Three good reads

Now that Amazon has just bought out Goodreads.com, I’m not sure if I’ll stick with it.  Is there anything left online that isn’t owned by Amazon, Facebook, or Google?  But the past couple of weeks I’ve managed to get to a few really good books.

E pluribus unicorn by Theodore Sturgeon

Sturgeon was a very well-regarded writer of sci-fi and fantasy, as well as mysteries and “literary” fiction.  E pluribus unicorn was the second collection of his stories to be published and the stories are uniformly excellent.  Most in this collection have some element of the fantastic, and all have great characters.   “The silken-swift” and “A saucerful of loneliness” are the most memorable, but “The professor’s teddy” and “Cellmate” are great too.  Very worth reading.

Painted devils by Robert Aickman

Subtitled “strange stories,” the stories collected here all use a creeping sense of horror and doom, and Aickman apparently considered them to be “ghost stories” although not all actually have obviously paranormal events in them.  In some cases the suspense is slowly built and becomes quite disturbing, only to peter out with a dry, quick resolution that only suggests what the fuss might have been about.  These types of stories work because Aickman is a really good writer and his dialogue and characters “make sense” even when it is hard to tell exactly happened.  I have enjoyed the stories so far but it’s not a something I’m going to tear through and I’m just reading one or two selections at a time between other books.

I picked up this collection at a library book sale, sadly without the dust jacket with I understand was done by Edward Gorey, and I understand Aickman’s books are not terribly common on the used book market for some reason.

Gods & golems by Lester Del Rey

I just started this collection of five novellas by Lester Del Rey.  Del Rey is a very recognizable name because of his editing and publishing but I’d been reading raves about him by Avram Davidson and other writers and finally found a collection of Del Rey’s own work.  So far it is staggeringly good.  I’m partway through the first, “Vengeance is mine,” which began as a fairly tender story about an intelligent if naive robot on the Moon who is awaiting the return of his human masters, who have apparently been destroyed by war.

Barney in the dungeon

When my daughter was a little younger and lots of kiddy songs were the order of the day, I found myself humming or even singing some of them on my work commute and making up alternative lyrics, as you do to stay sane.  So I imagined the songs that might be sung in the dens of humanoid caverns of The Keep on the Borderlands, with its infamous encounters of rooms full of juvenile orcs, goblins, etc.

So the first one was just a list of humanoids in order of HD:

(to the tune of ‘Head and shoulders, knees and toes’)

Kobolds, goblins, orcs and gnolls, orcs and gnolls.

Kobolds, goblins, orcs and gnolls, orcs and gnolls.

Bugbears, ogres, minotaurs and trolls,

Kobolds, goblins, orcs and gnolls, orcs and gnolls!

The “pecking order” must be one of the first lessons you need to know as a humanoid.  I suppose a more accurate progression in terms of HD would be kobolds, goblins, orcs, hobgoblins, gnolls, bugbears, ogres, trolls, but that doesn’t have the same rhythm.  Also minotaurs were necessary as I couldn’t think of a standard D&D humanoid with 5 HD.

The other one I came up with is pretty obvious too.  I guess if the young humanoids were singing this when the party bursts through the door, it would make the scenarios’ inherent genocide a little more palatable!

(to ‘Apples and bananas’)

I like to eat, eat, eat, clerics and paladins. I like to eat, eat, eat, clerics and paladins.

I like to oat, oat, oat, clorocs and polodons. I like to oat, oat, oat, clorocs and polodons.

I like to ite, ite, ite, clirics and pilidins.  I like to ite, ite, ite, clirics and pilidins.

(etc.)

Do your campaign’s  goblinoids and humanoids have nursery rhymes? Do tell.

DaDa vs. Constrictor

No D&D content this time, just an appreciation of a couple of Alice Cooper albums.

Because my car has a tape deck, I have been able to listen to a bunch of old tapes that I made in high school and college.  Recently it was a tape with two Alice Cooper albums on it: DaDa and Constrictor.

I found DaDa at a department store, some time in the mid-1980s, in the bargain bin.  DaDa never sold well and I read recently that Cooper says he can’t even remember making it (or the preceding album, Zipper catches skin, which was also a flop), as he was in an alcoholic haze for several years in the late 70s/early-to-mid 80s.  A few years later he went through rehab and sobered up and released Constrictor.  Those were the only Alice Cooper albums I ever had on vinyl, although I’d eventually get his older stuff on cassette.  (I gave away all my vinyl a few years ago because I didn’t have room for it, my turntable didn’t work well, and hadn’t listened to any of them in years.  Once in a blue moon I regret not keeping a few albums for the covers; there were some great ones, and DaDa certainly ranks).

