Knockspell #5

Matt Finch graciously sent me my contributor copy of KS#5 last night. I briefly flipped through it and there are some really cool pieces in there. I had already ordered a paperback copy from Lulu and I will probably wait for that to read through it in detail.

From my first impression, there is some really cool stuff in there, a couple of adventures, a cool article on using scrabble pieces for random monster generation and other things, and my little article on Pools and Vats.



Anyway, in the future I may post up a couple of short adventure hooks and additional spells that can augment the material found in the article.

Removing the Emo Dark Elf

I'm still working on my Forgotten Realms campaign. Here are the recent developments:

1. I've ordered up a copy of City System and The Ruins of Undermountain. Sadly my original copies were destroyed in a fire years ago. These books will be the basis of the game.

2. Drow - after thinking about it - I don't think there is anyway for me to resurrect these monsters for use in my game. All my prospective players have read too many novels about a certain drow ranger for me to ever think about including another drow elf in any DnD game. They just feel tired to me - the players know all their powers and weaknesses etc... My plan is to replace them with Serpent People - who will be a dominant race in the underdark in my campaign - filling the role that the dark elves have in the past and hopefully changing the character of my campaign toward the direction I'd like to go.

3. I'm working up two adventures to kick the game off that will probably use spells/items from my Vats and Pools article that I wrote up several months ago. I'm pretty excited to see how that material playtests.

Next up - a post about the serpent people I'm working on for my game.

Generation of Swine

I'm sitting here reading Generation of Swine by Hunter S. Thompson and what is tripping me out is how original this guys brain pattern is. Most people copy the thoughts and style of others in everything they create. Not Hunter.

Here he is riffing about Reagan:

"Reagan's children must be proud of him. With AIDS and acid rain, there is not much left in the way of life and love and possibilities for these shortchanged children of the '80's. In addition to a huge and terminally crippling national debt, and a shocking realization that your country has slipped to the status of a second-rate power, and that five American dollars will barely buy a cup of coffee in Tokyo, these poor buggers are being flogged every day of their lives with the knowledge that sex is death and rain kills fish and any politician they see on TV is a liar and a fool." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

I'm not sure what he would say if he was living in the foul year of our lord 2010... trickle down economics... lol... As I read this book I simultaneously want to laugh and vomit - now that is art. I wish I could have had brunch with him in vegas.

Anyway, the article I wrote about watery magic of vats and pools is definitely getting published - more to come on that soon. I think I am going to work on supplemental material for that article and put it up on this blog - extra spells, maybe some extra random tables.

The LL lord game that I was in flopped... our GM went turn coat on us and started a Mutant Future PBEM game. Who knows, maybe he will come back later. I wasn't feeling Mutant Future, although it received lots of good words on the nets, so in summary I'm back to a single game and I'm the DM. If anyone knows of any old school PBEM games where I could be a player - please let me know. I have some ideas for games that I could run as DM, but I would much rather be a player.

Weird Watery Magic of Pools and Vats

I haven't been posting much on this blog. Recently, I've been pretty much obsessed by the use of magical vats of liquid in my games. I created this Lovecraftian sort of monster in my Castles and Crusades game. It was an outsider "demon" creature from space that crashlanded in the Bright Lands of Greyhawk. I combined this concept with Moldvay's "The Lost City" and I'm working in this whole backstory about how the creature has spent the last 500 years feasting on the intellect of humans. My thought is that this creature is made totally of protoplasm and it can fashion itself a body and change the hardness of its goo to that of chitin plate if it desires. It's intelligence was so alien to human kind that initially it could not communicate telepathically with humans. After 500 years of feasting on human psyches it has now adapted to be able to communicate. Anyway, I ruled that during its crash landing on earth it lost a particular artifact which allowed it to live easily in any environment. It has been stuck deep underground living in certain pools that sustained its abominable lifeforce until it could regain the artifact. The PC's were chasing this Half Orc Assassin which had obtained the artifact, but they failed to stop the half orc from returning the artifact. This demon being which was revered as a god by these underground people has now been unleashed on Oerth. I'll be bringing the PC's into confrontation with the beast again once they have gained a few more levels and could survive the encounter. Anyway as a side effect of this adventure I became obsessed with pools and vats. I started brainstorming a huge number of ideas for how these magical vessels of liquid could be used to awesome effect in DnD style games. I have written a ~4-5 page article so far and I still have lots of ideas. I'm thinking of throwing it in front of some folks that publish hobby gaming fanzines. In addition, I will probably publish most or all of the ideas up on this blog and try and get some feedback for how the article is progressing. Here is my introduction to the article - I haven't done any re-writing yet, this is still a first draft:

Introduction:

Human kind has long had both a fascination and fear of water. Man needs this precious liquid each day to live and yet he can drown in a mere teaspoon of the substance. Vessels of water hold a powerful symbolism of motherhood and the womb, juxtaposing the origin of life itself with an environment that man can no longer enter without fear of death by drowning. Foul potions brewing in the cauldrons of witches and the embryonic vats birthing an artificial monster of a man are just two examples of how this powerful symbol has been employed in literature. This article aims to flesh out a variety of ideas on how you can use vats and pools in your fantasy RPG game. These entities should be used infrequently and each use should invoke either a pure magical wonder or a sense of horrific alien fear. The statistics used in this article are written for Swords and Wizardry, however they could be adapted with ease to any retro clone or original edition of DnD.