Ladies and gentlemen, Dave Hargrave

SPACE CREATURES AND OTHER ALIENS
IN FANTASY ROLE PLAYING GAMES

Some purists do not like to introduce any character or monsters into their game world unless they have a medieval or "Tolkienian" flavor or base. This really limits their play possibilities as far as I am concerned, for what better world to accept aliens than ones that already have a myriad of other strange and weird creatures as residents? Sure, it would be hard for a town like Peoria or Indianapolis to accept strange alien creatures, but would it be so hard for people that probably have elves, dwarves, hobbits and the like living down the street from them? I think not, for what i stranger, the alien with the blaster or the multi-tonned dragon that breathes fire? Think about it, and I think you'll find that logic supports the use of aliens in fantasy games, and that playability supports their inclusion as well. They are fun, challenging, and very novel as characters and as monsters. I can still visualize the pair of Vegan space travellers trying to figure out how a wand of fireballs worked after they had traded their stunner for it. They ran every test imaginable, and their computer kept telling them: "This item does not compute!" Still, it worked when that funny looking guy in the purple robes sold it to them. . . .

You get the point, I think, but let me just say one final thing on the subject and we'll go on to other things: The very essence of fantasy gaming is its total lack of limitation on the scope of play, both of its content, and in its appeal to people of all ages, races, occupations or whatever. So don't limit the game by excluding aliens or any other type of character or monster. If they don't fit what you feel what the game is all about, don't just say "NO!", whittle on them a bit until they do fit.

-from Welcome to Skull Tower (The Arduin Grimoire vol II), page 99

Shatnerday will wreck your face

How to Ruin A Perfectly Good Subsector

As we all know, Encounter Critical can be used for any sort of role play adventure. Any setting from any rpg, wargame, book, film, TV show, comic, play, wrestling promotion, toy line, or cereal box can be used as the basis for a series of EC adventures. Why just last week I was playing in a rousing game of Encounter Critical based upon the Meredith Wilson classic The Music Man. My fellow adventurers and I failed to retrieve the legendary Golden Medallion of Aught Five, but at least we defeated the Four Headed Barbershop School Board of Doom. (Okay, I lied. I just made that up. But I would totally play that game.) Since the primary, but by no means only, influences on EC are fantastical and science fictional in nature, those are the best places to go to start looking for campaign fodder. The path of least resistance for making an Encounter Critical campaign probably involves taking a fantasy setting and adding more robots and lasers and mutants. I say ‘more’ because any fantasy campaign worth its salt has at least a handful of those things, or could have them and nobody would blink. Today, I’m going to look at another option: starting with a sci-fi setting and tarting it up with fantasy.

My victim for this exercise will be Drexilthar Subsector from Traveller’s Charted Space setting, a.k.a. the 3rd Imperium and environs. Drexilthar isn’t one of those better-known subsectors like Regina in the Spinward Marches, but it’s one of my favorite in Trav canon. The book A Pilot’s Guide to Drexilthar Subsector is one of the many, many cool things created for Traveller by the legendary Keith brothers. What I like about Drexilthar is that by devoting a whole standard-sized Trav booklet to a single subsector, you get a nice write-up for each planet. I find that approach much more user-friendly than the sector book approach, where you get sixteen times more planets, but most of them are nothing more than a string of Universal World Profile digits. By the way, you can still get A Pilot’s Guide to Drexilthar Subsector, and several other awesome old rpg books, from the Different Worlds website. But feel free to pick another subsector for your EC galaxy. For other subsector data to abuse go here or here. Or BeRKA of the Zhodani Base will be happy to randomly generate one for you.

Anyway, here’s one method for putting your selected subsector to work for you as an EC campaign. For starters, don’t get in a hurry to alter any of the UWP data, that just ruins the point of stealing UWPs to begin with. (Of course you can do anything you want with your campaign; I’m just telling you this one method.) Instead, try interpreting that Universal World Profile through a crazy-go-nuts EC lens. So take the world of Kraan as an example. The Pilot’s Guide tells us Kraan’s UWP is C501456-8. That breaks down as an average starport at a smallish world with no atmosphere but polar icecaps, inhabited by about a thousand or so people with a representative democracy where everyone carries a shotgun. Yee-haw! Okay, so Encounter Critical thinking was starting to seep in on that shotgun bit. The Law Level of the planet indicates that shotguns are the only weapon you can legally carry. That doesn’t mean that everyone always walks around with one, unless you want it to. That highlights one of the core tenets of my thinking on EC: plausibility is for amateurs.