Constrictor was relatively successful.  It came out when a lot of older acts were returning to the studio and touring and Cooper had a successful tour for that album (I think Megadeth opened for him!).  The songs on Constrictor all fit in the ‘hair metal’ mold so popular in the 1980s, except that the sound is a little heavier and the lyrics are a little more cynical and tongue-in-cheek.  There is almost a ballad (which is not quite a power ballad); otherwise but the album is very consistent: anthemic heavy metal, with one exception.  The outlier is the main single from the album (“He’s back,” which was made for a Friday the 13th film soundtrack), which mostly substitutes keyboards for lead guitar.  The beginning of the track sounds a little like it was imitating Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” but soon drifts off into the more familiar creepy/humorous territory you expect from Cooper.  Listening to the whole album at  one go, I thought was better than I remembered but not great.  I never loved the album, but it is pretty decent as something to pass the time.

The other side of the tape is DaDa.  The album cover is an homage to a Salvador Dali painting; Cooper and Dali knew each other so I guess it was probably something Dali approved of — I don’t remember there being any mention of Dali in the liner notes though.  (One thing I do remember was that the back cover had all the credits & lyrics in a script typeface, but the credits also mentioned someone specific as the calligrapher of the lyrics.  I can’t believe the lyrics were all written out by hand, as the font is so uniform…but there it is, in the credits.  How quickly we forget what life was like before computers did everything.)

Anyway DaDa opens with a seriously creepy song that mixes a baby saying “dada” with a synthesizer playing minor chords and a drum effect that sounds like a gunshot or a heavy door slamming, and eventually some dialogue fades in.  The album as a whole does not exactly have a unifying theme, but it is as much a concept album as Alice Cooper Goes to Hell and Killers — there are some oblique connections among individual pairs of songs and like many concept albums before and since, the last track fades into the beginning of the first track, suggesting an eternal recurrence.  This makes a certain amount of sense.  If the song “Dada” introduces a disturbed man with a problematic relationship with his son, the second song, “Enough’s enough,” gives the son’s side of the story, before the next song, “Former Lee Warmer,” tells of a monster being cared for and hidden by his sibling — echoing the line in “Enough’s enough” (“why’d you hide your brother?”) as well as the confusion about how many children the patient in “Dada” has.  The subsequent songs mix humor and horror, and for the most part could be describing some of the struggles (with mental illness, violence, and perversion) of either the father or the son from the first songs.  The song “I love America,” easily the funniest of the tracks (“I love that mountain with those four big heads…”, delivered with a redneck drawl which, however, by the end of the song seems less satire and more earnest), is like an intermission or interlude before the final two songs.  “I love America” in fact contains an intermission of its own in the form of frenzied used car commercial.  But the last two songs — “Fresh blood” and “Pass the gun around” — seem to complete the cycle of violence.  The former chronicles the protagonist’s struggle to resist the urge to kill, while the latter is a disturbingly autobiographical song about slow suicide by alcoholism.  It is unlikely that any song here but the last has any real autobiographical significance for Cooper, but immediately after finishing the album, Cooper headed into rehab.

The songs on DaDa are hard to categorize musically; not as heavy as the earlier work by the band Alice Cooper, nor the solo albums from Constrictor onwards, they are more like the mixed bag of progressive rock albums Cooper did during his pre-rehab solo years (Goes to Hell, Welcome to my nightmare, etc.), but with a bit more of a pop/rock sensibility and maybe New Wave.  If he’d released the album twenty or thirty years later than he did, it would be called “indie rock,” I think.

Looking for images of the these albums, I found a pretty thorough writeup of Alice Cooper’s entire discography here.

That campaign blowed up real good!

There’s nothing like Death Frost Doom to stir things up when your campaign is beginning to peter out a bit.  Minor spoilers follow, so if you’ve never read or played DFD, you might want to stop reading now.

I’ve had DFD sitting around in the mountains since my first Telengard campaign (although I only actually got a copy of the module later; I’d heard of the basic idea and thought it would be a great fit, and would have improvised something like it if anyone had checked it out then).

I think level is not too important for this adventure, since it mostly exploration. The party was really near the upper limit — it’s supposed to be for PCs level 1-6, and most of them are level 6 now.  Still, the finale could be a TPK for almost any level of PCs, considering the confined space and overwhelming numbers of foes.  Being of highish levels made it possible for the party to fight one foe that a lower level party would have almost certainly had to bargain with, and defeat some other foes a low-level party might have been killed by, but since combat is not the focus of the module, it really didn’t matter too much.

