This one was much harder than it should have been.
Day 12 Triumph
What would I consider my greatest RPG-based triumph?
I have had some great opportunities in the RPG world. I have had some great gaming groups over the decades, met some fantastic people and I have worked on some great projects.
But I have to admit that Ghosts of Albion is one of my greatest triumphs.
Back when Eden Studios was working on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG I was part of the team. But I was also, for various reasons, growing dissatisfied with Buffy and the license. In the process, I got the chance to meet and talk with Christopher Golden. He had done some original fiction for the game and was interested in the process. He was at the time also working with Amber Benson on a new property with the BBC. It was about two siblings who discover they have a legacy of magic to live up to and a country to fight for in early Victorian England. The new animation, written by Golden and Benson and directed by Benson, was Ghosts of Albion.
From the very start, we wanted it to be compatible with Buffy and Angel. It had more magic and more powerful creatures. While Buffy had vampires and Angel had demons, Ghosts would vampires, demons, as well as fae creatures and of course ghosts. And all of these could be player characters.
It is one of the highest-rated and best-selling titles I have ever worked on. People still tell me how much they love the magic system, the content, and the rules. I have to admit that sometimes I read over it and think to myself "wow, I wrote that!"
I love the Victorian era, I love writing about magic and honestly, I loved working with Chris and Amber.
I have worked on many licensed products before and this one was by far the best experience I have ever had on a game.
Here's to hoping I can do more with NIGHT SHIFT to capture the same sort of feeling.
The name of the game was Dungeons & Dragons. So there was a certain expectation on, well, dungeons. But that is not all of what we got. Sometimes we went outside.
Day 11 Wilderness
Live-Action Role-Playing was not really something we knew a lot about back in the early to mid-80s. Yes even in my little town we had heard about SCA but that was something that happened far away in places that sounded exotic to us.
We did know about live D&D.
Of course, we had heard stories of people getting trapped in their make-believe world. I mean we had seen Mazes & Monsters right. But still in the time after discovering D&D and before discovering easy access to alcohol there was a time when my D&D group would run around the woods wearing all black to play "live D&D." Sometimes this was near the train tracks near the Hospital north of town but most often it was at the local Boy Scout camping area out way west of town. Known as Ebaugh County Park, we always called it Ebaugh Corner since it was on this corner of old Route 36.
It felt a lot bigger than what is on that map I can assure you.
We didn't get out there often. Our town was hit with Satanic Panic back in the mid-80s and we worried the cops would come out and harass us.
Not a lot of D&D was played here really. Frankly, my eyesight was getting bad then (and it never got better!) so running around in the dark was not something I could well. I was actually pretty pathetic really! I remember my last time there too. June 1987 right before college.
I never really did try live-action D&D again. Was never really my thing.
This has come up again recently as I am getting ready for a trip to the Renaissance Faire in Bristol, WI. My son and his friends are all dressing up in Assassin's Creed gear. I have been there in the past in Steampunk gear. Though I must admit I want to go in period clothing and keep a Star Trek badge hidden, just in case.
Hope to head there this weekend. It might not be the actual wilderness, but for a city kid like me, it is close enough.
Going for another alt-word today. Plus it gives me the chance to talk about one of my favorite topics.
Day 10 Advantage
One of my favorite new mechanics with D&D 5e is the Advantage / Disadvantage ruling. It is pretty simple really. A situation is in your favor, roll with Advantage, that is roll two d20s and keep the highest. If a situation is against you then roll with Disadvantage; roll two d20s and take the lowest.
It's not really revolutionary, but it is a nice quick way to adjudicate rulings and many rules use it.
Simply if you have advantage due to one condition and advantage on another one you still have only two d20s. If you have advantage and disadvantage they cancel each other out.
The thing that I like about it the most is the nice probability curves they generate.
You might recall that prior to selling my soul to the dot com world I was a Statistics professor at the University of Illinois colleges of Education, then Medicine. I taught at the undergraduate and graduate levels for years. I LOVE statistics.
I knocked together some simple frequency graphs of rolling a d20 normally, with disadvantage, advantage, and with a simple +3. These are chances of rolling the number (1 to 20) or higher on a d20.
The Data
The Graphs
Rolls are on the X-Axis (1 - 20) and the Probability on the Y-Axis (0.0 - 1.0).
The red line is our normal d20 roll. Blue is disadvantage (2d20, take lowest), yellow is Advantage (2d20, take highest), finally, the green is normal +3.
Is it much? Not really in the short term, but over 1000s of rolls over the last 7 years the effect has added up. And it is always a lot of fun. Especially when you are rolling and get two 20 (a 1 in 400 chance). Fun when you are rolling with advantage, but fantastic when you are rolling with disadvantage.
I have adapted it for use in my OSR games and it works great.
It's a Monstrous Monday and it is also Medium day for the #RPGaDAY.
Day 9 Medium
Most of my monsters in the various Basic Bestiary are Medium-sized. This works out well for a number of reasons, but mostly it is a boon for something I had been wanting to do for a while.
In D&D 5 monsters have different HD die types depending on their size. It works out like this.
