Well, might as well make it official.

After once again having not only no interest in posting for months but in fact a visceral aversion to the very idea of posting, I have concluded it is time to officially hang up the hat.

I may be back again; perhaps an official clean break is what I need to feel remotely interested -- or comfortable, for that matter -- with resuming activity once again. But if I'm honest about it, I've been less than enthused for a long, long time; I don't like what I've seen, and been seeing.

And you know what? My gaming-related activities are supposed to be fun.

All this in the blogosphere? Not fun.

The hamster hoard will remain where it is for archival purposes. I said once before that I would never delete my blog to spite others who may be interested in some segment of it, and I'll stand by that. But for the time being an archive is all it will be.

Z: The path of the sun ...

So.

Magical disciplines or schools based on the houses of the zodiac Y/N?

Perhaps with Ophiuchus being the necromantic -- or otherwise unsavoury -- dark horse of the lot?

Y: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Yes, another post so short it's barely a blip on the radar -- awkward letters + awkward time of the work schedule makes for short posts ~

Yesterday I was digging through Anima again and anxiously waiting for the Dominus Exxet book to finally crawl into my FLGS next month. Anima is definitely a happy place for me these days.

Today I was shuffling through my collection of Planescape material while tinkering with some critter notes I have stuffed inside the Red Box. (unfortunately I seem to have forgotten to write down some crucial thought processes and am not entirely sure what all the notes were for. oops.)

Tomorrow might be Anima again, or Planescape ... or I might go pick up that shiny new Shadowrun book that just arrived at the FLGS. Or I might bring Mutants and Masterminds to work instead, seeing as I've been reading a steady diet of the Legion of Super-Heroes for a week.


I don't believe in edition wars.
I don't believe in game wars, either.

X: Xenogears: A Rope Of Robots

I can only hope my games are half so awesome.

No, seriously.





"I did not betray you on purpose! I just decided to ally myself with a group bent on the destruction of everything you have spent your life trying to build! Sometimes people just grow apart!"

W: Watery realms ...

One of these days, I will run an aquatic/undersea/marine-based campaign. Whether the main action is on a scatter of islands with some submarine facets, or primarily under the waves with a bit of activity on the surface -- or, hell, just plunk a campaign in the Plane of Water and be done with it -- it shall be done.

I have an abiding fascination with watery realms and aquatic adventuring, all the better when mixed with ice and snow; I suppose this can be blamed on my native stomping-grounds, but the careless abandon with which I'll mix up my critters, places and even climates probably more resembles a jigsaw of oceanic concepts than anything else. Unfortunately, an aquatic setting is even more specialized than some of the other special campaign types I've bandied about and no one's quite gone for the idea yet.

Hell, I even have a watery/icy world that's something of a slowly budding pet project which would be ideal for a more sci-fantasy sort of game, with periodic hibernatory freezing and other such fun things.

Aah well, back to the musing ...

V: Bloody Vampires ...

Vampires are one of those fictional critters that I've never, ever liked. Not in fiction (especially not in this day and age *twitch*), and not particularly in my roleplaying games either. I'm quite bloodsuckered out, thank you, and I have no desire to change this fact.

(which isn't to say that I don't like tossing around various sorts of blooddrinking, soul-sucking beasties. but they aren't tricked out with the traditional vampire trappings, whether warped or played straight.)

I'd like to blame this on the obsession that many of my cohorts in university had with Vampire: the Masquerade, because that would be the easy answer -- but they were about as interested in every other White Wolf game, and I was and am quite interested in those. But despite a few attempts on my part Vampire left me by and large uninterested except for the spinoff Kindred of the East, which -- being more "ghosts returned from the Hells inhabiting (usually) their own corpse" -- kind of dodged the vampire tropes in any case. It was more entertaining watching the Vampire fans get irked as the local Werewolf player (me) knew their game better than they did than to actually play a vampire.

In other games, vampires still don't do it for me. In D&D anything a vampire can do a well-chosen fiend (usually a baatezu/devil) can do just as well or better; in a more science-fiction game a soul-eating psionic of some kind will fit the bill. I just don't go in for the modern vampire tropes (I'm rather allergic to that particular kind of whining angst), and the old tropes wore thin a long time ago.

