THIS VERY BLOG! Oh hell! Oh, and a ticket to our show with Low-Fi and The Boise Rock School at the Knitting Factory on October 22.

I choose to believe this song is about Tolstoy

2010-10-07T09:05:00.000-06:00

That could be because we just read Anna Karenina in our Rock 'n' Roll Book Club.

We get to play with these guys (well, at the same venue on the the same night, anyway) on Friday. I am very happy about that.

This is "Reform the Countryside," and you can hear it on Tears of the Valedictorian.

A Song for the Season

2010-10-06T10:00:00.000-06:00

Here's one of those Frank Zappa songs that, when I sing it to people, they often say, "No. There is no way that is actually a song that someone recorded."

Goblin Girl, as performed in New York City on Halloween 1981, I think.

I have no excuse for the clothes Frank and Bobby are wearing.

There's a game a-brewin'

2010-09-30T11:21:00.000-06:00

The little lady and I are just about moved into our new place. We're little more than a few folding chairs away from being ready to host a regular game of Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

Tommy, are you done with that pesky thesis?

Alan, have you read the Tutorial Booklet?

Who wants to play a Tigler, a Skeksis, or an Antique Japanese Lunar Rabbit-Man?

And because this post is really pointless, a random cephalopod link. Go there and read about this:

A photo of a macrotritpus larva, from Pharyngula on Scienceblogs.com

The Skeksis of the Gloor Waste

2010-09-15T09:18:00.000-06:00

So, there have to be Vulture Men, right?

(source)

These skeksis are the gloor-tainted vestiges of the Vulture Lords of eld, before the Plague of Blue Gloops and the fall of super-science.

They are laughably frail, vain (despite their horrid rotting-turkey-head faces), petty, greedy and full of devious tricks and magic gadgets. And YOU can play one.

Of course, they like to suck the Essence out of the Unicorn Folk, who are like Gelflings, only they're from ThunderCats:

What the fizz? The Wikipedia entry doesn't cover the Unicorn Folk? Does anybody know their proper name? They have stars on their foreheads, you know, like a weird species of Sneetches.

God, what a song!

There's totally anthropomorphic rabbits on the moon

2010-09-10T13:02:00.000-06:00

Hell, they probably even speak Japanese:

If you're playing LotFP:WFRP with me, you can totally play one.

Playable race: Tiglers

2010-09-07T11:20:00.000-06:00

EDIT: I really intend to revise and flesh out this post, but I'm busy falling in LOOOOOOOVE.

Tiglers are the humanoid descendants of white Martian apes. They are very similar to modern humans in all respects except that they have two extra vestigal arms ('tickle arms') below the human-normal two, and that their genetic code isn't stored in the form of DNA. It's something Martian. How they survived on Earth with this fundamental incompatibility is a mystery shrouded by eons.

Treat Tiglers as ordinary humans but with the following modifications:

Tigler Scholars have had some success decoding the technical 'manuals' in the data banks of the impossibly ancient Martian Martial Arts Pleasure Rockets, so any Tigler has a base 1in 6 chance to know how to operate newly discovered relics of Martian technology.

Sometimes Tiglers have lasers.

Tiglers worship two "Gods-In-Flesh," the time suspended Dinosaurs-With-Lasers in the Valleys of the Crash, and The Great Ape, a still-living 200-Million-Year-Old white ape of Mars who during the Great Folly ate the Mother of Trolls and has only grown larger and angrier since. He is also worshipped by trolls as the Trollfather.

It's vitally important that you watch this documentary

2010-08-22T12:16:00.000-06:00

The Dungeon Masters by Keven McAlester

It's not a new movie or anything but I just found out about it when the A.V. Club reviewed it recently.

Maybe there's not much in it that will be new to those of us in the hobby, but it gave me a thing or two to think about.

LotFP:WFRP Has Arrived!

2010-08-12T17:57:00.000-06:00

A little box from Finland was waiting on my doorstep after work today.

More news to follow . . .

EDIT: Well, that was a big lie (about the news, not about the game arriving). So, go here and get Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Weird Fantasy Roleplay for free. And then buy it.

Here's how hit dice are gonna work

2010-07-28T09:26:00.000-06:00

The human standard is a d6 hit die. When you get hit, roll your hit die, if it's less than or equal to the enemy's damage roll, you've been wounded. Fighting men will get bigger hit dice as they get better. And monsters will be a vast forest of befuddlement.

Then you roll to find out where the wound is. This will result in injury or, about 1 in 5 times, in death.

Depending on the location, there will be a variety of penalties and danger; I'm thinking broken bones and infection.

Becasue I'm getting specific (well, not right now, but when I do. . .) I'll have to take into account the three basic types of injury: blunt force, laceration and puncture. There are weapons that specialize in those things to differing degrees. And if I'm doing that I'd better include some differing effects for the different classes of armor, maybe with three broad classes there as well, with perhaps an intermediary between mail and plate. Wikipedia calls it transitional armor, I think. No, it calls it transitonal armour.

I know that a nebulous smattering of ideas isn't very useful to you, and perhaps not worth your time to read, but go ahead and give me any suggestions for precedents and directions others have taken with this line of thinking. Thanks!

By the way, Tommy and Alan, I don't intend to apply this to LotFP:WFRP right away, but maybe we can give it a test run before the Big Game arrives.

Thanks again, Dungeon Master!

2010-07-27T16:19:00.000-06:00

Wil Wheaton's twitter feed reminded me that today is Gary Gygax's birthday, so I just want to take a moment to once again express my gratitude for his part in this game we love.

I'll be perusing the DMG is his honor this evening. I was going to do that before I was reminded of the date, but now I've added the "in his memory" part.

What sort of illustration should I use?

Here's the picture from the Gary Gygax Statue Facebook page:

How much does D&D need experience levels?

2010-07-18T13:52:00.000-06:00

When I think about it, probably with too much naive 'realisticness' as the ideal, I'm dissatisfied with the increase of hit dice at each level up.

Think of a technically proficient guitar player--isn't he about as good as he'll ever be once he masters the instrument, say as a teenager like Clapton and Page? They might get wiser but are they going to play with all that much more technical proficiency?

So, if a guitar player is like our fighting man, isn't he 95% as good as he'll ever be when he sets out for glory as a strapping youth? Wouldn't it be even more glorious if he ended his career showering in golden coins upon a raft of his enemies' long bones, floating on the river of the blood of all the world's dragons, if he got to that point without all those extra hit points--if it was the treasures and storied arms he gathered in his adventures that made him great, not a game mechanic designed to make it easier for him to achieve greatness.

Wouldn't this make gold equal experience in an even more fundamental way?

Something new would have to devised to handle access to higher spell levels, and a skill system (which I guess is the way this concept is usually handled) would seem to be very appropriate in this form of the game.

This idea appeals to me. I'm interested in the opinions of the wise on this matter--though apparently not enough to pose this question in a forum where any of them will see it.

