Enjoy The Weird Gap Between My Teeth (video interview about everything)

I can't think of a bigger endorsement than that:

Interview on Demon City and LotFP

This is a post GenCon interview from Full Metal RPG.

And in case you missed it, here's an actual play podcast.

Only two more days left in the Kickstarter.

If You Want To See How It Works In Play

A lot of people are curious about how the tarot card mechanic for Demon City works in play and how the game feels at the table in general. Luckily the guys at the Red Moon Roleplaying podcast have invited me on to their show to run a game for them, so it's a good example.

After a brief, spoooky intro by the Red Moons, we get right into it...

So if you're interested, have a listen. We had so much fun we went on for like 4 hours, so I think the podcast is going to be cut up into a few different episodes.

Anyway--there's only a few more days left in the Kickstarter, so if you're interested and want a copy--jump on.

Minor Media Blitz

Most of the Demon City pictures are now up in a gallery in New York if you wanna see.

Also there is a nifty interview with me about all kindsa things up at 3 Toadstools.
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Collage Maps, Adventure-writing Process, A City of Cheese

Matt Finch (Frog God Games, Swords & Wizardry, Tome of Adventure Design, Spire of Iron and Crystal, cats and dogs living together) and I had a loooooooooong conversation about pretty much every RPG topic in the universe and the first two parts of it are up here and here.

We had a lot of fun and covered pretty much everything, so enjoy.

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Terror-Inquisitor, Baby Tom Waits, and Urbane Exponent of Ceasing To Exist

This is me, along with occasional co-authors and co-conspirators James Edward Raggi IV and Patrick Stuart being interviewed for the Just One More Fix podcast.

It was a good interview and we got to say a lot of stuff, loudly.

I'm hoarse because I'd been screaming all through the Ennies and then again after I had to scream over everyone at the party after.
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Maze of the Vanilla Medusa

First:

Here is an interview with me talking about Jeff Grubb's Marvel Superheroes game--and why I like it better than all other superhero games. In a lot of detail.

Second:

Many of you know James Raggi, who usually publishes game books I make, but you don't know Ken Baumann of Satyr Press, who published Maze of the Blue Medusa when it became clear James had too much on his plate this year to put it out (and that's a good thing--James should get behind a variety of stuff). Here's Ken Baumann, child star and literary publisher, explaining to a non-rpg audience why he put this book out. And here's a review that compares the Maze to a city in Croatia.

Third:

It's cool that we got nominated for 5 Ennies--if you're worried about the great DIY D&D stuff that got overlooked, you have a wee bit of time left to register to be an Ennie judge next year.

Fourth:

The actual blog entry--

I've noticed that if you have a weird room and a weird monster (not just reskinned weird,  but like what it does is weird) then sometimes it's super fun but sometimes it's just incomprehensible.

Weird rooms plus nothing is sometimes spooky but sometimes just like the players are like whatevs and walk past.

Weird room plus normal monster though--that's almost always a good time. Understandable enough that players can use their heads, novel enough that they have to.

The first draft of The Maze of the Blue Medusa--based on my map/picture--had a lot of weird rooms. (Patrick talks about how we changed it over the drafts here).

My thought was: ok, so we can get away with some normalish monsters especially on the wandering monster table--things that just try to kill and eat you and don't, like, want to buy your legs and turn them into crystal in order to build a monument to their Glassfisted God or whatever. The Chameleon Women, for example, are, mechanically, just stealthy humanoids packing one spellcaster per group. However, even the relatively simple creatures, in the environment of the maze, sometimes just make people go "Ok what the fuck Quay Bros shit is it this time?"

So anyway, point is I think the Maze tastes good with a scoop of vanilla--and the Wandering Monster chart is a good place to put it, since there are a lot of unique monsters on it that will probably get killed and just be replaced with more chameleon women. It would probably make this guy happy, too (though if he wanted to look at the art why'd he get it on pdf?).

So, here's a list of vanilla monsters you can toss in as your players trip through those 300 rooms.

