An Alchemical Proposal

Back in the Before Times a DM generally started out with a rulebook and was expected to homebrew everything else. Later when RPGs became commercially successful, whole product lines came into existence to support play. The DM as artiste/worldbuilder/lone nut is very fun but a helluva lot of work. The DM as high priest of canon has its own challenges and rewards. Personally, I think the smart thing to do in the latter case is to treat a games' canon as a lawyer treats the canons of law or an English professor treats the canonical literature: pick a position and bend the hell out of the canon to suit your needs. But today I want to propose (or perhaps just highlight) a middle road between the two, the Dungeon Master as alchemist.


Here's one alchemical recipe for a new campaign.

1) Start with any ol' D&D-esque ruleset, though a simpler system without alot of fiddly bits probably works better here.

2) Add some supplementary rules material. You're primarily looking for new Gygaxian building blocks (classes, races, spells, monsters, magic items, etc) to drop into the game. In this recipe you want exactly two different sources for this stuff, one of which is easy to put into your game, like adding Mutant Future as a source of monsters and treasures to your Labyrinth Lord game. For the other one choose something that might be a little harder to fit into your system of choice without some work. Something like Creatures & Treasures II for Rolemaster or the monster book for Mazes & Minotaurs, the Hekatoteratos. Don't be scared to go far afield for this second supplement book.

Part of the magic of this formula will come from the tension between the two selected supplements and part will come from your own personal adaption of the second, less compatible source. Another tension, and thus more fuel to the fire, can possibly be achieved by making one of supplements an ancient text and another one a more modern invention, like using your favorite issue of Fight On! or Knockspell combined with the Best of Dragon, volume I.

With most supplements that you select, there will be some material you don't like. Like I adore the monsters, magic items, and spells in the original Arduin Grimoire, but some of the classes leave me cold. The best thing you can do would be to challenge yourself to use this stuff anyway, to stretch your own chops. You don't have to use everything in your selected books, just try to go a little outside your comfort zone.

3) Now you need some fluff to hang all this stuff on. Pick exactly three sources of campaign inspiration. Two of these sources should be recognizable as fantasy material, like selecting your favorite Conan paperback and maybe Jack Vance's Dying Earth. Note that you are picking individual works, not entire bodies of work. Pick one Conan book. Don't use the later Dying Earth books. And for Grodd's sake don't look at a fan wiki or crap like that. These books are meant to be launchpads for your own campaign, not the final word on your setting.

Your third fluff is meant to be the wild card. Pick something way out in la-la land for this one. Don't even look at fantasy novels. That'd be too pedestrian. You want something like an issue of the Micronauts comic or the movie Krull or the Principia Discordia. Or a book like Barlow's Guide to Extraterrestrials.

Using the Alchemical Method your job as Dungeon Master is to make something syncretic/synthetic that takes all this disparate stuff and coheres it together in a single campaign. Achieving this will require a lot of trial and error work as you decide what from each source to keep, what to adapt, and what to drop. The result may be a trainwreck, but it will be YOUR trainwreck.

Demos & Distro

So nobody showed up to my Castles & Crusades demo yesterday. My wife was afraid I'd be heartbroken but it's hard to be down on the heels of two successful demos. Besides, I knew I was swimming upstream by scheduling my game for 10am Saturday. I'm sure half the gamers in town aren't even up by then, as they were gaming late the night before. So instead I spent about an hour shooting the breeze with one of the owners, mostly comparing editions of D&D. For a few minutes before I headed out we discussed the possibility of me running a regular game at the store.

I call the idea I pitched "low impact D&D". I was inspired by Ben Robbins' West Marches campaign, this post by James Raggi, and one of my own old posts. The basic idea is to run a pick-up game that is also a campaign. On my side of the screen is a big crazy megadungeon set in my persistent sandbox campaign world of Cinder . On the other side are all comers. Folks would be welcome to drop in and out as they please. Play would be episodic, with adventures generally ending the same night as they began. That way not showing for two months would mean little more than your PC was back at the inn running up a bar tab the whole time.

