Graffiti Generator Table

Hey all,

Today I'm taking inspiration from a tremendous post by Improved Initiative. Go check out his blog, it's some great stuff.

He was talking about the role of graffiti in making a town feel vital and lived in, and I thought it was a fantastic jumping off point that just needed one thing: a generator table. I took some time to put together a first draft of a graffiti generator table for a typical fantasy world. It's a mix of rumor mill, plot hooks, and flavor text; and any of it might or might not be true, up to date, or accurate in your game world. Try it out, comment below with your own contributions, and have fun.

Graffiti Generator Table

1 "Sardin McClint's store sells stolen stuff."
2 "Albion knows every girl at Miss Hattory's"
3 This is a strange symbol in a single color (a successful streetwise or similar check will identify this as a gang tag, and will allow the players to search the city, surveying the borders of various rival gangs)
4 Ornate lettering spells out "This is Vandalism"
5 There is a crude portrait of the town sheriff, made to look cartoonishly obese. 
6 "Nearland steel is a hoax"
7 "Jericho was here"
8 "Flora Cooprider hexes hogs"
9 You find a crude drawing of, . . . let's just call it anatomy.
10 "Nymphs dance at Ash Cay"
11 You see a very simple symbol (a successful streetwise or similar check will identify this as a hobo sign indicating a safe place to beg)
12 You see a very simple symbol (a successful streetwise or similar check will identify this as a hobo sign indicating that the police harass beggars here)
13 You see a very simple symbol (a successful streetwise or similar check will identify this as a hobo sign indicating that there's an aggressive dog in the area)
14 "Trinkets for sale, inquire inside"
15 You see a portrait surrounded by an ornate painting of a frame. At the base of the wall is a small pile of flowers that have been left by others.
16 "Buy Enid Pott's Meat Pies"
17 You see the symbol of a defunct and near-universally hated army, defeated nearly a century ago.
18 "Dwarves not welcome"
19 "Tam Beck summons dead"
20 A well composed piece of genuine art, painted on a wall around fifty feet above the ground. 

Book Review: The Midnight Line by Lee Child

The Midnight Line
Author: Lee Child
Publishing Date: 2017
Setting: The American Great Plains
Narrative Genre: Mystery, Thriller
Themes: Military Honor, Addiction, Gray Morality
Series Information: Book 22 (in publishing order) of the Jack Reacher series. It should be noted that the novels have limited cross-over and can be read in any order.

Subjective Length: A day or two

Score: A work of entertainment value The Jack Reacher series has become a mainstay of realistic adventure fiction. If you've enjoyed any of the previous entries in the series, The Midnight Line will not disappoint.

Controversial Themes
Addiction: This book handles the subject of addiction with surprising tact for a series built on the appeal of violence and action. It takes care to highlight the role that once-prevalent prescriptions have played in the current addiction epidemic, and seeks to shed light on the struggle of addicts.
Sexual Content: There are a few attempts at seduction by a married woman; as well as a sex scene that neither veers into completely obscure euphemism, nor graphic description. There is also a scene in which a woman's skirt rides up while she is being restrained.
Violence: The Jack Reacher series has always contained the heavy use of violence to drive the plot. This particular entry in the series has a little less than some of the others, but it is still noticeable.

**SPOILERS AHEAD***SPOILERS AHEAD***SPOILERS AHEAD***SPOILERS AHEAD**


The story opens with Reacher thinking back about the woman he left behind at the last town. He steps off of a bus for a stretch and spots a West Point graduate ring in a pawnshop window. Reacher examines the ring, buys it, and sets himself the goal of finding the original owner. The novel is intentionally vague about his motives, as Reacher himself expresses a little uncertainty as to what's calling him to get involved in this situation. It seems to be a mix of military honor, curiosity, a touch of what might be chivalry (he quickly identifies the ring as belonging to a woman), and perhaps projected guilt or regret from walking away from another woman only a day or so before.

His quest sends him back up the supply chain, from seller to seller, as he tracks down the woman in hard enough straits to sell something symbolic of so much hard work and effort.

This novel adds more likable and memorable side characters than many previous entries in the series; and really sold the cast well. The ending was less climactic than some others by the same author, but that seemed to underscore the quiet sadness in the themes of drug addiction. There is no grand showdown with two unstoppable juggernauts squaring off in battle; and the threat is not in powerful enemies, but in stealthy and unknown enemies.

