Thursday, December 8, 2011

Dungeonspiration: Epic Death


Sergeant Loronzo by The Boy -

When I was but a wee role player, I really didn't like the whole character death thing.  It was something to be seriously avoided - going so far as to sit behind a DM screen and never risk a PC by never having one.

But when you come down to it, some of the most memorable moments in role playing are the deaths.  Case in point - The Boy.  While initially horrified by the concept, he is getting quite good at them.

In my Stars Without Number campaign, the characters were contracted by some shady underworld types to shut down a casino.  Not forever, mind you - just for a bit.  Actually, the party never asked - or even seemed to wonder - as to WHY someone would shut down a casino for a bit.  It just enough that they got to cause some chaos - and get paid for it.

The session turned out to be one of those long-ass planning ones.  You know those types.  The players get so interested in the planning aspect that it seems like they never get to the execution.  But several hours later, they had their plan and went ahead.

The plan was to blow up an intra-building sewer main in the casino's hotel and have millions of gallons of raw sewage flood the casino proper.  Actually, the plan was not a bad one at all.  The big problem was that the party's hacker was AWOL (an actual date with his girlfriend!) and so they had to hire a retainer.

The hacker henchman screwed the pooch on his computer and security rolls.  Badly.  Worse than bad. The hacker was particularly nice about the whole thing, calling the party up and letting them know he had miserably failed and had not only NOT prevented the security systems from detecting their activities, but had actually helped the casino security zero in on their nefarious activities.

Ron and Crazy-ass Tim were in the getaway car.  The second they heard the alarm go off, they were out of there.  Completely.  Utterly.  Gone.  Not even a post card.

The Boy, playing Sergeant Loronzo, and Kaye (yeah - the guy who plays Torvalds in the 2e game) were on the third floor, attaching explosives to the sewer pipes when the first security guard arrived, gun in hand.

Sergeant Loronzo picked up a huge plumber's wrench, swung it the guy, and grabbed his Order of the d30 Brand d30, choosing to use it at that moment.  The massive wrench did so much damage it cut the guard in half, showering everything in the room with blood.  They finished setting the charges and high-tailed it out of the plumbing room, racing to get to their long-gone getaway car.

They ran down the hotel hallway to the elevators, but they were too late.  Three security guards stepped out of the elevator firing.  Kaye was hit and died like a punk at zero hit points even.  Sergeant Loronzo wasn't having any of that, so he pulled out his stash of Lazarus Patches. The patches help dead character's come back to life.  Well, very recently dead characters.  And it takes a medic to really apply them well.  Sergeant Loronzo was not a medic.

But damned if he didn't try.  He slapped patch after patch onto his dead buddy, trying to shock him back into life, all the while dodging a hail of bullets.  The other players began a count down to when the timer would kick off the sewage explosives.  Eventually Sergeant Loronzo ran out of patches and the guards - none too happy with all the missing going on - ran up and began to pummel him.

Sergeant Loronzo ran out of patches.  He was very upset that his buddy has died for good.  He mowed down the security guards and proceeded to leave - but more security guards were coming out of the elevators.

The count down to sewage explosion was getting woefully close - like about one round.  Then the boy had an idea. He busted down the door of a hotel room, dove onto the bed, snatched a pillow, shot the glass out of the window with his laser, and leapt out of the building.

The explosives detonated.

Sergeant Loronzo had some hope that the pillow would soften the impact into the ground, but when the true gravity of the situation hit him, The Boy turned, fired his bright blue laser pistol in the air, yelled 'Sayonara,' and made his peace with the universe.

We all thought it was a very epic death - a very inspiring end - and one which should be remembered in the annals of RPGdom forever.

So if you know your character is going to die - think for a second.  What can you do to make the Valkyries sing loudly of that death in their meady halls until Ragnarok comes?  Do something cool - and inspiring.  The skalds will appreciate it.

- Ark

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Vayniris Anthology Project Deadline Approaching

No, I haven't forgotten or totally flaked out.  The Vayniris Anthology project is still going strong - I just haven't mentioned it in a while since it's a project in flight.

