the mutants of 4chan

Gameblog reader and close personal friend intruder_w reads 4chan so I don't have to. He emails me everything game-related that he suspects I would find interesting. That's very kind of him, because from my vantage point 4chan seems to be about as friendly as the worst attributes of Tangency combined with the best parts of theRPGsite and fed to Something Awful's dog. But it's not all flaming dog turds. Occasionally someone like Doc Aquatic posts something rad. Today the intruder sent me this nifty exchange concerning Mutant Future and Encounter Critical:

Mutant Future Anonymous 06/06/08(Fri)20:01 No.1923671 [Reply]
Yeah! Finally got in a session of the retro-almost-clone Mutant Future.

Rolled up an awesome mutant – Spark, the Human Bee, with the following
mutations:
Dwarfism
Complete Wing Development
Natural Armor
Body Adjustment
Killing Sphere.

Did not get to kill any spidergoats, but session rocked anyway.

>> Anonymous 06/06/08(Fri)20:06 No.1923730
How does the system work? Retro-clunky or retro-awesome?

>> Anonymous 06/06/08(Fri)20:26 No.1923850
>>1923730

It's pretty much Labyrinth Lord (Moldvay D&D) mechanics adjusted for a
Gamma World-like experience.

Lots of hit points (CON * 1d6/1d8), classless and awesome random mutations.

There's also an appendix (Mazes & Mutants?) outlining how you can
blend Labyrinth Lord and Mutant Future if you want levels to mean more
(in base MF a new level gives you a random bonus, either to hit, to
damage, or to a random attribute).

Yeah. Totally retro-awesome.
It's no Encounter Critical, of course, but what is!

>> Anonymous 06/06/08(Fri)22:14 No.1924471
>>1923850
>It's no Encounter Critical, of course, but what is!

Nothing. Encounter Critical rocks on toast.

Who knew that anonymous 4chan deviants had such good taste?

The Mutation Compilation

I mentioned a week or two back that I use an expanded mutation chart pillaged built from mutation charts found here and there. Some folks were really digging on this concept and asked me to share this uber-chart monstrosity. I'm not sure I feel comfortable doing that, as all I'm doing is ripping off other people's work. But I am willing to share the list. Originally I had 19 charts to choose from, so the players would roll a d20 to find out which chart to use with a 20 indicating a roll again. Three more charts have been added just yesterday, so I guess my d24 is going to get some use soon.

The Mutation Compilation Master Chart (d24)
1 - Mutant Future human/animal physical mutation chart
2 - Mutant Future human/animal mental mutation chart
3 - Mutant Future plant mutation chart
4 - Dyson Logos's Freak Legion based mutations & drawbacks
5 - Survival RPG mutations chart
6 - Encounter Critical Mutation Powers And Defects chart
7 - fanmade Encounter Critical mutations chart (found it in the official yahoo group)
8 - another fanmade EC mutation chart (also in the Files section of the yahoo group)
9 - Rondo's Severely Messed-Up Mutation Chart (yet another fanmade EC chart)
10 - Supplement V: Carcosa mutations chart
11 - "How Green Was My Mutant" charts for Metamorphosis Alpha from Best of Dragon vol I
12 - The random Hordling charts from page 76 of the original Monster Manual II
13 - Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader mutation chart (the original game, not the new one)
14 - Paranoia Mutant Power Table
15 - mutations chart from a draft post-apoc game that I don't think has been published yet
16 - drawbacks charts from the same unpublished game
17 - Mutant Scavengers of the Ruined Earth! (yes, there is a whole RPG hidden in my charts!)
18 - "Why Is This Mutant Smiling?" chart for Gamma World from Dragon #96
19 - "The Double-Helix Connection" mutation chart for Traveller, Dragon #109
20 - Mutation charts from Savage Swords of Athanor
21 - Joesky's Mutations Table
22 - Person Chaos Attributes chart from the WFRP book Realms of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness as updated by SlackRatchet (I just found this the other day but can't find the link right now.)
23-24 - roll again

Note 1: Since mental and physical mutations are all muddled together in this set-up I give Mutant Animals and Mutant Humanoids a flat d6 rolls on this chart. No d4 from here and d4 from there business.

Note 2: I don't keep the rules to all these extra games handy. Hell, I don't even own some of them. When something comes up that isn't obvious or needs hard stats, the player and I just make something up.

Mutant Future session #5

Wow! Last night's Mutant Future run turned out to be a real humdinger! You ever had a night where one PC idea or one crazy die roll spins the whole session wildly out of control? It was one of those nights and it was beautiful. A couple days ago I shared with all y'all the map of Slimy Lake. The adventure I proposed last night was an exploration the ruins of Crusty Island, just south of the Fishing Village where the current PCs are based.

A key concept here is that Crusty Island is not a natural island. Most of the ruined pre-apocalyptic city is 30' or more under the surface of Slimy Lake. The tallest buildings poke out of the water and over the centuries fallen vegetation has gotten logjammed between these taller edifices and coated over with the mysterious oozy crud that periodically flows down the Sludge River. Crusty Island is literally a booger-like crust a few feet thick floating on top of the lake but anchored to the taller buildings.

After explaining these facts I threw in the requisite "oh, yeah. rumors of ancient artifacts, yadda, yadda". Dane really latched on to the prospect that vast parts of the city were underwater and asked if the party had access to scuba gear. At first I wanted to outright reject this request. After all, it's a post-apoc setting where flushing toilets are beyond the ken of normal men, I have no maps of the underside prepped, and he was only kidding anyway. But then I thought to myself, what the hell? I gave him a one in a twenty chance.

Whaddyaknow? The little so-and-so made it. Rolled right out in the open and everything. For extra fun I decided that what he actually had access to was a single old fashion diving suit, the kind with the big brass helmet and long hose to the surface. The pump is a manual jobbie, requiring two people to keep the oxygen supply good. Actual scuba gear wouldn't be nearly as amusing.

The PCs get a lift to the island from local fisherman Swampy Joe. After avoiding a huge giant bee lair and dispatching a few wandering giant centipedes, they establish a base camp in a small building. The rest of the night turns into Aquanaut Adventures in the Mutant Future, as the entire session ends up revolving around a series of dives into the flooded levels of the ruined city.
The ruined building next door is venting some sort of poisonous gas, which our heroes discover is bubbling up from the water below. Dane wants to discover the source of these strange orange vapors, so he suits up and heads towards the stairwell leading down. This is when I tell him all about the Mutant Future equipment condition and malfunction rules. I sling some dice, he rolls a save versus poison, and runs back to the group as fast as he can without ever reaching the water. His PC is coughing and hacking, his lungs feel like they're burning, but he'll live.

Dane: Aargh! Why don't people in the future test their equipment before using it?
Me: You're the player. You tell me.

After testing the suit in some non-poisonous water, the group does their best to plug some leaks. Dane suits up and heads back for the poisonous stairs o' death. Once he hits the water a successful Dex check insures that he doesn't slip on the slime-covered surfaces. He makes it down two flights of stairs to the level that seems to be the source of the deadly vapors. He ducks under the bubbles of gas and enters a strange bluelit world. It seems the underside of the Crust is home to a phosphorescent fungus and it's lighting the level through some large holes in the walls as well as the windows. This allows Dane to see some sort of huge wormlike leviathan swim past the outside of the building.

