Spidergoat economics

Mutant Future is rad to the max. Here's a handy visual to explain what the game is about.

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The one place where the game falls down a bit is the starting equipment section. It's basically the exact same crap you can buy in any old edition of D&D. To run an MF campaign I'd definitely need to jazz it up a bit with stop sign shields and blackpowder weapons and miscellaneous debris.

The Food Vendors price list is an excellent example of how the rest of the equipment section should have looked. "Mystery meat kabob" and "rat on a stick" are listed as standard lunch fare. You can also get various mutant foods. Five gold pieces buys you a "spidergoat haunch".

Spidergoats are quickly becoming the Mutant Future mascot. They're featured prominently on the cover as foes of the PCs and they appear in a couple other places in the rulebook. Everyone online who has looked at this game seems to love to hate them. I know I do.

That five gp per haunch got me a thinking today. Spidergoats have eight legs. That's eight haunches, right? 40gp a goat, retail. So could a Mutant Future PC turn in dead spidergoats to frycooks for maybe 20gp a piece? Seems reasonable to me. Of course, knowing how PCs operate some carcasses will be more intact than others. Maybe a die throw of d4+4 for legs intact, and then sell the dead spidergoat for number legs times 2.5?

I really can't help myself. I think about things like this all the time.

Et tu, five links?

Eldritch Weirdness

Create A Graph

The Death of Gallium

Custom Random Number Generator

The Multinauts

Jeff's Threefold Apocalyptic Alignment System

Here's how alignment worked the last couple times I ran OD&D, Basic/Expert D&D, etc. Answer the quiz below to determine your alignment.

1) Ragnarok just started. Aligned on one side are the Kirby versions of Thor, Odin, etc. On the other side are Cthulhu and Shub-Niggurath. Where does your PC stand?

A) I fight alongside Thor!
B) I fight alongside Cthulhu!
C) Where do I stand? Are you crazy? I get the hell out of there and find a place to hide!

If you answered A your character is Lawful. If you answered B then your character is Chaotic. If you chose C then you're Neutral. It's that simple.

No other behavior matters for alignment purposes. You can sleep with your best friend's spouse and steal your grandma's last gold piece. If when the chips are down you fight alongside the inexplicable vikings with bad English accents or their proxies, then you're on the side of Law. You can fund orphanages and pay for Aunt Tilly's spleendectomy, but if you pal up with Yog-Sothoth it just doesn't count for anything alignment-wise.

Lawfuls can fight wars against each other, as can Chaotics. But if two Chaotic groups are fighting and the Lawfuls attack, be prepared for those Orcs and Goblins to suddenly act like fast friends. Good and evil, for purposes of detection spells and such, measure intentions. A man with malice on his mind detects as evil, no matter how good his previous deeds.

In short, Lawful and Chaotic are a decision (conscious or not) made by a character as to what side they are on in the grand cosmic throwdown between the barbarian gods and the outer gods. Good and Evil usually indicate a temporary state of mind. And no one is bound to any particular code of conduct, unless they take such a code upon themselves.

99.5%

My little sweetpea has been doing a good job monopolizing the computer again. This time, rather than Barbie & The 12 Dancing Princesses, my computer time is foiled by a combination of My Little Pony, Hello Kitty, and an sci-fi edutainment number called Starflyers. The Hello Kitty number is surprisingly good, basically a collection of soundly designed casual games. But I have trouble getting into a game called Hello Kitty Bubblegum Girlfriends, no matter how well-designed.

In the meantime I've been re-reading some Wilderlands material (finishing that review set off another round of feverish interest) and playing the crap out of Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy. I've had a copy of Lego Star Wars II pretty much since it came out. The game keeps a little "percentage complete" meter running. I'm now stuck at 99.5% complete. Somewhere in Mos Eisley is an orange lego brick that I simply cannot find. I've blasted every thing destructible I can find in that wretched hive, but still no luck. It's maddening.

Actual content tomorrow, if my daughter cooperates. ;)

Review: Adventure Games Journal #1

The last couple posts around here have been a bit of a bummer, so it's obviously time for some unbridled enthusiasm! Adventure Games Journal is the magazine side of industry veteran James Mishler's growing one-man FRP empire, Adventure Games Publications. James comped me a copy of AGJ #1 to review here and I dug it so much I signed on for the long term with a 6 issue/installment subscription. I say "issue/installment" because James is rolling out a modern day version of the Judges Guild campaign installment system. The subscription I paid for is good for 6 issues of AGJ and 6 campaign installments of the Wilderlands of High Adventure. Note that's High Adventure, not High Fantasy. This Wilderlands is a new licensed version of Bob Bledsaw's original, statted up for Castles & Crusades and fleshed out with lots of original material. I can't wait to get my first campaign installment.

