Author: mdhughes

Iron Falcon & Basic Fantasy RPG

One of the many OSR retroclones of some form of early Dungeons & Dragons, is Basic Fantasy RPG, by Chris Gonnerman, originally in 2006, and has lately been fully cleaned up as Creative Commons, no OGL or other license problems. And just recently his other game Iron Falcon, from 2014, has got the same CC cleanup and rerelease.

On both sites, the PDF or ODT (LibreOffice) files for the game and many (in BF's case, MANY) adventures are free, or you can buy a printed book from 'zon or Lulu. BF and adventures are sold at cost so are very cheap, Iron Falcon's priced a little higher but I got the hardcover rulebook for $22 and adventure for $8. Half the price of anything else you'll get!

Wherein I talk too long about game minutiae:

Basic Fantasy

BF is a pretty straight copy of Basic/Expert (1981). Most of it's much more terse than the original game. "Race" (I prefer the term Species) is not class: Some of the races (Dwarf, Elf, Halfling, Human) have limited lists of classes (Cleric, Fighter, Magic-User, Thief, F/M-U, T/M-U for Elves only), but there are no Level limits. So there's not really any purpose to being Human; he tries to balance that a little by giving 10% experience bonus, and an option in the back suggests you can double that. While I don't run a Humans-only game, I find it weird that so many games have devalued Humans to the point where you never see them played. Almost all fantasy literature stars Humans!

Levels go up to 20, rather than 14 in B/X. Clerics have a smooth spell distribution (I don't use them, but OD&D and B/X have a weird gap at Level 6 giving spell levels 3 & 4 at once; in BF L6 just gives SL 3). Fighters don't have War Machine/Cleave/Sweep etc, or any special abilities really. Magic-Users have a simple spellbook of Read Magic and one other spell, which is fine. Thieves get the usual list of skills with percentile chances, no species modifiers.

There's no alignment system. Which is fine, I often ignore or rewrite it for characters, but it's a serious lack in the monster listings.

Experience points gained for combat are 2-4x higher than B/X, Supplement I Greyhawk, or AD&D, so monster-bashing at lower levels is practical. "Non-combat challenges" are the only other source of EP ("XP") listed, gold for EP is listed in the optional rules.

Equipment list is decent, and most items have a paragraph explanation. Weapons could be longer but it's fine, and has variable damage listed, but not "damage vs large", which is useful to give Fighters an edge at higher Levels. Armor uses ascending AC only, base 11 (which I prefer, it makes 20-DAC=AAC (descending, ascending), but many OSR games use base 10, so 19-DAC=AAC), and chain and plate armor are priced reasonably (60/300 GP). Oddly, shields are 7 GP? Good list of land & water vehicles, and there's a very little bit of vehicle rules in Adventure and Combat, not a full wargame.

Encumbrance and movement is oldest-school weight tallying, rather than items or other faster systems; when every GP is 1 EP and you have to optimize weight to return value, that's "fun" for some people, but I can't anymore. Dwarfs & Elfs both get Darkvision, so the lighting rules are somewhat optional, but there are decent procedures here for dungeon exploration & long-term survival.

Initiative's individual, but only d6 + Dex mod, so there'll be a lot of simultaneous actions, which isn't resolved in detail. Maneuvering, charging, disengaging, running away, missile fire, grenades, cover, "flaming oil" (unrealistic but classic), a page+ of unarmed combat systems (oh no), energy drain, healing, falling, deafness/blindness, and how to use saving throws, combat has a good dozen pages of rules which handle most situations, MUCH more clearly than the original game or many retroclones.

There's 27 pages of spells, 100 pages of monsters, 17 pages of treasures. The spell book is excellent, basically everything from every variant of B/X and then some, to high Levels.

Monsters do not have any Demons, but do have dog-kobolds called Barklings, various weird renamings to avoid OGL like "Flicker Beast" for Blink Dog, "Deceiver" for Displacer Beast. Dragons (Cloud, Desert, Forest, Ice, Mountain, Plains, Sea, Swamp, Turtle) use randomized HP & breath weapons, not the traditional age-points-per-die, so an adult Red ("Mountain") Dragon with 10 HD has 10d8 HP and breath damage, rather than fixed 40 HP & damage. The fixed values made it easier to do rules of thumb and work out if you COULD take a Dragon on, rather than guessing at random values.

Treasures are fine, treasure codes like OD&D treasure types, and good variety of items. There's a grid for generating new form/effect combos for classic items. I go off-book of treasures very quickly, but if you're just stocking from this one book, it's adequate.

Then a score of pages of semi-random GM help, essays, and optional rules, with a couple very minimal dungeon & stronghold maps, and tables for filling dungeons. I don't know that that's sufficient for a new GM to learn to run, it's about as much as B/X but smaller scale.

There's a stat ("ability") roll system, but it's not great: Level/2 gives a target number, then roll d20 + stat bonus to beat that TN. Table lookup is annoying, modifier instead of direct use. Why not just roll under the stat, why involve Level at all? In this a Level 10 with DEX 3 needs 15+, same as a Level 1 with DEX 15; why even have stats?