U: Undermountain and megadungeons

Some years back I owned the Undermountain boxed set (as well as the second boxed set, but that one sucked so we won't speak of it). It wound up getting sold in a certain situation we shall not talk about and I have a line on acquiring a replacement copy. The thing is, I mostly want it for the reading and the occasional odd inspiration borrowed from a room description, or maybe to crib a cluster of rooms from a section of map to spin my own dungeon from.

I never could -- and still can't -- fathom actually running Undermountain as-is. This has nothing to do with the basic Realmsian nature of the beast (when I had the set I wasn't even touching FR materials in the main; if Undermountain was going anywhere it was, somehow someway, going beneath Sigil), but with the basic nature of the thing.

It's a megadungeon, and I don't do megadungeons.

Not that I have anything against the basic concept, mind you -- sometimes I wonder if I'd had more time as a player and less as the DM, I'd find them more appealing -- but I just don't get megadungeons. They feel like a combination of repetition and randomness that just doesn't appeal to me; I like my killing-and-looting spots to be compact and self-contained, and I don't go for the "bigger is better" route even when I'm not writing microdungeons alllll~ the way at the other end of the scale. Neither does the "mythic underworld"/strange dark limbo-esque concept of a megadungeon fly for me, because I don't fancy the dungeon-as-mythic-underworld trope either.

(why yes, I think those two things likely march hand in glove.)

So when that unspoken time of the weeding of game material hit, Undermountain was on the chopping block. I do miss it, though, because I used to read the big book fairly frequently as game materials go, and if I can replace it I will. Because if there's one thing that it -- and megadungeons in general -- do pull off for me, it's inspiration.

T: The trees, the trees

In Dragon #125, Ed Greenwood had an article on the trees of the Forgotten Realms; lovingly describing the physical forms, colours, preferred climates, types of wood, and purposes of a swathe of fantastical greenery. This article's contents would subsequently be republished in a few FR products -- one off the top of my head is Volo's Guide To All Things Magical -- and one could take that as a sign of the staying power of trees ...

... Or, being more accurate, the staying-power of this kind of detail.

The Realms gets a lot of flack for its detailed setting, and as far as some of the NPC individuals and organizations go I can understand that. But to give slices of how-things-work, the kind of information that, offered in a small capsule of data, can give a flash of insight into how a world is meant to work by its creator? I could eat that like candy (well, pizza maybe, I'm not much for sweets) and I try to evoke at least an inkling of world-detail in what I write.

My world-building projects, especially, hinge on subjects much like Ed Greenwood's trees; though I'm painting with a broader brush yet, I want to know and have at hand the trees in those places, and yes the animals and the types and make of clothing and all the rest. I want to be able to answer people's questions when they ask "so what grows in that place, and what do people do with it and how?"

It's not for everyone, and that's fine by me. Hell, a lot of the detail I work on may never see the light of day. But I know the trees, and that's good enough.

S: Spelljammer

Aah, my other beloved campaign setting -- though, ironically enough, one I have never managed to actually run though I tinker with the setting all the bloody time. (reasons for this are varied and in some cases withheld to spare someone who crops up on this blog from time to time ~)

Spelljammer was by and large already on the way out by the time I seriously dug into 2e, but that didn't stop me from pining after the material. It took some doing -- and moving away from the virtual barrenlands of my native terrain -- but I snapped it up and have been happy as a clam ever since.

I mean come on. Giant space hamsters. Of course I love Spelljammer ;3

Joking aside, those same hamsters and other strange critters seem to have cursed the setting with a label of "goofy" and "stupid" that it doesn't really deserve. Are a lot of the SJ monsters weird? Sure they are, just like the bizarre critters found in classic scifi. Is the idea of sailing ships flying through space stupid? Well, I guess that depends on just who you ask -- some of us enjoy the sheer out-there factor and, well, swashbuckling piratical derring-do. In space. Because it's just that awesome. That some other SJ features are the most gleefully, brazenly obvious easteregging of scifi and sci-fantasy anime (elven bioroids = Guyver units, to say nothing of the name "bioroid"; and the flamboyant reigar and their shakti are ripped clear out of Tenkuu Senki Shurato ... just the two most obvious examples) just adds to the fun.

