Curse of Strahd - for Shadowdark

I started running a game with my neighborhood gang for Horror on the Hill, a classic module from the 1980's.  Meanwhile, my high school group voted to do Curse of Strahd.  The high school gang was formerly "The Pillories", the party that played Lamentations of the Flame Princess over the past year and recently wrapped their campaign.  Originally we were going to do a Call of Cthulhu next, but I wanted to get some more "drive time" with the Shadowdark rules set, and we talked about several different campaign ideas.  They ultimately picked Curse of Strahd.  Curse of Strahd (COS) was originally written for 5E, but don't hold that against it, and it seems like it will work fine using Shadowdark rules.  We're 3-4 sessions into the campaign, but this post is about the conversion process and getting the campaign set up.

There are a  few good 5E campaigns that lend themselves to a retro style of play and sandbox gaming - Dungeon of the Mad Mage, Tomb of Annihilation, and Rime of the Frostmaiden, for instance.  Curse of Strahd occupies a nearby place - it’s a little verbose and almost wants to be a plotted or scripted scene-based campaign, but it's also set up as a hex crawl in the valley of Barovia, with Castle Ravenloft and several dungeon sites.  There's a small cottage industry in the 5E crowd of converting Curse of Strahd into a full-blown scene-by-scene adventure path, but it seems easy enough to go in the other direction too, and bring to the foreground the sandbox elements and player agency.

As written, the campaign suggests gifting experience levels to the players as the players wander Barovia and do stuff - it's more exploration focused than the scene-based milestones that show up in adventure paths, but doesn't go all the way towards an "XP for Treasure" mode like I'd want in a retro sandbox.  The first thing I wanted to figure out was how much experience the campaign gives out naturally if you tried to run it as an XP for Treasure campaign.  It was a little tedious, but I tallied the treasure finds from the hex-crawl locations and dungeons.  I also assumed characters will get to go carousing several times, as XP for carousing seems to be a default assumption of Shadowdark, and fits one of the themes in Curse of Strahd - Barovia is dreary, and wines and spirits are one of the few things that bring joy to the dismal landscape.  The total XP in COS a little light - there's enough XP for a party to get to level 6 if they "collected most of it" which we don't necessarily want to encourage.  So the XP will need a little juicing - either adding treasure to locations where it's sparse or nonexistent, increasing the reward amounts, and/or adding some boon or quest rewards for major accomplishments.  Shadowdark doesn't use a 1gp = 1xp basis; the game uses an abstract system where treasure hordes are worth either 1xp or 3xp, and legendary items are worth 10xp. I've seen where referees use a 5xp category for major hordes and I think that change could be effective at increasing the campaign's overall XP.  One thing I'll mention - the actual gold piece counts found in a 5E adventure are right in line with Shadowdark's recommendations - which is somewhere around 1/10th the amount of treasure you'd see in an old school game.

Sly Flourish has been running Ravenloft as a Halloween one-shot the past couple years and uses 5th level PC's for Ravenloft (the original I6 was for characters levels 4-6) so I imagine 5th-7th level characters would be fine for the finale of COS.  It won't take much adjustment to the campaign's XP to ensure player characters can get into that range before they head to Castle Ravenloft for the final confrontation with Strahd and the brides.

If you're familiar with Curse of Strahd, you'll know there are several meaningful accomplishments the characters can do along the way that could represent XP moments:  lighting the holy beacon of Argynvostholt, discovering Strahd's secret at the Amber Temple, finding the lost Arabelle (Madame Eva's heir), restoring the Wizard of Wines Winery, and so on.  Shutting down Old Bonegrinder or rescuing children from the werewolf fighting pits in the western caves could fit as well.

Regarding monsters:  there are online guides on converting 5E monsters to Shadowdark, so that wasn't hard to do.  I think I ended up with about 40 converted monsters in the monster document I made.