So most of that sounds great. I've tried running BF, and found it was kinda goofy. Bonuses are very large compared to base class/Level abilities. The very weak Fighters need at least a couple improvements. Initiative is, as in so many OSR games, a mess that cannot have been playtested as written. The lack of Demons can be solved with the "Basic Fantasy Field Guide of Creatures Malevolent and Benign" (damn few benign), which calls them "Infernals". It's definitely close to the right OSR game, but not quite there for me.

The supplements for BF are fine, adding some combat options, monsters, and new classes. The adventure books tend to be very Generic Fantasyland Theme Park, boxy maps with mediocre design, a lot of boxed text to read and checkboxes for HP. Several are overtly "copy an old TSR module but make it blander than mayonnaise on white bread".

BF: ★★★★☆
Field Guide: ★★★☆☆
Adventures: ★★☆☆☆

Iron Falcon

IF is explicitly an "OD&D 3LBB + Supplement I Greyhawk" and nothing more. In many ways, this is much, much more my jam, scruffy rogues getting rich or dying in dungeons. It's SO VERY CLOSE.

I'm going to be complaining here, not so much about Iron Falcon, but about Greyhawk. And IF is catching buckshot because it has some Greyhawkisms.

The core of the problem is CG: "Dedicated to Gary, without whom none of this would exist."

But yes it absolutely would. Dave Arneson created role-playing games as we know them; and if some cobbler from Lake Geneva hadn't published it, Blackmoor (and his friend Dave Megarry's Dungeon) would still have spread everywhere in the world and we'd be playing something very similar. And the problem in these rules is the influence of Gary's power-creep Supplement I: Greyhawk.

CG: "Ultimately, though, this game is not a representation of those rules as they were written nor even as I understand them but rather as I would play them. It seems there is no way to avoid getting a little bit of myself into the mix."

Stats ("Abilities") are the start of this, with the Greyhawk Strength & Intelligence tables. OD&D had no physical bonus for STR, only higher Fighter experience (so high STR = faster advancement = stronger fighter). I don't object to bonuses, but when they're SO heavily loaded on high stats, Greyhawk rewards 16-18 so much more, several Levels' worth of bonuses, that you have to get high rolls or you're trash. At least IF moves the percentile STR (18/01 to 18/00, giving +4/+6 bonuses!) superhero bonuses to an appendix.

Same for the insane Greyhawk Intelligence chart, which determines a Magic-User's Chance to Know, Min #, Max #, Max Level of spells; but it implies that you have access to all spells ever created, and you just somehow acquire them if you make this roll. Totally destroying the concept of magic from H.P. Lovecraft and Jack Vance's stories, where magic is a rare and poorly understood art with a few spells carefully studied, hoarded, and protected with ciphers. There is at least some understanding of the problem here, with a "Limited Spell Lists" option in the appendix, or the alternative "Extended Spell Lists" which requires you to buy a 2000+ GP spellbook for each Level, and you're just wandering around with this loot. I admire the attempt to rationalize this nonsense rule, but it's not OK. The BF spell acquisition rules are perfectly fine, so this was unnecessary. Swords & Wizardry has it, too, but then mostly ignores it in favor of spell acquisition.

Dexterity also adjusts AC with ridiculous –1 to –4 bonus; this is in most games at least left as an option for Fighters in light armor to parry, but here it's for everyone. AC inflation (deflation).

The good old "Trading Ability Score Points" mechanic where you get 1 for 2 or 3 from non-primary Stats to your prime requisite. In OD&D and Holmes, this only helped experience, 13 is as good as 18 for many things, but here it allows you to hit those absurd bonuses. Strike that out.

Classes (usual 4) go up to Level 22; OD&D Magic-Users went to 16, others to 10, while Greyhawk advanced M-U to 22, Cleric to 20, others to 14. EP costs are a little lower than OD&D or BF. Thieves have percentile skills and species ("racial") adjustments. Clerics have a newly weird spell table which isn't based on any version; good thing I don't use Clerics.

Species ("races") are Dwarf, Halfling, Elf, Half-Elf, with strict Level limits by class except Thief, and yet another variant of how multiclass works. Elf gets +1 to hit with sword & bow, Dwarf gets +1 to hit & AC vs giants, Halflings get no stealth but +3 (WTF) with sling, Half-Elfs get multiclass. Again sorry Charlie Brown, the Humans get a rock, tho this time Level limits mean you'd only play a demi-Human Thief or multiclass if you wanted long-term play.

There is a Law/Neutral/Chaos alignment system, as morality/group work, which at least means monsters have some indication of team.

Equipment's substantially reduced from BF, it has many of the same items but no descriptions, prices for armor are ridiculously low (like OD&D). And yet the weapon table is fully detailed, with "damage vs large". Range bonuses have varied between editions, none in OD&D ("see Chainmail" it says), Holmes and BF have +1/+0/–1 for short/medium/long, AD&D has +0/–2/–5, while Greyhawk has a horrifying table with different modifiers for S/M/L for each weapon vs armor. IF goes to +2/+1/+0, then in the appendix includes another version of the Weapon vs AC table. The problem is, the table's broken.

