[The Dark Eye] Retrospective: B13 Der Streuner soll sterben

Let’s go through Das Schwarze Auge adventure B13 Der Streuner Soll Sterben (The Vagrant Shall Die)

It has the secondary title Das Blutgericht von Thalusa (The Blood Court of Thalusa) which is one of the few times when both titles are equally evocative.

Ok, let me preface this: I utterly adore this scenario, even though it has it’s problems (dare I say it? some parts are quite racist). But I would say this is where Ulrich Kiesow shows real promise.

Now at this point MOST (but not all) of the DSA scenarios were written by him, or in cooperation with him. This included A1 which I really liked, and A2 which I found at least ok. But it also included the whole rest of the scenarios which contain some bad railroads, even if their premise might be good.
But this one is one where I really see what he is going for. This is intentionally pulpy, in the way that 19th ct. adventure stories were.

Unfortunately this includes some rather unfortunate tropes that come with such stories. For one the setting is quasi-oriental. And of course it involves arranged marriages, beheadings at the drop of a stone, and an evil looking coal black executioner.

On the other there really aren’t any really bad people involved. The executioner just happens to be coal black from a magical accident and is otherwise doing his job, and the one actual antagonist is coded as German, and even he has reasons to behave like he does.

Lots of bad decisions that come with the choice of setting and NPCs. I guess for the 80s it was fair for its day, but even in the 90s I remember this module as being discussed as “the racist one”.

But anyway, the plot concerns Prince Selo of Khunchom who had the really bad idea to have just a small peek at his fiancée Shenny of Thalusa. [that name tho…]

You see it’s tradition in their culture that enfianced people are not to see each other until the marriage rites are concluded. Which is all fine for Selo, except he HAS seen her parents and now fears his future wife might take after either of them.
So he makes the plan of… sneaking into the palace of Thalusa and having a look at her.

And if it’s really bad, can a life as a vagrant on the roads of Aventuria be quite so bad?

Yes, Prince Selo is an idiot.

In any case he even is successful in sneaking in, and quite enamored with Princess Shenny.
And Princess Shenny for her side is quite enamored with that handsome stranger she just encountered.

Unfortunately while they are both very enthusiastically consenting with each other (at least that discussion we don’t have to touch), he is captured by the guards and immediately sentenced to death by his prospective father in law.

Your mission now, if you choose to accept it…

Well, you should accept it, the Prince’s father promises you riches if you manage to make it to Thalusa in time with a document of his hand that can rescue his son.
Unfortunately Thalusa is about 300km away, easily a 10 day trip over land, and the execution is set for in 14 days.

And even if you get there on time with the document (which is not a given), and hand it to the wrong person, then you are back at square one. Well, square whatever Thalusa is in.

The heroes are given the choice of going by sea, which might shorten the journey to three days, but has a problem: it’s a the stormy season right now, and it might make things worse. A single ship is willing to make the passage on the off-chance of arriving in one part at their destination to make a killing selling hard liquor.

(I realized afterwards that I am not quite sure which season it is supposed to be, the text is talking about Frühjahr being a storm season in that part, so the early year. In our world this commonly would be spring. But in Aventuria the early year is autumn. But was this already established at that point? When does this actually take place?)

Despite Kiesow’s known fondness for railroads he does not actually go for them here. With a bit luck of the dice the PCs can indeed reach the halfway point, after which the storms become no problem anymore. It’s not likely, but it’s possible.

Then they are attacked by pirates though. Which also can be circumnavigated with proper care (the scenario contains a specifically designed boardgame here), and even if they board your ship they only will steal the document.

(they are not actually real pirates)

If luck is not with them, or if they decide to go there from the beginning, they end up having to go by land. But at least they might have gained a day or two.

This would be the place where a DnD scenario would pull out the hexmap. And we saw a hexmap in B8 already. Kiesow instead decides to use squares, for a squarecrawl, basically.
There are also no permanently keyed encounters, all the encounters are on random tables.

This includes meadows which have an encounter on a roll of 7 on a d6.

Oh yes, did you see! Did you see?! He made a joke!

What’s interesting about the encounters is how… stock medieval fantasy they all are. One would assume that with a setting where he uses all kinds of orientalist tropes he would do the same for the wilderness section. Instead it seems like he just took the monster descriptions from the rulebook: wolves, trolls, boars, a tatzelwurm. The closest to the Arabian Nights scenario you might be expecting is an Earth Spirit that can give you some healing.

