Mighty Thews and Non-Euclidean Geometry

Diamond in the Rough: Murderhobo with a Plotgun

2012-01-20T20:26:00.003-05:00

Once every year or so, amongst the millions of lines of special snowflaking and moral safe placeitude, rpg.net manages to produce a line or two of actual content. Here's this year's contribution, coming in early and thus putting a lid on the forum's relevance until at least January 2013:

"The great part about being a murderhobo is that not only can you fight city hall, it turns out that it's usually extremely flammable."

It goes on to elaborate that

Likewise, the terrible part about trying to enslave a murderhobo is that they don't fear death or pain, can't be bargained with for better living conditions, have no loved ones or friends to threaten, and also are very murderous on top of that.

Words to live by.

- DYA

Back in Black (and white): Not sure if want...

2012-01-20T13:39:00.007-05:00

Huh. Wow. Honestly don't know how to feel about this:

Wizards Is Reprinting the AD&D Core Books! (via wired.com)

(Old news, I know.)

On the one hand, you're supporting AD&D, and the Gary memorial as well. On the other hand, I was pretty ok with never giving WotC any money ever again, ever. And the irony is, they're not reprinting Unearthed Arcana (the one AD&D core book that REALLY needed a reprint, sans shitty bindings).

I mean, I want new (NEW) AD&D manuals. Don't get me wrong. And I like throwing in for support of the Gary statue (as long as it has gem eyes and is sufficiently trapped to discourage vandals). Honestly weighing the value of preordering and making sure I get some of these, and waiting and seeing in case the binding /printing sucks. They're at least leaving the contents alone, all original art & text in glorious black and white. (Hoping they're not all glossy stock, though.) And then there's the "attractive new cover design". *rolleyes* We'll see how THAT turns out (with WotC's track record, predicting lots of piercings and tribal tattoos, possibly a halfblind feycursed gelatinous cube weremonk fighting robots and bondage elves). 'Course, I could always sell'em if they're lame.

- DYA

Sage Advice under a Dark Sun (or, "Yes, Virgina, there IS a Dragon!")

2012-01-18T15:39:00.005-05:00

Here'e a handy-dandy link: All the "Sage Advice" Q&As (mostly Dark Sun-related) from Dragon #182 (not pictured above).

Dargonsfut forumz

First session of our Dark Sun game, tonight. Utterly surreal to be running 2nd Edition, again (it's been 15 years or so) rather than our usual mish-mash of Basic, 1e and HackMaster. Should be interesting.

- DYA

Adventures in The Google (nonsense post)

2012-01-16T16:27:00.006-05:00

Heh. Apparently when you do an image search for "blackleaf nooo", Mighty Thews comes up on the first page. That is all.

- DYA

P.S.: If it's been a bit sparse around here, I'm currently in my last quarter of school and juggling music on top of it - not a lot of time for gaming, lately. We got a round or two of Mordheim in the other week, and I'm actually running 2nd Edition next week? (Dark Sun? That might generate a post or two.) And Paranoia the following weekend. But I'm not promising anything.

P.P.S.: So there's some actual content, here's a map of every D&D world on one globe. Probably compressed to shit, good luck with that.

The Middenheim Madam (and why the WFRP career system rules)

2011-09-04T14:56:00.005-04:00

Real quick observation on the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay career system:

The players are hard at work establishing a crime syndicate (the Crime Dudes), and one of the specialties they're looking to diversify into is the flesh trade. Hos, to be blunt. To facilitate this, they've put the word out on the street for an experienced ("old" was how they put it) doxy with house experience. A former madam if they could get one. Thus was born Marienburg Rose.

So now to stat our new NPC. Browse browse browse, I'm actually mildly surprised to find that neither 1e nor 2e WFRP books have a "prostitute" career (as completist as they otherwise are) - until I read twice under the "Camp Follower" entry. Uh-huh. Charm, Street Fighter, Sleight of Hand, Resistance to Disease, so on and so forth. Well, fair enough - and the career actually offers a good mix of survival and interpersonal skills. One career down.

Now, of course, they're not gonna have a "madam" career. Buuuuut - Innkeeper? That'll do for government work. And then I see that you can go directly from Camp Follower to Innkeeper in just 2 career changes via the Servant career. BANG.

The funny thing is, a character that's 3 careers in like this is actually fairly formidable in WFRP, at least to my first-career PC group. This tough old broad has a pile of people skills and is a nasty customer in a scrap, to boot. Should make for some interesting bar scenes if the PCs actually get a house going.

- DYA

Not to worry, sir - I've got a Cunning Plan!

2011-09-01T02:30:00.012-04:00

Notes from tonight's WRFP session, while they're still semi-fresh in my head:

When we'd called it last time, the guys were fresh off a remarkably successful killing spree (especially down a dwarf, as they were). They'd been hired by a local nobleman to "forcefully acquire" a gem from a gang who'd recently made aquisition of it themselves - a stone, keep in mind, that local lore held to be tainted by a Chaos god no less than the patron of plagues himself, Father Nurgle (and one which, like crazy people, they still decided to fuck with).

This turned out to involve picking their way through a series of already-stormed gang warrens, getting into a few pitched swordfights (maybe two?) and actually coming out alive and intact, and the odd bit of diplomacy (supplemented, of course, as always, by the Cunning Plan). We got to meet the lively and deeply silly Tileans (who I'm playing more or less as the Marx brothers in 3 Musketeer costumes, at least here) in the guise of the Valentina gang, who'd been thus far outfoxed and outfought by our stalwart gang of sanitation workers.

As we picked up tonight, however, they met the one surviving person in the complex with any brains in their head - the Boss's bodyguard, Salasomthing or other. Sal something. *run to look it up* It's Sebastiano, apparently. Anyway, him. He manages to (very nearly) get the drop on them with a crossbow pistol (which the guys all immediately lusted after, of course - sealing his fate, or so I'd have thought), and avoid a whack at his noggin with Otto the graverobber's club, before convincing the party of the inevitability of casualties should they fight needlessly (something that ACTUALLY FUCKING WORKED for once, which just proves that Warhammer FRP is MAGIC). I think the fact that he was prepared to go into battle with brass knuckles had something to do with it, too, the players seemed to half respect that. Heh.

So they pump him for information, successfully resist their deep needs to immediately murder him for his crossbow, and find out that the reason the Boss's bodyguard doesn't want to fight, is that the Boss's body has already been bloodily compromised - to the utter bewilderment of the bodyguard, who didn't see a thing. They find the body, sans head, track the blood to the not-anymore-quite-so-secret door (says the bodyguard: "The tracks, they lead to the book-a-shelf! But a book, she cannot kill a man! This makes-a no sense!"), and actually let the fucking guy go. (Take note, THAT NEVER HAPPENS.)

Leave it to my guys, though: They offered him a job.

After that, they trekked back through the sewers (where the Small But Vicious Dog proved quite useful tracking a fresh blood trail through the awfulness) to a side cavern wherein there was a minecart. A minecart containing both the boss's head and the corpse of his apparent killer. Oh, and the stone, which they immediately put in the Box For Evil Awful Things they'd been given for that express purpose. The guys knew something was up (I may have even heard an "I've got a bad feeling about this" in there somewhere). The corpse was covered with... rat bites. The rat... catching dog started to go apeshit. They took the hint and got in the minecart, just ahead of the Huge Fucking Swarm of rats. *this is where I make my DM face*

They have a short Indiana Jones ride, find out the brake doesn't work, and realize that they're going WAY the fuck too fast. Resourceful fellows that they are, they decide to use the corpse as a brake. By hanging him over the back by his ankles. And letting his face drag behind them. Now, in my defense, I'm going to admit that I'd just watched Hobo With A Shotgun (which you should immediately go watch, too), and that this had a lot to do with my ensuing description of the blood and tooth and bone fountain that resulted from high-speed application of fresh corpse to unyielding minecart tracks. It didn't really help, though.

They get to the end of the line, hit the stop at the end, and tumble out in ungainly wound-taking heaps (except for NPC Hans the Boatman, who makes his Agility roll, hops the side and comes to a graceful running stop, and who has now become Neil Patrick Harris in my mind, for some reason). Everybody dusts off, and they find themselves in a smuggler's cavern, with distant, weird shadowy figures blocking the one exit - which also is traversed by another track, with the attendant cart conveniently available for PC mischief. They take the obvious route and turn the cart into a murder machine. They decide not to let a perfectly good (slightly-used) corpse go to waste, and toss that in for ballast, add a layer of broken pallet and lamp oil on top, set the thing ablaze and push; following after with swords and what have you drawn.

The flaming corpsecart takes out the two Mysteriously Robed Individuals blocking the exit, who obligingly fail to dodge, and the ersatz adventurers run out into the moonlight - the moonlight shining down into an open sewer, admittedly, but moonlight all the same. There they find another four Mysterious Robed Individuals, who were not at all obvious cultists, chanting in a weird circle (NOT CULTISTS) and looking menacing. One of them (the one in the middle) was an albino. DEFINITELY JUST NORMAL FOLKS.

The guys yell at them to cut the shit, and threaten to throw the evil nasty gem over the city wall, but I just keep rolling dice and smiling, and the chanting keeps getting louder. Finally, on Round The Very Last Before Something Bad Happens (I didn't tell them this), they loose crossbows at the Normal Guys Chanting In Robes. This seriously fucks things up, and everyone's minds nearly rupture as an awful pus demon from beyond tears through reality, grabs a wounded culti- errr, normal guy for lunch, and retreats through the yawning rent in time and space. (Meanwhile at the table we chuckle, sip adult beverages and roll dice - sometimes it must really suck to be a PC.) Terror tests are failed, Insanity Points are gained. PCs run screaming in horror through the city streets until they collapse in heaps of garbage, shivering. All's well that ends well, right?

It wouldn't be the Warhammer World if it didn't add insult to injury, so I didn't feel TOO bad when, on their way to deliver the damned thing, they got a chamber pot dumped on their heads by drunken noble rakes. (I rolled the "rakes" encounter, "drunken" and "pranks" were right there in the listing, and I reasoned they were plenty sick of shit and piss by that point, soooooooo...) They somehow once again resisted the natural urge that all PCs have to murder all NPCs, and avoided getting killed by bodyguards or arrested, and made it to the drop. Where they managed to alienate the patron in a (rather ham-handed) attempt to get the full payment they were due, so that'll bite them in the ass, later. Yaaaaaay, Warhammer World! *this is where I make my DM face again*

It occurs to me just how much Blackadder has accidentally slipped into my WFRP game, and - just now - how much more I should intentionally dial in. If there's a bigger influence on the general tone of WFRP's brand of comedy - besides maybe Python - I can't think of one.

- DYA

P.S.: If this all sounds at all familiar to you, and exactly like the example adventure in the 1e WFRP book, well, there's a reason for that.

Son of the Return of the Lost Raiders of the Temple of Elemental Evil Part II: Elemental Boogaloo

2011-08-24T16:09:00.006-04:00

Lately we've had a little trouble getting a full table. The usual reasons, jobs, school, everybody's in different bands, some folks are off at war. So I did what I do every few years, which is put out a random cattle call for gamers on the various Meetups, local game store forums, and so on. This is always a hoot - you're pretty much just dipping from the well, here, so you get all types of folks (ALL TYPES) showing up.

Now, historically speaking, I've generally gotten 1, maybe 2 long- to semi-long-term recruits, a handful of people who are cool but just not into our thing (or who aren't as inured to the constant criminal schemes, in-game frat pranks, and dick jokes - lately our table is kind of a fantasy version of the Trailer Park Boys), and 1 or two total neckbeards (who usually don't have the thickest of skin, and don't really last long). Some people dread this kind of thing, but I have fun with it - always a blast seeing somebody new getting a taste of our style of gaming.

This time I've got a double handful of responses - so I'm setting up a once-a-month weekend AD&D game, taking all comers, and we're gonna tackle the fucking Temple of Elemental Evil for real this time if it kills me. I've got 3 or 4 regulars, and as many or more randoms, so we've got a sizable group if half of everybody shows up (and it's a little easier to get attendance in a non-weekly game, in my experience at least).

I've dashed a couple parties against the rocky shores of T1, and couple against B1 in would-be preparation for Hommlett, so I've got a good bit of design work on the area done already, although it's not quite as detailed as other stuff (T1-4 was the very beginning of my experiments in hexcrawl, and I kinda didn't have a grasp on it, yet). So now I'm just pulling all my notes together and attempting to forge them into one cohesive campaign doc (the better to update, my pretty).

I'm looking forward to this - I think this time we're gonna kick that mother over and take its stuff.

- DYA

P.S.: The image, if you didn't know, is the cover art of Burzum's "Det Som Engang Var", which of course was directly inspired by the cover art from T1-4. Entirely appropriate mood music for the campaign, in my humble opinion (YMMV on that one).

"The little dog bites! The sewer rat bites! The little dog bites!"

2011-08-08T13:55:00.006-04:00

Randomly got the overwhelming urge to run Warhammer FRP this weekend. Without ever having run it before, or having read through the combat rules more than once like two years ago, or having played it more than 5 times (like about two years ago). Ran up the flag, ended up with 3 players for the evening. Luckily one of my guys has run it a couple times (and was amply capable of co-GMing), and it's actually pretty fucking light, rules-wise, so we pulled it off. Here's the quick and dirty:

SHORT AND SWEEET WFRP SESSION REPORT

Date: Current date is 2512 (10 years after the coronation of Karl Franz, 10 years before Storm of Chaos happens (or doesn’t))
Characters:
Otto – grave robber from Hochland
Gustav – rat catcher from Ostland
Bigtooth – dwarf tradesman from the Zhufbar (World’s Edge Mountains)
First session: PCs wake up, hung over, in a locked wagon, on their way to Middenheim, having been shanghaied into service as rat catchers after getting drunk at the Festival of St. Iverson in the village of Arenburg. They are held along with two thugs (Strigo and Piggy, brothers in arms if not in fact), and Hans (a bewildered young boatman, far from any river). Bigtooth starts a fight with Strigo, which quickly draws in Otto and Gustav (as well as Piggy), and the combatants pound each other until they are all exhausted (and soaked with foul stew by the guards). Finally they arrive at the great viaducts of Middenheim.
They are taken to a barracks, and from there (their promise of service obtained by Serjeant Fogelmann), to a sewer grate. They are put down in the shit, literally, and locked in, while an angry mob of rat catchers and dung sweepers advances on the watchmen above.
Bigtooth and Strigo immediately resume their earlier feud, only this time they are armed. A messy combat (again, literally) ensues, and both Strigo and Piggy are killed. (Strigo's leg was "demolished", and his skull then neatly bisected just above the mustache by the enraged dwarf's axe. Piggy, seeing this, slipped a gear, went berserk, and was cut down.) Meanwhile Hans and Otto look on with bewildered dismay. Eventually the remaining prisoners make their way down the sewer, bearing left at an intersection before the rat catcher’s small (but vicious) dog takes off after some prey. The party catches up, only to find more (and larger) rats than they’d bargained for. Bigtooth is nearly brought down by his wounds, everyone gets soaked in sewage, and only 1 rat is killed before the rest run off. So far, so good. [end session]

I'm psyched to run this, I've been curious about it since just about forever (WFRP was big at the FLGS I got started at as a lad), and the system seems like it just oozes awesome. Picking through the available material to determine what from the 2e run is worthwhile, and what is just rules bloat. *

Next time, I'll pick at their backgrounds a bit, dangle guild membership in front of the dwarf, and fuck with them a little bit more. Assuming they make it out of the sewer (it's not looking too good, even the small but vicious dog has broken ribs, haha).

- DYA

* It should go without saying that I'm running WFRP 2e, not the Descent-with-Skaven board game that FFG's hawking under the WFRP name, nowadays. Fuck that shit.

Dragons of Summer Boredom

2011-08-01T18:47:00.006-04:00

Haha, sooooooo, I went and bought myself a Dragonlance module? *ducks tomatoes*

Alright alright alright, lemme back up and justify, here.

Even back in the distant, primordial days of the early 90s, the setting wars were already in full swing. I got turned on to the Forgotten Realms grey box, and therefore was held in sneering contempt by the Dragonlance partisans at the local gaming store. (Meanwhile the Greyhawk holdouts looked on, shaking their heads knowingly and writing angry Usenet posts about Carl Sargent.) And, for my money, DL quickly became the clear harbinger of all that was wrong with 90s (A)D&D. (Never mind that the 2e Realms supplements would soon establish their own list of crimes, more concerned with OCD-inspired meticulous setting detail (read baggage) than the railroady plotwagon excesses of Dragonlance.)

Well, it's a lot of years later, and thanks to the internet I'm all too familiar with the atrocities of Lorraine and the Blumes in the 80s, and while I can see where it's tempting to find a scapegoat for the fall of the golden age, the Realms still don't fit. (See THIS blogpost for a good list of reasons why. ) But the meme still persists, no matter how ill-placed and uninformed the arguments.

So if the 'Hawk diehards are (passionately, heart-breakingly) wrong about FR, it follows that I may have judged Dragonlance a bit harshly as well. I've always enjoyed the fiction (the stuff by Weiss & Hickman, at least - let's ignore Sturm & Kit's moon trip and all that crazy shit), although I'll still maintain that good fiction is often anathema to good gaming. The glut of 2e-style setting supplements and later modules always turned me off, but reading through the 1e Dragonlance Adventures hardcover describes an intriguing (finely-tuned for the desired effect) AD&D setting. So when I had the chance to pick up a used (near-mint) copy of DL1 Dragons of Despair at the friendly local, I went for it. (They have the whole original run, from what I can tell, but I'm not THAT invested quite yet.) The question is: Can this series be run as a "real" campaign, with players who may or may not have read the fiction (probably not), and who don't have any special pre-formed attachment to the setting? And without the rails on? I don't know, yet.

So far, I can at least vouch that DL1 contains a wilderness hexmap (high marks for usefulness), and some interesting encounters. Seems like you could have a good time with the material as presented, and if you were willing to spin some BS should the PCs employ "lateral thinking" (i.e., having the attention span of a cross between a housecat and a superball, like all PCs), things should work out. (I do have the hardcover and a map, I flatter myself that I've got the DM chops to make something interesting out of an aborted run at the "plot", should it come to it.) The question is, does this play out once you're a module or two "deep", and the PCs have had more chances to "rewrite the script"? (Guess I'm gonna have to pick up the next one and see.)

At the very least it's something to read.

- DYA

P.S.: And apparently the cover art above is actually by Clyde Caldwell, not Larry Elmore? I never knew. Suppose I should've guessed, what with the distinct lack of almond eyes and boobies.

I am playing the SHIT out of Cyberpunk 2020

2011-07-07T17:17:00.004-04:00

And I'm really quite excited about it.

I only feel the need to trumpet it in this fashion because, by all appearances, NOBODY is talking about this game online. Which is a crying goddamn shame, on a few levels. But mainly because CP2020 was the second game I ever purchased (and the second game I ever ran), and I never really got a chance to run it through its paces the way I would've liked back in the day.

