City Planet

There is something very cool and awe inspiring about a city that spans an entire planet. The concept actually goes way back in Sci Fi literature, so George Lucas’ Coruscant was nothing new. He had actually planned to have Alderaan (a certain brother-loving Princess’ home world) be the setting for much of the action of the first Star Wars film, but budgetary constraints prevented what he envisioned. But he was finally able to include it in his prequel films. Unfortunaly, much of the time it is only visible through an apartment window as we listened to the cringe-worthy dialogue of Anakin and Padme. Outside those windows was bumper to bumper traffic of flying cars filled with yammering muppets (you would think it would be a simple matter to widen those traffic lanes, there being plenty of room in the sky) . We did get some good views of the planet surface during the opening minutes of Revenge of the Sith.

Anyway, tonight we do another session of KOTOR at Andys, and before the night is over the party should have escaped the space station haunted by a Sith Lord Lich and his minions, and be arriving at their next destination, Coruscant, the seat of the Galactic Republic.

On the day of many KOTOR game nights, I have sent little info-blurbs to the group about something in the Star Wars universe related to the nights adventure, so today I put together and sent the Coruscant stuff below. You’ll see that Coruscant has many features that make a city planet cool, especially one that has been such a city planet for over 30,000 years. There are miles and miles of true underground ruins, factor and industrial areas, and lower levels that cater to the lower rungs of society in contrast to the higher levels inhabited by high society (shades of Lang’s Metropolis).

Even though I only plan to have characters there for a couple of sessions, you could do an entire campaign set on this planet, and the only environment you would be missing is that of a wilderness. But with the underground areas being huge enough to have evolved their own ecosystems and unique creatures, I guess you could have that as well.





"Seen from orbit, it is a blaze of light and sparkling colors, reminding some spacers of corusca stones, after which this planet was named long ago."

"An incandescent organ of life, visibly vibrating with the pulses of billions."


Coruscant

Coruscant was a planet located in the Core Worlds. Its hyperspace coordinates were
(0,0,0) which in effect made it the center of the galaxy. The actual galactic center, was located in the Deep Core. As the center of the galaxy, Coruscant was generally agreed to be the most important planet through most of galactic history. It served as the capital for the Galactic Republic, Galactic Empire, New Republic, Yuuzhan Vong Empire, Galactic Alliance, and the New Galactic Empire. Coruscant also served at various times as the home of the Jedi Order and the Jedi Temple. Coruscant was not only the political center of the galaxy. Most of the hyperlanes at some point would travel through Coruscant making the planet one of the richest in the galaxy.

Geologically, the planet was composed of a molten core with a rocky mantle and a silicate rock crust. At its poles were huge ice caps that were popular spots for tourists. The entire surface of Coruscant was covered by sprawling kilometers-high ecumenopolis, and boasted a population of over a hundred billion to several trillion, depending on the era. Following the end of the Clone Wars, an official census noted 1 trillion official permanent residents. The statistics did not include transients, temporary workers, unregistered populace nor residents of orbital facilities. Because of these omissions, the "real" population of Coruscant was estimated to be three times the official amount.

Coruscanti skyscrapers dwarfed all the original natural features, including mountains, as well as floors of oceans which once covered a large portion of Coruscant's surface. Areas of Galactic City were broken up into levels, megablocks, blocks, and subblocks.[14] Coruscant itself was divided into quadrants, which were divided into zones.[7] Below the skyscrapers was Coruscant's undercity, where sunlight never reached. Artificial lighting illuminated these lower levels and advertisement holograms could be seen everywhere. There were numerous establishments for entertainment, catering to a myriad of alien species. The residents were collectively referred to as Twilighters.

Coruscant was once a world mostly covered in oceans.[15] However, all natural bodies of water were drained and stored in vast caverns beneath the city as a result of years of overpopulation. The only body of water visible was the artificial Western Sea, with many artificially-created islands floating on it, used by tourists on holidays.

With no other bodies of water available to feed and water its trillion inhabitants, Coruscant's architects, along with many others from around the galaxy, worked together to build a self-contained eco-system in the massive buildings set all over the planet. Polar cap stations also melted ice and distributed water throughout the planet-wide city through a complex series of pipes.

