The Other Side blog

Friday, September 24, 2021

Kickstart Your Weekend: ANKUR - Kingdom of the gods TTRPG 2E

Ok. So I did find a Kickstarter that interested me.

ANKUR - Kingdom of the gods TTRPG 2E

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mad-scribe-games/ankur-kingdom-of-the-gods-ttrpg-2e?ref=theotherside

Honestly, it looks like my sort of jam. In particular, it would be great for some other things I have planned.

Only 6 days left!

#FollowFriday: Ginny Di

I gotta admit I love the shirt!

Kinda burned out on Kickstarter right now. So it's another #FollowFriday!

I will admit, I adore Ginny Di. She has unbound enthusiasm about D&D and all things related. I know she is young enough to be my daughter and I have characters older than her, but I still think she is great.

It is so refreshing to come to her Twitter or YouTube pages and see how excited she is over something D&D-related. I'll read the posts or blogs of some of my contemporaries and wonder when the fun died in their lives leaving them as bitter old husks.

Plus she seems to irritate the right people, so that is a bonus all on its own.

The fact that she also loves her witches has almost nothing to do with it. Well...maybe a little.

I have already posted about her or her projects in the past.

This week Ginny is back with Morelia the Wood Witch in a POV roleplay. It is a fun little bit video, but it really helped me cement the idea that Morelia would be a great NPC in my War of the Witch Queens.

Content Warning to Bitter Old Grogs Who Are Dead Inside: The video features a shop where an NPC Witch SELLS POTIONS! Gasp, the Horror! The audacity! The cheek of it all!

Anyway. She is fun. She is funny. She has a ton of enthusiasm and I think she is great. In fact, I even sought out items she has been sponsored by at Gen Con because she made them look really fun.

So check her out. If you don't like her ask yourself, when did I die inside?

Ginny Di online

Give her a follow or a like or something.

Thursday, September 23, 2021

One Man's God Special: Syncretism Part 1, The Gods of Faerûn

This is the start of a multi-part sub-feature of One Man's God. I am going to pull in material from older Dragon Magazines when needed, though not enough to count as a "This Old Dragon." This series will also allow me to pull in more up-to-date material for the various gods and creatures beyond what was in the Deities and Demigods. The D&DG will be my starting point, but I am not limited to it now.

Since I have completed all the myths in the Deities and Demigods the initial goal of One Man's God is now complete. I might, after this, look to other editions of (A)D&D, in particular, 2nd and 3rd but for now, I want to explore some other topics that came up in my OMG posts.

One of those topics is syncretism.

Syncretism is the combining of gods or beliefs into a new set of gods and/or belief systems. This is something that happens in the real world all the time, though maybe less so now as the prevalence of monotheism is worldwide. We do see it more modern times in the cases of religions like Vodun and Santería.

While you typically don't see syncretism in AD&D there is at least one excellent example of it. Going all the way back to Dragon #54 from October 1981, we have Ed Greenwood's Down-to-Earth Divinity.

I am not sure if this article lead to the later developments of what the Cleric can do with their gods or not, but it was most certainly ahead of it's time. A quick reminder, while Greenwood has been telling us about his campaign for a bit now, the Forgotten Realms, as a product, was not due till 1987.

I covered this in an early This Old Dragon, here is what I said about it then:

Up first in real articles we have something from Ed Greenwood. So this year (2017) I have been spending some time expanding my knowledge of the Forgotten Realms. This article is one of the earliest articles on the Realms I know of. Down-to-earth Divinity discusses how Ed has put together his Pantheon of Gods. You can easily see how this evolved into the gods of the Realms. I found it interesting that he includes the elemental gods from the Melnibonéan mythos. There are a lot of "reskinned" Deities and Demigods gods here too (which is the point of the article). I liked that Ed specifically mentions that witches worship Selûne. The article is long and seriously good.

I feel I undersold how good this article is for my purposes. So not only can use this as a One Man's God entry in the pure sense it is also the perfect place to discuss syncretism. The insight to how the Realms gods took shape is fascinating, the implications of what is going here are much more interesting.

For the sake of today's discussion, let us just focus on the Faerûnian Pantheon as a whole. While they have evolved much since this article (and a further point in my case here). For modern examples, I will refer to the Faerûnian pantheon at the Forgotten Realms wiki.

