robheinsoo

Once upon a time in Elysombra, toward the 2/3rds mark of Jonathan Tweet’s epic 3e campaign, I switched from playing Sigurd, the dwarf fighter who’d taken a level of cleric to better understand Primus’ will, to playing a half-dragon gnome psychic warrior named Dzhay who maintained an illusion of looking like a jailbait Pippi Longstockings until she tore someone’s throat out with her camouflaged silver-dragon teeth.

    Dzhay plundered the Psionic Handbook and came out loaded for war. For this, and for abandoning Sigurd, and for somehow talking the notoriously stingy DM into gifting me with a full load of good magic items, I achieved campaign infamy.

    Which did not lessen the second time our party got gacked trying to destroy a particular naga-infested Temple of Evil.  We’d been hit by overwhelming barrages of empowered fireballs and lightning bolts, some cast by nagas and some cast by our own frickin’wizard, who’d had  the courtesy to ask whether Dzhay could take a hit from a fireball but did not entirely listen to the answer. The answer had been no, not so much, and especially not with a disintegrate spell on the way from the nagas.

    So Dzhay was toasted and Jonathan gleefully turned to determining the fate of the magic items she had been carrying. Old school baby! First I rolled saves for the stuff she used, then I turned to rolling for the items that she kept in her backpack. When I mentioned that it looked my +4 amulet of mighty fists had been destroyed, Mark Jessup, playing the party’s abused but beloved monk, Ta-Wei Shek, nearly spit out his teeth. “You have a +4 amulet of mighty fists? And you keep it in your backpack?”

    “Yeah, the enchantment I get from [one-or-the-other-of-the-cheezy-and-near-permanent-psychic-warrior-tricks-I-was-using] is better…Uh-oh.”

    “Augh! Augh! +4 amulet of mighty fists! Do you know what Ta-Wei is using? A +2. Augh! Augh!”

    Guilty. Guilty and oblivious. And in no position to correct the error.

    This, and other slights and fiascoes, eventually led Mark to utter the despondent war cry we forever associate with his flamboyant yet strangely ineffective characters: “I’m 76 hit points you don’t have to lose.”

    Although to be fair, in the final act of our heroes’ mortal existence, Ta Wei-Shek climbed the head of the world’s greatest red dragon, Vaerm, and punched her in the brain, no +4 amulet required. 

When Lee Moyer and Keith Baker started their Kickstarter for the excellent Doom that Came to Atlantic City boardgame, I felt there was something missing. A few things, actually. Despair. Desperation. The mounting pressure of inevitable torment.

But now that the game is meeting and exceeding its stretch goals one-after-another, now the torment arrives. As I seek to work with Lee on the art for 13^th Age, he is called upon again and again to reach deep within his withered septum to scrape another pewter benefit out onto the Kickstarter ladle. Let it be so.

I love this game. In a previous incarnation I no longer clearly recall, I contributed ideas to the game that its creators deemed worthwhile. Don’t let that put you off. It is more fun than capitalism and less destructive to your friendship circles than the OC (Original Cults). Although it appears to be a luck-based move-around-the-board adventure, there’s quite a bit of skill involved in actually winning, as the wins-to-losses ratio of the verdammt Keith Baker has proven in games I have been privileged to lose. 

We had an amazing family vacation for two weeks just as I was turning over the 2^nd playtest draft of 13^th Age. We spent two weeks in Turkey, starting with four days in the carved rock of Cappadocia, where I typed the new echo spell notes for the wizard listening to the night call of the muezzin bouncing off a fortress rock named the Castle of Uchisar. Then we drove south and west along the coast, hiking in ruins and swimming in the Mediterranean before catching aflight to Istanbul for a final four days of museums and bazaars.

In Kalkan, we stayed in a sweet hotel that we thought was named the Harpy Hotel. But half its logos and signs said the Happy Hotel. Which was it? Well it started as the Harpy Hotel. As witnessed by the Harpy Stele at the nearby ruins of Xanthos, the local harpies were conceived as benevolent spirits, winged women who took the souls of dead children to heaven. Huh. Dead children, well, I guess that’s the human condition. Heaven is good, at least.

