Friday, June 30, 2017

Weird Revisited: Strange Things at the Automat

I recent review of Weird Adventures reminded me of this post from July of 2010. The name of the establishment is, of course, a reference to characters in the works of James Branch Cabell and Robert W. Chambers, two writers whose work certainly influenced conception of Weird Adventures.



A phantom automat stalks the streets of the City. Horvendile & Hawberk’s may appear any where, but is less likely to be found on a busy thoroughfare or crowded street. It seems to thrive in the shadows. It's never found in the same place twice, and less than half of people who have been there have visited it more than once--and urban legend holds that to encounter it more than seven times is a bad omen, and harbingers death.

Horvendile & Hawberk’s, or sometimes “Double H’s” (used somewhat superstitiously), looks new, though its decor and signage looks a decade or more out of date. Decorative glass fixtures around the upper walls are etched with astrological symbols. The staff is always crisply dressed and pleasant, but doesn’t engage in conversation. In addition to the automat staples like coffee, pie, sandwiches, and macaroni and cheese, the coin-operated, hinged glass slots at double H’s sometimes hold (seemingly random) unusual items:

1. A Subway and Elevated Rail-Lines map of the City, with unknown stations identified.

2. The egg of an Oriental Griffin, worth a fortune--had it not been cooked sunny side up. Eating it leads to heightened sight for 48 hours.

3. A girasol ring, worth $200 to a common fence, but an evaluation by an expert reveals it to mark the bearer by tradition as the heir to a micronation in Eastern Ealderde.

4. A risque postcard of a Poitêmienne prostitute, imbued with the power of the eikone Doll, so that the owner has the power of charm over members of the opposite sex as long as they carry it on their person.

5. A used napkin with the address of a warehouse where a Staarkish Imperial military manhunter golem has been stored. It’s battered, but only needs a power source to return to operation.

6. Four-and-a-half pages of illuminated text in a magical script from a grimoire on which someone has over-written a series of bawdy limericks. Contains 1-4 spells, but must be recopied to separate the formulae from the limericks.

7. A post-bill asking after a lost dog named “Jakey.” The crude drawing of the dog is so indistinct as to be unhelpful, but it's strangely unsettling to the viewer. Any one who touches it will have vague nightmares and unrestful sleep that night.

8. A ornately engraved antique sixgun. It's intelligent (Int 17) and will attempt to dominate any bearer to force him or her to seek out its original owner who’s taxidermied corpse is currently on display in a roadside curio and oddity museum in the Dustlands. When used, it confers a +2 to hit.

9. A slice of preternaturally tasty pecan pie, that the consumer will talk about from time to time with some nostalgia for 1d20 years after.

10. A pocket note-pad with a glossary of hobogoblin cant and signs, which, if utilized improves reaction when encountering the tramp humanoids, and provides other helpful information for to “gentlemen of the road.”

Thursday, June 29, 2017

Let Alex Toth Illustrate Your Monster Manual

I've posted some Alex Toth animation model sheets before for their inspirational value. Here are more in that same vein:

This one could be a salamander:

Dogheaded? Junior dragons? How about insectoid kobolds?


If you ignore the heights given, these guys could be frost giants:


Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Wednesday Comics: The Wretch

Strange things happen in Glass City: a rain of babies falls, a grinning cut-out of a sun on a little girl's wall demands she give it a body, the spectre of a wailing woman kills children with her tears. The Eisner nominated comic The Wretch by Phil Hester and others resembles a superhero comic in some superficial ways, but it's actually something more akin to the New Weird literary genre in comics form.

The titular Wretch is a ink-black shape in bandages and occasionally hoses (he resembles a bit, a messier version of Spider-Man's black costume). He patrols the small midwestern city of Glass City where a lot of weird things happen. The Wretch never speaks. We're not given a clear indication of his powers, nor anything regarding his motivation of origins. The focus is more on Glass City's denizens and the odd things happening to them. The Wretch just tends to show up in the nick of time to fight something. The stories are all short and not very deep but they are a nice mix of absurdity and horror.

The second volume of Slave Labor Graphics collections subtitled "Devil's Lullaby" actually collects an earlier limited series (from Caliber Comics, 1996) than the one collected in the first volume. I think the chronological reading order of the SLG collections would be to start with the third and work backwards.

Monday, June 26, 2017

Random Motley Pirate Captains & their Ships

Art by William Stout

Here's an excerpt from the Azurth Adventure Digest: A series of random tables related to Motley Pirate captains and their ships.

Name
1 Black Hart
2 Black Mark
3 White Lily
4 White Lyle
5 Red Herron
6 Yellow Rose
7 Green Horne
8 Golden Boyd
9 Blue Yonder
10 Silver Bullitt
11 Gray Harriet
12 Purple Patch

Known For:
1 challenging captives to a game of checkers
2 an exotic pet
3 tendency to break into song
4 gold prosthetic nose
5 fine swordsmanship
6 prodigious appetite
7 half-merperson ancestry
8 mismatched eye color
9 numerous tattoos
10 sartorial excess
11 seasickness
12 Obsession with a specific sea creature

Ship
1 Scarwhal
2 Nigh Invulnerable
3 Blatant Beast
4 Typhoonigator
5 Luminous Nose
6 Hardluck Hooligan
7 Runcible Goose
8 Grand Panjandrum
9 Black Barnacle
10 Bandersnatch
11 Dubious Venture
12 Terrible Dogfish

