Species for Monstrous6: The Michigan "I Voted" Wolf

So, anything important happening today?

/s

While we chew our nails and worry about what tomorrow brings, I thought it'd be fun to do a little dry run of writing out a species for the house RPG system I'm developing bit by bit, currently referred to as Monstrous6.  And to keep things on-theme with the events of the day, I'll look at a species that needs to be put into a game: the Michigan "I Voted" wolf...

From The Daily Beast

Some context for anyone outside the States or otherwise just not up to date on your patriotic anthro wolf sticker news:  The state of Michigan held a contest for kids to design new stickers to be given out at polling places as citizens vote, to replace the standard old "I Voted + a flag" design.  (Well, in Georgia, we eventually got a peach on ours...but that's nothing compared to what Michigan is doing...)  There were (I think) nine winners in total whose designs are being handed out to voters in Michigan.  The one that seemed to get the most attention, however, was this gem by Jane Hynous of Brownell Middle School in Grosse Pointe, MI (yep, that Grosse Pointe).

For obvious reasons.  This wolf is awesome.  I would not be shocked if we were to later find out that it was actually drawn by Rob Liefeld, who then handed it off to his niece Jane to be a ringer entry in the kids' contest.  I even ordered a couple for me and Laura (copies, I'm pretty sure, as it seems like folks are actually paying pretty good money for the real deal).

So, I'm gonna make this guy/gal into a species for roleplaying.  Just something simple, though...the species setup I imagine using for my house system going forward, modeled after the way it was handled in Star Wars D6:

A tribute to the wolf by Katelyn Windels on Instagram

American Wolffolk

Attribute Points: 11

Min/Max:

Strength 2-6
Dexterity 1-6
Knowledge 1-4
Presence 1-5

Skill Distribution: 4/3/2

Special Skills: Tracking (scent) +4

Abilities: Darkvision

The American Wolffolk are a rarely seen cryptid species once found throughout the United States, but now having a much more limited range due to human encroachment.  They are now most visible in the current "swing state" of Michigan.  Despite the arguably negative impact of American "progress" on their species, the Wolffolk are often fiercely patriotic.  For example, they get really stoked when they get a chance to vote.

It is believed that this strong sense of national pride is due in large part to the love they have for their pack.  The ability to directly influence the decisions of their group is sacred to many Wolffolk.  Many have expressed concern at the systematic chipping away of rights that could ultimately lead to their disenfranchisement, but they are determined to get out the vote today to ensure that doesn't happen.

Geeky SKAturday: RxPxOxS (Fishbone)

Fishbone was one of the most popular American bands playing ska back in the 80s.  They're certainly legends of the genre, although they are probably known more for their eclecticism and unique high-energy blend of funk, metal, soul, punk, reggae, and on and on and on.

They unexpectedly released a new song on Thursday.  It is political and timely.

Let me be clear, because I know not everyone is going to like it...I truly want civility in political discourse.  I have cult members in my family and don't want to dehumanize anyone.  I believe in peace, probably to a fault as judged by most people...as in I believe there is power in peace, and in the cases where there are clearly more powerful forces at work, those are our chances as humans to give peace power.  BUT (I know you knew one was coming) I do occasionally need folks around me to be blunt enough to remind me that there's a lot going on in America right now that should not be normalized, and that there are ultimately convictions that matter.  In a world where I have been threatened and called a "liberal piece of shit" by a guy standing in my own backyard, I'm obligated to still try and recognize when things are...well, not okay.

Stay safe, everybody.

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Alright, let's lighten things up by giving the Rudie a sound from Fishbone.  How about the one that might be rudest of all of their rude stuff?

Skankin' to the Beat

1st-level Sound

Casting time: 1 bonus action

Range: 60 feet

Duration: 3 rounds

This sound gives all friendly creatures within range who dig the rhythm a boost to everything they attempt for the next 3 rounds.  When rolling for any skill check, magic check, attack, or save, they roll an extra 1D6 and add the result to the total.  Crits/bomb-outs/automatic successes or failures still count as usual.

(Too powerful?  Eh...good ;)

The Real Monstrous Matters: Oliphaunts in India

So this is pretty cool.  A pair of papers recently dropped giving a detailed analysis of a huge elephant skull that was found in India way back in 2000 (alongside a bunch of human tools).  And no, it isn't an Oliphaunt (or Mûmak)...but it is pretty darn big.