So let’s think about the UWP for a little bit. Why would anyone live on an airless turd of a world like Kraan? In Traveller the default answer is ‘economic advantage’, which is Marc Miller’s secret code phrase for ‘to make a buck’. Following Miller’s logic the usual reason a colony is set up on these vacuum worlds is to mine radioactives or mysterious sci-fi mumbo-jumbo minerals and sure enough that’s the route J. Andrew Keith took in his write-up of Kraan. Keith also puts an archaeological site on Kraan, which coincidentally sits on a big lanthanum vein. Lanthanum is the most important mineral in the Trav universe, as it is a key component of FTL jump drives. I can’t speak for your brain, but mine immediately starts thinking along the lines of the Lanthanum Pits of Kraan, a dungeon full of robots that can teleport around the room like blink dogs led by a cyborg lich with an atomic heart. After centuries of preparations the lich is finally ready to move against the surface dwellers. Soon they shall all be his cyber-slaves! [insert villainous cackling here]

Let’s go back to those 1,000 or so surface dwellers menaced by the minions of the Cybo-Lich. Why does a mining town of 1,000 need a representative democracy? For a community that small a direct democracy could easily work, with an elected mayor to run day-to-day government business. The text says that traditionally four mining outfits own all the mineral rights to the planet. But what if they licensed those rights to smaller outfits, because the ore veins are scattered about the planet in a way that makes large scale mining less profitable? Maybe those 1,000 people are split up across the face of the planet in ten or twenty smalltime operations. They usually all leave well enough alone, but they all have a vested interest in the lone starport, so some sort of centralized government is needed. Each mine camp sends one rep to the planetary council at the starport/capitol. So with just a thousand people on the world you’ve got all sorts of possible dynamics between the four companies, the archaeologists, the mining camps, the starport authority, and the planetary council.

Now let’s give those thousand people some EC color. For starters, the world ‘people’ could means lots of different things in Encounter Critical. A mining colony immediately suggests dwarves, but let’s put that aside as too pat an answer. Maybe the dwarves, being so skilled in mining and well-capitalized, can afford to only work large scale operations on planets with amenities (like atmospheres). Maybe the four companies who own the mineral rights are dwarves, but for a third-rate operation like Kraan they bid the rights out to others. Maybe the composition of each of the outlying camps merits a roll on the Race Determination chart on page five of the EC rulebook. That way some of the mines are run by klengons and some by hoblings and maybe even a few by plain, ordinary humans. A planetary council meeting should look like the League of Non-Aligned Worlds meeting in the Mos Eisley cantina.

For one last bit of UWP-generated Encounter Critical weirdness, look at the tech level of the planet. Normally, the tech level of a planet indicates what goods are readily available for PCs to buy, but for EC we can squeeze a little more mojo out of that number. Kraan is rated at TL8, which the UWP key in the Pilot’s Guide lists as ‘Circa 1980 to 1990’. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? I’m thinking a starport festooned with breakdancing wookeys carrying ginormous boomboxes and vulkin doxies dressed like early Madonna videos. I’m thinking TRS-80 computers and Pac-Man arcade games. I’m thinking criminals from Beat It and the living dead from Thriller, both ruled by a mysterious half-zombie who wears red leather armor and a glowing magical gauntlet.

That’s enough on Kraan, I think. Looking at Drexilthar in general, I think a lot can be achieved by simply remembering to add more dragons and wizards. That’s what most players seem to want when you talk about fantasy gaming, so why not just give it to them? And don’t hesitate to steal from Star Wars and Star Trek. Go ahead and make the Imperium into the evil galactic empire of Star Wars. When you’re playing Encounter Critical you don’t need to be shy about such things. A couple star destroyers wandering the hexmap commanded by an evil psi-witch named Darth Something-Or-Other will keep the PCs on their toes. Canonically the Drexilthar subsector is relatively close to Aslan space, but Trav’s catmen have never suited me (I’m more of a fan of the K’kree and Hivers). I’d probably just swipe Niven’s Kzinti as they appeared in that Star Trek cartoon, pink spacesuits and all.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Things I Am Thankful For

1) A happy and healthy daughter

2) A good relationship with a wonderful wife

3) A roof over our heads and some food to eat

4) An incoming administration that gives me hope we can get the country and the world back on the right track

5) My great Gameblog readers. You folks are all awesome!

