will you miss the smurf functionality if it doesn't make it into the forum rework?
Creative Director
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I’d like to try a Cthulhu story and see if I like it …
In your opinion, what are the best two or three Lovecraft Cthulhu stories?
Is there perhaps a really good collection I could pick up?
My favorite Lovecraft story is "At the Mountains of Madness" but that's probably not the best one to start on.
"The Dunwich Horror" and "The Colour Out of Space" are both pretty solid starters, though. "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" is pretty great also. And "The Call of Cthulhu" is solid, of course. So is "The Whisperer in the Darkness."
More than two or three, but it's hard for me to narrow things down there!
Any collection that has all of the above is a good one to pick up. Annotated ones can be helpful too, if you're looking for more info. S. T. Joshi (one of the best Lovecraft scholars out there) has annotated several of them.
Do you listen to any podcasts regularly?
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Creative Director
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Do you listen to any podcasts regularly?
Not lately, no. When I go on longer drives I do enjoy the various Mr. Ballen podcasts, but haven't done a big drive lately, ever since his podcasts shifted to Sirius. But yeah, lately I just don't drive regularly enough for long enough stints that podcasts make sense, and when I'm not driving I'd rather watch movies/TV/YouTube, read, write, or game with my free time.
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Alaznist gives Jan Daystar a weapon and Teleports him to get the Scepter of the Underworld; ....
OBOX-OB; ....
Sir Jeremiah Xanderghul in Twilight Gap near Magnamoor; ....
Scuttlecove and House Porphyry; ....
Sandpoint; .... Redshore ; ....
Here's my question:
Back in the 80s when you were young, and especially in the 90s, how often did you DM just all-the-way HOMEBREW stuff, and how much did you play IN Greyhawk, IN Faerun, IN Krynn or other published settings? Did you create all your own stuff but often (or some other adverb) place it *in* the Flanaess? Were you told to put "Headless" in The Crystalmists near Sterich and involve Orcus behind your Eldrua NPC-BBEG? That kind of stuff.
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One More:
Is Korvosa based heavily (or 'somewhat,' again, the adverb of your choice) on your Scuttlecove?
Many THANKS!!!!
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Creative Director
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| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Here's my question:
Back in the 80s when you were young, and especially in the 90s, how often did you DM just all-the-way HOMEBREW stuff, and how much did you play IN Greyhawk, IN Faerun, IN Krynn or other published settings? Did you create all your own stuff but often (or some other adverb) place it *in* the Flanaess? Were you told to put "Headless" in The Crystalmists near Sterich and involve Orcus behind your Eldrua NPC-BBEG? That kind of stuff.
.
One More:
Is Korvosa based heavily (or 'somewhat,' again, the adverb of your choice) on your Scuttlecove?Many THANKS!!!!
I started building my homebrew setting in 6th grade, a year after I first played the game, beginning with adventures (which required settings for context) before I realized that there were actual campaign settings out there already. Took me a weirdly strange amount of time to realize exactly what this "World of Greyhawk" thing was—I thought for a while that it was a different game than D&D since it came in a box with different trade dress (but also for a while didn't realize that D&D and AD&D were technically different games too—lots of confusing moments when I tried to understand what was going on in "Queen of the Demonweb Pits" when I only had the basic and expert set and the Monster Manual to reference!).
With the exception of running the original series of Dragonlance adventures for my younger sister as those adventures were coming out, all of the games I ran in up to college were homebrew. Once I got to college and was in an environment with several orders of magnitude more people interested in gaming, that probably dropped to 75% homebrew and a mix of Greyhawk, Dark Sun, Forgotten Realms, and Planescape. Then, once I moved up to the Pacific Northwest, the homebrew side kicked up a bit more as I played in homebrew games run by Jim Butler, Julia Martin, and a few others at WotC, and started running my own post-apocalyptic setting as a second homebrew.
When I ran homebrew games, I made significant use of using published adventures from Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms and generic settings to transition the plots into campaigns I run. I do that still to this very day when I run games set in Golarion (which I have the weird situation of it STILL sort of being a homebrew setting).
"Headless" was an adventure I was asked to write by Chris Perkins based solely on the title. He asked me to pitch him an adventure with that title and that's what I came up with. (Side note: That was the first time in 3rd edition D&D that stats for anything like a deity showed up in print—My stat block for Orcus in there I hear kinda got Chris in a bit of hot water because the D&D team was "jump scared" by the publication of a demigod stat block when they weren't quite ready for it... ha!) But as far as I remember, the plot and NPCs and setting for Headless was all mine.
Korvosa is not based on Scuttlecove at all. It's based on a city from my homebrew called "Qel-Vasa" that I renamed because I had fallen out of love with using the letter Q and not following it up with a u in a lazy way to make the word feel more "fantasy." (The gray maidens, Queen Ileosa, the Red Mantis, and several other plot points first introduced in "Curse of the Crimson Throne" also came from this city and a campaign I ran back in college.)
Scuttlecove is its own export from my homebrew, but grimdarked up significantly to serve as its tie in with the Book of Vile Darkness product.