Long ago when the world was new and the oldkin walked the lands there was one named Joomavesi. Joomavesi was beautiful and her black hair rippled and folded like the mountains. For long she walked beneath the stars seeking paradise and she found it on an island where the heart of the earth boiled the sea.

This was supposed to just be a quick G+ post, but I got long winded and philosophical so I figured I'd put it here instead.

A vaporware funnel/level 1 adventure

All PCs begin as townsfolk in tiny village in the mountains.

Swordfish Islands is going going going. 86.1% complete (assuming my burndown chart is accurate, and I don't suddenly realize there's something else that needs to be added). Book 1 - The Field Guide to Hot Springs Island, tentatively 100% complete with 43k words. Book 2 - The Dark of Hot Springs Island, still not done, but sitting pretty, or pretty ugly, at 79k words.

Turkey is delicious. Family is awesome. And now for some more Thundercats.

Episode 04 - Song of the Petalars

This is the episode that completely locked me in as a fan of the new Thundercats. Tiny people that sing. Plants. The bad guys are sending an entire army after the party and the army, flexing its technological might, is just clear cutting through the forest after them. When that's not enough General Slythe, while being massaged and sloppily eating fruit orders it to be set ablaze with this beautiful exchange:

General Slythe: "Burn this forest. Burn it to the ground, and the Thundercats with it."

Some Lizard: "But Kumai... and the others..." [Voicing concern for the scouts tracking the cats]

General Slythe: "Are expendible, as are you lieutenant. Now do as I command."

And then it cuts to four lizards wearing goggles and wielding flame throwers. Seriously. THIS is how you set up your badguys. Not. Fucking. Around.

On top of this, you get death (both bad guys and good) and existential angst because of relativistic perceptions of time. The show was absolutely doomed. Too dark. Too heavy. Too good. Time,  hopefully, will vindicate it. (Yeah yeah, the party gets saved from unbeatable odds at the end of this episode with a deus ex machina, but I'm forgiving it because it's the #1 it's Thundertank, #2 Panthro (thought dead) is driving it, #3 as he emerges from the tank he's one shots an attacker with a stylish flourish of his nunchucks while illuminated from behind by a planet. I mean, they literally did the deus and the ex machina.)

This show geeks me out.

The first two episodes of Thundercats (2011) don't have much in the way of gameable ideas as far as I'm concerned, but that makes sense. These two episodes are, in reality, a single ~hour long episode that lines up perfectly with the first gaming session of any campaign. Its purpose is to set the stage and form the party. These two episodes accomplish that quickly and effectively by establishing the world's status quo (i.e., Highly civilized and technology is myth) and then destroying it. As episode two ends a party of five (thief, thief(bard?), fighter(speed), fighter(strength or maybe a paladin), cleirc) has essentially been formed, has been given an objective, and has no way to go back to normalcy and shirk the quest.

It's good stuff, but is more "trope, trope, trope" instead of "idea, idea, idea" like the other episodes. 

Progress on Hot Springs Island continues. I'm fast approaching 90% and it feels good. Very good. For reasons I don't want to get into right now, I've got to hold off on sharing stuff about Hot Springs 'till I pass a certain threshold.

Here are a couple pieces of conventional internet wisdom: Google+ is a ghost town, and YouTube comments are a cesspool. In what appears to be an effort to tackle both of these problems, Google has begun merging these two services. The thought seems to be that forcing a "real name" G+ account on YouTube commenters strips them of their anonymity (thus increasing comment quality) and pushes more bodies into Google's land of plusses and circles. The intentions seem good, but there's some pretty awful collateral damage to active G+ users because Google doesn't seem to understand *context*.

I would like to take a moment to recommend that you back the Bee and Puppycat Kickstarter. There are only 9 days to go, and I believe it is representative of exactly what Kickstarter is here for.

To begin, I have no affiliation with the project in any way, shape or form. I don't know anyone that's working on it, and it doesn't really have anything to do with RPGs.

Natasha Allegri

Srok disagrees with Glavrok's approach to dealing with the Fuegonauts, preferring open warfare and repeated, direct attacks filled with bloodshed. 

See the whole thing at 20px

Here's my checklist for The Dark of Hot Springs Island. There are 172 sections (totally a heartbreak rpg because: numbers), and I've got the first draft of 110 of those sections done, putting me at ~60% completion. The Field Guide had 103 sections.

I should probably just post this picture and leave it at that as it does such a good job of conveying what I'm feeling right now in regards to the Swordfish Islands. There's a lot of doubt. A feeling that I should have just made a 10-12 page adventure and shipped it. And then done another. And another. And another. But I didn't, so now, I'm drowning in my own creation, and doubt.

