PC Manifesto

A) Fuck White Nationalism, National Socialism, and that ACKS guy. Also, Zak.. Fuck Zak. But that's not the kind of PC manifesto I mean. Provacateurism seems de rigeur these days, though, so let's get some eyes on this thing and make some cold hard ca$hes. How do you monetize a blog, again? Conflict? Great. I'm on it.

B) I want lots of variety in my PCs. I don't mean like "THIS HALFLING 3/3/3 Bard/Sorceror/Barbarian can dual-wield with Power-Hammers and has 12,000 Psi-Points with all metasciences, and is half-tiefling on his mom's side". I guess if that's the way your game goes, then that's cool but not my cup of T. Variety in PCs does not necessarily mean like 1000 different classes to choose from. They all tend to look like handsome anime types once I get the sheets in my hands. Like: sexy brooding thief. Sexy brooding swordsman. Sexy brooding wizard. This is not what I want. I want like the Wizard of Oz team. I want a telepathic dog, a robot brain in a spindly mechaunit, a migo technician, and a beleaguered time traveller. Shit - you don't need classes for all that. Maybe some HP and saving throws.

I fell in love with Into the Odd a few years ago when it came out, and it goes a long way to making terrific PCs who are not fleshed out in the least, except with the most rudimentary strokes. The magic is that it happens WHEN THEY PLAY. Your sombrero and great axe and sassy parrot do more than feats, specializations, skills, perks, flaws, any of that GURPS metagaming shit can do. I see an awful lot of "BUILDS" and you know what? Save builds for Dark Souls and then it's easier for me to mercilessly slaughter your character in session 2 - because (as in ItO) you toss dice three times and you're off again. Being from the old days I don't give a fig for your snowflake builds, bro, and no guarantee that your PC will live. The DCC funnel has been freeing in this sense. The only way to stay alive is to make a memorable character that you play well at the table and Tiamat can come for us all

They say the OSR is an undead thing. It's true. They do say it. Tainted by racism, sexism, barbarity, elitism. I'm thinking of doing 5e but in the manner of Old Skewl early next year at a local convention. Trying to coordinate it with friendly similar-minded DM's so as to infiltrate the tedious land of 5e organized play. I don't know how well my philosophy and/or lack of tact will play out or be received, and the organizer of the thing (a casual friend from the club I frequent) has a great deal of stuff on his plate. (post script: I did do it, and the 5e Basic Rules make for a decent old school 'feel' if you polish it up with moldvay, but that could be said of any rules set)

C) I don't give a fig for your backstory. Seriously. take it and cram it

D) PCs ought to accrue scars, changes, and storyhooks as they play. I guess this is C, part 2. A great thing about DCC is the corruptions table that steadily turns your humanish Wizard into a slithering pile of eyes and urges. That's like, Magic, Man. Lost eyes and hands lead to bionics and Vecna-pieces and so there.

E) Spend dat money. Carouse carouse carouse (and be pious and do research) You're not chasing paper in the bowels of the Oerth for no reason! Carousing leads to hilarity and the relative poverty of PCs. Also, if you're spending loot and selling Magic items, then those cultists at the local Cthulhu temple are going to get powerful As F*dge, and the Omniqueen wants her taxes, subhumans!

F) I seriously don't give a fuck about your backstory, dude. Almost always dudes. We're here to make backstory via the hilarious, spooky, exhilarating process of making a session and then promptftly forgetting those sessions and then recalling, later, those sessions which is, uh, the backstory

G) I mean, yeah, your game is your game but I am never ever ever looking to incorporate your backstory into the game. That;s on you. I prompt players ALL THE DAM TIME to give me juicy morsels of worldbuilding since I am lazy and this is a better way to invest investment into the game than some sad sack Conan/Edward Scissorhands/Blade the Vampire concoction you've got going on

