Dilvashti the Carrion Sculptor

Dilvashti the Carrion Sculptor
A centuries-old Angallan Sorcerer, Dilvashti looks like a handsome young Angallan Man and dresses in simple brown or dark red robes. He is charming and personable, and is also a master of reworking creatures, both with mechanical components and the limbs, organs and sundry other body parts of other living things. He does a brisk trade in gladiators; concubines to suit the most twisted desires; guardian and war beasts; and any other variation of repurposed creature there is a demand for. Rumors speak of him having contacts across the continent in all strata of society as well as distant spheres worlds such as The Changers of The Metal Earth, Vog-Mur The Necromancer Of Athanor, and possibly others? Dilvashti has a workshop and laboratory complex located in the subterranean regions of Pit, guarded both by his own creations and the community itself, which depends upon him to provide specialized mining labourers.

Hawkwind Related Third-Party Planet Algol Madness

[Spoilers-My Players Keep Out!]Sean Wills of Bite the Bulette continues his Awesomeness...

All I have to say is Wow! and that I am glad that someone beat me to the punch in detailing a means of getting to Athanor from Algol. And it's powered by Hawkwind!

A Second Planet Algol Campaign & Savage Swords of Athanor

While performing my usual post-work/walking the dog blog reading routine I was surprised and gratified to learn of a Second Planet Algol game!

I have been corresponding with Sean Wills, the auteur responsible for Bite the Bulette, regarding adapting his excellent Martian Skyship Rules for the upcoming Planet Algol booklet (which he very graciously allowed), and he had posted about a Planet Algol related project, but this still comes as a very pleasant surprise. I am also very pleased that his group used Savage Swords of Athanor * for the game, one of my intentions with the Planet Algol booklet is to not only present a weird science fantasy campaign setting but to also provide a rules options and supplements for weird science fantasy gaming, and I'm glad that others are finding Algol's "sister projects" similarly useful.

So to Two-Blade Leetha (Angalla warrior woman), Johnny Tupelo (Earthman (fighter), cowboy who may be dreaming the whole thing due to being cabbaged out of his head on peyote after capture by the Apache), and Uncle Lhubi (Kheruli magic user); shine on you crazy diamonds and may no shoggoths find you without a fully-charged gamma radiation pistol! And to Sean Wills: Thank you for finding my wacky creation a suitable venue for your campaign, may your players be able to laugh and start rolling up a new character when faced with the horrible death of a PC!


* I had opportunity this weekend to peruse a print copy of Savage Swords of Athanor and I am thoroughly impressed. Doug Easterly has expanded and refined the Athanor material previously presented on his blog into a complete and elegant package, and every page I perused made me want to adventure on Athanor!

Freakin' Savage Swords of Athanor on Lulu and Digest-sized Boxes

Print Version
PDF Version

When I first started getting into the Old School Revolution/Weird Planet Fantasy/Blog scene, Athanor was one of the first sites I started obsessing about. It's author, Douglas Easterly, has been posting a cornucopia of valuable "weird planet fantasy" content on his blog that I'm always eager to read, and in many cases nick for my own campaign.

Needless to say I am inordinately gratified to see that the Athanor material has been compiled, revised, and made available on Lulu. I'm unsure what the differences are between the content in this publication and the previously unveiled Athanor material, but I am eager to find out!

So congratulations to Doug Easterly, and may we see many more releases for this quality game setting!

As an aside, Doug has also been gracious enough to grant me permission to use some of his material for the upcoming Planet Algol release. Thank you very much Mr. Easterly, have a great holiday and a wonderful new year!

also...

Two Piece Boxes, 9&3/8" x 6" x 1', perfect for digest-sized booklets (or candy)

http://www.kitchenkrafts.com/product.asp?c2p=hp&pn=BX1400&bhcd2=1261536087

http://www.prettypartyplace.com/sb-211.html

I know of you out there in OSR-land have been assembling sets of digest-sized booklets, thanks for Planet Algol Campaign participant Lester you can now get yourself a cute little box to hold you booklets and dice! I don't know how I'm going to fit all of the AD&D/OSRIC rules in 8.5"x5.5" booklets...

The Jackal vs Big Baby, Two Excellent Random Tables and Some Great Monsters

Kal-Mor Meets The Vat-Man

"...a deformed head like an unwholesome parody of a human baby, the features tiny and clustered around the center of the vast idiot face..."

Illustration by Lester/B. Portly

Vat-Man stats available Here courtesy of the Dungeon Master of the World of Athanor. However, I believe they originated in Thool.

also...

Random Pulpy Planetary Romance Plot Generation Tables courtesy of Athanor.

&

Random Sword & Sorcery Drug Generation Tables courtesy of Yoon-Suin.

Both of the above were cut & pasted into my own supplemental referee manual.

Weird Fantasy Monsters and Martian Monsters from Beyond the Black Gate, the Grey Gulper and the Grook are my favorites.

R.I.P.Thool and Current Activities

Real Life concerns, my recent purchase of Borderlands and "D.I.Y. Booklet Fever" has been keeping me away from posting. However, I am still banging away at Planet Algol and have been somewhat productive.

I've been meaning to blog about this subject for a while, so I would just like to take a moment AND BEG THE WORLD OF THOOL TO RETURN. The fact that the World of Thool blog is gone is almost criminal, although I appreciate the Thool Wiki. If anyone was smart enough to cut, paste and save Thool content please let me know...the Phasmids are crying!

