The Head of Vecna

The Thyatic Empire Session 0: Character Creation

2012-01-14T19:28:00.000-08:00

I was reminded last night of another reason I get those pangs of longing for simpler systems. We spent the entire evening doing character creation, and didn't manage to get to the adventure itself. While this is hardly an alien phenomenon to me - the "character creation session" is a staple of most modern campaigns, I believe - at my age I often wish we could just sit down and play like we would any other type of game. The boys' palpable disappointment at not being able to begin the adventure after laboring over their characters for so long was something I had hoped to avoid. Alas, RuneQuest 1984 has a pretty complex skill-generation segment, which is what bogged us down for most of the evening. When you consider the old tales of D&D grognards rolling up new characters during game play after losing their PC to some devious trap or monster that proved to be too great a match for them, you start to feel like maybe something good got lost along the way. After investing so much effort into building these characters, the thought of one of them dying and having to go through the character creation process again sounded like more trouble than it might be worth. Of course, I say that, but the boys mentioned several times that they had other ideas if their characters did die.

Still, RQ'84 (I think it's referred to in the RQ community as RQ III) has some interesting ideas on character creation. Your Attributes give you modifiers to your skills, which itself takes a little time to figure out, because different Attributes affect each skill category differently, dependent upon the category - you may add percentile bonuses based on how many points the Attribute is over 10, but in some cases it grants you the bonuses if you're under 10, etc.

Once you figure out what Culture you're coming from (Primitive, Barbarian, Nomad and Civilized), you decide on a career, and that determines a lot of your skill percentages before you place the last 30 points wherever you like. It factors in how old your character is and how long he's been in his particular career; the skills you get from your career list multiples, and for each year your character has practiced that career, you get a number of skill points on the given skill multiplied by the listed number. For example, if your career listed Boat x1, you'd get 1 percentile on the Boat skill for every year you were a Boatman; if it said Boat x3, you'd get 3 points per year, etc. This meant that Michael was easily able to make his Rakastoi who had been a Warrior for many years, but has been an Entertainer in more recent years. The boys were able to make characters who were a Malpheggoi who had been raised by Shadow Elves and a Shadow Elf who was the son of a smith and a fire-mage, and had some of both of their skill (he called himself a "flame warrior," which I thought was pretty cool and suitably Elven). I bent the RAW here and there, but honestly, I didn't have to do much - RQ III made such allowances pretty simple.

However, this means that Michael's character - an older adult - has far better skills than the boys' characters do, since the boys both decided they wanted to be 16, and you only begin counting skill points per year after age 15. It took some effort to convince the boys that they weren't going to be failing every time they tried a skill, since their percentile ratings were so low. The game system allows the GM to set modifiers to their ratings based on conditions, and as the game clarifies, the percentile rolls are really for stress situations, anyway - like combat or serious do-or-die pressure - not everyday use. I imagine this will be bourne out in play.

Another old school artifact appears in early BRP - the Appearance stat. Some iterations of BRP replace this with Charisma or omit it entirely, but I felt like sticking with the original version to see how it played out. C's Malpheggoi, Mair'foll, got a pretty high roll for his APP, so we decided his scales were extra-shiny, and he said his character had natural feathered plumage - a detail I hadn't considered for the lizard-folk, but I really liked the notion, so I decided it was a rare trait among his kind, and probably part of the reason he was adopted by the Kaldoroi. N's Kaldoroi Shy'don, on the other hand, got an APP of 6, which N interpreted to mean he had a wild, bedraggled appearance, with an unruly mane of hair and a body so skinny that his clothes never seemed to hang quite right on him. It also gave us a reason why Mair'foll and Shy'don stuck together as they grew up - they were both social outcasts among the Shadow Elves.

All this being said, by the end of the evening, characters were completed, so we'll be able to jump right into playing when we next have the opportunity to meet. I designed my adventure so that we wouldn't have to endure the Buying Equipment phase of creation. Inspired by Elder Scrolls IV and V, the PCs will begin the scenario having been captured by Vikings, stripped of their weapons and armor, bound hand-and-foot and brought to a sea-cave to await the arrival of a slave galley.

One other mechanic I wanted to adopt for this game was that of Hero Points (or Fate Points, or Drama Points, or whatever you want to call them). As I think I mentioned in a previous post here, the boys - like my nephew and nieces when they role-played for the first time - have an overriding desire to dictate the outcome of any given imaginary situation. Getting them to remember that in an RPG they don't get to decide the outcome, but only what their characters do (or try to do), has been difficult at times. I decided that this time I would give them a mechanic by which they could do this, but under certain conditions. First, they would have a limited amount of Hero Points to spend (I arbitrarily said three to begin), which would refresh only after the end of a game session or through some coolness on their part - I was admittedly vague about what said coolness should entail, but I'd like to impress upon them the notion that sometimes in a narrative it's more interesting not to succeed or be the strongest and most impressive at all times. I also want to reward them for being, well, Heroes.

Secondly, the Hero Points can be used in a couple of ways: either to reroll the dice and take the better result of the two rolls; or to change a minor detail of the story. The boys latched on to this latter usage, of course, which prompted them to make several suggestions as to how they might escape their imprisonment, thus providing me with examples of what consituted a "minor change." C couldn't decide that the Vikings didn't notice Mair'foll had a sword in his pants, but he could decide that he had stashed his sword into a nearby barrel before the Vikings could take it from him.

Following all of this, I took the Bachelor's Night prerogative to stay up far too late playing Michael's copy of Skyrim. Delighted by his reports that your character can choose to marry an NPC, I decided to make a new character - a High Elf male - and start the game over. I was initially wary of making a magic-heavy character, as my previous experiences in Elder Scrolls magic-use was always pretty limited (I usually prefer to hack at enemies with my sword), but the combination of magic and sword turned out to be pretty fantastic. The magicka-replenishment rate for High Elves is pretty great (according to Michael), so I was going into every fight giving my foes the flamethrower-hand and then slicing and dicing as they burned. The experience reminded me why BECMI Elves are cool as a character class, though of course Skyrim is more forgiving about combining armor-use and magic. Still, it made me consider playing an Elf if I ever get the chance to join a FLAILSNAILS/Constantcon* game...

*Speaking of which, I just noticed that someone's running a GURPS 4e version of the classic Caravan to Ein Arris adventure at 9PM next Saturday. I wonder if I should try to convince Michael to join it with me...?

Skyrim, Rifts and A Few Revelations

2012-01-12T14:11:00.000-08:00

This post is really all over the map - at one point, quite literally - so please forgive my somewhat stream-of-consciousness approach. I had a bunch of different things I wanted to mention, and remembered a few more as I was typing them up. I probably should have just broke it down into separate blog posts over the next few days, but I'm far too disorganized to plan something like that. I'll leave that to the Jeff Rients of the world. Now you know why I haven't posted in months...

My friend and fellow gaming stalwart Michael received an XBox ("for the kids," ha ha) and a copy of Skyrim as Christmas presents this year. He gave me the opportunity to give it a spin, and darn skippy if it isn't a hoot. Even my wife got hooked on her first try. We've spent the last few weeks trying to come up with excuses to either go over to the Slussers or procure an XBox 360 for ourselves (sadly, neither have been possible).

My wife is off on a school-related outing to San Jose this weekend, so I have the opportunity to go hang out at Michael's house like a lazy bachelor (totally different from my usual self, the lazy married man) and sponge off of his family's hospitality and entertainment. However, I decided, this was a good opportunity to give a little something back, in the form of some gaming for Michael's sons. Namely, a Skyrim-inspired RPG session. Fortunately, he tells me the boys were quite excited about the idea, which is good because I've been obsessing over the idea ever since I played.

For the setting, instead of trying to recreate Cyrodiil or whatever the empire in The Elder Scrolls is called, I decided to go with something I'd be familiar and comfortable with, and frankly, something I've kinda been wanting to do for a while. I've taken Mystara, turned a lot of the countries into provinces of the Empire of Thyatis, and amped up the Byzantine feel while lowering the tech level a touch. I've always wanted to portray Thyatis as more medieval Greek than Imperial Roman, anyway - I'm not familiar enough with the Known World Gazeteers to know if that was the direction they were originally going or not, but having an ancient Roman-style state alongside medieval cultures always bugged me for some reason. The Byzantines, however, have fascinated me for as long as I've been aware of them.

With this in mind, I've ventured into modifying Mystara with a more liberal hand than I usually apply to personal adaptations. In the past I had an obsession with learning all of the official details about a setting and then tinkering only within those boundaries, building upon what was already there. These days...eh. I'm not getting paid to do this, so why stick with details or concepts that I don't like?

Allow me to follow this tangential concept for a moment. Michael's boys are demonstrating that they're capable of getting into more complex game systems than those we've played with in the past; they've recently started getting into GURPS 4th Edition. I mentioned to Michael that they might enjoy a game of Rifts, given their love of gonzo character combinations. As a concept, Rifts is easily as suitable a setting as the Infinite Worlds campaign for testing out all the options GURPS could handle. However, I decided early on that I had no desire to attempt direct conversions of statistics. That would be a load of work that I don't have time to take on, not to mention sounding like a dull exercise to me right now. I've never been a gearhead or a rules monkey, I'm afraid. I would just use the already-extant GURPS equivalents from the Ultra-Tech books and just wing it from there. If the Dead Boy armor didn't have all of the same features as those listed in the Rifts core rulebook, I wouldn't care and the boys would never notice. Then it dawned on me: I didn't need to keep any of the cruft that I never liked in the books. They'll never know I'm not using Worldbook 45 or taking into account the Three Galaxies setting or whatever. As they say, the game police wouldn't come over to break up my game, even if it did deface Kevin Siembieda's intellectual property.

I had already laid out a few minor changes when I happened across SirLarkins' Rifts: 2112 campaign design notes; that gave me extra encouragement to make Rifts Earth my very own without a thought to the canon. And I've been having some fun with it, even though the changes I've made have been relatively minor, probably assisted by the fact that I haven't been a Palladium fanboy since junior high and thus have missed out on pretty much everything since Coalition War Campaign (that's Worldbook 11, for those of you who care). I went through my old copies of d20 Gamma World and took some ideas from that to incorporate into my Rifts setting. So far, it's been a very amusing process.

The point of this whole tangent is this: you can be told, time and again, by everyone from Gary Gygax to Ron Edwards that This Is Your Game Now, Do With It As You Will, but it may take some time for that to really sink in. It did for me, anyway. It still feels a little revolutionary to me now, to rewrite major swathes of a published setting for my own games. It's not as though I was ever expecting someone in my gaming group to take exception (especially since we only play about three games for the most part) or someone to send me a cease-and-desist, but there was always a voice in the back of my head that said, "Well, what if someone does know the original setting, and joins your game? What are you going to do then?".

This is probably RPGs 101 for most people, so call me a late bloomer. I'll post something more about my take on the Rifts setting in another post. In case the suspense is killing you, it's not a huge deal - some of the names are changed, a lot of the stuff in the books is outright ignored, and really grokking that since the Cataclysm happened in our future instead of our present made me realize that I was free to make vast urban sprawls (now in ruins) exist where right now in the real world there is only farmland. And big Olympus-style arcologies, no less.

Okay, back to fantasy. Making The Known World into a Cyrodiil clone. I made a map, of course, to help me visualize the boundaries of the Empire of Thyatis, and their (indifferent-to-hostile) neighbors:

I'm almost certainly going to change the name of Alfheim to something more Elven-sounding, and you may note I changed Rockhome to its Dwarven-language translation. The Five Shires are now The Five Tors, since I didn't want my Hin to evoke Tolkien quite so strongly (in fact, I'm largely basing Hin culture on that of the pre-Roman Celts).

Here are some of the main features I've settled on:

Karameikos. The first Imperial province outside of Thyatis, conquered by the Warduke Karameikos and named in his honor (the original honorific I was considering was Megas Doux, which doesn't quite work for me; as much as I like Dux Bellorum, I wanted to stick with Greek-sounding titles). Though deeply loyal to the Empire, Karameikos remains a more rough-and-tumble province with plenty of opportunities for a commoner to obtain a fortune and a name for himself.

The Minrothad Guilds. I haven't read the Gazeteer on this region, but my version is essentially The Spacing Guild from Dune. These guys control all of the trade on behalf of the Empire, to prevent its nobles from becoming corrupt through the pursuit of profit (at least, that was the original intent; things have mutated a bit since then). The culture is similar to that of ancient Crete, with a mystery cult atmosphere of secrecy, blood-oaths of loyalty, secret rites and lots of hooded guys sneaking around. The people are essentially African in appearance.

The Kingdom of Ierendi. Pseudo-Hawaii is right out. The folk of Ierendi are seafarers similar to those of the Somali coasts.

The Broken Lands. Inhabited by Orcs, of course, who are more Orkworld than "Crock". They basically feel like they've been shafted by the world in general, since they may have once ruled a vast empire called Aengmor until the Elves and Dwarves brought them down. That's what they tell people, anyway, but then someone always derails the discussion with accusations of cannibalism...

The Malpheggi Swamp. Inhabited by the Malpheggoi, lizard men who are analogous to the Argonians of The Elder Scrolls. They claim to remember Aengmor, too, and point to their ruins as proof.

The Principalities of Glantri. Keeping the magocracy and the bitterly divided principalities; ditching the weird ethnic mix (the pseudo-Scots live next door to the pseudo-Spaniards? Huh?). These guys are basically medieval Russians whose distrust of each other is the only thing keeping them from sweeping across the Empire.

Darokin. No more Renaissance Italians. These guys were originally Imperials who split Thyatis when the decision came down to restrict trade to the Minrothad Guilds. They have since mellowed and rejoined the Empire thanks to their exclusive rights to trade with the non-Imperial Glantroi and Atruaghinoi. They've also been heavily influenced by the Celtic-style culture of the Hin.

Alfheim [tentative name only]. Home - more or less - to three, count 'em, three Elven subraces: the Queldanoi, who are basically the mana-addicted Blood Elves from World of Warcraft; the Asuryanoi, brown-skinned Wood Elves heavily influenced by those of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay; and the Kaldoroi, the exiled Shadow Elves who are WoW Night Elves with the serial numbers filed off, cursed with poor daylight vision due to their long centuries of subterranean dwelling. None of these guys really like each other very much, but that's okay, because nobody else likes them very much, either. That's why they agreed to chafe under Imperial rule: too many enemies.

Atruaghin Clans. Actually, this is more or less unaltered. Here's another minor tangent for you: I don't know about what other D&D players thought about the Atruaghin, so maybe I'm just a huge bigot, but I once balked at the notion of a Native American-style culture in my medieval fantasy world. Of course, this new version is more Late Roman/Dark Ages than "medieval", but you know what I mean, I hope. Anyway, a single illustration in a gamebook managed to change my mind:

A Kioga tribeswoman, from GURPS Witch World
Illustration by Larry MacDougall

Such was the power of that simple illustration (and the context in which the associated culture was presented, I guess) over me that I've been quite comfortable with the idea ever since. Maybe it's because it leans harder toward "Barbarian" than toward "Old West"? More Northeastern Woodlands tribe than Southwestern? I can't put my finger on it, exactly, but somehow it makes the notion work for me.

I also made sure to include Mystara's native Rakastas as a playable race, so I'd have an equivalent of the Khajiit. At this point they're basically the Romani of the setting, wandering the Empire and dwelling in nomadic encampments, as per their original descriptions.

There's more, but at this point a lot of stuff is kind of embryonic, and most of the other regions are, to my knowledge, relatively unaltered (aside from the greater Imperial presence thing). The first adventure will take place in the Soderfjord Jarldoms, to emulate Skyrim's Nordic setting, but fortunately, it can go anywhere we want after that.

As far as the actual game system I'm using goes, I was originally going to use Warrior, Rogue and Mage. The concept of this simple system matched up perfectly with what I was aiming for: a classless system in which any PC can fight, pick locks, cast spells, whatever. And I'd been hoping to get some use out of it for a long time. However, where it wasn't quite clicking for me was in the area of skills. WR&M is based on exploding d6s, using a roll-over-the-difficulty-rating system. You either have a skill or you don't; if you do, it adds 2 to your roll and may give you extra benefits here and there. That's cool and good and all, but not quite what I wanted for this particular game.

Instead, I decided to go with Basic RolePlaying. I've always liked BRP's method of character improvement, where every adventure in which you successfully use one of your skills, you get a chance to improve it. That fit perfectly with the Elder Scrolls system, as well as allowing anyone to use magic without worrying about character classes. It's slightly more complex than WR&M, but if the boys can handle GURPS 4e and Earthdawn, they can handle this. I've been going back and forth on which iteration of BRP to use: right now RuneQuest (the 1984 Avalon Hill edition) is in first place with Legend and some version of Magic World vying for second.

Okay, off to get lunch. More later.

Save vs. Cholesterol

2011-10-30T13:25:00.000-07:00

I am on a number of emailing lists, as I imagine most people are. One of them is a free newsletter from Spes Magna Games called Quid Novi? which features short articles on things you can use for your D&D 3.5/Pathfinder games. Recently the author suffered from a heart attack - he's okay now - but apparently this had an effect on him, which doesn't surprise me in the least. Given the generally rotten health of most gamers (including myself), heart attacks loom large on the list of likely maladies a gamer might suffer. In this case, he didn't even have any health problems, so I guess you never really know.

So, in case you had a good game use for it - maybe a spell or magic item that rapidly ages a character, or a character who has been noted as being overweight - here's the D&D stats for heart attacks, courtesy of Mark Chance of Spes Magna Games:

Awful Afflictions - "My myocardium is infarcting!"
Shortness of breath. Shooting pains. Tightness in the chest. A cold sweat and clammy skin.
Heart Attack
Type disease; Save Fort DC 20
Onset 1 day; Frequency special (see description)
Effect 1d4 Str and 1d4 Con plus fatigue (see description); Cure 2 saves
Description A heart attack often strikes without warning. It causes loss of strength and health, and the victim is easily fatigued. Even though a heart attack can be treated via Heal as if it were a disease, it inflicts damage quickly. A new Fort save must be made every minute. The fatigue effect remains until all ability damage is healed. For a more severe heart attack, raise the damage to 1d6 or 1d8 of Str and Con damage and increase the fatigue to exhausted.

2011-10-13T21:40:00.000-07:00

While idly paging through some of my old PDF copies of Dragon Magazine, I was reminded of the strange variety of articles that used to be printed there. It was far less of a TSR company organ in the earlier days of its run, and for a long time I remember enjoying the issues that I bought or somehow inherited (thanks, Adam!) because of the articles about games other than AD&D.

Anyway, I happened across this old relic and thought I'd share it here, as a reminder of the magazine's early eclecticism (if that actually is a word); from Dragon #44, December 1980:

C. S. Lewis's
REEPICHEEP

7th-level Fighter
ALIGNMENT: Lawful Good
HIT POINTS: 67
ARMOR CLASS: 3
NO. OF ATTACKS: 3/2
DAMAGE/ATTACK: 1-6 (+3)
HIT BONUS: +1
MOVE: 9"
PSIONIC ABILITY: Nil
STRENGTH: 18/01
INTELLIGENCE: 12
WISDOM: 9
DEXTERITY: 18/52
CONSTITUTION: 18/37
CHARISMA: 15

Reepicheep is a halfling-sized, intelligent mouse who walks erect on his hind legs. His fur is dark, nearly black. A thin band of gold passes around his head and under one ear. A long crimson feather sticks out of the gold band. He sometimes wears a long red cloak and is never without his rapier slung from his leather belt. The effect of all this finery is bold and striking.

Reepicheep is the most valiant of all the Talking Beasts of Narnia and Chief Mouse of the realm. He is a courtier and a warrior, companion to Prince Caspian of Narnia, and a hero who won undying glory in the second Battle of Beruna.

Reepicheep is the epitome of a gracious cavalier. His manners are extremely courteous and he retains his nonchalance under even the most dangerous circumstances. Reepicheep does not take kindly to insults or fancied insults and he is likely to challenge the offending party to a duel of honor. If the invitation to a duel is not accepted, he will belabor the offending party with the flat of his sword to teach the miscreant a lesson in manners. Reepicheep is extremely touchy about his short height.

Reepicheep abhors bullies, cowards and villains in general. His reaction to evil is similar to that of a paladin. He also hates unfair fights, and, all other things being equal, he will always side with the underdog.

When Reepicheep was a baby mouse in his cradle, a dryad woman spoke this verse over him:

"Where sky and water meet,
Where the waves grow sweet,
Doubt not Reepicheep
To find all you seek,
There in the utter East."

As Reepicheep says: "I do not know what it means. But the spell of it has been on me all my life." Because of the ambiguous prophecy, or perhaps merely from wanderlust, Reepicheep constantly wanders in search of adventure. Usually he journeys eastward, but wherever he travels he upholds his honor in battle, befriends the needy, and defends the helpless.

Written by Tom Moldvay

Another thing I always remembered about old AD&D material was how ridiculously inflated the ability scores were for characters adapted from fiction. Reepicheep has 18/01 Strength?! And check it out: Dex 18/52 and Con 18/37. I've never seen any ability score aside from Strength go into 18+ percentiles, but Reep's got two. I mean, I know he's cool and all, but I have to question the reasoning behind these stats.

So not only could you have Reep show up in one of your games to spank down your uppity PCs, but with this issue of Dragon you can also settle the age-old locker room question: Who would win in a fight - Reepicheep or Professor Challenger? (Clue: He's a 16th-level Fighter with "special Sage abilities" and a Strength of 18/90.)

The Un-Men

2011-09-24T23:04:00.000-07:00

Ever read GURPS Fantasy II: The Mad Lands? Me, neither. I mean, I skimmed it once or twice when I saw it in the game store years ago, but it never grabbed me enough to buy it. Don't get me wrong, it could be pretty awesome, but I didn't have the opportunity to find out.

One cool idea I remember from the setting, though, was the way monsters were conceived. I don't mean in the "dim lighting and lots of booze" sort of way, but all of the monsters that I remember being mentioned were once Men that had been cursed by the gods, which as you might have gathered from the book's title, were crazy. And not just because they dropped Coke bottles from the sky.

My hazy memory tells me that each breed of monster was monstrous because the gods had stolen something from them that made them human. So these Men-driven-mad wandered the highly-dangerous wilderlands outside of the villages in a very much "Points of Light" kind of way, and each one had different behaviors and [twisted] desires that drove them. All of them, the shamans said, were murderously jealous of Men...

Bearing that in mind, I jotted down a list of monsters like this, just to see what I could come up with:

The Skinless
The Eyeless
The Voiceless
The Breathless
The Legless
The Hairless
The Armless
The Legless
The Boneless
The Mindless
The Heartless

Obviously, some of them are more Fiend Folio 1e-worthy than others, but some of them, I think, have some creepy possibilities. A lot of them struck me as horrors from "Silent Hill," all mottled skin and flesh-masked stumbly freaks. If you go beyond the obvious handicap of a missing body part and read it as more metaphorical, you can end up with some pretty unpleasant terrors.

