Looks like I lost a couple posts in the Great Blogger Catastrophy of 2011 – hopefully they’ll come back. I’ll post a Deviant Friday in a while – in the meantime, you can watch Rowena Aitken drawing a “beyonder” for Hex Crawl Classics #3 – Beyond the Black Water. Just CLICK HERE.
I was checking out my audience today, and came across a visitor from Iran.
I’ve never seen Iran show up there, so it really stood out to me. That either means there is somebody in that nation that plays RPGs and came looking for the Land of Nod, or that they got here accidentally. Perusing my traffic sources, all the search terms were blog related, and the google images people had found me with were RPG-ish, so I’m going to hope that there’s some cool RPG scene in Iran that I know nothing about – but would love to learn more about. If you’re an RPG’r from Iran and you’ve visited this blog, drop me a line or leave a comment.
That’s it for now. Megacrawl update coming later.
… maybe they step into this.
Roll – Destination
1 – Alien city (see above) during an important ritual. There is a 50% chance the visitors are welcomed as emissaries from the gods and imprisoned in a palace of alien pleasures (if only the PCs could digest the alien food) and a 50% chance they are treated as intruders and put to death by a thousand searing rays.
2 – Step into a cellar at the moment Aleister Crowley is summoning a demon; Crowley must pass a system shock test or suffer a heart attack. His patrons may not take kindly to the intrusion.
3 – Pass through an atomic feedback flux loop onto the starship Warden. Everyone must pass a saving throw (vs. poison) or suffer a mutation.
4 – Find themselves in a cluttered wardrobe that leads into wartime England. They are welcomed by a man in a natty suit (Merlin) and pressed into a mission to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
5 – Walk into the lowest level of Castle Greyhawk with no memories (though spellcasters retain their memorized or prepared spells) of how they got there.
6 – Step into a massive submerged cavern and the grand council of dolphins. A dolphin mage will work fast to summon up airy water.
7 – Awaken in a brilliant woodland on Midsummer Night; cavort with fey both good and evil.
8 – Find themselves on a barren world as the representatives of Law in a gladiatorial combat with their opposites from another universe as the representatives of Chaos.
9 – Enter a padded cell of Bedlam asylum, where they must save a mad woman from the machinations of Fraz-urb’luu, for she alone can open the portal back to their world.
10 – Step onto a solar barque making its way across the skies of a mythic earth, moments before it passes into Hades.
—
Image (top) from Golden Age Comic Book Stories.
To be precise China, Korea and Japan. What’s the weirdest factoid about these geographies or cultures that you would like to see represented in Mu-Pan? I’m looking for the obscure here – something I probably haven’t already stumbled upon myself.
Submitters of my favorite three get a free PDF of NOD 8 and credit in the text.
—
Image from Alcatena’s blog.
Seriously, if there was one artist I could impress into lifelong service on illustrating the Land of Nod, it’s him. Astounding creativity and attention to cultural quirks and details, all blended seamlessly into a unified style. Love it. I’ll stop raving now.
Here’s a nice piece of prose by George MacDonald from his story The Princess and the Curdie.
“All this outside the mountain! But the inside, who shall tell what lies there? Caverns of awfullest solitude, their walls miles thick, sparkling with ores of gold or silver, copper or iron, tin or mercury, studded perhaps with precious stones – perhaps a brook, with eyeless fish in it, running, running ceaselessly, cold and babbling, through banks crusted with carbuncles and golden topazes, or over a gravel of which some of the stones arc rubies and emeralds, perhaps diamonds and sapphires – who can tell? – and whoever can’t tell is free to think – all waiting to flash, waiting for millions of ages – ever since the earth flew off from the sun, a great blot of fire, and began to cool.
Then there are caverns full of water, numbingly cold, fiercely hot – hotter than any boiling water. From some of these the water cannot get out, and from others it runs in channels as the blood in the body: little veins bring it down from the ice above into the great caverns of the mountain’s heart, whence the arteries let it out again, gushing in pipes and clefts and ducts of all shapes and kinds, through and through its bulk, until it springs newborn to the light, and rushes down the Mountainside in torrents, and down the valleys in rivers – down, down, rejoicing, to the mighty lungs of the world, that is the sea, where it is tossed in storms and cyclones, heaved up in billows, twisted in waterspouts, dashed to mist upon rocks, beaten by millions of tails, and breathed by millions of gills, whence at last, melted into vapour by the sun, it is lifted up pure into the air, and borne by the servant winds back to the mountaintops and the snow, the solid ice, and the molten stream.”
—
Image by Charles Folkard via Golden Age Comic Book Stories.
Over the past three days, I’ve been listening to recordings of Francois Truffault’s interviews with Alfred Hitchcock. I read the book based on those interviews a decade ago in college, but it has been enjoyable revisiting them.
Hitchcock, at one point, discusses the concept of suspense in film. He stresses that it is important for the audience to be aware that a momentous or terrible event is going to occur and when it is going to occur, and, of course, for the characters to be unaware. Simply blowing up a bus generates surprise, which fades fairly quickly for the audience. Letting the audience know the bus is going to explode – and that the people on that bus have no idea they’re about to die or be injured – creates a suspenseful situation that can last for several minutes.
In role-playing games, the players are both the audience and the characters. I think Referees mostly use surprise – “Black Dougal gasps ‘Poison!’ and falls to the floor” – with a bit of mystery thrown in by some of the old stand-bys – will the statue come to life and attack? does the lock contain a spring-loaded poison needle? etc.
My question is: Has anyone ever used suspense as Hitchcock defined it? For example, letting the player’s know that in 5 rounds the ceiling is going to collapse, but reminding them that their characters are unaware of this and must proceed with their fight against a gang of hobgoblins. I’d be interested to know how such a situation worked out.
This is so D&D it hurts …
Something to think about, the next time you’re designing a mythic underworld.
Some illustrations by Frank J. Paul (I think) for Amazing Stories via Golden Age Comic Book Stories. Head to the link to see them large size.
These would make a great foundation for a pulp sci-fi game.
Also – Where does Lucas get all of his great ideas?
Land of Nod 