Folk Saints: St. Gumption

Continuing an extremely irregular series of the folk saints in the world of Mittellus. This one emerged with player input during a session last weekend as I floundered for a name for the main church in Renneton.

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A Short Oar Sect image of the saint.

The long-deceased holy woman, Gunderdon of Frusk, often has her name shortened to Gumption when she is honored as an unofficial saint along the wild borders of the True Religion.

Escaping a raid on her convent, this devout sister of middle years set forth on a choppy sea in a coracle with woefully insufficient provisions. Her faith, grit, and determination pulled her through this ordeal and the subsequent trial of shipwreck on a deserted, cold island, where she remained for seven years, defending herself against wolves and sea-devils with a broken oar.

After her rescue, she traveled the wild shore on a donkey, enduring fantastic extremes of cold, dry and wet, surviving horrific tortures of the heathen. Eventually, broken in body but not in spirit, she met her martyrdom on a hot griddle, demanding to be turned over so she would roast evenly, and taking a miraculous three days to cook through and through.

Gumption's faithful scorn the complexities of civilization. If the Church will not canonize her because she never performed any miracles on anyone else's behalf, well, what do those incense-swingers know about anything anyway? Her followers place a premium on self-reliance and stick-to-itiveness, and waste no opportunity to teach these lessons to their children. Temples and shrines to the Saint are scrubbed clean, often several times a day.


If Eracle is the folk saint of strength, Gumption is the folk saint of constitution, and other elusive qualities besides. In social relations she is called upon to lend chutzpah. Where initiative is needed, she doles out moxie, spunk, pluck, pep, and good old-fashioned get-up-and-go. In uncertain situations, she recalls horse-sense to mind. And when danger looms, her blessing reinforces guts, strengthens the kidney, stiffens the spine, and thrusts the chin upward. Her spiritual enemies are lazybones, stay-a-beds, those who dilly-dally and shilly-shally, dingbats, duffers, poindexters, and the legions of the lily-livered.

Prophets of the Saint dress in plain, frayed and much-mended clothes, and carry as their sacred weapon a broken oar. There is a rift between the Long Oar (as staff) and Short Oar (as club) sects, often coming to blows; the Long Oars are seen as decadent by the Short Oars, and foolish in their hope that Gumption will eventually be canonized.

All her prophets lack the ability to abjure evil creatures, but emanate a 10' radius aura of morale (+2 for allied NPCs and animals). Additionally, they can exhort others to buck up and pull themselves together, having the ability to dispel fear, confusion, and paralysis at will by touch (at 1st level), at 30' distance (at 3rd level) or for all creatures in a 30' radius (at 5th level). Finally, they save at +4 versus all mind-affecting magic and distractions.

The B Team Can Relieve Your Campaign

A couple of recent gaming developments have made me really appreciate the practice of keeping up more than one set of characters in any long-term gaming group.

Part of my recent travels involved returning to the Cafe 28 on New York's 5th Avenue where some of the Red Box NYC games take place. Investigating, I found that a Glantri game was taking place the night before I took off back home, so I showed up to a table packed full of Erics (no, seriously, there were 4 Erics out of 7 guys at table).

One of these Erics was blogger "the Mule," who'd been present at my previous foray, and another was the GM. He ran a B/X game mostly by rules as written with some nice touches - no duplicate spell memorizing, declaring only spells and withdrawal from combat before the initiative roll. The players had maps of Eric's megadungeon from three years of continuous play, spanning five levels and hundreds of rooms. This "Chateau D'Amberville" is based on Castle Amber in the sense that The Lord of the Rings is based on the Elder Edda. It was truly a great glimpse into the potential of the format.

As it turned out, my newly rolled wizard character - Raz, son of Taz - was adventuring that evening with a B-list party consisting of players' secondary characters, mostly level 5 and 6. This explained the nonchalance when two of them got double-level drained, in merciless old school style, by some unexpected spectres, which we quickly fled from. I admired the good spirits of these players, who were evidently playing in a very free-wheeling table with drop-in party composition and multiple characters.

On returning home I unleashed the lead-in to an episode I'd been brooding over all January - a climax adventure that could take place in one session, and would cap off the plot of the "Faerie war" arc they'd been following since the summer. Today I learned the limits of plot-heavy climax adventures ... when one of the players called in sick and we realized that we just couldn't play on in this adventure without her.

So we decided to form a B-Team with the existing group, rolling up new characters and embarking ad-hoc on an adventure. The A team (Band of Iron) had started in the Valley of Milk and Cheese where I had also placed Jeff Sparks' Labyrinth Lord adventure Wheel of Evil, purchased but never engaged with, an appropriately cheese-themed adventure. And so, the new group started in the uneasy town of Renneton, got a good way into the cheese caves, and everyone seemed to enjoy the change of perspective and freedom from the burdensome importance of actions in the by now year-long main campaign.

Perhaps this is what most campaigns need past a certain point - a way to deal with missing or guest players, to blow off steam, and get the kind of fast-and-loose play that comes with an adventure rather than story focus.

