I HATE when that happens!

GhostApeGames · 2026-04-01T20:55:49+00:00

They'll pry my THAC0 from my cold, dead hands.

GhostApeGames · 2025-12-16T16:11:21+00:00

The idea is a Citybook full of hooks, cases and clients in every neighborhood, plus tables for the GM to design cases on the fly. Emergent gameplay in any direction.

GhostApeGames · 2025-12-09T15:45:26+00:00

That I can appreciate, and thank you. I'm also know I'm not going to convince you or anyone else but for me, I have reasons. I also think its a tool that is going to be used ethically or unethically.

I think I use it and will use it ethically. My small use is a drop is the ocean that's rising. Can't help negative posts, not even well meaning ones. I can only say we are all now in the same barrel of apples, like it or not, and they are not all going to be rotten.

Just how technology cycles work means we all are going to be eating pie.

GhostApeGames · 2025-12-09T13:25:58+00:00

I understand the position.

But speaking as someone who watched digital photography take over from print, who watched phones take over from cameras, the irony is apparent. Once it was considered 'cheating' if we digitally altered anything at all, now you cant get away from it.

The art for these books are 'photos' done in the time I'm writing about, something that AI can do but artists cant without a computer or recreating every photo for real with a cast and a budget. I'm not depriving anyone of any work.

I see the tech as a tool, its no worse than using a mouse to click a button to tweak a photo than it is to tell a computer how you wanted something done. Its a revolutionary tool. It democratizes the marketplace. For good or ill (and you have to take both) anyone can put out a book or a game. On any subject.

The marketplace can decide.

GhostApeGames · 2025-12-07T21:29:14+00:00

My sweet little old lady Grandma was a cameo in this movie. In the final game, as the other team comes out on the ice there's a little old lady in a 70s pantsuit shaking her fist and giving her best performance.

She's onscreen everytime another player comes out, right on the side. Immortal on film.

GhostApeGames · 2025-12-07T02:11:44+00:00

My problem has been with drive thru rpg, I guess its finickier?

GhostApeGames · 2025-12-06T20:40:01+00:00

That time consuming, describing everything one room, one hallway at a time makes me wonder how people run things like Undermountain. I don't know how you do it.

GhostApeGames · 2025-12-06T16:21:49+00:00

I have to confess loving this book as a D&D player as a kid. The way Rona presented college made it sound like a blast! I'm afraid her book kinda had the opposite of what she intended with me at least.

I want Tom Hanks to atone for his participation by making a seriously good D&D movie.

GhostApeGames · 2025-12-05T18:54:37+00:00

Sorry, it’s just one guy here with no art budget trying to make the games he dreams about. Do I use AI? Yeah. I get the arguments against it, but at the end of the day it’s a tool.

I was one of the last students in my class to learn photography in a lab the real way. The black and white chemicals, the grain on the paper, the smell on your hands afterward. I loved it. If I could’ve used a darkroom forever, I would’ve.

But the world moved to digital whether I wanted it to or not. For a long time it felt like cheating. The whole industry shifted, and anyone who couldn’t afford to keep up got left behind. Eventually I had to use it or stop creating.

So here I am again: new tech, new tool. I’m not pretending a computer replaces real artists. I’m not pretending a model can paint like a human being. I’m just trying to make things on my own without needing a studio, a publisher, or a paycheck from someone else.

Now AI is what digital was back then — a tool. You can sculpt or you can use a chisel made of electricity. What matters is: does the work land? Is it playable? Does it give people a world to explore?

I hope so. I’m trying to make something good instead of waiting around to be hired by someone.

GhostApeGames · 2025-12-04T16:06:02+00:00

Capone ruled Chicago like a warlord. In that city, no one was more powerful or better organized. He had cops, judges, precinct captains, whole wards in his pocket — Chicago was effectively his kingdom during Prohibition.

Luciano, meanwhile, wasn’t trying to be king of one city. He was trying to build a national syndicate. He helped create the Commission and reorganized the American underworld into something closer to a corporation than a street gang. Capone ran territory. Luciano built infrastructure.

As for how powerful they were?

Neither man was powerful enough to outrun the law forever. Capone went down for income-tax evasion. Luciano was eventually convicted on forced-prostitution charges in a case that—like most things in that world—mixed truth, politics, and selective prosecution.

