Launching the Colonial Hex Crawl

After a positive reception to Monday's post on a 'colonial hex crawl', I started sketching out the ideas this week for it, and I'm really warming to the idea as a mini-project.

I like hex crawls that involve mostly human encounters, because of the wide open possibilities for negotiation and parley in lieu of fight, fight, fight.  The American wilds in the early 17th century had a scattering of frontier forts and trading posts of the Dutch and French, colonies for the Dutch, English, and Swedish, and larger French settlements in Quebec and Montreal.  The native Algonquin and Iroquois populations are both allies and antagonists, and the two nations themselves were made of tribes that competed with each other.  I'm envisioning a wilderness where common encounters could involve patrols of soldiers associated with a fort; fur trappers; traders and merchants; natives of many types - farmers, hunters, traders, and warriors; various Christian missionaries - English Protestant or French Catholic.

The frontier suggests a portable alternate to the gold piece economy - animal furs and pelts were the major currency between Europeans and the natives.  There are plenty of sources that lay out the value of beaver pelts vis-à-vis common goods.  Returning home with stacks of pelts instead of gold pieces and gems is flavorful.

It's easy to map standard classes to period archetypes - fighters and specialists are soldiers, hunters, trappers, outdoorsman, and native guides; clerics are missionaries or native shaman; magic users represent witches, warlocks, and hermetic scholars that have engaged with the dark powers.  (They should probably stay away from Plymouth, or Salem.)  I don’t have strong opinions on the demi human classes, yet, but will probably make them Old World rarities or isolated throwbacks.

Okay, great, I have an idea to make an early modern period work as a frontier hex crawl - what makes it over the top?

The exciting bit is to create an American horror mythos that works for the older period - something like Lovecraft's New England or Ramsey Campbell's Severn Valley, but set in 1630 and heavily flavored with Native American folklore.  The mundane challenges of foreign nationals and hostile natives contrasts with exploring the wilderness and discovering slumbering monsters and awful gods.  Meanwhile, the colonists and traders themselves bring their own civilized horrors with them - the curses of vampirism or lycanthropy cross the ocean with the colonists, escaping into the wilds and preying on peoples not accustomed to dealing with them.  Those two themes - "modern" people encountering ancient horrors in the wilds, and "native" people dealing with the blight of civilization - that's what makes it really interesting for me.


*The awesome Wendigo interpretation is by Monkey Paw on deviant art

Angry Mutant Apes of the Black City

I was working on the ape men colony in the Black City's ruined arena, and had some fun with worm madness and the ape men.  Here's the simple version so you don't have to go back and read stuff from a year ago:

The ape men were slaves of the aliens in the city, white haired hominids like the Australopithecus, created for labor and servitude.  The aliens bred them by devolving early humans down along the genetic tree to a more primitive state.  The other factor to consider is worm infection.  The Greys bioengineered a parasitic worm that mutates and enrages its host (roid worms)- if you want a blast from the past, here's a whole article about worm infection: Worm infection and berserkers.  So what happens when a white ape gets infected with worm madness?

Angry Mutant Apes.

When the ape men see first signs of infection in a member of the band, they dump them in the pits, a series of warren-like passages beneath the tunnels where they lair.  There's a ramp leading into the arena from the pits, with a grate barring the way, and the ape men lift the grate to release the hungry mutants whenever the area is invaded.  I figure it's like Barsoom with snow and ice.

Angry Mutant Ape
AC as leather armor and shield, MV 12, HD 4, Atk 2 claws, 1d4/1d4, and see below, ML 7, AL N.

The ape men have learned to avoid infected water sources like the well in the Transit Tunnels, but there are still pools on the level 2 Warrens that have worm infection.  When a white ape is infected with worm madness, the unstable DNA of the ape men combines with the worm infection to transform the white ape into an actual 4HD carnivorous gorilla monster; 50% of them mutate further and gain one of the attributes from below.

1  Extra Arms - the mutant ape can make 4 claw attacks instead of two
2  Horn - a huge horn grows out of the mutant apes skull, granting a gore attack (1d6)
3  Vicious Bite - the mutant can bite for 1d8 damage
4  Oversized (extra HD) - the mutant is 5HD instead of 4HD
5  Sharp Claws - each claw attack is 3-6 damage (1d4+2)
6  Fast Healing - the mutant regenerates 2hp per round
7  Purple!  - 8HD and fist pounds that do 2-12 damage per fist
8  Gore slathered:  AC as unarmored, +2 attack/damage, morale 12, roll again
9  Super Intelligent:  has used low level telepathy or empathy to turn the other mutants into its followers
10.. ?

This table can easily be expanded.  What's your favorite ape mutation that belongs on the mutant white ape table?


* The picture is a mash-up of Trek, Congo, and the four-armed white apes from the Jon Carter Movie.