It started as a joke, but I think it's turned out rather well. I think it also serves as a good example of the way we're providing detail for our potentially major and semi-major NPCs around Hot Springs Island (and one day all of the Swordfish Islands). A few paragraphs of backstory and bullet points of motivation that ultimately won't matter anyway when the party charges in and kills them. #ZOMGCRITBUILD.

Spelling's been changed but I was lazy

Wrote this a while back and have been meaning to get it up on the blog.

Kinda like this but with more tigers, magic and outdoors
Image: Roger Fenton

Incognito! Sorta.

So, +Courtney Campbell over at Hackslash Master made a post today about getting into/onto G+ for roleplaying. It's very good, and I, like his reader Charles had a hard time making the switch over to G+ from RPG forums (like /tg/ and /r/rpg and whatnot). You see, in my youth on the internet I would get on forums, run my mouth, and get banned, so over time, lurking has become much more my style.

In the multi-verse of the Swordfish Islands, elementals come in two varieties:

Fleshy

A nereid and her pet

Non-Fleshy

A water elemental

According to a personality profile at work, I fixate a lot on "what?" questions. I, being biased, think they're the best way to get to the core of an issue or problem which I believe is critical because if you don't know the core of the issue, you can't actually fix a problem or communicate the problem to those who can fix it.

The vacation of writing has begun. So much to do, but so much fun stuff to dig into. I'm excited.

Problem currently being explored:

A tower made of lapis lazuli that used to be an observatory was turned into a pleasure resort and has fallen into ruin. Inside the resort is a ballroom. Inside the ballroom is a wall of mirrors that show a perfect, idealized, version of whatever looks into it.

+Scrap Princess is full of awesome. Since I've been slacking on the blog, I'm going to steal some of the brilliance Scrap laid out in a G+ thread both to share and to remember:

Ivory Tower by ~inthewings

Art and living seem to have an inherently antagonistic relationship to one another. Probably because they both take time, and place demands on the person doing them. Its very possible that I mean "creation" more than I mean "art" because creating something sucks. Actually creating it. Dreaming it up, storming it out, and making its skeleton is great fun, but the work itself sucks, and I'm going to post here and cry about it for a bit.

How in the hell is is the end of July? @_@

Work continues, slowly but inexorably. So have a post!

Chimes.

The elves of the Swordfish Islands loved music. Instead of locking their doors and chests with physical keys, they locked them with sound and used chimes to open them. As the civilization became more powerful and decadent, chimes became somewhat of a game and were used as a way for the elves to "one-up" each another at parties and social events.

So I've been working on a random chime table (as they'll probably be quite common in the ruins), and here are 50 random effects that may be associated with a chime. Needs some polish for consistent use of owner vs holder and the way area of effect is described, but I think it'll do for now. ^_^

Mikael Jansson photographing Emma Stone for Interview Magazine

Sad Ivory the Sorceress Queen, watches Synthexia crumble from her spire in the Crystal Metropolis (Hex 0902) with the same detached sadness she has felt ever since the great Urghis Khan was ripped to shreds by by a thousand colors out of space.

Bad guys and sandboxes don't mix.

Hit a major milestone with Hot Springs Island early this week and basically finished the Field Guide written and laid out, and on paper. Feelin' great! It's laid out so it can be printed on regular US 8.5"x11" paper that's been folded in half, and weighs in at a whopping 234 pages. Much of the reason for the length because every monster consists of two pages: one of art, one of writeup.

In the meantime, Telecanter put up a great post about his sandbox, offhandedly mentioned that the town of Gilworth raises fighting dogs and said he needed to make up a price chart for the dogs. Then, with dogs on the brain, I stumbled across a post on the Medievalist about dog names in the Middle Ages, and I ended up falling into some weird dog name wormhole on the internet.

Not being able to escape the dogs, I decided I'd make up a table of 50 dogs with interesting or useful abilities. I pulled a bunch of names from this page on Names for Roman Dogs (using the English translations 'cause I thought it was amazing how many of them are still used to this day), pulled a bunch of breeds at random from Wikipedia's list 'o dog breeds, and pulled the dog abilities out of the aether. Then I mashed it all into the table style Zak S. used for his nobles in Vornheim, so you can roll d100 and just pick a dog, or roll d100x3 to build your own.

Enjoy the mashup!

I've been listening to a lot of retro-future-new-newwave music recently, and it's giving me crazy ideas. Just as metal can inspire gloriously epic fantasy, synth-heavy-fever-dream music inspires a very spacy 80s fantasy, where magic is real, but so too is the ancient science of forgotten empires that walked the stars with abominations.