The longer I mess with the various versions of D&D the less I care about which particular ruleset I'm running. However, I believe it's considered polite to tell potential players what system is being used for your campaign. While the owners of Armored Gopher are willing to host campaigns using out-of-print rules, I feel like the smart thing to do would be to run a game that they could actually sell. It creates the potential of a direct benefit to the store, and it gives players who like the game an easy opportunity to buy their own copy.

So out of the myriad of D&D editions, retro-clones, and other similar games on the market, I'm looking to pick from the subset of retro stupid games that are available through normal distribution channels. Since [pick one->Runequest/Dragonlance/Vampire/3.x/4e] ruined the hobby most of these kinds of games are either long out of print, electrotechnotronic PDF releases, print-on-demand by Lulu, or sold by the author from a box in his hall closet. In fact I know of only three retro stupid games 'in distro', as I once heard a game industry dude put it. Let's look at the candidates.

HackMaster is totally, ridiculously awesome. But it's way more game than I would want for this project. I'd certainly try running HackMaster for a small group of hardcore dice-jockeys, but key components for this project are newbie-friendly rules and quick chargen. HM loses on both points. And the print run of the current edition is going dry. I'm not sure how much of the game is actually still available through distributors. I'm hoping to get some HackMaster action going when the 5th edition rolls out. I've been wanting a HackMaster Basic for years and with 5e the nice folks at Kenzer are finally going to grant my wish.

I would describe Castles & Crusades as 'workmanlike'. It's a reasonable compromise for group that contain fans of both 3.x and 1st or 2nd edition Advanced. The SIEGE Engine resolution mechanic is a quick and useful system for resolving stuff not covered by other rules. I wish I was as enthusiastic about this game as Doc Rotwang!, but I'm not. The various class abilities are more fiddly than I want for rules light play, but not heavy enough for serious mechanical wonkery. And most of the time I don't want a clean universal resolution mechanic. I much prefer the dynamic tension of a system with moving parts that don't quite fit together. C&C is a good system and I'd certainly play it, but I just don't feel that oomph that I get from other retro stupid systems. It works in my brain but doesn't speak to my heart. (Though I must note that as long as James Mishler keeps using C&C, it will always have a place of respect on my game shelf. It's like how I'm not usually moved by country music, but Johnny Cash is friggin' awesome. James Mishler is the Johnny Cash of rpgs.)

So that leaves Labyrinth Lord. I'm led to understand that it was only via herculean effort by Dan Proctor and his fans that LL got into the book distribution network. Well, my deepest appreciation and congratulations go out to them. As a retro-clone compiling the '81 Basic/Expert rules of D&D into one volume, the folks at Goblinoid Games have gotten one of the best versions of D&D ever made back into print. And thanks to getting into distribution, you can even get a copy at Amazon.

As regular Gameblog readers know, I started with '81 Basic and consider Tom Moldvay, its editor, one of the great unsung heroes of the hobby. So no arm-twisting is required to get me to run this Labyrinth Lord. That being said, I find it a little disconcerting that so many other great retro-stupid games cannot be easily purchased at the local game store.

Proscriptive Campaign Creation

The one time I ran adventure S4 The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth it was a bit of a mess, yet it remains one of my favorite AD&D modules. Not because of the adventure, but because of the awesome insert, called simply Booklet 2: Monsters and Magical Items.

It's 32 pages long, the last 3 of which are specific information for the Lost Caverns. But the other 29 pages are chock full of awesome. The first eighteen pages contain the write-ups for thirty-odd new monsters. (All of which later appeared in the original Monster Manual II, so don't rush out to get this puppy just for the new critters.) Following the monsters are a few pages of magic items, including three nifty artifacts: Daoud's Wondrous Lanthorn, the Demonomicon of Iggwilv, and the Prison of Zagig. The Demonomicon contains several new higher level cleric and magic-user spells. One of these new spells, Henley's Digit of Disruption, was not reprinted in the original Unearthed Arcana tome, even though all the others were. After the spells and items are a brief essy on magical diagrams and a brief list of reputed properties of gems.