Table: Size Categories
Size
Space
Hit Die
Tiny
2½ by 2½ ft.
d4
Small
5 by 5 ft.
d6
Medium
5 by 5 ft.
d8
Large
10 by 10 ft.
d10
Huge
15 by 15 ft.
d12
Gargantuan
20 by 20 ft. or larger
d20
So Medium monsters use the common d8 for hit dice and the truly monstrous Gargantuan creature gets a d20. While AD&D and Basic D&D went more for larger creatures having more HD this works for what I call the giant baby problem. A gigantic creature can have a lot of hit points, but no combat ability, two things that HD covers.
I also like this idea for personal reasons. When I moved from Basic D&D to Advanced D&D I often used a d10 for monster hit points and not the RAW d8. I figured the monsters had to be more "advanced" so they got more hp. I also rationalized this with the fact that Basic fighters use d8 for hp, and Advanced fighters used d10. Of course on average, this is only 1 extra point per HD, but I liked it all the same.
3e and 4e also used different die types for hit dice, but these were different for different types of monsters. I like the 5e way of using these for size.
You might have seen these in some of my write-ups. The Mad Hatter Goblin is a small creature. I list it's standard HD is 2 and it's average hp from a d8 and it's Con mod is 9 +2 or 11. As a small creature, the same 2 HD and +2 con mod gives the creature an average hp of 7 +2 or 9. Sure not a lot of difference, but enough over the long run.
I am presenting both sets for people that want to use my "Advanced" set of size-based hp calculations or the standard RAW ones. I have been using this for a while now and while there might not be a significant difference in the play of the vast majority of monsters, the ones it does affect really affects them.
I hope people, especially in the OSR crowds, take to the change.
We are back around to Sunday and that means we are all on the same word.
Day 8 Stream
I think it is no great assumption to say the advent of streamed games online has changed how the public sees RPGs in general and D&D in particular.
Making the claim that shows like Critical Role have increased the number of people interested in RPGs is not really disputed regardless what one's opinion of them is.
Personally, I am not a fan of watching or listening to others play D&D. I have nothing against them, and I think many of them are quite nice and I am thrilled for their successes and for what it means for the game as a whole. I just get bored with them.
Right now my favorite streaming pass time is The Great Courses. Thanks to this I have listened to/watched the history of the world in various courses from early pre-history to the Victorians. I have listened to a number of courses on religion, detailed history on England, and more about the Vikings than I care to admit. Currently, I am listening to How We Learn by Monisha Pasupathi, Ph.D. It is really great even though much of it is a repeat of my Undergrad days. Though I am chaffing under dismissal of treasured theories that have since fallen out of favor. ;) Most of these Great Courses feel like undergrad courses, but I have really been enjoying them.
So far I have gone through about 33 of these, about 75% of another Undergraduate degree. Though this degree would most likely be in history. Sadly there is no homework, no assignments, and no exams, so there is no opportunity to show I have been anything more than a passive learner.
Mind you in my choices here of one stream vs. another (say Critical Role vs. the Great Courses) is not a value judgment in any way other than how I choose to spend my own time. I also listen to a lot of highly questionable music while at work.
I think for my next stream I could work on shoring up my German. A language I learned in High School and for a couple years in college that I have not used in nearly 30 years.
Every so often I get asked what sort of things inspire me. I usually half-jokingly say 70s metal, cheesy horror movies, and comics.
Only half-jokingly because there is a not-so-small amount of material in my bibliography of published material and blog posts that are exactly all of that.
Presently I am re-watching Star Trek Enterprise with my wife. We only saw bits and pieces of it when it was new, our kids were babies then, and keeping up on TV was not our main priority.
So Enterprise takes place before The Original Series, thus the ship feels a little "low tech" and everything has a frontier feel to it. While I am enjoying it for its own merits I am getting a ton of ideas for my two Star Trek campaigns; BlackStar and Mercy. Season 1 deals with the Temporal Cold War and the Temporal Accords, which comes up later in Star Trek Discovery. This is also putting back into the mood for a combined Star Trek/Doctor Who game which means FASA rules. BUT inspiration aside I don't want to start YET another Trek game. I haven't even gotten the ones I am planning off the ground.
SO...maybe I can add some of these ideas to Mercy, BlackStar is a bit full as is. Maybe I can add a character from the 31st century on my medical starship. But why is he/she there? Maybe I'll leave that to the player.
Getting back to music for a bit, there is a song that has some solid Trek connotations to it.
One of my all-time favorite songs by the band Queen is '39. Written by the guitarist, and Ph.D. in Astrophysics, Brian May. The song deals with 20 astronauts that leave Earth on a one-year-long mission. One of the astronauts says goodbye to his wife and daughter, but due to the time dilation effects of moving near the speed of light, it is many, many years later when they return. While he is "older but a year" his daughter is a grandmother now. In the song, they had discovered a new world.
I have often thought it would be possible that later warp drive ships would run into older, slower relativistic ships with a crew that had left Earth decades if not a century before. You see this played out really well in Arthur C. Clarke's The Songs of Distant Earth. It was one of my favorite books of his and I loved the idea of "gritty" space travel and one very removed from the notion of warp drives.
