Listen here, folks! Listen here
Dungeons and Dragons Pronunciation Guide – Toren’s Guide to Everything (Podcast)
Toren’s Birthday/CRIMBO/Boxing Week Original Art Sale!
UPDATE! EXTENDED: Offering these at the $51 sale prices from Dec 19-31 2021
I’m 51 this June and to celebrate I’m offering all of these original D&D and other RPG pencil/ink drawings for only $51* each! I’ll be posting new pieces every couple of days
*(USD, unless you’re in Vancouver and can pick up, then $51 CAD)
CONTACT ME at thickets@uniserve.com
You can see more D&D art going all the way back to AD&D/2nd edition at https://torenatkinson.com/dungeons-and-dragons-original-art/
From BONDS OF MAGIC (Malhavoc Press)
From MINDSCAPES: BEASTS OF THE ID (Malhavoc Press)
From MONSTERS OF THE MIND (Green Ronin)
From CAVALIER HANDBOOK (Green Ronin)
From Temple Quarter (Game Mechanics/Green Ronin)
From Advanced Players Manual (Green Ronin)
From Advanced Bestiary (Green Ronin 2004)
From Traps & Treachery (Fantasy Flight 2002)
From Minions (Chaosium, Call of Cthulhu)
From Monte Cook Presents: Year’s Best d20 (Malhavoc Press)
From Wrath and Rage: A Guidebook to Orcs, published by Green Ronin
From Spaceship Zero: The Roleplaying Game (2001 Green Ronin)
From Liber Bestarius (Eden Studios 2003)
From Egyptian Adventures: Hamunaptra (3rd edition, Green Ronin Publishing)
From Black Sails Over Freeport (Green Ronin)
From Book of the Righteous (Green Ronin)
From Monte Cook’s Arcana Unearthed D&D 3rd edition pencil on paper
From Bastards & Bloodlines D&D 3rd edition (Green Ronin Publishing) pencil on paper:
From Black Company (Green Ronin Publishing):
Book of Fiends (Green Ronin Publishing)
Aasimar and Tiefling: A Guidebook to the Planetouched (Green Ronin)
Who Exactly Are You Going To Call?
I saw Ghostbusters: Afterlife. I liked most of it, but as a critic and as a Ghostbusters fan there was some stuff that rubbed me the wrong way, and so I’ve come to the internet to write it down.
You want spoilers? Cuz I got spoilers!
A lot of things in this film are both a strength and a weakness. Almost every relationship in the film seems surface level. Nobody connects in any real way except the young girl Phoebe and Egon’s ghost, which they do without any words. The mother is physically there, but not emotionally. She is both disinterested and uninteresting. She is blasé, takes no interest in her kids, and takes every opportunity to tell them (and everyone else) what a terrible parent Egon was. Which is weird for fans of the Ghostbusters and also seems like bad parenting maybe?
The ghost plot is a rehash of the first film, so not much original here and an overabundance of member-berries for old nerds like me. So if that is something you’re looking for, they got you covered – everything from Slimer 2.0 to Stay Puft 2.0 to “who you gonna call” and “are you a god?” I did like the Evo Shandor stuff and mossssst of it worked. I really liked that J.K. Simmons only got one line but the Evo in a box thing was a bit confusing, and I don’t understand why the terror dogs were just sitting around on the sidelines while Gozer was getting smoked by particle throwers.
The sudden deus ex machina of the original Ghostbusters was another strength and weakness. I mean, we all want to see those characters again and what they are up to, but showing up so suddenly to take agency away from the other characters legitimately took me out of the story. It kind of ruined the movie to be perfectly honest? That said, I thought their characters were on point and well-scripted. And I still have mixed feelings about CG-resurrection of Harold Ramis, which I thought they milked about 40% too much in the final scenes. But there were tears, so yeah, they got me.
Also, why, OH WHY did Egon lead Phoebe to release Vinz Clortho from the ghost trap? Didn’t that put them all in terribly deadly danger? I guess maybe it was part of his master plan but jeez, if you can move chess pieces and lamps, how about a pencil on a piece of paper?
The Elmer Bernstein music cues, identical to the original, brought back many memories, what with the original Ghostbusters being one of my most-watched films of all time, and I liked the design of Slimer, er, I mean MUNCHER and how well the animators pulled off its facial features.
