The Grumbling Griffin

Dungeon Synth

2024-05-05T03:46:00.000Z

Almost all the music I play while prepping and running sessions is plumbed from the boundless depths of dungeon synth on Bandcamp. These are but a few of my current favorites. Enjoy, and support these artists—especially if it happens to be Bandcamp Friday.

II by Fief III by Fief Nature and Solitude by Forest of Yore Compendium Reliquiae by DIM Realms of Magickal Sorrow by Old Sorcery The Candlelight Tomes by Gelure Spore Sorcery by Hideous Gomphidius

Encounters - Forests & Bandits

2024-05-08T04:02:00.000Z

These intentionally slight entries are intended as creative prompts—especially for weirdos such as myself who like to daydream about this stuff, even outside the context of game prep!

Bandits (d6)

Highwaymen harass a father and son.
Bandits rush toward the party—fleeing from something.
A corpse riddled with arrows. Tracks lead away from the road.
A group of brigands attempt theft by stealth from a sleeping giant.
A man sits beside a burnt wagon.
Several men in official looking livery demand a toll.

Forests (d6)

A giant naps beside the road.
Numerous camp fires a short distance off the path.
A dishonest wizard makes an unusual request.
Three woodsmen argue over the favor of a dryad.
A small child needs an escort home.
Cries for help some distance from the trail.

Encounters - Highlands & Weirdos

2024-05-12T21:57:00.000Z

Highlands

A griffin circles above.
Ogres bicker about a captive.
A giant towers over a traveler.
Numerous intricately detailed statues in action poses. Basilisk? Cockatrice?
Orcs, fresh from a victory.
Kobolds spring a trap.

Weirdos

A decrepit wizard offers the PCs a draw from his pipe.
Children play hide and seek among the trees/boulders/tall grass.
A man sits atop a large chest placed in the middle of the road.
An ornery individual hangs in a crow’s cage
Two halflings named Flim and Flam present an incredible opportunity.
The PCs arrive at a crossroads not indicated on any map.

The Accursed Armory

2024-05-14T22:00:00.000Z

This is an ongoing list of cursed magical items, weapons and armor which players will hopefully find intriguing, and be tempted to use, despite their downsides.

In some cases, these are magical creations gone awry. In others, they are intentional products of malign influence. And in some, well, “curse” is in the proverbial Eye of the Beholder™.

The Shadowband
A black iron ring that renders the wearer invisible, except for their shadow, and mute. The wearer cannot interact physically with objects or creatures, but also cannot pass through barriers. Can only be removed under the noonday sun.
The Serpent’s Ring
A platinum ring shaped like twin snakes. Enhances the wearer’s skill at deception, but carries a 3 in 6 chance of inducing self-deception. Removal requires that the wearer believe the ring to be mundane.
Bristle’s Bane
This gaudy ruby and gold ring is imbued with the spirit of a trickster god. It fills its wearer with a false sense of confidence, compelling them to engage in petty acts of mischief and games of chance. This continues until the wearer bets and loses the ring itself to an unwitting mark. When this happens, there is a 1 in 6 chance its final trick will be to not release from the wearer’s finger.
The Identity Loop
This ring, which is enchanted to appear traditionally feminine to men and masculine to women (DM discretion for any nonbinary PCs), changes the wearer’s gender for 3d12 days, after which it can be freely removed.

Appendix N

2024-05-23T00:00:00.000Z

All this stuff was either foundational to my interest in the hobby, or it's something that gets my imagination going. It's stuff that I love, and with any luck this list will keep growing.

Books/Short Stories:

The Art of the Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Game (Weis, 1985)
The Slithering Shadow (Howard, 1933)
The Tower of the Elephant (Howard, 1933)
Rogues in the House (Howard, 1934)
At the Mountains of Madness (Lovecraft, 1936)
Red Nails (Howard, 1936)
The Hobbit (Tolkien, 1937)
The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien, 1954)
Dune (Herbert, 1965)
Blood Meridian (McCarthy, 1985)
House of Leaves (Danielewski, 2000)
Southern Reach Trilogy (VanderMeer, 2014)
The Fungus (Knight, 1985) (objectively, this one is pretty bad)
Berserk (Miura, 1989)

Movies/Shows:

Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954)
The Hidden Fortress (Kurosawa, 1958)
Yojimbo (Kurosawa, 1961)
Sanjuro (Kurosawa, 1962)
Jason and the Argonauts (Chaffey, 1963)
Lord of the Flies (Brook, 1963)
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Leone, 1966)
The Hourglass Sanitorium (Has, 1973)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1974)
Sorcerer (Friedkin, 1977)
Phantasm (Coscarelli, 1978)
Stalker (Tarkovsky, 1979)
Clash of the Titans (Davis, 1981)
Dragonslayer (Robbins, 1981)
Heavy Metal (Potterton, 1981)
The Keep (Mann, 1983)
Conan the Destroyer (Fleischer, 1984)
The Black Cauldron (Rich, Berman, 1985)
The Goonies (Donner, 1985)
Red Sonja (Fleischer, 1985)
Aliens (Cameron, 1986)
Big Trouble in Little China (Carpenter, 1986)
Die Hard (McTiernan, 1988)
Willow (Howard, 1988)
Army of Darkness (Raimi, 1992)
Captain Ron (Eberhardt, 1992)
Cabin Boy (Resnick, 1994)
The Descent (Marshall, 2005)
Old Joy (Reichardt, 2007)
House of the Devil (West, 2009)
Valhalla Rising (Refn, 2010)
A Field in England (Wheatley, 2013)
As Above, So Below (Dowdle, 2014)
The Hateful Eight (Tarantino, 2015)
Don't Breathe (Álvarez, 2016)
The Void (Gillespie, Kostanski, 2017)
Annihilation (Garland, 2018)
The Terror (Multiple, 2018)
Us (Peele, 2019)
Green Knight (Lowery, 2021)
Barbarian (Cregger, 2022)
The Northman (Eggers, 2022)
Scavengers Reign (Bennett, Huettner, 2023)
Delicious in Dungeon (Miyajima, 2024)
The Company of Wolves (Jordan, 1984)
Berserk (Takahashi, 1997)

Games:

Zork Trilogy (Infocom, 1980-82)
Beyond Zork (Infocom, 1987) I learned to read to play Infocom games.
Enchanter Trilogy (Infocom, 1983-85)
Wishbringer (Infocom, 1985)
The Lurking Horror (Infocom, 1987)
Quake (id Software, 1996)
Resident Evil (Capcom, 1996)
Everquest (Verant Interactive, 1999)
Silent Hill (Konami, 1999)

Orphans

2025-10-28T23:16:19.000Z

I coaxed my group onto the Mothership last week for a run-through of Luke Gearing's "Orphans." As the resident OSR/NSR fan in the group, I've coaxed them into trying a few systems over the years. It's been more hit than miss, but this was by far the softest landing we've had in a new system, and the most immediately fun.

"Orphans" is still fairly new, but it seems like it's unfairly slept on in the discourse, especially as an intro to Mothership. I have nothing to compare it to, but it worked fantastically in that role for my group.

Maybe its origin as a Kickstarter olive branch contributes to it being underrated—or the fact that conceptually similar modules beat it to the punch? But we had an absolute blast with it, and were able to really hit the ground running.

So much was working against it, too—we were coming off an extended hiatus, trying a system none of us had played, with only a few hours of GM prep, including the time to learn the system. I'd had a couple weeks available to prep, but if I used my time effectively I'd be living a very different life.

A lot of credit goes to the Mothership itself for being so easy to run, but "Orphans’" vibes are immaculate. While looking for a one-shot to run in Mothership I discovered that I'm a picky little shit with sci-fi. I wanted something very specific: Something grounded in familiar tropes, that still manages to highlight the cosmic horror and underlying weirdness that makes Mothership sing. "Orphans" nailed it.

This isn't to say I have no quibbles. I love the graphic design, but the chartreuse color scheme feels like an odd choice for a module set on a station bathed in red emergency lights and orbiting a red planet. I also got stun-locked thinking about how gravity would work with the station's layout. Is the wheel meant to generate gravity? If so, what about the central shaft? And either way, how does one transition between the two when traveling from the lobby? It's nothing that mattered even a little bit in play.

What did matter, quite a lot, was the events table. The cumulative rolls worked great for ratcheting up the tension. Somehow every result felt intentional and appropriate in the moment. As the unsettling events escalated, they even crossed the vaunted horror game threshold between scaring characters and scaring players.

We broke for the night after a character slapped Tina across the face to get her attention, only for her hand to swipe through Tina's face as it dissolved into loose soil. Then rain began pouring from the ceiling. Panic ensued, and the party retreated through the airlock to their (broken) ship, disabling the airlock door behind them.

It was a hell of a moment.

I have a hunch "Orphans" will stick the landing, but even if it falls short I think the group is sold on Mothership.

One of my players said it best: We've all seen Alien(s) and other sci-fi horror flicks, so the character archetypes are familiar, and fun to embody. It's an easy vibe to sink into. I'd add that corporations doing atrocities and carelessly birthing existential threats gets more relatable by the day.

My only regret is that this blog's style goes hard for pseudo-medieval fantasy, and now I can't stop thinking about sci-fi horror. Edit: This aged poorly! I should've known I'd change the style early and often.

Edit: Successful finish! One character death by soil transmogrification, emergency power re-routed to fuel pumps, orphans abandoned on the station. The events table breaks down a bit once Auntie manifests the first time, but I still really like the mechanic.

