Friday, July 7, 2017

The Mathom-Making of Calabraxis

Daniel Bishop of the Raven Crowking's Nest, has a great tradition, based on Tolkien's Hobbit practice of Mathom-ing.  A mathom is a gift that the owner doesn't use to the full extent, and is given freely on the owner's Birthday. I forget when Daniel's birthday is, but to get his Mathom this year (as in dusty years gone by) one need only review a DCC thing and link to Daniel's OP

HERE IS MY REVIEW

Hearken, Wayward Traveller!  Have you a need for weird interludes, full of novel critters and strange situations?  Do your adventurers tire of kobolds, dragons, and Standard Template Spells? Well, look no farther - Claytonian's Wizardarium of Calabraxis seems to me to meet your requirements, Mendicant!

It is spilling over from one plane of reality into the next with interesting to fight/roleplay monsters and alien entities, offers strange toys to play with and experiment upon captives with, deadly traps to kill the unwary, and of course an evil and twisted Wizard that is long dead but still haunts the locale...

I admire Claytonian's work, in that the WoC is a thing he made all on his own, including the art.  In addition to writing and layout, he also has contributed artwork to other DCC authors' productions and is a talented visual artist in his own right. In the span of maybe 18 (6x9?) pages, he gives both a bare-framework and rich opportunity of Roleplay and Combat and Explorative play, with a healthy dose of hooks to bring the PCs in.  In addition, it seems to me that no PC that enters will leave the Wizardarium unchanged, and the multiverse itself may open up before them - weird time-travel possibilities and even transmogrification ought to be expected (and to my mind encouraged)

Disclosure: with Claytonian's permission, I incorporated his suggested Psionic power rules into my own solo gamebook as a way to strengthen the network of bonds between DCC authors' individual work, the way that HPL and Smith and Howard did so long ago. Claytonian is an advocate of this position and practice, I think, as all we DIY hobby-publishers ought to be.


NOW, BRING ME THE HEAD OF JOHN THE BAPTIST AND A MATHOM, UNLESS THE HEAD IS THE MATHOM 

Sunday, June 18, 2017

Offending the Elementals

I'm impressed at how often I have random RPG thoughts pop into my head while I am waiting for the dog to take a deuce on our morning/evening rounds.

 

It's Father's Day. My kid is about 4, and since she could walk she has had a bit of an interesting habit, in that she seems to collect rocks. Not special rocks, as far as I can tell, just "nice ones". She almost always has a rock in her pocket when we are out and about. My compulsion, I chalk it up to 35 years of thinking about Dungeons, is to peek into sewer grates and open manholes and drainage sluices. We all have quirks, I guess.

My wife has a fish tank that she fusses over. A good honest hobby. I got to thinking, whilst I prepared to stoop down to pick up some warm dog poo this AM, what if my wife and kid were like offending the Natural Order of The Universe?

Tiny rocks are baby rocks. Rocks start out Old and Awful, mountains with roots and the millennia sheer and crumble them away to helpless infancy. My kid sees a kindred spirit in a helpless stone, and picks up good vibes. My wife has a 5-gallon waterthing that she checks its chemistry and ammonia and the 5 little souls darting around inside. A fish tank is a constrained body of free-flowing fluid, sedated and captured for a human's amusement. Do Grome and Blibdoolploolp take offence?  I hope not. Maybe they dig it as it allows a greater sphere of influence. In an animistic world, every rock and stone is a potential friend and a spy

There are other than the 4 natural elements. Elementals of happiness, moonlight, gravedirt, ironworks, springs, ink; not just the 4 basic or 8 demi-elementals, or the infinite paraelementals. Anything that has a Platonic Ideal can be ripped (un)ceremoniously from There and brought to Here. Pretty common for the animal world paragons to come to The World but rare for elementals of other sorts, and only where the connections are strong

The Paper Elemental often appears on my dinner table. Covered with scribbles and made of unpaid bills and half-read magazines. If one is able to get into the innards of a paper elemental, you can get a level-worth of spells for each physical successful attack one makes, but you're suffocating and being shredded by an infinity of paper cuts each round, so have Protection

The Fishtank elemental has beautiful fish inside and enjoys being fed and given jewelry and when the chemistry is off it gets hateful and murderous and the fish are killed and then whatever it can get to next

I made that one post about the Imbue Spirit spell for DCC - the link should be in the side bar

Gotta get back to Father's Day stuff now this bacon and eggs and coffee are digesting

Hmm Breakfast Elemental. Sleepiness, lethargy, contentment as attacks. You awaken some hours later with nothing done

Wednesday, June 14, 2017

Putt-Putt 40K

FORE THE EMPEROR


I was reading this series of Zombie Golf posts by +Stiubhart MacChoille and immediately got to thinking about ways to use what I already have to make a Golf40K game or something like it
"Wilkins, pull the flag as the ball approacheth, and prime the Promethium Pumps."
"The ball travels 3d8+10 inches plus the golfer's S score, and deviates from the marked target by 1d6-BS, to a minimum of 0 inches."