Beyond that, there's a pretty bad-ass iteration of the CP2020 rules available in Interlock Unlimited, a fan-created project (albeit with the official nod from Mike Pondsmith, Cyberpunk 2020 creator) that is very much in the spirit of the OSR - taking the spirit of the original, smoothing out a few kinks and bolting on a few bits where the author's campaign needed them (mainly in the form of supplements, like one for the author's Night City PD campaign, another expanding the Mad Max-style American midwest). I like a lot of the tweaks, mainly streamlining Friday Night Firefight in a few places, and blurring the class-based/skill-based line a little more (providing a pretty clean option for multiple Roles). (The layout could use some love, but that's pretty much par for the course for old CP2020 fans. ;) )

System aside, I've been a big fan of the assumed setting in the CP2020 rulebook since I first ran across it. It's got the same pitfalls as any future setting - obsolete in places as soon as it hits the press - and a few of the setting assumptions were charmingly quaint even in the 90s, especially the information tech-oriented ones - but if you can't see your way clear to either fixing or ignoring these bits in a futuristic game, you're probably better off finding a game that spoonfeeds you monthly updates (I understand White Wolf does pretty well on this model). Personally, I started monkeying with the timeline when I was 15, and half this shit hadn't come to pass, yet; there's a bit more to be done, now, but that's half the fun.

The tech anachronisms are dead-easy to fix - cellphones are cheap, cybermodems run on cellular networks (towers only available in city centers, outside the city you've still gotta jack in, and running wireless is slower so you'll take a -2 penalty to your rolls) (or something). Audio and video content is distributed via the Net like everything else. That's pretty much it. (I'm still working out exactly how useful the "dataterm in your skull" chip will be in this paradigm.) Other than that, most of it lines up with our understandings of information and tech, even 20 years after the game hit the shelves, if you're willing to sort it out.

My game is gonna be centered around Boston Metroplex (as I imagine it), although I'll keep Night City as an occasional destination (gotta work in some jet-setting here and there) (and it's a great city supplement), but the great thing about the CP2020 setting (*cough*Gibson*cough*) is that it'll do pretty much anything. Mad Max-style road raiders, got it. Street-level dirt, got it. Glittery cyberhipsters making moves in corporate circles, it does that without even trying. Hard-boiled grunts, cybered to the gills and racking up bodycounts, no prob. And so on, it's all there if you're willing to spend some time on the specifics. Or, failing that, there's a supplement for pretty much every established subgenre.

So I'm just excited as shit about this, this is a great game that's been sitting on the shelf for a few decades, waiting for me to make sweet, sweet gamer love to it and lay it down by the fire. And so on. I'm the last dude around to care what's cool or what people are playing these days, but hopefully if we keep talking about it, a few more folks will give CP2020 a try (and/or break it out of cold storage), and we can all trade tips on acing uppity players. I mean storytelling. Or whatever.

- DYA

Medieval Demographics (or, "The Peasants are Revolting")

2011-06-29T20:18:00.007-04:00

If you don't know about this, well, you're fucking up. I don't know what to say. This shit (the Domesday book) has been up for a long-ass time, I vaguely remember consulting it regularly when I was running my d20 Cormyr campaign (which was a LONG-ASS TIME ago), and it's sprouted features since then.

What I'm interested in here is "how many people can [x] hexes of arable land being worked at [y] relative efficiency feed?" Domesday Book takes easily-arrived-at figures and gives you projected data on how many settlements the land will support (and of what size), how many fortifications will be required to hold the land, what size standing security force (guards, watch, etc) will be present, and how many of several key professions will be supported by this domain. (It's not ideal, for my purposes, that it uses kilometers, but beggars can't be choosers.) (Pretty sure it says that in the DMG somewhere, at any rate.)

Now, I'm actually using Midkemia Cities to generate my city professions, and there is some assumed demographic info there, and there's some figures from the Wilderlands booklets that have other figures, so I'm still kinda juggling all 3 just to see what feels right. The irony in all of this is that this shit won't matter for quite a while, but once players are at the "worrying about domains" stage of the game, it'll be too late to change all of this crap without serious re-working, and I'm gonna want a clear picture of the situation at the commencement of full-on armies and politics shenanigans.

- DYA

P.S.: Oh yeah, the map is from Darklands, the best open-ended sandbox RPG set in the Holy Roman Empire that nobody's ever heard of.

P.P.S.: Oh, and here's Michael Bolton as Captain Jack Sparrow.

Medieval Professions by Social Class (or, "Get a Job, Hippie")

2011-06-23T01:30:00.005-04:00

This is pretty sweet. A list of medieval professions at arcana.wikidot.com. They're grouped into broad specialties (farmer, artist, etc.) but the actual professions themselves are nicely granular (as the very guild-oriented professional classes tended to be).

This is relevant to my interests, BTW, because I'm attempting to cobble together a rough profession-based "no-system skill system" for D&D (or "insert your pseudo-medieval European fantasy game here"). Basically, just a roll on the social class table from the Unearthed Arcana, and a second roll on a social class sub-table of professions - each one gets a handful of skill names (some of which you might have only a 25% or 50% chance of actually acquiring), and that's it. No numbers, no rules whatsoever, you just have those skills, write'em down. If it comes up in a game, we'll deal with it during the game.

Luckily, I'm the proud owner of Gary Gygax's Living Fantasy, and that book lists an astounding array of medieval professions, and it groups them using the same class hierarchy (lower-lower through upper-upper) that the UA does. (Shocker, huh? :D) so between that, the above link, and a few other online resources, it shouldn't be a huge chore to at least put together fairly comprehensive profession lists. From that point, I can pretty much just fill in the interesting ones as I go along - if "land court bailiff" or whatever isn't represented on the skill list, I'm sure nobody will kick.

We did a very tentative test of this at the game tonight; we know know that the fighter is from an upper-class military background, the thief is the son of a well-to-do merchant, and the elf's parents were wealthy antiquarians. (Which of course means so far nobody knows how a shovel or a mop works, or how to navigate by the sun or the stars, for example.) (Should I run a polo-themed adventure, they're all set, though!)

- DYA

Dirty Dungeons, Done Dirt Cheap

2011-06-20T22:57:00.003-04:00

So, this is pretty choice. DIZZY DRAGON'S ADVENTURE GENERATOR

It's not too terribly dissimilar from a double handful of similar tools (and the more the merrier as far as these go, the usefulness increases along with the variety), but this one a) creates a fairly tight "maze"-style dungeon via geomorph, b) stocks them with B/X creatures (or just Basic, or d20), and c) creates some detail with results from the DMG dungeon dressing tables. The dungeons definitely have a certain style, and wouldn't use them for everything, but for a couple of quick "just in case" dungeon levels to toss on the wilderness map? Perfect.

- DYA

Wilderness hexes as dungeon rooms - Putting the "howl" in "howling wasteland"

2011-06-20T09:41:00.004-04:00

I have a million good resources to stock wilderness areas. Choosing between them and then deciding how to apply them is the trick. My main source material for this latest campaign has been the monster encounter tables from the B/X rulebooks, and the Judges Guild random ruins tables to give the areas some character. Once you're used to the JG tables, one line can easily provide a launching point for tons of spot detail. But every ruin having a monster ends up being a bit excessive. And you certainly don't want a substantial treasure at each location. Nor do you want every entry to be a deathtrap. Of course you can just use your judgement, but the programmer in my likes to have a methodology to start with (which I then freely ignore to taste).

Then it occurred to me - why not just stock the hex like I was stocking a dungeon?

Using the dungeon room contents table from B/X, 2 of 6 rooms have a monster, 1 in 6 a trap, and 1 in 6 have "special" contents (the remainder standing empty). Rooms with monsters have treasure fully half the time, while trapped and empty areas contain loot less frequently (2 and 1 in 6, respectively). This, for me, is a perfectly acceptable ratio for outdoors areas, and it's scalable to whatever level of detail / population density / ruin frequency you want.

For example, I needed to stock a 10 hex x 10 hex area in a hurry for our last game. I went through every hex in order, rolling d2 ruins results for each one. For each of these ruins, I rolled the standard d6 dungeon contents roll - if monster was indicated, I stocked the lair from the Expert Set tables (note that more than a few of these end up being men or demihumans). If it came up trap, the item/location was described as being potentially harmful to the players (this is a great way to throw in wilderness hazards like rockfalls and quicksand, BTW). "Special" results got "lost world" / weird fantasy-type stuff (gates, lasers, dreamworld crap, etc.), and empty "rooms" just got an unihabited / unguarded ruin or relic.

This process went smoothly enough with a notebook just jotting notes - when I added Tablesmith to the mix, it got a hell of a lot faster. JudgesGuild.com has the Ruins & Relics tables in TS format, which is just beyond fucking awesome. (TS is free to use, but there's a $10 registration to disable the nag - I STRONGLY advise you to check out the program and see if you don't think 10 bucks is actually a steal, and to consider registering.) This is an amazing piece of software for anybody that loves tables. You know you want it.

So, basically I end up with 100 hexes, each with one or two "somethings" in it (on top of the handful of locations already included from the Silver Princess wilderness map). Enough of those are monster lairs that you can get in a fight in maybe every other hex without me adding new creatures to the map, which is about right for the "first stock" by my tastes. As the players wander they'll uncover (and/or slaughter) map contents gradually, but the timed encounters will also _add_ new results to the map - so "restocking" is, I guess, almost automated? We'll see how that works in play, at least.

- DYA

Posting on RPG.net is Fun and Rewarding

2011-06-15T00:27:00.005-04:00

pic semi-related

(Note that I actually don't engage in trolling over there, but the comic above describes what it's like to even attempt to participate in the discussion if you're a) not into the flavor of the day (or at least not fawningly apologetic to those who are), and b) not in the emotionally-safe-place weaboo cool-kid's-club. SO ANNOYING.)

- DYA

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Saving Throws (But Were Afraid To Ask)

2011-06-14T17:15:00.006-04:00

Hahaha... So, every once in a while, dredging through the open sewer that is RPG.net yields a nugget of wisdom, nestled gently amongst the turds. This is pretty great:

ENTER THE VANGUARD OF ROLEPLAYING *snort* *snigger*

It's a discussion of old-school saving throws, and the perceived reasoning behind them. I've seen this kind of thing on Dragonsfoot here and there, but not with this level of thought and illustration. Worthwhile reading, I'll have this in the back of my mind next time I pull an, "ok, save vs. [THING]" out of my ass in-game.

Valley of the Silver Princess (or, "How to See Gulluvia On 50cp a Day")

2011-06-13T12:57:00.007-04:00

Running House D&D this Wednesday, or so I'm told. ("House D&D" being "Basic D&D with housemates and associates, including girlfriend-types and not specifically aimed at super grognards the way we usually roll around here".) Last time (the first time), we ran one session of the (banned) orange-cover version of B3 Palace of the Silver Princess (weirdness very much in - see HERE for details (UNLESS YOU'RE PLAYING AND THAT MEANS YOU, YOU SNEAKY ENGLISH K'NIGITS)). They spent most of the session getting there (jumping around city roofs and playing 007 before getting to the green dude with the hook), and then proceeded to make it a hundred feet or so in, blunder into a pit trap, and get their asses more or less handed to them by militaristic kobolds. Barely managing to force a failed morale check, driving the overly-effective dogmen away, the party limped back to the entrance, short a player character.

So now they're in need of warm bodies and an outfitter. (Besides the dead PC from last time, we may have one or two new players.) They're in poor shape for the "wander around until we inevitably run across imprisoned adventurers" thing, so that means travel. I'm loathe to handwave such things - sure, you can say "you get to town X with Y random encounters on the way", but I dig when things evolve a bit more organically. TO THE MAPPING CHAMBER.

I'm basing this on the overland map in (orange-cover) B3, sort-of-mostly shoehorned into the corresponding area from the Mystara map included in the D&D Rules Cyclopedia. Which is not to say I'm giving much if any weight to the Mystara stuff that's gone before - the material from B3 is pretty clearly out of line with what's been published for this area since, and I'm not a huge Mystara scholar anyway - but I figure I have the RC, and the pretty map pages in it, I may as well make use of it for the surrounding areas. Most of what I've done here is actually just North of the extreme Northwest corner of the RC Mystara map - which also means that the Western border of my map is "off the charts", even in the source material. So that's where I can get freaky-crazy - I'm envisioning a vast, weird steppes area populated by barbarians and giant animals (stolen from Judges Guild, natch), with a spice road across it and lots of "on the road" zaniness. With a nice, dangerous reputation to keep folks away from it before I've actually done any of the design work, of course. :D

With that context in mind, I spent some time mapping the locations and routes (roads, paths and rivers) from B3 onto my RC-based hex map. (Using the 5-mile Judges Guild scale for this.) (Yes I know it was supposed to be 15 miles, no I don't care.) Some map distortion crept in getting things to fit where I wanted them, but I managed to more or less preserve the distances between locations, so fuck it. From there, we have a pretty bare map. Time to flesh it out.

Using the "habitation" table from the AD&D DMG (pg. 173), I rolled the "chance of habitation" for every hex in a 15 x 15 hex area. Any weird results (assuming that the main towns were those on the map, and that there weren't a bunch of extra cities, for example) were massaged out (either moved somewhere useful, or ignored). Got a bunch of small thorps & hamlets, a ton of individual settlements / camps, and more than a few ruins. Using the "race of settlement ruler" table from Kellri's GDD#4, we find that there are a lot of displaced dwarven settlements in the area (presumably refugees from the Palace's fall) (used tons of Dwarf Fortress names for these, of course), and a couple of powerful retired adventurers living in the valley as well.

And here's where we're at (with water colored in, figuring not much there is gonna change or need erasing at this point):

With the terrain and main settlements arrived at, I have a pretty good basis to fill in the blanks with lots of results from the Judges Guild ruins & relics table, and then it's hexcrawl time. YEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHH

- DYA

Edit: I figured it'd be illuminating to include the map I based my work off of. So there.

Repurposing Battletech Maps (or, "Re-Re-Inventing The Wheel")

2011-03-25T11:19:00.006-04:00

School is very very crazy and gaming is pretty few and far between, lately, so I was psyched to have a chance to break out the Battletech stuff (for the first time in a loooong time) the other day. (Got two weeks off until it's back to Crazy Robots and Polygonland.) Introduced one of the roommates to tabletop BT - he's an old hand at the PC series, so most of it was already familiar. We did a pretty standard "attack/defend" scenario, just 'mechs (no combined arms stuff like tanks or infantry) and strictly 3025 designs (and level 1 rules). Today we'll probably do something similar, and then maybe we'll start working in the non-'mech stuff. I've always been curious how that mode of play goes - all my BT experience has been strictly 'mech-on-'mech.

So I'm reading the Mechwarrior book (the RPG chocolate to BT's boardgame/mini hybrid peanut butter), and there's discussion of running man-to-man combat using the standard Battletech maps (with a 5 meter to a hex scale). This looked lke fun, but it also occurs to me - why not use Battletech maps for other games where outdoor combat comes up a lot? I've never been a huge fan of wilderness layouts drawn on battlemats - visually it just doesn't work for me the way it does with dungeons - but I already own a big pile of hexed-out terrain sheets, with beautiful art no less. Next time I have occasion, I'm gonna whip out a few BT mapsheets and see how it flies. (The big decision: What scale to use (the hexes are a little bigger than the 1" I'm used to on my mat), and whether to bother restricting figures to the hexes, or to just use a ruler (a la traditional mini wargaming).

Of course this repurposing thing is nothing new - our learned and crusty readers will already be aware that Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival map was the original wilderness map for Gary's home game. Has a nicely circular feel, this.

It occurs to me as well that AD&D inherited OD&D's outdoor scale of 1" to 10 YARDS (as opposed to feet, as it is in indoor settings like the dungeon), and off the top of my head I can't remember whether Classic D&D followed suit. (The next chance I'll likely get to use this is our still-fledgling house Red Box game - the guys (and gal) came out of the Palace of the Silver Princess with one less adventurer than they went in with, and are considering making the trek down out of the mountains into the valley below, in search of able sword-arms and a decent outfitter.)

This would be a great fit for Traveller, as well, especially if I ditch Trav's assumed scale - the old Snapshot ship maps are beeeeyootiful, but who the hell wants to track down 15mm sci-fi minis when most everything else I play is 28mm and up?

- DYA

Victory for Clan Stormworks (or, "We Win at D&D, Part I")

2010-12-03T09:02:00.003-05:00

Wednesday night was the latest session of my boy Brandon's Dwarf Fortress-inspired AD&D campaign. Holy crap, that was some brutal-ass D&D.

When we left things the last time, the Stormworks boys had made a frontal assault on the fire giants' fortress - a structure that, in Jewel City's heyday, served as an arena/ampitheatre for the dwarf residents, sort of an inverted ziggurat - and killed their king, but were swiftly pinned down by the remaining giants. Holding a door against the giants themselves would've been simple enough (+4AC vs. giants is a big freakin' deal in AD&D, and most of our guys are well into negative ACs as it is), but their hellhound pets were roasting us alive the whole time we fought (their fiery breath being no problem for the giants we were fighting, of course).

This time, after debating the merits of the earthquake scroll I'd been carrying around (i.e., "do we want to give Brandon a reason to collapse the whole dungeon on us"), we decided to punch out and make a break for it, essentially just hopping over the arena wall (with a rope of climbing assist) and making a break for safety. That got us out of the giant fire and into the giant frying pan, so to speak, as we just ended up holed up somewhere else, in basically the same position as before but with the added complication that we were down a flight of stairs, which enabled the giants to just roll balls of burning debris down at us until we were smoked out. Lost about half the henchmen breaking our way out of there, and it was only thanks to a lucky morale failure on the part of our pursuers that we made it out of that spot - unfortunately, they subdued one of our number (Vindalf, the youngest of our 3 dwarf monster slayers - AKA the "Dwarven Hanson Brothers") and made off with him in their flight.

This threw a nice wrench in our plans, since normally we'd just retreat and heal up - and, at this point, we'd amassed enough combat xp and treasure that we were all due for level training, and would've just come back and stomped the remaining giants flat - but with Vindalf captured, all we had time for was a quick 4-hour nap (only netting our 3 clerics access to their 1st and 2nd level spells) and back at it. This time we had a diversion planned, though: My cleric Begli (with his trusty dwarven thrower) on the shoulders of Rekk (one of the fighters, proud owner of a set of slippers of speed), circling the fortress in one direction (at a high rate of both speed and fire-giant-testicle-smashing-themed taunting), throwing hammerstrikes at the walls and dodging thrown stones, whilst the remaining party snuck up (ahem, "snuck up" as much as plate-armored dwarven infantry can) to the opposite side, and took down the wall with a well-placed and -activated feather token (tree).

Attempting to enact a hasty flank maneuver pretty much just got us surrounded by giants this time, but with all of us scanning character sheets for the random potions we'd been carting around - this being the kind of "death or glory moment" when drinking unidentified potions seems like a good idea - we were all buffed to the gills and fighting mad for our lost brother. Matty's fighter Fjallar lucked out when the random "meaty bloody potion" he'd been carrying around for months turned out to be a growth potion, and we ended up with a 24 foot battlerager on our side - evened things out nicely. Getting all stuck in, we avoided the brunt of the giants' rock-throwing, and ater taking out an even dozen of the males, the tribe broke once and for all - the few survivors took off after the women and children, and we stopped to lick our wounds and wonder what the HELL they'd done with Vindalf.

SO ENDS PART 1 - MORE TO COME NEXT EPISODE

- DYA

Against the Elves (or, "Hacking in the Aardvarkian Age")

2010-12-01T10:03:00.005-05:00

Last Tuesday, I promised posts about Mordheim, Epic-scale 40K, Space Hulk/Crusade, and Battlesystem - so, of course, this week we have a post about HackMaster. That's the kind of dodgy and generally evasive journalism you can expect from Mighty Thews - when the audience zigs, we zag. I'M BLOWING UR MIND, RIGHT?

