Thank a Free Publisher Day!

I'm feeling kind of bad that yesterday's post, which was supposed to be a fun little commentary on our collective reading habits, seems to have pointed out a crystallizing issue that has led -C of Hack & Slash to decide to change from a free publisher to charging for pdfs. There's nothing wrong with being a for-profit publisher, but it was obviously a sort of wrenching decision for him which involved a bit of bitterness toward the way the community reacts toward free publications. And even though I wasn't the original cause, I apparently happened to make some observations that provided the last straw for him when they were set forth in the particular way I set them forth.

I do think, and I mentioned it in my earlier posts about Commercialization of the Old School, that our collective reading and posting habits tend to devalue free publications and their authors/artists. I'm as much guilty of it as anyone -- I think Chris Gonnerman, for example, deserves to be lauded to the skies for his free BFRPG project, and yet even though I've mentioned this in a couple of posts when free products arise, I don't think I've ever actually thanked Chris directly.

So I'm declaring my own "Thank a Free Publisher Day," and anyone who wants to join in with me, the more the merrier. I'm going to mention a couple of free publishers (note: this includes the people who have printed books up on lulu for cost only) and mention a place to say thanks.

1) Starting with Chris, I just created a thread over on Dragonsfoot HERE, for saying thanks for BFRPG. DF is where Chris mainly hangs out.

2) Then, Al Krombach for all the gaming resources he puts up at Beyond the Black Gate. I'm going to put this in a comment that will be totally off topic to his post, but I can't give out his email address, so he'll just have to figure it out. :)

3) Then, John Stater for all the Mu Pan free resources. (I also tossed this one in as a random comment for him to puzzle out if I'm in a 12-step program or wrapping up my affairs before going skydiving or something).

And there are a billion others, so if you don't have a blog, list them in the comments, and if you have a blog, post up the free publishers so people can go give them some applause, preferably directly! Make threads, name names, whatever. Lets make a day of it, or at least a few moments to either mention someone or to go to a thread/comment and say thanks for their work!

(I'll add more later, three is a good starter, and I'm hoping other bloggers will also be chiming in a bit on this, because it's a nice thing to do -- and remember, resource-heavy bloggers are free publishers, too!)

What makes a blog popular

-C mentioned as a comment to my last blog (and his blog, by the way, is here) that posting art or free pdf files is simply a recipe for silence and small page views.

This is actually my experience as well, as strange as it seems -- but with one exception. The free module I posted (Last Priest of Sebek at this lulu storefront) was a very popular post, but it had an unusual twist to it -- it was charity related. I think charity-related posts tend to generate more attention, if for no other reason than other bloggers linking to the post to help out with the effort.

On the other hand, my next two most popular posts were both unabashed navel-gazing on the topic of the OSR. People love reading about the "OSR."

And then the next most popular one I can't quite explain. It was the one called Diaper, Helmet, ADVENTURE! It was about a piece of Erol Otus art. The only explanation for this one I can think of is that the title drew people. However, it's sort of a counter-example to the other art-related posts that bombed.

So here's a tentative conclusion about peoples' reading habits with one SIGNAL exception. Most of us apparently like to read discussions more than we actually like to read resources. Nothing wrong with that, except that most of us seem to think or claim otherwise. Odd.

The signal exception is Zak's blog. Zak is all about art and game resources, although he also tells stories. People like stories, too, although my stories are sort of in the middle range of page hits. I think the reason for this is simply the quality of Zak's art, writing, and imagination. He's in a niche that most people ignore, but he just does it well enough to be one of the most-followed blogs out there. It's the brute force of quality.

Most other bloggers out there have a lot more data about this, but the trend seems pretty strong. Since I'm all over the damn place with wildly different topics and random approaches, I've gotten to see a pretty broad set of responses.

Conclusion, and other bloggers please feel free to correct or expand on this ... we are actually drawn, as readers, to topics that we SAY aren't the ones of interest ... but that's where we go.

I suspect we know this, too, but it's just a dirty little secret. Cool.

