GOZR Hit Points and Death

In GOZR, you have hit points (HP). I'd say 99% of you know what that means. For the others, a HP is your life force. It's a number that gets reduced when you are hurt by something. When it hits zero, you are dead.

Or are you? And why did I go with something so common, so ho-hum unoriginal as hit points?

DEATH OR DEBASEMENT?

I didn't want zero HP to simply mean death. But I didn't want any fiddly "you really really die at -10" type of stuff. So in the end it seemed obvious to me and a light bulb went off. Just let the damn players decide it.

You get chewed on by a 12-legged lizard and reduced to zero HP. The GM looks at you and asks "Well, are you dead?". It's your choice, see. But a choice with a price.

"I choose death."

Ok, then you make a new character and they get a little benefit for your noble choice.

"No, the lizard chews me up and spits me out because of the nasty taste. I had just ate that dead hinrat we found and the thing's foulness permeated my body. I am alive, but unconscious."

Cool! Now roll on a little table because you can't just cheat death for nothing. You are going to have some kind of permanent problem. A missing limb? A basic stat gets worse?

WHY HP?

Because they work. In action adventure games, in my experience, this kind of system just works. It's a solid mechanic that makes sense and everyone understands it. I fiddled around with different kinds of systems and nothing sang to me. Everything felt like an attempt to avoid HP, but still felt like "you might as well have HP".

I like hit points. What can I say?

GOZR Action Classes

In GOZR, you have three primary stats, which are called Action Classes: Cunning, Magic, and Prowess. All rolls are based on one of those stats. The lower your stat's number, the better. Why?

ORIGINS OF THE THREE STAT SCHEME

Because GOZR's system started its life as another game called Dead Wizards, a sword & sorcery RPG set in the city of Kanebok, which later was folded into the Black Pudding setting of Yria. (I have a lot of lore that only really matters in my head, but I gotta say it out loud.)

I dropped Dead Wizards but had already conceived of the rudimentary elements of the game's system. I thought about my favorite sword & sorcery characters and what kinds of things they got up to. I decided that they most often deal with situations by their wits (Cunning), strength and skill (Prowess), and their natural or supernatural reaction to sorcery (Magic).

I think this concept is well-supported in RPGs. Games like Into the Odd, GURPS, Tri-Stat, Big Eyes Small Mouth, and Barbarians of Lemuria have three or four stats. D&D can be boiled down to three basic types of characters: fighting, clever sneak, and wizard*. Daniel Sell, author of Troika!, has a blog post that looms large in my brain and has influenced my thinking on games ever since I read it many years ago. In that post, he proposes an OSR house rule where all PCs are "adventurers" and at each level of experience you pick one of three skill sets to improve. And yes, they are fighting, skill use, and magic.

My concept of the game is that everyone is a hero, in the S&S sense. Larger than life. A cut above. Not your run of the mill milksop. So when it comes to dice rolling, you really only deal with things by might, skill, or sorcery.

*Original D&D had fighter, cleric, and magic-user. This is fine... but in sword & sorcery (as I perceive it) you don't need a cleric. The wizard and the priest are often one and the same. But I do think it's a useful distinction to include a sneak along with a fighter. It's elegant.

WHY STATS ARE LOWER-IS-BETTER

So that explains why I went with three stats. But why are the stats low instead of high? A lot of folks struggle with this. But it's super simple.

They started out as D&D armor class or saving throws.

The first iteration of Dead Wizards was basically a hack of OD&D. But then I morphed it to use the original armor class system as the core mechanic. Then it was as short leap of logic to say "hey, every roll is a saving throw!" or "hey, this is just like rolling to hit an AC in old D&D.".

And that meant the stats needed to get lower as they got better, exactly like a saving throw. I called them Action Classes because that makes sense to me and I thought the acronym "AC" was easy. Yeah I know... this is confusing to some folks because it's not really armor class. But just think of it like this... "what the AC of this action?"... and suddenly it'll make perfect sense to you, I promise.

