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Thought Eater 1st Round Winners & Rules for The 2nd Round

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So all the essays for the first round of the Thought Eater Tournament are in and the votes are counted.

We can now go on to the second round, where there's a pretty good chance all the writing will be pretty juicy.

The winners are listed at the end of the post. Both winners and losers may feel free to reveal their identities and authorness in the comments if they like along with their blog addresses if they have them and anything else about themselves. You can also publish your first round submission on your own blog or wherever now.

Winners will go on to the second round, which I'm going to do a slightly different way. The second round is called "Say something original about". The key word is 'original'. Nobody else can have ever made, to your knowledge, whatever point you're going to make. It can be as mundane as "I first read Lovecraft while holding a Pink Panther plushie and so I associate Inspector LeGrasse with that" but it must be something that has not been said before. After you're 100% sure nailed original down, then make it interesting.

First round winners, you must pick a second-round topic from this list of dead and battered horses:

Say something original about JRR Tolkien
Say something original about HP Lovecraft or Call of Cthulhu
Say something original about Fritz Leiber
Say something original about Warhammer
Say something original about 4e
Say something original about 3e/3.5/Pathfinder
Say something original about Pendragon
Say something original about Vampire
Say something original about Shadowrun
Say something original about Rifts
Say something original about a movie that's RPG-relevant
Say something original about a classic RPG module
Say something original about any RPG illustrator

...as in the first round, you'll be paired with someone else. If an odd number of folks right about the same thing, you'll be paired with someone who wrote about something else--but that seems like the best way to do it since these are more topical than the other.

Your second round thoughts are due a little over one week from now, Sunday October 25th.

Here are the first round winners, in the order they were published:

Realism: First one

Books: First one

Things that don't work for you: Second one

Cute: First one

How relationships to characters change: First one

Infinite: First one

Rehabilitating an ignored or derided rule: First one

Why people choose games: First one

Common people: First one

People and their relationships to their PCs: First one

Group dynamics: Second one

Wonder: First one

Players making stuff up: Second one

Alignment: First one

Realism: First one

Evil: Second one

Abilities that allow you to skip parts of the game: First one

Brevity: First one (by a nose)

The essays on Forgotten RPG thing that's brilliant and Memorable Encounters TIED--they both go on to the second round

The essay on Emulation beat the one on Super-Intelligent monsters

The one about Time Management in Chunks got a "Yes" vote to go on the second round.
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Goblin Market Works Like This

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...not the poem about alegorically eating snatch by Christina Rosetti, the actual grand bazaar in the goblin city, Gaxen Kane.
-Only goblins and otherlike Boschean horrors shop in the goblin market. If you're a human you'll want a disguise. If you're an elf you'll want a disguise and an ambulance service on speed dial.

- So basically there's a lot of things in the Goblin Market so if the players are looking for specific items you can just offer a base chance a thing that sounds "Goblin Markety" is there coupled with whatever random tables you have around for weird potions, magic items and oddities you've got.

- In addition to this, random merchants will just shove things in players' faces while they look for whatever they're looking for and try to hard-sell them to the players with goblin sales pitches. It's no fun unless you do this. Here's what they had last night:

Tongues: You cut out your own tongue (irreversible) and stick in one of these. The merchant doesn't know where each is from but they are educated and speak 4d6 languages each.

Grinding beans: Small roasted brown beans that can be ground to make a dark powder. Dripping hot water through it makes a beverage that supplies energy and alertness. From the West.

A human girl, fully functional, w/cage: Age 7, stolen from Vornheim, a merchants daughter. She cries a fuckton and wants to go home.

Oil of Bislee: Makes a pair of warriors into berserkers for a turn, they must remain chained together though.

Fleshflies: They fly off toward the nearest living thing other than the party. One use.

Deed of ownership to a massive home in Gaxen Kane. Respected by local authorities.

Small grig (cricket-legged fairy) paladin in a cage fashioned from an emptied lantern.

Hollowhog: Basically a Pig of Holding. Acts otherwise as an ordinary pig of slightly below-average intelligence.

Crossbow bolt that can anchor in stone or any other substance and cannot be removed. Stolen from some dwarves who made it.

Imperial Foo Creature: From Gaxen Kane. Might be a trained Foo Dog from Oriental Adventures. Might just be a shih-tzu with baubles in its hair. Hard tosay. Your call.

Faerie Curse Removing Nut (someone else made this up) Let a cursed person sleep with the nut in their armpit on a new moon's night and the nut will turn black as it sucks out the curse. If the nut is then eaten by someone before the next dawn, the curse will transfer over to them, if it's not eaten by anyone by that time the curse will return.

-The big theme of the Goblin Market is everything can be had For A Steep And Perhaps Terrrrible Price. If the item itself isn't already a double-edged sword, roll d12 for an appropriate price for any given item:

1. Piece of luck (Next Natural 20 or critical success is taken by the merchant)

2. Ten minutes of your life (Goblin picks which, shows up for a random ten minutes some time in the next adventure while you end up living in some goblin merchant sitcom for 10 minutes)

3. Shadow or part thereof, like say just the arm. This makes Hide In Shadows harder.

4. A relationship. What exists between you and x now exists instead between x and the goblin. Sometimes the price is very specific, like your relationship to your grocer, sometimes the goblin lets you pick.

5. Your right to wear shoes. Spiritually speaking, that is--this isn't just legally binding, the gods themselves will not allow your PC to wear shoes once the deal is made.

6. Your semblance for one day. Goblin merchant looks like you for one day. What could go wrong?

7. A unique item of sufficient value or novelty you might have to trade. Interesting magic items are accepted, but also anything real weird.

8. An hour of your dignity. Last night the PC was placed on stilts terminating in turtle feet, fitted with in an unflattering dress and made to wear a hat of meat. Also a rude phrase was written across his back in the tongue of Gaxen Kane. It wasn't such a big deal until he tried to steal some striped hats.

9. Your help acquiring a pair of striped hats. Probably worn by some civilians in the market over there. Getting caught results in an awful goblin trial using some freakshow legal system that makes Vornheim's look like a model of stately prudence.

10. Your gender.

11. Your complexion. Genuinely replaced with a goblin complexion.

12. Your sense of time. Was that a turn? Hard to say. Did you sleep 8 hours? Who knows?
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"The Fetid Shit Stink Of Right Wing Power Fantasy"

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Why One Man Hates Star Wars Despite Never Having Seen It--And Why That Makes Perfect Sense



David Vs Goliath

I haven't seen The Trailer--there's not much point in rushing to watch a trailer for something your girlfriend will die if she doesn't see. A bedazzled pink Millenium Falcon on a wire hits me on the head whenever I stand up in bed because it is always overhead, chasing a pink tie fighter on another wire and always pursued by a pink Slave 1. I have no choice.

With regards to Star Wars I am lazily optimistic but not terribly invested.

But One Man (read this in a very heavy In A World Voice), Is Not Pleased...






David got really upset that Star Wars was going to be at Disneyland:

"Right Wing Power Fantasy" is Reactionary Art Critic move #5 by the way, dating back at least to Max Nordau's "Degeneracy". 

I wondered if Hill was alone here, but no--here's vigilantchristian.org echoing his fears of Star Wars leading to a Fourth Reich...

Hill has been forced to interrupt his screeds to acknowledge some cognitive dissonance...
 ...but even then, he takes a licking and keeps right on ticking...

...and this is not even everything that comes up when you search "David Hill" and "Star Wars". Point is, the man's got big ideas and it takes only a few seconds to find them.

Well we all do.

But Here's The Kicker

For the love of God, Montresor.
"I'm mostly in it for the Right Wing Power Fantasy"

The Larger Point

Now of course what any conscientious reader will be wondering right now is either:

-Yeah dude, everyone already knows David Hill, game designer, RPG gadfly, avid advocate of online harassment, and Concerned Father par excellence is not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, why should I care?
or
-Who is David Hill...and why should I care?

Maybe you shouldn't care--if you don't think that cool game stuff you want to play can come out of discussions about games we have online, you can probably stop now.

Anyway: this is about a much larger thing, it's about a way of talking about films and books and games that Hill advocates and represents but that goes wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy beyond him. 

Here's a weird fact: the fact that David Hill would repeatedly attack some movies without having ever seen them is 100% in line with the deepest underpinnings of the theory of art criticism that Hill and fellow RPG Drama Club critics subscribe to.

The method is:

1. Listen to a summary of whatever it is.

2. Assume the only message of the thing is that what happens in it is what should happen in real life.

3. Decide whether that would be good or not.

Since, in this PMRC-style worldview, a piece of media's message always baldly mirrors its elevator pitch you don't have to look at it, and a story is only worth telling if it's worth imitating.

In this view, we are all those teenagers that got run over in the street after watching The Program. Machines doomed to live out only the awful destinies hack writers imagine.

So you can assess, say, Star Wars, and assess it over and over and over and over on multiple websites without ever experiencing it because "the" message is what matters--this has corollaries:

Message does not emerge from style. Messages do not differ from audience member to audience member. The way an actor acts cannot convey a message. The way a director directs cannot convey a message. The sets, designs, costumes and use of mise en scene cannot convey a message.  

100 plus years of film criticism, Pauline Kael, Cahiers Du Cinema, Susan Sontag--these things grown-ups notice about how craft and performance alter meaning and how audiences receive things--do not matter. That thing where someone might notice that Alan Pakula's use of geometry in camerawork slowly turns The Parallax View from an almost Fall Guy like dueling-banjos romp into a horror movie about the terror of physical space itself does not matter.

That moment where you--being sentient and self-aware--go through a thing with your brain and your snacks and drinks and then notice what happens to your own self and the selves around you after that experience? That thing doesn't matter. That thing social scientists do where they find out what people in bulk do before and after a possibly attitude-changing event? That thing doesn't matter.

Real experience doesn't matter in a mode of criticism built on finding out if you can spell out what you hate using the alphabet soup of somebody else's art.

What matters is you found a trope and you wouldn't want that thing to happen in real life, that makes the thing bad. This is the mode of criticism-via-plot-summary used when you see people decry D&D as being "about" racial genocide or go "BUY MY GAME WHERE YOU CAN FINALLY TELL STORIES ABOUT..." some big concept that is more interesting than the game itself will ever be.  

A prime example is the Mother Jones story Hill references above --it contains no science linking Star Wars to militaristic attitudes, it just points out Star Wars kicked off a spike in awesome toys and dares the reader to make the leap to so...Reagan, Nicaragua, right? Right? Conveniently ignoring that the post-Vietnam era saw such a massive drop-off in military recruitment and US enthusiasm for overseas engagement that we now have mercenaries do most of the work for us. Pentagon officials frequently discuss the difficulties of waging war in a post-Vietnam environment yet, oddly, never talk about the delights of doing so in the post-Star Wars era--with which it almost entirely coincides.

The '80s wartoys that the article laments (StarWars, GI Joe, Voltron...) were lavished on a generation of teens less willing to go to war for their country than any previous one...
Bizarrely, military recruitment keeps going down even though
they keep making more Star Wars stuff.
Probably out of sheer coincidence, that drop-off between 90 and 98 coincides almost exactly with the Star Wars generation reaching recruitable age. An eight year old who had a Hoth playset in 1981 would be an 18 year old telling the Gulf War, George Bush Senior, and the hippie parents who sent his approval rating through the roof to go fuck themselves in 1991. Star Wars kids didn't turn into whitebread patriots, they turned into riot grrrls and invented Lollapalooza and bought hip hop by the ton until it was the most popular music in the world.

Is that a bad metric? Is it unfair? What would be a good one?

These questions don't matter in the world of "message" criticism. Things aren't things--they're "Stories About..." topics. And how you feel about the topic tells you all you need to know about the thing, relieving you of the burden of having to know about the thing.

This mode is freakishly common in RPG discourse neither despite- nor because of- the fact it's totally intellectually bankrupt but because it's a fun way to make the critic seem wittier and cleverer than what they're criticizing. Check me out I'm noticing HP Lovecraft is "Some dude fearing otherness in Connecticut", I am the cutest nerd. 

