Talking 'Bout Teratic Tome

Recently, quite a few Indie RPG publishers jumped on the Pay What You Want train to what I can only hope was Profit-town.  Since I'm actually playing quite a bit of DnD right now, and since DnD Next is extremely OSR-friendly in terms of material you can use with it, I decided to spend a little money.

Teratic Tome.

One of the things I picked up was Rafael Chandler's Teratic Tome.  I always like having new monsters to
spring on my players,  and since most of them have been gamers for many years, they pretty much know all the standards and new monsters are a good thing.

So, in that regard, Teratic Tome certainly delivers.  There are lots of new monsters here, and a fair number of interesting ideas, but on the whole, I have decidedly mixed feelings about  the Teratic Tome.

Things I Like:

• Some of the art.
• The dragons.
• Story hooks built into many monsters.

Things I Don't Like:

• The rest of the art.
• All the story hooks are pretty much the same.
• That one story hook doesn't exactly work for DnD.
• The whole book comes off kinda creepy.

The Art
The art is generally good, although it switches back and forth between traditional fantasy and hentai in a way that is a bit jarring.  I don't really have a preference in terms of style, but I like a book to stick with one or the other.  Some of the artists are extremely good, great even, but just as many are solidly "meh".

More problematically, there are a substantial number of tentacled vaginas (vaginae?) in this book.  And by that I mean, at least 5, although I'm not going to take the time to count them.  There are also many creatures based on naked women.

Before you get up in my grill, I want to go on record as saying I have no inherent problem with the idea of tentacled vagina art or naked woman art.  I have an internet connection and a Reddit account.  I have seen things.  We all have.  The the vagina with tentacles is appropriately creepy-gross, and fits with the horror-movie theme of this book.

But.  There are no spiked penises here.  Or whatever the creepy-gross male anatomy equivalent is.  In fact, there are lots of creatures based on creepy versions of naked women, pictures of breasts and so-forth, but basically no creatures based on creepy versions of naked men. It all comes off as a bit juvenile.  All I think as I read through it is "wow, somebody REALLY liked that picture of the succubus in the ADnD Monster Manual".

The Dragons
Are awesome.  They are horrible monsters that bring the apocalypse.  I will steal this idea forthwith and I doubt I will return to regular dragons, except perhaps as spawn/offspring of these monstrosities.  The dragons are almost worth the price of admission.

The Story Hooks
Many of the creatures presented in the Teratic Tome aren't exactly monsters in the traditional DnD sense of something that you might run into in a dungeon and then kill for treasure.  They are more like story hooks with statistics.  Story hooks and stats come up with by a sexually repressed Japanese man, at that.

Let's take the Altar Beast, for example.  It preys on "those who dissolve the holy bond of matrimony" by possessing one of the people who want to get divorced, then emerging from their body to feed on anyone that "encourages and permits this sin."  It's a towering, purple, tentacled phallus with lamprey mouths (OK, I guess there are some penis-equivalents in this book).  That smells like strawberries.  Holy Fuck.  Leaving aside that this thing is like the fevered masturbation fantasy of Sara Palin after a weekend-long hentai binge, this monster is essentially the template for half the book.

Here is the template: People are being murdered.  Find out the connection and confront the monster that is using a victim to cause the murders.  We see this repeated maybe 20 or 30 times in the Teratic Tome.  It's basically monster design by template.

Step 1: Pick obscure god of something.  Step 2:  Creature created to punish sin.  Identify the sin using this handy chart.  Credit:  Catholics, of course.  Step 3: Random colors and smells.  Step 4:  Graphics by hentai design school with focus on variations of naked women.  Step 5: Profit?

Many of the monsters in this book are essentially the crib-notes for a horror movie.  Which is OK, I suppose, if you can pull that sort of thing off in your DnD game.  They rely on physical horror - monstrous shapes emerging from human bodies, awful eyeballs with spider legs, that sort of thing.  Problem is, I don't think that physical horror works well in DnD.

Characters who regularly go toe-to-toe with giant spiders or the walking dead don't really blink at a towering purple dong-monster.  Horror like this relies on the known and understandable - a human murderer, for example, turning out to be something alarming and inhuman.  But since alarming and inhuman is just a day at the office in DnD, it loses quite a bit of potential punch in this setting, so many of the monsters are less useful than they could be.

In Summary:
Horror-based retro-clone monsters.  Compatible with most versions of DnD except probably 4e without much modification.

If you run LotFP, horror or dark-fantasy themed games this is probably a good supplement for you.

Don't leave it lying around if you have kids.  The focus on female-nudity-based monsters may not be for everyone.

The dragons are awesome.

What I'm Gonna Do With It:
I'm going to reskin quite a few of these monsters into summoned creatures, demons or magical abominations.  I don't think I'll use the horror-element story hooks too much.  The dragons have already been incorporated into

The Hobbit is the Great Goblin's Neck Wattle

I mean, look at this fucking thing!

Bloated, sagging and unnecessary, yet animated with care and attention to detail.

So, as you can probably already tell, I was not a fan of the new Hobbit movie.  Which sucks, because I was genuinely excited about this movie.  Hugely excited, since I adored the Lord of the Rings movies, and I've been a Tolkien fan from way back.  

Heck, this BLOG is named after a Tolkien line, and some of my most-read posts have been about Tolkien and his influence on me as a gamer.

Simply put - Peter Jackson was the wrong director for this movie.  He knew that, though, which is why Guillermo del Toro was initially tapped to do it.  Delays and general movie business made del Toro bow out, so Jackson picked up the reigns... and pulled a Lucas - smashing the movie into the bloated hubris of a director who has been so successful that people are no longer able to tell him things that should be self-evident.