Bats

d100 bats. The AD&D rule for bats is there's a (# of bats)% chance of putting out torches. I think the Maze is a lot more interesting as a true resource-depleting dungeon, then when you run out of stuff you face the difficult choice of finding a hidden exit, finding a way past Lady Crucem Capelli or Mad Maxing supplies together from scraps and stolen equipment inside the dungeon.

Diseases are an option with bats but I kind of hate them in D&D because either you get rid of them and, yay, just made the cleric do a thing or you don't in which case you just hate your character for a while. Or they're "interesting" (now your piss is lobsters!) which is kind of a gonzo grotty zany Old School cliche.

Beholder

Not exactly a vanilla monster, but a standard one. Plus something where at least you know just how scary it is on sight, unlike all the other cryptic bosses hiding in the Maze. Or maybe it's just a gas spore. Maybe not wandering, maybe tucked away in one of the hidden rooms.

Arya Fucking Stark

Faceless assassin 13-year old. But who is she trying to kill? Maybe one of the statues? In which case how? And who is she pretending to be?

Blindheim

The frog so fucked looking you go blind is a good cascade-effect monster. Plus like did we do frogs? Don't think there's any frogs in there.

Carrion Crawler

Scavengers go wherever, right? 

Drow

The drow are so fucking Maze. They'd be like shit who built this lit Maze we should kick it with them this is so #goals. We should kick it with them and turn them into weird spider hate cult friends underground. Whoever built this place must've read Vault of the Drow like...twice. Definitely that. And then they'd be like whaaat? Party of adventurers? You are asleep with our sleepy dust crossbows and we don't give a FUCK. Let's find something blue to touch until it's blaaaack and then resist 25% of all yr magic.

Goblin

Goblins are, as established, bad ideas. Going into the Maze is a bad idea. They'll talk backwards and try to steal art. Players will be like "Hah, idiots" and then the goblins will punch them and then what? The players punch them back but..wait, fuck, some of them are

Nilbogs

haha. Nilbogs get hit points when you hit them. Fucking read a Fiend Folio illiterates.

Lava children

Speaking of the Folio, just like "You hear a hissing sound down the corridor and smell sulfur". And a representative of WOTC is like "We decided it was inappropriate to have players murdering things that basically look like human children" and you'll be like "Yeah we're the OSR, you're lucky you have us, huh?" and then the players fail their Wis save and hug the babies and then scalding.

NPC party

NPC adventurers are like chickens, they're good with anything and they can replace you if you die. Tom Middenmurk's are the best.

Pudding

I can very easily see a chubby blanket of custardthick ooze like the unyellow part of a sunnyside egg scouring the lonesome smooth corridors. Color indicates resistance type: red= edged, blue=fire, etc. Standard biomedical approach to oozes: trial and error it until you get the right combo, then remember which is which. unless everyone who fought oozes last time is dead...

Rats

Rats start to look pretty tasty after all your food's been eaten by rats.

Wizard

In search of exotic stuff to put in stuff and do wizard stuff with. Probably the boss of like the goblins. Accompanied by 2 or 3 at all times.

Children's Pythons

Among the clans of the Black Ocean, the zoological affinities of the Northernkind are reversed, such that the mammal is considered a threat and the reptile an ally.

At birth, each child is assigned a python, for companionship, protection from the depredations of monkeys and to aid in gathering fruit. The child will frolic, sleep and share food with the python and the sight of a child without one triggers the equivalent of an Amber alert.

When the python dies, its skin is read--all snakes are books and all python species of the Black Ocean Isles are biographies. The tale told determines the future caste of the child or--if it belongs to one of the Old Genders--the child's future spouse.

Oh also, check it I'm on TSR's Game School podcast along with Satine.
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Gen Con, True Detective, Sleeping Kids, Merch, How to Run Vidchat Games and more

* Our wizard, Charlotte Stokely, was on True Detective Sunday night.

*If you're going to be at Gen Con, visit Booth 835, (Sigh Co), they'll have got signed copies of Red & Pleasant Land, R&PL bags as well as some very GenCon freebies we made just for y'all.