Underground Shrine Map

2011-09-08T22:27:00.000-07:00

While trying to work out some tech-related frustrations (Photoshop + Wacom tablet does not always do what I will it to), I spent a little time today doodling by hand. Inspired by Dyson of A Character For Every Game, I drew a dungeon map on an index card, making it up as I went. Mostly I did it because I wanted to mimic his crosshatching style, which, for whatever reason, seems to give his maps an extra visual punch that I really like. I was using a .5mm rolling ball pen on a single index card instead of a .7mm gel pen in a moleskin like he uses, so it doesn't have the same smooth, dark quality his maps have. I prefer .5 for pretty much everything else, so I may have to snag a .7 somewhere just for this purpose, and draw on top of a few layers of paper.

This reminded me of another artist's game maps that I've attempted to emulate in the past to mixed results. In the WFRP 1st Edition book Death's Dark Shadow, Ian Cooke had a cool way of representing forests in his maps. Here's a snippet from one of them:

I started doodling another map, using a technique similar to this to represent the earth and stone areas outside the dungeon walls. I'll have to scan it and post it here when I finish, since I think the concept I eventually emerged with was kind of fun. It's not done yet, though, so it'll have to wait until next time.

Anyway, regarding this map: as I drew it out, it seemed to me that it was probably an underground shrine, either someplace that had been built on top of by folks who weren't too particular about preserving it, or perhaps deliberately hidden from surface detection by the worshipers who frequented it. As you can see from the old map symbols (at least, the ones included in Mentzer Red Box Basic D&D), the entrance is through a trap door in the ceiling of the domed shrine; presumably one uses a rope ladder or some similar contrivance to descend into it.

One alternate possibility is that the chamber is entered via a magical mirror held by one of the statues in the alcoves there...

What is that rough-hewn secret chamber for? Was that created by someone other than the shrine's architects?

What caused the doorway to cave in? What was originally behind that door?

What's the deal with the well that features a submerged [further] subterranean passage to the pool in the secret chamber? Is it some sort of trick where a con-man puts on a costume of some sort (kept in the chests), swims through the passage and emerges from the well into a dimly-lit chamber filled with hallucinogenic incense? Is that part of the initiation of acolytes? Or is it an escape route, should the shrine be invaded by the authorities? Or is the passage sloped so that coin offerings dropped into the well end up in the pool, to be collected by the priest later and gathered up into the chests?

I dunno - you figure it out.

HeroMachine 3

2011-04-08T13:01:00.000-07:00

While trying to figure out some character designs, I went through my bookmarks to call up the old HeroMachine 2.5 website, hoping to stir a bit of creativity and help me flesh some character design ideas I've been developing.

Lo and behold, there is a Version 3 Alpha of the HeroMachine, and having created a character or four with it, I can confidently proclaim that verily, it rocketh. The improvements they've made on it are fantastic, allowing me to do a lot of things that the previous version didn't. The end result is not only a HeroMachine that has more options than before, but one which allows me to better manipulate what I put up on the screen.

Check it out here.

Six (Well, Seven) Angry Men

2011-04-03T15:13:00.000-07:00

I finally got around to finishing the last drawing of the WWI soldiers from No Man's Land. In case you're interested, or ever feel like running the adventure yourself and don't like the original illustrations, feel free to use these. Looking over the descriptions in the character sheets again, I'm thinking Grimm should look uglier and Mason should be thinner, but oh, well. My drawings are closer than the original illustrations...

You'd have to settle for one of the pre-gens being in a different outfit, though:

Call of Cthulhu: The Great War

2011-03-30T14:54:00.000-07:00

Partially at the insistence of Mr. Slusser (and partly due to my sentiment that I've been waiting until his children were old enough that they could entertain themselves so we could play a horror RPG again as we did Back In The Day), I've started to run a Call of Cthulhu play-by-post game. The aforementioned Mr. Slusser has quite familiarized himself with Lovecraft's work recently, and for the longest time I've wanted to attempt to run a full CoC campaign. Whether this is a lofty or misguided desire remains to be seen, considering the infamous mortality rate of CoC Investigators, but I've long has a document on my hard drive putting published and amateur CoC adventures I own into chronological order. I've also got notes on their respective geographical locations and people/circumstances that said scenarios use to hook the PCs with. CoC scenarios are also well-known for MacGuffins like "You have a distant uncle who..." or "An old school chum writes..." so I thought it would be a good idea, were I to run a campaign, to have a listing of them all in order to more easily fit them into his character's background.

The other thing I've long wanted to do is begin the campaign with what must have been an event looming large (psychologically, if nothing else) in many 1920s Investigators' backgrounds: World War I. I long ago purchased the tournament scenario No Man's Land, which takes place in the Ardennes Forest in 1918. As it happens, I tried to run it - suggested props and all - for Slusser's bachelor party. We only got about a third of the way through the scenario, and because I insisted on keeping the windows open to let in the cold (as the scenario also suggests), he ended up with a sore throat. But I think we had some fun.

...and yes, I am a huge nerd, thank you for asking. I had the silly notion that a night of gaming with the groomsmen would be more representative of our bachelorhood than a night of uncomfortably avoiding each others' eyes as a San Bernardino stripper offered lapdances in a voice ragged from nicotine, with a grand finale of drunken vomiting in the parking lot at 3am.

Anyway. Despite the scenario's faults (and there are a few), I thought No Man's Land would be a great introduction to a campaign. So now I'm getting my chance. He's also agreed to use one of the pre-gen characters from the scenario, which I've tweaked in spots to better accommodate the aforementioned scenario hooks, relatives, etc. Since one of NML's more glaring faults is, ahem, the artwork (which, apologies to the artist, is the worst illustrative work I've ever seen in any RPG product), I've taken the liberty of re-drawing the characters. That part has also proven to be lots of fun for me.

We talked about possible methods to play this game. Since Skype's been totally unreliable lately (delivering messages hours after they were posted, not informing each other when we're both online, etc.) and using it would require some schedule juggling, we opted for play-by-post. Despite using some fine sites for gaming in the past (Roleplay Online, Rondak's Portal), we thought that Google Docs would work well enough.

We've only just begun, but so far it's done a nice job. The newest iteration allows you to post comments in Post-It Note format off the right side of the document, highlighting the part of the text you're specifically commenting on. So I have text and pictures/illustrations either posted in the body of the text or linked to from these Comments. I can also post requests for dice rolls and rules discussions there. And, of course, when you share a document with your player(s), it lets you know when someone's updated the document (that is, posted their turn) by boldfacing the doc title on your Google Docs main page (it can also send you an email).

Where Google Docs is currently failing me is in regards to posting images. It used to allow you to wrap the text around your images, like one usually sees in books. However, in the latest version, this feature seems to have been removed for the most part. Now the picture you want to post has to sit on one line of text, meaning big, gaping blank spots. I don't understand how anyone at Google would think this was an improvement.

So now we're off, beginning in a foxhole on the Western Front in early October, 1918. We'll see how far our burgeoning Investigator gets!

Quick Post

2011-03-23T17:57:00.000-07:00

Just a brief few words for right now. I'm about to drive back home for the evening, but the weather forecast looks pretty bleak for the rest of the week: snow, snow, and in case we didn't get the memo, snow.

The last few times it's snowed, our power has gone out (so if you don't see any new posts from me in the next day or two, you'll know it's because I'm cut off from the rest of the planet). My wife's grumbling aside, I've always enjoyed our power outages. Yeah, it sucks not to be able to go online or use my computer for longer than an hour before the battery dies, but I always enjoyed doing stuff by candlelight. Also, everyone comes into the living room to gather around the fireplace as the rest of the house gets cold, so it's a perfect excuse to, you know, interact with each other. And play games.

Nothing reminds me of Old School gaming like power outages, because they force me to remember what I used to spend my time doing before we had computers more advanced than a Commodore 64 and consoles better than an Atari 2600. And as much as I love my computer, the internet, and all the goodies those two combined give me as a gamer, there's nothing to compare with the feeling of writing up an adventure or drawing up a dungeon on graph paper by candlelight. That's some straight-up nostalgia there.

This time, we're going to be ready for the inevitable blackouts. My wife and I are stopping at Target on the way home to pick up a new edition of Trivial Pursuit. We played our old copy with my parents last blackout, and as it turns out none of us remember 1981 with much degree of clarity. This might surprise you to learn, but things that were considered trivial in '81 only become more trivial after three decades. Sadly, a cursory Bing search shows that Hasbro doesn't make the cards-only specialty sets for Trivial Pursuit any more, so we're going to have to buy the full game again if we want new questions. Oh, well - hopefully that'll set us up until 2041.

Wyzards - 1st Session Report

2011-03-13T20:50:00.000-07:00

I ran my first session of Wyzards for the boys last night, and they seemed to have a good time. We started a bit late for a variety of reasons, which is par for the course in my experience. Best the boys get used to that now. They had already been giving some thought to what characters they wanted to play. N created Kodo Sanslasher, Brass Mage, and C created Slando Klindoran, Red Mage. They seemed to enjoy describing details about their characters' personalities, appearance and assorted quirks, though there was some initial disappointment that I wasn't allowing anyone to play a werewolf or a wolf beastman (which had been the plan for the original game I was going to run, in a different gameworld). I explained a bit of background about the Order of the Ivory Citadel - having pictures helped immensely, as I suspected it would - but once again I was reminded of the fact that, while the boys may have been more interested in the background information than I believe my sister's kids would have been, it's still tough to get across all of the information I'm used to trying to convey. And the fact of the matter is, it's better to convey those details through gameplay rather than giving an infodump before anyone gets to do anything. I need to bear that in mind for future games, and not just the ones I run for the kids.

Anyway, once stats were rolled up (3d6, assigned by choice) and important details written down, we finally got underway. Our 1st-level Magi began a brief adventure within the walls of the Ivory Citadel, being fetched by a Green Robe apprentice they knew - named Sarai - who breathlessly asked them for help. She and her friend Ardil had been exploring the Lower Catacombs of the Citadel, a place clearly marked as off-limits, when the floor gave way and Ardil fell into a chamber beneath. The boys dutifully ran off to help. Dad created a Boggart character (more about this in my next post), but had to put his daughter to bed so he didn't play for long. After some time spent running up and down the massive Spiraling Stair (which I decided on the spur of the moment was the central connecting structure of the Citadel), visiting the laboratories and workshops of their respective masters, the Magi hammered an iron rod into the floor, tied a rope around it, and descended into the pitch-dark tunnels beneath. Finding that Ardil was nowhere to be seen, they explored further into the darkness. They spotted kobolds, avoided confronting any of them, and then discovered a giant fungal forest, lit by luminescent growths. By the end of the session, they had found that the missing apprentice had been somehow abducted by mushroom men (Myconids), who had him in some kind of hypnotic trance. Through use of their magic and stealth, they freed Ardil from his trance, but the myconids released spores of alarm, and bats began to descend from the darkness between the stalactites. "...And that's where we'll stop for tonight!"

The boys were eager to use their spells, of course, and there were many moments where they thought to use spells to aid them only to discover that their spells didn't quite work the way they were hoping. For example, N wanted to use his message spell to tell Ardil they were looking for him, but unfortunately this would have required them to know where Ardil was. But N used his magic creatively and often; the next big challenge for him is going to be when he runs out of Mana Points in the next session, as he'd spent over half by this session's end. I don't recall whether C cast any spells at all this session, and for a guy playing what was basically a combat mage, he was always the first to suggest turning back and avoiding trouble. But perhaps it might make sense for a combat mage to realize the best way to win a fight is not to get in one at all...?

Two things cropped up that I wanted to note here because I've encountered them in all of the games I've run for kids.

First, the boys have a tendency to describe not only what their character does, but what happens after that. They've been made aware of the distinction between the role of Player and the role of GM, but they still slip every now and then and begin narrating results. This was something that my sister's kids did, too, and I had to keep reminding them that this wasn't how the game was played. There's a little indy gamer voice in the back of my head that tells me I shouldn't come down too hard on that desire, and to be honest I've tried to remain open-minded about that sort of thing. Once or twice I've taken some narration that they "suggested" and said, "Yeah, in fact, that's exactly what happens." But as Mr. Slusser pointed out to me a while ago, the boys are used to just narrating themselves out of story complications, and so playing in the traditional RPG mode should give them a bit of problem-solving discipline.

The other thing that came up - more with the Slusser boys than my sister's kids, though I've encountered it with other children as well - was a desire to roll on a stat for the sake of rolling on a stat, rather than just doing so when the GM called for it. I think what was happening was that, because I had called for them to make stat-based rolls in order to accomplish certain tasks, they got it into their heads that the key to dealing with failure was simply to roll again and hope for a better result, as opposed to trying something different. I don't mean that they weren't willing to try something more than once; I mean that they were slipping into metagame thinking, right down to the terms they used in describing what their characters would do: "I'm going to Dex-roll to get across the forest of mushrooms." Perhaps if I were to resort to die-rolling less often, it would encourage them to think in problem-solving terms? Yet everybody likes rolling dice, and I don't think I'm being excessive about it. I'm not certain, but it's a tendency I am curious about.

Mana Points

2011-03-09T09:40:00.000-08:00

I've had some thoughts about magic in my Microlite20 games, especially in light of the Wyzards setting I came up with.

As written, M20 uses a spell point system of sorts. It allows Mages access to all the spells in their level, but levies a point cost on every spell cast, to be subtracted from the Mage's Hit Points. I see how that can work conceptually, especially if you view Hit Points as a narrative abstraction - casting spells makes the Mage weaker, and if you cast enough spells he'll be utterly spent, falling unconscious. It reminds me a bit of hermetic magic in Shadowrun, where mages channel spell energy from the Astral Plane into the material plane by shooting it through their central nervous systems, an act which often results in physical trauma or Drain.

However, I can't say that I've ever been crazy about that rule in M20. Yes, it offers a limit to how many spells a Mage can cast in an encounter, but... I'm not sure. Something about it rubs me the wrong way, and I'm having a difficult time putting my finger on what it is.

So instead, when I ran M20 for my sister's kids, I introduced the concept of Mana Points, drawing from GURPS Magic and World of Warcraft. It's a spell-point system in which you have a number of Mana Points equal to your Hit Points, though they're tallied separately from HP. Thus, you can expend your personal reservoir of magical energy but still be on your feet and able to fight or run as the situation demands.

It's possible that this introduces a game-imbalancing element. I'm not really mechanics-savvy enough to know, personally, though right now I can recall reading an early interview with Gary Gygax in which he expressed his dislike of spell point mechanics for precisely that reason. Having said that, this doesn't bother me overmuch. My players generally care far more about character concept over mechanical advantage, so if they have a Fighter character in mind, that's what they're going to play, regardless of whether a Cleric might perform better, for example.

Continuing with the concept of Mana Points, I thought that my Wyzards setting, with its emphasis on Mage characters, could benefit from a few more options.

Mana Points are primarily recovered through rest. In the world of Wyzards, there are other methods by which one can acquire MP.

Drawing inspiration from WFRP, GURPS and Ars Magica, and supplements like Ronin Arts' 101 Arcane Spell Components Revised, here are some of the possibilities I came up with:

Mana Regions. Certain areas "generate" more mana than others; in in-game terms, they are magical places: secluded waterfalls, ancient standing stones, deep dark forest groves, etc. A Mage can draw mana from these places to fuel his spells. Some regions are aspected toward one particular college of magic or purpose - a mouldering graveyard under the light of the full moon might offer mana only for Necromancy spells. The site of a historic siege might yield mana for Abjuration spells.

Material Components. I've always liked the idea of material components, though I've never actually run a game in which I forced a player to keep track of such things. This option adds it as a possibility that a player might want to take advantage of, since it would improve his character's spellcasting ability. Like mana regions, certain items and artifacts attract mana to themselves, which can be withdrawn by a Mage. They might operate much like mana regions, with aspected mana and so on, but it might be more fun to add some other effects, like increasing spell duration or range, or just snazzy special effects. Like material components in AD&D, the items might be consumed in the casting. I'll probably decide that on a case-by-case basis.

Unraveling. Mages might be able to draw mana out of their own souls, doing damage to themselves in the process. This is kind of a last-ditch effort to get mana, for use in those times when you're down to 0 MP and something's about to cave in your skull. It would cause Hit Point loss as per M20 RAW, but to make it more interesting it might also cause other problems, such as troubling dreams, a weakening of the constitution or will, an increased susceptibility to enchantment or possession, or something else.

In regards to spell choice, since I'm going with an organization that stresses the different Colleges of magic, I think I'm going to need a greater selection of spells to begin the game with. I want to be sure that someone who specializes in, say, Abjuration, doesn't end up shortchanged compared to a Necromancer or Evoker. I've certainly got enough supplements to find the spells necessary to fill that need, so I doubt that will be a problem. In M20, Mages can cast any spell of a level equal to or below 1/2 their class level, rounded up. The RAW specifies that just because a Mage can cast any spell, it doesn't mean he should, and I embrace that philosophy. I want a Mage's spells to reflect his College/Order of choice, just as I would want a Cleric's spells (prayers, miracles, whatever - I've never liked the terms "cleric spells" or "divine magic") to be appropriate for their patron deity. So adding to the list of available spells should assist me in accomplishing this.

I decided in my last M20 game that Mages would begin the game with a repertoire of spells equal to half their Mind score, and I think I'll stick with that. Magi of the Ivory Citadel always begin with arcane mark, detect magic and read magic; the rest of the spells are up to the player. However, for the purposes of running this game for Slusser's sons, I think I'll choose their spells for them ahead of time. This time around, I'd like to get the game started as soon as possible, and I know they could easily get bogged down in spell selection. There'll also be the temptation for the boys to select the same spells as each other - which admittedly may be less of a possibility in a Wyzards game than it would have been in the straight M20 game I ran for my sister's kids - so I want to be sure that each character will have their own specialties and "signature" spells to make them feel unique and complimentary to each other. Maybe next time I'll let them look over the spell lists and choose their own.

One of the things I'm looking forward to doing with this game is inspiring the PCs to look for spellbooks and lost lore in order to obtain new spells. I've always liked that idea, but again, I've never really been in the position to introduce that into a game.

I'm considering one last change to the M20 rules, which I did with my nephew and nieces. Instead of the three attributes Strength, Dexterity and Mind, I think I'd like to have the full six attributes of regular D&D. Part of the reason is that I like the granularity (if that's the right word) that mechanically represents a more varied range of personalities and traits. The other part of the reason is that I remember RPGs - AD&D especially, with its Gygaxian prose - being responsible for increasing my vocabulary. I'd like to encourage the kids to learn words like "Constitution", "Dexterity" and "Charisma".

I'm also going to stick with the Old School Style rules, eschewing Skills for Primary/Secondary/Minor skill rolls, based on the descriptions of the characters' interests, hobbies and specializations. This should encourage the boys to think more about their characters' identities and personalities (which has never really been a problem for them, in my experience) and further avoid the homogeneity that could arise from both of them playing Mages.

Wyzards

2011-03-06T22:47:00.000-08:00

My friend's sons have been getting into the Harry Potter books.

We had a snowstorm last weekend that knocked out our power for a few days. My sister's kids (ages 9, 9 and 6) came over and I ran a Microlite20 Old School Style game for them (though I just called it "Dungeons & Dragons" and felt quite good doing so), which we all enjoyed. Well, I enjoyed it up until they started getting goofy and sabotaging each other's attempts to escape a cell they'd been imprisoned in. But we'd been playing for about four hours by then, which is a pretty long time to get a 9 year-old to focus on one activity aside from watching TV or playing video games, it seems to me, so I count the experience as positive overall.

Anyway, having had this experience, I've been in the mood to run the game for my friend's sons. We've roleplayed before - Teenagers From Outer Space and Earthdawn - though I don't think I've actually run a game for them yet. When Cataclysm came out for WoW, they got excited about the idea of playing Worgen characters. They've also been interested in our fantasy LARP, which includes animal-based Beastmen, so it made sense to me to run a game for them set in Xaria, the setting of our LARP. That way, they could become more familiar with the setting and thus be groomed for the day when they're ready to start as LARP players*, and they would also have an in-game excuse for being anthropomorphic wolves.

Anyway, back to whatever this has to do with Harry Potter.

While I was toying with the idea of running said D&D game for the boys, I was made aware of their recent interest in the Potterverse and so I began to think about a fantasy setting in which the primary focus was an order of Wizards.

I liked the idea of different Houses, each with its own character, history, philosophy and so on. I looked at a variety of games and settings that include this concept: Redhurst Academy of Magic, Ars Magica's Order of Hermes, WFRP's Imperial Colleges of Magic, to mention the ones that influenced me the most.

(I also looked at GURPS Witch World's color-based colleges of magic, but in the end I concluded that I specifically wanted a D&D world, and so the division that made the most sense was along the lines of D&D magical schools. This is not the time to go fiddling with the D&D magic system...)

I went back to The Complete Wizard's Handbook for 2nd Edition AD&D, and began scouring that book for its suggestions of what the personality types of different specialist Mages would be like. I incorporated those ideas into the ones I'd already started developing based on my own preconceived notions and the inspirations I'd gotten from WFRP and Ars Magica. A couple of the names, like Aegis and Mordant, are straight from Redhurst.

I'm not 100% happy with it yet (for example, Volkheart sounds too close to Voldemort for my liking), and I haven't decided anything about the world in which this order would be set, whether I would use something pre-made, modify an existing setting I already have, or make something out of whole cloth, etc. The cosmology so far is heavily cribbed from Witch World, with its palpable presence of Light and Shadow (I'll probably include Quan Iron, as well, just because I've always liked the idea), but still requiring a few other details to flesh out. Something else I need to consider is whether this means that the vast majority of Wyzards are specialist mages, and mages which draw from all of the colleges of magic are rare prodigies?

Granted, it's not necessary to come up with everything right now, and if I were to run this for my friend's sons, I don't know how much the boys would even be interested in that kind of background stuff. I feel like those details would certainly have been lost on my sister's kids, who played characters like "Merlin, Jr." and "Harry Potter the Girl" (yes, that was what Niece #2 named her character. I'll have to make a post in the future about that game session). But it does make me happy to create it.

Also, as I was working on this stuff, I happened across this analysis of alignment in the Potterverse written by Sandy Antunes, and came to realize how well it works. As much as I like the ninefold alignment system of AD&D-3.5e, I have to admit this four-fold system intrigues me, and meshes nicely with the Four Humours...