Dungeon theory: Layers of Mystery

So, one of the things I did yesterday was an illustration for the "Read Languages" spell, which I uploaded as a thumbnail above. The key to the picture is that the hieroglyphic script on the tablet gives way to some English in the area where the magic-user is looking. The viewer can see what's happening with the magic as it works. Sort of cool, I thought.

In any case, it led me to a thought about dungeons -- adventures in general, really. First, an adventure should have various types of things to discover. (1) the background information about past events (2) background information about the location, (3) what's there, (4) how to use what's there, (5) background or other information about current occupants, (6) indications for future adventures/missions.

That's six things I could think of to find information ABOUT.

But the next factor is this: each of those regions of information should also have more than one layer (maybe only one more, maybe a couple). What I mean: information about current occupants in G1 can tell you pretty quickly that there's a hierarchy of giants and ogres and stuff like that. That's one layer. The second layer, though, is the information that the giants are taking their orders from elsewhere and (here's the #6 piece as well) how to find the next group of bad guys.

This might sound like a huge amount of work, but I think most of us build this kind of thing into an adventure without really thinking about it. I'm not talking about complex layers of information, just that when you learn a thing, you haven't necessarily learned all there is to know.

An adventure -- this is one of the things that makes an RPG (and also a computer RPG) so compelling is that it takes place in the so-called "fog of war." At the beginning, you don't know much. Traps might be around every corner. As it develops, you begin to have a larger map. You begin to learn things about the mad wizard who lived here: perhaps his "warning!" rune, perhaps just that he collected blue pottery. Whatever.

Building the larger picture, learning more, delving into the unknown ... it is the layers of mystery
that make an RPG such a powerful genre of gaming.

It's fashionable to bust on the idea of having a "story," where the DM scripts the action too much, but it's critical to keep in mind that a BACKSTORY is something totally different and very important.

Without the tagline of "the dwarves delved too deep," the Mines of Moria are nothing but a big hole in the ground. But with that tagline from the backstory, the big hole in the ground becomes THE MINES OF MORIA.

(and then you learn about how that dredged up a watcher at the gate, and orcs came and killed all the dwarves because Mr. Balrog got loose, and by the way, there's a book that the adventurers can find so they can piece together the bits (layers) of mystery they have discovered).

Give them stuff to learn, bit by bit, even if it's trivial. That's a big part of the game.

Write On!

One downside I've discovered to blogging is that when you write something every day, it begins to cut into the time available for writing actual resources. So today, I'm going to focus on moving a couple of different projects forward.

1) Getting more material assembled for Knockspell #6 and writing my own part(s) of it
2) Layout on the Core Rules and possibly an illustration
3) Adapting a new FGG module from Pathfinder to Swords & Wizardry
4) Possible working on a re-structuring of my module "Drinker of Ships," which seems to have too railroady a beginning but will require a fair amount more writing to change (it was originally based on the "characters start in a bad situation" concept).

Obviously, I don't expect to finish anything, but I need to push the field forward instead of spending too much time working on a blog entry.

Stay tuned, though!

I thank you all!

Since I'm on permanent disability and my wife works for the state government, every once in a while some unexpected financial event has the potential to throw things into a real crisis. In general, the beer money that I make from Swords & Wizardry I don't spend - I either re-invest it in things like cover art, or I stash it in case of a family emergency.

About a week ago, my car suddenly developed an earth-shaking vibration in the engine. For those who have seen it at NTRPGCon, my car is a junker: the paint has flaked off about a quarter of the body, the driver's side window doesn't move, and the acceleration is similar to that of an angry turtle. But it serves the purpose of getting my daughter to work and me to the stores or other errands like handling my son's chronic missing of the school bus. Unfortunately, it was clear that this problem was going to rip up other parts in the engine - it was that bad.

It turns out that the engine mountings had started to come loose, or come apart, which is something you need to fix unless one day you want to see your car's engine through the rear view mirror. The problem was that this trouble developed just late enough in the month to come after the payment of lots of bills, but early enough in the month that there wasn't any way to just tighten the belt and make it through. You can only make it so many days by living out of the pantry; I know this from experience. Credit cards were a bit close to the limits, partly because of my new computer and partly because my wife had just gotten some repairs to her own car. A fixable situation, but one that needs a bit of time to even out.

