Burnout, thoughts on comics, two weapon fighting, Helltoad, and so on

Well, it appears to be fading now, but sometime in May, I experienced a bit of RPG burnout. I still managed to keep my semi-weekly ICONS game afloat, but I kind of lost interest in doing any more than that. I think if I hadn't felt obligated to my players I would have canceled that too. I stewed for a week or so and then I started to focus my energy in a different direction. I allowed myself to become consumed by comics. I read some current Marvel and DC for a few weeks, but they quickly lost my interest. It's true that Infinite Crisis, The Sinestro Corps War and Final Crisis we're kind of cool as was Annihilation; ultimately, though, all these series, and several others I sampled were hampered by the need to tie into current continuity.
However, I got the big Jack Kirby Captain America Omnibus and the BPRD Plague of Frogs Hardcover for my Birthday; additionally i received The Walt Simonson Thor Omnibus for Father's Day. The first two are, of course, excellent; the third, however, pictured at the right, is the best 80$ you will ever spend on entertainment. It is over 1200 pages of cosmic ass kicking, it opens with the Ballad of Beta Ray Bill and covers Simonson's entire run on the title (some 42 issues). One of my favorite things about it is that it has been completely recolored. The new colors really compliment Simonson's artwork, imo.

Well enough of that:

Two weapon Fighting:
At fourth level members of the Adventurer class can chose to fight with two melee weapons in lieu of using a shield. upon rolling a successful attack roll the player rolls two D6, the higher result represents the damage done by the combined attack. Two weapon fighter score a critical hit on a 19 or a 20. All other critical hit rules apply.

Hell Toad
Spell level: Sorcerer 3
Range: 240 feet
Duration: Instantaneous
Upon casting this spell the Sorcerer distends his jaw and vomits forth a 45 foot cone of screaming, burning, ravenous toads. The cone is roughly 10 feet wide at its base. Damge is 1d6/lvel of the Sorcerer. A successful saving throw results in half damage.


Anyway, I'm moving back to Denver next month and that means more FtF gaming and more play testing. So The Metal Earth Project is moving forward. The main slowdown right now is due to the fact that I'm trying to write up all the spells and I suck at that. My other major project right now is, for lack of a better term, a graphic novel. I've been thinking about it for years and actively working on it for a couple of weeks. I'll be moving in to my fourth page of artwork (I'm guessing it will be around 150 pages long) tonight. I have two main goals with this project: to improve my cartooning skills and to tell the kind of goofy cosmic super hero story I'd like to read. At the top of this post and below you can find Two pics (click to enlarge) of the main character, Doc Vulcan. Up top, he is transforming, below he is doing super guys do- or perhaps he is performing a dramatic reenactment of the last week or so of activity in the OSR blogsphere- you make the call. I'll also be using several public domain supers in the story. When I get about 50 pages done, I'm going to start posting it as a web comic.

Carry Me Home to the Fire

The undead are a tremendous problem in The Metal Earth. The magical and technological detritus of a thousand, thousand different vanished civilizations have created a world in which a corpse can rise up to terrorize the living in any number of different ways. Coming back from the dead, or rising, as it is popularly called is one of the greatest fears of the age.

This problem is primarily addressed through the near universal mortuary practice of cremation. However, people don't always die at home or even within the confines of the cities.
For most sentients it is nearly unthinkable to allow a loved one to face the possibility of risings and families will often impoverish or even bankrupt themselves to make certain that a relative's corpse is recovered and carried home for burning.

Rates charged for corpse recovery vary from place to place; 500gp is usually the starting price for any such expedition; sometimes if the body has been lost in an especially dangerous region the price can exceed ten times this amount.

Obviously, corpse recovery can provide opportunity for adventurers looking to earn a little (or a lot of) coin. However, aside from the risk inherent in travel outside the cities, there is also a social stigma. Corpse handling is seen as the lowest sort of task and those that engaged in recovery may find themselves unable to spend their coin in respectable establishments as they will have been relegated to the lowest caste of society- the Burners, perhaps the only group seen to be less desirable than humans (although not nearly as subject to hate motivated violence).

