Top 10 Things Thundarr the Barbarian Taught Me About D&D

10. A magic sword is always a good thing to have.

9. Raid your stepfather's library to learn new spells.

8. It's good to have a companion that growls and throws people around.

Fun trivia: Ookla got his name because the struggling writer passed by a UCLA sign.

7. Horses can safely land, with a rider, from any height.

6. Wounded old men you meet on the road can be counted on to impart information.

5. Bad guys tend to sneer the word "barbarian."

4. If you really need to get something done, a scream of "HaARRR-yee!" doesn't hurt.

3. Brute force beats out magic or technology!

2. Never trust a wizard ... they can be two-faced.

1. Barbarians kick ass!

There and Back Again

My decision was made rather last minute, based on a whole lot going on in my private life, but I got out to Gen Con 2009—huzzah! This year's con was a good one.

My wow-this-looks-rather-small plane touched down Friday afternoon—shockingly on time—and soon I found myself walking down the Indy sidewalk and glancing over at the Ram as if I had never been gone. It felt good to be back. I scooped up my badge, stopped to say “hi” to some fellow editors/writers, and then headed off to the Rock Bottom for some beer, buffalo wings, and ribs.

Later that night I (gasp!) got in some gaming, playing Xcrawl with the gang. Brendan LaSalle, the game’s creator, was our GM and he runs an exciting, rousing game. You haven’t lived until you’ve swung a sword from the front seat of a bumper car in a spike-filled arena! Many thanks Brendan for an awesome time.

Saturday afternoon much of my time was spent in the dealer hall, working the Goodman Games booth and flitting around the show floor in my spare moments.

Catalyst was selling a lot of cool items, in particular their CthulhuTech line, which, as noted on the blogs of my colleagues Mike Ferguson and Ken Hart, looks pretty damn cool.

Paizo released their Pathfinder rulebook. Not alpha, not beta, but the real deal. It’s a hefty book, costs $50, and was up to their usual productions standards. If you hated 3.5e, you can pass that sucker right by, but if you prefer 3.5e “fixed up a bit” with house-rules (grappling, I’m looking at you!) this combo player/DM book might well be up your alley.

Business at the GG booth was brisk, and I got the chance to talk with a lot of our fans, which was awesome. Our real popular draws this year seemed to be the excellent hero's Handbook series (especially the brand new Hero's Handbook: Tieflings and Hero's Handbook: Eladrin), our 4e Dungeon Crawl Classics (especially our $2 module and, surprisingly, the Warbringer's Son tourney module), and Level Up magazine (the new issue was sold out Friday I believe). The new Age of Cthulhu line (which is close to my wicked little heart) also attracted a lot of interest, especially from many folks that hadn't pulled out their Cthulhu books in a while.

We had a steady flow of customers, and recession or no, even Sunday morning was shockingly busy. My favorite moment was when a very popular but not-to-be-named RPG author stopped by the booth to chat and rattled off details from an adventure I had published in Dungeon magazine some 12 years ago! It turns out he's run the adventure for friends in the past. I love stuff like that, it very much made my day.

Saturday night Goodman Games held our yearly “How to Write Adventures That Don’t Suck” seminar. The seminar saw a lot of really good questions this time around, and some of the attendees stayed afterward for more questions and discussion. After the seminar I retreated to the Embassy Suites for a competitive game of Carcassonne with the Goodman folks (tip: never play Carcassonne with Joe Goodman, he’s cut-throat!) after which Ken Hart twisted my arm (heh) into a second dinner (for me at least) in which I attempted to eat a pulled pork mega-sandwich (see photo) at the Ram.

Rick's purchases (man, I went light this year!):

• About $12 of figures I totally don't need. Well except the aboleth. And the owlbear.
• Mysteries of Mesoamerica (Pagan Publishing)
• Bastards of Erebus (Paizo)*
• Cthulhu dice (Q-Workshop)
• A plush Cthulhu for my son Kai

*Featuring some very cool monsters by the talented Mr. Ferguson.

Was that really it? Blimey, I should have run through the dealer hall one last time.

