LotFP: RPG

Musings About the Monolith

2012-01-26T12:28:00.003+02:00

As Seen Yesterday on Google +...

First:

I think I'm going to use IndieGoGo to get sponsorship for the upcoming Monolith adventure. I think I've come up with a few interesting perks for higher-grade sponsorship. I just need a good naming scheme for the sponsorship levels (Gold, Silver, etc is LAME).

Kickstarter is the big name in "crowd funding" but last I checked isn't non-US-resident friendly as far as payouts. Also, IndieGoGo is not all-or-nothing like Kickstarter, which is very important since the project is not dependent on sponsorship -- this is just an effort to break the "spend all the money up front and then scramble to make it back" cycle I've been on, so I can get the next thing into production quicker.

Also:

Are "how to use this adventure/how to include this adventure in your campaign" sections in modules really useful to anyone in the year 2012? Don't people largely figure that out for themselves after reading an adventure?

The adventure is basically about a valley that maybe wasn't there yesterday that has a weird thing in it. It's an alien thing so it's not supposed to fit into a campaign (therefore fitting equally well into any campaign!), so I can't think of any plot hooks that aren't just so generic as to be insulting.

Speaking of those Author's Notes:

"You don’t want to do this to your players very often, mind you. You probably don’t want to do it to them at all. You’re their Referee, likely their friend, and feelings would be hurt. Well that’s what I’m here for. You’re not doing it to them, I am. You’re not responsible."

What My Players Taught Me Today: No Rope, No Problem! and What to Call the Natives?

2012-01-23T00:08:00.000+02:00

In hostile territory with a number of incapacitated foes? Want to take prisoners but have nothing to tie them up with?

"Kill half of them and use their intestines to tie up the other half."

OK then.

Also, today's game was the first session that the PCs were stationed in St. Augustine as foreign mercenaries to do the dirty/dangerous jobs the Spanish don't want to risk their own men with.

I've been having the Spanish colonists there refer to the natives as, well, "natives."

The question came up, "Were they using the word 'Indians' at that time?"

Yes! Columbus thought he'd landed in the East Indies in 1492, which is why the indigenous people of the Americas were called Indians from the start.

However, another player a different point of view:

"I just call them goblins."

I think the garrison at St. Augustine needs a staff psychiatrist.

The fun part? Today's session was a murder mystery where it turns out the culprit had committed the deed in the name of peace, compassion, and Christ -- and the PCs let him get away with it.

Edition Wars = Blog Hits

2012-01-20T20:34:00.003+02:00

Yesterday's Open Letter to 4th Edition Brothers & Sisters is now the 10th most viewed post in the history of this blog.

"Naked Elf" is the 6th most-used search phrase used this month to find this blog.

3 people found this site today with the search phrase "hot naked guys with horses."

What the hell is wrong with people?

Carcosa Update

2012-01-20T13:34:00.000+02:00

There are just 10 sets of extra maps and posters left for Carcosa, so if you want it, better act quick. These extras are LotFP Store exclusives.

Special thanks to Noble Knight and Troll & Toad for helping me out, they both allowed me to basically tell them what would be good orders for me to ship (the advantages of having an excellent sales history, eh?) and both those stores have limited numbers of Carcosa and Isle in stock right now ahead of the more general US retail availability coming this spring.

If you're on the fence about either book or just want to keep up with the scuttlebutt, I've been updating the reviews pages quite often, so click those links on the upper left and see what people have to say about both books.

Here's an interesting Men and Monsters Matchup table for Carcosa.

An Open Letter to my 4th Edition D&D Brothers and Sisters

2012-01-20T00:11:00.002+02:00

You've been telling us since 2008 that it's the in-print version of D&D that's important, and it's the current version bearing the name Dungeons & Dragons that's the best and brings the most gamers together.

I'm sorry I disagreed all this time.

Really, I apologize. I was out of line.

You were totally right all along.

So on April 17, forget about your old, dusty, has-been, canceled D&D. Don't be an old grognard and look at its outdated and broken mechanics like feats and powers and healing surges through nostalgia-colored glasses, instead stop living in the past and pick up the brand spanking new, hot off the presses, official AD&D 1e books and start playing the newest and best edition of D&D available!

Our games together will be epic.

(Sorry, I know I'm being a bad bad edition warrior and I'm going to hell for it but I totally could not resist. I cared enough to be pissed in 2000 and 2008, so I can care enough to gloat a bit now. At least I didn't say "Your D&D is canceled and ours is going to be in print? How do you like them apples?")

(PS. Dear new Blogger interface: You are ass and should die. You suck. Fuck you.)

What Interests Me About the AD&D 1e Reprints

2012-01-19T10:23:00.000+02:00

Wizards reprinting AD&D 1? That's certainly news to wake up to.

The books will be going for $34.95 (PH & MM) and $44.95 (DMG). Old copies are available from Ebay for far less. Should be interesting.

The first printings of these books from the 70s were top quality and if they haven't been flat-out abused, still hold up just fine today. Printed as books should be. If I get to see one of these I'll be very interested in the binding (and paper stock) and how the books compare physically to the originals.

How will the books be produced? The PDFs from a decade ago were bad scans, and there is no way the original production masters (in whatever form they used) could be used for a new print job, right?

New covers? Not necessarily a bad thing (that early printing Sutherland MM cover is terrible, for starters), but what will the new covers be? I think they're smart enough to not put 4e style art on the covers but being mindlessly old school will end in tears as well. I hope the Gygax memorial flyer next to the announcements (see here) is not an indication of what the covers will look like...

The Store is Back Up

2012-01-13T23:57:00.001+02:00

Europeans will now find they are being charged shipping. Couldn't be helped, as explained here. Unless you're in Finland, shipping is free in Finland, as if there weren't enough reasons why it's awesome to live here.

However, if your order comes out to 100€ or more (before shipping or VAT), use coupon code LOTFP for a 15% discount. This is good for everyone and will be an ongoing thing - no expiration date.

And someone's made an order before I even told anyone the store was back up. Yay!

Store Update

2012-01-13T17:53:00.000+02:00

More complicated and taking longer than expected (thus my sparkling mood in the now-deleted posts earlier today), but expecting to wrap up and reactivate before bedtime.

Torches Blazed and Sacred Chants were Praised

2012-01-12T19:44:00.000+02:00

As of today, LotFP Weird Fantasy Role-Playing Grindhouse Edition has sold 666 print copies.

Cool Isle of the Unknown Reviews!

2012-01-12T18:12:00.000+02:00

How to Succeed in RPGs or Die Trying has a good one here. If that doesn't sell you on the book, what could?

Here's one from Dragonsfoot.

Suvudu has a Carcosa review as well.

I Guess I Must Comment: Do I Care About D&D 5e?

2012-01-10T00:00:00.001+02:00

Don't know yet.

Will Wizards license Death Frost Doom for release for 5e? If not, would I be able to release Death Frost Doom as a third-party 5e release?

Would it still essentially be Death Frost Doom if converted to 5e? Would I feel dirty for seriously attempting it?

When these questions are answered, I'll let you know if I care about 5e.

Changes to Shipping in the LotFP Store

2012-01-09T14:50:00.000+02:00

At 1pm Helsinki time on Thursday, I'll be taking the LotFP store down to change how shipping is handled. The most important bits:

Free EU shipping for most orders is coming to an end.
Free shipping (with tracking #) for European orders totaling 125€ or more
Free shipping (with tracking #) for non-European orders totaling 140€ or more

Get your orders in before that time to take advantage of current conditions.

The full explanation or whats and whys can be found here. Any comments or questions can be left in that thread or emailed to me directly.

I'll notify the winners of the What the Hell is That on the Table? contest and post the results in the next couple of hours.

What Went Wrong: A Carcosa Character Generation Supplement

2012-01-08T10:26:00.000+02:00

Jeff Rients put it together. And he put that togethered thing here.

I'm a bit concerned about risking LotFP's good name by associating it with such a profanity-laced document, but hopefully damage control won't be too difficult.

What the Hell Is That Thing on the Table? VOTE!

2012-01-04T09:10:00.000+02:00

The entries for the What the Hell is That Thing on the Table? contest are in.

Read them here.

Now vote for your favorite! The author of the entry that gets the most votes gets a 5€ coupon code for the LotFP store. A random person voting also gets a 5€ coupon code for the store. Good through 2012!

How to vote: Sent an email to lotfp@lotfp.com. The subject should be THING and the body of the email should be the post number of the entry (from the thread linked above) that you

Contest ends Sunday 11:59pm Helsinki time.

(I'll announce my own pick for the 10€ coupon code winning entry on Monday along with the winners here. I wouldn't want to influence the voting by revealing my pick now. Or maybe I got Elder Sign over the weekend and I've been playing with myself too much to have taken more than a quick glance at the entries as of yet.)

"The most beautiful RPG book I have ever seen or, equally importantly, held"

2012-01-03T00:21:00.001+02:00

Yeah, that quote is about Carcosa.

Read all about it here.

Contest Ends Tomorrow the 31st!

2011-12-30T20:32:00.000+02:00

I recently got a new forum header, which led to the question "What the hell is that thing on the table?" And there's a contest about it!

Go see the picture, and the contest details, here.

Fooling Around with Game Design

2011-12-29T01:31:00.000+02:00

So Carcosa and Isle are out and shipping, and I'm waiting on some contributor input before moving forward with the next projects.

In this "between time" I've been doing what we all do at one time or another, fiddle around with the idea of making a completely new game. Whether it will develop into a real thing or not, too early to tell, but it's kept my interest more than similar attempts over the past few years.

If you're interested in seeing what I'm up to (and just maybe get the first look at 2014's hot release!), I'm posting my thoughts and notes in my forum here.

LotFP Wins 2 Diehard GameFAN 2011 Tabletop Awards!

2011-12-26T16:47:00.002+02:00

Grindhouse gets Best OSR, Vornheim Best Campaign Setting.

See all the winners, and the associated explanations, here!

Frowny Face and Happy Face Reviews

2011-12-26T10:59:00.003+02:00

RPGnet review of Carcosa isn't very happy.

Aventuras en la Marca del Este has a happier Isle of the Unknown photo review.

Well That's Going to Be a Bad Influence

2011-12-25T09:48:00.000+02:00

Was stuck at the in-law's house yesterday for over 10 hours (and to think I used to dread the holidays when I'd be all alone... note to self: make sure the next wife is an orphan)... I take my notebook on these trips because, well, what the hell else am I going to do?

Didn't get much done because of course the TV had to be on, playing Christmas concert TV specials most of the time. Made me aggressive - but I bet being forced to watch Andrea Bocelli sing with the Muppets would do that for anyone. And remember the 90s when Nightwish was this absolutely bizarre idea? Now here's Tarja Turunen singing in a church in front of Finland's President. Nothing completely ruins a fun thing - retroactively, even - quite like respectability.

Damn yesterday was torture.

So the few notes I did take were all about some rather, ah, interesting monsters and spells. Of the "I did that that zombie attack picture from Grindhouse and I just published Carcosa so let's use those as a new normal baseline and explore where we can go from there," variety.

So that ends up with a bunch of "I can't really use any of this, can I?" stuff.

Oh, look, one of my Christmas presents was a copy of Alan Moore's Neonomicon. I really like Lovecraft and I really like everything I've read by Moore but I'd never even heard of this. How did my wife find it?

(looking around this morning, this is how Moore himself describes it, if you're unfamiliar: "Lovecraft was sexually squeamish; would only talk of ‘certain nameless rituals.’ Or he’d use some euphemism: ‘blasphemous rites.’ It was pretty obvious, given that a lot of his stories detailed the inhuman offspring of these ‘blasphemous rituals’ that sex was probably involved somewhere along the line. But that never used to feature in Lovecraft’s stories, except as a kind of suggested undercurrent. So I thought, let’s put all of the unpleasant racial stuff back in, let’s put sex back in. Let’s come up with some genuinely ‘nameless rituals’: let’s give them a name.")

(also, check out this analysis of the book... I wonder if any of these ideas could work for RPG books?)

After reading Neonomicon most of that "I can't really use any of this, can I?" stuff in my notebook seems rather middle-class now.

Which leaves a couple things that still have potential, and some idea corridors I wasn't before considering are now open.

If you're familiar with Neonomicon, you're thinking the worst of this right now. Which is good, because that sense of dread is the coolest thing ever. But I do have limits, as there are certain things I'm not willing to play out in a game with other people, either at my home table or with random people at a convention, so I wouldn't ask you to do so. But hopefully this can instead be something else entirely that takes you by surprise. That will hopefully be good. And make you think "You can do that?" while looking at it.

(oh, I also received Dread: The First Book of Pandemonium RPG. Haven't read it yet and am not familiar with it at all, although I'm told it should be right up my alley. First thought after a quick page-through is this book has no business being 8.5x11 format and whoever decided that was a good size for RPGs in general, and this one in particular, needs a damn spanking)

A Blog About the Isle of the Unknown

2011-12-23T11:11:00.000+02:00

Booberry (the best of the monster cereals, so of course also always the hardest to find...), of the new Giant Evil Wizard blog, is writing a series of posts about Isle of the Unknown and the possibilities therein. Don't know how long Isle will be the focus, but it's the focus right now and that's cool enough.

Carcosa is "The Best of the Best This Year"

2011-12-22T09:04:00.002+02:00

Don't take my word for it, go read the review here. Lots of pictures. (see a translated version of the review here)

Also, a new review of the Isle of the Unknown.

Contest!

2011-12-19T13:07:00.000+02:00

I've got a new forum header image.

To celebrate (because packing and shipping hundreds of orders is kind of dull and I need some excitement), there's a CONTEST! With PRIZES!

Details here.

(and the LotFP main site has a new background image as well, have you seen it?)

Isle of the Unknown Reviews

2011-12-18T09:09:00.006+02:00

Armchair Gamer
Aventuras en la Marca del Este
azirk73 Youtube review
Dragonsfoot
Grognardia
How to Succeed in RPGs or Die Trying
Magician's Manse
Nerd Caliber
...and the sky full of dust
Worlds in a Handful of Dice
Von der Seifenkiste herab...

Carcosa Reviews

2011-12-17T08:08:00.013+02:00

The Alexandrian
Aventuras en la Marca del Este (English translation by Google Translate)
...and the sky full of dust
Armchair Gamer
City of Iron
Compromise and Conceit
Diehard GameFAN
Dreams in the Lich House
How to Succeed in RPGs or Die Trying
In Places Deep
Kill It With Fire!
Lost in Time One Two
No School Like the Old School
RPG.net
Samwise7RPG Youtube Review and Part II by azirk93
Stargazer's World
Suvudu
Take on Rules
Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque
Tenkar's Tavern Part 1
Untimately
Worlds in a Handful of Dice

My Friend Matt is Not Helpful

2011-12-16T23:23:00.000+02:00

Well, when he's not designing logos for me he's not.

I'm trying to come up with a good 400 word blurb for Isle of the Unknown's "Featured Product" message on RPGNow.

Since I suck at this kind of this sort of thing. I can make cool stuff, publish cool stuff, talk your ass off about it... but I can't sum it up without being corny.

330 hexes of adventure, with over 100 unique monsters and more magic and mystery than you can shake a stick at! The Isle of the Unknown is a setting that can be inserted in any traditional fantasy role-playing campaign.

That's bland and sucky, right?

So maybe I should get sarcastic. Landed me a wife off of OKCupid, worth a shot.

330 hexes of adventure, with over 100 unique monsters and tons of magic and mystery and more. DAMN is it cool. See that cover art? How cool it is? The coolness of that cover is totally representative of the coolness inside this bad boy. The Isle of the Unknown is a setting that can be inserted in any traditional fantasy role-playing campaign.

hmm. So I ask Matt for some advice. His suggestion?

