TenKeep

Jack London’s story “All Gold Canyon” is bedrock for some wonderful themes in old school DnD – character, law and chaos, and gold. The main character’s Bill, a gold prospector digging for Mr. Pocket , a huge nugget of gold. Just hearing Bill talk, you know him. “‘My…but I’ve got an appetite. I could eat iron-filings an’ horseshoe nails an’ thank you kindly, ma’am, for a second helpin’.” “Ah, ha! Mr Pocket! I’m a-comin’, an’ I’m shorely gwine to get yer...I’m gwine to get yer as shore as punkins ain’t cauliflowers!” He’s high in constitution. He walks away from being shot in the back. His Dex is good. London compares him to a mountain goat! Of his eyes, London said, “They were laughing and merry…and yet…contained much of calm self-reliance and strength. *** Lawful and bright as Bill is, that stranger, revolver in hand, has an “aura of things hostile.” That stranger is Chaos: …a feeling as when a cloud passes over the sun…something dark and smothering and menacing; a gloom

My friend Tom and I've been playin' Nate Hayden's "Rocky Mountain Man," a folio game where it's 1825 and we're trappers movin' West toward the Great Salt Lake. You can see our counters on the hex map, where we headed North just east of the Arkansas River. Tom's playing a 'business man' and I'm a soldier - Sniper Coltier. We found beavers small and large and a mountain river - named it the "Coltier River." I can't tell you what a great game it is and how far out it is, hearing to Daniel Thompson's soundtrack from the movie " Grizzly Man ," and exploring the open frontier. *** I did some research on mountain men in DnD but didn't find much, so there's a good idea to think about! Volume One of " Gary's Appendix, A Thoughtful Zine for OSE " has a feature on bears, though, and the entry for "grizzly bear" says, "Aggressive, 9' tall," AC 6; HD 5; ATT 2 x claw (1d4), 1 x

Here's a slight blog about sprites. First, some news from TenKeep. I heard it first hand from a guy who heard an eyewitness say, "At Silo Verde, sprites showed up." Says a swarm of 'em flew-in and put a curse on the brigand leader's horse - made her feel sun-sick and she wouldn't run. He said, "You could hear 'em laughing." Says they threw chunks of pure 'white' across the sand. Said, "They even led wounded hobbits to shade."  This got me thinking about sprites. *** Over Christmas I ordered a few minis from "Ral Partha Legacy." (check out their awesome website, https://ralparthalegacy.com).       You'll need a small brush to paint them. I bought 2 new paints to help with the colors: Army Painter "Glitter Green" for wings and "Azure Magic" for the stands. It's awesome seeing them fly around my place. *** The OSE rules say sprites are "1' tall winged humanoids...shy, but driven by

Today, I was painting an orc and it got me thinking.  Near TenKeep, orcs are brigands who prefer night to day, like the ravagers in Ferguson-Avery's Into the Wyrd and Wild : The Wilds do strange things to people, bending them, changing them...For many, the Wilds means their death...However, there are some...who don't just survive...The bloodshed, the violence, the madness, it calls to them...  *** I'd say Old School Essentials has it right. Orcs are "bad-tempered, animalistic." They carry axes, clubs, and spears. Orcs "delight in killing."  *** Orcs first appeared in Beowulf - the curse of the biblical Cain. Seamus Heaney called them "evil phanto ms": ...the Almighty made him [Cain] anathema / and out of the curse there sprang / ogres, and elves, and evil phantoms, and giants too..." (Heaney) In Old English , they're called "orcneas": ...ealle onwocon / eontas ond ylfe      ond orcneas / swylce gigantas (line 110). [...

Today's blog is about J.E. Holmes, a DnD legend, who introduced many to the game in the late 1970s. Today, I learned page 45 of “ Dungeons and Dragons: Rules for Fantastic Medieval Role Playing Adventure Game Campaigns ,” is the first place John Eric Holmes is acknowledged as editor the now famous ‘Blue Book’ DnD Basic rules (1977). Holmes lived from 1930 to 2010. He was a US Marine who served 2 years in Korea and was neurologist and a neurology professor at UCLA. He was the first editor of Gygax's little brown books (lbb) of Original Dungeons and Dragons. Today, I wanted to share tidbits about J.E. Holmes, for us, 'Sons of Holmes.'  ***      As of today, for $7.99 , you can buy a copy of Holmes' Basic Human Neurophysiology (1984). For $17.95 you can get Maze of Peril (1986), his collection of short stories about his son’s DnD character. *** In 1980, Holmes was interviewed for Psychology Today . He said a nurse in his game played a gnome who was "always wond