Before I knew it, it was Sunday. I did a last cruise of the dealer hall, did a quick final shift at the booth, and soon I was racing for the airport to catch my 2:30 flight home. It was wonderful to get some gaming in and to really talk with a lot of folks this year.

Here's hoping I can attend Gen Con 2010 (or else 2011)!

A Little Madness is Good for You

This week I was happy to see the arrival of my first supplement for the Call of Cthulhu game, Madness in London Town. This adventure is the second, after Death in Luxor, in Goodman Games’ Age of Cthulhu line.

The line is a difficult one to author. I always try to write a great, fun-to-play adventure first and foremost, regardless of the game system or ruleset. The AoC line adds three more layers of complication: sticking to the Lovecraft Mythos and feel, getting a good feel for the time period (1920s), and writing an adventure set in a foreign country. This makes for a challenge, to be sure. This project also coincided with the birth of my son, a time that any parent knows is more than a bit crazy (and tiring). I am however a huge horror fan and longtime reader of Lovecraft, so I attacked this project with a singular glee.

I soon found myself buried in research. I watched films about England, Googled up scans of old books, re-read certain Lovecraft short stories, and looked at endless photos and antique maps. I spent several nights just reading about British automobile companies and the models they sold. Well aware that Cthulhu players are a fussy lot—sometimes even overly fussy about rather trivial historical details—I did my best to litter the adventure with little tidbits. (An example: In one scene a description of an entrance of the British Museum casually mentions a bust of the Duke of Marlborough; at the time the adventure was set, there was a bust of the Duke standing there. In other areas—such as the amount of wooded land on the Salisbury Plain or the British Museum having “curators”*—I took liberties to benefit the adventure.)

*The curatorial staff are actually referred to as “keepers” but as the Call of Cthulhu game refers to its GMs as Keepers, I thought it best to avoid confusion.

Good CoC adventures have good handouts, in my humble opinion, so that was also a major focus of mine. I created many of the adventure's handouts and that was a blast. GG has a great group of artists and typesetters, but it was great to wear the design hat for this book.

England was my first choice of locations for this adventure. I spent some time over there studying some years ago, and I liked the country and its people so much that I actually tore up my return ticket. In the end (and luckily for England no doubt) I did return home after wandering the British Isles a bit more, but my love of the country persists.

Now that the smoke has cleared, I’m quite happy with the way it turned out. The adventure has insidious villains, duplicity and red herrings galore, and many old-style creepy touches. Some situations (such as a badly-placed mirror in one scene) were taken directly from frightening experiences I’ve had or odd things I’ve seen. I tried to touch on the multiple facets of horror: blood spatters, crawly wriggling things, mannequins that move when you’re not looking, creepy objects, etc. I also had fun in places trying to evoke a Lovecraftian style of prose (which is to say overly descriptive but creepy).

Thanks to my wonderful playtesters: Steve Crovatto, Mike Ferguson, Ken Hart, Dave Nicolette, and Willie Wahington (extra props to Mike for Keepering and getting Henry Prichard's vocal tics just right). Thanks also to Eddie Sharam for a great cover and for being receptive to my art suggestions.

Writing this book was probably the toughest assignment I’ve had in a while, but it’s the kind that has you grinning enough while you do it to make passerby wonder about you. It was that best type of project because it's an effort but it's also great fun in the process.

I hope you enjoy the adventure. Better yet, I hope your investigator survives it.

That Time Cometh

Oh yes, it barely seems like a year has passed, but Free RPG Day is upon us again! This Saturday, June 20th is the day, so be there.

Started by Goodman Games, Free RPG Day is simple: visit your FLGS (friendly local game store, but you knew that already) and pick up free stuff. Simple as that. It's a great way to encourage visits to that vanishing breed, the game store. And hey, while you're at it, support them. You need not buy anything to get a free goody or two, but why not support your local store while you're there?

I shop online as much s the next guy, RPG stuff included. But I sorely miss my vanished game stores. There's something special about visiting a brick & mortar store and actually flipping through that new game supplement or hefting that latest Fantasy Flight Games (free plug) board game monstrosity, not to mention the open gaming (which a surprising amount of stores still offer).

So visit your local store(s) and grab some free booty! Hey, maybe I'll see you there.

