A Creation Myth for the Cantons

All unbearable fantasy worlds demand a ponderous and senseless creation myth. Why should Zem, the world of the Hill Cantons differ? 

Tell us, oh savant of savants, oh chanter of lullabies, oh chiseler of gratuities, now that we are deep into our cups, the origin of this turtle-bound world?

First there was the Void.

Void? Surely nullity could not exist before World-Matter?

It matters little, of it's Nature we can not say but that All Void is divided into Three Parts. In the beginning, tiring of the Space of Demons the Overgod floated into the Insufferable Void on his great galley.

“What is the measure of my being?” he asked no one in particular. The Overgod was a restless god, troubled by his past of toil and tribulation and overeager for evolution. After listening to the ungrateful pattering and never-ending sideways stories of the Void only for answer he became impatient. “I must begin my work again,” he said to the poor-listening Void.

The Overgod began to toil. Great balls of burning vapor he hurled into the reaches of the Void, who bothered not to pause in story even. Around these balls he spun smaller balls of rock, metal, ice and gas. Great rings he placed here and there and span them all.

Enough with the old wives tales, man.

And in all that creation the Overgod grew frustrated and weary. “This is but the same as before. My work is thankless and jejune.” In his weariness he invented Drink in order to care not.

And the Overgod drank and drank and drank.

And soon he was joyous, dancing upon his creations in defiance. “I can take all you motherfuckers,” he roared before slipping off the shoulders of a gas giant. And then he slept for a great aeon and Drink split and covered many of the rocks.

And he slept and slept and in those wet, yeasty places grew Ocean.

When Overgod woke, his head felt smitten. “What have I done with my Drink?” he muttered piteously and his weariness came again.

“I crave sensation,” he mused to the newly-cowed Void. So he divided himself into Man and Woman and Both and he/she/them loved themselves in countless couplings. And the Overgod(s) begat other gods, the Little Gods.

Tiring of this and marveling at the wonder of his many offspring, he reformed and watched them in their dance for a great while.

But even this became stale, the staging too familiar and circular, the tales too predictable and then he created the Weird and the Dialectic that things would always change and not-change and then change again anew throughout the ages. Now pleased with his great work, a complicated, terrible and beautiful thing, he invented Drink again.

And again he drank and drank and slept and slept. And the Little Gods begat even littler gods and demons even and all fought and drank and stole and loved and lived again and again. And such is where our world in our time began.

There is something missing old man. Why do you shrug so?

Ale co se delas? (Old Pahr: “But what can you do?”)

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Pointcrawling Inside Hexes

Many a virtual page has been sacrificed on this here blog in elaborating various pointcrawling schemes. One could leave with the impression that I was completely down on hex maps in general.

This is really not at all the case. I still find that hexes still have a great deal of utility. Their numbering system and wide-open organization are ideal for any campaign I run where thorough 360-degree exploration and domain game-like clearing are central activities (such as the new colonizing Feral Shore phase of the campaign). It makes it hella easy in that context to organize the session when the players just say “ok so let's explore some of the hexes around the fort, we will take 21.20 and hop on to 21.19 and 21.18”

But I just can't leave it alone.

When it comes to the nitty-gritty of the actual site organization of a single hex, I tend to fall back on using a pointcrawl nestled right up in the hex. My brain continues to rebel against the yawning emptiness of even the five-mile hex in traditional D&D wilderness hex thinking (that point being made so well here) and it needs to fill in that space with a number of small little “rooms.”

So when it comes down to that kind of micro-exploration, I like having the more focused choices of the dungeon and the point-connector schema mirrors that nicely.

How does mixing the two systems work?

A good starting point for showing what I am on about is to boogie back to my original inspiration for the idea, that wonderful old Avalon Hill warhorse (that I could never figure out how the hell to play with all my preciousness as a tween): Magic Realm. One of the most fascinating and visually-interesting components of the game were the hex geomorphs that allowed you to build a totally new gameboard everytime you played (they also could be flipped to reveal a nifty new purple-hued configuration when the hex was transformed by sorcery, but no need to go into that).

The hexes provide an interesting way to break down the hex into smaller areas and provide a number of constrained exploration choices and dilemmas for a party wanting to scout out the whole area. 

A single Magic Realm hex.

Unpunched for the full effect

My own system is a bit less “geomorphy,” the external connections into the hex are a bit more abstracted and free-form to push back on the “gaminess” and allow for multiple approaches into the hex. I use the same color and connector in my wilderness pointcrawl (rather than restate the whole thing just look here at the text right after the pointcrawl illustration). Here is a semi-hypothetical example. 

Contents of a mashed-up Feral Shore five-mile hex

The only significant difference is the scaling amount of time between points and the dots on connectors that represent extra travel time. On occasion my pure wilderness pointcrawls may include contours, I make greater use of these in the intra-hex pointcrawl.

That's really all there is. As always the system continues to evolve, some concepts getting dropped as too fiddly, others getting more elaboration over time.

Questions? Suggestions for improvement?

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Prison Planet - Keeping the Slave Prisoners from Escaping

'Prison Planet' is an action-strategy game where your job is to keep the human slave population on Prison Planet on their attempt to escape. You have to know that human slaves are needed for a grand purpose. Thus, terminating them is not a good idea. Good luck!






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Play Prison Planet

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Playdoh Monster Arena Rules

A favorite “let's kill 30 minutes because Mr. K has a migraine” pastime in the worldbuilding and creative writing class for tweens I teach is the much-beloved “Playdoh Monster Arena.”