Next stop: "Decagone."*

The Art of the Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Game

2025-11-16T01:43:51.000Z

Just as “The Hobbit” was my introduction to fantasy, this book was my introduction to Dungeons & Dragons. It was tucked away with my dad’s back issues of "Heavy Metal," the first couple Rifts books^{1Rifts (Palladium Books, 1990)} ^{2Rifts Sourcebook One (Palladium Books, 1991)}, and a series of Frank Frazetta art books^{3The Fantastic Art of Frank Frazetta series (Peacock Press, 1975–1985)}, which were formative in a very different way.

I knew that Dungeons & Dragons and Rifts were the same type of game, but the Rifts rules were (and largely remain) impenetrable to me, so they weren't much help as a guiding light. I was left imagining playing D&D without a good idea of what that meant, primarily based on the scenes depicted and described in this book, and of course Gygax’s flowery preface^4Preface.

This should have been a gateway drug that sent me immediately scrambling for more, but the ghosts of the Satanic Panic still haunted my slice of small town USA, and my liberal parents were careening into their Christian talk radio era. My cousin’s breakdown, or whatever you want to call it, didn’t help.

Magic users always have the best clutter. Oh, I mean, "[lame boob joke]."

Older cousins often play the role of Ben Kenobi in a kid’s Dungeons & Dragons adventure. However, a few years ago, mine decided to retreat to an outbuilding on our family property to write a manuscript inspired by his group’s second edition campaign.

This “building” was an abandoned chicken coop with a small footprint and generous ventilation by way of split timber walls. I guess Daniel didn’t mind the breeze or the spiders. It sat empty for years, though, so the chicken shit was long gone at least, and the rats had moved out. It was well-built, though, and remained sturdy and dry after decades in the pacific northwest weather.

The coop sat near the property line, in the shadow of a birch grove that was beginning to overtake it. A perimeter of cottonwoods, apple trees, and an unstoppable Japanese knotweed infestation afforded the area considerable privacy from the rest of the property.

My all-time favorite D&D painting, and it’s from Dragonlance of all things. Find the Tardis.

One afternoon when Daniel was away, I sneaked a look. His cot and sleeping bag were against the far wall. An old typewriter was set up on a folding table, along with a pair of antique oil lamps he'd borrowed from our grandma's collection. Beside the typewriter was the manuscript. It was about 100 pages in a flexible black binder, just sitting there. I opened the binder and glanced at the first pages, then I got cold feet. He packed up and left a few days later. I wonder if he still has the manuscript, but after all these years it's probably best to let the mystery be.

What? That’s it? Okay, not exactly a “Mazes & Monsters” level freakout^{5Of course "Mazes & Monsters" wasn't really a "Mazes & Monsters" level freakout either.}, but don't undersell it. A lot of people write manuscripts, and very few decamp to abandoned chicken coops to do so. At any rate, it convinced my family that Dungeons & Dragons was a dangerous influence. So it was a shock to find those books on my dad’s shelf years later, packed with images of foul creatures and ritual magic, and exhortations to the reader to conjure mythical worlds full of eldritch horrors.

I love this, but it does remind me of my dog staring while I poop.

The Satanic Panic bugaboos became a central part of the appeal for me, and remain so. It adds an aura of foreboding to some of these paintings. The ancient elf clutching a glowing crystal wasn’t just cool, it was dangerous. It imperiled one’s mortal soul, and good luck finding a suburban boy who doesn’t enjoy imperiling his mortal soul. The “Wizards, druids, and clerics” section was always my favorite, for that reason. That’s the stuff that gave the Jack Chick types fits. You’d think “Griffons and other mythical beasts” would be my favorite, but they misspelled my name.

Ditch the horse if you want to live.

I recently repurchased this book to replace the copy I cut and pasted all over middle-school binders. It’s a 40-year-old glue-bound book, so the pages are loose, which was a good excuse to (gently) remove them to get make the high-res scans I’ve included throughout.

Many of these pieces were included in the more recent “Art & Arcana,”^{6Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: A Visual History (Ten Speed Press, 2018)} but the presentation is usually better (read: larger) here. This book is more of an art showcase—D&D was barely a decade old when this was book was compiled, and this art style was still taking over. "Art & Arcana" is essential, though, for its deeper dive into the history^{7See also: Eye of the Beholder: The Art of Dungeons & Dragons (2019)}.

Magic circles, grimoires and green smoke? Oh my!

So yeah, this book was Dungeons & Dragons to me for a couple years. Until I met a kid with a binder filled with OD&D hand-me-downs from his uncle. That’s when I finally got to learn all about polyhedral dice, the real purpose of graph paper, and how it all comes together to form what is objectively the best hobby in the world. But that’s a story for another post^{8Narrator: It wasn't.}.