6) The OD&D Discussion boards, Fight On! Magazine, the retro-clones and this whole damn old school movement we’ve got going

7) William Shatner

This one falls under "and stuff"

When my family wants pre-fab spaghetti sauce we have taken to preferring the marinara with Paul Newman’s face on the jar. I sometimes slide some garlic and/or onion into the pot to pretend that I made it myself, but for sauce from a jar it gets the job done pretty well. Prior to the last jar I hadn’t really noticed the label, apart from the floating head of the movie star. But this time as I was waiting for the water to boil up for the pasta, I checked out the jar more closely. What I found so dazzled and confused me that after supper I peeled the label off and scanned it in. Behold!


Usually I find those “story of our product” narratives you find on the back of stuff to be utterly banal, but not so with Mr. Newman. Dig this stream-of-consciousness spiel:


I love how the piece is signed P. Loquesto Newman, just so we can be assured of the creator's authentic Eye-talian heritage. I wonder how many fewer jars the company would sell if this product were called Loquesto’s Own? But the thing that really caught my eye and led to this post were these two words:

The idea of industrial strength spaghetti sauce seems… unsettling. Industrial Strength Paul Newman would make a pretty cool band name, though. At least until the band got signed to a major label and the legal department made them change it to avoid hassles with the Newman estate or the folks who make the sauce. Maybe they could switch to Industrial Strength Loquesto.

Dungeons & Dawn Patrol

I seem to be getting older every damn day. It used to be that I wouldn’t think twice of starting a six or eight hour session of D&D at 8pm or later. Now I can turn into a big grumpy butt if I don’t get to bed before 10 or 11. When a session runs late I reach a point where I just want to stop, no matter what is going at the table. At some point into the night I’m no longer interested in bringing the session to a logical stopping point. Finding a ‘good place’ to end the game invariably involves at least 30 more minutes of play. And by the time I start thinking about ending the session I’m already starting to run out of steam, so those last 30 minutes will probably involve the shoddiest GMing of the night. Clearly, there’s got to be a better way to bring a session to a close.

Back when I ran my gonzo 3.5 game there were a few sessions where near the end of the night I found myself fading fast in the middle of a bigass tactically-crunchy five-foot-stepping ‘combat’. ( I put the word ‘combat’ in scare quotes because the more distance I get from WotC’s idea of how battles work the less I see rules for fighting and the more I see some sort of hideous Kabuki Improv/Extreme Chess hybrid that has little to do with the blood and thunder I want out of a combat system.) So what I did back then was to arbitrarily declare the combat over: “And then the bad guys run away. End of session.” Not exactly the most dramatic of methods, but it got the job done.

With Labyrinth Lord and most of my favorite iterations of D&D long drawn-out combats aren’t that big of an issue. The combat system moves along at a better clip and the badguys actually do run away regularly thanks to the morale rules. I still don’t get why 3e/3.5 lacked morale rules. Moldvay and Mentzer had great morale rules, so much so that I’ve actually penciled Moldvay’s morale ratings into my copy of the OD&D monster book. AD&D’s morale rules were more fiddly and I could rarely find them in the DMG when I needed them, but they worked. Second edition’s morale rules were an improvement over first edition, but as I recall a sizeable chart of situational modifiers kept them from being as clean as Tom Moldvay’s version.

My real problem with old school D&D at the end of the night is the dungeon environment. What do you do if it’s past your bedtime and the players are still on level seven of the dungeon? In a modern set-up you could just freeze frame the game, make a note as to the room and level the party is on and pick back up in the dungeon next session. I have three objections to that arrangement. First, between sessions many players get ideas about things they want do at the start of the next game. If a player comes up with something pro-active like that I don’t want to tell them no unless absolutely necessary. Second, my plan for my next campaign is to run a no-commitment-required open table at the friendly local game store. Under that arrangement I can’t guarantee that session five’s table will have any of the players from session four.