Now we have seen visitors from the past in Trek before, TNG's first season episode "The Neutral Zone" has frozen humans from the late 20th century, the second season "The Emissary" with frozen Klingons, and the awkwardly named "The 37's" from Star Trek Voyager's second season with humans from 1937 found on a planet in the Delta Quadrant some 70k light-years from Earth.
This would be an adventure for Mercy. The starship Mercy gets a distress beacon from a ship that left Earth in 2139, just prior to the wide adoption of warp drive. Yeah, there are cargo ships that can go warp 1.8 or so, but most ships are going to be sleeper ships. Mercy, being Mercy, goes in to investigate and discovers a crew from 156 years ago. Likely the ship, I might call the Arthur C. Clark, was headed to a planet that is now claimed by the Klingons, or Romulans, or some other species.
I'll need to ponder this one a little more. In any case, I guess I'll keep looking for inspiration.
Back on Day 2, I talked about maps. So I figured today would be a good one to go with Explore.
Exploration is a key factor in a lot of games. In D&D and other FRPGs exploration is a key element in Hex Crawls. Even in games like Traveler and Star Trek exploration is a key element.
In truth, I don't do a lot of exploration these days in D&D. Most, no rather, all, my D&D games have a goal in mind. When I ran Vault of the Drow a while back I did a lot of reading on what others have done with it in the past. There is a ton of material out there on exploring the area around the vault of the Drow. Dragonsfoot alone has more material than I'd ever use in a lifetime.
For my BlackStar game exploration is the name of the game. Well, that and horror. I think that is because in BlackStar I really don't have anything like a "big bad" save for all the horrors of space. I am also not sure what my end game for it is, maybe part of the exploration will be mine as well.
Dungeons
Also, this month is all about Dungeons at the RPG Blog Carnival and hosted this month by Plastic Polyhedra. Certainly, the Underdark of the Vault of the Drow qualifies and it would be fantastic to go exploring there one day.
I think today I will go with one of the alternate words on the list.
Day 5 Community
Today I am going with Community. One of the things I really hope to get out of this month of posting is to get a sense of community from this.
While writing these posts is a joy in and of themselves and I do enjoy the challenge, what I am looking forward to is the community.
I am very curious to see what everyone else does. Take today for example. I have no idea what I would write for Throne and I am very curious about what others might write about. Will someone else choose Community? What days might occur where each word is chosen. That might be fun.
I also feel it is important not to be just a passive participant here. So I need to make sure I also interact with all the other posting on various social media sites.
So if you are participating in this please feel free to leave a comment below with links to where you are posting. I'd love to see what everyone is doing and saying.
Excalibur, Stormbringer, Mjölnir, the Sun Sword, Blackrazor, Narsil/Andúril, the Bessy Mauler, the Sword of Kas, Needle, Elbe the Heartbow. All worlds, whether ours or fantasy have fantastic legendary weapons.
Quasi-artifacts to quest for or be granted to those that are worthy.
Day 4 Weapon
Like all good game worlds, I have a number of unique and special weapons.
Demonbane
Demonbane is a bastard sword from The Treasure Trove found in Issue #91 of Dragon Magazine. The sword is described as "a great, many-hued blade of which the origin has been forgotten, but which was wielded by the great paladin Nord in his single-handed destruction of the Citadel of Conjurers." Created by Ed Greenwood it would later go on to be called Dornavver in the Forgotten Realms. In my games, though it became one of the weapons of my paladin Johan II and used to defeat Orcus in module H4. IT was lost in the Astral Sea and it has been the focus of all my paladins for the last four generations to recover.
The "forgotten origin" has been changed to a drow savant, Sharis Val, that created it along with his adoptive father a dwarf cleric of Moradin. The multi-hues come from the variety of metals used in its construction.
Ebonblade, the Sword of Black Flames
Ebonblade's history is tied up in that of Demonbane's. The story of Demonbane's construction is not as forgotten as reported. Among blacksmiths, the tale of the swords construction and its use to defeat the Citadel of Conjurers is a tale told by masters to apprentices all over the world. One such apprentice found where the Demonbane was made and used the leftover materials to make a sword to avenge the death of his killed master. The materials used in making Demonbane responded to Sharis Val's desire to rid the world of evil and in particular demons. Ebonblade responded to the hate and desire to kill others and thus became an evil weapon.
The Star Sword
This weapon was made from bit of a "star" the fell to the Earth. Longer than a bastard sword, but not quite as long as a two-handed sword. This sword focuses the magic energies of the wielder into the blade to add extra damage.
The Mace of St. Werper
Admittedly not all that different than the Mace of St. Cuthbert, in my defense I made mine before I ever read about it in the DMG. This one though was specific to my first cleric.
The Death Staff
This weapon is the very first Staff of the Warlock used by my character Magnus. It can blast a humanoid with its necrotic power and turn them into a zombie under the wielder's control.
Interesting one today. The alternate words are just as appealing to me as the main one.