In reality, art is not reducible to its themes. If it were, there'd be no need for it: once you believed the right things you could give up on art.

The levels of complexity present even in the dullest work of art are impenetrable to these folks (or they pretend they are. Ask them about some murdercentric media they like and they're suddenly Roland fucking Barthes). To take only the example near to hand--Star Wars was envisioned by Lucas (and seen by many of his generation) as a pro-Viet Cong allegory of the Vietnam War and by later film critics as a film whose stylistic choices alone (big budget epic heroic fantasy) undermined this subversive message and then by still later critics and Occupy activists as a film whose stylistic choices (bricolage and diversity=good guys, cleanliness and corporate uniformity=bad guys) reinforced a leftist message but then so wait gun control and on and on...

They're all wrong (the only consistent message Star Wars has been proven to have sent en masse to the public is "more Star Wars and more things like Star Wars") but at least they saw it before spouting off. 
"Awmm soopuw ekthighted about the Wight Wing Powuw Fantasy"
It goes without saying the messages people take from Star Wars are manifold not because Star Wars is such a many-splendored thing but just because it's a thing at all. Experience isn't simple and the way the world's 6 billion humans process any two hours worth of made-up stuff is even less simple. My point is an interpretation by someone who hasn't experienced a thing--or, more generally and extending to people besides David Hill--topical broadbrush criticisms that could have been made by someone who hadn't even experienced the thing are a fucking pox.

If the thing someone says about the thing could've been said about the Netflix blurb of the thing, the thing they said isn't smart, and they aren't smart, and they make the conversation worse and slower and everybody should start ignoring them.
Mandy with her tie fighters. As a disabled bi feminist immigrant sex worker,
she's obviously in it for the right wing power fantasy.

You can pretty much cherrypick anything until it sounds like shit if you want. I could say David Hill's beloved Vampire is basically about pretending you're better than everyone else because you're a sexual predator (or folkloric and metaphoric interpretation thereof). But I wouldn't because I realize that would be stupid and shitty and reductive and, if you think of games as important or the people who create them and enjoy them (for a wide variety of legit reasons I can't even begin to catalogue) as real humans--profoundly unempathic. People like what you don't like and you don't know why and you're too scared to go outside of your tinkertoy vision of what's wrong with the world and to enter someone else's head long enough to find out.
Chicken Little Criticism needs to stop and the people who promote it need to stop being supported by the RPG community in any way. You don't get better games or better gamers by accusing your fellow humans of making or loving fascism based on a TL;DR.

Those people who worked on that thing? They're people. They deserve an "innocent until proven guilty" just like everyone else--if you want to claim they're so stupid that you know more about what their art says to people than they do, you need to do better than "Well that's what I heard!".

The only right wing fantasy here is David's and it's a very old one--the fantasy of using art to parent the world.

Vrokk, Isle of the War Wizards

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I was talking to Anders about the Goblin Market and how after a while it doesn't take too long to make up content for a place once you get its "voice"--how most GMs invent little pocket-worlds they can, over time, learn to easily occupy, mentally.

These blog entries keep track of accumulated lore and developments, but they also work almost like a spell before GMing. I read through and by the end I'm there, and I can act and react like that place when I have to run a session because I go to the right headspace.

So anyway here's Vrokk...
Nominally ruled by Queen Jayeleene, whom the player characters rescued from Royal Fist Monkeys long ago, Vrokk is, practically speaking, a clutch of feudal magocracies.
Queen Jayeleene
The extremely vain and jealous queen has become increasingly eccentric, demanding all powerful women on the isle wear masks. They humor her.

The most powerful War Wizards of Vrokk are all equally subtle or inept, for, despite near-constant intrigues, the political constellations have barely shifted in the last century, save for the disappearance of Cyanotica Bast, whose arcology was then occupied by a demon of sloth named Anaxorchas.
Cyanotica Bast
There are rumors that Anaxorchas planned to overrun the nearby arcology of Nithrinn Poxx but so far this hasn't happened. Nithrinn Poxx has been behaving strangely--no less abritrarily than usual but somehow a different flavor of arbitrary.
Nithrinn Poxx

Clarissa of Oog and Hargen the Insidious have both long resided in the city of Vrokk itself.

Clarissa of Oog, she has a second mouth where her left eye should be

Hargen has recently developed a passion for Yoonish cloud pheasant, and has been eating nothing else and done nothing else but eat for the last 17 days.
Hargen The Insidious

No-one is sure quite why Vrokk attracts so many powerful magicians. Some say there are things buried beneath it, deep in the Cube, where the earth communes with itself in cthonic meditation relaying endlessly a tale of itself to itself and skin between the real and the dreamt is stretched like skin over the wide mouth of a deep drum.

What you do in Vrokk is hexcrawl between the wizards and their wars and their scheming. They're great for inscrutable assignments.

For instance:

-The adventurers need to locate a rottweiler. The dog is a witness to a territorial violation by a swallow acting as familiar to Nithrinn Poxx. The dog's wandered into a zone wracked with a spasm, which contracts and births hybrid moths which seek high office in Vrokk and, mistaking the rottweiler for an important official, have captured it and are at attempting to interrogate it.  Nobody has "Speak With Animals here so it's all a pill.

or

-The upper reaches of a flooded cathedral on the coast has been repurposed as a dock for Queen Jayeleene's fleet in its campaign against the Rogue Traitors who seek to plunder and harry the isles. The problem is the vicious sea elves infesting the cathedral's lower reaches. Something about repatriating a relic? And totally of course one of the other wizards is helping them just to be an asshole.


Vrokk is not natively exotic, but exotic things are done to it. The landscape is sporadically metamorphosed and beaten, its disrupted geography bears old scars--things unimagined grow in the spaces between watchtowers and armies.




The culture is languid, advanced, coded, suspicious, brittle, and tolerant in the lazy way of places where no one really likes anyone else. Everyone's mind idles on some distant plane or awful future dream of violet conquest. Sensitive visitors find themselves trying not to offend the sorcerers with their vulgarity until they realize everything does. Talking, eating, breathing--all necessities form a kind of painful background static to the War Wizards, not least because it reminds them of all the realities they have themselves yet to transcend.

The mighty War Wizards eye your party from godhood's lobby, wondering how best to use them to shorten their wait.

If I Have To Say "Mome Rath" One More Time My Face Will Fall Off

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THURSDAY

We were somewhere around West Adams on the edge of the freeway, when the Wayz began to suck balls.

I remember saying something like "We can't stop here, this isn't, like, where the place is."

But the Lyft girl had my back, and soon I was 8 blocks away, in an inflatable orange chair in a building with a plaque outside saying "The main issue in life is not the victory but the fight, the essential thing is to have fought well" which didn't make much sense to me but I took four selfies next to it anyway.

I didn't have much choice: there were a lot of people talking in official capacities at Indiecade The International Festival Of Independent Games but mostly about videogames, which I don't make. There were games to play though, so I did. I'd like to think I fought well, but when you're strapped into VR goggles watching ping-pong balls the size of cantaloupes bouncing off a waffle grid, it can be hard to tell.

I met a Pole and at least three Tylers. I know at least that much. I was informed my books either were or were not at the warehouse.

Eventually I had my only meeting of the day--with a company that made games, TV shows and comic books. I knew had read and enjoyed at least one of the comic books. I looked into the rep's blue eyes, eating Twixes "That was a good comic," I said. It was true.

After meatballs, there were prizes. There were game celebrities I didn't recognize making jokes about each other and saying "devs" and "triple A" and using acronyms. "All these other nominated games look amazing," I thought "I don't deserve to beat any of them". I didn't. Zoe Quinn had great shoes though. Back in Culver City there was a woman at the bar on a first date--Mandy and Stokes gave her a lapdance and kept taking their clothes off. We played a game with- but not of- cards.


FRIDAY

They still make things at 9 in the morning. It's not just that my books are missing, it's that ALL the merch is missing for all of Indiecade. This makes me feel better. 

There are game designers here from France, Poland, Germany, the UK--they ask me why Americans are so neurotic about language, I introduce them to root beer and tater tots. Maybe I am going to hell. The books show up though.

There are a lot of beautiful and very loud machines--a lot of people see a table full of books and just keep walking and I am cool with that, confident that my people will find me. Ok not confident but whatever. I am better off than the guy next to me with the text adventure who has to somehow explain that yes this is a computer but there won't be explosions. It's a good game though. I have his card somewhere. I have a million peoples' cards. I have all cards ever made and there are no cards left on earth. Maybe I should have cards? One day I will have cards. According to this one I met Luke Crane.

Somehow we end up at the same bar where the girls were taking their clothes off the night before. Probably because walking-distance Culver City on a Friday night is like a strip mall in a midwest town with a really important football team. The foreigners ask my advice--I told them art couldn't participate in the societal imperative to suppress the awareness of violence even if it wanted to and also get out of Culver City.


SATURDAY

I am fucking Abe Lincoln tired, but I can still pitch Red & Pleasant Land. But can I run it? People seem to think so, except one perceptive girl who notices that due to the Alice's randomized level-ups her thief can't do anything the person running the Alice can't. Well almost--I try to explain that she's got Languages, which is actually a useful skill, and that the Alice's saves are fucked but I'm so fried from talking about croquet balls and rapiers for hours on end with no sleep I barely believe myself. I won't realize I was right all along until I run the numbers the next day--but by then it's been so long since I slept I've forgotten whether you roll over or under saving throws. Seriously I forgot Red Box I am losing my mind. One kid makes a wizard named 'Bread" one makes a fighter named 'Neighborhood Asshole'.

The Red & Pleasant Lands are sold out by the end of the day, though. So I'm doing something right or everyone's stupid.

I come home to a thick and sugary smell which confuses me until I remember I'd told Anne to make a coat out of marshmallows. There it was, dangling from a floor fan to keep it away from the dogs.

There are two things they never mention about marshmallow coats: they're fucking heavy and women look great in them. We were having a birthday party--people dressed as Wolverine and Jarvis Cocker came, and a girl with sequins instead of eyebrows. It all ended with the birthday girl on my lap serenely mumbling about a game where pugs smell each others' butts which is a net win for Independent Gaming I think.


SUNDAY

Get away from the marshmallow goo all over the floor. Get in the car.  Where am I? Wait: It's preview time and we can preview each others' games. Except I can't because someone has to run this game.

For three days I've sat 20 feet from this video game that looks like exactly like weird spatial nightmares I've been having since I was four and the only game that won two awards and I never get to try it. It looks amazing. I don't vote in the Developer's Choice Award because I haven't touched most of them. People sure do ask a lot of questions. Yes, I drew it. I wrote it. Yes, D&D. It's not technically a game it's a supplement. Where can you get it? Who knows? Stores? I guess? This is Vornheim, get it instead, it's cheaper.

There are at least three other games here with Alice In Wonderland stuff. Meanwhile somebody has a game where you throw trucks that is literally powered by your thoughts.

Event staff tells us abruptly to pack up our gear, there'll be some end-of-Indiecade awards. The People's Choice award goes to Bad Blood, the Developer's Choice award goes to a Macbeth-themed game, the Press Choice Award goes to a game with big colored buttons called Codex Bash, the jury's Special Recognition Award which encompasses not only the normal nominees but everything at Indiecade goes to a fucking book called Red & Pleasant Land by Jez and fucking me.

I'm like what even is that? They give me a trophy with a Nintendo controller and Beavis and Butthead on it. Then I get some fried chicken and explain to some guys who made a game where you power up by screaming into a headset that the best videogame is Space Marine. Then Stokely rolls up EXACTLY WHEN THE SINGALONG PART OF BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY STARTS and we go to a party where we got to smash a virtual reality asteroid and it was scary and then we went to Venice and the only bar on the beach had a Doors cover band and Stokely tells the international game designers about being locked in a vault then there was a bartender in a Green Bay Packers shirt who was like "Oh you did Red and Whatsit Land I liked your game man" and me and the Pole and the guy from Bristol who made the big colored button game finished our drinks in the closing-time light of total exhaustion and weird victory.
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D100 One-Use Items And The Culture That Created Them

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Not all by me--crowdsourced by the Google+ braintrust in the thread here. If you can't follow that link and want to, write and ask to be added to my Google+ game circles along with a link to your Google+ address.

