Kirk vs. unidentified alien

fake albums

Inspired by kelvingreen's comment on Tuesday's post.

um... fear my wrath, puny mortals?

Like most respectable gaming rags Dungeoneer Journal #24 (December 1980) has an article full of new monsters. I love rules variants and DMing advice and all that sort of crap, but for me personally a decent game magazine has to include nuts & bolts stuff like monsters, magic items, spells, spaceships, etc. that I can drop right into my own games. Or even better, ready-to-rock adventures.

Anyhoo, I've shared crazy critters from other installments of the 'Monster Matrix' column a couple times before. Issue 24's Matrix brings us stats for what is in all likelihood the whimpiest god to ever to appear in D&D. Or possibly any other game. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...

FIRE GOD!

Here's the entry for this dude in its entirety:

Fire God by Scott Zeppa
No. Appearing...1
AC...2
Hit Dice...3+1
Align...CE
HP...20
Fire God can only be hit by magical weapons. Attacker(s) must withdraw after four melee rounds for one round unless the attacker takes [a] Potion of Fire Resistance or wields a Sword of Cold. If not, the attacker must wait the one round before he/she may return to combat. The Fire God has a pet Hell Hound.

I feel pretty confident that Mr. Zeppa didn't own Gods, Demigods & Heroes when he wrote up stats for this guy, otherwise Fire God probably wouldn't be so weak. A three hit dice god kinda suggests that maybe he ran his campaign with only the Holmes Basic rulebook. Maybe all his deities are three hit dice and PCs who made third level in Zeppa's campaign were considered semi-divine. Holmes put quite a few badass monsters in his edit of the rules, so the gods themselves would have to be pretty careful! (On the other hand, the lack of any attack/damage info suggests pre-Greyhawk OD&D. You're just supposed to know that Fire God does one attack for d6 damage (presumably fire) because almost everyone does d6 damage.)
If you use Fire God with the rules in Deities & DemiGods he could actually still be a pretty bad threat. Even as a mere demigod he would gain sweet saving throws (2 or higher on all saves) and a bunch of at will abilities: command (no save), comprehend languages (including speaking and writing), detect alignment, gate, geas (9"), quest (9", no save), teleport without error, true seeing. The gate ability only applies to members of your own pantheon, so in this case I guess that means Fire God would be able to gate in his dog.
Under the DDG this dude would also get the ability to grant cleric spells up to 5th level. So you could set up this awesome scenario where Fire God hangs out at his sweet-ass temple, living the high life. The High Priest of the faith thinks his deity is a total douchebag and he KNOWS he could take Fire God in a fight, but if the god is slain the EHP loses his best spells, forever. The challenge for a low level party (incapable of a direct confrontation) would be to somehow provoke the EHP to strike in anger. If the priest wins the cult of the Fire God is totally hosed. If Fire God prevails at least the world has one less EHP in it.

Cinder session #4

Another satisfying night of dungeon shenanigans! I had six players total last night, a new record for this particular campaign set-up. Previous players Carl, Joe, Squirrel and Wheels were joined by newcomers Tom and Jim. The latter said they had played in my big D&D con game not this last Winter War, but the year before. Honestly I did not remember them. They were totally cool about that. As I said last night, some days by evening I can hardly recall what I had for lunch. I was impressed that the new guys showed up with some characters made. Jim even had his own copy of the Labyrinth Lord rulebook.

The party ended up consisting of two fighters (Grognard Whiplash and Fergus Landry), two magic-users (Wheelz and Reginald Featherweight), a cleric (Deric Holyborn) and a dwarf (Fonkin Wurp). I thought that was a very reasonable mix of character types. It was just big enough that the two wizardly types could concentrate on mapping and holding the lantern, with only the occasional intervention to cast sleep or slay a fake dragon with a thrown dart. Speaking of sleep, under most editions of D&D it only affects human/demihuman/humanoid types. We discovered last night that in LL it affects “creatures”. That was a major difference when the party opened the door on the room full of giant rats. And here I was looking forward to infecting a few of them with the rat pox. Oh, well.

Good ol’ sleep ended up coming in handy in several encounters last night. In the first session against Stonehell most of the fights had been with the undead. Last night the party faced a wide array of sleep-able foes: kobolds, orcs, rats, psychokillers. I think the party was out of MU spells by the time they fought the psychos, but Deric managed to use hold person on two of them. “Psychokillers” is my term for stock berserkers, by the way. When encountered in dungeons I tend to describe them as axe-wielding maniacs from slasher flicks, rather than as Vikings. “You open the door and waiting for you on the other side are two Jason Voorhees and three Leatherfaces. They attack.” The psychos achieved surprise and won initiative on the following round, so I had them pour into the corridor among the party. Two even got swings in at the magic-users, but I rolled really crappily so no mage slaughter. Jim used the Big Purple d30 Rule to overpower Fergus’s counterattack on one of the psychos, totaling exploding the dude and splashing the party and the corridor in buckets of blood. Jim was pissed that the slasher guy had eviscerated his pet kobold.

