"The most beautiful game product I've ever seen"

The legendary Tim Kask--first editor of Dragon Magazine, publications editor for TSR back in the day and all-around old school legend did a rare--and pretty gushing?--video review of our lil game book we just released.

“One of the most extraordinary products that I have ever seen in all my years in the game business...It defies just about every precept of good publishing and yet it is probably the prettiest, the most beautiful game product I’ve ever seen”.

One of the guys who invented the hobby just said our take on it was as good as it gets. I don't know what else to say after that? Go buy Nebulith?

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Some Notes on Stokely's Birthday Game, Demon City and (mostly) Nebulith Now That Its Out

Good morning. 

Stokely's LOTR Birthday Party

Stokely wanted to have a Lord of the Rings costume party for her birthday so I put together a party game for it: Basically I used miniatures and other D&D stuff to make a Candyland-style game board with two pieces (goblin, hobbit) and the way each team/piece advances is do what's on a series of index cards. They had things like: 

-Arm wrestle The Balrog (Lisa)—if you win go ahead 2, if you lose go back 1.

-Describe in detail how you would slay a dragon. For each guest who says your plan is good, move forward 1 point, maximum 3 points.

-Get a snack. Share it with other guests at the party without using your hands (or theirs). You have two minutes. You move forward 1 space +1 per guest who shares with you, maximum 3 spaces.

Etc.

This was a simple game but easy for guests to tune into and out of, so it worked. Stokely was really happy how the party turned out so feel free to adapt the basic idea for any porn-star-birthday/LOTR cosplay parties you run.

Weapons and Demon City

 

Saw Weapons the horror movie by Zach Cregger, the former sketch comedy guy who also directed Barbarian. 

I liked it and it's a very Demon City movie in that it has a whole ensemble cast, different kinds of normal people with different kinds of normal skills, participating in investigating the Horror each in their own way--and not in a typical "there's four of us on this camping trip, oh no now we're getting chopped up!" way. And the way it ends is awesome and totally something a PC would do.

The Party in The Peacock Isles

In our home campaign, the party landed in The Peacock Isles (fake India) and took on Nassim's Sleepless Army--a convoy of drug addicts on elephants. The party was clever and (after a lot of arguing) trapped 150 bad guys and their elephants and took them out with no casualties without even a tense moment EXCEPT when one of the party members started looking for some of the mind-control crystal meth on the ground and immediately, mid-fight, snorted it just out of sheer role-playery. Despite everything he seemed surprised that it immediately meant he was mind-controlled by the bad guy. Luckily/unfortunately somebody else had a Remove Curse right there.

Nebulith Notes

Now that people actually can get their hands on Nebulith I'm seeing the first impressions (they seem to like it) and so I know there's an actual audience for behind-the-scenes notes on it. So here goes:

-There's a really good Samurai Film Festival right now at Alamo Drafthouse theatres, and there's like 20 of those in the US so if you live near one, enjoy! Three or four of the movies on Nebulith's recommended reading/watching list are playing between now and early September--I just got to see Lady Snowblood on the big screen last night and it was like drinking angel blood straight from the vein.

-Obviously the name of the book isn't Japanese. Alex came up with the idea of the volcanic cloud that froze into stone as the main Crazy Idea in the setting and I came up with the name for it (nebula latin for mist/cloud and lith being stone). He liked the new word so much he wanted the book to be named that. I wanted something more Japanese-sounding because I wanted people who might get it to, like, know that was the idea--it was Japanese. I knew agreeing on some other name would take forever so I gave in.

-James Raggi, the publisher, says this is his favorite of my books because in addition to everything else, it gives a sense of how ordinary people really live there. For the record, I hate the (two-page) section on ordinary life in Awa Nikko because I do not care. The last thing I want to hear about is what ordinary village life is like and all the research revealed it is exactly as boring as every samurai movie makes it out to be. Any GM who can't make up a regular village and any player who is mad that the details of a regular village aren't correct are people I want nowhere near me. But, its only two pages.

-I am also aware that there's a contingent of gamers (Prince, for instance) who seem almost hell-bent on being a caricature of conservatives in an '80s movie who not only get mad when things are creative in RPGs but will actually say it like that. Not "this isn't creative its just bad" but "I literally don't want creative things" Here is one example:

A fantasy idea in a fantasy game? This must mean its gonzo, yikes! How do I even run this?

They like the old TSR products that take 30 pages to tell you that in the Eastern-Europe-based setting people dress like Eastern Europe and eat things you might find in Eastern Europe. It is God's own mystery why any of these people are near this hobby but ok.

