Monday 7 December 2020

Gaps in the Market

 An incomplete list of things somebody (not me) should make:


  1. A grown-up fantasy wimmelbook (think Where's Wally? but hugely detailed battle scenes, crowd scenes in bizarre cities, elaborate buildings thronging with strange inhabitants, etc.). 
  2. An OSR pseudo-Shadowrun but using Labyrinth Lord or your OSR ruleset of choice. D&D somehow doesn't quite work with a modern setting (as anybody who has played d20 Modern will attest), but  I am imagining something less like Shadowrun's mashup of fantasy with cyberpunk, and something more like D&D races and magic and monsters suddenly appear in the real world, tomorrow - so why not try to make that with D&D-based rules?
  3. A series of detective novels (more along the puzzle-solving lines of Poirot, Brother Cadfael or Father Brown than the "let's get depressed about how terrible the human race is" lines of Wallander or Rebus) set in a D&D world, where the mysteries revolve around the cunning deployment of D&D spells, monsters, and so on (The Strange Case of the One-Eyed Vrock and the Misdirected Prismatic Spray, anyone?).
  4. D&D: Total War or something like it.
  5. A huge book filled with hundreds of maps of imaginary places. No introductory text. No fluff. Just maps and place names. I would buy it. 

35 comments:

  1. 3) TSR did publish a trilogy of mystery novels in 1996, under the, um, "Mysteries" label: Murder in Cormyr, Murder in Tarsis, and Murder in Halruaa. I haven't read them so I don't know (a) how good they are, or (b) why the second in the trilogy is set in a completely different campaign setting.

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    1. If they were written under TSR's auspices they are almost certainly bad.

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    2. Gary Gygax also wrote a trilogy of novels in his Aerth setting (The Anubis Murders, Death in Dehli, and The Samarkand Solution) that were supposedly like this - he claimed he wanted them branded as "The Magister Setne Inhetep Mysteries" and was annoyed when the publisher went with "action-adventure" style branding instead. I haven't read them because I'm sure they're awful - Gary Gygax was a remarkably bad novelist - but they maybe fit the bill at least conceptually?

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  2. For 2, there recently was a Kickstarter for a Cyberpunk-esque version of Low Fantasy Gaming, called "Lowlife 2090". It has magic, dwarves, elves, minotaurs, albeit not abruptly appearing, but being part of an alternate timeline (the second one I know of with dwarven mongols).

    Elves & dwarves just appearing tomorrow was the core concept of Modern 20's "Urban Arcana". Easy enough to convert to your favorite OSR ruleset.

    I'd totally combine 2 and 3, by the way. Cast A Deadly Spell, but substitute Lovecraft with Gygax and the 1940s with the 2020s.

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  3. For your third request try Glenn Cook's Garret novels.

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    1. Might be good (I have mixed feelings about Glenn Cook) but I meant actual D&D spells and whatnot.

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  4. Esoteric Enterprises might match for a Shadowrun-esque game. Glen Cook's Garrett Files is a decent enough fantasy detective series. Urban Fantasy in the modern day as a genre is a lot more common, I'd be interested in your take on the Rivers of London series.

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    1. I'd never heard of 'Rivers of London' until this very moment. Bizarrely, the author appears to be the brother of David Aaranovitch, winner of the Noisms' Prize for Having The Wrong Opinions About Everything Award in every year since 2002.

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  5. As to No.2: Stars Without Number and its supplements are pretty much there, rules-wise -- only change I can think of off the top of my head would be to reskin alien races as fantasy ones. Adapt setting material from Shadowrun or come up with your own and you'd be good to go.

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  6. I would back a Kickstarter on #5

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  7. I feel like maybe I should do a wimmelbook, my illustration skills have been stagnating from lack of use, and I drawn and enjoyed making wimmel-like stuff.

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  8. 1. I'm surprised no-one has done that, seems like a good money maker.
    2. Think a hack of SWN would work...
    3. Cook's Garrett novels sort of work here, a bit.
    4. The reaaaaaally old game Fantasy Empires kind of scratches that itch, played it so much as a kid. Only came I've seen that does multiplayer by having two people use different ends of the same keyboard.

