OSRCon 2013
Tickets have just gone on sale for this year’s OSRCon, which is going to run august 3rd and 4th (that is a weekend) in Toronto. I was there last year, and had a good time. It was a small, low-key con, and I expect this year to be similar. Ed Greenwood and Frank Mentzer are going to be there.
Last year, I got to meet a number of people in person that I had only known via blogs previously. I plan to attend again.
Rumbling Roar of the Chaimera
Logan K., who you may know as the artist of the winning map in Gus L.’s recent Tomb of the Rocket Men contest, has just launched a new gaming and art blog along with another contributor, Rose. Their work is fantastic, so I highly recommend that you check it out.
Already there are some wonderfully NSFW illustrations of petty gods and several posts about magic rules, including a chaos magic maleficar class. This post is alone better than most of the supplements on my shelf. Some samples…
…from the That Which Should Not Be table:
The next time the party wakes they will find the caster crusted to their bedding like a chrysalis, their hand sticking out the side like it is expecting to be held. If anyone touches the hand they feel a sting before it shrivels back inside the crusted shell. Save vs. Poison or the same happens to you the next time you sleep. You may not want to wait to find out what will eventually hatch from the cocoon.
The Ocean. When you are wounded your body gushes saltwater instead of blood, tiny translucent organisms and vibrant crustaceans you never imagined writhe about on the floor. If you are killed your body will burst and release the ocean.
…from the Abyssal Side-Effects table:
Fat, silvery tadpoles that look more like sperm squeeze out of your tear ducts, if kept in water for 3 weeks they will mature into long-limbed vaguely translucent milky frogs without eyes. The frog’s tongue oozes lazily from its mouth before being drawn back in, its croak is a gurgle, you never see it feed. Licking the frog is a powerful aphrodisiac. 10% chance the effects are permanent.
Be sure to check out the PDFs available for download (among which are the maleficar tables).
The Palace of Love (source)
Viole Falushe, the Demon Prince, speaks:
Artists before me have conveyed their assertions by abstract symbology; the spectators or audience has always been passive. I use a more poignant symbology, essentially abstract but palpable, visible and audible–in short a symbology of events and environments. There are no spectators, no audience, no passivity. There are only participants.
— Jack Vance, The Palace of Love (1967)
Hexenbracken Original
Not that I’m under the delusion that anyone that reads my blog doesn’t also read Zak’s, but I still feel compelled to post about this. Zak found this old hex map I put up but never used. I created it using the procedures from Victor Raymond‘s Wilderness Architect (which can also be found as a pair of articles in Fight On!, issues two and three).
He then prompted arbitrary people on Google Plus to stock it, democratic-like. The result can be found here (Google Docs spreadsheet) thanks, I gather, to Random Wizard. That’s right, almost every single hex has something interesting (that’s more than 600 keyed hexes).
From Zak’s summary post:
The Hexenbracken was created hex-by-hex over the last few days by a ton of people on Google + and Despite a certain amount of democratic noise that you’d expect from anything like this, I can say with my hand on my heart that it has a smaller percentage of stupid things in it than any other hexcrawl product I can think of.
The map, by the way, is in the public domain.
Hexenbracken with Gygaxian Democracy — key
Welcome to my new domain!
For a while now, I have been less than enamored of Blogger, for a number of reasons. The most continuously irritating aspect has actually been the URL rewriting by visitor location. But there are other more substantive issues as well, such as Google’s project of unifying their products (which I understand but do not like) and the poor Blogger backup functionality (it does not export images, for example).
Further, I have never really liked the name of my old blog. The meaning of “untimately” is only that it is one of the ways that I most commonly misspell a word (don’t ask me why I thought that was a good idea for a name). Really, at the time when I started my old blog, I knew that if I waited for a name that I was really satisfied with I would never actually begin. So I just picked something that was somewhat arbitrary and got on with it.
But now I think I have a name that I like, that makes sense, that is easy to remember, and that is rather unique. The meaning of the name Necropraxis is twofold. Necro and praxis, of course, refer to death and practice (as in contrast to theory). Necromancy, despite recent linguistic corruption, is more properly predicting the future by communication with the dead. So necropraxis, being the practice of manipulating death and unlife, more closely captures the idea of undead than necromancy.