Delta: Big Mistake in Weapon vs. Armor Adjustments

So I'd say that any 1E players who are still engaged in this gnashing-of-teeth exercise with these tables would be wise to put it to bed, because the whole effect of those tables in O/AD&D was fundamentally broken all along.

So anyway, I've traditionally gone with +0/–1/–2, or +0/–2/–4 for S/M/L, because those make bows less effective than melee, which is better for swords & sorcery, Conan rushing thru a swarm of arrows to cleave the enemy. All rules are wrong!

IF uses by default DAC (Descending AC), which is seriously just why is this still a thing in 2025? It's a historical error that shouldn't be around. Anyway, big table of class vs AC. BUT, in the appendix there's a proper AAC (Ascending AC) and Base Attack Bonus table, and the monsters all list DAC (AAC) format, so you can play like it's 1999.

Combat rules are much reduced from BF, but in most cases it's just as good. Initiative is side-based, but Dex modifier can move a character faster or slower than their side; that's… not unreasonable. I don't usually do around-the-table order, but it's faster and with only two rollers, simultaneous is less likely. It has an option for individual initiative, but tells you to decide how to split it.

Charging, healing, morale, flaming oil 🙄, turn undead if you do that, energy drain, falling, poison, and saving throws. No rules for disengaging or movement here.

Then follows 26 pages of spells. Again very complete, the one thing I liked about Greyhawk. A number of these spells are not in BF, and at the higher end are more powerful.

54 pages of monsters. Half the variety of BF. Still no Demons, but they weren't in 3LBB+Greyhawk, so I guess that tracks. Dragons (Black, Blue, Brass, Bronze, Copper, Gold, Green, Red, Silver, White) are back to age-points-per-die, called by color not some terrain (where does a Red Dragon live? Anywhere it wants to!) Vastly more useful for running classic adventures, but the lack of some weirdo monsters can be an issue. But there is a "Handbook of Monsters" which fills the gaps, adapted from the BF Field Guide.

30 pages of treasures, very similar to BF, but no form/effect table. In Appendix B are 4 pages of Intelligent Sword rules.

Adventuring chapter's buried way in the back, but otherwise similar to BF.

Another problematic Greyhawk table returns, as the Experience Point Awards. To advance from 1st Level to 2nd as a Fighter, in OD&D (straight 100 EP per HD), you'd need to kill 20 Orcs (1 HD), or 5 Ogres (4+1 HD). In BF, you'd need to kill 80 Orcs or 8 Ogres (4+1 HD). In IF you'd need to kill 133 Orcs (1 HD) or 10 Ogres (5 HD)! So you see you're saving lives by using a faster progression! Of course being a more strict OD&D, 1 GP = 1 EP, and some claim that's the right way to Level, but it makes all adventures pecuniary instead of derring-do. An accountant might love that, but I don't.

Finally, Appendix A, Alternate "Combat" Rules. Exceptional Strength, no. Ascending Armor Class, yes. Paladins, no; this is the Greyhawk interpretation where they are a bonus given to Lawful Fighters with Charisma 17 which was almost certainly a cheat code for one player. Weapons vs Armor Type, ha ha no not ever.

A few pages of optional rules for spells (see above), and a page of how to deal with death, mostly raise dead; ha ha no not ever. Negative ten rule, fine, I don't want players constantly rerolling, but it's not a canonical rule.

I got the book as hardcover, POD (Print on Demand). It's nice looking, great B&W homage by Alexander Cook to the B/X dragon fight by Erol Otus. Cover curls outwards a bit, but I'll press it and see if that gets it flatter.

I also got the "Iron Falcon Adventures Volume One". It's four short adventures, not particularly inspired, but playable dungeon crawls. I didn't get print of Iron Falcon 75: The Lakeside Adventures, which uses IF to run a Magic Comes Back game in small town 1975, modern-ish equipment; amusing but I'd use Call of Cthulhu or my own Nightmare Eve for that.

I'm still hacking around on some house rules, but it's not that much to remove the stuff I dislike and get a pretty good edition. It's unfortunate some of the choices were made. If I get ambitious, the right answer would be to edit the ODT file, remove Greyhawk as if it never existed, add in vital things it's missing (Demons), and get it printed & bound properly; it's CC licensed, so I can do that. We'll see. OR, I can just pillage it for more parts for my Little Sword Game, which already uses some BF text for spells, but is a fairly different kind of game, not trying to be historical.

Iron Falcon as-is: ★★★½☆
Iron Falcon minus Greyhawk: ★★★★½
Greyhawk powergaming: ☆☆☆☆☆
Adventures Volume One: ★★☆☆☆

Old Computer Challenge

So a few weeks back, prompted by the hosting provider for MysticDungeonClub no longer supporting FreeBSD so I need to move rather post-haste, I bought a new domain, with the ~worst~ BEST name I've ever come up with, I fear that I have now peaked and nothing will ever top this:

Cyberhole.online

A hole for cybering in, as one does. It's like Mel's Hole but even more deep and mysterious.

