Years Gone By

     I recently passed my 100th post on this blog and it got me wondering, how long ago did I start? I checked out the Blog's original home over on Tumblr and found this post, dating my online presence as Judge Toast to September of 2023. More than two and a half years ago. I made the move over to Blogger eventually and made a small effort to keep the Tumblr up to date with this blog, but just never really kept up with it. 

    When I started this blog Hodas was still mostly scattered notes and a handful of class documents and a single rough draft of a zine. I remember waking up one night and telling my wife "I gotta write" and hammered out the entire rough draft for the first Dueling Guardens of Hodas Zine, Goblins. That is coming, I promise. We're in a rough spot right now working out art, editing, layout, and kind of living in survival mode but it, along with two others, it is coming. 

    This blog has been something I've kept consistent for a long time. I've missed a few posts but I've been pretty good about getting out my Tuesday and Thursday posts each week. It's given my life a sense of structure and consistency. Even when it's just one of the session write ups or a magic sword that I generated on the spot the day before. It has gotten me in touch with more than a few people in the community who I have really appreciated their feedback and experience, people like Nick Baran from breaker press games, Daniel J. Bishop from many beloved books and articles and his Crowking Press, and many others. I would like to shout out to Buster from 19 Sided Die who I've gone to for feedback and given feedback to, talked to a lot and really feel like I've made a friend with. His blog is something I check every Wednesday. It might be a bit presumptuous of me but I really feel like our two blogs are growing together. I would also like to shout out Tyler Broor who has been running his blog since August of last year and has, in my opinion, become a bright spot in the blog sphere.

Seeing my weekly readers jump from 2-4 to around 1000 has really kept me going! I appreciate every single person reading this blog, Thank you all for coming by and reading! I would love to hear more from you guys, what you're interested in, how you feel about stuff I write! 

 I wanna sign this one off by saying thank you again to everyone who has been stopping by to read my blog. I will remain committed to making my regular two posts a week with intermittent self promotion when I am able to count past the number 1. I promise I am not a gully dwarf. I've been teasing it for a long time but there will be Hodas Zines in time, the first three issues are going to be the Goblins, the Minotaur, and the Ooze. We don't know if there will be a kickstarter yet but if there is expect more than those three.

Monster: Steam-Blood of the Sandbars

     Haven't done one of these in a while, despite how much I love making monsters. This time we got away from the usual method of tinkering with something that comes from the Monster extractors. (Not that they aren't great sources! Seriously, check them out, they are PWYW). Instead we got our hands on a bit of an old book that we only recently stumbled on: The Random Esoteric Creature Generator! This book goes all the way back to 2008 which feels so far away now.

    So this time we moved through the tables in this book and got our flavors and abilities of the monster, then put it all together. It has a lot of the bones of DCC, use monsters once, don't give them proper names for your PCs to call them. call them things like "achie's folly" or "the beast in the dunes", and other great advice. You can really feel the philosophy of the future of DCC in this book and it's a great time. 

But this isn't a review, the title of the post says there is a monster here! Here it is for you:

Steam-Blood of the Sandbars

Champions of Tibault Session 6

 Elves of Hodas are something I spent a long time thinking about. They were mentioned in the original game of wasteland that created the setting but they weren't a focus, just an offhanded comment. So I had some freedom. Elves in Hodas fall into two categories: The ones who stayed behind and the ones who left the plane. Most elves in the world simply left as the empire of humanity rose and enslaves all in its path. The ones who stayed behind secluded themselves in extremely hostile or magical locations that the empire simply couldn't gain access to. This created a culture of elves who are something of a cross between Tolkien and Llanowar from MTG. They are hostile to outsiders and powerful, immortal beings. 

    On the other hand, the elves that left all changed. The elves and land are one, a friend decided that in another game a long time ago and I've always loved it. So what happens when the elves find a new land? In Hodas, they take on properties of the land they move into. Almost all of the ancient elven cities shifted themselves onto another plane and took on the properties of those planes. Some elves now reside on the elemental plane of fire, their weaknesses and patron have changed. Others settled on the mechanical plane of law, their bodies taking on an almost clockwork appearance.

    This session was the first time I really got to break out the elves who stayed behind and show what they were really like. I like elves as an antagonist that believes it is in the right. 

