Category: Links & Media

Webcomic: Castle Greyhawk

I have a great love for webcomics. As a kid, the first thing I can clearly remember wanting to be when I grew up was an artist and writer for comic books. I even produced a 9 issue run of my very own super hero, “The Black Skull,” as well as first issues for “The Hunter,” and “The Brain.” In retrospect, I kinda had a thing for “The [Simple Noun]” as a naming convention. Though, come to think of it, two days ago I posted about a character named “The Ghost of the Uprising,” so maybe I shouldn’t talk about that tendency in the past tense.

When I was a teenager and a lovely young woman (whom I was very interested in at the time) introduced me to Megatokyo, I was intrigued. Mind you, this is back when Megatokyo was still good, but that’s beside the point. I became somewhat obsessed with webcomics. There was even a time when, I am not kidding, I had over 200 webcomics which I checked every single day. It was almost a religious ritual for me. These days I’ve scaled down to a measly 28. Several of those I still read draw their inspiration from tabletop role playing games.

Several of the big ones are on that list, Order of the Stick, Oglaf (NSFW), and Goblins are all fantastic. (For one reason or another, I never really got interested in Guilded Age). But I also read a couple which simply do not get the recognition they ought to. At least not yet. Which, finally, brings us to the point of this post:

Castle Greyhawk; The Comic Strip.

This homage to Gary Gygax’s iconic megadungeon, and the characters who dared to delved into it, has been a favorite of mine for a few months now. It’s a collaboration between artist Mike Bridges, and writer Scott Casper. Though it is still relatively new as of this writing, with only 15 pages since March, the team have already demonstrated that they can produce impressive work together. I look forward to seeing how they represent Castle Greyhawk itself. A dungeon which I, unfortunately, have never had the opportunity to explore myself.

Bridges’ work is reminiscent of the art in the old core books. The style supports both serious, and goofy moments, which is important for a comic like this. Greyhawk is a setting with the potential to be grim and unforgiving, but the game itself is not always a serious one, and the art reflects that. It is nicely detailed as well, particularly in the backgrounds. You can tell that Bridges enjoys creating the comic’s rooms and forests. And the giant centipedes which recently made an appearance looked legitimately scary for a 1st level monster! I’ve also been somewhat surprised by how much I like the gray scale coloring. Normally I much prefer colored comics, but this style supports the story’s retro tone. The black and white feels as though it’s continuing the legacy of Darlene Pekul’s marvelous DMG illustrations.

Casper’s writing has a nice pacing as well. So far the story has moved at a leisurely stride, with the party forming and making their way towards the dungeon, taking some time to work on characterization along the way. But it never feels like the story is moving too slowly. The characters always have a goal and they’re always moving towards it. None of the three primary characters are really well developed yet, but we have enough information to get us interested in learning more. Tenser is a young inexperienced guy who’s down on his luck, and thinks adventuring might help him turn his life around. Cool, I want to hear more. Yrag is an old soldier with a lot of experience, and an altruistic spirit. He’s a little gruff, but willing to show a couple of honest kids how to survive their first adventure. I look forward to learning more about his past! My only real complaint in this area would be Ehlissa. So far the only motivation for her we’ve been shown is that she’s crushing on Tenser, which is kind of weak. I hope we get to see some deeper motivations from her as the comic moves forward.

Really you should just check the comic out for yourself. As I mentioned above: it’s only 15 pages as of this writing, which shouldn’t take you much time at all to read. I think you’ll enjoy it!

(Though, for some reason, they post their comics on blogger. What’s up with that nonsense?)

Dungeons & Dragons, Small Towns & Zealots

Tabletop gamers of my generation never had to deal with the mass hysteria surrounding role playing games in the 80s. Some of us, including myself, did have people in our lives who believed RPGs were evil. I still have strong feelings about my experiences, and I’m sure others with similar stories do as well. But what we experienced was an aftershock of a much more widespread phenomenon. Most people I’ve spoken with view tabletop games as an interesting past time. Occasionally they deride it as childish, or ‘nerdy,’ but it’s not very common these days to come across someone who honestly believes it is evil. None the less there was a time when role playing games were the target of religious zealots all across North America.

I bring this up because I was recently sent a link to a series of forum posts and images, uploaded by a fellow called Walkerp. When he was young, his hometown was swept up in this ‘controversy.’ His mother (who is clearly the coolest mother ever) saved a lot of local newspaper clippings on the subject, and eventually presented them to him as a gift. He was kind enough to scan and share them, and I’ve reproduced them below. Some of them are a little blurry near the edges, but I was able to decipher everything just fine. Reading these clippings was enlightening for me. It’s one thing to know a controversy existed, to read about it, and even encounter an odd individual or so who still believes D&D is evil. It’s quite another to see these issues seriously discussed in a newspaper.

