Author: Imperium Romanum

So there’s this idea that gets passed around a lot wherever Lovecraft fans lurk that Cthulhu is some kind of unstoppable mega-monster against whom all human weapons are useless, that he and his kind are so indescribably powerful, so beyond our ken, that they would hardly even notice us trying to kill them and would wipe out all human civilization just to get rid of the clutter.

Cthulhu lost a fight with a steam boat.

Continue reading “Cthulhu Is Actually Quite Fragile” →

There are three different YouTube channels that I watch fairly regularly for their historical content (four if you count the Great War, which is much more narrowly focused than these other channels are), and sharing them here gives me an excuse not to write a proper blog post today.

Military History Visualized concentrates primarily on WW2, but also has plenty of videos on other subjects. His production values are very high (though not necessarily his production budget), which means his videos are easy to watch even for a long period of time. I soundly condemn his recent decision to have a face, but I love him anyway, especially for his videos on misconceptions propagated by movies and video games (whether in service of the medium or just due to laziness). He cites his sources and often quotes them directly, so he’s also the one whose accuracy I’m most confident in (unless you count the Great War, who I hold in similar esteem).

Lindybeige is a controversial figure, but his main detractors are weeaboos, Wehrmaboos, and people who think being contrarion is a greater sign of intelligence than being right. I haven’t watched all of Lindybeige’s work or even most of it, so it’s possible he actually did make some serious blunders, but so far as I can tell the umbrage against Lindybeige mainly comes down to fanboys who dislike it when he makes a point against their favorite historical armies and people who are hopping on the bandwagon. His production values are just north of totally abysmal, which makes him an easy target even though his information is generally accurate. He’s not as good at citing sources and the like as Military History Visualized, and only tends to do so when a video is so overwhelmed with backlash that he feels the need to address it with a follow-up in which he pulls out some primary sources (almost invariably British) with which to smack his critics. Lindybeige is definitely sometimes misleading by omission, in that he is clearly a fanboy for his home country and will avoid making points against Britain if he can, and will always make points in favor of Britain, but he doesn’t spread misinformation that make his country seem more awesome than it is, he just likes to talk about the times when his country really was awesome and doesn’t so much tend to bring up the times when they got their tea-stained teeth pushed in.

Lindybeige occasionally makes videos about applying historical accuracy to RPGs and wargames, especially to fantasy settings. There’s no denying that he comes across like a smug asshole with no sense of drama in them, but ignore the tone and pay attention to the substance, because there’s some great worldbuilding advice there. It’s not like it’s thin on the ground, either. Lindybeige’s unscripted rambling certainly drives information density down, but it’s not that low.

Shadiversity is a pain to listen to. MatPat’s voice took some serious getting used to, but I can’t seem to get used to Shad at all. That’s kind of a testament to the quality of his content in and of itself, though, since I’ll sit down to listen to it anyway even though it makes my ears bleed. He likes to talk about how much he loves swords, but his best videos are the ones where he talks about castles. His series on whether [insert fictitious castle here] would be any good as an actual fortification is great for worldbuilding in much the same way as Lindybeige’s RPG-related content is, and likewise his videos on what kind of weapons would be best suited for [fantasy creature].

Honorable mention to Overly Sarcastic Productions, which has some of the best history videos I’ve ever seen and kind of deep sixed my own nascent plans to run a history YouTube series, since my concept was basically the same as their history summarized videos, except it turns out they beat me to the punch by like a year, and also while I might have been able to compete in terms of scripting and voice acting, I can’t draw for crap and I’m terrible at finding and editing together relevant pictures, so they have me thoroughly trumped on the visual end of things. As such, Blue’s historical videos sound like broken dreams and loneliness to me, but I really enjoy Red’s content and what videos of Blue’s I did watch I could appreciate the quality of despite my personal hangups.

I like stumbling across good but obscure work, because then I can link to someone else’s stuff and call it a day. Today’s gift from serendipity is Dungeon Hacks, from Dungeon Keeper Radio. They also made a sequel, and I’m hoping they’ll make more. Each video takes a few minutes to talk about a few ways to make a dungeon more dangerous without just adding more or higher level monsters and traps, but rather using the monsters/traps the dungeon already has more effectively.

For example, Matt Colville recommends in his one-page dungeon video that you have a trap room and a creature encounter. That’s a good idea for your very first adventure, but as Dungeon Hacks point out, it’s more interesting (read: deadly) by having monsters take advantage of the trap to attack the heroes. A simple pit trap is only going to cause some minor damage by itself, but if you set it up to collapse only beneath the weight of someone who weighs over, eh, 200 pounds or so, that’s probably going to be someone wearing at least medium armor, which means one of the party’s meatshields is at the bottom of the pit and not on the front lines when your goblins spring their ambush. A particularly cunning example from the videos themselves is using skeletons to keep the party boxed into a room filling with poison gas.

Each of the two videos I linked above is full of ideas like this, a total of about twelve minutes of them. That doesn’t sound like much, and it’s not, but it’s dense with smart dungeon design, which means it doesn’t take long for you to listen to but will give you plenty to chew on in that short amount of time.

As anyone who’s been following this blog knows (these people know nothing, because they do not exist), my younger brother moved away recently. He won’t be in regular contact with civilization for a while, and he left behind a few things, including some drawings he made of our old D&D game. The campaign we played before the one that finished at Phlan. This was one Hoard of the Dragon Queen. I asked him if it was okay if I scanned them onto the internet before he left, and he said sure. Then I realized I don’t actually have a scanning machine, so here are some terrible phone pictures of them instead.

Continue reading “Hoard of the Dragon Queen: Fan Art From My Brother” →

Another one in the “shameless blogging” category, this post is dedicated entirely to a brief recollection of the battle for Phlan. It’s the last session of D&D I ran for my younger brother before he left. I was running the Tyranny of Dragons campaign initially, but by the end things got…different. I squished several different adventures together into a single finale, and ran them with an improvised mass battle system.

Continue reading “The Defense of Phlan” →

Seeing as how this is basically just my blog, now, let’s talk about my goal for the year.

Continue reading “The Quest Log For Meat Space” →