Roles, Rules, and Rolls

One Page Brawling

2012-02-07T13:00:00.003Z

Launching into Book 2 of the 52 Pages, may I present the distillation of a simple unarmed combat system. Here as always, the "one page, 18 point type" restriction allows jettisoning a lot of excess material. Two options: do you wish to hurt or detain your opponent? If the latter, effects depend on your relative size. Regardless, the "to hit" roll reigns supreme.

Clicking, as always, enlarges.

If you think some characters deserve super luchador powers you can have them wrestle as one size category higher. (And yes - size categories are a property of monsters but go like this: giant rat -1, dwarf 0, human 1, ogre 2, giant 3, huge giant 4.)

Also: CAC = armor class without worn armor, UAC = armor class without shield and dexterity bonuses.

Silhouette Jackpot

2012-02-06T12:00:00.004Z

PhyloPic "stores free silhouette images of animals, plants, and other life forms. All images are available for reuse under a Public Domain or Creative Commons license."

Telecanter, I think we just hit the motherlode.

Some choice picks:

Protoarchaeopteryx

Any old school game that has familiars should think seriously about the criminally neglected archaeopteryx.

Kelenken guillermoi

Prehistoric goblins are riding these guys.

Homo sapiens sapiens

RUN!

Wisdom: For the Ultimate Priest or the Ultimate Scout?

2012-02-05T12:50:00.001Z

D&D's Wisdom stat seems to be the most easily dispensed when people write house rules and variants. If you don't like clerics, you won't like wisdom, for starters. Even with clerics left in, something seems to compel people to re-envision this unwanted stat ... as sanity, luck, piety, will. Check out this D&D tutorial video and the way Wisdom has to be handwaved around. Do "common sense" and "sense of self" really go together with "religious involvement"? Why, in 2nd edition on, does Wisdom give bonuses for skills like perception, outdoor survival and healing?

A wise guy, huh?

The prevailing view of wisdom in psychology is that it's the long-term knowledge of how best to achieve a meaningful life. Fine, but try translating that into a die roll bonus. Robert Sternberg, one of the predominant researchers in intelligence, argues that beyond IQ (reasoning ability, equivalent to D&D's Intelligence stat), success in life is also predicted by creativity, and by a third "street smarts" factor which he sometimes calls "practical intelligence" and sometimes "wisdom." The problem with this third factor as a game stat is that it's about making the right decisions. Feeding players the right decisions or forcing them to make the wrong ones because of their Wisdom would be a recipe for frustration.

This is why Wisdom constantly has to be reinterpreted as a character, not player, attribute. One approach (let's call it "Piety") is to just say it's whatever it takes to be a cleric/priest/paladin and tie it exclusively to divine magic. This is similar to what I do with Intelligence, renaming it Intellect, and treating it as "head for book learning." The problem here is that really no other character class has any reason to have a high Wisdom.

There are two other very different things Wisdom's asked to do, especially in 3rd edition D&D, with its design pressure to make all game elements meaningful. One is "Will" or ability to resist mental influence: 3rd edition has Wisdom modifying Will saves. The other is "Perception" or awareness of one's surroundings: 3rd edition also has Wisdom modifying a variety of skills like Spot, Listen, Sense Motive and Survival.

Well... Will and Piety perhaps go together, if you make the long assumption that contact with divine forces is the only way to resist influences on your mind. But Will and Piety are definitely at odds with Wisdom as Perception. The static, supportive role of cleric in the original game is right opposite the scouting, mobile role of the thief. It doesn't seem right that both classes draw on the same stat, when AD&D explicitly stated that their roles were opposite, and each one's prime requisite was the ability score the other could ignore completely.

How to resolve this mess? I recently had the insight that if Wisdom = Awareness it could mean different things for divine and profane classes. Simply put, have priest-types (or prophets) not get the Wisdom bonuses for earthly things like listening. Their awareness is attuned to a different sphere.

To sum up, in my game going forward, high Wisdom has the following benefits for a prophet:

Qualifies for the class
Stronger miracles, healing and abjuring evil.
Stronger Mind saves (similar to 3rd edition's Will)

And for a non-prophet:

13+ Wisdom gives +1 on d6 perception skills; 8- Wisdom gives -1..
Bonuses in Wisdom gives 10/15/20% bonus to experience, but no penalty for low Wisdom - the logic here being similar to awareness, that a prophet's Wisdom is too tied up in higher things to help learn pragmatically from experience.
Stronger Mind saves.

Yes, this means that Wisdom is still a melange of Piety, Perception, Will and even the kind of life-learning that shows up in the psychology definition. I'm happy to live with that conflation, just as I'm happy for Dexterity to cover both fine and gross motor skills. The important thing in a character system is to give a variety of choices that make global sense, not create the ultimate human resources instrument.

Another thing to think about - if and when I introduce a Druid class to the game, their nature-bound spirituality would let them get both divine and mundane benefits of Wisdom.

Megadungeon Mini-Module: The Tavern

2012-02-02T09:14:00.002Z

With all my thoughts on the modular megadungeon, I realized something recently while on the road. The best format to present my Cellars of the Castle Ruins adventure (an Upper Works and Level One compatible with Castle of the Mad Archmage) would be in modular segments.

Here is my first such segment. Players in any of my existing campaigns, of course, should not peek. Can we get a crowdsourced megadungeon going across the blogiverse? Talysman has taken the first step.

The main elements are a one-page format, a three-letter code, a map at 0.5 cm = 10 feet, a key to said map, and a small graphic that presents the shape of the module at 0.5 cm = 50 feet (this one is a 3 x 3 square). The small graphic is meant to be traced or cut out and fit into the larger-scale map of the megadungeon.

It's also helpful to have the exits mapped to the middle square of any given 50' edge, so the segments can fit with each other and the usual style of geomorph. Note also the blank line left to fill in your own megadungeon and campaign connections.

Anyway, let me know if you try your own hand at the megadungeon mini-module!

Megadungeon Connections

2012-01-24T07:10:00.001Z

A well-constructed megadungeon gains depth - in the esthetic sense, not architectural sense - from the connections between rooms and levels - again, in the esthetic sense.

The level in room 25 of level 2 opens the gateway in room 60 of level 4.
The lizard men in area B of level 3 are entertaining a minotaur ambassador from the medusa on level 5
The painting shows the dungeon's architect as a young man, battling serpents while a gleaming platinum is within reach.

Sometimes these connections, too, can inform the wider campaign world.

You realize with a start that these are love letters implying a torrid affair between the current Bishop of Vorgrad and the Mother Superior of the local abbey.
The book reveals a recipe for immortality, but it is not any herb or potion. Rather, it is the shocking heresy that the Gods were once mere mortals, who over long lives filled with heroic deeds accumulated enough virtu to ascend to the Outer Planes.

The challenge for the modular megadungeon is to take bits and pieces from this creator and that creator and integrate them into a whole that gratifies the players' need to feel like they're discovering things, clues and traces in space and time. Some reliable ideas:

The Downstream Lever: A control or trick or puzzle in one area, opens or closes or activates or releases something in another area.

The Historical District: This kennel ... and this kitchen ... and this library ... all belonged to the Demonic Chef of Avalino, and bear his marks and signs.

War: The inhabitants of one area are at war with the other, hold captives and loot, and fortify the border between them...

Peace: ... or due to diplomatic or trade relations between them, letters, gifts, and envoys from the others are to be found.

I'm not sure if any other ideas of this kind exist but if so, post 'em up.

At this point the question has to be asked: what does this mean for the designer of modular dungeon pieces? Do you leave levers up and put a few blank spaces for the megadungeon assembler to note down what the lever does? Or do you leave it up to them to pencil in little notes? I think any kind of module should encourage and help out good practice, so I'm going to have explicit "dangling hooks" in the dungeon, which the user can freely connect to other sections. Likewise for the secrets of the dungeon, the political area and indeed the whole universe. I'll tell you how big the secret is, you fill in what it is and what the clue might be.

4E D&D Is The Oldest-School Old-School Game Out There

2012-01-21T15:04:00.001Z

If you recognize that roleplaying games started when wargamers started personalizing rigid sets of wargame rules, refereeing acts of guile and subterfuge as preludes to Napoleonic battles ...

If you also open your eyes a little and notice that some players are not just using the tightly regimented episodic skirmish combat rules of D&D 4th Edition out of the book, but doing roleplaying "cut scenes" to shape the direction of the campaign around them ...

Then "let's drop some roleplaying around this set of wargame rules" is the oldest school play mode around.

23 DM Answers

2012-01-18T18:18:00.002Z

Zak's questions, my answers.

1. If you had to pick a single invention in a game you were most proud of what would it be?

The Gnome as consolation.

2. When was the last time you GMed?

Last Sunday

3. When was the last time you played?

Late November

4. Give us a one-sentence pitch for an adventure you haven't run but would like to.

The crypts and cellars of the City of Vorgrad must be cleared one by one to reinstate the Nine Mysteries of Crime and return it to its former standing as City of Thieves.

5. What do you do while you wait for players to do things?

Roll dice menacingly in a small box.

6. What, if anything, do you eat while you play?

Varies from pizza to junk food; once, a red lentil stew.

7. Do you find GMing physically exhausting?

Not half as much as teaching. In fact I find it actually adds energy.

8. What was the last interesting (to you, anyway) thing you remember a PC you were running doing?

I had an L5R Hida berserker once who said "Treat me as a go stone upon a board of doom." And played suicidally and was the only survivor.

9. Do your players take your serious setting and make it unserious? Vice versa? Neither?

My setting is as serious as your life and just as ridiculous too.

10. What do you do with goblins?

They are generic evil killable sword fodder. Little vicious guys who would like to have a warrior code but haven't realized that's incompatible with cowardice. I would like to have a campaign where they are the evolved form of tomatoes.

11. What was the last non-RPG thing you saw that you converted into game material (background, setting, trap, etc.)?

Hieronymus Bosch's Temptation of St Anthony.

12. What's the funniest table moment you can remember right now?

Hooven using his randomly assigned wooden teeth and a torch to cast a menacing shadow and frighten kobolds ... and it worked! (Gencon 2010)

13. What was the last game book you looked at--aside from things you referenced in a game--why were you looking at it?

The Scaum Valley Gazetteer, because I am thinking of running a Dying Earth game.

14. Who's your idea of the perfect RPG illustrator?

Tramp. As serious as your life and just as ridiculous. Pure joy.

15. Does your game ever make your players genuinely afraid?

Yes, and my wife had a "Black Leaf" moment when her character died.

16. What was the best time you ever had running an adventure you didn't write? (If ever)

I think my recent runs of Castle of the Mad Archmage and Tomb of the Iron God have both delivered a lot of fun.

17. What would be the ideal physical set up to run a game in?

A trunk full of minis, a lit up table to project maps onto, and some way to make it work.

18. If you had to think of the two most disparate games or game products that you like what would they be?

Baron Munchausen and Kingdom Crush

19. If you had to think of the most disparate influences overall on your game, what would they be?

Social psychology and horror fiction

20. As a GM, what kind of player do you want at your table?

Intelligent, creative, fun, with the occasional just fun as a foil.

21. What's a real life experience you've translated into game terms?

Can't really say that I've ever done that literally.I prefer to take the fantasy tropes, the world peculiarities, the horrors and violations, the mindsets of the NPCs, and proceed more or less from there into a logically mapped out insanity.

22. Is there an RPG product that you wish existed but doesn't?

Reverse Tower of Babel to end edition wars.

23. Is there anyone you know who you talk about RPGs with who doesn't play? How do those conversations go?

Less and less embarrassed as I get older. But I only really fly the flag if I think they would want to play.

Dungeon Tetramorphs

2012-01-17T22:13:00.001Z

As a way out of the Geomorphic Megadungeon Wallpaper Blues may I suggest you:

Take your 100' x 100' squares
Divide them into 4 50' x 50' squares
Rearrange those 4 squares into a tetromino, ignoring the persistent Russian chiptunes in your middle ear
Draw your dungeon rooms on that tetromino
Repeat for all possible tetrominos (maybe not the 4x1), mix together, and play the puzzle!

I have done this for the two "Tetramorphs" shown below, and added a further innovation: grayed-out exits (doors, passages) that are only "real" if they are placed right next to a non-grayed-out exit. This is so that you avoid the extreme connectivity of each 100' square having 8 passages to the nearby squares.

Like them? Maybe there are more in the future.

The Graph Paper Architects

2012-01-17T08:34:00.002Z

"One final enigma surrounding the architects of the Mythic Underworld: their complexes, catacombs, tombs, strongholds and hypogea were all built to more or less completely fill a 340 by 440 foot rectangle. Perhaps akin to the mining extravagance of their corridors built to a width of either 10 or 20 feet, it is clear that some strange concern with geomancy impelled the rigid proportion of their constructions."

One of many dungeon maps by Tim Hartin.

In the graph-paper shaped dungeon, after a while players figure out to look in corners for secret doors, and have a pretty good idea when they've explored the whole level. And yet so many megadungeons - even less ambitious adventures - are mapped this way. Castle of the Mad Archmage jams four sheets together for each level. Stonehell uses the one page dungeon template, a square about two-thirds the size of the standard graph paper, but otherwise does the same, and makes each square a stand-alone section. World's Largest Dungeon uses 16 blocky maps, each about twice as big as the standard graph paper but still uniformly rectangular.

Standard maps at first glance seem to solve more problems for the DM than the player. The DM doesn't need to wrestle with large or odd-sized pieces of paper. Players, though, don't know exactly where they enter on the graph paper, so even in the most orderly dungeons their maps will tend to go off the edge.

But in actual play, how much usefulness does the graph paper dungeon add? After all, the DM doesn't usually need to see all of the 440 x 340 foot area - only the immediate area of 5-10 rooms is useful to a session of play.

This argues for the modular megadungeon to be portioned out in smaller sections, such as Talysman recently demonstrates. The overall strategic map can then be as irregular as it wants to be. In fact, the fitting together of the modules in a whole ten-level dungeon can be easily mapped on a 1 square to 100' scale, where each section, approximately 7x7 or 6x8 squares, is a separate level.

A related issue on a smaller scale is the way of dungeon geomorphs, as cool as they are, to create an overly dense and connected "wallpaper" of rooms and passages. The standard format seems to be a 10' x 10' square with exits in the middle of each 5' length of side, 8 in all. This has been the aesthetic barrier to my using geomorphs, up until now.

One solution would be to just arbitrarily say that 1 in 3 geomorph squares is blank. You deal them face-down from your stack on a d6 roll of 1 or 2, and erase or block off the connecting doors and passages.

Another idea is ... well, I'll show you what I mean next time.

Notes from a Hiatus

2012-01-15T23:12:00.000Z

Some of you may have noticed I haven't posted much here in the past couple of weeks. Cresting the New Year a lot of work (psychology) and "other work" (pro game design) activities have come up and the old blog jones has been put on a back burner ... probably for the whole month actually, bookended as it is with two conferences.

Getting out of the groove of posting every day is definitely a factor. The little obsession of comments, page views, and post counts is easy to put down when other things from the paid side of my life intrude.

We did play yesterday and the party that left off in the middle of the Tomb of the Iron God, fought and ran their way past goblins aplenty to freedom. I had worried that the encumbrance limits were too harsh but they enforced just the right level of concern for the value of treasure and a limit on the dungeon haul. There was a kind of deus ex machina that saved one party member who otherwise would have been left behind, but it's hard to resist that when he became, according to the rules and laws of Mr. Finch's module, the chosen liberator of the Iron God. Well, he was left behind, too injured to run ... just miraculously transformed into an iron statue, which fits the God's M. O. perfectly.

I'll be in LA next weekend but can't stay long enough to catch Satine's charity gaming day. More's the pity.

I'll be back ... soon ... probably in February things will clear up and I'll get back on the tracks.

The Meaningful Megadungeon

2011-12-30T09:07:00.000Z

The original megadungeon, Greyhawk Castle, was devised for a rolling playgroup that met over many long evenings and weekends. Addicted to the thrill of a new style of gaming, that group could cover pages and pages of graph paper, forge characters in the heat of unforgiving death, and over years reach the highest levels and the lowest.

Today's gamers rarely have time for such foolishness. Jobs, kids, life in general keep us to one session a week if we're lucky, though more often expect twice a month.

Will your party explore the whole of whatever megadungeon you've created? Almost certainly not. But more important is the knowledge that they could go off in many different directions; that the whole living breathing potential sprawl of the place is there around them.

To achieve this feeling, and the feeling of meaningful exploration, the dungeon must be more than an infinitely repeating wallpaper of passages, rooms and random filler. Three desirable things:

1. The sub-areas of the dungeon must show differences in design (wide passages, narrow passages, orthogonal, diagonal, curved, irregular, etc.) and decoration.

2. The areas of the dungeon should relate a meaningful history for the players to discover. This can happen on a micro level - "this was once the kitchen of the Minotaur Lord but now it is the lab of a crazed alchemist" - and a macro level - evidence related to what the Minotaur Lord was doing, how he got on with the other power groups, what his place was in the rationale of the dungeon.

3. The areas of the dungeon should refer to each other, both in terms of architecture (a multiplicity of stairs, chutes, teleporters giving the sense of freedom of movement between safer and more dangerous places) and features ("this lever opens the portcullis on level 3"..."in this room is an ambassador from the troglodytes on level 4").

Now, life is short not just for players but GMs as well. The temptation is to make it up as one goes along, but this risks missing out on the epic sweep and overarching plan implied in criteria 2 and 3. Recently, JDJarvis over at Aeons and Auguries has suggested a modular, crowdsourced approach, in which people contribute individual sections but the exact geographical connection between them is up to the individual GM. I like this, because it takes a lot of the burden of effort from the individual GM while still allowing creative input and personalization. But question number 2 and 3 remain - how to convey an overarching theme and plot?

Next post I'll address this issue, explain why I can't stand geomorphs, and offer a better solution.

The 52 Pages (Well, 22 and Counting)

2011-12-29T12:00:00.003Z

I don't know why people complain about there being no monsters in Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

They're all there. In the Open Game License, attributed to the Tome of Horrors. Probably thanks to this clause:

You must update the COPYRIGHT NOTICE portion of this License to include the exact text of the COPYRIGHT NOTICE of any Open Game Content You are copying, modifying or distributing...

Or maybe just excessive caution? Who knows.

But I'm not here to have any more arguments about this. No more unmannerly comments, please. And now please welcome the first installment of the "One Page" fantasy gaming system.

The quality of this product is such that it embodies every design decision that is objectively correct. You may think you preferred descending AC or the standard spell lists, but once you see this work shine forth with piercing beams of correctness, your worldview will certainly be dislodged, and you will acknowledge the One True Way.

After lo, these many years, and countless futile and abortive attempts, That Darn Roleplaying Game is finally fixed! Put down your house rules, ball up your supplements. The capstone has been lowered on an era.

(plus it's not a roleplaying game)

Ah, who am I fooling? I'll be happy if you steal a few ideas from here for your own game. That's why every rule is on its own page, and this will be clearer once the somewhat interlinked stuff surrounding character creation gives way to the systems of play. Just before the Open Game License (AIEEE!) there is a brief and functionally formatted guide to what is to come.

Download to the right.

More on the OGL

2011-12-28T11:21:00.002Z

Damn Blogger for not being a forum. Rather than bury my replies to yesterday's comments, I'll make them into a post.

Stuart:

If you were legal under copyright law, but they send you a C&D anyways then they could do the same under the OGL. You're just operating under contract law now instead of copyright law.

I'll take my chances with a tightly worded contract that they've provided an FAQ for, rather than the poorly understood murk of copyright law, especially across national boundaries (I'm a US citizen living in the UK), especially in the realm of games where very little precedent has been worked out.

Telecanter:

What words or concepts did you use that you feel put you at risk?

It's not any one or two or three, it's a complete game product that pretty much uses all of them, and that's all I was going to put under OGL. I'm not talking about trademark law here, of course, I'm talking about what would count as a "derivative work" (standard copyright law) rather than a "novel extension" (the Super Add-Ons precedent).