1. Humanskin glove gives advantage to choke attacks. Created by lizardmen/reptilewomen.
2. Nomadic burnt oak cake. Allows mount to move 25% faster but carry 10% less weight.
3. Origami stone. Perfect fidelity to a marble chunk save for its softness. Burn it: crazed stone golem appears. Creator: vapor-poisoned razor-fetishist wood monks.
4. Weeping Pillow. Will kill any child or elderly person sleeping on it and used in times of famish and calamity to spare them a slow death.
5. Huge black lacquered fingernail. Witch giant's family heirloom; reflects sunlight as moonlight. Creator: some dead witch giant.
6. A limbless dog corpse that inexorably wriggles toward a well, poisoning it. Craft of the unrelenting hillmen.
7. Powdered Hopes - a mix of dirt from home and herbs ensures a sleeper that they dream of the family they where forced to leave behind.
8. Hunt Stink. 2d4 pills in a bag.  Consuming one makes you smell like local prey animals for 1 hour (cumulative effect). Created by Orcs.
9. slimy tincture in tiny glass vial holding an enormous squid-like creature. expands rapidly when broken or unstoppered. An atlantian transport device or prison.
10. Lonely Crown. A metal headband, when worn the slave cannot see others who wear the same item ensuring that they can't conspire against their masters.
11. Bag of Platonic solids. Out of bag, they cut through everything, steadily and rectilinearly, until holder recites a reductio. Creator: a fallen godling's geometry cult.
12. Crystalline seeds you plant into blood soaked ground. Grow into D20 arrows, +2 versus the type of creature from which the blood was spilled. 
13. crystalline lens that converts sunlight to a d4 hp magic missile blast. aarakocra sacramental.
14. troll graft held in a mildly acidic solution. inserted into wounds to create bonzai creatures. illithid art implement. applied and quickly burned, serves as a healing patch.
15. Anesthesiode. Poem congealed as portable foam; dissolves once recited. Reciter saves vs. being numb to new info, d4 hours. Creators: Roving band of occult restauranteurs.
16. pomeranian figurine. If dashed to the ground, 3d10 small dogs rush a target in sight, knocking it to the ground and dealing 1 hp/dog. made by martial artist wizard.
17. A small amount of sand from the depths of the ocean. If thrown any creature within a 15 feet cone must make a save by death/DC 17 CON save or take 6D6 damage, half on a successful save, also suffer from blindness for 1D3 rounds. Made by deep mermen
18. Sundering-stones - Red orb split with jagged line. Brought together, shatters any continuous object. Siege-breakers from ancient, rigid empire; blessed by a King’s final breath.
19. a series of crystals whose chime may open a door to any place, lasting d8 hours. created by elves with bald heads and in neon robes.
20. a gel distilled from star mite fluid by githyanki dissidents. creates a tiny star for a single second (pulls everything in sight to the center, burns for 4d6 damage, double to undead.
21. a white staff which, when struck to the floor three times causes all the curtains and portals in the room to fly open. holy implement of bard priests of an annoying god.
22. Ground bone powder, snorting it gives dream visions from the past of your immediate location. Created in a village where everyone wears strange wooden masks.
23. a grass cloak allowing you to crouch and hide, appearing to be a small barrow or mound. made by reindeer-riding animists.
24. finger bone key , made by xaosichects to spread their theories surreptitiously. dropped in water, backdoor access to the dreams of an alternate self most close to you, dimension-wise.
25. a small door, made by xaosichect operatives. Placed in the stomach, may be opened to hide or imprison someone in another person.
26. Blood-wood curio box, fashioned from a bough of the first tree, into which all regret can be placed. Bardic item. Gives advantage to all performance and reaction rolls until someone in the village discovers the Bard's true name; then confers disadvantage to all performance and reaction rolls until the owner moves on. Destruction of the item releases all its contained regrets and causes suicide for all thinking creatures within a hundred leagues, save vs magic devices (Will) to avoid. Created by a mountain-folk rune maker of the northern lands, slyly gifted to a rival canton's Konung, made for his mead hall's skald (also his lover), immediately disfavoured, mocked, and expelled into the wintry wild.
27. Political pamphlet made by sturmlord fascist devotees. only legible to Dagon-men. Non-Dagonians reading vomit a jet of water as strong as a fire hose.
28. Nautilus cap with a kelp "feather". If flourished, charm all Dagon-men in sight. Made by deep sea explorers.
29. Jack in the box made by infernal tiefling jester class. Every third "pop" releases whoever is trapped inside in exchange for whoever is most close to and looking at the box. 
30. A cave dwelling culture, they pierce pterodactyl eggs, drain them, and then fill them with successive layers of magic powder. When the egg shell is smashed, it erupts into a prismatic sphere.
31. Reed basket, keeps one armload of fruit placed in it eternally fresh, made by a wise woman of the western marshes.
32. Alligator skin cap made by hermits along the Nile. Bite something for 2d6 damage and hold tight for d6 damage each following turn.
33. Venus of Willendorf via alien sculptor. Summons an alien beauty so terrible to behold all are struck mad for a turn. She'll write any spell in your spellbook if you can avoid showing your madness and offending her.
34. Maniples of martial artists priests, cracked like a whip, can bind a target for one turn.
35. Song stones of a lost avian empire. Beautifully painted. If broken, emits an ancient melody that triggers feelings of 1. Euphoria 2.terror 3. Alertness 4. Starvation in all who hear it.
36. Golden colored dandelion. If blown, the seeds multiply until they obscure vision in a 20 foot radius for 5 rounds. - Created by sylvan elf gardener who grows magic plants. 
37. Pomade in a small ceramic jar. Safely closes any bleeding wound, but it always leaves an ugly and painful keloid scar. Made by orc medics. (1d4 doses left)
38. Cage carried by hunters of the horrors that breach the Shimmer in Tarnis. Removes ability to fear; if opened, user faces all accumulated fears simultaneously. 
39. Swamp Spike: poison plant used by lizard men/bullywugs. Increase melee damage by 4 for 1d4 rounds, at end of each round user/victim suffers 1d6 damage (no save).
40. The Hollow Children- hollowed out obsidian shards that each contain a memory of fleeting youth- a coven of hags from the Slidgil Depths.
41. Loud Pearl--put it in your ear to hear everything in a 200' cone through walls or other obstacles. Made by sea elves.
42. A pair of metal spikes that vibrate like a tuning fork when crossed in the presence of men from beyond the stars. Made by elves with throbbing brains.
43. water tablet - grape-sized dry tablet turns into a barrel's-worth of water when exposed to the slightest amount of dampness. Made by nomadic wizards for long journeys across sea or desert. 
44. Restoration Dagger – Insert large, hollow, stiletto-like blade into flesh, press button. Nanites effectively heal spell, resurrect recently dead. Basic med-tech of space-faring giant ape-philosophers.
45. Crow eyeball. Consuming it instantly converts you into a sentient murder of crows for 1 hour. Created by orcish assassins.
46. Moonbottle. When unstoppered, the moon vanishes from the sky and appears in the bottle for a single night. Created by a cult of witchunters.
47. Flail of Flying: Large ungainly flail that if whirled around above your head causes you to rise rapidly into the air until your arms tire. Made by suicidal priests of a forgotten godling.
48. Small gold tuning fork. When struck against rock, it resonates at different frequencies and volumes depending on type and proximity of the nearest precious metal deposit. Created by deep gnomes.
49. Dero sweet airs. Smell of sulfur, salt or jasmine stone. cause temporary visions of a conspiratorial, mad truth.
50. Graveworm. Placed in: right ear, improves intelligence; left ear, improves wisdom; chewed & spit, curses an opponent. Effects are minor & last d10 minutes. Grave diggers' secret.
51. Tincture of Melancholy: Vial, one dose, dark blue liquid. Scent causes weeping for 24 hours (-4 Charisma).  Creator: theatrical troupe led by an emo warlock.
52. Silver Tongue: Fits over tongue like sleeve, for 24 hours wearer has advantage on all romantic/diplomacy interactions. Creator: Loveless warforged from Island of Bones.
53. Arrow that causes plague of Otto's Irresistible Dance, transmitted by touch. Creator: siege wizards.
54. Egg shell. All who hear it crushed are blinded and deafened. (save at penalty). Made in luxurious and opulent underground nation of thieves.
55. Millescan Mirror: enchanted to capture planar creatures and banish them from our plane when shattered. Created by the Demon-quellers of Millesce. 
56. Bark sheet. Worn as girdle. Wearer looks like a tree until non-move action is taken, then shatters. From anarchist forest tribe.
57. A piece of string that gets tighter the louder the wearer is. Breaks when wearer is detected. From monastery of silent monks.
58. Powder that increases in temperature as wearer risks being seen. Burns away if wearer seen. From ashes of baby-stealing demon elves.
59. A wind up statue that absorbs all spells encountering it's song. All release simultaneously when the song ends, destroying it. From sleep-worshiping Tiamat cult.
60. Blade of Grass: small vial of liquid that if poured on a blade of grass it temporarily hardens into a steel-like blade (1d6 hours). Made by Plains Elves.
61. Bubble of Trouble: a small glass vial with a soapy mixture inside and a wire hoop attached to the stopper. When the bubble blown from this mixture pops, the reflections of all living creatures on the bubble's surface come to life and attack their doubles. Made by cruel changeling fairies.
62. Paper Frog: a large origami frog, has one Jump spell written into the folds. Used as a disposable pogo by the assassins of the Silver Lotus Clan. 
63. Worm Bullet - hard chrysalis awakened by body heat. Melds with nearest organ to impact site and aggressively animates it in 1d6 turns. If cut open, contains as many worm bullets. Gunslingers of the Great Grub.
64. Cracker of Quality - hard tug ejects one gold crown,  joke that read aloud paralyses one random listener, and another item from this list. Venerable traditionists.
65. Doom Spinner. Spinning top makes low droning when spun, inducing sense of dread and mild optical hallucinations. Decreases morale in earshot, creatures dying nearby choke out grim prophecies in Latin with their last breath. Prophets of a dead race.
66. Faerie Curse Removing Nut: Let a cursed person sleep with the nut in their armpit on a new moon's night and the nut will turn black as it sucks out the curse. If the nut is then eaten by someone before the next dawn, the curse will transfer over to them, if it's not eaten by anyone by that time the curse will return.
67. Merrow Spittle: water-breathing potion, causes imbiber to grow webbed feet and hands, making underwater movement easier. Tastes REALLY bad. Occasionally causes vomiting, negating effect and impairing the drinker. Used by urchin divers.
68. A nourishing broth that acts as a cure disease spell but also causes you to gain d8x10 pounds. Created by a cult of grandmothers who think you're too thin and don't eat enough out there on your adventures.
69. Bottled Ship: is a model ship in a glass bottle. When the bottle is broken the ship rapidly grows to 1:1 scale permanently. The ship is still one solid piece of carved wood, with no hold or cabin. The wheel and ropes are just decoration, but it will float (upside down). Failed experiment of a smugglers guild.
70. Door in a Bag: a small pouch with sawdust inside. When the sawdust is throne against a wall, roof, or floor it creates a doorway for 1d6 minutes. The doorway is two meters high, one meter wide, and up to two meters deep. Made by the gravediggers guild.
71. Silver bullet that never miss it's mark. Cast under a new moon by poachers in the southern mountains.
72. A bag of leaves & debris that when poured out in a 10' circle makes a pit trap beneath it. Created by woodland trappers.
73: Courtesan's Veil: cloth imbued with a spurned Tiefling's tears, it gives the wearer max Cha/App for one evening. However, anyone who interacts with the wearer falls possessively in love.
74. Herringbomb. Immensely stinky, fermented fish from beyond the northern sea, in metal container. Releases Stinking Cloud when opened. Northerners are immune, and will claim it tastes like expensive cheese. Mmmmm, lutefisk!
75. Half-life candle: they burn as bright as the sun for 5 minutes, cannot be extinguished, hazardous to hold while lit, permanently radioactive afterwards (Dwarven Vampire Hunters) 
76. Make-up that constantly changes the features of your face for a night (Decadent Psychedelic Nobility)
77. Hair gel projects your surface thoughts into a bubble above your head for 30 minutes. Practical joke made by 3rd year divination students. 
78.  Shoe phone - With this shoe/boot phone you can phone in one limited wish from a Genie.  The shoe phone was created by the Maxwellians, a ancient race of humans that wore extravagant tunics.  
79. Glass throwing dagger, shatters on impact. Any damaged by it have total amnesia for 2d12 rounds. From Persian-esque city on edge of Desert of Nepethe.
80. Braided sisal nuptual collar of the dogmen. An orgasm experienced in daylight will grant the wearer a fortune and cause blindness for d6hrs. From the forests of Argeld. 
81. Drawstring pouch contains whispered secret, now unknown to original speaker. Made by paranoid secretive sub-race hidden within society, zealous guardians of their annonymity.
82. One of Huginn's feathers. Burning it removes everyone else's memories of last round's events. Used by Odin's agents.
83. Bar Ragga Death-cap History and Flavor Text: The cult of War-barra have long been feared by the tribes of the west, not for their battle prowess, but for their Deathsong. Worn about the neck of the War-barra child-soldier is a skull-like seed-pod known as the Bar Ragga Death-cap, or just Death-cap. This seed pod is a psychotropic plant cultivated deep in the catacombs of the tribe's mountain fortress near a millennia. In the face of certain death, War-barra child-soldiers consume the Death-cap, releasing a flood of endorphin stimulating chemicals into their blood-stream. Consumption of the Death-cap, means certain death, but allows for one last action in which the consumptive, is restored to full vitality, strikes with unerring precision, and vengeful strength.  Bar-Ragga Death-cap Game Mechanics: Character must save vs. Poison (+4 bonus). On save she is restored to full health, Attacks with a +4 to hit, a 2 in 6 chance the hit is a Critical Hit, and damage multiplied by the character's level. These effects last one round only, or until the target of the character's Deathsong is killed, after which the character dies frothing at the mouth as her veins and nervous system are overloaded, chemically burned up, and her heart explodes. Resurrection, heal spells, etc are completely ineffective. Any character consuming the Death-cap irrevocably dies. All War-barra soldiers seek a glorious blood soaked death.
84. Black sands of Yonde, collected by ragged alligator men. Presents visions of anything that occurred while stars still lit Yonde.
85. Mirror reflects parallel reality where things play out slightly differently. Shatter to choose the best outcome of either world (advantage). Made by alternate you.
86. White Snake Ring. A ring in the shape of a small white snake, biting its own tail. When you put the ring on it animates and bites you, dealing damage that you never fully heal from unless you do a quest or cleansing. You're also troubled by disturbing dreams and have a fondness for mice. If you take lethal damage at any point while wearing the ring, it burrows into your hand, and a large white snake immediately bursts from your body, shedding your skin and moving a good 30 feet away. Within a minute or so, you gain consciousness and can crawl out of the dessicated snake body, healed of your last lethal wound. Crafted by Albino Ovates of the secretive White Snake Shamans. 
87. Starfish of Zzoz. A strange creature from another plane with an interesting defense mechanism. If you rip off arm from the starfish, if phases back to its home plane. The starfish will vanish and  1. You go ethereal for a short time, existing between worlds 2. 1 and the starfish dumps a psychic bomb on every one within 100 feet. You'll recover quicker since you're prepped for it, but bring a spare change of underwear.  3. 1, 2, and a portion of its watery realm floods the area within 100 feet, causing a small tidal wave ( strong enough to knock people of their feet and wash out a dungeon room)  4. 1, 2, 3, and the area is filled with Jellyfish that give poison damage. These starfish are carefully cultivated in shallow sea nurseries in their home realm by intelligent plane traveling manatees who value them as art pieces. 
88.  Crunchy enchanted, dried beetles, produced by the Scaly Death tribe.  They act as a standard healing potion and taste of mozzerella.
89. Ask-a-Doll: Garishly colored yarn dolls that represent local celebrities (the mayor, the archbishop, the Dragon terrorizing the parish, your own party members if you're famous enough). If you ask it a question about where to find services, entertainment, or goods, it will attempt to read your mind and give you the best suggestion on how to spend your time. Has 1d4 uses, and you get to keep the doll. Immensely popular with children, slow people, and the king's court. Commissioned by the city council to encourage tourism, crafted by gnomes. Occasionally you'll get a hacked one that slips by quality control. The ones by prankster gnomes are obvious and ribald, the gentry love them. Other ones are much less obvious and suggest ideas that seem fine, but usually wind up causing trouble.
90. Beetles of Borgheranz: If crushed into a paste and worn as pomade, +5 CHA to wearer. Causes horrible dreams. From Frenchy Faerie court.
91. Knife that turns one living king into a voodoo doll for another. Both most be struck at least once. Creator: Drow.
92. Infected caltrops. Creator: Urban murder halflings.
93. Crossbow bolt that can anchor in stone or any other substance and cannot be removed. Creator: Dwarves.
94. An habitual liars dried tongue is crushed into a powder, the person who eats it forgets the names of those he/she is about to lie to.
95. 5 inch tall golden man figure obeys any order given by owner, will interpret orders in a way that is most beneficial to most people. Ironic gift for evil cultist.
96. Githyanki intentional bomb. A biorganic and barbed metal pupating creature into whose mind is imprinted a single intent. As it sheds its chrysalis and dies in alien air, all within range are powerfully compelled by this one intent.
97. Piece of gum that when you blow a bubble actually allows you to fly a bit. Created by children with a sense of wonder and bit of magical ability 
98. a magical scroll (spell really doesn't matter) that has been written in charcoal and everything is misspelled and has backwards letters and upper and lower case just randomly littered though out it. When used to cast the spell you roll four times on your wild mage surge table of choice. Created by goblin sorcerers
99: Snow Globe: a glass orb filled with water and white powder. When smashed causes a localised blizzard for 1 d6 hours. Made by homesick northern gnome mage.

