Contact Information:

jay@vanishingtowerpress.com

Thursday, November 29

Where in the World is Xoth?

Xoth is here actually. Well, only in my multiverse. The World of Xoth is Morten Braten's creation for his Pathfinder game. I took his setting material and used it for my playtesting of USR Sword & Sorcery. This, an the "Known World" of Mystara from B/X D&D, are my touchstone campaign worlds when I got back into gaming five years ago. With some regular play it didn't take long to start  daydreaming about intersecting gaming worlds and gaming groups with each other. The Flailsnail's conventions showed me that I didn't even have to be thaaat concerned about different systems mashing with different system PC's. Running some Classic Traveller and keeping a Clockwork & Cthulhu campaign going the pieces of my multi-verse are mostly full-formed now. Mystara, Xoth, 1646 C&C Earth and the super-future of my Outer Frontier Traveller Universe I'm placing all in the "normal", terrestrial universe, with only Clockwork & Cthulhu and Traveller necessarily being separated in time.

I quickly populating the different campaign worlds with many different "doorways" out of the terrestrial universe and into other "realms", the multiverse of my game world; "Murph's Multiverse"! Mystara PC's ventured into the far future, Mystara's the-end-of-time (my Ro'Myr setting?) as well as crossing over into A Red and Pleasant Land. Xoth, these PC's activated ancient devices which connected to beings in Outer Frontier Traveller Universe, as well as through Lotus poisoning in the far-east they ended up in a strange mushroom-dreamland. The PC's from my current C&C game have entered the realm of The Pale Lady (shares space with A Red and Pleasant Land) and became acquainted with "trans-arcana" penetrations. In the Outer Frontier that PC group investigated and activated more troubling powers started in another time and place on Xoth which brought my multiverse its first glimpse of horror-scarred Carcosa...

Which gets me all thinking about a visual map of all this. Where all these great settings get placed and their linkages get tracked.

So now I know where Xoth is, Trappist-1, and Earth. Mystara can be place anywhere in the known universe (or beyond) and right now there really isn't a pressing need at this point to pin it down. The Outer Frontier will eventually get mapped back to "original" Earth. Oh yeah, I even have some modern-day adventures from Anthropomorphic USR and Fear & Loathing USR to bridge all my imaginings to the here and now!

The inspiration for my map is coming from that great map of Kamandi's world by Kirby. Now I guess I just got to draw it :) 




The Why? of doing this is to hone a functional DM'ing device to tap crossover opportunities by retaining, recognizing and cataloguing mentally them for later use. If I have a multidimensional model of my homebrewed gaming universe I can hang cool ideas like ornaments on a christmas tree. Or stars in the night sky I guess.

Wednesday, November 28

Running Rom'Myr for Hobbsapalooza

An online weekend of live play, Hobbsapalooza is open to anyone who wants to play or run games online for three days starting this Friday! I will be using this opportunity to see if I can get a Friday night game of BFRPG going to try my own Dying Earth setting of Rom'Myr. Being late evening for the east coast I can easily see this game not getting off the ground, but fingers crossed...



The Google Drive document the Hobbsapalooza link above sends you to is where you write in the games you want to run or play. The administrator will copy your DM submission into the Player sign up page when "approved". This is a small online con, but knowing Hobbs & Friends it will only grow every year. So come on down!

Friday, November 16

A Red & Pleasant Land Random Generator Page

I've started another page on the blog for aRaPL random generators. Like all the other random generators I am using Meandering Banter's Text to HTML tool to take split-column tables and get them as close to a one-click generator as possible. I haven't figured where the break-down point exactly is, but I think somewhere north of 23,000 combinations crashes the HTML posting here on blogspot.


For example; this first generator Intercepted Communique had to be broken up into three separate buttons to provide the over 2 million(?) combinations the various tables from the book generate, giving you a complete mysterious missive on the fly!

Anyways, I will add more split-table generators from this great OSR setting, there are some real cool ones in this publication.

[EDIT] It seems Blogger can only handle so much HTML in any given post so I cannot dump everything in one page. Two to four generators per page seems to be the limit. Somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 combination/table entries is where I think I break my blog. What this means is many separate pages to cover a specific topic, bargle! 

Wednesday, November 14

BRP Pulp Adventure Generator

Has been added to the Random Generator Page. With one click you get the frame work for your next astounding adventure in the world of two-fisted tales!