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The Indie Game Shelf: Prism

Welcome to The Indie Game Shelf! Each article in this series will highlight a different small press roleplaying game to showcase the wide variety of games available. Whether you’re a veteran gamer looking for something new or brand new to the hobby and wanting to explore what’s out there, I hope The Indie Game Shelf always holds something fun and new for you to enjoy!

Prism: An Aquatic World of Relationships and Intimacy

Prism by Whitney Marie Delaglio/Little Wish Productions is a diceless RPG designed for one GM and 1-4 players to explore character interactions, relationships, and conflict resolution in a mystical aquatic world. The setting of the Prism RPG is introduced in the free online comic Prism the Miracle (also from Little Wish Productions) and involves a variety of aquatic humanoid species, elemental magic, and a collection of deities responsible for the creation and oversight of the world. Both the game and the comic promote a sex-positive environment of exploration of emotional and physical intimacy, so that’s something to keep in mind when picking up and sharing this game; it is recommended for players of age 18 and older.

The Story

Stories in Prism will focus on the characters’ values, their relationships, and the obstacles they must overcome, often by working together. The game provides a setting backdrop and mechanics that support these story elements. Each player character (PC) in Prism hails from one of the six Realms of the setting, each being associated with a different color and one of the world’s deities. For example, the Gold Realm is headed by a descendant of the God of Life. A PC’s Realm gives them a cultural and ethical background, describing things that the Realm “values” and “resents,” which have both mechanical and narrative significance. Similarly, players also track mechanics for their characters’ Relationships, providing both mechanical and narrative fuel for the game’s stories. Relationships can be of any kind (platonic, sexual, familial, etc.), and they track on a negative-positive spectrum (from the character’s viewpoint) and are asymmetrical, meaning that one character can have a Negative Relationship to another character while the second character might have a Positive Relationship to the first.

The world described by Prism, besides being aquatically themed, includes many mystical elements that can be used to contribute to an interesting and emotional story. The six deities who created the world each have different personality traits and hold a strong influence over the inhabitants of this world. They have representatives who speak on their behalf, and the gods themselves still wander the world and are at least watching, and may even be moved from time to time to interfere. The people whose bodies die in the world of Prism leave behind Silhouettes, shadows of their souls, that remain active until they can find peace. The setting also features elemental magic and a dark contagion known as the Punishment, a magical infection that awakens destructive emotions in people and often causes them to be shunned by their communities.

The game explores themes of deep emotional involvement and intimacy, and the consent and safety of everyone at the table is of great import. The game begins with the “Tea Party,” a kind of pre-game session zero that includes not only character creation, but also group worldbuilding and game topic discussion. The GM and players are reminded of the importance of enthusiastic consent during this pre-game process, and the X-Card is explicitly mentioned as an important tool to use. While the game itself focuses on particular story elements, the overall plots of the stories are left to the group to decide, and much of that discussion takes place during the Tea Party.

The Game

Characters in Prism are created as a combination of several different types of background. The Realm, mentioned previously, ties the character to a culture and value system. The Template offers some insight into the role or nature of the character, including if they’ve been infected with the Punishment! Characters are rounded out by Family (species), Vocation, and a starting Relationship to another PC, and they are completed by rating the characters Skills, which have already been affected by the earlier choices made. For example, a PC may favor the Insight Skill for being from the Violet Realm and also favor the Etiquette Skill for choosing a Vocation of Diplomat; all other Skill ratings would be filled out at the end of character creation. The background choices made also assemble a collection of Traits and Talents for the PC, such as a PC from the Barbed Fish Family gaining a special Fish Form Trait or a PC using the Nocturnal Template receiving a Trait that grants them initiative in certain circumstances.

The game explores themes of deep emotional involvement and intimacy, and the consent and safety of everyone at the table is of great import.

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Prism is a diceless game. The core mechanism of task resolution is simply comparing a PC’s rating in a Skill against a static difficulty number with the difference between the two dictating success and whether the resolution includes a bonus or complication. This core, however, is surrounded by additional mechanics and modifiers that can tie the characters’ values and relationships to the resolution of every problem. Acting in accordance with the values outlined by a PC’s Realm can bestow Blessings or Curses which alter the rating of the PC’s Skills. In addition, the Relationship mechanics, due to their asymmetry, confer a variety of mechanical modifiers in different narrative situations. For example, in a two-way negative relationship, one PC could get a bonus while taking an action to show up the other, while a PC with a positive relationship to someone with a negative relationship to them could get a bonus to get the other character to notice them.

A spellcaster sings an Inferno spell of “Simple” difficulty — a torch-sized flame — and “Typical” difficulty — a flying fireball.

Besides tracking Relationship mechanics, players also track Physical Endurance and Emotional Endurance, giving physical combat and social strain equal mechanical footing. The magic system is also streamlined; magic “spells” simply describe an element or group of elements that can be controlled, and the actual effect of magic is just another type of action to take, governed by a specific Skill. The game is geared toward multi-session play, as Relationship ratings are changed between sessions based on what has transpired in the fiction.

It’s also worth pointing out that the artwork communicates much about the game, even mechanically. In most games, even the best artwork goes far enough to illustrate the setting and perhaps even convey a sense of the atmosphere of the fiction or even the tone of gameplay. All of this is accomplished in Prism, but it also takes the extra step of using artwork to communicate mechanical significance, as well, such as how to set the difficulty ratings for task resolution.

Character creation is neatly procedural, and the core mechanics of the game are quick and easy to learn. The complications for new players or GMs may be the specific situational triggers for individual PCs’ special Traits or the conditions dictated by Relationships, but players keeping their own characters’ Traits in mind will help keep things flowing. The pre-game Tea Party procedure definitely makes this game easy to pick up and play, since everyone can learn all they need to know during the character creation process, and everyone at the table gets to contribute to the setting of the game and goals of the stories. With immediate player buy-in and long-term play encouraged by Relationship mechanics, this game wants you and your group to take your time to explore these characters and their world.

The Shelf

Prism is currently available for purchase in print and PDF formats from DriveThruRPG, and don’t forget you can read the Prism the Miracle comic online for free. If you’re looking for other games with similar themes, you can check out Deep Love by Jason Morningstar/Bully Pulpit Games, a four-player game of deep-sea exploration and, in the words of the publisher, “a feel-good game about the complexity of love and sea monsters.” Although not published yet, if you’re looking for underwater settings and emotional exploration, keep an eye out for the upcoming Descent Into Midnight, a Powered by the Apocalypse game of underwater community, teamwork, and corruption. The game is still in development, but public playtest materials are available now from their website. I can’t mention RPGs with underwater settings without also mentioning Blue Planet from Biohazard Games, a detailed look at a whole underwater world for gaming and exploration. Finally, if your interests lean far into exploring character intimacy, I cannot recommend enough Star Crossed by Alex Roberts (also from Bully Pulpit Games), a two-player game of complicated love.

If you’ve got something on your shelf you want to recommend as well, let us know in the comments section below. Let’s fill our shelves together!

The Indie Game Shelf: Prism published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

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swipestream · 5 years

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Wargame Wednesday: SPI’s Freedom in the Galaxy & WW Links

Freedom in the Galaxy

Anyone ever play Freedom in the Galaxy?

I’ve had this game since childhood but never got around to playing it. It has traveled the world only to be placed in storage for years at a time. A couple of weeks ago I decided to dust off the box and see what I had missed. What went missing over the years are about 30 counters out of the original 400. There is a Vassal version but for now, I’m procrastinating, deciding on exploring the Vassal game or research then make the counters I’m missing.

This post says it all about the game’s release:

“I’ve always had a soft spot for Freedom in the Galaxy, SPI’s 1979 blatant rip-off of the Star Wars franchise. Rumor has it that SPI produced the game first and sought the Star Wars license second. Maybe not the best idea to come out of that meeting.

The license was either denied or too pricey. SPI then seemingly spent about 15 minutes filing off the serial numbers and presto … Freedom in the Galaxy. You can see it’s so not Star Wars as the main protagonists are Adam Starlight and a princess named Leia, I mean Zina. Though Han Solo seems to have morphed from lech to lizardman, at least on the box cover.”

The game concept was interesting, a mix of characters performing missions and strategic military units. This post provides both a game review and walk through of a few turns of game play.

The 18th Volks-Grenadier Regiment

The Bulge series continues with a post on the 18th VG based on a Foreign Military Studies manuscript.

Guaidó Makes a Move in Venezuela

I haven’t made a Venezuela update in a while and seems Guaidó was set to gather more military support but had to get ahead of imminent arrest.

Best War Movies of All Time

Ranker.com is definitely a click bait site but I find this list of war movie lists helpful. Lists include Napoleonic War movies, WW1, Korea and a host of others. For the list “Best War Movies Ever Made” some of my votes on the next page.

Over 400 movies listed but here are a few I gave votes to. My criteria is subjective and I probably couldn’t explain it to you even with a gun to my head. I may down vote one movie for not being historically accurate but up-vote something semi-fictional but is entertaining, and so on.

Ranking is at the time I cast my vote:

1: Saving Private Ryan – no vote, despite the scenes on the beach there are a lot better movies deserving the #1 title.

2: Full Metal Jacket – no vote, same reason as #1 above and that’s despite the boot camp sequence.

3: Apocalypse Now – no vote, even though it is one of my favorite all time movies (original version, not director’s cut). It does belong in a war movie list but not #3.

4: Platoon – down vote.

5: Band of Brothers – up vote.

6: Bridge on the River Kwai – up vote.

7: Black Hawk Down – up vote.

8: Schindler’s List – down vote.

9: Patton – up vote – classic.

10: Braveheart – down vote. Feel bad down voting as it is entertaining but shouldn’t be in the Top 10 and not historically accurate.

13: Das Boot – up vote. WW certified.

14: We Were Soldiers – up vote. Close to WW certification.

16: Tora! Tora! Tora! – WW certified.

19: Letters for Iwo Jima – up vote

21: The Patriot – down vote and I actually enjoy Mel Gibson movies but could never get into this one.

23: Enemy at the Gates: Up vote

24: Inglourious Basterds: can I down vote twice?

25: A Bridge Too Far: WW certified.

