Projecting D&D

Sometimes movies that have nothing to do with fantasy interpret the old school style of D&D much better than many fantasy movies do.

For example, my wife and I have been watching the mini-series Lonesome Dove (1988) this week. It stars Robert Duvall (with pretty great performance, I must say!), Tommy Lee Jones, Robert Urich, Danny Glover, a young Steve Buscemi and Chris Cooper and a very attractive Diane Lane who all put in great performances supported by an outstanding script.

It is a western about two former Texas rangers (Duvall and Jones) who decide to move cattle from southern Texas to Montana.

Pretty standard fare, right?

Well, first off, morality is quite blurred as these 'good guys' rob, gamble, and have quite an affinity for chasing down the whores. And I don't mean some stereotypical broad stroke of a character. It's the underlying theme of the story. In fact, most of their conversations revolve around whores and killing Indians. Their whole venture is based on stolen cattle and horses from a rancher in Mexico.

Lonesome Dove is a godforsaken town in the middle of southern Texas along the Rio Grande river. It's not much of any type of settlement but these two rangers have cleared at least a couple of hexes worth of indians and bandits.

As they break out on their journey, they are accompanied by a number of great NPCs and are followed around by a number of interesting sub-plots.

It's a great slow-paced wilderness adventure filled with danger at every turn, small towns and gritty violent death. It doesn't hold back on any of the true darkness that is missing from most westerns. In fact, the violence can be quite pulpy if you take my meaning. Oh and being a woman in this movie is not something that anyone would find enjoyable no matter how tough a character they may be.

True, westerns are not a far cry from the worlds of rough D&D adventures but this has more of a classic pulp D&D vibe with it's camaraderie, blurred morality, tough characters, wild lands and savage violence than most other fantasy movies.

Am I just projecting D&D onto a show I'm watching? Well when my wife, who has only been playing D&D for about 6 or 7 sessions now, blurts out, "this is one old school adventure!", there must be something there to take notice.

So over this holiday season, if you can't roll dice and you have a taste for a great wilderness adventure I would suggest checking out the mini-series Lonesome Dove (I think they made a tv series after it but I can't vouch for that). You can watch it instantly on NetFlix.

Session XXVII: When The Dead Are Hungry For Souls

Quote of the Game:
"I'm wearing Plate Mail so I hope I don't get a boner."

Descending deeper beneath the Tower of Zenopus than ever before, our party of intrepid adventurers worked their way down a steep flight of dusty, cobweb filled stairs. Along the way, Gnarly discovered a red gem buried in the thick dust.

Finally coming to the bottom of the they followed a passage to a dead end where only a small portly statue stood upon a pedestal. The statue had a human body but it's head was that of an amphibious creature. It had a single red gem for an eye. Gnarly placed the red gem that he found into the other eye socket and a hidden door opened into a north-west passage.

Heading south they found a long narrow chamber with alcoves along the walls. As they began to search the room from the alcoves came a pair of mummies! Failing to fall back from the Televon's symbol of Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams, the mummies engaged the party.

Before the battle was over, two additional mummies appeared out of the darkness. And as the mummies were slain or a burning ruin, Wolfheir and Gnarly ended up with the dreaded mummy-rot!

Exploring the chamber, it was found that one of the pillars holding up the low ceiling had a hidden compartment inside of which was a spear inlaid with decretive heads of wolves. Wolfheir proudly carried the spear and decided to attack from the second ranks as his wounds from the mummy were grievous.

Retracing their steps, they followed another passage south into an odd hall bathed in a slight green glow. The glow was coming from a large pool of green mist in the center of the room. The four corners of this pool had 4 stone statues of domesticated cats with emerald gems for eyes. All along the wall were relief carvings of cats of various breeds and sizes facing the pool.

Exploring the pool of mist, it was decided to tie someone to a rope and lower them down. There wasn't a volunteer so it was decided to tie their Black Hand captive to the rope and lower him down. This captive was just awakening from his horrors from the previous explorations when he found himself tied to a rope and being plunged into the mist. He screamed in protest as he was lowered down to at least 50 feet when his screams had stopped. Tibag and Wolf pulled him back up and found that he had fainted once again.

Wary of the mist, the party decided to play it safe and just steal the emerald eyes from the cat statues and continue out a side passage from the room.

Exploring further they came across tomb where black shapes were lifting off the lids of coffins. Tibag fired an arrow into one of their backs. The four hungry wights turned and charged the party. Yielding not to Morpheus' symbol, the four soul sucking fiends attacked the party. Gnarly sent his mushrooms out to attack but one fell to the touch of the wight.

Maudlin, in battle with a fiend felt the odds were against her survival after she had sacrificed her shield to save her soul and stepped back to retreat. In doing so, Adara the ranger tripped upon the retreating dwarf and fell prone before two of these vile beasts! The life was drained out of her!

Finally defeating the wights, the rest of the party explored the tomb and discovered it to be the resting place of dwarven lords. The tomb was looted and the party thought it best to retreat back to the surface and lick their wounds.

This was our last session of the year as the holidays usually become too busy for everyone to meet. It was a good session to end on, a lot of excitement and fun to end the year. We planning on getting together sometime over the holiday for some additional gaming (there's a large list of games that we've all been waiting to try). Our Swords & Wizardry sessions will return in early January.

Best of holidays to everyone!

Save The Earth!!!

Prog 200!

Yesterday I hit my 200th post.

