Too Many Curses

I’d love to review this funny little fantasy novel, but truth be told I did not finish it. I actually got into it for less than fifty pages. It was a little too whimsical to me, and constant silliness is ok for awhile, but not for 300 pages.

But there is a fantastic dungeon idea to be gleaned from within the pages of this book. Basically, it takes place in an evil wizard’s castle. In his career the wizard has had many enemies, and he had vanquished them all. But rather than kill his foes, he preferred to trap them in different forms and lock them up in his dungeons. So this multitude of rival wizards, knights, and adventurers off all kinds exist as monsters, phantoms, and even inanimate objects such as walls, paintings, and suits of armor. One unlucky victim even exists as a mechanical pulley unit that drags meat for the monsters from larders deeper in the dungeon.

The wizards’ slave, who actually is a young female kobold, runs around cleaning and feeding and generally doing upkeep on the castle and environs.

The D&D roots of the story are clear, and so it would be natural to take ideas from it for games. This sort of mega-dungeon, populated entirely by purpose rather than some sort of Gygaxian Naturalism would practically write itself once you got working on it. First, have some small parts of the dungeon complex be polymorphed victims, such as corridors, walls, and bridges. Even entire rooms could have once been a living being. Maybe the castle itself. Let them talk a bit, and either hamper or help adventurers with info. Have some victims be magical statues or mirrors that do helpful or harmful affects on those that dare to deal with them. And of course stock the dungeon with typical monster fare, but each and every one of these monsters was once a person, and they still have their original intelligence and can often still talk. Maybe some want to hurt the party to please the wizard and maybe get a reprieve from their curse; or maybe they will help if the party promises to kill the wizard, therefore relieving them of their predicament (of course, even if the wizard dies they still might be there).

Even some treasure items could be former foes of the wizard, such as talking jewelry, or intelligent swords and armor. And of course, don’t forget to have a helper/apprentice who runs around taking care of the place.

And perhaps the wizard has a massive spell cast on the castle itself, so that if anyone dies within it’s walls while opposing him, they automatically reincarnate in a different form rather than perish. Just another victim in the castle, rooting for the party to stop the foul sorcerer.

Awesome stuff, and probably the first time I got really good ideas from a book I could not finish.

What Color is your Orc?

Who would have thought the humble orc would have gone through so many changes since first used in D&D?

Created by Tolkien for his Middle Earth cannon fodder, their use in Dungeons and Dragons made them a household name. First mentioned in the “White Box,” they were described as savage tribal creatures that live in caves or villages.

In pre-AD&D days, my orcs pretty much looked like the figures I found. Those early figs, Ral Partha I think, pretty much were the pig-faced orcs as depicted in Hildebrandt Bros. LOTR calendars, where more often than not they also seemed to wear roman centurion armor. Tolkien did not describe them as pigs, but having mentioned broad noses may have lead to the pig thing. I never really liked the pig look. James at Grognardia seems to have gone “full hog” with this “orc as pig” philosophy, making the orcs in his Dwimmermount campaign actually be boars given humanoid form. Hmm. That’s all good, but for some reason to me it seems less orc, and more like something from the old 80’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. When I picture a “boar man” it’s hard not to see it in a badly animated cartoon image in my mind. Not to say James is wrong , but that image is my least favorite as far as “What color is your orc.” Never mind that people are going to start confusing orcs with wereboars during the full moon.

Some pretty shitty orc miniatures came out in conjunction with the Ralph Bakshi animated LOTR 70’s film. In that movie the orcs were just dudes with fake tusks and caveman fur singlets, made to look pitch black and poorly rotoscoped. Bakshi even just shaded old footage of Zulu warriors from old movies for some of the orc scenes. There was some creep factor to that look, but it really made for some craptacular miniatures based on the film.

During the 80’s, orc figures evolved into a more ape-like look, and by around 1990 Warhammer 40000 continued with the green caveman meets ape look. Orcs now were becoming more thuggish than pure snarling evil as Tolkien portrayed them.