Faerûnian Gods

In this article, Greenwood details how he created the Gods of Faerûn. Many of these gods are "reskinned" versions of Earth gods. While there is a very practical game-design reason for this there is also an implied in-universe explanation; clerics of those gods came to Toril and brought their gods with them. We see this in books, like Neil Gaiman's "American Gods" and we see it later in the Realms itself with the Mulhorandi pantheon, which are the Egyptian Gods, not even changed all that much.

For his Gods, Greenwood choose to stick pretty close to the first printing of the Deities and Demigods. Again there are very practical reasons for this. Here is a breakdown of the "immigrant" gods to Faerûn.

Faerûn	D&DG	Pantheon	Notes
Azuth	Aarth	Nehwon	Direct port, concept-wise
Bane	Druaga	Babylonian	Human form
Chauntea	Demeter	Greek	Direct port
Gond	Hephaestus	Greek	Direct port
Ilmater	Issek of the Jug	Nehwon	Some aspects
Loviatar	Loviatar	Finnish	Direct port
Mask	Hermes	Greek	No Justice domain
Mielikki	Mielikki	Finnish	Direct port
Milil	Bragi	Norse	Changed
Oghma	Oghma	Celtic	Direct port
Silvanus	Silvanus	Celtic	Direct port
Sune	Aphrodite	Greek	Direct port
Talona	Kipuytto	Finnish	Direct port
Talos	Storm Gods	Many	Combined aspects of other gods
Torm	St. Cuthbert	Greyhawk	Concept only
Tyche / Tymora	Tyche	Greek	Direct port
Tyr	Tyr	Norse	Direct port
Elemental Lords	Elemental Lords	Melnibonéan	Direct port
Cults of the Beast	Beast Lords	Melnibonéan+	many sources

This is not to imply that all Gods in Faerûn are imports. Far from it! Many of the gods discussed in the article are different enough from their sources to be considered new gods. Which is exactly what syncretism does. There are also plenty of brand new gods. For example, Mystra is nothing at all like Hecate.

What About Demons and Other Gods?

One Man's God is supposed to be about gods and demons right? Certainly, the demons of the Monster Manual ARE the demons of Faerûn. We know that Orcus has had a lot plots and schemes in the Realms since the very start. And in the opposite direction, One Man's Demon is another's God, Asmodeus went from the Arch Duke of the devils to a God of Evil. The details of his rise and fall have been dealt with in many books, but the best ones for my money come from the Brimstone Angels series by Erin Evans.

Evans also shows how imported gods can work. The Pantheon of the Untheric Gods, which were the Babylonian Gods, were re-adopted by the Abeir Dragonborn living in Tymanther. In her book "The Devil You Know" Evans shows Untheric/Babylonian gods first as human-like then as Dragonborn-like as more of the Dragonborn living in Djerad Thymar came to believe in them, in particular the God Enlil. Is it possible then that Bane IS Druaga, just evolved through the ages that his form has changed? Isn't that also syncretism?

Nothing Like the Sun...

I have been going over this article for a very long time. There is quite a lot here to tease out and use if you are willing to take the time. A good example of this comes from a tiny tidbit of information found in the paragraph for Selûne, then just Selune. We are told that Selune is "revered by witches (and a few may worship her)." Later on, in the Deity/Character Relationships table, we are told that the witches used are the ones from Dragon Magazine #43.

Reading through the various works on the Moon Goddesses, Selûne and Shar, and the Elven Sehanine Moonbow, there is a lot of back and forth on who is an aspect of who and what not. This all lead me to a bit of syncretism of my own to combine all three goddesses into one Goddess of the Moon with three aspects. I detailed this years ago in my "Chanel Divinity" article Nothing Like the Sun. Each goddess represents the aspects of the triple Goddess; Maiden, Mother, and Crone or Sehanine, Selûne and Shar respectively. Here they are more than just the Goddesses of the Moon but the Goddess of Witchcraft as well. The waxing crescent is Sehanine and her "moonbow." The full moon is the Mother Selûne in her full glory. The waning crescent is Shar and her sickles to reap the souls of the dead. But like their Goddess they are reborn as the Maiden once more.

Realms diehards might ask how can these Goddess exist? Well, I also ask why does Zeus-Serapis exist when, supposedly, Zeus, Serapis, and Osiris also still exist? I like my Gods and Goddesses to be mysterious and strange and maybe a little contradictory.