Our party took on the module in two sessions — the first extremely carefully, as only the bard, assassin, and magic-user were present for the session, and the second a bit more recklessly, as the assassin and magic-user were joined by the paladin and dwarf, as well as four low-level meat shields.  Two meat shields died (one suicide, one energy drained) but otherwise the party was mostly unscathed.  The assassin gained a point of strength but lost a point of intelligence, and Funko the gremlin also lost one point of intelligence.

They had only opened one big crypt door by the time “hell vomits its filth” was triggered, so most of the undead were not immediately able to swarm the party. The one turn “lead time” meant they were able to find Cyrus’ tomb just before the undead actually began awakening.   Opening his tomb, they quickly found the coffin and surmised that there was a vampire about, so the dwarf immediately began destroying the coffin and scattering the earth.  This caused Cyrus to appear and attempt to parlay, but the party immediately attacked and being some serious ass-kickers, defeated him in matter of two rounds.

It took a bit of discussion before the party realized that there was no way to simply fight their way out, and they came up with a reasonably good escape plan, barricading a door and going out a ‘chimney’ to the surface.  My lax ritual casting rules let them escape with all their gear intact, but under stricter rules they would have been forced to leave a lot of stuff behind.  As it was the magic user could cast ‘fly’ enough times to give the party a safe exit from the dungeon.  I suppose if I’d been a jerkier DM I would have had ghouls come for them via the chimney while the casting was being done, but that would pretty much be a TPK by fiat, so I overrode the module’s suggestion there.  Instead, the party flew down to Zeke’s camp and rode their horses off the mountain.

With a village (Clovis), a town (Puddington), and a small city (Skara Brae) all within a day’s forced march, the party was scrambling to give warning and figure out how to deal with the army of the dead now on the move.  Hilarity ensued, and the party even split up, but I’d already determined that they had a fair amount of time before the main body of zombies and skeletons were really on the move, and the ghoul horde was too disorganized to give immediate chase, so probably the undead will not make a ‘bee line’ for anything and instead need to fan out until they find victims.  Or a leader.  I understand the party let a mummy-priest get away a few sessions back.

Time to start figuring out potential troop strengths for the local settlements and how to handle large-scale battles.  One thing that might be fun could be a “cut scene” where a hopelessly outnumbered force fights the vanguard of the undead army, both to create some foreboding and to introduce mass combat rules.

I’ve heard of DFD  ‘ending’ campaigns but I think it Telengard it might be a bridge to the ‘end-game’ of fortress-building, army-raising, etc.  DFD would also be a fun campaign-starter at low levels or even first level, come to think of it.

Lyke Wake Dirge: a lazy lyric post

Lyke wake dirge is a traditional dirge or funeral song that I first heard on a Buffy Sainte-Marie album.  Here’s a transcription I found which looks about the same as Buffy Sainte-Marie’s version (the refrain in italics is in every verse, but only given in the first verse):

THIS ae nighte, this ae nighte,
  Every night and alle,
Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,
  And Christe receive thy saule.     

When thou from hence away art past,
To Whinny-muir thou com’st at last;

If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon,
Sit thee down and put them on

If hosen and shoon thou ne’er gav’st nane
The whinnes sall prick thee to the bare bane

From Whinny-muir when thou may’st pass,
To Brig o’ Dread thou com’st at last

From Brig o’ Dread when thou may’st pass,
To Purgatory fire thou com’st at last

If ever thou gavest meat or drink,
The fire sall never make thee shrink

If meat or drink thou ne’er gav’st nane,
The fire will burn thee to the bare bane

This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
Fire and fleet and candle-lighte.

.
A most excellent exegesis of the folk song is here.  D&D players will enjoy learning the etymology of  the word “lyke/lich,” which keeps cropping up in old school blogs.  I’d take slight issue with his rendering of “This ae night” as “On this night” because “This one night” seems more accurate — the idea is that this is the lyke’s (lich’s, or body’s) last night in a house, as it will be buried tomorrow.

