Unfocused Thoughts on Uz

I've been trying to coalesce a few Uz related thoughts into a coherent post.  I've failed, so I'm going to do what I always do when I fail at that...

• What the Dark Country is to Doom Metal, Uz is to Space Rock.
• Uz takes place in Earth's very very very distant future.  Some of the humanoids (morlocks, deros, etc.) are degenerate humans.  Others (reptoids, greys, etc.) are the remnants of alien invasions that succeeded and failed at various points in the planets past.
• The biggest influences are: HPL, CAS (particularly the Zothique cycle, Atomic Horror movies, Coast to Coast AM, and the Old Testament. 
• I need to go back and remake the Priest class.  I still like the idea of them mutating hideously as they get higher in level, but I'm not sure how big to make there spell lists.  I'm also not sure if I should make different spell lists for each god or one big one they all draw from.
• If I can nail down Priests good enough, then I'll probably get rid of MUs.  That'd mean there would only be three character types: Fighter, Specialist, and Priest.
• No demi-human characters.  Well... maybe Reptoids.  That would be kinda cool.
• Psionics and tech stuff taken from Carcosa.  Also a bunch of monsters.
• No magic items, just ray guns.
• No alignment.  Hell, there won't really be any metaphysical forces at all.  "Gods" are killable (with probably only like 15 - 20 HD) super-aliens who have strong enough psionic powers to give mortal spells.  Theres probably really powerful ones like Azathoth, but most are what CoC would classify as Great Old Ones, and pretty weak ones too.
• Two types of ruins/dungeon: high tech and low tech.  Low tech ruins are structures that became ruined after the deluge.  High tech ruins usually became ruined before the deluge, but some priests/sorcerers/whatever that survived the flood remembered crazy super-magic-science long enough to pass it on to other enterprising young demons.
• Gods are Moloch (a sentient patch of radiation), Dagon (exactly what it sounds like), Mot (mass of swirling, decaying flesh with awful Ghoul Priests), Kothar (Yog-Sothoth in a disconcerting, humanoid form), and a few others.  I want to include Lilith, but I'm not sure how to treat her yet.
• The Sun has turned a deep shade of red.  Most of the world is desert with rain forests trapped in little valleys.

That's it for now.  I might post more later on this crap later.

Carcosa Review

Note: this is a review of the PDF version of this product.  My physical copy has yet to arrive, and I will update this review once it does.

I first became interested in the OSR about the time Carcosa was causing a big stir.  As such, I associate the two things very closely.  Despite the fact that I had never seen the product, Carcosa in its own way showed me that D&D didn’t have to be about blue nosed hobgoblins and color coded dragons.  Instead, a D&D setting should be an idiosyncratic amalgamation of the creator’s influences and preferences.  I’ve tried to do this with all of my projects since starting this blog, and its greatly affected the development of the Dark Country even if the two settings don’t look anything like each other.

As such, I was delighted to hear that James Raggi was going to be reprinting Carcosa.  I never got the chance to purchase it the first time around, and I knew from his Grindhouse boxset that Raggi was capable of extremely high production values.  This seemed like the most opportune time to see what Geoffrey McKinney’s world was all about.

I have neglected to explain what Carcosa is thus far in the review because I believe most of you reading this already have a pretty good idea.   Still, I suppose I should give some introduction to the product before I essay to review its contents further.  Carcosa is a controversial science fantasy setting that is heavily based on the works of H P Lovecraft with a dash of Jack Kirby.  The reason for its controversial nature is likely to be well known to all of you, but it will be discussed below.

The PDF itself is very attractive, though the choice to essentially put two pages on a single page can get a bit clumsy, and often causes the background image to look unsightly.  I imagine this isn’t a problem at all with the physical book.  The art is usually excellent, though a few pieces are too busy and are difficult for the view to correctly interpret.  On the whole though it is an attractive pdf, and it lacks the long loading time similarly attractive pdfs often suffer from.

