Doing a bit more research on my next Witch Queen adventure when I turned up this little Italian gem.  So. What do you get when you mix Italian actors, Norse myth, a witch, the son of the Devil, and a magical throne?  Well, you get Il trono di fuoco or 1983's The Throne of Fire.

The Throne of Fire (1983)

Azria the witch is impregnated by the Devil to give birth to a mutant baby.  The baby grows up to become the less mutated Morak played to great scene-chewing effect by Harrison Muller. Born at the same time is Siegfried played by Italian stuntman Pietro Torrisi in his last role.  I can't really find much on him.  

In order to gain the Throne of Fire Malak has to marry Princess Valkari, played by Sabrina Siani.  Now, obviously, this is an allusion to Valkerie, but they keep pronouncing it "Val-Kar-EE."  Hmm. I can live with it.  Malak captures the Princess, but not before she can show off her own Xena moves.  

Siegfried comes to the court of the former King Agon, and now belonging to Valkari, to fight Morak.  He stabs Morak, which only causes him to laugh and reveal his "devil face" ala Lucifer.   Defeated he is tossed into the Well of Madness, which admitted was fun.  Here, for reasons, he finds his father, Well it is revealed in a long flashback that he was in the court when Morak first attacked.  He makes Siegfried invisible and invulnerable to everything but fire. 

Siegfried teams up with the Princess and helps her escape, but not before Morak can shot him with a flaming arrow. 

Recaptured Princess Valkari shows she is more than capable of getting herself out of jams and if that means sacrificing Seigfried, well she only just met the guy after all.  She doesn't wear much more than what is show in the poster above in this, but that is still a lot more than she wore in the Blue Lagoon rip-off, the Blue Island.  But I'll give the writer and director credit, for a bit of 80s, Z-Grade Sword and Sorcerery romp Princess Valkari is quite capable. She manages to escape on her own and kill a few guards in the process while Siegfried is still tied up.  

Malak lets Siegfried go to lead him right the Princess, which of course works. And they are recaptured again.  This is getting monotonous. 

Malak charms the Princess to get her to marry him and the solar eclipse happens, "The Night in a Day," so he can sit on the Throne of Fire.  But I guess the timing was not quite right, because when Siegfried throws Malak onto the Throne he burns up.  

Valkari becomes the new Queen and the people want Seigfried to be King.  Really???  He didn't really do a damn thing.

Game Content

The Well of Madness is nice, and a real Queen would have given Seigfried a title and then told him to pound sand.   A Witch Queen would have turned him into a newt for his impertinence. 

Not much here though that can't be found in other, better movies.

--

Tim Knight of Hero Press and Pun Isaac of Halls of the Nephilim along with myself are getting together at the Facebook Group I'd Rather Be Killing Monsters to discuss these movies.  Follow along with the hashtag #IdRatherBeWatchingMonsters.

When I first started in RPGs I was all about complexity and systems that mirrored everything, these days, I am more about simplicity.

Day 21 Simplicity

There used to be big debates in RPG circles, narrativist vs. simulationist.  Gamist was thrown in there as well. You don't see that as much anymore. Well.  You do, but now the focus has shifted a bit. 

This debate has waged on in various formats, various permutations, over the decades. But in the end, the one that wins out for me is Simplicity.

I like a lot of games. I like to read and play a lot of games.  I don't like needing huge volumes of pages to explain to me how to play a game.  Sure I understand the value and the place of supplements and "Splat" books, but the core needs to be simple and complexity for complexity's sake is not a value. 

AD&D is a great game, but let's be honest. The rules are a hodge-podge of systems that are largely unrelated to each other save in a post hoc fashion. The layout of the rules is equally poor. We learned it then because it was what we had and we didn't know any better.  AD&D 2nd Ed is better organized (sort of its purpose) but there are still bolted on systems.  Honestly look no further than skills and psionics.   Also, AD&D 2nd ed loses some of the charms of AD&D 1st ed.  Is the charm in the complexity or is the charm in our memory via "Nostalgia Goggles?"  Hard to say. 

D&D 3rd Edition did a bit of a better job of this. 5th Edition does a better job still.  Still neither are at the level of say WitchCraft, Ghosts of Albion, or even Doctor Who Adventures in Time and Space.

I am not trying to imply that simpler is always better.  For example, many of the Powered by the Apocalypse games are quite simple and none of them have ever really grabbed me.  In fact, I usually find them too simple.  

But for me, I desire to remove unneeded complexity for complexity sake and keep my games and my designs a little more simple. 

Today's alt-word has been on my mind a lot lately.  I have been wanting to talk more about it so today feels like the day. 

Day 20 Lineage

Since its inception, D&D has had race as a feature of the game.  However, since its inception race has been more or less been misused.  Really Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, and Humans are different species.  Now while it is true humans can interbreed with elves and orcs I am going to stick with the notion here that they are species.  

