My grandparents lived in Burkett, Texas - a stone's throw away from Cross Plains - the town where Robert E. Howard spent most of his life. I spent many summers there, tromping through the surrounding wilderness. Howard lived in Burkett when he was 11, and probably tromped through the same places. Sometimes when I am relating that to others, I tell people that I grew up playing in Conan's back yard.
The rather lengthy poem below takes place when I was 11, the same age that Howard was when he lived there decades before. This was mere weeks before I was to return home to Houston and discovered Dungeons and Dragons, and about a year before Conan the Barbarian was to grace the silver screen and provide my introduction to the man who's footsteps I had unknowingly followed.
Pecan Summer
The smell of dusty curtains slowly gives way to bacon
As wisps of back seats and long roads recede into dream land.
The morning is covered in gauze, with no impetus to remove it,
Aside from the growing glow through flowerdy yellow curtains.
A good stretch and grunt and smile are followed by a poke;
A rude reminder of the feathers in the pillow.
Bare feet against bare floorboards to the kitchen,
Where pops and splatters mingle with morning plans.
We dip heavy biscuits into the golden centers of eggs,
Sopping up the gooey goodness and finishing the whites
Using silverware stamped with eagles perched on bent crosses;
The old man's final stab at a long dead evil.
Armored against chiggers with jeans, tube socks, and tennis shoes,
We head out past the pecan trees with hammocks strung between,
And down the white gravel lane with the caw-honking sounds;
Peacocks and peafowls at the Peaflower Ranch & Tax Write-off.
The gravel crunches loudly beneath our feet as we march.
The spaces between houses widening as it gets hotter.
To the left we see the silvery glint of corrugated tin;
The old cotton gin still stands, but is filled with gourds now.
The sides of the road burst into color with an odd mixture;
Deep purple bonnets and the red and yellow stain of paintbrushes,
Which descend on either side as the road lifts upward
To an ancient silver and rust colored truss bridge.
The crunching abates as we walk on its paved surface,
Only one car width wide, but a faded black dashed line down the middle.
Trees crowd in amongst the trusses and create a green canopy,
While the gurgling sounds tell us of the unseen creek below.
We stick our heads out beyond the metal girders and look down
At the pebbles underneath the crystal clear water.
The dangerous move from girder to rebar to branches, then dirt
Would frighten mothers, but is far more fun than the safer path.
The journey upstream is filled with woods and pastures
And the occasional cluster of cow patties by the creek,
Then the land rises as white hills made out of chert push up,
Exposing veins of flint that make us dream of old Indians.
The air gets hotter and hotter until the vibration
Seems to match the buzz saw of the cicadas' wings and both
Sound and heat seem to penetrate into bone
And leave me with the lifelong feeling of the perfect Texas afternoon.
The creek widens and slows abruptly into a swimming hole,
With desiccated gar fish hanging from fishing line
Tied to tree limbs all around the lake, in a vain attempt
By the locals to eradicate the antediluvian creature.
In the middle of the water floats the huge trunk of a tree,
Its branches bare and stunted, but still reaching skyward.
We shuck off clothes and dash into the deep water,
Headed towards the mysterious platform of untold fun.
We grab branches, trying to pull ourselves up on the tree,
Only to be met with a swarm of countless giant red ants,
That emerge from the tree and coat it in a seething layer of
Desperation and anger, hell bent on finding dry land.
Still more hordes of bright red ants spew out as we paddle away,
Hundreds and thousands of the insects launching themselves
Into the water, creating rafts with their bodies for their
Compatriots, a nightmare version of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria.
With more fun to be had, we stay away from floating islands of death
And swim and splash to our hearts content, then dry out in the
Texas sun, shake our clothes out for rattlers and cotton mouths,
Then make the long trek back to what some would call civilization.
Downstream is easier, but longer, as we linger to take in
As much fun as we can, and the dog skeleton we find helps.
Crickets take over from the cicadas as the sun creeps down
Beckoning new life that sleeps during the day, out into the cool air.
We pull ourselves up on the bridge while slapping mosquitoes,
But endure the bites a bit longer as the forest comes alive
With the green glowing streaks and blinks of fireflies,
Creating patterns that stay etched in our minds for a lifetime.
- Ark
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Friday, June 10, 2011
That'll Do, Pig. That'll Do.