Broken Arrows

By coincidence, I had been thinking about one of the logistic aspects of the game this week that I seem to blow off in my campaigns - keeping track of ammo. Then Talysman writes about it so I feel I should share my thoughts.

Are most people overestimating how many arrows would be lost in combat, given enough time to recover them afterwards as part of the ten minute post-combat rest? This blog has 50% attrition, Talysman has 33%. It doesn't look like too many arrows would be broken even shooting against armor (here) so the main source of loss would be sticking in the wound and being broken off, being trodden on in combat, or just disappearing into the distance. It may be useful to overestimate these occurrences, though, if only to have ammo supplies play a meaningful part in an adventure.

Also topical for Valentine's Day.

In battlefield combat, of course, there is the factor of not wanting your enemy to easily pull out arrows or use them back against you, that led some historical archers to use arrows with the point intentionally loosened. Most of what adventurers are fighting, though, won't have bows themselves. The option can be given to loosen heads if needed, but it seems more important to explorers to be able to conserve arrow stores.

Here are a couple of ideas:

1. Track ammo supplies using toothpicks stuck in a piece of modeling clay, packing sponge, or styrofoam (personally I hate the sound of squeaking styrofoam so that's right out.) Pull your "arrows" out when you shoot them and turn them in if they break or are abandoned. Indicate special arrows (magic, silver, etc.) using marker on the tip.

2. Arrows, magic or otherwise, break immediately on a natural damage roll of 6; I also have a missile fumble that breaks the arrow. Otherwise, there is no need to have a fiddly "realistic" system or extra dice rolls to model what is ultimately just another aspect of logistics like food, water, and light source consumption. So, breakage and loss are abstracted after the combat; each archer loses 1 out of every 4 arrows shot, rolling d4 to see if there is any loss when a fraction of that is shot. If the party flees the battlefield, of course, losses are total. Magic arrows can be exempted from this due to superior construction, although they may be picked up by intelligent foes.

3. Arrow heads can be loosened to become unusable after any hit (including a hit that would connect with an unarmored target even if it missed due to armor) and 3/4 unrecoverable.

Almost-Encounters: Sights, Sounds and Leavings

Regularly, when I roll for random encounters underground or outdoors in a game, I allow for the possibility that some kind of clue to an encounter happens instead. For example, if rolling a d6 for an encounter, a real encounter happens on a 1 and a clue happens on a 2. In my hex-stocking wilderness system, there's also provision for clues, though on a less frequent basis than real encounters.

I usually make the clues up on the spot. They fall into two kinds: sights and sounds, which can occur even when the party is stationary; and leavings, which the party has to be moving to find. Here are some examples.

Sights: A pair of griffins flying across the sunset, many miles away.
In the night, a brief red glow, sighted across a far-away ridge line (red dragon).

Sounds: Snatches of shouting and song down in the valley (bandits).
A full-throated roar echoing across the plains (lion).
Far away, echoing through many passages, a door slams (dungeon monster - ogre, perhaps?)

Leavings can be...
Body parts: The cast-off skin of a giant snake.
Manticore spikes, embedded in a tree.

Victims: A dead squirrel, withered and drained of all blood (stirges).
The bones and equipment of a former adventurer, scattered all through a long corridor (gelatinous cube).

Tracks: A long wide trail of half-dried slime, bending around a corner (giant slug).
Large hoofprints, going across the road (gorgon).

Smells and vapors: The slight stench of rotting flesh in the air (zombies).
A smoky haze hanging in the air (hell hounds).

Environment damage: A scorched spot on the dungeon wall (hell hounds).
The tracks lead into a trodden and torn clump of thorn bushes (gorgon).

Intentional markings: Obscene graffiti on the wall, written in Dark Rune pictograms (humanoids).
A strong musky scent around the base of a tree (giant wolverine).

I find that using clues this way adds suspense to adventures, gives players options (do we investigate this, or run like hell?), and makes for more meaningful information than most random "dungeon dressing" out there.

Running Bandits Across the Many Worlds

Well, I couldn't get much enthusiasm to blog during my trip in the latter half of January (especially when my computer's hard disk crashed) but did get in a fair amount of tabletop action. Stick with it, there's some more commentary on megadungeon design below ...

My first stop was the gaming in-laws (previously) where my wife rolled up her third first level magic-user with a Sleep spell to venture into the Castle of the Mad Archmage - promptly dubbed "Repetitia." Thus augmented, the usual family party set out to defeat the Skull Stacker bandits in the upper works, led by the green-armored terror, half-orc Grunya (or Grainne - medieval orthography being what it is). This would be the third time the Skull Stackers have appeared in my various parallel universes - the first time in the long-ago Trossley campaign, the second in the Saturday games I ran last year for the local game club.

Accompanying the party was a detachment of the local guard, pushing ahead of them three convicts from the rival bandit gang captured in the previous session. The convicts were chained to polearms and told that their way to mercy was to attack without regard for life.

