FightingFantasist

Castle Bastard Bits

2012-01-30T21:38:00.005Z

Been playing with my "Three Random Words" method of generating dungeon rooms. Here are the results from the last session, feel free to nick any stuff you like. The "words" are a list of 100 words I wrote down very quickly, trying to tie each new word into the list. More about this process here.

Words - HAMMER, POINT, PULLEY

A statue of a Dwarf engineer/miner. He has a hammer over his shoulder and a pulley hanging from his belt. He is pointed with outstretched finger at something important down a corridor or through an archway or might even be pointing to the exit.

Words - OLIVE, OCTAGON, ROUND

A round room 25' across. An octagon is painted on the floor in a dirty green-ish brown-ish paint. The octagon touches the circumference of the room at it's eight points. Significance unknown.

Words - BLOCK, RED, CRASH

A room with floor, ceiling and walls consisting of 2' square stone blocks covering with peeling, flaking gloss red paint. Ceiling looks uneven and not safe. If more than 2 people enter this room, the ceiling collapses. Damage is equal to dungeon level number x d6. Save vs Petrification to halve damage.

Words - BONE, LION, FACE

A treasure - a 4' x 3' carving of a lions face, facing the viewer. It is carved from a single, monstrous piece of bone from an unknown beast. Value 400gp to collector but may be cumbersome to extract from the dungeon.

Words - RIVET, SHARD, LIFT

A liftcage (elevator). Rusty Victorian steam-punk with huge rivets. The floor is littered with shards of a glowing blue crystal, significance unknown.

Words - WATER, HANG, PROP

A rough mine tunnel with the ceiling supported by pit props both upright and bolted to ceiling. Puddles cover the floor. From the props hang 4 sinister looking nooses. If the water of the puddles is disturbed (as it will be unless the PCs specifically avoid it) the nooses spring into evil animated life.

Each noose is AC5, HD1 and can only be struck by edged weapons. If a noose hits a PC it slips over the PCs neck and chokes(*) for d6 damage per round until either it or PC expires. PCs trapped in a noose attack at -4, PCs trying to kill a noose with another PC trapped in it attack at -2.

(*) Yeah, I know. Hanging kills by snapping the neck, not choking. Have the floor collapse once a PC is trapped if you really care.

Words - COLLAPSE, CARVING, SHARK

Four door room, impassible due to totally collapsed ceiling. It appears from the rubble that room was decorated in carvings with a shark motif.

Words - SUN, ROUND, SOIL

Soil covers the floor to a depth of a couple of inches except for a section in the middle of the room where a 4' rough circle has been cleared to reveal a floor carving of a sun with a scowling face. It's mouth is slightly open if anything is inserted into the mouth it will spit flame hitting anybody over the carving. Damage is dungeon level x d6, Save vs Dragon Breath to halve.

These done, I then tried the other approach which is to pick a monster and then roll up three words to place the monster into an interesting encounter area.

I was reading The Best of White Dwarf Articles III and came across this monster, the Sraim.

This is actually an AD&D conversion of a demon in a Runequest article.

The original is by Dave Morris in Dealing with Demons run across WD44-46 and the AD&D conversion was by Liz Fletcher in WD48. Illo by John Blanche.

Anyway these looked ace for a Dungeon Level 3 monster so I rolled up two encounters with the Sraim.

Words - DISC, CHAIN, OFFAL

Room is a 40' wide circular shaft. The floor is a disc suspended from 4 great chains that are mounted in the ceiling far above. There is a gap of approximately 2'-3' around the disc depending upon how it is swinging. How deep the shaft is under the disc cannot be told.

On the disc lurk 2 Sraim (Hp 17 & 16). The disc is littered with offal which is dropped from a trapdoor in the ceiling in order to keep the beasts fed.

Words - TIP, ILLUSION, GOLD

Illusionary pile of gold coins in the NW corner of a room or cavern. An illusionary pile of rubbish in the NE corner. 3 Sraim (Hp 19,14,9) lurk behind the illusionary pile of rubbish. If the PCs investigate the gold coins first, the Sraim charge them through the illusion (dispelling it in the process) and achieve surprise on a 1-4 on d6.

(I used TIP here in the UK informal sense of a rubbish dump)

Multiple HD PC Species

2012-01-26T17:47:00.005Z

Totally unplaytested.

Starting a non-human PC with more than 1HD - If you start at Level 1 with more than 1d8 hit points (OK, d10 for some classes in 1E) you have effectively got the extra HD on a "mortgage". To pay this "mortgage" off you cannot gain any more hit points until you have completed levels past your starting HD equal to the number of levels for which you were over-rated.

Badly explained. Time for an example.

OK, Bugbear PC. Level 1 but 3HD (ignore pluses unless they are 4+ in which case treat the species as being 1HD more than printed). "Cheating" for Levels 1 and 2, catches up at level 3. To cancel out the bonus gained at Levels 1 and 2 cannot gain hit dice for levels 4 and 5. Starts gaining HD at Level 6 again.

So assuming a Bugbear is just a B/X or BECMI Fighter with surprise ability and 3d8 for hp.

Level 1 - 3d8 hp + CON bonus (CON bonus gained once)
Level 2 - 3d8 hp + CON bonus (CON bonus gained once)
Level 3 - 3d8 hp + CON bonus (CON bonus gained once)
Level 4 - 3d8 hp + CON bonus (CON bonus gained once)
Level 5 - 3d8 hp + CON bonus (CON bonus gained once)
Level 6 - 4d8 hp + CON bonus (CON bonus gained twice)
Level 7 - 5d8 hp + CON bonus (CON bonus gained three times)

and so on.

Neanderthal or Lizardman PC - Both of these species are 2HD creatures, so will be 2HD + Con bonus until reaching Level 4. (Lack of advance at Level 3 "pays off" "cheating" at Level 1).

There is probably a point past which such species unbalance a low level game. You'd have to decide that for yourself. It's also easily abusable by that sort of player so regard it as a litmus test of whether or not a player is the sort of player you'd like to play with.

(Citadel Miniatures ADD56 Bugbear - one of my all-time favourite Citadel castings - halfinched from here - http://www.verdensmand.com/add)

More Castle Bastard II

2012-01-25T18:05:00.004Z

I had to knock dungeon design for Castle Bastard on the head for a week or so. Mainly because I was in such a creative groove that spending an evening pencilling down ideas and generally being lost and happy in the process of sub-creation meant that my mind was running amok when I retired for the night and I wasn't sleeping. For somebody prone to insomnia this is obviously Not A Good Thing.

In an ideal world I could have just have stayed up until the small hours to get everything down on paper but unfortunately I have to spend my days doing databasey stuff in order to pay rent, put petrol in Porker, fill freezer etc. etc.

This seems to be a recurrent irritant in my life - my natural hours are generally two hours behind the rest of the world. If left to my own devices I'd get up at 10 and go to bed at 2 and probably feel a damn sight better. I blame this being out of phase with the real world for my periodic insomnia and lost Saturday mornings.

Anyway, back to light grade megadungeon sub-creation.

I'm ripping off Steve Jackson (UK) for the "in" of my megadungeon. Castle Bastard isn't really very accessible (it squats on top of and spilling over the edge of dangerous cliffs above a violent sea and the surrounding land is claimed by hostile Bugbear tribes) so the PCs will be teleported in and out.

In "Orange Book" Fighting Fantasy the second scenario is called Shaggradd's Hives of Peril. This a fun-house dungeon under a hollow tree. FF runs a real-time clock (if it takes n minutes of real time to sort out an encounter then it took n minutes in the game world). This is used in this scenario to impose a time limit. The "hook" is that elderly Black Elf old woman Shaggradd owns the land above the dungeon and claims ownership of the dungeon through extension of this but is too elderly and frail to even think of descending down and claiming the loot. So she will offer a time limited teleport spell to adventurers in exchange for a split in the takings.

There is something a bit, well, rubbish about the plausibility of this but the utility of the idea has always struck me as excellent. That's why I've expanded the idea of Shaggradd out to becoming an entire religion of the Black Elf culture and now she is a Grandmother-like deitic figure. Her priesthood can offer a timed teleport to adventurers in exchange for a 25% cut. I'd like this to be a bit more mysterious than simply "we do this because we get easy money" so that somehow adventurers running amok through the dungeon is somehow helping the machinations of the cult. Not sure how yet but it probably doesn't matter.

On first visit of course you'd be teleported to the traditional Room #1 of the dungeon after deciding the upper limit of your "dive time". I quickly decided that it would be better for a megadungeon campaign if the party could later teleport to deeper locations. So the Black Elves will now give you a pot of magical purple paint and if you can paint a sigil of Shaggrad somewhere and if you can envisage it at a later date, you can be teleported from the upper world to that point. This then leads on to the party discovering the sigil's left by other parties and using them as teleport entry points. Which then leads onto the idea that in between sessions, 1d6 sigils could appear in random locations as other party's daub them on the dungeon walls.

So this would be the deal offered by the priesthood of Shaggradd, Grandmother of Black Elves.

1 - We take 25% of cut in gp value(*). If you stiff us we will know and you will be in serious trouble laddie and our tribe is spread across the entire world in a great Black Elf diaspora.
2 - We agree in advance the duration of the teleport enchantment.
3 - When the enchantment expires living party members are returned to the upper world. Dead party members are left behind unless they are being carried by a living member at the precise moment the enchantment expires
4 - We will teleport you to the opening chamber unless told otherwise
5 - To be teleported elsewhere in Castle Bastard you must be able to envisage a purple-painted sigil of Shaggrad that you have seen or created in the dungeon in a previous expedition. Purple paint and a Bristlebeast-bristle paintbrush provided free of charge.
6 - We cannot and will not cut short the teleport enchantment.
7 - If you end up leaving the dungeon through other (non-DM anticipated) means you still owe us the money. See Note 1.

In real world terms this has the ability to, what an old boss of mine called in fluent businessbullshitlingobingo, "timebox" a session to a definite deadline ("We'll play until 11") and makes each session a discreet expedition therefore allowing for a changing roster of players and PCs.

(*) XP still scored for this 25%

d20 Religious Quirks

2012-01-23T21:06:00.004Z

With religions and cults in fantasy worlds it's often all too easy to fall into a creative rut whereby you dream up things like this;

"Ariel is Goddess of the Sky. Her holy places are high places and her holy colour is blue. Her priesthood is opposed to erm... earth things and things underground. Things that are sacred to her followers are errr... the sky. And clouds and birds and precipitation. They hate soil and caves."

Real religions are all more quirky with that with some very odd strictures on behaviour. Roll a d20 and add this nonsense to your made-up religion.

1 - Religion practises genital mutilation shortly after birth
2 - Religion has grown out of an earlier, still extant religion worshipping the same deity and has an ambivalent relationship with that earlier religion.
3 - Religion is a schism from another religion and whilst their practises and beliefs are 80-85% identical, enough difference is found to permit a large degree of antipathy
4 - Some observers believe that this religions earliest writings are corrupted oral traditions attributing divine powers and presence to ancient astronauts who have manipulated the development and evolution of creatures upon this world.
5 - Religion follows it's writings literally, but only when translated into one specific language and one printing of it's writings. All others are untrustworthy.
6 - Religion's priesthood are forced into celibacy in order to avoid dynastic ambitions.
7 - Religion holds that's it's spiritual leader is reincarnated after death and accordingly puts much effort into locating the infant into which he has been reborn and elevating him to a position of power.
8 - Religion is monotheistic yet worships a range of minor, intermediary figures.
9 - Religion's objective to idolatry is so extreme that no visual depiction of it's most holy figures are allowed.
10 - Religion practises ritualised cannibalism with a non-meat substitute in an echo of earlier sacrificial practise.
11 - Religion holds that if a mortal is a good member of it's religion it may inherit the mantle of it's deity off an another planet somewhere.
12 - Religion has dietary requirements that seem to be a hangover of earlier civic law.
13 - Religion is entwined with mechanisms of an otherwise non-theocratic state - Monarch is also symbolic head of this religion.
14 - Religion requires that it's male clerics genitals are not misshapen.
15 - Religion is of eschatological nature (End of World is nigh)
16 - Religion allows polygamy in a male dominated culture (or polyandry in the obverse) and may be in conflict with civil authorities over this.
17 - Religion believes in reincarnation and karma with the disabled having been at fault in a previous life.
18 - Religion attempts to keep the contents of it's holy books away from lay worshippers.
19 - Religion has a priesthood divided into levels with cash donations required to advance a level.
20 - Religion's holy writings are held to be parables and fables, not absolute truth.

P.S. I See I What I Did There

More Castle Bastard

2012-01-17T18:11:00.005Z

I'm in a bit of a period of creativity at the moment so have managed to get down 2 complete sub-levels of Castle Bastard and many sides of A4 scribbled with further notes, not to mention the ideas that haven't made it as far as pencil and paper yet.

I'm going for a modular approach to dungeon design whereby each level consists of a multitude of sub-levels, each of which has a map which fits on a single side of A4. Tunnels and passages run off the edges of the paper and eventually emerge onto other maps to link sections to other sections. Vertical means of ingress and egress leads to other levels on other pieces of paper. Some of these routes before sub-levels are effectively "long and twisty" so there's no adherence to the idea that each map butts up to the next in graph paper style.

There are two reasons for this approach - firstly the interior of the world is a great megastructure of sections of underworlds stolen from a myriad of other dimensions and the sub-level concept fits in nicely with this. I can then have a pseudo-Egyptian sub-level with tunnels that lead onto things like the forgotten catacombs of a Bugbear civilization in a cave system and then some poison-gas filled vaulted chambers on the same dungeon level.

The other reason is that creating a single dungeon of around 10-30 rooms with a single theme is much more of a easily undertaken task than creating a map of 200 rooms and quailing before the task of filling it and gives better results than that 200 room monster becoming plain and vanilla because you didn't want to make the whole thing a series of monster warrens bored from solid black marble or similar.

I've adopted a three part approach to creating the individual sub-levels that seems to be serving me quite well.

1 - The Map

The Advanced Fighting Fantasy (2011 version) technique. D6s dropped on map, where they land is the rough centre of a room, read as a D3 for number of exits. Dice clustered together indicate adjacent rooms, clusters separated out are joined to the rest of the map by corridors/tunnels. A few D8s read as d4s are chucked in to avoid the trap of no room having more than 3 exits.

2 - Stocking

I don't stock room by room. Instead I come up with encounters and then place them on the map once I've got a complete list of encounters. To aid with this I effectively reverse-engineered the random generation table from B/X. If you were using this table and your dice rolls were all nice and regular, for each 12 rooms in your dungeon you'd end up with these results.

4 Rooms with monsters/NPCs of which 2 have treasure
4 Empty rooms with either 1/6th of these containing a treasure or with each having a 1-in-6 chance of treasure
2 Traps with 1/3 of trap rooms containing a treasure (or each having 2-in-6 chance).
2 Specials

I find it much easier to then fill in these "slots" before placing. You can look for an area that looks right for your encounter rather than simply obeying all the dice or wasting time keep rerolling.

3 - Word Association

I wrote about this back in 2010 and you should read that if you don't know what I am talking about. What I do these days with this technique is to try and ensure that the 100 words come from a sort of "word association" process with each word being the first thing that springs to mind once the previous one is written down. I believe there's a fair bit of coaxing great ideas out of the creative sub-conscious going on here. I then roll 3 d100 results and write down the results doing my best to combine and justify the three or at worst two of them. The "slots" mentioned above then tend to fill themselves.

The other beauty of doing it this way around (encounters, then place them) is that sometimes the word association process comes up with an idea that deserves expanding out to a whole area or sub-level rather than be under-used on just one room. This can then provide a theme for the current level or be written down as a candidate for later expansion. One of Castle Bastard's sub-levels which the non-existant NPC adventurers that populate the Rumour Table dub "The Forest of Rust" came entirely from a three word combination rolled at random ("FOREST", "IRON" and "SNOW" in case you are curious).

Even when you have a vanilla encounter such as 5 Orcs in a room, you can roll on the W.A. chart and try and see how that simple encounter can become something original and memorable if you have to incorporate words like "SMOKE", "SLOPING", "SKIN" or even just "RED" into it. All of those are words from recent W.A. chart's I've created.

To take one example, SMOKE, it could be simple as a cave filled with so much smoke that the PCs are staggering around almost blind when delving with the Orcs. But it has to come from somewhere which would generally be a campfire but it could be a natural effect of some fungus found locally which emits the smoke in order to spread it's spores. Tying this idea in with the prescene of the Orcs then perhaps the spores have a strong hallucinogenic effect upon the Orcish nervous system and, inspired here by thoughts of those medieval Catholic fanatics who practised self-mortification and ended up with fungal infections in their wounds, they believe they can speak to their gods when in this mental state. So we have drug-addicted Orcs who worship smoke-emitting fungi and while the obvious idea here would be for them to regard outsiders as violating taboo and worthy of a bloody death perhaps our Orcs are really evangelical about the whole thing and want to make converts to their religion.

Would this idea be wasted on a one-off encounter? Probably so suddenly we can have a whole cave network of stoned and tripping Orcs desperate for the PCs to see the smoky light of the true Orc gods.

This is working for me and the creativity is flowing. Each sub-level appears to be an easily manageable task and the word association has created dozens of ideas that I would never have consciously dreamed up if I was staring at a blank map and trying to give every room an unique and interesting encounter.

Chaos Lavatory

2012-01-16T22:19:00.004Z

Followers of Khorne! Why not show your devotion to the Blood God by dropping a pink toilet block in your cistern when there is already the fag-end of a green one in there and watch with utter delight as the the bowl now appears to be flushed with steaming blood and ichor.

Rejoice as you realise that all visitors to Coop Towers II in the next six weeks will have to be pre-warned of your Blood God Toilet and assured that, honestly, there is nothing wrong it.

(BTW "Khorne's Throne" - I've already beaten you to that one thanks)

Quick Question - Cave Terminology

2012-01-16T19:42:00.000Z

Does anybody know the collective name for a group of caves? I'm aware of "Cave System" but want something a bit more exciting for a dungeon level name. Cheers.

Naming err... Names on the Fly

2012-01-13T17:25:00.006Z

Need names in a rush? Especially Dwarf/Gnome-like names?

Easy fix - IKEA website.

Go there, pick random section, keep drilling down to the thumbnails of the various products. Pick a name. Job's a good 'un.

LATER EDIT - Matthew Schmeer has already has this idea and compiled a handy list of product names from 2010 at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16996130/2010_IKEA_Product_Names.txt

Naming Towns and Cities on the Fly

2012-01-12T18:27:00.003Z

Here's a neat trick for instantly coming up with a plausible settlement name either when improvising mid-game or running out of inspiration when labelling up maps.

Take a real world settlement name from a culture similar to that your in-game culture e.g. Cirencester.

Next change one letter. So from Cirencester we can get Lirencester. Sounds plausible in a pseudo-English setting as would Direncester and Birencester.

Lichfield for example gives us Richfield, Michfield, Lachfield and Lishfield. You can go all Germanic on the name by turning -field to -feld and coming up with things like Lizhfeld, Michfeld and Gichfeld. (Trivia - Lichfield's name is an English translation of Campus Corpus, Latin for "Place of the Dead" named by the Romans after a massacre of Britons there.)

Dudley gives us Rudley, Dutley, Durley, Dudlay, Dodley, Dudlen, Dadley etc.

Bordeaux gives us Tordeaux, Lordeaux, Bordeaus, Bordeaul, Borreaux, Borteaux etc.

Brandenburg gives us Trandenberg, Drandenburg, Brandenrurg, Brondenburg, Brantenburg etc.

This isn't entirely my own work - I noticed in the 1980s when I was a fervent player of the Lone Wolf gamebooks that Joe Dever seemed to be doing this a lot for his place names. The only one I can remember these days is that he had a city in Kingdoms of Terror called Varetta which is only character different to Valetta, the capital of Malta.

Another quick and dirty trick is to take two real world place names from an appropriate real world culture, split them the middle and reassemble the front half of A to the back half of B.

So I take two local town names - Dudley and Tipton - and mong them to produce Dudton and Tipley, both of which sound plausible pseudo-English village names. The next two towns along my commute home from work are Tividale and Oldbury which mongs to Tivibury and Old-Dale which also work. If I carry on along the road I get to Smethwick and Bearwood which give me Smethwood and Bearwick. Again these would work and sound OK to the ear.

Both techniques are the work of a second or two to come up with a convincing settlement name.

Open Table 2012 - Rumours II

2012-01-11T18:50:00.004Z

Castle B'stard

The Imperial Architects Guild claim that the shattered and collapsed heap of masonry on the coast that is Castle B'stard (pronunciation varies according to social class - in polite company it is referred to as Castle Illegitimatius) could never have originally taken the form of an intact castle as there is simply just too much rubble there. They hold that it was constructed in it's picturesque ruined state as a folly during the time of the Moninav Republic when such things were à la mode.

Conversely the local fishermen tell tall tales about huge stone blocks that fell from somewhere above the clouds over a period of seven days and seven nights which mostly landed atop each other in a chaotic and tottering heap. Students of the Turnbuckle school claim that Castle B'stard aimed for a position somewhere below the clifftop and simply missed.

