Behemoth3 Members' Blog

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I'm logging in from the Ibis Hotel Seoul, waiting for the bus that will take me to the 2004 Global Game Export Plaza for the second day of meetings with Korean game developers. Despite a complete day-for-night reversal, the jet lag isn[t so bad-the creeping sense of unreality comes from the fact that, for example, the keyboard key labeled z is actually a y.

Okay, this is old news to some, but it seems I never announced it on the B3 site. If you'd like to read Tavis's five answers to each of the Friday Five questions, including the history and future plans of Behemoth3, Inc., be sure to check out this link.

The first reviews of Masters and Minions Horde Book 1: A Swarm of Stirges are arriving! Here are links to each one so far, plus some of my favorite lines from each.

EN World: "A new lease on life" for "one of the monsters almost every adventurer has had to cross at an early point in their career" - Joe G. Kushner

Nuketown: "Old-fashioned bloodsucking fun... the monster ecology sections of the book are excellent, and evoked some of the classic articles from the old Dragon" - Ken Newquist

RPGNow customer review: "Thoroughly bookmarked and hyperlinked. Thoroughly illustrated. Chock-full of adventure ideas. Well-balanced material. Obviously a labor of love" - Jim Stenberg

RPGNow customer review: "An interesting product that takes a D&D staple and amps it up!" - Orval McCurdy

well, I've designed everything from journals to character sheets, t-shirts to building banners, but I've never done a book before. man it's a lot of work! part of it comes from the fact that I found myself treating every spread like its own complete layout, which means 30 layouts per book instead of just one. I had to rein it in a bit. another part of it is that, when proofreading a roleplaying game book, you're not just looking for typos, punctuation, spelling, grammar, and good writing--all important--but for accuracy of rules, consistency of style, and clarity of technical explanations. man it's complicated! I'm thrilled to say that after some wonderful help from my family I have the first two books being printed and trimmed at Express Media as I write. very, very soon I will be putting the finishing touches on the PDF versions which will go on sale at RPGNow within the week. keep your eyes peeled! and thanks for watching. PS as the resident site programmer I'm chagrined to say that right after sang's last post I managed to break the blogger, and didn't realize it until just this week. so I'm the one responsible for silencing my fellow behemoths. hopefully all the other work I've been doing will make up for it!

My friends have been asking about my misanthropic behavior as of late. When I explain my involvement with Behemoth3, and the insane schedule of getting multiple illustrations done by mid July, they inevitably want to know what an RPG is. They understand role playing in the pop-psychology sense, but don’t quite understand the concept of role playing as a game.

Now that I think about it, I don’t know if “game” isn’t a misnomer. After all there really is no way to “win”, only a way to progress and that progression could theoretically go on indefinitely. There is an argument for the word game, since “play” is involved, but there is also an argument to rename RPG with IS: interactive storytelling. An awkward acronym I grant you, but that’s the way I’ve always thought of RPGs.

Regardless, because of the academic literary background many of my friends come from, I often use the following explanation:

I listen to a local NPR station while sketching and drawing, especially a locally produced show that interviews an eclectic mix of fiction writers the likes of Tom Clancy, Amy Tan, Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut , John Grisham, Maragret Atwood, John Irving and others, and many of these authors speak of how they create a character and then engage in some sort of inner dialogue with them and allow those living entities to write themselves into the story -- sort of the Stanislavski method of fiction writing I suppose. They also speak of how these characters lead them in directions they might not have gone themselves, say things they never would have thought to say.

This isn’t far removed from the RPG experience. The author (GM) sits down with a backbone of a plot and asks his/her characters (PCs) to write themselves into the story, to bring to the whole a sense of varying individualities that is beyond the single imagination of the author. In the end, disparate people come together to, in essence, tell a common story replete with red herrings, plot twists, betrayals, tragedies and triumphs -- drama worthy of Shakespearian heights and J.D. Salinger lows. And all of these stories would differ from group to group and author to author.

