the Broodmother cover, a better look

(Click to embiggen.)

And here's the official ad copy written by James Raggi (which I must admit I signed off on):

THE MOST AWESOME ADVENTURE EVER 

Since the invention of the adventure module, there have only been five adventures that were rated the most awesome, the most epic. Broodmother Sky Fortress leaves them all behind. It’s got these creatures that are half shark. Half elephant. All badass. They fly around in this cloud fortress, wrecking everything in the campaign until the players step up to stop them. It’s all terribly exciting! And all brought to you by none other than the world-famous Arch-Mage of Old-School, Jeff Rients! 

As an added bonus, we’ve included a Greatest Hits of the ol’ Arch-Mage’s essays and game tools to build your campaign into the unstoppable juggernaut you’ve always wanted it to be. Your game won’t suck anymore! 

Broodmother SkyFortress: Buying any other adventure is just throwing your money away

I like how preposterous that last line becomes given that LotFP is releasing another great product simultaneously.

“Wouldst Thou Like To DIE Deliciously?” 

The year is 1617, and the only thing on the minds of every noblewoman and aristocrat in Europe is CHOCOLATE. The act of eating this modest confection brings so much PLEASURE, it has become more prized than tea, spices, even liquor ... and it all comes from one place: LUCIA DE CASTILLO’s factory in northern Friesland. 

This one businesswoman has Europe by the balls, and some will pay handsomely for the secret to her success. But Lucia’s factory isn’t what it seems to be. The horrors and cruelties that exist within its walls defy IMAGINATION ITSELF. Nobody ever goes in ... and nobody ever comes out! 

BLOOD IN THE CHOCOLATE is a psycho-sexual romp that pits characters not just against their enemies, but against their own twisting, melting, inflating, or poisoned bodies. 

This adventure comes from the imagination of Kiel Chenier (Dungeons & Donuts, The Hell House Beckons), brought to life by the lurid illustrations of Jason Bradley Thompson (Mangaka: The Fast & Furious Game of Drawing Comics, Dreamland). 

An adventure suitable for low-level characters for use with Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Role-Playing and other traditional role-playing games.

 I'll update all y'all again once I have a link to a product page.

Broodmother is a real thing.

Hey all!  I must pause in my preparations to teach the youth of America a second day on how awesome Beowulf is in order to provide a brief update.



This menacing figure is none other than game designer and publisher James Raggi, of Lamentations of the Flame Princess infamy.  In his hand he holds some sort of flintlocky pistol (is it a prop? a toy? an actual firearm?  I don't really know) and 2 books.

One of those books is Blood in the Chocolate, an adventure by cool guy Kiel Chenier that, as I understand it, is all about Willy Wonka taking a break from murdering children to spend time murdering your PCs instead.  Good, clean, wholesome fun.  Everyone reading this post should buy one.

The other book is nothing less than an actual copy of Broodmother Skyfortress, the adventure I wrote quite a while back now.  A few copies will be on sale this weekend at Dragonmeet, a convention in London.  Copies for all the wonderful people who put up money before I even wrote the thing will start shipping shortly thereafter.

I want to thank everyone who pledged, for both their initial faith in me and their patience.  And to everyone who emailed me over the years to ask when this darn thing was coming out, I thank you for accepting my vague promises.  I am so super-pleased that you will be getting your long awaited book soon.  It honestly fills me with joy to know you'll soon be holding your own copies.  And I hope you all like it.

By the by, the original design spec in the IndieGogo campaign called for a 32 page adventure.  The adventure actually runs longer than that and there's a bunch of bonus content in the back.  The last version of the PDF I saw ran 162 pages, or more than 5 times the content you were promised.  I hope that serves as a little apology/bonus for the absurd amount of production delays.

Also, if you haven't read Beowulf, you should totally get a hold of a good translation.  It's one of the wellsprings of modern Western heroic literature.  I teach R. M. Liuzza's more scholarly edition, but there are lots of other good ones.  The Seamus Heaney version is easy to find and quite popular.  A new edition of Tolkien's translation came out not too long ago as well.

Apparently PCs are very sound sleepers

Here's a crowdsourced thing from G+ I wanted to preserve for posterity. The challenge was to come up with cool alternatives to the "wake up in a dungeon cell" method of starting a scenario. Thanks to everyone who contributed!