The last piece to prepare for sandbox play was to have clear notes on plot hooks and connections between non-player characters, locations, and what the players can learn.  There are 14-15 places to explore in the valley, and varying amounts of NPCs to meet in each location.  In an adventure path, the author will dictate patrons or events that push the players from scene to scene; for the sandbox, the players have the agency, they're the ones doing the pushing, and the referee's job shifts to making sure they have the opportunity to get enough information to make meaningful plans.  The hardcover of Curse of Strahd is text-heavy and verbose; I found it helpful to make an outline for each location of which nuggets of information can picked up at each locale or NPC.  There's a natural flow to the campaign, with the opportunity to engage in side quests and detours depending on player preference.

And voila - that's how I've turned Curse of Strahd into a retro style sandbox.  I'd be glad to post the quest outlines or monster conversions if there's interest.  Otherwise I'll get some game reports rolling on how we've done so far.

The Pillories Have Been Death Frost Doomed

Herein lies the tale of our abrupt and terrifying end to Death Frost Doom.  As if it could end any other way.

When we last met with The Pillories, their halfling, Remi Knotwise, had crawled through an air vent and landed in a hidden part of the dungeon, the tomb of an undead horror (the Exalted Inquisitor).  After realizing he was trapped in the tomb, and taking some horrendous internal and psychic damage from the Interrogator's questions-from-beyond-the-grave, he quaffed his potion of gaseous form and flew out of there (leaving all of his stuff in the room).

Over the course of a few game sessions, the players scrounged for clothing for Remi amongst the crypts.  Allister tried to use ESP on the jelly monster guarding the "well of souls" to find out its secrets, and went temporarily insane when he was assaulted by the anguished thoughts of all the souls trapped within the creature.  Instead of whacking the creature and continuing past it, they decided (once Allister recovered) they would follow Remi's path through the ceiling tunnel and go whack the Exalted Inquisitor instead.  The undead Inquisitor was whacked.  Remi collected his gear, the magic user "knocked" the door, and the players found themselves in a new part of the dungeon, the tombs of the "Greater Repugnances".  They made the fateful decision to go left.

Left brought them to the Tomb of the Blessed Afflictor, the undead commander of the legions buried within the mountain.  He appeared as a long-robed skeleton lord sitting on his throne, leering at them.  He showed off his freaky undead mind-powers by telekinetically slamming the door behind them so they were stuck in the room with them, horror-movie style.

Maximus, the name of the undead general, wanted them to swear an oath, first requesting him to raise his undead army, and then a promise from them to guide him to a large mortal city.  in return, he would swear not to harm any of them, directly or indirectly.  These oaths would break the powerful magic keeping him trapped within the mountain.

The priest, Father Blackburn, was first to speak - "We will never serve you, monster!"  His henchman, Geoff, drew his sword.  The undead lord hoisted Geoff into the air with a lift of his hand after Geoff failed a saving throw, and with a flick of the wrist, sent Geoff telekinetically smashing into the far wall with a sickening thud.  Geoff died instantly (he was only level 1, after all).

Initiative was formally rolled, and the monster went first - sucking Blackburn into his grasp via the telekinetic force pull, and telling the others it was not too late to stand down before he killed their priest.  The rest of the players froze!  Intimidated by the undead lord, they watched as Blackburn continued to squirm and resist, denying all the monster's overtures towards capitulation, until the thing grew tired of dialogue with the rebellious cleric and drained the life energy out of him!  It may not have been a glorious death but it was well-respected by the others, as Blackburn's player perished while staying strong for his ideals (knowing this was the campaign finale).  What a dramatic moment - this is why we play these games.  Remi, Yuri, and Allister each took a knee and agreed to help the undead lord escape the mountain.

Time seemed to distort as a nightmarish delirium descended on them... the monster escorted them to the Crypt of the Testifier, where supernatural oaths were spoken and sealed.  The jelly monster at the well of souls was ordered to dissolve, releasing the anguished souls of the dead.  Maximus's undead army was reformed.  The players reeled as if in a living nightmare when they beheld the legions vomiting out of the crypts.  The hungry dead from the frozen earth above them clawed their way out of the soil and rampaged down the mountain and into the high vales and valleys, overwhelming clan holds and besieging the village of Langholm.  These were the anguished victims of the cult, now turned into free-willed ghouls and hungry dead, desperate to eat the living.  There would be rumors for weeks to come, spread across Scotland and Northern England, of a strange plague across the northlands, causing its victims to waste away while infecting them with a horrible form of cannibalism.