Things like:

"Peter, rocket-powered rabbit sleds are FUCKING IDIOTIC."

"No, Peter, you don't need an additional nemesis sub-plot involving an albino orc with a prosthetic arm."

"Personally, I don't think that the bird shit on the side of Radagast's head looks good at all."

"Why do we need a 5-minute scene were an unnecessary minor character brings a HEDGEHOG BACK FROM THE DEAD?"

"Do we really think we have enough material to stretch a short YA book out into 3 3-hour movies?  It sure doesn't seem that way to me."

"Are all these really long CGI fight scenes really necessary?"

"Do we have to come up with a whole new, untested technology for making this movie?"

"Are YOU ON FUCKING DRUGS?"

Things like that.

Ultimately, the movie is neither fish nor fowl, and that is why it fails.  It can't decide if it wants to be big, sprawling, epic Lord of the Rings, or tight, slightly slapstick Hobbit.  It's OK when it's one or the the other, and miserably, execrably bad when it tries to be both.  Which it does in pretty much all the action scenes involving the dwarves.

I wouldn't have minded a harder-edged version.  A group of dwarven warriors heading out to reclaim their kingdom sits just fine with me.  Some of the battle scenes, the early scenes with Smaug, the encounters with Azog, those all fit this sort of movie, and they were fine and good.

I wouldn't have minded a slapstick, slightly comedy Middle-Earth road trip movie.  The party at Bilbo's, the encounter with the trolls, cooking with busted-up elven furniture, Bilbo's arc generally, even the Radaghast the brown (the brown is shit, btw) - those all worked fine for that sort of slightly goofy movie.

But having them all in the same movie was just, schizophrenic.  Some parts weren't even that.  The entire stone giants scene was solid shit from start to finish, as was the entire underground fight with the goblins.  The action was largely Keystone Kops, which clashed horrendously with the faux-epic stuff they tried to cram in.

Jackson, like Tolkien before him, needs a better editor.  And Christopher Tolkien will no doubt hate it and weep himself to sleep atop the vast pile of money his father's work earned him.   

Vornheim: The Reviewening

I will start by telling a little customer service story.  I haven’t traditionally been a huge Jim Raggi fan, but I gotta tell you, he’s good at customer service.

I ordered Vornheim from the LotFP online store about 5 weeks ago.  Last week I was getting a bit antsy about it not being in my hands, so I wrote Jim an email through the store support contact.  I received a reply promptly (accounting for time difference) which apologized for the inconvenience, laid out the standard timeline for shipping to my location, described some potential reasons for the delay and offered to buy me another copy from a north American vendor (since he’s sold out)  if the product did not arrive within a certain amount of time.

I’ve worked in customer service, people.  I was a customer support call center manager.  This is HOW THIS SHIT IS DONE.  Armed with the information that a) the delay was within the range of expected shipping time, b) Canadian customs sometimes slows stuff down arbitrarily and c) I had an alternative if I was unhappy with the wait, which the vendor would pay for himself – I was happy to wait a few more weeks.  And lo and behold, Vornheim arrived late last week.

So from one customer support professional to another – fabulous job, James Edward Raggi IV.  Top f’ing notch.  It’s pretty likely that Jim knew that he wouldn’t have to buy/ship me a copy from a North American vendor, but he made the offer, and that is huge.  Much of customer service is managing expectations and providing options, and that was deftly done here.

On to Vornheim.

This book is smaller than I expected.  There is a certain expectation I have for physical dimensions of RPG supplements, and this book does not conform to that.  But that isn’t bad.  This is a very convenient size for an rpg book.  I could fit it in a coat pocket if I wanted to.  And the contents make me want to.

When I actually read the book, it’s incredibly DENSE.  There is more practical, useful, interesting stuff in this book than in all the 4e books I purchased.  There is NO wasted space.  The INSIDE OF THE DUST JACKET has a map on it.  It’s like working in a well-designed ship galley kitchen.  Everything is right there within reach and no space is wasted at all.

This is the chocolate brownie of role-playing supplements.  It’s small, chewy and tasty.  Getting a bigger piece would almost be overkill.

I quite like the multi-column random tables.  They are a great use of space, since they can be used straight across with a single roll or rolled on multiple times.  The dice-drop tables are also handy.  I’ve spent some time deciphering all the things they could be used for, and I feel that I’ve only just scratched the surface.

The book is also fairly edition-neutral, which is a good thing.  I’m mostly playing D&D Next right now, and I can use the stats and tools pretty much straight across.  A handy-dandy “Later Editions Conversion Table” is also included, plus the dice-drop charts support ascending or descending AC, depending on your preference and system.

I’m a little bit less in love with the included adventures.  They are interesting and all, but I can’t help but feel that the space they use would have been better served with more tools.  And make no mistake, this book is a toolkit.  There are tools for quickly building street maps, tools for populating businesses, for naming taverns, for organizing relationships between NPC’s.

Portable, incredibly useful, interesting art, helpful tables and not a single square inch of wasted space.  This book is fundamentally different than what you see coming out of any major RPG design company.  I can only wish that Gary Gygax was as good at book design as Zak S is.

The only downside is that it took a long time for me to get it.  But Jim Raggi dealt with that problem in an admirable fashion.  Thanks, Zak and Jim – now I have to reevaluate what I expect from BOTH and RPG supplement AND an RPG seller.