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John Wick's 'Chess Is Not A Roleplaying Game' Does Not Necessarily Indicate He Is Psychotic

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First, old business:

1. More preview art for Red & Pleasant Land, available here in the next few days.
click to enlarge

"God, it's so beautiful, I love this. It just makes D&D look so fucking now"
--Molly Crabapple

2. Yes, I got paid in actual money for consulting on D&D. Thousands of dollars. Ask them.

3. No, I don't think there's only one way to enjoy playing role playing games. The internet is just dumb and interprets "Here's how I like to make pizza!" as "Only ever make pizza." Remember the Golden Rule of Internet Shit-Talking: Ask anyone who says otherwise for a quote.

Now, new business:

Like everyone else I know, I saw John Wick's "Chess Is Not A Roleplaying Game" essay and was like "Ok, that's crazy…next".

Someone then plussed John Wick into the conversation where I opined that John saying stuff like  "D&D is not a role-playing game" and "Just a moment ago, I called weapon lists one of the most common features in roleplaying games. These things are not features. They’re bugs. And it’s time to get rid of them." as evidence of a highly advanced state of degenerative lunacy on John's part and John showed up and argued with me.

Then, eventually, he was like Ok, let's actually talk (like, with speech) about this.

So we did. Here's a video of us debating what John said.

For the kind of people who actually care about this kind of nitpicky RPG-definition argument, it was really good. It was an actually interesting conversation. There should be more of these.

Next time I'll ask John what's up with his whole "Indiscriminately killing orcs is bad" thing.
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(sigh) Ankhegs

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First, obligatory Red & Pleasant Land preview. It is actually back from the printer...

…not quite available to order yet--but soon. Soon. Sooooon.


So obviously: fuck ankhegs.

They're big boring insects, in every sense. Unlike real animals or mythical monsters, it hasn't got a stable, imaginable core and unlike other totally made up Gygaxian monsters like the beholder it's never had an illustration that stuck this particular image and not that one into anybody's brain. It's a handful of minor gimmicks glued to a pair of awkwardly mated syllables.

But, again, I got this. Check it:

So I changed the name because "ankheg" sounds like the last name of a session keyboardist in an 80s band with a yellow and dark blue album jacket. Rick Ankheg from the Wild Shoulder, y'know, the guys who did "Domes of Passion"? No? Anyway now it's Ankhara.

I made them non-boring so they'd be less boring and obviously redrew them as riding beasts which you can see and why am I even telling you that. But ok, here's the main thing:

The riders are not masters of the beasts, nor even are they Bravestarr-and-Thirty Thirty-like equals: the ankheg controls the rider. Like so many insect empires, they seek to enslave humanoids--uniquely, however, they don't want anyone to know.

So for all your party knows, there's just a ranged panoply of warriors striding boldly across the weatherbeaten plateau atop their chitinous mounts, rearing headlong at the face of a twisting column of  bleak, grey dust. And a violence rings out as the party and the strange cavalry join and mutually assail each other. Then the party slaughters the warriors smugly, but are left tired, bleeding, needing aid. Then and only then do the insects reveal they were the masterminds all the time.

They drag you back to their immensely-sophisticated cave-temple (they can't do the fine carving, so they rip human arms off and slide them over their own pokey arms like gloves) and then let their young batter you psychically by turning your own spoken language into awful insect reverberations (like  locust sounds in a night that only happens between your own ears). If you escape you might walk into sticky honeywax muqarnas falling from the ceiling or a pit where rival subqueens fight using only the limbs of men or find the precious paper they make from spit.

They are at war with driders.
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Fucking Cutting Edge Tabletop Jetset Here Y'All

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Long weekend. Hit Little Tokyo...

… then over to the Indiecade convention

It's Dungeons & Dragons' 40th anniversary so Jon Peterson (author of Playing At The World--the only not-unbelievably-shallow book about the history of Dungeons & Dragons and the only one written by someone whose favorite band is Shellac) and Jennell Jaquays were up on stage talking about the early days of gaming and the explosion of little zines that came out after the D&D rules.
Jennell and Zak
Jennell is awesome--she did Caverns of Thracia and Dark Tower--and then went to video games and basically got in on the ground floor there, too--working a lot of the seminal stuff in the field

Indiecade is largely a videogame convention and even some of the heavy hitters there had no idea how important Jennell had been. I had to be all "DO YOU FUCKING KNOW WHO THIS IS? PAC MAN! QUAKE 3! COLECOVISION! FUCK!"

Then I fanboyed:

Zak: "I'm totally missing my Dark Tower game this morning so I could be here"

Jennell: "I'm sorry"

Z: "After you did Thracia and Dark Tower it seems like everybody else just dropped the ball on big dungeons and started doing nothing but, like, monster-in-a-room and funhouses and…"

J: "It was funhouses and Here's A Story You Have to Run Through In This Order."

Z: "And you came back later after you'd done video games but you didn't do more design?"

J: "Well I stopped because I thought I was repeating myself."

Z: "So it wasn't an external thing?"

J: "No, I just didn't want to do the same thing over again, I wanted to move on."

Z: "That's so cool."

Historical tidbit: Jon told me that this picture from the original D&D "Men & Magic" was done by a woman named Cookie Corey:

Then I got to run some of the adventures from Red & Pleasant Land. This is what I look like when I do vampire children voices...
I had to run it off my laptop because the printed book hasn't shipped yet.

I had this conversation 1000 times at Indiecade:

"Is Red & Pleasant Land out?"

"Nah James wanted to ship it with Death Frost Doom and he sent Death Frost Doom back to the printer because it wasn't black enough"

"That's so James"


The game was fun though. First group killed one monster and escaped with a 300 gp chafing dish and the otherpretty much got Total Party Killed by vampires.

One group got put on trial for being too good at croquet and ran from a pudding--the other tried turning the Queen, then blackmail, to no avail.



with Anna Anthropy/Auntie Pixelante



Then back home to play D&D with the usual suspects:


"Instead of trying to deceive him, can i just, while he's confused, hit him in the kneecap with a hatchet?"

Then I ran my game after and the players decided to sleep under Deathfrost Mountain. 3 are insane, 2 are blind.

Then we went to the USC Playthink salon and they talked about putting more games in art museums and I was like Yeah hurry up.

Next up tomorrow probably I sow you what I did to the Azer which, seriously, I had to because Azer is the dumbest monster.
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Azer--"…as the fire devoureth the stubble, and the flame consumeth the chaff"

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-Isaiah 5:24


Aaaaaaaaaaaanother sucky "A" monster. Possibly the absolute bottom of the barrel, the Azer is supposed to be a flaming beardy dwarf from the plane of fire. It's like the kind of idea a disembodied butt with wheels would have if that butt worked for TSR in the 80s and hated people who played D&D and could hold a pen and sucked.

Anyway, here's mine:
Click to enlarge
The Azerites are the victims of a cruel and innovative goblin joke dating from the 8th Agon: dwarf prisoners were given a hallucinogen that made them both susceptible to suggestion and immune to flame, then set their faces alight and sent them charging at their fellows.

While under the influence of the burning Serums of Liao, the Azerite is not only borne into a manic fury, but perceives all non-dwarves as goblins.

The early Azerites became addicted to the Serums, as did their descendants. These pyrolatrous tribes have only two moods:

1. Berserk
and
2. Quiet, tragic, coal-socketed staring at anything inert enough not to drive them berserk.

On the right-hand half of the yellow statblock you'll see d4 things that happen while you fight ignited Azerites (wood things explode in sparks, etc) next to that you'll see a list of 8 titles of various Azerite warriors, the 8th is simply called "Serums of Liao" because the serums are actually more important than the identity of the dwarf who bears them. "The Path" is likely the honorific for their Bad Fire Wizard. The rest maybe have extra weapons or drugborne powers related to their names.

Below that is a list of short term goals for a randomly encountered group of azerites-- 1-4 are things they want to sacrifice to the flames, 5 and 6 ("all die in flames and battle"(including them) and "convert infidels" are self-explanatory.

The "Lair Actions" beneath are proper Lair Actions but also just things you might find going on in there. I suppose I could call them "Lair Features" but it's my monster manual so whatever.

Also replaced the hammer with an axe because why would you ever not?
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Gender And Representation In Warhammer's Realms of Chaos

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It was long ago. A Salt with a Deadly Pepa had just come out, Bad Religion had just done SufferDie Hard was in theaters--and nobody knew who Tzeentch was.

More than a decade earlier, Dungeons & Dragons--by fusing wargaming and SF fandom--had been be responsible for an influx of women into the hobby gaming scene. In three years, Vampire: The Masquerade would bring more in.

But this is wargaming and this is England, 1988, and Games Workshop was totally not doing that. And it's been that way ever since.


Why Pick On Warhammer?

Because by 1988 Warhammer had become basically its own hobby. After re-inventing tabletop wargaming for a post-D&D world with Warhammer Fantasy Battle (1983), they followed up with the one-two punch of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1986) and Warhammer 40,000 (1987) (the game which still looms over the miniatures hobby like a bleak and shouldery god) that was powerful enough that GW could afford to create a chain of Games Workshop stores. A teenager could scour the yellow pages for a place to buy tabletop stuff, go in, spend 45 minutes, come out and get picked up by mom without ever seeing a copy of Dragon or Call of Cthulhu anywhere near the top shelf.

In miniatures wargaming, Warhammer stuff was--and still is--nearly the only game in town, dominating the vast central plain that separates kids and their role-playing games on one coast from bent bearded men and their historical wargames on the other.

With power this great comes responsibility--and when it came to getting women into wargaming, the Warhammer franchise's Girlfriend Index, a quarter-century later, is still miserably low.



Why Pick On Realms of Chaos?

