Small houserule I came up with while redoing the my xp awards for my campaign:
Attending a church service/religious ceremony of a friendly faith and tithing appropriately to their stature (at least 50gp) gives 50 xp.
It also has a chance of bestowing a blessing. The character tithing needs to roll Save vs. Spell to gain the effects of a Bless spell until the next combat or rest period (whatever happens first).
A critical failure on this roll (1 in 20) instead gains them the effect of a Quest. The PC in question now is taken with the unbearable need to do something specific (ideally something related to the saint/deity worshipped in the temple).
Mind you, you might think this is just a boon for player characters, but the effect of this can also affect opponents, be they clerics, cultists, or members of various tribes. There is a chance any particular group is under the influence of a Bless spell, as long as there is a cleric or shaman attending their spiritual needs.
This also means the local tribes might send out representatives on Quests themselves. An orcish tribe might get the quest to locate a legendary weapon of their tribe now in the hands of the local baron.
It’s the first time I actually feel the amount of times I played in a year worth mentioning. I had a rather successful 2024 in terms of ttrpg gaming.
If my reckoning is correct (and I think I might miss a few) I played 56 sessions of roleplaying games this year. And this doesn’t take into account the ones that were scheduled but failed to take place.
Most of them were 2 hour sessions on the Grenzland Discord server, but I was co-GMing longer sessions in a Shadowrun3 game (via Google Meet)
The largest part of the sessions was my Glimmermark game with 16 sessions (plus two if you count my VTT experiments) run in Labyrinth Lord. Unfortunately despite it being supposedly a weekly open table game a few times nobody showed up.
I attended one convention (Cauldron), published 45 blog posts, one article in a fanzine, and participated in one podcast episode.
I also participated in 3 PbM games.
Systems I played this year:
Shadowrun 3rd edition Labyrinth Lord Helmets and Halberds Dungeons and Dragons (White Box+Chainmail) Dungeons and Dragons (Basic) Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Old School Essentials Dolmenwood Troika! Cairn Traveller (Classic) Traveller (Mongoose 2nd)
During my excursions into reaction rolls for Traveller lately I realized that the Traveller book has a template for how to create rumor tables (or just come up with rumors on the fly). Unlike other games (uhm… DnD) which never get into this deeper than having a rumor table in some of their scenarios.
This also obviously was used in the creation of the rumor tables for the early scenario booklets. So if you are interested in how this look in practice you could just check e.g. Kinunir, Leviathan, or Twilight’s Peak to have ready made examples. And I think it works quite well, because those letter codes in the table give a generic idea of what sort of rumor one might encounter.
(speaking off which: rumors also showed up on the Encounter tables, so could be encountered randomly).
And it would even be possible to just roll on it and decide on the fly what sort of rumor (speak: hint) the characters would get.
In my opinion the matrix is a bit too complicated though. There’s at least one additional step in the table between rolling and looking up the result which really doesn’t need to be there.
Now unlike the usual d66 tables modern (Mongoose) Traveller is fond of which give you 36 different values to play with, this one gives you… how many exactly?
There are 36 choices for sure, but there are 26 different values (because it’s using the 26 letters of the English alphabet for them) some of which show up multiple times both in the table and the list of letters. which means there is a certain spread of likelihoods to encounter specific rumors. And because of the way it is structured the more general rumors in the lower part of the table are in there more often than others.
OK, no, I have to make this a bit clearer.
Let’s find out how this works: all letter codes show up at least once, for 26 letters. Letter codes U V, W, and X show up thrice, and are designated General Rumors. Letter Codes Y and Z show up twice, also as General Rumors, but they are designated specific and misleading background data.
This means from 36 different values 20 should provide info for the adventure at hand, the other 16 should provide general data. In addition multiple values in the 20 first letters of the alphabet have the same category as others.
Major Fact C and Major Fact P have the same likelihood to appear, at 1/36. They should be different major facts though. Reference to library data W and L have different weights. The more generic W has a chance of 3/36 to show up, while L merely shows up in 1/36 cases.
The differences between the categories sometimes are a bit fluent. How do I make a clue that is veiled instead of misleading? On the other hand, it just gives a framework to work with so this is OK for now.
So now lets rework that table into something easier to use: If my knowledge of statistics hasn’t completely left me, all the entries on the table above should have the same chance of happening (unless using biased dice). But that means we can just cut down on the whole thing and not lose anything from it.
d66
Letter Code
Rumor
11
A
Background Information
12
B
Minor Fact
13
C
Major Fact
14
D
Partial (potentially misleading) fact
15
E
Veiled clue
16
F
Information Leading to trap
21
G
Location Data
22
H
Important Fact
23
I
Obvious Clue
24
J
Completely False Information
25
K
Terminology
26
L
Library Data Reference
31
M
Helpful Data
32
N
Location Data
33
O
Reliable recommendation to action
34
P
Major Fact
35
Q
Background Information
36
R
Minor fact
41
S
Veiled Clue
42
T
Misleading clue
43-45
U
Broad Background Information
46-52
V
Misleading Background information
53-55
W
Reference to Library Data
56-62
X
General Location Data
63-64
Y
Specific Background Data
65-66
Z
Misleading Background Data
And here we have it. Now to create a rumor table for an adventure or a location merely write down the letters A to Z, then fill in appropriate info. You don’t even have to fill all of it anew all the time. Just leave every entry over 42 the same and just change it on occasion (maybe after PCs have encountered it once or twice), leaving you with 20 rumors, hints, and infodumps you want to feed your players.
…of Hessia and Thuringia that is. But that means in living memory the Iron Wall ran merely a few hundred meters away from the location.
And I swear I wanted to go there and make a proper picture but there was simply no time. I managed to play more during the last weekend than I did during some of the last few years.
I saw it happened last year and was miffed I completely missed it until pictures showed up online. So I made sure to plan for it early on this year.
The convention took place in a small manor house in eastern Hessia (Schloss Hohenroda), which makes for really central Germany. It ran from Thursday the 17th to Sunday the 20th.
I managed to get there by Thursday evening, much too late and tired to actually do much but talk a bit with people and watch them play a Braunstein game where I lacked context. This was an issue I will have to deal with next year when the convention is planned even further west: either I get someone else to drive with me, or I have to travel by other means. I am not used to driving this long alone.
The town of Badwall under attack
The next few days were filled with lots of gaming, as games started right after breakfast and were only interrupted by meals (and sometimes ran into the mealtimes as well). It was fun, it was nice having people around that actually were talking the same things I was interested in, and which understood what I was talking about. Even with other RPG conventions that’s not necessarily a given. It was also fun doing some really nice creative gaming that did not involve following some sort of railroad for the sake of it.
On the other hand it also showed the audience of the hobby definitely trending towards the bearded old guy demographic (and considering how early I went to bed I definitely feel like I’m part of it).
Chainmail naval battle
Games I played
2 games in Wanderer Bill‘s Grenzland campaign (ODnD White Box+Chainmail). Different characters though, because the one from the first game was time-locked (and the one I played previously in his campaign safely back home…).
The campaign is running in real time, and when the game moves ahead the characters are out of commission for further games until it catches up. Which meant when we started venturing out in the second adventure the big fight of the first scenario still was in the future.
In the goblin market, miniatures not to scale
Our first adventure we were supposed to explore south of the campaign base Blaufahr to find new people for the depopulated settlement. The last few months in the campaign seem to have been quite rough. So we were given money to find new people and opportunities.
Instead we decided to go to the dungeon to loot. We rescued a few goblins from bandits and tried to establish friendly relations with the goblin king. Unfortunately the goblins at the local goblin settlement were wary of us, and when one of our MUs decided to steal an ancestral artifact the whole situation went sideways. Our fighters heroically managed to behead the goblin king and show off his head to his people. Then they were slaughtered by his enraged citizens.