In the last several years, we have seen two newly portrayed types of orcs. There are the Peter Jackson movie orcs, which I really like. In the film, they come in all kinds, which is how Tolkien described them. Although I have not seen orc miniatures based on those films (I was semi-retired from gaming for most of the new millennium), I’m sure the look would/did translate well to miniature form. Especially those badass Uruk Hai.

Now, with the World of Warcraft generation, orcs have become something much more than the original basic primitive savage good and evil concepts. Later editions of D&D let you play pure orcs as characters, and WOW followed suite, even going so far as to make them cunning, brave, muscular heroic warriors. Wow indeed.

So my preference is for the snarling, hateful orcs of Tolkien. Orc women and children? Characters will never delve deep enough to find them. They will only continue to contend with gangs and troops of the foul beasts in caverns and dungeons of the sub-surface world. And they will continue to put them to sword and axe with a clear conscience. In my game world, orcs were born to die. And I guess in my world, they look like whatever figures I happen to have on hand (including my one remaining “pig-face” orc from the old days).

D&D live action movie gets greenlight

Fake. Yeah, I know, lame. If we did get one at this point, it would be a Roger Cormen-esque budget straight to video mess. Or worse, some monstrosity directed by that Uwe Boll guy who makes all the crappy video game movies.

As you can see in the Cosplay photo, the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon from the 80’s has a small cult following. With the 80’s still being mined for it’s richness of pathos and irony and middle-aged nostalgia chumps like me looking to recapture our youth, just doing a live-action adaptation of the cartoon would please us game geeks. Try to do a new story, and you’ll end up with a Wayans brother as a thief, and Beholders so weak that they have been reduced to minor guardian creatures.

Even the annoying child Barbarian and his whining unicorn could not ruin it if it was done right. To keep the kids at the proper age, you get a bunch of mostly unknowns for them, and then just get a big star for Dungeon Master and Venger. My vote for Venger is Willem Dafoe. Scrunch Gary Oldman up with the miracle of movie Hobbitization, shave the top of this head, and you gots yourself the DM right there.

We can dare to dream. If they can make it any better than the D&D movie from the 90’s, then you’ll get my ass in a seat at the local movie house. I’ll probably stash a few Fat Tire Ales in my backpack though, just in case I need to dull the pain.

What’s your alignment, baby?

Like most young D&D geeks back in the day, me and my buddies often used D&D terminology in our regular lives as kids. Obviously, if you fell off your bike or skateboard and got bashed up a bit, you’d say “I think I lost about 5 hit points there” (in reality, being zero level, we probably only had about 3 or 4 hit points max). I remember as a teen surfing with another gamer, and he asked me how many wandering aquatic monsters did we risk randomly encountering. We saw sharks and jelly fish all the time, so those topped our list. Also in there was killer whales, “kooks” and killer bacteria (this was Santa Monica Bay, after all).

But my favorite “D&Dism” was a pick-up line that I actually used and ultimately got lucky with in my early 20’s.

In our teens, I had joked about how in the far flung future world of my gameworld, people used “what’s your alignment” instead of “what’s your sign” (the big real world pick-up line of the late 70’s, early 80’s).

At a party years later, I was enjoying the kegs and open bar, when a pretty blond girl asked me to pour a beer for her. Happy to oblige and a little toasted, I hit her with it “so…I’m a cool and easy chaotic good. What’s your sign, baby?”

Not even thinking it would work, she was fascinated and wanted to know what the hell I was talking about. At that point in life I never talked about gaming around non-gamers. I was totally in the closet. But for some reason I decided to tell this girl what alignment meant, and about the game it came from. She was sort of a bimbo and didn’t like sci fi or fantasy (not even Star Wars), but the opening I got with my gibbering D&D nonsense got me into her life and dating her for around three months. If I recall, it ended because we had nothing in common but being pretty. And I was broke around that time too. That does not go with “high maintenance” L.A. chicks.