The great benefit of this is that you know your target number already. It's right there on your character sheet. Since all rolls are player-facing, that means you know exactly what to roll. "My AC for smacking that wizard in the face is 10. I need to roll 10+ on a d20 to ring his stupid bell."

The GM can impose "unluck" to give you a -2 or worse penalty on that d20 roll to give some tooth to more dangerous tasks. And enemies have "threat", which allows them to do unexpected rules-breaking things like taking half damage or resisting magic.

WHY NO STAT-GETS-GOODER RULES?

The reason GOZR has no built-in method for improving those basic stats is also really simple. I didn't want power bloat. I didn't want to have a clunky system for improving a stat too much since you would end up with various modifiers anyway. If you start the game with an 8 in Prowess, then your fighting skill is 65% right out of the gate even if you have nothing to modify it. Finding a weird sword might get you some +1 or something. Being Lucky gets you +2. You can quickly approach 80% or better.

Your ACs can change, but they will do so organically, through play. For example, my friend Andy ran a wonderful GOZR adventure for our Monday night group and my gooz's Prowess was improved by 1 due to messing around with a magical (or super science?) dolmen of some sort. That's how you do it.

SUMMARY

• GOZR has three stats because those are the three things that S&S adventurers tend to muck around with.

• GOZR stats are lower-is-better because the stat itself is the target to roll.

• GOZR doesn't have built-in stat improvement rules because you don't need them.

Hymla Calls Me to Action

Here's a bunch of sketches of the barbarian warrior Hymla the Horn, slayer of demons, scourge of bandits and handsy wizards, and seeker of adventure!

Hymla presented herself to me over years, at first a vague representation of slayage and only since late 2023 fully corrupting my mind and revealing her identity to me. She is here now. I can't turn her away. She has free access to my inner life.

She wants me to make comics about her. She knows about those other barbarians who have their own comics and movies and god dammit she wants hers too.

I haven't the courage to tell her no nor to tell her that if I do her comic it will go unseen by almost everyone on the planet. Only a small but elite cadre of weirdos will care.

But maybe that's enough to prevent her from gutting me from neck to navel, as she has all but promised to do.

Therefore I will do what I can, Hymla. I swear to Black Wing, god of death! But have mercy and be patient... I'm very slow at this stuff.

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.

 

Artists I Like: Gilbert Hernandez

Like his brother Jamie, Gilbert Hernandez of Los. Bros Hernandez is an amazing comic book artist capable of delivering so much clarity and so much feeling in so few lines.

In truth, I was exposed to Gilbert's work more than Jaime's back in the day because as a sex-comics enthusiast in my early 20s I spotted Birdland and snatched it right up. Only later did I start checking out Love & Rockets.

Gilbert's work is fascinating to me because it seems to ride a line that I cherish. It is revered and respected as part of the Los. Bros. Hernandez oeuvre, which left a giant imprint on comics history. But it is happily and frequently dirty as fuck. Who else can draw women with huge boobs and still be an icon across generations?

Oh you sly devil, you. I see what you did there.

 

Ink Talk

Quick ink tip if you didn't know: If you are using a brush pen or fountain pen (anything that has an auto-feed system), you want to avoid pigmented inks such as classic India ink or sumi. They will gunk up your works. Instead, go for a dye-based ink specifically for fountain pens. Or use one of the pen-friendly pigmented inks such as Sailor Kiwaguro.

My array of inks right now is still basically the same as it was a year ago. I have Sailor Kiwaguro black, Thea Sketch Ink, and Noodler's Black ink. All of these are very good with brush pens, which is why I have them. They are also good for fountain pens.

But none of them are perfect. Here's my complaints about each of them.

I'll start with the lightest complaint. The Thea is just too dark. I was hoping for a very light gray ink that I could use over blacks and build up some tone. But this goes on just a bit too dark from start. Not a problem with the ink, in this case, I just chose one that wasn't exactly what I wanted.

