wordpress 7.1Full Moon Storytelling writes about how Downtime could be a fourth pillar of tabletop RPGs.
Uncanny Magazine released the Table of Contents for their upcoming Issue 70. There are some titles here that have me excited to dig into my subscriber copy. I’ll likely continue to link to stories I really enjoyed as they go live.
TTRPGKids did an interview with a Speech Language Pathologist about how she uses TTRPGs in speech therapy.
At All Dead Generations, there was a look at what a Beholder might look like as a biblical angel.
Wejia Cheng, an editor with Standard Ebooks, wrote about how eschewing automated shortcuts and doing the work can sometimes further our goals better than having the work done for us.
At Sly Flourish, there’s a discussion of mixing and matching preferred rules from different 5e versions.
Standard Ebooks ReleasesLady Rose’s Daughter by Mary Augusta Ward
Olney Hymns by John Newton
The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
Martin Birck’s Youth by Hjalmar Söderberg
The Perennial Bachelor by Anne Parrish
John Scalzi heard back from the FBI about his request for their (admittedly thin to the point of non-existant) file on him. Whomst amongst us has never wondered if the FBI file we joke must exist on us is actually there? I know my own jokes about an FBI file go back to things like being interviewed by a local socialist paper for my (albeit small) involvement with anti-Iraq War demonstrations at my high school.
Michael Damien Thomas of Uncanny Magazine talks about how community shapes science fiction and fantasy awards.
Athena Scalzi writes about her unexpected culinary adventure at the Denver Airport. I hear what she’s saying on this one, I had one of the best burgers I ever ate, filled with hatch green chilis, at a smash burger place in the airport on one of my flights out to Seattle.
At Sly Flourish, Mike Shea talks about the infamous quantum ogre, and how we can streamline prep while still valuing and respecting the meaningful choices and agency of the players at our table.
Standard Ebooks ReleasesThe Adventures of Sally by P.G. Wodehouse
Gullible’s Travels by Ring Lardner
The Wolf-Leader by Alexandre Dumas
So, Pokémon games have been in my wheelhouse since 1999, when a friend from school let me try his copy of Pokémon Red on a flight from Seattle to Washington Dulles for our school DC trip. They were one of my earliest introductions to RPGs, so I guess they’re responsible for my interest in a bunch of stuff I’ve written about here.
I played Red, Blue, and Yellow endlessly. I played a fan translation of Gold before saving up money to buy a copy on the day it released in the US. (And then had to wait days to start it because I’d left my Gameboy at my grandparents’ over the weekend.) I bought a copy of Sapphire as soon as it came out. A copy of Diamond and a DS Lite were the first things I bought with my first real paycheck in college.
What I’d never done was a Nuzlocke run. For those who didn’t spend the ’00s terminally online looking up movesets and what EV training was and all that jazz, a Nuzlocke is a self-imposed extra challenge in a Pokémon game where you can only catch the first creature encountered in a specific location and if a Pokémon faints, then it’s dead and must either be released or dropped into a graveyard box in your PC. Anyway, I had a copy of Emerald handy and decided to try one. I lasted until the first gym. This is the story of my first try at a Nuzlocke.
Everything started fine. I start in the moving truck, hop out into Littleroot Town, and go into my house. Set the clock. Grab the free potion from the PC. Then it’s off to see the Wiz–the Professor.
He’s not at his house, so off into the untamed wilds. Where the Professor is being chased by a Poochyena (mean looking yet slightly adorable puppy). So I grab a Torchic and save the absent-minded Professor. Birch takes me back to his lab and asks if I want to name the Torchic. Lava Chicken won’t fit, so Sanders it is!
Then it’s the standard bit of early game errand running. Two routes up to meet and battle the Professor’s daughter, May. She goes down, then I get my Pokédex and first batch of pokeballs. Now we’re cooking.
On Route 101, my first encounter comes quickly, and the pokeball works on the first try. Wormy the Wurmple is mine. I train Wormy and Sanders a bit and head back to Route 103 to add a third member to the team. Hello, Fido the Poochyena. Back into Oldale Town to take the exit I was supposed to. Along the way, we find Leafy the Lotad (animated lily pad).
So, uh, here is where I have the moment that first points out how different Nuzlockes are. I’m battling a Youngster and his Zigzagoon (the name basically describes it exactly) when I decide to try and keep Wormy in battle for just one turn to try and poison the Zigzagoon before switching. That was a mistake. RIP Wormy, we barely knew you.
