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The Ur-Thief

/ jstater / 4 Comments
Image by Sidney Sime, found HERE

One of the fun things about exploring old D&D is the search for the origins of its many elements. Rangers are Aragorns, rust monsters came in a pack of Japanese dinosaur toys, etc. The thief has often been linked to the Leiber’s Grey Mouser and Vance’s Cugel, but I would propose a different Ur-Thief … Thangobrind the Jeweller.

I’ve been boning up on my Dunsany lately, to help me apply the finishing touches to Bloody Basic – Weird Fantasy Edition, and last night read through the “Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweller” in his Book of Wonder. I draw your attention to the following passages, which seem very thiefy to me:

HIDE IN SHADOWS

“O, but he loved shadows! Once the moon peeping out unexpectedly from a tempest had betrayed an ordinary jeweller; not so did it undo Thangobrind: the watchman only saw a crouching shape that snarled and laughed: “‘Tis but a hyena,” they said.”

MOVE SILENTLY

“Once in the city of Ag one of the guardians seized him, but Thangobrind was oiled and slipped from his hand; you scarcely heard his bare feet patter away.”

“At night they shoot by the sound of the strangers’ feet. O, Thangobrind, Thangobrind, was ever a jeweller like you! He dragged two stones behind him by long cords, and at these the archers shot.”

FIND TRAPS

“… but Thangobrind discerned the golden cord that climbed the wall from each [of the emeralds] and the weights that would topple upon him if he touched one …”

LISTEN AT DOORS

“Though when a soft pittering as of velvet feet arose behind him he refused to acknowledge that it might be what he feared …”

Okay, not at a door, but keen listening nonetheless.

OTHER SKILLS

“… – now like a botanist, scrutinising the ground; now like a dancer, leaping from crumbling edges.”

 

“Oh, he was cunning! When the priests stole out of the darkness to lap up the honey they were stretched senseless on the temple floor, for there was a drug in the honey that was offered to Hlo-Hlo.”

Which, of course, means the Thief needs to be reintroduced as a class in its own right into the Weird Fantasy edition, sending the vagabond back to the “subclass” category. This thief will likely have a couple different skills to bring to the table, though.

Getting Primitive

/ jstater / 7 Comments

I have a tendency to run with ideas. The current one is an Age of Heroes campaign outline for NOD, or maybe Bloody Basic … or maybe both. I’ve been reading The Horse, the Wheel and Language by David W. Anthony, and it got me thinking about a stone age/copper age setting from before the movement of Proto-Indo-Europeans into Europe and India. Now, I’m not going to get into whether this theorized movement actually happened – I don’t have the background in it, and frankly, when I’m inventing a fantasy world to play in, I don’t care.

My current thinking is to set the game in approximately 3500 BC in Europe, the Near East and the adjacent regions. This means stone age technology, with a few advanced societies using copper weapons (which may have been ceremonial, but who cares.) Armor would be padded and leather, and probably no shields. Weapons include bows, javelins, spears, daggers, maces, clubs, and hand axes. Since most are made of stone or copper, the damage should be reduced from normal, which mitigates the lack of armor to some degree. Hey – it was a rough time to be alive.

I’m thinking I’ll take metal weapon damage back two steps for stone, with a chance of breakage on a natural “1” – maybe a simple item saving throw. For copper weapons, take damage back one step, with a similar chance of item’s being ruined on a natural “1” attack roll. For armor, I might draw on the post I wrote about fighting naked like the ancient Greek heroes were depicted doing in art.

Horses (ponies really) will be rare, and the knowledge and technology of riding will be very limited. In fact, it was probably unknown in this period, but here’s where we fudge things a bit.

Monsters will be geared towards prehistoric hold-overs from previous ages and the mythic monsters of the cultures of Europe and the Near East – manticores, chimeras, etc.

I’m working on a preliminary map of the cultures that were floating around in 3500 BC. Here, there will be some fudging and wholesale creation of ancient cultures. Mythology will be plundered, and something akin to Howard’s Hyborian Age will be woven from the strands of what little we know. This is where the “Age of Heroes” idea comes in – the idea that the heroic stories of ancient peoples were really set in this prehistoric age. Hercules, Jason, etc. will be featured in one guise or another. Here, I want to make use of the demigod class I wrote up a while ago – the idea is that the player characters are demigods walking the world, creating the stories that will be told for centuries after by the tribes and kingdoms they found.

