B/X Tomb Robber Hack

I wrote this little B/X D&D hack recently to emulate a gritty, scummy, city style sword and sorcery experience using the classic game rules.

You can download a zine PDF of it here.

B/X TOMB ROBBER HACK

IN THE DIRTY CITY OF HOGBONE, or Tombsburk, or Sluckbucket, or whatever filthy name you give it, the tomb-robbers, treasure-hunters, and murderous criminals thrive. There are no safe shires here.

This B/X sword & sorcery hack is inspired by Conan (the barbarian), Thieves’ World, Lankhmar, The Black Company, and a bit of Ankh-Morpork.

PC RULES

1. Everyone is human. If the GM allows elves or something, they’re inhuman aliens from another dimension or space or Hell and everyone hates, fears, and/or distrusts them. Your campaign is now defined by this fact.

2. There are no clerics. High priests might be sorcerers, but they’re not healing anyone.

3. Good and evil are not linked to alignment. Alignment is related to powers of Law and Chaos. A Lawful monster might be evil as a devil. PCs are most likely neutral, but it’s up to you.

4. Every player character is a 7th level Thief because those are the skills needed to be a crypt-raider. No levels are gained or lost. Level drain drains Ability scores instead.

5. This is your stuff: 3d6 x 100 gold. Roll 2 magic items using the General Magic table (page X44). Re-roll consumable items (like potions) if you prefer.

6. You get these perks based on your highest or second highest Ability.

•Str: Additional +2 to hit, +7 HP.

•Int: +3 (or +1d6) languages, 2 (or 1d4) 1st level Magic-User spells.

•Wis: Re-roll failed initiative; glean 1 useful fact about anything (once per encounter); good ventriloquist.

•Dex: All your Thief Skills are as level 10; climb upside down.

•Con: Save as level 10 Thief, +5 HP.

•Cha: +1 Morale of retainers; 1 devoted follower per Cha score above 10 (as 3 HD bandits); good at mimicking voices.

7. Rest to regain your strength. Heal up to 7d4 HP per day, rolling up to a total of 7 dice at any intervals you prefer. Taking a breather after that alley fight? Roll a couple of d4s to get your spirits up.

8. You know fear. When faced with undead, cosmic entities, or dark sorcery, save vs. spells or be gripped with fear for 1d6 rounds, unable to do anything but run and hide or stand there wetting your pants. Only for the first encounter, per occasion.

9. Gain 1 Hit Point after every adventure.

10. Spell-casting PCs can learn more spells, but it ain’t easy. Make a hard Int check (-4 to the Ability for the check) to learn a new spell from a book or scroll. Only 1 spell can be learned from any discovery of books of magic.

11. They will tell stories of your exploits. When you’ve played enough adventures that it feels like a proper hip-pocket paperback’s worth of short stories, everyone gains +1 to attack and saving rolls. At this time, you can retire a character, making them a level 9 NPC.

GM SUGGESTIONS

1. Monsters. Make them as unique as possible and never say “it’s a goblin”. Instead, “the locals say there’s a bog beast lurking about” or “the old temple is haunted by the angry spirits of the dead” and that’s that. There are no tribes of goblins, but there might be bandit gangs in masks.

2. Make monsters weirder. You can use monsters from the book as templates, but mix them up. Take abilities from three different creatures and hammer them together. That’s not a hill giant, that’s an abomination of human flesh stitched together by sorcery and leaking poison gas… with a big club.

3. Creatures of the night. Monsters of this world hate the sun and mostly only come out at night… mostly.

4. No clerics, but the dead rise. And they are afraid of the gods. PCs using relics of the gods may force morale checks on the walking dead.

5. Nothing is free. If you can waltz into a broken ruin and find a hoard of gold… it’s almost certainly cursed. Either cursed directly and each PC now has a death warrant, or it’s sacred to some ancient guardian who is now awakened and will not relent until everyone is dead. Watch a mummy movie for ideas.

6. Get to the action. Don’t let the players waste time debating their next moves. Keep the pace up. Assume a real time clock is ticking. They’ve been discussing how to or if they should open that crypt door for five minutes straight? Angry spirits show up to run them off. Other tomb raiders ambush them. Etc.

7. NPCs can be based on PC classes from the monster list, such as Acolytes and Bandits. More important ones can also be 7th level of their class. Boss NPCs should be treated as 9th level or better of their class: Fighter, Magic-User, or Thief.

8. Start local, don’t lore-nuke. Do NOT let yourself get caught up in too much pre-game world-building. Make up the dirty city, some NPCs, and nearby locations as needed. Let the adventurers guide your next move. Let the world grow from this local seed into whatever it will be, even if that means the PCs never really leave town. Cities have crypts, sewers, and assassins aplenty.

