- In 1978 I picked up the original first published Judge's Shield by Judges Guild. This was really made for OD&D using the Greyhawk supplement, but it worked for our D&D gane until the Dungeon Masters Guide was released around the summer of 1979. (I made a canary yellow Advanced Labyrinth Lord screen in honor of my old and worn Judges Guild screen.)
- During this period of the late 70s through the 80s is was also common for Dungeon Master's to just use gatefold record albums. This did not provide any helpful tables, but did hide the DM's notes and often the record albums were chosen for their trippy art.
- Later (not sure when) I acquired or most likely shared the T$R AD&D (1st Ed.) Dungeon Master's Screen. This is probably the most classic and well known screen, even had a separate 2-panel screen just for psionics!)
- When I restarted our game with new rules in 2004 I used the Ver. 3.5 D&D Deluxe Dungeon Master's Screen which was my first landscape paneled screen (my older screens basically had panels in portrait orientation). I really enjoyed being able to see over the screen better without having to stand up.
- When I developed a 3rd Ed./AD&D hybrid rules we used in our game starting in 2012 I found the original 3rd Edition DM screen from 2000 and just clipped a whole bunch of alternate tables on top the screen.
- During 2018 when we switched to a modified 5th Ed. I used Dungeon Master's Screen, Reincarnated (2017) which was the first screen I used in game play that was hardbacked instead of cardstock (4th Ed. had the first landscape/hardback screen I ever purchased, however we never ran our campaign in 4th Ed.). This was a superb improvement, especially when players in our game "sieged the DM" by launching volleys of dice attacks. The hardback screen repelled dice attacks where the cardstock screens often fee. I ended up over time covering this screen in stickers.
- When we switched to Advanced Labyrinth Lord retro-clone in 2019 I made the aforementioned canary yellow Judges Guild tribute screen.
- I also created homemade ref screens for Arduin games I've run for Green Hell in 2022 and a more generic Arduin screen in 2023. And also made a little mini-screen for Lamentations of the Flame Princess off of art for a future screen that hasn't yet been published.
- During 2024 we first started our new 5th edition campaign I used the 5e screen from the 5e Wilderness Kit (the screen art is very cool), then when the 2024 revision books were released switched to the 2024 standard screen.
Tuesday, November 25, 2025
Splendid Isolation
Friday, January 26, 2024
Happy 50th Birthday Dungeons and Dragons!
Wednesday, January 10, 2024
Iconic RPG Author and Artist Jennell Jaquays Passed On Today
Jennell Jaquays left us today. She wrote many Judges Guild scenarios for D&D that were used several times over during my early gaming, most notably Dark Tower. Ha, I played a lot of paladins and always braved the tower for its Mitraic artifacts.
Hi Matt.Thank you for the letter. No worries about cheap stunts, etc. I jumped across the stream six years ago already. I'm surprised these days if someone HASN'T heard about it. And to answer the question that many ask, "Yes, I'm a LOT happier now."I'll try to give your version of The Walking Wet a look over sometime soon. I ran a Swords & Wizardry version of it (with many modifications) two years ago in Texas and am currently doing a complete overhaul and expansion of it for one of my own projects. I set the events of my original adventure in the past of the one I'm working on. Lots of map expansions and revisions, new world content, some new monsters, and more. My current working draft is about 80 pages, typeset. I'm doing the same with another adventure Morkendaine Manor, that I wrote for issue 9 of the Dungeoneer as well. Unsurprisingly, a lot of my characters are female and unashamedly LGBT as well.
I currently have four different RPG adventure projects in the work and really need to finish one of them (I did, earlier this year, something called The Dragon's Secret for a fund raiser).
Anyway, I hope the convention run goes well.
Thursday, November 3, 2022
Wednesday, October 26, 2022
New Arduin Ref Screen
Now that Arduin is my "go-to" convention game, I put together a referee screen with more general Arduin player-facing art. Different than my previous screen which was more tied to the "Green Hell" jungle scenario I ran at the time.
The re-facing tables are all the same, although I have been assembling a rules cheat-book to capture many of Dave's particular rules that made Arduin a different flavor than regular OD&D (ha, some of Dave's variances were later somewhat adopted in other versions of D&D).
I had several pieces of art with different styles, the centerpiece being the art by Frank Kelly Freas from the cover of Complete Arduin. I created a unified motif by running each piece through the A.I. art generator "Deep Dream Generator" which created from the originals similar art in a new style that was the same for each piece.