(I guess no budget for illustrations…)

But it’s really the city adventure part where this scenario shines.
For one: there is an actual city adventure part with an actual map of Thalusa.
For the second: you are given free reign how to actually deal with the situation.
Now you were supposed to deliver a document, but you likely lost it either on the sea journey or over land.
If you didn’t you most likely handed it to the wrong person at the palace and he lost it for you instead.

in the meantime the prince is in his prison in the middle of the market square of Thalusa and the players are left free reign in how to deal with the situation.

Springing the prince might not be easy, but can be possible. Sneaking into the palace is possible (it’s worked out), but finding the right person there is difficult. Dealing with the executioner and his tools is also another option (the tools need to be in top order according to tradition).

Here is when the bog standard fantasy scenario all of a sudden turns into a heist. most likely the heroes will have to do something to save the prince, but what and how is their own choice. The scenario gives some valid ideas, but I bet some players would have more.

You could have an infiltration/dungeon crawl through the palace, but you don’t have to.

For what it’s worth if you are breaking into the palace you might encounter a scribe you can blackmail by threatening his favorite calligraphy.

And if you break into the executioners house you might encounter a Ulmenknecht, which seems to be a treant kind of being? I don’t think this being is still canon in DSA. It’s not the proper treant equivalent (that would be a Waldschrat), more like a wood golem?

And then there is Dolguruk, the executioner of Thalusa.

Who is black.
Coal black even.

Which is the result of a rather sinister human sacrifice he and a druid wanted to perform on a magician who managed to hit back with a transformation spell. Which caused him to turn completely black.

For some reason this story is the longest of all the NPC bios, despite being otherwise a rather incidental character.
And one who doesn’t actually do anything bad as such while the PCs are around.

I think Kiesow is very much going very much for the image of Der Schwarze Mann here, a “Kinderschreckfigur” (character to scare kids with? Man, we Germans have weird concepts sometimes) that is quite widespread. I still remember playing both the associated kids game and the card game based on it.

In a wider sense it was a depiction of (black) death and/or the devil.

But here it manages to keep all the bad connotations that made this game… inappropriate in polite society.

Dolguruk is I think still an active NPC in current DSA lore, he usurped Shenny’s father at one point and became ruler of Thalusa, and being an elf he also doesn’t seem to be easy to get rid of. He also had his backstory modified to have gained his look from a pact with a demon.
Not sure if that’s better or worse.

So…what do I think about it?

I don’t think Kiesow intended for this to come across as it does, but he nevertheless managed to write some really unfortunate implications in here.

Which might explain why this adventure never got the re-releases that other adventures from him got, despite being, from a design standpoint alone, one of his best so far.
There is considerable freedom of choice both in the wilderness and the city sections, and room for player creativity, all under time pressure. I really like this and I want to play this with people. I might need to prepare people that it was written 40 years ago.

Other languages

This gets into the times when the DSA adventures were no longer translated into many languages. The only translation I can find is the French one, in both the Schmidt and Gallimard version.

Still not sure why there were two versions. According to one commenter on dice.camp one was the Schmidt version, like in German, the other was the same format as the Gallimard gamebook translations and would have been sold in bookstores instead of toy stores.

In any case they used the secondary title for that, Le Bourreau de Thalussa. Not the worst choice.

Running Tally (by quality, from best to worst):

1. A1 Die Verschwörung von Gareth
2. B13 Der Streuner soll sterben
3. B2 Wald ohne Wiederkehr
4. A2 Die Göttin der Amazonen
5. B6 Unter dem Nordlicht
6. B9 Strom des Verderbens
7. B1 Im Wirtshaus zum Schwarzen Keiler
8. B8 Durch das Tor der Welten
9. B10 In den Fängen des Dämons
10. B12 Der Zug durch das Nebelmoor
11. B3 Das Schiff der Verlorenen Seelen
12. B4 Die Sieben Magischen Kelche

[Worldbuilding] Goals and Tenets

Flammarion Engraving

I have been working on my own setting for a while now, and I even used it in a few short games already. But I maybe really should put down what I actually want from the campaign. So there will be a few posts where I will throw some stuff at the wall and check what sticks.