Third, I don’t like the impression stopping in the middle of the dungeon gives the players. If we’re talking about a canned adventure or a smallish dungeon that they’re trying to clear in one go then I don’t mind too much. But for big honkin’ campaign-centerpiece mega-dungeons I just don’t like the message sent by stopping in the middle of the complex. Sure, the players all understand that the game is halted as if you pressed paused on a video game. But alongside that rational knowledge of metagame time management is the subtext that their characters are just hanging out in the dungeon for a couple of weeks, completely safe from harm until the players next sling dice. It’s not that hard to imagine the adventurers hanging around some dismal chamber, smoking cigs and playing cards until the players get back to the game. While pretty funny (especially if you imagine the monsters joining in the card game), that’s not exactly the image I want in my players’ heads. I want each visit to the dungeon to be a desperate battle of wits with half-illumined horrors, where just getting out alive is a victory.

All of three of these objections to ending a session deep in the dungeon have led me to consider some sort of half-baked house rules. I want to provide the players with a reason not to try “one last room” when we’re twenty minutes from the appointed end time for the session. OD&D Discussion Board regular korgoth offers a great take on solving the problem with his excellent Table of Despair. Dig it:

The Table of Despair

Directive: Roll a ten sided polyhedron and weep, mortal.

Lachrymose Catalogue of Results:

1-4: Thy flesh is consumed by underworld denizens!

5: Thou art lost to time and space.

6-8: Naked and bereft dost thou escape the nightmare below.

9-0: Thou emergeth unscathed!

I love that chart, but it’s designed for Empire of the Petal Throne. I’m told EPT tends to have pretty wicked dungeons, closer to the Tomb of Horrors or an average Call of Cthulhu hellhole as opposed to delightful little romps like the Caves of Chaos. So I’ve been kicking around other approaches to achieve the same basic effect. Enter Dawn Patrol.

Mike “St. Carmichael” Carr’s Dawn Patrol, originally known as Fight in the Skies, is a game of World War One dogfighting. When I’m feeling ornery I like to make the claim that “Triggerman” Carr actually created the first RPG product, not that Johnny-come-lately duo Gygax and Arneson. I feel half-justified in making such pronouncements because Fight in the Skies places a lot of emphasis on the pilots in a way that looks very familiar to modern role-players. Pilots are given individual names, tracked over multiple sessions and as they rack up experience they gain bonuses in combat. The pilots can also earn medals, promotions, and the opportunity to fly newer, better planes. But for my purposes here the most important part are the rules for being shot down over the front.

In Dawn Patrol if you are shot down over the front you have a 50% chance of escaping into friendly territory. Otherwise you make a d6 roll to see if you are captured or killed: 1-3 captured, 4-6 killed. If captured you get one roll at 1 in 6 odds of escaping capture to return to play. If you blow that roll your dude is a P.O.W. for the remainder of the war. Here’s where it gets interesting: “If a plane … is about 70% of the way to safety, then the chance of being killed or captured is only 30%”. I read that to mean that there’s a sliding scale of danger based upon how close you are to enemy lines. The default assumption of the game is that you’re dogfighting directly over No Man’s Land, so a downed plane could end up being controlled by either side at equal odds. But the closer you are to your own lines the better your chances of getting out alive when you’re shot down.

So for my new campaign I’m proposing that at the end of each session any character still in the dungeon must roll to see if they escape No Man’s Land. The basic roll is 50%, corresponding to situations where the character level matches the dungeon level. Each level’s difference alters the chances by 10%. So a fourth level character on the third level of the dungeon has a 60% chance of getting out unscathed, while a first level PC on level 3 only has a 30% chance of making it. A roll of ‘01’ always succeeds and ‘00’ always fails. A character with a greater than 100% chance to survive can share the love with lesser compadres, lowering their own chances to 100% and distributing the extra points as they see fit. Fly, you fools!