How do we start this crazy adventure? (d100)

01-02 PCs wake up in a mausoleum inside a haunted graveyard.
03-04 PCs wake up at the starting inn, but it is on fire.
05-06 PCs wake up getting shaved and tattooed and branded, before being hung up to give transfusions to diseased cultists. =)
07-08 PCs wake up in a wagon during a high-speed chase.
The PCs wake up hungover after a bacchanal
09-10 PCs wake up slung and tied over a horse.
11-12 PCs wake up on a sinking ship.
13-14 PCs wake up standing over their sleeping bodies.
15-16 PCs wake up tied to the belly of a boar
17-18 PCs wake up washed up on a beach after a shipwreck
19-20 PCs wake up falling from an airship
21-22 PCs wake up on a tower during a storm
23-24 PCs wake up during surgery... alien surgery.
25-26 Wake up with a knife to their throat
27-28 Wake up in a village, only they are still alive.
29-30 The PCs happen to be travelling down the road together when a horse-drawn carriage comes barreling around a turn towards them.

31-32 PCs wake up in a wizard's laboratory, decapitated. Fortunately for them they are being magically kept alive and just need to find their bodies. Also somewhere nearby there is a single golem that follows voice commands.
33-34 Pcs wake up in the inn. Water surrounds their beds. The inn is floating down river on a flash flood.
35-36 They wake up in individual coffins
37-38 They wake up strapped to various torture devices in a dungeon. Good way to introduce themselves as the torturer interrogates them.

39-40 PCs wake up each holding a fragment of a treasure map.  Between them they do not have the whole thing.
41-42 They wake up in each other's bodies. Sally the halfling thief is now playing a dwarven male fighter. They have to find each other in the city.
43-44 They wake up in a pitch black room that smells, and they are waist deep in acid. Something splashes nearby (they are in a giant's stomach, it unfortunately has worms. Big worms).
45-46 Being dragged from the sea by strange man-frog fishermen in walrus leather.
Wake up in a crater, smoking.
47-48 PCs wake up (unarmed and without their gear) with a headache, in a caged wagon, including an armed guard escort, and they are traveling in place they are not familiar with.
49-50 Same as above above, except they are traveling through an unfamiliar village and while being insulted and mocked by villagers, and being pelted with rotting vegetables and waste. They are quite aware of the shouts of "Witch!, Burn! Warlock! Demon Worshipper! Burn!" that can be heard amidst the other slanders, taunts, and insults
51-52 PC's wake up to find a rather large dragon attacking. As each pc is slain, they wake up once again, only they are not anywhere near their home,. They are all in a strange outdoor place with a glowing extra-dimensional gate or portal that is quietly powering down. The summoning wizard/wizardess is standing immediately before them.

53-54 PCs wake up in the menagerie garden of the Emperor
55-56 Wake up in a conference room with Dr. Doom.
57-58 PCs all wake up (with hirelings too) naked in bed together. A big bed.
59-60 They wake up underwater, surrounded by a maze of coral and seaweed. They have gills.
61-62 Wake up in hot air balloon that is descending
63-64 Wake up inside Kansas farm house In a tornado, tumbling through sky.
65-66 Wake up at your moms house, have an existential crisis, realize you need to go kill something and  take its gold.
67-68 They don't wake up. They never sleep. Insomnia has been constant for a month and now at four a.m. the dark sends a strange guest
69-70 They wake up outside of an already raided dungeon, unfamiliar magic items in hand
71-72 They hit middle age and none of their dreams ever happened and there are dragons out there and the bills are getting higher
73-74 They emerge spontaneously from the forehead of Zeus
75-76 They reverse-nirvana out of oneness with the universe and somebody in a dungeon did it
77-78 They wake up mid-brawl with each other. A neat sum of XP is offered the sole survivor. They were pregens, they roll up characters who were placing bets. The survivor won the privilege of guiding them into a dungeon

79-80 PCs wake up covered head to toe in unknown rune-tattoos
81-82 They wake up in a mesmerists room in Victorian London. He says that was a pretty good session but they need to regress again to find out where the special snowflake treasure went. They wake up in a dungeon.
83-84 They go to sleep on the night of the equinox and pass through The Gates of Ivory and Horn...
85-86 Waking up in a morgue has been done by Torment of course, but it has more applications than that.
87-88 They wake up under an upturned, burning wagon
89-90 The players (not the PCs), wake up naked in this strange temple. There is an old person in priestly robes staring at you
91-92 PCs wake up in the tavern, but the village is completely empty of other people. Half-eaten meals and cooking fires still burning. Footprints end mid-stride.
93-94 Wake up inside tubes full of fluid, which are slowly draining while an alarm sounds.

