It all comes down to this - Mordheim with pals

My buddy Gene made a big-ass, beautiful Mordheim table and pronounced a month-long campaign!

So I figure my hobby life, modest skill-building, and acquisition of tools and material goods and social connections have probably led up to this moment in a sense. My heart is glad and I will post pictures from tonight's last Thursday's game with a secret guest-star from the G+ days!

editore's noatationes: The secret guest star was Eric Hoffman of HoffCon over from Black Powder/Black Magic and other ttrpg ventures from DCC! but I posted the pics to FB/instagram. I had not seen him since 2018!

The night was full of foolhardiness and in one game I made so many armor saves I lost count. Krazy Karl the champion dove at a witchhunter's wardog from 2 stories up but garnered an Old Battle Wound, instead. The dog went on to badly maul the Youngblood Hanzy - who sadly got Multiple Injuries - leading to Survives Against The Odds and Hand Injury, so Hanzy is now the crossbowman trading off his spear to Friedrich. The rest of the team did about as well as could be expected, with lots of armor saves against witchhunter fire and ire. What started out as a chance to shoot the head witchhunter and his dogs like fish in a barrel turned hilariously awkward as they happened to be hiding in the very hilltop mortuary acropolis from which my team was shooting! So took my two casualties and bugged out, as his dogs woulda chewed through my archers pretty darn quick.

Afterward, we found an old trinket Shop in the ruins and a Lucky Charm but nothing else inside (still a nice roll of a '6'!). Used the money from the sale of wyrdstone to purchase Holy/Blessed Water and 10 Garlic, since I anticipate running into Undead or Chaos (although there are plenty of Sisters, Witchhunters, and other Mercs around).

Dungeon Hobby as Work vs Play

Firstly, never give feet pics for free. Is what I'm told.

But if you're just a hobbyist, like me, and you haven't incorporated the "hustle and grind" mindset which permeates everything in the US these days, give everything else away for free. Fight and resist capitalism. Don't let the shareholders drive policy or artistic decisions. The teachers and bosses and censors are explicitly out of the playroom. The simple joy of sharing fun ideas, of receiving feedback and enthusiasm, this is what will sustain our hobby in the long run. I see a couple of things that make me nervous - aside from the rising geopolitical tensions we all feel! - the first being the OGL-nonsense that WoTC is pulling, which is so hilariously sinister it's like comic-book villainy,

and the second is this #dungeon23 thing.

Listen, man, it's your old Uncle Noah Lebowski, resident beatnik and Maynard Krebs/Norville "Shaggy" Rogers clone. Don't let The Man get into your play time. Resist that urge to turn everything into a struggle for improvement, to turn your play into self-development, as if you're not perfect the way you are. You are not missing out if you don't choose to participate.

I'm all behind conscientious and mindful practice, but let's recognize that doing this sort of thing is what drives a lot of people OUT of art, of music, of writing, of poetry. Doing a thing that ought to be joyous when you're not at ease and relaxed and interested will drive the happiness out of it. I think McCoy, in his original post, was sort of signaling a little strangely about shipping things out the door, about a subtle thread of commodification. I can't tell you how dismaying it was for me to see the collapse of Google Plus into whatever it became at the end - a monetization platform where Kickstarter links got shared and shelfies were the mark of your engagement in the hobby. What did you just buy? I don't give a fuck. What did you think about it? THATS what I want, that sweet, sweet brain juice so that I can steal it and stick it in my brain juice and we can drink of each other's sweet sweet brain punch.

So, take part in Dungeon23, and Crom Bless You. Listen to the Lamentations of Their Women. That's great. Don't do it as an obligation, PLEASE, do it as play and exploration and share your cool ideas. Keep in mind that your hobby ought to be a surcease from toil, not a reason to grind yourself down or improve yourself. I am still coming to grips with this - American culture is always going to tell you that you are not as good as you could be and that you'd be happier if you only worked harder. As a therapist, I do not argue with mindful practice, but I DO argue with motivations and the unhealthy patterns of thinking that drive some of these things.

I have to think about #dungeon23 more clearly but as a parent, a self-employed professional, and a person who does about 20 different things to ease the existential pain of life on Earth, i've already got about a million half-done projects and I'm leery of taking on more and would never do so to keep up with the joneses. Would my participation in the TTRPG hobby community be of higher quality if only I kept at it every day? I'm dubious - I do it when the mood strikes me and I'm inspired and want to share. It's play for me and when it feels like work, I haul ass.

Mars and Bellona keep you, and don't trust anyone over 30

Pseudorandom vs. AI-Generated Dungeons?