RoC was quite unique when it was first unleashed on the world. It was the first GW product to have so much time and money allotted to the artwork.
-Tony Ackland

Warhammer has elves and dwarves and trolls but it also has Chaos. The baroque imagery of Chaos is the defining difference between the Warhammer mythos and the D&D one and that--because of the role of mutations as an excuse to convert and scratch-build miniatures--drives a lot of the mini-painting and modelling sub-hobby. The two Realms of Chaos books (Slaves to Darkness and Lost And The Damned) were central to building the Warhammer games into a coherent universe, and the lavish nearly-300 page books still stand as a high-water mark for mechanical richness, inventive writing, graphic design, and especially art in hobby gaming.

Without Realms of Chaos--which made the bad guys as interesting, playable and prone to internal strife as the good guys--the Warhammer franchise is just another '80s D&D variant with D&D in space tacked on. With Chaos, all the pieces of the Warhammer cult the Internet knows and loves and loathes slide neatly into place. Such sins as Warhammer commits trace back to this garden.

Personnel

Warhammer was nearly called Battleblade:  also, Warhammer was typed by Rick Priestley’s mum.
-Bryan Ansell

There were women around Games Workshop when RoChaos was gestating, but not a lot. Sixty-odd writers, artists and miscellaneous staff are credited on the first book, eight of whom are women--but none of them did any writing, illustrating or game design. About half worked on the short showcase of painted miniatures in the middle of the book--in addition to Trish Morrison, sculptor and co-founder of Marauder miniatures, three women (I think) painted minis: Suzanne Bladon, Katy Briggs and Lucie Richardson.

Only one female name reappears for the second book--Lindsey D. Le Doux Paton (now Priestley), previously credited as a typesetter, moves up to the writing staff for Realms of Chaos: Lost and the Damned. This makes a difference: while both books were loaded with the flavor fiction pieces Silver Age RPGs were so weirdly enamored of, the first one has nobody besides a nameless girl who "sniggers" while an old man's telling a Spooky Chaos story and an equally nameless woman who helps an artist summon something in some inscrutable way by "caressing" a statue, whereas the book Le Doux Paton worked on has a handful of stories that actually need the women in them in order to be stories.

The women in Lost and the Damned are mostly first-scene-of-the-horror-movie style sort of victim-protagonists: a blind woman's POV sets up the dramatic entrance of a skeletal champion, another sacrifices her husband to Nurgle for being too fat and then becomes the subject of a weird revenge as worms spout from his grave and turn her into a steed. Still: none of the women in these sidebars fight anybody, do anything particularly impressive, or know much more than anybody else.

There is exactly one gameable, named female character in all of the almost 600-pages of the two Realms of Chaos volumes. She is one entry in a list of 68 pre-generated chaos warband members: Jarea--a compatriot of Yrlman the Loose.

Lastly among the retinue is Jarea, a sorceress whose strange tastes have led her to Yrlman's side to learn the ways of pleasant perversity that he knows too well. But Jarea is far more powerful than Yrlman and is jealous of the favour he receives. For the moment she revels in her gnawing envy, biding her time--soon she too will take her first steps in the dangerous dance of Slaanesh's chosen…

So it's not much: an unillustrated jealous employee formerly in some creep's sexual thrall (would you say an ambitious male follower was "jealous"?--you'd probably just say he was "scheming" because that's a verb and so it's about what someone does, not an adjective about their emotions)--and she has an ant face. But she is Warhammer's first female chaos warrior. Hail Jarea, Shatterer of Ceilings.

I honestly doubt any of these stories (or lack thereof) per se turned off many potential female Warhammer players, or made male players take any extra effort to keep them out--you'd have to be pretty deep into the books already to notice them. They do, however, illustrate just how little it occurred to anybody at Games Workshop that there were girls inside the Warhammer world who did Warhammer stuff or girls in the real world who might want to do Warhammer stuff.

What does fail to turn young potential gamers off is seeing or not seeing themselves reflected in the art.
Left: dude, Right: dude
Also Not Appearing In This Book

Neither justice nor art are ever served by an artist making art about something they have no talent for  but once GW became both a corporate entity which openly did things just for the money and the largest voice in its entire hobby (and all the social spaces that entails) then the art directors and administrators become responsible for seeking out artists and writers who can do the things they can't.

If Adrian Smith insists the magnificent optical vortex he summons in that picture up there will dangerously unbalance if he drew in some tits, I have to trust him (he is, after all, an actual genius and I hate drawing guys, personally)--but it's preposterous to suggest the art director could find no decent and Warhammerable artist that was available to draw some woman on some other page.

In books stuffed with drawings and descriptions of dozens of creatures and societies, the number of missed opportunities here is amazing: centaurs are all drawn as guys, minotaurs are all guys, beastmen are all guys (despite how awesome and scary "she-goat" sounds), everyone involved in the Warhammer creation myth--the story of the Horus Heresy--is a guy, dragon-ogres are all guys (no rounded and distending green torsos), the Sensei--who possess a fraction of the Emperor's power and lead good-aligned warbands against chaos-- are only referred to as the Emperor's "sons", the word "coven" gets used a lot--and the leader of one is called a "magus"--with nary a "witch" anywhere (aside from the possibility of witch elves buried in the army list).

Crowning the casual archaisms (using "he" for everything, "Many wise men have been carried…""huntsmen") it's repeatedly pointed out that if your chaos champion does really well for a really long time he can become a daemon prince. And there's rules for daemon princes and point values and lots of pictures and generally just the word Demon Prince every third fucking page and nobody ever managed to think the words daemon princess yet somehow they do to remember note that wizard's familiars can take the form of "beautiful young women" as well as "sorcerer's imps and bizarre creatures"--and, oh yeah, the lesser daemon of Kweethul is a harpy. Women were treated not like audience members but like a sword & sorcery trope, in there attached to things just like snakes and snails and scorpion tails were.



Illustrations

There are two kinds of women in the Chaos art: sexy and not sexy.

Out of five or six-hundred pictures, here's pretty much every single not-sexy woman:





The vast majority, however, were very explicitly babes, which brings us rather neatly to...
Slaanesh

"Slaanesh was meant to be a sibilant, erotic, breathy, whispered/murmured sound. The models didn’t turn out quite as erotically charged as I’d hoped."

-Bryan Ansell

One of the first Warhammer games I ever played--when I was fourteen--was with a girl fielding an army of Slaaanesh--and the last one I played had a girl fielding an army of Slaanesh.
There are four chaos powers: Nurgle, Tzeentch, and Khorne, who are male--and Slaanesh, lord of depravity--who is both male and female.

So: 7/8ths male and almost* the only time Warhammer talks about androgyny it's in the context of evil. If  teenagers play you and you're the only game in town, that's a message, and it's obviously a fucked up one.

Slaanesh also dips into the whole sex-as-evil trope since there's no Good God of Sex but what're you gonna do? It's hard to imagine how anybody would do that without some very boring hippie shit anyway. Something about sex as transgression goes beyond passing cultural norms and gets into taboos about adult spaces vs family spaces and how authority and religion are always an attempt to control sexuality (because desire can and routinely does ignore and disrupt the oligarchic status quos these institutions are based on--see Romeo and JulietHamlet, all noir movies ever made etc) and so, basically, the idea of sex being somehow a disruption is just kind of always there because it is.

And anyway problems with this part of Slaanesh are pretty much part-and-parcel of the pseudocosmic 70s glam rock androgyny it grew out of--Slaanesh basically plugs into the same socket as Bowie, KISS and Manson:

Pastel and electric shades are the chief colours, although white is often used as well. These colours are also sometimes carried over into everyday wear, although they may be modified to fit in with current fashions. Regardless of any considerations, all Slaanesh followers wear garb of sensuously high quality.

….its troops parade in frivolous colours and clashing patterns, fantastic jewels and flamboyant costumes. The whole impression is that of a costume ball or masque rather than a battle…Its Daemons and warriors shriek obscene jokes to each other, disport themselves with the dead and laugh with pleasure even as their own lives are taken. Any sensation is, after all, to be experienced and enjoyed. To express horror is regarded as a dreadful failing, one that is sure to be punished by the lord of pleasure.



Slaanesh's creatures concatenate the sensual with the fucked--the mounts of Slaanesh are lean Gigeresques with phallic heads, "long, feminine legs" and at least 4 boobs running down the front, the fiends are pale insect-centaurs with whiplike tongues, and the greater daemons are Tom-of-Finland minotaurs with extra arms in studded leather. Many creatures of Slaanesh exude a musk that makes you want to stand near them, doing nothing.

And then there's the daemonettes--



The Realms of Chaos books are full of daemonettes and sexy babes for the best possible reason: the artists all liked to draw them. The artists all liked to draw them for the worst possible reason: it didn't occur to the art director to hire a wider variety of artists.

Regardless of the reasons they got there--Mandy will not roll without her daemonettes. Period. You can pry them from her cold, dead, feminist-gamer fingers.

Slaanesh and his panoply suggest a basic problem with de-sexualization. If you took away the daemonettes and replaced them with Female Champions in Reasonable Armor, you'd be inviting every woman and every feminist I've ever seen play Warhammer to leave the table. And that would be--in the most results-based and scientific sense--a sexist effect. Less women getting what they want, less women period. Suggesting the daemonettes are sexist or a problem is suggesting it's sexist or a problem to invite Whitney B. and Vivka V. and Mandy M. to come and play and be happy. And it isn't--not even a little.

A certain kind of girl really likes fielding an army of half-naked hellions in fetish gear--it happens to be a kind of girl I know a lot of. Unfortunately, it's pretty much the only kind you can be if you like having women in your army and you want to play Chaos.

