Hex Crawl 23 #209: The Deadly Reflective Grass

Six hexes northwest, three north of Alakran.

 

Such a lush dale of grass! Why do goat-tenders in the villages avoid it? Why do wise hunt-masters give it a wide berth? The answer is: it is deadly and reflective.

A wizard must have done it, tampered with a strain of switch-grass, made it capable of drinking not only light from the sun but also moisture from the clouds through its mirror-surfaced blades. The side-effect? Anyone who looks down at the grass will see themselves shattered into a hundred pieces. The experience is likewise shattering: WIS save, DC 13, for each round of looking, or become catatonic.

The bones of goats and a few people lie scattered here and there in the grass. The people had a few valuables; every hour of searching (best done at night, by the blindfolded, etc.) there is a 25% chance of turning up d12 x d12 go worth of trinkets and coins.

Amazon Mutual: Day-Glo Ideas from the Typewriter Era

Digital cameras can't really handle Day-Glo. I tried.

The year: 1982.
The text: electric typewriter and Letraset titles.
The cover: fluorescent orange.
The art: strictly amateur.


"Amazon Mutual Wants You!" Volume One, from Dragon Tree Press, is the most interesting and creative of my three old-school pickups (previously, previously).

 High concepts.

The concept driving this anthology is very 1982. It's that era in which the first flush of playing D&D straight had faded out, and the kind of self-aware narratives seen in Dave Trampier's "Wormy" comic were taking hold. So, the party are meta-adventurers, having been hired by a guild (the titular Amazon Mutual) to carry out the corpse retrieval clause on other adventurers' insurance policies. The four adventures are four such missions, each with a different author and a markedly different style.

Some of the guild rules are typical AD&D fun-crusher magical fiats. Retrieval teams are geased ("absolutely no save!") not to steal the victims' possessions. Body bags of holding eliminate the problem of lugging corpses back. There are half a dozen better ways to approach the first problem, ways that open the slim possibility of hoodwinking the guild -- Amazon keeps a list of possessions and recovery teams are held liable for missing stuff; an annoying familiar chaperones the rescue effort; and so on. The body bags solve a problem that's nonexistent if the party eliminates all opposition before retrieving the corpses, and kill an element of challenge that should hang over the adventure if they don't.

The book's approach to what we would now call challenge ratings, though, is one of the dead-end gems of the Typewriter Era, up there with the Midkemia attack matrix.

• First off, each adventure has a manifest of all the experience points available in the form of monsters. (It would be most helpful if treasure was listed, too, though, but the need for a GM to manage advancement rate is one of the most underrated things in level-based gaming.)
• This manifest also includes suggested experience awards for outwitting monsters, dealing with traps, and finding clues and other plot goals. Given the slow advancement pace of by-the-book AD&D this is absolutely key.
• There's also a section where it's explicitly recognized that the character power level appropriate for each adventure depends on what approach the players and DM take. So, one adventure is suitable for level 7-9 if the DM plays it as a standard fighting room-crawl, 14-18 (!) if the DM treats it as an organized fortress where all the denizens can be warned in a short time, or much lower levels if the players choose to take on the adventure with sneaking, diplomacy, or infiltration.

Temple of the Four Gods. The first adventure takes you to retrieve four adventurer bodies from a temple with a prosaic layout, short on monsters and long on tricks and traps. There are a few clues explaining how the temple went over from the four gods to the service of Loki, but overall this is a funhouse mini-dungeon with a few random gleams of dark humor.  Two corpses can be had almost immediately without any fight, one comes after a four-goblin battle, and it's only the last body that forces the players past a meaningful number of tricks and traps. Would run: 3/10.

Stronghold of the Mer-Witch. An underwater cave mission to retrieve two adventurers. One is dead and can be found almost immediately after a nasty fight with a gigantic eel. The other is alive but a captive of the mer-witch deeper in, who commands a small army of mer-orcs and (not very tough) sea trolls, and can throw three death spells a day among other powers. A coral golem and an interestingly furnished underwater torture chamber liven up the otherwise unremarkable, "storehouse, barracks, kitchen" design. Would run: 6/10.