Earlier in the night the party had beat up on a bunch of kobold civilians working trap reset duty. Before all the slept kobolds could be slaughtered Fonkin the Dwarf decided to spare two of them to serve him as trap detectors. He used his rope as a double leash and in fact the little buggers stumbled into a pit that might have otherwise zapped the party. During the period of their enslavement I kept looking for an opening for the little buggers to get away. When some orcs showed up on a wandering monsters roll I had the kobolds plead, in orcish, for help. Fonkin took offense at this and decided to off the wee gits. After the first one was decapitated the second one fell to his knees and begged for his life. Fonkin was not moved, but his buddy Fergus said he’d take the kobold off his hands. “Do you speak kobold?” I ask Fergus. “No, but I speak sword.” was the reply.

Fergus also made some unsettling comments about the kobold also serving as an emergency back-up food source. This was sort of a theme for the dude, as he also took some choice cuts from the giant lizard the party killed. But the creepiest episode was the aftermath of the psycho fight. The berserkers were also cannibals and in their lair the party found somebody’s torso was roasting on a spit. Fergus had to try a bite, “just to see what it’s like”. Someone at the table worried that Fergus might turn ghoul on them, but I actually rolled a 1 in 20 chance that he would be inspired to become a psycho killer cannibal berserker. No luck. If you weren’t at the table my report might lead you to the conclusion that Jim, the guy playing Fergus, was some sort of freak-o-tron. Just to be crystal clear: Jim struck me as a well-balanced dude who happened to be playing a fighter with some cannibalistic tendencies. He didn’t try to turn every encounter into an episode about cannibalism the way I’ve seen actually obsessed players do with their fetish of choice. Those kinds of players tend to bleed the energy out of a game, but Jim was highly entertaining and adding to the overall mojo.

And Tom was a great addition to the group as well. His dwarf took the initiative in a couple key situations, including volunteering to be lowered by rope into a mysterious shaft leading deeper into the dungeon. That didn’t turn out exactly as planned, as a monster attacked the party while they were reeling the little dude back up. Grognard ended up attacking the foe with an improvised dwarf-flail. He missed, hurting Fonkin instead of the baddie. I wonder if next session they’ll bring enough rope to actually descend all the way to the chamber at the bottom of the shaft. They ended up maybe 20 feet short of the goal last night. So far, that’s the only access they’ve found to anything below level 1.

After finishing off the psychos Carl suggested returning to the surface. We were about 10 minutes from the session’s scheduled end, so that seemed like a good time to wrap things up. Getting back to the stair ups turned out to be a terrible pain in the ass, as the party opted to backtrack through several dungeon doors rather than pass through the Really Scary Archways™. I’m a total bastard about dungeon doors. I don’t care that it doesn’t make sense that kobolds can easily open and close them but PCs have to roll well to accomplish the same task. And then when the kobolds are pressed into the service of good, suddenly they lose this precious ability! Here’s the deal, people: the dungeon isn’t simply a backdrop for the adventure, it’s one of the main characters in the story. The dungeon itself actively hates your guts!

Anyway, Grognard eventually flipped out over all these damn doors and decided to use his Big Purple d30 roll to overpower one of the open attempts. He rolled a seventeen, so he didn’t just rip the door off the hinges, the frickin’ hinges came off too! I adjusted my map to note the ex-door on the floor. When they finally made it out, the treasure and loot XP were divvied up. Reginald Featherweight made third level, while Deric pushes towards fourth. Grognard might have made third level, but he blew his carousing roll, getting the result that nets you no XPs and earning him a reputation as a drunken lout. I swear, that dude may have to switch home bases soon. Eventually the local authorities are not going to put up with all the trouble he keeps getting into whenever he gets back to town with a sack of gold to squander. Jim’s cannibal-killing cannibal also failed to carouse safely and wound up catching a venereal disease. So he got some bonus XP, but now every time his PC takes a leak it burns. That carousing mishap chart has turned out to be the best thing since sliced critical hits.

Kung Fu & Random Intrigue in Caras Celairnen

That Borderlands thing last week has gotten me thinking about MERP and its obsessive compulsive big brother, Rolemaster. The beast known as Rolemaster basically started out life as a set of separately sold add-ons for your D&D game. If you wanted more and bigger spells, you could grab a copy of Spell Law. For ridiculous critical hit charts, import a copy of Arms Law into your campaign. If you wanted more character classes and a pain-in-the-ass skill system, then Character Law was the thing to get. Put it all together and sprinkle with some magic pixie dust, and you have the full-on Rolemaster experience. As much as I like the critical charts from Arms Law and many of the wild variant rules from the various Rolemaster Companions, it was always a bit more game than I can handle. One local gamer, a fine fellow who will not bat an eye at playing HERO System or Star Fleet Battles, dismisses the game as "Chartmaster" because of all the look-up charts you need for darn near every action.