There are thousands of male miniatures and male characters in the Games Workshop catalogue--for women it's the relatively recent Sisters of Battle, the egalitarian-but-enigmatically-masked Eldar, or the daemonettes and the rest of Slaanesh's slutty army. It's this asymmetry that's bad and sexist. The men in Chaos are about war or disease or mutation or fucking. The women are about fucking. You can be whatever you want, so long as it's a choice.

To put it another way: it's not Slaanesh's fault if the only women in the Realms of Chaos work for Slaanesh, it's Khorne's fault for not hiring more women.


The Distaff Powers

The easiest way to untwist the genderweirdness in the Realms of Chaos is just to do what most adult gamers reflexively do anyway: ignore it. But there might be more interesting ways.

Let's posit a few things:

We know the people of the Imperium and Old World are Orwellian satires of hidebound xenophobes invented by Thatcher-era Britpunks.
We know these people--Space Marine chaplains, Grey Knights, Keepers of the Black Library, etc--are the sources of most of the legends we have about Chaos.

So:

What "everyone knows" about the Chaos powers is also filtered through a comically backward worldview.

The fact is there are at least three other major chaos powers--with Beasts, Mounts, Daemons, Marks, Sigils and Gifts of their own, but these are spoken of only in the quietest and most secure vaults of the Black Library. The old men call them the Distaff Powers. The existence of warp beings even more powerful than the Emperor is disturbing enough--female creatures of such status are a downright obscenity.

One is Lolth, Queen of All Shadows, but the other two…?

…and there are probably others with no gender at all.
-----

This runs smack into the Shreyas Paradox (named after an RPG guy who actually believes it): If you reproduce a medieval (or any past) time period or mindset in a game, you're reproducing a time when people were oppressed--which might offend people. But if you change the past so it reflects contemporary values you're whitewashing oppression out of history--which might offend people.

But since you should only be gaming with people you trust to handle any conversation that might come up, this paradox doesn't matter.

p.s. Yes I gave this entry a goofy pseudoacademic title on purpose.

* Yes, there is the very neglected Liadriel. Try googling him/her.
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Ontologically Ambiguous Banshee

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click to enlarge
Out of the A's in my 5e Monster Manual, and onto: The Banshee.

Made some minor changes (I took a sharpie to the original illustration, stuck some hooks in her hair, threw on some random legends from wikipedia) and some bigger changes:

-The banshee wail breaks all glass and crockery in the area. So your potions will dribble all over your scrolls--though you may not notice right away and when you get home from the dungeon (do you have a home?) you'll be like "Fuuuck", and your roomate's like "What?" and you'll be like "I fought this Banshee and…""And all your sandwiches have Fire Giant strength now.""Yyyyyyyup".

-…or maybe you won't because maybe you'll just be dead because I changed it so you hear the banshee howl once and save or you're unconscious and then again and save or you're dead. Like Silver Banshee in the Superman comics it has to know who you are in order to kill you.

-Now Banshees do not suck: they are fine, gothic and creepy--but ghosts and ethereal undead in general suck in D&D because basically you just hit them with magic or magic weapons and that's not spooky. So I gave a lot of thought to how you'd deal with something ephemeral and semi-real

I put together that idea from the Silver Banshee about the banshee having to know who you are to kill you with something I got while I was reading Heidigger about how things only definitely exist relative to a perceiver and how the banshee is a kind of ghost so that means it's there but not there at the same time and so it's only relatively extant and we can only say we understand a thing's existence to the degree and in the ways we can test it…ok anyway:

Any quality of the banshee only exists so far as the first person in the party to test that specific quality is concerned.

So, like, only the first PC to hear the banshee (probably an elf) can hear it. Only the first PC to see the banshee can see it, only the first PC to physically attack it can hit it physically, only the first to use magic on it can use magic on it, only the first to make telepathic contact can make telepathic contact, etc.

So, very likely, you'll have the party having to cooperate to fight a foe they aren't certain is there--and the banshee can only focus on one party member at a time.

This lasts until the next night (only goes out at night, natchrly) or until one of the characters dies (the condition persists while a PC is unconscious)--in which case the next PC to test the creature can interact with it on the "taken" level.
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In othier news, f you liked hearing Mandy's Warhammer army of choice yesterday, Mandy did a post on her tumblr about what she wants to see more of in video games (nsfw)...

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An Attempt At A Review of D&D

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If anything unifies all the experiences (and maybe nothing does) it's those cliches of the early levels--tavern keepers, scrimping for splint mail and ten foot poles, comically patchwork parties with the clerics next to half-orc thieves--not simply because they are a common starting point from which different games fork into mutually excluding orbits but because these early moments contain the maximum of the RPG's unique weapon: that constant intimation of potential. The moment when the door is not yet all the way open, when the clues have not yet jelled, when even the genre of monster is purely hypothetical. The million "coulds" of an isolated plinth in a square-plan stone place with 4 exits into 4 dark halls. 

On the first page of the novel when you don't even know what it's about "Walter stepped over a wheel onto the low, clean lawn…" what is it? What will it be? That's the RPG--except always, every chapter, because while the novel begins, imperceptibly but eventually, to list toward its themes (you know it is a book, you know it had an author, if the author isn't building to something you can stop paying attention to all the sandwiches and weather along the way), you know the RPG can't, even if it wanted to, proceed without scattering usable toys (the sandwich and the weather are yours if you want them), the potentia is always there, never quite dwindling into clarity because theme, or unity, or even meaning, implies an ending--and an ending is a limit. And the power of it is equal to the ability to suspend you in its limitlessness.

You are (and--when it's very good--can feel yourself-) standing continuously and absolutely genuinely on the brink of what art can only fake: the infinite.
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Basilisk, Littler

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Still fixing up my Monster Manual.

The spread on pages 24 and 25--with a competently done basilisk and a really quite nicely rendered behir about to petrify and electrocute each other, respectively--illustrates the problem with both of them.

They're both big lizardy things.  And since the game has dragons in it, big lizardy things risk eat into the terrifying and isolated psychological space that should belong to dragons alone.

I basically deal with this problem by making them really small.
A basilisk is just a sort of incredibly dangerous iguana--not so much a monster as a natural curiosity (thus Vornheim's basilisk fights, which take place in a closet). Also somebody--can't remember if it was wikipedia or Pliny the Elder--told me they're vulnerable to weasels and I believe them.

Otherwise the basilisk is an awesome monster with a cool name, plus I've already used like 3 of them in my campaign so I can't and don't want to change them much.

That crude sharpie drawing in the lower left is a sketch of some pre-lapsarian state of mythical equipoise where the medusa, cockatrice, catoblepas and basilisk stood mutually blocked from each others' gaze by the Egg of the World, which they all looked at, waiting to kill whatever emerged. How the clinamen that resolved this stalemate was introduced I haven't figured out yet.

(And yes, taxonomy pedants, we all know behirs--being salamandery--are amphibians).
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The Horror, The Horrocks

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An Interview With Sarah Horrocks. About Horror.
Tumblrable version here at this link here

From Horrocks' Tumblr
Most critics suck at their job. Few ever take the effort to push themselves past more or less dressed-up versions of "This part worked for me, this part didn't p.s. I went to college" and give you something to chew on even when you totally disagree with them--so I keep track of the good ones. If Dorothy Parker  says something about a play, if David Thomson says something about an actor, if Martin Amis says something about a novel, if Jeff Rients says something about games or if Sarah Horrocks says something about a horror movie, I wanna hear it.

Why here on an RPG blog? Here's why: in DIY D&D we talk about horror all the fucking time--when we talk about how a lot of Old School play turns D&D into a game of sneak-sneak-die, when we talk about atmosphere, when we talk about what and what isn't "across the line" in a game like Lamentations of the Flame Princess, or even when we just talk about how to make shit more metal. 

So it's worth consulting Sarah: she's agile, original, and precise (especially in analyzing how movies look), she avoids cliches while staying bloggily personal and conversational. Read her on a movie you haven't seen and you'll want to see it, read her on a movie you've seen and you'll see new things in it. Getting on with it, here's Horrocks talking horror:

Z: When did you first fall in love with horror movies?

S: It was really late.  I was a scared kid growing up.  I couldn't even watch like the scary episodes of Unsolved Mysteries without having terrible nightmares for months.  I mean I had nightmares without horror's help.  And I sort of carried that fear of horror into my early 20s even.  I started to dabble more into the genre mostly because of how depressed and terrible I felt in those years.  I was just coming out as trans, and was still massively struggling against depression, and I had no money--and against that I just felt numb.  I didn't know what I was going to do.  I mean I was writing then, but my sense was that nobody would ever want to read what I had to say. 

And so it was kind of a thing where it was almost like a self-harm kind of thing, where I wanted to terrorize myself

--I wanted to see how bad I could make it, by just confronting these things which terrified me or disgusted me--I mean I passed out in kindergarten on a trip to the hospital when they showed us how they took blood using a puppet.  

But I could just imagine the blood coming out of that puppet and what it would be like to have my own blood drained--so I mean, scared and weak stomached--and so at first horror was chasing this dark rush.  It's probably like that for other people, but when they're kids. To go through that as a young adult is weird.  

So I mean a large reason why I watched all of these movies was because in my comics, I know what I want to make, and I know that the stories I have to tell are horror stories--but I don't have the language for it, and by just spamming so many films at once into my brain, it would allow me to better articulate some of the horrors I feel day to day.  Plus, I mean there are so many great horror films that are a part of everyone else's lives, that I'd never seen...I felt left out!  I want to talk about Hellraiser 2, too, you know.
From Horrock's comic "Hecate Snake Diaries"
Z: So for a while there you were watching a gory horror film every day--did you find out anything that, overall, was true about horror?

