donate, get free book

So here's an announcement from James Raggi of Lamentations of the Flame Princess:

29.01.2017: Donate, Get a Book

LotFP is offering a free book to anyone who donates US$50 or more to the ACLU.

https://www.aclu.org/

Conditions:

• Offer is good for donations made from January 29 2017 onward.
• One free book per person.
• Offer good through February 2017, or until we give away 500 books, whichever comes first.
• Books available through this offer: http://www.lotfp.com/store/
• (yes, you can pick a t-shirt instead)
• Email proof of your donation to lotfp@lotfp.com along with your desired book and your shipping address.
• You will not be added to any mailing list, your information won't be passed on, etc.

My Broodmother Skyfortress, Kiel Chenier's Blood in the Chocolate, and Zak Smith's A Red & Pleasant Land all qualify for this offer.

Pass it on!

the Winter War meeple encounter

Over the weekend I managed to get over to Winter War 44, the forty-fourth annual gathering of game weirdos in Champaign, Il.  Sometimes I give the false impression that I am an old school guy.  The dudes who founded this convention bought their copies of OD&D at GenCon the year it came out.  One of them wrote pedit5, the earliest documented dungeon crawl computer game.  (The name is designed to look like a legit program, since it was unauthorized use of U of I's computer resources.)  Compared to them, I'm one of the snot-nosed new kids.

I used to go to this convention every year and run stuff and help staff it, but grad school rearranges one's priorities in a pretty big way, especially when you feel you have to work twice as hard to keep up with people half your age.  But my daughter wanted to go and play some games with her old dad.  How can I say no to that?

Before I get into the meat of this post, I want to send a message to Andrew.  This young man introduced himself as a fan of this blog, which was quite gratifying.  I didn't chitchat with him much because sometimes find myself slightly embarrassed when I meet a gameblog fan in the real world.  Basically because I can hardly believe that my readers are actual people living in the real world.  In a  later conversation with a mutual friend I learned that Andrew lives in the same town as I.  Andrew, if you are reading this, please send me an email so we can maybe play a game together.

Anyway, my daughter and I played some AD&D first edition run by cool cat Alex Riedel.  You might've seen me post on G+ about fighting doombats, skeletons, and a Skeleton Warrior.  I'm pretty sure that if we didn't run out of time we'd also have faced an Eye of Fear and Flame and maybe a Crypt Thing, too.  There was a "you are about to be murdered by 3 exotic undead" theme going on in the scenario.

At one point I was caught in a death trap with 2 other party members.  I was certain we wouldn't be able to solve the puzzle to deactivate the trap, so I drank a potion of diminution and escaped through the bars of the portcullis that had locked us in.  Imagine my embarrassment when the other two guys figured out the puzzle and also got out.  "Sorry I left you for dead, dudes?"  One guy admitted he would've done the same thing if he had the potion.  The other gave me the side-eye.

Since my daughter Elizabeth doesn't play that much D&D and we were in a mid-level scenario, I urged her to pick a fighter from the pre-gens.  She was having none of that.  She wanted the raw power of wizardry to be hers to command.  I was so proud of her blatant lust for cosmic power.  She managed to hold onto her lightning bolt until the big boss battle and effectively deployed it without catching anyone in a ricochet.  Too bad the dang monster was immune to its effect.

The other game we played was Search for the Emperor's Treasure.

I tried to get Elizabeth to turn to face the camera for this shot,
but she was too into the game to pay any attention to me just then.

Search is a delightful number from Tom Wham designed to emulate overland D&D-type treasure hunting and monster fighting.  The original version was published in Dragon #51.  The game was also reprinted in The Best of Dragon Games, but with a less amazing map.  The original map was done by Darlene Pekul.  She's better known for the classic World of Greyhawk hexmaps and the succubus in the back of the DMG, among other things.  Check this baby out:

You could use this as the campaign map for a pretty sweet little D&D campaign.

The Best of Dragon Games version uses a function but much less pleasing map.  The rest of the components in both versions are illustrated by Tom Wham in his usual cartoony style.

