Advanced Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Old School gaming returns to Community

If you've turned on a TV in the last 5 years then you already know that NBC's Community is the only reason that broadcast TV continues to exist.  Brave enough to devote an entire episode to D&D a few seasons back, last week they had the self-acknowledged hubris to do another D&D episode.  For the sequel, instead of averting Fa-- bulous Neil's suicide, they're trying to reunite Buzz "we need a cranky old guy to replace Chevy Chase" Hickey with his estranged, D&D playing son Hank, played by a neck-bearded David "Tobias Funke" Cross. 

Once again Abed is at the helm, this time leading the gang through a homebrewed adventure, the goal of which is to explore the Black Tower and destroy the evil necromancer/phile who lives at the top of it.

 "That's just what I love about role playing games is being told exactly what to do." --Hank Hickey

North is left.

In classic, Olde Skewle fashion, Hank decides to head south instead of crossing the Brutalitops Memorial Rope Bridge--a reference to Chang's decapitated MU from the previous D&D episode--which leads to the tower of the Dark Lord, taunting Abed with "If I walk too far south do I fall off your graph paper there?"  But Abed is prepared, pulling out a thick binder of homebrewed context.  And so the adventure begins...

I won't delve too deeply into the spoilers except to say that when Crouton, Shirley's half-orc druid, dies in a fusillade of hobgoblin arrows, Annie--reprising her role as Hector the Well Endowed--shows some classic PC chops by momentarily mourning the death of her ally before "rifling through her belongings."

Also of note, when the Necromancer eludes the gang, Buzz gets angry with Abed and demands a satisfying conclusion to the adventure, to which Abed--showing his own old school leanings--responds:

"I owe you nothing, I'm a dungeon master.  I create a boundless world and then I bind it by rules."

Here's the roster of characters with whatever details I could glean from the action:

Crouton
half-orc druid
Spells: Entanglement
Stuff: Horse meat, more horse meat
Player: Shirley

Joseph Gordon Riggs, Son of Sir Riggs Diehard
Protector of the Blade of Diehard
S:9, I:12, W:11, D:13, C:7, Ch:10
Stuff: Armor of Amor, Ring of Bling, Blade of Diehard, Chalice of Potions
Player: Dean Pelton

Sir Riggs Diehard, "Son-slayer"
Protector of the Hilt of the Blade of Diehard
S:14, I:9, W:8, D:13, C:14, Ch:14
Sword, Hilt of Diehard
Player: Jeff Winger

Hector the Well Endowed
S: 19, I:9, W:8, D:12, C:17, Ch:10
sword, shield, horned helmet, Bow, Arrows, Extra large cod piece
Player: Annie (again)

Fibrosis the Ranger
S:14, I:9, W:11, D:16, C:7, Ch:10
Bow and arrows
Spells: Cure Moderate Wounds
Player: Britta

Dingleberry the Troll
Player: Chang

Tristram Steelhard, "Lord of the Sky Spiders"
Holy Cleric with a mace
Spells: Torbin's Flesh of Fire, various cure and/or heal spells, Speak with Monsters, Lightning bolt, Snake to Rope, Flame Strike, Spell of Enduring Speed, Ice Spell
+3 Demonic Eye-look
Player:  Hank Hickey

Tiny Nuggins, "Waterboarder of Goblins"
Halfling Thief
Daggers
Player: Buzz Hickey

Gormenghastular Vocabulary Quiz

Fine literature in board game format.

A lot of you have been wondering what I've been up to lately since clearly the ol' Blog has been on cruise control since Christmas time.  Well, I'll tell you: I've been reading Mervyn Peake's awe-inspiring Gormenghast novels.  Holy hell.

Though not mentioned in Appendix N, the influence of Peake's tomes on, for instance, Moorcock's Elric--who seems to be perhaps a cross between Titus Groan, 77th Earl of Gormenghast, and Steerpike, the albinic mastermind of malfeasance--seems rather obvious, and even the law/chaos business that pervades Melnibonea is perhaps inferred in these works, though, thankfully, not in any overt manner.  Of course, you shouldn't hold any of this against Peake, he does not abuse his readers with the heavy-handed earnestness that renders the work of his successors so unpalatable.

Much like the vast and crumbling, ivy-covered Castle with its endless corridors and innumerable towers, cells, and chambers, Peake similarly investigates every archaic, obsolete, and encumbering avenue of the English language in search of just the right parlance to impart the tenor of Gormenghast.  The result is a viscous yet invigorating skein of prose that thoroughly envelops the reader... holy Zeus, when exactly did this turn into a book report?
 

