Wandering DM's Livecast This Weekend!

So if you need someplace to put your eyeballs this weekend and you wanna see how the old schoolies do it then check out my amigos Delta & Paul's titanic live streamed game session.

To celebrate Paul's birthday (Happy Birthday, Paul!), some of the finest gamers on this planet will be congregating for the long 4th. of July weekend in his palatial gaming room to run thru Dyson Logos' deadly "Dyson's Delve", continuing the epic adventures they began one year ago.

You can check out the livestreams here and here all weekend:

Wandering DMs on YouTube.

Wandering DMs on Twitch.

Were I a less philosophical sort of fellow I would be BOILING with jealousy right now, for they are all there in Massachusetts and I am out here in my fortress of solitude in rural PA. But I wish them all the best, and safe journey and travel mercies for all the folks making the trip up from NY. Maybe circumstances will allow me to attend next year's festivities.

Listening in via the miracle of the interblab is the next best thing, and in the meantime while I vicariously enjoy their shenanigans I'll be working on some exciting projects that'll hopefully be seeing the starlight soon.

So stay tuned everybody!

March Hare

Well, I know this blog has been kinda quiet of late, and it's A: because I'm furiously preparing for this year's upcoming Helgacon and B: I just haven't had much all to talk about. The latter's not entirely true, but in the interest of avoiding spoilers for reason A I've been keeping mum.

So here's a bunny!

There's an amazing range of things you can get these days in the hobby, but some things are too specific or too expensive to acquire, and one of these was a 28 mm scale rabbit. My usual go to for minis Reaper has a couple options in some of their metal familiar sets, but as a fellow of limited means I wasn't quite prepared to spend $10 bucks for what amounted to a character accessory.

But I needed an alternate form for one of the hengeyokai characters in one of my upcoming games, so I had to make it from scratch. I'm pretty happy with the result, if I may say so myself. I am beginner level at best working with the green stuff, and a tiny little critter is a challenge.

Anyway, we're a few weeks away game time, and even further from chocolate n' eggs time, but here's a hare to share.

Hippity hoppity!

Some Comments and Cogitations on Clerics

This is a boiled down version of some responses I gave to my gaming muchachos Paul & Dan's Wandering DMs discussion of Clerics from a couple weeks ago.

1: I tried to think about magical healing from whatever pulp literature/cinema I've encountered, and the only example I can think of is the scene in the 1st. Conan movie where the wizard played by Mako healed Conan up in some kind of special effects laden ritual after the disastrous raid on James Earl Jones' snake temple. (Although I think that was also more about curing some pretty heavy poisoning problems. Snake cults... whattayagonnado?) So that's a data point towards maybe just handing a couple healing spells to wizards and being done with it.

I think one of the over-arching issues with finding historical or fictional precedents to the concept of healing magic is that D&D's conceit of health as a numerated commodity just doesn't jibe with reality or fiction. Hit Points are an extreme abstraction of a very complex state/process, a very game based vital resource with healing spells and potions being a very game based solution for replenishing that resource.

In other words the fictions that we base the game on don't turn up with a lot of healing magic because the authors weren't thinking in terms of the characters having some kind of abstract number tied to their health that needs topping up. Generally, a character is either fine until they receive a dramatic enough wound, or any reference to damage they've taken is just there to magnify their courage and determination or heighten dramatic tension.

Often, I think, the literary trope for wounds and healing is the hero gets so roughed up they can't continue, and wind up holing up in some out of the way hideout and getting nursed back to health under the care of a sidekick or sympathetic, otherwise powerless ally, and then coming back healed up and determined to clean house. A prime example of that trope is Yojimbo/Fistful of Dollars/Last Man Standing, or when Darkwolf heals up Larn in Fire & Ice, or Lupin III's dramatic (and perhaps ridiculous) injury and comeback in Castle of Cagliostro. A lot of other examples abound.

The problem being that what works for a single protagonist doesn't really do the same for a large group of protagonists, and spending days or weeks out of commission under the care of a kindly old man or sympathetic schoolmarm isn't really what the game is about.

The fact that a player has a number on the sheet that kind of gives them a meter for how healthy their character is at once a help and a hindrance. A lot has been said about how abstract the system really is, and I think HP is a big part of it, but I also think it leads to questions that don't get asked in the fictive examples above. The biggest one being "How can I make this number go back up?"

Having the HP number there in black and white means that it's harder for the player to accept the literary hand waving and drama building that allows characters in books or movies to play on at full force through terrible punishment. Long story short, I think this is a prime example of game mechanics grinding gears with narrative.