Galactic City was divided into quadrants, "several thousand" in number, with each quadrant further split into sectors.[7] Each sector was numbered on official maps, but sectors often had nicknames, such as Sah'c Town (sector H-46, named for a prominent family that owned a large portion of its land) and The Works, the largest of Coruscant's designated industrial zones. (Coruscant practiced zoning, which is the designation of specific areas of land for particular purposes, such as governmental and senatorial, financial (including banking zones), residential, commercial, industrial, and manufacturing. Manufacturing and industrial zones were typically the largest designated areas of the planet.) The Works was once one of the galaxy's major manufacturing areas, where spacecraft parts, droids, and building materials were heavily produced during centuries, but as construction and industry became more efficient and cheaper away from Coruscant, The Works fell into disrepair.

It gained a reputation as a hub of criminal activity and many locals stayed away from it. A similar, but more dangerous area, was the Factory District, which was once the industrial heart of Coruscant until it too lost out to competition from producers in other Core Worlds. By the time of the Great Jedi Purge it lay in ruins and was almost completely deserted of sentients, because of the feral droids that prowled its streets. It was located on the opposite side of the planet, and was much more dangerous than the Southern Underground, Invisible Sector, which were infamous in their own right.[12] Another area of Coruscant was CoCo Town (short for "collective commerce"). Many diverse species lived there and worked in manufacturing. A partially enclosed open-air plaza near the Senate building, the Column Commons, was so-called because it housed most of the HoloNet and news media corporations.

The planet produced trillions of tons of waste an hour. Though almost everything on the planet, from clothes to packaging and machinery, was recyclable, some waste was too dangerous to recycle. Such items included worn-out hyperdrive cores which were delivered to one of the planet's five thousand garbage pits, where they were put into canisters and fired into a tight orbit around Coruscant. Garbage ships would then collect them and transport them to nearby moons for storage. Some of the more dangerous materials were shot into the nearby sun for complete incineration. Garbage not exported or destroyed was mixed into a slurry of silicone oils and processed by garbage worms which chewed it into pellets while removing any remaining organics, plastic, or recoverable metals. They turned millions of tons of pellets into carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases. Another problem for a world like Coruscant was the unimaginable amount of carbon dioxide and heat energy that its trillion-being population generated each day. Thousands of carbon dioxide-reactive atmospheric dampeners were put into place in the upper atmosphere to prevent atmospheric degeneration. The first set of these planet-wide dampeners, developed by the Galactic Republic, was known as the Coruscant Atmospheric Reclamation Project.[18]
Near the planet's core were a number of massive power relay stations. The lowest levels were abandoned to mutants and scavengers, such as the cannibalistic, mythical Cthons. The foundations of many of the buildings, some of which weighed billions of tons, also extended deep into the planet's crust.

History
Pre-Republic

"The recorded history of Coruscant stretches back so far that it becomes indistinguishable from legend…"
―Pollux Hax

The very early history of Coruscant is a bit sketchy and is not well known. Coruscant was considered by many to be the Human homeworld; early in its history, it was referred to as Notron, the "cradle of human civilization". Its name was changed at an unspecified date. At a certain point, the Celestials could have removed Humans from Coruscant to populate Corellia and other human societies on different planets throughout the galaxy.

It is known that at some point in ancient history, the near-Human Taungs attempted to conquer the 13 baseline Human nations of the Battalions of Zhell. A volcano decimated the Zhell, the ash filling the skies for two years, so the Taungs adopted the name Dha Werda Verda (Warriors of Shadow) for themselves. The Human Zhell eventually recovered and drove the Taungs offworld.

One hundred millennia later, Coruscant was surveyed by the Columi, who dismissed the planet as a primitive disappointment, despite the already planet-spanning ecumenopolis of Galactic City. New buildings were built on the old. As a result, there was virtually no exposed land. In the forgotten underlevels of the city, there was darkness, pollution and crime. Higher up, there were government offices and penthouses owned by the elite. The lower fifty levels of the ecumenopolis is said to have last seen sunlight tens of thousands of millennia ago.