You’ll note that in many of the clippings, a man named Clifford Olson is referenced. The anti-D&D crusaders repeatedly say they fear the children are being influenced by the game, and that they don’t want a repeat of the Clifford Olson incident. I had never heard of Clifford Olson before, but I assumed he was somehow involved in role playing games. Perhaps he was the kid who committed suicide over it which I’ve heard so much about. Curious, I decided to look into who he was. As it turns out he was not even slightly related to D&D or role playing games of any kind. He was simply a pedophile who raped and murdered young girls.

I am honestly floored by that casual and despicable accusation. How can any adult seriously claim a group of young teenagers are going to become monsters? It’s hard to believe a newspaper would print that kind of vile attack against children, much less that anyone would ever take it seriously. I understand that fear can be powerful, and that emotions run high after a tragedy, but there is no excuse for that kind of depraved behavior.

As I read this, I repeatedly thought of the men and women who worked on D&D in those days, Gary Gygax in particular. He (and no doubt many others at TSR) was a devout Christian. I can’t imagine what it is like to have your life’s work literally demonized by your own religious community. He probably found great comfort in his religious beliefs, but petty fools chose to take his source of comfort and use it as a weapon against him. Even decades after this nonsense had mostly blown over, after Gary died, a donation in his name was refused by his favorite Christian charity. I can’t even comment on that, it’s simply depressing.

Cicero said: “Not to know what happened before we were born is to remain perpetually a child.” So without further comment, here is what happened in our hobby before many of us were born.

Campaign Art: Gifts of a Wizard, and a Battle against Ogres!

Only a short post today. As I’ve mentioned in the past, two of the members of my current gaming group are artists. This works out pretty great for me, because I regularly get to see my games come to life in cool ways. Such as the above picture.

Currently, my ToKiJaTiMo gaming group has a lot on their minds. They need to kill a dire spider for its eyes, find an entrance to the underdark so they can steal some hair from a drow, track down a spider which is more than a thousand years old so they can nab one of its eggs, investigate a nearby forest where gnolls are mysteriously being transformed into half-ogre monstrosities, hunt down a lich, and make a trip to the Abyss to harvest some demon blood. And some of them haven’t even reached level 2 yet!

In order to facilitate their rather ambitious goals, they traveled across the continent to meet up with their old friend Mahudar Kosopske. The wizard gave the original party members (now level 3) some of their first adventures, and they’ve remained on friendly terms. So when they came to him requesting information and supplies, he was happy to aid them. Even if he did require almost all of their treasure in exchange!

This piece, by the way, is from my rather talented ladyfriend. She’s done a lot of art for Papers & Pencils in the past, and you can see more of her work on her DeviantArt page.

Edit: My ladyfriend is on a roll! This post has not even gone online yet, but she’s already completed another piece based on the same game. Here she depicts a battle earlier in the adventure where the party fought some of those mysterious half-ogre monstrosities. I really love the coloring here, with each of the characters being highlighted in a color which thematically represents their class. Red for the barbarian, green for the ranger, blue for the rogue, yellow for the cleric, and purple for the sorceress.

Reality is my Sourcebook: Outside

The sun and I are not on good terms.

We’ve got an uneasy sort of détente. It stays out of my realm, and I stay out of it’s. For the most part this works for the both of us. I only need to go outside when travel to work or the game store. But then, all I need do is scurry through the sun’s realm from my front door, to the car door. And since I live in the pacific northwest (the Seattle area) the sun often doesn’t even show up to harass me during that jaunt. Clouds and rain do, but I get along with them just fine.

Then I let a woman with plans to become an ecological scientist move in with me. This was a bad idea. Every so often she drags me, clawing at the carpet, into the natural world. I try to explain to her that the Sun will view this as a breach of our unofficial treaty, but she seems to think that I’m just being melodramatic. Somehow she doesn’t view the sun bombarding me with potentially lethal radiation as proof enough of its malice.

One minor benefit of these harrowing excursions is the inspiration I’m able to draw from them for my games. As I’ve mentioned many times before, reality is filled with amazing facts, many of which can be used as inspiration for gaming. Today I encountered a number of different natural environments at the two nature reserves we visited. And there, I discovered three things which I thought might be fascinating to use in a game.

At the first location we visited, we saw this large space filled with nothing but mud and death. Apparently this area is, naturally, an estuary. Simply speaking, an estuary is a meeting of fresh water and salt water, where rivers reach the sea. When early settlers moved into the pacific northwest, they blocked off the salt water, and used the land around the estuary to create an orchard. The land has since become a nature reserve, though, and the dike blocking the salt water was recently removed. As it flowed back into the landscape, it killed off all of the fresh water plantlife, resulting in this deathlike landscape. In a few years, salt-tolerant plant life will reassert itself. Until then, however, tell me this doesn’t look like a perfect environment for undead to live in? There’s nothing visibly alive out there. Just dead plants, murky water…and mud-caked undead ready to attack foolish adventurers?