I was in the car with my son, driving to Rosa's Cafe for some Tex-Mex. I like the beef fajitas, while the boy is a fan huge fan of cheese enchiladas - or as he likes to call them, inch-a-ma-la-kas.
Suddenly the boy looked at me from the passenger seat and said, 'Can we go to the convention again next year?"
"Of course," I smiled. A couple of day's before, we had been knee-deep in the North Texas Role Playing Convention, strutting our nerd-boy gaming selves around a hotel in Irving and wallowing in the old school.
"You know those old guys you liked when you were a kid?" he grinned. "I liked playing with them."
I chuckled and changed lanes. Luck and persistence had allowed us to play with the likes of Frank Mentzer, Jim Ward, Erol Otus and Dennis Sustare - names that were as unto RPG gods to me when I was my son's age. "Me too."
"And you remember when you were talking to Harley before the game," he said, suddenly looking at is hands. I got the feeling he was leading the witness. "And you said that you had played a lot of 4e, but after a while, you decided you didn't like it and you just wanted to go back home?"
With a nod, I wondered what he was getting at.
"I . . ." he fidgeted, "I kind of understand what you meant by 'home' now."
I gulped and kept on driving.
- Ark
Suddenly the boy looked at me from the passenger seat and said, 'Can we go to the convention again next year?"
"Of course," I smiled. A couple of day's before, we had been knee-deep in the North Texas Role Playing Convention, strutting our nerd-boy gaming selves around a hotel in Irving and wallowing in the old school.
"You know those old guys you liked when you were a kid?" he grinned. "I liked playing with them."
I chuckled and changed lanes. Luck and persistence had allowed us to play with the likes of Frank Mentzer, Jim Ward, Erol Otus and Dennis Sustare - names that were as unto RPG gods to me when I was my son's age. "Me too."
"And you remember when you were talking to Harley before the game," he said, suddenly looking at is hands. I got the feeling he was leading the witness. "And you said that you had played a lot of 4e, but after a while, you decided you didn't like it and you just wanted to go back home?"
With a nod, I wondered what he was getting at.
"I . . ." he fidgeted, "I kind of understand what you meant by 'home' now."
I gulped and kept on driving.
- Ark
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Dungeonspiration: Urutsk
Inspiration can come from unexpected places. When I first heard of Urutsk, from Timeshadow's blog, my interest was piqued, but I didn't know what to make of it. Was is fantasy? Science Fiction? Science fantasy? Scifant Fictastity? What?
When the Boy and I finally got to play URUTSK: World of Mystery RPG with Timeshadows at NTRPGCON, it was great. The experience is like what I imagine playing in Middle Earth with J. R. R. Tolkein as DM - only less English - or playing in Tékumel with Professor Barker - with less cinnamon. Urutsk is an incredibly detailed world, rich in scope and depth. Everything is new and different and weird and wonderful. I really got the feeling that I was experiencing a complete world, with it's own fully developed history, ecology, linguistics, and physics. There is blood magic, there is eugenics, there are crazy critters and shattered space.
As gamers we often sink into the same old comfortable tropes of fantasy or science fiction. For the last few years, I've been working on creating ultimate plain vanilla D&D worlds. While it's fun to go back and tromp through those tropes, and introduce them to my son, it bumps into the same problem I had with D&D when I was a kid. How can you call it fantasy when nothing is fantastic anymore? Oh, it's another orc. Oh, I'll roll up and elf. Oh, yeah, a dragon.
Timeshadows and her Urutsk has inspired me to get out of my self-imposed rut and start investigating the fantastic again, and to breathe life and depth into imaginary worlds. I want the players eye to bug out - not becasue I just dropped Tiamat into their tea party, but because they can't quite come to grips with the thirty foot tall Giant Flea Herds of the Gombatar Velt. Or something like that. :)
So go find something weird and wild and out of the ordinary - Urutsk, or something like it - and go get inspired to be fantastic.
- Ark
When the Boy and I finally got to play URUTSK: World of Mystery RPG with Timeshadows at NTRPGCON, it was great. The experience is like what I imagine playing in Middle Earth with J. R. R. Tolkein as DM - only less English - or playing in Tékumel with Professor Barker - with less cinnamon. Urutsk is an incredibly detailed world, rich in scope and depth. Everything is new and different and weird and wonderful. I really got the feeling that I was experiencing a complete world, with it's own fully developed history, ecology, linguistics, and physics. There is blood magic, there is eugenics, there are crazy critters and shattered space.
