What do I see? What do I know?
Posted: September 8, 2010 Filed under: Dungeons and Dragons, rules Leave a comment
If you are not familiar, a ‘knowledge’ check is a rules mechanic within an RPG where you roll the dice to see if your character knows something. If you roll well, the referee will give you a hint or a nudge in the right direction. If you roll poorly, you get no hint (or maybe even a hint in the wrong direction). If your character is smart or knows something about the subject, you might get a bonus to the roll of the dice or vice-versa.
‘Perception’ checks are similar, but instead of seeking to decide what your character does or does not know, they seek to determine what your character notices or sees. If you decide your character wants to look for the footprints of the person you want to follow, you roll a dice to see if you pick up the trail. If your character is a skilled tracker, you might get a bonus. If it has been raining and the tracks are faint, you might get a penalty.
It is worth noting that when I started playing rpgs (1978), ‘perception’ and ‘knowledge’ rolls or rules were unknown (at least to us). I quit playing for a while, and when I returned to rpgs(~2000ish), such rules or concepts were common.
In one of the first 3e games I played when I had ‘returned’ to playing RPGs, I had a character who had high STR and CON and abysmal other stats. He could fight well but I was very limited in whatever else the character could do. It was my first 3e game and I didn’t know the rules at all well, but I remember getting frustrated and bored because there was so little my character could do other than attack things. We were constantly being asked to do ‘notice’ and ‘listen’ and ‘search’ and ‘spot’ rolls… and, not to toot my own horn too much, but when the DM would describe the setting, I paid attention and try to formulate my character’s actions according to what I knew from the description I had been given — so if there were tapestries in the room, I would say that I wanted to look to see if I could spot anyone or anything hidden behind them, whereas some of the other players would just roll a dice and say, “I got a 26… what do I know?” This left me thinking that such ‘notice’ and perception rules were not a development I was interested in. Other folks I currently play with are less annoyed by the knowledge or perception rolls; they see these as means to introduce new info to the players or allow opportunities for further detailing of the environment.
Perhaps it is best to strive for a middle ground — if the player is engaged and takes initiative, and listens to what the DM says and attempts to use his or her own noodle to extrapolate info from what the DM has said or details that may have been offered up earlier, then a low “wisdom” score on the character sheet shouldn’t be as much of a handicap (perhaps the character is not naturally gifted in wisdom, but he or she is paying attention at the right time (since the player is paying attention)). One of the terms that I hear tossed around a lot that rubs me the wrong way is ‘flavor text.’ To me, ‘flavor text’ implies that the words don’t have any meaning or substance — so if the DM describes a red rug and a green metal chest, if it’s just ‘flavor text’ the colors will have no potential significance and the players can just roll ‘search’ to check for traps and whomever has the most skill points in search or perception is most likely to discover if the rug or the chest are trapped.
What I would prefer is having a situation where players can affect outcomes through thinking and remembering and describing actions and asking questions. Perhaps other items they have encountered have been color coded and the players might get a hint if they remember this… or maybe the red rug is just a rug. Players might get a bonus to their search roll if they describe what they are doing (i.e.: “I use my spear to lift up the edge of the rug and look under it — and I rolled X on my search — do we think it is trapped?” as opposed to “We search for traps and I rolled X — do we think it is trapped?” I know that creates more work for the DM, but I really like being able to interact with the environment and figure stuff out.
One of the first DMs I ever played under used the standard rules for ‘search’ for secret doors, but made us describe how we were going to open it — so even if you rolled a 1 on a d6 which meant you found the door, you might have to pull on a torch holder or press on a special brick to open it… which usually had to be determined by trial and error… which could be quite exciting/nerve racking if you were in a hurry. I thought that was a nice touch, and if I were to have my druthers, the ‘pure talking’ method of resolving such events would be my method of choice.