Special thanks to Boulet at the therpghaven.

Space D&D & using other people's material

Right now, if I were going to add an outer space element to my Metal Earth home game, space craft rules would be handled by a combination of Spelljammer and XXVc; earth would be the Metal Earth, Mars would be Athas (Dark sun), Venus would be Carcosa or Athanor and counter earth would be Planet Algol.

XXCv: What is in the box

So as stated in my previous post, I picked up a copy of Buck Rogers XXVc last weekend. I have vague memories of seeing this game when it was released, but I wasn't sure why I never picked up a copy at the time. I have always been mad for this kind of thing. As it turns out, the game was released in 1990, arguably the craziest year of my entire life (although the years that bracket it are also fair contenders for this title). Furthermore, I think I may have been put off of TSR product by this point for some bullshit early 20's reason or another.

I've flipped through all three books, and I'm about a third of the way through an in depth read of the first book. My initial impressions are extremely positive. The rules are AD&D based- an obvious bonus. Additionally, I'm a huge fan of Solar System SF and that is what this game is all about. I'm pretty sure I could tweak the rules for this game to emulate the settings from books like EE Smith's Space hounds of the IPCC, Bester's The Stars My Destination, Larry Niven's early Known Space stuff, and dozens of other things that I'm too lazy to type the titles of- or my own custom Solar System setting.

Anyway, onto the unboxing pics!




All these photos are crap. I can't cipher how to adjust the white balance on my camera, and my secret undersea base seems to be a less than ideal environment for taking pictures. Furthermore, autofocus sucks. I will be happy to rephotograph anything that anyone would like a better look at.
You can click on all these if you desire a larger/blurrier version.

Anyway...

First up the box. It is big and thick.

And it has a lot of stuff in it:
There are three books:

Two big ass reversible poster maps:

Counters and a (flimsy) three panel referee screen.

Several 8 x 11 planet map/stat (map on one side, stats on the other) cards.

A bunch of ship cards of the same size.
And this thing, which appears to be some sort of game aid designed to help with figuring out interplanetary travel time, fuel requirements and other junk.


Well, I have to say that all of this creates quiet an out of the box experience. It is a really nice assortment of stuff. I am not certain, however, how much table time some of the ship cards and what not would actually get. I'd have to give the game a spin in order to know that.

Playtest, Buck Rogers XXVc and some drawings

My best friend Scott and I did a long playtest (about 6 hours) of The Metal Earth rules during my visit to Denver last weekend. The entire thing was completely spontaneous. Scott ran three player characters: two adventurers (a minotaur and a grey) and a shae Sorcerer, who was the leader of the expedition and in search of magical treasure. Anyway, the party explored the Tower of The Changer * in its entirety and made their way down into the Forgotten Depths* wherein the party found a teleportation pool (Hex 0703) that led back to the city of Ssaur *. We tried out new spells, several of the character generation options, combat and some other junk. It went very well, and there is nothing like running a game with the rules scattered across a couple of books and several sheets of note paper to help one get an idea of how to put together a final product.
So the work continues, although I now have a complete outline and a good deal of almost every chapter written.

*Available for free on the left.

The other awesome thing that happened: I picked up a copy of the Buck Rogers XXVc game. I missed this game when it was released and I've been curious about it ever since- to the point that along with Gamma World 1e it is on my short list of games that I will purchase on sight.
As far as my copy goes, the box is worn, but it really doesn't look like anyone ever opened the game books and all the chits are still in place. Beyond that, If anyone is interested I could probably be talked into doing a more thorough review of the thing.

In other news, I can't say why, but the online gaming world is kind of bringing me down lately. I've given up on forums completely and sadly some blogs. I'd point out what bothers me (it's not politics, btw) but then I'd have to suffer through comments where people tell me stuff we ALL already know (i.e. people can post what they want on their blogs).

Here's some "Art" click on the images for larger versions.