Maximus ordered his army to fortify the mountain and close the passes, awaiting his return.  He needed to learn about this new world in the year 1630.  He collected the skin and clothing from Geoff back in the dungeon, consuming Geoff's likeness so he could pass as human once more.  The monster was pleased the characters would be taking him to York, a place he knew from Roman times when it was still called Eboracum.  He didn't mind that the characters claimed the campaign's "MacGuffin", a book of esoteric lore and knowledge that was on an altar by the Well of Souls.  Maximus had larger goals now.

The campaign ended when the group once again passed under the medieval gates of York.  The players felt the supernatural bonds of their oaths dissolve as they crossed the threshold to the city.  Maximus made to disappear amongst the busy streets, pausing briefly to look back at them over his shoulder and smiling from behind Geoff's stolen face and skin.  "Be seeing you."  He winked before flipping Geoff's hood over his head, and melted away into the crowd.

I'm not sure this is truly the end of The Pillories, but what a glorious and horrible way to part ways with our erstwhile heroes.  This group is going to undertake a gothic-themed Curse of Strahd campaign next (converted to Shadowdark), and that will keep us busy for some time.  Maybe I'll have The Great Virginia Disastrum read by then, and that could be our next LOTFP foray, a fun-filled trip to colonial Virginia.  But first, a nice vacation to Barovia.

 Be seeing you.

Horror on the Hill - New Maps and a Report

My youngest son's football team had a "bye" this weekend so I had some extra time Saturday and put together a few maps for our Horror on the Hill Shadowdark game.  ("Horror on the Hill" refers to the old TSR-era adventure module B5 The Horror on the Hill).

First up is Guido's Fort - a frontier stockade sitting across the river from the ominous "Horror on the Hill".  I put a small frontier settlement outside the fort, some fisherman, hunters, and loggers, along with a trading post, the Lion's Den Inn, and a stable master who supports also supports the fort.  I have some character sketches for them; since the stable master is a retired sailor (pirate), he could be a source for the rumor that leads a party to hunt for the Isle of Dread.  I'm thinking if this campaign sticks a little while, a classic Karameikan adventure like The Isle of Dread or Night's Dark Terror could be a nice follow-up to Horror on the Hill.

Guido's Fort for B5 Horror on the Hill

Here's the original wilderness map for Horror on the Hill - it might be one of my least favorite maps in the early B-series canon.  It needed something different.

Blech

At least for now, I've gone with a fun style reminiscent of a theme park map.  Maybe I'll do a Keep on the Borderlands map in this style at some point too.  I've lost some of the cliffs and elevation, so I may take another go but this made me chuckle and I had fun with it.

Horror on the Hill - theme-park style!

Here's the path the players have taken the first couple of games.  They cleared out a nest of killer bees (1), avoided a steamy geothermal cave (2), scouted an encampment of hobgoblins and avoided them (3), fought some ghouls in the graveyard (4), and then began exploring the ruined evil monastery on the top of the hill (5).

The trip to the top

We're enjoying Shadowdark so far - it feels like an OSR system, with a heavy focus on exploration, XP for treasure, and survival horror.  Player characters are very soft at level 1 and damage is flat, so the risk of TPK is ever-present.  Fighters are good, magic is powerful but unpredictable, and people drop to zero hit points a lot.  The "downed rules" do give the party a round or so to revive a dying character, which is both a little forgiving but creates a logistical challenge for the other players, so I'm enjoying the effects.

More to come on Shadowdark, but first I'll show how we wrapped our Death Frost Doom campaign.  Salut!