2: I heartily agree with the whole world building aspect that clerics engender, and actually I find it slightly problematic from the viewpoint of a practicing Christian. Since, as you point out, most of the cleric spells are cribbed from the Bible, the general commodification of the miracles performed, combined with having to make up other sources of those miracles to stand in for the big guy upstairs, is a little hard to reconcile. It would still be a problem just declaring capital G God as the functional religion in a D&D game, 'cos the Lord isn't a vending machine in the way that D&D clerics require their deities to be, and so that doesn't work for me either. (I mean, I'm all right enough with coming up with pantheons and such, since you can approach it as an exercise in creative mythology, but still, it's a little sticky.)

The miracles described in the Bible are all meant as teaching metaphors as well as demonstrations of the Almighty's power, in fact there's one passage in the Old Testament where Moses gets in trouble with God for performing a miracle wrong. He strikes a rock to produce water in the desert, rather then simply waving his staff over it, essentially messing up the Lord's demonstration of how faith works. Miracles are always granted with a greater purpose, and the personal convenience of a bunch of jumped up looters is kinda pushing it.

Long story short, I'm kinda in agreement that just letting the matter of pantheons and patron deities not be so front and center is the way to go, if you're still gonna include clerics. I'm okay suspending my belief for a game of make believe, as long as theology, or pseudo-theology, isn't the main thing.

3: I'm kinda unsure about Turning Undead being that big a problem. You guys both talk about it nerfing an entire class of foes, but on the other hand those foes are particularly dire, with the higher level types' immunity to conventional weapons and paralysis and level drain if you're playing them by the book. Sure you can't just turn orcs to dust, but you can stab 'em, which doesn't work for higher level undead unless you got magic items.You can also Sleep, Charm, and Hold Person 'em, which you can't do for any type of undead.

I think here's a point where a happy medium could be reached where on one side turning isn't an automatic kill switch and on the other the undead are more survivable. (I know Paul has a couple of lists of alternative undead powers that he uses instead of bog standard level drain.) Having tactical ways to drive the unquiet dead back or escape their notice is deeply ingrained in folklore and literature. The idea of a Van Helsing like figure (NOT the Hugh Jackman version, tho. Oy...) in the group is still kinda appealing.

I actually very much like that interpretation of clerics, and it informed my cleric character Deacon Silver in Paul's B/X campaign. I think one of the advantages I had in taking that approach was that I was the most knowledgeable about the lore of the game itself among that particular group of players, so it was a natural thing for the rest of the party to turn to me and ask "So what are we dealing with here, Deacon?" It was one of my favorite parts of playing in that campaign in that role.

That being said, you could still have the aspect of exorcism/turning and cut player character clerics out of your game. Relegate the experts to sage status, and allow them to pass knowledge for combating evil monsters on to the party. (In "Dracula" for example, I believe it was Lucy Westenra's suitors who were the ones who drove the stake into the "Bloofer Lady" while Van Helsing merely stood by and advised.)

Maybe, like finding traps, turning undead is a thing any party member can do, as long as they're properly prepared and equipped. Make it a power attached to certain relics, for example, and have those relics operate at a certain level of clerical powers. i.e.: St. Hieronymus' knuckle bone in its silver case can turn undead using the 5th. level column on the table, vs. a small folk charm given to you by a babushka in the village that only turns on the 1st. level column. It's essentially taking the ubiquitous healing potion solution and applying it to turning. There's a piece of equipment for that.

I went into this a bit a while ago here on the Sandbox, when Jeff Rients was talking about monsters that required plussed weapons to hit.

4: In a related point, Paul mentions "Speak With Dead". This to me seems like an ideal spell to swap over to the Magic User's list. That, essentially, is where the term "Necromancer" came from, after all. 

Scholars of the Old School

My awesome compadres Paul and Delta have sparked up a new project, wherein they discuss tabletop RPG's in the old school style.

These guys are two of the best GM's out there and I've been gaming with 'em for almost twenty years. They know what they're talking about, and if you check out their YouTube channel Wandering DM's, you will too!

The Creepy Crawl Chronicles - Session 58

Session 58
FULL HOUSE
Greed – Lvl 5 Homanculus
Tao – Lvl 5 Druid
Vlad Draculastein – Lvl 5 Dampyr
Ritzy – Lvl 5 Homanculus
Tysis – Lvl 5 Fighter
Tarvinir – Lvl 5 Magic User
Arongoth of Hogendaus – Lvl 6 Cleric/Vegetable

Monsters mashed:
1 of Baron Ünterlöb’s landsharks: Stabbed, magic missiled, and pinned to a rock with an awesome sword strike.
1000 EXP/7 players = 142 EXP apiece

Madmen met:
The Von Himmel brothers’ great great great great great great great Grand Uncle Nukus. He’s a spry old bird.

Commentary:

On the journey back to Von Himmel Manor, the players were confronted with the sight of a scrawny little old man clad in a nightshirt and furry hat, pelting furiously toward them up the trail with something huge and horrible burrowing hot on his heels.