Also they've got some cool Lovecraft merch...

*In other Gen Con news, there is no way Red & PleasantLand is going to win any of the stuff it's nominated for. Like 20,000 people voted and there's only like 3,000 print copies of the book, so the awards are going to go to mainstream stuff. Just saying: chill. It's nice we got nominated. But the awards are going to skew toward stuff everybody's actually heard of.

* During last week's game, the party encountered the sleeping children room. After half an hour of being verrrry suspicious, they figured out the deal. Laney gave her child-self the Cymric Dirk, the weapon she held as the Knight Viridian, which meant she'd retroactively been the Viridan Knight her whole life and she was suddenly an anti-paladin, which she turned into just in time to heal people who'd had the shit beat out of them by a giant bat which I got to represent with a real taxidermied bat I just got for my birthday. Here I scanned it:

Then she re-went into the room and unpaladined herself and went back to normal. Also some other people gave their kid selves instruments so they have Performance at plus-whatever now.

Which, considering all the ways that room could go, is a little strange.

*Dak has created a group for Old School game merch on Massdrop which is basically a way to get discounts on stuff by working together to make bulk orders. There's an FAQ here.

*Speaking of merch:

...you can get the Red & Pleasant Land art printed on anything now. If you just want a big print you can get that, too.

*We did a video panel on how to run a game over Google + here for Indie plus. It was me and Raphael Chandler and Contessa's Sarah Doombringer and other folks. A lot of people ask how to get started on GMing or playing games on-line: there you go.

*This quicky bit on medieval information tech security was interesting. 

“Whoever takes this book or steals it or in some evil way removes it from the Church of St Caecilia, may he be damned and cursed forever, unless he returns it or atones for his act” etc.

*This G+ thread has turned out interesting: 

"

Loose Ends Thread Have you dropped a chance detail into your game and have no idea where it's supposed to be headed? Put it in this thread.

Got an idea how to turn someone' else's loose thread into a new gameable for their upcoming sessions? Put it in this thread.

"

So far it's got sacrifices being enigmatically murdered before the cultists can get to them, an organ-harvesting witch and more. (If you haven't added me and written me a note telling me you want to be in my game circles, you won't be able to see it.)

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Goats, Bilbo's XP, etc

1. A Movie Review

So ok, everything you've heard about Hobbit: Battle of Five Armies is wrong.

First, you'll hear people being like "This movie sucks". They're dumb and wrong, as this short post-movie conversation with Connie reveals:

Zak: "Listen to this review: 'Bilbo Baggins is the only character capable of eliciting genuine reactions from the audience'."

Connie: "Uh, really? What about warpigs?"

Z: "What about wargoats?"

C: "What about trolls with morningstars for legs?" 

Who doesn't have a genuine reaction to wargoats? Nobody I wanna sit near.

Another thing you'll here is this is not a very faithful screen adaptation.

This is a totally faithful screen adaptation--of Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Which is a way better thing to be faithful to than Tolkien.

At one point Gandalf is like "These orcs are bred for only one purpose: war" and then, in like the film-editing equivalent of a typo, like one scene later Legolas is talking to some Other Extraneous Elf about some bats and going "These creatures are bred for only one purpose: war".

Now you might think "Well I have heard the script is a little weak". NO. It's just this is how fucking metal this movie is.  In the grimdark screenwriting of the Fran and Filippa there is only war. And that's good, because, dude: war   goats. Yeah.

Now if you've seen it you're also wondering what's up with Bilbo knocking down like three or four 10' tall orcs in a row by hucking rocks at them. What's up is Bilbo is clearly doing ranged backstabs and must be doing x 4 damage (rock=d4, average 2.5. Times four = 10, which is respectable and could probably knock down even a tough orc if they'd already taken melee damage) and they don't see him because they're in melee with other guys and it's a frenzy.

But how did he get leveled up that far because he's definitely 1st level (or even 0-level) in the first movie.

Ok check it: assuming Jackson's giving xp only for monsters and treasure (SPOILERS below if you never read the books or saw the movies):

Session one: dwarfs clean dishes, contract lunch, all that, then the party kills 3 trolls. Session ends. Bilbo gets enough xp to hit level 2.