How the Dinosaurs Got Their Lasers

2010-07-16T16:11:00.000-06:00

Millions of years ago, back in Dinosaur Times on Earth, there were all kinds of civilizations on Mars with a bunch of uniquely Martian artforms, philosophies and all that crap--but the interesting thing was the giant white four-armed apes.

One of these Martian cultures launched a Mixed Martian Martial Arts Tour Rocket to Earth (still in Dinosaur Times) to fight a bunch of title bouts. Of interest to us today is the one that pitted Martians on Tyrannosaurs with Laser Howdahs against giant white four-armed apes.

Obviously, it was a disaster for the Martians and the apes rioted and ate all the Martians and zapped the Lasersauruses with suspended animation rays.

Flash forward a couple hundred million years: the apes have evolved into humanoids--smaller now, about the size of the native hominids, but still four armed. However, the lower two arms are now much smaller than the upper two and are called "tickle arms" because they are now generally associated with intimacy, while the "work arms" do the manual labor.

Now, the ancient Martian Martial Arts technology is a true marvel, as the suspended animation field generators continued to function through all the eons, though they are starting to show signs of malfunctioning. . .

The Laser Howdahs, of course, haven't aged at all, as they have been Outside Time all this, er, time.

Well, crap--here's half an episode of Dino-Riders, show that I really wish I had known about before just now:

I just sent Raggi some money!

2010-07-15T11:41:00.000-06:00

I've placed my order for LotFP:WFRP and Hammers of the God.

Have you?

With thanks for inspiration to Jeff Rients

2010-07-02T15:18:00.001-06:00

No doubt you saw Jeff Rients's Encounter Critical scenario starters early this week.

Here's a few I thought of by trying to rise to his level of awesomeness:

1) Inspector Gadget and the Power Rangers must team up to save Moses from the Borg Terminators.

2) The mogwais on the cargo deck broke into the crate of magic Jelly Bellys and now a tribe of evil monkey-lizards with super powers is loose on the ship.

3) Your Firefly-class vessel is set upon by Reavers--who turn out to be Space Hippies who grew up to be Space Yuppies in the Space Eighties and are just out to have some Brett Easton Ellis-type good times with their cocaine lasers*.

4) A lawyer from a supernatural law firm (Daniel Dae Kim) joins forces with a Minbari bounty hunter (Mira Furlan) and they travel to a mysterious island to bring a rogue gaseous lifeform to account for his pointless television show.

* "cocaine lasers" is from the song "Pobody's Nerfect" on the new Wolf Parade record, Expo 86.

Did you see Wil Wheaton's new t-shirt design?

2010-06-29T12:10:00.000-06:00

Cuz you might just want to drop some cheese on it:

(Click to go to Jinx and buy one)

I guarantee that when I'm wearing mine and eating cheese, I'll will ALWAYS drop some of the cheese on my shirt.

Wil original post is here.

I apologize for this blog becoming a billboard for other people's merchandise, but that's all that's motivating me to post lately. You saw the Lamentations of the Flame Princess box photos, right? Holy Smoke!

Here's a Cool Comic You Should Buy

2010-06-04T10:27:00.000-06:00

Or read it online.

It's called U.S.S. Origin: the Beasts of Kay-7 and it's by Malachi Ward, published by Top Shelf.

The Comics Reporter ran the back cover image recently:

and I said to myself, "Aaron, you know what I like?" And then I responed to myself, "I like that."

You'll dig the front cover, too. Where my trekkies at?

And that's everything I know about it, except that I can't wait for it to land on my doorstep.

Coincidentally, my hip-hop name in high school was MC K7 Snerk. I never MC'd anything. Well, other than our cultic rituals at lunch.

A New Coney Island For Me

2010-04-20T10:20:00.000-06:00

This really has nothing to do with the place called Coney Island.

I don't think the word 'coney' is familiar to your average American, even though Coney Island is a household name. It probably has more currency in our hobby since Sam Gamgee traps and cooks some coneys somewhere in The Lord of the Rings. Seems it's time I read LoTR again, if I can't remember where, exactly--if only I could get my brother to return the treasured copies from my chidhood. . .

In the office this morning I said "You don't want the Easter Bunny hanging around out of season--it's getting to be barbecue weather, and coney is probably pretty good on the grill," prompting a colleague to look up this unfamiliar alleged "word."

She discovered that it's sometimes preferred to pronounce it to rhyme with "bunny," but we office mates agreed that perhaps "cunny" isn't the sort of word to bandy about the workplace.

So I head to the dictionary (that's what I do here at this blog, at least once a year) and discover a few interesting things about the humble "coney." The first is that the name can be used for both pikas and hyraxes. Anything that gives me an excuse to type "pikas and hyraxes" is self-evidently raditudinous.

The second is that on its way to English "coney" passed through French as "conis/conil" and started out from Latin as "cuninculus" which the American Hertiage 4th ed. suggests might could be from "cunus" or "the female pudenda."

Well, I guess "cunny" was on the mark after all.

I looked up "pudenda" too because, well, show me a pudenda and I'm going to look. Turns out it's a plural, so you could talk about a single pudendum, but usually two will do. But what interested me was that the word is a form of "pudere" (the neuter gerundive, if you really want to conjugate your pudenda) which means "to make or be ashamed." So, it's your shameful bits.

And that's why you will henceforth often find me on holiday in the Coney Island of my mind.

Wet Spellbooks

2010-04-09T11:09:00.000-06:00

There's just not enough writing (writing that has found itself before my eyes, anyway) about the hazards of getting wet. Dungeons are dank, dripping places often enough, but hardly ever has the wetness itself be a problem in my games. Say, just two weekends ago my Bahamuddan cleric was wading free as duck in waist-high frogwater, to say nothing of the juices of the frogs' interiors but not even his fussy white boots were any worse for wear.

So, with no more effort than it takes to type it (which is really the only kind of effort you'll find on this blog), here are the effects of falling in foul pools that should be making PC's cheap lives miserable:

Wet armor padding. It's at least going to slow you down. Maybe make it harder to swing your great-grandsire's single-edged sword, The Gummer. Maybe it's ruined altogether. If you want to keep that harness on, it's gonna chafe.

Wet thief's boots. You're probably gonna squeak, Sneaky.

Wet bowstrings. Yes, I wish you had written down "oilcloth to wrap extra bowstrings" too. Sodden arrows and fletchings probably don't work so well either.

Wet Spellbooks. This has huge potential. I can't believe I've never read the phrase "wet spellbook" before. Scrolls are going to be vulnerable to the smears as well.

Fssssss! Your torch went out. Aww, and the rest of 'em are soaked through as well. You didn't happen to make note of how your flint and steel were stored, did you? Too bad you weren't playing 4e and you could use one of those kewl glow-wands. Barf.

