Catching Up With Supernatural

I blinked, and a week went by without blogging.  My eyeballs have been on the TV screen (or more frequently, the iPad) finishing the last couple of streaming episodes of the TV series Supernatural in a binge of media consumption.  Not once in the past 9-10 years did I bother to tune into that one while it was broadcasting; my wife, an ardent Dr Who fan, relentlessly implored me to commit to watching the first season of Supernatural a couple of months ago proclaiming it would strike a similar chord.  It's actually been great fun.

Let's say, like me, you're somewhat averse to the television and were equally oblivious about the show - here's the theme:  Supernatural is about a pair of brothers who hunt monsters as their life's mission.  The show postulates a world where there's a brotherhood of "hunters", urban fantasy warriors that roam the backwaters and by-streets of America, staking vampires and laying ghosts to rest, combing the papers for gruesome murders and bizarre deaths to find the next case.  There are overarching metaplots that invoke Judeo-Christian mythology, involving rogue angels, scheming demons, and sundry Biblical monsters.  Beyond the metaplot stories, each episode is basically a "monster of the week" showcase, and the writers have definitely looked far and wide to fill out 9 seasons with critters.

Supernatural isn't a horror show, but you can still get plenty of ideas from it for your horror or D&D gaming.  It's pretty much someone's "Hunter the Reckoning" campaign made into an ongoing saga, the way True Blood is a Masquerade campaign brought to HBO.  I've gotten some good ideas for staging a few obscure monsters, and it's shown me that there's quite a bit of monstrous material in the Bible - ideas for some upcoming posts, perhaps.

Meanwhile, the kiddos have discovered Naruto.  I've been hearing quotes from the show non-stop for the past two weeks:  Dad, I feel really good about my red deck for this week's FNM - I'm going undefeated this week, believe it!  Which reminds me, the latest core set for Magic the Gathering dropped last week, so we've also been busy sorting cards and updating our standard decks.  I'm a decent sealed player and took second at our prerelease; for standard, I've been on pack rats and demons all season, so black devotion was easy to update with M15.  I figure there's a small amount of overlap between readers who are just table top gamers and those that play the Magic; you've either been loving the past year of swamps and demons and black horrible things or you can't wait for October and no more black versus blue showdowns.  Anyway, I'm pretty excited to have "Urborg, the Tomb of Yawgmoth", back in standard, believe it!

Despite the distractions of television and the playing cards, we've had some great sessions with the gaming groups exploring Taenarum.  I have a few game reports to post this week.  I also picked up a copy of the 5th Edition Starter Box to peruse, and an author sent a few adventures over to review.   Plenty to catch up on.

The Library of de la Torre: A Weird Fantasy Campaign Idea

Now that the September short adventures are almost behind me, it's time to start thinking about the next thing - if I were going to implement a wide area sandbox, what would the campaign be about?  The elevator pitch goes like this:

It's the mid 17th century.  The infamous witch hunter Luis Diaz de la Torre is dead, but his notes describe the existence of secret cults, blasphemous books, evil artifacts, and crazed wizards, working dire magic in remote places.  What will you do with the information contained in the dead priest's library?

The idea here is that at the beginning of the campaign, one of the characters, or perhaps a patron, inherits the library of this priest who was once part of the Inquisition.  In an alternate version of earth, those investigators carrying out the Inquisition do indeed come across evidence of sorcery and dark practices.  The characters inheriting the dead priest's library would come into possession of dozens of potential plot hooks right at the beginning of the campaign, and many of them could be local, allowing the group to plan their own expeditions and test the veracity of the priest's scrawls right away:

I fear the Bishop of Zaragoza is secretly a vampire - why does he shun the daylight?
Must investigate the coastal village of Braga - rumors of sea devils and gold trinkets from Atlantis.
They live beneath the streets of Cordoba, and they eat the corpses of the dead.  I will not go back down there.

Perhaps the priest's journal hints at a widespread conspiracy, or alludes to a global cult that links demon worship in the Levant with the sea gods of the Greek isles and horrible golden statues brought back from the conquests of Central America.  Many of the books in his library wouldn't be accessible at first, at least until the characters learn languages like Greek and Arabic, or fantastic languages like Hyperborean (or develop the right spells).  The plot hooks gained by reading the books, over time, would be more detailed, and would hint at larger places like the Nameless City, the sleeping god beneath a Teutonic Knight's castle in Poland, or how to find the entrance to the underground Serpent Men kingdoms in old Pictland (now northern Scotland).

The early modern period provides a lot of mobility with the advent of navigation techniques and good ships, and these plot hooks provide reasons for the group to travel across post-war Europe, into the Ottoman territories, or to see the New World for themselves.  The stories could be very modular, and many of the hooks could be developed as one-page "dungeons".

This campaign approach supports a strong aesthetic for weird horror; the human world is predominantly mundane - the waxing power of the church has marginalized arcane magic, and demi-humans (if they exist at all) live on the fringes of the human world.  Travel will have the usual hazards - bandits, pirates, religious intolerance, the risks of war, and plague; there will be banal challenges of duels, honor, social standing, and the law.  But when the characters explore the ruined tombs in the necropolis, the ancient catacombs beneath Paris, or the remote mountain fastness, they cross over into a place where the monsters are real.

If I go forward with this, where's that leave the Black City?  I'll just roll the timeline forward and use the idea of a ruined alien city on the island of Thule as is, except instead of a Viking camp up there, perhaps it's whalers that discover the city in the north.  I wasn't satisfied with how the vibe was developing; a little too much like a zoo for the weird horror aesthetic I originally wanted (unless I just embrace the gonzo and go 100% megadungeon with it).

