Grindhouse Edition Giveaway Contest... I Need a First Level Spell!

The Contest:

I need an original first level Magic-User spell to put in the spell list of the Grindhouse Edition. I want it to come from you!

Conditions:

• The spell you submit is your own original work that has not previously appeared in print or on the web.
• You will not forget to include the Duration and Range along with the name and description.
  
• By submitting, you give permission for me to use it in LotFP Weird Fantasy Role-Playing and add it to the Open Game Content.
• Need to be 18+ years old to enter.
  

Submit your entry to lotfp@lotfp.com.

The winning spell will be used in the box set, and its creator will get a complimentary copy of the Grindhouse box. All entries (that I don't think are utter crap, anyway) will be organized into a PDF to be freely distributed, with all spells being Open Game Content.

If you do not include a real name to be credited I assume you are OK with not being individually credited - I'd really rather not list internet handles.

Submit your entry before Sunday Feb 20 11:59pm Finnish time.

Three Castles Award Finalists

Announced here.

B/X Companion, Jonathan Becker
LotFP Weird Fantasy Role-Playing, James Raggi
Stonehell Dungeon, Michael Curtis
The Dungeon Alphabet, Michael Curtis
The Majestic Wilderlands, Robert Conley

The winner will be announced at the North Texas RPG Convention which takes place June 2 - 5 in Irving, Texas.

The Truth Comes Out!

So I'm talking to my wife about my ideas for a layout with interesting things happening outside of the actual text.

She says, "It would only be worth it if the people notice it, but you're selling to the nerds of nerds so you'll be OK."

She hastens to add: "But I mean it in a positive manner. It was not my intention to be insulting."

So now you know what I have to deal with here at Chateau d'LotFP.

The Grindhouse Fighter Pic is BAD ASS

With all the art I'm posting, let's not forget the guy doing the lion's share of the interior work, Amos Orion Sterns. Here is his portrait for the Fighter class, and I think you'll agree that should someone make a Hall of Fame for RPG art, this needs to be considered:


I know I'm posting a lot of art... but there's a lot I'm not posting. The two interior Sheppard pieces, Locke's zombie attack, the two interior Rainville pieces, the Casperson stuff, the four Nicholson full-pagers (he did the art contest pieces)... plenty of visual surprises for people who buy the thing. :D

The Full Color Version

Just because I'm curious. What do you think? (clicky clicky for more detail, a necessity with Alfrey's work!)

Grindhouse Edition Tutorial Cover... COMPLETED!

A nightmare made real by Aeron Alfrey (click for more detail):


The pic was done first as the black and white piece above (which has me doing backflips with how awesome it is), and then color was added afterwards.

The result unfortunately wasn't as great. The awesome detail of the original is still there, but is camouflaged by the color. But it's amazing what you can do with digital art these days. Here's something we came up with to retain some color - and horror with the remaining color being blood and brains - without losing the awesome effect of the colorless version.


So I need to decide exactly how to present the piece, but... it's a damn awesome piece. :D

The Sexualized Male in Game Art (+ Females!)

Interesting conversation about "The Sexualized Male" happening about. Zak opened with the question "What constitutes a sexualized male character?" here.

Trollsmyth has in the past few days explored the topic more here and here.

This kind of thing is interesting and relevant to me because I commission a lot of art, and I want to make sure I'm doing the right things to get the intended responses from people and not fucking the whole thing up.

Early on in the art process for the Grindhouse Edition (five months ago, before the Sex Wars brouhaha), I commissioned a piece specifically to portray an explicitly sexualized male. I used the context that I usually see guys preening with favorable response - a concert. (this also satisfied my want for some "slice of life" art instead of wowawesomeRPGpopcornart, even in the more expensive color pieces)

Here's what came of it. I call this character Blackie Ritchmore. Art by Nicole Cardiff.


(the original idea would be for the ladies to be suspiciously young, but it's probably for the best that it didn't end up quite like that... I also like making characters and personalities up for pieces like this... note how he's grubby as hell but his boots are absolutely spotless)

The Grindhouse Edition also has full frontal nudity in a few pieces - male and female - but I really, really hope that half of them aren't considered in any way titillating by the reader and I hope people don't think I find such things arousing. But I know how these things go and I look forward to all the accusations that will come.

