Most of my conceptual brewing is like panning for gold: rolling the idea over in my head again and again to refine it before putting pen to paper (or keyboard to screen) and shaping it into something hopefully understandable to my fellow man
Other times, a concept strikes out of the blue, arriving almost fully formed and ready to be developed. This was one such occasion. As I was having breakfast and saw a meme comparing American to Japanese isekai, it hit me…
Art was generated using Flux Schnell
“Vision’s mostly a lie anyway,” he continued. “We don’t really see anything except a few hi-res degrees where the eye focuses. Everything else is just peripheral blur—light and motion. Motion draws the focus. And your eyes jiggle all the time, did you know that, Keeton? Saccades, they’re called. Blurs the image. The movement’s way too fast for the brain to integrate, so your eye just—shuts down between pauses.
The troll shambled closer. He was perhaps eight feet tall, perhaps more. His forward stoop, with arms dangling past thick claw-footed legs to the ground, made it hard to tell. The hairless green skin moved upon his body. His head was a gash of a mouth, a yard-long nose, and two eyes which were black pools, without pupil or white, eyes which drank the feeble torchlight and never gave back a gleam.
This is going to be a short and to the point mechanical article about my homebrew redesign of vampires in Basic Fantasy. As well, because Halloween is coming up I thought I’d cover a couple monsters and give them some hefty overhauls.
In standard Basic Fantasy, vampires are an extremely dangerous foe to fight, having access to Level draining and being immune to all non-magical weapons.
This makes them very deadly but somewhat one note, they are what some might call a trick monster, they are nasty to fight unless you know their weakness or singular trick they do.
“An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity,”
Terry Davis, Creator of Temple OS. This article more exists for the sake of completeness and a bit more perspective on my introduction to the OSR.
My conversion from the 5th edition D&D to Old school D&D was a long, yet remarkably simple one. It involved very little convincing and at the same time very hard fought internalization.
We forgo doing things which we objectively known are better or more efficient because we think the effort expended to make that change is costly.