Necropraxis, in addition to gesturing toward my fascination with legends of the undead, also makes sense when considering OSR gaming. By playing (or learning from) the older editions of games, we are reviving them. Animating them to serve our current needs. Not allowing them to rest or vanish into the past as nothing but curiosities.
I’m still learning how to use WordPress, so the visual style and layout will likely change, but I wanted to go ahead and make the move, because once I made the decision to change and registered the domain, I found myself reluctant to publish new content to Untimately. Like my original blog launch using Blogger, I figured that it would be better to just get this off the ground even if the presentation was not perfect. I have learned enough about WordPress that I don’t think anything like static URLs should change going forward. However, I still need to find a good blogroll plugin and play around with how comments are handled. So, if anyone can recommend a good blogroll plugin (something that sorts by recent post and shows image previews would be best), I would be appreciative.
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| Image from wizards.com |
Wizards of the Coast is reprinting OD&D! From the site:
Each booklet features new cover art but is otherwise a faithful reproduction of the original, including original interior art.
If they play their cards right, they will release a hardcover compilation and then PDFs at staggered intervals. If that’s a real wood box, I’m sold. And who am I kidding? I’m pretty sure I will pick one up even if it’s not.
The only real downside: Chainmail is not included.
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| Image from JackVance.com |
JackVance.com is offering DRM-free ebooks (in epub and mobi formats) of most or all of Vance’s books. Some of the cover art (particularly for the Dying Earth books) is quite good. For example, see the covers of Mazirian the Magician or Cugel the Clever. I also like this Demon Princes cover.
I have yet to be disappointed by any Vance story (though I haven’t yet read them all). Particular pointers to Dying Earth stories (of course) and the Arthurian Lyonesse cycle seem warranted. Note that there is an all-in-one option for the DE tales.
Footnote placement is one minor issue with the ebook files. They seem to be embedded in the text several paragraphs below the reference, which looks wrong to me. I wrote to the site administrator about this, and was informed that they were aware of the problem but that it was a conscious compromise. Also, strangely, despite the files being DRM-free, it seems like purchase is limited to certain countries. Perhaps the original contracts for various locations differ (I noticed this only because I’m writing this post from the UK).
Despite those two minor downsides, the availability of these titles without DRM is something to celebrate.
There is a good chance you have already found out about WotC rereleasing many classic D&D PDFs, so I won’t pretend that I’m breaking any news here. Of couse, if you haven’t seen them yet, you should browse over and take a look:
The servers seem to be under some strain though, so you might want to come back in a few days after the initial stampede.
I haven’t bought anything yet (I’m just settling in from a transatlantic flight), but I’m sure I will. The PDFs for sale now are from recent, higher quality scans, and are bookmarked (according to the product copy I have read).
Thank you Mike Mearls and everyone else at Wizards of the Coast that was involved for making this happen. Moldvay D&D is now in print again, and for only $5!
Jack’s recent random robot generator post reminded me of another free generator that I had been meaning to blog about. You can find a PDF of it here:
http://www.swordsandwizardry.com/robotmaker.pdf
I don’t remember originally how I came across this. It’s a “roll all the dice” system. I am coming to greatly appreciate the convenience of this format.
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| Image from Space Detective #2 |
Here is a sample robot.
Model 4-6-4-9-9-1
HD 8, AC as plate, Atk 2d6 or restrain
This model is unique and was designed to serve as an escort. In appearance, the robot is a 12 foot tall metal construct that is vaguely humanoid. Instead of a head, it has a large round featureless dome which seems to grow out of what would be the shoulders on a human. The robot’s normal attack mode is a powerful smash with its metal arms that does 2d6 damage and may optionally push or throw human-sized enemies up to 20 feet in addition to dealing damage. The chest plate also opens, revealing 6 metal tentacles which have a range of ten feet and can grab and restrain a target on a successful melee attack.
Mission (roll 1d6):
Aaron Kesher’s excellent “Devil’s in the Details” series of articles from Fight On! are now available as separate free PDFs (as seen here). They have also been expanded to d20 tables.
Each is a series of tables for a common fantasy race of the form (some elves are… / most elves are…). For example, some elves:
13. Are haunted by murders of crows.
I believe I first read about these articles on Grognardia when James created some tables for Dwimmermount elves, and I think that is how I discovered Fight On!, the best OSR periodical.
