The Giant’s Adventures: I love them
Posted: December 11, 2010 Filed under: adventures, campaigns, Dungeons and Dragons 4 Comments
I love some of the earliest adventures published by TSR back in the day, but my absolute favorites are what I call “The Giant’s Trilogy” (includes “Steading of the Hill Giant Chief,” “Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl” and “Hall of the Fire Giant King,” (later the three were gathered into one adventure called “Against the Giants”)).
If you are accustomed to the modern “adventure path” style adventures, the first thing you will notice is how physically insubstantial the ‘Giants’ booklets seem in comparison. The older version comes in 3 skinny folders with maps printed in light blue on the inside (in the age of photo copiers, I think this color was chosen because 1970s era Xerox copiers had trouble reproducing it, thus TSR was probably attempting to prevent ‘analog age’ file sharing). There are no boxes of text to be read aloud to the players. Most creatures are not described with any more detail than their hitpoints (other details were to be found in the AD&D Monster Manual). The room descriptions mostly just tell you what (monster, treasure, furnishings) is in any labeled location and may include details like how they will react when player characters come strolling in or any traps or hazards that might be found in the area. Add a few wandering monster lists as well as some suggestions on tactics the giants will use as well as a ‘hook’ to get the players on to the next installment and that is it. The third in the series is a little more elaborate; it includes a couple of named NPCs who will be of interest (as well as introducing ‘The Drow’ to D&D players for the first time) and the suggestion that the adventure can be continued in the D-series of adventures.
The introduction to the first adventure, “Steading of the Hill Giant Chief,” consists of a pargaraph saying that giants have been raiding the lands of humans with greater frequency and unusual efficiency recently. The player characters have been ‘shanghaied’ into investigating; a greater plot is suspected and the player characters have been commanded to find out who is behind the attacks. If the players refuse, they are to be executed (how is that for motivation?). Any treasure the party can find is theirs to keep. The noble who gives the players this draconian assignment isn’t even named in the adventure. With that, players are led off to the nearby ‘Steading’ of the hill giants (kind of a stockade fort/cabin) and told to come back with answers.
If the players succeed in defeating the hill giants, they can move on to the icy caves of the frost giants. If the frost giants are defeated, then the players can proceed to the caverns of the fire giants. The giants have various pet monsters, traps and allies in their lairs, but the adventures consist of a lot of fighting.
So what’s to like about an adventure like this? I’ve heard fans of the 3e and later eras of Dungeons & Dragons dismiss this type of play as ‘hack and slash,’ and, if ‘hack and slash’ means killing monsters and taking their stuff, I suppose they are right. But other than being forced to deal with the giants, the players have complete freedom of action. From my limited experience, this is unlike the more modern ‘adventure path’ adventures where players usually have to first go to location A and talk to NPC B, then retrieve relic C and bring it back to NPC B, who will tell them that they then have to go to location D and defeat bad guy E… but bad guy E will escape, etc. The ‘adventure path’ reads more like a really long novel than what they thought of as an ‘adventure’ back in the mid to late 1970s. During that era, an ‘adventure’ was really just a location — and it was us to the players to provide the ‘inspiration.’
Those evil bastards!
Posted: December 8, 2010 Filed under: art, portfolio 2 Comments
Above is another new sample. I’d like to see more ‘fantasy’ art return to some of its less-than-savory roots… I don’t remember what year ‘Alien’ came out, but as a kid I remember sneaking into the theater to see it… and when that creature burst out of that guy’s chest I was terrified and delighted for a week.
So the theme today is “birth as a less-than-delightful event.” One of the things that made the Alien from the Ridley Scott movie so horrifying is that it implanted itself into the victim, like a fetus, and killed the host when it was ‘born.’
The evil high priest has just used his dagger to remove the demon spawn from the body of the woman chained to the altar… meanwhile the heroes (finally) bust in the door… too late to save the woman… but hopefully on time to save the world… we shall see. The Evil High priest’s ugly assistant attempts to draw his master’s attention to the impending interruption as guards with impractical looking polearms move to intercept.
Octopus Floor Update
Posted: December 6, 2010 Filed under: art, portfolio, project 6 Comments
This summer I started a tile and marble mosaic in our front hall that I wrote about in the blog earlier this year.
Since then, I made a bit of progress (see at right) although its been pretty slow going. This is, more or less, what you see when you look down as you stand in the front door.