The Last Man on Earth (1964)
Posted: September 7, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized 1 Comment
Before there was Will Smith in “I am Legend” or Carleton Heston in “The Omega Man,” we had Vincent Price in the 1964 black and white MGM classic, “The Last Man on Earth” (or “L.M.O.E.”).
Although “The Last Man on Earth” was made with a fraction of the budget of either “Omega Man” and “I am Legend,” the debt both later films owe “Last Man on Earth” is unmistakable. Somehow I barely remember “I am Legend.” I remember “Omega Man” fondly, if only for the way in which Heston would sport a stylish cravat as he drank cognac in his fortress of solitude while the vampires raged outside.
All three films have the same idea — a race of vampires, created by disease, lurk outside at night and are unable to stand the light of day while a single human holes up in a fortress at night and forages for what he needs to survive in the abandoned city by day. Vincent Price, as Doctor Morgan in L.M.O.E., spends his nights drinking, sleeping fitfully, making perfectly tapered wooden stakes on a wood turning lathe and listening to jazz records as the ‘vampires’ rage and moan and beat against the shutters and boarded up windows outside his house. He draws calendars on the wall of his fortress, uses a gas powered generator to power his home and goes out by day to scavenge supplies. He is exploring Los Angeles block by block, staking the vampires he finds in the abandoned buildings while they are helpless in the daytime and looking to find the source of the disease. Through a series of flashbacks we discover that he was a researcher working desperately to come up with a cure while the rest of the world succumbed. Morgan believes that because he was bitten by a bat carrying a weak strain of the disease years ago, he has developed an immunity. Everyone else slowly weakens and dies, and, if their corpses are not burned, they eventually rise as slow moving, wretched vampires who are repelled by garlic, sunlight, mirrors and the like.
Morgan eventually discovers that in addition to himself and the vampires, there is a third faction (people who have the vampire disease but keep it in remission with injections). With the help of one of these “remissive vampires,” he is successful in developing a cure, but the rest of the remissives end up misunderstanding his motives and gun him down at the end of the film.
Happy Labor Day!
Posted: September 6, 2010 Filed under: politics Leave a comment
Happy Labor Day!
This from Wikipedia:
The first Labor Day in the United States was observed on September 5, 1882 in New York City, by the Central Labor Union of New York, the nation’s first integrated major trade union.[1] It became a federal holiday in 1894, when, following the deaths of a number of workers at the hands of the U.S. military and U.S. Marshals during the Pullman Strike, President Grover Cleveland put reconciliation with the labor movement as a top political priority….
Given the holiday’s obvious “pro union” roots, I’m surprised that members of management, political conservatives, Tea Party Activists, Ayn Rand anti-collectivists, Communist Conspiracy Theorists and Ann Coulter (who described herself as the ‘proud daughter of a Union-busting lawyer’) can bring themselves to celebrate the holiday by going to barbecues or furniture sales. Shouldn’t the anti-union folks be trying to spit in the eye of organized labor by going out on ‘Labor Day’ and getting their hands dirty by digging ditches or doing assembly line work?
Revisiting Art for the OSR and Pricing
Posted: September 1, 2010 Filed under: art, commissions 9 CommentsOK, so if you have been following the blog you know that I’ve been having trouble getting paid by a few OSR type clients (there are 2 with outstanding balances owed me; other than sending them messages with requests for payment, I don’t know what else to do). In addition, there is the matter of the ‘ape head’ illustration where I let frustration get the best of me and managed to screw a bad deal even further from my end.
Going forward, I obviously need to do things differently and have received both public and private responses and suggestions. Based on that, I’m looking at:
- An overall rate increase.
- Require a deposit before I start work.
- Require a signed agreement before I start work.
- High rez scans delivered only after final payment is rendered… up until then, the client gets 72 dpi jpegs for placement/approval.
- Include a “change order” request process in the contract.
- Avoid the “noob” publishers who may (or may not)have good intentions but have unrealistic or unclear expectations.
