50 Barbaric Birthdays

Fifty years ago today, I uttered my first barbaric yawp. Looking forward to another five decades of telling Crom to go to hell!

The Stupidity of Boob Armor

Because it's never a bad time to remind people how ridiculous boob armor really is ...

2016: What a Year (and It's Still Not Over)

It's been a long time since I last updated this blog—nearly a year in fact! The Spring 2016 semester turned out to be just as labor-intensive as the Fall 2015 semester, and then my mother broke her right hip at the end of Finals Week. Summer 2016 was thus devoted to figuring out where my parents were going to be living (end result: in my house for 75% of the year) and then getting their stuff sold and/or packed for the move. I've only just been able to get back into the office, well over a month into what was supposed to be a research leave.

But ... my parents are settling in, my wife and kids and I are adjusting to the 50% increase in the size of our household, I'm starting to get work done, and I'm still gaming:

Barbarians of Lemuria

My Thursday night group is playing BoL whenever we don't have a sufficient quorum for Supers! Revised. The character I'm playing is a Mythic Edition update of Quaris the Fallen, the Legendary Edition character who was the subject of the very first post on this blog. It's a nice change to be playing a BoL hero instead of their opposition for once.

Supers! Revised

Our Supers! Revised GM (also the BoL GM) wasn't feeling the vibe with our Earthside campaign, so he retired it (along with Brute Squad, my duplicating brick hero, and a newer character, the arrogant Sasquatch geneticist Big Thought). The new campaign is set in outer space, and my new hero is a tribute to Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity Mesklinites:

"Legs," as his teammates call him, is a sentient millipede the size of a mastiff. His already substantial strength and toughness (he's a heavy-worlder) have been amplified by an ancient ritual, so all of his many limbs pack a powerful punch.

Uncharted Worlds

I've been doing a great deal of science fiction reading for the last several months, and my thoughts turned to SF gaming as a result (aided and abetted by the Supers! campaign). A little research into available, rules-lite SF TTRPGs turned up Sean Gomes's Uncharted Worlds, a Powered by the Apocalypse system that occupies (for me) a happy medium between traditional RPGs and the more thematic, story-driven games that epitomize the PbtA ludosphere. I was actually able to play in a G+ Hangouts game while I was closing up my parents' house at the end of August, a one-shot that ended with my shady astrophysicist activating an experimental hyperdrive and (with the aid of a roll of snake-eyes) killing the entire party in the process. Huzzah! I'm now thinking of how to go about running an UW campaign of my own ... I hope to post more along these lines soon!

The D&D Player's Worst Nightmare ...

Last year I gave you a beholder pumpkin. This year I give you the one thing no player of D&D wants to meet on a dark tabletop at midnight. Happy Halloween 2014!

The Book of Kirby

Over on Twitter, Copra creator Michel Fiffe announced a blog post describing his process producing Cobra #16 as one inspired by the King of Comics: "Kirby Is My Co-Pilot." His choice of phrase reminded me of the old saying "God is my co-pilot," and the above saying immediately popped into my head. Use this meme well, and use it wisely. But most of all, use it to celebrate Jack Kirby!

P. S. If you haven't read Fiffe's Copra (his love letter to Ostrander and Yale's Suicide Squad), now is a great time to start: Bergen Street Comics is about to release a TPB collecting the first six issues of the self-produced series. Pre-order the book; you won't be sorry you did!

Hey, Fourth Edition Book Burners ...

Why So Many Good Superhero RPGs Now?

Over at RPGnet, someone has posted a poll asking folks which system (Capes, Cowls, and Villains Foul or Supers! Revised) they'd use to run a Justice League campaign. While the poll is running in favor of my preferred superhero ruleset (Supers! Revised), the discussion has made it clear that either game would be a perfectly fine choice. Meanwhile, Steve Kenson is getting ready to release a revised edition of Icons, his acclaimed superhero RPG, HERO Games has a streamlined edition of Champions available, Paragons & Prowlers is getting decent buzz, etc., etc.

What's going on? Why are we living in a veritable Golden Age of superhero games? (Roleplaying games are generally in a good place right now design-wise, but superhero games seem to be doing especially well—I don't really see any sort of edition-warring taking place between systems.) Theories?

More You "Noh" You're a Gamer ...

Kusabira by Ise Monsui (1859-1932)

... when you're trying to decide whether or not to teach a kyogen about a yamabushi priest comically overwhelmed by demonic mushroom spirits, and all you can think is "Someone fumbled their 'Turn Undead' roll!"

You "Noh" You're a Gamer ...

Atsumori by Tsukyioka Kogyo (1869-1927)

... when you're deciding which Muromachi-era noh plays to place on the syllabus for your spring semester "Global Performance in the Late Middle Ages" and suddenly get a hankering to buy FGU's Bushido.

Mae Govannen, 2014!

So, long time, no post. November 2013 was the month where my teaching and grading responsibilities combined with my familial duties to eat up my life. December 2013 was the month where Ms. Vargold suffered a pulmonary embolism and nearly left me a widower with two children under ten. (Luckily her heart was strong, and the doctors were sharp—she's back home on the mend.)

