Doug's Art and Games Blog

While thinking about the Dungeons and Dragons campaign I am now running, I did a lot of collages and thinking about a steampunk aesthetic. The Steampunk-y collage series reflects this background world-building.

Monster of the Week for Tuesday, January 28 Every Tuesday a new system-agnostic monster. Sorcerous Assassin When a powerful practitioner of magic combines the hand of a criminal, the eye of a witch, and the body of a serpent and imbues it with power through a special ritual, it gives them the semblance of life. The construct moves with the speed and flexibility of the serpent, moving silently through narrow spaces, hiding readily as it pursues its quarry. The hand-head is able to open doors, locks, and latches, as well as helping the creation to climb. The eye sees even in magical darkness and through illusions and invisibility. The long nails of the hand are hardened and razor-sharp. They strike by surprise with hit-and-run tactics, weakening their with their first strike and with each strike slowing their targets ad their making them easier targets for more strikes. Risen from the dead, the assassin hs hard to kill, often rising barely alive again and again.

While thinking about the Dungeons and Dragons campaign I am now running, I did a lot of collages and thinking about a steampunk aesthetic. The Steampunk-y collage series reflects this background world-building.

A bit tired of 5e, but loving the experience of running urban adventures, I am thinking of moving to a different ruleset, most likely Index Card RPG. As an exercise in thinking about a new campaign, I have started putting together the skeleton of a campaign setting .  The setup is based on an idea from Jack Guignol of the Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque blog entry on using Dune as a model for a political powder keg . My usual inspirations for cities are Planescape, Bas-Lag, Joe Abercrombie, M. John Harrison's Viriconium, Micheal Moorcock's Runestaff novels, and Tanith Lee's Books of Paradys, in creating a sort of busy, crowded, metropolitan city filled with gothic ghosts, scheming, and both romantic and political intrigue, but almost none of that has made it into the document notes. I like to take minimal notes and try to bring out the campaign feel and style in play, as well as creating history along the way as the characters do, so I don't know how mu...

Monster of the Week, January 21 Each Tuesday, I share a system-agnostic monster painting with background. This week's monster is the Flame Shadow Flame Shadow Insubstantial, vaguely man-shaped creatures of fire, flame shadows seek unison with a human as if such union would make them complete. They are desperate for the union of flesh and flame, seeking the company of humans. Sages speculate that these creatures come from the magical realm, the elemental planes, or the fires of hell. However, the fact is that the flame shadows do not speak and do not leave any clue to their presence. Where they appear, fires break out. The humans they seek to unit with are charred and discarded as the flame shadows seek to unite with others. Flame shadows seem focused on acting out ordinary activities as they interact with others, with tools, with buildings, and ultimately in trying to embrace humans, but all their actions are wordless pantomimes of human life.  As creatures ...

Five Torches Deep After playing a few years of 5th edition, I have to say that I am still feeling like there are too many rules and too much to track about character advancement. Honestly, I would like something more like B/X with some of the elegance of specific 5e mechanics. Enter Sigil Stone Publishing's game, Five Torches Deep by Ben and Jessica Dutter. I am pleased that the game restructures classes into four familiar classes, with each having 3 subclasses at level 3. I love the recalibrating of rules to have power levels more similar to B/X classes, and simplification of rules -- there are only about 36 actual pages of rules. And those include some things 5e does well (advantage and disadvantage), adds simple but useful rules on fatigue and henchmen, and sets limits on advancement that keep characters from getting to the superhero level of power you see in higher levels of 5e. Five Torches Deep is a good compromise for people who want to introduce old-school modules ...

While thinking about the Dungeons and Dragons campaign I am now running, I did a lot of collages and thinking about a steampunk aesthetic. The Steampunk-y collage series reflects this background world-building.

Maze Rats Published by Questing Beast Games , Ben Milton's Maze Rats  is a tight little old school RPG that uses new rules to emulate old-style play. Originally developed as variant rules for Into the Odd , Maze Rats creates a classless 2d6 based system that is fairly familiar to players of D&D style games, but strips it down to minimalistic systems. Combat in Maze Rats is brutal, advancement is limited, and play is very straightforward. This isn't surprising since Milton has used this set of rules to run games for elementary school students. Within this very small set of rules, Milton manages to squeeze in some fantastically useful random tables, GMing advice, and a system of freeform semi-Vancian magic that means that characters are granted randomly-generated spells each time they prepare spells, which is both simple and potentially very weird. Maze Rats presents a set of rules that would be easy to run, but in a way that still requires the person running the game...

Monster of the Week, January 14, 2020 Each Tuesday, I post a multimedia painting/collage of a monster with background, presented as a system-agnostic combination of image and background for you, my dear reader(s) to raid as you desire. This project was very loosely based on the idea behind Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess in their book Fire on the Velvet Horizon ,  even though I have only encountered the book through reviews. Fungal Manifestation of Igramel Fungal materials borne on the space winds can find themselves on many worlds; those from the Planetary Wastes of Igranel spread of hosts to the hive mind of the Shadow Lords of Igramel. The fungal manifestations go on to infest worlds, building advanced sorcerous scientific devices to manipulate life to weaken, corrupt, or even topple the governments of sentient beings and pave the way for them to reshape those worlds to be more hospitable for their fungal life forms. The fungal flesh of the manifestations is re...

Into the Odd Lost Pages ' roleplaying game, Into the Od d,  is an old-school game not built to mimic any particular old school RPG. With rules inspired by the original edition of Dungeons and Dragons, Into the Odd goes its own way on many levels. Author Chris McDowall fits his game into a beautifully brief 48 pages, something few RPG designers seem able to do these days. Characters are adventurers in an early industrial fantasy world, exploring a strange underworld that houses ancient arcane items. The rules are simple, even simplistic, with characters defined by three abilities (rolled on 3d6), equipment, and sometimes by arcane special abilities. Rules are reduced to simple saving throw mechanics (roll d20 equal or under the appropriate ability score), combat assumes automatic hits, meaning you only roll for damage, and damage beyond your hit points lowers your Strength score and makes you roll a Strength save to prevent critical damage. While this makes character creatio...

While thinking about the Dungeons and Dragons campaign I am now running, I did a lot of collages and thinking about a steampunk aesthetic. The Steampunk-y collage series reflects this background world-building.

Obligatory First Post Welcome to the blog. I haven't done much blogging for years, but I used to publish a blog called Savage Swords of Athanor , which included some decent gaming material and dubious content. This new blog is a reboot of my gaming blog life. It is an outlet for some of my creative output related to roleplaying games again. Though I plan on the occasional post of reviews or my thoughts on RPGs or art of some sort, this blog will also feature some regular posts including system-agnostic monsters of the week and occasional one-page dungeons (which are likely to start out pretty bland until I get my feet under me.) My goal is to spend more of 2020 publishing blog posts than the past four years if only to entertain myself. Not to say I don't care about you, invisible and likely nonexistent readers. I do. I hope you enjoy.