Race, as a term, has a lot of negative connotations about it.  There is the idea of ethnic or phenotype determiners of race. There is the colonialism notion of races, and how that was used to justify all sorts of crimes against humanity for centuries.  There are even the Theosophical ideas of races which seem to be the well that D&D has drawn from.  In the end "Race" is not only not even the proper word, it is a woefully loaded word.

I like Species myself.  But you might say "but species can't interbreed!" except of course when they do.  There are sterile hybrids between species, there are even fertile ones. These range from plants to animals and even mammals.   Even in humans, there are fossils that may be human-neanderthal hybrids and many scientists think that we may have killed all the other archaic hominids or we may have bred with them until their genome was absorbed into ours.  We know from mitochondrial DNA scans that Neanderthals share more alleles with Eurasians than with sub-Saharah Africans.  

I also remember having debates in my Philosophy of Science class that species only serve the needs of scientists making taxonomic nomenclature.   

So can all the D&D Player Characters be different species? Of course. Can they interbreed? Absolutely some of them can.  But this is not really the full picture either.

Let's take the term used by the latest D&D 5e book, Lineage.  

Lineage has none of the baggage that race does. Nor does it have to overly complicated scientific logic that species does.  Lineage allows you to build what your character is.  

From Tasha's Cauldron of Everything:

At the first level you choose:

• Creature type. You are a humanoid. You determine your appearance and whether you resemble any of your kin.
• Size. You are Small or Medium (your choice).
• Speed. Your base walking speed is 30 feet.
• Ability Score Increase. One ability score of your choice increases by 2.
• Feat. You gain one feat of your choice for which you qualify.
• Variable Trait. You gain one of the following options of your choice:
• Darkvision with a range of 60 feet.
• Proficiency in one skill of your choice.
• Languages. You can speak, read, and write Common and one other language that you and your DM agree is appropriate for your character.

Simple.  You can rebuild any race you want.  

Just prior to Tasha's Arcanist Press released their Ancestry & Culture: An Alternative to Race in 5e.  A fantastic guide.  Where Tasha's uses "Lineage" this uses "Ancestry," which is in my opinion just as good.  But this product also includes "Culture" in the mix.   So what if you are a human raised by elves?  Or in the case of my own Sharis Val, a drow raised by dwarven clerics in a monastery.  It can even explain the already established differences in the three types of halflings/hobbits with fallohides/tallfellows having halfling lineage and living near elven culture.  Yeah, they are taller and the like, this is a blog post not comparative biology. 

You can also vote for Ancestry & Culture: An Alternative to Race in 5e for the 2021 ENnies awards. It is up for:

• Best Electronic Book
• Best Supplement
• Product of the Year

Pathfinder 2nd Ed also does something with all of this too.  Their system is more mechanically oriented.

Personally, I prefer this over the systems we have been using.  

I would adapt these to Old-School play, but I am going to wait to see how Chromatic Dungeons does it first. 

The annual ENnies awards is now open for voting and as usual, there are a lot of great choices to vote for, or at the very least shop for.

I might get into my picks later on (have to see how long voting is) but for today I want to focus on one particular book and maybe convince you to consider voting for it.

Up for Best Adventure and Best Cartography is Halls of the Blood King for Old-School Essentials. 

I reviewed Halls of the Blood King last month and frankly, I loved it.  So it is great seeing it get some official recognition.  It would be even great if it wins.

It has some serious competition, in particular from the Alien RPG adventure.  But keep in mind that OSE is still largely a one-man operation of Gavin Norman.  Alien and Free League is a more traditional publisher.  So to say that OSE and Blood King are punching well above their weight class is not hyperbole. 

So, if you can make the time, give HotBK a vote for both Best Adventure and Best Cartography.

Should be easy to stay on theme today.

Day 19 Theme

If my participation in the Character Creation Challenge in January, the April A to Z Challenge, and this month's #RPGaDAY Challenge, is any indication, I do love a nice theme to work with.

In my blog posts, it gives me a little extra focus and a little extra motivation.  It gives me something to look forward too and apparently, my readers agree.  My hits tend to go up during these times.

This year I am going to be doing my usual October Horror movie marathon and I am considering doing a Lovecraft film fest.  While that has some appeal and something I wanted to do for a while, but sadly many of the movies are not very good.  Not to mention I have seen most of them already.  Kinda defeats the purpose of the Horror Movie Challenge.

I will also be participating in the RPG Blog Carnival for October. The subject, naturally enough, will be Horror.   I have a few other treats for October planned as well, it is practically my holiday.

Other themes I enjoyed recently were BECMI month last year, Troll Week, Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, and for a deep cut, Superbabes.

