Here is a bit of inspiration for Noisms (the least I can do for him winding me up about Cyberpunk)

Haven't had much time to write lately or even read much, but after seeing this on Noisms' page "I could do with lots and lots and lots of little sketches and doodles that I can insert here and there wherever there is a sizeable blank space in the Yoon-Suin."  

Yeah but I can't draw.

However, when I read his two line description of his supplement "Tibet, yak ghosts, ogre magi, mangroves, Nepal, Arabian Nights, Sorcery!, Bengal, invertebrates, topaz, squid men, slug people, opiates, slavery, human sacrifice, dark gods, malaise, magic"  I immediately thought of this bit of artwork I scanned at some point late in the 90s. I have no idea where I got it and the only online image I found it on is in black and white and in Persian.

This is one of my favorite pieces of asian art I've seen, my  go to image when people start to yammer about Manga.

I have no idea where I got it from.  I had a scanner, the internet was lacking in such things then and I had a lot of second-hand magazines I'd buy for the art.  Then again it could be off some old roll of film I shot or out of some book. I was scanner happy and at some point trying to butter up a professor with no computer skills and a desire to do powerpoint.  

Now this I know was a post card from a travelling Mongolian art exhibit I saw in San Francisco circa 1995 at what I remember as a crappy little asian art museum they have in Golden Gate Park.   I might be spoiled by the volume of the Cleveland collection though, especially when it comes to the Japanese woodblocks and 19th century prints.  Oh and  as I tiresomely like to point out to people, it has the best collection in America to be found at a free museum., no matter what those pricks at the NY Met like to pretend with their "donation" sign, which is somehow still required.

It was this odd mix of Mongol masks,  and tapestries.  I liked this image so much I bought the T-shirt.  I think I can now claim seventeen solid years of strange looks for doing so.

This particular traveling exhibit was great, put the regular collection to shame. 

I've always wanted to use this idol as a monster in something.
Then again I want Ray Harryhausen to put it in a movie too.

Autopsy #2

Party assembled, underearth entrance assured, I started by pulling up the Palace.

Shifted the black to brown, it's easier to work on.  This way I could do some quick caverns for the sewers.  All those jakes and storm water grates have to go somewhere.  I figured large drops.  Water flow matter in the city, it's a rain forest. 

 Sketched in the old kitchens, then took what thy thought they were going for, the old treasury and stuck it under water. Come on a treasury?  Long ago looted and flooded to boot. So I swapped in the Old King's Wizard's quarters as the goal for booty.  The cool thing about drawing on the computer is it makes it easy to cut and paste floor plans for new levels. You just erase what you need to erase.  It lets you line up things, which in the case of this party came in handy once that dwarvish cleric got high in enough in levels to start casting rock to mud, lower water, and assorted mining related spells.  That gray grid is just a convenience really.  It makes drawing a room for a combat quick. I paste it in and out as needed, you use the color clear a lot when doing this. 

These are the sketches, so don't judge the final product on them (check out the previous post.)

I just keep pasting in the map as I continue, the elevations start to make things tricky.  The player's map will often contain alterations.  The one below has filled passages, collapsed ceilings, and a flooded puzzle.

So a quick synopsis.  We have the old storage rooms of the basement, the dungeon, which is filled with skeletons and a ghoul I decided became a ghoul by devouring his fellow prisoners.  So rather than enter the kitchen through the rat filled tunnels.  To the north are some irregular caverns, the usual spiders and ants.  Water filled passages might be half-filled, as good as a dead end to the Smith.  Beyond that was the front door to the Mushroom men section, a campaign specific race of myconids.  Their chief skill being they can grow new crops of troops in six weeks, modified to fit the party's last attack.  So the original sluggers eventually became black mushrooms who's spores neutralized magic, but that was for later.  Meanwhile what I thought would be the focus, a series of puzzles instead was a deadend.  The yellow star room for instance was never used and nobody ever entered the flooded room till they cracked it open by accident.   So in the mean time they set off to the south to explore the old servant's quarters.

Shameless Plug for NPR & How I Named my Blog.

A late night drive at the end of the weekend found myself listening to the Ted Radio Hour, Why We Collaborate.  I was in the dead zone for my ipod, who's little gadget gets overwhelmed by too many signals for a couple of hours, when the metro area is dense.  They often explore various "futurist" ideas and technology, a much better alternative to angry shouting in talk radio. It involved some interesting stuff and beat out listening to the same five hundred classic rock songs or the pair of girls who incessantly talk about their vaginas and kale on college radio.   Which is shockingly the most boring radio show ever heard, this show is the equivalent of a doctoral thesis on why everyone shouldn't be a radio show host.