Without Isle of the Unknown your campaign is as naked, evidently, as everyone on all of my covers.

*sigh*

Update

2011-12-16T02:18:00.000+02:00

The orders have been swarming in, and I thank you for that.

(Carcosa is less than 20 copies away from selling more than the original edition expurgated and unexpurgated combined; we're already there if including wholesale orders, but Geoffrey didn't do wholesaling so I feel dirty counting those for this purpose...)

However, actually processing all these orders is slow going! We got a bunch out the door today, we'll get tons more out the door tomorrow (well, it's after 2am so I guess I should say "this afternoon"), and the rest on Monday and we should be all caught up so that orders from that point will all be "shipped the next day." (will try to get all those who paid for 1st class shipping in the group going out tomorrow)

Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown Now on Sale in Print and PDF

2011-12-14T18:45:00.000+02:00

Carcosa

Weird Science-Fantasy Horror Setting. 288 A5 size hardcover. Full description of what it is here, PDF preview of actual book contents here.

The PDF version (which comes free with a print order) is an absolute state-of-the-art example of PDF technology, with extensive links, layers, and bookmarking. Click around on the maps.

Isle of the Unknown

Island hexcrawl full of the strange and unusual, suitable for any fantasy campaign. 128 page A5 size hardcover. Full description of what it is here, PDF preview of actual book contents here.

The PDF version (which comes with a print order) isn't quite state-of-the-art with the interior cross-linking as Carcosa, is fully bookmarked and layered.

Extras

Both Isle and Carcosa have optional add-ons. 250 of these are available for each book. Each book comes with an A4 sized map printed on canvas-like material and a double-sided full color A3 poster (both sides of the individual posters are shown in the pics here). Extras for each book are 5€ each. They are added by default, so toggle it to "No" if you don't want them. But you want them.

Discount Offer 1

Pembrooktonshire Gardening Society members get 2€ off the print versions of Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown as long as there are extras left for each book. When the extras run out, the discount is reduced to 1€ per book (the same discount Gardening Society members get on all print products in the LotFP store).

Discount Offer 2

Missed out on the Grindhouse Edition? If you buy at least 50€ worth of stuff from the LotFP store (say, the new Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown books), coupon code ULFIRE will get you a 12,50€ discount off the Grindhouse box.

The LotFP Webstore

BONUS

The Euro is in the crapper right now, so all of you non-Euro currency people can enjoy the best exchange rate in quite some time...!

(finally, right?)

Books Arrived

2011-12-14T12:33:00.002+02:00

The books have arrived and have been unloaded.

Two things need to happen before you can buy them:

1- I'm taking my helpers out to lunch now.

2- I have to do all the technical things to get the sales live. There are a good amount of things I couldn't prepare before the books came...

So it'll be some hours until sales go live, but unless I get hit by a truck, everything is in place for it to happen.

Books Not Here

2011-12-13T17:52:00.000+02:00

5:50pm and no delivery truck or phone call. Tried calling the printer earlier in the day, couldn't get anyone.

Me and the four people who waited all day here with me are thrilled.

Hopefully tomorrow.

Carcosa/Isle Update

2011-12-12T14:57:00.000+02:00

From the printer:

"books have left us and the driver is supposed to call you tomorrow before the delivery."

Tomorrow it is then. No, I have no idea when sales go live. There are books to receive and haul up four floors, pizza to buy for the helpers, and various administrative/cleanup duties to perform first.

But live they will go.

2012

2011-12-11T17:01:00.002+02:00

That's how many PDFs were sold during this past week's Anniversary sale at RPGNow. Quite an increase from last year's 821.

It's done now.

THANK YOU.

Coming this week, hopefully Tuesday: Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown in print and PDF.

Did I Mention I Was On Google+?

2011-12-09T11:34:00.002+02:00

Personal page. (chit chat, general gaming stuff, etc)

LotFP company page. (news, review postings, etc)

(Still waiting a firm confirmation from the printer about the arrival of the new books. I was given a "soft" Tuesday estimate.)

A Bit of Mischief

2011-12-05T23:37:00.000+02:00

Just checking my stats...

The #3 search phrase used to find my blog in the past month: "naked elf"
The #10 search phrase: "hot elves"

Those that remember that post are feeling sorry for those web searchers right about now.

You'd think I'd get more hate mail than I do, right?

821

2011-12-05T19:53:00.000+02:00

Last year I ran the big PDF sale and I sold 821 PDFs during the week.

I hit that number less than 45 hours this year.. Still five more days to go.

I take this as meaning interest in and awareness of LotFP is increasing (even the PDFs that sold tons during last years' sale are moving very well again this year) and all this publicity work I do has some sort of effect.

So forgive me if I take a second to pat myself on the back for successfully stacking up a nice buffer against the coming printing bills and then let me try to figure out how to turn discount PDF customers into Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown buyers in a little while. :)

Carcosa Cover - Problem and Solution

2011-12-05T12:40:00.000+02:00

Just got the Carcosa cover samples that were sent Thursday.

Two notes: The green moon and stars will be a part of the cover, they just aren't part of these samples. And if these covers are accurate, this book will be a slight touch thicker than the Grindhouse box.

Anyway... I was told at the beginning of last week that delivery of Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown would happen today, the 5th. But on Thursday I was alerted to a problem...

It seems the metallic foil wasn't bonding to the cover material. In this first pic, you can see what we were going for, and how the problems would make the book unworthy of being sold:

The printer even tested pressing a different foil underneath first, hoping the metallic foil would stick to that. The results were better, but not near good enough:

Their suggested fix was the following material:

The printer says this has bonded as it is supposed to, and I've just thumbed it fairly vigorously and it's on there tight. You're going to have to abuse the book a bit to get that to start peeling, I think.

Note that aside from the added green foil (which will likewise now be non-metallic), this is the cover. No title, no marketing blah blah. There will be a thin b&w wrap with all that jazz so it's identifiable on a store shelf (and in distributor warehouses!).

(note that the cover silhouette, in addition to echoing the original edition's, is the same image as the book's frontispiece, seen here.)

This situation might be a happy accident. My intention for the book was to look fancy-dignified, not fancy-gaudy (or at all like a typical RPG book for that matter). Using the metallic foil was shinier and perhaps "more sci-fi," but maybe it was a bit too much flash.

Everything might be delivered at the end of this week, or perhaps the very beginning of next. phew.

Anniversary Week PDF Sale at RPGNow!

2011-12-04T00:01:00.000+02:00

Tuesday is Finland's Independence Day. Wednesday is my birthday. Thursday is my wedding anniversary.

Calls for a celebration, and maybe this year it should be the same celebration as last year.

All LotFP PDFs are on sale over at RPGNow for $1.35 each effective immediately, lasting through the 10th.

Spread the word please. :D

It's (Almost) My Birthday!

2011-12-02T21:53:00.000+02:00

Today was tax refund day in Finland, so I took my wife out to dinner. Then we hit a bookstore, and she got me my birthday present:

Over 100 stories by over 100 different authors including Lovecraft and Dunsany and Merrit and Blackwood and CAS and Bradbury and Leiber and Kafka and Bloch and Jackson and Campbell and Martin and Barker and Ellison and Brite and King and Kiernan and Miéville and Gaimon and Ligotti and TONS MORE. Over 1000 pages. Looks to me like a one stop shop for the Weird.

(book's website here)

They also had this hardcover Lovecraft edition, a beautiful looking book, gilded pages and all... but I already have a set of Arkham House hardcovers so I can't really justify the purchase.

Isle of the Unknown and Carcosa PDF Previews

2011-12-02T15:00:00.000+02:00

Carcosa preview.

Isle of the Unknown preview.

There is a problem with the Carcosa cover at the printer, apparently the metallic foil isn't bonding well to the cover material. They are sending me a sample of their recommended fix (a different foil I believe), but it didn't arrive today. Independence Day is on Tuesday so even if it shows up Monday, arrrgggghhhhh delays.

(Isle and Carcosa are to be delivered at the same time so a delay on one is a delay for both)

Carcosa: What Is It?

2011-12-01T10:55:00.000+02:00

Men of 13 Races fight for life and power, ignorant of their common past.

When other tools fail, Foul Sorcery is wielded without compunction.

Enigmatic and inhuman Space Aliens have crash-landed on the world.

Psionic Warriors turn the tables on the uncaring Great Old Ones with Strange Technology from the stars and beyond time’s provenance, risking Blasphemous Madness and worse to tame the Hostile Planet and push back the darkness... for a time.

CARCOSA is a weird science-fantasy horror setting compatible with traditional fantasy role-playing games. It includes:

a new character class: the Sorcerer who summons and controls Cthulhoid entities
a new form of magic, including 96 sorcerous rituals
an easy-to-use psionics system
dice conventions
dozens of new monsters
tables for the random generation of spawn of Shub-Niggurath
5 colors of the desert lotus
countless high-tech weapons and items of the Space Aliens
Random Robot Generator
technological artifacts of the Great Race and of the Primordial Ones
mutations
800 encounters on an outdoor hex map with an area of 34,880 square miles
the Fungoid Gardens of the Bone Sorcerer introductory adventure
and more, all extensively cross-referenced and indexed!

Carcosa was originally released as a homemade 96 page booklet in October 2008, intended as Supplement V to the "original fantasy role-playing game published in 1974." This new printing is thoroughly reorganized and expanded and illustrated, no longer claims a direct tie to that game, and is presented in a 288 page deluxe hardcover format.

Here are some reviews for the original Carcosa release:
Dragonsfoot reviews by Korgoth, Melan, Spinachat
Grognardia Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Jeff's Gameblog
Some King's Kent

When Carcosa was released in 2008, it quickly became the controversial topic in old school gaming. As a fan I think the controversy was rather ridiculous (not liking it, fine, not buying it because of such content, fine, being outraged by a wholly fictional work to the point where you insult the writer and rage against those who weren't themselves outraged is silly), but even today people verbal take shots at the author in passing (and the book's been out of print for over a year!) so I think a thorough discussion of the portions of the book causing the controversy is in order.

The controversy is due to I believe just four rituals (out of 96 rituals, all of which take up 33 pages in a 288 page book - 18 out of 96 pages in the original edition) in the book, all dealing with dry descriptions of torture.

My own feeling about this is that these ritual descriptions are, if not absolutely essential, then at least overwhelmingly effective at communicating the absolute horrific and alien nature of Carcosa more than all the laser guns and mutant dinosaurs. It makes sorcery forbidden and dangerous in a way we're always told it should be in genre fiction and gaming flavor text, but never seems to be during actual play. It takes the perhaps too-familiar Lovecraftian bestiary and marries it to a magic system that many find beyond the pale. It is, in most situations, unspeakable.

They are not integral parts of play (refs and players must actively choose to make them part of their games), the text does not glorify or condone the acts either in the game or in real life, and nothing suggests that anyone should do these things or be OK with others doing them in real life.

As the publisher of the new version of Carcosa, I realize this will cost me some sales. But that's OK. Carcosa is not for everyone. Nothing is for everyone. Better to stand by the author's vision and intent than censor it or water it down scrounging for every last possible sale.

While I don't believe these disclaimers and warnings will prevent the controversy from flaring up again (argument and outrage pretty much dominated every single discussion about it a few years ago - which is why I spend so much time on it here), I can at least do what I can to get the word out to make sure that people who really would be truly bothered by this sort of thing don't spend their money on it.

Carcosa is the real deal, fearlessly imaginative, with everything dialed up to 11. The wondrous and fantastic, as well as the icky stuff.

Unsure if it would be distressing to you? Here are the author's own words about the whys and wherefores of Carcosa sorcery, including the text of the ritual that caused the most outrage:

Why Carcosan Sorcery Is the Way It Is

Carcosa will not be to everyone’s taste. I certainly have no quarrel with anyone who does not buy it. This post is to explain why I included the level of detail regarding the human sacrifice necessary for most sorcerous rituals on Carcosa.

Carcosan Sorcery is literally INHUMAN.

Humans did not create sorcery. The Snake-Men did. The (now thankfully extinct) Snake-Men originated tens of millions of years before man. These ophidian beings were not only literally cold-blooded, but they were also without emotion or pity. Imagine the eyes of a snake endowed with calculating intelligence, but no conscience whatsoever. These intelligent and amoral beings deeply studied the arcane aspects of existence, and in so doing discovered that a certain measure of control could be exerted over the very powerful Cthulhoid beings infesting both the world of Carcosa and the universe. This control could best be achieved with bloodshed. Snake-Men sorcerers, over countless millennia, honed and perfected their sorcerous arts. This included breeding the sub-human man-apes into the thirteen races of men, so as to be the most efficacious of sacrifices.

The Snake-Men subjected these hapless humans to the most horrific and degrading of fates in pursuit of sorcerous power. So please note: Carcosan sorcery (with its human sacrifice, rape, and torture) was created by an inhuman race that regarded us as we regard laboratory rats. The Snake-Men had as much sympathy for a human baby being sacrificed as we do for our veal dinner.

There is a grim justice in the ultimate fate of the Snake-Men: “At the height of their powers, the Snake-Men destroyed themselves by releasing ultratelluric forces impossible to control” (p. 111 of the expanded Carcosa book). In short, the Snake-Men paid for their sins. They were destroyed by their own sorcery.

Most Carcosan Sorcerers are EVIL.

In swords & sorcery literature, most sorcerers are evil. That is also true on Carcosa. Most sorcerers are reprehensible, disgusting, shocking, cruel, perverse, etc. Only a very few are otherwise, and they generally limit themselves only to the rituals of banishing (which do not require human sacrifice).

“Sorcerers Never Prosper,” or “Sorcery Doesn’t Pay”

The dangers inherent in sorcery are such that precious few sorcerers live to a ripe old age. Most eventually get destroyed by the Cthulhoid entities they conjure and/or attempt to control. Like the Snake-Men, sorcerers pay for their sins. And what the Cthulhoid entities do to sorcerers is a lot more painful than what sorcerers do to their sacrifices.

“So how can I use this kind of sorcery with explicit violence in a game?”

The explicit details can serve these two functions:

They make sorcerers GREAT villains for the player characters to slay. As a player I find it so much more satisfying to slay “the sorcerer who raped and killed adolescents” than to slay “the sorcerer who did some very bad things (details undisclosed)”.
They make PC sorcerers think twice before performing a sorcerous ritual. Several times in my Carcosa campaign, a PC sorcerer would be researching how to (for example) bind a certain Cthulhoid entity, and upon finding out the inhuman things required, DECIDED TO CEASE HIS RESEARCH. (“That price is too high.”) Many players will balk at sacrificing human NPCs when faces are put upon those NPCs, and when horrific details are given for what has to be done to those NPCs. Many players will refuse for their characters to kidnap an 11-year-old White virgin, rape her, and slay her. However, if the requirements of the ritual were vaguely worded (“requires one human sacrifice to be tormented and slain”), fewer players would balk. If the descriptions of the sorcery in Carcosa were less explicit, player character sorcerers would be more likely to engage in human sacrifice. The explicit language actually reduces (though it does not eliminate) the frequency of PCs sacrificing humans.

“Just How Explicit Is the Book, Really?”

M. A. R. Barker’s The Book of Ebon Bindings (published in 1978) was my model. Prof. Barker’s book is full of unflinching, clinical detail of human sacrifice, torture, and rape. Neither his book nor mine has the attitude of “Kewl! Blood and sex! Yeah!” Let us compare two passages from each work:

From the section on how to summon Gereshma'a, He of the Mound of Skulls (pp. 28-29 of The Book of Ebon Bindings): "In each of these three spaces let sacrifices be bound: in the northern pentagon a male human, in the western a female, and in the eastern an infant of not more than seven years...Then shall the evocator praise the Demon Lord and make the sacrifices. The infant shall be held head downward, and its belly shall be slit with the Ku'nur [the jag-edged sacrificial knife of the temple of Sarku]. When the blood is drained, the body shall be flung outside the diagramme."