As gamers we often sink into the same old comfortable tropes of fantasy or science fiction. For the last few years, I've been working on creating ultimate plain vanilla D&D worlds. While it's fun to go back and tromp through those tropes, and introduce them to my son, it bumps into the same problem I had with D&D when I was a kid. How can you call it fantasy when nothing is fantastic anymore? Oh, it's another orc. Oh, I'll roll up and elf. Oh, yeah, a dragon.
Timeshadows and her Urutsk has inspired me to get out of my self-imposed rut and start investigating the fantastic again, and to breathe life and depth into imaginary worlds. I want the players eye to bug out - not becasue I just dropped Tiamat into their tea party, but because they can't quite come to grips with the thirty foot tall Giant Flea Herds of the Gombatar Velt. Or something like that. :)
So go find something weird and wild and out of the ordinary - Urutsk, or something like it - and go get inspired to be fantastic.
- Ark
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Not Amused Door is Not Amused
My brain is still fried from a combination of NTRPGCON and a rather mean attempt by my employer to make me work when I'd rather be battling intergalactic space dragons from the planet Wurble. But I did manage to download the DCC Beta and give it a look-over.
I'm still mulling it over, but I like everything I've seen so far. The mechanics look cool - the art is awesome - and the ideas are great. Each little piece seems wonderful. My big concern is how it all fits together.
One of the ideas that seems to freak many people out is how you start the game. Each player makes 2 to 4 ZERO level characters with no skill, talent, or useful equipment whatsoever. Then these poor shmucks are tossed into an abattoir for an intro adventure. Then whatever chunks that get spat out of other end of the slaughterhouse that are still ambulatory get to become professional first level characters.
This horrifies the hell out of some commentators. I think it is glorious. In my head I am imagining it as a fantasy version of the game PARANOIA.
I mean, isn't that was D&D does anyway? It give you a magic user with a, on average, 2.5 hit points, and has a kobold stab at you over and over again with a spear that does, on average, 3.5 hit point of damage and you die at ZERO. DCC RPG is just being honest with that fact and institutionalizing a way to have your slaughter-fest and eat your cake too. Well, at least that is my take.
And there is something very attractive about a game where you could randomly roll up a character with a 3 Strength, a club, and cart full of dead bodies. Yes - this is indeed a possibility.
In the playtest, I saw the game run and it was awesome, but I also know that Harley is a good enough GM to a make dog turd shine like a diamond. What happens if I try to run it? There are some major departures from standard D&D. Are these good or bad? I just don't know. I must play more to find out. :)
- Ark
I'm still mulling it over, but I like everything I've seen so far. The mechanics look cool - the art is awesome - and the ideas are great. Each little piece seems wonderful. My big concern is how it all fits together.
One of the ideas that seems to freak many people out is how you start the game. Each player makes 2 to 4 ZERO level characters with no skill, talent, or useful equipment whatsoever. Then these poor shmucks are tossed into an abattoir for an intro adventure. Then whatever chunks that get spat out of other end of the slaughterhouse that are still ambulatory get to become professional first level characters.
This horrifies the hell out of some commentators. I think it is glorious. In my head I am imagining it as a fantasy version of the game PARANOIA.
I mean, isn't that was D&D does anyway? It give you a magic user with a, on average, 2.5 hit points, and has a kobold stab at you over and over again with a spear that does, on average, 3.5 hit point of damage and you die at ZERO. DCC RPG is just being honest with that fact and institutionalizing a way to have your slaughter-fest and eat your cake too. Well, at least that is my take.
And there is something very attractive about a game where you could randomly roll up a character with a 3 Strength, a club, and cart full of dead bodies. Yes - this is indeed a possibility.