It’s been a fascinating journey through prehistory for me so far – there was plenty I didn’t know, primarily about the extent of stone age urbanization. I’ll update you as I proceed. I’m still writing the next hex crawl. Sinew & Steel is pretty close to completion. Weird Fantasy is on hold while I bone up on my Dunsany and CAS. Still, all is proceeding nicely.

NOD for 2015

/ jstater / 4 Comments

NOD 25 – the PDF version – is now up for sale at Lulu.com. The link to my shop is on the right, or you can click HERE to go directly to the magazine. What does it hold?

NOD 25 – First issue of 2015! In this issue, the Klarkash Mountains hex crawl through weird, goblin-infested mountains. Also – The Thirty Years War Camapaign, the Landsknecht class, a Pen & Paper Football Game (American Football), random tables for making weird ecologies and a couple magic items. 76 pages.


On sale for $4.99

Now that it’s up, it’s time to start writing NOD 26, and to polish up the next Bloody Basic edition. GRIT & VIGOR is being play-tested now, and if I can find the time I’m going to do a short play-test adventure on Google+, in case anyone is interested.

My First Crush

/ jstater / 7 Comments
The first AF issue I ever bought, at a 7-Eleven

Sometimes, you discover your own history in strange ways – things you forgot you knew or did until something jogs your memory. Recently, my family and I spent some time in Boulder City checking out antique stores. Boulder City is not far away from Las Vegas, and is the anti-Vegas in many ways. The locals are anti-development, and thus B.C. has a small town atmosphere.

One of these aforementioned antique stores had a few shelves stacked with old comic books, and they were cheap so I was bound to buy a few. I started digging in and found a bunch of old Kamandis, Ka-Zars, Battlestar Gallacticas, John Carter Warlord of Mars, Shogun Warriors … groovy stuff from the ’70s and ’80s. I grabbed quite a few of those titles, and I also grabbed a couple old Alpha Flights.

When I first got into comic books in the ’80s (after playing TSR’s Marvel Super Heroes RPG, because I always get into things ass-backwards), the first two titles I grabbed onto were West Coast Avengers and Alpha Flight. So, I’m reading Alpha Flight #12, wherein Guardian dies a horrible fiery death, and it suddenly hits me … Heather Hudson (later to be Guardian and then Vindicator) was my first comic book crush (with Mockingbird a close second).

[Quick aside – I was thinking about that era in comic books, when I first started collecting them, and something struck me. The West Coast Avengers were led by Mockingbird, the Avengers by Captain Marvel (this lady), the X-Men by Storm (in her cool costume), and Alpha Flight by Vindicator. Four women leading super hero teams at the House of Ideas, and two of them black women. Has that happened since?]

So, Nodians – who was your first comic book crush?

(And keep it clean … there may be children present).

Non-over-sexualized women are sexier. Or is that just me?

 

NOD 20 Released … Finally

/ jstater / 6 Comments

So what took so long? Well, I’ll tell you, but first …

The twentieth issue of NOD finally arrives, detailing the fantasy colonial city of Dweomer Baye. This issue also includes the Vigilante class for Blood & Treasure, new aquatic monsters, cosmic hero Starman for Mystery Men!, an unholy relic, alien cocktails for Space Princess, random dungeon noises and the bogeyman! 34 pages

Click here to buy NOD 20 for $1.99

So, why did I take so long to finish one of the shortest (maybe the shortest) issue of NOD yet?

I think, first and foremost, my brain wanted to take a pseudo-sabatical from RPG writing. My post count has been low on the blog, and my output outside the blog has been a bit lower than usual. Earlier this year, I finished a couple issues of NOD and did some freelance work besides (more monster lairs), so the little grey cells, they were a bit fatigued mon ami,

While my brain was dragging its feet (sounds like something Yogi Berra would have said) on NOD 20, it was also dragging its feet on ACTION X and the NOD Companion – so I’ve been slowly working on all three projects.

Fortunately, I’m starting to get back into high gear (well, maybe second gear), and I’m also getting a bit more excited about NOD 21, which will detail the western half of the Virgin Woode hex-crawl. This will concern the Damnable Sea and the Victorian/Atlantean aquatic elves who dwell beneath its waves and are preparing to launch a war of conquest on the surface dwellers. They’ve enslaved the locathah, scattered the sahuagin, and now they’re turning their eyes towards humanity!