The hardest part of this is the ‘rate’ concept. I have no idea what is reasonable or fair. The conventional formula seems to consider type of usage (one time use vs. more rights) plus time/complication multiplied by usage itself (i.e.: I understand some illustrators and photographers may charge a lesser price to a magazine with a smaller distribution).
As far as the deposit goes, I’m thinking of asking for 1/2 up front and the other half within 30 days of delivery (when I did photography I tried to get paid within 30 days, even offering discounts if people would pay me before the first 30 days were up and threatening to charge more for invoices that went past 90 days— no one ever paid me early and the late clients who were billed extra for delinquent payments never paid the penalty (in fact, some of them never paid their bills at all)).
I’ve done some hunting and haven’t been able to find how much other artists charge for artwork — any good suggestions for finding price info out there?
Food of the Gods
Posted: August 31, 2010 Filed under: inspiration, movies 1 Comment
I watched another low budget 70s sci-fi / horror movie a few nights ago — 1976 “The Food of the Gods.” It was apparently based on a part of a lesser known H.G. Wells novel and the film bears little resemblance to the source material.
If you haven’t seen it, “The Food of the Gods” is the story of a football player and his buddies who go on a hunting expedition in what I think is British Columbia or Victoria, Canada. While hunting, one of them is killed by giant wasps and when his companions find his bloated body after he had been stung to death, one of the players, Morgan, vows to discover what happened and convinces his buddy to come along.
It turns out that there is a farm nearby where some sort of mysterious substance (that looks like oatmeal) has been bubbling up out of the ground (why is never explained) and the farmer and his wife have been mixing the substance, which they consider a gift from God, with the chicken feed. This has caused their chickens to grow to the size of horses (and, I assume, lay eggs the size of beer kegs). There is an (unintentionally) hilarious scene where Morgan the football player enters the barn and is attacked by a giant rooster. This is event is communicated to the audience by having Morgan look horrified as a giant rooster puppet head and giant rooster foot are flailed at him from off camera as his anorak is shredded. He kills the rooster with a pitchfork and then confronts the farmer’s wife, shouting, “What the hell is going on around here!?! I was nearly killed by those giant chickens!”
Morgan learns of “The Food of the Gods” (or “T.F.O.T.G.”) from the farmer’s wife. She reveals that rats and insects have also eaten “T.F.O.T.G.” and grown to enormous size. A greedy businessman who wants to make millions from the mysterious substance and his winsome, spunky female biologist employee show up, as well as a man and his pregnant wife who were ‘trapped like rats’ in their Winnebago (see above). My favorite scene involves cutting between the horrified looks on the actors faces and a swarm of rats crawling all over a toy Winnebago smeared with what looks like peanut butter. An intelligent, albino rat with red eyes seems to be the ringleader.
The humans retreat to the farmhouse where large rubber rat heads are thrust into the shattering windows as the women scream and the men blast away with shotguns. There are frequent cuts to scenes of rats crawling all over a model of the farmhouse while someone apparently shoots at the rats with some sort of paintball gun filled with what looks like a mixture red paint and raspberry jam.
Later in the film, Morgan uses home made pipe bombs to blow up a nearby dam, drowning the rats. There are several scenes of what look like live rats being drowned in a fish tank. Between drowning rats by fastening their tails to the bottom of a fish tank and shooting the rats with high velocity raspberry/paint pellets, ‘The Food of The Gods’ is the perfect document for PETA to show why it sucked to be an animal in Hollywood in the 70s.
The rats all drown and the survivors pile up the rat carcasses as well as the remaining “Food of the Gods,” douse it all with gasoline and torch it. We hear a voice over of Morgan saying what a terrible thing it would be if any of that “T.F.O.T.G.” were to get into the ecosystem as we see melting snow washing some Mason jars labeled “T.F.O.T.G” into a stream, which flows into a river, where cows are shown drinking the water (and licking up the oatmeal-like “Food of the Gods” from the jars) …then the cows are milked, and, ominously, the milk is served to school children… Oh, the horror.