100. Rage Snuff: a packed powder ball that can be crushed between the fingers and snorted, the snuffer instantly enters a barbarian rage. Used by the Chaos Monks of Bakoo.
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The Goblin Cubes

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Stairs down through mist-filled abyss for like 100feet. No ceiling, no floor, no walls, nothing but mist and stairs.

Then the stairs terminate at a door in the base of a 50' x 50'x 50' cube.

The surfaces of the cube are dense and all awrithe with carvings in black soapstone, kind of like...
Now while you can just go through the door (on Face 1), there's also doors on every other face, only these are set in the middle of these faces rather than the base.

Also, there are no stairs to these other doors, so you'll have to climb or fly around.

Once inside, the gimmick is threefold:

1) Each door leads to a slightly different version of the room inside the cube.

2) Only one of these versions has access to another set of stairs leading down further the rest of the dungeon. The rest are dead ends.

3) Once you open a door, you'll see that around the perimeter of the floor of the room there's a line of carved runes which, if crossed, triggers a magic trap--a different one from each direction.

Doors close when unobserved. Opening multiple doors simultaneously causes multiple effects.

The party has encountered two examples so far, some influenced by the Perplexity tables in* Red & Pleasant Land:

Statue Room

The carvings on the outside of the cube include the famous epic of the First Goblin King Insulting The Sun Thus Beginning Their Enmity. The room contains, in the center of the room, a life-sized statue of a goblin lord pointing to Face 1.

Stepping across the line of runes behind the door from Face 1 turns anything leather you've got into syrup.

Stepping across the line of runes behind the door from Face 3 turns anything metal you've got into syrup.

Stepping across the line of runes behind the door from Face 5 turns anything wood you've got into syrup.

Stepping across the line of runes behind the door from Face 6 turns anything stone you've got into syrup.

A) The door in Face 1 leads to a version of the room which has an exit on Face 6 which has stairs to the rest of the dungeon.

B) The door in Face 2 leads to a version with no other exit but back out to Face 1.

C) The door in Face 3 leads to a version like B but completely filled with a blackish liquid that gushes out in a torrent when you open the door.

D) The door in Face 4 leads to a version like B but:
-the door (which opens out/down) is directly under the statue
-the statue is now made of linked (easily dissassemblable and carryable) pieces of gold
-the statue stands in the middle of a ring of indestructible candles and anything crossing them (or their airspace) disintegrates.
...likely anyone who opens this door unaware of what's about to happen will feel an immense weight of the statue falling through the door and need to roll some dice.

E) The door in Face 5 leads to a version like D only you're seeing it from the side so it'd be real hard to get to the gold statue without being disintegrated.

F) The door in Face 6 leads to a version like B but there are versions of the adventuring party, all dead inside, apparently after some horrific battle.


Turtle Furniture Room

The carvings on the outside of the cube include the famous tale of The Goblin Brothers Who Turned The Moon Sideways To Use As A Boat Across The Night. The room contains a hearth, a rug in the center of the room, and several pieces of comfortable goblin-sized furniture carried on the backs of galapagos tortoises.

Stepping across the line of runes behind the door from Face 1 turns anything paper you've got into syrup.

Stepping across the line of runes behind the door from Face 3 turns anything magic you've got into syrup.

Stepping across the line of runes behind the door from Face 5 turns anything gold you've got into syrup.

Stepping across the line of runes behind the door from Face 6 turns anything liquid you've got into syrup.

A) The door in Face 1 leads to a version of the room which has an exit on Face 6 which has stairs to the rest of the dungeon and an ancient goblin king with a midas-touch who has been imprisoned here. There are gold footprints on the floor and the patch of ground around him has been turned to gold.

B) The door in Face 2 leads to a version with no other exit but back out to Face 1. 

C) The door in Face 3 leads to a version like B but containing 6 goblin guards armed with pikes.

D) The door in Face 4 leads to a version like B but containing an iguana-sized basilisk. (You come up under the rug).

E) The door in Face 5 leads to a version like B but containing happily married or otherwise settled future versions of the PCs, who have freed the turtles and who urge the PCs to stay and relax forever.

F) The door in Face 6 leads to a version like B but containing 6 small mammals (they look like hamsters but are really overweight shrews) who have gone made, having been trapped here since the dawn of their species by goblins resentful of "the new animals". They have red eyes and ancient diseases you have no immunity to.

So far the party assassin has managed to have the gold statue fall past him (he rescued the arm), had his leg disintegrated by the candlesmoke, got turned to gold leaping on the midas king, then turned to stone by the basilisk.

He got better.

And now a word from our sponsor:

Somebody Check Laney Chantal's Dice

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Session before last was a long time coming:

9 millenia ago it was prophesied that unto Demogorgon would be betrothed a Champion of Tiamat, and this union would bring the Age of Eradications.

To determine the distaff part of the sacred union the Five Churches of Tiamat--The Pale Eye, The Jade Fang, The Red Hand, The Cobalt Claw, The Black Wing--brought forth champions to battle to the death in a mad tourney. Winner marries Demogorgon.

Through a barely explicable series of events involving the Plane of Shadow, a hot dog, and not wanting to be fat, the champion of the Jade Fang was named: a halfling with a pet flying squirrel-Estuche, avatar of Laney. That's the halfling--the squirrel's name I can't remember.
The other champions were more typical: level 20 paladins in plate mail with crazy powers.

Long story short is we have a lone 10th level halfling ranger with like 40-50 hit points going up against 4 bad guys with like 160 hit points each and, among other things, the ability to heal 100 hp in a single round action.

In the gambling parlors of the cube-shaped earth, the experts have weighed in:

So you're probably wondering how Laney died. Well here we go:

The Black Knight

The party managed to take out the Black Knight before the tournament even started. Which, yeah, is cheating. But then Ela:

...sorry--Baweyn the elf ranger--had the bright idea to go around wearing the black knight's armor. So nobody knew the Black Knight was missing and the Black Wing never thought to replace him. Go Ela!


