Thor's got one hell of an adventuring party

Your bank account is going to hate this movie as much as you and/or your kids will love it. :P

I finally watched the trailer for Thor: Ragnarok and as soon as I saw the above shot, my mind immediately started classifying each character.

Hulk: Barbarian, cursed to transform into a monster when the berserker rage overtakes him.
Thor: Fighter. A god can be a fighter, right? He's rather miffed about having his prized magic hammer destroyed.
Valkyrie: Paladin. After all, she works in service to a deity, who presumably granted her special powers and abilities. I'm not well-versed in Norse mythology, so I might be wrong. Still, paladin feels right.
Loki: Some sort of rogue class. He's a sneaky-pete, has a preference for short bladed weapons like knives and daggers, and uses deception and misdirection.

It's an impressive party for sure, but having said that, I find the lack of clerics, spellcasters, and ranged weapons worrisome.

Your fantasy real estate: Palais de Papes

Credit: Jean-Marc Rosier from http://www.rosier.pro

I'm like a friggin' ReMax agent, showing you prime real estate for your campaigns. Just avoid Jimmy Nine Fingers; he'll sell you a subprime mortgage and homeowners insurance, then burn down your house with you in it and collect the insurance, which you so benevolently left to him.

Also don't ask him why he's Jimmy Nine Fingers.

Any hoot, the Palais de Papes was the seat of the Avignon Papacy back in the 14th century and is now a UNESCO world heritage site. What's the Avignon Papacy, you didn't ask? I'll get to that later. For now, let's ogle the pretty palace.

Credit: Jean-Marc Rosier from http://www.rosier.pro

Credit: Ingo Mehling.

Your fantasy real estate: Neuschwanstein Castle

It does have a very fantastical look that would make it ideal for adventuring.

So I was farting around on Wikipedia last month and stumbled across this article about a castle in Bavaria called Neuschwanstein Castle. Built in the late 19th century by King Ludwig II as both a personal retreat and as an homage to composer Richard Wagner.

Seeing the castle immediately got the hamster running in my head and I started to speculate what this thing would be like in a fantasy setting. The first thing that jumps out at you is that Neuschwanstein is not a military fortification. There are no outer walls or any kind of protection save for the hill it's built on top of. So clearly not meant to withstand a siege or hold territory. It wouldn't need to do either if it was located within the interior of a kingdom or empire where having a military fortress wouldn't be needed.

Ludwig II, King of Bavaria.

But like I said at the beginning, Ludwig II built the castle as a retreat and that's how I see it function in a fantasy story or roleplay setting. A nice getaway place for the monarch and royal family for whenever they want to get away from the capital for a while or to hold secret negotiations with foreign powers. Even far from the borders, a castle like this could be a source of much intrigue if a GM had the mind to come up with a quest line.

Of course, it wouldn't have to belong to a monarch. It could just as easily belong to a powerful member of the nobility such as a duke or an earl. There too is a potential source of intrigue for a campaign. A castle such as Neuschwanstein Castle would be pricey to build. Indeed, Ludwig II accumulated huge debts because he insisted on funding the construction with his own money and loans. That level of expenditure could draw the attention of the monarch's court and make them very curious about where the good duke or earl (or duchess or countess) is getting the funds for such endeavors.

A castle full of mystery and intrigue.
(Arto Teräs/Wikimedia)

Campaign ideas:

• A member of the royal court, likely through a less visible functionary, hires a group of adventurers to pay a visit to the noble and try to discover the source of their funding. The infiltration is left to the party, but discretion is preferred by their employer.
• The noble in question is found to have been skimming tax revenue or involved in some less than legal operations. The court wants them in custody but is unwilling to go about it in public for fear of triggering a rebellion or civil war. The party is employed to find a way to extradite the felonious noble back to the capital where they can be formally charged. Alternatively, the court decides to send the party to take care of the problem. Permanently.
• Another alternative is that the royal court decides to make an example of the noble by sending a force to seize their castle and take them into custody for a very showy trial. The adventurers are sent to reconnoiter the area for secret entrances/exits that would allow the approaching soldiers to take the castle from the inside. Failing that, they're to try and sabotage and compromise the castle's meager (because again, this thing isn't a fortification) defenses to make the royal fore's job even easier.

