The Map that broke the blog, behold the city of Mesiquitar

 I’ve been wanting to start posting again for a long time, but for years, I felt that I had to have a big project that I could post as a series of entries. I started three such projects last summer. One is something I will return to, but on the first try I realized after a few weeks that it was going in the wrong direction. The second is a mega dungeon, which I’m still working on and will eventually begin to post. 

The third project, pictured below, started more or less by accident. I wanted to do a city and decided to draw some of the individual neighborhoods. So I drew the first one- and I just kept on going. As you can well imagine, it’s an extremely labor intensive project. It’s grueling and full of a soul crushing amount of drudgery. This had led me to take months off from it at time. I haven’t touched it since early June. So instead of kicking back into gear last August, as was my original intent, I got sucked into this hell of my own making.

When I finish the entirety of the project, including the setting in which it is nested, illustrations and all that, I will probably kickstart it, there's no other way to recoup the time investment. In retrospect i should have done Kickstarter for B/X Mars. That way the naked people wouldn't have fucked my sales. I managed a silver bestseller, which is pretty good for something locked behind the adult wall on DTRPG, but I could have done much better).

Whatever.

Behold in all its broken mediocrity, the great, unfinished city of Mesiquitar:

Oh, how I loathe it. 

For what it's worth I'm not a Discworld fan and I had no idea that "Turtles all the way down" (upper left of the map) was so wired into it, so I may have to change the religion, which is okay, because I'm thinking of basing the setting on Western Asia/ North Africa prior to the Bronze Age Collapse. In those days, most every city had its own god, writing was limited to elites and a whole bunch of other shit. 

Post edit addendum: It seems I spell with a level of competence just below what one might expect from a college athlete. 

PCs: If all else fails, kill 'em all.

Alright there are some things I need to get off my chest. 

If you’ve been running games for any appreciable length of time you’ve no doubt encountered a few game killing behaviors from players. 

Things that immediately come to mind:

CoC players who act like they’re in a D&D game and treat general citizens as they do in such settings. An example of this is an otherwise scholarly investigator who has never so much as fired a gun, threatening to torture a shopkeeper or a priest or any random citizen from a postman to a ship captain for information. 

If you’re running CoC for any group, even if they’re longtime players, you have to ready for this. It will happen- unless you’re really lucky. The last time it happened to me I was really taken aback and didn’t react quickly enough. The player was strangely hostile, too.  It ruined the game for me. What’s the solution to this? Have someone call the cops- or just have the shopkeeper’s spouse or a passing policeman shoot the character in question, let them get away with it and become, knowingly, or unknowingly, fugitives. The types of characters who inhabit the world of CoC aren’t really going to stand much chance against the overwhelming force the police can bring to bear. 

Short version: Kill them. 

CoC is probably my favorite game to run, but it's tricky to get everyone onboard the midnight meat train.

Lore hoarding: If you give a player information that they should share with the party and for some reason, just don’t. I’m not sure what to do with this one, honestly. Maybe tell the player they should share the information. 

Other than this, I have no fucking idea. 

Help me out here. 

Confusion as to the difference between good and evil. Killing prisoners, no matter how evil they may be, isn’t behavior good people engage in and it’s generally considered a crime, you know, like all murder. I mean you can kill a bear, but you probably shouldn’t wack all those bandits who just threw their weapons on the ground. 

It’s just rude. 

If you’re evil, whether you admit it or not, and it gets out, and it will, actual good characters are going to hunt you down. That’s okay, though, because if you survive the initial contact, they won’t kill you; they’ll see to it that you’re put on trial and then (deservedly) killed, but with due process. 

The House of Parliament: this refers to players who just hang out in dangerous places and spend a long time going back and forth trying to decide what to do next or chewing over completely unrelated things- like what they're going to do when they get back to town. This is hard on the GM and players who are on task. 

I have to give credit where credit is due here: Gary Gygax solved this problem half a century ago with wandering monsters. I'm not even sure I'd go so far as to roll for wandering monsters at this stage. Stop talking about your wedding china, girl, a dragon is on its way. 

Making characters completely unsuited to the game. If the GM tells you to make a character who can fight- don’t make an unarmed diplomat. This is especially true if the game is STAR WARS- which has ‘WARS’ in the title. It shouldn’t take three characters to subdue a stormtrooper. Superheroes who don’t or won’t fight ( I have seen this more times than you can believe) and glass cannons are two more. It’s really difficult to scale combat for a group in these situations. 

The turtle and the special snowflake. You all know what the turtle is, I am sure, but just in case: The turtle is when players get so worried about danger that they freeze and essentially take two hours of game time to open a door. This is related to the snowflake: Some players have a good laugh and make another guy when their character is killed. Other people get really fucking angry. When I was in ninth grade I had a guy punch me and throw me out of his house. Now I’m not expecting behavior that extreme these days, but I have a hard time running a game if I know that someone is going to lose their shit if things go sideways. 

These two problems have a very simple solution- Pre Gens. 

There was a time when I hated the very idea of pre gens, but I have done a 180 on them in the last few years. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I’m ever going to start a campaign any other way, ever again. I’ll let players make their own guy once I feel confident they get the vibe I’m going for (if your idea is to subvert that vibe- move on down the road, because I’m playing this game too and I work really fucking hard to make it happen, jerk). 

Pre gens give you the opportunity to make sure you have a relatively balanced party that fits the mood of the game you are running. You can also create personalities for each one. Players don’t get as attached to these guys, and, ime, tend to play their personalities a lot better and have a lot of fun. One of the absolute best games my group has ever played involved bank robbers and hostages in a getaway car (1970’s station wagon with a rumble seat). Everyone had their own conflicting motivations and the chaos that engendered was glorious. We used ICONS, which is far, far from my game of choice these days, but it did make it possible to have an action sequence that lasted for two full sessions without a moment of boredom. 