Fortunately we have Thool's spiritual successor, Athanor, and I am gratified by the recnt news that Doug is working on more Hex Descriptions (one of my favorites in any product) and a Athanor booklet on Lulu. Check out (if you haven't already) the blog and the PDF booklets.

As I said, Planet Algol is still going strong. This last sunday was the Halloween session, with a rare appearance of our gaming group's "Trucker's Wife" Cameron. Much Hawkwind and Spaceart was listened to, a deceased companion and his magic armor was recovered, and the party repeatedly got lost in the Forbidden Mist Valley while seeking the rayguns of a crashed flying saucer.

I have been working on laying out and printing/assembling booklets myself (somewhat digest sized at 5.5"x8.5"), "Planet Algol I: The Iridium Plateau Players Guide"(16-20 pages) "Planet Algol I: The Irdium Plateau Referees Guide"(16-20 pages) and "Planet Algol: Kharhem - Snakepit of Daggers" (32-36 pages). I'm planning on selling these booklets at a modest price in the near future.

Kharhem is a Swords & Sorcery city setting with serpent cults, slavers, assassin guilds, subterranean complexes and an avatar of the black goat with a thousand young. Some of you may be somewhat familiar with it in a previous incarnation.

The booklets will be printed out and assembled by hand, D.I.Y. style, and I'm having a lot of fun with formatting and different papers. I'll be using quality paper and am planning on having great artwork (thanks to Fat Cotton and Douglas) so if everything works out as planned these will be an aesthetically pleasing bundle of weird science fantasy.

Much of the Planet Algol information from the blog will be in the booklets (and I'm not planning on taking any of that down), however much of it will be improved/expanded (I have to fix the terrible jungle symbols on the Iridium Plateau map), without any unnecessary wordcount bloat.

I have some Players Guides and prototypes printed up although the final version will definitely not have the Virgil Finlay artwork (I wish...).

Thoughts on Dinosaurs.... and their Hit Dice?

Notice how those two adventurers, presumably 4th level, have a real "not going to get involved" attitude going on. "Looks like the breeze is picking up Silverleaf, let's get the fuck out of here!"

I love dinosaurs, I have since I was a child, so it makes sense that I love dinosaurs in my D&D. Whether it's The Isle of Dread, the old Warlord comics, Carcosa, or a forgotten prehistoric age of swords and sorcery, dinosaurs work for me. One interesting thing about dinosaurs in AD&D and B/XD&D is that they were absolute monsters, both hit dice and damage wise. You could totally see a Tyrannosaurs get the jump on a dragon or giant and rip it to shreds. If you incorporated them into your random encounter tables, they were going to be one of the Alpha predators.

I call this the "Skull Island Effect," reflective how, in both the original and the Peter Jackson versions of King Kong (speaking of dragon killing Tyrannosaurs!), dinosaurs were bad-ass. A group of tough adventurers were going to have to be large, well organized and willing to take casualties to take one of these behemoths down. Reminiscent of old giant monster movies as well as Lin Carter's city-block sized "Thongor" dinosaurs.

Hohoho! I think that poor dumb bastard is going to get shredded by a cute ole' brontosaur! How humiliating. "It was hell! Joe got disemboweled by a triceratops, Sam was swallowed whole by a tyrannosaur, Pete was carried off by a pterodactyl, and Mike, well um, a brontosaurus bit Mike's head off. He wasn't even messing with it, just hiding in a tree. Yeah, I dunno, I thought they ate plants too. Maybe it though Mike was a tasty shoot or some kind of fruit?"

As an aside, one of things I love about Carcosa is that when you get into the hex descriptions you've got all these cthuloid monstrosities, war-machine robots, whacked out cyborgs and packs of dinosaurs, many with mutations like tentacles or blasting radiation beams out of their eyes, suddenly Carcosa makes me think of Kaiju and especially Monster Island! Think of all of those Spawn of Shub-Niggurath, robots, cyborgs and dinosaurs as giant fucking building crushers in rubber suits shooting radioactive laser blasts. It certainly works with the bucked load of hit and damage dice that AD&D and B/XD&D dinosaurs have.

Oh this? Just one of my snapshots from that vacation to Carcosa. Just another boring day watching mutant dinosaurs fight from a village of funny colored people with a dictator named "The Ultimate Warrior" or some shit.

The original, scrapped cover for Supplement V: Carcosa. Brink of destruction? This crazy shit's going to continue for billions of years on Carcosa!

On the other hand, there is a different, yet "genre appropriate" view, taken in works like the Carcosan Grimoire and Athanor. In these works dinosaurs are tough, but not the upper tier behemoths of classic D&D. I call this the "Warlord Comic Book" effect.

"For fuck's sake! Every time I get some one-on-one time with a hot chick in a crazy bikini one of you scaled cockblockers has to jump out of the bushes!"

Sure, when a slavering carnosaur comes bursting out of the jungle at the party it's no walk in the park, but Travis Morgan and company are able to easily dispatch the beast without any casualties. Hell, Travis Morgan can usually kill a dinosaur without wasting any of his pistol ammunition!

These lower hit dice dinosaurs are a different, interesting approach than the 20 hit dice tyrannosaurs of the classics, and I think it would work, especially to emulate a classic "comic book" style, or a campaign where the player characters are supposed to be kicking dinosaur ass left and right, such as a Turok inspired game...

Think that Indian is in trouble? He did that shit day-in, day-out for 28 years, this is his equivalent of a morning jog.