Cygnus:

This is a not-for-profit, non-commercial fan work that mentions some terms and concepts from D&D in ways that are believed to reside within the bounds of “fair use.”

Indeed, you do sign away your right to nominative use with the OGL. I can live with that; people are familiar with the coy work-arounds by now. But I'm not sure any statement can make a retro-clone or complete houseruled game into "fair use" (see here). At issue is whether the use of all the game terms from D&D together constitutes a particular expression of an idea even if the exact words to describe them are different.

ADDGrognard:

...either you create something completely original without a trace of SRD to it or you will be in violation of the OGL.

So you are saying that using the OGL for one work binds you to use it for all? Seems to me that if you don't accept the contract you take your chances with copyright law and the fair use doctrine. Based on precedent my impression is that an "add-on" that uses the terms from the game would fall under fair use but a derivative work that attempts to do exactly what the SRD is doing would not. Of course, if you do include the license then you have to make sure your use of the SRD is kosher.

This is the crucial issue for us all I think - to what extent the terms in the SRD are covered by copyright, as opposed to their precise expression as game system. If you rework the stats to give different effects, be generated differently (or at all - the SRD does not cover character creation, a gap that was put in there to cripple it as a complete RPG), but you use five out of the six names, would that be fair use or a derivative work? The Wizards FAQ refers to a stat block as one of the elements of the SRD: is it the concept of a stat block (I doubt it, too much prior art), a stat block with some of the terms but working completely differently, or a stat block with all the exact terms as laid out in the SRD?

Example: Game mechanics can't be copyrighted, but under the OGL you control it's fate. You have opted out of the standard copyright and secured the material inside a contract.

If you put those mechanics under Product Identity. And you have only secured them to the extent that other people use that contract.

Under the OGL you can lock it down under Product Identity and if someone uses the material then they can be sued due to license violation.

Even if they never signed up to the OGL? I don't think that solves the problem.

Considering the OGL

2011-12-27T11:29:00.002Z

The flurry of questions about my decision to put the One Page system under the Open Game License spurred me to do even more reading and research on this topic. One of the most useful resources I ran into, among a lot of ill-informed posturing, was this post and its predecessors, from someone who knows what he is talking about and has a good discrimination among sources.

Hasbro's OGL headache?

There's a big difference between what actually is covered under copyright law and what can plausibly be taken to court by companies with deep pockets. The practice of copyright is more restrictive than the law allows, due to the intimidation factor. This is how "T$R" menaced companies like Judges' Guild and Mayfair, and smaller fry posting D&D-compatible materials on the Internet, back in the 80's and 90's. It's easy for lawyers to scare someone into taking down their adventure that uses "alignment" and "armor class" or their supplement that mentions "compatibility with D&D (tm)." Today it would be harder to actually defend those concepts as infringement in court, given that:

Short terms or phrases don't fall under copyright unless they are emblematic of the work in question (like "Play it again, Sam" for Casablanca).
Precedent supports the making of original "add-ons" and supplements for games without license.
References to trademarks are allowed under the doctrine of nominative use, provided there is no other commonly recognized way to refer to the trademarked thing, and there is no confusion as to the origin of the product.
Game mechanics may be subject to patent (as in Wizards' soon-to-expire patent on the concept of a collectible card game) but this is a separate issue.

Nonetheless, a legal injunction can really test the mettle of the small company or individual it's leveled at. Which makes the Open Gaming License so amazing. Ryan Dancey and Wizards gave any creator of works derivative of the D&D game an invulnerability potion versus legal menaces. The promise is that, as long as the strictures of the document are followed, even the most blatant retro-clones are freely licensed product. There is even a way to combine open and proprietary material with the "Product Identity" clauses. Not great from the viewpoints of open source crusaders, but good from a commercial viewpoint.

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but every general is fighting the last war. The OGL was a silver bullet for two problems that had helped drag down TSR in the 1990's: commitment to producing a glut of official products, and bad publicity from infringement policing. In that light it was a brilliant single stroke combining PR and outsourcing.

But over ten years later, as the sales of the OGL product Pathfinder have outstripped those of the official D&D game, there must be bitter regrets indeed in Providence. Certainly, strong signals are being sent that the next Hasbro edition of D&D is going to go back to basics. If that's the case, it's likely that material being sold or given away that is currently not compatible with D&D 4th, but that sticks to the basic elements of D&D that have been very carefully maintained over otherwise seismic changes in the gameplay, will constitute more of a threat to their operations. In particular this would be true of complete games - "heartbreakers" - that let the players dispense with the core product that forms the mainstay of sales. It's also instructive that without exception, every commercial role-playing game that has been released as a clone or derivative of D&D, using that common language of stats and mechanics, has put itself under the OGL. This has decidedly not been the case with supplements.

Now, some people in the OSR (chiefly flagship captain Maliszewski) are extremely careful with their online content, to the point of putting every monster and spell idea under the OGL. My gamble is that this won't be strictly necessary. But something tells me that putting the core derivative work on this site - the One Page Rules modular D&D variant I have been using in games - under OGL rather than Creative Commons is a very good idea. There is enough of D&D's DNA in there that it seems both the prudent and correct thing to do.

That is my position anyway - certainly not legal advice of any qualified kind. If you think differently, won't you speak up in the comments?

Christmas World

2011-12-25T09:43:00.000Z

Definitely not part of the normal encounter table series. But hey ... Merry Christmas!

Santicore is Coming ...

2011-12-23T19:51:00.001Z

... and you're on his list.

(Or Sergeant D's, whatever.)

All punk rock nostalgia aside, there is a preview of the Secret Santicore project up and it is amazing - my request has been answered in spades by one of the best creators out there and will probably be a feature of my campaigns in 2012. Jez even included my castle map in the preview, though I wish I'd made the descriptions a little more fancy, but still, the presentation is outstanding. Also, full table of contents.

Abomination World

2011-12-22T21:00:00.001Z

If Bosch, Cronenberg, Burroughs and Lovecraft collaborated on a theme park, it might look something like this.

One third of the way through!

Five and Dime Stores: Coin-Based Houses

2011-12-22T09:10:00.000Z

Going on an even deeper level than the previous two installments, once you know the general character of a street area, you can use coins to create a scene for encounters or exploration. The random facing of the coins thrown down create a twisty little street that may branch and fork, as the characters enter from the larger thoroughfare.

The example I'll use is the more easterly of the two traders' districts from the previous example, magnified five-fold.

A little latitude in interpretation is needed here; the "industry" of the traders is probably haggling with each other, as opposed to their "shop" which involves dealings outside the world of traders. So, the "industry" related to the character of the street is an exchange for traders, while the "shop" is a traders' office.

Looking at the street in detail, the various establishments become connected and fleshed out. Dominating the street is the tall, severely imposing three-storied house of the Mallordrake trader family. Adjacent lie their office and a storefront through which they sell unwanted goods at bargain prices. Their prestige is such that they own an exchange building at the end of the street where all the city's traders meet to talk business, and where the street opens onto the plaza they have pressured the local authorities to maintain a post of the Watch. Opposite that, an elegant public garden advertises the family's generosity and good taste. The houses on the street, including the side street that slopes down to the river, are inhabited by the Mallordrakes' client traders and their families, one of which is a dwarven family. The Mallordrakes and their faction are known for their conservative style in fashion and this is served by the tailor and clothier Bostervick.

A nice place to visit ... but a better place to rob?

The Apple of Eve

2011-12-20T23:42:00.001Z

Now how great a relic would that be? A pity these historical spoilsport Scooby Doo mask-rippers have revealed it was just a lumpy lemon stolen from a synagogue in the times of King Henry III. But we can do better.

The Branches of Modesty, lost forever, alas.

The Apple of Eve

This fruit is not actually an apple, nor fig, pomegranate, citron or any other known fruit. It is a green sphere with golden streaks about the size of a large grapefruit, perfectly preserved since time immemorial. The two bites in it, one on each side, reveal a pearlescent white flesh that shimmers with the promise of the knowledge of good and evil.

Any who take a blasphemous third bite of the apple will surpass their ancestral parents' moral insight. Beyond knowledge of their own good and evil nature, they now are granted the ability to see good and evil in others. They can concentrate to get an idea of the good or evil motives of another person within 10' of them.

Of course, for such a campaign-breaking power there must be a disadvantage, right? Some possibilities ...

1. Roll the character's Wisdom each time. If failed, the character sees only potential for good and evil, not actual good or evil motives, without knowing it. This can lead to false accusations or unfounded trust.

2. Each time the power is used, a stalking angel with a flaming sword gets 500 feet closer to the character. When the angel makes contact, he banishes the character from this world, into a world of even lower promise.

3. The power also heightens the character's sense of his or her own sinfulness. Each blameworthy act he or she commits will force a save vs. spell (Will) or be driven to suicide.

4. After a certain number of uses, the character becomes "beyond good and evil" - losing the supernatural sensitivity and indeed all sensitivity to moral distinctions, amoral and possibly sociopathic. (All right, this is not recommended for players who would actually revel in this development, and by that I mean almost all of them.)

5. Save or die each time the power is used.

Penny Lane: Coin-Based Streets

2011-12-19T13:00:00.003Z

The next step down from the district, in our coin-based city system, is the "street" - well, really, a 200 foot wide area that may contain one notable street and a number of side passages and alleys. The world of narrow streets is traversed by wider thoroughfares that connect the districts. One Page Streets lets you generate all of this with a handful of change (and you don't have to have 21 coins ... just recycle the ones that turn tails up).

This system also works for creating a full-sized town of 2000, or of fewer people with fewer hexes, as long as you use the district system to give it an overall character and main industry.

As an example, let's continue the small city we were creating last time and flesh out its central district, dominated by local traders. This is the example illustration on the sheet, but what do all these coins and their dates really mean?

There are two main concentrations of traders (heads-up nickels); the dimes represent associated respectable trades, an academy area, burying ground and jewellers, while to the edges of the area some industries have become established. The quarters heads-up indicate that some higher-class streets are part of this area: the plaza is a fashionable promenade for the nearby gentry, country landowners who compete with each other to build the most impressive mansion and do a healthy business with the jewellers. And that cabal of wizards so close to the burying grounds ... it's no wonder the more knowledgeable are taking their dead to secure plots outside the city walls.

One advantage of this system is that it can be used on the fly. A few coins will give you the overall layout of the city, and as the party enters each district, a few more coins will show you what's artound the corner. Of course, sometimes they just want to know, "which way to the nearest tavern/pawnbroker/dog kennel", and the next page - for houses within streets - can help with that, too.

We Built This City On Nickels and Dimes

2011-12-18T13:16:00.002Z

The Babbling Bane took Talysman's system of city "quarters" literally and used a handful of random coins to improvise a village layout.

I think there is huge potential in this idea and have expanded it to this One Page supplement. Taking a different tack, I have gone on the highest "zoom-out" level to 1/5 mile hexes holding 2000 people each, based on my sources regarding population density. It's likely that a future supplement will cover what exactly can be found in each of those hexes using a similar method. What's more, I also see a need for a more fine-grained table covering exactly what each industry and trade might be. So keep an eye on this space...

Bearing in mind the international audience, I've made the coin specification as generic as possible. If you are in the euro-zone (touch wood) with 8 different denominations of coins, for example, you could put 1 cent and 5 cent in the lowest class, 10 and 20 in the next lowest, then 50 cent, then 1/2EUR.

An example using British coinage, leaving out the big coins and going 1/2p, 5p, 10p, 20/50p...

I have a 10,000 soul small city that needs to be populated. Gathering up small change, I find:

Two pennies, one from 2007 and one from 1979.
Two 5p coins, one from 2006 and one from 1990.
A 10p coin from 2002.

In the first three coins there were two heads, so this could be at the confluence of two rivers. Results, of course, should depend on the geography of your world - but they can also help to shape that geography if you are running on the fly. In this case, the two rivers idea makes most sense because the adventure is well inland.

In this arbitrary layout of coins and rivers, the pennies whose years end in 7 (left) and 9 (right) represent respectively working districts based on the timber industry and vice. As an additional detail, we can say that the vice district is the oldest part of the city, because its coin is by far the oldest. Now we see how the industry of the town can shape unknown geography, because surely there must be a great woodland nearby.

The 5p coins with a zero (left) and 6 (right) are craft districts that reflect the city's industries of armaments and stonework, respectively. This suggests a nearby source of stone, and trade bringing metal.

Between stone, timber and weapons we can guess that if there is any military threat, the city is well defended and walled. As a good architectural touch, there is competition between the builders in timber who dominate the northeast hex and the builders in stone who dominate the southwest, with buildings in the middle being mixed wood and stone.

The 10p coin is the district of local traders, who are assumed to run the city because they are the highest value coin; any feudal lord probably lives off the map. Thus, the urban government will be elective and dominated by the traders. Based on the products of the area, these traders are not rich; their trade routes are short and deal in common materials.

Silhouette Mania Spreads

2011-12-16T01:31:00.001Z

I thought I'd give back to the community in the spirit of the commendable Telecanter with these two silhouettes - a two-handed axe man I ginned up for my One Page rules, and a female fighter-type I thought filled a gap in the available selection. These are from public domain art and free for use under a Creative Commons license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/). Incidentally, the reason it's taking me so long to get the One Page starter pdf up is that I'm taking some good advice and switching it to OGL - it uses way too many terms from the SRD to risk any other way. And of course, that means retroactively re-licensing everything SRD-derivative I put up on this blog, but I think I have a form of words that will allow me to do that.

Anyway ...

And presto ... he's a frost giant!

Horror World

2011-12-14T18:05:00.000Z

Awoooo! Ow-ow-awooooooo!

Okay kiddies, tonight the Count has got something really scaaaary for you. Boo! Ahahahahah.

Green Slime Theme Song

2011-12-13T18:00:00.002Z

Ladies and gentlemen ... Green slime has a theme song.

In this technicolor B-movie from 1968, there's apparent inspiration for not one, not two, but three old-school gaming classics.

Of course, the green slime.

But then, the slime creatures ... with their one eye and tentacles ... kind of resemble Ropers.

Otherworld Minis roper.

And finally, the plot of the film ... one-eyed green aliens grow from larval form in a station, are blasted with energy weapons which only make them grow and multiply, and eventually overrun the whole place ... is a very likely inspiration for the classic Tom Wham game from TSR (and later Steve Jackson), The Awful Green Things From Outer Space.

And the director? The underappreciated Kinji Fukusaku, better known for Battles Without Honor or Humanity, Tora! Tora! Tora! and Battle Royale.

Like A (Stumbling) Thief in the Dark

2011-12-12T23:50:00.000Z

So this weekend I kicked off a new campaign using Matt Finch's Tomb of the Iron God as the starting adventure. Last year it was recommended to me and it definitely delivered on the old school funhouse-plus-meaningful exploration front. My players are fellow psychology students and researchers, seasoned online gamers all.

No wall sconces down here...

Because of the tactical mindset, one issue came up during play that I'd like some feedback on. My wife played a rogue character, as she'd been wanting to do ever since the RPG bug hit our household. But in practice, a rogue/thief/whatever under the Basic D&D or OD&D dispensation is very limited as a dungeon scout explorer. With race-as-class, a human thief can have no infravision, and sneaking around a dungeon with a shiny light is not very practical.

Of course, in race-plus-class systems like AD&D this is one big reason to take a nonhuman thief (plus all the racial skill bonuses) and in thiefless systems like true OD&D it's a non-issue.

So, have any players or DMs come up with creative solutions to let the thief-type take point in a dark, dark dungeon?

The Epic Fantasy Wargame: Survivals

2011-12-11T01:13:00.003Z

Not only did the hex-and-counter game suffer a sharp decline in the 1980's, but the medium was not that well suited to depicting a fantasy epic. There's a limit to how much information a counter or map hex can hold, and most of these games creaked under the weight of a mass of special rules that had to be constantly looked up.

There is also a kind of first-kiss syndrome that paints a halo around these old games. I think a lot of the positive feelings old-schoolers associate with them are residue from anticipating how cool it might be to try them, as well as a much less critical outlook when actually played. Not by coincidence, gaming companies in the 70's and 80's also seemingly chose to produce games largely on how cool they sounded. They had a naive (by today's standards) outlook on usability, play balance, elegance, replay value, and other factors that have come to gamers' awareness in the Internet decades. Again and again in comments on BGG - and in some comments on previous posts here - we hear that the rules are incomplete and baffling, the gameplay either simplistic and obvious or swingy and random.

And still ... there's something about the topic of an epic war highlighted by individual adventures and quests that sparked that anticipation in the first place and keeps gamers coming back for more. If Homer had been a game designer he might have separated his war game (Iliad) from his adventure game (Odyssey). But since then, writers of epic fiction have found that adventures make a war more interesting, while war gives adventures more meaning. In Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Astolfo journeys to the moon on a hippogriff to get the magic potion that can restore the sanity of Christendom's paladin Roland in the fight against the Moors and Saracens. Later, the model of the Crusading romance was picked up by Tolkien for The Lord of the Rings, the course of the war profoundly altered by the adventures of the Fellowship.

The epic spirit has persisted, then, in different game media even after the collapse of the hex-and-counter game. Below is a brief and not at all comprehensive overview.

* Figurine-based boardgames. There's something about the tactile weight of figures on a board, despite the production expense, that made this kind of game outstrip the counter-based equivalent sometime in the 1990's. While not suited for division-level simulations of the Eastern Front, the figure game has been used for a number of army-and-adventure games, from Fantasy Flight's Runewars to Wizards' D&D tie-in Conquest of Nerath.

Nerath. Photo by Lance Hobday, BGG.

* Computer games. I spent many an unproductive hour in the 1990's with SSI's Warlords 2, a straightforward game that played like the old Empire but with fantasy units and leaders that could go into rather generic locations, fight rather generic creatures rather generically, and get generic magic items, treasure or super-powerful troop types. Warlords 3 improved gameplay and graphics enormously. Although that series was pretty much an epitome of the epic genre, Heroes of Might and Magic also gave it a go, culminating in the exquisite storybook graphics of HoMM III that were never bettered by the two versions afterward.I don't think there's been a successful computer game title in this vein for a while; it would seem like a perfect extension of the Total War series, for example.

* Collectible card games. It would seem a natural move to take the wealth of detail required of an epic wargame and put it all down on cards ... but the lack of a map, with its epic sweep, means the epic genre was hardly attempted at all in the CCG medium, apart from one abortive game based on the above-mentioned Warlords computer game.

* Tabletop roleplaying games. You could argue that products instructing high-level player characters on how to raise armies and manage kingdoms represent a very different route to the same merging of adventure and war games. But instructions on how to wage war as lords of a domain in the various versions of D&D have usually been spare, and certainly not as well-regulated as any hex-and-counter game. To be fair, the fraction of campaigns that get to that point is probably tiny.

* Play-by-mail games. I mention these out of completeness although I've never played in one. Richard, he of the Dystopian Pokeverse, tipped me off to one such called Serim Ral, still going strong. No doubt a steady perusal of 1980's gaming magazines would exhume many others that didn't enjoy the same longevity.

Mighty armies, mighty quests; even with the near-total demise of hexes and counters, the urge to take in both in a panoramic sweep continues to fascinate game players to this day.

The Epic Fantasy Wargame Catalogue:1980-1991

2011-12-09T18:00:00.007Z

As obscure as the counter-based epic fantasy games from the 70's are today, the ones I presented previously are actually the better-known of the lot. The list below from 1980 on is largely a product of Boardgamegeek (BGG) research; I only have definite memories of seeing Barbarian Kings, Valley of the Four Winds, and of course the late arrival Greyhawk Wars.