Some of the elements are more rules ideas, some more setting ideas. I am also working on my own little B/X house rules for use in this setting.

These are the basic ideas I have that I am starting with:

* the setting is comparatively low level. 12 is the given maximum in my rules, but of course that is not the end. In any case the setting should be geared to have the level spread I was talking about before

* in a similar vein it also should have only one example of everything in most cases, unless it’s necessary. Meaning every big monster has a single example in the area, every polity has its own kind of government, every tribal people have one tribe.

* The main inspirations are Vance, Pratchett, C.A. Smith

* the exception are orcs and goblins. Orcs have at least two tribes, while goblins are such a diverse lot there might be dozens of small tribes everywhere

* there is an edge to the world. People are living below the edge in the “Vertical Realms”. Other people use the Edge Fall to launch ships into space. Not many of them are designed to withstand space though.

* elves are one of the most regular but tragic examples of this. They know that they arrived on this world from a different star. Many of them are driven to make the journey back to the star they came from, even if they don’t know how. Pilgrimages of Elves to the edge. The Call is something many of them hear.

* dwarves are dwarves. Sturdy, underground dwelling, small vikings or similar. They weren’t always though. People talk about the lack of dwarf women, but the truth is they lack men as well. Dwarves are created by other dwarves, made from rock that has been given form by one or more other dwarves. And the secret they do not often talk about is… the dwarves are old. Really old. But they did not always look like they do now. Dwarves adapted to what the dominant species above day accepted for a long time.

* there are those dwarves that never turned humanoid in the first place, still lurking, those are the rockworms of the deeps. There are also those that feel the need to go back to the dark. Those are the dark dwarves, the duergar. And there are those that took a humanoid shape in the times of the scaled people. Those are the kobolds.

* there are no halflings or gnomes in the Glimmermark. They might be in other regions.

* anthropoid ducks are a thing because yeah

* magic is Vancian. Magic is rare and difficult to find. Mastery of only a few spells might make one a proper mage. Only the standard 1st level spells are widespread.

* psionic powers are rare, but mystics are a thing. They are those who train their minds in the power of the unknown, and sometimes people receive wild psionics from one source or another

* similar to this various sects and schools of monks (martial artists) exist. They all focus on mastering their own techniques

* the Catholic (as in literally “all-embracing”) Church is a generalized polytheist faith that provides a power structure and basic teaching standard. Their clerics are able to adapt to a variety of cult roles for multiple deities. They accept the existence of nearly all gods, even if some of them are more placated than revered. In any case, it’s your usual hive of scum and villainy that shows up where you put people in charge of what people believe.

* pagans are those that do not accept the teachings of the Church and adhere to a single God or pantheon.

Ok. That’s it for now. I had some more ideas and I really need to gather them to make sense of them all.

[Shadowrun] Session 3 Silver Angel pt. 3 Perfect Run

This one was again a rather short session. It literally was just the rest of session 2, but a week later. It took all of 90 minutes and then we were finished.

They already had planned stuff out beforehand, so it was mostly just a matter of running through this, figuring out the details of the plan, and getting in.

Of course then the twist happens, but they were well ahead of that and managed to get around it.

Their main plan was getting into the facility via the sewers and the air ducts as before during their scouting missions. They were using a small arachnodrone to get in there, all the while the cat Shaman did watch out on the Astral plane.

The hacker managed to capture first the security cameras and afterwards got into the file store to download the rather large file.

I had previously wondered how to deal with the matrix role when we don’t play with a decker, and decided to introduce an NPC called Cypher.

Cypher can do everything, but only on the matrix. He/she cannot take part in the physical part of runs, but they can do basically all the things that are needed. It would be stupid if they would fail rolls and ruin the run without player input, so if something goes wrong in the matrix it will merely cause a delay, not complete failure. Cypher is good.

They have their own agenda though, and one that might be at odds with the PCs.

In any case, the run went off nearly without hitch. There was another team (Fuchi-funded) breaking in and trying to get the same file, but thanks to the planning by the players they were mostly left with a tripped alarm when the arachnodrone moved out of the air ducts.

The last the players heard of them was gunfire from the research center, as they hightailed out of there.

Successful mission.

