Archive for October, 2009
LikeEndday Interlude: Angels and Demons
Oct 31st
Where do campaign ideas come from? Sometimes their plots are ripped from the pages of books or are inspired by That Movie (that movie, all too often, being Star Wars). There’s a lot to be said for transplanting plots across different genres – imagine, for example – playing a scenario based on Speed, using Eberron’s Lightning Rail system. Or running The Matrix in the Forgotten Realms (“There is no wand,” muttered Elminster under his breath).
Many campaigns have no over-arching plot, and that’s not a Bad Thing. Our own superhero sessions are all based in the same multiversal reality and is a shared setting with no particular long-term thread running through it. Some storylines can take many sessions to resolve (if at all), but there’s nothing particularly to tie them all together, by design.
Endday is different. There’s a campaign plotline running through it from beginning to all too destructive end.
And it all began with me asking myself two questions.
Where do Demons come from? and Where do Angels come from?
The answer to the first question is easy: Demons are Fallen Angels who rebelled against the heavens and were cast out. So: Demons are Angels with a difference of opinion.
It’s the answer to the next question which shakes things up. Where do Angels come from? According to one theory all the major religions have subsumed the beliefs of faiths they’ve conquered, adapting their ceremonies and holy days into themselves to better convert the people to their way of thinking. Hence Christmas and Easter, among others.
Also – and here’s the important bit – the major religions have often taken the gods of the other religions and demoted them, making them lesser beings but subservient to the True god or gods (whichever gods that happened to be at the time). This is how Ra rose to supreme power in Ancient Egypt and how the Cult of Zeus afforded him the title of Father over all the other gods.
This is where Angels come from. They are gods, demoted. They are the ancient spirits of the wood and tree and brook and forest and glade. They are the gods of the early winter frost and the garden pond. They are the spirits of the hearth and home, of the harvest, love and hate. They are animism, ancestor worship and the mythos of countless forgotten peoples.
Which means that Demons, by extension, are also gods, demoted then cast out for wanting their power back.
Truth be told, who can blame them?
How to install a Lexmark x2350 printer
Oct 30th
An abbreviated tale of two hours wasted time.
1. Ask @simplychrista to do it. The printer is connected to her computer, after all.
2. She hunts for drivers for Windows 7. Downloads them and follows instructions to use the Vista drivers in compatibility mode. Easy.
3. ….. except they don’t work. Printer installs, but when she tries to print, is told printer is not installed. But it’s RIGHT THERE in the Printers box!
4. Much swearing. Not by me. Not yet.
5. Further investigation, correct (ie, working) drivers for Windows 7 will be available “in a few weeks”. So much for that. More on that particular problem, here.
6. Plug printer into my aged and mostly broken laptop.
7. Go to lexmark.com, click download, search for x2350 and snarf drivers for XP. This part was actually pretty pleasant and works as expected.
8. Double-click on cjb2300EN.exe, click the annoying-as-hell YES I DID DAMN WELL MEAN TO DO THAT YOU STUPID EFFING WINDOWS “security” dialog box that XP pops up whenever I click on an .exe what wasn’t made by Microsoft. And yes, I’ve tried everything to turn it off. And no, nothing worked.
9. Nothing happens.
10. Double-click it again. Confirm again. Still nothing happens.
11. CTRL-ALT-DELETE to check Task Manager. Nope. No installers there.
12. Figure it might be a corrupt .exe file. Redownload.
13. Double-click. Same again. Fuck you, Lexmark. All I want is to print ONE DAMN LETTER.
14. Might be a corrupt file on Lexmark’s site. Find another source, re-download. Different file-size. That’s promising.
15. Double-clickerty click. Nothing. Triple-clickety click. Still nothing. Hit the left mouse button until my thumb bleeds. Still nothing.
16. Right-click the .exe file and extract it after @simplychrista suggests it might be a self-extracting archive. It is, and it works. Because yeah, extracting .exe files is of course what you do.
17. Click on Printers and Faxes. Add new printer.
18. Tell Windows to look in the shiny nice new drivers folder. 100Mb of cruft later, I haz printer driver. Huzzah!
19. No, I don’t want an alignment page.
20. No, I don’t want a test page either. You feckers charge enough money for ink as it is without making me print more than I want.
21. NO I DON’T WANT AN ALIGNMENT PAGE, ok?
22. Open the letter. Print.
23. Pull papers from back of printer where it’s being chewed up by the Angry Printer Monster. It doesn’t stand a chance against the Angry Computer User. Not at all.
24. Re-feed paper.
25. Prints. Success.
26. Write tweet saying how much you hate printers. 140 characters isn’t enough room for all the hate, seriously.
Gaaah!