Review of Book of War

Last week, we spent about half our regular game session running a play test mass combat using the Book of War rules - here is the actual review.

Book of War is a short pamphlet (24 pages) that provides simple, easy to use rules for war game style miniatures combat with D&D troops, mercenaries, and monsters.  It's published by fellow blogger Daniel J Collins (Delta of Delta's D&D Hotspot).  In the foreword and design notes, Delta calls out three goals - to faithfully abstract the math and probabilities behind D&D combat, to create a war game that could be used during D&D or stand on its own as a side game, and to strive for a degree of Medieval realism.

The core rules are really simple to pick up - units attack with a d6 and a simplified armor value, and the rules around movement, formations, and the turn sequence cover about 5 pages.  The scale is 10 to 1.  Advanced rules in the same booklet cover things like units with special abilities and monster units, along with heroes and wizards.

Besides using Book of War to model military units in a D&D game, the book is set up for use as a stand alone game. Costs of units are balanced so that players could each build a force for the same points total, randomly generate terrain and weather, and play a table top game of movement and combat in lieu of a regular D&D session.  The author's blog features quite a few recaps of table top battles using various point builds.

One area where Book of War varies from attempts in other D&D mass combat systems is it diminishes the effect of leveled characters on the battle, unless the character is well above name level.  The concept is that when using the large numbers and averages calculated into Book of War's simplified dice, mid-level characters don't sway the outcome; it's how the math works.  For a party of player characters against special groups of monsters, the most satisfying approach for the players would be to have a hero versus monster side-battle using the standard D&D rules, rather than reduce their survival to a single d6 roll while embedded in a unit of troops.

The players really enjoyed this approach to mass combat.  The rules are simple enough that our 10 year old players could pick them up during the game, and start making their own moves (with nudging from one of the dads).  We've used the abstract combat of War Machine in our campaigns in the past, and this was greatly preferred - the players enjoyed be able to do table top maneuvering, and use terrain and tactics.  War Machine is basically "build a force, show up, make a single dice roll" to determine the results of a battle.  That being said, they recommended using War Machine for off-screen battles involving NPC kingdoms, and to use Book of War for player-facing combats.  One of the players does a lot of 40k Miniatures, and felt it was familiar, but simplified for fast play - thumbs up.

I'd recommend checking out Delta's blog; there were quite a few design notes last year that analyzed the math, and new units are added from time to time, expanding the selection of choices.  For instance, Delta recently covered lesser undead to provide stats for units of skeletons and zombies.  The book is available at Lulu in pdf version or print.

Moses is a 16th Level Cleric

Charlton Moses

We just passed Easter and Passover, and the pompous Cecil B Demille version of The Ten Commandments was on TV this past weekend.  The kids had never seen it, so we put it on the DRV; at four and a half hours, it was too much for a single sitting, and there are too many commercials.  We just finished.

Our kids are well trained geeks.  My 10 year old declared, "Moses is at least a 13th level cleric".  My daughter said he was a water bender like Ang the Avatar. When Ramses decided to plunge his chariots into the canyon of water, my wife is like, "Where is Admiral Ackbar when you need him?"  Then my son started conjecturing whether the fiery pillar was a flame strike spell or a wall of fire.

Assuming that the plague of hail is a suped-up Weather Control spell, I'd actually put Moses at 16th level  in AD&D terms - Weather Control is a 7th level cleric spell.  I think old Gygax must have liked that Cecil B Demille movie quite a bit.  You could argue there was Sticks to Snakes, Insect Plagues, Flame Strikes, Part Water, Control Weather, and even a bit of Commune in it.

As for the whole angel of death bit, regular clerics have got nothing.

Colonial Hex Crawling

I keep coming back to the idea of putting together a hex crawl for colonial New England - something in the mid-17th century, before the Salem witch trials, probably even before the Dutch lost New Amsterdam to the English - 1650 or earlier.

For our upcoming Cthulhu game in 1930's New York, I've been reading up on the history of the city, and it struck me how the early Dutch colonies of New Amsterdam had the frontier qualities of the American Wild West.  You have these European fur traders landing in the new world to make some money, heading up rivers and tributaries to trade with natives and trap animals, then returning to the settlements to get hammered and have a good time.  Basically the types of things you’d expect from adventurers.  Accounts of life in those Dutch colonies are quite a bit different from the theocratic colonies of Plymouth and Rhode Island.

Once you overlay the tropes of Lovecraftian horror, the idea of a fantasy game hex crawl in this type of setting becomes real interesting to me.  The native Algonquin and Iroquois nations struggle with degenerate neighbors that worship ancient horrors sleeping beneath the ground.  Alien terrors like the Mi-Go have been visiting earth for millennia, mining rare minerals and performing heinous biological experiments, such that remote ranges of hills are considered taboo for their evil reputations.  Beneath the ground, atavistic cave-dwellers emerge on moonless nights seeking flesh.