S: Well I think moreso than most other genres, Horror is mostly the cycling of modes that the audience is familiar with going in--and because the modes are familiar, it produces a kind of hypnosis, whereby the details within those modes are more important.  Horror is a genre entirely of the details.  Which has I think made it very ill-suited to modern audiences which only care about how the plot comes together. So like in Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage--there's a killer on the loose, the detective of sorts, tries to figure out who it is, and how to stop them, yada yada--but what's important is that opening scene with the art gallery with the big windows and Tony Musantes trapped between doors witnessing the murder, as we watch him watch a girl bleed out. 
So much about the best horror is about the hypnosis of having you leave a wider context and live in as close to a singular moment as possible. 
And unlike many other genres, horror will happily be nonsensical to hit that spot.  Someone like Argento happily works in a dream logic that is hinged entirely on the sensations of a particular segment.  

Past that, I think horror is more rich than any other field in terms of women's studies.  This is one of the few genres where women are usually the focal point.  For a variety of interesting reasons--but I mean, all these nerds are trying to get a Black Widow movie--but that's never going to be as empowering as Ripley in Alien.  The final girl concept in general is a really enjoyable way to approach these films.  I mean so many issues of harassment, and space and agency get hit up in horror so directly--and there's a lot more empowering figures in these films than like noir or superhero or romance genres.  So I thought that was interesting.

Z: Here's something you said that I love:
"There is a relationship between horror and the things that make us happy in this life that I think culturally we are unable to appreciate...when we deny horror's role we end up with lying sack of shit art that contains no truth to it"
…I was wondering if you could expand on how you see horror as a kind of "responsible" art form, with something to say.

S: Well for me the only thing that's really interesting to me in life is beauty or more directly the sublime.  I say this because I think that the sublime is an aspect of death, and the awe that we feel in it's presence is the terrible processes of time and how it pulls all of the moments that make up our experience farther and farther away from us--and that the process of living requires a desire for beauty in some form in order to justify itself--but if we see that beauty as attached to an idea that exists outside of time, outside of life--and actually as an aspect of the end of our continuous experience--then we understand that it is the one singular experience in life, and everything is just it's shade.  And so I look for ways to find these sort of imperfect temporal occurrences of beauty in symbols.

I think I probably need to expand slightly what I mean when I say beauty is death, and then once I do that it will make more sense why horror is important.  So what is the experience of beholding beauty?  It is fundamentally the experience of our own deficits.  Our own mortality.  Our own imperfections.  It is something that is beyond our scope and makes us feel small and dying in it's presence.  It calls attention to the horror of the passing of our time around us.  When you see beauty as the sublime, it's the sensation of losing your breath.  I've heard before, the idea of death represented as a entity like you see death and death is so beautiful that you can't help but accept it.  Whether that's a light that you follow, or whether it's a beautiful form with an infinity of unfolding eyes--that experience outside of life is what informs beauty.

I think even though functionally the way we are using beauty culturally is to scare people into spending money, the presentation is generally as an affirmation of life, which I don't think is correct. 
There is an underlying horror to all representations of beauty.  Beauty causes hate.  Enmity.  Jealousy.
We warp the bodies of ourselves and the world around us and do horrible horrible things because of it.  And in fact, many of our standards of beauty are built upon famine, torture, and exploitation.

So I think this is where the value of horror comes in because it reminds us of death's place in beauty.  And the times when that horror has been most fully accepted--that our lives such that they are are build upon the terrorism of the experiences of others around us--these are also the times when art has been most potent.  The most prominent example in American culture of this is 1970s American cinema which I think most would freely hold without too much contention, as the apex of our film culture.

But what was that built upon?  It was built upon the crashed idealism of the 60s, the dead bodies of King, the Kennedy Brothers, the re-election of Nixon, the Vietnam meat factory, Watergate--our crimes had become impossible to ignore, and our cinema reflected that. 

And was better for it.  Because it was the closest thing to expressing the truth of any moment which is it's attachment to an attendant horror.  Sometimes quite directly.  I think that horror is the most exciting way to attack this kind of thing as well--because with horror we can transgress and be terrible--now where Horror starts to fail is when those transgressions have no weight.  But fundamentally, horror is the ritualized symbols through which we can debase ourselves enough to sometimes peak at really rich veins of the sublime.  I mean any genre can have it's possibilities--but I find with horror the probability of seeing something and being shaken in some way, is much higher.  The number of sort of one hit wonders in horror kind of attests to this.  Pascal Laugier can only make Martyrs and films which aren't Martyrs.


Z: So what's good about beauty? Or is beauty just like: full of bad things but basically just a peak experience in and of itself so, without those peak experiences: why live? Can we make a "sugar-free dessert"? Beauty that's harmless? Is that a good idea?
S: Everything is good about beauty.  I don't think it's the dessert, I think it's the main course, in encapsulates the most we can aspire to experience both from within and from without, in life--because it is death.  There's nothing harmless about it.  Even in it's most neutered form. The question is more how can we craft beauty, or replicate beauty--or what are the conditions that are most useful for it to be called into being.  So like a soap commercial with a "beautiful" face, how that works is by creating a gap between how you feel, and what is being presented to you with beauty--the fear of your lack in this presence--and of the attendant deterioration of beauty through time, is enough to induce the kind of panic that may make you part with a few dollars.  But that's a pretty low form, because it is so sanitized.  In a soap commercial, the form that is being presented as beauty has been market tested to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and has been scrubbed of any and all danger--it's barely beauty at all because of this.  Beauty in it's full bloom is terrifying.  It doesn't just induce a clutching of one's wallet--but your heart and breath can actually stop--you think about Stendhal syndrome, and those kinds of reactions to beauty--or congregations in a church who start speaking in tongues--that's closer to beauty in it's actual manifestation.  When we make beauty safe and controlled I think life gets a little more stupid.

Z: Is catharsis basically what we're talking about here? How does catharsis work?
S: I think the best horror films, what's great about them is that they don't give you catharsis.  The end of Wake in Fright just makes you want to saw your head off.  Horror works obviously with repression, like catharsis does--but at it's best, it's catharsis without release.  In Simon Rumley's The Living and the Dead, it just keeps getting worse and worse, and nothing ever gets better.  You just watch this family disintegrate humiliatingly, horribly, violently under the weight of mental illness, and economic ruin until there's nothing left.

To come out of a horror film and feel that life is more bleak, and that there is no comfort for us in the end--it's pretty great.

I do think in the slasher film genre there is catharsis, but it's because that genre is also so phallic.  You're kind of coming in with the idea that it will be this buildup, and then the girl will get off.  Weirdly the killer's sexual attention is largely thwarted in the end, he never gets release--but the audience by seeing the final girl escape, gets their relief.  At least until the sequel.

But not all horror falls into that category.  I don't think for instance that Trouble Every Day is cathartic.  Maybe In My Skin is cathartic?  It depends on whether you view self-cannibalization with the same self-actualization as the protagonist of the film. 

I think the high point of horror is probably before the relief from terror, if there is any--where the story is at it's bleakest, darkest peak--it can kind of float in that space for a moment---and that's the spot you'd like to live in forever as an audience--even if it is completely awful.
Z: Is that sort of moment like the semi-catharsis of waking from a nightmare and realizing it was just
a nightmare?


S: Of course, but oftentimes this convention is subverted.  In Nightmare on Elm Street, they always think they're awake and safe and Freddy's gone, but there's always that last bit where Freddy's like "nah, not going anywhere".  Don Coscarelli's Phantasm and Phantasm II play with that as well.  "It's only a dream" Except in a horror film, it's oftentimes not.  

I think horror is on some level intrinsically about the notion that there is in the end no relief.  


Maybe the killer is killed like in Fulci's Don't Torture a Duckling--but the system, which is the real one creating the evil that is killing these children, is alive and well, and will continue to perpetuate.  Even when it's not a system, the slasher film from the get is set up with the killer just going away to jail.  Norman Bates wasn't dead at the end of Psycho.  At the end of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Leatherface and crew are still THERE.  Still waiting.  There is no relief, and I think that extrapolates out to a more realistic way to view the world, because we'd like to think, okay Hitler is dead, evil is gone--but Pol Pot comes around, Pinochet is making bodies disappear in a Chilean desert.  Murder continues to happen.  Molestation.  The rules of torture are rewritten for the sensibilities of our latest horrible incarnation.  This is an aspect of how our lives function.  Even something as seemingly innocuous as a Coca-Cola comes with a body count.  I mean the makeup that made so many women match the standards men created for them, was based on the experimentation and torture of animals.  Maybe capitalism has made the veneer of these transactions more palatable--but everything is still attached to an attendant horror, and it's only through feeling that horror in it's full weight that we can even approach the kind of truth that creates lasting beauty.  I mean like you said, what even is catharsis?  It seems like it's just one breath drawn among a lot of others.
Z: Do you think there's a difference between people who Don't Want To Be Reminded
of horrible things in their entertainment and people who Do Want To Be Reminded?

S: Just focus and how they are kind of oriented for whatever reason.  I mean some people stay through the credits of movies to see who all worked on the thing and out of respect, some people stay through the credits to see Howard the Duck.  I don't think one way is better or worse than the other.  Good and terrible people on all sides of it.

Z: You've talked a little about metaphors for your (or a?) trans- experience in horror movies--can you go into that a little?

S: Well as I said, even getting into horror movies at the age I did, I think came a lot from the attendant pressures and alienation that comes from being trans in a culture without a clear seat for that at the table.  But I think more precisely, it made relating to the "monsters" of these films much easier.  Or even if not relate--at least pursue a more well rounded understanding of the contexts around which they have been created.  Which I don't think is a wholly trans-thing because I think that general thing is what draws a lot of people who feel ostracized from society to monsters.  But I do think that horror films become infinitely more compelling the more malleable you are with your sympathies. 


