[Hype] No Artpunk II is out!

Posted on by Prince

And may be downloaded here. The best collection of OSR adventures this year, and indeed all years. 250 pages of content. Free, with any donations donated to National Fibromyalgia Association. Yes, on Itch.io!

We are still figuring out what the situation is going to be on Drivethru with the coming OGL changes but I am sure there will be some sort of resolution possible. If you are nervous, be sure to snag a copy of No Artpunk I, as well as a copy of Palace of Unquiet Repose and all of the other titles of the Merciless Merchants!

Thank you all for an excellent contest. And expect a proposal for No Artpunk III soon, along with some conditions for submission. Getting everything in the same format was a herculean endaevour 😛 And thank you all for reading, submitting, commenting, downloading and playing.

Long live the eternal, bountiful, vibrant and superlative TRVSR.

Update: Minor problems with the link, fixing it now.

Second update: It should be published now!

Third update: 7 hours in, 134 downloads, not bad at all! A warm thanks to everyone who donated.

Fourth update: 204 downloads, very generous donations coming in. Thank you all. I hope it will serve you well.

5th update: 16 hours in, 344 downloads, 500,- in donations, niiiiccccee.

6th update: 460 downloads. I’m not sure how much a Silver bestseller represents but we may have beaten out NAP I in a single day. Saline levels in the usual places are reaching critical levels. Reddit pleasantly endorses the release, with some very nice supportive takes from people that do not always agree with me but can see the merit in the project. Excellent, and more power to you. This hobby deserves no less. Update: And a perma-ban from the mods, oh well.

Update nr. 7: And the plot thickens yet again.

If you are catching flak…

I believe this started right around the time when I pointed out Yochai Gal had cancelled among others his former partner and source of inspiration Jim Parkin for nonsense and was considering removing all mention of him from the next edition of Cairn, performing a type of retro-active plagiarism. Now these types of behavior are hardly offensive for the subreddit, they certainly happen whenever I posted something. And lo and behold, I too was cancelled, and just when I was getting wide platform support because Yochai Girl threatened to scamper home if I was not banned. If this is true of course, which I am sure will become clear in time. Oh my! All this to stop a collection of adventures from raising funds for a charity!

It is of course, too little too late. NAP II has already reached its audience on reddit. I will expect new recruits from there for the next iteration, which will probably do even better then this one. It will do well because the entries are good and the method works.

You don’t have to like me, support anything I think, or you think I think for that matter, this is all the same to me. I don’t give a damn who or what you are. But are you sick and tired of endless rules-lite clones of clones that a child could cobble together? Do you think we can make better adventures then the stuff that is coming out now? Do you want modules to be more elitist, to test your mettle, to elevate and educate instead of pandering to mediocrities? Then I will see you for the next No Artpunk.

As for Cairn, well…I guess this means I’m not quite finished with Cairn either.

To be continued.

Update: 504 downloads. Someone seems to have been kind enough to repost the now deleted post. You can’t stop the signal.

Update:

Update: Itch.io is a very strange place.

Update: We did it boys.


49 thoughts on “[Hype] No Artpunk II is out!”

  4. So…haha, funny story…my adventure might be a bit “iffy” with regard to the OGL (the original, 1.0, OGL) as it makes use of the terms “displacer beast,” “githyanki,” “githzerai,” “mind flayer,” “illithid,” and “dungeon master,” all of which are explicitly listed as product identity under the terms of the OGL.

    [oh, yeah: “Tenser’s transformation” would be forbidden material as a spell containing a proper name]

    The good news is I’M not in violation of the terms of the OGL as I didn’t include a copy of the OGL in my adventure. Pretty sure using the terms by themselves constitute “free use” (as a defense against copyright infringement) as I’m not ‘porting monster/spell entries wholesale or describing how they function or are used.

    However, if you slap an OGL on the NAP2 book as a WHOLE, the inclusion of these terms WOULD constitute a violation of the licensing agreement, thus rendering the entire agreement null and void (sections 7 and 13 of the OGL 1.0A).

    SO, if that’s your plan (i.e. to submit the whole book to DriveThru under terms of the OGL) those terms will need to be edited to make them OGL-compliant: I can resubmit the PDF with the changes, or you’re welcome to edit the terms as you like; I’d suggest exchanging them for “phase tiger” (thanks Dan Proctor), “githy,” “githzee,”, “thought skinner,” “thought skinner,” and “referee.” With regard to the spell, just drop the name “Tenser.”

    Apologies for being a headache/asshole.

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    1. It is a developing story, but Artpunk might seem positively cuddly when compared to OGL 1.1. Everyone could be rewriting their material for Worlds Without Number.