Mission to Danger. The gonzo spirit of early-days roleplaying lives here. The person to be rescued, captive but not yet dead, is a "Hobbit Fighter-Techno" with a pistol, a switchblade, and a deadman switch, for he has mined the dark elves' dungeon fortress to blow sky-high! The DM is asked to play out the ticking clock in four hours of real time. Some nice situations can happen: meeting an illusionist cat who might help with infiltration, a possible fight between an enemy red dragon and a captured rainbow dragon, finding out the hobbit is an ornery and contrary ally, and a treasure hoard that turns into a river of molten gold if the explosives blow. Would run: 8/10.

Grimethorp's Manor. This adventure plays around with the Amazon Mutual premise. The party has to retrieve a peacefully deceased retired adventurer from his mansion, following the letter of his policy, but his ghost doesn't want his body moved. It's a clever concept but the execution is lacking. Until the party finds the body, they will be walking through the mansion rooms with nothing interesting to do. When they try to take the body out, the ghost starts interfering, casting nuisance spells and animating the house's furnishings to attack, just to frighten and annoy but not cause harm. That's also not going to work. You frighten D&D players by taking huge chunks of hit points, and making them roll save-or-die, not by having a rug say "boooo".  Would not run as is, and the adventure needs a lot of editing to work; I'd start by having bandit squatters and other random ruin pests in the mansion to give the adventure a real first act, make the ghost's attacks really dangerous, and on top of that have the rest of the bandits coming home from a raid just as the party is making to leave.

Baroque Tricks, Traps and Hazards

So many of the old evergreen roleplaying tricks were prefigured (or just plain figured) in Gary Gygax's Supplement I: Greyhawk. Among them:

The "monster body" dungeon.

The shrinking ray.

Looting monster corpses for built-in treasure.

Animated plants and furniture.

Items which cause warning devices to fail and alertness to wane (the beginning of a long slippery slope into giving with one hand and taking away with the other...)

As well as less perennial ones such as

A box of animal crackers which will come to life when grasped ...

Anyway, with all this in mind may I present the next installment of the 52 Baroque Pages - including a few twists on old tricks. Click it to enlarge ...

Lodge Initiations and Dungeon Tricks

Two separate sources this weekend led me to the amazing and disturbing Demoulin Brothers catalog of initiatory prank equipment  for North American fraternal lodges, published in 1930.

These lodges - the likes of the Elks, Moose, Woodmen, Odd Fellows, Red Men, and avowedly unserious outfits like the Hoo Hoo and E Clampus Vitus - outdid each other in prankish initiation rites, aided and abetted by the electric shock gadgetry and "burlesque costumes" of the Demoulin Brothers.

Having already remarked the similarities between the levels and titles of Dungeons and Dragons, and those of a fraternal order, I can't help but wonder if the spirit of the basement initiation rite also lives on in the tricks and traps of the "gotcha!" dungeon. In the DeMoulin catalogue, as with the Dungeon Master's catalogue, nothing is certain, safe things are dangerous and dangerous things safe. Even the famous imperceptibly sloping corridor of Greyhawk Castle has its precedent in the "balloon ride" gag shown below, visibly hoisted and imperceptibly let down.

One Page Falling & Hazards

The falling rules give 1d6/10' a little more teeth. Yeah, it takes something like 2000' to reach terminal velocity but to simplify we're capping it at 100' fall.

Traps are, well, there you go. There wasn't enough room to tell people to just put traps in where traps would logically be, rather than randomly in the middle of corridors the inhabitants want to use, corners of rooms, etc. I'm giving a simple mechanical solution because the whole figure-it-out-by-DM-discussion requires a lot of knowledge and advice (like this series).

Still to go: cleanup on monsters, treasure, examples, and a whole lot of tweaking and fixing.

Flip That Dungeon Cliche

"A room with a ceiling full of webs..?"

The cliche - spiders hiding in the webs, you can burn the webs, stuff is wrapped up in the webs.

"A statue with a missing arm ...?"

The cliche - find the arm, put it on, the statue comes to life, and usually is helpful.

