Fancy a new adventure? What about a ‘choose your own adventure‘, where what happens next is decided by the comments section? This is Comment Quest.
It has only been a few months since you left home to seek fame and fortune as an adventurer. To slay monsters, rescue villagers, to become a true hero praised and respected everywhere you go. To see what this strange and mysterious world has in store for the intrepid traveller.
Continue reading “Comment Quest – Part 1”When I saw the Transformers: Rise of the Beasts trailer, I was excited. If you have only seen one or two (or all five) of the Bay movies, you would be forgiven for not sharing in my enthusiasm. On the other hand, if you’ve seen Bumblebee, you should be very hopeful. In my opinion.
This is not a mini-blog to gush about that movie though. I could. The first five minute action sequence shames the first five movies all on its own with its awesomeness. I’m not here to do that though. I’m here to point out a really specific moment.
When the very first Transformers movie was announced, I had a very VERY specific hope:
I wanted to see a Transformer perform a handbrake turn into a transforming, flying punch like the intro of the original cartoon. (Like I say, very specific)
Six movies later, it happened:
I went back and watched this scene multiple times, with childhood glee. It just has to be deliberate. Someone working on this show was such a massive fan of the cartoon, that they wanted to same thing as I did. I can’t believe for a moment that this choreography is a coincidence.
I also had a very selfish thought: This was clearly made just for me.
That’s how little moments like this feel. A very specific want from a movie, song, game, play… and that need is met. A lot about Bumblebee did this for the child in me.
How about you? Was something made just for you? In part or completely tailored to your demands and desires? Too perfect to be an accident?
As always, thank you for reading.
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I knew, going into the creation of my ‘megadungeon’, that the first layer would have areas that were sealed off. I didn’t actually know why they were cordoned off, but I had a vague image of a clan living in the rear of the dungeon, cut off from several rooms because of prior events. This was because ‘Cut’ was my week 1 prompt, and I liked the idea of a dungeon clan that could be befriended if these areas were cleared of their dangers.
Last week, I built up one sealed off area based around the ‘idol’ prompt and the residential sector rend asunder by the former android guards. This week, I knew I wanted to make a laboratory sector, with the ‘mask’ prompt, but I couldn’t decide what was the cause of the abandonment of this zone. So I asked the lovely people on Mastodon to help me decide:
So this week starts out with a lab containing a monster grown from a failed experiment, with ‘mask’ as the key word. The week ended with me moving on to the rooms where the party can first interact with the clan that lives in the rooms not currently infested with monstrous plants.
Continue reading “Dungeon23 – Week 3”I’m not a fan of the Harry Potter werewolf. It’s far from the hottest of takes, but I’ve always had a particular expectation of what a werewolf should look like. American Werewolf in London, great look for a more wolf-like monster . Underworld, I didn’t like beefy muscle boys. My personal favourite werewolf movie will always be Dog Soldiers, which in my opinion has the best looking version.
The spindly, fleshy, CGI thing in Prisoner of Azkaban barely registered on my good-bad spectrum of werewolves. It’s definitely a monstrous thing, but it just isn’t lycan enough for my liking.
The lore of the Fantastic Beast werewolf does, however, do something I appreciate: it goes for the old-school ‘transforms only on a full moon’ version of the curse. If D&D, the werewolf has to change on a full moon, but they can also turn ‘shapechange’ whenever they feel like it. As curses go, most players would actually quite like to be bitten by a lycanthrope. The extra strengths and abilities quickly stifle the negative aspects of the curse.
So this monster conversion means that I can actually create a ‘true’ werewolf for your D&D game.
Continue reading “Fantastic Beasts and How to Slay Them: Werewolf”One of the options for this lengthy creative project is to turn to random tables and generators for inspiration for what can be found in each room. I haven’t needed to do this (yet) because I have a reasonable grasp of what I want to do on this month’s layer. Yet, the original post about Dungeon23 came with a list of key-word prompts, and I’m inclined to use them. Not so much to inspire me when I’m stuck, but to see if I can add a twist to the idea I already have.
In week 1, the prompt picked for me from the list (my wife picked a number from 1 to 52) was ‘cut’. So some of the first seven rooms have doorways cut off from fallen debris, and there are strange lazer burns in the floor and ceiling that all suggest a great battle once surged on the land above , adding a layer of intrigued to the dungeon I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.
In week 2, my random prompt was ‘idol’…
Continue reading “Dungeon23 – Week 2”Finally, with just four beasts left in the book, I’ve finally hit a monster that has an ability that stumped me. Two words in the description had me scratching my head, trying to figure out how that could possible work on a mechanical level:
“Outruns arrows”
I googled how fast medieval arrows could travel. Opinions were varied, but 150 to 180 feet-per-second was a good average. A creature’s turn is six seconds. That would put the Wampus Cat’s base speed as ‘1080 ft.’. The fastest speed I’m aware of in any D&D monster stat block is 150 feet, and that’s rare. Most characters move at 30 feet around.
A monster that can move over 30 times faster that the average hero is problematic. I think I found a solution that sort-of works…
Continue reading “Fantastic Beasts and How to Slay Them: Wampus Cat”Last week I converted Harry Potter trolls into D&D monsters. They have their merits, but they lack some of the cool abilities of what is already in place. I’ve got to do the same this week. The unicorn in Fantastic Beasts is elusive and mysterious, but the description lacks the plethora of abilities the D&D unicorn is decked out with.
Teleportation, spellcasting, healing abilities… the D&D version is ready for anything. It evens has ‘legendary actions’, a thing usually reserved for creatures 2 or 3 times for powerful.
So this creature I’m about to make is going to have nothing on its D&D counterpart, but I’ve made a commitment to do every Fantastic Beast as accurately as possible, so here we go.
Continue reading “Fantastic Beasts and How to Slay Them: Unicorn”I was seeing a lot of cool dungeon ideas online over the last few months, more than usual, with the hashtag #Dungeon23. I appreciated the creativity, but I did not think of google what this meant.
Then, just before Christmas, a friend introduced me to Dungeon23 and what the exercise was. Here is the original post, which explains the very simple concept:
A little bit of dungeon designing, every day, for a year. I was on board immediately. Some people are well into their ‘Megadungeons’ at this point, but I decided to what until the 1st to begin, alongside the friend who clued me in.
I’m onto room number 10 today, below is what my Dungeon looked like by the end of Day 7:
Continue reading “Dungeon23 – Week 1”
Gamer Peak 