Icosahedrophilia Podcast, Episode 5: The Wellspring, Part 2
In episode 5, we present the second hour of our campaign’s second adventure. Please listen now or subscribe via iTunes. This episode features the following segments:
- The Staging Area: I briefly recap the first hour of “The Wellspring,” and issue my sincere apologies to you listeners for the one-week delay in posting episode 5.
- The Weather Report: The second hour, more or less, of “The Wellspring,” recorded on August 30, 2008. This hour is almost entirely taken up by a long fight between our heroes and some spiders that ambush them during their trek through the jungle. (For more about these spiders, see the extended show notes.)
- The Prop Shop: I promote some more cool tokens produced by Litko Aerosystems, and play a promo for a podcast that presents actual play of the Goodman Games 4e moduleSellswords of Punjar.
For more detailed show notes, please follow the “Read more” link below. Thanks for listening to “The Wellspring, Part 2,” and look for “The Wellspring, Part 3″ around September 30, 2008!
A little advice to (sm)all game publishers
I like to buy game stuff. I really do. But if you want to pretty much guarantee that I won’t buy your product, just drop some errors of grammar or spelling into your product description. On my most recent visit to DriveThruRPG, a product popped up with the following credits:
Author(s): Cheis A. Field
Artist(s): Shammans Stock Art, LPJ Image Portfolio, Chris Field, others sited within the PDF.
No, really—the artists are “sited” within the PDF? How’d you get them in there? Never mind that the author’s name is misspelled—a simple typo, but one that someone should have caught before pushing the product into the catalog. Unimpressive.
Could it be, though, that these were just mistakes made by DTRPG and not by the publisher? I suppose, but given that the product description had nine unambiguous punctuation, spelling, or capitalization errors (plus four occurrences of a debatable point), I rather suspect the error lies with the publisher.
Sorry, Charlie. If you can’t spell, capitalize, and hyphenate your words properly in the product description, I’m not going to spend $12.99 on your product.
Do I want this book?
The Forgotten Realms Player’s Guide has been released in digital form through DriveThruRPG, and should go on sale in bookstores tomorrow. I’m running a homebrew campaign, not a Realms campaign, so I’m not sure whether I want to buy this book or not. DTRPG has a preview file that includes the table of contents, and it looks like I’d mainly be interested in the following bits of the book:
- Half-orcs (about 1/4 of p. 20)
- The swordmage class (pp. 24–34)
- The dark pact for warlocks (pp. 35–40)
- Feats (pp. 130–139; I don’t know how many will be Realms-specific)
- Rituals (pp. 140–147); a few, like purify spellplague, are obviously Realms-specific
And that’s about it. I’m leaning toward giving this volume a pass, though I’ll probably allow players to use materials from this volume if they purchase it themselves. However, if you want to play in the RPGA’s Living Forgotten Realms series or just in a home game set in the Realms, this book will be indispensable.
What’s in 100,000 names?
I recently added Gary Gygax’s Extraordinary Book of Names to my gaming library. The remainder of this post reproduces the review I posted at DriveThruRPG.
Okay … it’s a book of names. A big book full of lots of names. What else do you need to know?
Seriously, this book does have a few features that set it apart from other name books (like the Judges Guild Book of Archaic Names, for example). The first 20 pages, more or less, present an interesting and often useful discussion of names and naming. It’s not perfect; some of the phonemic associations suggested on p. 20 are over-the-top and have no actual linguistic validity, while some of the claims made are just plain sexist (”A blunt or forceful name like Darg or Rathek should belong to a male,” pp. 19–20) and others reflect the author Malcolm Bowers’s (no, not Gary Gygax, despite the series title) own sense of aesthetics, which may not match the GM’s. Indeed, some of the aesthetics proposed here are inconsistent on the same page; p. 20 tells us that a final /k/ sound “help vicious invective” but also convey “beauty, peace, and grace”—which should have clued Bowers in that his phonemics are mostly impressionistic nonsense. On the other hand, the brief discussion of onomancy and “true names” (pp. 21–24) could give GMs lots of interesting ideas to work into their campaigns, regardless of the rules set.
The bulk of this book really is a big list of personal names, arranged chiefly by geography and culture: Britain, Africa, America, Asia, Europe, the Mediterranean, and Oceania each get major sections with multiple subsections. Within each subsection, readers get a brief orientation to the geo-cultural group in focus, pronunciation guides, and lists of personal and family names, with other types of names (bynames or surnames, for example) also provided where appropriate. According to the publisher, readers ultimately get over 100,000 specific names in this format, making the book a good resource for GMs who need lots of NPC names, even on the fly.