But anyway, back to the magazine. Physically, the book is an 8.5" x 11" black & white affair running 48 pages. The cover depicts the Invincible Overlord on his pegasus throne, with two of his trusted aids at his side. I believe this is the first time I've ever seen an illo of that dude. And the weirdo in the robe is creepy-tastic. This piece and all the interior art and cartography are by Peter Bradley and I think his linework is pretty dang good.

James uses the interior covers for fullpage ads for his products. The first interior page is a table of contents and OGL declaration, while the next page is an editorial explaining what the magazine is about. The rest of the mag is chock full of pure gaming goodness, all written by Mr. Mishler. I'll give the rundown article by article.

"The World of the Wilderlands of High Adventure"

This is where James hit one out of the ballpark and got me to pony up for a subscription. In a dozen pages he gives a fabulous overview of the Wilderlands' cosmology and astronomy, thumbnail sketches of each of the 18 regions of the setting, and similar descriptions of the rest of the continent of Rhadamanthia, of which the canonical Wilderlands are but one small part. Each subsection of the article is full of meaty stuff you can spin into adventure fodder, NPC background material, or treasure item histories. But there's not so much there that you can't fill each place full of your own material. In terms of efficient delivery of inspiring setting info, the only two settings I can compare to Mishler's work here are Gygax's Greyhawk and S. John Ross's Uresia. Most settings deliver half this much awesome in twice as many words.

"Hanging Out in the City State: The Invincible Overlord, His Concubines, and his Children"

An article with the word "concubines" in the title had the potential to go south quickly, but Mishler handles this quite well. For those of you who like adventures full of politics and intrigue, this article is your huckleberry. The strange life and times of Hygelak the Dread, Invincible Overlord, his 12.5 concubines, and their children is a situation teeming with plot potential. A braver GM than I could build a great adventure where all the players assume the roles of various concubines during an assassination attempt or somesuch. For less ambitious or crazy GMs, all you need is a way to hook the PCs into the court in order to launch some high stakes fiascos. (PC to party: What didn't I tell you my sister was married to the Overlord? Must have slipped my mind.)

"Knights of the Realm and FEAR"

The first part of this realm is a detailed outline of the institution of knighthood in the City State. Lots of great details here in terms of the probably character levels of various knights, their equipment, their obligations to the Overlord, and their lifestyle. The second half of the article deals with the Fraternity for the Eradication of Armored Riffraff. The organization known as FEAR gets a brief write-up in the old Judges Guild Ready Ref Sheets. Their basic deal is that they like to beat up low class PCs running around in platemail. The info Mishler provides here gives some great background to the organization, taking what looked to me like merely an excuse to pimp over the PCs and turning it into an important and relevant social institution. And they know this wicked combat maneuver called Great Plate Crush they can use to pummel the bejesus out of uppity PCs. The article ends with rules for ransoming knights, something D&D has needed for a long time, and brief C&C stats for various forms of plate armor.

"Maze of the Mad Mage"

In my opinion this is the one weak point in the magazine. There's nothing wrong with most of the adventure and the key. In fact, it looks like a fun little dungeon romp in the style of the stuff in the old Dungeoneer magazine. But this dungeon comes with a gimmick and I'm not a big fan of gimmick dungeons. In this case the gimmick is that the dungeon level is chock full of instantaneous undetectable teleporters. It strikes me as the kind of dungeon that could set off riots among the players. And the teleporter key is hard to read in black & white. A full color map would have really helped here. Were I to try to run this thing, I'd probably attack the map with highlighters or colored pencils to make it easier to use. Also, one tiny nitpick is that the dungeon map has no scale marked on it.

"Monsters & Treasures"

I love these sort of meat-&-potatoes type articles. First you get stats for the Orblings, a new class of floating eyeballs with tentacles. I eat that stuff up. Michler notes that the Orblings are based upon the Steelies, an old Paul Jacquays monster from the Dungeoneer, but its not just a redo of an old monster, but an interesting new creature inspired by Jacquays work. Then you get a couple of magic items, the Wand of Witchery and Cauldron of Wisdom. With very little work this stuff should be usable in nearly any old edition of D&D.

"Lost Gods of the Wilderlands"

This one's a nice little 2 page article on Rash'l, God of Tyranny. Page one is devoted to stuff followers need to know and some neat history of the faith. Page two is stats for the dude. Even if you don't regularly feature gods popping up in your campaign, there's plenty of hash to be made out the first page of this article, including some nifty political tie-ins to the City State.