Perhaps the thing Ghostbusters: Afterlife was most successful at was getting me to want to watch the original again, as well as The Real Ghostbusters cartoon…especially the “Egon’s Ghost” episode, which is excellent.
What other Real Ghostbusters episodes are excellent, since I have you here? Sounds like a great time to make a top 6 list!
- Collect Call of Cathulhu, not just because they fight Cthulhu, but a well-crafted story by Michael Reaves.
- Mr. Sandman, Dream Me A Dream One of the entities that causes people to fall asleep and dream goes rogue and tries to put the whole world to sleep so there will be no more wars or conflict. Dreams come to life and IT’S WHACKED!
- Ragnarok and Roll – a jilted lover tries to bring about the end of the world, written by J. Michael Straczynski
- When Hallowe-en Was Forever: Samhain, the spirit of Hallowe’en, stops the clocks so that Hallowe’en will last forever. Written by J. Michael Straczynski
- Slimer, is That You? Egon and Slimer have their brains swapped, with hilarious results.
- and of course Egon’s Ghost, in which an accident ends up sending Egon to the netherworld. The guys have to go in and rescue him. Includes a terror dog!
Honorable mentions: Knock Knock; The Boogieman Cometh; Night Game; The Thing in Mrs. Faversham’s Attic; Citizen Ghost; and Take Two – the crew is called to California to help make the Ghostbusters Movie
Most of these are available to stream somewhere or other
Overdue Who Review: The Invisible Enemy
Season 15, 1977 (4 parts)
Here’s a weird one – a virus that transmits through eye lightning gives people a silver fuzz on their face and hands and they become mind-controlled by the viral “nucleus” which looks like a prawn. Even the Doctor becomes infected but Leela is immune because she’s all instinct, whereas the virus needs intelligence. Seems like a backhanded compliment to me.
At a space hospital, we are introduced to K-9 the robot dog and the Doctor and Leela are cloned, and their clones shrink down Fantastic Voyage style to take care of the prawn monster inside the original Doctor. But the prawn uses the same size-changing technology to embiggen itself and now the invisible enemy is very very visible. And makes bad decisions. The professor is a fun character. The story starts out strong but kind of fizzles out. Clever use of some cool-looking visors to hide infection and the Doctor’s ridiculously long scarf is used as a tether in this episode.
Next up: Image of the Fendahl
Overdue Who Review: The Power or the Daleks
“When I say ‘run,’ run like a rabbit…”
4th season; Season 1966; six 1/2 hour episodes.
Partway through the season, the Doctor regenerates for the very first time, and we enter the Patrick Troughton era. This is an exemplary Who episode, even though the original films were lost and this story was reconstructed in 2016 using the original audio and animation (re-finessed in 2020, which is actually the year that the story is set).
An Earth colony on the planet Vulcan is terrorized by Daleks after an overzealous scientist reanimates them from an inert space capsule. The scientist sounds like a muppet performed by Terry Jones. The new Doctor seems a bit queer (not gay but acting erratically) and emotionally distant from his companions, and the story gets intensely dark by episode 6.
The animation is quite limited, you can hear a lot of action happening in the audio, especially during the climax, but it is not reflected in the animation. This limitation of the human characters is actually offset by doing away with the limits of the daleks on a practical set. Instead of having the few dalek models moving about with cardboard cutout of a dalek crowd behind them, it’s like these guys were designed to be made into 3-D models and replicated in this environment. So that at least works better than the original!
One of my favourite episodes!
Overdue Who Review: Horror At Fang Rock
Season 15, 1977
In which I learned about the Schermuly pistol rocket apparatus (see below).
Horror At Fang Rock is probably the Who episode I’ve seen the most times, and therefor have the most memories of, with the possible exception of “Unearthly Child.” It’s also one of the most suited to a Call of Cthulhu RPG adventure – a few people in a lighthouse are victimized by an alien blob that is trying to call its fleet of spaceships to decimate the planet.
Interesting and well portrayed cast of characters, but don’t get too attached to anyone. e. Includes the folksy old-timer who believes in sea monsters, who, to the actors credit, becomes the monster, after a fashion. Castaways include sleazy stock broker reminiscent of Carter Burke in Aliens, and the high-strung secretary who provides more than enough screaming and fainting spells until her inevitable demise.