Coruscant was one of many worlds conquered by the Infinite Empire of the Rakata, who used Human slaves to build the Star Forge in 30,000 BBY. Under Rakatan domination, the Humans of Coruscant's colonization attempts were limited to sleeper ships, which ended up on Alderaan, in the Tion Cluster, Seoul 5, Kuat, Alsakan, Axum, Anaxes, Atrisia, Metellos, Corulag, and many other worlds. The Rakata were eventually decimated by a massive plague, leading to slave revolutions on Coruscant and other subjugated worlds.

Over the next two centuries, Coruscant was linked to other Core Worlds, including Corellia, Alderaan, New Plympto and Duro, by hyperspace cannons, via the Herglic Trade Empire. It was during this time that the Coruscant government peacefully absorbed the nearby Azure Imperium. During these pre-Republic years, the languages of Coruscant and its neighbors meshed to become Old Galactic Standard.

Galactic Republic
"That's the seat of Galactic government!'"

The Sacking of Coruscant in 3,653 BBY. In 25,053 BBY, when the Galactic Constitution was signed, the Corellians and Duros invented the hyperdrive proper, allowing Coruscant to become the capital of a democratic union: the Galactic Republic. 53 years later the planet became the galactic center, and remained the Republic's capital for 24,981 more years. Shortly after the formation of the Republic, the Perlemian Trade Route was mapped, linking Coruscant to Ossus and bringing the Jedi Knights into the Republic. Over the next millennium, the Corellian Run was mapped, linking Coruscant to Corellia and beyond. Blasters were also invented on Coruscant around this time, and the famous Galactic Museum was constructed in 12,000 BBY.

From the very beginning, Coruscant, as the Republic's capital, was the primary objective in several wars. The earliest among these was the Tionese War with the Honorable Union of Desevro and Tion in 24,000 BBY, in which Coruscant was bombarded with Tionese pressure bombs. Other early battles included the Alsakan Conflicts, the Duinuogwuin Contention, the Great Hyperspace War, the Third Great Schism, the Great Droid Revolution, and the Great Sith War. At the end of the Great Sith War in 3,996 BBY, the Senate Building was built to replace the old Senate Hall.

Following the devastation of Ossus, the Jedi Council took up residence in the Jedi Temple on Coruscant, to which many Jedi relics from Ossus were taken. The Temple was greatly expanded, including the building of the original Jedi Council Chamber. The Temple was repeatedly expanded including in 3,519 BBY, 2,519 BBY (when the Jedi Archives were built) and 1,019 BBY (when the Temple spires were finally fully rebuilt).

Got a good group? Be grateful for what ya got

(pictured above: some gamer dudes trying to look cool and casual in the presence of a purty grrl)



My posting has been a little sporadic the last couple of months, feast and famine, due to being busy with work and other good life stuff. As it has been fun (mostly) having even a tiny voice in the online gaming community, the time I devote to game shit lately has actually been devoted more to actual gaming and less about droning on and on in a blog about the geeky side of my fairly non-geeky life. I have no aspirations to write games or adventures, fanzines, or to share charts and maps from my own games. And hell, there’s just too big a glut of all that anyway, just like gaming blogs. You either make that a big part of your life or you don’t. I don’t read more blogs, join more blogs, or seek to increase my following more because I just don’t have time to do it. Plus it is not as exciting to me as it was when I discovered there was an OSR around three years ago. Honeymoon period over, you know? And in recent months I’ve realized the truth of it; the actual gaming is far more important than talking about it or reading about it. Playing the game is always more fun than hearing about it.

It seems to me that so many blogging GM’s out there aren’t so into playing the game as they are writing about it. Getting more followers on their blogs (usually by joining each and every blog out there), having people read their game material, printing personal fanzines, or just plain having a voice in the OSR. If they get actual gaming going on, it seems just a thing to do so they can continue to do the ancillary things based on it with some amount of gravitas. But shit, if you have a group and it’s good, that should be the focus, right? But it is often not, it seems.

As we approach the holidays, a time when I am never sure how much time I am going to have on my hands to indulge in the secondary and tertiary life things, I wanted to take the opportunity to post about something I probably don’t do enough of; gratitude for the people I have the pleasure of being around a game table rolling dice with, bullshitting with, arguing with, and for the love of Mike getting actual quality gaming in with. This post is for the people at my sessions who put up with me and my wingding style, and keep coming year-in, year-out. This bud’s for you, bitches (who mostly don't even read this blog, so I feel safe calling them "bitches").