As the sprightly senior citizen rushed past them, giggling madly to himself, the party were suddenly thrust into battle with a bulette that burst up from the road and attacked.

After defeating the creature with a measure of difficulty interspersed with a couple natural 20's, by the look of it, they headed on toward the mansion. The old man didn't speak beyond gleeful cackling and rude gestures, but they allowed him to follow them as they continued on their way.

They were met at the edge of the estate by Alexi Von Himmel, who introduced them to his Great Uncle Nukus. Mad as a bucket of beetles, but also a 20th. Level Fighter, Uncle Nukus liked nothing better than to seek out the biggest, scariest monsters infesting the woods and mountainsides and getting them to chase him.

The aggro he'd pulled when he'd met up with the party was the product of one of Dieter Von Himmel's rivals in the mad science biz, one Baron Ünterlöb. Whether this was a random encounter, or the beginning of a new subterranian assault, was yet to be seen.

Tune in Friday to see...

Note: The picture above is the monster Gabora from episode 9 of the original Ultraman TV series. I am firmly convinced that it was the original model for the little plastic toy monster that Gygax & co. turned into the bulette back in the early days of AD&D.

Jeff Rients covered the history of this monster pretty well in his classic 2005 article on the subject. Look at the picture he's got of the first bulette, look at Gabora up there, and tell me I'm wrong.

Shuwatch!

Helgacon XI - The Resplendent Palace of the Sultan

The Sultan, The Sultana, and the Sultan's Bodyguard, the half-djinn Zephyra.

I've been running an Arabian Nights themed campaign called The Thousand Year Sandglass for several years now, such that they've become a regular feature at Helgacon since Helgacon III. This year I decided that it's time to put the Sandglass on the shelf for a while, so I figured I'd give it a proper finale.

Last year's game "The Black Heart of the Burning Lich" featured a siege of the party's base of operations, the grand capital city of Kalabad, by the eponymous Burning Lich, a fiery undead sorcerer king from ancient times that they'd unleashed from his captivity in a bronze sarcophagus held by an evil sha'ir two years prior in "The Tower of Amashazzar". Long story (and neglected blog posts of yesteryear) short, they took him down and saved the town.

So I figured it was time for a celebration.

Hence the setting, the opulent palace of the Sultan of Kalabad. I posted the game's title on Paul's Helgacon Game listing and a brief flowery description, then had to sit down and figure out what I could do with that. Had to cash that check that I wrote with my big mouth.

I started with an elaborate map of the palace. This was the highest seat of power in a wondrous, mythical middle eastern empire, so it had to be at once fancy and fantastical. Here is the main level. I used it as sort of a game board, with player minis noting where they would wind up each night. I had a random roll for where the Sultan and the Sultana might end up as well, which could double the rewards or penalties if the characters' antics took place while they were there.

If you want to see more, watch this space for when I eventually get a campaign book together and up on one of the .pdf/print on demand sites. (I'm putting a pin in that idea here so that I can generate the gumption to actually do it. I gotta do it now that I've said I would. That's how the cowboys do.)

Next, I decided that since the theme of the game was a grand party at the palace, that its focus would be on Carousing. Taking the example of Jeff Reints' mighty and mischievous Carousing Rules, I made up my own custom tables for both failures and successes.

As an example, here's the top level mishaps table, for when the players failed their poison saves to see if their characters could handle all the exotic liquors and other heady amusements they were plied with. Each entry here had a series of elaborate sub tables for dicing out how each mishap would go down.

The Resplendent Palace of the Sultan Carousing Mishaps (d20)

01) Make a fool of yourself with an egregious social gaffe.
02) Insult a member of one of the four Guard corps. 
03) Awaken in one of the Administrative Offices or Halls of Government.
04) Member of Court has fallen in love with you.
05) Suffer a gambling loss to Member of the Court.
06) Tell such an excellent story at the feast that you now must top it the next evening.
07) Insult a Member of the Court.
08) Discover that some Member of Court isn’t who they seem.
09) Awaken in one of the Gardens
10) Mess with something in the Chamber of Wonders and experience a magical transformation.
11) Overhear conspirators discussing an assassination of a Member of the Court.
12) Awaken in Sultan’s personal Yacht.
13) Insult a Disguised Genie
14) Inducted into Secret Society or Cult
15) Accidentally destroy some precious art object.
16) Awaken in one of the Baths, Oasis’, or Fountains.
17) Awaken in Private Chamber of Member of the Court
18) You fall in love with a Member of the Court
19) Become privy to affair between two Members of the Court.
20) Drunkenly release a tiger from the Garden of Exotic Beasts into the palace.

