Thursday, February 9, 2012

Dungeonspiration: Genealogy


Not Gunter.

Shortly after I moved to Hollywood, I met a German tourist named Gunter who had a penchant for wearing a green and purple track suit that made him look like Barney the Dinosuar.  We spend hours discussing the true meaning of "Fahrvergnügen" and the Hitler's involvement in the creation of Volkswagon.  But I'll never forget that the second we met, he locked eyes with me and said excitedly 'I know your people!'

Gunter had done a lot of travelling through East German after the Wall fell, and had just came from another such trip to the US.  He said that I looked just like the people around East Berlin.  He had seen my face reflected in the streets there.

I didn't know quite what to think of that, but I filed the bit of data away for future use.

Fast-forward two decades and a friend is helping me with my family's genealogy.  Research in the area has always been difficult since the family isn't one to remember back far or talk to relatives much.  But with my friend's help, we were suddenly getting a lot of hits on Ancestory.com that helped to trace many branches back further than I had ever hoped.

Apparently they have water in Strausberg.
A lady named Margaret stood out.  I had never heard of her - my great-great-great-grandmother.  She had been born in Strausberg, Germany in 1811 and had come over to Texas at some point.  The name of the city sounded vaguely familiar, so I googled it.

Strausberg is a city 30 kilometers east of Berlin.

Wow.  Gunter was right.

It still boggles my mind.  I have 16 great-great-great-grandmothers, most from many places other than Germany.  The fact that Margaret's facial genetics have passed down to me - and held on so strongly - that some guy strolling down Santa Monica Boulevard could identify my genetic homeland - 200 years past - within a range of what - 18 miles - wow.

And here I thought I might look Irish, which is funny because so far, I can't find a lick of Irish in the family tree – despite what I had always been told by family members.

What I can find is Scots-Irish - something differently entirely.

Socks and sweaters anyone?
My patronym is contained in a group called the Little Scottish Cluster.  This is a group of families who share a recent Y-DNA genetic relationship.  The group centers on a common ancestor who existed around 900 -1100 AD and who lived in the vicinity of Stirlingshire, Scotland.  Moving forward to 1618, my ancestors are living in Argyllshire (which is apparently a mountain or two away from Stirlingshire.)  They decide - or are chosen - to be colonist.  Not in the New World - but Ireland.

I had thought that my family was of the oppressed Irish.  All I can find, however, is us being the oppressors.  Londonderry was the first planned English city in Ireland, and my ancestors were inhabitants.  Apparently, we were all good Protestants, but not the right kind of Protestants (Presbyterians,) and so logically, the best place for us was in to be in Ireland, setting an example to the godless Catholics on how to be proper subjects of the crown.

The Irish are still pissed off about the whole thing.
For 100 years the Irish tried to wipe Londonderry off the map.  Understandably so, of course.   The history gets very confusing, but at least one of my ancestors survived the countless wars and political upheavals - doing so well against the Irish that everyone in Londonderry was exempt from taxes (a legality which lasted apparently until the Revolutionary War.)

In 1718, my ancestors yet again decided to be colonist as the town Londonderry created it's own colony in the New World.  They built the unimaginatively named Londonderry in New Hampshire, and brought my patronym to this new continent on which I sit.  While the migration appeared to be economic in origin, it was probably more about religion and the anti-Puritan feelings going on at the time.  Supposedly, all of their neighbors thought the Londonderry colonist were Catholic Irish, which irritated the settlers to now end.  They were proper Puritan Scots, dammit.  A century in Ireland hadn't taken their kilts or haggis away!

So what the heck does all of that have to do with Dungeons and Dragons and inspiring gaming?

Well, what DOESN'T it have to do with it.  My little amateurish delve into genealogy and history has jump-started my brain something fierce.  There is so much I've learned that can go into world building.  It's taught me a few things (or merely reinforced them.)