There's also a good moment of seeing a character like Reacher --someone of quick decisions and solid resolve-- faced with a situation more nuanced than "find bad guy, kill bad guy". There are moral dilemmas presented here that enrich the experience.

Overall, not required reading, but a solid read. If anything in the "lone tough guy" genre piques your interest, then The Midnight Line will be a page-turner far too late into the night.

Happy reading, all.

Beastiary Supplemental: Slide-Rock Bolter

High in the mountains lives a massive beast. First seen by miners in the area, the creature came to be known as the slide-rock bolter.

This creature most resembles a whale. It hunts by gripping the mountainside with it's tail and lying in wait. The creature seeks out slopes of at least a 45° angle with a relatively clear vantage of the lands below. The slide-rock bolter drools a slick substance, which helps it to strike at its prey. When a suitable target passes into the beast's path, the beast releases its grip on the mountain and comes charging down the slope with its enormous maw agape to capture its prey. 

In combat, the beast is a one strike and gone type of predator. It has both high natural armor and a deep pool of hit points. Avoiding the attack would require a reflex save to jump out of the path of the creature's strike. 

The creatures are about 25 feet long at the end of adolescence, and can grow to around 60 feet if they live long enough and have access to substantial hunting grounds. 

Mature bolters can be more wary, and tend to avoid heavily armored parties that could be harder to digest; but may still attack when driven to hunger. Juvenile bolters on the other hand tend to strike at any movement. This can expose them to attack, and, in fact, while several bounties on young bolters have been collected over the years, older members of the species are almost never brought low by adventurers. 

Bolter-territory is recognizable by once-well-trod paths that have been allowed to grow over. An absence of local tribes, packs, and herds can mark dangerous areas as well. However, small birds and rodents do not tend to leave the area, as they are too small to draw attention from something the size of a bolter. 

Best of luck on those desolate mountain paths, and happy gaming, all. 

Check out the blog at the new address here. 

Interplanetary Travel: What Works best for your story?

Hey all,

The other day I decided to sit down and think about the different ways that science fiction has justified interplanetary travel. Usually finding habitable worlds is a task that can turn interplanetary travel into interstellar travel in a hurry. It seemed like a fun idea to put together a list of all of the ones that I could think of.
Here's hoping writers and game masters will find some useful food for thought in this one.

1. Faster than Light (FTL)
ex. Artemis Bridge Simulator
Real-space FTL travel might seem like the easy category; and I thought it'd be easier to find examples of stories where ships "just go that fast, get over it." but it turns out that pseudoscientific explanations are pretty fun to make. That being the case, "just going that fast" is actually fairly rare in well-known and well-received science fiction. 

2. Jump
ex. Farscape (Starburst), Artemis Bridge Simulator
This is basically just a spaceship teleporting. Again, I thought it'd be a little more well-represented in the genre, but I had some trouble finding a lot of examples. I will say, though, that it adds a fun complexity to Artemis to play the game on jump mode. Official recommendation: jump drive mode on Artemis. Alright, moving on. 

3. Otherspace 
ex. Warhammer 40,000, Animorphs, Star Wars
Whether it's subspace, hyperspace, zero space, or the warp; it's the dimension next door and rapid transit is no issue, there. Sometimes this is explained as less restrictive physics, or that this otherspace is a small-scale duplicate of our own space. Travel an inch there, travel a light year here. Then just pop back into our reality when you get to that space's equivalent of your destination in our space. Nothing simpler, eh?

4. Generation Ship
ex. Quotzl, Wall-E
This is the Oregon trail of interstellar transit. Your family loads up and heads out, hoping that one day your great-great-grandchildren will be born on this ship, and live to see the new world you've headed towards.

5. Spatial Bending
ex. Star Trek
This is probably the background explanation for a lot of FTL. You can't go faster than light, but space can grow and/or shrink at whatever rate it likes. Now say you could induce space to grow just right that the place you're flying in were to be stretched to a place a hundred light years away. Now you've got it. Traveling quickly, don't be ridiculous. The simplest solution is to alter the shape of reality, obviously.

6. Wormhole Tunneling
ex. Farscape
Sometimes this also ties into Gate Transit (#8), but where Gate Transit might tether, or even create wormholes; wormhole tunneling is more a matter of mapping out the places where our three dimensional space naturally bends and meets through higher dimensions. Imagine that you could either fly to Russia, or go to an alley in Omaha that happens (via, let's just say, the sixth dimension) to be adjacent to a Moscow deli.