The aforementioned name lists take up a little over half of the entire book, but there’s more. A colorful epithet can add a lot to a name (”Richard the Lionheart” sounds so much more buff than “Richard I”), so Bowers gives readers a whole section devoted to generating colorful epithets. As befits a “Gygaxian” product, Bowers supplies a random table for generating the form of an epithet (d20 roll: 01-06 yields “description,” 07-09 yields “thing,” 10-12 yields “description + thing,” and so on), but then the source lists that follow the random table aren’t organized according to these categories! Not that GMs will have a hard time using these lists, but it would have been more convenient to have lists of “descriptions,” “things,” “actions,” and so on labeled as such. The tables of titles are very Eurocentric, and while Bowers does offer some titles from non-European cultures to offset this, a strong bias remains evident (”Usually generic titles are enough. ‘Chief’ applies equally well to the head of any clan or tribe, for instance.) Book 3 also includes some suggestions for deriving names of organizations, military squads, and so on, which a GM can quite easily put to good use.
Book 4 deals with place names, and I was very pleased to find this section. Europe still dominates, but plenty of non-English words and word-fragments are given to fire a GM’s imagination. Yet here the book fails to provide a service that would have been invaluable: the theoretical discussion of place-names stresses the meanings of names, but Bowers does not tell his presumably English-speaking readers what all of the various words mean! Thus, for example, Bowers gives readers a list of Arabic colors—aswad, azrak, asmar, akhdar, sinjabi, ahmar, abyad, and asfar—but he provides no guidance as to which color is which! For Bowers, “place names” includes names for taverns and inns—quite commonly needed in fantasy RPGs—and this section comes in quite handy.
In book 5, Bowers discusses the construction of completely fantastic names. Some of this discussion is very helpful (”One [thing] that stops most people is the dreaded ‘unpronounceable’ … This sort of thing is pretty much pointless in a game where you have to speak the name out loud”), while other parts devolve into purely arbitrary pedantry (”One [apostrophe] in a made-up name might be considered debatable; more than one is unforgivable”). If you’re stuck for a fantasy name, try choosing one from Bowers’s lists on pp. 172–182. There’s even a random syllable table on p. 183 if you want to throw caution completely to the winds, and this table is followed by a whole series of tables broken down by creature type (for goblins, trolls, orcs, fairies, etc.).
If you’re in a silly mood, grab one of the names from Appendix A - Spoof Names, and throw your PCs into an encounter with the wizard Levy Tate or sic on them the unshakable bard Oliver de Plaice.
Although published in the “Gygaxian Fantasy Worlds” line, this book is not just for fantasy RPGs. Since most of the names presented are real-life names from real-world cultures, modern games can benefit from the book almost as much as fantasy games. Indeed, Appendix B - Name Distribution seems more useful for a modern game than a fantasy one. In this appendix, Bowers presents a country-by-country breakdown of naming proportions (based on a d% scheme). Yet the usefulness of this appendix is hampered by its use of categories that don’t appear elsewhere in the book. For example, the entry for Denmark reads “Danish (01-99), Turkish (00).” “Turkish” is also an entry in for Germany, the Netherlands, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Iraq, and of course, Turkey. However, if you pull out your d%, roll a Turkish name, and then go looking elsewhere in this volume for appropriate Turkish names, you won’t find any (save for four titles on p. 140), so you’ll probably have to fall back on Arabic, though Arabic and Turkish are not the same language. So what’s the point of listing Turkish and such in the name distribution tables if no Turkish names are provided in the book? (And what’s up with the d30 tables? No, really, d30?)
The content of the Extraordinary Book of Names is quite helpful. I’ve used it to good effect as a GM, and expect to get a lot more use out of it. However, as a PDF product, the Book of Extraordinary Names falls terribly flat in one important regard: it’s neither bookmarked nor hyperlinked, making navigation through the 210-page beast an annoying and time-consuming proposition. And since the book is sold as a secured PDF, one must either crack the security to add one’s own bookmarks, or live without bookmarks and spend precious time scrolling through to find the right page.