95-96 PCs wake up shrunk to 3 inches tall and inside an iguana terrarium. 

97-98 PCs wake up naked in the Sultan's harem as scimitar-wielding eunuchs enter the chamber.

99-00 PCs wake up chained to barrels of gunpowder, longs wicks sizzling towards their doom.

The Deadliest Page

So it's early into the evening of Election Day here in the good ol' U.S. of A. and the present political climate has me sufficiently freaked out that I have started drinking.  So please forgive me if parts of this post are incoherent.

Anyway, I wanted to take some time before I get fall down drunk to tell you about the Deadliest Page of the original Dungeon Masters Guide.  There are several pages in the DMG that will severely ruin your PC's life.  My favorites include page 28 (where we find out that not wearing a helmet will FUCKING KILL YOU), page 225 (the gods damned ENCUMBRANCE RULES), and page 80 (the item saving charts will WRECK ALL YOUR COOL MAGICAL SHIT).  But the deadliest page of the first edition Dungeon Masters Guide is page 182.  Imma explain why.

There are two rules for wandering monsters on this page that I have NEVER seen applied.  Not in my own campaigns and not in anyone else's.  (If you've used them, please let me know!)  Rule the first is the Psionic Encounter rules.  The basic idea seems to be that psionic monsters are attracted to psionic powers or--and this is the kicker--spells that resemble psionic powers.  A lot of low level spells appear on the list titled Spells Resembling Psionic Powers: cure light wounds, detect evil, detect magic, charm person, feather fall, enlarge, ESP, invisibility just to name a few.  The upshot of this rule is that if your party casts ANY of these spells there is a 1 in 6 chance that the next wandering monster comes from the Psionic Encounter Table rather than the normal wandering monster matrix.  This table is no joke.  Not only does it include all the standard psionic monsters like intellect devourers and mind flayers, but all the sundry denizens of the Seven Hells and the Abyss also show up on it.

This means that under AD&D1 rules as written it would be theoretically possible for a 1st level cleric on their first adventure to cast detect evil and find nothing, only for Demogorgon to show up a few rounds later.

The other, and I think more important, section is Patrols.  The DMG asks DM to designate all outdoor areas as either inhabited or uninhabited.  One of the key differences between the two is that inhabited areas are patrolled.  In fact a full 25% of wandering monster encounters in inhabited areas will be with patrols.  A patrol looks like this:

• Commander: a fighter (or ranger, if appropriate) level 6-8
• Lieutenant: figher (or ranger) 4-5
• Sergeant: figher 2 or 3
• 2-3 first level fighters
• (All of the above have plate, shield, lance, flail, and longsword, mounted on warhorses
• 12-24 zero-level soldiers with chain or scale armor, bow or xbow, and some hand weapon, mounted on riding horses
• either a cleric 6-7 or an MU 5-8

In other words, 1 in 4 encounters in inhabited areas involve a shit-ton of cops trying to ruin your murderhobos' day.

Ard times for MU's

So this exchange appeared in my tumblr feed yesterday:

That's pretty darn great if true, but a citation is lacking, so I hit up the online Oxford English Dictionary.  Here's the entry for the suffix -ard:

-ard, suffix

Etymology: < Old French -ard, -art, < German -hart, -hard, ‘hardy,’ often forming part of personal names as Old High German Regin-hart Raynard,Ebur-hart Everard; also in Middle High German and Dutch a formative of common nouns, generally pejorative, whence adopted in the Romance languages. Used in French as masculine formative, intensive, augmentative, and often pejorative, compare bastard, couard, canard, mallard,mouchard, vieillard.

 It appeared in Middle English in words from Old French, as bastard, coward, mallard, wizard, also in names of things, as placard, standard (flag); and became at length a living formative of English derivatives, as in buzzard, drunkard, laggard, sluggard, with sense of ‘one who does to excess, or who does what is discreditable.’ In some words it has taken the place of an earlier -ar, -er of the simple agent, as in bragger, braggar, braggard, stander, standard (tree). In some it is now written -art, as braggart; in cockade, orig. cockard, corrupted to -ade suffix.

The OED's first definition of wizard ("A philosopher, sage... Often contemptuous") confirms this negative connotation.