Many of the early colonists came to escape religious persecution; in a weird fantasy game, why wouldn't there also be witches, cultists, wizards, and sorcerers leaving Europe to avoid the inquisitor's pyre, either hiding in the settlements or striking out on their own?  American folklore has a tradition of "deals with the devil" - as the Black Man, or Old Scratch - happening out in the dark woods.   There's a theme of 'chaotic wilderness' versus 'law and civilization' that can be developed as well.

Part of why Lovecraft's body of work is so compelling is how he's created an intricate mythology for New England, blending science and cosmicism with supernatural horror in a self-referential body of work.  Stephen King carried the torch in a similar way with his Maine mythology.  I'm also enamored with Ramsey Campbell's treatment of the Severn Valley in England.  So I'd mine those sources for ideas on creating a sprawling hex crawl wilderness representing the eastern seaboard, littered with locations for these ancient horrors.

There could be opportunities for traditional dungeon crawls, too - cavern complexes and underground lairs of the atavistic cannibals, the lightless caverns carved by unknown hands implied by The Festival, the lost civilization of K'n-yan (from The Mound), or the subterranean dungeons carved by wizards to hide their experiments - like Joseph Curwen's dungeons from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

I admit, it' an unusual idea - I see a frontier of isolated colonies of competing nationalities, and then small border forts penetrating the interior of a dark and foreboding land, and then the discovery of monsters.  I usually carry around a brainstorming notebook for ideas, I'll keep it handy for jotting down notes for the colonial hex crawl and see if it generates a real spark.  Must be something about the zeitgeist, Chaoisum released a monograph called Colonial Terrors, there's an entire rpg called Colonial Gothic, and Sixtystone Press has a Colonial Lovecraft Country book penciled in for next year.  All of these works seem to be 18th century or so, around the time of the Revolutionary War, and they focus on traditional horror investigations, and not exploration and adventure.  Doing this type of thing as a D&D setting allows the use of technologies that explicitly support free-form wilderness exploration, like the D&D hex crawl and dungeon crawl.

With a cover like this, the LOTFP Grindhouse Edition looks tailor made for the colonial hex crawl:

Ode to Karameikos

I'm way behind on listening to podcasts.  The combination of fantasy baseball preparation and working my way through YSDC's Shadows by Gaslight audio recordings, has me way behind on gaming podcasts - so it was just the other day I listened to a Bruce Heard interview over on the Save or Die podcast*:  Bruce Heard on Save or Die Podcast

I've observed that many of the folks visiting here love the BX editions of the game, and probably know that Bruce led the D&D line during the late 80's and 90's, launching the gazetteer line, the Rules Cyclopedia, The Hollow World, and many other excellent products of the time.  If you like that stuff too, the interview is a cheerful peek into how some of those books came to be produced; I particularly liked the discussion of Dave Arneson's Blackmoor and how it was retrofitted into Mystara's past, showing up in Glantri, the Broken Lands, the Hollow World, and the DA 1-4 series of time traveling Blackmoor adventures.

One conclusion that emerged a few times in the interview was the importance and relevance of the gazetteers, and how underrated they were by gamers of the period, who were focused mainly on AD&D 2E.  I've been meaning to put together a retrospective on GAZ 1, The Grand Duchy of Karameikos, so this is a fine debarkation point.

Karameikos showed up in both versions of the expert rulebook (the 1981 Cook/Marsh version, and Mentzer's edit).  The 1981 version is extremely minimalist - we're introduced to Specularum, Luln, the Black Eagle Barony, and various humanoid areas stamped right on the map.  Mentzer's version adds a few more places, the towns of Kelven and Threshold.  However, it's the 1987 Gazetteer, The Grand Duchy of Karameikos, that really expands the setting and embellishes the culture and themes of the region.

Karameikos is a frontier of the Thyatian Empire, colonized by a Thyatian Duke that invaded the land 30 years ago after trading his ancestral (Thyatian) lands for the rights to rule the colony.  This sets up a simmering racial tension in Karameikos between the Thyatian Duke, Stefan Karameikos, his loyal nobles from the empire that accepted positions of nobility and power, and the indigenous people, the Traladarans.  It has echoes of the Saxons versus the Normans in 11th century England, with ousted Traladaran nobles, stripped of their titles, competing through mercantile tactics, crime, and banditry, against the interloping Thyatians.  There's a similar conflict between the imperialistic Church of Thyatis and the native Church of Traladara.

Make no mistake; the themes may echo from the Norman conquest, but Karameikos is not England; it's a misty, mountainous land of evergreen forests and things that howl at the night on the moors.  Vampirism and lycanthropy are common, and the setting introduces a new kind of vampire, the Nosferatu.  Some of those sleepy Traladaran villages, nestled in the countryside, are ruled by nobles that only drink… blood, like the Nosferatu wizard of the seaside village of Sulescu.  The Karameikan countryside evokes Romania or Transylvania, and the native people, the Traladarans, have a Hungarian or Roma quality to their names and dress and customs that would work well if one wanted to turn up the volume on the Gothic horror.  (As written, the setting is very much high fantasy).

