Mustard or Ketchup with that Dungeon?

Choice is a funny thing in games.  We expect our choices to be meaningful, but the types and amount of choices the players should expect is contextual.  If you're signing up to play in your referee's adventure path game, you already know the campaign is going to take you from scene A to scene B to scene C as you follow the story. Plotted horror scenarios are similar.   But you're expecting that as you encounter the various scenes, there will be a range of potential outcomes and consequences based on how well everyone is playing.  Choosing to abandon the story to go do something random, like joining the traveling circus (the first random thing that came to mind), is probably not an option.  It's against the ground rules.

I like dungeons and hex crawls because they provide a degree of player freedom within a limited geographic scope.  Dungeons in particular are good at reducing options to various binary choices - go forward or go back, turn left or turn right.

One thing I'm ruminating about - what's a good number of plot hooks to float to the players at any given time in a sandbox style game?  Imagine you're kicking off a new fantasy game and you want to build a simple hex crawl with a series of lairs and adventure sites scattered about.  You need at least one adventure site ready to go for that first game.  Do you usually prepare a couple of sites in advance and float some options?

A sandbox game with a bunch of plot hooks is easier to keep going once the game is rolling.  Just ask the players at the end of each session what they want to do next week.  Your detailed preparation is limited by adopting a 'just in time' approach between games.  But kicking the game off and getting started is another matter.

When preparing some of the megadungeons I've ran in the past, I never worried about "overdeveloping" the dungeon or building in too many choices - and risking developing areas the players never choose to visit.  Now that I'm thinking through how 5E campaign development might look, I find myself worried about doing too much up front.  It's a weird mental block I need to get past.  (Maybe I've psyched myself out due to fast advancement!  Blargh.)

To answer my own question, though - I usually like to have two or three distinct plot hooks before the players.  If you put too many out there, you risk a bit of "analysis paralysis"; a beer and pretzels group of gamers can quickly decide between a couple of options.  But here's one thing I stand by - the choices do need to be distinct.  None of this 'all plot looks lead to the same thing' type of tomfoolery.   "You're getting a hot dog no matter what you ask for, but whether you want sauerkraut, mustard, or ketchup is up to you" - that works with my kids.  In an RPG, all roads shouldn't actually lead to Rome.

A Framework for D&D Horror

It's no secret I've been casting about for the right vehicle for running a campaign merging horror and D&D styles.  I have a deep passion for the genre, although it's not always the best fit for my gaming groups - especially when I have a bunch of kids at the table.  Earlier this year I put horror development on hiatus to focus on developing an adventure campaign appropriate to all ages - regular readers are familiar with Taenarum, my mythology themed megadungeon.  Taenarum is going great, but that doesn't mean I won't revive the horror side projects.  It's just a matter of finding the right approach.

Specifically - I need something that lends itself to episodic play and small scenarios so we can do some one-shots and interpolated games.  It also needs to merge the key tropes of D&D and horror.  Before delving forward, let's take a moment and identify said tropes.

Old school D&D emphasizes exploration and recovering treasure over combat, separating it from newer iterations.  Settings assume gold and treasure is sequestered in old ruins guarded by traps and monsters, lending itself to a player-driven sandbox style.  Exploring old ruins to recover treasure, while avoiding combat - these shouldn't be too hard to work into a horror game.

Traditional horror game scenarios are almost always presented as mysteries.  The players are engaged with defining the mystery, then presented with clues and evidence that allow them to ultimately confront the danger or solve the mystery.  The mystery structure lends itself to horror when you overlay uncertainty, isolation, and the weird and unnatural over the top.  The place where horror gaming tends to break down is the ongoing campaign.  Either the entire campaign represents a macro-mystery, or you need a good narrative explanation for why the adventurers keep running into  the horror of the week.  Monster hunter shows, while greatly entertaining, usually  don't generate much terror or horror.

Stepping back, I'm thinking the theme of "bad places" supports blending the genres.  Picture a countryside littered with mysterious and forbidden ruins, each surrounded by peculiar lore and shunned by the locals - for good reason.  A handful of horror writers have gone down the path of mythologizing a local area with lurking horrors - HP Lovecraft's Massachusetts, Ramsey Campbell's Severn Valley, or Stephen King's Maine spring immediately to mind.    Creating such an area as a D&D style sandbox, with most plot hooks represented as legends and lore around lost treasures, seems well within grasp of our available technologies - the hex crawl, the site-based location, the conventional mystery structure.

Of course, each place necessarily represents a challenging, 'screw you' style of dungeon - as in, you woke the dead, now deal with it.  I've repeated it before, horror is ultimately conservative, and victims and protagonists alike bring the horror down on themselves by treading into the forbidden.  Monsters stand as warnings and signposts at the limits of humanity, guardians of the frontiers.  Striving to learn things 'man was not meant to know' calls for destruction.  (Grave robbing old tombs and recovering secrets best left buried fall into the same category).

This reminds, I saw something either this week or last where a reviewer was making cranky complaints about Death Frost Doom and the way the twist  in that dungeon can screw over the players.  I tend to view this as misalignment of audience.  Spoilers about Death Frost Doom:  In a moment of greed, the scenario sets the players up to destroy a thing that unleashes ancient horrors, sending the adventure into a radically different direction.  It's brilliant.  But it is very much true to the tropes of the horror genre, not heroic  adventure fantasy.  Springing a survival horror twist on the players is fair game in a horror scenario.  There has to be alignment of expectations between the players and referees (and I guess, in some cases, module reviewers) around the nature of the game and the genre we're actually modeling.

Anyway - this is where I'm at with it.  Start small, with a simple hex crawl and a few scattered lairs, and craft the sites into locations filled with mystery and horror.  I'll post an example in the next day or so to demonstrate the flavor.  Some of the more interesting questions fall into whether 'the horrors' should revolve around traditional monsters imagined fresh, or creatures generated whole cloth ala Lovecraft or Campbell.  What do you guys think?

I've Been to that Place, Too

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain... 
-Roy Batty, Bladerunner

Jim Flame Princess sent out an update for his recent campaign (the hardcover LOTFP referee book) to showcase a new piece of art.  The hardcover of the rules book came out extremely well, so I backed the referee book campaign as well.  Here's the latest piece of art:

Art from the new LOTFP referee book

I've been to that place!  Well, not me personally, since I'm usually the referee, but it feels like I'm there with the players, as I create the scene through words and gestures and the action unfolds in our shared imaginations.

I appreciate that modules are valuable for creating shared experiences.  Reminiscing with your friends about exploits from the campaign is great fun, but published adventures allow us to share those reminiscences with other enthusiasts in the hobby who weren't at the same table.  "I remember hearing about how your group defeated Strahd von Zarovitch… now when we got trapped in Castle Ravenloft, here's how it went down…"

Like anything, the ability to relate a tale briefly and well is paramount.  I don't mean to encourage the long-winded, "Let me tell you about my character…" monologues.

I'm usually not a meme person, but it would be interesting to hear brief recollections from various published modules in a form similar to that Bladerunner quote above.  It could be something recent (an OSR publication) or one of the classics from the hobby.  We can have some fun trying to identify from where these oblique references originated.  Feel free to drop your "Roy Batty" style memories in the comments.  I'll get a few started:

• I've seen the endless dead pour off Death Mountain and sweep aside the human villages below like a hungry tsunami.
• I watched with morbid curiosity as a pair of foolhardy dwarves failed to outrun a giant rolling boulder, while humming the Indiana Jones theme.
• I've sat to dinner with the ghostly inhabitants of a mist-shrouded castle and tasted food brought by spirits - and watched as some of my friends joined those spectral revelers, forever.

Before I forget, does anyone else recognize the picture?  In other words - Who else has stood beneath the ozone sky and watched the evolved Neanderthals twist in their bio-capsules?

Damage Output

Fantasy gaming with higher level characters is uncommon.  Proponents of newer editions proclaim a mid-level "sweet spot" that erodes as spellcasters begin to take over the game, making the other classes obsolete.  Is this a problem in OSR style games as well?  There are far fewer discussions about high level characters or high level campaigns.

Most of the discussions around the sweet spot focus on the magic user's ability to dominate encounters with damage output - the sweet spot is that transition period where all the character classes are contributing equally to dealing with tactical problems.  There's a secondary concern about utility magic obviating the need for a diverse party in the later game too, but today I'm focusing mostly on comparing fighters to magic users in the combat arena.  We've bounced around different old school style games so I'm curious how the relationship between the magic user and fighter scales in higher level games across some of these systems.  I've always assumed AD&D handled fighters the best, but both ACKS (Adventurer Conquer King) and LOTFP (Lamentations of the Flame Princess) have gone in vastly different directions with their respective approaches to "niche protection".

