Book of War Comes to Gothic Greyhawk

It's been a few weeks since we had a game session - we reconvened this past weekend.  Our last game ended with the player's receiving a messenger pigeon with a note explaining how  a distant battle turned out - but I decided it would be fun to let the players command both sides in the battle, and play it out this week, using Delta's Book of War rules for miniatures.  Their own actions would determine the course of the battle, and thus the contents of the note.

First - a step back, to orientate readers.  I'm calling this current campaign arc "Race for the Demonomicon".   It began when the characters learned, while trading horses with hill men in the Sterich Valley, about their old enemy, the Witch, marching off into the wilds with her army of orcs.  She was seeking a foul book, the Demonomicon, and had claimed to have learned a clue regarding its resting place - the horde of Iggwilv, at THE LOST CAVERNS OF TSOJCANTH*.

The players researched the book back at the well-stocked library they inherited from the vampire, Strahd, and learned that Iggwilv (a legendary Greyhawk villainess) had compiled her multiple lifetimes of demon lore and demon magic into a famous grimoire, the Demonomicon.  They gained additional clues as to the location of the lost caverns, and set off into the mountains on their own expedition.  This was many game sessions ago.

On the DM's side of the screen, a number of powerful forces at work in Greyhawk have also launched expeditionary forces to be the first to find the book.  Based on their starting locations, I've been plotting their progress and identifying when they'll be in the area of southwest Sterich on the calendar.  There are many interested parties after the book.  While the characters were on a side quest to THE FORGOTTEN TEMPLE OF THARIZDUN, their gnome allies had a small force guarding the area of the Lost Caverns when the witch - the first seeker of the book - arrived in the area.

I set up two sample forces for the battle between the gnomes and the witch's orcs.  The gnomes were heavily outgunned, but the player's goal was to inflict some losses on the witch (knowing, as metagame knowledge, it would make their ultimate job a little easier since they might eventually have to face the witch themselves).  Enter, Delta's Book of War.

Book of War
Book of War is a supplement for OD&D that provides simple rules for running large scale miniature battles using D&D math around armor classes and hit dice.  I put together two basic forces for the players, added some scenario rules, briefed them on how to play, and then helped referee the skirmish.  (I'm going to put together an actual review of Book of War sometime in the next few days).

The players randomly made some terrain roles for the battle map, rolled for sides (the two 10 year olds ended up with the witch's overpowered forces) and away we went.

The gnomes fielded 8 Infantry Units, 3 Archer Units, and a parcel of magic weapons on one of the units.  The witch's side had 6 light Orc units, 3 Orc Archers, 5 light Evil Men, a Gargoyle unit (5 gargoyles), and a Troll hero.   I swagged the point totals, but I had it loosely at 50 to 75 in favor of the witch, a big gap.

Here's the set up (using little wooden blocks and discs for the troops - each block or disc is 10:1, so the 8 gnome infantry blocks at the top of the picture represent 80 gnomes, with 3 blocks representing 30 archers nearby).

Book of War is easy to play, so the kids quickly moved out their forces, even learning how to "wheel" their orc infantry.  We discovered the leather-clad orcs, with movement 12, had a significant movement advantage over the heavily armored gnomes, which only moved 6.  The dad's side had a few rounds where their archers, on the high ground, rolled nothing but low numbers - it already wasn't looking good for the grown ups.

The kid's figured out if they attacked the archers with the flying gargoyle unit, the magic items were too far away to help (and my test scenario is horribly flawed!).  Continuing their unchecked aggression, the kids charged their evil men over the hill, and finished wheeling the orc spearmen to bring them in on the gnome flank.  It was all over.

The guys really liked Book of War, it plays fast and fun, and they liked having something less abstract than War Machine, which we've used in the past.  We'll have to work in more Book of War opportunities (with evenly matched sides).

Meanwhile, back at THE FORGOTTEN TEMPLE OF THARIZDUN, the players read the note that contained the account of the gnomish rout they just played.  They spent a long time considering their next move.  Their last major action was a 3-week epic battle (3 weeks of game sessions) at the entrance to the Forgotten Temple, in which they fought wave after wave of humanoids and giant-kin.  They were exhausted and spent, but they had the strong belief that the dungeon was drained of armed resistance, and they'd soon be able to moon-walk around the dungeon from one unguarded chest to another, looting.

Unfortunately, the excursion to the temple was meant to be a side trek for them, and the witch and the Lost Caverns were their original goal.  Do they abandon the empty dungeon, leaving all that possible treasure unguarded, to hurry back to the gnomish vale and take on the witch?  It would be a 3-4 day tough march back to the vale, and who knows how many days further north would be the actual Lost Caverns?