29: Midway: up vote

33: Lawrence of Arabia: up vote. “People over 50 are 2x more likely to vote for Lawrence of Arabia”. Guess there is no hope for the future.

34: Hamburger Hill: up vote and it don’t mean nuthing that it’s only at 34.

38: Zulu – WW certified

45 Battle of Britain: up vote

48 Master and Commander: up vote and pretty much WW Certified.

67 Stalingrad – no vote but have never seen it. On the list to watch.

72 The Killing Fields – no vote for the best war movie list but a great film and recommended.

74 Gallipoli – definitely recommend this Mel Gibson flick. Up vote.

76 The Eagle Has Landed – up vote despite being an adventure flick set in war.

84 Pearl Harbor (2001) No thanks. I’m actually irritated on having to spend the energy on moving my hand and clicking the button to down vote.

95: Dunkirk – WW Certified

102: Apocalypse Now Redux – down vote.

105: Three Kings – down vote.

106 The Dam Busters – up vote.

111 Waterloo (1970 Soviet – Italian film!) up vote

121 The Sand Pebbles – up vote

128 Captain America: The First Avenger – wrong list dude. Down vote.

130 The Winter War – Finland vs Soviet Union. Up vote.

156 The Wild Geese – up vote

164 Anzio – up vote

208: Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan

216: The Battle of the River Plate – not vote but on the watch list

268: The Last Detail: up vote. Doesn’t belong on this list but good flick.

271 Kokoda: Australians and Japanese fighting in the New Guinea mountains. Never seen but on the watch list.

275: They Shall Not Grow Old – up vote

281: Lenningrad: the 900 Days – on the watch list.

282: The Avengers – I’ll down vote anytime I see it on this list.

301: The Wind That Shakes the Barley – Irish Civil War. Up vote.

312: 84C MoPic – on the watch list

377: Lebanon – Israeli tank crew in the 1982 invasion. watch list

Wargame Wednesday: SPI’s Freedom in the Galaxy & WW Links published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

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Tabletop Gaming Creators You Need to Follow

On social media, people are always talking about how the tabletop game design space needs to be more diverse. Here’s the deal, it already is. As one of the co-hosts of the Asians Represent podcast, I’ve been able to meet and interview some incredible creators from around the world. Here are a few of my favourites.

Ben Chong (aka Flowers on the internet) is a game designer and game development lecturer at KDU University College in Malaysia. If you’re like me, and you enjoy the wonders of micro-RPGs, Ben is a creator you should keep an eye on. Of the 8 micro-RPGs he’s uploaded to itch.io, the ones that have stood out to me are Monolock and Magic Swords. The former is a sci-fi survival game about a mecha squadron being hunted by an unrelenting horror. Think Faster than Light meets The Predator. Even cooler, it’s low-prep and interestingly GM-less! Magic Swords is a fantasy game where you character is an enchanted weapon with a criminal past! That’s right, you play as a weapon.

Follow Ben on Twitter @SwordsnFlowers and buy his games at swords-and-flowers.itch.io

Fans of worldbuilding will really enjoy the work of Munkao, a visual artist and game designer also based in Malaysia. Since 2015, they’ve been working alongside another fantastic creator named Zedeck Siew on Thousand Thousand Islands – a Southeast Asian-themed fantasy visual world-building project. Thousand Thousand Islands is not your average reimagining of European medieval settings. This ongoing project takes inspiration from precolonial Southeast Asian culture, folklore, and mythology. This is the kind of campaign setting that the Stabletop gaming world needs. So far, four gorgeous zines have been released, and I’m eagerly awaiting more. Perhaps even a large-scale volume?

Photo credit: Zedeck Siew

Learn more about Thousand Thousand Islands at athousandthousandislands.com and follow Zedeck on Twitter @zedecksiew

Jeeyon Shim is a survival skills instructor and LARP designer based in the United States of America. Jeeyon designs evocative, thought provoking games that challenge our ideas of the nature of games. For instance, Pin Feathers and Cloud Studies are a pair of solo LARPs about pain, change, and recovery. They’re games, but also contemplative exercises that make you feel! In fact, both are so innovative that they were listed on the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America’s (SFWA) 2018 Reading List for the Nebula Awards.

Follow Jeeyon on Twitter @jeeyonshim and buy her games at jeeyonshim.itch.io

Every list like this needs to feature a great visual artist. Khairul Hisham is that artist. Based in Malaysia alongside its growing RPG community, Khairul is a visual artist and teacher who uses games like Dungeons & Dragons to help his students learn English. He’s worked on a variety of games as a visual artist and often posts free downloads of player tokens on his website. I’m a big fan of his Star Wars work!

Follow Khairul on Twitter @hishgraphics and check out his work at hishgraphics.com

Sangjun (aka Magister Ludi) is a game designer and translator based in Seoul, Korea. I recently interviewed him for an episode of the Asians Represent podcast and learned of some pretty cool projects he’s working on! It never occurred to me, but TTRPG (tabletop roleplaying game) kind of reads like tater pig. Sangjun definitely thought so, and made a “no-player” RPG about making a pig out of a potato. Seriously. This is a game and it’s very cool. In addition to this, Sangjun has published games of incredible emotional depth like Moonflower and span like the One Card RPG project, which he challenges himself to design a single index card game nearly EVERY DAY.

Follow Sangjun on Twitter @heofonkoppe and buy his games at magisterludikr.itch.io

Tabletop Gaming Creators You Need to Follow published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

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Randomer Encounters

If you have run a game campaign for any period of time, it becomes apparent that the random encounter tables for your adventurers become stale-dated or dull. Even if there are variations by terrain, climate or civilization, the game-provided tables become repetitive.

One solution to this challenge is to create your own table of “randomer encounters.” This approach has many advantages and can be used in any game system or situation. The primary advantage is that it is customizable to your particular game, adding depth and flavor to your sessions.

How to get started

The first step is to determine how many of these encounters you want to create. Ideally, you want to choose a number of encounters that can be selected at random by using dice. When I first started this concept, I started with 24 of these encounters (which can be randomized by using a 12 sided die with another die (a six-sided would do) to determine if I would add 12 to the result (on a 4 to 6) or not (1 to 3). After further experimentation, I found that 30 of these encounters (a ten-sided die rolled with a six sided die – add 10 if you roll 3 or 4, add 20 if you roll a 5 or 6) work best for my campaign. The point is to create a list where the dice can provide you with an easy, random result.

The random factor is important. As a GM you have control over events and situations that occur in your sessions. By introducing a random factor, you are yielding this control to your list. Ideally, your “randomer encounters” would run the gamut from the frivolous and incidental to the serious and consequential – as long as it fits into your game. It also keeps you on your toes as a GM.

Creating your list of encounters

Once you have your frame, you can start populating the list. This is where the fun is. You can use almost any source for creating these encounters. You can introduce some neighborhood scandal, foreshadow a future event, even note the actions of an NPC or refer to past events within the campaign. For example, if the party had betrayed someone in the past, it may be that this person/organization/demi-god is seeking information on the party (or that a rival of this individual wants to reward the party for their “good works”). This could be represented as “A shifty individual at the Local Pub has been asking questions about the party.”

Rumors are a favorite of mine. In my High Fantasy Campaign, the “randomer encounters” table has led to a persistent rumor that local authorities are considering a tax on magical items. This has been overhead as a bar room conversation, as a worry on the part of an NPC Alchemist, and as a debate between clerics whether or not holy items should be exempt from this tax.

A randomer encounter might be inserted to foreshadow a future plot hook. They can also be the source of mischief, misdirection and even outright lies.

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It may be that taxing magical items is a task that is beyond the local authorities. However, it is just a rumor and, as we all know, the crazier the rumor, the quicker it spreads.

A randomer encounter might be inserted to foreshadow a future plot hook (“There is increasing discontent among the aristocrats” or “No one has seen the Chief Mage for two weeks.”). They can also be the source of mischief, misdirection and even outright lies (“I am the heir to the Crown of Eredorre”).

This list of encounters can be used to introduce oddities into your campaign. Again, these can range from something out of Monty Python (“A well-dressed elderly man is walking down the street in a very odd and peculiar manner.”) to a cross-campaign event (“In a mirror, you see a party of strangely dressed adventurers trying to unlock a box of flashing lights.”) or even an encounter drawn from a film or novel. (“Four nervous and travel-worn Halflings are grabbing a quick meal. One appears introverted and moody.”).

These encounters should be suitable for your party’s capabilities.

How to use Randomer Encounters

You want to create opportunities for a quick scene or an interesting dilemma, not starting a new story arc or a creating a wasteful diversion (unless that is what you want). Therefore, you need to exercise some judgement when a “randomer encounter” occurs.

If the action is proceeding quickly, then an encounter of any kind is likely to be an unwelcome diversion. If the party is just waiting for the next day to occur, or if the GM needs to stimulate some new thinking, then an unusual encounter might be a good choice.

These encounters should be used to complement the existing random encounter tables. Typically, a random encounter reflects the local surroundings. It may be an encounter with wild beast while travelling through the forest or just part of the dungeon ecology. A “randomer encounter” should occur as part of the overall randomness of your living world.

Whenever an encounter is rolled, I re-roll to see if there is the possibility that the list be used. Typically, I roll a six-sided die, with a six indicating a “randomer encounter.” Sometimes, especially when things are dragging or the party becomes indecisive, I go straight to the list.

I always roll for a random result from the list. The unexpected is always fun and It keeps me sharp with regard to my own game mastering abilities.

Some Examples

High Fantasy (Urban) Randomer Encounters

1 A well-dressed Half-Orc is trying to sell an “ugly chicken” inside a locked box. (It’s a cockatrice.) 2 An alchemist is closing shop and items are at half-price. (Low quality products) 3 A handsome prince is desperately searching for the women who lost her shoe at the Ball. 4 The gall stones of red-headed Halflings give invincible luck to gamblers. 5 You are accosted in the street by a crone who claims you stole her youth. 6 The Eunuch’s Guild is recruiting – males only! 7 Graffiti is found in a nearby alley “Chaos is Boss!”, “Lawful is Awful.” 8 A pedlar is selling Amulets of Demonic Protection – a deal at 5 gold pieces each. (A scam) 9 Street urchins are running in fear from a gang of thugs. (Urchins have stolen their beer money). 10 A mage is looking for spell test volunteers (polymorph). 50 gp for each volunteer. (A lot more to be changed back.)

