Freebie Dungeon Challenge

So, here is the recent outputs of my ever-evolving dungeon generator code for Tablesmith. The idea is that you generate a big map. I use this ZORBUS map generator and also a local installation of Wizarddawn, mostly. Although I enjoy drawing maps, I find my own style of mapping is a little lame and IMHO dungeons ought to be the weirder the better, dig?

fixing to throw down a gauntlet. Are you an all-powerful demigod, or a scrub? Well? Which is it?

So, you make a vast, mostly lightless land. Then, if your players are brave (they are!) they agree to consensually hallucinate entry of their avatars into this perilous realm. If you the DM/Judge/Whatever are brave (you are!) you may try it like this:

You get your random map and have your mass-generator make you THREE different levels, slightly more dangerous than what you would feel comfortable with. Why? Because death is right around the corner. BUT, you don't look at the listings. Instead, you place each listing into a separate envelope. And you sit down to play. When the avatars go hence into the deeps, you have a player pick an envelope and you play the dungeon inside it, with the map you already made! You AND the players will have about as much awareness of what is going to happen... a kind of magic.

Your random encounter table ought to include some badass wizards, some crazy nasty dragons or near-dragon substitutes, friendly dungeon caretakers, a couple of settlements with some friend-able factions, and a fuck-tonne of treasure there for the taking, with plenty of things for each class to do. Unlocking locks, slaying beasts, turning undead, deciphering codes, tracking escapees, maps to follow, frenemies to make, and many many saving throws. So much treasure that you level up a lot, but dangerous enough to get that you die a lot if you fuck around and find out. And you have to get somewhere safe with the treasure to get your XP. Sprinkle around some easily defensible safe rooms with water and a toilet (I mean, why the fuck not?)

the pseudorandom lightless realm in question

I use the Moldvay random encounter method : every other turn roll a d6 and on a 1 you get an encounter moving toward the party from some short distance away (2d6x10") is how I interpret it. If you wanted to really and truly up the ante, you could have a random encounter happen on a 1 or a 2. You are free to make the random encounter table to your liking, because that will take some of the pressure off of you to totally think on your feet - you can stock it with RP opportunities, combat, horrid events, mysterious clues, helpless supplicants, or faction leaders for players to align with. Whatever you want the mostly flavor of the thing to be, the Random Encounters is where you really customize it. And feel free to slightly modify the weird entries if they don't suit your sensibilities but be fair and consistent or some players will catch on and get cranky (in my experience). You can pick some core beasties for the level, a couple of humanoid factions, and keep an eyeball on one of your bigger rooms for a possible small settlement.

EXAMPLE NOAH'S RANDOM ENCOUNTER TABLE (2d6):

2: A BADASS RANDOM WIZARD and ENTOURAGE (have these generated previously)

3: FRIENDLY NATIVE (some talky, wimpy race of under-dwellers, plenty of food and rough gear to trade, possible henchpersons or replacement PCs)

4: NPC Party (again, generate randomly, I usually have like 6 pregenerated parties on a separate sheet with their alignments and gear and some motivations)

5: swarm of beasties, small and irritating

6: pack of beasties, few but dangerous

7: wandering beasty, large but not a top-level predator (see below)

8: strange possibly dangerous environmental disruption (lights out/on, noxious gas, gravity fluctuations, chaos magical flux, mass-migration of vermin)

9: mindless undead or automaton (I like robots, because genre purity is dumb)

10: ethereal undead (gotta keep clerics useful, too)

11: random unguarded treasure but slightly hidden (in addition to whatever might already be generated in the room)

12: A Dragon. Whatever that means (I like Manticores, myself). Run for your life, or stay and get trounced or possibly make a powerful ally.

I include, as an attached file, one of these that I have made this morning. I challenge you to use it, and I will think of a prize if you let me know how it goes. I am thinking of making a donation of some copies of my gamebook to the local High School's gaming club near where I work, and maybe I will include you as the benefactor if you will let me know how your session(s) go.