I haven’t finished grouting between the irregular pieces of marble (the background) but the octopus himself (or herself) is complete.
The mosaic is between 5-6 feet wide and 10-12 feet high/deep. The octopus is made of glass mosaic tile (which you can buy by the pound). The border is made from a yellow Italian clay tile (which was rescued from a dumpster) and a cheap marble tile I bought from the Builder’s supply. The background is made from broken and irregular off-white/tan Italian unpolished marble (again, rescued from the dumpster) mixed with blue and tan glass tiles.
Once the floor is completely grouted, it will look much lighter than it does here. It also looks better under daylight; I took this photo by incandescent light.
Positive Press from the Blog-o-sphere on Exquisite Corpses
Posted: December 5, 2010 Filed under: exquisite corpses, publishing, reviews 2 Comments
OK, so I’m officially a shameless self promoter. Jonathan Bingham wrote a very positive review of my lulu monster-book, Exquisite Corpses, over at his blog, Ostensible Cat! Despite being allergic to cats, I like the Ostensible variety of felines.
If you haven’t ordered your copy yet, scoot on over to Lulu and get out your credit card and order one for the bathroom, one for the game room and one for the bookshelf! Lulu will print up a fresh one and ship it to you ASAP! Link to Lulu here!
Irreversible (Movie)
Posted: December 1, 2010 Filed under: art, movies, reviews 1 Comment
Irreversible (2002), by Gaspar Noe, has been on my ‘need to watch’ list for a long time and I finally got around to seeing it last week. Fair warning: if you don’t speak French, you will have to read subtitles… and some have found it to be an excessively brutal and disturbing film.
I don’t really know how to describe the film, other than to say that it presents the narritive of a woman being raped and brutally assaulted and then her boyfriend and a former lover attempt to take revenge on her rapist, but the entire story is told in chunks that are ordered backwards… so first we see the two main characters (Marcus and Pierre) being taken out of a gay S&M nightclub with the uncompromising name of ‘Rectum’ by the police — Marcus is on a stretcher and Pierre is in handcuffs. The next scene ‘chunk’ shows what happened right before that: Marcus and Pierre are searching the nightclub for a man known as ‘le Tenia.’ They find the man they think is ‘le Tenia’ and a fight ensues… Marcus gets his arm broken in the fight and Pierre beats the presumed ‘le Tenia’ to death with a fire extinguisher. Bit by bit, the film maker presents the story in chunks, each ‘chunk’ coming in reverse chronological order, so we see Pierre and Marcus discover that Alex has been raped as she is carried away by ambulance workers on a stretcher, we see the rape, we see the events at the party they attended that led up to Alex wanting to leave early, etc.
Not only is the film in reverse chronological order, but the scenes themselves are all composed of a single ‘take’ where the camera roves around at random at the beginning, then gradually settles on the main characters. The scene where Alex gets raped and then beaten into unconsciousness in a pedestrian underpass by ‘le Tenia’ is about 10 or 12 minutes long and appears to have been filmed with a single camera that just moves to follow the events (I subsequently discovered that many scenes were digitally ‘stitched’ together to make them appear as one long scene, but, if so, the effect is seamless). At the start of each scene the camera is moving around as if simply spinning freely through the air, showing the ceiling, the floor, the room, etc., in a manner that almost makes the viewer nauseous — I thought the director ‘overdid’ that particular effect, although with each scene the ‘free camera’ effect got less and less wild and shorter and shorter, so I suppose Noe was intending to show us how events had ‘spun further and further’ out of control as they progressed.
The film has been criticized for being excessively violent and disturbing, especially for the graphic rape scene and the scene where Pierre bashes in the head of the man he (wrongly assumes) assaulted the woman, Alex. Graphic sex and violence in films, however, are not deal breakers for me and while I feel it innappropriate to say that I ‘enjoyed’ the film (‘enjoy’ does not seem to be the right word), I found it very effective and would reccomend the film. I found the film making interesting enough, and the little details of the character’s lives compelling enough that I want to eventually watch it again. Not one for ‘family viewing,’ however.
