Strange Stones

Oh yeah! Now we’re talking!

Fri, 31 Aug 2018 23:26:31 -0500

Oh yeah! Now we’re talking!

Photo

Sun, 21 Jan 2018 09:30:32 -0600

anywhichwayatlas: New Map!

Tue, 24 Jan 2017 00:13:29 -0600

anywhichwayatlas:

New Map!

meanwhilebackinthedungeon: khazar-warrior

Thu, 22 Sep 2016 00:43:03 -0500

meanwhilebackinthedungeon:

khazar-warrior

70sscifiart: 1981 Joust poster art from the game’s actual...

Wed, 20 Apr 2016 23:11:54 -0500

70sscifiart:

1981 Joust poster art from the game’s actual designer, Python Anghelo

ein-bleistift-und-radiergummi: Lynd Ward illustrations for...

Thu, 12 Nov 2015 23:12:19 -0600

ein-bleistift-und-radiergummi:

Lynd Ward illustrations for Beowulf (Heritage Press, 1939; text is William Ellery Leonard’s 1923 verse translation)

Grendel

The East-dark falls
and I, shadow-walker, awake. I come
to this hated house, mead-hall of mylord-no-more.

With Blood-moon, tide-moon or none
I, pride-beast, across the moor,
in cold-quiet,
come.

I bring no rings for your glory, I was king and come
to kill history. Dream-cleaver, I reduce your ranks in red murder. Fang –tooth
For my father, became your perfect
enemy.

I have turned my tongue crystal, transformed
into your opposite philosophy.

You will worship the sun and winter-hunger.
Depleted every morning; your vacant bench
grows longer.

Your men fall like wheat, sword-arms weak. I speak
a storm of words, javelins and
revenge.

toomuchhorrorfiction: Zothique by Clark Ashton Smith Ballantine...

Thu, 12 Nov 2015 23:08:25 -0600

toomuchhorrorfiction:

Zothique by Clark Ashton Smith

Ballantine Books; Jun 1970

Smith born today, Jan 13, in 1893

sciencefictiongallery: Jack Gaughan, 1966.

Tue, 15 Sep 2015 18:25:05 -0500

sciencefictiongallery:

Jack Gaughan, 1966.

sciencefictiongallery: Jack Gaughan - Stormbringer, 1967.

Tue, 15 Sep 2015 18:24:33 -0500

sciencefictiongallery:

Jack Gaughan - Stormbringer, 1967.

meanwhilebackinthedungeon: the old well Nope. Nothing down...

Sun, 13 Sep 2015 01:01:50 -0500

meanwhilebackinthedungeon:

the old well

Nope. Nothing down there of interest.

Assorted covers from various editions of Tunnels & Trolls,...

Fri, 04 Sep 2015 22:56:01 -0500

Assorted covers from various editions of Tunnels & Trolls, including 4th edition, 5th edition, 7.5, and the new Deluxe T&T.

#RPGaDAY Favorite non-RPG thing to come out of RPGing:...

Mon, 31 Aug 2015 08:59:44 -0500

#RPGaDAY Favorite non-RPG thing to come out of RPGing: Friendships
Without a doubt, the best thing to come out of playing RPGs has been the friendships. I’m still close with guys I played with when I was a kid. A couple of them were even groomsmen in my wedding. I also owe RPGs credit for cementing the connection my wife and I have to our best “couple friends.” Basically, games of any sort are a form of socialization to me, and RPGs more so than most any other kind. So if you game with people, you get to know them. And if you have epic adventures with your group, those can become the foundation of friendships that last a lifetime. Even, sometimes, if you stop gaming with them due to moves or “real life” or whatever.

Oh, and no. I am not a brony. I just thought it would be funny to use that logo for this post.

#RPGaDAY Favorite RPG playing celebrity: Um, No If we mean...

Sun, 30 Aug 2015 09:59:40 -0500

#RPGaDAY Favorite RPG playing celebrity: Um, No
If we mean celebrities who happen to be RPG players, I don’t care. Not one tiny little bit. If some dude who used to play an annoying ensign on TV or some other dude who’s in action movies play D&D, that’s cool. But I don’t care.