They may really like those two pages.

-A lot of what we did here was me looking at the old Oriental Adventures and going "Ok, what didn't work here?". Zeb Cook, the author, was on the committee that gave me a Three Castles Award and I loved his book for introducing me to the kappa and the hengeyokai and all that jazz but in terms of gameplay it wasn't an epic leap forward from what we already had. I looked at each part that was supposed to feel different in a chanbara, martial arts epic or Asian myth than it did in my conception of a Western dungeon crawl and tried to tweak and shove until it got there.  The martial arts were problem one: in OA they just feel like more numbers without much more flavor added.

-Lots of people have right away said the book looks good. Thank you thank you it took three years. Most people haven't gotten a chance to play yet but once you dig in, I think the main exciting part, which won't be obvious until you play, is the classes and martial arts.

Inexperienced gamers might be looking at them and going "Ok, I see a ninja, I see a flying kick, so far so expected..." but if you actually know your way around an Old School game you'll notice how they work differently than both standard OSR characters and 5e-style ones.

PCs get some martial arts abilities. A few come with your class, but the majority are random depending on your class and/or the martial arts school you choose. As explained in the text, they're mechanically not much different than finding a magic item--you have a special thing that you can do in a fight. 

The abilities are intentionally not mathy and tend to involve a lot of either-/or- mechanics: Ascending Technique lets you extra-fuck-with anyone nearby that an ally has already hit, for instance.

At first or second level, they're just nice to have but whatever. At higher levels however, they begin to stack, like, now you're hitting people more than once per round, now you do an additional effect each time you hit them, now your ally has an effect that they can trigger because you knocked over the bad guy, etc.

Add to this the Yuta (local medicine woman) class which has ritual abilities like the Yuta's curse (anyone who attacks you gets a form of open-ended but limited curse of your own design) and the combats in this game go absolutely nuts.

In playtests, they consistently feel like they give a level of dynamism (you're up, you're down, you're grappled, you're inside-out, you lost your sword) and surprise that goes beyond the usual old school while avoiding the bean-counting of 4e-style tactical combat and the winner-is-the-one-who-talks-most style some indie games fall into. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised, but you may have to roll some dice to do it.

Alright bye.

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Nebulith and the New Red & Pleasant Land Are Now Available

Last week I was talking to James (in a conversation that will soon be available) and I said "Well you can have the conservative argument against free speech or you can have Black Sabbath and the OSR made its choice long ago." 

Today Ozzy's dead. He created some of the only important art that was also actually good in the history of the world. The party in Hell tonight will be the greatest since the Fall of Man.

In other news, kids, there's product.

Here's a video:

Nebulith is a new far-eastern setting, several years in the making, with all the things that implies: martial arts, samurai, ninjas, katanas--but also a lot of twists brought to the table by my collaborator, Alex Hopson, who wanted to make a setting based on his home, in Okinawa--and based on a very cool idea: a miles-high plume of smoke from one of the island's volcanic peaks has been frozen into stone, colonized by creatures, and that's where a massive dungeon is. Alex enlisted native Okinawan friends and his wife's family (locals) to help keep us honest about Okinawan culture.

Personally, I worked hard on two things in particular :

First, to present samurai, ninjas, martial-arts et al with genuine new playable depth but do it in a way that did not complicate the game past what old school players want in an exploration-heavy game where a new PC can fit on a 3x5 card. To this end I made a lot of random level-up tables (like this --and what's in Frostbitten and Mutilated and Red & Pleasant) and designed modular rules which made wu-xia style combat blend into standard old school play.

We playtested the new classes (Samurai, ninja, pirate, karate master, kijimuna hunters--Okinawan elves-- and the local spellcasting women of Okinawa--the Yuta) against western equivalents in a series of extremely fun playtests and it seemed to work out very well.

The second challenge was to make the characters, cities, dungeons, castles and creatures of our little world of Awa-Nikko look as badass to you as it did in our head.

I hope I managed it.

As for Red & Pleasant Land--it's the Alice-In-Wonderland-But-Vampires setting which sold so many copies it was the first product to get Lamentations of the Flame Princess out of debt and won so many awards the people mad about it all decided to lie about rape. I decided to sue some of them and that worked--at which point Molly at Fierce Ponies decided to reprint it.

These are uncompromised works, both made with absolutely no attention to what the market wants or whether it'd please anyone else. We made the books we wanted to for the games we want to play.