In the Cyberhole, I intend to put a bunch of services and objects, mostly very retro, like a Gopher hole (which I have tested). That'll be like the cool kids' version of a .plan file for me.

Over on MDC, I have a bunch of retro "console" minigames, but they're using an old framework I made that's pretty heavyweight, node and a database in the back-end. I can't reasonably code those in anything except a giant pile of ass JavaScript.

So conveniently OldComputerChallenge comes along, asking us to use old computers. I use old computers all the time, but mostly in virtualized form supported by other people, emulators like Atari800MacX and remake machines like the SpecNext and HyperMegaTech Super Pocket Atari. We all know I don't like Other Peoples' Code, so I need to solve that problem by supporting myself.

For the week, I'm working on making TinyBasicWeb which will put a bare minimum TinyBASIC in a web page, client-side (there will be back-end support for the "disk operating system", likely in the form of a CGI script). I think it's a doable thing in the week, I've done very similar scale projects in less time. Right now I have a terminal in "memo pad" mode that I can cursor around and draw in, and tonight I'm working on input routines.

The more interesting longer-term part is that I'll end up with a MUCH lighter-weight console for putting up my minigames, and it's super easy to wire this to talk over the network, so I can put something like Chez Scheme on the back end.

Further Cyberhole news as I dig it deeper.

Some of My History of Hypertext

So in 1979, young Digital Mark is shown a computer, a TRS-80 Model I, by 4th-grade teacher. Other kids play Snake, I hit break and type LIST, seeing BASIC code, because I've been reading the instruction card. "I can read and learn this!" Nothing else now matters to Mark.

That summer, I take an adult college summer course on programming. Over the next few years before I get my Atari 800, I use school computers, mostly TRS-80 but some Apple ][, to program obsessively. Libraries and book stores are scoured for information.

The main sources of knowledge for me then were:

  • Stimulating Simulations, by C. William Engel (1977)
  • Creative Computing magazine, ed. David H. Ahl (1974-85)
  • Basic Computer Games, Microcomputer Edition, by David H. Ahl (1978)
  • some TRS-80 Level II BASIC book
  • My Computer Likes Me When I Speak BASIC, by Bob Albrecht, People's Computer Company (1972)
  • Computer Lib/Dream Machines, by Ted Nelson (1974-5)

The first three I could buy, the last two I only ever found in the library. They are now all on Internet Archive. As noted here a few years ago.

Computer Lib is bizarre rantings mixed with really visionary stuff. It's a two-sided flippy book, pages numbered CL 1-68 one side, DM 1-60 the other). Computer Lib is about how computers work "now" (1965-1974), teletypes talking to mainframes or minicomputers. This is important! There's a range of computing levels.

Ted talks about BASIC and how to use it seriously, using arrays as data structures, in a few pages. Some weird stuff about other languages I haven't heard of. More about data structures, links between data in different places. I'M LIKE TEN YEARS OLD, man, you can't dump that on me! I didn't fully understand this stuff until Sedgewick's Algorithms years later.

Political ranting, some of it now unacceptably phrased, but CYBERCRUD is a good primer on how computers aren't the problem, people with computers are the problem. This echoes the People's Computer Company slogans

BASIC is the People's Language!

Use computers FOR people, not against them!

Dream Machines has a 1975 supplement about the Altair, bitmap graphics, and cheap microcomputers, which largely lines up with Computer Lib's earlier predictions. It goes in depth into how you can use graphics, image and audio processing.

If Computers Are The Wave Of The Future, Displays Are The Surfboard

Branching Presentational Systems - Hypermedia

And here he develops a theory of Hypertext, "by which I mean non-sequential writing". Everything you now know about the World Wide Web and GUIs, you pretty much got by way of Ted Nelson, Doug Englebart of NLS, JCR Licklider of Project MAC (multi-user time-sharing), and Ivan Sutherland of Sketch. I read this wide-eyed and believing everything.

The giant over-arching project for this is XANADU (earworm Olivia Newton-John song here). Xanadu is a very well-specified, complex, solves everything system. Ted's argument is that long-run everyone will use his system for every computation. This starts at DM 44, read that entire section if you read nothing else.

Returning CL/DM must've been the hardest thing ever. I read it again a few times over the years. (I have a stack of notes about it from more recent reading, but I'm here staying brief and focused.)

Over the next decade, we got and then slowly lost things like Hypercard. HC's an amazing technology, it is The Future We Didn't Get, because it was Mac-only, monochrome-only, Hypertalk is a somewhat annoying hybrid of BASIC, COBOL, and C, limited to either tiny windows smaller than the small Mac desktop, or full-screen Mac 512x344. Later that got better, and Myst was written in HC + many addons, but it remained a weird silo.

Repeatedly Ted Nelson says Xanadu is coming soon, shares new technical details which conflict with previous statements, various people on his team promote it, then unpromote it. The exchange in Dr Dobb's Journal 1983 disillusions me, convinces me Xanadu will not be coming soon.

The Internet became available to me in 1989, and Gopher came out in 1991, providing a real hypertext solution. It didn't have inline links, "transclusion" (include a chunk from another document), or bidirectional links, but it did let you make complex menus with text, links, images and other media, and interaction with forms/search fields. Gopher became the best way to hyperlink and index everything.