I'm gonna see if I can rustle up some #gygaxiandemocracy and get the G+ grodnards to join together, blend up some crystal swords and laser beams and help fill in the shattered land of Synthexia.

To help get things going I've made a playlist of inspirational music, so you can hear the vibe I'm stuck on.

The Vyderac are a type of blood sucking insectoid found in the Swordfish Islands. The Matron, or Queen, is totally stationary, but heavily armored and defended by her swarm. Her maggots reinforce the hive area, build additional blood reservoirs as the colony expands and can be transformed into the other three types of vyderac. The seekers identify food for the colony. The swarmers overwhelm the food and make sure it's blood doesn't clot. The feeders drain the food of its juices and transport the juices back to the matron so she can feed the colony.

Enjoy!

I've added a button! It's over there on the right, up above the "Adventurers" section of the blog (I'd love it if you'd push the join this site button too 'cause numbers going up on the internet gives my life fulfillment and meaning). Every time you push the button it will give you a random ship name based on the following tables:

Content has no value, but it's the only thing that matters. It matters because it's content that attracts the attention of an audience. It's the content that unites people, globally, from every conceivable socioeconomic background by giving them a commonality to discuss in mutual enjoyment. And then, when all of these people have come together and are talking about, and enjoying the content, they can choose to engage in a gentleman's agreement with the content creator, and say "We love what you do, and we love it so much that we will work together to try free you from your mundane daily obligations so that you can create even more content for us to enjoy."

And that's fucking great.

Jungle river of fire by Leigh Hilbert

Hot Springs Island has 7 different habitat zones, and I've really been focused on making each type of habitat *feel* different from one another. On the one hand I've been working on a list of descriptive terrain words the DM can quickly reference as the description of each hex. For example, in the areas of Heavy Jungle I've got things like (dense, shadows, dark, vines, twisted, musk) while in areas of Light Jungle I've got things like (sunbeam, canopy, clearing, bushes, vines, trailing, flowers).

On the other hand, and for the purposes of this blog post, I've really been focused on giving the random encounters of each hex type their own feel. To accomplish this, we're using 3d6 tables instead of 1d20 tables for random encounters, and we're nesting the tables like Russian dolls so there are tables in tables in tables.

Below are a few pages from our section on elementals. Things are still rough, but if anyone's got a minute to give a little feedback, it'd be greatly appreciated. Are these pages rendered completely useless because they don't have stats? Is the information about each creature useful, or does it smack too closely to AD&D 2e Monstrous Manual dreck?

Images are quite expandable, so zoom on in!

Word cloud treatment time. And yes... there were a lot of salamanders.

We have written a fiction to go along with Hot Springs Island, and I've just finished draft #2. It's taken longer than I thought to get here, and it's ended up weighing in at 11 chapters, an introduction, and 16,131 words. According to wikipedia that's enough to be called a novelette.

Growing up, music was a huge part of my life. In elementary school I sang in a boys choir, and then in middle school, high school, and part of college I was in the band, in addition to doing some singing here and there.

+Patrick Stuart has me thinking. He wrote an excellent introduction to our section on elementals which I'll likely post up soon (the complete section on elementals intro and all), and he seems to have become my current blog crush. If you're not reading False Machine and you've somehow found my blog, go and read his pretty words.

Patrick is working on a project about the dark places under the earth, and in one of his recent recap posts about the subject he said this, and I haven't stopped thinking about it:

"13 the impossiblity of darkness  - This one is important. I still envision a Light Economy as being a very important factor in driving/limiting exploration and travel. Light is a quasi-currency in fact. Always running out, always needing to get more. This should also key into making the players obsessed with light and the kind of light they have. It should highlight an important factor which is the living, liquid relationship between light and darkness."

I'm very excited about this project because I like caves. A lot. You see, I'm from Texas, and we've got two key cave ingredients, limestone and water, to generate a ton of the things. I even went so far as to get married in a cave this past December on the day the world was supposed to end. Since I'm opinionated, and since blogging is kinda all about having public conversations with strangers I figured I'd go ahead and throw a stone down this well.

Light in caves sucks. 

To the estimable +Patrick Stuart,

Here's my take, for what it's worth, on "What to Do?".

Should you sell? Should you not sell? Should you piecemeal it? Or launch it all at once? What to do? What to do? I've been asking myself the same questions about the Swordfish Islands.