Making Karameikos Great Again

I started a second game a month or so back with one of my older gaming groups running Shadowdark.  We had all ended up at the same end-of-summer barbeque, started talking about games, and realized several folks in the old guard wanted to give Shadowdark a try.  I had recently become enamored of the rules as well, and so the idea for a new campaign was formed.  This is basically our first game report.

Shadowdark reminds me a lot of Moldvay BX.  Maybe because it's like what a BX version of 5E should have been?  The game embraces simple classes, simple action resolution, and dungeon crawling.  The Shadowdark community claims you can run classic BX style modules with the system mostly as is, only adjusting the treasure down a factor.  I was drawn to the idea of seeing how it handled classic modules from the 1980's that we haven't run before.  Thus germinated the idea of running B5 Horror on the Hill in my favorite setting from that era, the Grand Duchy of Karameikos*.

One other thing we talked about was running a "gauntlet".  Shadowdark borrows some ideas from Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC), including starting with a pile of 0-level characters, putting them through a horrendous situation, and the survivors get to pick classes as level 1 characters.  In DCC it's called a funnel, in Shadowdark it's a gauntlet, but the concepts are similar.  One difference seems to be in DCC, each player will run all 4 of their zero-level characters at once, so a 5-person table will have 20 peasants trying to survive the funnel.  There aren't a lot of published Shadowdark gauntlets, but the mind-set seems to be each player runs a single character at a time, and the back-up zero level guys are off-camera in reserve (depending on the fiction of the gauntlet).

I decided to use the gauntlet as the lead-in to Horror on the Hill and make it part of the same nexus of events.  In B5 Horror on the Hill, a remote outpost (Guido's Fort) sits on the near side of the River Shrill; across the river sits an ominous fog-shrouded hill with the rising threat of the goblin king in the dungeons below.  I took a gauntlet called Cry of the Stingbat and hacked it up.  In my version, goblins are sneaking across the river at night to kidnap traders and homesteaders and throw them down a huge hole to feed a colony of "stingbats" (stirges) which assail the inhabitants of the fort at night.  The players start as a group of such victims, needing to escape a fairly linear dungeon before dawn when the flocks of stingbats return home and kill them.  They also found and killed a few goblins hiding out near the entrance; the goblins were carrying foul-smelling smudge sticks and stink bombs that immobilize the stingbats and let them manage the horde.

I can see the appeal of running a zero-level gauntlet.  Characters die left and right, which allows for some gallows humor, and story quickly emerges around the exploits of the plucky survivors.  We ran a strict time clock on the gauntlet night, and the added pressure kept things moving briskly.  Finally, there's a useful community generator at shadowdarklings.net that quickly makes a page of zero-level characters fully equipped for game night.  It's all very convenient.  My players had doubts, but now they're believers - I'm sure we'll do a gauntlet every chance we can when starting a Shadowdark campaign.

Ultimately, the zero-level traders, soldiers, and homesteaders returned to Fort Guido after their ordeal in the stingbat hole; they let the fort commander know about the stingbat horde and turned over the stink bombs and smudge sticks so the garrison could take care of the monsters in the daylight.  Having tasted dungeon adventuring, the group promised to reform back at the Fort as level 1 adventurers and take the fight over the river to the goblins - and hopefully get rich and powerful along the way.  Game 2 involved poking around the Fort, collecting rumors from the tavern and talking to the local "old timer", and finally hiring a boatman to ferry them across the river.  They agreed the boatman would return in two-days time at the agreed upon spot for a pick-up, so the players are carrying just enough food and water.  We honestly didn't get too far in their exploration of the hill after game 2.

I have a range of opinions on Shadowdark - I want to give it a few more game sessions (and maybe even try it with the other gamer group) before rendering official judgment.  It's definitely a vibes game that is laser focused on evoking an old school dungeon crawling vibe, while embracing a lot of modern mechanics from 5E and DCC.  I've had great fun; I don't know if it will displace BX (or even needs to).  I also signed up to run a few convention games as Shadowdark in a couple of months to get more drive time with the rules.  More to come on that front.