Day 3 Tactic
I am currently in the different stages of a few very interesting and fun projects. A couple I hope to get you all soon and others I hope their respective publishers get to you.
Presently I am also rereading some texts from my grad-school days and one, in particular, is about course design. Now while books are course do not serve the same purposes they do have some similar design ideals. It should be noted in my day of writing course curriculum I run into peers and colleagues who also are professional game designers. At one point I worked with several fellow designers that were also game designers (or had been) for WotC, White Wolf, and Mayfair. The skills are similar. But I digress.
The tactics I use to design a course or even design a bit of game work are also similar.
Whenever I have an idea for something. I usually start with what I call a vision document or a notes document. This lays out some ideas and key elements I want for the book/project. Let's take an example for a project I recently opted to put aside for now. The project on my working projects drive was called "Demon City Tokyo: 2074" and it was going to be an anime-action "Night World" for Night Shift. The idea came to me last October and grew out of a few other ideas I had "on paper" at the time. It was going to be expanded on from these core ideas. So I took that all and placed it in my vision document with some broad ideas; New type of super-collider, Tokyo of the future, some ideas on mixing a lot a Japanese and English for words. I also linked in a bunch of maps, pages on the internet. Help pages to refresh my Japanese after not speaking any in nearly 30 years (I can still count though!) and more.
My next phase or tactic in this process is to create the "thick outline." This is exactly like outlining, save that I am allowed to include paragraphs and other details. This allows me to start seeing the material in order and allows me to move material around a little easier. I find doing the vision doc first gives me free-thinking room and then the thick outline focuses these ideas into a form I like.
Up next is detailed writing. This is where I am on the Basic Bestiary series and where Demon City died. Not because I did not have the details, but because Dyskami Publishing was coming out with their own Demon City that was WAY too close to mine. NOW please be aware I am not suggesting anything here other than we both had a common idea. Theirs is in Kickstarter now and it is likely to be very good. I felt the world did not need TWO Demon Cities. Plus as I was working on my detailed thick outline my lack of knowledge of Tokyo was becoming more and more obvious. At one point I even moved the whole thing to my more familiar Chicago, but it didn't have quite the same feel.
Basic Bestiary on the other hand moved forward to the detailed writing stages. Here my tactic has been to pull any and all material I already had and use it here. Demon City Tokyo lives on in Basic Bestiary III since a lot of the demons I researched for it are still fantastic demons. While I write a ton of material here, not all it sees the light of publication or blog posts, and some not in the way they were originally envisioned.
After that comes playtesting, editing, revisions, layout...but those are all tales for another post I think.
One of the nice things about #RPGaDAY for 2021 is we also get a set of alternate words we can use. Today is Day #2 and that is Map, but the other words are "Senses," "Plan," and "Voice." But I am going to go with Map.
Day 2 Map
I adore maps. I knew very few role-players that are not fans of maps.
Speaking of Mysoerth, here is a new color map that fellow Mystoerth fan Matthew Fenn had made.
It is still a really fun map. If you look I have elements of not just Mystara and Oerth, but a little bit of Al-Qadim and even Gary's Necropolis. Let's me have all my cake and eat it too. A couple of things I would love to work into this map are Hyperborea (I already have a Boria) and maybe even a lost continent. I might need to make my world a bit bigger to fit it all in though. I have been playing with the idea that it is Ansalon there in the far south of the Far End Ocean. It would mean redoing large sections of Krynn to fit my world and it might not really even be possible. But then again my Zakhara does not look anything like the Zakhara from the Forgotten Realms.
I am still using Blackmoor as a common point of both worlds. I am also still wanting to make Hyperborea the land beyond the Black Ice. I am guessing it is about the size of Antarctica.
Not sure if I can cram everything in there.
Another map that I have been having some fun with is this Flat Earth map known as "The World Beyond the Ice Wall."
I have no idea who made it but I get the sinking feeling that Flat Earthers actually take this one seriously. I did find out who made it. It was made for a fictional sort of world, but it seems the Flat Earthers have adopted it as truth.
It does however reflect how I would do Hyperborea. A land beyond a wall of ice.
It is August and that means time for another #RPGaDAY from David Chapman and Autocratik. I look forward to this every year. Always some great writing prompts and I enjoy seeing what others come up with.
Day 1 Scenario
I had something planned for this, but I started writing it, and explaining it all was taking way too long. Even then I wasn't getting to my point so I scrapped it.
One question I get asked every so often is why do I like to use published Scenarios, aka Modules.
Simple. Sometimes I like to use something where a little bit of the heavy lifting (map, NPCs, monsters) has already been done. But that is only the lazy reason. The reason I am doing it for campaigns like Come Endless Darkness and The Second Campaign is to give my players the full D&D Experience. For something like War of the Witch Queens it is more can I take everyone else's witch-based adventures and fit them to a campaign arc of my needs.
Hopefully, I can put the latest tempest-in-a-teapot away for the one that was consuming us all last year.
It was one year ago that the whole Oriental Adventures deal went down. I am not going to go into all of it; there were petitions, camels, and a lot of chicken-little hysterics. But here are some of the salient details.
