Fresh Baked Shatnerday

My Ideal Gaming Table

Over the last few years I've seen pictures of several 'ultimate' gaming tables. I can appreciate the pimped-out gadgetry of those things, but my idea of a perfect game table is coming from a totally different angle. So today I thought I'd share my thoughts on this subject.

First of all, my table would be circular, not rectangular. I think King Arthur was right on the money in this regard. From a practical matter the rectangular table can obscure your view of some of the people sometimes. And it's easier to trick the players into thinking they're your equal if you're not at the head of the table. But seriously, I'm one of those old-fashioned DM's of the Judge Dredd school ("I am the law!") but I also believe that everyone at the table deserves the same courtesy and consideration. A round table de-emphasizes the DM-player power relationship in favor of a more egalitarian mood.

Also, the tabletop would totally have this totally rad magickal okkult symbol on it:

There'd be a chair at each corner of this unicursal septagram, for seven spaces at the game table. Six players is pretty close to an ideal for me. Three or fewer players feels inadequate, like I'm running half a game. Four or five feels like a full table. Six is where it really gets interesting, because at six players it's usually clear that I don't have any real ability to predict what the group is going to do. At that size of a group I'm slightly out of my league and have to work a lot harder.

To me one of the best parts of DMing is that you get a chance to build all sorts of fun static pieces like monsters, dungeons, wilderness environs and then you let players loose on them to see what happens. Usually it involves watching your toys getting broken, but hopefully the players do an interesting job of wrecking your precious creations. A few more players than you can safely handle adds a little extra frisson.

Also, I just like the idea of having a game table with a spooky-looking symbol on the table.

Another element of my gaming table goes back to my ridiculous pet theory on the origin and relevance of RPGs. It might have been over at the Forge where I first heard it explicitly claimed that role-playing taps into the storytelling circuit of the brain that's been present in humanity since cavemen sat around bullshitting about the giant mammoths that got away.

I don't dig on the notions of "storytelling" and "narrativism" in terms of RPG theory and design, but I think there's some truth to this premise. And that's why when playing a game that did not require a board or display, I'd put some fire in the center of the table. Sitting around staring into the fire and chewing the fat is becoming something of a lost art in modern technological societies. Instead we either sit in front of the TV and let it do all the talking or hang out together someplace without the soothing benefits of watching the flames dance.

Now, I know that if I put a candle or something like that in the center of the table every single session I'd eventually set something on fire, like a charsheet or my sleeve. To avoid that possibility I'd use a substitute that happens to be one of the greatest inventions of all time:

Lava lamps are pure distilled awesome. I never did drugs in college. I didn't need them to enter interesting altered states as staring at my lava lamp achieved the same effect on the cheap and without any biological side effects. But even if you aren't as susceptible to lamp-induced hypnosis as I am, the lava lamp produces intricate patterns of light in much the same way as a crackling fire. Think of the lava lamp as updated game equipment the way modern plastic polyhedrons are updates of dice carved out of bones.

So there you have it. My ideal gaming table: circular, with a strange seven sided star on the surface and a lava lamp in the middle.

Fun with Jumpspace

One of the constant criticisms leveled at Traveller and several other sci-fi RPGs is that the spacemaps are all in 2-d. It's a legit beef, since being three dimensional is sorta why we call it Outer Space and not Outer Plane. Among the Trav fans I've seen three basic responses to this problem:

1. The Trav maps are like roadmaps. Triple A doesn't usually mark elevations on their maps because all you need is clear directions to your destination, not feet above sea level.

2. Jumpspace, the spooky fairyland ships use to go FTL, is flatter than realspace and thus a 2-d map works just fine.

3. Shut up. We're playing a stupid game, for crying out loud.

While choices 1. and 3. have a certain appeal, I like option 2 the best because of all the rad stuff you can do with the concept of a jump plane running through the galaxy. I'm going to try to demonstrate some of these ideas with pictures, but this is my first time working with iso-type graph paper so it may be a little inept.

Figure 1 - Here we have a perfectly ordinary subsector, sitting in space minding it's own business. A jump plane map (i.e. standard subsector map) and a realspace map of this region would look identical. If you imagine a Star D floating above or below the plane, that star would be inaccessible by jump drive and hence astrographers would omit that system from the standard jump map.