ENTER WITHIN IF MOXIE AND/OR YARBLES YE HAVE

Personal Appendix N: Atari 2600 Adventure

I look back on the things that influenced me and my thinking about Dungeons and Dragons when I was 8 or 10 and a few highlights stand out strongly.

There are the usuals: Transformers, Thundercats, He-Man, various live action TV shows... I wonder if the A-Team is a huge influence on the way I play D&D? I bet it is and does, and I wonder if other people have made that particular connection. I don't even remember much about the show, other than the various team-work and "make some deadly gizmo" montage stuff. BA Barracus and his poison cat milk, Mad Mog Murdock, Faceman, Hannibal Lecter, that Robot V.I.C.K.I. that we all know and love. The hideous panther cultists that imbued the doctor guy with the power of the jungle cats. A 30 story battle gundam that shoots lasers out of its mouth. Man, the A-Team was the best. Don't try to mess up my A-Team headcannon with your feeble takes on reality: my version is better and will remain so in the face of contradictory evidence. The earth is flat, CORONA is a hoax, the aliens are prepping us for invasion, and my own subjective memory of the 80's has little bearing on Reaganism, Thatcherism, and where we are now.

Case in point: Atari's "Adventure" for the 2600 system. In my view the 2600 is the most important of all gaming systems and at the root of the present day mass-dissociation from reality of which I am a merely minor player. Why? It was ubiquitous and easy-to-grasp, not like the infuriating personal computers of the day that required "patience" and "understanding". Slap that cartridge in, flip the switch, and Let's GOOOOOOO. Remind me one day to talk about my experience programming adventure games in BASIC on the C64 - later. Right now, we're talking about "Adventure".

Warren Robinette's opus was not only a tour-d-force of programming economy and subversive swindling of the managers-in-charge, it's also clever and beautiful and elegant and infinitely replayable! If you're naive, he pretty much invented not just visual CRPGs but also the Easter Egg as we know it. BUT! BUT! The manual for the cartridge ("what's a cartridge? today's kids will ask") - even though  it seems to me not even written by Robinette, it contains the structure of a pure, distilled fairy tale and perfect and complete premise for every adventure before-and-ever-after. Stolen from Arthurian legend, somehow better and more perfect and precise. The box art painting by Susan Jakael quite simply merges with the actual game to become something that is, in my 7 or 8 year old brain, better than any drug or movie or cartoon until I was introduced shortly thereafter to D&D by my teenage half-brother and some gawky older kids... (gary and brian, you weirdos, thanks for nothing!)

In the box art, foreground we can see a few people/players/elves(?) trapped in the hedge maze, where a coiling wyrm holds aloft a yellow key. Beneath the wyrm, the crown and a hand that reaches for it... In the distance, a few other elves march off on pilgrimage from the Golden Castle. The Golden Castle is a Camelot, a Magic Place, the Ur-Castle. Banners flying, portcullis, you know the drill. And that's about it. A tree, dead. The tree looms large in my young mind... Why is the tree blighted but the hedge-maze green and robust? Well, the tree is natural of course and the hedge-maze is MAGIC, of course. The manual names some dragons, tells us that the sword is a part of the Good Magic, that the Dragons are Bad Magic (the Bat, too). The Magnet is hand-waved in the manual, and the Bridge (perversion of  2D reality!) is not even mentioned. The manual takes great pains to explain away a hardware problem implicit in the game, namely that the more sprites there are on the screen, the less likely they are to work properly and this can even be used (for example) to get past the dead body of a dragon that  might block your way... I can dimly recall the feeling of wonder and perplexity when I first encountered this game, and the sheer awful terror of a struggling dot swallowed into the belly of a roaring beast. Trapped Jonah-like, as my Lutheran school brain clearly connected. Hit the button and he's/you're/it's regurgitated and you try again.

More later

 

 

Something about Sewers: Ultan's Door 3 Review

This is IIRC the second sewage-related thing I have reviewed in the hoary life of this blog, the first being Daniel Bishop's commendable and filthy thing which you may find here.