I don't know that I'll definitely do the Library campaign framework - next up would be an overview of what the toolbox might look like if I were going to build this out, so I can get a better sense of the effort.  But once the basics of the sandbox are in place, the fact that the adventures themselves could be small and modular is very appealing.

Adventure versus Setting

I'm going to give this whole "Wide Area Sandbox" thing some thought and plot out how I'd build one.  By way of recap - the problem behind a Wide Area Sandbox concerns how to run a free-form campaign in a world where the players have a lot of mobility, and the traditional sandbox approaches don't cover enough real estate.  I'm going to look for ideas from games like Traveler, or Stars Without Number, and see what techniques in the Sci Fi RPG genre can be ported back into a game using sailing ships.

But a preliminary problem is that of setting.  Is the game mostly about exploring the setting, or exploring the adventures within the setting?  For instance, a Swords & Planet game is as much about discovering the new world in all its strangeness, as it is about any adventures there.

I have a specific tone I mean to establish, between the mundane civilized areas (which don't need the hex-by-hex sandbox treatment), and the distant areas where hex-by-hex exploration is warranted.  It's an evolution of an idea from last March, where I mused how wild frontier settings could be distinct from points of light - Wild Frontiers Part 1 and Wild Frontiers Part 2.  It's funny how older ideas don't die, they just wait for the right time to be expressed.

I find myself firmly in the camp of using a real-world model for the Wide Area Sandbox; I want the "Known World" to be familiar and mundane; adventures with monsters mostly happen in wild, out of place areas, and the frontiers.

And that brings me to the point where I'm having some questions:  For those of you that use the real earth as the model for your fantasy campaign, do you use actual earth places and names, or do you create that stuff whole cloth, only using the earth for inspiration?  I'm leaning towards using the real world, with a touch of magic and fantasy woven into history, and using real places, events and names.

If the characters find a magic sword in a tomb, and they learn it once belonged to the grandfather of the current king, it seems more sensible to be able to flip open a history book and see that it was made for Blah Blah Blah, the King of France, instead of making up false histories.  Time would be better spent on crafting excellent adventures.

The two candidate time periods for the wide area sandbox are the mid-17th century, and the Roman period.

The 17th century provides a backdrop of war and chaos in Europe, as well as frontiers across the ocean in the New World and early explorations of Africa.  The dark heart of Europe can still serve as a setting for classic monsters in the Gothic horror tradition; Dracula is timeless.

The Roman world is very cosmopolitan across the Mediterranean, but offers wild frontiers on all sides, just beyond the camps of the Legions.  It's ideal for a D&D game with a bit more armor and traditional weaponry because of the lower technology, but I'm not ignoring the fact that the Roman mindset is more removed; the past is a foreign country, after all.

OSR Mashup Idea - The Red Tides of Stonehell

Outside the sorcerer-ruled city of Tien Lung, a cruel vizier built a unique prison to house the city's many criminals.  It was a dungeon, a prison dungeon, that would be dug deeper by the prisoners themselves.  The prison dungeons would be vast and holde countless criminals; in this way, the sorcerers of Tien Lung would be assured an ongoing supply of victims to use in their cruel magical experiments.

But then, a century ago, a corruption took hold in the dungeons, twisting prisoners into monsters and driving out the guards; Soon control of the the prison was lost to the inmates. It's been theorized that the corrupting mist of the Red Tide somehow reached into the heart of the island, finding a fertile womb in the minds of the mentally imbalanced and despairful prisoners.  Over the past hundred years, all manner of monsters and corruptions have crept into the ruined halls of the prison.  Something dark lurks in the heart of the dungeon; the sorcerers of Tien Lung are aware of it, and it frightens them.  They've begun offering rewards for adventurers that return with maps, captives, and most importantly, information.

Here's an idea that needs to go right into The Junkyard - a mash up of Red Tide, Stonehell, Vornheim, and maybe even Lesserton and Mor.  If you're new here, The Junkyard isn't a bad place - it's a place where I park campaign ideas that I don't quite have time to work on right now; it's part of my Gamer ADD mitigation strategy.  Instead of scrapping my current campaign whenever a kick-ass idea comes along, I write some notes about the idea and park it for future rediscovery.

There have been some really excellent campaign supplements published in the past year or two since I've returned to old school gaming; last time I posted about Stonehell: Down Night Haunted Halls, I mentioned how Stonehell and Lesserton & Mor would work really well together, or how Stonehell would be cool as an Oriental Adventures dungeon.  (Stonehell is a 5-level megadungeon, with 20+ small dungeon levels in it; Lesserton & Mor is a well detailed home base town and a nearby ruined city.)

Thus, the mash up.  Stonehell would also work really well with Red Tide.  The dungeon was built as a prison by a cruel despot and vizier, and could sit nicely near one of the darker-themed Red Tide cities on the main island like Tien Lung.  The corrupting influence of the Red Tide, Dream Lords, and Tidespawn compliment Stonehell's themes of madness and insanity and outside influences.

A DM using these two together would be able to start a campaign with a solid, 5-level megadungeon, and have a full-blown sandbox setting at his fingertips whenever the PC's wanted to wander elsewhere.

Then there's Vornheim and Lesserton and Mor.  Vornheim is a kit for generating city adventures and would help with adjudicating the large cities in the Asian-themed areas of Red Tide (I don't have a review of Vornheim up, but there are plenty out there).  And there's plenty of room on the islands to place Lesserton & Mor in a borderlands region.  It's an instant sandbox campaign with fully realized mega dungeon and multiple adventure sites.