Whatever the truth of it what is now known as Castle B'stard squats atop the vertiginous Birdshit Cliffs overlooking the sea. Shattered stone outposts lie collapsed upon the many rock spires that stud the coastline in the vicinity. Access is near impossible from the sea and extremely hazardous from inland as it would involve crossing the ancestral hunting grounds of many a tribe of purple-haired Bugbears who regard the area as taboo to outsiders.

Birdshit Cliffs

Very tall, very messy. As if a divine hand had created them there with little care for the vagaries of natural coastal erosion or geographic plausibility.

A famous feature of Birdshit Cliffs (besides the guano) are the fossilised skeletons of many a dinosaur and example of sabre-toothed Megafauna. Reputedly these were created and placed here by the angry and immature god Jove-Jove in order to test the faith of his followers on the grounds that he had already told them that such did not exist.

Local (living) fauna include the notorious Canker Birds, a genus of filthy, ragged-plumed birds who seem to have been created by Grandfather Nurgle for other no reason than to act as a vector for assorted unpleasant diseases.

Count Metalmane
Little is known of Count Metalmane(*) other than that he is an agent of purest Chaotic alignment - that is he is Chaotic and commits Chaotic acts just for the sheer bloody hell of it as opposed to any fallacious notions of good or evil. It is believed that his impressive wig is formed from the skinned pelts of pedigree Poodle dogs but that might just be a mistranslation from the original Chaotic alignment tongue into the Common tongue.

Adventurer's gossip is starting to hint that Count Metalmane has declared himself the ruler of Castle B'stard.

The Cult of Divine Atrocities

A loose-knit underground movement dedicated to the appeasement of assorted evil and destructive alien entities, the Cult of Divine Atrocities is an umbrella brotherhood (and sisterhood) of pure evil that none the less enjoys a respected niche in society.

Put simply the Cult is prepared to do all the dirty work (virgin sacrifice, mass murder etc.) that keeps the aforementioned assorted evil and destructive alien entities appeased in order that they not run bloody amok amongst the mortals, tear open the sky or turn the entire planet in something resembling mould.

Individual temples of the cult are dedicated seekers of forbidden knowledge attempting to divine the truth about any forgotten gods that might have fallen down between the cracks of mankind's knowledge and so prepare the necessary rituals in order to stave them off. Suffice to say, malign entities of this kind tend to have somewhat foul rituals.

While the actions of the cultists are undeniably of an evil ilk, many of the cult simply regard their vocation as unpleasant but necessary. They recruit heavily from amongst those employed in similar unpleasant but necessary jobs such as slaughterhousemen, sewer workers and purefinders(**).

This is not to say that all cultists are pragmatic individuals concerned with the greater good as the cult provides a useful outlet for the less self-sacrificing members of society, not to mention those who thirst for the knowledge contained within the cult's formidable research libraries as well as numerous sexual deviants.

It is rumoured that on occasion, the cult is not above simply inventing a hitherto unheard of god, setting up a cosy temple and demanding legal protection from the local authorities. It is also rumoured that on occasion, the cult may deliberately ignore the appeasement and sealing rituals having carefully weighed up the personal pros and cons of summonation versus banishment.

(*) I wonder which HM-loving Citadel Miniatures in the 1980s sported an impressive metal-mane?
(**) Oh WFRP dearest, this should have been on your career list for the Rogue character class from day one.

Open Table 2012 - Rumours

2012-01-10T19:36:00.005Z

Assidla the Mentor once opined that the landscape below the surface of the world was formed by natural processes, that of the flow of water combined with shifting of rock caused by the great pressure of lava underneath. He furthermore argued that colossal plates of bedrock were slowly moving the continents apart at a speed imperceptible to the human eye. This was obvious nonsense and indeed he was later crucified for this heresy.

His student Cram of Yellow Crags continued his work after his master's death attempting to reconcile this heretical view with the obviously contradictory fact that the world beneath the surface of the planet consisted almost entirely of an inside-out ecumenopolis of dungeon complexes. He concluded that Assidla the Mentor's great work had been interrupted mid-flow by his grisly end and that he had really meant to describe the underpinnings of the planet in some earlier epoch. This was obvious nonsense and indeed he was defenestrated for this heresy.

Later the Dwarf sage Enoch Turnbuckle drew the conclusion that the dungeons beneath the world were of extra-planar origin and that some entity or machine was drawing them to itself from across the reach of all fathomable realities for unfathomable reasons. This was obvious nonsense and indeed he was later impaled for this heresy.

Uncaring of the consequences of obvious heresy, two hundred years later Citchpar the Hermit wrote a long and rambling treatise declaring his belief that the frogs or toads or possibly the frogs and the toads were responsible for this state of affairs. This was obvious nonsense and indeed so nonsensical that he escaped heresy on the grounds that nobody took this remotely seriously.

Following long term experimentation with speedballing Black Lotus and dried, rainbow-coloured Unicorn excrement, Citchpar later refined his theory to state that the frogs or toads or possibly the frogs and the toads were of extra-Galactic origin and had arrived here concealed within the wombs of metal Rocs which flew through space. This was obvious nonsense and indeed he was later bastinadoed and made to wade through the septic tank below The Palace of Nurgle for this heresy.

Re-opening the words of the impaled sage Turnbuckle, the monkey masked-clerics of the Cult of the Monkey Wight spent much time debating whether the volume lost in the extra-planar places when an underworld section was removed from it's place of origin was filled with the equivalent underworld section from this world. This was obviously an intelligent question and debate raged for some decades until the world outside of the Cult grew tired of the schismatic wars that this produced and they were threatened with liquidising for this tedious heresy.

The Cult of the Monkey Wight

It appears that, for unfathomable reasons, the ancient (and justified and possibly extra-planar too if Sage Turnbuckle was correct) Yu-Yu civilization worshipped undead monkeys and performed many a blasphemous rite of vivisection upon the dead of the monkey world in order to transform them into hideous, monkey barrow-inhabiting Wights. Modern scholars have little idea of the motives behind this practise but suspect that the Yu-Yuians felt that this was amusing in some way and may have employed Monkey Wights as comic relief.

The modern-day Cult of the Monkey Wight is dedicated to the unearthing of the resting places of Monkey Wights again possibly again for the reason that they find the ideas of monkeys from beyond the grave performing their funny monkey tricks as being quite funny. Cultists dress in brown robes and wear brass or leather masks formed in the likeness of monkey faces. They are always of Chaotic alignment.

Adventurers are often advised to be careful around the remnants of Yu-Yu archeology in case they accidentally disturb one of these level-draining little furry bastards.

Monkey Wights Stat-Line

Exactly the same as Wights in whichever variety of game you play. Except that Monkey Wights look like undead monkeys and may show evidence of their Monkey Wight-isation rituals such as sawn-off upper sections of cranium or entanglement in barbed wire. Some are believed to have developed nicotine addictions due to bizarre and inhumane treatment in an earlier life.

Black Elves

The race of Black Elves is a nomadic Gypsy race famed for their brightly coloured caravans and are in no way similar to the Dalish Elves of Dragon Age. At all. Little is known to humanity of these wizened and withered and nut-brown complexioned secretive fey other than that their principal deity is Shaggradd, Grandmother of Black Elves who lives in a Gypsy caravan somewhere beyond the Moon.

Black Elves are rumoured to die through shrivelling up to the size of a clothes peg should they ever come into contact with the base metal lead and must gnaw on silver to grind their teeth down otherwise their gnashers would grow to insane lengths with their upper set impaling their jaws and their lower sets ultimately piercing their brains. Black Elf juveniles are believed to gnaw on softer gold to grind their gums down.

Possible Links Between the Yu-Yuians, Monkeys, Cult of the Monkey Wights and Black Elves

Some scholars have noted the attractiveness of the shiny trim and fittings of Black Elf caravans to thieving monkeys (i.e. all of them). Furthermore since no monkey ever seems to be in possession of the shiny things they steal from Black Elves it is theorised that there must exist somewhere a Great Monkey King to whom all monkeys play homage and tribute in the form of sparkly bits of caravans. Specially commissioned artists impressions suggest that this Great Monkey King reclines upon a throne made from wheel hubs and chrome trim and mirrors stolen from a thousand Black Elf caravans, wherein which he receives his tribute in the form of more shiny stolen booty donated by his adoring subjects.

It is further theorised that the creation of the Monkey Wights by the Yu-Yuians might in fact be an attempt to sabotage the dealings of the Black Elves by creating immortal servants of the Great Monkey King. Possibly in exchange for money.

A Lust for Lustria

2012-01-03T17:41:00.003Z

You know what I'd like to see?

Richard Halliwell's Lustria written up as a campaign background.

Originally springing forth from a jokey play upon the title of Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods - which became Chariots of the Frogs in GW injoke speak - Lustria was a weird mix of ancient astronauts, once-advanced-but-now-degenerate amphibian beings, punk Amazons and, for no apparent good reason, Norse settlers and adventurers.

(I say was, Lustria still is, but it goes without saying that I'm talking about the days of Warhammer 2 and 3 and WFRP and not modern Warhammer)

It goes like this.

Once upon a time, the ancient Slann arrive on an obscure blue/green planet and shift it's orbit closer to it's parent star in order to alter it's climate, and then genetically engineer a bunch of helper/servant races. Once part of a great cosmic Empire, the World has two great warpy-teleport gates at it's poles through which interstellar traffic passes.

Then as a result of an unstated galactic catastrophe it all goes tits up and raw Chaos-stuff splatters through the warpgates, spiritually, morally and physically polluting the globe. Reality breaks up and goes all Moorcock at the poles, the Slann civilization collapses and everything goes a bit post-apocalypse.

Wind the clock onto the current year of the Warhammer World and it's South America analogue is a sprawling mass of Meso-American ruined cities once inhabited by the amphibian scientist race of the Slann that is now a primitive tribal race dying out at the hands of human settlers.

The human settlers are at war with the Slann and also with the remnants of their servant race, the Amazons, all of whom look like Toyah Wilcox in her prime, reproduce asexually via chemical means and have access to a bunch of Old Slann technological weapons such as, errmmm, bolt guns and bolt pistols. Also lobotomised and castrated human slaves with shaved heads.

So, lots of dungeon bashing in Chichen Itza, except that all the decor depicts humanoid batrichan super-scientists not Meso-Americans with bad haircuts. Unfathomable ancient technology, fallen civilization, ancient astronauts, jungles, disease, Norse homesteads, Toyah Wilcox and Christ knows what hiding in places where no White Man has ever been and underneath it all, the radioactive fallout of the dreaded Warpstone.

If only GW had chosen to write this up in campaign background setting back in the WFRP days.

As it happens, I'm not sure that WFRP would really be the best ruleset for Lustria. WFRP is so wedded to a low-fantasy, Germanic, urban game (the old "you start in an alley full of shit between two half-timbered buildings with double-headed eagles on their shutters" thing) that I don't think it would suit this pulpy, post-apoc goodness. It would really call for a White Box D&D treatment.

Open Table 2012

2012-01-02T16:13:00.003Z

I'm thinking of going "open table" for this year - that is run D&D games on an occasional basis rather than with any regularity and for whoever turns up. The sort of game that gets announced via social media or a simple cc list of interested email addresses and we play with whoever can make it.

WHERE?

I'm in the Black Country region of England, in the Dudley/Tividale/Tipton area. I have wheels and can travel, but they are two-seater sportscar wheels which limits the number of people I can give lifts to. I am a member of Stourbridge Wargames club, this meets on Fridays in Amblecote, Stourbridge (a mile or so walk from the bus and rail station) and that might be an option as it gives us as many tables and chairs as required for a £2 per head room hire charge (under 16s £1). It can be a little noisy at times though. But probably better than Coop Towers II which is a one-bedroom apartment and lacking in sufficient furniture for a six player D&D session.

WHAT?

It would be D&D of some flavour, probably an unholy mish-mash of Red Box, B/X, Labyrinth Lord and Swords & Wizardry. And it would be unashamedly "megadungeon" in style. I envisage each session being an expedition into a megadungeon with some form of mechanism to ensure that everyone is out by close of play. (For the record, possibly the solution given in Shaggrad's Hives of Peril - one of the scenarios from the original Fighting Fantasy RPG - in which the party are working under a timed teleport spell and will be magically transported to the surface after a pre-agreed interval of time has elapsed).

WHEN?

Periodically. Definately not when West Brom are playing at home. But if there is interest we could see when people are free and whether people prefer weekends or weeknights.

WHY?

I can't commit regular time to RPG campaigning. Probably, neither can you.

HOW?

You can register interest by commenting in the comments field or emailing me at o_cooperATyahooDAWTcom.

And Maybe Next Time We Go Shopping Games Workshop Will Be Cheaper

2012-01-02T10:37:00.004Z

The plaintive cry of an 8-year old, yesterday.

I took the not-really-a-nephew-nephew geek shopping after Christmas to spend some of his Christmas money. Birmingham is pretty handily laid out for geek shopping with CEX, ModelZone, Forbidden Planet and Games Workshop almost next door to one another in the same street.

(Obligatory footnote and plug for Niamh and Adey - with independent gaming store Wayland's Forge only two streets away from them).

NRANN's Dad is a mate from the Epic 40K trenches back in the 90s and he was appalled in GW - not just at the prices but at the -

(The Internet interjects - look, GW is fucking stupid expensive and probably losing customers hand over fist. We know this, get to the point).

- lack of any white metal. He picked up one blister of ~~Fail~~Finecast figures and was shocked at the huge amount of flash and pock-marking. As he pointed out afterwards over ersatz-chickenburgers in KFC, GW are now limiting themselves to rich kids and furthermore rich kids who are all competent modellers (and I added, those too fucking stupid to complain about the quality of the shit they are being sold).

(The Internet interjects - we know this as well. Get to the point).

So NRANN wasn't allowed anything from GW and spent his Christmas money on Star Wars toys from Forbidden Planet instead.

(The Internet interjects - better, but it was all prequel stuff wasn't it?)

Traditionally the view about GW from outside of THE GAMES WORKSHOP HOBBY is that it exploits the ignorant (in the "doesn't know anything about the wider hobby" sense, not the more perjorative sense of "pig shit thick") and probably provides an entry route into the wider hobby. I've generally gone along with this but mainly due to a bit of confused thinking.

It goes like this - you can't write off GW as an entry point to wider gaming because you are surrounded by people who started with GW in the 1980s. Therefore GW = entry point to wider gaming hobby. This however ignores the fact that 1980s GW != 2010s GW. Therefore what we can define as "entering hobby through GW" then is widely different to now. Much of the goodwill granted to GW by the wider hobby is because of this reason and has almost certainly been obselete for 20 years.

Furthermore seeing NRANN 's Dad as a father who suddenly envisaged having to bankroll all this shit out of his student teacher salary was an eye-opener and raised a question in my mind.

If we can justify (and excuse) GW as an entry point because n people every year enter the wider hobby how can we continue to do so if x people every year enter a GW store and get frightened off and stick to computer games? How many people are x? It is of course impossible to say.

Is Workshop now a parasite and detrimental to the gaming hobby as a whole? I think it is.

Curiously while geek shopping in those four shops I spotted something a bit similar. ModelZone sell Scalextric sets and cars. Everyone in the UK knows Scalextric but not everyone knows that it's only one brandname for slotcars. All 1:32 scale slotcars run on all brands of 1:32 slotcar track. ModelZone sell a few other brands of cars alongside Scalextric but have to display large signs stating that "AUTOART CARS ARE FULLY COMPATIBLE WITH SCALEXTRIC TRACK" in order to shift them. Otherwise people would assume that Scalextric was the only slotcar brand and these other boxed cars were for some other racetrack-type game.

Unfortunately GW occupy a position rather like that. Having told everyone who would listen that they are the Alpha and Omega of gaming those people who are frightened away are almost certainly lost to the hobby.

We've indulged them for years believing that if they vanished the wider hobby would stumble and fail but I no longer believe that - I now think the wider hobby would benefit if GW stores started closing.

Musings

2011-12-25T21:15:00.003Z

Once upon a time friends used to invite me to the sort of parties where you'd spend all evening in the kitchen and on occasion sneak out and push the car to the end of the street before firing her up in order to put as much time and distance behind you as possible. These days, same friends invite me to the birthday parties of small children just before Christmas which, of course, means that I pick up every bloody cold, sniffle and bug that is in circulation amongst small children.

Currently Grandfather Nurgle has lost interest in my nose and throat and decided to take up residence in my sinuses and squeeze them until the pips squeak. Arse.

Not much blogging recently, but ironically lots of gaming it's just that little of the gaming is of fightingfantasist.blogspot.com-style interest.

This season I have mainly been gaming Black Powder using 15mm American Civil War toys. Which is a truly brilliant game but probably of no interest to blog readers. It isn't even worth uploading pretty pics of the toy soldiers as I didn't do the painting (they are all second-hand).

Also Magic The Gathering has been played a lot but that's with the standard pre-made decks so of no consequence to blogging whatsoever. Last night, friends and I got in games of Ticket to Ride Europe and Condottiere, also of zero blogging interest.

Perhaps this is a corollary of some kind - the more I game, the less I blog. The more I blog, the less I game. Blogging perhaps fills the gap created by not gaming.

Anyway, I don't really have anything to blog about, can't think of all interesting projects to blog about and don't know when this will change. Normal service will be resumed at some future point presumably.

My Neighbourhood Dungeon

2011-12-05T18:51:00.010Z

"So you leave the sanctuary of Coop Towers II and walk for a half a mile or so along the sides of the artificial waterways built by The Ancients as their transportation network. After a few minutes you descend down a staircase alongside an old aqueduct near some cottages and follow the black waterway to the dungeon entrance, a great brick wall in the side of the hill with an arched tunnel amidst it. The waterway flows out of the tunnel mouth although at barely perceptible speed. There are narrow muddy paths on either side of the waterway leading into the darkness. From deep within the bowels of the tunnel you hear drips, mysterious splashes and creaking noises. Party order?"

Coop Towers II is sited near a real-life dungeon. It's the Netherton Tunnel Branch Tunnel which runs for 2.4 miles (4km) underground to allow canal traffic to cut through the limestone hills to the east of Dudley Castle. (Underground tunnels, a castle destroyed by siege and a warren of limestone caverns - it's a real fantasyland in this part of the Black Country. Even the name Netherton and that of neighbouring Netherend sound like they've come out of someones homebrew RPG campaign).

Tunnel excavation started in 1855 and completed in 1858. It's accessible to walkers (and water traffic of course) although unlit so a torch is required. It's also absolutely as spooky as fuck.

The whole structure is arched and lined in brick although there are some modern repairs in concrete. Periodic vertical ventilation shafts cast eerie pools of dim light down upon the water's surface causing rippling reflections on the walls akin to that of sunlight on the ceiling of a swimming pool but considerably grimier and more atmospheric. This has the quality of a will-o-the-wisp illusion in that upon looking into the tunnel it appears that you can see the daylight of the other end - but it's just the sun shining down through the closest shaft. When you get to that one you'll think you can definitely see the end this time. And you'd be wrong again. Nothing like a light to tempt someone in...

Rainwater seeping down through limestone rock overhead creates the usual lime formations but rather than hanging down from the roof in the traditional manner, the water follows the arched roof downwards creating great curtains of rippled sediment on the walls, translucent white with orange streaks where it has picked up rust from decaying Victorian ironwork.

Puddles are everywhere on the towpaths but the water is usually warm having filtered down through soil and rock that maintains the sun's heat.

The bottoms of the three still-extant ventilation shafts are ringed with great cast-iron circular girders, covered in various green moulds, weed, slime and bird excrement. Up at ground level the shafts are topped with what are locally known as "pepperpots" structures akin to traditional wells but capped off with iron bars to prevent people and animals (horses roam wild locally due to a local populace that thinks it's still socially acceptable to graze horses in the front garden of a small council house) falling in.

Later urban development has had to work around these as you can see here.

http://local.google.co.uk/maps?q=tividale&hl=en&ll=52.508516,-2.055173&spn=0.014392,0.042272&sll=53.800651,-4.064941&sspn=14.327693,43.286133&vpsrc=6&hnear=Tividale,+Oldbury,+Sandwell,+United+Kingdom&t=h&z=15&layer=c&cbll=52.508508,-2.055302&panoid=fIV0lGfuWCcxBRrzOwBCng&cbp=12,270,,0,0

Somewhere within the hill above the tunnel there are clearly areas of sealed off open space that collect rainwater and slowly leak into the canal tunnel below. The last time I walked this tunnel was after several days of prolonged rain and there was a steady deluge at points along the ceiling. The nature of constructing a tunnel like this meant that many shafts both vertical and horizontal were sunk in order to remove spoil during the excavation so I strongly suspect that some of these were capped at top and bottom once they had served their purpose. It would be typical of underground excavations in this part of the world for there to be no record made of where there are huge chunks of the Earth missing just a few feet below the surface.

Horizontal shafts were all closed off but their exits into the tunnel remain in the shape of features that resembled bricked-up fireplaces - once crawlspaces or possibly minecart railway tunnel runs.

So for a single, one-route under-the-hill subterranean feature we have a whole load of secret or concealed spaces with horizontal crawlspaces and vertical shafts. And that's before we realise that the water is opaque and absolutely anything could be beneath it and burrowing into the sides of the canal walls.

