Real Music

A certain..."individual" asked me recently if I miss listening to "real" music. In a word, no. I love the music I listen to, obviously, otherwise I would listen to something that isn't it. 

The issue that brought up his question was me listening to Warp Riders, an album by The Sword. My understanding of the album is that it is about a character called the Archer that discovers an artifact or seeks an artifact known as the Orb, and he is tasked by the Orb to find and defeat a being known as the Chronomancer. To do so, he must journey through time and space and a city called the Nightside. I don't know about you, but that sounds like the best 80s sci-fi film ever. It also inspired a post from a while ago about a city in space that is inhabited by The Darkest Night Detective Agency, and the final scenario of the Rebellion Arc campaign. 

Fine, the music isn't "real." I get that it isn't about love or loss and the band isn't turning a genre on its head or whatever, I get that it is about space pirates and being sold as a slave in a interstellar city on the edge of the universe. However, it does rock and it does have a good sound though. I think of it as a DnD campaign set to music, and that makes me love it. I like the imagery and the adventure that the lyrics paint a picture of, I can see Nightside in my mind's eye, and the song makes me want to go there. 

Music speaks to you, to some part of you, that is why you like it. I like stories, and especially stories about space and adventure, so of course concept albums like Blood Mountain by Mastodon, 2112 by Rush, and Warp Riders by The Sword are beloved by me. Of course I like songs about vikings and sowing the hydra's teeth in soil to make skeletal warriors. I also like Led Zeppelin, because they are awesome and have songs like Kashmir and Houses of the Holy and Heartbreaker, and also because they wrote songs about The Lord of the Rings and vikings.

I listen to the music I like, the music that speaks to me on one level of another, I don't listen to stuff that doesn't. I listen to MC Frontalot because he writes nerdy ass shit about computers and grues and whatnot, and I can relate to most of it. I listen to Captain Dan and the Scurvy Crew because I dream of wearing a tricorn hat and brandishing my pistol and cutlass. I listen to Witchcraft because their dark imagery and guitar work appeal to my tastes. I don't listen to rap because I  am not a thug with a platinum grill and my wife is not a gold digger.

Listen to what you like. It is cool to you and that is all that matters. Unless of course it says stuff like beating your wife and raping strangers is cool and you should do more of it, then you should probably find some real music to listen to that does not advocate sociopathic behavior. 

Whatever, I'm going to go listen to a song about vikings. 

Music: Forget You - Glee & Gwyneth Paltrow

Music: Bed Intruder - The Internet(s)

Music: Bowie's In Space - Flight of the Conchords

Fistful of Nerdy-Ass Shit

I got the new Early Man album yesterday. I really like this band, they have some very solid guitar work that I really dig, and their first album had some serious Black Sabbathness to it that made me happy in my metal organs. Those are the organs responsible for producing the chemicals that cause one to throw up the horns and headbang.They're also in part responsible for the growth of facial hair. Its science, trust me, I'm an EMT-B, I know things about the human body.

With the second album, the guitar work is still what draws me to them, I really love it. Each song, in my mind, starts with a very solid, very "metal" thirty to fifty seconds of good guitar work that remains throughout the tracks. There is less of a Black Sabbathness to the songs, which is good, because it means the band is replacing it with Early Manness. Fuck, I'm not a music critic. I like Early Man, if you like metal, you might as well.

I got confirmation from Jeremy that he is interested in playing Pathfinder with me as a trial run. Unlike the GURPS trial run, this is going to be more like a mini scenario, rather than a ten second battle that Eric and I didn't run properly. It's going to be a Spineplate and D'alton kind of thing, perhaps with Ga'zara as well if Jeremy feels like involving him. It will kind of kick off some things that get readressed in the next DnD scenario as well and the Pathfinder thing combined with elements of the eighth DnD scenario will amount to Spineplate's side mission. So, if the players do all the right things, they will be rewarded with two levels for our next play session. I believe this will bring us up to level fourteen by the end of the campaign (arc?). I'm excited!