This one goes right on the front burner if there's a TPK in the regular campaign.  There are even Vikings in Red Tide and an arctic area, for whenever I get the Black City done.

Fear in a handful of pages...

Chances are you've already seen this collection promoted on another site, but if not - go ahead and get 13 Flavors of Fear, a free download that contains over a dozen campaign setting ideas for a Weird fiction game (a couple of download options are in the RPG net post).  Get it, read it, be inspired.  Jack and Jeremy did an awesome job.

I already want to create a mash-up of a number of sub settings in a macro-setting.  One of my ideas for the future is to do a weird horror/Rome type setting like Cthulhu Invictus (or just convert Invictus to D&D).  I'd borrow heavily from the Weird Rome here in 13 Flavors of Fear, and then build out a few borderlands areas where the Weird is encountered more directly.

On the northern frontier - perhaps border encampments on the Rhine in the dark woods of Germania, or in northern Brittania along Hadrian's Wall - you could have something like 'The Cold Northern Wind'.  Rome is ideal for the contrast of civilization to the dangerous lands beyond the rule of law where things go bump in the night.

"Behind the Façade of the Seaside Town" could be placed anywhere along the Italian coast or any number of islands in the Mediterranean - Mare Internum Nostrum.  Just why did the ancient Phoenicians conquer sea travel so well?

Legionaries mustering out as farmers to the provinces, and wealthy landowners creating their massive plantations (latifundia), would encounter plenty of indigenous people - as would anyone in a remote trade town or seat of government in the wilds of Roman Europe - providing opportunities for Weird scenarios like 'Pilgrims in a Strange Land' or 'Pagan Outskirts'.

I'm going to file this in the Junkyard so I return to it for brainstorming and development - I even know what I'd call the setting - Terra Incognita.  I love it!

The Bucket List for D&D

What's on your D&D "bucket list"?  Meaning - what kind of games do you want to run or play before you finally hang up your dice for good?

Are there any monsters you've never had the chance to fight that you hope your DM will match your group up against someday?  How about gaming with the kids - is there a certain published adventure you can't wait for your kids to experience to see if it's as magical for them as you remember when you were like 12 or 13, yourself?

I spend a lot of time on the blog projecting ideas for future campaigns, but the current one (Gothic Greyhawk) grew out of a bucket list discussion from the players and just snowballed from there.  Most of the guys had never played the classic G Against the Giants and D (Descent into the Depths of the Earth) series modules, or the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, and we started imagining doing a tour-de-Greyhawk to experience these legendary and classic modules.  At the time I really wanted to do some supernatural horror (good vs evil type stuff) and I was sold on turning the World of Greyhawk into "Gothic Greyhawk" when the players pointed out that we should include Ravenloft, too.  (The module, not the setting).  At the time, the OSR was getting me all pumped up with old school love, so I hastily put together a bunch of hex maps detailing Sterich and Geoff for the old Darlene Greyhawk map, sketched out the towns and adventure sites (liberally dropping OSR modules and the tour-de-Greyhawk AD&D modules into various hexes) and away we went!

There's a few classic modules we'd like to get to in one of these campaigns - top of the list would be The Isle of Dread and Castle Amber - I ran both years ago, but not with my current players.  I know one of the guys has never played Keep on the Borderlands - that might be a good one for the kids.

I have that massive 4E Orcus mini looming over the playing space on the shelf - the players are pretty convinced that Gothic Greyhawk will conclude at some future time when they throw down with the Prince of Undeath himself, a notion I don't dispel.

But for now, it's Strahd!  That's right, friends and neighbors, we've started Ravenloft!  Look for the first game report shortly.

While you're waiting, drop a note about those things on your own D&D bucket list.

Edit:  One thing cool about getting together and talking about running the same adventure that other gamers have also run / played, is the shared experience of modules.  Simon's comment about running the LOTFP modules got me remembering - oh yeah, we did those!  They were awesome.

Dungeons & Deep Ones, Dagon & Dragons - Musings on Call of Cthulhu as a D&D Game

What makes Call of Cthulhu play differently than Dungeons & Dragons?  Would it be fun to run a D&D game in a Lovecraftian world?

After posting a week or so ago about turning Chaosium's Lovecraft country into a D&D sandbox, I've been giving quite a bit of thought to a future project creating a Lovecraftian sandbox for D&D.  This would be something totally different from the Black City, as it would be more horror investigation than a dungeon delving.

In a Call of Cthulhu adventure, there might be some opponents that can be overcome physically, but there are usually greater horrors that can only be thwarted, delayed, or contained.  In D&D, you can usually kill anything if you have a big enough sword.  Old school game play throws balance out the window, and player skill is required to gauge when to fight, when to run.  The investigative horror game would place more emphasis on those table skills.  "We see evil cultists performing a rite, let's get in there and stop them," versus,   "Oh no, the rite is over and here comes the Elder God, run!"

Chaosium already has published two intriguing historical supplements for CoC  that  cross over into the realms of fantasy - Cthulhu Invictus (for the Roman era) and Cthulhu Dark Ages.  In both games, characters have the chance to strap on some armor, grab a spear or sword, and head into the wilderness.  So a natural first question might be why not just run an Invictus or Dark Ages game?

Here's a quick rundown on how I see some of the differences:

Investigations versus Dungeons
If you ever look at a dungeon map abstractly, it's basically a flow chart where the doors and passages represent player choices.  A plotted investigation game with clues can be drawn up the same way - the rooms are scenes, the clues leading to the next scene are passages.  An investigative game *can* be run as a sandbox, with no need for railroading - many of the "dungeons" will be plotted as investigations.  Once the players reach an actual site-based adventure, you can run the game like a traditional dungeon.