My conclusion is that etymologically wizards are close to mad scientists, in that both concepts express the fear that there is such a thing as too much knowledge.  That's basically what I do in the latest version of my Wessex campaign already.  Magic-users are twisted by their secret knowledge into cosmic conspiracy kooks.  Their paranoid insights into the universe are considered blasphemies against the established order of the universe, even when they are true.

You, the universe, or both have gone very wrong

Why did you become an adventurer? (d30)

1. Early one morning you saw the sky crack, then break, revealing strange worlds behind the sky.  You haven't been able to live an ordinary life ever since.
2. You came home one day and the sister you buried a year prior was alive and well.  No one else in the family remembers her illness or death, yet her tombstone still stands in a nearby graveyard.
3. You used to work as a computer technician in a futuristic domed city, but woke up one morning the idiot child of the village blacksmith.
4. One day the bucket of the village well brought up blood instead of water.  No one else seemed to mind, but you sure as hell did.
5. After the eclipse everyone else spoke a different language.  You're pretty sure the folks back home thought you'd been possessed by a babbling demon.  You've only now just picked up the basics of your new native tongue.
6. Returning from a visit to a distant kinsman, an ancient forest covers the exact spot your village used to occupy.  You turned around and the trail you followed was gone.
7. You were caught up in a war between shadowy angels and titanic metal gods.  At the final battle you took a blow to the head.  When you came to you were still on the same charred and bloodstained field, but everyone and everything else was gone.  None of the locals remember the war or its combatants, yet you have a dozen scars from it.
8. One night you came home after a long day in the fields.  The womenfolk wailed and the menfolk cowered.  Your own brother drove you out of the house with a cleaver in one hand and a holy symbol in the other.  Later you found your own gravestone.  According to it, you've been dead 3 years.
9. You worked up the nerve to ask the elder of the clan what had happened to the shadows.  Why were they no longer a luminous rainbow glow, but instead dark and spooky?  Without answering, he had you driven out of the community.
10. On the day after midsummer everyone you knew started calling you by a different name, as if it had always been your own.  They also began blaming you for a wide variety of petty crimes.  Then you realized your face had changed as well.  Who are you?
11. You used to live by the sea until one night a brass galleon with a skeletal crew slid into the harbor.  A skeleton prince wearing a flaming crown blew a silent note on a bronze horn.  Everyone in your village marched aboard the galleon, as if in a daze.  It sailed away, leaving you alone forever.
12. In all your dull life you never expected to see an aerial battle right above your village.  Dragons and demons and flying ships exchanged strange fires and multi-colored lightning.  One of the dragons fell.  Only then did you realize how far up and how huge the combatants were.  The dying dragon crushed everyone and everything you ever cared about.
13. You used to be a dog.  Slightly smarter than most dogs, but just a dog.  Your young owner treated you cruelly.  Then one day you and your owner swapped bodies for no discernible reason.  The dog ran away--no doubt fearing revenge--but you had to run too because you couldn't successfully imitate your former owner.
14. One day you awoke in a mass grave.  It was only after you climbed out of a pile of rotting corpses that you realized you had no idea who you were or how you got there.
15. No one else back home can see the hole in the sky or the baleful gaze of the hideous cosmic beast that watches us through it.  You couldn't work in the open fields any more, knowing it was always looking over your shoulder.  You had to flee.  It still watches.
16. You used to be the whole universe, one vast ecstatic cosmic consciousness.  But then more and more of your all-body became numb and alienated.  Now you're just this tiny lump of ambulatory meat and you don't know what  happened or why.
17. You don't know on what strange battlefield it received its wounds or whether it was a giant or a god or something else, but it stumbled into the village green and promptly died.  Everyone else in the village entered into some weird frenzy, gleefully tearing the corpse apart and devouring it raw.  As you fled in horror they started to change into unhuman things.
18. Twice a year every year you had taken the old ferry, for as long as you could remember.  This time when you reached the far bank of the river it was a totally different place.  You turned around and the ferry was gone.  So was the river.
19. You used to be a professional circus freak, the Hideous One-Headed Four-Limbed Abomination.  Then one day the sky flashed a weird color and suddenly everyone else was deformed just like you.  The poor bastards don't even remember their former three-headed, six-limbed glory.  You're not a freak anymore, but you're out of a job and still kinda feel like one.
20. One day you started growing at a prodigious rate--or perhaps everything else shrunk--until your head cracked open the sky.  You grew and grew until you were normal size in a much bigger universe outside your old one.
21. You were born with a special gift: You can dimly remember your past and future lives, as if your consciousness were a tangled thread in the weave of time.  People back home thought you were a witch.  Maybe they're right, but the whole burning-at-the-stake thing they tried was still super rude.
22. One day the earth shook and the land shifted.  Your home and all your kin sunk beneath the waves, which was surprising seeing as how you lived a hundred leagues from the sea.  You'd have drowned, too, if not for that log you clung to.
23. One day cracks opened in the sky.  You suddenly fell upwards and landed someplace else.
24. One day you noticed an extra door in your home.  From the darkness beyond a gnarled green hand beckoned.  You're still not sure why you followed or who that goblin was.
25. You used to be an astronaut.  Your single seat orbital spacecraft passed through a strange energy field and you lost all contact with mission control.  You splashed down in a world that doesn't seem to be Earth.
26. The block of ice you were frozen in thawed out.  Apparently your home civilization has been gone for a whole ice age.
27. Back in the day you were a glorious 7-dimensional hyperbeing.  Then the war in heaven came.  An omega angel wielding a meson blade sliced off a 3-dimensional appendage, which fell down to ordinary spacetime.  You may look like an normal person, but you're really a living amputation in a fallen world.
28. The glowing blue rain turned everyone else in your home village into hideous snake people.  They told you they still loved you, even though you're now the local freak.  But you couldn't cope and fled.
29. You were a footsoldier in the last of the Psychic Wars, but an Oblivion Bomb has scrambled most of your memories of the conflict.  Your not even sure how you ended up on this particular planet.
30. You used to be a god.  Your whole pantheon fought in Ragnarockaggedon, but your side lost.  To escape the Cosmic Regulators and the inevitable trial for Crimes against Divinity, you dispersed your god-power and implanted your essence into a mortal body.