So we take the literal six steps into Petalburg City and head to the Pokémon Center. Wormy goes into the graveyard at the back of the PC and the rest of the team heals up to see what comes next. Petalburg has a gym, but my dad is the leader and tells me to come back later after having me chaperone a kid to catch the pokemon I wish I’d found (Ralts, a little psychic thing has been a favorite since 2003.)
So we head to the seashore where we find Tails the Taillow (a bird). We do some training to get everyone ready for the woods I see to the North then go heal up. In the woods, we meet Silky the Silcoon (a cocoon) and finally get Leafy the move Absorb that she’ll need for Roxanne’s Rocks. We also meet Team Aqua as one of their jerks is harassing some guy who just wants a weird mushroom Pokemon. After that we head to a flower shop, plant some berries, and go North into Rustboro City.
We get a desperately needed heal (everyone was about out of Power Points to use their moves) and head to the gym. Leafy solos all the gym trainers, settling in for the gym fight at level 12. I get real cocky given the whole “this one pokemon just two shotted everything in the building.”
And then I challenge Roxanne. Her Geodudes go down pretty easy, her attempts to heal with potions just fueling more healing for me with absorb. Then comes Nosepass (a Moai statue with a copper nose and stubby feet). Nosepass has special defense. So Leafy doesn’t do nearly what she should. Then come the rocks. Rock Throw, Rock Tomb. Just all the rocks. Leafy goes down. So out comes Sanders, but Sanders only has Scratch as an attack and it does basically nothing. This continues through my whole team as Roxanne basically casts “Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies” over and over.
So yeah, I’ve now tried a Nuzlocke. And made it as far as the first gym. I had a good amount of fun. Might actually try it again sometime.
Alex Schroeder wrote about the difficulties in the modern blogosphere of connecting through comments and email.
At The Soloist, there’s a discussion of playing Solo RPGs together. Whether that’s just each playing your own thing at the table and talking afterward or making each person’s solo RPG part of a greater whole.
At Prismatic Wasteland, there’s a great description of the tiers of canonicity existing in a game from something spoken at the table to something existing in one of the books used as inspiration.
Keith Ammann wrote a great discussion of what DM style looks like in opposition to player style. It’s a great discussion of how we play the games in front of us and has me thinking more about how I put my own sessions together.
Standard Ebooks ReleasesWith the Empress Dowager of China by Katharine A. Carl
Earlier this week I finished Maria Dahvana Headley’s translation of Beowulf. It’s a story I know well, having read various translations of the poem over the last couple decades. I loved her translation. There’s a mix of modern language and archaic formalities. It’s a translation you can feel the fun she had in writing it.
In undergrad, I majored in Linguistics. Between high school and college, I studied five years of French, four years of Russian, and two years of Japanese. I’m absolute garbage at live interpretation, but really enjoyed the art of translation. There’s joy to be had at working to understand what an author was doing with their word choice and figuring out how to do the same in the target language.
That joy in Headley’s translation was clear from the start:
Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of kings!
Headley translates the opening “Hwæt” into the narrator starting a boastful story as one might today. “Bro” is far from the “who/what” that Hwæt glosses as (gloss being a term for a “literal translation” or a “word-for-word” translation without worrying about context). But, the use of Hwæt in the opening line is more a call to attention. Heany’s 1999 translation of Beowulf uses “So” for the same purpose.
I personally think Bro does a great job conveying the boastful tale of medieval manliness that Beowulf is.
There are some, like the author Vladimir Nabokov, who are of the opinion that translation should be closer to a gloss, that translators of poetry should forego things like meter or rhyme or idiom for the sake of “accuracy”.
And perhaps with some idioms, that works. The French idiom “Les vêtements ne font pas le moin” is glossed as “The clothes don’t make the monk” which is so close to the Emglish idiom that a direct translation gives us both a sense of the meaning and the context that modern French emerged a little more immersed in Catholicism than modern English.
However, like I enjoy the sense of joy I get from Headley’s Beowulf, my favorite English translation of the most famous work of Russian literature (to Russians), Eugene Onegin, is a polar opposite to Nabokov’s gloss of Onegin. Douglas Hofstadter wrote a translation that maintains Pushkin’s famous Onegin sonnet. Onegin is written fully in verse, with 14-line stanzas repeating a specific rhyme scheme in iambic tetrameter. And that meter gives the whole book a texture that’s lost if you sacrifice it to word choice. Then there’s references that are lost to non-native speakers, little bits of word play that give Pushkin’s writing a fun feeling.