(There was in fact a chance they’d crown one of them the new king)
We spellcasters instead headed to the exit when it started to go wrong and managed to survive largely unscathed.
The second adventure was a scouting mission northwards, to figure out where a group of orcs that had attacked recently had their settlement. Through some smart play and good die rolls we befriended some scouting elves, hitched a ride on their ship, found the settlement, mowed down a patrol, then took their leader prisoner. All without casualties.
Then a random encounter with cockatrices hit us hard and turned the adventure into fantasy-vietnam, as our decimated party tried to hurry through unknown territory, getting the prisoner back to Blaufahr.
The four petrified elvish men-at-arms we left behind are now a permanent fixture in the ongoing campaign, at least until someone with a stone-to-flesh scroll comes by…
And that’s all exactly the weird off the wall gaming experience I love when playing ODnD.
baexta had a session of Albie Fiore’s The Lichway (from White Dwarf #9) on offer, run in ADnD/OSRIC, and I decided to take part. Especially as I realized I had forgotten everything about the scenario from running it… 12 years ago? Well, not everything. I remembered the central conceit. But the GM telegraphed that early on and the others figured it out and I didn’t have to feel bad about it. He also offered The Halls of Tizun Thane, and while I would have loved that one as well I just prepped that recently.
This was also the first time I actually properly played ADnD 1st ed. by the book, and I realized my view of it was correct: it’s a good resource to take parts from, but I do not care about the complexity itself. And ADnD is not actually all that complex, just more so than I like for this kind of game. I think there’s other games that do the complexity better.
It also was the first time I played Old School Essentials proper, as in another game we went down to The Jeweler’s Sanctum from the OSE Adventure Anthology I. Despite OSE being basically just a restatement of B/X with clearer design it also oozes some dark fairy tale vibe that seems quite different from standard B/X DnD. The game bore that out, even though it was quite the standard dungeon crawl: we were to explore an improbably large dungeon under a jeweler’s workshop. The scenario whittled away our resources with smaller encounters (giant centipedes and rats) before hitting us with a near TPK in the form of grey oozes. Our GM daeman managed to present this all quite well (he has a knack for using minis and terrain… and printing them out), but I can’t help but think that the scenario itself has issues. On the other hand we clearly didn’t figure out some of the stuff in the dungeon, so I might just be missing the point.
The last one I took part in was The Veiled Vaults of the Onyx Queen, a DCC funnel presented by le moule intello as a basic DnD scenario. It seems he wanted to run it as a DCC scenario as well but received some negative feedback about that before, so decided to switch it to DnD on the fly. Which… I don’t know. I signed up for the game when it was advertised as a DCC game, and so did daeman (see above), and I think we both wouldn’t have minded to play DCC instead. And I think it would have worked oh so slightly better because the magic system of DCC seems more geared towards this. That said, it still worked the way he ran it.
A funnel is a scenario concept where you start with multiple 0-level characters and develop them during the game for use in a later campaign, or you lose and replace them. Your characters might come out with some useful skills or magic items, and a proper backstory.
That said this scenario was more linear and basic than I might have liked, and seemed very specifically intended to introduce people to the hobby. And for that it might be very useful. It just also drops the players into a very specific Heavy Metal-style setting where nobody questions a queen living for 300 years and regularly sacrificing her least liked subjects to some eldritch being from beyond.
Other things…
Blackrazor wrote a tournament module for the convention (“Children of the Sea”), and I originally wanted to GM it, but didn’t find the time to look into it before. And when I signed up for it I either mistook the time slot or the game disappeared, so in the end I didn’t even play in it. It seems to have been quite fun though.
There was unlimited coffee. Unlimited coffee!
Also a free candy bar for brain food.
I received a Nibelung Saga game and the new issue of Grenzland on the Convention, but I will have a look at those in separate posts
I remember watching Land of the Lost, both the original ’74 show and the ’92 version on German television. I was not impressed back then, and to be fair, the special effects in both are special only in how pathetic they are.