You might enjoy Brandon Sanderson's "The Emperor's Soul," the story of Wan ShaiLu, a forger-magic user who had a hundred days to create a soul for an injured emperor. Shai worked her magic by making a "soul stamp" of the emperor's life. Sanderson's inspiration was seeing "chops" on ancient works of Chinese art. [left image from USF Mediazine] It got me thinking - chops might be a wonderful way to stamp spells in arcane scrolls. For example, in a lake country far from TenKeep, I know a magic user - Shakey Cat - who's got a problem with memory. He might remember spells by stamping chops! Shakey's got a new spell for seeing underwater - the "duckeye" spell - a second level magic user spell he created. I was thinking about his chop and how he'd remember. Maybe a stamp's just as good as remembering? The new spell creates second eyelids in the caster and for three turns, perfect underwater vision. We'll have to see!

Stephen King's 150 page novella "The Mist" truly evokes the "drugged thanatotic avidity" his characters experience as they confront the giant tentacled creatures lurking in the mist. The OSE monster manual describes "Octopus, Giant" as "Giant, eight-armed cephalopods" that "lurk in coastal waters, close to settlements." A great scene in King's novella is when the story pulls you in, amidst them. "A tentacled arm came over the far tip of the concrete loading platform and grabbed Norm around the calf. My mouth dropped wide open...The tentacle tapered from a thickness of a foot - the size of a grass snake - at the point where it had wrapped itself around Norm's lower leg to a thickness of maybe four or five feet where it disappeared into the mist...And there were rows of suckers on the underside, they were moving and writhing like hundreds of small puckered mouths." It was a bad situation. "Norm looked down. He s

Today I wrote flash fiction about the second level magic user spell, locate object.   *** Shakey Cat was an old conjurer, a magic user of sorts, who hung-out with rangers around the lake. He spent most of his time in camp, reading books and trying to figure out the maps. Late one afternoon, he was strolling behind a second lake and noticed he'd lost his knife, a good one with an elkhorn haft and silvered blade. Good thing , he thought, I have my locate object spell . Shakey circled his left hand and threw the spell for searching. Ninety feet of lakeside crammed inside his head. His eyes almost popped out. By the time he could walk again, the spell kicked-in. What stood out most was a heavy fish that sliced the water’s surface. He went ahead, jumped in, and swam to a pile of rocks, sort of like an island. He searched but didn't see the silvered knife. Earlier that week he’d read a ranger’s note about bull turtles that loved this lake, so he worried about his toes and fingers. M

My friend Dan wrote some information for anyone who wants to get a notice when a new TenKeep blog is posted. He wrote: The TenKeep Blog is available via RSS. If you already know and use RSS, then you can add the TenKeep Blog to your RSS feed using this URL: http://tenkeepblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss If you don't already know about RSS, here are some details: RSS is "Real Simple Syndication." Geeks and even some real people use RSS to keep up to date on news, events, and the really cool ones use it to keep up to date on D&D. Feedly.com is a very popular free RSS reader, and you can use it in a browser or on your phone/tablet. Other popular RSS readers are in the app stores for your devices. Just pick one and pop in the URL for TenKeep: http://tenkeepblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss The RSS might be something to check out. Thanks.

Around a campfire in the craterlands, a halfling named Tombo recounted fierce fighting in the desert. Halfling farmers from Tetrada ambushed brigands near Silo Verde. Tombo's tale and the photos below are a battle report from playing out the conflict in the old school game Book of War . *** In hills at Silo Verde, we concealed ourselves in saguaro cactus. Unaware , Amorcito's brigands rode in from the west. Our slingers lured them onward, into swagger and conceit. Like dust devils, we flew down on them, two ranks of horsemen and walking troops behind. We took a hill, and pounded those left with stones, but t he coward Amorcito made a run. When all was done, we drifted back toward La Gama. Our wounded hung back in the shade of a mesa and I set-out for help. It was lucky, finding you here.  Thanks for reading.  

A good remedy for a couple weeks' illness is light, fantasy fiction, for instance: Seth Skorkowsky's story, The Vault of Sowdek John Milius' and Oliver Stone's film, Conan the Barbarian Elaine Cunningham's novel, Winter Witch All create irreversible moments - not too dramatically rendered - when something big's about to happen. *** For sure, trouble's ahead when Skorkowsky's Ahren the Black Raven slips inside an enemy fortress, locates an ancient safe, and picks the lock. The loud click echoed through the room. Releasing his breath, Ahren tugged the door smoothly opened. Thin shelves lined the bottom half, each stacked with parchments...Ahren smiled, and reached inside. Then, the door mechanism clicked again, and bells began clanging somewhere above. 'Damn it! ' *** Conan the Barbarian is darker than I remember, literally, with lots of low light scenes. Conan is indeed a mighty warrior, who's lost too much. Still, adventure called and the