The Mummy (1999) as Dungeon

The Mummy (1999) is not a good movie, and I rewatched it about a week ago. Although it is not good, it has some elements of a good dungeon in it. Here I have outlined what I can recall, at least without having to do any further research, and with some interjections.

"*" denotes elements drawn from The Mummy Returns (2001), which was also not a good movie.

Getting There

• Map to dungeon inside Puzzle Box. (meh)
• Condemned man also knows the way. (cool)
• Path illuminated by a mirage at sunrise. (meh)

There

• Front door unlocked by Puzzle Box. (cool)
• Stone tablet that says:
  • the Book of Life is below the statue of Anubis.
  • the Book of Death is below the status of Toth.
• The Book of Life is below the statue of Toth. (nice)
• The Cursed Box is below the statue of Anubis.
• Imhotep is trapped and inanimate in a sarcophagus.
• Dormant mummies entombed behind figures on the walls.
• Jewels set in the walls are actually flesh-eating scarabs.
• The river of death flows through the lowest level.
• A Sacrificial Altar next to the river of death.
• A treasure room containing lots of stuff and also the Rod of Osiris. Except for the trouble of hauling it, it is unprotected.
• A big crocodile-headed self-destruct lever closes off all exits and sinks the dungeon into the sand.
• Location in the desert makes hauling loot inconvenient.

Items

Puzzle Box

• contains the map.
• opens the front door.
• opens the Book of Death. (meh)

Cursed Box

• curse is written on it, roughly:
  1. If you open the box
  2. And Imhotep wakes up & is free
  3. He will kill you and maybe take your organs
  4. And cause bad things like plagues.
• contains Book of Death and Canopic Jars.

Book of Life

• made of gold.
• incantation 1: control mummies (not Imhotep).
• incantation 2: make Imhotep mortal.

Book of Death

• locked, key is Puzzle Box. (lame)
• incantation 1: raise Imhotep.
• incantation 2: reincarnate Imhotep's lover.

Canopic Jars

• gold.
• contain organs of Imhotep's lover.

Rod of Osiris*

• a golden scepter.
• becomes a spear.
• the only weapon capable of killing Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson in his final form.

Imhotep

Imhotep's Goals

1. Kill all who opened the cursed box. Take organs as needed.
2. Reincarnate his lover. Requires:
   • a woman sacrifice.
   • the Book of Death.
   • the Sacrificial Altar.
   • the Canopic Jars.
3. Bad things?
4. Hates and fears cats. Will flee in their presence.

Imhotep's Abilities

• Assimilate organs
• Cause plagues (blood, frogs, gnats, beasts, pestilence, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, death of firstborn)
• Summon meteors
• Turn into sand
• Command undead
• Wall of Sand with his face on it. He looks really dumb while doing it. Also works with water.*
• Speak Ancient Egyptian and Hebrew (after taking a tongue).
• Rally a mob of locals.
• Immortality, more or less.

Factions

• Americans—basically a rival adventuring party.
• Magi—honor bound to keep Imhotep dead. Apparently Muslim?
• Locals—probably want to be left alone, but also apparently love Imhotep.

Summary

There are really only two ways to mess this up: self-destruct the dungeon or awaken Imhotep. Awakening Imhotep requires (1) opening his sarcophagus, and (2) reading from the book of death. This means that if it were run straight, paranoid players might not even interact with most of the stuff outlined in the movie, and instead they'd just haul off as much treasure as possible. This need not be disappointing: the mummy is bound to hunt those who opened the Cursed Box, a likely occurrence when looting. So if some scholar somewhere reads from the Book of Death (having been sold), and some archaeologist later opens up the sarcophagus (having been made aware of its location), then the mummy will start hunting the players. Alternatively, the mummy will just start messing stuff up on a regional scale via plagues. To force interactivity while the party is in the dungeon, just have the Americans make poor decisions while the party is there I guess.

Quick "Trainstorm"

Skerples proposes a collaborative dimension-hopping train. This is a quick brainstorm about trains, to help myself and others get started.

Image Source

Plan

1. Listen to Steve Reich.
2. Read Wikipedia.
3. Discuss on Chris McDowall's OSR Discord server.

Types of Railcar

and maybe some thoughts about how they exist in an interdimensional infinite train that never stops (unless it does sometimes).