The WWW was not an attractive system until Mosaic came out in 1993, mid-year it got inline image tags and imagemaps as a dumb hack, and Netscape Navigator commercialized it in 1994. Gopher might've survived this except the UMinn administration tried to extort payments for servers in 1993. I moved everything into my web site, as did everyone else.

The thing is, these are not Xanadu. Ted got increasingly strident that the WWW is not Hypertext because it's not bidirectional etc. But of course this is impossible: A local database can be forced to be consistent, but a network of unreliable computers cannot. One-way works with stupid complexity and GeoCities, and two-way does not. Imagine entering a web page and seeing 500 "sites who called here" links, some of them private. Each of them has to validate that it's paid the micropayment for copyright access to the site. It's not "web scale".

In the end, post 2000, there's a demo "release" of Xanadu, with a hand-hacked single-site database, no editor, no way to link your own stuff with it. It's not anything.

More notes to come, we'll be talking about this more on the Lispy Gopher Climate Show every Tuesday midnight UTC (like 17:00 PST). hashtag

Switch 2

Watched this in the Nintendo Today app, which is a lot better than yustub. Apparently I did need a videogame company-specific news/calendar app.

  • Mario Kart World: Open world! Just drive for fun all day. Nobody throwing shells at you! That's a good launch title.
  • Sharing C button & voice chat, external webcam: Seems pretty close to modern Discord, etc. VC. What's not great is the webcam isn't on the device. And here we see the first shots of real people holding a full Switch 2, and it's HUGE. Like a mini skateboard.
  • Screen is 2x higher-rez. JoyCon 2 can be used as a mouse, which is the funniest interaction I've ever seen. Kickstand does make small desk use possible. But I will miss almost-pocketable Switch Lite size.
  • Welcome Tour: Paid game, not a freebie. Why?
  • Uuugh, S2 takes new SD Express cards only, not the cards you already have. Fucking why‽
  • There's S2 paid upgrade versions of S1 games. It's probably too much to expect Nintendo to do anything free, but it's shitty.
  • Launch June 5.
  • Elden Ring Tarnished: Looks kickass. "ELDEN RING Tarnished Edition include the original game “ELDEN RING” , the expansion “SHADOW OF THE ERDTREE”, a new armor and customization features for Torrent’s appearance. The ELDEN RING Tarnished Edition arrives on Nintendo Switch 2 on 2025."
  • Street Fighter 6: Looks fine.
  • Daemon X Machina: Giant robot fighter, Xenosaga without the Nietzschean philosophy.
  • Split Fiction: Dual-play games are so annoying to get someone for.
  • Hogwarts Legacy: The Wizarding world always looks good. Nasty TERF creator of the original books, but Kids Today™ need to learn about "death of the author", and in any case the game studio has very little to do with her. Probably a no for me, but I do miss silly kids waving wands around.
  • Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4: What's great is, the S2 is as big as his old-school longboard. You should be able to stand on the joycons and grind! In any case this is an A+ title.
  • Hyrule Warriors Age of Imprisonment: Ugh brawler with Zelda skins.
  • Online + Expansion: GAMECUBE emulation! The Cube has so many good games. Down side is you're paying monthly, AND only get games Nintendo wants to release. I think Nintendo should have ONE, cheap subscription.
  • Cyberpunk 2077: Now you can have terrible framerate and bad clipping in your hands! Such a disappointing and ambitious game.
  • Duskbloods: Long pretentious vampire setting, no idea what gameplay is. 2026.
  • Kirby Air Riders: Cutesy Wipeout?
  • Donkey Kong Bananza: Explore destructible environments. Gameplay looks fantastic. But how on-rails will it be? The CGI monkeys look weird.

No mention that I saw of Animal Crossing.

Nintendo Direct 2025-03-27

And another in a week (04-02) about Switch 2.

  • Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D: Nice but unneeded.
  • Raidou: Remake of a nothing game, eh.
  • Shadow Labyrinth: Pac-Mac mecha Metroidvania.
  • Patapon: Low-effort remake.
  • Yet Another Farm Sim: Farm, date, & fuck every townsfolk! Again!
  • Yet Another Metroid Prime: Has Samus not suffered enough? Quake ripoff, not 2D explorer. PSYCHIC ABILITIES. Fuck no.
  • Disney bartender game: VAL-HAL-1A but zero fuckable chars, despite ALL OF RULE 34.
  • Witchbrook: Pixely magic school. Uh, maybe?
  • Eternal Life of Goldman: Nice art. Jumpy puzzles. Maybe!
  • Gradius: Repackaged. Good games. Salamander III new zones?
  • Necrodancer: Ugh. DLC & leaderboards. UGH.
  • Tamagotchi Plaza: I am unclear if you need to constantly eat or die, leaving schoolchildren traumatized.
  • Poke mans city. No.
  • Super ugly rhythm game.
  • virtual game cards: half-assed DRM sharing, 2-week limit. Why?
  • SaGa Frontier 2 remaster: Good game, remake unneeded.
  • Monument Valley 1, 2: Good games, but you probably played them on your phone 10 years ago.
  • Monument Valley 3: Nice.
  • Golf.
  • Marvel Cosmic Invasion: Cartoon side brawler. Co-op. Maybe? But not as good as Scott Pilgrim or River City Ransom.
  • Tomodachi Life: Back for another try at social games! Nintendo never succeeds at this!
  • Nintendo Today app: Because you need another in the bewildering variety of Nintendo not-game apps. I for one organize my life around what new thing Nintendo releases, so I'll surely use this as much as the Parental Controls app. Zero.