For ACTION X, I’m currently detailing some notable automobiles from the 20th century for the game. I still need to grab spell descriptions from B&T and some psionic power descriptions from Tanner Yea’s excellent Psionics of Lore supplement for the Spells/Powers section, but otherwise it’s just about ready to playtest. For anyone interested in participating, I plan to run the playtest on Google+ – it will involve entering Iran Mission:Impossible-style to capture or help escape (who knows!) a scientist working on their nuclear weapons program.

For the NOD Companion, I’m detailing the gazetteer portion that gives people an overview of the NOD campaign world in its entirety. I was originally going to make it somewhat detailed, then changed my mind and thought about doing the entire thing as a travelogue involving a Tremanni merchant, and have finally settled on doing more of a glossography with some hand drawn maps. When finished, it will include the overview of NOD, a collection of classes published in NOD and updated for Blood & Treasure, new weapons and some other character-oriented articles from NOD.

So – that’s the gaming side of “why it took so long”. The other side is what’s known as “my real job”.

For those who don’t know, I am a researcher/pseudo-economist who tracks the commercial real estate market in Southern Nevada (i.e. Las Vegas). I maintain an oft-neglected blog concerning commercial real estate, maintain a massive database all on my lonesome, and produce quarterly reports. Back when I started the blog and the hobby publishing, I produced three quarterly reports, detailing the industrial, office and retail markets in Las Vegas. Now, I produce those, as well as reports on the local economy, the hospitality sector, medical office, multifamily, rarely land and I help with a gaming report. I’ve also started doing some freelance economic work. In other words, I do quite a bit of writing, and that’s detracted a bit from my hobby writing.

Still, I think I’m getting back in the swing, so expect more content moving forward than you’ve seen in the last few months. Hopefully, as Frog God Games finishes the big projects it has on its plate, I’ll get the nod (no pun intended) to produce some more Hex Crawl Chronicles for them.

Get Yourself Some NOD 19, Fool!

/ jstater / 4 Comments

Yes, true believers (sorry Stan, needed a quick catchphrase)! NOD 19 is now available in digital form, paperback to follow when I see a review copy. What does this time hold? Dig some descriptive text:

“Spring has sprung, and so has NOD 19 (okay, that was lame, but this descriptive text gets tricky after a while). Anyhow – NOD 19 features the first half of the Virgin Woode hex crawl, a bunch of monsters, the puritan class, four new classes for Space Princess, a new race/class for Pars Fortuna and a bunch of other cool junk! 68 pages of excellence!”

There you have it, lads and lasses. Check out some NOD 19 and rock your brain-stem with fantasy goodness for $2.99 (cheap).

Check it out HERE!

And the MAP can be found HERE 

or just look below …

So far, only the western portion is filled in – the eastern portion will be detailed in NOD 21, while NOD 20 will focus on the colonial city-state of Dweomer Baye.

Women, Cars and Spaceships … A Retrospective

/ jstater / 4 Comments

While driving to work this morning, I was listening to classical music and musing on the design of cars and spaceships. I don’t mean real spaceships, of course – I mean the kind you see in movies, comic books, pulp fiction and television – the good stuff. I also started thinking about mens’ taste in women, and how the styles of disparate things tend to conflate at different times. With that in mind, I decided I was going to put together some images from different years (or small spans of years) of the top spaceship of that time, the top car of that time and what were considered the top sex symbols of that time to see if they clicked.

Here we go …

We’ll begin with 1929 and Buck Rogers. The spaceship was still in the “could have been designed by lonely housewives” era. Fairly sleek and only a few doodads stuck to the outside of the ship. For our car, we have a 1929 Duesenberg – also pretty sleek, formal and yet also sporty. Whether Buck’s spaceship had leather seats, I don’t know. For our sci-fi beauty, we have Col. Wilma Deering, Buck’s erstwhile companion and drawn as a classic beauty of the era – rounded face and graceful lips.

By 1936, Flash Gordon has burst onto the scene in the first of his film adaptations. The spaceship isn’t much different than Buck Rogers’ craft, though perhaps a bit sportier (check out the chrome!). Dale Arden, as played by Jean Rogers, conforms pretty closely to the earlier beauty standard, and the car isn’t terribly different from the 1929 Duesenberg, though you’ll note the nose is slanted back a bit.

1950 brought the film classic (?) Destination Moon. Destination Moon at least played at being hard sci-fi, though the design was definitely of the moderne period, with the sleek spacecraft. The beauty of 1950, Erin O’Brien-Moore was pretty sleek herself, and shows how tastes were changing at the dawn of a new decade. The car is a bit more compact than in the 1930’s, but in this case it looks like the spaceship designs are beginning to presage developments in automobiles.