Exotic Booty
1 A velvet bag of invisible, yet glowing star-gems.
2 Crates of ancient automata parts and junk machinery from Sang
3 The captured Frogling ambassador of Undersea and his attache
4 Casks of fine Viridian chrysochlorous wine
5 A nereid in a tank, actually a favored niece of the Sea King
6 Mirror boxes of bootleg moonlight
7 A small flask containing a condensed squall
8 Somewhat water-damaged back issues of the periodical Wizardry
9 Three cursed swords with a hatred for each other
10 A barrel of exotic fruit that act as a potions of healing if eaten
11 A corked and sealed bottle with a letter of introduction to King Volturnus, the East Wind
12 Crystalline unicorn figurines in various colors

Sunday, June 25, 2017

Dungeon Boomtown

The suggestion of boomtowns (linked not because you don't know what a boomtown is, but because of the list of historical boomtowns) near dungeons is something mentioned in D&D, but seldom is the concept developed in any interesting way. Chris "Hill Cantons" Kutalik has suggested before that the description of Maust on the border of the Dirdir-infested but also sequin-filled Carabas in Vance's The Dirdir is great for evoking this very thing, and he's right:

By noon Maust appeared in the distance: a jumble of tall narrow buildings with high gables and crooked roof-lines, built of dark timber and age-blackened tile...Running boys came out to meet the motor-wagon. They shouted slogans and held up signs and banners: "Sequin-takers attention! Kobo Hux will sell one of his excellent sequin-detectors." "Formulate your plans at the Inn of Purple Lights." "Weapons, puffpads, maps, digging implements from Sag the Mercantilist are eminently useful." "Do not grope at random; the Seer Garzu divines the location of large purple nodes." "Flee the Dirdir with all possible agility; use supple boots provided by Awalko." "Your last thoughts will be pleasant if, before death, you first consume the euphoric tablets formulated by Laus the Thaumaturge." "Enjoy a jolly respite, before entering the Zone, at the Platform of Merriment."
...They entered a narrow street running between tall, age darkened structures, the beer-colored sunlight barely penetrating to the street. Certain of the houses sold gear and implements conceivably useful to the sequin-taker: grading kits, camouflage, spoor eliminators, tongs, forks, bars, monoculars, maps, guides, talismans and prayer powders...
After a meal of stewed hackrod and mealcake, the three repaired to the library, at the back of the second floor. The side wall displayed a great map of the Zone; shelves held pamphlets, portfolios, compilations. The consultant, a small sad-eyed man, sat to the side and responded to questions in a confidential whisper. The three passed the afternoon studying the physiography of the Zone, the tracks of successful and unsuccessful ventures, the statistical distribution of Dirdir kills.
No quite as on the nose, but with plenty to inspire the town adventures that would take place between dungeon delves is Deadwood (2004). Here's a choice quote adventurers would do well to keep in mind: “Announcing your plans is a good way to hear God laugh.”

The movie Tombstone (1993) that civilizing forces are drawn to areas of great wealth as well as treasure seekers. They are a strange mixture of raw and upscale. From the opening narration: "Tombstone becomes queen of the boom towns where the latest Paris fashions are sold from the backs of wagons." And from Sheriff Behan:
"Have you seen how everyone dresses? Awful tony for a mining camp. No, sir, the die is cast. We are growing. Be as big as San Francisco in a few years and just as sophisticated."
Of course, a gunfight in the streets is ironic punctuation to his comment.

Friday, June 23, 2017

Azurth Adventure Digest


I've been working on a shorter publication, to tide people interested in more Azurth stuff over until the release of Cloud Castle of Azurth (which is still some distance in the future). The above is my mockup banner for the Azurth Adventure Digest (no cover illustration has been completed, as yet). This short publication will on the Boundless Sea, west of the Land of Azurth and collate what has been on the blog regarding the Motley Isles, have some random generators related to Motley Pirates, and give stats for a few sea-going folk who have showed up in my game. There will a short (longer than a one pager dungeon, but smaller than a published adventure) write up of the sandbox adventuring locale the Candy Isle.

Thursday, June 22, 2017

D&D Style

Which is more you?
As anyone who has read this blog for any amount of time (there's got to be someone!) knows, I don't not have one style, tone, flavor, what have you of D&D that I want to do all the time. The Land of Azurth is a bit whimsical and perhaps silly. The earliest setting I blogged up was perhaps reasonable standard if more rigorously rationalized "serious wordbuilding" D&D fare. If touched on more survival horror sort of setting riffs, and hope to one day finish a horror-tinged, pirate adventure (In Doom's Wake). This is to say nothing of the highly variant settings like Weird Adventures.

In other words, I like my D&D sort of like I my TV and music: eclectic. The at the table experience with me probably doesn't vary quite as much as my writing about them might suggest (getting a group of people around a table pretending to be elves with funny voices tends to engender some degree of humor), but they are not identical.

My time in rpg related social media has suggested that a lot people have a style/tone or at least a narrow range of style or tone they tend to like in their game. People are probably more tolerant for one shots than longterm campaigns of course, and probably have broader tastes in what they play in than what they run.

I confess I envy this a bit. I feel like avoid the siren's call of a new setting is hard enough, but add in a new or long ignored style or tone and it gets even harder! I feel like I could stick with a campaign longer if I knew what my favorite flavor was.