Droono Duckshar

In one of the last Rabbits & Rangers games I ran, the PCs went up against Count Drake-Yulla in his forbidding haunted castle. They never encountered his arch-rival, Droono Duckshar the Fowl Wizard!

This was a random thing I drew last night. I am in the midst of a bit of creative blockage so anything I manage to put down on paper (digitally or otherwise) is a boost to my confidence.

This was interesting because the entire time I doodled it I was pondering the direction of the game. As it stands, R&R is a perfectly fine Labyrinth Lord supplement. You can see that I referenced several things from the book on this sheet. But the ultimate question I've been asking since the book came out is what is R&R going to be in the future? Is it a LL supplement or a game of its own? If a game of its own, then I have no reason to stick with pure D&D rules. I've posted many times about this topic. I have written lots of versions of the game that are not D&D-based. But something keeps me tethered to the old rules. It's as if R&R was always meant to be funny animals in dungeons... so why would I use alternate rules? I have no high-and-lofty theme in mind beyond funny animals with swords. I could write this as a standalone game with an original rule set, going the way of Ironclaw or The World Tree. And that would be fine, except I feel like anyone playing it will simply say "this is just D&D with different rules".

And yet there are plenty of people who will look at the current R&R and say "this is just more D&D stuff... with goofy talking frogs."

You can't please 'em all.

When I think about it and let my hair down, this whole thing can be summed up in a simple equation:

Looney Tunes + Conan + D&D = Rabbits & Rangers

So you'll know what to expect when I know what to expect.

Al-Qadim: Golden Voyages

Cover by Jeff Easley drums up deep sea fears.

It's no secret I have a late-blooming, slowly-flowering love affair with Al-Qadim, TSR's 1992 Arabian Nights style setting for AD&D second edition. In my humble opinion, Jeff Grubb knocked it out of the park when he penned Arabian Adventures, launching the setting proper.

I recently picked up ALQ1: Golden Voyages, one of several "sourceboxes" that were produced for Al-Qadim. The set, written by the famous David "Zeb" Cook, was in pristine condition, which always makes me smile. Cook was also the primary architect of the second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons... but he will always be remembered by me for giving us Star Frontiers.

Looking at the publication date of 1992 reminded me that in 1992 I was a young man, newly married, struggling in college to make the grade and make ends meet. I wasn't gaming at that time, though I wanted to be. I was out of touch with new games and I was starting to feel strong burnout at the oversaturation of my geek markets. I blame Todd McFarlane and the various pre-bagged alternate Spider-Man #1 comics that still sit in a box in my storage building to this day. I stopped buying comics because of you, Todd. And even though I wasn't gaming at the time I was keeping an eye on mall bookstore shelves. I was noticing the glut of TSR books. I was ignoring them, along with Vampire: the Masquarade and everything else.

(I have a contentious relationship with the 90s. I turned 20 in 1990 so that whole decade should feel warm and cozy to me. Yet it feels alien. And when I say I was "ignoring" things what I mean is I was constantly looking at these books when I was in a bookstore. Just not reading or buying them.)

Anyway... this box set would have been sitting on some bookstore shelf staring me in the face at some point and I probably just ignored it. It's one of those little gems of the past I wish I would have grabbed when I had the chance.

$18? I remember when box sets were $8!

Like the other box sets from this line, ALQ1 is a curious mix of love and inspiration with budget constraints. Or so it seems. Inside the box are 6 booklets, some monster sheets, a large folded map, and a DM screen. The materials are nicely rendered with solid art from Karl Waller, the primary artist for the whole series. The maps are by the great David C. Sutherland III, so they are quite good.

At first, I thought this set had a bit of a sandbox vibe. Each little booklet seemed to describe different islands in The Crowded Sea, also known as Bahr al-Izdiham. But upon further reading I believe this box set lies somewhere on the continuum between a scripted adventure and a wild west sandbox.

Book 1: Home Port is where the adventures begin. We get this curious little bit on page 2:

"Golden Voyages is a special adventure set for player characters using the AL-QADIM™ rulebook and is set in Zakhara, the Land of Fate."

This struck me as odd because there is no "AL-QADIM™ rulebook". The series was launched via Jeff Grubb's excellent Al-Qadim: Arabian Adventures book and followed up with ALQ1 and other box sets. It just seems odd that they would use the term "rulebook" in reference to a game accessory.