"Lost Lore of the Wilderlands"

Next we get a nifty write-up on the Cozy Cave, a wilderness inn built into a Esgalbar, a secret elven outpost in a big tree, kinda like a Ewok habitation. Esgalbar is jam-packed with dangling adventure hooks and lots of meaty Wilderlands lore. The back cover of the magazine is a map depicting the Wilderlands hex containing both sites. (Map 5, hex 3119 if anyone cares.) My favorite part about this article is the die chart for who else might be at the Cozy Cave when the PCs arrive. Good stuff.

"Rumors Around the Wilderlands"

A page full of adventure ideas in the form of short rumors. Several are specifically for the City State, while others are tied to a specific Wilderlands map. Three of the rumors are for the Southern Reaches (map 18), which will be featured in the first campaign installment.

"Shopping List"

A "coming soon" list mostly for Troll Lords, Goodman Games, and Mishler's own stuff. Out of date at this point.

"Adventure Finder"

Some of you might be familiar with Goodman Games' Adventure Finder for their Dungeon Crawl Classics line. It's basically a big chart that helps you pick the right DCC for your party based upon their level. Mishler provides a similar service but across pretty much all the publishers I care about: Goodman, Green Ronin, Kenzer, Necromancer, Troll Lord, Paizo, and WotC. And seeing as how the sky fell last month, this list is probably about as complete as you're going to get for 3.x. File this one under "Why didn't anyone think of this sooner?"

So that's issue #1 of Adventure Games Journal. Like I said, this thing made me a believer, despite the fairly high prices. The quality is just that damn good. I still work on my personal Cinder setting, but after reading this stuff I dropped the Wilderlands onto my map of the star systems near Cinder. So now the Wilderlands, like Encounter Critical's Mighty Land of Vanth and several other settings, is just one small corner of my overall campaign universe. Did you know that the Kings of Kelnore had starships and once fought a space war with the Beast from Krull? It's true.

One final thing about James's version of the Wilderlands. There's been some confusion in some quarters about his campaign maps. Mishler is not simply producing color versions of the black and white maps that appeared in the Wilderlands boxed set from Necromancer. His maps have more detail. Check out these two samples.


I'm thinking that the old black & white maps might be useful as handouts for the players.

4e: reader response

I got some good comments to the previous post about my 4e run. Today I'm going to respond to one of them. Here's devan:

Don't play the pregen adventures, as they suck. I played one and was wholly underwhelmed. Then, last weekend, I played an adventure my friend made up, and had an enormous blast.

People who say it's more limiting are lacking in imagination. My group was fighting some dwarven soldiers holed up in a barn. There was one blocking the doorway, nearly immovable, fighting the dragonborn paladin. The wizard of our group was doing her best to rid us of the crossbow firing dwarves peeking out of the second floor window. My cowardly, city-rat-kid-turned-conscript rogue was doing his best to appear useful while not taking any heat, until he took a bolt to the shoulder. I built him in the direction of avoidance and mobility, figuring he was never much a fan for fighting fair, more for running away. I used an ability that let me move two squares before an attack, opting to make those two squares vertical. I made the acrobatics check to perch in the window frame upon my moving those two squares, and attacked the dwarf. Next round, after nearly being knocked unconscious and pushed out the window, I scurried in and used an ability that moves an opponent squares = to my Cha mod. Dwarves always move one square less for pushes, but I still got one square out of him; enough to trip him out of the rafters and onto his buddy downstairs, knocking them both unconscious.

So yeah, you can absolutely do fun, creative things with this system, you just have to learn this system. I urge you to play for a while to get in the swing of things before saying "Eh, it's not for me, cause I didn't learn exactly how to play the way I want in two games." It's different, it takes adjusting, and it really is leaps and bounds more fun than previous editions, as no one is sitting around waiting for their turn with nothing to do anymore. There are fun things to do and keep track of on nearly everyone's turn.

I know you are trying to be helpful, dude, so don't take this the wrong way. Do you know how many people have told me "Don't judge the game by the pre-release hype"? This despite the fact that Wizards obviously wanted people to judge the game based on their hype machine. And then a bunch of people said "You can't judge this new D&D by the text alone, you need to play it!" Now you're telling me I have to play several sessions before I judge the game AND that I can't use the adventure Wizard's obviously wants me to use.

Exactly at what point do I stop giving these guys a break? When do I get to trust my own instincts on this one? How many hoops do I have to jump through before I'm allowed to have an opinion? I'm starting to get a little tired of people who lay out prerequisites for me before I'm able to have my say. Again, I'm not trying to call you out, here. I'm just highlighting this annoying trend I see everywhere among 4e boosters.