MERP, on the other hand, hit the sweet spot for me. Middle Earth Role Playing slimmed down a lot of the more cumbersome rules in its predecessor, but remains compatible enough that you can easily import your favorite subsystems from RM. The original MERP rules are only 88 pages long and in terms of sheer gaming utility it kicks the asses of many rulebooks twice its size. And since Tolkien’s work undergirds so much of modern fantasy, you could easily get away with using MERP to power many other settings. I wouldn’t turn up my nose at MERP+Greyhawk or MERP+Mystara, for instance. MERP+Krynn could work as well, though it's not one of my favorite settings. Heck, I’d probably enjoy MERP+Forgotten Realms more than any attempt to play the Realms with D&D!

If I wanted to something straight Arthurian (you know, with no lasers and stuff) I’d give MERP a serious look. Thanks to the critical hits/fumbles, moving maneuvers and more rigorous magic system, I suspect it would run less like Pendragon’s attempts at literary Arthuriana and more like Excalibur. And now that I think about it, it would be pretty easy to MERP up the first three sandboxes in Points of Light. (If that phrase "MERP up" ever catches on, remember you heard it here first.)

Getting back to Middle Earth, I was reading Rogues of the Borderlands, the module I mentioned last week. The biggest town in the Borderlands, a place called Caras Celairnen, only has about 1,500 inhabitants and all the other human settlements have only a few hundred people. I can relate to that. I grew up on a farm a few miles outside a town of 1,000. Most of the nearby communities had just enough inhabitants to support a post office, a grain elevator, and a bar. But I got to wondering about what sort of people one could find in a Tolkienian town of fifteen hundred. MERP doesn’t have an easy answer for that, but Rolemaster Companion I does. And it involves dice! Yay!

To my eye "Section 8.0 City Design" looks like the direct antecedent to the community design rules that appeared in 3E. That’s not surprising, since several parts of 3E were clearly influenced by Rolemaster. Anyway, the basic deal here is to find out how many Magicians (or whatever) live in a city you divide the total populace by a flat number and then multiply it by a randomly rolled fraction. In the case of Magicians, take the total population divided by three hundred and then multiply it by .02 to 2.00 (2d100%). The city design rules give the formulae for every class in Rolemaster up to that point (which is A LOT by most standards). You also find out about some local institutions, like once you know how many clerics are in a burg you can easily roll up the total number of temples.

In order to give my die rolling hand a rest I put all the numbers into a rough draft spreadsheet to do the rolling for me. Normally I'd throw all the dice for reals but I’ve rolled up about 250 treasure types over the past few days and I can feel it in my wrist. Anyway, here’s what I found out about Caras Calairnen:

• The local garrison consists of 100 low level Fighters (2nd to 5th) led by 5 NCO’s (6th to 10th) and commanded by one officer (8th to 15th). They’re supported in their efforts by 15 Rangers.
• There are seven monks in town. A Monk between 6th and 10th level leads a group of 4 Monk Students (1st to 5th) and 2 Warrior Monk students (also 1st to 5th). They don’t have a formal monastery.
• There are four temples, but only 1 High Priest. The other three are led by lesser clerics. 13 low-level clerics serve in supporting roles.
• There’s a shrine where a Paladin of level 7+ trains 12 squires of levels 1 to 6.
• You can get healed at two different clinics in town, which are operated by 7 Healers and 15 Lay Healers.
• The town’s criminal element consists of a lone thief!
• Eight bards operate out of the town’s only theatre, where they are supported by 29 non-bard types who work as extras and stuff like that.
• There are 19 arcane magical types in town: 14 Alchemists, 3 Magicians, and 2 Illusionists. They do not associate with each other in a formal way (i.e. no school or guild). The rules make Alchemists three times more likely than Magicians, which is pretty awesome for the PCs since an NPC who makes magical stuff is way more useful to them than a (potentially rival) fireball lobber.
• There are also 4 Animists (sorta halfway between Druids and Clerics), 3 Astrologers, 2 Mentalists, 2 Mystics, a Druid and a Sorcerer.

For our purposes let’s set aside the fact that most of these classes have no business in a proper Middle Earth game and instead look at some of neat things we can do with this data. Let’s start with the completely incongruous monks. According to the rules Student Monks and Student Warrior Monks are normally instructed by Master Monks and Master Warrior Monks of at least 11th level. But in this hick town the best they can muster is a single under-qualified Monk that might be a low as 6th level.

