Burnout.

After running D&D nearly every sunday for almost four years, I will go on record and admit that I have officially begun to hate D&D.

Meet Mr. Hong

Mr. Hong is the proprietor of Hong's Lucky Leviathan Tea House in Feng Du province. He was a decorated officer in the Imperial Navy, a submarine captain who served with distinction in the campaign against the Daikaiju of Dokuro Island. Hong is a salty old man, as handy with a proverb as he is with a dirty joke. He is a good singer, especially fond of battle hymns. His Fish Head soup is legendary throughout the province.

The Lucky Leviathan Tea House holds many relics from Hong's naval career. Medals, ribbons, and commendations are draped over the shrine to Hotei (the largest in the province), and an enormous Steam Harpoon hangs above the bar. This makes the tea house a popular hangout for sailors and veterans, who love to hear Hong tell whoppers about his days at sea. Sometimes his tales turn melancholy and on these nights Hong closes early but his sad, drunken singing can be heard late into the night.

It is public knowledge that Hong's great grandfather was a Kappa, but breaching the subject is considered impolite and anyone who teases him on his heritage is likely to find themselves staring down the barrel of a Steam Harpoon.

"Illustration" by Booberry for American Barbarica

Duel of the Ultimate Weapons

Today I paid a visit to Guardian Games to score a copy of OA1 Swords of the Daimyo. The dude behind the counter asked if I was interested in the Legend of Five Rings CCG, because they're sponsoring a tournament tonight and the top prize is a samurai sword. The sword was on display and was suitably impressive looking for something that was obviously designed as a promotional item.

While chatting, I mentioned that giving away weapons as contest booty is always a crapshoot because you never know who the winner is going to be. I mean, for all you know it could be some guy who's trained all his life just to win that sword and take it on a killing spree. This was just an offhanded comment not really meant to be taken seriously. However, it would soon be made clear to me that the notion was not unique to myself because the dude began to articulate his contingency plan for exactly such a disastrous turn of events.

What followed was a slightly psychotic discussion about how one would best defend oneself against a lone swordsman in a retail environment. Other medieval weapons, apparently also kept on the premises, were integral to the plan. Disposal of corpses had also been objectively thought out. It seemed, to my ears at least, a workable defense plan.

Game stores and comic shops are the only real public forum for these kinds of discussions.

After leaving the store, I made a mental note never to start shit or try and go on a killing spree in Guardian Games. They are ready.

Two Men Enter, One Samurai Leaves

After a day of brainstorming and a flood of ideas, Sword Opera has emerged in my mind as a clear winner for my Dungeon Alchemy project. Pete Mullen’s amazing cover to Ruins & Ronin cleared up any remaining doubts. I adore Pete’s stuff and this new piece is positively spellbinding:



It's perfect. I generally find Pete's work mindblowing, but this one kicked my brain a few feet further from my head than I could have expected.

I’m still vaguely amused by the concept of The Children’s Crusade, but it’s a one trick pony and would almost certainly fail under long term play. Also, since I started trying to organize my thoughts on the two settings, the word count on Sword Opera (consisting mainly of a lot of free writing and half sentences) is nearly eight times that of the Children’s Crusade. Last, The Children’s Crusade would definitely be a game about something (regardless of how dumb that thing is), whereas Sword Opera isn’t about anything. And that’s the way I want my games to be. Games About Things expect you to engage them in a specific way, whereas Games That Are Not only require that you let your hair down and have a good time. The latter seems a lot more attractive to this 34 year old DM.

It is my promise that Sword Opera will never be about anything.

Here are a couple of the ideas/goals I have for this project:
- a medium size sandbox to explore
- lots of NPCs
- expanded rules for Intelligent Swords, because all magical swords will be intelligent
- a fairly brutal set of Critical Hit charts including plenty of dismemberment
(which brings us to)
- ways to replace lost limbs with cyborg bits. When I say cyborg bits, I’m talking Shogun Warrior style: big ass, failure prone robot arms that can shoot off their fists as missile weapons.