Ok, enough of that. Last night I rolled up an obnoxious, greedy, albino aardvarkian fighter who's obsessed with rocks and inherited his father's barbershop. (This, in case you were wondering, is why you fucking love HackMaster.) If you don't read a lot of semi-obscure comics by crazy people, the aardvarkian is based on the lead character of Dave Sim's Cerebus the Aardvark - a short, furry (not THAT kind of furry) Conan retread with a fondness for the drink and recreational violence (and, according to Sim, the voice of George C. Scott). Somebody wrote it up as a HackMaster PC race and got it into the HackJournal, which makes it Hack official. (There was a big hand-wringing contest on the forums over whether this was the death of HackMaster, opening the gates to half-gelatinous cube monks and shit - which just proves how gamers can manage to take even a parody game waaay too seriously.)

In any case, this little guy (all 3'9" of him) just needs equipment and he'll be all ready to run in Matt's Against the Elves campaign - where, if all goes according to plan, we will accomplish complete and total pointy-eared genocide on Matt's campaign world (and then, presumably, carry the fight on to wildspace with HackJammer - always did want to smash the Elven Navy, with the friggin' snooty attitude and butterfly ships and everything). This is all because we have a dude in our group who always plays elves, and he loves elves, and is pretty much your typical "elf guy", and even when we aren't playing fantasy he finds a way to basically play elves, and Matt's decided to put an end to it once and for all. Once we pull this off, no more elves in Matty's games, ever. Granted, killing every elf in the world (drow included, no sneaky subrace-carding out of this one) is kind of a tall order, but this is HackMaster after all - if I can find a copy of the 3e Players Handbook from before they banned the nuclear winter fireball spell, we should be fine. *

Super psyched to run an aardvarkian. Looks like the little bugger will be a nasty piece of work, too - took the active sense of smell and stealth talents (which, combined with my aardvarkian burrowing ambush ability, will give me assloads of attacks on surprise rounds) and the dirty fighting talent (which will aid in being a vicious little knee-biter), and my military training rolls came out pretty cherry, so I got a bunch of free skills and proficiencies. We'll see how he holds up in actual combat - I have high hopes.

- DYA

* This is not actually going to happen - as HackMaster started actual publication with the 4th edition, the 3rd edition PHBs are understably hard to come by, har har - but I think we'll get our hands on the spell anyway, just wait and see. ;)

P.S.: FB sure has my number - thoughtfully offered me a sponsored link to Viking Intelliwash Dishwasher this morning, which is clearly relevant to my interests. GOOD JOB, TARGETED MARKETING ROBOTS.

So I'm Back, Apparently (Blogging a Dead Horse)

2010-11-23T10:13:00.010-05:00

HEY FOLKS

Yeah, it's been several minutes, now I'm gonna post again. We'll get through this together.

To sum up: Hell of a year. In the 7 months since I posted last, my father died of tons of cancer, I dis-engaged an engagement I was in, moved, my band put out a CD, and I started school for video game development. Also my computer got rained in. (IN.) So you'll understand if I've been a bit lean on the updates.

That said, I also set up a brandy-new game room in the new place, painted a shit-ton of new minis, and played a bunch of games, so plenty of game-fodder for the post-mill there. Should have tons of lovely pics and ranting soon, for now here's a couple of highlights. (Excuse the cameraphone pics, hoping to have a real, actual camera any time now.)

Some of what we've been doing / what's to come:

Mordheim

Epic

Space Hulk (and coming soon, Space Crusade!)

Battlesystem

(We haven't played yet, so here's a picture of a kitty:)

Terrain-building crap

Tales of Clan Stormworks (or, "Dwarves Are Really Really Good at AD&D")

and the no-boys-allowed D&D game I'll be running in the next couple weeks (or, "Dungeons & Giggling"). (Sorry, no porn stars.) (Yet.)

(A more relevant kitty:)

- DYA

Fuck - so much for that campaign

2010-03-20T03:24:00.002-04:00

So, I find out tonight that one of the two other GMs in our circle just started running his group through a certain module. Said module has been the main focus of my campaigns for the last two or three years (or, at least, setting things up so one or more parties were ready to take it on). Maybe half my group is the same guys as his group; I totally can't run this module, now. I have NO IDEA what to do next. I feel like quitting AD&D for another system for a few might be the right way to go - just too much of my campaign work over the last couple years now leads to something I now can't use. Fuck. This shit sucks.

-DYA

Drunken one-off crawl pt. II: the revenge

2010-03-06T12:29:00.000-05:00

So I promised either a session report or falling asleep in the comments section of last post; I delivered on the latter promise. Here's the former.

Our stalwart troupe of hastily-named adventuring-type folk entered the Catacombs of the Necromancer via the timber lift ensconced in the ever-so-aptly named Stinky Hole tavern. The lift brings one to "The Training Grounds" (AKA Level 0, AKA The Rat Warrens), an area where (according to the talk around town) a small, inexperienced group of adventurers may hone their craft without exposure to the more-terrifying terrors of the deep. (Basically, yeah, it's a rat-whomping newbie level straight out of CircleMUD - a little tribute to a huge time-waster of my youth.) One of the standard rumors concerning the Catacombs details the way to "Level 1" and the dungeon proper (first right, first left, first right) but Angus said to hell with that. (IIRC, the last Basic game anyone in our circle played was my boy Matt's, wherein they lost 30 PCs in a night, so maybe his caution is justified.)

The party (consisting of, I believe, a fighter, a dwarf, an elf, two clerics and a halfling) entered the narrow passages of The Warrens. (5' wide, here, which makes having a spear- or polearm-armed back rank fighter almost necessary, lest combat devolve into the dreaded Conga Line of Death.) They first happened on an octagonal-shaped room containing a low table and several exits. Upon entering the room, it was found to also contain a nasty recurring green slime infestation; the party was surprised, and the fighter was drip'd 'pon, but the deadly goo only struck his helmet and pauldron (flubbed the attack roll), and - quickly discarding these - the room was marked off "no entrar" with chalk and the party moved on.

(A note here about green slime, and its inclusion in the "slow-pitch" area of my dungeon. Often considered one of the deadliest low-level monsters in D&D, and unfortunately (due to hazy guidelines on how to use the stuff) a rarely-used one by many DMs. IMC, one must be surprised by the slime to be struck (assuming it's clinging to the ceiling and not filling some drinking goblet or slime-spraying death trap), and an attack roll is made to see if it hit the PC, their armor (or gear), or simply the floor. Slime striking the armor gives PCs a round or two to react, and they get a "this shit's sizzling away" cue to work off of. In other words, you have to be relatively unlucky to get "slimed" in my game unless someone's worked it into a trap. Still, it's a potential PC-melter, why include it in the "safe zone"? 'Cause new players need to get the message right of the bat that there's no "safe," just "safer," and sometimes the first PC death is the band-aid-ripping that signals to newbies that their survival depends on their wits as well as luck. Putting the slime encounter one room from the door gets this out of the way (and while any replacement PCs needed are a shout away).

From the now-shunned slime living room, and while avoiding the described route to Level 1, the only remaining way lead to a small, circular room containing an ancient stone well. Lying in wait here was a 5'-long gecko - the party sprang into action and monster-pinata'd the fuck out of this before it could take anybody's arm off. The gecko was skinned for a cloak (bright blue with orange spots is apparently in this year), and the well was investigated.

Now, this is another potential "gotcha" that could be considered unusual for a newbie level. Iron rungs lead to the bottom of the well, where there is a sandy bottom (sometimes containing a small treasure) with a fast-flowing stream running across it; the stream's channel is just tall enough for a dwarf to walk and fight, but cramped for a human. Upstream, the channel leads to other areas of the level via additional wells (introducing the idea of hidden ways and non-explicit level connections). Downstream, there is an iron grate (now broken), the floor slopes down, and the sandy bottom is replaced by algae-slimed bare rock. If you proceed downstream, you are given several warnings and chances to turn back - failing to do so results in a Dex check, and - failing that - shooting down a dark waterslide to a wholly unsavory (and un-newbie-friendly) cavern level ("The Grotto") wherein death awaits with big, nasty teeth. (The teeth are on giant shrews, if you're curious. Nasty - these are described in Basic as pretty much R.O.U.S.'s, and they're rough customers. Y'know, for a fucking shrew.) This, beyond providing an area for slightly leveled-up and trouble-seeking PCs to explore, teaches the lesson that, yes, I really will give you enough rope to hang yourself with, and that ignoring "flavor text" warnings is somewhat inadvisable. So far I'd yet to see someone actually make it down there (usually the description deters players), and this was no exception. Next time, dear ones, next time. (More on that later - someone eventually fell for it! LOL)

So the watery channel was forded upstream - past an open-ceilinged gallery to another well (this with iron rungs as well). The halfling poked his head up and spotted there skeletons as they in turn spotted (and nearly spitted) him. Quick combat later, the skellies were so much bone meal; onwards and upwards the party proceeded.

Well, that's all my phone browser will hold, so looks like there'll be a part III. Next time I discuss alternative mapping methods, random cave generation, and the dinner bell.

-DYA

One-off drunken one-on-one Basic dungeon crawl

2010-03-02T22:53:00.000-05:00

Worst week ever for more or less everyone I know including me (car crashes, stabbings, internet drama and dental issues, no shit), and only one player made it for Tuesday hacking, so tonight I dusted off the Basic campaign (Zent-Mer) for a one-player, 6-character hackfest. Nice to see that I'd prepared a lovely DM's booklet with awesome on-the-fly encounters, a faction cheat sheet, and other time-savers before I mothballed this one - I was ready to go long before my player had 6 Basic characters rolled up.

Interesting tidbit I ran across browsing the New York Red Box site while waiting (Google it, I'm posting from phone so no link for you) - there are no "% in lair" figures anywhere in Basic D&D, but they are available (presumably copied from the LBBs) in the Judges Guild Ready Ref Sheets - nice to know for when I run wilderness games with this campaign. (Basic is usually my "on the road" game, and I'd much sooner cart along a printout of the inprobably-useful Ready Ref Sheets than a hardcover Monster Manual that I'll only be using for one stat.)

Drinking what I will describe as a "bomb-ass" spiced mead that a buddy of mine hooked me up with after I helped him move this past weekend; anyone in the Worcester area can enjoy the same (and the experience of brewing it for themselves) by stopping in to Deja Brew in Shrewsbury, MA on Rt. 9. (Ry works there on occasion.). It's a brewing supply store but they have equipment on-site for brewing, so if you purchase the ingredients and bottles you can have just about any kind of alcoholic goodness (beers, ales, wines and meads) you might imagine. Highly recommended.

-DYA

Mythos in Greyhawk / The Black Dog of the Cairn Hills

2010-01-18T03:04:00.009-05:00

Been digging into my first cross-genre experiment lately - stirring a little Cthulhu Mythos into my Greyhawk. It's funny - in basing my main campaign around the Free City and the Castle dungeons, this ends up being kind of inevitable. Both Gary and Rob Kuntz sprinkled this stuff liberally throughout their modules (published and otherwise). (Rob, if you were perchance unaware, was Gary's designated co-DM and co-author of the "holy shit 24+ levels" version of the Castle dungeons, along with a metric buttload of early Greyhawk campaign material.) This also gives me a chance to play around with my Call of Cthulhu stuff that sits around gathering dust. (I have more AD&D campaigns than I have time for, never mind other systems.) Besides that, I have an evil party to whip up adversaries for, and what better than stuff that makes them look good in comparison?

And hell, we all love cults.

Currently I'm brainstorming on the my own version of RJK's Temple of the Elder Gods, the cultists of which my players have managed to run into (and piss off). Thinking of a nice mean Lovecraft-y killer that a vengeful cult leader might unleash on their adversaries (assuming force of arms, traditional magical methods, and even psionic killers had failed), I stumbled across a Gord the Rogue reference (here) to Tharizdun having created 3 yeth hounds to hunt down Gord. Which lead my mind immediately to the Hounds of Tindalos from Frank Belnap Long's story of the same name (and Mythos-approved in HPL's The Whisperer in Darkness). Now, I could go to my CoC books and convert, but The Hounds are more or less an eldritched-up version of the black dog archetype found in English folklore - one version of which (the yeth hound) Gygax saw fit to add to AD&D. Seems like a perfect fit.

The real-world yeth hound is said to be the spirit of an unbaptised infant. In sword & sorcery terms, this could be read as: Cult leader sacrifices baby (Babies? Shout out to Carcosa!), gets otherworldly ghost dog to hunt you through fucking TIME through an ANGLE (nod to the Mythos version), and you die. Sounds about right. It's especially Mythos-y in that unless you have magic, you're completely fucked if one shows up - even magic weapons only wound the hound 1hp per "plus", so only a sorceror (or a high-level priest) has any hope of killing the thing before it eats the whole party.

So don't piss off a cult leader, I guess. Or at least sharply restrict their access to live babies. Either way.

-DYA

This is Goddamn Beautiful / WG13 Micro-review

2010-01-14T14:45:00.010-05:00

This is AD&D in a nutshell:

(In response to a thread stating that AD&D runs like a Swiss watch - i.e., that it's perfectly tuned and precisely balanced, but breaks down if you change something.)

No, a finely tuned swiss watch may be complex, but it is extremely ordered, regular, relentless, even tedious at doing what it does.

AD&D is a carefully constructed Rube Goldberg device. It is complex, intricately built out of string, spatulas, and squirrels running on wheels in cages, and in the end it only accomplishes something very simple like lighting the exploding cigar. But it's just as fun to simply see its parts work as to see what it accomplishes. And you can replace the squirrels with water drips, the string with levers, the spatula with a cannon. It's just as fun to see it work when you change around its inner workings and ultimately it still accomplishes the same goal of getting the cigar to blow up in your face.

\

Poetry.

So, the holidays happened, and that was a giant pain in the ass, and I haven't posted for a while. Here's what's been happening at my table:

We ran a few sessions of Keep on the Borderlands when a few of the regular Castle Greyhawk players couldn't make it out for a few weeks, with new (Good-aligned as opposed to the main party's Chaotic Bastard bent) PCs. Had a brutal few sessions of two-PC grindage (B2 is not kind to small parties), with several hostage takings (and rescuings - including a PC from a game I ran two years back!), ending in an all-but-TPK (i.e., only one PC and an NPC henchman are still alive, and they're in the clutches of hobgoblins - and nobody's posted any ransom money at the Fighters' Guild).

The guys have new PCs ready to go, but right now all the mercenary adventurers in residence at the Keep are scared to go anywhere near the Caves (as the recent disastrous expeditions are well-known). They won't even get word of the ransom demands for the old PC and henchman for at least a week, so for the time being their explorations will be limited to the surrounding countryside - and possibly the Caverns of Quasqueton. (B1, a module I consider much more suited to a small party.) We'll see next time the Worcester boys don't make it down.

[SPOILERS FOR WG13 CASTLE OF THE MAD ARCHMAGE AHEAD]

[SPOILERS AHOY]
Back at the main game, the PCs (now fully reinforced with 4 PCs, 5 mercenary men-at-arms and a freelance cleric/maniac of Erythnul) penetrated to Level 2 of Castle Greyhawk for the first time. I was psyched, a) because it meant they were starting to get that they can't "clear" the first level, and b) because now I get to try out the Castle of the Mad Archmage stuff. They lead the way to The Cellars the only way a smart adventurer would - with a live chicken. LOL They kick the thing down the stairs, and lo and behold there's actually a trio of giant frogs at the bottom, one of which promptly (and loudly) gobbled up the bird, alerting the PCs to its presence. One of the newly-returned PCs (the elven fighter/MU Vaz Deferenz) was killed in the ensuing melee, but nobody really gave a shit (since Jesse wasn't really psyched with the character - shitty stats and a party-inappropriate alignment - and in-game the other PCs all hated him). The chicken, however, lived through the encounter! (It was a bit confused and covered in frog ichor, but still.)

They press on - and let me mention here that these assholes have had simply unbelievable luck with secret doors. (The dwarf helps.) They quickly discover a secret tunnel leading them straight to the bedchamber of an orc captain - a brief parlay occurs but the lead fighter cuts the cur down as he began to break for the door. An extended battle breaks out as the remaining orcs become alert and pour in, but the party manages to set up a bottleneck and systematically cuts them down. (They're getting their unit tactics down pat at this point - I've got to give it to them.) Bodies are searched, orc hygiene practices are remarked upon, and they move on.

They come across a trio of skeletons lurking (as skeletons are so wont to do) in a closet. (Perfect Castle Greyhawk touch - there's just the right sprinkling of hokey humor in what I've seen of the WG13 levels so far.) And this leads to another first in my D&D experience - evil clerics controlling undead. I've literally never seen it happen in-game before - if a cleric commanded skeletons or zombies or whatever, it was just assumed to already have happened and was simply hand-waved. And it quickly becomes apparent to me just how damn useful a few mindless undead encounters can be for an evil dungeoneering party. The party instantly realizes that they have two new disposable front-liners (the third was destroyed before the command took effect), which would have been extremely useful had the commanding (NPC) cleric not been instantly killed by a giant wolf spider less than a minute later. By being bitten five times. In the face. Seriously.

(This breaks down as so: I roll an encounter check for any melee in open corridors longer than a round - or if someone's, oh, I don't know, say, yelling and screaming about the power and glory of Erythnul to a couple of dead people. We come up with a result of "nearby monster" - and the nearest thing that's likely to wander is a giant spider a few rooms away. The PCs dick around and debate how they can use the lye they've found while the spider creeps up on them. The thing surprises on a 1-5, the PCs obligingly roll a 5, giving it 5 surprise segments to kill them with. I check between the obvious targets, and it comes up Horgh (the cleric). With a 30" jump attack, the spider has a full five attacks (the first with a charge bonus), four of which it lands, the very first being a natty 20 for a critical (which I roll on the HackMaster table, coming up with a location of "left side face" and double damage). The cleric (y'know, the class with the amazing Poison save) fails all four saves, which would've mattered if the damage from the bites didn't kill him anyway. So yeah, wicked dead.)

They chop the spider to pieces in a round or three, but the check I roll for THIS loud melee brings up a new beasty, this time from the other direction - an ochre jelly. They don't know what they hell to do with this, but (muttering about their upcoming deaths) they shuffle into formation. It actually only scored one hit, and was cut to pieces fast enough - and this is where we establish that, apparently, in my version of Greyhawk lye will neutralize natural acids (such as that of the various oozes and jellies and whatnot). What the hell, it was a good idea, I'll roll with it until I decide otherwise.

They head north and encounter yet another first (for me) - an olive slime, followed by two slime creatures. Now, I managed to not have read the MM entries on these beforehand, and (as is so often the case for me when this happens) ran them totally wrong. So apparently these were variants. The slime itself I ran as a mobile blob, where it's actually a one-shot fall-from-above ambush predator like the green slime (or a piercer). So I gave the PCs extra xp for surviving (potentially deadly) attacks from it every round (instead of the 1 round it was entitled to). F it, they'll never know. The slime creatures I neglected to give the immunity to normal attacks that the slime itself has. This made them much easier to kill then they should have been, but again I just docked the PCs some xp for the kill, and then described them as only partially-transformed victims (with some flesh and bone still on them, and therefore vulnerable to swords). Again, not like anyone knew enough to care. Worked out ok. The bastard PCs then rack up another in their epic streak of secret-door-findings and score a magic robe for the cleric, and (with wounded mercenaries) head for the surface.