If you support them loudly and in public, we can keep doing that.

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We Talk About Carcosa, Realms of Chaos, Book Design, Record Collecting and more

James Edward Raggi IV, owner of Lamentations of the Flame Princess and I made a video--the second episode of "Educating James"--we start out talking about the relationship between his record collector mentality and the design of LotFP books and move on to talk about a bunch of other game and game-adjacent things.

00:00 Intro 00:46 James’ Record Collector Rant 04:17 Vornheim As Zine 06:08 James Vs The Human Race 11:04 On Fancy Game Books (including Carcosa) 17:05 Zak’s Favorite Fancy Books (Including Realms of Chaos and Mayfair’s DC Heroes) 23:38 On Book/Product Design (including Nebulith, the LotFP core book, Vampire: The Masquerade, Deities and Demigods, AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide) 33:50 Design and Characters (including Seclusium of Orphone) 41:16 Vibes 44:34 James Talking About Vinyl 46:07 More Book Design (including Outcast Silver Raiders) 47:59 Fascination (including Warhammer Fantasy and TSR UK) 50:43 Keep on the Borderlands modules 54:26 The Hobbit Movies 58:00 The One Thing James Hates (more about record collecting--and tunnels) 1:00:53 Coda (including Akira Kurosawa’s Ran)

The next episode will be spicy--we argue about free speech.

D20 D&Dables from Kirby's Thor

This isn't the first time I've stolen D&Dables from Thor. Which makes sense--it's been published once a month for like 50 years. Today we go back into the early days of Jack Kirby's Thor...

1. This awesome map. South is Earth? And check the bottom right--did you know Asgard had a mall?

2. A crypt containing Merlin. Or whatever powerful wizard. Of course he wakes up when it's opened, but consider this: he doesn't. The PCs open the crypt, they see its a powerful wizard, totally undecayed. And they're covered in valuable and powerful grave goods and...do they dare touch anything? Will that wake Merlin? Maybe they should just walk away? Maybe touching him inflicts a curse? That's ten minutes of watching players freak out and argue with each other, minimum.

3. Speaking of curses, when was the last time someone inflicted a Midas touch on one of your PCs? Everything they touch is gold? Or stone? Or tar? Anything so long as it would be very inconvenient if your armor was made of it.

4. This is a good plot. Stick this jerk on your hexmap:

5. What does it look like once the PCs are sold to the trolls?

6. Here's a weird problem you can give an order of paladins. Maybe it's a curse on a PC that they can never harm any living thing, maybe its a group of hostile knights who are mad at the PCs for swatting flies:

7. Good idea for a magic item: it can slice a hole in space allowing the atmosphere of one place to appear in another:

8. We all know that satyrs and centaurs love to frolic in the glade but when was the last time you actually had a party see them dong that?

9. Here's another challenge for PCs like the paladin thing--defeat the living statue without damaging it because it is a sacred symbol to the locals.

10. Portal to the home of the gods, hidden in the land of the giants.

11. Mountain marauders seeking a mighty item in a ruin rumored to contain demons.

12. Not quite ordinary paralysis or "hold"--your feet are just stuck to the floor.

13. Magic axe that can slice a hole into another universe.

14. A Shadow Chamber. Love a Shadow Chamber.

15. Wind Giants in a nameless land. 

16. This Celestial Chess game is cool and the chess pieces are clearly some D&D guys.

17. The Tower of Telescopes?? Each one surely sees in a different way. 

18. The enemy lies on the far side of the Boiling Plain!

19. A plot to suss out suspected treachery: It is announced that a warrior of the court is banished and must now roam unprotected. Whoever plans to ambush them is the traitor.

20. The Queen of the Giants is normal-sized and hot.

Alright, thanks for stopping by, catch you again in a few galacto-days!

Internationally Acclaimed Author Lydia Davis Discussing The RPG Community Specifically

Lydia Davis may be a name unfamiliar to gamers but she is no slouch. She got a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit medal and a Booker Prize.

Here is the story, in its entirety:

Fear

Nearly every morning, a certain woman in our community comes running out of her house with her face white and her overcoat flapping wildly. She cries out, “Emergency, emergency,” and one of us runs to her and holds her until her fears are calmed. We know she is making it up; nothing has really happened to her. But we understand, because there is hardly one of us who has not been moved at some time to do just what she has done, and every time, it has taken all our strength, and even the strength of our friends and families too, to quiet us.