When you arrive blinking into sunlight at the South portal (I live near the North portal), this is what you find - a pumping house built to drain mines. Clear Dwarven or Gnomish handiwork.

The tunnel was built to bypass an even spookier canal tunnel from the previous century when traffic queues there became measured not just in hours but in days. This tunnel, the Dudley tunnel, was not only a traffic tunnel (2.9 miles long) but also a mine, tunnels being excavated to allow barges to travel straight up to the workface of a limestone mine. This is a canal run underground to collect the stone straight from deep within a drift mine. You need to steal this idea and dungeon it.

As an earlier tunnel, Dudley has no footpaths. The water laps up against the arched brickwork of the walls. In it's heyday Netherton was lit by electric light from a dynamo (no longer in use - modern barges have their own electric lights). Dudley was never lit except by a few candles where mining work was occuring. The tunnel would originally have been pitch black and is water-filled from wall to wall throughout it's length. Much of the original traffic problems were caused by it's narrowness, allowing only one barge through sections at a time. And a narrowboat has a maximum width of 7' to conform to the locks - that's how narrow we are talking.

Pre-20th century barges had no engines and were towed by shire horses (hence the name "tow-path". When tunnels like this were reached, lacking footpaths the only form of locomotion was the human leg. "Leggers" (at Dudley, professional leggers could be hired for the transit from portal to portal) would lie on planks on the barge and push against the walls with their boots, "walking" the barge along. (There is a good illustration of this in the From Hell graphic novel).

With no headroom worth speaking of and no light source other than what candles and lanterns could be brought in with the travellers, this was a physically exhausting job lying in the dark, using your leg muscles to prevent a heavy barge from striking the tunnel sides and getting slowly dripped upon and then lying in the rainwater which has picked up a trace element of carbonic acid during it's slow filtering through the limestone rock.

Dudley Tunnel branches into three lines, two of which serve limestone mines/quarries. Some of the limestone faces are underground, others resemble sinkholes whereby a huge section including the roof has been removed leaving the tunnel emerging into small areas of daylight, but daylight that is a long way overhead and inaccessible. None of the tunnel is accessible by foot unless one abseiled through one of the "sinkholes" and even then there is nowhere to land other than into the water. The open-to-the-sky sections are all heavily overgrown lending them a real Lost World feel.

You can partially ride the Dudley Tunnel from the Northern portal on an organised trip from the famous Black Country museum.

If Netherton is spooky then Dudley is even worse. The Southern portal is located at one end of a wide grassy area where two canals meet and an old disused railway is carried overhead on a great, multiple-arched brick viaduct. As you approach, the surroundings seem to close in on you in a claustrophobic fashion. It's a very noisy portal and all manner of strange splashes, echos and cracks come from inside echoing from nearly 3 miles of direct tunnel and another couple of miles of side tunnels. All the caveman "Fight or Flight" instincts come out when looking into the tunnel.

For many people in 18th and 19th century people in Britain, the canal was not merely a means of transport or work, it was a home with some families (called "bargees") living their whole lives on the water in barges that were homes, living nomadic gypsy lifestyles and rarely venturing much further inland then the towpaths. Britain's boat people if you like. In a fantasy world where underground canals serve mines it's easy to picture troglodyte races that live on canal barges and never see the sun.

I hope that gets the creative juices flowing. If it doesn't, well I dunno hand in your DM's card. :)

(Pics via Google Images as I can't find the CD with mine on at the moment).

Three Totally Unconnected Things

2011-12-01T19:07:00.005Z

Call me slow on the uptake, but I've only just noticed that if you play a DVD through VLC Media Player you can snapshot any frame.

This could be very useful (not to mention time-sucking-up) for Zak-type pictorial dungeon design.

Secondly and totally unrelated to the previous erm, thing, one of John Blanche's original pieces for Clash of the Princes is up on eBay, starting at £129. Were it from Sorcery! I'd be very interested, I'm less enthusiastic about CotP having never owned the books. Props to Zhu for noticing this.

And lastly if you are the guy who keeps coming to fightingfantasist looking for (quote) "hinpo porno" (unquote), no it doesn't turn up anything interesting for me in Google Images either and it took me fucking ages to work out why half the results are mine.

(Because of the old Barrabang Hinpo Garrabang chant in Temple of Terror. Told you Mr. EIDOS man was sneaking something dodgy in there).

Dreadfulfleet and the New Random

2011-11-20T13:57:00.005Z

GW did a weird one-off game release recently for something called Dreadfleet. I didn't buy it because I objected to a load of things.

1 - It was £70
2 - It was another Space Hulk-style "teh limited" thing whereby they'd do one print run and then take the backup tapes with the manuscripts on and microwave them or something, trying to artificially create demand.(*)
3 - Their bizarre and secretive nature meant that they wouldn't tell you anything about it, clearly relying upon a docile herd of ruminant fanboys to go out and buy it anyway (which they didn't), either failing to realise or just not caring that Space Hulk was a known and much-loved quantity and Forthcoming Mystery Game isn't.

So, whilst I lack sales figures for it, it doesn't seem to have been much of a success and to be honest - if it hasn't been they fucking deserve that.

Anyway, when I found a review online that claimed it was the worst game that GW had ever put out (the review didn't put full stops between the words Worst, Game and Ever put may as well have done) my first, and somewhat smug thoughts were;

"What, worse that Trolls In the Pantry? Oii, That's My Leg? Combat Cards? Those cut-down versions of Battlefleet Gothic, Blood Bowl and Advanced Heroquest where you rolled the dice in the box lid? Reviewer is probably a 12 year old who started with the last edition of 40k."

I didn't expect to be morally chastened by the reviewer immediately explaining why the aforementioned GW miscellanea where all, in their own ways, better games than Dreadfleet. Colour me intrigued.

What I didn't realise was that quirkworthy.com is actually Jake Thornton, pro games designer and ex-WD editor. This is clearly pretty serious stuff if somebody like him is prepared to go public with opinions like that.

Jake's review highlights something about Dreadfleet and by extension GW that is starting to concern me. He's massively critical of it's randomness in that the randomness is moving control and tactical choice away from players. Dreadfleet effectively plays the players. (Yeah, I know - In Soviet Nottinghamshire Game Plays You!) and as a man who knows game design, Jake points out that this is a leveller between veteran player and novice.

Something I am picking up from Warhammer players at Stourbridge is that random charge moves and the randomness of magic is working to the detriment of the game. And we're a bit atypical at Stourbridge in that nobody played Warhammer until the last days of WFB7. I know that a lot of clubs and playing groups that had stuck with WFB for years have stepped away from 8 bemoaning the random nature of it and the the fact that it's suddenly inflated unit sizes seem a marketing decision, not a gaming decision.

Bang these three factors together - increased randomness in WFB, DF's totally random nature and a clear example of ledger sheet bottom line interfering in the design process and I'm starting to wonder if GW shirts have hit upon the random factor as a deliberate policy with which to make GW games more attractive for a beginner. Trouble getting started because everyone else is a veteran player with a well-tuned army? No problem any more as we'll remove player tactics from it and an good day you can easily beat "that guy".

If I'm right, then I suspect the forthcoming release of the next version of 40k could kill the game dead at Stourbridge. And that's a worry, not just for club numbers (we need a certain minimum to break even with the cost of room hire) but for GW's position within the market as "price makers" which might make other manufacturers follow this lead. Less of this tactical choice and rewarding skill please, but of this random bollocks whereby anyone can win.

(*) Everyone remembers the odd way that they found about 60,000 copies of SH in a warehouse a couple of weeks after the launch. Nearly all GW branches have some in the backroom if you ask nicely and the shop isn't full so we have the idiot and self-inflicted situation whereby they dare not lose face by admitting that it didn't sell out so would rather not sell surplus stock.

Coopitsu - Work In Progress

2011-11-19T15:30:00.007Z

Nothing special, but I'm doing something I haven't done for years which is to paint for the sheer bloody hell of it. For years, I've been painting in a very regular and mechanical fashion and with one aim in mind, which is to churn out figures for wargames with as little effort as possible. Such as these Victrix 28mm Napoleonic Wars Austrians which are sharing space on the painting table with Brother Hornhead and his mate up above.

The Austrians use what I call my "Airfix Homage Technique" which is essentially, if the plastic is a usable colour (as it was in a lot of the Airfix HO scale boxes of toy soldiers) then damn well use it, since Victrix cast these in an off-white why not use that as your basecoat? Some details slapped on and the whole lot covered in Devlan Mud and two coats of Citadel Gloss Varnish. Airfix Homage Technique is even more blatant in my abandoned WFB7/8 Night Goblin army which mysteriously uses grey as its base colour...

...and these EM-4 Miniatures re-releases of the old Grenadier Space Rangers which are cast in silver plastic.

So yeah, it's fair to say that for years I've treated painting as some form of industrial product line and then tried to see how more and more efficient I can make it in some form of demented Deming-like analysis.

And this is cool for wargames but I realised I was missing the creative, artistic side of things.

So the two plastic Chaos Marines above have been painted in a totally different and almost organic process. I've been influenced recently by a lot of John Blanche's modern figure painting which differs dramatically from the "paint like this" instructions that GW throw out.

JB's figures are dirtier and heavy on the texturing with a realistic muted look to them and he uses inks as a primary painting mechanism. How to do this? Well, a while back I noted a brief aside in Dave King's kingsminis.blogspot.com blog about painting with inks. Basically prime grey, drybrush white, wash with Badab Black and you have a primed, pre-shaded model. Then just layer on successive glazes of ink.

So that's I've done with Daler and Rowney acrylics inks for the red with the odd glaze of different ink to break up the uniformity of colour (another thing I've noticed in JB's work - all colours are mottled or randomly faded in some fashion). Precise ink-lining with Badab Black and Devlan Mud to get that soft blend between colours.

Anyway enough with the technical stuff. This is a slow process and has reminded me of a few things I'd forgotten about splashing paint on figures.

1 - Painting is inherently a pointless and daft activity

Wherein lies it's genius. There is nothing, nothing like sitting up at two in the morning adding a small highlight or extra glaze to a tiny part of a tiny 28mm figure and realising that you can't see it, but you know it's there and the sheer insanity of all this pointless idiocy is keeping you sane.

2 - Speed-painting for wargames is inherently a chore.

Even if it's a enjoyable chore. It is artless, all artistic expression has been removed. You are painting to order, because you need 10 Space Marines, one with flamer, one with missile launcher and one with a chainsword and you paint those and exactly those with no extras and tight control over the contents of the squad because that is the squad for your wargame.

3 - Painting figures for a game you have no bloody intention of ever playing again is weirdly liberating.

It is. I like the look of the Chaos Marine with the melta-gun so I painted him. This is anathema to painting-for-gaming which only uses the melta-gun if it's an "efficient build". Normally when I speedpaint, I have the idea in my head that as a figure or batch of figures are completed, there's a milestone towards a new unit or an army or a game. With this, there's nothing. You did it, because frankly you enjoyed it and the slower it is, the more of the enjoy paint time there was.

I mentioned above the word "organic" in regards to this sort of painting for paintings sake and this is what I mean - the Austrians and Goblins each followed a rigid and "tuned for speed" recipe. Each colour was planned in order based up experience painting a couple of test shots and the recipe was then tweaked and tweaked (do I need to paint this? can this be seen in the finished article? are these two colours similar enough to mean I could just use one of them?) to require the least effort for best result. This painting is different, it's a lot of spending ages looking at the model and trying out little odd touches of colour to try and change the direction the model is travelling in. Going back to the recipe analogy, the speed painting is like trying to measure out exactly 200 grams of rice or butter whereas the slow painting is more a case of getting halfway through and thinking "I might chuck half a can of chopped tomatoes in".

Haven't enjoyed painting so much for years. Can see it becoming a new hobby interest.

owlandweasel.blogspot.com

2011-11-16T18:06:00.005Z

I have no idea who does owlandweasel.blogspot.com but I do know that it's a fantastic name for a Brit Old School blog, it turned up in my referrals history and it collects RSS links to lots of Brit OSR and White Dwarf alumni blogs. Worth bookmarking.

EDIT - Oh hang on, it's Zhu Bajiee.

d20 You're Evil So Why Do The Others Tolerate You In The Party? Table

2011-11-14T20:03:00.004Z

You're an evil PC, they aren't. How does that work? (d20)

1 - Ancient evil hieroglyphics to be translated? Working knowledge of the undead? Intimate knowledge of the sacred names of the 1048 Devil-Rat Children of Phraamfaze the Mother of Bastards? They need you and diplomacy means they choose to overlook the other stuff.
2 - Greed for gold is more important than philosophical differences.
3 - If you are going to band up with people who have thief and assassin and necromancy skills, nobody should be surprised to learn that they didn't learn these skills in Sunday School.
4 - It's a yin-yang thing, philosophically we need the complete, rounded nature of humanity in our party to be successful.
5 - Somebody has to appease the evil deities. Hastur knows, if the odd virgin sacrifice stops and it wakes up, all manner of Hell on Earth will break loose. Unpleasant? Yes, but so is cleaning sewers and digging the plague pits but somebody has to do it.
6 - The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
7 - They go down into holes in the ground, kill things and steal their stuff. It's hardly their place to split hairs upon social niceties.
8 - They think you are full of shit and doing it to gain attention.
9 - You are self-interested to the point of being Evil but respect honour (archetypal Lawful Evil thing).
10 - You hide it, very, very well.
11 - You believe that these fools are bound to your superior will. They might be happy to keep up the pretence.
12 - Your presence means that the Paladin doesn't have to dirty his hands with the tasks that he'd find difficult - everyone's happy that way.
13 - Compared to what's waiting down there, you're merely a badly behaved boy.
14 - They are cretins and think that they can "cure" you.
15 - They are too frightened of your evilness to object to your presence.
16 - Deep down, everyone is like you. Or would be if they weren't so weak. And they know it.
17 - Evil is sexy. They like you for it despite themselves.
18 - They are secretly fascinated and living out their impulses through you via proxy (*).
19 - None of you are friends - nobody gets close to other people in this line of work in case the inevitable happens. So why would they care?
20 - They think it's just a phase and you'll grow out of it once you meet a nice girl.

(*) Any single man with married friends will be familiar with this one.

d20 So Why Are You Doing This Idiocy? Table

2011-11-14T17:54:00.001Z

A quick and dirty d20 table to explain why a PC has ended up as an adventurer.

So why are you doing this idiocy? (d20)

1 - Attempting to prove doubters wrong
2 - Deluded belief in self's glorious destiny
3 - Does not have realistic views of risk involved (and unlikely ever to)
4 - Extreme thrill-seeker
5 - Feels there is no other suitable role in life
6 - Fleeing previous life
7 - Forced into this life by others
8 - Hatred of underground race/species
9 - Homicidal tendencies
10 - It belongs in a museum!
11 - Protecting other party member
12 - Refusal to fit into preordained role in life such as peasant or urban worker
13 - Religious motives (bash undead, die in battle for deity)
14 - Searching for somebody - believes clues will be found underground
15 - Searching for something - believes clues will be found underground
16 - Sense of duty
17 - Suicidally desperate for cash
18 - Wants to be immortalised for heroic deeds
19 - Wants to be immortalised for heroic demise (WFRP Trollslayer Syndrome)
20 - Suitable cover for criminal tendencies (theft, violence)

Advanced Fighting Fantasy Random Mapping Technique

2011-11-10T19:52:00.009Z

I've been playing with the random dungeon map generation system from this...

Graham Bottley's redo of Advanced Fighting Fantasy. (Graham probably remembers me not buying the game off him at Expo - well I ultimately bought myself a copy from my FLGS).

This is a brilliantly simple and fast idea. Put a piece of A4 or Letter-sized paper in a similarly sized box (I use some slim red thing from about 1983 with a warrior fighting a Red Dragon on the front - it seems appropriate somehow) and roll a bunch of d6s into it, one per desired room.

Read each d6 as a d3 and that marks the position of a room and the d3 score the number of exits from the room. Join it all up and you get a semi-random map that doesn't suffer from the "Snap-to-Grid" effect like drawing on graph/construction paper does.

Here's the first effort from this evening.

Click to embiggen...

The example in the AFF rulebook just draws little circles around each number and links each with lines. I've adopted the idea of assuming that dice that fall cluster in close proximity represent rooms that are adjacent to one other, dice seperated by distance are linked by corridors. This produces dispersed clumps of room such as in The Shithole of Sardonicus above.

The downside is that dice tend to hang at the edges of the paper where they hit the box sides creating a sort of "drawn to fit a rectangular sheet" effect, which you see can in rooms 10,11 and 12 above. To get around this I experimented with closing the box and vigorously shaking it but this produced worse results, whereby all the dice were clustered together in one area. Maybe a taller box is required.

It also can only produce rooms with 1,2 or 3 exits so in the first attempt I swapped out some of the d6s with d8s, reading them as d4s. By changing the types of dice and how you read them you can seed the generation towards lots of exits or few of them.

Again, click to embiggen...

(I apologise for crappy digital photos rather than scans but have you seen the price of flatbed scanners these days, at least the ones that don't come attached to a cheap and nasty inkjet printer? I remember when they were about £20 even in PC World).

As it happens only one of the d8s came up with the maximum number of exits but both maps are the sort of thing I wouldn't have ended up with just by getting the pens, ruler and graph paper out.

A good technique, especially useful for sandbox DMs caught on the hop and needing a dungeon within the next 5 or 10 minutes.

Two questions

2011-11-10T18:44:00.007Z

1 -
With an AD&D beastie like this, that states hp, but not Hit Dice...

How do you run this in combat? Is that 88hp supposed to be a maxxed out HD11? I have never understood how this is supposed to work in gameplay and it's bugged me for about 20 years(*).

2 -
Mentzer Fighter needs 2000xp to get to 2nd level.
B/X Fighter needs 2000xp to get to 2nd level.
OD&D Fighting Man needs 2000xp to get to 2nd level.
Swords & Wizardry Core Rules Fighter needs 2000xp to get to 2nd level.
Swords & Wizardry White Box Fighting Man needs 2000xp to get to 2nd level.
Labyrinth Lord Fighters needs 2035xp to get to 2nd level.

What?

Where does that 35 come from and more importantly, what's so significant about it that it justifies changing something of a tradition in D&D? Why did somebody think, I know it's important to change that 2000 to 2035? In fact, what is up with LL xp anyway? And the required amounts to level up are all to cock so that a Dwarf requires the bizarre figure of 2187 to reach level 1 and a Magic-User requires 2501 just to be bloody awkward.

What on Earth is the thinking behind this?

(*) EDIT - Suddenly releases that 20 years ago is only actually late 1991. Make it more like 25.

Deathtrap Dungeon d20

2011-11-08T20:07:00.005Z

(As we know, Coop here won't be able to review Myriador's 2003 d20-isation of Deathtrap Dungeon properly because nostalgia would take over. Accordingly I decided to cast around for a more naive-level reviewer. So, here we have a first for fightingfantasist in that we have a guest reviewer in the form of Gene, my 12 year old nephew. )

Thanks, Uncle Coop.

Deathtrap Dungeon is a module for 3.0 d20 which is unfortunate because that's really, really old as because we know (I Googled it) apparently that was a 3.0 but that was great until it became shit because 3.5 came out. There's no need for either shitty 3.0 or good-in-it's-day 3.5 because now we have 4.5 and obviously that's the shit because it's newer. So I don't know if I'd be interested in this old shit but Uncle Coop asked me to look it so here goes. I'm not entirely averse to old shit, I did once play Super Mario 64 at Coop's but the graphics were shit and there weren't even any fucking Gamer Achievements to scorewhore.

Deathtrap Dungeon is based upon a book by Ian Jackson or someone and I'm really disappointed in the background fluff which is really immature. You are told to go through some illogical dungeon by a guy called Baron Sukumoff or something and then he'll give you money and honestly this is a style of inferior roleplaying that should have been consigned to history back when they did away with compact discs.

Honestly, when I was 9 I was roleplaying in a far more superior and noble fashion than this, this is pathetic and baby-like. Back when I was 9 I had a VtM character called Jack Cockhard and he had been embraced when he was a member of Ghengis Khan's Mongol horde and he wore this leather trenchcoat and fought with two katanas that were tipped with mono-molecular edges, the technology for which he'd stolen from a top secret Black Ops Area 51 lab and he had a cybernetic arm with two Desert Eagles and an Uzi built in and he was really angsty and suffered from ennui and we spent a lot of our time doing really hardcore in-depth roleplaying, so hardcore that we spent long hours in roleplaying sessions acting out what we were doing with prossies before embracing them and – (that's enough - Coop)

Anyway this is a immature dungeon of 57 rooms and maybe it would keep you entertained if you were 8 or something.

It's also only for one PC and one Storyteller (Dungeon Master – Coop) so I imagine it could be useful if you are too old to have a regular gaming group – say you are like 22 or something. There is a token effort made at saying you could run a party through but little said about whether Baron Sukedhimoff might notice this was cheating when the other entrants all turned up on their own.