Library of E-Babble

There's centuries of research in organizing a physical library, and some reasonable if contentious schemes.

Organizing your ebooks, whether epub, pdf, text, reaction gifs, whatever, can be much more ad-hoc, and is poorly researched at all.

For reading, on Mac I use Murasaki for reading epub, it's scroll-based instead of page-based, but it's very nice; for PDF either Mac's Preview, or Skim which is especially useful for research, I often Merge Windows and have 5-10 books open in tabs in it. On iPad, I use Readdle Documents mostly, but it doesn't handle comics so those I open in Chunky Comic Reader, syncing over DropBox or iCloud.

On Mac, as long as Spotlight works, it kinda doesn't matter how the folders are laid out, but it might take hours or days for new things to fully index. If Spotlight stops working, mdutil -a -E will erase existing indices and start over. I dunno what you do on medieval filesystems without xattr, but I don't think non-Mac users can read anyway.

If I refer to a book by terms not in title or obvious search index, I put those in the comment or tags (select file, ⌘I for Info). I use color tags for all media: Green = to-read, Red = error/editing, Yellow = important, Gray = read. I also have an Automator action to Label Gray & Open, mapped to ^⌘O, which I use when working thru a series.

For all my ebooks, I just have a big Books folder in Dropbox that I subdivide by category. Mostly I rename book files Lastname,Firstname-Title-Year.

ls:
!inbox/ Algorithms/ BASIC/ Business/ C/ Calibre/ Classics/ Clojure/ Computer Theory/ Design Patterns/ Elixir/ Game Design/ Grimoires/ Groovy/ Haskell/ HauntedMansion/ Hewlett-Packard/ History,Rome/ Horror/ Humor/ Hypercard/ Interzone/ Java/ JavaScript/ Jazz Age Pulps/ Julia/ Literature/ Logo/ Mac/ Mathematics/ Mondo2000/ Mystery/ NetRexx/ Non-Fiction/ Obsolete/ OMNI/ Pascal/ Phone/ Pilot/ Python/ RasPi/ Retrocomputing/ REXX/ Scala/ Scheme/ Science/ Science Fiction & Fantasy/ Technical/ UFO/ Unfiled/ unix_cd/ Vim/ Virtual Reality/ Web/ WIRED/

Which I'm pretty sure will make a proper librarian swear at me, but it's shelving what's important to me.

Books is currently 173.82 GB for 193,214 items. That doesn't count Comics, Gamefaqs (by which I mean all videogame texts, not just faqs), or RPG, where my X,000 game books are.

Corporate Horror Movies

The scariest monsters in our world are corporations. So I've picked out a series of horror movies about evil corporations, and rebellion or survival against them. No TV shows. No sequels (even if those explain more, like Cube).

All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say,
'I'm a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to
get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you
to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head
out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS
ANYMORE!'
—Howard Beale, Network

  • Metropolis (1927)
  • Modern Times (1936)
  • Desk Set (1957)
  • Seconds (1966)
  • Soylent Green (1973)
  • Network (1976)
  • 9 To 5 (1980)
  • Robocop (1987)
  • Falling Down (1993)
  • Clerks (1994)
  • Cube (1997)
  • Office Space (1999)
  • Fight Club (1999)
  • American Psycho (2000)
  • Resident Evil (2002)
  • Idiocracy (2006)
  • Michael Clayton (2007)
  • Lego Movie (2014)

Monsters! Monsters!

Let me explain. No, there is too much, let me sum up.

Back in 1975, Tunnels & Trolls was the second RPG ever written. Space Gamer has this:

T&T has a bunch of virtues, it's VERY simple, only uses 6-sided craps dice, it's very cheap, and it's less contradictory than D&D. By not trying to do everything, it succeeds at more.

In 1976, Rick Loomis' Buffalo Castle came out, introducing the world to solo adventure gamebooks! Years before "Pick Some Kinda Road" (lawsuit-happy owner) books.

Also in 1976, Monsters! Monsters! was unleashed on the world, turning the tables on those horrible adventurers and townsfolk, with playable monsters.

Many eons passed. T&T became the most popular soloing RPG, and a cult favorite for group play as well. It's always been my pick-up or teaching game, I can just bring out the City of Terrors pocket book, and have a full game and setting.

Often there were good mini-rules and adventures, in particular T&T Adventures Japan and the Beginner's Bundle, and the last edition, Deluxe Tunnels & Trolls and adventures updated for it.

More recently, Ken sold Tunnels & Trolls to a company which has done nothing much with what's left of Flying Buffalo. So he started focusing on the game he didn't sell: Monsters! Monsters!

