Original Roleplaying Concepts
Today is my younger Brother's Birthday. I also always associate this day as the real first day of the Fall Term. I have been in academia for so long (all my life really) that my calendar still pivots on the Fall term.
So my youngest son started his senior year last week. My older son can't go back to culinary school just yet. My Fall term started on Monday. Time to clear up old summer projects and move into new Fall ones.
And for this, I am asking for a Favor.
I want to get a few more of my books out into the hands of reviewers.
So if you are interested in reviewing one of my witch books or even (or especially) Night Shift, drop me a note. You can post below, but send me an email so you can include all your contact details and where you plan on leaving your review.
Thanks!
Again a couple ways to go.
I could comment on these strange days, but I have other social media outlets for that.
I am going to comment on the #RPGaDAY2020 list itself in that these are a lot of strange words.
Ok, I get it, Dave has been doing this a long time and maybe he is running out of words to use. but knowing and the work he has done in the past I highly doubt he is lacking in ideas. So I'll just put this here as my commentary and that's it.
Ok. Strange. Let's get to the meat of this.
Many of my contemporaries will point to Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tolkien, Moorcock, and Lovecraft as their main sources of inspiration to D&D. While I share the Tolkien, Moorcock, and Lovecraft influences, I also add Clark Ashton Smith.
But those were not my only sources.
Dr. Strange and Tomb of Dracula
The 1970s were a strange time to be sure. The 70s Occult Revival fueled my tastes in games in ways I never knew at the time and only saw in retrospect. Case in point. Dr. Strange comics and Tomb of Dracula. Both were favorites of mine but when Strange, along with Blade, would battle Dracula? Yeah, THAT was an adventure. I wanted my games to have these epic world-changing battles that start small but then go on out to the cosmic scale. Strange didn't just defeat Dracula. He destroyed all vampires.
I was already a huge horror fan at this point and Hammer Horror in particular. So these comics sent me searching more and more strange ideas for my games. I think by 1982 I had read every book of occultism in my local public library. Creating a witch class was an inevitable conclusion at that point.
When the Ravenloft module was released it found a no more welcome home than mine.
I have mentioned this in greater detail here.
Strange Stories, Amazing Facts
My copyThey, like many people of their generation, had a lot of Reader's Digest books. One, in particular, was Strange Stories, Amazing Facts.
This book should not by any stretch of the imagination be considered good literature or even good research. It is however good fun and a fun read.
While the book is divided up into roughly chronological sections including one on the future, it was the past and the monsters of myth that always grabbed my attention. Though flipping through it now that section on the end of the world would be fun to use.
For my birthday about 10 years ago my family found a copy and gave it to me. Complete with original dust jacket (I am book snob and prefer my dust covers intact).
I have been asked in the past to assemble my own "Appendix N". Maybe I'll do that one day.
Noah Berlatsky / August 25, 2020
Tom Brokaw popularized the term “The Greatest Generation” in 1998 to describe the Americans—and especially the American men—who survived the Depression and fought against Nazism in World War II. Brokaw saw this cohort in valedictory, heroic terms.
They answered the call to help save the world from the two most powerful and ruthless military machines ever assembled, instruments of conquest in the hands of fascist maniacs.
They faced great odds and a late start, but they did not protest. At a time in their lives when their days and nights should have been filled with innocent adventure, love, and the lessons of the workaday world, they were fighting, often hand to hand, in the most primitive conditions possible…
In line with this hagiographic blueprint, discussions of World War II veterans are mostly nostalgic and congratulatory. They saved the world for us. Of course, we all know they weren’t perfect (insert obligatory nod here to Jim Crow and Japanese internment camps). But we nevertheless owe them a debt of gratitude for their service and their sacrifice.
But did people at the time see the Greatest Generation as the greatest? Ira Levin’s first novel, 1953’s A Kiss Before Dying, suggests the answer is “not so much.” Levin, who was born in 1929, just too late to participate in World War II himself, presents the men who fought against Hitler much as later writers would present the men who fought in Vietnam. Rather than saviors preserving the nation, the “greatest generation” for Levin is subversive, unstable, and a danger to order and social verities. That characterization of the young gives the book a queasy, disorienting relevance, as if Levin confusedly thought he was writing twenty years later—or forty. Or seventy.
