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Via io9

Kickstart a collection of teen, homebrewed D&D modules from the 80s!

Now here's a crowdfunder for the ages! The Habitition of the Stone Giant Lord & Other Adventures is a new kickstarter compling homebrew D&D modules from ye "goode olde days".

The project aims to publish those long-lost adventures of kids from the 80s using their original, hand-drawn illustrations and maps and painstakingly typed text. Here's the gist of it, from the project's creator:

In 1981, 13-year-old Gaius Stern wrote and illustrated The Habitition of the Stone Giant Lord in imitation of TSR’s Dungeons and Dragons adventure modules. The Habitition is a true labor of love, typed and drawn as a DIY addition to the “Against the Giants” series of modules, part time capsule and part outsider art.

As art, its text and image show how a creative teen made his own contribution to the genre of roleplaying adventures, but where most such books were the work of a writer, a crew of play-testers, editors, and a stable of artists, Stern went it alone. As a time capsule, it provides a window on a particular way Dungeons & Dragons was played at a particular time.

PlaGMaDA and The Hutchingsonian Presents are putting together a collection of adventures written by young people in the 1980s. The focus is on game modules written by players, including their carefully made maps and painstaking illustrations, framing the sort of adventures we played back when we were kids. Help us print this full color book, it'll be great!

$10 gets you a PDF of the book, print copies are $30. This ain't no retro clone folks, this is the stuff of nerdly dreams brought back to life with a 21st century resurrection spell!

And YES, they're still looking for material for the book--so go get your Trapper Keeper from 1981 and start scanning those loose-leaf notes!

Cool 3D-printable dungeon crawler

So here's a cool thing that couldn't exist until the 21st century--a dungeon crawl tile game you can print out of resin. Here's what you get to make a complete game:

-6 delvers (Warrior, Wizard, Elf, Dwarf, Thief, and Priestess.)

-10 dwellers (2 Skittering Fiends, 2 Restless Spirits, 2 Hogboglins, 2 Shambling Corpses, 1 Cave Gronk, and 1 Ancient Guardian)

-40 dungeon tiles (print the tile set twice)

-6 door markers

-13 counters (6 Treasure counters, 6 Hazard counters, and 1 Stairs counter)

-12 six-sided dice (6 red Offense dice and 6 blue Defense dice) (These weren't printed, though I suppose you could)

All you need is a 3D printer. So if you've got one--or you're handy with that hacker/maker stuff-- then you've got yourself an endlessly printable dungeon!

Check out the full set-up. Props to Boing Boing for finding this little treasure.

Speaking of "cardboard roots"....

My last post about the Forbes article on gaming mentioned getting back to "cardboard roots" in order to revitalize some authentic creatvity. Nine-year-old Caine Monroy has it in spades.

If you haven't seen this video or been touched by the immense creative spirit in this kid, watch this right now. It's been making the rounds since last week when more than $165k was raised to send this him to college--and a matching fund was setup to help fund other kids' creativity.



THAT, ladies and gents, is how you bring some old fashioned imagination to your game--be it pen & paper, video, or of the skee-ball variety.

Check out the full story on the Caine's Arcade website.

Are board games and RPGs better than video games?

Get ready to nerd-fight! Let this recent Forbes article be your primer, which basically boils it down to board games/RPGs are infinitely re-playbable but take bunch of time to create:

“You can buy a great board game for under $20, and every time you play it, it’s a new game,” Silver noted. “This is a toy that can be played over and over again, so the consumer sees value in this type of purchase.”

Compare that with any major release on the consoles. Gamers play $60 for a vanilla title, and often fork out more for downloadable content or expansion packs.

Quintin’s argument is pretty compelling, but I’m not entirely sold. Yes, board and pen-and-paper games do come from a pure spring of ideas, and aren’t bogged down with the limitations of tech or the high expectations of massive profits. But aren’t we actually just comparing apples to oranges?

A good Dungeons and Dragons campaign is hard to beat on its own terms. You have to imagine a great deal.

And you have to set aside a pretty substantial chunk of time. Not just your time either. You need to find actual people to play with. Video gamers often play with friends either in the flesh or online, but at least in my experience the time requirements of a good board game or pen-and-paper RPG are vast in comparison.

...I get that, but isn't that doing that "work" the fun part? One passage I take umbrage with though:

Whereas board games require us to think, and pen-and-paper RPGs require us to imagine, video games tap more directly into the actual play.

We have to actually fight that skeleton knight, not just tell the DM what we’re doing and then role the dice. There’s pros and cons to each form, and while both low and high-tech gaming can be extremely fun and gratifying, I think we’re talking about two very different experiences that can’t really be held up the one against the other.

I'd aruge that "fight" in this example is really just semantics. Mashing buttons ain't fighting anymore than rolling dice. The one instance I could see that point is with gestural-based game systems like the Kinect or Wii (full disclosure, I own a Wii and it's a lot of fun). While I agree playing video games is more physical, I'd suggest it's better to just state that low-tech and high tech gaming gets you to use your brain in different ways and leave it at that.

I do agree though, with his clincher:

Maybe the gaming industry has mirrored too often the film industry, and needs to get back to its cardboard roots.

Indeed. Let's hear it for a healthy dose of homebrew, bootstrap creativity!

Read the full article at Forbes.com.

Your thoughts?

Creative Ebullience: Odds and Ends

Just a quick post while I'm getting caught up with blogging and setting material--I've stumbled upon several kernels of fun/creativity I thought I'd share. It's always good to have some go-to resources to get the gears turning again:

Jeff Rients has an eye for supplemental material, including this 19th Century "Encyclopedia of Useful Facts" to help round out your wild west/steampunk adventures.

While your checking out that free cowpoke book on Project Gutenberg, have a looksee at the Top 100 Books and Top 10 Authors. Everything on the Gutenberg is provided at no cost, but donations are appreciated.

Need template for a pre-historic people for your next campaign? Try the Aurignacians they look ripe for embellishment.

A list of unusual words via Boing Boing. Not meaning to cancatervate links of an inaniloquent nature, but this will help support my own philosophunculist tendencies. Here's hoping that your own ideas dehisce onto the blogpage, as it were.

Also plucked from BB is this Visual Study Guide of Cognitive Biases. Think of it as a manual for designing NPCs, angry mobs, and plot twists.

Okay, many of you already know about Monster Brains, just about the coolest blog anywhere. It's basically a monster manual begging to rolled up with stats. Helpful if you need a to fill a few spawning pools for your creeping hordes.

And finally, this is real dedication: a d1000 random table on spell effects. Don't let the fact that it was written for 4E fool you, there's some good stuff here. It's by in large rules-neutral anyway.

Carry on.