On the other hand, if they stayed to explore the Temple, they were giving the witch unfettered access to the Lost Caverns, and a huge head start on finding the Demonomicon ahead of them.  A true dilemma.

After much debating, the following viewpoint won out:  The Witch was "lawful", and served the devils, not the demons; the group theorized that she wanted the Demonomicon to keep it away from Orcus and his minions, and wouldn't use it herself.  They knew where she had her lair - Witch Mountain, of course - and figured the worst case was they'd have to besiege her mountain to get the book if she beat them to it.  But their main bit of rationalization was that the forces of the Forgotten Temple were previously a major threat to their allies, and they owed it to the gnomes to make sure the place was properly pacified.  They also believed that a Holy Sword awaited them in the dungeons.

They descended into the dungeons of Tharizdun, experiencing black obsidian floors, and walls of mauve with ropy purple tentacles writhing just beneath the surface of the stone.  Each next room was asdisquieting and bizarre.  Minor treasures were found, and a bronze ladder was discovered in a secret room.  It descended down a shaft into the endless dark, only a cold draft coming from deep below to hint at what lay below.

The players are convinced the purple striations are evidence of the Mind Flayers, and the awful tentacle motif is more evidence that this place was an illithid temple.  The bronze rung ladder surely leads to the Underdark.

We needed to end for the night shortly thereafter, with many unanswered questions.

*Proper Gygaxian etiquette requires the capitalization of all vintage AD&D TSR products, just like in the DMG.

The Headless Jotun

One of the areas I was revising for the Black City campaign last week is the Great Glacier.  The city is cut in half by a glacier that's pushed through the ruins, calving off ice chunks into the fjord along which the ruins sit.

A curious item to be found in the dungeons is the severed head of a jotun - the never-ending ichor that oozes from the neck has formed a pool which spawns nasty frost mites and other pests in the dungeon.  The headless body, on the other hand, is still frozen in the glacier…

The Headless Jotun
The jotuns are mythological ancestors of the races of giants, semi-divine beings dwelling beyond the world in their realm of Jotunheimr.  The passage beyond Midgard was once near the icy north of Thule.  This jotun's head was sliced off by an energy beam from the city's defense system, the Face in the Ground, and the ichor-covered head quickly melted into the glacier.  The headless body dropped onto the glacier - it radiates extreme cold and has long been covered by ice and snow.

Characters searching in the hex [I'm redoing the map, so I'll add the hex number later] have a chance, equal to finding a secret door, of noticing the 20' tall, blue, headless body, buried under 5-10' of ice.

If the Jotun Head is dug out of the dungeon and reunited to the body, the jotun's power is restored and the being will come back to life.  Roll a standard reaction to determine if the jotun immediately starts eating characters; if the reaction roll is positive, perhaps it offers a divine boon before stalking off to the north.

One other thing - the Face in the Ground may have been reactivated during excursions into the ruins; if so, it's entirely likely the Jotun is attacked all over again.

Fornjot the Jotun
AC as plate and shield, MV 18, HD 20, Atk By weapon or smash, damage 7d6, ML 11, AL C.

The jotun radiates extreme cold when angry, causing 1-3 damage per round to characters in melee with it.  The Jotun can cast magic user spells as a 13th level magic user, preferring spells of illusion, wind, or cold.

Note:
I always loved the part of Princess Mononoke where the mercenaries are running around with the head of the forest god of the wood, so I'm amused to have a bit with Vikings carrying around the head of an immortal giant.  I'm sure players will wonder what a jotun's head is worth, and it could lead to interesting problems if brought back to camp.

Cthulhu Gaming Patronage

Pagan Publishing had an amazing run of hit books starting in the late 1990's culminating with their Delta Green setting for  modern Call of Cthulhu.  I keep hearing on the message boards that an update to Delta Green is in the works, as well as a move towards publishing their books in PDF through One Book Shelf.  In the meantime, a few of the authors that contributed to Pagan's catalog have some related kickstarters to check out:

The Sense of the Sleight of Hand Man
This is a Dreamlands campaign starting out in 1920's New York.  Pagan's previous forays into the Dreamlands are more on the nightmare side than Lord Dunsany, so there's no doubt this will be a darker interpretation of the Otherworld.  Dennis Detwiller is a creative double threat here, writing and drawing the campaign himself; he has a lot of cool stuff on his blog to check out:  Nothing Can Stop the Blog.

Bumps in the Night
John H. Crowe III wrote and contributed to a number of Pagan's early Cthulhu books, like Mortal Coils and Coming Full Circle, and is the author on this collection of 5 non-Mythos horror scenarios for COC, Bumps in the Night. Pagan still has a loyal following and this one blew through the goal in less than half a day (both of these kickstarters are going pretty strong).