Valley of the Four Winds (1980)
I have very fond memories of this British franchise set in a world evocative of Bosch, Breughel and the wilder inventions of Da Vinci. From the fascinating miniature line, I painted up a whole army of Swamp Lord warriors with weird air-breathing apparatus. The boardgame was designed by Lewis Pulsipher as a sort of "illustration" of the Four Winds story. It's considerably smaller in both map size and ambition than the epics I've reviewed so far, and from all accounts play sticks close to the storyline. The hero is named, well, Hero, but there are magic Swan Bones, skeletal armies raised by the tolling of a huge bell on wheels, and a threatening Wind Demon hanging over the good guy city to keep things interesting.

Did I mention I liked the miniatures? From Lost Minis Wiki

Albion: Land of Faerie (1981)
This was a game included in one of the later issues of Ares, SPI's fantasy and science fiction sister magazine to Strategy & Tactics. Its premise: the Fomorian, Tuatha, and similar races from Celtic legend were not prosaic invading peoples, but magical kindreds such as trolls, elves and um, Cornish gnomes. Unlike all the other games here, the map was a real-world one, showing Great Britain and Ireland. I've never actually seen it but the map looks fairly attractive, SPI picking up the standard in that regard.

Barbarian Kings (1981)
This was another Ares game that I did see advertised but never bought. Set on the rather generic fantasy island of Castafon, it had more of an economic element than others, and was designed for multiplayer intrigue. Heroes, wizards, and spells had a significant role, but there was really no questing in the game, so BK stands as a somewhat marginal example of the genre. There was also a lot of bookkeeping with upkeep costs, simultaneously plotted moves, and so on. Unlike Sword and Sorcery, someone at SPI exercised editorial control over designer Greg Costikyan's awful puns in the magazine game, but they were restored in full glory in a reissue by Jolly Roger Games in 2001.

Demonlord (1981)
Inevitably, one of the microgame series (Heritage Dwarfstar) threw its hat in the ring with an epic struggle between good and evil. There were psychedelic map colors, wizards summoning the likes of the dreaded Balron, neutral factions to rally, and the like. I would say more but you can actually download the game, marvel at its wonders, and print 'n' play it.

My eyes! Image from Pete Gelman, BGG.

City States of Arklyrell (1983)
Okay ... I have absolutely no memories of the Arklyrell phenomenon from 1983, in spite of regularly buying Ares magazine, reading my friend's Dragon subscription, weekly trips to the well-stocked Hobby House in Stamford and occasional forays to Manhattan's Compleat Strategist. I will just have to take BGG's word that this game existed, with its garishly colored map, beasts of fantasy, leaders running around, epic doings ... Arklyrell at least looked simpler than the others, with the role of heroes confined to recruiting troops and picking up magic items.

Greyhawk: Wars (1991)
Zeb Cook's tail-end game in the genre gamed out the apocalyptic conflict that TSR felt necessary to spice up the World of Greyhawk in the 2nd Edition D&D era (see here for more background). Good and evil nations warred across the areas of the familiar Greyhawk map, sending characters on missions to retrieve treasure and powerful artifacts, and talk neutral nations and mercenaries into signing up. The design looks pretty straightforward, with complexity to be found in the sheer scale of the project.

So, I'll conclude the series next post, with some thoughts about why this genre of game fizzled out, or transferred itself to other game media.

The Epic Fantasy Wargame Catalogue:1975-1979

2011-12-08T17:00:00.002Z

All right folks. After a lot of jogging of the memory and a little trawling through Boardgamegeek, here is the first part of what I believe to be a complete catalogue of the epic fantasy counter-based board wargame genre, as defined in my previous post.

Photo by Ray on boardgamegeek

White Bear, Red Moon (1975; reprinted as Dragon Pass, 1981)
Designed by Greg Stafford, this is the original entry in the genre, although the roleplaying game that came out soon after - you may have heard of Runequest? - was what really brought attention to his world of Glorantha. In both incarnations, the game is a royal rumble of factions, one-of-a-kind characters, and monsters vying to control the Dragon Pass area on the edge of the Lunar Empire. Very memorable creatures and characters just this side of gonzo, and wild swingy magic effects.

Nomad Gods (1977)
The Gloranthan sequel to White Bear, set further south among the beast-riding tribes of the Plaines of Prax - and "beast" means llamas, impalas and stranger stuff yet. I've never seen this game but the few counters on Boardgame Geek look to continue in the trippy ways of the first game. As usual, the cryptic silhouettes and numbers on the chits hid a raftload of special rules which had to be diligently looked up, and one play aid was - I kid you not - a guide to inscribing the appropriate rules page on the back of each counter.

Photo by Mike R., on boardgamegeek

War of the Ring (1977)
SPI's authorized tie-in with box graphics inspired by the Ralph Bakshi cartoon, not to be confused with Fantasy Flight's post-Peter-Jackson figure-heavy epic. There was a huge map in the usual SPI style, over which you could fight a pure wargame, a character-based game of Sauron's search for the Ring and the Fellowship's quest, or a campaign game combining the two. Event cards, and limited logistics forcing Sauron to choose between all-out war and all-out Ring searching, added to the fun.

Elric (1977)
Once Chaosium acquired the Michael Moorcock license, Greg Stafford turned his hand to a larger-scale game about the epic conflicts in the Young Kingdoms leading to the apocalyptic war between Law and Chaos chronicled in the novel Stormbringer. Human armies are pitifully weak, but the real stars of the show are the heroes, sorcerers, monsters and of course Elric, who can be controlled (up to a certain point) by various players. Using sorcery can alter the Cosmic Balance, tracked on the side of the map. If the scales tip too far one way the End of the World is brought about.

Swords and Sorcery (1978)

Photo by Alex H, boardgamegeek

SPI continued the genre with Greg Costkiyan's epic game in an original fantasy world, taking a few ideas from their own War of the Ring. It's as if they tried to copy Stafford's inspired gonzo and were left holding only gonzo, with jokey names rejected by Mad Magazine ("New Orc City," "Nattily Wood") and such bland oddball elements as killer penguins, the hassock-like race of cronks, and yes, the obligatory Python joke. A variety of scenarios could be played, with battles, sieges, heroes, diplomatic missions, and magic spells depending on a complicated three-moon astrology that varied from turn to turn.

Divine Right (1979)
TSR's entry into the sweepstakes has become legendary on the strength of excellent support assets. One, the vivid calligraphic map by Dave Trampier; what a contrast to SPI's press-apply forests! Two, the world background write-ups in Dragon magazine that I still remember, possessed of a weird vigor that the contemporaneous World of Greyhawk somehow lacked. Although there were plenty of magic items and locations, an unusual amount of attention was also lavished on the diplomatic game, including the personalities of neutral kings and emissaries.

John Carter: Warlord of Mars (1979)
Once we've accepted that Burroughs' Mars is fantasy - and yes, I will fight on this - this memorable SPI game just about qualifies, due to its inclusion of a somewhat bland military game. The real spotlight, though, was on the heroes. A skirmish combat system fought out on graph paper was embedded within a heroic quest game which brilliantly embodied and sent-up the conventions of the pulp adventure romance.

The Epic Fantasy Wargame: Introduction

2011-12-07T19:15:00.000Z

In the 1970's and early 1980's, the established hobby of board wargaming cross-fertilized with a wave of interest in fantasy literature and adventure. The result? A genre of game largely neglected in the ongoing old-school revival: the epic fantasy wargame.

Below I'll catalogue the central elements of this genre; the ones in bold I think are essential, the other just typical.

Photo by j.mccracken at boardgamegeek

Epic-scale map board. The map takes in kingdoms and even continents, on a grand-strategic scale. It depicts either an invented fantasy world; a fantasy world taken from fiction; or potentially, a real-world area given a fantasy treatment.

Hexagonal map grid. Although this was typical of games in that era, there were some games (like the Elric one, or Greyhawk Wars) that dispensed with this, using movement by areas instead. Arguably, you don't really need the kind of precise rendering of maneuvers and battlelines that hexagons give when gaming large-scale pre-conscription warfare, in which small armies cruised across a huge landscape without much operational subtlety, and clashed at designated battlefields.

Photo by Richard Maurer at boardgamegeek

Die-cut cardboard counters. Another standard feature defining the era's wargames. The success of Axis and Allies in the early 90's would create another related genre of game using plastic figures, but that belongs to a later time.

The counters represent armies as well as individuals ... Without the armies, it's not a wargame, but an adventure or quest game (as in Greg Stafford's King Arthur's Knights). Without the individuals, it's not epic - typically, one of these games would have rules for heroes leading armies, as well as going on quests, conducting diplomacy, and other things that armies can't accomplish.

.. and there is a lot of flavor and color through other means. Counters for monsters, artifacts, special locations; cards, tables, or numbered paragraphs representing events, nations to be won though diplomacy, relics ... all of these are very typical of the genre and helped give each game the special flavor of its world.

With all these elements, the play and objectives of one of these games were fairly similar to the historical equivalents. Armies fought by comparing strengths and a die roll on a chart, and the object of the game was to capture territory; or at least doing so won victory points. Less typical, though, was the "epic" layer in which heroes moved around the board attempting various things, gaining magic items and allies, which in turn could serve as an alternate victory condition or contribute to victory points.

In the next post I'll attempt a catalogue of these games, and ask for your help in identifying any I may have missed.

Filth World

2011-12-06T22:07:00.000Z

Every city ... every hell ... every universe ... needs a sewer. Let the fastidious beware!

Part 10 in a series.

Dungeons and ... Darwin?

2011-12-05T23:26:00.002Z

Evolutionary psychology meets the Monster Manual in a new book by Paul A. Trout, "Deadly Powers." According to the author's summary in an article for Salon, we can explain the most awesome and nearly universally imagined monster around, the dragon, as a confluence of biologically prepared fears of the three main hunters of our tree-dwelling primate ancestors: snakes, raptor birds, and feline predators. These have armed the dragon and kindred monsters - griffons, couatls, and kamadans (OK, not really kamadans) - with their wings, scales, and fangs.

Zak S's Kamadan could scare the pants off a loris.

I haven't read the book, but the author's comments led me to think some more about the evolutionary approach to psychology. I'm no stranger to this topic and I've found it useful in my own writings to think about how emotions serve useful functions for individuals and social groups.But there's a difference between my functional perspective, and the claim that a phenomenon is biologically prepared and inherited from a distant past. I make no claims about this genetic route of behavioral transmission because I don't study genes.

There are two problems with making inferences about the genes from animal behavior (some monkeys have distinct calls for all three predators) and present-day human behavior. Advocates of evolutionary psychology claim that their method is scientific; considering conditions in the ancestral environment of humanity, they deduce what behaviors were adaptive then, and then test the hypothesis that those behaviors have survived in the modern day. But ...

1. Which ancestral environment are we talking about? The bird-snake-cat theory traces us back to small tree-dwelling creatures. Others refer to our time on the ancestral savannah. There may have been an aquatic period in there.

2. There is always an escape clause if we don't find that a behavior has survived from those times: it must have disappeared because it was no longer adaptive. In actual fact, what happens is psychologists find a phenomenon that exists in modern humans, and then try to explain it in terms of what might have been adaptive in one of those environments, or a similar behavior in an animal species. With this kind of hindsight bias, there are all kind of ways to stumble across a phenomenon that has a closer, better explanation in terms of cultural adaptation.

So take the prevalence of mythological monsters, with their snake-bird-cat aspect. The more straightforward answer is that lions, tigers and ocelots roamed over most of the planet's surface two thousand years ago, and they were scary. Birds and snakes possess magic and strange means of movement, so they naturally tend to have cultic significance even if they're not imagined as huge, and there are enough crocodiles in our African past to explain dragons more prosaically. Why propose special genetic baggage held over from tree-shrews, when cultural concerns are more flexible, also adapt to survival concerns, and explain differences as well as similarities in the world's myths?

A better candidate for a genetic adaptation is the way a few very specific small animals attract phobias - irrational mixtures of fear and disgust that serve as a footnote to the generally useful rule, "if it's bigger than you, run away." The most common targets of animal phobias are snakes and spiders, a tendency that occurs universally, and has obvious survival value in avoiding poison bites.

The fear-disgust mix also translates to "weird" or "horrifying" and explains why snakes and spiders, rather than birds or cats, are the mainstays (together with dead things and tentacles) of the weird fantasy genre. While the griffon can get a makeover as the most noble beast, there's always going to be something sinister about the giant flying snake.

A Quickstart Idea, and Troll in the Hole

2011-12-04T15:02:00.004Z

Another Mad Archmage Saturday at the gaming society, augmented by three potential players for a new campaign, including my wife (why does she always roll up magic-users?) I wanted them to get used to the system and my GMing ways before committing to something lengthier.

With the mixture of new and returning players the pressure to streamline character generation was greater than before. Say what you will about pre-THACO systems where the GM controls the attack and saving matrices, running that way means that character generation is lightning fast, with only abilities, classes, spells and equipment to determine. I skipped the saving throw step in character generation, and indeed, none of the new characters needed to make a save. I think in future, I'll skip the determination of most of the secondary bonuses and stats until they're actually called for, bring character generation closer to 15 than 30 minutes.

This was a big group with some continuity, seven players and three with continuing dungeon explorer characters. They went back to the secret entrance to the second level, with a mission in mind, gained from previous play: to kill the terrible troll, bring its meat to the lizard men on the third level, and thereby ransom Nelson the cleric, who had offered himself as a hostage. Key members of the party were a second gnome and a "flame prophet of R'hllor" (hey, I let him be eclectic like that).

They gained a clue from R'hllor that the troll could only be killed by flame, and conceived a plan to lure it into the 20' pit, then bomb it with oil from above. (I suspect that Joe Bloch designed the level to allow this, just a wee bit.) As the party stood there with an open light discussing their plan some 60' away from the troll's slightly open door (sigh), he emerged and forced theory to turn immediately into praxis. While the rest of the party hid behind the self-closing door to the secret entrance, Herpy the gnome ran for the pit, with the hope to use his weightlessness spell and float across it, luring the troll onto it.

The party then realized that they hadn't used the lever elsewhere in the dungeon to make sure the pit was unlocked.

Herpy, being a gnome, failed his spell casting roll, and rolled the result "Caster stunned." Oh yes, the spell still goes off. The troll took a swing at him, rolled a 20, which made him drop his sling, and put him on zero HP, unable to walk due to a broken leg. Because he was effectively weightless, I ruled that Herpy would carom off in a random direction away from the troll. He flew 10' and then the spell wore off. He was now on the other side of the trapdoor.

In the next round the party, thinking that the trapdoor would be locked for some reason, emerged from hiding and started shooting at and running up to the troll. This could have been disaster, except that I thought it only fair and reasonable that the troll would chase after Herpy for some distance before becoming aware of what was behind him. I rolled for that, and rolled to see what state the trapdoor was in, as I couldn't remember how the party had last left it. The troll ran ahead 20', over a trapdoor that was only part locked (a marginal result on the dice). Cre-e-e-ak ... crash!

The rest was history, except for some shenanigans when the troll's arm, which had not quite cooked in the oil bath, got loose and had to be imprisoned in a sack which was regularly beaten. Meanwhile, attracted by the horrid screams of the dying troll, a group of the neighboring gorics (rock sprites) appeared, offered their congratulations, then shuffled off down the corridor. By the time the party realized what they were up to, the whole crew of gorics was coming back from the troll's room with heavily laden sacks.

Diplomacy ... failed. In the ensuing massacre the only party member seriously hurt was the flame prophet, who had insisted on staying in the front after having been hit by one of Herpy's patented "through the legs" sling shots. The haul of coins was rich indeed, the troll arm had the lizard men greatly respecting the party and releasing the hostage, and the longer-standing members of the party had 2nd level well in sight!

What Is This Thing That Is Not A Role-Playing Game?

2011-12-03T02:12:00.001Z

And with the first page of the One Page series I bring the first book, covering character creation, to a close.

This is my simplest and most honest answer to the question in the page's title. People who already know what an RPG is - I mean really, is there anyone under 35 who hasn't grown up playing computer games? - will recognize the idea, but be enlightened by the face-to-face manner of execution. You will note that "role-playing," "story-telling," "personas" and the like are left behind with the excess baggage. And heretically, I address the question of winning. For this game eventually will come with training wheels, a model starter Generick Fantasye dungeon, village and town which the uncreative GM will learn from, and the creative GM will need no instruction to supersede.

The list of options in the lower right owes some debt to a number of posts over the past half year or so, in the Hack and Slash blog.

So ... any interest in a pdf of the intro and the whole character creation set so far?

In the OSR ...

2011-12-01T00:09:00.000Z

Players ... railroad DM!

Meme by Arkhein.

Comment if you want an explanation!

Prophets, Not Clerics?

2011-11-29T09:05:00.002Z

FrDave on Blood of Prokopius had an idea a while back that perfectly fits my search for an alternate term for an adventuring "cleric" or "priest." He suggests that a campaign might include miracle-working "prophets" in the Biblical sense of the word. I think this is a great idea not just for a specific campaign, but a general set of rules.

I think my dissatisfaction with "cleric" and "priest" is a widely shared sentiment. "Cleric" is one of those journalistic synonyms that has picked up unwanted associations. Some of those are with accountancy and others are with the standard, mace-packing, D&D class that has taken on a strange life of its own on the basis of game rules and historical misperceptions. Along with "priest," "cleric" doesn't convey enough of a sense of the strange and wondrous and miraculous. It implies that every village vicar comes equipped with healing miracles, and conversely, it implies that your adventuring holy person is akin to one of those cozy old souls, beholden to the church hierarchy, relaxing in the study with some port, available to do weddings and bar mitzvahs.

But none of the alternatives really work. "Saint" implies a very restrictive code of behavior, and anyway, players shouldn't be walking around canonized already. "Holy man" also implies you're sanctified, needs to be gender-switched for women, and comes across as bland and generic, like "magic-user."

Prophets, though, are not saints in the colloquial sense of the word. They're capable of summoning bears to maul some bullies, or marrying a prostitute to name the children as part of an extended metaphor. They are wanderers; without honor in their home town. I think they make a great model for adventurers.

So for me the question is how this model fits into my One Page rules for priests. Well, apart from "prophet" being longer on the page than "priest" (causing some grumbling), they should really have some way to prophesy shouldn't they? In One Page rules, priests get one "miracle" per day, plus an extra one if they make a Mind save. These miracles tend to be of a healing bent, but I'm finding the Priest class really strong in play because of their miraculous ability to bring someone back from a 0 HP or less major wound (that is, real physical damage rather than just hit points, in my system). So I'm considering replacing the Priest's progression of

Level 1: Heal major wound to 1 HP
Level 2: Make a second save against poison

(and maybe those two should be flipped around anyway?)

with

Level 1: Get indirect answer to yes/no question
Level 2: Heal major wound to 1 HP

and possibly other abilities at higher levels, to match the wide variety of miracles attributed to prophets in many religions.

Went to Dragonmeet

2011-11-27T11:30:00.000Z

In which I:

* Played in an AD&D game in the morning, run by a fellow who had clearly put some 20 years of work into the background of his campaign, with great maps and handouts. The adventure was a kobold hunt. The final challenge was certainly among the weirdest, toughest, and old-schooliest way to get a handsome kobold skull. There was a bit of fudging and nudging to get there, but we had a great time. AD&D was not at all cumbersome in this DM's hands, with plenty of stat checks in lieu of complicated procedures.

* Had a few words with James Raggi at his booth, picked up Vornheim and the Purple Worm Graveyard. He's more laid-back in real life than he is on his blog ... but then again, aren't we all?

* Also picked up a book of adventures for the Dying Earth system, which I've always wanted to run a one-shot in.

* Met up with my friend from the L5R CCG scene, who is now a 4th edition D&D player, and we played in a Castles & Crusades session. The adventure was a fun expedition to investigate a malfunctioning lighthouse, if a little on the easy side. My friend and I found the C&C system to play really well, a mix of AD&D with 3rd edition logic. I don't personally use it because its character generation doesn't fit my tastes, but with pre-generated characters that flaw went unnoticed. Old school made another convert that day...

Dragonmeet is a nice one-day con with no possibility of the fatigue that haunts longer events. One thing I did notice was a definite lack of miniatures, on sale or in games. This is too bad, as I do like using figures, and wanted to pick up some, or at least get some paints from another supplier than the Evil Empire of Nottingham. But I had to admit that the games I played in ran fine without figures.