It’d be wrong to wrap this up without so much as a mention of “The Art of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Game.”^{9The Art of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Game (TSR, 1989)} As a collection I find it lacking, but its best pieces (“Avalyne, the Life-Giver”, “Dragon slayers, and proud of it!”, “Gods of Lankhmar”) stack up favorably against its sibling. Arguably higher highs, but fewer of them, and too much filler.

I also just remembered my dad also had the “Dragonlance Saga 1991 Fantasy Art Calendar” and a few others I’m having trouble identifying.

How did this man never roll a D20 in his life?? It’s a tragedy. Oh well, to eBay!

Under Construction?

2025-12-04T00:36:15.000Z

Remember those old animated gifs that used to show up on every Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod and FortuneCity (my personal preference) sites? That's what this post is, minus the epilepsy trigger.

I'll also spare you the animated skulls, barbed wire page dividers, and embedded Java applets. For now, at least. I never know where my nostalgia will take me.

This is all to say I got a bug up my ass about fonts, and I'm in too deep to make anything coherent of this before my eyes shrivel into raisins.

So it's under construction.

Solo Play, Part 1 of X

2025-12-09T05:53:55.000Z

I've been solo-curious ever since I first realized it's not possible to play as often as I'd like with a full group, but I've only recently begun looking at options to try it out.

As always, my first instinct was to roll up a party in my system of choice and go in blind, making it up as I went, but I've now settled on using "DM Yourself"^{1DM Yourself - Solo Roleplay for 5e, D&D and OSR Adventures for Dungeons & Dragons and More (Scutt, 2020)} with selected bits of "DM Yourselves."^{2DM Yourselves - Solo and GM-less Roleplay for 5e, D&D and OSR Adventures (Scutt, 2022)} ^{3Caveat: I discovered this book when this post was already nearly finished, but I think it's going to be clutch.}

Contrary to the first book's recommendations of having a single PC and using 5E for its robust skill system, I will be running a full party (and then some). I'll embrace the slight procedural ambiguity that comes with not having a skill system over dealing with 5E's super-heroic power levels. Running a megadungeon in 5E is like filming an episode of Survivorman where Les can order same-day deliveries from Cabela’s, Home Depot, and REI. No, my copy of Swords & Wizardry Complete Revised has been collecting dust, so I'll finally try that out.

And since I can't *not *tinker, I allowed non-standard ancestry/class combos, such as the (imo) classic Dwarven Cleric, as my homebrewed setting demands^{4I'll get way too into this at some point, but while I love the OSR play style, I was raised on post-2E and early-MMO (well, EverQuest) vernacular fantasy.}. I don’t think any of the players are going to complain, and if they do they can hit the bricks^5rimshot!.

I'm happy being a Forever GM, so I want a super loose party emulation, though I'd prefer a "semi-autonomous" party over something entirely "AI"-driven. Default Behaviors^{6"[Default Behaviors] define what your character will do in any given situation (in the absence of any information to the contrary)." (DM Yourself, p. 9)} will be key for that, though I'll probably add a basic oracle so characters can still surprise me.

Binding Decisions^{7"Binding Decisions are like short-term Default Behaviours – basically a mechanism to stop yourself cheating, a way of committing yourself to a course of action before you’ve read the details of a location." (DM Yourself, p 30)} won't be used since I'm going for that hybrid party emulation approach.

I don't have anything against the concept of Binding Decisions, but the distinction between room description and detail doesn't really jive with Stonehell's one-page dungeon design. Plus, I like when my players surprise me, and I want to try to capture a piece of that. Maybe Binding Decisions will come into play with the room features that are elaborated on in the Special Dungeon Notes sections. I'm not really too worried about meta-knowledge, but it's nice to have something available when I don't trust myself to be unbiased.

At this point I've rolled up the party, so the next step is to hit up Stonehell. I'll be running it in the state my real-life, flesh-and-blood players left it in earlier this year, since that sounds like more fun than wiping the slate clean.

I’ll close this one here. Next time: We meet the party, and they head into the dungeon. And if they wipe, I have no one to blame but myself.

DM Yourself - Solo Roleplay for 5e, D&D and OSR Adventures for Dungeons & Dragons and More (Scutt, 2020) ↩︎
DM Yourselves - Solo and GM-less Roleplay for 5e, D&D and OSR Adventures (Scutt, 2022) ↩︎
Caveat: I discovered this book when this post was already nearly finished, but I think it's going to be clutch. ↩︎
I'll get way too into this at some point, but while I love the OSR play style, I was raised on post-2E and early-MMO (well, EverQuest) vernacular fantasy. ↩︎
rimshot! ↩︎
"[Default Behaviors] define what your character will do in any given situation (in the absence of any information to the contrary)." (DM Yourself, p. 9) ↩︎
"Binding Decisions are like short-term Default Behaviours – basically a mechanism to stop yourself cheating, a way of committing yourself to a course of action before you’ve read the details of a location." (DM Yourself, p 30) ↩︎

Infocom: A Family Trip from A to Zork

2025-12-29T07:09:00.000Z

"You are standing in an open field ..."