The rules are pretty dang simple, a stripped down version of the Clay-O-Rama playdoh monster rules from Dragon Magazine #125 (which I had a blast playing at our mini-con with full grown adults). But trust me this game brings out the competitive beast in even the sweetest of ten-year olds.

Monster Arena Rules

All monsters are:

constructed from at least a single large handful of playdoh;

allowed a d6 in hit points (unless they are “tough” see below);

have either three bombs no bigger than a dime or one single large bomb that's the size of a quarter.

A monster can opt to be one of three things:

Tough. They get an extra die worth of hitpoints.

Mean. They get two melee attacks in one turn.

Fast. They move at twice the normal speed (four handspans)

The Turn

1. Initiative. Determine who goes first with a d6. Highest score goes first and then around the table clockwise.

2. Bombs Away. The player gets to throw his bomb. His hand must stay behind the plane of his own monster, anything thrown over that is disqualified. A hit does a d6 worth of hp damage.

3. Movement. Monster can move two handspans (Fast monsters go four).

4. Melee. If the phasing monster is in direct contact with another monster he can make a melee attack. Roll a d6 on a 4,5,6 he hits. Roll a d6 for damage.

A monster killed in the line of duty is smashed by its creator (unless the ref rules that the poor creature has “exemplary artistic merit” in which case, take him home).

Proceed until there is only one sore winner champion-monster on the table.  

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Cell Defense - Helping Tom's Immune System Against the Bacteria

'Cell Defense' is a strategy game where you take the role of the commander of Tom's immune system. Your job is to setup your defenses to protect Tom's immune system against the bacteria. In order for you to achieve an 'A Rank', you have to strategically place your cell towers on the right spot. Good luck!






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Minecraft Doubles Its Profit

The market of mobile gaming is growing every year and new gaming apps are launched every second. Companies like King, who developed and published Candy Crush, have hundreds of employees and make billions of dollars revenue.

Besides this mobile business, there is still a huge market for PC and console games, online and offline. Mojang, the company behind the famous Minecraft game, proves this statement with their revenue of 2013 - it doubled!

In 2012 Mojang earned 325 million Swedish kronor, roughly 51 million US Dollar. The company and their 34 employees were able to double their profit in 2013 with 816 million kronor, which are 127 million US Dollar.

Even though Candy Crush's King earned a lot more, the numbers are huge compared to their tiny team of only 34 employees. Minecraft is already 5 years old and started as a very innovative independent game by Notch. All of the apps and games, which are published everyday, want a similar success and big revenue. But not only in developing and publishing, but in playing there is a lot of money to make. Casino Spesialisten is one example of them. Although it will be difficult to make the billions of Dollars like King with the in-game purchases.

Source: Wall Street Journal

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Ciao to the Tree Maze and Golden Barge

It's been a productive week here up in the hills and nothing makes me more happy than knocking a couple projects off of that ever-growing hobby project list.

I waxed enthusiastically last week about recovering a piece of my D&D tween past—the dreaded Tree Maze of the Twisted Druid. Happy to say complete with faux typewriter font, craptastic illustrations and hand-drawn map that it is ready and rearing to be played next Tuesday (a free PDF of that madness will be out after right that.)

The actual writing I found surprisingly very difficult, in fact I would go as far as to say it was one of the hardest pieces I have written in the recent past (and this coming from a guy who had to write ballbuster grad school papers and churn out insane amounts of timely copy in a newsroom.) The trick of trying to complete something fragmentary and so distant in memory and life space, while not bleeding over into total mockery or wholesale revision is a crazy balancing act.

Here's a concrete example, I retrofitted and reworked (slightly) an excerpt from a wince-worthy short story I had written in junior high (a year or so after the adventure) to serve as the requisite module intro:

“The Twisted Druid needs a punch in the nuts.

Once known to the world as the Druid Onald Agon he lived a life alone deep in the dark wild forest among the tall elms, live oaks and grackles. Alone day after endless day his brain turned in on itself and thoughts of raw power ate at him.

It was then that the old pecan tree, twisted in trunk with blackened gnarled bark, began talking to him. Telling him to do things. Dark things.

First it was little things like cutting the heads off chipmunks. Then evil and eviler things until his heart became as black as the trunk of that ancient tree. And in that great embracing darkness he began drawing around him and corrupting others of the forest in a maze made from living perverted trees.

It made him laugh.

But the Realms of Men cannot abide such Evil forever. Heroes are gathering and it is time to enter the maze, slay the Druid and take his ill-gotten booty.”

It doesn't quite satisfy me. It's only partially “true” to the writer's voice (no way would I have put “nuts punching” in the lede) and vision of 11-year-old Chris stuck in this weird and evocative ruined pile for his summers. It perhaps bends the stick too much in the self-mocking direction...yet...yet, I think the whole package will be heaps of fun to run next week. And I suppose for elfgames that's what really matters, right?

Nicely the sense of accomplishment from knocking out that silly and vain project, lit up the fires for finishing the Golden Barge as a publicly-presentable adventure and not just the jumble of pen-scrawled cocktail napkins, bullet points, chicken scratches and wine-stained maps that I use to run games with.

Not exactly sure yet what I want to do with it but likely on the suggestion of the players put it out:

1. as a stand-alone gift-booklet for anyone humoring me enough to play in my Golden Barge session at North Texas RPG Con

2. bundling it up with the rest of my write-ups of the surrounding Slumbering Ursine Dunes as a mini-sandbox and throwing it into the Live Weird or Diecompilation of Hill Cantons setting hoo-ha and alternative mechanical bits.

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