I still need to build a map for Guido's Fort, it's not provided in B5.  However, I did put together a new map for Karameikos.  This will sound a bit sacrilegious to fellow Mystarans (?), Mystara-philes(?), but the old 8-mile-per-hex style of the Trail Guides was leaving me a bit cold so I made a custom map (above).  Halloween is coming up, and Karameikos is described as a misty, wild land with dark forests, haunted moors, and foreboding mountains, like something out of Eastern Europe.  Maybe I could put the hidden valley of Barovia in the Black Peaks or Cruth Mountains in time for a Halloween one-shot?  It seems like it could work.

* Apologies for the lame title, when your country's politics are as ridiculous as ours, you've got to find a way to laugh about it.

The Pillories in Death Frost Doom - The Crypt isn't Empty

Our cast of characters continues to explore Death Frost Doom (DFD), but the ending of last game session was perhaps one of my favorites.  First - about Death Frost Doom.  In the early OSR period (pre-2010), this stood out to me as an adventure that took D&D style gaming in a new direction.  Once I started running a game with my old high school friends, I knew this was an adventure that we'd work into the campaign, especially because they like the horror genre. In DFD, the players explore an ominous dungeon full of catacombs and the creepy trappings of a long defunct death cult.  The tension builds as they continue to loot crypts but aren't finding any monsters - but they know something bad is going to happen at some point, they just don't know how and when.  Last game ended with the first bad thing.

The players were in a kitchen in an area of the dungeon dedicated to priest quarters.  They found a hidden air duct in the ceiling that led to a 3' square crawl-space.  The party's halfling, Remi, asked for a boost - he felt some cold air coming down the shaft and wanted to see where it went.  He lit a candle and crawled through the duct, discovering a long vertical shaft that seemed to go up and out - cold air was coming down the shaft from the surface.  But the duct kept going forward, so he kept going.  The other characters called for him to come back, but Remi said he'd be fine.  In the dim light of his candle, he could see the duct opened into the ceiling of another chamber, and it looked like some kind of crypt was down below.

He yelled back at everyone to hang tight while he dropped down to check out the room.  (Mind you, he had no rope or similar gear - once he dropped himself down into the next room, he had no way to get back into the duct).  "It'll be fine", he said, "I'll find my way back one way or another".

The lid of the stone crypt was carved with a relief of a gruesome tyrant standing on the skulls of victims; he passed by the sarcophagus to see if there was a way out of the room before looking into it any further.  Yes!  There was a door out.  Unfortunately, it was barred from the outside.  Why would someone put a bar on the outside of a crypt, as if to keep something in?  That's when he heard the grinding of stone behind him, as something with a grip of iron slid aside the lid of the sarcophagus from the inside and sat upright.  That was the cliffhanger ending of the game night, with the mummified remains of the cult's "grand inquisitor" jerkily lurching towards the trapped halfling and his little candle.  The mummified inquisitor began to interrogate him with a sepulchral voice from beyond the grave, while the other players watched on in horror.

It turns out Remi has been carrying a potion of gaseous form with him since very early in the campaign, so he's confident he'll escape the crypt of the undead horror if he wins initiative, and that's why he was so nonchalant about the risks.  The tension at the table eased a little in anticipation of next game.  But the players are now boggled with the idea that the sprawling dungeon is not entirely quiescent, and there are dark horrors waiting for them, lurking in undiscovered tombs.

By way of reminder, here is our cast of characters, The Pillories:

• Reverend Blackburn - L4 cleric
• Remi Knotwise - L4 halfling
• Allister - L3 magic-user
• Yuri - L3 elf
• Henchmen - Wood (fighter), Toby (specialist), Geoff (fighter)

Other events since last game report included discovery of endless catacombs, filled with thousands of mummified cult members - warriors, priests, commoners, and even children.  There have been traps and curses, including the cleric, who fell victim to a spell that saw him inscribing a tattoo of the death cult on his own forearm while caught in a mindless frenzy; he learned to his horror that he can longer receive the benefits of his own healing magic.  They also discovered the source of the ominous susurrus sound that permeates the dungeon, but quickly retreated when an ooze-like monster crawled out of a well to defend the spikey plant growth that was producing the sound.  They know they'll need to defeat the ooze monster and hack through the spike growth to reach their goal, but decided to double back and finish exploring some other areas and confirm there wasn't another way around it first.  This is how Remi ended up crawling through an air duct to the tomb of the inquisitor.

