Gaming and Getting Over It

 

It’s been almost two years, and I still wake up thinking about Afghanistan. The further out I get the more I’ve begun to realize: there is no going back from that phone call and seeing the tiger at the zoo. I thought the anger would die down a bit, that I would be able to return this blog back to its previously scheduled routine. I want to. 

I can’t. 

Every time I close my eyes I see her: an illusory Afghan ripped from her home, her school, to be enslaved to some pig. My mind understands the absurdity of that image, but I don’t have the courage to attempt to debunk it. Sometimes when I close my eyes she’s riddled with shrapnel, blood streaming from her bleeding face. That’s when I force my eyes to stay shut; I can at least keep my mind's eye on something I don't have the courage to look up in real life. And the rest of America has moved on, much to my chagrin and total lack of surprise. I meant, why would they? Taking responsibility for the aftermath of decisions is so alien to the American mind they lose it when fairy tale endings don’t happen for their pop culture icons, nevermind entire countries condemned to slavery in the face of our own apathy! So what am I supposed to make of American popular culture, where we idolize those who will not kill even if it means others die to maintain whatever moral purity they can fool themselves into having? Where idealism is just fine, even at the cost of lives? Am I supposed to take such obvious hypocrisy seriously, now that I see it for what it is? How am I supposed to think about such an obviously damning idea being celebrated in aesthetics?

I don’t have answers for these questions, for the record, because my issue isn’t a rational one. I was involved in the abandonment of a whole country. I have to grieve that, and my questions are symptomatic of my grief. By now I know they’re not the real problem. Somehow I have to figure out a way to integrate what happened into my life now, and until then these questions will persist. That is not a comfortable answer, but it is the only one I seem to have found. Bide your time and hold onto hope and all that! 

But that sort of decision has consequences, one of them being learning to sit with that kind of awful ambiguity.

And pretending that it's a comfortable thing to sit with is a lie. You have to let go of loving comfort and needing comfort to make you sane. But it's not a question of just diving into horrifying pain all the time, because no one can do that, all the time. Where does gaming and popular culture fit into trying to actually develop yourself and to become more, because you're either striving to live or dying, and no there is no inbetween?

Again, the solution is to sit and wait and watch. So that's what I've been doing.

And then the other day I randomly decided to play Bioshock Remastered on the Switch. I'd not played Bioshock when it first came out, although I was always interested in it. So, now it's on the Switch, so I bought it a few months ago... and then did nothing with it. Until the other day. I was having fun, but not a ton of fun, just getting used to the mechanics and the world and all the things I normally don't give videogames much time to do, but this was enjoyable enough!

And then this happened.

Right before she was picked up I had closed my eyes, and yes there was the Afghan girl was, and yes she was shredded all to hell, and that one time I didn't keep my eyes shut, so I popped them open... and there was this little abomination being restored to a little girl. My hands shook as I watched. I didn't hear anything after that. I couldn't. I just stared as the little girl curtsied, ran off, and climbed into whatever the hell that thing on the wall is. All of a sudden I had a goal: rescue all the freaking little sisters. It just sits in the back of my head: "Have you rescued a little sister today?"

No, I know this isn't me actually doing anything for anyone in Afghanistan, nevermind me actually solving the issue. I still have plenty of work to do on that front, and I know it. 

But if you think for two seconds that this one moment of relief, where someone is healed, isn't itself a moment of mercy I don't know what to tell you. This experience did and continues to do something for me, something I did not anticipate but am eternally grateful for. It's unreality seems to be part of the point: I can make something like this real, somehow.

I'm not sure where to go from there. But it is a direction. And that is more than I had before.

The Meeting of the Telvrans: Introduction and Set Up

It all began on Reddit.

No wait it’s okay, this story doesn’t necessarily end bad!

Like I said, Reddit. We’ll call him Prince. I saw a post of his I appreciated enough to DM him, giving my appreciation for his candor. We got to talking and eventually Crescendo, the RPG I'm developing, came up. Prince was intrigued and we decided to give Crescendo a trial run: one act, which should be about six sessions, session zero not included. But first Crescendo requires a pretty detailed setting bible to throw at the players. I had to get that done first. 

I decided to finally draw up my long-running setting, The Wanderers’ Psalms, and pitch it at Prine. I’m not gonna lie, I wanted someone with the quality of Prince’s candor to rip my baby game apart. So I decided to throw the best I got at him. And frankly it was only a matter of time; two years of not really playing on Heranyt had been too long.

It was time to return to my old home.

You don’t really need to know the mechanics of Crescendo to appreciate the setting bible, beyond that Prince and I both have a journal and the following is copied into both of them. And yes, the journal has mechanical weight. All of the below was generated by the mechanics of Crescendo and is necessary to play the game. Yes, that means it's a bit of set-up, but in comparison to your standard open table game it's about commesurate. Well, at least the way I set up an open-table game that is.

Again, I am just following the directions in my game. I'm not deviating to the right or to the left, I'm running the instructions out of the book.

The below is what I sent Prince, with my commentary upon it in italics.

The Meeting Place of the Telvrans

Languages Appropriated

I have personally found that very few things help world building like stealing real-world languages and modifying them to your native ability. Given that I barely have my own American English down pat, this is likely to lead to some hilariously bad pronunciations, for which I think God the reader cannot hear... although Prince with his beautiful French will. RIP.

The dwarves use a bastardized Japanese

The elves use bastardized Finnish. Humans, when trying to be fancy, use bastardized Finnish.

Humans from The Seven Iron Kingdoms use French, probably really bastardized.

The Seven Dooms

Dooms are the Judge's goals for the setting that are also world-building tools. Crescendo plays out in what are called Acts, where three Dooms are addressed. The other four then act upon the setting and change it.

1.       Not all post-medieval information we have is true, especially gunpowder and antibiotics. People are at the mercy of nature.

2.       There is a flame of goodness at the center of X ,linked to the hearts of all creatures on the planet. That is not so for other planets.

3.       Some beings have set up their own anti-flames, anti-points of light. They are corrupted and horrific beings. They wish to destroy those not like them.

4.       The elves fly amongst The Ring of Tears, the sub-orbital remnants of their continent.  Strange things are said to live there.

5.       The dryads of The Glade will decide to go to war with Fort Falls.

6.       The people of La Fourchette will begin to abandon it, even as winter comes on.

7.       The dwarves will enrage Fort Falls into war.

The following entries (Current Five and the planets) are the immortal pantheon of the game. These immortals are constantly acting upon the setting, and play a major role in the story. With each immortal are also symbols, like swans and elder plants, that those particular immortals favor.

The Current Five

1.       The Outsider. Prophet and Observer. Lit the Flame Eternal by becoming a member of each race, who all betrayed him in equally repulsive fashion. His deaths lit the Flame Eternal.

·       Swans, dandelions, tin, wind, creation, travel

2.       The Flame Eternal, The Secret Source. Integrator and Lover, servant and creation of The Outsider. Blue.

·       Fire, courage, magic, doves, copper, elder

3.       Telos, Leader of Those Who Sailed. Prophet and Inquisitor. A former anti-flame who was converted by the Flame Eternal. Black.

·       Bears, lead, seas, grief, protection, yew

4.       Eous, Leader of the Anti-Flames. Warrior and Trickster. One of the two moons in the sky, placed there as punishment for creating the Anti-Flames. Sickly Teal.

·       Chaos, defilement, crime, bees, bloodroot, iron

5.       Verzhoben, The Corrupter of Creation. Inquisitor and Observer Led the origin race known as the ensivalo in rebellion, extinguishing the first flame and dooming the planet for millenia.

·       Beetles, iron, deadly nightshade, void, betrayal, harvest

·       NOTE: all spells invoking Verzhoben are called “tech”.

The Seven Planets

1.       Enusta, The Mysterious Elder. The sun (gold). The Integrator.

·       Dandelions, fire, gold

2.       Tuntematon, The Painful Friend. The real moon (silver). The Observer.

·       Seas, grief, deadly nightshade

3.       Sota, The Suicide. Red. The Warrior.

·       Bees, iron, yew

4.       The Triplets (Epasointu, Epatoivo, Lahjonta), The Baneful Ones. Yellow. The Trickster.

·       Betrayal, chaos, bloodroot

5.       Rakkaus, The Hidden Devourer. Blue. The Lover

·       Elder, doves, copper

6.       Viivoty, The Mother by the Gate. Green. The Inquisitor

·       Swans, crime, travel

7.       Viestinta, The Destroyer. Orange. The Prophet.

·       Defilement, protection, deadly nightshade

The Myth

The myth is the cultural myth that everyone in this small little section of the setting uses to explain the immortals they've encountered. This myth is generally considered reliable by those in the setting and those at the table. Don't be looking for any real subversive stuff going on here.