Now, I've noticed in the past when playing and/or running games with the Carousing Rules in play that players will sometimes have a tendency to turtle up and avoid rolling on them. The risks tend to scare the naturally cautious side folks have more than the potential rewards (and potential for hilarious roleplay opportunities) entice them.

To ameliorate this, I came up with a mechanic I called "The Sultan's Favor".

Oooh! Shiny!

I got a bag of plastic gemstones as tokens. Players started with three each, and could spend them to get out of trouble, or earn them when they did something impressive. At the end, they could cash them in for tangible rewards like commissions in the guard or fiefdoms or even wishes granted by the jinni negotiated by the royal family. The colors of the gems had significance, both in what might be demanded in certain situations and what rewards they could bring.

Of course, all of this is kinda high concept for a D&D game, so I hedged my bets and put several unknown dungeon levels under the palace, in case all the carousing shenanigans didn't gel as a worthwhile experience. I spent a lot of time spinning the wheels of doubt about this thing. I planted a lot of ins to the underpalace throughout the carousing section, and made a handout of a mysterious tablet that contained maps of the palace both above and below that I handed to the players almost immediately.



(Partly this was also to account for the complexity and non-angularity of the palace map itself. I figured it was better to just hand the map to the players than drive both myself and a mapper mad trying to accurately depict the interlocking mandala of the Sultan's palace on a sheet of graph paper.)

How it went down:

So seven worthies and saviors of Kalabad dressed in their finest finery and hied themselves to the palace. For three days and nights, they partook of the delights of the Sultan's hospitality. Spies, thieves, and assassination plots were uncovered. A tiger was released from the Garden of Exotic Beasts, but quickly pacified thanks to a Ring of Animal Control. A shark was evaded in the Garden of Luminous Coral. The Sultan's private yacht was sunk in its berth. (Those Imperial Marines really know how to party.) A wizard was cursed with inverted gravity, forcing him to walk on the ceilings and avoid areas of the palace that were open to the sky. The party discovered a secret door in the Grand Library that led down to a hidden underground cache of ancient and magical tomes, scrolls, and tablets.

From there they explored the upside down palace beneath the Sultan's premises. They fled from a swarm of undead, flesh eating beetles. They discovered a throne room guarded by an avatar of Sekmet, lion headed goddess of war. They discovered a roiling cistern supplying water to the palace above, fed by a spinning, careening Decanter of Endless Water set on "geyser". They climbed down the inverted towers hanging in a vast underground dome, the field of sand at its lowest peak littered with fallen architecture and toppled statues. All of these wonders they reported to the Sultan and his Vizier, and were well rewarded and regarded for their discoveries.

Analysis:

Bottom line, I think I had a lot of good stuff and fun ideas here, but it was all too much. If I don't watch myself, I have a tendency to overstuff a convention game, preparing a campaign's worth of material for a four hour session. I'd intended the carousing/consequences of said carousing segment to last for 7 nights, but we broke it off at 3 goes 'round the table by mutual agreement between the GM and players as it was all getting too complex for any of us to manage. (One of my players said they could almost see smoke coming out of my ears as I furiously tried to roll up and adjudicate each intricate situation.)

I think if I were to do this again, I'd cut out the results on the mishaps table that required a who/what/when/and where along with needing evidence to be gathered (For which I used a version of my Dodecahedrons of Detective Work.) and just have results be immediate, like the ones where a character is magically transformed or inducted into a secret society or something. Too many wheels within wheels within wheels here to work out for such a short term game.

I think I also made a mistake in making the carousing mandatory. It would have been better, as Miz. K suggested, that it be a discretionary/wagering mechanic with the Sultan's favor, closer to how the original rules were intended.

So anyway, it was fun enough, and I think despite the furious flailing about my players enjoyed themselves, but could have been better. I think the stuff I developed will fit nicely in a Thousand Year Sandglass book, so watch for that. I will make myself make it happen.

And thus, we bid farewell, for now, to the desert lands of Sanduk Ramul, the Empire of the East with its glittering capitol of Kalabad on the coast of the Crescent Sea.

Sim sim salabim!

The Sandglass shall return. So it shall be!

Gaze inside the Cabinet of Mystery!

Still coming down from Helgacon XI and getting stuff put away. Today I re-organized my minis in the ol' Cabinet O' Mystery, arranging the different departments much more sensibly, I think.

It is as I'd feared some time ago. I no longer collect miniatures, but genres of miniatures. Ah well...

Little Big Score

While we're on the subject of the history of my mini-collection, I suppose I ought to talk about the foundation of my fearsome (and perhaps farcical) force of figurines. Most folks who know me and have gamed with me have heard this one a few times. I might have even talked about it here on the blog before.