Session 2 starts: The party finds Glamdring, Sting and other weapons in the troll hoard, plus kill some orcs on wargs. Level 3.

Session 3: A bunch of social bullshit with elves and the moon. Then the party gets ambushed--Bilbo fights a goblin, most of the people playing the dwarfs and Gandalf have doctor's appointments that day so it's mostly solo and Bilbo does the whole riddle-game with Gollum. Scores the One Ring. You can't get more than enough xp to level up once in a single session, so Bilbo goes from level 3 to level 4 without anyone realizing this is an Artifact.

Session 4: Guy playing Gandalf gets back from the dentist, the dwarves fight a ton of goblins, and the Great Goblin. Lottttts of xp for the whole group, Bilbo gets an even share. He's level 5.

Session 5: The party is chased by the White Orc and his minions--during this sequence Bilbo kills a warg, then an orc. Then there's all the pinecone business and they're saved by Gandalf casting Summon Eagles I Keep Forgetting About. Level 6.

First movie ends--I suspect some carousing here.

Session 6: Buncha bullshit with Beorn and his flick eyebrows, then Myrkwood/Mirkwood/Murkwood and giant spiders. Level 7.

Session 7: Elves capture dwarves. Bilbo does a lot of Move Silently which he can because he's a level 7 thief. The wonderful, inappropriate Six Flags Magic Mountain barrel-fight happens during which the dwarves kill lots of orcs. Bilbo sponges his share of this xp: Level 8.

Session 8: Ok, a lot of sneaking and talking and negotiation and Lake Town at the beginning of the session but then Smaug. Clearly the deal here is--even assuming Bard is some dumb deus ex machina DMPC--the party gets a share of xp off Smaug for shaving some hit points off before Bard's called shot to the wyrmbelly.

This leaves Bilbo at Level 9 before the Battle of Five Armies even starts. Though he is still smart enough to avoid melee as much as possible.

P.S. Jackson's Gandalf is clearly Vancian--he's out of spells for the whole third movie.

2. Here Have Some Toys

The Winners of the D&D Widget Contest...

...are two people. Try the toys they made! Because both were cool:

David Coppoletti's Dungeon Remixer using pieces of my and Jez Gordon's Red & Pleasant Land maps. I can't wait to see what else he does with this in the future.

Alec Henry's LOTFP character generator which is not quite perfect yet, but is very good and edged out the other character generators on account of it picks spells

...these two can email me their mailing addresses to which I will send signed copies of Red & Pleasant Land.


3. Wait Have More Toys

Telecanter is on fire with the cool magic items lately.

1. Silver Razor - Shaving a person with this silver razor will cause them to love you until their hair grows back.

..etc.

Highly recommended.


4.  I am interviewed by a frog.

5. If You're Wondering About The Book, This Review Has A Red & Pleasant Land Flip-Through.

6. If You Are Smart And Already Ordered Red & Pleasant Land And Want To Know Where Your Book Is...

Raggi lays out when every recent order shipped--RPL or otherwise over here.

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John Wick's 'Chess Is Not A Roleplaying Game' Does Not Necessarily Indicate He Is Psychotic

First, old business:

1. More preview art for Red & Pleasant Land, available here in the next few days.

click to enlarge

"God, it's so beautiful, I love this. It just makes D&D look so fucking now"
--Molly Crabapple

2. Yes, I got paid in actual money for consulting on D&D. Thousands of dollars. Ask them.

3. No, I don't think there's only one way to enjoy playing role playing games. The internet is just dumb and interprets "Here's how I like to make pizza!" as "Only ever make pizza." Remember the Golden Rule of Internet Shit-Talking: Ask anyone who says otherwise for a quote.

Now, new business:

Like everyone else I know, I saw John Wick's "Chess Is Not A Roleplaying Game" essay and was like "Ok, that's crazy…next".