The Cobalt Knight

So Estuche faced the Cobalt Knight in the first round of the tournament, the joust. Herein Alondra (as Excene the druid)...
(seen here with Red & Pleasant Land cake)

...thought to aid her ally with low cunning: although magic is not permitted in the tournament, there was nothing to prevent the Knight Viridian from secretly replacing the standard mount of tiny Knights of her Church (the velociraptor) with a druid wearing that shape.
Also Alondra
So it was a blue armored electromagnetic titan with a bastard sword on a carnivorous destrier vs a halfling with a spiked chain on a friendly dinosaur.

First round Laney wins initiative and immediately rolls a natural 20 with the spiked chain, meaning the Cobalt Knight's not only taking double damage but has a chain around his neck while on a horse and needs to extricate himself before doing anything else like, say, healing. Plus also velociraptor.

On his turn the Cobalt Knight can't get himself loose, then gets yanked by the neck off his horse (rolls a 1) and Laney then proceeds to roll natural 20s over and over and over and over for the rest of the fight. Everyone's sitting on the couch just staring as she and Alondra beats the fucking tar out of this guy who doesn't even get one spare round to lay on hands. Also I think she uses her rangerness to tell his horse to just go away.

First round to the Knight Viridian: the crowd goes wild. The Church of the Cobalt Claw begins scheming to assassinate the celebrating PCs in their seats.


The Red Knight

After the joust begins the melee--all the remaining knights (minus the Cobalt one, slain in the first round)--thrown together.

The Red and Pale champions engage each other, leaving Laney to fight the (fake) Black Knight, who she, of course, (fake) beats handily.  While the PCs in the stands manage to stop an assassination attempt from mutant elves of the Cobalt Claw, The Red Knight falls to...


The Pale Knight

...the last Knight left opposing the bold halfling. The Pale Knight is (Roll d100...) 90% fucked up from fighting the Red Knight, and Laney, who hasn't got a scratch on her, leaps on her as soon as Red goes down. All the Pale Knight's bonus Tiamat powers like level drain and reversing the last round depend on Pale winning initiative, which Pale never does, Laney then proceeds to natural 20 the fuck out of him too while the gods of probability weep as rain rolls down their bell-curved roofs and everyone playing is just like holy mother of fuck.

...thus winning the tournament--as was clearly ordained by Demogorgon, Inciter of All Incidents, Laney's new fiance.

As I wrote almost 2 years before I had any idea this would happen:

The Jade Fang is one of the five Tributary Temples of Glistening Tiamat....its energies are green: the energies of jealousy, lushness, vigor, triumph, old wisdom, glibness, and theft.
Praise be to Him


As word reaches the gambling halls of Gaxen Kane:

Fiddlin' Joe Cooper makes 5000gp.
Anxious P's Babs loses 1200gp betting on the Black Knight.
Malice Aforethought wins 10,000gp.
Sir Ward wins 2500gp.
Pete Loudly the Sorcerer wins 10,000gp.

...and the girls make their way back to Vornheim, undisputed leader of the Church of Tiamat in tow where Alondra gets drunk and wakes up next to a succubus, Twiggy gets such a reputation as a party animal that carousing in Vornheim costs twice as much from now on, and then party sets off to find an easy side quest before a PC has to marry an elder god and are promptly set upon by carnivorous apes.

More later.
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James Went Into His Attic And You Won't Believe What Happened Next...

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...he found 50 copies of Red & Pleasant Land that aren't out in stores. So if you're no up for hunting around, you can order these straight from the publisher.

Only 32 left now, so hurry.

Because Bad Wizards Are Annoying

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These things are true in D&D:

-Evil wizards come up a lot.

-Writing out which spells of which level they have is a pain in the ass, especially because they might die in a round.

-Always giving all of them infinite spells of the appropriate level removes an important tactical limit that makes wizard fights interesting.

So GMs might be interested to giving NPC wizards a limit on what they can cast, but one that's easier to work with than the one PC wizards have.

Here's one False Patrick and me are using in the upcoming (really upcoming: it's in layout) Maze of the Blue Medusa book. It's based on the following additional observations:

-You're going to be keeping track of the wizard's hit points.

-Even if the spell selection is written out for you like in a published module, you still are always going to have the player's handbook and/or its spell list and descriptions immediately to hand just in order to run the game normally.



A most excellent Librarian, 12' tall. Guards the SEEPING CHIMES from interference and knows what they are for.

AC: 17
HD: 8
Atk d12 bite or by spell
Can be harmed only by magical weapons--except fire, which does doubles damage.

Spells: Gruel can cast any magic-user spell of levels 1-4 at a hit point cost to herself equal to thrice the spell's level--so Magic Missile would cost her 3 hit points. The cost of healing spells is deducted after the spell takes effect.

Treasure:
800 gp in ancient bracelets.

-----

Notes on this:

-Obviously you can adjust the hit point cost for different kinds of wizards to like 2/level or 10/level or whatever and for different editions. This particular version of this monster was designed for Basic-style monsters, who have way less hp than 3, 4, and 5 edition monsters.

-Again, this presumes you've got the PHB and its spell list by level right there anyway, so it's no biggie to look down the list and decide what spell you'll use.

-If you're tempted to use this for PCs, there are hitches that take hold: outside combat, it gives them them infinite healing (if they have any healing spells) which in turn gives them infinite spells, which in turn means infinite growth, shrinking etc etc. It's good for combat only.

-Players playing hardcore system-mastery-as-tactic will be frustrated by this, but, really, let them be. It violates the system's rules but not the genre's.
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He Chose Poorly and Rolled Worse. He Will Be Missed.

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In the words of that guy from The Usual Suspects--We did more jobs, and I saw more money, than you can ever count.

--

My most vivid memory of the late Malice is very mundane:

Years ago, he and my own thief, Blixa, were scouting ahead of our party in the Vats of Mazarin moving toward a corner around which was what we'd find out was a lich.
And Blixa said "Walls."
and Malice said "Walls."

And they began to climb forward on the walls.

It was just that workaday tactical-thief thing we had. We were good at it.

He was proud, strong-willed, aggressive, devious, and more often in the front line than was strictly healthy for an AD&D assassin. A team player but mostly in the sense that he reliably kept the enemy busy, like Custer or JEB Stuart. And, like them, arrogant, too brave and dead.

As a player, there is possibly no-one who more often had my back and I his. Certainly no man.

--

Moreover, he died at an extremely inconvenient moment--in another GM's game, we were smack in the middle of one of the most desperate battles of our lives--near the final room in Jennell Jacquays' fiendish and utterly balance-blind classic Dark Tower, where last session we got through exactly 3 rounds of combat during which all I managed to do was run away 3 times and get punched by a demigod.

Normally I'd want revenge--problem is it was me who killed him.

--

I was GMing and they were deep in the goblin palace of Gaxen Kane, just past the Goblin Cubes, they'd killed the purple worm--noisily, and summoned a nuisance patrol.


Step One

The nuisance patrol were red goblins, though, which means they go up in a spell when they die. The party was pretty tasty about keeping them from actually dying via Hold Person and knocking them into a well of damned souls.

But then Malice tried to knock one over with a 2-handed sword and did it too well--the one-hit-die monster popped off in a cloud of Blind.


Step Two

When the saves clear we have two blind party members and enough party juice to clear up one case. A coin is tossed. The toss goes to False Patrick's martyrdom-hungry roachman Fiddlin Joe. Fiddlin' Joe of course elects to remain blind and give the cleric the potion. The cleric takes it.


Step Three

Malice cleverly uses a fixture of dangled iron to capture a rust monster. Then forgets they did that. Alcohol may be to blame.


Step Four

There is a mystery door and, behind, a glimmer of what looks to be--in the Predator-esque light of infravision glimpsed between door and jamb--one unmoving thing, goblin sized.

Malice and Fiddlin Joe hide above the door jamb. Pete Loudly, the party wizard hovers above the jamb. The party cleric, Joe Dunneman, hides in the room beyond, on the far side of a green slime pool.

A trap is rigged up--a bucket or jar of green slime on a rope. Malice opens the door without looking through, the bucket swings, the door is closed.

The cleric (of the god of cleanliness) counsels against this untidiness.

The GM rolls a die for this blind and unquiet trap. The slime, unseen by any living PC, hits no-one and forms a puddle on the far side of the door.




Step Five

The players wait a long time for someone to open the door so they can ambush them.

Meanwhile the comprehensively alerted high-level goblin cleric on the other side of the door summons some guards. As, even in goblin land, you do.

Whether they know it or not, the party's in a Mexican stand-off.


Step Six

Malice flips upside-down and peaks through the door, failing his stealth roll.

From the goblin palace-guard's point of view what we have here is a lone elven aristocrat hanging upside down in the door to the vestry of their bishop's inner sanctum after vandalizing it with sacred slime.

With their overwatch actions, they throw their harpoons. Malice resists their attempts to yank him through the door. The goblin bishop lashes out with his five finger-tentacles--a gift of the Carrion-Crawler God, paralyses Malice. Malice is yanked off the doorjamb and toward the assailants, toward the untidy puddle of green slime he himself created.

But whatever--due to an incident earlier this year, Malice regenerates at a constant rate. Everything will be fine.


Step Seven

Now we talked about Fiddlin Joe the cockroach-man's martyr complex.

This extends to, for example, putting on his cloak of darkness and charging down a hallway toward the sound of his friend being attacked by four foes at once despite being completely blind.


Step Eight

Many dice are rolled. Fiddlin Joe runs into a wall. Under cover of the very darkness Fiddlin Joe is emitting, paralyzed Malice is dragged around a corner no-one can see. The goblin bishop backs up at another angle and prepares to kill whoever comes through the darkness cloud.


Step Nine

The subsequent rounds of combat are a hairy hell: Fiddlin Joe lashes out hitting mostly nothing in his own personal darkness, a goblin nets and grapples the party wizard on the far side of the obscuring dark-cloud, the bishop silences him, and the PC's cleric spends most of his time moving up from how far away he was when the whole fracas began what seems like years ago.

Meanwhile the paralyzed Malice is being unresurrectably changed into green slime over the requisite d4 rounds and armor-being-eaten-away period.


Step Ten

Fiddlin' Joe finally gets ahold of Malice.

The mighty Malice, slaughter of thousands, dissolves into green slime.


Step Eleven

Resurrection being out of the question, there's always the Time Giant Spit.

That is: the bottled drool of a sleeping Time Giant from a tower defeated in the summer. Carefully titrated by a trained alchemist, it can be used to turn back the clock on a character's condition.

Fumbled out of a bottle by a blind cockroach-man while elite goblins are trying to hit him in the dark, it can be a little more dangerous....


Step Twelve

Fiddlin Joe rolls a 65.

The proud pale elf is devolved far past primal grey elf, far past half-fae, back into the primordial lineages constituents from which elves emerged--some barely coherent pre-faerie eddy in the natural order and a desperate tiny curled amphibious something that would eons hence turn into a primate.

Thus passed white-haired Malice--djinn-slayer, gambler, exploiter-of-loopholes, leaving only tears and stuff.

A very specific way of playing D&D has passed forever from this world. We may again see its like, but not soon.
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Speedy Tree Maze

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That was me in the beak
So this 11-year old wrote a dungeon that almost killed me.

Basically Hill Cantons Chris' dug up a dungeon he'd done when he was a wee lad, re-keyed it and set us loose in it. I only survived due to a lucky roll on the Death & Dismemberment table. Fucking roc.

It wasn't much different than a regular day in a Chris dungeon, though it was a hell of a lot of fun. Wherein lies some kind of lesson.

The adventure has a few Dragon Magazine-style jokes in it (magic pecans, Sheryl Tiegs) but then, so do all Chris' grown-up modules. Anyway, it was fun and, on paper, is flexible enough to run as creepy Original Wicker Man style thorns-and-darkness freakout or as a gonzo Nicolas Cage Wicker Man goofball beer & pretzels job.
 or



And here's a one-page version I made for reference, feel free to use it after you've downloaded the details.
It also has a lot of room over on the west and south to throw in more stuff.