Back in the day, childhood favorites were like childhood friends: proximity was everything. I didn’t know it then, but these games were teaching me a way of thinking about play that I’d recognize decades later at the table. Infocom games might not have objectively been the best, but they were available, and they've held up much better than I could have hoped.

They had a lot to live up to after all these years. These weren't just games I booted up when dysentery wiped my party in Oregon Trail, or when I dead-ended in Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. These were places I returned to, over and over, until they became familiar. I read more carefully, talked through puzzles with my dad, and stumbled onto a sense of humor that still annoys my wife on a daily basis.

In interactive fiction (née “text adventures”), the game is the referee. It describes the world and presents obstacles to overcome—almost always puzzles; even “combat” was treated as a puzzle^{1With Beyond Zork being the one exception to this, which I think this was a misstep: Once the player solves the puzzle (i.e. employs an item to make an enemy vulnerable), making them spam attacks perfunctorily to whittle down this thing's HP is kind of lame.}. You interpret those descriptions and input your chosen action, which the game adjudicates^{2Or rejects outright if the verb isn't recognized or the parser chokes.}. It's the same core gameplay loop as most TTRPGs, filtered through the extreme technical limitations of Reagan-era personal computers. Those limitations came in the form of the small set of verbs (look, examine, open, take, put, etc.), a handful of prepositions, and the items made available by the Implementors^{3It reminds me of the OSR compared to modern D&D: solutions derived from character limitations smacking against player creativity, versus solutions selected from a massive toolbox of character options. Players in either can choose to engage with the game through "role-playing," but at least in OSR the play loop is an adventure game.}.

Even in the (ostensibly) serious games the designers couldn't help but be smart-asses.

"... west of a white house, with a boarded front door."

My dad was a blue-collar gearhead in the '80s. We were solidly lower middle-class, but he loved his hi-fi audio system, his home video setup, and his Apple computer. I've never asked him why he chose the much more expensive Apple IIe (and later IIgs) over Commodore, or an early IBM clone, but I'm glad he made the choice he did^{4I got an answer out of him: It turns out he didn't think much of the quality of Commodores, and IBM clones were too business-oriented. Apple computers were cool. The more things change...}.

We spent hours playing these games. The experience introduced me to the idea of structured play in a shared imaginary space. I'll never know the extent to which he was humoring me, but we would talk about the rooms and he'd make sure I understood the descriptions. He'd try my suggestions for whatever obstacles we faced, even if doing the wrong thing meant likely running out of lantern oil and being eaten by a grue. The games were designed with just one protagonist, but when we played together I imagined navigating them as a duo.

"There is a small mailbox here."

The games were tiny by modern standards, so they needed to trim every ounce of fat. The earliest were limited to roughly 80KB, and the largest only ever reached ~256KB. In other words, the total size of the Zork Trilogy, plus Beyond Zork, is (considerably) less than half the size of the images on this page.

To help make up for these limitations^{5And to add a bit of copy protection--these items often contained information critical to the games.}, Infocom (and other publishers of the time) embraced pack-ins called "feelies"--little tchotchkes and immersive booklets that drew the player into the game world before the floppy disk got anywhere near the drive. My favorites were the "Southland of Quendor" map and "The Lore and Legends of Quendor" book from Beyond Zork, and The Leather Goddesses of Phobos'^{6This game wasn't the most age-appropriate, but I'll take that up with my therapist. It wasn't the worst thing I played on the Apple II. (That had an age verification quiz. I don't know how I got past those back in the day.)} scratch and sniff card and 3D comic. I wish I still had the station blueprints, patch and forms from Stationfall.^{7I mean, I wish I had all of these relics, but I can't blame my grade-school self for not knowing the nostalgia demon I would become. Technically they weren't even mine to hoard.} The game doesn't loom large in my memory, but those feelies look like props from a Mothership game.

A limited selection of my favorite feelies. Images mostly taken, with profuse thanks, from the Infocom Gallery.

Beyond Zork (1987)

"The horizon is lost in the glare of morning upon the Great Sea. You shield your eyes to sweep the shore below, where a village lies nestled beside a quiet cove. A stunted oak tree shades the inland road."

This was my first Zork game, and my first taste of interactive fiction.

I didn't realize it at the time, but this entry was unique in having ability scores, a rudimentary map and a combat system, making it the most overtly RPGish of all Infocom's games.