Someone then plussed John Wick into the conversation where I opined that John saying stuff like  "D&D is not a role-playing game" and "Just a moment ago, I called weapon lists one of the most common features in roleplaying games. These things are not features. They’re bugs. And it’s time to get rid of them." as evidence of a highly advanced state of degenerative lunacy on John's part and John showed up and argued with me.

Then, eventually, he was like Ok, let's actually talk (like, with speech) about this.

So we did. Here's a video of us debating what John said.

For the kind of people who actually care about this kind of nitpicky RPG-definition argument, it was really good. It was an actually interesting conversation. There should be more of these.

Next time I'll ask John what's up with his whole "Indiscriminately killing orcs is bad" thing.
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Pictures and Also I Am On A Podcast Again

1. Here is me talking about my D&D book on a podcast. It has guitars. We go into a lot of detail about the book if you still don't know whether to buy one. Really: just do it. As soon as everyone in the world has one I can stop doing podcasts.

2. Here is a bunch of pictures that you can take and then go And it Looks Like THIS!!! to your players...

The kanji says "That's your sister's head"

Luckily, the fortress is not yet fully operational

The lonely Tasmania of your ignorance

Goatskull Candelabras: Villainy :: Little Black Dress: Closet

It's not everybody who can paint a transparent eye like that

I may not agree with your desire to steampunk things but I will defend to the death how mercilessly obsessive you are about it

Nothing to see here folks! Return to your homes!

Watch me fidget a lot

Interview about game stuff.

Also: Trigger warning, brief discussions of necrobestiality and related topics as well as a great deal of me going "It's like, y'know...".

This Is What 10 Months of D&D Looks Like

Here's the character sheet for my FLAILSNAILS thief, Blixa.

Here's our fighter and Cthulhu librarian, Caroline Pierce talking games on a podcast.

And here's a hack of the Vornhem City Kit for Firefly (or pretty much any other SF game) that wrathofzombie did.

Art History, Amazing Case, Hot D&D Babes On Podcasts

So I was off doing a visiting artist thing at a college...
...and I was thinking about art history, and then I was thinking about games...

Art history fact:

Nearly every new art form whose birth history has recorded (photography, the novel, movies, comic books, popular recorded music...) went through a period where it was attacked for taking on themes too serious or adult for it. This period usually occurred before the art form was considered an art form and often before it had produced anything good enough that anyone would bother defending it as art.

In other words, the part of a creative activity's life-cycle where it is derided as being juvenile and exploitive and has to fight for its creative freedom would appear to often precede the period where it produces something deserving that hard-won artistic license. And may be necessary to achieve it in the mind of the public.

This situation generally resolves itself into an uneasy truce through a process of commercial genrification, whereby the medium ceases being identified with a single kind of work and a single audience and begins to branch out into kids stuff, teenager stuff, pop stuff, arty stuff, etc etc. Part of this genrification typically includes subconsciously assuming that while the medium is capable of art, only some of the genres (and which genres depend on who you ask, leaving the whole thinking conveniently vague to avoid arguments) are.

The word "arty" in this context corresponds roughly to "leave those weird fuckers alone".

After that, the turf wars only recur when stuff basically designed for one audience somehow manages to get itself (through accident or intentional provocation) in front of a different audience.

In other words, the problem is essentially the one where the guy who likes mushrooms and the guy who doesn't are both trying to order the same pizza, and the solution is the same, too.
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Oh Medina Antique Mall, Medina, Ohio, I love you.

Yes, the cobra-fighting-mongoose taxidermy was too big to fit in my luggage and yes, the British tax-stamped Revolutionary War-era bone d6 set I saw last year for 27$ and wasn't quite sure I wanted was gone too, but all is forgiven because...

Holy Fuck Check Out My Vintage Alligator-Skin Sample Case

Narrow enough to fit under the seat in front of you, rigid enough to sit on during 12-hour layovers in Milwaukee, and, better than both--double tiered.
Below is the lower section--exactly the same size as both my laptop and any standard-dimension RPGs, and deep enough to hold 5 D&D core books.
And the top layer? OMG sexy...


And it cost less than a tackle box.

