All Saints' Eve Miscellany

Happy Halloween! I'm on the road, but got time for a few quick cool things.

Do yourself a favor and check out this Cracked photo parade which has material for at least 10 Call of Cthulhu cases. Hail Nyarlathotep!

This is why you should never roll without backup in the medieval city:

I agree that the Purple Worm is the ultimate thing. Except for the Tatzelwurm, king of the Bavarian Underdark:

The plan to rob the wizard one coin at a time went fine, up to a point.

Extremely Crass and Noisy: Gryllus for Monster Monday

The Gryllus is an interesting case for my Monstrous Monday Monster. I statted him up on a piece of typing paper in high-school, having seen him lurking under the furniture and around the bend in more than one Hieronymus Bosch painting (statuettes for sale at the EMuseum Store):

My Spanish book on Bosch identified this kind of creature as a Gryllus, etymology unknown - is it from the Latin for "cricket" or a reference to the crewman of the Odyssey who begged Circe not to change him back from pig to man? Anyway, the Gryllus appears all over in medieval iconography, whenever a manuscript-doodling monk or a cathedral carver got tired of doing torsos:

No-body on the right, no-head on the left.

And okay I'm going to let my 16 year old self take care of the rest of this post, vomit lakes, ordure bogs and all. Stats in parentheses are for the "Bakarout" sub-variety. I think these guys were meant to be the manes/larva equivalent for Tarterus. Ka-scan!

click to enlarge

As a bonus, here's a partially revised version of the gryllus, with improved (?) color illustrations, new stats, and a spiffy two-column layout - forecasting 2nd edition D&D in 1983! - that I never got around to finishing.

click to enlarge

And how would I stat them today, stripped down for generic Old School games?

Knight Gryllus: HD 3, AC 3 [16], MV 6, atk: bite d3 (wounds only heal from rest), spiked headbutt d6; def: non-magical weapons do half damage round down, mind: low, size: 0 (small), xp: 3 HD + 2 minor abilities.
(Visor down: AC 1 [18] but no bite)

Mage/Monk Gryllus: HD 2+2, AC 6 [13], MV 3, atk: bite d3 (wounds only heal from rest), spells as 4th level wizard/cleric, def: non-magical weapons do half damage round down, mind: high, size: 0 (small), xp: 2+2 hd + 1 major and 2 minor abilities.

How I Do Silhouettes

So, let's say I want to do one of my public domain silhouettes (see latest zip file, to the right.)

I took some "snapshots" of the process along the way as I was doing one for a weretiger recently. I'll take the lesson about halfway to where I have a decent tiger silhouette, but not go into what I did to "humanize" the tiger outline.

First, I do a Google search for "public domain tiger" and get this fairly clean black & white illustration. This part of the hunt is the most difficult but also the most fun. I check that it's actually in the public domain (the source site, wpclipart.com, is pretty trustworthy).

The graphics software I use is GIMP 2, which is freeware. I'm still not fully conversant with its use of layers, but know some tricks to get around the annoying aspect of them.

First I copy the tiger from the image, then paste the tiger directly in a new GIMP window from the clipboard, using control-shift-V.

The next step is to clear away the background lines around the tiger. We want to get it to where the tiger outline floats free of the rest.

Next, a little darkening and reduction to plain black-and-white needs to be done, or the silhouette will have gray edges that interfere with the clean black line of the final transparent image. I usually accomplish this by turning the image's "brightness" down and "contrast" up using "Brightness/Contrast" in the Colors menu. Make sure the picture is in RGB format (Image > Mode menu) or this won't work.

 

We now have a darker-lined tiger with more complete lines. For extra assurance that the image is only black and white use the Posterize command under Colors and ask for only 2 colors. If you get weird colors, the image is not a true monochrome; use "Desaturate" under Colors to get it that way. 

Using the "fuzzy select" tool to the right of the lasso, I select the tiger, cut it out, select all, delete, and paste the tiger back in. There may be some trouble with layers here, but a control-H (to anchor the image) and control-A (to select the whole area) usually solves that. I then do some additional removal of extraneous lines and adding in dark spots to complete the outline, until the tiger is pretty solid:

Notice that this isn't the greatest stand-alone silhouette because the tiger's front legs overlap each other. You'll see that this will look a little weird in the final version. I don't mind because I want to edit out the legs and add in some human-like arms for the weretiger continuation, but having well-defined limbs is something to keep in mind when picking pictures for silhouettes.

Now here's the trick that saves a lot of work. Making sure that the tiger outline is complete, get the bucket fill tool and choose some color neither black nor white to fill the outside area. If there are spaces inside the silhouette, like the gap between an arm and body, those need to be filled too.

Now use the "Select By color" option from the Select menu to grab the red part. Cut it, select all, delete the screen (after returning the color picker to black foreground/white background) and paste it back in, finishing with control-h control-a:

And bucket fill the white with black, then go to Layer > Transparency > Color to Alpha:

Alpha is the channel that makes your image transparent, usually a good feature in a silhouette. Here, you should pick the same color that you used to fill around the outline - in this case, red. That will give you a final silhouette that has a transparent background and can go anywhere.

And so, there you go. Not too bad in spite of the weirdness with the front legs, and by the time I've turned it into a weretiger it looks like this:

Caught mid-transformation, with a little shear applied for weirdness, and a couple of ape arms glued on ... anyway, this is how I do 'em!

Denny's Hobbit Menu Proves ...

That Bored of the Rings has won.