I still want to do a series of Superhero posts including some different approaches to the superhero genre.  I could easily spend a month on that. 

Today's word is Write. Something I do every day.

Day 18 Write

Theodore Sturgeon, the American science fiction author, once stated that "ninety percent of everything is crap."  This has been come to be known as Sturgeon's law. 

I am not sure about his quantification, but I agree with the spirit of his adage.

Once upon a time, I did not consider myself a good, or even a fair, writer.   I enjoyed doing it for myself, but I never felt I would have anything worth publishing.  But at some point, it became obvious to me that the only way to get better at it was to keep doing it.  Not just do it, but also to get feedback and use that feedback.

These days I like to think that I am much better than I was.  Am I good?  That's hard for me to tell on this side of the keyboard.  I look at things I have written and often think "Wow. That is some good stuff...but it could be better."  Even books I am really proud of, Ghosts of Albion, the first Witch book, I look back on and see things I really would like to go back and "fix."  Not that they are broken per se, just things I would have liked to have done differently.

I am not talking about game design, I am always tweaking that (my "Basic" Monster stat block is a good example), but rather wording.

Blog posts are a good place for me to practice this and to get some feedback.  So if I have over 4,730+ posts up now (with a little over two-score in draft mode) that would mean according to Sturgeon that would mean that just north of 4,200 posts here are "garbage" and only 470 or so are "good."   I would like to think the good posts are a little higher, but again I can't argue with the spirit of these numbers.

Even if over 4,200 of my posts are garbage they did serve their purpose. Sometimes that is just have something to ponder while working something out, a bit of playtest, or at the very, very least, practice writing.   And this is just the stuff you have all seen.  I have a lot, maybe even a near equal amount that has never seen the light of day and may not.  That's fine. 

This is also one of the reasons I like to participate in these sorts of challenges.  While some ideas are easy, others require a lot more thought on how they relate to me. Writer workshops often have work sessions where you are given a prompt and have to come up with something.  This is the same idea only I have a bit more of a heads up. 

Hopefully, after 14 years of doing this blog I am still getting better.

The name of the game was Dungeons & Dragons.  So there was a certain expectation on, well, dungeons.  But that is not all of what we got.  Sometimes we went outside.

Day 11 Wilderness

Live-Action Role-Playing was not really something we knew a lot about back in the early to mid-80s.  Yes even in my little town we had heard about SCA but that was something that happened far away in places that sounded exotic to us.

We did know about live D&D. 

Of course, we had heard stories of people getting trapped in their make-believe world. I mean we had seen Mazes & Monsters right.  But still in the time after discovering D&D and before discovering easy access to alcohol there was a time when my D&D group would run around the woods wearing all black to play "live D&D."  Sometimes this was near the train tracks near the Hospital north of town but most often it was at the local Boy Scout camping area out way west of town.  Known as Ebaugh County Park, we always called it Ebaugh Corner since it was on this corner of old Route 36.

It felt a lot bigger than what is on that map I can assure you.

We didn't get out there often.  Our town was hit with Satanic Panic back in the mid-80s and we worried the cops would come out and harass us. 

Not a lot of D&D was played here really.  Frankly, my eyesight was getting bad then (and it never got better!) so running around in the dark was not something I could well.  I was actually pretty pathetic really!  I remember my last time there too.  June 1987 right before college.  

I never really did try live-action D&D again. Was never really my thing.

This has come up again recently as I am getting ready for a trip to the Renaissance Faire in Bristol, WI.  My son and his friends are all dressing up in Assassin's Creed gear. I have been there in the past in Steampunk gear.  Though I must admit I want to go in period clothing and keep a Star Trek badge hidden, just in case.

Hope to head there this weekend.  It might not be the actual wilderness, but for a city kid like me, it is close enough.

Going for another alt-word today. Plus it gives me the chance to talk about one of my favorite topics.

Day 10 Advantage

One of my favorite new mechanics with D&D 5e is the Advantage / Disadvantage ruling.  It is pretty simple really. A situation is in your favor, roll with Advantage, that is roll two d20s and keep the highest.  If a situation is against you then roll with Disadvantage; roll two d20s and take the lowest.   

It's not really revolutionary, but it is a nice quick way to adjudicate rulings and many rules use it.

Simply if you have advantage due to one condition and advantage on another one you still have only two d20s.  If you have advantage and disadvantage they cancel each other out. 

The thing that I like about it the most is the nice probability curves they generate. 

You might recall that prior to selling my soul to the dot com world I was a Statistics professor at the University of Illinois colleges of Education, then Medicine. I taught at the undergraduate and graduate levels for years.  I LOVE statistics.    

I knocked together some simple frequency graphs of rolling a d20 normally, with disadvantage, advantage, and with a simple +3.   These are chances of rolling the number (1 to 20) or higher on a d20.