I also think in terms of a transwoman's experience, that--I mean there's a big cliff you drop off when you stop presenting yourself as male in this culture--

things get a lot scarier and the space changes quite a bit, and that's without even adding into it the trans side of it, which ups the danger even more--but so fears about men's propriety and violent need to control my body, kind of get this really ramped up presentation that I think maybe makes those themes even more vibrant.

I've often thought that a lot of transphobia actually has it's roots in misogyny in general, and that if that were cured (which I doubt it ever will), then transphobia would follow suit.  A lot of the freaked-outedness about trans people is usually about transwomen, and it's the same way that a lot of homophobia is about gay men--fundamentally what you are talking about is the fear that straight cisgender men have of losing what they see as their masculinity, and being subject to the same terrors that they on some subconscious level must understand they perpetuate on a daily basis. I mean think of how many murders of transwomen have as their starting point, a straight cis-male who is attracted to a transwoman, but because of how masculinity is constructed--that attraction undermines core parts of his identity, and that undermining drives him to crazy fucked up violence.  But he didn't himself put that idea of masculinity there.  It was every man he met, and ever man they met, farther and farther back through history.  Until the idea of masculinity can be rewritten within the culture in a meaningful way, dark shadowy streets are going to feel like they always have a killer lurking in them. One of the great things about a film like Ms. 45 is Zoe Lund as part of her revenge for being raped--just refuses to stay in the safe spaces that are set up for women.  She goes into all of these spaces where women are occluded, and just starts lighting dudes up.
Beyond all of this, the body horror side of horror is also really palatable to me, because first being trans there's this horror of this wretched form and body, which is kind of this constant obstruction to my ability to express myself societally, and then past that, there's the body horror of being a woman and all of the insane impossible standards your body is constantly judged short of.  Anything good about your body is always eclipsed by the things which aren't.  So a film like In My Skin by Marina De Van is truly beautiful because it is fundamentally about this feeling of alienation within your own skin, and the struggle not per se to morph one's body into something else--but to come to an understanding and an appreciation of yourself within the skin you live in. 


There's this wonderful moment in that movie where she contorts herself in front of a mirror--she's covered in blood and viscera, and this contortion is really this strange violent angle that we see only through a mirror--but fucccck if that's not my everyday. 

The lies of the mirror and how our perceptions are unreal.  Like I can't look into a mirror to see myself for more than a few seconds.  I have to see myself as a stranger in the mirror in order to be able to like...get out of the house.  So like you know when you just glance quickly into a mirror, and that slight lag while your brain links the image you are seeing to your identity--that's how the rest of the world sees you.  But the longer you look at a mirror, particularly if you have any kind of body dysmorphic issues--you can watch--I can watch myself change shape in the mirror--I start to focus on all of the areas about my face or body that make me feel insecure, and those parts grow and become more prominent--so even though the mirror is the same mirror as it was to start, by the end, the image is not.  Weirdly photographs don't seem as prone to this problem.  I can see a photograph of myself, and there's enough of a distance there that I can believe it.  Even if I know intrinsically that photographs are just the editing of the photographer--and if they pick this photo of you vs. another, it's one thing vs. another.  Each image is a different you.  Which is really strange.

But yeah, these are the horrors of being trans.  I think that they parallel so much struggles cisgender women have shows that they are probably caused in most of their totality, from the discomfort culture induces in us, and the fact that for instance if you are trans, your safety is dependent upon how you scale up or down from notions of cisgender women's beauty--if you look too good, you'll get attention from men who might not know your gender history, and because of that might react violently--if you don't look good enough, you might freak everyone out and also get hit up.  It's a sincere mindfuck.  But it wouldn't be QUITE as bad if there were accepted ideas of trans-beauty within the culture--but we'd have to expand our ideas of beauty, and there's no money in that right now(maybe ever).  The big money is in the tabloid freakiness of transwomen, so thus and thus.  Which is something you see unfortunately in films like Silence of the Lambs and Dressed to Kill--which are excellent--but rely upon this freakishness to unsettle their audiences.  I man even Psycho, Norman dressed up as his mother *shocking*.  You could make a case that the slasher killer has at his roots coding for transphobia.  Thank god Michael Myers came along.


 You know Silence of the Lambs probably set me coming out back at least 10 years.  I was mortified back then that that's what I would be. 

It's embarrassing to admit now, because now I don't really give very much of a fuck.  But I've talked to other transwomen about Buffalo Bill, and they've said the same sorts of things.  How crazy is that?  That's one powerful monster.  This is where I remind people that transwomen are way more likely to be the victims of violence than perpetuate it.

Z: Can you go  a little more into why you find these horror movie women more empowering than women in other genres? Is it about surviving (or at least facing) a sort of totally inimical world?

S: I mean, it's some of that.  Getting pushed to your limits, to the point of hysteria, but still surviving--that you've taken this huge weight of the world on you, and like Marilyn Burns in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you're covered in blood and screaming and laughing--but you've somehow come out on top.  I don't think other genres allow women to be strong, tough, and vulnerable in this way. And I mean there's just way more movies in the horror genre where the perspective is that of a woman's.  The slasher flick is not through the killer's point of view afterall, it's through the woman's.  Usually in other genres the majority of the work they get is as a capable sidekick, or a love interest.  If they are the central focal point, it is usually in the romance genre, but they don't get to have quite as active a role as in the slasher flick.  Or Lady Vamp films.

Z: And some people are going to be distracted because when a women dies they just think "Some dude wanted to see a women in a refrigerator" and their ability to connect ends there. Do other peoples' responses affect your responses? Does this question make sense?
H: Well the thing with horror is that while women die, they also oftentimes are the sole survivor.  And yeah most of these films are made by dudes, and like, in a Giallo film when you see a knife stripping a woman naked, and the camera and the knife stabbing in places where straight dudes want to look--I mean that's certainly a huge part of the genre.  But the cool thing with horror in the slasher flicks is that even though that stuff kind of brings dudes into see these films, at the end of the day they still end up dramatically rooting for the final girl.  It's one of the few genres that is popular with men, where by genre tropes they are forced to see things through the perspective of women.
But as far as other people's responses to anything, I don't really bother. I mean I have my friends that I care what they think--but I have never needed my tastes or opinions to line up with anyone else's. But past that, meh. Even when I write it's for myself, and people can follow me on it or not--but I'm just trying to keep it moving.  I don't have time for suckers.

Z: Does "exploitive" mean something in horror? What?

H: I don't think more than anything else.  I mean the Avengers is exploitative.  Nike Shoes are exploitative.  Maybe in horror exploitation can be more freely owned up to and explored with more depth.  I dunno.  I often find the term to be used to feign a civility that is almost always false in some way.  These are exploitation films.  These are oscar nominated films.  I know I'd rather watch the former. 

I think with trash cinema or trash art in general, there's often times a crude directness that gives voice to factions in society that are being ignored in more mainstream areas.

So a lot of the Lady Vampire films from the 70s would be called exploitative--but the women in those films have more agency than the sidekick women in these modern day action flicks.  And you think about something like Ganja and Hess which is this beautiful blacksploitation vampire film--that's as good as any sort of art house movie you would put up against it now or then--and that that was a space where black stories could be told, black faces could be seen and heard--and how that space didn't exist then, and still doesn't really exist now--but that's the exploitation film?  So I feel like the term is a top down evaluation from people who it'd seem wise to distrust.

Z: I'd love to hear about how you'd sum up the work of your favorite directors: Jean Rollin? Dario Argento?

S: Jean Rollin is like huge for me.  My comic Dysnomia is basically a 30 page love letter to his movies.  My friend Katie Skelly is actually making this super Rollin-esque comic right now called My Pretty Vampire.  Like why Rollin is cool--well first off, it's just that, he's cool.  But the great thing with Rollin, and maybe Jess Franco has a liiiitttle bit of this--but not as much as Rollin, is this dream like quality--he definitely approaches horror as beauty.  And all of his films follow these dangerous sexual women who exist antagonistically against these peripheral rather clueless men.  And I mean just the way he will set up shots and the mis en scene that he builds up.  Like the end of Living Dead Girl where Françoise Blanchard devours her friend and lover Marina Pierro against this spotlit castle bridge in this long shot long take that could almost be a shot out of a slow cinema thing---THAT is why I love Jean Rollin.  He does things like that, that are so fucking beautiful, I can't stand it.  I have to pause his movies sometimes just because the experience is so overwhelming.  He's just a succession of perfect.  Like when you see someone put something horrifying together that you feel within you--I mean that scene is imbued with so much emotion because Blanchard's desire to feed has overcome her passion to love--but she is cognizant of that transaction as well, but is powerless to do anything about it.  She is both surviving and watching her part in the death of someone that she loved so much that she came back from the dead for her!  And Rollin and his actors get that so perfectly, and to let it play out in this long shot--and to really let it play out--I mean it's perfect.  If I ever make anything half that good!
I mean I like Argento a lot--but there are no horror directors who do it for me like Rollin.  You have to talk about specific films, like Possession, Trouble Every Day, In My Skin.  Or Argento's Stendhal Syndrome or Tenebre.  I probably like Argento on the same level as Fulci and Bava.  All of those italian masters are so predicated on the details and the visuals--they make really beautiful things.  I think the giallo in general is one of my favorite things just because it's this nexus of high fashion/luxury/excess, women, architecture, and gruesome nightmarish death.  I'm actually working on a comic that is very much inspired the feelings I have watching Mario Bava's best work.

It's interesting to sort of think about how the three might be different.  I think Fulci is more political.  His films are always kind of about the hypocrisies and failures of communal systems which allow--or almost encourage horror to take place.  In his movies, backs are turned, old women spit at you, doors and windows are closed--and everyone is complicit.  With Argento, he is a surrealist, he only cares about the dream, the hypnosis, his monsters are supernatural even when they are men, maybe especially so, and while he's thematically interesting, what I love about him is the power of his aesthetic--in a battle of themes vs. aesthetics, I will always end up caring about aesthetics.