Also, as someone who studied Russian, Hofstadter adding in a translation pun here and there gave me immense joy. In the opening chapter of Onegin there is a line in which Pushkin is lamenting his recent exile to the North and speaking in a double entendre of both the harsh weather of the North and the harshness of the punishment. Hofstadter translates the line as “The North was shall I say severe” which captures the original double meaning and adds an extra joke with the Russian word for North (север) being pronounced syeh-vyehr.
Anyway, whether in translation or not, I’d love to see more writing that embraces the joy of using language well. Choose the perfect word for the meaning and the tone and use it. Don’t be afraid to be sesquipedalian if the moment calls for it; break out the fun dollar words we had to learn for test prep, dust them off, and put them to good use.
Whether writing something to be read or composing some description in a game, words are our medium, and we should practice and flex our mastery of them. The worst that could happen in failing is that we have a funny moment with friends and use a better word the next time.
I’ve been reading titles from Appendix N and other lists of inspirational fiction from different role-playing games this year. There’s been some really good and some stuff that wasn’t quite my cup of tea, but definitely got me thinking about what stories influence me when I start prepping situations to bring to the table for my own groups. I was also inspired by some lists from Traverse Fantasy, Binary Star Games, and Githyanki Diaspora.
Dystopias and Resistance FictionOkay, so I’m a millennial and that means I was basically raised on a steady diet of dystopias and how it is good to resist the Evil Empire, especially when the Evil Empire is in the house with you.
Faerie is best when it gets crossed with real life. Because that’s what the original stories were like when they were first told. They were about concerns people had about their real lives.
I’m going to be completely honest, my favorite genre of science fiction is the space opera. Hard science fiction and the real physical limitations okay, but really I want stories about the people and what they do in intense situations.
Urban fantasy probably catches my attention more than mainstream fantasy. But, I did grow up rereading the full Lord of the Rings each year as the movies came out and Discworld formed a major part of my college reading. Also, I do own a couple Wheel of Time reference shirts.
Alright, so it’s been a minute since the last post I wrote about Eveline Hawking and the Vigilant. If this is the first you’ve seen me mention this solo campaign I’ve been running you can catch up with the earlier posts too: Part 1, Part 2.
We last left Eveline Hawking aboard the Rookery, speaking with a figure from her past. She just discovered that the electromagnetic storms she flew through on the way to the ship were caused by an artifact.
Attempt to Save the RookeryEveline steps over to the computer that the Lieutenant is standing at. Numbers fly across a screen. Eveline notes carbon scoring across many of the surfaces here in Engineering. She decides to take a closer look to see if it’s safe to fly the Rookery away from the storm that has disabled it.
At that moment, the ship rocks as another gust from the balefire storms strikes. Sparks fly from electrical conduits and the readout from the Engineering station cuts off. The smell of ozone in the air grows stronger.
“LT, we don’t have time to figure out if we can get the Rookery flying again. The storms are getting stronger, come on,” Eveline pulls at the Lieutenant’s arm.
They retreat back through the Rookery to the airlock of the Vigilant. Eveline closes the external airlock and turns the handle that should release the docking clamps. Nothing. She peers through the port on the lock and sees carbon on the latches. They were struck by the storm and fused. Great.
The ClampsEveline seals her helmet and radios to LT to close the airlock and move inside the inner airlock. She then seals the lock and moves into the small tunnel to inspect the damage to the docking clamps.
Eveline grabs a tool from the belt she carried into the Rookery and wedges its blade underneath the stuck clamp. Moving quickly, she applies force and the clamp releases. There is a hiss as the seal on the tunnel is lost and air rushes to the void.
Eveline moves to the second clamp, trying to think of the most efficient way to release the clamps, whether any order may assist in getting the ships apart faster. The ships begin to be buffeted by the storm and Eveline can hear the struts around the airlock being stressed from the forces through the rapidly thinning air. If she doesn’t get through this faster, she’ll lose both ships. Or worse, be left floating in the void through the storm. But she gathers enough of her wits to release the second clamp.
The third clamp comes away, but Eveline has to strain against it and the way her arm twists as the ship is hit by another gust leaves a soreness she’s sure she’ll feel worse about in the morning. But at least the clamp releases.
As Eveline rushes to get set up with the final clamp, a huge gust hits the ships. Eveline is tossed from her feet and flies backward into the lock she has tethered herself to. She hits her head against the inside of her helmet and is dazed for a moment. Her vision blurs as she is thrown around the tunnel at the end of her tether.