Going to Dragonmeet

2011-11-25T13:28:00.002Z

I'll be at the Dragonmeet convention in London tomorrow. See here. I know James Raggi will be on hand and I'll be meeting a friend there who is curious about the old school.

If you'll be there as well this is what I look like:

A little squashed horizontally, not sure why

I haven't registered anything but I might be persuaded to do a pickup Mad Archmage run. I've figured I can bring some pre-made characters, a few tokens and figures, and we're set. Who knows, if Raggi loans me some character sheets I might even do it LotFP style.

Bag of Tricks On Abulafia

2011-11-20T13:06:00.002Z

So, while other things have been taking up my attention this week, like the small matter of correcting proofs for my psychology book, I have managed to code up my Bag of Tricks table pdf (see link on right) in a much more useable, wiki-randomizer form using the redoubtable Abulafia site. Click here to use it.

It's nice to be able to design a table free of the constraints of dice and to use some of the other great tables for food, substances, colors, etc. on there. A sample of the results, which still may need some interpretation:

Tomb with hair which if turned gives a cursed magic item

If opened, the tomb is seen to contain a skeleton wearing a wig. The wig will fly up and attempt to attach itself to the head of the closest person (reflex/breath weapon save to avoid). It can be turned as a wraith, and if thise is successful the wig falls inert. In any case, if the wig is put on, it cannot be taken off without remove curse, and the wearer gains an 18 intelligence and wisdom but must save (will/spell) every hour or become possessed by the spirit of the dead person.

Painted designs with face which if gazed at heals one person (one time only)

These are murals of the goddess Egeria and her nymphs. The first person with 5 or more hit points damage to inspect Egeria closely will become entraced by her eyes and stand there for a full hour, no save. On awaking from the reverie the person will be healed for 1d6 damage for each level he or she has.

Altar with water which if a specific substance is mixed with it opens a passage

This is a baptismal font of the rite of Egeria, filled with pure water that drips into it from above. If it is defiled by any kind of rotten substance or bodily fluid, a yard-wide drain will open up in the font for one minute. It leads to the Chamber of Defilement below.

Painting with creature which if worn opens a passage

Uh, this one has got me stumped. That's OK, the generator spits out 20 ideas at a time.

Obviously there is some room for improvement, although complicated, it might be worthwhile to give each feature a chance to have multiple subfeatures, and each subfeature a chance to have multiple relevant actions. I also want to, with proper attribution, work in some of Kellri's special trick effects from the Encounter Reference document, and otherwise make some of the entries more specific.

Have fun using this!

Tomb World

2011-11-15T20:30:00.000Z

And now, something from the classics.

Equipment and Weapon Cards - System-Free

2011-11-13T11:59:00.000Z

I realized yesterday that it might be more useful if I left off all the One Page prices, weights, and rules assumptions from these cards, so that you can put on them whatever's appropriate in your rules system and campaign.

The weapon kits, of course, can't be system neutral entirely. For example, the "civilian" kit for wizards has a crossbow, the "rogue" kit for thieves has a bow and arrows, choices not supported by AD&D. I also included the mace in the "cleric" kit but some DMs may allow religion-specific weapons. You may want to substitute appropriate weapons (darts, sling) or just say that the weapon is for hirelings or other party members to use.

Hope these are useful!

Starting Equipment Kit Cards

2011-11-12T21:27:00.000Z

In my last few runs of the One Page system, I could feel time dragging as players (some completely inexperienced, some very savvy) waded through the equipment list to select stuff. I want to get it down to 15 minutes or so. Sure, I could use pre-gens, but part of the reason to have super-simple character options is to give the experience of rolling up a character.

This is just the six standard packages of adventuring gear I let characters start with for free, in card format. I see this as making set-up much quicker. The cards make it obvious that the job is to distribute all the standard adventuring gear and backups among the party.

Weapons, etc. coming up next.

Why Does A Dungeon Look Like A Dungeon?

2011-11-09T23:09:00.000Z

Everywhere from the Zork logo to Hirst Arts adventure scenery, the standard architecture of a "dungeon" - meaning, underground medieval fantasy adventure setting - is:

walls of regular or irregular gray stone blocks, anywhere from shoebox size to two or three times that
wooden doors fitted with iron hinges and reinforcing bars
floors of gray flagstone
torches in wall sconces

Prison World

2011-11-08T19:26:00.000Z

Shades of Penitentiary parts I-III and every other prison movie I could think of short of Jailhouse Rock, all leavened with Ye Olde Generick Dongeon Fantasye. Just think of it as StoneWhatTheHell.

Some entries are part bold italic and part not; the bold italic is the part that survives if the prison is merely a historic ruin being occupied by something else.

Do Split the Party

2011-11-06T10:42:00.000Z

Another Adventure Gaming Society club Saturday and a group of four players - no repeat visitors - rolled up characters to enter the freewheeling Mad Archmage's castle using One Page rules. In which it was revealed that sometimes splitting the party is a good idea. How? Read on ...

This was a party of experienced D&Ders who knew their stuff. Because they were only four in number (hunter-elf Alvissa, historian-cleric Father Robertson, mountain-hunter-fighter Freya, ex-military-outlaw-fighter Mikhail), I let them hire a man-at-arms, made up on the spot - Ivar the zero level fighter, whose distinguishing characteristic, as the elf's player produced an orc miniature to represent him, was that he was as ugly as an orc and in fact sometimes mistaken for one. This was to prove very important later on ...

Approaching the castle, they elected to avoid the main gate and headed for the bastion on the south wall. One bandit appeared and starting chucking rocks at them, followed by five more. Crouching behind the fighter's upraised shield, the band ran up under the battlement and the elf threw up a rope and grappling hook. The roll was a natural 20 ... so what else could happen but that the hooks caught one of the bandits crouching behind the battlement in the eyes? As he screamed and wailed, she cast her one Sleep spell, and he and most of the other bandits fell silent, then the unfortunate hooked man came tumbling down and hit the ground with a loud "snap."

At this point the party decided to split up. The priest, being roleplayed as a somewhat doddering old fellow, had the genius inspiration to dodder around the bastion's corner and see if there was a door. There was. He convinced the fighters and man-at-arms to come with him while the elf shinnied up the now securely attached rope to slit throats.

Meanwhile, the priest of Kronos took his sickle-shaped sacred axe and started hacking at the door to the bastion. As he made progress in chopping through the wood, the elf up top was interrupted in her grim task by the arrival of four more bandits, who had been roused by one bandit who'd escaped the sleep spell, and their half-orc leader, the notorious Grainne the Bandit Queen. Acting quickly, Alvissa shinnied down the rope, but not before taking one more sleeping bandit out.

At this point the remaining bandits quite understandably ran to the edge of the parapet and hurled rocks at Alvissa, who took a bad immobilizing body wound. Hearing the commotion, Ivar and the fighters rounded the corner and ... Grainne, with one look down at the mistaken-for-orc Ivar, rolled a high reaction, took a shine to him.

Played by the unconscious elf's player, Ivar introduced himself as "Ivog," got the fighters to haul off the elf "for eating later" and expressed an interest in joining the gang. The bandit who had run away recognized Ivar, but he was quick to accuse the unfortunate fellow a traitor. When Grunnya approached him, he fled, and the other four bandits ran off after him.

Meanwhile, the priest had hacked through the door and revived the elf, and together they entered the bastion, with its complicated architecture of stepped levels and towers. There followed a tense episode. The rest of the party was led to the inner courtyard to be sworn into the gang. Priest and elf took to skulking, exploring and picking off isolated bandits sent to fetch brandy. In a final climactic betrayal, with party out of magic and all but two bandits dead, everyone turned on an isolated Grainne. Luck was with the group that day, for they felled the mighty bandit queen and lost only the unfortunate Ivar, who took the full fury of a half-woman betrayed, dying of shock as the party cauterized his severed arm. The bandits even left a cart and horses to haul all the loot back to town.

Could this group of five have taken on a third level fighter and ten zero-level bandits in a face-to-face fight? Doubtful, especially with the reduced power of the One Page sleep spell. Splitting the party into a deception wing and a stealth wing turned out to be just the strategy, although I'm not sure how much it was arrived at on purpose. Also helping was the open-roofed architecture of the bastion and the loud voice of Grainne, so that the stealth commandos had a way to know what was going on.

Followers: Your PCs are Adventurers

2011-11-05T11:53:00.000Z

Followers - henchmen and hirelings - represent the sort of people who would follow a rootless adventurer into danger, and the limits on them in the One Page system reflect this.

One principle I'm following is that player characters have the class of "adventurer" modifying their role as a fighter, wizard, priest or whatever. NPCs are not playing by the same rules as PCs; they don't get experience the same way, shouldn't develop a raft of hit points on the basis of 30 years of scholarly research, may have skills and talents that adventurers never have the time to develop. So, I ended up limiting PC background skills so that adventurers don't become the craft mavens, alchemy brewers, and whatnot of other systems. You are adventurers, you pay other people to do that. If you were brought up as a beekeeper you might be able to get a discount on beeswax, but you're a failed beekeeper so your time is not best spent running a hive.

Likewise, when it comes to leading small armies around at 2nd character level, you won't really get a horde of hundreds following you unless you're backed up by some larger assurances. Maybe you're a captain in a governmental army, or the son of a duke. Maybe you're a bandit leader who started out as a rootless adventurer, with only a few henchmen and hirelings, but your successes, and your ability to offer a steady and relatively risk-free living, attracted more and more men.

The nuts and bolts of recruiting will be covered in the One Page village and town supplements. I see those as a way to codify some of the generic assumptions of what you can get in small and large campaign settlements.

Mythic World

2011-11-03T18:55:00.000Z

Back to the 36 chambers ... where titans clash and argonauts sail.

Liches: Superbia

2011-11-01T22:24:00.003Z

Closing out the season of sinful undead, we awake from Samhain revels to find the biggest undead, liches, and the biggest sin of all - the original sin of Adam, Eve and Satan - pride. "Ye shall be as gods."

"Lich" is an old Anglo-Saxon word meaning "corpse," and the transition to a gaming creature seems to have been through the writings of Clark Ashton Smith and other pulp scriveners who resurrected the hoary term to describe the sorcerous, shriveled walking dead.

coolminiornot.com

As Von noted way back when I started this series, liches fit the bill of the free-willed undead best, because they are the only ones to explicitly and always choose their condition. Their aspiration to immortality and godlike power itself have earned them the sin of superbia, pride. One might imagine that because they have reached their undead state through arcane sorceries, they have found a way to transfer their consciousness beyond the theological soul. They are therefore an unparalleled threat to divine justice; when destroyed, they merely cease to exist, and their sins will go unpunished.

How does the lich get that way? Following the idea of the lich as magical cyborg, it endures a seven-step ritual of replacing the parts of its spirit and soul with sorcery. It's possible to meet with a wizard at one stage or another of this transformation, a true fractional lich (as opposed to the curiously named demilich, actually more powerful than a full lich). These horrible rituals include self-mutilation, trepanation, and worse...

1. The wizard gives up the eyes, the windows of the soul, replacing them with icy burning sockets having full-spectrum vision to 120'.
2. The wizard gives up the breath, the door of the soul, replacing it with a magical voice that causes fear as a full-blown lich does.
3. The wizard gives up the brain lobe of Memory, the treasury of the soul, replacing it with a gem containing an intangible and infinitesimally compact library of lore. This ensures that the lich will retain super-genius intelligence and spell knowledge without the need to consult books.
4. The wizard gives up the brain lobe of Reason, the throne of the soul, replacing it with another gem containing a distillation of the wizard's own methods and rationality. This gives absolute self-control and resistance to enfeeblement, polymorph, and insanity.
5. The wizard gives up the brain lobe of Instinct, the foundation of the soul, sacrificing it utterly. This gives resistance to charm and sleep, and indeed freedom from all desires save those for knowledge, power, and the suffering of others.
6.The wizard gives up his or her soul, replacing positive energy with chill negative, and gaining the paralyzing touch ability, death magic immunity, or possibly even more dreadful powers of the Negative Planes.
7. Finally, the wizard surrenders his or her life, and the body begins to decay, replacing magic-user levels, hit points, and other stats with monster hit dice and stats, and acquiring the remaining resistances.

A contradiction in the lich-as-written may also contain the key to turning it. How does the lich's pride and vanity square with its appearance as a moldy old skeleton clad in rags? Surely if it is motivated by pride, the lich will find some way to keep up appearances. For example:

1. The lich casts a continual illusion, appearing as an attractive ideal of the being it was (or never was) in life.
2. The lich wears an iron mask, armor of fearsome construction, and mailed gauntlets to hide its skeletal state.
3. The lich has embalmed its bones in a waxen compound, creating an eerily lifeless similitude of dead-eyed face and cold hands.
4. The lich has opted for skeletal glory, studding its bones with rich metals, enamels and gems.
5. The lich appears as a skeletal horror, but has cast an illusion on itself, so that it sees itself as fair and youthful, its dank surroundings as a pleasure garden.
6. The lich has simply subjected itself to permanent invisibility.

Turning the lich consists, first of piercing or dispelling the illusion, then presenting the sacred symbol while subjecting it to mockery, to dethrone its sin of pride. Difficult, yes, but you didn't think you'd get away with just a d20 roll to fend off the king of the undead?

Vampires: Luxuria

2011-10-31T21:45:00.001Z

Vampires embody the sin of lust. Do I need to say more? All right, then.

Besides having the most attractive appearance of all the undead crew ... besides the neck-bite as kinky substitute sexuality ... besides the tapping in to archaic beliefs about vital force and sexuality, "the expense of spirit in a waste of shame" ...

Vampires are users, and that is the difference between the joy of sex and the sin of lust. Their embrace is pleasurable, perhaps, but actively bad for the one embraced. And yet, there are those who seek out vampires, wishing to be one, wishing to be used abjectly and in turn using. Intimacy becomes hierarchy.

Turning vampires? It's the classic operation, with the cross or the Magen David... I can't really improve on that ritual. But the sin of the vampire means that a failed attempt to turn brings the would-be Van Helsing under the vampire's charm, no saving throw. If you look into those eyes and blink, the eyes look into you.

And after Stoker, Murnau, Rice, White Wolf, Hamilton, and Meyer, and a hundred more, if you can't think of something creepy and sexy to do with your vampires, I'm certainly not going to give you a table.

Happy Halloween!

Mansion World

2011-10-30T17:00:00.011Z

A heady blend of Dickens, Gormenghast, Chas. Addams, Castle Amber, and Tegel Manor is on the menu tonight.

The maid has a phoenix feather duster. The feathers spit flame.

Six down ... thirty to go!

Ghosts and Poltergeists: Ira

2011-10-30T08:28:00.000Z

Wrath (ira) is a hard sin to attribute to any undead. I originally thought "hey, the wraiths of wrath" but beyond a stupid not-even-pun there is not much going for that. Wraiths and spectres, on reflection, are life-stealers, so they belong with the envious shadows. Redundant ones at that; I always thought that spectres in the original D&D were Gary's realization, "hey, these wraiths are not quite badass enough to be Ringwraiths."

As an emotion, anger is complicated and hard to study. In my analysis, this is because anger can be brought on by many individual things; it's a feeling state that over biological and cultural evolution has been recruited to respond to many situations. We feel angry when we are personally threatened, so that we can put up a threatening front; when our goals are personally blocked, so that we can persevere in working on them; when an injustice is perpetrated, so that we can apply social pressure to right it. The problem with anger is that each of these three things uses the same emotion, meaning that the three causes bleed over to each other. So, even if we have a goal blocked - bad traffic, say, or somebody publishing a game on the Internet that uses ascending armor class - anger pushes us to treat it like a personal threat, and even an injustice. And anger is a very visible state, which motivates us to communicate it and to come up with reasons for it. It's no wonder the medieval church fathers classed this ubiquitous emotion as a sin.

So what undead is defined by its rage? If you look to ghost tradition, the answer is obvious: the poltergeist. A literal spirit of rage, the poltergeist manifests in a house by throwing and disturbing objects. The problem is that in D&D, poltergeists are low-level joke monsters from the Fiend Folio. So we need to make them bigger and badder, and perhaps merge them somewhat with their bigger cousins, the ghost.

If the D&D ghost seems under-used, it's because, like the mummy, it merges high hit dice with weird attack modes: aging, which you can see as a kind of fear effect from its angry expression, and magic jar attack, which in effect is a kind of possession. It's not too much of a stretch to see the ghost as possessing its victims in order to express its rage, turning them immediately to attack their companions. Henceforth, the reworking:

Ghosts are another kind of undead where their sin in life translates well to their state after death. They died possessed by anger, frustrated in the accomplishment of some goal which may even be evident in the environment: an unfinished statue, an unescaped deathtrap. They are very hard to deal with because they can turn invisible and ethereal at will, and may only be hit by magic weapons, holy items or spells. Trying to turn them directly only makes them more angry, and they attack the one doing the turning; the way to deal with them is to face the other way while holding the holy symbol and intoning the sacred words, which will affect them in the normal way. The one weakness a ghost has is for the attainment of the goal that caused its anger; for example, a ghost created when a wrathful person died trying to escape a trap will be dispelled when the original bones are moved to a place of freedom.

A ghost will have 3 (poltergeist), 6 (ghost) or 9 (greater ghost) hit dice, with all other stats as written. It has one special attack for every 3 hit dice, from this list:

1. Save (Mind/Spell) or age 1d20 years when ghost first shows itself.
2. Telekinesis, throwing dangerous objects about as through the spell (and the ghost will seek out places with such objects).
3. Possession as by magic jar.
4. Supernatural chill in a 60' radius, extinguishing small fires, and doing 1 hp of damage/round if warm clothing is not worn (this will not reduce a character to zero hp however).
5. Death wail (as banshee); once per night, all who hear must save (Body/Death magic) or fall unconscious for 1 hour (3HD), 24 hours (6HD), or die (9HD).
6. Fear effect: roll two saves (mind/Spell) when ghost first shows itself, if both are failed then stand rooted to the spot for 3 rounds, if one is failed then flee at top speed for 3 rounds.

Mummies and Wights: Avaricia

2011-10-26T23:51:00.001+01:00

The sin of avarice would seem to be a natural one for the undead guardians of grave treasures. If this sin is a desire to possess more than one needs, then its ultimate expression would be a defiance of the truism "you can't take it with you." The animated mummies of horror films and stories, and the pale, hoard-guarding Barrow-Wights of Tolkien's invention, would then seem to refer to the same evil, the same origin.

But there's a paradox in this story that goes back to the Norse legends of the draugr: if the avaricious wight is so intent on hoarding its gold, why does it "recruit" the victim and increase the number of wights who share in the treasure? In D&D, the mummy's touch doesn't act this way, but I think this is more due to the obvious problem that the mummy needs to bandage up the bodies of those it kills in order to create others like it.

In fact, there's a lot that's weird about the wight. Tolkien has them as bony things, but they appear in D&D as these snarly bodybuilder types with Land of Oz hair. They're not that strong in hit dice but have the feared and hated ability of level drain, whereas mummies are tougher in combat but have a grab-bag of abilities that are not that nasty, and have a weakness to the common torch. Personally, I'll take the mummies; they come in all kinds of cultural flavors (Aztec ... Peruvian), there were cat and crocodile mummies, and it's not such a long step from those to the horrid animal-human hybrid mummies envisioned by Lovecraft in his ghost-written Harry Houdini story, Entombed With the Pharaohs.

Anyway, I want to take a different approach than the "living undead" of the last three Deadly Sins, and suggest that wights, mummies, and whatever skeletal guardians may exist are just variations on a single type of creature, united by their motivation to remain undead. These tomb guardian creatures may exist in a lesser form (stats as a wight) or a greater form (stats as a mummy) but each one's appearance is largely a product of the culture that buried it, and whether it awakened soon or late after burial.