The Crazies (1973)
Posted: August 28, 2010 Filed under: movies, zombies Leave a comment
The other night I watched George Romero’s 1973 film, “The Crazies.” This is perhaps (un)happy circumstance, because the next day a non-fictional group of crazies descended upon the Lincoln Memorial in Washington to demand that our socialist president let (the Christian) God back into our lives while reducing taxes on the wealthiest 10%… and many of them were wearing tricorner hats adorned with tea bags and star spangled T-shirts. Or something like that.
Cheap political potshots aside, I really wanted to like this film (it has always been on my “to watch” list; I just never got around to it). I haven’t yet watched the 2010 remake with the same name in which the previews feature a demented man dragging a garden fork around in a particularly menacing manner.
I find myself enjoying Vietnam war era films a lot more these days — perhaps because they hearken back to a time when US society was dominated by a fairly bitter cultural schism and there was a fear, in the back of the minds of many, that as a society we had become too “soft” or permissive and were under attack from within (which pretty much seems to be Glenn Beck’s schtick in a nutshell; ha ha… “nutshell!”). The parallels of social unrest and the themes of a culture war in films of the 60s and 70s are interesting to me because I see some similar expressed fears in the current media stream.
Situations created by fear and mistrust that spiral out of control had been themes in Romero’s Night of The Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978), so it’s not surprising to see them in “The Crazies.” But, unfortunately, for a lot of reasons, “The Crazies” just doesn’t work very well.
“The Crazies” begins with a farmer who lives outside a small farm in Pennsylvania going mad and setting fire to his farm. One cut scene later, we are then introduced to David, a volunteer fireman, and his girlfriend/fiance Judy (a nurse) as well as ‘Clank,’ David’s buddy and a fellow volunteer fireman. David and Clank set off to fight the fire as Judy rushes to the office of the local doctor to help care for the children of the dairy farmer who survived the fire.
Judy is astounded to find the doctor’s office invaded by soldiers in tyvek suits and gasmasks. It turns out that a few days earlier, a plane carrying a supply of some sort of a top secret biological weapon codenamed “Trixie” had crashed nearby and the agent/virus had made it into the water supply. We are told that the ‘Trixie’ virus kills some people and drives others insane. The doctor, worried because Judy is pregnant with David’s child, gives her a shot to help protect her and has her hide a syringe and a vial of the resistance drug in her pocket so she can inoculate David.
At some point we get to see “Colonel Peckham,” point man for the operation, putting his socks and underwear into a garment bag while talking on the phone about the ‘Trixie’ situation. He is ordered to go to the infested village and get the situation under control. Meanwhile, bombers are being scrambled into the air to nuke the Trixie town from above if needed. There are a lot of fists pounding desks and “Goddamnits” while some government bureaucrats and army men argue what to do.
There are various scenes of tyvek clad soldiers fighting crazy villagers. One soldier gets stabbed to death with knitting needles by someone’s grandmother.
Colonel Peckham arrives and sets up a perimeter guard; anyone caught trying to leave is to be detained or shot. David, Judy and Clank are captured by Tyvek clad soldiers and her supply of the resistance drug is confiscated. They manage to escape, taking Artie, a middle aged man, and Lynn, his daughter, with them and hide in a country club. Artie and Lynn, both now crazy, have incestuous sex. Clank, who is also increasingly crazy, discovers this and beats up Artie. Artie is later discovered dead, after having hung himself. Lynn, the teenager, wanders outside and is shot by soldiers. David, Judy and Clank run off after having another shootout with the soldiers.
At some point, an irascible scientist who worked on the original Trixie virus is brought to the town in hopes of being able to develop an antidote. He finally manages to do so, but, frustrated by the slow process needed to verify his identity over the phone, he decides to just hoof it over to Colonel Peckham, taking the antidote with him. He is mistaken as a “crazy” by some soldiers and forced into the local high school (where they are attempting to quarantine the crazies). Inside the high school, he is pushed down some stairs by some crazies and falls to his death. The antidote is destroyed.