In 1956, Forbidden Planet put earthlings in a flying saucer (guess those captured German scientists were finally earning their keep). Beauty isn’t much changed from 6 years ago, and the car, a 1956 Chevy Bel Air, is not yet exhibiting the giant fins that will grace vehicles in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.

By 1966, Star Trek has premiered. The Enterprise is unlike any spaceship audiences have seen before, and also notable is that the sole beauty of the cast (unless you include Sulu) is a black woman! Nichelle Nichols typified late ’60s beauty – curves and tall hair. The cars are becoming more slick as well – away from the tail-fins and into the muscle car era.

The next big leap, in this case back in some ways and forward in others, was 1977’s Star Wars (you might have heard of it). For the first time on film, we get a real sense of the “starfighter” – fighter aircraft in space. Yeah, the Star Destroyers were pretty iconic as well, but you really can’t beat the X-Wings and TIE Fighters for capturing the imagination of kids in that era. Our beauty is, of course, Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), who really found herself thrust into unfamiliar territory in her slave girl costume. The 1977 Ferrari pictures seems to have a similar profile to those X-Wings.

One last stop, and a leap forward to one of my favorite sci-fi series – Red Dwarf. Not American, and played for laughs, it introduced a completely utilitarian (and grandiose) spacecraft in the eponymous Red Dwarf. By 1994, we had maybe my favorite of all the sci-fi beauties introduced on this post – Chloë Annett as Kristine Kochanski (I like my women smart, beautiful and with a wry sense of humor) and the fairly utilitarian Rover. Substance over style in 1994 sci-fi.

Okay, there’s many more I could do – various incarnations of Star Trek, Alien, etc. I’ll leave further explorations to others.

The Man Who Was Thursday – Quick Review

/ jstater / 3 Comments

Read it.

Longer review …

I’m three chapters into G. K. Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday, and I’m loving it. I was wavering through the first chapter until the last few lines. Now I’m completely hooked. Imagine if you will the turn-of-the-century struggle between the Central Council of Anarchists and the poets-turned-police officers assembled to stop them from destroying the world. If you’re into the weird and absurd, you will probably dig The Man Who Was Thursday.

And since the inspiration has struck, I will be presenting, tomorrow, the anarchist class.

That’s all for today kiddies!

Spy Smasher is Smashing!

/ jstater / 1 Comment

Last night, I revved up the old Roku and watched Spy Smasher Returns on Netflix. Spy Smasher Returns is a film created by putting together pieces of the Spy Smasher serial from the 1940’s, and if you’re interested in running any kind of pulp-era adventure game, you need to watch this film.

It’s not for the story – a basic little thing about Nazi saboteurs and spies operating in the United States and getting their orders from a fellow called The Mask who operates from a submarine off the coast (the coast of what – who knows?).

The acting isn’t bad for a serial, but not Oscar caliber either. No – the two reasons you want to watch this film (or the serial) are the stunts and the settings.

Gaming is often about scenes – setting the stage, introducing the players and then shouting “Action!”, which makes movies and television shows excellent fodder for the imagination. Spy Smasher has some excellent settings to drop the players into – a clay factory with roaring ovens, a rickety-looking lumber yard building, a Nazi submarine, a houseboat, a train, a motor boat, etc. All provide interesting obstacles and opportunities for supporting the action.

The second reason has little to do with gaming – the stunts. Absolutely fabulous stunts (and the same goes for the old Captain America serial, which I’ve mentioned before) that remind you how fun movies were before CGI came into existence. These knuckleheads go all out in the fight scenes – leaping around, flipping each other, bludgeoning one another with balsa wood chairs), Spy Smasher roars around on a motorcycle like a madman, a wooden tower gets blown up and collapses, a motor boat takes on a submarine, etc.

So – my highest rating (892 stars) goes to Spy Smasher Returns / Spy Smasher. Check it out HERE folks.

 

How About Some Free Jack Vance?

/ jstater / 2 Comments

I’ll do a Dragon by Dragon later today, but wanted to share this in the meantime. Jack Vance has a website, maintained by family and friends, and they currently have an e-book of The Chasch up as a free download, with, they say, more to follow. If you’re a fan, or if you’ve never experienced Vance, visit the site and give it a look-see.

If you want to know more about The Chasch, you can read a bit at Wikipedia.