Pelgrane Press:  Night's Black Agents
Not a Pagan update, but since I'm on the subject of promoting horror gaming:  the next Gumshoe book, Kenneth Hite's Night's Black Agents, is in pre-order and is targeted for this summer (I'm hoping by GenCon).  Players take on the role of spies and ex-military in a shadowy world of vampire conspiracies.  The spy thriller genre is a great fit for Gumshoe's resource management - it should handle secret identities, hidden weapon stashes, underworld contacts, all that spy thriller stuff, really well.  I can see myself using this to do a mash-up of Trail and Delta Green and Night's Black Agents - alien vampires guiding the world towards the nihilistic ascendance of Nyarlathotep.

Pulp Cthulhu Inspirations

Pulp Cthulhu: Reckless Adventures in the 1930's jumps into the decade of pulp adventure! Enter a time when the world changes. Economic despair brings a nation low, while an eldritch shift in the fabric of reality unleashes dark horrors, and tempts heroes. Join in as secret societies and occult leagues battle against horrific creatures in a timeless struggle for existence.


Pulp Cthulhu expands upon the [Call of Cthulhu] setting and rules system, allowing for fast-paced, cinematic game play. It provides rules for insane scientists, reanimators, mentalists, gadgeteers, professor-sorcerers, supernatural detectives and much more...
--From Chaosium's Pulp Cthulhu blurb

Chaosium has been talking about Pulp Cthulhu for nearly 10 years - I remember hearing about it back when Cthulhu d20 was released, and I seem to recall an early version was even supposed to be a dual-stat product (BRP and d20).  That's a long time ago.

As I'm working through the background for our upcoming Trail of Cthulhu campaign, I realize the game is already going to be heavy on the pulp side of things - the characters will be a bit more stalwart than the nervous, sensitive types in Lovecraft's bleaker stories; the struggles will be a bit more real-world and physical than philosophical and dread-inspiring cosmic nihilism.

Note:  Ultimately I would like to run a campaign that features Lovecraft's bleaker themes, but I think it's something we'd either build up to, or run some one-shots in the Purist mode first - Trail has quite a few excellent Purist one-shots I'll be reviewing in the near future.  But a pulp campaign is a safe start for D&D gamers on their first foray into Cthulhu gaming.

I recently re-read Stunning Eldritch Tales, and it struck me how much two-fisted pulp action is already in some of the Trail of Cthulhu books - you've got sinister Nazi and Japanese agents, vicious Chinese triads and gangsters, jaunts to deserted islands, and weird science.  There's even a masked crime fighter like the Shadow, or the Green Hornet, in one of the investigations.

I'm working through the Dramatis Personae for the campaign, and we've  got plans to make player characters in a couple of weeks.

I've been thinking about pulling out my Mignola Lobster Johnson stories for some extra inspiration.  So here's the question for the readers - what's your favorite bit of pulp inspiration?  It could be a film, a comic, or even a gaming supplement or book.  Thanks!

Avoiding the RPG Railroad

Going off the rails on a crazy train

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
--Inigo Montoya

Earlier this week, Drance asked the question, "Can one merge the techniques behind railroading and the sandbox style of roleplaying?"  I quipped off an answer, something like "there is no style of railroad campaign, railroading is a technique, not a campaign style".  I've often observed the term bandied about to describe Paizo's adventure paths, or any investigative scenario, as if an entire class or style of gaming is railroad after railroad.  "We don't do adventure paths, because we don't do railroads".

The problem is one person's "railroad" is the other guy's great night of adventuring.  Lots of people buy and play those Paizo adventure paths and seem to enjoy them, so something seems fishy denigrating the whole lot of them.  I had some guy telling me recently the AD&D Ravenloft module was the worst railroad ever written.  I don't know which Ravenloft he read; the one we played was a 6 month guerilla war waged against Strahd and his coven of vampires, where every session tested the player's planning and resource management.  It was an amazing sandbox game.

This goes beyond nomenclature and definitions -  the whole issue is ridiculously subjective.  There is a sliding scale around constraining player choice, with varying shades of grey, and no clear demarcation point where diminished choices become an actual railroad.  Back when a few of us were discussing quantum ogres and whether the DM could fudge dice like Al Pacino, my concern with Illusionism was that if it was well done, the players wouldn't know the difference - so where do you draw the line?