In 2020, a new edition of Monsters! Monsters! came out, to go along with a new version of The Toughest Dungeon in the World (which assumes a Troll PC).

In 2022, Monsterary of Zimrala introduced a new setting, full of weirdo monsters.

And then in 2024, we got updated version of M!M! 2.7, and Steve Crompton's fantasy superhero/sexy times comics got a comic/sourcebook treatment, Cthulhu Crisis.

SO, that's what I'm gonna talk about here, the state of Tunneling & Trolling/Monstering Monstering these days.

Monsters! Monsters! 2.7

Cover is an arched portal, with monsters of all sorts coming thru. This works fine. The book is spiral-bound, on very heavy paper, which can be a little hard to flip thru but it's convenient at the table.

Ken promises a 3rd ed of M!M! will be more complete, but 2.7 is what we have now. It's fairly short, leads right into character creation by rolling stats (3d6 eight times as usual), picking species (no longer called Kindred) from Trolls (Forest or Jungle), Serpentmen, Uruks, Gremlins, or Zim (Zimralan Ogres). These have very simple stat modifications, not too far above Human.

Later in the book there's 28 Humanoids (Balrukh to Zombie), 22 Non-Humanoids (Basilisk to Unicorn), 26 Zimralan Humanoids (Bat Trolls to Zim), 7 Intelligent Demons (Anticorn to Xipe), all with typical T&T/M!M! stat multipliers and a special power! You can quickly get very powerful characters. Then another 78 non-statted monsters (they get one "Monster Rating" (MR) which serves as attack & defense!) for use as enemies. No playable Humans, Dwarfs, or Elfs!

Immediately drops into How To Do Combat, just 3 pages. It's a QUICK and EASY game. Every combatant rolls their weapon or monster dice, plus "combat adds" depending on stats, side with highest total inflicts the difference on the losers. There's a few specific rules for missiles, spells, armor, etc., but it's not meant to be hard or detailed, YOU invent the descriptions.

Saving Rolls (SR) are the main clever feature of all T&T/M!M! games, a roll directly against a stat, 2 dice, doubles add & roll over (DARO), plus stat score, target number is 20 at Level 1, +5 per Level. M!M! improves on previous editions by having a page explaining how to use Stunts, SRs in combat.

Chaos Factor is new, giving non-magic monsters a chance to adjust the dice. In my house rules, I require you to recharge your Chaos Factor with magic energy, Moon Crystals in Zimrala, but as written you can use it over and over, but only one monster per turn.

Adventure Points are experience. They're not well explained in 2.7, you SHOULD get them based on the MR/Level of defeated monsters, and a bunch of other things, but all that's listed is your SR rolls. More house rules time, which is fine, "make the game your own".

You directly spend AP to increase your stats, and your highest stat determines your Level, rather than saving AP up to Level, and maybe getting a +1 to something. Advancing your character is far more interesting in M!M! than that other game.

In even the first edition of T&T, there was a simple equipment list, then a VERY long detailed one with every historical & fantasy weapon & armor you'd want, with STR & DEX requirements, speical abilties, precise ranges… M!M! does not have this. It has a mini-rules level of items. Sure, many monsters don't use equipment, but it's still bad.

There's a very small list of 9 weapons for Egyptos (Humans brought from Earth). 11 weapons for the Zim, but they're massively overpowered (75d6 magic flint spear!). 20 Demon magic effects for weapons, which is helpful since T&T has never had a real magic weapon list. 3 special items for Dwarfs, a big table of generic guns, a few ray-guns for Curators and Advanced Humans.

Magic is next, with a reasonably good but low-Level spell list, 20 Level 1, 22 Level 2, 29 Level 3, 10 Level 4, 5 Level 5, 5 Level 6, 3 Level 7. As opposed to T&T, which had fewer spells, but went up to Level 17. I'm not thrilled that many of the spells got new names, or were pulled from Kindred-specific spellbooks, but that's more a matter of me relearning what's in there.

Monsters in Detail gives paragraph to quarter-page descriptions for dozens of monsters.

Ken St Andre has his own M!M! House Rules, because nobody plays any game the same way, including the authors. The really important one here is Spite Damage, which keeps combat from being a one-way death spiral.

There's a brief setting overview of Zimrala, two GM adventures of looting haunted, ruined towns. I must note a little indignantly that there's no scenario set up for invading a populated Human town and making off with their loot and pretty mates, or devouring people! That was the key attraction of M!M! 1st Ed, and it's still the most fun. Pretty obvious how to write it up, but the M!M! 1st Ed townsfolk table was more useful.

There's a Treasure Generator for coins & gems which has been in various T&T products for 40+ years.

An invitation to make new products for the M!M! system, a few of those have already come out.

★★★★½ - still needs a lot more equipment and more high-Level spells, but otherwise a kick-ass game. Usable as both a "normal" RPG or as a crazy monsters game.

Monsterary of Zimrala

Nearly the same cover as M!M!, but in a ruined temple and fewer monsters. As a bestiary, this is more fitting.