You can be assured of clandestine guards and conspiratory plots involving a secret magical weapon capable of kingdom-wide devastation if Tom Clancy were to ever run a campaign. Maybe Stephen King will run a tournament at the next Gen Con where four, zero-level elves find out about a body hidden in the woods and race their older brothers to the site, fighting and out-witting all manner of mundane creatures and circumstances along the way but learning much about what it means to be an elf. Don’t look for King’s name in the GM column, he’ll most likely use a pseudonym for this one. If it’s a King experience you’re looking for, that would take the form of a long and seemingly endless campaign run out of his home in Maine. A mid-level group of motley characters reunite after many years of inactivity to take on an unspeakable evil created from their own inner demons. Don’t waste your time looking for metaphors in this one, the creature exists outside the collective party imagination. Though the creature takes the goofy form of a red dragon in clown makeup, make no mistake, the sucker is deadly with a CR of at least 18. Did I give away the end? Sorry.

I heard that John Grisham is working on a courtroom module about an orc wrongly-accused of being merciful in combat. His defense team is led by a recovering alcoholic kobold who has forgotten more about orc law than any two halflings could ever learn. But this could be just a rumor. From the same source I heard of a campaign setting to be penned by Vonnegut about a world where dogs are always heard barking in the distance and the PCs are constantly pulled in and out of time. I don’t know... sounds a lot like Planescape™ to me -- except for the barking dog part.

What kind of session would Amy Tan, the author of “The Joy Luck Club” run? I'll leave that to others.

My dad, David Allison, was a highly-ranked competitive bridge player during his 20s and 30s. When I was a kid, my mom and I used to make fun of all the wack bridge terminology his books about the game would use.

I don't think that the complex, cooperative game of bridge is really so different from roleplaying--RPGers tend to have a kind of generational blindness to the many similarities between all kinds of play. Now that I have a son of my own, I bet my gaming books will seem as weird and silly to Javi as my dad's did to me! Wonder if I'll have any more success in making him a roleplayer than my dad had in teaching me to play bridge.

I can see now, though, that I'm made happy by any kind of play that Javi loves (and playing trucks, dinosaurs, and tea party isn't so different from RPGs either). I bet my dad would be happy to see me on the verge of making a profession out of the game my generation loves; I bet he wished he could have found a way to do the same. (For him, as for me, the answer might have been finding the right partners; some of the bridge tournaments I know he competed in had some hefty cash prizes, and I get the sense he was a pretty damn good player).

Wish you were around to talk to about this, Dad!

Thanks to The Game Snob for inspiring these thoughts.

I've designed some merch with sang's beautiful illos, made the whole site more legible with the stretched-hide and dried-blood color scheme, and added studio and sales pages. after a meeting with our excellent tax manager, where she quickly and patiently remade tav's and my spreadsheets to show us what we'll really be making after all this work, we've decided two important things: one, we need to be a corporation (and not just an LLC) and two, we'd better keep our day jobs. tav asked whether we were doing this for fun or money, but brian pointed out, well, making some money would be fun. so, we'll keep trying, and if we fail, well, I'll still have the cool masters & minions t-shirts that came in the mail today!

still, there's lots more to do. no. 1 is getting more of sang's illos on the site. I'm also laying out the pages for the first horde book. finally, want to get SwoRD working better (at all), get the vorpal tools online, and keep playtesting for the remorhaz championship in august.

Masters and Minions. Because tonight we're gonna party like it's 1974.

Masters and Minions. Never trust anyone over 30.

Masters and Minions. It's time to believe in monsters again.

Prismatic. Leave No Gamer Behind.

SwoRD. The wwwide open System Reference Document is mightier than the pen.

Vorpal. The cutting edge every fighter dreams of.

Behemoth3. Hugely Great.

Behemoth3. Support for any honorable people and their dreams.

well, I made some pretty sweet logos the last few days, which took hours longer than I expected (to the cost of my household and other job). redesigned the site: whole new architecture, new links, included the new logos, trademarked everything (for now, anyway), and managed to even turn the forum into a red-and-black nightmare (perhaps illegible, but kind of exciting). things are really rolling--wait till you see the new cover design!

here's my first B3log posted with my new backend, which I created for the less-unixy of the writers to use for their own blog posting (no need for us all to scrounge around in PHPAdmin SQL Hell).