I am generally weary and leery of Kickstarters. It's too bad, because it does seem (despite my anxiety) an ideal way to get a nice thing made in our byzantine capitalist system. A great list of the things i've kickstarted shows many amazing projects, a very few merely modest ones, and only one (that's right 1!) failed Kickstart: a beer that didn't get made for WayneCon a few years ago. Why my distrust? I don't know. Politics or summat

Before I begin the review, I'd like to state very upfront that I do not condone nor glamorize the use of REAL drugs and other substances, nor do I wish to demonize people in the real world who suffer from substance abuse disorders. I myself am beholden to two or three substances for my tenuous, dreary real-world existence and without Carbamazepine, Fluoxetine, and Caffeine I would be a juddering, shuddering shell of a man - incapable of joy or focus or safely operating heavy machinery.

I received the hard copy of the first "Through Ultan's Door" zine a few years ago, I think. The envelope came and I was surprised because I did not clearly recollect kickstarting the thing. And I downloaded the PDFs and my favorite things about it were: 1) portal-bility - there is a door to the land of Zyan, a dreamland, which you can use as is (that being, it's in Ultan's shop) OR you could pop the door anywhere you like. 2) the art - I am a longtime fan of the works of Russ Nicholson and his work appears therein, and also the other artists have striven for a similar feel: reminiscent of musty Fighting Fantasy books and John Blanche and the Fiend Folio - speckled and black and white and sort of 'gauzy' and C) also the setting of Zyan and its inhabitants are more 'implied' than entirely given freely, thick and cloying prose and many adverbs and adjectives and pleasing consonance. D) The ramshackle feel of the place - rundown, poorly maintained, sinister in disrepair. Rotten? Corrupted? yes, yes I think so. Not to give too much away, the encounters in TUD1 are delightfully weird - not weird in a bullshit sense like HOW THE FUCK CAN I PLAY THIS BULLSHIT but weird but real-enough in an unsettling fashion, as if in fact plucked from an unhealthy dream.  Masks are everywhere, the law of Zyan is ominous and alienating, and trickle-down economics are a literal thang. Plenty of rotten loot to steal, enemies to make, and hinted-at worlds to explore if only you can get there...

Well, in Through Ultan's Door 2, you really CAN get there. there's much more at that point to travel along and see and do. I love much of the setting of the second one, and the art is again fantabulous, Huargo and Nicholson and all them really sell it. I might critique that the second book strays slightly-but-not-irredeemably into the "arthouse Grant Morrison bullshit with lots of scribbly titties" thing that Zak peddled so hard, and overall the tone and feel is nicely brought over - maybe Dream is more concentrated in this zone? But the second issue begisn to give full access into the Sewers 'Neath Zyan, which (to my mind) is maybe the most chock full of potential yet of these.

I dimly recall, as if through secondhand opium smoke, that the city of Bastion from "Into the Odd" had a great sewer beneath it that was ripe for adventuring in and it was oft' played in and blogg'd about. Our own variant of the city had stretch that was so enormous that you could fly a rented dirigible-taxi through it in a action-packed chase. Zyan's Sewers as described in Through Ultan's Door #3 are full of danger, rotten things, hallucino- and entheogens, secret passageways and grottoes; all the usual things you might expect in a fantasy sewer. I've not ever partaken of opium  - well, codeine a couple of times during some rough illnesses a few years back - but TUD#3 gives me that same uneasy, cloud-headed feeling of cozy familiarity - languid? yes! fervid? yes, that too? Wan? most definitely.  Drifting in my tin trading-kayak down the sewer river, I espy a fat clutch of crab eggs and a handful of coins secreted to a pylon, there, and the grip on my gigging-quant grows slippery with sweat! What has been a lackluster venture marked with legal entanglements and an unrequited crush on a courtesan in the city above could now turn into a profitable expedition. But hark, what heaving mass of catfish-faced flesh approaches from beneath the foetid current!!??? And is that a barque of masked pirates coursing toward me yonder the next rapid?