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    1. There was one I used to play as a kid - wish I could remember what it was - in which the troops were just different coloured dots moving around the map, but which I found surprisingly absorbing.

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  9. 5. The old, long-defunct Year of the Dungeon blog at http://blog.microdungeons.com/ was something similar - tons and tons of interesting maps; not all useful, and mostly on the small side, but often intriguing, and sometimes excellent. (I have a friend whose GMing in the last ten years has mostly been based on these maps.) Much of the blog's content is gone now, including the compilations, but the original posts are still there in the archives.

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    1. I used to have a pdf I think I downloaded for free from a blog, which was maps of an enormous, sprawling, side-view dungeon, plus notes on what was in each area. I've lost it now.

      Because the map looked "How to Host a Dungeon"-ish, I thought it might be linked to from The Year of the Dungeon blog, but nope.

      I'm also mourning the D&D maps Google+ group :-(

      There's many good fantasy maps on DeviantArt.

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    2. the wayback machine has at least some of the compilations (I didn't check them all, yet).

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  10. We just ran a Cyberpunk D&D game on the fly as the party traveled to future Earth Tokyo in a mystery scenario involving Yakuza. We ended up a bit later (we rotated Dungeon Masters every 3 sessions) heading to Panama and Antarctica in kind of a Cthulhu-esque tale. Don't dream it, be it.

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  11. Number 1 could easily be accomplished by the mockman.com guy. I wonder what he's up to now?

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    1. Haha, I was just reading Number 1 and thinking crafty thoughts! Shamelessly: I have a new D&D map coming out soonish, and I wrote a game that’s coming next year.

      - Jason @mockman (using me & my wife’s gmail)

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    2. Haha. I like the use of the word 'easily' here.

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  12. https://comics.ha.com/itm/memorabilia/comic-related/moebius-and-geoff-darrow-city-of-fire-the-street-limited-edition-71-150-lithograph-1985-/a/7231-96297.s

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  13. I'd add:
    6. Luxury, straight-faced IRL replicas of significant books from fantasy series. I know DnD have books titled Volo's Guide etc, but I'm talking about a fancy/expensive leather-bound book written as though by Volo, cover-to-cover. 100% fluff.
    6. a) Licenced in-world maps, art, spell scrolls, rings etc.
    7. More RPG-like games that roleplay on different scales, e.g. family histories or nations. I know the likes of Ben Robbins' Kingdom exists, but I'm talking something much less indie, and closer to the crunchy, DnD tradition.

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    1. Like Crusader Kings II: The RPG? Birthright was kind of supposed to be this, right?

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  14. CK:II is a great example. Birthright was just before my time. I've read mixed things. The complexity of Crusader Kings suggests that maybe what I'm asking for doesn't exist because it can't.

    Outside of light indie games which (IMO) sidestep the complexity problem, there aren't many RPGs that allow for something other than a 1:1 player-to-PC ratio.

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    1. I have got Birthright somewhere. I might do a retro review of it. I have a bad track record of starting projects like that and never finishing them, though.

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  15. 1. made me think of https://imgur.com/gallery/zFR83w0

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    1. That's the kind of thing! A book of 100 or so scenes like that would sell like hot cakes (I think).

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  16. Cry Dark Future (my B/X adapted version of Shadowrun) will be published as soon as the artist I hired delivers on the commissioned pieces. It was supposed to be released last year (about the same time I last heard from the artist). It's possible he's dead from coronavirus.

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  17. And re #5, something that I've spent years trying to convince somebody else to produce is a book of "utility" maps - not dungeons or cool adventure sites (those are fun to create) but a variety of ships and taverns and shops and wharfs and bridges and farmhouses and manors and castles and caves and mines and crypts and shrines and monasteries and so on. Several examples of each, maybe including different architectural styles or eras but nothing too unique or clever. Basically something I can have on hand to pull out whenever I'm running a semi-improvised adventure and one of these locations comes up. I know it's possible to find all of these kinds of maps already, but I want a handy collected source of them. If by any chance someone has produced such a thing since last time I mentioned this in public, somebody please let me know so I can buy it (or at least peruse it to see if I think they did it right...)

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    1. Dyson Logos or whatever he's called does that kind of thing, right?

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