H) there needs to be mutants, robots, secret robots, synthmen, psionicists, elves (but not Tolkien elves unless we are counting the Rankin Bass Mirkwood kind), sigh I guess Dwarfs too, fuck it no hobbits sorry James, Red Martians, Tharks, whatever. The more the merrier. I guess I'da gotten into Talislanta if it weren't for all the half-dressed weirdos, but like, all the PCs in my groups are half-dressed weirdos anyways. Even the humans ought to have some weirdness about them. Extra digits, antennae, quirks, mutations, whatever. All rolled pseudorandomly. Like, if I could get a chart equivalent to the Arduin Grimoires (uhh, note, I have this chart) weirdo character traits, or like the PC equivalent of DCC's spell quirks, then we wouldn't need Elves, or (blech) Hobbits. Everybody'd want to be a undisclosed Star Trek style humanoid with blue skin and retractable arm-membranes and bionic eyes

I) I don't know why but Tieflings and Dragonborn really burn my cheese, since they happen to be the lamest, most accepted weirdos at the table these days. Also, I grind my teeth at Half Elves since that's some bullshit. It's a tiefling. A tiefling is literally a half-elf. I don't give a fig about the origin story of your mom or dad or whatever. It's all halfelves all the way down

J) If you can pull in an Unearthed Arcana mockup or (gods forbid!) a 3rd party or homebrew murderhobo class, do it. I probably won't even read it. I hope you're not slipping a build in there or trying to rules-lawyer me

K) there's like 27million gods, like in Anomolous Subsurface Environment. Fuck it, make it up, I don't care. Apollo? Great. Zargon? Awesome! Zardoz! More awesomer. Some twenty-handed aspect of Kalima, or Faceless Patron of Orphans! WHOOOOHOOO now we are talking. Be a priest of a whole pantheon, IDGAF. I think DnD focused too early on on some jealous Monotheism. Fuck it, have 9 patrons and 27 different conflicting goals going on. That's on you - just remind me to drop the negative consequences on you when you let 8 of them down

L) magic is hard to come by at the beginning, but AFTER THAT, it represents ways for the universe to incur chaos/kaos and randomness on your ass, and then you'll find that opportunities to mutate yourself, or curse your line down to 7 generations, well, you'll find they are ubiquitous since Those Who Wait And Watch At The Threshold are going to try to make doors in to hasten The End of All Things

M) I feel like I could go on like this all night but the coffee is making me have some GI distress

N) more later

As Above, So Below: Tron, the Matrix and Margaret St. Clair

Happy Birthday, you basement-dwelling grognard!

I was watching Disney Plus, as you do these days, and I hit up Tron: Legacy which was put on the screen practically like 10 years ago (pretty mind-blowing), and since it's the holidays and The Henchman's Mom is coming up for the Deromas in which we erect the corpse of a tree festooned with entrails and baubles, I was cleaning off my dresser. On the pile on the dresser, there's a couple of Margaret St. Clair books and some other stuff. The Shadow People (read it twice, somewhat work-y read), Dolphins of Altair (I never finished it), Sign of the Labrys (once, pretty fun). Tron Legacy was like the opposite of maybe what I was hoping another tronthing would be and maybe has the worst iteration of Uncanny Valley Bridges, ever, except maybe for Rogue One princess Admiral Leia

And so, there are some corollaries, there. There is a "levels of reality" thing going on. The under-world, wherein a hostile reality that contains baleful entities but you can master it. There's an over-world, too. We start in the middle, but you can get dDown There, and They can get Up Here, and people from Up There can get Down Here, too. A dreary quality in St. Clair is replaced by glowing wonder in the Grid. Special heroics when you cross the boudnaries of layers of margins and rivers

I note that the Elfs in the underworld have a leader who can come up, and in Tron: Legacy, Quorra is a special case of a natural-being (not a created Program) who is native to the Grid but who can eventually (spoilers) get Up Here to our reality. And there is Merlin, who came Down Here from the Overworld. He's a Tron User, but for our reality. Merlin is to Humans as Reality Hero is to under-elfs. Lay waste to the underbeings, get their loot, and come back up. Or maybe start down there and bring your crazy DNA and cure cancer or whatever or get up to shenanigans (I wish they had squared off with Dillinger's kid and the jerk of a CEO from the enticing open heist, but whatevs)