But he doesn't have a lot of time to take this all in or ascertain the source of the lethal orange bubbles, as a four foot long mutant leech attacks him! Piercing right through the suit and into his flesh, the leech starts to drain Dane's vital fluids at an alarming rate as Dane attempts to shoot him with mutant-powered gamma ray blasts. Two rounds into the combat Dane remembers that his plant mutant has Poisonous Sap and asks if the leech should be taking poison damage. I agree that makes sense and start rolling saving throws each round. Eventually the leech succumbs to a combination of gamma radiation and sap. Dane immediately announces that he is firmly holding the dead leech to his wound so as to not break the watertight seal the leech-mouth had on the suit. He slowly walks back up to the surface without further incident. The party dine on roast leech after draining the poison and thoroughly cooking it out.

Man, that encounter was rad to the max.

With Dane badly wounded other players step up to plate and take their chances with the diving suit. After getting the suit repaired in the Fishing Village and testing it, the party returns to the island and Wheelz suits up. He takes a shot at exploring the flooded level immediately below the ruined cubicle farm that's serving as their base camp. He ends up exploring an old dentist's office. Being a backwards future guy, he misidentifies a dental X-ray device for a laser cannon, which then becomes the object of the party's avarice. Somewhere along the way he also snags his suit and starts taking on water. What can I say? If these guys are going to bet their lives on a poorly-maintained centuries-old piece of equipment, I am going to run that plot point into the ground.

On his way out of the office and back up the stairs Wheelz makes a critical discovery. He spots some sort of underwater creature on the level before the bogey spots him. Wheelz does the smart thing and gets the hell out of Dodge, but he does notice that the finny creep down the hall is wearing some sort of belt full of gadgetry. There are intelligent mutants under Crusty Island!

But in their greedy little hearts they still lusted after that laser cannon. So they sold their most prized possessions (a wind-up Barky Dog™ toy and a baseball autographed by the World Series winning Chicago Cubs) to finance the purches of some mining equipment, more rope, a block and tackle, a bigass iron hook, etc. Pure hardcore dungeoneering gear.

They return to the island and try to guess approximately where on the dry level of the building they should dig to directly access the room with the laser cannon. A quick die roll suggests Wheelz does a good job of picking the spot. As they dig they open up a dry crawlspace between the levels, which they promptly strip of cabling and such to sell to the junk merchant. Once they have access to the floor below Carl suits up and is lowered into the dentist's office. He crowbars the X-ray machine and its armature from the wall, ripping out the cables with his sheer manly strength. The device is hoisted up via pulleys and ropes. Back at the junk merchant's they sell the cable from the access level for 25 poker chips and the laser cannon for 150, which I'm pretty sure is more money than they've seen the whole campaign. I started the PCs out dirt poor.

All in all, it was one of the best damn sessions I've played in a long time, owing a lot to player ingenuity and a little bit to my ability to roll with the punches. I had brief notes prepped for over twenty floors of adventure, but all of them were above the water line. So I spent all night ad libbing for dear life. When I got home I slept like the dead.

Mutant Trolls

So a space jockey and a barbarian go into a bar...


The golden crown of Random Character Generation is the Random Mutation Chart. You can end up with awesome mental powers to fry your enemies or somehow you can find yourself allergic to oxygen. You never know how a mutant will turn out. You can end up with an übermensch, a gimp or something in-between. So I've been knocking around some way to integrate random mutations into my D&D campaigns. Here are my thoughts so far.

Mutant as Class – This how the appendix in the back of Mutant Future suggests mashing up your science fantasy and vanilla fantasy. Mutant Humanoid, Mutant Animal and such are classes just like Elf and Halfling. Key parameters (damage, duration, etc) in several mutations are changed to per level variables. For example, something that does a flat 10d6 damage in Mutant Future is now rated 1d6 per level instead.

I’m not keen on Mutant as Class as presented in MF for two reasons. 1) You can’t play a Llama that is also a Lama. 2) Attempting to balance Random Mutations strikes me as just plain wrong. The balance, if any, enters into the picture because you have a chance of rolling Gamma Death Eyebeams but you also have a chance of rolling up Born Without A Face.

Mutant as Race – This is basically how AD&D would do it. I pick Avocado as my race and Ninja has my class and get on with my life. Fairly simple but sometimes I feel pretty strongly that Elf is a Class. Still, I’ve got to admit that at this point if a player told me “I want to run an Elf Thief” I would relent. I’d prefer if the player asked me to run an Octopus or a Balrog or something crazy like that, but I’d let an Elf Thief slide. The platonic ideal of the Elf class may appeal to me, but players ought to get a say in what they run as well. Unless I were to start using a table like this when I DMed:

1) Fighter
2) Magic-User
3) Cleric
4) Thief
5) If Con > 8 then Dwarf, otherwise roll d4.
6) If Int > 8 then Elf, otherwise roll d4.
7) If Con > 8 and Dex > 8 then Halfling, otherwise roll d4.
8) Roll d100 and ask DM to look up result on his Secret Bonus Class Chart.

I haven’t yet figured out whether I really want to do that or not, so I’m going to continue operating under the assumption that the players should get to some choice in PC type. Still I’d prefer not to add one more list of things players have to pick from at chargen. I like chargen as speedy as possible so someone with a dead PC can get right back into the thick of it as fast as dice and pencils allow.

Mutant as Template – This is the approach of Encounter Critical. In EC you pick (or roll) your race and your class and then you may optionally select one or more templates like Cave Primitive or Mutated. Selecting the latter indicates that you will be rolling 1-3 times on the random mutations chart and taking whatever the dice give you. That seems fair. A part of me wants to dictate that all PCs have a flat 1 in 6 chance of starting out mutated, but for some unfathomable reason not everyone likes to roll on those kind of charts. The other issue is that unless you build a Gnu or Aardvark class no one can play a Mutant Gnu or Mutant Aardvark. Or maybe general Anthropomorphic Animal and Ambulatory Plant classes are needed, on top of which you could layer the funky mutations given by the mutant template.

Mutant Future goes full blown Thundarr

Meet my campaign's newest PC:


I've been running games at the Armored Gopher since January and this whole time I have been eagerly awaiting some player to ask "Can I play X?", where X is not one of the classes/races/whatever in the rulebook. Last night I got my wish. One of the first things I heard as I entered the store was "I wanna play a lich." Joe was apparently ready to set aside his mutant with three brains in favor of something a little different. So he rolls 3d6 six times while I figured out how we would put a lich into the Mutant Future.

I end up offering Joe two options. The first implementation would be a gaunt Mutant Humanoid with half his physical mutations traded in for mental mutations. The mental mutations would be his "magic powers" and he'd effectively be a member of the Pseudo-Undead, like in the 1st edition Monster Manual II. The second possible method would be to start with the Labyrinth Lord version of the Magic-User, starting level set by a 2d4 roll but at 0xp and he would get Mutant Future hit points (a number of d6's equal to his Con). Other Undead abilities such as not needing to breathe would be adjudicated on the fly. I explicitly warned Joe that whether poison would work on this version would be a function of how dickish I was feeling whenever the situation arose.

Joe chose option two, so we now have a full-blown cadaver with a spellbook in the party. While I didn't add anything supernatural to this week's session, the kid gloves are officially off in this campaign. Balrogs wielding lightsabres and robots with magic rune casemods are now on the field of play.

Mutant Future session #4

Last night five brave souls gathered at the Armored Gopher last night to play some Mutant Future. My three groovy MF regulars, Carl, Dane and Wheelz, were all present. Back from exile working nights is the unstoppably awesome Joe. And joining us for the first time last night was Rialla, the daughter of the owners of the shop. Rialla's been present for many sessions I've run at the Gopher, but until last night she always declined my offer to join us. Now she's Spunky the Invincible Wonder Weasel, a nearly blind mutant animal with mental illusion powers and a musket. And she helped beat up the Buggems.