klutzing around with the Dungeoneer/Journal

The Dungeoneer #19/Judges Guild Journal #22 is an odd duck of a magazine.  The Journal was the flagship periodical of the Guild, while the Dungeoneer began life as one of the early D&D fanzines, this one launched by the great Jennell Jaquays and friends.  Jaquays et al. produced six issues before they sold to Bob Bledsaw.  (JG also reprinted the first 6 issues as a single book usually called Dungeoneer Compendium, though the cover says its The Dungeoneer: The Adventuresome Compendium of Issues 1-6.  Whatever you call it, I rank it right up their with the first 3 Arduin Grimoires as one of the best supplements from the good ol' days.)

The Guild decided to merge the two publications and this is the first issue of the merger, hence the two half-covers.  Take a moment to enjoy the cover art.  I don't know which I like better, the spell lady magic missle-ing the hand that created her, or the party looking up into the hole in the ceiling, not knowing some red gobliny dudes are waiting up there for them.  (Extra nerdy note:  The character sheet in the top illo is clearly from an OD&D game that used Supplement I: Greyhawk.  Score an extra nerd point in the comments by explaining how I know that.)

After this weird hybrid, the next three magazines put out by Judges Guild would be issues 23 through 25 of The Dungeoneer Journal, followed by issue one of Pegasus.  The latter magazine ran 12 issues.  An issue #14 came out in 1999 and #15 was, I believe, a PDF only from around 2004.  Did Pegasus #13 ever get published?  I honestly don't know.  What I do know is that while I've never been a collector of Judges Guild campaign installments or Journals, I've never been disappointed with issues of Dungeoneer, Dungeoneer Journal, or Pegasus.  As a whole, I give these periodicals two hearty thumbs up.

I'm not going to run through everything in this issue, because I intend to focus on one article.  But here are some of the other cool things inside.