The more and more I look at the local gaming scene in So Cal, the more I realize how grateful I should be that I have a regular group that has been going strong for over three years now. And thanking God they are (fairly) normal people who happen to be gamers. But what I think really makes this group special is, despite a couple of “unique” personalities, is that not a one is what you would call a geek, dork, or spaz; At least in my moderately critical and judgmental eyes. Everyone is fairly interesting and fun without being extreme personalities. They are genuinely special without being wanna-be game designers, pretentious “artists,” or "retired" sex workers, edgy or otherwise.

I’m basically speaking of my own selfish joy here. I took around 8 years off from gaming (see my last post for an exception) because I didn’t have enough people around me to play during that time who would have been a right fit for a game group. I spent a bit of time in the 90’s recruiting gamers from non-believers that I knew who I thought would enjoy it. And they usually did. But it came to a point when I got older and didn’t have that kind of crowd around me, at least that lived locally. I’ve never been ashamed of gaming, but I certainly never told everybody I knew I was into it. As if. If I wanted to approach somebody to play in a game, I had to feel secure they would not just smile, look down, shake their head, and go back to talking about The X-Files or Seinfeld or whatever.

And I sure was not going to go hang around game shops or cons to try and sift through the flotsam and jetsom to find people I could stand being around the table for several hours with on a regular basis. I mean, if I did not have this group and was willing to do anything to get some gaming going, I’d have to go to more cons, gimmicky pay-to-play sessions held at stores and comic book shops, or monthly Orange County gamedays full of aging gamer dad’s trying to get their bored kids interested in the hobby they grew up loving by making them sit through sessions, mostly done by eager but strangely subdued DM’s, who run games that consist of reading aloud from the box text of old TSR modules or Pathfinder adventures in monotone voices (yeah, I visited and saw all that)– when they have D&D going on at all. And getting involved with private groups in the area is usually unsatisfactory and often verging on the disturbing.

So while other local groups come and go like the proverbial wind, or consistent groups made up of an open door “temporary players” situation seem to struggle to carry on from one week to the next, here I sit somehow blessed with a great group made up of four of us who have been there the entire three years, and three of us who are now on their (more or less) two year anniversary of play, well, what can I say? Sure, I bitched about some of the power/meta-gaming here and there (mostly because I was not used to being around it, these were mostly seasoned gamers compared to my 90's groups), but now we are used to each other and our particular peccadillo's. We know what we can get away with, and what we probably should not try to get away with unless you are Dan Dan The Power Game Man(tm). And it there is a certain security in the fact that we have to turn down at least one person a month who wants in the group because we are at maximum occupancy.

Do I deserve this good fortune, gamewise? I dunno. I’m basically a decent person who generally focuses his over emphasis on passion and outgoingness in good and positive directions, including into the games he devotes time to. Hey, anybody who has devoted a certain side section of their life since childhood to a hobby of pretend deserves a group like this, and it’s unfortunate not more get to experience that. I’m blessed, I tells ya! How long will it last?

So do you have a strong group you are glad to have? Or are you just happy sporadically playing out there in the gaming jungle?

Oriental Adventures & The Legend of Green Snake

I was going through a box of my older DVD’s last night, and came across my copy of the 1993 Hong Kong film Green Snake. I really love this movie, which I think I originally saw at the WLA revival theater The Nuart in the mid-late 90’s. I don’t know if there is a voice-over English version, but I hope not. The movie is so beautiful to look at (when the sadly terrible special effects are not on screen) and combined with the sing song native language it is almost mesmerizing, and part of the films charm (at least for a Yankee).

Wikipedia describes the film thusly:

Two snake spirits have been training for many centuries to take human form and experience the love, freedom and wisdom that is supposedly only available to humans. White Snake (Joey Wong) is the more experienced one and proceeds to get engaged with local scholar Hsui Xien (Wu Hsing-Kuo), with whom she plans to have a child which would complete her passage into the mortal realm. Green Snake (Maggie Cheung) is the younger and more impulsive of the two sisters and she is not yet quite sure about the benefits of the human world. The two snakes move into their magically created house and start a successful medical practice in the town.