It’s funny that with the passing of time (and watching it in the original language, mind you) the bad quality of the effects becomes endearing, and it becomes more obvious how well written and inventive at least the ’74 version of the show really was.
But then… the names of the script writers read like a Who’s who of science fiction in the late 60s/early 70s: Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven, Theodore Sturgeon… the presence of Walter Koenig in that list makes it likely the Krofts just raided a local science fiction convention and shanghaied whoever they found on stage into writing for their little dinosaur show.
But it shows. I was not aware of it when I was a kid, but there’s some genuine sense of wonder in there. The Land of the Lost is not just some hidden valley somewhere, it’s an artificial time and space pathway in a pocket dimension, fallen into disrepair. And the original builders are still there, descended into barbarism. Although the nature of the dimension might indicate they also are the ancestors of the builders. There’s some weird timey wimey stuff going on, to the point that nobody can make sense of the timeline in the first place.
So what’s the show about?
If you never have seen it (or didn’t click the video above), it’s about the Marshall family (father Rick, and children Will and Holly) who are trapped in an interdimensional portal while rafting down a river and now are stuck in the titular Land of the Lost, a wide tropical valley with prehistoric flora and fauna that wraps around itself. Here they encounter mysterious ruins, helpful apemen (the pakuni), savage lizard people (the sleestak), dinosaurs, mysterious artifacts, and lots of other weird interdimensional flotsam and jetsam.
The effects are… bad, with dinosaurs played by a mix of (quite decent) claymation and (unconvincing) hand puppets, and liberal use of astonishingly bad green screen to put it all together. But the budget for the show was minimal, and they still manage to pull out evocative scenes from reused sets and bad photographs.
The acting is ok for a kids show, which means not great. But I have seen worse.
But the ontological mystery of it all, and the gradual worldbuilding is fantastic. Why are they here? How do they leave? And what IS this place?
And then there are the Sleestak. Everyone loves the Sleestak. They are derpy-looking lizard people that are almost always hissing, walk slow as molasses, and the costumes are terrible (and only three were ever made, which explains why they show up in groups of three at most). But they also are uncanny and implacable. Like the oversized pepper pots, the Daleks of Doctor Who, these are clearly monsters made on a budget. But they also are terrifying.
Their first appearance is in episode 3 The Sleestak God, and here we encounter them in a lost underground city, guarded by an allosaurus in the front yard, trying to sacrifice Will and Holly to their unseen God living in the tunnels under the city. There’s some heavy Lovecraftian or even Howardian vibes here. Much more than what you might expect from a stupid little dinosaur show.
What I am trying to say is… this show is pretty DnD in that “just after the game was invented” sense.
Now I doubt Dungeons and Dragons itself was directly influenced by Land of the Lost, and I doubt the series was influenced by DnD, the timeline just doesn’t add up for that. But they definitely were using the same sources for their ideas, and they came up with a lot of similar ideas.
That is to say, in the beginning it wasn’t influenced. Clearly kids were watching this and bringing their ideas from the screen to the game. Especially the sleestak might have had a great influence on how lizard folk in the game evolved over time.
Some links to other people who already wrote about it:
Nobody knows where the name Glimmermark comes from. One might assume it was the Glimmerstone Wars, that have ravaged part of the region for centuries, but the name itself seems to have been much older. There have been references about The Glimmer, or journeying “towards the Glimmer” for over a thousand years, in various languages. So the fabled stones seem to have been named after the region and not the other way around. The name Terra Sublustrii has been attested in late imperial writings, but the term itself only showed up in the accounting of provinces lost to barbarian tribes. For what it’s worth, legends of lost treasure abound in this region. As do those of monsters guarding them. – from the writings of Cara the Sage
I finally took the plunge and started my Glimmermark campaign on the 1st of July. Considering I am planning to have a 1:1 timeframe (1 day in real life equals about 1 day in the campaign world) that makes for a nice memorable start date. I guess I can do the DSA thing and have the year start in the middle of the year. That always felt like such a simple but effective “not in Kansas anymore” thing they did for worldbuilding. One of the characters already was playing in my previous VTT games in the Tomb of the Serpent Kings this means this was technically not the first session… but whatever. This is the first one that in my mind took place in the actual campaign environment I have been planning.
