Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Nemesis, a Poem by HP Lovecraft

I posted a small slideshow type video of "scary images" and a text to speech voice reading HP Lovecraft's poem, "Nemesis" to Youtube, in honor of the spooky season. Enjoy!

My CHORTLENEOK Youtube Channel.

Nemesis
By H. P. Lovecraft


Thro’ the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
Past the wan-moon’d abysses of night,
I have liv’d o’er my lives without number,
I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

I have whirl’d with the earth at the dawning,
When the sky was a vaporous flame;
I have seen the dark universe yawning,
Where the black planets roll without aim;
Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.

I had drifted o’er seas without ending,
Under sinister grey-clouded skies
That the many-fork’d lightning is rending,
That resound with hysterical cries;
With the moans of invisible daemons that out of the green waters rise.

I have plung’d like a deer thro’ the arches
Of the hoary primoridal grove,
Where the oaks feel the presence that marches
And stalks on where no spirit dares rove;
And I flee from a thing that surrounds me, and leers thro’ dead branches above.

I have stumbled by cave-ridden mountains
That rise barren and bleak from the plain,
I have drunk of the fog-foetid fountains
That ooze down to the marsh and the main;
And in hot cursed tarns I have seen things I care not to gaze on again.

I have scann’d the vast ivy-clad palace,
I have trod its untenanted hall,
Where the moon writhing up from the valleys
Shews the tapestried things on the wall;
Strange figures discordantly woven, which I cannot endure to recall.

I have peer’d from the casement in wonder
At the mouldering meadows around,
At the many-roof’d village laid under
The curse of a grave-girdled ground;
And from rows of white urn-carven marble I listen intently for sound.

I have haunted the tombs of the ages,
I have flown on the pinions of fear
Where the smoke-belching Erebus rages,
Where the jokulls loom snow-clad and drear:
And in realms where the sun of the desert consumes what it never can cheer.

I was old when the Pharaohs first mounted
The jewel-deck’d throne by the Nile;
I was old in those epochs uncounted
When I, and I only, was vile;
And Man, yet untainted and happy, dwelt in bliss on the far Arctic isle.

Oh, great was the sin of my spirit,
And great is the reach of its doom;
Not the pity of Heaven can cheer it,
Nor can respite be found in the tomb:
Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of unmerciful gloom.

Thro’ the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
Past the wan-moon’d abysses of night,
I have liv’d o’er my lives without number,
I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright

Monday, October 29, 2012

Hurricane, Wind Speed, Storm and Damage Charts

I have consolidated a large number of weather-related charts into one image, which may help people educate themselves to some degree, about tornadoes, hurricanes, wind, wave heights and other related information.


Click on image for larger sized image.

Saturday, October 27, 2012

Tabletop RPG Debris: Dude, Where's My Excellent World?!


Welcome to Abstruse Decapod's  Tabletop RPG Debris; the retrospective that takes a look at obscure and homebrew role-playing games you either might have never heard of, or which have simply been lost to time - sometimes with good reason.

Alright, well, let me get this out of the way. I was never a fan of Bill and Ted or Wayne's World - in fact, I can't honestly say I have seen either all the way through, with certainty ... and I have no immediate plans to remedy that. I just don't like the type of humor that these movies, and shows like them, tend to rely on. Like Napoleon Dynamite, they have a number of quotable lines, and that's great, and I know many people of all ages enjoy these movies - but not me. Maybe it's because I never knew anyone like any of the people in the movies, therefore can't identify with any character whatsoever.


Thursday, October 25, 2012

Free Downloads: Feng Shui RPG Character Sheets and Dragon's Heirs Archetype Sourcebook



The Dragon's Heirs for Feng Shui
- Made with express consent and hosted by Atlas Games, my compilation of all 59 of the official archetypes for the Feng Shui archetypes can be downloaded for free here.





Feng Shui Character Custom Sheets Pack
- 10 different custom character sheets for Feng Shui with different "theming", from Basic White to Jade to Wood.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Zoat Sourcebook for Warhammer Fantasy Role Play 2nd Edition (WFRP2)

 This is a completely unofficial fan-made sourcebook for Warhammer Fantsy Role Play 2nd Edition (WFRP2), fleshing out the Zoat race, which was removed from 3rd edition.

Monday, October 22, 2012

Free RPG From Me: "Winter's Cold Heart" Adventure

Hello and welcome, readers! This is something I wrote quite a while back but it got some good response by people that downloaded it, and ran it for their groups. It is written with Warhammer Fantasy Role Play 2nd Edition in mind, but is "systemless", only having general "stats" which a willing GM can easily adapt for his purposes and system.



