Goodman Games

Don't dig too deep. The Dwarves of Moria affirm this!

I've never read Jack Vance.

I'm reading the Compleat Dying Earth now.

Why in the WORLD didn't I read him before?!? He's amazing! As I read his stories, I imagine young Gygax reading them and eventually creating D&D, or Vance's characters as painted by Erol Otus. The Dying Earth stories so very clearly influenced all of D&D it's almost eerie. (But it's not eldritch.)

A sincere and enthusiastic THANK YOU to everyone here for encouraging me to pick up his work!

I think I about lost it when I read this!

Nothing better than a Moria reference in the middle of an adveture design discussion, since Moria is really one of the first megadungeons on record!

From what I've found, something is only done to death if you run the same thing 3+ times in a single campaign (i.e. Running 3 "goblin raider" adventures in a row.) I HATE those adventures.

Seriously? Write what interests you. Write something that makes you want to roll dice and run an adventure. White something that makes you excited about putting words down on the page. Don't worry about guessing what someone else is looking for. If you're passionate about what you're writing, it'll show when you try and pitch the adventure.

Most of the writing that I've done that I don't like tends to be the true "work-for-hire" stuff - where I got approached to write something that I really didn't care about one way or the other, but I accepted the job anyway. Not saying I did a terrible job with those projects, but it was hard to make them as good as they deserved, since the core ideas didn't particularly interest me.

I posted this in a link in "general" but if you liked The Dying Earth you might like this anthology as well.

Songs of the Dying Earth, George R. R. Martin & Gardner Dozois - Editors, $15.99. An anthology prepared in tribute to the career of Jack Vance features original tales inspired by The Dying Earth and includes contributions by Neail Gaiman, Tanith Lee and Robert Silverberg.

Here's a link:
http://www.amazon.com/Songs-Dying-Earth ... 134&sr=1-2

I haven't read it, but some posters on my OD&D boards give it decent reviews. They said that, like any anthology, you get some hits and some misses. They seemed more positive than negative, however.

"Arise, thread, and serve me!"

On the "Tentacles != Lovecraftian Horror" idea, I wanted to add, really HPL is basically only about fear of the dark. What's in the dark? Who knows? Nobody knows, I mean KNOWS knows. Sure, we have our ideas, we expect things to be more or less as we see them in daylight with the lights off. But the vast darkness of night is pretty frightening if you think about how little you, we as a species, really know about what's in it. There could be ANYTHING in it. The darkness below ground is similar, except perhaps claustrophobically tight.

Stephen King alludes to this in the Dark Tower series at some point, about the nameless things that find you wandering lost in the dark todash void. Nom nom nom.

Because that's ultimately what's hardcoded into us at a genetic level. We're afraid that when the lights go out, a lion's going to eat us. It's a proper object of fear.

Whether the thing doing the eating is a lion or a tentacled extra dimensional horror, or an extradimensional HOUND (my personal favorite of the stories, I think), it doesn't really matter to the eaten.

Beer, don't think that doesn't occur to me every time I am camping... I do manage to sleep, but I keep a 'bear bell' by my head, because there are things out in the dark, perhaps ready to eat us...

A couple years back at Great Basin NP, we did an after-dark, ranger-guided hike out to a choice spot overlooking the moon reflected in a large pond. There was just enough light to make out the white rock on the trail, so it was mostly done without flashlights on... the mind had much room to roam in the forested dark....

The words "bear bell" don't make me want to go camping anytime soon.

lol

Further digression from thread topic: Last year, we were in Sequoia, and hiking along a three or four mile trail between one set of buildings in the park and another. About a mile and a half from the far end, I heard a crunch off to my left. It was a smallish bear. We had more or less passed it, as it was foraging. Cool to see, about 20 yards distant, but I wanted to keep moving and pick up the pace. I about lost my mind when my wife turned back and took a few steps back the way we'd come so she could get a picture of the thing! Our son was between us then, and I wanted to call out for him to come to me -- well, to yell at them both to come to me -- but I didn't want to draw the bear's attention. A huge part of my concern was that this bear wasn't very large. Is mama bear nearby? That is the worst case scenario, as I understand it -- getting near baby. So my wife snaps a couple pictures, and we double our speed to get out of there. About 100 feet down the trail we meet up with the family from out of the country, and tell them there is a small bear "just over there" and that it could be dangerous to go that way. They go that way. Again, I have a moment of loosing my mind -- do I watch these people get mauled by a bear, or just keep moving? I sent my family up ahead and just stood there for a moment and listened. A couple minutes without screaming, I assumed they had gotten past the bear and went to catch up to my wife and son. Shortly thereafter we described the bear to a ranger who said it sounded like a yearling (IIRC) and was probably not accompanied by mama bear. Still... quite enough of a bear encounter for me.

My absolute favorite section of the DCC RPG core book was the section "The Great Wheel", bullet point one, where the author recommends: "the judge is encouraged to begin extraplanar encounters at low levels." I'm relatively sure that there was a great rift in my brain, as the right brain judiciously buckled up and marched itself into a corner, complaining that this was totally impossible, as the left side bulged, enlightened finally.

I cannot recall how many times I looked over D&D sourcebooks regarding the planes, where there were these colossal enemies that would require a party of level 20+ to tackle, and while I would be incredibly interested in running such a campaign, I always just told myself, "one day my players will get there!" This just reminded me of the potential for fun I see in the simplicity and (current) cohesiveness of the DCC RPG core.

Needless to say, these words will be on my mind heavily in the building of 0-level adventures. I'm already marinating in ideas which are building themselves as I try to focus on other tasks!

SIDE NOTE - STOP TRASHING GOBLIN RAIDERS AND ORCS
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Unfortunately, storytellers and game masters have unrightfully abused these characters as throwaway nobodies of no zero consequence. The mentality has always been '4 orcs, no name, and a chieftan, with a silly name, and you can increase your players by 1 level!' I recently read Goodman Games 'Monstercology of Orcs' by Maffei, and there was such an abundance of story inspiration in there, it would be so silly to write off orcs like they are yesterday's game. Yeah, you've seen orcs in caves, you've heard of orcs as savages, orcs being manipulated by a wizard, but what exposure has anyone had to the actual culture of orcs? Depending on which creation myth you choose for orcs, there are countless scenarios which could prove truly epic for a 0-10 campaign. Variations on orcs provided in said text were enough to get me considering that possibility. Especially since it appears based on the occupation list that DCC/Aereth has fully civilized all the demi-humans and humans (no human tribes, for example), the orcs are one of the last scraps of tribal organizations similar to that of humans of hundreds of years ago on the planet!