From the ritual of The Primal Name of the Worm (p. 65 of the expanded Carcosa): “This one-hour ritual requires the sorcerer to stand in cold, waist-deep water and to there drown a Jale male baby. He must rend the corpse with his own hands and spill the blood upon a stone taken from the phosphorescent cave in hex 0607.”

From the section on how to summon Ka'ing (p. 66 of The Book of Ebon Bindings): "[T]wo of the evocators shall go to a female sacrifice, and while one engages in sexual congress with her, the other will slay her with a garrote made from her own hair. Then the other female sacrifice shall be treated in the same wise, and thereafter two female evocators shall perform the same act with the two male sacrifices, save that the garrotes shall be of the hair of the evocatresses instead."

From the ritual of Summon the Amphibious Ones (p. 70 of the expanded Carcosa): “This eleven-hour ritual can be completed only on a fog-shrouded night. The sorcerer must obtain the root of potency found only in ruined apothecaries of the Snake-Men. The sacrifice is a virgin White girl eleven years old with long hair. The sorcerer, after partaking of the root, must engage in sexual congress with the sacrifice eleven times, afterwards strangling her with her own hair. As her life leaves her body, 10-100 of the Amphibious Ones will coalesce out of the mists.”

As one can see, the level of detail and its clinical character is very similar in The Book of Ebon Bindings and in Carcosa. If Carcosa “crosses a line,” then it merely crosses a line that was already crossed 30 years earlier by The Book of Ebon Bindings. I regard M. A. R. Barker as one of the Five Great Men of FRPGs (along with Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, Bob Bledsaw, and David Hargrave). Prof. Barker’s credentials are impeccable. I am confident that I am on safe and appropriate ground when I use his publications as a guide.

In the end, it’s all merely a game, fantasy, and words on paper. None of it is real.

So if reading descriptions of imaginary aliens doing horrible things to other made-up aliens on a planet 153 light years away from Earth for the purpose of influencing fictional slime/tentacle monsters is truly distressing to you, do not buy Carcosa.

(A final note: By request, a month after its original release, Carcosa was also made available in an expurgated edition, removing the most-complained about elements from the book. After the outcry and the requests for such a thing, after all was said and done after two years of the original edition being on sale in both versions, less than 15% of the book's total sales, including print and PDF, were for the expurgated version. LotFP will not be publishing an expurgated version.)

Get ready everyone... it's going to be another interesting ride.

Any other questions you have about Carcosa?

Keeping Cthulhu Scary

2011-12-01T06:02:00.000+02:00

Kenneth Hite's presentation at CelestiCon is available for download here. I'm only four minutes in and so far it's great.

This Carcosa PDF is Something Else

2011-11-30T15:36:00.000+02:00

Holy crap.

Just saw the latest version of the Carcosa PDF.

The book itself is extensively cross-referenced, has a proper index, etc.

The PDF takes all of that and links it within the document.

More than that, Eero (design/layout guy for the project) linked every hex on the maps (and the room numbers of the Fungoid Gardens map) so clicking on it goes straight to the entry in the body of the book.

Not that I look at all that many gaming PDFs, but this one is Pretty Damn Spiffy.

The PDF is included in the price of the printed book, and for those not wanting the physical book, the PDF will be available as a stand-alone product on December 11.

Isle & Carcosa Extras

2011-11-29T15:41:00.001+02:00

Isle of the Unknown and Carcosa will each have as extras the cloth map (discussed yesterday) and a double-sided full color A3 mini-poster. 250 copies of each will be available. (contributors get copies as well - 260 of each will be printed total).

The extras will cost 5€ each, and they are optional. But once they're gone, they are gone...

Note that in each pic, two copies of the poster have been laid down to show you what's on both sides.

Isle of the Unknown's poster has the keyed map on one side and an expanded print of Cynthia Sheppard's cover. The original plan involved a dust jacket and it wasn't until the last minute that we decided not to have one, but Cynthia had already completed the larger piece. We haven't told her yet...

Carcosa's poster has Jeff Rients' Periodic Table of Carcosa on one side (redesigned because the original wasn't in high enough resolution for this printing) and on the other a map of Carcosa keyed with relevant locations involved with the sorcerous rituals. Amos Orion Sterns had made a rough of this on his own after the first edition of Carcosa was released, and Geoffrey and I went nuts after seeing it. We really couldn't fit it in the book, but we knew we had to do something with it, so we had Amos tighten up the design and here it is as a limited edition extra.

Oh, my store software won't let me apply the Gardening Society discount to the extras, so Gardening Society members will get 2€ off Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown, even if not ordering the extras. After the extras sell out, the discount will go back to the usual 1€ off.

That means if intend to buy both, you could sign up for the Gardening Society today for 10€ and be saving 4€ next week - and membership gives you 1€ off every print product in the store, always, so you could theoretically turn around and save more money than the cost of membership right away. And you get a kickass membership card!

(figured if I was going to promote something I might as well be completely shameless, right? :D)

Details on Gardening Society membership here.

A Look at the Isle and Carcosa Maps!

2011-11-28T16:23:00.001+02:00

Just got the proofs in for the cloth map extras I'll be offering when the books go on sale next week. These maps will be printed in the appropriate book's endpapers, but I thought it would be good to offer stand-alone maps as well.

I originally planned on doing them in the soft-cloth Ultima style. But those aren't good for a lot of detail, because the ink bleeds too much on that material, and I wanted the hex numbers to show up on these maps. They're perfect for player maps, I think. (hexcrawl exploration purists are going to lynch me for that one, aren't they?) This next shot was supposed to show off the material - it's a soft canvas-like fabric, but the texture of the back of the map didn't show up too well... but you can see a bit more detail on the maps themselves so why not.

Isle of the Unknown - What Is It?

2011-11-28T12:11:00.001+02:00

The book should be arriving soon, [Update: The printer tells me Isle and Carcosa will be delivered Monday December 5!].

So. Isle of the Unknown. What is it?

I was going to do some corny-ass hype, but I thought instead I should quote a few things from the emails Geoffrey and I exchanged after I received the draft of the book and we discussed what form the book should take.

Geoffrey:

Isle of the Unknown is a hard-core and pure old-school product. I write the sort of thing I wish other people would write and publish. I love, love, love the format of Judges Guild's Wilderlands products. This sort of thing moves my imagination, and it has (to my druthers) very little wasted space. It's 99% pure gold.
That's what I am aiming at with Isle of the Unknown. I want all the wonder of the old Wilderlands, with none of the "OK, I've seen that before." Orcs and shit were new back then, but not now. So I've done a Wilderlands[-style] product that is all fantastic and no nostalgia.

Of course I wanted more nuts and bolts detail about the island:

You've got several entries that are "in motion" such as: "2408 A 7th-level cleric in a red surcoat with a white cross is mounting his horse " with a situation then described. I think maybe the "in motion/situation" entries should be part of encounter tables with more permanent features (lairs, statues, settlements, etc) being part of definite hex descriptions.

I think the utility of a product like this is its ability to be used "out of the box" - and I think the "civilized" stuff, and encounter tables, is important to do that. Not saying to nail down names and things like that, but...

Keep on the Borderlands spent "equal time" on the Keep and the Caves of Chaos, for example, all without using names or defining interrelations between people and factions beyond the broadest of strokes, and I think this could benefit from the same approach.

This is what Geoffrey thought of these ideas:

The sort of additions you suggest have always seemed to me wasted space. Even the Keep was little used by us (in contrast to the heavily-used Caves of Chaos).

I remember that James Maliszewski regretted that you didn't give any D&D stats to the people of Pembrooktonshire, and he regretted that you didn't include more mundane stuff in Weird New World. What were you supposed to do? Give stat after stat that said "S 10, I 11, W 10, D 11, C 10, Ch 11"? The Pembrooktonshiretonians are all 0-level guys with 1-6 hp. They need stats about as much as do their chickens, goats, and pigs. It'd be wasted space. And Weird New World doesn't need stats for seals, penguins, and mundane Eskimos.

Similarly, virtually all the people on the Isle of the Unknown are 0-level nobodies with 1-6 hp and stats in the 9-12 range. It matters not whether they are priests, scholars, knights, peasants, bandits, or what-have-you. And do we really need or want a table giving a list of the types of nobodies that might be encountered wandering around the isle? Even their equipment is all common sense: priests don't have weapons or armor, knights have both, peasants are "armed" with pitchforks, etc. I would regard such information in a product as worthless or even kind of condescending.

Hamlets, thorps, dorfs, etc. are also a dime-a-dozen: "The hamlet of _______ consists of 102 people living in 12 thatched, single-room cottages. They are all subsistence farmers. They own nothing besides humble clothes, tableware, and pitchforks." And for the details of the larger villages, I think that's a job for Zak's Vornheim product.

I can't over-emphasize that each hex in Isle of the Unknown covers over 86 square miles of territory. That is HUGE. Thus any encounter table that was even remotely "accurate" as far as giving a realistic chance of encountering the fantastic spot within the hex would look something like:

01-10 It rains.
11-20 You seen some rabbits.
21-30 You meet a peasant digging for mushrooms.
31-40 You step in cowshit.
41-50 etc.
.
.
.
.
91-99 A dog barks at you.
00 You encounter the fantastic thing described in this product.

(Players would have a truly boring time of it!)

If, for example, I were to erect a man-sized statue in a forest of 86 square miles, it would take forever and a day for someone to find the damn thing. You could probably walk 100' away from it and still not notice it. And that's assuming you knew it was there and were looking for it. If you were ignorant of its existence, you could probably walk through that forest 100 times and never stumble across the statue.

Except for the "OMG, Carcosa has children getting raped!" thing, perhaps the most common complaint I heard was that it was too world-specific. I want Isle of the Unknown to be able to be dropped into any campaign with little or no fuss.

... and then a few nights later I got this email from Geoffrey:

As I was falling asleep last night (in that half-awake half-asleep state) the following idea occurred to me. Then at 4:30 this morning I woke-up and couldn't fall back to sleep because of this idea. As I type this sentence it's 5:09 in the morning.

More than anything else, art in an RPG product needs to be useful. I think back to my early RPG days, and what "sold" me on a product more than anything else? Monster Manual-style art. The day I bought my Holmes Basic set, I also purchased the Monster Manual. It was a no-brainer purchase rather than the PHB or the DMG. Why? Because of the multitude of monster illustrations.

Some months thereafter I went to the store, money in hand, to buy the PHB. Ha! The Deities & Demigods book was sitting there, brand new on the shelf. One look at it (with its MM-style art) and there was no debate: I bought the DDG instead. I could sit for hours looking at the pictures in the MM and the DDG (and, in the next year, the Fiend Folio). The PHB and the DMG? Not so much. Sure, drawings of adventurers are cool, but how can they compare to the compendia of drawings of monsters in the MM, DDG, and FF?

Consider two monsters from the MM that nobody ever uses: the masher and the slithering tracker. (Hell, I literally never even noticed the very existence of the masher for about 20 years!) Why does nobody ever use them? What do they have in common?

No picture.

What if the interior art of Isle of the Unknown is devoted solely to Monster Manual-style (by that I mean relatively small drawings of just the monster itself) drawings of the 108 or so monsters in the book? That's a lot of drawings, but they'd be relatively small. The drawings would make the monsters come alive, unlike the poor masher and slithering tracker.

Plus, the drawings overall would be cooler than the drawings in MM, DDG, or FF. After all, how cool can a drawing of an orc or a brownie be? In contrast, all the monsters in Isle of the Unknown are weird and relatively hard to picture.

How am I going to argue with that?

... so suddenly we had a big art book project and at the same time a balls-to-the-wall hardcore old school Judges Guild-style adventure/setting.

And it's almost here.

Previews from the actual book and looks at the limited edition extras in the days to come.

Hail to England!

2011-11-26T22:26:00.003+02:00

Cue the Manowar!

Dragonmeet was a smashing success, with very nearly double last years' sales.

Vornheim has officially cracked the 1000 print sales barrier!

Oh, see this post from Zak? If we're talking a good-sized project (64+ page) I split the profits with the writer. He really has made as much as he's said (and has another big fat pile of cash coming from this quarter-in-progress sales).

(.02€/word or 35% profit I think is the figure, your choice, for 32 page or less items... the income is a lot less on smaller projects but my aggravation on the publishing side is just as much as the larger projects, so...)

Two things you get from this info: One, when you buy Vornheim or Carcosa or Isle of the Unknown, the authors are getting paid just as much as I am. That is true for damn few publishers out there.

Two, I'm going to invest more money into your book to make it as nice and cool it can be, and work to promote it, and work to distribute it, more than you are going to and more than most will. Yes, I am a small publisher and I have my limits (nothing has appeared since April because all my resources were tied up with Carcosa and Isle for a long damn time), I can only take on so many projects, and I'm picky, but if you have an idea that might fit with LotFP, maybe you should run it by me and see what we can do.

OK, third thing you should know, there's no guarantees with this system, if sales fall flat on their ass, you don't get anything, but then you didn't risk anything except time an effort. The financial fallout is all mine.

Is that an insane publishing model? Perhaps. But I talked to way too many bands in my time doing my metal zine that were getting absolutely fucked, making money hand over fist for their label yet not able to feed themselves off the exact same record sales. I don't play that way.

It's worked out well so far. I'll stop it only when I have to. And that's entirely up to you guys that buy the stuff.

(no, artists and such don't get a percentage because their work is going to be based on and support the writing. But they still get big piles of cash when appropriate... you don't want to know the Carcosa and Isle art budgets.)

Anyway, I'm off to eat and then to bed... 6am flight tomorrow... BACK TO FINLAND!

Off to London... Saturday: Dragonmeet!

2011-11-25T10:00:00.000+02:00

Stop by the table in the vendor room.

Buy stuff.

Or just chat.

I'll have some Isle of the Unknown color proofs with me for those that want a bit of a preview...

***

When I get back next week it's just writing while waiting for Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown to return from the printer (expected the week of the 5th).

I should be able to show you samples of the cloth map extras that will be available, and I'll start posting more info and then previews for the two books.

Why Playtest an Adventure?

2011-11-22T13:13:00.000+02:00

I have my ideas, but I want to hear yours.

Why is it important to playtest an adventure written for publication?

Are the reasons to playtest (or not) an adventure different depending on the game for which the adventure is written?

One Important Ingredient for Weird Fantasy: Total Disregard

2011-11-18T16:00:00.000+02:00

Disregard for the rules, disregard for the PCs, disregard for the "campaign plan." Some stuff just is, and how the players work around it (or choose not to) becomes perhaps the defining element of play.

In Dragon #16, J. Eric Holmes said the following about his earlier The Lovecraftian Mythos in Dungeons & Dragons article from Dragon #12 (and mad, mad props to my homeboy over at Zenopus Archives for bringing this stuff to our royal attention) :

In an early version of “the Gods” I said “if Cthulhu breaks out of R’lyeh, everyone in the world must make a saving throw or go insane.” I later reduced this as being a bit too gross.

Too gross? Totally. He was going to let people make a saving throw? That's some Monty Haul bullshit right there.

(I kid, I kid... sort of. But not really. At least in his article the universe ends if Azathoth is killed. No saving throw. Seriously.)

But there seems to be a hedging of bets when it comes to this sort of thing, then and now. "Let's take the edge off, because really, that's not fair. And we need to stat everything even though the text clearly implies some things aren't really meant to be fought, let alone defeated."

