Happy Anniversary to Nod

March 28, 2021 / jstater / 2 Comments

We have had a beautiful weekend here in Las Vegas. Perfect temperatures, sunny skies, singing birds – the works! We usually get a few weeks of this in Vegas until the Summer heat hits us full force.

Besides being a beautiful weekend, this weekend also marks – more or less – the 11th anniversary of the Land of Nod blog. Eleven years! I certainly didn’t forsee that when I started, and I guess I’ll have to aim at 20 years as the next milestone.

I’ve had a bunch of “looking back” going on over the last week, as I was recently going through some boxes from my dad’s garage that contain some artifacts of my past. I’ll share some of those soon enough. In the meantime, here are a few milestones of the blog, in case anyone is interested:

THE FIRST POST

The first post was actually made on the original Blogger blog, but it has been preserved here as well. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. If you go to that first post and start reading, you’ll find my initial forays into setting up the Nod campaign setting within the Swords & Wizardry rules, my decision to try collecting the blog posts into a downloadable magazine, and on to creating Pars Fortuna, Space Princess, Mystery Men! and so on.

THE FIRST BIG NUMBERS

So, what post got me my largest audience ever? I wish it was something insightful or creative that I wrote, but alas, it was not. You can find the post HERE. I’ll take it over recent fare in that series any day.

THE FIRST BIG DRAW

If that post got me lots of views, THIS POST used to be the champion for bringing people in from search engines. I used to do a weekly post showing off art from artists on DeviantArt – it was first called the Deviant Friday Five, and then just Deviant Friday. I’ve cleaned up many of those old posts to remove missing art, or in some cases removing posts when the artist is no longer on DeviantArt. Mahmud Asrar’s depiction of Dejah Thoris was a hit, so I always made sure to include a Dejah Thoris if an artist had done one. I’ll note that the images no longer come up properly in the post, but if you click on where they should be, they still link to the images at DeviantArt.

THE CURRENT FAVES

The two current favorite posts at the site are The World of Star Command, which I think got a link at Reddit, and an old favorite The Mother of All Size Charts.

And that’s it for the Land of Nod’s 11th birthday. I should have NOD 36 up for sale by the end of the day, and work continues on more goodies and more posts.

Have fun folks, enjoy your day, and please be kind to one another.

Weather Made Easy

March 20, 2021March 25, 2021 / jstater

If you’re running a wilderness campaign, you know that at some point you have to think about the weather. Weather can create interesting challenges for a party of explorers, or even just lend to the mood of a session. Referees can always just arbitrarily determine the weather based on their needs, but for long treks across the wilderness seem to call for randomized weather.

I’ve tried a few different schemes for randomly determining weather in my years of writing hexcrawls, but for the last couple of years have used a system that I think is relatively easy, and provides something usable, rather than trivial.

In each of my later hexcrawls, I begin my section on regional weather with this:

“You can use the following tables to determine the overall weather conditions during a hex crawl. The table is divided into the four seasons. Temperature is determined by rolling 1d6 and comparing the roll to the chances of temperature being freezing (below 30°), cold (31-60°), mild (61-85°), warm (86-95°) or hot (96° or higher). Freezing, cold and hot temperatures might require the adventurers to take steps to avoid negative consequences. Precipitation is a percentage chance. If the temperature is below freezing, the precipitation is snow (10% chance of hail). The TK can decide how much rain or snow falls during the day and its duration based on how much she wishes the weather to hinder the players.”

This is followed by a table like this:

Western Wood

	Winter	Spring	Summer	Fall
Freeze	1-2	1	–	1
Cold	3-5	2	1	2
Mild	6	3-5	2-3	3-5
Warm	–	6	4-5	6
Hot	–	–	6	–
Rain	55%	45%	45%	40%

The table provides a bare-bones account of the weather on any given day, which the TK can flesh out as much or as little as he likes.

The upper portion determines the general range of temperature based on the season, rolled on D6, while the last line is the percent chance of precipitation that day rolled on D%. If the weather is freezing, any precipitation that comes up is snow or maybe hail. Otherwise, precipitation is rain. How much rain? That’s up to the TK. If the TK wants the rain/snow to be a real problem for the PC’s, then it is heavy. Otherwise, it’s a moderate or light rain that provides mood and interest, without becoming a major pain in the butt.

Making the Tables

To make the tables, I could just make up the numbers willy-nilly. There’s nothing wrong with that approach, but I usually like to keep things more realistic. To that end, I choose a city in an environment like the one I’m simulating, and look it up on Wikipedia.

