Monday Pointers: January 10, 2010

D4:Clark Ashton Smith, now half off
Nightshade Books, publisher of among other things The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith is having a half off sale through January 26th. They also publish collections by Manly Wade Wellman, Glenn Cook, William Hope Hodgson, and others lauded in the OSR. They also have more modern pieces (well, Cook is modern) including Phil and Kaja Foglio's gaslamp novels.

Sadly, it looks like volume 1 of the Collected Fantasies is out of print at the publisher and thus not available at this sale. Still, volumes 2-5 for $80 plus shipping isn't to be sneezed at.

D6:Most heroes are by accident
Zak, of Playing D&D with Porn Stars (who I'm still jealous of not because his players are porn stars but because they're good players) has a system to randomly generate superheroes designed to be system agnostic (the only one I can see being hard to use with it is older V&V although the new edition with point buy will work I'm sure).

D8:Zak gets double linkage...
...with this excellent post on design specs. He's hoping to get a meme and I'm hoping people oblige him. I'll work on my own for this week for sure.

D10:Chick fight
While we're in a super's vein, check out this sample combat for the upcoming Mystery Men, an OD&D derived set of supers rules. I especially like the interplay between powers and starting level. This is very D&Dish (with high level wizards needing more experience to be the same level as a fighter) and works as a great "balance" mechanic in the classic sense (as opposed to 3.x/4th/GURPS sense).