If you fail the percentage roll to escape, then you are sent to the table below:

Triple Secret Random Dungeon Fate Chart of Very Probable Doom (d20)

1. You lucky dog! You manage to somehow escape the dark forces of the dungeon. You return to civilization, naked and half-delirious.
2. Waitaminute, Lefty’s not right handed! Situation appears to be #1, but you’ve been replaced by a shapeshifting badguy.
3. Maimed. You escape but suffer the effects of a random critical hit. Also, 50% of your stuff is gone, randomly determined.
4. Alas, you are no more. If any comrades escape they are able to bring your remains and your stuff back to civilization.
5. Pining for the fjords. If any comrades escape they are able to bring your remains back to civilization, but your stuff is lost.
6. Dead as a doornail. The general location of your body is known to any surviving comrades.
7. Your stuff has become part of a dragon’s hoard and your body part of a dragon’s supper.
8. That is an ex-character. The location of your body is unknown to all.
9. Bought the farm. Your body and possessions irretrievable due to dragon fire, ooze acid, disintegrator beam, etc.
10. Also dead. Your body is irretrievable due to dragon fire, ooze acid, disintegrator beam, etc. but your stuff is still around for some other jerk to nab at a later date.
11. Held for ransom by seedy humans. A member of the Thieves Guild can arrange release for 1,000gp per character level. 1 in 6 chance the money disappears.
12. Captured by monsters. Escaping comrades know the level you were captured on and the type of monster holding you captive.
13. Captured by monsters. Escaping comrades know the level you were captured on, but not the type of monster involved.
14. Captured by monsters. Escaping comrades know the type of monster involved, but not what level to search.
15. Captured by monsters. Unseen monsters spirit you away to an unknown location.
16. A fate worse than death. Drafted into the ranks of the monsters. Roll d6: 1-2 undead, 3 lycanthrope, 4 charmed, 5 polymorphed, 6 other.
17. You and your stuff are sacrificed to the loathsome Frog Gods in order to gate in d6 Croaking Demons that are added to the dungeon key.
18. A gorgon or somesuch has petrified you. Escaping characters know what level to search for your statue.
19. Lost in the dungeon. GM sets your location each session. Re-enter play if the party finds you.
20. Opportunity for betrayal. Pick one other character who got away safe. Roll 1d6, 1-4 he takes your place and has to roll on this chart while you escape, 5-6 you both suffer the fate rolled by your victim.

Results 4 through 7 on the chart allow the surviving members of the expedition to swear vengeance against the killer(s), as per the You Shall Be Avenged! rule in the Cinder draft house rules. Result 3 offers the same option if you make it out of the dungeon only to succumb to some lethal critical hit effect.

Anyone who is captured gets one chance to escape on their own power. The base chance is 1 in 6, increased to 2 in 6 if their character level is higher than the dungeon level of their prison. Treat successful escapes as result ‘1’ on the chart above. If more than one PC is trying to escape, all escape rolls are at 2 in 6 (3 in 6 for higher level characters). If you don’t escape you must be rescued or maybe ransomed. For each session of play that you languish in captivity or wander lost there’s a 1 in 6 chance of some worse fate befalling you.

Welcome to Carcosa

Here's a typical village from the sandbox section of Geoffrey McKinney's awesome Carcosa:

Village of 430 Green Men ruled by "the Speaker of all Truths", a neutral Swashbuckler.

I love, love, love the evocative titles assumed by most of the leaders in the world of Carcosa, as it lends an air of opulent decadence to what would otherwise be just another village bossman. But there's just not quite enough in those village write-ups for me to grab hold of. Thus was born an idea for a random chart to give each village a little individual character.