 We are coming to a close on our submission deadline.  The deadline is set for December 31st, 2011.  That's in three weeks.

If you have an idea you are keen on and just can't pull it together by the deadline, shoot me a message and we can mind meld about it.  A cut-off point during the holidays was probably a risky idea anyway. :)

- Ark

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Torvalds vs. the Honey Badger

It's thrall good.
I suppose it was my fault.  At least it was my causative action that began the chain of destruction - but listen - I had my reasons.  We were on the trail of an entire village of zombies.  Well, now we believe they were just regular people mind controlled by illithids, but at the time all we knew was that a herd of zombies was bearing down on our home village.

This is the 2e game being run by Crazy-Ass Tim, in which I am playing the sexy elf ranger lady Chartreuse.  One of the party members is Torvalds - the most useless first level magic user in the history of all D&D ever.  Yeah, I know - a boastful boast - but it's true - and even more so as the session unfolded.

So Torvalds rides an ox.  Everywhere.  Even places where oxen do not fit.  But traipsing through the woods following zombies was a bit much for the ox this time around.  Torvalds blew his animal handling roll - and the ox bucked him off and bolted.

The zombies were headed to destroy our town.  Torvalds was about to lead us on a wild-ox chase of ridiculous proportions in the opposite direction.  The ox had Torvalds' spell book - the only thing that makes him even vaguely useful.

So I shot the fucking ox.

Regretfully, the arrow didn't kill the ox.  But as Torvalds became enraged about what I had done, Merwyn's character chased after the ox and hacked it to death.

That's when Torvalds attacked Mervyn's character.

As the two first level characters began to tussle, my character Chartreuse got sick of the whole thing, turned around, and raced after the zombie horde to rescue her village.

Meanwhile, Torvalds actually killed Merwyn's character - dead.  Surprising, yeah.  The Boy thought that such a murder was horrendous and attacked Torvalds, smashing him down below zero hit point.  The Boy has a conscious, though, and only did subdual damage.  He then left Torvalds face down on the forest floor and raced after me.

I was busy tackling zombies and slapping them awake.  The Boy didn't think to tell me that one party member was dead and another was face down unconscious in a zombie infested forest.  But the horrifying screams alerted me that something was wrong.

Torvalds' recess playmate.
Torvalds awoke to a visit from a random encounter - a playful honey badger.  Crazy-ass Tim decided that the honey badger wouldn't do hit point damage - but instead - structural damage.  So, the playful honey badger ripped Torvalds leg off.  Thus the screaming.

So we ran back to where Torvalds was and tried to fight off the honey badger.  The honey badger was, of course, tough.  It ripped off another one of Torvalds' legs.  We continued to attack, and finally took honey badger down.  But even in death, honey badger didn't give a shit and ripped off Torvalds' left arm.

We applied tourniquets, and did massive amounts of cauterization with torches, and brought Torvalds back from the brink.  It really only worked because Crazy-ass Tim is a mean bastard of a DM.  But we had rescued our useless magic-user.  Yay!

Meanwhile, our entire village was slaughtered and burned to the ground.  So, I'm thinking that Torvalds deserves his fate.  Regretfully, he is even more useless than before.  But Kaye continues to play him without a hitch - reveling in his one armed, no leggedness - and declaring himself the Sorcerer Supreme.

The Boy has taken to calling Torvalds the Burrito Supreme.

- Ark

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Dungeonspiration: Gerard K. O'Neill


 "Is the surface of a planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization?"

Near the end of the space race, a high energy physicist named Gerard K. O'Neill became interested in space colonization.  He had already expressed his interest in space by applying for NASA's Astronaut Corp in the mid 60's, but papers from his students convinced him that designing self-sustaining space habitats could be a worthwhile endeavor.

