Artist Focus - Terry Dykstra

Watch it, Frodo...

Get out of my shared imaginative space, get into my chariot







A proud banner-waver of the facial hair tradition of D&D.

Now, Dykstra seems to get a fair bit of stick from some people online. I must confess that I don't like some of his work, but I can say that about luminaries like Brom and DiTerlizzi as well.

Terry Dykstra's art provided my first exposure to the D&D game. The elf opposite manages to be beautiful and bad-ass (even if she is the super-short D&D elf). The halfling conveys that although he's not a fat hobbit, he's still not the greatest warrior.



Dykstra (or the art director for the Rules Cyclopedia) is to be applauded for the racial variety therein. That and super-hot thief chicks.

It ain't D&D without face fungus

Yes, your player is 14 years old

Now, the more po-faced grognards despise this picture, and yet I see laments day after day for more humour in the D&D game "like the old days". Seems you can't win. Well, anyway, it made me chuckle.

Mikelmerck - a North that never was

For the genesis of Mikelmerck see Drama, Dice and Damsons. Rosey and I have batted ideas back and forth about this setting for old school gaming for a little bit. It would be a good setting for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, or (with some adjustment) Small but Vicious Dog. We envisage that PCs are the kind of loveable losers that 3d6 in order produces, and the setting sort of wrote itself. PCs are oddballs, fortune-hunters, ne're-do-wells and rogues. If not then they are stupid and rich (and those ones are usually clerics).

Mikelmerck

The "Great Marchland" as its name translates to (not "The March of St Mikela", as some effete southern scholars would have it) is often given such appellations as "True North" and "God's Own Duchy". The latter, incidentally, is where the confusion with St Mikela crept in; as theologians will know, this feminine spirit is the Voice of the Head, and thus misguided schoolmasters Down South thought they were very clever to link this to Mikelmerck's nickname. The real root of it is that Cushboth Himself would be at home in this paradise on earth, if he didn't like it, then stuff 'im.

Much as people take pride in this godliness, there are still rites to the ancient powers of earth, some of which have no name bar a title, powers such as the Nine Men of Muriz, and the Drowned Ones of Sevenwaters. As well as these, Mikelmerck has the dubious honour of being a place of dimensional 'thin-ness' - the barriers between otherworldly realms are weak here, and many tales are told of kinsfolk vanishing and reappearing years later, stark mad. The folk rites of the common populace (so scorned by the gentry) are designed to act as seals against these incursions from the realms of the Fey.

For humanity, this would be nothing short of a living nightmare, the very touch of a Fey Lord is enough to warp the body or chain the spirit. Their presence alone would begin to turn this world into another version of theirs, one of constant change and mad whimsy. Fortunately for most people this remains undreamt of as they retain only enough of the ancient prohibitions to enact them, not understand their real purpose. For those few magicians who know the truth, each new piece of knowledge is like the opening of a small leygate into their brain, leading most to be somewhat touched.

Bards

They rock.

Nerd-Rage of the Rakasta

Just to get it out of the way, I'm talking about these guys:

Mystaran cat-dude chillin'

NOT these guys:

Evil tiger-spirit in the Temple of Doom

The rakasta first appeared riding their sabre tooth cats in X1 The Isle of Dread, and have become one of those breakout hits of D&D (albeit in a niche manner). They went on to get their own moon kingdom (Japanese inspired) orbiting the world of Mystara (the Known World and Hollow World of BECMI), as well as a kingdom on the Savage Coast (a Merrie Olde England parody). They have gone from B/X to BECMI to AD&D 2E and still have many fans online. Why am I going on about them?

Polyhedron 101. Roger E. Moore wrote a short article brainstorming an OA campaign set on the rakasta moon of Myoshima. It was a really fun thought experiment and although some people despise anthropomorphic animal characters, I think they can be interesting if done well.

Can I get the rakasta (or some very similar being with a name change) into my work on "OA for LL"? Just maybe.

Corridor of Carnage

We continued with the raid on the drow hideout from where we left off last week, with my character Tarren, and his half-sister Chary leading the way. It all seemed in the bag, with most of us having a lot of special powers still to use and action points to burn. It didn't turn out that way.

I nearly saw the campaign I have been DMing for 3 years ended by a guest DM and a PC turned into a mind-flayer's thrall making mincemeat of the party. Once the dust had settled, Chary lay dead, the paladin and the wizard were unconscious and Tarren wept bitter tears at the loss of his sister. Out of character I hoped that the party had 5000 gold to resurrect her.

"I'm not sure I want to be resurrected after the lack of effort made to rescue me" her player harrumphed. She has a point in my case as i chickened out from running across the room to help her.

It was, however, a very tense, exciting encounter and I even considered running away at one point. It had an added frisson for me as, if it had ended in a TPK (Total Party Kill) then it would have wiped the character slate clean for the campaign.

Lucky items

I don't have any particular talismans I regard as lucky, nor do I carry out any rituals to ward off ill-fortune. That makes me quite pragmatic I suppose; I get flustered if I have to rush getting dressed, but that's only because I then forget to do up my flies or my tie is then hanging loose.

Not so lucky for the rabbit.

On the subject of lucky talismans (see what I did there?), I did consider putting in some rules into my latest homebrew of Oriental Adventures-ness for crafting one-use talismans. For those of you tuning in from nablowrimo land, I apologise if that sounds like complete gibberish.

Such items are common enough in other RPGs (e.g. RuneQuest) but you have to delve into various supplements to find rules for things like this.

Why Do You Blog?

I feel a bit of a fraud writing about why I blog given that I have only been doing so in a focused manner for a brief period of time, but in answer to the question; I blog because I am somewhat obsessive regarding my hobbies (namely, miniature painting and role-playing games). Blogging gives me an outlet to discharge/expunge/provide (delete as applicable) the various ideas going through my head.

Arda - The World

I am one of those gamers who has generally ended up being the GM for my tabletop groups, and I have started or thought up so many campaigns that I have lost track of them all. What I really need is a category like "The Junkyard" on Dreams in the Lich House in which ideas for campaigns are placed, to be developed further or not, as the whim may take me.

Tolkien referred to this urge to create a fictional world as "sub-creation" i.e. that one was expanding upon the Creation that God formed. For Tolkien, it was vital, if the sub-creation were to be "true" that it be congruent with the world as we know it, and that it not conflict with the Biblical account of the world, and the arrival of Christ. Hence, Middle-Earth is our world in a distant past inhabited by virtuous pagans, who fight for the good, whilst being ignorant of the Resurrection (well, it hadn't happened yet....) OK, for me (as an agnostic) that isn't really a factor, but I do believe that the creation of fictional worlds is a valid past-time.

Anyway, I seem to have veered into my undergrad dissertation, so I shall stop there!