I still haven’t actually finished with the rules I was preparing for it though, so right now we are playing with Labyrinth Lord rules, because that’s what my home rules are based on anyway.
The first session was a small foray into the ruins of Castle Dyson (aka Dyson’s Delve) from Castle Aberwacht (aka a modified Keep on the Borderlands). The immediate surroundings of the area are mostly those of Mike’s World (which I wrote about a while ago), with various other modules intended to slot into place around the area. Now I will have to make that area make come alive somehow.
I have to say that I am not quite used to people being so intent on actual measurements as my last players were. None of my previous long-term groups really were taking note of too many details, which tripped me up this time and really shouldn’t have.
There is a particular genre of writing for roleplaying games that is concerned not so much with generic usefulness, but instead with expanding on one particular scenario or other supplement that is just so well known it has an (likely very small) audience, despite that. And Mike’s World fits into that. I guess the biggest sub-subgenre of this subgenre is the expansion of Keep on the Borderlands. The module was after all one of the most played scenarios in the history of Dungeons and Dragons, and shines by the sheer applicability towards all kinds of settings. So there have been multiple attempts at expanding and emulating the module, from simply working out the Caves of the Unknown (which were left to the referee to work out in the original) to complete reworkings, as in Barkeep on the Borderlands. Mike’s World is closer to the former than the latter.
Now you might be familiar with McKinney’s name for writing the old OSR classics Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown, now already decades back. His Mike’s books are not quite as high-concept as these, but also hardly as controversial. Their central conceit is that they are dungeon and wilderness area expansions of B2 Keep on the Borderlands, as designed by a 12-year old DM named Mike in 1982. You can check out those three supplements for free on drivethrurpg, as McKinney decided to put the whole document behind the preview link. Which is good, as I was not quite convinced about the two Mike’s Dungeons and Mike’s Dungeon: The Deep Levels supplements which expand the Cave of the Unknown and the Caves of Chaos into a 117 level megadungeon that has been (generously) described as lo-fi: It effectively is combat encounter after combat encounter, in level after level of same-looking geography. I could maybe see a use for it as a very lazy, video gamey expansion of the Caves, but on the other hand…
nah.
On the other hand Mike’s World expands the brief original Wilderness section of the original beyond the surroundings of the Keep into a wilderness crawl in the same dimensions of the B2 Wilderness. This still annoyingly leaves the area west of the Keep frustratingly blank, but it does some interesting things for the areas past the fens and up the road.
The Wilderness we encounter here has been described as B/X filtered through ODnD and the ADnD monster manual. It is not too worked out. Every single of the additional maps, all in the style of B2, faithfully emulates a 12 year old working that all out for himself, smudges and all, and has about 2-5 new encounters, progressively harder the further you get away from the Keep.
According to McKinney the idea is that our 12 year old DM took the map of the Keep from B2, and worked out encounter areas roughly based on concentric circles, spreading out from there. Which means that the maps right next to original map might be appropriate for about level 2-3, with the danger increasing the further one gets into the unknown wilderness beyond the Keep, up to encounters appropriate for about level 14 in the eastermost sections.
Soon enough certain themes will become apparent: The area was until recently the scene of a rather bitterly fought war between dwarves (called dwarrows for some reason), gnomes, hobgoblins, and giants over the so called Glimmerstones (which clearly came from Carcosa as they glimmer in Ulfire, Dolm, and Jale), which caused multiple elemental upheavals and changes in the landscape. Some areas are situated on an elemental fracture, while the so-called serpent path snakes it’s way (hehe) through the setting, empowering ophidian beings.
