Saturday, March 2, 2013

infrequent blogs

Well, shit - I got a new job last year and picked up my guitar again - where has the time gone? Apologies are due to Jez, Erik, Stefan and the other dudes who I was in the middle of a conversation with when I up and vanished. Next time I'll let you know what's going on - and hopefully not disappear for a year.

I haven't played much of my home game since last spring, but I still toss ideas for games around in my head all the time. I ran a one-shot of my proposed Arthurian Labyrinth Lord game almost a year back, and it was... OK.

After some reflection, the setting needed some changes - it's back on the drawing board. One of the big improvements was adding Realms of Crawling Chaos to the mix. Now I have a setting that's still familiar enough to be easily communicated, but is gaining much-needed variety. I'm going to scrap the one-shot dungeon I wrote, and use a few parts in building a MEGADUNGEON beneath the Isle of Wight.

Actually, the megadungeon will extend underneath all of Britain.

Right now the setting is less "Arthurian high fantasy" and more like:
KING ARTHUR vs. ARAWN vs. CTHULHU!

You might say those first two are pretty similar. The Arthurian heroic fantasy milieu is closely related to Welsh and Irish folktales, but actually the concept of Arawn's 'otherworld' or a fairyland will be stretched to include not only classic D&D stuff like rust monsters and gelatinous cubes, but also the kind of gonzo shit I love to see on MMSFP. So while the Arthurian influence will govern the cities and wilderness of primeval mythic Britain, the folktale/fairyland stuff will take over underground - while the Cthulhian, Weird Tales shit will be stuck in all the hard-to-reach corners.

I have been crawling my favorite blogs (and some really cool ones that are new to me) for monsters and other ideas that fit the bill. Some of my older Arthurian posts are now inaccurate; the speed hireling table and the "Where do you hail from?" table specifically. I will update them in a while, if I am ever done my endless fiddling with the fucking things.