Book 1 goes on to describe the way the adventures in the box set are designed. The structure is described as having a beginning, middle, and end. The beginning is in Gana of the Pearl Cities, where the PCs are meant to be compelled to go sailing the Crowded Sea in search of a great treasure. The treasure itself might be one of several that are described. The reasons may be one of several offered, or something the DM cooks up on their own. In any event, the PCs ought to be on their way to adventure... the middle portion of the set. During this portion we get a genuine sandbox vibe. There is no script. There are many short "mini-adventures" presented in the various booklets. The DM is free to add new material and let the PCs wander as they will. But always there is some degree of pressure to get them to find the great treasure and return it to Gana, thus concluding Golden Voyages.

Naturally you can ignore all of that and just let the magic of the isles guide your adventuring path. The text might gently urge you to stick to the 3-part adventure structure but we all know DMs and Players are gonna do what they like anyway.

Cook seems to understand this quite well as he carefully walks that line between guiding you and scripting you. In the end, all he really intended was for your PCs to enjoy a Sinbad-style series of high seas misadventures:

"Although Golden Voyages has a beginning, middle, and end, very little about it is definite. There are several different ways the adventure can begin, depending on you and your player characters. During the middle section, when the characters are sailing about, there is no set order for the encounters. What the player characters encounter depends on where they sail. Like the beginning, there are several choices for ways to end the adventure. All these things are shaped by the interaction between the DM and his players."

Now, I don't have any complaints about this box set. For me, this is golden, as the name on the tin implies. But if I put on my critical hat for a minute I can comment on one thing about the presentation that might speak to the whole budget constraints comment I made above. And this is a statement that is true of all the Al-Qadim box sets I have seen so far. There is a tendency in these sets, and I believe with TSR in general as the 90s grinded them down, to re-use art. There are images I see in one book of the series that re-appears in another book. In ALQ2: Assassin Mountain, one of the books inside the box features the cover art from GAZ2: The Emirates of Ylaruam. In ALQ1, they just don't bother with covers for the 6 booklets. Which is absolutely fine, really. I just have this sneaking suspicion this is more of a budget thing than an aesthetic choice? Maybe I'm wrong about that.

A dancing fool of an ogrima!

The monster sheets are meant for the compendium binder, an idea of the early 2e era that I think was both beautiful and completely ridiculous. Beautiful because you could customize your monster manual to taste, adding new sheets from all the box sets they were putting out back then. Neato! But ridiculous because it's so ephemeral and delicate. Those sheets will get ripped and destroyed. We old school gamers like our sturdy hardbacks and saddle-stitched formats. Most of the Monstrous Compendium pages have the same format. There is a pic, stat block, and quite a lot of text describing the monster's appearance, habitat, lore, and how it fights. This was a tendency that probably grew out of those Ecology of entries in Dragon Magazine. Whereas B/X or 1e has relatively short, sparse monster descriptions, 2e tended to overshare. Anyway, the monster sheets in ALQ1 are slightly different because the front page gives you the stat block + page of text and the backside of the sheet is usually a full-page piece of art. Some of it pretty neat, such as the ogrima pictured left.

The six booklets. Slim but nice. Easy to navigate.

The booklets are actually really useful. If you only want to deal with running an adventure among the Djinni's Claws then you can just grab that volume and leave the others in the box.

A view of the inside of the screen and the folded map, plus monster art.

 The map is pretty great, as are all the Al-Qadim poster maps. They are large, colorful, and well-rendered to my non-cartographer's eye. They really invite you to explore this exotic land*.

Pretty sexy little DM screen.

The DM screen art is un-credited as far as I can tell. In fact, the only place in the entire box that tells you any credits is on the first page of Book 6: Map Booklet where it only states that Karl Waller did the illustrations. Since no one else is credited for illustrations other than Easley's cover art, I must assume that Karl Waller painted the DM screen. And a fine, fine job he did. As an aside... it's very strange to put the credits on the first page of Book 6. Normally there is an indicia or some kind of front page to a book where that sort of thing goes. But it's fine, really. Just not very clear. Does this mean that the credits are only for Book 6? I'm sure that's not the case, but it really isn't very professionally handled here. Clarity, people. Clarity.