One of the papers focuses on the morphology and phylogeny of the skull (and thus the animal), placing it in the genus Palaeoloxodon, which has some of the largest elephants that ever walked the planet.  (There's a really good summary of this paper over at Discover Wildlife.)  It appears that this individual is a second example of a species previously named Palaeoloxodon turkmenicus, which in the range of 4 meters/13 feet at the shoulder (and around 10 tons) was certainly...well, mammoth:

P. turkmenicus and a human silhouette.  Image by Chen Yu; swiped from Discover Wildlife.

It's worth mentioning, though, that there's another species in the genus, Palaeoloxodon namadicus, that some estimates would place as the largest land animal ever at over 5 meters/17 feet, and up to 22 tons in weight!  Here's a nice little video on that one:

(The other paper, meanwhile, has more information on human interaction with the elephant, based upon marks on the bones and tools found nearby.  Both articles point to an age in the range of 300,000 to 400,000 years, which will never stop blowing my mind.)

Of course, even a 22-ton behemoth doesn't measure up to what we saw in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films:

From here

I'm not familiar enough with Tolkien's original works to know if that's the size we should expect based upon the books themselves, but man are they fantastic animals.  (What is it Sam tells Frodo?  "No one at home will believe this...")  They've got to be at least...what, 40 feet tall?  So if we assume, at the high end of Palaeoloxodon, a beast that's 17 feet tall and 22 tons...something roughly the same shape but about 2.35 times the height would probably give us an animal weighing about 13 times as much.  So...around 286 tons?  Did I do that right?  Impressive!  (The Mûmak, not my work...)

And the coolest part is that they're using them as war machines.  I'm sure there have been plenty of takes on Oliphaunts in RPGs over the years, but I think I'll just stat one out for Monstrous Matters purposes on the premise that it's a REALLY big elephant.  It looks like the flagship proboscidean has about 8 or 9 hit dice in a typical d20-based system.  Do I really want to make a Mûmak a monster with like 80 HD, or as I would play it in Monstrous Matters gaming, a Strength value of around 80?  (Rhetorical question...)

Considering the D6-based system I've been playing with, it probably makes the most sense to pull ideas from Mini Six (which includes elephant stats and some nice, simple scaling rules) and WEG's Star Wars Miniatures Battles (which has a nice way of handling creatures by not worrying so much about what humans consider intelligence, and instead giving them an Orneriness Code that's used to test how difficult they are to work with).

From here

Oliphaunt

Scale: +4

Handling Difficulty (trained): 7

20 HP, 11 Defense

Strength 4

Dexterity 1

Knowledge 1

Presence 1

Attacks: 2x Tusk (1D6+4 damage) or Trample (2D6+4 damage plus target is knocked prone)

EDIT:  And I realized I posted this without mentioning the most basic of courtesies...a Happy Halloween to everyone!

Geeky SKAturday: Garden of Love (Don Drummond and the Skatalites)

From The Guardian

Jamaican trombonist Don Drummond is truly one of the giants of ska history.  He was a founding member of the legendary Skatalites...probably the most influential ska band ever...and his gift with melody meant he also wrote a number of their most celebrated songs.

Unfortunately, the last few years of his life were marked by tragedy, but in the time he was with us, Drummond gave us beautiful tunes that will last as forever as tunes can last.

There's a comic series about Drummond's life called Trombone Man: Ska's Fallen Genius that is currently in progress.  Written by Adam Reeves, with art by Constantinos Pissourios, and based on a book by Heather Augustyn, it looks really promising.  You can get the first issue free by going here and follow the Kickstarter for issue #2 here.

From the project's Facebook page

Finally, I'm sure this sound will be at least a little familiar to some of you...

Garden of Love

3rd-level Sound

Casting time: 1 action/8 hours

Range: 150 feet

Duration: Intantaneous effect/1 year

This sound channels the caster's inner love into the growth of plants within a specific area. There are two ways to cast the sound, granting either immediate or long-term benefits.

If you cast this sound using 1 action, choose a point within range. All normal plants in a 100-foot radius centered on that point become thick and overgrown. Movement through the area costs four times its usual value.

You can exclude one or more areas of any size within the sound's area from being affected.

If you cast this sound over 8 hours, you enrich the land. All plants in a half-mile radius centered on a point within range become enriched for 1 year. The plants yield twice the normal amount of food when harvested.

Ezra Brady, the Ranger (because sometimes it's just fun to look at characters)

I would imagine that many of us love RPGs, at least in part, because of the strangely pleasing feeling of having a character summarized on a character sheet.  I don't really even know how to describe it.  There's a certain power to having all these words and numbers mashed together, representing everything needed to put that character through some trials and generate real stories.