Well I named this blog because for whatever reason, I have a difficult time convincing Google I'm a not a Robot.  The rest just combines my conceit that Gort is the coolest robot of all time and a joke borrowed from the old Rogues Gallery.

One of the segments of the Why We Collaborate episode involved Luis Von Ahn, who invented CAPTCHAs, those particular little tests which demand you prove you aren't a robot.   Yet they aren't just a way to jerk you around and cut down on the spam.  They're actually crowd sourcing.   It's one of the few things that humans still do better than computers, pulling the patterns out of distorted or broken text.  Tasks like discerning the text distorted in a scanned book.  Those blurry google street level signs in current use as a Captcha?  That is google using you to improve google street view, five seconds at a time, every time you feel the need to comment about someone's blog.    I think arguing over the Big Ten expansion has likely clarified the addresses of six states by now.

So next time you find yourself frustrated as you try and order tickets or are commenting on someone's fine-ass map, keep in mind you've just made the world a slightly better place.

There you are.  It's Monday, everyone needs a bit of optimism on Monday.

Noism and his damn interesting thoughts on cyberpunk, a more than 4096 reply

Noisms'speaking of cyberpunk brought this particular raving

It's not the punk that went missing, it's the cyber.   Much of the vision found in Gibson is still valid.  Finding myself with a shut down government in the middle of what he always called the Sprawl, the 70s vision of a future of a balkanized America seems as threatening as ever.  Then again, this half of cyberpunk existed before Gibson and existed after Gibson.  All that is really missing is the menacing world brought on by the baby boom's glut of young men.  The inner city that Burgess wrote of in Clockwork Orange or Norman Spinrad wrote of in Little Heroes has largely been Disneyfied.  There simply aren't as many angry young men about anymore in the developed world.  Most of America's would-be revolutionaries seem to be FYAM, formerly young angry men, than the AYMs of yesterday.

The vision of a chaotic future of change, a world where half the population is discarded as victims of future shock is still a valid one.  As valid as it was when science fiction was founded in the 19th century, when Wells wrote of Morlocks and Verne wrote of technological doomsday devices. Automation or modern times, the inequalities brought on by change,  and the attempts to stave it off by the followers of King Ludd are just as valid as they were when Kurt Vonnegut wrote Player Piano.  For that matter, it's just as valid as when Dickens used it as a setting in his works.  ( Before  you say  luddite?)

All that has really changed is the industry which is undergoing change.  The Information Revolution has put as many people on the road as the Industrial or the Agricultural.  It's made as many robber barons and the edge is always just as near.  The last time this happened it was the shift to modern agriculture, the tractor which displaced the Joad's mule, a shift which is still going on in the undeveloped parts of the world. (There have been a number of pundits drawing parallels to the Gilded Age lately, either in horror or to point out America's New Deal came out of these inequalities.)

 Much of their technological vision hasn't paid off yet.  Which doesn't make it anymore invalid than say the O'Neil habitats were invalid in the 1980s.  In fact, Gibson reused many tropes of 50s science fiction.  We've yet to perfect virtual reality.  We've yet to invent an interface between your brain and a computer.   We've yet to invent a real artificial intelligence. We have no real nanobots.  Our Feed is the rather sad "3d printer" which turns out plastic crap on demand.  The hopes and fears of this tech are still there, waiting for us in the near future.  They can be used today, just as easily as two decades ago.

Recently I've reread what I consider to be the cream of cyberpunk, of course they missed any number of things.  Of course it didn't all come true.  As I read Gibson's Sprawl and Bridge trilogies, Spinrad's Little Heroes, and Stephenson's Snow Crash and Diamond Age, I was struck by the fact that much of the science is still valid in theory.  All that has really changed is the idea of cyberspace, which has panned out more into a digital library and the prevalence of cellular communications.

What is needed in a reboot isn't a radical change, but an update to the technology. To stop relying on the rather narrow number of inventions.  The general shell of a chaotic near future is still a good adventuring environment.  Just as the tentacled mutant post apocalypse future of Gamma World or the Morrow Project  is still valid every time someone makes a zombie movie or whatever that cheesy "no electricity" show is on NBC.

I'd envision such a reboot as simply being a near future scifi game, rather than one true to just cyberpunk. One which would refurnish that same noir/punk future with new scif ideas.  That would borrow the biopunk of Paolo Bacigalupi .  That would acknowledge the last thirty years of changes and ideas.