Space/Sci-Fi Randomer Encounters

1 The authorities are trying to keep knowledge of sabotage at the space port secret. 2 A desperate person is willing to part with longevity serum (reduces age by five years) for transport off-planet. 3 Protesters are picketing a local educational institution. “Down with the Eugenics Ban!” 4 Some children are playing Rangers and Aliens with an antique blaster (non-working but fixable.) 5 An autodrive cart is running down pedestrians at a nearby mall. 6 A “red shirt” crew member is deserting because she fears being killed on the next OA mission. 7 An Artificial Intelligence is seeking work after being fired for being “too controlling.” 8 Would you buy a pill to make you smarter? Of course, you would! (Reduces social inhibitions) 9 An asteroid mining company is looking for recruits. “Double Hazard Pay and great benefits!” 10 Organizers for the Robot Union are soliciting new members.

Using randomer encounters supports the overall thrust and character of your game. You can use them to shake things up or to finish off the tail-end of a session. It does require you to think about your campaign world and explore some interesting tangents. What would your table of “Randomer Encounters” look like?

Randomer Encounters published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

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Sensor Sweep: Paperback Fanatic, Ben Bova, Tros of Samothrace, Warhammer

Popular Culture (Men’s Pulp Mags): Justin Marriott and Paul Bishop are two of my favorite pulp culture mavens. (“Pulp culture” is a term I borrowed from the book of that name by Frank M. Robinson and Lawrence Davidson and expanded to encompass both early pulp magazines and pulp art and later magazines, books and movies that have pulpy DNA, such as men’s adventure magazines and action/adventure paperbacks and movies.)

Justin is a publisher of fanzines that focus primarily on mid- to late-20th Century pulp paperbacks, including THE PAPERBACK FANATIC, THE SLEAZY READER, PULP HORROR, and MEN OF VIOLENCE.

Culture Wars (Lou Antonelli): Once the sci-fi establishment stuffed the ballot box by buying thousands of WorldCon memberships to euthanize the Sad Puppies in the 2015 Hugo vote, it assured the irrelevance of the award.

Authors (Black Gate): The 1973 Hugo Award for Best Editor went to Ben Bova. This was the first year of the Best Editor Hugo. It has been awarded every year since then, though in 2007 it was split in two, with a Best Editor Award given for Short Form and Long Form editors. This last reflected the fact that the Best Editor was a de facto award for Best Editor Short Form all along. (While I completely agree that “Long Form” editors are tremendously important to the field, and deserve recognition, I still think that the Hugo voters – even people, like me, who are pretty well connected – are not really competent to evaluate Long Form editing.)

Authors (DMR Books): The other early S&S scribe to really admire Mundy was Fritz Leiber. As he said in his glowing tribute to Mundy, “The Glory of Tros”:

“Talbot Mundy’s Tros of Samothrace is one of the half-dozen novels I have re-read most often in the course of my life, or rather during the thirty-eight years since I first devoured it. Such books inevitably become part of our lives, closely interwoven with all of our thoughts and actions…”

Fiction (Track of Words): While it carries on the naming convention started with the Age of Sigmar anthology Gods & Mortals, for which you can read my review here, Lords and Tyrants is a slightly different beast in that its 16 Warhammer 40,000 short stories have all been previously released as standalone e-shorts. I’ve read and reviewed all of these stories individually on Track of Words, and while I would love to kick back and re-read most of these, I just don’t really have time to do so.

Authors (Kairos): Most readers of this blog will have heard by now that science fiction grand master Gene Wolfe passed away last week. If you just wandered in out of the rain, you may not have heard of him.

Authors (The Federalist): Science fiction writer Gene Wolfe died on April 14 at the age of 87. Even though I consider it one the greatest science fiction novels ever written, I taught Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer (1980) for only one term, back when I was teaching my Introduction to the Literature of Fantasy and Science Fiction class. Like The Sound and the Fury and Swann’s Way, both of which it resembles in ways, it’s a hard book to teach to a general undergraduate class. And Shadow is one of the most accessible of Wolfe’s novels.

Sherlock Holmes (Factor Daily): The Science-Fictional Sherlock Holmes containing a total of seven stories, each a science fictional pastiche of Sherlock Holmes, and an introduction – ‘Sherlock Holmes and Science Fiction’ – by the mystery writer Anthony Boucher and writer of many radio dramas featuring the detective. Two of the stories featured August Derleth’s detective Solar Pons, a character inspired by and based on Sherlock Holmes.

J. R. R. Tolkien (Black Gate): The fragment begins in Pen-arduin, a suburb of Minas Tirith — indeed, the towers of the White City are descried across the waves of the Anduin River, upon whose banks the town is built. Our perspective character, Borlas, who once served as “the first Captain of the Guard of Prince Faramir,” says aloud one eventide in his garden in June, “Deep indeed run the roots of Evil.”

Robert E. Howard (Black Gate): “Red Nails” happens to be one of this writer’s favourite Conan stories, of that particular length, along with “People of the Black Circle” and “The Black Stranger” (which REH also wrote as a Black Vulmea pirate yarn, “Swords of the Red Brotherhood”).

Gaming (Speculition): I think it’s fair to say ninjas are a fascination of the West. Silent, acrobatic killers, masked, and wielding a variety of neat weapons and tools, they appear in all forms of media: books, movies, comics, tv, and beyond. And they are perfect for video games. From the early 2D action-platformer Ninja Gaiden to Sub Zero, Scorpion, and Reptile in Mortal Kombat, Shinobi 3D to all the games which feature the famous mutant, pizza-devouring turtles, ninjas have been captured in a variety of forms.

Comic Books (Porpor Books Blog): After finishing ‘James Warren: Empire of Monsters’, I did some additional online digging into the circumstances of the lawsuit filed by Bill DuBay’s nephew Ben DuBay against Stephen King.

Fiction (Vintage Pop Fictions): The Saint’s Getaway was originally published in 1932 as Getaway, although two earlier versions of the story appeared in Thriller magazine earlier that year.

Simon Templar, his beloved Patricia Holm and his pal Monty Hayward are enjoying a well-earned holiday in Innsbruck. They are lying low, or at least are supposed to be lying low, after their previous adventure

RPG (Goodman Games): We are thrilled that our Original Adventures Reincarnated line has been such a big hit. The fan reception to Into the Borderland and The Isle of Dread has been nothing short of amazing. And at Gary Con we announced the next volume in the series, Original Adventures Reincarnated #3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks.

Sensor Sweep: Paperback Fanatic, Ben Bova, Tros of Samothrace, Warhammer published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

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20th Century Small Arms: The Interwar Period

The interwar period of 1919 to 1939 in the realm of small arms has two distinct periods. The first half 1919-1929 was a time awash in WW 1 surplus. The Polish-Soviet War, the Freikorps action in the Baltic States were all fought with WW 1 weaponry.

The British and French Empires were enlarged by territory in Africa and worse the Middle East. The British hoped to maintain control of the empire on the cheap using the Royal Air Force to cow the natives.

The one country in the 1920s that seemed to be innovating was Czechoslovakia. The Czech produced high quality Mauser rifles in the 1920s, most for the South American market. The ZB 26 light machinegun used 20 or 30 round detachable magazines, weighed 21.5 lbs, and an effective range of 1000 meters. It was deployed in 1928 and saw action in Manchuria, the Italian-Ethiopian War, and the Spanish Civil War. It provided the basis for the British Bren gun.

ZB-26

The Germans were not far behind. The MG-34 was designed by Heinrich Vollmer, tested in 1929, and introduced in 1934. It weighed 26.7 lbs and had a cyclic rate of fire of 800-900 rounds per minute.

The submachine gun started taking on new life in 1930. The Finn’s produced the KP/-31 submachine gun in 1931. It had the standard wooden stock but had a detachable round drum holding 71 rounds. This submachine gun also had a range of 300 meters, longer than any other submachine gun. The Soviets would copy elements of the Suomi and the German MP-28 to produce the PPD-34 starting in 1934.

Suomi KP/-31

The submachine gun would be used in small quantities in the Chaco War fought between Bolivia and Paraguay 1932-1935. Small numbers of German MP-28s were used in the Spanish Civil War. The Spaniards even produced a copy of the MP-28 and their own (Labora Fontbernat M1-938) indigenous design. Submachine guns appear to have sparked interested but not deployed in enough numbers to effect victory or defeat on the battle field in the 1930s. The French and even the Hungarians designed submachine guns during the 1930s as war clouds formed.

PPD 34

The Germans would make a leap with the submachine gun with the MP-38. It did away with the wooden rifle stock. It was the first submachinegun with a folding stock. It was all steel and plastic. This was a revolutionary gun.

MP 38

The big area of disinterest was the semi-automatic rifle. The Czechs produced the ZH-29 rifle which has the honor of the first self-loading rifle to be used in service. It fired the 7.92 Mauser round. A Chinese warlord bought 150, the Ethiopians, and Thais all bought a few. The problem was cost per rifle. The Poles developed their own self-loading rifle, the Kbsp wz. 1938 M. Supposedly, only 150 rifles had been produced and never distributed when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939.

ZH-29

The Soviets produced the AVS 36

AVS 36

(Simonov) in 1936. The rifle was too complex and lacked strength. It fired the 7.62 x 54R cartridge. It would be replaced a few years.

The one success story for a self-loading rifle was in the United States. The U.S. Army had begun trials in the late 1920s for a replacement for the venerable Springfield ’03. Thompson, Pederson, Colt, Browning, Garand among others competed. The Pedersen T1 rifle using a 276 cartridge almost won. The Garand design won out in the end. Originally designed for the 7 x 51 mm cartridge, John Garand also worked on model that would take the .30-’06 cartridge. Gen. Douglas MacArthur was Army Chief of Staff approved the rifle in late 1935. The first rifles were delivered in 1937. There were some kinks to work out but about half of the U.S. Army had the M-1 Garand rifle by 1941.

