My Take on Falling Damage

It makes no difference whether falling damage is determined with a linear increase in dice or an exponential one after you land on the poison spikes I put at the bottom of the pit.

Summer’s Here: The Punks Have Arrived

Longtime readers of the SoTPR may remember that I’m an aficionado of punk rock, having spent my formative years involved in the scene and fronting a small but durable ha-core band. Although I’m no longer active in my local scene, I remain a fan.

Last summer, through a series of coincidences and happenstance, I found myself attending a few punk rock shows in my area. It seems that, like the OSR, the punk bands from the late seventies and early eighties are having their own revival—cashing in on their dimming fame while everyone’s still alive. This is a good thing for fans like me in our troubled economic times for it means cheap local shows.

The paper today announced that the first of these punks of yore have arrived on my fair shores so I’m officially kicking of "Mike’s Old School Punk Rock Summer of 2010" this Saturday when I go see The Buzzcocks play a few towns over.



Checking out some of my favorite bands from back then, I see that it looks like Social Distortion and GBH will be in the vicinity this summer too. And although I don’t own any of their albums, my love for the absurd may take me to see GWAR next month. I’m anticipating more shows to be announced in the coming weeks. It looks like it’s a summer of Punkémon: Gotta Catch ‘em All

Market Research

After spending the last hour looking online at various plastic and metal miniatures, I've concluded that, should Mega Miniatures want a surefire way of separating me from my money, they really need to release a line of the oddest miniatures possible. I'm talking uplifted chimpanzees in space suits, mind flayer gladiators, ooze golems, four-armed Martian types, etc. Heck, I'd by an entire boxed set just based on this guy:

If there was somehow a line a figures like that in their wonderful buck and change minis, I'd be an happy gamer. The alien bar figures and grey aliens are a nice start, but I could use more inexpensive weird minis in my collection. Just in case anyone with any clout over there is listening...

Save vs. Nonsense

I’m off to the dentist this morning for a little bit of extended work. I’m fully expecting to be a little wacky for a good portion of the day as a result of this, so I thought I’d spread the love of random nonsense a bit before the weekend officially begins. As a result of this pending appointment and the agita that such engagements produce, I’ve pushed back the final bit of Stonehell until next week. In the meantime, please enjoy the following bits of whimsy.

If Scott Adams wrote comics for Dragon Magazine, it probably be very similiar to this one.

I find this one more funny than I probably should.

One of these days I'm going to write a book that traces the parallels between the punk rock scene and the old school renaissance. This shall be the cover.

And lastly, if you ever wondered want would happen if you took a very pixelated copy of Leonard Nimoy's "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" and crossed it with Bad Brains' "Pay to Cum," you've got yourself some pretty weird issues, dude. But since I'm not here to judge, here you go:

Sneak Peak at Level 3C

I've finished up most of Level 3C of Stonehell and I can safely say that it wanders deeply into Bat Country. I knew it was going to be different from the very start but recent developments seem to have placed it in territory deeply loved by devotees of the Scientific Realism of Encounter Critical.

I can give you one hint:

Oozing Charm Redux

With the theme song to “The Blob” now stuck in your heads, and the permanent psychological damage that might accompany such unholy knowledge fully underway, I’m afraid that’s not the end of the story. A dear friend of mine who quietly follows the goings-on around here was kind enough to point out that I missed another connection between B-movie horror and the origins of the “clean-up crew” from the LBBs.

In 1968, a movie titled “The Green Slime” was released. While I have never personally seen “The Green Slime”, it has been on the periphery of my awareness, being much lauded by friends of mine who are connoisseurs of crappy and campy cinema. The Internet Movie Database bears the following plot synopsis:

A giant asteroid is heading toward Earth so some astronauts disembark from a nearby space station to blow it up. The mission is successful, and they return to the station unknowingly bringing back a gooey green substance that mutates into one-eyed tentacled monsters that feed off electricity. Soon the station is crawling with them, and people are being zapped left and right!

Judging from that description, I think it’s safe to say that the green slime from D&D has no direct correlation to the entity in the movie. However, since the release of the film does roughly coincide with the developmental period of the game, it could possibly have served as inspiration for everyone’s favorite dripping ceiling monster if in name only. I leave this to better scholars than myself to elaborate upon. Anyone in need of an off-beat Master’s thesis, please feel free to pursue this venture.

