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.

YOU MAY FIND CLAYTONIAN'S OPUS MAGNUM HERE

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

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