Nonetheless, here are the results of my brainstorming, for your perusal:

WYZARDS

Wyzards is a D&D game world centered around the exploits of the Magi of the Ivory Citadel and their fight against their ancient enemies, the Shadow-Brethren of the Eldritch Oath.

The Magi of the Ivory Citadel is an ancient order of wizards devoted to protecting the land from all manner of non-political dangers. It was formed ages ago by a council of independent wizards who believed that magic was too volatile and dangerous to be learned without being accompanied by a guiding philosophy. And so these founders - the original White Magi, the Archmagi of the White Robes - created the eight Colleges of Magic, though each College came to be associated with their names. The Magi wear different colors to signify their House affiliation, though individual fashion choices vary widely between idiosyncratic and eccentric wizards. The one color they do not wear, however, is black; black signifies the Shadow. House Mordant once wore black robes, but after a great betrayal rent the order, they renounced them forever, wearing humble brown robes instead.

The Magi of the Ivory Citadel
The Magi are a collection of Orders - sometimes called Houses - governed by the Archmagi of the White Robes. Each Order is represented by an Archmage of that house; when one retires or dies, the other Archmagi elect the most appropriate member of the old Archmage’s Order to replace him.

Each Order is named for its original founding member.

The Amaranthine Order of Aegis
Also known as the Violet Robes, House Aegis specializes in Abjuration, protective magic. They are responsible for the protective magics that shroud the Ivory Citadel. Violet Magi think of themselves as protectors, with a heroic mindset but an unfortunate tendency to try to control others "for the greater good." On the whole they are thoughtful, orderly, gentle and soft-spoken, going out of their way not to attract attention. They care a great deal about family, compassion and selflessness.

The Xanthous Order of Fabricae
The Golden Robes specialize in Conjuration. They are often the mouthpiece of the Order to the outside world, assisting in travel, carrying messages to far-off places and acting as ambassadors to the nobility. They tend toward arrogance and smugness, but are also confident, courageous and bright. They show a definite tendency toward laziness as they grow further along in their studies - anything worth doing can be accomplished through the use of summoned creatures and teleportation.

The Cerulean Order of Oculus
The Blue Robes specialize in Divination. They are quite knowledgeable in many lores, cautious and deliberate in their actions, and strikingly insightful into the workings of men's minds. As a result, House Oculus is best known for its Inquisitors, who police the Ivory Citadel for wrongdoers. Perhaps the wisest of all wizards, Blue Magi are loners at heart who do not make close friends easily, and many have succumbed to cynicism and distrust due to the things their divinations have revealed about the nature of men. But all are respected for their ability to see what is yet to come.

The Verdant Order of Ynamor
The Green Robes specialize in Enchantment. Ynamor was an Elf, and his legacy lives on in the Verdant Order, which maintains close ties to the mysterious realm of the Fey. The Green Magi tend to be charismatic, physically attractive people; sensitive, passionate and caring, but given to romanticism that easily leads to hedonistic tendencies. They believe in the sanctity of life and nature. They are commonly one of the voices of reason in the Order. They also share ambassadorial duties with the Gold Magi.

The Crimson Order of Volkheart
Also known as the Red Robes, House Volkheart specializes in Evocation. The Crimson Order produces many powerful magi, the most respected of which are the battlemages known as the Knights of the Staff, or the Wizards Militant. They are serious-minded, intense and determined wizards, but are often overeager to prove themselves in combat. They are natural leaders, fearless and authoritative; however, in terms of personality they tend to be introspective and emotionally distant.

The Mazarine Order of Chimaeron
The Indigo Robes specialize in Illusion. They are known for two things: their extensive spy networks and their boisterous parties. They tend to be flamboyant and outgoing, remarkably creative and well-versed in the arts. Though possessed of sharp minds, they are not particularly deep thinkers; pragmatists by nature, believing in little but the impermanence of all things.

The Umber Order of Mordant
Also known as the Brown Robes, Mordant Magi are Necromancers. They are often misunderstood and blamed for evildoing and corruption even within the Ivory Citadel. In truth, they know better than anyone the dangers that the Shadow poses, as they are tempted by it daily but also see its pitfalls firsthand. They have a spirit of competition which leads them to seek out conflict, much like the Red Magi, but their pride has been laid low in the past. They fight against the Shadow-Brethren with greater zeal than any other Order.

The Ocherous Order of Thauvissus
Traditionally House Thauvissus has been named for their Saffron Robes, but in recent generations they have tended more and more toward the wearing of Brass, taking on a steampunk appearance. They specialize in Transmutation, and are typically curious, sharp-minded and deeply analytical. They are natural tinkerers, more interested in objects than people. The Brass Mages are alchemists and inventors without peer, obsessive collectors and clear thinkers, but they do not much care for discussions of morality and ethics, seeing such things as entirely dependent upon existing conditions which are seldom permanent.

The Shadow-Brethren of the Eldritch Oath

The Shadow-Brethren, also known as the Shadow-sworn, are the dark reflection of the Magi of the Ivory Citadel. They exist in opposition to the philosophies of the Magi, seeing them as tyrants, meddlers and misguided fools. Though they are often scattered across the known lands, forming cells, cults, covens and coteries to avoid detection and infiltration, they generally operate with a loose hierarchy, as they all serve the Twilight Court of Shadow.

The Eldritch Oath to which their full title refers is an ancient dark pact that each member of the Brethren has taken. They have pledged to serve the Twilight Court, the Shadow Masters, demons and devils who inhabit the realm of Shadow and long to cover the world in darkness. The Shadow-Brethren are their eyes, mouths and hands, always doing their bidding even when they believe themselves to be acting of their own volition.

The Shadow-Brethren often possess personality traits that are the skewed, sinful versions of their Ivory Citadel opponents (something akin to Antitribu from Vampire: The Masquerade - as I understand it).

*It should be noted that they have actually participated in our LARP, but only as NPCs.

Go Play OSR!

2011-03-04T15:51:00.000-08:00

Yeah, it's been over a year since I posted here. That's not because I haven't been gaming, I'm pleased to say, but blogging has taken a backseat to living life.

That's the excuse I'm going with, anyway.

The truth of the matter is that when I first began blogging years ago, I did so because I had moved across the country from my friends and family in order to attend art school, and blogging was a pleasant way to let them know what was going on in my life. Since I've graduated and returned to my home state, I haven't felt as much need to type lengthy descriptions of my day-to-day life. With Facebook and Twitter, I feel even less of a need to devote time to such efforts.

But the nice thing about having a game blog is that it gives me a place to put my thoughts where others might see them. Yeah, sure, part of it is sheer vanity - every gamer has a desire to share the fruits of their creativity with others and receive some kind of recognition for being the innovative genius they always thought they were. But also, quite sincerely, I don't know if I'll ever use a lot of the ideas I get, so hopefully by putting them out here in the ether, someone will find them and get some use out of them even if I don't.

Anyway, back to the look of things. Blogger has made some nice changes since the last time I was here, so I've cobbled together a new banner which is probably too big and doesn't show any gaming paraphernalia. I've changed the body font to something with serifs and the title fonts to some pleasantly Warhammer-ish typefaces. I'll probably get around to updating my links before long.

One other new thing is the "Freak Flags" I've hung up in the top right corner. The one on the right is an older one: it's the "Go Play" logo, which identifies me as a roleplaying gamer, inside an icthyus symbol, identifying me as a Christian. The basic philosophy of Go Play (which is discussed at some length here; the last post on page 8 is a fine summary) is essentially this: games were meant for playing, so go play them! It's not meant as a slam on those who are discussing their favorite games, or those who are prevented from playing due to their circumstances, but rather it's a light-hearted reminder of what we were meant to do with these things. It's also a kick in my own pants to remind me not to get caught up in the potentially endless process of game prep, the irrational "stage fright"-like fear of pre-game jitters, and other mental traps. No game will be perfect, and the games in which I have to improvise usually end up being the more fun and exciting ones. So go play!

The symbol on the left is much newer, and might require a bit of unpacking. OSR means Old School Renaissance or Old School Rules (or a dozen other terms); Bing it and you'll find a slew of blogs written by people who are playing older editions of Dungeons & Dragons, as well as a lot of other "old school" games, like Runequest and Classic Traveller. Recently a discussion began within these circles, spearheaded by the likes of Dr. Rotwang!, Jeff Rients, Thomas Denmark and others, in which the future of the Dungeons & Dragons brand is considered an entirely separate, unconnected entity to the game itself. WotC can do what they like with the brand, but what we're playing - be it the original white box D&D, BECMI, AD&D 1st or 2nd Edition, or even 3e/3.5 - is no less "Dungeons & Dragons" than the edition currently in print.

I happen to agree with the sentiments in this discussion. As I discussed to some small degree in an earlier post, I didn't buy 4e when it came out, and I'm still not really interested in it. When WotC abruptly ceased selling older edition material in PDF format, it really felt like they were telling us they weren't interested in our money any longer. As others have stated, it felt like they fired us as customers. I'm not saying this to stir rancor with newer players or people who have made the jump to 4e and have never looked back. I'm totally uninterested in Edition Wars. If you enjoy playing 4th edition, awesome - more power to you.

Like the Go Play symbol, the OSR logo isn't meant to be a slam against those who play and enjoy 4th Edition D&D, or any edition that may come after it. Instead, as Thomas Demnark outlined, it's meant to represent that:

1. The product is compatible with the original white box (or wood-grain box) edition of the worlds first and most famous fantasy RPG.

2. That's it.

As he explained in the comments section on that thread,

I see it as a group of people still passionate about the game they fell in love with as a kid. The only unifying factor being that it all sprouted from that little white box published in '74.

The symbol was originally created by Chad Thorson, who generously suggested that anyone who wanted to use it or modify it was free to do so. The version I have here is one I modified to my liking, with a parchment background and some graph paper within the letters OSR to represent the dungeon-crawling, mapping, graphic roots iconic to Old School gaming.

My posting it on this blog basically means I prefer to play older editions of Dungeons & Dragons, as well as being interested in other out-of-print games. The material I post here may be for any number of game systems, though admittedly the majority of what I post will be system-agnostic. I'm not really a crunch-and-mechanics guy.

To me, though, the OSR symbol also embraces an underlying philosophy, as Rotwang! said: games which are no longer supported by the companies that published them aren't "dead." So long as you keep running your old game with your friends, that game is alive.

Gamers Helping Haiti

2010-01-22T15:02:00.000-08:00

I learned of this through Fear the Boot, my favorite gaming podcast.

DriveThruRPG is offering a huge deal through the rest of January called Gamers Help Haiti. By donating $20 (which will go to Doctors Without Borders), you will receive a free bundle of PDF gaming material worth over $1000, including the Serenity RPG and the Cortex RPG System book (the system Serenity uses), Chronica Feudalis, Dork Covenant (the first Dork Tower comic collection), and a bunch of other cool-looking stuff.

So far they've raised $93,560 to help Haiti. Pretty sweet!

The Fourth World, For The Third Time

2009-07-05T22:18:00.000-07:00

Today I learned that one of my original gaming group's old standbys, Earthdawn, is going to be seeing a new edition. Mongoose Publishing, a British game company known primarily for producing D20 games based on properties such as Babylon 5, Slaine, Starship Troopers, Conan, Judge Dredd and Lone Wolf, will be producing Earthdawn Third Edition sometime later this year. There was a time when this would have made me somewhat concerned, as Mongoose's early D20 books were a little sloppily edited and characterized with the sort of large font sizes that were typical of, say, AEG's 7th Sea. But Mongoose seems to be doing well with the newest iteration of Traveller, Paranoia and RuneQuest, which uses their own systems, and despite their good intentions, I think it would be difficult to disappoint to the degree that Living Room Games did with Earthdawn 2nd Edition.

Mongoose has PDF previews available on their website. I haven't yet looked closely at what snippets they've shown (which includes a table of contents) so I'm unaware of what changes they'll be making to the rules. But they've already taken a step in the right direction by having Jeff Laubenstein design the covers of the Player's Guide and Gamemaster's Guide (and dang, they look cool).

Prior to this, RedBrick Limited had been keeping the flame alive, is it were, and doing quite well. The quality of their work has been consistently high, and I've been glad to hear of their adoption of Fading Suns and Blue Planet, dead games with brilliant settings. Unfortunately, they're based in New Zealand, and with the price hike for printing through Lulu, purchasing their books hasn't really been a possibility for me. Furthermore, with the change of hands, RedBrick will be phasing out the availability of their Earthdawn Classic publications. The two core books (which are the most expensive) will only be available until the end of this month. While I would very much like to purchase them both before then, I honestly don't know if I can swing that. It would be hard to justify to my wife when I already own the original books. I've wanted to see how RedBrick re-organized the rules for some time now.

On the plus side, while the Mongoose books will likely be expensive, at least they should be available at game stores in the U.S., so it's conceivable that I'll be able to purchase them with Christmas money or something.

The 'Good' Old Days

2009-03-25T23:57:00.000-07:00

I recently came into possession of a few PDF scans of the very first issues of Dragon Magazine, back in the 1970s when it was known as The Dragon. It featured authors such as Fritz Leiber* and Gardner Fox coupled with some truly awful artwork and articles that really demonstrate how the roleplaying game in those days was only just beginning to distinguish itself from the wargaming hobby.

On one hand, you've got interesting articles describing how to wargame the Battle of Five Armies from The Hobbit, or innovative tables to determine the circumstances of a character's birth. On the other hand, you've got some striking relics of the era, such as a cartoon poking fun at the recycling craze (adventurers run from a "Recyclosaurus", who wears a t-shirt that reads 'Ecology Now!' and munches on a can of 'Tree Frog Beer'), and truly odd articles like "The Idiot Class", which describes an NPC that player characters can hire "to confuse the enemy so that it will run away, attack a wall, commit Hari Kari, eat all its treasure or some related act, just so it will not attack the troop." Suddenly Gamma World seems like a pillar of sanity.

Lest we forget that there was a time when gaming was an almost exclusively male hobby (and, as the TV show "Life On Mars" tries to tell us, the 70s were a very different culture), one needs only look to a truly insulting article titled "Notes on Women & Magic - Bringing the Distaff Gamer into D&D". The author stipulates that female characters should not be able to fight as well as their male counterparts (though they "in some ways surpass men as thieves"; mid-level female thieves get to be titled "Succubus." Was the author in the middle of a nasty divorce?), and that the Charisma ability score should be replaced by Beauty, which is "important to thieves, fighters and magic users." It is further noted that "Clerics may not use beauty if they are lawful or neutral. Chaotic clerics may use their beauty score." "Fighting Women (warriors) may incorporate the spells of Seduction, Charm Men or Charm Humanoid Monster depending upon their level and beauty scores (see spells of seduction, et al). Women's strength scores range from 2-14." (Emphasis mine)

In case you were wondering what 'Humanoid Monsters' might include, here's the list given: "Hobgoblins, Ogres, Trolls, Giants, Mummies, Vampires, Gargoyles, WereWolves (either shape), Werebear (man only), Lizard Men and Centaurs."

...Dang. I don't know what women do for mummies, exactly, or why wolves are turned on by women while bears aren't, but I don't really feel like speculating.

Perhaps it's telling that in a number of the illustrations there is a recurring character who looks like a fairyland elf (you know, the kind with pointy shoes and hat that peaks in a curl?) and is always smoking some sort of hallucinogenic substance from a suspiciously-shaped pipe...

*A surreal and amusing article where he tries to explain wargaming to Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser.

One of my favorite lines: "Oh, so they fight only with their minds?" Fafhrd said. "That sounds sick to me. I keep my mind solely for enshrining the images of beautiful women."

Also: "About these wargamers or mind-fighters," the Mouser said, turning back to me. "I'll wager some of 'em aren't above using a real knife under the table, especially if the games goes against 'em."

"A man could keep on playing a table game, though hamstrung," Fafhrd put in.

Modeling After MMORPGs

2009-03-23T19:08:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of talk about how 4th Edition D&D attempts to emulate many of the features of MMORPGs. I don't have any firsthand experience of this; I haven't played 4th Edition, and my decision to pass on the entire thing was based on a lack of disposable income and the realization that I already have all of the editions of D&D I'll ever need to play D&D. I've got Moldvay Basic/Expert D&D and a half-dozen variants on it (Labyrinth Lord, Basic Fantasy, etc.) if I want a simple, nostalgic game, I've got True20 if I want a simple version of d20, I've got Microlite20 if I want a REALLY simple version of d20, I've got OSRIC and Swords & Wizardry if I want a REALLY nostalgic game...and I've got D&D 3e and 3.5, with about a million supplements for that system.

So I didn't really feel a need to remain cutting-edge. In fact, I rather enjoy being a little behind the times, because all of the books I use suddenly start getting cheaper.

Back to the point, one of the complaints people seem to have with 4th Edition is that it attempts to emulate many aspects of "World of Warcraft" and other MMORPGs. While I'm sure you could easily look up any number of threads about this on RPGnet's d20 forum (though I'm guessing you'll have to navigate a fair amount of flames), the gist of it seems to be that a) there are things a pen-and-paper RPG can do that a computer game can't, and b) vice-versa. Trying to mold a PnP RPG after a computer game may be an exercise in futility; if the idea is to attract MMORPG players to the tabletop gaming hobby, why present them with a product that tries do what their computer-based game does better? Wouldn't it be better to focus on the unique aspects of tabletop gaming?

Well, people seem to react both ways - some people like it, others hate it. My impressions after reading some of these reviews put me in the camp of "I'd play if someone wanted to run it, but I'm not interested in buying it, much less running it." Still, I'm intrigued by the idea of adopting certain aspects of MMORPGs to tabletop games.

Leave it to Paizo Publishing to come up with an interesting way of accomplishing this. For those outside the loop, Paizo is a company that took over the publishing of Dragon and Dungeon magazines when 3rd Edition D&D came out. The quality of that venerable company organ boosted noticeably; the artwork was gorgeous, the articles were interesting, the adventures were interesting, and the entire enterprise was given a much-needed injection of fun. Shortly before 4th Edition was formally announced (if I'm remembering my timeline correctly), Wizards of the Coast decided to repossess both publications from Paizo in preparation to take the magazines to an online-only format. I think. I haven't really kept up with what WotC did with them after getting them back from Paizo. Anyway, shortly after that came WotC's decision to leave the Open Gaming License and the d20 System behind, and the ultimatum to third-party publishers: you can publish works for 4th Edition (the GSL, I think is what that license is called) or for d20/OGL, but not both. While most companies took the 4th Edition route, Paizo seemed to think there was still a large enough market for d20 (possibly based on the sizable outcry that 4th Edition came too soon / 3.5 is good enough for me) and stuck with the OGL. They published the Pathfinder RPG, what they describe as "D&D 3.75". While the rules have met with a bit of criticism for being even more "overpowered" than its predecessor, the quality of Paizo's design and content seems to have made this a feasible business decision.

One of the nice things Paizo does is periodically send out free PDF preview copies of upcoming publications. They did this with the Pathfinder RPG, and more recently, they've done it with their campaign setting book, The Legacy of Fire Player's Guide. Aside from being a fantastic model for how to make a player's guide to a campaign world, Legacy of Fire introduces something they explicitly describe as MMORPG-inspired: Achievement Feats. My knee-jerk reaction is to say, "This is how you adapt ideas from MMORPG mechanics to a tabletop medium." It takes the 3rd Edition concept of Feats - special abilities that characters can do that are kind of like skills or powers or spells, which you accumulate as you progress in level - and adds a "World of Warcraft"-inspired twist: Achievement Feats are feats your character can earn by accomplishing certain tasks in the campaign, just like Achievements in "WoW". For example, you can earn "Healer's Touch" after curing a cumulative total of 1,000 hit points of damage for other creatures using healing spells; this feat treats your healing spells as if they were Maximized (as per the Maximize Spell feat), so long as they are cast upon others. "All Gnolls Must Die" can be earned if your character delivers the killing blow to 20 gnolls, hyenas, dire hyenas, werehyenas, jackalweres, or minions of Lamashtu; as long as you carry some sort of trophy harvested from a gnoll, you gain a morale bonus to all your Will saves and a competence bonus when fighting that variety of monster. They're not game-breaking, and while they require a bit more bookkeeping and planning on the part of the player who wants to attain them, Achievement Feats can be used by a creative GM to encourage PCs to accomplish something pertinent to their campaign.

I thought that was pretty sweet.

Level 1 Human

2009-02-21T18:46:00.001-08:00

If my wife and I ever do have children, I now know what to get for them.

The Day Everything Changed

2009-02-19T09:12:00.000-08:00

February, 2009. That's going to go down in history as the month everything changed.

Sure, 1999 is what everyone remembers. Those were grim times for everyone. After the 1980s, I thought I'd never have to live in fear of nuclear war again, but things quickly turned south and we'd barely had enough time to take a breath before we were at war again, and the threat was looming over our heads again. If the NEACaPS had ever gotten nukes, I think we might have seen the West Coast go up in mushroom clouds. Really, it was just a matter of time - that was what was on everyone's minds, I think. So it's a good thing that the Stranger came.

Look, I'll be honest with you - I was never a proponent of Unification. I kept pointing to the litany of evils the old United Nations was involved with - internal corruption, financial misdeeds, turning a blind eye to genocides while their own troops were committing atrocities... It's like democracy - it sounds like a great idea until you actually meet some of the people who are allowed to vote. America was unique, I said; other countries don't think like us. A vast portion of the world is composed of tyrannies and theocracies that have anything but human rights in mind. Why would we want to place ourselves under their jurisdiction?

But the utopians got their wish. After the Global Civil War, I guess everyone was tired of being afraid. The one good thing that's come out of this whole thing is that people started looking at each other as fellow human beings, rather than a package of "otherness". I always believed that the One World Government would come - as a Christian, it's one of the things you associate with the reign of the Antichrist - but I guess I never really believed I'd live to see it. It's eerie. Don't get me wrong, I was happy as the next guy when the War ended, but I kept wondering, "What's next? What's the next big axe to hang over our necks?"

So if you think about it, these last ten years have been amazing. But what happened this month...

Maybe it was inevitable. I mean, the Stranger came from somewhere, right? Someone built it - who knows how long ago, really - so it stood to reason that someone would come to get it. You know, you see all these movies about aliens coming to Earth, and most of them are of the "Mars Attacks!" variety. We've had that particular phobia since, what, H.G. Wells? But there was also "Close Encounters", and "E.T.", and "Star Trek"...it seemed more likely that anyone who came so far would want to be diplomatic, at least. There were scientists who insisted that their psychologies might be utterly alien to us - that we would be incapable of understanding each other. But I think that, while I agreed that it was a possibility, I privately thought it might be more like what Lewis proposed: any other intelligent life out there would either be sinless and enjoying communion with God, or fallen creatures like us. I suspected we'd be able to understand each other to a degree that would surprise the scientists. And to a longtime science fiction geek like me, that possibility kept me excited even when the details of the Unification troubled me.