There are some additional factors to consider.  One of our typical adventure sessions might cover 3-4 encounters, plus the potential for wandering monsters.  The goal is to avoid another later era phenomenon, the "5 minute work day", where the party rests and retreats after every encounter.  So the question becomes whether the magic users have enough gas in the tank to handle the encounters on their own when there's going to be a series of encounters without rests.  Do the fighters act primarily as "offensive linemen", keeping the monsters away from the spell casters, while the spell casters do all the heavy lifting?  Contrast that role with the fighters in the early game, where most of the tactical encounters are settled through missile and melee combat, and spells are held in reserve to get the party out of jams they can't otherwise handle.  Is this a more satisfying style, which is another reason why we see more lower level games than high?

Magic users are fairly similar across editions (except for LOTFP, noted below).  The typical high level wizard is going to have enough spell slots to burn a 1st level combat trick and 3rd level X-damage spell in each encounter, supplemented by a 4th or 5th level combat spell in one of the other encounters.  Assume average damage 3.5, a 10d6 spell will let the wizard do 35 points per encounter, with magic missiles adding 17.5 points (AD&D style) or 22.5 points (BX style).  Obviously, that 35 point X-spell can be devastating as a burst, stripping hit points from a large number of enemies.  Still, that establishes our baseline - a wizard that is rationing his or her magic to have a few good volleys for each encounter is easily laying down 50-60 points of damage, and that's not counting the 2nd, 4th, and 5th level spells or access to devices like wands and staves, many of which can alter combat math even if they don't do direct damage.

Assume an average encounter is against a party of eight high level fighters - a real baseline creature - they'll have 50 hit points or so each, close to 400 hit points across the entire group.  If they're caught in a magic user burst spell, they'll have a 50% save chance to reduce the 35 point X-damage - we'll just say the magic user strips 26 hit points from each (35 expected damage, reduced by the expected number of successful saves to 26 average).  The party will still need to dish out 24 damage to each remaining fighter (and the magic user should be able remove one with magic missiles).

For calculating to hit and damage, I'll assume the fighter has a +1 from strength, is using an appropriate magic sword (we'll say a +2 sword) for an average damage roll of 8, and the opponents are wearing good armor (plate and shield).

Moldvay-Cook B\X
BX Fighters don't get any extra attacks per round.  They'll hit 70% of the time, doing a meager 5.6 average damage per round (round up to 6?).  Trying to wear down those opposing 10th level fighters and their remaining 24 hp each is going to take a long time in BX terms - very grindy.  Each BX fighter will need an average of 4 rounds to mop up a single opponent.

AD&D
The AD&D fighter also has a 70% chance to hit on each attack; the difference is they get an extra attack every other round, so they'll average 9 damage per round instead of 6 damage per round.  If you're using weapon specialization, the chance to hit is 75%, and they attack twice per round for an average 16hp damage per round.

The AD&D fighter is significantly more effective than BX - and keep in mind that fighters with high strength will be doing more than a +1 damage bonus (bringing that hp-per-round closer to 18-20hp per round).  Unfortunately, the NPC opponents would have 10 extra hit points (AD&D uses a d10 for fighter hit points) so we're still looking at 4 rounds to finish an opponent (or 3 rounds if specialization is in effect).  The AD&D fighters clean the floor against monsters with 8-sided die hit points.

LOTFP
The 10th level LOTFP fighter will be hitting only 65% of the time, and they don't even get a damage bonus from strength.  They'll average 4.5 damage per round (round up to 5).  This fight will be even longer and grindier than the BX version.

Keep in mind that there are no X-damage Magic User spells in LOTFP, and the other characters in the fighter's party (even at 10th level) will only have a pathetic 10-15% chance to hit in combat each round against the heavily armed sample opponents.  In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king - that's one way to make the fighter seem good.  LOTFP obviously doesn't assume the same degree of tactical combat is going to be happening as in other retro clones.  In fact, the proposed sample fight would be a mind-numbing affair - at least 10 rounds to kill a single 50 hit point opponent.  Best just to summon a demon with the level 1 magic user spell and let the eldritch horror go and fight.

ACKS
ACKS uses a modified BX chassis for the fighter - the base chance to hit the opponents at level 10 will be 65% of the time, increased to 70% if the fighter has a "fighting style proficiency", which is likely.  The ACKS fighter gets a damage bonus based on level, which is +4 at level 10.  Thus, our ACKS fighter's average damage is 12 per successful hit, which equates to an average of 8 damage per round (3 rounds to knock out one of the opponents).  It's an upgrade from the BX fighter, but it's below the AD&D fighter (and way below the souped-up "weapon specialization fighter" from AD&D's Unearthed Arcana).

However, there are two other factors in ACKS - there's a cleave rule, which means every time one of the opponents is taken out, the fighter gets to tack another 8 average damage on the next one (a down payment on defeating the next guy), and there's a system-supported critical rule (a weapon proficiency) that maxes the damage on a natural 20.

---------------

I expected to get to this point and begin a discussion on challenging high level parties - for instance, ways to present difficult tests outside of combat that push the spell casters into selecting powerful utility spells and forcing interesting resource choices.  But after seeing how poorly the fighters scale in pretty much all the old school variants, do you really want to run high level tactical challenges where the fighters carry the load?  On the contrary, you need to be jamming more magic wands at the casters and let the party continue the asynchronous warfare.  A combat featuring the fighters is going to feel like one of those 19-inning baseball games (score tied the whole time 0-0 until the first run is plated)… ZZzzzzz.

From the perspective of peaking early, enjoy those moments of glory while you're level 1 and level 2, fighter players!  It won't get any better than when you're holding the front line in plate and shield, and killing off humanoids and bandits every other round or so.  It's like high school all over again, where that popular jock guy seems kind of successful now to your teenage eyes, but in a decade or so he'll be the one with the beer gut and the bald spot who never left town, and that brainy nerd from your chemistry class is the next Bill Gates (ie, the 10th level party wizard).  Magic users are living the white collar dream.

Your Path to Real Ultimate Magic

...Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,  
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full  
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;  
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,  
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between  
The effect and it!
--MacBeth

The spell system in Dungeons & Dragons works fairly well for the game.  The game is mostly about exploration, puzzle solving, and combat, and the spell system is loaded with utility effects to give players tools to solve game problems.  It's great for the game, it's just not very literary.

Example, the Light spell:  The torch of tomorrow, today!  Why carry a burning stick of wood, when you can have light that's safe, heatless, and brighter than a torch, all for the low cost of a 1st level spell?  If you act now, we'll upgrade you to a permanent heatless lamp at 3rd level, Continual Light!

You see the same thing with the Levitate, Fly, Dimension Door, and Teleport sequence of movement spells.  It's magic as technology.  Narrator:  Why physically walk up stairs with your own muscles when you can fly?  In the future, wizards everywhere will dazzle with feats that defy gravity and both time and space.  Grocery shopping will never be the same when you can teleport to the market!

(Apparently, magic as technology makes me view standard D&D magic effects as a 1950's expo for the world of tomorrow, since that's the voice in my head...)

Literary magic, on the other hand, usually features horrible choices and sacrifice.  There is a price to be paid for power.  Odin sacrifices an eye to learn wisdom at the well of wisdom (Mimir's spring) and in other stories is hung for nine days on Yggdrasil, the World Tree, in order to gain wisdom.  Alberich the Dwarf forswears love for his magic powers.  Faust sells his soul to the devil, one of many such literary dealers.  Even characters embedded in a setting where they have superhuman powers often make dark choices for more power - Saruman, Voldemort, Darth Vader.

Then there's the approach we see in writers like HP Lovecraft, where magic frequently has terrible (unforeseen) consequences.  Lovecraft's fiction is full of instances where a would-be sorcerer contacts beings from beyond or summons liminal entities, then gets blind-sided by the repercussions.  That's the twist.  Sure, the Deep Ones will give you gold and valuables dredged up from the ocean muck… just don't read the fine print.  And remember, a deal's a deal.

Earlier this year, one of the cooler OSR type game books that came out was the LOTFP Better Than Any Man for free RPG day.  While folks gritted their teeth about the salacious cover or the full page picture of the cannibal cultists, one piece that flew under the radar was the approach to low level spells in the book.