Of course, a GM could also use Neuschwanstein Castle as the setting for a standard dungeon crawl, but I like the three above ideas better. I'm biased in that regard, though. Any of these ideas could easily be adapted into plots for stories too, which is a nice bonus.

I would read or play the heck out of this setting

http://fuckyeah-nerdery.tumblr.com/post/145016913685/prokopetz-consider-victorian-england

 

And that's how you troll a troll

Credit: Stepan Alekseev.

I get the feeling that there are a lot of DMs and players who will look at this picture and go "Yeah, that's happened before."

What happens after a dungeon has been crawled?

It's a good question. I don't know much about the crawling of dungeons, tombs, or what have you, but unless they're crawled more than once, they would be left fallow, provided that everything has been killed in them. So, what happens to them after that? Seems like a waste of good space that could be repurposed for other uses. So with that thought in mind, what if the players were given the option of taking possession of the dungeon or whatever it is either for their own purposes or handing it over to the nearby settlement or authority for their use.

But what to use it for? Since dungeons and tombs are underground, they would be cool enough, temperature wise, to be usable for storing food, which would make it a profitable venture to rent it out to local farmers, vendors, and taverns. Cheap housing also comes to mind. It wouldn't be very desirable to live in a dungeon or a tomb, but it would sure beat not having anywhere to live. You could also sell it to any interested wizards.

I'd hate to be the guys hired to clean one of those places, though. Can you imagine having to haul out of the goblins, trolls, orcs, zombies, skeletons, etc. corpses. And the dusting. My god, the dusting.

I think I just found the perfect Christmas gift for RPGers

d20 ice mold from ThinkGeek!

I'm not even going to pretend that most of you folks don't know about this already, but it's so freaking cool, isn't it? Just imagine playing an OSR game, Traveler, whatever, with one of these bad boys in your glass.

Like a classy gent. They're only $11.99 too, which is surprisingly cheap.

h/t Laughing Squid.

Pedal powered battery charger and an IKEA refugee shelter (because of course IKEA makes refugee shelters) for your post-apocalyptic RPGs/world building needs

First up, Boing Boing posted a video detailing how to rig a bicycle to recharge batteries. Becky Stern, the woman behind the video explains that in the black out caused by Hurricane Sandy, she was able to use this method to stay online thanks to her friend Hackett setting this rig up. Check it out below.



Interesting. I can see this being useful as part of a quest in a post-apocalyptic RPG like Mutant Future or Gamma World.

Quest ideas:

• Maybe a party has to construct one or several to help out a settlement
• They find a piece of pre-apocalypse technology, but need to charge up its battery in order to activate it.
• If the party has a base, they have to build some of these to power objects.

In terms of fiction/world building, a bicycle-turned-generator could be a fairly common sight in post-apoc settlements since bikes would likely be in abundance.

Second, Web Urbanist has this interesting shelter that the IKEA Foundation and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees teamed up to create for use in refugee camps. The shelters normally employed in the camps are only meant for temporary habitation.

Like the bike generator, these have uses in both gaming and world building:

• Possibly a common sight in settlements or at the players base.
• A quest aimed at acquiring a load of these shelters to bring to an existing settlement or to help establish a new one.
• The main character(s) come across a warehouse or derelict truck with some of these inside and decide to appropriate them for their own use.

Are you a DM running a post-apoc RPG or a writer of post-apoc fiction? Do these look like something you'd use?

Image inspiration: Tom Hiddleston looks awesome in armor

Found these on Tumblr.

I did some googling and found that these are from The Hollow Crown, four-part TV adaptions of Shakespeare's  Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 & 2, and Henry V. Tom Hiddleston played Henry V. I really dig the armor and cloak in those pictures.

In a fantasy or gaming world, I could see him being a noble. Maybe not a king or prince (well, not one high on the succession list), but definitely a noble - maybe a baron or earl. I could also see him being the leader of a band of mercenaries or a rebel army.

Pictures via paraph, h/t briecheek.