Your brief play report sounds like a good time and I certainly don't want to discourage anyone from having a good time with any game they are digging. But you and a zillion other gamers liking the system doesn't automatically make it a good fit for me. And like my adventure Wednesday, I don't see much fun stuff that couldn't have happened under a different edition or a different game.

Reader asmodean66 may have put his finger on the problem "I think the main change is that 4e is not a "simulation" of adventuring, like previous editions of D&D, but rather, it is a game about adventuring. The mechanics enforce game balance and playability over real world physics." Now, D&D has never been an exacting simulation of anything, but some of the changes make the game look less like an RPG and more like something else that I don't want or need. People have accused D&D of being a minis game or a video game in RPG drag. To me, it looks a little bit like a Euro style boardgame: an exquisitely balanced abstract game about nothing in particular with a whitewash to give it a little context. In this case the whitewash is "D&D but not the boring old D&D you've loved for 30+ years".

Finally, I'll end this post with S. John Ross offering a little perspective on the situation:

My reaction to 4E is pretty much exactly the same as 3E and it goes like this: If this game didn't have the D&D trademark attached to it, it would pass mostly unnoticed as yet-another-D&D-like-game. Nobody would feel obligated to try it, nobody would feel obligated to give it a chance, nobody would feel any need to have an opinion about it, and it would sink or swim (or, more likely, just sort of coast into a quiet place on the shelves) like everything else.

The most interesting thing about 4E is, IMO, exactly the same as the most interesting thing about 3E: it's another game with the Dungeons & Dragons trademark legally applied to it by those who purchased said trademark.

"Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in."

[Sorry, Doug. I couldn't find the screencap you suggested. So I just quoted the movie as the title of the post.]

So last night Stuart ran a couple of encounters from Keep of the Shadowfell for the group. I played Owen, a human wizard loosely modeled after the protagonist from the film Dragonslayer. Doug played Morgan Ironclaw, a dragonborn paladin straight outta the pregens. Doug noted that for once the pregens Wizards created don't suck. And Pat played Bloodaxe Axebeard, a surly dwarf and one of those new-fangled laserclerics. Why do clerics now shoot lasers every round?

When I finagled Stuart into running 4e for us I figured I'd probably end up here on the Gameblog either declaring the game the Great Satan or eating massive crow and admitting it was the bee's knees. But mostly my reaction is "meh." It's a new edition of D&D. It does some stuff differently than previous editions, A LOT of stuff. Probably too much for my taste. Those sacred cows all the hip kids wanted to see dead and buried? From where I sit D&D is made of that stuff and very little else. But that alone doesn't make this new edition a bad game.

In terms of actually playing the damn thing it just didn't knock it out of the ballpark for me. We had some fun messing around with the tactical elements of beating up kobolds, but I wouldn't say any more so than playing 3.x with this crew.

My online pal Settembrini's concern that "the game plays your character for you" may be overstated, but after playing a couple fights I certainly see what he's saying. On any given round it seemed pretty clear that there was exactly one power suited to the tactical situation and if I didn't use it I was being a damn fool. Of course I opted to be a damn fool when I went after that spellslinging kobold with my quaterstaff but the little jerk had it coming. But still, having a longer list of mechanical tricks that my first level magic-user could accomplish felt a lot more limiting than playing the poor schmuck with one spell. With earlier MU's if I ran out of spells it forced me to come up with lots of on-the-fly shenanigans to beat the baddies. To understand the brave new world of 4e imagine a magic missile crushing the darkness, forever.

The most interesting thing I've noticed about 4e so far is how powergaming the system seems to work. Some people will try to tell you that the simplified character creation makes powergaming impossible. Those people lack vision. The munchkining of the game obviously lurks in synergizing among your teammates. The era of the overpowered "character build" may be over, but I predict that the smart munchkins will be all over "team optimization" like stink on poop.

Overall I had fun last night but the system had fairly little to do with it. I could have played any of a dozen crappy RPGs and gotten the same good times with these guys. We're going to try again in two weeks but unless something new shakes loose you can count me among the non-adopters of this new edition. So far it just isn't delivering anything I want out of a D&D that I don't already have.

The best thing about last night was the birthday present Stuart gave me. He commissioned Angela of Necropolis Studios to produce one of her custom "monstrous" dice boxes. I've been saying for a while now that Angela's dice boxes will be the thing that all the cool game junkies will need to own and now I've got one of my own. Check this baby out: