I'll get back to gods in a bit, but I am assembling all the pieces I need for the War of the Witch Queens.
Some OSR monster books, some rules, a bunch of different adventures. Yes that is a 4e book in the mix too.
Still working out details and having a lot of fun. If I decide to go to a maximum of 13th level then I am sticking with Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea. If I think it will go higher than that, all the way to 20th level then I want to use Castles & Crusades.
Working out some details for my games and it got me thinking about gods.
I am toying around with the idea that the gods are nothing more that super-powerful mortals ala the D&D Immortals rules. I am even tossing around this idea that the gods loose their powers and fall to the Prime Material.
For example, I was thinking of making many of the goddesses of magic, witchcraft and the like really powerful witches, they have just come to be regarded as goddesses. So Hecate, Wee Jas, and the like.
Doing something similar with the various pantheons also seems to fix a few issues I am currently running into in my world building.
What roles do the Gods play in your games? Do you use them much?
A while back I posted some songs to a "mix tape" I was calling "A Sojourn in Hell".
One of the things I didn't mention in the first post is how the collection of songs got together.
On September 10, 2001 I was working at my dream job at a dot com. Yeah I'll admit it, I was making a ton of cash. It was the near the end of the Clinton economy and we were rolling investment capital. And then the bottom dropped out and the dot com crash happened. I was laid off and went home for lunch.
A year before I picked up the D&D 3.0 Player's Handbook, so I thought I would sit down and finish up my new 3.0 witch book, Liber Mysterium. Napster had just died and had a ton of MP3s.
Then I sat at home the next day, September 11, 2001 and watched TV in horror.
What began, for various reasons that I will get into on a later date (if at all) my own Sojourn in Hell.
Today I can listen to these songs and they now mean something else to me. They represent part of my life where I was deep into writing gaming material and producing it at a rate I have not matched.
One of the videos I loved the best in the early days of MTV was Peter Gabriel's "Shock the Monkey". The video was legitimately creepy and Gabriel was the only one who seemed to know how to use this new medium. The Nu-Metal band Coal Chamber teamed up with Ozzy "Prince of Darkness" Osbourne to do a cover of this song. It's good but lacks something the original had. Still though I really enjoy it.
For reasons I am not entirely sure of myself I really enjoy Eminem. It's a guilty pleasure. Kinda like listening to Spice Girls...er wait. Maybe not. But the deal with Marshal is he is actually pretty damned talented. This song has nothing to do with me getting laid off. Nothing. Really.
Plus I have to admit that Dr. Dre looking over to Eminem like he is an idiot throughout this video is great.
I know the pieces fit cuz I watched them tumble down no fault, none to blame it doesn't mean I don't desire to point the finger, blame the other, watch the temple topple over.
Tool is the thinking person's dark metal. Lateralus should go down in history with such albums as "The Wall". "Schism" is another song that spoke to me a lot during this time.
There is a rumor/story that when Trent Reznor first heard Johnny Cash's cover his song "Hurt" he was silent for a few minutes and then said "yeah. That's what I meant." You would have a very difficult time convincing me that Cash's version is not the TRUE version. Much like "All Along the Watchtower" is Jimi Hendrix's song and not Bob Dylan's, despite what the liner notes say.
This is, as my brother Dan says, like watching an old man slowly die before your eyes.
"Tales of Brave Ulysses" seems the odd one out here, but not really if you consider the feel I was going for in the books I working on then. I guess to say it makes sense to me.
Deep Purple was always one of those bands I felt that people either got or they didn't. A little like Uriah Heep. "Hush" is notable for being the first song to go into the "Sojourn in Hell" folder on my old Gateway.
I wanted to end the collection on an upbeat note. I figure I could do worse than the Wiseguys "Start the Commotion".
Back in the early 90s "Tales from the Floating Vagabond" was the game that people most wanted to play in my neck of the woods. I knew a guy who had playtested it and could ramble of adventure ideas with the best of them.
This is not a post about that game.
This is a post about a place very, very, very much like the Floating Vagabond.
