Some Notes on Stokely's Birthday Game, Demon City and (mostly) Nebulith Now That Its Out

Good morning. 

Stokely's LOTR Birthday Party

Stokely wanted to have a Lord of the Rings costume party for her birthday so I put together a party game for it: Basically I used miniatures and other D&D stuff to make a Candyland-style game board with two pieces (goblin, hobbit) and the way each team/piece advances is do what's on a series of index cards. They had things like: 

-Arm wrestle The Balrog (Lisa)—if you win go ahead 2, if you lose go back 1.

-Describe in detail how you would slay a dragon. For each guest who says your plan is good, move forward 1 point, maximum 3 points.

-Get a snack. Share it with other guests at the party without using your hands (or theirs). You have two minutes. You move forward 1 space +1 per guest who shares with you, maximum 3 spaces.

Etc.

This was a simple game but easy for guests to tune into and out of, so it worked. Stokely was really happy how the party turned out so feel free to adapt the basic idea for any porn-star-birthday/LOTR cosplay parties you run.

Weapons and Demon City

 

Saw Weapons the horror movie by Zach Cregger, the former sketch comedy guy who also directed Barbarian. 

I liked it and it's a very Demon City movie in that it has a whole ensemble cast, different kinds of normal people with different kinds of normal skills, participating in investigating the Horror each in their own way--and not in a typical "there's four of us on this camping trip, oh no now we're getting chopped up!" way. And the way it ends is awesome and totally something a PC would do.

The Party in The Peacock Isles

In our home campaign, the party landed in The Peacock Isles (fake India) and took on Nassim's Sleepless Army--a convoy of drug addicts on elephants. The party was clever and (after a lot of arguing) trapped 150 bad guys and their elephants and took them out with no casualties without even a tense moment EXCEPT when one of the party members started looking for some of the mind-control crystal meth on the ground and immediately, mid-fight, snorted it just out of sheer role-playery. Despite everything he seemed surprised that it immediately meant he was mind-controlled by the bad guy. Luckily/unfortunately somebody else had a Remove Curse right there.

Nebulith Notes

Now that people actually can get their hands on Nebulith I'm seeing the first impressions (they seem to like it) and so I know there's an actual audience for behind-the-scenes notes on it. So here goes:

-There's a really good Samurai Film Festival right now at Alamo Drafthouse theatres, and there's like 20 of those in the US so if you live near one, enjoy! Three or four of the movies on Nebulith's recommended reading/watching list are playing between now and early September--I just got to see Lady Snowblood on the big screen last night and it was like drinking angel blood straight from the vein.

-Obviously the name of the book isn't Japanese. Alex came up with the idea of the volcanic cloud that froze into stone as the main Crazy Idea in the setting and I came up with the name for it (nebula latin for mist/cloud and lith being stone). He liked the new word so much he wanted the book to be named that. I wanted something more Japanese-sounding because I wanted people who might get it to, like, know that was the idea--it was Japanese. I knew agreeing on some other name would take forever so I gave in.

-James Raggi, the publisher, says this is his favorite of my books because in addition to everything else, it gives a sense of how ordinary people really live there. For the record, I hate the (two-page) section on ordinary life in Awa Nikko because I do not care. The last thing I want to hear about is what ordinary village life is like and all the research revealed it is exactly as boring as every samurai movie makes it out to be. Any GM who can't make up a regular village and any player who is mad that the details of a regular village aren't correct are people I want nowhere near me. But, its only two pages.

-I am also aware that there's a contingent of gamers (Prince, for instance) who seem almost hell-bent on being a caricature of conservatives in an '80s movie who not only get mad when things are creative in RPGs but will actually say it like that. Not "this isn't creative its just bad" but "I literally don't want creative things" Here is one example:

A fantasy idea in a fantasy game? This must mean its gonzo, yikes! How do I even run this?

They like the old TSR products that take 30 pages to tell you that in the Eastern-Europe-based setting people dress like Eastern Europe and eat things you might find in Eastern Europe. It is God's own mystery why any of these people are near this hobby but ok.