In the playtest, I saw the game run and it was awesome, but I also know that Harley is a good enough GM to a make dog turd shine like a diamond. What happens if I try to run it? There are some major departures from standard D&D. Are these good or bad? I just don't know. I must play more to find out. :)
- Ark
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Why I Am Broke
I had intended to regale you with more exploits at NTRPGCON, but I've found that my brain is fractured. Instead, I offer you the contents of The Boy's and my swag bags:
- Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Weird Fantasy Role-Playing: Grindhouse Edition
- Vornheim: The Complete City Kit
- Sword & Wizardry: Complete Rulebook X2
- Advanced Fantasy Miniatures - Lord of the Great Plains (NTRPGCON Exclusive)
- Tourist Traps: A Swords and Wizardry Adventure by Dennis Sustare
- The Dwarven Glory
- Two sets of URUTSK: World of Mystery Player's Dice
- B3: Palace of the Silver Princess
- C2: The Ghost Tower of Inverness
- I1: Dwellers of the Forbidden City
- I3: Pharoh
- L1: The Secret of Bone Hill
- S1: Tomb of Horrors
- X1: The Isle of Dread
- X2: Castle Amber
- Legend of the Five Rings GM's Screen
- Pathfinder Bonus Bestiary
The Boy does have other things, scattered around the house - dice and doodads and whatnot that I'm sure I'll never see again. And the last two were raffle prizes, so they didn't make me broke. :)
I'd like to thank Timeshadows, Frog God, and Mythmere (and other people I don't know of yet) who showered The Boy with generous gifts and priceless good times. We may be broke in cash, but we are certainly rich in warm feelings.
- Ark
Monday, June 6, 2011
Gaming on a Harley - The DCC RPG Experience
Harley Stroh is a modest man who apologized profusely for us having to sit through a playtest of the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, instead of getting some 'real' gaming in at the North Texas Role Playing Game Convention.
"Are you kidding?" I said, "Do you know the kind of buzz DCC RPG is getting out there? Get on with it, man!"
I chose a fourth level pregen Wizard and named him Urlik the Blemished. The big thing that intrigued me about DCC RPG was the variable nature of spells, in order to emulate 'true' Vancian mechanics - so I had to had to play a wizard. Had to.
The Boy picked a Dwarf fighter and, of course, named him Regdar. One thing I've noticed about my son, he either wants a character who is exceedingly tall, or exceedingly short. There are no inbetweens with him. The rest of the party was comprised of another fighter, a cleric, and a thief.
I won't get much into the mechanics of the game, as they are discussed elsewhere - and the beta should be available for download on Wednesday from the Goodman site. Interesting features include:
That reminds me. ZOCCHI DICE! DCC RPG uses zocchi dice. I love those dice and try to invent ways to use them in my Labyrinth Lord campaign. DCC RPG uses them inherently. Of course, you can emulate a d5 easily enough - but it's much cooler just to have and roll one.
The set-up for the game was that I, Urlik the Blemished, hired the rest of the party to go and beat up some baddies, basically. However, Harley took me aside and gave me the skinny on just what was going down. While it wasn't horribly nefarious, that fact that I refused to give the party specifics of what was going on, and that I played Urlik the Blemished like a very creepy Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth, made them very untrusting.
The game culminated in a scene to stop the big bad. The fight was going poorly and Urlik called upon his patron. An amazingly lucky roll allowed Urlik the Blemished to suck the souls out of the big bad and the henchmen, gaining their power. This completely freaked out the other players, who decided to kill poor - and somewhat evil - Urlik. The fighter began to smack Urlik with a grate, to little effect. The thief gained part of Urlik's true name (long story,) and tried to turn his spells back on the wizard. That didn't work too well, and Urlik charred the thief into dust. Then the cleric popped off a super-charged banish spell and blew Urlik to kingdom come.
The rest of the day, people came up and asked me why our table was cheering and whooping so loudly near the end of our session. I had to tell them, "Well, they were cheering so loudly because they killed me."
I've heard some moaning on blogs and forums about the complexity of the spell-casting charts. Yes, They are more complex than OD&D or AD&D. They require spell casters to have a copy of the book, or at least a print out of each spell. If you are wanting dead simple - this isn't it. But you know, compare DCC spell-casting to the obnoxious spew of powers in 4e, and you still have something incredibly simple - and what that small amount of complexity buys you is an awesome spell system that feels like a book, not video game.
It was an great session and Harley Stroh is an awesome DM. This is the first new system in quite a while that I've wanted to play. Let me be clear about this. I DM. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I'm the DM. I look at games as a DM - think about them, analyze them, digest them - as a DM. But I want to play this. I want to roll up another wizard, hunt down a DM, and be a player in a Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG game. I haven't had that strong a feeling for a new system since - oh - 1981, I think it was.
Well done, Goodman dudes, well done. Thanks, Harley
- Ark
"Are you kidding?" I said, "Do you know the kind of buzz DCC RPG is getting out there? Get on with it, man!"
I chose a fourth level pregen Wizard and named him Urlik the Blemished. The big thing that intrigued me about DCC RPG was the variable nature of spells, in order to emulate 'true' Vancian mechanics - so I had to had to play a wizard. Had to.