Final thoughts: If Arabian fantasy filtered through Western eyes isn't your cup of tea, you will not like any Al-Qadim products. If it is, then I think you'll be compelled to dig this stuff as I do. I'm not going to argue that this box set or any of the others is flawless. Clearly they are not. There are editing problems, re-purposed art, and in the case of ALQ2 they even got the name of a book wrong on the cover... yikes! But on the whole, this is really solid, fun stuff. Karl Waller's art is quite good, in my opinion. His pen-and-ink work is similar to Easley, which might be why he's the guy doing it here. I have no foundation for that claim other than stylistically he hits the same niche and maybe that was an art editorial directive. Again, the maps are lovely and the overall construction of the Zakharan setting is alluring to me. I can feel the setting in my bones when I read about it. I know I'm bringing a lot of that to the table and reading into it, but that's how I feel about it. Now gimme a scimitar and get out of my way.

*Yeah, so basically Al-Qadim is just a cartoon of actual cultures, stories, and traditions. It isn't representative of those cultures in any meaningful way. It is a Western white dude's exotic power fantasy ala Lawrence of Arabia and, more directly, The Seven Voyages of Sinbad. And that's ok, I think. But it is important to recognize this fact and be sensitive to the thoughts of people for whom the ideas being cartooned herein are part of their actual cultural heritage. I don't believe Al-Qadim is mean or unfair to it's source material, but it is also not genuine to it. And in the pages of Arabian Adventures Jeff Grub makes it pretty clear he is only drawing inspiration from real history, Arabian Nights, and goofy Hollywood fantasies.

I watched Bredan Fraser's The Mummy a dozen times and will probably watch it a dozen more. One of my cherished memories from childhood is watching a Ray Harryhausen movie in the auditorium in first grade. I love this stuff, so I am right there with Grubb in his enthusiasm for the setting and I'm thankful he was involved in the project. I'm happy Al-Qadim is a thing.

Demodyn Character Class

Ah, Black Pudding. The zine you can eat with a fork. The hotly debated, much anticipated, Billboard Top 100 #69 debut pick! Yes, I am still working on issue #6. Off-and-on, here-and-there, when time, inspiration, and ability conspire to allow.

Here is another character class for the issue: the Demodyn, a little demon class. I sketched out the demodyn years ago in my sketchbook and they just sort of lived there, occasionally spitting fire at me until I did something with them.

On a side note... it's been a long ass time since I did comics. I was just thinking how much fun it could be to do a Black Pudding comic book. A fantasy romp wherein all the various character types, monsters, and NPCs of the zine appear. Yeah, that sounds SUPER cool. Main reason I'm not doing it (right now): comics are a lot of fucking work. I mean a lot of fucking work. You ever do comics? I did. I did a lot of them. For years. You spend weeks or months drawing 24 pages that people read in less than 10 minutes and then forget. Which is fine... it's fine, really. It's fine. But I think something kind of broke inside me back in 2010-2012 because I just fuckin' stopped doing comics at all.

Anyway... here's a B/X style character class for your demonic gaming needs. I wonder how these guys would play in S4: The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth?

G+ Warrior

G+ Warrior as character sheet. Because we should send this guy out like a champ.

Thoughts:

Fighter, because that's what I drew. And G+ has been a fighter over the years.

Level 8 because G+ started 8 years ago. It's approaching name level, but will be cut short by about 3 months, thus the XP just shy of reaching level 9.

Stats were a bit random, but I figured if this is a PC that made it they would have some pretty decent ones. G+ has been awesome but not perfect, so it's strong, smart, and definitely tough. But not always wise or agile. What is really excels in, I think, is personality. Because we made it that way.

I rolled the hit points. Because that's what you do. As you can see, poor bastard is almost down and there are no healing potions in the inventory.

+1 sword and +1 shield of course.

Drink stain, natch.

Lots and lots of other ideas could have gone into this but it was just a fun thing I wanted to do. So here it be.

Share as you wish.

"I got 2 hp left and half a can of diet soda... Let's DO THIS."

G+ Going Down Fighting!

Well, it's going down rather quickly and there's not much fight, but at least people are still posting to the end!

Bring it on, I can do this all day!

Krita vs. PS

She approached the elder ibberlings cautiously...

A bit of doodling in Krita. I enjoy drawing with Krita quite a bit more than Photoshop, however there are certain shortcuts and features in my old PS7 that I miss dreadfully.

Krita doesn't have good macros (yet). One of the macros I wrote for PS7 simply expands a selection, fills it with the foreground color, then deselects it. This is a time saver when doing big black fills and prevents those annoying ghostly white lines showing the edges of your fill area (the expansion of the selection takes care of this).

There's really one giant, huge benefit to drawing in Krita over PS7. I can draw at any scale and the lines are nice and smooth. In PS7 I have to zoom in very close to get the lines smooth. If I draw from a distance, the lines are jagged and wobbly like I have a problem controlling my hand. But that isn't the case with Krita. And I really like that.