Consider such "overpowered" first level spells as A Spell to Grant One’s Heart’s Desire, Journey to the Past , De-Age, or Deflect Damage.  A Spell to Grant One’s Heart’s Desire is essentially a first level Wish spell, but the caster dies as part of casting the spell; it's the nearby folks that get their wishes granted!  Journey to the Past is a severely limited version of time travel; De-Age is a longevity effect that can force loss of levels and other unfortunate side effects; Deflect Damage provides a powerful combat effect, but the deflected damage lands on random nearby people - ideal for a power mad loner, not so great for an adventuring party looking for utility spells.

The bit that's so interesting about these overpowered first level spells is that it highlights an implied axis in the default D&D spell system: high level D&D spells are high level because they combine usefulness, a powerful effect, and a notorious lack of negative side effects.  Sure - you can have a powerful Wish effect at 1st level, but the short cut is going to cost you more than you can imagine.  If you want to do powerful magic the "safe way", it's going to take a lot of hard work and a ton of experience points.  See you again at level 18.

The benefit to DM's is clear.  If there is a powerful, whimsical, literary effect you want to achieve, there's very little harm making it a first level spell, as long as it's accompanied by terrible costs or awful side effects.  Think of it like a skill test.  Your player character magic users aren't going to be interested in effects that maim their characters; leave that to the NPC's who "fail their wisdom checks" to make short-sighted power grabs.  For instance, I love the idea of a first level Raise Dead spell to bring back a dead loved one, but then the caster has to deal with the Pet Sematary style consequences when the loved one isn't quite the same person on the return side.

This is all part of an underlying philosophy that eschews game balance and treats the campaign world with reckless disregard for the status quo.  My name is Beedo, and I approve this message.

The Witches of High Helmsley - An Encounter Discussion

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
--TS Elliot, The Hollow Men

A desperate, pox-ridden man stumbles out of the underbrush and into the lane ahead of the party, crying out for help.  Aged and covered in diseased sores, the exertion is too much for his frail state, and he dies after gasping out… "three… they did this to me, they tricked me…"  The dead man has a distinctive hunting knife and sheaf stuck into his loose-fitting belt, assuming anyone overcomes their disgust to get close enough to search him, along with a hand-made fetish around his neck.  Looking down at the map, the main track continues to skirt the moors towards the old abbey and the village of Helmsley down in the river valley, but an underused trail leads off towards the moorlands and the small hamlet of High Helmsley in the direction the man came.

There are big differences between different "versions" of an encounter:  how the encounter area looks in my raw notes, how I'd use those raw notes at the table to bring a scene to life, and how it could be presented as a written piece for an audience.  These variations - it's surely worth some Friday conversation!

For instance, the little excerpt written above would never actually be written out by me as game prep.  I'd probably improvise that scene  (or something similar) as a random encounter for a group that happened to be trudging towards the market town of Helmsley as a combination teaser / plot hook to investigate the witches of High Helmsley.  The encounter teases just enough to indicate there might be something fishy going on in the small community further on.  If they continue on to Helmsley proper, they might learn the hunting knife belonged to a robust young man from a neighboring farm, someone not at all resembling the horrible pox-ridden corpse left behind on the lane.  Following the lead out to the remote farm where "Oswyn Hardaker" recently went missing, they discover he left behind a morose young bride and a now ill-tended farm.  "He was spending too much time climbing up toward High Helmsley, he was, he had eyes for a girl there, I just know it, and now he's left me for her", bemoans the abandoned wife.

A written description of Helmsley as an encounter site might go like this:

The Witches of High Helmsley:

Subtle fear of curses and malevolent spells allow a trio of beautiful witches (Agatha, Rhea, Clara) to rule over the misty Hamlet of High Helmsley from within the small traveler's inn there, The Hanged Man.  The trio long ago signed their names into the Black Book in return for their eternal youth; the Horned Man taught them the Scapegoat Ritual, a piece of dark magic to transfer their illnesses, years, and imperfections onto a sacrificial victim through a hand-crafted cursed fetish, which quickly ages and overwhelms the host.  It's been a few years since they last enacted the ritual, and Agatha is beginning to show a few wrinkles near the corners of her eyes again… 

High Helmsley is a tiny settlement on the edge of the moors, home to clannish shepherds and folks that mutely ignore outsiders and close windows and doors to strangers.  The vicarage has gone abandoned and the church lies in disrepair; only the small tavern shows a sense of upkeep and displays any welcome on a dark evening.

[ I'm omitting the actual game stats and descriptions for the 3 witches since they're not pertinent here]

My actual handwritten notes are even more sparse, since it's mainly sentence fragments and jotted thoughts with a few ideas on how a wandering group might learn all is not well in that remote Hamlet of High Helmsley.

The OSR is as much about publishing (either via blog or book) and sharing creative thoughts as it is about rules and the old games themselves.  We're a movement with many facets, but doesn't it always come back to the table top?  It's difficult to convey the nuts and bolts of the DM's craft via the written word; the presentation of the material can vary based on the decisions and interpretations made during "run time" by an imaginative DM with a bunch of energized people around the table.

Another way of offering the question is the problem of Voice:  how much authorial voice is necessary to convey meaning?  I find it's analogous to presenting an oral play, a drama, with or without the staging or reading directions.

The description of the Witches of High Helmsley encounter is bland, although there's probably enough there for a referee to give the hamlet a foreboding, ominous character when a group wanders into the place.  But if I absolutely wanted someone at home to have the same patented "Beedo Experience™ " as me and mine, I would need to recommend \ encourage \ dictate that they stage the whole thing nearly the same way as me - including that lead-in encounter with the recent victim of the Scapegoat Curse in the prologue, who stumbles out in front of the party,  dripping with corruption like Dorian Grey's secret portrait.  And even then, you can't commoditize an experience or guarantee it would work the same at your table.

There was a kerfuffle some time last year when the drafts for Dwimmermount started to surface after the successful Kickstarter - I think it was Tenkar's copper pieces group that ran one of the levels, sans any kind of embellishment or DM creativity (as a kind of experiment), and then said players complained about how flat and boring was the game.  "But James Mal's sessions lead to such interesting game reports!  We wanted that patented James Mal™  experience at our table, too."  It ended up being hollow.

This is a fascinating dichotomy for me - the contrast between strong, directive encounters vs bare bones - since I favor megadungeons and similar material that's usually meant to be improvised off of sparse notes; contrast that with the micro-setting approach where numerous encounter details are often plotted, scripted, and/or scheduled using timelines.

Wanted: Professional Adventurers

The typical mode for Dungeons & Dragons resembles the American wild west more than any caste-bound feudal society. Powerful bands of armed adventurers, answering only to themselves, wander the countryside, looking for trouble.  What law-abiding society wants a bunch of outlaw bikers, armed to the teeth like pisteleros and knife fighters, rumbling into town and representing imminent violence?  Governments make laws against such behavior.

I know, I know - don't over-think your "fantasy" world.  Verisimilitude is overrated.  Call it a personal failing, but having a social framework that reasonably allows for armed adventurers is important to me during setting design.  More so because I trend towards settings that are alternate history or strongly inspired by real world history.

Luckily, there are lots of real world examples of armed adventurers we can look towards for understanding how and where such groups might operate.  I'm just a fan of history, so it's quite possible the readers will have other examples to suggest in the comments.  As a side note, this post is a bit of an add-on to something I saw over at Greyhawk Grognard the other day (Professional Adventurers), pointing out a dislike of professional adventuring guilds.  I agree that I'm not a fan of the approach to adventuring guilds in fantasy games. But there are some real world precedents for "professional adventurers", just not in the way they show up in, say, The Forgotten Realms.

Soldiers of Fortune
Leaving home, joining the army, and going off to loot distant places has a long history for real world adventurers.  I'm using the term "join the army" loosely, it covers a wide range of armed bands.  Historical examples include numerous Roman generals (and other ancient world conquerors) who raised an army primarily on promises of loot and lands, and went off to conquer distant places for personal glory (use Caesar's campaigns in Gaul as the model).  Medieval knightly orders like the Templars or Teutonic Knights (crusaders in general), Spanish Conquistadors, Vikings, and Germanic barbarians (Völkerwanderung) all come to mind, too.  Smaller bands, existing on the frontiers during lawless periods, include examples like pirates, wild west outlaws, or mercenary companies during the 30 years war.

In the D&D campaign, your first level characters aren't likely to be this style of adventurer, and it won't have the necessary degree of player agency for a good game early on - this is a mode of play for the mid to high levels.

Explorers
Shackleton, Lewis and Clark, Magellan and the famous figures of the Age of Exploration; if the world has large swaths of "terra incognito", another mode for legalized adventuring is the state-sponsored voyages of exploration.

