Happy New Year 2009!

Happy New Year, one and all. Here's hoping that 2009 is the best yet for everyone. Inspired by Amityville Mike's list from last week, but with much less insight and forethought, here is my own list of gaming related resolutions for the upcoming year.

1. Complete The Upper Levels of The Dismal Depths: I feel that the heavy lifting is done here, now comes the actual map drawing and inking, then the compiling. I'll figure out how to merge all 12 maps, the Bestiary, and the one page Guide into a single file, create a PDF, and figure out what to do with it from there.

2. Consider revising and trimming down Ulin-Uthor, The Dim Expanse: While Ulin-Uthor will never be distilled down to the granularity of The Dismal Depths, I can certainly edit the existing work in order to dispense with much of the detail which has forced that project to the back burner. As my current gaming vehicle, The Dim Expanse might never reach a completed state, but hopefully in 2009 some section or the entire work will be finished and into PDF.

3. Finish Solstice as a Campaign Setting: Inspired by Geoffrey McKinney's Carcosa, I hope to actually finally settle on some union of Solstice, No Future and Walpurgis that will yield a unique setting which encompasses The Dismal Depths, Ulin-Uthor, and many other homebrew projects I've been working on this past year.

4. Finish the D&D Cover to Cover series: And from those notes and comments write an OD&D Companion. I'm currently on Volume 2, p. 31 with my re-reading of OD&D, so there is light at the end of that tunnel now. I've received so many excellent observations and comments from my readers that have forced me to reconsider how I approach this hobby that I feel something needs to be done with these words of wisdom. I might call it The White Box Companion or something. Hell, I don't see why I couldn't call it The Dungeons & Dragons Companion. It's clearly a review of the books, so I doubt there should be any fear of copyright infringment.

5. Finish Lower Caves of The Darkness Beneath: I've made great strides with this future submission to Fight On! My problem now is which direction do I take? Do I continue with the wordy, detailed writing that I've used thus far (one room is a full page of text) or do I take the buther knife of word economy to the whole thing and attempt to let readers sort out the many indepth themes within?

6. Attend some Cons: This is a must for me. I'm so removed from the living, breathing face to face aspect of D&D that it sometimes makes me wonder if I'm fooling myself. Besides, I wouldn't mind actually meeting some of the other members of this online old school renaissance in person one of these days.

7. Expand my face to face gaming circle: This goes hand in hand with the above resolution. Playing is an extrememly important facet of the referee design process. Given the far flung proximities of my old gaming crew, expanding my circle of players will help engender more real face to face gaming and learning.

8. Encourage my 14 year old to finish his dungeon: And then plunder it with my own Entourage. For so many reasons, I truly hope that my 14 year old son catches the D&D bug. I cannot even begin to list the ways in which this hobby has expanded my mind.

So there you have it. I'm sure I've left a few gaming projects off of this list, but the above resolutions would certainly constitute a very good year of gaming in 2009.

~Sham, Quixotic Referee

Crazy Campaign Idea

So, this idea just sort of hit me as semi-interesting tonight. I bashed out the below text based on the idea.









Walpurgis

The remnants of mankind, those spared by the War Pigs, are given to insanity, addiction, dreams and hallucination in the bleak aftermath of the Electric Funeral. Survival is marked by Paranoid struggles against the threats of a world consumed by madness; from The Wizard of the Vast Wastes and his Shunned minions; the time-traveling, vengeful god-like, merciless Iron Man; the deranged Fairy-King Jack the Stripper and his goose-stepping, steel-booted armies (those same ruthless murderers of drug-induced nightmares seen before the lunatic cries of "Fairies Wear Boots"); the false hope that is the thought devouring Church of Planet Caravan; the mutated, cannibalistic Tainted of the Hand of Doom; the demented Rat Salad Brood of the Forbidden Depths; the Snowblind Horrors that unravel reality beyond Luke’s Wall; to the pagan, demon-worshipping rites of the fell cultists of the Black Sabbath, this campaign is certainly not in the Land of Oz…or is it?