Sidebar:  Illusionism is the technique of giving the players the appearance of choice, but the DM foists his or her own plan on the situation regardless.  The idea behind the quantum ogre involved moving the DM's precious ogre encounter into whatever woods the players entered first.  If you're Al Pacino, you can get away with it, and the players are none the wiser.  But Illusionism is the Railroad's cousin.  If I had to settle on a simple definition for Railroad, it'd be something like this, "imposing a predetermined outcome on the game's events" - at least to get past the semantics.

To give you an idea of the problems with subjectivity, consider these scenarios:  Is a trap with only one solution, a railroad?  How about if the town guard is after the party, and there's only one safe way out of town?  Does your answer change if they robbed someone, precipitating the man hunt?  How about when one NPC after another keeps giving them the same, tired plot hook, leading towards the DM's prepared adventure site? Is a linear dungeon a railroad?

My own solution to the problem of subjectivity was to look at things from the game master's side of the table, and to apply the objective test based on my definition of railroad:  Is the DM predetermining the game's outcomes?  Looking at the situations above, each one of them can be construed as a railroad if the DM has predetermined a singular solution or a particular outcome - if there's truly only one way to beat the trap, to get out of town, where to adventure, or how to proceed.

The interesting thing about blogging, you get exposed to new ideas, you get the chance to reflect and mature your own thinking.  These days I don't believe the objective test goes far enough - the opposite of the railroad is agency and choice, which means the players have explicit influence on the actual events.  The test of whether player choice matters is subjective from the player's perspective.  It's not enough for the DM to do the right thing from the DM's side of the screen, but he or she needs to let the players know they're playing it straight, too.

Consider this pair of railroad examples to illustrate the concern around influence and choice:

• No matter what the players do, the villain is going to escape - invisibility, fly spell, teleport - the villain will pull something out of the hat and escape to return later in the adventure.
• No matter what the players say to the duke, they're not going to change the duke's mind.

We've all seen adventures from the 80's that required a villain to make an appearance, do some bad things, and then escape to return later.  (Poor Dragonlance, always taken to the wood shed).  When the players slap a Silence 15' spell on the evil wizard, and he uses a teleport spell to escape anyway, that kind of apparent cheating seems to cross the line - it's like the classic dice fudging problem, not letting the players win when they've played well and should have won.

But consider how the answer changes if the players subsequently learn the big bad guy wasn't actually a wizard at all, but a demon in human guise using spell-like abilities to teleport (thus circumventing the Silence spell).  Likewise, the duke has been mind controlled by his wicked vizier and the players have no chance of convincing him of their innocence because of the enchantment.  It's only when they're surreptitiously visited by the previous adviser to the Duke that knowledge about the charm comes to light and they understand why things unfolded poorly for them.  In both cases, the player's lack of influence can be mitigated when they get the rest of the information - which is why I'm putting an emphasis now on going the extra mile in terms of player-facing information.

Here’s the summation.  The appearance of being railroaded is going to come up in any game - it's subjective, because there's a sliding scale of constrained choice.  The scale starts with resource constraints and mild nudging on the one end of the spectrum, and goes all the way to the DM's heavy hand forcing the action with Mary Sue NPCs, pixelbitching traps,  and undefeatable villains on the other side of the spectrum.  It's important for the DM to avoid predetermined outcomes, but it's just as important to allow the players to influence events through their choices, and ensure that they see that they have influence, too.  The TL;DR answer to the railroad comes back to the simple principle of "saying Yes" during gaming and ensuring that choices matter.

Afterthoughts
Getting back to Drance's question, my answer stands - there's nothing inherent about a sandbox game that makes it immune to the railroad, because the railroad is a bad technique that pops up whenever the DM starts reducing choice and influence; it's not a campaign style.  There are plenty of opportunities for the DM to introduce antagonist reactions and chokepoints in a sandbox that force the direction of the game, even if the sandbox started fairly wide open and player-driven.  I tend to think what he's really asking is whether the DM can introduce events, antagonists, plot hooks, and other elements of story-driven games into the sandbox, and still give the players a full range of agency.  The answer is YES, but use these things judiciously.

There are campaign styles that are more susceptible to the railroad technique than traditional site-based locations, which is how the adventure paths and story games get implicated.  I'm doing a lot of prep for our upcoming Cthulhu games, and the investigative genre is fraught with peril.  Impactful horror games rely on the big reveal, and if you're not careful, you can find yourself taking shortcuts through nudging and leading and railroading to ensure the players get to the payoff moment.  That's a big enough topic - avoiding the railroad during horror gaming - to make it a separate, upcoming post.


*The picture is Blaine the Mono, from the cover of Stephen King's The Wastelands

Poll Results Round Up

Polls from the past few months included how people use Cthulhoid monsters in their games, how high do you like your D&D games to go, and how do bloggers keep up with their favorite blogs.