I had been thinking of doing this thing as a kitchen sink kinda deal, but I think it would be better to provide some limits on the setting. It’s generally more rewarding for me to pick a handful of elements and find ways to make them fit together. I think it also makes for a better result. Then I try and envision it as a lost pilot for an 80's cartoon series. If I can see it clearly I know I'm on the right track. I’m still choosing exactly which elements I want to work with, but my current 10 word pitch is “Mythical Samurai Western with Hella Weird Monsters and Robot Fists”.

For the purposes of this blog, any rule info I post will be in Retro Clone terms to make it more generally useful to anyone likely to use it in the first place.

Sword Opera

Option #2 is a sandbox setting inspired by Wuxia/ Kung Fu movies. It's a bit of a kitchen sink, drawing additional elements from Gamma World and Spaghetti westerns. It pretty much sprang from my love of the visual aesthetic of Afro Samurai (even though I can never make out exactly what the hell is going on in that show). In most episodes I've seen, the protagonist (I think) is usually walking around villages that look like they could somehow be found in both ancient Japan and the Wild West. Samurai Jack also trod similar visual territory. Frequently these towns are also lit by old neon signs, further blurring the lines of time and place. It's kinda like someone had the idea to set Blade Runner in Deadwood. The effect, to me at least, is an arresting, dreamlike atmosphere that I'd love to experience first hand, at least if I was a badass who could wield a katana without accidently cutting off my own dick.

As kids, we loved Oriental Adventures. It's only drawback was a criminal lack of illustrations. Asian history and mythology are an easy sell for D&D. It has the fantasy tri-force of Sword, Knight, and Dragon, as well as tons of the weirdest monsters ever dreamed up. It's very rich stuff, still provoking a reaction in me 20 + years later. I mean, if you were a kid growing up in the midwest in the 80's, chances were pretty good that you had a pair of nunchaku purchased from a flea market, or at least some throwing stars got from the county fair. Extra points if you spent hours trying to recreate the training sequence from A Nightmare on Elm Street pt 4. We were all pajama ninjas, and those aren't the kind of memories that ever leave a man.

In creating a kitchen sink-style sandbox, my aim would be to provide a handful of dials that I can adjust as needed. There'd be parts of the setting where the "Heartbreakingly Beautiful Traditional Mythology" dial is turned way up, and others where the "Grindhouse Kung Fu movie", "Steampunk Western" and "Crazy Anime Weirdness" dials get involved. There's something really compelling to me about the idea of a wandering Ronin cutting down a mountain village full of Hungry Dead on his way to battle the Evil Cyborg Ninja that killed his Sensei, only to learn that said Ninja was merely one of five highly specialized assassins employed by a criminal clan of shapeshifting dragons to make the aforementioned Ronin's life hell.

If I'm being honest with myself, this campaign probably has a much higher chance of sustaining my interest over a longer period of time.

Rules I'd be looking at:
-Again, BECMI/Cyclopedia D&D with Oriental Adventures and Ruins & Ronin
-Gamma World/Mutant Future for weird monsters that fit further up the anime dial. Rather than being radiation-derived, I'd probably describe these creatures as the offspring of devils or products of Alchemy.
-Also, this setting would probably work really well with 4e, whose totally over-the-top character abilities are practically specific to this type of game. Had 4e been released as "Oriental Adventures 4e" rather than D&D 4e, nobody would be bitching. The 4e game I was running before we abandoned it to return to old schoole play was heavily influenced by asian mythology and it fit like a glove.

Fluff:
As I said, the visuals of Afro Samurai & Samurai Jack would be an influence, but the content much less so. Using one kitchen sink to inspire another is usually a bad idea. Therefore I'm looking at:
- The Bridge of Birds by Gary Hughart
- Jade Empire (video game)
- Across the Nightingale Floor by Lian Hearn

If I wanted to further blur the lines and go more "Journey to the West" I might replace one of the above with Ramesh Menon's beautiful novelization of the Ramayana. Rakshasa and Oni seem like they'd play well together.