"A table with a meal all laid out to eat?"

Ha ha, yeah right, it's a trap.

"So there's this lair of nine rats and  2000..."

Otherworld Miniatures' familiar diorama

Well, you get the idea. When I used to write poetry, one of the things I taught myself to do was to break cliche. A poem that's made up of turns of phrase that have been said before is, at best, a song lyric. If the first thing that comes to you when describing long hair is a waterfall, then flip that into lava, falling smoke, avalanche, waves of night, anything but the obvious.

Of course, not all the cliche busters work. You have to do something new and have it be meaningful. The hair in the poem can't be a cascade of weasels, nor can you plausibly open a chest and have a horde of butterflies carrying peanuts spring out. I'm just saying that we're coming up on five years of the Old School Refinement and pretty much all the obvious homages have been paid. Time to leave homage and go on the road. An adventure author can now invert, subvert or just ignore cliches.

I was going to have humanoids as the low-level feuding groups in my mega-dungeon but now I have different clans of mutant rats. I tried to give the bandit gang in the caves some more sinister secret than the usual robbing and looting. The race of crow-men that used to inhabit the rest of the caves and left its mark there is pretty different from the usual run.

So, trying to flip the cliches I started with ...

The webs are all there is. It's a web monster. Oh, and it burns ... but its pieces thrash about, fall, flap and float down to you like sticky sheets of napalm. If you're feeling nasty you can put a golden spider up in there - burning reduces it to scrap metal.

The statue doesn't have an arm to complete it. It's a statue of a one-armed adventurer. If it sees another one-armed person enter the room (even someone faking it), it will serve the person if the missing arm is the same arm, and fight him or her if the missing arm is different.

The meal ... well, here is where the subverted cliche itself becomes a cliche, the "gotcha" of the too obvious reversal, like "sympathy" characters who really are in need of help or demon idol gems that really can be looted with no problems. Here is where you might go sideways, with a mixture of good and bad effects. The demon doesn't come after you when you steal its eyes, but there's a subtle curse, starting with the thief's eyes turning the color of the gems ... yes, that really is a crying damsel in distress, but she turns out to be spoiled and annoying and a liability to the party's survival ... the meal is food of the gods, roll d6 on this table.

Any other favorite cliches or cliche-busting encounters out there?

When to Role, When to Rule and When to Roll

One point, left dangling from my recent series, I'd like to address: When should a DM use an analog mode of task resolution based on player descriptions of actions in role and your rulings on them, and when should he or she use a digital mode, rolling dice against set skills and difficulties?

There's a great benefit to seeing the physical environment of an adventure for what it is, rather than an abstract map dotted with "trap" and "secret" symbols. A lot of task resolutions then become simple. Is there a naked, unworked stone corridor? Then any tripwires or pressure plates or door seams will be evident to anyone with two good eyes, even in flickering torchlight, when proceeding forward at the glacial pace of dungeon exploration. I mean, try not noticing everything there is to notice while taking a minute or more to examine a 12' stretch of corridor, 1st Edition AD&D style.

What if the task is more difficult? Say there's a gossamer-thin tripwire spun by dark elves, or a seam of uncanny dwarven construction. Say there's a complicated bas-relief that could be hiding any number of buttons or holes, or a cracked floor with any number of outlines possible. For these, I would say that a long and close inspection would reveal the hidden feature. In player terms, they would have to give me a detailed description of what they are doing, and repeat that each time they are doing it.

Player attention, in other words, is a resource, drained by repetition and boredom. But forget what I said about trying to model this with limits on character attention. It's a player thing, not character. And player things, too, are analog.

If you want to reach the heights of immersion and intellectual challenge that come from an analog game, you have to trust your players to respect their time and enjoyment. You have to trust them not to abuse your system by giving long descriptions of detailed searches  at all times. If you're playing with dopey kids or grown-up asshats or hyper-task-focused fun-murderers, use a more rules- and dice-bound system - please!

