This is a job for Tenser's Floating Disk!

 Not a bad hoard actually, but quite the challenge to move out. Unless...

Misheard Spells

Flay Marrow
Nasty save-or-die spell created by insensitive necromancers.
 
Whiz or Die
Creates the sudden urge to urinate in a bladder-having creature. Experienced adventurers know it's more than a prank. 



Char Monster
If you can't persuade them, envelop them in a pyrocaust.

Ice Dorm
Briefly fashionable pinnacle of the brief misheard spells fashion, creates a habitation out of five walls of ice complete with ice beds, ice benches and ice bar fully stocked with ice bottles, ice glasses, and vodka.

Wall of Ire
A curtain of red, snarling faces that forces all crossing it with Animal intelligence or above to save or cringe back.

Phased Oar
Allows you to make an oar that phases into the ethereal plane and back in a minute. Invented around the time when the misheard spells fad was rapidly reaching exhaustion point.

Colors Pray
A rainbow blast of seven prismatic hues, each one having the effect of a random cleric spell from the 1st (red) through 7th (violet) level lists, and whether reversed or not also being random. Usually hurts people, but you never know.

Irony and Gamer Uncool

The second great coping mechanism to stave off the Fundamental Uncoolness of D&D is irony. Forget hipster mustaches and Alanis, this sense of irony is closer to the literary sense, or the kind of "romantic irony" discussed by such writers as Schlegel.  Ironic literature is conscious of the ways in which it is art and not reality. One way to handle this, then, is joking about the gap between a lofty representation and its base material.

As soon as literature became aware of itself, it became aware of this rift, with the earliest expression being Don Quijote. I keep coming back to Cervantes because the Quijote staked out an early and commanding position at the tangled cloverleaf intersection of fiction, fandom, fantasy and moral panic. In spite of the increasingly baroque proliferation of fantasism in popular culture across the past fifty years, nobody has even tried to wrest an American Quijote out of the rich source material - wielding a bat'leth, perhaps, and defying a couple of gangbangers. Perhaps it's because the new Quijotes have a posse, a Facebook group, a con. They no longer tower in solitude over the Castilian plain, and whereas before the curate and Sancho Panza might have staged an intervention, nowadays they just shrug and go to watch The Big Bang Theory.

Three ways irony can enter a game, and reduce the self-consciousness of becoming one's character ...

1. At its least threatening, gamer irony-lite mixes the fantasy world with references from outside. Every dwarf named Shakira, every Holy Grail gag, every "joke" dungeon level tries to water down the FUDD in the same way that National Lampoon undercut the earnestness of Tolkien with Bored of the Rings. Some of these jokes have become so reflexive that they have themselves become uncool, contaminated with the residue of gamer earnestness - see Holy Grail, above.

2. At the same time more sophisticated and more nerdy, there's ironic distance to be had in the discrepancy between the fantasy world of the game and the rules used to simulate it. Two of the most successful RPG comic strips have played with this concept - Knights of the Dinner Table showing what a group of rules-lawyering players look like, Order of the Stick showing what a fantasy world looks like when awareness and semi-awareness of the rules absurdities pops through. These jokes require the most inside knowledge to pull off, but they also work against absorption in the game by showing the artifice by which it's upheld.

3. It's also an old source of ironic amusement to hold an unflattering mirror up to the self-same daydreamer, from Quijote to Walter Mitty. The ironizer of roleplaying has the same strategy at hand, but almost always it's the other guy who inhabits an unflattering reality in contrast to the high-flown fantasy world. Thus we get the alpha-nerd stance, with its one-two of "We know enough about this game ... to make fun of the losers who play it." As self-hating and hypocritical as this attitude is, there's no shortage of it around, as witnessed by Fear of Girls, Zero Charisma, and so on. A particular twist of the knife is to interpret role-playing as inadequacy compensation, so the weakling plays a barbarian, the socially challenged plays a smooth lover man and so on.

I should also mention the rare times when irony works in favor of fictional immersion - the irony when game play fails to fulfill the expectations of fiction. The villain makes her first appearance ... and the heroes manage to find a way to kill her dead then and there. The quest of the long lost McGuffin ... turns out to have been a false rumor all along.All the same, somehow, this kind of irony also works against the self-inflicted stigma of immersion because it makes the players feel like they are taking part in something real and messy and mature, not something out of storybook land.

