How Do You Know it's a Drummer at your Door?

The knock speeds up and he comes in off-time!

Ba-dum tiss?  Ba-dum tiss.

 

I’ve always wanted to do a series on musicians that I think are just fucking amazing.  My criteria for choosing a musician is somewhat fluid, but mostly has to do with how distinctive I think they are stylistically.  It also has to do with guys I think might be slightly underappreciated for what they do. But the main thing is that all of these guys have a really distinctive style – as soon as you hear them you can tell who it is.

Drummers are up first.

 

Andrew Dymond / Andre Diamant (DURACELL)

This British-French kid uses a triggered kit hooked up to a synth and becomes a one man band playing hardcore punk chiptune stuff from video games that were popular when I was a kid.  Which is cool enough, but holy fucking SHIT the energy he brings is just amazing.  This is the first thing I ever saw with him in it, and the sound quality is a little rough, but I love it for so many reasons.  First of all, you can clearly see him playing (for a given value of clearly – he’s often moving so fast that shit’s just a blur).  You also see him adjust his setup from time to time, which I find endearing.

But last and not least, even if you deleted all the triggered stuff, this would be some of the fastest and most intense drumming I think I have ever been exposed to, and I spent large parts of the 90’s at death metal shows.

Seriously, if you can’t be bothered to watch anything else, 8:00 to 8:40.  He just EXPLODES, what he does here is drumming PERFECTION.  It’s better in context and I encourage you to watch the whole fucking thing, but if you don’t listen to anything else from this post, make it that, holy fuck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QfwKqy3LyY

 

Billy Cobham (MILES DAVIS, MAHAVISHNU ORCHESTRA)

Billy has been on too much stuff to list it all here.  He was the drummer for most of Miles Davis’ later stuff and worked with Stanley Clarke (who we might talk about a little when I get to bass players).  Hell he even worked with Peter Gabriel on the soundtrack for The Last Temptation of Christ, so he’s not exactly underappreciated, but he is absolutely worth knowing about.  Again, I’ve chosen something that is incredibly fast – but Billy has a really light touch and it sounds crisp instead of heavy (and I mean that in the best way possible).  There’s a bit at 4:19 where he starts hitting a china cymbal repeatedly and you wonder where the fuck he was keeping the extra arm.  If you like this and want to see him actually play, look up the live version of Awakening, same band – The Mahavishnu Orchestra.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boOu0L45M44

Damon Che (DON CABALLERO)

Damon’s main band is Don Caballero – these are the first guys I ever heard the term “math rock” applied to.  He’s nicknamed the Octopus and it will be easy to see why.  The first time I saw these guys live I was watching him set up.  Almost all drummers have a rug they put their bass drum or drums on, usually with a rubber bottom, to keep them from scooting away (or at least all the drummers I ever played with had something like this).  One of the guys I played with a lot used to weight down the rug with cinderblocks.  He played really hard.  Che is the first drummer I ever saw who nailed his rug to the stage. There are so so many things I could pick from for this band that showcase how insanely talented this guy is.  It is really really hard for me to pick just one.  And I'll probably come back to them when I talk about guitar players - Ian Williams, who went on to play with Battles, is almost as distinctive as Damon is. The ability of these guys to not listen to each other while they listen to each other is amazing. As with all of Che's playing, this is a moving animal, never settled, always twisting and turning and looking about itself for something to sink its teeth into, and I love that about his work. And the intro count in this thing is one of my favorite little moments in rock:

Guitarist: One!

Drummer: One!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPmkQ_heOME

OK, ok one more from Che because he’s that good.  Also the song title is fuckin great and if you get through this you’ll understand the tiss and the ting a little better than you do now, I promise.  The ride cymbal that kicks in around 3:16ish - oof.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kcb8aov3zt0

 

Joe Warlord (USURPER, BONES)

Last one up for now will be Joe Schafer, also known as Joe Warlord.  I will have to admit a bias here – the guys in this band were a couple of years older than me and most of the folks I hung out with, but they are from the same general area and went to the first high school I got expelled from, and I have very fond memories of hanging out in their jam room and smoking pot at like 14 years old.  They always played an incredibly heavy brand of metal, and as a kid I was really really into aggressive music, metal and punk especially.  They went on to do a kind of semi-pro thing, a lot of touring with bands like Cradle of Filth, Christian Death, and Mercyful Fate, as well as another band that came out of the local scene, Macabre.  Anyway, Joe is a fucking beast.  You could pretty much pick anything they have done and it would be remarkable, but this thing is nuts, especially towards the end.  Even if you don’t care for metal, I encourage you to kind of bite down and listen from 6:30 on, and pay close attention to the change up around 7:20 when it goes double-time.  It is inhumanly fast.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0nTBUFIq0s

That's it for now - not sure whether it'll be bass players or guitarists next.  Probably bass players.