This quickly devolved into the lowest sniping that is typical of these cultural debates.
The end result was Wizards of the Coast putting a disclaimer on all older products about how they are an artifact of their times that honestly did not appease anyone.
We (Wizards) recognize that some of the legacy content available on this website does not reflect the values of the Dungeons & Dragons franchise today. Some older content may reflect ethnic, racial, and gender prejudice that were commonplace in American society at that time. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. This content is presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed. Dungeons & Dragons teaches that diversity is a strength, and we strive to make our D&D products as welcoming and inclusive as possible. This part of our work will never end.
So where are we now?
People made a HUGE outcry that they were going to be censored and that the older PDFs were going to get pulled or worse, they were going to be edited. People kept screaming slippery slope and other weak arguments.
None of that happened.
What did happen is that OA went from just a small handful of reviews and "just" a Platinum bestseller to a couple of score ratings (not actually reviews) and a Mithral best seller.
Screenshot 2020-01-03
Screenshot 2021-04-12. Only difference? Disclaimer and greater sales rank.
Comparing the files I downloaded when it was first offered in 2014, the one I downloaded in July of 2020, and the one I downloaded just now, they are all the exact same. There is a difference of 11 bytes between the 2020 and 2021 versions that I can't account for yet, but every page is the same.
Your file sizes may vary due to name and customer ID#
Nothing in the file itself has changed.
I said at the time that WotC was not going to take it down and they were not going to change it. I was right not because I had faith in WotC (far from it) I had faith in the money involved.
To take down a best-selling, low-cost, high ROI product is foolish.
To edit the same product incurs a cost, a high cost in many cases, that greatly reduces that ROI.
The intelligent thing to do is always make a new, better product to support the new current rules system, not anything at all for a nearly 50-year-old system with a diminishing customer base.
Also, the assertion that this would cause WotC to stop selling classic D&D pdfs altogether was easily dismissed. They kept adding more and more pdfs and PoD ready books. Focus has shifted a little from adding new pdfs (though the most recent ones are from June 18th or so) to get current pdfs PoD ready.
At the end of the day, Daniel Kwan was still making some very good claims. These have been carefully spelled out in this series of videos. Warning this is over 26 hours long. If you want to dispute his point of view you need to watch this first.
If I were in charge of the D&D line I would get in front of this now saying "Yeah, you have some great points. Let's assemble a dream team of experts both in history and in RPGs to make a new BETTER book."
I stand by that. I have no idea if WotC is doing this or not, but I am a bit disappointed that no 3rd party publisher came forward to do it. Now to be fair, Paizo very well could have done this and I just missed it. Brian Young has been doing exactly this for Castles & Crusades at Troll Lord Games. Maybe the closest we have is Joesph Bloch's / BRWGames' The Golden Scroll of Justice. I don't have it, but I have read that it is good. (edited to add. I just bought it to see how it is. First reaction, it looks good and has the level of quality I have come to expect from BRWGames, but I have no idea how representative it is, I am not qualified to measure that.)
People need to stop looking at these as "threats" and see them as opportunities to do better or at very, very least sell more books.
If you have been online at all this week then you likely have heard about the new new TSR. Justin LaNasa secured the trademarks that were lapsed (again). There was a TSR Games that produced the new Top Secret game and were involved with the short-lived Gygax magazine.
The tale began before this, but let's take the June 15th date as a start of the new TSR in the public eye when they sent out their press release.
Lots of people have dissected this already and I have no desire to retread that ground. There are a few things I want to talk about and for that, I need to start here. So let's establish some facts. From the PR.
The team includes Justin LaNasa (CEO), Ernest G. Gygax Jr (EVP), Jeff R. Leason (COO, and Stephen E. Dinehart (CCO).
Ok. So far so good...almost.
LaNasa has posted some questionable material online, on his own FB page, and on the Dungeon Hobby Shop page, now since deleted. Now people are allowed to have opinions and they don't have to agree with mine. If someone deletes something they posted I am going to assume they had a moment, thought better of it, and deleted it. That's fine. No need for me to bring it up. But there are others, and when a pattern begins to emerge well it is less like a momentary lapse of reason and more like behavior.
Here is one from a little more recently.
As a card-carrying member of the "Woke Nation," I take exception to this. You don't have to like my opinions to take my money, but don't hold your nose and laugh while doing it. Sorry, but if "woke" means I actually care about the opinions and feelings of others, then fuck it, I am woke. Not only that I am a pretty big Social Justice Warrior and I have the receipts (in many cases actual receipts) to back that up. Guess what, I can spend my money elsewhere.
If that were all, I could almost ignore it. I certainly would post anything about it, I'd just not buy your stuff and move on with my life. There are lots of things I don't like; I want to talk about the things I do like.
Look. It's an interview, not a presentation, not a press junket, so there are some rough bits in the presentation. But the real rough bits are really rough.