That's a key point - for the most part, both the Soldiers of Fortune and Explorers mode of play assume institutional support - the ruling body or church back home is explicitly sponsoring campaigns of conquest or exploration for glory, god, or territory.  So maybe the out-and-out banditry (pirates or outlaws) needs to be carved out into it's own category of "illegal adventuring"?

Grave Robbers and Salvage Experts
I can't think of any famous grave robbers.  If the adventurers in question are looting the tombs of someone else's culture, they're engaging in salvage; if it's their own culture, they're probably going to be branded grave robbers.  People are funny that way.  So maybe you could call some of the explorers that 'discovered' various Egyptian treasures, like Howard Carter, founder of Tutankhaman's tomb, famous salvagers.  Tomb raiders.  There certainly are other types of salvages - the recovery of some of the Spanish treasure fleets, shipwrecked by hurricanes, and recovered by pirates in the Caribbean, comes to mind.

This type of exploration could easily translate into dungeoneering for lower level adventurers in a game.  I'm just conjecturing here, but perhaps the key difference between real world salvage and the types of activities in the fantasy game is the presence of institutional acknowledgement or patronage.

You could envision a D&D campaign striving for more "realism" would involve sponsorship of delves into distant ruins as the mode of play for lower levels.  Then, when the characters move into the mid to high levels of play, they could launch more grandiose expeditions, now involving armed conquests as they take the lead roles over large groups of men in that "soldier of fortune" style of play.

You have to ask yourself:  if the local rulers or similar institutions know that large treasures, lost secrets, and buried magic are just sitting out there, waiting in the ground for recovery, wouldn't they be the ones to sponsor operations to go and recover them?

Only in "fantasy land" would a king or ruler allow a bunch of no names to recover enough wealth and power to threaten the throne...

For Where Your Treasure is, There Your Heart Will Be Also

There is an interplay between rules and settings and scenarios that's been on my mind lately.  It's not an issue with strongly themed game systems that are closely aligned to their default setting and play style, but D&D-type games are ciphers, reflective mirrors, blank pages on which to scribe a unique vision, and it's fair to ask the question - what is your particular game really about?

I'm coming at this somewhat stream of conscious and still organizing my thoughts, so perhaps another tact is in order:  Consider the D&D retroclone system, ACKS - Adventurer Conqueror King.  Part of the unique niche ACKS has carved out in the fantasy space is having top-to-bottom balanced economics, domain management, trade rules, and costs for armies and kingdoms.  A Dungeon Master that puts all that time and effort into detailing those particular characteristics for the baronies and kingdoms in their sandbox game clearly feels the information is important and relevant.  A player there should assume that as their characters move into the mid and high levels, they'll be expected to gain land, deal with economics and domain management, and build armies.  The NPCs will be coming for them with armies of their own!

The converse is the DM that spends all their time writing intricate dungeons, and barely spares a page of notes for the home base, the surrounding countryside, or the politics outside of the dungeon.  Better be prepared for week after week of dungeon crawling, in that kind of campaign.

Horror adventures are usually deep on detail and atmosphere.  They tend to have intricate back stories leading to a big reveal.  They are the opposite of the sparsely described (but vast) dungeon.  In fact - that's another kind of test to consider for your writing style - are the adventures broad horizontally, meaning the DM has created  a large adventure, sparsely detailed, or are they vertical; a narrow scope, but deeply detailed with multiple layers of secrets centered around a small area?  And how do these choices reflect the default activity you expect of the players?

It seems to me there's some kind of rule around writing that should help inform the discussion, but I'm not remembering it.  Not quite Chekhov's gun, but something along the lines of it - such as, why would you do a conventional  story in an oddball setting, unless the sci fi or fantasy elements were critical to the telling?

I'm sure someone out there reading this is a writer, and they'll be able to express this as a well-known principle.

Common wisdom amongst DM's and game masters is to only prepare what you need.  That's good, useful advice.  However, let's take it a step further, and only prepare what your game is about.  Perhaps that's already implied, but the idea is to force an additional layer of self-reflection and answer the question, what is your game about, anyway?  Is it dungeon crawling?  Then ask yourself what is the bare minimum in terms of a setting you can get away with to make the best framework for dungeon crawling, and spend the rest of your time on making fantastic dungeons.

I tend to think this is why I dislike the Sword & Planet genre; I'd rather focus my time on things like interesting adventures, and skip all the parts about creating (and then narrating) alien cultures and why they do things differently there.

How does this apply to a horror themed fantasy game?  It pushes you towards a real world setting more often than not.  Using a pseudo-historical setting means that no energy is diverted towards setting, when the dictates of the genre already require a huge outlay of effort creating the detailed mysteries.  The real world offers everything you need for backstory and all your creative work can go into the horror side of things.

Of course, the bit that cooks my brain here on a lazy Saturday afternoon is this:  the answer to the question, "what is your game about", has a tendency to change over the course of a campaign, doesn't it?

Matters of Size

Many RPG rules sets have a recommended or implicit target number for party size, as well as practical limits on what the game system can handle and keep things moving.  When you read about the early days of D&D, it seems like those guys played with gigantic groups - 10 players or more!  Those halcyon days haven't exactly returned, but my home group these days tends to be larger than the game groups earlier in my career - it now includes dads and some of their older kids, so our regular attendance is usually 7 players and a DM.  It could easily be more if I had a bigger table and more chairs.

One wrinkle to consider as I compare Call of Cthulhu vs weird D&D horror is this party size factor.  I feel like the target number for Cthulhu gaming is probably 3-4 players, though we've frequently had to stretch to 5.  Whether the premise involves a pair of police detectives and consultants, a few Delta Green agents, or the traditional PI or jack-of-all-trades and friends taking on a job that leads to an occult investigation, the scenarios are intimate, and the nature of searching for lore and clues favors a small, focused group.  It's comical to picture a flock of 15+ investigators (players plus retainers) descending on a small cottage in search of leads.

This reinforces my decision to stick with a D&D style system for any future campaigns that develop horror themes - whatever loss accrues in atmosphere due to the number of players, is outweighed because the setting and rules admit a larger play group at the table.  We do have some explicit Call of Cthulhu plans brewing for in-between games, but we'll shave some group members for those scenarios to get to a smaller player set, keeping the kids out, for instance.  I can think of a few Cthulhu campaigns that can support a gigantic party, too - something like Beyond the Mountains of Madness could probably do it, if we ever want to try an extended campaign using Chaosium.

Scaling D&D material to work with a large group wasn't much fun during the 4E era.  I've got to remember to keep one eye on NEXT and see if WOTC is falling into the same trap of the "5-man party".  If I see any marketing blather about the "party-size sweet spot" coming from those guys, I'm out.

What's your Campaign Style?

After yesterday's post, I had a funny idea - I have an opinion about my campaign style, but how accurate is that perception?  We're not the best judges of ourselves - humans usually are not gifted with much self objectivity.  Looking for an external opinion, I asked the players to come back with their own rating of our campaign style, to see if they look at things the same way.  I highly recommend you try it out yourselves and gauge whether you and the players are on the same page.

Here are the top five descriptors I picked (remember, the whole list came out of Stuart's merit badges):

My game focuses on Exploration & Mystery.
My games are Gonzo and can include a lot of strangeness.
I roll Dice in the open and don't fudge the results in my games.
Players characters Death is a likely event in my games.
Players in my game should be prepared to Run when the odds are against them.

However, here's how the players rated the campaign (5 out of 7 players voted; I skipped the two eleven year olds since they're not on email).  I asked the adults to limit it to their top 5, too.

Death - 4
No Dice Fudging - 4
Improvisation - 3
Exploration - 3
Run Away - 2
Tactics - 2
Tells a Story - 2
Non-Combat - 1
Mirroring Ideas - 1
Gonzo - 1
Disturbing Content - 1
Player Skill Matters - 1

The two most agreed upon characteristics are the campaign is deadly and the dice matter - remember, all of these players were part of the group that gakked Strahd Von Zarovitch with a single well-placed spell during the Gothic Greyhawk campaign of 2011, so they've been on the beneficiary side of sticking with dice results, too (Die Strahd Die).

I don't think I improvise a lot, but the players indicated the campaign used a lot of improvisation.  (I'll take that as a compliment).  The votes that left me head scratching were the ones for "My game tells an interesting Story".  For me, "Story gaming" has a very specific connotation - a scripted series of scenes with a predictable climax and story arc, or a collaborative game structured to tell a traditional story with climax and denouement.  In other words, the exact polar opposite of the sandbox campaign we're actually playing.  I asked the players about those votes, and the response from the players was - "No, the interesting story is something that happens after the game sessions, when you look back at a character's survival - the story is pieced together through play over the campaign".  That definition is pretty much in line with emergent characters and the whole point of a sandbox game.  It's funny how elusive it can be to achieve a mutual understanding on even a simple definition.