Chocolate in My Peanut Butter

Years ago in college I edited the school paper. My mentor was a professor nicknamed Tinker, a grizzled old newspaper woman who ran the paper with a firm but kind hand. Every semester it was the same: a student would arrive, new to the paper, and ask about submitting poetry. Tinker would immediately take charge and always forbid the inclusion of poetry ... it was a newspaper, dammit, and that meant just the facts, except for the Sports or Op-Ed pages. The student scurried away, a few months would pass, and another student would show up... I thought to myself, wow, this lady hates poetry.

Later, as I got to know Tinker better (a far nicer woman than she probably sounds here), I discovered that not only did she love poetry, but she had several published books of verse (and not vanity press stuff, mind you).

I asked her once about it, even though I really knew the answer by then, and she said, "Poetry is beautiful, but it belongs in the literary magazine."

Old grognard that I am, I've grown to view my D&D much the same way.

I love horror movies. Love 'em. My favorite board game at the moment is Arkham Horror. I enjoy the Call of Cthulhu RPG, indeed I recently authored an Age of Cthulhu adventure, so I have no dislike of horror games. But too much horror or "grim-darkiness" in my D&D leaves me, well, meh. That trend has gotten old fast.

Likewise, I'd jump at the chase to play the original Star Frontiers game (ears perk up Mike?) or Gamma World (man, I used to dig that game) but mixing science-fiction elements with my D&D likewise leaves me cold. I'm not talking about short adventures for a change of pace, mind you, such as Expedition to the Barrier Peaks or Mike Ferguson's excellent Talons of the Horned King (soon to be released in a 1e version at Gen Con!)—those can be great fun. I'm talking about a steady diet. It's just not my style. I'm a similar stick in the mud when it comes to Gnome gadget-makers, Dwarven railroads, steam rooms, or other non-medieval technology showing up in my game.

I've watched at least one cool History Channel special about the clever use of steam-driven statues in temples by the ancients to fool the faithful, so I know some interesting technology was certainly used in the past, but for me it just isn't what my game is about. A magic electrified floor square? No problem. Electric wires booby-trapping the floor? Don't want it ... even if the end-result is the same.

You see the trend here. I'm all for having a few laughs during the course of play. You thief blew three Climb checks and fell through a window and landed atop the mayor... that's pretty funny. But in-game gags? Yeech. Just play Paranoia already! Again, one-offs like Gygax's Wonderland-inspired modules are fine, but I don't need silly goblins or joke-cracking ettins.

I guess this makes me sound a bit close-minded. I tend to view it as the opposite ... my D&D isn't so boring that I need to mix in everything but the kitchen sink to keep it fun. I get along fine letting my imagination run with the "standard" fantasy concepts (if there is such a thing as standard in this genre). Of course, to each their own ... I've seen a lot of crazy campaigns out there, and some of them were pretty cool. What about you? Like some chocolate in your peanut butter from time to time?

Make Way for the Orcs!

It's out:

Monstercology: Orcs represents my longest solo work to date at 50,000+ words. This project was a hard effort, and it taught me my limits in how many quality words I could write in a day. In the second half of this project I hit that beloved zone, that hole in the paper writers fall into when they're really cooking ... every night I would stop writing, check my word count, and exclaim the new total out loud, amazed at what had flowed into my humble, ever-expanding Word document. I love that feeling. The writers out there know what I'm saying when I say there are times I'd pay to make the words flow like that. (Toward the end of this project, every night I lined up a row of plastic orcs on my computer monitor and I would later knock one off for each 1,000 solid words written—if I didn't make good progress, the orcs "won" and were added to the next night's row. I took great pleasure in defeating the orcs in hordes later on!)

I'm real happy with the way this turned out—it somehow has a huge amount of creative fluff and yet when one flips through the book one runs into lots of 4e crunch: orc variations, new weapons, new feats, paragon paths, etc. I also stuffed a full-blown lair in the back of the book for good measure. I was trying for a 60:40 fluff/crunch ratio and I think I came pretty close. The new Monster Manuals in particular have virtually no fluff, IMHO,  and I definitely wanted to provide details that could both extend a DM's knowledge of this very classic monster and also give them a few plot hooks in addition to the crunch. 