Enough of that!

One of the effects in Death Sparkle Doom that I'm putting together at the moment:

"Reverse Character's XP"

So if your character had 1,009 XP, he now has 9,001. Or if he was a high level badass with exactly 100,000 XP, congrats, he now only has 1 XP!

(just my luck that the PC that triggered this effect had 101 XP at the time... that was totally no fun!)

PCs can also have their permanent HP maximum increased, or decreased, d100%. Not such a huge deal either way for a first level character... totally game-changing for a high level character.

The Dancing Queen in Yellow has three possible endings: A great extradimensional elder thing under the control of a depraved cultist, a great extradimensional elder thing under the control of a PC, or a great extradimensional elder thing under the control of no one and going on a rampage. Because it's coming. The summoning happened the day before you found out about it. It's just the controlling ritual that has to be done at a specific time yet to come...

And I can see the red pen being taken to the Monolith adventure when Refs see what its guardian is like. Oh yeah, just by looking at the Monolith PCs gain a level. Refs, do not yet despair for your campaign, for the players will not much like why that happens.

Or maybe as I finish these projects and play them more and start to revise them, I'll chicken out. But if I announce some Constantcon/FLAILSNAILS style Skype playtests with the instruction "roll d20 to determine your character's level at the start of the adventure," you'll know I haven't.

(you don't need sanity mechanics if your goal is to drive the real-life players crazy, you know?)

(I'm on the jazz, man)

(if I didn't have this stuff to do and a few other things I should be doing, I'd do the second Against the Giants review about I3-5... perhaps the best of the early D&D "adventure paths" but for how three small details are handled which largely unravel the whole thing.)

What's the Biggest Map You Find Convenient at the Table?

2011-11-17T16:30:00.000+02:00

As far as a physical object, how big is too big to be useful in play?

Over the years there have been sets published with full poster-sized maps. Undermountain had them, I think Dragon Mountain did? World's Largest Dungeon did as well I think, but if they were also supposed to be battlemats (were they? School me!) that might be more forgivable.

But I know I always had trouble using such large maps at the table. They are just... too... big!

I've got a couple projects (Insect Shrine and the Asylum adventure) that when I get around to finishing them just do not have maps that will fit on a standard page (either the usual size or a spread in my A5-sized books).

So what's just right for you? How big is too big for you to use in play?

People Team Up to Tell Me What to Release!

2011-11-15T19:45:00.000+02:00

I was talking to Matt Johnsen about plans as I often do, and he suggested that I release something on a scroll.

Cool idea!

Except... referencing areas other than what you're reading that very moment would be kind of crap. Functionality, damn it...

So I tell my wife the scroll idea. She gets excited because she's thinking I should do an adventure based on a railroad (seriously), Murder on the Orient Express kind of thing (I'm partial to doing something paying homage to Horror Express, a movie I remember terrifying me as a child). "As the train travels to the next place, you just move down the scroll."

"But," I say smugly, "there needs to be elements of player choice in altering the outcome of events. If we came up with ways that players could really influence this train adventure, then it could work."

She answers: "They could decide whether to die sooner or die later!"

I was so proud. She's learning!

Death Sparkle Doom: Why? and First (Recent) Playtest

2011-11-14T10:55:00.001+02:00

"Gee, I'm already trolling the busybodies by making a Grindhouse Edition with zombies putting hands up hoohas and putting out Carcosa which portrays evil sorcery as evil. Pushing much more in that direction is fun but we're going to get to a point of diminishing warblegarble returns if we keep pushing that way. How to achieve the same effect in another way?"

That 'effect' being important because as a 9 year old owning the AD&D books, the sense of everyonethinksD&DisevilSatanicI'mgoingtocommitsuicideforplayingit, and I can't let my mother see the insides of the books she's bought me because they have drawings of boobies, and I can't read the Monster Manual at night because some of these pictures are really scary! were as much a part of the base RPG experience for me as "There's this game where you can do ANYTHING and not argue about whether you missed or not!" and I have to pay it forward. ;)

... and after a couple years of publishing, and over a year of seeing TONS of what my peers are doing through my OSR-based retailing on the web and at cons, I have this idea that releases should be events, they should be presented as unique and special things, lest they get lost in the sea of releases, lest the ideas within get ignored once purchased because the whole thing appears so mundane and same-old.

I could point lots of fingers there (and have a bit), but instead of being an armchair internet critic, I get to show 'em how it's done, right?

(and then everyone else sits back and gets to complain that I make a big deal out of everything and oh my god how much cheaper would that have been if he hadn't done that!)

Anyway, my latest outrage technique was to go cute. Present an adventure in the manner of a children's book, nice thick pages, very very bright and colorful throughout. The cover will be influenced by the colors and atmosphere of My Little Pony and the Care Bears.

That will be the new face of fear!

But I need something to put into such a product, right? Flashy is awesome, but it's one thing to make something that gets attention, it's great to do something that makes people feel they need to have it because ohmygodhowawesomedoesthatlook!!!, but it needs to be unique and original and awesome to be worthy of a presentation that's unique and original and awesome. Or else it's all shit.

... I had just the thing in the archives! The adventure was originally run about five years ago or so. It was a little puzzle-based dungeon based on the chromatic dragon color scheme, where solving several different color-based puzzles opened up a passage to go up this mountain; the alternative was to fight their way up to the top. I forget why they were going up there. Was it the observatory where dwarfs had enslaved some hill giants?

I pulled this adventure out a few years ago in an attempt to get it into publishable form. Remember, before deciding I was going to be a publisher, I was just going to have other people publish my work. I was going to submit the adventure to Brave Halfling to publish, but in my "genius" I sent the module straight up its own ass as the five chromatic dragon color scheme was muddled by including ultraviolet and infrared light, microwaves, gamma rays, etc. It turned into a big glop of shit, so I abandoned it and wrote No Dignity in Death instead... and then ended up stipulating so many things concerning the presentation that it didn't make any sense for someone else to release it...

So this "color-based adventure," if it could be brought under control, seemed to fit the "colorful children's book presentation." But it needed something a little more... Tying it in to the whole Duvan'Ku thing and making it a Death x Doom release would give it that little kick. It's been well over two years since Death Frost Doom and over a year since Duvan'Ku got any publication mention (in Hammers of the God), and Death Ferox Doom is in developmental hell, so to speak (how to get rid of the overly Traditional D&D* elements without gutting all the key parts where they are currently included, how to make the social sections of the adventure come truly alive -- the "Here are the tribes!" sections I've written seem static and boring!, and how to present it all so that it's too cool for school are all issues I am struggling with), so I'm not draining the Death x Doom well dry.

So a few weeks of organizing, note taking, general dressing up, and integration of the Duvan'Ku "mythology" (including an explanation of why this place exists and how it would function by those that made it), I had a dungeon ready to play.

It's an "everything you touch messes you up and you have to touch a lot of stuff to beat the thing" type of affair.

The first play-through of the new dungeon concept wasn't a total success.

I mean, the three PCs that went through the thing were suitably messed up. I think the basic setup is good. They conquered the dungeon, but one of them is now 18" tall, another is 20' tall, and before he accidentally popped himself out of existence the third PC was made of mist and enveloped in a field of darkness.

The Problems As I Saw Them (my players can chime in if they like):

The PCs destroyed the source of clues in the adventure. I actually had to fudge them not being completely destroyed as they should have been or the whole thing would have gone to shit right away. There needs to be a clue about the clues.
I'm getting really awful about the reward/XP thing in adventures**. "This structure protects a treasure!" OK, fine, there's a specific treasure to find at the end. But it's not a pile of gold or silver or anything. And playing shouldn't be a total binary "succeed/fail" proposition. The adventure needs more tangible rewards here and there.
Needs more urgency. A lot of the puzzles are tense enough, especially once the players get the pattern of what's going on. "If we touch that one there one of our items is going to go bad... and we have to touch it." But when the players are just guessing or working from wrong assumptions (say, because of destroying the clues...) it becomes a repetitious treadmill of "suffer an effect, then go check to see if it did what we want it to do." Presenting some other dangers so this isn't all being done quite at the PCs' leisure is in order, and the means to provide that is already in the adventure.
I used a master effects table for the various elements. So no matter if the players touched a colored energy field, got clawed by a guardian of a certain color, or decided to have fun with colored lotus powder, each color rolled on the same effects table. I think I need to separate that out so while, say, a violet energy field, a violet guardian, and violet lotus (PURPLE LOTUS III!!!!!) will be thematically linked as their effects go, the specific effects should be unique to whatever element is triggering it.

That concludes this edition of "what I wrote while waiting to download the revised Carcosa production PDF with changes made in light of the printing proofs."

* this one's hard to explain. It's just important for me, no matter the underlying system and procedures of play, to have my stuff feel different from traditional D&D. The classic TSR stuff has been done. It's continuing to be done and redone by numerous authors in our scene right now. More power to them, but I want something a bit different and distinct, "this is 2011!", not something that slides comfortably beside what was done in 1980 or a "what if?" experiment or whatever. That's one frustrating thing about the fly-by Weird Fantasy critics, yes, it's a retro-clone kind of thing, but if you embrace its assumptions, playing it leads to a different atmosphere and creative space, and dare I say a whole different game than say OSRIC or Labyrinth Lord if you run a campaign. It's not "a slightly different way to play the same old D&D." At least I don't think so. Or maybe my degree of differentiation is so slight that there effectively is no real difference. Whatever. I follow my muse, you follow yours.

** if LotFP gets a third edition someday, the level system is on the chopping block.

The Mayan Calendar Is Wrong... The Universe Ends December 2011... CARCOSA IS AT THE PRINTER!

2011-11-08T17:01:00.000+02:00

It's done. At the printer. Coming early December 2011.

Hardcover (thread-sewn binding) with a foil-stamped cover, 288 A5 pages, beautifully designed, generously illustrated... you will bow down in AWE of this thing.

And it's not just going to be a pretty physical item. It's been expanded, reorganized, extensively cross-referenced and indexed. Seriously, Eero Tuovinen has been a damn SUPERHERO preparing this book and making sure it's a thing of both beauty and utility.

I am so excited about this, not only in being able to re-release Carcosa and get it out to a wider audience, but in sparing no expense in making sure it was released in a format that did its contents justice.

Carcosa is a big fucking deal to me. It was the first thing that showed me that this whole old school thing was not only about reclaiming the respect and fan base and not being treated like backward morons for the games we like to play, but that we were going to surge forward and be more than a shadow of days gone by.

The Carcosa controversy was raging when I had the first date with the woman who became my wife. Poor girl had to deal with me taking Carcosa out at the restaurant and ranting to her about how awful and small-minded a lot of people were and that this thing was awesome and those people were wrong!

I feel so excited that this thing is out the door. So full of energy, like this is a weapon that will conquer the world and beyond.

I can't wait to show this thing to you all.

Goddamn I have the best job in the world.

Isle of the Unknown is AT THE PRINTER

2011-11-07T13:57:00.000+02:00

Hardcover (thread-sewn for those of you looking out for that), 128 pages, over 120 illustrations, full color throughout.

Should go on sale the first couple days in December.

I hope to make the 'at the printer' announcement for Carcosa tomorrow.

An Odd Quote Pointing Out Why RPGs are a Niche Hobby!

2011-11-07T11:45:00.000+02:00

Over at RPG.net, user Shawn said:

"Of course D&D's game play should be fun enough on it's own. It's a game. If the rules are dependent on story and things the players bring to the game as opposed to what the game itself brings to the table to be fun and enjoyable enough to play, then the game has failed miserably."

To me, that's the entire point of RPGs as opposed to card/board/video games. If the players (including the Referee) bring nothing to the table, there is no game, and there's really nothing for the rules to even do.

The always-active nature of the hobby is the tough sell, I think, and why other entertainment forms are more popular.

"It's like reading, but harder!"

Zombie Apocalypse Game

2011-11-05T22:38:00.000+02:00

I'll admit that the first reaction I had when Goblinoid Games announced Rotworld was "SON OF A BITCH I WAS GOING TO DO A ZOMBIE GAME!!!!!!!"

I quickly calmed down when that little voice in my head said, "haha, yeah, when?"

But looking through the table of contents, I was disappointed to see that it was almost all system. 43 of its 64 pages are system. The Dead Rise and Zombie Creation (another 10 pages) I guess are necessary...

But to me, the heart of a zombie apocalypse game isn't system, it's not even really the zombies. It's finding out what and who's left and how difficult they are to get to and deal with.

Chapter 6: People You Meet (p44-46) and Chapter 9: Corpse Master Tools (p57-61), that's the game in a zombie RPG. "We go there. What's there? Anything useful? How infested is it? Anyone alive? What's their condition and disposition?"

And it's 8 pages out of 64 in the game.

I know it's not fair because I haven't actually read the game, but I can't help but feeling they have it all backwards. Put in a short and sweet system (suitable for "you want to play a zombie game? *BAM* you're ready!" ... and zombie combat pretty much comes down to "Are you surprised? Are you surrounded? If no and no, Are you armed?"), and then tons and tons of support for on-the-fly gaming. Basically a billion and one random charts that cover everything from "what's left in the convenience store?" to "how difficult is it to run I-95 between Jacksonville and St. Augustine?"

Basically the zombie experience is a heaping pile of random encounter charts, reaction rolls, and random treasure charts.

This sounds like I'm challenging myself to do something I don't have any time to do.

Vornheim: The Complete City Kit Promo Video

2011-11-04T23:00:00.000+02:00

Zak put this video together awhile back, but I only recently figured out Youtube accounts, and figured if I added my video I should put this up there as well.

LotFP Night Visions Video

2011-11-04T18:40:00.001+02:00

This was the ad that was up on the big screen at the Night Visions festival last week. Very NSFW if you need to be told.

Carcosa Will Give Me a Heart Attack

2011-11-04T16:29:00.000+02:00

Days away from the print date for Carcosa.

... the artist has been out of touch for almost a week, with four pieces of art still to turn in. He was one of the people who lost power during that big New England snowstorm last weekend. This week has been stressful, to say the least.

But he's now he's borrowed a generator and is uploading the needed files. Nothing like getting everything done at the last minute. :D

One of the pieces is the cover. Here is Carcosa's frontispiece, with the cover being a silhouette of this to call back to the cover of the first edition:

Halloween? Oh yeah, it is! MOVIE LIST!

2011-10-31T22:29:00.000+02:00

You want a Top 10 list of movies to watch to get the Weird Fantasy Role-Playing vibe?

TOUGH!

You get the first 10 movies I can think of that fit!

Alien
The Blob
Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter
Hellraiser
Predator
Quatermass and the Pit
Ravenous
Ringu
The Thing (1982 Carpenter version)
Witchfinder General

Cripes! This Baker Thing Has Legs!

2011-10-30T19:46:00.001+02:00

First, thanks to all that bought something during the sale. Big success. :)

On October 11 Vincent Baker made a post on the Forge with the title "Lamentations of the Flame Princess is made of lies!"

I made my comments here on October 14.

But it spreads!

On October 22 Baker's comments were addressed by someone on the RPGSite with the thread "Swine Attack LotFP." It's up to 111 posts with the usual Forge/RPGSite animosity.

Earlier this morning a thread started on RPG.net: "Forge Thread: LOTFP is made of lies." This one's going to weird places (see this reply as an example).

Whew.

I will once again state that I don't see how Baker thought there would be moral grounding within the game (I intentionally removed any such thing - A Stranger Storm doesn't work at all if morality is mechanically enforced or even tracked - the fun is in watching the players squirm as they try to decide what to do!). I don't think Baker really was attacking the game at all and he had fun playing even if he made some incorrect assumptions out of the gate.

