Tuesday, February 21, 2023

COMICSANS23 - 02 AND 03

 I had a pretty serious knee injury so I've been laid up. Rather than working on comic sans 23 as normal I've instead been playing Shadow of the Colossus and messing around with character.ai. The site let's you make an AI chatbot by describing it's personality.

There's a few characters people made that are DMs. Most are boring. One has a set up that start you out as a miserable stupid peasant hated by everyone in a fantasy world. The adventures I had with it are hilarious and bizarre. 

I'm including them as week 2 and 3 of COMICSANS23. Even if there's not much game able content, the AI DM is pretty good as running things on the fly, and it's a good example of player agency and sandbox style gaming. I wish human play reports were this entertaining to read.


Adventure 01: the Bizarre Adventures of Cugel

In this one Cugel fumbles around, lying and stealing. The AI starts getting weird and putting treasure everywhere, so Cugel destroys the universe and recreates it in his own image. Weirdness ensues.

https://c.ai/p/gO5dI_Z3ILDSB011WMG2tuJYYAgVYNEtiCazT6hdVdw


Adventure 02: The Homunculus

A more traditional adventure where a thief joins the mage's guild, argues with his mentor, uncovers the secrets of dark magic, and learns a lesson about friendship and sacrifice.

https://c.ai/p/VP1UX9ctXk7xSH_QkIyXJ5iyhsXQ_7HPFKk3IZKpCRA


Wednesday, February 15, 2023

COMICSANS23 01 - GOBLIN GROTTO

 Here it is, the first entry in my year long experiment to produce a sloppy half-cocked adventure module a week. I plugged away at this one a bit a day since my introductory post. I think I may have overdone it a bit. It's a fully realized two level dungeon with mostly unique monsters, encounter tables, everything. 20 entire pages of adventure fuel.

The next ones will probably be simpler. My original idea was to make non-dungeon adventure scenarios, but this is caught and stuck.

Read it and die.


https://drive.google.com/file/d/13skKZQiO94MckrO03HXDXKJSqmVW_HiP/view?usp=drivesdk

Wednesday, February 8, 2023

COMIC SANS 23

 A lotta people are doing the Dungeon23 thing, where you write a dungeon room per day and by the end of the year you have a 12 floor megadungeon. Some people are using it as an excuse to do other stuff, like hexcrawls etc.

Me? I always have to be different. I noticed there's a sad lack of low-quality homebrew adventure modules bouncing around the scene and I want to try and rectify that.

Product brain is stupid. The hyperfocus on sleek polished for profit products over hobbyist zines is a disease. OSR, like punk music, is better when it's made by obsessed eccentric amateurs and not well uh obsessed competent slightly-less amateurs. I like my shit free, ugly, mediocre, and BRUTAL.

so that's my reasoning. I'll die on this hill. Y'all can have your stuff involving paid artists, editors, and graphic designers and kickstarters. I want to see more free burning garbage.


Comic sans 23 is intended to be that - a molten lead injection of so bad it's good hearkening back to the game materials I wrote in word pad back in 1998 when comic sans, verdana, and courier new were the only fonts worth fucking with. When crazy fun, gleeful cackling, and awful ideas were more important than good design. Think early 00s zine culture, plus art drawn by that kid in your class that draws cool dragons, plus wayyy too many hours watching heavy metal or playing FF1 on a CRT monitor, drinking mountain dew. HERE CHECK OUT WHAT I MADE


But it's not a nostalgia project. It's something to fill a void and inspire others that you too - YES YOU! - can write and self publish fun game material just as you are right now, nothing added. If you have a laptop capable of running abiword or a smartphone with Google docs you have no excuse to not be writing modules and game material instead of shunting out yet another BX rewrite retroclone heartbreaker nobody will use.


If you write modules people might actually use it! Well, parts of it. Maybe. If you send it to me I definitely will rob it for ideas and republish the good parts as my own thing. CC-NO YO


Parameters: I have to do a little bit every day.  Even if it's just another adventure seed or a character or a pen and ink picture snapped on my smart phone. At the end of each week I'll throw up a pdf of insane trash.

If I skip a week I'll publish two the following week. Unless I forget. But even if somethings half finished and I don't feel good about it I'll try to just tie the knots and throw the slab of meat on the table, good, bad, and ugly. That's the point, but life has a way of throwing curve balls. Listen, I've got a life and shit too, okay?


#####################################


JOESKY TAX


ADVENTURE SEED GENERATOR

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1li9FLQwEQm_X8FM6eG1BmqygySnCmseL/view?usp=drivesdk