Last Dungeon

A while back, a couple of guys at work approached me one day and basically said “We heard you were a fun DM will you run a game for us?” They wanted to play D&D.  Two of them had played in the past, but were pretty new to it, two had never really played any RPGs.  I thought it would be fun and expected it to last a couple of months.  They wanted to us the newest rules, and I had no major objections.  I didn’t mind giving it a try, especially considering that I really didn’t expect it to last a long time.

That was over four years ago.  At this point the characters are level 15 (some other time I may do a really whiny post about high level play in 5e), and I have got them to what will be the final dungeon in this campaign.  The first adventure was a hire from a pig farmer who had been missing livestock and it turned out he had an orc problem.  Then there was a haunted manse (basically I took the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh and changed it quite a bit so that it was more to my taste and fit the 5e ruleset).  A couple of custom dungeons followed that, and then a trip to the Deep Carbon Observatory.  After DCO, I ran two more custom dungeons, a weird one that was a bunch of towers and another one that was an attempt to do horror in D&D and which worked fairly well!  I got my players to buy in, and it was a lot of work, but I split them up and ran one on one sessions for a few weeks until they met up again.  I did a write up on this blog of that one, called Facility Designate 339-19, and posted a link to a google drive folder with all the material in it.  After that I took them through another custom dungeon and then I dumped them into the Maze of the Blue Medusa, which was fun to run.  Then, the dungeon I ran for them just before this was mostly procedurally generated and combat heavy.  It was ok, and I think the players had fun with it, but it was not my finest moment, and I’d like to end things with something much more substantial and memorable.  So I am back to planning and am taking the time to write up the last dungeon.

I have some maps, and the monsters have been more or less determined, but I’d really like to put in some interesting / fun puzzles and traps and encounters that need some thought.  I’ve been scouring the internet in search of stuff like this, but if anyone out there has good resources, or just a favorite trap / encounter / puzzle from an RPG, please tell me about it, either in the comments or you can email me (dsulli42 at geemail dot com).  I’d love to hear about stuff you found particularly memorable.

One idea that I love, (not mine, but I can't recall where I saw it) but will probably not use in this particular dungeon (it’s hard to see how it would fit in) – is a dungeon where the players have the ability to change the seasons to change conditions or where the dungeon is on some sort of accelerated seasonal change (each season is six hours or something).  Changing to winter may freeze a previously uncrossable pool of water, spring may melt ice that was blocking a doorway, summer may allow the “sun’s” rays to be focused to light a fire in a place that cannot otherwise be accessed and which triggers something else to happen, or the autumn may reveal a necessary clue previously hidden by leaves or hanging ice.  I am going to use this SOMEWHERE – probably in one of the next campaigns I run, probably for lower-level characters (no higher than four or so) – but it simply doesn’t fit right now and the PCs have too many alternate ways to solve problems like these.

Anyway, I would like to give this party a memorable last dungeon and I would love love love to hear one or two of your favorite traps, tricks, puzzles, or encounters.

 

It Ain’t Alright

The band I played that gig with back in September has continued to play and it has been really rewarding and honestly a lot of fun.  We did a LOT of recording at one point, more than a hundred songs worth, and one of the guys in the band decided to remaster some of the old stuff.  It’s come out pretty nice! At some point all this stuff will be up on Spotify, but I wanted to share a track and decided on this tune, called It Ain’t Alright, which goes into a cover of Pink Floyd’s Interstellar Overdrive and has a nice period of that funky drug experience music I love so much before resolving in what, to me at least, is an incredibly satisfying way.  I had nothing to do with writing this thing – I think it was composed by the guitar player for Rights of the Accused for a band our keyboard player was in with him called Think Freud (I think – though I could be wrong, and I think the name of the original band was why we added the Interstellar Overdrive cover), and of course Interstellar Overdrive was written by Pink Floyd.  I used to LOVE playing this thing (sans the Floyd cover).  It’s really simple and even drunk it wasn’t that hard and I liked staggering all over the stage while we played this thing (a far cry from my most recent gig where I was still so out of practice all I could do was lock eyes on the fretboard to try to make sure I didn’t screw up – but if we play again, that will have changed, I'm finally starting to get back to where I was).