Their enemies are a buffoonish Taoist and an overzealous Buddhist monk Fa Hoi (Vincent Zhao) who make various attempts to banish them from the human world. The monk thinks of himself as a keeper of the natural order of the world and is very prejudiced against spiritual beings seeking to improve themselves. He brings things to a head when he abducts White's husband from the human/spirit mixed marriage into his religious reeducation camp–styled temple.

Anyway, whenever I think of this film I think of Oriental Adventures (applying things that I like to gaming terms was a habit I never managed to fully lose after attaining it in childhood). Around 2003 I was into the second or third year of my gaming semi-retirement when I ran into an old player of mine at a suite party at Loscon in Los Angeles (a very rare sci fi con appearance by me) at around 2am. Lisa was from that period in the mid-90’s when almost all of my players were female and we were mostly doing Call of Cthulhu and Champions. Lisa, pretty high on joy juice, talked about how much she loved the old games, and raved to her fairly new husband about my DM’ing prowess (of course a party at a convention is the perfect place to hear that). It was decided right there that I would be doing up some games for these guys and whoever in the near future. At the husband Jeff’s request I would be doing some Oriental Adventures (something I hadn’t run since around 1990). Current player in my group Terry, who had played with Lisa in most of those 90’s games and was Lisa’s roommate back then, was up for it as well so there we were doing OA on a semi-monthly basis on weekends for awhile.

The movie Green Snake had a heavy influence on many of those games for me. For one thing, Lisa ran a Hengeyokai, and I tweaked that race just a little to match the changelings of Green Snake (animal spirits who spend many years of training and meditation to change into the higher human form). Then there was the super-powered, self-righteous monk of the film who both admires and distrusts the White and Green Snakes, Fa Hoi. I totally ripped-him off to create Tai Seng, a monk who I used as and NPC to guide the players towards various adventures and activities (he was not a prick like the movie version…for the most part).

Anyway, take a look at my favorite scene from the film, where the snakes White and Green make their transformation to beautiful human form on the roof of a tavern during a rainstorm, while a wedding/orgy goes on inside (little nudity so be careful at work). Maybe you’ll get the chance to watch in it’s entirely at some point. If you are going to run OA in the future, I demand you watch it! It might give you some great ideas as well.

The Heartbreak of November 1st

Aw, the unhappy ending of a beloved holiday. A Jager hangover in the office is never an enjoyable thing. And all the candy in the mailroom Is leftover crap nobody wants. Sweettarts, lollipops, and some kind of weirdo Mexican candy. There are still some cupcakes leftover in the large kitchen, but they look like somebody smooshed them with the palm of their hand. That’s ok though, because they are a sad reminder of the poor turnout and uninspiring costumes from yesterday’s office Halloween party anyway. The new blonde bookkeeper in the black cat costume was pretty hot though.

Last night I wanted to do the second year of a grand tradition. See, last year I happened to be at home heading towards midnight on Halloween, with the “Sounds of the Season” channel on. At exactly midnight they were playing “Monster Mash” or something, and *bam* suddenly it went right into cheerful holiday music. You know that stuff they play before Thanksgiving that aren’t really Christmas tunes or carols but evoke the Holiday Winter spirit anyway? So the image goes from a grinning pumpkin to a pilgrim handing a Native American a horn-o-plenty (the Native blissfully having not a clue about what would soon be happening to him and his people). Anyway, I was so jarred by that transition that I wanted to be there for it last night. Why not? All my holiday out and about partying was over the weekend (Sat night up till 5am, and there were some great costume concepts out there), so at home on Halloween Monday night it’s me and some Jagermiester at midnight with my new little tradition waiting for the musical transition…but nothing. No change-over. As of this morning, they are still playing goddamn Halloween music on that channel. I wonder how long that will go on? Halloween is over, dude! I’m thinking Time Warner Cable maybe don’t exactly have a crack team of professionals keeping an eye on those music channels.

Aw well, time to take down the cheap Rite-Aid decorations and get back to work. At least on the next holiday in a few weeks I’ll get a long weekend off. Vegas, baby!

Luther and The D20 Murders

I discovered Luther on the BBC America channel, a network I started watching mostly because I like hearing Gordon Ramsey’s constant swearing get bleeped.