Once upon a time Verzhoben decided that he did not wish to serve creation, but to master it. He corrupted himself and the ensivalo, along with all their slave races, extinguishing the First Flame. When they did so, the ensivalo realized they cared nothing for their own genetically engineered creations, and left them, to parts unknown. Without the First Flame the races fell to barbarism and undeath.

The Outsider intervened. He incarnated as each of the races -elves, orcs, minotaurs, dwarves, dusken, wolves, dryads, and humans - trying to get them to accept him… only to be killed by each of them, in turn. The humans didn’t even let The Outsider survive childhood. But as the last incarnation of the Outsider was killed, a pillar of blue flame leapt from the corpse and burrowed into the planet, straight down to the core… where the Eternal Flame now rests. The undead plague ended. The insanity ended. Some were nostalgic.

Led by Eous, some began to try to extinguish the Eternal Flame, to no avail: the Outsider’s will was behind The Eternal Flame. Telos, Eous’s right hand man, turned on Eous, founding a resistance group, Those That Sailed. Unable to extinguish the Eternal Flame Eous forced the flame within him, which he could not extinguish, to turn to his mind, to his goals. And thus the first Anti-Flame was born. Others followed suit, drawing power from Herna, the Abyss.

Telos and the Eternal Flame begged The Outsider to force the Anti-Flames to relent, traveling to the very heights of Seitseman to plead their case. No one knows what was said that day; Telos and the Eternal Flame will not speak of it. But Telos, along with Those Who Sailed, have spread throughout the world, working towards an end goal that none know of. Someday we may know of it.

Seasons

A cold spring, a mild summer, a vicious fall, and a bone-chilling winter, as the wind usually comes in against the Etranger Mountains.

The Feast Cycle of the Seven Iron Kingdoms

Yes, there's a cycle of celebrations, and it is relevant! Players use these to heal up from long-standing conditions and get a lot of XP from participating in them.

The Gathering and Forgiving Days: The first days of harvest. With each barn filled an attempt is made at resolving a grudge with copious amounts of communal drinking. Small trees are placed into the ground with a secret desire whispered into them.

The Day of Mourning: The winter solstice. All lights are extinguished, even the eternally communal bonfire. The bonfire is relit by a child at midnight, and the party begins.

Finding Seitseman: the spring equinox. Telos and the incarnation of the Eternal Flame had to learn the way to Seitseman by climbing a tree and watching the cloud formations. Roof parties and tree crownings are held.

Secret Day: All gather around the trees they planted, and reveal whether or not their secret was granted.

Yes, I drew the map in Paint. Yes, the circles in the top left are trees. Shut up.

 

The Local Area

The Glade: where the dryads gather, location actually unknown. They were last seen gathering for a push against Fort Falls for cutting down several dryad hometrees.

Fort Falls: Right at the meeting of The Telvra River, Telvra Falls River, and the Minor Telvra River, Fort Falls is the last military outpost from the Seven Iron Kingdoms. It protects the town La Fourchette, but both are losing more and more people to migration south each year.

La Fourchette: Colloquially just called “Crotch”, La Fourchette was once a prosperous trading post with the dwarven strongholds Sakabun Horu and Kami Horu. With the slight of Warlord Akio, however, the trade dried up, with the dwarves growing ever colder. If Crotch doesn’t fall to the dwarves, it’ll become a ghost town, whichever comes first.

Sakabun and Kami Horus: The two closest dwarven strongholds still in existence, the dwarves have total control over all natural resources in the area, including up to the area of Fort Falls. After the slight to Warlord Akio a growing resentment to the human presence in the land has been brewing, including raiding parties.

I sent all that over to Prince, who was supposed to read it and make a character with that context in mind. Crescendo makes characters by a structured series of journaling prompts, which the player uses to make one of those overly long and drawn out backstories that folks like myself love. Here's what I got back:

I grew up in Fort Falls. My father was a sergeant there, my mother a seamstress. I remember watching the logs going on the barges of the Telvra River. Even then I was headstrong, fearsome, quick in anger. The old woman said it was the Sign of Sota, under which I was conceived. She took her own life during the Day of Mourning, two years later. When they relit the bonfire she was gone.