There will be a few news items available later on, some of which might tell the players absolutely nothing.

One thing that never was established in the lore was what that Silver Angel file was actually about to be so in demand. I assume it’s some cybertech, but as I said it never was picked up again.

Next weekend Glimmer’s player will GM the first part of Harlequin. Looking forward to actually playing again.

[The Dark Eye] Retrospective: A2 Die Göttin der Amazonen (The Goddess of the Amazons, 1985)

Cover of A2

Let’s read through Das Schwarze Auge adventure A2 Die Göttin der Amazonen (The Goddess of the Amazons) from 1985.

First I was a bit demotivated to do B12 Der Zug durch das Nebelmoor, now there is A2. It’s not actually bad. That would be better.

A2 is aggressively middle of the line. Rather a steep drop from the freeform madness that was A1, I don’t understand why this had to be in the A-line.

The author is, again, Ulrich Kiesow, illustrations are by Ina Kramer, cover by Claus Biswanger.

This time I really dig Biswanger’s cover. Amazing composition.

I would say that this is the adventure that introduces amazons to the setting, but that would be incorrect. Two of the NPCs, including amazon queen Yppolita, were already taking part in the tourney in A1. Which is a neat way to establish why the patron decides to deal with the player character as opposed to literally anyone else: they might have been seen on the tourney together with the queen and he can be sure that they know what the queen of Kurkum looks like.

That is of course assuming they learned of her identity on the tourney. If not it might be interesting for them to recognize their casual acquaintance as royalty.

There are a few small connections like that in those adventures. It’s clear that the authors expected the players to play the scenarios in order. Well, after all there were no others. (If one ignores the 3rd party ones that were already cropping up)

B10 allowed for the characters to become minor nobility in Warunk, A1 had them take part in the emperor’s tourney where they met Yppolita, A2 sends them south of Warunk to the area of Beilunk, B13 then sends them even further south and features a trap that only works if the players played A2.

Map of adventure area

So back to the scenario: the heroes are hired by the merchant Stoerrebrand to deliver a statue of the warrior goddess Rondra to the Amazon fortress Kurkum.

Adventurer looking at small statue

The amazons have stopped trading with the merchant (they were his source of curcuma (turmeric) natch) and he doesn’t have a clue why, but he tries to get back into their good graces with that gift.

The heroes first have to investigate in the city of Beilunk where the fortress even is, because as is appropriate for Amazons it is well hidden.

Hunting society

We get some random encounters during the wilderness sections, and some prophecies by local Rondra clergy. It turns out the amazons recently have started raiding the surrounding countryside.

The reason for this (which we will find out at the end) is the dark mage Xeeran who has created an idol of a goddess that has replaced Rondra for the amazons, and now he is using them as his private enforcers. The heroes now hopefully should infiltrate the fortress, free the imprisoned queen, and deal with the dark mage.

Sigh.

Oh where to begin?

This scenario is absolutely rife with unfortunate implications. This was obviously before DSA started becoming the game of near absolute gender equality it would be in the 90s, when I started playing.

one might think some parts of it might just be for… cheap titillation (hee hee)

Two amazons taking care of their gear

It also was written by a man. Well, yes, Ulrich Kiesow was male. But that’s not what I mean.
Here we have a scenario all about powerful female warriors, and yet there is a man that has bedazzled all of them, and the strongest of them is kept locked up just waiting for rescue.

Blergh.

The worst part comes early, during the investigation in Beilunk, when the heroes are supposed to gain information from some drunk cart drivers that immediately start fighting with the PCs.

Adventurers being pelted by food

What’s the best solution here?

I will tell you the one no sane person should try, but which is the one non-violent one the scenario proposes: send a lone female character to the drunk cart drivers, because “none of them would be ungentlemanly enough to attack an unarmed woman“.

Are. You. Fucking. Serious?!

Closer to the palace we encounter Rondra clerics who were driven out of their temple in the town of Shamaham by the amazons that are now worshipping their false idol (later retcon established this as an effigy of one of the archdemons).

Abandoned temple

They are holed up in a conveniently abandoned Rondra temple nearby that houses… a Dark Eye.

The most powerful of the DSA magic items, and the only reason it’s available at all is because the clerics had to flee into this ruin.

Not contrived at all..

And it’s not even the only one, as there’s another dark eye in the nearby town ready to drop exposition.