The boggies beat it before they took effect and, per Goodgulf's instructions, headed for the orange-and-green flashing sign at the center of town. There they found a gaudy plexiglas and chrome inn, whose blinking sign portrayed a boar, rampant, devoured by a mouth, drooling. Beneath it was the name of the inn, the Goode Eats & Lodging. Passing through the revolving door, the party signaled the bell clerk, whose nametag read Hi! I'm Hojo Hominigritts!. Like the rest of the staff, he was costumed as a suckling pig with false sow's ears, tail, and papier-mache' snout.

Congratulations to Messrs. Beard and Henney of the Harvard Lampoon.

And Now, the Next Set of Baroque Spells ...

Illustrations from Robert Fludd's Utriusque Cosmi. These tend to a more destructive bent.

The Radiating Cloud of Seven Interfering Bands...

Mattoon's Perchancical Quartermaster ...

 

 The Subaqueous Egg of Bellorand ...

The Destructive and Formless Chaos and Void ...

Wundite's Whirligig ...

And this ... the Facade of Apollo and Marsyas, which may have once been invoked as a spell, but now is a permanent architectural feature of the magical academy at Dol Deriun.

Flip That Dungeon Cliche

"A room with a ceiling full of webs..?"

The cliche - spiders hiding in the webs, you can burn the webs, stuff is wrapped up in the webs.

"A statue with a missing arm ...?"

The cliche - find the arm, put it on, the statue comes to life, and usually is helpful.

"A table with a meal all laid out to eat?"

Ha ha, yeah right, it's a trap.

"So there's this lair of nine rats and  2000..."

Otherworld Miniatures' familiar diorama

Well, you get the idea. When I used to write poetry, one of the things I taught myself to do was to break cliche. A poem that's made up of turns of phrase that have been said before is, at best, a song lyric. If the first thing that comes to you when describing long hair is a waterfall, then flip that into lava, falling smoke, avalanche, waves of night, anything but the obvious.

Of course, not all the cliche busters work. You have to do something new and have it be meaningful. The hair in the poem can't be a cascade of weasels, nor can you plausibly open a chest and have a horde of butterflies carrying peanuts spring out. I'm just saying that we're coming up on five years of the Old School Refinement and pretty much all the obvious homages have been paid. Time to leave homage and go on the road. An adventure author can now invert, subvert or just ignore cliches.

I was going to have humanoids as the low-level feuding groups in my mega-dungeon but now I have different clans of mutant rats. I tried to give the bandit gang in the caves some more sinister secret than the usual robbing and looting. The race of crow-men that used to inhabit the rest of the caves and left its mark there is pretty different from the usual run.

So, trying to flip the cliches I started with ...

The webs are all there is. It's a web monster. Oh, and it burns ... but its pieces thrash about, fall, flap and float down to you like sticky sheets of napalm. If you're feeling nasty you can put a golden spider up in there - burning reduces it to scrap metal.

The statue doesn't have an arm to complete it. It's a statue of a one-armed adventurer. If it sees another one-armed person enter the room (even someone faking it), it will serve the person if the missing arm is the same arm, and fight him or her if the missing arm is different.

The meal ... well, here is where the subverted cliche itself becomes a cliche, the "gotcha" of the too obvious reversal, like "sympathy" characters who really are in need of help or demon idol gems that really can be looted with no problems. Here is where you might go sideways, with a mixture of good and bad effects. The demon doesn't come after you when you steal its eyes, but there's a subtle curse, starting with the thief's eyes turning the color of the gems ... yes, that really is a crying damsel in distress, but she turns out to be spoiled and annoying and a liability to the party's survival ... the meal is food of the gods, roll d6 on this table.

Any other favorite cliches or cliche-busting encounters out there?

"Thangobrind, We Will Avenge You!"

It seems that whenever people discuss the appropriateness of D&D or whatever other roleplaying system to a fictional genre - sword & sorcery, gothic horror, existential horror - the answer that I end up agreeing with is:

D&D should bring the story, the literary source should bring the setting.

The plot that D&D supports, a band of 3 or more diverse adventurers looking for discovery, gold and glory, comes from one specific kind of fiction, the adventure yarn - originated in the 19th century by the likes of H. Rider Haggard, but with precursors as far back as the Argonautica, the original League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Hercules! Orpheus! Jason! Castor and Pollux!).

Prof. Tolkien undoubtedly read these stories in his younger years and applied them to his tales, first the treasure hunters of The Hobbit and then the more epic yarn of Lord of the Rings. (If you ever wondered why the Woses are in Return of the King, just give them grass skirts and bones through their noses.)

The other genres don't really support this plot. Sword and sorcery is for one or two protagonists. Horror usually involves a person or group who is in distinct danger of getting killed or worse (I guess early level play supports this, if you take away the characters' ability to fight back.) Gothic horror is a completely different kettle of fish. Stories of chivalry - the kind that drove Don Quijote mad - have a lot of interwoven solo adventures, but nothing like a party adventure.

Sure, these stories can contribute creatures, landscapes, buildings, tricks, traps, enemies, situations. But ultimately, it's D&D's own posse of fighters, thinkers, healers, sneakers that gets dropped into them. Kind of like Abbott and Costello never really went all Gothic tragedy when they met Frankenstein, if your adventuring party gets dropped into Jane Austen, you had best believe they will be checking out the silver candlesticks and dueling Mr. Darcy.

Thangobrind, for those curious, is the protagonist of Lord Dunsany's great, laconic adventure story. Alone, he negotiates perils that are very D&D, gets his hands on a great luminous gem, and meets a sticky end at the hands (?) of its guardian. His story is not D&D ... but the story of the four adventurers who followed in his path and tried to take the gem, that is!