Justin Howe's Blog, page 45
March 20, 2013
Ur Adventure Design
I never really got the hang of adventure design. Some kids I knew made meticulous maps and filled pages with neatly written stat blocks and all that junk. I never quite had the wherewithal to do that, and pretty much did my best getting just winging it (and ripping off the last movie/book/TV show consumed). For awhile this actually worked – but not always. So I did the meticulous design thing, but it wasn’t as fun.
When I started up the Vaults game, I once again tried winging it. The results w...
March 19, 2013
Checking In
Here’s some stuff:
Jin, my wife, got interviewed for her translation work on the Witcher game over at this gaming site. Of course it’s only in Korean, but Jin had a fun time working on the project and doing the interview. Did you know if you image search Witcher 2 in the USA it gives you all the monsters you can fight, but if you image search it on the Korean web it’s mostly pictures of the women you get to sleep with? True fact. Or at least maybe it is.
Two weeks back I inherited a load of boo...
March 14, 2013
The Hive
In the years between the eighth and ninth cataclysms the remnant population of Ur came into contact with the Hive. Where the initial matriarchs of the Hive came from is lost to history, but it is speculated that the first matriarch was a renegade from her own civilization who sought shelter in Ur. Symbiosis between local humans and the Hive occurred over the next few centuries. Now the towers of the Hive rise above the south east section of Ur.
The Hive is a massive structure, riddled with tun...
March 11, 2013
Schedule Change
But is it really a schedule change if there was never any schedule in the first place, eh?
From now on Thursdays* are going to be gamedays around here. I figure it’s about time there’s some consistent content on this blog, and I’ve stolen so much from so many other gaming blogs that posting my own stuff seems only right. Not to mention most of this stuff has already been written in some shape or form even if it’s only scribbly-scrawl at this point. Pretty much all of it will have been used in...
March 10, 2013
Lois the Witch and Other Stories
My review of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Lois the Witch and Other Stories is now live at Innsmouth Free Press as part of their Women in Horror Week. Like most Victorian writers Gaskell wrote her share of ghost stories and those in the collection are a nice grim assortment. Not only that but I suggest that Gaskell’s ghost stories serve as proto-noir and precursors to the works of Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, and Dorothy Hughes.
I also make a joke about bonnets and four-in-hand neckties.
Go check...
March 2, 2013
The Eagle-Shark Has Spoken
Once upon a time one of my 3rd grade students drew this:
THE DREADED EAGLE SHARK!
And I was like, yes, my players will have to fight this. And they did! And then afterwards they all drew pictures of it, because they are greedy for sweet sweet experience points because EAGLESHARK!
As you can see the description sort of shifted because it was late and I was like eagle wings, no bat wings, no two legs, no four legs – two tiger, two eagle…
February 28, 2013
February Books
1. Temporary Agency – Rachel Pollack
I enjoyed this from start to finish. Set in an alternate modern day New York City sometime after a neo-pagan revolution brings Bright Ones into the world, it’s a fun read that’s also a bit gross when the angels start making people tear their own skins off. Best of all the book is short, and I appreciate that.
2. Dagon – Fred Chappell
Weird, frustrating, and more than a little bit terrifying this 1968 literary novel attempts to recast the Lovecraft mythos in t...
February 27, 2013
A Month or So Ago
It is frustrating at times because one day you will be reading a book and thinking “This is great – This is the way to do it”, then two days later you’ll be reading another book and it’ll be doing the exact opposite thing, but you’ll think the exact same thing.
When faced with two opposite truths the issue is no longer to find the fault in one, but to decide between them. Which path will lead you to the place you want to go.
February 24, 2013
All of the Faces
“All of the faces, young, old, male, female, white and brown and black, were part of the many faces of the great sad thing that moves itself from here to there and back again in all forms of transit. Faces staring into space, faces reading faces looking inward at the stories inside them.”
- From Russell Hoban’s Linger Awhile
February 22, 2013
Brand New Silver
We reach the place after wandering. It’s her favorite place she tells me. It wears its history like thrift-store treasures: a trellis railing from its years as a Hof bar, stained and worn coffee lounge couches with mismatched cushions, its roadstall tables and chairs. The stove’s chimney pokes out from a hole above the wooden door — shiny and silver. We sit. We order. “The table’s are big,” she says. “I come here sometimes to work.” The owner talks to someone in a room beside the kitchen. A y...