Still one of my favorite albums ever, Black Sabbath's Paranoid. With it's doom and gloom and social commentary, Geezer Butler's harrowing lyrics seem to mesh together to form a vision of mankind's grim demise. Throw in a couple B sides from singles off Paranoid (The Wizard and Snowblind), include the intros and outros (Jack the Stripper and Luke's Wall), and viola, a dozen distinctive aspects to formulate a campaign around. Oh, and yes, Walpurgis is not the preferred title, but in case you're wondering it's the 'original' War Pigs, linked below. Crazy? Yes. Promising? Maybe. How to make it actually work? That's the fun part.



Walpurgis warns about the disastrous end awaiting devil-worshippers, so no I am not advocating black magic or the dark arts or anything. I just love me some Sabbath.

It was either this, or Rush's 2112, but that's an idea for another Crazy Campaign.

~Sham, Quixotic Referee

Solstice: Through The Ages

Excerpts from my tiddly site's Solstice Introduction:

This is not a world of damsels in distress and princes galloping to their rescue, this is a world where the cold harsh reality of evil and darkness pervade everyday life. Mankind is pitted against threats from within and without while the uncaring Fae look on, unconcerned with the meaningless, pitiful lives of mortals. Solstice is a world of ruthless dictators, murderous bandits, greedy merchants, power-hungry generals, corrupt clergymen, brutish lawmen and torch-bearing mobs. It’s a testament to mankind that it has not collapsed in upon itself. Were it not for the constant dangers presented by the monstrous beings of this world, perhaps mankind would have exterminated itself by now.


Solstice is a land overrun by monstrous civilizations; mad wizards in lost towers; labyrinthine, inexplicable underworld dungeons; forgotten ziggurats of demon-worship; secret temples of forbidden rites; cities ruled by unprincipled despots; lost societies of Neolithic savages; vast unexplored wastelands; enigmatic ruins beneath the seas; frozen citadels atop colossal mountains; in short, a bleak, harrowing world of unreason, disorder and chaos.It is within this world of Solstice that your tales of fortunes and fools shall be written. May your tales be remembered and retold.

Solstice is a loose collection of various ideas and notes from my own Game Mastering history, stretching back to the late 70’s. Very little if anything remains from those earliest creative efforts, when world building consisted of a dungeon, inn and village. Solstice does represent nearly thirty years of working toward actually constructing a viable, fleshed out campaign setting. Through the years the campaigns were set in various locales, including Greyhawk, Arduin, and even Waterdeep. The worlds were actually of my own making, but I used the maps, history and trappings of those settings in some form or another. I added regions, fleshed out scant descriptions, and generally turned them all upside down; shaking out the good stuff and ignoring that which didn’t interest me.

In between these published settings, Blackthorn began to grow and take shape. The end result was a system of heavily homebrewed rules highlighted by very specific character Races and Classes. Blackthorn was a dead end of sorts, though. It’s technically an AD&D supplement, wrapped around a world map and some very basic history. Although I typed up and printed off Blackthorn, and distributed copies to my players at the time, we never actually played a game using it.

What remains of Blackthorn is the world map and historical entries. From this brief stab at an actual homebrewed setting grew the roots of Solstice. In creating Blackthorn, the first thing I had to do was expunge all those elements of the aforementioned Greyhawk, Arduin and Waterdeep. Arduin was the last to go, as it was a central nation on the small continent which had hosted two different long running campaigns. The idea at the time was to simply replace Arduin with a new central nation, that being Blackthorn, hence the name of the supplement. I later realized that the title Blackthorn was not the best choice for a D&D supplement, and now here I sit years later using the same theory, instead with Solstice supplanting the original name.

What I wish to do with Solstice is present a modular sand-box setting featuring maps, history, hex details, adventure locales, races, monsters, treasure, and perhaps some optional house rules. This is not a new desire or goal, but I have been encouraged by old school efforts of late, including Fight On! and Swords & Wizardry.

