Justin Howe's Blog, page 10

The Monk, An Irreverent Synopsis

My posts about Matthew Lewis’s The Monk remain some of the most popular I’ve written. I can only imagine people are using them to pass tests in classes instead of reading the book itself. Which I am fine with.

It’s a 400+ pages Gothic novel; my series of posts was only about 6000 words.

This past year for Christmas I collected all the posts, cleaned them up, and put them in a booklet that I gave to my patrons as a holiday gift.

“like a poisonous mulled wine, delightful” – a patro...

Orlando Furioso, Canto IV

I made the comment on twitter that I am glad I skipped the introduction because I fear it would’ve tried to make me think this was a book to be taken seriously. A Dante’s The Divine Comedy, instead of what it actually is: a 16th century run of Avengers comics. The whole thing reads like Ariosto took all the legends and epics he knew and mashed them into one continuity Crisis on Infinite Earths style. And I’m here for it.

Plus it’s really good bedtime reading.

Last canto we ended with B...

Orlando Furioso, Canto III

Hey, 

Did you know that Ariosto was sponsored by the D’Este family? 

Do you know who the ancestors of the D’Este family were? 

Turns out they were Bradamante, that lady knight of great virtue, and Ruggierro, that guy knight of great virtue. But wait you say, aren’t they on opposite sides of this war between Christian and Saracen? Why yes, that’s true. They are on opposite sides of the war, but they have destinies, and one of them is to get married, found the D’Este family, more to F...

Into the Odd: Actual Play

I recently ran a game of Into the Odd using the scrypthouse write-up from my Mysthead 3 ‘zine (itch.io page here). It was fun. The players were repairman sent to determine why a local scrypthouse had gone silent.

Using the pathetic fallacy generator from the ‘zine, I rolled up a house that craved silence and dampened sounds. For the cause of the trouble I decided the local corps members had come into contact with a void wraith and been taken over by a bad signal. I also stuck a roaming void m...

Orlando Furioso, Canto II

Second installment and I am noticing a pattern. Introduce knight. Make the knight fight. Put knight in hole. Introduce another knight or switch to one you already had in a hole. Rinse and repeat. It’s a neat formula. I can see why the book’s been so popular.

This chapter has a lot of that. It also has wizards, sprites, dwarfs, and a winged horse. A veritable monster manual of stuff. 

So strap on your sword belts and let’s go!

Rinaldo and Sacripante are getting ready to duel. The cau...

Orlando Furioso, Canto I

Welcome to this year’s self-imposed task! 

Feel free to occupy yourselves as you see fit!

As mentioned before, this year I’ve decided to read Orlando Furioso, the 16th century over-the-top chivalric romance by Ludovico Ariosto. 

Who’s that? 

Dante lived  from the 13th to 14th century. Chaucer in the 14th century. Ariosto lived from the 15th to 16th century. He was a contemporary with Erasmus, Martin Luther, and Machiavelli. So that’s a thing to remember: While princes learned to ...

Recent Games I’ve Played

Part of the game shelf

I’ve been playing some games. Here’s what I thought about them:

Worlds Without Number: I wasn’t a fan despite my love for Stars Without Number. We made characters and I ran a few combats. Overall, I found it too crunchy. I think Kevin Crawford is designing a very different game than one I want to play. For one, I’m drifting away from games with detailed skill lists. I’d rather it was all summed up in a word or two background/archetype. Still, the chassis fascinates m...

Game Stuff

Never too early to figure out your next Halloween costume.

I updated my itch.io page with all the game materials I’ve made to date. They are all pay what you want. Most materials use Necrotic Gnome’s Old School Essentials as their ruleset, but they could be tweaked for any tabletop fantasy game.

Mysthead 1: Mysthead is a grab bag ‘zine of stuff used at my table and not. 12 pages, includes details of the Mysthead region with adventure seeds, the Beachcomber class for Old School Essentials...

Scrypt: A Lexical Fungus

It’s been a bit. I’ve been lazy. I’ve also been working on another issue of Mysthead. I might also have started to post some game stuff to itch.io. Mostly bespoke classes for Old School Essentials and an adventure.

One thing I want to add to my game table are condition cards that impact roleplay as opposed to mechanics. One inspiration was the card game The Grizzled, but I’m sure it’s been used elsewhere. So I took that idea and mushed it with the notion of what if languages could be inf...

Scrypt: A Lexical Fungi

It’s been a bit. I’ve been lazy. I’ve also been working on another issue of Mysthead. I might also have started to post some game stuff to itch.io. Mostly bespoke classes for Old School Essentials and an adventure.

One thing I want to add to my game table are condition cards that impact roleplay as opposed to mechanics. One inspiration was the card game The Grizzled, but I’m sure it’s been used elsewhere. So I took that idea and mushed it with the notion of what if languages could be inf...