SUMMARY
This scenario, Winter's Cold Heart, is divided into two sections: Section 1: Ice in the Blood, and Section 2: Blood in the Ice. The division and name reversals are intended to help differentiate different style, atmosphere and overall “feel”. Though some combat is likely, mostly in Section 2, the scenario relies more on reason, critical thinking and using clues to solve a fairly straight-forward puzzle which will help increase the chance of survival for the inn’s patrons.


OVERVIEW
This section will strand the PCs during a winter storm at a friendly little place called the Sugarloaf Inn (or whatever inn you’dlike to use) – but the cheery fire inside pales in comparison to the chaos of the blizzard raging outside, and the hunger which waits both outside and within the walls of the inn itself.


DOWNLOAD
File Hosted on Google Drive


Friday, October 19, 2012

Free Art: Turtle Centaur (WFRP Zoat)

This isn't fantastic or anything, but I thought I'd share a vector art image of a turtle-centaur I just made, which the Warhammer game would refer to as a "Zoat". It is "open" clipart so is free to use for any purpose as far as I'm concerned.


Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Free Downloads!

Okay so maybe they're not super impressive, but at the very least, they might give you some ideas for games or characters or something, or at best, you can play and actually enjoy some of these PDFs!

Downloads

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Creative Commons 0/Public Domain: Orc Head

I am hereby officially dedicating this image to the Public Domain, free for any use by anyone.



CC0
 
 To the extent possible under law, Jason Patterson has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Orc Head. This work is published from: United States.

WTFWatch: Hawk the Slayer Fan Fiction

Author: slytherinsa (at http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6841526/1/V2-Voltan-and-the-Cardinal-Sin)

"Such a meeting on a wild and windy January night took place between the Archbishop and four guests; Hawk the Slayer and his brother, Voltan the Warlord being the principle invited guests. The archbishop had too perforce, since they would not be left out, Annis, Voltan's tiny pale lady; and Jehanne, half sister to Annis' half sister and accounted step sister by that strong minded young lady. Jehanne acted as Hawk's page while she learned enough to be called his squire. She had cut her hair short to pretend to be a boy to better protect her sister Sylvia ere Voltan had taken them into his care; and kept for the nonce her dark golden curls short and still, for reason of her slender build, passed as a boy.

Voltan scowled at the Archbishop as Hawk introduced them; their reconciliation was still of recent date and the warlord was edgy around those who had recently been his enemies."

Wat.

Seriously - WHAT? Hawk has reunited with his sixty some year old brother, whom he himself killed, at the end of the greatest sword-and-sorcery classic movie ever, Hawk the Slayer, starring Jack Palance and John Terry. Now Voltan and Hawk both have new wimminz and Voltan and Hawk are attending church? I was going to ignore this and move on, counting it as an odd quirk, being the only Hawk the Slayer fanfic on the net (well, it and another both written by this same person), but now this is such an incredibly eyebrow-raising work I'm making sure to make a note of this for anyone that is curious about what a Hawk the Slayer fan fiction work looks like, around 18 chapters each... wow. As a Slaver from the River Shale might say, "God's Teeth!"



Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Free Vector Art: Asian Woman

Over the past few years, I've been working on improving my artistic ability by doing the "static" (non-moving) equivalent of "rotoscoping" (or "roto"), which is a film/animation technique that involves drawing/painting over live action scenes, to produce crisp, clean cartoons or line art, probably the most famous of the earliest and still continuing examples, would be Walt Disney's many films, that have that "realistic" movement quality, that involved a lot of frames, rather than the handful usually associated with cartoons and drawn animation. As part of my posts here, I'm going to start posting some of the images I've put up on the Open Clip Art Gallery or other places, mostly this vectorized clipart, though I may also do some hand work as well.







Asian Woman Vector Art




This was a bit of a cheat but it turned out so well that I used it anyway. It is using the "Photocopy" or Black and White filter from a graphics program (probably GIMP, but it's been so long I forgot), and then I ran it through Inkscape (a vector graphics program that lets you trace bitmaps to make line art). I don't know where I got the picture, but judging by its quality, I'd hazard a guess it is not public domain or royalty free, so while you can use it for your own purposes, I'd recommend against trying to use it in a commercial work.


Monday, October 01, 2012

RPG Debris: Tabletop Trash or Treasure: Hot Chicks

Don't let the name, soulless poser art and sexist appearance on the cover and within fool you - there are a few good ideas within the Hot Chicks RPG. What is done with them is a tragedy, but they do exist. Ever wanted rules for building your own computer from scratch, in-game, but felt there needed to be a woman in a push-up bra on the cover of your RPG, because just couldn't quite feel like enough of a nerd without that? Hot Chicks answers the call.




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emmX9qkqSVM