There followed a tense battle across a curtain wall and tower with scaling of walls, dodging and not-dodging of arrows, opening of one door from within and another door using Repetitia's enlarge/reduce spell on the planks. Dad and daughter climbed a grappling rope to find Grunya and comrades atop the tower while son and the rest of the party battled up from within the tower, landing a critical hit on the leader at the best possible moment to knock her down the stairs. Soon she was dead and the young version of the rival bandit Fergus, who had appeared in Grunya's respawned band when the Castle reappeared, was in custody. Shades of Looper! The captive older version of Fergus offered his own life to hang for the crimes of both if younger Fergus could be indentured to the party as a man-at-arms - very different from how this dilemma played out in Trossley.

The next day, the party, now mostly second level, decided to return to the Castle's dungeons and head down the rightmost of three stairs to level 2. After disposing of a spider they found themselves in a hallway occupied by ... not bandits ... okay, brigands. A quick sleep spell disposed of most of the band and in short order they were negotiating surrender terms with the leader, Tov Encher. Tov convinced them that only he could pacify the neighboring troglodytes who had come to investigate the sounds they heard, and so got them out of the level, and set himself free at the price of the gang's treasure.

It's only after running the brigand episode that I realized this was another example of Joe Bloch's hidden depths beneath the Castle's terse descriptions. (I've previously noticed some subtle setups running the west end of the second level, where a seemingly unbeatable monster has the means to defeat at hand, and a fear trap combines with branching corridors behind it, to effectively split the party.)

The group of about 12 brigands lives in a series of 20x20 foot rooms off a straight hallway behind a door, close to the stairway down. To quote:

BLACK SPEAR GANG (#35 – 40). A group of brigands has taken up residence with the idea of ambushing adventurers after they are weakened. They have not been very successful of late, and will often send out patrols to look for likely targets, setting up ambushes, etc.

This is where it pays to read ahead of time and embellish the dungeon. My one idea was that they would try to dissuade adventurers from entering their area, instead shunting them to the nearby troglodyte-controlled corridor, which would easily yield a weakened party for the ambush idea. Therefore, I had the brigands put the delver's rune for "Treasure" on their own door, which obviously (?) would make parties suspicious and choose the other door. However, nobody in the party managed to decipher the rune, so in they went.

The fallback plan for the brigands, in hindsight, would be to put bars or blockades on the inside of the doors, hope the party would bypass the unmovable doors to venture deeper within, and then ambush on return. But DMs, like players, have to live and learn.

Personally, I think working with the design of the dungeon to bring out strategies like this is a fun challenge. But I can see how a product for less experienced session runners might gain value by going beyond the minimal descriptions, and spelling out some of the more interesting possibilities that might not be immediately obvious.

The Megadungeon Paradox

As the blogosphere faces the possibility that all we'll have of Dwimmermount is a draft, critical evaluations of that draft are flooding in, from the dismissive to the constructive. One big part of the criticism - really just an extension of last summer's "9 rats, 2000 cp" beef -  is that the upper level maps are boring.

There's a reason for that, very much in keeping with the Phase 1 of the OSR that Dwimmermount represents. Phase 1 was all about copying the old stuff, with a "D&D is always right" mentality. Take a look at this paparazzi shot of Gary Gygax's Castle Greyhawk dungeon Level 1:

It's a hot mess of jammed-together, samey rooms and corridors, and from all accounts the keying was minimal. I'd rather explore even the upper levels of Joe Bloch's Castle of the Mad Archmage than this map - even though the Castle is another case of a Gygax homage intentionally putting the more generic stuff up top and the wilder level designs below. (Besides, the Castle has hidden depths to its design not evident from casual skimming - as I hope to demonstrate next post.)

But from experience of actual play, consider what this design approach means. Most explorers of megadungeons never get past the early levels - just as most campaigns never reach level 10. This means that most people's megadungeon experience is intentionally boring, with the real fun deferred for a lower level that never comes.

Phase 2 of the OSR means that enjoyment and amazement take precedence over carbon-copying the old school. The goal is not to reproduce the means, but the ends, of the class of 1974 - the sense of wonder and discovery now hard to recover from a set of expectations turned cliche.

This means that megadungeons should engage from the beginning, with early levels that reward exploration with variety - not the most awesome and dazzling stuff, certainly, but fun mapping, meaningful phenomena, intriguing hints that draw explorers deeper. I've tried to follow this principle with my first-level completion for the Castle - which I'm more and more inclined to release as-is this month - and with my new mega-project, one section of which is finished.

Don't You Just Want To Slap the 90's ...

in its smug, bard-lovin', Next Generation, Wheel of Time-buyin', Renfairin' face?

Thanks to Internet Archive and its cache of Dragon Magazines, I've been pondering this entirely unremarkable table of contents from #180, where the big big feature is a preview of trading cards, and other articles tell you ...

to have your campaign make sense, to give magic weapons backstory, to intentionally play a low-intelligence character dumb, to haul off your party cleric to perform weddings in his home town, how to raise funds for your gaming club, and please make the acquaintance of this four-horned giant battering ram - get it? - and six-legged earthquake-making dinosaur.

The real posts will resume soon, hopefully with better content than that. I'm back from an extended professional/vacation trip where real gaming took precedence over game posting.