Sunday, October 30, 2011

Hit Point Survey

Warriors Experience Table, SWN, pg 21
Okay, so this isn't one of those 'click the button' surveys, but more of a 'response requested' kind of thing, involving standard D&D style hit point rolling.

Now, in all my years, I've been under the impression that when you level, you take your Hit Die and roll - then add your new hit points (and perhaps CON mod) to your existing hit point pool.  Everyone I've ever dealt with has been in agreement - it seems to be intuitive.

Stars Without Number has classes, levels, and hit points similar to D&D, but apparently, that's not the way you do it.  From page 23 in Stars Without Number, under the heading Hit Points:
"Don’t worry too much if you roll a low number. As your character gains experience they will gain more hit points and the chance to reroll poor dice. Some GMs may choose to omit the initial roll entirely and simply start new characters with the maximum possible hit points."
Unless I'm misreading, this seems to imply for SWN that, you reroll your hit point every level.  It's an interesting concept, if it is indeed the concept here.  Has anyone heard of such a thing?

- Ark

Oktoberbrawl

Apparently, a couple of weeks of regular gesture drawing is pretty effective.  This sketch actually looks like a human being - at least to me, anyway.


So watch out.  If you spill your beer, Oktoberbrawl Girl will kick your ass with a stick.

- Ark

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Dungeonspiration: Stars Without Number

I used to have a reoccurring dream.  Well, it was more of a reoccuring theme.  I would be in a comic book shop, or a book store, or a flea market in an ancient submarine, or in the Transylvanian basement of a fetid castle - and I'd be looking through boxes.  These were big long white boxes filled with every role playing game imaginable.  I would dig through them, looking for that one science fiction role playing game that had everything I wanted - good combat mechanics, good skill systems, good starship rules, and good universe generation systems.

I'd inevitably find some rpg system that had an awesome cover and everytihng I wanted inside - and I'd rush to the zombie check out girl or the auto-purchase-bot with a big smile on my face.  Then I'd wake up and start cussing - realizing that it was just a dream.

I've had that dream a LOT.  It's representative of my search for a perfect rpg in my younger years - especially a perfect science fiction game.  I've played quite a few - Star Frontiers, various forms of Traveller (black book, mega, 2300,) Space Master, GURPS Space, Star Wars - and read even more.

Okay, I'm not going to say that Stars Without Number is perfect, but damn, it's good.  It seems to fulfil the promise that Traveller made back so many years ago, but never quite delivered.

Traveller had a fun - if nerve racking - character generation system where your character could die before gameplay started.  It was great for generating back-story - but the actual mechanics were - MEH.  Stars Without Number takes good old fashioned D&D mechanics, simplifies them, and tweaks them with a light skill system.

There are just threee classes, Warrior, Psychic, and Expert - but the Expert - like LotFP's Expert class, is highly customizable with skills, allowing you to create anything from a doctor or spaceship mechanic, to a bounty hunter.

The game tosses out the good old hit charts and follows a simple formula.  Twenty always hits, one always misses, and you determine that with a d20 + your Combat Skill + Att Mod + Att Bonus + defender's AC.  Poof.  Beautiful.  I really wish the d20 developer dudes would have thought of this, rather than having to flip AC on it's head.

And you know when your first level psychic has d4 HP and a sniper rifle does 2d8 - only good things can happen. :)

Where Stars Without Number really shines though, for me, is in it's universe creation.  Just like in Traveller, you sit down and randomly roll up a sector full of stars.  In my youth, I loved this, and as other sci-fi RPGs were produced, they had similar creation rules, but they got more specific on the physical characteristics of various solar systems.

I loved the complexity and exactness of some of those systems.  Charting out how many AUs distant each planet was from it's star, calculating the specific density of a planet, determining albedo, etc - all these were great fun - for me - an amateur astrophysicist.

It never really translated into fun during a game.  Even if the players knew what the term 'albedo' meant, they wouldn't have cared to know that planet X925g-U had a rating of 57%.

