Best of the Web - Top 10 Tactics, Humanizing Monsters, And Saying No to RageBait

Courtney at Hack & Slash has a nice post called On the Top Ten Tactics for Hostile Dungeons in which he lists off some old but vital strategies to keep players alive in a nasty dungeon.

Brent, a Glass Boy, at Glassbird games has a post called Humanizing monsters. He talks a bit about an encounter in Tomb of the Serpent King which is interesting enough, but the real gold is the table at the end with Humanizing Trait and Monstrous Trait columns (I'd ignore the Monster column and roll every monster independently) designed to make beasts more interesting to talk to. The entrees in the table aren't the normal personality things but seem more gamble than usual and nicely applicable to intelligent monsters. I'll be using this, or cooking up something similar.

Along the same lines d4 Caltrops has done something similar with Monster Meins by type which looks to be super-useful. I'm thinking of naming beasts using the adjective.  For example Odius Hill Giant and Smug Hill Giant are better than Hill Giant #1 and Hill Giant #2. No additional description are needed, the personality is in the name and sort of implies these are folks to talk. For folks that are unlikely to be talkers I'd go with a description: Big Nose Hill Giant and Bearskin Cloak Hill Giant for example.

The Last Redoubt has a post called Just Say No to Ragebait which makes a good point that people forget. That sort of link would disappear if people stopped clicking the stupid things. I'd expand this well beyond ragebait to the plaque of the internet, those lists that use a false thumbnail to suck you in and then spread a tiny bit of content over three dozen linked pages. 

Long ago Apple mail had a feature where you could right-click on spam and send back to sender as if your email address wasn't correct, which had the result that the spammers removed your email address from their spam lists because they don't want their own mail servers filling up with useless email. This had the result of eliminating nearly all of my spam, for awhile, then Apple removed the feature and the floor returned. I'd love someone to create something similar for links. Allow you to mark a link so that whenever it appears on any webpage it is crossed out with a little red X, perhaps with a note from you on why you blacklisted that link. Fake thumbnails, millions of links, ragebait, whatever. I think the internet would rapidly become a better place as those sites stopped getting hits (and hopefully improved their content). I'm probably being overly optimistic, they'll probably just buy up a new address to fool everyone once again rather than change.

Best of the Web - Simulacrum, Post-Apocalyptic Maps, and Rules as Written

Simulacrum has posted the beta version of their Fantasy Heartbreaker which is also called Simulacrum. I haven't had time to read through it yet, but one aspect I really like is he's included a Designer Notes document. I really like this idea. In fact I'd considered doing something similar myself but petered out before I had anything worth posting. I will take up the project at some point. Anyway, I hope this becomes a thing with every Fantasy Heartbreaker providing rationals for some decisions, even if its just for consistency and backwards compatibility. 

Trollsmyth has a nice post called Using the Real World to Create Post-apocalyptic Maps which provides a quick serious of steps on how to do exactly as the title says. For some reason it didn't occur to me before but D&D or any of its variants would work nice enough in a Thundarr the Barbarian campaign. The only difference is the addition of cyborgs and post-apocalyptic maps.

Christopher Stogdill posting over at Tenkars Tavern has a post called Is Rules as Written Really Still a Thing? I'd ask, was it ever a thing? Speaking of AD&D in particular. I never met anyone that used weapon speeds, weapon adjustments by AC or segments. These were rule-rules, not optional like Psionics (which I've never met anyone that used either). I don't think Gygax used that stuff. DIY was built into the thing from the start by adding that sort of incompressible rules in order to differentiate it from anything Dave Arneson was a part of. 

Best of the Web - Zihindia, Fantasy India

Over time Greyhawk Grognard has published a series of posts about the lands of Zihindia, an Indian based campaign area in the World of Greyhawk

A Catalogue of the Lands Beyond the Flanaess / Map of Zihindia

Demihumans and monsters of Zihindia

The Zihindian Pantheonn (part one)

Zihindian Pantheon (part two) / Zihindia, Land of Illusion

The Sagacious Swami / Zihindian Pantheon (part three)

Yoga in AD&D / Zihindian Pantheon (part four)

As far as I know this, and Arrows of Indra are the only attempts to create a fantasy India setting. I've seen attempts at the Far East and Arabia but not many regarding India. This is a shame because in many ways India is a better model for the typical Fantasy World (I'm talking Victoria-era India mostly because I know more about that time frame). The place is filled with ruined forts and temples and shrines. They had multiple religions (Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and Sikhs) living in the same region and getting along most of the time, more or less. You had bandits, hill raiders! and lots of factions and politics. And you had them all hiring as soldiers to each other (the British and the Sikh Khalsa hired soldiers from all religions and cultures). The place is ripe and I applaud Greyhawk Grognard for doing the work.