Eveline pushes through the pain and pulls herself along the structure of the tunnel, finally disengaging the final clamp. She sees so much damage to the docking mechanisms on the Vigilant as she looks back, but they are free of the Rookery.
Eveline uses her tether to pull herself fully into the lock of the Vigilant and activates the controls to retract the docking tunnel. She seals the outer lock door.
“LT, tunnel is retracted. Pull us away from the Rookery and get us out of here!”
She feels the maneuvering thrusters gently push them away from the other ship as the indicators show that the lock has matched pressure the the ship’s interior. She moves into the ready room beyond the lock and sags to the floor once she’s pulled herself out from the EVA suit.
While looking for stories from Appendix N, I came across The Eldritch Dark, which catalogs the works of Clark Ashton Smith. Since my own local bookstores are devoid of Smith’s works, it’s been a great find.
Over at Prismatic Wasteland, there is a blogwagon on the theme of randomness beginning. I can’t wait to share my own contribution on this one.
Rob Heinsoo wrote about the Free-form Demo for 13th Age 2nd Edition. This is an interesting structure for an introductory one-shot. I’m thinking of trying it with my group.
Patchwork Paladin does not prep at all sometimes.
Standard Ebooks ReleasesShort Fiction by Catherine Louisa Pirkis
The Rover by Joseph Conrad
Poetry by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Village by Ivan Bunin
My Life in China and America by Yung Wing
Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown
Saragossa by Benito Pérez Galdós
One of the first non-D&D RPGs I played was the fourth edition of Shadowrun. I was hooked from the start. It has fantasy. Check. It has Cyberpunk Dystopia. Check. Its default setting at the time I was introduced to it was Seattle. Check. It felt like this game was made specifically for me.
Were the books easy to parse for the rules? Absolutely not, Catalyst is not the best at organizing information in their books. Were the rules easy to carry out at the table once understood? Still no, a simple combat action can take about 3-5 different rolls to carry out. But did any of that wreck my enjoyment of the game? It really didn’t.
My friend Liz was the one to introduce me to Shadowrun. It’s one of their favorite games, though they weren’t a fan of some changes introduced in the Fourth Edition compared to the Third Edition they were more used to. My own first copy of a Shadowrun book is a collector’s edition of the 20th Anniversary printing of the Fourth Edition. That game only lasted for a couple sessions, like I said, they weren’t a fan of the newer rules, but I was hooked.
When I moved from Seattle to Lansing for school, I met my Michigan RPG group. I started off just as a player in the D&D Encounters program, but pretty quickly got my Game Master itch again and started up a Shadowrun night. That game ran through the end of fourth edition and through the first couple years of Fifth Edition. We played through the entire Seattle and New York seasons of the Missions program.
Nearly every RPG group has that story from a session that you revel in as you share with other gamers. Shadowrun provided one of those for my group. Our dwarven rigger doubled as the group hacker. Given the way fourth edition treated wifi, he could largely stay in his van. That fact was baked into the character. The man lived in his van, was a total tin foil hat type and was entirely eccentric. Never was that eccentricity more on display than during the run when the group needed to break into a house of some executive to look for incriminating evidence. The rigger decided to hack the alarms. Now, that’s not a bad idea, nor is it a strange one on its own. But most hackers would simply turn off the security system. Ours rewrote the software to order a pizza when tripped instead of summoning police. Meanwhile, the group continued in under the impression that the alarms were off. I guess they were, from a certain point of view.
When I moved from Michigan to Ohio, I had a several year gap between Shadowrun games before trying to teach my current group the game by Zoom in 2020. It did not go well. Shadowrun is way too clunky to try and teach while reminding yourself of rules and dealing with the split attentions that are a reality of remote play.
But, I’ve been reading the fourth edition again, been looking at the missions again. And the itch is coming. I want to break out the combat cheatsheets and procedure checklists for ranged attacks. I want to sit with players as they spend their 400 points of customization and make the most unhinged characters. Because that magic blend of fantasy and cyberpunk just leads to some of the best characters I’ve ever seen.
In the Player’s Handbook, there’s a recommendation to read The Return of the Sorcerer by Clark Ashton Smith. I thought it was a book, so I spent a bunch of time looking for it. It’s really a short story from 1931, and I was able to find a copy online.
The premise is that the unnamed narrator is hired to assist a researcher as a secretary, in part because of his ability with Arabic (longtime mythos readers will know where that’s going). The work gets more mysterious, especially after some translation work, and the boss seems really paranoid about some rats in the walls.