• "Critical Hits and Funbles on Non-Humans" by Glenn Goddard.  Two functional looking percentage charts, similar in many ways to Dave Hargrave's charts.  My fave result for sheer gruesomeness is probably "spine ruined."
• "Dungeons Diseases" by the great Lewis Pulsipher.  I'll admit this one disappointed me intially.  I was hoping for disgusting fungal infections, orc rot, rectal bees, etc.  Instead it's a comedy piece commenting on certain kinds of players.  Example: Mapitis in which the "victim becomes more interested in maps than monsters.  He incessantly asks questions about angles and distances."
• "Jewelry" by the also great Steve Marsh.  One page of charts of various things that can be jeweled.
• The regular Monster Matrix column includes a nifty critter called the Balloon Beast by Gregg and John Pittenger.  It's a shame that this monster has not been folded into the umpteen varieties of beholder variants.  The Waldweibchen by Kurt Smeby is a great example of the kind of grumpy and mercurial fairy that D&D needs more of.
• "Mac's Packs" by Thomas A. McCloud is another example of the "fast pack" concept.  4 pre-packaged sets of adventurers gear in a container (backpack or sack) sold at a discount.  Personally, I lean towards charging more than regular because of the premium on convenience.  Still, neat stuff.
• "Adapting the Book of Demons" also by Lew Pulsipher.  I can't leave something with the words "Book of Demons" off this list, but it's about making a demonology game product work better with bog standard D&D assumptions.  I'm not certain, but I suspect the work in question is the same Book of Demons that ended up bundled into Gamescience's The Fantasy Gamer's Compendium.  At the moment I can't locate my copy of the latter to confirm, but, as I recall, one of the reasons I've never made much use of this Compendium is that all of its components seem written for a fairly idiosyncratic campaign.  Pulsipher seems to be dealing with that exact issue in his article.
• "Metallurgy and FRP," also by Steve Marsh, is a one column piece on considering how the rise and fall of demand brought on by new technologies can impact the relative value of metals in your campaign.
• "Dungeon Generator" by Charles L. Evans is exactly what it says on the tin.  It resembles the one in the Gamescience product The Book of Tables, but I can't confirm if they are the same just now.  My guess is that both Gamescience products are sitting next to each other on some bookshelf or another.
• "Traveller Rumors" by Bill Paley is one page with 13 adventure seeds for any campaign.  I'm pretty sure that the planets mentioned in the text (Pickering, Salivarius II, Credosh III, Bendex III, Krestmast, Samelos XII) do not appear in any known canonical sector.
• "The Old Hill" is an adventure by Steve Marsh written for Chivalry & Sorcery. It is set in a pocket universe called a Garden World, one of "a series of interlocking planes of existence... They were the lesser hearths of each of the Vali or Star Powers summoned by the Norns when they wove the world... Then came the blight of Upharsin and many things changed."  This isn't the first time I've really grooved on Marsh's sense of cosmic history.  In the adventure itself PCs can be struck by the literal Wrath of God as well as fight an angel, a daughter of Lilith, and a really grumpy tree.  I also live this bit from the introduction: "Some of the inspiration for this came from Ed Simbalist and from William Glenn Seligman.  An Erol Flynn movie ran as background for the typing and mapping.  I especially want to thank Lee Gold for her helpful comments."  Lee Gold is the matriarch of Alarums & Excursions, the long-running D&D apa-zine.  Ed Simbalist is one half of the team that created Chivalry & Sorcery.  And Bill Seligman is the author of one of the best Dragon articles ever written, "Gandalf was Only a Fifth Level Magic-User."

None of those articles or the ones I haven't mentioned are why I started this piece.  Instead I want to talk about Kevin Fortune's "Using Klutz Factors."  This is a short piece in the long tradition of making magic-users roll dice to cast spells.  I've tackled this sort of thing before myself, as have many others.  What I want to give to you today is NOT a simple transcription of Fortune's system, but a slightly spruced-up version.  My two main objects with the system as presented are 1) too many percentile rolls and 2) some multiplication of percentages.  By switching to mostly d20-based rolls and adding an extra chart to remove the math, I feel like the result preserves the spirit of Fortune's system while trimming the fat considerably.  I've also limited myself to the first 14 levels of experience and 6 levels of spells.  Gandalf may have been higher than 5th level but I don't care much about anything higher than Expert level anymore.

Revised Klutz Factors

after Kevin Fortune, Dungeoneer #18/Judges Guild Journal #22 pages 7-9 (Aug/Sep 1980)

I. What You Gain

No magic-user likes limitations on their power and this system, which requires a casting roll for every spell, is pretty limiting compared to a lot of versions of D&D.  However, it comes with one big advantage for MU's: you may keep casting the same spell but the Klutz Factor doubles each time, until a Klutz effect (a fumble) prevents you from casting again.  This system actually sounds like it would work well for those BX referees who stick to the hard version of the spellbook rules, which say that if your MU can cast 2 first level spells a day and 1 second level that is the maximum number of spells allowed in your book (see page B16).  Some DMs might even want to forbid players from doubling up on spell memorization under this scheme (e.g. no 2nd level MUs memorizing 2 sleep spells).