The Gazetteer is an extremely well-rounded DM's resource for culture and verisimilitude; it covers customs, dress, coins, calendars, holidays, politics, names, religious organizations, thieves guilds, heraldry, even ancient history and mythology.  There's a large section on personalities, providing statistics and practical DM notes on staging Karameikos's powerful figures in games.

Quite a few of the classic modules from the "B" line were fitted into Karameikos, and the later modules in the line were explicitly placed there.  X1, The Isle of Dread, ostensibly departs from Specularum.  Of course, the absolute high water mark for adventures is B10 Night's Dark Terror, which embellishes much of Eastern Karameikos, and exploits the land's mythic past, introducing ancient ruins and a desperate race to find the ruins ahead of a gang of slavers.  It's one of TSR D&D's greatest adventure modules, bar none.  Just don’t try to find it a nice version on E-bay, unless you want to pay (a lot).

Karameikos begins the excellent practice in the Gazetteer line of providing battle ratings for the various military units in War Machine terms, and scenario seeds on introducing wars - and in Karameikos, that means the revolt of the Black Eagle Baron.  The Baron is a roguish Prince John figure rebelling against Richard Coeur de Lion - if not the historical version, at least the Prince John of Robin Hood tales and Errol Flynn movies.

Karameikos is one of my favorite Gazetters to this day, and it’s my go-to setting for pick-up games with the neighborhood kids, because it has such readily identifiable historical tropes and themes.  I should point out, the Gazetteer is not without a bit of controversy; the early versions of Karameikos in the expert sets were far more sparsely populated, and the populations were increased by a factor of 10 to support a more populous and cosmopolitan Medieval kingdom (or should I say, Duchy); one comes across such nitpicks from time to time where those things malinger, like older message boards.  Don't be dissuaded; The Grand Duchy of Karameikos is an excellent book.

Well, let's hope that the suits at WOTC do the right thing and reintroduce their electronic PDF program for vintage games.  The Gazetteers were well produced, professionally written, and deserve to be enjoyed by newer gamers rediscovering classic D&D.


*I don't regularly listen to Save or Die, though I do check out the related one (Roll for Initiative) from time to time, but the interviews are a great way to catch up with various TSR figures from back in the day.

A Review of the Black Drop

Shortly after reading The Black Drop, I knew it was one of the first Trail of Cthulhu adventures we had to play.  It has the right blend of exotic locale, real world history, weird horror, and moral difficulty to generate a memorable horror game.  Plus - for the D&D and fantasy gamers out there - the ideas behind this one make for a great inspiration in your fantasy or weird horror game, if you don't mind filing off the serial numbers.

The adventure involves the Kerguelen islands, a small cluster of islands in the far south of the Indian Ocean just outside of the Antarctic circle.  A steamer (with the characters on board) is headed to the islands to retrieve a failing French colony of shepherds, while across the islands are littered encampments from the age of whaling.  Unbeknownst to the players at the start of the adventure, a sinister group of Nazi scientists are on their way to the islands as well.

The Kerguelens are the topmost remains of the sunken Kerguelen plateau, which was home to the ancient Lemurian empire; as the players explore the island, they even encounter Lemurian artifacts.  The adventure revolves around the stirring of an ancient god, a 30 year astronomical cycle, ambiguity whether the colonists or the scientists can be trusted, and some difficult moral choices that force horrible decisions on the players.

The scenario is fairly open ended, and the players have a lot of choice around where they want to go and how they want to explore the island.  Time is a factor, as there's an impending astronomical event that drives some of the action, and antagonist reactions also drive some events, but otherwise this is a freer structure than many investigations.  It also offers a lot of interesting role playing situations for the keeper.

Some groups don't like body horror, or psychological horror, or having to do bad things, and this adventure confronts the investigators with decisions concerning the latter, so there's some fair warning.  My own group is not comprised of horror enthusiasts, and they thoroughly enjoyed the scenario, although the body count was quite high.  I'd recommend using the pre-generated characters and running this one as a one-shot, rather than integrating it into a campaign.

I highly recommend the scenario, it's one of the strongest in the Trail of Cthulhu line, and the investigation ends up feeling quite epic and action oriented for such a short jaunt.  I've often called it the "lite" version of Beyond the Mountains of Madness.  It's written by Jason Morningstar, an RPG designer in his own right (Fiasco), and the PDF format makes it a great way to test drive Trail of Cthulhu - the adventure is 40 pages, with 6 pre-generated characters, maps and handouts, and should cover two nights of gaming (6-8 hours).