7. Relativistic Speed
ex. Ender's Game
Just because you can't go the speed of light, doesn't mean you can't take advantage of time dilation effects experienced when approaching the speed of light. In two-hundred years of travel, you could experience only a few years of time's passage in your own timeline. You do essentially guarantee that you'll never see the people you've left behind again, but that would have been an issue in generation ships, too.

8. Gate Transit
ex. Stargate, Cowboy Bebop, Mass Effect
It might be wormholes, otherspace, or teleportation; but what makes it Gate Transit is the gate. Maybe that's a literal opening, or it might be something like the mass relays. Either way, some piece of tech, networked into a system of similar tech can send you from "gate" to "gate", usually almost instantaneously.

9. Seed Ship
ex. Manseed
Like the generation ship, this ship doesn't really move faster than light, it just plans for a long haul. Unlike the generation ship, this isn't a flying colony, it's a flying fertility clinic. A ship heads off with the resources to breed and incubate new humans upon arrival. It protects the species, but memories of earth will fade pretty quickly.

10. Colonize a Better Space
ex. Firefly
Of course, any of these methods could be used to head for a solar system that's a little more tightly packed with habitable worlds. By the time your story starts, earth may be a distant memory, while interplanetary travel is just a week-long hop between nearby habitable worlds, moons, and asteroids. Massive terraforming in the Sol system might be another way to get the same effect.

11. Mental Projection
ex. The Shadow out of Time
This one's probably the oddest of all: aliens with powerful mental abilities capable of body-swapping through space, and perhaps even through time. This falls pretty far toward the sphere of weird science fiction, but the horror potential can make for some interesting storytelling.

Can you think of any methods I've missed? What's your favorite way of justifying this kind of space travel in science fiction?

Happy travels, all.

Egyptian Ratscrew

Hey all,

If you saw my youtube video Friday, you may remember my mentioning ERS. Egyptian Ratscrew, also known as Egyptian War, Egyptian Rat Slap, or (according to wikipedia) Egyptian Ratkiller, is a game that I remember very fondly from my childhood. In an article about 500, I spoke about the value of customizable games as educational tools. Well, ERS is another great game for teaching young people to look at rules from the inside out.

The basics are pretty simple. Deal out even (or roughly even) piles of cards to each player. The players take turns playing one card off of their deck without looking at it, and placing it on a pile in the middle of the table.

Every face card that gets played needs to be "matched" by another face card. When a player plays a face card, the next player plays out a specific number of cards (or until they play a face card), and then the player after them have to play out cards trying to get a face card, and the first player to not play a face card forfeits the entire pile in the middle of the table to the player before them.

Aces give four chances to match. Kings give three chances. Queens give two chances; and Jacks give only one chance to play a face card.

Of course, if this was all there was to it, there'd be no skill involved. This is where the slapping comes in. When a certain combination of cards is played, the first player to slap the pile gets to keep the pile. If the player slaps something that doesn't count, they have to add a card of theirs to the bottom of the pile. If another card is played before anyone slaps, the opportunity has passed. Slapping takes precedence over matching the face cards, so if someone plays a King, and the next player plays a King, the first player to slap that pair gets the pile, even though a run of face cards was still going.

Which combinations are used are what add spice and variety to the game.

Pairs: Almost every game of ERS will allow slapping on pairs. So, if someone plays a 3, and the next player plays a 3, any player at the table can slap the pile and claim all of those cards as their own.

Sandwiches: A sandwich is a pair separated by a single card. So, if a player plays a 6, the next player plays a 4, and the next player plays a 6, then the first player to slap the pile, gets the pile.

Marriages: The marriage rule treats a King and Queen combo as a pair.

69's and 96's: This is a bit of a cheat, and many players recognize it as an "easy mode". It allows a player to slap on any combination of 9 and 6. This helps very young players who can get easily get confused by the similar symbols.

Ham and cheese sandwiches: This is a sandwich, but with two cards in the middle. This can make the memory aspect of the game even harder, but experienced players will sometimes relish the challenge.

Runs: If three cards that are in sequence with each other are played in any sequence (i.e. 2, then 4, then 3), this can be slapped on.

Of course, these aren't the only possible combinations, and creative players will definitely begin house-ruling some slappable combinations of their own. Have any of you played ERS before? What are some combinations you remember from your own games?

Happy gaming, all.