Leela does some fine companioning in this episode, unlike previous eps her ideas and actions are not pooh-poohed by the Doctor and all the men. She’s in control and in her element, fighting monsters. This is also the episode where her eyes change colour, because actor Louise Jameson was tired of wearing brown contact lenses for the character, so they wrote a bit into the script where she was blinded, but when she recovered her eyes became blue. Why they would care what colour her eyes were when the character was introduced is beyond me.
All in all a fun, spooky bottle episode that could serve as a great introduction to Doctor Who for folks who like period horror.
Next up: The Invisible Enemy
Overdue Who Review: Talons of Weng-Chiang
Final episode of Season 14, 1977
So I’ve never actually seen Phantom of the Opera but I expect if you threw in a dash of Jack the Ripper, ‘Oriental’ racism, and an enemy from another time this would fit the bill.
This is a six-part serial that could have been compressed to 4. Briefly, real British actor John Bennet puts on yellowface to portray evil “Chinee” (to quote the local copper) actor Li H’san Chang, a hypnotist with an animated ventriloquist dummy (that we later learn is part pig). They both serve a Chinese god Weng-Chiang who of course isn’t actually a Chinese god but a despot from the future. The Doctor refers to him as the Butcher of Brisbane so I guess he’s a (white) Australian?
Anyway this is a series of Leela having good ideas and actions that either end with her inconceivably failing to stab someone in the back after successfully sneaking up on them, or simply being told by men to not get involved because it’s too dangerous for a woman (even the Doctor, who knows she’s a capable warrior).
There are several actual Asian actors, though they all play opium-addicted thugs. Racism aside, the intrigue and characters are mostly enjoyable, although the time despot chews almost as much scenery as Jeremy Irons in the Dungeons and Dragons movie.
The writing includes lines like “In my country we have saying: Man who goes too quickly may step in bear trap” and “On my oath, you wouldn’t want that served with onions. Never seen anything like it in all my puff. Oh, make an ‘orse sick, that would.”
Next up: The Horror At Fang Rock
Voice Acting Tips for Dungeon Masters From An Actual Voice Actor
Hi! I’m Toren Atkinson! In addition to being a Dungeon Master and an illustrator for D&D and other RPGs, I’m also a professional voice actor! I’ve done voices for video games, cartoons and commercials.
While voice acting is not necessary to be a good DM (or player), I think we can all agree it adds a lot to keep characters lively and memorable. But I’ve heard a lot of people say that they just can’t do voices. And to that I say – you can! And I’m here to help!
Let me tell you my secret: If you’re like me, you’ve got a notebook that you bring with you to your gaming sessions. In my own notebook – on the last page (the back inside cover, in fact) – I have a list of character voices that I am comfortable with (I’ve included it below). Every time I need a new non-player character to interact with the players, I flip to that page and pick a voice that’s suitable, and when I’m not in the thick of roleplay, I’ll remember to make a note beside that voice as to which character it belongs to, so that if the players come across that NPC again, I can refer to the list and keep things consistent. Some of the voices are impressions of celebrities or existing film & TV characters, while others use broad accents or my own repertoire of character voices.
“But Toren,” you say, “I’m not a professional voice actor. I can’t do impressions or accents!”
There are a lot of ways to provide vocal character without doing accents or impressions. Let’s say you’ve got an English noble character, but you can’t do a British accent to save your life! Well, you can try to simply use refined, proper diction. It helps if you literally look down your nose at your players while doing so. Conversely, for a lowlife dock monkey, slurring your words and talking in slang, with every second word a profanity can absolutely get a great character across (for added fun, they don’t have to be offensive or modern curse words)
You can change your cadence – maybe someone speaks super quickly with run-on-sentences, with eyes darting and face twitching. Or, they speak robotically with the same emphasis of every syllable. Or portray the always bored and/or “too cool for school” cynic – who speaks in slowly and monotone, like Daria or the teacher from Ferric Bueller’s Day Off (“Bueller…Bueller…Bueller…”). Perhaps an old shell-shocked veteran speaks softly while staring into the middle distance. Another character speaks only in whispers, but they do so with wild enthusiasm. You can whisper, can’t you? Meanwhile there’s that guy who doesn’t have an ‘inside voice,’ always talking to you as if you’re on the other side of the street. And how about the character who is chronically constipated, with the strain coming through in their voice?
