Midjourney artwork

 

Yep, I got bit by the MJ bug too, and holy shit, this is amazing. Yes, there are still weird anomalies and strangeness, but look at these samples I was able to make on my very first day of messing around with it.

If you look closely, you can see MJ trying really hard to evoke Frazetta with the signature in the bottom. So neat!

Please ignore the images below, they used as reference for some MJ projects I am messing around with:

....on Thieves

I have never been in the party of 'there is something wrong with the thieves class' but upon reading James West's recent blog post I began to think about it.

After an initial distaste for his idea of rolling a d100 for each Thief Ability initial score, I actually came around and really liked this idea. This would create wildly different and dynamic thieves from the outset, making each one unique. I would include Hear Noise, deviating from the d6 roll (which is weird anyway since the rest are d% rolls). 

Now how to handle progression? Lookin at BECMI and BX, the thief goes up by an average of 26 points per level gain. (Side note, weird how we have that damn to hit plateau in the rules but here thieves get better every level....what gives Gary?) Anyway...

So what if we take their Dexterity score, add to their Intelligence score, and that is how many points the character gains per level to increase their Thief Ability scores. If we use an average of 11 for each score, we are just slightly below the points gained in the original system. As we likely are starting off better initial scores, we are most likely ahead of the terrible initial scores in the original game.

What are your thoughts?

B/X Actual Play podcast....that's actually good!

The other day over on FB (yes, I occasionally haunt there, and no I will not friend you) a fellow mentioned this podcast called Tale of the Manticore as a good actual play podcast. I gave it a listen

I can honestly say this is probably the BEST AP podcast I have listened to. The author weaves a story around the solo RPG he is running/playing in such a fashion that the overall effect is quite engaging. He splits this up with sidebar discussions on the character backgrounds (including the badguys), rules he is using or choosing not to use, and house rules and his reasons for using them. He also, so far, sticks to Matt's Best Podcast Guidelines #2: Stick to around 30 mins or so, otherwise you are simply bloviating.

As I said, this is a solo game but he manages to use voices and actors for some of the other parts and this along with his skills at storytelling come together to make a podcast not only interesting but a great listen.

Give it a listen, you might enjoy it (click the link or image above to head over to the TotM website).