Been toying around with this thing called Hero Lab from Lone Wolf Development, and it seems like a nifty product. It lacks the "Hey, you're doing stuff wrong!" warnings of the 4th Edition Character Builder, but it is still a pretty robust character generator that covers a wide range of systems. I believe the price point is like thirty bucks for the full version, you get data for one gaming system with it, and you can get full install on two computers (I think). It has data for 4th Ed, 3.5 OGL, Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, and a few others, available for purchase. I believe it also offers some customization tools that would allow me to tailor the Pathfinder database to my campaign world. This excites me a bit. I love character builders. Especially the kind that update their data. I have no idea why my players haven't bought a one month subscription and gotten the 4th Edition character builder. There is so much published material out there right now and the character builder has it all centralized in one place, no need to steal pdfs or page through books. Plus, if you let your subscription lapse, you still keep the full version of the character builder. Fred has often said there doesn't seem to be much material out there for 4th Edition, or something in the vein of there aren't enough options. Or maybe that was Eric. I'll be honest, I only half listen to Fred, I find it more productive to just listen to my earbuds and assume he is talking about Whil Wheaton or Hurley. Hehe.

To continue, there are twenty-six core classes in 4th Edition, one of which is a DDI exclusive. Every power source has at least one of each of the four roles. Except Shadow, which only has a Striker, and Martial, which lacks a Controller. Each class has three or four defining features to choose from to tweak their playstyle and dozens upon dozens of class specific feats at each tier to further tweak what they do. PLUS, fifteen to twenty powers at each level to choose from when picking At-Wills, Encounters, and Dailies when those option comes up. Then you get into paragon and epic destinies. There's a lot there, and my players aren't getting any of it because they don't know it is there, and they don't care to investigate it so it is really on them. I just kind of wonder if that lack of info is coloring Eric and Fred's opinion of the game. They are basically playing out of the PHB, and there are three of those now, heh, plus a book dedicated to arcane characters. They play a Artificer and Swordmage respectively.

On a side note, 4th Edition isn't about your feats or your loot, those generally do minor things. 4th Edition is about what your characters can do, that is the basis of the power system. Your powers, not your feats, determine your play style. If you want to be a shield using fighter that charges around bashing people with that shield, you take all the powers that let you do that. If you expect feats to allow you to do that, you are going to be disappointed, because all you're going to find is the ability to add your shield bonus to your Fortitude defense.

Moving along.

I recently took a really close look at 4th Edition and what I can do with it and I found myself in danger of speaking about it, rather than Pathfinder, when we decide to use a new system. I'm not in the fevered grip of GURPS fanboyism anymore, and I really do enjoy 4th Edition. Fucking hard as Hell to make Kethranmeer the way I want to in it, but I can do it. I'm at the point where I can pick and choose and tweak and change as I need to to make my own races and feats, or even powers if I thought it was necessary. If I stumbled a bit and things weren't entirely balanced, we can roll with it and I can look to other places for inspiration. I was starting to edge towards staying with 4th Edition and just continuing with it, rather than switching. I think I'm over that now though. I just feel like there is so much 3.5/Pathfinder love in the group, that someone should offer up a dissenting opinion that is rational, experienced, and well thought out.

Always remember that first and foremost, above everything else, I am fucking metal.

Music: Death Potion - Early Man

Music: Brainwash At Birth - Early Man

Music: Someone Elses Nightmare - Early Man

Music: Nine Riders - Early Man

Music: Fight - Early Man

Music: Through Chemtrails - Early Man

The Forgettening

I left something out the other day when I was talking about campaigns that were and whatnot. Its just a little thing, and I never really got too far on it, but I thought it was kind of goofily neat.

It was during that time that I was first really getting into Led Zeppelin, this was probably around the time I bought I and II and added them to my collection. There was so much...I guess you could call it mythic imagery in some of the songs that they were somewhat inspirational to me. Even when you get past the Lord of the Rings-ish songs there was some neat stuff to be found in there. To be fair though, my brain has been conditioned to "find" mythic fantasy elements in pretty much anything, whether they're there or not.

