Friday, December 16, 2011

Dungeonspiration: Skyrim

No, I didn't draw it - but I should have.
Drats - I missed my Thrusday Dungeonspiration deadline again.  I should be ashamed.  But I have an excuse.  I blame Skyrim.


Skyrim is awesome.  It look great.  It plays great.  Dragons drop out of the sky in an attempt to punk you all the time.  And what's better - there is not a cluster of people around the world hating you because you were late for a raid.

As I play, I see vistas to describe, horrible traps to throw my players into, and quests to get them involved with.  I'm totally inspired, but somewhat deflated by the knowledge that every single one of my players is playing Skyrim too, and so all this cool new stuff won't be new by the time I regurgitate it into a campaign.

It seems like everyone I know is playing this game.  I wouldn't doubt that there has been a worldwide drop in blog posts since 11/11/11.  A friend's girlfriend also mentioned that there will most likely be a dip in the number of births 9 months from now. The game is riveting, and when our table-top group gets together, we sit around talking about what we did in Skyrim.

Which makes me think: Skyrim is bound to have an effect on table-top game design.  Admittedly, I wasn't paying attention to tabletop or video games in the early 2000s, but 4e has long been lauded as an attempt to make D&D more WOW-like, and from the little I know about WOW - that definitely seems to be the case.

So what will be the effect?  There is not a lot new or groundbreaking about Skyrim - it's primarily the execution that is superbly done, coupled with a great advertising campaign.  A Skyrim billboard still sits on I35 out of Dallas heading for the suburbs.

I'm not much of a game designer. I'm not good at picking apart Skyrim for it's interesting mechanics - aside from maybe it's lock-picking mini-game.  So I'll post the question to everyone:

What effect do you think Skyrim will have on table-top game design - or even just mechanics or idea integration into existing games and people's campaigns?

And yeah, I know some of you have not played Skyrim.  Ya'll feel free to fuss about us other time wasters down in the comments below too. :)

- Ark

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Warning your DM


My Pathfinder DM - Merwyn - let me roll up a new Pathfinder character - a level higher than normal - if I used "in order" 3d6, as opposed to something more wimpy - like 4d6 minus lowest wherever you want.  I took him up on the offer and rolled this:

STR: 10
DEX: 9
CON: 12
INT: 14
WIS: 8
CHA: 17

Not horrible, but not what I would call a great spread for the classes I'm used to running.  After some research, I discovered that the Pathfinder Bard would work with those numbers.  I've never run a Bard - and never had any interest in doing so - but it gave me an idea.

Crazy-ass Tim plays a halfling thief in the game - Peter No-Parents.  Peter is min-maxed so that he can basically never be seen by anyone if he doesn't want to be, and can pickpocket just about anyone.  He also has an ability that makes him look just like a human child (i.e., street urchin,) rather than a halfling.  Peter No-Parents is basically worthless at anything else.

Peter is quite evil, and steals from the party.  Actually, Peter isn't really known to the party.  He hangs on the periphery and commits mischief.  Evey once in a while, a character might see a kid, but the kid walks on by, and no one is any the wiser.  It's really irritating (but funny,) and I designed a character specifically to detect and kill him.  That was Bloodspurt the half-orc paladin.  Bloospurt, regretfully, died - murdered by another party member (an assassin) for tying him up and trying to convert him to a Lawful Good diety.  Oh well.

My idea was . . . unusual . . . so I figured I had to warn Merwyn before I brought this character out for a spin.

Subject: A Warning

Merwyn,

My rolls lean me towards a bard, and with the present make up of our party (I'm talking about players, not characters,) doing anything constructive or legal will be pointless. So I have made a trickster/scammer bard - a conman and entertainer in one.


It hit me that I can work Peter No-Parents into the act. I could continue on, earning full master level ranks for my Beard and Boobs badge, and make a female bard, and have that female bard pretend to be Peter's mom, for heightened scamming activity. It also gives Peter an avenue to actually be an active member of the party - even if maybe some party members never quite figure out what is going on. 
 
Tim and I discussed this briefly, and I believe we are both happy with the concept. Her name shall be Alouette - like in the French song (Ah-low-et-ta,) meaning a lark. Yes, she sings. And she dances. And she knows all about nobility and bluffing and disguise. She is quite greedy as well. 

Peter, will of course, be required to take a bath. And be fumigated.

So, basically - I'm warning you.

Run for the hills.

Sincerely,
Your worst nightmare


We'll find out tonight at the Pathfinder game how well this goes over.  If you can't beat em, join em.

