Saturday, August 13, 2011

My Alternate Reality Adventure - Vornheim II: Dungeons

So yesterday I tripped on a stack of Philip K. Dick books in my office and ended up in an alternate reality; the dimensional portal remained above the books so I decided to do a little investigating before returning to this reality.

It didn't take me long to learn something awesome about this reality: PANTERA NEVER EXISTED! I went to a metal show and the crowd was practically gentlemanly, no douches in pot leaf hats backwards moshing into everyone; "metalcore" bands sounded like Rorschach and (oldschool) Corrosion of Conformity instead of Pantera; etc., it was pretty sweet!

But before attending that gig I stopped by a game store. It looks like Hasbro never bought WOTC in this reality, D&D was still third edition and they were actually putting out cool useful products like hexmap sandboxes and packs of standup cardboard miniatures. They had dungeon modules that included the dungeon tiles and cardboard standups for the adventure! I checked online and you could actually buy old OD&D, AD&D, B/X D&D, Gamma World, etc. products via a POD service!

Anyways I see some familiar style artwork on a shelf and it was a book by Zak S., "Vornhein II: Dungeons." My credit card didn't work in this alternate reality, and the store only took american money for some reason, so I wasn't able to buy it and bring it back with me, but it was pretty sweet.

It contained all of the cool dungeon generation shortcut procedures that are on the D&D With Pornstars blog, but there was a butt-load of additional content such as all of the monsters from the Fiend Folio that Zak redid, but now with statistics (including No. Appearing, Morale Scores and Treasure Types). There were more monsters than just the Fiend Folio remakes, and they were generally pretty awesome with the kind of wacked out mechanics that you'd expect. Plus Telecanter had contributed a bunch of content as well! It also contained a bunch of dungeons and lairs; it was significantly bigger than the Vornheim city kit.

Man, I hope Zak produces that book in this reality...

9 comments:

  1. No Pantera + no Hasbro takeover of WotC + Vornheim Dungeons = what on Earth did you come back for?

    ;)

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  2. Man, the singer of my old band was getting tattoo'ed by one of Paul Booth's old guys (Leorcifer) and Phil Anselmo was in there getting some work done while they filmed him for some DVD or some shit, trying to read HP Lovecraft. Phil was so fucked up he couldn't actually read the words and they had to stop shooting every five minutes to coach him...anyways My singer was wearing a Discharge shirt and Phil got excited and was said "that's a good band", when Johnny (singer) said, "Who are you again?" Phil looked really bummed.

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  3. Huh, I wonder if it was the same reality where there was that Planet Algol book.

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  4. ...and Pavement never existed, so indie bands never started doing the strum-strum-moan-moan prozac-rock thing.

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  5. PKD books are one of my favourite go-tos for alternate-world tripping :)

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  6. Zak S said: "Huh, I wonder if it was the same reality where there was that Planet Algol book."

    Where is this reality and how do I get there?

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