Showing posts with label delicious humble pie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label delicious humble pie. Show all posts

Thursday, 14 April 2011

AtoZ April - L is for Lopsided

Day 12, and Sham strikes again.

Lopsided monsters? Nah. That whole "asymmetrical = weird or evil or unhealthy" trope has been exploited good and hard already, and then inverted/subverted by everything from The Elephant Man to Sloth from The Goonies.


WD Fiend Factory: some hits, but plenty of misses too

(and *rassa frassa* Teleleli beating me to quarterlings. Having an idea first like it's his or something...)

So let's talk about Lopside.

Lopside is where you go when you want something separated or rendered down quickly and discretely. It's another of those odd rustic backwaters that are so typical of the Wilds, inhabited by people with thick accents, goggly eyes and an extra toe or two. They don't like outsiders here, and even expected visitors are treated with the barest minimum of courtesy.

The dominant feature of Lopside is the Weirdmills, strangely toadstool-looking mills that infest the hilltops. Through some strange pact or quirk of the land, the millers of Lopside have somehow gained the ability to render anything down into a processed form, with each mill having its particular speciality. The fees (a proportion of the final milled product) charged by the millers are always high, and usually extortionate.


Sickle of Expropriation
Invented by a mad wizard affected by Red Star Fever this curious object separates those struck by it from their value. Any character struck by the sickle (damage as dagger) suffers extra damage equal to his HD/level - attacker's HD/level and loses a percentage of his carried wealth equal to 10% x his HD - attacker's HD. The sickle is incapable of injuring anyone devoid of any wealth.
Once per day the sickle can render the person struck incapable of independent action (as hold person, save negates). Rumours persist that, if the correct formulae are incanted over it, the sickle becomes capable of creating a temporal stasis effect.

Pic Source
Nasnas from White Dwarf Fiend Factory pdf (courtesy of the electrowubz)
Windmills by Jaroslav Panuska from Monster Brains

Tuesday, 4 August 2009

Jack Vance Offers a Little Salt with my Words


Reading Jack Vance's Emphyrio at the moment. I have to say that, against my own expectations regarding my previous experiences of Mr Vance, I'm really enjoying it. It's probably something to do with the weird future culture he's created. But then I love the kind of 'lots of inferences' baroque sci-fi typified by Frank Herbert's Eye collection, Zelazny's Lord of Light (read right before I started in on Emphyrio) or Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality stories.

Unlike the Dying Earth stories I really get a sense of depth and scale in the back story of Emphyrio. I think it was Bruce Sterling who - after Arthur C. Clarke - called this kind of thing the 'unwritten book' of the author's research and world building. You never actually see the stuff in the unwritten book (by definition), but you can certainly infer its existence from the content and style of the written book.

So, yeah. Vance. I'll be cooking me some humble pie then...

In other news:
  • Batting about some ideas about polearms and Babylonia recently. Hopefully the grogosphere hivemind won't pip me at the post on these.
  • Giant centipedes don't get enough love. They need a random table of their own they do. I shall see that this injustice against our shoe-bankrupted insectile friends is rectified!
  • Currently looting the One Page Dungeon competition pdfs for all they're worth. There's more delicious braincustard in there than you can waggle a serving spoon at.
  • Percentile thief skills make no sense in a game where almost nothing else uses %ages. Dyson Logos has given me much food for thought...
  • The Octopus class by Amityville Mike (he's quite mad you know) is now canon for the Vaults game
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