Dirty History & Hobbies

Beware of Lord Lobster, a true Knight of the Dinner Table! He's well armored, sure, but I'll bet he'd succumb to a vat of clarified butter. Where's my shell-cracker +2?

5 months ago | [YT] | 1

Dirty History & Hobbies

Here's a picture of a couple cats from the band. These bards have tails....

5 months ago | [YT] | 2

Dirty History & Hobbies

Be on the lookout for my next video, where we'll talk about what level of expectations the game world should have for the player characters, and how that should change over the course of their adventuring careers. I am only providing four options because that is the limit of YouTube's polling system.

I will expound on what I'm thinking these categories mean, in terms of character level, etc., in the video.

In short:

*Chosen Ones:* Despite being novice adventurers, the player character are considered among the most important heroes in the land (e.g., the characters are prophesied to be the saviors of the realm).

*Rising Stars:* While they were only considered "run of the mill" adventurers at the start of the campaign, they quickly establish themselves as capable and important (e.g., the characters become retainers of the local lord after only a few "levels" of advancement).

*Hard Knockers:* These characters have made their way from dungeon to dungeon living by their wits and their weapons. They may be thought of as powerful, but are probably considered more mercenaries than heroes to the folk they encounter (e.g., standard sell-swords and hedge mages, perhaps adventurers of some renown, but not heroes of the people).

*Dark Horses:* These characters made their way to "name level" purely by dint of their own initiative and hard work, nobody ever offered to help them, and they return the favor (e.g., characters who have begun to attract followers and started to build strongholds of their own, but who never held positions where they were seen as heroes by average folk).

5 months ago | [YT] | 3

Dirty History & Hobbies

Dragon slaying seems like it might have been a little easier in 1483...just sayin'

Artwork from:
Johannis de Cuba's Hortus Sanitatis, Strassburg, 1483
Title: Killing a Dragon to Extract Its Precious Stone (ouch!)

5 months ago | [YT] | 3

Dirty History & Hobbies

Well, gee whiz, with WotC/Hasbro jumping into the gambling game, I'm wondering how long it will be until they start filling up some other vice niches with D&D IP?

Why not pour yourself a nice cool glass of Mordenkainen's Magnificent malt liquor and think about the world of opportunity that's been opened up? Don't forget to buy a few extra, so you can pour a Mordy Forty out over the gaming table, for all the TTRPG'ers that went before....

Not into beer? No worries!
Maybe you'll like Mind Flayer the fortified wine?
Or, how how about Dave & Gary's "Hard" Potions, in a whole range of fruity flavors?

8 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 2

Dirty History & Hobbies

The next video is going to be about Alignment in AD&D 1e. There will be an Alignment tracking sheet as the companion downloadable PDF. Gary Gygax recommended tracking variation in how character's conducted themselves from session to session with regard to their professed Alignment. This tracking is not intended to suggest that Alignment should be narrowly construed, or rigidly enforced; in fact, Gary explicitly said that variation in conduct should be expect, which the primary reason for tracking trends over time.

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8 months ago | [YT] | 1

Dirty History & Hobbies

Does the thumbnail for this week's video seem familiar to anyone? Is it too "on the nose" for a video about models?

9 months ago | [YT] | 2

Dirty History & Hobbies

The next video is going to be about campaigns. I hope to keep it fairly brief, but will refer back to the videos where I've already dealt with more intensive aspects of campaigns. The main idea is to start rolling out some videos that I can make shorter because I've already talked about the topic in more detail in a previous video; of course, I'm also hopeful that the shorter videos will evince more comments.

Anyway, as an example of military campaigns from the real world, I will briefly outline the major events of Napoleon's Montenotte Campaign, from April 1796. I made some buttons to use for an on-screen map, and thought I might share them with you here. The first one represents the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, the second one represents the Holy Roman Empire (Austria), the third one is a simplified one for the Austrian army that I chose not to use, the fourth one is for France, and the fifth one just adds the famous "Liberty! Equality! Brotherhood!" motto to the French button. Cheers!

Just for the record, the images are hereby licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 International Attribution license (CC-BY).

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10 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 3

Dirty History & Hobbies

Several experiences with YouTube content, lately, have made me wonder what viewers desire from TTRPG videos. This has varied from claims that creators must demonstrate proof of concept by reviewing a recent use of an idea in their own game (which seems to imply some kind of universal utility value for gaming advice/commentary), to creators voicing concerns that their content may not be received as actually useful to other gamers (something with which I struggle, especially because I produce some pretty esoteric content, and don't use much rapid change imagery, which I think is often expected from the medium of video).

So, the question is: What do you expect from the TTRPG content that you consume on YouTube (or similar platforms)?

10 months ago | [YT] | 4

Dirty History & Hobbies

I'm back in the weeds with graphic arts...my nemesis. I'm sure viewers will have noticed that I use a lot of public domain artwork from historic works; in part it's because they're free to use, but I also just like the styles, colors, composition, etc. of older visual arts. In truth, even if I could perfectly draw the images that I can imagine, I would still never remotely emulate the "hyper-realist" style that is found in many/most RPG books these days. Unfortunately, that leaves me with a lot of decisions to make about artwork to include with adventures. I can sort of fake my way through landscapes and map; but, figures are just not something I can draw passably on my own.

I thought I might introduce you to Usagi Kojirō, the ronin rabbit. As you can probably guess, he's sort of an homage to Usagi Miyamoto (and also to Sasaki Kojirō, a famous swordsman who was slain by Musashi Miyamoto, in a duel on the island of Ganryū-jima), who is probably better known as Usagi Yojimbo. He's a character from a Mausritter adventure/campaign that I made up. In the first adventure, the player mice meet him as drunken stumblebum, who has never recovered from losing his beloved Okaru to the evil Queen of the Spider Goblins. In that adventure the player mice can enlist his aid in helping them to clear some Oni from an abandoned temple; later, he is one of the potential allies they can call upon to help them defeat the big bad, which also affords him an opportunity to slay the QSG.

If you are not familiar with Ukiyo-e, which is among my most loved forms of visual art, then you may not recognize that the image is a composite of made from the center panel of a triptych depicting Minamoto no Yorimitsu's retainers slaying the Earth Spider, by Utagawa Kuniyoshi , and Rabbits as Okaru and Kanpei in a Kiyomoto Dance Play of the Journey Scene, by Utagawa Yoshifuji. I just re-worked the pieces to be what I needed to have a full color chapter head graphic (I may eventually publish the "Clerics of Smintheus" campaign as a PDF).

Now, for AUT 1 - Ruins of the Kobold King's Lair, I need to figure out how to draw a number of monsters that don't appear in any of the OSRIC books, at least as far as I know. For some of the more natural/animal monsters I can find old artwork that would be suitable; however, for some, such has Fire Newts, Giant Striders, Vulchlings, and Greenhags, there's a lot less reference material available for free use.

That leaves me with trying to learn to draw them myself, such as this Kobold example (which is not yet distinctly different enough from my reference image to think I can use it for commercial printwork), or trying to build out something that is in the public domain, like the cloak-wearing rat in the last image, which I could turn potentially turn into a wererat (although I definitely need to "evil" him up a bit for that).

Anyway, I thought it would a good time to mention that the adventure is in good shape; I just need to figure out the artwork, especially now that I've eliminated the need for many of the full-page maps (for now, they will still go into later modules in the full campaign arc). Thanks for looking at this post!

EDIT: Incidentally, the last image with the fox, the cat, and the rat dividing some cheese, was originally drawn by Sarah Noble Ives. She's one of my favorite folk and fairy tale illustrators from the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries.

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11 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 1