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Post by capvideo on May 22, 2015 11:25:39 GMT -6
Caspar David Friedrich has some amazingly evocative paintings. I’ve used several of them. And one of my absolute favorites, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog:
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Post by capvideo on Mar 2, 2015 11:19:18 GMT -6
I go with alphabetized together, but I also think that D&D-style spells are extremely well-suited to being put in a searchable database. Without that, I’d go with alphabetized by level.
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Post by capvideo on Mar 1, 2015 10:39:28 GMT -6
That would be Awesome, Scott. It’s like those little texts on the bottom of neighborhood/church group cookbook pages. “For true love, add 1 tsp cyanide, 1 tsp hemlock, mix with three parts hate. For fireball mix (see next page)”.
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Post by capvideo on Feb 26, 2015 12:18:15 GMT -6
I literally just this weekend changed the organization of my spells from “by level” to alphabetically. But I did this only after putting all spells online in a searchable database, which includes being searchable by level. The book contains a list of of names by level and by school, but the descriptions are by level; the sorceror in our game had been after me to do this for years, because it makes it easier to look up spells during the game. Names are almost always easier to remember than level, and he hated having to scan through for the name and then find the correct level and then the spell.
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Post by capvideo on Feb 12, 2015 11:23:58 GMT -6
You probably want a proportional serif font of some kind. I like Adobe Garamond, but Baskervilles, Palatinos, and such are also good choices. And if you want to buy fonts, try searching on “good fonts for books” for advice.
Two books I found to be good references many years ago are Looking Good in Print and, especially, The Non-Designers Design Book. The latter is a very easy and informative read.
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Post by capvideo on Nov 5, 2014 14:05:03 GMT -6
I certainly buy more than I use--some are enjoyable enough just as reading material. But I keep the best in a separate pile for use between my own custom adventures or for when the players go off course. In our last campaign I can remember using The Mad Demigod’s Castle (to introduce a new player), The Caverns of Thracia, The Fell Pass, and Chagmat. Almost ended up using The Hammers of the God, The Wandering Trees, and The Fabled Garden of Merlin.
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Post by capvideo on Jul 10, 2014 11:58:01 GMT -6
If overwhelmingness is an issue, what about a “Best of Fight On!” smaller issue with a collection of representative articles from across the current run?
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Post by capvideo on Jul 9, 2014 15:19:34 GMT -6
I actually come back to 4 a lot, with The Tower of Duvan Ku, Fungoid Gardens of the Bone Sorceror, The House of the Ax and The Mysterious Crystal Hemisphere.
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Post by capvideo on May 4, 2014 15:12:43 GMT -6
I seem to remember Different Worlds having some good stuff. I have a couple of issues lying around (33, 35-36, 44, according to my list), but I was never able to consistently find it at gaming stores.
I’m looking through the index right now (my books are still packed in the garage from a recent move) and I remember The Star-Devourer, by Steve Perrin, as a decent short superhero/horror adventure, in #35, and Kabbalistic Magic, by Simcha Kurizky, in #36. And, I think, Contemporary Ideas about the Necronomicon, by Richard Kaczynski in #44.
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Post by capvideo on Mar 28, 2014 20:48:13 GMT -6
Saw this on Carjacked Seraphim, thought it appropriate: After seeing the cab driver photo, I do wonder if he used himself as a reference often.
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Post by capvideo on Mar 28, 2014 13:26:23 GMT -6
Man, his Pseudo-Dragon and Wyvern pretty much influenced every fantasy adventure I’ve run.
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Post by capvideo on Mar 28, 2014 1:04:04 GMT -6
Argh. Could be him. It’s probably the cab driver from Carbondale mentioned in Dave’s Wikipedia entry (there’s a photo at boardgamegeek). Has it ever been confirmed that the cab driver was DAT? I can believe it easily enough, he looks like someone from a DAT drawing.
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Post by capvideo on Nov 1, 2013 22:11:17 GMT -6
Whilst being somewhat of a OD&D purist I have become enamoured of the D&D-alikes that stray from being slavish clones but do not do all the imagining for me. Especially those that deliver that 'old school experience' despite taking a different path to the cut-n-paste crowd. If you have played any (and not just read-thru them) I'd be interested in your recommendations. Well, I like Gods & Monsters. It’s our home game, so to speak, so we better like it! Among the ideas was to go back to the basics of archetypes (classes) and then build the more complex classes out of specialties every odd level. So it doesn’t have the proliferation of feats that D&D 3x had, keeping the “classes” relatively simple. We’ve been playing it for several years now. The rulebook is pretty well frozen now.