9. Luck of heroes. Taking a note from the classic 1e Conan modules, PCs have Luck Points. Only you, the GM, knows how much Luck they have. Players can spend Luck to accomplish feats of adventure that would be very risky if they relied on the luck of the dice. Like leaping roof-to-roof in the rain without dropping a fragile glass egg or putting an arrow through the tiny hole in the dread warlord’s demon scale armor.

Players cannot spend Luck to affect dice rolls and Luck must be announced before actions are taken. Luck doesn’t replenish, but you can secretly give a point here and there for incredible moments of gaming or for completing a book of adventures.

Ask each player to roll 4d6. Now secretly determine which result goes with which PC. That’s their Luck… until it runs out.

Happy sword & sorcery gaming!

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.

Slowpoke

Slowpoke, 1+ short sword: Each round the user waits to attack, add +1 to hit or to damage. On a Critical Hit, the target must Save vs. Poison or take 1d6 damage per round for 1d6 further rounds.

Among the Goblin peoples, patience is not a virtue. But the Goblin hero Gog the Looming (he was almost 5' tall) prided themselves on being a patient warrior. After Gog aided the wizard Gim, the old magician repaid him with the gift of a sword with patience to spare. Unfortunately for Gog, he waited too long in a battle with the Elf assassin Lier Landor and died a mere month later.

Cascade

 

Cascade, +1 Sword: Each consecutive hit after the first deals +1 additional damage. Any missed attack deals 1 point of damage to the user. 1/day, the user may speak to the sword's devil spirit as if by the Commune spell (1 question, 20% chance it is a lie).

Stormdriver Thornheart, one of the greatest of the old dwarf forgers, was challenged by a powerful and mysterious hero to make a weapon that could contain his dark soul's fury. He then heaped sacks of gold upon the table and added "If it is within your skill to do so." Thornheart, being a proud artisan, immediately agreed. When the forging was finished and the dweomers sealed, the dark stranger marveled at the blade's beauty. "And now" said the dark hero, "let us see if it can contain the fury of my soul." The dwarf's final payment was the full length of Cascade in his heart. The sword drank, the eyes of the pommel glowed, the enchantment was complete.

Fang

Part of the Doomslakers B/X project.

Fang, +1 sword: User can speak with serpents at will and transform into a pit viper once per day for 3 turns. Snakes will not strike the user.

Fang's history is obscure. It seems to have started life as a fairly mundane scimitar that was perhaps used to slay various foul beasts roaming the darks of Underwood. It seems to have gained notoriety when a particular hero named Low Hill (so named for she hailed from a low hill) wielded it on many an adventure, many of which involved the slaying of giant snakes. She hated snakes, apparently. Low Hill was known to run with three wizards named Bo Zun, Tala Dulak, and Epizidimus the Wary. Perhaps one or all of them conspired to enchant their companion's sword as a special gift. Low Hill was eventually swallowed whole by a purple worm.

Hawkhead

Part of the Doomslakers B/X project. 

Hawkhead, +1 sword: User can see through the eyes of a passing bird for 1 turn (10 minutes). During this time they cannot see anything else.

This sword was forged in Nylar before the city fell to ruin. It was made at the behest of the legendary hero Makkus the Mark whose clarity of vision and steadiness of hand was unparalleled. Perhaps this blade currently rests in a pile of treasure in some forgotten tomb or in the hands of some troll or scoundrel haunting Hill Country. Where the famous bow of Makkus rests is a mystery.

Some say the voice of Makkus may be heard by worthy warriors who heft this sword in battle.

Glimmer

This is a Sand in the Bone post.

I wanted to do something interesting with some of the basics of urban life in the game. Food, drink, substances, sleep, and money. Because this game is heavy focused on setting.

For money, I didn't want a simple coin system where you spend 10 coins to get a thing that is valued at 10 coins. That's a fine system, especially if you don't want commerce and haggling to be part of the play. But I want to experiment with making commerce and haggling a part of the play.

In Kanebok, the city of the game, there is coinage but it doesn't really matter. Because people value a more abstract thing called glimmer, or glim for short. Basically, the idea is that the people of this world value that which glimmers. And the extension of that is the shine of the person who has the glimmer. Meaning: you can "sell" your worth by roleplay. It kinda doesn't matter how many coins or baubles or silver hoops you actually possess. That stuff is very abstracted. Instead, you have a dice value of glimmer that you possess. When you want to trade glim for something, you don't just plop it down on the counter. You can, of course, and that's OK. But it won't win you any favors or discounts.