I had great fun running it, and I'm looking forward to the next installment.

Understanding Shadowdark Treasure XP and Gold

I've continued to spend time with the Shadowdark rules and we're going to try this out in a few weeks after we've wrapped our current LOTFP game.  Character creation and advancement, adventuring, combat, monsters, there are many things in Shadowdark that look like they will play great at the table.  Shadowdark reminds me a lot of what I first loved when discovering the original Moldvay basic book back in the 1980s, and I see a similar sentiment again and again.  Characters like Morgan, Silverleaf, and poor Black Dougal, would seem to be right at home in this game.  One thing that tripped me up on the first read was the treasure system.

Shadowdark is a game that gives XP for treasure, but it's abstract, it's not 1gp = 1xp.  A "normal" treasure horde is worth 1 XP, and a first level character needs 10XP to reach level 2 - so they need to find 10 normal treasure hordes.  Above a "normal" horde, there are "extraordinary" treasure finds that are worth 3 XP, and a "legendary" horde would be worth 10 XP.  For levels 1-3, there's a suggestion that a normal horde should be worth at least 20gp (minimum - it could be more).  An extraordinary horde might include a permanent magic item, and a legendary horde would involve the campaign's unique items and quest items - unlikely at 1st level.  This approach to treasure and XP looks simple to use in practice.  If our 1st level party finds 200gp in a chest, it's 1 XP; if they find 30gp in a bag, it's also 1 XP - simple.

There are a few wrinkles to this approach.  First, everyone in the party gets that 1 XP when finding a treasure horde - it's not tallied and divided at the end of the adventure.  In an old school game like Moldvay/Cook BX, if 5 players found a meager 20gp cache, they'd divide it by 5 at the end of the adventure, they'd each pocket 4gp, and get 4xp (for a fighter, that's 4xp towards their 2,000 xp requirement for reaching level 2 - .2% of the way there!).  For the 5 Shadowdark PC's, they each net 4gp at the end of the adventure as well, but since the find was a normal treasure horde for them, they each received 1 XP upon finding the cache, wich represents 10% of what they need for advancement.  That's a big difference in outcomes, no?

I went ahead and built a "by-the-book" table to figure out how much gold a typical Shadowdark adventuring party would collect over their career, and I'll put it here:

Over the course of 10 levels, the Shadowdark party should collect at least 36,000gp if you only followed the book minimums, but it could be more.  Furthermore, players could cash in things like mundane equipment they found in the dungeon which would count as money but not necessarily experience in game terms.  For comparison, a 10th level 5E party (using by the book treasure hordes) would have collected 80-90,000 gp over their career, so I imagine a Shadowdark group would have a similar haul.  Our Moldvay/Cook BX adventurers would have collected a million gold pieces by level 10.  These figures also provide a simple conversion guide for a BX type adventure - since Shadowdark adventures gain about 1/10th the treasure of a BX character, you can convert BX adventures by scaling down those 800gp treasures to 80gp for Shadowdark.

One of the rationales for the scaled down gold may be there's not much to spend money on in the core rules.  The equipment list is sparse.  There are no spellbooks, no spell research, no gold needed for magic item creation.  You're not saving up for a castle or stronghold.  There are no retainer or hireling rules, and there are several good reasons why Shadowdark (much like 5E) eschews followers and breaks from old school conventions - see below*.  The core rules are also not prescriptive about levying upkeep or living expenses.