You don’t really hear that “what’s your sign” line outside of Burning Man these days, but I still think knowing somebody’s alignment is a whole lot more informative about them than what month they were born in.

Yo, Dog - it's da Urban Druid

OK, that's for a modern game, but the urban druid could fit well into all sorts of genres. But for now I'm thinking fantasy.

I love the idea of an Urban Druid. I really only GM games, but if I still played in them this would be my next character. Though created for later editions of D&D than I use, It would be only a small deal to adapt it.

Although I only discovered it online recently, it first appeared in Dragon Magazine # 317 in 2004. There is also an Urban Ranger apparently, and I will for sure look into that later.

The urban druid lives in or near major settlements, and draws it’s power from the people, the animals, and the buildings of the town or city. The buildings are the urban druid’s trees, the alleyways it’s “nature trails,” and the streets it’s rivers and streams.

Rats, dogs, cats, scorpions, spiders, ravens, and the almighty cockroach are the urban druids friends and range of familiars.

One of the coolest powers of the urban druid is Crowdwalk. With this ability, the druid can move through crowded city streets as if they are an empty field. You can imagine looking down at the teeming city streets, and the urban druid passing in a straight line through the crowd without brushing up against anyone.

The urban druid can also take on not just the animal shapes of the city, but the city itself. At mid-levels it can become wagons or doors, and later houses or even streets. I’m already thinking of a high level urban druid NPC for my major city, who likes to take the form of a mystical looking house (think Doctor Strange’s Greenwich Village pad) at the end of a street in the poor part of town. When he is on the move in humanoid form somewhere, locals go “wasn’t there an old run down house down there this morning?”

The article is reprinted at the Eberron site if you haven't seen it. Hella cool.

http://eberronunlimited.wikidot.com/urban-druid

Behold, the mighty Kobold!

These kobold guys sure get around. They have had various incarnations in D&D, none of them very much like their legendary “real world” counterparts.

I have not used a kobold (and who could use just one?) in my games for at least 15 years. There came a point in my long-running game world, maybe in the early 90’s, where I just thought there were too many non-human “goblinoids” running around in tunnels and ruins of my lands. Orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, gnolls, bugbears, kobolds, and others. And of course, if I had used every variation of these creatures that appeared in The Dragon, White Dwarf, or The Dungeoneer, It would be a goddamn overpopulated circus world down there!

I mostly stuck with orcs and goblins throughout the 90’s for my underground grunt troops. Bugbears were pretty much Uruk Hai orcs, except for the brief period I had as a kid. In those very early days I portrayed them like they appeared in a crude original D&D book – a big hairy body with a pumpkin for a head. I still used gnolls very occasionally in the 90’s (with a tendency to inhabit above ground ruined cities), and still thought of them as being in remote parts of my world. But my thinking was that kobolds just don’t exist anymore, at least where players might go in their travels.

But in trying to come up with a quick mini-adventure with a bit of combat for next week, kobolds came to mind. I have a party of mid-level characters in my current campaign, and I am adding a couple of new players into the mix. Hmm, what to throw at the party where 1st level dudes can fight next to the bigger guns. I know…a troop of kobolds! Little goblinoids with 3 hit points each! Everybody kills one when they hit! Nice!

But how to portray them at this point? In the old days, they were pretty much little dog-headed goblins. Before AD&D, the “white box” described them simply as small goblins (as if goblins weren’t small enough). At some point in later D&D evolution, they became non-goblin and somewhat reptilian, their dog heads replaced by lizard heads. I think I read somewhere in the nineties that they were now related to dragons! Wow, I remember that art in the DM’s guide (I think in there) with a bunch of kobolds attacking a dragon. Now they are related to them? Jeez. Third Edition described several kinds of kobold, including aquatic, desert, jungle, etc etc etc.

Who knows what the hell they are in 4th ed?