There is an absolute misunderstanding of IPs and copyright. The complete dismissal of the players of 5e is also poor professionalism. I get you don't like the game, you don't have to like it, but dismissing the players of 5e? Sorry, my kids are huge 5e fans and they are having every bit as much as we did; maybe more. Referring to them as lemmings, also not a fan. Also dismissing the largest population of role-players with money right now? That's just really bad business practice.
Again, irritating, but not 100% damnable. Anyone can say something stupid once.
But completely insulting the LGBT players by dismissing "gender identities" is so not cool and extremely unprofessional.
Online, Justin, in his capacity as CEO of TSR, has made the claim that this is just Ernie expressing his own opinions. Well, that doesn't really fly. The interview was in his capacity as a spokesperson for the company he is Executive VP for. Let's be honest. No one will pay the "nostalgia dollar" based on LaNasa's name alone. They are banking that despite not having a real plan that I can see and a lot of hope that people will buy these products based on the "TSR" and "Gygax" name.
They want to produce a new "Star Frontiers," they own the name, but that is all. None of the IP, none of the rules. Nothing really.
I fear they are poking a very large bear (WotC/Hasbro) and I am not sure they get that.
Shannon Appelcline has written an update on TSR 2.0 and TSR 3.0 for his Designers & Dragons and has posted it to his Facebook page.
There is more. Lots more. But I am not really interested anymore. This feels like a cheap cash grab to go after the nostalgia dollar and doing it by appealing to the lowest common denominator of that fan base.
Sorry but the whole thing is leaving a rather bad taste in my mouth. I hope to see some changes, but I am not holding my breath. But I don't need to give any more of my cash to people that utterly dismiss the experiences of people I know and care about.
Get your act together TSR or you will follow the business trajectory of the last two TSRs. And doubling down on Social Media is not only unprofessional but it is also a bad look.
Let's take a quick break from Ravenloft to talk about something that will send many DM's screaming for the hills in horror.
Character backstories
Now, most old-school players will argue that 1st level characters don't need a backstory. That would be fine and all, but I remember playing in the 80s. I have lost count of how many "disgraced princes," "lost royalty," or "tragic orphans" I ran into in games. I get it, it was fantasy and a way to play out various ideas, concepts, whatever. D&D was cheaper than therapy. I get it. I do. And it is fine you don't want to do them now.
But don't pretend it didn't happen.
I have no issues with backstories. In most of the RPGs I play a backstory is an excuse for the GM (me) to torture your character some more. Have the Love quality/drawback in the Buffy RPG? Yeah. Might want to rethink that one. But I don't always have to do that.
Our two primary modern examples of "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" by Joesph Campbell are Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter. By all accounts, they are 1st level characters. Luke is a farm kid. Harry is an abused 11-year-old. BOTH have great backstories. "Yer a wizard Harry!" "My name is Luke." "Yer a Jedi Luke!" But, yes, both are tragic backstories. Take Campbell's own example of the Monomyth, Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh is already the King when the story starts. That's a backstory no one would accept!
Let's just say that there is going to be some sort of backstory. How should you do it?
Well once again let's turn to Ginny Di.
She might be new at D&D but her enthusiasm is greater and more infectious than a room full of Grogs blogging about it. Your humble author included.
Her recent video is overtly about one topic, but she actually makes two very good points here that pretty much everyone should agree with.
So her two major points are:
Backstories don't need to be tragic or even dark
Leave it open enough for your DM to work it into the campaign
That's solid advice. One I would like to hope that most Old-Schoolers follow already.
My oldest son has already instituted a "maximum" limit on what a backstory in his games are. Right now I think it is a page, but he has talked about a paragraph. Me? I don't care, make as long as you like just keep it in reason.
Ginny points out that characters, and this is true for every version of the game, are not normal people. A level 1 character is still better than a 0 level Normal Human. They have more hp, are better at fighting or even have magic. Even in Van Righten's Guide to Ravenloft, the Survivors are slightly better than normal humans. Luke already was Force-sensitive, Harry could still do some minor magic and talk to snakes.
Also, no normal person is going to live a life to go out adventuring. So find those reasons. Even if that reason is "I just want a pile of treasure."
Taking Ginny's Advice
At the end of the video, she asks us two questions.
Have you ever had a character with a happy backstory? What kind of problems do you run into when writing character backstories?
These are good questions to ask.
Happy Backstory?
Yes. My wizard Phygora, like his namesake and idol Phygor, came from a well to do, happy prosperous family in Glantri. He was well-liked, no issues with school, loves, or friends. Just one day he decided, like Phygor before, him to travel the world to learn all the magic he could. While this could have been tragic, it was symbolic of my own desires to learn all sorts of things.
I have had fighters and thieves that have "only it for the money" or as the kids say "the lolz."
Backstory Problems?
Sadly I do find the tragic backstory easier to write. Larina's family died in their apothecary shop while she was away studying. Though I recently brought her mother and father back. Johan's twin brother was killed by ghouls, then he died to become another's character's back story. I have the usual suspects of orphans, outcasts and other murder hobos. They far outweigh the happy stories.
Over the years though I have been looking at other ways to generate characters and backstories.