Anyway it sounds like an excellent template for a D&D adventure to the ‘other side’!  The Whinny-moor, a field of dangerous nettles and spiky plants must be braved, and then the Bridge of Dread, just to get to the other side.  The Whinny-moor would obviously have some lost souls, “picked to the bare bone,” haunting it, as would the fires under or near the Brig’o'Dread.  The Bridge may just as well be guarded by some other kind of gatekeeper; I’d try to resist the temptation to use the version in Monty Python & The Holy Grail, but still a riddler or even an inquisitor (who reminds the PCs of their many damnable transgressions!) would be cool.

Buffy Sainte-Marie has several other unexpectedly D&D songs that could be fuel for adventure ideas; maybe I’ll get to them some other time.

Auger appreciation day

Just a reminder to celebrate the tools-o-the-trade!

Any unusual or innovative use of mundane equipment in your campaigns? Do tell.

Demonomania!

Crazy busy days this weekend ameliorated by some fun craft time!  I finished up most of the unpainted demons and devils I have — several from the MegaMinis monster pack, as well as a really old Efreet and a crazy-looking boar that seemed like it must be demonic.

First up is a bat-demon thing — MegaMinis, a recast of a Metal Magic sculpt.  He’s got a long segmented tail (as do most of the other Metal Magic demons from this set) but is otherwise very bat-like.

He just got a couple of layers of brown drybrushing and a pink wash on the nose and tail, with my usual white talons and teeth job.  All these demons were super fast to paint since it was mostly a matter of a few layers of drybrushing, a wash, and a few details.

Next up a devil with a strange spade-like weapon.  It’s a lot like a Chinese ‘monk’s spade,’ except they have a blade on both ends.  I know Grenadier did a devil with the same weapon which maybe this was a knock-off of?  I like the cresent moon shape of his head too.

Then there are two blue demons.  They might actually be any of a number of things — the one with the raised arm might equally well be a troll or some sort of creeper in the dark like a grue; the reptillian one could also be some sort of saurian.  They both illustrate the strangely two-dimensional quality most of the monsters from the MegaMinis set have.  I wonder if Metal Magic was limited by their mold-maker, or it was just an aesthetic choice to go so flat.  They all look pretty good in profile but coming head-on they look pretty goofy.

The huge hands on this one remind me of blue demon minoins of Tzeench in the Games Workshop line from the early 90s or very late 80s.

This guy has so much animation from the profile and looks so flat from the front it is just heart-breaking.

Next up some boar-demons — one is humanoid (a starving Type II demon?) and the other is of an unknown (to me) make — he might be a dire boar?

The three-pronged tail is odd; otherwise he might be a giant wereboar.

If anyone recognizes this boar monster, I’d love to know it’s make.  The cratered base suggests it could be a sci-fi mini.  It is lead so it must me pretty old.  I think it was among the old lead someone sent me couple years back, but it might also be from a used minis bin at Origins or something.

Now lastly, my favorite of the pack and the one I put the most effort into — a Grenadier Efreet.  I really wanted to make the flames throw some light on the bottoms of his arms and cast shadows over his shoulders and face.  The glossy finish hides this a little; I also wimped out on depicting the reversed shadowing — I really ought to have dry-brushed black over the topmost areas.  Still, he looks pretty good.

It’s a classy sculpt and based directly on Trampier’s Monster Manual illustration:

Not a perfect match but darn close!  For some reason Grenadier gave him some bling.  I have one other Grenadier efreet, which is a re-sculpt, that looks terrible and will be getting repainted now that I have some practice.  The other guy has a more Neanderthal look to him and his arms are not crossed, but he’s still emerging from a pillar of fire.  I have no idea why Grenadier would discontinue the Trampier version (the resculpt was put out before they lost the AD&D license so it’s not that!).

The stone god awakens

The stone god awakens, by Philip Jose Farmer.  That’s one hell of a book jacket.

Anyway I can’t say I’m a big Farmer fan.  I haven’t really read enough of his work to form a general opinion.  In fact this is the first novel of his I’ve read, and I’m not sure if I’ve ready stories by him in anthologies.

The premise of the book is that a physicist is frozen in time for millions year by some largely unexplained experiment, and emerges into a world populated by primitive humanoids that seem both human and animal.  He takes up with some cat-people who have been worshiping his frozen form as a god, and introduces bows, horse riding, and gun powder to them, and then gets increasingly involved in the various races and begins a search for other humans as well as battling another ‘god’ — a vast banyan tree system that threatens to consume the entire land mass.