Okay, that just explains the whole internet, right there.

Below are the reasons for my ratings.  The one thing I aspire towards is challenging the players and not their characters - but I don't feel like I do it consistently enough or well enough to call it out as a defining characteristic.  It continues to be my aspiration.

Exploration & Mystery
The Black City is a ruined, sprawling hex crawl, with a series of detailed surface structures, and a vast underworld dungeon beneath it.  It's all about exploration - and there are some deep mysteries around who created the city, and why did they disappear thousands of years ago.

Gonzo
We've got aliens, robots, plastic humanoid servitors, Vikings, Byzantine and North African sorcerers, ray guns and lightning rods, spontaneous undead, powerful inhuman intelligences masquerading as Norse gods, Hyperborean artifacts, Lovecraftian servitors, and a hefty dose of "dungeon madness" turning some of the explorers into berserkers.  I tend to think it's a bit gonzo, but apparently not.

No Dice Fudging
If it's worth rolling, it's worth rolling in the open.  The cornerstone of a sandbox game is "meaningful player choice", and that includes the good and the bad consequences.  No good can come from undermining the integrity of the game by lying about the dice results.

Character Death
There is a lot of satisfaction in survival when there's no safety net (dice fudging or otherwise) and the players survive (or not) based on their own planning, choices, and tactics - and a bit of good fortune.

Run Away
Encounter balance doesn't mean anything to me.  I balance the world - monsters are roughly equal to each others in terms of power when they're in the same area - but there are plenty of outliers that will overpower the player characters if they take on the wrong monster head on.  We had a party of 1st level characters run into a ghost, for instance (easily an 8th-10th level monster).   They haven't even run into the dragon yet!

I don't think I'm done with the merit badges - the list could be a useful tool to get insight from the players on what's important to them personally.  For instance, maybe they want more intricate, tactical combat from the game, or they want a bit more drama or non-combat roleplaying (such as politics, or domain management).

Wanted: DM's with Charisma

Game masters need to develop the campaign setting, build the scenario, learn the rules - and they also need some decent social skills.  More and more, I've come to believe most problems at the table should be solved outside of the game, with a frank table discussion.  But it takes a bit of composure and a willingness to problem solve to lay it all out there and talk through a solution.

Here's some for instances:  you often see criticisms complaining about how players have sabotaged specific campaign styles and victimized their game masters - players that balk at adventure paths, because they want to go off the road; game masters that admit to failed sandboxes, because their players didn't know how to take control and everyone just sat there.  A competent GM needs to be able to discuss the parameters of the game up front, and then monitor when things are going sideways and take a time out to have an out-of-game discussion to get things back on track.

Negotiating skills are important.  Negotiation is about conflict resolution, and reaching a solution that works for everyone - it's like the art of getting to "yes" you hear about in the business world.  One of the big complaints about the older style of games is that they create arbitrary (authoritarian) game masters.  Maybe that's a problem for teenagers.  Good problem solving skills and negotiation skills allow the game master to deliver cooperative rulings that work for both sides - game mastering is another area where some life experience and maturity go along way.

Hey, I'm not just the president of the hair club for men, I'm also a client.  I've had a few irksome situations in recent memory, cementing my tenet that a DM needs to be able to talk to headache players, ie, confront the mismatch head on.  I've had the guy that wanted to treat the scripted, linear adventure path as an extreme sandbox, blatantly ignoring agreed-upon "missions" to hi-jack the sessions.  I've had the guy that insisted the only character he wanted to play was that neutral evil half-orc assassin, who promptly started messing with the other players as easier sources of XP than the dungeon.  I've had the guy that thought old school exploration was a quaint and interesting throwback to the ancient times; real D&D involved a fully laid out miniatures battle mat, with both sides set up on the table ahead of game time, so the session could always start with the first combat.

Most of these situations ended with the mismatched player finding a different game.

The indy-game term you see discussed about this whole situation is "social contract" - what are the implied agreements at the game table that define how the group is going to operate?  I'd go a step further, and say what's important aren't implied agreements, but tacit agreements.  Make those things verbal, express, and negotiated up front.  And be willing to part ways with players that want something different from a game, and can't reach a middle ground with everyone else.  A long term gaming group is like any relationship, and it's best to get those expectations out on the table right from the beginning.

One of my favorite lists of campaign and style preferences is still the original merit badges put together by Stuart a couple of years ago over on Strange Magic (original post here).  Here's the full list, and Stuart actually has some neat little icons over at his place for making a little merit badge sash.

• Tactics are an important part of my games.
• My games will tell an interesting Story.
• My games will be Scary.
• My games focuses on Exploration & Mystery.
• There will be Player vs Player combat allowed in my games.
• My games are Safe and you don't need to worry about content or character death.
• I will Mirror back player ideas I think are interesting in the game.
• My games use a pre-made Map and pre scripted content.
• The GM is In Charge in my games and "rule-zero" is in effect.
• My games rely on a lot of Improvisation rather than pre scripted content.
• My games are Gonzo and can include a lot of strangeness.
• Characters in my games are Destined for greatness, not random death.
• I roll Dice in the open and don't fudge the results in my games.
• My games include Disturbing content.
• My games focus on interesting Characters and Drama.
• Players characters Death is a likely event in my games.
• I play By-The-Book and "rule-zero" is not being used to alter existing rules.
• My games are more of the Social, Fun and "Beer & Pretzels" style.
• My game is primarily Non-Combat in nature.
• Players in my game should be prepared to Run when the odds are against them.
• My game has Shared GMing responsibility with the other players.
• I frequently Tinker with the rules of the game.
• My game focuses on Player Skill rather than character abilities.

I should drop my own players a line and see how they'd rate our game on what seems important at the table.  I'll post what they say - it's a funny way to start the year.

Your World in the Balance

The green dragons that terrorize the Elderwood rarely cross the river; the stone castles along the borderland that face the river are built to withstand acid, and poison gas, and the men that guard those walls cut back the brush for 100 yards or more, to provide clear lines of fire for the massive ballistae that face across at the Elderwood.  At least once a year, a caravan tries to traverse the desolation of the dragons, and it goes heavily armed, with a column of sturdy knights and dozens of mercenary archers along each flank.  Even so, it's a risky business, guiding caravans across the wilds.

You shouldn't be asking the question, "Are things in the game balanced for the player characters?"  The world doesn't give a flip about the player characters or their level.  A better question is, "Is the world balanced to itself?"  Is there a reason the ogres haven't eaten all the orcs in the nearby forest, or the people are able to live in the valley while the giants live in the mountains?  Why do kobolds live on dungeon level 1, and the hobgoblins live on dungeon level 2?  Have you ever looked at the "number appearing" on any wilderness charts in the early editions of D&D?  The wilds are a dangerous place, and the only way to survive out there is to go big or go home.

When running an old-school D&D game, the DM's job is not to provide fair, balanced encounters for the players.  The player characters are not precious and unique snowflakes.  The job is to provide a coherent setting, an impartial setting, and give enough information for the players to make their own decisions.  It's not my fault if a 1st level party ignores the warnings, crosses the river into the desolation of the Elderwood, and gets promptly eaten by the green dragons that terrorize the place.  They should have listened to that old geezer at the tavern.

If your game world features a megadungon, then that place represents a bizarre underworld that follows different logic than the surface world, but it is consistent to itself, and it too holds your player characters in little regard.  It's up to them to gauge the amount of danger they can handle, not you.  In the underworld, monster encounters are loosely equal to other monsters also inhabiting the same dungeon level as themselves.  Your guess is as good as mine why it works out that way.  I suppose they're drawn to the deeps by the lure of treasure, but settle to an appropriate depth where they can survive and still hoard the most wealth.  It's why the underworld is such a strange place - the dungeon levels.  But it's not your job to fully explain it, either; make it coherent, so it follows its own internal logic, and then let the players figure it out from there.  Whatever you do, don't balance it down to their level of incompetence.

This is going to be my true test for 5th Edition, whenever we're able to see enough of the system to evaluate it - can it be used to create a coherent fantasy world?  If we're back to minions and solos and monsters that change roles and games stats in relation to the player characters, the answer, not surprisingly, will be no.

Everything You Know About the Map is Wrong

Hic Sunt Dracones.  Terra Incognita.

