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

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

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

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

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

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")

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")

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

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