The beginning of this is almost like Anarchy in the UK, and I think that’s probably intentional.  A few other reasons I always liked this one - first, you can tell it was written by a guitar player.  Being that the guy who sings and plays keys wrote a lot of the material we play, it noticeably lacks things like a fucking E flat (typically I use standard tuning to E and whenever an E flat comes up I have to go up the neck when I want to go down and I often wind up restructuring what I am playing entirely to account for this). Second, you can be as aggressive or as laid back as you want with the picking.  It's hard to hear on the recording because we are using so much distortion, but once the intro walkdown is finished, Leanne (other guitarist at the time) and I are both playing a da-digadiga-da-digadiga-da da pattern that's pretty goddamn vigorous, but it sounds just fine with slower picking if you run outta gas.

Instant Kafka · It Ain't Alright - Interstellar Overdrive

https://soundcloud.com/dan-sullivan-977382186/it-aint-alright-interstellar-overdrive

I don't think I can overstate how good it has been for my overall mood and mental health to have this outlet.  We've been working up a bunch of new material, which has been really engaging and satisfying.  We're not at the point where it's worth laying anything down other than on a phone or something just to capture the ideas, but we're getting close with  few things. But if anything is gonna keep me out of the hole I usually find myself in at this time of year, it'll probably be playing stupidly loud rock n roll.

Astrology in RPGs

Has anyone heard of a system that uses astrology to determine character stats and characteristics? Wait.  Let me say first that I think astrology is basically a crock of horseshit.  But it's still kinda fun and interesting, and some systems get really really involved.  A few things converged on this topic recently - Patrick Stuart's announcement of Gackling Moon made me think about this a little, along with a discussion about Tekumel I eavesdropped on (I always think of the planets around Tekumel because the whole arrangement is so weird), and where one of the luminaries was named for Lovecraft / Clark Ashton Smith's Dreamlands reflection of Saturn, Cykranosh (and who runs the Satrap of Saturn blog). I really like the Book of Ebon Bindings, and one of my favorite things about it is the way it links demons with certain stars, and it would be interesting to incorporate that as well.  I started making a generator for heavenly bodies.  At the moment it is pretty basic, just craps out a few details about a star. I'd like to take it a step further maybe and put something together that could create a game world's solar system, major constellations and stars, and a zodiac of sorts, then combine everything into a generator that spit out a character at you, complete with ability scores and a few major personality traits (which the player could chose to lean into or ignore if they wished). Solomon VK did a nice post on star names here.

I think what I want is probably beyond the ability of the HTML template generators I'm capable of using to do - essentially generating a full Astrological system and doing a natal chart designed to give a player a character to work with as well as linking the stars to certain ultra-powerful beings, whether malevolent or benign.

But for what it is worth here's the generator as it stands so far, just a very simple thing that spits out a star, its color, and gives a little factoid about it.  More to come, I hope.

INQ 28

There's been a long lull for me in mini work while GW pulled all the Adeptus Titanicus stuff for reboxing into Legions Imperialis.  The good news there is that there is a lot more terrain to choose from all of a sudden, and some additional tiles for a gameboard that I may pick up at some point (goddamn they are pricey though, for bits of plastic).  Anyway, I haven't played 40k for several years, but I have a pretty decent collection of bits and unbuilt models from when I was playing, and I started messing with some of them one day out of boredom while sitting in yet another online meeting at work.  I've always been kind of fascinated with kitbashing and conversion of minis.  I've started with an inquisitor, built partially from Greyfax, a Skitarii Sicarian, and the Crusader model from one of the Blackstone Fortress expansions, along with some other sundry stuff.  It is an interesting process, and one that can easily get me out of myself, which is valuable in and of itself to me.

If you have not done so, the INQ 28 scene in general is worth checking out.  I have linked it before but in particular the fanzine 28 is really, really good.  If nothing else, the point-counterpoint articles in issue four on whether minis are art or not is kind of fascinating, and brings up the Chapman brothers' Hell (which apparently burned up in a warehouse fire and was replaced by a new diorama they called Fucking Hell) as an example.  It's a fascinating question.  I don't have a definitive opinion on the matter but I think I lean towards the idea, that yes, minis can be art.  For me the really good stuff happens when someone goes off-script a bit and invents their own pieces of lore (or uses the minis in a completely original way, perhaps not for gaming at all), but even seeing an incredibly well-done "textbook" army feels to me as though it might qualify.