They may really like those two pages.

-A lot of what we did here was me looking at the old Oriental Adventures and going "Ok, what didn't work here?". Zeb Cook, the author, was on the committee that gave me a Three Castles Award and I loved his book for introducing me to the kappa and the hengeyokai and all that jazz but in terms of gameplay it wasn't an epic leap forward from what we already had. I looked at each part that was supposed to feel different in a chanbara, martial arts epic or Asian myth than it did in my conception of a Western dungeon crawl and tried to tweak and shove until it got there.  The martial arts were problem one: in OA they just feel like more numbers without much more flavor added.

-Lots of people have right away said the book looks good. Thank you thank you it took three years. Most people haven't gotten a chance to play yet but once you dig in, I think the main exciting part, which won't be obvious until you play, is the classes and martial arts.

Inexperienced gamers might be looking at them and going "Ok, I see a ninja, I see a flying kick, so far so expected..." but if you actually know your way around an Old School game you'll notice how they work differently than both standard OSR characters and 5e-style ones.

PCs get some martial arts abilities. A few come with your class, but the majority are random depending on your class and/or the martial arts school you choose. As explained in the text, they're mechanically not much different than finding a magic item--you have a special thing that you can do in a fight. 

The abilities are intentionally not mathy and tend to involve a lot of either-/or- mechanics: Ascending Technique lets you extra-fuck-with anyone nearby that an ally has already hit, for instance.

At first or second level, they're just nice to have but whatever. At higher levels however, they begin to stack, like, now you're hitting people more than once per round, now you do an additional effect each time you hit them, now your ally has an effect that they can trigger because you knocked over the bad guy, etc.

Add to this the Yuta (local medicine woman) class which has ritual abilities like the Yuta's curse (anyone who attacks you gets a form of open-ended but limited curse of your own design) and the combats in this game go absolutely nuts.

In playtests, they consistently feel like they give a level of dynamism (you're up, you're down, you're grappled, you're inside-out, you lost your sword) and surprise that goes beyond the usual old school while avoiding the bean-counting of 4e-style tactical combat and the winner-is-the-one-who-talks-most style some indie games fall into. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised, but you may have to roll some dice to do it.

Alright bye.

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This is the mini she ordered

Of course the goth wants to play a vampire in D&D--now she's miniature shopping.

(this one)

(Quick vampire class: A first level vampire can do two "Vampire things" per day. Plus can only die in vampire ways but being reduced to zero hp by normal means puts you down for ten minutes--more than enough time to stake you if the enemy's dedicated. More Vampire Things per day at higher levels. Usual vulnerabilities, etc.).

Our Barbarian is Pet of the Month

Charlotte Stokely was a wizard...

...but then The Black Metal Amazons of the Devoured Land cut her arms off.

Then she was a Sea Elf wizard...

...and Chameleon Women mutilated her with their machetes...

Then she was a Sea Elf druid...

...and a blob dissolved her and she rolled up a barbarian...

...now she's Penthouse Pet of the Month for May 2017...

...so good luck with that, Stokes.

This is actually true.

Click to enlarge and see how Penthouse thinks Stokes is "The Total Package" because she's funny, likes football, got a full scholarship to Florida U and "participates in a weekly Dungeons & Dragons campaign".

Players Are Funny And Horrible

Last session was pretty funny an iphone video is worth 1000 half-remembered lines of transcribed dialogue, so here we go.

Set-up:

We’re playing Maze of the Blue Medusa and the players have found an exit leading out of the Maze to an island. To quote the book:

The islanders believe this dungeon is their spirit world. A strange impossible land of powerful and capricious beings who must be placated with regular offerings of useful things.  Kept in eternal equipoise by the scheming of cunning priestesses.   

They think anyone who comes out of the dungeon (including adventurers) is divine and live in constant fear of being favored by one of these capricious goddesses and dragged into “the underworld” so they wear masks painted with the features of ugly women and claim to have nothing of value. (I love that bit, it was Patrick's idea.)