Anyway, my point is that Peake uses a lot of strange words, or uses familiar seeming words in unusual ways making his novels an adventure in--oh, crap, I'm slipping into book report mode again.  Screw it: I challenge all you word nerds out there to a little Peakean Vocab Quiz.  Let's see how you measure up:

1. adumbrate
2. abactinal
3. daedal
4. fugness
5. liana
6. monody
7. pranked
8. raddled
9. susurrous
10. tare

ANSWERS: 1) You're not even close. 2) Really? Is that your final answer? 3) You might think that was it, but you are obviously incorrect. 4) Not even Webster knows for sure what Peake was getting at. 5) Wrong, fool. 6) That's pretty close, for a simpleton. 7) Can it possibly be that obvious? No, it can't.  8) Admittedly, even Peake was only guessing when he used this one, but that doesn't excuse your tepid effort. 9) Your pallid attempt to make yourself seem smart has achieved the exact opposite effect. 10) a member of Vicia, a genus of trailing or climbing plants.

OSR Blogowners Association d12 Meeting Minutes

OSR BLOGOWNERS ASSOCIATION: INAUGURAL MEETING MINUTES

Attendees: Talysman the Ur Beetle, the Zenopus Archiver, Claw Carver, Mandy Morbid, Art Garfunkel, Finn the Human, Cyclopeatron, Lord Vader, two bemused members of the Ohio State Rabbit Breeders Association, Me

Absent: Huge Ruined Pile, Rients, Your Dungeon is Suck, everyone else.

1. Lord Vader called the meeting to order and opened the floor to nominations for officers.
2. I nominated Talysman for President. 
3. In retaliation, he appointed me Secretary. 
4. Mandy was thanked for attending.  A lone dissenter asked if she even has a blog.  (She does, though the real action is at her tumblr place.  If you don't know who she is, please note that neither site is particularly SFW.)
5. A motion was unanimously passed acknowledging that everyone thought Art Garfunkel would be taller.  
6. Cyclopeatron asked Lord Vader to remove his helmet to confirm that he wasn't Hayden Christensen. The motion was seconded.
7. It was motioned that a monument should be built to honor fallen bloggers.  No one volunteered to approach Malishefski to ascertain his willingness to pose for it.
8. It was agreed that all OSRBA blogs will be written in Gygaxian Prose.  A portion of membership fees will be allocated toward providing the Lake Geneva Manual of Style to all members
9. Mr. Vader volunteered to establish a New Blogger Training Gulag. All potential new bloggers must serve a 7 year sentence apprenticeship at the facility after which they are allowed access to a keyboard. 
10. Mandy was again thanked for her attendance.  I'm beginning to wonder if maybe this  community might be something of a sausage-fest.
11. The Zenopus Archiver agreed to bring doughnuts and root beer to the next meeting.
12. Meeting was adjourned.

OSR Resource: Printable Paper

If you have a stationery fetish like me, you need to visit this website toute d'suite:

http://www.printablepaper.net/

You can get PDFs of the standard graph paper and hex paper but also all sorts of odd varieties including octagon graph paper, pentagon graph paper, logarhythmic graph paper, polar graph paper for the next time you go through Lolth's DemonWeb Pits.  Oh man, it just keeps getting better.  Shooting targets, chess boards, comic pages, music composition paper, storyboard templates, columnar pad paper for your accounting needs, knitting templates, calligraphy stuff, light blue paper with whit elines for folks who don;t like high contrast...  And, for you Euro-trashers out there, you can get much of this awesomeness in A4 size!

Did I mention this stuff is all free?  

Combat Progression Table

While fighters get a bump at every level and bigger hit dice, in my mind, Clerics and Thieves are somewhat combat neutral: they get d6 HD just like normal people--they start at +0 and move up only every other level. 

Meanwhile, combat deficient MUs not only start in a hole but dig deeper as they progress in level.  This combat dissipation of the magickerial class is probably the result of tangling with eldritch powers or the painful piles they develop from sitting around blogging in all their spare time. 

Further to the footnote, the same principal of cumulative modifiers applies to T/MU and C/MU multi-classed characters.  Also, everyone knows that the highest level F/MU you could possibly have is a 7th/11th level elf, right? 

Sporadic Blog Hop Challenge D&D Movie: Dragonslayer!

The movie I most closely associate with D&D is a movie that I've never actually seen: 1981's Dragonslayer.