So I think I was right, and unfortunately, they turned out to be of the Fallen variety. All we know about them is that they thought nothing of coming to Earth with guns blazing, and that they're huge. Well, I guess we know more than that - if the allegations are correct (and the attack footage proves that the UEG knew something all along that they didn't tell anyone about), then hopefully we're going to start hearing a lot more about what our leaders know about the Giants.

Not that we can do anything about it. They took the SDF-1 and left. They took Macross Island, for crying out loud. Who knows what else they can do? What do we do if they decide to come back?

Heirs of the Hood

2008-11-05T12:30:00.000-08:00

Not entirely certain why, but as I was trying to fall asleep last night I began to think about Robin Hood. I had been thinking about Sean Connery, because one of the characters in my NaNoWriMo novel is "played" by him in my imagination. Sean Connery, of course, played King Richard Coeur de Leon as a cameo in "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves," but he also played Robin himself in "Robin and Marian."

The movie looks at an older Robin (in real history, it would only be about five years after Richard's return to England), a trusted captain of King Richard, reluctantly fighting on behalf of his liege in France. Robin doesn't like it and, after Richard gets killed, returns to England with Little John. He finds out that Marian is a nun, and goes to see her. Somehow the Sheriff of Nottingham becomes his enemy again; I don't really remember how it all happens. I have only vague memories of the movie, and while I recall it being fairly dull, depressing, and at times, a little disturbing (why isn't Robin wearing any pants?), the concept behind the film - whatever happened to Robin Hood? - always interested me.

I started to think about how "Prince of Thieves" ended, with Robin and Marian's wedding. Robin's noble status is presumably restored by King Richard, so he's got to have a manor and all that attends a feudal lord. Presumably - given not only the social obligations, but also their passionate love for each other and the lack of contraceptives - they'd start making some babies.

So how about a medieval campaign in which all of the PCs are Robin and Marian's children? Their parentage signifies them as "special" (in that glowy Player Character way), and they'd likely have no end of interesting patrons who would have influenced the development of their abilities and political ideals along the way. How many of the Merry Men are still around? How many of them have gone straight and are honest peasants now, and how many are still outlaws? As a landed lord, was Robin forced to issue justice and hunt them down? Or does he turn a blind eye to them out of gratitude for their past deeds?

(Wikipedia tells me that in the earliest tales, Robin is a yeoman - a commoner. The trend of later tales turning him into a nobleman suggests to my modern American mind a strain of elitist thought - "only a nobleman could or would choose to lead commoners in a just cause" - but for the moment I'm ignoring all of that and focusing on the image of Robin Hood that's currently most recognized.)

At first I was looking at it as a sort of investigation of what happens when the rebel outcast becomes The Establishment. But as I started reading up on the events following Robin's royal pardon, another story began to present itself.

1189 - King Henry II dies; Richard I becomes King of England and goes on Crusade. He doesn't take Jerusalem, but negotiates a truce that allows access for pilgrims.

1190-1191 - John attempts to overthrow William Longchamp, the Bishop of Ely and Richard's justiciar. John promises the city of London (who likes John more) the right to govern itself as a commune in return for recognition as Richard's heir presumptive. Robin of Loxley, Earl of Huntingdon, begins his opposition of John.

1192 - Richard is taken prisoner by the Duke of Austria as he returns from Crusade. Robin urges his fellow nobles to collect his ransom, but is made into an outlaw by John's machinations. Robin becomes the leader of the Merry Men of Sherwood, stealing from the nobility to pay for Richard's ransom (going with the Good Guy model, this is what he does with his share of the loot, the rest going to aid the poor and oppressed).

1194 - Richard's ransom paid, the king returns to England in February. He restores Robin's status as Earl of Huntingdon, puts down John's rebellion and pardons him for trying to steal his authority. He is crowned again in March - in case there's any doubt about his claim to the throne - and names John his heir. Robin and Marian wed. Richard leaves England for France in May.

1199 - Richard dies in Chaluz, slain by an arrow fired by the boy Peter Basile. He pardons the boy, then dies. Mercadier, his faithful freebooter companion, has the boy flayed alive and hung. John Lackland becomes King of England, but faces revolt in the name of Arthur of Brittany, son of his dead brother Geoffrey. [5 years after Robin + Marian]

1200 - Mercadier dies, assassinated by another freebooter in John's service. Philip II recognizes John over Arthur of Brittany (who, by modern standards, has a better claim than John). [6 years after Robin + Marian]

1203 - Arthur attempts to kidnap his own grandmother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, at Mirebeau, but is defeated and captured by John's forces. Arthur is imprisoned first at Falaise and then at Rouen. No one is certain what ultimately happens to him. In addition to capturing Arthur, John also captures his sister, his niece Eleanor, Fair Maid of Brittany. She will remain a prisoner until her death in 1241. Through deeds such as these, John acquires a reputation for ruthlessness. [9 years after Robin + Marian]

1205 - In hope of avoiding trouble in England and Wales while he's away fighting for his French lands, John forms an alliance by marrying off his illegitimate daughter, Joan, to the Welsh prince Llywelyn the Great. John begins a dispute with Pope Innocent III over who would become Archbishop of Canterbury. This conflict will last until 1213. [11 years after Robin + Marian]

1207-8 - Franciscan order is founded.

1208 - Albigensian Crusade against Cathar heretics in southern France begins, continuing until 1229. Philip Augustus is strengthened by ruining southern nobles. [14 years after Robin + Marian]

1209 - John is excommunicated, and England is placed under Papal interdict. No religious services, including baptisms and burials, are allowed. Some of his barons rebel against John. Cambridge University is founded. [15 years after Robin + Marian]

1211 - John puts down the Welsh Uprising. [17 years after Robin + Marian]

1213 - Innocent threatens England with a Crusade led by Philip Augustus of France. Philip wants to place his son Louis, the future Louis IX on the English throne. John, suspicious of the military support his barons would offer, submits to the Pope, making England a papal fief. Innocent III quickly calls off the Crusade that he never really had any intention of carrying out. [19 years after Robin + Marian]

1214 - John turns his attention back to his overseas interests. The European wars culminate in defeat at the Battle of Bouvines, which forces the king to accept an unfavorable peace with France. The defeat finally turns the largest part of his barons against him, joining those who rebelled at his excommunication. The nobles join together and demand concessions. [20 years after Robin + Marian]

1215 - John meets the rebel nobles' leaders at Runnymede, near London on 15 June to seal the Great Charter (Magna Carta). Because he signs under duress, however, John receives approval from his overlord the Pope to break his word as soon as hostilities cease, provoking the First Barons' War and an invited French invasion by Prince Louis of France (whom the majority of the English barons have invited to replace John on the throne). John travels around the country to oppose the rebel forces, including a personal two month siege of the rebel-held Rochester Castle. [21 years after Robin + Marian]

1216 - Retreating from the French invasion, John takes a safe route around the marshy area of the Wash to avoid the rebel-held area of East Anglia. His slow baggage train (including the Crown Jewels), however, take a direct route across it and is lost to the unexpected incoming tide. This loss deals John a terrible blow, which affects his health and state of mind. Succumbing to dysentery and moving from place to place, he stays one night at Sleaford Castle before dying on 18 (or 19) October, at Newark Castle (then in Lincolnshire, now on Nottingham's border with that county). Numerous, possibly fictitious, accounts soon circulate after his death that he had been killed by poisoned ale, poisoned plums, or a "surfeit of peaches." John's nine year-old son succeeds him and becomes King Henry III of England. [22 years after Robin + Marian]

1217 - Although Louis continues to claim the English throne, the barons switch their allegiance to the new king, forcing Louis to give up his claim and sign the Treaty of Lambeth. [23 years after Robin + Marian]

So, the way I read it, the PCs take after their parents and oppose King John as he makes England's situation worse by the year. They might rally and/or champion the barons who fight against John, and could play a role in the stirring the ideals of the Magna Carta*.

John himself makes for an interesting villain. His reign is characterized as one of the most disastrous in English history. He functions as an efficient ruler, good at administrative detail, and is sought out as a judge in the Royal Courts for his fair-mindedness. However, he is suspicious, unscrupulous, lecherous (he had many illegitimate offspring and was accused of being envious of many of his barons and kinfolk, seducing their more attractive daughters and sisters), and mistrusted. His crisis-prone career is sabotaged repeatedly by the halfheartedness with which his vassals support him, and the energy with which some of them oppose him. He lost approval of the English barons by taxing them in ways that were outside those traditionally allowed by feudal overlords. He allowed for the tax called scutage, where payment is made instead of providing knights (as required by feudal law); this became particularly unpopular.

There's also the question of whatever happened to Arthur of Brittany. A new Merry Man, anybody?

Add these large-scale political events to that all of the other fun stuff that could happen in Medieval England, and I think it has the makings of a great campaign.

Heck, I might do something comics-related with this idea...

*It bears pointing out that John was pretty good with legal wrangling, and there is speculation that John made it so the document undermined the barons' power by extending rights to commoners, in order to get back at them. This being a primarily cinematic campaign, however, I don't know to what degree this would be a triumph on John's part as it is a chance for egalitarian-minded PCs to play a part in the creation of modern democracy.

Halloween Horror

2008-10-31T07:49:00.001-07:00

I think of Halloween as the holiday when I traditionally run a horror game.

This is wishful thinking, though. I don't know if I actually ever managed to do this as any kind of tradition in the past; I know I always wanted to, and I have run a horror game once or twice on Halloween for friends in the past, but it was a long time ago, and certainly never often enough to qualify as a "tradition".

When I was younger, I avoided the horror genre. I had a lot of nightmares growing up, and had no desire to be scared further by frightening images or unpleasant thoughts. I scorned horror movies and ignored horror novels. But this all changed the first time I played a horror RPG.

I can't recall, exactly, what the first horror RPG I played was, but the first one I can remember GMing was Call of Cthulhu. Beyond the Supernatural was another early one. Something about the use of atmospheric elements like the flickering light of candles, spooky music on a stereo, and the occasional assistance of nature herself, with howling wind or chilling fog setting in, made the horror game different. I found the ability to scare others while remaining in control of the situation - I knew the adventure plot, I knew what was coming and had some idea of how to deliver it in order to cause tension and apprehension in my player(s). And yet, I was not immune from that sense of fear, either, as I was to discover after walking back to my car alone in the pitch dark after a late horror game session... Through that experience, I came to understand that the horror genre is an art, requiring a certain skill to pull off well; I suddenly found that I could watch horror movies and scrutinize them. I could judge whether they were actually creating horror, or just relying upon gore or "startles" to creep out their audiences. I bought Ken Hite's must-have book Nightmares of Mine (and, later, his edition of GURPS Horror) and began to really take a close look at horror.

Now, here I am years later, with a desire to continue playing my copy of Silent Hill 3, but being a little apprehensive about turning the lights off and immersing myself in that world again.

I haven't been able to run or play a horror adventure in many years. In fact, I think it was just before the Slussers had children - or was it when Slusser got married? - that I ran a horror game. Since horror is so dependent upon building atmosphere, having any kind of distraction is a big problem, much moreso than with any other genre of RPG I can think of.

I miss it quite a bit. There's something that horror games give you that no other game can. And it's one of the very few RPG genres where it's okay if your character dies. In fact, it's almost expected.

Here's a quick look at the horror games I own (and would love to run tonight, if I could):

Call of Cthulhu - The granddaddy of cosmic horror, this game still appeals to me. I think it's more to do with its default historical setting of 1920s New England than its nihilistic cosmology, but I can't claim to be completely immune to its charms. I have long desired to run an entire campaign, beginning with the World War I scenario No Man's Land, and following those PCs (those that survive, anyway) through their subsequent brushes with the Cthulhu Mythos across the 1920s (I've got a few). I would love to do this someday. Maybe when I'm in the nursing home.

D20 Call of Cthulhu - I don't know how well this handles running CoC adventures; the D20 system can get cumbersome at times, and if you have to stop the game to look up rules, you may as well kiss that precious creepy atmosphere goodbye. Few systems seem to lend themselves to rules lawyers (and their pet arguments) as well as Dungeons & Dragons, and D20 carries on that tradition. Having said that, this book is amazingly well-written, offering not only a decent conversion of the game to D20, but also providing some priceless advice on running horror games - indeed, running games of any genre. This one is oriented on playing in the modern day, rather than CoC's other traditional settings of the Roaring 20s or the Victorian 1890s. Speaking of modern day Cthulhu...

Delta Green - Call of Cthulhu meets The X-Files. After the Innsmouth Raid of 1927, the American government begins to pick up on the fact that there's Something Going On... In DG, you play a government employee who becomes a member of an illegal government conspiracy group, the aforementioned Delta Green. Emphasis on the illegal: this involves not only horror, but also heavy doses of paranoia. This is notable for being one of the most well-written and researched campaign settings I've ever seen, and I'd love to run some of the scenarios presented in these books.

The (New) World of Darkness - White Wolf's game of generic horror. While you can use it as the basis for a world that includes Vampires, Werewolves, Mages, and all of the other White Wolf traditional game lines, nWoD is nice in that you don't have to. With this edition, you can run any kind of modern horror game. I think it's a perfect fit for Silent Hill, myself, and I have at least two adventures I'd like to run that take place in that quiet mountain town...

GURPS Horror - Duh. The third edition is written by Ken Hite, and is much different than the previous editions of the book. This one unfortunately cuts out the description of Victorian London, but in its place gives you one of the best in-depth examinations of horror tropes and themes to be found outside Nightmares of Mine. This book is gold for its explanations of where the tropes came from, and thus, how to best capitalize on them.

Chill - This was the classic go-to for horror with the Campaign folks, and after reading the gamebooks I can see what the draw is. The secret horror-fighting society SAVE is a simple and brilliant excuse to bring "average Joe" PCs together to face the supernatural on a semi-regular basis. I, however, prefer the notion of the Society as a beleaguered, scattered, cryptic and more-or-less impoverished organization than the centralized, well-funded group that the game book seems to describe. More Rosicrucians than CIA, thanks. If you're looking for this game, make sure to look up the Mayfair edition, as the original Pacesetter edition was more humor-oriented.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel RPGs - These are more recent purchases, and they utilize the excellent Cinematic Unisystem roleplaying game...uh...system. Written in a chatty, humorous, but not annoying (unless you don't like Joss Whedon-style dialog) style, these games not only capture the feel of the television shows perfectly, they also provide a rules framework for a wide variety of games. One could just as easily run a Hellboy campaign, a superhero game, or a straight-up modern action game with these rules. Check out what people are doing with it on Eden Studios' forums... I have eight seasons (no joke) of an Angel RPG campaign completely outlined. It's called Spooks (no, not this one); it begins in Buffy/Angelverse Los Angeles circa 1938 and follows the formation and early years of The Initiative, the shadowy organization that would show up as a semi-antagonist in "Buffy" Season Four. I'd love to run this, but I question whether I've got the chops to run such a long campaign set in the World War II era. I can handle fantasy games and Shadowrun for that long, perhaps, but would I be able to stay in the mood for film noir and pulp-horror adventure with a sense of humor but unexpected depth, darkness, and character development for such an extended period? Well, it's worth a try... C'mon, it's got Nazis! Who doesn't like beating up Nazis?

Hellboy - While GURPS Lite 3rd Edition is an okay fit for this one, I think that Angel's Cinematic Unisystem would do a better job. Nonetheless, this is the sourcebook on Hellboy, chock full of awesome Mignola illustrations. If you haven't read the comic... Well, here. Read it. The gist of this is that you work for a government agency that deals with the paranormal (and often part of someone's mythology, like Baba Yaga). Hellboy is one of their primary agents. He usually deals with said paranormal by beating it senseless while issuing longsuffering one-liners. Notable in that your agent could be a normal person, but it's also quite likely that your agent is something supernatural. Characters in Hellboy have included a fishman, a pyrokinetic, a homonculus, and an ectoplasmic spirit. One of Hellboy's primary villains is Rasputin. THE Rasputin. And, you know, Nazis. Dang, this would make for a fun campaign.

Dark*Matter - Going deeper into X-Files territory than the television show ever did, this is one of the best modern conspiracy-horror books I've ever seen. It presents data on a wide range of popular and obscure conspiracies, monsters, and paranormal topics that we hear about in the real world, and presents multiple options on how to run them in a campaign. It also presents a loose cosmological explanation for what's going on, and offers an organization for PCs to work for, the Hoffmann Institute. It's a little more potent an organization than I would normally like for such a game, but it can still work; in fact, watching "Fringe" gives me a pretty solid idea of how it could be an intriguing, mysterious, and paranoia-inducing employer for characters (imagine being an employee of Massive Dynamic...). All this in a nicely-illustrated hardbound book!

Ghostories - A generic engine for running horror adventures. I love simple rules systems. I love cheap, easily-affordable games. PIG's Ghostories gives me both of those things. When you're running a horror game, you really want to have a game system that doesn't interfere with the narrative or slow things down as people start looking up rules - that's an atmosphere-killer, and building atmosphere is absolutely crucial to running a horror game. It's also compatible with their other genre Diversion i games, meaning I can use it in conjunction with their western game Coyote Trail as my system conversion for Deadlands. Speaking of...

Deadlands: The Weird West - This Old West Horror game has a lot of potential, and I own most of the books published for this game, which is quite a few. Deadlands is all over the map - it incorporates not only horror, but also pulp action and steampunk; it describes itself as "Spaghetti Western with Meat". The result is a game that can be played in a variety of styles...but personally, I'd like to run it dark and atmospheric.

Over the Edge - Not exclusively a horror game, but certainly heavy on those elements. This is a rules-light, surrealism-heavy game reminiscent of "Twin Peaks", "Lost", Cat's Cradle, and Burroughs novels. It comes with a thoroughly detailed modern-day setting, the Mediterranean island of al-Amarja, and a catalog of all the weird stuff going on there. I have a campaign-starter in mind already - that of CIA agents investigating possible al-Qaeda cell activity - but this manages to be such a wide-open game that any type of character and any type of background could conceivably work. All you need is a reason to come to the obscure island. All the rest is done for you, really. This is an excellent example of the "sandbox" setting presented for a modern day game.

Ghostbusters - Old and out of print but still pretty brilliant, from a game rules standpoint (Fear not, though - click on that link and be reconnected with that spirit from the past). West End Games made this, arguably one of the best entry-level RPGs on the market. While the adventures I've seen for it are pretty goofy (a little more than I would like for what is admittedly a comedy game), this game is wonderful in that it parodies the structure and feel of Call of Cthulhu scenarios so well. Made by many of the same people who brought you Paranoia... As fun as the original system is, were I to run it today, I'd use the even easier-to-learn-and-run Risus system by S. John Ross...who admits that the Ghostbusters RPG was a major influence. Oh, and that's free, too.

Well, that's all I can think of at the moment, though I've got the nagging suspicion that I've forgotten something. Anyway, I look forward to the day when I can run a spooky game once more.

Happy Halloween!

EDIT: I did remember something. I don't actually own the Palladium game, and I wouldn't use the system, but I liked the idea, with some modification: Nightbane. The premise is that while you think you're a normal person, you are in actuality a monstrous, extra-dimensional being who just happens to be walking around in a human body most of the time. Or are you just its vessel? Are you going crazy, or is this what you really are?

I also just remembered Hunter: The Reckoning. You become endowed by the mysterious Messengers with mystic powers with which to fight the supernatural. I have rather a lot of adventure ideas for this one, too.

Okay, enough for now - I'm starving!

CAPVT MVNDI

2008-10-30T10:45:00.000-07:00

Ancient Rome is one of my perennial favorites in terms of settings. I'm not entirely certain why I find it so fascinating, except perhaps because we seem to know so much about it. There are so many similarities between we postmodern Americans and the ancient Romans, and yet at the same time, there are differences that really make them seem quite alien at times.

Take, for example, the Roman virtues, which are nicely illustrated in the RPG FVLMINATA: Armed With Lightning. As an example of Duty and Respect, the book proposes a situation based on historical precedent: You find yourself in a civil war. Both sides suffer heavy losses. Your sister's fiancee fought for the other side and was slain. Your sister does not show up for your victory celebration, choosing instead to attend the funeral of her betrothed. As a good Roman, what do you do? Run her through with your gladius for being unpatriotic. One must remember that Christian virtues such as Love, Hope, and Forgiveness were unusual, and often ran counter to typical Roman thinking.

Anyway, I've accumulated a number of books on ancient Rome and find myself coming back to it constantly. I have a couple of maps of Rome (and one of Ostia, Rome's primary port), lots of illustrations, and at least three RPGs devoted to the setting. For quite some time, I've been wanting to convert the Green Ronin Freeport adventure trilogy to a Roman setting. I've also worked to some degree on a comic project in which the protagonist is a vigile, a night watchman. I often describe the project as "Law and Order" set in Ancient Rome. My research on that led me to do some general research on the topic of crime, the forms it takes, the kinds of organizations that profit from it, and so on.

Then an idea was sparked after I participated in a discussion thread on RPGnet. While talking about the notion of "sandbox settings", in which there is no metaplot to speak of, but the setting is created to enable Player Characters as much freedom over their activities as possible. There is sufficient detail in these settings (or the means are present to create sufficient detail off the cuff, on demand) that the Players can choose what they want their characters to do, where they want them to go, and basically follow their own personal goals without the GM trying to railroad them to following a preconceived plot. A good example of this is the "Grand Theft Auto" series of video games. There is an overarching plot, but players are not bound to follow it. Instead, you can spend as much time as you want driving through the city, committing various crimes (because, let's face it, if a game allows you to crash into things, drive like a maniac, and beat people senseless, most of us will do it at least once) as you like. MMORPGs sometimes have an element of this, too. But no video game (thus far, anyway) can really capture the freedom a Player can enjoy in a tabletop RPG designed with this purpose.

Cutting to the chase, someone starting talking about "Grand Theft Auto" in various settings, and someone mentioned Ancient Rome (referring to the idea with the groan-inducing term 'Tiberpunk'). That started my gears turning. FVLMINATA does a nice job of breaking down Rome into its various neighborhoods, giving a fair description of the feel and typical content of each neighborhood in the city. This made it easier to figure out what kinds of crimes might occur where, and where ethnic and economic tensions might make things more interesting.