1) Some families just plain don't move for hundreds or thousands of years, while others are vagabonds.
2) Oral history can be atrociously wrong.
3) Entire groups of people are often used as pawns and made to feel really good about it.
4) Mountain people can be a very mule-headed, stubborn bunch.
5) The amount of history I don't know about my own culture is staggering.
6) Reading histories written by Presbyterian ministers in 1850 can make your eyes bleed.
7) Dominant genetics are far more . . . dominant . . . than I thought.

So eventually, my patronymic family continued to migrate, with my great-great-great grandfather operating a ship out of New Orleans and running guns to the Anglo colonist during the Texas Revolution.  After the war he was apparently loaded and helped build a new town in Texas, then married the German genetic powerhouse of a woman - Margaret of Strausberg.

I swear - these people really inspire me.  I had no idea that my family could be such a great source of gaming idea.  Why not go peruse your own family history, and see how it inspires you?

- Ark

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Outsourced Game Report and Sketchdump

The Boy ran his Labyrinth Lord game last week.  It was a good old fashioned Holmesian-B/X style dungeon.  The party was made up entirely of gnomes.  Okay - Kaye played a half gnome/half orc.  I'm not sure what gnomish zeitgeist was in the air - but it worked.

The game started normally in a tavern, and turned strangely Salvador Dali-esque as my son's brain spewed forth with the imagination that only an 11 year old can wield.  He far exceeded my meager attempts at being a DM when I was the same age.  I had a lot of fun.

Crazy-Ass Tim has a wonderful report on our shared lucid dreaming session, which I suggest you check out.  I don't think I could have described it any better.

Meanwhile - please enjoy the sketchdump below:






- Ark

Monday, February 6, 2012

North Texas RPG Con 2012

I just registered the Boy and I for the North Texas RPG Con.  I'm pumped.  Last year was very cool.

It's happening in June, from the 7th till the 10th.

The line-up of special guests so far is:

Sandy Petersen, Tim Kask, Jennell Jaquays, Erol Otus, James M. Ward, Frank Mentzer, Jason Braun, Rob Kuntz, Steve Marsh, Steve Winter, Dennis Sustare, Jeff Dee, Jack Herman, Pete Kerestan, Zeb Cook, and Diesel LaForce.

I'm particularly excited about the awesome artists in that list.  Some of you may have noticed I've been on a drawing kick as of late.  :)

The first thing I guess I should do is apologize to Zeb Cook.  I've been bad-mouthing second edition for decades - but now I regularly play it and am enjoying it.  Ooops.  Sorry Zeb.  Musta beena brain fart or something.

- Ark

Thursday, February 2, 2012

A Night At The Tavern


Well, after a few month drawing my head off, I'm not completely disgusted by what I'm spitting out.  I'm still 10 light years from what I consider competent - and 5,000 light years from where I want to be - but that seems to be the nature of art and artists.

Shortly after posting the Betty picture, I was approached by an old friend that I hadn't talked to in a long while.  He's a pretty prolific author and he's working on a trilogy at the moment - a trilogy that needs cover art - and he wanted to see if I would do them.  Life is kind of odd, yanno?

:)

- Ark

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Betty

Okay, so not game related, but I finally had the nerve to try and draw Betty Page.  Maybe Betty could attack a pack of PCs from atop a dragon.  Yeah.  That's the ticket.  But for right now, she's just chillin.

Betty has been bikini-ed for your protection.  For those of you who are feeling brave and NSFW, hop on over to my deviantArt gallery for the un-bikini-ing. :)

- Ark

Friday, January 27, 2012

New DM Advice

The Boy has decided to take the plunge and run a one shot Labyrinth Lord game next week.  Two years ago, he referreed a game of Savage Worlds - doing very well I might add, but has not been back to that side of the screen since then.

He's eleven years old now, which was the same age that I started DMing.  However, he has four years of experience playing rpgs, so he has a huge leg up, and I anticipate that his first game will be about 17 bazillion times better than mine.

The Boy is a bit apprehensive about the prospect of DMing, and the advice his old man has given him probably hasn't calmed his nerves any.  I can be somewhat of a morose, haphazard, lazy, doom-and-gloom style game planner.  (Just try to kill them - all - horribly - with random monsters and traps far tougher than them.  A lot.  It's easy! Story?  Pffft!)  Works for me - but maybe not anyone else.