Crystals are awesome. Not because of healing auras and crap like that, but because of their geometrically regular form and symmetrically arranged plane faces. Hot Springs Island, being a place where water and fire duke it out beneath the earth, contains a number of crystal caves. A couple are being mined by an efreet, and one, hidden away beneath a lagoon, serves as the (perhaps last) refuge for a group of nereids.

The nereids have been on the losing end of things for several millennia, and many of their sisters are dead or captured. Until the last nereid is freed (or accounted for) the survivors have engaged in an unbroken lament, singing in shifts for a thousand years inside the Crystal Sea Cave.

Rockin' out to Ocean Towers, writing up dungeons. It's been a good day.

On Tuesday (04/16/13) four adventurers were sent to Hot Springs Island on an expedition by the Martel Company. Their objective was to confirm or deny the rumor that four 50' tall statues made of gold could be found on the island.

This is their story.

Indie Metal Mondays have fallen off for a couple of reasons:

1. Finding quality metal-obscura on bandcamp takes time, and I've been having to spend it on other things. =(
2. I've been crushing on electro-swing.

So if you're in the mood for something different, check out the Carlson Two. They're aus Berlin and ausgezeichnet. Give 'em a listen.

The Carlson Two

For part one go here.

Harp is a man of average height, with brown hair, a white scar along the right side of his jaw, and the watery blue eyes of a drunk. He appears reasonably strong, but carries an inch or two of fat over his musculature. Indio claims that Harp is on everyone's shit list due to his drinking, and is only tolerated because of his skill with a sword. His answers to my questions were terse, and he rarely met my eyes during our talk.

Thomas Cole - Desolation

From stardust to beauty to rubble, and back to stardust once more.

Awesome people on the internet created a script that makes parsing out text for word clouds even easier. I have been very excited today.

To celebrate I turned the parsers on Robert E. Howard's "Tower of the Elephant" and Lovecraft's "Colour Out of Space".

I really need to learn me some python.

Day 15 - Aboard the Siren's Edge

Our search for a suitable location at which to found this new port continues. After the incident on the Webbed Isle, and Vance's death on the Island of Blooms, Captain Rand has ordered all crew to remain aboard the Siren's Edge and Siren's Folly until scouting parties from the Martel Company return with an initial report. Scuttlebutt is beginning to turn sour, and the pranks the crew normally direct towards the Martel Company representatives that remain with the ships are escalating into almost open hostility. The crew is clearly not handling the death of Vance well, and while I understand Captain Rand's desire to not risk his crew unnecessarily, our men are itching to get off these ships and explore the islands that will be their new home, even if they have proven rather inhospitable so far.

Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky (1817-1900)

Ship on Stormy Seas

The way this guy was able to capture sunlight shining through water is stupidly amazing. It seems like he just kept painting the same type of thing over and over again. Since I haven't read anything about him at all, I'm having a good time letting my idealistic side, and my cynical side battle it out on a field of ignorance.

Did Ivan keep painting the same type of thing, (with some variations) because he was trying to perfectly capture the essence of something ellusive and true? Or was he just rockin' out what sold and was easy?

Regardless of the reason though, his stuff is busy playing mixologist on my soul right now.

Fully realizing I missed the point of the Phantom Tollbooth, I've got to admit that I've always liked Dictionopolis much more than Digitopolis. Lists of words are consistently able to get my mind running towards ideas, while lists of numbers get me running away from them. Because of this, I  dabble a bit with data visualization to aggregate word lists out of large chunks of text, just to see what shows up, so I hit +Zak Smith's wonderfully orchestrated (and wonderfully fun) Hexenbracken and Kraal with some data viz sticks and turned all 1144 hex details into two pictures.

The Hexenbrachen

The Kraal

I'm calling our first public playtest of Hot Springs Island a pretty rockin' success. The new Dragon's Lair location here in Austin is amazing, and they had a great turnout for their first Austin Indie Creator night.

Two groups managed to explore parts of Hot Springs Island that evening. The first, sought the elusive kujibird, rumored to be extinct, but also rumored to have feathers of gold. The second sought a renegade mage, survived a shipwreck, and lost a beloved pet... falcotronix (may he never be forgotten).

You can check out some pictures below, and if you're in the Austin area and interested in playing in a game or two, sound off in the comments or hit up swordfishislands on the old gmail. For those of you on G+ that may be wondering what this is all about, we're still working on some digital solutions but we'd like to get things tested out via hangout as well.

The end is getting closer, and while the updates here on the blog may become even more sporadic, they won't be stopping completely.

Stay metal.

Our first playtest "in the wild" will be at Dragon's Lair tomorrow. To celebrate, we printed out 50 copies of the pdf below to give away or sell at just above cost (we'll see what the demand looks like).