You also have to resolve not to let them cheat their way into this resource, using crappy min-maxer crutches like the standing-order instruction sheet (see under "excel spreadsheet" anecdote there).This is just one of those times where you have to know what your group is like. Don't assume the worst right away. But don't think that the right system can substitute for mutual consent to have fun. Good players will fret about the possibility that an asshat could ruin the game, or even the possibility that they could be that asshat. But they won't actually do it.

Eventually, the environment will channel their attention. They'll zoom along a blank corridor or room in real time, because they know that any danger there will be spotted by their cautious in-game progress. They'll stop and check out mosaic floors, complex sculptures or patterns ... if they're wise. Your naturalistic, analog signaling of opportunities for complication will guide their attention. "Dwarven craftsmanship" or "illusionist's castle", of course, should spur them to new and temporary heights of paranoia.

Now, when do you roll? Yes, my game has a "notice detail" skill. And I use it for the same purpose as saving throws in James M's classic analysis. It gives players a digital chance when their analog skills don't quite meet the challenge. Even if you're running down a corridor, you might notice the tripwire that your slow advance would make obvious. Even if you're just standing next to a bookcase casting idle eyes on it, you might notice the odd jointwork that sends you looking for an opening device.

There's one caution, though: I haven't yet had players get up to the point where their skill in notice detail becomes near-automatic. In my system a rogue could get there by level 4, though at the cost of everything else roguely. With more even development they're likely to max out the Notice skill around level 8.

I'm not sure whether the greater chance of success at those heights is a just reward for sticking it through, or a blow to the fun in analog gaming. Perhaps the balancing factor is this: At higher levels, you're more likely to face complex, brain-challenging mechanisms and effects, so that the challenge is not whether you see them, but what you do once you see them.

Iron God: The Pit, the Pole and the Point Dwarf

This post has spoilers for Black Blade's Tomb of the Iron God adventure module. But not any spoilers for my players who have marched through most of it. So be forewarned and see you on the other side of the cut.

OSR Contradiction 2: Player Skill vs. Minimal Dungeons

Does OSR mean an Old School Regurgitation of everything that was played, printed and xeroxed in the olden days of the adventure gaming hobby? Or an Old School Refinement, taking the best products and learning from them, and looking past the rules as written to mine the reminiscences of the founding roleplayers and see exactly how they had fun?

Geomorph by Fighting Fantasist

Certainly, if you look at almost all old school modules you'll see two things that had rules associated with them: pits and secret doors. Especially in the early days, these rules were rough and ready, betraying the miniatures origins of the game: roll a d6 and fall in on a 1 or 2, roll a d6 and detect the door on a 1. Because there were rules, and character features that improved the odds, it was seen as necessary to include pits and secret doors in any dungeon worth its salt. Leaving them out would be like leaving sand traps and water hazards off a gold course.

Many, many games were played with this mechanistic, 8-bit digital method. Many more would be played using the more sophisticated rules that interacted with character skills and eventually turned into Spot checks. What almost nobody was doing was the "player skill" method that's seized the Old School mantle. Next to no space in Dragon magazine was dedicated to elaborate analog mechanical trap descriptions in the manner of Courtney's Hack & Slash blog. What you saw instead was rules, charts, tables.

So does your Old School Reenactment involve tooling around a graph paper funhouse just rolling for pits and doors? And if your Old School Rejuvenation involves tapping ahead with a pole, what effect does that have? Is the pit lid heavy or light? Might it tip open or echo with a tap? These are questions that need analog solutions, immediately bypassing the "roll 1 or 2" crudity of the Old School Rules.

Tomb of the Iron God is the dungeon we have been playing in since January. It's by Matt Finch, who also authored the 95 Theses of player skill, the Quick Primer. By the Primer, using player skill for pits and secret doors requires analog descriptions of their mechanisms. But in the module, recreating the more usual form of Old School play (or perhaps just out of reflex), you have oodles of un-detailed pit traps and secret doors. Bam! Contradiction. Yes, the module notes tell you to ad-lib ... and ad-lib I did. But I would have appreciated being tossed at least a bone or two for such frequent, important, and eventually unexplained features of the catacombs.

Next time ... my solutions and the players', an in-play review.