One aspect of Solstice that I have been attempting to fine tune is the various eras and ages of the land. Here are the primary epochs as I have imagined them:

I: The Dawn of Man
II: The Age of Man
III: The Twilight of Man

The Dawn of Man encompasses the age when the Fae slowly lost dominion over Solstice to Mankind. The Age of Man is the time in which Solstice, as currently written, takes place, when Mankind rules the land. The Twilight of Man is the era described in No Future, when Mankind is fading after the cataclysmic events that ended the previous age.

I think The Twilight of Man might now be viewed as a poor copy of Carcosa, even though the concept was formed long before I knew that Geoffrey McKinney was preparing to publish his homebrewed setting. The Age of Man might be too generic, and the Dawn of Man is a recent view of Solstice I’ve formed through some of my creative projects.

So, I don’t know exactly how to proceed. Perhaps move forward and fully flesh Solstice out in the Age of Man, as originally intended, with sections covering those epochs before and after. In the end, the ‘generic’ approach can be eclipsed by good old fashioned creativity.

My current plan is to create a setting using Swords & Wizardry as a rules reference, and get the whole thing polished and presentable. Lastly I’d make it available as a template for inserting adventures and hosting a campaign. I’m hoping I can follow through and get this particular project completed and available to interested parties in the near future.

~Sham, Quixotic Referee

REH, Pulp and Me

Most of you probably share with me a love of pulp fantasy in the Howard style. I find it rather interesting that most of the Grognards I rub elbows with across the interweb probably fall into the Howard camp more so than the Tolkien camp. D&D, of course, doesn't fall into any camp, and it's literary influences were simply generic fantasy as a whole. It took a bit from Tolkien, a bit from Vance, a bit from Howard, a bit from DeCamp, a bit from Leiber, a bit from Anderson, etc. All of these little bits blended together to form a somewhat generic milieu intended to get the creative juices flowing for other aspiring referees who also might want to host fantastic medieval wargames.

What we ended up with, ultimately, in AD&D, was an all-inclusive generic fantasy setting which eventually became the default D&D worlds, inspired by Gygax's Greyhawk, and later, Greenwood's Forgotten Realms. I'm a big fan of Greyhawk, and I appreciate the Forgotten Realms, but at the end of the day, both are somewhat generic melting pot settings of fantasy inspiration. This is not a knock on either, just an observation that both share many accepted D&D standards.

In the past, many game designers, authors and individual fans of particular settings and styles have indeed taken up the torch and molded D&D into more narrow settings. For example, the very first D&D game I ever played (not refereed) was a home brewed OD&D LBB campaign that was all Tolkien, all the time. It was a helluva lotta fun. Clearly, because I am still playing this silly game 30 years later, and can even recall quite clearly those first sessions.

Recently, I have rediscovered my fondness of Robert E. Howard, thanks in no small part to Del Rey books and their reissuing of Howard’s works in their original state. It began in 2003 with The Coming of Conan The Cimmerian. Recently I started reading the sixth such book in the series, Kull: Exile of Atlantis. I read (and reread) the three Conan books; The Coming, as well as The Bloody Crown of Conan and The Conquering Sword of Conan. I also thoroughly enjoyed Bran Mak Morn: The Last King, and The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane. I highly recommend ALL of these excellent volumes. I purchased all but Kull, which I grabbed at Borders a few days ago, from Amazon.com.

Back in the day, I loved the chronological Conan Del Rey paperbacks. It was great fun collecting them and reading them, and (in case you haven’t noticed) I love Frank Frazetta’s art. At the time, I didn’t realize that most of the stories within that long running series were not even written by Howard. Now, in reading these original works, it’s quite clear which of the stories were actually Howard’s own. They jump off the page and crackle with raw, visceral energy. I’m a huge fan of DeCamp, too, but he could never quite do Conan justice. In the end, the DeCamp and Carter fillers simply detracted from the real Howard stories. DeCamp was at his best with his Harold Shea series with Pratt. But that’s a topic for another post.