It doesn't even have to actually happen.  I've gotten a ton of enjoyment just from reading over species and classes in publications like Dragon and Fight On! and thinking about the characters I COULD make with them.  I am sometimes frustrated by the fact that we don't have unlimited time to enjoy all the cool stuff this world offers, but for some reason, this world of unlimited possibilities of who I could be is reassuring.

The presentation of complete characters, usable in new stories and potentially carrying the legacy of stories they've already experienced, is also one of the things that attracted me to blogging about RPGs.  Others, of course, do it much better and more consistently than I do.  Justin at Halls of the Nephilim, for instance, shares a ton of evocative character and monster builds on his blog.  I don't know how he knocks out those seemingly complete characters in more complex systems like 5E (yep, I called it complex); I would get so bogged down in minutiae that it would cease being fun pretty quickly, but I love looking over the details he puts into characters that start to tell a story before the story even starts. 

And Tim at The Other Side...he's pretty much made an art out of giving us characters for a variety of games, often reusing themes and personalities (like his iconic witch Larina Nix) to fill out a multiverse that can be enjoyed outside of specific game sessions.  (And yes, I do still "mourn" the loss of regular retellings of the story of Tim Knight's Acrobatic Flea on his blog Hero Press, but I'm sure the Flea is living on in many, many corners of the multiverse!)

So, where am I going with this?  Eh...nowhere, really.  I just really like looking at characters sometimes and wanted an excuse to post this guy...Ezra Brady.  He was my character in a 3.5 game about...checks notes...THIRTEEN years ago...?  (Oh man I'm getting old.)  Named after two Linneman dogs, he would eventually multiclass in (if I recall correctly) a third-party or homebrewed Pathfinder class called the Beastmaster, picking up an animal companion of his own.  I'm pretty sure it was a wolf and had a produce-based name in honor of my girl Celery.

Anyway...thanks, John A., for letting Ezra run around your world of Dragnaria!  Here's how he started, and down below, I'll stat him out as I would for a starting character using my current system of choice.  (Note:  I was sort of obsessed with the idea of portal fantasy at the time, so I was very glad John the DM was willing to let me run with the backstory I wrote...)

In hindsight, I wonder if using a mini with a red beard was a bit of a Mary Sue move...

Ezra Brady

Human Ranger 1

Str 10  Con 9 (-1)  Dex 16 (+3)  Int 13 (+1)  Wis 11  Cha 8 (-1)

SAVES  Fort +1  Rflx +5  Will +0

AC 15  FF 12  Touch 13

HP 9

Deity: a god/God  Alignment: NG  Init: -3  Move: 30 ft

ABILITIES  Favored Enemy: Orc; Track; Wild Empathy

FEATS  Weapon Focus (Longbow); Toughness x2; Point Blank Shot

FLAWS  Noncombatant; Unreactive

COMPOSITE LONGBOW +5 (+6 <=30 ft), dmg 1d8, piercing, crit x3, rng 110 ft, wt 3#

LONGSWORD -1, dmg 1d6, slashing, crit 19-20 x2, wt 4#

LANGUAGES  Native tongue (English), Common

SKILLS  Climb 4 (+4), Handle Animal 4 (+3), Heal 4 (+4), Ride 4 (+7), Survival 4 (+4), Swim 4 (+4), Craft (Bowmaking) 4 (+5), Knowledge (Nature) 4 (+5)

GEAR/MONEY  Composite Longbow (100 gp, 3#), Arrows (20) (1 gp, 3#), Longsword (15 gp, 4#), Leather Armor (10 gp, 15#), 114 gp

Ezra Brady led a pretty normal life in “our” world, although it was a life filled with secure adventure. Ezra earned a modest living working at REI, filling his free time with outdoor activities like hiking and spelunking. One day, on an expedition in a cave in central Illinois, Ezra’s gear failed him, and he went hurdling earthward through a cold pool on the cave’s floor. Surprisingly, he wasn’t injured at all, but when he emerged through the water’s surface, he realized the cavern around him had changed greatly. Climbing to dry land and slowly coming to his senses, Ezra heard noise around him. He wouldn’t know what they were at the time, but there were orcs at work.

The orcs captured Ezra, stealing all of his earthly belongings. Through guile and sheer effort, Ezra escaped from his captors and found friendship with an elven hermit living in the mountainous surroundings. This mentor taught him to hunt, to survive in the wilderness around him, and to fight back against the single minded orcs. After several months of tutelage, which included extensive training in the land’s native tongue, Ezra ventured eastward in hopes of finding a way back home. He eventually found himself in a village that seemed to be marked by strange happenings of late; hoping that this might be connected to his awkward appearance in this world, Ezra decided to see what he could learn in the charming but frightening hamlet.

