Notes on BPPB

And what, you ask, is "BPPB"? Well, it is the Black Pudding Play Book, of course.

Black Pudding issue 4 (2018) featured 15 pages of house rules under the OSR Play Book title. Black Pudding issue 7 (2022) featured a 17 page gazetteer and mythos for the world of Yria.

Black Pudding Play Book includes all those pages (with modifications), plus 32 more. It's a 64 page book.

Now, the plan is to simply release it as a PDF and POD on DTRPG. I am not planning a big crowd funding campaign or anything. The world is not good right now, prices are already high, I just don't feel it. I want to put this out there because I love it and I want to share it. The PDF will probably be Pay What You Want, just like the issues of BP have always been. The POD will cost money, naturally.

POD note: DTRPG requires a blank page at the end for their internal use. So the book will actually be 63 pages of content. But there's a random table on the back cover, which was meant to be on the interior. So that is your 64th page.

DESIGN NOTES

I have a lot of design notes, so I'll just keep this one a bit short and to the point, hitting on a few important ones I want to mention before I forget.

• I find that I use both GM and Judge. I won't change that. They are interchangeable.

• These are house rules for B/X. Hacks. I've developed them over a god damn decade now, playing here and there, and noodling about them all the time. They are the kinds of house rules I enjoy using. You might not like them all, and that's fine. You can pick and choose. But be aware that some of them are interdependent.

For example, Thief skills are based on making a Saving Throw plus ability score mod. If you abandon the single Save method, you need to consider which category of Saves to use for these skills, or default to a DC system like modern D&D. It's fine either way.

• Speaking of Thieves. I kept the XP requirements for the core classes unchanged. So Thieves have the lowest requirements. But in BPPB, Thieves are useful. They can DO THINGS. Their skills are good. I gave a balancing nod to this fact by making them a bit less combat-effective. Their to hit bonus is not as good as B/X. But that's ok. If you wanted to be a great fighter, be a god damn Fighter.

• Speaking of shitty fighting... I did not give Wizards much of a combat bonus at all. And I think that's appropriate. But I did give them SOMETHING. I don't see how you could work beside warriors for 5 levels, being in many fights, and not get a little better at fighting. So they do eventually get a bonus.

• I did away with spell levels. I don't need them. I retooled most of the 1st and 2nd level spells (and others) to be level-less. For both Wizards and Clerics.

• Speaking of Clerics... I have never been a fan of D&D Clerics. They are generic. Later editions did a better job making them cool, but still. I honestly favor a game without them. But I did include them in this one and gave them a lot of random tables for customization. They do have to make a Prayer Roll, just in case their gods decline their petition for a miracle. It's only fair. Oh, and Clerics can't heal very much. They can a bit, but not much. I increased the amount you heal by sleeping, which I much prefer.

• Speaking of classes... You can use any BP class you want, or any other class. It's fine. But the classes actually defined within this book are, in order of appearance: Fighter, Thief, Dwarf, Elf, Botten, Cleric, Wizard, Goblin, Lizz, Skeleton Warrior. That kind of represents the most common "adventuring types" found in the setting. There's a table showing the average distribution of classes, and I think "other" (BP classes like Eyeball) are about 5% of the total. But players don't choose based on that. They just choose. Or roll. Whatever.

I'll follow this rambling post up later with more information. The book is 99.9% complete. Everything is done from the cover to the back cover. But I need to give it a few more editorial passes, then put it into the right format and get myself a print copy before I go firing it out into the world. That being said, it will still be at least a few more weeks. Stay tuned if you like this kind of shit. 

Artists I Like: Stan Sakai

This week I'm looking at Stan Sakai... legendary creator of legendary rabbit samurai Usagi Yojimbo!

Usagi the protector... he's just a good guy, you know? He does the right thing most of the time. And his skills are off the charts.

He is brought to life by Stan Sakai's masterful pen. The stories are great. Simple, and direct. But it is the high quality linework that makes them stand out. There's a nifty walkthrough of his process on Stan Sakai's website.