There is a special restriction on turning tomb guardians, as with the other sinful undead. Although they may be turned normally, the turning ends if any associate of the cleric picks up any of the creature's treasure. Turning will not succeed while any such associate is carrying loot, either. By ransacking the tomb, the adventurer shows his or her self to be a fellow-sinner in avarice with the undead guardian, and the power of holiness will no longer work as protection.

In addition to only being harmed by magic weapons, tomb guardians have two of the following special attacks, which vary from case to case (d6):

1. Level drain as a wight (but without "recruitment")
2. Rotting disease as a mummy
3. Fear effect as a mummy
4. Unerring tracking of those who stole its treasure (as in the old mummy movies)
5. Enchants a victim within 30'; save (Spell.Mind) or become mentally confused, transported back to the times of the guardian and unwilling to act (as in Lord of the Rings)
6. Shapeshifting at will, into smoke, an unnaturally heavy animal, or seaweed (as in legends of the Norse draugr)

Shadows: Invidia

2011-10-25T23:30:00.001+01:00

The animated shadow is by definition a being of lesser standing, an envious follower, dependent on light and an intervening body, aspiring to an independent state it can never have. Like the ghouls, its status as undead wavered in early D&D, and is still uncertain in (for example) Swords & Wizardry. There is a certain eerie power in the idea of a shadow that one day refuses to serve, and that really doesn't need the additional tag of undead to chill the blood. Lord Dunsany memorably explored the idea of a detachable and tradeable penumbra in his novel The Charwoman's Shadow.

The sin of envy, or the medieval invidia, is studied by psychologists and philosophers as an emotion. It seems to be a pretty common theme in such studies to split the emotion into a "good" side and a "bad" side, which reflects the idea that emotions are basically functional but often go wrong. In this research, benign envy is explained as a desire to emulate the superior, while malicious envy involves achieving parity through reducing the superior instead. It is the destructive side of envy that the evil shadow embodies.

Shadows make a fine undead creature. Think of them as a void of life-force, lacking entirely in Strength. When they see a being with superior Strength, they enviously approach, implying that they will attack the strongest by preference. Their touch destroys the strength, but does not steal it. Eventually, their victim ends up dragged down to their level, a shadow among shadows.

What of the person who voluntarily chooses existence as a shadow? This is a rare wish, supported by an equally rare necromantic rite, and marks the ultimate triumph of envy. To give up one's own worthless existence for the chance to tag at the heels of a far superior person is similar to the motivation to become a zombie, perhaps. Thus, the living shadow creeps at its master's feet in imposture of the natural shadow. But the creature saps, rather than serving, its superior - making one attack per day on the victim's abilities, and adding any stolen points to its own score, until it merges in hateful life with the victim, creating a being of walking dusk without a shadow of its own, and adding the victim's hit dice and hit points to its own. Thereafter the envious soul has no reason to remain, its victory complete, and the completed shadow-being tends to become possessed by a darker genius.

At both stages, the living shadow can only be turned by two or more clerics, each bearing a holy symbol on which a clerical light spell has been cast, and arranged so as to surround the shadow.

For this as well as the more common undead variety of shadow, there exist several varieties which each possess their own special attack upon the abilities, and their own consequence once draining is sufficiently advanced (1d3 points on a successful hit, regained at 1 point/day). The consequence of zero points in any ability is death and conversion to a shadow.

1. Attacks strength; at 1-2 points victim becomes flaccid and unable to move.
2. Attacks dexterity; at 1-2 points victim becomes hyperactive, moving and acting about uncontrollably.
3. Attacks constitution; at 1-2 points victim becomes moribund and takes 1 hit point damage each round of moving.
4. Attacks intelligence; at 1-2 points victim becomes amnesic and unable to remember declarative facts such as his or her own name.
5. Attacks wisdom; at 1-2 points victim becomes catatonic, unresponsive to outside senses and lost in a world of his or her own mind.
6. Attacks charisma; at 1-2 point victim becomes repulsive even to him or herself, and will attempt suicide if not restrained.

Ghouls: Gula

2011-10-24T23:03:00.000+01:00

Beyond the titular Latin-to-Arabic pun, ghouls embody gula (the cardinal sin of gluttony) in an obvious manner: they feed on the bodies of the dead. On top of that, ghouls are my favorite undead creature because, at least in their source material, they're not obviously undead. In Lovecraft's story Pickman's Model, it's implied that ghouls, like the inbred Martense clan in his less accomplished The Lurking Fear, are a degenerate strain of humanity, whose necrophagy forms part and parcel of their condition. Pickman even becomes a ghoul in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, where he and his meeping buddies come off as strangely sympathetic Addams Family types.

The paralysis that is the ghoul's special weapon, and especially deadly with multiple attacks, doesn't appear in Lovecraft, and may be original to the D&D game. I used to think it was a reference to the ghouls that accost Elric in Moorcock's The Vanishing Tower, paralyzing him with their cold touch, but the novel's 1977 date is later than the Chainmail and OD&D originals. It's unlikely that Moorcock cribbed the idea from D&D, but one never knows.

Although Gary Gygax made the conscious choice to make ghouls undead in going from Chainmail to D&D (more ghoul-trivia here), they seem like an obvious choice to explore as "voluntary undead" in this series. I've never quite understood how ghouls fit into the D&D undead mold of "if they kill you, they recruit you" because they seem so indiscriminately ravenous. A vampire might have the self-control to grant the "dark gift" of undeath or withhhold it, merely killing its victim ... but a ghoul holding back from a tasty, board-stiff human morsel? Hardly likely.

Living ghouls are gourmands and degenerates who develop a taste for human flesh and determine that the best way to get it is to feed upon the already dead. The diet awakens regressive tendencies in their genetic makeup and they become prognathous, robust and somewhat dog-like in their gait and demeanor. Haunting graveyards, they logically become followers of strong undead creatures, who feast on the souls of the unfortunate and leave ghouls the mere body.

Not being undead, living ghouls require a special reminder of their damned state in order to be effectively turned. In this case, it is sacred food, such as the consecrated bread or wine of Christianity, or barring that, foodstuffs created by a holy clerical spell. If the turning destroys the living ghoul, it lapses into a coma and can be returned to human state by forced feeding of consecrated food for three days.

The appearance of a ghoul - living or not - sets off ancestral memories in humans and related beings (dwarves, halflings, gnomes) but not elves, which can lead to one of the following fear effects - varying either by the individual, the ghoul pack, or on a racial level:

1. Save (Paralysis/Body) or paralysis by touch, as the original.
2. Howling causes a morale check among NPCs, and PCs must save (Spell/Mind) or become distracted, incurring -2 to hit and +2 to be hit.
3. Charnel smell within 30' forces a save (Poison/Body) or retch as with a Troglodyte's stench, unable to attack.
4. Paralyzing stare within 30'; victim gets two saves, one against the gaze (Spell/Mind) and one against the paralysis (Paralysis/Body).
5. Gibbering and meeping in close combat is maddening; requires a save (Spell/Mind) or become confused and attack a random adjacent being.
6. A hit from a ghoul's claws requires a save (Spell/Mind) or the victim cowers for a round, either fleeing or fighting defensively.

And no - I am not going to stat up the bizarre, half-medusa Roy Thomas comic-book version of Pickman's Model....

Zombies: Accidia

2011-10-23T10:33:00.001+01:00

The medieval sin of accidia (acedia), or sloth, refers to a condition that today we treat as a mental illness: depression. But more generally, the sin refers to inability to act or decide, retreat from the world rather than engagement with the world, and in its ultimate expression, suicide.

Psychological writers, such as Erich Fromm or Roy Baumeister, have identified the human motive to "escape from freedom" or "escape from the self" by submitting to authoritarian regimes or cults. When people willingly become zombies, they symbolize this abdication of will to another. This living zombie is perhaps closer to the drug-induced state of living death implicated in the questionable anthropology of Wade Davis (The Serpent and the Rainbow) than the walking dead of George Romero. It also brings to mind the philosophical zombie, which forms part of the solipsist argument (referenced in Heinlein's story "-- All You Zombies --") that we can never know for sure if anyone apart from ourselves is free-willed and conscious.

Zombies, sluggish and slavish, embody the sin of sloth when a living person willingly submits his or her body to the ritual of a necromancer. Otherwise they are mere animated corpses, a desecration but nothing more than that. Necromancers greatly prize the former kind of zombie, for their greater power, and because to recruit them gives much prestige. Therefore, necromancers and their agents often haunt popular locations for suicide - bridges, precipices - in hopes of persuading the unfortunate to surrender their lives in one sense rather than the other.

A living zombie has all stats as a regular zombie, with 4 additional HP. It is unholy but not evil ( having given up its free will) and not undead. So, it can only be turned by reminding it of its own identity - its personal name must be spoken, or a mirror held up to its face in place of a holy symbol. If the turning destroys the zombie, the spell is broken and the person returns to life.

As a bonus, here is a d6 table of attributes and powers that can make all kinds of zombies more scary.

1. Fingernails and teeth that break off in the wound, preventing 1 hit point of healing per wound until Cure Disease is cast.
2. If wounded down to 3 or fewer hit points, guts spill out of the zombie's abdomen and come alive. They make an extra attack ignoring armor, and if successful ensnare the arms (on an odd "to hit" roll; cannot attack until victim rolls d20+STR > 25) or legs (on an even "to hit" roll, cannot move and 2AC worse until victim rolls d20+STR > 25).
3. Zombies are immune to piercing weapons (although being stuck on a spear can hold one at bay), and take half damage (rounded down) from blunt weapons unless the wielder aims at the head with -4 to hit.
4. Zombies can only be killed by physical damage if it does 5 or more points at once.
5. Can throw its own arm, which attacks on its behalf for 1d4 damage, while the remaining arm on the zombie also attacks for 1d4.
6. Is a bloater zombie.

Evil World

2011-10-21T22:37:00.000+01:00

In keeping with the seven deadly sins, I guess, although I'm also just going through a table I made several months ago for these genres. A little Dante, a little Bosch, a little de Sade. And a toast to Matt of Nod, and his own very tasty Inferno.

Some of the categories on the table of genres don't look as viable as they used to, so maybe there'll be a little contest coming after the coolest stuff has been exhausted...

Seven Undeadly Sins

2011-10-20T23:47:00.003+01:00

I'm thinking more and more that the right approach in monster-ology lies between Flame Princess' "do it yourself, do it all yourself" and conventional D&D's "here, all the monsters are in this book." In fact, my one-armed man chart from earlier in the week comes within an ace of accounting for the hit dice of most existing classic monsters, and is a good template for any others you may care to design.

But what about the stranger stuff, like undead? Well, what makes undead scary and unpredictable is their special abilities, both attack and defense. This suggests a little d6 table with possibilities for abilities that will make each encounter uncertain and memorable. After all, folklore doesn't treat ghosts as a race, but as a class of cursed beings, each with its own story.

One thing I want to do before Halloween is try a new take on the undead, using as a background the medieval church doctrine of the Seven Deadly Sins. Beyond a naturalist "ecology" of the undead, these reworkings imply a mythical symbology and moral psychology of these wretched creatures. In brief: sloth = zombies, gluttony = ghouls, envy = shadows, avarice = wights/mummies, lust = vampires, wrath = spectres/wraiths, pride = liches. Justifications to follow, especially for that one that doesn't quite seem as right as the others.

A final issue: undead-ism is most often seen as a curse transmitted unwillingly, but the more frightful possibility is that some persons desire the various states of undeath, as a means of achieving desires unavailable to living mortals. It's this potential that I think affords a new vantage point on these venerable villains.

Character Birth: Choice vs. Speed

2011-10-19T22:58:00.000+01:00

Count me on the side of quick with a few choices rather than slow with a lot of choices, when it comes to generating characters for adventure games.

My One Page system cuts out an element of choice - not without some controversy as I recall - by having class determined directly by stats which can, if necessary, be switched around once. It works choice back in, though in a relatively light way, by allowing open-ended selection of background descriptors that can have some effect on when skills work best.

Oh yeah, I changed the skills sheet some so that languages and backgrounds could fit in. I am pretty happy now with the way backgrounds are a kind of "adjective" or "subject" that modify the base chance that the very generic skill gives you. You only get to use Knowledge to remember facts that are part of your background, and if you try using most skills in a setting or task consistent with your background you get a +2 on that (these are indicated on the new version of the character sheet, below).

I've noticed recently, though, that character generation with this system tends to bog down around skill and equipment selection.

The solution for equipment is to have random tables for weapons and standard starting armor, and to pass around a deck of cards with the six equipment packages so that the party as a whole is adequately equipped for their first expedition. That's for a future post ...

The solution for skills was simple. As I had it, players were "choosing" only a pip or two of skills to shift around their character sheet. So why not just have skills also flow from class and stats - keeping in mind that the flavor and scope of each skill in my system is modified by the freely chosen background descriptors ...

Anyway, this is what's going on the end of this sheet now.

At this point I'm a little overwhelmed by the multi-ring circus I've got going on in my free time, what with the One Page system ( a little stalled out, as I got done what I needed to run a few games with it, so the impulse to complete is kind of dormant for now ), the Genre Worlds tables, Zak giving the high sign for the Obstacles & Openings cards, and even more, including some contributions to other people's product and a big slow secret project. It will all come complete in the fullness of time, I guess.

Dark World

2011-10-18T23:52:00.000+01:00

Olms: the human fish.

The Old One-Armed Man's Monster Guide

2011-10-17T23:01:00.003+01:00

How to balance the need to keep a not-always-level-appropriate environment fair to players, with the need to keep a sense of mystery about the campaign? There has to be a middle ground between the monster-book memorizers and the clueless neophytes who unwisely take on a troll.

Most of the people I've been DMing for recently are new to the hobby, and I've been trying a variety of subtle and not so subtle hints. I think one thing that might work is just a simple rule of thumb based on size, with cautions about oddball monsters and special powers. This says nothing about what kind of bestiary the DM is working with, but avoids some of the more obvious mismatches, as long as you refrain from throwing killer bunnies into the mix. By the way, fighters should also be able to size up the fighting capacities of other humans and beings with levels.

I ran out of room to mention dragons on this sheet, but there's no real need to, right?

Click to enlarge. Apologies in advance for the Bush-era color code flashbacks.

Insect World

2011-10-16T13:40:00.001+01:00

For every can of pesticide, there'll be a human genocide...

I see the exterminators as masked ranger-types with tanks of poison on their backs and chitin-smashing pick-hammers.

Also, slightly different choice of verbs here, which I'll go back and update the other charts with.

First Timers' Dungeon Crawl

2011-10-15T23:42:00.001+01:00

At the university's game club meeting today, I finished off the first foray into the Castle of the Mad Archmage. If the previous week's theme was "slaying easy foes" this one's was "RUN!!"

There were six people around the table and four were completely new to tabletop roleplaying gaming as of last week, with various experiences in boardgaming, computer RPGs and those online story games my niece is into. I think D&D provides a perfect entry point because its assumptions and cliches are so widespread that everyone slips into it like an old pair of loafers. From my viewpoint the run of computer RPGs these days tends toward the "line up and blast each other" Japanese style, so having real, running, 2 dimensional problem-solving tactics in a game may have been a special revelation.

Four of the eight people who were at the previous week's game showed up along with two new folks. It took a while to roll their characters up (I'm thinking of producing custom character sheets for each class to speed this up) and we decided that the turmoil of the party fleeing down separate corridors and splitting up would explain the disappearance of some and the appearance of others.

Incidentally, I may be going to Dragonmeet in London on 26th November in loose affiliation with the club (that is, more likely to stay with friends than take the minivan, coach or whatever they end up hiring for the day). If any UK or other oldschoolers are planning to be there, I might want to run for one session and play for the other. Let me know in comments.

Play report and Mad Archmage spoilers after the cut.

Cube from Otherworld minis

First, the split party had to be reunited. Thomas the fighter had fled down a passage and now had to contend with Ugo the ogre, who had been a friend to Thaddeus and now was eyeing Thomas up and muttering "Food!" in ogrish. Thomas had the brief idea to attack, and they traded blows before he decided to run back.

Meanwhile the nameless fighter was running right behind the barbarian and recovered from the fear effect just in time to hear the footsteps stop, then a sickening thud from far below. She made her way back to the remainder of the party, as did Thomas and the ogre who was pacified by his special friend Thaddeus. The two new characters, another priest (Christian, not Thorian, by the name of Nelson) and a dwarf, now made their appearance.

Exploring and pulling a lever which turned out to control the pit doors, what remained of the barbarian was nowhere in sight by the time they opened again. The party:

passed through some rooms occupied by peaceable gem sprites who claimed to possess only coal,
ran into a wandering gelatinous cube, which they frightened off with a fire made from cloaks and other garments doused with lantern oil,
hacked through a stubborn door only to find it occupied by foul-smelling, stone-spear-poking denizens, and ran when the cube made another appearance,
lost the ogre when he boldly charged a troll,
and finally made it down the stairs to the next level where they were immediately surrounded by far too many dinosaur-riding lizardmen. A good reaction roll meant that instead of being dinner, the party was ordered to bring back dinner in the form of troll meat, and Nelson volunteered to stay behind as a good-faith hostage.

The afternoon winding to a close, the party made it back, opened the one-way door by brute force (18 strength) and made their way back.

Swamp World

2011-10-15T00:08:00.000+01:00

Number 2 of an ongoing series.

36 Genres, 36 Worlds

2011-10-13T22:13:00.000+01:00

One more adventure content generation idea.

There are at least 36 genre cliches for content in fantasy adventures: deserts with mummies, tombs and pharaohs ... savage prehistoric lost worlds ... dark brooding gothy castles ... the special legacy of mechanically minded races with clockwork traps and horrors ...

Now, the most interesting adventures tend to layer one of these content ideas over another, either in space (the fire demons tunneled up under the dwarven fortress) or in time (the fire demons inhabit what used to be the dwarven fortress).
Here' s a template for a dynamic encounter table, eventually one per genre, with at least 4 ways of using it:

1. Roll d2 for column (the 2 wide ones) and d20 for row, for 40 straight-up features, hazards, treasures and encounters from a single genre.
2. Roll d20 and read straight across the table for a canned encounter in a single genre.
3. At the interface between two genres, roll d20 on the main left column of one table, d20 on the main right of the other, and pick the verb that goes with the right hand column (or with the left if that makes more sense; the verbs will be the same on every table). You end up with something like "troglodyte workers PRODUCING scrap metal from the ruins."
4. When one genre occupies the ruins of another, do the same as 3, but only accept italic responses to represent the "dormant" genre. You may have to do this a couple of times; alternatively, or if you have to reroll more than once, show the corpses or abandoned works of the dormant creatures instead of the real deal.

And the example ... (click to enlarge)

Yeah, it'd be a lot of work, all 1440 entries of it, but it could be really cool ... so let me know what you think.

Obstacles and Openings

2011-10-12T23:51:00.000+01:00

Zak S had a really cool idea that never got finished up: to have tables where you could roll a quick entrance feature or encounter as the players start to explore a ruin you haven't got prepared, together with a purpose and history for that thing that would give you something to latch onto in improvising further content in that adventure. He also suggested that it might work well as a deck of cards.

The main way I want to tweak this is to break the purposes down into Openings and Obstacles. That way, you could take each card straight as it reads, or add variety by drawing one card and then drawing others until you found a matching card so that the purpose can be mixed-and-matched with the description. I also am going with more detailed descriptions of the features to make it easier to use as a "quick, need ideas" generator.

As with the original idea, the texts assume you have determined by some other means who the original Architects and current Inhabitants of the ruin are. Monsters, Vermin and Intruders may also make an appearance ... perhaps to be determined by some other deck?

A couple of examples below. Don't know if it'll amount to anything, but I figured I'd test the waters and see if there is an interest for this.

Slouching Towards the Slugfest

2011-10-11T23:07:00.002+01:00

There's a process I've observed over my years playing and designing for the Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) collectible card game, and that recently came to mind as I read what Randall had to say about overpowered spells in D&D.