An old voice actors trick is to actually change your voice by physically interacting with your face, whether it be holding your nose, pulling your cheek out with a finger, or whathaveyou.
Don’t overstay your welcome.
For throwaway NPCs a strident or grating voice can be amusing and memorable, but for main NPCs that the players will see over and over, I recommend not going over the top. Nobody wants to hear your Gilbert Gottfried or Elmo impression for 3 hours.
It needs to be said: avoid offensive caricatures. My rule is if a player of a minority was at my table (let’s say a South Asian) and I did a stereotypical caricature of that minority (Apu, for example), would I feel weird? If the answer is yes – don’t do it. This goes for sexual preference and those with any kind of disability as well. Your mileage may vary.
And as always, be mindful of others within earshot of your game. After overusing ‘shouty guy’ in your friends living room you may find you no longer have a place to play.
This is the list that I use. I hope that it will inspire you to try something new next session!
Stereotypical Brooklyn guy
Stereotypical Canadian guy, eh? (McKenzie Brothers)
Stereotypical Scandinavian
Stereotypical Russian
Stereotypical Australian/Steve Irwin/Bruce
Stereotypical Italian/Mario
Yarrrr stereotypical pirate voice
Edward G Robinson
James Mason
Alec Guinness
Wolfman Jack
Sir Ian McKellan
David Attenborough
Dracula (Bela Lugosi)
Tim Curry
Tom Waits/Nick Nolte
Jason Statham/Ray Winstone
Christopher Lloyd
Tracy Morgan
Billy Connolly
Inigo Montoya
Charlton Heston
Lennie from Mice and Men (“I will call him George”) AKA Patrick Star
Bane
Emperor Palpatine
Dustin Hoffman
Ricardo Montalban
Christopher Walken
Christoff Walz
Kennedy/Mayor Quimby
Morgan Freeman
Jay Baruschel
Brando
Beavis/Butthead
Montgomery Burns
Transatlantic accent
Elvis
Watto (Star Wars)
Ed Wynn (Mad Hatter/Mayor McCheese)
Brian Blessed/John Rhys-Davies
Jesse Ventura
Bob Dylan
Kermit the Frog
Hagrid (Harry Potter)
Chris Rock
Wallace Shawn
Jack Nicholson
Clint Eastwood
Sean Bean
Korg (Taika Waititi)
Harvey Fierstein
Drunken Dudley Moore
Thurston Howell the 3rd
Samuel L Jackson
Cobra Commander
William Shatner/Zap Brannigan
Gomer Pyle
Grimlock (Transformers)
Jimmy Stewart
Maude Flanders/Fargo
Alice Glick/Maude Frickert/Old Lady
Monty Python old British lady
Teen with Cracking Voice
Fat Albert
Hank Hill
Boomhauer (King of the Hill)
Al Pacino
Owen Wilson
Jack Sparrow
Michael Caine
Aku/Mako
Robin Leach
Hippie surfer dude
Caesar with lisp (Life of Brian)
Ozzy Osbourne
Comic Book Guy (Simpsons)
Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel (Simpsons)
Doctor Girlfriend (Venture Bros)
Red Skull
Agent Smith/Hugo Weaving
Alan Rickman
Ahnold
Raphael (Sarcastic clerk from The Simpsons)
Humphrey Bogart
James Cagney
Peter Lorre
Jack Palance
Marvin the Martian
Lumpy Space Princess (Adventure Time)
Southern Belle/Tree Trunks (Adventure Time)
Mayor of Townsville (Powerpuff Girls)
Power Enterprise: The Voyage Continues
Today John Burton, Chris Woods, Peyton Woods, Warren Banks and I played what I think was the 285th session of Power Enterprise the roleplaying game.
It was a real trip revisiting this game that I created in the 80’s and refined over the years, and playing with the original crew and a representative from the new generation!
How to GM 
269 DO YOU BELIEVE IN MAGIC? (cont’d from 268) (2021/08/28)
The lead Mouvetran “thinker” alien speaks to the group via the ‘flora-link’ attached to the back of Spykos’ head. The thinker suggests the group come to the Mouvetran base and be a part of the research. It explains “Perhaps if we join our minds together we can accomplish great things. Unlock the secrets of the planes. I’ve already done the hard part, I’ve found a way to capture magic. I understand some creatures of this realm are immortal, impervious to harm and death, or they were before I took their magic. Perhaps we can find a way to harness these powers and bestow them upon yourselves and your collective.” The group agrees and will head towards the base which is at the edge of the big lake to the East. They then disconnect the flora-link and Spykos is disoriented but okay.