The contents themselves are, for the most part, excellent.   The two most controversial parts of the book are actually presented fairly early on.  The sorcerer class and its associated rituals are what caused the largest part of the kerfuffle when I first heard about Carcosa.  On the one hand, the rituals appeal to my “crossroads and dead goats” aesthetic; however, I must admit that I was a bit more disturbed by the most infamous ones than I thought I would be.    In particular the Summon the Amphibious Ones ritual was especially disconcerting, and I think it’s rather illustrative of the tension I felt when reading the rituals.  On the one hand, I enjoy playing casters – even evil ones.  It would be hard to say that Philip the Bloody is a nice guy.  Also, in case my regular readers haven’t noticed, I love frog monsters.  So one would think that the two would mesh well and I’d have an evil sorcerer that could summon frog things, and that is what you get.  However, the human cost of the profane ritual required to get some frog minions is so disturbing that I could never play a character that would do such a thing.  This is the intention.  I don’t think McKinney is the depraved degenerate some accused him of being, but instead he’s trying to make the evil sorcerer truly evil.  Carcosa is ultimately a horror setting, and horrific it is.

The other controversial aspect, though it’s considerably tamer than the rituals, is the dice conventions.  While I haven’t tried them in play, they look as though they would be a bit too fiddly at the table.

However, even if one removes these controversial elements, there is still a lot of stuff left in this book.  There are alien technological artifacts, different kinds of lotuses and their uses, a whole plethora of monsters, tables for generating random ray guns and random robots, a simple psionics system, and of course the setting itself.  If one is interested in science fantasy gaming using an OSD&D-type rule set, I cannot recommend these sections of the book highly enough.  The monsters are a wonderful mix of Lovecraftian horrors and weird, lurching slimey things.  The psionics system seems easy to use, but might be a little too randomized for some tastes.  This is easy enough to house rule without changing the whole system.

The hex descriptions vary in quality, and sometimes in format.  Often, villages are given approximate population figures, but other times they are not.  The overall effect, while possibly a bit uneven, goes a long way toward preventing the development of a “canon” Carcosa.  The DM will have to do a bit of work to bring the setting to life, but McKinney has provided a consistent enough vision to make this both easy and enjoyable.  I found myself particularly drawn to the Silken Conclave precisely because the population figures had not been expressly stated for those hexes.

The map for Carcosa is a not the most attractive one in the world.  This has less to do with the specific rendering of the map and more to do with the sketchy nature of the original.  It’s serviceable enough, and the use of purple helps establish to the viewer that Carcosa is an alien world.

Ultimately I’m glad I purchased Carcosa.  I’m generally a fan of weird science fantasy sorts of settings, and it will definitely help me with much of the legwork for my Uz setting.    For that matter, the setting itself seems interesting enough that I may run it with minimal changes, though I’d likely use more conventional dice mechanics.  Carcosa is an excellent product and the Lamentations of the Flame Princess version has production values to match this excellence.

I give Carcosa 4 out of 5 stars.

Note: I have not included Fungoid Gardens of the Bone Sorcerer in this review.  I found flipping back and forth between the map and the text in the pdf a bit tedious and I want to wait until I get my physical copy before I pass final judgment on that adventure.

Monster Monday: Devils of Steel

For this monster Monday I decided to give you a new monster I made for Uz.   I know I've haven't been doing them as regularly as I said I would, but settling into this semester has been more difficult than I imagined.  Still, I hope to do it more consistently in the future.

Anyway, here is the monster:

Devil of Steel

No. Appearing   1d10

Armor Class        18

Hit Dice                 6+6

Movement           120’
No. of Attacks    See Below
Damage                 1d6 Each
Morale                  10

Alignment            Chaotic

The Devils of Steel are large, humanoid monstrosities that haunt the Waste of Rust.  Their skin is composed of a strange, rubbery metal that is hard as steel but allows them to move freely.  This cobalt-colored metal is stretched tightly over their skeletons, giving them an emaciated appearance and a skull-like visage.  Their heads are bulbous and topped with a boney ridge, and their limbs are twisted in ways which would make moving painful for most humanoids.

They can attack with both claws in one round.  They will always attack the same target, and if they hit with both attacks the target is grabbed and can take no actions.  The Devil of Steel will then swallow the victim down its horrible, rubbery gullet.  The victim will then take automatic damage each round until he or she can be freed.

The metal which coats these creatures makes them impervious to all magic and also halves all damage from energy weapons.  The color of their skin has led some scholars to believe they are related in some fashion to the Deros, but none know what this connection might be.