• Refrigerator cars. Unirionically called "reefers".
• Various maintenance cars. The clean the ballast, rearrange the ballast, clear the snow, distribute lubricant and herbicide, and measure the track geometry. Consider how these tasks change when the ground underneath the ballast is unknown and can change suddenly.
• Rail ambulances. Provide services to remote areas, but on an endless non-stop train, they more likely act as hospitals.
• Specialized cargo cars. Coil cars are designed specifically to carry rolled-up sheet metal. Slate waggons are designed specifically to carry slate. On a train that could be carrying any kind of exotic material, what considerations would the car carrying it need?
• Stock cars. Carrying a bunch of exotic animals across dimensions doesn't really need much explanation I think. It raises the same questions as all cargo does, but is more immediately gameable. Possibly it would act more like a zoo or a farm though, given the circumstances.
• Schnabel cars. The cargo forms an integral part of these cars, without it they're just "ends". Use this as an excuse to make the middle of a car be anything you want.
• There are all kinds of tanks and hoppers and boxcars for general cargo. Other than the futility of regularly transporting cargo on the Indefinite Express, I'm not sure what to do with these. I guess instead of regular shipping from one location to another, you might have powerful dimensional merchants who trade their wares as they can, possibly lording over several cars just for cargo. This all presupposes that the train will make stops though.
• Railroad cranes. Ostensibly used for maintenance, these ones could easily be used to snatch interesting things while thundering past them.
• Mail cars. I did not realize that the mail is actively sorted while in transit, so that it's ready to ship out when it arrives. I don't know what to do with this though.
• Dining cars. Probably more like farms or shopping malls here.
• Sleeping cars. Where people live? Possibly unremarkable.

See Also

• The Great Train Robbery
• Other Train Robberies
• The Pullman Strike
• Other Train Strikes
• Hobos

I would like to be sure that nobody thinks this is final in any way. I'm just trying to pretend that my Wikipedia binge was useful. I would hate for my interpretation of something to step on the toes of anyone else's great idea.

Hapaxes in the Ultraviolet Grasslands

At the beginning of the glossary of the Ultraviolet Grasslands (UVG), Luka asks: What have I missed? What needs more details? One way to find things that might be missing is to look for hapaxes in the work. This is not a good plan, but I tried anyway.

Process

The following stuff was done in bash. I assume some familiarity with the commands, but comment on particular decisions that I made. It could be cleaned up.

First, we need the corpus as text so that we can work with it:

> python3-pdf2txt.py -o UVG.txt UVG.pdf

Then we clean up the text, and select all the words that only appear once:

> cat UVG.txt |
tr A-Z a-z |
sed -e 's/\s/\n/g' |
sed -E 's/[][<>.,();:+?!%/©&]//g' |
sed -e "s/[‘’]/'/g" |
sed -e 's/[“”"]//g' |
sed -e 's/[–—]/-/g' |
sed -e 's/[-"'\'']$//g' |
sed -e 's/^[-"'\'']//g' |
grep -Ev "^[-0-9'd]+$" |
sort | uniq -u > UVG.hapax

Line breaks have been added for clarity. Parts of this bear closer examination:

sed -e 's/[“”"]//g' |

This could be folded into the second sed statement, but it might be useful to keep but normalize double quotes for some purposes.

sed -e 's/[-"'\'']$//g' |
sed -e 's/^[-"'\'']//g' |


Quotes and hyphens at the beginning or end of a word are unlikely to carry much information, so they are stripped. This must happen after all the dash and quote characters have been "normalized".

Lots of the words that only appear once (6832 now) are not exciting. So we'll remove all the dictionary words:

> /bin/diff -i /usr/share/dict/words UVG.hapax |
grep ">" |
cut -d " " -f2 > UVG.hapax.new

Again, line breaks have been added for clarity. The full path to diff is specified because I've otherwise aliased diff to colordiff.

Results

Of the 1612 hapaxes now left, it might be interesting to see how the characters are distributed.

> cat UVG.hapax.new | fold -c1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -gr

This gives a table of character frequency:

3223
1647	e
1295	a
1155	i
1106	o
1097	r
1016	s
1010	n
916	t
877	l
837	-

. . .

4	3
3
3	8
2	ô
2	ç
2	9
2	7
1	Ö
1	ñ
1	ë
1	â

The most common "character" is blank, and I suspect this is related to newlines (3223=2*1612-1). The other "blank" character appears to be a space that did not get stripped out initially, or which was later re-introduced. Perhaps it is some kind of other whitespace.

The most exciting thing in this table (I think) is the high occurrence of the hyphen. This means that roughly half of the "hapaxes" are likely composite words, and worth considering separately. For example:

sub-node
six-lives
noble-pillared
mercy-is-weakness
marrow-beet
curse-maddened
six-limbed
force-glass
stock-piled
self-regenerating

Disregarding hyphens, these are all words a dictionary knows, but which Luka may be using in novel ways.