The Realm of Darthon

I thought you guys might enjoy this. The other day, I was watching a marathon of Regular Show on Cartoon Network last Saturday and this episode came on called "But I Have a Receipt". In the episode, Mordecai and Rigby DM a tabletop RPG for game night, called The Realm of Darthon.

This reminds me of the box art to HeroQuest.
Regular Show wiki.

The episode is a homage to D&D and other tabletop RPGs and pokes fun at all of the stereotypes. For example, at one point during the game, the DM's guide says for one of the characters to roll a d50, but the game only came with a d48 and apparently, two marbles. During the same scene, Rigby is shown using one of those mechanical calculators, the ones with the spool of paper, in order to figure out whether or not one of the characters scored a hit. Eventually, Mordecai and Rigby realize that the game sucks and try to return it for a refund, but the store owner refuses because the game has already been opened. He also claims that they weren't using their imaginations when playing the game.

This is probably a bit more accurate than it should be, isn't it?
Regular Show wiki.

Well, what happens next is pretty typical of the show. Mordecai and Rigby decide to sabotage Darthon's sales by pointing out to potential customers how much the game sucks. One of my favorite parts is when they point out that all of the character classes and miniatures have the same head and face, but with different bodies. The store owner responds by raising the discount on the game until he's giving copies away for free with a purchase of gum. He then loses his shit and teleports (somehow. Just go with it) Mordecai and Rigby into the game, dressed as their characters, in order to prove that the game does not suck. Then, I guess he decides to murder them.

The two manage to turn the tables on him and defeat with a sword to the chest, which after they return to the real world, is revealed to be a ruler to the chest. Honestly, the attempted murder isn't even that shocking, given that they've been both directly and indirectly responsible for multiple deaths on the show. Anyway, the game store owner finally gives them their refund - seven dollars - and then drives himself home, with the ruler still sticking out of his chest.

I bet this would count as a critical hit. And attempted murder.
Regular Show wiki.

Pretty funny episode.

The wear and tear of campaigning

Hard traveling men.
Credit: Wikipedia.

Inspired by this post I read last night from Erik Tenkar of Tenkar's Tavern: Does Anyone Use Real Life Illnesses / Viruses in Their Campaign?. Oh, the things one thinks of when they're sick.

As I sit here, waiting for my next "call to nature", it occurs to me that the only times I've seen illness / viruses / flus and the like in an RPG campaign, it been as part of a plot hook.

I don't ever recall an adventuring party getting sidelined by dysentery, a flu, the norovirus (love ya dude, but you are more than welcome to take your leave now) or any such run of the mill illness.

It got the gerbil running in its wheel and I started to think about the other riggers a hard traveling, hard fighting party of adventures might face. Footwear, for example, would probably have to be replaced at least once or twice a year, depending on what kind of paces they're put through. Clothes would likely fair worse, especially given frequent combat. Then there's personal hygiene. Questing would work up a mighty sweat and unless a party bathes regularly, villagers (and monsters!) would undoubtedly smell them coming from a mile away!

Megadungeons? Pfft, megadungeons are so passe.

I keep reading post after post on some of the OSR blogs I'm subscribed to about megadungeons and all I have to say is YAAAAAAAWN! Sure, sure, megadungeons are fine...if you're an old lady and don't have the testicular fortitude to handle a truly manly dungeon: the microdungeon!

Sssh, don't worry, not everyone can handle such a piece of awesomeness as a microdungeon. Just go home and play with your Yu-Gi-Oh cards and hope Santa brings you a bigger pair of balls for Christmas.

So what's a microdungeon, you ask, your voice quivering slightly as you try to man up? A microdungeon is a dungeon that is roughly the size of a shotgun shack.

Floor plan of a shotgun shack.
Credit: Wikipedia.

A "shotgun house" is a narrow rectangular domestic residence, usually no more than 12 feet (3.5 m) wide, with rooms arranged one behind the other and doors at each end of the house. It was the most popular style of house in the Southern United States from the end of the American Civil War (1861–65), through the 1920s. Alternate names include "shotgun shack", "shotgun hut" and "shotgun cottage". A railroad apartment is somewhat similar, but has a side hallway from which rooms are entered (by analogy to compartments in passenger rail cars).