I thought of the various ethnic groups in Rome which would likely band together for protection, possibly forming gangs to that end. There might be something akin to terrorists, fighting to bring down the Roman government and re-establish their freedom (like the Egyptians or the Celts, perhaps). There would certainly be a black market of some sort, and cartels dealing in proscribed goods. Senators would likely have agents working on the streets toward various ends (especially since Senators were forbidden by law to make profits from business, which I'm certain they would try to skirt around), adding potential extra danger to interfering with any given criminal activity - you never know if you're disrupting a powerful Senator's income! There are the sports teams and their fans, which were such a potent political force in later Byzantium that they caused such riots as to threaten the Emperor's rule. You've also got the regular run of muggers and other petty crooks - Nero himself was supposed to have snuck out to roam the city at night, mugging people... And, of course, there would likely be vigilante groups dealing with all of the above chaos, trying to restore order to the viae in their own way.

Thus, the basis for CAPVT MVNDI. Caput Mundi was a nickname for the city of Rome, meaning "the head of the entire world." This game would be a sandbox setting, in which the PCs are free to roam and explore as they will. Player Characters could work for law enforcement, being police/detectives or lawyers, rooting out and fighting crime while dealing with a sometimes corrupt government; or they could be up-and-coming criminals trying to make a place for themselves in a wicked old city.

On a tangentially related note, I watched the pilot episode of the short-lived television show "Roar" on YouTube yesterday. Notable now, perhaps, for starring Heath Ledger as the show's protagonist, it was set in a Celtic Britain that is held (or being invaded by, as the episode's conclusion suggests) the Romans. I don't know exactly when it's supposed to take place, but given that Longinus shows up and mentions that he's 400 years old, I'm guessing it must be sometime around 365 AD (assuming he was about 35 when Jesus was crucified). This would mean that the Roman hold on Britain would only last about another 45 years before the Romans there declare their independence and are told by the Emperor to "look to their own safety." I just looked up some data on Rome at that time and it seems to jive with one or two other things I noticed in the show (for example, one of the Roman noble characters present seems to insist on a monotheistic faith; 365 would be post-Constantine). The show has a little bit of cheese - things that probably looked good on paper but came across as a little hokey in live action - and the Hero's Journey structure was pretty apparent to me, but it wasn't bad. The pilot episode is pretty self-contained, like a miniature movie, so while I think there could have been more open ends to entice the viewer to continue watching the series, I am kind of interested in seeing where next they went with it.

Watching the episode made me think, not for the first time, that a game in which players play Celts fighting Roman domination of their lands could make for an interesting campaign.

D&D: Monster Hunters

2008-10-28T06:24:00.000-07:00

When one thinks of Dungeons & Dragons, one of the primary concepts that comes to mind is that of slaying monsters and taking their treasure. The entire experience/level progression system has traditionally been based on this idea (though later editions of the game have expanded to include more non-violent means of progression, which I appreciate). One of the things that breaks up the monotony of this concept is the wide variety of monsters that one's character may face.

So why not base an entire campaign around this idea? You know it's going to happen anyway, so why not acknowledge it from the beginning?

The concept of the Monster Hunters campaign is simple: the PCs are a band of monster hunters. See? Simple. Now, while the idea of traveling around being more or less philanthropic, aiding villages with their monster problems, is certainly a worthwhile concept for a campaign, I'm thinking of something a little more focused.

I have a number of supplements and magazine articles - many of which date back to first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons - that examine D&D's concept of material components. Material components (known in some games as reagents) are physical items that are necessary for the casting of a spell, and often are consumed by magic in the casting. Many of these components are rather exotic - the eyelash of a cyclops, the blood of a wyvern, that sort of thing. So wizards - especially high-level ones, with all of their powerful spells - have a fairly constant need for the acquisition of these items. But frankly, when you become such a high-level wizard that you're in need of such items, you've got far more important things to do than grub around for components. World-saving things, plane-hopping things. That's where the PCs come in.

The PCs work for a powerful wizard or alchemist. In Middle Earth, this might be someone like Radagast or Saruman; in the Forgotten Realms, it could be Elminster or Blackstaff. Their job is simple: the wizard tells them that he needs an item. He may or may not provide the PCs with information about where they can find it, descriptions of the beast or item in question, etc., depending upon the tastes of the DM and the needs of the adventure. The PCs may just be simple muscle, but frankly, I'd find it more interesting if part of the reason they were hired over garden-variety mercenaries was because of their supposed expertise in the area of monster lore.

Part of the adventures would likely involve doing research. This could mean anything from journeying to a large metropolis to find a scholar who catalogues beasts, to venturing into the trackless wastelands to find a hermit-sage who knows more of these creatures than anyone alive (or may be the only one who knows anything certain about them). It may mean going to settlements where the beast in question was spotted and asking around for witnesses to its appearance and behavior, or just plain trying to find the elusive creature and observing for themselves.

What gives this campaign variety, of course, is the monsters themselves. It might be helpful to bear in mind a model something like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", which operated mostly on a "Monster of the Week" structure for its episodes. Of course, in that case the monsters were the ones who came to town, whereas I'm imagining something where the PCs range out from a central location (the wizard's tower) to various locales in the countryside. In any case, the wide variety of exotic beasts in the many Monster Manuals and their ilk should provide ample fodder for adventures. The DM chooses a monster to focus on for this adventure, taking into account what makes it unique. Then the DM figures out what it is that the wizard needs from this particular monster. Sometimes it's going to be something really esoteric (such as the creature's dreams, or its laughter, or something), but most of the time it'll probably be a bit of its anatomy. Then it's up to the PCs to learn as much as they can about the monster - through research, interviews with witnesses, and/or trial and error - and slay it. Or capture it. Or do whatever is necessary to get that bit from the monster and survive the encounter.

Now, while it stands to reason that the PCs are working for a powerful wizard and thus they can rely upon his powers to save their bacon if things get too bad - after all, they're working in his interest - I wouldn't use this safety net. As I said before, this wizard has big, important things to do that take up his attentions. To him, the PCs are NPC Hirelings, not allies. If they get slain, that sucks for Elminster only because it means he has to take the time out of his busy day of drinking with Mordenkainen and seducing goddesses to ask Lhaeo to hire more monster hunters. Don't expect him to show up at the funeral, is what I'm saying. The PCs are largely on their own. Yet, for those DMs who worry about such things, it's at least conceivable that the wizard can pop in to save them if a deus ex machina is all that stands between the continuation of this campaign and a Total Party Kill.

To keep this campaign from getting stale, the DM can introduce subplots into the adventures. Perhaps a local villager feels protective of the monster. Maybe the monster is a shapeshifter and has replaced someone influential in the region. What if the monster has the ability to possess people, or to make them do its bidding? Perhaps a cult has arisen around the monster, providing it with tribute and sacrifices, informing it of local activities, making offerings in exchange for its protection? Maybe there's a local feud between families that makes any business in the village near the monster's lair difficult? You can have subplots that are completely unconnected to the monster hunt, but which nonetheless might draw the PCs into them...

Given how many monster compendiums are floating around out there, this seems like a campaign that you could run for years and years.

One of Us, One of Them

2008-10-22T21:37:00.000-07:00

One of the latest ideas I've had for a roleplaying campaign was inspired by the television show "Heroes." If you've been living under a rock (or are a Slusser), "Heroes" is essentially Marvel's X-Men in plainclothes (no, not that one). In it, there is a mysterious organization called simply "The Company", which appears to have the purpose of studying, tagging, and - when necessary - eliminating super-powered individuals. While they appeared in an antagonistic capacity in the show's first season, subsequent seasons have shown things to be a little more complicated than that.

The Company's standard operating procedure is summed up with a simple phrase: "One of us, one of them." This means that when the Company's agents are sent out to perform a mission, a "normal" agent is partnered with a super-powered individual. Recent episodes of the show have begun to illustrate why this may be a good philosophy.

Aside from the fact that a non-powered Agent can benefit from having an edge against his (often empowered) opponents in the form of a Super, recent episodes have shown that super-powers tend to place certain psychological stresses on a person. Remember that all of the empowered (with the possible exception of Matt Parkman, an L.A. cop) are "normal people", not secret agents or soldiers or people who have specialized training. When normal folks develop powers, it can mess up their relationships. Accidents happen. People get hurt or killed. Sometimes, people start to think that they're superior to other human beings (the old Magneto/Brotherhood of Mutants/Teragen/etc. philosophy). Sometimes (like Gabriel/Sylar and Niki/Jessica), the power itself twists their minds, turning them into killers. Thus, the un-powered human Agent keeps them grounded and in touch with their humanity...and, if necessary, puts them down.

This simple concept (combined with the events of the last few episodes) made me think that this was an excellent basis for a Supers campaign. I'd probably choose to set the game in a different world than that of "Heroes", but I'd make it very similar. The world of "Project Phoenix", as presented in GURPS Psionics (for 3rd Edition), is a good choice (and, as it happens, I was just tinkering with that setting in my mind the other day). One player would play the Agent, and the other would play the Super. Together, they would have adventures that would be like a mix of "The X-Files" and "X-Men", hunting down dangerous mutants - er, supers. As they did so, there might be tension between them - will the Super get out of control? Can the Agent (and the Company they work for) be trusted? What happens if one of them decides to jump ship, or thinks that the work they're doing crosses too many moral lines?

But what system to use?

GURPS was the obvious answer, with its point-allocation character creation process (the Super puts character points into his power, while the Agent puts his points into attributes, skills, contacts, legal authority, etc.). Still, I'm still adjusting (very slowly) to 4th Edition, and I was curious as to what else would work. I looked at my go-to for superhero roleplaying, the old FASERIP system Marvel Super Heroes, but it's pretty skimpy on the skills side of things. I think it could still work, but I wanted a second opinion.

So I posted the question on RPGnet. One of the Old Jokes on RPGnet is that every week, a different person will ask the question, "What system should I use for a superhero game?" So I had to preface my question a little more specifically. To my delight, I immediately received a slew of thoughtful responses. Here are the results of my informal poll:

Wild Talents / NEMESIS 7
Primetime Adventures 6
Mutants & Masterminds (ideally with the Paragons supplement) 4
Cinematic Unisystem / Angel 3
GURPS 4e 3
FATE 2
Truth & Justice / PDQ 2
World of Darkness 1
Hero System 4e or 5e 1
Dogs in the Vineyard 1
Mutant City Blues 1
Over the Edge / WaRP 1

Discussion of how trust between the Agent and the Super were also discussed, and a few games were referred to as being notable for their trust mechanic: Panty Explosion (which sounds far smuttier a game than it actually is), Wraith, Cold City (which sounds like an awesome game anyway), and The Mountain Witch. Another person suggested that if you simply replace Fanmail in Primetime Adventures with "Trust", and rule that it couldn't be spent on the player character's own conflict, it would work well.

In any case, I own about a third of the games suggested, including Primetime Adventures. So, if I ever manage to get my group to sit down and play it, I guess that's the show I'll pitch to them. But PTA really requires the other players to not only agree to it, but be pretty interested and mentally invested in it. So maybe I'll catch them after watching a good superhero movie...

Freakin' Awesome

2008-10-20T09:38:00.001-07:00

Watch this.

I won't be able to afford it for years, and I won't get into it until after all the cool kids have gotten tired of it, but I wouldn't mind playing.

Fauna

2008-10-10T07:59:00.000-07:00

Here's another concept for a fantasy setting. Illustrator Tony DiTerlizzi is the one to blame for this, with his consideration of such a setting and his Mouse Thief character sheet, which was so cool-looking that it made me start thinking about it. Go read that blog post before going on to this, because he states the concept better than I would.

The idea is a fantasy world inhabited by intelligent animals. Yeah, it's basically Ironclaw - furry fantasy - though I imagine it with the animals having more anatomically-correct physiques (digitigrade legs and so on) than just being humans with animal heads. I still picture them being on the same relative scale, though - elephants will be larger than mice, but on the order of Halflings v. Half-Orcs. D20 Modern has stat modifiers for "Moreaus", which are basically animals genetically modified to be human-like, so I've already got a simple go-to source for D&D game stats.

Nations are mostly divided up by species, though there are some more progressive lands (trade capitals, I imagine) where they mingle more freely. Some might include a large mix of species, somewhat like how Britain contained a mixture of peoples after being invaded by so many of them (Celts, Romans, Saxons, Vikings, Normans, etc.), while others are more homogeneous and perhaps xenophobic. With the exception of those isolationist or hostile nations who think they should be Top Dog, I wouldn't want to be too harsh on this segregation, as my experience with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG series informed me that players like having the opportunity to choose from a wide range of species.

I also want some big racial enemies, to provide a Doom that looms on the distant horizon. My first thought - influenced by one of my current real-life conflicts - was that of Cockroach Barbarians. An evil, ravenous, implacable horde of scavengers who sweep across the countryside with lightning speed, destroying all in their path, producing little of any worth. If you see one, there's probably ten you don't see. They multiply incredibly quickly, and once they get into a region, they're nearly impossible to displace. I guess Locusts would work just as well, but I think Cockroaches are more evocative of "icky" feelings and thus make more viscerally interesting foes (I guess they could always ride giant locusts...yeah, that's the ticket!). The fact that they're a different Class (Insecta) from the other races makes them more alien to those who must defend against them. In other words, they're Orcs.

Another enemy came to mind as I considered these guys, inspired by my relatively recent sale purchase of Vigil Watch: Warrens of the Ratmen from the Scarred Lands D&D setting. I've liked Rat-men ever since Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay introduced the Skaven; the Ratmen (or Slitheren) of the Scarred Lands are Skaven with the serial numbers filed off. So this world definitely needs to have a Vast Underground (literally!) Conspiracy of Domination-Driven Chaos Rats to threaten our bright-eyed, fluffy protagonists.

As I began to consider this world, thoughts of their religions, genesis, and overall cosmology began to suggest themselves. Going with the basic conceit of the animal RPG eco, the peoples of Fauna believe that they were once of a lesser form (dumb animals, that is) until they were endowed with intelligence and more capable bodies by a divine being. They're uplifted, but with a mystic rather than sci-fi basis. Given their humble origins, I began to consider the possibility that perhaps this is a world that once was inhabited by humans, but they experienced something akin to a rapture/judgment End Times deal, and are thought by the bestial natives of this world to have either Ascended to a higher state of being, or were Damned to a lesser state. In either case, they're long gone, leaving behind only ancient taboo-shrouded ruins to be explored by the bold and the irreverent. This, of course, suggests a body of eschatology in their religion warning that they're in for the same fate someday, an ultimate judgment of their character by the God(s).

While the pre-existence of humans in this world allows for the possibility of human-like or human-based creatures (like Centaurs, Lammasu, Lamia, etc.) to exist, I think it gives the world more of a unique flavor if one strikes all creatures from the Monster Manuals that have these distinctly human parts. I don't mean to get rid of anything anthropomorphic (though, now that I think of it, that's not a bad idea), but I just don't want any creatures running around with a human face.

The concept of animals-as-people always introduces an uncomfortable question: what do they eat? What fills the role of animals in a world populated by anthropomorphic animals? I didn't want to have the strange co-existence of Goofy and Pluto. Fortunately, other people have tackled this problem. I took Stan Sakai's idea from Usagi Yojimbo and filled some of this niche with lizard-type creatures. In fact, I thought, why not fill the niche with dinosaurs? They could range in all sizes, most of them miniature, but some of them large enough to serve as beasts of burden, war mounts, and so on. As for their diets, it might retain a sort of cultural/racial flavor for species to remain herbivorous, carnivorous, or omnivorous. Rabbits still eat only vegetables, while Cats eat meat.

This setting is by no means unique, of course; as this bounced around in my brain I began to mentally list other settings that influenced the idea: eco, the surprisingly engaging (to me, anyway) RPG by Morrigan Press where you play normal animals who have been endowed with heightened intelligence a la "The Secret of Nimh"; Skyrealms of Jorune, which includes the genetically uplifted Children of Iscin; Mutants in Avalon for the After the Bomb setting supplement for the Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Weirdness RPG, the Justifiers RPG and the comic and RPG Albedo Anthropomorphics. Also influencing this were, obviously, Brian Jacques's Redwall series of novels and David Petersen's Mouse Guard graphic novels, although the latter casts the protagonists as being "actual scale", the size and anatomical build of real mice rather than human-sized anthropomorphizations. Also influential was the "Dimension X" story arc of Ninja High School (which featured Napoleonic Rats fighting Cockroach Barbarians).

Elminster's Law, or, The Law of DMPCs

2008-09-17T19:18:00.000-07:00

Jeff Rients may have just given a name to a well-known roleplaying phenomenon. I don't know if he actually invented it or heard it from someone else, but I only care that I can now refer to it by name:

Elminster's Law:
The PCs' desire to kill an NPC is directly proportional to the DM's love of the character.

The Forge of Fury

2008-09-10T02:33:00.000-07:00

This is the teaser I wrote for my new game on Rondak's. Hopefully it should be approved and posted in a day or two:

Here's some mood music to set the scene (right-click to open in a new window; make sure to check your volume before you click! EDIT: For some reason, the link includes this website address in front of the actual address, and I can't get it to quit doing that. So you'll just have to edit the address in your own browser, I'm afraid).

Durgeddin the Black, desirous of arms,
Smith of great skill, renown'd among Dwarves,
All spattered and bloody, with hands steep'd in red,
His apron for smithing smear'd with the blood
Of goodwife and mate of hundreds of years
Heldardris Nor Erzak, daughter of Heldal,
Granddaughter of Firumvor Keeper of Steel.
Down at his feet lay bones of his children
Their broken young bodies bone-pale by forge-light -
His beloved kindred, slain by the Blackbloods;
They took from him treasures too dear to be priced.
Now takes he hammer from that ancient anvil
And holds it aloft, the fight to be joined;
He calls on his people to rise up to battle,
Bloodthirsty cries and steel upon steel;
Sparks from the craft of Tharmekhûl’s anvil.
The Dwarves of Durgeddin claim many an Orc
Ere dawn's Sun arising upon that foul day,
But only a handful of clans are left breathing
The winds of the mountain - so few, so few.
He led them, the Hero-Smith, his orphanéd sons
And daughters, descendants of ruin and pain,
To find a new home down deep in the good earth,
A hearth that would warm them and guard them with stone.
Yet grief would not let him find slumber in darkness
And Durgeddin raised up his fists in his rage
And swore on the names of his ancestors long-past
An oath of dire vengeance, of hatred, of wrath.
The blood of his family still staining his beard,
Old Durgeddin promised to raise up a foundry,
A pit where the forge-fires were fueled by his rage,
Where armor was shaped by the beats of his anguish,
Where weapons were cooled in his own boiling blood;
This forge of fury, by powers unholy,
Would he, by his own hands, raise up from the earth,
And hammer out weapons made black by his dark hate
With which to annihilate the psychotic hordes,
The hellspawn that stole all worth from his life!

So is told the saga, as the Dwarves themselves chant it.

Yet who could have known that, after so many centuries, this Forge of Fury would be found?

Now I'm A Tiny Adventurer

2008-09-06T14:40:00.000-07:00

I'm going to run a dungeon crawl for Mr. Slusser on Rondak's. We've been playing Tiny Adventures on Facebook a bit lately, and while it doesn't whet my appetite for 4e, it does make me want to play the editions of D&D that I do own. So we discussed it; he wants to play a Paladin, and I want to use my kit-bashed D&D gameworld, Anhur.

As much as I enjoy putting together an adventure on Rondak's, one of the big reasons I secretly look forward to beginning a game there is having an excuse to create a title placard for the game. I mentioned this to Slusser, and he commented that it must be an artist thing. He may be right, but for whatever reason, I love looking for interesting and evocative images on Google Image Search, throwing them into Photoshop to tweak, and then matching them up with just the right font. I couldn't tell you why; I wouldn't describe myself as a graphic designer, per se.

Anyway, here's what I came up with:

This time, I thought a minimalist approach would work.

If RPGs Were Cookbooks

2008-06-20T10:34:00.001-07:00

This link comes from Jeff's Gameblog: Killjoy Cooking With the Dungeons & Dragons Crowd.

If you don't know much about the roleplaying game community (at least, as it manifests on the internet), this is a pretty accurate translation of what we're all too often like into "normal person" language.

If you have any familiarity with the roleplaying game community, you will recognize your own.

Maybe I'll Just Get Into It When It's Old and Cheap?

2008-06-06T15:35:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure I've already said so on this blog, but I'm giving 4th Edition D&D a pass. I'm skipping this edition, and perhaps may be ending my investment in any "current" edition of D&D with 3.5. I've got enough invested in 3rd Edition / 3.5 that I'll probably never need another version of D&D; besides, I've got enough variations on that system - including the version I'm currently using for our Xaria campaign, the super-stripped-down Microlite20 - and previous editions of D&D that I am satisfied. I could easily and happily game with what rules systems I have for the rest of my life.

Having said that, I've got the latest Alpha copy of the Pathfinder RPG from Paizo, which promises to be a sort of "D&D 3.75". I could be persuaded to purchase that after they've finished it, since the quality of their publications is quite high, both visually and content-wise.

Anyway, I just got an email today from one of the online games shops I frequent, announcing that the long-awaited 4th Edition D&D books are now available. It could be that I'm just an old fuddy-duddy with long out-of-date perceptions of how much games cost, or that I'm a cheapskate with very little disposable income any more, or that gaming is simply not as much of a priority in my life any more (...no, it's not that), but I'm a little appalled at how much money Wizards of the Coast expects their customers to spend to get one single RPG.

In order to play 4th Edition D&D, you'll have to pay:

$34.95 for the Player's Handbook
$34.95 for the Dungeon Master's Guide
$34.95 for the Monster Manual

= roughly $105.00, not including tax.

...Oh, and if you want the introductory adventure, that'll run you another $29.95. That's thirty dollars for a freakin' module!

Maybe I've completely forgotten what it was like in the old days of gaming - perhaps the old 1st Editions of these books were comparable in price relative to 1970s/80s prices - but I cannot conceive of spending $100 for a single RPG. When there are SO MANY game systems available on the market for a heck of a lot less (if not free), paying this much just seems like insanity to me. On the other hand, Monte Cook's 672-page hardcover setting book Ptolus: City By The Spire sells for $120 - if you can find it - and it remains a consistent best-seller. So that theory about being an out-of-touch old grognard may be true.

But I can live with that.

In other news, I'm becoming a World of Warcraft addict, and it's all Slusser's fault. I got a $30 gift card for Target as a graduation gift, and Slusser - who recently bought the game - sent me a ten-day trial version of WoW to play. After getting duly hooked, I used my card to get the Battle Chest version of the game, which includes the first expansion set, The Burning Crusade. My first impressions are as follows:

If you're interested in roleplaying a character, there are far better ways to do it. WoW isn't necessarily opposed to roleplaying - they have servers that are designated as specifically for roleplayers - but it suffers from the same problems that all MMORPGs suffer from, in my opinion: the players.

There is nothing to stop you from roleplaying a character and getting into it; in fact, there are several emote commands which allow you to express yourself pretty fully. The NPCs speak in-character, even though the conversations are completely scripted (unlike in Neverwinter Nights, where you usually have your choice of responses that may affect the outcome differently from one another). You could have a real roleplaying experience, even if it's the experience of playing under a very evocative but heavily railroading GM.