So the party comes out and demand a place to sleep. The villagers hastily begin to assemble a sleeping area near the entrance to the dungeon. “No,” says the witch “We want to sleep in the village, not near where all the monsters come out”.

“Oh, great ones you don’t want to sleep in our village—it is very ugly. Perhaps…the ampitheatre near the extinct volcano?”

So:

Once that’s settled:

-Grog the human fighter immediately goes to sleep
-The girls have to decide what to do with their elven prisoner
and
-The Chameleon Woman paladin still pines after the half-dragon Lady Crucem Capelli who they met in Room 2

Lady Crucem Capelli, in blue, above--stealer of hearts

This resolves in a scene that should probably have a content warning because the girls introduce some…themes concerning how best to utilize their prisoner of which the DM most definitely does not approve.

It's a goddamn golden age of games

Ok, so everybody knows our cup runneth over and everybody has more good advice, cool games and random tables than they know what to do with. Some highlights lately:

Scrap Princess on G+

Dope Scrap merch on her RedBubble store

If someone were to ask me which person on the internet is most likely to post a thing and that thing is a thing I have to read right away, it's Scrap Princess. Gladiator insects, Shin Godzilla toys, magical girls gone wrong, Planescape done sideways--and maybe maybe doing Secret Santicore again this year? Scrap's feed is the feed to end all feeds.

Blood In The Chocolate

Kiel Chenier's had a weird year--he got stiffed by the Blue Rose people after running their game for them at Gen Con (as part of their ongoing "talk a big game about LGBT diversity but treat actual LGBT folk like rat snot" program) and yelled at by a crazy homophobic person for saying the Pulse shooting wasn't about their dumb game blog. But he's managed to come out of it with an adventure about murder and candy that's getting the Deeeluxe LotFP treatment.

Maze Arcana

Do you like Eberron? Do you like watching people play D&D for hours on youtube? Do you like the guy who directed Metallocalypse? Well then have I got a show for you: D&Dw/PS's very own repeatedly-dying-elf Satine Phoenix has put together an actual-play Twitch show called Maze Arcana where you can see all that. The stream is live on Sundays and then I think the plan is to cut it up into smaller chunks throughout the week. Sometimes I'm on it, too and they let me play a changeling so i do a lot of voices at least when I remember to because like actually they film pretty early sunday morning so like yeah anyway....


Stacy Dellorfano's all-female team on Swords & Wizardry--

by the pre-eminent Gennifer Bone

It's nice there are retroclones of old versions of D&D so it's easier for new players to figure out the rules, it's nice they're getting reprinted so people can get their hands on them and it's nice that Frog God Games took a cool step by having Head Witch of Contessa, Stacy Dellorfano, be in charge of assembling the team.

Now I know what you're thinking at this point--Zak, these things are all great, but they're all spearheaded by people who are lesbian or bi or gay or trans or Of Color or more than one of those things--have the straight white cismen of DIY D&D been tapped dry? Fear not: Matthew Shmeer wants your help on a crowsourced hexcrawl, James Mal has a new OSR sci-fi zine and Jason Sholtis of Dungeon Dozen--the world's most useful blog--has a new underworld kickstarter and it looks awesome and I think they're all straight boring white guys like me.

Also not D&D-related but definitely With Porn Stars related--if you live in California you'll probably be asked to vote on something called Prop 60 in November and will have seen some scary billboards about it. I wrote a long article about how incredibly dangerous and fucked it is, complete with a deep dive into the specifics of the text of the actual law which reads like it was written by drunk children. So, y'know, if you like reading my takes on mainstream RPG modules, more of the same...

About our druid's ex...

This blog is called Playing D&D With Porn Stars--and sometimes that means it's about porn stars instead of D&D. Especially when something important comes up.

Some of you may have heard about Stoya--who plays a half-elf druid with a dog named George--accusing her ex-boyfriend and fellow porn performer of rape a while back.