Lethality
Call of Cthulhu is more lethal than D&D.  Experienced Call of Cthulhu characters still have the basic hit points of any human, and are just as easy to kill throughout their whole career.  On the other hand, a high level D&D fighter can take a lot of punishment.  A Lovecraft game run using D&D rules will have a pulp action feel, since the characters will be more willing to hang with a monster and try combat instead of cutting and running as quickly as their CoC brethren.  Folks used to more D&D action will enjoy leveling in lieu of "realism".  Of course, powerful Mythos entities will still crush any group.

Sanity
I'm on record as disliking the CoC sanity system because it discourages investigation, which is what the game is supposed to be about; I like the Trail of Cthulhu approach because it encourages exploration, but I feel that D&D style adventurers don't need extra motivation to expose themselves to awfulness.  I'd leave this out of the game and be happier for it.  (The previous post was 'Does a sanity mechanic belong in D&D?')

If I'm going for horror and can't create a sense of dread without requiring a roll and forcibly telling the players, "You're scared now", it's time to hang up my dice.

Skills
CoC characters have professions, which define their skills.  A fair amount of CoC mechanics are tied up with skill checks.  Old school D&D has only an abbreviated skill system.

I don't think this is much of an issue for an old school DM, as he'll be comfortable with "rulings over rolls".   Game mastering an investigative game requires the DM to understand the important clues that will drive the investigation forward and give the players the opportunity to discover the important clues, regardless of skills or rolls.

Languages and Books
A big component to Call of Cthulhu investigative play involves eldritch tomes, dead languages, and Mythos magic.  The LOTFP game has excellent language rules for a D&D style system, and Realms of Crawling Chaos brought interesting tome rules into D&D - we have this element covered.

Healing and Clerics
In Call of Cthulhu, mental health is more of a long term factor for healing than physical health, and the game uses various sanity healing mechanics.  I'd be ditching sanity, so no need for psychoanalysts.

The cleric, as a wielder of divine power, has no analog in Call of Cthulhu.  There are no higher powers on the same side of humans in the standard Lovecraftian universe.  I tackled my approach to reconciling the cleric and deities for use in a Lovecraftian universe months ago:  Fear and Trembling and Dungeons.

Classes
If you're playing old school D&D, you probably love the roles at the table implicit in classes - fighters fight, clerics protect, magic users cast spells, thieves bring special skills.  It's an instant hook for roleplaying, and part of the game's enduring charm.  In an investigative game, skill and role playing are more important.  With the old school approach to skills, classes shouldn't be an impediment during investigations, and will be familiar ground during combat.

Magic
In Call of Cthulhu, the only magic is bad magic - Mythos magic.  Every spell has a deleterious side effect.  In the standard D&D game, magic is a useful resource.

There are a few approaches I'm considering to reconcile the two approaches - one is to create a whole new class of ritual magic to cover Mythos spells, useable by anyone (or any magic user) with the right eldritch tome.  One could just adapt the Call of Cthulhu spell lists and bolt on the new magic system.

The other option is to convert the most common Lovecraftian spells into actual D&D magic user spells and make them rare and dangerous - they're not part of the commonly known spell lists.  That's the approach in Realms of Crawling Chaos, and it seems it would mesh well with the darker tone of magic in LOTFP.

Experience
D&D characters get most of their experience for treasure, so traditional campaigns often have an element of avarice to them.  Characters are more often rogues than heroes.  By the book play rewards the biggest haul of loot.  Still mulling it over, but XP might be an area to make a change - you want the group investigating the murder at the old mansion, not looting the mansion and ignoring the mystery part of it.  (Call of Cthulhu doesn't use an experience or level-based system; skills improve gradually through use).

Conclusion
I think D&D could work fine to run a Lovecraftian investigative campaign; the group will be tougher than a standard party in Call of Cthulhu, so fights against minions and mooks will go the party's way more easily, but Mythos monsters will still be scary.  The familiarity of the D&D system and class-based roles is a big draw (and the fact that there are a ton of D&D players versus Cthulhu players).  I know I wouldn't have any problems with my own player group trying a Lovecraftian sandbox with D&D mechanics, but their interest in Call of Cthulhu itself has mostly been one-shots.

Oh - and as I mentioned in the Gamer ADD post a few days ago - you'd have the benefit of being able to convert 30 years of Cthulhu campaigns.  Masks of Nyarlathotep or Shadows of Yog Sothoth would be a ton of fun as 16th century horror campaigns played out in post-Renaissance Europe with D&D mechanics.

This project goes in the queue after the Black City!

Many Faces of Stonehell (a junkyard post)

"What is the most resilient parasite? An idea. Resilient, highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate..."
 -Inception

The Junkyard:  This is the place where I put campaign ideas, notions, and high concepts that just haven't gotten built.  Yet.
* * *

This is a continuation of my Ode to Stonehell  - the review from the other day - putting some thoughts together on different ways I've considered using the book.  Stonehell is more than an adventure module - weighing in at 20 dungeons in scope, plus the upper works and a pair of supplements, it's a mini-campaign covering character levels 1-5.  Once Stonehell 2 is out, I'm thinking it will cover levels 6-9 or 6-10.  Truly epic.  On with the ideas!

From Funhouse to Madhouse
Stonehell was a prison created by a mad despot and his twisted vizier as a dark experiment; the prisoners themselves carved the dungeon after generations of laboring.  A powerful extraplanar creature was attracted to the pain and suffering within the prison, feeding on the negative emotions, and it continues to lurk in the deeper levels even today, attracting monsters to the dungeon and keeping it Chaotic.