Well, long story short (pun intended), in the last post I talked about seeking a "DM's Set" of minis, a bunch of placeholder goons that players with their unique and personally chosen minis could go up against in my games. I got that modest boxed set of skaven for that purpose. And eventually I bought that one undead expansion for HeroQuest, which gave me a nice selection of skellies, zombies, and mummies to throw at them. (I'll pull those out and post a shot of 'em here eventually.)

But my big score, as it were, was acquiring a copy of the Battle Masters game just as it was getting remaindered at KayBee Toys at the local mall. I paid all of $10 bux for it. My memory is vague as of the time frame, but I wanna say it was around 1994-95. I remember setting about painting 'em all up over the subsequent summer break from college, with a bit of help from my brother. I spent an additional $10 on individual bases from the hobby store, so all told that adds up to 100 miniatures for around 20 cents per guy, which is good value any way you slice it. (Especially considering the ogre, all the mounted figs, and the cannon crew.)

I painted most of them, with the exception of the orcs with the skulls on their shields and the good guy knights, which were my brother's handiwork.

The human soldiers made a pretty good contingent of town guards, with a crossbow auxiliary to boot. The cannon crew pretty much hung out on top of the tower as tchotchkes on various shelves thru the years. As you can see we kinda ran out of steam before we got the main force of knights painted up, and I have no idea where the other two mounted human lords got to. The archers' faces were kinda flat and featureless, and I never really liked 'em too much, so while I painted 'em, they wound up in storage without bases. I dug 'em up for this shot and stuck 'em down with fun tack.

On the monsters' side, you'll note we left the riders off the wolves, because they were more useful to me as just dire wolves without goblins on 'em. I often wish that I'd just painted 'em up all black like I did #5 in the middle there, but since they're pretty much relics now there's no goin' back. No idea what became of the gobbo riders. I did the chaos archers up in those kaleidoscopic colors and have always called 'em "dragon men". Never used 'em much 'cos I don't tend to have a lot of use for archer figures in a dungeon setting. The beast men I did up in animal skin patterns and have always used them for gnolls. As I've said, the standard Games Workshop green skin on goblinoids and their ilk kinda bores me stupid, so with the orcs and goblins my brother and I went with skin tones reminiscent of shrunken heads or bog mummies, so that the eyes and teeth would really pop. The shields on the orcs and the doom guards were originally drawn on with fine point marker, but that faded over time, so recently (around last year or so) I dug up a bunch of WH shield decorations I had in my bits box, painted 'em up, and glued them on to gussy the old goons up a bit.

And of course, most of the massed marchers got their own rub on numbers so I could keep 'em straight in combat. 

So that's pretty much been the backbone of my mini collection for a while now.

Skaven and Me.

Waaay back in the day, back when I was a fledgeling DM just out of high school in the early 1990's and running games for friends in college, miniatures were kind of scarce, and I was kinda growing frustrated with the vagueness of "I attack the nearest one" when running combats in the dungeon. Most players could scrounge up a figure to represent their character, but massed mobs of monsters were a tough thing to conjure on the tabletop.

So to rectify this situation I purchased a box set with the idea of having them be general purpose dungeon goons. This was back when Games Workshop was just getting into plastics. Even back then goblins and orcs bored me to tears, so I decided to go with this old box set of GW skaven, since I liked their look and there were 10 of them which is a serviceable number for not a lot of money. (How times have changed. Games Workshop's products and "not a lot of money" don't tend to wind up in the same sentence these days. Bah.)

The way things were at most hobby shops, you just couldn't cheaply or easily get a large number of the same thing if you were buying blister packs of metal minis. (I think by now you've noticed that I've perennially been reluctant to spend a lot of money on minis. Well, to be clear, I mean not a lot of money PER mini. I still buy enough minis for it to be a minor material vice. Say what you will, buying toys makes me happy. My sweet spot right now is between $2-$4 dollars per dude, unless they're especially large or unusual.)

I wasn't quite the ultra-literalist mini-user I am now, so I figured they could do duty as anything from goblins to orcs to gnolls to whatever the encounter tables coughed up. As long as I had some consistent baddies to act as tactical tokens, I was satisfied.

These guys are some of the oldest minis in my collection. Alas, poor #2 got cronched by a friend's parents' hyperactive Australian shepherd when my minis case was left open on the floor of their house in a moment of inattention. (His mom felt so bad about it she got me a gift certificate to a local restaurant as a weregeld, which was totally unnecessary but still greatly appreciated.)

I have a bunch of these old style Warhammer Quest skaven in my copious unpainted pile. I could do up a replacement for him. But I dunno. He'd stand out. My techniques have evolved a lot since I painted these guys. (I think they were actually painted with my art school acrylic paints out of tubes, rather than the bottled craft store paint I work with these days.)