This Hot Springs Island beta sampler contains 13 monsters, 8 plants, and 1 dungeon from the island. It's only a sliver of the content we've made for this hexcrawl, and we're thinking it might be good to keep churning out these little booklets, so we'd love any feedback you may have on the content or layout.

If you'd like to print your own copy, grab the PDF here. (print as booklet)

If you want to read it on your computer or tablet, this one is probably better.

And if you'd like a higher resolution version for printing, email feedback and the request to the email in the pdf. :) In the meantime, here are a few sample pages!

Work work! Gotta make the booth look awesome this Thursday.

Current inventory to accomplish this:
2.5 yards of heavy canvas
3 yards of burlap
25 yards of waxed cotton thread
One spool of black upholstery thread
One 3'x5' fish net
60 paper tags
5 heavy duty needles
4 wooden crates
89 camel bone beads carved to look like skulls
117 wooden beads
9 aluminum grommets
1 hammer
1 pair of scissors
1 pen
1 32gb flash drive
1 pocket knife
1 iron
3 proofs of our Zine-like handout

And 50 feet of rope 'cause what adventure would be complete without it?

We're making t-shirts. I've heard that black and gold is the best color combination for obscure yet metal RPGs.

Salutations!

The blog's gotten pretty quiet this month. To give you all a peek behind the curtain, the outward silence is because we're running around with our hair on fire because we were able to get a table at Dragon's Lair's "Indie Creator Night" to demo Hot Springs Island.

Twenty Paces is a group from Minneapolis that (based on their current myspace/facebook) pages seems to have only really been active back in 2008 when they released a four track album of progressive instrumental metal called "Cassini". In 2010 they released a single track called "Ghost (She Moans)" which immediately caught my ear while trawling through Bandcamp.

"It... it grabbed Vivian from the shadows and bit out her whole neck in one bite with its giant fucking teeth man. Then it dropped a wall of fire on us and roasted that bastard Revio alive. I didn't think these things could cast spells man, but I was looking right at it as it did. And that's not all. That's not fucking all [indistinguishable]. As it dropped that spell, the thing, I don't know, flickered or something, and I swear on my cock that creature turned into a big-tittied naked woman with her head thrown back, mouth open to the sky like a whore's. But only for an instant."

Red Pyramid by Throne on Mars has brought me back to where I need to be. A good buddy of mine got me distracted by the happy insanity that is Bit.Trip Runner 2 (amazing btw), but I've got content to rework of a more... metal nature.

Long, long ago, before the Swordfish Islands ever came into being as a concept, I was reading through the AD&D DMG looking for interesting magical items to put in the paths of my players, and I "rediscovered" the Chime of Opening. I've read the magical items section of that book hundreds of times, but the possibilities surrounding the idea of a chime that can open things had never resonated for me. This is probably because I *love* playing thieves, *love* getting my hands dirty with lockpicking, and absolutely despise anything that makes noise and might reveal my location, or attract unwanted attention.

This music, right here, is the guilty pleasure on which all games should be built. Both the cover and the music clearly communicate the "fuck you I'm awesome" vibe that the world needs more of. So many companies and people are using the word "epic" these days, and I think that's terrible. Epics are long, sad, hard, and filled with death and struggle. There's a time and a place for epic in everyone's life, but what I think people are actually trying to express when they use the word epic these days is actually "glorious".

Charlie Parra del Riego, of Lima Peru, is glorious.

I've always believed that creation stories are best when carved onto a wall and forgotten in the jungle for several thousand years.

This is a limited edition Montegrappa "Chaos" fountain pen that was apparently designed by Sylvester Stallone. It's currently listed on Amazon for $67,000. This thing practically begs to be made into a magic item... but what? It can't be something as common as a pen that draws life. I mean, it's got a skull, lizards and a sword with a winged skull on it. This thing's got to be metal.

If you throw out its size, maybe it could be a scroll case? But what's on the scroll? End of the world spell? True name of a demon? List of "sold" souls?

Are you currently suffering from lockjaw and need a fix? Try some jaw-droppingly awesome Temple. These two badasses from Phoenix are sure to set your brain ablaze with their compellingly awesome experimental, sludgy, doomy, deathy, instrumental metal.

Alright kidos (and maybe not so kido). It turns out that if you search for "Bravest Warriors Porn" on google images, the image in my post on how awesome the Bravest Warriors show is comes up as the ~4th picture.

When asked how he draws like he does, Safari responded with "I just draw a bunch of squiggly lines until it looks like something."

Coppermane Prowler