I also think that different people playing my game differently is an awesome thing, and even if they don't have a consistent vision of what LotFP is supposed to be, it's still coming out differently than people playing Labyrinth Lord or Swords & Wizardry or old D&D - mechanically similar in many respects but not the same games as LotFP.

If my resources weren't tied up with Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown (both should go to press in 8 days!), I would have gotten an adventure or three out by now out which would better define my perception of the weird with some more ready-to-go examples and how it's not very hard-codable into rules. But I didn't because Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown aren't going to get done without deciding to get them done, you know? And at that point there's nothing to do but put everything else on hold and sacrifice the resources necessary to do them right.

Night Visions Night 4

2011-10-30T10:00:00.000+02:00

Got home from Night Visions a little while before I writing this, and will be going to sleep after it posts. When I wake up, the sale is OVER!

Anyway... once again, highlight spoilers in parenthesis to see them.

Viva Riva!

"Branded by the international media as the Scarface of Congo, Viva Riva! is a slick, violent and sexy action thriller set in the streets and back alleys of the wildly exotic city of Kinshasa."

I really don't like gangster movies. Don't like Goodfellas, the Sopranos was never interesting to me... setting it in Africa doesn't make it any more interesting to me. So one criminal steals stuff from another criminal and leads the high life while being hunted by other criminals, the authorities are corrupt, it's all so very violent and tragic. Yawn.

Really, the only thing me and the wife got out of this movie was "Glad we're lucky enough to not live in that shithole."

Two Eyes Staring

Fucking excellent.

A ghost story: A women in Belgium dies, leaving her rather large and spooky house to her estranged daughter, who has created a life and family for herself in the Netherlands. The family decides to move in to this house. The 9-year old daughter starts seeing a girl in the cellar that has to do with the family's past... and everything starts going to hell.

No blood and guts. Very little violence at all. Creepy. Escalating in tension until it hits you with the twist.

A word about twists... good movie twists don't seem like gimmicks, they don't seem like the moviemakers ran out of ideas and figured fooling the audience will save the movie.

When a good twist hits you, you feel stupid for not seeing it sooner because of course things should be that way.

This movie has a great twist.

Twist is a fun word. Good thing I'm home alone right now or someone'd be looking at me weird because I'm saying "twist twist twist twist" out loud here.

hmmm.

Here's how to make yourself feel old. "Wow, the mom in that movie is MILFy!" Get home, check IMDB (which contains unlabeled spoilers in the cast list)... oh... she's younger than I am. Fuck.

When this movie ended, I headed home, had dinner, watched the beginning of Goldmember on TV (another movie!!), took a nap, and headed back down to the theater to start watching movies again at 1am.

The Ward

What the hell? This is a John Carpenter movie? Seriously?

It's about some young (teenage?) women in a psych ward in a mental hospital. There's a ghost killing them one by one, but nobody seems to believe them.

The twist? (The same as Identity. Without any of the things that made Identity good.)

This is a bad twist that made me feel stupid for waking up after midnight and walking across town to see it. Not that anything leading up to the twist was the least bit interesting.

This movie is shit, top to bottom, front to back.

The Gates of Hell (aka City of the Living Dead)

Lucio Fulci makes shit movies. He's this legend, I know, and in the late 90s when Anchor Bay was releasing his movies uncut I snapped them up fast and squirmed and was properly grossed out. Because Fulci presents a nice grossout.

... but... ahhh... back in the day, things like the Friday the 13th movies were censored to get them to an R rating. Even the bloody hack and slash of American cinema was watered down. This foreign stuff? Exotic and did what you couldn't do, even in theaters!

... but it's 2011 and watching a movie with shitty acting and shitty "plots" and stupid dialogue and shit doesn't make any goddamn sense isn't going to cut it just to watch someone puking up guts on screen. Fuck, even House has featured a popping eyeball, you know?

... yet Fulci's movies were banned or edited all to crap for decades in some cases because they were just too graphic and horrifying. How quaint the 70s and 80s, eh?

Anyway, the story here is a priest hangs himself in a Dunwich cemetery, triggering the opening of the Gates of Hell! A psychic and veteran reporter rush to the scene to stop it!

Fine, whatever. But it's so goddamn stupid (teleporting zombies!) that it kills the "money shots."

Perfect example: At the beginning of the movie the psychic is thought dead. Is buried. The reporter, investigating the story, happens by as the woman wakes up and starts screaming. To help her, this dumbass gets a fucking pickaxe and starts wailing away at the casket.

The idea of laying there in a coffin as the head of a pickaxe continually comes within a hair's breadth of piercing your face should be scary. And intense. But it was handled so clumsily (the guy's trying to help her by doing that? Moron!) the audience here was laughing at it.

I bet it would be pretty gross if you were sitting in a room and for no reason the window is smashed and suddenly the room is filled with maggots blowing in. Watching it was a comedic experience because the window blew in for no reason and then we get "dramatic" shots of four actors wiggling around (the director really did stick a big pile of maggots in front of an industrial-sized fan, by the way). Oh no! Maggots! Why, if this keeps up, these poor people will need to change their clothes or something! If this scene was real footage of a real event, it would be America's Funniest Home Videos fodder.

... or maybe it was a 3am showing immediately following a shit movie and I had no patience it.

The Woman

A woman is for some reason living in the woods. She is completely feral, a wild animal for all intents and purposes. A man out on a hunting trip discovers her, and decides to capture her, lock her in a cellar, and make it a family project to civilize her.

This movie is fucked up! FUCKED UP!

The guy playing the head of the household (a middle class family that lives on a sizable piece of land outside of a small town) looks similar to and acts just like a toned-down Will Ferrell (and watch Stranger than Fiction before telling me Ferrell is shit or anything). He is absolutely perfect as the calm, disarmingly charming man who is all to believable.

He's also the most despicable movie villain I can recall seeing.

This juxtaposition creates some laughs early on, but before long, nobody's laughing anymore.

The actress playing the feral woman is also superb. I never for a second questioned the idea that she was really and truly a creature of the wilderness. Amazing stuff here.

The movie did break its own reality a bit as once the captive woman escapes (yes, that's a spoiler, but talk about being the most obvious spoiler in history) her feats of feral vengeance are a bit beyond what would be plausible. But the twist the movie has in reserve more than makes up for it.

This movie is not on the first tier of video nasties... that would be reserved for movies like I Spit on Your Grave (30 minute rape scene), A Serbian Film (tons and tons of sexually related violence, much involving children), and Cannibal Holocaust (real animal deaths and some real bastard protagonists)... those movies are all filmed in a way to put you, the viewer, in the middle of the absolutely disgusting events of those films. The Woman doesn't employ that, it's the more standard cinematic detachment. And as I said it forgets itself momentarily. So it's not a first-rung "Nobody should ever watch this ever because it's too fucked up" kind of movie.

But it's right there at the top of the second tier. This is some disturbing, disturbing shit, and the disturbing bits have little to do over the top gore (not a lot of that here).

Best of the fest, and a must-see movie.

(oh shit... checking IMDB, this movie is the sequel to a 2009 movie called Offspring, which I'd never even heard of... apparently this isn't just some random feral girl, as the actress is reprising her role from that movie... hmmm)

Inbred

Whoa.

This isn't a great movie or anything, and it's presented as a horror/comedy, but...

Well, here's the IMDB summary: "Four young offenders and their (social) workers spend a weekend in the remote Yorkshire village of Mortlake, which prides on keeping itself to itself. A minor incident with locals rapidly escalates into a blood-soaked, deliriously warped nightmare."

... that's basically it. The humor comes from the fact that the locals treat this situation as completely normal. This ultraviolence is rather matter-of-fact to them, and they present shows and play games around it. (in fact, a lot of the "humor" in the movies this year comes from this exact thing... "Here's some really horrible disgusting shit for you, and here is some comedy relief in the form of characters who think dismembering a corpse is no more unusual than making the bed.")

There really aren't any twists and turns (aside from the fact that the bad guys win, after some resistance, a strong and final victory with the victims' escape hardly ever even seen to be likely), so it's a straight up splatterfest. And splatter splatter splatter it does.

In fact, the gore effects here are some of the best I've ever seen. You could still tell it's CGI, but only just - it really does look like they're swinging axes full force at each other's heads and making full contact and SPLAT. It's on one hand really fucking awful to watch (like when the horse steps on the guy's face) but on the other hand if this dinky low budget thing can do this, there is hope for more ambitious movies to not have to use trickery to obscure things that don't look good (whereas I thought movies like Diary of the Dead and Scorsese's Departed were ruined by too-obvious CGI wounds and blood spatter).

It's weird, that for all the stomach-churning violence (and there is a lot of stuff I just haven't seen done before that makes a lot more sense than most common horror movie violence), it never enters the realm of the truly disturbing as a whole. I saw that as a guy that just watched 6 horror movies in a night mind you, but when I watched Hostel, I thought "brutal!" When I watched Inbred, it was like watching Star Wars... it's a spectacle that happens to be about violence and lots of blood, but it didn't make me feel dirty for watching it.

Recommended...

... and that was Night Visions. 18 movies in 4 days. (there were 10 more movies screened that I didn't get to see)

Best of the Fest: The Woman, Hobo with a Shotgun, Red State

Turkeys of the Fest: The Ward, Gates of Hell, Another Earth

whew. It's a semi-annual thing so I get to do it all again in April!

It's 10am now (feels like 11am since clocks turned back overnight here in Finland), I'm off to bed!

Night Visions Night 3

2011-10-29T13:35:00.000+03:00

In addition to the big LotFP ad, it seems they also screened some movies last night at the film festival... (highlight the 'blank' stuff in the parenthesis to see spoilers)

The Whisperer in Darkness

Hmmm.

This same crew made the Call of Cthulhu silent movie and I've been waiting for Whisperer since the first trailer hit... what, five years ago? This was the movie I was most looking forward to.

But after seeing it I have very mixed feelings.

The story that we know is the middle of the movie. They added a ton of stuff at the beginning of the movie (which I feel mostly good about, or else it's just a guy reading letters so something had to be done), but they also added a ton of stuff to the end of the movie. The end of Lovecraft's story is only the end of this movie's second act.

We can argue about the merits of what they did with the end third of the movie, but can we at least agree that (Wilmarth consoling the neighboring farmer's daughter in a barn protected by Elder Signs with a weepy story about him losing his own family in the influenza epidemic of 1918) and (the big chase scene with the mi-go and Wilmarth's airplane - seriously!-) are not at all very Lovecraftian?

The production as a whole was a huge step up from Call of Cthulhu, where the seams were only visible if you were specifically looking for them ("a-ha! The rain isn't real because you only see the drops in the puddles in the foreground, not the background!" sort of thing), with one exception. The CGI mi-go looked rather awful. The stop-motion Cthulhu of the first movie was no great shakes but it didn't seem out of place with the rest of it. Whisperer is so sharp otherwise that awful looking monsters really stand out.

It has an appropriately Lovecraft ending though,

Revenge: A Love Story

Hmm. Not a fun movie. Not at all.

We open with some madman killing policemen and ripping the fetuses out of those policemen's very very pregnant wives (and daughter? no way that older cop was married to that younger woman?).

They catch him. And then the movie goes to Fuckedupville. Because, as it turns out, his actions are not completely unjustified.

This movie goes to bad, bad places and has a lot of collateral damage.

8

A Finnish production that helpfully had English subtitles built in.

From the IMDB summary:

"Linda is a young psychology student, who wants to help his boyfriend Riku, who has fallen into a state of psychosis, by taking him to a mystical cave, where human subconscious and memories start to live their own life. Linda soon realises that she can't help Riku, before she has faced her own most painful traumas."

It's all 'Face the bad things you've done and the bad things that have happened to you' sort of stuff.

Red State

Easily Kevin Smith's best movie. It's not a comedy (although moments of black humor pop up throughout), but a very cynical, hateful movie about people completely out of control.

Who are the players?

A trio of teenagers going to get some MMMF action with an older woman they met on a sex personals site. A Westboro Baptist-cum-Branch Davidian religious cult that is kidnapping and executing homosexuals. The ATF.

... before the ending I was feeling sorry for just about everyone in this movie. Everyone was making bad choices, some made evil choices, and everything goes to hell.

The ending is strikingly unsatisfying from a cinematic/moral point of view, but it felt very true-to-life.

The credits are divided up between "Sex" "Religion" and "Politics" and I bet many fascinating conversations can be had about this movie. My opinion? (The "Sex" people all did nothing wrong but follow their crotches, with their level of deceit being far lesser evils than what anyone else was doing. "Religion" was scary as fuck but somehow this bunch of murderous bigots were brutally victimized by a far more evil and powerful government juggernaut.)

Michael Parks is scary good as the leader of the cult. John Goodman is great as the commander of the ATF unit. Everyone here did a great job... absolutely nothing about any of the performances rang false at all.

What a linuep. Three "people doing awful things, but for (to them) good reasons!" movies to really make you hate life... and a space lobster movie.

LotFP Debuts on the Big Screen!

2011-10-29T01:26:00.000+03:00

A 40 second LotFP promo spot debuted before the showing of The Whisperer in Darkness tonight at Night Visions!

Fumbling around in the dark with a digital camera with the flash turned off, I only managed to get two lousy pics as evidence:

Probably would have been better shots if I wasn't taking them from my seat in the third row, but what the hell, right? There were 360 witnesses for that showing alone, I don't need that much photographic evidence. :)

The ad is running the rest of the weekend at the festival. We'll get the video posted sometime during the coming week. It shows off the game's nasty bits of art (horny medusa on a 20' tall screen!), since Night Visions has the audience that would most appreciate that sort of thing...

And in the Q&A with Whisperer director Sean Brannery, my question was "How did Sandy Peterson get involved with the movie?" Which meant the guy had to explain who Peterson is and talk about the Call of Cthulhu RPG before giving the answer (he provided funding to get the movie finished).

So what did you do today to expose tabletop RPGs to new audiences? :P

Night Visions Night 2

2011-10-28T10:13:00.002+03:00

... not a great night. Can't talk about these movies without spoiling them to hell, so spoilers in white, highlight the text to see them. (great, what's tomorrow's post gimmick going to be?)

Another Earth

An exact duplicate of Earth (and the moon!) comes into view, and as time passes it's getting closer! Then we find out that (not only is this an exact duplicate as far as form and land masses etc, but that each and every person on Earth is also duplicated there!). But the movie's not about that, as the planet situation is merely background noise for what the movie's really about. The movie is about the tragedies and hardships of two people that I really can't give a fuck about because THERE'S A DUPLICATE EARTH THAT'S GETTING PRETTY HUMONGOUS IN THE SKY SO WHO CARES ABOUT PEOPLE AND THEIR NORMAL PROBLEMS???? And of course it ends just as it might get interesting for someone that would actually be interested in a movie that might be about a duplicate Earth closing in on us.

Rabies

This was a mess of a movie. It wasn't about anything, just bad things happening to people out in the woods. In Israel. It was like a tragic and violent episode of Seinfeld in that way. (still haven't figured out why it's called Rabies)

Basically there's this killer that has set a traps in the woods. This snares some woman and her brother (with whom she's having an incestuous affair) is freaking out about how to get her out. Luckily for him a group of teenagers/young adults gets lost on their way to a tennis match... and the police are called, but boy oh boy are they not going to be helpful. And there's a survey team in the area too.

The funny thing? (the killer only kills a dog before he's knocked out. Everyone else kills one another, horribly, through cases of mistaken identity, because there's a fucking minefield in the woods, or because some of the people here are serious assholes and out in the woods situations are just going to get out of hand, right?)

whew. I couldn't tell if this was all supposed to be really dark humor or if it was all unintentionally rather silly.