The Buggem Lair is one of the mini-adventures in the awesome first edition Gamma World module Legion of Gold. Because it's not for D&D, I think Legion is often overlooked as a classic in the field of sandboxy adventure. But last night I drilled down on the chapter with the big bug monster lair for some loud, stupid fun.

Here are just a few of the highlights of the night:

• The Buggems were defeated not by ubermutations or high-tech weaponry, but by good ol' fashion player ingenuity. They smoked the bugs out!
• I let all the new characters roll on this table for some crazy extra starting equipment, in addition to these tables I had already been using. Dane ended up with a toilet plunger, which he used to plunge out some insectoid larva that had been implanted in some hapless farmers!
• Joe had the Mutant of the Night. He rolled both the good mutation Dual Cerebellum and the disadvantage Dual Cerebellum (Defective). Basically, he has three brains, one of which is evil. Both Dual Cerebellum entries stress that your extra brain may be located anywhere on your body, so Joe decided he had a spare brain in each buttock. Joe's evil brain had some mental mutations that he wasn't allowed to know about, so much to my delight I had this little chart behind the screen entitled "Joe's Secret Brain". I heartily recommend to all GMs that they have a chart behind their screen just like that; it is pure joy.
• Dane showed up with two sets of Gamescience dice, apparently taking this post to heart. He even had a sharpie to color 'em. I'm also going to go out on a limb and totally take credit for the fact that Armored Gopher suddenly carries Gamescience dice. I have no evidence that I had anything to do with this development, but as a member of the Blogger's Guild I'm required to assume I'm 1200% more relevant than I really am.

No PC's died and the party scored some high tech guns, so I call that a very successful Mutant Future outing. Next time I need to show up with a proper MF screen, more blank character sheets (we've exhausted my initial supply due to PC mortality!), and more mutation charts. That last item is a result of too many mutations making multiple appearances for the group's tastes. So I'm putting together a compilation of every random mutation chart I've got handy.

Mutant Future session #3

Last night Carl, Dane and Wheelz all started new characters, since at the end of the previous session the entire party was blow'd up by an android with a grenade launcher. I don’t have the charsheets in front of me as I type this, but Wheelz made a mutant humanoid named Zat who was blind yet possessed the ability to manipulate light waves. Carl played Fruity, a mutant tree with oranges that were actually grenades he could lob. And Dane played Pungent Shamblestump, a plant with both good and bad pheromones (one scent tended to incite people to violence towards him, the other acted as a sort of charm person ability). Pungent also possesses a form of mutational lycanthropy, allowing him to transform into a giant two-headed ant with a poison stinger.

We were joined by Gameblog reader Infamous Jum, who drove all the way from Valparaiso for some mutant mayhem. So of course he was the first and only casualty of the evening. His first PC was a mutant humanoid named Jonagar Throgus, who possessed psionic flight and a Black Canary style sonic scream attack. I thought Jonagar was going to buy the farm when he flew up to the giant mutant spider in the first encounter. The spider promptly entangled him in webbing and drew the poor guy towards his poisonous maw. Fortunately, Fruity’s citrus grenades killed the spider slightly more than it killed Jonagar. Later the J-man volunteered to scout out a strange haziness in the air ahead of the party. It was a rad zone. He died. Death comes that easily in the irradiated doomscape of Mutant Future.

Jum’s replacement PC is Thorny Bill, a giant walking rose with a scary face painted on one of his petals. Jum wanted non-plants to have a reference point for communication purposes, but he didn’t want them to assume that such communications would be pleasant. Brilliant.

So the theme of the evening’s adventure was a continuation of the previous two sessions: the water merchants have stopped coming to the village of Esperanza and the PCs must do something about it. Since the party sent to explore the settlement on Poison River never returned, it was decided that another group should cross the Crunchy Desert in search of the water merchants’ home base. Play began on the far side of the desert, the PCs canteens empty and food supplies almost exhausted. The first pond they found was next to the home of the spider mentioned above. I was a little surprised that no one checked out the webbed up tree for treasure. They would have found the egg sac and a shoebox containing some Reagan pennies (i.e. copper pieces).

Speaking of coins, the village elders had given the party a supply of cash for purchasing water to bring back. At first I described the hundred bucks as lumpy gold coins. Lumpy because I imagined either they were partially melted or had been poorly cast. Dane didn’t seem to dig on carrying a bag of gold, so I told the group I had considered an alternate currency for the campaign world: poker chips. They immediately caught on to the idea of ancient plastic discs of no particular value becoming the standard coin of the mangled present. So instead of the gold standard the campaign setting now uses the chip. And not those fancy pants ones you get at casinos, either. We’re talking about the cheap kind that people have been using in home games since before poker went legit.

The party eventually arrived at a small town on a lake. Their attempts to set up a mutant crustacean as a water merchant were foiled by the guys family patriarch nixing the idea. The lobstercrab people are simple grain farmers and any new idea is a bad idea to their elders. When playing the dude I tried real hard not to fall into my very bad Zoidberg impression, but it wasn’t easy. I’ve gotten a lot of opportunity to work on Futurama voices lately as my daughter has been populating much of her imaginary play with the characters from that show. She Mary Sues herself into the captaincy of the Planetary Express ship, with Leela getting a demotion to first mate. (Professor: Good news, everyone! I’ve hired a seven year old girl with no prior experience as the new captain! Leela: That time the autopilot was put in charge of the ship was humiliating enough, but this completely wangs chung! Zoidberg: I hear little girls often have candy. Does the nice captain have anything to share with her good friend Zoidberg? Etc.)

Anyhoo, the group decided that setting themselves up as the water merchants was the most sensible thing to do. But they needed more cash than the 100 chips they had on hand, so they went looking for work. Not honest work mind you, but adventurer’s work. Eventually they discovered that a band of pig-mutant bandits were holding some prominent townsfolk for ransom. A reward had been posted of 50 chips each for the returned citizens, while the heads of the king and queen of the pigs were worth 250 chips each.

Finding the secret hideout of the pig people involved a minor brush with a radiation zone and an opportunity to annoy some very deadly robots that they took a pass on. Thanks to clever planning and some favorable dice rolls Pungent used his charm person aroma to drive the pigs into a frenzy. As I put it last night “You are the Beetles and they’re willing to kill each other to be the first to get an autograph.” The leftovers were mopped up with various PC weapons and mutations, including Thorny Bill using a heat ray to literally fry some bacon.

What won’t a PC eat? Always an interesting question. Sure, when you’re on the tenth level of a dungeon and the rations have run out, killing and eating giant rats is perfectly acceptable. How about a giant spider? Or howzabout a giant spider with human eyes? Last night’s group didn’t hesitate to consume the latter. And intelligent, bipedal pigs were just another source of tasty ham treats to this group.

So the session ended with the PCs back at town. They collected their rewards and used some of the pig people’s food stocks to throw a party. Everyone made level two. As the session was breaking up they considered retiring to live a longer, more peaceful life as water merchants and farmers. I’m seriously considering setting next session a whole generation later, when the economics of the situation no longer support Esperanza buying its extra water from across the growing desert.

One final note: I’m enjoying all the crazy mutations and weird creatures and super tech, but I’m starting to miss the wizards and stuff. Trying relatively straight (if gonzo) post-apocalyptic in this campaign (and my magic-free Encounter Critical post-apoc game last February) has really driven home for me that the Kitchen Sink Coalition of Arduin/Synnibarr/Rifts/Encounter Critical is definitely where I want to be. Whether that means combining Labyrinth Lord and Mutant Future, or finally launching a full-blown campaign in a native kitchen sink system (EC or Rifts or Lords of Creation), or simply chrome plating some variety of D&D, I dunno.

