So it has been a year since James Maliszewski's last post at Grognardia and the OSR is still a thing. Still no Dwimmermount, though. I read ...| middenmurk.blogspot.com
A long time ago I started to put together a bestiary. I've pursued various other projects in the time since but I still have a fair bit of material I'd like to publish and a reasonably coherent design philosophy. I'm honing an approach to the layout and information design. None of these three mockups are finalised.| Middenmurk
Some may remember this post from long ago, where I wrote about farm tools and various other improvised weapons. This post was meant to follow it but time and circumstance necessitated several circumambulations of the stablished earth betwixt that time and now, and various vicissitudes observed and experienced, so the original is barely recognisable. The names and pictures are what counts, though. Good names can be dusted off and reconditioned.| Middenmurk
Six Words| Middenmurk
This started with nomenclature, as so many things do. I started writing a response to Scrap Princess's post about Dinosaur naming conventions in the fantasy genre. Then I got carried away.| Middenmurk
Two things;| Middenmurk
I think that armour is one of the| Middenmurk
In the beginning everything was a mystery. You started off| Middenmurk
While I recognise that the makers of mediaeval and fantasy| Middenmurk
There is a small subset of internet nerds who dislike the| Middenmurk
Far beyond Pricking Moray another| Middenmurk
An excerpt from The Carcass of Noon;| Middenmurk
As I see it, there are two main| Middenmurk
So I spend time writing one thing and then go off and write| Middenmurk
I don't own a copy of Dwimmermount so I don't know how this would play out in the original but it seems at least vaguely cromulent. This dungeon was generated through use of the find/replace function working from Zak's fairly recent MadLibMount post, I haven't seen any others. | Middenmurk
When I read this at Monsters and Manuals about the nature of the practice of writing I thought it made sense and so returned to my previous habit of tapping on a keyboard. Nothing came of it at first (there is definitely a rusty period) but eventually the same dense and crusty stuff that I enjoy started to re-emerge, which was gratifying. Additionally, Santicore reared his ugly and I availed myself of the opportunity to do the layout for my own entry which got me interested in the algorithmic...| Middenmurk
Here's another image from my Middenmurk bestiary. Grimmel-Dobbies comes, as usual, from a couple of dialect words and essentially means Pond-Fairies or Pond-Bogeys, they are essentially my version of the Welsh Gwragedd Annwn. They live in Lake Nenuphar (Nenuphar means water-lilies) and do not remember that they were inundated centuries ago. As far as they are concerned their realm was ever thus and there is no such thing as water. There are stirrings among the feuding houses, though, and a he...| Middenmurk
I have been playing with layout and proceduralism. There are ways of dragging more information out of every dice roll. Doing this has an aesthetic appeal for me. Every time it is necessary to roll a dice to produce a relatively uninteresting result, like how many of something there are, I want to see more interesting results generated. I am also erring on the side of terse description though I can't see that lasting very long.| Middenmurk
For a very long time I've thought that there was a problem with equipment in D&D. Essentially, a fighter starts with a perfectly decent weapon at the beginning of first level and very soon afterwards acquires the best armour available in the mundane world. By second-level there is not much that interests the fighter on the standard equipment list save more of the same.| Middenmurk
I am not interested in 5E because it is inextricably linked to the contemporary fantasy aesthetic. This also happens to be the secondary reason why I hated the Hobbit films. I realise I have exiled myself to a barren peninsula of my own eccentricity here but the fact remains that the aesthetic essence of the thing (i.e. its "style") matters far more to me that playability, accessibility or innovation. If 5E pursued a Weird aesthetic and rolled out Ian Miller, Russ Nicholson and John Blanche t...| Middenmurk
When the time comes for describing the monster the GM looks up and to the left, searching for the words, and the hands come out and begin delineating and caressing the invisible contours of this thing they are imagining. The players are transported, to some extent, by this performative enactment of monstrosity. It is not merely the actual description of the monster but the struggle for description that bears the aesthetic reward. There is a moment of shared mythopoieia where the GM is delvi...| Middenmurk
There is a moment when you've got to get off the big boat and start paddling to shore and fucked if I have any understanding of how that particular process goes. The mystery that is on the shore is unfathomable. I'm not there but am paddling still.| Middenmurk
I frequently scrawl in notebooks because of situational restrictions ( at times self-imposed) then I lose the notebooks. Later on I find them while cleaning or looking for something else and what is written within immediately and inevitably distracts me from whatever useful task I am performing. The person who wrote that stuff knew precisely what I like and seems to be endeavouring to reconfigure reality and art in just such a manner as is ever my intent, and yet, some quirk of my drug-addle...| Middenmurk
I have a thing where I am fascinated and appalled by the ramifications of gold being the source of all power in old school games. It makes me think of Blood Meridian and of Cortez and like all the things with which I am deeply emotionally entangled I prance and caper at the margins of the thing because I cannot stare into the heart of the mystery and cannot bear to try to hold it for fear it might be crushed by my apish forepaws. It reminds me also of this bit of Milton;| Middenmurk
This is my obligatory anagram post. I've been listening to Rabelais again on audiobook in the forest and it got me onto a blog called Six Degrees of Thomas Urquhart, which is nice and allows me to indulge my logofascination, the which indulgence is one of the primary reasons for the existence of this blog (no secret really). So Zak brought up this site which I've been in love with before and I allowed myself the writing of this little post in which I mess with anagrams and mediaeval monotheism.| Middenmurk