Now, another thing with the Thea is that I started to notice more and more how blue it was. Then my brush pen went dry and I was refilling and I noticed the bottom of the jar had build up. I shook the jar, refilled, and suddenly the ink was very gray again. So there's some settling of the ink that causes it to separate into a more blue tint. I have very little experience with non-black inks, so maybe this is normal. I don't know.

Regarding darkness, I realize most folks buy these inks for writing and they want something dark enough to actually show up and be legible. But I want to draw with them. So I'll fish around for a lighter gray, I suppose. The other option is diluting some of this with water to thin it, but that isn't the greatest solution since it makes the ink a little too watery and thin.

Sailor Kiwaguro is probably my favorite ink right now. But my complaint with it is that is is inconsistently black. I noticed it more when I used it in a fountain pen. Whereas the Noodler's flows wet and dark black from the pen, the Sailor ink is spotty and gray at times. But it works wonderfully well in a brush pen.

Also, Sailor dries quickly and seems to do well with other media going on top of it.

Now... Noodler's is a real heartbreaker. It goes on very black and wet, which is quite fantastic for the fountain pen. It's a hell of a good sketching ink. Perfect flow.

But the stuff takes forever to dry. Even after 24 hours it can still smudge. And... worst of all... if you try to erase pencils under the ink, you will lift ink off the paper. A lot of it. See pic for example.

This ink does seem to be absolutely perfect for sketching and writing. It's very black. But I never use the stuff if I'm going to be erasing or using some other media on top of it, such as markers.

Noodlers. Left is no erase, right is erase after 24 hrs. No good!

I also have Dr. PH Martin's Black Star, which is waterproof India ink. It's pretty good stuff, possibly better than classic Speedball. But I tend to shy away from normal pigmented ink (like India) because it's not as friendly with brush pens and fountain pens. The Sailor ink I use is also pigmented, but I guess the particles are much tinier and so it doesn't clog up the works.

Ink... another fascinating topic worthy of a deep dive.

Sexy bottle.

Artists I Like: Larry Todd

This week's Artist I Like is Larry Todd, one of the lesser-celebrated cartoonists of the 60s and 70s underground comix movement. He was a New York guy who was pals with Vaughn Bodé and the two collaborated on science fiction and comic covers that are absolutely amazing.

I confess I haven't read many Todd comics. He's best know for Dr. Atomic, which seems to be in the post smokin' wheelhouse of the comix movement. All those guys liked to do was draw drug using hippies and naked ladies.

I don't know how to explain my attraction to this style. But Bodé and Todd both simply charm the socks right off of me. There's a cartoon vibe to them both, mixed with a fantastical aesthetic and it's just perfect.

Larry Todd died less than a year ago in Sept 2024. And that makes me very sad. The idea that I could *possibly* have found a way to contact him and I didn't... well, honestly, that's just how I roll. I never reach out to "famous" artists I admire because I assume they don't want to talk to a schmuck like me. Anyway, RIP Larry Todd.

Todd + Bodé

This image inspired my whole ZSF idea, honestly.

This is my fave.

 

ROC Talk

I'm in a comics mood.

I was in a comics mood this time last year and I knocked out a 25 pager with Hellion Cross. I printed 50 copies of that book with an egregious error on the center spread... I had drawn the center pages without considering the correct margins. I had to manipulate the positions of captions to make it work and in doing so I duplicated one caption and deleted another. No idea how.

Fast forward to today... I'm finally going to launch ROC: Random Order Comics... a "regular" comic book title I where I can just stuff all my comics work. When I get something finished, I can just add it to the next issue. When I hit the 28-32 page count, I can do a cover and pull the trigger on it.

I'm not worrying about what kind of content goes in each issue or how I'm going to publish them. They are standard American comic book format and I'm keeping it Rated R or under. I'll probably stick to black and white for now. Those are my only rules. There may be fantasy comics, goofy strips about politics or memories, or whatever I feel like drawing.

Here's a few pages from the first issue. I'll post more about it later. This issue is complete other than a cover.