The Year in Awesome

Man, '08 was a great year for gaming. Here's some of my favorite stuff.

The Joys of Small Cons

I got to three local cons this year, two of which I was able to run some fun games at. Winter War continues to be the big event of my gaming year. Anybody willing to brave Illinois weather in early February is welcome to sling dice with me at next year’s ‘War. Just down the road is Flat Con, another great little con even if they do run it in a bigass warehouse-type space. I went to I-Con in Springfield for the first time. That last one was kind of a bust; apart from finding an old Gamma World module at one of the dealer’s tables I didn’t see much to interest me. The obvious solution here is to go again next year and run some stuff.

Treasures of a Slaver’s Kingdom

S. John Ross has pretty much ruined my chances of ever being a stalker of game designers by being so dang accessible online. It’s just hard to sustain that special level of maniacal devotion required for creeper uber-fandom when you can just send the guy an email and he responds all nice and friendly-like. Where’s the aloofness, the subtle contempt for the fans? Despite these flaws, Ross did get me to play a text adventure game again, a feat I would have thought impossible until the release of Treasure of a Slaver’s Kingdom. Hell I didn’t even play Peasant Quest when it was released, even though at the time I was clicking to Homestar Runner multiple times a day looking for new sbemail and whatnot. Anyway, Treasures is set in the world of Encounter Critical, which should tell you all you need to know to decide whether you should be playing this game or not. (Hint: if you like things that are awesome, you should.) Ross, here’s my request for ’09: Vanthian Battle-Doxies pinball machine.

Adventure Games Journal #1

One issue does not a great magazine make, but man, Adventure Games Journal #1 is a hell of an issue! You can really tell how much James Mishler loves the Wilderlands and he's got the chops needed to pull off a one-man magazine on the subject. I've already talked about this one at length, so I won't repeat myself here. Hopefully, we'll see more issues in '09.

The Esoteric Whachamacallit & their Simulcra

Okay, the real name of this book is The Random Esoteric Creature Generator For Classic Fantasy Role-Playing Games And Their Modern Simulcra. The title above started as a placeholder because I began this post without the book at hand. I just can't bear to take it down now that I've typed it. Anway, I’ve got the too-cool-for-school ashcan edition, but you can get the big commercial sell-out version from Goodman Games. This little beauty is a book of random monster generation tables written by James Raggi, a dude so metal he moved to Finland just for the music scene. Raggi is exactly the sort of brash, smart, opinionated jerk the old school renaissance needs. His game blog is one of my favoritest, cutting through a lot of the bullcrap and calling things like they are. James also gets all worked up in the The Random Esoteric Yada Yada, which I love. The ranty designer’s notes are almost better than the superb monster charts, and I say this as a guy who can’t get enough dice charts.

Points of Light

2008 is the year the hobby woke up and remembered the sandbox campaign. Like forgetting about Dre or Poland, I still don’t understand how exactly we let this powerful gaming tool slip out of our collective consciousness. As with everything else wrong with the hobby, I’ll just assume that [pick one: Runequest/Lorraine Williams/Vampire/Wizards of the Coast/your mom] is to blame. Rob Conley is a key figure leading the charge on bringing sandbox play back into the fore. Like Mishler above, he’s done great work updating and expanding the Wilderlands of High Fantasy. But with Points of Light Conley and his partners in crime produce four new ready-to-game sandbox settings in one neat little package with all the modern production values. If you’re running ANY edition of D&D or a similar game and need a place to set your adventures, forget those big boxes and full color hardbounds. There’s more actual game material in tiny little Points of Light than in many settings five times its size. You ever read a gigantic setting book and then ask yourself “But how the hell do I run this?” With Points of Light the answer is literally this simple: put the PCs on the map and go.

The Passing of Great Ones

I mean absolutely no disrespect by mentioning the deaths of Gary Gygax and Bob Bledsaw in my list of ‘awesome’ things that happened this year. The world is a less lustrous for their leaving us. But there’s a thin silver line around that otherwise dark cloud, a moment of bittersweet joy that should not be ignored. The unfortunate loss of Gygax resulted in worldwide mourning and for a brief time the whole world got to see the impact made by this funny little man with his silly little dice and crazy dreams of fantastical adventure. It’s a beautiful thing that Gygax did for us and we’re all a little bit richer for anything that can remind of us of that fact, even the man’s death.

Bledsaw’s name is far less known both to general public and to gamerdom at large, but I salute him as one of the true giants of the field. Count him and his guild of judges among the blessed few that held the hobby dear in its earliest days. Had it not been for his efforts and the efforts of others like him, the rpg hobby might have withered in obscurity and it may have never come to pass that a redheaded farmboy of nerdy disposition would wander into a toy store to discover a strange pink box with the words "Dungeons & Dragons" blazoned on the cover. Here I am a quarter century later, still fascinated by the worlds of adventure barely contained by that game. Bob Bledsaw had a part to play in that. That it took the man’s passing for me to fully appreciate his contribution is unfortunate, but at least we still have a chance to honor his memory.

Game store demos

Man, I was a fool all the years I could have been running demos at my local store and didn’t. Don’t underestimate the sheer joy of saying to a random dude who walks into the shop, “Hey, man. Wanna play an elf? We also got this beardy wizard that needs a player.” There was no outside pressure on the situation. Unlike a con, we didn’t have to worry about sticking to the schedule or making sure everyone had paid to play. And I didn’t worry needlessly over the fact that people paid cash money to sit at my table. And unlike a normal campaign, we didn’t have to worry about the normal social concerns that surround an ongoing group. We just had a couple of hours of pure gaming bliss, no strings attached.

The Gospel According to Lou Zocchi

There's just something keen about watching a grognard natter on about dice for twenty minutes.

Mutant Future

I consider Mutant Future important to the hobby for three reasons. First, it’s just friggin’ awesome, what with the laser-eyes mutant and spidergoats and zombies and all. Second, the last version of Gamma World kinda seemed like a knee to the collective groin of post-apoc fandom. Mutant Future offers an alternative vision for the genre. Third, we’ve seen a lot of good non-clone retro rpgs on the fringes of this crazy old school renaissance, such as Encounter Critical, Mazes & Minotaurs, and Forward… to Adventure!, but MF is the first neo-retro game produced by one of the retro-clone outfits. You can’t point an accusatory finger at Mutant Future and deride it as simply aping an earlier design. Sure it has a lot in common with Gamma World and Basic D&D, but it also does a lot of things its own way. I love the old ways and the old games that them taught to us, but there’s a difference between appreciating that stuff and allowing it to distort or frustrate new creative endeavors. I celebrate this new golden age of crappy old games we seem to be enjoying, but I am not content to simply game like its 1979. We need to take the old school techniques and move boldly forward in new directions. Which brings me to…

Carcosa

Not everyone liked this one and I respect the opinions of most of the people who thought Geoffrey McKinney went one step too far. But man, Carcosa’s just so damn good that I feel there has to be a little wiggle room for the artist here. The horrid details of the ritual sacrifices are such a small and relatively uninteresting part of the book that flying into a moral panic about it strikes me as an overreaction, but that’s just one dude’s opinion. (Furthermore, somewhere between that moral panic and my opinion there’s room for thoughtful criticism, which is always welcome.) Personally, ever since reading “The Doom That Came to Sarnath” as a schoolboy I’ve wanted to see a game world with brooding horror and phantasmagorical strangeness. Chaosium’s Dreamlands didn’t quite get the job done, leaning too heavily on the waking world of Call of Cthulhu. Empire of the Petal Throne almost achieved what I wanted, but seemed bogged down by linguistic trifles. And Chaosium had another chance to grab the ball and run with it during the d20 boom, but their Melnibonéan book was one of the great disappointments of that period. Carcosa is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to what I’ve long wanted, and where it diverges from my ill-formed desires it does so delightfully, offering strange new vistas I would have never imagined myself. Do you seek exciting new worlds to explore or to conquer? Carcosa awaits. Let the clever and the brave try their might against it.