With Bava, I think what I vibe most with him right now is he also has the aesthetic heft of Argento--but he also hates the rich in a way that someone like Bunuel could appreciate--and I think that feels really timely.  My two favorite Bava films are Bay of Blood and 5 Dolls for an August Moon--and both are just these greedy rich bastards beautifully cannibalizing themselves for some extra money.  I'm always down for that.  It's why the Exterminating Angel is my favorite Bunuel film. 

Oh we're going to lock some rich people in a room and let them be the monsters they are?  Sign me up.

And Bava does it with panache.  These gorgeous villas and spaces--the bay in Bay of Blood is beautiful, and all of the kill scenes are wonderfully staged.  And then you also have work of his like Shocked which I still roll over in my head.  I probably like the heights Argento gets up to the most, but Bava is close.  And Fulci's New York Ripper is absolutely one of my favorite movies.  It's almost like an Abel Ferarrra movie!

Z: Are there any comics that you feel tap the same kind of territory as your favorite horror movies?

S: Well I mentioned Katie Skelly's comic that she's making which she's been posting on her tumblr as it progresses.  I love Emily Carroll's horror stuff--but she's more like Junji Ito in that they're kind of classical horror in that Poe-Lovecraft radioplay way--it's delightful and I love it--but it's not exactly what I'm most into.  Sloane Leong's short body horror comics, are really cool, they're like on some new french extremity type vibe.  Suehiro Maruo's Ultra-Gash Inferno and the Laughing Vampire are definitely in the spot for me.  But really, not really.  Skelly's Vampire is the first thing I've seen that is coming from the spot I am.  Oh something like Saga De Xam--but I've never read all of that.  But I mean it's good. There's a lot of space for what I want to do and what I like.  Oh yeah, also Al Columbia.  It's still like 1930s/40s horror--but I like how it's fucked up.  I mean I guess him and Suehiro Maruo are similar in that way.  Though the transgressions of Maruo in terms of fluids and humiliation is stuff I'm really interested in.

Z: Can you talk a little about color and horror? Saga De Xam and Argento have this certain lurid post-psychedelic palette, while a lot of '70s films have a sort of warm underlying tone whereas new movies tend to have a sort of cool bluish thing going on. Is that something you think about?
S: Yeah.  Color is a big deal for me.  I don't know why.  I guess it's not for everyone, otherwise people wouldn't keep making comics and movies with aimless shitty palettes.  But I am really drawn to expressive color.  Like the first Alien has these deep blacks, which you lose yourself in, and they set off against these really sterile eggshell white rooms--and it is completely beautiful, and it works across thematic and dramatic lines within the film as a whole--and then you watch Prometheus, which is a film I like--but Ridley almostly completely tossed out the blacks.

So we finally see a thorough exploration of the engineer's place, and rather than the gothic black Giger paintings of the first film--we get this blueish greyish tones, which depower both the black AND the white--so the separation is muddled, the contrast is fucked, and nothing hits with that leathery bio-mechanical oomph that the first film had.

And I mean it's the same director!  What drives me crazy about a lot of modern films is that colors aren't allowed to express themselves anymore.  You watch like late 60s Godard, and he's just hitting you with primary colors like haymakers--directors now don't even think in color it feels like--and I'm speaking generally, but they just digitally tone everything into this grey bleaugh or amber bleaugh--and then comics copy that too--and I feel like if you're going to have something in color--throw those colors with bad intentions.  I want to feel them.  And with horror this is doubly important, because horror is always really effective in black and white, so if you make the decision that you're going to go color on horror--you need to have a reason for it, and you need to know why you are using this color or that color. And again, I'm speaking in generalities.  There are modern filmmakers in horror or otherwise who use color like they know what they're doing.  I saw this great Albert Serra film called the Story of My Death, which has these deep blacks and lovely browns and greens.  American Mary I thought had some great color stuff in it.  Antichrist.  There's a lot.  Just...not a lot.

Red & Pleasant Land--in the flesh

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Red & Pleasant Land--my kit for running an Alice-In-Wonderland-inspired continent (plus vampire wars) is almost ready.

These are photos of a misprinted copy I just got--the pages are way too thin, but basically this is how it'll look. James spent more money printing these books than my art publishers did printing my coffee table books--so it's going to be something special. I do not think there is another RPG book like it.

The book will be available to order around December 4th and cost around 35 bucks I think. So the thing to do is save a dollar a day starting today. Or 2 dollars a day if you plan on buying someone one for Christmas or whatever. Which you should. Because it's awesome.






There are 3 locations done like this--with all the info on the map.

Like 40-some monsters

Like Vornheim, there's a ton of tables & tools for making
your own content--in or out of Lewis Carrolled Transylvania
2 big dungeons


You won't be able to see through the pages on the final version

Used it in physical form for the first time GMing yesterday.
It was easy to find stuff, easy to use and the red ribbon
bookmark James wanted turned out to be worth it. So: pleased. 
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We Need Your Help On Vornheim 2nd Edition

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While the pdf of Vornheim: the Complete City Kit is still available *, the hardcovers sold out very quickly and people have been asking after them for years.

So: finally we are shooting to have a new physical version out this winter. We want to make a few very minor tweaks--one of which is fixing typos.

The only one I already know about is that the "Where's Eshrigel?" table appears on page 11 for no reason.

If you know of any typos in Vornheim, please send 'em in. You can post them in the comments here, or e-mail me.
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*Also: if you don't have one, get one, it's award winning and stuff. Here's a detailed review.
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That's The Way To Do It!

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Try this game:

Tell WOTC how to renew their settings for 5th Edition in two sentences or less. You have to do at least three settings. Extra points if it seems like something they might actually do.

Here are mine...

Dragonlance

Still a high-fantasy adventure path--but gamify the players' attempt to stay on the path and play their character: each player gets an objective slipped to them secretly ("Kill at least four draconians before reaching Mindenhork") and they level up when they achieve the objectives--at which point they get a new one. Also subsidiary objectives worth xp--but monsters alone are worth little or nothing.

Kara Tur/Oriental Adventures

All the Kara Tur classes are feat-heavy 4e-style variants on the core classes. Lots of shoving people around the scenery, tactical combat and crazy stunts and all the feats have names like "Thousand Golden Mantis Lock".

Dark Sun

There's no good reason not to just release Dark Sun as a complete Carcosa-style hexcrawl from the get-go, accompanied by random tables (like these) for generating weird locals and villages. Without these details, the setting can be summed up in like 4 pictures and there's no need for most of what's in the boxed set.

Ravenloft

…is redone as essentially Call of Cthulhu Medieval. Or the Dark Country. Ravenloft itself is just a big gothic country or alternate earth but the characters start out as Old School-style useless 0-level funnel-fodder in a place with terrible communication and supply lines and have to scrabble and scrimp for class features and spells.

Eberron

Start by releasing it not as a standard setting book but as an alternate monster manual--with each standard creature rewritten--with no stats (or collapsed stats) but with info on how they fit into the politics and ecology of Eberron.
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ENTER THIS CONTEST! Make A Widget On Twine Or Whatever

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So I made this, it's terrible…

…so why did I make it? Just to prove a point: here's a widget that generates random 3d6-in-order ability scores and walks a person through character creation and I made it in like fifteen minutes with zero programming skill using a thing called Inklewriter and the advice here. There are also ways to make it so certain options or ideas appear or disappear depending on whether you've passed "key" screens and to insert pictures and whatnot.

If I'd put a little more work in, I could actually plunk a new-to-D&D player down in front of the screen while I went and fished out dice and minis for them and they could make their first character for any edition with all the bonuses and thief percentages and spells and whatever. I can also see this interface being used for:

-Character lifepaths

-Interpret-the-picture style puzzle challenges

-Giving players characteristics or class/race based on hidden rules (i.e. like What Voltron Lion Are You?--style quizzes)

-Dungeon modules (click the option the players took instead of trying to find a page in a book)

etc.

So that point I was making is: there are several easy-to-use online story/text-game-writing tools that you  can use to make stuff that might be useful at a game table instead of for their original purpose.

Another one is Twine...

Since I managed to almost make a decent character generator and all I'm trained to do is rub colors into paper and jiz on people for money, I bet you'll be way better at this than me. So I am announcing the…

D&D With Porn Stars Official Digital Widget Contest

Due Date:

December 4th (but there's a bonus for turning your widget in early, see below).

Prize:

Signed copy of Red & Pleasant Land goes to the winner.

