An Abominable Fancy

  See more of these amazing drawings at her website, sunflower cat .

My six-year-old GM'd his first game, today. You know how kids will draw out battlefields, and then sorta play out the scene by having everything shoot at everything else? My kid was doing a version of that, and I suggested adding dice into the mix. The result was a hilarious improv rpg. I played "Pomo, the Monster from Asteroid Tomato Area." I'm not too sure what the rules were. There were lots of dice pools and jets of acid and it all ended in a TPK.

In trying to imagine a fantasy RPG based on Heinrich Kley's drawings , the first thing I wanted to captures was the riotous sense that anything could be alive and acting out its own dramas and comedies. Gasoline Stallion Animated Objects Everything wants to live, even stone and wood and metal and glass. The world is awash in animating spirits seeking forms to inhabit. The more attention, be it care or anxiety, people focus on an object, the more likely it is that an animating spirit can bond with it and bring it to life. Complex machinery, such as autos, firearms, and furnaces, are almost universally animated. Beyond all the normal attributes and functions one would expect of an object of the given type, animated objects posses Mobility, Alignment, and Motivation. Mobility An object’s form usually determines how mobile it is. If a normal version of the object is capable of movement, so is the animated version. If an object, such as a clawfoot tub, has parts th...

A few weeks ago,  +John Stater posted a notion of making a simplified version of his admirable Blood & Treasure as a foundation to build retroclones based on the work of specific illustrators. That's an idea scientifically calibrated to pique my imagination, and I started wondering "What would D&D look like if it was based on the work of Heinrich Kley ?" I've been playing with it a bit, and it's synched up with a number of other ideas I've been noodling. Here's a rough outline of how I'm framing things: Alignments Civilized Wild Social Status Laborer Bourgeoisie/Burgher Gentry Background Wilderness Rural Urban Maritime Military Trade High Society Academia Clergy Class Soldier Sneak Spell-caster (Inventor, Spiritualist, Illusionist) Doktor Race Centaur Elefant Froschling Human Krokodiller Satyr Right now, I'm building it all on a f...

Julius Klinger, 1909 via Quinourier  Entirely relevant to a ruleset/setting I'm playing with.

Francesco Goya obviously had witch-sight. Over on Roles, Rules, and Rolls , Roger the GS was describing a particular novel's depiction of elves, dwarves, and other faerie whazits, and said this: They are normally invisible except to those humans who have been granted "witch-sight" through sorcery. However, their deeds sometimes manifest as omens, portents and misfortune for humans. (As an aside, this would be a great campaign rationale. Ever wonder why the king with his retinue of knights can't go after those goblins threatening the village? They need the adventurers, witch-sighted all, to actually see the goblins.) Aw, man. Wouldn't be a gorgeous bit of color for, say, Beyond the Wall? Or any folkloric campaign? Everybody knows that there are beasties lurking about, and blame them for everything that goes wrong. Sometimes they're even correct. Everyone has a story about seeing a sprite when they were a child, or a kelpie in the swimming hole, ...

Okay, let's see if this works. Hopefully, if you follow this link, you can download a usable Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that will figure out all the variables for movement in B/X. Movement Charts and Calculator Please correct me if I've left anything out, or gotten anything wrong. It should look kinda like this. The Google Docs view is not editable, but if you download it (and have Excel), you should be able to monkey with it.

1. Spend a season working as City Guard, solving medieval crimes. 2. Defend a dungeon from outside invasion. 3. Travel the Ptolemaic solar system. 4. Harrow Hell. And I'd like them to 5. Do it while dressed like an upper-crust hunting expedition from the Thirties.

Because I'm a super-brilliant genius, I seem to have erased this really long review I wrote this morning. So, the $0.02 version: It's good! Don't let the desktop-publishing aesthetic keep your from spending eight bucks on it. There's some really great innovations here that are built of a clean, simple D&D core. Namely: Character Generation that also generates character history and setting locations and NPCs! Nearly no-prep scenarios that provide structured improvisation off all that stuff from chargen! Fun, flexible magic that doesn't wreck the game! I can't wait to play it!