I have a more recent example, of a summer camp slasher game I ran not too long ago, which I’ll go into more detail about in another post, maybe the next one, but I have a few ideas so we’ll see what I get to first. 

Addendum: Page flippers and wafflers. Write down the pages of things you're going to need to know in combat and/or be ready to go when your turn comes around. Everyone else is waiting on you. EVERYONE. 

NSFW Working on adaptation of The Jewels of Gwahlur

If you have been here a few times before, you will know that I have been struggling with a graphic novel for years. I realized last august that I would have to split it in to two parts to make it work. This led to instant burnout and I drew nothing but game maps for several months. I started to shake the dust off a couple of months ago but it's been rough going. 

I decided that it might be to my benefit to study a story and break it down into a script and pictures. Jwels has always been a favorite of mine so I settled into that. I know better artists have already covered this story, but I don't really care. None of the previous adaptations have satisfied me.

Reading the story again and really studying it changed my perspective on it a bit. For one thing, it feels like it is the end of a much longer story. At least one of the important characters never appears in the story, for example. So I'm not sure I can do a one for one adaption. But, I'm going to try my best. 

Some art: 

Caller of Cthulu

 There are a lot of practices that were prevalent in the early days of the hobby that have long since fallen out of regular use. I play online these days. (I’d love an FtF group but for a variety of reasons it is not feasible.) As with games in meatspace, online games have a problem when there are too many players trying to talk at once. It’s worse online because if someone interrupts you when you are speaking they will completely drown you out. This sucks as a player, but it’s worse as a GM. Random jokes and crosstalk can make it almost impossible to get through a simple description or slow things down to the point that it’s difficult to build momentum or even continued investment. If you have any issues with sensory overload, it is maddening. 

Not too long ago I ran a CoC game and I opened it up to eight players. It was fucking awful. I could’t make out what anyone was trying to say, because, invariably, someone else would start talking over them. 

Worse than this, however, was the 10-15 minutes eight people, who were continuously talking over one another needed to decide weather or not they were going to go through a door.  

The game lasted four sessions, but actually went to shit in session three for reasons unrelated to the group size. 

However, I learned some important lessons. 

Were I to run such a large group again (doubtful) I would absolutely use a caller. 

What’s a caller? A caller is one player who sorts and organizes what the group is going to do and tells the GM. So that’s one person talking to you instead of eight or whatever. 

I’ve been asked how this helps the players.

It doesn’t. It’s for the benefit of the GM. Well, I guess it helps the players as the GM is less likely to scuttle the game and run away forever. 

How does that work if they’re all still talking over one another? 

You mute them until they have it together and are ready to go. Go make a coffee or a snack, take some notes, check some rules, bask in the momentary peace or whatever. You work hard enough putting everything together. Let the players sort their own stuff out. 

Yeah, I know it's been two years since my last post. I'll talk about that some other time. 

The State of the Metal Earth and What's to Come.

To begin with,  I'm still here and still doing stuff. 

The good news, I suppose is I have had a change in the way I approach game design. 

In the past I felt like I needed to, for lack of a better phrase,  over explain everything. Everything was locked in place by completely unnecessary editorializing and theory blarg. I managed to avoid this with BX Mars, but somehow forgot the lesson immediately. 

Current Projects

My time is my own these days and I have been putting it to good use working on stuff:

The Planet Eaters. my online graphic novel, I am roughly halfway through the story. I want to take a break to organize and quantify my ideas before I tackle the second half. 

http://cosmictalescomics.com/comic/cover/

To this end, the next thing I release, gaming wise, will be a Planet Eaters  ICONS supplement detailing Drift Space, a scattering of rogue stars located between the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxies and the main theater of action in the comic. It will detail heroes and villains, planets and factions, ideas on how to run a cosmic campaign and much more. 

IP with a comic and a RPG, can a movie deal be far behind?

Mars:

I'm just reformulating my ideas on my next major Mars RPG project, which will be a complete game somewhat compatable with TSR DND, but its own thing as well. It will come with color art issued in an adult version and a rated R for repressed version. Dying Mars is the working title. I am considering polishing up and coloring the old art and releasing the monster section as a stand alone product suitable for use with OSE. 

Samson of Mars, a short novel of Martian adventure is in its fourth draft. I will release it on the kindle. 

An excerpt: 

Samson risked a glance at the sun. Swollen and bloated, it shimmered and warped and looked back at him. At him.

Something black, oily and rotten crawled across it. 

He drew in a ragged desprate breath. Caught off guard by the bitter stench of the blistered, burning hole in the sky, he gagged and drooled. 

Driven by reflex, he took another breath. 

He could smell the sun; it bore the stink of reptiles and madness. 

Other projects:

I have three, maybe four settings scattered through the past. I'm going to assemble what I have complete on them, fill in the gaps and do some little books. The Dwarves or The Metal Earth settings will be next. 

This Blog;

In the near future,  in an effort to resurrect this thing, I'll post samples from all my projects gaming and otherwise. Maybe. I may also talk about CoC, which I've been playing. 

Another recent Planet Eaters page:

READ IT FOR THE PLOT

PS I can't seem to comment here. when I log on it takes me to the dashboard. So, I'll address any relevant comments in the next post. 

Planet Eaters, double update

http://cosmictalescomics.com/comic/page-038/

Planet Eaters Update

Check it out, if you will. 

 Planet eaters part five The Null-Coil

here's what the art looks like if you are on the fence. It's come a long way in the last few years.