Rules:


  • What you make is supposed to be a useful tabletop game tool, not a game or story in itself. Edge cases acceptable.
  • Enter as many times as you like.
  • Tools can be for any tabletop RPG but since I'm the judge I'm probably biased towards ones I like.
  • You can make your widget using Inklewriter (some tips here) or Twine (available here--a little more complex) (some tips here and advanced tips here) or any other program you like so long as I can make the final product work on my mac.
  • Your widget cannot be extant and available on the web as of yesterday (i.e. no submitting old stuff)
  • More info about how to do things available from the RPG community here on Google +--add me if you haven't. (Not necessary to enter the contest).
  • Submit your entry by emailing me: zakzsmith at hawt mayle. If you don't email me, it does not count.
  • Entries will be judged by me on the following criteria:
  1. Usefulness: 1-100 points. How likely would I be to use this at the table for a game? Does it duplicate something already available or is it genuinely new? Do the writing and pictures (if any) make it more useful? 
  2. Speed of Entry: 1-27 points. For each day (Pacific time) your entry is received before December 4th you will receive an extra point. So if I receive your widget on December 3rd you get one bonus point. If I get it today--Nov 7--you get 27 bonus points. 
  3. Attractiveness: 0 points. Does it look lovely? If it doesn't make the thing work better I don't care. 
  4. Dorkness: Negative 100 points. Oh my god your widget is actually a Turing Test! How cleverly you have subverted the contest paradigm! If you do anything that tries to be funny but actually just makes the widget less useful you will end up with negative points which means I have to come to your house and take whatever you value most away from you. Exhausting for everyone involved.
  • Special Handicap Rule: Fancy smart actual programmers are totally allowed to enter with super-advanced widgets utilizing skill and programs far beyond that available to the average blogger. However, if this results in one or more stunning Lebron-shows-up-to-the-playground entries, these will be judged separately and I will award both "n00b" and "Jawa" prizes
Uh, I think that's it, you can ask questions here or on Google+.
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Behir In Name Only

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Ok, first: announcement: So James Raggi had me rewrite his classic Death Frost Doom module (the one I started my own campaign off with) to create a new deluxe version with more new stuff in it (and less old stuff) with Jez Gordon ilustrations. I feel good about it "…this feels like the essence of D&D crushed into diamond. Overworld and Underworld. Pure myth. "

It is currently available as part of the Bundle of Holding charity thing, where you can get this along with the Labyrinth Lord Advanced, and +Dyson Logos 's Dyson's Delves (awesome maps) and much more--all together for like 8 bucks or whatever. Only available for a week.

If you have any questions about what the differences between the old and new Death Frost Dooms feel free to ask in the comments--I definitely think the rewrite is worth getting even if you have the old one, as there's a lot of new content you can scrape fro other dungeons.
Ok, now on to the main course, continuing to vandalize the 5e monster manual.

Behirs. Behirs are basically crappy semidragons as if D&D needed more of those dating back to AD&D Monster Manual 2. However, the new 5e illustration is very cool and salamandery, and I did was black-in the shadow to make it look nice and slimy.

I completely, if lazily, overhauled this monster:
The behir is now a familiar-type monster maybe a foot and a half long.

"Behir" is a nice, pseudo-Arabic Jack Vance-style name--so I figured chaos wizards of the Dying Earth thousands of years into the future send Behirs back in time to whisper spells into the ears of sorcerers while they sleep.

The Chaos Wizards hope to place the right spells with the right wizards at the right time in order to carefully manipulate timelines so that futures where they rule come about.

Since these effects are subtle and have a butterfly-wing-theory-like effect on the future, practically speaking it seems like the wizard's just getting random spells each night. Which, in game terms, they are.

This very speedy revision of the Behir is based on two way better ideas you should read:

1. False Patrick's Shaman class-which chases spells in dreams using a cool mechanic which you can totally port over if a PC gets hold of a Behir.

2. Arnold Punch's idea about where faeries come from.
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Blood Frenzy and Larceny and Level Drain and Cute

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Stokely missed a session. So we were updating her:

…King.

They want to see the Pale King because they want to collect their reward for rescuing the Sleeper ("that mouse"). The Sleeper himself was not forthcoming with loot.
The Pale King

It went like this:

A month ago they get into the dungeon, find a bunch of bottles with messages floating in them in a pool. One (the ranger could tell) was written by a mouse. It wanted to be rescued.

So then they spend like hours and hours and session and sessions roaming the dungeon...

…fighting demons and vampires and giant rooks, Mandy loses all her stuff, people almost die 2 or 3 time, Stokely loses 2 levels, Halloween comes and goes...
Yeah, I know, Tuxedo Mask sucks, but what am I supposed to do? 
…be all "Yeah, you guys can all go out as Sailor Scouts and I'll just stay home"?


...and then after like 5 sessions, they find the mouse, thanks to the druid's owl.



Chewie played the owl. Owls are good at finding mice. 

After all that shit, the party's expecting the mouse to give them a reward. Because, y'know, a writing mouse: it's probably rich, right?

And, frankly, the DM is expecting the mouse to give them a reward.

But then Mariah the cleric had found this teacup, so she's all "Tell the mouse we have a teacup it can rest in".

"The mouse comes out, crawls into the teacup…and disappears"

"No way…"

Y'know how sometimes you get to show your players your notes to prove you didn't just make up a gotcha because you're horrible?

Well I got to do that with my new book for the very first time...
"FUCK!"

Then I kind of just couldn't stop laughing for ten minutes because: seriously.

So Mariah turned her attention to other things, like the manticore Joey Vs Skin had drugged in other room that was paddling in circles thinking it was a manta ray after rolling a 1 to save vs hallucinogen.

Mariah found this obscurely charming even though manticores are jerks.


All this interspecies romance got everybody talking about rolling on the carousing table.

Stokes' witch problem turned into a whole elaborate plot thread--Mandy dealt with her unexpected morning after a lot more efficiently:


Then they fell in a river and fought some dragonfish. But that's life.

No more cute stuff for like a year after this. It's all claws made from the dreams of dead men after this.

If Nobody Ever Asks For Your Ideas You May Not Realize Some Ideas Are Better Than Others

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Sometimes you read people on-line--you read their game blog or in a forum or whatever--and you think: this is the first time anyone has ever listened to you about anything, isn't it? Some handle it with grace, and it's cool to see. Some don't--but they don't in a very specific way.

_

If people often seriously ask you for your opinion and then go do something with your opinion that affects something, then you might start to think of opinions as affecting things.

If nobody ever seriously asks for your opinion, then you might not think of your opinion as carrying much weight or affecting anything.

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If you think of your opinion as affecting things, you might be incentivized start to try to make sure it makes sense.

If you don't think of it as carrying much weight or affecting anything, you might not be incentivized to think too hard about trying to make sure it makes sense.

("Makes sense"--that is: matches what you know or could find out.)

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If you try to make sure your opinion makes sense, you might think of opinions in general as things people have thought out and really believe.

If you don't think too hard about whether your opinion makes sense, you probably think of opinions in general as inherently provisional things that you usually keep to yourself because they're not thought out.

(Like: if you don't think too hard about your opinions or value them much, your opinion of who is smarter might be, in your mind, about as meaningful as who is wearing a better shirt. The idea that one might be a thing you could go figure out and check on and the other isn't might never occur to you, if nobody much ever did anything based on your opinions anyway.)

_

If you think of opinions in general as things people have thought out, you'll tend to think of sharing opinions as basically just polite.

If you think of opinions inherently as provisional things people usually keep to themselves because they're not thought out, you probably think of sharing one as a bold, confident act.

_

If you're used to thinking of opinions as things people have thought out, someone sharing an opinion is (baseline) helpful, good, productive, polite, respectful, necessary and…inherently to be challenged by other opinions. And all subject to fact and being thought out.


If you think of sharing your opinion as a bold, confident act then someone saying what they're thinking is risky to everyone involved--it is asking for things to be put at risk, it is asking for people to make themselves vulnerable. After all--everyone risks revealing their opinion is not thought out, don't they?

_

You see people who seem shocked and alarmed not just to have their opinion contested (which is strangely common) but to be asked at all. This is frequently followed by a diatribe about how unimportant they are--as if that were the point. 

If people often seriously ask you for your opinion you won't see that request as hostile and won't see why people do.

If nobody ever seriously asks your opinion you may be scared. It's not just that you can't handle a conversation about your ideas, it's that you misunderstand why you're being asked to have one.


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Red & Pleasant Land And Death Frost Doom Deluxe Are Out But Disappearing Fast

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Last I checked Red & Pleasant Land was disappearing at faster than a copy a minute--at the current rate they will be gone in two days. Anyone who's tried to scrounge up a print copy of Vornheim knows how hard it is to get your hands on these things once they disappear.
Connie says: "This is the greatest book I have ever read…"
"…Glory can be yours, too."
So I am very happy with it and you should buy eleven (one to mark up, one to keep and nine to give people on each day of Hannukkah) now.

But don't take our word for it! Here's what the rest of the free world has to say:

China Miéville (author of Perdido Street Station and The Scar)

"How lucky are we? Once again we get to experience the artistry and art, the cantankerous smarts, the dissident gaming philosophy of Zak S. It's inadequate to call Red & Pleasant Land brilliant. With alchemist swagger, Zak takes the base matter of well-worn fantasy standards and our cheerful nerd hobbies, and makes the strangest gold."


Molly Crabapple (artist, journalist, author of Shell Game, King's County suspect # 2-2-14 08955-10)

"God, it's so beautiful, I love this. It just makes D&D look so fucking now."



Kenneth Hite (author of Qelong and Night's Black Agents)

"It should be next to impossible to do anything original with Dracula or Alice, but Zak S demonstrates instead that it's next to impossible for him to put out a bad game book. He trails his barbed artistic and gaming sensibilities through these two modern myths and emerges with something more than a mashup or a collage: it's a necromantic restoration of a nightmare that never was."



Monte Cook (author of Numenera, Ptolus, The Strange)

"Zak is not just imaginative, he's bold. Which means that while he recognizes the value of fantasy traditions, he doesn't hesitate for a moment to throw out anything that's become tired or dull. Going to Zak's blog is like opening a window to let in fresh ideas when the room is full of only stale, trite, conventional ones."