Some players and GMs might be put off by the $20 price tag on the PDF download, even though this represents an enormous savings off the $35 printed edition. Compared to other name lists, though, it’s by no means out of line. Some other “name generator” products give you c. 200 names for $5—that’s about 2.5¢ per name—but the PDF version of Gary Gygax’s Extraordinary Book of Names gives you over 100,000 names (or so says the publisher) for $20—that’s more like .02¢ per name, plus you get all of the value-adds that I’ve mentioned above. So yes, $20 is a significant outlay, but if you accumulate several smaller products for $5 each, you’ll soon find yourself at $20 with only 800 names in your pocket. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the product for players, who just need to generate names for a few PCs, but for a GM looking to fill a world with memorable NPCs, this book comes in very handy and beats the price curve on similar products (even in its printed version, actually).
Icosahedrophilia Podcast, Episode 4: The Wellspring, Part 1
With the fourth episode of the podcast, we move into the second adventure in our D&D campaign. Please listen now or subscribe via iTunes. This new episode features the following segments:
- The Staging Area: I briefly recap the adventure presented in episodes 1–3 and set up the new adventure, which begins with our heroes drifting aimlessly on a vast sea previously unknown to them.
- The Weather Report: The first hour, more or less, of “The Wellspring,” recorded on August 30, 2008.
- The Prop Shop: I review various battlemap options for representing a trackless rainforest, eventually preferring one of the maps from Mongoose Publishing’s Starship Troopers Roleplaying Game: Floorplans product over other options from SkeletonKey Games and Paizo. I also play a promo for the Escapistcast.
For more detailed show notes, please follow the “Read more” link below. Thanks for listening to “The Wellspring, Part 1,” and look for “The Wellspring, Part 2″ around September 13–15!
Icosahedrophilia Podcast, Episode 3: The End Is the Beginning, Part 3
Our third episode concludes the first adventure in our new D&D campaign. Please listen now or subscribe via iTunes. This new episode features the following segments:
- The Staging Area: I briefly introduce the podcast and recap the previous episodes.
- The Weather Report: The conclusion of “The End Is the Beginning,” recorded at our game session on August 9, 2008.
- The Prop Shop: Brief nods to the manufacturers of various accessories used in our adventure, plus shout-outs and a plug for Radio Free Hommlet.
For more detailed show notes, please follow the “Read more” link below. Thanks for listening to Icosahedrophilia Episode 3: The End Is the Beginning, Part 3! And please look for Episode 4, “The Wellspring, Part 1,” around September 8, 2008.
Icosahedrophilia Podcast, Episode 2: The End Is the Beginning, Part 2
Episode 2 of the Icosahedrophilia podcast, which presents actual D&D gameplay for your enjoyment, is now available! In episode 2, you can listen in on the second hour of play from our August 9, 2008 session. Listen now or subscribe via iTunes.
In this episode, we feature the following segments:
- The Staging Area: Just a short recap of last episode’s adventure, “The End Is the Beginning, Part 1.”
- The Weather Report: About an hour of actual D&D play in “The End Is the Beginning, Part 2.”
- The Prop Shop: A brief review of gaming tokens manufactured by Litko Aerosystems, plus a few shout-outs and a promo for the Gamer Traveler podcast.
For more detailed show notes, please follow the “Read more” link below. Thanks for listening to Icosahedrophilia Episode 2: The End Is the Beginning, Part 2! I hope you’ll join us again soon for The End Is the Beginning, Part 3.
Return on investment: the Complete series
This post continues my series assessing 3.5e materials for their use in my upcoming D&D (4e) campaign. For an explanation of the rationale, see the first post in the series.
The Complete series offered a broad range of character options, so the bulk of each book was addressed to players. I’m approaching these assessments from a DM’s perspective, so it’s pretty obvious from the beginning that these books will be less useful to me as a DM than the environment books or monster books. On the other hand, there’s still some very interesting material in these books.
For the full survey, please follow the “Read more” link below.
Icosahedrophilia Podcast, Episode 1: The End Is the Beginning, Part 1
Well, our new Stormhaven campaign has begun, and the guys have agreed to an experiment: podcasting our actual play sessions. A number of other podcasts have put out actual play episodes, and these seem to be fairly popular—but I don’t know of any podcasts where the entire premise is actual play of an ongoing home campaign. So, enter the Icosahedrophilia podcast! Each episode of the podcast will contain three segments:
- The Staging Area: Brief introductory remarks and, in episodes 2 and following, recaps.
- The Weather Report: About an hour’s worth of actual gameplay from our campaign. (The campaign originates in Stormhaven, so the gameplay section is the Weather Report … get it? Of course you do. You may groan at will.)
- The Prop Shop: Brief descriptions or capsule reviews of props we used in our gaming session, along with props and shout-outs to folk who made our game and/or podcast possible.