This world is connected to but not the same as the City of the Gods setting, where all the old pantheon gods ended up. There's a solo adventure, Mission for a Cat Goddess, where the goddess Sekhmet and Demi the Demoness ("Tenh-Mer") pull your character from wherever (Trollworld probably) to Zimrala.

The Zimrala setting is a typical giant continent with every terrain and culture mashed up. Perfectly serviceable as a gaming setting. The desert has been "invaded" by ancient Egyptians, in a colony of Sekh-Atem; there's a promise of a sourcebook but this hasn't come out yet. A long timeline for 28,000 years of prehistory. An excuse for Gristlegrim's Dwarfs to come to Zimrala. I really want a lot more setting, I'm spoiled maybe by DT&T's Trollworld chapter with multiple cities and a gazetteer in a bit more detail.

Magic on Zimrala is more interesting, adding Chaos Factor with a little better explanation. God Magic is divine intervention with no limits except GM caution. Demon Magic is always-on but a little more focused, 9 "Auras" of types of demons. Dwon (Demon Dwarfs) Magic is delusional religion, roll and see if your wish works. Moon Crystals can contain Wizardry power or specific spells or super-powerful effects, but also attract monsters called Etherdragons. Portals are all over Zimrala, leading to dimensions or into space!

Zimrala has 7 (or 8) moons, and most of these are habitable/explorable. There's not a lot of explanation in detail, but there is in Cthulhu Crisis.

Zimrala doesn't use coins, but gems, Amethysts are equivalent to GP or $, up to Moon Crystals worth $20,000.

So that's quite a lot, and only up to page 34! The majority of the book is bestiary, a page on Humans and near-Humans, animals, 68 monsters, 27 playable monsters, 6 demons, 12 demon monsters. These are often really weird and non-standard.

A short GM adventure/useful information site for monsters to explore.

And finally the Mini-Rules, just enough M!M! to be playable with this book alone.

★★★★☆ - great bestiary, very minimal as a setting book.

Humans! Humans!

Cover has scary humanoids, maybe Humans, Elfs, Dwarfs, and a Wizzard, busting into a nice safe dungeon, with the comic book characters pasted in front. Unimpressed.

One would hope this is the things monsters are scared of. It is instead more of a book for running Human & friendly PCs.

The book's pretty thin. Starting player & GM advice for surviving and not TPKing when facing the giant monsters of Zimrala as a squishy little Human. I'd just suggest not being one!

Humans, Dwarfs/Dwon (Demon Dwarfs), and Moon Elfs (ugh Warcraft) get stat multipliers, Professions, Skills, and 1 in 6 get Special Abilities. That's OK, mostly brings them up to monster power level. There's no stats for Fairies, Leprechauns, and "Hobbs", classic T&T kindred, and I kinda miss the first two.

Professions and Skills overlap a lot, but the Profession doesn't provide any fixed game benefit. Skills replace Talents, and have a Level, adding to Saving Rolls. Special abilities are somewhat rare, and range from Eagle Eyes to Divine Intervention, specific mechanics aren't given for everything but you can add to SRs also.

The Elven & Dwarfen Professions, Skills, & Abilities are each different.

Human Vampire & Avatar rules are also printed in the comics which they're based on. Vampires are fairly weak but are nearly impossible to kill permanently. Ken gives them 1 stat point per 100 years, to make 3000-year-old Vampirooni from the comics not be super-powerful. I'd do d6 x 100 years, and 5 stat points per century.

Avatars may be divinely-blessed like Erika Amerika or magic artifacts like Tessa Ract. It's purely up to the G.M. to decide what abilities these get.

But then there's 5 pages of equipment reprinted from M!M!, NOT new weapon charts, which would actually be useful.

★★★½☆ - does what you need for filling out Humans in M!M!, but I'm unimpressed by the Avatars, and the equipment repeat made me 🙁

Cthulhu Crisis, Vampirooni's Crisis

So, Steve Crompton and the late Randy Vogel had been writing these Vampirooni (Vampirella knockoff), Demi the Demoness (succubus), Erika Amerika (super-powered reincarnating Native American girl), and Kitt-Ra (Sekhmet's four-tittied cat goddess avatar) softcore porn comics for a long time. Which I often find this kind of thing entertaining, I'm a Richard Corben, Vaughn Bode, Robert Crumb, etc. kind of sleazy Zap Comix kinda guy.

The Crisis comics start on Earth present & near future, Tessa Ract (get it tesseract), and an evil vampire from ancient Egypt, a Moth Girl and Squid Schoolgirl working for the Yellow Wizard Hastur, who colludes with Cthulhu, wreck their days. There's a dumpster full of dead ninjas, the god Set, spaceships, and a skull asteroid base.

On the one hand again this is generally my jam in comics, but as M!M! sourcebook it's really not at all what I do. Some parts are useful, each issue has a mini-GM adventure/location. None are related to Zimrala, and only a bit to City of the Gods. But I'm sure not putting Vampi in my games.

★★★★☆ style but ★★☆☆☆ utility.

Saturday Morning Cartoons

Grab a bowl full of sugary cereal, and sit down to veg your brain out to heroic cartoons of the '60s to early '90s!