Trick or Treat

80s "classic" that features cameos by Gene Simmons and Ozzy Osbourne (so naturally they're featured on the DVD cover like they're the stars or something).

Basically, kid named Eddie Weinbauer (played by Family Ties' Skippy) is a lonely loser metalhead freak is always getting bullied and humiliated at school. He talks about killing himself but one thing keeps him going: Heavy metal, in particular his hero Sammi Curr, who had graduated from the same high school the kid goes to and went on to conquer the rock world.

Curr dies in a fire, but a local DJ takes pity on Weinbauer and gives him a studio master version of Curr's unreleased album... which turns out to be magic as Curr speaks to Eddie and helps him get his revenge...

There's a good movie in here somewhere. I thought it captured the "put upon high school loser" pretty well, the whole PMRC thing was played up in the movie, and the kid's taste in metal reflected what a hardcore metalhead would have listened to (the kid has Judas Priest and Raven posters up on his wall, and has Megadeth, Razor, and Impaler albums in his collection). The setup didn't seem like horseshit.

But it didn't quite work out for this movie. They get details like the record collection right, but there's the big red boom mic dipping into the scene so often it should have gotten a credit. The way one of the jock bullies shouts "WEINBAUER!" it sounds like he's yelling "WHITE POWER!" the whole movie. And the actual threat in the movie was lame and there really wasn't much suspense. (Rocker Sammi Curr comes back to life as an evil electric ghost that can materialize through sound equipment and shoots lightning out of his guitar all through playing his unreleased record backwards!)

Not very good.

DEEP RED

Dario Argento's 1975 classic murder thriller! On the BIG SCREEN!

IMDB sums it up best: "A musician witnesses the murder of a famous psychic, and then teams up with a fiesty reporter to find the killer while evading attempts on their lives by the unseen killer bent on keeping a dark secret buried."

The one problem with this movie? The pace of the investigation is rather slow and when our heroes discover something, they really don't tell us, the audience, anything that would help us identify the killer.

It's pretty much a twist ending, with everything explained in hindsight, which is a bit much for a movie lasting over two hours.

Argento's movies are almost all a complete mess as far as the script, plot, and pacing (although the script and plot here are perfectly fine). Let's be honest here, his "masterpiece" Suspiria is completely incoherent - I think Tenebrae is his best movie. I wonder how things would have been different for him through the decades if he teamed with a real writer with rather than writing his films' scripts himself.

What Argento can do better than almost anyone is shoot a scene and make it a goddamn work of art. (oh, and hire Goblin to do the music)

And Argento displays a set of great big brass balls here. For all the problems this movie has, none of them matter. Argento (reveals the killer's face to us very early in the movie, and in such a way that it identifies the person as the killer. But you don't see it because Argento knows what to do with the camera and sets the scene up so that he's supremely confident that he can put the killer's face right in front of you on a 20' tall screen and you won't see it.

And he's right.

The reveal/playback at the end of the movie blew my mind completely apart when I first saw this movie years ago.)

Today's lineup is looking really good.

The Whisperer in Darkness (the movie I'm most looking forward to seeing in this whole festival), Revenge- A Love Story, Kevin Smith's Red State, and Morituris.

Plus hopefully something really cool and special for LotFP.

See you tomorrow!

Night Visions Night 1

2011-10-27T09:33:00.000+03:00

Hobo with a Shotgun is like an OSR kind of grindhouse movie. It's clearly made with love and an homage to just how wrong a lot of those 70s movies were, but at the same time it's a movie that can only be made with that 30-40 years of reflection. It's very self-aware, but in this case that makes the movie. It is the movie. It's a love-in to the genre.

You know, you watch those old movies and they're trying to make a hard-hitting and serious movie but what they've made is a movie which has edges so raw it freaks people out. This one goes for the hard-hitting and the freak-out but forgets about serious. For the most part it's a "mean streets in a corrupt city" thing, but it might be a wetter movie than Brain Dead.

This probably isn't a "good movie," but it's a grainy movie made in Technicolor and it's called Hobo with a Shotgun and whatever else you can say about the movie, it delivers everything it promises and then goes right over the line with it.

The Thing 2011 (spoilers, although these spoilers are summed up as "It really really is a prequel")

Not a bad movie, but there is absolutely nothing particularly good about it either. Carpenter's was a masterpiece in its own way.

It's also interesting that a decently-budgeted movie with studio support was allowed to be such an explicit prequel to a 30 year old movie that never did all that well (financially) to begin with. They take some pains to make sure everything ends up as MacReady and co. find it later on. Hell, as soon as you find out one of the Norwegians don't speak English, you know he survives because at the beginning of Carpenter's movie the Norwegian they shoot doesn't speak English! (the movie ends with the Norwegians in the helicopter chasing the dog...)

But instead of being a remake that either stands or falls as its own thing (or in comparison to the previous version... Carpenter's movie wasn't the first time the story was told after all!), this one is handicapped by the fact that it is a prequel. Stylistic differences become wrong (and I'm not talking film stock or anything overly ridiculous like that), and inconsistencies become not a different artistic or technical interpretation but wrong. And there were such stylistic differences and inconsistencies.

The monster is seen way too much, it acts way too movie-monstery and aggressive (no way this is the same creature in Carpenter's movie), and a lot of times the reactions of the people in this new movie just didn't ring true at all. They didn't sell the paranoia and fear of the people very well at all.

As a generic monster movie? C+, competent and not stupid but nothing spectacular at all. As something that should supposedly work for a back-to-back showing, D.

Dead Ball

uh... low budget over-the-top Japanese movie.

A preternaturally gifted criminal baseball player (he jumps into outer space to gain momentum for his fast ball) must join the prison baseball team as commanded by his Nazi warden. With deadly results.

(more money put into this poster than the rest of the movie...)

(It's that kind of movie)

(There are a lot of Nazis in this movie. And a Hitler shrine. But it's OK, they're the villains. And described as having "segregationist" policies, but that may just be a bad translation.)

(The St. Black Dahlia High School baseball team. Did I mention that this is supposedly about teenagers?)

(yes, they had a character whose entire purpose is to go "Hahaha, they're making fun of Avatar!)

GRINDHOUSE SALE (25% off Most Items, 20€ Grindhouse Box) + Distribution Sponsorships

2011-10-26T12:15:00.000+03:00

THE GRINDHOUSE SALE

Coupon Code: GRIND11

25% off (almost) everything in the LotFP store!*

In celebration of the Night Visions** festival happening through the end of this week in Helsinki (a horror/sci fi/fantasy/cult movie festival... real grindhouse stuff!), LotFP presents the GRINDHOUSE SALE!

From now until the time I wake up Sunday (movies run all night Saturday until about 11am Sunday, who knows how long I'll last and how long I'll sleep afterwards!), items in the LotFP store are 25% off!

Note that the Grindhouse Edition box's regular price has been adjusted for this sale so that after applying the 25% discount it will cost just 20€!

* The Fine Print:

Minimum 10€ (pre-tax, pre-shipping) purchase before the discount kicks in. Normal VAT will apply to the discounted order and normal shipping charges will apply.

EU print orders will be shipped Second Class mail under this promotion.

All print orders made using the coupon code will mail out Monday October 31.

(Tome of Horrors is not included in this sale... to cover this, the price has been increased so that the 25% discount will reduce it to the previously listed price. It'll be returned to its regular price after the sale!)

** LotFP is in no way affiliated with Night Visions beyond buying tickets to attend, by the way

Questions? Suggestions? Email lotfp@lotfp.com or stop by the LotFP Message Board!

Spread the word!

DISTRIBUTION SPONSORSHIP

LotFP has regular retail distribution waiting for it in the US.

The problem? Due to recent postage increases it is unfeasible to use normal parcel shipping to supply the distributors with LotFP product. But bulk shipping requires large volume, and that means a considerable initial outlay...

RPG publishing, especially on LotFP's level, is not a cash-rich business. Tons of money in, tons of money out, not much stays. The choices are basically delay releasing any product for a few months just to get the past products into the regular retail channels (and you've waited long enough for Carcosa and Isle and all the rest without making you wait longer!)... or... raise the money to do it outside of the regular sales.

So here it is. Distribution Sponsorship.

Price: 81,30€ (+VAT for EU countries...) (61€ during the sale)

For that price you will not only receive a warm fuzzy feeling, but you will also get a 2 page (A4 size) adventure, one of a kind and custom-written just for you. At least one page will be the adventure text and description (in Times New Roman 12 point font), with the other being maps and charts (handmade). This will be mailed out within 31 days of your order or your money back. (if included with other items, this will ship separately; the rest of your order will not be delayed)

If you have something specific in mind for your current campaign, feel free to leave a one-line summary that includes things like level, climate, general theme (no use my giving you a pirate-on-the-high-seas adventure when your players are stuck in a desert!), etc.

We need 19 sponsors to completely cover these costs, or 25 if buying a sponsorship during the Grindhouse Sale.

JOIN THE PEMBROOKTONSHIRE GARDENING SOCIETY

10€ (+VAT for EU countries)

Members receive a 1€ discount off all print products in the LotFP store, forever!

You will also receive a Membership Card in the mail with your name and member number. This will be sent to you with your next order (of physical goods) and can be used to claim your discount in person at any convention that LotFP attends, as well as claiming your discount on LotFP products at selected conventions where LotFP isn't there!

If you want a different name on the membership card than the name you've used to register this store account, make that clear in the order comments please.

Your account must be manually upgraded for the discount to apply; if you order other items with the Gardening Society membership there will be no discounts applied. Order the membership alone, and wait for the email stating your account has been upgraded. Only then will your discount become active on your orders.

Carcosa and possibly Isle of the Unknown will have non-free limited edition extras, and Gardening Society members will get discounts on the extras as well on the books themselves.

CHANGE TO FRENCH SHIPPING CHARGE

Because of issues earlier in the year shipping to France, we'd instituted a 6,15€ flat fee to add tracking to those orders. This fee will now only apply to orders weighing 1500g or less, because packages heavier than that will be shipped as a parcel which includes a tracking number at no added cost.

LotFP Coloring Book

2011-10-25T20:36:00.000+03:00

I'm thinking that I should do something for Free RPG Day next year.

That Monster Brains article on the D&D coloring book a couple days ago was cool. An LotFP coloring book sounds like a pretty rad idea.

Amos Orion Sterns is on board for the project.

Now to come up with some good ideas for pics...

Anyone know of a good printer in or somewhere near Fort Wayne, Indiana?

Christianity in Our Games!

2011-10-20T19:34:00.000+03:00

The campaign I'm running now takes place in 1600 Europe. England, to be precise.

That means Christianity.

In some ways, that makes things easier. Religious characters can actually follow a religion. Even if players are working from anachronistic ignorance, there still is a basis to their religion and the expectations of how a religious character would act and restrictions and responsibilities they would have.

If working from entirely fictitious religions and gods (especially the dreaded homebrew!), it's harder to internalize such things and they tend to go the way of encumbrance tracking and recording how much food you have left on your great quest.

One problem I ran into right quick by using Christianity... "So, ah, what about all these Cleric scrolls in this old (Roman) dungeon then? Why can Cleric PCs use them? And if they can't, when the hell are Clerics really going to find scrolls?"

(my answer? "The scrolls are in Latin! Now stop thinking about it!")

Even in the classic D&D setup, these scrolls make no sense, but are more easily handwaved. "Why can a Cleric of St. Cuthbert use that scroll he just found in the drow city in the temple dedicated to the really evil spider goddess, huh?" Because, ahhh, some bullshit D&D fantasy reason about how the cosmos works, that's why!

(MU scrolls make perfect sense... every MU's style is unique, but hey, Read Magic!)

When using real-world religions, that gets a little tougher to explain. If the PCs are looting/exploring some heretofore unknown Egyptian pyramid, it's not unreasonable

(INTERRUPTION: My wife would like it announced that she likes ice cream with crunchy oat bits and syrup)

... it's not unreasonable to assume that there would be Cleric scrolls in there. The PCs in such a setting are going to be Christians, Muslims, Jewish, Hindu, or whatever.

Should the Clerics in the party be able to read and use these ancient Egyptian scrolls? Why? If you handwave it, aren't you basically saying that the religions are all merely different denominations of the same True Faith in your campaign?

If they can't use them, then aren't you basically hamstringing Clerics (especially if using an old D&D edition that doesn't even give Clerics spells until 2nd level) in a way that the whole class and ability structure didn't have in mind? (be real, if doing the regular exploration thing it's rarely going to be the PCs' own religious artifacts they'll be finding)

(and if you're not even using our own Earth in your campaign, how do you even use real-world religions in it? I mean, one can reasonably conclude that early D&D Clerics were implicitly Christian, but one can also reasonably conclude that the implied setting in early D&D wasn't our world...)

ay ay ay. This stuff's a headache before even worrying about offending anyone by gamifying their religion.

Kenneth Hite to Contribute to The Monolith from beyond Space and Time

2011-10-20T00:16:00.000+03:00

Just confirmed today.

"by James Edward Raggi IV with Kenneth Hite" sounds pretty good, don't you think?

LotFP: Made of Lies!

2011-10-14T11:02:00.001+03:00

So Weird Fantasy Role-Playing is being discussed on the Forge (here!).

I feel like I should say something, but I don't speak Forguguese. So I'll comment here so I don't derail their conversation over there. (I post this here because much more people actually read the blog, but any actual discussion about my post here should probably take place on the LotFP forum).

First of all, I do not understand the connection between "consistent moral underpinning" and "horror." Nor do I understand how "ironic and cynical relativism" is "antithetical to straight-up gritty weird historical horror."

My mind keeps twisting towards Scream-esque "rules of horror," and thus shit-ass awful formulaic horror movies, when I try to think those through.

But I think my difficulty in understanding Baker comes from a fundamental conflict between game philosophies.

"What is this game about?" If the game strongly defines this for you, it's not a good RPG due to being too narrow in focus. "What do we do?" should be defined by the adventure or environment (and so it's the Ref who decides by either creating or choosing the adventures or placing the elements of a sandbox), not the game.

(how's that for a deciding "old school/new school" definition?)

(and yeah, never was a big fan of Pendragon for this reason)

LotFP campaigns could be about witch hunters whose terrorizing of the countryside is simply collateral damage in their quest to stamp out evil, it could be about those seeking knowledge and riches in order to gain influence and better society, it could be about some greedy fucks looking for gold, or it could be about honest-to-gosh do-gooders helping people and smashing evil.

But if the Ref and the players have different expectations, it could get interesting. If the players create a bunch of terrorizing witch hunters and the Ref presents adventures for do-gooders helping people, I think that's going to be one hell of a rip-roaring game provided everyone runs with it instead of running away from it.

James Nostack had an interesting comment: "The rules of the game directly reward getting rich and, if necessary, killing whoever gets in your way... These are shitty moral values if taken seriously: in the real world, they would be the values of a psychopath."

One frequent criticism I get is that my game needs some sort of insanity rules, because of course any horror game worth its salt requires them, right? I figure that PCs in RPGs are pretty much insane by definition, especially in the Lovecraft mold of their insanity being a result of seeing more of the true nature of the world than most people. When it's commonplace for a group of characters to all get one room at an inn in a peaceful countryside, and take turns keeping watch in that room... or insisting on wearing armor and weapons in town no matter what... or they're already completely crazy, no mechanic required. Adding rules for insanity to tell players how their character should behave strangely is completely redundant.

I do want to note that I consider "Weird Fantasy" to simply be a euphemism for "horror," and really the difference between "horror" and your favorite genre is simply one of presentation.