The Boy picked a Dwarf fighter and, of course, named him Regdar. One thing I've noticed about my son, he either wants a character who is exceedingly tall, or exceedingly short. There are no inbetweens with him. The rest of the party was comprised of another fighter, a cleric, and a thief.
I won't get much into the mechanics of the game, as they are discussed elsewhere - and the beta should be available for download on Wednesday from the Goodman site. Interesting features include:
- A wizard can 'burn' her stats to increase the power of spells and also to invoke the power of her patron,
- Thieves appear to be able to burn luck points in order to improve the chance of pulling something off (although I think anyone can burn luck points - it's just more likely that thieves have more,)
- And the warrior has a special 'Mighty Deed of Arms,' kind of a carte blance combat maneuver where the player can describe some combat feat of awesomeness and roll a d5 to pull it off.
That reminds me. ZOCCHI DICE! DCC RPG uses zocchi dice. I love those dice and try to invent ways to use them in my Labyrinth Lord campaign. DCC RPG uses them inherently. Of course, you can emulate a d5 easily enough - but it's much cooler just to have and roll one.
The set-up for the game was that I, Urlik the Blemished, hired the rest of the party to go and beat up some baddies, basically. However, Harley took me aside and gave me the skinny on just what was going down. While it wasn't horribly nefarious, that fact that I refused to give the party specifics of what was going on, and that I played Urlik the Blemished like a very creepy Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth, made them very untrusting.
The game culminated in a scene to stop the big bad. The fight was going poorly and Urlik called upon his patron. An amazingly lucky roll allowed Urlik the Blemished to suck the souls out of the big bad and the henchmen, gaining their power. This completely freaked out the other players, who decided to kill poor - and somewhat evil - Urlik. The fighter began to smack Urlik with a grate, to little effect. The thief gained part of Urlik's true name (long story,) and tried to turn his spells back on the wizard. That didn't work too well, and Urlik charred the thief into dust. Then the cleric popped off a super-charged banish spell and blew Urlik to kingdom come.
The rest of the day, people came up and asked me why our table was cheering and whooping so loudly near the end of our session. I had to tell them, "Well, they were cheering so loudly because they killed me."
I've heard some moaning on blogs and forums about the complexity of the spell-casting charts. Yes, They are more complex than OD&D or AD&D. They require spell casters to have a copy of the book, or at least a print out of each spell. If you are wanting dead simple - this isn't it. But you know, compare DCC spell-casting to the obnoxious spew of powers in 4e, and you still have something incredibly simple - and what that small amount of complexity buys you is an awesome spell system that feels like a book, not video game.
It was an great session and Harley Stroh is an awesome DM. This is the first new system in quite a while that I've wanted to play. Let me be clear about this. I DM. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I'm the DM. I look at games as a DM - think about them, analyze them, digest them - as a DM. But I want to play this. I want to roll up another wizard, hunt down a DM, and be a player in a Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG game. I haven't had that strong a feeling for a new system since - oh - 1981, I think it was.
Well done, Goodman dudes, well done. Thanks, Harley
- Ark
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Get Thee To A Convention
As I sit here, winding down from three days of convention going and getting ready for a fourth, my mind keeps on going back to the huge joy it has been, meeting people like Jim Ward, Tim Kask, Erol Otus, Frank Mentzer, Jeff Dee, Paul Jaquays, and Dennis Sustare. These were people I knew as a child - I knew them from their words and art and designs. I knew them, but I never really met them.
With the smiles also comes the sighs that this is my first RPG convention. I am kicking myself that I never went out to meet Gary Gygax or Dave Arneson or Eric Holmes or Jim Roslof or the many others who contributed to the early days of rpgs and have passed on.
Go to a convention - these smaller conventions especially. Meet these people. Meet the other game designers and publishers who are following in their footsteps. Go meet an ocean of people who love rpgs as much as you do. It's well worth it.
- Ark
With the smiles also comes the sighs that this is my first RPG convention. I am kicking myself that I never went out to meet Gary Gygax or Dave Arneson or Eric Holmes or Jim Roslof or the many others who contributed to the early days of rpgs and have passed on.
Go to a convention - these smaller conventions especially. Meet these people. Meet the other game designers and publishers who are following in their footsteps. Go meet an ocean of people who love rpgs as much as you do. It's well worth it.
- Ark
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)