Saturday, October 1, 2022
Aftermath of Pig-Faced Ork Con Arduin Game
The "Pig Faced Ork Old School Role Playing Game Convention" rolled into Fresno, CA and was a smashing success!
Tom Wendt who runs the damn thing pours his heart and soul in - No reg fee, free giveaway contests and raffles, candy, waters, game judge badges, PIZZA, plus Tom does all the decorative art himself (not to mention advertising fliers) and secures the venue room at the Fresno County Woodward Park Regional Library.
I figure about 9 games were running including AD&D, Arduin (which I GMed), Holmes Basic D&D, Star Frontiers, Traveller, Weird Frontiers and more. Probably 50 gamers in attendance which is pretty good for a one-room con.
Emperors Choice Games and Miniatures asked if I would run an Arduin game there which worked out perfectly 'cause my partner Heidramor happened to be attending to a friend's baby shower in the area that day. I had run an Arduin game at DunDraCon last February. Each session is getting me better and better versed in the technical adjustments Dave Hargrave included for his game.
The end result is that now I have an Arduin-specific game bag set aside to run Arduin adventures.
I'll be back...
Friday, July 22, 2022
Honor Among Thieves
Saturday, May 8, 2021
The Combat Discharger
Wednesday, September 30, 2020
Everything Is Connected
| (Wilderlands imposed on Ghostring) |
My present Judges Guild Wilderlands campaign has been running for 15 years, and has direct linkages back through our "Blipping" campaign running between 1988-2005 and somewhat looser connections from our earliest campaigns there and elsewhere from as far back as 1979. (Ha, however, in a sort of "Groundhog's Day," every Wilderness campaign restarted the jumpstart year of 4433.)
Unfortunately, fast-forward back to nowadays after Bat in the Attic Games announced in February 2020 it would suspend all future dealings with Judges Guild over a series of racist and antisemitic posts made by Judges Guild owner Bob Bledsaw II, and it has become complicated to support the old-school brilliance of these Wilderlands works by the Senior Bob Bledsaw, who passed in 2008 and is unconnected to the present drama and controversy.
I sort of pulled a fast one on our shared referee "New Old Weird World" campaign and slipped the Wilderlands into a world map there, albeit in a Tekumellian, post-apocalyptic scene more than 20,000 years in the future.
Basically, I had found some time back a Judges Guild adventure for the sci-fi game Traveller call "Marooned on Ghostring." The setting is a planetary system missing from records of the galactic Imperial government, and several (but not all) of the attributes are similar to the system of Ghenrek IV, the planet where The Wilderlands exist.
I ran with this information adopting what I needed and changing the rest to fit the world into the Imperial empire of the far future.
Ha, so myself, I have been running essentially one campaign all this time. Everything is sought to fit (not always smoothly) within an ongoing story of our group's adventures where I've refereed.
- Furthest back, circa year -30,000 BCCC, Agent Smith (High Fantasy campaign) from an alternate or far-away galaxy future had dabbled in forbidden arts and ends up on Ghenrek IV during the Uttermost War between the intergalactic Elder Alliance and the forces of a single Markab prince from The Void. Smith is attacked by "Grey Goo" (a nanotech swarm) and only saved when Elder Alliance engineers transform Smith into a cyborg. Smith is secretly left behind on Ghenrek IV when the Elder Alliance abandons their starbase there under terms of a cease fire with the Markrab Prince.
- During the year 4433 several large masses of combatants ranged across the Wilderlands (High Fantasy campaign). A humanoid and giant force that sieged City State of the Invincible Overlord. Githyanki sent by their Lich Queen to establish a massive hatchery helping combat future Mind Flayer domination. The traitorous Drow Necromancer who plotted with the World Emperor to field an undead army. And finally the undead horde released from Mount Doom across the Wild North above Valon.
- Also during 4433 an adventuring party (High Fantasy campaign) resisting the Githyanki incursion assembled the Tripartate of All Evil, inadvertently releasing the dreaded elder god, Tharzadu'un. As the elder god attempts to access a hidden portal to escape from this prime material plane, a massive magical-thermonuclear explosion occurs and the party/world (?) only survives through intervention from Codex of the Infinite Planes. This adventuring party is soon after imprisoned in a stasis field as when they moved to defeat the Drow necromancer.