Amazon queen in divination tool

I assume this was mandated by the publisher. The whole Dark Eye name was an idea an advertising agency came up with to make the game more marketable (I guess at least someone there read the Lord of the Rings…).

Then for 13 adventures there was no mention of it.

Most likely the publishers complained and Kiesow put in two at once.

Some other random stuff:
Searching for the “Palace of Kurkum” the heroes might encounter a pair of beggars that will guide them to it.

Well, they will guide them to a thief den/pub called “Palace of Kurkum”.

Pub sign

That… feels a rather daring choice of name considering there’s a non-zero chance an actual amazon might come across the place and take offense. And amazons were known to be violent even before being enchanted by Xeraan.

If the heroes sneak into the fortress and go all the way up to the top of the belfry they are attacked by a pair of tree dragons.
If they fight too long the amazons below will notice.

Tree dragon attack

Oh yeah, the dragons just happen to pass by at that moment and have otherwise no bearing on the scenario.

Amusing: dark mage Xeraan with great effort teleported in two trolls and two sabre-toothed tigers to guard his lair.

Sabretoothed tigers

Unfortunately he soon figured out that was a mistake, as the trolls are mean and like to annoy the tigers, and the tigers crap everywhere, so now he needs to teleport in food and teleport out excrement.

Which means he hasn’t gotten around to actually get rid of either of them because he’s too busy with everything else. As DSA uses a spellpoint system that replenishes in a similar way to the HP system it can be inferred that he is permanently low on spell points because he has to clean the tiger droppings with magic.

Ok, altogether, despite my misgivings, it’s not bad. And considering what came before this easily ends up one of the better scenarios I have gone through. For now.

With a bit of work it could be a really memorable, if not epic experience.

This is about the time when they stopped translating the adventures into other languages. I guess unlike the German edition the other languages did not sell enough to justify the extra effort. A2 only received a French translation.

The events of the scenario were picked up in later publications. Xeraan became one of the prominent NPCs during the Borbarad campaign in the 90s (he became one of the heirs of the Demon Crown, and also was established as the person responsible for the events in B10), part of the subverted amazons kept being subverted and founded their own demonic amazon order, Kurkum fell in that campaign, and the backstory of queen Yppolita was worked out in a novel by Kiesow himself in 1987 (Die Gabe der Amazonen/en.: The Gift of the Amazons), and then picked up in his great epic novel Das Zerbrochene Rad (The Broken Wheel), published after is early death in 1997.

In other words: lorewise this scenario was like a butterfly spreading his wings and causing tornados

French cover of La Reine des Amazones

Running Tally (by quality, from best to worst):

1. A1 Die Verschwörung von Gareth
2. B2 Wald ohne Wiederkehr
3. A2 Die Göttin der Amazonen
4. B6 Unter dem Nordlicht
5. B9 Strom des Verderbens
6. B1 Im Wirtshaus zum Schwarzen Keiler
7. B8 Durch das Tor der Welten
8. B10 In den Fängen des Dämons
9. B12 Der Zug durch das Nebelmoor
10. B3 Das Schiff der Verlorenen Seelen
11. B4 Die Sieben Magischen Kelche

[Blog Carnival] V Donnut Valley: Let’s Party! Festivals and ceremonies!

(Trying out that wordpress reblog function…)

I know everyone is tired because of various Xtobers so this month’s topic is about party and chill. Let’s Party! Festivals and ceremonies! If you want to join the carnival ( https://ofdiceanddragons.com/rpg-blog-carnival/ ), write up your own entry and post it in a comment below or send me a link to any of my accounts […]

Let’s Party! Festivals and ceremonies!

Last month’s was at The Other Side with the topic Horrors, Gods, and Monsters.

I think it’s great this still is running. I mean, are there any other blog carnivals still active?

This was a THING when blogs had their heyday.

[The Dark Eye] Retrospective: Le suppôt de Satan (The Devil’s Henchman, 1986)

From what I have found there were exactly two scenarios for The Dark Eye in Casus Belli, and this is the second one. Le suppôt de Satan (The Devil’s Henchman) by Jacques Dalstein and Jérôme Bohbot from Casus Belli 34 (still 1986, the same year as the previous one). This was after the release of the extension set in French, which is referenced and immediately almost completely ignored by the scenario. The main antagonist is specifically not using the extension set rules.