The remaining (unhyphenated) words, are a mixed bag. Take this random sampling:

pyrokinetic
skalin
psionics
dustland
irshe
replicator
10x
visec
mearls
mirodar

Many of these just show the limitations of my dictionary ("pyrokinetic", "replicator"). Some of them show the limitations of the process ("10x", "jrientsblogspotcom"). Some are ad-hoc compound words ("dustland", "malicereflective"). The rest are either made-up, proper nouns, or typos, and I don't have a way to distinguish between them. It's possible that some of these were "created" by pdf2txt, which uses tunable heuristics to decide where to draw word boundaries.

If you're interested in playing with the lists, I've uploaded them here. They are split into "hyphen" and "nohyphen", and should be alphabetical.

Disclaimer & Plug

I back Luka on Patreon at the $1/mo level, which grants me access to early drafts of his projects. The version used for this project was the most recent version available to backers, but it has not been edited.

UVG is currently running a Kickstarter for a fancy printed version with editing and more art. There's a link to a free version of the manuscript there too.

Bloodring

A natural consequence of bad ideas. My entry in the Into the Odd PocketMod Jam (2019). CW: slavery, combat as sport.

Motivation

• Make gladiatorial combat interesting in a game where combat is best avoided.
• Provide an opportunity for things to get worse.
• Create something useful within the given constraints (time, form factor).

Notes

• Amounts of money are rough. Pay should be enough to motivate free gladiators, but not so much that slaves are freed too quickly.
• After first blood, combat is assumed to take turns.
• Mutilations are meant to give combat consequences between "death" and "recovery". They also convey the passage of time on days when PCs do not fight.
• Making more gladiators is easy: For captive gladiators I used 3d6. For free gladiators I used 4d6 drop lowest. For simpicity everyone starts with 1d6 HP and no mutilations.
• As a starting point for adventure it still feels lacking to me because it doesn't provide many motivations of its own and takes away a lot of the PCs' toys.
• Combat should be survivable enough that characters don't necessarily die, but unpleasant enough that PCs consider escape or revolt or other things preferable.
• Consider gambits from Moonhop or extra HP from Electric Bastionland (under "Scars").

Learnings

• The booklet was written in LibreOffice with an A7 paper size. It's apparently quite difficult to do N-up printing without a margin, so I ended up using PDFResizer.com. Had I time, I would like to use PDFjam.
• The PocketMod format really forces an economy of words. I found myself writing sentences that were barely intelligible in other contexts.
• The cover image is Piranesi. The Wound Man is Ambroise Paré.
• Printing on US letter paper, I found printing at 98% was the largest I could get before I lost things to the margins. This is why all my PocketMods are slightly off-kilter. The reasonable thing to do would be to print them all with outlines and then trim the paper to size, but that's work. Or find a printer that goes to the edges.

Files

bloodring-A7.pdf - for viewing on a screen.

bloodring-A4.pdf - for printing on A4 paper.

bloodring-US.pdf - for printing on US letter paper.

bloodring-A7.odt - for editing

About Zak

Apparently Zak S is an abusive PoS (CW: abuse, sexual violence, violence). Later today he is planning to make a statement, but what could he say?

I feel things, but obviously not nearly to the degree of his actual victims. From my place of relative privilege, what can I do? I'm not a large voice in this community, but I don't think that should excuse me.

What to do with his social media presence?

• Unfollow him on Twitter, Tumblr, G+, and Instagram, even where I am not active on these platforms.
• Unsubscribe from his podcast, and its associated media.
• Stop my Patreon contribution ($1/mo).
• Remove his blog from my sidebar and feed reader.
• Leave his Discord server. I won't be updating the Gygaxian Democracy doc anymore either.
• I don't have any of his porn, but like, I wouldn't watch it? I wouldn't watch James Deen either.

What to do with his stuff?

I've got some things of his:

• Vornheim (print/pdf)
• Maze of the Blue Medusa (print only)
• Death Frost Doom (print/pdf)
• A Red & Pleasant Land (print/pdf)
• Dial H (print)(he drew one page of it)

For now I'll keep them I guess, but I don't think I'll be using them. None of them can't be replaced by other books.

What to do with his associates?

Some of his collaborators and friends are waiting for his statement, although most of them have already distanced themselves. The ones I'm still watching are:

• LotFP. I have always thought of LotFP as an accepting place for minorities that got a bad rap from some corners because of their publicity-stunt GWARness. I believe that many of the other creators at LotFP have already cut ties with Zak, but if Jim continues to work with him, then I am not sure I can continue buying their products.
• China Miéville. China Miéville is one of my favorite authors, and has collaborated with Zak in the past. I'm not sure if they are in frequent enough contact that he would comment unprompted, but I'll certainly think much less of him if I see a future collaboration without some significant statement.

What to do with myself?

I have recommended Zak's blog to people in the past, and given his books as gifts.

