Wear it on your sleeve

In my welcome back post I asked folks for suggestions for future posts.  I'm going to start today with Ark's question "howsabout sharing something you've learned as a grad student and how it related to gaming?"

My first thought on that point was that people should really wholesale rip off Charles Dickens for locations, characters and plots to fill out their steampunk games.  But that's probably not a new idea.

But here's something I've been thinking about for a while.  When you're an undergrad on the first day of class the professor probably asks you to stand and say your name and what your major is.  As far as I can tell this serves no purpose other than to make the Undecideds feel bad, because it hardly ever comes up again.

In my grad classes though, we're all studying some form of English something or other so we dig deeper.  I introduce myself as being interested in English lit with a focus on literary hoaxes.  Sam tells us he's into how trauma theory can interrogate postcolonial literature.  Other Jeff says he's a creative writing dude really into hybrid texts.  Etc., etc.  Note that I'm also Other Jeff.  That's hilarious in a world where everyone reads Edward Said and/or Jacques Lacan, trust me.

What I dig about this is that we all get a good foothold up front about where we are coming from.  So like the other day in class I called out Sam on his insistence that pre-colonial texts are "authentic" cultural artifacts.  He knows I wasn't trying to harsh his groove, but that I'm the vaguely postmodern dude who insists that Fake Literature Is Real Literature.  We were able to have what I thought was a fruitful conversation and part of it was due to the fact that we both knew the other guy's priorities.

So you can probably see where I am going with this.  One thing I think good ol' Ron Edwards got right back in the day was the simple recognition that different gamers want different stuff and we should clearly articulate these differences.  I don't fully follow his next step, that we need to craft games to exaggerate certain priorities and minimize others.  Rather I think we can mostly all participate in the same sort of game and see what happens when these priorities push and pull each other during play.

Obviously this requires a little self-reflection on our parts.  When we give a table full of new people a line or two describing our interests, what should we say?  For example, "Hi, my name is Jeff and I'm here to get my PC into trouble" may really help the other players when my dude starts acting stupid.

fine tuning your monsters

Most DMs I know like more monsters better than fewer monsters.  Monsters are lots of fun.  Writing new monsters can be a easy way to pretend you're working on your campaign.  Buying books jampacked with new monsters helps keep the hacks in the game industry fed.  It's all good.

But today I want to talk about how to turn the monster list you have into something peppier.  You don't need to write up some new monsters. or buy a new book or even drag an extra monster book to the game.  I'll walk you through three things you can do to make your players' lives hell in a fresh new way, using only the '81 Basic D&D rules as my example.

Step 1 - Throw Stuff Out
Take a look at your monster list and try to get a sense of it as a whole.  What parts of it can be easuly cut?  More monsters isn't better when trying to make a coherent campaign setting.  (Though if you are making an incoherent campaign setting maybe you should skip this step.)  For example, depending on how you slice it, there's maybe 100 monsters in the Basic rulebook.  That's not a lot compared to campaigns with Monster Manuals in play.  But even in this list there's fat to be cut.  Does my campaign world need both Giant Ferrets and Giant Shrews?  Hell, does it need either?

Then there are the broad categories with lots of individual monsters.  How many types of dragon do you need for this campaign?  In my Wessex campaign using not just one type of dragon but one single, individual dragon worked a hell of a lot better for me than any game I've run with lots of dragons.  And if I wanted to do something more Sword & Planet style, maybe I would cut the dragons altogether and prominently use the Draco Lizard (under Lizard, Giant, page B38) or the pterydactyls in the Expert set.

Similarly, not every campaign needs every kind of monster.  Does your campaign need kobolds, goblins, orcs, hobgoblins, gnolls AND bugbears?  Do you need skeletons, zombies, ghouls, wights AND wraiths?  One or two humanoid races and one or two undead may be enough to get the job done.  Or look at the entry for Cat, Great (page B32).  Most campaigns probably can survive without Mountain Lions and regular type Lions and Tigers and Panthers and Sabre-Tooth Tigers.  Just pick the one that suits you and stick the rest on a shelf.

Special warning: Be careful about cutting both orcs and dragons.  Orcs carry a bunch of Tolkienian and Warhammery baggage, but that baggage is something players can easily tune in on.  Or to put it another way, who doesn't like beating the snot out of orcs?  Similarly, dragons occupy an import conceptual space in Dungeons & friggin' Dragons.  Cutting them could alienate a lot of players.  Dropping both orcs and dragons may make some people wonder what the hell kind of artsy fartsy crap you are trying to pull on them.