Eventually I saw a commercial for Luther, a UK series made up of 4 episode seasons, that is currently on it’s 3rd season. What drew me in was that a couple of particular episodes seemed to be about killers who used D20’s and D8’s to decide on who and how to commit their crimes.

So I did watch these episodes On Demand, and besides the gaming gimmick I fell in love with this show. Luther, a big, black London serial killer profiler, is this almost paladin-like force of good, catching killers and unwittingly letting the evil he encounters get all up in his head. Sort of like a Sin-Eater. Although in personal pain over his work, and failed marriage, he obsessively goes about helping people threatened by evil, even though he himself seems in need of help. One of those hurt, lost personalities.

Anyway, the two killers in question are in competition. They roll randomly for their targets off of tables in their journals, and gain points that let them use better weapons on the next kill. They sort of level-up. These two-parters are the third and fourth episodes of season two, but I would recommend you start with season one off of Netflix and work your way up. The show is that good, based mostly on the great characters. When you watch episode one, with it’s genius physicist female serial killer who kills her parents just to show she can get away with it (pictured with Luthor above), I think you’ll be hooked. She is one of the most fascinating bad-guys I’ve seen on TV in years. Check it out.

Do I even want to be considered “Old School” anymore?

That is what I have been thinking this week after seeing reactions to the Dwimmermount project over at Grognardia the last few months (and a wide variety of other old school blogs and web pages), and especially this week.

I did not seek out much in the way of online info about gaming until recent years. In the 90’s during a heavy gaming period, I checked-out some forums briefly on AOL, but by around 1999 or so I had gone into a retirement period from gaming that would last several years. I was getting so involved in the world music community in California, and was spending much more time with people to whom gaming was not even on the radar of, I pretty much quit (I always had a busy life outside games, but at that point I knew nobody who gamed or wanted to. And when I would be dating a girl around then I certainly never brought up gaming to them). It was getting hard to get people together on a weekend (then the preferred time to play) for several hours on a Saturday or Sunday, and it did not seem worth it anymore. I for sure was not going to start gaming as an adult at game shops and cons. I was done. I thought for good.

Then three years ago I got contacted by current group host Andy off of Meetup.com where I had sort of off-handedly started a profile, and *bam!* we had a group together and have been gaming regularly since. On a weeknight actually, because regular weekend gaming again was still a pipe dream and would probably always be so with rare exceptions. So this OSR thing was at full steam as I discovered. I saw an advert for some D&D podcast that appealed to me so I listened and James from Grognardia was the guest (they described him as a blogger who did not always have the most fascinating posts, but by sheer virtue of the amount of posts he had a big following). After that I checked out James blog, and was ultimately inspired to start my own, as I had my own old school stories to tell.

After three years of checking out the OSR, I’m getting pretty tired of old school-style artwork when it had previously been nice and nostalgic (, I will always revere Trampier and others from the past for pure nostalgia value) currently being produced. Same-old same-old adventurers cautiously approaching a dungeon doorway. So little of it inspires me now. Case in point, James and his proudly displayed art samples for Dwimmermount.

The artist is excellent, but I’m sorry, the standard knight dude and the old broad who runs the leather mug booth at the Ren Faire somehow schlepping into a mountain top dungeon in the wilderness not only is uninspiring to me, but seems to me not to be very far from the realm of a parody drawing of old school D&D. I’m fine with people liking it, but Jesus Christ, words like “Outstanding” and “amazing” on the comment thread is giving me a serious douche-chill. Most of James readers are at the point where they are pre-sold on anything he does, it seems.

Now, James as usual is a little touchy when it comes to his work and fan club. Differing opinions on his work is often met with a “you can go read other blogs” type of stuff. Fair enough. But although I have rarely kissed his ass (I think James feels mostly burned by me in the past for my hearty defending of the 80's Conan film that he bashes constantly and obssesively), I feel I have chimed in with plenty of thumbs-up on ideas and reviews over the years, and try to offer my own experiences of the old school that is perhaps a bit more visceral and from the viewpoint of an outgoing personality (i.e. I was on the football team in high school as opposed to the chess club).

