ZSF: Badger's Hole Ep. 0

Official playtesting of ZSF kicked off Monday night with a fun session zero. The group of four players (and me) created their weird PCs. The character creation rules seem to work very well... no one was confused and we had four solid PCs, some backstories, and some reasons to be together after a little over an hour. Including banter and discussions.

We started the adventure during the final 30 minutes of play. The PCs had been hired to crew the SS Stymie on a mission to check up on a lost science faculty. No other details were given other than the pay of $200 up front and $300 upon completion. Not a fortune, but a solid little gig.

The characters are a bit of a mixed bag of weirdos.

Lucian Kane is a drug-dealing devil. Literally a devil, as that is one of the 12 Forms you can roll if you choose. He bought a fake engineering background to get hired on the gig.

Z the Inscribed is a kind of experimental artificial person. Genderless, sexless, and created to aid/serve humans on a cruise ship (I think). But a tattooing incident resulted in a death and now Z, uncertain if they did it on purpose or not, is on the run and in existential crisis mode.

Nurse Twitchet is a flytrap plant person in pants. They are out in the ZSF just looking for love, it seems.

Doctor B. P. Chitterbati is a spider person and an engineer who is for damn sure very well-read.

The PCs are on board. The ship was locked down suddenly... seems the good Captain Deuce failed to pay his docking fee at Hellion Cross space station. But some quick hacking by Dr. Chitterbati silenced the alert and freed the ship for takeoff.

Now the ship is in space and the PCs learn that there are others on board... two agents of SEDCA... the ZSF's version of the CIA. Who is really behind this mission??

Black Pudding Comics?

Been kicking this one around a while. Black Pudding Comics... drawing from the treasure trove of characters and ideas in the zine as well as my other related works (I mean, there are a BUNCH of characters in the Meatshields of the Bleeding Ox section). Why not tell some stupid little stories about those guys?

I don't want to limit the comic to just material from the zine. Instead, the idea is to do comics that riff on the entire meta-setting of Pan-Gea, the whole "mythos" as I like to call it. There's the ancient world of Pan-Gea itself, then the sword and sorcery world of Yria (which is where the zine lives, mostly), and finally the sci-fantasy space setting of ZSF - the Zoa Space Frontier.

So my idea is to do comics of any of these flavors because they all share the same backbone: the Pan-Gea mythos. The gods and demons such as the Sun and Moon and Hunter Raven and the Worm Witch, and so on. These are ideas that have lived in my brain and in my creations for decades. A sandbox to play in. Might as well play, right?

Right now it looks like I have quite a bit of finished material that would fit nicely into the book, mixed with new stuff I'm working on.

Disclaimer: I'm high on the idea right now and it's Saturday night. This could all crash and burn. I'm just daydreaming here. We'll see. 

I mean, look at all these goofy bastards.

 

Ink Talk Too

Update to my constant preaching about how much I love Sailor Kiwaguro ink.

My second bottle of the stuff went gray. I don't know how or why, but it just happened. One day I'm using it fine and it's as black as ever (which was always very dark gray, not as black as Noodler's for example). Next day I grab my brush pen and it's like... "Oh, is this the gray inked one?" But no.

I inked up a new pen with Sailor.. the ink was gray. Or, at least, much grayer than ever.

Turned the bottle over to show no residue at bottom.

See that gray bot? That's using black ink.

Theories include ink separation, which is dispelled by the image above of the upside down bottle. Another theory is light exposure. But the ink has always been at my desk, which has no sunlight. Nothing has changed.

I dunno. It's fine, though. I'm still going to use it all, because I enjoy artifacts of physical media more than I ever have in my entire life.

I don't know if this is a common thing for the Sailor inks or not. I haven't done a ton of research on it.

More ink talk here.

ZSF Update

I've posted many times about this game and I've changed my mind almost every single time. Last time I talked about the game system, it was based on the idea of getting "successes" on rolls. Same concept as used in games like Vampire: the Masquerade.

But I've since decided against that. The "final" playtest form is a simple 2d6 additive roll, with various conditions for adding more dice, getting doubles, and so on.

Other than that, things remain mostly the same. The character sheet elements, which I've been teasing for over 2 years now, remain the same.

Playtesting soon. The game is reaching a form that I'm comfortable with. I might have too much material going on. I don't know yet. It's a big world and I just keep having ideas to fill it up. Thankfully it's the whole damn galaxy so there's plenty of room for it.

 

Dawegama Brush Pen

A couple years ago for Xmas I bought myself a bunch of brush pens to try out. I have been using a few of them consistently, but there were a couple I hadn't yet cracked open.

Recently I inked up this Dawegama fountain brush pen, a Chinese pen from what I can tell. Very cheap at less than $10.

It has a metal body and a snap on cap that, honestly, snaps very nicely. Cheaply made, the pocket clip is janky and wiggly. Which is fine for a cheapo.

It has a built in plunger feed. You dip the tip into your ink, then slide the plunger up to suck the ink into the chamber. The body screws off in a less than satisfying scratchy way. Not very precise tooling, doesn't feel like it'll ever seal quite as tightly as you'd want.

The tip is very soft and flexible with real brush fibers. But it isn't precise either. It doesn't come to a consistent point. You cannot get a consistent line. But you can get a huge range of thick to relatively thin, making it a useful wash or fill tool where precision isn't your primary concern.