Fight On! Magazine

When I started this post I considered doing it as a Top Ten sort of affair, but I quickly realized that I would find it impossible to rate all of this stuff. However I know Fight On! magazine would have been #1. Born in the cauldron of the OD&D Discussion forum, Fight On! consists of three (soon to be four) issues of pure gaming goodness. Most of the articles will work across many editions of D&D and other related systems. A few articles are aimed specifically at other games, like Empire of the Petal Throne or Mutant Future. I am truly humbled that my own meager submissions can be found alongside such vibrant, imaginative work as Gabor Lux’s Fomalhaut material or Kesher’s wonderful demi-human pieces or many others. Fight On! is full of all the stuff that made the bygone years of Dragon so golden: adventures, monsters, treasures, and new rules unfiltered by a corporate vision. You really get to see lots of very cool individual takes on old school gaming. Pseudonymous editor Ignatius Ümlaut deserves a huge amount of kudos for all the work he does to put this ass-kicking pile of awesome together each issue.

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.

here, have some bullet points

• Howdy, folks! I haven't been on the internets much for almost a week now and when I have it's been to access Google documents. Since misplacing a flash drive for a few days I've decided to switch to a non-localized set-up for my word processing. I've been trying to put the last finishing touches on the Mutant Future sandbox article for the next issue of Fight On! The deadline for submissions has come and gone, but the editor is kindly allowing me a little extra time to finish up. This baby will be my single longest contribution to Fight On! to date, but I'm trying real hard not to overdo it. Paul Crabaugh is my role model for what a good game article should look like: no longer than necessary and immediately useful.


• Local Item #1: Speaking of Mutant Future, I started a new MF campaign last week. We'll be playing at the Armored Gopher every other Wednesday; next session is next week. Anybody who wants to come sling post-apocalyptic dice for an evening is welcome. So far we have a badass ubermenschian Pure Human (Wheelz rolled his character in front of me and got a 12 as his lowest stat), an anthropomorphic deer that can see the future and a guy that looks like the Silver Surfer who can disintegrate you with the power of his mind. We played out a slight variation of the sample adventure in the book: rather than outsiders hired to find the lost water shipment, the PCs were locals trying to save their town from drying up. Next session I'm parachuting them onto my sandbox.


• Local Item #2: Some nut came into the Armored Gopher and traded in a bunch of RPG stuff for some Magic cards. If you dig on Palladium products, there was a bigass shelf of the stuff in the used section. I nabbed the always-fun Compendium of Weapons, Armor & Castles and the Rifts Conversion Book. I also got the BECMI D&D supplement Creature Catalog, which is basically the Fiend Folio of non-Advanced D&D though not quite as weird or British. And I talked newly minted DM Dane into getting the unknown nut's Fiend Folio for use in his brand new 2nd edition AD&D campaign. Huzzah!


• In case you haven't heard HackMaster Basic is out, though my copy hasn't quite made it through the distribution system to my local retailer. Reviews can be found here, here, here and here. That last one was written by Mark Hughes, who I'm pretty sure is both smarter and crazier than I am. His anti-AD&D screed is a classic.


• A bunch of new gaming goodness has popped up on the radar while I was away: Mike Davison's Ruins & Ronins in both PDF and print, David 'grubman' Bezio's lastest deal, a neo-retro sci-fi game called X-Plorers, is available in a free playtest edition, and James 'the Comissioner of Gaming' Mishler has a bunch of new PDF stuff from Adventure Games Publishing. I haven't had a chance to check all of this stuff out yet but it's all coming from great people chock full of awesome ideas.


• Lulu sales of the Miscellaneum of Cinder, counting both print and PDF versions, have now surpassed 100 copies. That's literally an order of magnitude greater than I assumed I would sell, so big thanks to everyone who bought a copy!

Mutant Future session #12

Last night's Mutant Future session was pretty chaotic. Bob the Human returned to the team after the player missed the previous two sessions and a new PC, a two-headed porcupine, was added to the team, joining up with Ed the three-armed beak-faced mutant and Jynx the demon with extra faces where his kneecaps should be. They continued to pillage the Howling Tower, facing such delights as a giant mutated maggot and and flying manta ray that was actually a form of fungus. The party neatly avoided a simple but deadly trap: a room packed full of deadly ooze. By opening a door from afar (with Jynx's prehensile tongue) they were able to trap the ooze monster in a corridor with doors at both ends. Bob found a magic ring by remembering that he had a sword that detected gold. And Ed looted a necromancer's study, making off with a book bound in human skin that wriggled when touched. That necromancer is going to be pissed when he gets back.

The party then decided that they needed to find a wizard to trade the magic ring and/or book for stuff they could actually use. So they set off for the Laughing Dragon Inn, because Lord Brain sometimes passes through there on his travels. Lord Brain is a Thundarr style wizard, with a brain in a jar where his head should be. The party also met Dergo the Four-Armed Bard, who plays old rock and roll tunes on ukulele and accordion. He's best known for his Hawaiian polka rendition of "Voodoo Child".

Anyway, Lord Brain was very keen on getting ahold of that ring, as it allows one to read the past history of objects. He's got a lair full of techno-artifacts and no user manuals. So he traded the party one suit of Terrazonian Stormtrooper Armor for the ring. Since Dave Hargave invented the Terrazonian Stormtrooper Armor it's pretty effin' sweet: Ac 2, quarter damage from fire, half damage from sonics, no damage from cold, 70% chance of deflecting lasers, 25% of ricocheting bullets, helm makes you immune to gas and blinding attacks, comes with 20 hit points that sit in front of your own (and they self-repair!). The helmet looks a lot like a cylon head, so that's pretty awesome. The only obvious defect is double damage from electrical attacks. (Note to self: more blue dragons.) Bob's the only guy in last night's group who can wear the suit, so he is immediately declared the guy who gets to go in front from now on.

Dergo the Bard also gave the party a lead on a new adventure site. Originally, the exploration of the Howling Tower was predicated on finding a specific ancient spellbook. Turns out they were following a false lead. Several sessions ago the party mixed up two totally different wizard's towers and I didn't correct them. Now they know where the correct wizard's tower can be found and to expect giant scorpions as big as houses. Since this whole crazy expedition started to benefit the now-dead lich PC (still guest-starring as the skull Jynx carries in his backpack for fun), Ed discussed with Lord Brain what he would trade for the legendary Spellbook of the Silver Flame. Lord Brain pretty much offered them anything they wanted: a city to rule, a conquering army, techno-junk from his personal armory, etc. What self-respecting PC wouldn't risk life and sanity when the stakes are that high? I can't wait to see how things go next session.

Mutant Future session #11

It's been a while since I updated all y'all on my Mutant Future campaign. Last night the faithful gathered at the Armored Gopher for their third session attempting to loot Dave Hargrave's Howling Tower. The player roster included campaign stalwarts Carl, Dane and Joe and relative newcomers Austin and Charles. It was the second session for the latter gentlemen.