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Post by capvideo on Sept 29, 2013 14:33:25 GMT -6
Now, the problem is this: Some of the characters are pretty complex, compared to the rather simple ruleset. How can one express, say, a psion, a shapechanger, or similar over-the-top in OD&D and the simulacra? The way we did this in Gods & Monsters was to pare down the classes to the basics, and then provide specialties at each odd level (including first level) to customize the classes. A psion would most likely be a Monk (Monk in G&M being psychics, not martial artists--unless, of course, they have the martial arts specialty); for a shapechanger, we’d have to look at what role they play in the group. Do they fulfill the role of a thief, a warrior, or a monk? Then add the shapechanging ability as a specialty at first level. Probably shapechanging would be broken into multiple specialties where each subsequent specialty would have, as its prerequisite, the previous one. The same concept could easily be used in OD&D.
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Post by capvideo on Jul 19, 2013 21:10:18 GMT -6
Good luck! It's a wee bit of drive from San Diego, but I hope you get a good turn out. -Mike Where are you in San Diego? I'm in Hillcrest/Mission Hills.
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Post by capvideo on Aug 21, 2012 22:58:25 GMT -6
There are a whole bunch of really cool old-school adventures on Dragonsfoot. I keep a bunch of my favorites listed on my Old School Cool web page: 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 And then there’s Castle of the Mad Archmage which stands alone! Second the recommendation of Death Frost Doom and Hammers of the God.
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Post by capvideo on Aug 14, 2012 20:47:59 GMT -6
Stonehell and Anomalous Subsurface Environment are both OGL. Well worth checking out. I have a bunch of FDL ones at www.godsmonsters.com/Guide/ that I had a blast with.
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Post by capvideo on Apr 20, 2012 15:16:23 GMT -6
Lots of these pleasures that were fine (because necessarily occasional) in resource-poor societies get more problematic in resource-rich ones. I guess that's a slim silver lining if civilization collapses. What will you do if the post-economic collapse world I keep getting spam for ends up using tobacco and cigarettes as currency? Good luck, my dad went through the same thing, although he went from smoking, to chewing, to abstinence. I still remember him opening the car door at stop lights to spit out chewing tobacco when he was done with it! I think my mom hated that more than smoking.
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Post by capvideo on Mar 9, 2012 19:04:27 GMT -6
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Post by capvideo on Mar 7, 2012 11:08:40 GMT -6
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Post by capvideo on Jan 7, 2012 22:14:11 GMT -6
I'll second the ASE recommendation: it's very cool. Forgot all about it.
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Post by capvideo on Jan 5, 2012 21:23:36 GMT -6
I link to a bunch of my favorites at www.godsmonsters.com/Game/print/The Majestic Wilderlands, Stonehell, and Villains & Vigilantes would probably be my top three recommendations.
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Post by capvideo on Dec 27, 2011 14:35:35 GMT -6
I’m pretty sure it’s BLIZZARDS305 (more than one blizzard).
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Post by capvideo on Oct 7, 2011 8:06:30 GMT -6
Human Centipede
Range: self Level: 5 Formula: words, gestures, ingredients Ingredients: brass needle and spider-web thread Duration: level minutes Casting time: 1 minute Area of effect: Up to level creatures, touching Saving throw: Negates
This spell causes up to level creatures to merge into the caster's body. The caster will grow in size to accommodate the new creatures; one might become a leg, another an arm, another a tail, and so forth.
All creatures to be affected must be touched by the caster, or by someone who the caster is touching, or by someone who is touched by someone the caster is touching, etc. If someone in the chain makes their saving roll, they and anyone “behind” them will be unaffected.
The caster is in control of the human centipede and may command movement and other actions. However, the new body parts are free to do anything that does not contradict a command from the caster. The human centipede thus often moves in a jerky, stop-motion fashion.
Hit points for the human centipede are the sum of all hit points of constituent creatures; when the spell ends, hit point losses are divided evenly among all creatures (including the caster).
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Post by capvideo on Mar 14, 2011 8:21:09 GMT -6
tabula casual? (mixes latin with italian, plays off of tabula rasa)
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Post by capvideo on Jan 26, 2011 20:37:00 GMT -6
Level limits were meant to solve problems that the special abilities of demihumans introduced, which were usually explained “in the day” just as tom describes them. One of the biggest is that demihumans get to be multi-classed; in OE/BX some of them “just were”, that is, an Elf was automatically a fighter/magic-user. And in 1E a demihuman character can share their experience among two or more classes—but since experience costs double every succeeding level this meant that at worst a multi-classed demihuman would be one level lower than everyone else.
Of course, that rationale isn’t much consolation to the halfling who only has one class but is still stuck as a fourth level fighter when everyone else is sixth, seventh, or eighth level.
There have been lots of ideas for solving this. Off the top of my head:
1. Just raise them. 1E did this with Unearthed Arcana. It raised level limits generally as far as I can tell. It raised the level limit for those demihumans who only chose one class. It also provided higher level limits for characters with higher prime requisites, which carried over into 2E (1E sans UA sort of had this—it had level limit penalties for lower ability scores). And it provided higher level limits to demihumans of different racial stock, allowing the player who wanted to be an elven fighter to choose, say, Wild Elf as their Elf type and get a level or two extra.