Or actually they head for walk-straight-into-a-gelatinous-cube-land. (Random again - clearly the Elder Elemental God is active in this area, with all the puddings and jellies and what have yous.) One PC gets frozen, another one-shots the cube (critical), and they wait around for two hours (fending off rat attacks) while the paralyzed guy gets better. Finally it's back to the surface - they camp on a section of the inner bailey wall (south of the Egyptian Pylon Gate) and head back to the Free City in the morning (the cleric with a brand new experience level - being a new player, his first, so he's psyched).

So my first experience with WG13 was just what I was looking for - gonzo, nail-biting, high-stakes dungeon crawling. Dying to see where they go next. Also dying to see if my copy of Bottle City shows up in time (ordered it that night), because they're about two lefts and a right away from stumbling across this relic of the Lake Geneva campaign. However, I suspect that a few loose ends will tie themselves up and a few campaign seeds sown will bear bitter icky revenge-y fruit next session, possibly putting a return to the dungeon on the back burner. But that's for next week.

-DYA

P.S.: Also played my buddy Brandon's amazing Dwarf Fortress-themed 1e game last night. We pulled an iron man session - 11 hours, cut off around 4:30. Amazing craziness, all kinds of new revelations about the fabulously dysfunctional Mountain Dwarf culture, but long story short: We fought Duergar with a decanter of endless water riot-control firehose. More on this later.

Wilderlands of 'Hawk Fantasy - Hexcrawl Notes

2009-12-14T01:19:00.006-05:00

In designing the wilderness area for my Greyhawk campaign, I'm finding that I have a million and one choices to make as to my "wilderness procedures", and that these will shape a) how I prepare my material, and b) how smoothly the game runs when we're in the thick of it.

It all comes down to encounter checks (of several varieties). In order to capture the level of simulation (and risk vs. reward) I'm looking for, I'm going to have time-based encounters (as per the DMG - checks at predefined intervals during the day) and exploration-based encounters (1 check for every new hex entered, probably a 1 in 6 or a 1 in 10, with the chance for encounter increased in dangerous hexes like mountains and forests). Exploration checks will draw from nearby lairs (with a chance to find the lair itself based on "% in lair"), while time-based checks will be from a terrain-based encounter table (and may add new lairs to the map, again depending on the "% in lair" rolled). Encounter checks within a few hexes of settlements will have a chance of being converted into a "patrol" encounter (which may or may not benefit the PCs, depending on what they've been up to lately), while encounters on a road or frequently-traveled trade route will use a dedicated "on the road" encounter table (which itself contains a certain chance of monster encounters).

I'm also splitting "creature checks" (monsters, travelers, patrols, etc.) from "location checks" (ruins, relics, settlements, etc.). Passing through a hex, I'll roll a "chance to spot" for each listed (and previously undiscovered) ruin or relic in the hex (setting this on-the-fly - something small but in the open would be a 1 in 6, something big a 2 in 6, a settlement 3 in 6 assuming it's out in the open, while something concealed might be a 1 in 8 or 1 in 10). Searching a hex will take as long as crossing the hex twice, and will allow another roll to spot (with the chance to spot improved by 1). If the PCs spot nothing (or they've already discovered everything in the hex), I'll roll a 1 in 6 chance to discover something new (taken from a pregenerated list of unassigned R&Rs) and add it to the hex. (I expect frequently-traveled wilderness routes will become quite detailed as the campaign matures.)

Now, I know the chances to spot something in an actual 25 square mile area are miniscule, but this is a game conceit I'm willing to live with. I'm generating between 1 and 3 locations for each hex on my initial pass-through - it's to be assumed each hex contains many more than this, and that the others will be added on subsequent passes (once the pregenerated ones are discovered). This is all conjecture until it actually sees play, of course - I'll hopefully get to try it Tuesday, and I'll check in to report how it goes. I'm aiming to have three full "Darlene hexes" (the 30-mile hexes from the folio map) detailed at "Wilderness Grand Tactical" scale (5-mile hexes) by then, and I'll let the players know that if they get off that map, then the FPS (fights per second) of the game is going to slow drastically (while I whip up new crap).

-DYA

GAAHHHHH - TEH GOOGLE BEEN DISCRIMINATIN' 'GAINST ME

2009-12-10T13:04:00.003-05:00

Hahahaha... Stupid Google tries to show me "D&D" results instead of "AD&D" when I ask for them, and then begrudgingly tells me, if I insist, "Oh OK, I SUPPOSE I can show you this "AD&D" you speak of." It's only one more click, but I don't have time to sit around clicking on websites all day, I HAVE CRAP TO DO, JACK.

LOL

-DYA

Roll For Initiative podcast is up now, you go listen.

2009-12-10T12:41:00.006-05:00

Check this shit out: Roll For Initiative is a brandy-new first-edition-centric podcast by two guys from the DF forums. It's pretty cool so far - they're 2 episodes in (each is something like an hour+), and they're already starting to get their dynamic going. The guys are pretty decent on the mic, the lack of which skill is the downfall of most well-intentioned 'casts I've heard (admittedly not many), they seem well-prepared, and they know how to discuss a subject without just sounding like two dudes having a conversation at the game store. (The smell is better as well, which is nice.)

The show is, regardless, painfully nerdy at times (expect a lot of rolled eyes from your girlfriend if she's walking around the apartment while you listen would be my advice), but that's as much of a feature as it is a bug in my department. LOL It's far worse when folks try to turn D&D into something Xtreem like BMX or MMA or cat juggling or whatever. This is honest. This is pure. I want to bask in the nerdliness when they're talking about the Deck of Many Things (and the inevitable campaign-nuking that ensues when you drop one as a DM).

They're focusing on 1e, and what I really like is that there's back-and-forth about how the hosts (and others) interpret BTB rules, and discussion of house rules from different campaigns as well. These guys get 1e - there's a lot of talk about all the different ways you can run your campaign, and about the flexibility and "open-sourced-ness" of OAD&D. I'm totally on board with the idea that the game just plain works better when you take Gygax's "make it your own damn game and stop asking me how initiative works already" mandate to heart.

(Presumably recurring) features include a monster spotlight (they're working from the Dragon "Creature Catalog" beasties now, I believe), a magic item spotlight, and a "Stickler's Corner" where they discuss obscure and fiddly rules. (Yay!) In the second episode they talk to the guy who wrote that Dragonfire DM program back in the day. There was some other stuff, I don't remember, I've been smoking resin this morning.

They also have a website with links and extra stuff from the show; you can get the shows in m4u or mp3 format direct from the site, or by RSS feed. You go there now.

-DYA

This is fucking D&D. This right here.

2009-12-07T16:13:00.004-05:00

From the DF general forum (in a thread about a) Frank Frazetta claiming never to have read any Conan stories (and that nobody else read them either), and b) some new Conan collection where the guy writing the intro bashes REH):

Man, speaking of - this picture just says "friggin' D&D" to me all over. There's a big raging fighter-type (who appears to be flying, or at least leaping for somebody's throat), a cultist with a censer and an altar and the nekkid sacrificial girl with teh bewbs and everything, some kind of magic brazier spewing eerie smoke, demons or gargoyles or something in the background, and then for some reason there's an alligator and an octopus. If I was playing this session I'd think my GM was either on powerful hallucinogenics or a goddamn genius. :lol:

-DYA

Greyhawk Creation Comix

2009-12-06T19:38:00.005-05:00

Just stumbled across this nifty little beginner's primer on Oerth's creation myth. lulzy.

-DYA

P.S.: Going to see Until the Light Takes Us tonight at the Cable Car Cinema in Providence. I'll let you know if it sucks.
P.P.S.: It didn't suck. I enjoyed it; can't wait until there's a DVD version (hopefully with some unedited interview footage).

7 Angry Dwarves (give or take a few) b/w The Bastard Squad in "Sex in the City"

2009-12-04T09:29:00.007-05:00

Special double half post, which is like one regular post but with ADD.

I just played in the second session of a 1e AD&D campaign that is officially Fucking Awesome: It's Dwarf Fortress, for AD&D. If you haven't heard of it, DF is the most brain-tazeringly complex and in-depth Roguelike RTS city sim featuring manic depressive alcoholic dwarves out there on the market today. It also has ASCII graphics. Did I mention it's free? (Check HERE for how this campaign got started, and HERE for the #1 reason why you need to check out DF. Trust me.)

Long story short: We're 5 dwarves (two clerics - brothers - and three fighters - also brothers - think the Hanson boys in Slapshot) sent from our native hold way the fuck up in the mountains to scout out a site for a new settlement. We've got a wagon of supplies, two 0-lvl dwarven hirelings (a cartographer and a party grunt/porter/wagon watcher), and not one but TWO burglars (a human and a halfling). That's one more than Thorin had, so we've got to be successful, right? Problem is, one of'em (the halfling) is chronically lazy and semi-suicidal (character quote: "Life is pain!"), so he's half useless. On top of that, the other cleric's player has decided to run him as senile as hu- er, dwarvenly possible. The comedy relief is in full effect here, folks.

So that's awesome, so far. Brandon runs a great game, and the players are a blast. We've been hugely successful so far - several experienced players playing smart and hard, plus the fact that five heavily-armored dwarves cut through gobbos and hobbos (and bugbears, oh my!) like a knife through hot butter. A drunken dwarven knife through cowardly goblin butter. We've already cleared out one lair (a ruined monastery) and have started preparing it as a base camp for further expeditions into the surrounding hills. I know Brando's tendency to pile on the hurt when he thinks the players are doing too well for his tastes, though, so I'm sure there's a shitstorm coming our way real soon. But we're fucking dwarves, we'll deal.

PART THE SECOND

In my game, meanwhile, the guys are taking the evil party thing to heart in a big way. Which is also very very awesome. I ran my very first assassination mission at the start of our last session - given the option of a straight roll on the table, or playing out the scenario (and having the opportunity to improve his chances through smart play), the player chose the latter. It was largely a cakewalk - Angus chose the right contract (out of two offered), and took his time casing the location and mapping out the target's moves. When it came down to it, his roll for death attack didn't succeed, but he was able to silence the target with traditional melee and get the fuck outta Dodge anyway. Mission accomplished.

That completed, we went on to determine what the other players' PCs were doing while this was going on (the whole thing took about a week, game time). As I've mentioned here before, I'm using the Midkemia Cities book (which I highly recommend) for its city encounters, but there's also a "city catch-up table" for determining what (if anything) happens to a character during their off-time. They can adjust their chance for an event (up or down) by a certain amount based on their intelligence and/or wisdom. Some of the events on there can have some pretty profound effects on the game, especially if the player chooses to pursue them - for example, one player got "offered dangerous mission". PC gets offered a mission (with the price determined randomly before they accept), and if they choose to attempt it, they have a straight percentage chance of either making it back (with a big bonus in gold and xp) or simply dying. My brother's PC took his chances (for a first-level character it's a smart gamble), but the dice didn't agree, and he bought it. To his credit, Dave shrugged and asked for a clean sheet. (Vive la AD&D! LOL)

The other present player for this session (we were a bit short-handed this night) got a result of "make a friend / your friend has insulted someone / friend asks for help". A few more rolls, we find out that a co-worker (these tables allow for PCs to actually get a job while they're killing time in they city - I decided this was just a fellow adventurer) has insulted a powerful personage, has to get out of the city or face assassination, and asks the PC for assistance. Brandon, without missing a beat, offered to take this guy along to the Castle, and then asks Angus about taking the contract. LOL So now I've got two players in the assassins' guild. EVIL PARTY FOR THE WIN. (They also hired a couple of 0-level spearmen, but these men-at-arms didn't stick around for long once they saw the kind of shenanigans my guys get up to. Hahaha...)

Since they were pretty short (and planning on killing the NPC they'd already hired), they went about looking for a healer to hire on. Since they're complete bastards, this would have been somewhat problematic, except that they thought to inquire through the assassins' guild as to "sympathetic clerics." What they got was one crazy SOB cleric of Erythnul, who was almost more sadistic then they were, and a damn sight creepier. The expedition assembled, they headed off down the Old Castle Track towards the Little Hillwood (and Castle Greyhawk beyond). Oh, with a quick stop to kill the NPC fighter and stash his body.

They delved into the Castle ruins, touched up the map some, encountered some bullywugs (who'd just moved into the lair of some goblins the PCs had "forcibly evicted" a few games earlier), and defeated them. One PC was wounded (the assassin), so they stashed him in their secret bolthole and pressed on. They then returned to the room where, several trips back, they'd fought an evil cleric and his gnoll minions. They'd driven off most of the gnolls and killed the priest last time; anticipating that the gnolls might have returned (but presumably without their clerical backup), they didn't anticipate any problems cleaning up. Which would have been true if the leaderless gnolls hadn't allied with the nearby Old Guard Kobolds. A sound PC rout followed. ("Game over, man, game over!!!")

Getting back to town, our aspiring assassin came up with an interesting way to get treasure identified (they'd come across a potion and a magic dagger in the bullywugs' bindles) - send his hos out to track down a sympathetic bard, and then treat him to a triple-around-the-world on the house. I gave it a chance on the dice, and it came up jackpot, so this worked. (Hey, I'd have gone for it.) So they were able to avoid dealing with the Striped Mage (and his occasionally reasonable but highly variable prices). All in all, a unique session by any standard (well, mine at least).

-DYA

Bardic Lore Pt. 1: You Spoony Bard!

2009-11-30T09:33:00.012-05:00

So, in a very roundabout way I've finally had to address the question of bards in my campaign. To wit: Dealing with last week's Advanced Prostitutes & Procurers game led me to look at the Thieves' Guild structure in the City of Greyhawk, which prompted me to take into consideration the "other" illicit guilds described in The Canting Crew: The Assassins' Guild, the Beggars' Guild, and the Vagabonds' Guild. This last encompasses Jongleurs, Gypsies, Strolling Players, Mountebanks and Tinkers (with a great deal of overlap between them). In other words, itinerant entertainers - which inevitably leads us to bards.

Now, I've always had a soft spot for the class. As a player (probably because I get to actually "play" so infrequently), I love "in-between" classes and jack-of-all-trades characters. As a GM, having a bard of any stripe in the party inevitably leads to hilarious situations and juicy complications (not to mention a great information pipeline when I want it). That said, it's had a bit of an identity crisis through the years (and editions).

The original (OD&D) version appears as early as Strategic Review #6, and already we're told that it's basically an amalgamation of the Nordic skald, the Celtic bard, and the medieval minstrel. The class has lore abilities (specifically used here to ID magic items in the dungeon), a basic bent (if not a requirement) towards Neutrality (the bard in all TSR editions seems to have a Heart Full of Neutrality), access to tons of languages (1 per point of Intelligence), and the odd mish-mash of fighter, thief, and (upon attaining 2nd level) spellcasting ability (here from the MU list). Interestingly, elves, dwarves and hobbits may all pursue the class, albeit with limits to their advancement. The 0e bard has a d6 for hit dice and attacks as a fighter of equivalent level. Thieving ability is as per a thief of half their level, rounded down (thus presumably not accessible at 1st level), with the backstab specifically excluded. Here the bard may use any weapon, but is limited to chainmail or leather armor (chain, however, precludes his ability to climb walls and move silently). The article is silent on whether they're allowed to use a shield (I'd guess no). The 0e bard has a % chance per level to mesmerize opponents (once per day per level), and once this is done he may plant a suggestion as per the spell; he may also use his music to counter song-based effects (the harpy's song is mentioned). Perhaps most unusual is that the bard here attracts followers starting at 2nd level, and these followers increase in number and level as the bard advances in experience. The Gaelic college names (Fochlucan, Mac-Fuirmidh, etc.) are present already. (Note: I had assumed these to be "mock Gaelic" and pseudo-historical; not so, as it turns out - check this link for a metric ton of bardy goodness.)

AD&D and the Players Handbook brought us the 1e bard, AKA "the original prestige class" - prestigious indeed, due to the requirements in getting one through actual play! The class seems to be a retro-fit of the 0e version, adding in a highly unusual (and somewhat problematic to arbitrate) "training period" before you actually get to the bardyness. (That's a word, right? Bardyness? Should be, anyway.) What's more, the progression here (gaining at least five but less than eight levels of fighter, then gaining at least five but less than nine levels of thief before finally switching to bard) works completely different from the standard dual-class (or multi-class) systems (which has caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth over at the Dragonsfoot forums, I can assure you). The class as presented here has a reputation for a huge power bump once the bard levels are attained (as the xp progression given here is somewhere between the fighter and the cleric, yet for some reason the bard BTB gets a new HD every bard level, again flying in the face of the traditional dual-class system where you don't get new HD until your new class exceeds the old), as well as the near-mythical rarity of actual, played-from-first-level 1e bard PCs.

All that craziness aside, the actual class is pretty close to how it's presented for 0e. Races are limited to elven and half-elven. (This is parodied somewhat in the novel Azure Bonds, with the halfling "bard" Olive.) (Note how retardedly powerful the actual bard in this story is, too - he becomes a friggin' god by the end of the series! Clearly either Novak or Grubb had seen one in play at the table. LOL) Alignment is now required to be Neutral in at least one of its axises (this would also stay put until d20 rears its ugly and oh-so-permissive head). Hit dice are still a d6, but the 1e bard attacks as per his fighter level, which never increases once the class is abandoned (more on that later), while thieving ability is as per thief level. Weapons are now restricted (the druid list plus non-two-handed swords), and now only magical chain is permissible (presumably once you've worked through ten levels of fighter and thief, this is not too problematic). Spells are now from the druid list, and go up to 5th level; what's more, the 1e bard gains all druid abilities as a druid equal to their bard level. Additional languages are granted as the bard advances in level. The Legend Lore, Charm and Counter-song abilities of the older class are present, largely unchanged (albeit at a slower rate of advancement), and are supplemented by the now-ubiquitous ability to inspire his allies in battle (+1 to attack, +10% to morale, requires 2 rounds of singing and lasts a turn).

It took AD&D players all of three years to decide that the weird advancement was a little unwieldy, and the concept perhaps a bit muddled, and to do something about it. Dragon #56 (December '81) saw the publication of "Singing a new tune - A different bard, not quite so hard" by Jeffery Goelz. Goelz takes the bard as presented in both previous incarnations, and melds it into a single-class warrior-druid-illusionist (without the thieving associations or the attendant skills). This is informally known as the "Welsh bard," taken more or less from the Welsh Mabingion cycle. The Welsh bard may be human, elven or half-elven (with unlimited advancement); halflings and dwarves may only attain up to 5th level. Alignment is sort of weird - no evil, tending towards law and/or neutrality. Armor is leather only, but may be supplemented with a wooden shield (i.e., as per the druid), although the shield will interfere with Charming. Weapons are as per the druid with the addition of non-bastard-or-two-handed swords, handaxe, hammer, and horseman's mace, and excluding the spear. (Which seems pretty rough giving the poor armor situation and the back-rank position this implies - I'd be inclined to add it back in.) The Dragon bard attacks as a fighter, but does not gain multiple attacks per level or versus "insignificant opponents". They receive but one starting weapon proficiency, and attack with a -4 penalty to non-proficient weapons. They are also prohibited from using an off-hand weapon (such as a dagger or handaxe). (Again, seems a weird restriction.) Here the bard gains druid spells upon attaining 2nd level, and illusionist spells on reaching 4th. However, there is a list of spells from both traditions which are unusable by (these) bards. This bard does not gain extra languages per se, but rather adds a Read Languages ability to their Charm and Lore abilities; the Charm ability here is unrestricted by uses per day. The Inspire ability is as presented in the PHB, with the addition of a +2 bonus to saves vs. fear, and only requires one round of singing (or poetic oratory). The Counter-song ability, in addition to providing complete protection vs. harpies and the like, grants a +1 to saves vs. non-song sonic effects (such as that of a groaning spirit). Interestingly, the bard may also sooth road-weary travellers (I should note that this has never proven the case in my campaigns ;) ), granting a bonus to mounted or pedestrian movement overland. Lastly, the druid abilities are scaled back to just the shape-shift ability, and this at 11th (rather than 7th) level.

