Locked up for a thousand years? Must be a good guy.

On at least three occasions, the party I'm DMing for has released Major Evil into the world just because it said so. I don't know what compels these players to act like they do, but every time something's trapped, someone invariably releases it because it seems "trustworthy" or similar.

You'd think they'd learn.

On Treasures.

This has been said elsewhere, by smarter people than I, but it can be repeated.

Treasure is not always coin. We all know this.

Lately I've been on a kind of virtual tourist spree. I've been looking at museum collections, and you can often lift stuff from them straight into your game. If not that, you can get inspiration. Let's have a look around the world and see what we can find.

In the National Palace Museum of Taiwan, we find a nice selection of curios. A meat-shaped stone, for instance (it's a personal favorite of mine). Apart from food-shaped things, there are also paintings, calligraphy, rare books, documents, ceramics, bronzes and jades. A lot of these things are valuable now but maybe wasn't at the time, but isn't that just like a treasure in a dungeon? Maybe it was valuable then, maybe it wasn't. Maybe you can find a collector, maybe you can't. If we look quickly at "Curious", we get a nice list of stuff:

• a carved inkstone (clouds and dragons) 
• a ch'un-lei zither (a stringed instrument)
• a lacquered peony box
• carved bamboo brush holder
• a carved bamboo brush washer in the shape of a lotus leaf
• a cloisonné box
• a curio box
• an enameled container
• a glass snuff bottle with interior painting
• a painted lacquer container
• a carved olive-stone boat
• two pocket watches with painted enamelware

It's not hard to imagine some of this stuff having magical properties. If nothing else, they're quite fancy and would fetch a nice price to the right person.

Documents, similarly, yields interesting results. Maps are documents. Palace memorials, archives in dead languages, "gold-leaf tributary document from Siam", edicts... A lot of those could be worth something. Land claims could be substantiated or revoked over something like an old map, noble titles could also be in jeopardy.

There is a lot, head over there and check it out. Next time we're visiting some national parks of the US.

(and yes, I'm alive. I struggled a lot with depression last year (and this), but I fully intend to get back to updating this thing.)

Magical Swords

The group, well one of them at least, came across a magical sword. It could speak to them, both verbally and telepathically, and decided it liked the dwarf just well enough that it might let him wield her.

The dwarf thought she was annoying when she constantly wanted to rush into battle, calling him cowardly when not jumping headfirst into stuff, and generally being a pain in the ass, and so decided to leave it.

Did not see that coming.

Godzilla

Just got back from the new Godzilla movie. A few thoughts are listed here, hopefully spoiler-free.

The new Godzilla movie is:

• About white men
• Pretty fly creatures

it's not:

• good at representation
• good at equality
• good

Alright. Granted, I fell asleep a few times during it, but I don't think I missed anything important. But here goes: the main character is a white guy. Everyone else, with two exceptions, are white men. There's one white woman, and one asian (Japanese?) guy. That's it. The main guy's girlfriend is a white, blonde girl who is also a nurse. I, for one, am surprised by this. I think the dialogue must've gone sommat like this:

-- Okay, we need a girlfriend or wife or something for him. Something important.

-- What if she's a nurse, we can show how caring and loving she is?

I mean what the fuck? I don't know, but it's just such a fucking cheap move that I get tired thinking about it. Isn't Will Smith's wife (or whatever) a nurse in Independence Day? At least that movie had an ex-wife working for the president (who was white, obviously). I can't remember.

Anyway. Yeah, so look: the entire cast, and most of the background people, are white. Would it have been so fucking hard to make the girlfriend latina or Japanese or something? Like, white guy's father worked in Japan, he could very well have married a Japanese woman, but no -- gotta have a white main guy. Aight, so make the girlfriend Japanese or African-American, or Latina or whatever. Make the general something other than white. Make some of the marines or whatever they are non-white. Representation isn't hard. Just take a character, then make them not-white. You don't even have to change anything. The general could have been a woman, that would have raised the number of important women in the movie by 100%.

Oh yeah, also: the white guy's girlfriend is absolutely pointless. She doesn't do shit (ok, I might have slept through the parts where she's amazing, but I seriously doubt it).

So no. The new Godzilla movie isn't very good. The entire idea behind the kaiju (I think they're called?) is cool and can be lifted completely out of the movie and applied to Your RPG Setting of Choice. In fact, I will do so for Roanoke. Apart from the city destruction scenes (which are okay), it's a bad movie.

Online RPG Thing: Shadowbrook Manor - Completed

Last year I ran Shadowbrook Manor as an online one-shot thing. I never wrote down what happened, but basically this:

The party oooh spoilers, more under the cut:

Checklist: Online Sandbox Thing

• Write description about the city Roanoke and its rumors
• Also describe main families of Roanoke, and the different districts
• Write up some important NPCs. Stats? Who cares?
• Create starter packages.
• Write email to players.

It doesn't look like too much work, to be honest. This thing is happening, hopefully start next weekend.

Online Auctions

I can't visit eBay or similar sites (Yahoo Japan's auction site, for instance) without losing money. Or I guess it's more "spending" than "losing", since I actually get stuff. Japanese auctions are interesting; most people aren't really willing to send stuff internationally (kinda like American auctions, but with an added language barrier), so it usually ends up with me hiring a proxy service, which makes everything cost that much more.

My brief visit to eBay ended with me winning a Japanese dice set -- I was looking for d6 mainly, but I'm not one to say no to one of each. Besides, they were purdy. I ended up paying ~$3 for each, which is kinda expensive for dice, but what can you do about it, am I right? I also ran across, and just now won, The Book of Lairs 1 & 2, which ended up costing me ~30 bucks. I think that's a fair price? They'd be about $23 on Amazon, before adding on shipping (which definitely won't be $7). I don't really know what they're for, but inspiration is always nice, I guess.

I have one bookshelf left to assemble, for now, and after that I'll start comparing AD&D GM Companion to the AD&D GM Companion Manuscript. The manuscript was like, 300-400 pages I think? So they cut a lot of stuff, but the text in the published book is also really small, so it could be that they just squeezed everything in. If I find myself with absolutely nothing to do and a scanner at hand I might scan the thing too (not the book, of course), but don't count on it. Dunno what I'll do with it once I've listed differences. Maybe some collector will want it? Then again, not sure I want to sell it. Meh.