Renfield's Cast 8 - Spewing Monsters

I was so sick this episode. We try to talk about monster manuals and get no further than The Mythos Dossiers. Then we get distracted by blogs, but we said we'd do that weeks ago so it's ok.

SHOW NOTES

Renfield's Cast 2 : Black Screens Green Text

This week on RENFIELD'S CAST we talk about retro rpg blogs and what we'd like to do them. Ollie gets conjunctivitis in the depths of an ancient forum and Robin invents a new numerical system for reviewing RPG products. THEN WE RUIN IT ALL BY GETTING VCR AND VHS THE WRONG WAY ROUND TEN FUCKING TIMES OH MY GOD.

Show notes after the break

I Ran Logan Knight's Mystics

Rules are shit - this is known. However, I must concede that they are nice for making people do things and making them feel like the things they are doing are the right things to do.

In vanilla Dungeons and Dragons people playing wizards obsess over finding weird scrolls, thieves piss off the rest of the party at every turn and fighters hang around, feel washed out and itch to kill things. All as it should be.

But then along come clerics and bore the shit out of absolutely everyone. Maybe that's intentional? Whatever. Fuck them. Clerics are boring.

Don't worry though. It's going to be OK.


Logan Knight has answers. He wrote a blog post where he suggests replacing stodgy old clerics with his own mad, itinerant mystics. I did, and you could too. Let's talk about why that'd be a good idea.

DIY OSR Starter Sets

Inspired my recent acquisition of Paolo Greco's punk rock anthem, the Cthonic Codex*, I have been thinking about starter sets.

Here are some things that are great about starter sets:

• They come in BOXES.
• Having BOXES on your shelf in between the books makes you feel like a deviant.
• They are full of weird stuff that would seem totally unrelated if it weren't all in a BOX together.
• There are primal human urges to read things that are books but play things that are in BOXES. If you want something played, put it in a BOX.
• You could be making your own OSR Starter Set right now.
• Then you could give it to the one you love. He will say, "I never understood how you could play a game from a book. Now that you have given me your favourite game in BOX form I can love you again."

HERE ARE SOME STARTER SETS YOU COULD MAKE

These ideas for basic OSR starter sets were chosen with a few simple premises:

1. The base of a starter set should sometimes include rules, and then either a module with which to use those rules or instructions for generating scenarios for those rules.
2. The separate pieces of the starter set should have nothing to do with one another. Not be made by the same person, not intended to be used with the same system.
3. The components of the starter set should be free or very cheap.
4. These are all things that I really like and would genuinely love to play.

I Ran Deep Carbon

I am not yet done with Deep Carbon Observatory, though the end is near. My players are currently trapped deep within the Observatory itself; too afraid to descend the great titanium chain into the darkness and kept from returning to the hollow comfort of the surface by the ravenous malice of a naked, crawling giant. This is the culmination of about eighty hours of play during the last six months (almost an hour per A5 page - and that's not counting a lot of unrelated fucking around). This book is dense to the point of being obtuse. Nothing is repeated. Nothing is explicitly stated that can be inferred. In order to discuss it I am going to be blunt and obvious about content that is deft and clever and, I am certain, reveal my total misunderstanding of several core concepts central to Deep Carbon and life in general.

Let's go.