GT
Wizard
Duke of Indiana, Knight Commander
Posts: 2,032
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Post by GT on Jan 4, 2018 1:18:50 GMT -5
All I know is that McGregtimm was one helluva bard!! Heh!
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Post by geneweigel on Jan 4, 2018 9:26:19 GMT -5
All I know is that McGregtimm was one helluva bard!! Heh! Thats the highlight of the whole thing! Seriously, I recall when he announced HOMP and they had some image of a tunnel (that didn't make it into the final product) to promote it and it was like WOW! on the other side of the time line. Wasn't there some other adventure he hyped up that never came out? Castle Wolfmoon? You can bash those associates until the cows come home but why did he associate with them in the first place? Especially the motormouth guy who was obviously never even on the same Gygax style page? I had never heard any Gygax content appreciation on the LA forums. It was all standard blandy rpg think. There seemed to be a kind of settling with Gary going on that I could not (still can't?) wrap my head around. Gary must have reached a point in the 90's where it was like he had to stay cursory to the side as a figurehead or be sued once again. I remember being introduced to "Greytalk" and Gary was kind of an afterthought on there. I thought it was an electronic mental institution. One of his associates (not mentioning any names) had lost his cool as soon as I opened my mouth with Gygax praise. To praise Gary is to insult everyone! I wish that I still had that e-mail account. I think I printed it up but who knows where it is now? But that was my welcome wagon to the real world of what Gary Gygax was up to. I really didn't think they could be that bad of an issue but nothing was coming out right that seemed good on preview. Another Gygax hell pit was the LA video game forum. Anyone remember that? Random fantasy imagery repackaged as LA. <<<SHUDDER>>> So again, why? Was he masochistic? He seemed rational but then another deal would pop up and he would have a flotilla of numbskulls on board. The whole passive aggressive bull shit that was going on when he was trying to promote Legendary Adventures with me helping. It was his idea and this guy that he was working with was weird. I said to Gary we can do it in another dimension but he insisted upon "Learth" and this guy had a decade worth of Gygax drippings assorted together that I looked through. His line of thinking must have been as if he was saving it all for some LOTR epic that he wouldn't even let Gary use as a module setting. I used to joke about LEJENDARY HAWAII but this was the only area that wasn't being used on "Learth". Can you imagine me trying to promote the idea that Gary still has it with Luau imagery? I actually wrapped my brain around this. I saw that problem guy in person in 2007 and I didn't know what to say. I was too distracted in "Rob World". There is nothing to fix now because what can you fix that won't be absorbed by the movie production company that bought the rights to all the Gygax stuff? I had sketched plans for LA illustrations to try to make it look better (the races, monsters, etc) but I have no inclination to finish any of it. I just wish that guy wasn't such a ballbreaker but its too late now. All that aside, there is a greater notion to AD&D-ize all of his material in the back of my brain but I would need official permission before I even touched anything of his. NECROPOLIS completely converted would be cool.
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Post by grodog on Jan 5, 2018 0:21:41 GMT -5
Wasn't there some other adventure he hyped up that never came out? Castle Wolfmoon? That was the Chris Clark/Inner City third module in a series; some details @ www.fuzzyheroes.com/catalog.php?category=Castle%20Wolfmoon%20Adventures but #3 is vaporware so far as I know (unless Chris has a copy of the unpublished mss. perhaps---has anyone asked him about it?). All that aside, there is a greater notion to AD&D-ize all of his material in the back of my brain but I would need official permission before I even touched anything of his. NECROPOLIS completely converted would be cool. Frog God is planning to reprint Necropolis for Swords & Wizardry (OD&D), and I hear that Trent may get to help insure it's done right! Allan.
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foster1941
Warlock
Duke of California, Earl of Los Angeles, Knight Bachelor
Posts: 476
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Post by foster1941 on Jan 5, 2018 0:59:12 GMT -5
We’ll see, but probably not for at least a couple years either way...
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Post by geneweigel on Jan 5, 2018 7:42:49 GMT -5
Well that explains why NECROPOLIS D20 was off kilter. They probably lined up a Harvey Weinstein roster of designers depending on whoever was showing the most cleavage! Seriously, I'm not a fan of any of that (Sword &Wizardry, Frog God, Dungeon Classic, etc) its too much of a land grab of free territory. Osric seemed more interesting as an open thing but I'd rather aim for an official AD&D version absolutely without all that safe play of quasi-d20. I honestly think that the whole d20 thing was/is a scam to lure people in with pipe dreams of campaigns having publishing potential. Nobody is interested in Lorraine Williams style text garbage anymore they want ready to go smack dab Fritz Leiber-ish style content or nothing. I'd say I'd like to see Necropolis as official AD&D if they can manage that I'd buy it but I doubt it. I would still like more enthusiasms for Gygax conversion as a movement rather than a published product.
