The Onion's superior campaign background

Sadly, this is better than the background in some fantasy literature, almost all fantasy movies, and many fantasy games:

Old, Wizened Fantasy Character Confirms That The Darkness Is Rising

You could set that guy in Clichea and be reasonably sure you've done your due diligence in starting a campaign. The players are going to ignore most of what he says and avoid the portal because it's dangerous and ask "What, the Shadow who?" about five sessions later.

Uncommon Weapons in a Common Weapons Campaign

In my experience, when it comes to gaming and weapons, players generally eyeball the unusual weapons. The strange, unique, and odd draw the eye and get the pick.

I was prompted to think about this from an email from a fellow GURPS GM asking about a related subject.

In a game like GURPS DF, with a large amount of points to spend, high skills to start, and access to extra money with some of the point budget, it's tempting to go for something unusual. The two-longsword fighter. The all-long-knives-guys. The katar and reverse-grip sword guy. The hammer-backed-pick-guy. The morningstar guy. The katana-and-sai-guy. Whatever.

One problem with that in my own games is randomized treasure. You might pick a trident, or a light horse cutter, or twin katars, but there isn't any guarantee that I've put magical ones out there. If I'm generating randomly, the tables in supplements like DF8 are skewed towards the more common weapons. The odder your weapon of choice is, the less likely there is a newer, fancier, more magical version just sitting out there. And the higher the odds that if there is one, it's the only one.

My own tendency is something boring but effective. It's probably a combination of my own personal tendencies (much of what I use is boring but effective, from exercises to vehicles - not all, but enough.) I know it's tough to replace the odd and unusual. And my games match. You could go an entire campaign - Takashi Harada can attest to this - without finding better katana and wakizashi than you started with. You'll find orcs with broadsword galore in my DF game, but orcs with horse cutters, jian, smallswords, kukri, etc. not at all.

If I was placing weapons in a story game, I'd possibly be more generous in this respect. But only possibly. I think my own tendencies and the style of my games - generally a slog through pseudo-medieval Europe with a lot of AD&D nostalgia - pushes people away from the unique and unusual and more to the utilitarian and common.

How about your games?

Secrets of Saltmash, first glance

I received and have been reading through the Secrets of Saltmarsh.

Overall, I'm enjoying the book. It's well put together, and it ties together the three original adventures with some additional later edition adventures related to the sea.

It does make some changes to the original. Some of them make sense with the changed edition. Some of them seem to be changes just for the sake of change. Some are decidedly odd to my eyes - like half-demon and half-dragon characters just around because . . . somewhere along the line those became normal races to have around.

Overall, though, what I've read so far is interesting and useful, and makes the Saltmarsh area a nice little hotbed of adventure. I'm looking forward to finishing it.

One special note, though, about Holmes Basic - the Tower of Zenopus is the sample dungeon, and the Zenopus Archives has had posts about how similar it sounds to the setup of U1. Well, now it's part of the Saltmarsh adventuring area. Nice. Very nice.

Book Update: Fun with Quotes

Over the past few days, I turned in the quotes for my latest DF book.

I won't say what they are, but I will say I do have quotes from:

Glen Cook - a standby for good quotes, as he paints huge canvases with few words.

Hugh Cook - his book Wizard War is one I've stolen a lot of inspiration from.

J.R.R. Tolkien (from his best work, too. Others might disagree, but they're not writing this book or blog.)

Alexei Pehov - it's tough quoting in translation, but I found a really good one that fit the page that needed it.

Michael Moorcock - he wrote of an anti-hero with a magic sword, in a world headed toward its own Ragnarok of sorts. That's an easy source of quotes. For this one, I knew what I wanted and had to track down the book more than the quote.

Gary Gygax - because it's Gary Gygax. I quote from his fiction, but the DUNGEONMASTERS GUIDE is always a good source of quotes. Especially ones that toss off game-changing concepts in a single parenthetical sentence.

I really should keep a file of pithy, fun quotes. But mostly I keep them in my head, and know where roughly to look for them. This can work well, like the quote I pulled out of a Glen Cook book for this one. The book was on my shelf.

It can work poorly, when I want quotes and realized I'd loaned out Moorcock's Stealer of Souls, most of my early Leiber books, all of the Alexei Pehov books, and more. I got a couple of those back in tine, and David Pulver rode in to the rescue with a quote from another book I was looking for. Steven Brust is usually a good source of quotes, as are Jack Vance and Roger Zelazny, but I had what I needed from the above.

I can't wait for this book to come out.

Bones IV trade/sale pile

I haven't really sorted these guys, but here is what's up for sale or trade.

Also included are all of the earlier Bones III figures (mostly) that I'd like to ditch.

Basically for the IVs, it's Gauth, the pig and cart, some various female fighters (mostly), the Chibi pack, all of the decorative posts except for the flame ones, the kobolds, and a few others.



Click on those to see a larger sized image and get a closer look.

I'll sell the whole pictured lot for $50 + shipping, or I'll break it up for trades or individual sales. I'm still trying to get rid of some other minis, too, if you want to add in to the deal.

Felltower Elder Tongue - Collected Facts

This post collects a number of notes about Elder Tongue, one of the hidden languages of my Felltower campaign.

The original description is here:

Elder Tongue: An old language, out of current use. Used back in the day by evil wizards, ancient scholars, and still used today by ancient beings, usually of great evil. Not a great way to impress your local clergy, who might report you to the Inquisitors if you walk around showing you know this. Of course some Inquisitors will know it well, to better fight their enemies! Ancient magic books are often written in this language. Wizards sometimes (okay, often) learn this in its written form only, to read forbidden texts and learn dark secrets.

According to this post, it costs double for Gift of spells。

Other assorted facts:

- Elder Tongue's characters have many readings, both individually and when collected. A character's reading (and substance of its meaning) can change based on characters that come before it or after it.

- Elder Tongue can be written left-right or right-left. It's sometimes written horizontally, sometimes vertically. This can change the meaning substantially.

- Elder Tongue's writers are often willfully obscure and deliberately opaque. Even with a clear reading, the intent might not be clear - and characters may be used as code. Gift of spells let you read or speak the language, but don't provide you with the intent and meaning of coded messages. There are no spells available that break codes.

- Elder Tongue is fixed and unchanging - it's not a living language - on the world of Felltower. It's not clear if that remains the case elsewhere.

OSRIC Wiki

Thanks to Rob Conley at Bat in the Attic for posting a link to this:

OSRIC Wiki

I've perused bits of OSRIC, although I generally just go back to the early gaming books of my life, the AD&D hardbacks. Still, OSRIC is a good resource for checking out what AD&D contains and for better explanations of the rules AD&D purports to explain itself. This just makes that OSRIC referral that much easier.