- At some point by 4434 the Baron of Blackmoor sends a group of adventurers (Blipping #2 campaign) to acquire what he believes to be a powerful weapon to defeat the various forces threatening Blackmoor. Unfortunately the "weapon" activates "The City of Gods," a terraforming installation left over from the Elder Alliance/Markab days which was never put into use. The Baron activates terraforming force beams to manipulate flows in the molten core of Ghenrek IV altering the planet's tilt, spin, magnetic field, gravity, etc. and creates a world-wide apocalypse.
- The adventurers (Blipping #2 campaign), after messing with a faulty Mind Flayer time ship, are deposited sometime around year 8400 in the northern post-apocalyptic dry barren waste. They are only able to escape back in time after discovering the Comeback Inn situated on a barren outcropping of magical black rock. The inn has a somewhat randomized time portal in its basement. This is how the adventurers meet the Baron of Blackmoor in 4433.
- After these adventurers (Blipping #2 campaign) fell through an interplanar transtemporal "rabbit hole" into an alternate prime material plane where they meet Matsuhara Yatsuya, a Time Lord, who sends the party through using his TARDIS to a number of alternate far, far future scenarios, which seem to ultimately resolve in either a "Matrix"-like AI generated artificial existence, or a fiery ecological disaster of acid rains and marauding demons.
- The adventurers (Blipping #2 campaign)are abandoned in the Wilderlands approximately in year 5,433 where there is only a barren, icy wasteland populated by cultish white elves who are in transdimensional communication with Githyanki. Ultimately, they discovers a Githyanki plan to infiltrate the Mind Flayer home planet, a discworld.
- In our latest campaign (New Old Weird World campaign)adventurers are back on Ghenrek IV circa 25,019, utilizing the Ghostring world map to provide new terrain, and the planet is still tilted from the terraforming 20,000 years previously which has altered the original climate.
Despite the recent drama of Bob Bledsaw's son, the Wilderlands for me continues to be our longest running campaign setting which still pays dividends to our imagination.
Wednesday, July 8, 2020
Cube World DIY Print
Because I do a lot of personal binding of my gaming stuff I already had a comb binding machine (they run about $50-$75 plus you have to buy the plastic combs). If you do some DIY books comb binding is an inexpensive method to bind a book if you don't mind a cardstock cover (not hardbound).
Note: I DID NOT trim the Cube World book of installments because I wanted to add as time went on, but longer books, if you do this a lot, require a machine-cutter to trim the edge or you can pay a print shop to trim (I bought a machine-cutter because print shops sometimes over trim). I think about 8 years ago I paid around $120 for a machine hand-press cutter that will cut I think up to 300 pages at a time.
You can pay always pay a print-shop to do all of this but $$$.
The Atlas pages I printed on photo paper and placed in one of these Pioneer Leatherette Post Bound Album, 8.5x11 pages, because the "bolt" page binding is concealed, and these are hardbound more like a regular book, but also expandable.
The album itself comes with 10 pages (enough for 20 prints). You can get all kinds of cheaper expansion pages, however if you purchase the Pioneer Albums Postbond Top Loading Page Protectors with 5 8.5x11 pages (this is a 3-Pack) these include the expansion bolts to increase the size of the album.
I put photo-paper prints of Zak's notebook pages (which are smaller, original page size 8.5x5.5) in this Filexec Products Art Presentation Book, 5"x7", 24Page/48 Views, (Pack of 2). I printed these 2 per page and then trimmed them down with a simple paper trimmer that run about $20 and are useful to have around.
Here are images of Cube World maps discussed in the video:
Tuesday, June 9, 2020
Legendary Lands of Arduin, Episode 4 (World Geography)
Wednesday, May 20, 2020
Fireworks Hailing Over Cube World
| (Artist unknown, embellished from a t-shirt) |
| (The Adventures of Prince Ahmed, by Lotte Reiniger, 1922) |
Tuesday, May 5, 2020
Legendary Lands of Arduin, Episode 3 (Home Brew)
| (Arduin home brew map...) |
Thursday, April 16, 2020
Notes from the Underground: Zak Smith's Cube World, Installments #1, #2, and #3
So lie our way through space and time with elaborate vividness possessed judges only weep to flagellate perpetual and efficient lack of originality.
“I want more life, fucker.”