Also, speaking of druids:
If you're following the porn news, D&D With Porn Stars stands with our druid, Stoya, 100%:
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The Nazi Games

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I don't have answers to all these questions, but it seems to me far too many conversations go too far with out ever asking questions like these. People get stuck on boring, kindergarten-level questions like "Can art affect people?" (Yes) "Can art be racist, sexist, etc?" (Yes) "Can art be unconsciously those things?"(Yes) "Can fiction be racist, sexist?" (Yes, but it's relatively rare)  "Should we avoid offending people at all costs?" (No) and "Should we censor things" (No) and pretend the argument is about that. Here are some questions which are for adults.

I chose Jewishness as an example because it is a form of marginality (however minor, in the US in 2015) that I can claim by birth--I am not, myself, religious--but these questions are still meaningful when ported to other, considerably more marginalized, groups of people. So here we go-- the easy ones are first:

--

1. Hitler writes a game. He intends it to clearly reflect his worldview but he's so bad at writing, no-one can understand it and it has no effect on anyone.

Is it anti-semitic? Why or why not?

--

2. The author of this game harbors no prejudice and is kind to everyone -- this is publicly known and is privately true. Or at least as true as it can be of anyone. No-one has ever even suggested she harbors any bigoted feeling or idea. She has sacrificed a great deal for the well-being of the marginalized.

Her game is rancid with prejudice, Jews are called kikes, every race is slurred and degraded. The imagery and experience system suggests it is heroic to slaughter anyone less well-off than wealthy blonde white men--and it is written at a level suggesting it is for children. Her motives are unclear: perhaps she wrote it as a kind of cathartic exercise to purge herself of wicked thoughts, perhaps simply as an intellectual challenge to write in a voice that was not her own--it's impossible to be sure.

However, this game is unreadable. It is written in a language that was lost forever and will never be remembered or recovered, even by the author. No-one knows anything about it.

Is it anti-semitic? Why or why not?

--

3. The motive behind the game is repulsive -- it seeks, proactively, to begin a race war. The author is unimaginably racist. No-one knows any of this.

The game is a ridiculous failure in its secret purpose and nobody even notices the racial overtones, they are so clumsily coded and poorly written. It comes across as a charmingly inept kind of Gamma World or Mutant Future.

A prominent celebrity of color is quoted as saying he is a fan. Its odd and accidental charm makes it not only popular but immensely, disproportionately popular among players of color. A statistically meaningful number of people who aren't white take up the hobby because of it. People who do play it generally walk away with a greater feeling of tolerance toward others than they walked in with. Universities where they study games, like UCLA and Columbia -- notice these things and report them. The results are confirmed. This goes on forever.

Is the game anti-semitic? Why or why not?

--

4. Hitler writes a game. Or maybe Goering or Goebbels. Or the Grand Wizard of the Klan.

Nobody knows they are the author. They die.

The game is discovered later, author unknown. It is published, embraced. It has no content anyone ever accuses of being racist. It seems considerably less ideologically loaded than, say, Pong, to anyone whoever plays it. Let's say: even in these fraught times, it attracts less racial critique than any other RPG ever, though it is popular. The audience is skewed in no particular way. Social scientists can detect no notable change in attitude among people after playing the game. In fact: there is none.

Is the game anti-semitic? Why or why not?

--

5. The game is produced with the best will in the world by the most progressive soul imaginable -- but not the most talented. It becomes popular.

Because it is kind of dull or because of the social circles through which it propagates or for some other reason that's difficult to trace, the earnest (and in no-way detectably offensive) game only manages to acquire a very WASPy audience. It changes their attitudes in no way, as it was preaching to the choir. Because it is popular, it actually makes the RPG audience less Jewish and more WASPy than it already was.

Is the game anti-semitic? Why or why not?

--

6. A Jewish person produces a game. They harbor no self-hatred. Exactly half the Jewish community finds it offensive and anti-semitic. The other half doesn't and, in fact, hails it as a vital exploration of social issues essential to the community that couldn't have been addressed any other way. It changes the game audience in no way and there are no detectable changes in peoples' attitudes about race after playing or reading it.

Is the game anti-semitic Why or why not?

--

7. A white anglo-saxon protestant produces a game. They harbor no anti-Semitic feeling. Exactly half the Jewish community finds it offensive and anti-semitic. The other half doesn't and, in fact, hails it as a vital exploration of social issues essential to the Jewish community that couldn't have been addressed any other way. It changes the game audience in no way and there are no detectable changes in peoples' attitudes about race after playing or reading it.

Is the game anti-semitic? Why or why not?

--

8. A person bearing no prejudices produces a game. It is broad and written for children and relies on stereotypes about people of many ethnicities either because they're oblivious or because they think this is a good way to get ideas across to children. It is incredibly popular among people of precisely those ethnicities and encourages everyone who plays it to learn more about those cultures. It is, in fact, more popular among a diverse audience than an earlier, less stereotype-riddled version of the same game.

Is the game anti-semitic? Why or why not?

--

 9. A progressive person produces a game full of progressive ideas about people of all ethnicities, including Jews. It is dull and (measurably, like in a lab) makes people think these kinds of games suck.

Is the game anti-semitic? Why or why not?

--

10. 30% of Jews say the game is anti-Semitic and offensive, 70% say it is a vital exploration of social issues essential to the community that couldn't have been addressed any other way.  It has not other measured social effect on the audience or the audience's attitudes.

Is the game anti-semitic? Why or why not?

--

11. A person bearing no prejudice produces a game. 10 Jewish people play it and are offended and say it's anti-semitic and never play RPGs again. 10 Jewish people love it and have the best experience of their gaming lives and go on to do a great many game things. It has no effect on anyone's attitudes about prejudice except the offended people--people who like it just say it's fun.

Is the game anti-semitic? Why or why not?

What if 20 Jewish people love it?

90?

2000?

Only 2?

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12. A game divides the Jewish community. All the Jewish people you get along with and think are smart consider it a vital and necessary exploration of their identity. All the ones you don't and think are stupid consider it anti-semitic.

Is it? Why or why not?

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13. A game is produced by a superlatively progressive person. The game is for adults. It has no measurable effect on the attitudes of adults or on the demographics of the adult audience.

It is not for children, but if children were to play it, they have a chance of adopting anti-semitic attitudes.

Is the game anti-semitic? Why or why not?

--


14. Progressive author. Fun, popular game. The game has only one sociological effect on the audience and it is measurable: people who have anti-semitic beliefs are more likely to take an anti-semitic action after playing.

Is the game anti-semitc? Why or why not?

If so: is beer therefore anti-semitic? Why or why not?

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15. Progressive author. Fun, popular game. The game has only one sociological effect on the audience and it is measurable: stupid people are more likely to be racist after playing.

Is the game anti-semitic? Why or why not?

--

16. Progressive author. Fun, popular game. The game has only one sociological effect on the audience and it is measurable: mentally ill people are more likely to be racist after playing.

Is the game anti-semitic? Why or why not?

--
17. Progressive author. Fun, popular game. Smart people become less racist when they play the game and understand important issues better and more viscerally, stupid people become more racist. There is no other way to address the complex issues in the game except via playing the game in its current form -- it, for example, requires people to adopt roles of real-life Jewish people who were guilty of banking-related crimes.

Is the game anti-semitic? Why or why not?

--

18. Progressive author. Fun, popular game. The game is old: the game's measurable effect on the audience at the time was to diversify the audience and make it more progressive. No Jewish people at the time were offended. However, now, looking back, there are elements which are not as progressive as the language we use today -- however the style of the game is so dated that everyone who reads it, looks at it or plays it has a level of historical distance or irony akin to when they read the casual references to Jewish bankers in 19th century novels. It is not for children.

Is the game anti-semitic? Why or why not?

--
19. Progressive author. Fun, popular game. It offends only extremely, orthodox conservative Jews who have some sexist or homophobic ideas built into their way of doing their religion. But it does offend pretty much all of them.

Is the game anti-semitic? Why or why not?

--

20. Progressive author. Fun, popular game. No measurable effect on participants' attitudes or the wider game world's demographics. However, it is written in english and english is a language and so contains inherently racist constructions like "Hip hip hooray".

Is the game anti-semitic? Why or why not?

If not--how many Jewish people must claim to be offended before it is?

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21. Let's assume you are not Jewish but you hold the purse strings at a company about to give money to the author of game 7 above money for another project. Let's assume that for whatever reasons you need to decide whether their game was anti-semitic or not and back that decision with your money.

Can you? Or do you leave that to Jewish people to decide? And assuming they are split -- how do you decide?
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This entry is old and accidentally got deleted, here are the original comments:

10 COMMENTS:

  1. Sorry, didn’t want to derail your discussion. I will have a try, though I fear my english is too bad for complicated expIanations, I also hope I did understand every entry as intended:

    Clear yes for 1 (intent delivered)

    3 yes (intent delivered) - It’s like people of colour walking with PEGIDA (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriotische_Europ%C3%A4er_gegen_die_Islamisierung_des_Abendlandes)

    4 nope (no intend, author unknown); becomes a “yes” as soon as the author is revealed

    5 nope

    6 nope (not intended)

    7 nope (as 6)

    8 nope, though the author is playing with fire

    9 it probably sucks, but nope, not anti-semitic

    10 nope

    11 nope

    12 is hard… I’m not sure, perhaps I’m very exclusive with my jewish contacts - perhaps I only chose the non-religious or what. Probably isn’t anti-semitic per se, though.

    13 no, it’s not. It’s like some immature person who likes anti-war-movies because of the action scenes - as long as it is clearly stated that reader-discretion is adviced, the work is not anti-semitic.

    14 why does it promote anti-semitic actions? Any hint in the text or is it interpreted the wrong way by those weirdos? And no, I’m not that into alcohol at all but beer is not anti-semitic.

    15 same with 14, perhaps even more dangerous; manipulating the “simple-minded” is a big problem with any kind of extremism

    20 nope, no. This is like saying: Hey, Fabian, you’re born in germany so you’re totally anti-semitic. Too simple.

    With these I’m a bit overburdened by now - they are probably the questions you find most interesting: 2 (???), 16, 18, 19, 21.
    Reply
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    1. So for you intent alone is the important factor.
    2. Perhaps not the only factor but a very important factor. The way the intention is delivered to the reader is important, too. You probably cannot expect every reader to get your intent without stating it somewhere. And a little bit of honesty and authenticity won't hurt either.
  2. The answer to 4 would have to be "no." It would be like asking "if Hitler made a garden, would the tomatoes be anti-Semitic?"

    I think makes more sense to ask two questions, rather than ask if "work X is anti-Semitic": (1) Does X express anti-Semitic ideas? (2) Does the work suggest the author is anti-Semitic? These are things you couldn't tell from, say, Hitler's tomatoes.
    Reply
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    1. This comment has been removed by the author.
    2. I don't really buy your two alternate questions, Matt. Take Lovecraft and Call of Cthulhu. Lovecraft's fiction definitely includes racist and anti-semitic ideas if you look for them (and often even if you don't - check out "The Horror at Red Hook"). Lovecraft was a racist and an anti-semite (despite his marriage) - that's virtually undisputed. That does not mean we should stop reading, enjoying, studying, or being inspired by Lovecraft's fiction or games that draw on it. Reading Lovecraft or playing Call of Cthulhu does not make one a racist. That's surely what's more important - effect, not intention or the beliefs of the author, nor the presence of unpleasant ideas in and of themselves. These might be worthy things to point out, but not as a basis to condemn the works in question.
    3. Jonathan:
      "That does not mean we should stop reading, enjoying, studying, or being inspired by Lovecraft's fiction or games that draw on it."
      PLEASE
      do not lower the conversation by introducing simplistic ideas into it.

      Whether "we should" read something is entirely unrelated to the question at hand.

      The question at hand is whether or not you can call a thing "racist". Not what to do once that determination is made (which is a much simpler debate for much dumber people).
  3. Well, I wrote a thing long enough to run into Blogspot's character limit, and then I refreshed the page and saw your comment to Jonathan about not caring about the question of what to do about it, so I'll summarize my views:

    Basically, I think effect is what matters, not intent. Intent matters a great deal when you're trying to decide what to do about a problem, but effect is what determines whether there's a problem in the first place.