So, The Boy would gladly appreciate any advice from OTHER PEOPLE on how to DM, pull a one shot together, etc.

Thanks in advance. :)

- Ark

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Dungeonspiration: Type IV


As we stand uncomfortably at the windswept gravesite watching the coffin of Fourth Edition Dungeons and Dragons being slowly lowered into the ground, I feel the desire to toss in a white lily.  The lily is a symbol of innocence that has been restored to a soul once departed.  It expresses purity, majesty, and sympathy.

I owe a lot to Fourth Edition.  It had been years since I had played a role playing game when I heard that a new version of D&D was coming out.  All of the things that had kept me away from the table - moving around from town to town like a refugee, dating, marriage, college, birthin' a baby, being laid off after 9/11 - all of those things had settled to the point of manageability.  I had some time for me again, and here was a fresh new D&D, peeking it's head around the corner.

How could I resist?

Fourth edition finally gave me the impetus to sit down and really read, understand, and implement the entirety of a gaming system.  Before, it was enough to get a gist of a game and then fly be the seat of my pants.  Type IV begged - demanded - to be understood before played - it being so different and all.

I met a lot of people, played a lot of games, and have friends I never would have because of Fourth Edition.  Back in 2007, it was a great rallying point for those of us whom life had whisked away from gaming and were coming back to the fold.

I got to play with minis.  I had always wanted to incorporate  minis in my games, but beyond using them as a marker for marching order, I'd never gotten to use them.  Again, 4th edition demanded their use, and I gladly tossed wads of money to keep myself swimming in little plastic toys.

Fourth Edition was the first role playing game my son ever played, and he loved it.  It introduced him to doing math on the fly, use of spatial thinking and strategy, and cooperating with a group of people to complete a complicated task.  The game also helped us bond together as father and son in the same way that others bond together with baseball or football or some-such thing.

In the end, however, Fourth Edition D&D never gave me the warm fuzzies that Basic or Advanced Dungeons and Dragons had given me in my youth.  At first I thought it was just me, but after a lot of trying and tinkering, it became clear that Type IV wasn't designed to provide what I was looking for.  It took a journey into the OSR for me to remember - and rediscover - what I had been looking for all along.

My long, loud break-up with Fourth Edition is well documented on this blog, including embarrassing rants and name-calling, so I don't feel the need to repeat any of it.  Let's just say I fell out of love and hired a mean and vindictive lawyer.

This column is about inspiration - and inspiring other.  Fourth Edition Dungeons and Dragons inspired me to get back into role-play.  It inspired me to get out and meet new people.  It has even helped to inspire my son and I to form a closer bond.  It even brought me back to the very roots of my gaming career.  In those regards, Fourth Edition was far from a failure - but a raging success.

The innocence I once came to Fourth Edition with has been restored by it's death.  So yes, I'll gladly toss that lily into the grave.

Fifth Edition is now peeking its head over the horizon.  I wonder - what will it inspire?

- Ark

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Zak's Question Thingy


Okay, I'm finaly getting around to answering Zak's question thingy:

1. If you had to pick a single invention in a game you were most proud of what would it be?
If realm of game mechanics, I'd say the Dead Simple Lock & Trap Mini-Game.

2. When was the last time you GMed?
Last Saturday.

3. When was the last time you played?
Last Wednesday.

4. Give us a one-sentence pitch for an adventure you haven't run but would like to.
An adventure based on Lorna, The Ark, one of Alfonso Azpiri's Heavy Metal stories.  Kind of like Metamorphosis Alpha, except with less clothing.

5. What do you do while you wait for players to do things?
Move on to the next player.  Gotta keep things rolling.  If I'm waiting for ALL the players, then I calmly and quietly plot their deaths.

6. What, if anything, do you eat while you play?
Spaghetti, pizza, buffalo wings, beef jerky, peppermint candy, very small rocks, sloths.