Oh, yeah, the antagonist. You can see him in the illustration on the first page of the scenario.

Wait, you might say, but DSA doesn’t have black dark elves.

See, that’s where you are wrong. Number one in some of the earlier adventures there were actually black dark elves (which later got reskinned… see what I did there… into albino dark elves wearing black armor).

Number two is… the guy is not actually meant to be black, he is supposedly dark purple.

I am not sure I could play a serious game with players and manage not to laugh when the dreaded antagonist shows up and looks like an eggplant.

There is of course an actual reason for this. Purple in DSA is the color of the nameless god, and that is most likely why our dear purple elf is purple here. He is mentioned to have this color because of dark magic, but he also is established as a servant of the Nameless One. Someone read the extension set and extrapolated. The whole dark magic makes your skin go weird idea also came up in B13 Der Streuner soll sterben, which was translated to French in 1986, but in this case it was a very specific magic accident that turned an elf coal black from the environment he was in when the accident happened.

The scenario is maddeningly thin. There are some striking ideas in there though.

It all starts in a tiny nondescript village somewhere, which at night has ghostly riders pass by or even attack. There’s a small investigation into the situation, including an encounter with a witch and a bit of grave robbery, before going into the forest.

There is a black castle there which only shows up at night (I actually like this part), which is where the riders come from. Sneaking into the castle is acknowledged as a good idea that’s absolutely futile, because the bad guy knows everything that happens in the castle.

In any case the characters are invited in. We are supposed to have a nice dinner with the dark elf, although we can just show him an amulet which makes him lose all power. In the end we have to fight through the castle (there’s a pool with piranhas here for reasons), and find him trying to summon a demon. We have to fight that one as well. The end.

Maybe it’s an issue with the translation, but I really don’t know what either the PCs or the antagonist’s motivation for anything is besides “they are heroes, he’s a bad guy sorceror with dark skin”.

I guess it might work as a very short side trek, maybe for younger players. I would get rid of the whole purple skin angle and just make him a very unpleasant elf, although maybe I could find an elf sorceror mini and paint it purple? That at least would make for a memorable miniature.

Altogether the scenario is not great, but it might be good for a single evening of old school DSA play.

[The Dark Eye] Retrospective: La dernière nuit (The Last Night, 1986)

I was browsing stuff about Casus Belli and it’s Jarandell subsetting, when I came across some scenarios they published for L’Œil noir at the time it came out.

I actually never really had thought much about the stuff that appeared for DSA in other languages. Schmidt Spiele seemed to make it a thing for a year or so, but then stopped publishing new things. And I knew there was some nostalgia from people who played it back then, but soon after first the Italian, then the Dutch, and finally the French versions stopped getting new releases.

The Dark Eye’s first edition was translated into French in 1986, which is also when this scenario appeared in Casus Belli (in the same issue as a similar Dungeons and Dragons scenario): a very short solo penned by Jean Balczesak: La dernière nuit (The last night). This was in Casus Belli 32 (1986).

I do have to assume that this was an initiative of the French publisher of the game (Gallimard) to get the game some mindshare with French players. For what it’s worth they manage to misspell the name of the German publisher in this issue. And Gallimard otherwise was mostly doing gamebooks, e.g. the Fighting Fantasy series.

It’s… not good.

Actually it’s surprisingly engaging for such a short scenario, but it really is just four pages. The player character makes the mistake to talk to the wrong person (You thought he was a guard!) in the city of Agadinmar (where?!). It turns out you have been chosen as a sacrifice to the god of the city (who?!) and will be slowly tortured to death in the most excruciating manner, before being burned. Yeah, that’s not something to look forward to, so the whole scenario is about you trying to find your way out of this predicament.

The tone of the scenario is rather jovial, with a sometimes dry sense of humor. I find it interesting that of all things Balczesak decided to emulate the mode of speech employed in the starter set. But oh well.

Unless Agadinmar is the translation of a city I know under a German name this is not actually a place in DSA lore. The red-robed priests that do human sacrifice also don’t sound like anything I am aware of in the game. But that might easily be because at that early time of the game there simply was not enough lore to go against. Well, German-language areas had the the extension set already which contained a description of the setting, but that would be translated later in the year. The scenario does fit into the vibe of early DSA somewhat. Back then not much was established yet, and over time things would go different than those first few books would show the place as.