Next, finally: Being immersed and staying cool.

This Is Fair Use, Right?

The mashup: Moominera.

Braggart: Munchausen meets Munchkin

Cracked.com had a piece recently that may as well be called "Don't Play That, Play This" in which the author argued for the superiority of post-1990 boardgames like Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride to traditional family boardgames like Monopoly and Risk.

I am pretty sure nobody reading this blog needs convincing on that point, but it occurred to me that similar value judgments could be made within the category of games considered "geeky." As one example, there's a class of games that I think of as "LINO": Legends in Name Only. These date, also, from before 1990, when weekends were long and unrelieved by the Internet, and game designers put quickness of play and elegance pretty low on the list.

Revisiting these games as an adult with few opportunities to sacrifice more than four hours at a time to the gaming gods, they don't have as much appeal. The long playing time, rather than creating an epic realm beyond time and space as you remember them doing, instead just aggravates their design and rules flaws. Titan, I'm looking at you; Kingmaker, Talisman, the list goes on. I would even venture to say that almost every game in the plastic-figure chokefest genre (for example, Shogun/Samurai Swords) has been decisively made obsolete by FFG's Chaos in the Old World, which delivers the same kind of strategic sweep at half the price point and less than half the playing time.

The present age's Legend in Name Only has got to be SJG's Munchkin. A rampant best seller by hobby game standards, Munchkin's fun value is about 75% exhausted once you have read the jokes in any given deck. The game grinds on randomly, punctuated only by outbursts of violence against anyone so much as threatening to be the winner.

Yesterday, though, I got introduced to a game that kicks Munchkin out the door. It may be hard to find outside the UK, but Braggart plays in a half hour or so and delivers solid laughs. You are taking the part of Generick Fantasye adventurers sitting around in Ye Old Fantasye Inne and boasting of their exploits, which you put together from a required Deed ("I heroically slew...") and Foe ("...the foulest of all dragons.") and can embellish with a Scene and Result. All these cards have a point value, with the less impressive ones being lower. There are also Ploy cards that let you steal and draw cards, and "Liar" cards which let you switch out better for worse cards in another player's story. The humor comes mainly from bathos ("I forged elemental weapons to destroy ... an angry looking chicken") and slightly suggestive exploits ("I covered myself in oil to wrestle ...")

Strangely enough, Braggart's flaws are also Munchkin's flaws: the laughs follow the law of diminishing returns, and the gameplay is random with a hobble-the-leader tendency. Honestly, the best feature is that Braggart proceeds to a definite conclusion: the winner is determined when the deck runs out. What Braggart lacks that Munchkin doesn't, of course, is over a decade of expansions.

All the same, what makes it work for me is that it's a sendup rather than a simulation of adventure, kind of like the Baron Munchausen game on rails.

Which Rock Group Would Play This RPG?

The Warlock, bliss_infinite, has posted a wicked little meme up on the Home Brew asking of classic rock groups, which roleplaying game would they play?

I put it to you the opposite way. Given the following roleplaying games and adventures not covered in that list, which rock group would be most likely to play them?

Still goin' strong!

1. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay
2. The Riddle of Steel
3. Dogs in the Vineyard
4. 7th Sea
5. Gary Gygax's Cyborg Commando
6. Dragonlance
7. Tegel Manor
8. GURPS Fantasy
9. TSR S2: White Plume Mountain
10. RIFTS

My answers below the cut.

What do you get the geek who has everything?

A character sheet for the fridge! (not to be confused with a mere zero-level shopping list)

Available through TopatoCo from Dr. McNinja creator Christopher Hastings.

Fantastic Torch

Amid this amusing series of Photoshopped ads for products only ever seen in movies, behold this dungeon delver staple:

by BRWombat

It's true, even Middle Ages movie torches always go up like they're soaked in gasoline; stay lit forever; are found in sconces without much thought as to who put them there or changes them every two hours or so; and aren't really necessary due to ambient illumination. Yes, the movies are one place where low-tech is better, as we find out further on down the list ...

by Corey Vaspasiano