Imagine my surprise at finding here, specifically, in short story form, writing about RPGnet, StoryGames.com, the Forge, etc. and the many other hugbox communities that caused trouble online because of their desire to comfort their local lunatic.

I have written these things many times myself, but nobody really took it to heart.

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The Theory of the Labyrinth

A good part of the magic of D&D is from a specific aesthetic effect it shares with several other types of fiction that I'm going to call The Theory of the Labyrinth.

It's this:

So theres

• The Known
• The Unknown, and
• The Labyrinth. 

The Known is like: so you go to Boston, you see a statue of a man in the town square. Who is it? George Washington. Easy to know who that is, why he has a statue here, what it means. You eventually ignore it because its so familiar and easy to understand, it's as unremarkable as a chair--despite the remarkableness of George Washington as a figure. 

The Unknown is, like, you go to the desert and see Newspaper Rock. This is the Unknown. No-one will ever be able to explain all these glyphs, painted across centuries, they are forever a mystery. Intriguing and a spur to the imagination but ultimately you know you will never understand it the way you do the George Washington. You won't access the lives of the people who made them, you won't be able to see what this meant to them--it is -unknown-and also, to a certain degree, not-knowable. It is from a time with no written records and oral traditions conflict. 

Then there's The Labyrinth:

You go to Croatia or something. You're in a tiny village. There's a statue of a man on a horse. You are with a French friend, a Spanish friend, you ask them "Who is the man on a horse?" they shrug.

Now you know this:

That guy has a name--you don't know it but he does. You can ask around and go to some archives and find out who he is, why he is important, what he did in this tiny village, this is --you know-- technically all knowable despite the fact it reaches into the distant past. 

You don't know if it'll mean anything or be relevant once you find out--you also don't know if you do the work to find out whether it'll just go in one ear and out the other. You don't know how connected it is to your current concerns (perhaps not at all, perhaps very much so) , but you know that it is both real and--to you--unknown. You -could- find out. And this weird in-the-middle space is where megadungeons live. Even for the DM--they can't take it all in just by reading it, they can't say how it'll play, it always represents more knowledge than a person can hold in their head. So it is an object of eternal fascination, even once it's explored. 

It is a Rabbit Hole. You can go down it. There is definitely -something- there.

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Although The Labyrinth effect requires reference to the past, it is (in my reading, anyway) most common in modern authors who marvel at the complexity of the past as an aesthetic effect in itself.

Labyrinth-aesthetics in literature are frequently the result of an American author's encounter with a culture that has a long(er) and less morally-legible recorded history. The author from the younger country is more capable of being dazzled by the vastness of these functionally-infinite stories.

So: Thomas Pynchon encounters Europe and the tangled international histories that lead to WW2 in his labyrinthine novel Gravity's Rainbow.

Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges encounters the world of Old Europe inside his library and explores bookishly infinite imagined pasts in his short stories.

William Burroughs, HP Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith also partake on occasion--though their fascinations often lie further east.

And, of course, Gary Gygax, Arneson and co encounter versions of European history (via fantastic fiction and realistic wargames) and turn it into D&D, a great engine of infinitely explorable, infinitely interconnected histories.

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(I don't know about Tolkien. British but mazy. He always seemed to exert a storytellerish mastery over his fiction where you got the feeling he knew what every stray reference was to. I think his references to the deep time of his setting were to give a feeling of myth rather than an unknown of tangled obscurity.)

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I am tempted to wonder if this is one of the few clear advantages D&D's fictional background has over Warhammer's--the British authors at Games Workshop were happy to detail for you what life was like for everyone and exactly who all the bad guys were and what they were about (the better to make playable, legible factions), whereas D&D always pointed to ragged edges of the unknown--a lich is what now? The rakshasa is from India? How do you get there in Greyhawk? What is the Invoked Devastation? Who is Vecna and why are we only speaking of him in whispers?

The unfinished quality of the game fiction had a tacit flipside: if you played the game long enough you'd find out.

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HP Lovecraft, Racism, and Educating James--New Video

A new webseries (?)

Zak and James attempt to discuss Lovecraft and racism, while also bringing up: Jordan Peele, Lovecraft Country, Kingdom Death, Alien, Jaws, nerdy introversion, Taxi Driver, James’ Lovecraft-movie picks, Blue Velvet, James’ fear of stuffed animals and the sea, turn-of-the-century WASP atheism, avant-garde fiction and band-aids, amateur press associations, PG Wodehouse, Bertrand Russell on romanticism and Hitler, deer are scary, a plot hole in Lost Boys, X-Men vs Dracula and more

Keith Giffen Is Dead And He Was Better Than Anybody

Keith Giffen died.