Actually, the one thing about these guys that was truly irreplaceable were those rub down numbers. They're really hard to find these days. (At least for cheap. :-\) A lot of art supply and hobby stores just don't stock 'em in that size. I dearly wish I still had that sheet. It was lost in the endless shuffle of papers I've always been surrounded with long, long ago.

The numbers were my big solution to "I hit the nearest one." Now I could have my players tell me what number they were aiming for.

A lot later, I bought a box set of Rat Ogres and Giant Rats, when I was filling out my assortment of dungeon dangers. I blogged about it a while ago here. I was inspired by Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition when I painted up the Clan WhateverblahblahWHFluff handlers. Because if I'm anything at all, I'm a huge nerd.

And that's that about my rats.

Fantasy Furniture

Been doin' a little recreational painting the past couple days. Nothin' too dramatic, just workin' on my backlog.

Yesterday I decided to have a go at getting a bunch of dungeon set pieces I'd accumulated painted up. The treasure piles were my most recent acquisition, gotten with the idea that I ought to have some metaphorical carrots to go with all the monsters wielding their sharp, pointy sticks.

Although I think when you've moved from collecting characters and monsters to collecting set pieces you've kinda turned a corner. Ah well. C'est la donjon.

Here's a couple more shots:

This one's a real looker...

This guy got painted up over the past week while I was working on other stuff. Another pretty iconic D&D critter a la Reaper. He was an impulse purchase, once again driven by the fact that Bones are so wonderfully cheap, and has been sitting in my backlog box for a long time.

I've never run a game with a Beholder in it, although I guess I'm more than adequately equipped to do so now. I tend to reserve those rounded bases for more science fiction themed minis, but I think this guy could play in a variety of sandboxes, depending on the situation.

 

I do wonder what initial games with the Beholder must have been like, back in the days when the Greyhawk Supplement was just a twinkle in Robert Kuntz & Gary Gygax's eye, so to speak. (From my reading on the 'net, I gather that Kuntz's older brother Terry came up with the Beholder, and it caught Gygax's eye, again so to speak, as a good candidate to add to the monster roster.)

Beholders are very much a D&D monster, something more out of a pulp science fiction story than folklore or fairy tales. They feel almost like a pen & paper prototype for a video game sprite, a list of game effects with a cursory personality (they're mean and bad and want to kill you) and a thin veneer of monster colored paint wrapping the whole thing up.

Of course as 40+ years of D&D have passed they've been fleshed out and riffed upon. (They got a big boost to their backstory in Spelljammer, which I still have a fondness for, even though it could have been a lot better than it was.)

If you're, like, 80% eyeball, do you really want to get within arm's reach of somebody with a dagger?

I may sound like I'm being critical, but actually I kinda like how semi-abstract they are in earlier editions. They're a product of the rising creative tempo of the game, back when there weren't any boundaries on ideas and anything strange and memorable could take root.

So here's lookin' at you, Beholders.

Madness In The Mail!

Hey hey, lookee what I got!

Yes, it's my pal Paul's crazy cards for any sort of role playing game that saps your sanity, a system-neutral snap on supplement to help your players act out going all oofty-mcgoofty when confronted with things the fragile human mind was not meant to know.

You can get a copy of your own right here: https://www.thegamecrafter.com/crowdsale/insanity-cards

Do... do you see it too?

Here comes the cavalry!

As I'm mostly a dungeon delving GM and not much of a wargamer, I don't tend to have a lot of use for mounted figures. I tend to like minis that are the characters or creatures as is without accompanying mounts. (And I kinda don't favor figs with a lot of set stuff built up under 'em too, like vampires with a tombstone and whatnot. Kinda immersion breaking, honestly. I know it's nitpicky and overly literal, but am I supposed to believe Count Blahcula dragged that stone (often cross shaped which raises even more questions) behind them into the dungeon or drawing room or whatever? But I digress...) I prefer my figs on their own two feet and in a generally kinda neutral pose.

All that rambling preamble aside, I do occasionally have use for mounted figures on special occasions, so here are a few that have cropped up in convention games I've run over the past few years. All of these are from Thousand Year Sandglass games I ran at past Helgacons.

First off, we have the dreaded Kordoka raiders, scourge of the deep deserts mounted upon their carnivorous Leopard Horses. I got these guys intending to do a running mounted battle across the dunes. I've got 4 swordsmen, 4 lancers, 3 archers, and a mounted sorceror armed with a high speed version of Flaming Sphere that worked kinda like a hunter-killer fireball.

Sadly the encounter was stopped before it could really get rolling thanks to several well placed regular fireballs and other mass damage spells from the party that I should have anticipated and accounted for, which is part of why I view "The Black Heart of the Burning Lich" as one of my weakest outings in that particular campaign. I'm not really good at mass tactics from the DM side of the screen (like I said, not much of a wargamer). In more adept hands, this would have been a pretty awesome fight. Ah well.