What I have in mind is Hivegolf.  9 holes of creaky hive towers, Plague Zombies, sludge, sumps, and gang warfare.  A couple of gangers surround and escort the driver and putter and you pop up encounters like from the Outlanders random encounters, and there's a ref like in Blood Bowl and your gang can pick up loot counters, archaeotech

Wyrds can telekinetically slice/hook you.  Hive conditions.  Stroke penalties. Spook-enabled targetting of hidden holes.

http://www.twohourwargames.com/zombiegolf.html

You can grab the rules +Stiubhart MacChoille used, or close to it, at the above link. Certainly got to model up some ball and hole counters.  Melta-Photon-balls and Exhaust-vent/Bunker-targets?


I think +David Okum may have done a golf series, also (maybe not, but he should have done)

Thursday, May 4, 2017

Mini-Molds

Got some heat-activated instant mold compound and toyed with it last night in a slow spell at work. Problem is I only have some old Green Stuff (like 5 years old) and it didn't soften very well so my results were pretty abominable. Still working out the kinks but here is the essential process, on some RTB1 plastic beaky marine heads and the only female Imperial plastic head in my collection, the gunner head from the SoB Inmolator kit. Next will maybe be some autoguns and old power fists

 
    

Monday, April 24, 2017

Market Forces


My lesser hobby is Goodwills, looking for old tech.  My lesser lesser hobby is that feeling of amaze when I go into New York Mart in Rockville, not far from my second office... Smells of fish and far away - in fact they have a whole tank full of live eels! Not to mention piles of different noodles and all kinds of shit you never saw in your local grocery store. All kinds of drinks from exotic (to me) fruits, I mean they got durian here, they got pandan here, they got grass jelly... This feeling of amazement reminds me very much of Kabuki Kaiser's Mad Monks of Kwantoom, and In My dreamy over-stimmed state I was prompted by various product names to make some NPCs:

Durian Jackfruit: Hard-hitting bandit of the hill countries.  He is known to alight from trees with a giant gnarly mace and brain merchant caravan guards. It is said he is part marmoset or maybe ooloi but nobody is sure. His parents where Cthulhu cultists, and he has no regard whatsoever for civilized peoples unless they are immune to his fluid-filled Mace of Concussions +2

Mr Squid: Biomancer from the Quadling countries. He has a face like a half-frozen octopus, a head full of second-rate biosofts, and 3 arms ending in triple-jointed fingers.  Maybe it's a 'he'. I don't think it matters too much. He loves to hire less-busy-than-him adventurers to secure rare herbs and organic, locally sourced components of his customized decoctions that will do all sorts of crazy combinations of spell effects for very brief durations. Metabolism is the key, here.  He also is very willing to sell his old biosoft chips or trade them for work or ingredients.  He will give you very good rates for unique ingredients.

Horlicks: Horlicks is a Parrot-Kenku Yobber. That is, he steals safes and other large objects from hardened targets. His specialty is art.  Big art.  Nobody knows how he gets these big objets d'art from tiny windows, but he has like 14 bags of devouring that never get hungry and a portable hole for a wallet.  He's got a nilbog coworker that nobody's ever seen.  Maybe it lives in the portable hole.

Apple Sidra: Apple Sidra is a fox-tailed shrine-keeper maiden at the Wayshrine of the Clam-that-looks-like-a-lotus.  She is always engaged in beating back clam poachers, eel-men, and other unsavory types, or else recovering the Holy Lotusclams after they have been poached (not cooked, but stolen - she hasn't yet lost a Lotusclam permanently). The Blue-Green Lotus Clam in particular is 247 years old and it is said that stealing it is the 4th Step in the Path of the Slippery Buddha, but that eating it will surely cause unceasing nausea until the end of days (incidentally, also immortality but who wants nauseated eternal life?)

Hi-Red Tiger: She is a noodle-saleswoman from the Lightless Lands below and has a great number of connections to the Underkingdom cuisine trade. There is always a line to her noodle booth where one may rub elbows with haughty elfs, Dralasite Miners, Dalek Scientists, Svirnebflin Gangsters, and Yoon-Twai Noblewomen.  It will take 1d8 hours to get to the front of the line, and you get what she hands you, if she is there, or else her understudies do.  The noodles are great but the broths are where the magic lies, as they are slightly psychotropic and very filling.  A bowl will put you in touch with the Higher Realms until you visit the loo or sweat the poison out through your pores.  The good thing is, you can dehydrate while you wait

That's all I got for now, except a bitchin green straw broom that my kid will ride like Kiki does in that movie, a pile of coconut-pandan grass candy, some Pocky, and Black-Black chewing gum. Also, some Korean Ramen that is better by far than the shitty ones we get from Top, and also some Canned Cappucino that I believe is making me hallucinate and anyways, back to work

Buy 'The Hounds' - Click Here