The biggest problem is that such near future scifi hasn't been in vogue lately.  Most of the big name authors of cyberpunk no longer write as much scifi.   Most of the current Hugo awards seem to go for fantasy, steampunk, or slipstream. The ones which are scifi seem to be distant futures, alternate realities, or space opera.  I tried to come up with something newer than windup girl and failed.

For near future scifi RPGs to become re-energized we need a rebirth in scifi, to something which isn't just a super hero comic book, start trek utopia, or space opera. Something which isn't just third string authors borrowing a first rate author's visions.

Working on a new campaign

So, I'm planning for a new a campaign,  trying to rustle up the people who will commit to a weekly game.  Even a weekly game during football season.  May happen may not, but a DM can dream can't he?    Part of this is trying to talk people into playing who haven't played in awhile or don't get out, or won't be in a  room with someone else.   That is the slow part.

I'm committed to the world.  One I've used before. It's high medieval, verging on the renaissance, lacking only gunpowder.  Norse based invaders over-running a rain forest covered island and conquering the bronze-wielding, pseudo-Celtic people to establish a number of kingdoms in the highlands of the island.  A period of eight hundred years or so passes and it's a much more modern time then it was when the Redhand waded ashore and founded his city dedicated to the War God Tyr.  A second wave of invaders has arrived enslaving the northern tribes, loosely based on the Babylonian mythos, inhabiting a as yet unfinished city in the classic autocratic eastern model, filled with slaves which have a religious hatred of Dwarves and Gnomes. 

(Yes it's the idly sketched map you go just go with)

Yes that Dark Elf Empire up there is roughly sketched in as corrupted by Demons.  The elves on the main island would be either high elves or wood elves, with varying magic.    The races tend to keep to themselves, the halflings are unknown in the human lands, as of yet.  A very Tolkien vibe.

 Those population notes are one of the things that need to be changed.  I'm still trying to get an estimate on the number of people in the city proper, but it's much higher than the original projections.     The god Tyr is the patron deity, as the king cares not if you're good or evil, just that you swear him and his house allegiance.   Other Gods have since surpassed him, the common man's Thor and the nobility's Odin are richer.  The mystery cult of Balder is popular, as are dozens of other lesser Norse Gods and Goddesses.  I'm going a bit old school with them and pulling things from a translation of the eddas I own, rather than settling for the homogenized versions of Bullfinch's. The Celts' Lake Goddess is not ignored in the city, nor is her lover the green man, as he has a lot of pull in the climax rain forest.  That religion is a bit less organized, much more Joseph Campbell influenced, where the religions tend to flow into each other by location. The Norse worship the pair as Frey and Freyja and the elves in their own way. Then mix in a smattering of Sumerian and Babylonians cults, as hidden temples.  Think of the climate as somewhat like Seattle in the high lands and the Amazon in the low lands.

The city is pretty sweet if I say so myself.   It's  about three miles in diameter and is mapped on street level down to 2.5' equals a pixel.  In part this is a result of the constraints of the computer I started it on.  The under earth part is still loose, as I've been using it for as dungeon for different campaigns. So some parts are sketched in, others are detailed.  The text varies as well.  If I need something I spend time on it.  I have no desire to make the six figures of NPCs that current estimates would require.    That is just time wasting, better to make six hookers and use them, then worry about making five hundred.

The sandbox is about recognizing what can be faked and what needs to be theorized ahead of time, so you can do things on the fly.  So I've bothered to sketch out the general powers of various religions, the priests are somewhat specialized by religion. 

Autopsy of a recent campaign

My last campaign turned into a megadungeon.
This autopsy is inspired by a recent discovery of a memory stick under the couch, filled with various versions, which I used to use for display purposes.

The map is a bit of a compromise, as it shows many levels and a number of 

alterations, a product of spellcraft.  The odd green marks the unexplored.

It wasn't really meant to be a megadungeon, but just kind of drifted that way.  What was meant as a weak starter dungeon turned into a much longer adventure.  The party seemed less interested in various story stubs and quests offered to them, then "finishing" what they'd started.  Most likely in part a result of not needing to go looking for new adventures, my fault, and part a result of the limitations of an after work game, where everyone wanted as much action as possible.