Session 6:

Orkov came to the party and revealed that the party, through Deranged, was indebted to him. When the party asked for proof he had a featherfolk step forward and relay the entire conversation between Orkov and Deranged to them. Deranged began to make outlandish claims about Orkov and claimed that anyone could say anything and that it wouldn’t always be true. After some confusion it was explained to Deranged that featherfolk can replicate any noise or voice they hear with absolute accuracy as long as they only repeat the thing that they heard, exactly as they heard it. This prompted Deranged to insult him. Naturally he demanded full repayment immediately. Deranged challenged Orkov to a battle in the arena and Orkov accepted, believing his champion would crush anyone Deranged could hire. 

Deranged, unable to find a champion stepped into the arena to battle against Black Stone, Orkov’s champion. Deranged put up the best fight they could but ultimately was defeated by Black Stone. In a desperate attempt to survive Deranged switches minds with the original Deranged in the dagger. Shockingly Black Stone heals Deranged, stating that if they couldn’t pay the debt then Orkov would gain a new slave.

The party collected their friend and wiped out quite of bit of their funds paying off the debt owed to Orkov and departs for Evernight in order to find some treasure and wealth to make up for their losses.

The party hacks it’s way into evernight and finds that the foliage is growing back behind them. Eventually they get into the forest itself, they find it is dark but lit by a strange silvery light that permeates the forest in the form of moon beams coming though the trees above. The party scouts the area and spots a strange group of rat creatures scavenging something nearby until a horn is blown in the distance which startles the creatures and sends them running. The party soon finds out exactly what startled the creatures when they are ambushed by elves and surrounded. They are told, through Witherbone’s translation, that the only reason they are alive is because they travel with this disgrace for an elf.

Blog d100: A book or movie

 Been a bit since we did one of these! This Post is part of a challenge from the Blog d100 challenge made by Buster over on 19 Sided Die.  Check him out!

 

Rolled: 58 - Talk about a movie or book that influenced your setting!

 

This is a good one but a bit of a tough one! The setting of Hodas is inspired by SO many sources. I've already gone on about how Micheal Moorcock has influenced the games at length. So what Source could I talk about next? So instead I'm gonna share a few and give a short talk about why they inspired me!

 

Heavy Metal:

Heavy Metal is a bit of an old one, an animated film from the 1980's. This movie just refuses to explain anything and just tells its stories. It opens with a car dropping onto a planet from space and the driver just driving home and getting annihilated by an evil green orb. It talks about how powerful it is and then tells stories where it is defeated like... 3 of 5 times or something. The music of it, the storytelling, it really left a mark on me when I was young.

 

Silver age comics: 

I've been reading comics for ages, almost entirely my dad's inherited collection. I ran superhero games for decades and you could really feel the influence of these comics. Heroes were heroes, villains were villains, the systems worked as intended but villains were getting out of prison once a week. It used to be a really black and white superhero setting where there was a lot of multiversal and villain of the week stuff. This setting grew up as people who read different comics came to play and changed the setting with their influence. 

Michael Moorcock:

I know I did a post about him but I just wanna highlight that the Corum books were a huge influence on me. They were the first time in a book I had seen someone borrow from Celtic myth. These are another world of sword and sorcery that refuses to explain anything. There is a giant in the water and he drags a net behind him, why? Don't worry about it! I very much felt that was a good way to handle things like that. The players don't need to know why and how everything everywhere works all the time, their characters certainly wouldn't know these things. 

 

The Etched City:

This book is about two people who leave behind questionable lives and arrive in a city that has many low magic elements. It very much is a story that feels very low magic until suddenly it isn't. This really made me lean into the low magic part of DCC. When I run, the world doesn't feel like it has a lot of magic in it until you find yourself in a remote island not on any map and the people here all descended from elementals.

 

Fantasy Metal Music:

This is a more recent influence but fantasy metal music feels like a love letter to the old school world of tabletop. Some of the songs are about the same novels I'm talking about. Blind Guardian does music about Elric, The Wheel of Time, and Arthurian legend. Glory Hammer has this whole world of insane high magic fantasy with tech elements thrown in, there is a whole song about a magic dragon (machine) and the magic scroll to control it (instruction manual). Recently I've picked up Eternal Champion, I think based on the name you can guess the influence on that one. 