However, there was just enough sitting in the Swords & Wizardry bank account to handle the gap between what we could pay, versus what we needed to pay, for the repairs, which was $521.29. Without that money available, we would have run into some serious difficulties; mainly my daughter, since I drop her off at work, but in other ways, too. For those who aren't familiar with Houston, Texas, you have to drive everywhere -- there is effectively no public transportation in most of the city.

Anyway, I thought I would mention it and say thank you to all those who have bought various modules or rulebooks, etc. from me over the last year or so! Although the end result of purchases obviously aren't foremost in peoples' minds (except when doing something like Chgowiz is -- see HERE), hopefully it will be a lift of the spirits for people to know that the money from our games and hobbies, even when it's not going to charity, can sometimes have a really big unexpected effect somewhere down the road.

So thank you, all of you -- have a good feeling today about the hobby -- it can occasionally have some significant real-life effects!

Matt

Destiny, Conan, the Grey Mouser, and their Job Histories

Destiny.

It's a fairly common device in heroic fiction for the author to provide a bit of foreshadowing to suggest that the protagonists are destined for greatness in some way, and Fritz Leiber and R.E. Howard are no different. Fafhyrd and the Mouser are mentioned as being bifurcated parts of the same mythic-hero identity. R.E. Howard is a bit clearer about Conan's destiny: he's going to be king of Aquilonia. (Okay, I don't know for absolute certain that Howard was the one to interject this into the Conan stories -- it might have been in the DeCamp stories, but which author it was isn't all that material).

I'm going to suggest a couple of ideas about how the destiny of these two heroes is quite different. That's related to my original plan for this post, which was to talk about how the two heroes approach problems, but this topic of destiny got so intertwined with it that I changed focus.

Conan the Average Guy
On the one hand, there's Conan. He's your regular old blue-collar, Joe Sixpack schlep. In general, he tries to approach things with the best sort of plan he can manage, and his goal is usually money (or, at least, food). Usually he's just trying to find a good job, and -- like most of us -- it turn out that his boss sucks, or that somebody has a hostile merger planned for his company, or that the management expects him to do stuff that's not actually in his job description, or that the company plans to terminate his employment at the end of the project.

Heroic Job Histories
As with most heroes whose story is best told as a short story, Conan's curriculum vitae is a disaster. He can't hold a job, the results of his work are generally disastrous, and he has a history of killing his employers. Fafhyrd and the Grey Mouser do little better. On the other hand, high-fantasy heroes like Frodo Baggins are reliable employees. They hold down a job for long periods of time, and usually work for a good boss. The pay is often less, but there's a lot of satisfaction with a job well done (save the world, etc).

Fafhyrd and the Grey Mouser: Problem Employees
This duo, unlike Conan, tend to remain unemployed for long periods of time, and often "live off the land," engineering a sort of primitive social welfare plan without the consent of the donors. They meander into situations, usually without any particular plan for what they want to achieve, simply relying on their ability to improvise. Whereas Conan is an ideal employee, Fafhyrd and the Grey Mouser are people you really don't want on your payroll. They divert funds, and tend to get distracted. The only reason they don't kill their employers is probably because their employers are a pair of spooky wizards that could blast them into bits.

The Destiny of Conan
Conan's destiny is to become King of Aquilonia. In other words, his destiny is to achieve a specific event. It's not a destiny written by supernatural forces, because, as we know, Conan's god Crom just sits on a mountain and watches the world go by. Like the watchmaker god of Enlightenment Christianity, Crom simply sets things in motion, tossing his barbarians out into the world like an infinite number of monkeys, mildly curious to see which ones become Kings of Aquilonia and which ones end up as fat couch-potatoes working as security guards and talking about their glory days at the siege of Venatium, drinking beer, and watching the chariot races.

