My friend Gus from Dungeon of Signs is running a contest. He wants you to draw him a map for the following locale, which he plans to key and run in his gonzo science-fantasy D&D game.
Screened by thicket, swamp and forest, a necropolis of the ancients sinks slowly into the earth. Its existence rumored by foresters and vaguely referenced in some of the Temple of Science’s oldest logs, the tombs and monuments have remained slumbering and undisturbed for ages. Ancient construction materials provide protection against the elements, but in the glorious times when man traveled beyond the sky tombs were not considered sport for plunder and the treasures of the ancient sky-farers should be unguarded, untrapped and ready for any hand that has the audacity to reach for them! Hack through the brigand haunted forest and seize the wealth of the very stars, amongst the TOMBS OF THE ROCKET MEN!
I’m not 100% sure why he’s bothering with this contest, because if you look at his dungeon maps they are all amazing. Still, I would be remiss if I didn’t enter. I ended up drawing something that looks like an office building or an old high school. That is to say it is kind of boring. This means you have all the more chance to win!
I’ve put Philotomy’s Musings by Jason Cone back online. You can head over to the grab bag section of my site to read them. It joins the He-Man show bible, so it is in good company.
When I got back into old school D&D one of the first websites of note I came across were Philotomy’s Musings by Jason Cone. The writing there was my first experience with Original D&D as a scholarly pursuit. The 1974 D&D rules are so minimalist they beg to be interpreted. His writing was one such interpretation, one that gained much well deserved popularity.
I am using the NYT’s Emphasis library to let readers link to individual paragraphs and sentences on that page. I will probably start using it through out the site, it’s quite cool. If you do any long form writing its worth checking out.
I’d love to host the original D&D rules online in a similar fashion, but I’m guessing Wizards of the Coast wouldn’t be cool with that.
I’ve updated my Random Character Generator to spit out a table of characters in one go: Random NPCs. My assumption is that a list of random NPCs with stats and basic descriptions could come in handy. If anything, you can use it to quickly generate a bar fight.
A quick tip: you can add a number to the end of the npcs URL to generate that many NPCs. (It currently caps out at 1000.)
I’ve backed several RPG Kickstarters. I discovered the whole old-school D&D scene via the Random Dungeon Generator as a Dungeon Map Kickstarter project, and that led me to backing Dwimmermount and Barrowmaze. By the end of the summer I think I got a lot more picky about what I was willing to give money to.
Spears of Dawn is notable for shipping ahead of its estimates, and shipping a bonus goal much sooner than I had expected. I think the other projects that shipped were more or less on time. That’s 4 projects that have shipped out of the 14 projects I’ve backed.
The LotFP Hardcover still hasn’t shipped, but there are PDFs of the new layout and it seems to be reasonably far along. Still, it’s pretty damn late. You’ll notice I still backed two more projects from the company. The stuff LotFP put out is particularly good so i’m willing to put up with the snails pace. I don’t get the sense James Raggi is going to run off with my money.
Champions of Zed is probably the worst of the projects I’ve backed when it comes to communicating what’s going on. It was supposed to ship 7 months ago. Weird West Miniatures is apparently done, though I have yet to receive anything from them. Dwimmermount is very late, but more than enough has been said about that.
When I got back into all the RPG stuff I was pretty excited about all these Kickstarter campaigns. Now, not so much.
I picked up a copy of the new limited edition S-series adventure compilation Dungeons of Dread. It’s a nice hardback book that collects 4 modules released by TSR that were meant to separate the wheat from the chaff when it came to D&D players. Those modules are: Tomb of Horrors, White Plume Mountain, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, and The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth.
This new edition begins with an introduction by Lawrence Schick, author of White Plume Mountain. He briefly explains the history of the series and of each module. Following this is a short table of contents and then each of the modules presented exactly as they appeared however many years ago. If you’ve seen the AD&D reprints the quality is much the same: that is to say quite good. Like the AD&D reprints the illustrations in Dungeons of Dread seem a bit higher contrast than the originals. The art work is reproduced reasonably well, but I suspect some detail has been lost in scanning the originals for their inclusion here.
Unlike the AD&D reprints Dungeons of Dread is much more of a collectible than a gaming aid. Presenting the 4 modules together like this is nice if you just want to read them, but to use them in the game would probably be unwieldily. The illustration booklets you’re supposed to show your players are bound in the book, as are the maps for each adventure. That’s not to say you couldn’t use this book at your table, but it’s a step back in usability compared to the original TSR modules. Really, something like this would have been better presented in a box set, but no one makes box sets anymore.
If you’re a fan of the old modules this collection is well worth a look. As I don’t own the originals, the choice was simple. I picked up my copy for $30 on Amazon, which is less than i’d pay for each module used on eBay.
Gorgonmilk is the place to go for all your DIY D&D needs. I’m a particular fan of his alternate covers for the Original D&D booklets. I discovered the site recently, and it’s really quite excellent.
I’m thinking of running a Dark Sun game using the Original Dungeons and Dragons rules at some point. As such, I wanted to figure out a simpler set of rules of psionics. I thought a good first step would be to settle on rules for wild talents–people who have some small psychic ability. I wanted about half the population to have a wild talent. It turns out that if you ask a random character to roll under their random wisdom score, they’ll succeed about half the time. I wanted a set of powers that weren’t overly powerful, but still interesting enough to be used in a game. I’m curious to hear what people think.
Player’s should roll under their Wisdom score to determine if their character has a wild psionic talent. If they fail the roll the character has no wild talent; if they succeed, the amount they succeed by determines their wild talent as follows:
d
Power
0
Know Direction - The character knows which way is North.