Austin hadn't been to the campaign in several sessions (which is totally okay, it's meant to be a 'drop in when you please' sort of affair) and wanted to make a new character. Like any right-thinking non-communist he opted to play a mutant, affording him the opportunity to roll on my Mutation Compilation. I don't think I've told you nice people about this little house rule I've developed. One of the hazards of random mutation charts is that they are finite in scope. At some point a player will throw the dice and end up with nothing but mutations we've already seen in play. This can be quite disappointing, even when the mutations are powerful. In short, no game I've seen ever has enough mutations. The Mutation Compilation is my response to this issue. I simply dug up every mutation type chart I could and made each such chart a subchart of a d20 table. This is how Austin's mutant panda bear ended up with poison excretions from some online post-apoc RPG, batwings off the Hordlings charts in the 1st edition Monster Manual II, and squid tentacles coming from out his head from I don't even remember what game.

The Mutation Compilation proved very handy last night because the everybody else ended up rolling up new PCs as well. While looting level one they stumbled across a door that everyone in the party failed to open. Carl couldn't stand the fact that this door refused to yield, so he got out his crowbar and pickaxe and went to work. Two turns later the door was utterly demolished. The room beyond was sunken 4 feet below the floor level of the rest of the dungeon and filled with greenish, swampy water. Just peeking above the water line is the lid of an enormous stone chest or sarcophagus. Dane's character, an android centaur, teleports onto the top of the lid. That's when the Vroats attack. The insectoid Phraint is fighting a Vroat in this Erol Otus illo:

A Vroat's basic deal is that that it hops at you like a frog but eats your face like an alligator. And three of these things want to destroy Dane's PC. Dane immediately gives one of the Vroats a face full of shotgun, but it doesn't go down. Carl lights up another with a plasma pistol blast and Charles fires his crossbow wildly as Austin takes to the air and Joe dives into the water.

That's when the wandering monster showed up. I had rolled a wandering monster during the door demolition project. But I thought to myself "Hmmm, this could get pretty hairy what with three Vroats in the next room. How bad will the wandering monster's timing be?" I decided to roll a d6, the closer to six I got the less favorable the monsters arrival on the scene. Of course I got a six.

The monster's first attack was to breathe a cone of acid on Carl and Charles, who are still standing in the ex-doorway. They both blow their save. The damage is minor, but I make them roll item saves for all their gear, with a 1 on a d6 destroying the item. That's when someone at the table inquires if Carl is still carrying the mysterious metal egg (roughly football sized) found two sessions or so back. He is and unfortunately it is a bomb. I give Carl a fifty/fifty chance the bomb is destroyed without detonating but the dice go the wrong way. This particular device does 75 points of damage to everyone in 150', no save.

Initially I declare everyone dead, but Dane goes to work. Dane is in law school. He doesn't rule lawyer but by God he is great at arguing to his maximum benefit in ill-defined imaginary scenarios. He's always polite, often quite imaginative and usually entertaining when he gets on a roll, so he gets away with a lot of shenanigans in my game. Sometimes I have to stop him with a stone cold "No" but this time I let him plead his case. After arguing that Austin's cthulhu panda was out of the direct blast by virtue of being in flight near the ceiling, I allow a die roll to save the critter and he makes it. I give Dane a slimmer chance on his 'hiding behind the Vroat and letting it absorb the blast' plan, and the dice do not go his way. So Austin end ups being the lone survivor of third expedition to the Howling Tower.

Let me tell you about how great these players are. They start rolling dice for new characters before I even finish digging up new charsheets for them. No whining or complaining, they all roll with the punches and are eager to get right back in the game. Hell, this is Carl's third party slaughter since I started running games at the store a year ago. So here's the new party members:

Carl - a Labyrinth Lord dwarf with a few mutations, most notable extremely large purple feet with orange toenails, looks like a midget Fidel Castro

Joe - Joe said "I want to be a demon" and rolled up a mutant humanoid with a prehensile tail, a prehensile tongue 6 meters long, and a face on each knee. I don't know how he does that.

Dane - three armed freak with an eagle's beak for a mouth and the ability to devolve opponents

Charles - a skeleton man (all his organs, muscles, etc. exist in another dimension) with a 10' diameter neon green afro and the ability to regenerate like a troll

There first order of business was to dash back to the dungeon and get the loot out of that damn chest! Austin had fled in a panic and left it behind. The haul was quite rich, which they used to buy armor and stuff. They also traded a bunch of clocks found in another room for some guns. I can't wait to see what damage these weirdos do in two weeks!

Labyrinths & Mutants

I've been kicking around ways to mash up Mutant Future and Labyrinth Lord to better fit a more Thundarr the Barbarian-inspired game. Basically, a science fantasy game with both the familiarity and social commentary available to post-apocalyptic Earth and the magic of straight-up D&D. And more lasers. There's a section in the back of the MF rulebook for such shenanigans but I'm just not digging that particular implementation. I've mentioned before the mutant rules in particular don't really light my jets. But in the past weeks as I have considered the subject of Class holistically (i.e. What classes do I want in my game?) I have come around to the idea of Mutant as a class option. In the end, I think I want a Basic/Expert style approach, with Race as Class and relatively few options. Four humans and three non-humans seems like plenty of classes most days, but I don't have my list quite cut down that short just yet. Here are the classes I've been kicking around so far:

Savage - The baseline fighting class, suitable for Thundarrs, Conans and any uncivilized human who gets by on force of arms. Perhaps not much different from a standard Labyrinth Lord fighter.

Scavenger - The uncivilized human who gets by on stealth and guile. I.e. an alternate thief of some sort.

Techno - A human knowledgeable in ancient tech and science. This class would be reserved for unfrozen people from the Science Age, refugees from Logan's Run style arcologies, time travellers, visitors from advanced extraterrestrial colonies that survived the Fall, etc. Inspired by the Arduin class of the same name, though I'd be more inclined to use the St. Andre version.

Sorcerer - The basic human arcane caster class. I'd like to stick as close to the standard MU as possible, but I also kinda want to ditch spell books for a know it/throw it approach. I think I'd like the default magic-using PCs to be just as illiterate as everyone else in the party.

Wizard - I can't run a Thundarr game without giving the players the option of running one of those awesome mutant techno-wizard guys that Thundarr is always fighting. This class would combine the skills of the techno and sorcerer with the possibility of mutating into something horrible. Mechanics-wise, it would be akin to the Elf class: lots of powers but a painful XP chart to climb.

Witch - An arcane caster who gains additional power by making pacts with extradimensional demons.

Prophet - The cleric class of the setting. Instead of serving a temple and a distant god, these people directly hear their god's voice. Think Joan of Arc in the year 4094 AD. I may drop the ability to affect undead or make Turn Undead into a spell.

Cyborg and/or Robot - Because cyborgs and robots are cool.

Deviant - My version of a mutant class, with name inspired by the Deviants of Marvel Comics. Instead of mutant powers that level up as the character does (the Mutant class in the back of MF) I would go with full-blown MF uberpowers. The catch is that the character starts with very few mutations and continues to mutate in play.

Brute - Because if someone wants to play Ookla the Mok I sure as hell ain't gonna say no. I might borrow the Half-Ogre class from Ruins & Ronin for this one.

That's ten classes, which feels like too long a list to me. I guess the Wizard and Witch could be folded into the Sorcerer as subclasses, bringing the total down to eight.

World of Cinder, session 9

So last night all the PCs died. While on a mission to bring back the head of a rogue wizard they decided to mess with a sleeping dragon. It woke up and breathed on the entire party. Johann the Gnome, Carl's henchman, was the only one in the gang with enough hit points to survive if he saved. And he didn't. I feel bad for Dane. It was his first session of the campaign and less than an hour into it he and everybody else was dead. But that's just the way it goes sometimes in the kind of game I run.