I saw Usagi here and there as a youth but never in the wild, always in a magazine or something. I didn't get my hands on any of the comics until I picked up Fantagraphics' volume one collection. I was probably 30 by then. But since my 30s were extremely formative for me, artistically, it was good timing and I hope something of Sakai's magic rubbed off somewhere in my doodles.

Doomslakers to Black Pudding

In 2016 I was fishing around for a zine. I knew I wanted to make one, just wasn't sure what it was going to be. One of my early ideas was Claw Claw Bite, but that title was already taken by a Pathfinder zine, I think. A few days later I settled on Black Pudding.

But before all of that, there was Doomslakers! After all, I already had the blog. I don't remember why I didn't roll with Doomslakers as the title other than maybe I didn't want it confused with the blog. I'm not sure.

But here is the original cover for the first issue of what would become Black Pudding. Of course I used this art for Black Pudding issue 2... I felt like issue 1 needed to have an actual black pudding on the cover, so I drew one.

 

Artists I Like: Tony Salmons

In 1985, when I was 14, the Savage Sword of Conan issues 113 and 118 were published. The first had Earl Norem's Conan on the cover and the other featured a classic Joe Jusko with a bikini lady and Conan and a monster. You know the one.

In the back of each issue was an 8 page story. The first was called "A Quiet Place" and the other was "Alchemy", each written by Don Kraar and drawn by Tony Salmons*. My only knowledge of Tony Salmons came from those stories in SSoC.

Each story was short, brutal, and to the point. The first was about Conan, tired, wanting a quiet night of rest. But of course thugs had to ruin it and so they died. My favorite part of that story is when they kill all the roosters before they can crow so Conan can sleep.

I know Salmons has done other comic book work, but I'm not familiar with it. I never hear his name mentioned. What is his story? Did he give up on comics or just never make a huge splash? His pacing and choice of framing are incredible. I believe they informed my own instincts about comic book art. For example, the way Salmons makes little short series of silent panels and zooms in on details, such as Conan's horse being nearly dead from exhaustion or his sword being bloody as he rides up to the inn.

We get a lot of detail with very few lines. His forms remind me a little of Herb Trimpe and also Frank Miller. I'm not sure who is influencing who, but Trimpe obviously predates either Miller or Salmons. I would also say Mignola's later work has a touch of Salmons' charm, whether it was a direct influence or not.

*Let's give love to the letters: Jack Morelli on "A Quiet Place" and Diana Albers on "Alchemy".

Artists I Like: Amy Jean

Amy Jean is a funky artist who does a lot of music posters. I found her through falling in love with King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. Her style meshes perfectly with the band's aesthetic.

I would describe her work as funky, psychedelic, and blacklight poster style. Also... pinball machine backglass! Oh... and tee shirt ready.

 

Status and Doomslakers RPG Notes

What's going on with me right now?

Life is happening. Family life is pretty good. We're dealing with the dystopia of the United States one day at a time. How fucking hard it is to get rid of an obvious existential threat to your own nation? Pretty god damn hard, it seems.

But I digress.

Creatively: I'm in a weird place. I have not been drawing very much. I doodle here and there. But my main energy has been going into creating the Doomslakers RPG. That progress stalled a bit a few weeks ago as some drama creeped up, but I started running a playtest of the rules last Monday and I'm excited for that. I'm running The Gardens of Ynn by Emmy Allen using the Doomslakers rules. The setting is completely different, but this playtest kind of happened suddenly and I wasn't ready to run the full game with its own setting. Since I had been wanting to run Gardens for years, I seized the moment.

Here's a quick and dirty overview of the Doomslakers rules:

It's a d6 pool. Basic roll is an exploding 1d6 (1d6e). You add dice based on the skills you have, tools, and other factors. You need at least one success. A success is either 4, 5, or 6, based on difficulty and all that. It's a fairly standard success-based pool system.

Instead of hit points, you rack up damage. There's no upper limit for damage. If you take 6, you add 6 to your running total. At some intervals, you have to make an impact roll. This is a 1d20 roll + current damage. So if you have racked up 12 damage, you roll 1d20+12 on an impact table. The results range from minor hindrances (usually reduction of pool dice) to death.