M-1 Garand

The biggest problem with self-loading rifle development was the insistence on using over powerful cartridges. A shorter, intermediate cartridge would have been ideal, but militarys were wedded to their 1890s ammunition.

The 1930s saw a final flowering of the bolt action rifle. They were on the way to being obsolete with the self-loading rifle on the horizon, but some beautiful and ugly rifles came out at this time. The Soviets would produce a Mosin-Nagant carbine in the late 1930s.

The Hungarians produced the Mannlicher Model 35. It was very much in the trend of producing shorter versions of pre-existing rifles.

Hungarian M 35

The Italians and Japanese both used a 6.5 mm cartridge that lost power and penetration. The Italians opted to convert to a 7.35 mm cartridge. Unfortunately, Il Duce had spent lots of money on the war with Ethiopia and intervening in the Spanish Civil War. While some rifles of the new caliber were produced, those were given to rear-echelon troops. As John Gooch put it in Mussolini and His Generals:

‘Fascism was a command economy in which only commands were plentiful.”

That Japanese found the plains of Manchuria and Inner Mongolia were not conducive to their 6.5 mm cartridge. They attempted a conversion to the 7.7 mm but like the Italians was incomplete. Fighting wars is not conducive to changing cartridges.

The most bizarre bolt action rifle was the French MAS 36. It was a clunky looking rifle that fired a 7.5 x 54 mm cartridge. It did weigh a little less at 8.33 lbs. Apparently it was reliable and accurate. John Weeks has this to say about the MAS 36 in World War II Small Arms:

“It was one of the ugliest rifles ever to be made, and one of the least satisfactory to use, for the designer was more interested in the factory foreman than in the firer.”

MAS 36

As it was, the MAS 36 was used in small numbers in 1940. Most French infantrymen still carried the now ancient Lebel.

The British would go to war with the same Lee-Enfield as used in the First World War. The Wehrmacht would use the Mauser carbine. The infantryman was far down the list on priorities.

20th Century Small Arms: The Interwar Period published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

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J. Manfred Weichsel: Going Native and Other Stories

J. Manfred Weichsel has been a regular in the independent short fiction magazines that have sprung up in recent years. His short works have made the cut and graced the pages of Crisova, Fierce Tales, and Milhaven’s Tales of Wonder, and reading them back to back in an anthology like Going Native and Other Tales it is easy to see why. He writes with a fearlessness that goes beyond the safe and carefully prescribed limits of what passes for the counter-culture today. His works don’t so much touch upon third rails of the zeitgeist as they gleefully grab hold of them and let the energy flow through them. That’s not to say that these stories are preachy or heavy-handed, although the reader’s mileage may vary on the latter, but that they don’t shy away from considering well-established cultural norms from new perspectives.

Going Native includes six tales of fantasy and science fiction. All of the stories would have felt perfectly at home rubbing shoulders with the tales that once dominated short fiction magazines. They have the anything-goes attitude and the spirit of adventure that once characterized the sf/f genre before it became he playground of those reaching for serious literary acclaim. The stories feature a heavy dose of body-horror, the warning tale seldom seen theses days, and nightmare visions of alternate earths where our own world’s mistakes are amplified to a stomach-churning degree. The book is not without its flaws – Weichsel is an author whose career is in its infancy and at times it shows. The collection includes a few jarring word choices that don’t quite fit into the overall mood of the piece. That said, as the collection progresses, one can almost see the growth in his skill and an increasing comfort level with his voice. His authorial voice becomes stronger, the moods darker, and the plots more convoluted, and it’s rare to see such growth within the pages of a single volume.

Better yet, Weichsel writes with a daring willingness to experiment, and this volume reads like the outpouring of a man whose visions have been too long contained within his head. It’s a heady thing to be swept along on a journey like this, and his passion comes out in the stylistic choices he makes.

Consider “Complicit in Their Bondage” in which the controversies of today lead inexorably to a future that bears a curse strongly reminiscent of that seen in Jack Vance’s Dragon Masters. Whether its speculating on the roots of today’s discontent or speculating on the horrific bottom of a slippery slope, Wiechsel lays his vision out in a way that forces the reader to reconsider his own vision.

In “Alter-Ego” he follows in the footsteps of a Roger Zelazny or Philip K. Dick with the tale of a man who trusts his own judgement so little, he commits himself to a sanitarium. Once there, he finds the place hides a dark secret, and in the course of his investigation uncovers a mystery that revolves around himself. Or does it? The narrator of this piece struggles to understand who he is, even as dark forces and the inmates around him play havoc with the very concept of identity. Frankly, things got so convoluted that I couldn’t keep it all straight, but at no point did I ever doubt that the narrator himself had lost track of who did what to whom and where. The final confrontation revolves around a battle of wits, as all the best mysteries do, and results in the sort of satisfying conclusion that less brave authors would shy away from.

In the final analysis, if you want to read some of the most unusual and creative short fiction out there today, give Going Native a shot. It will introduce you to the sort of energetic experimentation that can only be found well outside the usual publishing houses that dominate the industry today. And keep the name J. Manfred Weichsel in mind – he’s an author that shows a lot of promise in this short volume, and you’re sure to be seeing a lot more of that name in the years to come.

J. Manfred Weichsel: Going Native and Other Stories published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

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Fantasy and Adventure New Releases, 27 April 2019

Fighter jocks, secret conspiracies, elemental academies and Cleopatra’s tomb all feature in this week’s roundup of the newest releases in fantasy and adventure.

Alt-Hero: Q #1: Where We Go One – Chuck Dixon and Helix Haze

When federal agent Roland Dane is sent to Peru to escort a U.S. Cabinet member, he has no reason to believe his assignment is connected in any way to his Treasury team’s recent bust of a ring of amateur counterfeiters. But when the Secretary of State and his entourage is unexpectedly attacked and the subsequent news reports of the attack bear no resemblance to the events he witnessed, Dane is forced to confront the shocking discovery that nothing in his world is quite what it appears to be.

Alt★Hero: Q is an incendiary comic series that explores the mysterious phenomenon of QAnon. Set in the Alt★Hero universe, the story is written by The Legend Chuck Dixon, the co-creator of Bane and the most prolific author in the history of comic books.

The Earth Awakens (Elemental Academy #2) – D. K. Holmberg

Having passed his first test at the Academy, most believe Tolan has proved he belongs. Only Tolan knows the truth: that his shaping required power from the borrowed bondar—and possibly from the elementals themselves. If he can’t find a way to shape without one, he’ll be expelled from the Academy.

When he intervenes to stop another attack on the city, he once again finds himself in the middle of the battle between Terndahl and the Draasin Lord. Worse, because of his continued reliance on the bondars, he begins to fear he might be responsible for releasing elementals.

Another test approaches. For him to remain at the Academy, he must find real power within himself, but a greater challenge distracts him. With increased attacks on the city, Tolan might be the only one to know what they’re after—and how to stop them.

Lions of the Sky – Paco Chierici

Sam Richardson is a fighter pilot’s pilot,i a reluctant legend with a gut-eating secret. He is in the last span of his tour as an instructor, yearning to get back to the real action of the Fleet, when he is ordered to take on one last class—a class that will force him to confront his carefully quarantined demons.

Brash, carefree, and naturally gifted, Keely Silvers is the embodiment of all that grates on him. After years of single-minded dedication, she and her classmates can see the finish line. They are months away from achieving their life-long dream, flying Navy F/A-18 fighters. They are smart and hard-working, but they’re just kids with expensive new toys. They’re eager to rush through training and escape to the freedom of the world beyond, a world they view as a playground full of fast jets and exotic locales.

But Sam knows there is a darker side to the profession he loves. There is trouble brewing in the East with global implications. If they make it past him they will be cast into a dangerous world where enemy planes cruise the skies over the South China Sea like sharks, loaded with real weapons and hidden intentions.

The Lost War – Karl Gallagher

It was supposed to be a weekend of costumed fun. Instead these medieval historical reenactors are flung into a wilderness by magic they don’t understand. They must struggle to survive and deal with monsters who consider them prey . . . or worse.

“Karl Gallagher’s first production, the Torchship Trilogy, was good enough so that I read and reread it. He has now turned his hand from science fiction to fantasy.” – Professor David D. Friedman, Professor, Santa Clara University, also known as Duke Cariadoc of the Bow, KSCA, OL, OP, founder of the Pennsic War.

“Highly recommended for those who enjoy watching a group fighting for their own survival on a sticks-and-stones level of technology in a brand-new world which has magic (and to make it more interesting some in the group are becoming magic users themselves)!”–Amazon Reader Review

The King’s Enemies (The Henchmen Chronicles #5) – Craig Halloran

In the final inning Abraham must shut the enemy out or die.

The invasion begins with an enemy the likes the people of Titanuus have never imagined. Armed modern weaponry, diabolical forces muster at the Kingsland border wall, while savage barbarian forces called the Gond, secretly lay siege upon the House of Steel.

With the Crown of Stones incomplete and the king slipping into madness more treachery bears fruit as former alliances are broken and old enemies rise again.

Outgunned and overmatched, Abraham Jenkins, must use his wits and sword to bring the enemy down before the curtain closes and he is trapped dead or alive in Titanuus forever.

Savage Sword of Conan: The Original Marvel Years Omnibus Vol. 1 – presented by Marvel Comics

Crom! This inaugural volume ushers in Marvel’s line of definitive Savage Sword of Conan collections. Full-color covers, letters pages, pinups, extensive articles and reviews on Conan, his world and his creator -everything’s included just as no one is spared the vengeance of Conan! After the breakout success of Conan’s color comic, Marvel brought the legendary sword-and-sorcery saga of Robert E. Howard’s hero to its black-and-white magazine line. In lushly illustrated novel-length adventures with all the drama, violence and allure the comic book medium can off er, writer Roy Thomas and Marvel’s greatest artists craft a host of Conan classics like Barry Windsor-Smith’s “Red Nails” and John Buscema’s “Black Colossus” and “A Witch Shall Be Born” featuring the infamous Tree of Death are just the beginning!