They were a tough breed, army brats. By day we ran all manner of errands for whomever asks. You learn to stand up to the elder children or you will be worked to the bone. Sota the Warrior. When we were sent outside the walls to collect firewood I split a boy's lip with a yew branch; he was two years my senior. Father thrashed me, but I could see in his eyes he was proud. In the fall my mother gave birth to my sister Veronique and passed away shortly after, while I held her hand.

Life became harder then. The groups of boys would chase me, but I was nimble enough to run and hide amongst the beekeeper's hives. Other times I took a beating, sometimes badly. Father would ask me how and, when I told him, he would grunt and reach for his bottle, telling me to do better on the morrow. It was a harsh existence. Fearful, painful. While I made few friends, the next years were easier. The elder boys became apprentices and were gone. I then made two friends, Sal and Rene, and we watched the lumber barges pass in the summer, while the younger boys gathered firewood.

The masters came at the appointed time, Finding Seitsemann. While parties were being prepared and trees were crowned they inspected us in a cold hall. Master Girard selected me for the polemen. I was so happy I cried.

Master Girard was hard, his piercing rasp never failing to elicit verbal jabs from the other apprentices. He would know if you were lying or scared or hiding something. I feared and respected him.

My hot blood made me ill-disciplined. It took many cuffs and mess duty shifts before I could march in step. The intricate formations and maneuvers of a pike-man became mine over time. I learned also to control my temper. Your fellow apprentices  were tied to your fate, and if your unit fell short all were punished.

If we were not being trained there were endless tasks. Bringing water, mending tunics, sharpening pikes. An hour every day we would have to ourselves, one we would play cards for coper. If Iwas indifferent to marching I was a gifted Bez-lue player. I gained a reputation for stubbornness. After the second year our apprenticeship was over, and I was allowed to wear the colors of the Papillion, Fort Falls' block of pikemen. I married Genevieve the same day, a match made by my father and hers, and though I loved her little she was kind and doe-eyed.

Our duty began in earnest. We patrolled walls, roads, and the forests of Fort Falls. We had to quell unrest in La Fourchette. I gained a reputation for discipline and courage. I never saw dryads, but men would go missing on patrols or be found in unusual places later. I found an unusual talent: I was a natural carpenter. Soon Papillon found me a hundred tasks to train that skill. I set wheels, mended barricades, and repaired the commander's tent. I grew in time to be respected.

Genevieve passed away giving birth to our son, Luk. I asked Veronique and her husband Gelbert to take him in, for I had no time to raise a young boy.

I worry for the future.

And with that the backstory concluded. Haunting stuff. Prince then figured out his relationships, based upon the number of times he'd written about them in the backstory:

Veronique, level 2

Gelbert, level 1

Luk , level 1

Zak level 1

Rene level 1

Father level 4

Master Girard level 2

We drew up some gear for Girac: a decent pike and some armor that could take a hit or two.  Nothing terribly fancy, and Girac had some money left over.

We then drew up three Beliefs for Girac. Beliefs are subjective statements that are part characterization and part plot hook. Beliefs have what are called Resilience Points (RP), which tell you how hard the character believes in them. They're roughly equivalent to HP from old-school games, and the numbers mean just about what they mean there:

Superiors should be obeyed, 4 RP

You should stick by your comrades, 5 RP

It is natural to use force to advance your own interests, 7 RP

So yes, those are very low. The beginning of Crescendo is usually of a brutal nature that most games do not think to show, that of the effects of adventuring upon the mind and its need for constancy... as opposed to all the shit that can happen to you if you go out your door.

Prince then chose two Traits for Girac, adjectives that described his base personality: Prince chose Quick to Anger and Loyal, both at level 1. Trait levels tell you how powerful the Trait is in influencing the mechanics of the game. HINT: level one's not very good.

Last, but not least, we drafted the Act's Poem. Yes, you make up a poem in Crescendo. It is used as world-building and a set of thematic rewards is based upon it. Prince seemed a bit skeptical at first but took to the process like a duck to water, practically writing the Poem, much to delight and surprise. Here it is!

Sing to me, O muses!