The reasons for my association are obvious: it came out in the summer of '81, shortly after my 12th birthday, when I was 6 months into my D&D career.  In the thralls of early D&D obsession, I was avidly reading anything that even vaguely resembled "fantasy."  Then along came a movie--a real live movie!--about D&D stuff; it was confirmation that what I was going through was a legitimate cultural phenomenon.  Unlike all the obscure books that I was reading that otherwise went unnoticed in the nether regions of the local library's science fiction section, everyone who saw the ads on TV or the posters at the local cineplex was aware that here was a movie about dragons going on: D&D in film format!  And even if no one saw it--it did not do very well at the theaters--it still put the fantasy genre on the cultural map along with James Bond and Indiana Jones--"For Your Eyes Only" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark" being two movies I did see that summer.  And even though I still haven't seen the movie, I did read the novelization and the Marvel comic book version. 

Sporadic Blog Hop Challenge: First character death and getting a life

As I've mentioned before, though I thoroughly disapprove of these sorts of challenges, questionnaires and other group divulgence endeavours, I also can't quite resist them either.  So, while I'm not fully engaging the blog hop challenge, there are a couple of items on the list that I can't pass up.  So please sit tight and listen up, I'm about to tell you the fascinating tale of the death of... Elfrandel the Executor

He was my first ever AD&D character, a high octane elven fighter/ranger/magic user/thief/assassin/bard or somesuch insane combination of classes.  It was the end of summer 1981, 7th grade was only a few days away, and I had been bowing out of D&D sessions with the gang for the last month.  The combination of our hack 'n slash approach to dungeon creation and the omni-classed elves that everyone was running at the time had rendered gaming sessions into tedious dice-rolling marathons. 

But, I was starting to do other things instead of playing D&D, including joining the soccer (futbol) team.  On the first day of soccer practice I came home with a pain in my leg that would turn out to be a season-ending stress fracture, and was unceremoniously informed by my brother that my character, Elfrandel the Executioner, had bit the big one.  I wasn't even there for the event.   I assumed even then that the rest of the players had just gotten tired of running my dude for me and let me have it.  And I didn't really mind that the character was dead--I don't even think I asked how he met his end.

What did bug me is that they were essentially telling me that my D&D membership had lapsed, I was out of the club. Even though I'd been skipping out for half the summer, that had been me bailing on them, but now that they made it definitive, yeah, I was kind of hurt.  But, even though my soccer career didn't even last until school officially started, I still found plenty to do to entertain myself in junior high.  I was a class representative on the school social committee, "played" on the basketball team, though I shot 0% from the field for the entire season, was active in my church youth group(?!), served as a stage hand for the drama club (!?!), and even dipped my toes into the turbid waters of adolescent dating (!!???!); all kinds of  crap that I can't imagine was ever a part of my being.  So in response to how did I handle the death of my first character?  I went out and got a life.


Obviously, however, D&D and I were not finished with each other and it was the nexus of two events that changed the course of history: Christmas and puberty.  That year my mom, blissfully unaware that my D&D "phase" had been over for many months, got me a load of random D&D accessories, including the World of Greyhawk Folio.  The map and gazetteer suddenly grounded D&D in its own world, much like all the shoddy fantasy literature that I'd been devouring for the last year.  It gave D&D a big picture beyond wandering from town to town in search of dungeons so that we could wander from room to room in search of slaughter.  It gave us an idea of what to do with our high level characters.  I was re-hooked.

As for the puberty part, while poring over all my new D&D booty, my height doubled to 8-foot-4 overnight [I trust that my readership will surmise that a Hyperbole Alert is in full effect].  I became a moody prick, distanced myself from most of that extra-curricular crap, let my grades slide, and took a step back from the female of the species for next 4 years.  Instead, I re-focussed my energies on D&D.  And comic books.

In the winter of 1982, while keeping abreast of the X-men's dealings with the Krull, the Marvel's "Contest of Champions" and all the other important goings-on of the Marvel-verse, I churned out nearly 3,000 unfinished dungeons, filled out twice as many character sheets, [again with the hyperbole alert] and meticulously devoured every other word of the AD&D rulebooks; I had transformed myself into a sort of D&D golem using my newfound wisdom to finally crack the code of the enigmatic "percentile dice" that had befuddled our gaming to this point.

Actually, scrap all that.  Now that I think of it, Krasdale the Lizard Man died in action in July of 1981, pre-deceasing Elsinore by more than a month. How did I handle it?  I let fly a series of expletives, including my first ever use of the f-bomb.