(Read in Flavor Flav voice:) Oooohhhh NINETEEN EIGHTY-NINE!!! 2e drops (yo), and the bard gets a single-class overhaul. This is the bard I grew up with, and the genesis of the modern concept of the class. We're firmly in minstrel/jongleur territory, here - the Celtic origin of the class is touched upon, but the actual class described is basically a fighter/thief/MU (errr, "mage") with good people skills. Races allowed are back to human/half-elf, alignments are back to neutral/something. Armor up to chain is allowed (with attendant adjustments to thieving skills), but no shield; weapons are unrestricted. Spells are now from the MU ("wizard") list again, and there is mention of the need for a spellbook. Hit dice are on a d6, with fighting ability as per a thief. Thieving abilities are restricted to Climb Walls, Detect Noise, Pick Pockets, and Read Languages; the 2e bard is better at Detect and Read than a thief, but suckier at Climb and Pick. The Charm ability of previous incarnations has been reduced to a chance to shift listener's reaction category by one place (with an equal and opposite reaction if the target makes a saving throw). The Inspire ability is present, here it can provide (either) a +1 to attacks, a +1 to (all!) saves, or a +2 to morale; it now requires three rounds of singing to work, and lasts 1 round per level of the bard. Countersong is limited to song-based effects, and requires the bard to make a save to get the effect. The Legend Lore ability is present (5% chance per level), albeit somewhat gimped and ambiguous (does not reveal pluses or powers, only alignment, cursed-osity, and history). Finally, 2e bards can attempt to use scrolls as a thief (just a little bit better).

Lastly, we have the bard as presented in WotC's 3rd Edition. Without going into it too much, the d20 bard is essentially akin to his 2e presentation, with much more emphasis on the "skill monkey" aspect of the class (since now there are skills), spells as per a 3e Sorceror (just a few spells known from the Wizard list, but you can cast'em a zillion times, no book), some weapon restrictions (basically simple weapons with "fencer-type" weapons added on top), limited to light armor (leather up to chain shirt) and (non-tower) shields (albeit with a chance of spell failure when casting in armor). The Lore ability is now Bardic Knowledge, works pretty much the same. Inspire, Counter-song and Charm (now Fascinate) are present, but the reason I include this class is the division of the Inspire ability into Inspire Courage (pluses to combat like we're used to), and "Inspire Competence", which allows you to sing a song and make somebody better at any random task, and is fucking hilarious. The character of Elan (from Order of the Stick) is pretty much based around this, and the "Bluff, Bluff, Bluff, Bluff the Stupid Ogre!" song is one of my top ten webcomic comedy moments; hence this class's inclusion.

So that's the rich tradition of the bard, as seen through the lens of a game about genocidal murder and doing B&Es. Next time we get to look at how I'm bringing some of these classes in line with each other for (simultaneous, parallel) inclusion in my AD&D game. There will be fucktons of charts.

- DYA

The Old Guard Kobolds (or, "Pimpin' Ain't Easy")

2009-11-28T01:20:00.007-05:00

Tuesday's game was an interesting session.

Last time, the PCs were on a map-and-loot jaunt through the Storerooms (level 1 of the Castle Greyhawk dungeons). Near the end of the night, they managed to discover a long-hidden secret chamber. Shortly after, a nasty skirmish with a band of goblins left them pretty banged up, and they retreated to the secret bolthole for a rest.

Now, they were careful to cover their tracks and leave no obvious trace of their passage, so I allowed that they'd be pretty safe there, as long as they Anne Franked it. Usually I've encouraged a trip back to town at the end of a session (since you never know who's gonna be around for the next session, and I try to avoid having un-played PCs in the game), but here at least the players who turned up could operate out of the secret room, with the inactive PCs hiding out. Well, next session we ended up with 3 players.

There was some discussion of turning back to town and assembling some hirelings, but instead the 3 PCs mounted a scouting expedition. They spent a few turns double-checking the party map (there've been a handful of mappers working on it, which tends to make things nice and confusing), and then headed off to the quarter they hadn't hit, yet. And met the Old Guard Kobolds.

If you're an adherent of the Lake Geneva Campaign, you've heard the stories, if not - well, just suffice it to say that these are some Very Burly Kobolds (who've been taking out PC parties for decades, now). The party as it stood was about as tough as a 3-member low-level party can be (two tanky fighters and a fighter/cleric), but right off the players knew something was up. The little bastards were falling like so much wheat (or at least the ones in the front were), but only due to some fancy rolling on the players' part - and they weren't falling fast enough, since the ones in back were tossing oil - and then some of them turn out to be capable swordsmen - and that one's wearing fucking PLATE MAIL - and here come two more units of'em - SHIT SHIT SHIT LET'S GET OUT OF HERE - and I laughed very much.

To their credit, they just exactly pulled it out of the fire, with only one fatality and a handful of hit points left, but (by at least one of my players' admission) their reluctance to flee was almost the death of them. I'd like to say the lesson was learned, but of course they're already plotting out bloody vengeance against the kobs. I suspect it won't be as easy as they're imagining. [EVIL DM GRIN] Their early realization that these weren't "just kobolds" was downright heart-warming, however; if they can at least take away from this that they can't always rely on their knowledge of the Monster Manual to gauge encounters, I'll consider us ahead of the game.

After that fiasco, the party hoofed it back to the Free City of Greyhawk. This was the first time I broke out the map (I'm using Joe Bloch's maps - Joe Bloch of the Greyhawk Grognard blog and the thoroughly awesome WG13 - for my City of Hawks and so far they're eminently suitable), and the first time I plotted the party's course to their destination, with encounters every few thousand feet courtesy of the Midkemia Cities book (I'm loving this supplement so far - read on).

The first encounter I rolled up, as the party was traversing the main drag north towards the Old City, was a prostitute. Consulting the sub-table, I learn that this is exactly (*roll*) one prostitute, who is (*roll*) approaching one of the characters for (*roll*) help. Off the top of my head, it becomes apparent that this is a street girl, and that some bruisers from the bawdy house nearby have been trying to run her and her co-workers off of their corner (nobody likes competition). The players bite and we're off on our first city adventure of the campaign.

This ends up being an interesting exercise in on-the-spot content creation. They head to the spot, the party leader gets the girls to point out their antagonists, and the PCs go to "straighten out the situation". After a few tough words are exchanged, they demand to speak to the thugs' boss; the thugs are only too happy to show the PCs in so that they can fall in behind and bash their collective brains out in private. A close-quarters melee follows (in the foyer next to the coatroom), and, with the thugs realizing the futility of direct attacks (one fighter in plate mail, and we're using weapons VS. AC, they'd be hitting on 20) I got to break out the pummeling and overbearing rules from UA. (Lesson learned here being that you really need multiple bodies for the overbearing thing to work well.) With the largest of the three doormen downed, and the other two wounded and fled, the party leader relays his message to some newly-arriving bravos (that the girls ought not be messed with from here on out), and they take off. Being smart enough to have the hookers show them through the back alley, they even avoid the watch patrol that's headed to investigate the disturbance. The girls are brought to the Green Dragon (where the regular working girls shoot them dirty looks), and it is decided at that these will now be two of our PCs' hos, and that they will now look after the ladies.

So now my PCs have some hos. I'm still figuring out how to handle this. Gary Gygax's Canting Crew book has some amazingly detailed thieves' guild info (that I'm using pretty much as-is for my City), and from here I learn that not only is prostitution a guild-run activity, but that there's even different branches for different types (high-class girls, house girls, street girls, etc.). So not only are they horning in on one branch's racket, they're interfering with another's. I suspect they'll find that pimpin' ain't easy, even in the City of Greyhawk. LOL

All in all, out of one random encounter I got a new city location, the name of its owner (and an idea of what its foyer looks like), two new slightly-detailed NPC enemies (the escaped doormen), a potential in-town conflict for the PCs to deal with (the guild), and a rather interesting and potentially hilarious campaign complication (i.e., "How the shit do I handle PC ho income?")("And do they gain XP for it?")

Hell of a session.

-DYA

PS: This post at Old Guard Gaming Accoutrements is awesome.)

WTF, Sparta. Seriously?

2009-11-18T12:22:00.004-05:00

LOL - I just stumbled across this tidbit on tvtropes.org - from the article on "Annoying Arrows" (i.e., the tendency for characters in media to get stuck full of arrows and keep on fighting) (yeah, D&D gets namechecked here):

300 in a way both overstated and understated the effectiveness of Persian arrows. The arrows were actually very light, like most weapons used by the Persians, and would bounce off Greek shields and armor instead of sticking into them like in the film. But the Persian army was renowned less for its ground archers and more for its mounted archers, who would ride close to the enemy and harass them with targeted arrow fire, which the Greeks at the time had no defense against. After the war, the Spartans actually invented the "hoplite run," in which a soldier would have to sprint the better part of a mile in their armor to train for running down enemy cavalry.

Seriously, Sparta? When presented with deadly enemy horse archers, your response is "JUST RUN THE HORSES DOWN AND PWN THEM YOU PUSSIES"?

Greyhawk Sandbox Project (Steps 1-10)

2009-11-17T11:22:00.004-05:00

Tuesday is AD&D night around here, so I'm spending some time before the game to get all my campaign ducks in a row, so to speak. One thing that's topping my list at the moment is an overland map - I don't have one (or at least one with a finer scale than the Darlene map's 30 mile hex - great for getting an overview, but not so useful for hexcrawl-style wilderness adventure). So far we've been concentrating on the dungeon (Castle Greyhawk), with the city itself (Free City of Greyhawk) only just starting to show up in play - but it's only a matter of time before somebody picks up one of the adventure hooks laying around (or gets bored) and wants to do some hiking.

Bat in the Attic blog (a fine OSR destination if you haven't checked it out yet) outlines 34 steps to make a fantasy sandbox, and I'm dying to try his method. The first three steps (1 world map, 2 label important regions, 3 write region blurbs) are already taken care of thanks to the World of Greyhawk folio, and step 4 is to choose your starting region - again, centering on the Free City of Greyhawk, the choice is made for me. Steps 5-10 involve detailing the local map, so that's where I'll be starting.

Now, surprisingly, there's not a single zoomed-in hexmap of the Greyhawk region that I can find. There are plenty of beautifully illustrated maps out there, most of which look like they'd be useless in my gaming (and most of which incorporate elements from 2e modules and the 3e Living Greyhawk campaign, none of which I'm using). So it falls to me to create a usable hexcrawl map of the area. I'll likely be doing this with the DMG random terrain tables as inspiration (although I'll place the result generated with some mind as to "realistic" terrain).

Something else I stumbled across last night: Bat in the Attic has also put up a great rundown-by-pantheon of the Greyhawk deities - something I've meant to do for quite some time (long enough that I probably never would have). The posting is HERE, and the full rundown is HERE. Great stuff.

Game Store Gloat

2009-11-05T19:58:00.008-05:00

Holy fuck - quite a run to the local game pit this afternoon. Check it out:

JG88 Dark Tower (Paul Jaquays' legendary "upside-down dungeon", set in Judges Guild's Wilderlands setting.)
FR5 The Savage Frontier (Also by Jaquays - a classic sandboxing/expansion of Ed Greenwood's FR1 Waterdeep and the North. It's like Forgotten Wilderlands; been meaning to pick up a hard copy of this for years now.)
9031 The Rogues Gallery (Random NPC generation guidelines and stats for TSR employees' PCs - some of them included under protest, while Blume was forced to make up others when the players wouldn't cooperate. 1980 edition, B+W with Erol Otus art on the front and bogus Mordenkainen and Robilar stats inside.)
9047 Monster & Treasure Assortment (Dungeon level-appropriate encounters and treasures, 100 a piece for 9 levels, and trap/trick tables. I already have one of these, but this is useful enough to keep a copy in each campaign binder - I'm up to maybe four at this point.) (!!!)
B1-9 In Search of Adventure (Compilation of the first 9 modules in the B series, loosely tied together in a campaign. I've got maybe half of these already - from what I hear, the half that matter - and by all accounts this compilation contains heavily-expurgated and hacked-together versions of these modules, but I'm curious to check it out, and from a completist's point of view - well, it was missing from the collection. What can I say? LOL)

All of these for $5 or less. FUCKING SCORE. Dark Tower goes with the JG pile - the Wilderlands is my "someday maybe" setting, as I'm working on the GH stuff first. Savage Frontier was a must before I restarted my Realms campaign, so maybe that'll get going a little sooner. (This would be the PCs from my rather long-running (now defunct) d20/1e hybrid Realms game, only converted over to Hackmaster/1e hybrid stats and thrown some 30 years back in time to the Grey Box era. They keep requesting this, and I keep not having it done. It'll likely involve a lot of Hacking in Undermountain, so once I've got Castle Greyhawk out of my system and my megadungeon legs under me, that'll be a prime candidate. One of these days.) M&T and the Rogues Gallery are just great all-around table aids. (Although I should mention that Kellri's Encounter Netbook is a more-than-suitable replacement for both products, plus a whole shit-ton more. Worth checking out for any pre-2000 D&D edition.)

Damn this collector bug. Hahaha...

-DYA

What is good in life, Conan?

2009-11-04T00:31:00.004-05:00

Nothing momentous to report. Just another Tuesday night around here: Me and some good buds enjoyed some single-malt scotch and some good buds. The party dickered over terms with some hirelings, then made an expedition to Castle Greyhawk, only to run into a hobgoblin and his goblin cronies - the same group that they'd only a few sessions earlier routed with judicious application of murder holes and flaming oil. It was a near thing, with the party pulling out a win but with the thief injured and the rest near "E" on healing and hp, but the haul was just worth it. The hired spearman ate it, while the torchboy ran away. They returned to the city, blew a week while the thief rested up (two members were offered positions in the military, another Gilliganed his way into a possible knightly appointment, and the thief picked up a nagging chest cold that will slow him down for a few weeks)*, then wandered the streets (passing by a Pelorite pilgrimage being harassed by street urchins)* hocking their ill-begotten gains and recruiting for the next adventure.

Man, D&D fucking rules.

* Random city events courtesy of Midkemia Press's fine "Cities" book - now re-available from Midkemia's website here: LINKY)

-DYA

Cyberpunk 2025 (or, "15 Shitty Years")

2009-10-03T11:47:00.003-04:00

Speaking of GM ADD...

I made what I would consider to be a fairly successful FLGS raid last week. I scored a really nice copy of Warhammer City (with the map in) for WFRP, a Role Aids Dwarves module (cool detail on a few dwarven settlements and an adventure for dwarven PCs), the Traveller introductory adventure (I've got tons of supplements, still need to track down the 3BBs) and, most relevant to today's mental meanderings, two Cyberpunk supplements - Rockerboy for Cyberpunk 1e (AKA Cyberpunk 2013) and Eurosource Plus (for Cyberpunk 2020 - an update of a previous CP1 supplement, as I understand it).

Now, it just so happens that while AD&D 2e was my first love, gaming-wise, CP2020 was always the girl on the side. Second game I ever ran, with even less resulting campaign play then AD&D - sessions generally went catastrophically off-script as soon as the players realized they could just run around shooting shit, and tended to culminate in Grand Theft Auto 3-style SWAT showdowns. Everyone always had a blast regardless, but it was irritatingly dissatisfying as a neophyte GM. Anyway, flipping through my newly acquired nerd lore, all kinds of fun one-off ideas started to run through my head. I'll run it in a month or so just once, I told myself. Just once - got a new AD&D campaign to play, after all.

Enter my IT recruiter with a two-day contract working on Blackberries in Boston. This job involves my taking the (stupid fucking) Commuter Rail into Boston, so I have plenty of time to read my new CP crap on the train. What I do not have, however, is time to prepare for the 1e session on Tuesday (not slinging my CZ stuff in a backpack to get banged up), nor the energy or inspiration to freestyle one.

Luckily, I'd just spent two days going back and forth between my slacker metalhead home life and my fast-paced tech-y corporate life, pounding pavement in Boston's glittering yet filthy downtown financial district, working on improbably tiny yet ubiquitous hand-held portable PCs - the kind of experience that drives home how close we really are to the cyberpunk era (and how close Gibson and pals really came to outright prophecy in their fiction). CP2020 inspiration I had in spades (and my players weren't tough to convince), so we whipped up some characters and ran'em through a few introductory encounters (read: gruesome and needless firefights) to get a feeling for the system. (Protip: If you're an unprepared GM who needs time to throw together a quick scenario, hand your players the CP2020 cyberware and/or gun list. Guaranteed at least an hour of drooling while you get your homework done.)

A few things about running CP2020: First, the system is suckawesometastic. By that I mean that it's a great base mechanic (ability 1-10 + skill 1-10 + roll 1-10 to hit a target number anywhere from 10 and up) with a super-brutal and nicely medium-crunchy combat engine built on top, but there are a decent amount of holes in the combat system (forcing GMs to make some tough calls on some pretty basic combat procedures), and the character creation is both inspired and super super super broken. Now, it needs to be said that this was published in 1990 (based on a ruleset from '87 IIRC), and that kind of thing was a lot more acceptable then. If anything, the ambiguities and rough spots give an experienced GM plenty of elbowroom to tinker - and CP is an old school system in that it responds beautifully to careful house ruling (and in that this is almost a necessity in places). However, as a newbie GM in the early '90s, this was a bit beyond me, and as a result combat was slow and often confused, while characters were bristling with guns, cybered to the gills, and world-class combatants to a man.

Then there's the assumed setting, the timeline, the net, and the glam rock. (Oh, the glam rock.) 2020, from 2009, looks hilariously late '80s - the graphics, the lyrics, the culture, etc. The USSR never fell, we got space shit done on time (instead of falling into a post-Challenger funk), the US economy collapsed in the '90s (without the benefit of the dot com boom) and cybernetics are everywhere. The net is pretty much as all-encompassing as it is now - dead-on in places - but the specifics are laughable from where we stand (even if you buy into VR/simstim as a viable consumer interface).

There are three ways to handle this: Draw up your own timeline, say fuck it and call it a divergent timeline (from say 1990 on), or some combination of both. There's a lot to be said for just rolling with the silly - CP works as a game even if the assumptions are a bit off, and the gonzo anime feel you get from the CP2020 setting material is cool in its own right. On the other hand, devising your own timeline is a great mental exercise (I love this shit - extrapolation is what real SF is all about), and you end up with a more plausible future from where we sit. I went with option C, and started drawing up a timeline that takes us from where we are now (with a few "top secret technologies" retconned into the last decade or so) to pretty much where the 2020 book puts us, with a good bit of the Net and other tech stuff given a modern facelift (along with some of the cultural stuff). I was able to come up with a workable sequence of events that gets us there in 15 (admittedly tumultuous) years, giving me a street date of 2025 (which is a nice round number and can also coincidentally refer to the houseruled-to-fuck "version 2.5" that I'm running). I kept most of the classic setting elements (Arasaka and the other friendly corps, hyperviolent and strongly-themed gangs a la "The Warriors", the Sprawl, the Combat Zone, balkanization of the Americas, etc.), I just chose to get us there in a different way. On top of that, I was able to whip up a gutload of new stuff - if there's one thing I can do easily (almost reflexively), it's dream up ways things can go as tragically wrong as possible. I'm also stealing with abandon from the standards - Gibson, Neal Stephenson (especially the strip mall/franchise culture from Snow Crash), etc. I plan on a bit of Appleseed-style hardsuit cop drama (in my Boston, the Highway Patrol has their own reality show - sponsored by Militech, which indidentally provides all their equipment and training), a bunch of street-level craziness (the Bay flooded, and downtown got rebuilt around the elevated highway, so the North End is now a series of canals under the "shelf" of the new downtown), and a good dose of Mad Max highway combat.