Yeah, kind of like that. I mean, it's nice. There is a nicely-rendered character option/idea about a real-world protagonist drug-shifted into the imagined play-world, and I worry about the glamorization of heavy tragic drug use - I would probably not allow my kiddo to delve into TTRPGs with these zines, and of course I do not believe one ought to make light of real world problems like opiate addiction or sexually transmitted illnesses or narcissism-driven petty legal feuds that can only be won by the wealthiest party! But there is much to plunder from Zyan should you brave what is beyond Ultan's Door! Most of it would not even require combat

In my mind's eye, I have inserted Ultan's Door in a pawn shop in our local Tours-en-Pays (from Castle Xyntillan) and of course there is a spell-scroll somewhere that will allow entry into The Gardens of Ynn, and in one desolate corner of a dungeon, a wraith peers into a bottle that contains a dungeon that contains a labyrinth that contains a city that contains a spaceport, and above in the night sky there is a station wherein travel to any point in the galaxy is provided and that is how my brain works.

incidentally, Gus L has vaslty expanded one of the piratical encounters given only a few paragraphs in the secret-sewer portion of the first volume. When I say 'vastly', I mean Gus ably turns an entry about sewer pirates into a 40-odd page excursion with lore and factions and legal intricacies aplenty (Gus is a lawyer, hisself, if I recall rightly and so knows the tedia of it and also i think he's a pirate probably)

Also, weird and fun diseases, nuns, automata, lurid candies, startling monsters, interesting magic items and spells, and more sewage-coated fun than you can shake a punting-pole. There is much more than what i have merely hinted at in my impressions, here, and I've not yet scratched the surface on the second part of this issue (yes, two volumes in this issue, and a separate 40-page scenario, a handout of additional diseases, and a separate confectionary-based adventure-scenario-possibility)

So much for relatively little moneys! If you did not Kickstart the thing, then I urge you to hasten yourself and find Through Ultan's Door #3, and also 1 and 2. The whole crew of artists, layout persons, and editors (many people that have esteem for anyways!)  have done a bang-up job, and much cheaper than an opium problem, I imagine

After the Orange Emperor - And Some Reviews

 "Twilight of the Orange Emperor" was actually the name of a (very very brief) Google Plus campaign that I started when Trump announced his candidacy. At that time, I think we all thought it hilarious and a scam. And (let us breathe deep and recognize) it was a scam, but much more dangerous than we anticipated, let's agree or not I don't care. There's a problem with letting a toxic, self-interested narcissist run your space - it becomes about them, and about making money, and about them making money. Community be damned.

So, IIRC correctly, there was giant Ivana Trump Sorayama-style chrome-combiner robot, hideous mutant cyborg shocktroops, rebellious greaser mechanics, collectible canned sandwiches (don't laugh it's a real thing and god bless Jarrett C. who I miss dearly), and a thrilling hotrod car chase to grandma's house and we agreed it was a blast. And then it dawned on us, I think, that the guy was serious, and then G+ shuttered, and then... I don't know to be Frank, and let's be Frank shall we, Frank? My ninth chakra and mystic eye was closed, and peering easily into the Dreamlands became frightful and hideous, and sleep has been fitful.

I'm not saying a new day has dawned because Ewok orgies give way to brooding Fascism and bigger death stars, yeah? But when the Evil is vanquished a bit, it's time to get back to work. That's what all those movies I watched as a kid have told me.