Mertwig's Maze, published by TSR, is Wham covering the same ground thematically and is also fun on a bun.  I recommend omitting the final dungeon from play, though.  It's a bit anti-climactic and not needed at all.  King of the Tabletop (Dragon #77, errata #78) does fantasy battles and strategery in the Wham fashion.  It was later re-made into Kings & Things (West End Games, later Z-Man Games).

One of the most hilarious mechanics of Search for the Emperor's Treasure is that it is fairly easy for your adventurer to be be barred from a town or castle as a public nuisance.  One player's wizard ended up getting kicked out of four different spaces on the map.  That's player-charactering at its best.

As is often the case at cons, the guy running this moldy old game had given it a deluxe makeover.  I've seen this sort of work done with Kingmaker and several other boardgames.  (And I fantasize about doing the same thing to the old TSR mini-game Revolt on Antares.)  Scott, the referee, had the small map (11" x 17" originally) blown up to poster size. And he created some sweet custom character sheets, which were laminated.  He also upgraded some of the playing pieces, which is why the word "meeple" appears in the title of this post.

Instead of the original tiny cardstock chits, we marked are location on the map with these sweet-ass meeple-style silhouettes, from this set:

Actual sizes here range from 24mm to 52mm.  The human figures are roughly scaled to modern 35mm figs.

Apparently these babies were successfully kickstarted and have subsequently completely sold out without me ever catching wind of their existence!  Fantasy Meeples were kickstarted by Gamelyn Games and sold through Meeple Source.

I love minis at the game table because they help everyone understand spatial relationships between PCs, monsters, and objects.  I hate minis at the game table because the spectacle of the tabletop sometimes distracts from the imaginative space where the game is actually happening.  Fantasy Meeples do the job of game pieces while being suggestive rather than definitive.  That's the sort of ambiguity I could use in my D&D games.  And they're cute, too.

So, if like me, you'd like a set of these babies but missed them the first time around, please consider going to this page and leaving a message for Gamelyn asking them to produce more Fantasy Meeples.

how to do a thing like the Wessex online campaign

Over on the Google+ I was queried about the ins and outs of running a many-player online campaign like I did with my last big Wessex game.  I've had a couple of days to think about this, and here are the things that helped make that game work and/or what I would do if I attempted the run such a beast again.

Keep the Paper Flowing

Keeping track of a bunch of players is a logistical/bureaucratic process.  You need to know who your player pool is, how to contact them, and a way of tracking who has played when.  I recommend having people sign up by answering a survey made with Google Forms.  Experience using surveys with students suggest that you need to limit yourself to 10 questions or less and any question that requires more than a one or two word answer counts double.  Here's what I might ask:

• What is your name?
• What's an email address you can be reached at?
• What is your Google+ handle?
• If you have a FLAILSNAILS PC, what is theire name/race/class/level? (You aren't committing to playing that exact PC and no other, I'm just curious)
• Tell me one weird thing about your PC [this would count as 2 questions]
• Any special concerns about the game? I.e. schedule wonkiness, are you hearing impaired, is there a kind of monster that you really can't deal with?  [also 2 questions]

Google Forms allows you to dump all that info into a spreadsheet, to which I would add columns to track who played in what game.  That way I can tell at a glance that Bob has played 5 of the last 8 sessions, so maybe someone else needs a chance, meanwhile Christine has been on the list since the beginning and still hasn't got to play.  Speaking of which...

There's More Than One Way to Make a Party

I used several methods to decide who got to be in any particular session.  Random selection was a common one.  Keeping an eye out so that more people got a chance to play was another.  However, I also had really good luck with some hybrid methods, such as keeping one player from the previous session and randomly select three others.  This allowed for some continuity of play.  A couple of times I picked one player (randomly or not) and let them recruit the rest of the team.  This worked best on the occasions that I got emails from players who clearly had an interesting agenda for the game.

Communication Routes

You need a clearly labeled channel for official communiques from you to the entire player pool.  Obviously this blog was handy for that.  You also need a central venue for players to talk about the game, like G+ or a facebook group or something.  Also, the use of a single regular drinking establishment in the campaign combined with the carousing rules encouraging PC inebriation worked really well in allowing me to regularly broadcast details of the adventures that would otherwise be hush-hush.  If the players spent hundreds of gold expressly to get blotto and earned XPs in the process, then there was no room to complain about me occasionally exposing the secret results of their session.  This is important because you want enough info out there that the next party will have one or more ideas what to do with your dungeon.