Soggy food. Uh, sure you can still eat it. What's your Constitution score? Thanks. Oh, and do you know what page the disease rules are on?

Foot blisters. Walking around all day in slippery boots and mushy skin has got to be hard on even the most iron-thewed. Maybe my milquetoast modern daintiness is showing through here--but shouldn't road worn feet be a concern to adventures even on the driest delves?

I'd love to hear about how you handle water hazards and suggestions for where to find treatments of these things in actual rules.

Hey Everybody, My DM is in Houston Doing Microgravity Experiments!

2010-04-08T13:50:00.000-06:00

You can read about it here: http://microgravityu2010.blogspot.com/

He's on the ground crew so he's the guy answering the phone when the flight crew has to say "Houston, we have a problem."

Sorry to repeat the oldest NASA joke since Apollo. I am not, whatever you have been told, a professional comdeian.

Playing music for little kids is tons of fun

2010-04-07T08:40:00.000-06:00

I hope each and every one of you gets a chance to do it sometime.

Last night this band I play drums for played at Boise Public Library for an audience with a greater number of toddlers and grade-schoolers than you usually find at bars on weeknights (where we are used to playing).

At one point we were entirely upstaged (no pun intended) by the kids who rushed the "stage" and took up all manner of shakers and tambourines and maracas and danced their little hearts out. Yea, and they did make a joyous noyse unto the Lord! I even had to give up my drum throne for a minute or two to one particularly fearless girl.

I know there were pictures and video to capture some of the moments (specifically my peculiar brand of incompetent xylophone playing) but I don't see any of it in linkable locations yet this morning. Maybe later.

So I figure--actually, my boss suggested it--this band should tear ourselves away from the handsome rewards of playing to bored barflies on Tuesday night and take our music to the public library publicity circuit.

Tell your local librarians to give us a call. Erm . . . and to schedule an event that could use us, I guess.

So this Milton cat, he any good?

2010-04-06T09:22:00.001-06:00

Yes. Yes he is pretty good.

My book club is reading Paradise Lost (we're only up to Book Two) and (as I'm sure is obvious to some) the influence on D&D is stunning. Just about everybody from the Demon and Devil entries in the Monster Manual has appeared.

Not Tiamat, of course, but I think Milton's Portess of Hell has her beat:

". . . [A]t last appear
Hell bounds high reaching to the horrid Roof,
And thrice threefold the Gates; three folds were Brass
Three Iron, three of Adamantine Rock,
Impenitrible, impal'd with circling fire,
Yet unconsum'd. Before the Gates there sat
On either side a formidable shape;
The one seem'd Woman to the waste, and fair,
But ended foul in many a scaly fould
Voluminous and vast, a Serpent arm'd
With mortal sting: about her middle round
A cry of Hell Hounds never ceasing bark'd
With wide CERBEREAN mouths full loud and rung
A hideous Peal: yet, when they list, would creep,
If aught disturb'd thir noyse, into her woomb,
And kennel there, yet there still bark'd and howl'd
Within unseen."

Now, why don't I remember the Hell Hound bit making an appearance in D&D?

She is Sin, and the other "formidible shape" is Death. Maybe you'll get a quote about him some other time. Or you can read it yourself at literature.org.

An idea I got from a footnote in the Norton critical edition were using, about the etymology of adamant--that it literally means 'untameable'--gives me an idea about how weapons forged of this popular metal should behave. Sure, you have an Unbreakable Sword of Legend now--or, wait--does the sword have you?

Well, okay, Ego weapons already have the potential to do that. I always look for something new, but it's hard to find.

Is Angband Olde Schoole?

2010-04-05T09:18:00.000-06:00

In case you don't know what I mean, this picture will take you to the Wikipedia entry.

This is my favorite video game. Thanks are in order to reader Erik who introduced me to it in the form of Moria for the Amiga round about 1991. He is the humble acorn from which sprouted and thickened this mighty oak of . . . a stupid blog.

So, then the question I posed at the top: is it Olde Schoole?

Actually, I don't care, so sorry for ambushing you.

Here's why I love Angband:

It's pure dungeon crawl. There is a bit of a nod to social interaction in the haggling with shop keepers, but that is exactly as exciting as you would expect having a chat with a robot from 1985 to be. I am attracted to "purity" but I should really not say "purity because" that sounds like "ethnic purity" and fuck that. I'm attracted to minimalism: stand up comedy: just a guy talking. Fiction: black marks on paper. That's infantile, I guess, but that's me. Angband has one town and a dungeon. That's all it needs.

It's brutal. If you make a mage, you will die in a pit of poisoned stakes on the first or second level. Or be eaten be a snake.

It continues to hold mysteries for me after nearly 20 years of playing it (every few years or so). I have never gotten close to the level where Morgoth lurks, with his halting gait and dented iron crown. When your character dies you don't get to go back to your last save; you get to start a new pathetic 1st-level peon. You can get around that with the slightest effort, but then you've robbed yourself of 20 years of fun, you snot-nose little punk. Are you happy now?

I love this game so maybe I should try to put what I love about it into the next campaign I run. Ahh, well, that's probably going to be Marvel Super Heroes, as I have mentioned. That requires a slightly different tone.

I feel like putting together a side project while my regular group takes a couple of weeks off. Better lock your doors, America!

It's Saturday: Saturday is the Day I Play D&D

2010-04-03T13:13:00.000-06:00

May that never change.

Well, a different day is fine. A different game is fine too. But still, is all I'm saying.

Full Poser Disclosure: we're playing 4e (I was out-voted) but we did just enter the Ruins of the Moathouse.

But maybe that just adding sacrilege to apostasy--it is this Moathouse:

As penance I'll say 6 Hail Jeffs and order a copy of Advanced Edition Companion from my local game shop (all About Games in Boise).

Amen.

The Voidship, Cloudsource

2010-04-02T13:32:00.000-06:00

This is obvious and probably too of-the-moment (or worse, totally last year), but I've just come to fear that this really is the future:

The first generation to grow up texting and twittering--always in contact with everyone and living in public--is completely comfortable with the hive mind concept, so comfortable that it just happens organically without anyone even taking notice.

So now the human race is a single consciousness. If you thought the overnight eruption of Wikipedia was a marvel, wait till the same principle is applied by a whole planet to manufacturing starships.

This is what interstellar civilizations will look like.

Individuality is hopelessly outmoded. Resistance is . . . well, you know the rest.

An early design of the voidship Cloudsource.

My Favorite Trickster This Year

2010-04-01T10:50:00.000-06:00

It's not the Flash rogue named The Trickster. He died and spent a year hand handcuffed to the Pied Piper (in Countdown to Final Crisis) but that's still not as bad a fate as seeing Mark Hamill and Corinne Bohrer dressed like this:

It's not Mr. Mxyzptlk, which that same Countdown to Final Crisis identified with the Trickster God outright. I haven't read many Superman stories but I plan to dip my toe in the Silver Age shortly, so who knows, the Imp From the 5th Dimension may well take the honors next year.