Some background: The designers of L5R:CCG made a very simulation-based game back in 1995, much more detailed than the original CCG, Magic:The Gathering. The characters you brought out in this Kurosawa-meets-Tolkien world could attach troops and items, go to court, fight in duels, choose the terrain for their battles, cast spells - even commit seppuku if necessary.

One very visible source of strategic thinking for this game was Sun Tzu. Battles were winner-takes-all, with the loser destroyed, so assurance of overwhelming odds was necessary, and attacking always risky. It was possible to take back-and-forth actions to try to whittle down the enemy forces or temporarily disable them, but terrains could shut down battles or annul them entirely. What's more, there was a range of intrigues, assassins, duels, and courtiers that could put enemy leaders and troops out of commission before the battle.

This state of affairs resembles a certain type of old-school roleplaying game where combat is potentially lethal; where cheesy, if naturalistic, tricks abound. Flaming oil, sleep spells and war dogs were the players' weapons against save-or-die poisons, meager hit dice, and death at zero hit points. Under such conditions any advantage was acceptable to seek.

In both games, as time passed, designers responded to player concerns by making the combat more back-and-forth, less all-or-nothing. In L5R, effects that shut down battle or kept military units out of battle were greatly restricted or eliminated, starting in Diamond Edition in 2004, with the ideal being for units to meet in battle and trade actions back and forth. Meanwhile, D&D's 3rd edition redesign in 2001 also filed away the rough corners, with greater PC survivability, less absolute dangers, more whittling down and strategic combats.

This process - inevitable? - represents the fading of the simulation of war into the game of war. Also, the compression of the simulation of life (exploration, politics, intrigue) into the self-same game of war. The truth of Sun Tzu - avoid engagement if victory is not certain, and seek victory by other means than battle - turns into the chivalrous slugfest, approximating equal arms on an equalized battlefield.

Turning a rough-edged simulation into a smooth, equalized game is an achievement much prized, it seems, by game designers anxious to please a certain player demographic: those who at the same time take their games too seriously, while at the same time having little patience for subtle and deadly gameplay. It's as if people would agitate for fool's mate to be removed as a possibility in chess. There's a visible point, though, in many gamers' evolution when they become willing to put down the foam boffers and pick up the katana.

One Page Equipment, Weapons, Armor

2011-10-10T19:09:00.000+01:00

As promised, for those following along at home. Probably the one page of these that's most "detachable" from the system is the equipment page. I find that this distribution of the standard adventurer equipment into six little packages really speeds up preparation for one-shot dungeon crawls. It would be even nicer, I guess, if each equipment package was represented on a separate card...

Testing out the One Page System

2011-10-09T22:44:00.003+01:00

One Page is my ongoing revamp of Basic D&D, with less kowtowing to Old School mechanical concepts than the Old School Players rules, and more "stuff that works" from all editions.

Eight members of my university's Adventure Gaming Society, mostly students and capable gamers all, sat down on Saturday to give it a whirl. I walked them through character generation, with the printed-out sheets handy, and that took less than an hour. Still, I feel like making even clearer sheets for character generation once people have settled on their class, similar to the Old School Players self-filling character sheet (download on the right).

In the end, the party contained five fighters - ranging in flavor from barbarian, to rural nobleman with 18 Strength and 17 Charisma - plus an elf, a priest of Thor and a gnome. The nobleman's Charisma entitled him to a follower, which I rolled on the handy 20-random-Meatshields table as the notorious Lesseig the elf! Is this a prelude to my Trossley campaign or just a parallel universe? For the venue was none other than Joe Bloch's Castle of the Mad Archmage, using my house-designed first level.

(Some SPOILERS, of course, follow.)

However, the party voted to enter the second level through a secret entrance that rumors had turned up (corresponding to the Quicksand entryway in the Blochiverse), so my original content was bypassed. After dispatching some randomly encountered Bloater zombies, they began romping through the corridors. Between the 3d6 high as a base for 1st level hit points, and the use of a serious wound table for falling below 1 HP, we only had one casualty, who was healed up to 1 hp from her sucking chest wound by the party priest. But then again the party managed to avoid the serious badass encounters in the area, as well as any meaningful random encounters...

Some observation on the system and dungeon (I'll spare you the links back to the One Page posts):

Gnomes are really good, between humanoid interpreter and superior darkvision and the random spells (though let's wait till the mishaps start getting rolled). May have to tone back their darkvision to the dwarven norm.
The "chop till you drop" fighter rule got used a lot; we didn't see that many damage rolls that the "force or finesse" applied to, which confirms the general lucky dice rolling of the party. Several crits but not one fumble!
The priest is really good, especially the ability to heal up a wounded character back to where they can function again. May have to rethink the armor allowance for that one.
Working with descriptions as sparse as Joe's Castle allows for a lot of improv and strange phenomena, especially when I'm using a 2 on the encounter die as a clue or noise from a wandering monster. Strangest improv: I decided that pushing in an ogre statue's eyes would open the nearby secret door, but the gnome used Weightlessness magic to allow the barbarian to bash it down, so I ruled that the impact reversed the force through whatever mechanism was working, and caused the eyes to bug out. Then the party brought the statue to life, and the ogre so created is wandering around with pop-eyes.
I have a better appreciation of Joe's design skills. In one section, there's a seemingly pointless mini-maze with baffled corridors and a couple of branches. But the room on the other side of that maze has a fear effect. Turns out that little maze is really good for splitting and confusing terrified party members fleeing in the dark!
I'm learning to roll with and enjoy player shenanigans I would have censoriously vetoed a year ago, like splitting the party, intraparty conflict, or treasure-filching.
Random failed hireling loyalty rolls are funny.

Next up, the three equipment pages that almost complete the character generation part of the game; still need to do the followers and animals page.

How to Remember Time in the Dungeon

2011-10-08T20:47:00.001+01:00

By Haku, via b3ta.net

In running dungeon adventures, one thing that has always eluded me is the careful in-game timekeeping needed to judge things like torches burning down, explorers getting hungry, or wandering monster checks. It's something that's easily forgotten in the heat and fun of the moment. So that makes me suspect that draining precious attention to do a careful, minute-by-minute accounting of time would be both doomed to fail, and detract from enjoyment. This is the same consideration that led me to drop pre-announced actions from my game.

What's needed, I thought, is an insight like James Raggi's list-based encumbrance (see also the Alexandrian's Stone system). Take something players do anyway - like write down what stuff they have - and simplify the bookkeeping to follow directly from that. To be exact:

1. As with list-based encumbrance, switch to more natural units: from "minutes" to "scenes." Exploring 1 room is a scene, unless it's a huge cathedral-like space. A combat is a scene. Walking carefully down more than about 50' of corridor is a scene. Taking extra time to do something like skin a lizard or eat lunch is a scene. Each scene is roughly - very roughly - about 5 minutes. That means a 30 minute torch lasts 6 scenes, a 1 hour flask of lantern oil lasts 12, and you roll for wandering monsters every 2 or 3 or 6 scenes depending on your rules.

2. To keep track of time - this works best if you have more than 4 or so at the table - pass some kind of visible token around. Start it at a random player and say it passes to the left whenever you change scene. If you forget a scene change, just do it retrospectively. I tried this in the first test of the One Page system today with eight players at table, one of whom volunteered her toy ninja, and it worked like a charm. It's easy to remember how many times it has gone around already, and to say things like "The current torch will go out when the ninja gets around to Connor."

3. As a bonus, I found myself designating the player with the ninja token as a kind of democratic caller. This meant that the temporary token-bearer had the responsibility to propose motions on decisions, like which way to go, and put it to a vote. This tended to cure the paralysis that eight at table can cause. In combat, because I use side-based initiative, I would start with the token-bearer and ask for actions clockwise. That worked pretty well too. Oh, and finally, whoever has the token gets to roll the initiative die.

This rule looks like a keeper in my games, especially for large dungeon crawl sessions.

Skill Resolution: Red, Yellow, Green

2011-10-07T23:43:00.000+01:00

I believe there is an apocryphal quatrain of Nostradamus that starts out

When the Cook of the Mountain returns to Wizards' lair
To beat the Old School drum, or maybe not

And the Monsters and Manuals swell to the number 78
With the crackling flames of men of straw
Then Tupac shall slay the one whose initials are JFK ... (etc., etc.)

In other words, how should dice rolls, DM rulings, and rules procedures be balanced? This sounds strangely familiar to me. But let me try and tie it all together.

What Monte Cook was proposing is simply a feature that all RPG resolution systems have. Think of three zones. In the red zone, an action fails. In the green zone, an action succeeds. In the yellow zone, more resolution is needed.

The d20 resolution system that Cook co-designed for 3rd edition lays the zones out like this, based on what's known about the action's difficulty class number (DC) and any modifiers that apply:

1 + mods > DC
Any other DC/mods combination (resolution from d20 roll)
20 + mods < DC

Going to the other extreme, a system based on DM's say-so and interaction with players looks like this:

DM says you can
DM asks you for more questions and decisions (resolution from information provided)
DM says you can't

What exactly was Monte proposing in that recent article? Details are hazy, but it looks something like this:

Rules say you can (character skill > challenge level)
If character ability = challenge level, roll dice against an ability check (resolution from dice roll) OR player describes action in such a way as to change from "no" to "maybe" or "maybe" to "yes" (resolution from information provided)
Rules say you can't (character skill < challenge level)

Which is not too far from the Grand Unified Model of all Refereed Gaming:

Rules as interpreted by the DM say you can (character skill > challenge level)
If the DM finds no clear "yes" or "no" in the rules or in the DM's head, roll dice against an ability check determined by the rules, or by the DM if the rules do not cover it (resolution from dice roll). Player can describe action in such a way as to change from "no" to "maybe" or "maybe" to "yes" (resolution from information provided)
Rules as interpreted by the DM say you can't (character skill < challenge level)

From which all else can be derived depending on the exact procedures which are privileged in the yellow box, the amount of stuff in the rules, and the amount of stuff in the DM's head.

But you know, since I started on this post earlier today I think it might have been scooped a little more elegantly.

Who Mourns for HyperCard?

2011-10-06T15:34:00.003+01:00

I thought I'd contribute my own gaming-and-Macintosh reminiscence on this sad occasion.

In my early years of graduate school, though I had no regular gaming group, I was still coming up with all sorts of things for gaming. One of those - lost, alas, in the mists of floppy disk breakdown and software obsolescence - was a random dungeon level generator using HyperCard.

If you never had the chance to use it, HyperCard was an incredible application for the Mac, with aspirations to be a kind of object-oriented operating system within an operating system. It let you program hypertext, create databases, and much more, using a very simple, intuitive language. HyperCard was quickly picked up to create such point-and-click adventure games as Cosmic Osmo (pictured), by the Miller brothers, who would go on to create Myst. I used HyperCard to create an academic article database and keep addresses in, but also screwed around with creating games (where the "pieces" were buttons that moved around and could be clicked on) and the dungeon generator.

HyperCard had an easy, snap-to-grid function that let you draw rooms and corridors with ease, and I eventually figured out how to randomize the size, shape and position of generated room objects. Over on the side, the program spit out a key with features, monsters, treasures, tricks and traps for each room.

All this, of course, was before the Internet as we know it existed. If I'd been able to post the stack up and share it with the kind of community that visits this blog, it wouldn't have died an obscure death, and I would have had the motivation to make it a lot better than it ended up being.

Look to the right, and see my downloads: "PowerPoint Mapping," "Old School Dungeon Encounters," "Endless Bag of Tricks," "Bag of Problems." Those are just the fragmented and worked-over pieces of that lost HyperCard stack. Where now, indeed, are the bytes of yesteryear? Who will put HyperDumpty together again?

The Bard as Hireling

2011-10-05T23:14:00.000+01:00

So ... if all a bard character does is strengthen your morale and make you feel at home in the wilderness and know lots of semi-useful trivia, maybe you're better off having a bard as a retainer instead of playing one?

Think of the precedent. African kings with their praise singers ... Brave Sir Robin's bard. Xena's sidekick Gabrielle was a bard, and it's hard to think of the roles being reversed, isn't it?

The bard, then, can be seen as a luxurious accessory for a pretty accomplished party of adventurers. Wages for a bard are a base 100$ (gp) a month, with an additional 50$ for each bonus point the bard's Charisma and Intelligence scores give. What do you get for all this? Well ...

The bard can sing in a wilderness or dungeon camp. This increases the natural healing rate by 1 for characters 2nd level or higher. (I houserule that you only heal 1 hp/night in camp, but 1 hp/level/night in a safe location such as an inn).
The bard with exceptional Charisma, can sing and play at any time to give all other hirelings and henchmen a Morale bonus on 2d6 equal to Charisma bonus; if no bonus, a bard's playing still negates 1 point of any morale penalties in effect.
Some bardic traditions instead give enemies a like Morale penalty. These are the ones that come equipped with bagpipes.
The bard can create a spectacle of entertainment as the party enters or wanders around a settlement. This creates a certain notoriety, both for good and bad: urban encounters are twice as likely to happen, and the party is twice as likely to come to the attention of local authorities. This also gives +1 to reaction rolls in situations where a song is appropriate and the audience is receptive to the bard's style, but -2 if the style is disliked. Finding out the king's tastes is very important.
The bard can sometimes act as a sage on matters of history and legend for the cultural tradition he or she knows. This translates to a 50% chance of answering a general question in that field of history or legend, 20% of answering a specific question and 5% of answering an exacting question, plus 5% per bonus point in Intelligence the bard has. Chances are cut by 1/5 for a cultural tradition that only borders on the one the bard knows.
If using the carousing rules, the bard increases by a factor of 1.5 the amount of money that can be converted to experience, as people flock to the party trail.

Mere musicians can also be had for 50$ a month, with none of the "sage" or "morale" abilities, and thus no bonus for exceptional scores. Musicians, however, often show poor morale when heading into danger (2d6 morale score 1d6+1) whereas bards are more inquisitive and made of sterner stuff (morale score 2d4+2).

Why the Bard is Meh

2011-10-04T22:53:00.004+01:00

Great PC games, shame about the class

The Bard character class, currently being considered by J-Mal and FrDave, is a notorious target of fantasy adventure jokes. Despite perennial efforts to reboot the class, it carries a heavier burden of affliction than Marley's ghost. Let me count the chains:

1. First and foremost, when bards use their bardy powers, the player says something like "I sing away your cares and worries!" or "I strike up the lute with an epic lay that sets the foes to flight!" The thing is, when any other class casts a spell, the other players don't care what the mumbo-jumbo is. With a bard, though, you expect to hear an actual song, against all reason, and that creates a nagging itch.

NO, bard player, do not sing at the table. Not even if you're good at it - not unless everyone signed up for an adventure game that every now and then becomes an awesome singer concert. Nor should you specify that you are singing some made-up fantasy song like "The Ballad of the Owlbear and the Hive of Bees." That's still way too damn twee. It's embarrassing, like having two players describe how their characters are making out.

2. Wizards can cast a spell, clerics pray, and the effect happens. But a song should last longer than a one-minute combat round and especially longer than a ten-or-six-second one. So fire-and-forget bards are unsatisfying and need-to-stay-on bards are no fun to play.

I wish you'd prove me wrong...

3. A cleric can bash while brandishing the holy symbol, "a Dios rogando y con el mazo dando" as the Spanish saying has it. A wizard isn't supposed to fight. We imagine the bard as being able to fight, although in a kind of effete way, all with puffed breeches and a feathered hat and a jaunty little Robin Hood sword. This compensates for magic abilities that are less versatile than a wizard's ... perhaps. But the fact is, you can't fight very well while strumming a lute. Especially considering that ...

4. That lute is also as sensitive as a baby's bottom and with one misaimed blow, one dunking in cold water, there goes the bard's meal ticket. Unless you go all munchkin and demand to play a cast-iron vuvuzela bard, a triangle bard, or the ultimate in powergaming: an acapella bard.

5. At the end of it all, if I go back to my analysis of miracles, the bard's most characteristic powers just make him or her a secular cleric. Dispelling evil ... calming storms and savage beasts ... swaying minds ... even the fortifying effects of music can be seen as healing if character hit points represent some amount of confidence and morale.

So maybe the bard works best after all as a cleric? Oh, and not to forget this decidedly historical version of the bard class for Old School systems, envisioned as a kind of rogue/faceman/sage hybrid by Dave Baymiller. Yeah, I stumbled across it while searching for embarrassingly effete bard pics online, what of it?

Anyway, I've said my piece. If anyone wants to stand up for the bard, let's hear it!

Page Two of the One Page Character Sheet

2011-10-03T21:06:00.002+01:00

I thought I'd put this up to finish off the character sheet, as prelude to the "starting equipment" one-pager. The main notable feature is the encumbrance system, and even that is a boiling down of the brilliant list encumbrance system from LotFP. You incur -3 move penalties as you take on more items, and start on a line that's higher up depending on your strength.

Dwarves, by the way, can't really carry as much as He-Man. They just start up there because they start at 9 move, and stay there for a longer time as they take on load. Their effective encumbrance ends several lines form the bottom, because at -9 to move they are stationary.

Finishing character generation for the OPP (One Page Project) takes on a new urgency these days. I have made contact with my university's Adventure Game Society and there is some provisional interest in a floating Old School dungeon delve...

Resonant Meaning in the Fantastic

2011-10-02T23:43:00.003+01:00

Let's get back to the jewelled mosaic of perfect little scenes of wonder and fascination that I last examined as a replacement for the naturalistic churn of monster races and by-the-book magic in D&D.

The problem with that mosaic is that without some underlying sequence to it, it eventually grows meaningless and dull. The cure for that, then, is to arrange the tiles in some sort of scheme that has resonant meaning.

1. The Initiatory Progression. This is the hidden thread connecting the "levels" of the standard adventure dungeon. The rootless monsters, pointless tricks and riddles, sadistic deceptions, and weird environments have out-of-frame meaning as initiatory challenges to the followers of the Dungeon Mystery Religion. As the players progress, the challenges become harder and more varied, and they acquire level titles and cultic secrets like good Mithraists or Freemasons. It's this lurking text that explains why even the most random gonzo collection of levels exerts a narrative pull. But imagine the flow of meaning that opens up when some of the other techniques are layered onto it ...
2. Mock-Naturalism. A naturalistic initiatory progression behaves like a film noir; with progress comes revelation of the hidden web of corruption, the material ironmongery underneath the noble ideals. Mock-naturalism, though, commodifies the intangible in a whimsical and mysterious way, without reducing it to solid matter. The goblins steal dreams from sleeping children, which they then weave into pixie-nets and sell to the muffled merchants from Mars. Demons traffic in soul coins. What this is not, though, is demystification. If the magic sun gems are really radioactive rocks, we leave the fantastic entirely.
3. Power Struggles. Trade and production can coexist in the fantastic with the other common structure of the naturalistic world: struggle. A war between day and night, between heaven and hell, between mountain and sea has the potential to fix in place all manner of combatants, neutrals, vacillators, turncoats. Each side has its own style and esthetics, and there need not be only two. The discovery of these hidden powers is itself an initiation.

4. System of the Cosmos. An expedition to the southern polar land reveals unthought-of abysses of history that conclusively dethrone man as lord of the earth. The initiatory path reveals the mystic meanings of the ten numerals, tracing the zigzag path of creation back from World to Essence. The sins, the planets, the spectral colors all reveal a comforting and powerful structure to the universe. And the horror genre reveals instead a system that is malevolent or wholly uncaring. The goal of this knowledge can be power, godhood, immortality, the salvation of the earth, or merely to know the truth, which is reason enough for many.

I strongly believe that looking back in a few years' time, the prize for the best mega-dungeon, super-campaign or whatever will go to the experience that weaves the most of these elements of meaning into itself.

The Bloater

2011-09-29T23:48:00.004+01:00

Mulling through the possibilities of Nethacking undead powers, I had a quick idea for a kind of corporeal undead. Maybe it was the very filling Italian meal tonight (what kind of salad bar has three kinds of fried fish anyway...)

