This Is Why This Has Lasted Six Years

I just got this last week.

It's from a friend who saw my ex- and I every week. As usual, we stayed friends after and she didn't believe any of the bullshit, but she moved upstate a few years back.

You can't make this shit up:

 

Everyone who wanted to spread this bullshit took spreading it very seriously. Everyone who knew it was bullshit, well, the nicest way to say this is: they're somewhat less dialed-in.

I would say I don't know whether to laugh or cry but I don't do either any more.

There's no lesson here, we're all fucked. Happy Holidays.

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PC Backgrounds Only Faster

One thing I initially liked about 5e was the skill list--it seemed like a reasonable compromise between all PCs of a class seeming to have identical skillsets (old school) and "Use Rope"-level useless granularity. A few of them felt superfluous (Investigation f'rinstance) but it was basically ok.

The Background system in 5e, whereby a player has a race, class and then a secret third thing they used to do was interesting especially if you have an established world like I do because everybody's bringing a little more meat to the table. I also works well if you often have newbie PCs played by newbie players mingling with 10th-level, 10-year veterans rich in lore.

Being fairly old-school by inclination, however, I did not like how long character generation took--especially for new players, for whom I do not like to create the impression that the game is more complex than it really is. Backgrounds seem the worst culprit here: everybody creates race, class and stats, I can do the modifier math for them, and picking spells and weapons is fun. It starts to feel stupid when rattling off the background list though--so here's what I do:

When running The Zak Hack I just ask "What did your PC do before becoming a (wizard/fighter/thief etc)?" they usually have an answer right away. Then I give them 2 skills they don't already have implied by the job and some useful job-related trinket and move on. (Demon City handles this via the "Occupational Skill" which in turn is influenced by Call of Cthulhu NPCs who all have their own job as a %ile skill, like "Gravedigger 78%").

For example last session my pal Devin made a half-elf wizard and he said he used to be a plumber so I gave him a choice of (pick 2) Persuasion, Perception and Sleight of Hand, plus a guild letter of introduction and some tools.

Then the only question was what are elves doing with plumbing but let's be real, for elf cities the fountain budget alone is staggering.

There's A Very Simple Explanation for All This (reader participation time)

 

Game day yesterday. Got to use the Compendium (get yours today!) for the first time since it arrived in the mail, which was fun and convenient...

...the players found a Dealer In Fine Silks in a cage held by some toad demons in the megadumgeon. They were escorting him back to Port Gobelins after finding him in a cage only to find (after a very dramatic archery contest--thanks dice) that Port Gobelins was besieged on all sides by warriors of chaos.

Since the dungeon originally began at Port Gobelins, they then took him all the way back to the dungeon, reverse-traversed it and popped up back where they started over a years ago, inside the city under siege.

But Here's What I Need Your Help With...

The real chaos came when these long-suffering adventurers, after many battles and negotiations, arrived back in the besieged city and rolled on the Carousing Table. This was the last action of the evening, and here are the results:

-Bleezy the Sea-Elf wizard has a massive hangover (the least of it)

-Bob the Ranger was turned into a pig by a witch on account of lewd advances. (He got better. Bleezy has Remove Curse in old school and in 5e this only lasts an hour, so either way it was temporary).

-Horg the half-orc wizard has offended a local military officer (no small thing in a city under siege)

-Tor the half-ogre barbarian has offended the court wizard (I didn't know Port Gobelins had a court wizard)

-Horg has woken up in bed with the court wizard

-Tor has burned down an entire district of the city and everybody knows (again, no small thing during a siege)

So here's my thought:

While the Carousing Table is a mere chart and the PCs were too black-out-drunk to see any plot or narrative connecting these six events, I am sure there is one. And I am sure it is the seed for next week's adventure.

So, here's the contest:

What happened last night? What Coen Brothers-esque dominoes fell that explains all of this? How does it lead to intrigue in the next session. Best answer gets some free RPG pdf of mine that they don't already have.

If you need background, Port Gobelins is here, on the coast:

...and it looks a lot like Venice and there are little masked goblins running around pretending to be children:

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It Will Be Here, It Will Cost 0$, And Then It Will Be Gone Forever

The hardcover, full-color, 8.5x11", 400-page Compendium is now available. Until Jan 1. Then it's gone. And it costs 0$.

Fifteen years in the making, it includes:

-All of the illustrated Cube World material--fully re-designed to be easier to read, cross-referenced, with notes, including adventures in Voivodja, The Southern Daimyos, The Peacock Isles, Drownesia, Nephilidia and more.

-Dozens of pages of unpublished new material.

-The entire aborted Violence In the Nympharium scenario--re-laid out, redrawn, and deluxified

-An entire illustrated megadungeon--with dozens of levels--which my players have been in and out of for the last 2 years. Designed to be the be-all-end-all dungeon of its kind, with every kind of cool dungeon monster and environment represented in its dozens of levels.

-New completely crawlable maps of the chivalrous continent of Broceliande. Likewise--my players have been in and out of here for the last 2 years.

-Tools and tables to use all of this stuff.

That is--it basically has all the material for my campaign that isn't in another published book, everything in all the Cube World pdfs, and more.