But the Trickster I celebrate this year is that red-headed rascal, that boater-hatted be-bowtied Beau Brummel, History's Least Efficient Assassin,

ARCADE!

Platform shoes and a white tuxedo. Consider that a shopping list.

Wild West Cinema from Spectrum Games

2010-03-31T15:36:00.000-06:00

I just bought Wild West Cinema, which is I believe the latest release from Spectrum Games (who also brought you Cartoon Action Hour Season Two, a game I really do plan to get to. Okay, no plan, but I HOPE to get to it).

I also, uh, hope to share my thoughts on the game after I've had time to read it and kick the tires. Naturally, since I have now posted about this, I will never do it.

What struck me at first glance was the "monster" stat blocks--I love the presentation and am excited about the lightness of rules it suggests.

Here's a sample:

That looks just like the kind of stat block I want to use.

The PCs have moderately long skill lists, which I'm less excited about, and the tone of the rules seems to favor story-oriented and play-acting type gaming (the experience rewards, for example include those for advancing the story), but that will be easy enough to ignore and instead play the right way: treasure and money are your points; points are your only goal.

Even with these quibbles, I am motivated to round up some rounders for a session or two--just as soon as we're done with the Murderworld (Jeff Grubb, 1984) module for for Marvel Super Heroes.

I hope you'll give Wild West Cinema a look as well.

Comic Book Drums?

2010-03-17T11:20:00.001-06:00

In stores today!

On my wall tomorrow!

P.S.

This Green Lantern . . . erm. . . Luigi is the guy that sold it to me!

(at Captain Comics, the finest comic shop in Boise)

The Torture-City of the Blue Gloop Super Scientists

2010-01-04T09:39:00.000-07:00

Hear! A title that could belong to a Captain Underpants book!

See! That 'Gloop' is probably not an English word but the name of a Roald Dahl character!

Know! Fear of cuddly aliens that look like they came from a DreamWorks movie!

I'm thinking about writing up the dungeon I had planned for the Mutant Earth and giving it to all of you. I'm calling it The Torture-City of the Blue Gloop Super Scientists, in case you hadn't guessed.

It's inspired by Forbidden Planet, Dollhouse, my own fevered fancy (which is little more than a jumble of half-remembered gleanings from pop culture, full of shiny bits like 'Gloop'), and apparently Monsters vs. Aliens, though not intentionally. I might as well watch it now, and steal what I like.

Teasers:

In one dark laboratory, experimental baboons have been kept alive by cyborganic grafts for centuries since the disappearance of their keepers. For some of those centuries alarms, still powered by Infinite Alien Energy, have been shrieking into the baboons' ears, accompanied by spinning red lights. The baboons are not happy.

Not far from the Mad Baboons is a glass-walled tank of cyborganic sharks. It's suspended 20 feet above the floor of a huge empty room, maybe with some banks of blinking and blooping diagnostic machines along the walls. Off to one side there is a large lever-switch-handle sticking up from the floor. I wonder what it does.

Ennui Sausage

2009-12-30T11:17:00.001-07:00

Well, now I know that andouille is the French form of the Latin for 'things induced (into sausage casing).' Induction Sausage. I didn't know how to pronounce it--and I still haven't tried it, but at least I have now heard of it.

So that's what I'm going to call the new Seasonal Disguise record--Ennui Sausage. That or Three Glass Kitties. Did I mention we're making a record? Why would I--most of you are also making that record.

For those of you who are not mking that record I should mention that I don't, in fact, get to name the record, so it will no doubt have an entirely unridiculous name when it is finally released, hot and fresh, all over your greedy ears. I do get to call it something, though.

Twilight Unmasked

2009-12-15T14:20:00.000-07:00

It's the next issue of Buffy Season 8, isn't in which the Big Bad's Secret Identity is revealed?

His name is Twilight, so that's a pretty good name for the enemy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Twilight is the opposite of dawn. The Ex-Key Dawnie hasn't been herself lately--and even now that she's been returned to her usual shape, she's not acting quite right. What's all this smoochy business with Xander?

Well, I'm not going to predict that Twilight will be revealed to be Dawn. I'm not going to take the bait. But who else could it be? Is there anyone important left? Cordelia? Jessie from the pilot? Kendall Casablancas?

Anya. She would be my choice. I mean, I hate the temporary deaths of comics as much as the next guy who buys the death stories anyway, but if Spike--whose final exit was my greatest source of joy in the whole series--didn't stay dead for more than a few weeks, why should the delightfully odd ex-vengeance-demon who didn't irritate me at all (unlike any number of cocky over-sexed leather-clad contrarian types in the Whedonverse)?

Twilight is Anya. It's settled. ~~Anya is also my favorite character in A Song of Ice and Fire. Any ya' see a pattern?~~ Whoops! Her name is Arya. Man, I wish he would finish that next book.

More things in heaven and earth

2009-11-30T14:47:00.000-07:00

Than are dreamt of in my philosophy, anyhow.

How am I ever going to play all these games?

I'm studying up on Twilight Imperium. I hear you have to do your homework before you play that one. It has common DNA with the games I have hated most so there's a good chance I'll want to set it on fire, but I'm going to tough it out. It looks like a ripping good way to spend 10 or 12 hours in a stinky room with 7 other guys.

I want to play both the Serenity and BSG RPGS from Margaret Weis Productions. They run on the Cortex System, right?

And I have all these frakking HackMaster books. And now they're out-of-date.

I've never played a sci-fi RPG (I was a very fantasy-centric kid). What's best--Star Frontiers, Gamma World, classic Traveller, Mutant Future, Metamorphosis Alpha, Star Ace? I've got 'em all.

I ran Dangerous Journeys for a year or two in the 9-tays. I still have the tattered old books. Maybe I ought to give the rules-lite Mythus Prime version a shot. I thought it was an dumbed-down embarrassment back in the day, but now it's just the way I wanna play.

And GDW also made all these Space: 1889 books that I still think are about the coolest concept ever.

Gah, I've never even played GURPS.

I have print versions of Cartoon Action Hour and its supplements, but the Season Two version seems more up my rules-fearing alley.

Star Wars D6. Or BESM?

Swords & Wizardry or Labyrinth Lord. But I have books for all the versions of actual D&D!

And I'm pretty excited about Shadow, Sword, and Spell.

That's it. I'm going to have to give up sleeping and leaving the warm circle of honeyed light from my reading lamp. You can't make me!

Oh, I'm going to need some players. Drat!

Let's Get the Band Back Together

2009-11-11T13:52:00.000-07:00

First, a piece of personal communication that has no place in a stately public forum such as this blog: Alan (our first first violist and first second side drummer) told me last night at band practice that he read MY WHOLE BLOG.