Step 2 - Reprioritize
Now look at what you have left on your monster list.  What critters have you relied on in past campaigns?  What monsters have you not used yet at all?  As you situate your monsters into your campaign, consider a light touch with monsters you've already used and emphasize the stuff you have yet to take full advantage of.  Looking through the Basic rules I've never or only rarely used Sprites, Weretiger and Rock Living Statues.  Surely there's some great material waiting to be written about those creatures.  Sprites are "very curious".  What sort of trouble could they get into?  Maybe you could write a fairly standard Things Man Was Not Meant to Know adventure, only the trouble is the mad scientist type is actually a gang of magical tinkerbells. Weretigers are neutral lycanthropes.  That says to me you could write an adventure around needing to bring a band of those guys over to your side.  Or maybe you could do something with a Were- version of a white tiger being mistaken by locals as a ghost tiger.  And Rock Living Statues shoot lava from their fingers.  How come I don't use them all the time?

(Seriously, if either weretiger scenario or the sprite idea does anything for you, please steal it.  Every once in a while I get emails from folks "Hey, you mind if I use so-and-so in my game?  I think a lot of gaming bloggers would agree with me that we want you to use this stuff, otherwise we wouldn't share it.)

If you reprioritize your monsters, make sure you think through how this affects other mechanical elements in the game.  If you don't use dragons and focus on Rock Living Statues, maybe you should replace that sword +1, +3 vs dragons with something that beats up lava jerks.  Similarly, making undead less ubiquitous means you need to think about how that pimps over clerics.  Maybe you should allow them to turn something else or *gasp* grant them spells at first level.  Who charm person affects is another issue.


Step 3 - Repurpose
This is where you take the monsters as written and screw with them in some way to make them unique to your campaign.  Not every monster should be an exercise in "Oh, in Jeff's extremely hip campaign orcs are actually corssdressing timetravellers..."  Too much of that robs D&D of the lingu franca status that allows things like FLAILSNAILS to really work.  But a little such monkey business can really give you some neat material to work with.  You can start with little cosmetic things, like making Giant Tiger Beetles literally half beetle, half tiger (or half Beatle, half tiger).  Or making lizard men into full on Sleestaks.  I like giving Giant Crab Spiders big pinchy claws.

You can also think in terms of what ISN'T included in the monster descriptions.  The BX rules don't tell you that Skeletons are unintelligent undead robots or that Owlbears are no smatter than the average bear.  Maybe the skeletons in your campaign can be reasoned with, if you can get them to shut up about how much they miss being alive.  Whiny bastards.  And maybe owlbears actually have mythical owl wisdom and the PCs accidentally murder the Helpful Forest Oracle they were looking for.

And don't hesitate to just flat out steal stat blocks.  Maybe you campaign world doesn't need ogres as such, but if you want to quickly stat up some sort of big angry gronk, there's four hit dice of grumpy waiting to be used.

Yo!

Howdy, folks!  I'm not dead and neither is this blog.  My first semester as a fulltime grad student has been kicking my ass.  I haven't even had a chance to play any D&D since friggin' August.  But I did get a draft of my Lamentations of the Flame Princess module to Jim Raggi, though I still need to redraw the maps and maybe take one more quick pass on the text.  But it's written.

Anyway, I'm going to try to get back in the saddle with regular updates here.  Either later today or tomorrow I'm going to try to work up something on the canonical monster list in B/X D&D.  Past that, I'm not sure what I'm going to write about next.  Feel free to offer suggestions in the comments.

The Short Life & Stupid Death of Chester of the Pointy Hat

Back in high school I managed to play, as opposed to DMing, a lot more than I do nowadays.  Quite a bit of this play was in the one Killer DM game I've ever really encountered.  This is the DM that started one fighter of mine pre-raped and who colluded with the players to pull all sorts of shenanigans on each other.  We put up with a lot from that guy (though sometimes we pushed back, too) but he also was an adult running games for schookids, so he probably put up with a lot from us as well.

