Gelatinous Cubed

Yes, that's right.

The reason I haven't been posting very much is because I have, I've just been sneakily doing it over here.

Almost every D&D fan has probably hacked their own version of their favorite roleplaying game into something they can call their very own. But being a graphic designer, I guess I feel obligated to try to do it in style and then show it off.

Like most of us, most of my projects end up only half-finished, or ever existing really only in our minds as much as down on paper. Well, I'm happy to announce that I'm already over halfway finished with Old School Hack, and am fairly close to posting an honest-to-goodness playtest document shortly.

As much as I'd love to gush all about what the game is and what it's going to do for you (yes, you!), that was really the whole reason that I built a quick website for it, so I urge you to click on it and take a sniff at what's brewing in the pot (and then leave some comments if you want me to know how it smells). Yes, do it now! Er.. and thanks!

I've fallen in love with Cleverbot, which is totally awesome! Let's play D&D with it!

You are in a 10' wide corridor. It stinks of mildew and rot, there is a flickering light up ahead. What do you do?

How does mathematics know when I'm about to begin experiencing flickering random noise?

Eh, don't worry about the math, I'll do most of the rolling. What character class are you playing, anyway?

For one glorious summer (2002? I think?) I ran Rappan Athuk: the Dungeon of Graves for a bunch of my gaming buddies up in Oakland. I had moved down to Los Angeles and it was sort of a "last gasp", and I invited everyone to come to the table with their most game-breaking character concepts - at least three of them - to run them through the grist of what is arguably the world's deadliest dungeon.

I was going through some gaming stuff and came across the back of the module where I had written down all the glorious deaths that had occurred, and in the interests of archiving and entertaining, I now present them to you, with a slight warning of minor spoilers:

First and foremost I asked my players to specifically not come up with characters for the campaign until yesterday's session - I'm well aware that some of them have been rarin' to play certain things and that's fine, but I didn't want any characters built in a vacuum like they usually are.

The session started off with some pretty intense explanation and history of the Eberron setting, some of my players being completely unfamiliar with it. Doing this I was able to get something of a read as to what parts people got jazzed by and what they didn't. I laid out the map on the gaming table and using it to illustrate the different countries, the history of the continent, the culture of each, the disaster of the Mournland (Eberron's own Hiroshima), but mostly in general terms.

Then I pointed to the player's starting country (Aundair) and start getting more specific. With a stack of post-its handy, I started laying out some of the elements of the campaign that might be relevant to a character's story, I could quickly jot a name or description of it down, and then stick the post-it near it's "location" on the map, like so:

• "So down by this village are the floating towers of the Arcane University, and you can see them from miles around."