Of man-killing Sota

And the zenith of his rage

With his resentful fist of iron

Sota smote Tuntematon

he split and cracked his silver skin

And nightshade blood rained from the heavens

Before Sota came then the inqisitor

And queried "Why then have you smote my son?"

Sota laughed: "How could I not, given what we are?"

And with that prep was done. 

Thanks for reading!

If you're wanting to see the current draft of Crescendo, please click here.

If you want to come to the Discord server and ask questions and possibly even see a game or three, click here!

At the Bottom

Ever the Lord schools my tongue to utterance that shall refresh the weary; awakes my dull ears, morning after morning, their Master’s bidding to heed.

An attentive ear the Lord has given me; not mine to withstand him; not mine to shrink from the task.

I offered my body defenceless to the men who would smite me, my cheeks to all who plucked at my beard; I did not turn away my face when they reviled me and spat upon me.

The Lord God is my helper; and that help cannot play me false; meet them I will, and with a face unmoved as flint; not mine to suffer the shame of defeat;

here is One stands by to see right done me. Come, who pleads? Meet me, and try the issue; let him come forward who will, and accuse me.

Here is the Lord God ready to aid me; who dares pass sentence on me now? One and all they shall be brought to nothing, like garment the moth has eaten!

Who is here that fears the Lord, listens to his servant’s message? Who would make his way through dark places, with no glimmer of light? Let him trust in the name of the Lord, and lean upon his God.

For you others, with brand at girdle, that your own fire would make, with fire your own brands have kindled light the path if you can; this is all the gift I have for you, a bed of anguish.

Isaiah 50:4-11

Let's get something straight: the idea that progression doesn't lead to death is a peculiarity of our modern age. You can try to conserve your momentum into the great beyond, but the actual end point is always the same. This is true for all things, from single-cell organisms to planets and beyond. No, you cannot avoid it: you will die. So will your society, along with the thoughts that went into making it; can you imagine what future civilizations will think of our society a hundred years from now? No? Get started, it changes how you approach life now, and for the better. Oh, and this applies to your own psychology as well, with your body moving in its own up and down rhythms. Anything before Christianity acknowledged this reality, with "afterlifes" either not existing or being so wretched that nobody in the modern era would want it, finding that the reality presented in pre-modern religions to be something out of a horror film.

Sorry folks, it's not a horror film, that's reality.

Christianity does not deny this reality. It does not deny that progress is disintegration, death, and that the best you can do is try to slow down the process as much as you can before control is lost. Oh no, Christianity does not deny the cycle. It calls it what it is: the Fall. This existential change was not intended by God, we did this and cannot get out of it.

No, progressives, you neo-Christian heretics, you cannot defeat it, or even slow it down for all that long.

Christ did not get rid of death and its cyclical loop. Christ changed the loop itself. By dying and going into Hades, where He rescued those who wanted to leave, whom we know as the righteous dead. But they had to choose to leave.

Today in the Orthodox Church we celebrate the beginning of this cycle, of Christ giving us the choice to change the loop in our souls, in our minds. Today is the day that God, instead of annihilating His creation and starting over like a child with his toys made our creation, the cycle of death, His.

For those of you wanting to know why God couldn't just yank us out of creation and put us in a new world... think that request through. You are not a soul in a body, you are a body-soul hybrid, you are not one or the other. You are both. You are you because of your body and soul. If you hate so much that you're willing to nuke your own self and everyone and everything else so that way you're no longer in pain... just sit with that idea and really think it through. And I mean really, actually, think it through.

God. Loves. You. And that means the world you're in. Not what you want the world to be. Not what you want yourself to be. But you as you are, whether your be drugged to avoid the pain, just taking that pain out on other people, or denying it with sheer force of will and wearing yourself out. God loves you, so much so that  He took on your reality, becoming man so that He could feel the disintegration, feel the pain that is the normal human experience not to mention when things go wrong. And the normal way involves you collapsing under the weight of your own existence, suffocating under all the little paper cuts to your psyche as the years wear on and your body begins to fold under the stress of your mind and its inability to fully process everything it's faced.

Hey look, crucifixion is death by horrific suffocation!

Huh.

Now, this leaves us all with an uncomfortable choice, doesn't it? We can either fight the process and hurt all those around us by doing so and still fail, or we can trust that God's Crucifixion means He sits right there, behind the pain, all the way down that inner chute to Hell so many have found, and that if you look for Him, and scream with Him "MY GOD MY GOD WHY HAVE YOU ABANDONED MED?" you will find Him!

