BX Character Sheet Landscape

Here's a BX character sheet I put together by taking elements from various other sheets and Black Pudding pages plus new elements. It's landscape, which is not my usual thing. But you know in actual use a landscape sheet is more practical from what I've noticed. I did a bunch of pregens in landscape for a Nerdlouvia con and it saved table space.

Rick and Morty vs. D&D

I only bought this on a whim because it was cheap on pre-order, I'm a sucker for 64 page rulebooks, I like R&M, and I'm also a sucker for cool box sets.

The box is an entirely playable game. You can literally run D&D from this box for many sessions without buying anything else. You can be creative with the contents, make up your own adventures, and never buy anything else. You got your core rules, dice, four character classes through level 5, a bunch of races, a very cool DM screen, and a dungeon to play through.

The rules are presented coherently with Rick's rickness helping you understand what the hell you're reading. Which is fun.

But I don't LOVE this. Here's why I don't LOVE it.

It's literally just vanilla 5e D&D. It is absolutely NOT Rick and Morty D&D. It's vanilla milktoast Dungeons & Dragons with Rick and Morty kind of sprinkled on top as they offer meta-commentary. The adventure that comes in the box, The Lost Dungeon of Rickedness: Big Rick Energy, seems like a fun romp with plenty of juvenile humor (buttless zombies?) that feels like Rick and Morty. But at the core: just plain D&D.

There are no descriptions of portal guns, laser guns, or anything sci-fi that would be in the theme of R&M. This is because the box set is JUST D&D as (Rick sees it). It is Rick and Morty explaining how to play D&D. It is not playing D&D in the Rick and Morty universe... which is kinda what I was hoping for.

Hell, we even get the same blah passages on rules we get from the 5e books along with some of the same extremely boring artwork.

But yes, we also get tons of fun R&M cartoon art and lots of R&M commentary. Just no god damn portal guns.

(If I'm missing something, let me know.)

Is it worth the price? YES.

Why? Because if you want to play basic D&D 5e and you don't want to spent $150 doing it, you get ALL YOU NEED right here. In a fun package. Just don't expect high level hijinks (it goes through level 5 and D&D is more-or-less a 20-level game). And for god's sake don't expect space ships and laser pistols because they ain't in here. The price on the box is $29.99 but you can probably still score it for $20.

If you are trying to learn D&D or want to give D&D to some snot-nosed teen this is your cheap ticket in.

The Wonderful & Terrible Things That Effervesced in the OSR Scene, Part 3

The good and the bad. And the ugly. Oh, the ugly. The OSR scene has had its fair share of all three, hasn't it?

DIY publishing is an open playing field. I got my start in it in 1988 when I was in high school. Myself and some friends slapped together a zine we called Fast Lane, which was mostly comics. Don't bother Googling it, you won't find anything. I might have some copies stashed in my storage building. If I ever get around to digging that shit out I'll post up some pics. And cringe.

F5... every zine under the sun.

Anyway, we published 3 issues and then graduated and went on our ways. I then started publishing on my own around 1994. I published a lot of small press comics and zines between 1994 and 2004. I was really into that whole scene, hitting the S.P.A.C.E. (Small Press and Comics Expo) con in Columbus Ohio and joining the Small Press Syndicate and the United Fanzine Organization. I had a fucking subscription to Factsheet Five.

The coming of the internet broke all of that. But that's a tale for another time. Right now I just wanted to lay some basics for a rant about quality in publishing within small niche markets. Traditionally it hasn't been very good. Most small press comics and zines were photocopied affairs that were cheap, fast, and dumb. And it was fucking awesome while being terrible.

The OSR and DIY RPG scene has been similar, with tons of slapdash dungeons cranked out to scratch that old itch so many of us have - to make something D&D, dammit! And lots of these slapdash dungeons are free or pay-what-you-want. That's totally in the spirit of the small press scene. Others charge a pittance at a dollar or two. Totally fine. Others want you to pay more for what I'd consider to be rather humdrum content. I'm not paying you $10 for an uninspired 5 room dungeon with some goblins and a mad wizard, so please don't ask.

I mean sheesh. Put some killer art in it and maybe I'll concede my hard-earned cash.

Room 3: Empty.
Room 4: Goblins (2) AC 6, HD oh my god kill me now

But I digress and perhaps I sound a bit harsh. I dunno. Back on target...

A collection of my comics!

The scene has produced a shit ton of fucking excellent books as well as a metric ton of forgettable books. I mean geez louise... TSR made some cool stuff back in the day but did they really ever make anything as badass as Barrowmaze*, The Chained Coffin, or Old School Essentials? Not really. And there are plenty of other great books to call out as well, though a few of them were created by complete shitheads and I'm loathe to bring them up. You know what I mean. This is perhaps the ugly part of the scene, and I'll probably get around to saying my mind about that as well in a future post within this meandering series of screedish rants and nerdy gibberishings.

(*Yes, I'm aware that Barrowmaze contains some relatively bland entries and empty rooms and repetitive shit. But if you have actually perused that book and, even better, used it at the table and you don't agree that it's a masterpiece of resource-grinding dungeon-crawling design then you can just go fuck yourself, buddy. I kid, of course. But it's true.)

ASIDE: I straight up Googled myself with the phrase "small press comics" included in an image search and got bupkis. My decade of self-publishing comics left a long, deep shadow indeed! Hah. But if you take out the "small press" bit you'll get at least one result plus a bunch of Black Pudding stuff. Whew!

GM Shirt...

In the works for XII...

Blue Wizard (finished)

I posted the sketch for this guy a while back. Here's the finished art. The version appearing in The Hole in the Oak is cropped a bit.

Back in my day, sonny, we rolled our only d6 up hill in the snow. Both wa-- well you get what I'm sayin'.

The Hole in the Oak Adventure Module

The Hole in the Oak, an official adventure module for Old School Essentials, is now available at DriveThruRPG. I illustrated this adventure, which was written by Gavin Norman and published by his imprint Necrotic Gnome.

A hole in an old oak tree leads characters down to

a maze of twisting, root-riddled passageways, the

chambers of an ancient wizard-complex, and the

banks of an underground river where once a reptile

cult built their temples.

A classic dungeon adventure for characters of 1st to

2nd level

Babies. They're going to get you.

Cover Art: The Hole in the Oak

Here is the cover art I did for Gavin Norman's adventure module The Hole in the Oak, part of his Old School Essentials Kickstarter (formerly called B/X Essentials). You can pre-order this adventure and all the Kickstarter stuff from that link.

So yeah... evil babies! That should be a fun encounter, right? Screw all this talk about ork and goblin babies... let's have actual babies that kill you! What's the Lawful character to do? lol