Smith does a really good job immersing you in the creepy research sorcerer’s house. Descriptions and vibes are spot on. The creeping horror gets you excited for, and simultaneously dreading the next revelation.
It was really good, it’s really short, and you can get it online. There is no reason not to check it out.
Using in a Game?So, there’s some good storytelling things here that are reminding me that I do not need to be subtle or clever in my secrets to be effective in surprise and horror and dread.
Smith pretty much gives away the big ending twist between the title of the story and the information given through the translation done within the first couple scenes. Then you just sit and wait for the pay off.
There’ve been plenty of discussions about when players have no idea where they’re going because they’re missing some piece of the puzzle. This story is a pretty clear example that hiding the secrets is not necessary and that in fact putting them right out there can be effective in building that level of dread that we might be looking for.
I really enjoyed a review of Reactionary Worldbuilding: From Speculative Imagination to Political Practice put together by Ancillary Review of Books. The review takes a look at a book that tracks connections between Speculative Fiction and the ways it has been co-opted into the libertarian/alt-right circles. It’s added a book to my TBR list.
I really liked a discussion at Sly Flourish about the player tendency to defend the fun out of a game. It started with Kelsey Dionne of Arcane Library saying she could tell when players homebrew classes as opposed to GMs because they create abilities to pull challenge out of the game. There’s a suggestion that instead of making defensive magic items just have numbers go up (and thus turn combat into a series of unfortunate misses) you add something interesting like fire shield that can turn defense into offense instead, and invite players to want to get hit and have to balance hit points with the fun thing they get when they get hit.
Aldin th Mage posted Notebook RPG, a solo game designed to need only a pocket notebook, a pencil, and a d6, on itch.io. It looks interesting and I definitely have a Traveler’s Notebook clone with me most days.
There is a new competitor to DriveThruRPG, more dedicated to TTRPGs than itch. I’m liking the layout and how responsive RPG Trader is. Also, they have all the games put out by Almost Bedtime Theater, one of my favorite podcasts.
Standard Ebooks ReleasesMoving the Mountain by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Sword of Damocles by Anna Katharine Green
The Great Illusion by Norman Angell
In the last couple months, I’ve been getting back into “retro games” aka the ones that came out as I was a kid, and increasingly, the ones that came out while I was a teenager. Gameboy Advance and GameCube being “retro” is crazy, but such is the way of linear time.
Pokémon Fire RedThis one kind of started the most recent kick with its release on Switch. I picked up Fire Red, and got my daughter Leaf Green to go with her new Switch Lite.
I never actually played the Gen 3 remakes when they originally released on the GBA, though as a kid I did play through all three Gen 1 games literally dozens of times.
I love things like adding the running shoes to Gen 1, movement in the original (once I’d played Sapphire) was just so glacial. I am a bit torn on updated movesets for the Kanto Gym Leaders though, as someone who always goes Charmander, Brock’s Onix having Rock Tomb to wreck my Viridian Forest Butterfrew caught for facing the gym stings a little. (And then of course my Charmander hit level 16 in Mt. Moon and learned Metal Claw…)
I’m still very early in this one, as Misty is ALSO harder than I remember, even with my trusty Pikachu in tow.
Pokémon EmeraldI previously wrote about attempting my first Nuzlocke, but when I crashed out against the first gym, I decided I’d just convert to a regular run since it’s been a minute since I did a Hoenn game.
I just finished Norman. What is it in Gen 2 and Gen 3 with Normal Gyms? Norman wrecked me multiple times until I finally figured a way to get past his Spinda without losing one of my fighters to Psybeam and figured a way to stall past Slaking.
It’s interesting after playing Gen 8 and Gen 9 to return to the less open-world games and see how much exploration and figuring where to go next was already part of the game.
Now to figure if I want to spend the time farming for a Feebas and try for a Milotic on this run…
Advance WarsI have loved this series since I first got my GBA with a copy of Advance Wars and a copy of Golden Sun. Still working my way through the tutorial part of the campaign, but really enjoying the practice thinking through best places to move things, which units to sacrifice in order to achieve an objective, and generally quickest way to beat each map.
Fantastic game.
Fire EmblemAnother long-time favorite. I am currently stuck on the first fog of war map of Lyn’s campaign. Archers in the dark are obnoxious.
Also, always pay attention to the win condition in the corner, lest you send Sain at a boss expecting a win and then he gets maxed.