Well, she did--and many other women came forward--and while it didn't surprise anyone in the business, it surprised everyone in the media.

A Major American Magazine commissioned me to write about how that happened.

PROBLEMATIC!!!!!

Some days I use this blog as a platform to talk about the gap between public perception and day-to-day reality in the lives of sex workers, using gaming and game-play (including the terrifyingly Delta-Force style murder-hobo efficiency of which this group is capable) as a lens through which to show that women in porn are far more complex as both individuals and as a group than media stereotypes about them might suggest.

This is not one of those days.

The first thing that went sideways was Mandy (cleric, highest level PC in the game) was too sick to play, so she just liveblogged the game on Twitter. The previous session had been quiet and it all started innocently enough:

I still have that plastic vegetable tray, it seems like a good place to put dice.

Without Mandy's Roger-Waters-esque lead-from-behind style the party was bereft of direction, a dangerous thing in the cruel white wastes of the Devoured Land. They were not, however, bereft of alcohol.

Adam arrived and was quickly elected new boss:

Stokely: Adam is the pussy wrangler.

Zak: It's the Second day of the Purifier so Ratatoskr--the slandering ferret--will leaves his fastness to gaze upon his shadow and thereby measure the depth of the coming winter. 

Alondra (druid): Wait can I turn into a ferret & fuck that Valentines Day ferret dick? I'm gonna get some Valentine Day ferret dick or pussy I dunno what it is.

I allow that should the animal in question be encountered there is nothing in the rules to prevent the occurrence of said assignation.

Stokely climbs up an embankment for some reconnaissance. There appears to be a wolf, pacing behind the piled snow, waiting to pounce.

Stokely: I turn back to the party & I go like this.

Karolyn: I don't know what that means--does that mean eat some pussy?

The battle is joined and becomes quickly desperate. The animals of the Devoured Land are not like ordinary animals. Things are here as the once were and will be again--beasts intrigue like gods, understand our languages, do not fear fire, are not distracted by meat or scattered by thunder. They have goals, and would see them efficiently achieved. People are running out of options.

Alondra: I have a snow a leopard you can ride on.

Stokely: I said I cast Fire Shield.

Zak: Yeah and I said you can't because you're in hella close combat.

Stokely: You were distracted because I unbuttoned my blouse.

Zak: All I know is 3 wolves are attacking you.

Karolyn: Remember the time we all took our tops off and he tried to kill us even harder?

Zak: You guys have theories within theories.

Alondra: I cast flaming sphere.

Karolyn: Is your flaming sphere named RuPaul?

Zak: RuBall.

Mandy: This game is chaos so far.

Karolyn: Seriously.

The party beat up two wolves, scared away two others and captured a third. It turns out the wolves can talk--all the animals can because Things there are as things were in the day before all days, when all that is now knew a common tongue and a young, smoother moon hung pearl-like in a black bed of stars yet unborn.

After some questioning, the wolf agrees to leave the party alone if it is let free.

Then the party decides to camp for the night. It's two wizards, and druid and an alice, 5 inches tall.

The spellcaster sleeps while the tiny DelRay the alice stands guard. Meanwhile the wolf (who is a liar, duh-wolf?) spends a few hours corralling its friends, the GM rolls some encounter dice, the alice fails a perception check, and is promptly ambushed.

The party awakes to the sound of a doll-size scream and a line of bloody tracks.

A pursuing Adam casts Evard's Black Tentacles, the wolf saves against them.

Karolyn: So there are tentacles and I'm not having sex with them because I'm unconscious?

Alondra: I think I have a bow & arrow.

Everyone in the room in unison: You have a boner?!

Karolyn (having now lost her 5th PC in a year): Drunken color commentary here we come. RIP DelRey.

Zak: You died fighting for what you believed in, not unlike Antonin Scalia. Does anyone have more than 60 feet of dark vision?

Stokely: I have a big dick.

Alondra: I have 60 feet of darkvision.