Figure 2 - What if more than one jump plane cut through the galaxy? Ships on the yellow jump plane could visit systems A, B and C. Ships on the white jump plane (below and parallel to the yellow one) could visit D, E and F. Even though B and E are very close to one another, you cannot plot a jump course from one to the other because there is no jump plane connecting them. If you want to get really crazy with your campaign you could introduce a second FTL drive that doesn't use jump space at all. A merchant with a warp drive (or whatever) could make zillions of credits moving goods between B and E. Without such a drive the civilization of A, B and C would probably be completely different from that of D, E and F. They could communicate via lightspeed transmission and STL ships, but compared to the hustle bustle of life with jump drives that may not amount to much.

Figure 3 - Here we have two different jump planes, but they intersect. A ship at system A could jump to B or C but they couldn't reach D or E in a single jump, since there's no direct jump plane connection. The ship at A would have to jump to B, then jump to D or E. Obviously, a world like B could be of enormous strategic interest to the powers that be.

Figure 4 - Here the jump plane is curved vis-a-vis normal space. Here you can plot a course from A to D, but it would be a very long jump, possibly outside the range of any known drive. Jumping to B then D would be the smart thing to do for most vessels. A navigator in a ship at system C could actually plot two different courses to system B, a short one and a long one.

Figure 5 - Here's a bump in the jump plane. B and C appears to be one parsec away in real space, but the the navigator has to plot a Jump 2 to get there. The Scout service identifies these sort of hazards and marks the maps accordingly, but in uncharted space something like this could leave you in the middle of space and out of fuel.

Figure 6 - A hole in the jump plane makes travel to world C impossible. And to go from B to D requires an intermediary jump to world A.

Now imagine that the the jump plane used the the 3rd Imperium, et al., is twisted and torn and tangled in ways a hundred times more complicated than my simple examples. This would easily explains oddities in the official maps like the Antares system being in the wrong place. It would also explain why ships need both fancy nav programs and high paid navigators. You can't just point the ship at the nearest star and hope for the best.

Someone with actual skills at geometry could probably come up with additional jump plane scenarios.

Recommended: The Spire of Iron and Crystal

So yesterday I read The Spire of Iron and Crystal, a Swords & Wizardry adventure from S&W guru Matthew Finch. Man, this is great stuff. The Spire compares very favorably in tone and content to module B4 The Lost City, by the late great Tom Moldvay. Both riff off that great old weird fantasy trope of the forgotten last outpost of an ancient, corrupted civilization. I eat this sort of Cthulhuesque stuff up and it makes for great drop-in adventures that could be slotted into nearly any campaign. I could totally use The Spire of Iron and Crystal in either my World of Cinder or the pseudo-historical Japanese setting I've been working on. And adapting the module to Geoffrey McKinney's Carcosa would require rather little work, mostly just changing a couple spell scrolls. Though branded for Swords & Wizardry, I don't spot anything that makes the module incompatible with the vast majority of old editions and retro-clones of D&D.

You can get your own copy of The Spire of Iron and Crystal at lulu.

they had a sale on ellipses

So my daughter got a Happy Meal the other day with a Night at the Museum 2 themed toy.


That's supposed to be a monkey astronaut emerging from his tiny space capsule, but when I looked at it dead on like this...

...all I could see was this...

...plus this...

Wouldn't the Doctor visiting the Planet of the Apes be totally awesome? And imagining Daleks with little monkeys inside them, running the machines with little clockwork levers, is cracking me up.

You know what else could use some intelligent apes? Star Trek. Consider the awesomeness of a timeline where the Apes movies (at least the ones where the humans and apes eventually got along) formed part of 'ancient' Earth history. You could have apes in Star Fleet uniforms working alongside the humans and vulcans.

excluding the middle

Today I want to talk about magic items. In D&D-type games magic items can be broken down into three broad categories.

Expendables – Potions and scrolls probably immediately spring to mind, but this category also includes charged items like wands and rings of wishes. Some miscellaneous items, like Quaal's feather tokens and the various dusts of also count here. And stuff like laser pistols with a limited number of shots in their power pack. You might be able to get back to town and reload some of this stuff, but if you can run out of the magic in the middle of the adventure then it's an expendable.