So, the gist was that I would base a campaign world on the albums of Led Zeppelin. There was going to be a city where doves were a sacred creature, based on the line about doves in Houses of the Holy, and harming them was punishable by death.

There was a race of the world called the Gentle Race, and their elders kept them chained to a vow of pacifism. This was because the elders saw all of time and space and possessed technology that could literally scorch the planet black, that was mostly based off of the first few lyrics in Kashmir.

Another tie in or whatever was that there was going to be a scenario about a city that was situated in a low valley and was perpetually in danger of flood. See where I'm going here? Well, there were bandits that wanted to raid the town, or were being employed to destroy it, something like that. They went about destroying the levees surrounding the town with explosives and the PCs would have to stop them or something while the flood was in the midst of occurring. Do I really have to say what song it is based on? No? Good.

Gallow's Pole and Immigrant Song were some other songs I had scenario ideas for. There were other little things, but nothing that was a big deal. I could just never find a clearly understood way of saying where the inspiration was coming from without being blatant about it. I could never really come up with a campaign focus story-wise either, so that was another reason it never really reared its head.

Music: MC Frontalot - I Hate Your Blog

Confused

You ever listen to 2112 by Rush? Its one of my favorite Rush songs. A man in the far flung future finds a guitar and falls in love with the music it produces while learning to play it. He brings it to the rulers of the galaxy/universe (the Priests of the Temple of Syrinx) who determine what art and music is allowed to exist. They scorn the guitar as a stupid relic of "the Elder Race of Man" and tell him the guitar will not be allowed to exist. So he flees the priests and finds his way to a cave and has a dream of beauty and wonder and upon waking he kills himself because he cannot bear to exist in a universe that denies the beauty of the music wrung from the strings of a guitar and wishes to move onto the world in his dreams.

At least I think that is what it is about, regardless: Good fuck song.

Anyway, there is a line in the song about the Elder Race of Man. This line inspired me to write, and always makes me think of, a story I was working on a long time ago called The Elder War. I always think I should go back to that one because it ties a bunch of random elements from some of my other stories together so that as a whole they make sense. I can just never really get into writing it. I like it, and it is actually something of a twist on the first story I ever wrote. A POS called Cernunnos' Story that was a godawful story and a worse DnD campaign, or maybe vice versa. If you're reading this and remember the time where it was like ten players and two DMs and we were all in my parent's garage and Jason Julian was all like "Kinouis the Vengeful does not care for this!" and slammed his fist into the table, it was set in that campaign world. Kardia if I remember correctly. Anyway, Cernunnos' Story was truly atrocious, every name and character in it was named after and ripped off of something I had read and liked at one time. There was a lightning god named Raiden, a sorcerer named Thorn Drumheller (if you've read the follow up books to Willow), a city named Rome, magic fields called mythals (if you know anything about Forgotten Realms elves), and so on and so forth in that vein for some time. I tried to rewrite the story later and quit because I realized I was copying Robert Jordan's magic system. Anyway, the Elder War was in part a spiritual re-telling of Cernunnos' Story (and the main character of the Elder War was one Kern Yew'nos, har har).

Hmm. I seem to have lost track of the point of this particular post, but it is a quarter to four in the morning so I think that is forgivible.

Anyway. I think I'm going to start posting my Norse Story up to this site. I'm not saying it was super awesome, but I had fun writing it and I think taking another crack at it might be a hoot. Originally it was written as a Norse story but I was working on my current DnD campaign when I was working on it and I decided a main character from it migrated to the continent it the campaign was taking place on so I've been kind of wanting to go back and violently retcon it so it sits better with my campaign world and doesn't have so many overtly Earth/Norse references and this might be an opportunity to do so.

To sleep, and dreams of the Dolphinian-Sharkasian War! In this episode Porposian mercenaries go rogue and Admirals Ack and Barr must use all the tools at their disposal to track the mercenaries through the rings of Saturn and bring them to task before they can provide the Sharkasians with information regarding the secret moonbase on Titan.

Music: 2112 - Rush