    If something is causing harm, there's a problem that should be addressed. However, I don't necessarily think that people being pissed off is harmful in and of itself. There needs to be something more serious going on. Sometimes people - even marginalized people - are pissed off for dumb reasons.

    If there's no harm, then I don't think it really matters what the intent was. There are too many harmful things in the world to waste one's time and energy on condemning harmless works.

    By those standards, my view on most of these should be clear, but I'll comment on a some of them:

    5 is complex, because although the game is causing harm, I would argue that it's not problematic in and of itself. It's not directly hurting anyone or promoting any kind of hate, but it is having an effect on the overall shape of the market. There's a lot to be said about this, but in the interest of keeping this brief and on-topic I'll just say that I think the solution is not to do anything about this game, but to create and promote other games that have an opposite effect.

    My feelings about 6, 7, 10 (all cases), 11, and 12 are more-or-less the same: The game is not causing enough harm to worry about, and it may even be doing good by sparking off debate that could wind up advancing the overall conversation.

    8 is a perfect example of the kind of thing that people need to stop worrying about.

    9 isn't hateful, but it is harmful.

    14-17 all are contributing to harm, but in all of these cases the root cause of the harm is something else. Any energy spent on addressing the harm added by the game would be better spent on addressing the root caue of the harm, be it pre-existing racism, stupidity, mental illness, etc.

    In regards to 21, my feeling is that you should definitely look to the views of the Jewish community to inform your decision, but ultimately you need to make up your mind for yourself. It's a cop-out either way to make your decision based only on whether other people are upset or not. You have to look at the strength of the actual arguments the different sides of the debate are making.

    In general, I think that focusing on labeling things as racist (or sexist, homophobic, etc.) or not distracts from the work of actually making the world a better place. It's just too easy to get lost in tangles of semantics.
    Reply

The D&D Characters The X-Men Would Play

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Cyclops plays a human cleric and never admits that he wanted to play a paladin but never managed to roll the stats needed back when Beast used to run AD&D and now he's just sort of settled into the role.

Colossus has been playing the same paladin since like the first time they met the Shi'ar and it secretly kills Cyclops because he makes it look really fun. Also Peter draws his character and cosplays his character and people give him his-character-related gifts for his birthday.

Kitty Pryde plays a halfling ranger or druid, just whatever gets her the animal companion fastest in that system, ok?

Storm wouldn't play for like years but then during the Blue-Team/Gold-Team era she was reconnecting with a lot of things and shyly was like "Hey can I play?" and now has this sorceress she is SUUUUPER protective of. Black Panther was baffled at first but has played a few sessions because people don't say no to Storm and now he's like one of those Batman tactical-thief types p.s. also never say "Batman" around T'Challa he will just excuse himself because he'd love to keep playing but there's matters of state, peace out mutants, enjoy your game. Storm would never roll her eyes in mixed company but she does kind of look briefly up at the ceiling when this happens and says it's ok she'll catch up with him later.

Psylocke plays an assassin and, yeah, seems to be working out some issues.

Iceman wants to play Vampire but plays D&D because that's ok, sure. Halfling fighter.

Cannonball plays a human fighter named Arthinius.

Jubilee plays that kind of thief that likes to backstab but is always forgetting to actually sneak first and is the kind of player that is the best reason they called it "rogue" in later editions but the X-Men don't use that term even when they play 5e (which Havok really wanted to try) because it would be confusing.

Illyana Rasputin would have been told by Colossus about the battle princess class because Colossus lurks OSR blogs and she really kind of wants to play one and the DM will let her but plays a tiefling wizard out of this kind of scary sense of hard-bitten Russian realism.

Havok uncomplicatedly plays an elf ranger and loves it. He is always texting like "When are we playing, guys?""Are we playing this week?""Are we going to that Con? It'd be funny we could cosplay as ourselves, you guys, wouldn't that be funny?". Sometimes Polaris comes along but nobody can remember where she left her character sheet so they keep having to make a new character for her every time.

Warlock wanted to play a lantern. In the beginning people tried to explain that equipment was a separate section but then they were like fuck it, sure guy, you're a lantern. He died and his new character is High Hard Boots.

Dazzler plays a half-elf multiclass fighter/wizard and does that thing where she completely goes off-goal and starts improvising intense motivations for her character but people are like actually this makes the game more fun, I'll roll with it.

"Hey Longshot, we're playing D&D!"
"Really??? I was going to go just to the pet store and watch frogs jump. But that sounds fun! Who do I get to play?"
"We still have that gnome monk you made."
"Oh, right yeah. Where are we?"
"Well when we left off you were all deep deep inside Demogorgon's palace and then you hear a rumbling from every direction...who's rolling initiative for your side?"
(all the players in unison) "LONGSHOT!"

Rogue plays an elf barbarian named Shugah Pie and rolls 20s, bitchessss.

Gambit has never been invited to play.

Cable played a half-orc cleric until 4e came out and then was all over the warlord (and all over 4e, Cable loves 4e with a blind and jealous ardor) and Beast makes him a little warlord hack for whatever system they're using. Cable is deeply touched by this but there is absolutely no way anyone would ever find that out, even telepaths. But Beast fucking knows.

Madrox will play anything. Well, some of him will.

Banshee DMs because he has a lot of time on his hands.

Beast DMs a lot, too, but when he isn't DMing he is always down to play and plays a thief with a high charisma and is basically the team leader in D&D.

Angel plays an elf fighter that is exactly like the Peter Jackson Legolas, including intermittent bits of the sort of moody Dark Legolas you see in the Hobbit movies.

Legion only wants to DM and only wants to run Carcosa but....is actually kind of good at it.

Magneto actually secretly only ever turns good because he likes DMing and seriously Blob and Pyro and Mystique are not playing D&D with anyone. Toad wants to but has never told anyone. He plays boardgames with Martin Prince from the Simpsons sometimes at the rec center but only when they can find something that's 2-player.

Sunspot plays a barbarian.

Wolverine would not play a barbarian. He just plays a dwarf fighter and he has a sense of humor about it because he used to drink with Fritz Leiber. Or at least the Wolverine I know. Fuck Hugh Jackman.

Nightcrawler has a good sense of humor but no sense of irony so he doesn't play a drow thief he plays a human ranger who is baaaasically Robin Hood. He's not minmaxed or anything but you always know everybody's making it out alive if Nightcrawler's playing.

Wolfsbane thinks D&D is devil sorcery at first but then got into and she's an elf druid. Kitty has to remind her what her spells are.

Professor X doesn't DM for the team anymore, the Starjammers and Lilandra made fun of him for it and he never quite got over it. He secretly sneaks off and plays Rolemaster with Reed Richards and Dr Strange though.

Fantomex is a savage minmaxer who plays whatever the most exploitable class is in whatever system but is actually not a dick or a spotlight hog about it to other players. Quentin Quire, though, do not get me started.

Deadpool shows up once in a while and says "Hey guys I can totally run Castle Greyhawk? Rat On A Stick?" His real passion is Paranoia though. Obviously.

Jean Grey doesn't play but is super-supportive of other people in the mansion playing and kind of envies that they could just be that creative and unselfconscious and instead locks herself in her room and masturbates while thinking about plane crashes.

The first time Emma Frost played it was just because she knew Jean Grey never played even though Cyclops was super into it but then she did actually herself get super into it but pretends not to be--she plays a dark elf cleric of some increasingly terrifying god.

Doug Ramsey is a fucking bard.
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My Useful 2015 Stuff

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Hey, it's coming up on the end of the year. Bye, year.

The most popular and plussed posts of any year are usually the ones like this one about leaving the Escapist  that people visit because they matter outside the RPG-o-sphere and people plus because they want to show support for the position. But rather than rehash the year in game drama I figured I'd focus on stuff from the past year you can use in games.

First up, the interviews I did this year went over pretty well. If you haven't read them I tried to ask some questions I hadn't heard answered before:

  • Here's Stacy from Contessa("When I thought for sure I was going to give it up, something amazing happened.")
  • James from LOTFP ("The decisions characters make in horror movies are more interesting to see and think about than the decisions characters make in action movies.")
  • Rey and Grey from the Break! RPG ("I took the name from an old joke my friends and I made about the Guilty Gear video games: ‘The game works because everyone is broken.’")
  • ...and Kenneth Hite("So yeah, if you play a game I wrote set in the 1930s and come away more racist or sexist or Freudian or fascist or Stalinist, yes I think it's your fault, not mine or even Stalin's.")
In the practical gameables there's:


Vrokk, The Goblin Market, and other entriesabout details of the gameworld I'm using are all gathered under the "campaign" tag here.
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How To Write 10,000 Pages of Gibberish

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For someone running an ongoing campaign, free game stuff should feel like free candy. Oh I have to run an adventure next week--oh look, what's this in the mail? I'll just take this vanilla and add some sprinkles and...

But no. Too often game stuff is literally worse than useless--the time you spend reading it is more time than it could take to make something up that was equally good.

Although I've harped on this for years, it still amazes me that you can get like a 60-page RPG supplement called something totally up your alley and juicy like "Spider Queens of the Devil Maze" and flip through it for ten seconds and then not only turn away in disgust, but be 100% sure you were justified in doing that. And that this is normal.

Going through all this WOTC and TSR stuff I'm definitely amazed and almost impressed how few genuinely gameable ideas manage to get communicated in these texts.

How do they do it? I went through and tried to figure out the most important bits:

1. Pretend a standard monster in a standard room is an encounter worth paying for.

This is the biggest one by far: Yes, it is fun to fight an ogre in a room, but it is not fun to pay to be told that there's an ogre in a room, especially not for 8 paragraphs. The idea that an ogre can be in a room is logically implied by the ogre being in the Monster Manual, which you probably already own.

If I am actually paying for it--the environment should be complex, the creature should be complex or both.

Of course, many fine products include encounters which are a standard creature in an environment, but they do this without sucking because they avoid making mistake #2...

2. Write out mundane or obvious details, so it takes forever to tell you there's a standard monster in a standard room.

The length of an encounter's description should be-, and rarely is-, proportional to its depth. For example.

Another example, from Waterdeep: High-HD skeletons that can cause darkness, riding on skeletal horses attack in a darkened wood. They try to capture someone you're chilling with and bring them to the bad guy.

That is literally everything you need to know about that encounter. It's a spooky encounter, totally legit--it takes a whole fucking page for the author to get across what I wrote in two sentences.


3. Pretend reskinning a monster is worth paying for


This is more an issue with independently produced content than with WOTC and TSR: making the orc throwing axes into a cyborg clown throwing pies with exactly the same stats and vulnerabilities isn't actually doing a hell of a lot. The creature still is dealt with, tactically, the same, and still requires the same kind of thinking to defeat. New things should be new.


4. Don't let the art do any of the heavy lifting

Lots of RPGs have bad art and that's not news, but the more heartbreaking issue here is how the art so rarely provides the module writer any help. Things that could be explained with art are instead explained with words. Or worse--both, wasting time and space.

"It looks like this" beats boxed text. A diagram of what's in a room when it's searched is better than 3 pages describing it.

Kelvin Green's Forgive Us is a great and rare example of a module where the visuals actually help the writer get across details that would've taken paragraphs to explain otherwise.


5. Be squeamish about adding special rules and tables

Unique situations are rarely set apart with special rules, tables or procedures, generally out of some misguided attempt to present the system as capable of anything as-is.

If you're using a module and you, by definition, have the book right there in front of you then you're not creating any new inconvenience by introducing a one-time-alteration in how things work. The GM's already looking at it.

There's also a related problem where unique effects are described as stacked (but unalterable) piles of standard spells. So instead of just going "magic won't work here" they go "There is an anti-magic spell whose radius has been altered with an alter-radius spell to encompass only the room and which has a permanency spell on it and...".


6. Use boxed text.

Some people defend boxed text on the grounds that that it teaches newbies how to describe things. The problem is:

-That only explains why there should be one instance of boxed text at the beginning of the book, not why there should be dozens all over it.