• I'm attempting to reach every individual who I've recommended or gifted his stuff to to let them know, so that they can make their own informed decisions.
• On this blog, where I have linked to his blog, I am adding the rel="nofollow" property to those links.
• On posts where I have mentioned his things, I will comment with a link to this post.

I think I might know someone...

When I first moved to Buffalo and didn't know anyone in the area, I ended up staying with my girlfriend's roommate's mother's friends in the area (they were great people). When someone on the OSR discord was asking for a good contacts system I thought I would try my hand at one that reminds me of that connection. I figure this is probably half a solid contacts mechanic, so I hope someone gets use out of it.

Draft One

Roll	Relation (1d20, 1d10)	Ability (1d6)	Strength (1d8)	Weakness (1d12)
1	classmate	fence item	loaded	owe them money
2	roommate	carry stuff	trustful	addiction
3	friend	employ party	respected	snitch
4	fiance(e)	get information	loyal	hunted
5	drinking buddy	get item	manners	dumb
6	ex	teach skill	cautious	cowardly
7	landlord		learned	unwashed
8	tenant		strong	hidden
9	coworker			bad blood
10	boss			cursed
11	brother			mad
12	sister			busy
13	cousin
14	uncle
15	aunt
16	niece
17	nephew
18	mother
19	father
20	grandparent

This is what I made initially, and you can see it with a little more in the Google doc. When you have a chance to meet new contacts, you can roll up a contact at two removes (e.g. 1d20 and 1d10 under "Relation"). If that contact doesn't work out for you, add another d10 to relationship, then another d20, and so on each time you need a new contact before you can naturally make more.

Draft Two

Then I thought I'd try automating this process, because that's trendy these days. This generator owes a lot to Betty Bacontime and Spwack's work, but I had to rework it to make it do what I wanted it to.

DIE TRYING

I have had the pleasure to play in two of Spwack's DIE TRYING playtests. While I'm only talking about the DIE TRYING rules here, these can be difficult to separate from Spwack's play style. I can also only discuss the rules that I've encountered so far.

Click for the DIE TRYING rules. (Image credit: "Bogeyman")

The rules start with 7 pages of character generation. This is garbage unnecessary¹. You need two links to make a character:

• Spwack's Random Character Generator
• Optional: Character Intensifier [non sic]

This is the first great innovation in DIE TRYING: to automate character generation without loss of interest. It's 1% of the effort of rolling an OD&D character with all the nuance of a million pounds of Pathfinder splatbooks. I recommend making one now, just to see what I mean.

And yet, for all the tricks and abilities your new character will have, they will still be lacking. One of my characters started with a spell, but no magic dice. Both of my characters started with the eye of a malign entity upon them. Another party member started with a mystery egg, and no way to hatch it. Every character is very weak and readily dismemberable.

This is the core of it: DIE TRYING is a game of want. I'm sure you can starve to death in the game, but mere hunger and encumbrance and exhaustion are not its motivating factors. Instead, DIE TRYING presents a world full of interaction and interest. Then it gives you characters that have abilities, but not power, and an immediate need to fill that gap in order to survive. Where the rules shine is the lists of ways to get more power and learn new abilities. Because you will need those to live.

This leads to the other major innovation in DIE TRYING: the X system. Characters get ad-hoc Xs instead of experience. Xs are awarded for achieving things or failing terribly, for good plans and bad ideas. Xs are awarded out-of character for things like attendance, character portraits, or this review². And Xs aren't some nebulous investment in an eventual "level", they go directly towards meeting immediate needs. You can add an X to anything on your character sheet that needs more oomph behind it. I had a crowbar on its last legs, but with an X I shined it up good and now I have an acid-resistant crowbar. I appeased an ancient king, and now I have a little more leeway when dealing with it. After three Xs, my colleague's egg hatched, and now his "son" is a helpful slime that he carries with him.

In case I've been unclear (and even were I not being "compensated" for this review) I've had a genuinely great experience with the system. Especially if you're in Spwack's timezone, I believe he's still playtesting on Discord, and I recommend it.

---

1 The main reason I favor "OSR" type systems is that I find character generation to be a chore. The main thing I miss about more "bloated" systems is the bizarrely specific characters you could build, like a mutant half-elf blind seer/assassin. If this were my system, I would do it like Perl: the generator is the rules, and then relegate the whole 7 pages to an appendix.^back

2 Missed opportunity for a hot take: "DIE TRYING is a transmedia storytelling project that blurs the line between platform and experience and transcends traditional narrative frames." For real though, the same colleague with the egg got an X for opening a door with a big red "X" painted on it. We knew in advance that he would, but I'm not sure if it's because it was an obviously bad idea (it was), or if it's because it had an "X" on it.^back