Up until now, I haven't really had the time or will to post as a result.

But I did want to check in one last time before the clock ticks over into 2014. The past year has been the blog's most productive year: 40 total posts (including this one), 12 more than the 28 posts I made in 2010. Moreover, until November went all pear-shaped, I managed to post at least once a month for ten months. Here's hoping that I can get back on that schedule in 2014!

2013 was also the year where 13th Age got me back in the GM's seat. Thanks to Pelgrane Press's organized play program, I've run (I believe) 5 sessions' worth of the game and plan on running more in the new year: the system is a blast to play!

Best wishes to everyone for a safe conclusion to 2013 and a pleasant beginning to 2014!

What Does the Beholder Say?

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

The Dog Days of Summer

I don't want July 2013 to slip by without a post to the blog, so here's a little update on just how crazy the last month has been.

When I last posted on June 17th, I was days away from closing on both the sale of my current home and the purchase of my new home. Within twenty-four hours of that post, though, I was thrust into limbo: our buyers' lender indefinitely postponed the closing, throwing our planned purchase of a home into doubt (since we needed the sale to cover our down payment). Three weeks of misinformation, miscommunication, and general bureaucratic hijinks ensued. The end result was that the buyers had their loan application rejected—the sale was off.

We put our house back on the market and looked around at other real estate comparable to the house we had hoped to buy. Nothing was really a valid alternative for our needs. So we decided to take a risk: we have applied for a bridge loan on our equity to pay for the down payment on the house we wanted all along. The danger, of course, is that we will get what we want without selling our current home and thus end up paying two mortgages and two sets of utility bills. I'm confident that the house will do well as the real estate market picks up after the summer vacation, though. Fingers crossed!

The other insanity that's plagued me for a month is my fantasy-themed "Intro to Fiction" course. Not the students—the students are great, and I've enjoyed all of our discussions about the authors on the syllabus. (This class was especially amazing when it came to discussions of China Miéville's Scar.) No, the problem is that I underestimated how much work is involved in keeping up with the grading for an Advanced Composition course with a required total of approximately thirty pages of writing. In a regular semester, that's a lot of labor, but it's spread out over fifteen weeks. Condensed into eight weeks, the same amount of grading becomes a desperate race against time!

Class ends tomorrow (with a final discussion of Ursula K. Le Guin's Voices), so the end is in sight. I'll have to use the weeks between the end of summer school and the start of the fall semester to catch up on some of my own paper writing, but I should be able to resume a more regular posting schedule.

Modifying the Vargold "Brand"

Recently I've been feeling somewhat restrained by Vargold's exclusive focus on fantasy fiction and role-gaming—not because fantasy has lost its place as my favorite genre, but because I've been thinking of things I'd like to write about other genres and forms and media. I could do so on a separate blog (indeed, that was my original plan back in 2010 when I created Vargold to cover fantasy gaming and fiction and Krakalactaka! to cover comics), but I have found that maintaining multiple blogs is more or less a recipe for abandoning at least one of them.

I'm therefore "rebranding" Vargold by broadening its scope to take in comics and other species of speculative fiction. Fantasy will remain the primary focus of the blog, but it will no longer be the only lens through which I view nerd culture. To signal this shift, I've modified the blog description above to read "Barbaric Yawps on Comics, Role-Gaming, and Spec-Fic."

Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997) Now Online

Robin Laws just noted on Google+ that the entire text of John Clute's 1997 Encyclopedia of Fantasy is now online as part of the beta text of the third edition of Clute's Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. While both books are technically aimed at academic users, they still make good reading for fen.

Thor Bids Thee . . .

A Happy Halloween!

Vargold Turns Two

OK, the venomous pao's Strange Stones was two years old on Friday, February 3rd, and now it's Vargold's turn to be the birthday blog. What was going on back in May 2009 to give birth to these blogs in February 2010?

(Seriously, though, thanks to everyone who's followed the blog, commented on it, and/or added it to their blog roll—I appreciate it very much!)

I Look Forward . . .

. . . to reading all of the various Dungeons & Dragons-related blogs and web fora over the next few months.

NOT.

Happy Halloween!

Vargold Baby Birthday

Regular readers will remember that Vargold went on a bit of a hiatus after my second child (a son) was born on 14 August 2010.  Well, here we are a year later, and the little barbarian is now one!

Here he plays with the shaker eggs from his brand new birthday drum kit.  Me, I'm going to try and get him to provide musical accompaniment to my ongoing reread of Lord of the Rings.  "Drums, drums in the deep.  They are coming . . ."

Shadow, Sword, Spell, and . . . BABY?

James Malieszewski of Grognardia has coauthored a "humanistic, pulp fantasy" RPG with his Rogue Games partner Richard Iorio.  The game's called Shadow, Sword, & Spell, and it looks like another good addition to the tradition of sword-and-sorcery RPGs.  I don't have time to review it at present, though—something suddenly came up:

Once the baby is settled in at home, I'll post a SS&S test character.