When Quorra arrives in the Midworld, she brought a fetish-choked parody that I've not got the yarbles to watch

There are a lot of great messages in The Shadow People, not just the interesting Wicca flavored stuff, but also about drug use and dependence which I guess whas pretty rampant in 60's Berkeley. Also, negotiating sexual relationships without guilt - a la Summer of '69/Age of Aquarius. Pretty blase about shacking-up and romantic attachment. The lady Carol who is rescued comes back from the underworld a hollow PTSD-filled shell, yearning for attercorn but unarguably better off for not being in the dismal, dark, joyless place where she was going to be somebody's lunch, eventually. Flynn goes Down There to the Grid, and his heart is captured. He foregoes life in the "real world" and fatherhood and family and success in order to be a User in the Grid. Sort of like Neo and the hackers in The Matrix, moving down (or Up) a meta-level, unlocks some special quality in you...

Tron and Flynn, I think. Great way to enhance your potential, at least on paper

There are some interesting messages about reality, illusion, reality, enlightenment, drug use, love, human potential. I'm too tired from poor sleep to elucidate, and will let you think on it

Not to mention, when aldridge comes back up from the underworld, he comes back in the same time, but not in the same reality-place! There's no way that all that stuff could happen in 3 years (robots, drone-dozers, fascist secret police, uh wait). Somehow, they are unhooked in reality and float around land in some Other track.

I have a minigame of The Shadow People which is a bit of a slog, and you go down to the bottom and come back up changed, and things around you are different. The time you spend down there will cost you in terms of stats and scars, but you will gain in terms of magic and weirdness

There could be a subcampaign in all D&D-type roleplaying where you could get into the fae underworld OR you could get into the bottled-city/Grid in the cpmputer

Will post the thing when I am motivated to finish it (maybe tonight!) - maybe I will just post the skeleton to get it off the docket

Possibly-influential DnD texts

I don't know if this has been batted back-n-forth, but I was thinkin' about the stuff that Gary and the boys n girls mighta been readin' back in the day and the influence of sci-fi and sci-fantasy and pop culture on the nascent DnD. How do I incorporate the weird world, thinning barriers, and dream influence more fully into my creative process?

Here's my pinterest board about my dream geography

Anywho, amongst other things that crossed into my threshold of awareness was a book called A Treasury of Witchcraft by Mr. Harry Wedeck who appears to have been a right-polymath in the classical sense. I'm surprised I havent come acrostik before. I would bet that some of the thaumaturgy/goetic magic diagrams and such that appear in the 1e DMG were prolly lifted right from this book, but I haven't unwrapped it yet from its mailer. The reason is because I gave in to a impulse buy sort of synchronistically since at the time I was thinking about this issue (prompted by another book buy) I was also listening to a podcast about sinister forces afoot in NJ who mayen't/mayve killed a young girl in a magickal sacrifice (or possibly accidentally? is my hunch)... [see, for more information, the murder of Jeanette De Palma in 1972 in Springfield, NJ and the weird circumstances that surrounded it) Try these: Double Date with Death, Death on The Devil's Teeth

Also, got a one called Dragons, Unicorns, And Other Magical Beasts by Palmer and Bolognese which I had as a boy but sadly absconded with it from the library - my right-hearted grandma Anne probably had to pay the overdue/replacement fee to Miami Springs Public Library but this one had such great linotype/woodcut art and had such terrifying images that I could not bear to part with it on purpose, although between then and now (something like 35 years or more?) I lost my physical copy but not the image of the Barghest which it contains...