II. What You Need to Track

Each MU has a Klutz Factor for each level of spell they can cast.  This is a three variable factor, so in a 2-d presentation like this screen, it'll take two charts to get to.  Every time your MU changes INT or their level, you'll need to look this back up.  Use Tables 1 and 2 to find your character's Klutz Factor.

Table 1: MU Level versus Spell Level

The A's in parentheses are spells someone of that level shouldn't be able to cast.  They don't figure into Fortune's original tables, but I added them in case you wanted someone to fumble a high level scroll under this system or something like that.

Once you have the letter code for each spell level you can cast, cross index the result on Table 2 to find the Klutz factor for each level of spell your MU can cast.  You should probably record this number adjacent to the spells/per day indicator on your character sheet.

Table 2: Intelligence to Klutz Factor

This Klutz Factor is a d20 thing.  When an MU fails to cast a spell you've got to roll over this number to avoid a spell fumble.  Every subsequent time you cast the same spell in a day, this number doubles.  That looks absolutely disastrous for low-INT magic-users, but you need to blow the casting roll to even reach this point in the process.

One of the downsides of this system, probably the one that trips me up the most, is that you need to look this stuff up for NPC magic-users.  Since I'm super lazy about such things, here are all the Klutz Factors for an MU of 11 Intelligence.

Table 3: Typical MU Klutz Factors

Example: Andrigal of the Weeping Beard, a 3rd level MU, attempts his second web of the day.  His normal Klutz Factor, as a default Int 11 NPC, is 6 for second level spells.  Since he has attempted web once today, his Klutz Factor is doubled to 12.  His chances to cast are the same as always (see below), but if he fails the casting roll then he will fumble the spell on a second d20 roll of 1-12.  Note that his 3rd and subsequent web spells of the day are all going to be fumbles IF he blows the spellcasting roll, but he can risk it as many times as his shriveled heart desires.

III. The Casting Roll

Before the Klutz Factor comes into play, Fortune's system calls for a casting roll similar to that employed in Chainmail, but d20 based and expanded to cover a wider range of levels.  On the chart below an I indicates Instantaneous success (the spell goes off), a D indicates a Delay, the MU must keep chanting and gesticulating for d3 rounds before the spell goes off (d3 turns for non-combat spells), and an N indicates No Effect.  According to Fortune's system only when a No Effect occurs is the Klutz Factor check made.  Though I'd also consider using Klutz Factor rolls for when someone took damage while working through a Delay effect.

Table 4: Spellcasting Chart

For many campaigns, it would make sense to allow the players to record these numbers for their character.  But when I've tried a similar system before I kept this sort of info behind the screen because I like to keep some of the workings of magic a mystery to the players.  Note that a system like allows for a campaign where high level casters don't necessarily reshape the world in their image.  Wizards know that high level spells are unpredictable enough they should only be used in emergencies.

I've added the numbers that are highlighted/in parentheses for situations like a low level MU casting a spell directly out of some higher level character's spell book.

IV. The Klutz Effects

Okay, so your favorite pet magic-user has rolled an N effect on their casting roll and then rolled high enough on the follow-up d20 that a fumble has occurred.  Throw a d10 and consult the chart below to see what actually happens.

Table V: Klutz Result Chart

1. Spell has normal effect, but on the wrong side of the conflict.

2. Spell has reverse effect on target.

3. Spell has normal effect, but only on Magic-User who cast it.

4. Spell has no effect and caster Mind Blanked, unable to cast for rest of day.

5. Spell has normal effect but Magic-User drained 1-4 points of Intelligence for rest of day.

6. Spell has no effect and Magic-User drained 1-4 points of Intelligence for rest of day.

7. Spell has reverse intended effect on wrong side of conflict.

8. Spell has reverse effect, but only on Magic-User who cast it.

9. Spell negated and Magic-User loses ability to cast a random spell for 1-4 days.

10. Spell klutzed so badly that Magic-User is scared to use it again.

Obviously once you have the whole system in place this last chart is the sort of thing that can be added to and/or modified to suit the spirit of the campaign.  Also, Fortune includes a few lines about overcome the fear effect of number 10, but it references the mechanics "Bravery," "character roll," and "Conversion Chart" without explaining what those things actually are.

So there you have it.  Another system for making MUs more complicated and a bigger pain in the ass to play.  I'm normally pro-MU and anti-complication, but I'm also pro-rolling more dice and anti-magic is as reproducible as a grade school science demonstration.