One drawback is the body is thin so the ink chamber doesn't hold a lot. It holds slightly less than a more typical pen, from what I can tell. I say this because I burned through the chamber very quickly the first time I used it. Or it felt that way, anyway.

Like the Yongsheng 3009 (another cheap brush pen), this one gets a 2 star rating. Not the worst, but not great. I might go 2.5 out of 5... it does feel slightly better than the Yongsheng to me. For price, it's well worth having one just as an ink fill tool to play around with. But I don't see myself using this for any kind of profession or precise work. This is a sketching tool.

Here's my guide to brush pens, if you're interested. 

ZSF Character Sheet Deep History

My space fantasy RPG ZSF is on the front burner again. It is an adventure game set on the Supercalla space highway. I begin playtesting it in a month or so. This is probably the first game I ever designed around a character sheet, which I created before making any game rules. I'd say this isn't a bad way to do it, though I would caution doing it exactly how I am.

I drew tons of these character sheets between 2023 and now and I haven't changed the elements. I'm locked in. These are the elements I used to design the game. I refused to change them. Why?

Because I gave it a shitload of thought and these are the elements I need for this game. The skill list (abilities, attributes) includes the six things that all spacers will do in this game, over and over. Explore, Drive, Fight, Operate, Shoot, and Talk. Everything else can be a Trait.

Anyway, here's the first two sheets I ever did. You can see in the first one that I was not 100% locked in but by the second sheet... I found it.

The first ZSF sheet.

 

This is the second one, on the next page.

To demonstrate how this sheet hasn't changed... here's the most recent one I did.

I think the elements are mostly self-explanatory, but here's a rundown of what they mean.

EDFOST: This dumb acronym stands for Explore, Drive, Fight, Operate, Shoot, and Talk. The Skills of the game. Most of the action rolls are based on one of these. One early feedback from my group was "Edfost sounds stupid"*. Fair enough. But it's how I have enshrined it into my brain.

So I built some lore into the setting. The names Ed Fost, Stef Do, and Fot Sed are the equivalent of John Doe or Jane Doe. Ed Fost himself was apparently a real guy. Some factory working schmuck who got used by the system and now his name and face are the standard for a generic person. I think that's kinda funny.

Never trust anyone who says their name is Ed Fost.

DEF: This is Defense. It reduces damage and comes from armor and shields and stuff.

LP: Life Points, which work exactly like Hit Points.

SP: Space Points, which are like XP that you spend to help change and grow.

Aces: These are luck points that let you absorb damage, improve rolls, and add little narrative flairs.

Name, Form, Background, Gear: These all seem self-explanatory. Form is what you are... like a green bubble headed guy or a robot.

Traits: These are things outside normal Skills. Not just skills and powers, but relationships and stuff. They add to dice rolls.

$: Money. To buy ship stuff, cooler gear, road snacks, etc.

The game is built around these pretty simple concepts. Dice rolls are probably mostly about shooting monsters, hotwiring spaceships, and fast-talking alien leaders.

My current thought is to publish the game in the form of a series of zines. But it is still very early and I might change my mind.

BPPB Errata 1

As I find errors the Black Pudding Play Book or they are pointed out to me, I'll post about them here, as needed. Since this is just one item to discuss... would this be "erratum"?

Page 22, the Vulgar Grimoire:

Magic Missile says it has a duration of 1 turn. There are two ways to handle this.

1) You can cast MM and the missiles will hover or be on your person for 1 turn (about 10 minutes). You can loose them at will anytime during that duration, regardless of initiative. That could be handy since the spell never misses. But you might not need it in 10 minutes... so that's a risk.

2) Just ignore that and treat it as an instant cast, like every other iteration of the spell.

Midaka Maps

Everyone who became a DM in their youth created their own fantasy world. Mine was called Midaka. It grew out of the imaginings I had as a young teen alone in my room, creating characters, making up backstories for them, creating castles they lived in, and so forth. Eventually I drew these maps of the Old and New lands of the east and west.

I have a few binders of lore about this setting, old and musty and full of embarrassing content. I might scan a bunch of it eventually. I don't know. For now I have a few scans here and there and the material is safely stored away once again, probably to be found by my kids when I'm dead. Possibly tossed out, who knows? (I kid... I think they would keep this kind of personal stuff. But that's really their choice, not mine.)

Maybe I'll post these maps again later and talk more about them, unpacking some of the stuff you see here. Like what the hell is Curab's Anomaly? There's some deep lore about that, I think. A wizard, a betrayal, a rift in reality. Stuff like that.

 

Black Pudding Play Book

The Play Book is now live! Go forth and dice.

PDF is PWYW (pay what you want). Get if free if you ain't got no money. It's all good.

You can get the hardback + PDF if you're a high roller.

 

BPPB Print Proof

I got the Black Pudding Play Book print proof and it looks pretty awesome. I'm extremely proud and excited about this book!

One tweak: I'm going to adjust the cover art because I don't like how it looks off-centered. It's almost impossible to predict exactly how it will look via print-on-demand, but just nudging it over or something should do the trick.

There are some drawings in the book that appear more gray than black. This is because when I do scans, I usually try to maintain something of the original brush strokes and pen strokes. I like it that way. I'm sure someone will think it doesn't look good, but it's 99% on purpose.

This was a true labor of love. The work was done over the course of years. This really is my personal B/X table book.

I'll post again once it goes live.