The Biblyon Broadsheet

As of this morning, all of the older articles on the Biblyon Broadsheet have been moved to the new format. Any links you have to blog posts, topics, and categories should continue to work; they’ll be redirected to the new URLs. If you see a problem, let me know.

The only links that won’t work are direct links to the images in my image library. I’m considering redirecting all of the old images to an advert that supports my politics. If you’re mooching off of my bandwidth, you might want to stop. You can convince me not to do this by actually linking to an article that contained the image, something no one is currently doing except one page proudly advertising itself as an image ripper. Of course, if you’re using images from my site without reading the articles, you also aren’t reading this. I hope you enjoy gun-toting hippies.

For those of you that care about that sort of thing, the new site is built off of Django. That will make it more flexible than the hacked-together (though useful for its lifespan) system I had been using. For those of you who don’t care about such things, expect more pictures and perhaps even video if I see something cool on YouTube.

This is part of what I love about the old-school ethos. I was browsing through Pegasus #12 today, looking for adventure ideas for what happens after the current adventure and before the player characters reach their destination, and I ran across this very old-school spell: Disbelieve Reality.

If the recipient misses his Save vs. Magic, the caster is able to convince him of the illusionary nature of any one real item. This will allow the victim to walk through walls, over pits, etc. Only one thing may be disbelieved. It must be a well-defined item but may be as complex as “the attacking army.” The spell lasts as long as the disbelieved item remains in visual contact.

Besides requiring that the target fail their saving roll for it to take effect, the target is required to make an Intelligence roll every round (which, remember, is a minute long in AD&D). If they roll lower than their intelligence on d20, they no longer disbelieve, and, like Wile E. Coyote, fall into the gorge. The smarter they are, the more likely they are to hold up that ACME sign.

Just as in real life, people find it easier to fool themselves than to fool others. The caster need only roll 1d10 (illusionists) or 1d12 (magic-users) less than or equal to their level to continue disbelieving reality. Since it’s a third level illusionist spell or a fifth level magic-user spell, that’s not going to be difficult.¹

The spell requires speaking, motioning, and a material component. The material component is at least ten cubic feet of smoke or cloud. Poof! A big cloud of smoke, cast the spell, and reality is unreal.

Range is touch, and the casting time is one round.

Remember that in Gods & Monsters, you’ll have to estimate spell level by doubling the D&D level; it’s probably a seventh or eighth level spell. And since rounds are only ten seconds, I’d say that the Intelligence roll need only be made every minute. And the Reaction roll would be against Reason. They’ll need to fail a Reason roll in order to disbelieve reality.

I would probably make it a spirit manifestation instead. It’d be a good effect for Chaos and Trickster spirits. Call it Maya, Moksha, or Pierce the Veil, and give a true bonus to the roll of the target’s Wisdom as a major contributor. So that, while Intelligence hinders the character’s ability to achieve Moksha, Wisdom helps.

Every game has its own soul, however ragged. Gods & Monsters and its adventures have been inspired by far too many books to list here, but there are a few that should help you, as player or adventure guide, find your way among the ruins of my rules.

Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers.

Great stuff. Probably role-played, these guys do things only player characters get away with. And while there’s always a focus on d’Artagnan, it’s a very wide focus. The Three Musketeers also get a lot of screen time, and their screen time, like that of player characters, is usually when they’re together. This changes in later books; it becomes more like a PBEM or maybe even a Polaris-style game. If any one book will give you the feel of Gods & Monsters, it’s The Three Musketeers.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

I know, it’s almost a cliché to put Tolkien on a list like this. But if you haven’t done it yet, go back and read Lord of the Rings from a gamer’s perspective. Watch how Tolkien builds the “game world”. He starts small; he regularly removes the NPCs from the narrative. The discussion about what to do with the ring in the Last Home? It’s a bunch of player characters bouncing ideas off of non-player characters. Any editor today would tell him it doesn’t belong in a novel. But it does belong in a game. The player characters have choices to make. The Hobbit is arguably a more beautiful novel. But it’s the prequel the game master wrote after Lord of the Rings went off the rails.