The significance of the default character name being "Frank Booth" was also lost on me. I couldn't find anything suggesting this was an intentional reference to David Lynch's "Blue Velvet," which had released the year before, but it'd be one hell of a coincidence^{8I don't remember any nitrous-oxide tanks...}.

My dad was more of a sci-fi head, so we started this out as a duo but pretty quickly moved on. I did my best to continue on my own. It was slow going, but it was a lot of fun.

For fans of: "The Face in the Frost," by John Bellairs.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1984)

"As you part your curtains you see that it's a bright morning, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, the meadows are blooming, and a large yellow bulldozer is advancing on your home."

We got the babel fish!

Like I said, the old man was a sci-fi geek, so of course he'd read the books and watched the series on PBS, but this was 6-year-old me's first exposure to story, and the intergalactic utility of towels.

Watching the BBC series years later was surreal. I couldn't help but think of the series as the adaptation, not realizing that, of course, both were adaptations (or reimaginings)--and not even of the books, but of a radio series.

Plenty has been written about this game's puzzle design, and with good reason. Some of the ways you could dead-end yourself were truly cruel, but that just meant we had to dump more time into the game, so I wasn't complaining. Besides, we had no expectation of "fairness" in these games, we didn't know any better. If we couldn't figure something out, we put a pin in it and tried again later.

Eventually we did get ahold of some InvisiClues booklets, but they were used sparingly, and only as a last resort. Even then, the highlighted answers quickly faded away. At one point a friend of mine got caught up in the invisible-ink gimmick and revealed every single answer in the booklets we had, despite never having played the games. That’s how I learned the answers faded quickly once revealed—and that re-highlighting wouldn’t bring them back.

For fans of: ... I bet you can figure that out.

Leather Goddesses of Phobos (1986)

"Some material in this story may not be suitable for children, especially the parts involving sex, which no one should know anything about until reaching the age of eighteen (twenty-one in certain states). This story is also unsuitable for censors, members of the Moral Majority, and anyone else who thinks that sex is dirty rather than fun.
"The attitudes expressed and language used in this story are representative only of the views of the author, and in no way represent the views of Infocom, Inc. or its employees, many of whom are children, censors, and members of the Moral Majority. (But very few of whom, based on last year's Christmas Party, think that sex is dirty.)
"By now, all the folks who might be offended by LEATHER GODDESSES OF PHOBOS have whipped their disk out of their drive and, evidence in hand, are indignantly huffing toward their dealer, their lawyer, or their favorite repression-oriented politico. So... Hit the RETURN/ENTER key to begin!"

With the above warning screen displaying each time the game booted, exactly how The Leather Goddesses of Phobos was allowed into the rotation is beyond me.

Playing it again, I'm pretty sure he left it on "tame" mode and let the suggestive bits sail right over my head. The description of Trent splattering all over the walls did not sail over my head, though. It freaked me out despite all the previous fake-outs.

I remember the moment--though sadly devoid of context--when I realized the title was, I guess, risqué. I'd just said it out loud to an adult family member, then got the ineffable feeling that I shouldn't have done so. Maybe that moment is why this is the last Infocom game my dad and I played together.

For fans of: Amazing Stories, Barbarella, and, I don't know, Flesh Gordon?

The Lurking Horror (1987)

"This is a large room crammed with computer terminals, small computers, and printers. An exit leads south. Banners, posters, and signs festoon the walls. Most of the tables are covered with waste paper, old pizza boxes, and empty Coke cans. There are usually a lot of people here, but tonight it's almost deserted."

As a first attempt at pure solo play, The Lurking Horror threw me into the fire^{9Or out into the blizzard.}. It's arguably even more age-inappropriate than Leather Goddesses of Phobos, albeit for very different reasons. The latter's vaguely phallic cover art and "mature" humor were lost on me at that age, but this game scared the hell out of me. There's a real sense of isolation and dread throughout, resulting in something like text-based survival horror^{10Come to think of it, with its focus on resource constraints and attrition, survival horror is another genre that overlaps with OSR play.}.

It was my first real exposure to Lovecraftian horror^{11Any horror, unless you count "Bunnicula: A Rabbit-Tale of Mystery." I don't.}, and some of the fates that can befall the player character were truly disturbing^{12One word: Rats.}. Up way past my bedtime, all by myself.

For fans of: H.P. Lovecraft, obviously, but this time around the early dream sequence reminded me of "Creep, Shadow!" by A. Merritt.

"You are at the bottom of a seemingly endless stair, winding its way upward beyond your vision."