The original scenario had them coming together has treasure hunters, a party of the moment put together in order to plunder an ancient treasury.  I was currently experimenting with a magic system which required wizards to kill other wizards to advance levels, compensating them with a bit more power at low levels.  The idea was to change the normal power arc which wizards enjoy in most campaigns,. where they're often close to worthless at low levels and then come to dominate combats.   Yeah, everyone who I explain this to goes "uh oh like Highlander then?"  which is a close enough explanation to go with.

Purple denotes underearth entrances and arch ways.  So that

set of purple dots is the jakes, but the lines on the bridge 

are arches. Green crosses are tree trunks. A black pixel is

usually a pillar, heavy rains make stoa popular.  

First was a half-elven mage, Nadia, her mixed blood a product of the revels at the local Lake Goddess temple.   A witch of the Norse path who required blood for her spells and could eat only raw flesh. She was currently apprenticed to an elderly wizard at court and feared that his death would be quickly followed her own as without his protection someone would be sure to challenge her to improve their own power. The royal court is a bloody place, filled with temperamental nobles and hotblooded fighters.   Now just off her wizard's tower, a decaying half ruined structure of great age at the center of the palace, was the old abandoned hall of the Mad King.   The Mad King being the centerpiece of an ancient legend of kin slaying and betrayal, which nearly exterminated the dynasty. The old hall was filled with enough ghosts that even the the holiest of clerics had given up trying to cleanse it and had long been replaced by a hall which was much more resplendent.   It was rumored that the king's treasury lay somewhere beneath it, if only one could find a way beyond the ghosts.

 Her friend and protector was a journeyman Smith, Tercius, who in this world is a wizard in his own right.  A class which has no need of mage blood to increase in power, but who had as a goal enough money to make his own way in the world.  His power was centered around fire, iron, and making.   His limitations were a pathological fear of water and the need for his hammer to spell cast.   His help in the plot would be needed to smuggle the other adventurers into the palace, despite his lawful good nature.


The ghosts of the Mad King's Court made the third member of the group a necessity.  Durzan, a young Celtic warrior, recently in from the Big Green.  His barbaric tattoos and ill manners won him few to no friends in the great city of the iron men. The Big Smoke is not always a friendly place to the wild men of the forest, who remind the lords that their peasants and servants were once free men. His value is priceless, as this swordsman has a charm which wards off ghosts, the shrunken head of his gr'gr'gr' grandfather, which he wears on a thing about his neck.   He claims the head speaks to him, telling him stories of the distant past, when the bronze-wielding Celts ruled the land and the Lady of the Lake was unfettered.

The fourth member of the party was an oft-drunken dwarven heretic, who has fled the Mountain Kingdom one step ahead of the Order, the religious police who enforce the orthodoxy. He lived a squalid, chaotic life in the slum known as Dwarftown, fearing to leave the sanctuary provided by the Red-Fisted Earl.  Handbills promising a reward for his arrest hung in the Dwarf Embassy and he did not have the money to bribe the king's emissaries.  His healing powers and knowledge of the underground will prove of value in the cellars of the old palace.

The last member was the fixer, the schemer who put together party.  An acid-footed mage of the Saahtakan or Babylonian path, he sought naked power to protect himself from his own master, an ill-tempered magician who refuses to explain just what happened to the last half dozen boys who were his apprentices.

Greed united them all.

Everybody got a page of back ground &
 some  little maps of their neighborhood.

This looks like a lot of work, but I have the city mapped already, so it  is just a matter of getting back stories down on paper. A fair amount of the NPCs & rumors are cut and paste.  As I've mentioned before, this city is something I did over a long period of time in small bits.  I know some people store up adventure modules, but I have a file cabinet full of those sorts of notes, and didn't use many of them.  Too much last minute tinkering is always required for such things. You know how it is, you do most of the plotting for an adventure while drawing the map. "Oh this is where the troll goes."  "Here is where a gnome sell potions."

Assorted Playing Aids

  I've been looking about quite bit on other blogs and throwing away ideas I was working on.  I just finished reading Bat In the Attic's outline for making a fantasy sandbox as well as Playing D&D w/ Porn Stars' version and realized while I really don't agree with either's methods, my particular method  of building a fantasy sandbox would really not be on any more or less help.  I've come to think that much of such writing is "here what works for myself," rather than actual, usable tips.   Personally I use a mix of the two methods and toss in dice rolls with an occasional creative enhancement aid (Bukowski's pal) for inspiration.   It's all just an attempt to pile up creativity ahead of time, against the approaching needs of a sandbox campaign.  That late night hour when they've roamed outside of bounds in an unexpected move.  I tend to fly by the seat of my pants sometimes.