The Data

The Graphs

Rolls are on the X-Axis (1 - 20) and the Probability on the Y-Axis (0.0 - 1.0).  

The red line is our normal d20 roll. Blue is disadvantage (2d20, take lowest), yellow is Advantage (2d20, take highest), finally, the green is normal +3. 

Is it much?  Not really in the short term, but over 1000s of rolls over the last 7 years the effect has added up.   And it is always a lot of fun.  Especially when you are rolling and get two 20 (a 1 in 400 chance). Fun when you are rolling with advantage, but fantastic when you are rolling with disadvantage.

I have adapted it for use in my OSR games and it works great.  

It's a Monstrous Monday and it is also Medium day for the #RPGaDAY. 

Day 9 Medium

Most of my monsters in the various Basic Bestiary are Medium-sized.  This works out well for a number of reasons, but mostly it is a boon for something I had been wanting to do for a while.

In D&D 5 monsters have different HD die types depending on their size.  It works out like this.

Table: Size CategoriesSizeSpaceHit Die Tiny2½ by 2½ ft.d4 Small5 by 5 ft.d6 Medium5 by 5 ft.d8 Large10 by 10 ft.d10 Huge15 by 15 ft.d12 Gargantuan20 by 20 ft. or largerd20

So Medium monsters use the common d8 for hit dice and the truly monstrous Gargantuan creature gets a d20.  While AD&D and Basic D&D went more for larger creatures having more HD this works for what I call the giant baby problem.  A gigantic creature can have a lot of hit points, but no combat ability, two things that HD covers. 

I also like this idea for personal reasons.  When I moved from Basic D&D to Advanced D&D I often used a d10 for monster hit points and not the RAW d8.  I figured the monsters had to be more "advanced" so they got more hp.  I also rationalized this with the fact that Basic fighters use d8 for hp, and Advanced fighters used d10.  Of course on average, this is only 1 extra point per HD, but I liked it all the same.

3e and 4e also used different die types for hit dice, but these were different for different types of monsters.  I like the 5e way of using these for size. 

You might have seen these in some of my write-ups.  The Mad Hatter Goblin is a small creature. I list it's standard HD is 2 and it's average hp from a d8 and it's Con mod is 9 +2 or 11.  As a small creature, the same 2 HD and +2 con mod gives the creature an average hp of 7 +2 or 9.   Sure not a lot of difference, but enough over the long run. 

I am presenting both sets for people that want to use my "Advanced" set of size-based hp calculations or the standard RAW ones.   I have been using this for a while now and while there might not be a significant difference in the play of the vast majority of monsters, the ones it does affect really affects them.

I hope people, especially in the OSR crowds, take to the change.

We are back around to Sunday and that means we are all on the same word.

Day 8 Stream

I think it is no great assumption to say the advent of streamed games online has changed how the public sees RPGs in general and D&D in particular.

Making the claim that shows like Critical Role have increased the number of people interested in RPGs is not really disputed regardless what one's opinion of them is.

Personally, I am not a fan of watching or listening to others play D&D.  I have nothing against them, and I think many of them are quite nice and I am thrilled for their successes and for what it means for the game as a whole.   I just get bored with them.

Right now my favorite streaming pass time is The Great Courses.  Thanks to this I have listened to/watched the history of the world in various courses from early pre-history to the Victorians. I have listened to a number of courses on religion, detailed history on England, and more about the Vikings than I care to admit.  Currently, I am listening to How We Learn by Monisha Pasupathi, Ph.D. It is really great even though much of it is a repeat of my Undergrad days. Though I am chaffing under dismissal of treasured theories that have since fallen out of favor. ;)
Most of these Great Courses feel like undergrad courses, but I have really been enjoying them. 

So far I have gone through about 33 of these, about 75% of another Undergraduate degree. Though this degree would most likely be in history. Sadly there is no homework, no assignments, and no exams, so there is no opportunity to show I have been anything more than a passive learner.

Mind you in my choices here of one stream vs. another (say Critical Role vs. the Great Courses) is not a value judgment in any way other than how I choose to spend my own time.  I also listen to a lot of highly questionable music while at work.  

I think for my next stream I could work on shoring up my German. A language I learned in High School and for a couple years in college that I have not used in nearly 30 years. 

Getting back to this last week I was at my parents' and the week before I was celebrating my wedding anniversary.  So let's jump in feet first with another cheesy 80 Sword & Sorcery flick. This time I am watching 1982's Sorceress.

I was pretty sure I had never seen this one before and I was right.  I would have remembered something so dreadful.  Bad acting? Check. Weird mutant creatures? Yup, check. Gratuitous nudity? Oh yeah. Lots of violence against women? Well, yeah it was the 80s.