If I’m lucky, the Wikipedia page has a table like this one for Rio de Janeiro:

To figure out the percent chance of precipitation, I just take the total of the average days of rain for the three months that make up a “season”, such as December, January and February for Summer (I almost wrote “winter” until I remembered I was working south of the equator), and divide by 90. In this example, Rio would have a 32% chance of rain during the summer season.

I then take the average high, daily mean and average low for each of those three months, and rate it using the scale mentioned above and repeated here: Freezing (below 30°), cold (31-60°), mild (61-85°), warm (86-95°) or hot (96° or higher).

That gives me 9 temperature readings for each season – I use those to determine the chance on a D6 of a day falling into one of those temperature ratings. Using Rio in the summer again, we get the following temperature ratings:

	DEC	JAN	FEB
Average High	Mild	Warm	Warm
Mean	Mild	Mild	Mild
Average Low	Mild	Mild	Mild

So, we have 7 milds and 2 warms. Seven divided by nine is 78%. Multiply that by 6 (i.e. D6) and you get 5. That means a 5 in 6 chance of mild weather. We don’t need to do the calculation for warm, in this case – it would be 1 in 6, but if we had more temperature ranges, we would use the same procedue for each. Naturally, the Referee can intervene a bit in these figures. Because Rio can get quite hot in the summer, I decide to go 1-4 = mild, 5 = warm and 6 = hot.

You do this same process for the other seasons, and you end up with a table like this:

Rio de Janeiro

	Winter	Spring	Summer	Fall
Freeze	–	–	–	–
Cold	–	–	–	–
Mild	1-6	1-5	1-4	1-5
Warm	–	6	5	6
Hot	–	–	6	–
Rain	17%	29%	32%	26%

So, if I’m running some adventurer in the region around Rio during the summer – maybe they’re searching for some ancient ruins or a satellite that crashed in the region – I roll 1d6 and d%, On the d6, I get a “6”, meaning it’s a hot day. On the % I get a 53, meaning no rain – just humidity.

Stunt Spectaculars

March 14, 2021March 25, 2021 / jstater

Wow, have I been busy the last couple weeks, at work and home – so I apologize for a lack of posting. Before I get to the meat of the post, a couple quick notes:

1. I jumped on MeWe about a month ago, and it hasn’t pissed me off yet, so you can find me over there if you look.

2. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the last week cleaning up and organizing this blog. I’ve worked on the categories and tags to make finding things easier, cleaned up some blog post titles, etc.

It’s a wonderful thing exploring the cinematic past. I think it is safe to say that, for most of us, there are far more movies that have been made that we haven’t heard of than we have heard of. More importantly, some of your favorite movies are ones you have never heard of. Not everything in the past was a gem, of course, but there are some goodies hiding out there.

Two movies I’ve seen in the past couple months qualify for me as “recent unknowns” that I ultimately enjoyed. Both of them are stunt heavy, and call to mind the days when non-CGI stunts dominated action movies. The crazy stunts started early in Hollywood, though they were far more often the purview of comedies than action films. One can draw a straight line from Buster Keaton’s astounding stunt-filled comedies of the 20’s and 30’s to Jackie Chan’s astounding stunt-filled comedies of the 80’s and 90’s (and beyond).

The Stunt Man (1980)

The Stunt Man is the story of a fugitive (Steve Railsback) who becomes a stunt man to escape the authorities. He becomes involved in a love triangle – well, sorta – involving the director he works with (Peter O’Toole) and his protege actress (Barbara Hershey, pre-lip expansion). The stunts are amazing, but the movie is really about the domineering director and the mystery of the man’s fugitive past. They do a good job of making you nervous about who this stunt man really is … aided considerably by the fact that Railsback had previously played Charlie Manson. His face is enough to make you think something terrible is lurking beneath the surface. No spoilers here – you’ll have to watch it to find out how it comes out.

The Junkman (1982)

This is a weird little movie that is extremely stunt heavy. It took H. B. Halicki two years to get it made, but boy did he get it made. There is a mega-car chase with explosions that is worth the ticket of admission. The Junkman is part of a trilogy with Gone in 60 Seconds and Deadline Auto Theft, two other b-movies worth watching if you dig car movies. The Junkman is not as complex as character study as The Stunt Man, and does not have the heavy hitter status of a Peter O’Toole, but it’s still a fun flick for a lazy Saturday or Sunday afternoon.