But no one does. Almost no one on WoW roleplays their character, even on the RP servers. Most of the time, they'll speak out-of-character, in games/rulespeak. They're too busy running around killing things and completing quests given to them by automated NPCs to bother with any sort of character depth. In fact, last night there was even a guy who was complaining about our roleplaying that was going on around him: "I have got to get off of an RP server!" His decision to be there in the first place makes me scratch my head, especially since he was a 70th level character, so it's not like he hadn't been there for a while...

While the setting itself is beautiful and immersive, the players in it will yank you right out of that immersion and make you feel like you're in some sort of elaborate amusement park populated by snotty teenagers. It seems to be the exception rather than the rule when you encounter a player character who has a name that would actually fit in a fantasy setting. Most everyone is Frankthatank, or ihategnomes, or Ninjhahz... It says something when you meet a Dwarf character named "Dawarff" and think to yourself, "Okay, that could work..." But I think Blizzard shares a little blame for this: the game manual specifically says not to give your character inappropriate or joke names, but then, on the very next page, there's a screen shot which includes characters named "RobM" and "IcyShiva". And though they threaten to change characters' names that are like this, I don't really believe them. Many of these guys are 70th Level, which is like the highest level or close to it, so either they've been playing straight for the past week, or Blizzard prefers cash over atmosphere - which is perfectly fine. It seems to be working out amicably for them.

But for every snotty flamewar that goes on in the general and trade chat channels (the open chat dialogue that runs at the bottom of your screen no matter where you are, but are especially noisy in the big cities), foaming at the mouth with ridiculous one-upsmanship or political talk (highly verboten according to the Terms of Service and manual, but again, nothing I've witnessed any sort of moderation reacting to), I've run into players who are quite generous, casting beneficial spells on your character, offering to help out, etc. I was playing one of my characters when someone rode up to me and gave me a gold piece - which, in WoW, is quite a lot of money for a character not even past 20th level - and said, "Twink to your heart's content" ('twinking' being a term for equipping your character beyond their normal means using stuff from higher-level characters). And we've even run into one or two people who were actually roleplaying their character. So while I was anticipating a lot of nastiness, for the most part I've been pleasantly surprised.

Someone referred to WoW as "a treadmill that makes you fatter." I get that. I agree. But at this point, the scenery is new to me, and the progression in power and ability is quite entertaining. At first I was concerned about buying a game that I'll have to keep paying for in order to play. However, I have a group of like-minded friends that I play with, and this also gives me an opportunity to connect with my brother-in-law and nephew, who are both really into WoW. So it's worth it. It'll never replace my tabletop RPG sessions, but I don't think it's really meant to, either. There are things that MMORPGs simply can't do.

Do Gamers Make Better Movies?

2008-05-13T00:10:00.001-07:00

Steve Jackson seems to think so, and he points toward Jon Favreau, the director of "Iron Man", as his proof.

I haven't seen it yet, but I really want to, and everyone I know who has seen it said it was good. Every commercial and trailer I saw for it made me want to see it even more. Soon, I'll get my chance.

In the meantime, "Prince Caspian" opens on Friday, and I will be seeing that.

Gaming Again!

2008-04-06T15:05:00.001-07:00

The last few weeks have been great for gaming. I've gotten to play in two games in the last two weeks.

Last weekend, my wife and I went up to the mountains to visit the Slusser household with the intention of doing some gaming. Our friend Miner - veteran LARP GM - wanted to start up one of his oldest campaigns, called "Flight 42", and suggested the same weekend to play. We told him that we were already committed to gaming with the Slussers (planning on continuing the Earthdawn campaign I'm currently GMing), but we were still interested in playing his game.

A bit of advice: If you've never gamed with Miner, and he invites you to play in a game he's GMing, you say 'yes!'

Fortunately for us, Miner convinced the Slussers to host his game, so we played that instead. We were joined by Gaughen and Antos, which was great because we haven't gamed with them in ages, and we hadn't yet seen Antos since returning to California. So a grand time was had by all.

And as I alluded to in my above suggestion, Dave is one of the best GMs I've ever played with. He had music, he had pictures and illustrations, he had handouts, he knew his system inside and out (a system of his own creation, if I'm not mistaken), and I think he used just the right amount of description. He didn't get too hung up on details, as I tend to do. His pacing was really ideal - I never felt rushed or as though I didn't have enough time to express my character's personality, and yet at the same time, we managed to get through something like four mini-scenarios before the evening was complete. And he did all of this with Slusser tykes around his ankles. I suspect that GMing LARPS for over 10 years probably gives one some measure of skill at improvisation and dealing with distractions.

The game itself was really fun. The campaign concept is specifically designed so that anyone can join and play in any session. If you miss a session, no problem. It's a really neat idea. I don't want to give anything away for those of you who read this blog and may have the opportunity to play in "Flight 42", because it's really better if you go in not knowing anything about it. What I can tell you is that we all played modern day, "average Joe" type characters who were, for reasons of our own individual devising, were taking a commercial flight from LAX to the Bahamas (or was it Barbados? I don't recall at the moment, and Miner has my character sheet). I played a comics artist who had been working in the industry since the Silver Age (the 1960s), and who had created a character called 'Fantoma' - bascially a female Doc Strange - that had recently been made into a blockbuster movie. He won a lawsuit with DC Comics over rights, and won a considerable settlement, which he was using in part to take the first vacation he ever had. Marilyn played a college student with a major in physics. It was her first time playing a game set in modern day, and she said that she really enjoyed it - it was the first character she'd ever played that she could really get into roleplaying, since she understood her mindset.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun.

The other game I got to play in was Ernie's Star Wars game. We continued our story, as our Jedi used an old star chart to locate the Esper system. At least, we thought it was a system. When we arrived, we found only a black hole surrounded by a considerable amount of debris. In fact, coming out of hyperspace, our Togarian pilot, Tolas (a catlike alien played by Budzik) had to take evasive maneuvers to avoid slamming into some of this debris. The rest of us had to hold onto something, and quick; unfortunately, the eldest member of our party, Jedi Master Zandis Mirr (played by Rob, who couldn't make it to the game) was taken by surprise and flew across the cabin, slamming headfirst into a bulkhead. The Cerean Jedi, Foster (played by Aaron), managed to heal his wounds with the Force, but Master Mirr was still unconscious.

So that's one way of dealing with PCs whose players can't make it to the game.

Once we got our bearings, we spotted a small Naboo fighter drifting amongst the debris. Upon investigating, we discovered that its pilot was still alive inside, semi-conscious but with life support systems almost depleted. We brought him aboard and bolted his ship to ours, and began the inevitable introduction/interrogation procedure that usually follows such encounters on the trail of possible Sith. He looked like a bit of a scoundrel - my character, Jedi Knight Nura Nuada, recognized that he had been a slave gladiator at some point, and carried a lightsaber on him - and called himself Stormbringer, an obvious stage name. Turns out he was looking for a hooded man with a cybernetic claw for a hand, which Foster had experienced visions of.

Stormbringer was a PC; Kevin was able to join us, and this was how Ernie introduced him into the game.

Oh, by the way - I just learned about an interesting way of making character sheets, so that the GM and other players can see what your character looks like while you simultaneously are able to read your stats. I've seen it called a "tent"-style character sheet. It requires that you fold a page in half and set it up on the playing surface like a tent; one side has your character's picture and name, and the side facing you has stats and so on. It's really handy for other players to remember what your character looks like, especially if you're playing an alien, or in my case, someone of the opposite sex. I'd like to think that my roleplaying skills aren't so bad that no one could tell my character was supposed to be female, but I think it may be unavoidable for people to say "him" instead of "her" when the player is male.

It's like this, see:

Anyway, I'm sure this kind of character sheet is easier to create for some game systems than others, but since characters in Ernie's homebrew system consist of five stats total, I was able to fit my portrait, stats, race, age, and brief character history on one side of the "tent".

Here's the picture I'm using. Phear my leet Photoshop skilxxorz!

Nura Nuada, Jedi Knight

It probably goes without saying that Stormbringer suggested Nura bunk with him.

I put my character "tent"-sheet together in PowerPoint, but you could easily do it in Paint, if you wanted. The hard part was flipping the picture and text on the GM/Front side upside down. I printed it out on parchmenty cardstock (I would have used plain white, but I don't have any that firm) and now I'm looking forward to showing it off at the next game session...whenever that will be.

A New Life Awaits You In The Offworld Colonies

2008-03-11T08:51:00.000-07:00

So, a few weeks ago, I was idly paging through my copy of the Aliens Colonial Marine Technical Manual, when I began reading the chapter dealing with Synthetics. Synthetics, in "Alien" terminology, are biological androids. Ash (from the original film) and Bishop (from the second) are both synthetics.

As I read, I said to myself, "Huh - organic androids. Kinda like Replicants in 'Blade Runner'."

Click.

What if one were to ignore the opening placard in "Blade Runner," and assume that, instead of Los Angeles of 2019, it was actually Los Angeles, 2219 or so? What if a Blade Runner was called in to deal with a group of Replicants/Synthetics who had broken with their corporate employers - Weyland-Yutani - and were now loose on Earth? What if, in the course of tracking down the Replicants, said Blade Runner discovered that they were trying to stop a Weyland-Yutani cargo from making earthfall, or were trying to destroy one of their biotech research and development facilities that was dealing with off-world organic materials?

If you know what I mean.

I probably don't have to go into what it might be like if said Blade Runner were to learn that Something Else was also looking around for the same xenoform...

My D&D Stats

2008-03-11T03:13:00.000-07:00

Okay, I usually skew as Lawful Good in these things, but checking the results I see that I was only one point away, so I guess I'm okay with that. My Dexterity is higher than my Wisdom? My Prime Requisite? I must not be a very good Cleric... I think that the only reason my Dex got rated so high was because I have pretty good aim. See, this is why 2nd Edition AD&D Player Options allowed you to split attributes...

I Am A: Neutral Good Human Cleric (4th Level)

Ability Scores:

Strength-11

Dexterity-14

Constitution-12

Intelligence-13

Wisdom-10

Charisma-12

Alignment:
Neutral Good A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment because because it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Class:
Clerics act as intermediaries between the earthly and the divine (or infernal) worlds. A good cleric helps those in need, while an evil cleric seeks to spread his patron's vision of evil across the world. All clerics can heal wounds and bring people back from the brink of death, and powerful clerics can even raise the dead. Likewise, all clerics have authority over undead creatures, and they can turn away or even destroy these creatures. Clerics are trained in the use of simple weapons, and can use all forms of armor and shields without penalty, since armor does not interfere with the casting of divine spells. In addition to his normal complement of spells, every cleric chooses to focus on two of his deity's domains. These domains grants the cleric special powers, and give him access to spells that he might otherwise never learn. A cleric's Wisdom score should be high, since this determines the maximum spell level that he can cast.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

Dungeon Crawl

2008-03-10T00:51:00.001-07:00

Ever since learning about Gary Gygax's death on Tuesday, I had been in the mood to play some D&D. The more old school, the better. Fortunately, Budzik, Aaron, Haleanna and my wife were all available and interested in playing. Budzik and I decided that we should play a good, old-fashioned dungeon crawl, and figured this would also be a good opportunity to test out some variant D&D rules I had in my possession. His D&D campaign had been getting bogged down in combat and excessive feats usage, and he was looking for a simpler way to run the game.

Marilyn bought a whole lot of snacks and treats, some healthier than others and all of them great. Budzik brought left-over snack-bags of food from his work, and Haleanna brought some mocha frozen yogurt from her job. Aaron, true to form, arrived late, but at least he came.

After considering a couple of different rules adaptations and variants, we ultimately decided to go with Microlite20, probably the simplest version of the d20 engine I've yet seen. All of the rules fit on one double-sided page (and the flip side of the rules are really only of use for the DM, anyway).

My wife used a half-Orc Fighter we had made for a D&D3e Birthright game that I ran a few Christmases ago, though when questioned about her character later, she said she was a full-fledged Orc. Budzik rolled up a Human Mage who was eager to earn some gold. Aaron made a Gnome Thief, amusingly portrayed with a German accent, and we rolled up an Elven Cleric for Haleanna, since she was arriving late.*

I had decided that the game should be set in Xaria, our LARP setting, since that would be most familiar to everyone. After considering some free maps on Wizards of the Coast's website and a couple of PDF adventures I had on my computer, I eventually settled on Looking Glass Deep by Malhavoc Press. It narrowly won out over Gary Gygax's Keep on the Borderlands, because it seemed like we'd have a better chance of actually finishing it in one night**, and I was intrigued by its promises of monsters that used tactics. I set the adventure, as per Budzik's request, in northern Quivera, the Orange Duchy, which is ruled by Duke Kagrug the Orc. Lots of concerns about monsters invading from Uragoth to the north, especially what with King Onk's latest forays.

Now, given my intended goals for the evening, and given that we'd spent a considerable amount of time talking and catching up on things (nothing I regret, certainly), and that the players spent more time creating their characters than I really thought they would, I probably should have started them at the mouth of the dungeon. I was going to do so, but they immediately started asking me about whether they'd met at an inn, and Budzik explained to Haleanna how that was a hoary old cliche about D&D. Since it was such a cliche, and we were doing Old School style, I embraced the cliche and even had them met there by a Mysterious Cloaked Old Man, the full nine yards.

After a few minutes of listening to the players bantering in-character (which was marvelous - these folks are very good roleplayers), the Mysterious Cloaked Old Man came in out of the rain, spoke a few hushed words to the innkeep, and came over to the PCs with a proposition. He needed someone to go to an old, ruined fortress and map it out for him - he would provide them with parchment and mapping tools, and he hinted at the fact that while the ruins had been deserted for over a century, it was not unknown for bandits or foolish treasure seekers to go there and pick over the cold, dead stones. In exchange for a rough map of the place, he would pay them a gold piece per day, which he thought was quite reasonable, since scribes only get paid about three silvers a day.

Haleanna surprised me by immediately and coldly haggling with the Old Man, and before you know it, she had negotiated the Old Man up to twenty GP up front and fifty upon delivery of the map, with the provision that they would disarm any traps that might still be in the old place (since the old Baron who once had the run of the place was rumored to have dabbled in magik).

Then came more discussions as to how they would proceed, what lodgings they would require, whether the Old Man should be followed (he was), etc. By the time the characters finally reached the mouth of the box canyon where the fortress was, and the Gnome had scouted the first wall, Budzik had to go home to feed the baby and my wife was beginning to fall asleep. As is typical, we never got as far as the "dungeon" part of our dungeon crawl. *sigh*

Nonetheless, they all thoroughly enjoyed the simpler new ruleset and the gaming experience, and all wanted to continue at some point, though a round of questioning revealed that no one will be available again for a few weekends. Oh, well. Even though I hadn't even looked at the adventure an hour before the game began (I was trying to read it while they were making characters, and of course there would be no concentrating going on while that was happening, so I read and re-read the first page about six times before I finally got anywhere with it) and completely improvised my cheesy cliche opening, we all still had fun. I got to have at least a little bit of an old school gaming experience again, which is what I really wanted after all.

*We cut Haleanna slack because a) we didn't know if she was going to be able to make it in the first place, b) she brought mocha frozen yogurt, if I hadn't already mentioned, and c) she's cuter than Aaron.

**Foolish me.

The Ending of An Age

2008-03-04T13:01:00.000-08:00

E. Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, father of this quirky roleplaying hobby and author of a style so idiosyncratic that the word "Gygaxian" had to be added to the geek vocabulary, has died at the age of 69. Without him, this hobby may still have come into being, but it would have had a completely different flavor. This blog would have a different name, for one - I think that the lich Vecna was his creation; it was a part of the gameworld he created (and the first gameworld I ever roleplayed in, the one I grew up with), the World of Greyhawk.

Though the man's gaming style was not to my taste, his work certainly made its impression on me. He improved my vocabulary, teaching me words like "milieu" and "dwoemer" through his rulebooks; through his bibliography and recommended reading lists he introduced me to some of my favorite fantasy authors, Fritz Lieber and Robert E. Howard. It wouldn't be going too far to say that the man's work was a significant inspiration to me, and had a considerable impact on my life. In fact, without the work that he created, I think it's fair to imagine that many things which have shaped the geek subculture came into existence because of his influence, such as World of Warcraft (born out of Warcraft, which was born out of Warhammer, which was born out of D&D). He suffered through a lot of legal battles and unfair treatment over the property he created with Dave Arneson, and ended up being unjustly kicked out of his own company. Yet from what I've seen of him, he was open and kind toward his fans and colleagues. He came to The Source in St. Paul once while I was there, and I watched him run a D&D game for a little while. I think it would have struck me as odd to see a white-bearded old man playing a roleplaying game had I not already been prepared for it by seeing our elder friend Vern play Campaign, or met renowned fantasy artist and southern gentleman Larry Elmore, whose artwork will forever in my mind be associated with Dungeons & Dragons.

Sadly, the lives of gamers tend not to be so long. A few other industry creators and professionals of note are in poor health, from what I read on RPGnet. Gamers in general are not known for the good shape of their bodies. So Gary's passing comes as another warning to me - I've been eighty pounds overweight for a while now, and with a father who was diabetic, I'm really pushing my luck.

I don't know what Gary's personal beliefs were, so I can't comment on his ultimate destination. If you'll forgive me for being a bit cheesy and maudlin, all I can do is raise a tankard, say a fond farewell, and thank Uncle Gary for all the fun.

EDIT, Again: I went to the TrollLords website, publishers of Castles & Crusades, and one of the forum posters quoted the last e-mail he received from Gary, on January 16:

Thank You, Michael,

All I am is another fellow human that has at last, after many wrong paths and failed attenpts, found Jesus Christ.

Via con dios,
Gary

"Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven." Matthew 5:16

Moreover, here is one Christian gamer's story about Gary, both his regrets and his triumphs.

Praise God. We'll see you on that far shore in the House of the Lord.

"He Say You Brade Runnah."

2008-02-20T21:30:00.000-08:00

I was idly paging through my old copy of the Aliens Technical Manual, which I had originally bought as reference material for my 2300 AD RPG, when I started reading about how the Colonial Marines are organized. If you remember the movie "Aliens," you'll recall that an android is assigned to each group of Marines (I'm too drowsy to go look up the specific organizational title).

I started thinking about the possibilities of the setting of "Aliens" - the book really fleshes that universe out - and thinking about how "Predator" got a crossover, putting them in the same universe in about as official a way as one can (and thus providing Dark Horse with a nice cash cow). And there's a lot of talk in the Manual about the colonies that humanity had settled...

And then it occurred to me: Lifelike, organic Androids. Off-world colonies. Megacorporations. Where have I heard these things before? Ding!

Sure, it says in the beginning of the movie that it's Los Angeles, 2019, but seriously, do you think L.A. will look anything that large by then? That's only 11 years from now. Ignore that title placard and pretend that "Blade Runner" takes place about two hundred years from now, and it may as well be the same universe as "Aliens" and "Predator."

So, naturally, I started thinking about adventures that could be set in Deckard's corner of the Earth...

A Cunning Plan...

2008-02-18T15:27:00.001-08:00

Aaron Williams has a brilliant idea that may just save American culture, presented in his comic strip Full Frontal Nerdity.

I'll invest in that plan.

My Ultimate D&D Game

2008-02-14T10:25:00.000-08:00

I was trawling around the forums on RPGnet and happened across the following question: "What would be your "ultimate" D&D style? Forget the rules system... what elements of plot, character & style do you hold as your ultimate D&D experience?"

Because I was eating breakfast and putting off my homework, I came up with the following answer:

Epic, in the sense of LotR and Dragonlance. A big, sweeping campaign with the fate of the world in the balance. Good versus Evil, with those thinking themselves in the middle eventually having to choose a side. Triumphs and betrayals, victories and tragic deaths. Flawed heroes, not anti-heroes. Melodrama, not angst. Romance and romanticism. Friendship, honor, compassion and bravery, pitted against treachery, selfishness, and fear.

Formidable and frightening monsters, ancient titanic ruins whose histories are lost in time (but of which fragments of lore survive), heroic battles against uncertain odds. Magic items and artifacts with stories to them - it's not a +3 Broadsword, it's The Flame of the West; it's not a Potion of Healing, it's the Waters of Ilumina, springs blessed by the goddess of the forests.

Hobbit-style halflings. Tinker-merchant Gnomes. Beautiful, arrogant, tragic Elves. Stubborn, honor-bound, tragic Dwarves. Monster races that aren't just Evil for Evil's sake - some of them are honorable, and some of them are twisted. But not all monster races are misunderstood foreigners - some of them were birthed by Evil to usher in the End of the World. Desperate appeals for alliance in the face of extinction. Religious orders. Sorcerous orders. Knightly orders. Angels and Demons, and their pacts with mortals.

The artwork of Larry Elmore and Wayne Reynolds. Tony di Terlizzi and Russ Nicholson.

Levels 1-6. A mixture of wilderness and urban adventures.

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up for me.

Robotech: The Movie?

2008-02-09T18:10:00.000-08:00

...and I don't mean "Megazone 23" with a different script.

This is from September of last year:

http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?id=43915

I understand that rumors are rumors, and not everything that gets optioned ever makes it to the theater.

But "Transformers" got turned into a movie. And unlike "Transformers," this would make me all giddy inside.

Star Wars

2008-02-08T08:26:00.001-08:00

Ernie ran a Star Wars game last weekend. The invitation came out of the blue, and at the last minute; Budzik called and invited me to join them. I grabbed a few books from my Star Wars library - the Visual Dictionary, the Omnibus, WEG/D6 Star Wars roleplaying rulebook - and drove up to Ernie and Pam's swanky apartment in Norwalk. Present were Budzik, Aaron, and Rob Hearn.

Ernie was trying out a new system of his own creation. It was very simple, which I greatly appreciated, allowing us to focus more on what our characters were like than trying to allocate points and reference charts. Apparently, someone else had run a game for him using a similarly-improvised system, and he liked it so much he decided to make his own version of it. He warned us a couple of times not to get our hopes up too much, but since this was the first time I've had the opportunity to do some tabletop gaming with the old Campaign crowd, I was more than pleased.