The novel’s main character is Bud Corliss, the good-looking, working-class son of an unsuccessful father and an over-indulgent mother. Corliss is drafted, fights in the Pacific in World War II, and is honorably discharged in 1947. He goes to college, determined to make his fortune by marrying a wealthy woman, and starts dating Dorothy Kingship, the daughter of industrialist Leo Kingship. When she becomes pregnant, however, he realizes that her father will disown her for immorality. He kills her by pushing her from the roof of the municipal building where he has lured her, ostensibly to be married. He successfully makes her death look like a suicide, and there is no police investigation.
Corliss then sets his sights on Dorothy’s older sister Ellen. Using information he obtained about her from Dorothy, he woos her and becomes her fiancé also. She becomes suspicious of the cause of Dorothy’s death, however, and when her investigation threatens to expose him, he kills her too. He turns to the third Kingship daughter, Marion, and she falls in love with him too. However, Gordon Grant, a DJ who met Ellen while she was investigating Corliss, uncovers his plotting and warns Leo and Marion. They confront Corliss in Leo’s factory, where they semi-accidentally force him to fall into a vat of molten copper.
Corliss is a veteran, but he is not portrayed as a paragon. On the contrary, he’s lazy and vain, and these qualities are highlighted, or exacerbated, by the G.I. Bill. He drifts from acting school to Stoddard University, “which was supposed to be something of a country club for the children of the Midwestern wealthy,” his tuition guaranteed by the government.
The war, and social programs for veterans, allow the lower classes to mingle with their betters, resulting in boastful ambition and sociopathic violence. Corliss is evil in part because of his burning sense of entitlement beyond his station, an ambition nourished by the social dislocations of war and welfare. While he’s fighting abroad, his father conveniently dies in an auto accident, symbolizing the son’s emancipation from his past class status and the old hierarchies. Society and family alike are shattered and upended, freeing him to go down “the road to the success he was certain awaited him.”
The novel’s anxieties about Corliss’s class mobility are tangled up with concerns about gendered disorder. He pushes Dorothy to get an abortion (a plot point notably excised as too scandalous in the 1956 film adaptation), underlining the younger generation’s disdain for traditional family values. More, Bud himself is feminized—A Kiss Before Dying is a noir, and Corliss is cast in the seductive femme fatale role. He is fussy and meticulous about his appearance, and determined to advance through sexual wiles rather than hard work.
At Stoddard, as Bud starts dating Dorothy, he orders Kingship industrial pamphlets (“Technical Information on Kingship Copper”) and reads them with devoted intensity, “a musing smile on his lips, like a woman with a love letter.” When he romances Dorothy, and Ellen, and Marion in turn, he is really courting Leo Kingship, the patriarch. Leo’s daughters are merely convenient, interchangeable erotic pathways for Bud’s queer, singular passion. This is Eve Sedgwick’s “male homosocial desire,” in which men’s lust for other men and men’s lust for other men’s wealth and status are intertwined, displaced, and inseparable. Bud has one of his few honest, visceral emotional experiences towards the novel’s end, when he is being given a tour of the copper plant. He sees it as a “heart of American industry, drawing in bad blood, pumping out good! Standing so close to it, about to enter it, it was impossible not to share the surging of its power.” He is at once ravished and ravisher, entering into and filled with intoxicating patriarchal oomph.
Corliss also feels that pulse of eroticized dominance after each of his kills—and especially after his first murder, which takes place during the war. Corliss gets separated from his unit and stumbles upon a lone Japanese soldier, who tries to surrender to him. The enemy urinates in his pants in fear, and then Corliss shoots him, with a sensual deliberation.
Quite slowly, he squeezed the trigger. He did not move with the recoil. Insensate to the kick of the butt in his shoulder, he watched attentively as a black-red hole blossomed and swelled in the chest of the Jap. The little man slid clawing to the jungle floor. Bird screams were like a handful of colored cards thrown into the air.
After looking at the slain enemy for a minute or so, he turned and walked away. His step was as easy and certain as when he had crossed the stage of the auditorium after accepting his diploma.
The phallic gun, the yonic wound, and the orgasmic cries of the birds give way to a post-coital satisfaction more thorough than any pleasure Bud experiences in the arms of the Kingship daughters.