2. Make levels cost more, either from the start or after the level limit is reached. 2E included this solution in its DMG as the “Slow Advancement” optional rule. “Require demihumans to earn two, three, or even four times as many experience points as a human in order to advance a level… the best compromise is to allow demihumans normal (or double-cost) advancement to their “maximum” levels. Then require them to earn triple or quadruple experience points to advance beyond that.”
3. Don’t worry about them. Like tom, this was rarely an issue for us—we considered ourselves pretty lucky to make it past 4th level. Having a level limit of 8 was simply not on our radar. It did mean we didn’t play halfling fighters, but that was probably part of the point of those rules.
4. Ignore them and give humans something else. Star Frontiers did this, for example. We do this in our current game; every character gets a specialty; being a Paladin is a specialty (for warriors), being a noble is a specialty (for anyone), being a druid is a specialty (for prophets), and being a demihuman is a specialty. So there’s no level limit on being an Elf, you’re just foregoing having some other specialty that you might have taken.
And, of course, there’s “just ignore them”, which I suspect a lot of players did.
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Post by capvideo on Dec 6, 2010 2:06:14 GMT -6
You've got me really looking forward to this issue...
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Post by capvideo on Nov 20, 2010 20:10:16 GMT -6
I was noticing something similar to what you suggest as I reread the old D&D rules for an article on GodsMonsterscom.. The Moldvay red book, for example, has two paragraphs on neutrality: Those two paragraphs describe two very different ethos. The first paragraph describes the traditional Druid-like outlook, which in practice ended up being very strict and lawful in nature. (I much prefer the idea of Chaotic, i.e., wild, Druids, as you describe.) The second paragraph is awfully close to evil. The Holmes blue book describes neutrality similarly to that second paragraph, but the differences make it clearly evil: It almost looks to me like some people played the original alignment system as Law, Chaos, and Evil.
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Post by capvideo on Sept 28, 2010 23:44:51 GMT -6
Gods & Monsters. Basically, it's a penalty of three to hit. It's for times when the attacker wants a specific result from an attack other than whittling hit points away. Such as "I want to knock the potion from his hands. I'm making a called shot." If the attack hits, the opponent needs to make a saving roll (assuming the called shot was a reasonable one) or they've been affected by it in ways other than losing hit points. They fumbled the potion when their hand got hit by the rock (or when they dodged the rock), or something like that. I also sometimes require called shots for attacks that have the potential of delivering some further effect, such as the hanging vine not just doing damage, but also grabbing their victim by the neck.
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Post by capvideo on Sept 26, 2010 11:51:44 GMT -6
Well, here’s a start, then. Adventure | Issue | Levels | The Ruined Monastery | 1 | 1 | The Tomb-Complex of Ymmu-M’Kursa | 1 | unknown | Nature’s Nasty Node | 1 | 4-7 | The Tower of Birds | 2 | 1-3 | The Upper Caves | 2 | 1-3 | The Red Gem of High Cartography | 2 | 3-5 | Khas Fara: Village of Fear | 3 | 1-? | Spawning Grounds of the Crab-Men | 3 | 1-4 | The Fifth Circle of Hell | 3 | special | House of the Ax | 4 | 4-10 | The Spring Temple of Ai | 4 | unknown | The Tower of Duvan’Ku | 4 | unknown | Arcane Vault of Isis | 4 | unknown | These Mean Streets | 4 | unknown | Mysterious Crystal Hemisphere | 4 | 2-4 | Fungoid Gardens of the Bone Sorceror | 4 | 1-3 | The Tomb of Ixtandraz | 5 | 4-6 | Black Blood | 5 | unknown | A Giant Dilemma | 5 | 2-4 | The Barrow of Therex | 5 | unknown | Warren of the Troglodytes | 5 | 2-5 | The Tribe of Rorvash | 6 | unknown | Blocks of Quox | 6 | 3-5 | Stone Gullet | 6 | 2-3 | The Lower Caves | 6 | 2-5 | Welcome to Slimy Lake | 6 | any levels | Hell-Grave of the Tveirbró∂ur | 6 | 1-3 | Legend of the Dullahan | 7 | unknown | The Temple of the Sea-Demon | 7 | 3 | Former Gnomish Caves | 7 | unknown | Song of Tranquility | 7 | 3-5 | Beware of the Lord of Eyes | 7 | unknown | The Search for Lord Churisa | 7 | unknown | Fane of Salicia | 7 | 5-7 | I Thirst | 8 | 3-5 | The Howling Emptiness | 8 | 6+ | Khosura | 9 | special | River Walk | 9 | 4-7 | Caverns of the Beast Mistress | 9 | 3-6 | The Hobgoblin God’s Crown | 9 | 3-5 | The Blasphemous Shrine of the Tentacled God | 9 | unknown |
Edited: updated with information from dungeonsndigressions.blogspot.com/2010/03/index-of-adventures-in-knockspell-fight_07.htmlEdited: added another couple from issue 9 from my own www.godsmonsters.com/News/fight-9-pdf-400/Edited: more updates from makofan and labsenpai on this thread.
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