Certain knowledge is an enemy of wonder.   We frequently see advice on begetting uncertainty through monster usage; use a custom bestiary, or mix up the characteristics of monsters to keep the players on their toes.  For me the problem goes further - the very act of creating statistics to define a thing limits the possibilities by bounding them.  I consider this a curse of Westernism, and blame Aristotle.  This is not escapable on the DM's side of the screen; to define a thing is to reduce it, and as game masters, this is what we do.

But today I'm considering a complimentary topic, regarding the hex map; as modern people, we take for granted that maps are accurate.

Where do fairy tales take place? It's always "once upon a time in a land far, far away", an indeterminate period in an indeterminate kingdom  - the tales can be anywhere in Europe, but left to the reader's imagination.  The great 1930's horror movies I like so much are vaguely placed in central Europe or Germany, someplace east of the Alps but west of Russia - a foggy land of pre-modern technologies and lonely castles and superstitious peasants you also won't find on any maps.

As the game master, you need to know the monster statistics, just as you need a firm grasp of the geography of the game world.  A map is an awfully convenient way to organize information, after all.  But the intent behind custom bestiaries is to keep that sense of discovery and unknown in the encounter system; can't we do a similar situation with our maps and exploration?

I've never placed a high premium on wilderness maps for the players that deviate from the game master's map, but my opinion is clearly changing.  Sure, I've used the simple approach of leaving white space, but for a scrawled warning of "beyond here, there be monsters" or "unknown lands".  How about distortion of scale or coastlines, the way old maps of the globe show a clearly defined Europe, but vague outlines for the New World continents?

Another approach is presenting the map like old street directions.  For instance, I really liked a Salisbury player's map I saw in Pendragon; it was an abstract collection of heraldic devices, landmarks, and walking distances, delineating the extent of player knowledge through areas known via oral tradition.  I could see a similar approach in a nautical campaign where the "map" consists of sailing directions and distances.

What it comes down to is appropriately defining the well-known local world of the players, while keeping the larger world vague or incorrectly described to reinforce the thrill of exploration and wonder.  A nice side effect is that maps of far off places become a much more important source of treasure.  Englishmen in the Age of Sail were knighted for returning home with maps and charts taken from the experienced navigators of the Spanish or Portuguese.  The value of a good map is apparent if you're going to travel off the edge of the world.

Challenges of the Saltbox

The archetypal D&D game, where a beginning group of adventurers meet in a tavern and head out to the local ruins, doesn't necessitate skills beyond those inherent in the class descriptions; fighters are already good at fighting, magic users cast spells, clerics can affect undead, and so forth.

Not so when you consider staging a maritime adventure.  The roles on a ship demand specialized skills - navigators need to read charts, calculate dead reckoning, mark soundings, and take latitude measurements; crewmen need to know the proper rigging of the sails and ship maintenance; gun crews need to know the elevation and targeting of cannons and the measurement of charges based on range and shot.  The captain is perhaps the most knowledgeable and experienced sailor on the ship, as well as requiring a strong personality and commanding presence.

Old school (rules-light) D&D doesn't provide much support in the rules for adjudicating these situations.  Which is fine, the game is Dungeons & Dragons, not Sloops & Sailors.  I imagine one reason many campaigns don't feature significant ocean travel is precisely due to discomfort by the DM.  If you're going to run the saltbox, you need a plan.

Hiring Experts
The by-the-book answer is to require adventurers to hire navigators, a captain, gunnery crew and sailors; there's no real provision for player characters to have said skills (unless perhaps the DM is using background professions or something like the 1E DMG).  This is fine if the ocean travel is a means to an end, like getting to the Isle of Dread; not so much if most of the campaign will revolve around the sea.

How would you handle this in an old school game?  Hybrid systems that split the new/old school line (like ACKS) have a proficiency based skill system, so player characters could add specific skills over time.  Alternatively, the DM could rule that characters spending enough time ship-board could learn these professions after a sufficient period as on-the-job-training.

Hack n Slash pointed readers towards an old post on A Rod of Lordly Might that broke professional skills down into categories of unskilled, skilled, expert, and master, and provided ideas on costs and times to pick them up (outside of the class and level system).  I like the idea of requiring experts initially, but letting the players add the skills as professions if they really want to allocate time and effort in game to pick them up for their characters, too.

Adjudicating Skill-Based Situations
In the dungeon environment, rules-light skill decisions on the fly are handled through a negotiation; the player describes what they want to do, the DM comes up with a success chance, the players think of ways to enhance success, and we either agree on a ruling or a roll that needs to be made and move on.

In a situation where specialized knowledge affects frequent encounters and combat, I'd like to push more of this resolution towards a defined system of rolls.  Can the crew get more speed out of the ship in a pursuit and evasion situation; can the captain's maneuver to get into a broadside position succeed; was the grappling and boarding attempt successful; did the navigator succeed in guiding the vessel to that remote island across the trackless ocean?

Looking through the BX rules, there are some guidelines for adjudicating these types of maneuvers, but they don't have a variable element for individual skill.  So one approach is to elaborate these generic guidelines for solving common situations, like pursuit, maneuvering, boarding, and navigation, and then apply modifiers based on player choices at the table.

An alternate approach is to add appropriate individual skills to the mix - use something like ACKS's proficiencies, extend the LOTFP d6-based skills to include some nautical skills, or use professional descriptions like unskilled, skilled, expert, or master to provide some common modifiers.

Agency and Autonomy
I've talked about this in the past, that playing crewmen on someone else's ship doesn't provide a lot of agency and authority to the players - they take orders, they don't give them.  As such, maritime adventures are postponed until the group has sufficient wealth to hire and outfit their own ship.

For a low-level campaign, I like the idea of the group starting with vessels small enough for them to afford, or ensuring one of the earliest adventures puts them in ownership of a suitable vessel.  Lots of real-world pirate careers started with canoes and pinnaces, trading up over time to progressively bigger vessels.  I've been working on a kick-off adventure for such a campaign, where the characters start as conventional adventurers, and gain an opportunity to seize an appropriate vessel and become privateers by the end of the adventure.  I'd use privateers because  I tend to think my players would rather be 'legal pirates' with patriotic targets, rather than murderous, indiscriminate raiders.

A useful thing about the 16th and 17th century colonial waters, the Spanish Empire of the time can be portrayed as universal, unsympathetic villains, the way early 20th century films frequently demonize Germany.  The destruction wreaked by the conquistadors was widespread and massive, dimmed only by 5 centuries.  But that's grist for another mill.

Anyway, that's where I'm at - gathering ideas for resolving common maritime problems, consulting what's been done in BX and AD&D 1E while looking at other game systems (currently looking at how Flashing Blades: High Seas handles similar situations).  James at LOTFP threatened to develop a maritime supplement at some point, but I don't see it on the near horizon (though hopefully the LOTFP guns supplement is inching closer...)

I'm also considering how player characters can gain some professional expertise in these non-dungeoneering professions, if desired.  Not only would this stuff be necessary for a Spanish Main setting, it'd be useful in the Black City - in another couple of months, the Spitsberg Pirates will be ready to buy their own longship or knarr and going where they will.

Game masters that have run a heavy nautical campaign seem few and far between; it's an idea that's occasionally discussed, but infrequently executed.  But if readers have suggestions on these issues, I'm thankful for any insights!

D&D is the Search for the American Dream

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

In other words, heavily armed strangers ought to be allowed to wander the countryside, look for ruins to explore, monsters to kill, and treasures to loot.  I don't need a white picket fence and a backyard barbecue, I just want to get to name level, build a castle, and attract 5-50 followers.

On Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff, they talked a bit about historical role playing and why people choose to play in fantasy settings instead of the real world; this loose paraphrase of their convesation sums it up for me:  "People want to play in a historical setting like the dark ages, but they don't want serfs, they don't want an all powerful Church dictating the rhythms of daily life, they don't want any social constraints on free movement and agency.  They want to play Vikings and still let that one guy in the group be a ninja.  They want the wild west, with swords."

It summarizes quite well why I mentally come back to the Age of Sail as the consummate historical era for gaming, even though D&D's technological sweet spot is hundreds of years earlier.  It's why my current game is built around free-wheeling Vikings.

The past is a nice place to pretend to visit, but we wouldn't really want to live there.

Feudalism Ate My Sandbox

You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.  You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.
--Fight Club

Desperate rogues and cutthroats swigging ale in a smoky tavern, pouring over old maps, and swapping tales of plundering ancient ruins is the meat and drink of the D&D experience.  This vision of freebooters is quite removed from the feudal manorial system, where the majority of people are tied to the land as servants or defenders, and there are no inns and taverns for hard luck adventurers to plan their next delve.

Of course it’s odd, because the default tech levels in D&D reflect the early medieval world, and tales of knights, chivalry, and adventures with the fey realms would be ripe for inspiration.  I loved Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions, and it certainly seemed inspirational for many elements in D&D.

The good life

Joking about running feudal era characters, someone posted this on the RPGsite as a potential character background table:

Roll d10,000:
1 nobility
2 clergy
3-6 merchant
7-15 craftsmen
16+ serf

The point is well taken; running a dark ages campaign has always seemed problematic because of the social conventions.  Who would be the typical D&D style adventurers in such a setting?  Desperate outlaws that slipped their manorial bondage to live in the woods as bandits?  Everyone else is too tied to the system.

HR2 Charlemagne's Paladins, the 2E era historical reference for 8th and 9th century France, puts the characters in the role of members of a noble household - sons, daughters, and fosters of a Frankish count.  I've been reading Pendragon lately, the Arthurian game, and it's somewhat similar - everyone starts the game as a newly made knight, owner of their own manor and possessing a fair amount of starting wealth - at least by 1st level D&D standards.  Even a poor knight in Pendragon starts with armor, weapons, a pair of riding horses, a squire, a warhorse, and a sumpter pack horse, along with a small manorial holding and annual income.

That's one way of solving the problem of a feudal setting - letting everyone start the game as a noble with a degree of standing, and not a hard luck scrabbler eager to mug some goblins for their coppers.  Dark ages nobles were a rough and tumble lot, required to defend their small manors and support their lieges with military power, so it's not a bad role model.  But it turns the D&D end-game on its head, since knights are usually represented by mid-level fighters or higher, and the typical D&D character doesn't get property until name level.  It also undermines the desperate need for that next pouch of drinking money that underpins swords & sorcery and picaresque adventuring.

I ran a dark ages sandbox some years ago, with the players starting as members of a noble's household, and it left me a bit unsatisfied as a sandbox; too many of the adventures were "what is the noble count going to send them to do now?", since the players were essentially vassals (like everyone else in the setting) and it ended up more like 'mission of the week' and less like the players planning their own delves.  You need to be able to turn the keys over to the players, put them behind the wheel.

Another approach would be to cheat the historical aspect a bit and slide in some market towns and the occasional inn and tavern, de-emphasizing the feudal manor as the starting point.  There's an old school sensibility to the idea that knighthood and standing is something earned during play by proving one's worth through feats of arms (instead of being born a snowflake).  In the chaos of the dark ages, shrewd counts and kings will elevate tough and worthy warriors to the nobility through enfeoffment.

The feudal world has been on my mind lately, as one of my kiddos has been reading King Arthur stuff, and I had picked up Pendragon before the storm.  I tend to think if I did a feudal sandbox, it would be the latter approach, allowing the players to exist outside the manorial system and move into the ranks of landowners later in the campaign.  The dungeons and adventures in such a setting are topics for another day.

How about you, have you run a sandbox game in a feudal setting, and if so, how did you reconcile the freedom and autonomy inherent in a D&D style sandbox?

Today in D&D School

I had the thought to do this article before the big storm, so it's been sitting on my computer while the power was down, waiting to post.  The moms of one of our players said something nice to my wife: "Your husband is doing a good job with the D&D game, the boys are learning so much about history while they're playing".

So I asked the kiddo what kinds of things he's learned in our current campaign.  Here's what he had say:

Real vikings didn't wear horned helmets.  The vikings went everywhere and drank beer or mead - Russia, England, France, and even Canada.  They ate dried, salted, or smoked fish in the winter,  and lots of pickled stuff, like pickled cabbages.  But if you didn't eat fresh stuff every few weeks, from hunting or fishing, you could get scurvy.  Their boats are called longships or knarrs.  The men are either jarls, karls, or thralls depending on whether you're a noble, freeman, or slave.  They do crafts during the winter in those big halls and drink more beer (beer was like food you could store all winter).  They used cone helmets with nose guards, wooden shields, and axes.

I'm sure he knows a lot more, like how island shelters are constructed, how names are formed, what everyday life is like back home, that kind of stuff.  We also watched the recent Nova episode that showed the forging of an Ulfberht sword and the guys talked about it during one of the games, so he now knows a bit about how crucible steel is made and why it was superior to local steel.

I had overlooked this as a benefit of a setting based on real-world history - I like getting ideas from real myths and legends, using real maps and place names, but there's this huge educational upside to also consider if you game with kids.  Besides, if you like history, the research and reading inherent in preparing the setting is pretty dang fun.  The real world is endlessly strange and fascinating.

My home library is slowly accreting 'day in the life' books, like The Time Travelers Guide to Medieval England, Everyday Life in Viking Times, or A Day in the Life of Ancient Rome;  I appreciate the modern approach to scholarship that's painting these vivid pictures of ordinary life by piecing together bits from anthropology, literature, archaeology, art, and written history.  As Black Vulmea said over here - Booke Faire - many children's history books also feature curious bits about everyday life to help kids place themselves in the period;  these sources are really fast and accessible for the harried game master.

I've actually had a few  parents on the block wrinkle their nose when their kid went home and asked if they could sit in on one of the kid-focused D&D games during the summer - like it's the late 1980's again, and D&D is only something for... I dunno, weirdos or something.  Meanwhile, they don't blink when their kids play gory TV-MA video games and blow the heads off zombies or loot bodies in Skyrim.  I'll stop judging.

TL;DR version:  You can slide in plenty of historical knowledge into your tabletop game, ninja-style, the way some moms are known to puree healthy stuff like carrots and mix it into their kid's food sight unseen.

Black City Game 9: Part 2; and Encounter Notes

Here's the second half of the game report from this past weekend.   I'm going to round out part 2 with some play observations on this session since the death toll was so high - there are some things I'd do differently as the DM.  DMing is a skill best honed through trial, error, and bit of reflection afterwards on.

Part 1 was yesterday; the basic situation was that the party surfaced into an area of the ruins far too dangerous for 1st level characters, and encountered an alien ghost.  The ghost destroyed two party members by possessing their bodies and running them down a street into a death trap where they were incinerated; two other party members were fiddling with an alien device, which exploded and sprayed their bits all over the rocks; everyone else was running for their lives at that point.

In other words, same stuff, just a different week.

Mustafa, the desert warrior, sprinted after the fleeing characters to help them regroup in the next hex over; he marveled at their wrinkled faces and age lines, since many of them aged 10 years after seeing the ghost.  The others caught up, and once everyone calmed down, they decided to sneak back into the starting hex and try to slip down the hatch without the ghost noticing.  By the time they got back there, they could see the body of the NPC Agdi off in the distance, being marched stalwartly towards his death while under the influence of ghostly possession.  Since the ghost was temporarily occupied, they slipped back into the "safety" of the dungeon and locked the hatch behind them.

This has been their longest foray in the dungeon, spanning multiple sessions of play; they were on their 5th day of rations in-game, frequently needing to fill their water in the dungeon, and it was probably a good time to start heading back to the entrance at the Well of Woe, which would be at least another 8 hours through the subway tunnels - meaning another overnight encampment was necessary.  Besides, since 3 player characters were greased by the ghost encounter, some of the guys were keenly interested in rolling new ones.  In the meantime, there were enough retainers alive that everyone continued to play.

The party started south, safely passing the lair of the Winged Terrors, and approached the Mist Dungeon.  It was theorized the orange door in the tunnel north of the Mist Dungeon might align with a domed structure on the surface - the dome was encountered a few sessions ago - so they decided to see what was behind the door.  It was a shaft upwards with a ladder.  The shaft did indeed lead to the interior of the great domed building on the surface.

The interior was a 60' dome, illuminated by an intermittent purple light, with a number of alcoves containing pedestals and glowing podiums with alien control beds.  The floor was sunken a few feet below an elevated walkway that circled the room.  A calcified alien cadaver, with bulbous oversized head and brain, sat in an a massive 'brainiac throne' in one of the alcoves.

Shortly after entering, the dust was disturbed and Brick the Halfling was pushed into the open shaft by an invisible assailant; he grabbed onto the ladder and avoided falling to his doom.  This was followed by other ghostly attacks against various character weapons, as the invisible force tried to snatch weapons out of the character's hands.  The group tried a few different tactics to identify the location of the invisible attacker (like throwing dust into the air and looking for a shape) but ultimately someone thought maybe the alien corpse was somehow to blame, and Mustafa sprinted up there and started smashing it with his scimitars.

