That Time I Fixed the B/X Thief

Straight up: the thief sucks in B/X D&D. It's the only class that is actually bad at its core shtick. 

But we can fix that. Above you see the rather baroque and over-complicated division of thief ability scores and their chance of success per level. My advice: just use the Hear Noise column for all Activities Thiefly in Nature.

This also means that you can assign a 1 in 6 chance of success to non-thieves trying to do Thiefly Stuff.

Sorted.

(This was an old idea I had from years ago that someone asked to see again, so here it is, posted for posterity.)

DIY TORG

We played a lot of TORG in high school, when we weren't playing D&D or Warhammer FRP. If you aren’t familiar with it, here’s the basic premise: earth has been invaded by a bunch of different "realities." Each of these realities is a different genre, so there is generic fantasy reality invading Great Britain, a cyberpunk reality invading Japan, a pulp reality invading Egypt, etc.

Do you ever look wistfully at your shelves and shelves of games and think, "Man, I wish I could run some of these settings I’ve accumulated over the years?"

Why not run them all at once?

What if earth was invaded by the "realities" of the game settings you’ve got collecting dust? 

Here’s how I’d go about it (click to enlarge):  

Three Views of the Basilisk

- Hanns Heinz Ewers, Alraune

- Paracelsus

- Jorge Luis Borges, Book of Imaginary Beings

Other Dwarves, Elves, and Halflings

D&D has three classic "demihuman" (ugh) races, which have accumulated some fairly generic lore over the years. Consider the following as one way to re-flavor dwarves, elves, and halflings while keeping their core conceits:

Dwarves aren’t greedy; rather, they are addicted to finding. The joy of a dwarf is the joy of discovery, of excavation, of beholding the unearthed. That curious, proximate joy can be measured by the length between an object’s disappearance from the world and its dwarven rediscovery. An item recovered after a few years of laying lost will give a dwarf a momentary, fleeting shiver of pleasure, but a dwarf can be sent into paroxysms of jouissance at the uncovering of an item from a long undreamt past age. Nevertheless, all findings, even climatic rediscoveries, are transient pleasures. A dwarf must seek the forgo‚en anew and hope to find something even more elder and misplaced in order to simply feel. For this reason, dwarfs are most commonly found within the Sea of Rust, where they mine the silt of decay for remnants of eras now past.

Those who are now elves were once gods. Among the fey they were peerless; they were worshiped by goblin, sprite, and leprechaun, and that devotion transformed them into divine manifestations of Faerie itself. But when men arose and prospered upon the Earth, they did not deign to bend their prayers to the dimly-perceived elves of Faerie. As men grew in numbers and asserted belief in their own gods, the elves grew weaker until they were reduced in mystic strength below the fey that once offered them blood sacrifice. This diminution of status from godling to long-lived mortal drove the elves mad; each elf possesses a sliver of retained divine intelligence, but it struggles against confinement within the contours of a mortal brain. All elves are haunted by the memories of their former godhood. Worse yet, these memories are not just recollections of the gloried past, but also persistent reflections of the future and of presents that represent other, unfulfilled potentialities that will never come to pass. The elven mind struggles to sort through this confusion of omniscient experience and remain present in the moment-to-moment flow of time—to others the elves seem hopeless fey and lost in the tumult of their own lost transcendence.

Halflings are not born; they are made by the dark magic of hags and left in place of a stolen human child as a changeling. The viciousness of hags is legendary—they rear the pilfered child as their own, raising them to be pawns in their war against humanity, and leave a halfling behind as a joke on the bereft human parents. Indeed, the name “halfling” is a cruel mockery: their stunted bodies are only half at home in a world made for larger folk and as their inhuman parentage is discovered they are destined to only find half as much love from their foster parents as the natural child would have been given. To be a halfling is to be Byronic, morose, and desperately ravenous for more of everything that is denied them; halflings live in a constant existential morass of half-emptiness—nothing satisfies, nothing sates, and nothing fulfills. They seek half again as much food as the hungriest man, half again as much adventure as even the most curious explorer, and half again as much wine, pleasure, and love as the most debauched libertine. They are both a satire on mankind and a satyr of mankind.

Jack of All Trade's Pulau-Pulau

What the gaming scene really needs is a campaign setting that is just absolutely miserable. I’m talking about a world of mud, rain, and deformed peasants. Someplace where the available classes are Cripple, Syphilitic, and Bastard. (Multiclassing is possible; you can be a Syphilitic Cripple or Syphilitic Bastard, but the XP requirements are pretty hefty.) This is a world filled with monsters that would as soon give you a blood-eagle as look at you, but the real monsters are the brain-damaged townsfolk and the toothless administrators motivated only by greed and bloodlust. This is a setting in which nothing will ever get better, and in which a Heavy Maiming chart will be consulted for every hit–critical or no. Let’s not even talk about the detailed rules I’m homebrewing to cover infections, equipment breakage, and random miasma clouds.

Just kidding, there is already a ton of that kind of setting being played.