Anyway, gotta go - playing in Long Island with my boy's folk rock thing. Here's 3 great CP2020 resources on the web to tide you over:

2k20: http://www.mecha.com/~conkle/cyber/
The Blackhammer Cyberpunk Project: http://www.dreadgazebo.com/2020/
Datafortress 2020: http://datafortress2020.110mb.com/

- DYA

About The New Campaign (Or "GM ADD Strikes Again") [CZ:UW+WG13/1e]

2009-09-24T16:27:00.000-04:00

When I stopped posting a few months back, my main campaign was my B/X homebrew sandbox. Sketchily detailed fantasy city-state with attendant a-wizard-did-it megadungeon below, Wilderlands-style hexcrawl areas in the surrounding hills, forests and swamps (using the Known World map from the Expert Set, but ignoring the Mystara stuff). One of the nice things thing about this campaign is its portability - I can run it with just one binder, no bookshelf required. Since I was running a lot of games out of my house, that was huge. However, my gaming time sorta fizzled around May, and I wasn't running games for a while.

Right when I got some free time to game again, a few things happened at once. I got some of the guys from the band hooked right around the same time several players from my old group became available on weeknights, so I suddenly had a double-handful of players. The GM of the BFRPG / Castle Zagyg game I was playing in abruptly suspended the campaign, and I'd been sitting on a brand new (unread) Castle Zagyg:Upper Works boxed set since the winter con season. And I needed a good excuse to clean out the Nerd Loft (incidentally, where my big table and AD&D / HackMaster shelf reside). A recipe for GM ADD if there ever was one.

So now we're on the fourth or fifth session of AD&D First Edition, using CZ:UW and Joe Bloch's WG13 as Castle Greyhawk, placed 2-3 hours' walk to the east of the Free City of Greyhawk (ignoring Yggsburgh and all TSR-published versions of both the City and the Castle), with the '81 folio and '83 boxed set versions of the World of Greyhawk campaign settings for background. I'm keeping most of the background material from the pre-'85 modules (I've got most of the 1e-era stuff) but ignoring most of the other Greyhawk material and changing whatever strikes me at the moment. I'm using lots of anecdotal material from the Lake Geneva campaign (pulled from forum posts and interviews on the net) for inspiration, but I'm not worried about canon or any aspirations to "authenticity". From what I can tell, the key to running a Gygaxian campaign is not obsessively parroting details from the game he ran, but rolling with the punches and thinking on your feet to see what kind of game you can come up with.

The group itself is a blast: Three players from my first long-term campaign (all hardened AD&D vets), three complete D&D virgins (the guys from the band - all 3 have played plenty of PCRPGs, including Baldur's Gate, so they're picking up fast), and rotating assortment of other folks - I'm seeing anywhere between 6 and 9 folks turning out every week. (It occasionally strikes me that I'm a lucky bastard - all I ever read is tales of woe from guys trying to get 3 players at an OAD&D table on the same day, and I'm almost to the point of turning good players away.) Running a group this size is an interesting challenge, but using a caller (and loudly-rolled wandering monster dice) is keeping things pretty smooth.

In keeping with my understanding of the original campaign, I've thrown alignment restrictions to the winds, so of course the guys immediately seized on playing an eeeeeeeeeevil party. In practice, they're not going as apeshit as I expected them to - it may be that, over the years, I've impressed upon them the repercussions for out-of-control PCs who Get Caught. (Hahaha...) They're plotting the betrayal of good-aligned adventuring parties, terrorizing small farming hamlets, abusing hapless hirelings, and indulging in the occasional good-natured inter-party assassination bidding war, but nothing that would arouse the wrath of the gods (or the guard) so I'm letting them play it out. All parties involved are half-expecting the whole thing to go down in a bloody PC-on-PC TPK at some point, but so far they're actually more or less working together.

What's more, they're actually succeeding. [CASTLE ZAGYG SPOILERS TO FOLLOW] They've made the trip to the Castle grounds a few times now (over a couple weeks of game time), in which time they've made a cursory exploration of the lower and middle courtyards, successfuly penetrated the dungeons (huh-huh, "penetrate"), and made inroads to Level 1 (the Store Rooms). Nobody's died yet (to my utter consternation), although they've had several close calls. They've had skirmishes with various humanoids in the Ruins level, and driven off the gnoll minions of a rival evil cleric (who they then seriously murdered to death*). (The party currently contains 3 evil clerics, so clearly they were protecting their job security.) They've managed to secure a defensible (if somewhat nightmare-inducing) refuge from the predations of the undead. The party MU also managed a neat little coup - they scored a few magic items by smart (and lucky) play, gave them to the MU, and he netted enough XP to go from level 1 to the cusp of level 3 in the space of two games. This, and the plate mail they liberated from the cleric, should give them a decent toehold on survivability, and it's looking like this batch just may make it over that 1st level hump.

Here's the line-up as it stands now:

Grishnakh Skuthne - Half-Orc Fighter 1
Baldermir Von Bizmark - Human Fighter 1 (on the cusp of 2)
Vladimir - Human "Fighter" (Assasssin) 1
Gozher the Gaucherion - Mountain Dwarf Cleric (Abbathor) 1
Mordis Pitborn - Half-Orc Fighter/Cleric (Incabulous)
Rudger - Half-Orc Fighter/Cleric (Fuck if I can remember)
Vas Deferenez - Half-Elf Fighter/MU 1/1
Treg Kerelius - Human MU 2 (on the cusp of 3)
Alberoth (AKA Dingle) - High Elf Thief 1
Falatious Bowlhard - Grey Elf "Thief" (Assassin) 1

Currently they're on level 1, just having won the fight with the gnolls (I'll be giving them the results of the room-loot next session.)

More on last session later.

-DYA

* Man, speaking of players messing up a perfectly good plan. Gnolls, 4th-level cleric with hold person on tap. Rough situation for a 1st level group - unless the friggin' F/C PC on point wins initiative and drops a darkness spell on the enemy priest (who then obligingly fails his save like a good little xp-container)(grumble grumble). Tough to cast PC-party-fucking spells when you can't see them. *grump*

Basically, I waste him with my crossbow. [Sort-of HackMaster Basic Review]

2009-09-20T19:36:00.006-04:00

So, I got to try out HackMaster Basic today. My overall reaction would be more or less "fuck yeah."

I should preface by admitting that it was a pretty stellar and Hack-appropriate group, so the target audience was firmly in place. The player group consisted of: Dale (who runs the monthly-or so HM 4th Edition game I play in, and who hosted), Tyson (he'll be joining Dale's regular game next week), and myself (with a BTB HM4 campaign on hold and a HM4/AD&D hybrid campaign in early prep stages). GMing was Charles Brown, who's authored a couple Kenzer HM modules (Dead Gawd's Hand comes to mind as I write this); Chuck's a pretty active HackMaster booster in the local gaming scene.

I was ready to be fairly critical, sitting down at the table - I play HM4 for the AD&Disms, and tend to cross-pollinate the two systems pretty freely, so the news that HM5 wasn't going to be AD&D-based was a downer for me. Overall, new HM material is only useful to me as far as it's easily converted / ported over to my heavily-customized AD&D engine. That said, I was also licking my chops anticipating what cool rules I could steal for my HM4 game.

Come to find out that, while it may not strictly be "1e on crack" like HM4, it's not that damn far off. It sure as hell isn't d20 (and it's a far cry from World of 4craft). From AD&D, we still have "6+1 stats" (the familiar 6 along with "Looks" subbing in for Comeliness), and the super-granular stat bonus charts from HM (most bonuses and penalties start below 9 and above 11), but the functions of these scores has been shuffled around. Strength no longer provides a bonus to hit, however both Dexterity AND Intelligence do. Similarly, Dexterity provides a defensive adjustment - as does Wisdom (!). (The dumb fighter, as both Dale and I would learn, is not nearly as effective in HM5 than in previous editions.) Score generation is more flexible now - you have the option to take six-in-a-row, swap two scores, or arrange to taste - but you earn big Build Point bonuses by taking the more restrictive options (25 for swapping, 50 for taking it like a man). Scores can still be increased by cashing in Build Points (5 fractional points per BP as opposed to 25 in HM4). I rolled decent Dex, average Str and Con, and abysmal everything else. I decided to play a dwarf fighter. (When all was said and done, I was able to buy the Str and Con up to respectable levels, but everything else stayed crappy - I ended up with a 3 Charisma.)

Skills are percentage-based, where the score to hit is the relevant ability score plus whatever mastery dice the player bought in character creation (this more or less directly from HM4), but now we have a whole list of skills that regular people "just have" at a base rate (a nice addition). Also, wherever a skill depends on two scores, the lower is used (where previously they were averaged). I kinda like that - again, makes dumb PCs a little tougher to deal with. There isn't really a dump stat in HMB. With my lower-than-low mental scores, most of my skills were absolute crap. I also took a roll in swimming and one in first aid on top of the freebies.

Nobody played a spellcaster, but apparently there's a spell point system. *shrug* I like my clunky old slots/level Vancian dealie, but I'm sure that's house-rule-able.

Quirks and Flaws: In HM4, these are rolled randomly (as many times as you're dumb enough to ask for), and you earn BPs based on how hard you get boned. Here they don't buy you anything, instead all PCs roll for one Quirk (mental) and one Flaw (physical) (I think). I got "Foul-Mouthed" (like he wasn't gonna be anyway with a 3 Charisma) and "Pocking" (i.e., I got acne scars, -1 to Looks).

Combat: Here's where things get crazy/awesome. First off, instead of ACs and to-hit charts, combat is an opposed test. (Lots of things seem to be opposed tests.) The attacker rolls their to-hit (on a d20, no worries), and adds any bonuses from level, abilities, specialization, talents, magic, and so on. (These are, thankfully, all summed up on the weapon profile - no hastily adding them up on the spot.) The enemy makes a defense roll (d20 if they're aware, d8 if surprised or prone), adding in defense modifiers from abilities, magic, and such. If the attacker wins, the enemy is hit. Shields and weapons both boost defense (if the character is aware and can bring them to bear), whereas armor does NOT - however, both armor and shields absorb damage from a successful hit. If a shield is hit (i.e., makes the difference between a hit and a not-hit), it makes a save against breakage (modified by the damage and shield size). There's also knockback if you score enough damage (not sure of the math, but it happened once or twice). Interestingly, there's still crits, but now you can also roll a Perfect Defense and score yourself a free counter-attack.

Initiative is cascading - everybody rolls once (on a d12!), and then initiative is counted up from 1 (no rounds, the count doesn't "reset"). Attacking adds your weapon's speed to the count, attacking again adds it again. It's surprisingly fluid, and makes high-speed weapons like daggers nice and mean. (Honestly, this is a big change but I think I really like it - HM4 has this weird dichotomy between its round-based initiative (imported almost verbatim from the 1e DMG) and its tracking of movement and non-spell-melee-or-missile actions by segments. This system seems to remedy that.)

We played the introductory module that (as I understand it) is downloadable from the Kenzer & Co. site. To sum up (SPOILER ALERTS): Stuff is missing, go find out who took the stuff and get the stuff back, murdering the stuff-takers is optional. We got to the place, fought some wolves, fought some snakes, defeated a (normal, non-magical) apple tree, talked to (and successfully resisted the urge to murder) an old lady, murdered some halflings (the GM insisted they were kobolds but we had decided early on that the culprits of the stuff-taking were halflings, and wouldn't be dissuaded) ("mountain halflings" my dwarf theorized), and got the stuff. Then the guy wouldn't pay us because he keeps his money in a module that hasn't been published yet (no, really, I'm not making that part up). A good time was had by all, we won at HackMaster.

So, I'll be ordering myself a copy about as quickly as I can manage - it's pretty crunchy, which is not exactly how I prefer my AD&D, but as its own game it's got an awful lot going for it. (I'll be stealing from it liberally, both for 1e and HM4.) And the one-book presentation is a big plus. If you can arrange to sit down at a table for a test-drive, do yourself a favor. Thumbs up.

- DYA

Attention Vault-Dwellers

2009-09-17T02:02:00.004-04:00

Holy fuck, this is awesome:

Wasteland

Wasteland is basically Fallout for tabletop, using a modified Traveller engine. Everything's there - the weapons, the creatures, the whole lot. This is sheer brilliance. I want to run it right away. DAMN YOU, GM ADD!!!1!!11

OH SHIT A NEW POST

2009-09-16T19:15:00.006-04:00

Hey, I was gone for awhile* but apparently I'm back**, so here's a random (experimental) house rule to screw with.

SKILL PRACTICE / SKILL TRAINING

I always liked the skill systems in games like Ultima Online or old BBS MUDs, particularly the ability to learn a skill either by in-game practice or by training from an instructor. However, tying skill advancement to repeatedly performing a task over and over again is tricky.

First off, in online CRPGs game time generally equates to real time (albeit at a compressed rate), so advancement by practice is at least limited by the player's playing schedule and/or capacity for boredom. In a pen-and-paper RPG, where real time has an extremely nebulous relationship to game time, there's little to keep enterprising players from simply saying, for example, "I climb the inn wall a hundred times, let's start making skill rolls". How exciting for you and your players. Players should be rewarded for working on skills in-game without reducing play to a MMO-style grind session.

Second, some skills are way, way easier to learn than others. You can learn to build a fire effectively with only a few attempts (even quicker if you're camping out in the cold without a gore-tex mummy bag), while some hunters hunt for several seasons before ever making a kill (especially if they're doing it without a hunting buddy who knows what he's doing).

That in mind, consider assigning a die type to a skill based on how tough it is to learn (small dice for easy skills). Taking examples from the Wilderness Survival Guide, fire-building might have a d4, fishing perhaps a d6. Something like hunting maybe as much as a d8 or d10. On a skill practice attempt, the die type assigned is rolled - if a 1 is rolled, further attempts are made on the next lower die type. If the player gets a 1 on a d4, they have successfully learned the skill.
A player may make only 1 such practice attempt a day in this manner. (Not to say they can't keep trying, but only the first roll counts,). Basically, either you practiced (GM's call on how practice for any given skill takes), or you didn't.

To account for a trainer, a practice attempt could be considered successful on a 1 or a 2. This could be used for a peer trainer (i.e., PC training PC), where perhaps a master trainer could even allow success on a 1, 2, or 3.

Furthermore, in a game where skills are rated by competence (as opposed to binary "you have it or you don't" skills), this system can be reversed to track advancement beyond simple competence. Roll from d4 up to d6 and so on, and assign a skill level to the die type being rolled - maybe d4 = clueless, d6 = novice, d8 = apprentice, d10 = average, yadda yadda yadda. (Could also apply to NWPs that have multiple slots.) You could assign different ratings for different skills if you wanted that degree of granularity.

Keep in mind this is all system-neutral brainstorming, except that it obviously assumes some sort of skill system is in play. I use simple roll-under ability checks in Basic, but I'm considering working NWPs and/or secondary skills (as per the 1e DMG)into my new AD&D campaign - however I'm not a fan of the "proficiency slots per level" system in the Survival Guides. In any case, the above could be used in any game with a similar system. I may use it, or a variant thereof, for LBB Traveller at some point soon.

-DYA

* Family illness + PC issues + unemployment + new band getting ready to play shows, all teamed up to make blogging (and gaming) the last thing on my mind for a few weeks, there.

** However, a) things calmed down a little bit, b) my bandmates started asking about D&D, and c) the guy running the fucking sweet BFRPG/Castle Zagyg campaign I had been playing in made a sudden departure from gaming, leaving me free to read mine. It was immediately necessary to start a new 1e / Castle Greyhawk campaign. ;) More on that in probably my next post.

*** Also I got a Blackberry so I can post random nonsense as it pops out of my head now, and then I sat down for a smoke, read about rules for catfish noodling being included in an old issue of White Dwarf, and the preceding rule nugget popped out. Yay for the illuminating properties of the halfling's weed.

**** wait, there wasn't even a "***" up there, why did you read that last bit? why are you even reading this?

B/X HOUSE RULES, OR “RUINING A GOOD THING”

2009-05-01T16:38:00.001-04:00

Thread here got me thinking on yet another house rule for B/X – seems like as good a time as any to run down what I’m currently using while I’m adding another one.

First the new steez: IMC, so far, I've given MUs Read Magic on top of the two random spells they get. Up until now I've just rolled straight random - yeah, I'm a meanie, let's see what you can do with floating disc and ventriloquism (for some reason that combo comes up a lot) - but I'm going to try something different.

MU SPELL SELECTION:

MUs (not elves) get read magic in addition to their ususal two starting spells, as part of their training. For each of the two remaining spells, the DM will roll two spells and the MU player may pick which they want.

(This gives the MU SOME control over what they get, and a better chance of getting at least one combat spell, but they're still at the mercy of the dice. (Somehow I predict a lot of people rolling floating disc and ventriloquism twice in a row. LOL) Looking at it now, elves may or may not get the choice. Suck it up, pointy - enjoy AC2 and a non-suck hit die.)

That gets added to what’s already in play – let’s take a look.

CHARACTER CREATION:

I specifically haven’t specified this in the house rules docco, but my go-to method is 4d6 (best 3), in order – if I’m feeling magnanimous, you might get to swap any two scores. For a one-shot or special occasion, I might go with something different.

Also, I tend to use the adventuring equipment packs from B3 Palace of the Silver Princess when rolling up PCs for a whole group – having a table full of people all poring over how much wolfs bane to take and who has the torches takes way too much time from kobold whack-a-mole, and the packs give the group a good selection of standard equipment they might not think to take otherwise (like iron spikes).

NON-STANDARD CLASSES:

They’re in, subject to highly arbitrary DM approval. As per the “Customized Character Classes” article from Dragon #109. (Get it if you don’t have it – must-have stuff for Classic, IMO.) Pitch me a concept (whether an AD&D race-and-class combo or something funky like a monster), and we’ll talk. (Vampiric gelatinous cube monk, anyone? :D) (NO.)

BONUS SPELLS:

Spellcasting humans (i.e., clerics and magic-users) whose prime requisites are 16 or greater receive one bonus 1st level spell per day; those whose prime requisites are 18 (or greater) receive two. Note that this will allow a 1st level cleric to cast spells.

That last part is a deliberate design decision on my part – this lets me still have groups of 1st-lvl “acolytes” (usually cultists IMC, at least in the dungeon) functioning as sub-par fighters, but gives a PC cleric the possibility of a spell.

I realize that granting 1st-level MUs up to 3 SPD can significantly up the “nuke factor” if they get lucky and score sleep, but even with the new rule the chances of getting 18 Int AND “win encounter” are pretty low. (Hell, gotta let’em win sometimes.)

CHANGING EQUIPMENT / MISCELLANEOUS ACTIONS:

Consider actions such as changing one weapon for another or removing something from a belt pouch to take roughly half a round. If the party rolled 4-6 on the initiative die for this round, perform the action on the party’s initiative and then drop your relative initiative by 3 for your attack – this could result in your attack taking place after the monsters’, even if the party won initiative. If the party rolled 1-3 on the initiative die, the action takes up the whole round, and you cannot attack this round. Note that attacks with two-handed melee weapons always come last in the initiative sequence – you can’t combine these attacks with another action, other than movement. Dropping an item to the ground is free, and retrieving an item from a backpack or other storage takes an entire round.