As a game master, you really don’t need an excuse to create an environment, since most of your players probably won’t be too picky about how a given environment came about. But if you strive for accuracy, just put an abandoned settlement and a dike that crumbled from age.

It was as we were looking at this creepy landscape that my ladyfriend also took the opportunity to tell me about Bog Bodies, which you should totally check out if you’re a fan of undead stuff like I am.

The second location we visited is apparently somewhat unique to our area, and somewhat mysterious as well! Scientists are not entirely sure what causes the formation of Mima Mounds, which are sort of like tiny hillocks. The tallest are a little taller than an average person (about 7 feet), and they apparently occur primarily in areas of plains/prairie. What I found most fascinating about them, from a tactical perspective, is that they are almost invisible. Since the entire area is a field of grass and small plants, it can be extremely difficult to identify the mounds. In the picture above, they are only clearly apparent because that photograph includes the treeline for them to intersect. Check out this photo where the mounds don’t block your view of the trees. I promise, there are a bunch of mounds in this shot:

This would be an absolutely perfect place for an ambush. Particularly for small creatures like halflings, gnomes, kobolds, or goblins. Four or five of them could hide behind each mound. The small field I visited today could cloak several hundred warriors, all able to appear instantly to charge across the flat ground between the mounds.

Wikipedia has a panoramic image of the field I visited today. It’s almost 12mb so it takes a moment to download, but it’s a pretty impressive view.

Finally, there was this crazy moss. Neither of us was even able to identify it, so I can’t share any solid information on it. It was growing absolutely everywhere on the Mima Mounds, in huge patches as large as 7-8 feet across. It was so prolific we assumed it probably was not actually dead, yet it sure as hell didn’t seem alive. It was completely dry and brittle, crunching under our feet as easily as snow would. And a lot louder than snow would as well. It would be impossible to sneak up on anyone through moss like this.

On a final note, as we were leaving to head home, we met Spiderbro. He was a bro.

The History of Dice

The Awesome Dice Blog (which is indeed awesome) recently posted a fascinating infographic which is too cool not to share. The folks who made it have generously made it free to share, so here it is:

I see that Rome fell shortly after the invention of the D20. Maybe we ought to be giving more weight to Jack Chick’s warnings…

There’s a lot more interesting information in the original post, so be sure to check that out as well!

Poker Comics: The Natural Order of Things

Today I learned that the newest player at my game table, Poker the Rogue, is an artist. Now I’ve got two of them! The comic above depicts a scene which took place early in his first adventure, when I rolled “Worg” on my random encounter table, and “Wounded” on Trollsmyth’s “Monster Motivation” table. I think the party’s reaction is documented rather well.

Two of the members of my group (both of the artists, actually) have a large interest in ecology. So when one of them mentioned that it might be an invasive species, I confirmed that Worgs (along with any “Magical Beast”) could be considered an unnatural, and thus invasive, species. It was funny to see sympathy for the creature completely dry up once the players realized it was harming the game world’s ecosystem.

The whole exchange took perhaps ten to fifteen minutes of game time, and the fact that it was memorable enough to make a comic about just goes to prove what I’ve always said: the best kind of fun is the kind which players create for themselves. The game included several well crafted NPCs, a dungeon filled with rich lore, and a few very impressive landmarks. But the #1 thing this player latched on to, and wanted to share, was a moment when a randomly-rolled encounter gave birth to some quirky party interaction.

This comic tickles me absolutely pink. I hope there are more of them forthcoming!

Goblins Redux Illustrated

Way back in November I wrote about a game session in a post which I had entitled Goblins Redux. To quickly recap, it was a Zalekios Gromar game, which is usually one-on-one with me and the GM, but since my ladyfriend had moved in with me we wanted to get her involved in the game. Rather than creating a level 12 character to join in, however, she suggested that she play the four level 1 goblins from Pathfinder’s “We Be Goblins” module. The game ended up being extremely entertaining, and she even described it as “the most fun I think I’ve ever had playing D&D.”

She recently made this drawing of the campaign’s final encounter. There were these large flying dragon-things which Zalekios was fighting. Being level 1, nobody really expected the Goblins to be much help. That is, until Mogmurch managed to throw an alchemical bomb directly into the creature’s mouth. The act was so remarkable that even though we decided against leveling the goblins up, it has been decided that Mogmurch will forever after get a +4 bonus when attempting to throw something into a small space. I thought my readers might get a kick out of the drawing. And if you do like it, you can check out more of her work on her deviantart page.