Let's do this instead:

Pulau-Pulau
Precis: An island in the East Indies where bumbling-yet-oppressive French imperialists are stymied by swashbuckling American and European secret agents.
Conspectus: Ruled by Governor Croque and Captain Brogard in the name of Napoleon Bonaparte; improbable steam-powered inventions; intrigue, spy games, and general skullduggery; incompetent French soldiers clashing with masked heroes fighting for the people’s justice; historical anachronisms abound; missions delivered by revolutionary-minded parrots; guests appearances by Lewis & Clark, the Marquis de Sade, Blackbeard, Thomas Jefferson, and, of course, Napoleon; swordplay, swinging on chandeliers, cape-swishing; pirates, insurrectionists, assassins; so many puns.

How I'd Do Pulau-Pulau as a Savage Worlds Setting
Setting Rules I'd Use From the Savage Worlds Deluxe book: Heroes Never Die, High Adventure

Some new setting rules:

Everything is a Weapon
Jack of All Trades is full of swashbuckling action; even though the characters usually fight with rapiers and sabers, they also often use the environment to fight one another. To help encourage the use of items in the background (stray ropes on the dockside, flipped tables at an elegant party, etc.) drop all penalties for improvised weapons and assign them damage dice that exceed what you would assign in a more "realistic" setting. Also, let them be used creatively (with a bonus to the roll) for Agility and Smarts tricks.

You Can’t Take the Pun-ishment
Anyone making a wise-crack or pun right before making an attack gets a +1 bonus to their Fighting, Shooting, or Throwing roll.

Arcane Backgrounds: Weird Science, maybe pull in Alchemy from Regime Diabolique.

Total Skull - Horror Movies Watched in Oct. 2016

Starry Eyes is like a less stylish Neon Demon that substitutes aspiring actresses for aspiring models. The plot has more substance to it than Refn's film, but it still manages to be underdeveloped and underwhelming. The pull quote on the cover about how it is like Cronenberg and Lynch coming together in one film couldn't be farther from an accurate statement--where is the psychological depth, the willingness to get weird?

The conceit of Behind the Mask is that we're watching a documentary being filmed about a potential killer who wants to follow in the footsteps of Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees, and Freddy Krueger. It's semi-comedic, and blatantly referential to all the tropes of the slasher genre. You'll see the final act's twist coming a mile away, but you could do worse than this movie.

In Let Us Prey a precinct of police officers and a number of apprehended criminals go through a rather biblical dark night of the soul. The narrative weight of themes that revolve around the nature of sin, redemption, and judgment is spoiled by a gonzo and often nonsensical plot. Does no one near the police station hear the gunshots happening within the building or notice that it is on fire? 

I've watched The Descent a bunch of times, and I never get bored with it. The claustrophobia, the brutality, the moral bleakness...this is a horror movie I unreservedly recommend. It's a modern classic of the genre. The horror of what's going on within the caves is excellent, but the horror going on between the characters is even better.

I've been obsessed with this V. C. Andrews's Gothic novel since I read it, so I figured I should give the recent Lifetime adaptation a chance. Mistakes were made. Nearly everything that makes the novel an insane psycho-sexual roller coaster is absent here. 

I love a good historical ghost story, but unfortunately The Awakening wastes a decently atmospheric build-up on a convoluted final third. I really liked that the central character was a strong, seance hoax-busting woman, and I also enjoyed the added atmosphere lent by the trauma of World War I, but ultimately the contrived ending didn't do the rest of the film justice.

Tomb of Ligeia isn't the strongest movie in the canon of Roger Corman's adaptation of Poe's stories, but let's be honest: I'll gladly watch any Corman-helmed Poe riff if it has Vincent Price in the lead. Admittedly, the film has about two climaxes too many, but this is cinematic comfort food for me.

It turns out that watching Scarlett Johansson--even if she's playing an extraterrestrial predator--pick up and dispose of a series of men is actually pretty boring. The long close-ups of her face and interminable shots of driving didn't help.

De Palma's cinematic adaptation of Stephen King's novel is less about the anxiety surrounding adolescent sexuality, and more focused on the prurient adult interest in adolescent sexuality. The opening scene, framed as a soft core porn enticement, gives way to the horror of watching. Also note the gym teacher's unhealthy obsession with her students and the ways in which Mrs. White's fixation on sin and repression function as a voyeuristic doubling.

Heavy on atmosphere, light on scares, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is an odd little meditation on what really produces spectrality, and its close relationship to spectatorship. And I do mean meditation; if you like your movies action-packed, this quiet little number is not for you. Even fans of slower, moodier pieces might need to approach this one in the right frame of mind.

Hold Out Your Bag for a Treat

Did you miss out on physical copies of MORBID FANTASIES? Well, we're in a trick or treating mood, so to celebrate Halloween, we're offering a completely free PDF copy of the book for you to read and enjoy. Follow this link to download your copy: http://bit.ly/morbidfantasies

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