My current layout project is taking much longer than I anticipated. (It always does.) I should have some more recycled material posted to cover the next few days and then hopefully it will be done.

For today, I’m going to just briefly reflect on just how powerful and effective re-skinning can be. It’s an important part of the DM’s toolkit. And although it’s often talked about in terms of saving prep time, I think it’s arguably more important that re-skinning can so trivially take something familiar and recast it as something mysterious, enigmatic, and evocative.

Although re-skinning has become something of a hot fad over the past couple of years, I first encountered it way back in 1990 when I read an article in Dragon Magazine that dealt with re-skinning spells. (Magic missiles are great for this: You can describe them as pretty much anything.) I think it was issue #162, which would have been my very first issue, but I won’t swear to it and I’m away from my Dragon collection at the moment.

What brought this particularly to mind today was a recent re-skinning I did in my Ptolus campaign:

The creature rears up, plunging its clawed hand into its own chest. It rips out a gob of flesh and hurls it down the length of the chamber. It strikes the wall and spatters. Small globules of white, turgid flesh writhe and bound up into blasphemous creatures of lumbering, squelching flesh…

That’s an osyluth summoning 2d10 lemures. My players were so distressed by this unfamiliar ability that I actually had difficulty finishing the description due to the outcries emanating from the table.

Okay. That’s all I’ve got for today. More tomorrow. And lots more in the near future. (I hope.)

Collected from the web: There are over 200 bodies on Mt. Everest.

Because it is so difficult (if not impossible) to retrieve those bodies, they are simply left in situ. Grisly, but fascinating monuments to those who have attempted the most famous of climbs.

(For the record, if this were to be the way I died, I would actually prefer to have my body left there and remembered. A fleeting touch of immortality.)

What’s interesting is that many of these bodies have become actual landmarks. Some have earned nicknames. They have become part of the mountain and part of the experience of climbing the mountain.

Turning this to our most prevalent topic here at the Alexandrian: When I’m DMing, because I’m forgetful, corpses will frequently end up disappearing as if they were phasing out from a CRPG. This is not a deliberate choice on my part; quite the opposite, in fact. When I remember to account for corpses, some great gaming experiences have come from it: Whether it’s the heads of formers PCs on pikes outside the Caverns of Thracia. Or the murder investigation launched when the PCs irreverently left corpses laying in an alley. Or the mystery posed by disappearing corpses in the labyrinth. Or the sinking, near-poisonous miasma which resulted from the PCs leaving a bloody charnel house of corpses to molder and rot.

At an open game table, of course, this sort of thing will crop up more frequently. (Where the heck did that corpse of a necromancer come from?) But even without an open game table, you can consciously choose to have the environment evolve when the PCs aren’t looking; or evolve as a result of the actions the PCs have taken (or not taken). The typical milieu of a D&D campaign is strewn with corpses. Don’t forget about them.

John and Abigail, the play I wrote starring John and Abigail Adams, is now available for the Nook.

Through war and peace, tragedy and joy, the friendship and love of John Adams and Abigail Smith formed a passionate and enduring marriage which helped shape the future of a newborn America .

Through long years of separation – brought about by John’s work in Boston and Philadelphia during the events of the American Revolution – the couple’s only means of communication were their letters. Literally thousands of letters survive, and this unique adaptation – in the style of A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters – allows the couple to live again in their own words.

The play was produced independently in January 2002. It received a second production in August 2007 as part of the Minnesota Fringe Festival.

Of its inaugural performance in 2002, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune wrote: “John and Abigail is an adroit adaptation … a chance to hear about the sacrifices involved in championing the American Revolution. John and Abigail endured their extended separations with pen, paper, and patience, communicating news of disease, death, battles, longing, and love.”

The play is also still available for the Kindle and in a print edition from Lulu.

Buy Nook Edition – Buy Kindle Edition – Buy Print Edition

David and Tellius both requested a compiled PDF version of 101 Curious Items. And so I shall oblige:

(click image for PDF)

Enjoy!

“101 Curious Items”, of all the things I’ve written, may be the one I have found most useful on a personal level. I refer back to it constantly, using it to fill in bits of detail and flavor whenever I start running dry during dungeon prep. (Or just when I feel a particular complex is a little too “normal” and utilitarian.) Even if I don’t use one of the items from the list directly, I’ve found it to be a great source for inspiration. For example, the “Items of Interest” in the bloodwight nests of The Complex of Zombies drew heavily from this article.

The article was originally submitted to Dragon. It was rejected due to a lack of mechanical content and because some of the items included magical effects that weren’t statted up like “proper” magic items. A few months later, the article became one of about a dozen that I sold to Campaign Magazine. Unlike most of the stuff I wrote for Campaign, this one made it into print and I actually got paid for it before the magazine went out of business. It was published in the June 2002 issue.

Curious Items 1-25
Curious Items 26-50
Curious Items 51-75
Curious Items 76-101

I love including these kinds of little details and oddities. As another example from The Complex of Zombies, there is the manuscript entitled Observations of Alchemical Reductions and the Deductions Thereof by Master Alchemist Tirnet Kal. A Craft (alchemy) or Knowledge (arcana) check (DC 22) reveals that it was once a well-known alchemical text, but that the last copy of it was thought lost several centuries ago.

These little sparks of creativity tend to light up the game world for the players. And you can never tell when little sparks will light surprisingly bright conflagrations. I’ve seen a PC define their entire personality around something I thought of a magical knick-knack. On another occasion, the PCs took some items similar to the ones in this article and launched a bidding war between several powerful factions. The connections they made during that bidding war have had all kinds of strange, long-term consequences for the campaign.

You can see some similar thoughts being explored in “Putting the ‘Magic’ in Magic Items”.

A fun little exercise to try at home: The next time you’re getting ready to run an adventure, take three of the items from this list and drop them in. Maybe just leave them lying randomly about (or stuffed into someone’s pocket). Maybe twist the item to the setting. Maybe twist the setting to the item. Whatever works. Then wait and see what happens when your players stumble across the curiosity.

101 Curious Items – PDF