The encounters are not quite as weird as one would expect, but McKinney’s trademark focus on all kinds of colors holds sway even in this world. Sure there might be an Ulfire stone from outer space, but there are also blue harpies, a clear river running over amber-colored gravel, rainbow colored hippogriffs (I suspect a My Little Pony connection with those), pinto centaurs, and white apes (that might transport you to a red planet). It’s all a bit jumbled together, one could even call it a gallimaufry of themes (a word I learned from the trading post on map 4), but it can serve it’s use as an expansion of the module quite nicely. I do think it needs to be expanded by your own ideas a bit more. As it is it sometimes appears just a bit too barebones and generic. Which, to be fair, is exactly what it sets out to be.
The whole setting is supposedly the untamed wilderness. So the DM takes his inspirations from his reading material. The woods in the untamed wilderness are as dark as Mirkwood, with spiders to match. But the place is also somewhat… small… Using the scale from B2 we have an area here that fills about a 20 mile hex, filled to the brim with weird encounters, and a level scale from 1 to 14. That all seems a tad over the top, but it might just be what a starter campaign needs.
I do have to admit that there are things that bug me about the whole thing: yes, the scale is one thing, but it fits what it sets out to do. But I somewhat dislike just how low-fi the presentation of the product is. And I know it’s part of the aesthetic the author is going for, but I think I’d really love to have the whole map in a cleaner format. (at least there is a 3rd party overview of the whole setting available somewhere…)
I decided to use this expansion, and locate some of the dungeons I had planned for my starter sandbox further into the area. The Caverns of Thracia fit well closer to the Serpent Path, Quasqueton somewhere into the northern parts, and The Tomb of the Serpent Kings… I guess also somewhere in the hills close to Thracia. I am wondering if I can get the monastery from B5 anywhere as well. Maybe in the south.
I am not a fan of Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition. In fact I am not a fan of the 4th edition either, or the 3.5th edition, or Pathfinder (the 3.75th edition) for that matter. Actually I burned out running 3e and that was the impetus to go back to older edition, retroclones, and the OSR.
Which means I only really was touched by the introduction of warlock peripherally.
It didn’t help that I first saw them done in 3.5 and was not impressed. I still am not. It took them a while to get them into a state where players might intuitively grasp what the class is about. The 5th edition one seems to have managed that though, and I think I get why: warlocks are fun.
They are the kind of power fantasy that has all the hallmarks of a chugging half a quart of vodka with Red Bull and stealing a car. Maybe in the back of your mind you know that this is a bad idea, but right now you are intoxicated and it’s fun and who knows if morning will ever come and who cares about those flashing blue lights behind you?
Warlocks are the bad example your parents warned you about. It’s what lazy kids become when they grow up. But why, do the fighter and the magic user say, do they have so much fun being lazy? What about training? What about studying?
To which the Warlocks answer: “Eldritch Blast!”
But no, I think Warlocks as a character concept are really wonderfully OSR: you sell your soul to… not necessarily the devil, but SOMETHING, and then you can do all kinds of stuff you never learned. That sounds overpowered, and it is. But there is the implicit end of the warlock, which most people seem to forget because they treat it as just another class: this is a class that is completely dependent on some other unknownable being and their whims. There is not really a good ending for the warlock. Whatever actually happens with them when they die, in most cases it shouldn’t be pretty. If you have pledged your soul to the devil you won’t end slurping ice cold drinks at the shore of some scenic lake of fire. If you pledged it to an archfey you might end up as furniture.
I think what is missing from the class as written a bit is that there should be marks of what you are doing on you as well. You don’t become level 5 with no outside mark. I would say that every level there should be a possibility of a new pact marker. Cloven feet? Horns growing? Ears start looking like leafs? Something like that.