Building on Locks and Traps

Arkhein asks the question that has been on everyone's mind since the Quick Primer on Old School gaming dropped - how do you get all descriptive and Old Schooly with mechanical devices when you're neither an engineer nor a locksmith? How do you solve in-game mechanisms without game mechanics?

So, Telecanter comes up with this neat, simple flowchart thingy for dealing with locks and mechanisms.

Zak adds his own take on the system.

I have but three things to add. One is an observation that with a lock, you succeed by getting it to work and fail by jamming it. With a trap, you succeed by jamming it and fail by getting it to work. So, you can use the same procedures for the two, but with different desirable outcomes.

Two is a variation. Roll on the list of 36 text-adventure-style action words from the "black die 1" column of Table D in my Endless Bag of Tricks pdf. Do this once for each of the action words you're using to solve the mechanism. It's then on you to come up with a trap/trick/lock description that uses them all. I just rolled up "Move," "Turn," "Sit on," and "Push" which suggests a nasty-looking rotating door with a built-in seat.

Three: could you use an actual puzzle in-game? Having played a fair number of the Big Fish hidden object computer games, I am excruciatingly familiar with the kind of old mansion whose exploration requires completing Towers of Hanoi, 15/16 slider puzzles, pipelaying games, and the like. I am pleased to say that the recent Mansions of Madness board game from Fantasy Flight includes this kind of mini-puzzle in a way that doesn't feel overly forced or corny. At least after one play. So perhaps that can be useful, every once in a while.

Another inspiration for a "get the sequence right" puzzle designer, by the way, is the GROW series of flash puzzles (strip of square icons to left in that link), the perfect blend of clue-giving, trial and error, and sheer surrealism.

Oh yeah, and speaking of mechanisms, this, if you ever wondered what a DC 35 lock looked like.

Nonviolence II: Nonviolent Problems

Nonviolence in an adventure can also flow naturally from the challenges it puts forth. Traps, tricks, and problems are all challenges that don't require hurting or killing to get past, but can be just as deadly and exciting as combat.

To expand on a very early post from this blog:

Traps (and related things like locks or bars) are challenges that admit one solution. The first part of the challenge is detecting the trap. After that, there is usually only one way to deal with the trap, which can be abstracted to a dice roll, or turned into more of a puzzle with a description of the trap's mechanics.

Tricks are usually more obvious to spot than traps, but less obvious to solve. Often the players must figure out what should be done to solve the trick. Often there are numerous different things that can be done, with beneficial, harmful or informative outcomes.

Puzzles are tricks with one solution and one outcome, usually beneficial.

Problems are the most open-ended situations. These are situations where a goal can be reached by a number of different means, including some that may not have occurred to the adventure designer. Examples are fording a flooded river, crossing a constantly geysering cavern on chain-swinging wooden disks, finding a way to attend the Countess' exclusive masked ball.

In this post I'm going to present a simple system to get creativity working on problems. This will be followed soon by the #2 request in my poll - the system to generate tricks and creative traps.

The system for problems - "Bag of Problems" - gives a random listing of non-combat challenges that might be faced in an adventure and some of the complications that might make dealing with these challenges more interesting. It's a one page pdf up on Google Docs. I give one example with it, and more will be forthcoming in future posts - specifically, I'm going to use it to create a nonviolent adventure, "Egg of the Gazolba." As always, let me know if you have any problems downloading it and what you think.

Here's the example on the sheet, as a taste of a creative departure from the kind of simple sketch the table gives. These remind me a little of the folklore motifs from Stith Thompson's book - itself a great source for fantasy game ideas. In both cases I like how a full story can be created from a simple phrase.

Statue - change appearance of: A massive statue lies toppled athwart a passage further on. Although the original paints have faded, its eyes seem to have a vivid shade of green, its nose is broken off, and its gaze is directed at the statue guarding the other side of the passage, identical in all respects except its eyes are normal and its nose is intact. The green eyes are a clue that the statue is jealous of its twin. If the two are brought equal – either by disfiguring the standing statue, or by embellishing the fallen one – the fallen statue will roll aside, opening the passageway. Brute force is also a possibility, though the fallen statue will take the strength of 20 men to move.