Although I just need them to be weaker goblins for my encounter (I want to describe all these little pricks running around the village making off with wine barrels and livestock), I sort of want to make them more like the legends as well. In myth, they did actually come in a variety of types. Some helped around the home (in one description I read they sound a lot like house elves from Harry Potter), some lived in troops underground and worked mines just like their D&D counterparts. Folklorists have proposed that the mine kobold derives from the beliefs of the ancient Norse or German tribes. It is suggested that the Proto-Norse based the kobolds on the short-statured Finns, Lapps, and Latvians who fled their invasions and sought shelter in northern European caves and mountains. There they put their skills at smithing to work and, in the beliefs of the proto-Norse, came to be seen as supernatural beings.

Some even snuck aboard sailing vessels to help sailors. That is very unique in legend – not many mystical creatures were helpful towards sailors. The seas were all about the terror.

Although I like the idea of expanding the kobold beyond the barking reptile dogmen of D&D past, I really already have pixies, fairies and boggarts to play these parts. Because I have Scottish parents I have heard a lot about Brownie legends, and use them for needed purposed in games at appropriate times. They can do everything from help an old man repair a shop full of shoes, to making a farmers milk go bad.

But at least I have rediscovered the humble D&D version of thekobold, and will use some in my game next week. I just wish I had about 50 miniatures of kobolds to use. That would spice-up the ol’ greasemat.

D&D TV?

Comedy Central’s new show Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire (ha ha), while obviously based much on Conan movies and other fantasy fare, does indeed seem to have some D&D inspiration. The flaming sword of the title (that so far seems to have a bit of a mind of its own, a very classic Dungeons and Dragons trope) seems to hint at this, as does the skill - varied party of adventures that make up Krod’s gang.

OK, OK, D&D probably only enters into it a bit, and this show seems to be taking a shot at being more like a cross between the wildly popular Xena: Warrior Princess show from the 90’s, and the Robin Hood parody series When Things Were Rotten from the 80’s. Maybe a bit of Shrek in their as well. The main difference here is that while Xena had wild action sequences and was actually funny a lot of the time, and had a fairly big budget, Krod doesn’t really have either quality in decent amounts.

Show creator Peter Knight sites Monty Python and the Holy Grail (a movie he claims to have seen more than any other – and it’s possible we have that in common), but I see none of that classic comedy going on here so far.

Some of the humor seems to come from the Get Smart school (characters who are skilled yet seem to fuck up all the time). But whereas I laugh my ass off watching Get Smart, I was only mildly amused a couple of times during the hour-long pilot: once when Krod’s pig-faced henchman accidentally pins Krods hand to the back of a bad guy with a crossbow bolt (this happened in the first few minutes of the show, and gave me great hope), and then in the evil villains castle. The bad guy likes to ride around his castle corridors on a full-size horse, while his advisors walk alongside it scrunched up against the walls. I liked that.

Game fanboys are likely to appreciate the female of the group. She is a lovely, exotic type who would rather seduce enemies than fight them. Portrayed by India De Beaufort, gang bang humor abounds around here. She is this shows “Kelly Bundy.” Krod wants her to be his girlfriend, while everyone else snickers about her whorish passions.

OK, “big laughs.” But where is my D&D TV, dammit? Why not? How about a show similar to Firefly, but with a group of disparate adventurers in a fantasy world (Baldur’s Gate!). Start them at a tavern, and have the first episode be about a dungeon delve. Thow in the tropes: ten foot poles, gelatinous cubes, corridors with strange sounds and colorful magic gases, goblinoids in large numbers camped out in a cavern, carrion crawlers, etc etc etc.

And I don’t mean make it funny. Make it a big grim and gritty. Let humor come from pathos and irony, like they do in old school games that took things fairly seriously. Get the characters fleshed-out in city scenes in between dungeons. Have the larger “Underdark” be the whispered about realm that the party will eventually go to (shit, do the entire Against the Giants/Vaults of the Drow storyline). Man, that would be cool.

Then I woke up in a cold sweat, and realized that only American Idol and Flavor of Love was on. Sigh.