COLLECTING: SAVAGE TALES (1971) 1-5; SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN (1974) 1-12, SPECIAL (1975) 1

Tomb of the Queen (Jo Bennett Archaeological Mysteries #2) – Kristi Belcamino and Nick Thacker

Jo Bennett, fresh off her incredible discovery of a temple full of snakes hidden in an Arizona desert cave, wants to answer the question that’s been plaguing her for her entire life:

Where is Cleopatra’s tomb?

She’s idolized Cleopatra since she was a girl, following in her mother’s footsteps. Now she has the career and education to back her up, as well as her small team of close friends.

But she’s not the only one looking for Cleopatra…

And whoever finds her first will control a fortune, as well as something even more sinister…

Uncanny Collateral (Valkyrie Collections #1) – Brian McClellan

Alek Fitz is a reaper, a collection agent who works for the supernatural elements of the world, tracking down debtors and solving problems for clients as diverse as the Lords of Hell, vampires, Haitian loa, and goblins. He’s even worked for the Tooth Fairy on occasion. Based out of Cleveland, Ohio, Alek is the best in the game. As a literal slave to his job, he doesn’t have a choice.

When Death comes looking for someone to track down a thief, Alek is flung into a mess of vengeful undead, supernatural bureaucracy, and a fledgling imp war. As the consequences of failure become dire, he has few leads, and the clock is ticking. Only with the help of his friend Maggie—an ancient djinn with a complex past—can he hope to recover the stolen property, save the world, and just maybe wring a favor out of the Great Constant himself.

It’s a hell of a job, but somebody’s got to do it . . .

A Witch in Time (The Halflife Chronicles #5) – Wm. Mark Simmons

Years back, a blood transfusion with a member of the undead left Christopher Cséjthe a half-vampire. Since that time, he’s gone mano y monster with zombies, werewolves, master vampires, and creatures from the Cthulhu Lagoon—not to mention an immortal Nazi, an ancient Babylonian demon, a six-thousand-year-old necromancer, voodoo queen Marie Laveau, the mad monk Rasputin, and a couple of the Great Old Ones.

As founder of After Dark Investigations, he’s seen his fair share of the seedy side of the supernatural world. He’s saved New Orleans from total destruction in the past. And lost his family to another temporal realm. To add insult to injury, someone cut the gas line of his SUV and then ran over him with a semi-truck while he tried to get a tow. But this is the third time Chris has died.

It’s old hat at this point for him. Now, awakened in a world he doesn’t quite recognize, he’ll have to use his wits to once again keep the supernatural world at bay. INTERPOL is interested in some of his associations with Vlad Drakul’s grandson—better known as Dracula—and a trio of witches from Greek myth want him dead—and for good this time.

Bad enough. But what’s worse is that the IRS is looking into his tax returns and not at all liking what they find. Now that’s really terrifying.

Fantasy and Adventure New Releases, 27 April 2019 published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

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The Truth About Your Prep

A few weeks ago, I got all ranty on Twitter about something I am calling Prep-Shaming. It is that thing when someone brags to you or just to the world about how little their prep for their game was. It always sounds something like this, “It took you four hours to prep that game, I prep my game in 5 min with six words I write on a Post-It ™ note.”

Here is a secret from the guy who wrote the book on Prep (seriously look over to the right, its right over there)…

It does not matter how much or how little you prep.*

What matters is did you run a great game for you and your players?

There. That.

Why is there an asterisk? Well, there is one caveat, which I will get to in a little bit.

But first, let’s talk about prep.

What Is Prep?

Most people will say that prep contains your notes, monster stats, clues, etc that you need when you run your game. They are only partly right. Sure we put those things in there, sometimes we put too many things in, sometimes we put the wrong things in there. But all we have established is what prep IS. We need to understand what prep does, before we define what it is, to us.

Prep is what we need to feel confident enough to run a session of whatever game you are playing.

Prep is short for being prepared. If you are prepared to run your game, then it means you are confident enough to run your game. Does that mean the game will be good? No. Prep does not determine a good game. Your GMing and the players will determine that.

But if you are confident and relaxed because the Prep you did has you prepared to run your game, then the chances of a good game are much higher than if you are stressed and freezing up because you can’t find the Dragon Grappling rules.

The Size of Your Prep

Ok. So now that we know that prep is the thing that we use to make us confident to run a game, we can start fresh and figure out what should go into it.

Never Unprepared does a good job of talking about this, so I will sum it up. Put into your prep the things that as a GM you are not going to be able to do off the top of your head as the game is unfolding. That may be maps, or monster stats, clues, key dialog, rules for swimming in armor, etc. Don’t put things in your prep that you are good at, let your brain take care of those.

Also, different games need different prep. A Powered by the Apocalypse game requires a small amount of prep, but a complicated investigation in Gumshoe will likely require more.

In the 36 years I have been gaming, my prep for a single 4-hour session has varied from 15-20 pages to 1…

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So, in the end, your prep will be whatever size you need it to be. In the 36 years I have been gaming, my prep for a single 4-hour session has varied from 15-20 pages to 1, but one thing remained constant. No matter how big or how small, I was confident when I got to the table. That allowed me to focus on running good games.

So don’t let anyone prep-shame you about your prep, and don’t compare you prep to anyone else. Your prep is for you alone.

What about that asterisk?

Oh right. That asterisk, we should talk about the caveat about how big your prep is.

Your prep is only ever the wrong size if you can’t prep your game in the time between games, and that is causing you to not feel so confident at the table — or worse, causing you to cancel games because you are not ready.

So if you are playing weekly and writing 10 pages of prep, and you can do that every week, then you are doing fine. But if you are playing weekly and you can’t always get those 10 pages done, then you need to change something.

You have a few things you can change:

The frequency of your game. You can move your game from weekly to bi-weekly and increase the time between sessions to get your prep done.

Change games. You can change the game you are running to something that requires less prep.

You can get supplemental material to aid your prep. You can buy maps, magic items, or other things on DriveThruRPG, and use them rather than make them yourself.

You can reduce what you prep. You can figure out what other things you can eliminate from your prep, based on what you can handle in your head. I wrote a series of articles years ago called Prep-Lite that detail some of this, and it’s in Never Unprepared as well.

As your life changes, your free time to prep is going to grow and shrink. Additional responsibilities such as children, advanced degrees, gig work, etc are all going to shrink your free time each day, and your prep will get crunched.

How you solve that problem is up to you. Often its a combination of the things listed. For me, when my kids were born, I eventually did three of the four things. I started by changing my games from weekly to bi-weekly. Then I started to reduce my prep. Eventually, I changed to games that were more improv in nature and supported lower amounts of prep.

Keep On Prepping

Your prep is a personal thing. It is made by you, for you, to use to run awesome games. Do not fall for the trap that your prep has to be like anyone else’s. It needs to be what you need it to be. The most important thing is that you get to the game and behind the screen feeling confident and ready to have a great time with your players.

Over time our lives change and we often have to adapt in order to keep that confident feeling at the table. Sometimes that means that we have to change our prep and hone it to be more concise.

To paraphrase a popular saying, “you prep you.”

Tell me how your prep has changed over time. Share some details, but no prep-shaming.

The Truth About Your Prep published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

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Short Reviews – The Green Dream, by Bryce Walton

The Green Dream, by Bryce Walton, appeared in the Winter 1949 issue of Planet Stories. It can be read here at Archive.org.

Even though I took Walton to task for his 5-point letter on illogical themes in STF, I’ve got to admit that between Savage Galahad and The Green Dream, I’m fairly impressed by his ability to convey the alien and the weird.

In The Green Dream, drug lord Owen Baarslag is accompanied by a strange alien girl, Joha, on his quest for revenge.

Owen is quite a heel:

To the Tellurian colonists scattered minutely through the rich area of Sector 5, Owen Baarslag was an unspeakable obscenity. A degenerate derelict; an abnormal who had “gone native” and things even more despicable. A Stith addict who eked out a precarious existence in the most polluted occupation known: that of forcing the timid Venusian swamp natives to harvest the meagre crops of aukweed from the lake bottoms.

He wasn’t always, though. He was once a scientist, quite brilliant, actually, until he was outlawed by the academy. Owen forever harbors a grudge against his twin brother, Albert, also a brilliant scientist, who was the one who turned in the very psyche eval that condemned him.

Owen has plotted an exacting revenge that involves murdering his twin brother and taking his place in his greatest accomplishment: entering the Time-Encystment chamber which will allow him to jump 500 years into the future with all of his brother’s fame and accolades, leaving his past disgrace behind him.

Needless to say, this isn’t going to work out how he plans.

The most fascinating part of the story, where Walton really shines, is in Owen’s relationship to the alien girl, Joha. Owen’s sickly dependence upon her, her hatred for him, and how it manifests, and how it leads to his undoing is brilliantly handled. Plus, Walton succeeds in making her really weird!

Don’t forget! The Illustrated Stark 70th Anniversary Edition of Leigh Brackett’s Queen of the Martian Catacombs is out from Cirsova Publishing next Tuesday!

Short Reviews – The Green Dream, by Bryce Walton published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

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John Boyle: The Queen’s Heir

John is a long time supporter and commentator of the CH blog and during a discussion concerning elves he mentioned his version of elves (albeit peripheral to his storyline) in his Children of Khetar series. I ended up ordering a copy after I found out the book was set among the Hittites in the mists of prehistory.

I’ll admit up front, and some positive reviews to include a 5 star review on Amazon agree, the story is slow in getting started. I found the first couple of chapters hard going as every paragraph served to build the back story and book’s universe. The reader that plows through, takes the information onboard, and gets to the adventure will be well rewarded. When interviewing John I mentioned my initial difficulty and the Q&A on the next page will reveal there reasons behind the detailed opening chapters.

By the way, if you are interested in elves, John reveals that they will play a prominent role in the third book.

Q&A on the next page.

Scott Cole: Are you following historical themes or is the Queen’s Heir universe mostly a John Boyle creation?

