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.)

Work on the Alexandrian has been light of late because I’ve been toiling to wrap up a major project.

The big hitch-up at the moment has been layout. Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that Windows 7 won’t run the version of Quark I own, which means I needed to upgrade to a new layout program. After examining the available options, I decided to switch to Adobe inDesign.

While in many ways I’m glad I’ve made the switch, the fact that I’m basically needing to relearn layout from the ground up is definitely complicating the completion of this project. (Which is already far behind schedule.) Things are just similar enough to be confusing. It’s easy to see why lots of people and organizations choose to stick with what they know because it’s what they know.

But if all goes well, I should have a major announcement coming down the pike in the next few days. And starting later today I’ll be posting some of my older professional work to fill the gap.

The slow slog of converting posts from the old site onto the new site continues. I’ve now finished everything up through the end of 2009.

Some good stuff from 2009:

Fixing Munchkin Quest: Some house rules that helped fix the pacing problems of Munchkin Quest. At the time, I was very hopeful that this game would become my go-to dungeoncrawler. Unfortunately, it didn’t prove a keeper in the long run: The game is too long for its shallow mechanics and the end game bogs down. It was defunct at my table even before Castle Ravenloft and Wrath of Ashardalon came long. But if you’re going to play Munchkin Quest, I highly recommend this easy fix to the gameplay sequence.

A Nomenclature of D&D Editions: A one-stop guide to all 10 editions of D&D, including the covers of each edition.

Reactions to OD&D: This series received the bulk of its entries. Basically my early thoughts on reading and playing White Box-only D&D from 1974. A lot of this stuff has been influencing the design of Legends  & Labyrinths.

Don’t Prep Plots: This is the core manifesto for how I design and run RPG campaigns. Everything else — the Three Clue Rule, Node-Based Scenario Design, Adversary Rosters, Megadungeons — are just various means to achieving this end.

Halls of the Mad Mage: The Halls of the Mad Mage twist back on themselves in impossible spatial contortions. Here you’ll find everfalling rivers, endless stairs, and mobius chambers. A one-page dungeon that won Best Geometry in the One Page Dungeon Contest.

Stripmining Adventure Modules: Buying an adventure module can be a gamble. This is how I hedge my bets.

So You Want to Write a Railroad?: A sarcastic inversion of Don’t Prep Plots.

In other news, the arithmetic captchas for authenticating comments have proven to be a huge success. I was having 500+ spam comments hitting my spam filter every single day before implementing the captchas, which made it impossible to sort through them looking for comments which had erroneously been filtered. The math problems have essentially eliminated the spam. There’s apparently one guy from Russia who comes by every day and posts a single comment, but that’s it. (Apparently my posts on proxy translating The Seagull have convinced the Russian spammers that this is a Russian website.) This has allowed me to salvage more than a dozen comments in the last month that would otherwise have hit the bit bucket.

Finally, apologies to anyone who may be waiting for a reply to an e-mail you’ve sent. Since launching the new site I think my e-mail address has been easier to find and my inbox is insane. I’m hoping to have some time in the near future to dig through everything in there and catch up, but right now it’s completely swamped. Sorry!

Comments have been re-opened.

As described here, WordPress has developed a bug where it periodically closes commenting on every post on the site. At this time, there is no solution and WordPress’ development team appears to be pretending that the problem doesn’t exist. The only solution right now is to wait for it to happen and then turn the comments back on manually.

If you come to the site and comments are turned off on any post, it’s an error. If it’s not too much hassle, feel free to drop me a quick e-mail so that I can fix it.

Thanks.

I’ve added a captcha-esque math test to the comment system in an effort to cut down on spam.

The spam filter is working great in preventing comments from actually getting posted, but it’s leaving me with hundreds of comments to scan through every day to make sure legitimate comments aren’t getting lost. That’s too heavy a load and it’s resulted in several comments getting lost forever.

If you have any problems, please drop me a note so that I can fix it.