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foster1941
Warlock
Duke of California, Earl of Los Angeles, Knight Bachelor
Posts: 476
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Post by foster1941 on Jan 5, 2018 12:28:08 GMT -5
I pretty much agree, but since Frog God controls the rights (as successor to Necromancer) and has stated their intent to do it, I figure if there's an opportunity to influence it towards something good I should take it. That said, my only communication with anyone at Frog God about this was a message-board back and forth a few months ago with one of their guys where I said I'm interested in being involved and they said something vaguely positive like "that could happen" but nothing since. I suspect if anything ever does come of it will be something like them sending me a near-final draft and asking me to look over it and provide comments (for free, with a tight deadline), and when I send back notes on everything they've done wrong being thanked for my input but told it's too late to do anything about it. That seems to be the way these things always go.
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foster1941
Warlock
Duke of California, Earl of Los Angeles, Knight Bachelor
Posts: 476
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Post by foster1941 on Jan 20, 2019 1:04:16 GMT -5
At long last I sat down and spent some time with this frustrating bad-but-should-have-been-good adventure (and Gene's one-line summary of each pane on the previous page of this thread was a huge help!) to figure out how to maybe salvage something more playable and satisfying out of it, both by deleting a lot of the lamer panes and imposing more of a discernible pattern that players could actually learn and exploit rather than just being forced to run a gauntlet of 49 random challenges. Here's what I came up with: SHAPE (Represents Challenge Type) Disc - transformation Oval - puzzle Hex - misc Rectangle - combat Square - helping Star - false finale Diamond - finale COLOR (Represents Setting) Red - underground Orange - misc Yellow - desert/plains Green - woodland Blue - mountains/boreal White - false finale Violet - finale Red Disc - Pane 10 Orange Disc - Pane 46 Yellow Disc - Pane 22 Green Disc - Pane 1 (Key) Blue Disc - Pane 13 Red Oval - Pane 20 Orange Oval - Pane 48 Yellow Oval - Pane 21 (Key) Green Oval - Pane 5 Blue Oval - Pane 16 Red Hex - Pane 8 Orange Hex - Pane 15 Yellow Hex - Pane 45 Green Hex - Pane 36 Blue Hex - Pane 23 (Key) Red Rectangle - Pane 35 (Key) Orange Rectangle - Pane 30 Yellow Rectangle - Pane 19 Green Rectangle - Pane 3 Blue Rectangle - Pane 11 Red Square - Pane 47 Orange Square - Pane 27 (Key) Yellow Square - Pane 44 Green Square - Pane 17 Blue Square - Pane 4 White Star - Pane 50 (appears when all of one color + one of each type (or vice versa) completed) Violet Diamond - Pane 51 (appears when all 5 key panes completed) Special Tokens (gained in order upon completing first four key panes; one use each) 1. Lens - view a pane before entering 2. Reset - return to pipe without completing a pane 3. Extra Life - killed in pane respawns in pipe 4. Phone a Friend - commune with Zagyg Greyhawk Deity Equivalents Gwynn = Baalzebul Bili = Belial Arianrod = Fharlanghn Llew Llaw Gyffes = Pelor Amadan Mors = Zagyg McGreggtim = Heward Some of these panes don't quite fit the theme or setting they've been categorized into, but they're reasonably close. To make these actually usable in an AD&D game they all need considerable work anyway, so they could presumably be massaged into a closer fit as part of that process. Is that work something I'm ever likely to actually do? No, but at least if I do decide I want to I've got a roadmap, and have proved to myself that - as I suspected all along - there is a way to pull something at least semi-coherent out of this mess. Too bad nobody advised Gary to do something similar when they had a chance
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Post by geneweigel on Jan 20, 2019 1:20:27 GMT -5
Still don't get the slop in his D20 products. He didn't do the work? That jackass who used to pop up from time to time when Gary was alive (not mentioning any names) was always insinuating Gary didn't do anything anymore. That shit with the undead book went right in so he was on that but I wonder if he was using these people too much?
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Post by grodog on Jan 21, 2019 15:52:44 GMT -5
I've never dug into this box set in earnest, in part due to the even-worse-than-usual TLG atrocious editing---my original impression was that there was very little worth trying to salvage from it.
It sounds like you think the adventure is actually worth running, given your analysis and trimming it down to a more-reasonable size. What are the cool things that stand out to you, Trent, that make it worthwhile?---does it have cool planar aspects, or is the architecture of the panes pretty much all handwaved away?
Allan.
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Post by geneweigel on Jan 21, 2019 16:49:00 GMT -5
Its a lot of handoffs to the usual suspects from the LA crowd. The goons that used to linger on the LA forum basically with that love to work for an rpg but would rather be working for official TSR types. Very cringy to deal with in my opinion. This really was assinine that my initial review was terrible. Too too hopeful.