It occurred to me years (ok. decades) ago when sitting in my History of Psychology course. We were going over Freud's theories of self and were contrasting them with later theorists. Now I have always preferred Jung over Freud. I guess I am just Jung at heart! (sorry. That joke is mandated by my university, if I don't use it they take away my degrees.)
I am planning to expand on this, but I came to see many of my characters as representations of various Freudian and Jungian concepts.
The easiest one to show is Larina, she is a manifestation of my Jungian Anima/Shadow Self. Phygora is my Freudian Super-Ego, Johan is my Ego and my assassin character represents my Id.
I have always been curious if others have done this.
"A fine website, but even more than that...THANKS FOR THE GREAT PARODY OF THE DARK DUNGEONS TRASH! Best wishes."
Gary Gygax circa 1999
Back in 1994, I moved to Chicago to work on my Ph.D. and be closer to my then-girlfriend (spoiler, I married her in 1995). I was working at the College of Education at the time as their tech-monkey. I told them I knew how to write code. I did/do, but it was all Pascal, Fortran, and some C and VisualBasic. What they wanted was HTML though they really didn't know it at the time. I built their student databases and worked on their nascent website.
My very first website, made in 1995, was The Chicago Campus Crusade for Cthulhu. I had all my Call of Cthulhu materials online and it was a parody site. This was quickly followed by my Gateway2000 PC site (yes I was a huge fan of Gateway computers). I had built them both in Notepad, a tool I still use today to edit all my HTML.
The earliest captures were 1998, but by then I had been on for 2-3 years. I was using the "noarchive" tag and "Frame breaker" scripts a lot back then because there was a real concern for webpage theft and spaghetti publishers. I thought that would help. What they do was keep my site from being archived by bots.
This kept me from finding the very first versions of my sites, though I still have all the HTML code backed up. I did notice that when I went back for my second Ph.D. my student account was reactivated and there are some captures from around then as well.
In any case, the knowledge I gained from those sites was poured into my newest site, The Other Side.
So dark. Very Internet. Much frames.
I named it after an old newspaper column I wrote for my school newspaper in High School and then my first year of undergrad. Plus it sounded mystical and new agey.
I am not 100% sure of the exact day it went live. I know it was between March 10th and the 12th because that was my wife's birthday. Also, I was in a Cognition of Memory course at the time when I jotted down my first ideas for it in my notebook. So that was Spring term 96.
The site changed over the years. I added more and more material and soon it was the home of my first Netbook of Witches and Warlocks, published in 1999. I had moved from my campus site to RPGHost for the longest time. From there I was also on Xoom, NBCi, Tripod, and then PlanetADnD.
Whoa, easy there Darklord.
Around 2003 or so I kept getting hacked and my sie taken down. My host asked me to take it down for a bit because of all the DoS attacks he was getting. So for a while, all that remained were some mirrors of the site that I rarely updated.
The site was revived in 2007 on this blog.
I still use the same background, though in a much-lightened fashion. Some of the material written for that old site has also come back here.
Sadly many of my then contemporaries are gone. PlanetADnD is no more. BlueTroll has been gone a long time. All the old hosting services are long gone. I see that ADnDDownloads is still up after a fashion. Mimir, the Planescape site, is still going and looks the same as it did back in the 1990s, though I don't think it has been updated in 10 years and many links are broken.
While I miss some of the "wild west" days of finding the perfect, or the perfectly odd, netbook, things are better now. DriveThruRPG gives me legal means to complete my collection and DMGsguild covers my need for fan-created material. And that is just the tip of the iceberg as it were.
Do I have it in me to go another 25? Well...I'll be in my mid to late 70s then, so no idea. But I am going to keep having fun with this as long as I can.
I am considering doing the A to Z Blogging Challenge again this year. It's been a couple of years since I have done it. I was feeling I was alienating my regular readers with it in favor of people just coming through from the Challenge.
So this year I wanted to do something that any and all readers would enjoy. This year I am doing Monsters.
The idea here is to give me some external motivation to get my two monster books done.
For new readers, there will monsters which are always fun. Since many come from the tales of fantasy, myth, and folklore maybe there will be something they can use for their own writing or just enjoyment. For my regular readers, new monsters with stats. I am also looking for all sorts of feedback on not just the monsters, but the stat blocks as well.
The one I have been using on my Monstrous Mondays has been working well for me, but I am sure I can tweak it some more.
The monsters for April A to Z will likely favor the Basic Bestiary I, covering all sorts of witchcraft-related monsters with plenty of fae and undead, but I am not ruling out some demons for Basic Bestiary II.
Both books will come in softcover (Basic red) and hardcover (orange spine) versions. So they will work with whatever version of the game you are playing. The interiors are the same with stat blocks designed to work with both the "Basic" and "Advanced" versions of the game.
So far Basic Bestiary has over 330 monsters with 156 of them complete. The others are various points.
Basic Bestiary II has over 500 demons, devils, and related monsters.
I am also going with my own compatibility logos on these since they really have gone beyond one system or the other. They are still largely "Basic" in nature, but as you can see from my Monstrous Mondays stat blocks they have a little bit of everything in the OGC. I am going to use this month to experiment.