Email me if you want it: zakzsmith AT hawtmayle dawt calm.

Also: The Cube World pdfs are no longer available (aside from the unillustrated utility ones like Book of Jerks)--all that material is now only available in the illustrated Compendium.

None of this will be on sale after January 1st.

And all you pirates--this will not be available as a pdf. It's available in this hardcover only.

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Megadungeon Map

click to enlarge

The players find this somewhere in the megadungeon, showing how the areas connect, where the Gate of Six Keys is and where the keys are.

Awful Green Things In The Dungeon

After many months of being like Oh man I gotta do that, my friend recently dug up the copy of Awful Green Things From Outer Space that he first played as a child--originally printed in Dragon Magazine in 1979 and with the chits originally glued to little pieces of linoleum or something by some 12 year old of his acquaintance back in the day. 

To be quick:

1. It rules.

2. It is highly D&Dable.

So the basics are this:

-There's a ship (above)

-There's little counters for Player One: Crew members with what a gamer will recognize as different Move, Attack and Health stats who can move around the ship.

-There's little counters for weapons they can pick up (pool cues, knives, stun guns, cans of rocket fuel, etc) which have different characteristics.

-There's little counters for Player Two: Aliens who invade the ship starting in a random location. The aliens start as eggs, then become babies, then become adults--all 3 stages with different stats.

-They fight.

If you are familiar with the Warhammer family of games, you may recognize all these elements from the Warhammer 40k-derived game Space Hulk, where one side plays Genestealers (Alien alien knock-offs) and one side place Terminators (big guys in oversized extra-cool space marine armor).

Space Hulk replaces chits with miniatures (cool improvement) and replaces the map-ripped-from-Dragon-Magazine with a board full of cardboard tunnels you can make yourself (cool improvement), however, unless Space Hulk has been upgraded since I've played it lacks the one super-cool thing that makes Awful Green Things really special and replayable:

Weapons are scattered all over the ship when the aliens invade--and each one has one of a variety of totally random effects. Everything from a blaster to an electric fence can do one of about a dozen things and you don't know which until you use it on an alien.

Some do a ton of damage, some do almost none, some shrink the aliens, some grow the aliens, some make the aliens burst into tiny fragments which then grow--it's scary using weapons but you will lose if you don't experiment with them. It makes for a new experience every time.

There's later editions and an expansion game for Green Things--I don't know if they added "randomly teleports you to another room" or "turns out the lights in the corridor no-one can see" to the weapon effects, but they should.

Smear Math for Morons

 One very weird thing I've noticed when people discuss the smear campaign is people saying these two thing, often in the same breath:

• lol Zak is so cancelled we sure destroyed his life lmao!
• lol Zak is suing people saying he lost millions, what an idiot lmao!

Now, if you're not a moron (and it should go without saying that anyone participating in the smear is a moron) you'll realize these are basically opposite statements.

If you smear someone and so completely destroy anybody's ability to earn a living doing their job as long as there's an internet, you've likely cost them over a million dollars. That's not about me specifically, that's anyone.

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The math:

Let's say you, like me, live in California.

Minimum wage is 16$ per hour.

That's 128$ per day.

That's 3,840$ per month.

That's 46,080$ per year.

Assuming the person lives a minimum of 30 more years and (like most artists) never retires, that's 1,382,400$.

That's assuming no inflation and just using minimum wage--and I did make more than minimum wage.

(Just for the development of I Am The Weapon alone, I was making 3000$ per month before the smear. If that less-than-minimum-wage figure seems high remember I'm contracted for all the writing and all the illustration. If you would like the documentation on that--just ask. This is also in every court record. I also had two projects in development with LotFP at the time--Bards and Violence in the Nympharium. Both of those included a cash advance and then I make a percentage after. Or ignore all these numbers and look at how much the artists and writers make on literally any mid-tier indie RPG kickstarter.)

Now, I am publishing again and so that income's not all lost, but that's only after having successfully sued three people who smeared me.

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And here's probably the main thing seem to forget or not realize:

RPGs isn't my main job, I've never claimed it was. I am a painter. I paint paintings for a living that people are supposed to buy. That is my job and was long before any game stuff I did ever existed.

Just because the people who smeared me were themselves in RPGs doesn't mean that I only lost RPG work. You'd have to have brain damage to think that only people in games noticed your smear campaign. All that work disappeared as well.

This is all in the article Dr Weisman wrote (missing audio here).

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And, of course, on top of that, destroying someone's reputation doesn't just destroy their income, it destroys their entire life.

And the non-monetary damage to their life is undeniably worse than the loss of income.

Since death is preferable to my current situation, if you're me, basically this cost me however much my entire life is worth. That's a price higher than any dollar amount. The only reason I am sticking around is the very slim hope it gets undone.

Again: this isn't special. I assume you think your life is worth a lot to you, too. If someone offered you a million dollars to die, you probably wouldn't take that deal.

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There are a lot of things that are really obvious about the situation the hatemob created that seem to be lost on everyone talking about it online, this about money is just one of them. But it fits in a blog entry so there you go.

If you lie about someone being a felon and put it all over the internet and that person's entire life is working in public, you did way more than a million dollars worth of damage.

It's not about me being special, that's just life.

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