My favorite part of the book was actually the fiction intros for each chapter. Early on I conceived the idea, based on my memory of a Forgotten Realms Cult of the Dragon supplement written by Dale Donovan. The supplement wasn't particularly memorable from a rules standpoint, but I thought the fiction snippets, written in serial form, of an ego-strong dragon falling under the sway of the cult and becoming a dracolich was wonderful, wonderful stuff. As it turns out, my project manager, Harley, had good memories of the fiction in that book too, and let me run with my concept. Making the fiction blend into the chapter concepts the way I liked was a challenge, but in the end I think the fiction works and adds the right flavor. 

And hey, while I'm going on here, I'd like to give due props to the talented Ben Wootten for a wonderful cover. That hulking guy is bad-ass!

I'm curious to see how readers like the book and to hear their take on it.

Favorite Critters From the Monster Manual II (1983)

Continuing on, let’s take a look at some more monsters. Flipping through this book again, I was actually shocked just how many great creatures are on offer here. It really makes the 4e Monster Manuals looks rather sterile in comparison. Instead of a bunch of bloodied and shift powers, we get a whole range of special spell-like abilities and attacks. Call me a grognard, but this book has aged well.

That said, the MM II was a dumping ground (in the best sense) for the best creatures from various classic modules. Some modules—S4 The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth and I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City in particular—brought a host of enduring creatures to the game (you can thank the named modules for the aboleth, behir, and yuan-ti, among others). This makes selected my top ten really difficult … it’s like picking the top 10 Beatles songs, there’s just too many. Anyway, let’s give it a go…

My selections in alphabetical order:

1. Aboleth

These critters scream H.P. Lovecraft to me. They are totally alien in nature and weird—exactly the non-humanoid sort of creature that are perfect for underground romps when you are tired of using the Drow.

2. Behir

I love these guys. Love ‘em. The Erol Otus illustration on the cover of the aforementioned S4 is probably one of his best, and it sold this creature for me. It was a happy day when I got a behir figure in a random figure pack; by weird coincidence I got an identical figure as a birthday present that same day, so woe to the party that explores my dungeon one day and runs into a mated pair of these dangerous, unique monsters!

3. Bodak

Deadly, deadly, deadly. Forgive the dreadful MM II illustration. I love the simple background: “A bodak is a human who was changed to a monster after venturing somewhere upon the Abyssal Planes where mortals were not meant to be.” Stupid mortals!

4. Cave Fisher

Cave fishers make for great set pieces and scenes, allowing a DM to add a fear of heights or three-dimensional tactical element to combat as fishers on high underground ledges haul up hapless adventurers. Of such things are great stories made.

5. Cloaker

Again, here is an alien monstrosity with a cool set of attacks: envelop while holding off assistance with a swinging tail club.

6. Derro/Duergar

These evil small folk are flip sides of the same coin, yet very different. Both serve as a nice balance to the Drow. The elaborate weapon tactics of the derro are the sort of thing you rarely see detailed today in RPGs, and they help to set the race apart. Later editions focused strongly on the derro’s inherent trait for madness, which was a fine addition.

7. Dracolisk

I’m not huge fan of hybrids, as they usually strike me as unfair DM creation meant to kill adventurers. This and Gygax’s greater basilisk (in this same tome) were clearly designed as PC  killers—the greater basilisk has a pertrifying gaze plus poison gas breath, for crying out loud!—but I always liked this particular hybrid for some reason.

8. Gibbering Mouther

Totally bizarre and Lovecraftian, with a cool set of special abilities. Always a challenge to fight.

9. Russet mold/Vegepygmies           

Not only do vegepygmies represent a unique life form, but if you, as an adventurer, are careless you can become one. They were a great addition to S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and a monster that didn’t strike me as a humanoid you could reason with.

10. Yuan- Ti

To me, these snakemen evoke that primitive fear of reptiles—cold, unemotional creatures that will simply consume you if needed. The yuan ti, in my view, evoke the pulpy Conan stories of Robert E. Howard and they are a great villain for those out-of-way places, such as desert cities and similar locales.

So those are my personal favorites? What are yours?