There's new stat added called LUCK which can be used like in the original Fighter Fantasy gamebooks but shittily, you have to roll it and can't point build so there is no way to optimise your build! This is total wank and means you may get laughed at for having a sub-optimal build. Totally unacceptable in this day and age. I felt completely raped by the system.

Much of the artwork is reused from the original book back in the 1950s or whenever it was which is OK considering it's old and crap but a few are redrawn for this scenario. Uncle Coop lent me the original book and I noticed that there was a pic not found in this version of a hot Elf bird being strangled by a giant penis snake which was quite hentai and -

brb fapping.

For the purposes of this review, I did cheat my way through Steve Livingstone's original book and the scenario is pretty close but wimps out a little bit by adding lots of little notes with cryptic clues throughout the dungeon to tell you what to do (I would have just allowed a Wisdom skill check and if the player makes it say, so “OK, you were clever enough to collect the right number of gems during your passage through Deathtrap Dungeon, you can have 5000xp”). I think the problem is here is that Ian Steve's original book was designed to be Nintendo-hard and take many attempts to get through (there's no Save points for fucks sakes) but nobody wants to make a killer dungeon that can't be beat on your first play-through otherwise fat cunts like Jordan in my gaming group will burst into tears when their Planetouched Tiefling Paladin-Bard gets poison-gassed to death by Igbut the Trialmaster and then Brooklyn will throw him out of his bedroom because he stinks because he never showers because it's too much effort to lift his Slipknot t-shirt over his man-boobs.

Also I think if you are playing this and didn't read the original old book you won't really get it and if you did, you know how to win and will have to pretend you don't while saying things like “Oh wow, a sapphire. I'm so glad I found this and I'm sure it won't ever be needed in a contrived three-gem-door-lock puzzle later on in this dungeon.”

Apart from the dungeon you get a little splatbook about Fang, the town where Deathtrap Dungeon is sited but it doesn't answer a really important question I have about the place and without a canon answer I wouldn't be happy to run a game in Fang.

Basically is Fang AZN? I ask because in the original book Sukumclit appears to be wearing clothes from Natalie Portman's wardrobe on Naboo and the people of Fang look like AZN kids or something. And we know that Steve Ian was a bit of a weeaboo and named Suksumballs after a street in Bangkok's red light district so I think he meant Fang to be all AZN and the scenario here doesn't really go into that and assumes it's like European Middle Ages like the 1910s or something back in the days when Germany bombed Hitler with the A-bomb.

What I need to know is, and I need a proper canon answer here from somebody who has read all the fluff, are there chickboys in Fang? Because if it's AZN I think that would fit and we could have some good games there.

It's like if an AZN guy made a load of money by inventing Pachinko or Pokemans in Asia and then he came to Europe on a shop-lifting expedition like all those Spanish schoolkids you see in Birmingham city centre and then when he went home he decided to create an RPG book and named his BBEG Lord Reeperbahn or King Singelgebied or Baron Hagley-Road-Between-Bearwood-High-Street-And-Five-Ways then we'd know what he was talking about.

My verdict – It's kind of OK if you want this kind of old shit or you don't have enough friends and have to play D&D with just one player and aren't bothered about whether are there are any newhalf lady-boys in the tavern the PCs stay in.

Apparently there's a sequel to the old book called Trial of Champions and a d20 version of that too, which I haven't read but I guess it must be better because it's the sequel.

Random stuff

2011-11-07T21:00:00.007Z

Stuff thought about whilst dozing under the fever dream influence of cold remedy, ibuprofen and Deep Heat.

- I now have a 2nd Edition DMG which cost me £5, mint. Late model WotC "stopgap" printing on shiny toilet paper. While it's no reflection upon the quality of the material therein, I have to declare 2E DMG to be the least inspiring rolegame rulebook I've ever seen. Dull illustrations, no sense of wonder. Nothing leaps out and tells you that you want to play this game. Clearly CHA was used as a dumpstat.

-Also in my possession is the d20 adaptation of Deathtrap Dungeon. Review following at some point in the future.

-The Pathfinder starter set covers levels 1-5 and looks to be such an ideal RPG starter set so that it's once again made painfully obvious that Pathfinder is the shittiest name ever given to an RPG and is totally devoid of all mass-market appeal. For Christ's sake, buy the D&D name from WotC (you'd be doing them, us and yourself a favour), rebrand it and make sure it's in WHSmiths and the Argos catalogue for next Christmas).

(Yeah, I know, pipe-dream city and probably the crack pipe at that. But I'm an ill man so let me dream awhile...)

- I've forgotten to mention that I've had the Advanced Fighting Fantasy RPG for a few months now and it's a nice little package. Maybe review following in a bit. It has a very nice Zak-esque random dungeon generator whereby you drop a bunch of d6s on a piece of paper, each dice fall showing the rough location of a dungeon room with the score read as a d3 to indicate the number of entrances and exits.

- On the subject of Zak-esque dungeon generation, a quick browse through Deviantart turns up all manner of useful stuff for such generationey.

- For the base picture for Zak pictorial dungeon design, try here http://darkbooks.org/gallery/gallery.html and scroll down to Magical Pictures and the assorted Magical Landscapes n galleries. I got this image from there which would be a really good portal to about 17 or so one-page dungeons, Caves of Chaos style.

- Finally, I can't remember where I found this, and can't be arsed with tineye-ing it, but they deserve statting up and placing in a dungeon along the Wheelies from Citadel of Chaos.

The Wumpus Dungeon

2011-11-03T18:47:00.003Z

As we all know the OSR regards the concept of balancing a dungeons denizens to the levels of the PCs as being for bedwetters and lightweights. The acme of OSR brilliance is for a group of experienced Grognards to run a party of Level 1 milksops through a dungeon of 15HD creatures and Save versus Death traps and to get away with it.

So, why not a dungeon designed specifically for this style of play?

Here's the idea which has been germinating in the back of my mind for a couple of months.

A dungeon with just one denizen - anything else is just the usual dungeon scavengers, rats and the like. But that one denizen is practically obscene in terms of strength and the idea is for the party to get in, achieve their goals and get out without having to face the beast.

(It's probably an idea to not make the denizen some form of antediluvian uberdragon - heroic players tend to think that offing them becomes their task and we want to concentrate their minds on avoiding it, not playing at being Billy Big Balls).

So the big bastard (which I dub The Wumpus after the single-denizen dungeon of the 1970s computer game) is a total TPK'er - Save versus Death attacks that sort of thing. The party should not be able to get into some form of fisticuffs with it, nor get trapped by it without losing party members.

The trick to setting this thing up strikes me as requiring the following

-A deserted dungeon with plenty of entries on the rumour table .
-The Wumpus, whose puissance is well known to all NPCs who have words put in their mouth by the aforementioned rumour table.
-Something achievable within the dungeon that does not require slaying of The Wumpus.
-Potential to allow the players to use their intelligence to minimize the chances of meeting The Wumpus so that the more intelligence they display, the safer they become. This could a weakness of The Wumpus - for example it can't get through the boreholes less than 6' in diameter that criss-cross the dungeon so the potential is there for the party to plan out their routes.

It doesn't actually have to be a dungeon dedicated to just this Wumpus, it could be a single level within the megadungeon but then obviously the players need to know what they are getting into it. It's no good having the party discover a trapdoor down to a level, entering it with no idea of what will be there and then getting crucified by your Black Dragon/Purple Worm hybrid. When they know it's there in advance and have a reason to go to that level and the information needed to make a proper plan, then we have a Wumpus Dungeon.

Worked Example - The Castle of the Hydra of Two Score and Four Heads

Big old castle. I've been playing Ico HD on the PS3 so it's a titan structure on an unfathomable scale clinging to dizzyingly-high sheer seaside clifs. Cyclopean and all that. The Wumpus is a 48HD, forty-eight-headed Hydra with Save versus Death venom on the teeth of each head. It gets +4 to attack and damage rolls when the Moon is full, or is immune to the blows of mortal Man or can only be struck by silver weapons. Local villagers know this.

(This game gave me vertigo. I don't even suffer from a fear of heights IRL)

Players should soon twig when a villager tells them "The beast has two score and four heads, each drooling steaming venom and legend states no mortal Man may no so much as scratch it's flanks! Now buy me another pint."

The Hydra permanently sleeps dreaming it's black dreams through which it gains sustenance in lieu of food (so it's effectively immortal). It wakes when mortals enter the castle, perhaps because a network of statues set in the walls whisper to it to wake. This is probably known to the rumour table as well.

Apart from the Hydra there are traps, but only really from the hazards of navigation (cave-ins, collapsing floors, general structural crapness and a few one-way doors).

The only real "fighting" threat to the party is the Hydra, other fauna are just rats, spiders, snakes etc. These could be nasty out of all proportion to their size if venomous/diseased. There's also the potential for NPC adventurer groups with conflicting aims to the PCs.

There are plot hooks aplenty

-There are piles of gold and shiny-shinys because such stuff coalesces out of the ether in order to tempt adventurers into megadungeons.
-Somebody entered and presumably died and somebody wants you to recover their remains or an heirloom they were carrying.
-Somebody entered and presumably died and they had something you want.
-Kudos awaits (i.e. xp) he who can sneak into the castle and recover a scale from one of the Hydra's necks to prove the size of his big brass balls.
-A wizard wants something for a magical/mystical gee-gaw that is only found within the castle (plantlife, spoor of The Hydra etc.)

Potential to minimize the risk

-What can we do about statues that alert the Hydra through their demonic whispering?
-An upper level of the castle is broken and smashed and open to the elements and much of the floor is missing and accordingly the Hydra can't reach it. Travel is possible across this but at some point the party will need to descend to the Hydra's level and look for another route back up to the upper level.
-Decoy NPCs, willing or otherwise
-Weakness to silver means that the party might be able to minimize the movement of the Hydra by meaning of silver-plated caltrops or similar.
-Looking for squeezes and crawlspaces that the Hydra won't be able to follow the PCs in.

Gary Chalk Interview at DFB Studio Blog

2011-11-01T20:52:00.003Z

Unfortunately all I seem to be doing these days on this particular blog is linking to interviews elsewhere! Anyway DFB Studio has a brief interview with Gary Chalk here.

I particularly like this bit...

I find the modern Warhammer worlds mind-numbing dull, but since they have been specifically designed to appeal to twelve year old boys, rather than sad old gits like me, that’s not really very suprising. As for White Dwarf, it isn’t really a magazine, it’s a monthly product catalogue and a very well designed one at that.

I don’t think that Workshop products have been made to appeal to adult gamers for years. Adults are no longer their target market. If adults want to buy their products, no doubt they are pleased, but their buyers are adolescent boys who buy boxes of orcs for about two years until they discover girls.

Mr. Chalk tells it like it is.

Dear Cousin Jonathan...

2011-10-31T18:55:00.004Z

Please don't do any more gamebook covers. Thanks.

Lobo Solitario

2011-10-28T21:15:00.004+01:00

Regular readers will know all about my sneering contempt for foreign covers of British gamebooks. And here. And also here. Oh, and here as well.

So it's pleasantly surprising to discover that at least one printing of the Spanish versions of Lone Wolf had some really nice covers, presumably locally sourced.

Lone Wolf doesn't really look like the 16 year old he's supposed to be at the start of Flight from the Dark here but the image of him on the cover of Shadow on the Sand is suitably monastic.

Rogue Trader 1983

2011-10-26T18:43:00.006+01:00

Sometimes, when sorting out raw material for the increasingly crammed-full-of-Brit-Old-School-goodness tumblr blog fuckyeahbritisholdschoolgaming.tumblr.com (try the archive and spin that mousewheel - it's ace) that I do, you come across some really amazing stuff.

Such as this;

It's from October 1983 and the First Citadel Compendium. It would of course appear in print four years later and no longer be an RPG or a spacecraft combat system as first touted. Fascinating to think what would have been in that manuscript had it been published back when it was actually first advertised.

You could of course argue that this particular game didn't appear for twenty-six years and the launch of the Fantasy Flight Games RPG of the same name.

Tales from the Maelstrom Interviews Rick Priestley

2011-10-03T19:12:00.002+01:00

Assuming that you haven't already seen it, then this is a excellent interview with RP and well worth reading;

http://talesfromthemaelstrom.blogspot.com/2011/09/rick-priestley-interview.html

Some great views "behind the scenes" regarding the creation of 40K and, more importantly, how Rick intended it to be played in the first place. It strikes me that Mr. Priestley is far happier now that he can be (to adopt a phrase that the OSR like to bandy around with respect to Gary Gygax) Gamer Rick rather than Workshop Rick.

I Think John Blanche Just Told Me Off

2011-09-22T21:06:00.001+01:00

http://fuckyeahbritisholdschoolgaming.tumblr.com/post/10526245842/the-knights-panther-is-not-a-copy-but-a-very-deliberate

:)

So I Went to Workshop Today...

2011-09-18T15:23:00.004+01:00

To buy two pots of paint for a slotcar racing project. And the guy at the till said "Hi" and finished with "Have a nice one", rang up the paint and didn't try and sell me a White Fraud subscription, didn't try and sell me a big box and didn't jig about asking me what I was painting while using the word "kewl" a lot and giving the impression that he hadn't actually listened to a word I was saying.

I could get used to this.

I'd say at exactly which GW store I received this surprisingly pleasant and respectful customer service but I'm sure that if I did that somebody would lose his job over it. :(

Rod of Seraillian

2011-09-11T21:07:00.004+01:00

The second-hand racks at Waylands Forge were good to me again yesterday, this time with a copy of GM5 - Rod of Seraillian, the last of the semi-regular module-magazine hybrid published by Paul Cockburn and some other refugees of TSR Inc's massacre of TSR UK's Imagine magazine. And all for a mere £1 as well. Curiously I didn't have to flip through the racks for this - it leapt out at me from the other side of the shop - neither did I have to search for the two Prince of Shadows books from last week which were also serendipitously on top of the pile. They found me so to speak.

GM5 (February 1987) is a perfect-bound publication (think thin card cover with a right-angled, flat spine), the bulk of which is taken up by Carl Sargent's 38 page adventure Rod of Seraillan (yeah I know it says 40 pages on the cover...). Aside from that there's a few interesting articles/editorials.

The editorial apologises for this being the last issue, blaming TSR's cancelling of advertising as being the final straw, a tit-for-tat response to GMPubs questioning if the downsizing of TSR UK was suggesting it was being wound up. There seems to be a lot of politics going on here, what with the GMPubs thing being distributed by GW and Cockburn beavering away on WFRP.

Interesting news and opinions frozen in amber in late '86 - WFRP is vastly outselling AD&D in the UK, industry opinion is that Lorraine Williams has bought a white elephant in the form of TSR which has supposedly peaked and is losing shelf space in the US and there is a Celtic campaign background for AD&D written by TSR UK that will probably be butchered by TSR Inc. That would have been interesting to see - TSR UK's talent (basically the original WFRP crew) writing up Slaine The Barbarian for AD&D. It's a great shame that that is lost to posterity.

Also, Cockburn doesn't think that the much-needed 2nd edition of AD&D will ever see the light.

All of this should of course be read through the lens of coming from a organ only one part removed from GW Head Office and from a man whose magazine was terminated by TSR.

Reviews look at the AD&D Dungeoneers Survival Guide and Wilderness Survival Guide and the D&D Immortals set and the reviewer isn't impressed by any of them.

GMPubs served the role of being a sort of borderlands refugee camp for the famous Pelinore campaign which had started life in Imagine and was an attempt to produce a semi-official D&D setting tuned for UK tastes. I can't tell you very much about Pelinore as I never saw an issue of Imagine back in the day but I do know it was the house campaign of people like Paul Cockburn and Tom Kirby (yes that's the Tom Kirby, the one you can blame for the modern day Evil Empire - clearly he was a gamer once...). So the last Pelinore article turns up in here and is a brief thing about Sages and a couple of academic establishments wherein they may be found.

(Sages were essential parts of the PC party economic engine in D&D/AD&D, identifying unknown magical artifacts and acting as stop off points for DM's to dripfeed out rumours and legend about this evenings dungeon entertainment).

Of course, Brit Old Schoolers will be delighted to see that the 1980s British tradition of stupid punning NPC names was being used here - we have NPCs called Pana Seer, Gimble Gyrewabe, Methurtyd Vill and Gottun Himmel, the latter of whom presumably didn't make the cut for The Enemy Within.

(There's even more Brit Old School nostalgia in the included scenario which has plenty of good old references to something called "Page XX". Oh Page XX, how we miss you in this modern CTRL+F age...)

Finally, off to Rod herself, the Pelinore scenario for this issue.

Rod is 38 pages, it's Carl Sargent-authored and it's dual-statted both for AD&D with D&D (effectively Cyclopedia D&D but before that compilation volume was ever published). There's a plot about going to the dungeon to recover a holy artifact that's at risk but...

An ex-work colleague of mine once ranted long and hard about people who tell you about a film or book they've read, give a very rough outline of what it's about and then, with a glint in their eye exclaim "BUT THERE'S A TWIST!" therefore allowing anyone with a modicum of intelligence to immediately realise the twist ending whether they wanted to or not.

(Apposite to this - another ex-work colleague once recommended a new film called "Sixth Sense" to me, finishing up with the gushing praise that "and you never realise Bruce Willis is dead until the very end!". Suffice to say, I have never bothered to watch Sixth Sense. Although I gather that apparently Bruce Willis is actually dead throughout this film.)

And now I'm going to do precisely this.

There's a plot about going to the dungeon to recover a holy artifact that's at risk but...

THERE'S A TWIST!

Rod is a fairly high level beast, it's for 6-9 PCs of levels 6-8. Structurally it's just a five level dungeon with a high degree of Gygaxian naturalism. Sargent starts each level with a discussion of what the denizens of each level will do in response to discovering that there is a full-scale enemy incursion going on. This is neat and makes the dungeon other than a static place whereby evil clerics hide in their rooms until their doors are opened. So they should respond intelligently to what the PCs are doing elsewhere but...

THERE'S A TWIST!

Anyway, the climax of the adventure is a battle with a 155hp being from another plane. Assuming the PCs can sort out the holy artifact's at-risk status and tie up the loose ends, a great big Deus Ex Machina will turn up, thank them and then resurrect any of the casualties. I'm uncertain as to how I feel about this sort of thing - it just smacks of "but it was all a dream!" and if the scenario assumes that resurrection of this kind is necessary (and up to three dead PCs a day!) perhaps it's not that well designed. Maybe this was an accepted part of high-risk, deadly scenarios in the Pelinore campaigns of Cockburn, Kirby et al.

Not bad for a pound and BTW, the cover has precisely sod all to do with the contents. It's actually the cover for a Gor novel (hence the slavegirl who, Gor being Gor, probably chained herself up) called "The Gamesmaster".

Chimps Outside For First Time In 30 Years

2011-09-08T18:43:00.003+01:00

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/lab-chimps-laugh-hug-taste-freedom-162813744.html

I'm not entirely sure why it took until now for AIDS research chimpanzees originally rescued in 1997 to actually be allowed outside but having seen this, the first thought that came to mind?

Paranoia troubleshooters. Sent outside of Alpha Complex to a strange place with a really, really high blue roof. The only thing missing from the video is one of the chimps acting to backstab another with an experimental plasma-powered vacuum cleaner.

New 40K Gamebook

2011-09-07T12:43:00.003+01:00

Games Workshop have published a gamebook - Hive of the Dead, set in a 40K millieu.

Now, Space Marines aside, have you ever wondered how you would cope in a zombie apocalypse? Would you be food for the Undead, or the hero of a post-apocalyptic wasteland? Well, now you can find out. Hive of the Dead, the first ever Warhammer 40,000 gamebook, is released today. This is not a normal book. Rather than reading it in a traditional linear manner, the end of each story section will present you with a number of options, allowing you to control the direction of the story with the decisions you make. You will also need a pencil and a standard six-sided dice (if you're anything like us, there are probably a dozen down the side of your sofa) in order to combat the Undead denizens of Hive Septus.

(source:GW website)

It's a £13, Print On Demand book only available from the Black Library webstore. Sounds pricey for POD but it's a claimed 288 pages so might be a big beast.

Thanks to Scott H for the headsup.

Prince of Shadows

2011-09-04T14:05:00.004+01:00

A nice find in the second-hand racks at Waylands Forge yesterday.

Prince of Shadows was a two-gamebook series from Gary Chalk and David Kerrigan dating from 1988 and 1989, urban-based and published in an unusual format - each book is 8.5" x 10.5" and has only 64 pages with a 200+ paragraph length.

One of those gamebooks that, like the two-player FF book Clash of Princes, I only saw once or twice Back In The Day, didn't pick up and regretted it ever since.

Pete Tamlyn On Gamebooks, 1986

2011-09-01T18:55:00.005+01:00

Looking at a gamebook in pure game terms, as a contest between you and the writer, the book is simply a succession of game turns in which you have to choose one of three options. This is not a very complex game: even in noughts and crosses you get an average of 4½ choices per turn. The sad fact is that if a gamebook writer plays fair and gives you the chance to make an intelligent decision each time, then the game will be much too easy to solve. Instead they rely on dirty tricks: withholding information from you, giving seemingly sensible choices that lead you into inescapable danger, and killing you off as often as possible. That way the game takes longer, and the player gets more value out of it.