I'll give you a moment to go and change your diapers, because you've undoubtedly wet yourself from the sheer brilliance of the microdungeon. Another feature is that each room contains two thousand chests filled with gold coins* and only one rat. Additionally, the dungeon is populated by old people from a retirement home and will incessantly try to talk to you for hours on end about what things were like back in their day and how Warren G. Harding was a great president.

I'll understand if you can't bring yourself to play a mind blowing, ultra-masculine dungeon. Go and content yourself with your wee little pansy megadungeon.

*Unfortunately, all the coins are the gold plated commemorative ones you see advertized on TV all the time and are each only worth a fraction of the value of a copper coin.

A tabletop RPG of a tabletop RPG would be a pretty interesting game.

Stumbled across this old storyline from PvP a few months back, but never got around to posting about it.

Credit: PvP.

An tabletop roleplaying game where you play as a group of people playing an RPG sounds like it would be awesome. What's interesting is that Scott Kurtz actually lays out a pretty good outline of how the game would work throughout the strips. For example, only female characters have access to charisma and only women can play a female character. You can have your character cheat, provided he has the necessary skills and alignment. It's too bad he never developed the idea into an actual game. I'd play it.

You can read the rest of the strips here.

HeroQuest: The first and only tabletop RPG I've ever played

When I was a kid, I used to sleep over at my brother and his family during the summers. One night, and this was something in like 1994 or there abouts, he showed me this new board game he'd gotten and some of you may have heard of it: HeroQuest.

While the game box says 2-4 players, I went solo, while my brother DMed. To say it didn't go so well would be an understatement. I ran into two skeletons and burned through all four characters - a barbarian, a wizard, a dwarf, and an elf - in short order. It was a one time session, because I didn't find it all that much fun as a result of my disaster first time. About two years later, he gave me the game, but I never played it again. Instead, I would set the board out on my bed and read the manual, setting up the board for each level and playing with the miniatures.

I don't know what became of it, but HeroQuest disappeared and I mostly forgot about it as time passed. The game would come to mind from time to time, but I could never remember the name. Since starting Swords, Dragons, and Nerds, I start thinking about the game more often and not being able to recall its name nagged me to hell. That is, until I saw this post on Tower of the Archmage* and I had one of them "aha!" moments.

With the name now in hand, I took to Google and found the Wikipedia article about HeroQuest and discovered some interesting tidbits. The game was a collaboration between Milton Bradley and Games Workshop. Not only that, but the game is set in the Warhammer Fantasy universe. It was much lighter than D&D, but probably succeeded in acting as a gateway to D&D and other RPGs.

HeroQuest wasn't the first RPG I played, Dragon Warrior on the Nintendo and some JRPGs on the Super Nintendo came first, but it and they helped foster my interest in RPGs. HeroQuest won't be the only tabletop RPG I ever play. Someday, I want to eventually find a group where I live who have an open spot for a newbie. Hopefully, they'll be into OSRs.

*Where I also snagged the picture. Tip of the hat for that.

Picture inspiration: Destroyed abbeys

Both pictures are by 19th century German artist Casper David Friedrich.

The Abbey in the Oakwood.

Ruins of Eldena near Greifswald.

I like both of these paintings because of ideas and possibilities they invoke. In a fantasy setting, these could be the ruins of abbeys or monasteries long abandoned by their monks or nuns. Or, maybe they were once the headquarters for an order of paladins, their halls echoing with the sounds of holy warriors marching in full armor. Finally, maybe they were a retreat of sorts for priests who needed to recharge themselves after strenuous questing or missionary work.

As for their demise, there's a number of possibilities. Perhaps they were destroyed by an enemy force, demonic or otherwise. Maybe the paladins formed the backbone of their kingdom's military and so they were attacked first in order to take them out of the equation. The enemy was successful and the buildings were left to nature to reclaim. Vikings were rather infamous for attacking these places because of the amount of loot they could plunder, so that's an idea.

A good idea is to look to history for some inspiration. The religious wars that took place in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are a great example. The paladins or other religious orders get caught in the middle of a war between two versions of the same religion, much like the wars between protestants and Catholics. In England, at around the same time, Henry VIII ordered the dissolution of all monasteries and abbeys in England, Wales, and Ireland when he established the Church of England.

