Battle Scarred

This is what a Judges Guild Judge's Screen looks like after you game with it from two to six times per week from ages 13-16. (1978-1981) Decoloration resulted from spilled beer, I believe the dark spot on "Treasure Types" is weed resin.

Wild Space

Ok, so I am gaming my adventuring group through a dystopian apocalyptic Wilderlands where some cataclysmic event has knocked the planet Ghenrek IV off it's axis.

Last game we had two new players introduced, Daughter Cooliosis and her Coastie husband, who are each running some futuristic characters. Soooo of course because my brain is never settled I had to come up with an entire intergalactic milieu for the setting.

Judges Guild back in the late 1970s and early 1980s published several supplements for the science fiction RPG Traveller set in the Gateway quadrant. I wondered whether there was any effort to tie in the Wilderlands setting with the science fiction products.

While it doesn't appear that there was any direct effort to do so, I did find a Judges Guild Traveller scenario Marooned On Ghostring where, as a result of an interstellar mis-jump, a starship crew ends up at an uncharted planetary system.

The similarities are that Ghostring (the planet) is the fourth planet of the system, earth-like, and has a planetary ring - all just like Ghenrek IV from the Wilderlands.

While the topography is not the same, there was an area in the middle of the Ghostring planet map that was amenable to some slight changes that would evoke the Wilderlands setting. I photo-shopped the adjustments and resulted in this map below. Hexes are 435 miles across which puts that center-northern continent with my changes in at the same scale as the Wilderlands.

The northernmost area needs some work where Valon and areas above that city would be, but otherwise the Wilderlands settled in quite nicely.

Next I had to add my off-kilter for the future Wilderlands, and also change the weather effects to make the planet colder and more barren. This is the planetary map I'll be using in the game.

DunDraCon Moving to Santa Clara after 29 Years

(My first DunDraCon convention badge, DDC 16. Then hacked it for DDC 17.)

DunDraCon announced that DDC 44 will be the last at the San Ramon, CA Marriott Hotel and are moving the gaming convention to the Santa Clara, CA Marriott.

My gaming group has attended DunDraCon in San Ramon since Kevin tipped us off about the convention moving there in 1992. We have commandeered vacant rooms, gamed in stairwells, hallways, private guest rooms, and of course all the open gaming rooms.

Sumerled, J.A.S., and Postman Bob even made it up onto the roof of the hotel one year. (Somebody in maintenance left a long ladder alongside the building - attractive nuisance!)

We have had an annual pre-game parking lot BBQ nearly every year (even in the rain), and used to hold a breakfast BBQ also with J.A.S. and his gas-grilled pancakes.

During my "dark times" with the drink when our d&d game wasn't all that healthy our single game every year was still The Con. The only two I missed are 2005 when I resided, newly sober, in my SLE, and 2014 when I had to retake the bar exam that February.

Dang, nearly 3 fucking DECADES... that I believe qualifies as an era.

Nobody Home?

(Art from Black Gate)

So, lizard-cleric takes a long view with his superior infra-vision across the night-time snowy wastes and suddenly spots two humanoid figures moving as quickly as they seem capable through the snow toward the rope trick where the party is hidden. Lizard-cleric awaits their approach and hales them when the couple, a bare-chested human and a half-giantess, is within 40 feet.

Just as the couple make the location of the party's rope, masses of ghouls appear behind following them, ghouls being room-temperature undead and invisible to lizard-cleric's infra-vision.

The humanoid newcomers turn to stand and fight, while haughty paladin and several companions drop down to join the fray. Despite brutal destruction and waves of undead-turning waged by the adventurers, ghouls keep coming in numbers approaching hundreds. As combat continues lizard-cleric notices heat from a tall gaunt and armored shape perhaps 500 feet in the distance on a large hill opposite the source of ghouls from whence the humanoid couple ran.

As battle rages a huge undead knight approaches, half snake and wielding weapons in its four arms. The giant half-snake is adorned over its eyes with a blackened visor.

The new bare-chested man motions toward half-giantess companion, indicating he sees the visor, when the giant half-snake lobs a small globe into the midst of the heroes. The globes explodes in fire and necrotic magic. Haughty paladin leaps in front of his dragonborn associate, sparing her from certain destruction, while the others, severely wounded, retreat back into the rope trick (shrinking the half-giantess to fit everyone).

As the battle seems futile a large band of githyanki warriors, as they had briefly encountered in white elves cavern lair, magically appear shifting in and out of existence engaging the ghoulish warriors.