John Boyle: My fantasy stories are set in an alternate Earth where Plato’s story of Atlantis is true, which used to be fairly common backstory material. Queen’s Heir is set in Khetar (the Egyptian name for the Hittite homeland in what is now Turkey) and begins the story of how a band of faithful followers helped King Mursilith (or Mursili) I to his throne. The protagonist of most of the books in the series is Joran Kingsword, one of the leaders of this band and eventually King Mursillith’s right-hand man. The historical King Mursillith I reigned between 1556-1526 BC and had enough military muscle to sack Babylon. He shows up as the character Silmurth Sharpspear in the first book. To give you a point of reference, 1500 BC is about 100 years before the birth of Moses; not only is there no Christianity, there isn’t even any Mosaic Law and this world is a very dark place in many ways.

There is powerful magic in this world, and beings who pass themselves off as deities (they’re not) but as time goes by the use of iron and the spread of humanity will force the world to change. Around the time of the Siege of Troy (circa 1250 BC) there will be a big war between the elder races that uses magic powerful enough to change the face of Europe and kill most of the non-human races or force them to flee through magic gates to other worlds. By the time the world recovers, it looks much like we know it did by about 700 BC but in 1550 BC it is still a very strange and dangerous place. The glaciers haven’t finished melting, so the sea levels are lower, magic has enabled the presence of dragons and dinosaurs but worst of all there are some very powerful magics in the hands of some very ambitious people, both human and non-human, and it doesn’t bode well.

So, in answer to your question: No, but eventually Yes.

SC: I noted the strong female characters, to include many fighters that were influential in Joren’s early life. Are the female warriors written for modern sensibilities or a call back to the Amazon legends or even the earth goddess mysteries?.

JB: This started out as a game-related influence; when I started writing the stories that became the basis for my books, it was the early 80’s and people made game systems that didn’t recognize the differences between male and female physiques. It was dumb, but that is the way it was then and there are gatekeepers looking to enforce that policy today; so this wasn’t a sop, it was what was expected. However, that didn’t mean that I can’t use my own ideas to explain it. Much of what you see in the matriarchies on the human side DOES come from my knowledge of pre-historic earth goddess cults, ie The Great Mother: Maiden-Matron-Crone, the use of axes (labyrs), giant snakes as temple guardians and so forth.

On an individual basis, none of my female human characters are going to be as good or better a warrior than a man without paying a hefty price. The women of the Red Hunters aren’t human anymore, human warrior women who are as big and as strong as a man are the subject/victims of enchantments that either drive them insane or reduce their fertility to almost 0% and kill them outright if they give birth or reach the age of 40. .

SC: Any game influences to look out for like D&D?

JB: You asked about the possible influence of D&D or other games; well, I don’t really know much about Dungeons & Dragons, but I was heavily influenced by the work of Greg Stafford and Steve Perrin after meeting them in the late 70’s and Sandy Petersen as well. I did some writing for Chaosium Inc., small pieces for the RuneQuest and Stormbringer game systems and the influence of Stafford’s Glorantha runs through Queen’s Heir. I took the idea for the general framework of my world from a book called The Sword of Rhiannon, by Leigh Brackett. When I went looking for a society to hang from that framework, I remembered something Greg Stafford once wrote about the Hittites and I looked them over and was drawn by the phrase “The Thousand Gods of the Hittites” (some sources say 10,000, the Hittites mention gods everywhere and often give nothing more than their names).

The Hittite nation was located between Babylon and what would later become Greece, and was a military rival to Egypt; it was influenced by all three cultures and any story I told in that setting could draw upon a wealth of sources: perfect. The Hittite deities were a mix of godlings; some were much like greek gods from classical mythology, some were very babylonian and others seemed unique. That was a great fit for the stories I wanted to tell and I choose the Hittites as the background nation for much of what happens in The Children of Khetar series. So if anyone is looking for a game that has influenced my novels, they should think in terms of RuneQuest rather than Dungeons & Dragons.

SC: How do you describe your approach to fantasy writing in this book?

JB: Hmm. I just wanted to write a story that entertains my readers without rubbing SEX in their faces. I was born in the 1950’s and it seems like what I remember of my childhood and youth happened in a different world. I remember reading books by the authors listed in Gygax’s Appendix N as a simple matter of course, everyone did. I was also influenced by artists who drew the great serials that were published in the Sunday papers: Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon), Burne Hogarth (Tarzan of the Apes) and especially Hal Foster (Prince Valiant). Those artists and authors such as Tolkien, Howard, Burroughs, Merritt, Mundy and Brackett have all influenced the books I’ve written (and hopefully will write on down the line) and they managed to entertain people without the use of rape or sex acts on every other page.

The most common criticism of my books is that there is no sex; considering that the first two books are stories told by a grandfather to one of his granddaughters, I’m going to continue to disappoint some people.

SC: I understand that originally, you wrote this as a short story but had to significantly expand it before you could get anyone interested in publishing it.

JB: Yes, I had written a short story that was published by Issaries Inc in the game Hero Wars back around 2000. It got enough positive feedback that Greg Stafford (who passed away in October of 2018) made me an offer to turn the short story into a novel. Greg was getting out of the business of publishing fiction, so I was to write the novel, have it reviewed by him for accuracy and then I was to shop it to a publisher. This was at the end of 2001 or beginning of 2002 and when I did a survey of a few publishers I found that they were looking for a minimum of 100,000 words for manuscripts from an unknown like me. It’s one thing to write a short story of 15k words; it’s something else to stretch that into a 100k word plus novel. It took me longer than I expected.

SC: I have a question on Byzantium mentioned in your book. I’m guessing it is a precursor from the time before the great upheaval to the small Greek colony (circus 600 something BC) that eventually grew into Constantinople?

JB: Yes, if you are familiar with Greek myth, you will remember that King Minos is served by a brilliant inventor, Daedalus. I mentioned him in the first book and he returns in the third book. It was he who designed many of the wonders of my version of Byzantium and it is Daedalus who hides copies of his blueprints in secret caches so that the Dark Age he foresees does not destroy the city he loves forever. He has a workshop/office atop the great statue of Byzan that dominates the harbor of Byzantium in my world. Daedalus makes an appearance in the third book in the series: Dragon’s Kiss.

SC: What can the reader expect in Part II and how far along are you with Part III?

JB: Part II is the novel Raven’s Blood, which I published in January of 2019 through Amazon. It follows Joran in his flight from the city of Byzantium and his adventures among the peoples at the western end of the Great Sea: the daughter colonies of Phoenicia, the fabled kingdom of Tartessos in western Iberia and the feudal lords and sorcerers who dominate what will become Gaul and Britannia. He learns a great deal about waging war, knowledge he will need to drive the Empire of the White Sun from his homeland. There is more action than in the first book, everything from alley fights to pitched battles, and brushes with sirrush dragons, ghouls and the Lupaku, the wolf people who have a blood feud with Joran’s family. He also learns that there is something about him that attracts supernatural creatures, up to and including Vitharr, the Norse god of Vengeance.

Part III is titled Dragon’s Kiss and is about 10% done; I hope to have it published by the end of the year. It includes Joran peripherally, but puts the focus on Belkara and her efforts to build up a base of power for her and her mate while laying the groundwork for putting the rightful king of Khetar on his throne. There will be a lot of politics and magic to go with the fighting in this book with most of the book taking place in Byzantium. That is the book where the elves of my fictional world will make their appearance; rather than the soulless creatures you find in traditional literature, they have more in common with the Tuatha De Danann of Irish Myth.

Scott, I would like to thank you, not only for giving me time and space to talk about my books, but also for the work you do for Wargame Wednesday at the Castalia House blog. There is always something of interest; that link you posted for Obscure Battles website was a great idea!

SC: Thank you and I think I can speak for all CH bloggers in that we appreciate the readers and those that provide comments, feedback and criticism.

John Boyle: The Queen’s Heir published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

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swipestream · 5 years

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Wargame Wednesday: 24 April Post

Today’s WW post is over at the WW Blog. Topic is the 424th Infantry Regiment’s short but eventful war plus Col. Tom Riggs’s story. He was in command of the 81st Engineers, manning the last line of defense before the Germans smashed through and captured St. Vith’s vital crossroads. They also captured Tom Riggs but his war was not over yet. He wound up in a prison camp in Poland, escaped and was picked up by the Red Army.

Wargame Wednesday: 24 April Post published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

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swipestream · 5 years

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Monster of the Week Tome of Mysteries Review

Powered by the Apocalypse games have been a major force in the RPG hobby for years, but it took me a while to fully understand how they really worked. One of the first Powered by the Apocalypse games that helped me to understand the concept, as a whole, was Monster of the Week. Given that it was also a game about one of my favorite genres, the text of the game really spoke to me.

An interesting aspect of the product that I’m looking at today is that I saw various bits and pieces of it take shape in the Monster of the Week Roadhouse, a Google+ community for fans of the game. Monster of the Week Tome of Mysteries is a little bit of everything, and serves as a supplement to the core rules of the game. It contains new rules, playbooks, advice, and mysteries.

Now that we’ve scoped out the location, let’s find out what we’re dealing with.

The Tome Itself

This review is based on the PDF of the product, which is 278 pages long. The PDF has a full-color cover, with black and white artwork throughout. The formatting is the same single column setup of the core rules, with bolded headers in a different font than the regular text, making it easy to follow the information on each page. There are several full-page illustrations marking the individual sections of the book.

Foreword

Often, the Foreword is just a brief set of comments that flow right into the introduction, but I wanted to specifically call out the foreword in this book, because in addition to reflecting on the history and creation of the game, it is written in a manner similar to the moves in the game, and is one of the most on-point forewords I have read in an RPG product.

Rules

The next section in the book contains new alternate rules that can be implemented in a Monster of the Week game. These include the following:

Alternate Weird Basic Moves

Phenomena Mysteries

Special Moves

More Flexible Investigations

Monster of the Week is based on tropes established by monster hunting television shows over the years, and in most of those shows, the heroes are capable of performing various rituals when the plot calls for it. Alternatively, they can tinker with super science to do what needs to be done in a more science fiction-based monster hunting story. These are represented in the current rules with the “Use Magic” move.