... and still waiting for the right project is an explicitly homoerotic male concept. It was going to be the cover of the now-scrapped monster book idea (my interpretation of the satyr) but I still may find a place for it yet. There is a bit of intentional homoeroticism (or at least my straight-male impression of it) that made it into the Grindhouse Edition (look at the grappling rules when it's out) but it's nowhere near as blatant as the monster book cover would have been. (not that my motives are pure... squicking out that middle-aged prude conservative grognard stereotype - you know, the ones that theoretically are the chainmail bikini audience to begin with... is the point of the exercise. I bet that will get complaints, but with little exception, I only use nudity and eroticism at all for horrific effect)

Of course I'm still a bit confused about the whole sexualization thing when it comes to portraying women. I can't divorce the "sexualized" definition that people use from things that appeal to me when it comes to these discussions.

See this?


It's an Elmore piece from the Companion set in 83/84. As a 10 year old or whatever, of all the various things in TSR art that could have given me those funny feelings, this was the one that I would stare at endlessly in that way. Not the AD&D succubus or the sylph or Aleena or whatever else people commonly bring up. (and in Elfquest, which I also read quite young, for all the sex and other things going on, it was Moonshade that to me was "the cute one")

(my wife bought the fake ears at Spiel and hasn't even taken them out of the damn package. Fuckin' hell, right?) (I just read this out loud to her and she's giving me very funny looks)

So one thing that confuses me a bit, because of my own preferences, is that when people complain about cheesecake art and talk about what they wish were depicted instead, their preferred depictions are more likely to make me look at the piece in the way that they complain that the cheesecake art is intended to be viewed.

For example, the box cover. Turning Luna into a topless snake demon to me killed any sexual appeal she has because it's a monstrous image, whereas the idea of putting Marjut into the Solomon Kane getup was a far more appealing idea for me than the miniskirt/mesh top combos she wears.

So am I good guy for not resorting to contextless cheesecake, whatever the reason behind it? Or am I bad guy for objectifying the Strong Female?

My head hurts...

Grindhouse Edition Rules Book Cover... Here!

All hail Jason Rainville for this one. Click for greater detail.

Plans! Frustration as Ideas Come Faster than the Ability to Follow Through!

There's this feeling in the air that big things are going to happen. But not as many things as there could be.

Here's the to-do list:

• Finish the layouts and proofing for the Grindhouse Edition.
• Finish the formats, get all the final materials, and finish the layouts for Vornheim.

Those are happening pretty much at the same time.

Once those go to press, I'll set up the PDF versions so they'll be available to pre-orderers immediately, and then start the pre-orders and publicize that around the web. (I'm waiting to hear back from another printer about pricing for a "free gift" for those of you who pre-order both items)

I'll have a few weeks before they come back from the printer (offset press this time).

What has to be done during those weeks? Basic layouts have to be done for Isle of the Unknown and Carcosa so I have the page count. Then I need to make an appointment for the printer to get quotes for both those books in a variety of possible formats, as well as another project from another blogger I've got in the pipeline that I won't announce yet because I want to see if any of this is going to sell before I start publicly dragging them into my affairs. (and I have a few other submissions to review for possible release as well)

Once I know what format we'll have for McKinney's books, I can commission art.

Once the Grindhouse Edition and Vornheim come back from the printer, this place is going to be unlivable and I won't have time to do anything else but assemble boxes and pack them to ship. We have warehouse space arranged, but with 2000 boxes that need to be hand-assembled, those pictures I posted last summer are going to look like the epitome of tidiness compared to how full this place is going to be. This is going to take weeks to get them all put together and transported to the warehouse and frankly no writing is going to be done during that time - just packing, shipping, accounting, paperwork, and keeping track of the publicity as copies start to arrive on people's doorsteps. Somewhere in there I have to get the PDFs uploaded to the third-party vendors as well (and the Bits and Mortar people...)