Pete Tamlyn, Crash 31, August 1986

For me this encapsulates the difference between Lone Wolf and Fighting Fantasy.

In it's day, Lone Wolf appeared to blow the doors clean off FF with it's believable world and branching structure that relied upon intelligent decision-making rather than luck/brute force/whim of Livingstone and a refusal to get drawn into "got to Boss encounter - only two of three required geegaws" territory. It's also how I managed to complete some of the early LW books (sans dice admittedly) on their first run through and then had no real desire to return to them.

It's clear to me now that, despite the criticisms of the FF format on gamebooks.org, the FF books have dated better than LW because they adopted the latter approach to gamebook design. A decent FF game is a great puzzlebox that requires multiple passes to completion and even then still has the "AAA" game to go after - the promised solution that minimizes the dice rolling and allows Mr. SKILL 7 STAMINA 14 LUCK 7 to get through.

Your correspondent here has the memory of a goldfish so gets a lot of replay value out of FF books that he hasn't touched for a decade or so. I don't really get much replay value out of LW books in the same way that I don't get much replay value out of RPG scenarios I've played in. It's odd, but back when I discovered LW I would never have believed that I would come around to thinking that this new approach to gamebooks, almost a real RPG campaign and everything, actually didn't have the legs of the approach that it appeared to be making obselete.

I still pick up FF books off eBay, I've only bought one LW book in the past 17/18 years or so and that was a second-hand Caverns of Kalte last week in order to fill an annoying gap in the run of the first 12 on my bookcase.

(The exception that proves the rule is of course Castle Death which has all the hallmarks of Joe Dever trying to write an FF book. It's one of my favourites and notably one of the LW fanbases least favourites).

Assault of the Ogroids

2011-08-31T18:13:00.005+01:00

It's 1987. You, teenaged ZX Spectrum owner, are reading Sinclair User (possibly while waiting four to six minutes for a game to load which is probably about to R Tape Loading Error anyway) with the nagging feeling that the magazine is just a crappier copy of the far superior Speccy gaming mags Crash and YS(*). This is a negative, but the positive of it being the 1980s is that Basic D&D and FF are hugely in the public eye so that Spectrum magazines(**) keep having articles on tabletop gaming.

And here's one in that very issue of Sinclair User by the blog's favourite-gamer-artist-who-isn't-Russ-Nicholson, Gary Chalk (Lone Wolf/Red Wall/Talisman etc.) that I didn't know existed until yesterday when I found it looking for something entirely different and now totally forgotten.

Assault of the Ogroids is a strange mix of boardgame and random encounter table-driven sandbox. As can be seen if you read the scans (SUBTLE HINT), the idea is to pick a route across a gridded map and reach the other city in the 30 hours time limit. Each square has a terrain type which is keyed to a random encounter table, some of the entries of which are themselves keyed to random encounter subtables which should be manna from heaven for OSR sandbox haven't-a-fucking-clue-what-is-going-on-in-my-own-campaign enthusiasts (SUBTLE HINT).

There is a computer-moderated element to this, but you don't need an 1982 vintage home computer in order to play it - all it does is book-keep and generate d% and d8 results for you. It's going to be less hassle to just do it yourself with paper and dice.

Yes children, once upon a time we actually had to type in the source code ourselves if we wanted to run the thing. And then debug our typing errors. And then debug the typesetters typing errors. And then debug the coders errors. Upon such things men were built.

A couple of simple mechanics might arouse the interest of OSR sandboxers. Firstly, each terrain type has a time cost to cross it, meaning that the player has to balance crossing mountains with going around them and decide which is quickest. Secondly, the players stats detoriate with each square crossed with hard, fatiguing terrain costing more. Thirdly, you can run from any encounter but then you will "scatter" from the space which may put you in harder, slower terrain you didn't want to be in.

P.S. Any game in which your character token is represented as a man running away frit is Old School in my book.

(*) Sinclair User started off as a hobbyist magazine for early ZX81/Spectrum adopters but went downhill when the audience changed to a younger, games playing demographic.

(**) Maybe C64 magazines as well but who gives a fuck? Amstrad? Did they make computers?

(Scans from worldofspectrum.org)

This Is Megadungeon

2011-08-26T18:25:00.004+01:00

On the grounds that the real thing is even more awesome than you could ever imagine...

The Rumble Room, Tennessee. Click them all to embiggen (well worth it).

From http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2030448/Incredible-images-climbers-descending-hundreds-feet-stunning-caverns.html

The Lichway

2011-08-22T18:18:00.003+01:00

The Lichway - Albie Fiore's classic scenario from White Dwarf 9, Oct/Nov 1978. The first of the great scenarios that WD became known for.

The trouble with posting about The Lichway is that I'd feel a fraud talking about it as I wasn't there Back In The Day so can't really offer an opinion on it's influence. Older and wiser heads would just shake sadly. Instead I'll just leave these here so you can appreciate it yourself.

POP QUIZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - For whom does The Lichway directly lead to a knighthood? I mean a real one, in the real world with the Queen and a sword and everything - answer is below...

Our later-to-be-knighted-pop-quiz-question-answer was once invited by a neighbour to play in some strange new American game called Dungeons and Dragons and the scenario the DM neighbour was running was of course The Lichway. Instantly made a fan of D&D, this individual decided to take up the DM's mantle himself and created a world full of slightly off-beat creations.

One of his creations was a in-game justification of the "Vancian" one shot magic system of D&D. In his gameworld, spells were effectively demons that took up temporary residence inside your brain and exited once cast, memorizing the spells in the first instance being a process of encouraging the sentient spell to leave the page of the spellbook and climb inside the MU's head.

His campaign also involved luggage made from sapient pearwood, an upside mountain and the whole thing was flat, disc-shaped and carried on the back of four elephants, who were themselves atop a giant turtle swimming in space.

The Lichway was massively influential upon Britgaming, but even more influential upon the stock lists and future profits of WHSmiths.

Tumblr

2011-08-16T19:37:00.003+01:00

We regret to inform those whom it may concern but the Boy Coop has temporarily run out of words. Until suitable words can be found again please accept, by way of recompense, pictures.

Name the (Mantic) Warpath Starter Set

2011-07-27T18:39:00.003+01:00

http://www.manticgames.com/What-is-Mantic-Games/Shows-and-Events/Name-the-Warpath-Starter-Set.html

I might suggest ROUGE TRADER, and for the background suggest that it all kicks off in a disagreement over exclusive asteroid mining rights for minerals used in cosmetics.

Feel free to add your own sarcastic and piss-taking suggestions in the comments box!

Geeky Shopping Weekend

2011-07-25T12:56:00.002+01:00

-League of Extraordinary Gentleman #1
-League of Extraordinary Gentleman #2
-Batman Arkham Asylum (Grant Morrison comic book, not the videogame which I had and grew bored of)
-Second-hand DVDs of Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke
-Not second-hand DVD of Laputa Castle In The Sky (replacing, ahem, the "backup" copy I had before)
-15mm American Civil War Union Army (painted) from a Stourbridge clubmate who'd bought 4 boxes of this stuff off eBay sight unseen on a whim and was happy to sell a couple of boxes off for what he'd paid for them so that we can get some games of Black Powder in.

Suffice to say at no point during this weekend did I actually leave the house intending to buy any of this rammage.

The insanity continued on Sunday when, because it was a beautiful morning, I took the Porsche out for a run to Worcester (a 60 mile round trip) in order to visit WHSmiths to buy a book of six first class stamps. It's only money after all.

(At this point Coop talks about 20 year old comic books that he has only just discovered in the same fashion as a 13 year old talking about this new old band called Nirvana that he's just discovered or indeed in the same fashion as the 13 year old Coop talking about this cool new old music from somebody called Hendrix and some guys called The Who that he's just discovered).

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is rather marvellous and much like Watchmen (you know Watchmen, it's a 25 year old comic book that I discovered a couple of years ago and would like to tell you all about just in case you've never heard of it) in that there is so much going in the art that it requires multiple re-reading and examination. I also feel it's a waste of time talking about it because you all loved it years ago, but hey I loved it and lots of it is REALLY CLEVER and by that I mean makes me the reader feel REALLY CLEVER for spotting how REALLY CLEVER it all is. Sometimes I feel like the cocky 16 year old Coop all over again. I could see the Island of Dr Moreau homage coming a mile off, but didn't see the Rupert The Bear thing coming.

tdlr; LoEG is rather good isn't it? I'd never read it before.

Arkham Asylum however was just disappointing and a waste of a tenner. Impossible to follow the narrative and the artwork is so dense and overwrought that it's essentially a glossy book of meaningless pictures and part-pictures with minimal text. In this edition Morrison's original type-written script is included (perhaps in an attempt to explain WTF is going on) and is about four times as long as the comicy bits and full of important stuff that is completely AWOL in the finished product - such as explaining who the bloody hell characters as and WTF is going on. A pretentious twaddle let down.

tdlr; AA is rather bad isn't it? I'd never read it before.

So that leaves three slices of Studio Ghibli loveliness to be getting on with but Summer isn't the season for be sitting in with DVDs when you live on the canal. They'll probably emerge in the Autumn.

This Friday we are playing Black Powder with 28mm Boxer Rebellion toys. I almost feel morally obliged to bring along cigars and brandy for the gentlemen players of Stourbridge.

Scooby Doo Undead

2011-07-14T22:08:00.003+01:00

Naff grainy shots but this is what I'm currently working on with the old paintbrush. Mantic Games plastic undead painted, not as corporeal "solid bone" undead in the usual style, but as insubstantial ethereal ghosts.

The plan is to produce an entire army done in this paint scheme with no exceptions. Everything in the army is a ghost and painted in this otherworldly green glow. I'm taking inspiration from things like the Deadmen of Dunharrow in LotR and a Russ Nicholson illustration of a host of ghosts in an FF book (exactly which one I forget).

This is unbelievably quick and simple to paint - black undercoat, top one third in Citadel Codex Grey, the bottom two thirds drybrushed lightly with the same paint. Then the area around the face is drybrushed white (as if the face is a light source) and the face filled in solid white. One good wash with Citadel Thraka Green Wash (the stuff that smells like cheap cider).

Still to do the bases, which will be done in a "Welsh Slate Quarry" style with dark grey rock and gravel, dotted with static grass. But I chuck the quick pics up because I know a couple of my gaming mates who read the blog were keen to see what the final effect looks like.

For me at least, this yields better results than the approach the GW Studio took for their Army of the Dead figures which just look like stone statutes to me. I feel that this approach works because the ghost "fades out" towards it's feet and the stark white of the face underneath the wash makes the evil face pop out and this draws the eye.

I didn't come with the technique myself, it's an adaption of one I found here - http://www.vampirecounts.net/Thread-The-Rise-of-the-Von-Kerryathe-Legion-Picture-Heavy?pid=31508#pid31508

Another of Zak's Great Ideas

2011-07-14T19:33:00.003+01:00

Over at D&D with Pornstars.

Follow the link for the full-size. A campaign map using inspirational images scaled to show the relevant spatial relationships and relative proportions of the different geographical areas of the map. A really, really neat little idea that makes me want to leap on Google Images and start building worlds. Some people in the comment thread suggest that you need proper hexes and scales and plausible physical geography but in all honesty this is all I would ever need or want.

That boy has more brilliant ideas for RPGing than can surely be contained with one skull.

Borneo Rainbow Toad

2011-07-14T19:29:00.002+01:00

Lost since 1924, photographed for the first time ever. More details at The Register.

We want Giant Borneo Rainbow Toads and we want them statted up.

To The Games Shop On The Train

2011-07-10T17:40:00.007+01:00

I went into Birmingham yesterday on the train to go to Waylands Forge, my FLGS. There's normally nothing noteworthy about this (I'm there quite often) but yesterday was the first time I'd been since moving gaff.

This meant that I'm now living by another train line so have the dubious pleasure of arriving at Brum via the dread hole that is New Street Station. Anybody who has ever travelled on a cross-country train to Brum will be familiar with the trainbound arrival at England's second city - dingy, stinking underground platforms and escalators up to the world's most dated 1960s shopping centre before being disgorged into a crowded pedestrian ramp down into the pedestrianised centre of the city.

Until I moved gaff I used to live on the so-called Jewellery Line that brings you into the city either via the somewhat bright and airy Snow Hill or the charming Edwardian station at Moor Street. Both were pleasant ways to arrive in Brum, New St. is not.

But, and here's the big but, back in the 1980s my mate Jamie and I used to catch the train to go to Games Workshop and in those days New St. was the terminus for our route not Snow Hill.

So stepping off the train at that station to go to the gaming shop was like stepping back 25 years in time and took me back to days of daysaver train/bus tickets and spending £2.50 on a blister of five figures.

New St. is currently being rebuilt, the plan is to basically rip off the entire top and expose it to sunlight and that will be an improvement long overdue, but just this once it was nice to arrive in the old dump and be reminded of the old happy times of the cheap train ride to GW in the Pallasades.

While I was there (Waylands not GW circa 1987), I bought this.
110 plastic figures for a mere £45. From a fantasy games company I like a lot, have high hopes for and appreciate their value for money pricing. Which I carried home on a train from New St. having breathed in all that diesel muck from the dim half-light of the subterraean platforms. Made me feel like it was 1987 again...

Warpath By Mantic Games - Epic Trolling Sir, Epic Trolling

2011-07-04T20:36:00.009+01:00

Ronnie Renton contemplates launching plastic Zoats, Fimir and racist Pygmies. And Christmas Marines and Chaos Toilets. Possibly Slann with las-guns too.

OK, so you are Ronnie Renton, ex-GW employee now running your own plastic toy soldier company. Your first releases are some High Elves priced to dramatically undercut your ex-employers High Elf range although they are a litle slim so you only really undercut your ex-employers Lord of the Rings range. But that degenerate Brit Old Skool blogger Coop buys a few boxes for his abortive LotR project anyway.

Then you bring out some Undead and Dwarfs, most definately undercutting your ex-employer and ex-employer must be at least a trifle narked.

At that point, and completely out of the blue, it's suddenly time to shift INTO MAXIMUM OVERTROLL!!!!!!!!

In rapid succession you release ~~Chaos~~ Abyssal Dwarves mainly because your ex-employer hasn't bothered with those for ages and it will seriously piss them off.

(Oh and at some point whilst all this is going on you get the bloke who wrote the previous version of your ex-employer's flagship fantasy wargame to write your, err..., flagship fantasy wargame).

Then you respond to your ex-employers, ahem, problems with shifting production to a new ~~cheaper~~ much more fucking expensive medium by shifting to the same medium and relaunching your Wraiths with twice the number in the box compared to before but at the same price. On the same day your ex-employers launches it's new ~~cheaper~~ much more fucking expensive ~~range~~ P.R. disaster and shitstorm complete with pubes in the boxes. The Lulz are strong in this one.

And then, because that's not trolling enough to keep you happy, you then launch your beta test of your new fantasy in space wargame written by the bloke who wrote the previous version of your ex-employer's flagship fantasy wargame with the following logo

Which of course features a gauge that goes past 40,000.

Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not 40,000. You see, most blokes, you know, will be gaming at 40,000. You're on 40,000 here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on 40,000 on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?

And because this is a fantasy in space wargame (you know, fantasy in space, the concept that your ex-employers are desperate to pretend they never intended in the first place) you have to have Orcs in Space and something called "Armoured Humans" and of course in your first release you have...

Space Dwarves.

Ronnie, a nation salutes. Epic trolling Sir, epic trolling Sir.

Please bring out Davlen Muck or something in big bottles. That would also be ace.

What Happens When B/X D&D and WFRP Make Nasty Monkey Love?

2011-07-02T17:57:00.004+01:00

This happens.

Chris from Vault of Nagoh's brilliant take on WFRP recast to use B/X D&D. The most entertaining rulebook I've read in years.

(Oh, and the title is his words not mine. Not that I'd disown them if they were mine of course)

Grav-Attack!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2011-06-30T21:36:00.005+01:00

Posted because otherwise you would never believe it (unless you were there of course). Back in WD95 (November '87 - the WFB3 launch issue) this was the official, "Chapter Approved" way of making Space Marine vehicles.

On the subject of which, here's a spy shot from deep within the midden of Coop Towers II.

Rick Priestley Talks Wisely On The Subject Of The OSR Without Even Knowing He Is Doing It

2011-06-29T20:13:00.002+01:00

There's a really good interview here (WARNING PDF LINK!!!!) with Rick Priestley and John Stallard that was published in Battlegames in 2009. It's from when Rick was still working at GW. A lot of it is just three old wargamers reminiscing about the 1970s but there are some interesting bits in there about GW's approach to wargaming.

There's a fascinating passage here that I think, coming from the mouth of a pro games designer, is very illuminating about the rise of the OSR even though it's actually about wargaming and GW's approach to this:

"Wargaming really took off in the 1970s with people of our generation, so as 11 or 12-year-olds, we were growing up with wargaming, and then we were maturing. As teenagers mature, they go through various psychological stages. One of the things about kids in their mid-teens is their fantastic ability to absorb and to learn, but their utter inability to make generalizations or compromises. It’s something you only learn in later life. If you talk to mid-teenagers about rights or wrongs, their attitudes are very black and white. They really have no facility to make judgments. They don’t like judgments, especially boys. They simply don’t have the ability to develop those soft skills."

I was quite relieved to read this to be honest as I always thought my information retention skills had atrophied since puberty but apparently that's the same for everybody. It's why I hate long, complex rulebooks now in my 30s even though I was a sponge for such in my early teens. It would also explain the amazing popularity of some games that require the player to juggle many pieces of knowledge in his skull at any one time, such as exceptions to the main rules and "special abilities" and the like.

...for a certain section of teenagers, the fact that you had wargames rules was part of your social life, because you’ve got no ability to have any other kind of social life. You don’t have the soft skills. So when mid teenage boys interact with one another, the fact that they can do it with a set of rules, enables them to have a conversation, and do something together. It gives some common ground. But the rules become really important. For a more mature kind of individual, and, ironically, for a much younger individual, the rules can be quite soft. Because when you’re very young, you know how to play, and when you’re much older, you feel faintly embarrassed that you might have taken this or that much too seriously.

I think Rick hits the nail on the head here even though he isn't talking about D&D.

OK what he is actually talking about in the interview is a masterpiece of diplomacy. The subject of Warhammer being quite unsophisticated is obliquely not-quite mentioned, and Rick therefore doesn't quite justify, explain and apologise for it. What Rick sorts of hints at is that Warhammer was quite deliberately written in the style of wargaming Godfather Don Featherstone and aimed at the same sort of teenage boys who got into wargaming via his works (such as Priestley and Stallard) and was a deliberate move against the complex and allegedly sophisticated rules of the late 70s/early 80s but everybody is being just too nice to mention all that.

Warhammer Armies

2011-06-22T19:14:00.005+01:00

If you play Orcs and Goblins in Warhammer you will need the ~~Codex~~ Army Book which I just checked out on the GW site (don't worry I was behind seven proxies) and it costs £25.

For an army list.

Yeah, there is background info about the faction but nobody gives a shit about that.

Yeah, it has lots of pretty pictures but that's because GW live in a Nottinghamshire dream world wherein Sir Tim Berners-Lee never had a bright idea over Christmas 1990 and in that dream world people actually pay money to look at hardbacks of figure pr0n rather than just look it at for free on tinterwebs at CMON, Frothers, Warseer and the like.

So effectively, in order to play Orcs and Goblins you need to splash out £25 on the only functional part of the book which is the army list. I'm sorry but that's the only way of looking at it. The rest of it is hardcovered bloatware full of glossy pics (Internet) and fluff (bollocks) to give them an excuse to charge £25 for the whole shebang.

And of course, modern Warhammer being what it is, you'll probably have to go out and buy your regular opponent's ~~Codecii~~ Army Books as well in order to know what you are up against and plan accordingly (modern Warhammer being a game of combo'ing and list building after all). Keep adding the price of new army books to the cost of your army.

Now, there's a generation of gamers who have grown up under this one-faction-one-book regime and think it's normal. If this sound likes you pay attention to yer Grandpa Coop because he's going to share a tale of the olden days with you.

This is Warhammer Armies. Published in 1988 and I believe the RRP was £9.99 compared to £14.99 for the 3rd edition Warhammer Fantasy Battle hardback. Direct price comparisons with the past are always tricky but a scan through online RPI calculators suggests that it's £17.78 in modern money. (My gut feeling is that it's closer to £20 but either way it's comes off slightly better in a head-to-head price comparison to the Orcs and Goblins book).

Now, this is what Warhammer Armies contained.

A collection of rules for all the new races introduced since WFB3 was published (including two, the Ki-Rin and Temple Dog which I swear were never released in miniature form). A collection of rules for the new Warengines published in White Dwarf.