I've heard that when you have a kid, you get to experience childhood again through them. You introduce them to the things you enjoyed, and watch it hopefully spark joy, and you feel it. I believe this was especially true for my dad. He was never the most social guy, and few of his friends shared his geekier interests. He introduced me to comics^{13The standards from Marvel and DC, including all things Conan.} and movies^{14"Blade Runner," "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension," "Cherry 2000." Only the very best 😬. "Conan the Barbarian," too, but he always griped Arnold being miscast.}, then we discovered these games together. When I showed a lasting interest he started relating to me as a friend--albeit one with a strict bedtime, and the reading comprehension of a grade schooler. For better or worse he had someone to share these things with, even if the content wasn't always age-appropriate. A more generous and equally likely explanation is the inverse: He wanted to be someone I could share these interests and experiences with--someone his dad never was for him.

If you were somehow inspired to experience (endure?) any of these ancient relics, you can paste game file URLs from The Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog into Parchment and play in your browser. Or download the files to play with Frotz, if you prefer (as I do) to keep it local.

With Beyond Zork being the one exception to this, which I think this was a misstep: Once the player solves the puzzle (i.e. employs an item to make an enemy vulnerable), making them spam attacks perfunctorily to whittle down this thing's HP is kind of lame. ↩︎
Or rejects outright if the verb isn't recognized or the parser chokes. ↩︎
It reminds me of the OSR compared to modern D&D: solutions derived from character limitations smacking against player creativity, versus solutions selected from a massive toolbox of character options. Players in either can choose to engage with the game through "role-playing," but at least in OSR the play loop is an adventure game. ↩︎
I got an answer out of him: It turns out he didn't think much of the quality of Commodores, and IBM clones were too business-oriented. Apple computers were cool. The more things change... ↩︎
And to add a bit of copy protection--these items often contained information critical to the games. ↩︎
This game wasn't the most age-appropriate, but I'll take that up with my therapist. It wasn't the worst thing I played on the Apple II. (That had an age verification quiz. I don't know how I got past those back in the day.) ↩︎
I mean, I wish I had all of these relics, but I can't blame my grade-school self for not knowing the nostalgia demon I would become. Technically they weren't even mine to hoard. ↩︎
I don't remember any nitrous-oxide tanks... ↩︎
Or out into the blizzard. ↩︎
Come to think of it, with its focus on resource constraints and attrition, survival horror is another genre that overlaps with OSR play. ↩︎
Any horror, unless you count "Bunnicula: A Rabbit-Tale of Mystery." I don't. ↩︎
One word: Rats. ↩︎
The standards from Marvel and DC, including all things Conan. ↩︎
"Blade Runner," "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension," "Cherry 2000." Only the very best 😬. "Conan the Barbarian," too, but he always griped Arnold being miscast. ↩︎

The Final Countdown

2026-01-11T21:20:30.000Z

... or is it? I love Decagone's time loop gimmick, so I put together a Countdown app to visualize (and audiolize?) it. Set the time, start the countdown, and it will loop infinitely. The remaining time persists between sessions, for when the one-shot turns into a two-shot.

Seconds tick by with soft beeps, which slowly increase in volume as the countdown progresses. The pitch also ramps up over the last minute, to increase the tension. At 00:00 it plays an elevator ding and door opening. Not 100% accurate to the module, but it's evocative.

For the best experience on mobile: Adding the app to your Home Screen will allow you to launch it in full-screen mode.
On iOS, the above must be done from Safari. Also note that sound will only play if your phone isn’t muted so make sure Silent mode is off (Do Not Disturb is fine, and recommended).
Android hasn’t been tested, but it should work as expected.

For my fellow privacy weirdos, this app runs 100% client-side and tracks nothing. Cloudflare Pages records basic analytics, but uBlock Origin will knock that out. Local storage is used only to persist settings and remaining time across sessions.

Update: I'm running Decagone again this weekend so I made a few updates to this.

First, I added a facility map toggle because I didn't want to print the player map, and having it on a screen felt more thematic. The map view times out after 10 seconds, so players can't use it to ignore the countdown, and also just to frustrate them.

Next, I added an optional track from SleepResearch_Facility's excellent Nostromo for ambience. It's a fantastic release, and peak Mothership ambience. Can't say enough kind things about it and I hope its usage here isn't a problem. The track resets along with the countdown.

Finally, I added double-clicking/tapping to skip the timer to 00:00. For those times when a group decides to climb the ladder or pilot the bathysphere. For Wardens who aren't going full sicko mode and making the party play out those doomed efforts in real time.

Name Generator

2026-02-01T22:00:34.000Z

In a world with Fantasy Name Generators, no one needs another random name generator. Except me. I needed another random name generator. This pairs given names from the estimable Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources^{1This is my favorite kind of hyper-specific Internet thing.} with surnames pulled from various Internet sources. The given names link to their DMNES entry for more detail, and surnames link to entries on House of Names^{2Most do, but not every surname has a page at House of Names.}.

No effort was (or likely will be) made to make the combined human names "culturally consistent."

Edit: Crummy name lists added for Dwarves, Elves, Gnomes and Halflings. Placeholder content, but I needed them ASAP.