My olde-homey-group-game game was steeped in Dave Hargrave's gonzo-DIY Arduin and the idea of "Multiverse" with 4,000 or so parallel universes discovered in the Arduin Nexus (so far). So our home games had no trouble bouncing campaigns and intra-campaign from any of our home brew settings to Hargrave's Arduin (Empcho is MIA, only used resellers) to Dave Arneson's Blackmoor First Fantasy Campaign (Only used resellers for FFC, can get Mystara or Zeitgeist versions) to even Cyberpunk and friggin' Star Trek.
The particular products Arduin Grimoire Trilogy and Blackmoor/First Fantasy Campaign are basically DIY campaign notes resulting from how parties in the author's home campaigns gamed and what the judges learned worked as a result of gaming in an actual, home campaign among friends - exactly the way RPGs are played by the rest of us. With ideas fleshed out informed from interactions with their friends (not employees or testers), Hargrave and Arneson educated us in an often gritty fashion, not merely what to play, but how we could play using their own campaigns as examples. And we did play.
40 years nothing similar to these early works has come along since, until now.
| (Earth and cube with same volume, from Possibly Wrong) |
(* Not to be confused with the 2005 Radica Cube World electronic toy or Picroma Cube World video game released in 2013/alpha and 2019.)
What is Cube World?
1. Well first off we know (meaning me and the general public) everything Zak published for OSR D&D has a place in his home campaign:
On Vornheim Zak writes "These are our rules and tables and monsters and places. I wouldn’t want to spend all this time writing a book I couldn’t use."
Of A Red and Pleasant Land "You can set an entire campaign in Voivodja or (and this is what I did) just have it occupy a spot on the campaign map in case your players want to go there..."
Maze of the Blue Medusa Zak put on his blog a Digital DM Screen that has a button for "Random Cube World Hex." This also provides a clue to the overall size of a campaign map. I fiddled about with the button and the largest number I came up with was hex 2020. Calculating the square root is about 50 (49.9444) and given Zak's penchant for 6-mile overland hex results in a square campaign map roughly 300 miles by 300 miles.
Zak in MotBM also references Nyctopolis, "... the annihilated capital of the Reptile Empire." In a blog post from July 2016 Zak indicates Suarians of Nyctopolis may become "Knights of Tittivila," the goddess of flesh and change. This religion is also found in Vornheim and "... operates out of ordinary buildings all over the continent."
There is a history in MotBM that provides some details about the rise and fall of the "Reptile Empire" where also Vornheim mentions some traditions descended from "Reptile Men." It is easy to presume these details are related and Nyctopolis is out there somewhere.
Finally, Frostbitten and Mutilated has a bare campaign map roughly 340 miles north-south by 250 miles east-west with the city of Vornheim located toward the southern end and the "Devoured Lands" of Frostbitten and Mutilated located toward the northern. This map from F&M is likely the area of the main campaign map.(See MotBM note above)
2. We know Zak's campaign takes place on Cube World, a cubic, hollowed-out gigadungeon, where different sides of the cube are essentially different regions of reality:
When Zak released Vornheim back around May 2011, he included this little tidbit paragraph at the bottom of the map key on page 3...
"The entire planet is a hive of stone tunnels carved by long-dead civilizations. Familiar landscape features – trees, grass, seas and oceans – form but a thin layer on top of this gigadungeon, and the ruins of nameless cities punch through the crust in every direction."
Later that same year in a September 2011 blog post Zak writes "I have long casually assumed that the world Vornheim is on is cube-shaped. I figured: the whole planet is artificial and made of solid dungeon beneath a thin layer of vegetation, so of course it's a cube."
Implications of a cube-shaped planet are "... because the atmosphere would still radiate outward in a sphere from the planet's core, the habitable areas would be limited to non-communicating separate circular zones on each face of the planet." (See image from Possibly Wrong above.)
(Both Vornheim and F&M reference a single, round moon, so perhaps with moon phase/eclipse math inhabitants might have discovered their planet is squared, not round, and thought to tunnel over to another side.)
The six faces of the world would also aptly develop together as environments of a quasi (i.e. non-traditional D&D) multiplanar system. "... (T)he best way to get to these other biospheres would be to go through the earth and come out the other side. Bam, you're in a new world or--literally--on another plane of existence. And that's why they're called planes."