Zak's Questionnaire

1. If you had to pick a single invention in a game you were most proud of what would it be?

Probably Nightwick Abbey/the Dark Country if only because there has been such a positive response to it.

2. When was the last time you GMed?

About two weeks ago.

3. When was the last time you played?

About one week ago.

4. Give us a one-sentence pitch for an adventure you haven't run but would like to.

A Star Trek adventure where the bridge crew find themselves stranded on a D&D-style fantasy planet.

5. What do you do while you wait for players to do things?

Sit there.

6. What, if anything, do you eat while you play?

With my original group it was always pizza, but more recently it's been chips and various dips or chex mix.

7. Do you find GMing physically exhausting?

Sometimes.  Sometimes I actually find it invigorating.

8. What was the last interesting (to you, anyway) thing you remember a PC you were running doing?

Dragging an animated statue kicking and screaming out of the only room it could be animated in, hauling it back to town, and then selling it.

9. Do your players take your serious setting and make it unserious? Vice versa? Neither?

The first one, definitely; however, I'm also partially to blame.  As much horror and what not as I try to inject, I'm naturally kind of a clown.

10. What do you do with goblins?

This

11. What was the last non-RPG thing you saw that you converted into game material (background, setting, trap, etc.)?
The "Groans" from that Hobbit spec cartoon that was floating around the blogosphere recently.

12. What's the funniest table moment you can remember right now?
I had a player who liked to metagame and who had a quasi-encyclopedic knowledge of the various stuff (monsters, magic items, etc.) in 3.5.  I put out a rumor that a "juvenile" dragon was looking for a wizard to teach it magic.  The metagamer, who happened to be playing a wizard, figured that they could easily just kill the dragon for it's hoard.  Once they got to its layer they found he was an Ancient Wyrm that acted like Frito from Idiocracy.  He particularly liked to tell people to "suck one."


That one might also double as the creation I'm proudest of, now that I think about it.

13. What was the last game book you looked at--aside from things you referenced in a game--why were you looking at it?

WFRP 1e.  I was a big fan of 2e and I wanted to see if 1e was everything I've heard it is.

14. Who's your idea of the perfect RPG illustrator?
Mostly that his or her work is appropriate to the material itself.  I will say that I want a supplement or even a corebook to have a consistent look, which usually means a single artist.


Having said that, either Dave Trampier or Russ Nicholson.

15. Does your game ever make your players genuinely afraid?

Rarely.  More commonly the response to my games is "Weird..."  I think I joke too much to scare people.

16. What was the best time you ever had running an adventure you didn't write? (If ever)

I ran the village of Hommlet once and the PCs 1) brought capitalism to the World of Greyhawk and 2) made Hommlet into a tourist trap.  They never actually went to the moathouse.

17. What would be the ideal physical set up to run a game in?
Everybody around the table in comfortable chairs.  I'd also like it if I have enough room for my giant binder and AD&D hardbacks.  I'd also like to have some system where I can easily play thematically appropriate music.

18. If you had to think of the two most disparate games or game products that you like what would they be?
Not really sure about this one.  Maybe Traveller and Harnmaster because of the Sci Fi/Fantasy split.

19. If you had to think of the most disparate influences overall on your game, what would they be?
Atomic horror movies and Medieval History

20. As a GM, what kind of player do you want at your table?

One who is willing to buy in to what I want to run.

21. What's a real life experience you've translated into game terms?

The look of Nightwick Abbey's underworld in my head is very much tied into my trip to Hastings Castle -- but with more slime.

22. Is there an RPG product that you wish existed but doesn't?
A megadungeon "kit" in the style of Vornheim or a wilderness kit in the same style.  Alternatively a simple version of D&D that more or less runs like OSD&D but has a unified mechanic and allows for a modicum of character customization.

23. Is there anyone you know who you talk about RPGs with who doesn't play? How do those conversations go?
Not really.  There was one guy who I would talk to about setting stuff -- he's a writer -- but I got he played in the online Traveller game I did about a year ago.

Short Update

I've been neglecting the blog recently, which is due to a combination of getting Skyrim for Christmas and settling in to the new semester.  Once I get a better handle on my schedule, I should be posting quite a bit more.