(This one occasionally gets almost cut – so far I’ve avoided having to refer to the initiative die beyond “you won/lost,” and focusing on the actual numbers rolled starts to bring us into AD&D territory – I can run an AD&D melee round easily enough, but it’s not what I’m going for with B/X. I dunno, it hasn’t been much of a pain in play, so it’ll stay in until it gets to be a pain in the ass.)

SPELLCASTING IN COMBAT

Casting MU spells requires at least one free hand and the ability to speak clearly. Swapping equipment to free up a hand for spellcasting is a miscellaneous action as described above; swapping equipment back into the hand would require an additional miscellaneous action.

Casting clerical spells requires that the caster be able to speak clearly, and present a holy symbol. Note that “holy symbol” can simply be a weapon or shield, properly sanctified (in a ritual that takes 1 hour and 50gp worth of material) (and assuming the cleric's order is not ideologically opposed to such a thing).

(Classic doesn’t get into spell components (V/S/M), and I’m pretty comfortable with the idea that merely being loud and demonstrative with your cleric badge out is enough for a clerical spell. MUs are the ones who have to manipulate bizarre pseudo-science and eldritch formulas.)

MISSILES IN MELEE:

Attempting to fire a missile while in melee will allow the foe to make a free strike against the character – if the attack is successful, the shot will be ruined.

In addition, when firing a missile weapon while engaged in melee, there is a -4 modifier to the attack roll (stacking with any range modifiers).

MUS GET STAFFS

MUs can use quarterstaffs. OH, THE POWERGAMING

Ok, enough for now - I'll post more later. Home now, then to Paganfest. (I get to see Moonsorrow, Primordial, AND Korpiklaani in the same night. I'm awesome. LOL)

DYA

First level characters are too powerful - did you know?

2009-05-01T10:57:00.005-04:00

Nagora posted this insightful little essay on Dragonsfoot:

First level characters are too powerful

That got your attention, didn't it? Well, half seriously, here's what I've been thinking recently:

In AD&D, zero-level characters are pretty weak. Even men-at-arms have only 4-7hp and normal people have somwhere in the region of 1-5 or so. Now, BtB, "normal people" are 99% of the population (I'm only dealing with humans here). So in a town of 3000 adults, 2770 of them will have less than 8hp; probably more than 1500 will have less than 6hp.

It is these people to which weapons are scaled. A dagger stab is not a serious threat to a first level character given how common it is to grant firsties a hp boost (I rountinely give average hp or the hps rolled, whichever is higher, many people simply give max hp at first level) and, of course, PCs get CON bonuses which 0-levels rarely do (BtB their max CON is 15).

A first level magic user fights as well as any normal person and, equipped with a sleep spell can absolutely count on facing down and killing a gang of 4 such people (perhaps more) single-handedly. If s/he has magic missile then s/he can make most normal people drop dead from 210 feet away. With charm person they can make a town's mayor into a puppet from 360 feet away - while the latter makes a speech or some such. The potential for gaining political power is staggering!

A first level fighter is probably a bit less frightening to normal people, but is still generally able to laugh off even a good sword stroke from puny "norms" whilst their potential for great strength, say 18/51, means that even a glancing blow with a broadsword for minimum damage will almost certainly slaughter even the toughest soldier. Normal people never get a STR bonus to-hit or damage. The first level ranger does all this AND gets a double CON bonus and special abilities too!

Clerics, of course, frequently get bonus spells at first level and don't have to hope on random selection for their spells. So, in addtion to being armed and armoured and better than a normal trained soldier at combat, a cleric can command, cause fear, and/or darkness which the normal person has little defense against.

Thieves are "merely" equal to a trained soldier in direct combat, and have poorer armour in all likelihood, but their potential for DEX bonuses will probably take their overall AC to something in the region of chainmail and their ability to backstab gives them horrendous potential when combined with their ability to get into places where they can attack by surprise.

A party of 6 of these guys in a village is very serious trouble for the inhabitants if the party is hostile!

-------------

Okay, so it's overstated (and I carefully avoided the monk) but the point is that many experienced players lose sight of how capable first level characters actually are. They are in fact pretty tough compared to normal people, yet players used to higher level play can be very cautious when playing firsties again, to the point where they sometimes play them as more cautious than I think the player would be in real life!

I recently had a situation with a very old-timer player who, when given a first-level ranger to play hardly ventured out of town and explained that he was just playing "the way I think a first level character would be". Yet this first level character was big, strong, in his 20's and far more capable of surviving a one-on-one attack than most real people, even soldiers. The player's pre-concieved notion of first-level characters as little more than helpless babes crippled his ability to play the character.

Back in the days of OD&D this was understandable - there was no such notion as 0-level and when wandering about, for example, the City State of the Invincible Overlord, everyone you met was basically one of the leveled classes and if you were first level then, quite logically, most of these people were better than you.

With AD&D the "background level" was drastically reduced and in the process the heroicness of the player characters massively boosted. Yet it seems to me that most people never noticed. I think mainly because most play is not in towns, cities, and villages. It's in places where the opposition is almost all supernatural in some way or other.

Re-reading Conan I was struck by how much of the time he is facing hordes of normal people in towns with a tougher leader and/or a single supernatural sidekick. I think this is a much better model for low-level adventuring than the normal "dungeon full of kobolds" model. By placing the first-level characters into a setting of normal people, the superiority of the characters is established by simple comparison while the nature of an "urban" setting allows the party to flee, regroup, rest and so forth in a much less artificial way than most low-level dungeon or wilderness scenarios.

There is a learnt helplessness about low-level play that I think is discouraging for players (how many people here have heard the lament "can't we start at 3rd?"?) while simultainiously draining the colour out of the background and the specialness out of being one of the elite 1% that should be fun rather than a chore on the way to higher levels.

And it cuts the other way too. As I mentioned on another thread, a dragon is the nuclear weapon of the AD&D world, from the point of view of normal people. A dragon played BtB will land in a county and OWN it - simply flying overhead will cause all opposition to flee, the breath weapon of an adult green dragon will kill evey living thing in a market square; a red's will do likewise in an even larger area while also setting the town alight. Economic ruin and destruction are the inevitable result of a dragon entering even the most powerful empire's borders. Nothing and no one can stand in the way of these beasts. Except...the heroes!

Yet these monsters are routinely dismissed as "whimpy" or "in need boosting". Because most of the time they are not in any context which shows how fantastic either the dragon or the dragon-slayer are.

So I'd encourage all DMs to take a little more time to ground their games in the reality of the normal people before they start to complain that 11th level characters are "not high level", or that magic items are what separates a character from the mundane, or even take the fighter's multiple attacks against under 1HD creatures away from them. The more you let the players feel that their character's are special then I think the more fun they will have, and the more they enjoy rather than dread playing 1st level characters then the more willing they will be to take risks and act (anti-)heroiclly and everyone will enjoy the results.

Thus endith the sermon.

There's a lot to chew on, here. One thing I've always been struck by is how many folks see that AD&D (for example) has 20 levels built in, and assume that you're therefore actually supposed to get to 20th level in the course of normal gameplay. Where, from a logical standpoint, 9th (i.e., name) level characters are world-changing heroes, superhuman in almost every way. This puts the lower levels in the proper perspective, I think. (There's a reason an 8th-level fighter is a "super hero"!)

Anyway, good stuff.

DYA

This is how you do it: New York Red Box

2009-04-30T16:34:00.005-04:00

Just ran across this site. From what I can gather, it's a wiki for not one but two B/X campaigns being run by a group of NYC gamers (as well as other stuff - so far I can see pages for a White Box campaign and a Traveller campaign). There are articles about things like house rules, rules and procedures cribbed from other editions/games, settings, campaign logs, individual PCs, and pretty much everything else. Lots of good stuff on hexmapping. Some of the articles are "bloggish," with sections cut-and-pasted from various rulebooks and musings as to their possible application in the game. Overall, these folks have really taken the B/X toolkit and made it do whatever the hell they wanted it to do, which is awesome. (There's even a "mission statement" to this effect on the homepage, with a link to Matt Finch's "A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming.") There's a forum, which I haven't reall poked around on yet, but overall I get the impression of a bunch of guys having a blast exploring the old school landscape, and bringing the gospel to the masses. I like.

NEW YORK RED BOX

DYA

SOME INFLUENCES PART II

2009-04-30T12:24:00.002-04:00

Part II of this.

The art of Jim “The PCs are SCREWED” Holloway
The art of Frank Frazetta
The works of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee
The works of Robert A. Heinlein (not just “Glory Road,” but all of his works – in particular the concept of “pantheistic solipsism” introduced in “The Number of the Beast” – and, yes, all my campaign worlds have an axis on the Burroughs continuum)
Dark Tower (the Milton Bradley game, not the Judges Guild module or the Stephen King book)
Endless Quest books (particularly Circus of Fear and Under Dragon’s Wing)
The 1977 Rankin/Bass adaptation of The Hobbit (screw you, I like it)

DYA

GNOME-ON-A-ROPE

2009-04-30T10:53:00.003-04:00

Flower, the trap-springing gnome-on-a-rope, was a PC in the first “real” D&D game I ever played in. (Not 100% on the name, but if it wasn’t “Flower,” it was something like it.) He was played by the 12 year old brother of one of the older players, who was (and remained for years afterwards) completely nutso off-the-wall hyper, and he played his character much the same way. His PC was basically the slave of the party MU, and he was led around on a rope tether (which he was constantly straining against to reach shiny things and levers). When the party would come to a suspicious-looking section of corridor, the party meatshields would heave-ho Flower down the hall, and then proceed to drag him back by his leash, springing any traps he bounced across along the way. At the time this treatment seemed somewhat harsh (albeit hilarious), but looking back now, the trouble his PC would’ve gotten in were he not tethered to the party would probably make a few 10’ pits seem like a walk in the park.

Here’s to innovation in dungeoneering!

DYA

STEAL FROM THE BEST, OR "WANDERING LAVATORIES"

2009-04-29T12:52:00.003-04:00

Poking through the archive of Amityville Mike's frequently-awesome blog, and I dug up a neat little morsel of FUCKING AWESOME. Check it out.

The Wandering Chamber Table

This is SO going in my DM pack. Hell, after I run out to this interview, I may just sit down at home and whip up some plug-and-play random dungeon nodes.*

DYA

EDIT: * I did.

LYCKANTROPEN THEMES

2009-04-29T11:50:00.003-04:00

I’ve never been entirely comfortable with mundane weapon immunity in D&D. (Silver to hit, magic to hit, etc.) I appreciate the intent, and there’s definitely something special about the palpable dread an experienced player group experiences when they realize that they can’t even scratch the things they’re fighting. However, it tends to result in cartoonish situations, especially with lycanthropes. Having these creatures be just flat immune to damage seems to conjure images of two-handed sword blows just bouncing off without messing up their fur – even if you accept the abstraction, it tends to nag a bit. For me, at least.

That said, I do want to maintain the nastiness of these creatures, and a certain degree of invulnerability is inherent in their nature. The rationalization I’ve always made for were-creatures’ immunity to mundane weapons is that the wounds simply close as fast as they’re inflicted, rendering the blow moot. This line of thinking has usually led to the conclusion that, if you get one of these creatures pinned and have a big hacking blade handy, you can still remove the head and kill it. Not strictly within the letter of the rule, but it’s always seemed like an appropriate sop to fantasy realism.

I’ve wrestled with these issues somewhat while working on my current campaign, but I didn’t expect anybody to run into a lycanthrope for a good long while, and so had put them on the back burner. Last night, sure enough, the party ran into were-rat territory and I was obliged to think about them pretty damn fast.

What I’ve come up with, as a (tentative) compromise, is this: Non-silvered weapons do only half damage to lycanthropes (well, were-rats, at least – I’ll deal with the other types individually), and the wounds from these weapons heal at 1hp a round (even past the point of “death”). Their skeletal structures are also remarkably resilient, so that a player attempting to decapitate a downed rat-man must bring it down to a full -10hp (while getting past the resistance and still regenerating) before the head can be fully removed. Otherwise, the foul creatures will continue to regain 1hp a round, regaining consciousness (and mobility) at 1hp.

In practice, this worked pretty well. A bit more book-keeping than I usually like to do with a monster, but were-creatures should be pretty rare, so it’s not like it’ll come up all the time. You end up with a 3HD monster that has (effectively) the hp of a 6HD monster, and regeneration on top of that – pretty damn survivable, but possible to overcome with a concerted effort. 3 ratmen ambushed a fighter-heavy 6-man party (all 1st level), and it was a pretty close thing – one ratman permadead, one downed but escaped, and one never below half hp, only breaking off combat once the other had fled. The party had one member incapacitated and lost better than half their total hp – they definitely learned to respect the little grey bastards. This was against only 3 of them – I’m hoping that, after this experience, they’ll know enough to run should they bumble into a full-sized patrol, but if not, their next PCs might. ; )

Speaking of were-creatures (and RE: this post’s title), this morning I found myself sick to death of the Slough Feg CD I’ve been OD’ing on, and all the other metal stuff in my car besides. I randomly dug out the one mellow CD in the car at the moment: Ulver’s “Lyckantropen Themes.” Laughed at the appropriateness considering last night's session, and gave it another spin. Without going too much into Ulver’s career-long musical self-reinvention (check them out on Wikipedophile if you’re curious), this is the original soundtrack to Lyckantropen, a Swedish werewolf movie. It’s 10 tracks of dreary, dreamlike atmosphere based around a single 3-note piano riff, and (since it’s an Ulver release) it’s damn near perfect. In addition to being a good listen on its own merits, this CD makes an amazing dungeon soundtrack – it’s alternately laid-back and tense, with lots of barely-heard background sound. I use it on the regular.

Give it a listen, why don'cha?

DYA

POST-GAME REPORT: WHICH WAY JUMPS THE FROG

2009-04-29T10:57:00.000-04:00

It should be no revelation to anyone who’s GM’ed more than a game or two that you can’t predict what players are going to do (or where they’re going to go). The best (and only) way to guide their movements short of laying down the rails is to selectively skimp on prep-work. If you’ve left a corner of your dungeon level bare of detail, they’re going to zoom in on it with player sonar and start digging around in it. They’re like fucking ferrets – they get into EVERYTHING (and tend to smell weird).

Accordingly, when I lovingly re-drew, detailed and re-stocked two sheets’ worth of dungeon levels last night, I practically FORCED my guys to flee the area like so many suspiciously-well-armed refugees. They got through a door I didn’t expect them to get through (and which may be replaced with a stronger version in the near future by a pissed-off landlord), wandered down several hundred yards of unpleasant, single-file (and barely sketched) corridor, whomping vermin and deftly avoiding every potentially gainful distraction I put in their path until they finally wandered into a real fight (and got banged up enough that it was time to make for the surface). No hard feelings, though – I can improv when I need to. It’s like jazz – it’s dungeon scat. (Actually, no, that sounds horrible, it’s nothing like that. Don’t Google that term, either.)

FWIW, I actually like having areas that were developed during play. I do stuff I wouldn’t normally do when I’m pressed for time, and let things get into the game that otherwise (were I sitting at home, unharried by bloodthirsty players), I’d overthink and try to rationalize. Frankly, I tend towards the realistic, the well-reasoned, and the explainable in my designs, and this isn’t always a good thing. The weird, random, unexplainable shit is where a lot of the wonder of the dungeon comes from, and going “off the map” tends to draw some of that into the overall fabric. Can’t be a bad thing.

Next time, though, I’m gonna be ready. My goal, as of late, has been to provide myself with a handy “DM pack” to run Zent-Mer with – something that, along with a red book and the map, will be all the material I need for a long session. Inspired largely by Kellri’s Old School Encounters Reference, I’ve been distilling any number of charts and lists into an information-dense 8.5”x11” booklet. Next addition: A selection of small dungeon “nodes,” straight outta Appendix A (1e DMG), ready to plug in and stock when the ferrets get loose.

DYA

PS: Oh, yeah, they got into a fight. More on that in a few – I’m still tossing around an on-the-fly rules hack I stumbled into last night, we’ll see if it sticks.

PPS: Another thing, going back one more link in the inspiration chain from Kellri’s book: No DM running Classic D&D should be without a copy of Monster & Treasure Assortment. Such a simple idea, such pure DM gold when you’re running on the fly (or stocking in a hurry).

D&D IN METAL, OR “WITHOUT WARNING, A WIZARD COMES WALKING”

2009-04-28T11:17:00.005-04:00

Maybe it’s just because I grew up at the right time, or got turned on to both a bit earlier than what might be the norm, but D&D and metal have always gone together for me like peanut butter and Satan. I mean chocolate. But, really, what personifies the heart and soul of E.T./Reagan-era AD&D more than a bunch of denim-girded teenagers listening to Ride the Lightning and slaying their way through the Deities & Demigods? White hi-tops and Chessex golf ball d100s and bong hits in the basement. I can see it now.

And it’s easy to see metal’s influence on D&D’s players (and, arguably, metal’s album covers on D&D’s artists), if not necessarily on its initial creators. (Not sure Gary was much of a Slayer fan.) Fantasy permeated the music of proto-metal bands such as Black Sabbath, King Crimson, and (as perhaps best articulated by superfan Brock Samson) Led Zeppelin.

“Listen to those lyrics, man. That song's about love, and longing... yes, and hobbits. Look, it's a metaphor!” – Brock Samson

The New Wave of British Heavy Metal (yes, caps are necessary) brought fantasy- and history-inspired bands like Iron Maiden, Saxon, and Grim Reaper to US orc massacrists. New York power metal pioneers Manowar rocked the full barbarian garb and sang about swords and shit.

Perhaps most telling is that both were at the center of the ‘80s moral panic craze. (Start one today!) Apocryphal stories of devil worship, drug use, human sacrifice, and naked boobs on album covers (or Monster Manuals) were traded over Twinkies and Tab at countless PTA meetings, and the moms and pastors of America got organized (and annoying). Our multifaceted and finely-nuanced culture was undoubtedly enriched by the addition of backwards Ozzy and Priest records and super-well-researched Chick tracts. (Blackleaf – NOOO!) Of course, all of this, in reality, contributed to more cross-pollination between the two camps than before. “If you already think swords and demons and pissing off your folks are pretty cool, then here’s another hobby for you!”

And then at a certain point, the pendulum started to swing the other way, although it’s tough to pinpoint exactly where. Bathory (and sole member/multi-instrumentalist Quorthon) came out of Sweden with a raw, thrash-influenced sound (almost single-handedly creating the genres of black metal and, shortly after, Viking metal). The lyrics were clearly influenced by the folk tales and legends of the Norse people, but I think it’s tough not to see a good bit of Gygax’s touch in songs like A Fine Day to Die and One Rode to Asa Bay. There’s a certain longing for adventure in Bathory’s music that rings damn familiar to me, and I’m pretty sure that’s why.

In Norway, while second-wave black metal pioneers Mayhem were still evolving their signature sound, the members of Old Funeral were running around in the woods ‘til 4 in the morning whacking each other with swords and tackling the Temple of Elemental Evil. Count Grishnack (later Varg Vikernes) would leave Old Funeral to form the vastly influential black metal project Burzum. Vikernes acknowledges the influence T1-4 had on the covers of his early records, and how playing AD&D and MERP would influence the concepts that led to Burzum. ("A Burzum Story, Part I")

Meanwhile the remaining members of Old Funeral would found Immortal, whose lyrics mostly deal with a a frozen, wintry hellworld called Blashyrkh.