This one I've posted before, but this is a much better scan:
Here are the PCs from my ICONS game Doc Crucible (left) and The Fire Knight (right):
And some rushed drawings of next week's villains (The Round Up Gang):

Whiplash McKracken


The Texas Skull
And Little Lady Lariat
Theses guys are bounty hunters who are hunting down the PCs (who have been accused of being Soviet collaborators [the game takes place in 1950]) There are a couple more of this crew: Kid Snake Eye and Pappy (think like the Hulk, but a redneck feller); I haven't gotten around to drawing them yet.

Rushed gameday superficial glosses: Part 2

As with last time, I've waited until the last minute and we have our game tonight. All of these were done between 12:20 and 3:20 this afternoon. For those just joining us, these guys are all aliens for my super hero game. If you'd like more of a clue see my previous post.

Click the images to enlarge

First up we have: Braino! He's thinking bad thoughts. About... you!




Next the Reptiloid!

and his pal, Squishy: the alien amoeba!

I did a line and wash thing with Squishy. The paper warped. Apparently, the scanner doesn't like warped paper. Bitch.

Next, the Glar, synthetic foot soldiers of the Krang!

And now, the last resort of the Krang! The Worminator. I rather like this one, actually.


Anyway, regarding the Metal Earth. We will be splitting our weekend game sessions between Icons and the Metal Earth starting in a bout a month. I will not be the referee for the ME game, which I think is ideal, because it will actually be more of a test of the rules as opposed to a test of my ability to make up shit on the spot (although I'm sure i will do some of that as well). And I get to play! So this will be the play test before I release a general play test doc- if I decide to do so.

Online gaming stuff, and some rushed game day drawings

Here are some drawings I did for Sunday's game Earth Zero (Icons). We have finally hammered our online system down. We use Skype for voice and infrno for the game table. We turn off all A-V functions in infrno. Although a big part of face to face gaming is being, you know, face to face, we've found that online video is a pain in the ass to implement and kind of distracting on top of that. We had a blast on Sunday without it, so there you go.

Anyway, here are some extremely crappy drawings I did for the game- click to enlarge and all that. I had limited time to prep, so I spent 15-30 (or less) minutes from concept to pencil to inks on each one. I'm going to make this a regular practice, I think, and maybe allow myself an hour or two to do a post session drawing of a scene from the game. This will create a pictorial history of each campaign. Augmented with captions, I think it'll be neato- despite the rushed, substandard look of the art.
The characters (Doc Crucible and The Fire Knight) hail from 1949AD; however, as a result of a long series of events, they have found themselves on board a derelict generation star ship (pictured above) named Interphaze, which left earth in the 54th century, but has been drifting around in No Space for about 6000 years. The Biozone is designed to look like the surface of the Earth; DC and TFK actually wandered around up there for a couple of sessions before they accessed the lower level and got a look out into space and a clue. The scale is all wrong on the pic, actually, I eventually decided it was too small. I think the ship is at least a couple of hundred KM long. I'm waffling on that point. Also I did that drawing in like a minute and a half with a ballpoint, so cut me some slack if you will.
As it turns out, the human crew died off long ago and the ship is currently run by (possibly evil) gene engineered dolphins, who tend to the 20k human colonists residing stasis chambers located within giant, artificial, water-filled caverns on the systems level.
Also, there are monkey people, most of whom work for the dolphins, but some who have broken away and formed their own civilizations

Anyway, the ship has an infestation of mind control parasites known as the Krang! The Krang! arrived on the ship when their much, much smaller star ship had some kind of hyperspace malfunction and materialized inside one of the thousands of artificial caves that make up the geozone. TFK and DC are part of a temporary alliance of money people and dolphins committed to stopping the Krang before they gain access to the slumbering human colonists. The Krang! crew is made up of a disparate group of mind controlled aliens, like these guys on the left.

Here is the picture of the Krang! spaceship, which is trapped in what the Monkey people (The Imae) call "The Cave of the Old Ones." Incidentally, this is where Sunday's game came to a close:
















Last but almost certainly least, a security droid that the the boys activated by accident whilst exploring another area: