Kudos all around

Stuart, one of the players in my D&D game, is now a published, paid freelancer type. Way to go, Stuart! He has an article in the June issue of Silven Trumpeter, the PDF house organ from Silven Publishing. I don't know much about these Silven guys, though I am enchanted by the title of their product 50 New Ways to Blow Things Up and the sequel 50 New Ways to Turn Things into Other Things.

Martin Ralya's Treasure Tables blog turns one year old today. Happy Birfday, TT! If you're a GM and haven't checked out Martin's blog before, I heartily recommend it. It's chock full o' useful GMing advice. I suppose it isn't even proper to call TT a blog, since the site also includes some nifty forums and a GMing wiki. It was the Treasure Tables 2-parter on Wikis for GMs that gave me the tools necessary to start my own obsessive Traveller fan-wiki.

An Interesting Observation

Jon and I both run local D&D games, he has his awesomely weird World of Alidor and I have my all-fighting-all-the-time Wild Times campaign. Both of us use miniatures and a Chessex mat to take full advantage of all the fiddly bits in the 3.5 combat system, with its AoO's and 5-foot-steps and whatnot. But there's one big difference in our set-ups: I use a Battlemat (measuring 26 inches by 23 inches) and Jon uses a Megamat (34" x 48"). His mat pretty much covers the entire table and much of our other game periphenalia sits on top of it, but even so the actual playing field for our little plastic and metal dudes is much larger than the little almost-square sitting in the middle of my table. The size of our playing fields has a noticeable affect on combat. In his game spell and weapon ranges are much more critical and you need a lot more movement to close with an enemy. My game is far more forgiving on plateclad melee types. Admittedly, we both end up exacerbating the differences. I treat my mat as the battle screen on an old computer game; any movement off the mat counts as 'escaped' like we were playing a tabletop version of Ultima IV. Meanwhile Jon is perfectly willing to say things like "the enemies are approaching you from 200 feet from the map edge". You can get away with only carrying an axe in my game, but in Jon's game you best be carrying a bow if you don't want to miss out on a LOT of combat. I'm seriously considering a Barbarian/Scout for my next Alidor PC, partially for all the extra movement (an partially because I've been reading a lot of Howard lately). Meanwhile, in my campaign Pat's 'speedster' half-elf was wasted on my tiny tactical display.

I'm now seriously considering getting one of the larger Megamats and alternating between the two sizes from session to session, to try to balance out the relative advantages of light infantry/archers/artillery versus the tanks.

Pro wrasslin': trash culture at its best

One of the wrestlers who really got me hooked on Total Non-stop Action was "The Fallen Angel" Christopher Daniels. He's got this arrogant badass character that works as a heel or a face, real ring charisma, and some great moves. In his TNA appearances he wears these cool robes that make him look like he's about to swing a wavy-bladed dagger and invoke Set. Today I discovered that when he wrestles in Japan he dresses like this:
On this side of the Pacific he's the Anton LaVey of wrestling, but in the Land of the Rising Sun he is Curry Man! I love this sort of inexplicablility. Curry Man?!? WTF?

Have you noticed...

...that surfing the web makes you want to buy more stuff? Or is it just me? I've been in greater and lesser stages of eBay addiction for 7 years now, but I only end up there when some other site puts the bug in me. I certainly don't need more Traveller stuff, but I search eBay for more old Trav crap after nearly every lengthy visit to Citizens of the Imperium. Recently the Evil DM put me on the hunt again for fun comics blogs. How much time can I spend reading Dave's Long Box or Chris's Invincible Super-Blog before I break down and buy some comics? Not much longer, I think. Recently I've been reading some more astronomy/science/science fiction blogs and, lo and behold, I'm suddenly buying and reading sci-fi paperbacks again. And I can't visit a place like Bad Movies or The Ruthless Guide to 80's Action without feeling the urge to buy some DVDs. Am I the only one who gets this way? Some times I feel like my entire internet experience is one big commercial advertisement for my geekotronic lifestyle.

Strangely enough, one of the few sites that lacks this effect is Wizards.com. I used some freebies from Wizards now and again and I appreciate the articles, but never has Wizards' website ever talked me into buying a product of theirs. That's what the ENWorld forums are for.