- Ark

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Yes, Those Are Dice in My Pocket AND I'm Glad to See You

Feel the power of my huge-ass dice!  They are so big, I could take out car windshields if I decided to chunk these off of an overpass.  The creator was saying that they had imperfections - but frankly - my eyes don't focus to the level where said imperfections might be.  They look great!



That right there - where the #5 is - is where the frikkin space medusa is waiting for the party.  Shhhh - don't tell them though.  Let it be a surprise.

- Ark

Monday, December 12, 2011

Naked Ponies!

Okay, not naked, but here is the original My Little Portal Ponies image without all that text.  I figure that other people can probably make it funnier than me.  Feel free to make word balloons, insert bad jokes, and spread bronie RPG love world-wide on your blogs and other places.  Penicillin optional.  Link-backs welcome.

- Ark

Clicking makes it bigger.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

My Little Pellatarrum

A few weeks ago, I made a smart-ass comment to Erin Palette, that went something like this. "For my next trick, I will draw the My Little Pony invasion of Pellatarrum." Pellatarrum being, of course, her crazy-ass fantasy setting, and My Little Pony being - well, if you don't know - stop reading. This isn't for you.

I had no idea how hard drawing fan art is.  Well, I could have spit out pony stick figures, but no - if I was actually going to act on my half-baked remark, I should do it right.  Trying it really makes you respect professional cartoon artists.  The forms are so simplistic - but have to be so perfect - otherwise they don't look right.  There is something very zen about the art form.  Yes, and this is complete drawn from scratch - no tracing - and done in SHARPIE on paper, then sucked into Photoshop for a dye-job.

The Boy was horrified and refused to look at what I was drawing while I hummed the My Little Pony theme song.  Okay, that was just a side benefit for my inner sadist.  

Below is the MLP Invasion of Pellatarrum.  I do not give this to the OSR, like previous art.  I give it to Bronies worldwide.  Post it wherever.  Not that I own anything about it.  Hasbro owns it all.  Just like D&D.  You know the drill.

So anyway, enjoy!

- Ark

Click Rainbow Dash to embiggen.




Friday, December 9, 2011

Ellen-14

Ellen-14 is a non-player character in our Stars Without Number campaign.  The picture doesn't do her justice - but it is similar enough to her appearance to get the point across.

The lady is ten feet high, twenty feet wide, and thirty feet long.  She is somewhat rock shaped, and her tough skin is a gray and black color - the kind you find on certain bloated ticks found in the foothills of Arkansas.  She has a human head emerging from the gray skin a bit over five feet up from the floor, and underneath it hang two human arms.  Having no feet, she moves around like a horta.

Ellen-14 is a human-alien hybrid.  Actually, Ellen-14 isn't just one entity - the name is a signifier for an entire brood of approximately 100 individuals - the 14th generation since initial hybridization.  All of the individual Ellen-14s are pretty much the same, and they keep in contact with one another to avoid drifting apart mentally.

The aliens who designed Ellen-14 (and the many other hybrid variants,) are known as the Metha.  The Metha look pretty much like Ellen-14, but without the human head and the human arms.  They have been sentient for half a million years, and have spent most of that time doing bioengineering work - redesigning themselves - and their biosphere - countless times.  Currently, their bodies house 15 to17 brains - some genetic copies of other alien species that they met in the past.

The Metha fit into the Stars Without Number alien classification of 'Other' - alien beings that are too different from human beings to communicate with or understand.  After a series of brutal wars after first contact, the Metha created the human-metha hybrids as an attempt to understand humanity and communicate with them.  The Metha are completely oblivious to the fact that the mere sight of Ellen-14 and her various sisters and brother causes most humans to run in abject fear.

Ellen-14 does, however, bridge the gap between humans and methans.  She has 18 brains inside of her - one of them human, and they all chat with one other through bizarre chemical interactions, radio waves, and pulsing light.  She is well aware of how she looks, as well.  "Oh my," she will often say, "You think I look hideous.  I do.  I cannot argue.  But I couldn't find a thing to wear today that didn't make me look bloated!"

Ellen-14 is also a smart-ass.

The player characters have - strangely - taken a shine to Ellen-14 and her brood sisters. I'm not sure why.  She is their 'Mr. Johnson," in Shadow-run speak.  They are still very nervous about the pure methans, though.  It might have something to do with the aliens engaging in thermonuclear war as a sport.  But who knows.

- Ark

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