Gen Con live

Gen Con has quintupled in size since I was last here. It's pretty amazing to see all the creativity in all the many many new games here.

I made some postcards to hand out with a free monster on the back. I'm sharing space with Goodman Games at space 413. There is a big Dungeon Crawl Classics banner overhead. Hope to see some readers of this blog.

John Carter versus the White Apes

This is a composition I've been messing with for a while. I had a color version that has been posted here before. This one I've changed some poses and added some interesting martian ruins in the background.

Usually I make Dejah Thoris a brunette, but this princess is blonde. Maybe it's her cousin.

Gen Con 2016 or Bust

I've made arrangements to attend Gen Con 2016!

I will be spending time at the Goodman Games booth, and will have some of my recent Original Edition game books for sale. Even if you've got them, or aren't interested in purchasing any you can swing by say hi and get a free postcard with a monster on it...the dreaded Yarglith.

It has been several years since I've made the trek to gaming mecca, so I'm really looking forward to it. Hope to see you there.

http://www.gencon.com/

How metal is your vocabulary?

Without a doubt two of the greatest flavors of the '70's and '80's is Dungeons & Dragons and Heavy Metal.
I would blast Metallica and Black Sabbath while drawing D&D characters for my high school gaming group. The imagery of metal is essential dark fantasy and naturally inspires characters, creatures, and adventures for any great D&D campaign.
A data scientist recently scraped data from over 200,000 metal songs to compile the most metal top 20 list of words. How was this data compiled?

To get the lyrics, I scraped www.darklyrics.com. While darklyrics doesn't have a robots.txt file, I tried to be gentle with my requests. After cleaning the data up, identifying the languages and splitting albums into songs, we are left with a dataset containing lyrics to 222,623 songs from 7,364 bands spread over 22,314 albums.

These words are a handy reference if you wanted to spice up the taunts of a Heavy Metal Lich "I'm gonna tear the veins from your body as you scream and pray to the gods!" or if you wanted to come up with the most metal name ever for an adventure module "Reign of the Flame Demon's Sword of Sorrow".

Most Metal Words
1 burn
2 cries
3 veins
4 eternity
5 breathe
6 beast
7 gonna
8 demons
9 ashes
10 soul
11 sorrow
12 sword
13 goodbye
14 dreams
15 gods
16 pray
17 reign
18 tear
19 flames
20 scream

There was also a list of the least-metal words, but I didn't want to taint this totally metal post with those words, so you'll have to follow the link to see them.

Source: http://www.degeneratestate.org/posts/2016/Apr/20/heavy-metal-and-natural-language-processing-part-1/

Official TSR AD&D Radio show from the early 80's

Once again, master sleuth and D&D historian Jon Peterson digs up long lost treasures. This time in the form of a previously unreleased AD&D pilot radio show. The show is engaging and well produced. I found myself wanting to hear more!

https://youtu.be/N74fRQkqAJE