And then full army lists for the following;

Dark Elves
Wood Elves
High Elves (Sea Elves vanished after WFB2)
The Empire
Bretonnia (this was a brand new split for the general "Old Worlder" human factions. Bretonnia is more historical French than the modern version, Empire less of a gunpowder and puffed-and-slashed army)
Chaos (undivided)
Skaven
Orcs and Goblins
Dwarfs
Slann (proper Slann, not Lizardmen)
Undead (in modern terms the Vampire Counts and "Iron Maiden Powerslave" Tomb Kings combined with chariots, Mummys and Vampires in the same army)

In other words all of the WFB3 races in one book. But that's not all. It then went on to add Ally lists from which you could pick to bulk out your forces (to avoid this being used to make all armies contain pretty much the same forces, the Ally lists you could pick from were mandated by your main list and furthermore unless they Hated your enemy, they were all at -1 to their Ld)

Chaos (different to above list, includes Chaos Goblins and pre-hat Chaos Dwarves)
Dwarf
Dark Elf
High Elf
Wood Elf
Fimir (ask your Dad)
Old Worlder
Orcs and Goblins
Pygmy (Tintin in the Congo style - just don't ask. Citadel are more likely to produce new Fishmen or Squats then they are to return Pygmies to WFB)
Skaven
Undead
Halfling
Zoat (ask your Dad)

And also Mercenary lists which can be better than regular troops (they never have to Pursue for example) but might turn sides unless you spend extra points on bribing them to stay honest).

Dwarf
Giants
Ogres
Half-Orcs
Hobgoblins (Asian Orcs)
Nippon
Orc
Norse
Old Worlder

There's a bunch of photographs of the GW Studio figure collection, doublepage spreads on sample forces from the collections of Kev "Goblinmaster" Adams (Orcs and Goblins), SODOFFBRYANANSELL (Chaos) and Dave "Superstar" Andrews (Bretonnia, although looking suspiciously like a historical Wars of the Roses army with a wizard tacked on), and colour plates of troops and shield/banner designs.

160 pages. Modern £17-£18. Every list you needed, current throughout the entire lifetime of 3rd edition. A later full Norse list was published in White Dwarf.

£25 for for one army list is fucking greed and you, I and they all know it.

Blanchitsu - The Warlock (1986)

2011-06-21T17:38:00.002+01:00

Yep, been very quiet for a bit. Sorry about that. Living out of cardboard boxes is not really conducive to gluing and painting and gaming.

By way of recompense have this cover scan and article from Warlock 10 (Jun/July 1986) which is pure 80s Blanchitsu so will delight everyone except for the heretical Darth Phil who will just grumble at me instead and tell me to develop some good taste.

UK Games Expo 2011

2011-06-06T21:21:00.005+01:00

When it comes to UK Games Expo I take the attitude that it's a pleasantly diverting day out that is only 20 minutes drive away and a social meet with gamer mates. It doesn't really satisfy me as a shopping trip (not really being into non-confrontational Eurogames with wooden blocks and the thinnest of themes pasted on afterwards such as being a carrot farmer in Amish Pennsylvania or a town planner in 17th century Lille or similar nonsense) nor as a gaming trip - I get annoyed when stallholders try and button hole me to try their pre-production game and if I am going to sit down to a miniatures skirmish game I'd rather play a full one rather than a 15 minute sample. But it's on the doorstep and we all meet up and have a pint.

This year was no different. The overhead of moving house meant I could only spare the Sunday to attend.

Being reknown as a Brit OSR blogger you'd have expected me to feel morally obliged to buy Advanced Fighting Fantasy when I saw it on sale and so of course I didn't. I did get collared by somebody selling it (and a reprint of Alexander Scott's Maelstrom which sweetly reproduces the original Penguin cover, "FF Zigzags" and all) but didn't like to say that while I fancy Titan (my original copy is long lost) and Out of the Pit (my original copy is v. tatty) I'm wasn't that interested in AFF back then and am even less interested these days. I like the simplicity of "Orange Book" FF and never felt the need to further elaborate upon Steve J's original rules. And, what I was trying to avoid telling the chap concerned, I can get the books through Waylands Forge and thereby support my local FLGS.

Which I actually found to be a bit of a theme with attractive purchases on Sunday - Mantic Games, Mongoose, M:tG, AFF et al are all readily available to me anyway at the end of a short train ride on a Saturday so aren't likely to appear on a shopping list when other, less attainable items, might be.

Just spoilt, that's my problem. No doubt somebody who lives nowhere near a decent FLGS would have been delighted with the goods on offer at Expo.

Still, I did keep up the Brit Old Skool credentials by snagging a second-hand copy of Derek Carver's Warrior Knights - original GW printing, not the modern FFG one. I remember reading about this game in Games Review magazine back in about 1990 and thinking it sounded interesting but I think it had disappeared from GW shelves at that time. I also have a GW printing of Blood Royale, Carver's other GW-published game that I picked up at a wargames show about six years ago. I don't know when we'll get to put Warrior Knights down on the table for a game (it's apparently a looooonnngggg game as was the fashion in the 1980s) but I'll shift through the components and rulebook and report back soon.

Of lesser Brit Old School interest (i.e. none) was my other long-desired find, a copy of Speed Circuit (Avalon Hill printing with the Formula 2 cover - clearly cheaper reproduction rights than Formula 1 or the Indy 500!). The pair of old games together came to £35 which is pretty reasonable when the combined man-years of "I want these OOP games" must total about 30+.

I did see copies of Raggi's Weird Fantasy Roleplaying (sorry mate, but I can't bring myself to refer to it by your favoured acronym - the Brit Old Skool was there first) and Zak's Vornheim in the wild, although it did appear that Vornheim had fallen to the clutches of the bloke behind OSR's favourite producer of little mans, Otherworld Miniatures. Otherwise I think I would have snapped that up as well.

Leads Dead Baby, Leads Dead

2011-06-01T12:42:00.002+01:00

So no more metal from Citadel Miniatures. Of course it hasn't been white metal in the traditional lead/tin alloy sense since the early 90s and the abortive legal move in New York State to ban lead to protect people from lead - that is to say the stuff that wasn't flying at subsonic speed and tumbling in the air because that's a Goddamn American right or something similar and otherwise socialists will take over and the Nazis will be able to send heterosexual WASPs to the Gulags and ban Christ and introduce health care plans. Or so I'm told.

The current batch of Citadel resin looks mightily less than impressive but apparently I haven't drunk the Kool Aid so must be a hater...

Anyway I couldn't really let this pass without a brief mention.

When I discovered gaming and GW, the idea of metal figures was somewhat bizarrely exotic. That's an odd word to use but there was a cachet to the idea that these little 25mm models (and they were 25mm back then before the scale creep) were made from metal. We laboured under the impression that they were entirely lead (imagine the weight that would have made your army - little 1970s and 1980s cars like the Datsun Cherry and the Allegro wouldn't have had the grunt to shift you and your army to the wargames club) but knew the real name was White Metal which sounded like unobtanium or something - metal that was white. How does that work? Why did nobody point out that in the hands of Ansell, white metal was actually any colour from silver to black with the darker the model, the worse the alloy and the more likely to was to be pitted and rotting away with five years. No, I don't miss Citadel Pig Lead one bit.

These models were mysterious because they were dangerous. You mustn't swallow them. You mustn't give them to infants under 36 months. You mustn't chew them. You must wash your hands after modelling. Heady stuff. Dangerous-sounding stuff, implying that this was Real Grownups Stuff. Citadel had a little logo of a devil clutching two leaking tubes of glue to warn you that this was a multi-part casting, probably wouldn't go together well and was For Skilled Modellers Only. The hardcore of the hardcore. SERIOUS BUSINESS kids.

And then on the racks in Games Workshop and those more enlightened toy shops that stocked a tiny subset of what GW could provide them wholesale the packaging was itself indicative that something serious awaited within(*). Star Wars figures were standing upright rattling around in blister packaging and that was probably the only time they would stand upright in their entire working lives. White metal figures had to be nestled in with their own snug backing of foam rubber to protect them. This was no sturdy toy that could smashed over a siblings head. They were made from soft metal - how could these be toys?

Another thing I remember is that the blister packages always seemed to be full of white metal dust. And that in extremis you could use an old figure as an improvised pencil for updating your character sheet. (Guilty as charged.)

Metal used to an aspirational thing like white goods, timeshares and CD players were for our parents. It was bloody expensive en masse and decent-sized collections were beyond nearly all of us so, like the Tamiya radio control buggies that kept appearing in Beatties, we kept a flame burning for it because we couldn't have it in the quantities we wanted. Even the non-gamers at school had the odd couple of figures in a box somewhere without any idea of what they were going to do with them.

I can't imagine being one of modern GW's favourite spoilt bastards whose parent's bankroll anything and everything.

This isn't a plastic-is-shit, resin-is-shit screed, the Terminators in Space Hulk are absolutely stunning, I imagine when they finally crack the process even their Finecast resin might be halfway acceptable.

Just a little shout out to the days where the mere fact that they were made from metal in an increasingly plastic age meant they were something special. And that's gone now.

(*) Not old enough to have seen the figures sold loose in filing trays with the C-number on the front of the tray.

New Apartment New Danger

2011-05-31T12:43:00.003+01:00

Stuff that went in the skip would reduce hardened Grognards to tears. Stuff with resale value on eBay but I couldn't be arsed. It just keep going, crash after crash after spillage of metal and paint and plastic and the fluttering of ripped paper. Wonderful life de-clutter.

I have a flat on the waterfront and I have pet(*) swans. You might have all your old figures and ton of gaming material you'll never touch again in the closet but do you have swans? No. (**)

Feels good man.

The RPG Shelf

As part of newly-imposed apartment lifestyle self-discipline I have a single shelf for RPG material in A4-ish sized books. No overspill is allowed. If it's new and doesn't fit, something goes to make way. End of. I'm even slightly annoyed that there are three copies of original-and-best WFRP there. (One hardback with colour plates and loads of mistakes, two poverty model softbacks). Following on from that...

No RPGs as reading material

If its to be bought, its with the intention of being played. None of this nonsense of buying an RPG "just to read" or "just to see what it's like". I could have picked up a second-hand copy of Pendragon for £15 on Saturday but resisted. I ain't going to play it. For reading entertainment buy novels. Left Pendragon in the second-hand box for somebody who might play her.

Out with figures

I have no facility to spray in the flat (no balcony and spraying out of the window is going to create problems with blowback and parked cars underneath). So figure gaming is pretty much going to be on the back burner for a long time. To be honest, I feel like this is a weight off my shoulders when I think of the storage problems, clutter and guilt at the unfinished projects. Feels good man.

(In the week that GW discontinue metal. Curious but unrelated. And I finally lost interest in GW in the month that WD stopped being stocked in WHSmiths. Also curious and also unrelated.)

Dining Table.

I has one. Never had one before. Not very big (90cm x 50cm) but I has one.

No more old consoles.

Incomplete Amiga and Atari Jaguar - skip. N64, Dreamcast, Gamecube, SNES + Super Wildcard, Atari 5200, NES, several hundred game - Charidee shop. PS2 is on the slide and will go to the tip when it's laser finally gives up the ghost.

New life, new gaming.

I think it will be boardgaming, RPGs and MtG (premade decks only) in the future.

Kindle WiFi

Bought with birthday money. Makes it much more practical to buy download PDFs.

So you moved home. Whoopie-Shit Coop.

It's more than that. It's a new start in a new town and a massive junking of impedimenta. It's the end of a long period where I was owned by possessions not the other way around where total crap was kept because I felt it ought to be, where I found things that had been stored for 8/9 years and not once looked at nor used in all the time since I had bought the original house. This is just fucking idiocy. And I blame gaming.

NEXT WEEK - UK GAMES EXPO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(He never fucking learns that boy).

(*) - ish. I suspect Her Maj owns them.
(**) - probably. Unless you are the Queen.

Gothic Punk Tumblr

2011-04-28T18:56:00.004+01:00

I've had an email from a guy called Phil Helliwell about his tumblr blog, Gothic Punk which is exclusively dedicated to collecting as much John Blanche art as is humanly possible. Since Blanchitsu is curiously not represented very well on the intertubes this is a laudable aim. Recommended unless you are one of those sort of fools who doesn't rate Blanche. They do exist you know.

Busy Moving...

2011-04-26T21:02:00.003+01:00

A couple of blog followers have nominated me for this Stylish Blogger thing that is doing the rounds - I haven't ignored it, it's just that I'm currently too busy to do any blogging so it won't get looked at for a while. I've sold Coop Towers so I'm sort of up to your eyeballs in alligators leaving one home in Dudley's rural Gay and Lesbian village and sorting out a palatial waterfront property elsewhere (I kid you not). The sham that passes for normal service will resume at some point.

RIP Elisabeth Sladen

2011-04-20T07:49:00.003+01:00

Sad news from the BBC -"Sarah Jane" has passed away from cancer at the age of 63.

LATER EDIT - Dork Tower's tribute here.

A Quandry of Unfathomable Proportions

2011-04-18T20:05:00.005+01:00

Hey it's a new Michael Moorcock novel but its crappy modern Doctor Who but it's a new Michael Moorcock novel but its crappy modern Doctor Who but it's a new Michael Moorcock novel but its crappy modern Doctor Who but it's a new Michael Moorcock novel but its crappy modern Doctor Who but it's a new Michael Moorcock novel but its crappy modern Doctor Who but it's a new Michael Moorcock novel but its crappy modern Doctor Who but it's a new Michael Moorcock novel but its crappy modern Doctor Who but it's a new Michael Moorcock novel but its crappy modern Doctor Who but it's a new Michael Moorcock novel but its crappy modern Doctor Who but it's a new Michael Moorcock novel but its crappy modern Doctor Who but it's a new Michael Moorcock novel but its crappy modern Doctor Who but it's a new Michael Moorcock novel but its crappy modern Doctor Who but it's a new Michael Moorcock novel but its crappy modern Doctor Who but it's a new Michael Moorcock novel but its crappy modern Doctor Who-

DAMN YOU LIFE WHY MUST YOU TAUNT ME WITH SUCH GORDIAN KNOTS AS THIS!? HOW DO I SQUARE THIS CIRCLE!?

A Very Brief Review of Suckerpunch

2011-04-17T22:27:00.002+01:00

Wagner's music is better than it sounds - Edgar Wilson Nye (1850-1896)

Sandbox Steve Jackson (UK) Style

2011-04-10T21:15:00.004+01:00

Reading through Warlock #5 I found "In Search of the Mungie's Gold", an article from Steve Jackson with a wilderness scenario for Fighting Fantasy. I thought this was mechanically unusual enough to justify a blogpost showing how SJ suggests a novice GM might run a wilderness/sandbox game.

The gorgeous John Blanche mono-and-spot-colour map is an 8x8 grid. Our PCs have arrived in the boat in the SE corner in search of the titular gold and are presented with the map - it's a player handout and doesn't really convey any information, just a great big slice of Blanchitsu Brit Old Skool Dungeonpunk atmosphere. I loves me some of that classic White Dwarf spot colour - a big nostalgia trip I'll freely admit.

The procedure is as follows. The scenario gives 16 encounters for the GM to place upon the map. Three of the encounters are with the Mungies (gold-hoarding gliding Apes - Warlock #5 has an "Out of the Pit" feature detailing the four dangerous Ape races of Mauristatia) and must be placed in adjacent squares. Other placings are just free. The GM therefore has a copy of this map (or just an 8x8 grid) with 16 marked locations. (Clever readers will note that this implies a ratio of 1 in 4 squares being keyed to encounters).

Each turn day consists of 4 Periods of Time, in which the party may move one square orthogonally. A little dial is included at the bottom of the map for handy reference.

Upon entering a square, the party may choose to Explore and will encounter the, err, encounter should one be present. Presumably nothing happens if they don't Explore so you only find trouble if you go looking for it. The scenario design works around this potential non-event of a gaming evening by requiring the party to Explore, not only to encounter the Mungies (and their gold) that they are after but also because three of the encounters can result in the party being told in which rough direction the Mungie lair lies. Presumably the party will Explore every square unless they are heading for home with the gold or with their tails between their legs.

Terrain type of the square seems totally irrelevant to the party's progress other than a note that Howl Cats live on the timberline and should be placed in appropriate terrain. (Howl Cats are Ape's with Lion's heads which means we are back in Citadel of Chaos Ape-Dog/Dog-Ape territory.)

At Night, there is a 2-in-6 chance of "Night Creatures", i.e. Wandering Monsters, the table of which is actually at reference 123 of The Shamutanti Hills (available under separate cover). If no night guard is placed, all players suffer the loss of 4 STAMINA points as they are attacked in their sleeping bags.

In the Night phase, any character who didn't eat a meal that day loses 3 STAMINA points.

If the party choose not to rest at Night, each character loses 2 STAMINA points.

(Direct translation to other rule systems is not that easy/clean but if you are not familiar with FF, characters are generated with STAMINA scores of 2d6+12, loss of a round of combat inflicts 2 STAMINA and Provisions heal 4 STAMINA).

If the GM has access to Warlock #2 and it's random table for Wilderness encounters, SJ suggests that each "non-keyed" square could have a 2-in-6 chance of a random encounter.

Note that Steve Jackson is still a swine with his concluding paragraph...

Yeah, thanks for that Mr. Starship Traveller Space and Time Coordinates.

Simple though it is, I'd love to play in something like this so long as it has a spot colour John Blanche map of that awesomeness.

Beardy Planning To Wake Great Cthulhu Up

2011-04-06T19:08:00.003+01:00

One-man sub to the deepest point of all five oceans. Awesome stuff.

Now the burning question is - those teeth versus Great Cthulhu's. Which set will come off worse?

Even I'm Shocked

2011-04-05T20:19:00.002+01:00

I am just beyond words. Nothing repeatable in polite company can ever do this justice.

Fighting Fantasist Dungeon Geomorphs VIII

2011-04-05T19:17:00.002+01:00

Hadn't forgotten, just hadn't done any for about a month. Two 5 x 5 corners and two 10 x 5 borders.

Lets Play - Proteus #13, The Shadow of Shargan

2011-04-04T20:35:00.005+01:00

Honestly this couldn't look less like a trap if it was Admiral Ackbar wearing a wig and his wife's knickers posing for cameraphone pics on /b.

-62-

You walk up to the nearest statue, which is of a young man. It is incredibly life-like, and the youthful features are twisted into an expression of terror. Then with a sudden shock, you realise that these are not statues, but real people petrified into stone by some volcanic eruption. Their horror when the disaster struck remains frozen eternally upon their faces.

But why have these grisly monuments been placed together in this cave – and by whom? Or will the whole complex be full of such relics? You shudder in spite of yourself, and at that moment there is a low rumble, like distant thunder, and the ground trembles slightly under your feet.

Suddenly, the “statue” nearest to you topples over and shatters into many pieces on the floor, and you notice something glitter amongst the rubble. You stand motionless until the shaking subsides and then bend down to discover a small, red-gold ring amongst the broken pieces. Do you wish to take the ring? If so, turn to 101. If not, turn to 171.

While waiting for a decision, why not pursue the adverts from this issue of PROTEUS and buy some Grenadier figures? An Orcus for £1.50!

Today is Monday, Monday Yesterday Was Sunday, Sunday, That Means Saturday was the Day Before That

2011-04-04T18:08:00.002+01:00

I had hoped to be blogging today about Afternoon Play, a Eurogames meet held on the first Sunday of the month at Urban Coffee Company in central Birmingham but...

...I'd still been out drinking in Brum at 2 o' clock on Sunday morning so never made it. (Also, it was a showery day and I didn't fancy self and games getting saturated whilst walking from the train station). Maybe next month. I would have been taking Citadels and Risk Express and maybe Dungeonquest.

And a game of Friedrich at Stourbridge on Friday got cancelled due to lack of players so that was a pretty disappointing gaming weekend all told really. (But a good home match at the Albion with us beating Liverpool followed by birthday bash at the Glee Comedy Club made up for it).

I did get to do some gaming last week on Tuesday at Dudley Darklords with a game of Cold War Commander against Webby. This was the third game of a new project that Web dreamt up, that of mixing the "anything goes" fictional bush war nature of AK-47 Republic with the "we like these" nature of the CWC rules. A jumble of 1:72 ex-American and ex-Soviet tanks and the Republic of N'Bungitupa went to war under my command and achieved very little. It's a refreshing change to that of playing with the usual NATO supertanks and little mans that generally do what you tell them to. We have a gentleman's agreement not to pick any forces that look halfway decent. My most useful units were SU-100s (not even proper tanks) and a MiG-21 Fishbed (flown by N'Bungitupan air ace Wing Commander Tallyho Choksawai) which sort of sums it up.

Stuff You Can Plagarise From Temple of Terror

2011-03-31T16:39:00.006+01:00

I've semi-completed Temple of Terror (i.e. found the best route that collects all five dragon-shaped artifacts) and here are the funkiest elements you can half-inch for your own games.

Vatos

Lost city in the Desert of Skulls, proper walled-town Arabian Nights style. Why abandoned? Not covered in book, perhaps a water source dried up or a caravan route changed.

Large scale underground, essentially as soon as you pass the gate you go straight down a flight of stairs and don't emerge again for anything other than a deathtrap. There is a route that exits through a one way door outside the city walls (a GAME OVER), so presumably lots of secret ways of ingress scattered around the desert. The ruler of Vatos is the priestess Leesha...