For a little under 9 pages of text, Ed Greenwood really delivered here. So much so that in truth this blog post was started months back. I wanted to go back and reread posts I had made about this, posts I had made influenced by this, and more Forgotten Realms information. In truth, I could go on much longer about this topic just in the Realms themselves, the world is much more dynamic that I had given it credit for, but I am going to stay on topic here and move on to other worlds and other gods.

So. Thank You, Ed Greenwood. This is quite a quality bit of work.

One Man's God Special: Syncretism

Wednesday, September 22, 2021

Seasons Change...

But I am still here doing what I do!

Today is the Autumnal Equinox for the Northern Hemisphere and the Vernal Equinox for my friends in the Southern Hemisphere.

For me, this brings the march to darkness and of course my favorite time of year. The spooky season of Halloween.

And do I have a lot in store for you all this year! Starting off with a couple of hosting I am doing all October.

October Horror Movie Challenge

I have been doing the October Horror Movie Challenge n for years now. I just got a new DVD in the mail today of one I have been searching for forever so I thought today would be a good day to announce that this year I am hosting my own Horror Movie Challenge.

I am not doing anything wildly different than in previous years, and I am largely following the rules as set out by Krell Laboratories.

You have 31 days, October 1st to October 31st, to watch 31 Horror movies. At least 20 of these need to be first-time views.

Currently, I am working on my list of movies. I wanted to do a Lovecraft film fest. But I am finding that there are quite a few Lovecraft-themed movies I just don't have access to. So I am going to expand my list a bit.

I have even created a new banner image to use.

If you want to copy this to your own posts then here is the HTML code!

Just copy and paste that into the HTML editing window of whatever you are using to post.

But that is not all that is happening here.

RPG Blog Carnival

This October I am also hosting my first ever RPG Blog Carnival. This October will be all about Horror in RPGs. So kinda what I like to do anyway, but now you can join me. I will have an official post going up on October 1st for you to see all the details and link your blogs/vlogs/social media posts back.

You can check out the details at Of Dice and Dragons the home of the RPG Blog Carnival.

I plan to talk a lot about horror and how you can use it in your games. I am also going to spend quite a bit of time with other horror games and how they can be mined for ideas.

Once again October is going to be a very busy time here. Hope you all join me!

Tuesday, September 21, 2021

Post Gen Con Updates

Nothing gets my creative juices flowing better than being at Gen Con! So I thought I might post some random updates on various projects, both public and personal.

Other Side Publishing

Fiend Folio II

This one has generated a LOT of discussions. But here are my goals for it.

This is just a project for me. Not publishing it.
I am doing it to get a good feel of monster evolution from OD&D to AD&D and from the late-70s to the mid-80s. The "Sweet spot" of old-school gaming. This will inform me on how to build better monsters for the Basic Bestiaries.
I need to get in some Adobe Indesign practice. This will give me that.

Basic Bestiaries

These are moving along nicely BB1 has 250 monsters in it now, which is by all measures a good number. But I want to do some more for all the volumes I have planned so I can ensure a common look and feel across them all. I am happy with what I have here and I am really looking forward to getting these out.

The High Witchcraft Book

What I have been calling my "last" witch book has been left on its own for so long it has mated with some other files on my hard drive and given birth to ANOTHER witch book! Yeah, I have enough material now for two books. Those are a little later in coming. I want to make sure I am not just putting out material because I have it, I want it to be good. The second book will come out first more than likely with the High Witchcraft book retaining the notoriety of being the Last Witch book.

Gen Con Brilliant Idea #1

My family and I got to play a LOT of games together over Gen Con. Something came up during play that I think will be great. Thankfully a lot of the work has already been done by my for other projects. This project will complement the Basic Bestiaries, but one is not required for the other at all. I am keeping this one close to my chest for now.

Personal

September Sales

WHAT IS HAPPENING HERE???? My sales are like 4x to 5x what they normally are! I looked at the sales and thought it had to be wrong. I rechecked the math and yeah. My only guess is that it is because Halloween is so close people are looking for horror-themed materials for their games.

So. I spent some money. Well...I spent a lot of money.

The Wild Beyond the Witchlight

Classic D&D characters? the Feywild? Creepy ass carnival? Creepier clown named Thaco? HELL YES! Honestly, there is so much fun stuff here. It portrays the feywild as it should be, equal parts light and dark, beautiful and terrifying, whimsical and deadly. And often all at once.