Stephen King, The Dark Tower

When I started on Highland back in 1986 and chose “medieval old west after a spiritual cataclysm in a world with weakened walls” as the base idea, I didn’t know that I was traveling a road King had already started or was about to start. I’ve long since given up trying to be completely different from the Dark Tower (as you can see if you read Helter Skelter). Dark Tower doesn’t contain King’s best writing. See Hearts in Atlantis for that. But it does contain his most compelling characters. Hearts in Atlantis is a modern novel; Dark Tower is an old-school serial.

The Greyhawk Grognard is looking at how to organize the various sections of D&D-style rulebooks. OD&D had Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, and Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, AD&D reorganized to the Players Handbook, the Dungeon Masters Guide, and the Monster Manual. Why separate the game master book from the player book? Why keep monsters separate as well?

The way I look at it is this: if it’s a rule, it goes in the Rulebook for all players to read. If it’s specialized, it gets its own book. And I like to keep each book that gets used at the table at 120 pages or below and in a format that flattens more easily.

So, I have the Gods & Monsters Rules in their own book; the Arcane Lore magic book, and the Divine Lore prophet book. I separate out spells and spirits because only some of the players need them, and they take up a lot of space. I’m trying to avoid the necessity of looking things up in an index (one of the reasons I’ve avoided even making an index) by keeping each book focused.

I used to make a “big” book available on Lulu¹ that combined the Rulebook, Arcane Lore, and Divine Lore. But nobody bought it—including me. At the table I found it more useful to be able to hand the Divine book to the prophet player, the Magic book to the sorceror, and not have them distracted by the rules that they don’t currently need.

There are a couple of oddities, currently. I have skills in the Arcane Lore book because they aren’t big enough to go on their own; I may end up moving them into the main rulebook since they are far more integrated into the rules than they used to be in previous incarnations. Specialties and psychic powers will stay in the Arcane Lorebook because they’re too small to go on their own. It’s all a tradeoff between playability and just plain having too many books lying around.

Several years ago, I wrote an article about making custom character sheets using downloadable fonts and any modern page layout software. I used Apple’s AppleWorks package to make the examples. I updated it later for Scribus.

It’s fun designing things like that. But when I decided to include these custom character sheets in the downloadable set of gaming sheets for Gods & Monsters, it wasn’t a joke when I added a third, “advanced” sheet that is just a blank page of ruled paper.

College rule, wide rule, graph paper, or just a blank sheet from a sketch book. In my opinion, those are the best custom character sheets.

This is why, even though I’ve started using the “professional” looking character sheets to portray NPCs such as Deanna Carmen in Helter Skelter, I never updated the sample characters in the main rulebook. Those are player characters, and as such they should be scrawled out on whatever paper you’ve got handy. Just like the Moldvay Red Book example. So I left the example characters in boring table format, hoping to someday do them up as if they were on normal paper.

Well, I finally got around to it last week in Scribus, using some downloaded fonts from Abstract Fonts. They look awesome, as you can see on Sam Stevens’s character sheet (PDF File, 293.6 KB). And each one uses a different font, because, of course, each player character is made by a different player.

I considered doing them by hand, but that would have meant either them all being in the same handwriting, or getting my friends together and then being unable to make changes when necessary without trying to match their handwriting. Also, it would mean scanning them as images rather than as text, which makes the documents less useful for alternative readers.

The only problem with the EPS files is that for some reason, Word really doesn’t like EPS files. Besides not displaying them onscreen, it also makes the RTF file size huge—about 90 megabytes uncompressed, and 36 megabytes compressed. None of the individual files even reach a megabyte; the math there is way off. A quick test with Nisus indicates that when I switch to Nisus, the compressed file size will drop down to a more manageable 13 megabytes. (The PDF, of course, is even smaller.)

