Wednesday, October 31, 2018


So I've owned for years this old DAW anthology Heroic Fantasy, which I read one story at a time over the course of a decade or so.  My favorite of the bunch is "The Mistaken Oracle" by a dudeperson named A. E. Silas.  It offers an interesting answer to one of my favorite big, dumb questions to pose in fantasy literature, "What the heck is a Wizard, anyway?"

I've not encountered the name A.E. Silas anywhere else.  Not that I'm one of these guys obsessed with Appendix N.  In fact, my interest in fantasy lit kinda trails off after Tolkien and Howard and Jack Vance's original The Dying Earth, at least until it picks up again under the pseudonym of "magical realism."  On any given day, I prefer to read fantasy that's 500 years old rather than 50, but I make exceptions from time to time.

A couple weeks back I finally got around to seeing if A.E. Silas had written anything else.  Unless she published under another name, I can find just one other work of hers, a fantasy novel called The Panorama Egg.  I needed for work a certain book on my wish list and had a freebie coming to me (Thriftbooks has a frequent flyer program, kinda like a punch card at a coffee house.  Between that and the free shipping for orders over something like twelve bucks, I use it just as much as Amazon for books.).  So I went ahead and got it.

My copy just arrived yesterday and I'm only 43 pages in, but I have to share this little tidbit:
He looked at her and shook his head.  Half a year in this place, and he wasn't used to her.  People called her Melaklos as if it were a descriptive term, and referred to her by that fourth pronoun, ke, which is used in the trade tongue to refer to something neither masculine nor feminine, but living and therefore not neuter.  She called it the neutral.  Various peoples applied it to weapons, ships, the sea, fire, the moons, and nearly all mythological figures, gods and monsters alike.  The Melaklos was probably a demon of some sort.
The Melaklos referred to here is the trickster figure who enables the hero, a lawyer in modern day America, to cross over into a world of swords and sorcery.  The Melaklos presents as a lovely but slightly odd-looking woman.  So here's a novel published in 1978 that is taking a moment to wrangle with the issue of who is a he, who is a she, and who is a person that doesn't fit neatly into those categories.  I think that's pretty neat.

UPDATE: Derik Badman found that A.E. stands for Ann Elizabeth.  Still no additional works, yet, but at least now I'm not misgendering the author like a numb-skull.  Thanks, Derik!

Monday, October 29, 2018

turns out there are RPGs that don't involve orcs

So this morning I got to participate in one of the playtest sessions for Zak's superhero game.  I quite liked a lot of what I saw.  Chargen involved a combination of random roll and choices.  The mechanics were similar to FASERIP but replaced the bigass d100 color chart with dice for stats.  (Like Savage Worlds, my Toughness is a d6, my Agility a d8, etc.).  I'm not sure I followed how initiative worked but the GM managed it so I didn't much care.

Anyway, here's my hero, the irrepressible Sewer Lad!

5 minutes with HeroMachine 2.5

His two superpowers are summoning (but not really controlling) lots and lots of rats and his deadly Sewer Touch, the latter of which he is very reluctant to use.  It can, like, melt your face off, man.  I did my best to only threaten to use it in dire circumstances, but I ended up have to corrode a bit of the villain Brick.

Sewer Lad is also a not-particularly-good martial artist and a leading authority on rat biology who works in the small and under-funded Rat House in the City Zoo.  His pal is Tad, a sewer maintenance guy with a big wrench and a heart of gold.

Sewer Lad teamed up with the Arcanist, some sort of dark emo mindbender, to fight the villains Mindvoid, Brick, and Nullifier. I had a great time.


Later this week I'll be trying out the World Wide Wrestling rpg.  This is a Powered by the Apocalypse type story game, so it's a bit out of my usual sort of thing.  It's the first pro wrestling RPG that I like.

If you're interested in playing in the campaign (assuming we don't all hate it after one session), the game is being organized on the DIY RPG discord.  If you're not a member there, just hit me up via email (jrients at the gmail) or twitter or something and I'll send you an invite.

Thursday, October 25, 2018

Shiny Rocks

So Angus at Meandering Banter built this doo-hickey that can turn any list into a bit of code for random table widgets.  Below are buttons that should each generate a random gem, based upon but not completely mimicking the charts in the first edition Dungeon Masters Guide.

For instances where you have an odd valued gem (150gp, 400gp, etc.) just use the next lower amount assume an unusual size, a nonstandard shape, a unique coloration variant, etc.  By the way, I tend to imagine Huge gems as fist-sized, Very large gems like golf-balls, Large gems like dice, and default gems as roughly dime-sized.  But your campaign may be more realistic than mine.

If you want the actual code to put into your Digital DM Screen, here's a file with all of them.

Much of the time in my D&D games I treat gems as simply a nice portable way to score GP and XP, but sometimes you want to know more specific details.  For example,
  • Spell components: black pearls for animate dead, diamond for bringing people back to actual life.
  • Tricking people: A fool might buy a flawed gem for more than its worth, or think a high quality rock crystal is actually a diamond.
  • Known prejudices for specific stones: IIRC Lord Dunsany says gnolls love emeralds and and Gygax says in the DMG that dwarves don't care for pearls.  Important to know when negotiating prices for ransoms with kidnappers.
  • Personal preference: I knew a player once who liked to name her PCs after gems and then call dibs on all examples of that type.
And it might  just be fun for a player to find out the details of those three gems worth 100gp sitting on their charsheet.