War awakens something in Corliss; he learns the pleasure of violence, which he carries back with him to unsuspecting and vulnerable civilians in the US. The dynamic is similar to David Morrell’s 1972 novel First Blood, in which veteran John Rambo unleashes a one-man Vietnam war on a sleepy American town. Rambo’s violence is notably racialized. Part of what happened to him in Vietnam is that he became infected with Southeast Asian methods and Southeast Asian anti-Americanism; fighting the non-white enemy turned him into the non-white enemy. Corliss, too, becomes what he fought. In the moment before he is forced into the copper vat, he soils his pants, and he remembers the soldier he killed.
The front of his pants was dark with a spreading stain that ran in a series of island blotches down his right trouser leg. Oh God! The Jap…the Jap he had killed—that wretched, trembling, chattering, pants-wetting caricature of a man—was that him? Was that himself?
Corliss’s identity and that of the Japanese man are confused as victims, and therefore also as aggressors. The vision of the Japanese as pitiful cowards substitutes for, but does not erase, the more prevalent image of the Japanese as implacable monstrous “fascist maniacs,” to use Brokaw’s term. Like Rambo, Bud as a soldier is stained with foreign violence. His assault on the status quo recapitulates the assault of a foreign enemy, and his death recapitulates that enemy’s defeat.
Levin, then, presents Corliss as an amalgamated threat, vaguely associated with a range of disparaged identities—young, working class, feminized, queer, non-white, non-American, veteran. This agglomeration of marginalized threats must be squashed by a perhaps overly strict but still essentially legitimate white, patriarchal order.
This familiar conflict is usually seen in pop culture through a generational lens. Levin’s portrayal of Bud foreshadows invidious stereotypes of lazy, feminized, racialized hippies and lazy, feminized, racialized millennials. But if even the youth of the Greatest Generation were smeared in this way, maybe the problem is not the kids themselves, but the conventional, persistently invidious stereotypes of rebellious youth. Every generation, even the greatest, is viewed as a potential betrayer, ready to overthrow the white male capitalist order. And so every generation, even the greatest, must be dumped into that copper vat, melted into the same mold, its old form erased and forgotten so the next generation’s demands can again be portrayed as novel, without history or legitimacy. The greatest generation is always the last generation. The young are supposed to kiss them before dying.
Noah Berlatsky is the author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics.
Archimedes, the polymath of classical antiquity, is quoted with "Give me a lever and firm place to stand and I will move the world."
A lever is one of the six simple machines described by Renaissance writers. The lever is usually the first, though I think the inclined plane or ramp may have historically been the first.
How does this apply to my games? Well...it does in a couple of ways, but the underlying theme is "keep it simple."
Design
Like a lot of people, I have been working from home since March. It has worked out well for me since I can work anywhere I have a solid internet connection. My wife has been home as well and I will admit I have enjoyed being home with her and my kids quite a bit. I often get to listen in on her meetings when I go upstairs (my office is in my basement next to the game room) to get coffee. She has been talking about Optimization Levers all week. In her case it has to do with software development. But it is something I think about a lot in my day job and in my own RPG design work.
One of the reasons I feel I will never fully be part of the Old-School movement (whatever the stripe) is that I prefer simple solutions over complicated ones. Don't give me 10 different ways of doing something in a game when one will suffice. I don't need tables when a simple algorithm and a number will work just as well or even better.
This is one of the reasons I feel that modern D&D is superior, design-wise, to older D&D. I don't need pages of attack matrices for different classes and monsters when 3.x BAB and AC as DC works so much better. I don't need percentile dive for thieves skills and d6s for ranger skills when both can be done with a d20.
The more you can simplify the rules the more then fade into the background and people can just play.
This is the central design philosophy behind Cinematic Unisystem. Everything is d10 based. Successes are based on any adjusted roll over a 9. Simple.
But simple mechanics do mean the game as been "simplified" or "dumbed down." It means the esoterica has been removed. For D&D and Unisystem the lever is the d20 and d10 respectively.
I see a lot of people online complaining that such and such game is "dumbed down" or "made simple," often accompanied by a confession of never actually have played the game in question.
Don't confuse simple with simplistic.
Tools of Design
Likewise, I like to keep my process of design simple. I feel it puts me into the right headspace for design. So my levers here are the basic sort. Paper and pencil.
Don't get me wrong. I am a technophile. My wife and I love to be on the cutting edge of technology. I can even remember a time in the early 90s where I was looking for 50Ω terminators for the in house network we had built when such things were not only not common, but there was no good place to buy all the parts we needed for the multiple types of computers we had at the time.
I will still run stats to determine spell levels and figure out which levels are needed. While I can, and do, run those on my computer, I taught stats for long enough to also do the calculations with a pencil.