I want to apologize for having wasted his time--or, worse than wasting it--like, actively abusing his time, like a cheese-grater of the mind's eye or something.

Anyway, I placed an order for Swords & Wizardry from my friendly local game store (All About Games in Boise) today. I hope you'll do the same. I hear that kind of thing is good for the hobby. I'll just have to take their word for it.

I guess this means I should play some S&W. Hear that Tommy? Maybe you can get some use out of the lovely rules booklet that you had so painstakingly spiral-bound!

Pretty soon I'll have me a copy of Raggi's The Grinding Gear. I wonder, is there a connection here? That title sounds like this adventure might be something of a meat grinder, which might just suit the kind of gaming groups I've experienced: abortive fits and starts.

Fine. I hereby assemble a gaming group and purpose to run them and dozens of their hapless 3x5-sized S&W characters through PITS OF RUTHLESS CRUSH.

Also, we'll graft on the soap opera rules from Amagi Games.

In loving memory of an opinion. . .

2009-11-04T14:38:00.000-07:00

I'm finally coming around to an appreciation of Obituary's 1990 record Cause of Death. (I was prompted to revisit it by the chapter on it in the new collection of Decibel magazine's Hall of Fame features, Precious Metal).

It's practically musical in one or two places--and downright groovy in plenty of others, a welcome change from the dull pummeling of most early death metal reocrds.

Plus, the vocals remind me of Blaine Fart (of my favorite-band-in-high-school, The Accused) and that's always a good thing.

And one more capper: the first Lovecraft paperback I ever bought had that same Michael Whelan painting on the cover.

Looks like I'll have to hit up the corner record shop for The End Complete next.

Seriously, the trailer for the new Twilight film looked kinda awesome

2009-10-28T11:57:00.000-06:00

Now, I didn't read the whole thing (spoilers for I show I've already watched but am re-watching right at the beginning of the article's subject) but there is an impressive post about Willow and Tara's relationship (starting in season four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and the relationship's relationship to doors, here, at a kind of astounding blog called This To Say About That that I learned about today through whedonesque.com.

In the post (which surely deserves to be called an 'article') I encountered the word liminal for the first time. Yes, I am a little embarrassed about that. Turns out it means, in part, threshold, which is pleasing Anglo-Saxon looking word that I wanted to know more about--I wanted the Anglo-Saxon roots to be transparent to me. This is how I am with words.

The etymology of threshold is murky and doesn't really offer up its secrets, but the American Heritage 4th ed. does send us to the Indo-European root (that I don't know how to display properly) that is pronounced just like Tara.

I know, right? But that's not all. The first definition for that root is to rub, as in tribade--as in the the band Tribe 8, or as it appears in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun (where I learned it), tribadist.

Yes, I will post everytime anyone on the internets compares something to Proust

2009-10-27T15:38:00.000-06:00

Here's the latest Proust-parison, from Sunday's When Will the Hurting Stop:

"I will reiterate that neither comic is very good at all, but it's still pretty remarkable how they managed to sneak onto the stands on the very same day. It's like they're just trying desperately to see if anyone is awake at this point. It takes a lot of work to make Jeph Loeb look like Proust, but I'll be damned if his Red Hulk book isn't eleventy-billion times better than any of this shit. "

It's about two Marvel comics out last week. Who cares what they're called?

New Year's Resolution: Read 100 Comic Scripts

2009-10-26T09:48:00.000-06:00

You've heard of fiscal years--well, this is a spiritual year (ignore for the time being the fact that the regular year probably has its start as a spiritual year): Halloween to Halloween. Let's hope it fares better than the Metal Year.

Okay, so it's yawningly trite. That's how you know it's Rooted in Tradition.

I started this blog a little over one year ago for no other reason than to follow Occasional Superheroine--then I discovered the Old School Renaissance and (sort of) focused on writing about that sort of business. I do still read to you from dictionaries from time to time. (Check out byronic--dude should be a vampire. In comics.)

That's about all the retrospection I wanted to do. To the Future!

There is an artist who personally requested that I write a comic that said artist would draw. Am I going to ignore this opportunity? It's likely, but this old post by Gail Simone has stirred me to action (I love the part about putting truth in a scene, and after reading Welcome to Tranquility I believe she can do it, but it's what she says about seizing opportunity that I'm high on right now). Read the 'part two' too, about civet-stink.

I know nothing about writing comics, natch. This will be no surprise to long-time readers, who are well aware I know nothing about writing anything.

So--READ 100 COMIC SCRIPTS. Gail Simone posted a few that will make a fine start.

Hong Kong Phooey as Reverse Don Quixote

2009-10-24T13:09:00.000-06:00

Aside from the kung fu movie stereotypes that might possible be offensive to an entire hemisphere, this Hanna-Barbera cartoon from the mid-'70s has a premise plenty sturdy enough for a Saturday morning short-form cartoon from the mid-'70s.

And the lead is voiced by this dude:

(Scatman Crothers)

Who was also the voice for this dude:

(Jazz the Autobot)

So that's pretty sweet.

Anyway, I gathered you here today to talk about that premise: the Reverse Don Quixote. Hong Kong Phooey's alter-ego is a hapless janitor who believe he has learned super kung fu from a book but who is in fact a totally hapless lunkhead who's only success is that he doesn't notice how much damage and mayhem his lunkheadedness causes. Presumably, everyone else has mistaken his obliviousness for the transcendent grace of a sublime master and that his why the whole city holds him in reverence, worship, and awe.

Right--that worshipfulness is the Reverse part of Reverse Don Quixote--whereas Don Quixote's delusions of grandeur are obvious to everyone else, in Hong Kong Phooey's case his windmilling kung fu chops (that's for Choya, a kung fu nerd, who would be shouting "There are no chops!" if read this blog) are celebrated as the greatest way to save the day. So everyone is suffering Phooey's delusion, so maybe it's not so much a Don Quixote in reverse as a Everyone's Don Quixote. Let's just ignore that, hmm? While we're at it, Phooey also has a cat, Spot, who acts as his Sancho Panza, an overlooked and unappreciated partner who actually saves the day, by freeing Phooey from the file cabinet, or rolling him down the street when he gets stuck in a garbage can.

But I bring all this up because I suspect this premise has been used before--I mean the Reverse Don Quixote, not the forwards kind. That was in Don Quixote.

Surely it wasn't a Saturday morning show from 1974 that originated the premise of a bumbling hero who nevertheless saves the day and is treated like a hero despite his constant cock-uppery.
It's been reused by Pamela Anderson's V.I.P. ( I think--I haven't seen it), and to some extent in the USA network's Psych (haven't seen that either).

So, have you seen this before--before 1974--in something besides Cervantes?

Crap. I shoulda just gone to TV Tropes.

Horror-Themed Board Games?

2009-10-22T08:27:00.000-06:00

The group ran through a print 'n' play zombies game last Friday--didn't catch the name but it wasn't much of a game, though a little better than Zombies!!!