Stars Without Number tosses most of the physical nuts and bolts and replaces them with - um - for lack of better words - a SCI-FI-TROPE-A-TRON-3000.

The default setting of the game is that humanity expanded rapidly into the galaxy, achieving amazing technology, then something happened to crash civilization and crash it HARD for a while.  Now humanity is rebuilding and worlds are reconnecting with one another.  You know, that old chestnut.

Rolling up a world, you might get something like this:

Atmosphere: Breathable mix
Temperature: Warm (could result in a desert or swampy type place)
Biosphere: Immiscible (i.e., you can't eat the natives)
Population: Hundreds of Thousands of Inhabitants
Tech Level: 4 - Baseline
Worlds Tags: Police State, Hostile Biosphere
Culture Base: Russian

Looking at the results, and the pointers in the book, a hundred idea pop in my head.  The first to come into mind is a place like Harry Harrison's Deathworld - a planet full of jungle animals and plants ready to eat anyone in a second.  But it could just as easily be a world reminiscent of earth in Stephen King's The Mist or frankly, Frank Herbert's Dune.

The creation process wonderfully tosses a bunch of tropes together and lets that pot full of 'kitchen sink' soup cook in your mind for a while until something awesome pops out.  Who gives a flip about the gravity of a world - unless that gravity is different enough to mean something and be a good plot device.

Star Without Numbers also allows for the same type of randomized trope construction of cultures, aliens, npcs, religions, political parties, and corporations. Each of these systems is geared towards creating conflict and issues that will provide ample adventure opportunities for the pcs, wherever they go and whatever they do.  It's a wonderful sandbox creation system, and very fun to work with.

I mean, I would have never thought to make up a low-tech world where the entire society had to hunt down alien whale-like creatures to survive, in some sort of Moby-Dick-gone-viral planet, but with a roll of some dice, my mind began churning along and I was there.

Sine Nomine published the original version as a free pdf, and I bought a physical copy of it.  Enjoying that, I grabbed Skyward Steel, which is a sourcebook for space navies.  I liked that so much, I went and got the updated version of Star Without Numbers from Mongoose - and it was worth it - rules for AI's and mech, and an entire world culture generation system.

I'm really impressed with what Kevin Crawford has been doing with this game.  I haven't been this inspired to run a science fiction game in quite a while.

So if you haven't yet, go grab Star Without Numbers.  It's free, and even if you don't intend to play it, it's chock full of good adventuring ideas that should impress even jaded players.

- Ark

Friday, October 21, 2011

Draw the Ninja. Be the Ninja.

At some point, it was suggested that I illustrate my little 'what happened at the table' stories for the blog.  The prospect actually frightened me.  I'm not that great of an artist, and I try not too judge myself too harshly, but the thought of spewing out hardly recognizable crap scribbles on a constant basis filled me with dread.  So I've been practicing - trying to get better - so one day I can draw crap drawing with at least a tad more self-confidence.

Following some advice from Tom Preston, I decided to start gesture drawing, which is just a artsy-fartsy was of saying 'draw as fast as you can and don't worry about specifics too much - just get the overall flow.'  Thirty second gesture drawing seems to be all the rage, but kind of hard to do and juggle photos, sketchpads, pencils, and an alarm clock.

Then I stumbled on the Figure and Gesture Drawing Tool, a nifty website with configurable tools to run you through a course of gesture drawing - as if you had a real-life old battle-axe of a art instructor in your own living room, yelling at you to draw faster.  Okay, it doesn't yell, but it can certainly feel that way.

So, if you like to draw, and you want to get better, you might give the tool a try.  I've been at it for a week or so and I may not be getting better, but at least I am getting more confident about my crappy drawing.  One day I might even illustrate how poor Schmeky Encephalitis died in the Kobolds Ate My Baby game (for the second time,) or how my character Bloodspurt the Half-Orc Paladin in our Pathfinder game was ruthlessly executed by the party's assassin for being too annoying to live.

Until then, enjoy the hastily sketched NINJA!