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      4. It sounds like there will be a non-OGL version of Swords and Wizardry soon enough, so there should be cover.

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  6. Delighted to see this; swiftly purchased. I think a few might be inspired to produce their own top 10 lists. In no
    particular order, and with the proviso I need to have studied it, for OSR:
    1. No Artpunk 1
    2. Thulian Echoes
    3. Peril in Olden Wood (edging out The Beast that Waits as an area with secrets. and the Blackapple Brugh and Hideous Daylight for “dark fairytale”)
    4. Vaults of Volokarnos (from Echoes from Fomalhaut)
    5. Blood Moon Rising
    6. Pod Caverns of the Sinister Shroom
    7. Baklin, Jewel of the Sea
    8. Gatehouse on Cormac’s Crag (or The Saint of Bruckstadt or Gunderholfen)
    And the two that you couldn’t pick:
    9. The Red Prophet Rises
    10. Palace of Unquiet Repose

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  9. Got it. Thanks Prince, for all your heavy lifting.

    Canvassing for advice:

    I’ve got both Volumes but haven’t read through all the entries yet.

    If you were going to run one of these adventures for a small group of players — some of whom have never played an RPG before — at, say, mid-level, which would you recommend? It might only ever be one session, maybe two or three.

    Thanks for any help.

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    1. Not all of us were duped. This is the main reason I’ve never included an OGL in any of my books (the other reason being space considerations).
      ; )

      Good link and worth the read.

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  12. Prince, thanks again for organizing the contest and doing all the hard work to get this out. With NAP I and NAP II, there’s enough excellent content for months and months, if not years, of gaming.

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  13. Christ, the level of sulkiness on Reddit about this is appalling. “Men quibbled about politics” is a pretty fucking accurate and neutral take on modern RPG discourse, and watching people react as though daggers had been driven into the bottoms of their feet by it is silly at best.

    Though there is some serious wisdom in the guy who commented “trying to be a bad boy in RPG circles is like trying to be the toughest mime.” He is pointing it in the wrong direction, but the principle is a very sound one.

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  14. The adventures look good and donating money to the fibro charity is great. It’s such a shame that you have such a repugnant personality and views on some social issues. However big you think your audience is, I’m convinced you would be one of the most popular and well-regarded creators of the osr community if you could just keep your cringy jokes and rants to yourself.

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    1. First, I genuinely hope you like them and get some use out of them. If you donated, my thanks, it is a good cause, both of them ;P

      I think for your generosity I will give you a longer answer. Do with it what you will.

      I seem to get along with a lot of people despite that ‘reprehensible’ personality, people tend to fall either on the loving me or hating me spectrum. I suspect I am simply not compatible with a certain type of people. I have found some peace with that, and enduring their company and their intolerable customs, their pettiness, their pantomime, their parochial sensibilities, this is ultimately not for me. Your vision of me being a king of the OSR, attractive though it might be, well, I can get far, but I cannot become mainstream in this current paradigm without betraying who I am. My ideas, however, will spread and will continue to spread. Not because I am charming, or funny, or terrible or I use slurs or whatever, but because I am correct more often then not.

      There are a lot of things that are inferred about my beliefs, generally by people that are not terribly honest or clever sorry to say. I will state that I hold identity-politics, gender, sexual orientation etc. to be irrelevant unless it impairs on the game (or anything else). This is the proper way, by the way, not this ugly identity based nonsense. I am a homophobe? Why do I review works by Emmy Allen, Jaquays and god knows who else? Does having gay sex make you a good or a bad author? Do I need to go into the sexuality of my B2 players? What if someone sends me a donation? Do you think I screen them by race and sex before I review it? I do not even screen them by politics. I care NOTHING for your politics. Reactionary? Because I diagnose a problem correctly and proscribe a panacea? The contention is not that the method is wrong, the contention is that I am mean for using the method at all. It is not about any beliefs, it is about finding a kill quote to confirm a conveniently held inferrence about my beliefs.

      You can talk to or look at the commenters here. Are these right-wing guys? Some of them. Some of them are liberal grogs. Some of them are communists or socialists. Some of them are weirdos. I like all of them. Why? What are they selected for? Because they can put their preference for the game above the ephemereal concerns of contemporary politics. The OSR was like that once, and I think it shall be again.

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      1. A-fuckin-men! I suspect my political and social views are to the left of yours, maybe by a wide margin, but I don’t know for sure because it doesn’t matter at all in the context of what we’re both/all here to talk about. Yeah I cringe a bit and shake my head when I see you say deliberately provocative stupid shit that I know is going to trigger the haters and drown out the actual substance (as the latest Reddit kerfuffle has proven) but I also know that that’s part of your persona/shtick and people trying to tone-police it is just going to make you double-down, so I let it go (while secretly holding out hope that you’ll eventually outgrow it, just like you did the YDIS-era trollery). It’s called compartmentalizing and being a mature adult. Something a whole bunch of pearl-clutching would-be cultural revolutionaries clearly know nothing about.