Blog d100 sharing this week

Since the last time I posted one of these and there are a couple out there I have been keeping an eye on. If you are doing this and want to see your posts here, please comment and I'll make sure I'm linking you!

 

From Mythscribe we have: Who Digs those Dungeons?, be sure to check them out, a lot of good content over on Mythscribe!

Blog Graveyard vol 1: Knights in the North

     If you're here then you probably know about at least 3-5 other blogs out there in the DCC sphere. You might also be aware of the number of interesting blogs out there that have fallen silent. I still use a lot of those for reference material and sources of rules, classes, monsters, and really anything related to DCC. So I got a suggestion from a friend of mine to talk about some of the older blogs out there. He's new to DCC and already has the attitude and energy for this game. He's bridging between his home system and DCC so smoothly and with such good energy, he's even contributed an interesting entry to a secret project I'm working on. He was reading something I wrote for another post I am writing where I reference The Secret Santicore and asked if there is any sort of resource list or archive of these blogs that are now silent. The unfortunate answer is that there really isn't. I fear the task to archive and source all of them is beyond me but I can at least talk about some of my favorites and maybe help people who are just getting into DCC find other sources that they might not normally locate. This series will only be covering blogs that have been silent for 3 or more years, and despite the cheeky title I'm not saying these blogs are truly dead and will never come back, I'm not the blog graveyard keeper or blog undertaker.

     So to kick this off we are starting with one of my favorites, Knights in the North! This blog's last post is 12/08/2019, it was to announce their Patreon which also seems to have fallen silent. KitN had a team of writers & artists who really made the blog come to life. Most posts come with some art and something that fits not just DCC but can easily slot into the OSR sphere. They had it all, Classes, Spells, Patrons, Gods, house rules, cool tables, new races, magic items, and ready made encounters. If you're here, you probably have heard of KitN but if you haven't, buckle up!

    I want to share some of the highlights some of my favorites to get you started reading their work and give you enough to decide if you wanna dig deeper (you should).

    The Knight class: This class could be covered under warrior, flavor is free after all. That said, it offers someone a way to play a little more energy leaning into the legends and myths. It included a great piece of art and excellent rules. It hit all the notes I personally would want in this class, it has deeds, fighting style based on alignment, divine leanings, a code of conduct, and can even incur their own version of disaproval. 

Animal companion rules: Animal companions are all over Appendix N, if you've read any of those books you can probably think of one or two off the top of your head. This added a much needed rule for covering animal companions. I know a lot of people will say "quest for it" which I think really is only complimented by this. The PCs can quest for animal companions and the judge has rules already made for this. This offered a simple set of rules to give any character an animal companion, a stat line, and advancement without building out a whole new class for it like a certain blogger who's post you're reading right now.

 Equipment Qualities and Materials: This is a great one that I use all the time. It offers some ways of spicing up weapons and armor without just making them magical. I use it in almost every single magic sword post you might find on my own blog. A weapon that does +1d damage without being magical but looks like a sawtooth sword, something made by elves to be lighter and faster, something forged on another plane that detects as lawful or chaotic, all of these things and more add some real flavor to the weapons and armor you might generate randomly. 

 Down time rules: There are probably tons of these out there by now, I know of at least two others, but these were some of the first ones I ever saw and I loved them. I got a lot of mileage out of them and still come back to them for some games. Excellent for when your players decide they wanna hang out and recover without carousing or creating more problems for themselves.

Random Encounters: This is such a good weird random encounters table. It has a wizard traveling on a scorpion, Fae trickery, roadside monoliths, and candy you find on the ground. I like to break this one out on occasion to keep the world feeling weird.

 House rules: No conversation about KitN would be complete without a mention of these house rules. If you've been reading my blog for a while you'll know how much my own house rules list references these often. There is more than one post on their blog that falls into this category but the two big ones are linked here. I strongly recommend reading through their work. 

 

Knights in the North has been a massive influence on my own blog, in the content I cover, the diversity of topics I want to cover, and the format of adding a PDF to the end of most posts so people can download and have the content in their own folder, even if my blog goes belly up. I strongly recommend digging through their content if you've never been there before. This is the one that inspired me to start to blog, to share the things I made for my own games in a public space for others to enjoy and comment on. I hope my love letter to their blog made you wanna check them out. Writing this was really wonderful, picking through their blog is such a trip down memory lane for me.

DCC Martial art: Drunken Monkey

     Those of you familiar with Secret Santicore might remember this post. The Five-Fold art of war is a martial arts system that builds on the back of an already existing system for patrons to give more martial inclined characters something similar. Yes, warriors and thieves can have patrons, in fact Lankhmar had excellent rules to make characters into patrons which warriors and thieves might get a little more mileage out of. My issue was always that while anyone can have a patron it's pretty obvious that a spellcaster is likely to get the most mileage out of one by nature of them usually granting spells.

    Personally I love some martial arts madness in my RPG. for decades now my favorite class has always been the monk in any game that will allow me to play one. I have maybe 4 versions of the monk class in my folder, This one is my favorite because it feels like the early editions of D&D monk by having thief skills and random mystical abilities and limited advancement.  There are other ways to do high flying kung fu rules in DCC, like the fantastic Kung Fu classics, which is more for emulating the kung fu movies I know more than a few of us grew up watching. 

    All that to say: I like martial arts and the rules from Secret Santicore are my favorite way of including them in DCC. This is one of my own martial arts made under those rules. I added some things, like an ability score adding to unarmored combat, affiliated deeds, and special rules. I'll admit I had a hard time getting this one finished, it basically is writing 4 spells and a bunch of other things. I ended up binging some of my favorite kung fu movies in the process for inspiration which certainly didn't help speed up the process. So here it is, for your enjoyment:

 

Drunken Monkey 

Champions of Tibault vol 5

    This game saw a lot of action from Talshu's player. I really enjoyed this character. She collected titles as we kept playing. Each time I looked at her sheet she had added a new title to the titles section and I kind of loved it. This person was one of the only people in the games who used the multiclassing rules which I really loved.

    This session saw a lot of down time so we really see the party scatter and get up to their own little issues. I use a combination of down time rules from a few places but usually it is just a matter of asking what the party wants to do and playing some of that out.

 

Session 5:

The party encountered Electra and Honest, the only survivors of the party who went into Evernight, learning that the others were dead and they captured some kind of massive bipedal rat in the forest. They sold this creature to Wounded Animal and intend never to try adventure again, Electra considering taking up a role as a tavern girl somewhere and Honest thinking of leaving the city entirely.

Egrat retrieved a diamond of some value from his share of the treasure from their recent adventures and offered it to Obedient in exchange for the newly born crown jewel’s assistance studying a pearl carved with a spell. Obedient agrees and a new Crown Jewel ooze is born Tunic. Tunic uses it’s body to enlarge the carvings on the tiny pearl, allowing Egrat to study it and copy the notes.
Halcyon starts to work with her contacts in the city, friends, fans, and allies in order to start to piece together an information network. Many of them don't have the skills for it but agree to keep an ear to the ground.

Talshu Is hired through the Torchlighters to investigate and obtain a sketch of the beast Wounded Animal recently purchased. She sneaks an artist into the barn and finds the creature, as well as a group of children who seem to be in cages. Her morals get in the way of the job and she releases the children to find that they are strangely grown up for the age they appear to be, they claim to be from a village nearby but it is not a place Talshu is familiar with. She completes the job and gains information on Wounded Animal that she brings back to the party.

Later, Talshu decided to acquire some alchemist’s glue from a stall in the market. The first alchemists she stopped by, a pair of married old goblins named Overconfident and Square, gave her a price she didn’t like and would not budge when she insulted them and implied she could take it. Talshu decided not to shop around and snuck into their stall at night and took the solvent and left a snide note. Naturally she was accused of the theft and demanded trial by combat. The old couple hired a well known featherfolk gunner which prompted Talshu to look for her own champion. Aerin refused her and recommended a goblin he knew called Loose. Loose was hired and the arena fight was short and brutal. Loose ignored the spirit of the fight to disable his opponents ability to surrender and then smother him slowly. Talshu is cleared of any wrongdoing but her stomach turns a little as she watches the Featherfolk’s struggles and attempts to plead for it’s life.