- Ark

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Dungeonspiration: Lovecraft & Roerich


In the Antarctic eldritch horror travelogue 'At the Mountains of Madness,' H. P. Lovecraft makes mention of the "strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich" a total of seven times.  I didn't notice that in my first read-through in my tween years.  The story was full of bizarre references to the Miskatonic University, Edgar Allan Poe's novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, the famed Plateau of Leng, and the Necronomicon - and I wasn't exactly sure what was real and what was not.

Admittedly, 'At the Mountains of Madness' was serialized in Astounding Stories in three issues, so some repetition is understandable, but still that leaves, on average, two mentions of this mysterious Nicholas Roerich per serial episode.  It was something H. P. Lovecraft expected his readers to know about.  So, during my most recent read through, I hit up Google in search of answers about this mysterious artist.

Well what do you know? Nicholas Roerich was real.  Per Wikipedia, he was a "Russian mystic, painter, philosopher, scientist, writer, traveler, and public figure."  As well as being a novelist and prolific painter, he also advocated protecting historical sites and institutions devoted to education, art, and science.  He was nominated several times for the Noble Prize.  The more I read about the guy, the more I like him, despite his somewhat grumpy appearance in photos and paintings.

The paintings Lovecraft mentions - well - Roerich spewed out art like a frantic machine.  Identifying the specific paintings is impossible becasue there are so many to choose from.



"Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich, and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred." - H. P. Lovecraft, 'At the Mountains of Madness'




"Odd formations on slopes of highest mountains. Great low square blocks with exactly vertical sides, and rectangular lines of low, vertical ramparts, like the old Asian castles clinging to steep mountains in Roerich’s paintings." - H. P. Lovecraft, 'At the Mountains of Madness'



"It was young Danforth who drew our notice to the curious regularities of the higher mountain skyline - regularities like clinging fragments of perfect cubes, which Lake had mentioned in his messages, and which indeed justified his comparison with the dreamlike suggestions of primordial temple ruins, on cloudy Asian mountaintops so subtly and strangely painted by Roerich." - H. P. Lovecraft, 'At the Mountains of Madness'



"There was indeed something hauntingly Roerich-like about this whole unearthly continent of mountainous mystery.  On some of the peaks, though, the regular cube and rampart formations were bolder and plainer, having doubly fantastic similitudes to Roerich-painted Asian hill ruins. The distribution of cryptical cave mouths on the black snow-denuded summits seemed roughly even as far as the range could be traced." - H. P. Lovecraft, 'At the Mountains of Madness'



"As we drew near the forbidding peaks, dark and sinister above the line of crevasse-riven snow and interstitial glaciers, we noticed more and more the curiously regular formations clinging to the slopes; and thought again of the strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich." - H. P. Lovecraft, 'At the Mountains of Madness'



"From these foothills the black, ruin-crusted slopes reared up starkly and hideously against the east, again reminding us of those strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich; and when we thought of the frightful amorphous entities that might have pushed their fetidly squirming way even to the topmost hollow pinnacles, we could not face without panic the prospect of again sailing by those suggestive skyward cave mouths where the wind made sounds like an evil musical piping over a wide range." - H. P. Lovecraft, 'At the Mountains of Madness'


There is a substantial quantity of Nicholas Roerich's work to see.  The Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York would probably be a great place to go visit, but you can take a virtual peek at the museum. Or you can aways Google your way to more art.

So go check out some of the art that inspired H. P. Lovecraft to be all freaky-deaky, and maybe add some freaky-deakiness to your campiagn afterwards.  Oh, and while the following images doesn't quite fit in with 'At the Mountains of Madness' - it still sets quite a mood:




- Ark

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Are Grognards Hipsters?

Internet Joke I Don't Get - But Still Makes Me Laugh
Last week, one of the young punk gamers at the table, Mervyn, called Crazy-ass Tim and I hipsters.

Honestly, I don't know what the hell a hipster actually is, except perhaps that they are skinny kids with shaggy haircuts.  I think.  I don't know - even after doing copious amounts of internet research.