TOR!

The bloater is a zombified corpse at the point of corruption when the body swells with foul gas and ichor. It is all too easy to hit (AC 9 descending/10 ascending) and moves extremely slowly (move rate 3). But it is robust (2+4 HD), attacks with both hands to claw and strangle (2d4 damage) and has a special defense. When hit for more than 4 hp damage, foul ichor sprays out, and the monster rolls an extra "to hit" with an extra +2 against the attacker. Success means the ichor burns the attacker for an amount equal to the amount dealt by his or her own attack, minus 4. Also, the victim must save (Fortitude/Poison) or contract a disease that picks a random ability score and drains 1 point/day until cured.

The Fantastic Through Weirdness

2011-09-28T23:42:00.003+01:00

Moving beyond written setting elements to create surprise and wonder for your players, we have already seen the ease and limitations of the random way.

The way of Weirdness is just to pull things out of your imagination. The better and more informed your imagination, the more wondrous things appear. Think of a Renaissance wunderkammer ....

The museum of Olaus Wormius

Moussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, and the pictures that inspired it ...

Lord Dunsany's jewel-like story vignettes ...

Each one perfect in its self-containment, the artistically described miniatures of Weirdness are best described from the surface going inwards... beginning with an impression, a synaesthesia, an emotional feeling, a sensory package that only then takes form by association.

To take an example: the image of rainbow colors on a black background. What does that bring to mind?

Gems against black velvet
Bright eyes, multicolored, curious in the night
Small bright-eyed skittering creatures, hoarders of gems
Halls of black volcanic rock, the creatures barely visible unless they open their brilliant eyes
Smoke thick in the air, black and billowing, multicolored sparks of magic, fireflies
Bright cascade of tones, hurtling in the void
The Rainbow of Midnight, unnatural, a black-skinned queen resplendent in gleaming enamel and polished stones
Darkness and serenity, then sudden bedazzlement, a brittle, tinkling surprise quickly enough gone

We have here the set design and cast for a whole area in an adventure; its appearance, creatures, ruler, hazards, inconveniences and treasures. Self-contained, without deeper meaning, the variety can be sustained for one session or two before boredom sets in and we're off to the next.

The trouble with this method? The same as with random generation, but on a larger scale. Random generation gives you a seeming variety that eventually resolves into a gray mud, like an array of randomly colored single pixels. Whimsical sensory environment generation gives you bigger pixels - about the size of mosaic tiles - but with enough time and distance the variety here, too, resolves into patternless gray.

We need a way to arrange the pixels, to pick meaning out of the random impressions. This is the deeper meaning of Resonance, and the method of the fantastic I'll explore next.

Return of the Consolation Gnome

2011-09-27T22:48:00.001+01:00

Taking a break from the fantastic for now. Here's the one-page version of my gnome consolation class. It's meant to be detached from the rest of the rules, so a little more crowded because of the need to include all the basic class-type stuff that got their own table in basic character generation. Click to enlarge.

Oh, and the spell failure mini-table can be used separately if you have wild magic areas or whatever.

Keeping It Fantastic: The Nethack Way

2011-09-27T07:57:00.003+01:00

Trawling through the comments and ideas going around about fantasticism, I can identify three approaches, that each might work for different people at different times. Let's call these Nethacking, Weirdness, and Resonance. Each of these is a way to escape the crystallization of the fantasy campaign into a set of rules that players can peep at, manhandle, and get bored with.

Honestly, the main problem comes from D&D and its system-and-half-a-setting approach. The half a setting - the rules about races, monsters, magic items, and so on - has mutated into Ye Olde Fantasye and a genre in its own right, spawning millions of DMs' "products of the imagination" that all tend to look the same except for the maps and names. If you look back and see what's casting those shadows on the cave wall, the Order of the Stick cartoon is a pretty fair approximation.

Nethack: Instead of going by the Monster Manual version of what attacks various slimes, jellies and puddings can resist, the DM rolls up the traits of each goo-blob type randomly on a table. Another table tells you whether magic boots go with Levitation, Giant Strength, or what not. I call this "Nethack" because it reminds me of roguelike games. Each new character has to find out anew what the black potion, swirly potion, and all the rest actually do, because these correspondences are randomly generated with each spawn of the game. Telecanter has been producing some fine examples lately (also, also) of this approach.

Nethacking it is the easiest way to go, and it's a required minimum for a DM or game designer who doesn't want players assuming knowledge their characters shouldn't have. Although it's not strictly necessary when running a group of new players, beware if just one troll-burning veteran should join their ranks!

Two limitations on Nethacking's utility, though. For one, you're unlikely to get anything really wild and crazy by just randomly recombining existing things in the game, although a good table can help with that. For another, random generation misses as often as it hits. That's because a random table can help with divergent creativity, but not convergent.

To illustrate, any random monster table can help you Nethack up some off-the-book monsters. I'll use my own, and roll three times. Once for what it looks and moves like ... a beholder. Once for its hit dice, AC and other number stats. A vampire. And once for its special powers ... a piercer.

Yaaaaa!

Okay, I've got a really tough big round pain-elemental-from-Doom guy who hovers on the ceiling and drops to bite your head off. But my gut reaction is "meh." For one, the surprise part gets in the way of the "zounds! a beholder" mess-with-the-players part. It's original ... but not much more than that.

So the next step is to use your judgment and creativity. Next time, two ways to do that.

The Fantastic Through Obscurity

2011-09-26T08:26:00.003+01:00

Discussion on how to keep the fantastic in adventure gaming continues, with a renewed desire and specific tips. My further thoughts ...

In information security, the phrase "security through obscurity" is used to disparage the hope that vulnerabilities can be protected by keeping them secret. In their early stages of development, many game forms achieve a sense of wonder through obscurity. Magic: The Gathering, for example, initially provided this sense of wonder through opening packets of collectible cards and finding ones you'd never seen before ... or having them show up in your opponent's deck. Eventually, like many security-though-obscurity hopes, this was dashed through the posting of complete spoilers on the nascent Internet, and through the practice that rapidly developed (to Wizards of the Coast's great joy) of buying whole boxes of product in order to get a complete set. Within a few years it was a poor collectible card game whose manufacturer did not provide rarity symbols, checklists, and eventually complete spoilers and previews.

Was there an attempt to keep the fantastic around through obscurity in early D&D? It's hard to deny when reading the Gygaxian objurgations in AD&D to keep players' noses out of the Dungeon Master's Guide. But that is already late in the day. The time of wonder and fantasy is fading, and the desire to standardize the game deals the death blow; the secrets that used to be kept in the Dungeon Master's cranium are now holy writ. In this light the railing against players accessing the mass-produced secrets sold in Barnes and Noble sounds as hollow as Canute's commands against the tide.

In the age of the Internet spoiler the sense of wonder is even more crucially down to the individual game master. In the comments on Monsters & Manuals I made a point that bears expanding here.

1. When players are denied access to the rules that let them carry out mundane tasks at the starting level, this creates a denial of mastery. You can certainly play this way, with players issuing orders and seeing what happens, in a "fog of war" kind of way. But a lot of players are used to a certain level of rules mastery; a generation has grown up with console RPGs. You don't have to deny them this all the way.

2. Expanding what I've said about high level magic spells, denying knowledge of rules and techniques found at higher levels also helps create the sense of wonder. If the game was about kung fu, then not being able to read all about what a high level Taoist master can do would help achieve this.

3. The technique in Lamentations of providing no standardized monsters or magic items points the way to a game system where the rules of the mundane are known to the players, but the fantastic elements are an idiosyncratic revelation from game to game. Yes, creating the fantastic is hard individual work for the DM. But the alternative, especially with experienced games, is a group of players who ready the oil when they see a troll, who can find out exactly how much every gland in every dead monster corpse is worth, and for whom the only surprise is tactical, not strategic.

I have a few ideas of my own, both on how to make the hard work easier, and how to make the hard work mean more. Next post I'll try to articulate them more fully.

Elves and Dwarves Up, Halflings Down

2011-09-25T11:13:00.002+01:00

Cave halflings are another story.

When using a race-as-class system in D&D, as I like to do, halflings have a problem. As outlined in the various versions of Basic D&D, they're little more than short thieves.

Now, elves explicitly started out in OD&D as hybrid fighter-magic-users and stuck with that concept in Basic, so they add something extra to the mix of classes. Dwarves, to the extent they have underground exploration abilities, are kind of a fighter-rogue hybrid; at least, they get more interesting the more they tend toward that, and less interesting the more they are just short fighters.

In my one page rules, although it's not quite so schematic as that, I did consciously try to include a fighter-wizard hybrid (elf), fighter-rogue (dwarf), and rogue-wizard (gnome) type. I suppose an expansion might also take on the various priest hybrids, with fighter (paladin), wizard (mystic) and rogue (monk) to complete the cross-fertilization. Is this a complete scheme, with anything else just being variants on the basic classes? Not sure, but it seems that way to me.

In race-and-class systems, by the way, the halfling also fails to take advantage of the diversity available. This all comes from the concept being too tied down to Tolkien, and made worse, not better, by all the quasi-halflings that show up in Tolkien knockoffs, from kender to gwarpys. But at the same time Tolkien gives us two hobbit models: a fighter-type (Frodo and his companions) and a thief-type (Bilbo). It's a concept made for separate race and class systems, but although in AD&D it's possible to play a halfling fighter, there's very little incentive to do so. The halfling is almost always optimized as a thief under most D&D rules.

Anyway, here are my one page elf and dwarf rules.

One Page Wizard and New Spell Cards

2011-09-24T12:40:00.001+01:00

Putting this up makes me realize there's a pending project I have, to write more spell-descriptions for the Old School Players rules I'm using. When last my players met they found the need for descriptions of spells as high as 3rd level, and I'd like to have it all written down so there's no misunderstandings!

Anyway, this set of one-pagers continues the philosophy of spells from here and here. Things are even more changed up from D&D and I have taken on board an idea from (CORRECTION: Italian name related confusion) Tsojcanth's Paolo Greco, to have spell level equal caster level and space the acquisition of new spells more evenly. Of particular note is the change to Sleep which takes its rightful place as a level one feller of rats and kobolds without the implications for higher-level monsters, insectoids and so forth.

In a versatility boost, Force Shield subsumes Hold Portal, Tenser's Floating Disc, and Shield; Weightlessness likewise has more uses than just Feather Fall, and Tonguetie/Tongueloose is kind of like Silence reversible to ESP. I'm careful to make the information revealed by the human intelligence spells, Tongueloose and Detect Thoughts, subject to DM control, so that plot points don't have to be given away directly.

One Page Class Powers: Fighter Feats from Damage Dice

2011-09-22T22:23:00.000+01:00

As I've mentioned before, I like the idea of the DCC-RPG's Mighty Deeds of Arms but think their extra dice rolling and table looking-up will slow down combat rather than juicing it up excitingly.

My goal was to design a feats system that proceeded more or less automatically from what the fighter was already doing. True to my vision of the class, the fighter, unlike the rogue, shouldn't need to think as much. He wades into combat with a few minimal tactical precautions and the normal dice rolls do the work.

The second insight was to reduce the table weight (and page space) by using tables I was already using: my critical hit and fumble tables.

The follow-through power, as I note, is not original, but it's classic and it balances the "unhinge the big guy" of the feats with "plow through the little guys."

A caution, though: these rules work best with some other assumptions I make in house-rules, such as that light weapons don't get full super-exceptional Strength bonuses (otherwise dagger + 18 STR = super punch up machine), and that "smashing and bashing" weapons like axes and maces have damage scores in the form d6+1 (for example) while swords and spears have damage scores in the form d8 (for example). This makes the smashers more likely to score Force feats and the slashers more likely to score Finesse feats.

The only extra dice roll is the save, but I felt that was only fair to avoid fighters pushing around much tougher enemies. In a pinch you can say that they only work on a successful hit and forget the save. Does that appeal? Yea or nay ...

One Page Class Powers: Rogue

2011-09-20T22:23:00.000+01:00

The rogue is not just supposed to be a troubleshooting thief filing his nails until the next 13% chance to detect traps, but a light fighter, a real ranger (not the spell-slinging ridiculoid beastmaster 2d8 munchkin thing from AD&D), a swashbuckling fop, and others of that ilk. These powers are all combat, encouraging use of terrain and positioning, built off the need to survive and run in encounters while scouting ahead, and incidentally work best against a lone opponent. Oh yes, and a rogue is really good at the old thiefly adventuring skills, including noticing detail and mechanics.

(D&D Murphy's Rule #57864: elves are only good at noticing secret doors vertically in walls, not mechanically identical secret pressure plates in floors, which count as a trap. And what if the trap is a secret panel in the wall ... is it a door or a trap?)

As I mentioned a while ago, I think each of the classes in D&D is best served by mechanics that emphasize the different styles of their players.

Fighter: unlimited use powers that require little strategy.
Rogue: unlimited use powers that require strategy.
Priest: limited use powers that require little strategy.
Wizard: limited use powers that require strategy.

That's the template I've followed here, anyway.

One Page Class Powers: Priest

2011-09-19T23:59:00.001+01:00

We're on to the class powers: the big four, then dwarves and elves on one page, and a one-page consolation gnome class (he'll be a little thin so I might pad it out with a table of magical screwiness). This one I'm presenting first because it's the least original, and I mean that as an homage to Talysman's no-spells cleric idea, which I discussed and modified previously here.

I'm only detailing levels 1-5, but at level 7 you get cure poison, and level 9 you get raise dead, with suitable limits. Turning is smoothed out from how it usually appears: you can't blast skeletons into dust, but you can make orcs sweat a little from the back rank.

D&D Combat Isn't Abstract

2011-09-18T22:01:00.002+01:00

Getting into the powers for each of my One Page classes, I'm graphically illustrating some of the combat-relevant powers with icons representing the combatants and terrain, on a five foot = 1 inch grid. I fully expect a few people to react with five-foot-square-latter-day-edition-phobia, so let me explain.

I know the role of miniatures in D&D is an evergreen Old School debate topic, right up there with ascending armor class and evil PCs. I don't think the debate has been properly framed, though. It has been about miniatures, but it should be about graphic displays.

"You need miniatures to play D&D" immediately brings up anxiety about blown credit card limits, trying to get every monster you're using in the campaign, having to paint up the damn things, anti-corporate grumbling about required additional equipment. None of this has to apply to other graphic displays, like pennies marked with Sharpie on a dining room table, or whiteboard drawings updated on the go. Sure, the more you invest, the better it looks, but does anyone limit their encounters to their miniatures collection? Sooner or later, orcs are going to have to stand in for lizardmen, chess pawns for extra goblins beyond the 5 or 10 you own. This "miniatures" thing is a red herring.

"Coach, can't we just narrate this encounter?"

Another red herring is the allegedly abstract nature of the D&D combat rules. Come, I will show you an abstract combat system, and its name is Tunnels and Trolls. No locations, no maneuvers, just who's fighting and who gets hurt. D&D only looks abstract as a combat game because it's a kludge, an exaptation, a hybrid of naval and tabletop wargame rules that became obsolete as an accurate simulation of skirmish warfare the moment Runequest came out. Hit points and armor class are for ironclads, the whole idea of incrementally taking damage from a large pool is a better model for large units than individuals, and various other things like the one-minute round and missile rules with assumptions more suited to mass than skirmish archery also betray the game's battle-scale roots.

It would be impossible for such a battle-based system to ignore the various situations that need accurate positioning to resolve: flanking, a charge versus a missile-firing unit, breach of a line. At the most basic level in D&D are similar questions. How many PCs can attack the monsters? How many monsters can attack the PC's? Who's in front, who's safe and who's vulnerable?

People generally accept the relatively fine grain of time in D&D combat, rather than resolving all in one chuck of the dice, because it gives leeway to make tactical decisions as basic as "should we stay or run?" And this, in turn, is because combat is a common and lethal activity that players need to have spelled out for them. It's OK to have the DM rule "The wall is too slippery, you can't climb it" but not OK to have the DM rule "The mummy is too strong for you, he kills you with a single blow."

I'm genuinely curious, though: if you don't use some kind of visual aid in a D&D-like game, how do you keep track of what's happening to the same standard? The abstract solution sounds fine, right up until the point where your players' view and yours diverge. In a world of 10' passages, 5' doorways and marching orders that might never happen. But neither will this scenario where tension, fun, danger and the unexpected are a direct product of the characters interacting with the scenery. Even Ludovico Ariosto, the Renaissance poet and author of Orlando Furioso, used model knights to help choreograph that epic poem's climactic three-on-three battle on the isle of Lampedusa.

Bottom line is, if you're communicating with the players, why give up the ability to illustrate the action in ways that work together with words? I'm not sure but I suspect for some the urge is to flee the figures, the toy soldiers, the wargame roots of D&D and embrace something seen as more mature and story-like. That's not where I want to go, though. For the adventure game I want to play, figures on a map do best to regulate the tension and strategy of knife's edge combat.

Page One of the One Page Character Sheet

2011-09-17T16:09:00.002+01:00

"One page" is going to have to be a misnomer when it comes to the character sheet. Although I guess the actual character stuff all fits on one page, with the rest being information about possessions, associates, gold and experience that can go on ... not a character sheet, but an inventory ... yeah, that's the ticket.

Unfortunately Blogger has gone messing with their code again, so clicking a picture reveals the unbearable transparency of the source image...fixed now.

The Grand Inquisitor's Roleplaying Game

2011-09-16T13:22:00.000+01:00

Portrait by van Rainy Hecht-Neilsen

I've already made this analogy in a comment somewhere, but the broadening of the pallet-shifting quantum ogre debate (see link collection here) brings this to mind yet again.

As a game master, what happens when you take freedom from your players to give them pleasure and security?
As a game master, what happens when you give your players only the illusion of freedom, toward the same goal? Choose path A or path B, each leads to the same pre-prepared encounter.

I think in both cases, you stop having the fun that comes from interacting with the players: taking their choices, building on them with choices of your own, having a mutual conversation.

That kind of relationship tends toward the situation of authoritarianism described in Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor parable. The Inquisitor alone takes on the burdens of freedom, offering the trade of true liberty for security. Under this illusion ...

...they will be glad to believe our answer, for it will save them from the great anxiety and terrible agony they endure at present in making a free decision for themselves. And all will be happy, all the millions of creatures except the hundred thousand who rule over them. For only we, we who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil.

I can't conceive of the railroading GM as inspiring anything other than misery or defiance in any mature player. Yet the answer of creating illusory freedom is by no means an answer, for it robs the GM of freedom so that the players may think they have it. It tempts the GM, saying "Look! You need only prepare one encounter! The players need never know!" But you know - and can you really maintain your enthusiasm in the face of that predetermined choice?

I know I couldn't. It's a false economy of effort that magnifies each saving tenfold in loss of enjoyment, the same as if players were to be told, "There's no need to think or try to solve problems in different ways here, just run at the monsters every time." The illusion ultimately enslaves both parties, and solves nothing.

One-Page Skills are Hard

2011-09-15T22:59:00.002+01:00

This was a real tough page to design. The skills each have a little row of tick boxes on the character sheet. The space limits of that, and this explanation page, forced me to strip down the skills into a bare six things. Even then I'm cheating a little with the skinny font on the explanations. Is all of this necessary? I'm not sure.

There's a little outside baggage from another roleplaying game I followed. Its designers got into trouble for not presenting examples of each difficulty level of action for each skill, in one of the revised editions. It was the usual nerdrage thimblefest, but made me appreciate that in general such guidelines are a useful thing to have. Here, the examples also let you know what traditionally separate skills fall under each category.

Backgrounds also appear on the character sheet; the player supplies two adjectives or nouns like Woodland Barbarian. Wizard, Priest, Elf and Dwarf have one word supplied for them; respectively Magic, Religion, Woodland and Underground. Knowledge skill points are hard to get. I figure this is a way to realistically show knowledge in a background area that retroactively depends upon ability to learn, but requires too much study to improve while adventuring.