Reading/read: Steven Newton and crew's Creep, Skrag, Creep! for DCC which is a sound funnel almost like the movie Alien in its horrific simplicity and ably done. I think it's a little light in terms of what it gives you for most modern sensibilities (so many unaddressed questions!) but it's not a bug for me, that's a feature

Inquiring into: Jacques Vallee, Liminal Earth, and Frederick Barbarossa (this link is a psyke-out!)

DunjonCorp: Highfell Edition

On the 6th hour of the 6th day of the New Year, in the Principality of Brine, in the salt-scraping ramshackle village known as Endtown, our lowly townies played admirably by the DunjonCorp team sat. They sat and drank and lamented about the poor financial prospects. IF ONLY they concurred, IF ONLY THIS PLACE WAS NOT SO BORING

IF ONLY I HAD NO SALT IN MY NOSE

IF ONLY MY BLOOD PRESSURE WERE NOT SO HIGH

IF ONLY I COULD PAY OFF THESE EXORBITANT LOANS

Ahh, but what good is wishing into a tankard of ale-brine? is what my dear grandmother always told me as she drank her ale-brine

...and as if in answer to their innermost and verbalized prayers, Jojen the Cantankerous, a minor noble from distant Threshhold and a budding sorcerer offered the every patron of the bar the princely sum of let us say 5 GP a week to accompany him and his handlers (Chivas and Gorp) to Highfell in the mountains to the north, there to loot and explore in the name of civilization and commerce and magistotheurgetical science

And so they departed, aglow with the prospects of new livelihood but as soon as they stepped a-blinking into the sunny late afternoon there was a clap of thunder and a distant mushroom cloud and THERE! above the Great Salt Reach a spinning, wobbly, not-at-all plummeting chunk of Highfell has saved them the trouble of commuting by hanging there mysteriously in the air, lit from within and without by strange energies, shimmering hazily, defying reason and good sense

There she hangs and Jojen and his crew stood aplomb in wonder, mostly dumbstruck

There’pon with a giant CRACK! a chunk of the (mountain?castle?dungeon?) separated from the grander piece and DID to Endtown’s dismay begin a lazy descent to Aereth. On a trajectory with the very Mayor's crummy house from which the party observed the phenomena! At this point, a flock of Luftbaboons peeled away from the battle and made its way to the town and harassed the party who took some losses, of course, but nothing unsettling (it was Keith whose PC's died owing to random chance and it seems suspicious that maybe I do not like his PCs but such is not the case)

The party barked orders to the Mayor - evacuate the townspeople! And so it went - some calculations and they determined that 3 or 4 hours until touchdown and probably destruction of the town. A few hardy souls and the Salt Mercantile Guild guards stayed behind to assist with maintaining order.

The trusty spyglass revealed that a smallish battle between some cloaked figures was afoot on the parapets and crenellations - and ominously large parts of the ruin tumbled to the earth below (ripe for looting!). Enacting a foolish plan, the party and some carpenters felled some trees and lashed them together to make a climbable pole to reach ALMOST to the height of the bottom of the floating chunk. The party stopped on the way to sift the wreckage below and some spurious artifacts (a catsuit made of spider silk, a painting of a clown on black velvet, and something else which my mind does not recall)

The conniving rutabega farmer (Ashley's) latched on to the wires and ducts jutting from below and so the party climbed up, reduced by half owing to falls - Boris the soldier (Eli's!) was lost as was his gear. Even the rutabega farmer fell heroically and embedded herself forever into the salt flats.

They managed to alight on what I now name Cattohnus' Chunk, since it were determined that the tower nearby was his/hers/its, and also they looted an ancient statue of Arcantyl's female aspect of its fist-sized rubies for eyes. Keith has a thing for playing femmes fatales with quick fingers and avarice,. The rest of the party took cover from acid rain - this time weak enough but who knows, with all this purple lightning around, what might happen?

Knocking on the Wizard Cattohnus' door, they were greeted by a stone man more than 20 feet tall, and the muscular scribe (Keith's PC) left a calling brick, which presumed to describe their appointment. But there was some wait - an extradimensional one, at that, and during the wait a flock of Luftbaboons alighted around the party and harassed them, the biggest one even counting coup on the scribe who deftly boxed the winged mandrill's ears much to the amazement of the creatures who responded better to the violence than any gesture of friendship.