I've put the Nightwick Abbey G+ game on hiatus until I can expand the dungeon a bit more.  I'll also be tweaking a few things and restocking the first level.  Those who are already on my list of players will remain on my list of players once I get started back, and the time should be the same.

I'm also going to be returning to the Wilderness around Nightwick Abbey and fleshing out the settlements in the Bishopric of Lichgate.  Once that is finished* I hope to run a Dark Country game with a more regularized cast of characters instead of a rotating pool.  I'm not sure what time I'll be running this or how I'll be selecting players, but I should have more on this very soon.

*By finished I mean "finished enough to run."  I don't really think I'll ever be finished with the Dark Country.

Mappa Mundi

Several months ago, I said I would make a post about what makes a good fantasy map.  At the time, I would have said that utility is the highest good.  A gaming map should ultimately be usable at the table, and as such its primary purpose is to display the distances between two points so that the travel time and the number of random encounters that will occur between the two can be determined.  However, almost a year later I have come to a different conclusion: every campaign setting needs two maps.

The first should be more or less what I described above.  I'd prefer a true hex map, but different configurations are possible.  The ultimate goal of such a map is to display distances and to help determine what random encounter charts the referee needs to roll on.*  If it can also be pretty that's cool too, but utility is far more important.

The second map is the setting's equivalent of a mappa mundi.  For those unfamiliar with the concept, a mappa mundi is a type of highly symbolic map used throughout the middle ages.  The one pictured above is particularly famous for its detail, but simpler designs also exist.  Mappa mundi  are not meant to get you from point A to point B.  Instead, they are meant to convey ideological information.  The most simple ones show how the sons of Noah spread across the three continents, and more complex ones can tell the entire story of man from the Garden of Eden to the Apocalypse.

For gaming purposes I mean something a bit more like this:

This map doesn't do a terribly good job of telling you how far the Gates of the Moon are from Runestone but does tell you something about the character of the place and the people who live there.  This is often difficult if not impossible to achieve with a typical hex map.  Plus, this style of map is just more pleasing to the eye.

A good example of a setting that uses both is Harn.  First, we have Harn's hex map:

While not a true hex map in the way Erin of the Welsh Piper uses the term, one can still uses this map to figure out how much time it will take to get from one point to another and to generate encounters over that period.  One also gets a sense of how much farmland is present, which is a rare thing for a gaming map to do.  

Now the mappa mundi:

This map is much better for giving Harn a sense of place, even if it lacks the utility of the earlier version.

Sadly, my talents are much better suited for the more hum drum sort of maps, even if I do admire mappa mundi.  I may attempt one anyway, but my cartoony style will likely be a poor fit for the tangled forests and squalid cities of the Dark Country.

Unfocused Thoughts After Skimming WFRP 1e

Today was the first day I was able to look over the new copy of WFRP 1e I got for $5 off of amazon.  I've only previously dealt with 2e -- which I love -- and I believe someone on G+ wanted me to say what I thought about 1e once I got it.  I've only skimmed it a bit at this point, so here are the things I noticed just flipping through the pages.

• Holy shit! This is awesome!
• There doesn't seem to be the same kind of unified mechanic that exists in 2e, which kind of saddens me.
• The monster list is much more robust than the one found in 2e's corebook.  
• Wait... WFRP rules for random encounters and treasure? I'm in love.  Does anyone know if they port over well to 2e?
• There's a lot of... stuff in here.
• The more I look at it, the angrier I get at my 2e book.  I think I like 2e's system better, but the amount of material in 1e makes 2e look like crippleware.
• The art ranges from mediocre to evocative, and I absolutely love the cover.
• There's a Jabberwock on the monster list.  I approve.
• There's also an entry for boars.  Some may find this boring, but boars are fucking mean.
• I like how the careers are divided up into types.  SBVD does this too, and I may make new tables for 2e that incorporate the materials from those two games.
• There is a certain irony in the fact that my copy of 1e is less beat up than my copy of 2e; however, since it's a softcover I doubt that will last long.
• There is a lot more info on the different states in the Old World.  It'll be interesting to read over Bretonnia to see how it's different.  From what I've heard, I think I'll enjoy the 2e version better.
• Alignment?!
• The organization seems a bit... off, but it's nowhere near as bad as the DMG.

That's it for now.  I'll make a more complete report after reading through it some more.