Taken together as a whole, the contents of Booklet 2 seem to be whispering a message into my ear. And that message is "make a campaign out of me". This almost random collection of monsters, magic items, spells, and miscellaneous bric-a-brac looks like just enough stuff for you to build a cute little setting. Give me this slim volume, a Player's Handbook, and a decent screen, and I could run a neat little mini-campaign without either the Dungeon Master's Guide or any further monster book. I'm not seriously suggesting that anyone do that. It would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Especially seeing as just last month Doc Rotwang! and I were mooning over the 1st edition DMG over at his blog.

Instead of being draconian about it and saying "I'm only using the stuff in this pamphlet", a fair more reasonable and sustainable approach would be to use the contents of Booklet 2 as the center pieces of a campaign that includes all the usual D&D stuff. So you could have orcs and dragons as needed, but the main threats of the campaign would be the derro and behirs or dracolisks from Booklet 2. Imagine a world where all the 'dragons' breathe acid AND petrify at a glance! That'll wake up some complacent dungeon hackers. (Incidentally, Jim Holloway draws the creepiest little derros I've ever seen.)

So this finally brings me around to the title of this blog post: Proscriptive Campaign Creation. The basic idea is to help yourself drill down on campaign creation through deliberate acts of omission. I find this approach extremely handy when dealing with kitchen sink settings or games with simply vast quatities of monsters and stuff. D&D being my prime example, of course.

By saying to yourself something like "Hey, this campaign is going to focus on this list of monsters" you'll achieve a tighter focus and a more memorable campaign. The big key is to pick memorable monsters across a wide spectrum of abilities, types, and power levels and to not paint yourself into a corner. When you've embarked on this type of exercise you need to remember that sometimes it's absolutely okay to occasionally break out the old standards like orcs and ogres. Hell, I'd be a bit sad to get through an entire campaign and never stab an orc at least once.

Generating the list of featured creatures can be the tough bit. I would absolutely love it if someone swiped the idea of using the S4 Booklet 2. Sign me up for any campaign where the Big Bads are the demon lords Baphomet, Fraz-Urb-Iuu, Graz'zt, and Kostchtchie. Remember Kostchtchie? He made the cover of Dragon once. That hammer of his may not be as powerful or have as much street cred as Mjolnir, but it's still pretty effin' cool.

Another awesome monster source for a proscriptive campaign would be the original Fiend Folio. Alot of people think of that book as the worst grab-bag of monsters TSR ever cranked out, but I think of it as a wonderful, glorious buffet of wacky critters. (You know, not many folks these days seem to remember that where we all saw the Githyanki for the first time.) Many of the monsters in the old Folio might be crap by today's standard of dungeon ecology and mechanical coherence, but if you used it as your sole monster book I guaran-damn-tee your players will never forget your campaign! For a modern D&D campaign I'd probably go off the beaten path for my monster source. My first pick would probably be Bastion Press's Minions, the 3.5 version of which is a PDF product called Complete Minions. Though I gotta say that it would be hard for me to put a Secret Eater into one of my games. They just look too much like Todd McFarlane's Spawn for me to take seriously.

In a game with lots of little shiny bits like D&D there are plenty of other things besides monsters that come in long grocery list quantities. Shining your light on just part of the list works with much of that other stuff as well. Going back to Booklet 2 for a moment, Daoud's Wondrous Lanthron, the Prison of Zagig and especially the Demonomicon of Iggwilv look like perfect Macguffin level artifacts around which you can build lengthy plot arcs.

The one thing I recommend DM's not trim is the list of character build options. I firmly believe it's the players' job to decide exactly what kind of freaks of nature they run. Don't let them roll over your campaign with some obscure ultrapowerful class or race from an oddball supplement, but give them a wide enough variety of nifty options to choose from and most players won't go that route.