All the telekinetic attacks around the room retracted and started attacking Mustafa defensively, and other characters  joined him on the walkway where the alien corpse sat on its throne.  Within a few minutes, they hacked it to pieces, but Bottvild was knocked below zero hit points during the fight, when her own weapon was wrested away and used to stab her.  She was successfully stabilized with first aid before dying (bind wounds house rule).

In the dust and rubble of the desiccated alien corpse was a spectacular indigo gem, a blue passkey (5,000gp value).  There were also numerous orange passkey gems all over the floor, 100gp each.  One of the players theorized that each gem was probably embedded in one of the creatures, which meant that each gem sitting on the ground is where one of the ancient creatures died and crumbled to dust.

We try to end around 11pm on Saturdays; this was closer to 11:30pm, so we stopped right there.  Next week they'll finish exploring the interior of the dome, and then head back to Trade Town and their encampment with a worthy haul of treasure and experience, and a chance to make some replacement characters.

Observations
Any time 4 characters die in a session, it’s probably a good time to step back and analyze if this was bad dice or bad luck, mistakes during play, bad design, and so on.  Not that my players were overwrought; this isn't their first old school game, and the death toll in Gothic Greyhawk was frequently catastrophic, especially during Ravenloft.  They take wide scale character death in stride.

The surface of the Black City is a ruined city, cut in half by a flowing glacier.  The area north of the glacier is obscured by mist and clouds.  The further north in the city you go, the more dangerous it gets, and the common belief is that no one in Trade Town has survived a trip north of the glacier (most folks in Trade Town are zero level men, or levels 1-3 if they have a class).  These are all facts that have been made available in the game.  So the players knew the area above ground was a dangerous area; they just didn't know how dangerous, and they were hoping to score a cool find in an untouched area, and scoot back into the dungeon.  (Note that no one actually went into the small cave that was teased!)

But I question whether the 1st level of the dungeon, which extends under both halves of the city, should have *any* egress points into the ruins north of the glacier, considering it's possible to jump from a 1st level of difficulty to encounters with golems and ghosts and whatnot - serious high level fare.  Note:  most of these dangerous encounters are bound to a specific location, which explains why they don't wander down into the first level of the dungeon and crush all the weenie monsters and low level guys.

I've also broken the paradigm of dungeon level = risk level in the sense that the 1st dungeon level is huge, such that the south part of the first dungeon level is mostly 1st level challenges, and the north/north east section of the first dungeon level contains 2nd level challenges.  The next level down follows a similar pattern, with the southern section of the caverns as level 3 challenges, and the north section of the caverns as level 4.  I'm wondering if it would have been better to have 4 smaller levels (stacked one on top of another in a more traditional megadungeon design) versus having these massive, sprawling tunnels and caverns, covering multiple character levels of danger.  One of the great opportunities in designing a megadungeon, and playing in one, is presenting a degree of control over the risk versus reward that the players choose, so a degree of transparency is important.  I'm second guessing a bit if this approach has undermined some of the utility - I'll have to talk to the guys.

I have no qualms about how the alien ghost encounter turned out; the players had plenty of time to flee the ghost, and the fact that it possessed an NPC first was a bit of a gift; had they abandoned him to a gruesome fate, they might all have gotten away without a lost character, although it would have been a bit cold and uncaring.  They've fought ghosts before, and experienced the body-hopping magic jar phenomenon first hand, and know full well that knocking out or disabling a host just encourages the ghost to snag a better ride in the next round.

I will adjust the Unstable Hyperborean Artifact™ however.  It fired a 30' disintegration ray, with a 1 in 6 cumulative chance of exploding for 3d6 damage after the 1st shot.  However, I really wanted to foreshadow that there was a mounting risk by having it grow progressively hotter with each shot.  Since it blew up after the first shot due to an unlucky roll, that prevented any chance to learn about the risk.  Going forward, I'd tweak the text so any such device won't start rolling to blow up until after the 2nd shot, so the players can experience it getting hotter.  I don't think a dungeon needs to be fair or balanced, but the players should have a chance to learn about risks and make intelligent decisions based on facts.  That's the "game" part of the dungeon crawl, the player skill part of it.

Special Bonus
The two encounters featured in last game session were actually written about here on the blog ages ago when I was brainstorming and thinking out loud about such things; you can read about them below.  (I will ask that my players, if any are reading along, go ahead and skip these links).

Plaza of the Watchers, Featuring the Alien Ghost
Psionic Ghost of the Hive Mind

Prince Valiant as a D&D Setting

75 years later, the weekly Prince Valiant comic series is still going strong.  There have been a number of different creative teams keeping the continuity through the years, and the comic strip has been compiled into a number of different reprint volumes; my local library has them, in fact.  I never fully got into the drama of Prince Valiant as a kid, but as an adult, I appreciate the unique narrative captions and the realism in the graphics.

But here's one thing you won't find in Prince Valiant - historical realism.  Prince Valiant's adventures take him from the Roman frontier to defending Europe from the Huns; as Gawain's squire (and then companion), he rubs shoulders with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round table, and spent time chasing viking raiders to North America.  The castles of Valiant's England are not wooden motte and baileys like you'd expect in the dark ages, but the massive stone structures of the high middle ages.  Prince Valiant was there for the fall of Rome, but still spent time on the crusades and went looking for Prester John; I wouldn't be surprised if Robin Hood showed up in one of the storylines, or perhaps even Genghis Kahn.  The writers pick and choose the most interesting bits from 700 years of western history to weave the ongoing saga.

The fantastic thing about the Matter of Britain is the way it exists somewhat out of time, eliding historical details to absorb later social conventions.  In this way, we get knights in armor, courtly love, and chivalry, all in 5th century Britain, no questions asked!  There's much to be gained in treating your D&D campaign the same way - learning how to stop worrying and love the glorious mess.  D&D draws from a wide range of historical periods and folkloric sources to populate the game with its myriad elements; we don't have to know all the ingredients to enjoy the flavor of the soup.

Mundane Adventures

We use plenty of inadvertent oxymorons in the game - war games, realistic simulations, living dead, giant dwarves, little giants, chaotic organizations, and plenty of random logic.  Here's another one to put in the mix - mundane adventures.

Have you ever run an adventure, where the characters get hired to do something, and no fantastic elements make an appearance?  They rob the rich merchant, and get away with all the loot without triggering any magical countermeasures; they escort the caravan to the next city for mere mercenary wages, and no monsters attack from the hills?

There's a principle of contrast to consider - the weirdness of monster-filled adventures juxtaposed against the banality of everyday life.  But I question if anyone bothers worrying about creating such a contrast when table time is limited.  I recently reviewed Death Love Doom, where the group believes they're going to loot an abandoned mansion, and instead it's all blood, horror, screaming and running.

A setting or gaming milieu can be so removed from the player's everyday experience that nothing seems banal even though it's mundane… Traveller attempted to get away with games lugging trade goods from one star system to another via arbitrage as an 'adventure'.  How'd that work out?  No, seriously - if you were a big fan of classic Traveler - did the rules lead to interesting games because everything else was so extraordinary?

I spent most of last week down in Williamsburg, VA, taking in all the exciting historical sights (and sites) - Jamestown, Yorktown, Colonial Williamsburg - it's truly spectacular.  The notebook I'm using to keep my  Colonial Hex Crawl notes has gotten some heavy work!  Adventures in the setting will be in the horror / weird fantasy vein, and less of an ongoing campaign, more like one shots.  But it got me thinking about a game set along the eastern seaboard in the early 17th century and the types of mundane adventures had by the explorers of the time - scouting the frontier, prospecting for resources, trading or negotiating with Indians, dealing with pirates and foreign agents.

The "problem" of introducing mundane adventures primarily shows up in a sandbox game, particularly a game set in a low-fantasy or historical setting where the fantastic is less commonplace and verisimilitude would dictate a percentage of opportunities that having nothing to do with supernatural intrusions and the blood, horror, screaming and running.

I've been equivocating myself - on the one hand, there's the Call of Cthulhu model; it's a historical game, but we don't run mundane scenarios and players rarely have a wide range of choice among plot hooks; regardless of milieu, it's a given that every COC scenario is going to cause some character-sanity damage and result in the screaming and the running.  Like Scooby and the Gang, no matter where the party goes, they happen to be the "lucky ones" that uncover all the eldritch horrors.

Opinions or examples of how you've used or avoided mundane adventures are most welcome, as I work through the pro's and con's myself.  Like most things at the table, the social element favors not making such a decision unilaterally, but consulting with the players around their preferences as well.