 

These minis came from Gripping Beast, their Arab Light Cavalry box. The sorceror's fast rolling flame balls are from Reaper. All were obtained from my awesome local game store Legions Games.

Next up, a passel of pissed off purple pygmies commanding colossal crabs. That year I was doing a Sinbad-esque seafaring jam called "Islands on the Crescent Sea" and I needed some nasty natives to menace the heroes and their ship as they put into port on a series of deserted islands.

This was an example of kludging together a bunch of stuff I had on hand. The pygmies were intended by Games Workshop to be Forest Goblin Spider Riders, and came with The Battle of Skull Pass box set. (Which at the time, circa 2006, was a great deal for about $50 bux, giving you a pretty decent amount of minis. If only GW product was so reasonable now...)

Well, the spiders were too awesome to not use just as giant spiders. (Or convert into even worse things.) So I was left with a bunch of crouching goblins decked out in loincloths and feathers. But then I had a Reeses Peanut Butter Cup inspiration with a handful of crabs from a Target bought set of sea creatures, and there you go. I only had about 5 crabs vs. 10 gobbos, so I got a bunch of assorted crabs via amazon.com and improvised a few special characters.

Here's their chieftain and his bodyguards. The mixed crabs had some beefier versions of the crabs I used for the rank & file, so they became the chief's retinue, and I did some putty and bit boxing on the big little man's horrible, barnacle festooned doom crab to make it appropriately monstrous and gnarly.

Naturally hostile natives gotta have a shaman, so I mounted the unit musician with his skull bonker on a hallucinogenic looking fiddler crab.

Finally, since all I had left were some smaller crabs of a different species, I did a hunter pygmy with a pack of tracker crabs to patrol the beaches and hassle any castaways who dragged themselves ashore.

Finally, taking my inspiration from my crabby little creeps, I mounted an amazon mini I had from Reaper's Savage Beauty box set on a sea turtle, and created Julnar, Daughter of the Sea, who was more of a benign encounter/guide type character.

This is another example of a mini I didn't really know what to do with. (Again, call me over literal but I just thought she'd look odd kneeling her way around the dungeon or whatever when everybody else was in "standing ready for action" kinda poses.) I think she works pretty good on turtleback.

And so that's pretty much what I got for mounted stuff, aside from a bunch of old knights from Battle Masters that my brother and I painted up waaay back in the day. (Like, I'd say 1995-1996 or so.) I painted the three villainous ones on the left and my bro did the noble knights errant on the right. They're okay for early efforts painting wise but honestly don't see much action on the table.  (Pardon the dust. They usually hang out on shelves when I have shelves to spare, right now they're taking up space awkwardly in a plastic container in my closet.)

I'm pretty much including them just to be complete in my cavalry coverage.

 

Giddyup! Hi ho, Pewter (or plastics) away!

Also, whoot! I surpassed 2016 for number of posts! Onward and upward!

Insanity Cards

I would be remiss (one might even say, crazy) if I forgot to mention my friend and longtime dungeon pal Paul is running a crowd sale at The Game Crafter for his innovative Insanity Cards.

The more folks who buy in, the cheaper it'll be for all of us who've bought a copy. So check it out, and try to ignore the hamsters talking to you from under the floorboards. They're cheapskates, and wouldn't know a good gaming product if they had it crammed in their grubby little cheek pouches.

Henchmen and Hounds

One feature of old school type gaming that I enjoy is henchmen. While admittedly they're more mouths to feed, both literally and metaphorically with treasure and XP, having a couple extra hands down in the dungeons can be a really good thing. Especially since there are a LOT of mouths to feed down there and it might be the difference between whether you or your hired help get volunteered for that job.

The best ones develop their own personalities and become just as much a fixture of the campaign as the player characters. (I still fondly remember Melchior (with his missing fingers and his justified pathological fear of wolves) Strang the Unlucky, or good ol' Frog from when I played in Paul's ongoing campaign back in the day.)

Meta game wise, they're a great source of backup characters if your primary character fails their save vs. the big Trapper Keeper in the sky and you don't want to wait to get back into the action until the party extricates themselves and treks all the way back to the tavern to find a new sucker adventuring companion. This is why I always recommend henchies get a full cut of the in-game loot, even if they're only drawing 1/2 exp. It makes an easier transition than the party just deciding all of a sudden the former flunky suddenly gets a pay raise.

So I decided to have some hireling figs on tap with my dungeon kit, just to have 'em.They can also do duty as town guards or bandits if need be. I dunno why I decided to make them kinda like starter Pokémon (water, fire, and leaf types) but the rock/paper/scissors aspect of that may come into play somehow. Who knows?