Love the variety of units, thinking through how to use them, and the variety of characters in the story.
Permadeath of favorite characters remains as frustrating in my 30s as it was to my teen self.
These are the four I’ve played the most of the last few weeks. There are a couple I’ve put like five minutes into, but I thought I’d stick to ones I played enough of to actually have thoughts about.
This year, I’ve been making a concerted effort to track down and read some books from Appendix N, as well as from the comparable lists from Pathfinder, from 5e 2014, from Dolmenwood, from Numenera, and honestly from every TTRPG in my collection I could find a list for. I also wrote a list of some media I find inspirational when I make up stories for my players.
So far this year, I’ve finished 34 books; not all have been on one of the list but many have. And I’ve copied those lists into a notebook and noted both the similarities and the differences even between games that share a lot of DNA like AD&D, 5e, and Pathfinder. It got me thinking. What are we saying about our games when we list those things?
The Original Appendix NAppendix N gets talked about a lot in TTRPG spaces online, especially those dedicated to the OSR. Dungeon Crawl Classics uses the name Appendix N as a shorthand to refer to its slightly gonzo styling. Goodman Games even has a blog section dedicated to the books. But what is Appendix N and what’s on it and what does that mean?
What’s on Appendix N is largely a who’s who of pulp fantasy writers: Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, A. Merritt. There are also some pulp horror writers: H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth. There are even a couple authors who before looking in the direction of titles included, I’d think of more as science fiction authors than of fantasy: Poul Anderson and Andre Norton.
Okay, so we have a lot of pulp adventure. So what?
Well, let’s think of some of the most well-known examples of early D&D play. To me, things like the Keep on the Borderlands, Tomb of Horrors, and Jennell Jaquays’s fantastic Caverns of Thracia. The intended campaign, as expressed through the examples given by TSR, was an episodic one. Think of a hero like Conan. We might learn a thing or two of his backstory, but by and large he arrives to the story fully formed, solves a problem, and moves onto the next place and the next problem. And most of the pulp fantasy listed in Appendix N follows that same idea, character who is mostly an archetype arrives at a place, solves a problem, and moves on to the next place.
And so we see in that early D&D that we generally roll up characters that are competent at their jobs, they arrive at a place that has a problem, they solve the problem, they move onto the next place which may not have anything to do with the problem or location we saw here. The throughline of the campaign is the recurring characters of the PCs having their episodic adventures.
Fifth Edition, Forgotten Realms, Modern Fantasy TrendsWhile Pathfinder predates Fifth Edition, it does certain things differently so I’ll address Fifth Edition first.
By and large, Fifth Edition’s Appendix E modernizes the list given in AD&D Appendix N. It gives specific titles to seek out for authors who were previously addressed only by name, and updates the list to include authors who were not published (maybe not even born) in 1977.
Twenty-first century authors like Brandon Sanderson and Patrick Rothfuss join the list, alongside changes to point you toward Clark Ashton Smith alongside H.P. Lovecraft or that to experience Manly Wade Wellman, you should read The Golgotha Dancers.
There is still a lot of pulp here, since Appendix N was all pulp adventure. But the new stuff does not carry that same episodic pulp vibe. Here we add The King-Killer Chronicles, the Wheel of Time, A Song of Ice and Fire, Shanarra, Dragonlance, Earthsea, and Mistborn. This is a shift from the earlier episodic pulp adventure to heroic and epic fantasy. These are stories that stick with a small core group through a single ongoing quest and plot.
And we see that shift in inspiration reflected in what the default mode of play handed out by Wizards of the Coast becomes. Even the Starter Set’s Lost Mine of Phandelver is a multi-level journey to track down a missing person that morphs into a quest to take down a villain that leads to various locales. Then, with the first official adventures released after the full launch, we get the Tyranny of Dragons duology in Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat. These set a standard for a Fifth Edition campaign that you begin as lowly level one adventurers and through one single ongoing plot line uncover related but growing threats that take you to the godlike powers of high level D&D. Like Vin in Mistborn who begins as a member of a street thug group and grows to take on first the ruler of the city, then eventually a god. Or like Rand Al’Thor and his ascent from farm kid to The Dragon Reborn.