Aside from what I thought were the excessively long ‘wandering eye’ camera shots, my only other complaint was that in one portion, a scene where ‘le Tenia’ held Alex down on the floor of the pedestrian underpass while beating her face with his fists didn’t quite look real to me. ‘Le Tenia’ appeared to be striking the air right next to the actresses’ face and the sounds of the impact were unconvincing… as if they were dubbed in. Obviously I don’t expect the actress to really be beaten into a coma in order to make the film convincing, but given how ‘hyper real’ everything else in the film appeared, a small detail like this really stood out as a flaw. Perhaps the beating didn’t work for me because I wasn’t prepared to accept the scene as ‘real.’ I don’t know.
I’m going to have to beg the question whether or not the violence in the film is ‘gratuitous’ or not, simply because I don’t know that I accept the majority’s definition of ‘gratuitous sex and violence.’ In the case of Irreversible, however, I think the director made a conscious decision to make certain scenes as explicit and disturbing as possible. Since the violence comes early in the film, and afterwards we only see what leads up to it, the film is much more about observing the events in these people’s lives that led up to this horrible series of encounters.
You just can’t go back…
Posted: November 29, 2010 Filed under: Dungeons and Dragons, games, philosophy, rules 7 Comments
Sometimes I wish I could re-create the fun my young friends and I had back in 1978, starting with the ‘basic set’ (pictured at right). Maybe I’m looking at the past with rose-colored glasses, but it seems as though we were less jaded that the players I encounter (or the player I have become) today.
One of the most obvious changes seems to be in the number of options and choices available to the players in preparing a character to play. Here I guess I’ll start to sound like the old Dana Carvey curmudgeon who wheezes about walking barefoot fifteen miles to school in the snow each day, uphill both ways, “and we liked it,” but I actually find myself nostalgic for the very basic and simple ‘cookie cutter’ characters and classes in the original D&D. One started character creation by rolling dice to determine your strength, intelligence, wisdom, etc., and then, based on what you rolled, you chose a character class. One could adjust your scores in very minor ways: you could swap two points of intelligence for one point of strength if you were a fighter, etc., but one usually ended up with characters whose average ability score was 8 to 10.
My memory of those games is that as players, our pleasure in the game was much more immediate and less abstract — what we as players decided to do or not do seemed to have more bearing on events than anything written on our character sheets. There seemed to be less ‘rules lawyering’ because there were fewer rules to lawyer with. Instead of resolving all actions through balanced universal d20 mechanics with things like ‘roll a dice to notice’ or ‘roll a dice to listen’ or ‘roll a dice to use your engineering knowledge,’ we would talk about what we wanted to do. “I want to look under the bed and behind the dresser” instead of “I roll a search check.”
I’m thinking about these things because recently a friend of mine, who was running a session of a newer RPG told me that the last time they met “he had the worst session ever.” I don’t honestly think that a different set of rules would have helped or hindered (the problems were probably more a set of abrasive personalities rubbing each other the wrong way), but our conversation about what went wrong at the session made me want to think about what goes wrong or right when we sit down and play (I was not at this horrible session, BTW).
HANDS OFF MY JUNK!
Posted: November 28, 2010 Filed under: politics, stupidity 5 CommentsSuddenly, some Americans are very angry. Some of the same people who didn’t make a peep when we went to war in Iraq under false (or wrong) pretenses, who stayed quiet when the Administration and FEMA sat on their hands as the floodwaters inundated New Orleans during Katrina, who didn’t say anything when treason was swept under the carpet in the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson affair, who remained silent as foreign nationals were imprisoned and tortured without evidence or charge by the US and her allies, who did not protest when the definition of the word “torture” was rewritten for the convenience of politicians, who said nothing through the warrantless wiretaps and email scans, who did not protest when George W. Bush called the Constitution “just a piece of paper”… these people are finally outraged and have declared that they “will not take it anymore.”
What is the reason for their anger? New airline security regulations in the US that require scanners that can see through people’s clothes just went into effect. So when you stand in front of the scanner, some underpaid TSA guy or gal will see an outline of your penis.
I don’t believe that most of what we (the US) did in response to the terrorist attacks on 9-11 made us safer — but I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I hear how much fuss some people are making about this. I don’t believe that having a TSA employee look at the outline of my naked body will really make my flight any safer… but, in the scheme of things, I don’t understand why the new scanners outrage some folks when everything else that has come before it (that represents real abuse) has gone unmentioned. If I go to a gym and take a shower, strangers can see my penis. What is the big deal?