SURELY A LAWFUL EVIL PROBLEM

So if you look back through the mass of my posts, you will notice many many many times that I advocate for mass pseudo-random generation of dungeons, or at least dungeon ideas, based on methods outlined by Moldvay and Gygax and others... I personally stole/appropriated a huge number of tables and charts and methods, and also made up a great deal of items in a huge list amounting to like 3000 lines of code. When I say "code", I mean a couple of decision-tree and number generation code but mostly adjectives and nouns and adverbs! So my most advanced, albeit rudimentary, method is orders of magnitude lamer than a slick AI adversarial network or million-iteration learning model. It's my brain and some tables I lifted from early-TSR books.

Why, a couple of months ago I even had a text-prompt generated artwork post. Yeesh. 

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around how this method - i.e. have the machine do the hard work and fill in the empty spots myself, and gussy it up some at the end - is any different, philosophically, from the GAN-network or GPT-Chatbot method that I am seeing go around. To be absolutely clear, my method doesn't cause me as much internal strife as letting an AI do the majority of the work, but I'm on the fence! Could I ever be expected to do ALL the work involved in generating a vast, demon-haunted underground death-complex?

The answer is probably a resounding NO. But like, maybe I wouldn't ever offer a thing an AI made for sale, it would be like cheating on my art final instead of submitting a shitty doodle, or having someone write me a good dissertation instead of a half-assed one like I would probably write.

Would I try, or play, a module that an AI generated? Yeah, sure, I guess. I have deep misgivings about it in a way that I do not have for purely-randomly generated ones, like donjon.sh and all those.

The machine gods exact a high price, I guess, and like Don't Raise Up What Ye Cannot Lay Back Down

Here are some links to other things you could find with a simple google search:

http://tenfootpole.org/forum/index.php?threads/making-a-module-using-chatgpt.386/

https://aidungeon.io/  - looks like a playable thing

https://medium.com/building-the-metaverse/creating-a-text-adventure-game-with-chatg-cffeff4d7cfd - this one seems to have also used the AI-generated art

https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/za8bmf/openais_gtpchat_knows_about_dd_and_can_even/ - alas, reddit

https://www.thegamer.com/dungeons-dragons-chatgpt-ai-dm/

Running D&D in 4K with 500 Mods

 You won't believe my frame rate! Haha - JK I'm messing with you. But am I, really?

So I remarked to a friend the other day that even though they are cooking up 6th edition D&D right this moment, I'm just now getting used to 5th edition and starting to see that it's not as lame as I first anticipated back in the Google Plus days. At that time, I lamented something like "I've got DCC, Labyrinth Lord, d20, AD&D, Moldvay/Cook, Call of Cthulhu... why would I need ANOTHER edition of D&D?" You must understand, I just had purchased the Codices for my imperial troops in Warhammer 40K and they dropped 7th, or maybe 8th, or maybe I missed one? Anyways, too many editions, amiright?

Fast forward to last week, I just beat Calamity Ganon in Breath of the Wild on my kid's Nintendo Switch. If I may say, so, I must say the way I did it was pretty epic - I bounced his own big-ass laser beam back at him with my Hylian shield and it was down to the wire, too. I think it was my third try. Breath of The Wild is pretty amazing not because of it's cartoony graphics, or its well-developed protagonist, or its novelty or anything. It's amazing because you can spend a day or two running around the tutorial part of the game (the Plateau) thinking "Damn this place is big!", solving puzzles, engaging in classic Legend of Zelda-style play and then once you get the tools you need to open up the rest of the gaming world it's like KABOOM. It's gigantic! A lot of it is, admittedly, sort of big and empty and just running around exploring and climbing and beating up mobs or getting your shit pushed in by the occasional super-mob sub-bosses. I've got like 25 hearts now, and still getting my ass handed to me by the lion-centaur guys.

She's happy BECAUSE she has a paraglider and a hi-def texture pack mod

It's great because of the paraglider, and because it's non-linear for the most part! When you see a vast open space before you, you can often climb up the nearest cliff or tower, look around with binoculars, spot something to check out and WHEEEEEEE paraglide over to it and check it out. You don't even necessarily have to do any of the side-quests or anything, you could kind of just gather ingredients and cook stuff and run around looking at stuff. There's even a whole section of the map that is entirely optional - one gets the sense that it was meant for bigger stuff that must have been edited out for time. The game even provides a down-hill shield-skiing mechanic for making your way downhill quickly but it wears out your shields - why would I do that when I've got this totally kicking paraglider?

Anyways, BotW has that wide-open, run around agape looking at stuff, beating up monsters and sometimes running away feeling that I like in D&D. I distinctly recall that after I'd finished Fallout 3 and the DLCs for it, I got a "no deaths from jumping" mod and spent my time climbing to the highest points of the game and jumping off of things - night-time, day-time, exploding bombs behind me. I think at one point I was actually trying to figure out how to import a hang-glider or low-gravity parachute model into the game but it's beyond my limited ken.