Research still involves me, some books, and a folded up sheet of paper that serves as a bookmark and a place to keep notes.
Coffee and pencils. Still my most reliable tools.I mean yes. I will still transcribe those notes onto my PC/Laptop/Phone with some more details. but it has worked well for me for years.
So my advice is to be like Archimedes. No, I don't mean run through the streets of Syracuse naked yelling "Eureka!" But rather use the simple tools and find a good place to stand.
Wizards of the Coast just announced their next book for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition and I could not more excited.
Tasha's Cauldron of Everything is set for release on November 17, 2020. I already pre-ordered the standard and alternate cover from my FLGS so I should be getting it on Nov. 7.
What is this book about? Well, that is Tasha, aka Natasha the Dark, aka Iggwilv the Witch Queen on the cover. Honestly, that is all I need to know.
But...I can see why others might want to know more.
It is going to be set up similar to Xanathar's Guide to Everything with new rules. What do I know is in it so far?
And that is Graz'zt on the Alternate limited edition cover too.
Wizards is hosting a D&D Celebration on September 18-20 and will be revealing more. I am going to try to make it.
Too bad it won't be out for Halloween!
Of course let's not forget the art Jacob Blackmon created for me of the Witch Queens, Larina, Feiya, and Iggwilv!
Name: Prison for a Thousand Young
Name: Leptis Magna
Name: Hidden Within
Again, lots of directions for "Edge" but I think I am going to go with "cutting edge" and talking about the latest cutting edge in dungeon exploring technology.Right now the hottest thing for D&D 5 is the Combat Wheelchair.
Sara Thompson is a D&D player and accessibility educator (and if you had any clue how much money my company spends on accessibility issues you would understand why such a person is vital today) has designed a "Combat Wheelchair" for D&D 5e.
You can get a copy of it here, Combat Wheelchair 2.0.
It is actually kind of awesome, and I wonder why it was never dreamed up before. I mean seriously how many D&D games can point to X-Men comics as a source of inspiration? Certainly someone, somewhere had D&D versions of the X-Men and Professor X included.
She released it on Twitter and very quickly it caught attention. Artist Claudio Pozas even provided some free art for it. She even got a lot good press on this.
https://strataminiatures.com/
Name: Nightmare in ProvidenceYesterday was fantastic!
I got to reprise my love of Dungeon mastering low level Old School Dungeons and Dragons.
I introduced my dear friends Scott and Raven to my Eldorath campaign world, a place I've been developing since High School in the late 80s. The characters began in the Barony of Baconbach, a place I've been using for Knightly Fightly wargames in recent years.
and the Characters are now based in the regional mercantile metropolis of Rosewich, recently annexed by the Barons of Baconbach.
The experience was carefully planned by Scott to be totally social distance appropriate (none of us are healthy enough to risk Covid, and our families are even worse risks) so Scott set up video equipment to project the small erasable game board I had, and the plastic fantasy figures (toys) to keep track of the locations of various characters, which was both easy to use and really helped narrate things clearly while keeping us at totally separate tables. I feared masks would make DM-ing difficult, but they were not a problem at all, so we were able to get the social immediacy you need for a good game and still maintain safety. Kudos to Scott and Raven for the brilliant plan. It indeed deserved to have a tail stuck to it and be called a weasel.
Scott wrote up a precis of the adventure a dungeon crawl in a small barrow dungeon, and I'll share it here so you can enjoy the flavor of our game;
Today began the adventures of Hēlin Fitor and Lighter Graves, cleric and wizard out to explore the lands of Baconbach.
We were met by an unarmored noble, who promised us both 20gp to explore a nearby dungeon. We would later meet at the small town of Rosewich to collect after we made a report of the contents.
With that we gathered our supplies and ventured within, encountering fire beetles feasting on the corpse of a badger. At first, we attempted to catch one in a bag to be sold as spell components to the local apothecary, but they proved too quick—at first. Three dead beetles and one live one in a sack later, we returned to town to sell out new treasure. The Apothecary was receptive to the beetle and offered store credit—which was immediately depleted on replenishing my spell components for my Magic Missile spell (special mistletoe).
We enocountered a sheet named Silvester, who enjoys butterflies, who joined the party, becoming a guide of sorts. Silvester was able to tell if items were magic, and this proved useful.