I get excited about working with other people and there's something a little easier about looking at someone else's project and deciding what extravagances to bestow upon it. When I do that for one of my things, it feels self-indulgent. When I do it for someone else's work, it feels like I'm just doing what's best for the project.

The problem is that somewhere in there I want to write some new stuff too. And what I want to do accumulates as these other projects take time. What's on my project list?

• Death Ferox Doom (you'll love this - it has to be delayed way further because the money for the "player handout" visual stuff - and the planned artist! - are going to be used for McKinney's books). But I'm just frothing at the mouth to present the newest expedition to learn about and combat the Duvan'Ku! The Dead Sign will be sighted again! It's been played, mapped, all it needs is the intelligible text written from the notes... although after the Grindhouse Edition, the OMG CANNIBAL ARTZ!!! won't be much of a headline-grabber...
  
• A rework of my old Sanitarium adventure (the first adventure I ran when returning to D&D in 2006!) - I got a cool new idea for the whole thing after my last reading of Horror at Red Hook. It involves combining it with my mothballed "Return to the Old School" concept (involves a university, the working title was a *wink wink* double meaning) and time travel and extradimensional spaces. The original Sanitarium has maps and writeups of the basic space but that would only scratch the surface - the background and premise would need to be changed to reflect the change in concept.
  
• The Tutorial cover pic is so awesome I want to do something with Iri-Khan... and Dario Argento's Three Mothers trilogy has given me some ideas too. (tie one or both of them in with the Sanitarium? And check out Argento's Inferno for different way to deal with occult books!)
  
• The Guns & Renaissance & stuff supplement thingy I've been taking notes on while reading these dozens of history books I've accumulated lately. This one I think is the best for business to pursue...
  
• The Eastern European Sandbox taking real life infamous historical figures and basing it all around the popular legends that surround them.
  
• The "meta-module" which has no adventures in and of itself, but creates background situations (pestilence, drought/famine, invasion, etc) to lay over your own adventures and campaign.

And by the time I sit down and really start working on one of these, they'll be old ideas and I'll want to be chasing a more current muse. (you'll notice Insect Shrine isn't there - this will sound weird, but I think perhaps it's way too "classic D&D" for the direction I've been taking in both play and design. It was conceived as a "classic!" type thing in 2006 and didn't even represent how I was playing then...) I'm still open to submissions for people doing their stuff (more adventure material than setting material right now, thanks), but I certainly don't want to farm out any of my concepts to someone else to actually write.

But as self-employed friends keep telling me, it's much better to be too busy than not busy enough.

But whether it's these ideas or something else that ends up getting done, I can tell you that I'll be at this for as long as you guys let me. Lots of cool things on the way and in the works by a whole load of people - and publishers. It's a better time to be a gamer than it's been in decades, and the bettering isn't stopping here.

And after saying all that, I confess that I basically took the whole weekend off and did jack shit other than read. :D Back to the heavy work in the AM...

Why Does Malcolm Sheppard Suck?

I haven't posted since Monday! Damn. Been busy with stuff. But I think I have time for a rant.

Malcolm Sheppard Why do RPGs Suck? What a load of shit. I've read exactly two things by Sheppard (remember Why You Can't Have Nice Things?) and they both show his utter contempt for the traditional role-playing game, the people who play them, and the people who make them. How else do you explain his saying things like 'hexcrawls are a symptom of a writer's disdain for himself and his audience' and pushing the idea that clones are proof of creative failure without taking a closer look at what the "clone" movement has in turn enabled and grown in the player base.

He's got this notion that if you find something you like and you want to play in that sandbox and not take a great big bite of every new idea that comes along, you're irrelevant and indeed harmful to the hobby and industry. If you produce material for these satisfied people, you're creatively bankrupt. The ever-growing number of OSR players and publishers are pissing all over those notions from a great height.

At some point you just have to admit that the RPGPundit's "Swine" are not imaginary boogeymen. They do exist...

(oh shit, Pundit's already weighed in: "For him 'creative' means 'the brilliant and artistic splatbook auteur creates a work of his own genius that you proles will devour like the mindless unwashed that you are.'" *checks Sheppard's writing credits* Sounds about right.)