And I'm sick of zombies anyhow. Y-A-W-N.

There's Arkham Horror, but I want to unleash steaming streams of pee on the smoldering ashes of every copy of that game.

I have The Hills Rise Wild --it's actually the same foundation as the print 'n' play game with more equipment rules and such, and a pick-up-and-deliver objective laid on top. Let that stand as Exhibit 2 in my case that a Lovecraft theme is no signal of good game play inside that box. The opposite, even.

I've got Finstere Flure (that's for Holger, who doesn't read this blog), I mean Fearsome Floors. A better game than those, but not so much with the horror beyond the Universal Monsters type of Scooby-Doo type Count Chocula level 'horror.'

Of course the ultimate in gaming horror is A Game of Thrones, but that's entirely the wrong kind. I hate that game so hard it gives me stones. And a rhyming curse, I guess.

Boy I hate a lot of stuff. So, give me your suggestions of horrific (or just horrible) board games. I need 'em by tomorrow at 5:00 and don't make 'em anything I will hate.

Holy Hell! There was a Karate Kid cartoon?

2009-10-21T09:04:00.000-06:00

And you can watch it on Hulu?

How did I miss this one back in the actual Ay-tays?

Oh, '89? Yeah, I lost touch with pop culture for about five. . . or ten years starting in '89.

(Several) Dollhouse inteviews hit the tubes today

2009-10-20T14:10:00.000-06:00

One with Miracle Laurie at the Buffyfest blog (it's probably still on the blog roll to the right), one with Dichen Lachman on the SFX magazine site.

And one with John Cassaday, the Astonishing X-Men artist during Joss Whedon's run who is about to direct an ep. of Dollhouse, in which he says this:

The Beat: I’m with you on both of those! Do you have any thoughts on the cast and characters going in? Any favorites?

Cassaday: I like the relationship between Echo and Ballard. There’s a strange dynamic there. They’ve grown into something very different than where they started out. Ballard has become part of the machine he swore to take down in order to get the job done. He’s no longer CIA. It’s a personal mission for him and that mission is embodied by Echo. I enjoy the back and forth between all the employees and the actives. I’m fascinated with the trickiness of the technology and how it can be applied to anyone to serve any purpose… The possibilities are endless and mind-boggling.

The Beat: What’s your biggest challenge, do you think, going into this?

Cassaday: I read a script and have specific ideas as to how I want to tell the story. When I draw, it’s me and only me– essentially a one-man show. One challenge comes in dealing with a crew of a hundred people waiting for and watching me… I’ve met most of them and they really know their jobs. I’ve watched the crew at work and feel I’m in good shape. Another issue is working with actors. I’m excited about this as much as anything. I feel lucky in a sense, that with it being a television series, the actors will have been playing their characters for roughly 22 or 23 episodes by the time I hit the set. We won’t be forming their characters from the ground up. They know their origins. They understand themselves and their motivations. I also look forward to dealing with any day-players, so I can get those creative juices flowing there too… Constructing personalities. So very Dollhouse!

Causing me to think about that 'construction of personalities' as it is done by the director, yes, but more so by the writers and creators (and of course the actors, at a later stage). I'm focusing on the writer's role because you have to consider aspects of the Dollhouse to be metaphors for what the TV writer does--but be careful not to let such a discussion collapse into a black hole of infinitely reflected self-representations. You'll be sucked into your own navel and become an ultra-dense singularity of wankery.

Then there's Paul Ballard's character arc: he tries to bring the Dollhouse down but ends up inside it. Sucked in like it was a belly-button. It reminds me of a problem a friend had once about the author's voice: a voice that is trying to be genuine, honest, free of stylistic affectation and rhetorical artifice is in fact using that stylistic choice in the same way as the other stylistic devices, the ones it's trying to avoid, are used. There is no escape from choosing a self-representation. Likewise, a parent organization, like the CIA, won't let you pursue a crazy quest to defeat something like the Dollhouse, and you certainly can't defeat it by becoming part of it. You might think you can outfox the foxes but that just makes you an even foxier fox.

I don't know. I thought I had a thing there.

So as a director or a writer, you're creating everyone's self-representation, and trying (sometimes, I hope) to show a true representation of the world as you see it--but it's all make-believe, and make-believe about deception and false identities. And if you're Dollhouse, you're doing it on Fox (but maybe not for very long).

Oh man. See the note above about ultra-dense wankery. I'm really sorry.

If Caroline is all of us

2009-10-16T09:48:00.000-06:00

As Echo accumulates more and more echoes of the people that have been installed in her, she becomes less a metaphor for how we are shaped by the powerful than for how we have to hide elements of ourselves, or maybe that we can hide elements of ourselves and lead double, treble, whatevs-ble lives. She has to keep the memories she's retained secret from the Dollhouse so that they don't prevent her (by sending her to the Attic) from finding her true self, and in that secrecy she stands in for the impression management we all have to do.

It's with that in mind that I embark on Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life hoping it will carry me to some grounds for an argument about what Dollhouse has to say.

I'm so sorry about trying to make that sailing metaphor work.

I haven't seen many examples of the show presenting Echo as intentional impression management, but I'll be on the lookout. More sailng? Sorry.

I heard once in college that Chekhov's story 'The Lady With the Dog' was about the leading of the double life, so go check that out (beware of cruddy ads).

Who do you trust?

2009-10-15T14:06:00.000-06:00

I dropped all the Marvel comics titles (except Runaways, even though it probably deserved it for its own weaksauce-itude) from my pull list this year because of Secret Invasion--because it proved that MArvel was willing to sell me garbage in $4 monthly installments, wasting 8 months of my comics consumption. In one-issue-a-month chunks, sure, but still.

But this post isn't about that, other than to say that the basic emotional hook in Secret Invasion (Who do you trust? Is he a skrull? Am I?) was copied from Battlestar Galactica (Is she a cyclon? Am I?).

And to some extent the same thing is going on in Dollhouse, or was during the first season (Joss has said they'll back off that element, since it gets silly if it goes on too long*). Who is a Doll? Are you?

I'm not going to call this concept tired or accuse anyone of conceptual bankruptcy (except Secret Invasion)--I'd rather look at this a case of an idea with a great deal of emotional resonance that a lot of people want to write about and watch about. Watch about? Yeah, it's the dopest new extension of a prepositional semantic scope or whatevs. Get hip.

But I'm not going to do any of that looking today. Just making note of something I might someday do some thinking about.

*Man, I really should start book marking the web pages I know I'm going to make reference to. Sorry, I don't know where I read that.

I haven't read Ibsen either

2009-10-14T09:35:00.000-06:00

Not that that's relevant to today's generally irrelevant-to-anything post: a quote from an interview with Joss Whedon (on forbes.com) from before Dollhouse aired:

Forbes: This show is more cerebral--and perhaps more niche--than we're used to seeing on the broadcast networks today. Is there room for shows like this?