Stonehell has some of the "funhouse" qualities of the early megadungeons, but I would play up the horror aspects of it.  Many of the human 'monsters' in the dungeons are descendants of the prisoners, in various states of insanity and degeneration - one level is full of the insane and exudes a creepy vibe.  Asylums feature in many of my favorite horror movies.

Gothic Horror stories are almost always personal in nature; in the horror version of Stonehell, the characters would be related to the descendants of the prisoners that escaped after the dungeon fell into disuse.  As they plumb the depths, are the sub-humans they're fighting distant relatives, and do the players ever learn the truth about their legacy?  Lovecraftian themes implicit here are things like tainted blood, degeneracy, and one's inescapable destiny - conceits from such heart-warming, inspirational stories like "The Lurking Fear", "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family", "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", and "Pickman's Model".  Horror and Stonehell, best friends forever.

The Less and More Approach
Sometime earlier this year I reviewed the excellent Lesserton and Mor supplement by Faster Monkey; it describes a fully realized home base town for adventurers, along with a nearby ruined city for placing adventures.  Hmmm, the one thing Stonehell is missing is a home base town… combine those tastes, it'd be like peanut butter and chocolate.  Lesserton and Mor and Stonehell.  Mmm, tasty.

I'd consider removing the Stonehell upper works and placing the entrance right in the ruined city, perhaps under the old imperial palace or citadel.  Having to deal with Mor's Orkin tribes every time you go in and out of the city would be loads of fun (for the DM).

Alternatively, use the simple wilderness map that came with Lesserton and Mor to place it out in the countryside, and give the players multiple options on dungeon destinations.  Either way, between these two products, you have everything you need to run a long lasting campaign.  If I didn't have so much going on, I'd probably be running this as a campaign myself (with the horrific version of Stonehell from above).  Time to start warming up the TPK voodoo doll again and ask for nothing but 20's.

The Seven Samurai… in Stonehell
I have a limited knowledge of Eastern history, but when I hear about a despot using countless laborers to build a massive underground prison dungeon to hold political dissenters (part of the Stonehell back story), I can't help but think this would play well in a land once dominated by a corrupt, Imperial empire in a fantasy version of the Far East.  You could imagine the mad Dragon Emperor of the previous century bending the vast resources of the empire to implement his cruel scheme, his soldiers dragging away his enemies to the endless dungeons.

I keep waiting for the OSR version of AD&D 1E Oriental Adventures done right… it's coming some day, I believe it!  In the meantime, there's Ruins & Ronins, an add-on to the Swords & Wizardry rules to provide some Asian feel.  Unlike AD&D 1E which took an expansive view of Asian myth (with a whole lot of martial arts), Ruins & Ronins is Japan-centric and fairly grounded.   I'd want more of the high flying wire-based wuxia martial art action in the AD&D 1E version in my own Asian themed campaign - iron-skinned monks catching arrows, kung fu eagle claw attacks, ninjas and crazy kiai shouts - brings me back to those Saturday afternoon Hong Kong theater movies.  (Ruins & Ronins, though, is an excellent value - the monsters alone are worth having as a resource).

Assuming I didn't do a Stonehell campaign with my regular group as a main campaign, I could see reskinning it to be an Asian themed megadungeon.  Costuming orcs, hobgoblins and similar humanoids in lacquer armor and giving them some nunchucks - I'm all over it.

Closing Thoughts
Stonehell really changed my thinking around dungeon layout, and how much detail you need to run a good game.  Hopefully yesterday's picture of Gygax showed that he ran his own game off sparse notes as well.  I don't know if I can take advantage of the same layout techniques as I put together the Black City, I'm a rambler, but I'll be thinking about it.  As I get older and crankier, I want game products that play well at the table more than read well.  I've started to loathe products where monsters and key information are camouflaged in a wall of text as part of the encounter description - blech.  (Just because TSR did it that way doesn't mean it was a good approach, people).

I'd also recommend using my ideas for keeping a megadungeon campaign fresh in a Stonehell campaign - I'd build campaign events for the Stonehell campaign and a handful of rival NPC groups to keep the players on their toes, and require them to react once in a while instead of always initiating adventures.

The Weird, the Normal, and the D&D

So the Gamer ADD is hitting me hard.  I've been reading the new Weird Fantasy thing and this idea of converting Chaosium's Lovecraft Country sandbox has been ricocheting around my cranium, and my typical Gamer ADD risk mitigation strategy - parking the idea in the Junkyard - didn't work the first time out.  I wrote an article a while ago on Gamer ADD management strategies - mitigation, acceptance, avoidance and transference.  Parking an idea in the Junkyard until the time is right hasn't failed me yet!

There were lots of interesting comments yesterday about "What is the Weird?"  The thing I come back to is the general agreement that Weird needs Normal for contrast.  I have a hard time with Normal in a regular D&D world.  Normal is all about mundane, every day stuff; a fantasy world is built to instill a sense of wonder.  Normal is in the mind of the players - the default elements of the world need to feel familiar for the players.  (Sword and Planet, get the heck outta here - don't let the door hit you on the way out).

Alright, you say - just make your D&D world low magic, an analog to a real-world historical period so it feels grounded.