By the way, I was totally planning to do an April Fool’s Day post. It was going to be about how one of my players accidentally bought the 4th edition rulebook instead of Pathfinder, and asked if I would give it a try since they spent all that money on it. I would then extol the virtues of the system, and how I had completely misunderstood it previously. In the end I decided that I really needed to use this weekend to recuperate some of my energy and finally get around to doing my taxes–and I didn’t even do that latter part! I’ll just have to plan something really original for next year…

Vidya: Legend of Grimrock

As a general rule, I try to keep things on this blog strictly related to Paper & Pencil role playing games. Not only do I feel I owe it to my readers to provide content in keeping with the blog’s purported theme, but I find that having a focused topic helps me keep more of a focused mind. However, every now and again, something comes up which cannot go unshared. Something which may be only tangentially related to the blog’s subject matter, but is so profoundly awesome that to keep it to myself would be criminal. Legends of Grimrock is one of those somethings. It’s an oldschool style dungeon crawler, like the ones which were popular in the late 80s through mid 90s–many of which were licensed AD&D titles. Games like Eye of the Beholder, where the player took on the role of a party of adventurers, moving through a dungeon 5ft square by 5ft square.

Legends of Grimrock appears to have taken that formula of a video game infused with grognard style, and updated it in the best way possible. Just take a look at their beautiful trailer:

Looks amazing, right? But that’s just a trailer. Any game can have a good trailer, the question is what the game plays like, not how awesome it can look when you video-capture all the most visually impressive moments.

Well they’ve got plenty of gameplay trailers out as well. Like this one:

I’ve really been getting back into World of Warcraft the last few weeks. (I used to be quite the WoW nerd!) But after seeing these trailers, I can’t help but wonder if my subscription’s days are numbered. I haven’t been this excited about a game’s upcoming release since Batman: Arkham City.

Legend of Grimrock will be released April 11th, and will be available through Steam for $14.99 USD. BUT, if you’re as excited as I am, save yourself a few bucks! Go to the Legends of Grimrock website and pre-order the game for a measly $11.99 USD.

I’m sure I’ll be doing a full writeup of the game once I’ve had some time to play it. That is, if I remember I have a blog to maintain at all!

Reality is my Sourcebook: Bejeweled Skeletons

History is interesting.

Like, really interesting.

Americans, like myself, don’t tend to get a lot of historical education. I don’t know about the what others may have experienced, but looking back it seems as though I simply learned about the same things over and over. It wasn’t until a few into my university education that I realized I knew next to nothing about American history after the revolutionary war. I was even less familiar with the history of other countries, and even less familiar than that with the history of countries outside of the west. It is a failing I have been regrettably slow to correct, which is really too bad, because ya know all those people who were alive before our parents?

They were awesome.

I mean, they were awful. For most of history, every social group has been dirt under the feet of the social group above it. I firmly believe that the human race has, overall, improved as time has gone forward. But none the less, if you take the time to explore the past, I guarantee you’ll find something amazing. Something like bejeweled skeletons.

I haven’t been able to find much more information than is given in my original source (Defunct). The scant information I’ve been able to discover about the individuals has covered their lives, and stopped short after their death. But, apparently, these are all saints of the catholic church. As best I can determine, it seems that all died sometime before 1100 C.E. Each was taken from Rome (probably the catacombs under Saint Peter’s Basilica, though I’m not positive) sometime in the 1600s. Their remains were dressed in these elaborate, bejeweled imitations of what was then modern fashion. They were then re-interred in the catacombs of a small German chapel.

I’d love to learn more if anyone can find anything on the subject. Though the benefit of not knowing is that I get to imagine the details for myself. Was this odd, elaborate ritual done peacefully, or were the remains stolen? If the former, why? Was the transfer of hallowed corpses a bargaining chip in a diplomatic negotiation, or were the corpses moved because it was felt they did not belong amongst the hallowed corpses? Perhaps they were garbed in such a rich fashion in an attempt to satiate their spirits for the dishonor of being removed from a more respectable grave. And if the latter, if the remains were stolen, why, and how? Was there a battle, or was their acquisition a daring act of subterfuge? Were they each members of some secret society, and were taken so they could be buried according to that society’s rituals, or were they all secretly members of a single family? The possibilities are enticing, and endless.

This is the stuff adventures are made of. For a low level adventurer, finding just one of these skeletons would be worth delving through a 10-level dungeon. Even higher level adventurers would be awed to find a group of these skeletons posed around a table, perhaps reenacting some magnificent deed from their lives.

Pictured above is Saint Maximinus, whom I imagine would not be a fun person to game with. Each of the skeletons below are labelled in turn. Many thanks for the beautiful photography must be given to Toby De Silva. You can see more of his work on his website. (Defunct) He’s got an eye for the macabre, which I like.