The Villains' Memorial

Last night, our Land of Azurth game continued with our heroes assaulting the half-buried prison ship where the Burly Brothers and their gang are likely keeping the kidnapped ambassador from Lardafa the City of Beggars.. Usually, the heroes exploits are the subject of our recount, but today, I thought I'd focus on those that went down under their blades:

Four bully-boys: The names of these unfortunates are forgotten even by their emloyers. They were the newest and weakest members of the gang. Only chance lead them to be on guard duty at the time assault. None mourn their passing, especially not their two confederates that jumped overboard to escape a similar fate.

Nort and the Gorch Brothers: Three more seasoned bravos, the Gorchs were brothers, and though not twins, the Burly Brothers and their lieutenants never bothered to learn to tell them apart. They would answer to either name. Nort and Moq were either the Gorchs' half-brothers or their cousins. They had even less personality, though Nort had on rare occasions displayed a fine singing voice. Moq escaped the assault, stealing the party's boat and disappearing into the night as his cousin (or half-brother) fell under the spells of the warlock, Kairon.

 Skawl: The Burly Brothers' scar-faced lieutenant. He was said to have gotten his scar in a duel. He only spoke of the incident rarely and even then obliquely. The truth was, he remember very little of it owing to an excess of various intoxicants on the night it occurred.

Grool: The resident cook on the Hurly Burly. Grool could hardly be called a culinary genius, but he liked his work, so much so that none would have dared take it from him even if they had wanted to. If his fellow cutthroats were put off their appetites by his numerous sores and unhealthy complexion, they never let it show. Grool wielded his cleaver with a deft and fearsome hand, but he was in the end, unable to stand against multiple assailants. The fish head stew he had made for supper was his culinary epitath.

Strange Stars Update

Work proceeds on the Strange Stars gamebooks. John Till has finished the draft of the Fate implementation and I am in the process of editing. It's going slower than I would like due to work related stuff that won't abate until the end of April. Still, Lester is already working on the layout with what I have gotten through, and (despite my initial plans not to) I have comissioned a few pieces of new art, including a piece from "Reno" Maniquis  who did the piece that's on the cover of Strange Trails over on the sidebar.

Stay tuned.

Our Gang

I don't talk a lot about the social aspect of the game here, tending to focus more on ideas or inspirations, but my gaming group has been down a couple of players the past couple of sessions and not just due to difficult schedules (which happens to us sometimes). One of my players--one of my friends, Jim--was diagnosed with colon cancer and has been undergoing chemo. We hope we've worked out a way for him to join us this time via the internet, at least. We'll see.

My present group is pretty new in its current configuration. Andrea is the newest and brings some fresh enthusiasm. Though new to rpgs in general, she has jumped in with both feet. She plays in our group and in a weekly game with another group. Her character is a sort of fussy dwarf cleric, often appalled by the moral failings of the world.

Eric and Bob have gamed with me off and on since we were residents. Bob always plays fighters with a flexible morality and a strong appreciation for gold. In real life, Bob works like crazy and still trains for things like mud-runs and zombie obstacle courses. Eric sometimes tries to play evil or amoral characters, but his inherent goodness always stymies him. He can't even be evil in pretend. He has a fondness for magic-user types.

Tug I know from the comic book store in town where he used to work, but he has since moved on to better things. Tug sort of reminds me of Jake the Dog on Adventure Time! when he's all joie de vivre. He plays a frogling thief named Waylon who strums a banjo.

Gina is a GM in her own right (I've played before in her Boot Hill game) and the author of a Western Romance novel, first serialized on her blog. She's also Jim's wife. When she played a hoodoo woman in our last game,she brought a bag of props with her--including a chickens foot and a crystal ball. This time she's a badass elf ranger--no props, unfortunately.

And Jim, well, it's likely Weird Adventures wouldn't have happened without him, since he did the layout. He writes a comics blog. Despite having a wife who is a gamer, he hadn't really played a lot until I dragged him into it. He's often plays it very cautious and and calculated. He'd do well with a killer DM, but in my games, his over caution just winds up bringing a bit of amusement. As a former local rock star in his youth, it's fitting he plays the bard.

I have to confess, I'm never been a big fan of games, in general. I don't really play video/computer games. Board games are something I like only rarely. I like rpgs, though. In part, it's due to the creativity involved, but without the people I sit at the table with, it would only be writing--and that wouldn't be the same at all.

Return to Azurth

This weekend the group is getting back together (hopefully the whole gang) for another Land of Azurth session for the first time in a couple of sessions. The PCs will likely invade the partially submerged lair of the Baleful Burly Brothers and their murderous gang.

To get back in the mindset of that world, I updated my Dictionary of Azurth. Check it out for entries on  Troglopolis, Apiaria, and Noom.

Wednesday Comics: The Multiverse So Far

Too busy tonight for a spotlight on a new world, so I figured it was as good a time as any for a review of what we've covered so far:

Earth-4 (Charlton Earth)
Earth-6 (Stan Lee's Just Imagine Earth)
Earth-10 (Earth X)
Earth-20 (Pulp Earth)
Earth-35 (Awesome Comics Earth)
Earth-37 (Chaykin Earth)
Earth-38 (John Byrne's Generations Earth)
Earth-39 (T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents Earth)
Earth-51 (Kirby Earth)

Building Races in 5e

The stats for the races in the 5e PHB always looked like there was a method to their construction. I don't know how strictly in guidelines of that sort were followed, but it certainly looked like the designers had them.

I was a bit disappointed when the DMG came up and didn't really include any guidelines of that sort. Luckily, the internet has come to the rescue with not one but two people claiming to have discovered the formula. Here's one originally posted on Reddit, and another I came across on rpgnet with a pdf and a spreadsheet. I haven't looked at either of them close enough to know how well they match up. They use different numbers, but that doesn't necessarily mean they don't translate.

Robot Dungeon

I've written before about a world where the dungeoneering was an done by androids who were the remnant of human civilization (all that's here). There's another way to get dungeons crawling with robots, and that's with a future post-apocalyptic world that's been overrun by them. Instead of apes, or fairies, or vampires, let the robots take over something like Screamers (and the Philip K. Dick story it's based on "The Second Variety"), Terminator, or Magnus: Robot-Fighter. Unlike those examples though, human civilization can have been pushed back to pseudo-Medieval levels.

Say the robots have moved mostly underground, leaving humans to limp along on a damaged surface world. The underground bases of the robots would be a lot like dungeons. Robots would have made various robotic or bio-robotic guardians--monsters, of sorts. Maybe the robots are even aliens? A post-sentient, techno-organic swarm that landed and buried itself into the earth, spreading underground like roots, building robotic creatures in a myriad of forms as it went. You'd have a whole underground ecology of robots. Add "magic" (really psionic powers in disguise) and you've got a fantasy world, or close enough.

For a real fantasy world, assume that the alien robotic swarm invaded a fairly D&Dish world (except with maybe less conflict to begin with).