Map: Temple Sanctuary

Here is another map I drew during my daughter's appointment. This is a temple sanctuary building, part of a temple complex.

Two temple guardian statues sit at the front stairs that lead up to an open veranda. The roof is held up by two foot pillars. The inner railing (pillars again) overlooks a sunken garden. A well is on the left side of the garden, and a pond is on the right side. There is a tool storage room that connects the gardens in the back. In the center, the oval sanctuary contains a large 30-foot statue of the resident deity on a raised dais with an altar behind. The back of the temple is a series of rooms, including the rear priest's entry hall, a robing room on either side, and two staging halls in the corners.

The temple complex is also fortified to prevent raids by bandits. The temple has 4-inch oak bars for all the doors. In case of attack, the priests would withdraw to the rear chambers, especially in the two robing rooms, in which both sets of double doors can be barred. Each of these robing rooms has a hidden trap door that leads into the crawl space beneath the building. These tunnels lead to the two secret doors on either side of the front steps, perhaps allowing the trapped priests to escape under cover of night.

I need a triangle. Badly.

Obligatory GenCon Post

The last time I went to GenCon was 30 years ago this week. It was at the University of Wisconsin -- Parkside in Kenosha. This was two years before GenCon moved to the MECCA center in Milwaukee. Wikipedia.org thinks the attendance was about 4000.

I think this was the last time I was refereed by Professor Barker. As I recall, my character was Tolekh hiVriddi, the character I played in Craig Smith and Tim Cox's EPT game at The Little Tin Soldier Shop in Minneapolis. He was an unwashed barbarian, who eventually bought (and/or married) his way into the Vriddi clan. Why he ended up in the underworld beneath Jakalla that weekend I don't remember.

The idea of being at GenCon now scares me. I can't imagine trying to get into games when 40,000 other people are trying to do the same thing. When I go to a game convention, I want to play in games I've never played with people I've never played with. At least, I want to play in games.

So I did some math.

40,000 participants. Let's say only half want to play RPGs. 20,000. Let's say each game can take an average of 6 players. 3333 games to accommodate each of the 20,000 playing a single game. But I want to play at least 6 games over the 4 days. 20,000. That's how many games would have to be scheduled to let everyone play 6 scheduled games over GenCon.

So, how do you put that into a program book? Give everyone an app? It better have kickass search capabilities.

I can't find any statistics of how many RPG sessions are scheduled, but I'm willing to bet it's much smaller than 20,000, probably in the 3000 range. So, I'm guessing if I went to GenCon, I wouldn't be able to play my 6 games. Perhaps I'm wrong.

Map: Floorplan of Tubecar Station

This structure has survived the previous 30-100 thousand years. The curved portion used to be a high-tech glass/plastic half-dome, but it has since broken, and the pieces are strewn across the floor. At least, those pieces that haven't been carted off for nefarious purposes or construction. A stairway leads down to the tubecar. The roof of the back rooms is missing, and the two walls of the larger room are crumbled.

Top View

Side View

These were drawn with a 0.4 mm black india ink Faber Castell Pitt artist pen on an acid-free sketch book. The images were touched up digitally, and the side view was combined from two drawings.

Heroes and Other Worlds: Magi Carta -- a mini-review

One of the books I bought this summer was Magi Carta: The Compendium of Magic and Spells for Heroes and Other Worlds. Written by Christopher Brandon, Heroes was inspired by The Fantasy Trip, one of my favorite systems, as well as B/X D&D. Magi Carta is 192 pages long in the 5x7 digest format and costs $21 for the softbound version and $10.99 for the PDF from Lulu.com.

The book starts with ten pages of magical options, including ideas for limiting starting spells by social status or by requiring lower IQ spells before getting higher IQ spells, two interesting forms of spellcasting, spell gems (a form of temporary magic device), wizard's staff, spell books and familiars. Then a full 176 pages of spells, nearly 600 spells in all. The spells are a range of effects, many of them adaptations of standard D&D spells, such as Prismatic Spray.

This is a pretty thick tome. The cover art is very nice, and Lulu's production values are good. The interior layout is simple but very readable. Some spell adaptations are better than others, but overall, this is a great resource for the game, especially if you are using D&D modules in your HOW game..

Chris Brandon has done a very nice job of supporting his game. Heroes and Other Worlds now has an expansive set of spells, a sandbox (Rob Conley's Blackmarch converted for HOW), and a fanzine, The Cauldron. I hear rumors of a future Redwald book for HOW, as well.

My Cons for the Next Year

When I decided to get back into running games at cons last year after a multi-year hiatus, I jumped in headfirst and now I'm up to my ankles.

In February, I ran a GURPS Tekumel scenario, Rumble in Jakalla, at Con of the North, my local game convention of good size and regional scope. I would have run a GURPS Traveller game, but no one showed. A colleague said that he's always had trouble filling GURPS Traveller games at local cons. So, I won't be running that game again.

This fall U-Con takes place in Ypsilanti, Michigan from November 22-24. This con has had a Tekumel Track for at least the last 15 years. I'll be running two Tekumel games, Rumble in Jakalla, and an experimental game using some hexcrawl rules I'm adapting to Tekumel called Where in Sarku's Cold Wormy Hell are We?. I'm very excited to come back to this con after being away for years. I have friends I miss. (Hi George! Hi Krista! Hi Patrick! Hi Joel!)

Then the heavy lifting occurs. For next year's Con of the North in February, I'm organizing a Tekumel Track which currently has 40 hours of games submitted. We have a dedicated table as well as a fine collection of GMs, including something of a Tekumel celebrity, Don Kaiser, who played in the Professor's own games for many years. Jeff Berry will be supplying me with figures and other support. I'm very excited about building a new Tekumel Track.

For this con, I'm re-running Where in Sarku's Cold Wormy Hell are We? and also one of Krista Donnelly's wonderful adventures, Lost in the Library. I played this module when Krista brought it to U-Con. It's a good intro adventure that is not a "Fresh Off the Boat" game.

Now I just have to develop my hexcrawl rules, fill out the maps and features for Sarku's Wormy Hell, update my GURPS Tekumel rules, and read the whole Lost in the Library scenario several times. Sounds like fun to me!

I hate Vancian magic

I don't like the D&D magic system. Let me rephrase that. I hate the D&D spell memorization rules. The idea that you can only memorize till you cast a spell rubs me raw, like sex on the beach.

But I think I have a simple change that will satisfy me without changing existing magic user classes.

Magic users are still limited on what spells they can memorize, but for daily casting limits, total the levels of spells memorized and that gives you how many levels of spells you can cast.

For example, Aloysius Archmage, a 3rd level magic user, can memorize two 1st level spells and a 2nd level spell, say Magic Missile, Sleep, and Invisibility. When it comes to daily casting limits, instead of being restricted to casting each of those spells once, the magic user can cast those spells in any combination as long as only four levels of spells are cast. Aloysius could cast four Sleep spells, or two Invisibility spells, or one of each of his spells, or any combination that totals four levels.

This seems to be the easiest way to keep the existing D&D spell infrastructure and still be something I can get fully behind.

I'm sure someone has thought of this. How did it work? Did it destroy 'game balance'? Did it make playing magic users more fun? What were your experiences?