Now it's your turn to bring on the horror
Oct 30th
Churning out a horror(-ish) themed render a day is fun, but today the brain juices aren’t quite flowing as they should.
So, I’m going to hand the floor over to you, gentle reader. Suggest a horror image you’d like to see and I’ll pick one (or more) and make it. Want to finally see the stuff of your nightmares up close? Think you’ve got what it takes to come up with something really scary? Now’s your chance to shine!
Bring on the horror!!
She watched them burn
Oct 29th
I have vague memories of a tale about a female serial killer from the Great Depression era. She married well, insured heavily then drugged her husband before setting fire to their house. After a suitable period of grief she upped sticks to another state and did just the same all over again.
She married and killed about 15 times before she was caught, tried, sentenced and (as I recall) executed.
But that’s not what I remember the most. What makes this story still echo in my mind is that she sat calmly and watched the burnings. Every. Single. Time.
Assault on the Anti-Delve
Oct 27th
With just three players on hand I wanted a quick zero-prep dungeon for a few hours entertainment: time to crack open my copy of Dungeon Delve. This is, I reckon, one of the best value tomes yet released for 4e D&D. There’s 30 one-shot sessions within, and any GM worth his salt should be able to use them either as-is or pad them out to become fully-fledged multi-session adventures. I consider it like D&D’s version of Traveller’s 76 Patrons, giving you just enough information to play. It provides the bones. You, as GM, provide the meat.
I’d heard that of all the Delves, number 3: Orc Stronghold was the weakest, and that of course meant I wanted to run it. As written it’s a straight “clean out the old keep” scenario where the adventurers have been commissioned to….. you’re ahead of me, right?
It’s not high on originality – there’s a metric tonne of Orcs (18 by my count), 2 fire beetles, a dire wolf and a pit trap and not a lot else. The perfect clean slate for a wicked GM mind. My first consideration was to apply a theme to the Delve. Make all the monsters Zombies (complete with Undead Pit Trap. Oh yeah!) or have them infused with a Chillborn taint. Or perhaps have the spirit of the Keep itself infect the monsters and give them a stone-like quality. I’m liking the idea of Half-Elemental Orcs. Then, it hit me.
Reverse the dungeon.
The Reverse Dungeon has a long and (dis)honourable part to play in the history of D&D. I remember several takes on the theme of the playing the monsters in the pages of Dungeon (and before that, Dragon) magazine and the classic Reverse Dungeon module from AD&D gave you everything you needed to play the other side of the fence in 96 perfect-bound pages.
Looking further afield and there’s the utterly lovely Goblin Lake solo adventure for Tunnels & Trolls – first published in 1979 and re-released as part of Free RPG Day back in 2007. I’m sure other systems can lay claim to scenarios which offer the chance for players to game at the opposite end of the alignment chart.
We’re not talking about playing the noble savage here. This isn’t the game where the PCs are savage Orc Barbarians or honourable-yet-ruthless Drow Assassins. This is true role-reversal where the PCs characters are evil scum and villainy and the GM-controlled “monsters” are the tough and noble party of heroes.
I generated four third-level heroes as my GMPCs – Edda the Gnome Wizard, Fangnir the Dwarf Fighter, Rhyl the Halfling Rogue and Modesty the Human Cleric Nun – and handed Dungeon Delve to the players.
“You’re the Orcs and their pets. Split them between you and defend the keep!”
For the first encounter Mark took the Fire Beetles, Paul the Orc Raider in the Tower and Jon the other two Raiders. I juggled the four PCs as best I could (Gnome Wizards rock!) and won out, but not before Fangnir took a shedload of damage from not one to but two Fire Sprays from the Beetles! Ouchy.
Encounter two was a different matter. With 3 players controlling the monsters (1 for the Eye of Gruumsh, 1 for the orc berseker and half the drudges and 1 for the rest) if felt like I’d been ganged up on! Half the Drudges went around the cauldron while the others stayed with the Berseker to the North of the Pit trap – effectively boxing my GMPCs in right on top of the Pit Trap. Cue the Eye of Gruumsh pulling the lever and down they go. Both Modesty and Edda fail the save and take damage, followed by the Orcs tipping the flaming Cauldron on top of the whole party for another 2d4 damage – and another 2d4 damage next turn as they’re now swimming in a Flaming Pool. Nice. Thanks for that.
We ended it there because, seriously, we’re laughing too much to play. Two encounters and I’ve had my ass well and truly chewed. I’ve been shown that even a setup that looks deceptively simple can be brilliant in-play.
I’ll be looking at reversing a few more of the Delves in the future, that’s for sure. But not before my ego recovers from the bruising it took this time around :D