7. Do you find GMing physically exhausting?
Never physically - but mentally - yes.

8. What was the last interesting (to you, anyway) thing you remember a PC you were running doing?
Last session in Stars Without Numbers, one of the PCs who happen to have been a spy robot that could change his physical form impersonated a security officer on a space station and got swept into an illegal cage fight below decks.  Hilarity ensued and even the Boy joined in in another cage fight.

9. Do your players take your serious setting and make it unserious? Vice versa? Neither? Yes.  Yes.  It flows back and forth and all around.

10. What do you do with goblins?
Make them tricksey.

11. What was the last non-RPG thing you saw that you converted into game material (background, setting, trap, etc.)?
A UFC cage fight.  The fact that the cage fight in the game was a naked cage fight was purely my invention.

12. What's the funniest table moment you can remember right now?
The Boy, after fighting in a naked cage fight, forgetting to put on his clothes and going all medieval on an agitated spectator, gutting him to death with a moly knife, then suddenly realized what he had done and slapping a Lazarus patch to bring the poor corpse back to life.

13. What was the last game book you looked at--aside from things you referenced in a game--why were you looking at it?
Actually - Big Eyes, Small Mouth.  I just found it in a pile of old manga and I forgot that I had kept it.

14. Who's your idea of the perfect RPG illustrator?
In the early days, Erol Otus and Jeff Dee.  Later, Elmore was my man.  A couple of years ago, Wayne Reynolds.  These days - John Kovalic. :)

15. Does your game ever make your players genuinely afraid?
Yes.  But then again, we are talking about my son.

16. What was the best time you ever had running an adventure you didn't write? (If ever)
I'd say back in high school running the I3-5 Desert of Desolation series.  It has a nice Egyptian flair and fits so well into the whole tomb robbing thing.  There were a lot of tricks and traps and mysteries for the party to solve.

17. What would be the ideal physical set up to run a game in?
A room with a big table and chairs.

18. If you had to think of the two most disparate games or game products that you like what would they be?
Rolemaster and Big Eyes, Small Mouth.

19. If you had to think of the most disparate influences overall on your game, what would they be?
H. P. Lovecraft and Lao-Tse.

20. As a GM, what kind of player do you want at your table?
Seriously non-serious people who can be serious when required.

21. What's a real life experience you've translated into game terms?
Joining a religious cult.

22. Is there an RPG product that you wish existed but doesn't?
An rpg that replicated real life physics, physiology, and psychology - scaled well from individuals to armies - and was equally effective replicating stone age to super science.  Oh - and is easy to play and whose entire ruleset can be memorized by my feeble mind so I never have to look at the book.

23. Is there anyone you know who you talk about RPGs with who doesn't play? How do those conversations go?
Honestly, they don't.

- Ark

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Pony Roller


And those of you who think I can leave well enough alone should know better.  Ponies are Magic.

So this is Twilight Sparkle rolling up her character the old fashioned way - 3d6 in order.  Looks like she's off to a bad start.

This is for Erin Palette and her awesomely awesome Unknown Ponies: Failure is Awesome.  Which I missed.  Completely.  Dammit.  I only check Facebook like every other week.

- Ark

Lady Roller

By popular demand - for those identifying as female. :)

- Ark

Old School Roller


Here is a little scribble I did.  It's yours.  Feel free to put it on your t-shirts, coffee mug, your blog, or shave your head and have it as a nifty new tattoo.  But don't sell it.  I think some people claim they own the shirt or something silly like that. :)

Higher res available on request.

- Ark

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Dungeonspiration: Thinking

I was toying with dropping this column at the start of the year, but due to some kind words from readers, I chose not to, and instead just slow it down to every other week.  We'll see.  I enjoy writing the articles.  I enjoy thinking about writing the articles.  But there is the problem - my thinking is gone all different recently.

Drawing is to blame - I'm sure.  I've been drawing a lot over the past few months - rekindling my love for making pictures - which was in it's height decades ago when I was first playing D&D.  Drawing uses vastly different parts of the brain that than a lot of different activities - oh - such as thinking in words about words you are going to type out in a blog.