Reaction rolls should be affected. People might fear you, but they won’t respect you. You took the easy way and when people know they KNOW. Animals will look at you funny. You might not be able to pass under a horseshoe anymore. Mirrors shatter. That stuff.
Also ages ago I wrote about how to do multiclassing in my opinion. Every level, even the first, should cost as much as the next highest level of your other classes. That still holds up, but I think Warlocks… don’t follow that rule. Because learning another class when you spent your life doing something else shouldn’t be easy. Unless, well, you sell your soul or something. New warlocks just become warlocks.
Bob Walters 1982, published without context in Dragon 63
Dungeons and Dragons was published 50 years ago, and almost immediately afterwards ‘zines and magazines appeared to give players and DMs more material to work with. And even beforehand things were published in Diplomacy zines and even mainstream magazines.
And there have been a lot of attempts by fellow bloggers to go through these magazines systematically, although in a lot of cases they focused almost exclusively on the holy trinity of Dragon, Dungeon, and White Dwarf. Which after all were the biggest RPG magazines there were in the English language.
So I decided to write down some articles when I find them. Mostly as a way for myself to remember them (I keep coming across useful articles that don’t quite fit with what I am working on, only to half-remember them months later when I could use them). But also because some stuff should not be forgotten just because it’s only in some magazine published halfway across the world 40 years ago.
I am going to use a small rating system for now:
A – for good articles with good game use
B – for articles with some use
S – for articles that are so good they could sustain a whole campaign or at least multiple sessions on their own
H – for articles of historical interest but maybe no actual game use
C – for campaign specific articles with barely any use outside that particular campaign
F – for fiction of note
I – for some general interest stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else, also stuff that is neither good nor bad but maybe has an interesting idea
J – for jokes, cartoons, and humor of note
T – for things that are so terrible I just have to point them out
That… should be enough for now. I don’t think this will be done systematically as I mostly want to note down when I come across some stuff. If an article is not on the list I didn’t think it was interesting.
So lets begin.
Dragon 63 (1982)
G. Gygax, Featured Creatures: Deva, p.5 H– preview to MMII I guess G. Gygax (?), Where the Bandits are, p. 14 C– details on the Bandit Kingdoms in Greyhawk Tom Armstrong/Roger Moore, Bandits! p. 23 B – bandit NPC class, I mentioned before I have reevaluated the use of those. This one might be a bad guy, or it might be Robin Hood. I can see some use for that. Roger Moore, …but not least: The humanoids. Goals and gods of the kobolds, goblins, hobgoblins, & gnolls, p. 25, B – some interesting ideas for minor gods and spiritual beings of the humanoids. Might be useful for fleshing out some humanoid tribes. Misogynist vibes though. Larry DiTillio, Chagmat, p. 33, I – adventure level 1-4, arachnid antagonists, very mediocre dungeon, overwritten, slightly misogynist vibes (why do spider care about abducting maidens specifically?), but has an old one-armed swordsman NPC I wanna steal G. Gygax, A Couple of Fantastic Flops, p.72 H – Gygax trashes the Schwarzenegger Conan movie and promises a D&D movie with the quality of Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark by 1984/85. Gee, I wonder how that turned out?
Dragon Magazine 74 (1983)
Leonard Lakofka/Brad Nystul, Bureaucrats and Politicians, p.8. I (maybe J) – two NPC classes, overwritten and not very useful, although both read more like a joke I don’t quite get Ronald Hall, Landragons. Wingless wonders of a faraway land, p.12, B – creature feature about wingless dragons, notably the third entry manages to mess up the notation for inches and feet so bad it requires multiple rereadings Lewis Pulsipher, A player character and his money…, p. 50, A/H– first appearance of the silver standard conversion, otherwise lots of ideas to part the PCs from their money
Dragon 104 (1986)
[OH wow, I was thinking about it, and there was absolutely nothing notable or useful in this issue. The closest was this:] Christopher Wood, A plethora of paladins, p. 45, I – expands the “holy warrior” archetype from Paladins and Anti-Paladins out into the other 7 alignments. All are NPC classes and all kind of useless. I don’t see any immediate use for this.