If we’re talking about RPG players who have somehow become celebrities, I care even less. So your stand on something RPG related is controversial or otherwise considered noteworthy by people? Good for you. But I don’t care.

Again, nothing against any of these folks. It’s just not a thing to me.

#RPGaDAY Favorite RPG website/blog: Google Plus When it comes to...

Sat, 29 Aug 2015 09:39:33 -0500

#RPGaDAY Favorite RPG website/blog: Google Plus
When it comes to online RPG discussions I like Google Plus. And as they continue to monkey with it, stripping it down and such, I worry that it’ll die the slow death that Google foists on its products sometimes. Fingers crossed that doesn’t happen, though.

There’s a rich, varied, and interesting group of gamers active on G+. And the communities feature makes it even easier to ingest only the stuff related to games you care about. So if you’re not on G+, consider hopping on. Let’s just hope it’s still there later on.

#RPGaDAY Favorite game you no longer play: Hero System &...

Fri, 28 Aug 2015 09:10:36 -0500

#RPGaDAY Favorite game you no longer play: Hero System & TFT
Man, the fun I had with both The Fantasy Trip and the 4th edition (and earlier) of the Hero System. TFT was my D&D, y'all. I mean, I started with Moldvay/Cook/Marsh B/X and I played some 1e AD&D, but TFT is the system I really cut my teeth on. Hence, most likely, my general preference for non-class systems. And the Hero System went even further in letting me build out my own worlds and ideas. And, of course, the character building options were quite appealing.

These days TFT and Hero are largely not part of my repertoire. TFT because, um, I don’t actually know. I guess the main GM for that system quit GMing it for his own reasons. And Hero because I just don’t have the time for building everything from scratch. And my tastes have lightened a bit. And, in both cases, I have come to embrace random character creation a lot more in my dotage. But the good memories are strong with both, and I’m sure I’ll dust one or the other off at some point.

#RPGaDAY Favorite idea for merging two games into one: DCC...

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 09:29:17 -0500

#RPGaDAY Favorite idea for merging two games into one: DCC Insanity Into BRP Rationality
Since I like the d100 system of BRP so much more than any d20+mods system, I’ve occasionally pondered pulling the nifty stuff from Dungeon Crawl Classics into Basic Roleplaying. I think you could have BRP’s non-class based goodnesswith all of the funky class stuff without too much trouble. And if need be, the class-esque approach from BRP Classic Fantasy could probably serve as a guide.

Example: Mighty Deeds. They’re probably my favorite part of DCC. How to implement them in BRP? Easy! Take the existing BRP skill Martial Arts as a starting point (check out how BRP CF does this for the classic Thief backstab skill). Simply have Mighty Deed as a skill, start it at 33% or so if it’s tied to “warriors” specifically, or whatever you want. Now when a character rolls to hit she’s rolling against the regular combat skill and Mighty Deed skill simultaneously. If she rolls under both, she hits and scores the mighty deed. If she hits but doesn’t roll under Mighty Deed, she hits but doesn’t pull off the deed. Just like if you roll a hit but not a deed on the Deed Die in DCC. Done and done.

But what about spell casting, and corruption, and all of that? Well, I haven’t spent much time thinking on it, but it seems like it ought to be some fairly simple math and charting. That whole “each d20 result has a 5% chance of coming up” thing ought to be a nice guide. Maybe I’ll actually get to this at some point. Until then, it’s my favorite idea for merging two games into one.

#RPGaDAY Favorite inspiration for your game: Music Music,...

Wed, 26 Aug 2015 09:19:24 -0500

#RPGaDAY Favorite inspiration for your game: Music
Music, particularly rock & roll, is deeply tied to my RPG experience. I didn’t really listen to rock when I was a young kid (my folks were big into classical and jazz), but not long after I started playing RPGs I got into rock thanks to some of the other folks I was playing with. I wound up buying my first album, the Heavy Metal soundtrack specifically because I’d heard some tracks from it during a game.