There is one thing regarding “The Green Slime” that I can state with confidence, it also being the reason that this film is embraced so warmly by fans of campy cinema:

Like “The Blob”, it has a pretty hip theme song.

Oozing Charm

Let me explain this so you don’t think I’ve made a permanent sojourn into Bat Country. It all started with Sham AKA Dave’s excellent look back on the Little Brown Books. Amongst this week’s offerings, he ruminated upon the “clean-up crew” of the various oozes, slimes, puddings and jellies that plague the dungeon depths. While these beasties have no direct correlation to monsters of myth or literature, it was generally agreed that the 1958 film “The Blob” served as inspiration on some level.

This reminded me that I had watched that film again a few months ago thanks to its inclusion in my local library’s video collection. It was every bit as goofy and great as I remembered it to be, plus you can never, ever go wrong with Steve McQueen, so it turned out to be an enjoyable 86 minutes of my time. But the real pleasure was the film’s theme song. I had either completely forgotten it or never paid much attention the first time around, but on this go-around I thought that I could stop watching immediately after the opening credits and still be satisfied. At a game session a few weeks back, I tried to expand the horizons of my fellow gamers by singing a stirring rendition of the theme song, but my hazy memory of the lyrics – the single repeated stanza that it is – and lack of any natural talent failed to convey the greatness of the piece.

It has come up once or twice since that time, and I kept meaning to track it down to play for them, but I kept forgetting to find it. Now, thanks to a twisted train of thought that started at Sham’s intellectual train station, I’ve finally arrived with the goods. So if my DM is reading this, play the below video for Karis. Everyone else, I dare you to listen to this – composed by Burt Bacharach! – and not hear this in your head the next time you run into a black pudding or ochre jelly in a game.

Hwacha!

Have you ever gotten a word or a phrase stuck in your head? One embedded so deeply that no matter what lengths you go to; it still remains there, just below the surface, waiting to escape into conversation?

That was my week.

At the risk of sounding snobbish, I don’t watch a lot of random television. I’m more prone to pursue other activities to kill time rather than to channel-surf and hope that something half-way decent is on to pass the time. Most of my T.V. watching is “destination programming,” or shows that I make a specific effort to catch a few times a week. Like with my reading habits, as I get older I find that most of the television I watch has some educational merit, usually being programs shown on History or the Discovery Channel. This is where my problem began this week.

I’m a fan of the Discovery Channel’s “Mythbusters.” It’s the kind of edutainment programming that meets my need to walk away from a show with some new fact in my head AND tends to feature a lot of explosions. The dichotomy of human nature: the elevation of the spirit and the satiation of the animal.

This past episode featured an examination of the “hwacha,” a medieval Korean siege weapon that functioned by firing 200 rocket-powered arrows that detonated on impact. In other words, a very impressive piece of war machinery. Take a look:



Pretty neat, right?

The thing is that despite the utter coolness of the hwacha, it was the word “hwacha” that got me. It’s one of those words that you can just savor. A word that begs to be dropped into any conversation, relevant or not to the discussion on hand. A word to be completely over-used until your friends and acquaintances threaten bodily harm until you stop with the “hwacha!”

Go on. Say it. Nobody’s looking.

It’s a good one, no?

On Saturday night, I simply could not stop using this one. First, I had to make sure that I mentioned the episode of “Mythbusters” at least three times, just to ease it into conversation. Quite easy to do, as our gaming group seems to have a fixation with siege weapons after The Ballista Incident. Then it progressed to my general battle-cry during combat. Finally, it suffered a definition-shift to now mean “to attack stealthily from behind,” as in: “Mike, what does Zoltan do?” “I’m going to hwacha those two goblins!” By Sunday afternoon, “hwacha” had become the name of a game played on a trampoline. One that involved many rubber balls and sneak attacks by people lurking underneath the trampoline.

What can I say? It just wouldn’t let go of my brain.

In fact, I’m pretty sure that hwacha is going to continue to live a very long life deep within the bowel of the Dungeon Not Yet Named™. I’m not quite sure yet how, but rest assured it’ll be there. Perhaps as the actual device itself (consider this fair warning, would-be adventurers), or maybe as my own personal version of “Bree-yark!” One way or another, it’s too fun of a word to let slip to the wayside.

Or at least I think so. My fellow gaming group members may be of another frame of mind.