Instead, you present your glimmer with flair, if you can. One way to do that is to offer some kind of story along with the glim. Like "See this copper disc? It is etched with the head of a bear that swallowed three men whole. The bear slayer extracted the copper from the bear's own blood and forged this disc." And the person you're talking to, perhaps a person from whom you want to get a nice new pair of boots or sword, may find that story charming and accept your offer. This also boosts your social status as a person with good tales.

Mechanically, it is about rolling some number of dice from your glimmer pool and trying to match or beat the target that the Judge* has in mind for the vendor. The coolness of your haggling attempt will influence that target (the Judge becomes the NPC vendor, listening to your pitch).

Of course this is a sword and sorcery adventure game, so I don't want sessions to be all about haggling. There will be quick and dirty rules for abstracting through this process. You don't have to roleplay every vendor interaction. In fact, once you establish a rapport with an artisan maybe you do end up with a standard glim value that is spend when you need their shit. Only when your social status changes or something about the vendor changes would you need to revisit an interaction.

And so on.

Other posts about Sand in the Bone you might find interesting:

Sand and Something
A Reflection
Weapon Whoopin'
Marks and Risk


*I'm using "Judge" as my go-to for GM. This is not settled yet, I may change it. But it god damn sure won't be "referee" nor do I want to go with GM. Of course I'm tempted to go with Sandmaster, because sand is really central to the game. But the Nounmaster thing is probably played out. So maybe Judge is just what it will be. Personally, I don't care for arguments about the language of naming a GM and how it colors the play experience. I don't believe it does color the experience because honestly nobody at the table actually calls you by GM or DM or whatever. Mostly it's just "Becky" or "Jude" or whatever your dumb name is.

Fawn & Serpent (Old Art XXV)

More Pan-Gea stuff. This one was cool because a guy sent me a sketchbook in the mail so I could draw directly into it. It wasn't "his" sketchbook, in the traditional sense. He would take to conventions and pay comic artists to draw in it. Most of the art already in the book was from creators I didn't know but there was at least one or two pieces from big names. I just can't remember who the hell they were.

It struck me as a bit odd and risky to send a stranger such a treasure and ask them too doodle in it. But it turned out pretty good, I think. There's a color version of this that will show up in the series later. Since I'm getting old and senile I might forget I wrote this one and repeat the story like a codger telling tales of The Big One.

Sand in the Bone: Marks and Risk

In this post, I talked about weapons and weapon damage for Sand in the Bone. I said PCs would have "Mastery" they can spend on weapons. I've thought a little more about this and realized that I already have a thing called "Marks" which can easily cover weapon skills. So I'm folding the idea of mastery into Marks.

Characters begin with some number of Marks. A Mark is really just any special feature the Player wants to highlight about the character. Since this game doesn't have any traditional attributes, such as strength or intelligence, Marks allow you to customize however you like. So Mark could be a special skill, a relationship, a magical power, or even some kind of curse or negative trait.

Now, I do not want to go the positive vs. negative balance sheet route. In G.U.R.P.S., for example, you can gain points to buy skills and advantages by taking disadvantages. Need another 5 points? Give yourself a paralyzing fear of snakes. And so forth. This is a fine mechanic and I don't ever mean to give that game shit for what it does. It's solid. But I don't want that here.

So my idea is that there is a mix of creative and random elements to chargen. The random means you might get a negative Mark, such as a curse. That way we don't have to fuck around with making PCs that have intense coulrophobia in order to allow for extra perks. I want to be a better gymnast, so I'm making my dude a galaphobe!

Which leads to another concept I'm definitely working into the game: risk. Choices matter. So during chargen, Players have a baseline method for making a character and they can stick to the baseline and come up with something awesome. Or they can choose to take risks in the hopes of getting better results. This will manifest as multiple chargen tables you can choose to roll on. While there may be one basic table to roll on (A), you choose to roll on alternate table B or C, each of which have more potent results but also more drawbacks.

I want to carry that concept through the entire game. For example, the use of Sand, which I talk about here, is inherently risky. And not just in the random dice rolling way, but in the sense that you are making choices that increase or decrease risk.

ASIDE: I had flirted with the idea that you could play this game absolutely middle of the road. Making almost zero dice rolls, you could sort of coast through conflicts. But the tradeoff would be that you could never have amazing success or make incredible discoveries. You'd be living a boring life for a great adventurer. So I'm not sure if I want to include that or not.

Striding Warrior

This is art for my upcoming RPG, Sand in the Bone (formerly called Dead Wizards*).

I decided to lean pretty hard into the "sand" part of "sand and sorcery" on this project. I even re-tooled the setting map to eliminate some non-sandy environments as I found them to be utterly superfluous to the tone. I have this habit when I do setting maps to try to include all kinds of environments... like people will be disappointed if they can't do snowy north adventures in my sand and sorcery game.