Mechanics with the appropriate Background could also represent some kind of craft skill, if needed. But the four-color universe of adventure has little patience for naturalistic characters who hammer their own armor...

All this rethinking means that characters in my previously presented starting page get way too many skill points, so I redid that too. Most characters start with one part-shaded box in most skills, so it's not like only rogues can climb.

I guess the character sheet should be next, or at least the first page.

Which Rock Group Would Play This RPG?

2011-09-14T23:07:00.003+01:00

The Warlock, bliss_infinite, has posted a wicked little meme up on the Home Brew asking of classic rock groups, which roleplaying game would they play?

I put it to you the opposite way. Given the following roleplaying games and adventures not covered in that list, which rock group would be most likely to play them?

Still goin' strong!

1. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay
2. The Riddle of Steel
3. Dogs in the Vineyard
4. 7th Sea
5. Gary Gygax's Cyborg Commando
6. Dragonlance
7. Tegel Manor
8. GURPS Fantasy
9. TSR S2: White Plume Mountain
10. RIFTS

My answers below the cut.

1. Iron Maiden ran into Judas Priest in the studio and they decided they had to play, started on the rules, then some girls showed up and they all lost interest except for Rob Halford. When Priest went on tour with Witchfinder General and Demon in 1988, Rob started the campaign. Witchfinder took it over and they still play a session every month or so.
2. Yngwie Malmsteen, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, and The Great Kat tried to play this once the night before the Grammys, but they got into too many rules arguments.
3. The Decembrists.
4. Muse. Matt Bellamy used the system for a really wicked game set on a future Earth where the seas have turned to dust.
5. Devo... no, Manowar... no, Devo ... ah screw it, Atari Teenage Riot.
6. Heart.
7. Ian Anderson ran this game for Jethro Tull on the Heavy Horses tour. He is, was, and ever will be the best Tegel Manor DM known to man.
8. Genesis, circa the 1991 "We Can't Dance" album.
9. John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants scored a TPK with the giant crab in 1992 against his whole band plus the Barenaked Ladies.
10. Manowar ... no, Devo ... no, Manowar ... ah, screw it, Billy Idol circa the Cyberpunk album.

Two Page Character Basics: False and Forced Choices

2011-09-13T22:21:00.002+01:00

These two pages really go together; one gives the basics of an approach to character creation, the other follows it through with some of the basic stats for each character class. After that there is one page for each class detailing the special powers they get.

One click makes you larger, one click makes you small...

Some comments on the design here. I take a "cut the crap" approach to the relationship between ability scores and character class. If you don't take the obvious incentives in Original, Basic and Advanced D&D to put your highest abilities into the class' prime requisites - the experience bonuses, the stats helping with class powers - you must be making some kind of point. The kind of point that no player I have ever known, ever wanted to make.

So why not just require it?

Making a fighter with average Strength so he can have high Wisdom is a false choice. It's the illusion of an option because it's completely suboptimal, and can only lead to regret once the player understands the game system. By turning the false choice into a forced choice by the rules, mental capacity is freed up to make other, more meaningful choices.

(Other meaningless choices in old school D&D and the neo-clones who won't let its design choices go: duff seldom-useful spells that have to be memorized beforehand ... weapons with no reason to use ...)

After all, characters can still be quirky on their secondary stats, because I only allow the one switch necessary to bring you into the class of your choice. If you roll 9 strength, 15 intelligence and 13 wisdom and you want to play a fighter, he'll still be either smarter or wiser than your average grunt.

Another thing. Turning Constitution into Confidence keeps the abbreviation in line with Original Standard D&D, and lines up with my previous arguments about changing the CON stat and treating character hit points as morale. I'm pretty pleased with this move. It even feels right in its old school location next to Charisma, instead of feeling out of place as a physical stat most akin to Strength.

Another other thing: Dwarf and Elf "class" to let you know, this is race-as-class territory.

This may not be the most modular of the handouts, but it's necessary for a complete game and it lays down the background for some of the assumptions and choices in the more portable stuff coming up.

Solid Gaming History

2011-09-13T01:02:00.005+01:00

From Metafilter comes a link to a really well-written blog that covers a lot of history relevant to old-school gaming: cardboard, paper and 5 1/4" floppy. Jimmy Maher's The Digital Antiquarian goes analog for a series on hex wargames and D&D that gives the best concise narratives of these hobbies' origins I've yet seen, and then traces their influence on computer games through the divergent paths of text adventures and computer RPGs. Early in my blog's history I noted a reverse influence - the more naturalistic problem-solving nature of text adventures coming in through the Old School movement and enlightening the number-crunching, cRPG-like ways of later D&D editions. So it's good to have all this history spelled out with great detail and insight. For example:

' I submit that D&D was in practice not mostly played by groups of “artful thespians,” but by scruffy teenage boys and men perfectly happy to remain Jim and Bob as they pondered the best way to kill that group of trolls in the next room. And that experience of D&D a computer could, within inevitable limits, simulate pretty well.'

There's even an emulator version of Temple of Apshai, the pioneering computer RPG. Brave danger as a congeries of extended-set ASCII blocks!

Good stuff here.

One Page Vital Stats

2011-09-11T20:42:00.000+01:00

Following the program of One Page Rules, today I present a kind of "master handout" that introduces many of the vital stats characterizing PCs, NPCs and other beings in the game.

This is page 2 ... right after the introductory page where the general play and point of the game, and such terms as "character", "creature", "DM", "d6" and so forth are described. I haven't laid that out yet.

This is a different system than the more elaborate Old School Players rules I'm using for my current campaign. It's built for concision.

More to come ... as always, let me know if this way of presenting rules is clear.

I'm also going to issue a blanket acknowledgment to Telecanter, whose silhouettes will show up throughout this series.

One Page Graphic Style

2011-09-10T01:29:00.001+01:00

I'm deep in the one page project and have a bunch of new ones to dole out in the coming days.

Meanwhile, I'm looking at my own efforts and some others' in the genre and trying to determine what the right mix of graphics and text is for me. My first effort was graphic-heavy:

But a little cryptic, especially to the right with the chest and door. A reader also needs to know how damage can come to be applied against a particular piece of equipment, and that the weird shield at bottom is made of metal. A little more text wouldn't be amiss here.

There's art under there ...

One of the card games I play a lot is Race for the Galaxy, which has attracted carping about the complex system of graphic icons on the cards. This is a standard trick in Eurogames to allow them to print cards that work in all languages. Then they print a multilingual rulebook that explains all of those glyphs and numbers.

But some of the effects in Race are too cryptic for the all-graphics approach. They're explained in text on the card, which supports an accompanying graphic that most of the time will not stand on its own as an explanation. This, of course, undermines the multilingual rationale for the glyphic language. But could there be another reason to wed text and symbol?

This is how I see graphics and numbers on my One Page Rules. They're there to break up the monotony and allow a quick visual reference. But unless they're truly representational and understandable icons, they'll be backed up with text. A kind of Rosetta stone for a visual language that's quickly learned, to back up the verbal lesson with a quick glance in play. Symbols interspersed with more iconic silhouettes and illustrations.

So, pop quiz: can you guess at a glance what each of these symbols at left represents in my rules?

Also check out the one-page efforts of Telecanter (there should be more in the archives) and -C at Hack and Slash.

Emotion Dice Chart

2011-09-08T21:20:00.002+01:00

And now, here is my one page emotion dice encounter reaction chart. You can use the emotion dice if you have them, or substitute regular d6; as an aid to memory, the odd numbered faces are negative (vs. positive) reactions, and the high-numbered ones are strong (vs. weak) reactions.

Click to enlarge

And one example.

The party, led by a charismatic warrior with a +1 bonus, runs into some orcs with a Hostile disposition.

The orcs greatly outnumber the party (so circumstances favor a move to the right) and the party quickly throws a couple of sacks of gold at them, which is deemed fitting tribute (circumstances favor a move down).

An ANGRY (5) and a NEUTRAL (1) are rolled.

First, the hostile orcs get angry, moving one to the right.

Then, circumstances come into play. The orcs stay in the rightmost column, but shift one down to CONFIDENT. The orcs laugh and bid the party begone, scooping up the gold.

Next time I'll show what one-page format has done to my more traditional-style reaction table using two rolls of 2d6. I think the format has changed it for the better.

Emotion Dice

2011-09-08T14:05:00.000+01:00

In Amsterdam this summer I picked up a pair of these dice that are meant to teach kids about emotional expressions. What a great way to mingle gaming with my research into emotions ...

The 6 faces of each die.

Scanning across from top left, let's number them 1 to 6. Four of the expressions are easy to label: 1 is sad, 2 is happy, 4 is indifferent and 6 is angry. But 3 and 5 are interesting because they're expressions that emotion researchers haven't paid much mind to - yet here they are in a set of basic emotion dice for kids, which tells me someone needs to pay closer attention to them.

Number 3 is the wink. A facial expression, yes, but an emotion? The wink to me communicates something more intentionally than an emotion does; amusement, affection, a secret ... I know of no papers on winking.

Number 5 is the "mean smile." At another conference this summer I got into a conversation with a fellow psychologist about this one. He pointed out that the muscle groups for frowning and smiling are rarely activated together. But every child knows the meaning of this expression. It combines the powerful, hostile message of furrowed brows with the pleased expression of the smile, and it means "Ha ha! I gotcha!" Is it just that people often don't show this expression to pictures in a lab? Or that it's more a caricature expression than one found in the wild - combining elements of hostile frown and smile that are understandable when combined, but rarely actually expressed together? These questions require further study.

Anyway, for gaming purposes I also noticed that expressions 1, 2, 5 and 6 vary in two ways: mouth grimacing/smiling and eyebrows frowning/lifted.

Eyebrows are an interesting way of signaling dominance. Some research finds that frowning actually makes you look physically more mature and masculine, because grownups and men have heavier brows. Likewise, the raised eyebrows you see in expressions of fear, surprise and sometimes happiness convey that the person is temporarily feeling less powerful, because children have more space from eye to browline. In gaming, they can represent whether the person is feeling more or less powerful than whoever they're facing - in other words, a morale roll.

As for the mouth, that's used to communicate agreeableness - in other words, a reaction roll.

If you've been following this space for a while, you may see where this is going. Stay tuned - I'm going to adapt that table to use with the emotion dice.

What do you get the geek who has everything?

2011-09-07T12:38:00.000+01:00

A character sheet for the fridge! (not to be confused with a mere zero-level shopping list)

Available through TopatoCo from Dr. McNinja creator Christopher Hastings.

Railroad in the Sandbox

2011-09-06T08:54:00.005+01:00

Before I leave the ruins of Undermountain there's one more lesson to be had.

Ed Greenwood provides a great variety of hooks and plots that will take the adventurers into his mega-dungeon by one entrance or another. One of the hooks depends on the players seeing a ghostly knight. I mean, this is hardly a spoiler because it's so bleeding obvious what you're supposed to do. But after the apparition is described, we read:

If the players elect to do nothing about the Ghost Knight, they will soon be unable to sleep - whenever they close their eyes, they will see his angry-faced, shining image coming toward them with sword drawn.
This vision continues regardless of spells, magical barriers or cures, planar travels, and so on, until the sleepless, exhausted PCs lay the Ghost Knight to rest by revisiting the alleyway in which he disappeared. (Undermountain Adventures, Greenwood, p. 2)

That last sentence is particularly rich. It conjures up a scene of human defiance and petty authority worthy of Kafka. Or Looney Tunes.

Players: "Okay, well, we're pretty sick of these hauntings, so we're going to burn this plane shift scroll and travel to the Happy Hunting Grounds."
DM: "You spend the day marveling at the abundance of buffalo and opossum. But when you lay down your head to rest in a stand of pawpaw trees ... yes, this low-level knight ghost, this one-shot clue to a secret alley entrance, relentlessly reaches across the gulfs of space, time and probability to wail 'Whyyyy wonnnnt yoooou plaaay with meeee?' all night long!"

Well, OK, this was 20 years ago, in TSR's golden age of plot railroading. It's a sign of how pervasive the one-track adventure mentality was in those days that Greenwood feels compelled to screw over the players' free will even when there is absolutely no need. It's not like the players are following the hook to an adventure that took their DM two months to prepare, or even to a one-track purchased module. No, this is a boxed set that details at least a dozen entrances to the sprawling Undermountain complex. In modern terms, it's a sandbox ... with a railroad running right through it.

And did I mention the Ghost Knight is bleeding obvious? If your players turn down the hook of their own free will, it's like they're telling you, "Nah, we don't really want a dungeon adventure today, do you have something more in the line of a ship's chandlery economic simulation?"

There's a larger lesson here. It's inconceivable today that one of the top RPG designers could manhandle players with a design choice like this. The reason? Language. Over the course of the last two decades, writing about RPGs has reached a high critical level, spurred on by the emergence of White Wolf as a challenger to the hegemony and outlook of D&D, and by the spread of independent criticism over the Internet. Sure, the language sometimes collapses into jargon. But it also gives us powerful tools to articulate what wasn't obvious twenty years ago, let us spot the railroad in a sandbox, and figure out why it's not just an asshat move by the DM but actually unnecessary.

Out of the Orange Corner

2011-09-04T22:26:00.001+01:00

So now we are looking for better solutions for the problem that led Ed Greenwood to break away from his renowned naturalism, with dictatorial bans on most of the high-level travel and intelligence-gathering spells so that parties couldn't use them against the many tricks and traps of Undermountain.

"Sorry guys, can't transport through that mysterious cloud ... again ..."

What do you do if teleport, passwall or ESP just ruins what you have going on in the adventure?

1. Say "Yes." Is it really such a big deal, in D&D, if a wizard has memorized a 5th level teleport spell instead of a cloudkill that could lay low a whole room full of lizardmen- and then uses that spell to deal with a deathtrap? Do you really think brute force solutions are only for combat? Do you realize that blocking these spells, which your player's wizard has memorized with no guarantee that they'll come in useful, forces her into a dumb damage-max mentality? Do you not have enough killer combats and lethal traps set up that the party should be applauded for finding a way around them, instead of booed for avoiding three hours' worth of pointless exercise in your dungeon jungle gym?

2. Say "Yes, but." There are error chances on teleportation, and at the most common levels in AD&D the caster can't take along more than one armored bodyguard. Casting ESP on someone will likely offend them and may not even work if they get a saving throw or think in an unknown language. Be familiar with the difficulties of each supposedly "broken" player approach, even come up with further twists, but don't knee-jerk away from them.

3. Flip the script. If a party can fly up to the window, passwall through the wall, move invisibly and silently while the archwizard is sleeping, and steal the fabled jewelled skull ... best believe someone can fly up to the party's stronghold, passwall through the wall, move invisibly and silently, and steal the skull back plus a whole bunch of other stuff.

4. Be naturalistic about security. So, in a world with such magic, what are the odds that someone has developed countermeasures, and that the stronghold or ruin has got them deployed? Some already exist; for instance, lead sheeting against ESP. Point is, the security measures should be explicable and part of the naturalistic concerns of the opposition, not handwaved in as "super powerful ancient magicks." Security measures are also more fun if they add more difficulty instead of shutting down attempts completely; the wizard's tower protected against flying by a pack of circling griffons, and against teleportation by etheral dimensional hounds that can follow teleport-tracks, Tindalos-style. And soon enough, if you're taking advantage of point number 3, the party will want to know how to protect themselves ....

5. Make spells increase fun, not kill it. This wasn't really available to the designers working within the lines of AD&D, but it's what I and all the rest of the old school players can achieve through house rule tinkering. Teleport is caster-only. ESP lets you detect only the presence of a sentient being, and if they fail a save, a couple of cryptic words from its stream of consciousness. Passwall - nuh uh, no way, though I do allow a high level spell that lets you turn a 10' cube of stone into oatmeal. But then you have to deal with whatever might follow you through, instead of having it neatly close up after you. And also, you have to deal with all that oatmeal.

The Orange-Painted Corner of Naturalism

2011-09-03T13:36:00.004+01:00

Is "whale on 2nd Edition AD&D" week over yet? No? All right. I'm here to pay homage to the first Undermountain boxed set, from 1991.

[Spoilers follow]

Let me start with the positive. Ed Greenwood stands tall as a pioneer of fantasy naturalism in role-playing games. I devoured his Dragon magazine articles in the 80's, so rich with invention and detail. They worked up the plain and sometimes weird building blocks of the game into something more like a fantastic museum.

This is about 10% of Level 1.

In re-treading the orange and yellow floors of Undermountain last week I noticed no shortage of this imagination. It's a great resource from which to learn and steal set-pieces: ingenious traps and tricks, disguised monsters, classic fake-outs, detailed combats where the enemy uses every tactic available.

The core area of these Saturday Night Special encounters, justified by "hey, mad 29th level sado-wizard," is fringed by more naturalistic environments: the tavern where adventurers' descents make up a kind of medieval reality show, the slaver town of Skullport, or Waterdeep's monster-infested garbage dump. And even the smallest treasures drip with detail. Why loot "some jugs of wine" when you can have "14 wicker-jacketed, 5-gallon green glass carboys of dry white wine (1 gp)"?

At his best, Greenwood doesn't just create naturalism with physical and economic details. He takes the official monsters, spells and magic items to the limit. Ropers and mimics take on a dizzying variety of guises. Wands are disguised, put into the hands of enemies, worked into traps. Why make a trap rely on magical tentacles when you can use an imprisoned mutant carrion crawler instead? Sure, there are occasional "inexplicable" magical effects, but you get the sense he had more fun working with the standard toolbox.

But here's the catch - players can use their resources to be naturalists too. Faced with a script that says "Endure your heroic, character-defining quest up through seven chromatic levels of the Rainbow Tower to reach the solid gold pineapple on the platform at the top," the prosaically-minded player rebels and says "Er ... what does this fly spell do, exactly?" This is why medieval knights were afraid of crossbows. History is written by innovators who at one point said, "Screw the rules of engagement. This works." Player naturalism finds short cuts around fantasy railroads using the rules and resources built into the game itself.

Ah-ah-ah, but ol' Halaster is not letting you off so easily in Undermountain. Inexplicable, massive "magical fields" stop all teleporting, ESP and other game-breaking spells. We see not just a naturalistic designer, but one who expects players to use naturalism too - and prepares for it! Just about every dead body you find in the maze has a name and a history in case the players try Speak With Dead. That's cool, but at the same time there are places where the player runs up against "because I say so."

What you can do in Undermountain: Fry a whole room of orcs with a level 3 fireball spell.
What you can't do in Undermountain: Use your 5th level rock to mud spell to deal with that trick where the stone hands take one magic item and give you another. The hands are just impervious to any magic short of a limited wish.

What is detailed in Undermountain: Exact procedures for lifting, smashing, and being crushed by the doors in the Bonecrusher trap.
What isn't detailed in Undermountain: How exactly those necrophidii, the ones that jump out of the pillar you have been prying gems from, steal your magic items. They just do! It's part of the trick! What do you mean, you want a DEX check?

"Look sharp, the floor here is orange."

So, it's not the designer's naturalism, but a particular response to anticipating the players' naturalism, that paints the encounter into a corner. I'm not picking on Ed Greenwood. This is a common problem in 2nd Edition-era adventure design, lampooned pitch-perfectly over many issues of the Knights of the Dinner Table comic.

1. The designer wants the characters and setting to read from the mythic script. Characters should succeed through force of arms where appropriate, and through clever wits in designated clever wits areas. The setting must be allowed to enforce the moral lessons of its tricks and surprises.

2. The players want themselves, not necessarily the characters, to be heroes. Their funniest and most awesome stories are of outwitting the DM, not the dungeon. The more the rules describe a prosaic, lawful system of cause and effect, the more they can leverage this against the mythic story to gain advantage.

3. This is where things go awry. The designer refuses to allow player creativity to work and imposes more rules, by decree. When the players burn down the Hollywood saloon facade they find, not a way out, but walls behind made of solid steel and three feet thick.

Now, how can a designer do naturalism and not end up like this? I have a few tentative solutions, coming up next.