He has been sick for many years, so it's not a surprise but, still, I'm sad.

If you look him up, you'll notice in all the comic book news site eulogies, he's weirdly hard to summarize. They'll say he created this or that second-tier character or contributed to an influential run you may or may not have read on a comic book you may or may have not have heard of.

This is fitting--Keith's style, like his art and writing--is hard to pin down.

Here's the splash page of one of his comics:

Again: this is what they call the splash page --the big announcement page to get you excited.

Batman's face is in shadow, Robin's facing away and would be unrecognizable if this were a black-and-white comic, and it took me, a huge Giffen fan, like, minutes to realize that what's going on here is there's a blue-clad figure (Clayface) in a hat holding a knife up to stab Robin. 

This is everything they tell people not to do in illustrator school. And Giffen was great at it.

Nobody can use the traditional comic bro vocabulary to explain why his comics were so good.

He also just kept evolving. All of these are the same guy:

Defenders 50, from the beginning of his career

Legion of Super-Heroes #1 when Giffen was a fan-favorite

Dr Fate limited series, when he started getting weird

Near the end of his first Legion run

His soup-to-nuts creation The Heckler

Another later-career all-Keith joint, Trencher. Scroll back up to the Defenders and compare

Throughout his career, Giffen was dogged by accusations of copying other artists--but this misses the point. Giffen was mr anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better. Or at least weirder. He was like the Ridley Scott of comics--Oh you made Barry Lyndon you say? Here's The Duellist. You made Dark Star? Here's Alien. Ben Hur? Fucking Gladiator. You made 2001? Star Wars? I made Blade Runner. 48 Hours? Thelma and Louise.

The early work--like that Defenders page at the top--owes a clear debt to Jack Kirby, but the dense, dark designs and schematic presentation are far too deadpan for Kirby. Keith caught a lot of slack around the time of that Dr Fate page for copying Argentine artist Jose Munoz--but Munoz had that loose, indie sensibility--he didn't have Giffen's full-color design sense. 

And what Giffen did with Munoz's style...

...he summons a bodiless mouth in mid-air to annihilate Batman with green vomit. Meanwhile, what's Munoz drawing? Some guys playing jazz?

I mean, if he's not going to use his style why not let Keith borrow it?

The next page down Giffen's starting to be influenced by Kevin Maguire...

...but whatever the fuck Colossal Boy's lonely shapechanging wife is doing to herself in panel two, Maguire would never. And that snap screwball-comedy transition to the angry-eye close-up? Pure Giffen.

A major reason Giffen's going to be hard to summarize is he did exactly the opposite of the conventional wisdom about what we're all supposed to like in comics.

If I was to try to summarize what that was, I'd say it was this sort of thing:

Ahhh, the podcasters sing, the storytelling. That story sure did get told. That robot definitely busted through that wall and Batman sure does look concerned about that explosion.

We're supposed to really like that. It's clear, it's accessible, it's emotional, it's simple, it's open, it's...meh.

Ever since Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics came out people have been talking like there's something to understand. Like: it's a fucking comic, dude. It's a form literally designed to be understood by schoolchildren. It's never hard to understand comics.

People praise comic artists so often by saying "the storytelling is so clear you don't even need to read the words to understand it, it leads the eye across the page".

Who cares? Giffen realized the eye would always get across the page sooner or later because there are panels and the page is a picture the person reading wants to look at because they bought the comic on purpose to look at it. Comics aren't rocket science.

Giffen went hard the other way. He made gorgeous patterns of color blocks and shapes on the page--and if they didn't tell the story all by themselves--oh right, there's word balloons.

What does it mean? Where is the story going? Who cares? Keith Giffen built comics as labyrinths of color, shape, continuity, reference, collage, image, jokes. They didn't invite you to understand, they didn't have epic character arcs of Campbellian heroics, they invited you to come get lost in the funhouse.

Keith Giffen's comics make you go "What the fuck is this?" and honestly--if you think how everybody who loves comics loves them because they picked up issue 456 of some random comic which was part 3 of a 6 part arc that got finished in some whole other series the next year by different people or loves them after finding some manga with a mythology that you have to get through 4 fanslations a Wiki and an anime to understand--that is what a lot of people want. They want to peel the arcana apart.

I loved Keith.

I hope someone picks up where he left off.