Blashyrkh mighty be your name victorious a kingdom we made
with strength and pride all the way you are at the heart of winter
The statue watches the kingdom your giant wings make all beneath
I'm staring forth the raventhrone I know I'm at the heart of winter – Immortal, “At the Heart of Winter”

You do the math.

90s power metal act Blind Guardian would bring a number of innovations to the genre, but they also wore their nerd influences on their sleeves (with songs about wizards and elves and an entire freakin’ Silmarillion concept record) and name-check Dragonlance in their lyrics. Bolt Thrower created a dirge-y, grind-influenced death metal sound, but the band were also gamers in the UK – Warhammer players – and managed to work out a deal with Games Workshop allowing the band to use Warhammer 40K art for the cover and 40K concepts in the lyrics on their debut album. US folk/power metal outfit The Lord Weird Slough Feg (shortened to simply “Slough Feg” as of late) take their name from a character in the very metal 2000AD comic Sláine(featuring the exploits of the Celtic barbarian of the same name), while their lyrics deal with a number of gaming-related topics (with song titles like "Troll Pack") - hell, they actually have a Traveller concept record.

Finally, Richmond, VA’s Battlemaster are purely gaming metal. Their debut record is entitled “Power Word: Kill,” and has a big’ol d20 on the front, song titles from their releases include “Dungeon Crawl” and Undermountain.” Swedish-style melodic death with lyrics about critical hits, mind flayers and liches. No fucking around, here.

I’m skipping a million other bands (look up Battlelore for a laugh sometime), but you get the picture.

Speaking of D&D in metal, I’ll be running tonight for a couple of guys in the band (one of which has played already – once – and has apparently been practicing on Baldur’s Gate II, hahaha) and some other assorted Worcester ruffians. Finishing one-page template version of the main Level 1 hub today, and laying out my DM pack so (in theory) I’ll be ready for whatever they throw at me. Should be a blast or several.

DYA

SOME INFLUENCES (AKA APPENDIX N+)

2009-04-27T17:06:00.003-04:00

One for the road before band practice.

Here are some things that should be considered central influences on Zent-Mer (and I should keep in mind while brainstorming):

The '81 editions of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic and Expert Set, by Tom Moldvay and David Cook, respectively
The Wilderlands of High Fantasy
Nethack
Colossal Cave Adventure
Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord
Final Fantasy I
Dragon Warrior (AKA Dragon Quest)
Ultima 6
Steve Jackson's Sorcery!
The works of Robert E. Howard (Conan, among other mightily-thewed heroes)
The works of H.P. Lovecraft (Cthulhu Mythos and Dreamlands stuff in particular)
The works of Edgar Rice Burroughs
The works of Fritz Leiber
The music of Black Sabbath
The music of King Crimson
The music of Varg Vikernes
The music of GWAR
The art of Erol Otus
The art of David C. Sutherland III
Thundarr the Barbarian
The Venture Bros.

I'll add to this later. Obviously, the extent to which these influence the actual campaign varies, and some are there for a mere handful of ideas, or even a general tone. Some are there because they go well with smoke-filled basements. YMMV.

DYA

D&D IS OUT OF PRINT FOR GOOD

2009-04-27T15:40:00.007-04:00

AND I COULDN'T BE HAPPIER

*ahem*

Suppose I should quantify that, some.

When I say that D&D is OOP, what I mean to say is that the game I (We? Maybe yeah no?) grew up with, the game that brought us things like 10' poles, 10' corridors, and gelatinous cubes to clean them, is currently alive and well - it's just living under an assumed name, or rather, a slew of them. OSRIC. Labyrinth Lord. Swords & Wizardry. Basic Fantasy RPG. And let's not forget trailblazers like HackMaster and Castles & Crusades, nor a slew of other quality products being produced for free, by talented, dedicated hobbyists, all of which have done more to keep the traditions and legacies of our hobby alive than the folks who, technically speaking, hold the deed & title. (BTW, let's all be grateful that T$R never thought to copyright the ampersand back in the day, or none of this would be possible.)

Of course, there's still a game that you can pay money for that says Dungeons & Dragons on the cover, and it has (I'm told) both those things in it, so it's not technically false advertising, but it's kinda like the crappy second Darren and/or Darlene (from Bewitched or Roseanne, depending on which era of brainwash you prefer) - no matter what name they slap on it, all that's needed to put the lie to their claim is the evidence provided by your own two eyes.

Readers of RPGpundit's blog will be familiar with the concept of a shadowy, lurking subsector of the hobby, dedicated to ruining real RPGs so that their touchy-feely substitutions can flourish in the aftermath - and I don't find the notion as implausible as some. What's just as insidious is well-intentioned game designers who don't get it, screwing up the hobby's flagship game to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and depriving kids coming onto the scene of the chance to experience real, actual D&D. Luckily, D&D lives in a safe place where the Monte Cooks and Mike Mearls of the world can't hurt it, going by a double-handful of assumed names, frolicking in a sunny meadow and eating dewdrops. And killing a shit-ton of orcs.

DYA

Rescaling the map - to redraw or not to redraw?

2009-04-27T14:38:00.004-04:00

So, as mentioned earlier, I've been in the process of transferring my dungeon levels from 5' scale full-sheet (8.5"x11") graph paper to 10' scale, 30x30 square One Page Dungeon Template sheets. And I'm finding a million places where, had I drawn these maps to a 10' scale in the first place, they would've "snapped" to the 10' grid. I'm on the fence, here - on the one hand, this is the dungeon as I drew it, a few player characters have already wandered through and mapped some areas, and there's no good reason for everything to conform to a 10' grid that isn't there. One could make the argument that to do so is to coddle PC mappers. On the other hand, redrawing it would make things easier on me as a GM in describing distances, and possibly make the whole thing a little easier to read.

In the end, I suspect I'll end up redrawing - as I've gotten away from the need to describe every twist and turn with surveyor-like precision (and in fact started impressing the impossibility of such a task on my players), the need for a micrometer-tight dungeon map lessens. What's more, I've made it a design feature that dungeon levels are subject to periodic re-routing by the Construction Crew (or just regular old magic), so I may as well put my money where my mouth is. I'm willing to bet that players using pre-revision maps will never notice the difference, anyway.

DYA

LAST MINUTE PREP... AGAIN

2009-04-27T11:31:00.004-04:00

Oh yeah, I am running a game tomorrow. LOL Suppose I should at least pretend to get ready...

A big part of the design philosophy with Zent-Mer is doing some design work on the front end (lots of customized random charts, cheat-sheets, etc.) to let me run on the fly with next-to-no prep. There's still a ton to do in that department, but let's look at what I actually did do so far.

- Master encounter table, encompassing encounters with nearby monsters (i.e., "LOOK AT THE MAP, DUMMY"), encounters with "cleanup crew"-type monsters (vermin/nuisance encounters), and references to the level-specific tables, as well as calls to "event/dungeon dressing" tables.
- Level-specific wandering monster tables (with a B/X-modified version of the "DUNGEON RANDOM MONSTER LEVEL DETERMINATION MATRIX" table from the 1e DMG attached). Most intelligent entries here have at least one possible faction listed, common encounters(like goblins) have more than one.
- Compiled dungeon dressing tables (mostly C+P'ed out of the DMG). The tables here encompass lost items, inscriptions/graffiti (big nod to Nethack, here), sounds, air, and "weirdness".
- Master rumor table and example rumors. (These are in an extremely embrionic state, but there's enough there I could run a few sessions before using them all.)
- Faction "cheat sheet" done up in Excel. This contains any and all human, demihuman, and intelligent monster factions, and their relationships to each other. Knowing from the get-go that goblin tribe A hates goblin tribe B but pays tribute to Bugbear gang C while hiding from Gnoll band D can be super hella mega useful. Also helps immeasurably with city intrigue adventures. This sheet is also where I flesh out a lot of my random encounters - a nameless group of thieves has a guild to belong to, a group of acolytes becomes cultists of [EXPUNGED BY THE INQUISITION], etc.
- Random leftover stuff, like the "quest/geas" generator from JG's Ready Ref Sheets - great little mission generator, there.

And, of course,

- Dungeon levels. Originally drawn up in 5' scale (because I apparently hate trees and slim binders), now being transferred to "One Page Dungeon Template" format (see the link on the right side of this page) in 10' scale. Big props to everyone involved in this project, BTW - it's really helped me boil down my dungeons to what needs to be on the page.

I actually only have the "rat-whomping newbie level" and a few pages' worth of levels 1 and 2 mapped out so far, but there's enough there to occupy tomorrow's group (nobody who'll be there has been past Level 0 yet). Anybody falls down a chute, I'll pull out Appendix A from the DMG, no worries. The nice part is that the upper levels are nice and familiar to me, now (I've run several parties through them at this point), so they run pretty smooth in my head. Not having to refer to the key when describing a room is a cool feeling - I haven't been able to do that since I was a kid, when I used to run the example dungeon from the 1e Realms set again and again. (I still know the Halls of the Beast-Tamers pretty much by heart.)

So what I'll do in my spare time over the next day or so is to organize what I've got into a "DM's packet" where it's all in one place, and (in theory) that, the B/X booklets and my map binder should be all we need. I'll have a post-game up at some point on Wednesday. (Probably.)

- DYA

Battletroops Squad Record Sheet

2009-04-24T11:43:00.002-04:00

I'm now realizing that there are no Battletroops fanpages on the net, at least none that I can find, so fan resources may be a bit hard to come by. I wasn't able to find any Squad Record Sheets, so I whipped up one in Excel. Looks alright.

BATTLETROOPS SQUAD RECORD SHEET

I'm leaving work early today for a job interview - maybe once I get home I can lay out the mapsheets and try it out. Seems like BTroops would be a decent solitaire game (providing you're as easily entertained as I am).

Random FLGS score

2009-04-24T01:05:00.002-04:00

Band practice was delayed a bit tonight, so I swung by That's Entertainment in Worcester to sift through the used bin. Pulled out an unplayed and unpunched copy of Battletroops for 5 bucks. I never thought I'd get around to owning this game - it's like tabletop Rainbow 6 set in the Battletech world. Can't wait to try it out.

MY WORK IN PROGRESS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS

2009-04-23T15:09:00.004-04:00

Now that I've abandoned the Known World map as a home for Zent-Mer, I have the happy task of creating a new wilderness map. I'm weighing how much I want to plan out now, and how much I want to leave to random chance and/or development during play.

On the one hand, planning in advance lets me do an awful lot of "stocking" ahead of time. Starting play with a fully-detailed wilderness area is certainly an attractive proposition.

On the other, it's a lot of work up front. It's possible that a more organic approach, like generating "unlocated" hex contents and assigning them as the party travels, could be a good compromise. Maybe with a few large hand-placed landmarks (like oceans, the big mountain ranges and forests, etc.).

I'm also trolling around trying to round up as many random terrain / hex contents / inhabitation generation methods as I can, in order to compare them and arrive at a solution for my campaign. So far, the 1e DMG, Kellri's (completely indispensable) CDD#4 Old School Encounters Reference, the JG Wilderlands of High Fantasy and Dave Arneson's First Fantasy Campaign are the main sources. (If you know of any others, hook it up!) I also have a copy of the 2e-era "Worldbuilder's Guidebook", which takes a slightly more "top-down" approach than I had initially planned, but still could be worth another look. (One of the better supplements from this era, for my money.)

Once I come up with an overall system I like, the real fun of actually generating this sucker comes in. Me and the Ravaged Ruins tables are gonna get very cozy for a few minutes.

DYA

This is a test...

2009-04-23T10:04:00.000-04:00

Testing phone posting, here. Maybe I'll have some more game aid type stuff up later. That is all. -DYA

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE (SUCH AS IT IS) AND ADDITIONAL BONUS RAMBLINGS

2009-04-22T23:51:00.004-04:00

Yeah, it’s another one of these. Like several of you (137 is a number I see a lot), I’ve been lurking about the Old School Renaissance¹ corners of this blogosphere ² thingy for a while now, stealing shit like a madman for my own nefarious purposes and chuckling at the comment wars. Along the way, I’ve come to appreciate the blog format as a way to organize cluttered thoughts (and as a way to brainstorm with other clutter-brained folks and share materials). That, combined with the fact that I need to brush-up on some software stuff (woo-hoo, back in the job market!) have, tragically, led to this. Apologies in advance. (Edit: Apologies number two – apparently I really like footnotes.)

A bit about me, to give you some frame of reference (and pump up the word count): I’m just the other side of 30 as of this writing, and besides rolling dice and playing make-believe I waste my time in music ³ and IT ⁴. I picked up the RPG bug in the early 90s, just on the cusp of 2nd Edition AD&D. Coming on the scene when I did, we used a mish-mash of 1e and 2e stuff (mixing in some of the Rules Cyclopedia-era Classic D&D material when it made its appearance) – this may have contributed to a certain “system agnosticism” that’s stayed with me to this day. We (“we,” here consisting of myself, my younger brother, and two diaper school buddies) would branch out somewhat into games like Cyberpunk 2020, MERP, Rogue Trader (i.e., 40K 1e), and a few others, but the D&D bug held on pretty tight. My folks are old-school SCA nerds ⁵, golden age sci-fi readers and Tolkien appreciators, so no surprise there. Eventually, however, the mid-90s rolled around. Magic blew up, Vampire hit it big, and the trenchcoat-and-katana crew took over the gaming scene. I responded by dropped gaming like a hot potato – girls and hardcore bands suddenly seemed a lot more appealing then emoting about my sanguine nyghttyme ayynygst with even pastier and pathetic-er dorks, and there’s only so many hours in a day when you’re in high school.

Some years later (2002 or so, IIRC), I stumbled across a box of Space Hulk minis while helping a friend move. I called him out on his closet nerd status (literally, they were in the closet), we started talking gamer on the way to the liquor store, and by the end of the night I was calling around trying to track down who had all my books and figs – I was hooked. Trolling around for the new 40K rules landed me in a gaming store for the first time in a long minute, where I would encounter something called “3rd Edition D&D.” Incredulous that such a thing existed (last I knew in high school, “that Magic company” had bought TSR, and I had just assumed they would put it in their back pocket and let the license die), I picked it up and had a look. Like a lot of folks, on that first read I was attracted by a number of things that seemed (at the time) like brilliant fixes to some perceived weaknesses of the AD&D engine, some of which I’d been doing for years anyway. Some of it was a little worrying already (dwarf wizards?), but I grabbed a copy, got in a game as a player for a few months to get un-rusty and learn the system, and dived back into the GM pool with a new campaign. Haven’t stopped rolling the dice, since.

The rulesets, on the other hand, have been zooming backwards in time at an alarming, almost Doc Brownian rate. Refereeing two year-long-plus 3e campaigns, I was running into places where the rules didn’t fit the world I was running ⁶, or where this or that subsystem I remembered from AD&D wasn’t present ⁷, or where the assumed power curve and “balance-above-all” design philosophy clashed with my ideas of player challenge ⁸ and campaign longevity. ⁹ Before I realized it, I had houseruled the d20 interpretation of D&D into what was, at its core, a super-crunchy AD&D. Finally, when the second campaign in a row degenerated into game-paralyzing bloat around level 5 or 6 (and GM prep became a part-time job), I’d had enough. Perhaps, instead of trying to reverse-engineer D&D out of a generic system (something I feel that the WotC designers weren’t all that successful at, and that was frustrating the hell out of me), just playing real, actual AD&D and applying the changes I liked from d20 would be closer to what I was looking for?

Enter HackMaster. It was 1e and 2e, mixed together like we used to do in the old days, with just enough 2.5-era crunch to make the combats comically brutal. It was a breath of fresh air, especially the mock “killer GM” stance (after the touchy-feely player empowerment I had seen in 3e, this was chicken soup for the GM soul). The High Gygaxian tone and heart-on-the-sleeve homages to the classics was completely infectious, inspiring me to re-explore the systems I grew up with. In no time I’d stumbled across the Dragonsfoot forums, and I’ve been wandering down the winding paths of our hobby’s golden and silver ages ever since. 1st Edition AD&D, 3 flavors of Classic, retroclones like OSRIC, LL and BFRPG, and the OD&D / Judges Guild stuff – pretty much everything except my native 2e (which I still haven’t found a real use for, besides the Montrous Manual and Worldbuilder’s Guidebook), I’ve been exploring it all, picking up ideas and influences along the way. (Having a hell of a time, too.)

Currently, I find myself attempting to catalog a burgeoning B/X (’81 Moldvay Basic / Expert) megadungeon, with a rapidly-filling city above and a pretty sparse wilderness area surrounding – that will, in theory, be the bulk of what I talk about here. The whole thing was initially put together as a means to introduce D&D tropes and concepts to the uninitiated, and to provide a framework for the B/X rules to be explored; that’s shaped its development so far, and those will continue to be my goals. However, it’s also becoming an experiment in sandbox play, organic setting generation, free-form world design, and in “world programming” (i.e., shaping the world via custom random generation charts, and the exercise of rationalizing those results into a coherent whole). I’m going to try and use this format to further those ends, hopefully making the whole process more fruitless (and less painful) for me. Maybe you get some mileage out of it too, who knows? (Yeah, me neither.)

Besides all that, you’ll hear about my other campaigns (past and present), other systems, general old-school gaming stuff, music, nerd culture, the occasional psychotic rant. Whatever comes to mind. I’ll also try to assemble a collection of links to old-school / sandbox resources (as much for my convenience as anything else), and host the ones I come up with myself. (I spend an alarming amount of time generating custom game aids.) There may be pretty pictures, I don’t know.

Anyway, here’s this. Check this space soon for more.

DYA

¹ I love that somewhere along the way we’ve picked up proper noun status.
² Worst. Word. Ever.
³ Black and folk/Viking metal in particular – you’ll probably see posts relating to that here and there.
⁴ As noted above, half of the purpose for this blog is to give me an excuse to bone up on applications I need a refresher in – MS Office, Photoshop, HTML, etc. – as well as give me a chance to get familiar with RPG-specific tools like Campaign Cartographer, Hexographer, Tablesmith, etc.)
⁵ Fun fact: My mom apparently won an archery contest while dressed in full renaissance noble dress, and while 6 months pregnant with me. She says she was never a better archer than when she was pregnant – it did something to her balance. Go figure.
⁶ An increasingly canon-lite Forgotten Realms based not so much on the 3e set as on the 1e/early 2e Realms I ran back in the day, with an assload of my own additions. First real frustrations with canon overload are HERE.
⁷ Terrain and weather generation, domain-management stuff, henchmen and hireling interactions, the freaking reaction and morale rules… and on and on and yeah. So. Yeah.
⁸ One of the weaknesses I see in the CR system is that a smart, cautious, AD&D-trained player group (which I was both blessed and cursed with) will steamroll over CR-appropriate encounters. (Seen it time and time again.) Challenging them effectively without resorting to a Tucker’s Kobolds-type situation every time means they fight way over their assumed EL, and the resulting XP glut completely breaks the level ramp.
⁹ Particularly the problems inherent in designing a large dungeon under 3e rules – the party levels so fast that it can’t clear (or tame) much of a largish dungeon level before it’s “powered up” to the point where they can’t be challenged by the other threats present on the level. Fucking with the power scaling was one of my earliest (and biggest) issues with 3e.

EXCUSE THE MESS

2009-04-22T22:37:00.001-04:00

Development and layout quite obviously in progress. (Check out the nerdy parchment theme they have in the default templates. Very "thatched roof cottage.") (Edit: Yeah, I changed that.)