HOW DO YOU MAINLY USE THE MONSTERS OF THE CTHULHU MYTHOS IN YOUR GAME?
Alien terrors in a horror game (58%) Monsters in a fantasy game (41%)

Monsters from the Mythos show up in a wide range of stories, from Lovecraft's bleak fiction in the 1920's to the weird fantasy stories of Clark Ashton Smith and RE Howard; its natural that gamers would use them in a blend of horror games and fantasy games.  I like pulling in Cthulhuoid monsters into fantasy whenever I want the D&D game to take a turn towards horror as a change of pace.

WHAT ARE THE HIGHEST LEVELS YOU LIKE TO SEE IN YOUR D&D GAMES?
Level 6 (OD&D, S&W) (17%), Levels 10-14 (until killed by the Tomb of Horrors) (38%), Levels 14 (BX) (12%), Level 20 (3.X, 1E, LL) (12%), Level 30 (4E) (0%), Level 36 (BECMI) (2%), Until godly ascension (4%), D&D never ends, fool! (11%).

More often than not, we play BX or similar systems that end by level 14, so that's probably where I voted, but I have to believe the majority of folks that voted D&D continues until the high level characters are killed by the Tomb of Horrors are the right-thinkers in the bunch.  It creates a funny mental image, high level characters besotted with ennui, marching off to the Tomb of Horrors to either end their tiresome existence or win the ultimate prize.  Honorable mention goes to "D&D never ends, fool!"

HOW DO YOU KEEP UP WITH YOUR FAVORITE BLOGS?
Google Reader (34%) G+ Stream (0%) A Blogroll (34%) RSS or feedreader (5%) Bookmark (16%) Search Engine (4%) Something else (5%)

I use Google Reader quite a bit, it's a good way to keep up with Wordpress blogs, but I learned from the comments that quite a few folks use their blogger dashboard to browse blogspot blogs in the stream.

I was surprised how many folks use blogrolls to keep up on their favorite blogs - that motivated me to make sure my favorite Wordpress blogs get added to my blogrolls.

One good thing I learned was that no one uses their G+ stream as a primary way of keeping up with blogs, so there's no major reason for merging your G+ and blogger accounts.

Psionic Alien Ghosts

One of the locations I recently put together for the Black City is haunted by a psionic ghost.

The Black City is an alien ruin because the race of Greys was slaughtered in a psychic cataclysm before the ice retreated.  Their most powerful controllers, the hive minds, were advanced telepaths, linking the entire colony telepathically.  When tragedy struck, the torment of the hive minds left behind psychic ghosts, malevolent shadows of pain and hatred that linger even now.

Thus, there's a class of psionic monsters in the Black City that can be encountered in locations where a hive mind died during the cataclysm.  While the more powerful versions will be like the Monster of the ID (drawing inspiration from that classic, Forbidden Planet) the one inhabiting the ruined "central command" is more like a vicious poltergeist.  Another one to add to the Black City Bestiary.

The calcified corpse of the hive mind still sits in the large amplifier chair that once allowed it to broadcast commands throughout the city.  A dull mauve alert has been flashing for a millennium or more, casting the large room into intermittent darkness.  The psionic ghost fettered to that crystal corpse attacks with telekinetic pushes, or seizing weapons to smack characters with their own armaments.  The push attack isn't damaging, but anyone that climbs the tall shaft from dungeon level 1 into central command from below is in for a rude surprise.

Psionic Ghost of the Hive Mind
AC as Unarmored*, MV 12, HD 5*, Atk By weapon or push, ML 12, AL C.

*The AC and HD stats are for the corpse fetter.  The actual psionic entity is immaterial.  Destroying the fetter by reducing it's hit points to zero releases the psychic residue and destroys the ghost.

Unlimited by the physical constraints of a body, the psionic ghost can make 2-4 attacks per round.

Invisible:  the psionic ghost is invisible, but any seized weapons will dance around in front of the character it's attacking.  Detect Invisible reveals the psionic ghost, which appears like a malevolent leering alien with oversized head, and the tendril fetters tying it to the crystalline corpse like a silver cord are plainly seen.  Detect Evil also reveals the ghost's presence and the fetter.

Telekinetic Push:  A character saves vs paralysis or is knocked down by the telekinetic push.  This can be used to knock characters back down the shaft, or keep them from charging the crystal corpse.

Weapon Grab:  treat each weapon as AC Chain for purpose of the grab attack; a character can make an open doors check to retain a weapon already in hand, but a sheathed weapon is yanked away for use by the ghost.

Weapon Attack:  Any seized weapons can be used on future rounds to make a 5HD attack.