The Lobheist

Hey all,

Per Saturday's video, I've got some info and stats on this creature, which I've dubbed the Lobhest. The write-up should lend itself to several systems, but for stats, I went to OSRIC. It's an open game license reference document, which makes it useful for statting a monster without worrying about the legality of using the system.

Lobheist
(pronounced "Lobe" "Iced")
[from Scottish Gaelic Lobais (craft, ingenuity) Bheist (beast)]

Hunt-bred Lobhest

frequency: rare

no. encountered: 2d6 (plus a sapient fae creature to act as handler)

size: man-sized (medium)

move: 220 ft

armor class: 0

hit dice: 4d8+2

attacks: 1

damage: 2d4+1

Special attacks: poison

Special defenses: immune to faerie fire

magic resistance: 15%

lair probability: semi-

intelligence: animal

alignment: none

level/xp: 4/230

Draft-bred Lobhest

frequency: rare

no. encountered: 1-2 (plus a sapient fae creature to act as handler)

size: large

move: 120 ft

armor class: 0

hit dice: 6d8+4

attacks: 1

damage: 2d4

Special attacks: poison

Special defenses: immune to faerie fire

Magic Resistance: 15%

lair probability: none

intelligence: animal

alignment: none

level/xp: 4/230

Feral Lobhest

frequency: rare

no. encountered: 1

size: large

move: 150 ft

armor class: 0

hit dice: 6d8+4

attacks: 2

damage: 3d4/3d4

Special attacks: poison

Special defenses: immune to faerie fire

magic resistance: 15%

lair probability: 15%

intelligence: semi-

alignment: none

level/xp: 6/550

The lobheist is a creature bred by the ancient Fae. When the elves fled their Fae masters, these beasts were used often in the hunt for runaway elves. As a result, the lobheist features prominently as a "boogeyman" of elvish culture and lore.

Several breeds exist. The Fae created breeds of lobheist to be used as hounds of the hunt as well as beasts of burden. Additionally, lost lobheist have been known to go feral. Feral lobheists tend to be solitary beasts who seek out primal natural areas and establish a den.

The small hunting breed grow to be about 1 meter tall at the shoulder and hunt in a pack commanded by a sapient fae. The massive draft breed stand between 3 and 4.5 meters at the shoulder and are used as needed in manual labor under the direction of a handler. They are the least intelligent and have the least training and fewest instincts for combat. The feral breeds fall in the middle, and, while savage, only stand about 2.5 meters tall at the shoulder.

A lobheist will not cross running water; however, this is an inherited fear borne out of their Fae heritage, and the water itself poses no threat whatsoever to their physical being.

This same Fae heritage grants them a noticeable defense to magic, including a complete immunity to the effects of the faerie fire spell. Their diet makes their saliva, functionally, a poison; and following a successful bite attack, the target must pass a poison save or incur an additional 1d4 poison damage.


Enjoy the monster, and stay safe in the dark woods, roleplayers.

If a tree . . .

It's a classic question: "If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?"

On the surface, a lot of people can easily dismiss this. Why wouldn't it make a sound? There is no known force that could prevent it from creating a vibration in the air while unobserved. However, this brings in the impossibility of proving a negative. It is impossible to say what does or does not happen in circumstances that are, by definition, unobserved. That rabbit trail leads into weird quantum stuff, but there's another tack to take on this question, and it's semantics. As a literature guy, I'm thinking we veer into semantics rather than dig deeper into the weirdest of sciences.

So then, semantically speaking, is a "sound" a vibration in the air? You might think that, yes, that is what we know that sound scientifically is; but think about it this way: could sound be defined as the interaction between airwaves and eardrums?

If a vibration never interacts with a set of eardrums, is that vibration sound? 

Another old adage goes "In space, no one can hear you scream." If a tree falls in a vacuum, yet is influenced by gravity equal to that of earth, it still strikes with the same force, and creates the same vibrations; but without a sound-conductive medium, those vibrations do not travel through the right medium to reach human ears.

Most would say that a tree falling in THOSE circumstances would not make a sound, even though the force of impact creates the same energy's-worth of vibration as a tree falling on earth. So, in one set of circumstances, the tree falling and not being heard by humans makes a sound; yet in another circumstance, the tree falls, and goes unheard by humans, and does not make a sound.

I would argue, then, that the tree makes no sound; because until a vibration reaches an eardrum, it is not a sound; it is nothing but a vibration.

. . .but, what do you think?