The setting was the Old Republic, roughly twenty years before the beginning of "Episode One." We were all playing Jedi - something I've never gotten to do before, outside of playing "Knights of the Old Republic" - of varying experience. I made a Knight named Nura Nuada who, by Budzik's suggestion/insistence, would have been played by Jennifer Garner. She had been found by the Jedi Master Kye Peyna on Nox, a garbage moon of Kuat, begging in what passed for the starport there. He recognized her self-reliant spirit and physical toughness even at her very young age, and negotiated with the head of her scavver clan to purchase her from them. She was the combat-oriented Jedi in our party, extremely skilled with a lightsaber and telekinetic Force powers. Budzik made a catlike alien Padawan named Tolas, whose specialty was piloting and starships; we decided that Nura's master had also sponsored Tolas's entry into the Jedi Order. Tolas thought of Nura as his "big sister," which is, in fact, what he often called her. She, in turn, referred to him as "little brother." Aaron made another Padawan learner, a peaceful healer from an agrarian society named Foster (Aaron's strength is not necessarily in naming characters, but the background information and society he came up with compensated for that). Finally, Rob made an older Jedi Master named Zandis Mirr, who had been involved in dealing with spice cartels on Kessel for the past few years.

The system was pretty simple: each of our characters had five slots for abilities, ranked at 20% intervals (100%, 80%, 60%, 40%, and 20%). Ernie had a list of abilities which seemed to consist of both Force powers and skills like Interface (which could be applied to dealing machines or animals); we chose which abilities we would rank at which ratings. When making skill or Force power checks, we would roll percentile dice, trying to roll under our rating, and he would apply modifiers to the rating depending upon difficulty. Our health was rated in dice; each character had ten d10s. These d10s could be spent on skill rolls to boost our chances of success - each d10 used this way could be rolled and the result added to our skill rating that we had to roll under. However, since the d10s were also like hit points, there was a risk to using them. They would only be replenished when our characters rested (or after each session - I can't remember which now).

We were brought together on Coruscant at the Jedi Temple. Nura had been returning from a mission amongst the Wookiees on Kashyyykk, hoping to arrive in time to congratulate Tolas on completing his final ordeals before being named a full Jedi. Upon arrival, she was met by representatives of the Council and summoned to appear before them. All four of us were brought together there and told that we were being sent on a mission to discover the fate of one Jedi Master Merlosis who had gone missing. Merlosis had been investigating a disturbing case: a Padawan had been slain, cut in half with a lightsaber, and his Master, Jendo Kree, had disappeared. Merlosis was hunting for Kree when he mysteriously vanished near Naboo, on his way to Corellia. In his last transmission to the Council, Merlosis had warned, "Jendo Kree is gone. The Sith are coming." Of course, the Sith had been gone for so long that it was almost like being told that a fairy tale had come true...

Our band flew out to the Expansion Region, to the Tyna system, which was embroiled in a civil war that the Republic was keeping its hands out of. After narrowly avoiding being shot down by natives, we found the wreckage of Merlosis's single-man ship, its hyperspace booster still attached. As we searched, a band of warriors appeared on a nearby ridge and began shooting at us. Some of them appeared to be setting something up. The others took cover. I decided that, in true bad-ass Jedi fashion, Nura would start running toward the soldiers, flipping and somersaulting to avoid their shots. The Force - or the dice - were with me, and I got my cool cinematic scene I was hoping for, deflecting their blaster shots with my lightsaber and flipping over the rocks they hid behind to land menacingly in their midst. As some of them ran, Nura saw that they were setting up a cannon, so she deflected their blaster shots into it and destroyed it. When the smoke cleared, one of them was left, holding his blaster in his trembling hand. Nura gave him an ultimatum: "You can shoot me, and perhaps die, or you can leave now and live." He chose to try both, shooting at me as he ran away. It proved to be a bad idea on his part.

Now, for those who have not had the pleasure of gaming with Ernie, he is a GM who is fond of props. When Nura returned to the rest of the party by the ship wreckage, she learned that they had found amidst the detritus a map. Deciding it was not enough to just tell us this, Ernie had at some point sat down and painted a star chart on a large black piece of paper in gold and silver. Along with it was a transparent blue plastic strip with a pattern of stars painted on it. We had to figure out, sliding the strip around on the star map to match up their constellations/systems, what Merlosis's planned route had been. Eventually we figured out that there was a system on the strip which was not marked on the map, and determined that this was where he had been headed.

So, note to self - props are awesome. I'm looking forward to the next time we can meet and play, which should be pretty soon, as Ernie is going to be flying off to Panama later this month. After that, Budzik has plans to get his old D&D game started up again. He started it shortly before I moved away, and apparently they got pretty far with that campaign in the time I was in Minneapolis. Best of all, he's asked me to resume playing the character I had originally made for that game, a Half-Orc Cleric of Vorak, God of War...

The Last Grenadier, Burbank

2008-02-01T22:22:00.000-08:00

Tonight I wanted to get out of the apartment for a little while, both to clear my head and to give Marilyn some alone-time (since I'm always home when she is, so I get alone-time but she doesn't - alone-time being very important for introverts like the two of us). I decided to drive over to The Last Grenadier, which is one of L.A.'s oldest roleplaying game stores, as well as being personally endorsed by famous geek Wil Wheaton. I have two addresses for The Last Grenadier, so I went to the one I haven't seen. Whether this means there are two branches, or that one is an old address (which I visited often the first time I lived in L.A. back in 2000-2001), I don't know. This commentary is regarding the branch at 820 Hollywood Way.

I think I've been spoiled by The Source Comics and Games in Minnesota. For those who have never been there, The Source is what every game and comics shop should be - friendly, knowledgeable clerks (who aren't snotty in that Simpsons Comic Book Guy way); well-organized shelves offering the latest books and drawers filled with old standbys, classics, and obscure small-runs; a large gaming area with a week full of scheduled events; sales and special events; and - I cannot emphasize this enough - cleanliness.

The Last Grenadier has a lot of stock. There are boxes and boxes of gamebooks, some of which I've heard of but never seen in print (such as Tunnels & Trolls). Their collection of Osprey Military books is impressive, and if I wanted miniatures (what we used to refer to as "lead figures"), I now know where I could get just about anything I wanted.

Having said these things, I can't help but make comparisons to The Source, and The Last Grenadier loses pretty much every point.

TLG is seriously in need of two things: organization and a thorough dusting. There's no carpet; the floor is bare concrete, marked with numerous mysterious stains, skidmarks, and other markings. The staff kept the front door open the entire time I was there, and while it isn't frigid down here, it is cold enough outside that the store had the feeling of a drafty, unheated warehouse. This feeling was added to by the stacks of boxes lining the walls, the unexplained blankets covering some of the stock on the RPG tables (is it not for sale? Is it water-damaged?), and the copious dust filling the bottom of every shelf and box. Many of the gamebooks I looked at I would expect to get some kind of discount on were I to purchase them because they were dirty, warped, and obviously not in new condition. I'm all for supporting local businesses - especially when they're comics or games stores - but I do expect the product I'm purchasing to be treated like product that's meant to be sold.

The store was roughly divided into Osprey Books and assorted military/reference books took up the front of the store, RPGs were in the middle (mostly in cardboard boxes on folding tables, with some on a couple of bookshelves), and boxed games and miniatures lining the walls. The RPG books on the shelves were mostly organized by system, but while the books in the boxes (2/3 of which were d20 System books) looked as though they had been organized at one point in the distant past, but after many generations of gamers had picked through them, were mixed haphazardly. If I was looking for a specific gamebook, I'd have a rough idea where to look, but I'd almost certainly have to ask for help in finding it. I'll give the clerks the benefit of the doubt here, but while I was greeted as I came in, I was never asked if I needed help. The clerks never gave me a second glance after I came in, as far as I could tell. Again, after the helpful-yet-not-overbearing presence of friendly clerks at The Source, I know that this is not too much to ask, and it does make a difference in atmosphere.

Another point lost is the fact that The Last Grenadier doesn't seem to have a website. Now, in all fairness, I didn't ask the clerks about this; I'm basing this conclusion on a simple Google check. The Source's website isn't anything to write home about, but it is easily found, and they maintain an e-mail list that regularly appraises customers of sales, new products, and events.

I'm probably making this sound pretty awful. Again, let me reiterate that it wasn't the worst gaming store I've ever been to. TLG has a lot of stock, even if it takes a little time to find it, and much of the time all I want to do is walk the aisles and browse. I don't know how much profit TLG actually makes and whether they make enough to improve the look of the store. But I will say that, for the casual shopping gamer, it appears to be run more like someone's hobby basement rather than a place of business. While they don't sell comics (not that I saw - though I was pleasantly surprised to see a copy of Zander Cannon's The Replacement God trade paperback for sale), Scott McCloud's argument in Reinventing Comics still holds true: if your store looks like a poorly-lit clubhouse backroom rather than a warm, well-lit, friendly and open store, your potential clientele - women, children, those other than hardcore hobbyists - is much likelier to simply go online for what they want.

Whatever Happened To...?

2008-01-29T21:27:00.001-08:00

They were a moderately popular classic rock band in the late '70s who inexplicably vanished when New Wave started getting attention. They resurfaced in the mid-'90s with this attempt at a more artsy sound, but failed to garner any real attention. This was their last album.

And I made them up just now.

Here's fun, courtesy of Jeff's Gameblog, which got it from somewhere else further up the chain, naturally:

01. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band.

02. http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.

03. http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/ The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

04. Use your graphics program of choice to throw them together, and post the result as a comment in this post (or a link to it, if you can't post images here - I haven't figured that part out yet). Also, pass it along in your own journal because it's more amusing that way.

EDIT: Oops. I fixed the third link, so it actually goes where it's supposed to.

Earthdawny Freshness

2008-01-23T12:39:00.000-08:00

Marilyn and I went up to the mountains again this weekend to visit with family and friends. The highlight of the weekend, for me, was the chance to sit down and roleplay with the Slussers and my wife again after so long. Even better was the fact that Marilyn was the one who suggested we do some gaming. So we pulled out our old favorite, Earthdawn, and continued with the adventure we had left off playing when we moved out to Minneapolis. I was originally considering starting an entirely new adventure, but then I happened to find a huge stack of notes that I had taken for the original game. They even pinpointed the spot where we left off. I knew the fact that I never throw anything away would pay off...

I've been running them through the old Basic/Expert D&D module B10: Night's Dark Terror. I had forgotten how jam-packed with encounters and challenges this adventure was! We've gotten several sessions out of it, and we're almost halfway through. It's much more epic than most D&D modules I can remember, and while the original has something of a Dark Ages Russia feel to it (the Grand Duchy of Karameikos, for the Mystara setting), it translates to Earthdawn fairly well.

We have Michael playing Notilos Iajo D'avanza, a T'skrang Swordmaster; Joanna playing Lara Whisperwind, a Windling Elementalist; and Marilyn playing Myra, a Windling Warrior. They are accompanied by a number of NPCs: Vagnus the Puzzler, a Dwarf Illusionist from Bartertown (my PC from our previous adventure); Karska Thu'quol, an Ork Weaponsmith from a nearby lumber camp; and Taras, non-Adept Dwarf cousin to the PCs' patron, Stethus. Vagnus travels with the PCs because he was intrigued by the idea of the adventuring life (something he's finding is much harder and less pleasant than he'd originally anticipated).

My conversion is set in the southern Throal Mountains, along the Alidar River. The PCs have been hired by a Dwarf merchant to see a herd of white horses to sale in Tansiarda, but the sudden incursion of the Skull Whargs Ork scorcher tribe have thwarted that. Now they've discovered that the Skull Whargs - and a mysterious group of slavers calling themselves the Iron Legacy - have been working for a Man In Black named Golthar, seeking a magical tapestry the PCs are now carrying. Furthermore, the scorchers have abducted the party's patron, Stethus, and they've been told that he's been taken, along with other slaves captured in their search, to a ruin in the north... I've been adding encounters or altering them to suit my tastes, and a few of the players' decisions have forced me to improvise some things, but that's good. It's all been working out to make running the adventure a richer and more enjoyable experience.

One of the more interesting events that sprung up due to improvisation was an encounter on the Island of Lost Dreams. In the original module, there is a small island in a lake inhabited by pixies; also on this island is something called The Black Mirror. In my re-write, the island is on the Alidar River, and has recently been settled by a Windling clan. There is the remains of a tower there which pre-dates the Scourge. Subsequent attempts to settle the island and rebuild the tower by the Throalic Army and T'skrang of House Syrtis resulted in disaster, as the workers inexplicably slew each other. The matron of the Windling clan informed the PCs that there was something evil in the tower's ruins - those Windlings who had ventured inside later became irritable, argumentative, and threatening to those who had been their friends. Eventually, they had to be banished. The Windling matron asked Myra if she would deal with whatever it was that was causing this problem - as long as this darkness laid beneath them, she said, her people would always be tempted to investigate it, and she did not want to lose any more of her people to this corruption.

The PCs delved into the old tower's gutted lower levels. They discovered the cause of these problems: a black mirror, made of polished obsidian, set into a gargoyle-like stone frame. The PCs knew from tales they'd been told that the island had once been home to a seer, a seeker of visions. They figured that looking into the mirror would be a bad thing, so they devised a strategy of figuring out what the problem was - primarily, tying up an NPC and having him look into it and tell them what he saw (in their defense, the NPC - Vagnus - volunteered, and had some knowledge of things magical). He saw visions of what appeared to be future events: Ork scorchers in stone barricades, a human in black robes taking the party prisoner while Karska walked away with a pouch of coin, of Taras and Stethus walking away from Notilos and Vagnus in chains. He also saw the man in black holding up their tapestry while a needle wove a thread through it...

Well, things looked a little dicey and Vagnus didn't want to look away, even though it was causing him pain, so they knocked him out. So far, according to plan, but then Notilos couldn't resist and glanced into the mirror. He saw similar visions: Karska arguing with Stethus and Taras as he sorted through the loot the PCs had all taken from some tombs together; an Elven Questor of Garlen that Notilos had been healed by the day before being carried out of her home on a bier, her throat slit... The PCs discussed what the visions could have meant, whether they were distortions, lies, or just one possible future. In any case, Myra discovered that the mirror could be damaged, and so they destroyed it, with Karska (blindfolded) hacking it to pieces with a pick, and then dumping the remains into the river.

Nonetheless, Vagnus began to act suspiciously toward Karska, and there was some concern that he might have been enchanted by the mirror. The next morning, an Elf arrived in their camp to tell them that their Questor of Garlen had been slain in the night...

The background on this mirror, the seer, and the island had all been developed; I wrote a pretty extensive background on it when I first planned to run it, years ago. But the events that the PCs saw were more or less improvised, if I can risk ruining the illusion (well, not all the events, but I'm not going to say which ones!). The PCs' reactions to these have been intriguing, and I'm interested in seeing how things pan out. I have a pretty good idea of what's going on, based on what I wrote, but I'm interested in seeing how the PCs interpret them, and ultimately what they do about it.

Man, I've missed playing, even though I was kind of rusty with the old Earthdawn rules. It was really good to get together with my old gaming group - well, most of them. Next time I need to invite Dan, so we can have the entire crew present.

The Power of Steam!

2007-12-09T19:31:00.000-08:00

While doing a Google image search (technology that saved the comics artist!) on steam technology for my manga project, I came across this photograph...

Apparently it's a steam-powered pennyfarthing. Just the thing for perambulating about the canal waterfront on a balmy Martian day!

Anhur - The Patchwork D&D Gameworld

2007-11-20T23:32:00.000-08:00

So here's the quickie handout that I typed up for that D&D game, just because I thought it would be fun to share, and it would give Slusser something to read over the Thanksgiving holiday. See how many setting names and elements you can spot - there's at least five or six settings that I ripped off here...

Happy Thanksgiving!

---

ANHUR

In ancient days of yore, the many lands of Mithra were ruled by the Elves and the Dwarves, who hated each other with such a passion that they waged terrible wars for dominance. They employed mighty magics and created horrific beasts with which to strike at each other; many relics of this age may still be found in the wilder places of the world. Since their numbers were never great, and births rare enough that any death was considered a great blow, they enslaved other peoples to fight on their behalf. This was the Age of Blood.

The Humans were one of these subject peoples, though they were enslaved by both sides. Their gods, the Asgardians, reflected their warlike and brutal lifestyles. However, they were united for the first and only time in the history of the world by divine beings known as the Harbingers. At the mountain peak of Denelspire, the Harbingers anointed a woman as Divine Imperatrix, and guided her to forge the Earthly Empyrean of the Firstborn (as the Humans began to call themselves). This was Anhur, in the Ancient Antillian tongue. The Firstborn, bolstered by the divine power of the gods, rebelled against their venerable masters, and overthrew their rulership. The rebellion that they began inspired the other races - most notably the violent and treacherous Blackblood (those which we call Orcs, Goblins, and their ilk today) - to rebel in kind. The Elven and Dwarven empires could not withstand such a loss, and they retreated into the hearts of their realms, the Elves to the forests and the Dwarves to the mountains, never to rule over others again. This was the Age of Fire.

A golden age followed, in which the Firstborn spread even further across the world, claiming dominion over Mithra as the Harbingers directed. But division amongst the Harbingers as to how the world should be ruled spread to their followers, and the Firstborn fragmented into a hundred nations. The Divine Imperatrix remained loyal to those Harbingers who stood for life and honor - Corean the Champion, Madriel the Redeemer, Tanil the Huntress, Hedrada the Lawgiver, and Denev the Earth Mother - and Anhur prospered for it, a beacon to all Firstborn nations. But the schemes of the remaining gods - Chardun the Tyrant, Belsameth the Slayer, and Vangal the Reaver - conspired to destroy Anhur. For centuries Anhur warred against her enemies, always seeking leadership from the gods, but ultimately it was Enkili the Trickster who turned the tide. Deceiving the Divine Imperatrix into believing that her most loyal soldiers, the Taltain, were conspiring against her, Enkili convinced the Imperatrix to call down a divine curse upon them. This betrayal rent the Firstborn apart from within, and the once great nation of Anhur fragmented, falling to civil war. Thus ended the Age of Illumination.

Centuries have passed since the Great Betrayal. Three nations clash for the mantle of the Divine Imperatrix: Cygnar, Kingdom of the Swan; Magador, Kingdom of the Condor; and Khador, Kingdom of the Raven. Though the King of Magador holds court in ancient Denelspire, the other rulers are not content to let this stand. Each nation always grooms a woman to be anointed Divine Imperatrix, once Denelspire has been taken and Anhur reunited under one crown. This is the Age of Strife.

The Harbingers of Anhur

The Anhurian nations formally reject the worship of the Old Gods (as they call the Asgardians), seeing them as remnants of a culture of slavery, not truly of the Firstborn but belonging to the Elder Races of Elf and Dwarf to keep them in line. This doesn’t stop many Anhurians from worshipping them, of course, and many worship both pantheons, as well as any others they may pick up. Most peasants think they can use all the help they can get.

A Gazeteer of Southern Mithra

Mithra is the continent in which the lands of Old Anhur lay, and it is also what its natives call the world. Old Anhur is in the southern hemisphere of Mithra, so it gets warmer the further one goes north, and colder the further one goes south.

Little is known regarding the farthest stretches of the world aside from dire legends. Far beyond the Viridian Empire in the east is said to lie the savage Kingdom of Karak, whose natives are the most degenerate of all Firstborn, engaging in cannibalism, ritual torture and sacrifice, rulership by the undead, and worship of heathen gods most hideous. To the furthest south is the Great Glacier, where it is so cold that no human can survive, where the wild freezing winds can shear flesh from bone, and giants perpetually war with titanic beasts of ice and iron. In the distant north are said to be the Demon Empires, earthly domains of demon princes and the vilest of diabolic monsters, who capture any interlopers into their domain, gleefully tormenting them to slake their mad sadistic lusts. None have ever returned from these mysterious and deadly realms...

Alvarheim - The largest forest in the southlands, Alvarheim - as its Wroclaw name suggests - is ruled by Elves. This Elven nation call themselves the Raesha, the High or Sun Elves. Their arrogance is considerable, as they think of themselves as the paragon of Elven culture. Their Queen is devoted to maintaining Elven cohesion as a people; in fact, while there have been many Queens, they are always known as Enduriel, suggesting that the culture of the Raesha is eternal and unchanging.

Aneirin, the Forest of - Also known as the Silverwood, the Forest of Aneirin is revered as the ancestral home of the Anhurians. The first Divine Imperatrix was a slave of the Elves who ruled this forest, the Danae (more commonly known as the Grey Elves, Silver Elves, or Moon Elves). The Danae still dwell here, but live in relative peace with the humans who surround them, preferring to remain isolated in most ways. An ancient pact called the Sanguine Covenant ensures peace between the Anhurians and the Danae, though there are those amongst the Elves who push for aggression against the interloping humans, especially since it could be said that Anhur no longer exists. A recurrent Danae raiding party known as The Wild Hunt spontaneously arises on the occasional full moon, hunting down and slaying humans like animals. In their defense, the humans they target are almost always those who have aggreived the Elves, despoiling the sanctity of the Silverwood or otherwise antagonizing the Elves. Cygnans believe that the Wild Hunt will only slay those who are not pure of heart. The Danae are ruled by a council called the Eldermost, consisting of the oldest Elves in the forest. While consent to their rulings is not enforced, it is generally understood that those who disregard their judgments willingly withdraw any claims to protection by their fellow Danae. Corunglain was the village where the First Divine Imperatrix, Ragnahild I, was born, and has since grown into a considerably large town.

Atruaghin Clans - The grassy plateau, forest, and hilly regions of the Battleplains of Gwalion are inhabited by barbarian herders, hunters, and fishermen who live in small villages. All the villagers claim to be descended from the ancient hero Atruaghin. If threatened by war they unite under a temporarily-elected leader, but usually live independently of each other. The Clans worship no gods, but rather revere the memories of their ancestors who have gone on to Elysium, and seek wisdom from the elemental spirits of the world.

Caldea - The westernmost barony of Cygnar, Caldea enjoys a reputation as a doggedly loyal and rugged province (indeed, the standard of its largest city, Caneus, prominently features a dog). Caldea has always been at the forefront of any conflict against the Wroclaw barbarians. In order to discover what was going on with the barbarians, the Baron of Caldea formed the Rovers. The Rovers would scour the wilderness looking for signs of the barbarians, or worse. They would then report such impending incursions to their leaders who would be able to raise a large enough force to repel the invaders. Over the years, the Caldean Rovers gained a reputation for being the best wilderness scouts available - a reputation enjoyed by the Taltain before the Great Betrayal.

Canolbarth - Home to an Elven people called the Arali (“Wood Elves”). They are on good terms with the Quolya (“Sea Elves”) of the Coreanic Sea, and respect Deep Sashelas as well as their own patron, Corellon Leaflord. The Arali traditionally meet four times a year - or in times of great peril - at a great fortress known as Evefalim, which, it is rumored, magically changes location within the forest dependent upon the positions of the moon, stars, and planets.