So rather than bother to lay out my particular mix of randomness and system, I'm going to discuss  a few helpful techniques for playing in a sandbox.

Erasable cards.   I have a stack of plasticized cards I use to have private discussions with players.  I also use these cards to sketch floor plans, what someone can see while flying, what the outside of the castle looks like, the village layout, etc...   All those last minute floor plans that a sandbox endlessly demands.  Maybe they just took an odd turn.  Maybe they jumped down the garbage chute.  Maybe they decided to swim down the exit passage of the pool. (How many times can you pull the "the passage is too small" bit before some smart ass says "well I have a potion of water breathing and a dimunition spell.")  Maybe they just went invisible and eluded what you thought would be two days play of monsters and hit the edge of the mapped parts of your mega-dungeon.     Unless it's a fight, you might not bother to draw it out on the glass.  Then I take this stack of cards and use it to expand on my written materials, converting it into notes.  In the past, I used a notebook or even cheap newsprint, but the plastic cards were scavenged for free and use the same markers.

Erasable board or glass, ruled in one inch squares.   I know some people prefer to use die-cast walls and such props, but it takes less time to draw a line then it does to get out a set of walls.   Other people dispense with the grid entirely, but it's easier than measuring everything.   I used to game with a guy who had a truly large piece of tempered glass, which was often large enough for an evening of maps.  I even used to make dungeons which I knew would fit on it.  I'll openly admit this colors my map making. I long ago gave up orientating buildings anyway but neatly north and south. My dungeon passages connect neatly to an axis. Why?  I'm willing to sacrifice a minor aesthetic in order to be able to sketch it out fast.   As for people who say the figures and the map is a crutch, I say screw them, most people need a chess board to engage their minds.   Until I come into a cheap or free flat screen to mount beneath a glass coffee table, I'll keep using my grid.

Camera  One of those things I only started doing fairly recently, after I got a nice camera as a gift.   I don't print a lot of photos.  I don't obsessively photograph friends.  I do like to take my camera hiking, which originally was to take landscapes and such. We've all done it, most of our product is second rate and of no real worth, compared to ten minutes of google imaging.  Other than some experiments in sight lines, I didn't use these pictures at all as planned. What I did discover was completely different uses for my camera.  I found myself using it to take advantage of trail maps. Snap a picture, no need to have a map or a good memory.  I also found myself using it for birds, flowers, and trees. Not to keep pictures, as much as to try and expand my knowledge of what I'd seen.  So I could name the birds I'd seen, even when they're not color coded, i.e. red-winged, black birds; a blue heron; or a gold finch.  One of those skills you father or grandfather always just seemed to have, but which you don't unless you're an eagle scout.  Back to business though.  I've found a camera is also a good game aid.  It makes for that quick snap at the end of an evening, so you know where everyone was positioned.  It also works for those free form caverns you drew  or that orc lair in the ruined tower, because who knows when the party might decide to come back or hole up there again. They might very well decide that it's perfect place to take on their pursuers some time.  So a camera and a few well placed shots comes in handy.

The Big Screen  or at least a monitor.   I like throwing a map up on a screen to remind people where they are in a big dungeon.  I think this is valuable, especially when your'e playing with the inebriated, children, or with big breaks between sessions. I've even been known to rev up power point and some pirated fantasy art to set the mood, which turned out much better and a lot less intrusive than similar attempts to set the mood with music (we're old, half of us have hearing damage.)

Computer   Now I realize you all know the computer can be your friend or you wouldn't be reading this, but I've also noticed that a lot of people don't really work on the computer for producing materials.   Maybe it's the old school thing, maybe it's just I haven't come across the right blog yet.   Now I understand the pleasure that comes from creating by hand, just as you did thirty years ago.   That there is a certain pleasure to be derived from sitting with a sheet of graph or hex paper and your favorite pen, pens, or pencils.  That there is a joy in taking a break from technology and just jotting notes and sketches on a piece of paper.   That unless you're under the age of thirty or so, you're never going to quite feel the same tactile connection to sketching on a screen as you do on paper.  OK maybe it's not thirty, but I've never met an artist who was completely comfortable with electronic sketch pads over thirty.  Yet scanning your work in afterwards simply isn't going to cut it. You're missing a lot of really sweet tricks by not using your computer in a better way.

Which is basically a long way around to laying out the next few articles i intend to write here, call it a bit of a computer tutorial for sandboxing.