Anyway, although it wasn't a conscious design process I'm pretty sure that the concept for Chester of the Pointy Hat came from two sources.  First, H.P. Lovecraft's works and Call of Cthulhu were new and exciting to us back then.  I was (and still am) in love with the concept that reading musty old spellbooks drives you mad.  Second, I'm pretty sure that around the time Chester was rolled up and played that I saw on something like 20/20 or 60 Minutes a report on the effects of the defunding of the mental health care system under the Reagan administration.  [Please no politics in the comments.]  As is typical of this sort of reporting, the tone was "Holy crap!  Homeless schizophrenics wander our streets!  They are going to break into your house and molest your blender!"

So thus was born Chester's personality.  He was driven mad by his arcane researches, but not in the cool, Gothic, brooding, cackling sense you'd expect, but rather as a smelly, pathetic, muttering bum.  I refused to sleep in inns, opting to hunker down in rain barrels.  (The DM obligingly rolled to see if I caught pneumonia.)  I ended up getting kicked out of and barred from most taverns the party frequented, for being noticeably more unhinged than a standard PC.  Johnny Law got involved when in revenge I lit one tavern on fire.  Not with burning hands or fireball, mind you.  I just stone cold walked up to the exterior wall of the joint and assembled some kindling and got out my tinderbox, right in front of everyone on a main street in broad daylight  All in all, I thought it was an interesting character to play.

Of course he died.  Like I said, it was a campaign with a Killer DM.  And playing my MU as mentally ill wasn't exactly going to do the poor sap any favors.  Still, this death is one of those incidents that, in retrospect, makes me question whether Jim was a Killer DM at all.  Maybe he was just playing fair and we were all idiots.  He was our first DM outside of my original game group.  The lot of us were self-trained; we started with my Basic Set and had no clue what we were doing.  Maybe it was just a School of Hard Knocks campaign.

Anyway, we were going after a dragon.  This was super exciting for us.  There had been a few dragons in our previous games, but this was our first time that A) we knew that a dragon was in the dungeon and B) we had made a conscious decision to go after that lizard and take his loot.  We started out doing everything right.  I think we had just acquired a Dragon back issue with an article on successful tournament play and we were making a bit of an effort to use the guidelines therein to be more professional in our dungeon pillaging.  So as stealthily as possible we scouted out the whole dungeon level in advance and ended up with a graph paper masterpiece with a big blank spot behind a pair of big double doors.  That had to be the dragon's lair.  Even better, we located it with the minimal possible resources expended and no casualties.

This is when our new professionalism all went to crap.  We started arguing, loudly, in the middle of the freakin' dungeon, about the best plan to kill that dragon.  I'm pretty sure that after a few minutes of name-calling the DM started casually flipping through his copy of the Monster Manual, but we were too dumb to realize that meant he probably was looking up a wandering monster attracted by all our shouting.

In fact, he was double checking the range of a dragon's senses, which I'm pretty sure in the original MM is duly noted in inches.  So when my crazy hobo MU5 declared angrily "FINE!  I don't care what you assholes do!  I'm going to open those damn doors, throw my fireball and you can clean up whatever is left!!!" what I didn't know was that the dragon heard the whole thing.  Out of 'kindness' the DM didn't make me roll to open the doors.  I flung them open and promptly melted under a torrent of acid.  Black dragon.

As I recall, the rest of the party ran like hell.  And like so many sessions before and after that one, I started a new character.

At this remote point I can't recall much else of Chester's career save for a random encounter in a forest.  The DM rolled up gnolls on his wandering monster matrix and looked up the number appearing in the MM, which is something like 30-300.  The dude literally rolls every d10 on the table and declares "You round a corner and approximately 200 gnolls attack.  Roll for initiative."  We took the bastards in the longest single fight of that campaign.  We used every attack spell, sleeping and fireballing and Melf's acid arrowing as many as possible, but they still kept on coming.  The archers in the party shot until they were all out of arrows.  They still kept on coming.  My puny dagger-wielding magic-user spent more rounds in melee combat with those bastards than some MUs will melee over their entire career.  It was incredibly stupid ("We come round a corner, in a forest?"  "I set 35 of them on fire with magic and the rest just keep coming?") but also one of the damnedest damn fights I've ever played out.

The PC casualties in that campaign were ridiculously high.  Just getting from the beginning to the end of the session with the same PC was an exhilarating victory.  That's why I'm all for save-or-die, level drain, zero level funnels and balanced-dungeons-my-ass.  Not because I'm enjoy forcing players to suffer the same way I did, but because I want them to experience the high of just escaping the session with your life.

Hulks & Horrors

I've been busy as heck lately moving to a new town (good-bye Champaign-Urbana, hellow Bloomington-Normal!), packing and unpacking and getting ready for grad school (I've got a teaching gig this semester!  yay!).  Things may start to return to normal around here soon.