My first foray into “game design” was, in fact, a game called Heavy Metal and it was heavily influenced by the tunes on the soundtrack - especially Blue Oyster Cult’s Vertan of the Psychic Wars. Little did I know I was inadvertently channeling one Michael Moorcock, who cowrote the lyrics to that song.

Cut to 30-odd years later. I’m a bassist in a gigging band with an album out. I listen to music constantly. And that music seeps into my gaming pretty fiercely. Whether I’m throwing on vintage Sabbath or modern music with a similar feel (hello, The Sword) as the background music for games, or listening to music of any ol’ type while I’m working on an adventure, music inspires my gaming. And occasionally my gaming inspires my music. But that’s a different story for a different time.

#RPGaDAY Favorite Revolutionary Game Mechanic: Wild DiceMy...

Tue, 25 Aug 2015 09:09:29 -0500

#RPGaDAY Favorite Revolutionary Game Mechanic: Wild Dice
My favorite revolutionary game mechanic is the Wild Die concept. Courtesy of the Chaosium design team, and introduced in West End Games Ghostbusters RPG, the Wild Die is a d6 that “explodes” when it rolls a 6. That is, if you roll a 6 you keep that value, roll that die again and add its new roll to your total. And you keep on going as long as you’re rolling sixes. Epically crazy high totals are possible, which is fun in the right genre.

Over the years the Wild Die has had other bits added to it, such as being a very bad thing if you roll a 1. But I don’t much care for bad things happening 1/6 of the time, so I’ve never really embraced that part. The Wild Die concept has been used countless times since Ghostbusters, and my favorite implementation of that is the Doubles Add, Roll Over (DARO) version that crops up in Tunnels & Trolls, for that game’s very open Saving Throw approach.

#RPGaDAY Favorite House Rule: Expanded Skill Points, TFT I...

Mon, 24 Aug 2015 11:48:07 -0500

#RPGaDAY Favorite House Rule: Expanded Skill Points, TFT
I don’t really think of myself as a big “rules as written” kind of guy, but in considering this question I’ve discovered that I don’t have too many house rules that I follow. Or perhaps I have many but they’re so ingrained after all these years I can’t really mentally separate them from the actual rules. After a little introspection, I finally remembered one that is definitely a house rule. And even though it’s for a game I very seldom play anymore, I’ll go ahead and call it my favorite…

Long ago, before there was an internet to answer these kinds of questions on my group played Metagaming’s The Fantasy Trip (TFT) a lot. An awful lot. Outside of some Classic Traveller and my occasional victory in getting folks to play Hero System games, TFT was the game at our table. One of the things that got house ruled early on was expanding the pool of points characters had for acquiring skills. By the rules you got skill points equal to your IQ stat, which for a starting character was usually not more than 12 at best. With skills like “Thief” and “Sword” costing 2 points each, and more advanced things like “Alertness” and “Two Weapons” costing 3, the types of characters we wanted to play were rather hard to put together.

So a decision was made to allow characters skill points equal to their IQ stat plus the average (rounded up) of their ST and DX. On average this gave a starting character a good 5-8 more points, which was really all we needed to make strong but not overpowered characters. That right there is enough to make this my favorite house rule.

#RPGaDAY Perfect game for you: Basic Roleplaying I haven’t...

Sun, 23 Aug 2015 10:28:46 -0500

#RPGaDAY Perfect game for you: Basic Roleplaying
I haven’t really played enough BRP to answer thusly, but somehow I know it in my heart that BRP is “my game.” I think this is because despite not having ever really played RuneQuest, and only playing Call of Cthulhu recently, when I was a wee gaming lad I had a copy of the original BRP pamphlet and its deep simplicity and simple depth cast a subtle spell on my imagination that has held tightly for 30-ish years.

I love generic toolkit systems where I can learn to play and then go exploring. And percentages for task resolution just make sense. And percentages that aren’t obscured by odd dice mechanics are even lovelier. But that 3-18 attribute spread I first learned to RPG with is still there. And so are the funny-shaped dice. It’s everything I really want in a game.

So yeah. Viva BRP! Here’s hoping the “new” Chaosium don’t have to abandon it just to survive. Something new and delicious a la Worlds of Wonder would be grand…