Mervyn's argument was that we were hipsters because we thought all of this old crap - games, books, music, etc - was hyper-cool - so cool we even had blogs about it.   In my mind, I'm just a fat old dude having a nostalgic stroll down the more pleasant parts of my childhood.

But I do have hipster glasses.  I walked into the eyeball store and told the lady 'I am a nerd and I need some nerd glasses,' and she giggled a bit and gave me some nerd glasses - which turn out to look exactly like hipster glasses.  Go figure.

I'm not really worried about what people call me, but it would be nice to know exactly what it is that they are calling me.  Knowledge is power.

So tell me - what the hell is a hipster, and do our crusty-ass old grognard selves fit the definition?

- Ark

PS I guess the real question is if I run up to James Maliszewski and yell 'HIPSTER,' would he turn around? ;)


Thursday, October 13, 2011

Dungeonspiration: War! Good God, Ya'll


The Irish trounce Norway.
I've been playing Medieval II: Total War for the last couple of weeks.  Okay, it's like five years old, but I just heard of it.  Five bucks on Steam, and it is pretty cool.

A good chunk of it is devoted to various military campaigns, ranging from the Norman Conquest and The Crusades, to the Pacification of the Americas.  You juggle economies, manage spies and diplomats, and build infrastructure.  Yadda yadda yadda.  Fun for some, I'm sure, and fun for me when I was playing Civ II.  But I'm over that.  What I really like is the bit where you zoom down into battles.

I'm sure this isn't news to most video games players, but for those people like me who live under a rock, it's pretty friggin nifty.  You get to control all of your units in real time - and have the handy use of PAUSE as well.  The game allows you to build battle scenarios, but I much prefer to have it pit two random armies, kitted out with random but sensible units, and fight in a completely random place.  You end up fighting in plains, forests, or hills, during rain, for, or night, at river fords, forts, villages, towns, massive castles, or unassailable cliffs.

Playing these battle simulations gets my mind going about D&D and what most of those shiny weapons and armor were actually designed for in the real world - bloodletting on a massive scale - and how different types of units translate into the various character classes of editions both old and new.  It also gets me hungry to have large scale warfare occur in-game.

I've been building up tensions in the Labyrinth Lord game between the Lawful human forces and a Chaotic army headed by the great green dragon Abaraxis.  Small skirmishes have been happening, but the humans have been pussyfooting around, not really interested in attacking.  It's kind of a big thing to effect the campaign, and I've been pussyfooting around too.

The Egyptians fight Denmark in a river crossing.
Fighting these computer battles have changed my mind.  I have a much clearer view of what the armies look like in my head now, and what their capabilities are.  The humans have some wicked magic - but the dragons have the old AD&D fear ability going for them.  Imagine that hurtling out of the sky at a well formed phalanx of warriors.  So much for well-formed.

The PCs have been on the edges of what has been happening.  They haven't been too interested in getting involved, though.  That's perfectly fine.  The war is inevitable and will occur with them of without them.  The repercussions of the war - well - that will be nigh impossible to escape - whatever happens.  I still don't know how it will pan out.  Perhaps I should play it on the computer. :)

One of the more interesting thing about Medieval II: Total War is that The Boy is studying Medieval History right now.  He right there reading along about the state of Europe, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Crusades, then watching the game, learning names of cities and countries that don't even exist anymore, watching archers rip light infantry to pieces, seeing the primitive precursors of gunpowder weapons, watching siege towers take walls, and marvelling at the utter chaos as his father's troops are routed and run and run and run in every direction for what seems like forever.

I never would have dreamed I would have heard my son yell, "Get your arbusquers out of there! Can't you see the heavy cavalry charging?" :)

So go get out of the myopic view we can fall into sometimes in role playing games, and go play something on a grander scale.  It can give you a much more expanded viewpoint, with which you can look at your rpg campaign in a whole new light.

And watch out for the heavy cav - it's a killer. ;)

- Ark