I find myself coming back to two periods in particular - post-Renaissance and the Roman Empire.  The historical Dark Ages and the Medieval periods seem too provincial and claustrophobic; the cosmopolitan nature of the Roman world and the Renaissance world supports a lot of the elements that modern folks take for granted in the world - autonomy, freedom of movement from place to place, a merchant class, inns and taverns and restaurants, mail and communications, commerce, and a degree of sophistication in culture and government  that creates art, theater, and politics.  An alternate earth in those periods could be made to feel "normal" to a modern sensibility - the Renaissance perhaps more so than the Roman world.

So I'm kicking around the idea that my sparse, Lovecraftian Weird Fantasy sandbox will either be placed in the South of (fake) England or France during the Renaissance, or will be at the height of the Pax Romana.

The Renaissance gives you overseas travel, the beginning of the Age of Sail and the colonization of distant places; there's definitely a pulp vibe to discovering vile cults in distant jungles.  I've previously remarked that the thing I miss the most when doing a standard D&D Dark Ages sandbox is the sea travel and exploring distant jungles or lost islands - it just doesn't fit the Medieval theme.

Chaosium has a whole Cthulhu expansion built around Rome (Cthulhu Invictus); it takes mythos entities and maps them to the creatures and stories of Greek and Roman myth (and vice versa).  Scrolls and relics, gods and new religions poured into Rome from the conquered territories and hinterlands; this would provide lots of opportunities for adventures involving cults, artifacts, and "books" of forbidden lore right in the capital city, let alone putting the campaign on the frontier and dealing with the unknown earth beyond the rule of law.

The game would be low magic D&D, most likely LOTFP rules, and draw heavily from Realms of Crawling Chaos and the Mythos stories.  While the Black City is still my main focus, I think I'll start keeping a second brainstorming notebook while I work through these ideas and see if one of them has mental legs.

I thought about going full circle and making the Viking Age a setting for both a Lovecraftian sandbox and the Black City megadungeon in the same milieu.  The world could be presented as low magic, gritty, and "realistic".  However, the tone of the Black City as a campaign dungeon, the gold-rush nature of having a sprawling ruin with lots of active adventuring parties plumbing the depths in competition, means supporting so many of the tropes of D&D that the dissonance might be too much for me.  It's awesome fodder for a D&D campaign with a touch of Lovecraft; not so much for a Lovecraft game that just happens to be using D&D rules.  But I'm brooding on it.

Anyway, next up, some more table-related items for the Black City (building the megadungeon project is still the top priority).

What is the Weird?

The other day I mused about taking all of the Call of Cthulhu "Lovecraft Country" supplements and making a D&D sandbox out of them - man, the Gamer ADD is hitting me bad on this one - I may need to start a notebook on it.  It's one of those ideas I wish I thought of years ago.  More on that in another post.

Trey wondered in the comments if Weird is becoming too commonplace.  I've come across a few recent adventures that I would classify as "Weird" - we just played Hammers of the God, and a recent review was Spire of Iron and Glass.  For me, a Weird adventure needs to put horror, fantasy and science fiction into the blender, and keep the nature of reality and the cosmology very ambiguous.

But what really is the definition of Weird?  Is it one of those, "I can't define it, but I'll know when I see it?"

Does the Weird need Normal to create contrast and context?  If the whole campaign world is a gonzo mix of sci-fi and magic and horror, is it still Weird or is it just Gonzo?  I've been reading through/enjoying my LotFP grind-box and Mr Jim is clearly in the camp that the world should be as normal as possible - low magic and gritty, so that there's a clear demarcation between the Normal and the Weird.  It's a very compelling idea, but where does that leave Xothique, or Hyperborea?  In the realm of Gonzo?

I don't know that I have an answer, but would love to hear from *you*.  The Black City project I've been plugging away on has a blend of sci fi, horror and fantasy that nudges it towards my definition of Weird, but I'm undecided about the nature of the larger campaign world and rules set.  Does context matter?

Here's a good question, like a thought exercise - is an alien ruin in a historical Viking game different, in terms of Weird vs Gonzo, than placing it in a high-magic fantasy campaign loaded with magic items and high level wizards?

Gamer ADD Junkyard: Lovecraft Country for D&D

"What is the most resilient parasite? An idea. Resilient, highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate..."
 -Inception

The Junkyard:  This is the place where I'll post campaign ideas, notions, and high concepts that just haven't gotten built.  Yet.

Folks running D&D games love to talk about putting a touch of Lovecraft in their D&D games .  I'm sure I'm not the only one who returns again and again to the idea of tweaking the tropes of D&D and running a Lovecraftian D&D game world.  The popular Weird Fantasy Roleplaying game nudges D&D that way, toning down the clerical and arcane magic, and amping the grittiness.  But just the other day I had one of those simplistic ideas that's just crazy enough to work - instead of trying to put some Lovecraft into my D&D game, how about putting some D&D into a Lovecraft game?

Here's the basic idea:  Chaosium created a Call of Cthulhu sandbox some years ago by publishing sourcebooks penned by Keith Herber for the major areas of Lovecraft Country - Arkham, Dunwich, Kingsport, Innsmouth, even Tales of the Miskatonic Valley.  The towns are fully detailed, populated with NPCs; each book has a few mini-adventures, and provides the ability to play follow-up stories to some of the famous Lovecraft tales.  It would not be hard to transplant these 3-4 sleepy little New England towns to someplace like the south of England, late in the Renaissance or during the age of sail, and run Lovecraft Country as a magic-light D&D game.

Arkham featured the famous Witch House (Dreams in the Witch House… has a familiar ring to it, eh?), along with Keziah Mason and Brown Jenkin; there's a graveyard that's home to dozens of ghouls, the famous Miskatonic University restricted collection, and plenty of other Lovecraft stories are in Arkham.  The University frequently finances expeditions to distant ruins, and could serve a similar role here.