Dark Horses Running

I had one other idea for a campaign building exercise. I thought I was totally settled on the Arthurian one, but Runner Up won't leave my head and now seems to be shouting at me, so I'll present it here as well. I had originally wanted to get back to a more traditional vanilla High Fantasy setting, but I think I need to give the other one a chance to be heard before locking myself into the extended work of developing one or the other.

I'm going try and nail the two of them down into elevator pitches and see how my players react. One or the other will probably be the next campaign once Gammafrost winds down (which admittedly may be a while). Anyone who reads this and wants to throw their 2 cents in is also welcome to join the conversation.

In an Age of *ahem* Chivalry

“In Camelot, the war isn’t going well. Villages are burning, more and more children are being kidnapped by the Fey, and Merlin fears that even the royal court has been compromised by changeling spies. The Knights are few and stretched thin, and the light of Excalibur has not been seen for years. But Merlin has a plan to turn back the forces of Chaos.

The Children’s Crusade is that plan. All over the realm, young boys and girls are being trained in the arts of espionage, insurgency, and guerilla warfare. These are their orders: “Play near the forest, get captured, escape and report. If you cannot escape, create as much havok as your little hands can manage and take a dozen of those Seelie bastards with you when you die”. Then they are hastily knighted and sent off to their doom.

These soldiers are poorly trained and almost certainly doomed to die in the forest. But war is hell, kids are lucky, and the Children’s Crusade may be our only hope.”

That’s the overall gist of American Barbarica’s new campaign. It’s silly, obviously, but that’s part of what attracts me to it. The idea of playing l’il knights trapped behind enemy lines started to crystallize after seeing this Penny Arcade strip proposal. Also, I’ve had the idea for a while that Harry Potter would be a lot cooler if more students had died like The Gashlycrumb Tinies. These, combined with the fact that I love Arthurian mythology and have always wanted to do something D&D with it, started to congeal in my head over the weekend.

I’m already probably circumventing Jeff’s Alchemical Recipe, but I don’t think the campaign police are going to kick down my door anytime soon. I’m not committed to a ruleset just yet. I think I want to let the themes cook a little longer and then look for the best fit.

I’m probably cheating by using mythology as a source of campaign fluff, but the fun thing about using myth for a role playing game is that you can bend it to your will and make it do whatever you want without simultaneously taking a dump on human culture (that’s what social networking sites are for). Arthuriana is a self-contradictory mess already anyway. If I want to combine Morgana and Nimueh into the same person, or model Merlin after Dick Cheney (they both have the Devil as a father, after all), or make Launcelot a robot or a dashing french Gnome, there’s no reason to feel guilty about it. The audience who shames me is sure to be small.

*Note: For the context of the setting, the terms "Knight" and "Adventurer" are pretty much interchangeable. It's a catchall name for all officially sanctions Agents of the Crown, including Fighters, Wizards, Clerics, and Thieves

Current list of inpirational books:
-Mallory’s Le Mort De Arthur OR T.H. White’s The Once and Future King - for the Arthur’n, though my recent purchase of Garry Gianni's and Marc Shultz's new Prince Valiant collection Far From Camelot may well unseat either of these.

-Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions - for the descriptions of Fairie

-Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 - For the ridiculous military satire.

Possible list of Rule bits:

BECMI/ Rules Cyclopedia D&D (my go to game)
Dark Ages Bestiary (from Whit Wolf's Dark Ages line)
Pendragon
Grimm"
and due to recent talk in my game group, I may even look at such heretical texts as the most recent edition of "The World's Most Popular Role Playing Game". Don't shoot me for mentioning it.


This week: More crap like this, an essay on the concept of Chivalry According to Mallory, some commentary on that Merlin show I hate to admit to liking, and ...The Questing Beast!
EDIT: If the Runner Up ends up capturing my heart, these posts may not all see the light of day.