Leesha

Buxom evil enchantress. Laughter causes paralysis (one of the GAME OVERs of the book). The only weapon that can harm her is the tooth of a Giant Sandworm (or perhaps that of a Purple Worm in a more vanilla, less world-specific D&D). You'll have to dream up exactly why both of these things work yourself.

Has a cadre of guards one is blind, another deaf-mute and probably eunuchs- typical fat, bald, bare-chested harem guard types with pyjama bottoms and scimitars. Sponsors an art competition, artists are granted Ring of Protections that leave them immune to harm, winner receives large prize, losers executed. That sounds an odd conceit but if you're the evil overlord why not surround yourself with nice things? There must be plenty of egotistic artists and poets who cannot comprehend not winning.

Remarkably underemployed by Livingstone, once confronted with the tooth does a runner and to the best of my knowledge never shows her face in an FF book again.

Malbordus

The real BBEG, basically just lodging at Vatos presumably with Leesha's favour. Interesting idea as it seems apparent that Vatos is not Malbordus's dungeon which is quite novel and a bit of an inversion of the usual arrangement.

Gnome Scavenger

Drop out living in rooms full of scavenged tat. Has a staff which turns into a deadly venomous snake when tapped on floor. Good example of a neutral character who may be an ally to the party who lives safely in a hostile dungeon by nature of his protective staff and presumably from being beneath contempt/notice.

Sword Arm Corridor

Four statue arms clutching swords sprouting out from corridor walls.

Messenger of Death

Spectral adversary, effectively shouts "Boo!" at the player and runs off. Leaves the letters D, E, A, T & H in five separate places ahead of the player, accidental discovery of each causes SKILL, STAMINA and/or LUCK loss, if all five are found, Messenger of Death materializes to watch the player expire (A proper No Saving Throw job).

Mummy's Curse

A corridor strewn with broken glass. Mysterious figure throws a glass bottle at party which breaks revealing a scroll in an unknown language. Read Magic or similar reveals it to be a Mummy's Curse with serious deleterious effects. A nice piece of gamebook design here in that the option to cast the Read Symbols spell tempts the player into triggering the trap whilst the broken glass should act as a hint not to.

Skeleton Warriors with Sphinx Headdresses

Just really cool.

Giant Fireflies With Random Electrical Attacks

Likewise.

Bronze Idol Statue

A bronze statue of a youth with two-handed warhammer. If the shadow is crossed, animates as Living Statue, Iron and attacks. If passed on the other side remains inert. (A neat Fire on the Water style visual puzzle - a dying man tells you to beware of a shadow and the illustration shows a shadow and then asks upon which side you wish to pass).

Sphinx Chair

Pass a test of general manliness to gain a boon, fail it to be punished.

Night Horror

Mutant humanoid fighting with a rod akin to the Well of Lost Souls key in Raiders of the Lost Ark. A sort of solar/laser attack from the gem in the rod. When dead, ceiling starts lowering just for good measure.

Iron Eater

Ferric-munching ceiling denizen. Harmless to flesh but destroys helmets. Presumably rolls one attack, if hit dissolves helmet (if worn), AC-1. Can do little else but sneak back to ceiling very slowly. An irritation to remind the players to look upwards even when there aren't obvious ~~piercers~~ stalactites.

Golden Chalice

A Golden Chalice that summons a Wind Elemental to fight for the wielder with the immortal magic words "Barrabang Hinpo Garrabang". (Probably means something important in dodgy Bangkok nightclubs...)

---

There's no real "best path" through ToT that minimizes the risk to the player - you will still need to pass at least one Test Your Skill and one Test Your Luck to survive, a Test Your Luck is required to acquire an item without which the battle with the Night Horror will seriously drain your SKILL and there is an unavoidable SKILL 10 STAMINA 20 monster before you get to Vatos. Accordingly I have no desire to return to the gamebook and "do it correctly" with the dice and no cheating.

(Temple of Terror illos by Bill Houston, copypasta'd from a really poor PDF scan hence shitty quality of reproduction)

How Big Is Destiny Quest 1 - The Legion of Shadow?

2011-03-26T20:29:00.000Z

Very big.

Deathtrap Dungeon Cameltoe

2011-03-25T17:02:00.004Z

Thanks to blog regular kelvingreen for this link. Truly bizarre.

(This cover reminds me very much of this Exalted splatbook cover, even down to the presence of mumblers)

Lets Play - Proteus #13, The Shadow of Shargan

2011-03-24T22:18:00.004Z

We needed a casting vote after two votes apiece for each option, so I chucked a D6. East it is then.

-12-

You have gone only a short distance East when the tunnel
opens out into a long, low cave, filled with statues of people.
You hesitate for a moment, but there is no sign of life, so you
venture cautiously forward. Do you wish to examine the
statues more closely? If so, turn to 62. If you would rather
hurry across the cave to the exit you see in the East wall, turn
to 8.

Magical Using Of Fire Blowing Mountain

2011-03-21T18:14:00.004Z

Literal translations of the Japanese titles of the Fighting Fantasy books. From Titannica.

Magical Using of Fire Blowing Mountain (The Warlock of Firetop Mountain)
Fortress of Barusensu (Citadel of Chaos)
Forest of Destiny (Forest of Doom)
The Space Ship Which you can Wander About (Starship Traveller)
Thief City (Cityof Thieves)
Underground Labyrinth of Trap of Death (Deathtrap Dungeon)
The Island of Lizard King (Island of the Lizard King)
Maze of Scorpion Swamp (Scorpion Swamp)
Cave of Witch of Snow (Caverns of the Snow Witch)
Mansion of Hell (House of Hell or to give it it's US title - House of Heck)
Necklace of Dead God (Talisman of Death)
Assassin of Outer Space (Space Assassin)
Soldier of Freeway (Freeway Fighter)
Sanctuary of Fear (Temple of Terror)
Federal Criminal Investigator of Outer Space (The Rings of Kether)
Pirate Boat van Sea Number (Seas of Blood)
Push Down the Cyborg (Appointment with F.E.A.R.)
Electric Brain Destructive Manoeuvres (Rebel Planet)
Demon of Deep Sea (Demons of the Deep)
Sword of Samurai (Sword of the Samurai)
Labyrinth Exploration Competition (Trial of Champions)
Robot Commando (Robot Commando)
Destructive Person of Mask (Masks of Mayhem)
Nightmare Castle (Beneath Nightmare Castle)
Revive Sorcerer (Crypt of the Sorcerer)
Star Strike Rider (Star Strider)
Illusion of Fear (Phantoms of Fear)
Thief of Midnight (Midnight Rogue)
Cave of Evil Spirit (Chasms of Malice)
Last Soldier (Battleblade Warrior)
Monarch of Basement (Slaves of the Abyss)
Sky Fortress Aarok (Skylord)

I hereby declare that from here on in, I will adopt Monarch of Basement as my official title. Anybody who doesn't like it can either exile themselves to their Space Ship Which They Can Wander About or suffer Electric Brain Destructive Manoeuvres.

The burning question raised by all this is, of course, whether Magical Using Of Fire Blowing Mountain is a better title than Der Hexenmeister vom Flammenden Berg.

(The pic is from a Yahoo auction of the Japanese edition of Warlock magazine which lived on far longer than the original UK edition. Seems to be some interesting artwork reuse going on there - I recognise a couple of the covers from UK Warlock but note with interest the tenth anniversary WD cover there (bottom left) and the Josh Kirby UK cover for Tunnels and Trolls 5th edition overlapping it)

Lets Play - Proteus #13, The Shadow of Shargan

2011-03-20T20:49:00.004Z

OK, things don't go as well this episode. Anyway, onwards and upwards...

Personally I wouldn't have done it, but then I've read the gamebook before even if it was over twenty years ago in a caravan in the Wales in the pissing down rain.

-151-

As you begin to make your way around the edge of the pool, there is a rush of bubbles to the surface and out from the water bursts a huge, black beast. You are drenched by its sudden eruption, and the black water is uncomfortably hot and stings your exposed flesh – lose one Strength point. The creature before you consists of a dozen long, powerful tentacles, each tipped by a glistening poisonous claw. The tentacles radiate from a black, amorphous mass, the only distinguishable feature of which is a circular gaping maw. It seems to sense exactly where you are, though, and as its tentacles reach out towards you, you realise you cannot escape.

You must fight each tentacle in turn as a separate monster. The tentacles have a Dexterity of 12 and a Strength of 4. If you manage to “kill” six tentacles (i.e. sever them from the main body of the monster), turn to 181. If the monster inflicts ten points of damage upon you before you manage to do this, turn to 161.

SKILL 12! Did Livingstone write this? Jesus wept.

Unsurprisingly this didn't work out very well. We aced the first tentacle with a laser sword shot, but by the the fifth tentacle came around we were down to STRENGTH 11 and it did two hits to us to do that all-important 10 points of pure, unadulterated TPK. So off we go to 161.

-161-

The creature has succeeded in paralysing you with its poisonous claws and you fall helpless to the floor. Immediately, the slimy tentacles curl around your body and draw you towards the slavering maw. Your adventure ends here!

But-but-but that can't happen! You have to sit there while I read out my great metaplot and you watch my Mary Sue NPCs save the World! What about my plot arc? YOU HAVE TO HEAR IT!!!!

OK, that was a bit of early doors GAME OVER so time for a mulligan.

(Have to admit, I don't see what all the fan boy slavering is about. She looks a bit like troubled Britney in this pic but obviously a lot less tarty and pregnant)

Off to 191 and pretend the campaign-derailing fuckup never happened. 181 just told us there were no other exits and sent us back to 191 anyway so it was completely ITS A TARP!

(Note the sequence of the numbering here - 141 or 191, 151, 161 or 181, 191 - somebody clearly had no imagination for randomizing the paragraph sequence).

-191-

Climbing the foothills of the volcano, you are relieved to
discover that the way you have chosen is not as treacherous as
you had feared. The narrow track you are following
meanders up the West side of the mountain, and you try to
stick to this is as far as possible.

Having climbed some distance, you consider pausing for a
moment to get your breath back, and reflect on your
situation. Even as you do so, there is a wild shrieking in the
air, and a sound like the beating of gigantic leathery wings.
You draw your laser-sword and search the skies – to see a
huge flying reptile, and a warrior with his legs firmly
clamped about it, wielding a blood-stained sword.

The sky darkens, there is a flash of lightning and a
thunderclap, and then an image forms from the clouds
themselves: a face, leering down at you, the mouth open
wide, revealing studded teeth. Slowly the eyes revolve, and
then there is a triumphant laugh, as the sky turns darker, and
the Pterodactyl and its rider swoop towards you. The
Pterodactyl’s beak snaps horribly close to your unprotected
head, and its rider swings at you with his sword. They climb
into the purple sky, whooping and shrieking, then swoop for a
second attack.

(Cover illustration I assume.)

You aim your laser-sword: first, you must kill the
Pterodactyl, and then its rider. You steady yourself against a
rock – this will be no easy battle.

Dexterity Strength
PTERODACTYL: 9 14
If you defeat the Pterodactyl, turn to 3.

This was more like it. We won the first round so shot the screechy proto-bird in the face for 6 STRENGTH points then finished it off while losing 4 STRENGTH ourselves. Ration eaten for +5 STRENGTH we are up to 18 now.

-3-

The monstrous flying reptile lies in a crumpled heap on the
ground, its barbarian rider thrown clear, but apparently
unhurt. You face him – now that he is grounded, he seems
to you to be less sure of himself, swinging his sword wildly.
He is no match for you, a trained Promethean Guildmember,
and his swings become almost manic, as you duck, parry, and
steadily drive him back.

Deftly sidestepping his next, despairing, sword-thrust, you
drive your blade home to the Barbarian’s heart. You feel a
tinge of sadness, as you sheathe your sword; but the sky
lightens again. Looking up, you see that the image – the
face, you are sure, of Shargan himself – is fading; now you
must continue your search – though first, you feel that you
might rest a moment: turn to 106.

-106-

After the battle, you make your way to a nearby outcrop of
rock to sit down and get your breath back. Then to your
amazement, you discover a tiny cave entrance and waste no
time in crawling through into the darkness beyond – turn to
170.

Hands up those of you who are really amazed that on the slopes of this volcano under which sits the BBEG's underground lair of evil we actually found an entrance? Thought not.

Note that this is the third successive paragraph that offers you no choices - padding the paragraph count out are we?

-170-

You activate your torch and find yourself in a tiny South-
heading tunnel. The rock is very dark and lined with black,
glass-like veins. The air is hot and dry, but not uncomfortably
so – yet. Very soon, the corridor ends in a T-junction. Will
you go:

East? Turn to 12
West? Turn to 155

Don't worry about the decision - I'm sure it's not like it would be important or anything as if one direction might allow us to get a geegaw we will need at the end and the other one won't. That would be just daft.

We Attempt TSR's Dragon Quest

2011-03-19T09:56:00.006Z

Big Al found a copy of this on one of this periodic trawls through the local charity shops. When he earlier told me the title of what he'd found I was actually thinking of SPI's rarity Dragonquest, ie. this;

But apparently not. Anyway, Dragon Quest (Two Word Title version) got dragged out last night for a game of the introductory scenario and, well, hmmm is about the size of it.

First impressions are that this is a Lorraine Williams-era TSR panic project brought about by the sale figures of MB/Evil Empire's Heroquest. Let's compare the backs of the boxes to see exactly what I'm talking about.

One of the games

The other one of the games

There are, I think we'll agree certain stylistic similarities although it appears that the bogbrush haircut of the late 80s seems to have vanished by 1992 in favour of the proto-curtains/centre parting shoegazer thing.

Pretty much 99% of the artwork is recycled from other late 80s/early 90s TSR projects and I'm sure there's some geeky trivia game enjoyment to be had from trying to spot them all. With the plastic figures of Heroquest being replaced by flimsy cardboard fold up things and the mass of artwork from other games it's clear that this was chucked together very quickly and little operating budget. Even the (very nice) white metal figures are straight out of the Ral Partha catalogue with a nice piece of lampshading of the fact on the cover of the box.

To the gameplay itself. One player is DM and has a scenario booklet. All games take place upon the plain castle map, scenarios state where doors are to be placed when the players enter rooms, therefore turning the map in a different layout for each game. So three of us sit down to play with DaveO doing the DM duty.

And then I get passed a PC card that is essentially a full Cyclopedia-era D&D character. And I mean full, it has the complete collection of STR, INT, WIS, DEX, CON and CHA with a THAC0 system (here called "Fighting Ability") and Prime Attribute modifiers and AC's listed with and without shield use and wait a minute what is going on here?

It's as if Heroquest sat you down with all the plastic toys and boardgame trappings and presented you with the full and unexpurgated rules of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. I'll give you just one example that sums up this weird juxtaposition. Initiative is by individual, with DEX attribute modifiers. That's right, the clumsy system you never use in the real game is here in the juvenile boardgame version.

WHOOSH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

THE SOUND OF A SUDDEN AND JARRING UNEXPECTED AUTOMOTIVE ANALOGY HEADING THIS WAY AT FULL SPEED!

Have you ever heard of the Alfa-Romeo Arna? Probably not. This was a car that Alfa-Romeo and Nissan worked together on in the early 1980s. Obviously this was a match made in heaven - Nissan's Japanese quality and Alfa's design flair and ability to make driver's cars thus compensating for each other's flaws. What a match! So obviously you'd let Alfa design it and Nissan build it.

It's a no-brainer isn't it?

You'd have to be really bloody thick to let early 80s Nissan design it and early 80s Alfa build it? Nobody would be that stupid surely?

This is why you've never of the Alfa-Romeo Arna.

Dragon Quest is like that - it takes the worst parts of two games and rams them together. The Heroquest clone format would be great (even with the bargain bucket components and reused artwork) with a simple set of game mechanics. Basic D&D is great with it's freewheeling RPG format. But Dragon Quest just messes it up by marrying rules which are far too complex in this situation to poorer quality "bits" than Heroquest.

I enjoyed playing A Game With Mates but in all honesty this is a "neither" game, it's not simple even to benefit from the whole Heroquest thing and not flexible enough to justify it's Cyclopedia mechanics. As I stated after the game if I'm going to be using a full D&D ruleset I'd rather have the flexibility and improv abilities of a full RPG, if a boardgame I'd rather it was at a level of Heroquest, Dungeon! (remember that one TSR?), The Sorcerers' Cave or ~~Castle Schadenfraude~~ Dungeonquest.

A game designed by committee and spreadsheets I think.

Ian Livingstone Tells Fibs

2011-03-17T21:28:00.010Z

"The one true way involves a minimum of risk and any player, no matter how weak on initial dice rolls, should be able to get through fairly easily".

Arsebiscuits.

There are two parallel routes through to the desert city of Vatos where our dungeonbash and scavenger hunt awaits. The route that appears to lie upon our "true way" still involves a Save or Die special whereby we have to Test Our Skill succesfully or drown in a shipwreck.

The other one which doesn't involve a Save or Die involves, at best, a fight against a SKILL 7 STAMINA 9 Pterodactyl and at worst the same encounter whereby it has a SKILL of 8. That doesn't sound too bad but we have to fight it by proxy with a Giant Eagle of SKILL 6 STAMINA 11 and we die if it loses (we are flying on it's back and will do a Wile E. Coyote impersonation our mount runs out of STAMINA).

And then, on the unavoidable path to the dungeon we hit this:

OH SHIT! Get to the Ornithopter!

And there's no option to avoid it by walking in an irregular rhythm nor by planting a thumper in the sand some distance away.

GIANT SANDWORM SKILL : 10 STAMINA : 20

Yes, that's unavoidable, we haven't even got to the titular Temple of Terror yet and in comparison the BBEG of the entire game is a "mere" SKILL : 10 STAMINA : 18

If we do beat it (i.e. cheat or had the good genes to be born with a SKILL of 11 or 12) and control the Spice and therefore control the universe we get a ~~kris knife~~ Giant Sandworm tooth which is a nice souvenir. And then later on, reference 73 asks us if we have a Giant Sandworm tooth, so it appears that that nice Mr. Livingstone didn't even realise he'd done this.

Suffice to say I've abandoned plans on doing this one with the dice. I do hope your playtesting at EIDOS Interactive is a bit better than this Ian...

(That said, playing sans dice is still good fun as it is an imaginative gamebook with great atmosphere. And Giant Sandworms.)

Lets Play - Proteus #13, The Shadow of Shargan

2011-03-16T18:47:00.003Z

Previously on Let's Play PROTEUS #13 The Shadow of Shargan...

The FF commentard collective killed a demon (my handicraft with the dice) then accepted a lift from a stranger in a Traveller air-raft, presumably to go and see some puppies or something. Then the majority of the hivemind decided to start at the bottom of the volcano and work upwards with only one comment suspecting that maybe Shargan had a space rocket-eating bigger space rocket hidden underneath a fake flooded caldera that was actually just painted metal shutters.

An attempt to re-create the opening of Citadel of Chaos by Dr. Bargle was ruled invalid on technical reasons.

New Houseruling

Following from Zhu's comment last episode anybody who can indicate their choice by a song lyric whereby the title of said song indicates the chosen path whilst maintaining allusion to the democratic nature of the voting for choice process wins TEN INTERNETS.

- 141 -

You begin to search around the foot of the volcano,
scrambling over ridges of solidified lava, until you suddenly
come across a small cave entrance. You switch on your torch
and squeeze through the tiny crack to enter a low tunnel, the
walls of which are like black glass. You follow it North for a
short distance, till it opens out into a large, low cavern. Its
rocky floor is almost totally filled by a large pool of dark
liquid. Wisps of smoke rise from its obsidian surface, which
bubbles sluggishly like a simmering cauldron.

You cannot tell whether there are any other exits from the
cavern, so will you circle the pool to investigate the far side?
Turn to 151. Or go back outside and climb the mountain to
try and discover a more promising entrance? Turn to 191.

Lets Play - Proteus #13, The Shadow of Shargan

2011-03-10T19:32:00.003Z

OK three people rang the premium rate vote line and we have a 2:1 split in favour of following Ming the Merciless's fatter brother, court official Lai-Ti. So back we scurry to paragraph 2 (1,11,2 - we are getting all the low numbered paragraphs) and...

-2-

Lai-Ti is the proud owner of one of the three hover cars
which exist on the Island of Aarlach (the other two belong to
the King). As the car speeds rapidly out of Isar, the little man
chatters away constantly about the glorious deed which you
are about to undertake, and how eternally grateful the King is
going to be, and how honoured he is to meet an actual
member of the Promethean Guild.

After a little while, you stop paying attention to his
ceaseless chatter and merely nod and murmur in what you
hope are the appropriate places.

Already Mount Villpus dominates the skyline, its black,
ridged slopes towering above the rest of the island like a
brooding, malignant shadow, ready to blot out the whole
land. It is not long before Lai-Ti brings the hover car to a halt
at the foot of the volcano, and you get out and turn to thank
him, but now he is in no mood for idle talk, and speeds away,
anxious to put as much distance as possible between himself
and the abode of the Sorcerer.

Will you now start to climb up the mountain to try and
discover an entrance to Shargan’s underground fortress? If
so, turn to 191. If you would rather search around the bottom
of the mountain for a cave entrance at its foot, turn to 141.

So then FF blog commentors, up the mountain or search for a cave at the bottom?