In the meantime, I would be remiss if I didn't share a link to the Hulks & Horrors fundraiser, as today is the last day to get in on this bad boy.  H&H is a game of sci-fi dungeoneering that's radically compatible with older versions of everyone's favorite game of smelly underground locales and angry fire-belching lizards.  I've seen a very thorough playtest draft that looks hella sweet.

Even if you don't want to pitch in some dough, click through that link just to check out the cool illo of the hoversquid wielding two rayguns.

Star Frontiers and Space Elitism

Nice custom paint job on that outer space van.

Star Frontiers was the first sci-fi roleplaying game I ever owned.  As a kid I didn't get it.  Back then I thought all things sci-fi flowed from two benevolent gods: Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas.  Neither Star Wars nor Star Trek were a particularly good match for what was going on in Star Frontiers and I lacked the Golden Age of Sci-Fi chops to recognize what was happening here.

But as I get older some parts of the game have started to make more sense to me.  Here's one piece that seemed lame back then but I kinda get now: the spaceship skills.

The original Alpha Dawn boxed set contained no rules for spaceships.  This frustrated the bejeesus out of every purchaser of this game that I have ever met.  We all wanted to hop into a spaceship and go all Han Solo on the galaxy. The Knight Hawks follow-up finally gave us all sorts of cool rules for spaceships.  The basic game booklet is a meaty little tactical ship-to-ship game that holds up on its own very nicely.  However, the ultimate goal of zooming around the universe as easily as Buck Rogers or Starbuck was hampered by this chart:

This image grabbed from starfrontiers.com,
where registered members can legally download the old stuff.

This chart had to be a bit of a heartbreaker for folks who already had PCs they wanted to move into space careers.  My mind boggles at the sheer number of XP needed to be a Han Solo type, who could pilot a ship, plot a course, conduct repairs and man the laser cannons.  Such a character would need almost superhuman levels of skill mastery.

So let's go with that for a moment.  In Traveller Pilot is a cool skill but not that much harder to acquire than learning how to brain someone with a club.  But in the Star Frontiers universe you need a pretty good grasp of computers and a total mastery of technology (skills are rated level one to six) just to get in to piloting school.  Navigation through hyperspace is such a complicated task that only the most elite of computer operators can even attempt to plot a jump course.

The best analog here, I think, is the heyday of the American space program.  Space ain't for amateurs.  Only the best of the best of the best in various terrestrial professions have the chops to learn space skills.  Test pilots and aces are allowed near the controls of spacecraft.  No one else can cut it behind the wheel of these multi-zillion credit wonders of technology.  If you want to be trusted with the cannon on a spacecraft you need to prove that you've mastered smaller weapons.

Basically, anyone with even a single level of Piloting, Astrogation, Engineering, Rocket Weapons or Energy Weapons is officially As Cool As An Astronaut.  Younger readers may not remember this, but there was actually a time when pretty much everyone agreed that astronaut was the coolest job in the world.  They were like real life Captain Kirks living among us mere mortals, but working among the stars.

So if I ever ran Star Frontiers again, that's how I would do it.  Space travel on the Frontier is still a new and exciting thing, like the glamour of the 60's Jet Set/Space Age but writ large.  Starting PCs dream of joining the elite, those who are trusted to operate the small fleet of starships operated by the United Planetary Federation spacefleet, the richest planetary governments and the handful of interstellar corporations.  Every spacer has a cool nickname like Buzz or Deke and walks around with the unmistakeable swagger that comes from knowing they have the Right Stuff.

Yo, Banesfinger!

On an old post Banesfinger recently asked:

Does anyone know of a good Zocchi dice retailer (on-line) up here in Canada?


I asked around on Google+.  Here are the responses I got:

Eric BoydYesterday 4:05 PM

http://myworld.ebay.com/dark_elf_dice/?_trksid=p4340.l2559 has quite reasonable rates on shipping to Canada.

Ramanan SivaranjanYesterday 4:31 PM

This fellow was going to ship to Canada the next time he has another set of dice up for sale: http://www.ebay.com/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320952061652#ht_500wt_1083

Eric BoydYesterday 6:16 PM

http://www.getjar.com/WeirdDices orhttp://www.gandreas.com/iphone/dicenomicon/index.html are gonna be the cheapest solutions...

Hope that helps!