Bortak the Lieutenant Luftbaboon explained they were somewhat unnerved by the sudden disappearance and reappearance of their territory high in the sky and offered to take the party back to the ground... No sooner said than done and we approached the wrapping-up point...

Selling their loot, the party (6 zero-level humies) have accumulated enough XP for first level which is to say 250+100 after shares allotted. A tenuous relationship with a small band of flying primates, and it seems to the inhabitants of their grotty little agri-salt village that the party are heroes

Cattohnus' Chunk, instead of hurtling to the Aereth and smashing up Endtown, settled very gently and now only perpetually THREATENS to obliviate Endtown. Who knows, aside from a big stone butler, what horrors live within it? And what has escaped onto the ground to threaten the countryside?

TUNE IN TO WATCH

Ideas for Squads/Conversions

I picked up a couple of Reaper things since for a while I was walking around with a few Wolfmother songs in my brain. I got a Female Efreet since I couldn't find a nature giantess for Colossal Girl. And I made a thief for myself from kitbashed bits n pieces (Imperial stuff, I guess, and a couple of things from the Frostgrave cultist set) for "Joker and The Thief" and up in the air about a Joker character from say Knight Games or else maybe just a classical harlequin or something...

Anyway, it got me thinking - playing around with my 3d printer has just about killed my need to buy 40k stuff, since effectively I could print, in a long time I suppose, whatever 40k figs or terrain or might want. I was sort of thinking about doing some vehicles but, probably, I will never again play 40k. I just don't have the taste for Grimdark anymore. Too much real fascism in my country these days for the bullshit fake small-f-fascism of the Imperium to appeal to me. And, I reflect, I have rarely had a good time playing 40k. I have had a good time HANGING OUT and playing 40k also, but it's not the 40k that was fun about those times. In fact, 40k is only my jam at about 500-1000 points and for that, I'd rather be playing Necromunda, and for that, I'd probably rather be playing something fast and sensible like Frostgrave. I dig the "desperate troops and last stands" of 40k more than the lantern-jawed-Ubermenschen they've become. I mean, you won't see any tubby SM getting blown away by pirate orky weirdboys, these days. Too serious by half again, wot

If GW wanted to kill it for me, they'd introduce some solo style rules for when I'm bored and tired but can't sleep. I KNOW I KNOW, I said that a new Necromunda would sell it to me, but they took all the wry irony and self-awareness out (no shit I find the tedious I JUST WANT TO PLAY NO POLITICS of the s/Necromunda to be piteous in the extreme)

I don't know.

Ideas for conversions - Miyazaki. I mean, have you seen the Temekulans? They were Spess Mureens before there were any. Just need a rounded conical helmet and cloaks and BOOM. I'm struck, now, by how much I was influenced in my late childhood by Excalibur, Knight Riders, and Warriors of The Wind. It's probably down to Miyazaki that I even like 40k!

Also, Stardew Valley - I just literally saw a Pig Cart painted up on reddit at lunch. The backstory of the wars that is hinted at in the game is fascinating to me.

I been reading a lot of Gang War NYC, and Last Days (made a review here, once, and it sits better with me the more I read it) and seems to me that a good thing would be side-plot cards for just about any game you might think of. I think the most interesting situations in 40k arose for me when we used Mysterious Objectives

Anyway, just getting this out of my noodle since I'm bored

I also got a couple of Blackwolf the Wizard's troops (including Necron 99) coming from my buddy Brian, who works the booth for Wee Wolf minis. He may BE Wee Wolf minis, but that's like saying Peter Parker may be Batman...

So I picked up some savage orc thugs from ebay and I will edo those up like Scortch-colored emutants. Need some viking style elves as opponents, but I got a lot of stuff on the back burner these days.