Best of the Web - Would you Burn, Red Teams, Megadungeon Explorers

Hall of the Grymlorde has a thought provoking post titled Would you burn hit points to hit harder? It is a post in the form of a question, not actual mechanics behind it. I find the idea intriguing. If you read the magic rules for my Fantasy Heartbreaker of the moment (Not Dead Yet)  you'd see I have a similar idea for spellcasting. Spellcasters ante up stats as a sort of spell point. Ante up more and your spell can be more powerful (range, duration, power, etc). If you succeed, its all good, if you fumble your casting you lose that many points in a stat.  I can imagine a similar mechanic for combat using Hit Points. Since HP heal quicker it'd be less risky in the long term, but since they are eaten up quickly in combat the short term could be bad, really bad.

But sometimes you really need to hit. Sometimes you really need to do as much damage as possible. Being able to exert that extra effort just seems like an idea the game has been missing and I think if I ever update my game (or create a GLOG Heartbreaker) I'll probably add this mechanic. Damn I like this mechanic conceptually and hope to hear back from anyone that uses it in play.

Seed of Worlds has a post called Villainous friends: using Red Teams in your game. The idea is to have Factions in your gameworld and let another control that factions plans and reactions to the players. The folks controlling the factions don't even have to be at the table as everything is more about the big picture goals of the faction. If you had the right people involved this could work out really well. Initially I thought the post was going to be more along the lines of an old idea I had of the Joker. The Joker was the extra player at the table, who would speak for the enemies (at least some) so the GM didn't  have to do it themselves. I like the idea but never implemented it as speaking for the enemies is one of the joys of being a GM so I have always been reluctant to give that part away. With Seed of Worlds idea that isn't an issue and you'll get factional plans and development that a single GM might never have considered.

Beyond the Black Gate has an old post with a new class called Megadungeon Explorer. It seems to be a bit of a blend of fighter, wizard, and thief. I think the concept is intriguing. I'm thinking 5E with all those little abilities each level, do they make sense in all environments? What if are Ranger is stuck in a city the entire time they are earning XP to go up to 3rd level, does it make sense you'd learn Primeval Awareness the way you normally would? What about a Thief in the desert or a Wizard on a ship? It seems like there are times when the normal progression should take a pause, or those level abilities could be swapped for something more appropriate for the new environment. This idea would work better with a GLOG class with the easy multi-classing as is it is probably more effort than its worth but it seems there might be something there I'm just not sure how to form it yet.

Best of the Web - Gamma World, Chaos Beasts

 Geeknative has a post called: D&D: Wizards of the Coast release a first edition post-apocalyptic Gamma World bundle. He suggests its a D&D setting but its not really, it's a game of its own and somewhat different than D&D but it doesn't have to be. I like the idea of them releasing older stuff to check the interest, but they should follow this up with a 5E version of Gamma World. Treat the game as a setting for D&D. Follow that up with Dark Sun and really expand D&D beyond the Vanilla Fantasy. Release a new Monster Manual dedicated to mutant future and more psionic oriented beasts and I think they might really have something. Then again maybe it's just me and Vanilla Fantasy is where the big bucks are, what do I know.

Remixes and Revelations has a post called OSR: Chaos Beasts in which he stats up a Chaos Beast along with (and this is the best part) a bunch of tables to customize the beast. Anything with Chaos in the name should be unique.

I'll take a moment to outline my own 'chaos ooze' of sorts, creating a bit of a life cycle of different monsters. See whenever you fumble while casting a spell it creates a spray of 'chaos snot' which is a bunch of tiny molecules that cover everything. It's mostly harmless at first and not worth mentioning except as part of the life cycle. If left alone the chaos snot turns into a grey ooze, if the grey ooze is left to grow it becomes a gelatinous cube (shaped that way because of traveling through square shaped corridors all the time, if the thing travelled through a corridor with a triangular shape they'd be gelatinous triangles. The next phase of life is a gibbering mouther and then a shibboleth (which would mostly be too large to easily leave whatever room they'd ended up in). Of course this is all GM nonsense characters are unlikely to ever know about unless they captured and studied one. Also it creates a dynamic that Adventurers (or at least magic users) are at fault for the potential chaos destruction, and if ignored the chaos will grow and get horribly worse. I find it strangely satisfying to have a lifespan for certain things (like dragons with their young, elder).

Another thought was that chaos snot, or grey ooze, if consumed will create beastmen. So if chaos snot covered grass and a cow ate it, anyone that ate that cow would mutate into a minotaur type beast man. If a goat ate the snot, eating that goat would create a satyr-like beast man. You could create almost any combo-with the same justification. This helps satisfy my own brand of Gygaxian naturalism (and I don't particularly like the Greek myths as is, they are just too well known).