Multiple Routes to Trouble

If I did one smart thing in setting up my dungeon, it was taking inspiration from the Caves of Chaos in terms of the number of ways into the adventure.  Fresh groups knew they could try one of the entrances no one else had and find a fresh new bit of fun waiting for them, while veterans could move quickly through previously covered ground to reach deeper levels and more troubles & treasures.  (By the way, if it hasn't been used I totally call dibs on Troubles & Treasures as a title for something.)  And go ahead and make some of the entrances a bigger pain than others.  Two of my favorite sessions started with players who decided to enter the most flood-prone sea cave and the time a group excavated the rubble pile to find a new stairs down.  Sometimes to have an adventure you gotta do things the hard way.  Heck, start with an obvious but magically sealed alternate entrance.  It will drive players crazy.

Simple rules, simple setting

If you want the largest possible player pool you can't really make the larger milieu the star of the game, nor can you use a system where building a new PC feels like homework.  Obviously, my setting mattered a lot to my game, but in a way that unfolded naturally through play rather than requiring significant briefing ahead of time.  Also, try making a shared Google Doc with absolutely everything needed to make a new PC for your game.  The shorter that document is, the better.

And don't run a system where you have to look up a lot of stuff all the time.  Working through mechanical problems seems even more annoying when playing with people online.  Better to run a dumb system you know down pat than a great system you're still struggling with.  And remember, when in doubt give any vaguely plausible plan a 2 in 6 chance of success, but a roll of six means things go ridiculously bad for the party.

Maintain your dungeon

PCs in dungeons are like preschoolers in a library: lots of people have fun but when it's done a bunch of shit has been haphazardly rearranged and there's bodily fluids all over the place.  In addition to noting monsters killed and treasures looted, it's extra important that you track any other changes: marks left, blood stains, traps disassembled, burnt out torches abandoned, etc.  Oozes, vermin, and kobold janitors can clean some of that stuff up for you, but the players will eat it up if you leave traces of previous expeditions about the place.  And once in a while shake up your dungeon status quo: move some monsters around, add a new trap in a previously-explored corridor, have an umber hulk or purple worm burrow some tunnels making strange new connections.

Well, that's all I got in me at the moment.  Maybe some of my supercool players will chime in with what worked and didn't work for them.

the Broodmother that might have been

Here's a little trivia about Broodmother Skyfortress (still available here and in PDF-only here).  At one time in the development process I wanted this to be the cover art:

That's an illustration by late 19th/early 20th century artist Henry Justice Ford.  It appears in The Green Fairy Book, one of 25 or so such volumes compiled by Scottish literary critic Andrew Lang and his wife, who I've not seen addressed as anything but "Mrs. Lang."  Not that I go too deep into this stuff.

Among other stuff in its pages, The Green Fairy Book has a version of the 3 Little Pigs that features houses of mud and cabbage instead of sticks and straw.  IIRC there's a fox instead of a wolf in that one as well.  The 3 Bear also appear, but they frighten a Little Old Woman instead of Goldilocks.  You can read the stories yourself on Project Gutenberg (text-only) or check out this nice scan on the Internet Archive.

Ford's illustration above features Grumedan the Enchanter, a man so large four of the king's strongest men struggle to carry his club.  He serves as the antagonist of the delightfully named tale "Prince Narcissus and the Princes Potentilla."  As Telecanter pointed out in 2011, this illo clearly inspired Trampier's cloud giant in the original Monster Manual.

So my idea was to put this illo on the cover of Broodmother as a way of faking out the players.  As play begins they catch a glance of cover art that resembles canonical cloud giants, then WHAM!  The referee hits them over the head with shark-elephant-centaur dudes wrecking their shit.  It would have worked, too, if not for you meddling kids James Raggi's insistence that using public domain art is unprofessional.

Reason #147 to Love the Internet:
Googling "Scooby Doo unmasked shark"
got me exactly what I wanted on the first result.