This RPG will have an original system. It is not specifically OSR. It is not based on D&D. It also includes elements more akin to my old game The Pool. Specifically there is a risk element with a meta-game mechanic. And yet it is still a traditional RPG in the sense that there is a Judge and Players and they are separated at the table by a barb-wire wall of doom. I kid.

Sometime in the near future I will ask bribe my Monday Doomslakers friends to play this thing.

*If I can get some momentum on this I might do a supplement for the game using the Dead Wizards title. Hey... I can dream, can't I? Don't crush my dreams.

Sand and Something

I haven't been drawing much lately. Part of the reason is just lack of time and inspiration. Another part is that I've completed all of my outstanding paying gigs (exception for one or two I need to do). Another reason is that I'm more in a noodling phase than a doodling phase. I'm thinkin'. It's scary.

Mostly I'm thinking about Dead Wizards. I can't predict what I'll actually do this year but I truly hope that this game will see publication in 2020. I've definitely never been closer to settling on the core mechanics, theme, and all that important jazz than I am right now. This game has been through many changes over the past couple of years and none of the iterations have felt as right as this one.

So one big open question about this project is the title. I've been using Dead Wizards as the working title for a few years. And while I like that name quite a bit, it's abbreviation is DW... same as Dungeon World. And like it or not that bugs the shit out of me. I know it's a minor thing, but it's enough to put me off.

So the title I'm leaning into right now is Sand in the Bone.

It's still evocative and kind of metal, even though this setting isn't "metal", per se. It's definitely sword and sorcery and Sand in the Bone has a gritty feel that I like. Plus it gets some of the setting's feel right in the name, sand being a central theme to the game.

ASIDE

I had set myself some hard rules about naming this game. I said absolutely zero of any of this:

Noun & Noun
Word of the Thing
Black anything

Success!

A Reflection on Dead Wizards

EDIT: I changed the name from Dead Wizards to Sand in the Bone for various reasons. This post is talking about the same game.

What follows is a long-winded reflection on Dead Wizards* and where it is headed for the future.

This might be the first time I mention the game in the blog:

My good friend Cyd is running a Penny Hack for us on Mondays, which is probably wrapping up soon. At that point I will ask my cohorts to indulge me once again and dive into a campaign that is largely inspired by mixing up Tanith Lee, Robert E. Howard, Frank Frazetta, and Richard Corben. Some good ole S&S in a project I've been calling Dead Wizards (or Kanebok... not sure how it will appear yet). I ran this once before and it was nice but this is a totally revamped version. Trying some ideas. Breaking the old game down and working from its bones to make a new toy. If all goes well, this will be one of my 2017 publishing projects.

But that was 2017 and I know for a fact I ran a Dead Wizards playtest locally almost 4 years ago. Or something like that.

This all started when I looked at Swords & Wizardry White Box and fell in love with the simplicity of the single saving throw. Somehow that morphed into a desire to make a sword and sorcery RPG which somehow morphed into sand and sorcery.

Sand and Sorcery

(Which, BTW, might make a killer game title.)

I am not sure if this label has a distinct definition. If it does, I am unaware. But it is what I use to describe Dead Wizards. All I mean by it is that the genre is sword and sorcery and that the setting has

a desert sands flavor.

First, about sword and sorcery. To me, S&S is fantasy wherein magic is both uncommon (but not necessarily "rare") and dangerous. There are no high elf good witches here. The genre sometimes has a bleak view of humanity too. But all I'm really concerned about is that the magic is uncommon and the heroes are larger than life - but still all-too-human. If you are a person who turns into a cat, then  you are weird and dangerous to others, not special and magical.

The sand bit is a little harder to nail down. I am not interested in making fantasy Arabia, but I am interested in riffing on some of the fantasy Arabian tropes. I'm also borrowing heavily from various African cultures and even dipping a little bit into India and southeast Asia. But none of them are the model and this setting isn't a representation of any real world analog. It is fantasy, pure and simple, wherein the people are not white and the landscape is not European.

If that is confusing all I can say is I'm going to try really fucking hard to practice "show, don't tell" with the presentation of this game.

And on to that reflection stuff

So the game began its life as a S&W hack. I ran one or two sessions in that vein, which were fine. Then I broke away for a while to do Rabbits & Rangers and when I came back to it I tried to design an original system, but with lots of S&W bits. The system was kind of modeled on the old descending AC from D&D. You had three categories and for each you'd have a to-hit table. That playtest was short but went OK as well. I still wasn't feeling it, though. I ran a few sessions of it and then my mom got sick and I kind of fell away from running games for a bit.

The next stab I took at it was even more of a non-OSR system. This time no playtesting took place. And now I'm back at it with another redesign. This one feels more right than ever before. An important element fell into place recently where a piece of the setting kind of clicked with the system. Namely, sand.