IT'S A GAME?

I have a lot of random RPG thoughts, most of which are forgotten within minutes and never uttered. Maybe I should make a stronger effort to jot them down. Trouble is most of them are lame.

I was thinking today about the idea that all monsters and all magic in fantasy games should be unique. It's a fine thought. But there is a pretty good counterargument, with regard to playing D&D in particular.

D&D is a game. Specifically, it's a game of exploration, risk, and the accumulation of wealth and power. Reading the rules to the 1981 Basic/Expert game, you are given a clear and concise set of rules for playing the game exactly in that way. And nothing more. It is a game.

One element of playing this game, for a lot of players I think, is that they can learn the game's "playing pieces" and navigate its rules to be better at D&D. When a game is framed squarely as a game, this makes perfect sense. If I have encountered a basilisk before, in another adventure with a different character, then my player knowledge about the creature's gaze attack is a piece of the game I know and understand... why should I not move my new playing piece (PC) in such a way as to avoid the known gaze threat? I'm playing the damn game, right? And this, for me, might be boatloads of helling fun. I'm winning!

Of course this is just one play style and it is extremely focused on the "game" part of "role-playing game". I'm not advocating it as a default style of play or a preferred one. When I play I tend to try to be "in character" in the sense that I move my playing piece in a way that my playing piece would move rather than how I, from a godlike vantage point, would suggest that the PC moves.

I'm quite confident all of this has already been fully explored on a number of blogs and websites. I know it was a hot topic back in the early 2000s at The Forge. I just wasn't paying that much attention. I'm usually 10 years behind the curve, to be honest.

Mongar's World

Here's a random thing from 2017 I found on the hard drive. I believe it was meant to be a 200 word RPG entry. "Superirorium" is pretty damn lame, JV.

Mongar’s World

It is 1955. You are on a secret mission to space to find a better source of energy before the Communo-Nazis. Your ship is caught in a weird portal and crash lands on a verdant world of dinosaurs and robots. The planet is ran by a madman called Mongar who collects alien bodies for his wretched experiments.

The planet has a Soviet base, violent talking apes, flying snakes, and sub-zero nightly temperature. Mongar has captured rockets and flying saucers that might still work.

Mongar’s power comes from Superiorium, a liquid energy source from the heart of the planet. It is yellow, acidic, and burns hotter than jet fuel for 1000 hours per ounce.

There is a 2-in-6 chance Mongar will fall in love with a random PC.

Roll 1d6 for each to determine your Smarts and Fitness. Swap them if you want. Roll 1d12 + ability score vs. a target of 9 or 13 (hard tasks) to perform actions. An injury requires a survival roll (9). Further injuries are 13 (hard). You heal 1 injury per day.

Can you survive Mongar’s attacks, avoid the apes and snakes, and escape the planet with the Superiorium?

B/X Character Sheet

Here's a new B/X D&D style character sheet. This will end up on the back cover of Black Pudding #6, most likely. For this one I was going for a cleaner look with only what I think are the bare essentials.

G+ Running Out of Hit Points

My G+ feed has been dwindling for a while thanks to Google's announcement that the platform would be shut down very soon. Now shit got real because if you'll notice there's no longer a G+ button below my blog posts. Also, can no longer leave comments on my blog via G+ and all previous comments left in that fashion are going to magically disappear in a puff of vaporous nothing. I did run the takeout download to get all my G+ stuff so it's sitting in a zipped archive on my hard drive. I'm not really sure what to do with it, to be honest.

And yeah, this all makes me sad. I know it makes a lot of people sad. G+, for me, has been a hub of creative fun for a good run of years. I also realize that some people didn't love G+ for various reasons, including the fact that the OSR, which was very strong on G+, includes a lot of politically right wing individuals. For some people on the left, a right wing person is a threat to their actual physical safety and having one hosted on a platform sends an unwelcome message to them. It's complicated. Not everyone agrees about it. It's a thing.

I have started using this blog more since the announcement and I plan to continue doing that. I'm also on Instagram and Facebook. I do have a Twitter, but I barely touch it. I also have a MeWe and I'm trying to use it more, but I just haven't gotten the habit of it down and so far it doesn't feel quite as cozy as G+. Maybe in time it will. I don't know.

The bottom line is that G+ is going away very soon and there's nothing to do about it. So no sense whining and wishing, I'm just going to move on and try to find a new groove. After all, Google isn't shutting ME down. Right? Right?!