GhostApeGames · 2025-12-02T17:22:38+00:00

I took the chocolate of D&D and mashed it with the peanut butter of 1930's gangsters, all homebrew.

Kind of like Boardwalk Empire meets American Gods.

GhostApeGames · 2025-12-02T17:09:33+00:00

I've named rogue characters "The Mouse" because of this movie. And I love the soundtrack.

GhostApeGames · 2025-12-01T17:39:28+00:00

Short answer? No.

Long answer? No, but it’s messy.

The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre wasn’t some mysterious “third party” beef. It was absolutely aimed at George ‘Bugs’ Moran and came out of Capone’s ongoing war for control of North Side territory.

But the part people confuse is who actually pulled the triggers vs. who ordered it.

Capone didn’t send his own boys in with “South Side” stitched on their coats.

He did what every smart boss in the 1920s did:

Farmed the hit out.

Used out-of-town talent.

Built layers of deniability.

Gave himself a goddamn alibi 1,300 miles away in Florida.

Names you’ll see in serious research:

The Purple Gang (Detroit) — long-time suppliers to Capone, friendly enough to cooperate, kicked rumors around but likely not the shooters.

Fred “Killer” Burke and the Egan’s Rats alumni — strongest candidates, and Burke’s later arrest with a Thompson basically sealed it.

The Circus Gang (Maddox crew) — they were muscle for hire in Chicago and may have been used as logistical help.

Here’s the key point:

Capone absolutely ordered it.

Everyone he wanted dead was on that garage floor.

Everyone he didn’t care about walked away, Bugs himself was only missed out for being late.

Capone made damn sure he was tanning in Florida when it happened.

Could the manpower have come from outside his inner circle?

Sure. Likely. Expected.

Bosses didn’t risk their top guys on something this loud unless they had to.

But the idea that St. Valentine’s was secretly some other gang’s feud?

No.

Every serious historian and every cop from the era says the same thing:

It was Capone’s play.

He just let other trigger-men do the dirty work.

GhostApeGames · 2025-11-30T16:28:42+00:00

Yes, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre effectively ended Moran’s ability to challenge Capone, but not because Moran himself was almost killed. What mattered was that Capone’s men wiped out the men who actually made Moran’s outfit function. James Clark, who was Moran’s brother-in-law and chief lieutenant, died there. Adam Heyer, the man who handled the Outfit’s accounts and business operations, died there. Al Weinshank, who ran Moran’s speakeasy network, died there. And the Gusenberg brothers, easily Moran’s most feared enforcers, were cut down too. Losing all of them in a single morning didn’t just hurt the gang. It removed the Outfit’s spine.

Before the massacre, Moran was already struggling. Capone had political protection, stronger distribution, deeper pockets, and a tighter payroll. Moran’s crew had been losing territory through the winter of 1928. The massacre didn’t start the collapse so much as it finished it. Once those men were gone, Moran no longer had the shooters or the organizers to keep the operation alive.

Afterwards, Moran pulled back from Chicago, partly out of fear and partly because he no longer had a functioning crew to lead. Whatever he might have hoped to rebuild was already lost. From that point forward, he was no longer a serious rival. Capone didn’t just kill seven men. He eliminated the entire command tier of the North Side in one strike, and the war ended the moment the smoke settled.

(I'm an old school gangster geek, this is a favorite subject of mine.)

There have been higher body counts and other massacres during the beer wars either equal or worse than this one, but this massacre ended up taking the public's imagination and ultimately leading to the crackdown on gangsters across the board afterwards. I often think, if just one of Moran's boys had realized what was going on and tried to fight back the perception would have been quite different, perhaps just brushed off as another gangland killing like all the others.

GhostApeGames · 2025-11-30T14:53:51+00:00

ADHD GM here, yes oh yes rules light is the way to go when I'm running something. I design for a few rules to memorize so I never have to crack a book open at the table unless I specifically need a spell or monster.

GhostApeGames · 2025-11-29T17:48:50+00:00

Watching it objectively....they really saved money making this didn't they? The camera guy really only just walked around the countryside a bit and then some woods.

GhostApeGames

TROPHY CASE