David, Judy and Clank manage to ambush a few soldiers and disarm them, but Clank (full blown crazy now), kills the prisoners while David is trying to get them to tell him what they know. Judy opines that David must have a natural immunity because he is not crazy. Clank goes gonzo and starts shooting soldiers in the woods, finally getting shot himself. Judy, now showing signs of being crazy, wanders into the crossfire between some crazed civilians and soldiers and is also killed. David, his spirit broken, is captured and led away.
The movie ends with Colonel Peckham being congratulated over the phone by some stuffed shirt bureaucrat at his success in having contained the outbreak. Peckham seems depressed at how badly things have turned out. The film ends with him boarding a helicopter because there has been another outbreak in another town, and, as the new “Trixie containment” expert, he is needed to try and contain it.
Like many of Romero’s films, the ‘messages’ of whom to trust and mistrust are a bit too heavy handed for my taste, but I can’t decide if that is a factor of the awkward dialogue or lack of character development. I try not to judge the production values of films from this era too harshly (budgets were a fraction of what they are now and there was very little in the way of post-production effects available at any price in 1973), but many of the edits and portions of the sound in the film could have been much better. One of the real problems with “The Crazies” is that they try to pack too much into one story. The discussion of what the virus is and how it got into the town require a lot of exposition by the town doctor and military officers. Stylistically, I think most horror or action films have moved away from explaining what is happening as much through the characters on the screen discussing whatever problem confronts them, so perhaps I too jaded by the more modern storytelling of films like 28 Days Later, but there are places in which “The Crazies” really kind of plods along. The film switches back and forth between three stories (1st is the story of Judy, David and Clank; 2nd is the story of Colonel Peckham and 3rd is the shorter story of the doctor and his antidote) and I wonder we (as an audience) would have been better served by concentrating on just one story. I also find that characters in Romero films tend to be pretty thin as far as showing the audience their motivation. Granted, horror and sci-fi are genres where character depth and development tend to be pretty thin as a rule, but Romero always makes gestures towards developing his characters and then just leaves his principle characters as people who can be summed up in a single sentence.
I enjoyed the film and would watch it again (if I didn’t have so many things already in my queue and not enough free nights to watch them). I’d be curious to see how the remake of “The Crazies” compares to the original, but the previews of the 2010 version make it look more like a zombie/slasher film than the original.
Changes afoot with Swords and Wizardy
Posted: August 25, 2010 Filed under: art, OSR 3 Comments
In case you haven’t heard, Mythmere Games (makers of Swords & Wizardry) has now partnered up with Frog God Games (an offshoot of the company formerly known as Necromancer Games). Earlier today there was a bit of a brou-ha-ha over the wording of an annoucement with comments that vary from critical of to supportive of the promises of new “professionalism” in production values that Frog God Games has sworn to deliver.
In case you don’t know (and I can’t imagine you don’t), Swords & Wizardry is orginally the brain child of Matt Finch, a fan of the older editions of D&D who used the “Open Game License” and “System Reference Document” issued by Wizards of the Coast during the 3e and 3.5e heyday to make a game that plays so much like the original D&D (with just product identity and copyrighted names and terms stripped away) that one could barely notice the difference between the two games. Read more about it here.
As is usual with the OSR community, this latest announcement has stirred up s
ome controversy. I’ll let you follow the links above and figure it out for yourself.
The thing that I find regrettable is that apparently they have decided to reissue the Swords & Wizardry rule book with some new content and a new cover. The original cover, by Peter Mullen, is above at left. You have your group of crazy adventurers, dressed in outlandish armor, hoisting the halfling up into the lap of a dead giant’s skeleton so he can steal the gem from the pommel of the giant’s sword. Not only is it a great, evocative illustration, but it also has a unique character and ‘look’ that hearkens back to TSR artists like Dave Trampier and Erol Otus without slavishly copying them. As an artist myself, I love Mullen’s work.