Edit #2: Added "Gygaxian" names + definitions drawn from the glossary of Poplollies & Bellibones: A Celebration of Lost Words.

Berserk?!

2026-02-27T01:53:23.000Z

Light fanboyism to follow, and potential spoilers for the first 34 (or more) volumes of Berserk published by Dark Horse.

As a man of a certain age, I always thought my friends and I had been on the vanguard of late-'90s Geek Culture. "We were into it before it was cool." "We paved the way for you youngins." Blah blah blah. But I hadn't even heard of "Berserk" until this video popped into my YouTube algorithm a couple years back.

Even then I was slow on the uptake. When I finally noticed that the music in the video was from a series^{1It's ridiculous how many times I revisited this video specifically for the music before I even thought to check its source.}, and that the series was supposed to be pretty good, I was in. Hirasawa's music. The ending. GRIFFITH!! Holy shit. A lot of the dialog is classic hyper-literal anime word salad, but that just adds to the charm.

I tore through the anime, and by happenstance the manga was recommended to me after I went apeshit over "Uzumaki," so I already had it in my treasure hoard. Thank god.

Now I can't stop. In fact, in the short time since I wrote the initial excerpt for this post I've read another 10 volumes. The way its developed has been really fun.

I was into the epic scale pseudo-medieval European vibe, and liked the riff on the Inquisition. I was pretty stoked about the transition to a full adventuring party, since the Man Without a Name trope was threatening to overstay its welcome. Adding sorcery and trolls was a neat twist, but is it seriously going full-on trad fantasy now?! Giants and dragons and goblins and moldering skeletons in misty graveyards are pretty fantastical. It'd be a massive change after thousands of gnarly images of phallic/yonic (often at the same time!) demons, but I'm here for it. Spoilers for the rest of the series: Oh okay, fantastical genital monsters and full-on toothy cock demons. Well-played, Miura.

Speaking of massive changes, I'm thrilled Miura eased off the gratuitous sexual violence. I don't assume he meant to glorify sexual assault, but the full-page hero shots of r*pe were gross. Maybe it's a cultural thing, but it was gross. It's still not perfect, but come to think of it, Edgelord Miura more or less vanished after the Conviction arc^{2This actually parallels the story development, with Guts settling into a new found family, etc., so maybe it's a creative decision.}. Whether or not that lasts, it's been nice.

I'll wrap this up. This post was just an excuse to gush a bit. I was sad to learn that Miura passed a few years back, before finishing this series. But then, an author living long enough to conclude their fantasy epic isn't very fashionable these days.

Not to suggest I'm some sort of immortal demon who sacrificed the lives of his friends to achieve his outsized ambitions..!

Game Master ... or Taskmaster?

2026-03-15T22:04:32.000Z

People who enjoy dice-based TTRPGs enjoy rolling dice, but I've been watching quite a lot of Taskmaster lately and felt like "taskifying" character creation a bit. Specifically the assignment of ability scores^{1Eventually I'd like to add similar processes for selecting race, class, starting equipment, spells, etc., but I probably won't. Just roll for those.}.

It’s a completely unnecessary procedure that turns character creation into a minor ordeal. Or, "A magnificently futile use of our mortal lifespan," to borrow a line from Victoria Coren Mitchell. But it's fun to think about.

Ability Scores

STEP 1: List each player and the number of the month in which they were born, adding +8 for January through June^{2For example, June equals 14, July equals 7, and so on.}.
STEP 2: Answer the following questions. Each answer identifies a player; that player’s number from Step 1 becomes one of the ability scores available to assign in Step 3.

Who is the player ...

who has lived in the most states?
whose birthday occurs soonest after yours in the calendar year?
whose first name has fewer letters than yours by the smallest amount?
whose name in alphabetical order comes immediately after yours?
who you've known the shortest?
whose birthday occurs soonest before yours in the calendar year?
whose is closest to you but older (select yourself if you are the oldest)?
whose first name is alphabetically furthest from yours?
with whom you have the longest-running text message history?
who has the most pets?
whose last name immediately precedes yours in alphabetical order?
who you've known the longest?
whose first name has more letters than yours by the smallest amount?
whose birthday is farthest from yours on the calendar?
who is the youngest?
whose first name immediately precedes yours in alphabetical order?
with whom you have the most recently started text message history?
whose name in alphabetical order comes immediately before yours?
whose first name is alphabetically closest to yours?
who is the oldest?

STEP 3: Determine the starting question for ability score assignment using the day of the month on which you were born. If that number exceeds 20, subtract 20. Begin there and assign scores in order, returning to 1 after 20 if necessary.

... Your time starts now?

Note: This was conceived of for systems that use 3d6 for ability score generation, but it can be adapted for Mothership by omitting the +8, and adding +25 to all month numbers to determine the final scores.