Vintage Sweets of the Ginsea Shore

I fucking love New Jersey. What's not to love? They got nice beaches, boardwalks, forests, farms, pizza, custard, animatronic gorillas arguing in helicopters. The works. When I was farming in eastern PA, the shore held some of my fondest memories. The whole dairy crew got a vacation to the shore in the summer of '16 and gosh it was such a blast. We had a cooler full of mayonnaise, tomatoes, bread, and cheese (made from our cows' milk!). And the Village at Allaire State Park! So many fond memories, but this is a gaming blog.

Warflies - Picking the Bones of No Man's Land

War Stinks!

The Great War sucked, probably. No one alive today could say one way or the other. They played soccer one time, I saw it on Doctor Who. Doctor Who is kind of what inspired this vibey idea. But not that episode.

I make no secret as to my estimation of Chris McDowell's Into The Odd and Electric Bastionland settings. It's great! The setting is evocative, weird, and hearkens to the long 19th century, all of which, to me, is sort of hyperrelevant to our current dissolution of reality. The sort of game where you could fight some angelically mutated Rudlof Steiner motherfucker who went insane from browsing too deep in the Akashic records. Throw in some Martians and Psykranauts, blend with the powderkeg of Ruritanian Europe sans serial numbers, and the OSR sensibilities of absolute scoundrels, and I present, blogified, Warflies.

Toward an Exquisite Crypt

the exquisite crypt can be many things

in the wake of all the cool jazz happening on bluesky, i got myself feeling the spirit of g+ alive again. it's certainly more twitter than it is anything else, but there's still potential. folks be talking about what the community of the OSR could look like, and using a strengths-based approach, defining what we want instead of what we don't want --- so i want more collaborative dungeon design.

Into the Odd - In the Mountains of Touforte, part 2

 After a quiet and uneventful night sleeping on the leather couches, the companions awake and begin to make ready, Tinneraine and Vanise find a pair of swords displayed on the walls and clasp the scabbards to their belts, while Awela and Sadiba peruse the bookshelves for anything of value. Sadiba, noticing a tome on sword-fighting, brushes aside a dusty web when a sharp pain on his hand elicits a scream as he falls to the ground shaking. Tinneraine dashes over and swats away the enormous pallid ghost-recluse with his new sword before he sucks the poison out from Sadiba's wound.

"My dear, you must be more careful," Tinneraine says to Sadiba upon his return to consciousness, "who knows what foul crawling things can do!"

"It's best we depart now," says Awela as she shoulders her pack.

As the companions exit the manor they notice the corpses they had encountered the previous evening had vanished by some means in the night.

Tinneraine mutters some esoteric prayer to calm his beating heart as they pass by and set foot across the dewy meadow toward the mountain pass to the north.

Into the Odd - In the Mountains of Touforte

I have decided to try out some solo RPG'ing. Doing some Into the Odd solo hex-crawl, using my binder of random tables and a smorgasbord of solo tools. We will see how this goes, but I have had fun so far.

Dramatis Personae

Awela Singh - a veteran demolitions expert who served in the underwar years ago before turning to a life of adventure and criminal endeavors. In addition to her penchant for explosives, she plays the french horn in a veteran's orchestra.

Vanise Palamas - an enthusiastic mountaineer with a background in anarchist sabotage and bongo-accompanied poetry. Her connections to Bastion's underbelly has kept the crew gainfully employed of late.

Tinneraine Toohzette - a defrocked minister of the nameless saint of secrets, he was excommunicated for being a gossip. His side hustle as fashion columnist at an independent rag mostly feeds his luxury addiction.

Sadiba Navda - a young, curious man recently released from an indentured bond to a mining syndicate his parents sold him to as a means to escape debts. Unlike his boyfriend, Tinneraine, he has no interest in engaging in crime and continues to work an honest day-job mining for the syndicate.

I guess it's 2024

trying to find where the time goes

The Congress of Swine

 

this was the first iteration of nutmeg pass

 
initially, what would become The Congress of Swine was just a fun collection of words i came up with when i decided to include Rosa Bonheur's painting of wild boars in the snow while constructing my first map of Nutmeg Pass, using this sort of voronoi-esque hexmap. it sort of stuck with me, so i thought, what better way to follow up my cairn dungeon (see Caspar David Friedrich's painting also included above), than playing around with these mysterious swine.