I passed out some new character sheets and the players started clacking the 3d6s but total party kill by dragon breath had sucked the fun out of the room. So we got to talking and Carl indicated that he was ready to play something else for a while. Before the session had started Wheelz and I had been discussing our mutual interest in Labyrinth Lord's gamma ray powered sister system, Mutant Future. Carl was onboard with that and Dane seemed willing to play along. So I have two weeks to develop something resembling a Mutant Future campaign, or at least an initial scenario. Good thing I was already working on a MF wilderness map!

Dig this

I've been remiss in not reporting this item sooner.  Starships & Spacemen second edition is a project from Goblinoid Games that takes a musty old sci-fi rpg and updates it to full compatibility with Labyrinth Lord and Mutant Future.

In case you're new here: Labyrinth Lord is the retroclone closest to Basic/Expert D&D and if add in the Advanced Edition Companion it also emulates they way AD&D played when I was a stupid kid who didn't know you "couldn't" mix AD&D and BX.  Mutant Future is an almost-clone of Gamma World that more compatible with LL than Gamma World was with BX/AD&D.

Adding a full-blown sci-fi option to this scheme is pretty much my definition of rock solid awesomeness.

This project is already fully funded, so if you kick in five buck now you will be getting a PDF of this game.

Sunrise over Lake Damned-If-I-Can-Remember

The ol' Gameblog went on an unexpected hiatus for the last week or so because of a number of factors. The primary explanation is that I was super busy getting ready for the family trip to Wisconsin. I'm typing this post from the condo we rented at a very lovely resort near the the small town of Cable. Any Gameblog readers in the area? Shoot me an email: jrients @ gmail.com. Though to be honest, I haven't checked my gmail account in about a week and it might take a day or two for me to get caught up in that department.

So my good buddy Pat is in town for a visit last weekend and he, my daughter and I headed over to the Armored Gopher Games for a used game auction. Armored Gopher's last used game auction was of the silent type, where you simply write down you best bid on an attached slip of paper and then the next day you get an email informing you that you spent way too much money on a big pile of game crap. This time it was a live event, modeled closely on Winter War's excellent format.

I know you all are surprised to hear that I spent too much money on a big pile of game crap. Well, it was only twenty bucks, but I didn't spend more than $3 on an single item, so I ended with a lot of stuff. For some unknown reason I was in a mood to bid on a old board games, winning the bidding on the Parker Brothers D&D cash-in Shadowlords!, the Avalon Hill bookcase game UFO, Alien Contact (which I knew nothing about and bid on solely based upon nifty font used on the box's logo design), The Legend of the Lone Ranger (bought at my daughter's urging) and the licensed board game for the old TV show S.W.A.T.

On the RPG front I ended up buying one of the later, black-covered 2nd edition Player's Handbooks and the infamous Skills & Powers book. I didn't play any AD&D during the period when Skills & Powers and the other "2.5" books were out and I've been meaning to get them for a while. True story: I got heckled when I bid on the 2nd ed PHB. Josh, one of the regulars that make my Encounter Critical and D&D con games so fun, shouted from a couple rows back "isn't that a bit too new for your tastes?" I shot back "The first printing was in '89. That totally counts!" A cheap copy of Palladium's Monsters & Animals also made its way into my win pile. Is it possible to have too many monster nooks? I doubt it. I also nabbed two third edition Gamma World modules and the Buck Rogers adventure War Against the Han. The latter is for the Buck Rogers rpg that TSR did that more closely resembled the original post-apocalyptic pulp novel. I figured now that I'm running Mutant Future as an ongoing venture a few cheap post-apoc resources could come in handy.

Which brings me around to Wednesday and Mutant Future session #2. I had the same three players (Carl, Dane & Wheelz) running the same three characters (Silver Bob, Ted "Creepy Deer" Fletcher & Stern the Pure) with the addition of Stern's new henchman, Dumbo the Elephant Dude. I decided to use WalkerP's One Page Dungeon, MineCo 3000 Uranium Ore Extraction Complex. Continuing the previously established theme of "Oh noes! Our hometown is running out of waters!" I fed the party a totally bullshit rumor about a settlement further down the Poison River. Their mission: find out how the locals are able to purify river water, or at least arrange to buy water from them. [Spoilers!] The Ore Extraction Complex doesn't purify any water. Its run by androids and hypno-zombies that the androids don't mind slowly killing with poisonous water. So a totally false lead, but given reports of activity down river a plausible one. What can I say? Years of watching Gilligan's Island as a youth probably gave me a twisted idea of what constitutes a fair scenario.

Anyway, the party all died. They got through the majority of the adventure and burned through most of the allotted session time, but then things went awry. The One Page Dungeon format leaves a lot of lacunae for the enterprising GM to fill in and with this particular one-pager an unanswered question was "what are the androids armed with?" So I rolled some dice and consulted the artifact charts. I got mostly stuff like laser rifles and six-shooters, with one android armed with an electric stun baton. But one of the two androids guarding the Great Computer God ended with a grenade launcher and some lethal photonic grenades. The sick thing is that photonic grenades only damage living beings, so the androids have absolutely no reason to be dainty about their placement on the battlefield. Only one PC made his save vs. instant grenade death and he was gunned down one round later.

To their credit, the gang immediately started rolling up new PCs. Too bad these new guys are a bands of rejects. Two thirds of the team is blind! We'll see how well that works out next session.

The other thing, besides prepping for vacation, that's been eating up my time lately has been a book. I've been obsessively reading Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I read it cover-to-cover over the last week and brought it along to immediately re-read. I can't remember the last time I did that. From the first read I can't quite make up my mind whether this Jaynes guy is Sigmund Freud crazy-but-important-to-his-field crazy, Nikola Tesla brilliant-but-doomed-to-be-misunderstood, or Immanuel Velikovsky/Ignatius Donnelly trying-too-hard-to-explain-everything-with-one-theory crazy.

Cinder II: Electric Bugaloo, session 1

So Wednesday I got my regulars at the Armored Gopher to agree to taking a break from Mutant Future to play some more straight-up D&D/Labyrinth Lord in my World of Cinder setting. I was greatly enjoying the Mutant Future game but I was getting to the point where I was trying to play "top that" with myself every session. That's a dangerous mindset because it usually leads to either rampant Monty Haulism, depressing total party kills, or things just getting way out of control. So I felt like I needed a break.

Cinder II takes the basic campaign world concepts previously explored in the World of Cinder and puts them through the filter of an alchemical mash-up of old gaming junk, particularly the first Arduin Grimoire, the Dungeoneer Compendium, Unknown Gods, Verbosh, Rat on a Stick, the Ready Ref Sheets, and the Keep on the Borderlands. So last night we made up some new character and set off for the Keep on the Borderlands. The initial PC group consisted of the following:

• Charles is Tobin of the Silver Sledge, a drunken dwarf and member of the only notable dwarf-clan in the region.  It was established early on that his character is a drunkard, but an amusing one.
• Wheelz is Kelgar, another dwarf but an outsider to the region. He's in the Kingdom of Verbosh searching for the Bonnie Prince Charlie/Strider style Lost Dwarf King.  Incidentally, Kelgar ended up starting play with the Sword of Shiva (+3, whirlwind like a djinn 1/day) because of a lucky draw out of the Deck O' Stuff.  Oddly, he never drew it during the run.
• Carl started as Olf, dimwitted cleric of St. Carmichael. But he got killed by a goblin spear in the first battle of the campaign. So he rolled up Brett the Bold, cleric of Irshar the Blind Gardener. My new 'How To Make A PC' hand-out really did the trick in speeding up chargen, as Brett was actually able to join in the last couple of rounds of the fight where Olf bought the farm.
• Ria is the Mysterious Unnamed Thief. She told the folks working the gate to the Keep that her name was Adele, but that was just a pseudonym. This thief is such an enigma Ria actually left the Name field of charsheet blank.
• And Dane is playing Roi Cribbet, traveller from another time and another world. Using Jamie Mal's Stranger class, Roi is basically the 1st level D&D version of this guy:

Yes, Roi has a chainsaw for a hand.