-It teaches GMs to read stuff out of a book, which lesson is 1000 times more bad than the lesson of how to describe things is good. I'd rather have a GM go "It's a fucking room" spontaneously than give a 300-word description from a book.

-It ruins a perfectly good opportunity to have a picture of something rather than a generic image of a palace guard looking mustachey.


7. Include lots of standard magic items.

Magic items should be weird and have disadvantages, every second spent describing one that isn't like that is pages we don't need. Even if they weren't utter shit, they're already in the DMG.

Here's a good idea someone had: Huge Ruined Scott had a kingdom where the crown was (unknown to anyone) a Helm of Opposite Alignment. So it explained why all the General Ulysses S Grants turned into President Ulysses S Grants and the murder-hungry coup-leaders turned into even-keeled moderates. That's worth paying for. A +3 spear super isn't.


8. Makes sure the game-specific cosmology is always lazily written.

As soon as anything interacts with a god in a D&D module, everyone falls asleep. Pages and pages of description just basically amount to "Here are the parts of pop Protestantism that are in this adventure". The God of Murder is not going to go easier on you because you murdered 8 orcs the day before, the Goddess of Light is just nice, she doesn't actually care more about the PC carrying a torch than the one casting Darkness, the goblins do not wear masks in church for fear of their terrible goblin god knowing their faces.

Love or hate Vancian magic, its paraphernalia--the scrolls, books, wizard schools--are lovingly and (relatively) creatively described in D&D. Clerics and anyone interacting with them just get these interchangeable cultures. Priests are good or bad, churches are vaguer versions of real history, rituals take only time and mcguffins.


9. Make monsters that are just hit point bags

...so a lot of surface complexity is generated by things which have no real effect. Like this party is three hobgoblins and three goblins but this one's four goblins. It doesn't fucking matter because there are no playable cultural or biological differences encoded into these creatures.

WOTC tried to give different hit-point-bag monsters different tactics and die mechanics, but they never had anything to do with a different essential conception of the creature, so in the end the connection between a hobgoblin and their way of hitting you was just arbitrary. The orcs mob you the hobgoblins hit and run. Sure, whatever.


10. ...and make sure they all have statblocks

Statblocks take up way too much space in everything. There are whole games that wouldn't amount to more than a handful of pages if it wasn't for the fact "A horse is faster than a person and has more hit points" is technically expressed in a different way in their game than it is in D&D. A statblock is a tool of convenience, it is not a new idea.

Unless an enemy has nonstandard powers, its playable stats can fit in two lines, in any game, maximum.

11. Structure it as either railroad or 100% location-based, include no other options described in any detail

Ideally, modules should be the perfect place for experienced writer/GMs to give examples of how to simultaneously prep complex and structurally sophisticated content while also allowing players freedom and flexibility about how to proceed. There should be flowcharts or diagrams or if/thens. And...there isn't.

Location-based adventures (nonlinear dungeons with branching paths, hexcrawls) are great because they provide structure for you. Cool. But what if you have, say, one intelligent NPC who escapes the party and starts making plans? Then you have to move beyond the pure location-based adventure. But then the only other kind of adventure typically presented is the event-based railroad--which amputates any discussion of how to structure an adventure. You just follow the breadcrumbs.

So if you are reading anything other than a location-based adventure you have to ignore half the text as it's just advice on how to railroad the players back to the event chain.

So one of the few things a module might actually be good for, they hardly ever do. It's crazy that after 30 years of horror and investigative game modules I had to write out how Hunter/Hunted works on a goddamn blog.

12. Make sure your information and graphic design sucks.

Duh.


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So what's left in a standard module when you scrape out all the pork cracklins? Here's the first 6 pages of TSR's Wonders of Lankhmar:

Adventure one: Each of the five-fingers of a five-fingered magic item is hidden in a different place. The NPC who initially brings a single piece to you is secretly commissioned by those who owned the piece to kill you once all 5 pieces are discovered.


Adventure two: The target you are supposed to arrest then offers you double to arrest your patron.

Neither of those is revolutionary genius but those are both ideas worth paying for--produce 20 more of them and you've got yourself a whole page worth of content a decent human being would be able to sleep with themselves at night after pawning off on someone. Better yet, take one of those ideas and flesh out the details with other ideas that themselves are interesting (make the NPC who commissions the party interesting, make the target interesting, make the locations they live in interesting, stop using fucking "guard dogs 2hd"), so that instead of just a page full of adventure seeds, you get something worth like $11.95 or whatever.
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An Art Lesson From the Late Goblin King

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2000something. Miami Beach. Late and everyone's drinking.

The girls are talking about their first crushes, they're all inhuman and inexplicable--cartoon characters, Boba Fett, bears, tigers, aliens.

When it comes around to Sasha Grey's turn she says "David Bowie in Labyrinth,"because Sasha has to be stylish all the time.

Then immediately the girls were like Yeah, definitely, David fucking Bowie in Labyrinth.

Last night a young grown-up in the middle-stages of Bowie-grief told me, quite seriously "Jareth formed the basis of my entire sexuality." This is common enough that magazines have whole articles about it...

Labyrinth has sexuality in it the way a Pathfinder book with a boob pirate on the cover does--only by implication. Though there's no actual sex at all in that movie (that story), it would be completely different if you kept the text the same but changed the images so the utterly sexualized Jareth was some gnarly unfuckable goblin dude (Dark Crystal) or an older woman (Wizard of Oz) or something else. It would mean and feel and be something different--the theme of temptation, the whole metaphor about growing up, that twilight alone-in-the-big-house-teenager-feeling, all that would've landed with a different impact. And it was a massive impact--when Bowie died, Labyrinth was trending on Twitter right next to Heroes and Ziggy and Moonage Daydream. 

This all illustrates something often overlooked and difficult to convincingly articulate in the heat of the mercifully-less-common-but-still-depressingly-possible conversations about barbarian biceps and chainmail bikinis in D&D and its cognates: namely, that sexuality in these stories isn't just a detour from the story dropped in to please (or upset) some segment of the audience. It's not the thing the word "fanservice" tries to suggest it is: it's a functional part of what makes worlds we know are fake resonate in the minds of people who only live in the real world. It is part of the fabric of the story--inevitably and every time. It needs to be inasmuch as any other part of the story needs to be if it wants to be that story. 

The fantastic has resonance because it reminds you of something, but transformed, and everyone (everyone) has a time and a place they can go to in their lives when sex was a scary, dark, poorly understood thing.

A great deal of what's in fantastic stories works by accessing the dream- and child- consciousness, by ricocheting around the mind's defenses, and pulling on the mind's strings by coming through a side-door. Sex is not just a thing that's there to bring in the teenagers--it's part of human consciousness and fictions are about fucking with human consciousness, and when any common part of the human experience is too strenuously avoided in a fiction it becomes conspicuous by its absence and the whole thing feels janky and artificial and fails to leave a mark in the mind. How many High Courts full of characters as plausible as Ken dolls do we owe to TSR's mid-80s sexphobia?

It's really easy to point to examples of artists who use sexuality as part of the palette--besides Bowie, there's nearly every other pop musician on the planet, in art there are the Beardsleys and Schieles, in fiction, even the Bible has the Song of Songs--but for some reason people let the geniuses who talk about tabletop games pretend that even in games for adults sexuality is some removable crowd-pleasing genre convention, like katanas or some shit. Can we get over our embarrassment and just point out how frankly fucking immature that is?

Maybe us porn stars are the only people who can say this, since when anyone else does it they're immediately attacked as being some desperate slob whose only glimpse of a boob is the Monster Manual succubus. The succubus is there for the same reason Jareth was: it tries to tell that particular story.  Let he or she who doesn't ever want to look at a stranger's ass cast the first stone. And then pick it up and go away because you're boring.

Sex, like any other thing in a story, can be handled without finesse--it can be done clumsily (Apocalypse World), it can be done tastelessly (Death Love Doom), it can be done naively (Blue Rose), it can be done tediously (Monsterhearts), it can be done hamfistedly (Isle of the Purple-Haunted Putrescence), and it can be and will be done not to your own special snowflake taste and orientation over and over and over and over and over again in a million ways because not everyone is you, but it can't ever be done gratuitously--because these stories are about people and their imaginations and sexuality is not a gratuitous or peripheral part of the human imagination.

If you want more Bowie-sexy and less cleavage-sexy in your game art, ask for it and blame art directors if they don't give it to you--but don't pretend there's something wrong with an artist painting what they want to look at. If the people at your table start getting creepy when sex comes up: kick them out like a goddamn grown-up, put that right there in the rules if you have to. But if you're going to pretend it's only there for horny fourteen-year olds, please fuck right off and leave the world to those who actually live in it.
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smh sunday

To Tim Kask And TotalCon,

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Dear Tim,

I'm Zak. I've read a lot of your Dragonsfoot threads over the years about the early hobby and, like everybody else, read a lot of Dragon back in the day.

Since one of the biggest genuine problems in RPGs is men speaking for women I want to limit what I say here as much as possible, and simply use this blog (just because it's one a relatively large number of people in RPGs read) to deliver a message to you and to my readers and then step aside, in the hopes that we have dialogue instead of dueling monologues.

There's been a lot of controversy that all started with this blurb for your For Ladies Only game at TotalCon:

This adventure is written specifically for the wives, girlfriends and daughters of gamers, as well as those females wishing to delve into the field without a lifelong commitment. It has been boiled down to the basics of role-playing as it used to be: A sheet of paper, some dice, a pencil and some numbers on that paper accompanied by an open mind and a sense of adventure. Ladies, come see what all the fuss is about

Let me summarize what I'm pretty sure about--

-There are women who are smart and have done cool things for the RPG scene who found this  language condescending.

-There are women who are smart and have done cool things for the RPG scene who have not found this language condescending.

-You didn't mean to be condescending. (Intent isn't everything.)

-Some of the folks on your Facebook page were incredibly douchey to one of the women who raised the issue even after she had wished you well about your event.

-You wrote a post responding to this controversy which ended with the words: "By the way,  I hold a Master's in Education; I am reasonably certain that I know what I am doing."

-Everyone I've talked to about this finds that sentence deeply condescending.

-I find that sentence condescending. I think it was meant to be condescending by any reasonable use of the word. I know because I'm condescending all the time.

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My bit:

Making people angry online (even accidentally) is something we all do. Who you choose to patch things up with and talk to and who you tell to fuck off reveals which of those people you value.

Everyone in my corner of the DIY RPG community values women who were upset by your handling of this, including, for example, Stacy Dellorfano--the woman who built the best online con in gaming.

They have been through a lot, with a lot of genuinely condescending, genuinely sexist RPG guys telling them what to do.

Whether or not they have judged you for what you wrote in your blurb, or how you handled it, we are now going to judge you on whether you value Stacy and other young women who have been trying to improve life for women in the RPG scene over the years enough to listen and talk this out with them--without pulling rank, without blocking anyone, and without your friends and fans jumping in on the conversation to defend you or plus each other.

If you don't, it will ratify our worst suspicions about what you think of the women who are trying to keep up and spread enthusiasm for the hobby you contributed so much to over the years. You can extend a hand to the next generation of female gamers, or you can slap it aside.

I don't care where you have that conversation, but I think you need to do it. You aren't obliged to care what I think, of course, but that is the point: you are being judged on what part of the RPG community you care about. I do not think you want to or should choose these women as your enemies and if you don't indicate a willingness to continue a dialogue with them, you are doing just that.

Sincerely,
Zak
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Children's Pythons

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Among the clans of the Black Ocean, the zoological affinities of the Northernkind are reversed, such that the mammal is considered a threat and the reptile an ally.

At birth, each child is assigned a python, for companionship, protection from the depredations of monkeys and to aid in gathering fruit. The child will frolic, sleep and share food with the python and the sight of a child without one triggers the equivalent of an Amber alert.

When the python dies, its skin is read--all snakes are books and all python species of the Black Ocean Isles are biographies. The tale told determines the future caste of the child or--if it belongs to one of the Old Genders--the child's future spouse.

Oh also, check it I'm on TSR's Game School podcast along with Satine.
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