Blaaarg's page

Religion is wonderfully weird. I'm not a very religious person, but I love all the tradition and oddness of ritual. I feel that the flavor of religious practice is sometimes missing from games and this is my attempt to fix that.

I envision every clerical domain as having a different style of prayer, and each domain comes with a bit of sacrifice; something the cleric commits to, which connects him to his deity. The religious act separates the Cleric class from the ordinary clergy, who don't do magic. This isn't meant as a mechanical change, really, just flavor.

A few I've come up with:

Air
Prayer: Air clerics climb a high place and meditate silently in the wind. They climb a tree, or up on a rock, or sit on a stool if they're trapped indoors (which they hate).
Sacrifice: Frequent fasting; air clerics tend to look pretty gaunt.

Animal
Prayer: Wear animal skins or horned headdresses, dance and caper while imitating animals, growl and howl, paw the earth, etc.
Sacrifice: Eat no cooked food.

Chaos
Prayer: Slip into an ecstatic trance, writhing and gibbering as chaos takes over.
Sacrifice: losing control sometimes, occasionally drifting into trance states at random.

Any ideas? I would love a brainstorming session on this.

I'm currently running The Haunting of Harrowstone and I wanted to share some ambient background mixes to play with music or in place of music, depending on your group's preferences. Here's what I've got so far:

Harrowstone ground floor and upper level

Harrowstone underground level

Ustalav Forest Nighttime

I'll do more if anyone is interested. Blarg.

My players just finished The Wormwood Mutiny and they were so excited afterwards that they had a two hour brainstorming session to come up with a name for their ship, the Reckoning, complete with a flag!

I gotta say, that is one sweet pirate flag. More flags!

I've put together a few tracks for anyone who likes to GM with a bit of noise in the background. In my home games I'm always using it, or music, or both at the same time. If you want to loop the videos, go here and paste the url in the box.

Here they are:

Aboard the pirate ship.
I've already done one of these, this one's just longer.

Rickety's Squibs.

The Deathknell.

Tidewater Rock.

Mancatcher Cove.

All the above files were made using Softrope. Enjoy!

I've been making a few custom audio environments with Softrope for my Skull&Shackles group and I thought I'd share some of what I've been working on:

5 minutes of pirate ship sounds

Naturally since the sounds in the video aren't randomly being selected like in softrope, it may get repetitive but I made it pretty long to compensate. If anyone wants a longer one or wants me to mix a different soundscape just let me know and I'll do it.
I like to play this one while I browse and pretend I'm at sea. Arrr!

I've had a very productive week off. I've always liked sculpting little custom minis with Sculpey clay, usually oozes and worms because they're easy.

Anyway, I was online looking at the dungeon furniture on sale at Dwarven Forge and on Ebay and all of it was either too expensive or not what I liked, so I've been making my own. I'm a planner, so I made a list of every common type of dungeon furniture my players are likely to run across. My goal was to have a versatile pack that would be useful in multiple games. I intend to bring each of these things into miniature reality over the next few weeks (months?).

This is the list I made:

6 small dungeon doors
1 big dungeon door
3 small tables
1 big table
5 bookshelves with books and items inside
6 columns
2 coffins
2 stair tiles
2 piles of rubble
1 mage's desk
1 big bed
1 throne
1 altar
1 magic pool/font/well thing

That about covers it, right? If there are any other dungeon must-haves let me know because I am in a crazy sculpting /planning mood.

11/24/2011: I finished the doors, the bookshelves, and the tables!!
Here is everything so far: Blaarg's Minis.