1
Far Hearing - For one turn the character hears all sounds within 50’ as if they were being whispered directly into their ear. The character may choose what sounds to focus on.
2
Far Seeing - For one turn the character may view a scene up to 50’ away as if they were right there. They may see through walls and other obstacles, but not through lead.
3
Thought Projection - The character may communicate a brief message mentally with a creature up to 50’ away. The target understands the character, even if they share no common language.
4
Object Projection - The character may teleport a small object in their possession up to 50’ away.
5
Telekinetic Grasp - For one turn the character may manipulate small objects from up to 50’ away.
6
Spark - The character may ignite any flammable object within 50’ of them. (The “heat” this power generates is no greater than that of a candle.)
7
Levitate - For 1 turn, the character can float above the ground (up to 10’).
8
Minor ESP: For 1 turn the character may read the mind of another creature. (The character understand the creature even if they share no common language.)
9
Cell Adjustment - The character regains up to 1d3 lost hit points. (This increases to 1d6 at level 3, 1d8 at level 6, 1d10 at level 9 and 1d12 at level 12.) The character may make a Save vs. Poison to cure themselves of any non-magical disease.
10
“Invisiblity”: For 1 turn the character can completely hide his presence from up to one sentient creature per level. The target may make a Save vs. Magic to resist the character’s power.
11
Id Insituation: All sentient characters, friend or foe, within 25’ of the character feel an uncontrollable urge to eat, murder or fornicate.
12
Psychic Distress: All sentient characters, friend or foe, within 25’ of the character are immobilized for 1 turn.
13
Minor Mind Control: For 1 turn, the character may manipulate the target into doing whatever the character wants. The target will have no memory of any events that transpire while under this mind control. The target my make a Save vs. Magic to resist the mind control.
14
Minor Precognition: The character may re-roll any saving throw.
15
Psionic Defence - Once per day per level, the character may make a Save vs. Magic to avoid the effects of any psionic power that targets them. (This is in addition to any saving throws the power may allow for.)
16
Psionic Immunity: The character can not be the target of any psionic power.
17
The Haitian: no character within 10’ of the character, friend or foe, may use their psionic powers. The character also gains Psionic Immunity.
A character may use their psionic power once per day. (Psionic Immunity and The Haitian are exceptions here: they are always active.)
If you feel like you aren’t getting enough Final Fantasy in your D&D, Hack & Slash has you covered with this new class for your D&D games, the Blue Mage. Now you can play Gau from FF VI along side Celes.
As far as I can tell, TSR put out four splat books for Dark Sun that were very similar in their presentation: Elves of Athas, Dune Trader, Slave Tribes, and Veiled Alliance. Each book takes a look at a particular group, with the bulk of the books being write ups of example factions: with Elves of Athas you had example elf tribes; with Dune Trader you had example trading houses; and with Slave Tribes you had example slave tribes. Having reviewed the previous three books, it seems only fitting I take a look at the last one, Veiled Alliance by Allen Varney.
Veiled Alliance takes its name from the secret society of magic users that the book covers. The book opens with two totally throw away chapters about the alliance in general. Most of the information is silly, boring, or uninspired. You could probably just drop these chapters completely or shrink them greatly and jump to the meat of the book, the descriptions of the alliance chapters in each city-state.
One thing that makes this book interesting is that it expands on the information available about the various city-states in Athas in general. Each city-state is discussed briefly before moving on to the alliance chapter that operates within it. For each alliance chapter we learn: how to make contact with the group, how they initiate new recruits in to their order, their history, their leadership (NPCs) and information about their hideout. The fact the various alliance chapters have hideouts strikes me as odd, since the first chapter describes the alliance structure as being organized like a terrorist cell: small groups that are only aware of a few other cells. Why would an organization like that need a place to hang out? Each section also has some example adventure hooks, some better than others.
On the whole Veiled Alliance just isn’t very good. It’s definitely the weakest of these four splat books. All of these books have been overly verbose, but this one really does feel like it is mostly filler with all the tangential information about the city-states. The book does do a good job at showcasing what different sorts of Veiled Alliance themed adventures might look like. Each alliance chapter is reasonably different than the next. If you’re looking for used Dark Sun books, this feels like one you could safely skip.
I was thinking the next little web application I was going to build would be something for managing notes for a hex crawl.
One problem with the way they are published now is that you need to flip all over the place because hexes are usually listed in columns. If your players are in Hex 0101 information about Hex 0201 is going to be further away than information about Hex 0116, which seems silly. With a website you could view your hex crawl as a series of 3 x 3 grids, the hex you are on being the centre. Clicking on one of the adjacent hexes would bring up a new 3 x 3 grid with information about the new hexes the players could now move into. This would probably give you a better sense of what’s happening around a hex than the way most books present things. With a web page you could even display a big grid of all the hexes and information about each one. You could scroll around on the page to see what’s up.
The PDF version of Carcosa does a pretty good job of linking to anything and everything it can within its hex descriptions. This is something you can do quite easily with a web page. More so, you could have this cross reference information be generated automatically based on the description the user types in.
As players move around they’re going to effect the world they are wandering around in. You could track these notes and changes, updating your hex crawl as you go. You could track what the players have done, and what your NPCs are doing as well. You could see a history of what’s happened in any hex, which could be handy.
I’m curious if anyone else has thought about this stuff? Is there other stuff about running a hex crawl that could benefit from the power of modern computing?