And we see a shift here in the assumed setting of D&D. Greyhawk was largely created as a patchwork of these different dungeon locations that were largely dealt with in passing mentioned as landmarks you found yourself near as the module introduced the new hole in the ground (this one is a nasty smelly one, not a comfortable Hobbit hole). In contrast, Fifth Edition (at least the 2014 version) selected the Forgotten Realms as its default setting, giving characters a selection of Forgotten Realms deities as defaults in the core rules, and with all the hardcover adventures released taking place there (though generally with a small paragraph near the beginning on how a DM could rewrite the giant book to make it fit elsewhere). The Forgotten Realms is a Middle Earth to AD&D’s Hyborian Age. There is generally a single giant metaplot during any given season of play with all releases tailored to it. The Realms are full of plot and the plot carries the story rather than the player characters.
And generally that plot is big bad evil guy is doing big bad evil thing and you need to go collect the MacGuffins to stop the terrible apocalypse. Like taking the Ring to Orodruin. Or like finding the Sword of Shannara. The standard variety of play has shifted in the decades D&D has existed and we can see some of the new inspirations that have helped make that shift reflected in its curated list of inspirations.
Pathfinder’s Eclectic ListLike I said before, Pathfinder did things a little differently from Fifth Edition. It did update Appendix N with more modern stories. It included A Song of Ice and Fire before Fifth Edition did. But it did not only modernize the list. It widened the genres to which it looked for inspiration. It also looked backward for earlier stories as well.
Where Fifth Edition added Sanderson and Rothfuss, Pathfinder added Homer and Hugo. Where Fifth Edition added Shannara and Dragonlance, Pathfinder added Hellraiser and the Scottish Play.
And, as a huge fan of the Golarion (or Lost Omens) setting, I honestly see exactly where a lot of these choices fit in. Pathfinder may trend closer to Fifth Edition in its lean toward the long-form campaign built around a single story. After all, Pathfinder started off as a campaign setting and series of level 1-20 Campaign Paths for D&D 3.5e. The inspirations for that setting then stayed in mind when Paizo revised 3.5 to create Pathfinder.
And I can see the Barker influence in a place like Cheliax with its demon worship or Razmiran with its living God Dictator. I can definitely see the Les Mis influence in Galt with its French Revolution styling and magical guillotines. Places like the Saga Lands also give a more sword and sandals pulp vibe. Pathfinder’s Inner Sea region is a varied place with varied stories to tell, and it makes sense that the inspirations that came into it are similarly varied.
Anyway, these are some of the things I’ve noticed while reading through these lists. Have you noticed anything similar when looking at curated lists of inspiration for your games?
For the last couple years I’ve been reading some early books from fantasy and science fiction, like Ensign Flandry. This week, I continued that trend with Sargasso of Space by Andre Norton.
The book was originally released in 1955, under the pseudonym Andrew North. The copy I have is a digitized release by Open Road Media. I mention that, because I have some critiques that are not of the writing itself.
The book is a space opera centering around Dane Thorson a recent graduate into the Trade Service who finds himself matched with a Free Trader ship, the Solar Queen. The crew of the Queen wins an auction for trade rights to a newly surveyed planet, then gets chartered to carry a research team there. But when one of the crew goes missing on an expedition to get the bearings of the planet, surprises lie in wait.
When I reviewed Flandry, I mentioned some sexism that marked the book ‘a product of its time’ as we often put it. I noticed a lot less of that here. Certainly an amount of human-centric colonial assumptions about humanity’s place in the cosmos, but you were probably already imagining those the moment I said space opera and trade service.
The pace was quick, and I enjoyed the crew of the Queen, even if they perhaps aren’t so fleshed out as a crew like that of a Becky Chambers book (to think of a modern author writing non-military space opera). There’s examples both of new crew members making new crew member mistakes, and learning and growing and getting it right the next time. That growth across the story, rather than just being the Author’s Gift to Plot from the rip, is refreshing.
I also loved the word play of the title, once I looked up the word sargasso, remembered what it meant, and remembered the risks sargassum presents to ships.
There is an entire series around the Solar Queen to be read, and the second book is titled Plague Ship. I’ll definitely be reading more of these. I want to see more of what Dane and crew get up to on the next planets they visit.
A couple weeks ago my usual game night had a cancelation and since I’d picked up XCrawl Classics on a whim during the DCC Sale at DriveThruRPG, I ran a one-shot. Since hearing the premise of the game, I’d been itching to get it, itching to read it, itching to run it.
The premise is that in a fantasy dystopian United States analog (an empire ruled by Emperor Ronald I, aka Ronald Regan kept alive by an unholy mixture of advanced medicine and necromancy), dungeon crawling has become a reality TV phenomenon. See why I was instantly sold? As a forever-GM, that means I get to put on my cheesy TV announcer voice and do my best Ryan Seacrest announcing of game action for a whole night. Complete with sending the game to commercial break for bio breaks. (Not actually in the rules, BUT IT SHOULD BE).