And with that I've just crawled over 100+ followers. A decent ration I suppose.

So to celebrate, I thought I'd review some of the highlights of the past 200 posts.

The most popular page just happens to be one of the crappiest dungeons and that would be the Castle Caldwell page with 1,170 pageviews. Now, I really don't think all these views are game related. I think most folks are looking for this: Castle Caldwell Won't they be surprised if they use my map while exploring the real Castle Caldwell ruins and run into some goblins and firebeatles!

The next highest page view is my Frank Frazetta memorial page. No mistake here that visitors are indeed seeking out one of the greatest fantasy artists of all time whom we have lost this past year.

After that we have my map making tutorials as the most frequently viewed pages. That is good. I'm glad people find it useful. I feel that I've contributed something back to the FRPG community.

After that we have just a various list of pages with our session recaps scoring quite high too. I'm glad you're enjoying our misadventures!

Some of my favorite posts while hosting this blog are:

5 Great Things To Come Out Of The OSR
One More Delve Back In Time
DM As Participant At The Table: Improvisation
New Race Atlantean

My thanks for all of you who enjoy reading my rambling posts about this extremely odd yet extremely entertaining tabletop game and a welcome to all you new followers too. I hope you find something useful, entertaining, or thoughtful about The Warlock's Home Brew.

Oh, don't forget to check out The Warlock's Curiosities for a bunch of free goodies!

Now for other 200th celebrations!

Hack And Slash

Continuing our look back over our past year's worth of sessions we decided to collect a list of all the monsters hacked and slashed. And so, in no particular order....

1 Zombie Cat
9 Ghouls
5 large spiders
54 Giant Rats
1 Zombie
1 Evil Wizard
1 White Ape
6 Pirate
130 Crypt Crawlers (Crotch Goblins (yes, that's right, 130!))
2 Giant Centipedes
5 Skeletons
31Goblins
1 Iron Statue
1 Eater of the Dead
1 Giant Tic
1 Were-rat
5 skeleton
1 Monster Rat
1 Giant Spider
3 Cave Eels
1 Giant Crab
4 Mushroom-men
7 Giant Frogs
14 Members of the Black Hand
9 Beast-men
6 Orcs
1 Wooden Golem
6 Evil Clerics
2 Gargoyles
1 Hell Hound
2 Shadows
1 Evil Priest
1 Living Statue
6 Giant Ants
2 Jackals of Darkness
1 Giant Skeleton
1 Walking Slime
2 Gricks
4 Mummies
4 Wights

Updated:

PC Deaths:
Arven - Priest of Mithra
Gedleesmote - Dwarven Axe-bearer
Adara - Stygian Strider
Slick Vinny died but was resurrected.

...and with that we hit 200 posts!

NOT The Thor Trailer

I told ya!

Okay, okay, here it is.

The Peak Of The Marvel Silver Age

It would be hard to argue that the Marvel Silver Age of comics was the best for the superhero genre. The stories and artwork exploded off the pages especially with the artwork of Jack Kirby, John Romita, Steve Ditko and John Buscema and with inspired dialogue by Stan Lee.

Beginning in in the early 60's with the Fantastic Four and soon after with Spider-man, The Hulk, Thor and the Avengers, the stories progressed in a linear fashion with events having far reaching consequences upon the characters and situations throughout the new and expanding Marvel Universe. Character deaths were, at that time, permanent and character change, even for their main characters and supporting cast evolved throughout this era.

This lasted until about 1968 when Marvel was sold and the characters began to become marketable iconic images of the day. Story-lines began to be repeated and cause had only temporary effects.

There might be many arguments when the actual peek of this era was, but for me I would say that it was December 1966 with this story here:


All the issues of the Fantastic Four lead up to this moment of spectacular greatness!

The ongoing battles with the infamous Doctor Doom, the baddest of the bad of marvel villains who had been out of action for more than a year after his hands were crushed by an out of control Ben Grimm!

The cosmic power of Galactus was unleashed upon the earth for the first time and the power of the Silver Surfer was demonstrated when he fought The Thing a couple of issue earlier. All the elements were in place for the battle royal! Here we have the Shakespearean tragedy at it's greatest!

The unsuspecting three-some (Johnny was out seeking the hidden refuge of the Inhumans and his love Crystal) get called into stop a prison escape of their old enemies the Sandman and the Wizard.


But this is all small potatoes as the Silver Surfer answers a royal summons from the ruler of Latveria...
After a brief friendly display of power between the two Doc Doom almost lets the cat out of the bag as one of his servants inadvertently bumps into his fearful master!

Doom is quick to seize control of his explosive anger in front of the wary Surfer.


And now begins the ultimate peek of the Marvel Universe...

One of the greatest, if not the greatest splash pages brought to you by Jack Kirby, Joe Sinnott, and Stan Lee.


So what does Doctor Doom do with his new found power cosmic? Begins to conquer the world starting with his own hapless Latverian villagers before moving on to the Defeat of the Fantastic Four in issue 58!

This storyline would continue on for another 4 issues after that. This was the very first time in the Marvel Universe that the power cosmic was stolen by an the diabolical Doctor Doom and went head to head, no holds barred against the heroes of the earth.

It would only be a few short years later that Kirby would bitterly leave marvel and the creativity would stagnate (for the most part). Unfortunately, this exact storyline would be revisited again and again in the 70's, 80's and 90's and adapted into a less than satisfactory movie with each time being watered down in it's power and grandeur.

Just thought I'd share....