Conan, in other words, makes his own destiny, even though it's waiting out there for him. This is classic philosophical determinism. With dialectical precision, Conan's migratory path from one crappy job to the next shuffles him toward inevitable monarchy like Yates's beast shuffles toward Bethlehem. His nature destines him for a specific event; his life is a teleology wearing the false mustache and beard of a picaresque tale.

By Contrast: Fafhyrd and the Grey Mouser
Fafhyrd and the Grey Mouser don't really have a forward-looking destiny. What they have, instead, is an identity. They are the residue (dregs, perhaps) of some past mythic hero that, typically for them, managed to screw up its rebirth and end up as two people instead of one. Already, here, we have the implication that determinism and teleology don't play much of a role in Leiber's world; cosmic forces do their best to work as advertised -- the rebirth of a mythic hero being one example. But as cosmic forces go, they are pretty incompetent -- the mythic hero ends up split into two bodies, like a bad teleportation.

Unlike the way Conan's course became fixed at the moment Crom breathed a particular personality into him, Fafhyrd and the Grey Mouser don't have any particular event that they're moving toward. Or, if they did, that plan had to get scrapped because it called for a single hero, and the double-half-heroes obviously weren't up to the job specifications. Rather, Fafhyrd and the Grey Mouser are caught in the currents of heroism without a destination. They are destined always to have to operate in the rarified events of mythic significance, but it's significance without destination, a great band that never seems to get a recording contract.

Cosmic Blind Instinct and Cosmic Over-Scheming in the Fafhyrd/Mouser Setting
The cosmic forces involved in the Fritz Leiber stories seem to operate on two levels. At the top level, there is a squabbling, scheming marketplace of higher beings, screwing things up in the same manner that destiny itself screwed up the reproduction of its mythic, archetypal single hero (ending up with two boozing reprobates charged up with all the power but none of the dignity of myth).

However, at the lower level, there is something deeply mysterious, represented by the gods in Lankhmar (as opposed to the gods of Lankhmar). The existence of destiny, too, is an interesting mystery, given that it's defective. Things are moving deep beneath the surface defects of Leiber's cosmology, but while the top level of gods is so scheming that it can't achieve anything, the lower, deeper level seems to operate only on a blind, reflexive level. It's like instinct, or the Jungian collective unconscious, or the secondary brain in a dinosaur's butt. At least it has a certain majesty to it. Issek of the Jug inhabits Fafhryd for a while, to execute the terms of a prophecy that Fafhyrd invented. The gods in Lankhmar rise and walk when they are upset.

Mouser and Fafhyrd are actually picaresque Heroes - Conan is not.
So basically, the Grey Mouser and Fafhyrd really are picaresque heroes, because although the universe is doing its best to provide direction, the cosmic forces are all screwed up and no-one, including the gods, has any idea WHAT the hell is going to happen. The future is undefined because the cosmic forces are in such disarray. The Grey Mouser and Fafhyrd don't seize free will: they have it thrust upon them because that's what happens when the universe can't get its act together.

Two very different ways in which heroes are related to their fictional worlds. There's Conan the hard-working hero with a specific event-destiny, and no real interference by destiny on his behalf, and then on the other hand there's the Grey Mouser duo, caught up in the rip-tides of myth but with no place to actually go.

It's kind of fascinating.

Pitch and torches

If I recall correctly, one of the pieces of advice that Gary Gygax gave about Dungeon Mastering was to read omnivorously, including non-fiction. Since I woke up this morning thinking about torches and flammable things, here are a couple of minor thought-offerings that, even if they don't directly affect your game, might give you some ideas. They concern the mundane and lowly torch.

Pitch is one of the substances used in making torches (I looked this up). This stuff can be derived from petroleum (in which case it is called "bitumen") or from resin. Heating wood without burning it causes tar pitch to drip away from the wood, and this is also, by the way, what causes wood to turn into charcoal. I never knew that -- I'm glad I stumbled across it.

In general, torches have been made not with a single stick of wood, but with a bundle of sticks (or reeds, or bamboo, etc), usually green rather than cured, tied together. Pitch or animal fat is used at the end (impregnated into cloth or moss) to slow down the rate of burning and keep it from blowing out too easily.