Since sand is everywhere in the setting, I thought what a great way to express it - have a "sand" category on your character sheet. Sand is how much willpower you can exercise over the world in which you live. The powers-that-be express their will on the world, and sand is their blood. So characters can use sand to express narrative control in the game.

This takes me back, back in time to 2001 when I wrote The Pool. The same concept is at play here. There is a bit of a gamble to the use of sand and the payoff is narrative control. This idea is what I remember being the most powerful and prescient impression I got from The Forge. This simple notion that a player could do some of the work that a GM is normally doing. Of course that idea blew up after those days and now we have probably hundreds of games devoted passionately to narrative gaming. Back then, not so much.

To be clear, this is not a story game. It would be fine it if was, but it isn't. This is a traditional RPG in the sense that you have a GM and players and the GM is responsible for setting the stage, describing things, and adjudication. But, like The Pool, this game allows for some degree of narrative control to go to the players via the sand mechanic.

I'll speak more about sand later. I've yammered enough tonight.

*I decided it was preemptive to bold and italicize a game that doesn't yet exist. So until I actually have a manuscript, I won't bold and italicize Dead Wizards like I normally would. It doesn't matter, I know. Stop judging me. My blog, my rules.

More posts about this game over the last few years:

Playtest #3
A Bit of Dead Wizards
Drawing Gaj'Uth the Three Headed Elephant

Arzra

Back in the early 2000s I was doing more comics. I had this comic going for a few months (doing 1 page a week) that was about a gender-shifting catperson named Arzra (spelled backwards: Arzra). I really fell in love with this character. The whole gender-shifter concept, for me, was a direct inspiration from Tanith Lee's Death's Master. Lee's Flat Earth books are foundational to my inner fantasy worldview. I place them squarely in the sword-and-sorcery category alongside Robert E. Howard's Conan.

Anyway, Arzra was a gender-shifting catperson version of Conan. I wrote the character as a wanderer, getting into adventures, with a strong sense of savage honor. At this time in my life I was a pretty rabid individualist in my philosophy. I would have called myself "libertarian" at the time, though the term for me had a different meaning than what we think of today (I always picture cowboy hat-wearing rednecks with guns screaming about free speech today). For me, this was about opposing authoritarian moral police.

Arzra was meant to be a vehicle for me to tell exciting fantasy stories that could be sexy and philosophical at the same time. I have several scripts lying around and they generally involve the character wandering into a weird place and encountering a weird entity, usually with some kind of dialog exchanged that cuts to the bone of how I felt about religion and morality. Arzra wasn't inclined to take a knee before authority and he had no interest in being responsible for anyone other than himself. She was a barbarian, after all, albeit with a sharp mind. She could slice you open as easily with her words as with her sword.

The art to the left was part of the comic, which was done with brush markers, colored pencils, and Prismacolor markers on bristol. I believe the pages were something like 14x14 inches. It was a lot of fun to do, but the amount of labor that went into each page was a bit much for me to sustain over time. And these were totally rated R pages with lots of nudity, making it a bit awkward to share later on Facebook and the like.

I did a bunch of drawings of this character for the period of a year or so and I really hoped I could turn it into a "regular" comic book series. Alas, doing anything "regular" just doesn't seem to be in my DNA. The only reason Black Pudding has persisted (yes I'm still working on #6!) is because it has very few constraints. I allow myself to wander and do whatever I like, within the domain of old school D&D style gaming. If I tried to make each issue themed or have an ongoing comic in it I'd probably flounder and sputter out. Much love to creators who can crank out issue after issue of comic book series over time. Salute!

Revisiting the Chainmail Chick

Joe Jusko killed this one.

C. September 1984. A young me, approximately 14 years old, depending on exactly what day of the month it is*, picks up Savage Sword of Conan #104. I'm all-in on the Joe Jusko cover. There's ice and snow, muscles, a ninja**, and a redhead with underboob. What's not to love?

I remember that day. I picked up the issue at a local convenience store and it was the second or third time I did it. I am pretty sure the first SSOC I bought off the shelf was #103, which remains to this day one of my favorite single comic book issues of all time. That issue is what made me fall in love with Conan the barbarian. Well, y'know, after the movie anyway. I would be a religious consumer of SSOC for at least the next 2 years. The names Ernie Chan, Joe Jusko, Gary Kwapisz, and Tony Salmons would be etched into my developing brain, ensuring my lifelong love of sword and sorcery and muscled barbarian fantasy.

Boobs optional, but appreciated.


That's right. I said it. I might be a woke lefty with no tolerance for right wing fascist pricks, but I like a good exploitative pin-up barbarian chainmail chick now and then. And go fuck yourself if you find that troubling***. Wokescold somebody else.

Anyway.

I drew this years ago. I like it a lot for some reason.

I've been thinking about chainmail chicks lately. Check out Black Pudding for my take on an old school character class emulating what I love about this motif.

So what makes this motif compelling? Some elements are just god damned obvious, base, and probably rooted in my I-Am-A-Man existence. They're sexy as hell. They're tough, bombastic, and bodacious. I want to be a chainmail chick, motherfuckers. You heard me right. I don't want to nail one, I want to become one.

To be tough as nails, able to gut a man in a single blow, and still look damn fine? Hells yeah. The problem is there isn't enough variety on the meme. We need more fat chainmail chicks, black chicks, buck-tooth chicks, bald chicks, etc. Because fuck your beauty standards, you reactionary prick****.

So in Black Pudding #1 I had the Chianmail Chick character class for B/X style OSR gaming. I remember creating that class and thinking "I really need a male matching mate". So I also created the Sinewy Barbarian. Those two classes were my approximations of Conan and Red Sonja, from the comics, in RPG format.

It's kind of a crass move to counter a busty character class with a beefcake. I know that. I'm not arguing that I did things correctly. I never claimed to be correct about these things, just honest. I wanted to present something I loved. And I didn't just include the Sinewy Barbarian because #equality. I did it because I have a tremendous love for the archetype that Conan represents. I am a man, after all, and the idea of a strong man facing a hideous and dangerous world appeals to the reptilian part of my brain in a big way. It's why I watched Conan the Barbarian, Beastmaster, and The Road Warrior every chance I could when I was a teen. It's the same reason Big Trouble in Little China remains in my top 5 favorite movies of all time. Again, I might be a woke SJW, but I'm also a pulp-inspired aficionado of all things pin-up and two-fisted action. It's in my blood.

PITT brush pens, Prismacolor markers.

Ok... so considering the dynamics at the gaming table, how feasible is it to have chainmail chicks? Well... it kinda depends. I can see a shitty situation where a reactionary prick includes them at his table and amps up the misogyny. This is not good. It's uncomfortable and harmful. But I ran several games in which people were playing Chainmail Chicks from Black Pudding and having a great time of it. There was no sexism or misogyny. We were having a grand old time.

I guess this is one of those things. Like... if you're putting something out there that pricks might use in a negative way, then what is your responsibility to help keep that from happening? I am not sure. I feel like the intent of the work is inherent in the presentation. If I'm a prick for creating the Chainmail Chick then the work itself will reflect as much. But if I'm not being a prick then the Chainmail Chick, particularly when considered alongside the other content of Black Pudding, should not feel misogynistic.

I feel like it's all OK. And many women have told me me how much they love my representation of women in my art, even when I'm doing the sexy pin-up thing. I fully understand how dangerous that is... that not every woman is going to react the same way. I get that. But I can't tailor my art to suit all the outliers and all the feels. I just do what I do and I try to do it responsibly. I really really try.

Holy shit this post is going long and I've had more than a few glasses of sangria. Enuff is enuff.

*My birthday is at the end of Sept.

**I don't care if that guy is supposed to be a ninja or not. Is it supposed to be a Black Dragon, such as those seen in King Conan comics? I don't know. Looks like a fantasy ninja to me and my 14-yo brain read it that way.

***I'm not sure how to elaborate on this. I recognize and accept that misogyny is a huge fucking problem but I do not accept that sexy images of women is the root of that problem. Or even a significant element of it. Now, I do believe that exclusionary sexy images are a problem. For example, if all the pin-up women are skinny bitches that's not fucking cool at all. People come in all types, so let's not be dicks about it.

****Oh, hey, let me clarify something. Everyone who has followed my creative journey for any significant time (may the gods bless you) knows that I like to draw fat girls. But I am not a discriminatory connoisseur of the pin-up. I like all shapes and sizes. I can be just as enamored of a skinny waif as a fat broad (holy shit I don't mean that in a negative way... "broad" is such a fucking nasty term, isn't it?). What I mean to say is that beauty is not defined by size or shape. Beauty is largely subjective and a person's beauty in the eyes of a beholder is a package deal. Or something. I'm a dude here. I'm trying real hard to express a positive message and I'm probably not cut out to do it. Please move along, nothing to see here.

This has been a drunk post. You are welcome.

Black Pudding Heavy Helping Vol. One... Still Alive!

Never hurts to promote your work now and then...

Black Pudding Heavy Helping Vol. One is a re-organized, slightly re-mixed hardcover collection of the first four issues of my OSR-style RPG gaming zine Black Pudding. It's heavy on style and cartoony fantasy art with plenty of game-ready stuff like character classes, monsters, spellbooks, and ready-to-roll dungeons!