Dunwich has the sorcerous Whateleys, of course, but the Chaosium Dunwich adds a huge twist to the area in the form of sprawling underground caverns and a secret entrance to the lair of an elder god.

Kingsport is one of my favorite locales; there's the worm that walks, and an ancient cult of Tzulcha worshippers that travel to the lightless caverns beneath Central Hill (featured in the short Yule story, The Festival), and the The Strange High House in the Mist - a portal to the Dreamlands on the high cliff overlooking the town.  Awesomeness!

Innsmouth, with it's Deep One hybrids and Innsmouth look, seems cliché to me as gaming grist these days, but would still be fun to include.  I might emphasize more the sunken Deep One city of Y'ha-nthlei and the threats past the reef, though the Esoteric Order of Dagon does make an excellent villainous cult.  We could mix it up.

Statistically, it'd be an easy campaign to pull together - mash-up LOTFP Weird Fantasy with Realms of Crawling Chaos by Goblinoid Games.  There'd be no humanoids, limited or no demihumans, and low magic.  The benefit of having a few hundred sketched out NPCs and living/breathing towns (re-skinned for the 16th century) and littering the countryside with Lovecraftian plot hooks - that's the draw. Presto, instant Lovecraftian sandbox.  Heck, since it'd be in an alternate England, you could put in the Severn Valley and Campbell's Goatswood locations, too.  I love Y'golonac and Glaaki.

An obvious hook for the campaign would be the University and the College of Magic.  (Perhaps magic is still studied as a black science, though the church works tirelessly to get it completely banned).  One of the Arkham plot hooks in the Chaosium books involve some of the scientists at the University hearing about a recent meteorite and sending a group out to Dunwich to recover it; it very quickly plunges the characters into exploring both Arkham and Dunwich.  This would work fine to kick off a Weird Fantasy version, and then let the players run with it from there.

There's tension between arcane casters and clerics in the weird fantasy tradition (that whole witch hunt/heresy thing), but adding the Cthulhu Mythos creates a new dynamic.  Arcane casters can argue there actually is blasphemous magic involving Elder gods and insane cults that threatens them all, and gives clerical party members a plausible reason for temporarily teaming up with them, despite the church hierarchy crusading to close Miskatonic completely.  (I would make the standard magic user spell lists the 'acceptable magic' from the perspective of the majority of arcane casters, and the Mythos spells, from something like Realms of Crawling Chaos, as the banned magic found only in blasphemous Mythos tomes).

I think the big mental switch for me is this - I would approach this like setting up a sprawling Call of Cthulhu sandbox, where you place monsters, cults, and adventures irrespective of challenge and levels, but run low-level D&D guys through it.  It seems like a much different thought exercise than creating a D&D game, with the tropes of D&D in mind (classes and levels and magical rewards).  For instance, the Black City, while it might turn out to be an excellent mega dungeon setting, is clearly being built with D&D style adventuring in mind - it envisions much more pulp action, even with some of the horror.

The Junkyard - City of Ember for Gamma World

"What is the most resilient parasite? An idea. Resilient, highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate..."
-Inception

The Junkyard:  This is the place where I'll post campaign ideas, notions, and high concepts that just haven't gotten built.  Yet.

I recently watched a movie with the kiddos, something called "The City of Ember".  In the prologue, the world is being destroyed by an apocalypse and a group of humans are shuffled off to a city-sized shelter deep underground, to wait out two hundred years before returning to the surface.  Over the course of the two hundred years, the time capsule with instructions to escape the city is lost, and people continue to live in the city as the infrastructure crumbles over time.

I couldn't help but think how this would be a great set up for Mutant Future or Gamma World.  The infrastructure of the sheltered enclave, New Eden, is crumbling, and the mayor or elders come to a fateful decision after consulting the archives; it's time to send a search party to the surface world looking for a critical MacGuffin before the city's reactor blows up.  (Although I never played anything in the Fallout series, I think they have a similar set up).

It turns the tropes of Gamma World on it's head.  In Gamma World, the characters are typically primitives, living in the mutant future, and they know next to nothing about the Ancients or their technology.

In this type of game, the characters would know rudimentary technology, and be equipped with maps hundreds of years out of date showing the location of ancient military complexes, research centers, and nearby cities where they could seek the control rods or fuel needed to keep the city running.  They would know nothing about the barbaric societies and mutant horrors waiting on the surface.

Emerging after 200 years...

The Grognardian is currently doing a cover-to-cover reading of 1st Edition Gamma World (thanks James - it's been fun so far!) and he asked the question whether the 1st Edition cover actually fits the game.  It would fit this approach to Gamma World!  Scientist-type characters with armaments, maps and radiation detectors would be perfect for the type of characters emerging from the shelter.  You could see a Mutant Future style android in that mix, some pure strain humans, and maybe even humans with limited mutations - perhaps the vault wasn't as sealed as expected.

This would be a very easy campaign to set up, too - basically plop the home base shelter in the middle of a giant hex crawl of the ruined future, give the players an outdated map from 200 years ago, and let them roll.  There would be a time limit of course - be back in 6 months, or New Eden goes boom.

Too often Gamma World adventures were presented as coming-of-age quests for teenage primitives in the Gamma World; I like the idea of turning that on it's head and having the characters start as tough soldiers and scientists, with some basic equipment and weapons, conducting a wide area survey seeking critical supplies before time is up.

Anyway, I'm going to park this idea in the Junkyard while I focus on the Black City, but it's intriguing!

"You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! Damn you all to hell!"

