In Search of Adventure (Young Lord Steakfist Goes Forth)

Well, hell, that was fun.

Wednesday's been kind of a big deal, lately - Wednesday is the night I actually get to PLAY D&D. Like, as a player. Most of the time, I'm the one running the games. (Sure most of you know how that is.) However, over the last 6 months or so, I've gotten to try out Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, gotten into a good handful of Labyrinth Lord sessions, and even banged out a session of our buddy's mythic Greece AD&D campaign. It's cool to get some time on the other side of the screen. (Heavy is the head that wears the Viking Hat, after all...)

This week, though, a slot opened in our Wednesday night rotation, so I kicked off a new Classic D&D campaign of non-specific vintage. I'm using the Rules Cyclopedia as my reference, but the players are all using '81 Moldvay Basic books. Beyond telling the guys that thieves can't use two-handed weapons, it's close enough for government work - if anybody gets to Companion level, we'll address the differences. We're using GAZ1: The Grand Duchy of Karameikos, B1-9 In Search of Adventure, and my modest pile of B Series modules for background and adventure material. Compared to our usual Monday Forgotten Realms game (where my... well-stocked Realms library can be a double-edged sword, sometimes), this is a nice slim set of sources to work with, and of course Basic is just a whole other order of simple compared to drink-from-the-firehose-style AD&D. It's liberating.

Now, I know it's base heresy, but I am enjoying the added minute or so the GAZ1 background tables add to B/X character creation. (For human characters, it amounts to 3 rolls, less for demihumans.) We get to find out a human PC's social standing, ethnic background (native Traladaran, Thyatian, or mixed), and their hometown. I'm firmly in the "character is what you do, not what you write down" school, and I like to see players develop their PCs in play. Two-page backgrounds are not encouraged in our games, much less a requirement. But with just 3 pieces of information, the guys were spinning off all kinds of speculation about their characters' place in the world, their family structures, and their relationships to each other. Great signal-to-noise ratio - once these guys are at Expert level, and their adventures expand in scale a bit, we'll have plenty of grist for the mill. We already have the illustrious dynasty of Lord Steakfist (and their ancestral home, "Castle Planet Fitness") contrasted with the ill-fated and penniless Brownwater clan of Black Eagle Barony (poor Dunder escaped that blighted land concealed in a pig cart, got killed in the face by a giant shrew in the first encounter, and was in short order replaced by his brother Slipsun). Great stuff.

Let's talk about the source material a bit. In particular B1-9. I've seen this collection get a lot of bad press from completist Mystara folks, and on one level, I can see why. The premise is that it's a collection of the first 9 B Series adventures (I'm with you, so far), and that they're threaded together in a loose campaign - not a lead-you-by-the-nose "adventure path", but a branching web of adventure hooks that allows the players the lead in navigating (a great idea, and - even if you don't use the adventures presented - it shows how this can be done, which is an important lesson for new DMs using published material). Unfortunately, several of the adventures presented are chopped for space, and I have to question the decisions made on what got in and what didn't.

B2 Keep on the Borderlands is included, but the Keep itself (one of the most iconic base towns in the hobby) is reduced to a paragraph describing the castellan brushing off the PCs. B3 Palace of the Silver Princess (the green, published version, not the extra-spicy orange version) is included, although the "programmed adventure" Chooose-Your-Own-Adventure content is skipped. (I don't miss it - as a matter of fact, this version is in some places better-presented than the original.) B4 The Lost City is here, but only the top levels of the complex are provided - the unkeyed lower levels are missing. (This kinda sucks - for play value vs. page count, a few more pages with the lower level maps would give a DM running this a lot more potential mileage.) B5 Horror on the Hill has its mini-wilderness area amputated - while I haven't run this one, a friend is running the original for two groups right now, and he tells me this is an unfortunate omission. Tracy and Laura Hickman's B7 Rahasia is here, both sections in their entirety. (With the original Daystar West Media printings, publication as RPGA1 and RPGA2, and subsequent compilation as B7, this is the fourth incarnation of these adventures!) B8 Journey to the Rock (a tournament adventure) is presented, slightly slimmed down. B9 Castle Caldwell and Beyond (itself a loosely linked collection of scenarios) gets 4 of its 5 mini-adventures seeded into the larger work, and the 5th is dropped. Finally, B6 The Veiled Society is the thread that ties the whole thing together - all roads lead to Specularum, and any of In Search of Adventure's three main threads will bring the PCs there to deal with the machinations of the Veiled Society. It is presented with the map from GAZ1 (as opposed to B6's earlier Specularum cartography), and sans cutouts or stand-ups, but is otherwise unexpurgated.

And poor, poor B1 - the original Basic Set module, the one that started it all, gets reduced to two half-page maps, unkeyed, and a single rumor. Not a line of the text makes it in. I can see, if I squint, where the "key your own dungeon" aspect would make it easy to lay this one on the chopping block, but I think it's a glaring omission - beyond the historical significance, these are some of the most iconicly weird room descriptions around, and exploring Quasqueton's baffling labyrinth is one of the hobby's major shared experiences. Devoting less than two pages sorely underutilizes Mike Carr's work on this foundational text.

So I can see where this collection gets its tawdry reputation from. Beyond the missing material (and make no mistake, this still clocks in with the AD&D megamodules on pagecount), the links between scenarios are tenuous - that they're not on hard rails is a feature, not a bug, but it will require a self-motivating party to navigate from one scenario to another. (The hook for B7 Rahasia, in particular, is... barely there - it amounts to, "Hey, there's this guy, an elf I guess, he wants you to play FedEx, and there's no reward offered - do you do it?") That said, there's a great campaign here if you're willing to fill in the holes. It presents Threshold (as detailed in the Mentzer Expert Set, and expanded upon in GAZ1) as the "base town" where the PCs meet, equip, fish for rumors, and return to should they ignore the scenario links presented in the "interlude" sections of B1-9. It provides some basic wilderness movement rules (nice if you're running this without access to the Expert Set and you want to handle such things in play). And the overall structure of modules is solid - a smorgasbord of Basic-style dungeons, culminating in a first foray into city adventuring. The whole thing would lead seamlessly into either the proto-Expert Set play of B10 Night's Dark Terror*, or the hardcore hexcrawl of X1 Isle of Dread. It just takes a DM willing to shore up the superstructure.

Looking at the table after tonight's game, I'm especially struck by what a complete game one could run with the Rules Cyclopedia, GAZ1, and B1-9. That's a lot of stuff in 3 books. As it happens, I have copies of B1 through B4 on hand, so I'm using the originals in tandem with the compilation material to bulk things out a bit. But you could do without.

So, I'm using my super-scientific review process and slapping a B minus on B1-9. It's just a ton of material, flaws notwithstanding. And it's worth pointing out that, of all the modules ever released, B1 and B2 are far and away the most common (and the ones that are most sorely missed here). If you're running B1-9 In Search of Adventure, spend five bucks tracking down B1 and B2, and you'll have upgraded this megamodule to a solid "A".

- DYA


* Formerly available on eBay for the price of 10 talents of gold and an orphan's heart, this classic - the last thing the TSR UK team would do before defecting to GW and creating the legendary Enemy Within campaign for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay - is now available in PDF format on www.dndclassics.com for a paltry sum. It's a great time to be a gamer.

This is Goddamn Beautiful / WG13 Micro-review

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.

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

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