That's a big ask. The biggest.

But I've done it. Y'know, once or twice, if I can summon the courage. I've looked on the way down, following the notes left behind by those who did it. That's literally part of the point of this blog. And God is there. He is not there in the way I expected Him to be. But He is, and when He opens His mouth, it is to ask to join in. It is not what I thought I wanted, but you cannot do another cycle than the one humanity already picked: the collapse is always going to come. And there's very little I can do to slow it down, or anyone. Christ does not tell me that my experience is wrong, He asks to ride the elevator to Hell with me.

Every time I've told Him yes something has changed within me. I don't know how else to put it, but my experiences have proven to me that this two thousand year process, of finding Christ in that elevator on the way down is the true way to survive and thrive in this world.

Today is the day Christ goes down. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to try and find the courage to let Him take the trip with me. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God, after all.

Index Card RPG

It's a very strange thing, to read the Index Card RPG (ICRPG). Like, what on earth can you say about this book, beyond asking "Is this near the apex of d20 design or is this so darn close it would take a miracle to evolve any further???" And, I mean, I don't really have an answer to that question, but the fact that I have to even ask that question should tell you what this game actually is. Regardless of the answer, ICRPG's mechanics are simple but have significant depth to them, the GMing section is about to close to perfection as you can get, and the hundreds of pages of additional content are beyond what was necessary, in the best way possible

So, first off, mechanics. Anyone reading this blog knows I'm a stickler for them, that games have to be well-designed before anything else. ICRPG took every single d20 innovation I'm aware of and not only iterated on it, but then perfected the mechanics they iterated on. It's really hard to understate how simple this game is to actually run! Difficulty classes are assigned by "room", and can be manipulated very easily to produce a wide range of results. Characters now have multiple "damage dice" to deal with different types of challenges, and so therefore the difference between monsters and complex tasks have been eliminated entirely; it's possible to run the game entirely on the fly to a degree that no other d20 game could possibly match. I'd feel very comfortable handing this game to a beginner and seeing what they did with it, because as long as they were confident in their ability to BS they could do pretty much anything they wanted. Character creation is quick and almost painless, with you just needing to pick some stuff from a few lists, jot a few numbers down, and then start. I mean, maybe others would have difficulty running it completely on the fly, but I sure as hell wouldn't, and I know that when I was a younger GM or a player I would have killed to have these mechanics.

The GMing section is easily the best d20 section I've ever read. No, you're not going to do a better one, sorry! Besides the usual "be confident" and other such nonsense there is actual, good, real advice, like setting up room as set pieces, different tips and tricks that could only be gotten with years and years and years of playing. If you're not going to play the game that's fine, but read the GMing section if nothing else. It's a game written by an incredibly experienced and intelligent GM, who had spent a very long time trying to work out exactly what he wanted to say to newbies. If there is any reason to buy this book, it's the GMing section!!!

... and then there's the extras. Oh man, the extras. There's tons of settings in the back half of the book, along with races, story hooks, classes, stuff that would normally be its own book at 50 bucks, but it's in here in a small $17 book and it's just so wholesome. Looking at this book, at the sheer value of this part of the book alone, I find myself humbled. There's love in the rest of the book, but that's not really what jumps at me in the front half. That's simply a great game and great advice. But here? This section? It absolutely didn't need to be here. There's page after page after page of content that's thrown in practically for free, and only because the author wanted you to have the very best he could possibly give you! As I struggle to make Crescendo, as I bang my head on that engine over and over again, books like this become a beacon of hope for me. I know that sounds odd, but if I'm not even in the same ballpark of ICRPG in terms of love and value, what's the point in making a game at all???

And that, ultimately, is why ICRPG is the d20 RPG. Not because its mechanics are practically perfect. Not because its GMing section is the best d20 GMing section I've read in actual years, somehow beating out 4e's DMG2. It's that this game was made out of a serious love for the pulp genre, a love that pushed at this author so freaking hard that he made the best game he could, simply so others could see what he saw and love it too. I am not saying other designers do not make their products out of love, or that d20 is a soulless field of horrors or something, but in the realm of d20 this is a gem, and even outside of that type of game ICRPG stands out as the definitive text on the d20 pulp genre. Just period.