Isometric notebook map

I like this map Alex Schroeder pasted in his notebook. I'll have to print some isometric graph paper for myself...

(I believe the map is for an adventure that will appear in Fight On! number 14.)

Thoats

Thoat, Lesser

About the size of a human horse, this Barsoomian creature has eight legs with yellowish elephant-like feet, a long neck, hairless grey hide, and a wide, flat tail. Red Martians breed lesser thoats as mounts, and sometimes employ them as beasts of burden. AC 6, HD 4, Move 24"

Thoat, Greater

The greater thoat resembles its lesser cousin in form, but stands ten feet high at the shoulder. In temperament, it's more vicious and unruly. Green Martians ride greater thoats in battle. AC 6, HD 6, Move 24"

Creatures of Man size or smaller who attempt to mount a greater thoat without prior telepathic training must save versus Dragon Breath or sustain 2-12 trample damage.

There are two species of thoat on Mars: the small, comparatively docile breed used by the red Martians as saddle animals and, to a lesser extent, as beasts of burden on the farms that border the great irrigation canals; and then there are the huge, vicious, unruly beasts that the green warriors use exclusively as steeds of war.

These creatures tower fully ten feet at the shoulder. They have four legs on either side and a broad, flat tail, larger at the tip than at the root, that they hold straight out behind while running. Their gaping mouths split their heads from their snouts to their long, massive necks. Their bodies, the upper portion of which is a dark slate color and exceedingly smooth and glossy, are entirely devoid of hair. Their bellies are white, and their legs shade gradually from the slate color of their bodies to a vivid yellow at the feet, which are heavily padded and nailless.

The thoat of the green man has the most abominable disposition of any creature I have ever seen, not even the green men themselves excepted. They are constantly fighting among themselves, and woe betide the rider who loses control of his terrible mount; yet, paradoxical as it may appear, they are ridden without bridle or bit; and are controlled solely by telepathic means, which, fortunately for me, I learned many ago while I was prisoner of Lorquas Ptomel, jed of the Tharks, a green Martian horde.

The beast to whose back I had vaulted was a vicious devil, and he took violent exception to me and probably to my odor. He tried to buck me off; and, failing that, reached back with his huge, gaping jaws in an effort to seize me.*

Kickstarted for free OSR art?

Should we have free community art for old school RPG house rules?

I'm floating this idea to see if there's enough interest. I like to make semi-pro looking house rules documents for my games. One of the issues I've run into is that, as great as the Open Game License has been for old school gaming, art and illustrations are typically reserved as Product Identity. That's totally understandable, but it means I can't, for example, shove my house rules into Swords & Wizardry and distribute it, even if I'm only giving it away for free to people I play with (online or off).

What if we started some kind of kickstarter project to commission art that anyone could use and redistribute in their own non-commercial RPG projects?

Would this be useful to the community?

Is there enough interest?

How would artists feel about it?

Carcosa Wacky Races inspiration

Richard, the Bosted Globe posted a bunch of photos you may find useful for your Carcosa Wacky Races (should you wish to make them an annual event).

(Somebody make this guy a color!)

Glow-in-the-dark fungi

The National Geographic photo contest has some great entries, including this one:

Hiking in pitch darkness within the dense forest undergrowth, one might encounter one of mother nature's awesome creations. A scene which many thought only belongs to the Sci-fi Movies. Filoboletus Manipularis is a fungus which naturally produces a faint eerie glow in the night by a natural process known as bioluminescence, shown in this 3-minute long exposure of these elusive little mushrooms.

Add some giant glow-in-the-dark mushrooms to you dungeon or sandbox!

My RPG bookshelf

James Maliszewski asks for photos of the bookshelf you most frequently use in gaming. Mine changes fairly often as books get shuffled around, but this is it at the moment:

• Stonehell
• Ready Ref Sheets
• Realms of Crawling Chaos
• AD&D Players Handbook
• AD&D Monster Manual
• AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide
• Tome of Adventure Design
• Swords & Wizardry Core
• AD&D Fiend Folio
• OSRIC
• Labyrinth Lord
• LL Advanced Edition Companion
• Arduin Trilogy
• Playing at the World
• The Hobbit
• The Lewis Chessmen (which are my reference for dwarves)
• a few Conan collections
• Ill Met in Lankhmar
• The Iliad
• The Odyssey
• Carcosa
• Borges Collected Fiction (I'm undecided about the new translations)
• The Book of Imaginary Beings
• The Arabian Nights
• Dying Earth
• Lem's The Cyberaid (Trurl and Klapaucius are basically Vancian wizards)
• a Lovecraft collection
• Vorheim
• OD&D vI-III and Greyhawk
• Swords & Wizardry WhiteBox
• A Book of Surrealist Games

And, on the end, a few movies:

• Thundarr
• Fantastic Planet
• La Planète Sauvage
• Land of the Lost (complete original TV series)
• a Ray Harryhausen collection

The shelf below this has a couple of magazine boxes full of modules and some three-ring binders, but their spines aren't particularly distinctive. The Greyhawk Folio, Holmes, Molkday, Cook, the LotFP Grindhouse box, and the Astonishing Swords & Sorcerers of Hyperborea box are down there too.

Tinkering LBB d6 damage

In LBB original D&D, all weapons do d6 damage. This seems to upset a lot of players who grew up with variable weapon damage. I've been satisfied enough with the "you'll be just as dead if I slit your throat with a dagger or a long sword" rationale that I've stuck with d6 damage in my Stonehell white box game.

However, I recently got pulled into another discussion on the matter, which mentioned a couple of popular d6 damage variants. These variants concern themselves with differentiating short/light weapons (daggers, darts, slings) from normal weapons (swords, spears, maces) from long/heavy weapons (two-handed swords, polearms, lances).

The first method is to roll d6 -1 for light weapons, d6 for normal weapons, and d6 +1 for heavy weapons.

The second method is to roll 2d6 and use the lesser roll for light weapons, roll 1d6 for normal weapons, and for heavy weapons to take the higher of two d6 rolls.

I wondered what sort of damage these methods would yield, so (since I don't really understand more than the most basic dice math) I wrote a little script to do some test rolls.

The mean average is easy enough to figure out. The mean of a d6 roll is 3.5, so d6 +/-1 will give a mean of 2.5 and 4.5. No surprise there, but it's reassuring to see the results I expected (within three-hundredths of a point over 100,000 rolls).

The median is somewhat more interesting. The median of 1d6 will of course be 3 or 4. The median of 2d6-take-the-highest is 5. The median of 2d6-take-the-lowest is 2.

The mode of 1d6 can be anything. The mode of 2d6-take-the-higher is 6. The mode of 2d6-take-the-lower is 1.

If I was a fighter with a two-handed sword, I'd be lobbying for the 2d6 method. It certainly proves more differentiation between the weapons types than the +/-1 method.