#monsterworks

Getting ready to start recording for our behind the monster podcast. This is our second recording and planning session.

This is gonna be great!

@starwarssith13

Welcome to MonsterWorks Studio, a place where fear becomes reality in our short films and in our artwork. After a 4 year hiatus, we are happy to be back.

Monsterworks is a small channel on YouTube run by two friends who write the stories, do the makeup, and film it ourselves.

This is the main icon for our studios.

It's a sigil @starwarssith13 and I developed a few days ago using moon glyphs. The glyphs I used were fear, death, energy, dark, and blood. I know it sounds like something an edgelord would do, but there's a reason these were chosen.

At MonsterWorks we hope to inspire fear and feed the little bits of darkness in everyone. We want our films to make your blood turn cold and for our sfx makeup to look as good as possible with what we have.

(CW: arachnids, webs, body horror)

Monster concept for OSR-type games, including a stab at statting them up.

I read a blog post yesterday: https://illusorysensorium.com/doom-clock/

Normal old-school D&D encounter check, you roll a d6 every turn or two and on a 1 you get an encounter. The overloaded encounter die is a tool that's become popular in the current generation of old-school-inspired games. Overloading the encounter die lets you abstract the need for actually tracking how long your torches have been burning or your spells have been going.

The post up there goes into a list of potential problems with this approach and the author suggests quite a neat mechanic: the doom clock, a usage die (i.e. decreasing in size) until your expedition is "doomed and lost". I think usage dice are a neat mechanic - my beloved Alien RPG uses usage dice to track how much oxygen your character has and I love that approach.

But I kind of like the overloaded encounter die. At least the way I've been doing it, I like the sense of the dungeon being a more dynamic place. So my immediate inspiration on reading this was a compromise. Here's my revised OED table:

1 - DOOM 2 - Encounter (A Slime Draws Near! Command?) 3 - Local Effect (A mixed bag, varies by dungeon and level - one of the options I always include here is to have a door become stuck because I never include enough stuck doors normally. Sometimes it means a character gets cold dungeon water leaking on them from the ceiling. This is also where I put what I consider non-monsters from the monster manual - yellow mould and shriekers and the like. Were I a more courageous man I'd also put corridor traps under this result) 4 - Local Clock (Tick one of the dungeon level's clocks. This is something that will definitely change the situation in the dungeon level, e.g. [faction name withheld for spoiler reasons] invades the level. Though I've yet to see one of these clocks completed so this may require tweaking.) 5 - Omen (I'm not actually sure how omens are intended to work - whether they just fix when the next encounter roll is going to be or if the next time you would roll an encounter check, there will be an encounter with the omened result. The way I've been doing it is to treat it as an encounter far enough away to avoid (my players rarely choose to avoid the encounter)) 6 - Free (Nothing happens) So that DOOM entry would basically mimic another result on the table based on how many times that result has come up on that delve. First - Free Second - Local Clock Third - Omen Fourth and onwards - Encounter

Well, it's got the spirit of the Doom Clock right? Getting that sense of time pressure because the Mythic Underworld is starting to hate you. It does remove the extremes - there's no hard time limit until you are lost in the underworld, and there's no organic room to have beneficial encounters that diminishes as time goes on (however: the first DOOM result (Free) could be replaced with a beneficial encounter if I really want to add that back in).

I'm here to keep the Spooky Season going, with a 5-map DOOM2 WAD I've made called Zombie Base.

It's pretty basic, five levels total, playable in about 30-45 minutes by my reckoning. Difficulty levels are implemented but I haven't really tested outside of Hurt Me Plenty. I suspect this is on the easier side, I don't really consider myself a veteran DOOM player.

I've only tested it with GZDoom but it should work with other ports since all the maps are in vanilla DOOM2 format.

@starwarssith13 when he presents me with our newest little monster film stars.

Our newest film is in the making.

We're still working on scripts and character designs, but by spring we should have it figured out lol.

Smiley boi is our spooky little guy who will bring fear and love into everyone's cold, dead hearts 😃

@quietdumbassbitch