TenKeep

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...