Whedon: Well, I don't want to be accused of saying, "I'm so much smarter than Fox." The concept is tricky, but it's not exactly hard to follow. It's not like we're shooting Proust. But whether or not it's niche, depends on how many people respond to it. And I assume it probably will be because most of the things I do are, but it's not like we set out and said, "Which people do we want to alienate."

Gee, I hope they're not shooting Proust--that's the plot for me 'n' Josh's comic book idea about Baudelaire! (Actually, it was Rimbaud, you know, as in "Rambo.")

Oh, you Pretty Things--I had no idea your name was so naughty

2009-10-13T15:29:00.000-06:00

While I work up my next Proust post, here's an article with some background on the Chaucer business on Dollhouse episode 2.3, that I wish I had already known all about because I studied Chaucer in college--or, hell, even because I've ever read Chaucer at all, even in translation (or maybe I should say modernization). But I didn't.

Mellie and Madeleine

2009-10-09T09:33:00.000-06:00

So I had a joke I wanted to write after finding today's quotation: the connections between Proust's ideas about sleep and psychology have so much in common with the Dollhouse that I'll be surprised if they don't show us a character named Madeleine. Oh wait.

Topher and Mellie/November/Madeline found on Tvsquad

So, here's what I found yesterday (It comes after a fun description of dreamy sleep that I would like to quote but would not like to type, from the 'Saint-Loup at Doncieres' section of The Guermantes Way):

That kind of sleep is called 'sleeping like lead,' and it seems as though one has become, oneself, and remains for a few moments after such a sleep is ended, simply a leaden image. One is no longer a person. How then, seeking for one's mind, one's personality, as one seeks for a thing that is lost, does one recover one's own self rather than any other? Why, when one begins again to think, is it not another personality than yesterday's that is incarnate in one? One fails to see what can dictate the choice, or why, among the millions of human beings any one of whom one might be, it is on him who one was overnight that unerringly one lays one's hand? What is it that guides us, when there has been an actual interruption--whether it be that our unconsciousness has been complete or our dreams entirely different from ourselves? There has indeed been death, as when the heart has ceased to beat and a rhythmical friction of the tongue revives us. No doubt the room, even if we have seen it only once before, awakens memory in which other, older memories cling. Or were some memories also asleep in us of which we now become conscious? The resurrections at our awakening--after that healing attack of mental alienation which is sleep--must after all be similar to what occurs when we recapture a name, a line, a refrain that we had forgotten. And perhaps the resurrection of the soul after death is to be conceived as a phenomenon of memory.

This time the emphases are mine, so young can call me obnoxious, if you don't already.

But, come on, doesn't that sound just a little like the Dollhouse?

I ain't got no soul

2009-10-08T08:20:00.000-06:00

I'm a materialist, though I'll cop to being pretty ignorant about what that means. Still, because of my beliefs I find it hard to see any value in discussing the soul in a serious way (rather than as dramatic-license style handwavium, say), which is why I'm not sure about the value of Ramon Fernandez's essay* 'In Search of the Self' beyond providing the quotation (from somewhere in the Search--exactly where, I don't know) you'll find below.

The quotation, which I had to chew over several times before I could get anything out of it, is worth your time, particularly if you view it as similar to the point of view of a Doll being wiped and imprinted. I'm uncomfortable with all the wiping too.

At whatever moment we consider it, our total soul has only an almost fictitious value, in spite of the numerous tally of its riches, for now some, then others, are unavailable, and this, by the way, just as much whether they be actual riches or those of the imagination. . . For to the cloudiness of memory are linked the intermittences of the heart. It is doubtless through the existence of our body, similar for us to a vase in which our spirituality might be enclosed, that we are induced to suppose that all out internal goods, our past joys, all our sufferings, are perpetually in our possession. Perhaps it is just as incorrect to believe that they get away or come back. Anyhow if they remain in us, most of the time they do so in an unknown domain where they are of no service to us, and where even the most usual ones are pushed back my recollections of a different order which exclude all simultaneity with them in consciousness. But if the frame of sensations in which they are preserved is caught again, they in their turn are endowed with that same power of expelling all that is incompatible with them, of installing solely in us the ego which lived them. Now as he whom I had suddenly rebecome had not existed since that distant evening on which my grandmother had undressed me upon my arrival at Balbec, it was quite naturally, not after the present day which that ego was unaware of, but--as if there were, in time, different and parallel series--without any solution of continuity, at once after the first evening of yesteryear, that I was adhering to the minute in which my grandmother had leaned towards me.

A few comments:

The emphases are Fernandez's rather than Proust's. They do help you find your way through the paragraph.

There's nothing hinky going on with the grandmother--just think of the narrator remembering his experience as a little boy.

The bit about the 'ego which lived them' being 'installed in us' is pretty on the nose for what happens in the Dollhouse chair, isn't it? I wonder what kinds of things were installed before software. Paintings mostly, I guess.

Isn't it funny that the 'different and parallel series' might make you think of Buffy and Angel?

An essay by Marguerite Krause, available for the next week on smartpopbooks.com, about Angel's soul, reminds me that all this business of soul-swapping and Doll-wiping and soul-seeking (not just soul-searching) can be thought of as one continuous meditation on the nature of the self.

*found in Proust: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Rene Girard, Prentice-Hall 1962

Just what does Proust have to say about the Dollhouse?

2009-10-07T12:23:00.001-06:00

You watching the Dollhouse? Yeah, most folks aren't.

The hook here has got to be memory--which weirdly is the word that just went through my headphones ('Burning Memories' by Ray Price).

Memory, especially involuntary memory--in Marcel's case, the return of his childhood, then the whole of his life; in Echo's case (in season 2) flashes of, what, the 23 personalities dumped in her, plus the one that she came in with, and how those give her Slayer powers.

What? No slayer powers? Didn't you seen her pwning in the Jamie Bamber episode? I was all "WTF's with all the Slayer fighting powers. Evs."

Srsly, that's how I talk to myself.

The theme of Dollhouse seems to be that we're all programmed by the influential to be what they want us to be*. I recognize that in my experience, all the way from learning to stand in line in kindergarten, to binge drinking in high school, to my present-day pop-culture-obsessed consumerism.

A theme of In Search of Lost Time is that these memories that reappear to us unbidden, with all their force and vividness, are different in kind from things that we purposely remember or seek to recall.

So, if we equate Echo's Caroline personality, the one she came in with, to an involuntary memory, once that sticks with her even though it's supposedly been removed from her body and stored on a hard drive; and we take that equation to mean that it's different in kind from the 'voluntary memory' of the Imprints she takes out on Engagements, a difference seems to be more real, more genuine, just because it is her natural personality, then we have arrived at a rather vacuous connection of Proust and the Dollhouse.