There is just so much here. Stats and backgrounds for Kelek, "Charmay", Skylla, and more! Personally I LOVE want they did with the Charmay/Skylla confusion. A slightly different twist than my own, but one that works well enough.

Temple of Elemental Evil

Going from 5e doing Old-School to Old-School going 5e. I also grabbed the Temple of Elemental Evil today.

This one is so massive it will need its own post.

Since I was in an old school mood I also grabbed the Codex series for Castles & Crusades.

The Temple will be the end cap to my 5e campaigns. So this is going to be great really.

And on top of everything else, I actually lost some weight over Gen Con!

Monday, September 20, 2021

Monstrous Mondays: Opinicus

A little slow on the posts today. Back from Gen Con and all. Got to play a lot of great games last week.

This beastie has been on my mind since playing some Blue Rose.

Opinicus
Large beast (magical)

Frequency: Rare
Number Appearing: 1d4 (2d4)
Alignment: Neutral [Lawful Netural]
Movement: 120' (40') [12"]
Flying 240' (120') [24"]
Armor Class: 5 [14]
Hit Dice: 5d8+10* (33 hp)
Large 5d10+10* (38 hp)
Attacks: 2 claw, 1 bite
Damage: 1d3+1 x2, 1d8+1
Special: 10% chance of speaking
Save: Monster 5
Morale: 8 (10)
Treasure Hoard Class: II/Q
XP: 400 (OSE) 460 (LL)

Str: 15 (+1) Dex: 15 (+1) Con: 16 (+2) Int: 9 (0) Wis: 12 (0) Cha: 10 (0)

The opinicus is a cousin of both the griffon and the hippogriffs. They are smaller than griffons and a bit longer. Like the griffon, they feature the body of a lion and the wings and head of a large hawk. Unlike the griffon though, the opinicus has all four limbs of a lion.

Unlike the griffon, the opinicus is a vegetarian, its preferred method of feeding is to swoop down into the back alleys of cities to eat the fruits and vegetables tossed out after market days. Opinicus makes their homes in the tops of tall steeples and towers. They feature as animal in many coats of arms.

The opinicus has a 10% of talking. They speak the local languages of the urban areas they live in. They have been known to help homeless humans find sources of shelter and food. The opinicus has little use for treasure, but they do keep gems they find.

The female opincus lays a clutch of 2-8 eggs roughly the size and shape of a coconut. Juvenile opinici do not have wings, developing them after their first year. Opinici can live 50 to 60 years.

NOTE: The Opinicus from Monster Manual II are considered to be Eastern Opinicus.

Sunday, September 19, 2021

Back Home from GenCon 2021!

I just got back home from GenCon 2021. We had a great time. We stayed in masks a lot and we spent a little more time playing games in our room and outside, but all in all, we took a lot of precautions, washed hands a lot, and of course got vaccinated a while back.

For this Con, I did not continue the Order of the Platinum Dragon campaign. I have been building something cool for it and taking it to Gen Con would have been a pain in the ass. Instead, we continued on with the War of the Witch Queens campaign. Everyone really took to Basic Ear D&D well and my son even bought his own copies of Old-School Essentials.

We picked up our Old-School Essentials at the Games Plus booth. They had a bunch on Day 1 and were completely sold out by Day 3!

Oh. And despite some claims to the contrary, Gen Con was still full and there were plenty of people here. We spoke to a few of the restaurant workers and a few owners and they were thrilled that Gen Con was back, even in this limited fashion.

People stayed in masks, for the most part. Though we are still going to quarantine for a bit just to be safe.

We picked up some great games too. The kids both work now so they were able to spend their own money. Which is great, cause I bought a lot for me.

So far our favorite has been The Red Dragon Inn by Slugfest Games. We had a blast with it. I have been wanting it for a bit now and I am glad we got it.

We played some NIGHT SHIFT and that was great. While we were playing this guy stopped to see what we were playing. He mentioned he wanted to introduce his 10-year-old daughter to D&D. Long story short, the drummer of the band Shinedown watched our game. I gave him a copy of NIGHT SHIFT, which he loved.

Not sure what our plans are for next year, but we had a great time this year. Glad to be back at Gen Con.