(for example, because of all the gore and sometimes raw violence on display, I often have trouble thinking of mystery shows like NCIS, the Las Vegas CSI, Silent Witness, and Waking the Dead as not-horror because of the presentation. I think it's why I like them more than the Poirot/Marple/Lewis/Frost softer-edged style mysteries)

(I digress again: They can't win when showing the autopsies in these shows. Silent Witness has no problem showing nude bodies on the autopsy table. My wife noted during one scene that the actress must have been cold on the set because of the goosebumps and erect nipples the body had while the pathologist actors are all stone-faced talking about the contents of her stomach or some such.

My reaction? "um, dear... why are you looking at a cadaver's tits? That's pretty sick."

But on NCIS, they can't show the naughty bits, which is an issue because just about every episode features a scene about the autopsy. Sometimes they just have bright light covering up the nads. But in one episode I saw last week they covered up a girl's nipples with a flap of skin from the y-cut that opened up the torso.

US broadcast standards: You can see the mutilated insides of a human being in detail... but no female nipples.)

And my view about the one of the original poster's games: I think I view Dogs in the Vineyard differently than its author. I see everything about The Faith and the setting given in the book and the rules for making towns to be pure flavor to push the players' buttons. The game seems to me (rather plainly so) to be about Player vs Player conflict, so you need to set that up in a group that's supposedly working together. In my experience a united party just romps through that game, and PvP conflict usually happens when one player takes the setting and fluff seriously and another uses their real-life sense of right and wrong to guide their decisions.

Toybox Style Play

2011-10-12T09:18:00.000+03:00

I think of all the possible adventure design approaches that are out there, I like the Toybox the most.

What is a Toybox?

It's giving players lots of stuff to play with in an adventure. You don't fight it, you don't loot it, you probably don't talk to it, and it probably has little to do with mechanics or any stat on a character sheet. It's interaction with the environment on a player level.

The absolute classic example?

B1, In Search of the Unknown. The Room of Pools and Cavern of the Mystical Stone are the most obvious examples of the Toybox concept, but the descriptions of the four books in the closet, the long description of the bat cavern, even the various storerooms having their contents cataloged down to the number of stone blocks shows that the players are supposed to care and perhaps do stuff with all of it.

Just inside the entrance is the aftermath of a battle. That could have easily been glossed over to give the "oh look, a battle was here, look at the bodies!" effect. But no, the bodies are all described in a way that allows the PCS to play CSI and puzzle out a bit of what happened.

Toybox!

Other classic adventures which feature a heavy Toybox element are the Tomb of Horrors, White Plume Mountain, and Expedition to the Barrier Peaks.

For OSR releases, I think one reason why I promote and adore Cursed Chateau and Spire of Iron and Crystal so much is for the Toybox aspects of those adventures. Cursed Chateau is even a meta-Toybox as even if a room is just "oh, a bunch of monsters here" it plays into a greater scheme that the players have to figure out and then master to succeed.

My own adventures are very Toybox-oriented. Tower of the Stargazer, The Grinding Gear, and Hammers of the God are pretty much Toyboxes front to back. Death Frost Doom has a heavy Toybox factor, even if there are other things that overshadow it. In fact, these days I consider the adventures without a heavy Toybox element (Weird New World, No Dignity in Death) as being my weaker efforts, but even so there are toys to play with in each of those.

Long live the Toybox!

Hey, New Yorkers...

2011-10-11T22:19:00.005+03:00

I'm still on the mailing lists of several publicity firms that promote metal bands and labels... and just received this (the movie's playing at Nightvisions in Helsinki later this month as well... can you guess why I'm posting this here?):

Wild Eye Announces Rare 35mm Screening Of Trick Or Treat In Brooklyn!

This Halloween, Wild Eye invites you to bang your head against the movie screen with a rare, 35mm screening of 1986's heavy metal classic Trick Or Treat plus a slash n’ grind trailer show!

Prepare to get caught in a 35mm mosh pit as Wild Eye Releasing presents The Heavy Metal Horror Show! Appearing at Brooklyn's own Nitehawk Cinema for two nights only: Friday, October 21st and Saturday, October 22nd, starting at Midnight.

Headlining the bill is the 1986 head banging horror classic, Trick Or Treat, directed by Charles Martin Smith. Experience the mysterious death and backwards record-induced return of rock n' roll superstar Sammi Curr (Tony Fields) as he haunts his biggest fan Skippy, er, we mean Eddie (Mark Price). Watch as Curr shreds till everyone on screen is literally dead, with special guest appearances by Ozzy Osbourne and Gene Simmons.

And as if that isn't enough to satiate your sick minds, make sure to show up early to catch opening act The Ghost Of The New York Grindhouse Trailer Show performing a full hour of spine tingling horror and exploitation trailers from the '60s and '70s that will raise your hair, but without that can of Aquanet.

So cancel your Dungeons & Dragons game and raise your devil-horns as we bring heavy metal to the silver screen in its purest form, with the entire evening's events being screened from original 35mm prints and the volume turned up to 11.

Avoid price-gouging scalpers and get your tickets now! Advance tickets are available at the Nitehawk Cinema box office and at http://www.NitehawkCinema.com.

http://www.wildeyereleasing.com

http://www.nitehawkcinema.com

Saw This on the Intertoobs

2011-10-11T20:51:00.000+03:00

Fast Blast Energy Drain

2011-10-11T09:29:00.000+03:00

Some monsters have "energy drain." Traditionally, that means they drain experience levels.

That's... dumb. Lots of bookkeeping, Power disparities within a party Abilities lost and lots of time is spent just getting back to where a character was.

Better idea: Energy Drain drains XP off a character.

How much? HD x 1000 XP? HD x d1000 XP? Something along those lines.

Just subtract XP from the character's current total. It can go negative.

The character never actually loses any levels though. Your 10th level character could be reduced to -10,000XP by the vicious undead surprise attack and it's still going to be a 10th level character.

It's just going to take that much longer to ever advance to 11th level. Still a massive pain in the ass, still a huge consequence for PCs, but only the absolute minimum bookkeeping is needed and nobody's going to have their mid- or high-level character commit suicide just because it'll take longer to reach the next level. (low level characters are screwed, but who cares about the fate of a low level character?)

Characters die and become the sort of undead that drained them when they are actually killed by hp damage, not by the experience drain.

Fast Blast Movement Rates

2011-10-10T08:10:00.000+03:00

("Fast Blast" = "I had an idea but haven't thought it all the way through yet"... and I've been listening to Coast to Coast AM again lately...)

120' movement per turn is ridiculously slow, right? Even if you do the double move described in some versions of the game (in which case why not just say movement rate 240'?). So how to explain it?

Keep in mind that underground, it's dark. Available light sources don't really illuminate very well. Watch the Descent movies, or go walk around a cave (or dark woods) with a lantern.

There is no casual movement in dark, unfamiliar, hostile environments. Period.

Exploration Movement (movement rate per 10 minute turn)

Allows mapping with "good enough for government work" measurements given.
Allows automatic spotting of obvious traps (open pits, etc).
Nonobvious but exposed traps (tripwires) are only triggered if the party is surprised (roll as if it's an encounter) by them.
Normal chances of surprise in an encounter

Walking Movement (movement rate per minute)

No measurements given for mapping
Obvious traps are not noticed if they surprise the party
Nonobvious traps are automatically triggered
Double chances of surprise in an encounter

Running Movement (movement rate per round)

Automatically trigger all traps in the way
Automatically surprised in an encounter
No mapping, and the Ref doesn't even have to tell you about passages or doors you pass... in fact, if in a totally unfamiliar area, save vs Paralyzation (every round?) or run into a wall or trip or otherwise have your nose come into swift contact with a hard surface.

Fast Blast Magic Idea

2011-10-09T12:29:00.000+03:00

What if there were no spell levels? Every spell is level 1 and scales in power with the level of the caster, much like Magic Missile and Cure Light Wounds is handled in LotFP.

Complicator:

What if the "level 1" is scaled to the level the caster is when the spell is learned?

For example, if a caster learns Magic Missile at 1st level, when the caster is 5th level he casts MM at the 5th level of power.

If the caster learns Magic Missile at 5th level, it would still be cast as a first level spell. When the caster reaches 6th level, the MM would be cast at the 2nd level of power.

(a spell sheet would need to be done to keep track of relative power level...)

Suddenly, We Have a Deadline

2011-10-06T09:22:00.000+03:00

I need to get things to the printer on Nov 7 in order for them to be out this year.

The plan is to get Carcosa and Isle to the printer (these have taken long enough...!), have them back around the first of December and ready to order and ship.

Carcosa will be 288 pages, deluxe hardcover (foil embossing on the cover, about 40 pages of art inside), going to be 3cm thick, looking at 30€-32,50€ on the price for these.

Isle of the Unknown will be a 128 page hardcover, full color throughout, tons of art. Looking at 20€ - 25€ for the price here depending on how we work some things.

Once the books are off to the printer I can concentrate on showing real previews that'll show some content and how the presentation will look.

Working on giving both limited edition (250) extras. The idea for Carcosa is a cloth map and a double-sided poster, both full color. Cloth map for the Isle, looking into other extras for that as well. Don't think I can offer the cloth maps for FREE, but we'll see closer to the time.

I do believe things will shake out so that there is the same shipping cost for ordering both as there would be for just ordering Carcosa (no difference between the price for a 501g shipment and a 999g shipment in the Finnish postal system)... but I won't know for sure until they return from the printer so no pre-orders... they go on sale when they arrive.

Looks like Monolith and then hopefully a flood of smaller (and cheaper!) adventure stuff for 2012. The only big-ticket item I have on the schedule right now for 2012 is Exquisite Corpses - Poag is still working on it.

Tome of Horrors Complete + Other Frog God items up now in the store!

2011-10-05T11:54:00.002+03:00

The Store.

The Tome of Horrors Complete is a HUGE FRICKIN BOOK. 671 pages (+ ads that I guess fill out the signature), just about 4cm thick. The usual pricing scheme had to be thrown out due to the cost of getting them over here, but EU customers should still do a bit better than ordering direct from the US.

I also now have in stock the following modules: Beyond the Black Water, Death in the Painted Canyons, Spire of Iron and Crystal (which is, despite the new cover, still one of the absolute best adventures to be published these last few years, highest recommendations), Splinters of Faith 9, Splinters of Faith 10.

Plus a good deal of other OSR stuff is still in stock so buy it all. I have books going to print this month so cash in hand would rock. :D

These are all Swords & Wizardry versions.

Remember that Gardening Society members get 1€ off all print products in the store, and 2€ off on the Tome of Horrors.

All prices include shipping for orders within the EU (only exception is France) but do not list VAT until you're logged in and an item has been added to the cart.

Because I have to get some boxes to ship them, Tome orders won't ship out until Monday. If you're in the Eurozone and want to pay by bank transfer (which I greater prefer, if that matters to you) you won't lose any time before receiving it if you order today. Placing the order reserves a copy for you at the time you place the order.

Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol

2011-10-04T23:39:00.000+03:00

Just picked up the first two collections today.

(with the times, that's me)

WOW.

Why didn't anyone tell me?

I see some... common ground here.

I think The Monolith from beyond Space and Time would be a fine and not out of place Doom Patrol adventure. And I think they'd have a "fun" time down in Pembrooktonshire.

What the Hell, Frog God?

2011-10-04T00:42:00.003+03:00

I try to be easy to get along with these days, especially with my fellow publishers with whom I have a business relationship (in this case a sales outlet for another publisher's goods). There are rants and raves that some people in this scene deserve, but I'd rather sit at the adult table for the time being. And complaining about what other people do with their releases is silly, since I can just show my way with my own releases, right?

But sometimes I see something so dumb I just can't keep my mouth shut.

The good news about Frog God Games is that they continue to pump out material at an impressive rate. Swords & Wizardry is well supported and plenty of their stuff gets a consensus thumbs up, so they're not flooding the market with crap.

I have 10 copies of the S&W version of the Tome of Horrors on their way along with 5 of their other new releases, for you Europeans who want a bit better deal on shipping, by the way.

The bad news is that one of those new releases is the new printing of Matt Finch's The Spire of Iron and Crystal. The module is awesome, and in fact is one of exactly two modules (the other being Maliszewski's Cursed Chateau) from this OSR thing that I tell people that I wished I'd written and/or published myself. I can't say enough about how awesome it is.

Why is that the bad news? Well...

2009, self-published:

2011, published by Frog God Games:

(edit, for clarity, here's a larger image of the One Night Stands cover on another module)

So the adventure doesn't even get its own cover, it gets the embarrassing One Night Stands naughty joke cover that's on the whole series.

Great Mullen art that was directly related to the module substituted for art that doesn't have a damn thing to do with the module it covers.

Is there any excuse?

Hands up if you think a modern day classic has just been downright defaced.

*raises hand*

What Blogs Am I Missing?

2011-10-01T12:40:00.000+03:00

I added a few yesterday, but I haven't updated the blog list for quite some time.

What I'm looking for (any one of these will qualify a blog, doesn't need to be all of them!):

Pre 1985 D&D
The OSR Games (OSRIC, LL, S&W, LotFP, etc)
15th-17th century historical focus
Weird Tales stuff (pre 1950s stuff)
Old and/or Obscure Horror (art/movie/story)

What I'm not looking for:

2e+ D&D
White Wolf
Actual Play reports

So what blogs should I check out and hopefully add to the blog roll?

Jinxing Upcoming Projects

2011-10-01T10:58:00.000+03:00

Things currently in production and their status:

Carcosa Waiting to approve sketches of two pieces (including the cover) and it's just waiting for the finished art to roll in, a little bit of work to do on the maps, and from their it's all typographical tightening.

Isle of the Unknown "Let's order 125 pieces of art!" sounds like a great idea until you realize the burden you've placed on the layout guy to make it all fit. There's a lesson here... layout first, then get art based on that. It might take a bit to get it right, but all the prelim formats look gorgeous. This will be the prettiest book yet to come out of the OSR, which totally fits the color and atmosphere that Geoffrey put into the writing. Frankly putting another 125 pieces of art into the book would have been cool because there's so much to see on the island and I like it being made more real.

The Monolith from beyond Space and Time Announcements about this coming soon. Cover's done, my writing barring the intro matter is done, none of the interior art though.

Out by the end of the year on all these though. (it's October already? Yikes...)

Working On:

The Dancing Queen in Yellow One of those ideas where I have a set-piece ending and am working backwards on it so it can make sense and not be a complete railroad. City adventures are difficult to do that way, but I think "People are plotting, what are you going to do about it?" style adventures can't be open exploration sorts of things because the PCs are reacting. But even plotted adventures need concrete decision points where player decisions changes the flow of the adventure so anticipating a decent number of "if then else" branches (let alone going back and dealing with what people do to it in actual play!) is a bit of work.

Death Ferox Doom For some reason this keeps getting pushed back in favor of other things. It suffers from the Dancing Queen in Yellow problem: It's big and I'm sure I can do something else faster so I try to do that instead. The hang-up at this point? The native tribes, how they interact with the PCs, and their relationships to each other. I bet everyone will concentrate on the pyramid in play, but to me the setting is defined by the people in it and why the act certain ways and how that can complicate exploration in the area. If this winds up just being a cool dungeon crawl with a weakly defined surrounding wilderness I'll consider the project a failure.