Steve Long The Licensing Trap This is a different sort of thing. Long is just wrong here. Not contemptuously so, but wrong.

Frankly, if a group wants to play in "a licensed setting," who gives a shit? A group having fun playing in someone else's world is just as entitled to that as playing in a setting made up by the GM. There are pitfalls, as I talk about in the Ref book of my game, but it's not awful in concept.

"Let's play some Dr Who!" (for example) is not an idea that I would expect to be rare in gamers, you know? How is it bad business sense to take advantage of it? How is that being bankrupt of ideas? If a licensed game indeed enables play in that particular world, that's fucking awesome. Some people do want to get on with gaming and not customize all this shit endlessly themselves, strange as that sounds to some of us.

As I've said before, our job as publishers is not to amaze purchasers with how amazingly original and clever we are or to develop IP for other media. Our job is to produce gameable material for play. That's it. Nothing else. All that other stuff we do along with that is for our own benefit and satisfaction and amusement, not the purchaser's.

Does it really make one shit's difference if a group wants to play in Golarion or Middle-Earth anyway? Or how about The World of Darkness vs the Dresden Files world? One of each pair is purpose-built by a RPG company, the other comes from novels. The decision to play in any of these worlds means a group is not using a "home-brew" world. So what's the difference on the publisher end? Prestige in the community? Getting patted on the back by other RPG designers? The hopes of a Hollywood deal?

*fart*

(wait a minute, why does Sheppard think Golarion sucks? I haven't read a word of Golarion setting material, but an off-the-cuff guess is that it is a setting that provides opportunities to engage in the kind gaming that gamers like to do instead of presenting them with foreign concepts and ideas that don't do dick for encouraging or sustaining a real-life at-the-table game)

Frankly, playing in a "licensed" setting means the players might actually know what the fuck is going on once in awhile without all the info needing to be spoonfed to them by the GM. That may not be the creative option, but sometimes it's the better option.

Remember, it is not the publisher's job to be the creative one. It's the publisher's job to excite the imagination of the potential GM and inspire the creativity there. A hex crawl, for instance, demands that the GM create and improvise because there is no way in hell to make a comprehensive hex-crawl that gives all the answers and provides all the necessary information on a platter during play. A good module has a setting or situation with no scripted outcome; anything can happen and watching the players destroy the module's carefully prepared environment is the fun of it.

All the unique IP in the universe isn't going to help a game if the core of it doesn't contain gameable stuff, and if there is gameable stuff then the IP attached to it is pretty much just window dressing - the stuff can be transferred to other "IP."

... why yes, I am releasing hex-crawls in the coming months and assuming that the company doesn't go ptbtbt I'll be chasing a license this summer (just because sometimes I want to call a spade a spade and stop euphemizing - I have no desire to make it appealing to the "property's" current fanbase). And I made by own simulacrum! And no official explicit company setting is even in the planning stages! It's strangely satisfying being everything Sheppard thinks is wrong with RPGs these days, considering that it looks like he's the embodiment of everything that kept me out of the game shop for well over a decade.

(Maria: "These people have fallen onto their own sword.")

***

(and while I'm ranting and my blood's pumping, something unrelated: I'm waiting on the final art pieces for the Tutorial and Rules books for the Grindhouse Edition. To save the artists themselves being associated with my RAARR RRAAARR!!!!, I'll say this here instead of when I post the pieces:

The gauntlet is thrown down. I dare anyone to produce better gaming art in 2011. Wizards of the Coast and Paizo and Fantasy Flight with your deep pockets and pick of whatever talent you want, my fellow OSR publishers with your unlimited well of ideas, all you storygamers with your edgy concepts all about making meaningful fiction happen in play... any of you. Match this. Try. Please.

You might think this is just empty hype. You might think "How good could a gaming illustration possibly be?" You might think I'm creating unrealistic expectations that this art can't possibly meet. You might even think I'm just full of shit. However, I have one advantage here that you don't: I've seen the art.

Trust me on this one. During the next week or so they'll get done and I'll show them to you and you'll see for yourself and you can join me in over here being in awe of these things.)