Americana. I feel like the genre of Americana-gaming is ripe for an even bigger4 explosion at the moment - you just watch. Now Trump is gone and other (ahem) toxic personalities have subsided we will be able to fulfill our Manifest Destiny of RPGing - we turned away from L Frank Baum and the promise of Oz to focus on dreary Pseudo-Tolkienisms for the past, oh, I don't know. 60 years? Casually discarding a jillion capable American (particularly American women) scifi/fantasy authors to focus on the post-WW2 histrionics of Tolkien was a disservice to us all. I think I bought a copy of a 5th edition DnD Americana-based thing that is really cranked up to 11 on the parody (lots of Trump and, uh, Clinton)

Speaking of Americana, I Kickstarted my esteemed associate Tim Deschene's zine from last year "One of Us". There's been a fun trickle of stuff in my Americana awareness of late. Erik Jensen's The Lumberlands zine came out in the same batch of Zinequest 2 and arrived in my box a few weeks ago and is pretty terrific. More on that, later, probably. I can recall the Morgenzursturm the Manticore thing from a couple of years ago, David Baity's old west setting, and Eric and Carl's Black Magic Black Powder DCC setting. Not to mention The Shudder Mountain/Chained Coffin thing that Goodman Games put out back a few years ago was terrific. Listen: give up on the elfs and the dwarfs and the dragons n such and embrace the Tin Man and the Scarecrow and etc etc etc. I'm gratified in that I have run in the circles of these folks and nibbled on the edges of the pizza, some. 

It's Tim and One of Us is pretty fun, but the zine is a bit of a taste teaser. It feels fairly dense for a couple of dozen 6:9 ratio pages... The art is terrific. Essentially ONE OF US hints at that Freaks movie from way way back, and indeed the setting is focused on a travelling circus full of servants of The Madame wandering around, doing her will. A nice set up for a campaign. There are 100 new 0-level funnel occupations (Dust Bowl inspired), two new Classes (Strong-person and 'Natural Wonder' or mutant), the patron write-up for The Madame (without the d3 themed spells that the DCC kids love these days and are IMHO tedious to write) and some very evocative monsters. I've accidentally and coincidentally been on a 3.5e Ravenloft kick lately so this all feels very ominous...

MOre later - sadly my head not entirely in RPGs these days (I'm on an electronics and music kick that distracts me)
 

Empire of the East: Received

I had forgot i backed the kickstarter for this. I received the hard copy this morning (sitting at the local snowbound post office!), and the cover art and contents are terrific.

Quick breakdown before I need to get to work: relatively brief compared to some settings for DCC although much more is implied than given. Which is great. The flipside of the coin is that I have no experience with Saberhagen (except I did read some of the Berzerker stuff) and I promptly would discard  all the NPCs, which must account for a good chunk of the book. Page counts are not important but a chapter of NPCs is meant for fans of the books, which I could be but am not, and even then I  

Things to steal explicitly: science/technology. If you don't want a sentient tank and artificial intelligence in your fantasy, then you and I ought not to be friends. The idea that physical combat effectively nullifies magic is delightful and would save a lot of hmm-ing and hmm-ing at the table. Psychic combat, maybe even simplified further than what is presented (I tend to discard the DCC spellduel since it's infamously clunky - there's a blogpost on here from way back that has some proposed rule changes). Class limitations might feel restrictive to players, but makes sense to me sometimes. Gifting of spells - Wizards temporarily loaning another PC the use of a spell is a delightful idea and blows a whole world of cool opportunity wide open. The patrons Ardneh and Orcus. I read the PDF that came to backers pretty fully and totally skipped over the NPCs. I guess my DCC already IS Empire of the East except for some details - technology and aliens and AI more rampant in Thrend than what is represented in this fine book, but of the same cloth if you get my drift. Less tolkien and more asimov. 

The magic items are fun leftovers from the end of the techonological era of long ago... like all magic items they ought to be mysterious, powerful, and unpredictable (or else so haywire that they are dangerous to use)

More later, but i'd buy it probably just for the Ian Miller cover art! My group has sadly moved on from DCC since I don't run the majority of games, these days, but I may convince them to return so I can do some Ynn/Amberville/Xyntillian. The spectre of the Orange Emperor no longer clouds my judgement with the long shadows of fear and so I may rise again to wizardly prominence when these piteous fools drop their guard! Muwahahahah!

Anyways, more later (I forgot to post my One of Us review, also). Peace and Plenty be upon you, zero-level henchpeople!