Haughty paladin's left leg is missing from the orb's explosion, and adventurers retreat up the rope trick. Lizard-cleric takes I final look to locate the strange gaunt and armored person, who is now bounding through the snow in their direction.

The party rests and heals for some time within the extra-dimensional space of the rope trick, when it is decided to take a look about before the spell ends.

Outside extra-dimensional space they seem to be floating in dark and silvery clouds. Off in the distance a city stands on a huge floating rock. The city is marked by two ivory towers intertwined in a double-spiral, a double-spiral exactly the same as the towers on the assimar's banner...

Future Viridistan

(Original map from Judges Guild, 2005 I am pretty sure...)

Har, I "Ted Turnered" a black and white re-imagined Viridistan, City-State of the World Emperor. I still think this is a trippy map and wanted to enhance it a bit, then, since the adventuring party I have been game judging is in a future dystopian Wilderlands, though perhaps I will utilize this map for the "Immortal City" of the future (circa about 5400 BCCC).

There are a number of factors for future Viridistan. One was when we last left it was being threatened, unbeknownst, by undead hordes from beneath the city-state. Second there was a conspiracy by Wildfire, son of the Green Emperor, to take the throne. Third was the apocalyptic explosion from the City of the Gods in the Valley of the Ancients.

I think I'll start with the named features on this newer map to see what characters and artifacts might have survived the intervening history. Next I suppose I'll have to figure out what happened prior to the apocalypse. Fun stuff, heh, heh, heh...

Grenadier Miniatures Box Sets

I still have plenty of these miniatures, but only one of the old boxes. Their art was fantastic...

***Ray Rubin is the artist and also was a Vice President of Grenadier.

Artaban

My good old friend Kevin has resided up in Washington State now for just about a couple of decades.

When we started up our v.3.5 Wilderlands "High Fantasy" campaign back in 2004 I hadn't thought about remote, online playing really at all. But when we started gaming again after a very dismal probably 8-year period of chronic drunkenness (for me anyway) of running maybe 1-2 sessions each year, Kevin wanted in.

The half-drow Artaban began as an NPC who Kevin glommed on to because he joined late compared to everyone else and we wanted to keep the character levels similar. We patched Kevin in with a webcam of our game table and speaker-phone which worked "some" of the time (had volume and cross-talk distorting the signal problems).

Still Kevin stuck it out, then Shade Structure's mad gnome druid assassinated Artaban after the dwarf fighter had coldcocked him. See, Kevin had a somewhat disruptive habit of min-maxing then threatening other PCs. In character? Maybe, but Shade said his was an "in character" killing.

Anyhow, I utilized Kevin/Artaban's heathy indignation to run Artaban as a ghost on a side trip through Deamonweb Pits and ultimately a necropolis in the Desert Lands until Artaban reunited his soul and physical form.

Artaban was also a "half"-drow with no original description of what the other half was. I started to weave a tale that the other half of Artaban's genealogy was something ancient and very evil: a Markrab.

Markrabs were a powerful and evil starfaring race that attempted to dominate the Wilderlands planet way back at the dawn of civilization there. A markrab prince setup a fortress in the Valley of the Ancients and proceeded to devastate the population of dragons. This prince started the pre-history Uttermost War by destroying a Space Alliance star cruiser, space station, and satellite probes around the planet. Total destruction of the Wilderlands was only averted by a peace treaty because both sides wanted the opportunity to study the magical "gates" and ecology of the Wilderlands.

Kevin's Artaban eventually rejoined the party for a bit, then in 2011 we had a long-time member of our group, Postman Bob, pass on, so that particular adventuring party ended up in stasis. 2012 we started the new Blipping II campaign and the Wilderlands were left behind for a bit.

Then, as things are wont to do, the game circled around back to the Wilderlands by way of Blackmoor (which has a connection to Judges Guild and the Wilderlands) and getting a chance to use Rob Conley's Wilderlands Map 19, The Wild North, in conjunction with the zombie invasion from Lamentations' "Death Frost Doom." The issue of time and ultimate fates has been introduced, kind of multiversal outcomes that none of which seem particularly rosy.

So now I have the party set in a dystopian future Wilderlands. Not technology-future, it is still basically swords and sorcery, but dark in terms of being barren, no clear allies, and having introduced elements of loss and dread. What I want to do is begin to link the past with this present and a nice way to do that is have a character, Artaban, whose existence spans the intervening time, join up with the new adventuring party.

We'll have to see what Kevin thinks after he receives the package pictured above...

(Here is Artaban's prior history if anyone is interested.)