Did I mention that I worked out charts for the lineages of PC fighters of a knightly persuasion as well as a list of possible mentors for newly minted MUs.  So no one opted to play either class.  That's DM prep for you.  So anyway these folks start out on the road to the Keep, looking for adventure in whatever comes there way.

I have a confession. I absolutely could not help myself last night. When I described the guards at the outer gate to the keep I specified they were the dudes guarding the entrance to the wedding in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  They get into the joint and give their names to the vaguely incompetent scribe who records all persons passing through the gates.  Mystery Thief tells him her name is Adelle.  We'll see if she remembers that next session.

The party ends up at the Dew Drop Inn where the proprietor Gustav gives them the obligatory Caves of Chaos adventure leave, despite Roi trying to pay for a beer with his MasterCard.  When that doesn't work he tries cash, to which Gustav replies "We don't take that Verbosh City stuff here."  The party also meet Mohag the Wanderer, a seasoned adventurer who agrees to join the group for 25% of the take, and five mercenaries looking for work.  They pass on both offers.  They might've taken the mercenaries on, but my starting equipment charts end up with most PCs beginning play pretty dang poor.  Yes, in my game you can enter play with an awesome magic sword but not have lunch money.  You're supposed to use the one to get the other.  Some of the party members end up sleeping in the stables because they can't afford the silver piece for the flophouse.

We ended up exploring all of three rooms in the Caves of Chaos, but they were pretty fun rooms.  They entered the goblin caves and had a knockdown drag-out fight with six goblin guards.  It was a pretty sweet fight.  Mystery Thief was setting goblins alight with her torch, Roi cut through spear-hafts with his chainsaw, and Tobin was shieldbashing the little mofos like crazy.  One goblin ran up some stairs to ask the hobgoblins on the level above for some help, but I rolled a die to see if the hobgobs gave a crap.  They didn't, so the poor little bugger ended up speared through the back and pinned to the door.

Roi decided to chainsaw through the door to the hobgoblins, giving them plenty of time to evacuate the non-combatants and set-up an ambush with their bows.  Dude was nearly pincushioned the moment he finished sawing his way in.  Two of the hobgoblins were killed and morale broke for the rest, who fled through a door on the opposite side of the room.  The party opted to search for loot before following the routed baddies.  Eventually they end up at the hobgoblin Torture Chamber/Food Storage/Rumpus Room, where the hobgoblin torturers are whipping the bejeesus out of a gnoll with several other prisoners chained up nearby.  These particular hobgoblins are big tough sons of bitches and take several rounds to dispatch.

Roi then frees the gnoll, who of course has been whipped to the point of berserk insanity.  One dead gnoll later and the party is arguing over whether to free the four humans and one orc chained to the wall.  Tobin and Brett end up murdering the orc while Roi is distracted talking to the humans, who they eventually free. The merchant and his wife reward the party when they get back to the keep, while the two caravan guards agree to serve as torchbearers/packbearers for the party.

I'm really looking forward to next session.

Saving Throws, part 1a

In part 1 of my series on saving throws oddysey commented:

I'll admit, though, that I'm considering adding a "radiation" save. Not so much with the purity.

Funny you should mention radiation. Allow me to list one more set of saves from a game I have handy.

Mutant Future
Energy Attacks
Poison or Death
Stun Attacks
Radiation

The numbers on the MF saving throw chart line up closely with the Labyrinth Lord rules from which Mutant Future is derived, so much so that here are save categories as they appear on my custom World of Cinder GM screen insert:

Breath or Energy
Poison or Death
Petrify, Stun or Paralyze
Wands or Radiation
Spells or Devices

My charts are set up that way so I can drop in mutations and post-apoc tech at a moment's notice.

Inhuman Future

I've been kicking around an idea for my next Mutant Future campaign: humans as an endangered species.  The folks that do all the important stuff in the campaign would be plants, animals and robots.  In some areas of the world humans would be considered mythical while in other places they might be second class citizens or treated as animals like in Planet of the Apes.  Other communities might never have heard of humanity.  The PCs might care about the fate of humanity and the campaign could even be about that, but humans (mutant or otherwise) are not what the milieu itself is about.  The world of 2525 (or whatever) just doesn't give a crap about humanity anymore than the world today cares much about any of a hojillion extinct species.  They're dead and we've moved on.  Later we're dead and they've moved on.

There'd still be morlocks somewhere, of course.

Would this set-up annoy you as a player?  I'd certainly be open to letting folks play PCs who were some sort of the last remnant of humanity, whether that means mutants slumming about radioactive ruins or cryogenically preserved pure strain humans.  But I wonder if this sort of heavy-handedness might make the game ungrokkable to some players, especially the neebie types.

Illo courtesy Dresdan Codak.

and now, a random chart

If Mutant Future gets a new edition, I hope it contains something like this:

Optional Random Mutant Animal Stock (d100)

01) Alligator

02) Alpaca

03) Amoeba

04) Ant

05) Anteater

06) Ape

07) Armadillo

08) Bear

09) Beaver

10) Bee

11) Beetle

12) Butterfly

13) Camel

14) Catfish

15) Centipede

16) Chameleon

17) Chicken

18) Chinchilla

19) Cockroach

20) Cow

21) Crab

22) Deer

23) Dinosaur

24) Dodo

25) Dog

26) Dolphin

27) Duck

28) Eagle

29) Earthworm

30) Eel

31) Elephant

32) Ferret

33) Fox

34) Frog

35) Gecko

36) Giraffe

37) Goat

38) Goldfish

39) Goose

40) Hawk

41) Hedgehog

42) Hippopotamus

43) Horse

44) Housecat

45) Hyaena

46) Jaguar

47) Kangaroo

48) Koala

49) Leech

50) Lemur

51) Leopard

52) Lion

53) Llama

54) Lobster

55) Monkey

56) Moose

57) Mosquito

58) Mule

59) Muskrat

60) Octopus

61) Ostrich

62) Otter

63) Panda

64) Parakeet

65) Parrot

66) Penguin

67) Pig

68) Piranha

69) Possum

70) Praying Mantis

71) Pufferfish

72) Rabbit

73) Raccoon

74) Rat

75) Rhino

76) Salamander

77) Seahorse

78) Scorpion

79) Shark

80) Sheep

81) Skunk

82) Sloth

83) Slug

84) Snake

85) Snail

86) Spider

87) Squid

88) Squirrel

89) Tiger

90) Turtle

91) Turkey

92) Unicorn

93) Walrus

94) Weasel

95) Whale

96) Wolf

97) Wolverine

98) Zebra
99-00) An Abomination Unto The Lord (roll twice, combine results)

Kindly Mutant Lords (i.e. GMs) may allow players who roll on this chart to substitute an animal based power for one or more random mutations. For example, a skunk PC might trade in one roll on the mutation charts for the ability to spray funk (the bad kind) on opponents.

Next task: a plant chart.