But every week a hotel guest mentioned that as far as they knew, harpies were monsters. Eventually the hotel acknowledged its PR error. The owner’s name includes a Turkish word for happy, so the new name is a double-entendre that most guests won’t realize.  

As we were checking out I decided to take one last look at email since it seemed likely we wouldn’t have access that night. I had a surprise present, the first 13^th Age monster tile I’d seen from the Diabolist, sent over by Lee Moyer who’d finished the tile from Aaron McConnell’s rough pencils. And yeah, the moment we were checking out from the Happy/Harpy Hotel, Lee sent over the harpy.

I had my laptop in hand as we checked out and showed the art to the concierge, saying “You know all those people who turned the harpy into a monster and made you change the name of your hotel? I make games. I’m part of your problem.”

For those of you reading this entry for information on 13^th Age instead of keeping up with my synchronicity highway vacations, here’s the scoop on our monster tiles. Preparing the art order, I mulled over the fact that our monster selection for the 13^th Age book deliberately sticks close to d20 norms. Therefore most of our monsters have been extremely well-illustrated multiple times. And recently. What were we going to add? Did our audience really need another monster-format illustration of a gnoll? An otyugh, even? There had to be a more interesting approach. So I turned to the strengths of our setting: what if the monsters could be represented by control glyphs created by the Archmage? That way the monster illustrations would be different and say something useful about the world. Maybe I’d put together a card game using the glyphs. Maybe the game would correspond to a game played by wizards. 

I talked the idea over with Lee Moyer. Mr. Value-Added, I call him. Once Lee began experimenting with the glyphs, he suggested that we rank the monsters with icons they might be associated with instead of giving the Archmage all the credit. Of course! Each monster or monster type appears on a form of tile, stone, gem or plaque associated with one of the icons. The Diabolist’s tiles are all shaped like the harpy tile, a shape you'll recognize from the icon's illustration. On the Diabolist’s other tiles, instead of a harpy you’ll get a hezrou or dretch or balor. But the Elf Queen’s tiles look nothing like the Diabolist’s tiles, ditto for the High Druid and each of the other icons associated with a few of the monsters.

Lee nailed this project. We’ll share more monster tiles soon!

Yesterday morning I decided to take advantage of the buy-15-and-you-finally-get-1-free card I had from Starbucks. I rolled on down the hill to the drive-through, made the order, pulled up to the window and reached for the postcard where I'd thrown it in the passenger seat. "That's odd," I thought. "There's a 13th Age postcard in here. I thought I only had one of those.  Great! It must have fallen out of Jonathan's stuff and Lisa found it when she cleaned the car." The card was something we put together for Jonathan when he was on panels at Norwescon. The wonderful art by Aaron McConnell and Lee Moyer shows two of our evil icons, the Diabolist and the Lich King.
   Beat. Beat. Beat.
   "So where's my Starbucks card?"
   Beat.
   "Oh."
   Yeah, I was a few sips of caffeine shy of firing on all neurons and I'd grabbed the wrong treasured postcard from the special spot behind the Fokker DR-1 triplane model on my desk.
   So as I floundered for my wallet to pay for coffee with a Starbucks Gold card instead of a postcard, I told the barista I'd grabbed the wrong card.
   "Well that looks really cool! What is it?"
   Turned out I could  *almost* have traded the 13th Age postcard for coffee. The barista and a friend working beside him play a lot of tabletop games, mostly Pathfinder and Warhammer. Next time I'll find out which Warhammer armies they favor.

I just signed up to support Steve Long’s MYTHIC HERO on Kickstarter. It’s like Deities & Demigods for the HERO System. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say it’s like Gods, Demi-gods and Heroes for HERO. Pantheon on pantheon clobbering time! We could kill Foxbat as Finnish gods! Hurraavaa! 