Our group only plays once every three to four weeks, but we play for five or six hours in each session, so I should have plenty of material to push out a full episode every week to ten days. That’s my goal, at least.
You can download the first episode directly or subscribe in iTunes (recommended). To see the full show notes, click on the “Read more” link below. Enjoy the show!
A storm is coming: T minus 1 day
The Stormhaven campaign begins on Saturday, August 9. Each day this week, I’ll be posting a short “tidbit” of information about life in Stormhaven, or the campaign, to help get everybody “in the mood.”
Our Stormhaven campaign will use D&D 4e rules, and a such, will also use the standard D&D cosmology. Here’s some insight into how Havenites see the world around and beyond them, combining standard D&D concepts with material from the Stormhaven setting book.
Stormhaven teems with excellent sailors, and along with excellent sailors come excellent cartographers/geographers, astronomers/astrologers, and other such specialists. Most Havenites have no first-hand experience with any land other than their own—the chief exceptions, of course, being those sailors who have put into port on the few remaining port cities scattered around the eastern crescent of the Moonshale Sea. Havenites do know that they are living on a roughly spherical world, and they have calculated approximately how big around it must be. All of this was primarily the work of mathematicians and astronomers/astrologers, in consultation with observant navigators and cosmographers whose carefully annotated star charts made the calculations possible. Yet Havenites know very little of the lands except those that border the Moonshale Sea. The lands to the immediate north and east were once dominated by the vast human empire of Nerath, but that is long since gone. Lore buried deep in dusty tomes speak of Arkhosia, an empire dominated by the dragonborn, and of Bael Turath, a huge kingdom (yet farther east than the reaches of Nerath) whose human overlords bound themselves to devils and thus spawned the tiefling race—but there are so few dragonborn or tieflings in Stormhaven that many modern Havenites doubt these rumors are true.
Even though they live on a ball, Havenites still have a sense of global “up” and “down,” and although they see the stars, their minds range somewhat beyond the stars. In Havenite thinking, above the stars lies the Astral Sea, where (most of) the gods live in their mystical “domains.” Below the word gapes the Elemental Chaos, and at its bottom, the Abyss. “Beside” the world, so to speak, stand its two echoes, the ominous, but not inherently evil, Shadowfell (through which all creatures’ spirits must pass after death, before moving on to their final fate) and the enchanted Feywild, where practically everything is magical. In dark stories and urgent whispers, Havenites might also speak—but very infrequently—of the Far Realm, source of the most aberant creatures imaginable. It’s rumored to lie outside both the Astral Sea and the Elemental Chaos, but Havenites try not to think about it too much; the mere mention of the Far Realm can drive the weak-minded insane, or so local lore insists.
Many different gods are known and revered in Stormhaven, but the dominant faith is the worship of the Triumvirate: Bahamut, Corellon, and Moradin. Sophisticated Havenites consider Bahamut, Corellon, and Moradin to really be three “aspects” of a single god, but for practical purposes, most Triumvirants (as worshipers call themselves) see the Triumvirate as a divine partnership between three gods. Most Triumvirants, whether theologically sophisticated or not, feel themselves more closely tied to one of the three gods (or aspects) than the other two. Triumvirants who celebrate stability and appreciate skilled craftsmanship and engineering tend to emphasize Moradin (as do many dwarves, out of racial pride); those who celebrate beauty and appreciate the creative process as much as the created product tend to emphasize Corellon (as do many elves and eladrin, out of racial pride); and those who celebrate justice perceive a moral cause-and-effect order in the cosmos tend to emphasize Bahamut (as do many dragonborn, out of racial pride, as well as humans). Triumvirants tolerate the veneration (but not outright worship) of Melora, the sea goddess, alongside of (but not instead of!) the Triumvirate, but they oppose paying respects to any other god.
The most powerful rival to the Church of the Triumvirate in modern Stormhaven is the Order of the Storm, founded by descendants of Palanas Rockhammer. The Order, whose clergy are called Stormroarers, advance the belief that the sea itself is a deity, that there is no other god, that the material world is the entire world (there is no Astral Sea or Elemental Chaos, and certainly no Far Realm, and the Shadowfell and Feywild are merely odd ways of perceiving the natural world), and that worshiping false gods risks the wrath of the sea. The high priest, Stormroarer Kromodus Stormhaven, often employs very aggressive conversion techniques.
With the background from these countdown posts as well as other setting information that the players already have, we’re almost ready to begin our adventure! Later today (Friday, August 8th), each player will receive additional tidbits specific to his or her character. For interested bystanders, I’ll post those later, after the session has passed.