Keith Baker (creator of Eberron)

"ZAK SMITH'S IDEAS ARE... (d100)
1-21. Intriguing
22-49. Innovative 
50-62. Insane
63-92. Indispensible
93. Warm & Fuzzy
94-95. Torn through a wormhole from a dystopian future that can only be stopped by the timely intervention of a Nordic cyborg
96-100. Roll twice and use both results.  "
--Keith Baker

Vanessa Veselka (journalist, author of PEN-prize winning novel Zazen)

"Let me be plain in case it is not obvious; you want Zak Smith as your GM....Zak unfolds one mind-blowing illustration after another. Art is never absent from anything he does. The world we are in was once the site of a giant castle roughly the size of a continent. Worn to its roots now, all that’s left is the foundation of old power structures. There is a Red King (who dreams of an Antiland) and a Heart Queen (who is cruel) and a Slow War. One name for this place is “The Land the Gods Refuse to See.” It has mirror portals that lead to a Quiet Side of the glass where you go “unplayably insane,” a reminder that Zak uses Lewis Carroll like manga uses the atom bomb, as inspiration for a terrifying and wondrous landscape…"

…in Matter.

Charlotte Stokely (star of Skater Girl Fever and Not Too Young For Cum 4)
"Groovy"
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The new, deluxe Death Frost Doom--the classic fantasy module that I started my campaign with--is also out. James had me completely re-write it.
with massive new art by Jez Gordon

From the introduction:


When a freakishly original thing is made, it inevitably contains both inherited and mutant genes. When the original Death Frost Doom was found on the doorstep of the old school gaming scene, its horror-short-story tone and structure came thinly wrapped in familiar adventure-game trappings. James and I agreed that this new edition should maintain that tone and structure, but replace as many of the handed-down bits as possible with more creepy magic.


When I first read James' Death Frost Doom, I considered it not just the best module I'd ever read, but the only usable one I'd ever read. It demands only a little of your campaign's space and time, but it does something with every inch of that space and every second of that time. I've tried to keep it as disturbingly efficient as it was when I first met it five years ago--when it helped kick off the campaign I am still running today (and when it caused most of the trouble the characters have been dealing with since).


I think we've done no violence to it, and given you and your players a few more toys to play with. And smash.

…the reception of the pdf has been good:


So go buy things. There's a package deal on shipping, too, so literally, this is the best time to pick up anything else you might want from LOTFP including the must-have Carcosa hardcover (which not nearly enough people own) and new ones like The Idea from Space and No Salvation For Witches.

I am extremely pleased with everything we've done here. It's been years of effort to bring this to you. These are days the like of which will not be seen again. 

Silence Darkness Death Silence Darkness Death

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So the party was rolling up on this castle tucked away in the excellent Shoe Thief map Jez drew for Red & Pleasant Land* which I have defaced with…
…"Pale King's knights fighting decimator".

Being hungry for adventure--and noticing the decimator had 60,000gp worth of gems embedded in its wrists--they decided to intervene.

So:

IN THIS CORNER, REPRESENTED ON THE TABLETOP BY THE RANCOR…
The Decimator

Colossal Avatar of Ona -- a deity of indeterminate gender and variety that snuffs out illumination in all forms. Particularly hates books, and it's priests punish speaking with death. Paradoxically also associated with light, but in forms like Cherenkov radiation and white phosphorus. (Ona invented by Odyssey)

AC: 19
HP: 300
3 Atks at +10 for 2d30/2d30/d100

1st round--Silence Aura 1000'
2nd round--Darkness Aura 200'
3rd round--Death Aura 20' (1st hit knocks you to zero hp, second kills anyone at or below zero)
…then it starts over again

Move: as human

(and yes this is this same rancor as this guy…


)


AND IN THIS CORNER, IN THE BLACK MILK TIGHTS…

The D&D W/PS team…

Stokely the tiefling wizard
Brian the human wizard
Kerowhack the human thief
Tizane Ildiko the tiefling cleric
Gypsillia the half-elf thief
Mariah the human cleric

The megalethality of the monster did what I wanted--it forced everybody to work together...

So Brian wasted no time casting Reverse Gravity...
…and now an interesting situation obtains: the spell's radius is smaller than the height of the Decimator, so he was reverse-gravited from his nipples to his toes but the top of him was fine.

(Also note Reverse Gravity has a ceiling of 100' in 5e.)

This cleverness freed everybody up to start artillerying the now-floating decimator, who had to make a Dex Save Vs Bryan just to move on account of having to use its big paws to walk.

Still, that left it with two attacks doing 2d30 each per round, and it (that is: I ) figure out it could throw pieces of castle at people….

At least until they disintegrated its right arm, at which point all it could do was hold on with its left and kick stuff.

Oh, and do the silence then darkness then death thing.

Kerowhack came through with a natural-20 with a dagger for 44 points of damage (non-spellcasters add their entire d20 roll to damage) and Mariah used locate creature during the darkness rounds.

There were a few close calls (Rolling d30s for damage creates so much tension at the table it's amazing. Try it. Stokes was down to 4 hp at one point and I rolled a two. Everybody exhaled.) but only Gypsillia fell afoul of the death aura, mostly because she was trying to climb into its butt and timed the rounds wrong --quoth Gypsillia: "Trying to get into a Decimator's butthole is like doing double-dutch".

Mandy shot a blade barrier at it in the dark and missed, then Stokely used Bigby's hand to shove it towards the barrier and that was the end of the Decimator.

So she's up there in the sky at zero hp, floating against the 100' anti-gravity ceiling along with dozens of shredded chunks of colossal flesh.

Someone had featherfall and cast it just as the spell wore off--allowing Gypsillia to avoid becoming Flatsillia and then healing her up.

Good job, team…though since they used so many of their best spells I surrrre hope there's not another one….




*Available now! GO GO GO! BUY BUY BUY!

These Are The Days, This Is The Hour

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I LOVE THIS, SHOW PEOPLE THIS:

Sure, these famous artists and writers and designers like it, but what do random D&D people think?

"I spend a great deal of my time waiting with people. Waiting in courts. Waiting in hospitals. Waiting in office buildings. Waiting for someone whose hidden behind a door to walk in with a proclamation that will alter the course of the person I'm sitting next to. Distraction is key. That is where A Red & Pleasant Land comes in. 

I'd say that when Zak was writing this book I doubt he was thinking that it would be used in such a manner but, let's be honest, if anyone could grok his books being read on the floor of crisis centers and in high back courtroom pews, it's going to be Zak. 


People know Alice. People like games. People love stories of how there are people in the world who make things, especially when they are stuck waiting for a door to open and someone to walk in and pronounce ruin or rebirth. It makes it a little less awkward for all those involved to have something to do with their gaze. The very least this world can do is offer them something beautiful. A Red & Pleasant Land is that." 


"It's good, really, really good. "
Here (of all places).

"I really liked what I have read and seen and I gave me lots of game ideas. Somehow, it is the direction that I wished Ravenloft and Vampire : the Dark Ages had taken : a bold and weird direction..."

"If you don't buy a copy of this while you can, you will regret it. It's a masterpiece of RPG artistry." -Here.

"It makes most full-colour rulebooks look like some old bullshit. "
Here

"The book is gorgeous, and it reads like literature."

"I am thoroughly impressed. Not only are the illustrations beautiful (of course), but it exudes weird faerie tale, the old old kind filled with cruel murder and dream logic."

"In a year that saw the release of yet another edition of Dungeons & Dragons, A Red & Pleasant Land is nevertheless the most impressive – and inspiring – RPG book to have come out in 2014. It’s wittily written, beautifully appointed, and, above all, bold in the way it reworks its source material to create something at once recognizable and original. Even if you’re not the least bit interested in adventuring in Wonderland, consider taking a look at A Red & Pleasant Land simply as an artifact. It’s a reminder of just how much energy and creativity is to be found in the old school/DIY gaming scene these days."
Here

"It may be the best thing to come out of a small press RPG publisher ever."
Here (David's post isn't public, so if you don't believe me and aren't one of the 2000 people in his circles, ask him)

If you're curious about what's actually in it--there is an extended review here --along with a sample of what it's like to use the tools inside to generate an adventure location.

If you want to hear what it's like from a player's point of view, there's a nice write-up here.

and...
Thanks Kelly Sue!

Yeah, ok, that is just a bunch of random internet people but on the other hand: zero disappointed customers so far. Just think: hundreds of gamers have been looking at this pdf for six whole days and still not found anything to complain about.

So, yeah Red & Pleasant Land is selling well enough to have turned the publisher from a man into an order-filling Christmas elf for the rest of the winter. Be patient with him, if you have any trouble ordering check out this post he made. There are still copies of the hardcover as of this writing.

Also: here is an interview I just did for Bleeding Cool where the writer uses the word "controversial" four times and which features a photograph of me next to a chihuahua dressed like the devil.

Oh and here's a message from Santa:


Behold, He Is To Thee A Covering Of The Eyes Unto All...

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-Genesis 20:16



Still redoing the Monster Manuual,--FINALLY A GOOD MONSTER!

Beholders are wonderful and terrible, of course--and the several variations that the Monster Manual lists just spread the terror thin. Before you get to the actual Eye there's all these preparatory minor terrors like Spectators to worry about. Fuck that. Also, the eye-themed lair actions seem misguided.

Here's a beholder-lite (and sort of a lair action) that makes sense to me. Y'know the gas spore...
…the monster that notoriously looks just like a beholder but is hollow and filled with murder?

I assume these are bio-engineered by the beholder itself as decoys in its moist and stygian alchemical pits.*

(Also, I figure beholders--what with telekineses and no hands and therefore likely thinking of their entire environment as part of their body--are philosophers.)

But where do the Beholders themselves come from? 

Do you remember that issue of Thor where he went to look for Odin's missing eye and he found it and it shot fire at dwarves and told Thor stories? Well that's obviously a beholder.

Beholders are the cast-off eyes of gods--that's why they're so rare.

When psychotic white elf alchemists get ahold of beholders, they do this with them...

*Scrap Princess has a great idea: the gas spore is a cordryceps-like fungus that takes over the eye.

OH WAIT HOLY SHIT: the Beholder itself is what happens when the fungus takes over a god's eye and the gas spore is what happens after thousands of years when it finally gets totally fungusized.

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