  

These guys come in 3 packs so they're a good way to fill out your roster on the cheap. You can also get 'em with spears, bows, and x-bows if you wanna get fancy. I didn't, so sword guys are good enough for me. 

I've also got a faithful porter, for those non-combatant, stuff carrying jobs where you might not want to bring a pack mule or pony down into the depths. Reaper's got a pretty decent peasant with pitchfork and torch. With a little modification to the fork, like maybe turning it into a spear or quarterstaff, they could make a good torch bearer.

Good ol' Yothrick the Downtrodden.

Now another form of dungeon helper I've seen before is someone often has the bright idea of bringing dogs into the scary, monster and trap infested underground. I'm a bit more ambivalent about this. Just like henchmans, dogs are really under the control of the DM, but are a bit more unpredictable since they're animals and unless you've got a druid with the right spells along it might be hard to get 'em to understand or do what you want. 

It pays to remember that they're just dogs, not remote control robots who can bite monsters. They'll spook at really unnatural things like undead or aberrations. They bark, which at the right time could be a vital warning of danger but at the wrong time would be like having your own pet shrieker following you around. Plus if you bring 'em along just to set off traps you probably ought to scratch "Lawful" or "Good" even "Human" off your character sheet if it somehow got on there.

Still, I figured it'd be worth picking up a couple of doggos for either extra help on a delving crew, or even better as K-9 units for any town guard entanglements the party might find themselves in. It's always worth remembering, if the DM allows you to have it, then they get to use it too.

Big puppers. These guys are pony sized in 35mm scale. In fantasy world dog curbs you.

'Tis the season...

... for me to cover the table with miniatures that need paintin'. It seems to happen around this time of year. I dunno if it's just an after affect of the holidays or making plans for upcoming gaming events.

So this year for Christmas, my nephew got me a bunch of dice sets, which led me to cook up the idea of making a portable, ready to play "D&D kit" for those random occasions where I run into a bunch of folks who're interested in playing but have never had the chance and we all have a few hours to kill and aren't going anyplace.

Okay, it's 00's on a d100, but if that extremely unlikely set of circumstances comes up I wanna be ready for it. Plus it's an excuse to buy more minis, which is one of my few material vices.

Part of the portability factor is having some minis that are nice and durable, and also blazingly cheap. Thus, my selections are all from Reaper's gloriously affordable Bones line. Now that I've sussed out the proper way to prime and seal them, without getting unfortunate chemical reactions and unwanted tackiness, they've become my brand of choice. Did I mention they're inexpensive?

My axe of choice on the tabletop is Labyrinth Lord. It's nice and basic, and easy for me to lift up the hood and tinker with. So for the six dice sets I chose and color matched the classic tetrad of classes (fighter, thief, magic user, and cleric) and filled out the rest with the most popular of the demi-human classes (elf and dwarf). Sorry, halflings. Guess you came up short.

I've got a couple smallish maps from the inestimable Dyson Logos that I need to key up, and I'll make some quickie character sheets, probably laminated so that they can be used with dry erase pens.

Of course, into any dungeon, monsters must fall, so I got some workable basic stock:

 

Skellies

Giant Bugs

Berserkers

Miscellaneous Critters

Ochre Jellies

Living Statues

Deep burrowing aberrations and their Brain Beast master

Anyway, that's a good start, but there's so much more to paint and show, so watch this space as the year unfolds.

Oh my fargin grag!

This...
is just awesome!

This just washed up on the beach as I was surfing the net, but here's the original Source.

Critter Condos

Being a nerd with OCD, nothing thrills me more than getting my toys nicely organized. I just finished whipping my miniatures collection into partial shape, and so I thought I'd blog about it, as one does.

I've found that these bead organizers are great for storing and transporting minis. I favor this style manufactured by Darice which can be picked up at Michaels or whatever your local craft store might be for about US$2.50, with an additional 99 cents for a bit of foam to line the bottoms of the chambers. You get about16 small cells and 1 large one, which as you can see here with my Fantasy Heroes & Henchmen set holds a decent selection. 

They're cheap, very nicely modular, and with a little extra foam padding and some rubber bands I've found they stand up to air travel in a carry on suitcase quite nicely. And they fit pretty well in a lot of places at just 10.75 X 7 X 1.5 inches. Being able to travel with minis is a big deal for me now that most of my gaming is in remote locations.

Now all I need is to figure out a good storage case for larger stuff. It's a bit more of a challenge. For lack of a better oxymoron, these miniatures are too big.

Have fun, will travel!

P.S.: It is also as I predicted/feared: I've gone past collecting individual miniatures to collecting entire genres of miniatures. Ah well, at least I got someplace to put 'em now...