What about Cube World Installments? (Not for players, some spoilers)
1. There are several hundreds pages of new and updated material Zak has decided to publish:
In a blog post this past April 8, Zak wrote he has over a hundred pages of material originally intended for Lamentations of the Flame Princess (including Violence in the Nympharium and Bards), hundreds of pages of new material such as hex locations, new monsters, weird religions, "... new rules, tools, creatures, classes, every country, every continent, from to Vornheim to the goblin kingdom of Gaxen Kane to Drownesia plus a vast megadungeon beneath. The whole Cube World."
Zak had not planned to publish any of this, but an unnamed DM asked Zak to write her a scenario involving a Tiger-King which Zak decided to sell and donate the first week of sales as a benefit. Zak wrote that positive experience "... maybe there are some people in the online RPG scene who aren't gullible psychopaths" motivated him to release all of it. "Everything. Nothing piecemeal."
The caveat is that the material isn't being presented according to "publisher quirks" of an LotFP or Satyr Press. It is Zak's art, maps, and words. Zak is taking time to write up his notes. But the appearance of the text thus far is nitty gritty if that matters to you.
2. The first set of installments are each separate sets (not linked between them):
Rules are LotFP and compatible with old versions of D&D like 1st edition AD&D and B/X, or OSR retroclones such as Labyrinth Lord and Swords & Wizardry (note: LotFP skills are used). Zak includes a very simple rule to modify encounters for 5th Edition D&D. And Zak helpfully provides variations for either LotFP early modern Europe or medieval fantasy settings.
Zak also includes notes with each installment suggesting alterations for each scenario to run piecemeal if necessary for your campaign. (If you aren't familiar with Zak's prior work, one hallmark is that it's modular.)
All of the scenarios contain new monsters and unique ways adventurers interact with the various environments.
Cube World #1: Castle Terravante, Vault of Omnilex, and Crypt of the Wretched is two linked scenarios and what Zak's home group is gaming right now. "A social-interaction clusterfuck involve shenanigans in a castle (a duke, a count, a scheming priest, a dark secret etc) and the rest about the dungeon beneath." The dungeon will be supplemented by a megadungeon, but not yet.
Cube World #2: The Inquisitor's Road, The Gray Fortress, The Echo Chambers (plus d100 potions with ingredients) has three distinct parts. "In the first scenario, the party heads through the wilderness to investigate a heresy at the behest of religious authorities, in the second section the party encounters an evil cult in a once-abandoned fortress, and the third section is a dungeon."
Cube World Installment #3: The Curated Destruction "is a semi-legendary library created by the elves to contain all useful knowledge and literary art." This scenario, in addition to tables of interesting books and tables of uninteresting books, has regional descriptions of the campaign world.
3. How does one purchase installments?
Zak has been selling installments for $5 and some pennies ($5.01 for #1, $5.02 for #2) except installment #3 is much longer and goes for $10.03. The text is PDF and maps hi-res JPGs.
The most punk, DIY, and underground way to buy these is to visit Zak's "Only Fans" pay porn site (no porn there, just RPG). Just a side note, I got hit with a bogus ransomware email threatening to send my contacts video captured from my webcam watching videos from the site and "self-pleasuring." Ha, bogus because I watched no videos and don't have a webcam.
If you don't mind missing Zak's message updates on "Only Fans" there is also a Venmo setup.
**** UPDATE 4/22/2020 - Updated blog post about what's out and how to get it.
What do I think?
I have enjoyed Zak's RPG work for a decade. On the installments, these are the wordsmith and art I grew accustomed to from Zak's blog and prior books. Not instructing you verbatim how a scenario should be run but rather where you might want to end up and a variety of thoughts on how to get you there.
Published campaign settings, however, are really no big thing, the difference here is this is Zak's personal campaign. Nothing matches the time, effort, and love for your players than what a game judge makes for the home group and setting you actually game in. Rarely for the rest of us are works available combining that personal effort with an award-winning author and an existing body of professionally published works. Jesus, I can only think of one predecessor: Dave Hargrave and Arduin.
Dave Hargrave was cut short at age 42 though, and most of his campaign notes, additional dungeons, maps, etc. are said to have likely ended up in a landfill. When a bit of interest in Arduin came up again during the early OSR, there was almost nothing written by Hargrave to add to the dozen or so Arduin works Hargrave published during his lifetime. That didn't stop Empcho from publishing an 800-page Arduin world book though, and a game map. The huge main difference is it wasn't Dave's voice in the words.
Ok Zak, please don't die, and I'll look forward to your vision for Cube World. Thanks!