I suggest you leave airships, binoculars, cars, teleporters, pegasi, telephones, telegraphs, trains, giant-robots, starships, rockets, warpgates, portals, computers, networks, the whole shebang. Give the players reasons to explore and a fun time exploring and the rest of the game will practically play itself. I just got access to a playtest version of "Wasters" RPG testing doc which has a procedurally generated burned-out city and a system for populating it with factions and generating missions etc. and I think it'd be cool to drop into my local face-to-face game. We'll see.

Keep on paragliding and exploring. Seriously the Zelda folks need to do a Nausicaa game with air-to-air combat c'mon folks just money on the table right there

Crowquill and Lasrifle - Gobbos

My question, at base, is "What makes an oldhammer Ork or Goblin what it is?" Is it gangly legs? Ape-y arms? A sense of humor and style? Googly eyes and a tongue stuck out sideways? A poser for the ages, I guess.

Long ago, I had two Blogger blogs. One was this one, the other was "The Crowquill and Lasrifle" and it was about my bad painting and weird 40K lists of witch-hunters and zealots and power armor. I folded it into this blog a few years ago, because really who needs two separate hobby blogs? Not me, that's for sure. Like a fish needs a bicycle! Next thing you know I'll be droning on about my Dead Cells/Dark Souls problem, or woodworking, or synths, or any number of other ways I escape the awful reality of the downward spiral of capitalism in its death-throes. The present becomes the future and it's going to be grimdark, if you get my meaning.

The C&L is no longer extant, but I still plastic-minis hobby, for sure. I don't play enough (Frostgrave and Bloodbowl every few years at this rate).  I got it into my head some time ago to make a mostly-goblins and Oldhammer orcks list for 6th (maybe 4th?) edition Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Also, Undead (Vampire Counts flavored), but it's because I like painting skellingtons. So I slowly acquired via eBay a lot of little monopose plastic goblin archers, and scooped up discarded single orcs and nightgoblings, and especially fanatics and other weirdos. I prime things in the spring, and then I wait a couple of years to paint them, because I'm a professional and a dad and husband and who has time when I'm doing real life and like 15 different hobbies? In a fit of pique this weekend I sat down at the table and started base-coating a small army of goblins and nightgoblins from various eras of WFB. I kinda dig the late 80's to early 90's plastic ranges mostly because they are easy to put together and easy to paint, and the Citadel/Marauder lines because of the sculpts and the personality.

So, what do I got on the workbench? I was going to do an escalating "Border Princes" list that was flexible but depended upon acquiring more orcs and gobbos and capping it off with internecine struggles between the goblin shamans giving way to full leadership by a Black Ork and his Wyvern and underlings and man, these troops are hilariously undependable in small numbers (and I guess against elfs and dwarfs). Just on paper, I guess since I've not fielded any but I do have primed and mostly basecoated:

A Night Goblin shaman

A single River Troll

10 Night Goblin spears (modular kit which means big old heads which is terrific)

10 regular monopose Goblin spears - maybe for the Blood Pass set? I think they were the second edition filler troops from the boxed set?

5 fanatics of various stature and physiognomy, some plastic, some metal, one a conversion since his hands were missin'

47 (that's right, forty-seven) plastic monopose goblin archers - hilariously cheap and undependable in terms of the game, also (luckily) cheap in real life (like 80 cents a piece off of ebay). Sort of meditational to paint

I primed these all black with zenithal green to yellow to white highspot highlights - my intention was to thinly airbrush everything but my cheap airbrush is always in need of cleaning and maintenance, so I mostly use airbrush paints slathered on with a brush so it comes out real thin and patchy and you know what? I kinda like it. No-good, unreliable, cheap and good enough to pass the time. I will probably never field them and I don't often share finished minis unless I really like them, which is hardly ever. So, we'll see.

My plan is to get these done with some reikland flesh shade, or maybe reliable old floorpolish-and-black/green-ink and base them badly and crank out some movement trays. Then fill in the command gaps with resin-printed stuff, laser print or hand-paint some kooky orky/gobbo banners, and be done.

I've also got some goblin wolf-riders, an ork boar with rider legs (but no torso), a boar-chariot with crew, and some kitbashed squig-herds. That's about it. I have a secret dream to figure out the formula to get some marauder-proportioned orky and goblin weirdos into a posable format in Blender and crank out some custom resin troops in oldhammer style but this is cloud-talk at the moment (I could probably do it in an afternoon if I really put my mind to it but WORK! FAMILY! GUITAR! ugh). I could easily manage some Ork boss torsos for this boar and extend that to an oldhammer-inspired Wyvern rider - I just need time! time! give me time, precious

I did make a base pig-faced ork head .STL a while back just to make the unit-toffs/boyz have the appropriate lineage but I let that go by the wayside like all things I undertake. I tell you, generalization of hobbies is not the way to go. Better to be obsessive and focused.