        Liked by 4 people

      2. I don’t know why my server isn’t allowing me to “like” comments anymore (neither via phone nor laptop). That’s a real bummer. I’m taking the time to post this comment as a double-thumbs-up for Trent…although I am bothered even less by anti-PC speech than he is.

        RE: These Updates

        Wow. I’m surprised that anyone would push back against the NAP2 release just on…principle? I guess? Because they think YOU are a jerk or something?

        I realize and understand that there are crazy folks out there and reactionaries and whatnot, but…um…it’s a real charity, right? It’s not like the money is funding the Klan or Al-Qaeda or something.

        Idiot fucking children.

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      3. @Trent

        I live in a completely different country, with different social issues, laws, baggage, history etc. etc, so our position is likely to differ more then not, for sure, even had we the same inherent temperament. I have noted the occasional profanity does serve to filter out a lot of people at the door. I don’t like this late stage state religion stuff that is being imported and pushed even here. Complying with it seems almost a profane and certainly a debased act. Conversely the act of saying an outrageous thing every so often, it is a break from the routine, a reminder that these boundaries are man-made tools, not divine dictates, and while they literally determine lives, they are also very silly.

        @Becker

        I believe the current consensus is that I am a big meany jerk but even the OSR reddit, hardly a bastion of vicious anarchist pranksters and the dreaded reactionaries!, was actually majority positive, with a minority of whiny people. The timing is obviously very suspect.

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      4. [“Wow. I’m surprised that anyone would push back against the NAP2 release just on…principle? I guess? Because they think YOU are a jerk or something?”]
        This makes sense, as he didn’t write the content, and also doesn’t get any of the profits

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    2. This seems an obvious troll to me [tohn jarnowski – pundit] to which you and Trent Smith respond with self praise? Being the centre you might still be delusional if you ignore the winds of propaganda.

      Politics should be removed from aesthetic discussion except when it is BAKED IN to culture from one side. eg DnD now says a RACE like Orc is an ‘evil right wing concept’. No-one reads history anymore.

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      1. A Trollish sort of chivalry, to telegraph one’s intent.

        Its always a trade-off. Is it pure provocation, based on deception? In this case I felt it used enough existing sentiment to merit a general response.

        Engaging with these sorts of bizarre constructions (i.e. orcs is racist) in itself is in some way advancing the cause of the propagandist. It must be done carefully if at all. The idea is that the framework becomes inescapable and permeates every facet of daily life. You are either for or against. You cannot plug out. Most people, even victims of indoctrination, are not political animals and would prefer neutrality in their escapism.

        I’m reminded of something like an analysis of Tolkien’s work on the tenfootpole forums. These people seem unable to grasp any sort of themes or appreciate the origins of a work, or the mindset of the person that wrote it. The only criterion is if some sort of bigotry has taken place, and if so, what kind of bigotry it is and how bad the bigotry is. The banality of it is dystopian. A people created for reading tweets and hr memos, clap at corporate press releases, make wow noises when the next marvel movie is discussed, and toil away at a corporate desk in servile sterility.

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  15. Fantastic works, all participants! Hail to the winners! And to Prince of course, I appreciate the new volume’s layout, goodies and table of contents.

    P.S: My deepest regret over the resident shonda Yochai. I hope he pipes down.

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  16. Oi Prince, what is the suggested donation? I don’t want to low-ball you or to make my wallet cry. A range would be nice as a guide. Thanks, mon!

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  17. Late to the party here, but can’t wait to go and download NAP II! Thanks again for the shout out, though I feel slightly icky if having werewolves in a module makes it more attractive to perverts. Mistakes were egregious, and when going up against the best of the best, they can be ill afforded

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    1. You really did very well. If I compare how tight your writing was in Spears versus TotS, you really made giant strides. For your own games it matters little, if you want to make something another player can use it is vital. I look forward to including Spears in NAP compendium. Even a weird person who came to NAP 2 to troll liked the writing.

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      1. Thanks bud. For the record, I am loving NAP 2. I can see why everyone was included. Are there any other major curveballs you’re thinking of throwing in next time, like only higher levels or having it all based around a specific map? Regardless, I’m looking forward to it

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  18. > As for Cairn, well…I guess this means
    > I’m not quite finished with Cairn either.
    A tremendously useful think-piece awaits to those who would compare Cairn vs GOZR.
    Dare you take this challenge?

    [exeunt stage left]

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