And that jar on the bottom left, it came with like 6 of them.

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And now, some of my favorite grognards...

Also, Top-Right and Middle there are interviewed about RPGs on a podcast, with some intermittent help from Bottom.

There's a lot of talk about being chronically ill (and Mandy says "Roleplayer" when she meant to say "Rolemaster"), but if you hang on, other topics include:

Mandy Morbid, Kimberly Kane, Isabelle Lilium, I Hit it with My Axe, D & D 1st Edition, MUD, Text Adventures, Aspergers, Autism, Shadowrun Kickstarter, Shadowrun Catlyst, Rifts, Classic Rolemaster, Twilight 2000, Fiasco (Bully Pulpit Games), Theatrix, D&D 4e, Call of Cthulhu, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dark Heresy, Monster Manual (Sutherland Cover), Vornheim, Raymond Carver, D&D 5th Edition Announcement, D&D Character Creator, Monte Cooke, StarCraft, D&D 3.5 archive, Arabian Nights Roleplaying, Magic the Gathering, Google Plus, Succubus, Draconian Race, The Sims, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, WoW BGLTQ Guild Story, World of Warcraft, Steam, League of Legends, Heroes of New Earth, Doctor Who, RPG- Cubicle 7, Blade Runner, Star Wars, Firefly, Fallen Angels, Star Trek, Far Scape, Ten Commandments- Ramses II, Rick Santorum, The Joker, Harley Quinn, Drow Elves, Catastrophe Dominated Ecosystems, The Phoenix, Jean-Paul Sartre, Anarchy, Changeling the Dreaming, Sci-Fi Alignment Chart, Autodidact, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, Ragnarok Online

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Oh and
P.S.

Tomorrow is International Anklebiter Illustrator Day!

Get those munchkins drawing.

Some brief notes from the road

Two search terms people used to find this blog today:

"playing d and d with pornstars biting donkeys"

"playing d and d with pornstars animal assisted arson"

If I recall my Actual Play posts correctly, neither searcher will come up empty-handed.

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A simple, weird D&D psionics system I invented at Richard Lurker's request.

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If you still do not own Vornheim here's a relatively thorough video review of that slim but throughly

fucking reviewed volume--start at 13:00.

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Our girl Satine Phoenix getting interviewed about RPGing. It's so cool to see her off running her own games and being all confident and shit and out there making Hollywood D&D friendly. Even if she does fudge on the dice. Interesting new-to-DMing POV.

Percentile Systems, Girl Voices and the Maltheistic Endgame

See the lurid spectacle (actually it's audio so there's no spectacle. Hear the lurid autacle?) of me trying hard not to bore you on episode 13 of this podcast. I do a lot of ummmmm....but some of the questions definitely made me think and it was pretty fun in the end. Parts are slow so listen while you're cooking or something. Topics covered include:

D & D 1st Edition, Shadowrun Kickstarter, Rifts, Warhammer and Warhammer 40K, Chaos, Twilight 2000, Fiasco (Bully Pulpit Games), Theatrix, Vampire the Masquerade, Old World of Darkness, Telnet, Fugazi, Bad Brains, Western, D&D 4e, Google Plus, God Call of Cthulhu, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Labyrinth Lord, Mike Mearls, Monte Cooke, Lingua Franca, CR Greathouse, Inside Baseball, Stormbringer, Realm of Chaos- Slaves to Darkness and The Lost & the Damned, The Necronomicon, Eldar, How DragonlanceRuined Everything, Loom of Fate, Chicago by Night, D&D 5th Edition Announcement, Dwarfland, Classic Rolemaster, ConstantCon, Zak Smith's G+, Joan Rivers, Monty Python, Burning Wheel, Carcosa, Apocalypse Now, Adventure Time, Home Movies, Firefly, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, The Wire (Wikipedia), Lex Luthor, Superman, Hannibal Lecter, The Joker, Ming the Merciless, Tiamat, Tiamat- D&D Version, Demogorgon, Demogorgon-D&D Version, Enuma Elis, The Shawshank Redemption, Deadlands, aaaand Dread