According to their press release, Frog God Games is going to release a new copy of the rules with a new cover (see at right). I’m not sure who the new artist is (Rick Sardinha?), but I find the decision disappointing. I know that the new cover looks more ‘current’ and ‘contemporary’ — more like the cover of a mass market paperback than Mullens’ weird, indie-looking picture, but, despite the great technique and cool, computer generated painted look, the new cover doesn’t scream “pick me up and play me” like Mullen’s cover does. Mullen’s cover recalls the spirit of the art on the Dave Trampier AD&D players handbook that featured a group of adventurers in a temple with a pot-bellied demon statue where two adventurers were prying a gem as big as a human head out of the eye socket — at least for me. The new cover? It looks professional — but also looks a little bland — like this cover could be on just about any 4e era or 3.5e era WOTC product. The new cover is technically and artistically very accomplished… and is much better than anything I could ever do. But since I think the main strength of a game like ‘Swords & Wizardry’ is that the D&D player who last played 30 years ago will be perfectly at home with this rules set, making this “retro clone” game look more like another post-Gary Gygax/Dave Arneson modern RPG game is, in my opinion, a step in the wrong direction.
I don’t pretend to know dick about how you successfully market a game. But I know what I like. Peter Mullen’s cover rocks. I wish I had a ton of money so I could buy the original artwork from it and hang it in my house.
Skinner’s Hell Dream
Posted: August 23, 2010 Filed under: art, inspiration, music Leave a comment(warning: probably NSFW)
Who does not want to play in a campaign like this one?
A new art hero!
Posted: August 19, 2010 Filed under: art, inspiration 1 Comment
(Image of Skinner’s painting “borrowed” from Redefine Magazine)In my web wanderings, I recently found an artist I really like who straddles the line between art and illustration with a really cool, crazy style: http://www.theartofskinner.com
He shows in galleries and also does illustration and apparently has some comic books in the works — some of my favorite things! Sprikled throughout his drawings are all kinds of monsters — including beholders, mind flayers and goblins!
The Last Episode of "He-Man"
Posted: August 18, 2010 Filed under: art, comics, He-Man 1 Comment
I was gonna write something moving and important today — maybe about Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s current “race relations” dilemma … or the cynical maneuverings of the US Republican party on the NYC mosque issue… or the cowardice of the US Democratic Party on the same issue… and then I just said, “Fuck it,” and decided to post this picture of how I think “He-Man and The Masters of the Universe” should have ended.
I wasn’t a fan when He-Man was on TV (being a little too old for it), but, in retrospect wonder how many of the creators of this show were chuckling behind their hands as they had the effeminate “Prince Adam” secretly save the universe every episode as his butch alter-ego, He-Man. The name, ‘He-Man,’ was especially funny because becoming a ‘He-Man’ was the goal for Charles Atlas’s skinny 90 po
und weakling, Mac, who was sick of having bullies kick sand in his face. They were still running that same ad (which looks like it dates back to WW II) in comic books when I was a kid.
As I recall, He-Man stories were cribbed, plot wise, from the old Superman cartoons. Prince Adam and Teela, his female companion, are confronted by some horrible plot or disaster or villain. Price Adam then runs away in fear and secretly transforms into He-Man. The hero sets things right, earning the gratitude of Teela and the population who never suspect that He-Man and Prince Adam are one in the same even though they look exactly alike except for clothing and hairstyle. The danger averted, the hero departs, changes back into Prince Adam and comes back and asks what he missed. Teela then tells Prince Adam that he is a loser and wonders aloud why he can’t be more like He-Man. Prince Adam then breaks the fourth wall of cinema by winking at the viewer and making some self-depreciating joke while Teela rolls her eyes. Substitute Clark Kent for Prince Adam, Lois Lane for Teela and the cartoon is a direct ripoff of the Superman cartoons I watched in the late 1970s.