You can see others doing their theme reveal over at the A to Z Blog until March 20.
I was debating on whether or not to remark to the latest (and maybe the last) of the ongoing drama with Joss Whedon, but I think at least a summary and retrospective might be in order. Besides one of the reasons of for the existence of this blog was due to the earlier incarnation of The Other Side getting hacked all the time by Whedon fanboys because they did not like my message then. So. Here we are nearly 20 years later.
First, let's start with the most recent news. On February 10th Charisma Carpenter took to Twitter to talk about how she had been treated by Whedon while filming her last season of Angel. While widely known to many people in the fan community at the time, this tweet was a revelation to many. Among the other issues were asking her if she would get an abortion to accommodate the Angel shooting schedule and storyline. What followed was a tsunami of posts from fellow actors and people associated with Buffy, Angel, and Firefly.
The question that some are asking is why is this all trending now versus 18 years ago? Or why are the actors all coming out now as opposed to then?
Well, keep in mind that a lot of the actors and people involved DID come out with these allegations. I remember talking online about it at the time, in particular, Charisma Carpenter's firing because she got pregnant (which is illegal by the way). What is different?
First, the actors above have the advantage of a more robust social media infrastructure. They can get their message out to more, quicker. Cases in point all the Tweets and Instagram posts above.
I mentioned Jeff Pruitt and Sophia Crawford above with a "yet again" they shared this story before. Back in 2000. It was detailed by Jeff, quasi-anonymously, in his "The Parabal (sic) of a Knight." He is the Knight, Sophia is the Handmaiden and the Young Prince who becomes King is Whedon. It is also fairly negative to SMG, but that is not what I talking about today. While he had to hide this in a story, the Buffy fandom at the time dismissed all of Jeff's and Sophia's claims. It only took 20 years before the fandom took them at their word.
Related to that is my third point. The fandom that revered and protect Whedon is largely gone. Back in 2003 or so, Whedon was on the top of his world. Any complaint would have been drowned out by the screaming fans that worshipped him. Case in point. Anytime I would post something to my older version of The Other Side my host would get attacked. It got so bad that between 2005 to 2009 there was no "Other Side" on the web. I created this blog since I figured Blogspot/Google would be better protected. Of course by that time I had decided to move on.
People talk about "toxic fandom" and how it can be directed in a negative way at creators. One facet they don't mention is how un-checked praise and even worship of creators can also be damaging to others that are trying to warn us about those creatives. Woody Hall, Harvey Weinstein, Stanley Kubrick, Quentin Tarantino, and yes Whedon all built their cult of personality and auteur status. These same cults also shielded them from scrutiny.
The "Big Question" everyone is asking is "Why now?"
As I mentioned above the climate has changed. These actors are no longer in a place where Whedon can damage their career. They have moved on to other things. Charisma has roles, SMG is living the stay-at-home mom dream she has always wanted (and her husband Freddie Prinze Jr. is doing great), Amber has books out and has been behind the camera more than in front of it. So the control he once had on their lives is not there. The fan network has largely gone away as well.
Also, and this can not be stated too many times, other people do not have to conform to your timeline of healing. Michelle Trachtenberg said it took her years to even come to terms with it. Eliza Dushku only talked about the sexual abuse she suffered at age 12 three years ago. Michelle Trachtenberg mentions that it took her till she was a woman of 35 to deal with things that happened to her as a teenager of 15. I know others he has been involved with as well. The gaslighting he has done to them still bothers (enrages) them. You don't get to dictate how others heal.
The question also comes up of why didn't others speak up or stop it. Well, I think I covered that, the ones that did were blacklisted and deemed "difficult to work with." You also have actors like Anthony Head and Amy Acker that said they did not see this abuse but support the others all the same. Again, it can't be said too many times but abusers work by targeting those they know they can abuse and get away with it. Bullies always pick on those weaker than themselves. In terms of the power structure, everyone was weaker than the Grand Auteur.
Back in the early 90s I had a job at a head injury facility. I was a Qualified Mental Health Professional for the State of Illinois. I took the job because my own research was on cognitive development. The job was so depressing. I would call my girlfriend every night after my night shift (she was living 300 miles away at the time; its ok though we got married in the end) complaining about how awful it was. Not the staff, they were great, it's just the despair. She asked me many times why I don't just quit. I couldn't. Apart from needing this on CV for my Ph.D. program, I also needed to eat, pay rent, and have a job that a working grad student could do at night. I couldn't just leave. Neither could these actors, and I didn't have a contract holding me in a place like they did.
The Second Big Question is, for me, Why do I even care?
Over the years through my work on the Buffy, Angel, and Ghosts of Albion RPGs I have gotten to know a few of the people involved here. They are good people. In the years following, I have been able to get to know more. They are also good people. They deserved a lot better than what they were given.
I guess really it is no surprise when given the chance to do my own versions of the Buffy-verse the people that made it over were "played" by Charisma, Amber, Michelle, Eliza, and also Alyssa Milano and Rose McGowan.
Truthfully the only answer one needs to give to a question of "Why should you care?" is "Because what happened was wrong."