LotFP vs BX - operations

"Operations" is my pet term for the things you do to make an adventure happen that aren't the fighty rules.  Obviously in some games most of the operations rules are in the skill section, while others fold combat and operations into some sort of universal mechanic.  LotFP is more focused on skills than pre-1989 editions of AD&D, but it is still not a heavy skill-based game.  Furthermore, LotFP uses my favorite way of resolving darn near anything: throw d6, roll low for success.

The operations chapter in LotFP (titled "Adventuring: The Rules of the Game") is broken down into 20 subsections arranged alphabetically.  Each section is one or more paragraphs in length.  To avoid this post becoming too long to be useful, I'll try to keep my analysis of each to a sentence or two.

Architecture - Dwarven-type stone lore, but since this is now a skill, everybody else gets a 1 in 6 and Specialists can improve it.

Climbing - Another base 1 in 6 chance skill (no roll needed if both hands free and using ropes or a ladder), failure indicates a fall from a random point along the climb.

Doors - Useful rules for multiple people on the same door, crowbars, breaking down doors and the time it involves.  A simple but nice improvement on BX.

Excavations - Rule for how fast people can dig.  I'd compare it to the rates in the DMG but it's in another room and I am snug under a blanket right now.

Experience Points - Combat points are earned only for dangerous foes killed, KO'd, routed, or captured.  Chart similar to the one in BX but simplified nicely.  1xp per 1sp looted from adventure areas only.  You level up only after you return to a safe place.

Foraging & Hunting - Nice rules based on the Bushcraft skill.  I'm slightly put off by the lack of explicit rules for fishing.

Getting Lost - Similar to BX, but the Bushcraft skill can avoid the problem.  Since halflings are great at Bushcraft every wilderness expedition should include one.

Hazards -  Subsections here for ability score loss, aging, damage (KO'd at 0 hp, mortally wounded at -3 leading to death in d10 minutes, stone dead at -4), disease, drugs & alcohol (drunk characters are -2 dex and saves), falling, poison, starvation, and sleep deprivation.

Healing - Three tiers for healing rate: half hit points or more heal fastest, less than half heal slow, 0HP or less heal even slower.  At the fastest rate full bed rest only heals 1d3 per day.  No natural healing in dungeons.

Languages - Now a 1 in 6 skill but Int mods apply.  Each time you encounter a new tongue roll to see if you know it.  Penalties apply to the roll if the language is outside your culture.  I can't get behind the -3 penalty for dead tongues, though.  That means only Specialists who focus on linguistics or people with Int scores of 18 can learn them.

Light and Vision - Straightforward rules for lanterns, torches, and candles.

Mapping - Explicitly requires one party member carry paper and ink and nothing else in their hands.

Movement & Encumbrance - The best encumbrance rules I've seen in a published rulebook.  You count items instead of pounds or coins.  Identical small items can be grouped into a single item (e.g. 20 arrows), while 100 coins make a single item.  Up to 10 items is 120' movement, up to 15 is 90' movement, up to 20 is 60'.  Carrying an oversized item (including Great weapons) bumps you down the movement scale.  Also, great rules for mounts here.

Searching - Specifies that finding a secret door and knowing how to open it are not the same thing.

Sleight of Hand - Pick pockets and other shenanigans.

Stealth - Move silently/hide in shadows bundled into a single base 1 in 6 skill.

Swimming - LotFP assumes all PCs can swim but gives a 90% drowning chance to anyone with a movement rate of 60' or slower due to encumbrance.

Time - An exploration turn is 10 minutes.  A combat round is six seconds.  A segment is one second.

Tinkering - Locks, traps, jury-rigging, and other mechanical shenanigans.

Traps - Mostly general advice, but I like the optional rule here that spellcasters can be allowed a 1 in 6 chance to detect a magical trap.

Overall, lots of very sensible parings-down and beefings-up of the BX rules, presented in clear, concise language.  This is probably my favorite chapter in the LotFP Rules & Magic book, as it provides many nicely streamlined ways for the PCs to get into all sorts of trouble.

I made these

Inspired by the rainbow logo and tagline at the end of this classic commercial, I spent a few minutes on pixlr.com turning Chad Thorson's OSR logo into this stuff.  This was primarily for my own amusement and as part of my ongoing efforts to suck less at graphical stuff.  But hey, maybe you can get some use out of one of these.  Or maybe you can go and do a better one.