Random Situations for Carcosa Villages (d30)
1. The villagers have suffered predations from a local (same hex) band of bandits. The bandits are men of a different color and the villagers will be extremely suspicious at best or outright hostile to visitors of that same color.
2. The village is run by Amazons, who will attempt to enslave men of the same race and slay other men. Women of the same color will be recruited into the fold if willing, while women of other colors will be allowed to go in peace. Men of any color without mutations or other physical flaws may find themselves conscripted into the village leader's man-harem.
3. Villagers worship a local god (1-2 Spawn of Shub-Niggurath 3-4 horribly malfunctioning Robot 5-6 other) and a sacrifice is due soon.
4. Villagers work a small mine of a random element. If the element is not hostile to the locals their spears and knifes will be composed of the stuff. If the element is hostile to the locals the leader of the village will have a sword or axe with a blade made of it.
5. The village contains many mutants (1-2 sizable minority 3-4 majority 5-6 all inhabitants) and there's a 1 in 6 chance that the mutation is due to some local condition (background radiation, strange elements in the water, etc.) that might affect the PCs.
6. The inhabitants of the village hate mutants, going so far as to expose infants with obvious mutations and drive off or kill inhabitants who mutate later in life. Strangers with obvious mutations will be attacked on sight.
7. The ruler of the village is a cyborg with an addiction to fresh organic parts. Some villagers are missing eyes, limbs, kidneys, etc. The ruler will attempt to harvest the PCs for spare parts if possible, not being picky about color if a particularly strong arm or sharp eye can be appropriated.
8. A rumour is going around the village of a secret sorcerer among their own. Sorcerous village leaders will want the rival eliminated but also greatly desire any books or paraphernalia in their possession.
9. In addition to the stated inhabitants he village has a racial minority of another color equal to about 10% of the main populace. 50% of the time this minority is a repressed underclass, the other 50% they're outright slaves to the majority.
10. The main agricultural product of the village is a local fruit that is deadly poison to another race of men (1-3) or a specific monster type (4-6).
11. At least half of the village is ill to some degree or another. Rumours abound that someone has been poisoning the well.
12. The villager has a very skilled healer. Under the ministrations of this person wounds heal at twice normal rate and other harmful conditions can be relieved at the referee's option. It is 50% likely that the ruler of the village considers the healer a political threat.
13. The village has had some success domesticating a species of dinosaur to serve as beasts of burden. Because of the enormous agricultural benefits the dinosaurs provide they will part with these creatures only for powerful artifacts or other great boons.
14. The power in the village is a Space Alien Computer that advises the ruler.
15. Somewhat friendlier than many villages, the folks here are willing to trade with men of any color. Because they are willing to work with wandering traders many different types of goods might be found for sale here and the citizens enjoy a better standard of living than most places.
16. Other visitors are in the village, perhaps an NPC party seeking their own adventures, traders on business, or a sorcerer up to no good.
17. The village is in cahoots with a band of slavers. Visitors will be captured in the night and held in a root cellar or iron cage for 2d6 weeks until the slavers return looking for wares to buy. 50% chance that a party consisting entirely of the same race as the villagers will be safe.
18. The villagers have a local supply of one type of lotus. Only the leader of the village and d4-1 elders will know the secret of making the raw plant into working lotus dust.
19. The villagers are all gone. Where did they go? Will they return?
20. The village is built amongst the sprawling ruins of ancient inhuman city. A handful of villagers know of a secret entrance to the strange tunnels below the ruins.
21. The leader of the village is a different color of man than the other inhabitants. An ancient law of the village requires each leader of the village to be a different color in turn. Randomly determine the next color leader the people are expecting. If any of the PCs are of the proper color the leader will consider him a threat while at least some of the villagers will greet their new savior with open arms.
22. One of the villagers (5% chance all of them!) is afflicted with a curse and when the stars are wrong turns into a horrible leprous monstrosity.
23. A local festival is set to begin in d6-1 days. The party is welcomed to stay and participate. During the drunken orgies any male party members of the same color as the villagers will be surreptitiously married off to suitable brides. New husbands will be expected to stay.
24. The village possesses d4+1 working artifacts of alien technology, some of which might even be useful.
25. The village has suffered a very recent attack (d6-1 days) from either other men (1-3) or some sort of monster (4-6). The men of the village believe they know the location of the lair of their foe, and 3d6 of them are planning a counter-attack.
26. The leader of the village is a dying old man, not expected to last more than 4d6 days. The leaders d4+1 children are all vying to be the next ruler and some of them might try to enlist the aid of the party.
27. A wandering unholy man has taken up residence in the village, preaching a new law of blasphemy and pain.
28. The villagers are cannibals. Either men of different color will be considered food or else they have a taboo restricting them to eating members of their own race. 50/50 chance.
29. Part of the economy of the village comes from fishing a nearby lake, river, etc. A minority of villagers are members of a Deep One cult, with a 2 in 6 chance of the village leader being a cultist.
30. Either the leader of the village or a local "witch" (50% chance each) possesses psionic powers. Strangers will be subjected to psionic surveillance to determine their intentions.