Death Sparkle Doom While digging through my archives (read: folders of old notes on the shelf) I came across a simple little adventure all about colors. It needs rejiggering (I'm not going to do something where everything relates to the chromatic dragons these days) but it's a location based ancient static environment so making it another lost Duvan'Ku thing isn't a big leap. It's been over two years since Death Frost Doom so if two Duvan'Ku things appear in 2012 I'm hardly beating the idea into the ground. And the presentation I have in mind would be rather unique... said Sheppard when asking for a price quote on a cover concept: "Holy crap I think I just threw up in my mouth a little (In a good way, ha) ;)"

Insect Shrine of Goblin Hill It's still on the list. The part I'm most excited about these days is the part I'm positive no player will ever discover in the adventure. The issue here is twofold: It's full of D&D-isms that I no longer use and those parts are rather central so they need to be changed (you can get a goblin tribe living in a cave from anyone, so you won't get that from me), but changing them makes certain other things not make sense so that all needs to be reconciled. Plus I have this A3 sized Ramsey Dow map that's awesome and must be used but how am I going to fit that into a book?

Shot and Sorcery An Early Modern era sourcebook with rules for everything from firearms to finance and mass combat. Intimidating because I'm looking at XRP's Magical Medieval Society books as a standard for this and there's so much to learn to do it right. I'm buying some weird books to use as research material for this. I've got the firearms rules and a mass combat sketch so far but that's about it.

The Book of Satanic Witchcraft The Malleus Maleficarum is not an easy book to get through (I have the Christopher S. Mackay translation) but I am convinced that it can be turned into a very kickass game supplement (I also have books on the Spanish and Italian Inquisitions that would be part of this project). Might be folded into Shot and Sorcery... Still in the "trudging through the research material" phase on this.

The License I've never tried licensing IP before, don't know if it will happen, and I don't know if my general cluelessness in these matters will be the thing to prevent it from happening. "Your movie is cool and I'd like to use this thing in an adventure I'm doing" is my motivation, not releasing some branded game or supplement or anything. But licenses are only granted for limited times so if this goes through it goes to the immediate top of the pile after the current projects are off to press.

Plus:

Zak Stuff Every so often Zak has ideas for another book, and the stuff he posts on his blog all the time is smart and Vornheim's done so well that whenever he decides something is a go I think I'm up for it.

Submissions I've gotten one draft so far and several more cool pitches that I hope turn into drafts. I hope to present some cool adventures for you from unique talent in the new year.

Phew. Now to get the lead out of my ass and push some of this out the door!

The Rule of 1 in 6

2011-09-28T12:00:00.000+03:00

Random encounter chances are 1 in 6.

That's a 1 in 6 chance that something rather annoying-to-dangerous happens when just walking around the dank ol' dungeon.

But that's a wonderful thing to use any time a PC is doing something rather unseemly or getting into trouble that maybe they shouldn't be getting into. Let's face it, PCs are made specifically to get into trouble. It would be a dick move to summarily punish them for doing what they're supposed to do.

But there should always be a chance that mischief goes all to hell, even if it's otherwise harmless and has nothing to do with whatever else is going on in game.

Why not 1 in 6?

For example, in my last session it turns out there was a brothel very close to a particular location of interest (damn you Vornheim!). I decided it was disguised as a laundry, but that deception couldn't stop one of the PCs. So he's getting into mischief. Had nothing to do with anything.

You could just fast forward. You could just see what the other players are doing.

Or you can roll a d6 and see if something bad happens. That's what I did.

A 1!

The dice had just given me permission to screw around with that character. And so I did.

Here comes the priest with some minions, tarring and feathering everyone in the place!

And confiscating their stuff, for which they'd have to pay a fine to get back.

The PC was a Magic-User in this case, and I was kind enough to rule that the priest thought his spellbook was just a book of French pornography since he couldn't understand any of it. Cost the PC extra silver to get that back.

The Carcosa Problem: The Haves and the Have Nots... or, Humans Are Not Cool

2011-09-25T11:34:00.000+03:00

When I got the original edition of Carcosa back in 2008, the view I had of the setting was one of primitive man armed with sword and vile sorcery making its way in a cruel, cruel world.

There were pages and pages of ray guns and technological marvels and all the things the Space Aliens, Great Race, and Primordial Ones have made.

Mentally I treated those things the same way I did most of the magic items and high level spells in D&D - almost background noise, stuff that I suppose is in the setting, somewhere, but nothing that will ever show up in a normal campaign.

But that's not right, is it?

Carcosa's Old Ones are meant to be interacted with, meant to be battled. That's why there are all those rituals, that's why the "gods" have combat stats, that's why there are all these rocket launchers and power armor, that's why there are these strange dice procedures... This isn't traditional D&D where you eyeball the monster HD and the PC levels and estimate how things might go.

And on a pure in-setting level, you have all these advanced races that ruled the world for aeons, most of them are still around here and there. There's a lot of this stuff to be found.

I think to decide that the PCs won't ever really take on Cthulhu, or that they shouldn't ever drive a tank, or that the rituals should be assumed to only be used by NPCs removes a little bit about what makes Carcosa special. It's making sane what was clearly designed to be utterly insane.

But humans are primitive on Carcosa. They can't make any of this cool stuff on their own.

To me this creates a power disparity on Carcosa. The haves and the have nots. Who has discovered and mastered some of this superior technology, and who has not?

And how to depict both the primitive nature of humans and the access some have to the advanced tech?

One thing we needed to get in there was a cyborg Spawn of Shub-Niggurath. Them wacky space aliens, right?

Talk about have-nots, Bone Men look like they don't even have skin...

I can't help but address something else as well. The 300 Carcosa pic that Rients first posted is cool and all, but there is a reason why that sort of thing won't be in the book:

We're intentionally avoiding it.

Geoffrey's art guidelines said that humans should be depicted only in certain ways (killing other humans in a ritual, getting victimized by a monster, looking up in horror at some horrible thing)...

"Carcosa is certainly not a planet in which adventurers 'pose for the camera.'"

These guidelines are obviously not unbendable, as Geoffrey approved these two pics here and they seem to not fit any of those things. But notice that humans are still second banana to other things in the pictures. The Bone Men are tiny in comparison to the beast in the second picture and one can imagine all it has to do is sweep a tentacle and the men are in a world of hurt. The humans in the first picture are completely obscured in technology, and the focus of the pic is the weird creature in the foreground.

In play, PCs are going to try to make their mark, do all the cool things, become powerful. A bunch of art showing how cool the PCs could be would be conveying exactly the wrong message though. The book's job is to communicate the setting. And on a setting level, humans just aren't that important in Carcosa. Yet.

Carcosa Publishing Trivia

2011-09-23T17:14:00.000+03:00

Forgive me for repeating it (I mentioned it seven months ago or so), but I have a feeling I'll be repeating this story until I die...

I deal with the senior sales person over at Otava even though I'm a very small publisher. Perhaps it's because I'm special, or perhaps it's a random draw, or maybe she's just the best at speaking English over there.

In one of our first Carcosa meetings, I asked this senior employee of a printer that's been in business since 1890 if they had any connections in India or something, because I was wondering if we could get the book bound in human skin. (I mentioned India because as Return of the Living Dead taught me, India used to be the source for skeletons for medical research purposes... skeletons with perfect teeth!)

"Not amused" is one way to describe the reaction. We're going with Balathane Sensuale material for the cover instead, with two-color metallic foil stamping for the graphic. It should be HOLY CRAP THAT'S AWESOME special and the book will give you little orgasms just touching it... but it's not going to be anyone that used to be alive.

But I had to ask, you know?

Weird Fantasy Module Name Generator

2011-09-20T18:50:00.000+03:00

Because I'm not above wholesale robbery, or as I like to put it, refinement...

Click the graphic to actually read it, or download the pdf...!

This isn't perfect... articles are a bit iffy, so include/remove "the" as appropriate. And being random, some of the results aren't awesome (Against the Nun and The Man from beyond the House won't be burning the house down anytime soon), but STOP HARASSING ME ABOUT IT DAMMIT

LotFP Interviewed by Fanzine Rolero!

2011-09-19T12:41:00.000+03:00

Last month while in Oulu for the Jalometalli metal festival, I had the opportunity to sit down and be interviewed by Fanzine Rolero!

Read it (in Spanish!) here.

Isle of the Unknown Cover Art

2011-09-15T20:00:00.001+03:00

While I'm on the boat to Sweden hoping a Poseiden Adventure LARP breaks out, I decided to go to the ship's internet kiosk and check my email... Geoffrey's approved the cover art! Here it is...

Art by Cynthia Sheppard. This isn't the whole piece; it's a wraparound so this is only really half of it, but this is what will be on the front cover panel.

Off to Stockholm! Be Back Monday!

2011-09-15T10:59:00.003+03:00

Leaving this afternoon for Stockholms Spelkonvent. I'll be running two games on Saturday!

I'll be back Monday to deal with any correspondence, and normal order shipping will resume on Tuesday.

Today's Gnarly Purchases!

2011-09-10T14:48:00.000+03:00

This volume, like the last couple, include issues that came out after I started to collect them back in the day. What I never knew is that I had missed issues! Nine SSOC issues worth of stories are collected here, and I've never seen four of them before. So in that way, a much better buy than anticipated!

One story I didn't miss back in the day was SSOC #105, featuring The Mill. Features a political backdrop (peasant revolt), cannibalism, attempted rape and murder (including the attempted murder of an infant!), betrayal, dismemberment, and blood and blood and blood and blood and blood. All for sale on the local convenience store shelf.

I had just turned 10 when that was originally published. A hell of a thing for a pre-teen.

(and I don't read the new Conan stuff coming out now... can a story like The Mud Men of Keshan get published today? Mostly naked women bounty hunters track down the wanted Conan who is helping a Keshan shaman return his god-totem to his village to defend it against the savage cannibal mud men...)

Just learned last night that Orne's second album The Tree of Life came out in July.

Finnish occult prog on the Italian Black Widow label! "Sounds like Van der Graaf Generator, Black Widow, King Crimson, Gabriel-era Genesis, Pink Floyd..."

The first album The Conjuration by the Fire gets my highest recommendation, and halfway through my first listen of the new one I find no disappointment.

Thumbs up to the local games store and the local record store for having these available with no waiting. :)

Castles & Crusades or LotFP... Which Do You Prefer?

2011-09-09T22:40:00.000+03:00

Don't tell me, tell the person asking over here on RPG.net.

Interviewed on The Coffee Break Podcast

2011-09-09T15:55:00.000+03:00

Listen here...

I Have the New Carcosa In My Hands... Sort Of

2011-09-08T16:58:00.001+03:00

So the layout is more or less done except for some typographical adjustments and the art that needs to be dropped in.

I went to the local digital print shop (the people that printed everything for me up to the Grindhouse Edition/Vornheim releases) and had them do me up a perfectbound copy of the new Carcosa so I can see how everything looks and do another round of proofreading with an actual book. Thought you might like a sneak preview.

This mockup (with no cover art) is 282 pages, but that doesn't include two pages for the Fungoid Caverns map. The final book will be 288 pages (the 2008 edition was 96), with a good deal of added material such as the Fungoid Gardens of the Bone Sorcerer adventure, an added encounter in every single hex, random encounter charts, plus other little things here and there.

so it might have a few blanks at the end. This one is made of regular copy paper whereas the final version will be hardcover with more robust paper inside.

Carcosa will be fancy with formal "front matter" in the book. The final book will be printed in 3 colors, but of course I just got a black and white mockup here. A lot of the page texturing (which will not be underneath the text) was left out of this version as well.

Here's a spread in the ritual section. The blobs at the top and bottom (with the GLE notation) are just placeholders for art, as is the off-kilter block on the bottom right. The art allocations are largely irregular like that throughout the book - will be interesting to see what all the final pieces look like.

Here is a spread from the monster section. As you can see, we've alphabetized the creature listings and put the stats with the descriptions. Also shown here are a couple of examples of creatures that have rituals associated with them, and how that ritual info is part of the creature listing.

Some of the hex descriptions here. I thought it was kind of neat how Eero Tuovinen (the layout guy) separated the labels, hexes, and separate encounters within the hexes from each other, and this is something that really benefits from having a few colors to play with in the book.

Oh, there's a new Carcosa blog out there called, fittingly, The Doomed World CARCOSA.

Stockholms Spelkonvent Sept 16 - 18, Who's Going?

2011-09-07T20:56:00.000+03:00

I'll be running The Monolith from beyond Space and Time on Saturday for sure, and will have either The Dancing Queen in Yellow or The God that Crawls ready to go that same day as well.

Any readers showing up and wanting to play?

Friday and Sunday will be "hang out and talk to people" days...

I'll also bring a selection of OSR goodies for those that would like to pick something up.

A Total Shock

2011-09-07T12:43:00.000+03:00

A Nice Grindhouse Review and a Note

2011-09-06T21:11:00.000+03:00

Diehard Gamefan has reviewed the Grindhouse Edition, and they have to be nominated for most hilarious use of censorious black bars.

They do seem to suffer from a common misconception though... that picture opposite the Halfling class description is the illustration for the class, the same as every other class gets. If you didn't notice this, remember what the Halfling's best class ability is and make another Search roll.

Save or Die Podcast Interview with Zak

2011-09-05T23:58:00.000+03:00

About Vornheim.

Listen here.

This Was Only a Test...

2011-09-05T19:21:00.000+03:00

I ran The Monolith from beyond Space and Time for the first time yesterday in a hallway at Tracon.

It featured characters wondering whether suicide was the answer to a dilemma, leaving the key adventure area two weeks before they entered, getting attacked lots and lots by an enemy that didn't exist, and ended up with two characters killing each other over whether they should eat the brains from the head in the jar or not, and one character ended up in the Forgotten Realms.

In other words, a great success.

I'll need to run this one lots more, as the key to making this a success as an adventure will be clearly explaining all the weird situations and possibilities the Monolith allows.

I think I've said before that when I playtest an adventure, I'm not looking for what I need to change mechanically or balance-wise, but rather discovering what players are likely to do within the adventure and make sure that the module includes enough information about the setting/situations to handle it.

Next run of the adventure will be at Stockholms Spelkonvent. Be there!

THIS IS CARCOSA!

2011-09-02T19:51:00.000+03:00

Pic by Rich Longmore, click to enlarge.

That wasn't an informational blurb, that was a command. Click that bad boy and look at it.

There are a lot of hidden details in Carcosa that Geoffrey didn't spell out in the first edition, and I think some of that hidden lore can be used to entice people to investigate Carcosa rather than just being a revelation for people already digging into it.

I didn't want to alter the text to accomplish this (although Geoffrey did write a new introduction and a Humanity on Carcosa section for the upcoming edition) because using a lot of blah blah blah isn't going to suck anyone into anything.

So you clicked the pic, right? Some Carcosan man is stepping into the Temporal Transcendence Gulf, one of the technological artifacts of the Great Race. It's a frickin time machine, right? So what better way to give a sneak peak at various historical epochs of Carcosa?

Using a bit of influence from the intro of the old Buck Rogers TV series, we can throw a few things into one picture. The Snake Men experimenting on the pre-human man-apes, the coming of the Space Aliens, and a glance at the civilizations of the Great Race and the Primordial Ones...

Carcosa has a history, and a major difference between Carcosa and most settings is that humans aren't part of the setting's history. Humans were just lab animals (hence the color coding) who experiment on each other now (the rituals) because that's what the all-powerful Snake Men did and humans now want to be all-powerful! Now humanity is free as 13 separately breeding species, making their way in a very hostile world. Will humanity rise from this barbarism to create an Age of Humanity on Carcosa, or is the story of man just going to be one of extreme cruelty on the way to being eaten by radioactive dinosaurs?

That's how I see Carcosa. I'm sure Geoffrey will stop by with his own view on the matter... or else end up horrified that I've given it all away. :D

(I'd say that highlighting all this fun stuff will also help people remember there's more to Carcosa than 4 nasty sentences, but we all know that's not going to work, especially since that section will have art too, and we all know how much restraint and good taste I have with that sort of thing...)