Hugo Dyson

2011-03-10T17:30:00.002Z

You all know his thoughts on Hot Elf Chicks...

Right In The Tangley!

2011-03-10T12:49:00.003Z

Tangley is now my favourite euphemism for vagina and one I intend to slip into normal conversation at every opportunity.

(Unintentionally hilarious advert from White Dwarf 18, April/May 1980)

Fiend Folio Rejects

2011-03-10T12:46:00.001Z

Ages ago I mentioned in passing (whilst looking at early WDs) that a blog post on Fiend Factory rejects that did not make it into the Fiend Folio might be worthwhile. After all when heavyweight, deep level uber-foes such as the Flumpf make it in, what was missing must have been really bad. And then I promptly forgot about it.

Anyway Greg Gorgonmilk has rised to the challenge and started a series of blog posts on precisely that subject. Go read them.

Angus McBride

2011-03-08T18:01:00.007Z

Angus McBride (1931-2007) is probably most famous amongst roleplayers for his beautiful covers for many a MERP and Rolemaster supplement.

However that is not his only legacy left behind for gamers. In the mid 70s he started a long association with Osprey Publishing, producing many a colour plate for the Osprey Men At Arms series, therefore becoming one of the most prolific illustrators of historic soldiers and warriors around and influencing many a wargamer and figure collector. British tabletop wargaming and it's cottage industry manufacturers owe him a huge debt of thanks.

Now I didn't know this until I did some Googling for the purposes of this post but McBride was involved in a fairly controversial children's book back in the 1980s. Ladybird, children's book publisher of slim hardbacks on all manner of subjects actually published child versions of Dracula and Frankenstein to some notoriety. As I recall Mary Whitehouse got involved and there was some media debate as to whether horror classics (and a sexualised one at that with Dracula) were suitable subjects for children's literature. Suffice to say my Mother, always keen to up my reading age, ran straight out and brought me a copy as soon as the fuss kicked off.

Lets Play - Proteus #13, The Shadow of Shargan

2011-03-06T10:40:00.003Z

OK, noisms over at Monsters and Manuals has done this sort of thing before so lets have a go here. I'll copypasta from the OCR copy I have and handle all the dice-rolling, the decisions are made through a purely democratic method of you the readership commenting upon which choice to take, majority wins.

This is PROTEUS #13 The Shadow of Shargan. It's 225 paragraphs long so is similar sized to the adventures published in Warlock. (PROTEUS was a UK magazine putting out short gamebooks through the newsagent distribution chain - I did a blog post about it a while back)

Mighty infodump follows;

This is a story about a world where science and magic
exist hand in hand. Sorcerers work alongside Scientists
without conflict. Dragons fly through a blood red sky, while
androids and robots populate the world below. You are a new
member of the Promethean Guild, a secret organisation
whose aim is the elimination of evil. The tasks you had to
undertake to prove yourself worthy of entry into the Guild
tested your skills and strength to the limit – but it was worth
the effort. The way is now open to you for adventure and
wealth, and you have the friendship and trust of the other
members of this elite body. Before you begin, you must
discover how swift, strong and skilful you are.

tl;dr - It's like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.

PROTEUS uses a FF-rip off gamesystem with DEXTERITY and STRENGTH replacing SKILL and STAMINA. In this adventure SKILL is actually FF's LUCK but doesn't decrease with each test. There's an extra complication in that we have a laser-sword

If this is the first
round of fighting, and you have fired your laser-sword,
subtract six Strength points from its Strength score at that
moment. For all subsequent rounds, subtract two Strength
points. If the creature’s Fighting Power is greater than yours,
it has wounded you – subtract two points from your current
Strength score (unless told otherwise in the text)

SIX STAMINA POINTS!

Sorry... SIX STRENGTH POINTS!

OK, out with the dice and our mans has
~~SKILL~~ DEXTERITY :10
~~STAMINA~~ STRENGTH :19
~~LUCK~~ SKILL :12 (woot!)

We also have six ~~PROVISIONS~~ RATIONS each of which restore 5 ~~STAMINA~~ STRENGTH therefore suggesting that food in the future of science-fantasy is much better than that found in Allansia.

Now YOUR [OUR] QUEST BEGINS..

The kingdom of Aarlach is an insignificant little
island, far to the East of the more scientifically
advanced countries of your world. Magic still
rules there, and the Laws of Science which now
exist hand in hand with Magic over most of your
planet, have hardly touched Aarlach’s distant
shores.

That, you realise, is the sum total of your
knowledge of Aarlach, as you stand facing
Guildmaster Kreen and the Aarlachian emissary,
Kai-Tul, in a derelict building on the outskirts of
the city of Talsheen. Kreen has just introduced
you to Kai-Tul, a tall, thin man, dressed in black,
who scrutinises you with yellow, cat-like eyes.

“The kingdom of Aarlach wishes to hire you,”
Kreen explains. “Their emissary contacted me
this morning and explained the situation to me before you
arrived. I feel that you are the most suitable member of our
Guild for the task.”

He turns to Kai-Tul. “Is this
Guildmember acceptable to you?”

“The reputation of the Guild foregoes the need for any
testing,” the dark emissary hisses. “I know of the trials that
all who wish to enter the Guild must undertake.”

“The King of Aarlach will pay you 50,000 gold pieces if
you succeed in this mission,” Kreen tells you. “It is the
maximum amount he is prepared to offer and it is not
sufficient for the hire of one of our more experienced Guild-
members. Although you have only recently entered our
Guild, you show great promise, and it is my wish that you
undertake the task. The Guild will never force you, however,
and the choice is yours alone – but you cannot make that
choice until you know the situation. Kai-Tul?”

The Guildmaster invites the dark man to speak.

“Our land has recently fallen under the shadow of an evil
power,” the emissary begins. “The Sorcerer Shargan, who it
is said is also well versed in the Laws of Science, has
harnessed the power of a Fire Elemental, and with it has built
himself an underground fortress inside Mount Villpus, a
dormant volcano, which last erupted many centuries ago.
Mount Villpus is situated at the heart of our island kingdom,
and towers above all our lands. We believe that Shargan is
using the energies in the heart of the volcano for the building
of some terrifying weapon. I have told Guildmaster Kreen
here, that such a weapon could mean not only destruction for
Aarlach, but I believe for the rest of the world also.”

“Of that last point, I am not sure,” Kreen butts in. “But
whatever the case, it is clear that Shargan and the threat he
poses must be eliminated.”

“Many of our people have tried,” Kai-Tul continues. “All
have failed. Our people are not great in number and they are
filled with terror of Shargan and none will fight against him.
We need someone of great courage, skill and strength to deal
with him, a warrior who is familiar with danger and knows
how to deal with such power and evil. Are you that person?”

Are you? If so . . .

tl;dr - Go to volcano, kill man.

-1-

The next morning, you rise early and pack the few things
that you will need for your journey. Then you make your
way to the inn where you agreed to meet the Aarlachian
emissary, only to be told by the innkeeper that Kai-Tul is not
here. Something in the innkeeper’s expression arouses your
suspicion, and in one swift movement, the blade of your
laser-sword is at his throat. Swallowing nervously, he finally
admits that Kai-Tul was murdered in his sleep, and pleads
with you not to tell anyone or it will ruin his business. You
leave in disgust and head for the boat which you know Kai-
Tul had hired to take you both to Aarlach.

You tell the Captain of the emissary’s misfortune, and the
man is instantly filled with fear, saying it was demons sent by
Shargan that killed Kai-Tul. The Captain himself is a native
of Aarlach, and although it is obvious that he too fears
Shargan’s rage, he still agrees to take you to his country, for it
is in you that the hopes of his people lie.

The voyage to Aarlach will take three days, and all
proceeds smoothly and without incident until the night of the
second day. In the early hours of the morning, you are
awakened by an unearthly shrieking from the deck of the
ship. You spring from your bunk and grab your laser-sword
before racing up onto the deck, to discover six, winged,
demon-like creatures attacking the three crew members who
were set on watch. As you rush to their aid, one crew member
collapses, the life ripped from him by the miniature demon’s
dagger-like claws! The two demons who were attacking him
notice you almost instantly, and race towards you, shrieking
wildly. Praying that the remaining two crew members can
defend themselves against the other demons, you activate
your laser and attack! The second demon hovers, as you
battle with the first.

DEMON: DEXTERITY :8 STRENGTH :8

If you defeat the first demon, turn to 11.

Relatively straight forwards fight, we get 18 against the Demon's 15 in first round so shoot him square in the face for 6 damage. Round 2 we get 14 against his 17 but Round 3 we get 16 against his 15 and finish him off having lost 2 STRENGTH in the fight. Then we go on to paragraph 11.

-11-

At once, the second demon dives at you – only to be impaled
on your blade. As the demons die, their bodies vanish in a
cloud of black, foul-smelling smoke, and you turn to see that
with the aid of the other crew members, the rest of the
demons have been similarly disposed of. The white, fear-
filled faces of the Aarlachians tell you that they believe these
were demons from Shargan, but nothing is said and you
return in silence to your tiny cabin.

The rest of the journey is without incident, but the fear and
tension amongst the crew is very strong. On the afternoon of
the third day, however, the boat arrives safely in the
Aarlachian port of Isar, and you are met by a fat, balding little
man called Lai-Ti, who says he is an official in the Court of
the King of Aarlach, come to take you without delay to
Mount Villpus.

Will you trust him and go with him? If so, turn to 2. Or,
say that you would prefer to make your own way to Shargan’s
lair? Turn to 21.

Fighting Fantasist Dungeon Geomorphs VII

2011-03-06T08:22:00.001Z

The missing #15 that got omitted from a post a few posts back.

Fighting Fantasist Dungeon Geomorphs VI - And A Question Related To Them.

2011-03-02T18:24:00.004Z

Here's #16 which has secret passages coming out of it's arse (with added hypostyle).

And now the question - I've started knocking up a manuscript for a PDF ebook of my geomorphs with a eye to releasing it once there is a round number (say 100 or so). But which size would be best?

Scaled to 10cm x 10cm with a 1cm = 10' scale (admittedly this is implied), I can only get two of the full-size geomorphs on a page. Shrink them down to 5cm x 5cm, implying a scale of 5mm = 10' and you get three abreast and four deep for twelve per page. Any thoughts or preferences? What would make for a more useful (free) product?

Tunnels and Trolls UK Covers

2011-03-01T19:32:00.004Z

If the art style looks familiar to you and you're thinking "Discworld" then that's because the late, great Josh Kirby illustrated both.

In the UK Corgi Books printed the T&T rulebook as a mass-market paperback and doubled up the solo adventures in similar-sizde paperbacks. The City of Terrors was, as I recall, a slim half-length book given away with some printings of the rulebook, sealed together on the bookshop shelves.

Unlike the US editions, the UK books were re-numbered with pure sequential numbers (not the curious mix of alphanumerics in the original printings). Kirby handled all the interior illustrations as well as the covers giving T&T UK-style an individual look and atmosphere. Proper sword-and-sorcery stuff. You'll notice that he kept the whole Troll-receiving-a-TTYF-in-the-face thing from the original cover in his remake.

Each solo gamebook had a much abridged version of the main T&T rules included so you didn't actually need the rulebook to play solo.

Scans acquired from here.

John Blanche Fighting Fantasy Boxset 1983

2011-02-28T19:32:00.002Z

A slipcase of the first four Fighting Fantasy books with illustration by John Blanche. As mentalist as Blanche's work ever was back then. Is that a bit of a Slann/Lustria/Chariots of the Frogs thing going on on the back cover?

(Half-inched from here)

Random Humanoid Traits

2011-02-28T18:25:00.004Z

Thirty ways of quickly making a tribe or society of humanoid foes distinct, arranged into a handy-dandy d30 table.

1 - Ability to phase/teleport
2 - Activity cycle inverted (nocturnal to diurnal or vice versa)
3 - Albinism
4 - Cannibalistic or Vegetarian, whichever is most unusual (Wood Elves practising ritual cannibalism, Orcs living purely off cave mushrooms etc.)
5 - Chaotic mutations (two heads, animal heads, tails etc. common to all or majority of tribe)
6 - Cultural converts (culture is that of a neighbouring culture, perhaps one stronger or politically dominant - e.g. arboreal Goblins imitating Wood Elves)
7 - Cycloptic (one-eyed)
8 - Extreme inbreeding (stunted growth, stunted intelligence, physical deformity etc.)
9 - Extreme physical adaption to environment (sonar hearing coupled with blindness for troglodyte communities, webbed fingers and toes for marsh dwellers, fur for arctic conditions etc.)
10 - Has lucky/sacred colour (found on shields, face paint dwellings etc.), if sacred may not be willing to attack PC displaying sizable amount of this colour
11 - Heavily armoured
12 - Heavily pierced (in a region where precious metal or stone is available, tribe may be wearing their treasure)
13 - Heavily tattooed
14 - Hive-mind
15 - Law/Chaos alignment inverted (CE becomes LE, LE becomes CE etc.)
16 - Makes extensive use of poisoned weapons
17 - Mannerisms very alien, penalties to party's attempt to communicate
18 - Matriarchal society (or vice versa for traditionally Matriarchal societies such as Drow)
19 - Much shorter/smaller than usual
20 - Much taller/larger than usual
21 - Non-sexual dimorphism (pronounced physical differences between same gender or amongst asexual creatures often related to caste system within society - e.g. warriors ants compared to worker ants)
22 - Operates in partnership with local fauna which it has domesticated (spiders, snakes, wolves etc.)
23 - Practises self-mutilation, common across tribe (scarring etc.)
24 - Primitive (more so than usual - stone weapons)
25 - Religious converts (religion is that of a neighbouring culture, perhaps one stronger or politically dominant such as a ruling Empire etc.)
26 - Sexual dimorphism (pronounced physical differences between male and female such as size whereby female is much larger than male or different colouring/plumage etc.)
27 - Something about party is taboo to tribe (Elves, Dwarves, fire, religion etc.) and response will be either fear or violent hatred
28 - Technological (more so than usual - gunpowder weapons, advanced smithing)
29 - Unusual colouring (fur, hair etc.)
30 - Uses unusual weaponry

The Evil Empire Is Just Dead To Me Now

2011-02-25T22:06:00.005Z

I had something of an epiphany this week in that I realised that I have absolutely zero left in the tank marked up “Games Workshop Enthusiasm” and accordingly the activities of the company are now as meaningless to me as those of, say, Tampax, the manufacturers of cancer sticks, ITV and the department of WOTC that puts out that Essentials board game thing with the Dragonforged Rageblood Razorfinger Tankbrawler with 50hp at first level or whatever it is where the rules go out of date as soon as they are published and you need to keep paying to download stuff to patch your books. In other words if it vanished tomorrow I really wouldn't care (*).

Now, I've never reached rock bottom with the Workshop, not even in the bleak mid 90s when the figures were generally utter shit, I couldn't afford the cheapest thing in the shops and locally the GW scene was akin to a wasteland (The Wasteland around Marienburg if you like) whereby the mere suggestion of 40K or WFB at Stourbridge was enough to get you blackballed and your club membership revoked. I was always waiting for the time when it was practical to build myself 40k and WFB armies because deep down, I always wanted to be able to play the games. Whenever I liked. In the future perhaps when I had the cash and somehow my painting had become more efficient so that I could actually finish regiments let alone whole armies.

But now, in February 2011, this is real “I've had enough of you and the kids and I'm leaving you to live in a bedsit” stuff.

“Ah”, you nod sagely, “it's the high cost and price gouging that's got to him”.

And you'd be wrong.

If GW stuff was half the price, I wouldn't buy twice as much. I'd probably buy more than I was doing but certainly I wouldn't buy double and help them make up the shortfall. The reasoning behind this is really quite simple – I never buy faster than I can paint (I don't use unpainted figures for gaming) and while my painting is getting faster ever year, there is a time limit on fast I can get stuff from sprue to tabletop and that slows expenditure down to the point where I was perhaps spending £20 on raw materials that would occupy 6-8 weeks of paint table time. Since I don't regard that as expensive, I'm in the happy situation whereby I can buy quicker than I can paint so I'm (well, I was) happy at that point.

While I feel spiritually unclean for even having the mere thought, let alone voicing it, it suggests that GW pricing is actually correct and at the right level (for me at least). So there's no jilted fanboyism going on here at least.

So what caused it?

Well, they bought out a book.

Admittedly this isn't a book that violently abuses myself and family, murders my pets and shits on the softtop of my car but it is an annoyance, and the last straw I.e. the one that breaks the dromedary's spinal column. It's another Orcs and Goblin army book. It's hardback, it's £22. It's probably a very nice book, in fact on the evidence of the last Warhammer rulebook it's probably figure-pornographic enough to induce a fatal attack of “The Gush” ( © Chris Morris). (NSFW – but then neither am I and I go to work like most days).

But I've got the older one and I've used it twice and indeed I've got the older rulebook and used that twice as well. It's the whole upgrade path thing really pissing me off. To carry on gaming without losing the greater GW community I have to upgrade. And I hate being told to upgrade by big companies. It really gets my goat.

When is the next upgrade happening? When will the next thing that functions perfectly well but has to be retired from service because the great financial Gods of the Nottingham Spreadsheet have decided that cost benefit analysis requires me to do so in order to keep up with everybody else?

Bollocks to them. It's not the money, it's the principle.

Also...

I think at the ripe old of six-and-thirty I've outgrown the whole GW image thing.

I'm bored of Grimdark. Actually that's not quite true. What I'm bored of is GWs modern Grimdark. In the past, Warhammer was grim (WFRP particularly) but there was a vein of black humour and craziness running through it which lightened the mood and pointed out that you really shouldn't be taking things too seriously.

There's just none of this in modern GW lore. Why this should be I don't know. Either a bunch of people came to work in the GW fluff department who just didn't get it or hidden levels and irony is just a no-no because, I don't know, perhaps a focus group thought it might confuse a core demographic or something. But I find modern GW fluff vaguely depressing and unattractive. It's not something I explore enjoying and increasingly I don't wish to explore.

Here's a good example. I have the figure skirmish game Song of Blades and Heroes (it's a clunky title, but it's an Italian game and perhaps the title works better in Italian) which is clearly a lightweight Mordheim-a-like for playing a campaign of 3-4 games within an evening. I've never played it but have started to collect 80s Chaos figures for a Chaos Warband (thus mixing two of my favourite GW skirmish concepts in one – Mordheim and WFB Chaos Warbands).

Comparing these 80s figures with the modern stuff makes something very obvious leap out. Old Citadel Chaos Warriors were clearly an excuse for the sculptors to kick loose and design baroque armour completely uninhibited by historic reality (or indeed borrow from across the whole sphere or historic arms and armour from many geographically and chronologically diverse cultures). Modern Citadel Chaos Warrior is all KILLKILKILLKILLFUCKSOULSHITTERRIPSPLEENGOREMULTILATEIAMGODOFGURO and frankly it's fucking juvenile.

I can just picture the GW shop clone having had his daily regulation MDMA injection straight into his rectum let loose with the fullfuckingon sales rant at the confused parent of a 11 year old autistic boy.

“Yeah and these are the Chaos Warriors of Khorne they are like the coolest models ever and they are like the ultimate in psychotic warriors and they just slaughter everything and their hero has an axe called Bastard Rapist of the Innocent and they bath in cauldrons of gore and nothing stands in their way because they cut hack hack hack through everyone in their path and their god worships slaughter and forces them to cut their own head off if there isn't enough slaughter and he uses the powdered bones of concentration camp victims as underarm deodorant and...”

I just don't want any part in it. Is Coop getting soft in his dotage? I don't think so.

In a way it's like Frankie Boyle. When he was on Mock The Week he was hilarious because he kept a vein of humour which took the edge off his shock value and his carefully judged “right side of the edge of unacceptable” was skilfully done. On Tramadol Nights, a show in which he works on his own and is given full rein to do whatever he likes there is no vein of humour to his unpleasantness, the whole comedy is just shit and not funny.

Most of the older GW lore caught the imagination and created a mental image of a world I wanted to explore. I look at modern stuff and it just seems shit. In fact even the common phrase “fluff” seems to sum it up – it's disposable and unimportant, not in a “here's our World but you probably just want to create your own background” way but disposable and unimportant in that it's just shit and lazy shit at that that does a quick cut and paste job on historical military campaigns and hopes that piss-poor standard of history in British schools these days means that none of the kids will notice that you just ripped off Stalingrad and Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan and could barely be bothered to file the serial numbers off whilst you were doing it.

So the worlds bore me, the upgrade path of forced obselence pisses me off and while I could give up and play on my own with 3^rd edition Warhammer, I'd rather play games than be a gaming billy-no-mates.

So yeah, much like the morning you start a new job and realise that your old job was through a door you won't return through I just couldn't give a flying fuck about the Nottingham crew at all. I can't even summon the enthusiasm to dislike them. It's completely gone and I know I won't be back.

Curiously February 2011 marks the first month since April 1984 when the magazine moved up to newsagent distribution that White Dwarf hasn't been available from WHSmiths. I find this strangely appropriate somehow.

(*) Not entirely true – if they vanished there would be no Devlan Mud wash and no 'ardcoat gloss varnish and my painting would be absolutely fucked.