Olympus’ doggy notices something in the woods behind them, and it is discovered that a group of elflings has followed them, offering to help them with whatever their quest is, along with some delicious vitality-giving berries. The group lets them tag along. Nomad offers some of his magic items, a flame-throwing crossbow and an invisibility cloak, to the earthlings, since the foes are invisible to his senses. Olympus takes the cloak.
When they reach the lake they see a towering tripod-like vessel, 100’ high or more, with the doors open and a bunch of Mouvetrans waiting for them. Nomad, who cannot see the mouvetrans or the ship, does detect a roiling energy ball hovering above the lake, and the group deduces that there’s some magical nexus in the top level of the base. Olympus uses the invisibility cloak to sneak into the vessel, which is surprisingly de-powered and all the doors are in the open position. He climbs up the shaft of a non-operational lift, and sees a research lab with bagmen, geranium men, minijens, and katyr technicians. He senses the thinker and the thinker psionically detects him as well, and asks him to wear a flora-link as a gesture of good faith. Olympus rebuffs the offer but offers to go get the rest of his group. When he climbs back down to the doorway, he sees a human worker with a flora-link, telling the Tenejen that she should be there to help facilitate communication with the Earthlings.
Solaris, Moses and Sliderman are beckoned to the craft and when they arrive the geranium men move to don flora-links. A fight breaks out! It seems the mouvetran tech is failing, as the mouvetran energy weapons keep sputtering, leaving the aliens with punching and stabbing weapons. The elflings too gather to assist, even though they cannot see the foes. Meanwhile, Spykos disappears into the woods (again) and Olympus’ marble doggy is killed in the fray.
After all the mouvetrans are dealt with, Sliderman notes that the human (now hiding in a side room) looks very similar to his patron, Felix Smets. The heroes pull the flora-link off her and she explains that she is Smets’ twin sister, an expert in the field of dimensional physics. She was recruited to work on a project and the next thing she knew she was a mouvetran slave. She tells the group all the ways that they could stop the project, and the heroes climb up the shaft to the lab, where there’s a line of geranium men protecting the machinery, along with minijens and bagmen and katyr technicians. They plow through them but Olympus and Ujurak are being drained of magical power, especially after the thinker cranks the machine up to 11. Solaris is pitched down the elevator shaft by a minijen, Olympus magic cloak stops working, and Ujurak is unable to maintain his rock form, reverting to human form. They continue to pound on the mouvetrans, setting the magic device on fire and finally smashing it. The force field holding the magic nexus is disrupted and a huge explosion of magic blows everyone back. With the anti-magic field down, the mouvetran ship begins to register for the locals, and the elflings dance the dance of victory. The heroes are infused with random magical energy, giving them new powers. Sliderman uses the scroll of planar travel to get them back to earth, but it seems like something has gone wrong, for when they return to Earth, the skies are filled with ash and the city is in ruins!!
CAST:
Sliderman (Peyton), Solaris (John Burton), Olympus (Chris), Ujurak (Warren)
Nomad, Spykos the Nephilim giant, Dr. Felicia Smets, elflings
Mouvetran thinker, minijens, bagman, geranium men, a Tenejen, a Katyr soldier and many katyr technicians
Overdue Who Review: Robots of Death
Gosh I wonder who the bad guys are in this series? Robots of Death has not one but two persons of colour, who sadly are killed by ep 2 (of four episodes). Everyone, including the robots, has a futuro-baroque fashion sense, which is both incongruous and kind of refreshing to see something different. The robots don’t have a ‘robot voice’ but they do have robo-vision, when we see their victims through their eyes kind of like Predator. And of course when they go evil, it initiates the evil red glowing eye effect, as per their programming, I’m sure. The Doctor comes up with an ingenious plan to take out the robot controller, as well he should. Not too bad, overall, even though automatonophobia is misnamed as robophobia.
Next up: The Talons of Weng-Chiang (oh lordy)