Luchadors!
Catgirls!
Hoard Horrors!
Whispering Vaults!
Sinewy Barbarians!
A Goblin!

With some nice contributions here-and-there from people such as Matt Hildebrand, Karl Stjernberg, Jayne Praxis, and Ed Heil!

The hardback book is a mere pittance at $18 and if you're cheap or you don't do paper then you can get a PDF for a trifle $6. You cannot fail in this adventure. But if you do, there's a random table to find out what the monster does with your ruined corpse.

Get yours while supplies last!

Front cover

Back cover

Kanebok, the City of Dead Wizards

Following up on this post, here is the original blurb about the cit of Kanebok, the setting of Dead Wizards. I wrote this blurb several years ago and it is presented here mostly as it was, unedited. This will not be the final introductory prose but very close to it as I am keen on keeping this vision as pure as possible. Comments follow the blurb... imagine it being read aloud by Mako Iwamatsu.

KANEBOK

From the cataclysms of wizard wars crawled Kanebok, the City of the Exalted Prince. It squats on the edge of a cliff over which spills the dark waters of the River Uth. It is flanked by a desert and perilous badlands. Many old roads converge at its gates and queer vessels from queer lands arrive on the waters.

The Moyirs run the city. Dozens of them compete with one another, cunning and dangerous, backstabbing and plotting, always looking for the angle that will put them in the Mojab’s favor… for the Mojab is the boss of the Moyirs and the de facto ruler of the city. From his Marble Tower of Time he rides a resplendent palanquin of gold and jewels carried by sinewy slaves. The Mojab is the mouthpiece of the Exalted Prince, who is himself a child of the gods. All must answer to the whims and decrees of the immortal Exalted Prince, Supreme Ruler of all the Land, high in his Palace of Glass. Though he is rarely seen, his merest gaze can strike a man dead and his desires are law. On the rare occasion the Exalted Prince enters the city streets he is carried in a glowing howdah on the back of an immense three-headed elephant called Gaj’Uth. A brigade of his arcane guards go before him to clear the path, crushing those who refuse to move and demolishing structures so that not even mighty Gaj’Uth is made to touch the dirty city and its dirty people.

They say to be crushed by the feet of that great beast is to ascend immediately to heaven and be done with this life.

Few are willing to risk it.

You have come by fortune or fate to the city gates, their grisly faces grinning as you enter. Inside are streets of dirt and stone, malodorous, cacophonous… at once a nightmare and a dream. The city is never asleep. It is never still. They say the foolish or brave can find paradise here, if they aren’t swallowed up first.

This is going to be an interesting night, at the very least.

/end blurb

So yeah. Kanebok is meant to be "exotic". I am aware that my whiteness and Westerness means that I am coming from a very particular perspective and that many or most people in the world will have different perspectives on what that means. It's the curse of being human.

Anyway, while not being a direct representation of any culture, this setting is inspired by Arabian Nights types of fantasies, Hollywood-filtered Egyptian fantasy, and various African and East Asian images and ideas I have sponged up over the years. It's a melting post of this stuff... along with a lot of Western baggage, of course. It's the kind of shit a pulp hack writer would slam into their typewriter.

Speaking of which... in my head, Kanebok is the hub for a series of pulp adventures. Each gaming group is like a hack writer crafting their yarns in a shared universe... not unlike the way many authors contributed to the shared universes of Thieves' World or the Cthulhu Mythos. I was chanelling a lot of The Black Company, Conan the Barbarian, and Tales From the Flat Earth when I came up with the idea. I'm not trying to pave new terrain, just running on a feeling here. I hope the end result is something evocative and deliciously pulpy... warts and all. We'll see.

More on the setting and system later.

Gaj'Uth the Three-Headed Elephant

Following up on this post, here's more of Gaj'Uth. Now, this piece is actually part of a larger piece of cover art for the Dead Wizards RPG I am writing (I don't know when I will be finished, but hopefully this year).

This whole project was born out of a desire to make a pulp sword and sorcery game. Not a narrative game in the strictest sense, but one with more narrative sensibilities than OSR games in general. The system started out as a pure riff on OD&D and I ran a playtest or two with that version a few years ago. But it has morphed quite a bit since then. The second iteration used the descending AC to-hit tables as the primary "core" mechanic, which I still believe is a really cool idea... but I ditched that idea for Dead Wizards and am now working toward an original system that bears some OSR artifacts (there is a saving throw, you use d20 rolls vs. a target).