Exploring to the south led us to an alcove with a grinning unicorn carved into the keystone of the arch. It was a dead-end, containing a skeleton, which, once poked, animated and requested in a spanish accent some water, which Fitor offered from his waterskin. The skeleton acccepted, uttering only "Gracias" and picked a green emerald from its nares. It then collapsed into a disanimated pile of bones.
Having determined that nothing else of interest was in evidence, we turned north and explored there.
Upon returning to the room where we met Silvester, we listened carefully at the door to the north. Raven's character thought there was a sound of something moving amonst metal, trying to be quiet. We opened the door, and were surprised and the wizard was knocked down by a cross, talking pig which carried a silver spoon for a weapon.
After everyone recovered, an argument ensued. The DM used the word oleaginous, so I'm repeating it here; indications were clear this pig was not to be trusted. Slippery fellow, though perhaps not as well as he might have thought himself, as shall be seen.
He gave the name of Pickywiggy Boldpants and joined the party, filling the role of a thief.
After progressing into a room filled with rotting shipping barrels, the sound of sobbing was heard, emerging from the only intact barrel. This proved to be a dish, which, as soon as Hēlin freed the dish from the barrel, caused the silver spoon Pickywiggy had brandished as a weapon to speak: "Marsha? Is that you?"
The dish also spoke: "Jaughn!"
They seemed to require each others company, but Pickywiggy declined at first to part with the spoon, claiming value well beyond the copper, then gold pieces offered.
A brief battle ensued, and this time, we caught the pig in a burlap sack until he consented to accept the 2 gp payment offered. Once he agreed, he surrendered the spoon, took the 1gp (the second to be delivered in town), but he ran off as soon as he was released from the bag, claiming we had not seen the last of him.
The Dish and Spoon were then married by the cleric, and stored in a backpack together. We have no idea what to do with them at this point. I'm pretty sure it makes small sense to sell sentient silverware.
Digging through some offal with a gigantic rib netted the party a ring (which Silvester suggested was ordinary), and we then encountered a basin with water tricking into it. It seemed ... clear enough, so Hēlin filled his waterskin and sipped it, and promptly fell into a deep sleep which lasted an hour.
After rousing from slumber, the party left the dungeon to rest and prepare for their next foray.
Treasure:
The sheet, named Sylvester is a magical bed sheet with a curious back story; he was the winding sheet of a powerful wizard whose dying magical powers seem to have seeped into the cloth and given it life, he's a kind heart-ed, child like, and even a bit dim (sheets are not known for intellectual pursuits after all) fellow, whose one combat skill is taking the form of a charlie brown ghost and going "boo".
The dish and the spoon had tried to run away together, hiding in a barrel of dishes going to Rosewich. Thier origin seems to be in a pewter-ers work hut. Fearing sale and separation they fled. Sadly bandits attacked their caravan and stashed the barrels in the barrow dungeon where they were found. Though completely distracted with one another now, they are kind people, and have some talents that the future shall reveal.
and lastly, Pickwiggy, an unpleasant cad whose love of stealing boysenberry pies from windowsills led him to rob one from the local and powerful witch Ogenhilda, she, naturally took umbrage at this and cursed the odious footpad with life in the body of a pig.
Name: Call of Cthulhu Occupation Kit: Occultist
Name: The Pipeline: A Call of Cthulhu Scenario for the 1980sI am what I would call a casual collector of old-RPGs. I don't think I go crazy to find certain items, but there are some I am always on the lookout for.
I am particularly fond of anything printed in England for example. I have mentioned before I am an anglophile and a huge fan of anything English/British/Celtic/Gaelic. So I have made some effort to get some of the older D&D/AD&D books that were printed in England by Games Workshop.
All these books are softcover, which is kind of interesting.
On my list is a Holmes Basic box published by Games Workshop.
I don't have one of these and all the ones I have found are really expensive.
I am also not an autograph hound, but I have a couple items that I am proud of.
First, Deities & Demigods signed by Jim Ward and a couple of the artists.
Need to get some more of these. Erol Otus and Darlene are my goal.
And my only Gary Gygax signed item.
One last thing on my list is a carded set of Dragon Dice.
I used to get these at B. Dalton's Bookseller in Springfield IL. Had I know how much they go for now I would have bought a couple extra sets.
Yes I know. There are superior dice. And what I would pay for these I could several dozen sets of other dice. But what is the point of going to grad school for 14 years and living on popcorn and pineapple for a year if I can't spurge now?
Name: The Reunion