In his first paper on the subject, "The Colonization of Space", published in 1974, O'Neill wrote:
"It is important to realize the enormous power of the space-colonization technique. If we begin to use it soon enough, and if we employ it wisely, at least five of the most serious problems now facing the world can be solved without recourse to repression: bringing every human being up to a living standard now enjoyed only by the most fortunate; protecting the biosphere from damage caused by transportation and industrial pollution; finding high quality living space for a world population that is doubling every 35 years; finding clean, practical energy sources; preventing overload of Earth's heat balance."
Soon, NASA became interested in O'Neill's research and began funding his efforts.  O'Neill tied many different concepts and technologies together to come up with feasible ideas for space colonization, including solar power, the L4 and L5 Lagrange points, asteroid mining, and magnetic mass drivers.  NASA enlisted other scientist into investigating space colonization, resulting in a golden age of such research. The U. S. Congress, soured on the high cost of space activities - including the Apollo program - withdrew most of O'Neill's funding before the end of the decade.

The ideas that resulted from O'Neill's research are still fascinating.  They open a door to plausible science fiction.  Simply looking at his designs and reading a bit about them are enough to get the mind going.

The first type of space habitat O'Neill' envisioned is a modified Bernal sphere - an idea for a space station developed in 1929.


The Bernal sphere came in two sizes - Island One, which was the smaller, and Island Two, which was larger.


The first two of O'Neill's 'islands' were relatively  simple affairs - big old spinning balls in space.  Island Three was another matter.  Island Three, which has come to be known as the O'Neill Cylinder, is comprised of two separate space stations.  These two gigantic cylinders spin around each other, creating a much more stable system than just one cylinder, which is apt to start spinning from end to end and squash everyone inside.


Yep - that means that Babylon 5 was inherently unstable.  I suppose Vorlon technology kept it upright.  Not only is the O'Neill Cylinder concept more stable, but look at the view!


When you lump O'Neils designs in with the Stanford Torus style of space station, you get all of the space station you could need for a good hard science fiction setting.  And these puppies - especially the  O'Neill Cylinder, make for absolutely great mega-dungeons and Jim Ward Metamorphosis Alpha style gaming.

So go dig through the Internet and do up a science fiction campaign right.  Screw artificial gravity generators.  Do it the old fashioned way - and build a habitable colony to boot!

Anchors away.

- Ark

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

In the OSR . . .

Without further ado . . .


Yay.  I can draw cartoon boobies.

I had meant to write about five gazillion blog posts over the Thanksgiving holiday.  Instead, I wrote butkis.  Nada, zilch . . . nothing.  Not even a Dungeonspiration posts.  I suppose I could could apologize - but I really dislike when people apologize for not writing enough in their blog.  It's like they did something wrong.  Advocating genocide in your blog?  Okay, that's wrong.  Not posting enough?  NOT WRONG.  Lazy maybe, but not wrong. :)

So I've been drawing a lot, fiddling with different styles and whatnot.  The elf chick popped out when I was actually trying to draw something else - but I decided to color and ink it anyway - since I liked her expression.  But just the picture was kind of weird, so I gave it a caption.

POOF - it's a MEME!

Yay!  It's the "In the OSR . . ." meme!  Everyone jump on the bandwagon and go create something - a poem or macaroni art or whatnot.  Try to be actually funny - unlike me.

Like so much of my OSR art, I'm giving this to the community.  I doubt that anyone really wants it - but feel free to repost, spindle, and mutilate.

Ohhh - btw - I won an award!  Thanks Tim! (Not Crazy-Ass Tim, but the Other Tim.) Apparently, my blog is 'quirky.'  I had no idea.  I'm going to have to go look that up in the dictionary to find out what it means.

- Ark

Saturday, November 19, 2011

More Retro



Yeah - more stuff that doesn't have to do with gaming, but I was particularly happy with this one.  I'll try to keep more game related art on the blog.  After all, I have a deviantArt account to toss all the other stuff on. :)

Enjoy.

- Ark

Friday, November 18, 2011

Rather Gamey Cheesecake


Okay, so it has nothing to do with gaming.  More practice drawing.  This is an attempt to draw in a 'retro cartoon' style.  The reference, she is here.

This was done by hand with Sharpie and colored pencils, because the only pc that can run Photoshop was being used at the time by The Boy for SKYRIM.  Sheesh. ;)

Enjoy.

- Ark