Regardless, you could certainly use abandoned abbeys and monasteries as either a questing point or a nice little diversion from your campaign's main quest. There's bound to be items left behind in the decaying structures, things that were never looted or scavenged. Maybe the paladin or cleric in your party stumbles upon a holy relic or a new tome of spells or the like. A possible quest point could be to locate and bury the remains of the people who lived there and were killed by whatever disaster befell their home.

I'd imagine if your party were to come across any hostiles, it would probably be bandits or wild animals. They could also be mistaken for grave robbers by a passing patrol of soldiers.

Interesting games: Spears of the Dawn

Since posting links to Kickstarters seems to be a popular thing with blogs, I thought I'd hop on the bandwagon and link to one myself. Spears of the Dawn is a fantasy RPG by Kevin Crawford, the maker of Stars Without Number, that has an interesting theme - medieval Africa. I like Crawford's reason for doing it:

Spears of the Dawn is intended to be an encouragement to other indie game designers. For decades, we've heard the common wisdom- "African games don't sell," people say. "People can't identify with African character art." "Medieval Africa hasn't got the variety and flavor of medieval Europe." "Players aren't comfortable with an African-flavored setting."

I've just laid down a $3,000 bet that the common wisdom is wrong. I've written this game, commissioned the art, and already paid out $1,800 of the budget in art costs. I've brought on the superb artistic talents of people like Nicole Cardiff, Luigi Castellani, Earl Geier, Andrew Krahnke, and Ian MacLean. I've gone to the sources, looked at the histories, checked out the mythology, and I can say with perfect confidence that medieval Africa provides amazing material.

Going by the fact that the Kickstarter has already surpassed its $3,000 goal, I'd say people are interested in an Africa-themed RPG. I just like the fact that there's going to be an RPG out there that isn't based on medieval Europe. Freshens things up a bit.

h/t Blog of Holding.

A big bang: Artillery in fantasy

Wikipedia.

You don't really see it much in fantasy, do you? Artillery. Cannons, with the big booms and the big balls turning some poor bastards into a red stain and a column of brave soldiers into a slaughter house. Wow, that was a bit morbid, wasn't it? Well, in any case, it's a bit of an anachronism that you don't, especially since cannons existed during the middle ages. The Turks famously used them to batter the walls of Constantinople, ending the Byzantine and by extension, the Roman Empire. Indeed, according to Wikipedia, Europe started making use of cannons during the late middle ages, with the earliest one being something called a pot-de-fer, which debuted during the Hundred Years' War.

Granted, I'm still a relative n00b when it comes to fantasy fiction, so I'm probably generalizing. I suppose the reason you don't see them around in fiction is because writers are probably afraid of pushing the tech level to that point because where there are cannons, guns are sure to follow. I don't think that has to be. It would be simple just to BS an excuse for firearms not to exist in a fictional world, especially since the early ones were just godawful - literally just metal tubes mounted on wood.

New item for your RPGing: A potion that works every time, 60 percent of the time

From the makers of Erotic Orc, the only cologne made with bits of real orc.

I was born, six gun in my hand

The perfect theme song for any adventuring party. Might have to replace "six gun" with a more setting appropriate weapon, like a sword or whatever for fantasy and a blaster for scifi. Post-apoc games need no adjustment.

On dungeons, maps, and orc wangs (NSFW)

Fair warning, this comic has a bit of potty language.

Click to embiggen.

Oh, Hijinks Ensue, how I love you. It would be funny as f*ck if that happened in a game, though. Characters getting lost and winding up in completely different locations than their other party members.

"Dammit, where the hell is that tavern?"
"The directions said take a left at the Tomb of Horrors and a right at Blackmoor Castle, so how the hell did I wind up in the Abyss?"
"Huh, this looks more like a hive of scum and villainy than a tavern. No wait, it's just an Applebee's."

Then of course there's the guy who ends up at a brothel instead, but doesn't complain at all.

I double dare a DM to include an Orc fornication chamber in their next session. >:D