HERO is one of the systems I think with a hell of a lot more than I ever played it. In practice I nearly always end up running simpler games. But HERO made a deep impression on me when it first came out and I still find it easy to think using its terms.

HERO is a system that can handle fights between gods without undue distortion to its usual play dynamics. I don’t feel like and dissecting the various ways that d20 games have handled fights with gods. Maybe someday when I’m feeling analytical. But today I just wanna tell the story that popped into my head as I signed on for MYTHIC HERO. This is a D&D story from junior high, the downbeat tale of my first battle against a god.

In the late 70’s, before AD&D came out, I went to the Eugene Public Library most Saturday afternoons for public gaming . The day I’m thinking of brought a surprise: a friendly guy I’m not sure I’d known before volunteered to run a D&D game for everyone who wanted to play. This wasn’t just special, this was High Holy Day Special. Most of us library gamers wanted to play D&D but there wasn’t anyone willing to run a regular game. We usually ended up playing board games or war games or miniatures games or talking about roleplaying instead of playing.

I think the DM’s name was Danny. He was jolly and friendly and he wanted everyone to join in to try something he couldn’t do with his regular gaming group: an all-out battle against Fenris Wolf!

I had to have that repeated to me a couple times because it blew my mind. I had thumbed the pages of Gods, Demi-gods, and Heroes but I didn’t own it. I was pretty sure that fighting Fenris Wolf was impossible, but Danny saw the game as a big interesting hilarious experiment and just wanted everyone to pile in and see what happened.

I’m pretty sure Danny also wanted to have fun running the game. So things weren’t going to turn out well for him. At the start of the game I was one of the problems. I’d run less-and-more accurate versions of D&D for friends and I’d played in a couple other people’s games but I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that I was just supposed to take one of my characters that was from another game/world/table and play it here. I didn’t even have those characters with me because I obviously wasn’t going to play those games at the library.

I eventually made the leap of imagination between worlds and attempted to recreate one of my characters. I have no idea which one. I think I knew it didn’t matter, My highest level character, third or maybe fourth, was not going to do much against Fenris except end up as a tooth stain.

At which point Danny gave another lesson in DMing that could have gone well if he hadn’t been trapped among barbarians. He told people who had low level characters that we should all take a magic item or two to give us a fighting chance. Maybe that’s not exactly how it got played, maybe he got browbeaten into it, I don’t know. But I remember confusion and frenzy as truffles were dropped in front of swine. I think the high level characters got into the truffles also.

There were side fights between gamers telling each other that the items they were getting were or were not usable in their regular home campaign. About this point I made some type of adolescent sensitivity roll and realized that Danny was just trying to be nice and run a game for a whole bunch of people and that he had twelve or thirteen players being whiny and terrible and annoying to him. We were like brain-damaged baby birds. Finally, a Dungeon Master! We will tear him open and suck his marrow!

By the time we started actual play I think Danny was depressed.. The table, oblivious, whined about many sudden-and-inevitable deaths before a variety of Monty Haul characters started carving Fenris up. There was some broken magic item combo attached to a flying invisible halfling who ended up sitting on Fenris’ head and stabbing away at no personal risk.

Subcontracting Ragnarok out to the bastard stepchildren of Finieous Fingers turned out to be a depressing one-shot. I died early and drifted away from the painful table. In later months I thanked Danny for the game and fumbled attempts to say how cool I thought it was that he had tried it. It took years for me to realize how many game-opening lessons had played out in that session. 

John’s blog over at http://sacnoths.blogspot.com/  talks Tolkien in depth and breadth. I poked around on the web after hearing John’s story and found it interesting that fans on some Tolkien discussion sites mentioned just how terrible they would have felt if something like the Boorman movie had been filmed first. But now that Jackson made the films that people pretty much agree got LotR right, some people said that they would be curious to see a less faithful adaptation, an artistic treatment that brought something new and unexpected to the story.