The tree is huge — miles and miles across; thousands and thousands of feet tall; with thousands of branches.  Forests, rivers, and lakes form within the branches, and many strange animals and humanoids populate it.  It is fairly inspiring as a strange environment to explore: rivers course along some branches, to fall precipitously into waterfalls thousands of feet down; the ground beneath the tree is a perpetually dark, swampy mire, where bits of the tree occasionally crash down, and various vermin inhabit the decaying branches.  The tree itself may in fact be intelligent (why spoil the book?)

The other thing I liked about this book was that it provided a fairly a somewhat consistent world for Gamma World type adventures.  The world as we knew is long gone, and the flora and fauna are all unrecognizable.  It also suggests what is probably the most logical way to run GW: the PCs, like the protagonist, are from the past (or another world) and are discovering the mysterious environment.  Other have suggested running mutant PCs in the GW as tokens of  species, and this world would at least make mutated animals viable species.

Apart from using the book as inspiration for gaming, though, I would not really recommend it as literature.  The hero is never all that interesting, and his main conflict is whether or not he’s attracted to a cat-woman (I’m guessing Farmer is).  The book is not broken into chapters but is more like a really long short story, which gets kind of tedious.  The bad guys are obviously bad from the get-go, but no one has very clear or realistic motivations. The book also fails to end with any real sense of resolution, and it seems like Farmer may have wanted to leave opening for a sequel.  If not, he actually made a fairly bold and original choice, to leave the villain undefeated and hero wondering if it is worth fighting.  I guess I should give him the benefit of the doubt and say he breaks conventions a little; still, I had a lot of trouble caring about the characters or even telling most of them apart except by species.

Some more new monsters

Haven’t been posting any session recaps lately but will try to get some player’s session summaries up soon — the bard player in particular has been doing a bang-up job writing up cool stuff.  Anyway for the benefit of DMs, here’s the roster of monsters the party fought last time in a castle in the dreamlands (lots of bugbears too but they were normal bugbears):

Tentacled wings — a humanoid monstrosity, arms replaced by giant  bat wings and replaced by a bouquet of tentacles.  I must have gotten the idea from Lovecraft but nothing springs to mind as the immediate source — they are not Old Ones or Night Gaunts, perhaps my confused conflation of the two.  Anyway they fly, and attack with their tentacles which, if they hit, latch on and do d8 per round.  4 HD, AC 15.

Composite rats — Massive rats about the size of a small cow, with enormous maws that do 2d6 damage on a bite, and spread disease (Fort save 1 week after being bitten; fail = random disease).  HD 4, AC 14.  Each time they are hit, they split — first into two rats the size of mastiffs, and then into four cat-sized giant rats.  These smaller forms retain 4HD for attack purposes and 2d6 damage!  If hit in the smaller giant rat form, the next division turns them into a swarm of regular mice, no attacks, they just scurry away.  Don’t bother tracking HP — each hit just divides them, so basically you need to make 11 successful attacks to get rid of one! Or use area-effect spells.  The massive bite damage really stung them too.  I like these because they are in reality getting tougher as the fight progresses rather than weaker (more attacks).  One player had the idea to stop them splitting by trying to wrestle and snap the neck of a mastiff sized rat and I would have allowed that to work if he’d been able to hit the thing with his grapple attack.

The Matryoshka doll boss — I guess this could be any series of monsters, but the idea is the first ‘layer’ looks like it is just a leader of lesser humanoids, but kill it, and the thing sheds a skin to reveal a much tougher monster.  In this case we had Bugbear chief/Mind flayer with cursed sword of wounding/Type II Demon.  The cursed sword gives bearer a -2 to all saves, which made the whole encounter more survivable for 5th-6th level PCs.  When the demon started gating in more demons, things got hairy.

There are those who might think I just made up these monsters to have an excuse to use some monster figures I haven’t used lately or recently finished painting.  They would be right.  Maybe pics to follow.  And better names for them.

Lolth

I don’t really think I did this one justice, but I had surge of painting energy and finished up this conversion Scottsz gave me when he was clearing out some old stuff.

I gave her dead, white eyes, and added some color to the black spider body, but mostly left his paint job alone.  The front legs have white tips, to suggest talons or horns.  The knees have a reddish highlight.

I can’t believe I forgot to fill in the hole in the base. On my list.  Also the Roslof painting, that the conversion is based on, gives her eight yellow spots on her “chest” area — probably secondary eyes.  (I had to look it up but apparently most spiders have two ‘main’ eyes with lenses and four or six secondary eyes that just detect light/shadow and movement.  Also spider eyes are simple, rather than compound like insect eyes. The more you know…) So the drow-head eyes must be her “main eyes” and the six spots are “secondary eyes.” Cute.