I'll come back tomorrow and see if I can do any better. Why would I do that? Well, there's an essay contest that I really wish I was the kind of person who would submit an entry for. Hey, my brother got something like this published (just a chapter, not the whole book, this one too), why not me?

*okay, I didn't think of that on my own--Joss said as much in an interview I read recently, but I didn't find it with the slightest effort, so no link for you.

The Horror! The Horror!

2009-10-01T10:13:00.001-06:00

It's the 1st of October and round here that means it's time to kick off the Season of Blood: 31 days of non-stop horror movies to prepare the soul for the only feast day that I enjoy celebrating--that's right, CANADIAN THANKSGIVING.

No, that's on the 12th, but since my job requires I attend an in-service on that day every year, it is pretty faughing horrible.

Anyways, I want your suggestions--there's no need for them to be good movies, as I care very little about quality. I generally prefer supernatural horror, and I think I'll start this year with Nosferatu, which I didn't get to last year. From all y'all I want a bleeding, screaming, weeping, flesh-rending stack of cheap thrills deep enough to keep me occupied until November.

And. . . go!

Spondee & Me: After the Flood

2009-09-28T08:16:00.000-06:00

If you ever get the chance to fill in as a drummer for a pop-rock band at very good show for a very enthusiastic audience, I recommend you take it. It ain't half bad.

It's FAUGHING RAD, actually.

But I've never gone out of town with a band (listen to this pretentious wind bag, he's been 'out of town with a band' exactly twice) without regretting that I didn't have a dictionary with me. Last time it was all about eyebrows leading to the pubic bone, and other adult discussions of hair; this time it's a plethora that's got me prurient.

I just want to quote the Oxford American (2nd ed.): "(a plethora of): an excess of something."

I'm not "literally" waving this in anyone's face--I'm just saying that if you tell this certain someone to grab you a plethora of unicorns before those 40 days of rain, don't expect that famous rainbow to be farted out by no horny horse.

Not Dead, Just Drumming

2009-09-22T09:46:00.000-06:00

Last week I agreed to learn 10 songs in two weeks so I could fill in for Spondee's drummer for two shows in Moscow (that's a college town in northern Idaho, not the site of a Great Fire that greeted the Conqueror Napoleon). I guess one of the shows has been canceled. What-evs. I'm honored they thought of me to back them up; I'm thrilled to accept the challenge of learning the songs on short notice, and I'm digging the songs. Maybe you'll like 'em too.

I have since then done nothing but study those songs. I hope I haven't forgotten the songs I play in A Seasonal Disguise. We got a show on Thursday.

Didn't I used to play in a Country & Western band too? They don't have a MySpace.

Your regularly scheduled Mutant Earth programming will resume after these rock 'n' roll events. Meantime, enjoy the tunes. And please do give something to Steve Perry.

ThunderCats Writer Could Use Your Help

2009-09-02T11:29:00.000-06:00

Tom Spurgeon draws our attention today to a plea put out a couple of weeks ago by Steve Bissette that a writer, Steve Perry, who worked on ThunderCats and Silverhawks (among other things, such as a comic called Timespirits) is in desperate need. Follow those links for details--the short of it is that he has terminal cancer and no support. Donations to him (I'm just repeating what those guys report) need to be postal money orders as he doesn't have a bank account to cash checks. Tom Spurgeon has also volunteered to act as electronic middleman, if you're unable to do the money order thing.

Donations can be sent here: Steve Perry, 38046 8th Ave, Zephyrhills, FL 33542 USA

His scripts are still entertaining me today as I work through my ThunderCats DVDs (and those Silverhawks discs I'll get to someday)--and the Mutant Earth is crawling with Thunderans, so the legacy grows, if only in the tiniest way. He isn't credited on the IMDB for ThunderCats, so I don't know what specifically to thank him for--so the existence Ro-Bear Berbils shouldn't sway your decision to give one way or the other.

Show your gratitude to a man who brought you some treasured childhood memories.

What if armor gave you hit points?

2009-08-13T10:19:00.000-06:00

Clash's post about front loading, particularly the part about armor-as-damage-reduction, got me thinking. First it got me thinking that maybe my ignorance is my only strength, since it has never occured to me that armor doesn't make you harder to hit. Well, armor only exists in D&D as far as my experience goes, so what do I care. Never mind that. It also got me thinking of how that front loading might be made more back-loady by having armor grant hit points, leaving your AC at 9.

Following Delta's mechanic (d20+fighter level+AC>=20=WIN), a first-level non-fighter hits AC 9 on 11+ or 50% of the time. In OD&D average weapon damage is 3.5, so for 100 swings an unarmored combatant would, after waiting patiently to be swung at all afternoon, take 175 points of damage. I guess they used to call the damage hit points, but that will just confuse today's readers and I prefer to do that through garbled writing.

So, moving up the scale of armors, leather will protect you from 10% more blows, resulting in 140 damage on average--as savings of 35 hp. For chain the savings is 70, for plate 105. How's my math? That would make normal shields worth 17 or 18 hp, which pleases me as a convenient way for them to be rather quickly destroyed.

Now what do we do with these imaginary 100 blows? Is that a useful number? How many hit points should the armor provide over its life and the life of an adventurer? How about arbitrarily saying the armor is destroyed after 100 blows? Make it one hundred and one, as that's more folklorish.

Wait a minute, nobody's going to count 101 blows! They will of course be represented by the hit points. Whew. I almost missed that one.

Then again, nobody on the Mutant Earth is wearing any armor yet, and when they do it will probably be force fields, so I don't have a good (that is, requiring no extra work) way to try this idea out, not this week anyway. I'll put it in the hopper.

English is a Sausage

2009-08-11T11:53:00.000-06:00

I'm back from my first Rock 'n' Roll Toor. It was great to play to an appreciative house in Portland, with some of my family there, who made the hour-long (even when they're not trapped in traffic) drive to see us. It was fun to jump and bray like a jackass all day in Nick's car and half a day in Josh's car, and all night in the sweaty European style sheets of my room in Seattle.

But that's of scant interest to all of you, I know. Unfortunately I don't have anything to say about D&D today either. I've got a load of ideas for my Mutant Earth Megadungeon, but I can't share them until my players have encountered them--and they have killed the living crap out of my players.

Travelling the Pacific Northwest I was reminded of all the bizarre (to my ear) words English acquired in the course of taking all this territory from its natives--many of which I can't really see as strange, as they are so familiar, like Massachusetts and Mississippi. No, I can totally see how bizarre those are in English vocabulary, even more so with the placenames in Washington state: Snoqualmie, Walla Walla, Puyallup . They're a definite spice in our word-sausage, added to the bulky, knobby Anglo-Saxon, and the broad veins of Norman French and chunks of Old Norse here and there. But surprisingly little of Celtic origin considering how long speakers of the two language families have lived side-by-side. I wonder if any of my UK-native readers might share their feelings about these weird American placenames. Hi, Chris!