The new series presents Howard’s work in the order in which the stories were written, and makes no efforts to fill in the gaps or ghost write anything to make it into a complete life and times of Conan. If you aren’t familiar with the real Conan by REH, do yourself a big favor and read The Coming of Conan The Cimmerian. I’d bet that you’ll end up reading all six books. (Del Rey is also publishing other pulp works by REH, I think it’s his Westerns and Boxing stuff. If it’s REH, it’s probably good. But knowing what I know about REH, S&S was his love, the other stuff paid the bills).

This brings me to my recent interest in pursuing how I might incorporate my love of REH (and Lovecraft, too) pulp fiction into my D&D games. My two major side projects right now, No Future and Project X, are basically my dream of somehow blending REH and HPL into an OD&D campaign setting.



All of this has also led me to download and print an awesome stripped down version of TSR’s mid 80's Conan RPG called ZeFRS.

It might be just what the doctor ordered to plug into my No Future setting. But, on the other hand, you know as well as I do that I’ll end up opening my little tool-kit with those LBB and making my own house rules for D&D in a grim, gritty, low magic setting. If I can ever get my hands on the actual TSR game:



I'd be one happy fanatic.

~Sham, Quixotic Referee

No Future

Imagine, if you will, a world ravaged by it’s own past. A world plunged into a second Dark Age, where Mankind has crawled back through the centuries from the brink of extinction. A world where Mankind is haunted by it’s own history, amidst a backdrop of ruin, destruction and apocalypse.

The mysterious, lost technologies of the ancestors of these surviving men, those very secrets that brought about the cataclysmic events which pitched this world into it’s Doomsday, have left their unmistakable mark upon this world. Now for the most part buried under the rubble of ancient ruined cities, or guarded and secreted away, these lost relics are the very stuff of legend, fear and superstition.

Must be Gamma World, right?

Rather than a nuclear holocaust in the modern age of man, imagine a return of “The Nameless Ones” upon a world of classic fantasy. From the Dread Vault, the Sleeping Gods were roused, devouring mankind and laying waste to civilization. A world shattering event as the curtain of reality was drawn open and the chaos of unreason and of the dark truths flooded across this land, leaving nothing more than a few scattered survivors. Mankind was on the brink of extinction, those that were spared struggled to survive in a world gone mad, tainted by the very essence of unreason.

Mankind now consists of scattered societies, huddled together in large enclaves or nomadic tribes, dotting the landscape like tiny beacons of light upon this world thirsting for heroes, this world of No Future.

Instead of a world of the far future, with mankind fighting mutation and robots, No Future is a world of fantasy, with mankind fighting a mind-shattering past and primordial guardians.

Elves, Dwarves and Hobbits are no more. Man stands alone. The technologies lost are essentially the Riddle of Iron, and the many secrets of Magic, now buried and forgotten. There are no Clerics in this world, for the gods have fled the heavens themselves, abandoning mankind in the process. Magic is present, but raw and unrefined, chaotic in nature and never permanent. The advanced techniques and secrets of this ancestral magic are still to be discovered and understood, or perhaps the very Laws of Magic have changed in No Future, no one is certain.

It’s is a testament to the perseverance of man that they did not also succumb to the near total destruction of life upon this world, instead, dragging themselves out of that near twilight of man, and finally into a somewhat recognizable Bronze Age. It is uncertain if mankind has finally reached it’s pinnacle, amidst this aging world. The threats from within and without seem to grow stronger with each passing Winter.

No Future will be a heavily house ruled version of OD&D, using Chainmail inspired combat and new Bronze Age inspired Classes and items, all set against a backdrop of bloody, gory hack and slash pulp adventure. Alternative Combat might be used in the end, but I’d like to try a dice heavy d6 system.

The setting will probably be renamed at some point, and the entire world will be an ongoing project for me. A small distraction from Solstice when I need a break from mega dungeon design. Just something else I can blog about. As far as Solstice relates to the setting, perhaps No Future is Solstice’s own climactic conclusion, as the remnants of man dwindle into the grim history of this world. Perhaps a new working title could be Solstice: No Future.

No Future is inspired by Howard and Lovecraft, but it will be a game of OD&D in scope and spirit. Rules light, unrefined and open ended.

~Sham, Delinquent DM