So far on that thread the only other dissenting opinion is of young gamer grrrl Rachel of Rach’s Reflections (the only girl on the thread agrees with me. A win is a win), who is for sure a smart cookie. She had some very contemplative comments on how changes to the old, silly styles can be cool and keep what was good while having a bit more umph!:



“... It may just be my late entry into the hobby, but the whole "ren-faire" look that seems to be in vogue to the old-school community just looks... silly to me, particularly in conjunction with the idea that old-school play is a little grittier and more mercenary. A certain amount of stylization to make adventurers look cool is a good thing. I'm not saying full dungeonpunk, but...

“…Well... look at Johnny Weismuller in a pair of brown trunks, Errol Flynn in a green unitard and felt jerkin, or Burt Ward in elf booties and green underwear.
Now look at Tarzan as drawn by Disney, Jonas Armstrong with a cowl and leather armor, or Robin as drawn throughout the 90s and oughts.
Which one looks more like a reject from a panto, and which one looks like someone that knows how to throw down? Keep in mind I'm not asking what's more accurate to the text (Tarzan) or the period (Robin Hood), I'm just saying that they look more like they might be taken seriously, without being excessive at that…”

I like this lass. Smart is so sexy. Anyway, there is bad updating (dungeonpunk with bald heads, tattoos, and giant hoop earrings; black leather in X-Men film costumes, Spider-Man in a costume that would cost 100 times his freelance salary, etc), then there is good updating like the stuff Rachel mentioned. Truly, Disney Tarzan (I think the best Tarzan so far, and the closest to the books outside of DC comics 1970’s series) and 90's Robin looked like they could realistically kick ass, but were still Tarzan and still Robin.

But going too far into the past to search out fuzzy feelings really only goes so far to me (anymore). I think you can tap into that past without same-old same-old. Not that I'm the guy to do it (real job, interests besides gaming, mid-life crisis, etc etc etc), but I will tell you this; I was not immediately taken with James R’s LOTFP, or Goeff’s Carcosa, but the more I see of what old school Grog’s who are trying to maintain the old school look and feel are doing, the more I am attracted to those truly unique works that actually think outside the box while still being basically, at heart, old school fantasy gaming. Shit, they certainly are not boring.

Bottom line, and please excuse my French, but how the fuck many more basic, old school dungeons and drawings of knights at the dungeon doorway do we still need to see at this point? Is there a bottomless need and desire for this stuff out there?

When it comes to me and “old school,” I think I am at a crossroads, folks. While I think I will still run me some ol’ school D&D here and there, I think I’m done looking at new scenarios, settings, art, and writing for it unless it has something new to say and something that inspires me more than just looking like art from back in the day (or looking like a parody of it).

What say you?

Paul Crabaugh and Me

The other day no less than two well known blogs (Grognardia and Jeff’s Game Blog) posted about a gentleman named Paul Crabaugh, who wrote some interesting articles for Dragon Magazine (and some others) in the early 80’s. I knew Paul a little from my youth playing games at Aero Hobbies in Santa Monica, so I thought I would do a post about him myself since the name is getting bandied about.

Oh, and the title of this post is a play on Michael Moore’s famous first documentary. I actually did not know Paul well, and can only speak on experiences surrounding gaming with him at a dingy, smelly little game shop.

I bought most of my first D&D stuff as a kid at a place in West LA called Chess and Games. Way in the back they had a medium size rack that contained the LLB’s, Greyhawk, and Blackmoor. I snapped them up with what little allowance money I had.

But my real gaming started at Aero Hobbies. For my first year or so gaming there it was mostly kids my age I think, plus a couple of much older former leftover wargamer beardo’s who probably should not have been around kids.

But not long after I started going there it stopped being so much about young folk, as a passel of 20 and 30 something guys, including some friends of owner Gary, started playing a lot at the store a lot more. Most of them were not so nice to the younger teenagers, acting like their presence was a liability, and were typical of snarky D&D geeks.

But one guy who was actually pretty nice to the younger folk there was Paul Crabaugh himself. Not that he particularly wanted to play with kids, but he didn’t seem to resent their presence so much as the other older guys did. He never put the younger people down, ever, which seemed to be the stock in trade of his peers.