Stokely: My dick is 2d4.

Karolyn: My dick is going home.

Someone else gets ambushed by the wolves' remaining companions and Adam the wizard is running out of spells.

He tries to cast Fabricate to create a structure to protect his friend...

Dave: Nevermind--the casting time is ten minutes.

Chaos continues to reign.

Stokely: What do I do next big daddy?

Zak: It's your spell not mine.

Luckily Alondra has her shit together, or at least her pet does...

...and, just as the party is in need of tracking, the ranger arrives...

...though she was perhaps not taking things as seriously as the situation warranted...

Alondra rolls another 20. And there is much rejoicing:

.

Alondra, oscillating in celebration so her ponytails hit her in the cheeks: "I don't need a man! I can smack my own face!"

Ela: Does anyone want some beer? I stole it from my parent's basement.

Karolyn: Your live tweeting is highlighting the hoe-ness of this game.

Eventually they find a safer place to sleep. When they wake up...

There are like, some clues and stuff, and landscape. It looks like the ferret tracks are four hours old and run perpendicular to a set of leopard tracks.

Stokely (Very softly): Zaaaaaaak what does that mean 'cause we're not paying attention.

Zak: It means you're gonna die.

Then the druid has to go, to meet a Valentine's date:

Karolyn: We support each other.

Zak: We can stop now if you guys want...

Ela: NONO NO KEEP GOING!

Zak: Uh ok.

Following the frozen course of the River Slith, they run into Amazons of the dread Ulvenbrigad, who will not hear the words of men. This requires some quick explaining about Adam and Dave.

Stokely: By the way milady I have pink nipples.

The quotation mark was emphasized.

Adam (to Ela): Excuse me mistress may I speak?

Ela: I like this a LOT!

Siri plays a Rihanna song. The party begins to realize they've been captured.

The amazons take the party to their leaders, KylesaMara and MaraKylesa, the lychewives.

Ela: Can my rat do anything?

Zak: I feel like I should not have to explain to a Harry Potter fan the vast capabilities of a rat.

In the manner of all vastly outnumbered PC parties brought before high-level foes, the PCs begin to say the completely wrong things--almost immediately bringing up, before the wolf-worshipping Ulvengbrigad, the amount of canis lupus they've chewed through in the last 48 hours.

Their attempts to rectify this faux pas were less than impressive:

Dave: Tell her something like 'I'm just on the rag.'

Stokely: Slave no one asked you!

They begin to strip the party of their arms and armor, and while the wizard does beg successfully to be allowed to keep a ration of cheese, the PCs don't manage to keep their heads.

Adam: She's a tool of the patriarchy she started this!

Ela: Slave!

Adam: You're gonna want me to talk soon!

Caroline Pierce: Oh shit.

After two brutal rounds of combat Stokely is unconscious, Ela is surrounded and Dave is grappled.

After a lot of metagaming, Adam decides the best he can do is touch the remaining awake PCs and Shadow Walk out of there to a spot about 3 miles away.

Dave: I'm gonna cast Scry on Stokely.

Zak: You see the Amazons preparing to cut the arms and legs off an unconscious Stokely so they can torture her and find out where you went.

She took the news surprisingly well.

Happy Valentine's Day.

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Somebody Check Laney Chantal's Dice

Session before last was a long time coming:

9 millenia ago it was prophesied that unto Demogorgon would be betrothed a Champion of Tiamat, and this union would bring the Age of Eradications.

To determine the distaff part of the sacred union the Five Churches of Tiamat--The Pale Eye, The Jade Fang, The Red Hand, The Cobalt Claw, The Black Wing--brought forth champions to battle to the death in a mad tourney. Winner marries Demogorgon.

Through a barely explicable series of events involving the Plane of Shadow, a hot dog, and not wanting to be fat, the champion of the Jade Fang was named: a halfling with a pet flying squirrel-Estuche, avatar of Laney. That's the halfling--the squirrel's name I can't remember.

The other champions were more typical: level 20 paladins in plate mail with crazy powers.

