There’s a lot of terrible Halloween music out there: fake “horror” sound effects set to Casio keyboard demo music and banal lyrics.

Here’s part of my Halloween playlist to get us started. What’s your favorite Halloween music?

jffdougan has kindly accepted my submission to his blog carnival A Night in the Lonesome October, “The House of Doctor Chamberlain.” Not only that, it’s the second entry! I’m honored.

The other entries so far include is a “charmed hero” theme and a neat set of “cultist” themes for D&D 4^th Edition, so there’s already some cool content out there. Hope you follow the carnival!

Michael Garcia’s The Lost Kingdoms is a GM aid, meant to provide a ready-to-use framework for a typical fantasy kingdom.

And that is its biggest problem.

On the one hand, The Lost Kingdoms may be useful for new GMs who want a generic fantasy town with the barest bones of backstory. The setting’s background–wild kingdoms locked away behind a gate, recently re-opened for adventurers–is a great idea. The document lists a few common locations–a tavern, a weapons shop, a general store, several temples, etc.–each with a paragraph or two of basic information.

On the other hand, who wants to adventure in a generic fantasy town?

However, there’s not enough detail in The Lost Kingdoms to raise any of its contents to life, and what does exist should be easily imagined by any GM. Do I need someone to tell me that my town has a weapons shop? If the players need one, I can just say “Yes, there’s a weapons shop.” The meager information provided in the shop’s description (that it’s run by ”a very well-known pair of Dwarf brothers”) could just as easily be re-imagined.

Worse, the book’s naming hurt my brain. Most places in town have deliberately generic names, like Apothecary and Inn, but the town square is named Statdplatz. Areas of exploration are given names that sit uncomfortably between generic and specific, like Edge Mountains, Morning Mountains, Crystal Lake, and Wasted Sands.

And the emperor who unsealed the gate? Bob the Magnificent. It just jars.

To top it off, the last page refers to ”the awesome random encounter chart which I also provide,” which I can’t find anywhere in the book.

Even at its current $0.99 price, I can’t recommend The Lost Kingdoms. What’s here is too generic and weirdly named to be useful.

I had the good fortune to play a game using the free Risus “everything RPG system” as part of DC Gameday this year.

Risus is very generic, which is its key strength. The system can be explained in two short paragraphs, which I will now attempt to do.

Each character is made up of clichés, each of which gets 1 to 4 dice. Each character has a total of 10 dice to distribute amongst clichés. You can add a ”hook” (interesting backstory) to your character for an extra die.

To attempt an action, choose a cliché and roll that number of dice. Add the result (rolling 3, 4, and 4 results in 11); if you meet or beat a target difficulty number, you succeed. If you fail during a conflict, remove one die in that cliché for the rest of the conflict; if you lose all your dice in one cliché, you lose the conflict. You can also “team up” to assist a team leader, by rolling one cliché’s dice and adding all the sixes you roll to the team leader’s roll.

'John Carter of Mars' (c) artmessiah on DeviantArt

Our game was a Flash Gordon-style story, set in a garden party on Venus. The cast was as follows:

• An arrogant spaceship captain (think Zap Branigan)
• An ace reporter
• A Robby the Robot-style robot
• A slightly mad professor
• A spunky female hover-limo driver
• A femme fetale

We had an excellent group; people were throwing ideas out and actively playing. Unfortunately, though we raced after the mad Moon Men, we were unable to complete the story in time.

Risus is a flexible and straightforward system that struck me as easy to play and easy to GM. Opposed actions are against other characters’ clichés. At most, you’re rolling a couple of dice and adding the result. Boom.

Download Risus

'Dice' by jamesrbowe on Flickr

I suggested on #4eDnD that we organize an online group to play different, interesting games every week. We’d focus on trying out new things, but could certainly play the same system a couple weeks in a row if we felt that was worthwhile.

I’m pleased to announce the first session:

When: Friday, 21 October 2011, starting at 7:00pm Eastern Time

Where: Google+ Hangout. Make sure to circle me.

System: Dresden Files. You will not need to own a copy of the rules to play. We’ll create characters and define the setting during the session.

Signing up: Either leave a comment on this blog post, or join the Yahoo! group and add a record to the database table for this game.

Spent a good chunk of last night reading It’s All Too Much, based on a recommendation from Merlin Mann on the ”Back to Work” podcast.

It’s an excellent, kick-in-the-butt response to having too much stuff, and guides the reader through ways of tossing out a lot of it.

I was inspired by this image of Steve Jobs, way back in the day:

This was his apartment. He was a millionaire at the time this photo was taken.

So, I tossed a whole lot of things yesterday. Piled up some of it for Goodwill; the rest will go away. I’ll be free of it. Time to focus.