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foster1941
Warlock
Duke of California, Earl of Los Angeles, Knight Bachelor
Posts: 476
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Post by foster1941 on Jan 22, 2019 0:12:15 GMT -5
I've never dug into this box set in earnest, in part due to the even-worse-than-usual TLG atrocious editing---my original impression was that there was very little worth trying to salvage from it. It sounds like you think the adventure is actually worth running, given your analysis and trimming it down to a more-reasonable size. What are the cool things that stand out to you, Trent, that make it worthwhile?---does it have cool planar aspects, or is the architecture of the panes pretty much all handwaved away? Allan. I mostly just like the concept - a group of PCs forced to complete a gauntlet of being quickly thrown from plane to plane, forced to quickly adapt to many different environments and challenge types, quickly assess the situation and figure out what they have to do to escape/defeat it. We saw it in Come Endless Darkness and at a much reduced scale in Maze of Zayene 2, and it feels to me like a compelling, exciting, highly gameable situation. Alas, the adventure as published totally fails to live up to that potential. Given how poorly executed so many of the pane mini-adventures are, and how poorly so many of them seem to fit with the ostensible theme (a lot of them just feel like generic mini-adventures), Gary’s penchant for farming out grunt-work, and - frankly - the crowd of disciples he was surrounded by in this era (side note: where did all of those guys come from?) not a single one of whom ever produced anything worthwhile or that seemed in any way to be on the same stylistic or thematic page as Gary’s 20th century work, it seems fairly likely that Gary came up with the concept and maybe sketched some sort ideas, but farmed the actual writing out to the assorted no-talents, all of whom were happy to work for no credit (and no pay?) because it brought them into the “inner circle” of trust. That’s certainly easier to buy than that Gary actually wrote all this stuff himself. There’s still the matter of him allowing it to go out under his name, but at that late stage of life he was probably more concerned with getting paid and ensuring the livelihood of his family than his legacy. If this is true, and the actual pane-adventures were mostly (all?) ghost-written by the legion of sycophantic hangers-on, then the question arises whether it’s worth trying to salvage this stuff. Much of it definitely isn’t. At least half of the panes aren’t worth trying to salvage at all. Even those I did choose to keep are mostly underdeveloped and have significant issues and were I to actually try to run this I’d probably end up virtually rewriting most of them. That in doing so I might be effectively replacing the work of a gaggle of ghostwriter hacks - taking the same sketch they were given to work with but turning out something better, that feels more in line with the spirit of Gary’s work is kind of ironic and funny.
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Post by geneweigel on Jan 22, 2019 1:00:10 GMT -5
There was one of them that attacked me on Greytalk because I said something about 2E in 2000 or 2001. I forget which but it was someone with credit on many LA things. Not Clark, Troy or Creffield.
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Post by GRWelsh on Jan 22, 2019 10:15:01 GMT -5
In your opinions, what percentage of The Hall of Many Panes was written by EGG? Since he had a unique writing style, it should be discernible if he wrote the lion's share of it or only provided outlines and high level ideas. If the latter, then I'm glad I never bought it. However, I do like the core idea of an adventure based on The World of Tiers or the Come Endless Darkness gauntlet with options to figure out patterns and bypass some of the challenges.
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foster1941
Warlock
Duke of California, Earl of Los Angeles, Knight Bachelor
Posts: 476
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Post by foster1941 on Jan 22, 2019 12:08:37 GMT -5
It's hard to say, because of the way it was published with dual-stats for d20 and LA. The d20 stuff makes up probably a third of the word-count (and is the main text, with the LA stuff as sidebars) and we know none of it was written by EGG. My assumption at the time is that the d20 editors (Jon Creffield and John Troy, IIRC) had (badly) edited an original manuscript by Gary, but they could well have played a greater role. Each pane-adventure starts with a big block of boxed text describing the intial scene/situation when the party arrives in each pane that generally sound to me like Gary's "voice," but we know that, for instance, when Frank Mentzer worked on T1-4 he tried to write it in as close to Gary's voice as he could (which makes it harder to determine what from that finished module is Gary vs Frank), so others could have done the same thing here. Or perhaps the boxed text is the what Gary wrote and gave the other guys to fill in all the rest...
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Post by Scott on Jan 22, 2019 12:22:01 GMT -5
It’s tough to say. Most of this stuff was Gary’s material, or concepts, but he had other writers flesh it out for publication. And Gary had such a signature style that it’s easy to tell when it isn’t him writing it. On top of that Troll Lord butchered a bunch of adventures with their bad editing. Gary posted extensive session reports while playtesting this. So I assumed he was pretty heavily involved with the development. Jon Creffield is listed coauthor and I’d guess most of what you read comes from his keyboard.
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Post by davegibsongreyhawkdm on Jan 22, 2019 15:59:52 GMT -5
I’m not familiar at all with this adventure, however, why wouldn’t it be a good idea to use the original colored dice from the original box set for structure to generate d4+d6+d8+d12+d20 = 50 panes?
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Post by davegibsongreyhawkdm on Jan 22, 2019 16:05:28 GMT -5
By the way, my original white d20 got so worn over time it would take forever to stop rolling, and some numbers results it would not land on any longer...
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Post by davegibsongreyhawkdm on Jan 22, 2019 16:12:33 GMT -5
It became like one of Furnok of Ferd’s loaded knucklebones...
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