I believe that this is manufactured outrage that has more to do with wanting to embarass the current administration than anything else. I come to that conclusion because the TSA was created and it’s mission defined under the previous administration. It is all just political theatre and the outrage is all about 9 years too late.
Good Press! Game Developer Magazine
Posted: November 26, 2010 Filed under: computer games, games, publishing 1 Comment
Just a quick note to wish everyone a happy holiday and mention that I just had an illustration published in Game Developer Magazine.
Game Developer Magazine is an industry publication for people who create video games, so you probably won’t find it on the shelf at your local news stand. A big thanks to Brandon Sheffield and Jeff Fleming of GD Magazine for the chance to have my work appear in your magazine — consider me ready to draw whatever you need in the future!
If you lie to me, why would I trust you?
Posted: November 23, 2010 Filed under: consumer, culture, stupidity, weird Leave a comment
The envelope at the right arrived in my mailbox today. At first glance, it looked like a 1099 of a w-2 form. Since some of the companies I do freelance work for send me 1099s, I normally keep an eye out for them and stash them away for tax time. The big ‘2009’ in the upper right makes it look like a tax document dealing with the year 2009. I also lost my job this year and had to claim unemployment, so all sorts of ‘official’ documents requiring my response end up in my mail.
I ripped open the envelope and discovered that I had been selected for special financing on a new car by a local Ford dealership. I felt that the sender had intentionally tried to make the envelope look like ‘official government correspondence’ and left off the return address in order to increase my chances of opening it (as opposed to printing “We want to sell you a car!” or something similar on the envelope, which , admittedly, would have resulted in the envelope and contents going right into the recycle bin).
As far as sales pitches go, though, this one seems really flawed. The sender attempted to deceive me about the envelope’s contents in order to get me to open it, and, once I had opened it, wanted me to come in and buy a car. I understand that the real goal of the car dealership is to make money by selling cars, but isn’t gaining the trust of the customer important in the process? The thought that immediately occurred to me, once I opened the envelope, was, “Geez, this person lied to me to get me to open this envelope (true, in the scheme of things, a pretty unimportant lie)… and now they want me to trust them to give me a good deal on a car?”
As I tossed the letter into the bin, though, I began to wonder if such a pitch did work… after all, this isn’t the first time I have received a letter that looked like something important and turned out to be a sales pitch (my favorite was one that was printed up to look like a refund check from the IRS… and when you opened the envelope you saw that they were offering you a loan or something). Part of me thinks that deceiving people into listening to you long enough to hear your sales pitch is an asshole thing to do, yet, amazingly, it must work because I keep getting these letters.
Maybe the true ‘seller’ is a breed apart — he or she is someone who can lie to your face to get you to open the envelope, and, once you have opened the envelope, then unashamedly switch tactics and try to get you to buy whatever they are selling, even though I think my reaction should be, “Hey, you just lied to me! Shut the fuck up and leave me alone, you slimeball!” The ‘effective salesperson’ is perhaps someone who is not encumbered by the same degree of shame that the rest of us are handicapped with.
Atomic Knights!
Posted: November 20, 2010 Filed under: comics, inspiration Leave a comment
I finally got my copy of the reprints of “Atomic Knights” comics in the mail… and I can’t wait to sit down and crack it open.
The series originally ran in DC’s “Strange Adventures” in the years 1960-1964; a little before my time. It is apparently not to be confused with another comic called “The Atomic Knight” that I know nothing about (maybe “The Atomic Knight” is about a bookworm who got superpowers by suffering a paper cut from a radiated copy of “Ivanhoe”).
The comic is set in post-nuclear holocaust America in the year 1986 (yeah, I know… but in 1960 the threat of a nuclear war on any given day was a possibility people thought about, so, in context, it works). There are all sorts of weird radiated mutants running around and a few scraps of humanity struggle to survive. “The Atomic Knights” are a collection of do-gooders seeking to keep civilization alive and help the other survivors. I guess they may have raided a museum for suits of medieval armor… and the armor apparently protects them from radiation (ah, the optimism of the 1960s). Others, like the evil Black Baron, are hoarding food and attempting to set themselves up as rulers. The “Atomic Knights” also ride around on giant dalmatians and battle foes that are animal, vegetable, mineral and extraterrestrial. What fun!
I had never heard of “The Atomic Knights” until recently, and never would have if not for the internets. Thank you, Al Gore for bringing me “The Atomic Knights!”