Long story short is we have a lone 10th level halfling ranger with like 40-50 hit points going up against 4 bad guys with like 160 hit points each and, among other things, the ability to heal 100 hp in a single round action.

In the gambling parlors of the cube-shaped earth, the experts have weighed in:

So you're probably wondering how Laney died. Well here we go:

The Black Knight

The party managed to take out the Black Knight before the tournament even started. Which, yeah, is cheating. But then Ela:

...sorry--Baweyn the elf ranger--had the bright idea to go around wearing the black knight's armor. So nobody knew the Black Knight was missing and the Black Wing never thought to replace him. Go Ela!


The Cobalt Knight

So Estuche faced the Cobalt Knight in the first round of the tournament, the joust. Herein Alondra (as Excene the druid)...

(seen here with Red & Pleasant Land cake)

...thought to aid her ally with low cunning: although magic is not permitted in the tournament, there was nothing to prevent the Knight Viridian from secretly replacing the standard mount of tiny Knights of her Church (the velociraptor) with a druid wearing that shape.

Also Alondra

So it was a blue armored electromagnetic titan with a bastard sword on a carnivorous destrier vs a halfling with a spiked chain on a friendly dinosaur.

First round Laney wins initiative and immediately rolls a natural 20 with the spiked chain, meaning the Cobalt Knight's not only taking double damage but has a chain around his neck while on a horse and needs to extricate himself before doing anything else like, say, healing. Plus also velociraptor.

On his turn the Cobalt Knight can't get himself loose, then gets yanked by the neck off his horse (rolls a 1) and Laney then proceeds to roll natural 20s over and over and over and over for the rest of the fight. Everyone's sitting on the couch just staring as she and Alondra beats the fucking tar out of this guy who doesn't even get one spare round to lay on hands. Also I think she uses her rangerness to tell his horse to just go away.

First round to the Knight Viridian: the crowd goes wild. The Church of the Cobalt Claw begins scheming to assassinate the celebrating PCs in their seats.


The Red Knight

After the joust begins the melee--all the remaining knights (minus the Cobalt one, slain in the first round)--thrown together.

The Red and Pale champions engage each other, leaving Laney to fight the (fake) Black Knight, who she, of course, (fake) beats handily.  While the PCs in the stands manage to stop an assassination attempt from mutant elves of the Cobalt Claw, The Red Knight falls to...


The Pale Knight

...the last Knight left opposing the bold halfling. The Pale Knight is (Roll d100...) 90% fucked up from fighting the Red Knight, and Laney, who hasn't got a scratch on her, leaps on her as soon as Red goes down. All the Pale Knight's bonus Tiamat powers like level drain and reversing the last round depend on Pale winning initiative, which Pale never does, Laney then proceeds to natural 20 the fuck out of him too while the gods of probability weep as rain rolls down their bell-curved roofs and everyone playing is just like holy mother of fuck.

...thus winning the tournament--as was clearly ordained by Demogorgon, Inciter of All Incidents, Laney's new fiance.

As I wrote almost 2 years before I had any idea this would happen:

The Jade Fang is one of the five Tributary Temples of Glistening Tiamat....its energies are green: the energies of jealousy, lushness, vigor, triumph, old wisdom, glibness, and theft.

Praise be to Him

As word reaches the gambling halls of Gaxen Kane:

Fiddlin' Joe Cooper makes 5000gp.
Anxious P's Babs loses 1200gp betting on the Black Knight.
Malice Aforethought wins 10,000gp.
Sir Ward wins 2500gp.
Pete Loudly the Sorcerer wins 10,000gp.

...and the girls make their way back to Vornheim, undisputed leader of the Church of Tiamat in tow where Alondra gets drunk and wakes up next to a succubus, Twiggy gets such a reputation as a party animal that carousing in Vornheim costs twice as much from now on, and then party sets off to find an easy side quest before a PC has to marry an elder god and are promptly set upon by carnivorous apes.

More later.
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