I also had a version that said "Old School Ruckus" under the logo, but I'm not actually trying to make fetch happen.

(PS I don't have larger versions.)

LotFP vs BX - equipment

Happy New Year!  Today I continue scouring through the Lamentations of the Flame Princess Rules & Magic hardbound and comparing it to good ol’ Basic/Expert D&D.  Let’s look at equipment.

BASIC EQUIPMENT

Item	Cost (gp)	LotFP  (sp)	Notes
Backpack	5	1
Flask of Oil	2	5cp	The LotFP version is lamp oil and does less damage, but with a small chance of engulfing the foe in flame
Hammer (small)	2	Not listed	I’d tell players to buy a Minor Weapon and call it a small hammer
Holy Symbol	25	25	The 25sp holy symbol is silver.  Cheaper steel and wood version are available.  No mechanical difference (turning, spellcasting, etc.), as far as I can tell.
Holy Water (1 vial)	25	25
Iron Spikes (12)	1	3cp
Lantern	10	3
Mirror (hand, steel)	5	1	Silver and glass mirrors also available for higher prices.
Iron Rations (1 week)	15	7	Sold by the day in LotFP.
Standard Rations (1 week)	5	35cp	Sold by the day in LotFP.
Rope, 50’	1	3
Small Sack	1	2cp	Only one size of sack in LotFP
Large Sack	2	2cp	Only one size of sack in LotFP
Thieves Tools	25	50
Tinder Box	3	1
Torches (6)	1	6cp
Water/Wine Skin	1	1
Wine (1 quart)	1	1	Poor and rich quality wine also available
Wolfsbane (1 bunch)	10	1
Wooden Pole, 10’	1	5cp

With the notable exception of Thieves Tools (call Specialist Tools in LotFP, of course), most Basic rulebook equipment is the same price or cheaper.  Which is good, since decent armor is so damn expensive.

EXPERT EQUIPMENT

Item	Cost (gp)	LotFP cost (sp)	Notes
Crowbar	10	2
Garlic	5	1cp
Grappling Hook	25	5
Stakes (3) and Mallet	3	6cp	Mallet and wooden spikes listed separately
Camel	100	Not listed
Cart (2 wheels)	100	25
Draft horse	40	Not listed
Riding horse	75	100
War horse	250	500
Mule	30	25
Saddle & bridle	25	Not listed	Included in the cost of a horse, I presume.
Saddle bags	5	1
Wagon (4 wheels)	200	75
Boat, river	4,000	1,000
Boat, sailing	2,000	6,000
Canoe	50	25
Large galley	30,000	Not listed	Many ship types listed in LotFP , not sure how they match up to BX.
Small galley	10,000	Not listed	“
War galley	60,000	Not listed	“
Lifeboat	1,000	100
Longship	15,000	30,000
Raft	1/sq ft	5
Large sailing ship	20,000	Not listed	“
Small sailing ship	5,000	Not listed	“
Troop transport	40,000	Not listed	“
Light catapult	100	Not listed	“

Lamentations has a lot more stuff on the price charts than BX D&D.  The list is comparable to the 2nd edition AD&D Players Handbook, with additional animals (carrier pigeons, dogs, livestock, pony), more containers (barrels, chests, pouches), chariots, drink and meal prices for inns, services (postage fees, hiring a coach, shipping freight, buying passage on a ship), a variety of lodging options (including renting a place on a monthly basis), and a bunch more miscellaneous gear (including that staple of Google+ D&D play, lard).

The fact that I can buy a map to the kingdom, copy it into a blank book, and mail the original to someone in another kingdom for about 40 bucks says a helluva lot about the Early Modern nature of default LotFP play.  In a western medieval setting the blank book alone would be pricy as hell.  The presence of tobacco on the miscellaneous list further suggests that colonialism is on the march in the default setting. Though obviously if you want halfling gardeners responsible for the cultivation of pipeweed that’s your prerogative as a referee.

One slight annoyance: my character can buy some paper and a vial of ink, but I can’t find a quill pen listed anywhere.