But the whole point was to make a sword and sorcery game in which you "play through a pulp yarn". The basic unit of adventure role-playing is the adventure itself and in DW that unit is called a yarn. It's a story and it emerges from game play. It's really important to take in that sentence and understand what I mean. You would play this game as a game and whatever kind of lucid, weird, disjointed, harmonious, violent, beautiful, dreamy, or fucked up series of events that emerge from it would be the yarn, or story, that you created. I am not saying this is a "storytelling game" in the sense that many people mean that phrase. It is going to be a game with a game master (I use the term "Judge" because it's the best term - fight me if you want) and while the players do have a lot of impact on their world it is not a shared storytelling game in the strong narrative sense that you'd get from most story games. It's an adventure game with strong narrative flair, not a story game... just to be clear.

Once you complete your yarn by dealing with your characters' needs, you could continue playing more yarns with the same characters or not. I'm designing the system so that it isn't zero-to-hero. Like in most heroic fantasy stories, the "heroes" begin as larger-than-life figures. They are already better than most people. So there isn't any need for balancing or a sense of scale, mostly. This is the kind of game you could run fairly quickly with low prep, depending on how comfortable you are with being creative and judging on the fly. I cringe a little at using the term, but it's a fairly "rules lite" game.

I'll post more soon about the setting and the game system.

Victorious One

Here's a doodle I unearthed among my files. I had essentially forgotten a bunch of art (some of it for the better). I kinda liked this one.

Drawing Gaj'Uth the Three Headed Elephant

I have circled back around to Dead Wizards, having taken the very long way to get here. For those who might not remember or care, Dead Wizards is a sword and sorcery tabletop RPG I have been "working on" for a long time now... how long? Let me just go and check...

The earliest post I can find on my blog is 01/22/2017. But I believe I was posting about this on G+ (long may it dance in the Happy Fields of Memory) before that time. I know I ran a playtest of a Swords & Wizardry version of the game at least 3 years ago.

So I have been in a bit of a creative slump lately. I haven't been getting streams of new ideas like I used to. I was beginning to worry that my idea well was dry or I was just so old and jaded I didn't give enough shits anymore to make the pump work. But I was driving home from Indiana on a work trip and I had this amazing 4 hour long brainstorm. Normally I listen to podcasts and audiobooks on journeys but on this one I just let some music play the whole time and I let my mind go nuts. Essentially, I wrote the core of the game on the road.

Because I didn't have a "game" yet. I had versions of a game and I had playtested a few of them, but wasn't really satisfied. That's why I kept thinking I might just make it an OSR game and stick with old D&D mechanics. But now I feel kind of liberated from that idea. The setting could work with those mechanics, but there's really no reason it should have to. I haven't written a standalone RPG of significance in years. Many years. The Questing Beast was probably the last one. It's high time I got back to the work.

Gaj'Uth is not amused by life

Which brings me to drawing Gaj'Uth the Three-Headed Elephant. I mention the elephant in the opening tone-setting for the game thus:

"On the rare occasion the Exalted Prince enters the city streets he is carried in a glowing howdah on the back of an immense three-headed elephant called Gaj’Uth. A brigade of his arcane guards go before him to clear the path, crushing those who refuse to move and demolishing structures so that not even mighty Gaj’Uth is made to touch the dirty city and its dirty people."

For context, the game is inspired by Arabian, Indian, and African mythologies and concepts. It is absolutely not a representation of any particular culture or people at all and is filled with all sorts of feverish fantasy flizbits from my brain that aren't even part of the three influences I mentioned. So it's kind of tricky to decide how to describe it, how to "market" it, and so forth. I'm doing it for my own pleasure and satisfaction, as I usually do everything for that purpose. I want to make something cool and wicked and evocative in the vein of pulp fantasy stories as filtered through my own head. So that means as much or more Tanith Lee as Robert E. Howard.

But I've said all this before. I even presented some mechanics from previous incarnations of the game on G+, generating some nice conversations and debates about how the game would work. I believe in those iterations I was enamored of using the descending AC to-hit matrix as a core mechanic for all game actions. While that's still a sexy idea in my book, I do not believe that's the way I'll go with this game. I have a pretty clear schema in my skullpan that I feel like makes some kind of sense. It's a theater of the mind approach for sure, with less emphasis on game tactics (such as blow by blow combat) and more emphasis on the bigger picture... the life's work of a character and the juicy way they fit snuggly into the game's setting.

And it does have a setting. I'm not shying away from that here. I have often tried to keep things loose in terms of setting so my work can be picked up and dropped into existing game campaigns. Not here. This is a very specific place with a specific ethos and way of existing with it. Not too complex, mind you. I don't like games with a huge wall of text or series of novels I have to read before I can "get it". I don't want to make that game.

Ah see now I ramble as is my wont. Stream of consciousness eat your heart out.

I will post again down the road a bit, probably discussing the mechanics. And I'll arrange some playtesting with my Monday night friends as soon as they will indulge me.

Until then, be kind and enjoy your moments.