I do have to address one SJ critter directly just on principle, and that's the giff. Here we have burly, hippo-headed humanoids with an obsession for both overly-grandiose military trappings and explosive firearms ... Now, I've seen giff called goofy, silly, and various other things that basically boil down to "not good for much other than bad comedy". Maybe I'm just looking at them sidewise, but it seems to me that hulking militaristic humanoids that look like one of the most dangerous mammals alive, with a fascination over the most unpredictable weaponry in the setting and no self-preservation instinct to speak of aren't goofy, they're downright impressively imposing (if not just a little panic-inducing). Especially when your enemies/antagonists/rivals have hired on a few ships' worth of them ...

The crystal spheres and phlogiston are a clever sendup of antiquarian cosmology, and I was sorely disappointed when the 3e/d20 Polyhedron mini-campaign "Secrets of the Spider Moon" discarded them in favour of more conventional space. (you even need to wear spacesuits. how .... mundane.)

But then SotSM was really a kind of disappointment all over, I'll freely admit -- there's adapting and updating, and then there's deliberate gutting. SotSM very deliberately removed everything that was Spelljammer except the concepts of ships in space and created a bland system (game and solar) that reads more like generic scifi than it's predecessor as often as not. And it was wrapped up in a kind of faux-grimdark set of trappings (dwarves as grim former illithid slaves, ditto half-orcs, gnomes had lost their planet and not a tinker in sight, etc etc) that all but screamed "Look! Look, a Spelljammer that you can take seriously we're being serious yes we are". The scant nods to original SJ's liveliness, like the spelljammer ace prestige class (or whatever it was called) were oddly dissonant.

Oh, and of course one of the major adversaries, the source of the game's name even, were the damned drow. Of course.

Bleh.

(at least the elves were rightfully called out as arseholes. that was kind of nice.)

Not being one to turn up fresh fodder, mind you, I've been happily tinkering around with SotSM to make it into a serviceable crystal sphere in Spelljammer proper. Because why not?

R: Rolling the Bones --

What little rituals do you have with your dice?

Do you have a special bag or box or suchsort container for them, maybe keep them in a specific place (or, if in a box, set out in a specific order)? Do you have certain dice for certain tasks -- one die for all your attack rolls, or one set for playing and one for when you're the DM?

Do you let other players use your dice, or even touch them? (a bit extreme, perhaps, but I've seen it in action) Or is there something, some little quirk or action, that you feel compelled to do with your dice before a game or even before an especially important roll --

It's strange how much we can get attached to these little bits of plastic (or metal, or glass, or odder things), and how much importance we place on them, all wrapped up at times in our own unique little superstitions. Then again, given that the very lives and luck of our pretendy-funtimes people depend on those dice, perhaps it's not so strange at all.

My dice live in a decrepit old buckskin pouch that I've had since, oh, grade school sometime; the very same pouch I've used since I started gaming. The cords have snapped and the leather's getting weak, but I just can't seem to bear replacing it -- a fellow geek at my worksite found me a very fetching faux-velvet bag (not Crown Royal but it's close!), but the most I've done is put the pouch inside the bag, along with two sets of White Wolf-themed dice that didn't fit in the ol' buckskin.

Along with my dice (two sets, one blue and one a weird pinkish-orange -- that second one is my DM'ing set -- and a fusty set of black Vampire dice a friend didn't want any more), the pouch contains the following:

- a faceted crystal sphere the size of a small grape, meant to be hung from a cord but the drillhole broke
- three coins: a (Canadian) penny, a Chinese coin of who-knows-what provenance and a Russian coin I found after a hockey celebration
- a thumbnail-sized beaded mouse, in silver beads with a black nose and blue eyes; it eats the dice lice (you know, the little bastards that nest in your pips and such and weight your dice)

If any of the little frobby things are taken from the pouch, I get stroppy.

I don't mind other people borrowing my dice, oddly enough, though I've gamed with people who refused to use them because they weren't their own dice. I'm not much for people just idly playing with my dice, though.

So how do you roll the bones?