The Biblyon Broadsheet

I just posted a replacement for MathPad on my general blog. MathPad is a great application for freeform calculations, kind of a cross between a calculator and a spreadsheet. It’s one application I use a lot, but unfortunately it hasn’t been updated in a long time and won’t work on Mac OS X Lion. So I finally wrote a simple replacement in Perl that, while it won’t do everything MathPad does, will do most of what I use MathPad for.

Either MathPad or padmath can be used for freeform calculations, such as this “spreadsheet” I used for a Villains & Vigilantes character:

Have MathPad or padmath recalculate, and the bottom section changes to:

I find MathPad very useful for making quick calculations in games that need them during character creation.

“Forget your troubles, lay down your burdens, and enter a world of wonder.”

In our last game session, one of the sorcerors cast a mage bolt and did maximum damage. At seventh level this should happen once every 256 times—four bolts, d4+1 each bolt—and since mage bolt is a very common spell it’s not surprising that it eventually happened.

It’s still cool when it does. We all stopped the game, marveled, and I had the presence of mind to take a photograph.¹

You can see a few other things on this character sheet. Owen’s player designed his own sheet, and he’s also almost as ancient a D&Der as I am, so he still calls Reactions Saving Throws. He also keeps meticulous records of his spell components.

And we’ve been playing forever. It looks like he printed this sheet on November 15, 2008, and updated the experience on November 20 2010 and again August 20 2011 and December 3 2011. He’s about to update it again, assuming they survive tonight.

“Thoughts on Old School Role-Playing Games and Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game”

Cygnus at Servitor Ludi is running a series on “Symbols, Glyphs, and Sigils”. His latest is Rota Fortunae, the Wheel of Fortune. Symbols often offer wonderful inspiration for adventures—especially the little things in an adventure that make it more intriguing for the players.

An earlier post discusses the Masonic lion’s paw—a once-secret handshake that helped Freemasons recognize other members of their secret society. That’d be a neat way to have the player characters meet up with a contact of a contact in a far town.

Guy Fullerton has created a list of adventures (and systems) for “Gygax-era flavors of D&D”. He’s got a lot of great adventures in the list, and most, if not all, of them should work great with Gods & Monsters.

I’ve added Guy’s list to the Old School Cool page.

Now that I’ve got a Gods & Monsters page set up on both Facebook and Google+, I’m going to start using them: every Monday I’m going to upload some free media from Wikimedia Commons or elsewhere that has inspired some part of Gods & Monsters. And every Friday I will upload a map, flier, cover image, or document graphic for an existing or soon-to-be-published Gods & Monsters adventure book or rulebook.

This week focuses on the circus! Circus posters from the 1800s were amazing collections of strange and arcane language. Traveling circuses have fired our imaginations for probably as long as they’ve existed, perhaps culminating in Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes.

My upcoming Coriandrome Circus adventure pulls heavily from all of these things. But the circus flier I made for the adventure pulls almost directly from several real circuses; some of the strangest things on it are not my imagination: the 42 flaming truths, for example, really were advertised as part of the Sells Brothers’ Millionaire Confederation of Stupendous Railroad Shows. Later they merged with another circus to become Adam Forepaugh & Sells Brothers Enormous Shows Combined (later still, just Forepaugh & Sells Brothers). They have some of the most amazing poster copy, and I stole from them shamelessly to make the Coriandrome Road Show flier that I’ve just posted to Facebook and Google+.

It will of course also be part of the resources file when I make the full adventure public.

The Gods & Monsters Facebook page includes “likes” for other OSR and cool gaming resources, as well as links to other pages, preferably other pages that have images, because they make the Facebook page look cooler!

I’m about to release the next book for Gods & Monsters, and thought it would be nice to have a Facebook page. I don’t think I like the new page style as much as the old page style, but it doesn’t look like there’s an option to switch back.

It also doesn’t look like there’s a lot of other OSR folks on Facebook, but that’s not surprising. I did find Villains & Vigilantes and Lamentations of the Flame Princess, so now Gods & Monsters likes V&V and LotFP!

Well, Gods & Monsters always liked them, but now it’s official.

“This project is the fourth installment of my ongoing effort to re-create my old TSR / Dungeons & Dragons artwork—which was reportedly destroyed by some thoughtless functionary to make room in TSR’s files. Last time, I re-created 12 drawings that I did for the Norse chapter of the original 1980 edition of a book called ‘Deities and Demigods’. This time around, I’m re-creating 12 of my drawings from AD&D module S3—Expedition to the Barrier Peaks!”

I pledged for Jeff Dee’s Deities & Demigods project and got a great Anubis out of it. And rued not choosing to get the Ra postcard as well. This time I pledged at $25 to get both of the psionic drawings he’s doing to recreate his art from Expedition to the Barrier Peaks: the creeping Brain and the Mind Flayer.

If you want in, hurry; the project currently needs to be funded by March 10! I have no idea whether it will get extended or not. And if you want some originals, there are still a few left as I write this.