even Mr. T dreams of being him

This one goes out to last week's anonymous commenter and everybody else who misses Shatnerday.  Big thanks to my buddy Pat for providing the original Mr. T coloring book image.  For more Captain Kirk coloring book action hit up this article or this weirder one at Plaid Stallions.

The Wessex Manifesto

Gameblog reader Richard commented in a previous post to ask:

Do you have any kind of manifesto document for your Wessex? Anything to do with rough date, geographical extent, degree of verisimilitude? I always wonder with campaign worlds that have stuff in common with European areas of one age or another where they contact history and where they diverge.

Seems like this would be a good opportunity to write a comprehensive overview of what I'm trying to do in my recent D&D efforts.

"Wessex" is the name of the setting.  The campaign (meaning the setting in action, or the setting over time) is called "A Surfeit of Lampreys".  Though neither of these terms come up very often in play.  This is because I don't bring them up.  The players are quite satisfied knowing that the gameworld is roughly analogous to medieval England of a certain period (more on that in a moment).  I don't ram home the name of the region or the artsy-fartsy title of the campaign because I believe that for every x of material the players care about, worldbuilding DMs tend to create 10x of crap no one else at the table finds interesting.  I try hard to keep that extra 10x out of the players' way, though sometimes I do drone on about how "Oh, no.  In my campaign we don't use platemail because it wasn't in use until blah, blah, blah."  But usually I try to focus more on how the slimy thing with the tentacles is trying to eat Sir Yourdude's head.

"A Surfeit of Lampreys" is the traditional way of describing King Henry I's cause of death.  He was an old king with digestive trouble.  His physicians warned him to lay off the fatty foods and heavy oils, but the dude loved him some lampreys in oil.  I've seen at least one historian blame the cook for over-oiling the lampreys, but come on.  The king could have sent them back.  He's the friggin' king.  In my opinion the old coot has to take full blame for killing himself by gorging on lampreys because he had been specifically warned off such fare.

Anyway, I find the story an hilarious example of how human foibles can ruin a whole kingdom because Henry I's death kicked off the succession crisis/civil war/total fiasco referred to as The Anarchy.  During the Anarchy (1135-1154) merry ol' England is ripped in twain by the forces of Henry's daughter, Empress Matilda and the king's nephew, Stephen of Blois.  Mr. of Blois gets himself crowned King of England early on in the conflict, but Matilda is able to control vast swaths of what is ostensibly Stephen's realm.  Some chroniclers of the period emphasize the breakdown of civil order and misery of the regular people.  I've read historians who consider that stuff to be anti-Stephen propaganda, but for me the banditry and disorder described provides an opening for PC shenanigans.  If the social order is stressed by national events, the PCs can act like normal PCs without the full weight of the justice system falling on their heads.  This is important to me, as I find one of the key psychological functions of rpgs is to provide a socially acceptable venue for the participants to take their ids out for a stroll.

I should note that by setting the game in the Anarchy, and more specifically during the period when Empress Matilda is most active in England (starting in 1139) I am consciously rejecting the Gygaxian concept of the "ongoing campaign".  I think it is often overlooked that before Gygax solidified his model of the campaign (which he discusses at length in the 1st edition DMG) most everyone pretty much was working off of the wargamers'/actual soldiers' definition: a set of military actions in a specific, finite context.  Thus we can talk about the campaigns of the Punic Wars or Rommel's campaign in Africa.  It wasn't until the boys-trying-to-make-summer-last-forever insight "Hey, these games can run indefinitely" that the campaign as we know it today was born.  I can't quite tell if it was Gygax who figured out that D&D campaigns don't have to end.  Maybe it was Arneson or someone else.  But it was Uncle Gary who explained it to the rest of the world.

So I'm trying to resurrect the previous usage in A Surfeit of Lampreys.  Barring extraordinary PC action (which I do not rule out) the campaign covers June 1139 through November 1153.  If we reach the end date of the campaign and everyone is still digging the Wessex scene, my plan is to start over.  Lots of things could be changed in the second playthrough, but the overall geopolitical situation would be the same.

Geographically, the campaign world is much smaller than many others.  I'm really only interested in a rectangular slice of southwest Britain defined roughly by Oxford in the northeast, the Isle of Wight to the southeast, the tip of Cornwall (Land's End) to the southwest and the southernmost part of Pembrokeshire, Wales in the northwest.  You can see the latest version of my campaign map here.

The region so described corresponds roughly to the fictitious Wessex country of Victorian writer Thomas Hardy, plus a piece of Wales.  Hardy was one of the first authors to really figure out that a good way to sell books was to set them all in a shared universe that held some sort of romantic appeal to the audience.  Hardy wasn't a fantasy author or even a Gothic novelist; his Wessex books have very little to do with knights or dragons or ghosts or anything that would be immediately useful in term of plot elements.  But Hardy really inspires me in two ways.  First, he renames a crapload of places in his books.  Instead of Salisbury, he calls pretty much the exact same place Melchester.  Instead of Corfe Castle he uses Corvesgate, etc., etc.  Mentally this helps me construct a pseudo-historical campaign, which I think is very important and superior to an actual (non-pseudo-) historical campaign if one is going to run a game with functioning magic and flying dragons.