The first thing you would notice about Paul was how huge he was. He was a massive man. Not especially tall, but he very much looked like Michael Moore after doing three months worth of a Morgan Spurlock routine super-sizing at Mickey D’s. No-Chair-Can-Hold-Me big (and I say that being no Jack Sprat myself lately). But he was a gentleman in every way to everybody. He spoke to a 15 year old very much the same way he talked to adults, with respect and interest for what they had to say. Very rare among gamers. That is one thing that even though I didn’t think of it at the time, made me really like the guy. A gentleman in a sea of owner Gary’s asshole peers and cronies.

I didn’t know until quite some time after meeting and playing in games with Paul that he had written D&D articles for Dragon. Since Paul only really seemed to like Traveller and other science fiction games at the time, I’m guessing that his heaviest D&D period had been in college. He was writing about stuff he didn’t seem to play anymore (though I think he wrote some Traveller items as well) unless he was doing it away from the shop. The interesting thing was he never talked about those articles. He had zero ego about it. Owner Gary had pointed them out to me. I thought it was pretty cool.

Gaming at Aero was pretty bland and more often than not boring for me. Whether GM'd by a sleazy, druggo Vietnam vet, or a college educated computer programmer, it was not so much as story-making or painting a picture for players. It was monotone descriptions of things, usually some pun or two thrown into (like older geek from all walks of life seemed to love back then – more often than not based on Monty Python), then something attacks and you fight it (owner Gary's games had a bit more peronality to them than the others). I’m grateful for my Aero exposure to Runequest and Traveller and other games I may have never played otherwise back then, but even as a kid I knew games were better when you could inject a little personality, passion, and wonder into them.

Paul’s Traveller games were moderately interesting, nothing really special in retrospect, and like most younger guys at Aero I didn’t get too involved in them. Games by older guys like Paul, owner Gary, and other regulars seemed to be aimed at one or two other older guy’s characters no matter how many people sat at the table. One or two characters doing everything and everybody else were just side characters; side-kicks at best. Just sitting and watching. Looking back, that was a real shame. One time, towards the end of my going to Aero on a regular basis (sports, girls, and my own gaming groups were too attractive compared to the dust, moldy smells and the heinous attitudes of the Aero sausage-fest) my sweetheart of the time, who lived an hour north in Ventura, was in town for the weekend and I took her to Aero to play in one of Paul’s Traveller games. I spent all this time getting her a character set-up to play (if you know Traveller you know what that takes), but when we were ready it was once again an ignore fest as Paul pretty much ran the game aimed directly at owner Gary and left us and everybody else to sit, fidget and stare. I really get the impression that Paul would have been most happy just running for Gary alone with nobody there.

You’d think that a tall, beautiful girl at the game table for a change would generate some interest, but these guys were just too into how they did it at Aero (or maybe they didn’t know how to deal with a female gamer who didn’t look like Janet Reno) so In retrospect I guess it wasn’t Paul’s fault, although we never once got so much as a “so what are you’re characters doing?”. Young people, who these games were ostensibly aimed at, got no props at Aero. It was adults playing games and the young’uns be damned, unless you were one of owner Gary’s little blond cabin boys he got to watch the register now and again (I think one of those grew up and eventually bought Aero from Gary before he passed a few years ago). Thankfully, a couple hours of being ignored at the table ended when one of my high school friends showed up and asked us to hit the mall with him and we got gratefully the hell out of there to go have fun. That was the last time I actually sat in on a game at Aero I think. I was outgrowing it. Moving on to my own groups, and to non-gaming related activities. This was one of my experiences at Aero that shaped me as a GM. In this case, I would always make sure and give lots of time to other players no matter what character was shining at the moment. Actually, now that I think of it, most of my good qualities as a GM comes from doing the opposite of things I experienced in those old games at Aero.

I guess Paul passed away a couple or three years after I stopped hanging out at the shop. Sometime after abandoning the place for more fulfilling pastimes, I saw Paul walking in downtown Santa Monica. He was unmistakable, what with his size and the ever-present long-sleeve office job shirt with pocket protector he wore all the time. I just kept on moving for whatever reason, probably because I had so many unsavory experiences at that dingy game shop that were still fairly fresh (including Paul's Traveller game), but I wish I had stopped to talk to him a bit away from the negative environment that was Aero. He was one of the very, very few older people I came away from the place having any respect or admiration for. I’m glad his name still gets mentioned in the gamer community all this time later.