[Tools] Free Character Portraits Redux

A few years ago *cough*eleven*cough* I made a small post about free character portraits available on the net. As was pointed out to me all of the links on that post are dead by now. And to be fair, 11 years ago it was harder to find stuff than nowadays. Now there are online generators and friggin’ AI art generation applications that were just not there 11 years ago. Back then it felt like there was a sudden dearth of resources after the d20 boom went bust and all those publishers went out of business.

But anyway, I decided to work over that post again and repost it with corrected links:

Wizards of the Coast PC Portraits Archives

A few hundred pictures from the old Dragon magazine. Some good, some bad, very mixed batch. This goes to the wayback machine archive of it because after a long period of hiding them away on their website Wizards finally got rid of the old edition stuff a few years ago.

108 Portraits from Nevermet Press (also on drivethru)

Pretty good ones. I definitely like those. The page says 60 portraits, but it was a kickstarter that went up to 108 in the end, all of them released as Creative Commons

Public Domain portraits

Might be too small for a lot of uses, but definitely free because sourced from old paintings

An addition to the former, with 30 portraits from Diego Velazquez

Well, same as before, but a more unified look

A Miscellany of Links pt. VI

Free Stuff

Critical edition of Little Wars (Scholarly Editing)

Download 222 Belle Epoque Posters (Open Culture)

Thoughts

What’s the function of a stronghold? (Spriggan’s Den)

Thoughts on the Cleave house rule (Traverse Fantasy)

Simultaneous Initiative (alch3mist nocturn3)

Props

How to fold letters the old fashioned way (Propnomicon)

Random Tables

100 Goblin Trinkets (OSRvault)

100 Harmless Dungeon Denizens (OSRVault)

d100 Elf Clan Missions (Elfmaids and Octopi)

d100 Halfling Missions (Elfmaids and Octopi)

(your name) AND THE HOLY GRAIL

So this exists: “(your name) AND THE HOLY GRAIL”. A Monty Python and the Holy Grail themed adventure scenario from Space Gamer #41 (1981).

Because yes, we need even more Monty Python references in our DnD sessions.

But well, this came out in 1981 and just as a magazine scenario. so when maybe not everyone in the hobby had seen the movie. On the other hand it clearly points to some alternative endings because the players would expect the stock ending (my favorite being the black knight showing up and telling the PCs that he told them it was just a flesh wound)

The scenario is… barely playable I would say. It wants to be an extended dream sequence by itself, which is kind of a cop out.

…how fitting…

A lot of the encounters only make sense if you have watched the movie, and still it does not quite GET it.

I would say it’s only playable if you are really into the Pythons and work out some better start.

That said, there is some stuff I do like in between:

• rules for travel by coconut (because of course)
• the Spanish Inquisition shows up (you didn’t expect that, huh?)
• the hex scale is .73 swallow flights (also it’s neat seeing the setting nicely hexed)
• those who visit Camelot have a 10% chance of succumbing to general merriment

On the other hand most of the scenario is just variations of things from the movie. the damsels of Castle Anthrax are there, so is the witch burning, so is the monster dropping dead by death of animator.

Sigh.

Yeah, it tries to be the movie. so much so that there are rules on how to move the plot forward by using The Narrator, God, or even The Director (in this order) to force stuff in the right direction.

I think this could be good if one would work it out a bit more. Like this it’s just the movie forced into a scenario. But I wouldn’t mind filing the numbers off and using some encounters in another game, or going the other way and filling that hexmap with more original encounters so it’s not such a glaring rip off.

By the way the scenario never actually states it is written for DnD. Of course it is, but it’s never said.
As a matter of fact this whole issue of Space Gamer is a special D&D issue, but whenever books are mentioned it’s the newest AD&D stuff, even when Gygax pens the article. I guess this came out in that brief period where even Gygax didn’t make a difference between D&D and AD&D to cut Arneson out of the royalties.

I have the feeling this issue was largely paid for by TSR. I think Space Gamer was way more into Traveller.

I am tempted to just introduce coconut riding in an otherwise normal setting and leave it completely unexplained, just to see the eye rolls of the players.