The other way Hardy inspires me is that he considered himself a poet but is remembered as a novelist.  He pretty much wrote the Wessex novels for his public and his poetry for himself.  That's a pretty good analogy for what I try to get out of being a DM.  The PCs live in a prose misadventure but on my end I hope to see a moment of poetry now and again.

Which brings me around to my retro/stupid/pretentious theory of roleplaying games.  It's been five years since I first outlined my threefold model of rpgs.  I've run a lot of consciously retro/stupid games since then.  A Surfeit of Lampreys is my attempt to hit the trifecta.  In order to inject some pretension into the mix I'm looking at legit history (both primary sources and analysis by modern experts) and Brit lit.  In addition to Thomas Hardy so far I've also borrowed material from John Keats (his unfinished play King Stephen was the original inspiration for choosing the time period), John Milton and William Blake.  I've also done a little research into older occult sources (real grimoires, etc) in order to write some more fauxthentic spells.

So that's what is going on in my head when I think about this campaign.

Mother's day gaming

Here's a quick pic of your humble author snapped by my sister Jenn at her place earlier today.  Played a few breezy games with her and her friend Travis, including Zombie Dice and San Juan, the Puerto Rico themed card game. The game above is Tier Auf Tier, a stacking game involving little pieces shaped like various cartoonish animals.  I love a good stacking game.  Anything of the Jenga type where everyone can have a good laugh when the stack falls over.  Making the stack out of silly animals only adds to the ridiculousity of the situation.

A Surfeit of Lampreys, session 10

So this week's D&D session found the characters back in the dungeons below the ruins of St. Gaxyg.  Having cleared James Maliszewski's "Ruined Monastery" (Fight On! #1) they focused most of the night on the level below, where I have placed Gabor Lux's "Tomb Complex of Ymmu M'Kursa" (also FO! #1).  I made a few changes to the Tomb Complex.  I think I previously mentioned using google translate to render most of the tomb engravings into Latin.  I also changed some of the monsters from standard types to uniques: some zombie were given a coffer corpse style choke attack, a wight was changed to this weirdo with transparent flesh that revealed the black necromantic blood oozing through its veins, and the stone golem like minor godling became a sumo wrestler made out of poop.

That last one was a big hit with the players.  They set it on fire, stinking up the dungeon like nobody's business.  When the sumoturd didn't burn properly Sir Jean Claude dropped a vial of mysterious Yellow Essence on him.  It melted the monster and part of the floor under him, granting the PCs access to a chamber below.  They decided to try to clear the level before exploring any further down into the dungeon.

They left at least one other part of the dungeon for their next expedition, a door labeled as leading to "Yliaster the Accursed Sorcerer".  Some of the players wanted to try cracking it open as soon as they found it, but they were down on spells and wiser heads argued for a better planned entry.

Two other notable events.  The Evans brothers, a pair of Welsh thieves, reached tenth and eleventh level respectively.  That's a direct result of my linear XP charts as well as the faster progression for thief types. Carl decided to retire these two fellows, as they have a big piles of gold and swanky houses back in London.  Reflecting on this decision, I announced that tenth level would now be the mandatory retirement age for the campaign.  There's nothing wrong with higher level play, it's simply beyond the scope what I want do in Wessex.

Besides, higher levels aren't really that necessary given my house rules.  Case in point: Alvis the Pardoner deciphered part of Adonis Tigerblood's spellbook.  Because of my overcasting rules, he could immediately begin attempting to cast the second, third, fourth and fifth level spells contained therein.  He didn't start throwing these spells around, though.  I think the fact that almost all of them are my own weirdly-named homebrew spells put him off.  Dane really wanted him to throw the Zenumic Conjuration, which summons a single demon, the same one each time.  So if you get it killed or piss it off further uses of the spell make for prickly situations.  The other spell that the players seemed to like was Beard of Uzza.  It functions pretty much like a cloudkill, except that the spell works by growing the caster's beard superfast, smothering everyone in the area of effect.

Too bad Alvis didn't try any of those spells Wednesday night, as it will be a while before we come back to Wessex.  I pitched to the players the idea of taking a little break from the D and the other D for some Wild West action.  So for the next couple three months we'll be kicking it Boot Hill style.  In two weeks my players will stick their noses into the Newton Massacre, an infamous Kansas gunfight.

No steampunk.  No zombies.  No magic playing cards.  Just rat bastard gunslingers.

Coffee drinkers? Pitied.

wandering spy charts

Scanned these babies in from Victory Games/Avalon Hill's old James Bond 007 rpg. A "hot area" is one relevant to the GM's plot. A "cold area" is when you give the PC's clues telling them to go to Cairo, but they all decide Zanzibar is the place to be. Designer Gerard Klug should get some sort of medal for planning for that inevitability. (Note to players: If you encounter James Bond, you are in the wrong movie.) I forget what the pluses and minuses in parentheses mean.

Polybius cartridge art