Bonus Gear – This covers your basic sword +1 and the vast swath of other magic items with predictable and reliable effects like rings of invisibility and horns of blasting.

Artifacts – The weirdo unique crap like the stuff that originally appeared in Eldritch Wizardry: the Wand of Orcus, the Recorder of Ye'Cind, etc. and other magic items that are one-of-a-kind (or nearly so) and tricky to use.

A fairly common complaint among D&D veterans is that magic items can seem dull as dishwater instead of wondrously awesome. I think a lot of this problem can be laid at the feet of the Bonus Gear category. The combination of reliability, non-expendability, and ease of use results in magic items that are about as arcane as an electric can opener. I don’t have copies handy as I type this, but if you look at the fantasy adventure RPGs put out by TSR after OD&D, such as Empire of the Petal Throne and Gamma World, I think you’ll find a lot less Bonus Gear.

So if you’re building an old school campaign world from the ground up, here are some ideas on how to downplay the Bonus Gear:

Ban the Stuff Outright – This is harsh and if the players catch on they will probably cry like big ol’ crybabies. The smarter players will research spells and order custom potions from alchemists and stuff like that to work around the holes in the magic items charts. The result would be an awesome campaign where demons are banished with custom Demon-B-Gone spells rather beaten up by swords +2, silver weapons are in high demand, alchemists are even bigger pains in the ass and everybody carries way too many flasks of oil. That’s assuming your players don’t just kill you and sell your internals to Chinese organ-leggers.

Artificial Maximum Scarcity – Get out your musty old D&D rulebook or retro-clone of choice. Flip to the magic item charts. Now imagine for a moment that there’s exactly one example of each item in your campaign world. There’s only one shield +2, only one wand of fireballs, only one of everything. Simple supply and demand results in players suddenly treating every stupid little magic item as the coolest thing since sliced bread. Want a good time? Slip the poor bastards a rumor that the only mace of disruption in the whole dang campaign is in Dracula’s castle.

Add New Layers to Old Items – Basically this method takes Bonus Gear and turns each item into one of the other two categories. A simple example would be an expendable rope of climbing where each time it is used there’s a 1 in 6 chance it completely unravels. Or going the other way consider an already-awesome flametongue sword that has artifact-like bonus powers and secret curses. This creates a lot of extra work for the DM, but making crazy crap like this is supposed to be one of the fun parts of running the show. And not every Bonus Gear item need be customized.

And I'm back.

I hope you all had a good Gameblog-free week. Big thanks to Zachary over at the newly spiffed-up RPGblog2 for taking care of yesterday's Shatnerday post! I've spent a fair amount of time I'd normally be blogging watching Futurama with my lil' sweetpea (she thinks Leela is cool) and doing some reading. I re-read R. Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth for the first time in forever. I highly recommend it for any referee wanting to run a Star Trek game where the Federation is a genuine Roddenberrian hippy-dippy utopia. I also started Michael Hanlon's 10 Questions Science Can't Answer (Yet), a light but entertaining pop science book.

I also spent some time doing more research for my Saikaido campaign concept. I've been grasping at exactly what I'm trying to accomplish with this whole schlameel, but reading this excellent post helped me zero in on the target. Saikaido is a straight swords & sorcery/weird fantasy game that happens to be set in southwest Japan circa 1275 instead of Hyboria or Atlantis or whatever. That's it. That's the whole concept. What can I say? I like starting with dirt simple elevator pitches and building from there.

Another item I worked on was "Welcome to Slimy Lake", a mini-sandbox for Mutant Future that I hope to see published in the next issue of Fight On! magazine. Gameblog reader and all-around cool guy VacuumJockey kindly did a sweet computerified map based upon my hastily scribbled one. This I guarantee: there will be a bear with laser eyes.

The big bummer of the past week was the Wednesday game session was a no-go. The gamer known as Squirrel has dropped out of the local gaming scene to deal with some sort of personal issue, and he was responsible for bringing two of my other three regulars to the table. So Carl is now my only regular player for the World of Cinder campaign. If next run he's the only other person at the table I may shelve the campaign and try something else for a while. We'll see what develops.