The alternate weird moves introduce a more granular approach to hunters and how they do that “something special.” A character that doesn’t take use magic as the thing that “makes them weird” can still perform magic, but it’s more difficult and has more consequences. In exchange, they get the ability to choose one of the following options:

Empath (reading emotions)

Illuminated (connected to a secret conspiracy)

No limits (pushing beyond physical limits)

Past lives (remembering past lives at convenient times)

Sensitive (minor psychic abilities)

Telekinesis (moving things with your mind)

Trust your gut (getting hunches to act on without formal investigation)

Use magic (the default from the core rules)

Weird science (kind of like use magic, but explicitly with scientific trappings)

What is interesting about these moves is that they serve to “customize” playbooks in a way that goes beyond the options for the individual characters. You can have a wronged that will never think of touching magic but has trust your guts, and they will seem very different than one that gets flashes of past lives to guide them on their quest for vengeance. Although I have always loved how flexible the use magic rules are in the game, I’m really interested to see the freshness that some of these options may add to a playbook that has seen a lot of use over time.

Also in this section is a discussion of “phenomenon” mysteries, mysteries where the hunters aren’t trying to stop a specific kind of monster, but rather, they are trying to reverse some adverse supernatural effect plaguing an area. These call back to shows like Fringe that feel very much like a monster of the week style show, but the weirdness isn’t a monster, but a device or cross-dimensional rift. It also models television programs like Eureka or Warehouse 13. This section includes phenomenon types, threat moves, and modified questions for investigating a phenomenon.

Many of the playbooks in the game include a move that triggers when Luck is spent, and there is a section of the new rules dedicated to making sure that all of the playbooks (including some of the expanded playbooks available online, and the new ones included in this book) also have moves that trigger when Luck is used.

The section on more flexible investigations is one that I know some of my players would have appreciated. It is a discussion on making the investigate a mystery move results a little less rigid, for when players have questions they want to have answered that don’t fit into the assumed template.

Overall, I’m really interested to see everything in the section at play at the table.

New Hunters

The next section of the book introduces new playbooks to the game. The new hunters include:

The Gumshoe (a regular private eye caught up in supernatural cases)

The Hex (a general magical practitioner, more flexible than The Spooky or Spellslinger)

The Pararomantic (a hunter with a romantic tie to a monster or supernatural creature)

The Searcher (someone that has become a hunter after a brush with the unknown)

The Gumshoe draws on a lot of different private investigator tropes, even beyond the monster hunting genre, and revolves around following a specific code. The Hex is based around creating custom use magic moves and turning them into predictable rotes. The Pararomantic has a special track for determining the path of the relationship and the fate of the playbook’s significant other. The Searcher gets slightly different abilities based on the encounter that first introduced them to the supernatural (for example, if they saw Bigfoot, or if they were abducted by aliens).

It is interesting to see how some of these playbooks encompass an aspect of characters that served as the basis for other playbooks. For example, Harry Dresden is almost as much Gumshoe (at least early on) as he is Spellslinger, and Buffy is both The Chosen One and a Pararomantic in early seasons. Beyond playing the playbooks “straight,” it is interesting to see what kind of customization might come from taking advanced moves to access bits and pieces of these.

On their own, I like all of these, although the Hex feels the fuzziest. I think there is definitely a space for a dedicated spellcaster that isn’t as flashy as The Spellslinger or as touched with potential ruin as The Spooky, but I’m not as excited as I should be over customized use magic moves being the core conceit of the playbook.

Advice

The Advice section is a series of individual essays on various topics that touch on Monster of the Week specifically, and more broadly, on urban fantasy tropes and running games in different environments.

Some articles are more about topics like convention games, one-on-one gaming, sub-genres like gothic horror, less structured games, and the intersection between monster hunting and kids on bikes. Other articles are more specific to the game itself, introducing moves for things like spellbooks.

This section has some of the most specific language about safety in the book, which is not so much a separate section, as interspersed into discussions on other topics. The rules on spellbooks can be carved up rather than used whole, but the advice that really jumped out at me involved the advice on running at conventions, which has very detailed discussions on timelines and how to pace a game, and the detailed checklists of items to introduce at various stages of a mystery that appears in the article on less structured games.

Mysteries

There are almost thirty mysteries that are outlined in the final section of the book. These involve concepts, hooks, the countdown (the developments that will happen if the hunters don’t intervene), monsters, and in some cases, custom moves.

This section is a good resource, not only for mysteries to run, but to see how mysteries should be structured, how custom moves can play into them, and for monsters that can be cut and pasted into other mysteries. I am especially fond of The Circles, a mystery that puts a spin on crop circles and utilizes a classic monster in a way that really feels like an episode of the source material. The Curse-Speech is an attention grabber, utilizing a migrating evil language as one of the plot hooks. Everybody Get Psycho is another favorite, as it has a great twist on the classic trope of a cursed object and heavy metal music. The Quiet is a creepy, cult focused mystery with a great custom move and lots of atmosphere. By no means are these the only mysterious I would recommend checking out, but these are some of my favorites, that walk the line between calling back to great tropes while doing something fun and different with how the plot might advance.

Because the concept of “Monster of the Week” is very broad and can cover a wide range of stories, there is a great deal of variety in this section. Some, like the opening mystery, are a little bit too gonzo for me. Time travel and futuristic AIs push a little outside of my comfort zone for expected Monster of the Week stories. I also know that for my own tastes, homages that are a little too on the nose aren’t my favorites.

There is a wide variety of authors on these mysteries, so I don’t think this was a conscious design decision, but a few too many of the mysteries veered into very traditional roles for women in horror scenarios (vengeful spirits from relationships, witches tampering with powers beyond their control, etc.). No individual mystery is especially insensitive in how it utilizes these tropes, but similar tropes become a recurring factor. I also would have liked a content warning for the issues dealt with in the various mysteries at the beginning.

Those disclaimers in place, there is a ton of material to use, either for a quick night of play or to pull bits and pieces from to construct other mysteries. There is a lot of material here to use for resources.

Successful Hunt

The material in this book is equally suited to add excitement and variety for veterans of the game, and to give someone brand new to the genre plenty of tools to work with.

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The material in this book is equally suited to add excitement and variety for veterans of the game, and to give someone brand new to the genre plenty of tools to work with. While it’s a great resource for Monster of the Week, the material in this book is also a great resource for urban fantasy games in general, along with some really strong advice for convention games.

Out of Luck

The book is very strong, but if you aren’t a fan of gonzo or obvious pop culture references, some of the mysteries may not be as useful to you. A few too many mysteries lean heavily on some specific roles for women, and individually these are fine, but it is a bit of a recurring, if unintentional, theme. Safety, as well as appropriate topics for individual tables, is discussed, but not specifically called out in their own section of the book.

Recommended — If the product fits in your broad area of gaming interests, you are likely to be happy with this purchase.

I think this is going to be a solid purchase, not only for anyone that is already interested in Monster of the Week, but for anyone that wants more material to build on for monster hunting and urban fantasy stories. There is a lot going on in this book, and so much of it provides a solid basis for telling stories at the table, as well as best practices for setting up those games.

Do you have a favorite monster hunting scenario that you have played through? A particularly fun twist that your group experienced? We want to hear from you in the comments below, so please let us know what you think.

Monster of the Week Tome of Mysteries Review published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

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swipestream · 5 years

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4 Funky Fungi to Liven Up Your Game (And A Few Ways To Use Them)—Part 1 of 2

This is as pretty as mushrooms get. Fair warning: it’s all a horror show from here on out. Image Courtesy of Pixabay.com

Beneath the soil they wait, oozing digestive juices to liquefy and absorb any edible material hapless enough to fall in their path. Silently, patiently, they spread hidden tendrils thinner than a hair under the ground, linking threads to form an invisible net below the feet of the hapless humanoids lumbering above them. Relentlessly, they burrow through the ground. Growing, consuming, they bide their time over months, years, centuries, even millennia until the time arrives that they burst through the ground, hurling copies of themselves into the air and preparing to begin the cycle once more.

Sure, this is a workable description of any number of ancient evils in fantasy gaming, but it’s also a pretty solid way of talking about the fungi you probably have in the patch of ground nearest to you right now. What we think of as “mushrooms” are really only formed by a small fraction of fungal species;

…in fact, the “mushrooms” that we see are just the mechanism by which fungi spread. This means that Toad from Super Mario Brothers, myconids from D&D, and any other mushroom creatures you can think of are just ambulatory reproductive organs, and the Smurfs village is basically a scene from a Saw movie.

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in fact, the “mushrooms” that we see are just the mechanism by which fungi spread. This means that Toad from Super Mario Brothers, myconids from D&D, and any other mushroom creatures you can think of are just ambulatory reproductive organs, and the Smurfs village is basically a scene from a Saw movie.

The majority of the “body” of a fungus is its mycelium (yes, like the network in Star Trek), which grows out in all directions, seeking food and forming a network within the soil. This underground network exists in nearly all areas with vegetative life, and in addition to decomposing materials that would otherwise pile up, it is used by plants as a kind of external digestive system, forming a symbiotic relationship whereby plants can gather food and nutrients that they can’t reach with their own root systems. There is even evidence that this network of fungi is also used in a form analogous to communication between plants, forming what is sometimes called (and I could not possibly be more delighted to tell you this) a “wood-wide web”.

Until around 1960, fungi were considered to be plants — which makes sense; they grow from something that looks like seeds, and they don’t move on their own. However, later science determined that they were much more closely related to animals, just completely immobile and without any sort of muscle tissue — which really makes me wonder whether I might technically be a fungus. They store energy as glycogen (like animals) rather than starch (like plants), and their cells are given rigidity not by plant-based materials like cellulose but instead by chitin, the same material that makes up the exoskeletons of insects like cockroaches. Yum!

Fungi can be medicinal or poisonous or delicious (or sometimes a combination of any two of those things), and the difference between a good dinner and an early grave is sometimes a matter of how they’re prepared. Indigestible or poisonous mushrooms can be rendered edible (or at least less harmful) by any number of techniques. I’m not going to go into more detail than that because a) this is the Internet, and no one should try to do this kind of thing based on the advice of an RPG blog, and b) even if that were a good idea, I’m the absolute last person who should be giving that kind of instruction. With that in mind…

Warning: mushrooms can kill you.

