Tuesday, January 9, 2018

NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLEATLY DIFFIDENT

(started sometime around Christmas 2017) 

+Dunkey Halton's I Do Not Remember That Move blog - suggestive rather than explicit. There's a dungeon generator in there that I love

(note, it's this: http://henrycjc.com/rememberdismove/dungeon2.cgi?rooms=10 in which the number at the end is the number of 'rooms' or areas you wish to generate - don't expect it to fully make sense, but DO expect it to brighten up some lobes in your brain for a second or 10)

Dungeon Generators and nonsensical procedural generation as a positive rather than a negative

The appeal of novelty, unexpected incongruence, and exploration.

MASHUPS and recombination

Spelling variations stolen from german words : The umlaut.  Like, what if a Dragon ist really ein DragU:n with an umlaut, there where the 'u' is? Like a Dragon with a GUN for the head or tail or legs? Eh?

the AE character (i always like that character and it makes me happy to use it in texts, especially with IM Fell font and OpenType features)

(1/9/18 it's good to return to these notes on an irregular basis so that I can renew those neuronal linkages. these ideas have merit, still, but I am not yet returned to the frame of mind necessary to compleat them!)

I wonder what your most recent blog post dungeon bullshit power trip would sound like if you translated it to German or Dutch or Romanian and then back again?

Eh?

Why do I ask? I dunno. Give a try you lout!


Monday, December 11, 2017

PRODUCT REVIEW: TRANSYLVANIAN ADVENTURES

I was excited to see this when it came out, and I remain excited (some years later) at the prospect of it still coming out.

It nicely ties a simple, flexible system in Dungeon Crawl Classics to some relatively light-hearted Hammer Horror flavored PC options, with a juicy pulpy feel in case you were interested in heroics and Ravenloft-oriented play for your group of DCC gamers

The book is a few fundamental alterations to the DCC Luck and death system, a very very complex PC background system, a good handful of character classes, and some hints at greatness. I wish that the author had followed through with hinted plans to expand it into monsters and setting suggestions, and there is a strong hint that the magic system (sadly hanging still in Limbo) would be pretty meaty and different than what we got in the core DCC book. I devoured the whole thing and went to bed pretty late/early with my eyes bleeding profusely and the names of some ancient evils on my lips.

I would purchase this again - I think I left a review on the day it was published to the effect of some layout issues and typos, and its leanness in terms of setting, magic, and monsters were the things that I found wanting.

I still find them wanting, but it did provide me and us (a loose cadre of crack monster-hunters and treasure-oriented scoundrels) with 20 or 30 hours of great fun, so it was money well-spent, I think. It seems to me that it opened up the DCC field for genre-bending in a way that is proving fruitful even today with the release of lots of 3rd party stuff like Black Powder Black Magic and the Neon City stuff.


Buy 'The Hounds' - Click Here