All hail OSRIC

As my experience running and playing D&D grows, so grows my confidence that I can actually hack it running a game that runs to almost 1000 pages of core material (not to mention the near limitless supply of supplementary stuff available). At this stage I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm competent with the 3.5 rules, but I know enough that I can use 20+ years of accumulated low DM cunning to fake my way through it. So nowadays I don't pine for the fjords of retro play as much as I used to. It wouldn't take much searching through the older posts of this blog or my previous blogging effort to find endless words of mine wasted on whining about how the new game is hard and not the same and blah, blah, blah. I still have as high opinion of the old ways of the Rules Cyclopedia and Moldvay's Basic Rules. And I find myself continuing to buy Castles & Crusades books in a slow trickle. But I no longer yearn to flee the artifices of modern gaming civilization and return, like some Ludo-Luddite, to a nostalgic golden age of gaming that never existed.

Still, I would be remiss if I didn't tell all y'all about OSRIC. OSRIC stands for 'Old School Reference and Index Compilation'. The basic idea is to extract the rules information, the hard mechanical data, from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and release it as Open Content. I am not a lawyer but it looks as close to legit as any such project could get without Wizards' approval. For all the reasons outlined above I'm not exactly racing to hop on the OSRIC bandwagon, but I find the project exciting. A free version of AD&D would make re-recruiting old gamers much easier; no slinking through bookstores for used copies of the old books or chasing copies on eBay. And even better, we may see new modules for the old game. That would be pretty dang cool. Best of luck to the followers of OSRIC.

spacemen & pirates & barbarians

I was very pleased to be able to polish off Perry Rhodan #1: Mission Stardust over the weekend. The story didn't involve as much direct shotout/swordplay action as I prefer, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. I was surprised when Major Rhodan and his crew discovered human-like aliens from the Imperium. Could this be the inspiration for the first encounter between the Solomani and the Vilani in the Traveller setting? I found in my game room a copy of Conan the Buccaneer, one of the three Conan volumes I thought I was lacking. Conan the Warrior and Conan the Usurper are all that remains in completing my Ace paperback Conan collection. I think I'll re-read them all once I get through my current batch of paperback adventures. Today I started Black Vulmea's Vengeance, a pirate tale book also by Howard. Yar! Ol' REH must have really liked panthers, because as far as I can tell in every one of his stories at some point or another he compares the speed and dexterity of every single one of his heroes to panthers. In this book he pulls the panther ploy on page one! Could Panther Hunting be the Howard equivalent of Clench Racing?

As I was messing about in my game room I made a second discovery. I found a copy of To Duel With Dragons, the second module for Iron Heroes. I could've sworn that I had purchased the first such volume, Song of the Blade, but it looks like after I finished pawing through all the IH book at the Dragon's Table I ended up carrying the wrong book to the counter. No real harm done, I suppose, other than owning a 4th level module for a game when I had intended to buy the 1st level adventure. I fully intended to purchase both eventually.

Need more mooks

As I'm slogging through building baddies for my campaign I was once again reminded about how annoyed I am that the DMG doesn't have standard NPC charts for Warriors like they do for the PC classes. Has anyone out there put together a bunch of stat blocks for simple warriors? I could maybe see myself paying a buck or two for a collection of decent stat blocks. Hell, I can imagine a whole PDF product line like this. Call it Goons or Grunts or something. Each installement in the line would give you statblocks for Warriors levels 1-10, or even just 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, and 9th for a certain theme. I've used Warriors with levels in the teens, but I'm not sure if anyone else does that.

Examples:

Orcs with Falchions (like the 1st level guy in the MM)
Orcs with Double Axes
Orc Archers
Viking Raiders
Knights
Archers
Guards (you know, generic guys with spears or polearms)
Peasant Cannon Fodder (beat on some Commoners!)
Ninjas (using the Expert class)
Pirates (again using the Expert class)

Are such things available and I don't know where to look? Would anyone else pay a buck for ten or twenty statblocks full of mook? Setting aside for the moment the feasiblility of this concept as a commercial product, what if I did up some stat blocks and threw together a PDF. Would anyone download a freebie full of cheap orcs?