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Warning: mushrooms can kill you, just like they were rumored to have killed the Roman emperor Claudius, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, Pope Clement VII, and the composer Johann Schobert. And that’s just some of the famous people. About seven people per year die of mushroom poisoning in the U.S, and hundreds more are made seriously ill. Even though there are pictures in this article, and for the most part I tried to find reasonable approximations of what the fungi in question looked like, this is not an identification guide. I can’t even match my socks in the morning, and I can barely avoid killing my family when I cook for them even when I don’t use potentially poisonous ingredients — do not take anything I say as adequate reason to put these things in your mouth.

However, describing such things is not only safe, but extremely cool. And with that in mind, I present to you 8 Funky Fungi To Liven Up Your Game (And A Few Ways To Use Them).

Mind-Controlling Ant Fungus (ophiocordyceps unilateralis)

Strangely, the animated “Antz” movie left this scene on the cutting room floor. Is that reference dated? I feel like that reference is dated now. Oh, well. Look it up.

By itself, there’s nothing especially new or interesting about a fungal infection. If you’re alive, which I assume most of you reading this are, you are already host to a dizzying array of fungi, yeasts, and other creatures that call you home. They’re like roommates (good or bad). They do their thing to varying degrees of intrusiveness and stink. You also do your thing, and if you’re too incompatible, one or the other of you gets evicted. Cordyceps is more like that friend who visits from out of town and suddenly surprise! They’re moving to your city and need a place to stay. First they start eating all the food out of your fridge, then they start making demands, and before you know it, they’re trying to hollow you out and turn your body into a nutrient paste they can use for reproduction. Which is not, in fact, something that everyone does, Harold.

This particular species of Cordyceps infects carpenter ants, and then even while eating them alive, hijacks the nervous and muscular system of the ant, forcing it to travel to an appropriate piece of plant cover, climb to the ideal elevation for reproduction, clamp on to the grass with their mandibles, and then die. The fungus continues to spread within the ant, before eventually sprouting out of the long-dead husk and throwing its spores to the wind, beginning the cycle all over again. Some scientists think that the ants may be cognitively unaffected during all of this, and that the mechanism is actually a little less like mind control, and a little more like being controlled like an agonized marionette from within. Nature is amazing.

Potential Game Use:

A prodigal son from a local farming community finally returned, but the day after his tearful homecoming, he wandered into the woods and disappeared, only to be found again a week later dead, hollowed out, and filled with a mysterious powdery substance that creates a powerful feeling of well-being when inhaled, even accidentally. The heroes have been called in to investigate the case, as local law enforcement has no idea what is going on.

At first, all signs point to a horrible drug deal gone bad, until the characters find several locals attempting (and maybe succeeding) in stealing the mysterious powder, claiming that they feel compelled to share with their friends and family. “Addicts” at first violently resist any attempts to prevent them from taking or spreading this powder, eventually becoming a kind of hive mind that exhales spores onto the PCs. If not helped, the entire village will die in agony, possibly spreading the infection to other nearby areas.

In such a story, there are plenty of opportunities for medical or nature rolls (to determine the nature of the illness or the drug), social rolls (to determine that individuals are being non-magically mind-controlled) and constitution-type rolls to avoid infection. Potential solutions include spells curing disease, exotic alchemical reagents, introducing another fungal or bacterial species to counteract the infection, and good old-fashioned fire (for games that tend to be a little darker in tone).

Candy Cap Mushrooms (lactarius rubidus)

Sure; when a mushroom hunter finds something on the ground that tastes like maple syrup, they’re “nature-loving” and “exploratory,” but when I do it I’m “too old to still be doing this kind of thing” and “need to put on pants.”

Edible mushrooms, by themselves, aren’t all that much to write home about (unless “home” has a mycologist, in which case you should definitely write home to make sure you’re eating the right ones). Edible mushrooms that make for a workable ice cream flavor start to get a little more interesting. Where lactarius rubidus gets really fun though, is after the initial consumption. When dried and then reconstituted, this mushroom tastes like maple syrup (because, it turns out, it produces the same chemical that is used to make maple syrup flavoring—now who’s being unnatural, Canada?). The real magic happens later, when the sweat and tears of people who eat the mushroom start to smell like maple syrup as well. It’s like someone with more imagination than impulse control stumbled across a wish-granting leprechaun and demanded a combination of dessert and cologne, and I’ll be darned if the little guy didn’t make it work.

Potential Game Use:

The characters are invited to a feast by a local fae noble. Because interactions with faeries in folklore and fiction are one part entertainment to three parts weaponized manners, eventually, a character is going to insult someone. To keep this adventure from feeling too “on the rails,” feel free to use a character loosely associated with the fae whom the PCs have insulted or irritated previously. For a little foreshadowing fun, include some sort of massively dangerous but largely mindless beast in a cage, leashed or otherwise bound near the tables as the characters eat. After the feast, the heroes are offered an especially delicate and exotic dessert mushroom, which is also given to the dangerous creature. The creature immediately tears into the dessert mushrooms with terrifying abandon: think “Cookie Monster” meets “Sharknado.” Because players aren’t dumb, they will almost certainly check the dessert to make sure it’s not poisonous, magically or otherwise trapped (which of course, it’s not), and/or wait to see what happens with the Hungry Hungry Horror. Offer the character some sort of minor benefit for eating the mushrooms — healing, one additional use of a power, or whatever form of play currency is used in your game (e.g. inspiration, conviction, XP). Keep track of what characters eat the mushroom and how many they eat.

Following the meal, the characters discover the delightful side effect of the mushroom — they smell exactly like the delicious dessert they just consumed thanks to their unrefined humanoid biology. Their fae hosts, of course, have more refined digestion. As the characters look on in horror, the fae lord at the head of the table lets the leash slip on their pet monster, who lunges at the nearest character while the nearby court of fae watches and applauds. This is a fairly straightforward mostly-combat encounter, but with a lot of potential fun in the form of set pieces for combat. Think flipped tables, improvised weapons, flying crockery, and lithe, mocking figures darting in and out to make things more “interesting.” This may also be an opportunity for more socially-oriented characters to use their charm to request assistance from particularly engaged onlookers.

Octopus Stinkhorn (clathrus archeri)

Apparently, they smell as good as they look.

To the right, you will see a picture of what I absolutely swear is not only a fungus, but the single grossest fungus I have ever read about (and that’s including a species coming up in the next article that grows exclusively on herbivore dung). The Octopus Stinkhorn begins its visible life as a slime-covered bolus of egg-like material with its forming tentacles barely visible. Eventually, the tentacles strain against their “egg” and burst outward, covered in a thick, black-brown goo that smells like rotting meat. The stench attracts nearby flies and other decomposers, which wander around on the surface of the tentacles, picking up spores that they drop elsewhere (basically pollination, as imagined by Clive Barker).

Potential Game Use:

Look. If you’re going to have something sprout up unexpectedly from the ground that looks like Cthulhu’s dust bunnies, you might as well lean all the way in. Something unclean has been here before. “Here” can be the site of some sort of horrible sacrifice, sacrilege, or slaughter, or it can just be a case of “wrong place at the wrong time.” As another straightforward combat encounter, it’s hard to beat a tentacled creature that can unpredictably reproduce from any spot on the ground, but the real challenge will come in the form of the creatures that are attracted to and defend the Supernatural Stinkhorn. Take this as an opportunity to drag out every gross monster you’ve ever wanted to use. Giant cockroaches? Go for it! Slime molds, gelatinous cubes, worms that walk? They’re all fair game, and they’re all making heart eyes at this festering mound of thrashing goop. Every successful strike results in everyone within 10 feet getting splashed with putrescence, triggering some sort of constitution-type roll to avoid either taking damage or losing the next round heaving breakfast onto the ground.

What’s more, who’s to say what characters who take damage from such an attack might not themselves be the source of the next infection?

Bioluminescent Fungi (~80 species)

Preeeeeeeety sure this is a Photoshop job, but you get the idea. Glowing mushrooms: They’re A Thing (TM).

I almost didn’t include bioluminescent fungi in this list. They’re such a cliche that it’s almost not worth it. But there are about 80 species of bioluminescent mushrooms, and that’s a pretty big chunk of the fungal kingdom to just leave out because everyone already knows about them. So, with that in mind, yes. Glowing mushrooms are real, and there are a bunch of them, and yes, they all look very, very cool. Do yourself a favor and do an image search of them sometime.

Potential Game Use:

Lighting is a sometimes-underutilized part of adventure and encounter design. I can’t count the number of modules and supplements I’ve read that treat lighting as sort of a throwaway — there’s almost always magical ambient lighting, or unexplained torches (which are, if you’re a sucker for verisimilitude, extremely unlikely), or sometimes no lighting at all. Which makes sense on a certain level — much like encumbrance or precise weapon details, not everyone likes thinking about and tracking questions of visibility in exploration or combat. However, I propose that if you’re looking for a quick and easy way of making things interesting in an otherwise bog-standard dungeon or cave, start caring about lighting. Have unseen things chittering in dark corners, or drips just out of eyesight, or things darting out of view as soon as the characters get too near.

Another consideration: do your players have darkvision? Of course they do. If it’s a fantasy game, pretty much everyone has darkvision. Things without eyes have darkvision. A soup tureen has darkvision in some rulesets. You know who doesn’t have darkvision though? The large group of frightened prisoners the characters may have just freed. Alternately, some puzzles or clues may only become visible when viewed under the light of a specific species of mushroom, the identification and gathering of which can be an encounter all by itself. For an extra “wow” factor, consider making a homemade blacklight to represent the mushroom’s glow, and using lemon juice to write a hidden clue, message, or even whole puzzle.

In Conclusion:

Fungi are really, really neat and can add to just about any fantasy game, above or below-ground. They’re terrifying, dangerous, delicious, poisonous, useful and frustrating in equal measure, and if you let them, they can give your game a touch of alien whimsy that few other things in the real world can. If you’ve enjoyed this article, come back in a couple of weeks for Part 2, where I give four more kinds of fungi you might want to use in your game.

In the meantime, do you think you’ll be using more mushrooms in your games? Do you have a favorite fungus (or a suggestion for me to cover in the next piece)? Let me know in the comments!