The difference between a Warrior Monk and a Monk is that Monks get all sorts of neat spell effects for their righteous kung fu, while the Warrior Monks stick strictly to kicking ass and taking names. So a Monk could probably instruct a novice Warrior Monk in the basics of martial arts fighting, but it’s not going to be pretty. Basically you’re asking the Cobra Kai punks to learn from Mr. Miyagi. The non-Warrior students are going to be more successful in this environ, frustrating the already naturally belligerent Warrior types. The situation is a ticking time bomb. Eventually those two Warrior Monks won’t be able to take it any more. They’re sick of meditating in the lotus position all day, dammit! When are they finally going to learn the secrets of real, ultimate power?! Will these kids walk out on the sensei and seek out adventure? They could become henchmen, allies, or rivals of the PCs.

Or maybe one or both Warrior Monks get involved in the local crime scene, possibly just for the cheap thrills of getting to beat people up. The one thief operating in the town could use some help! A town the size of Caras Celairnen should normally average a thieves guild of fifteen scoundrels. I just got an outlier result with the one thief. What’s the story here? Is the town one of those super-nice saccharine sweet places where life is so good (almost) no one has any need to resort to crime? Or did the grim Rangers and Paladins get together and burn down the thieves’ hideout one night and now the place that was rebuilt on the spot is haunted? Maybe the sole survivor of the ordeal is putting a new gang together and plotting revenge.

Another thing I noticed is that I ended up with 2 healing Clinics and there just happens to be two different classes that specialize in healing. Maybe the seven Healers (a class powered by divine magic) operate a religious institution that only cares for members of the flock, while the Lay Healers (a psionic type class) operate a secular medical facility which makes you pay through the nose. Sure the PCs dig the free cure light wounds from the gang at St. Somebody, but how many times are they going to be sent on crap holy quests before they start considering the advantages of the more business-like atmosphere at Mind-over-Matter General? And which joint secretly healed the badly burned burglar that crawled into the place the night the “good guys” nearly set the whole town on fire?

Finally, I should note that Mystics and Sorcerers make pretty decent villains. All the Sorcerer spell lists have the word "Destruction" in the title. What else do you need to know? Mystics get both some illusory/misdirection spells and some elemental attacks. Could one of them be an agent of Witch King of Angmar? Who tipped off that dumb Paladin Squire as to the location of the Thieves Guild HQ? Could the same person be whispering to the Warrior Monk Students, trying to turn them to the dark side?

And what’s going to happen when the commander of the garrison finds out that the Rangers, who are nominally under his command, started the fire that his men ended up fighting? Dammit, he lost two soldiers putting that conflagration out and was himself fairly badly burned!

Here's a rule I need to remember

"A character surprised by a monster may drop whatever he is holding –on a die roll of 6"

I just rediscovered this gem on page 10 of Doctor H’s All-Natural Health Tonic Elixir & Shoe Polish, more commonly known as Holmes Basic D&D. Being what it is, no rules are given for how long it takes to retrieve a dropped sword, torch, or map. Or rules for whether you need to make a roll just to find your sword in the underworld gloom. Or whether the torch sputters out or rolls away. Or rules for whether the map happened to land in a puddle and is now ruined. Which means I can be as mean-spirited about such details as my blackened little DM's heart desires. Huzzah!

Here’s a rule that I do remember and use regularly, from the same page:

"Many dungeons contain traps, such as trap doors in the floor. If a character passes over one a six-sided die is rolled; a roll of 1 or 2 indicates that the trap was sprung and he has fallen in, taking one or more 6-sided, dice of damage."

I like how the word "traps" is italicized, like it’s some foreign concept being introduced to the public for the first time. Maybe before Raiders of the Lost Ark people didn’t understand how dangerous it was to go into underground temples and steal golden idols? Professor Jones teaches us so many valuable life lessons. "Nazis. I hate these guys." being my personal favorite, and probably more widely applicable than "Don't look into the Ark of the Covenant."

On at least two runs of mine in the past six months an entire party successfully passed over a trapped area without setting it off. One time they even backtracked through the same square later during the adventure and the trap remained undisturbed. As much as it would have amused me to see one or more adventurers fall into that pit, I also really dig knowing how oblivious they were to the danger. It's my little secret.

Here's one last Holmes quote:

"MELEE RESOLUTION -- CONQUER, WITHDRAW, SURRENDER OR DIE!"

That's got to be one of the coolest section titles ever.

because every campaign needs its own crappy runes

So I've been goofing around making fonts over at YourFonts.com. Somebody over at RPGbloggers pointed this site out, but I can't remember who. Thanks, unknown blogger!

It's not much, but it's mine. If you want, you can snag your own copy here. It's only caps and numbers, but it's meant as the half-assed script of the lower classes.