Let's be 100% honest here, this movie was made for one reason, to show off the nubile assets of Leigh and Lynette Harris, and I am not talking about their fighting ability. Or acting ability. 

Besides being known for being Playboy playmates in 1981. Lynette also went to prison for 5 months in 1990 for tax reasons. She and her twin were both mistresses of businessman David Kritzik.  He was paying them to have sex with him and the IRS doesn't like it when they don't get their cut.  They both would later be exonerated in 92.  Not to be outdone Leigh would later expose herself to some minors.  Their real-life stories sound more interesting than this movie.  Though they seem to have fallen into a bit of obscurity.  Likely that is what they no prefer. 

Hmm...maybe I should return my attention to the movie.

Not to dump on this movie too much.  We do have a cool wizard who gives the twins their fighting powers. A creepy satyr. A generic Viking-like warrior.  An evil sorcerer who is also the twins' father. An evil priestess. Zombies attacking. And a battle of the gods.  So I mean all the right elements are here.

It does have Corman's fingerprints all over it.

They have the same abilities as the Corsican Brothers; they can feel what the other is feeling.  With the brothers that was typically pain, these two...well it's a bit different.  The idea though is not a bad one, I used a similar idea with the Anamchara.  Well, the sensing the others feelings part anyway.  

Roberto Ballesteros, the evil sorcerer Traigon, is really the only one here that has any sort of resume here.  I hope the poor acting here is really due more to bad dubbing.

I will give the director credit on one thing.  While the twins are constantly in trouble they never once appear weak or scared about their situation.  When given the chance they pick up weapons and fight.  Sure they act naive at times, but they were sheltered their whole lives so that is expected. 

In the end rather laughable, but the zombie battle is fun.  The gods battling in the skies is weird, but I will admit I got a solid Deities and Demigods vibe from it.  Ok the D&DG if it were made by Roger Corman

Yeah. Not great.

Gaming Content

The movie is very generic 80s fantasy; derivative to be honest.  It's not so much what you can get out of this for your game since likely your game has already done everything in this movie. 

--

Tim Knight of Hero Press and Pun Isaac of Halls of the Nephilim along with myself are getting together at the Facebook Group I'd Rather Be Killing Monsters to discuss these movies.  Follow along with the hashtag #IdRatherBeWatchingMonsters.

Going with another alternate word today.

Day 7 Inspiration

Every so often I get asked what sort of things inspire me.  I usually half-jokingly say 70s metal, cheesy horror movies, and comics.

Only half-jokingly because there is a not-so-small amount of material in my bibliography of published material and blog posts that are exactly all of that.

Presently I am re-watching Star Trek Enterprise with my wife. We only saw bits and pieces of it when it was new, our kids were babies then, and keeping up on TV was not our main priority. 

So Enterprise takes place before The Original Series, thus the ship feels a little "low tech" and everything has a frontier feel to it.  While I am enjoying it for its own merits I am getting a ton of ideas for my two Star Trek campaigns; BlackStar and Mercy.  Season 1 deals with the Temporal Cold War and the Temporal Accords, which comes up later in Star Trek Discovery.  This is also putting back into the mood for a combined Star Trek/Doctor Who game which means FASA rules.  BUT inspiration aside I don't want to start YET another Trek game. I haven't even gotten the ones I am planning off the ground.

SO...maybe I can add some of these ideas to Mercy, BlackStar is a bit full as is.  Maybe I can add a character from the 31st century on my medical starship.  But why is he/she there?   Maybe I'll leave that to the player.  

Getting back to music for a bit, there is a song that has some solid Trek connotations to it.

One of my all-time favorite songs by the band Queen is '39.  Written by the guitarist, and Ph.D. in Astrophysics, Brian May.   The song deals with 20 astronauts that leave Earth on a one-year-long mission. One of the astronauts says goodbye to his wife and daughter, but due to the time dilation effects of moving near the speed of light, it is many, many years later when they return.  While he is "older but a year" his daughter is a grandmother now.   In the song, they had discovered a new world.

I have often thought it would be possible that later warp drive ships would run into older, slower relativistic ships with a crew that had left Earth decades if not a century before.  You see this played out really well in Arthur C. Clarke's The Songs of Distant Earth.   It was one of my favorite books of his and I loved the idea of "gritty" space travel and one very removed from the notion of warp drives.

Now we have seen visitors from the past in Trek before, TNG's first season episode "The Neutral Zone" has frozen humans from the late 20th century, the second season "The Emissary" with frozen Klingons, and the awkwardly named "The 37's" from Star Trek Voyager's second season with humans from 1937 found on a planet in the Delta Quadrant some 70k light-years from Earth. 

This would be an adventure for Mercy.  The starship Mercy gets a distress beacon from a ship that left Earth in 2139, just prior to the wide adoption of warp drive. Yeah, there are cargo ships that can go warp 1.8 or so, but most ships are going to be sleeper ships. Mercy, being Mercy, goes in to investigate and discovers a crew from 156 years ago.  Likely the ship, I might call the Arthur C. Clark, was headed to a planet that is now claimed by the Klingons, or Romulans, or some other species.  

I'll need to ponder this one a little more. In any case, I guess I'll keep looking for inspiration.

A couple of REALLY GREAT Kickstarters are happing right now.

The Night Companion

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jasonvey/the-night-companion?ref=theotherside

This sourcebook for Night Shift: VSW RPG blows the doors off! New classes, species, magic, monsters, core system options, and more!

Night Shift has been a labor of love for Jason Vey and I.  It has been a chance to use the rules we love (Old-school D&D) and bring it to a modern supernatural setting like the licensed products we have worked on in the past.  If you liked any of my work regardless of the system used then this is a great fit.

Here is what the book is right now:

• Four new character classes: the Divine Warrior, the Mystic Martial Artist, the Psychic Gunslinger, and the Spirit Rider
• Rules for playing supernatural species including Celestials, Driven, Ghouls, Infernals, Lycanthropes, and Vampires, expanding upon the "Supernatural Race" option in the core rulebook
• New options for generating ability scores for normal, gritty, and cinematic games
• Rules to convert your game from class-and-level to entirely point-buy
• An alternate Alignment system focused on good, evil, light, and dark
• Guidelines to convert your game to a unified mechanic: both d20-based and percentile-based options are covered
• Enhanced combat rules: variable weapon damage, range increments, weapon classes, grappling rules, jumping, drowning, suffocation, poison, disease, and more
• New Arcane Powers and spells, plus enhanced rules for ritual magic 
• A GM section that goes behind the scenes of the system, talks about keeping track of your play style options, gives guidelines for creating cults and secret societies, and discusses tropes of sub-genres of horror and how to use them in your game
• Dozens of new monsters, enemies, and NPCs for your game
• New art by industry notable Bradley K. McDevitt, commissioned just for this book. At first, it will be the new classes and species, but more may be added depending on how well the Kickstarter does (see Stretch Goals). 

And at the $5,000 stretch goal, I am going to provide a new Night World!  And I am quite excited to bring you this one.

Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/magpiegames/avatar-legends-the-roleplaying-game?ref=theotherside

This one so doesn't need my help. I scored $1 Million in its first 24 hours and has been hitting $1M a day since. 

But it is Avatar and it is a lot of fun.  I am not a huge fan of Powered by the Apocalypse, but this game is just too gorgeous to pass up.  Plus those sweet stretch goals.

So spread the word!  Both of these games are going to fantastic.

Going to go with an alternate word again. 

Day 6 Explore

Back on Day 2, I talked about maps. So I figured today would be a good one to go with Explore.

Exploration is a key factor in a lot of games.  In D&D and other FRPGs exploration is a key element in Hex Crawls. Even in games like Traveler and Star Trek exploration is a key element.

In truth, I don't do a lot of exploration these days in D&D. Most, no rather, all, my D&D games have a goal in mind.  When I ran Vault of the Drow a while back I did a lot of reading on what others have done with it in the past. There is a ton of material out there on exploring the area around the vault of the Drow.  Dragonsfoot alone has more material than I'd ever use in a lifetime. 

For my BlackStar game exploration is the name of the game.  Well, that and horror.  I think that is because in BlackStar I really don't have anything like a "big bad" save for all the horrors of space. I am also not sure what my end game for it is, maybe part of the exploration will be mine as well. 

Dungeons

Also, this month is all about Dungeons at the RPG Blog Carnival and hosted this month by Plastic Polyhedra.  Certainly, the Underdark of the Vault of the Drow qualifies and it would be fantastic to go exploring there one day.  

I think today I will go with one of the alternate words on the list.

Day 5 Community

Today I am going with Community.  One of the things I really hope to get out of this month of posting is to get a sense of community from this.  

While writing these posts is a joy in and of themselves and I do enjoy the challenge, what I am looking forward to is the community. 

I am very curious to see what everyone else does.  Take today for example.  I have no idea what I would write for Throne and I am very curious about what others might write about.  Will someone else choose Community?  What days might occur where each word is chosen.  That might be fun.  

I also feel it is important not to be just a passive participant here.  So I need to make sure I also interact with all the other posting on various social media sites. 

So if you are participating in this please feel free to leave a comment below with links to where you are posting.  I'd love to see what everyone is doing and saying.

Excalibur, Stormbringer, Mjölnir, the Sun Sword, Blackrazor, Narsil/Andúril, the Bessy Mauler, the Sword of Kas, Needle, Elbe the Heartbow.  All worlds, whether ours or fantasy have fantastic legendary weapons.  

Quasi-artifacts to quest for or be granted to those that are worthy. 

Day 4 Weapon

Like all good game worlds, I have a number of unique and special weapons.

Demonbane

Demonbane is a bastard sword from The Treasure Trove found in Issue #91 of Dragon Magazine.  The sword is described as "a great, many-hued blade of which the origin has been forgotten, but which was wielded by the great paladin Nord in his single-handed destruction of the Citadel of Conjurers."  Created by Ed Greenwood it would later go on to be called Dornavver in the Forgotten Realms.   In my games, though it became one of the weapons of my paladin Johan II and used to defeat Orcus in module H4.  IT was lost in the Astral Sea and it has been the focus of all my paladins for the last four generations to recover. 

I always thought it might look a little like this sword.  

The "forgotten origin" has been changed to a drow savant, Sharis Val, that created it along with his adoptive father a dwarf cleric of Moradin. The multi-hues come from the variety of metals used in its construction.

Ebonblade, the Sword of Black Flames

Ebonblade's history is tied up in that of Demonbane's.  The story of Demonbane's construction is not as forgotten as reported.  Among blacksmiths, the tale of the swords construction and its use to defeat the Citadel of Conjurers is a tale told by masters to apprentices all over the world.  One such apprentice found where the Demonbane was made and used the leftover materials to make a sword to avenge the death of his killed master.  The materials used in making Demonbane responded to Sharis Val's desire to rid the world of evil and in particular demons.  Ebonblade responded to the hate and desire to kill others and thus became an evil weapon.

The Star Sword

This weapon was made from bit of a "star" the fell to the Earth. Longer than a bastard sword, but not quite as long as a two-handed sword. This sword focuses the magic energies of the wielder into the blade to add extra damage.  

The Mace of St. Werper

Admittedly not all that different than the Mace of St. Cuthbert, in my defense I made mine before I ever read about it in the DMG.  This one though was specific to my first cleric.

The Death Staff

This weapon is the very first Staff of the Warlock used by my character Magnus. It can blast a humanoid with its necrotic power and turn them into a zombie under the wielder's control. 

 What weapons populate your world?

Interesting one today. The alternate words are just as appealing to me as the main one.

Day 3 Tactic

I am currently in the different stages of a few very interesting and fun projects.  A couple I hope to get you all soon and others I hope their respective publishers get to you.

Presently I am also rereading some texts from my grad-school days and one, in particular, is about course design.  Now while books are course do not serve the same purposes they do have some similar design ideals.  It should be noted in my day of writing course curriculum I run into peers and colleagues who also are professional game designers. At one point I worked with several fellow designers that were also game designers (or had been) for WotC, White Wolf, and Mayfair.  The skills are similar.   But I digress.

The tactics I use to design a course or even design a bit of game work are also similar.

Whenever I have an idea for something. I usually start with what I call a vision document or a notes document. This lays out some ideas and key elements I want for the book/project. Let's take an example for a project I recently opted to put aside for now.  The project on my working projects drive was called "Demon City Tokyo: 2074" and it was going to be an anime-action "Night World" for Night Shift.  The idea came to me last October and grew out of a few other ideas I had "on paper" at the time.  It was going to be expanded on from these core ideas.  So I took that all and placed it in my vision document with some broad ideas; New type of super-collider, Tokyo of the future, some ideas on mixing a lot a Japanese and English for words.  I also linked in a bunch of maps, pages on the internet.  Help pages to refresh my Japanese after not speaking any in nearly 30 years (I can still count though!) and more.

My next phase or tactic in this process is to create the "thick outline."  This is exactly like outlining, save that I am allowed to include paragraphs and other details.  This allows me to start seeing the material in order and allows me to move material around a little easier.  I find doing the vision doc first gives me free-thinking room and then the thick outline focuses these ideas into a form I like.

Up next is detailed writing.  This is where I am on the Basic Bestiary series and where Demon City died.  Not because I did not have the details, but because Dyskami Publishing was coming out with their own Demon City that was WAY too close to mine.  NOW please be aware I am not suggesting anything here other than we both had a common idea.  Theirs is in Kickstarter now and it is likely to be very good.  I felt the world did not need TWO Demon Cities.  Plus as I was working on my detailed thick outline my lack of knowledge of Tokyo was becoming more and more obvious. At one point I even moved the whole thing to my more familiar Chicago, but it didn't have quite the same feel.

Basic Bestiary on the other hand moved forward to the detailed writing stages.   Here my tactic has been to pull any and all material I already had and use it here.  Demon City Tokyo lives on in Basic Bestiary III since a lot of the demons I researched for it are still fantastic demons.  While I write a ton of material here, not all it sees the light of publication or blog posts, and some not in the way they were originally envisioned. 