So you can die in one roll from one blow.

There is a meta currency. Luck points are earned when you roll your lucky number in an action roll. Since the number is 1-6, it will come up pretty frequently. You will earn luck points multiple times per session. I hope that leads to players being willing to spend luck freely instead of hoarding it.

One of the things you can do with luck is defer your impact roll. Ultimately you must make the roll, but luck can put it off. There are other mechanics that can reduce damage. So the idea is you might be able to reduce your damage total before being forced to make an impact roll, thus giving you a better chance at not being killed or knocked out.

One of my concerns is that the impact rolls will be too frequent. I mitigated it by having thresholds for when they are made. You don't make one every time you get hit, unless you get hit pretty hard. But there are triggers that force the roll no matter what.

At the end of a fight, if you have any damage, you have to make that impact roll. Luck can't prevent it.

Anyway, that's the core mechanic of the game at the moment. It applies to all actions, not just fighting.

But I am toying with the idea of changing it to a d12 pool. The only reason for doing that is to get some granularity out of the numbers, which is just another tool in the kit. But that also makes luck points less frequent, so it might not be worth the trouble. I need those luck points flowing because they do a lot of heavy lifting.

The Doomslakers RPG itself is based on the setting (implied and explicit) of Black Pudding. It is an original system and has no direct basis in D&D... so it isn't a Black Pudding RPG, directly. Black Pudding zine remains a classic D&D based zine, at least for the first 8 issues. This game is a riff on the ideas within where you play the role of an agent of the Doomslakers Adventure Company, taking nasty, dangerous jobs in the seedy city of Seapath. If you see it in Black Pudding, you will probably see it in Doomslakers in one form or another.

True Metal: Attacker

I've seen the Attacker album Battle at Helms Deep floating around the internet for years but I can't remember actually listening to it until today. I didn't expect it to be awesome. But it is.

The sound is pure heavy metal. This was from 1985, merely two years after Slayer and Metallica debuted. Metal was just starting to develop sub-genres, but it would be a while before we became obsessed with such divisions. This isn't thrash, death, black, grindcore, or speed. It isn't power or pirate metal. It's just heavy metal. Thrashy crunchy riffs with soaring and screeching vocals, rock and roll rasping vocals, and hard rock drumming. Plenty of tempo changes and shredding lead guiarts.

It's a true metal masterpiece, if you ask me. This is in the vein of Saxon, Raven, Judas Priest, and Mercyful Fate.

 

Mighty

This blog is about me, the stuff I do, the things I like, and whatever else I want it to be about. Today I want to talk briefly about something that happened yesterday, completely unrelated to anything I normally post here.

Our dog Thor has died. He was a very small chihuahua. He was about 12 years old.

For the past year, he was very slowly declining. It started when he stopped being able to jump up on things. We got a dog ramp, which helped. But lately he was even struggling with the ramp.

But he was still pretty spry. He had a healthy appetite and barked a lot. He was fully mobile other than vertically.

He was my pal. If I was on the couch, so was he. He was not a player... he didn't have toys. He only had his people. The other dogs are toy fiends, but Thor couldn't care less about that. He wanted the treats and the snuggles and to bitch about the neighbors.

I loved him. It was a sudden, unexpected death. Based on our timeline, he was barking at the neighbors and doing his thing, then he was dead less than an hour later. When I found him, he was still quite warm.

Rest is peace, you annoying little friend. The house feels emptier.  

Artists I Like: Alexi Gorboot

Alexi Gorboot (Алексей Горбут) is an artists I know almost nothing about other than seeing his work on Instagram. It's van art ready-made for a blacklight and done up in a comic book style I really adore. He doesn't appear to have a website, so his main point of contact is socials like Insta and Facebook.

He has an intentionally classic-looking comic book art style with flat, vivid colors in the vein of someone like Skinner or Jason Galea. But I think his primary inspiration is simply old comic books. The colors in old comics are famously very flat and vivid (though faded and halftoned, depending on the era). I think Alexi is consciously emulating that vibe. I dig it.

Sketchbook Caramel

Another batch of recent sketchbook drawings.