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It's really just an old plastic D&D mini that I colored (just the cloak) with a black sharpie.  It probably wasn't the best idea to do a quick 'n dirty re-base so that he now looks like he's standing in chocolate mousse...

Ezra Brady

Species: Human

Home: Earth

Current Location: Dragnaria

10 HP, 14 Defense (leather armor)

Strength 2
Dexterity 5
Knowledge 3
Presence 2

Skills: Bows +4, Tracking +3, Animal Empathy +2, Medicine +1

Languages: English, Common

Goal: To get back home!

Quote: "I have a feeling I'm not in Illinois anymore..."

Geeky SKAturday: Cupid (Amy Winehouse...among others...!)

Hey, it's still SKAturday!

It may not be proper to note Amy Winehouse in the title up there (vs. the other artists that have taken on this classic), but it's her cover that inspired this post by being in regular rotation for me lately.   (If you've never checked it out, Amy's ska stuff is really good...)

Here's her take:

"Cupid" was written and originally released as an R&B song by Sam Cooke in 1961...

The song has seen a number of outstanding cover versions over the years, some of which sit happily enough in a Rudie's wheelhouse to earn it a place in the canon of ska.  Johnny Nash, the American singer-songwriter who perhaps most famously gave the world the song "I Can See Clearly Now," released a rocksteady version in 1969:

American ska mainstays the Slackers covered it on their collection Lost and Found and regularly played it live for quite a while...

And the version that introduced me to the tune was performed by the Usuals, a Florida ska band that released it on a really cool red, heart-shaped record back in 1998 (which also included the incredible song "Hey Boy," and was very kindly given to me long ago by my buddy Jake):

So...let's make it a sound for a Rudie!

I figure a Charm spell plus a love connection should probably be tougher than Charming a Person but easier than Charming a Monster...so maybe 3rd level?  Then, we can add in an element of a Philter of Love...removing the "if a gender you're usually attracted to" clause because really, if we're going to the level of creepy where we're forcing amorous feelings on a character, why would we put a gender restriction on it?

Cupid

3rd-level Sound

Range: 30 feet

Duration: 1 hour

Save: Wisdom

You call for Cupid's arrow to be targeted at a creature you can see within range.  If it fails the saving throw, it is charmed by another being of your choice for the duration of the spell and will regard that being as its true love while charmed.  When the spell wears off, the creature will remember the events of the previous hour and, if sufficiently intelligent, know that it was emotionally manipulated.

A Goblinoid Family Tree

(Or really a phylogenetic tree.  I just liked the sound of family tree more in the title.)

So, in reading a post by James over at Grognardia, about Dragon articles on fantasy languages, I started to wonder if sometimes I just don't fly my geek flag high enough.  As in...maybe I'm not appropriately minmaxing the fun I could get out of the RPG hobby by not allowing myself to just go nuts like I want to as a nerdy scientist who also loves games about elves and goblins.

James posted a tree of language families, originally appearing in Dragon #66, that shows the development of the Middle Elfin tongue into a variety of fae languages.  And it's awesome.  I love that sort of stuff, so why don't I do more of it?  I wonder sometimes if I remain so focused on having an "anything goes" attitude about the world(s) I game in (like the setting for the Monstrous Matters campaign) that I miss out on creating things that would genuinely make me smile, even if I don't completely buy into all of the specifics.

With that in mind, I'm going to consider this a worthwhile way to spend a few minutes.  Here's a phylogenetic tree of a few goblinoid species, along with a few creatures from that galaxy far, far away that I suspect might be closely related.  (If you have access to genetic data, please let me know; this is just based on physical characteristics.)

Images from the Forgotten Realms Wiki, Wookieepedia, and Scryfall

I feel like this just opens up a whole world of stories for how these species became distributed as they are.  Maybe I'll follow up there.  (If you'd like to see some of my related ramblings, please check out the stuff I've written about the Fantaspora Hypothesis and #WookieesAreBugbears.)

Thanks for looking!  Now, for a character (cribbed from RPGGamer.org):

Image from Wookieepedia

Wicket

Full name:  Wicket Wystri Warrick

Species: Ewok

Home: Endor

15 HP, 12 Defense (small size)

Strength 3
Dexterity 3
Knowledge 2
Presence 4

Skills: Survival +4, Thrown Weapons +3, Languages +2, Climb +1

Goals: Helping and protecting his friends

Quote: "Goodbye.  Good-bye."