It's been somewhat difficult to rectify the two - writing muscle and drawing muscle.  These images take me away from my standby form of communication.  But it's not that I'm idle.  I don't -not- think about gaming and blogging.  I just - I guess I just think about it visually.  It's been hard translate.  I guess that's the word.  One part of my brain has a tough time talking to another part of my brain.

But something interesting has been happening.  When I sit down and play D&D or Stars Without Numbers or Pathfinder or whatever, my imagination has become more vivid.  I see the game very vividly - maybe even more vividly that when I was a young pimpled punk clutching the blue Holmes and dreaming.  Even the bane of my imagination - mini skirmishes in Pathfinder - play in my mind in technicolor - not just on the gaming mat.

As I read stories now - the images in my head are wonderful.  I'm so happy that this has coincided with the Vayniris Anthology Project.  I've been reading the entries and hoo-boy - the descriptive power of these great authors is giving me some excellent TV in my head.  (Thanks guys, btw.)  

It's all very inspiring to me.  I want to be more descriptive in games - fill other players with wonderful pictures - not just as a DM - but as a fellow player.  I just kinda have to relearn how to connect both parts of my brain.  Perhaps some duct tape will help.

So, I don't know if this is inspiring or helpful at all - but here it is.  Oh, and before I go - I fixed up a progress sheet for Little Miss Skyrim up there, in case any of you are interested in the artistic process of some old dude who can't draw as well as he wants to, but is sure enough trying:



Have a wonderful day.

- Ark

Monday, January 9, 2012

Cognitive Dissonance

Is it weird that:

1) I wish WOTC the best of luck with 5e and am even interested in beta testing the game to help make it an even better game,

. . . but at the same time . . .

2) I hope that WOTC fails miserably with 5e and goes down in flames, creating such a sulfur-belching crater that no game companies will go anywhere near the name Dungeons and Dragons and we can finally let the poor thing rest in peace

???

- Ark

Thursday, January 5, 2012

What Happens When You Let The Demons Read Carcosa


Happy New Year!  I'll remember 2011 as the year I moved from a rather monotonous diet of 4e games in the RPGA to full fledged nostalgia overload with the OSR, through the conspicuous consumption of ancient role playing paraphernalia and glorious, glorious mass killing of PCs.

I also started blogging seriously (or not so seriously) about my old school gaming and the process of bringing my son into the fold.  This year I'm going to be putting more focus into drawing with the Rather Gamey comic.  I had a lot of fun drawing the My Little Pellatarrum mock comic for Erin Palette, so I figure I might as well stay the course.

So, Thursdays will now alternate between Dungeonspiration articles and the comic.  Hopefully - if things go right - I can graduate to TWO or maybe THREE panels per comic.  Woot!

(No actual correlation between the term 'comic' and the concept of 'humor' is implied.)

- Ark

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Who Do Dwarves Hate?



Members of the 'Sexy Elves for Axeless Dwarves' Charity Cheerleaders Squad, that's who.

Really, it was just an excuse to practice drawing a picture of an axe pulled tight across boobies.  Why?  Ummmmm . . . no idea.  Oh yeah - fun!  Yeah, that's it.  It was fun! :)

- Ark

Monday, January 2, 2012

Vayniris Anthology Project Update

I'd like to thank everyone for their great story submissions for the Vayniris Anthology Project.  We have some wonderful stuff here that I am reading through now.

We have a slight problem though . . .

There are not quite enough stories to flesh out a full anthology.  I know that there were other stories being worked on that were not completed by the end of the year.  As such, I'm going to extend the submission deadline to March 31st, 2012.  And if you are interested in submitting more than one story, please feel free.

I'd really like this project to be successful, and I'm sure a little time wouldn't hurt at all. :)

- Ark


Friday, December 30, 2011

New Moleskine

Check out the new Moleskine I got for Christmas.  I'm not sure whether to use it or frame it.


And yes, I've been dorking with the blogs template.  Things are changing.  It's not just your imagination. ;)

- Ark

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Dungeonspiration: Contact Sheets

This will be my last Dungeonspiration column for the foreseeable future.   I'll get into why after this week's installment . . .

I've been running a Stars Without Number campaign, which has been going fine with it's automagically generated sector sandbox.  But I got a hankering to try out a published adventure, so I went out and grabbed Kevin Crawford's Hard Light.  It's basically The Keep on the Borderlands for a science fiction campaign - a sort of mini-sandbox inside a great big sandbox.  The thing reads great, and has been playing great as well.

One avenue the referee and players can explore in Hard Light is in solving a mystery.  There are about ten important players in the mystery.  In planning the game, I became worried that the players would not be able to keep up with all the people involved.  How could they remember all of the people if I was having a hard time keeping track myself? Then I thought of a trick I used to use in my old Top Secret days - contact sheets.


I whipped up this contact sheet of contacts (from page 6 of Hard Light, for those following along at home) in less than an hour using deviantArt.com's search function and the freebie graphics program Paint.Net (which I use when I don't want to spend the time waiting for Photoshop to load.)  As the PCs meet the denizens of Hard Light, I pull out the sheet and point.  Not only do the players seem to enjoy looking at the pictures - they seem to be remembering them better than they would just with a auditory description.

There was an unforeseen problem.  The character in the lower right-hand cell - see him?  When I snagged the pic, I noticed that it was labelled 'Old Man Logan.'  Having read X-Men back in the 80s, I knew who Logan was, and just assumed that someone had drawn him old, and that the players would never think to associate him with Wolverine.

As soon as I brought out the sheet, two of the players pointed and said 'Hey, it's Old Man Logan!.'  I had no clue that there had been some sort of very popular 'What If?' kind of series based on good old Wolverine in the future.  The players seemed to immediately like the guy before I said a word about him.

So, if you are snagging art for a game, give some thought about the impact a particular image will create.  Players already bring a lot of baggage with them into a game, so try to use it to your advantage. :)

Now . . . as to why Dungeonspiration column is going into hiatus, or perhaps retirement:

1) Focus - The intent of the column was to inspire DMs (and as an afterthought, players) about gaming.  I have a hard time writing about just that.  I'm all over the place - as this particular column illustrates nicely.  It really has nothing to do with the concept of 'Dungeonspiration.'

2) Need - Do the readers in the OSR blogosphere really need to be inspired?  From what I read on other blogs - no.  People are chock full of awesome ideas all over the place.  I think that what people seem to need above all else is time.  If I could somehow bottle time and distribute in via the Internet, that would satisfy a lot more people's need.

3) Self-Discipline - Another reason for the Dungeonspiration column was to provide me with a weekly reminder to write blog post - at lest one a week.  While I think it has helped, I also think that I would have done it anyway - crazy holiday weeks not withstanding.

4) Other Projects - I've got some other projects in queue for 2012.  Those projects have to do with gaming and providing additional blog content - so it's not like loosing Dungeonspiration would be reducing content on the blog itself, I just need to juggle my time wisely.  I still have a lot to juggle and decide what I want to tackle - so some meditation time is in order.

So thougts are my thoughts on the Dungeonspiration column and it's future.  But perhaps I have missed something.  If the column is doing something else for you that I haven't thought of, please let me know.  There may be a reason to keep it around longer that I'm not aware of.  Maybe it warrants a monthly column or something.  I don't know.  If you have any input, feel free to leave it below. :)

Have a Happy New Year - and don't go driving drunk or nothing.  Boozing away and passing out on someone's sofa is far better etiquette than wrapping your car around a telephone pole.

- Ark

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

I Used To Be A Blogger Like You . . .

. . . then I took an arrow to the knee . . . AND they stole my sweet roll . . . WHILE breathing fire on me from the sky.  Thank goodness for DRAGONREND.

I hope everyone had a great Christmas - even if you don't do that sort of thing.  Religion should never get in the way of getting drunk and insulting family members.  Even if they are aliens who shoot you in the knee.

- Ark

P. S. Did I mention knees?