Cygnar - Kingdom of the Swan. Contender for the throne at Denelspire, the King of Cygnar has always upheld the tenets of Corean and Madriel, trying to retain the glory of Old Anhur. While not as efficient as the fighting forces of Magador, and not as magically powerful as the sorcerers of Khador, the barons and knights of Cygnar take inspiration from their deities, and have a reputation as being blessed champions (or holier-than-thou meddlers, according to others). Honor is considered one of the highest virtues in Cygnar, and features prominently in its many knightly orders; it inspires many to live noble lives, but it is also responsible for countless duels and petty conflicts. The city of Belynar - once known as Belarus in Old Anhurian days - is known as the City of One Thousand Temples; immigrants and merchants which have flooded the city over the centuries have brought their native gods with them, and so this city is believed by many to be the holiest city in the world…or the most deeply, hopelessly divided. Cygnar is effectively ruled by the Grand Master of the Royal Order of the Aquiline Cross, Lord Sir Malbeth Blackhawk, who advises the Imperatrix of Cygnar, Sylmarine IV.

Darokin - The wealth of this western Magadorian city is based on trade from Lake Amsorach, the Streel River, and the eastern caravan route which trails north of the Malpheggi Swamp. Darokin is effectively a plutocracy, ruled by the wealthiest merchant families. It has a vicious rivalry with the "common-blooded thugs" of the Minrothad Guilds. The Darokin regularly trade with the Ædlung, or “Hill Dwarves”, of the nearby Jaw Mountains.

Elsewood - Once this relatively small forest was known as Astoth, where the Arali once ruled, but have since been scattered or have joined with their kin at Canolbarth. The forest was largely used as a royal preserve for the King of Cygnar until a lord who was unjustly stripped of his titles and lands by an unscrupulous noble escaped imprisonment and took refuge here. Taking the old name of the forest as his own, Lord Astoth declared the forest his kingdom. He enticed a large number of folk to migrate to the forest by offering them more freedom than their local nobles allowed them. Lord Astoth, being one of the best archers in the land, decided to make archers the core of his growing army. This new army, smaller than most armies fielded by Cygnan nobles, used every advantage that the forest could provide for them. This small army soon became one of the most feared in the land. Lord Astoth is long dead - as is his enmity with Cygnar, having received a pardon from the Imperatrix - but his half-Elven heirs still hold sway here, training new generations of archers to defend the forest and those who would threaten her.

Ethengar, the Khaganhold of - The Khagan of Ethengar rules a nomadic, horse-bound Human people who ride a long strip of land based on the seasons. They are an enigmatic people, long removed from the Anhurians, who have turned their backs on all gods, worshipping none. The Ethen justly claim that there are no more skilled riders in all of Mithra.

Khador - Kingdom of the Raven. This Anhurian nation is effectively a magocracy; most noble families in Khador have a sorcerous lineage, and all must be proficient with arcane magic to be considered fit to rule. While the princes and princesses of this nation mostly live in the Razhirum, splendorous citadel of Tarahir, each ruler has a castle hidden in some remote wilderness area. The rulers are more concerned with magical research than actual ruling; most decisions are left to the various local councils of elders and princely stewards (the latter of which often tend to be warlike thugs and raiders who abuse their authority). The princes and princesses do not trust each other and live in a state of uneasy truce, yet history has shown that in the face of invasion they are quick to unite. In extreme emergencies, they will rally under their chosen Imperatrix, Varsinya XIX, but this typically lasts only as long as the emergency does.

Krakathoz - Deep within the mountain chain known as the Stormholds lies Krakathoz, kingdom of the Mablung Dwarves. These Dwarves are also called "Mountain Dwarves" by other races, and consider themselves the true heirs of the Undying Imperium, the Dwarven empire that once enslaved the Firstborn. It is said that the Mablung of Krakathoz are ruled by one of the Living Ancestors, a Dwarven ghost magically encased inside an Iron Golem. No one knows what the Mablung currently plot...

Magador - Kingdom of the Condor. A militant Anhurian nation with a disciplined professional army. Were it not for their relatively poor resources, they would have united Anhur under the marching boots of the Magadorian Legions long ago. Hedrada is as popular a patron deity here as Corean (and some even go so far as to openly venerate Chardun). The Magadorians consider the Wroclaw to be less than human, and treat them accordingly. Magador is ruled by King Eregoth III, who easily maintains control over Magador’s child Imperatrix, Magdolnae V. Eregoth hopes to conquer the rest of Anhur before Magdolnae reaches puberty in the next few years.

Memnoth, the Archprelacy of - A theocratic nation which claims descent from the Anhurian temple of Hedrada, though they are not a culturally Anhurian people, but the descendants of Viridian immigrants. Notable for their rigidly enforced clerical rule, their indomitable Templars (paladins) and their ever-watchful Justiciars (demon-hunting Inquisitors), the Faithful of Memnoth believe that while the Harbingers established the ascendancy of the Firstborn, only Hedrada gave them a way to live. They dismiss the need for an Imperatrix, believing the office was only necessary to create Anhur, not to maintain it. One of their more shocking beliefs is that every Firstborn is equal to others, and they long ago rejected the concept of a noble class. Memnoth is currently ruled by the elderly Archprelate Hedjhazi, who longs to capture Denelspire before he dies.

Minrothad - A semi-independent city-state within Khador, run by a syndicracy: the heads of various trading guilds. The trade influence of the Minrothad Guilds is felt as far west as Wroclaw, and all along the eastern coasts.

Revelshire - Home of the Hin, called "Halflings" by most; they themselves specify that they are of the Lightfoot lineage. This area is ruled by a council of sheriffs. Four times a year the sheriffs meet at a great feast and there decide shirewide policy by vote.

Rhona - The Rhona, commonly known by other races as “Gnomes”, roam the countryside in colorful, noisy caravans. They are known for selling all manner of wares to anyone they meet, and range from underhanded peddlers trying to con witless peasants into buying junk to master craftsmen offering high-quality goods to those who can meet their price. They have a reputation for being not entirely trustworthy, making shifty deals and devilish contracts, but also for finding and selling things that no one else can.

Taltain, The - Rangers devoted to Tanil and the Anhurian crowns, the Taltain were renowned as the most deadly and loyal warriors in the Anhurian armies. Answering directly to the Divine Imperatrix, the Taltain abided by a code of honor which respected the land and protected the innocent from those who would prey upon them. Due to the deceit of Enkili, the Divine Imperatrix came to believe that the Taltain were plotting against her, and she cursed them with lycanthropy, making them outcasts. The Taltain’s fall from honor was the catalyst that divided Anhur, and there are those that say the souls of the Taltain are intertwined with the soul of Old Anhur. Though they remain secretive, dwelling on the outskirts of society, the Taltain still act in accordance to their old vows and code of honor, serving the cause of Old Anhur wherever they may. They are known by their lycanthropy, though over the ages there are various strains according to family lines; Taltain of different families turn into different beasts. It is said that they train their young to control themselves when they are in their changed bestial forms, though there are rumors aplenty that the Taltain no longer know how to do this… The leaders of the Taltain are a council of mysterious beings known as the Guardinals - few, if any, outside the Taltain are said to have ever seen them.

Tharbrian Coast - A wild and untamed strip of land along eastern Khador. The Tharbrian Coast is renowned as a dangerous, wicked, and thoroughly exciting place, featuring pirate havens galore. The Viridian Empire often attempts naval raids along this coast, but has always been thwarted by the combined efforts of the Minrothad Guilds and the sorcerous princes of Khador.

Viridistan - The Viridian Empire sprawls over lands across the Coreanic Sea, ruled by the so-called World Emperor of Viridistan. Viridistan is a city-state nearly as old as the citadel of Denelspire, though by all accounts this subtropical empire is deeply wicked and decadent. Cygnar entertains a Viridian ambassador - Farzad Fazan Malekai - almost as a formality, partially so as not to offend the ancient power and partially so as to remind herself what the Anhurians could become if they forget their noble origins.

Wroclaw - Considered barbarians by the Anhurians, the Wroclaw are united only by their faith in the Old Gods of the wild places - Odin, Tyr, Thor, Freya, and others. The Wroclaw are renowned as fierce warriors; their religious devotions are rumored to involve human sacrifice. They keep a respectful distance from the Raesha of Alvarheim, giving tribute to the Elves in exchange for what the forest provides. The Wroclaw usually recognize no single authority outside their own warchiefs, but a powerful lord named Istvan Vargha is reportedly rallying karls (warrior-chieftains) under his feathered banner to take the fight to the Magadorians.

A Real, Live D&D Game

2007-11-20T09:23:00.000-08:00

Being in my last semester of art school, I don't really have the time to do any gaming for the most part. There's simply too many time-consuming projects, many of which suck the creative juices right out of you, and the rest just take too freakin' long to finish to devote time to any other pursuit. So it was with some measure of enthusiasm that I was invited to do some D&D on Saturday. Not only did I get to play, but I got to wear the viking hat, as they say.

For a long time, I was loathe to put anything unoriginal into a game setting. I thought that I was a creative type, a story writer, and so everything I made should be original, springing forth from my own brain and drawing upon nothing else apart from general impressions. When you're trying to be both a gamer and a comics writer, this is a really tough thing to do, because your creativity gets stretched kind of thin, and you end up putting your efforts into one thing or another, but not really both.

So this time around, invited to fill in as DM for a game that had begun as a completely improvised one-shot, with characters but no real setting apart from some handwavey vague details, I decided to make up a setting for this game that would fit the characters and the situation described to me. And I ripped off a half dozen published game settings to do it.

And it felt good.

I like my patchwork game world. I like that I didn't have to stretch my brain to come up with utterly unique names and situations, but rather just picked and chose names and concepts that I liked from other game worlds, and made a setting that made some sort of internal sense. I quickly typed up a four-page summary of the setting as a handout, complete with map (thank you, Wizards of the Coast Map Archive). I came up with a basic story idea after glancing through the Creature Collection and considering the ending of the last adventure, and made a couple of level-appropriate encounters (thank you, Hypertext SRD). I wrote everything on Initiative Cards and Storyteller Aids, grabbed my screen, and felt more prepared to run a game than I think I have in years.

And it ran well. While I still miss the quality of character roleplaying that I enjoyed in my old California game group, it turned out nonetheless to be the sort of game that one thinks of in later years when looking over the old gamebooks and getting nostalgic. It was what a good D&D game session should be.

I don't know if it was just that I was so in need of a break from homework, or if it was the college atmosphere (we played in an empty classroom); if it was the fact that I didn't overthink and overplan the entire thing, but planned just enough; if it was that I got to make a fun world that was just what I wanted and I knew instinctively; if it was that one of our players had her laptop and the school internet connection so we could have the "Diablo II" soundtrack playing on a loop in the background (thank you Bee.fm); if it was that I didn't feel a lot of pressure to perform because the improv that came before was, well, very improvisational... I don't know exactly what it was, but man, it was fun. It reminded me why I like gaming so much.

Blast From The Past: RIFTS

2007-11-18T14:29:00.000-08:00

My wife and I are packing up our things, preparing to move back to California in December. As I was going through my bookshelves today, I decided to toss out a pile of old notebooks that had been sitting on the bottom shelf since before we moved out here to Minneapolis. They're full of old gaming ideas, characters, system notes, and other things, but ultimately I decided that I don't seem to have a big problem coming up with new ideas, and one must preserve moving space for more important things.

Still, I couldn't resist going through them to see if there was anything of worth. There were one or two things I could see myself using, but I also happened across this RIFTS character, one of many that I never got the chance to play. This one was made for a planned game that my friend Sammy was going to run, which would have been the first RIFTS game I'd played since, well, I don't remember.

This is Mercy Libre. As you can guess by my choice of playing a Principled Purestrain Human Rogue Scholar, munchkinism isn't what brought me to RIFTS. The logo on her helmet says "Ex Libris Lazlo", the motto of the Order of the Library of Lazlo.

Heck, I'd still play this character.

Worldwide Dungeons & Dragons Game Day

2007-11-01T16:12:00.000-07:00

My e-mailer and postcard from The Source in Falcon Heights, MN (the best comics and games store I've ever been to) inform me that this Saturday, November 3, is International Dungeons & Dragons Day (or "Worldwide Dungeons & Dragons Game Day", according to WotC; and after all, wouldn't they know?). What with 4th Edition looming on the horizon and WotC's final big 3.5 hurrah, the Rules Compendium, I expect the tables to be packed. I'm usually wary of gaming with people I don't already know on a friendly basis - I've had enough creepy or disappointing convention gaming experiences - but man, I really would like to go play. As it is, I'll be spending part of the day helping a teacher set up an art show, and the rest of the weekend working on homework. It's a little disappointing, because there have been a lot of "last time I'll probably ever get to do this" moments in the past months as I prepare to leave Minnesota in December, and this is one of them: the last time I'll get to sit in on a big event like this where I'll have all the necessary gamebooks to jump in.

After buying every new edition of D&D since the Moldvay Basic Red Box, I'm ready to sit this next edition out. I don't have the disposable income I once did, and I certainly don't have the time I once did, but even more than these two things, if I want to do a dungeon crawl, or an epic fantasy campaign, or simply "play D&D" (which is a legitimate urge all its own, I think), I've already got more than enough books to do it to my taste. Especially since I find myself running from rules creep and massive stat blocks, diving back into the womblike security of Blue Box Expert D&D, its clones (like Basic Fantasy), or stripped-down versions of d20 like Core Elements or E6. Even True20 looks like a lot of work to me these days.

So, au revoir, D&D. I am now officially a grognard.

Black Smoke and Red Sands

2007-10-29T06:31:00.000-07:00

I've got D&D settings up the proverbial wazoo. If I ever wanted to play D&D (which I often do), the most difficult part for me would be to decide which setting to use. I've got Greyhawk, which has years of nostalgia behind it. Speaking of nostalgia, I've got the broad overview of Mystara that came with the Moldvay blue-box Expert Set and Module X1: The Isle of Dread, and as I was looking over it last night it occurred to me that it would make a fun setting to just up and run with; I've got Birthright, my favorite setting; Eberron, which I got from someone else but have never really thought much about (aside from the Warforged, which are cool, and the pulp/noir-influenced illustrations); I've got every edition of Forgotten Realms, a setting I don't love but can't ever seem to let go of entirely; Dark Sun, which I've been planning to adapt as a replacement for Marac in Earthdawn; Spelljammer: Shadow of the Spider Moon, a lovely rewrite of Spelljammer for Polyhedron Magazine, complete with Alphonse Mucha-influenced artwork; I've got the alternate world of Yrth from GURPS Fantasy / Banestorm, which I've been slowly converting to d20; and tons of historical settings by way of books like Charlemagne's Paladins and A Mighty Fortress to Avalanche Press's Vlad the Impaler and Last Days of Constantinople to Green Ronin's Medieval Player's Handbook. I've probably got a few more settings besides these that I can't think of at the moment, but suffice to say, I don't really have a need for a new setting.

A while ago, Jeff Rients mentioned on his Gameblog that he had long considered undertaking a challenge to create a D&D world using the old 1st Edition Fiend Folio as its primary monster manual. Someone in the comments section of his blog said that once they finished up with their steampunk campaign, they'd like to try making a Fiend Folio-centric world. I initially mis-read that entry and thought he was proposing a steampunk world based around Fiend Folio, and my mind clicked.

Since then, I've been throwing together a basic setting, which culls liberally from various sources, and I call "Black Smoke and Red Sands". It's based around the fusion of Planetary Romance and Victorian Steampunk. The basic conceit of the setting is that in 1876 or so, magical portals opened up in London and a few other places on Earth. These portals led to Mars, which was pretty much along the lines of what Percival Lowell imagined: great red deserts criss-crossed by canyon-like canals, sustaining a dying world. In fact, the Martian civilization had left numerous ruins in the canals - and even more grandiose and ancient ruins on the nearly-airless highlands - but none of the Martians themselves remained...unless one could consider the numerous mischievous and malicious creatures collectively known as Gremlins to be the Martians, but such works seemed impossible to have been constructed by such small-minded creatures.

In exploring the Martian canals, the British (and many others after them, including the Germans, French, Americans, and Greeks) discovered two amazing things. The first was Martian sorcery - magic was the art upon which the Martian civilization was built, and it was to the amazement and fascination of xeno-archaeologists that the mysterious formulae and incantations actually produced consistent "miraculous" effects. Under scholars like Camille Flammarion (a real-life influence on Percival Lowell), the "Martian Science" is beginning to be cataloged and codified.

The second discovery was that of more portals, leading to other worlds. Portals have been found which lead to Venus, Mercury, and other places, all of which are at least vaguely habitable. Mercury has provided a wealth of mines to exploit for those who dare to work there (it's become the new dumping-ground for criminals), and Venus, with its steaming jungles, is a great source of lumber and exotic drugs and medicines. Another major resource which has been exploited are the Dakon, sentient ape-like creatures who walk upright and speak. The Dakon have largely been enslaved by the Imperial powers, removing most of the demand for African slaves on Earth, but introducing new theological quandaries for the Church.

Now it's the 1890s, and colonization of Mars (with plantations on Venus and mines on Mercury) is well-underway. The technological advances made possible by Charles Babbage, Nikola Tesla and the rejuvenated Greek Empire have given the Imperial powers everything from steam tanks to clockwork limbs to lightning guns with which to subjugate the savage Red Planet. The discoveries of Martian sorcery and technology have caused wizardly societies to rise to prominence (as well as cults devoted to hoary alien Martian deities). Some wizards - working with the Gremlins named 'Svirfneblin' by the Norwegian who discovered them - have combined the sciences to create self-aware automata and other strange wonders.

Yet no one suspects the true reason for the Martians' disappearance...and why the Dakon fear and hate their memory so deeply.

This setting is built upon many influences. I've grabbed ideas from Space: 1889 and GURPS Steampunk's "Etheria" setting, with "Stargate SG-1" and a touch of Castle Falkenstein's sorcerous orders. I also threw in some other stuff I hadn't yet used but wanted to, like Phil Reed's Construct Mechanus. As I went through the Fiend Folio, I found that most of the races and monsters divided nicely between Martian "gremlins" and magical constructs, and Venusian hot-climate dwelling beasts. And while I wanted all the standbys of Victorian adventure and hissing, clanking steampunk, I also wanted things on the frontiers to be really rough-and-tumble, justifying a more Sword-and-Planet attitude of Burroughs-style swashbuckling and savage action (as is fitting for D&D). Colonial Martian culture is becoming something quite different than stolid, refined London civilization - Mars is infecting humanity.

Since this blog is really about cataloging ideas and not writing teasers, I'll spill the whole of what I've been thinking:

The Githyanki and Githzerai of the Fiend Folio are the remnant peoples of the Martian civilization. The Martians' devotion to magic resembled something like that of Moorcock's Melnibone, and affected them similarly. They became decadent and corrupt, thinking little of the damage they did as they wielded power to bend nature to their will. They created the portals, discovering lands beyond their own world to conquer. Unfortunately, one of these portals led to what we know as Pluto - a frozen, hellish ball of rock containing chamber upon chamber of hibernating Illithid - those the Martians came to know as the "Mind-Flayers." They had no defense against their psionic assaults, and were soon subjugated. Only millennia later was Gith able to raise a rebellion against their masters. However, those who followed after Gith chose seperate paths to liberation: the Githyanki relied heavily upon necromancy to bolster their power, while the Githzerai forged an unholy alliance with a Venusian power, the savage and potent Slaadi. The Githyanki would not allow themselves to be made a subject people ever again, and so the two factions split to become mortal enemies. Their war of liberation was never really completed; even now, they dwell in strange lands beyond the portals, plotting their next move.

And, of course, the Mind-Flayers are still out there somewhere.

"This Is My Player's Handbook..."

2007-10-29T01:55:00.000-07:00

"...I am what it says I am; I have what it says I have; I can do what it says I can do."

(For those whom this is too obscure a reference, look here. I don't blame you.)

For my Drawing 3 class, I was most recently asked to create a self-portrait, something which depicted a struggle or a dichotomy in my life. Since my teacher is a Fine Arts major, she asked me to accomplish this without using body imagery or an illustrative narrative, but rather to make it "experiential." (Never mind that she couldn't explain to me what this meant; that's a tale for another day) I came up with a dichotomy, but ended up getting flunked out of the class before I could accomplish it. What can I say? I'm a Comic Art major, not a Postmodern Abstract Artist.

The inward "split" that defines a lot of my person is that I've always straddled two social worlds: that of the Church, and that of gaming. There is no Scriptural or doctrinal reason that these two things should be in opposition; the arguments that are leveled against gaming revolve around either a misunderstanding of how roleplaying games actually work ("No, we don't actually cast spells or worship made-up deities, and the demons are in the book as enemies to fight"), or guilt-by-association, since many gamers are practicing neo-pagans, outspoken atheists, or socially-inept outcasts. Likewise, most people I've met in the gaming world are embittered against the Church for the treatment they experienced at the hands of paranoid preachers, apprehensive parents, and/or abusive schoolmates; and are driven away by Christians who are hidebound, hypocritical, or socially-inept outcasts.

And thus, I find a strange sort of fusion within myself. I wouldn't describe myself as socially-inept, but both Christians and gamers are outcasts. I think both groups would tend to consider themselves such, aberrants who don't "fit in" with mainstream society to some degree. While Christians may be perceived to be more influential in politics (and I'm not so sure we are), gamers and general geeks are perceived to be more influential in popular entertainment (again, I'm not so sure about this). I've listened to fellow gamers blast Christians for being "The Religious Right," while Christians write books about how gamers are "encouraging teens to embrace the occult through television shows and films." While there is a certain degree of truth to both statements, neither really present a wholly accurate image.

Yet both groups, when they're at their best, take in the dregs, the misfits, and the outcasts that the world has no admiration or use for, and show them love and acceptance for who they are.

So that's how I'm introducing myself here. I'm a Christian, and I'm a gamer. God help me.

Bear in mind that I will probably never be so serious here as this again. I created this blog because I use my other blog, mystery cycles, primarily to talk about my general life and communicate with my network of geographically-separated friends. Many of them don't get my geeky game references, and sometimes I just want to jot down the basics of some idea I've gotten into my head that have me excited this week, but that I'll probably never run for lack of time or interest. I have a large gaming library and a recurrent case of Gamer's ADD, bouncing from game to game as the whim strikes me. As such, I get these ideas. I've used very few of them - ever - and I like the idea that perhaps someone reading this blog will get a kick out of one, or get an idea spurred on, or will in any case grab it and run.

The Head of Vecna is my gaming idea repository. Feel free to use it, because I may never get to.

EDIT: I just realized that I'm not as original as I thought I was in naming this blog. "The Head of Vecna" was the title of a column on RPGnet by Dream Pod 9 author Hilary Doda. My subconscious mind probably remembered that and was still getting a kick out of the title reference. This blog has nothing to do with her, except in a tangential, gamery way. Sorry if there was any confusion.