System-wise, XCrawl Classics is based on Dungeon Crawl Classics, which began as a line of especially lethal adventures for D&D 3.5, then grew into its own system that embraces things like entirely random character creation, gonzo adventures, and extreme lethality especially in the early game.
XCrawl’s Got Talent is a 0-Level funnel that is included in the XCrawl Classics Core Book and was an easy choice for a one-shot. For those unfamiliar with XCC, or its antecedent Dungeon Crawl Classics, a funnel is where each player rolls up 4 random 0-level characters and plays through an adventure to see who lives to get character levels.
The adventure was a blast. The lethality and need to think through rooms was made clear immediately, setting tone and making expectations obvious. The players adapted quick and the randomly rolled quirky costume table introduced hilarious characters right away. Honestly, there is no way half the characters generated would have been thought up had we been building characters normally.
I would definitely recommend X Crawl Classics if you want to try a gonzo twist on fantasy.
Justin Alexander of The Alexandrian discussed what his session prepped looks like. I like to look at what other game masters do and see if there’s anything I can steal borrow for my own prep.
Dave Clark at Full Moon Storytelling speaks about how maps don’t need to be fancy battlemaps in HD with all the whizbang features. I like the discussion of how even simpler maps can help us understand the relationships between locations.
Back in March, It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton recorded one of my favorite stories from Uncanny Magazine: SuperMAX by Daniel H. Wilson. It’s a really funny story. If you’re not a fan of audio, you can read the story at Uncanny Magazine.
Standard Ebooks ReleasesThe Fifth Queen Crowned by Ford Madox Ford
Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum
Perishable Goods by Dornford Yates
Saïd the Fisherman by Marmaduke Pickthall
Bel Ami by Guy de Maupassant
Banjo by Claude McKay
Recently, I grabbed some lists of science fiction and fantasy authors from my hometown of Seattle, as well as some more local to my newer home in Northeast Ohio. One new-to-me author from the Seattle list was Kira Jane Buxton. I looked her up and came across her debut novel, Hollow Kingdom. The blurb on Libby about “Watership Down meets Dawn of the Dead” and a foul-mouthed crow protagonist wandering Seattle in a zombie apocalypse was an instant sell and I grabbed the audio book immediately and started listening that afternoon.
When I finished it, I had to send a message to my sister asking if she wanted to read “a funny zombie apocalypse that will make you cry.” (She’s a big animal person, so I knew that part would hit harder than anything people.)
This book opens with the protagonist, a domesticated crow named S.T. (short for Shit Turd), watching his human’s eye fall out from his head. This is the sign that all is not right with the world S.T. lives in and sets off a quest with S.T. and his trusty canine buddy Dennis. The book wanders around Seattle and King County seeing what has happened. S.T. hopes to find a cure for what has befallen humanity.
The book pays off on the excellent blurb fantastically. There is plenty of banter between S.T. and the other animals, and a sort of chosen animal quest between the various neighborhoods of Seattle. I especially loved the cryptic names given to various important supporting characters and threats. Who doesn’t want to figure out who The One Who Opens Doors or The One Who Spits are?
Overall, this one was an extremely fun read and I’d highly recommend tracking it down. There’s apparently a sequel which I will absolutely be grabbing.
Over at Full Moon Storytelling, Dave Clark has a fun discussion of the challenges for DMs with the new weekly Beyond Drops and decisions about whether they fit into your campaign.
At Bastionland, Chris McDowell uses an analogy with racing circuits and rallies to talk about different types of locations and play loops that you find in the same game.
At Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together, there is a reread of L.E. Modesitt’s Recluse Saga beginning. Since I have a Recluse book I got from the Tor.com ebook of the month club back in the day on my TBR, I will definitely be following this.
The Professional Women’s Hockey League announced the first team of a new round of expansion in PWHL Detroit! (I’m slightly excited to have a team within driving distance)
At Skeleton Code Machine, there’s a discussion about the mechanics of 2d6 Dungeon and how its Manoeuvre mechanics make an interesting solo dungeon crawl.
Standard Ebooks ReleasesThe Walls of Jericho by Rudolph Fisher
Hamilton by Mary P. Hamlin
The Nature of a Crime by Joseph Conrad
Dr. Wortle’s School by Anthony Trollope