One of the things I like to do is steal good poetry and rewrite it for Highland. I did this with The Lady of Shalott in The House of Lisport. I just did it again for a new adventure our group is currently going through, the road to the first city. I stole straight from one of the best: Rome Unvisited from Oscar Wilde’s Rosa Mystica. It turned out even better than the Lady of Lisport. The fifth stanza is probably going to be the highlighted text of the imprint page:

• And yet what joy it were for me
• To trod my feet upon the earth,
• And journeying toward Aira’s birth
• To kneel again at Drasoli!

The rest of the poem undoubtedly still has changes to be made, but I do like those lines!

Here for your enjoyment is Urbana Mystica: The Song of the City.

Northwest

• • The corn has turned from gray to red,
  • Since first my spirit wandered forth
  • From the drear cities of the north,
  • And to the solar mountains fled.
• • And here I set my face toward home,
  • For now my pilgrimage doth yield,
  • Although, methinks, yon blood-red field
  • Marshals the way to Aureum.
• • O Mesiemblé, who dost hold
  • Upon the central roads thy reign!
  • O Mother without blot or stain,
  • Crowned with bright crowns of triple gold!
• • O Meshiaské, at thy feet
  • I lay this barren gift of song!
  • For, ah! the way is steep and long
  • That leads unto thy sacred street.

Southwest

• • And yet what joy it were for me
  • To trod my feet upon the earth,
  • And journeying toward Aira’s birth
  • To kneel again at Drasoli!
• • And wandering through the tangled pine
  • That break the gold of Marsu’s dream,
  • To see the purple mist and gleam
  • Of morning on King’s forty-nine.
• • By many a vineyard-hidden home,
  • Orchard, and olive-garden gray,
  • Till from threaded Edekli’s way
  • The central hill bears up the dome!

I love making up my own maps, keying them out, imagining ahead of time what the player characters are going to do, and then watching them tear it to shreds. Sometimes, of course, I need an adventure quickly, or I want to throw them a bit of a curve. There’s a lot of cool stuff out there for old-school games now to choose from. Here are some of my favorites. You should be able to use all of these with Gods & Monsters, and most of them can be easily re-skinned for your own game world.

Fight On!

Fight On! has some definite cool. It’s looking a lot like early Dragons; some of the Gods & Monsters-compatible adventures I’ve bookmarked for later use include the Fifth Circle of Hell in issue 3; House of the Ax and Mysterious Crystal Hemisphere in issue 4; the Lower Caves, Welcome to Slimy Lake, and Hell-Grave of the Tveirbró∂ur in issue 6; and while I haven’t gotten to issue 7 yet I certainly recommend Song of Tranquility.

Castle of the Mad Archmage

The Greyhawk Grognard’s Castle is now up to eight levels, and it’s still growing. It is uniquely old-school and the maps are beautiful. Technically, it isn’t the castle, it’s the dungeon of the castle. It’s designed to go underneath a castle of your own design.

Dragonsfoot

Dragonsfoot’s archive contains both adventures and a sporadic e-zine, Footprints. Footprints #1 came out in early 2004; it’s now up to issue 16. Like Gods & Monsters, Dragonsfoot was old-school before it was cool, and the site design and general esthetic of the place reflects that. Plus, they now have Len Lakofka continuing Lendore Isle! They have separate sections for Original D&D, AD&D, etc., but you can mix and match easily. The adventures I have marked for future reference are:

• DF14: Goblins Tooth I: Moonless Night by Lorne Marshall, for 6-10 characters of level 1-3
• DF18: Where the Fallen Jarls Sleep, by John A. Turcotte, for characters level 3-5
• L4: Devilspawn, by Len Lakofka, for characters level 3-5
• DF21: Beneath Black Towen, by John A. Turcotte, for characters level 4-6
• DFT2: Battle for Gib Rus, by Michael Haskell, for 6 characters of level 5-7

Lamentations of the Flame Princess

Green Devil Face is a fun zine, but Raggi’s adventures really shine. Death Frost Doom is a very cool combination of Lovecraft and Raimi, and Grinding Gear and Three Brides also look very good.