I have to admit when Tav mentioned Trampier during our first conversation about my illustrating some beasties for Masters and Minions I didn't recognize the name though I knew, just plain knew, he was referring to those images with the little DAT signatures. I knew it because I thought, "what other illustrations from the Monster Manual could bring about such boyish reverence from an old school D&Der?"

Who could forget Trampier's versions of the Minotaur, the Rakshasa, Salamander, Lizard Man and -- my absolute favorite -- the Dragon Turtle?

As we talked Trampier's Shrieker kept flashing across my mind's eye in perfect, high-contrast focus. The silhouette of the adventurer in the background holding his head together was a perfect illustration for what I was thinking as Tavis went on to explain the theme for Masters and Minions.

I hadn't looked at Trampier's stuff in over a decade but I was amazed at how much they held up under my sentimental scrutiny, and how they still pulsated with vibrant, fantastic life when compared with some of the more life-like images of later edition manuals. Maybe that's why they've held up for so long? Maybe because one can absorb those images with a single sweep of the eye, the wood-cut-print-inspired ink storkes burning a phosphorescent, iconic after-ghost lingering in the visual cortex long after the page has been turned.

I hope what I've done for this project can pay some small tribute to Trampier's work. They have indeed heaped inspirational gravy onto my overheated brain during the past quarter century.

HO. LEE. SHIZNIT.

I have only three words to say:

Ho. Lee. Shiznit.

Repeat these sacred syllables until you feel the sensation of your mind not only being open but blown completely apart, leaving your tender and naked brain shivering on an ice field in Arctic winds that howl over the tinkling, crackling sound of the worms melting their way inexorably towards you.

This is a worthy homage to Trampier indeed! It's beautifully obvious that you too have spent the better part of a lifetime soaking up and meditating on his classic images, and now they're like highly polished pearls for a new millenium. I'd say that you had surpassed the master, except I just noticed again that his minotaur has DAT appearing in the hair over the minotaur's groin. How f'in cool is THAT?

And if our plan succeeds--if the 30th Anniversary proves an auspicious occasion on which to bring the Master back to this plane--we will want to offer him the best tribute we possibly can.

here is my first B3 blog! while the blog is exceedingly ugly right now, I'm proud to say I created it from scratch using PHP. one advantage of this is that I can change it any way I want over the coming months. one disadvantage is that it takes time and work to make it look pretty. but bear with me!

"As originally conceived, D&D was limited in scope only by the imagination and devotion of Dungeon Masters everywhere... But somewhere along the line, D&D lost some of its flavor, and became predictable... When all the players had all the rules in front of them, it became next to impossible to beguile them into danger or mischief. The new concept pioneered within these pages should go a long way towards putting back some of the mystery, uncertainty, and danger that make D&D the unparalleled challenge it was meant to be."

- Foreword to Eldrich Wizardry by Timothy J. Kask, TSR Publications Editor, April 23, 1976

30 years after the original publication of D&D, I think that this is still a great goal for Masters and Minions. And isn't it amazing that people were worrying about D&D becoming stale and ossified just two years after it came out!

New material is a paradox. By "proliferation of rule sets," Kask probably meant that many players owned the white box and thus knew what the DM was likely to have up their sleeve. So releasing something they hadn't read helped keep things fresh.

Nowadays, there's enough published stuff that (if the DM's sleeves stay well hidden!) no player could conceivably have boned up on it all. In fact, there's so much coming out that it can drive people away. A moderator on the Grayhawk forum wrote: "A big part of my decision to return to Basic D&D is that I'm tired of buying an endless stream of new material."

A game can become predictable if it doesn't have new sources to grow from; but a steady diet of exotic novelty can become tiring even faster. Can "the new concept pioneered within these pages" steer a course between these two? Maybe if I stop writing manifestos for a minute and return to work on Masters and Minions, we'll find out...

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