After that comes playtesting, editing, revisions, layout...but those are all tales for another post I think.

One of the nice things about #RPGaDAY for 2021 is we also get a set of alternate words we can use.  Today is Day #2 and that is Map, but the other words are "Senses," "Plan," and "Voice."   But I am going to go with Map.

Day 2 Map

I adore maps. I knew very few role-players that are not fans of maps.

I talked about this in the past. A lot.

• Lost lands of Middle Earth & Doggerland
• Doggerland as Middle Earth
• The Original Known World
• Victorian London
• Mystara / Urt / The Known World
• Ancient Earth
• Mystoerth!

Speaking of Mysoerth, here is a new color map that fellow Mystoerth fan Matthew Fenn had made. 

It is still a really fun map. If you look I have elements of not just Mystara and Oerth, but a little bit of Al-Qadim and even Gary's Necropolis.  Let's me have all my cake and eat it too.    A couple of things I would love to work into this map are Hyperborea (I already have a Boria) and maybe even a lost continent.  I might need to make my world a bit bigger to fit it all in though.  I have been playing with the idea that it is Ansalon there in the far south of the Far End Ocean.   It would mean redoing large sections of Krynn to fit my world and it might not really even be possible.  But then again my Zakhara does not look anything like the Zakhara from the Forgotten Realms.

I am still using Blackmoor as a common point of both worlds. I am also still wanting to make Hyperborea the land beyond the Black Ice.   I am guessing it is about the size of Antarctica.

Not sure if I can cram everything in there.

Another map that I have been having some fun with is this Flat Earth map known as "The World Beyond the Ice Wall."

I have no idea who made it but I get the sinking feeling that Flat Earthers actually take this one seriously.  I did find out who made it. It was made for a fictional sort of world, but it seems the Flat Earthers have adopted it as truth. 

It does however reflect how I would do Hyperborea.  A land beyond a wall of ice. 

It is August and that means time for another #RPGaDAY from David Chapman and Autocratik. I look forward to this every year. Always some great writing prompts and I enjoy seeing what others come up with.

Day 1 Scenario

I had something planned for this, but I started writing it, and explaining it all was taking way too long. Even then I wasn't getting to my point so I scrapped it.

One question I get asked every so often is why do I like to use published Scenarios, aka Modules.

Simple. Sometimes I like to use something where a little bit of the heavy lifting (map, NPCs, monsters) has already been done. But that is only the lazy reason.  The reason I am doing it for campaigns like Come Endless Darkness and The Second Campaign is to give my players the full D&D Experience. For something like War of the Witch Queens it is more can I take everyone else's witch-based adventures and fit them to a campaign arc of my needs.

Mind you I am not opposed to my own scenarios or adventures. I did The Dragon and the Phoenix and The Season of the Witch campaigns for my Buffy games. 

I enjoy reading other scenarios and I enjoy coming up with them. 

Here's to a great #RPGaDAY2021 month!

Gary Gygax's Necropolis is an odd bit of my personal RPG history. About 25 or more years ago, before I had kids I was working downtown Chicago, this gave me access to the transit rail system and dozens of libraries.  While Wizards of the Coast was scanning and putting up old AD&D modules for free on their website the number of scanned PDFs was non-existent.   So I did what anyone with my resources would do. I checked out all the RPGs books I could from various libraries.  I was young, just married, working on my Ph.D., and had no money.  

In my searches, mostly for books written by Gary Gygax, I found Dangerous Journeys. While the game system was terrible (sorry, it is) I loved the background fluff.  So much so that I add his Ægypt to my own world. I read the Dangerous Journeys and Mythus version of Necropolis many times over. I even finally got my own copy (which I frustratingly can't find right now!!).

It became a central part of my desert region, the Deserts of Desolation and Death, and merging it with bits of Dark Sun is has become the capstone adventure for my Second Campaign.  Though instead of using the DJ version I am using the d20 version from Necromancer Games, published some 20 years ago.   I should note that The Mystical Trashheap blog has a nice conversion of the DJ version to AD&D.

So imagine my excitement when Fog God launched their newest Kickstarter!

Necropolis: An Epic Adventure in the Desert Sands

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/necromancergames/necropolis-an-adventure-in-the-desert-sands-for-5e-and-sw?ref=theotherside

So this is for 5e and S&W.  While both are nice, it is the 5e version that I am going to use the most since the Second Campaign is a 5e game.  Since it is the capstone I am going to have to make it a bit deadlier.  I am just not sure if I need the hardcover version since I want to print it out to write notes on.  BUT I also don't want that wear and tear on my printer.

Delivery is scheduled for the end of the year, so that works fine for me, even if it is a little late. 

I just need to figure out which level to pledge at.