The Junkyard of Ideas: The Glantri Game

"What is the most resilient parasite? An idea. Resilient, highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate..."
-Inception

The Junkyard:  This is the place where I'll post campaign ideas, notions, and high concepts that just haven't gotten built.  Yet.

My love for the GAZ3, Principalities of Glantri, is disproportionate to the amount of time it's actually seen use on the game table, but it's a perennial visitor during my bouts of Gamer ADD when I'm casting around for a new campaign setting.  One of these days.

Glantri is a late 80's classic D&D product written by Bruce Heard, part of the Gazetteer series for classic D&D's "Known World".  Glantri is a realm of wizard-princes where magic is king; it's chock full of chaotic, homicidal, high level magic users.  It's about as gonzo a setting I've seen; the source of magic throughout the world is an alien nuclear reactor deep beneath Glantri City, buried there when an ancient star ship crash landed, suffered a melt down, and sank beneath the earth.  The ultimate origin of most magical creatures in the Known World is magical mutation.

Glantri did magic-as-technology long before Eberron; it did the Great School of Magic well before Hogwarts (and had arcaners vs mundaners); it's had vampire, lich and werewolf wizards in various dark brotherhoods well before the Camarilla and WOD; it's got power politics, skullduggery, and even a few cameos from Clark Ashton Smith's Averoigne (courtesy of X2 Castle Amber).  Glantri City is riddled with twisting canals and waterways like Venice, and the streets are home to conniving cabals of every sort, including powerful thieves and assassin's guilds.  There's quite a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor, too, so the tone can be adjusted lighter or darker to fit your own vision - it wouldn't be hard to run a Glantri-game like Discworld, for instance.

The Glantri sourcebook has quite a bit of rules-crunch - there are skill bolt-ons to the magic user class to allow things like potion making, elemental mastery, dracology, to necromancy; there are alternate XP rules for magic research, alternate rules for spell and item creation, and a new Path to Immortality by mastering Glantri's unique magical source, the Radiance.  The later editions of Classic D&D - BECMI and the Rules Cyclopedia - went from levels 1-36 and had an end-game focused on gaining immortality.

I've often thought if I wanted to run a campaign with byzantine politics, backstabbing, and "Tales of the Dying Earth" style roguery and repartee, I'd place it in Glantri.  A megadungeon would provide a good balance of consistent dungeon adventuring versus treacherous politics, and there would be no shortage of patron-wizards to set objectives in the dungeon.

The biggest reason I haven't built a campaign around Glantri yet is "The Mystara effect".  I have a love-hate relationship with the Known World (Mystara); it's an odd patchwork of faux-historical nations stuck together, and I'm never sure if I want to set a game there or transplant a Gazetteer somewhere else.  When I've done Known World games in the past, they've always been centered around Karameikos and using various classic modules placed in the Grand Duchy.

Stonehell Dungeon: Down Night-Haunted Halls or Castle of the Mad Archmage, two recent OSR products, would be excellent megadungeon center pieces for a Glantri game.  And the wheels start to turn in Beedo's mind again...

The Junkyard of Ideas: Midnight for Old School D&D

"What is the most resilient parasite? An idea. Resilient, highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate..."
-Inception

The Junkyard:  This is the place where I'll post campaign ideas, notions, and high concepts that just haven't gotten built… yet.

It's a way to help manage (or encourage) my Gamer Attention Deficit Disorder.  And then you'll be infected with the idea too.  Muhaha.

Midnight RPG:  gone but not forgotten

Midnight for Old School D&D
Midnight was a 3.x era campaign setting put out by Fantasy Flight Games.  Here is what made it awesome.  Start by envisioning The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the world of Middle Earth, and imagine that something went horribly wrong for the Fellowship.  Sauron won the war.  Aragorn's head went on the pike, Gandalf was killed, Sauron got the One Ring, and the orcs conquered the major cities of Middle Earth.  Puppet rulers were placed in charge, backed up by the orc generals and their armies; many humans were placed in labor camps.  In the hundred years since the fall, Sauron has been plotting his final campaigns against the few holdouts of good - places like Lothlorien and Rivendell that are now facing the long night of defeat.

That's the starting place for the world of Midnight.

But it gets better.  The vast ruined wastes of the old kingdoms are now haunted by packs of undead ghouls, the Fell, permeating the setting with an element of survival horror if the party crosses the wilds.  Life in the cities feels  like WW2 era France and the Nazi-resistance.  Evil clerics called "Legates" enforce the edicts of the Dark Lord and are constantly on the hunt for traitors.

Making it Old School
I'm always kicking around the idea of taking the huge Midnight continental map, Eredane, and converting it to a massive hex map.  The idea of wandering from place to place, living off the land, encountering old ruins, fighting ghouls, trying to recover the magic and faith that was lost, all while hiding from armies on the move, would work really well as an old school hex crawl with tons of random tables.

I ran short campaigns in 3.x era Midnight, because I found creating stat blocks in 3.x was so tiresome; that's no longer a problem if we make it old school!

There are two reasons this project is still on the shelf.  I've been waiting to learn a graphics program before carving up the Midnight map into manageable chunks and converting it to a hex map.  I recently got a GIMP book and plan on learning how to use GIMP.  The other reason is that when I decided on The Black City as my next project, our weekly play group had sketchy attendance and I thought a future megadungeon made more sense to allow people to slide in and out.  (Episodic play and all that).

But there's no need to convert Midnight at all; you could start with your own Tolkien-like setting, nuke it into a post-apocalyptic wasteland ruled by the evil overlord, and roll out the zombies and orcs.  What fun!