Dragon 114 (1986)
Bill Muhlhausen (and others), The Witch, p.8 I – this is the at least third incarnation of the Witch NPC class. Unfortunately it still is barely usable as the class still is predicated on being an evil overpowered demon-worshipper. Nick Kopsinis/Patrick Goshtigian, Grave Encounters. Creatures that lurk in cemeteries and crypts, p. 22, B – bread and butter article with graveyard encounter tables Margaret Weis/Kevin Stein, Running Guns. Ground Vehicles for the BATTLETECH game world, p. 78, H – I’d rate it higher, but seriously all that is covered in the core rules by now Randal S. Doering, High-Tech Hijinks. Integrating technology into an AD&D game campaign, p. 84 B – a bit overwritten
Spent literally hours trying to debug a #network issue in my home network and did just not manage to get it working.Websites wouldn't work, unless they already were in the cache of the pihole.Network was there, but dns resolution was timing out all the time. Restarting of the machines did not do anything, but I could access the machines remotely.The culprit turned out to be (of course) the one unmanaged switch in the setup. One restart of that later and the network was working as it should.
sigh.*reads job ad again*"Your responsibilities:"..."Collaborate across Private Compute teams to align on dependencies and co-ordinate execution plans, identifying and implementing opportunities for automation, velocity, and simplification."sigh.I feel like I need to start drinking again.
by the way, my Erasmus love story isn't even unique in the slightest (except for me of course). I noticed that whenever I meet a German guy here there's a 90% chance they moved here for a girl.The other 10% are creepy.
this is very convenient for whatever right-wing nutso is in power, because Germany as a state does not give a rat's ass about some Polish citizens in Poland, and largely isn't even aware they exist. So they can get some points with their nationalist voters for showing their strength to those evil Germans, while Germany at large doesn't even notice.
just a thing I was just thinking about: do you know there is a German minority in Poland?I mean, besides people like me who moved here for their Erasmus love.There still is a minority of Polish citizens with German heritage and language, which have been here for hundreds of years, largely in Silesia.They are a favorite punching bag for right-wing governments who always make their life harder when they are unhappy with Germany.#poland #germany #german https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_minority_in_Poland
Had to block an asshole. I don't do that all that much but he was just too much of a turd.Turns out he's the mod of his instance. What do you think? Check the instance if they're rotten or just block all of them?#fediverse
honestly, aren't reboots going a bit too far by now?#movieshttps://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/paddington-4-escape-from-new-york-reboot-studiocanal-1236562975/
having a single Kanye West concert in Poland, in walking distance (more or less) from Auschwitz is... certainly a choice.#music #rap #nazihttps://glamrap.pl/kanye-west-oficjalnie-w-polsce-jedyny-koncert-w-chorzowie/
So I'm in a beastly mood today and while talking about the most stupid decisions ever my mind wandered to Brexit. Not even Brexit itself, but does anyone else remember when during the Brexit negotiations the British side was found completely unprepared and openly discussing their goals with the British press, only to be surprised the EU side was able to read English newspapers?What the hell was that about? Grandstanding? A humiliation fetish? What?!#brexit
As an additional bonus they got fedexed a handwritten (!) "Change account details" form from India, and got told they cannot be paid until this was sent back, despiteA) having the same account for over a decadeB) the account being on their invoiceandC) it not being skin of their nose if someone else's production line stands still
My wife just told me one of their local customers outsourced their whole accounts payable department to India, without ever training the people there in the details of Polish accounting.They now are in dire need of the product her company sells (as in: they cannot produce anything without it), but can't get it because for the last six months they couldn't figure out how to pay for the previous shipment.(Mind you: this concerns a Polish company paying another Polish company)#business
At one point someone's gonna write a book about JD Vance and call it "The Grim Reaper" and it's gonna be the most hardcore thing anyone ever said about him
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