Combat as (Blood) Sport

A common reframe in the old school landscape is "Combat as War vs. Combat as Sport," often used to negatively contrast elements of 5e and particularly 4e concerned with encounter balance an "the encounter" as a fundamental unit of game action in general with the old school. Without getting into the merits of how this argument is typically framed, I think that even if we accept this as true, there is a way to lean into those elements of modern D&D and come out with something cool. Instead dungeoncrawling for treasure (mainly), maybe the dungeon environment could be the battleground of a big tournament.

X-Crawl deals with some of this territory, I guess, but from what I read of it, it is set in the modern day, and seems very much concerned with the celebrity aspect of things, bringing in a lot of professional athlete cliches. All well and good, but I'm more interested in something more like Dragonball Z. The fighters are in it often for the personal betterment--a personal betterment that is practically apotheosis, which dovetails nicely with D&D advancement. What if the gods or Immortals or whatever design the dungeons as tournament grounds, and foundries to forge new Immortals to join there ranks?

In this context, the lack of XP for gold makes perfect sense. Also, "levels" of dungeons are likes brackets of a tournament. In order to give a good spectacle, you don't want scrubs advancing to take on the contenders too soon. Mainly playing this sort of setting would just mean thinking about the game differently. The only change might be that there would be fewer nameless rabbles or humanoid tribes with young and the like. Everybody in the dungeon is playing the game.

Wednesday Comics: House of X/Powers of X

Jonathan Hickman has a penchant for "big idea" comics, often with an epic scale and science fictional overtones. All of those things I like, but for me there is a lack of focus on character, and perhaps a Kubrickan coolness that has made it difficult for me to love his Avengers or Fantastic Four runs. Maybe with the X-men, he's finally won me over.

House of X and Powers of X (actually pronounced powers of 10, a reference to its logarithmically remote future stories) tell of an interlocking tale of the world's mutants under Xavier embarking on a radical plan to save the future from....well, yet another mutant-related dystopia, then one takes "Days of Future Past" to a transhuman extreme, with the Nimrod controlled Man-Machine Empire facing off against the surviving mutants under Apocalypse.

I'm not sure how Hickman will bring this all to a satisfying close. It feels so much like an ender, its hard to see how the inevitable return to some sort of superhero status quo won't seem like something of a let down, maybe even a cheat.

So far, though, it's a fun ride.

Between Planar Stations

It doesn't have a name. Not really. This is intentional; names are power, after all, and power that can be used against you. When whoever instantiated the original version of the city did so, they fixed and compressed its noumenal building blocks into a potent glyph, a sigil. And that is what its inhabitants and its visitors from myriad plane-aware worlds have called it every since.

Only rubes get duped by maps hawked in Sigil markets or the orreries venerated by mundy cargo cults, the city is not at the center of anything physical or even metaphysical. It's just that it embodies the concept of nexus, and so it's the most stable router or gateway for astral bodies shooting through the howling conceptual metric.  From Sigil, you can get to anywhere, whether you should or not.

A lot of travelers get to Sigil and never leave. Some, the trafficked, press-ganged, fearful, or injured, have no choice. Others stay out of business interest, boredom, inertia or laziness. Why endure the vicissitudes of travel when all the worlds will come to you, eventually?

Eberron & the Jackelian Sequence

The announcement of a 5e Eberron book got me thinking about a similar setting that I like better than Eberron: Stephen Hunt's Jackelian series. I wrote about it back in 2011. Hunt wrote a few more novels in the series after that point, but it's a shame there has never been an rpg.

Anyway, the novels are well work checking out.

Wednesday Comics: A New Episode of Bronze Age Book Club

Here's the latest episode, taking on Adventure Comics #462. Oh, and we're now on Google podcasts and Apple podcasts. Like! Subscribe!


Listen to "Episode 3: ADVENTURE COMICS #462" on Spreaker.

Weird Revisted: The Weird Frontier

The original version of this post first appeared in 2010. I've revisited it from slightly different angles a couple of times since.
 

This cover deserves to be the basis of an rpg setting.

Well, maybe not just this cover all on its own, but the crazy idea it and the series (Tomahawk) it's a part of suggests (at least to me)--namely, combining the James Fenimore Cooper-style frontier tale with fantasy. Transplanting the whole civilization-against-the-wilderness thing to a colonial pseudo-America.

It’s almost completely unmined territory. It’s only been sort of attempted once, as far as I know--Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker series does early nineteenth century fantasy in an alternate North America. Sure, one could point to novels (and even an rpg or two) with a kind of “Illuminati/Masonic magic behind the revolution” or a “Ben Franklin cavorts with the Hellfire Club” sort of deal, but all of that pseudo-historical “hidden magic” speculation fails to deliver a moment of rpg inspiration Zen like:

Wilderness adventures wouldn’t be the only way to go. Surely things like Mystery Hill, and the rampant speculation such sites inspired (even at the time) ought to suggest plenty of ancient American civilization to provide honest to goodness dungeons. There might not be demi-humans (though there could be), but all the other standard D&D ingredients are easy to find.

Garage Sale

My local gaming store (Firefly Toys & Games) had a "Gamer Garage Sale" where they sold old games that folks had brought in. Not a lot of rpg stuff, but some. In picked up the box set, Gary Gygax's Hall of Many Panes for five bucks, the Exalted boardgame War for the Throne, and most randomly this miniature, paper Old West town, and assorted Western miniatures. They're all different scales (H/0, 00, 1:72), but hey, that's an impulse buy for you.

Read for that next Boot Hill game, I guess.