The best armor for a fighter, plate mail, is probably not affordable until 3rd or 4th level.  Mithril armor is a better option that's probably achievable in the mid-levels.  Although silver weapons are alluded to in the monster descriptions, I couldn't find any rules on the costs for silver weapons.  There aren't many obligations the players will have to spend money on; priests may have to pay penance (for recovering spells), and everyone else will have torches and consumable equipment to replace.  The big swing factor in the rules is "carousing", which lets players convert extra cash into experience.  In fact, the one watch out to making your world's hordes far richer than the default guidelines would be the unintended consequence it could have on carousing; if you juiced the wealth guidelines, carousing XP could get out of hand.  I haven't analyzed the carousing rules in detail yet, but my sense is there might be diminishing returns as a group levels.

I've called Shadowdark a "beer and pretzels" dungeon crawler and these observations on the Shadowdark economy reinforce that view.  It's not trying to be a simulation.  The lower amount of gold, coupled with the carousing rules, ensures player characters will be frequently broke and willing to get back into the dungeon.  Shadowdark hasn't embraced an end-game that involves domains, castles, or strongholds just yet, so the lower wealth isn't an issue.  On the other hand, the referee doesn't have to deal with the ridiculous situations in older games where player characters have hundreds of thousands of gold pieces sitting around back in town by the mid-levels, and referees invent taxes, training costs, and other penalties to try and drain the coffers.

These are just observations, not judgments.  I'm really looking forward to seeing this game in action, and now two of my gaming groups have both expressed an interest, so I'm sure we'll be firing it up in the near future.  I think we're going to see Shadowdark continue to peel off 5E players and make inroads into the OSR crowd as well as the word continues to get out - it's quite good.  More to come.

* Reasons Shadowdark eschews retainers:  the encumbrance and light system is about forcing tough choices on the players for equipment, torches, and treasure, and extra "mules" in the form of retainers relaxes the resource pressure.  Likewise, the 'action economy' of Shadowdark is meant to be 1 action per player per turn, so things move quickly around the table.  Extra non-player characters on the player's side would slow the game the same as if the players were juggling multiple attacks and bonus actions and action surges and similar 5E-isms.  Finally, the XP rules discussed here, where XP is immediately granted for finding a treasure horde, would also need an adjustment if retainers were put in the mix - perhaps they get half XP like in older editions.

Reading the Shadowdark Rules

I've studied the Shadowdark rules.  I love them.  We're certainly going to run a dungeon crawl using Shadowdark once the York 1630 campaign reaches a good resting spot.  After that, who knows?  One player is clamoring for a Call of Cthulhu campaign;  this group has never experienced the glory that is Dwimmermount; I also want to take a look at the recent Lamentations campaign, A True Relation of the Great Virginia Disastrum 1633, because it sounds interesting and I love the historical setting.  But first, let's talk about Shadowdark RPG.

As an OSR game (or OSR adjacent), it uses 3d6 (in order) to generate statistics - the way Crom intended.  There are only 4 core classes, and the term race has been replaced by the term ancestry, which sounds so much better than "species".  ("Species" is what that outfit in Seattle was adopting, last I checked).  The game has a lower power curve than traditional BX, covering levels 1-10 and squishing nine levels of spells into 5 "tiers".  Hit points and damage are lower, and so is spell damage, and there is no longer a Raise Dead type effect, so death is going to stick.  No player characters have any dark vision, whatsoever - darkness matters.  There's a simple encumbrance tracking system, and resource management (especially light and torches)matters.  There's no skill system, and the DM is encouraged to rely heavily on player skill and only use ability checks for situations where failure is important.  Ability checks have also replaceded saving throws.  Combat has been streamlined to move quickly, including eschewing detailed ranges for "zones" like close, near, and far, encouraging theater of the mind play and getting away from having to measure everything on a grid with a ruler and counting squares.  It's like the author played one-too-many 3-hour-long 5E combat calculating 5' steps and opportunity attacks and declared "Nevermore".

Some other old school things I really liked is putting reaction rolls and morale back into the game (well, obviously they never left our OSR games, but they were minimized in the fifth).  The game uses XP for treasure, going so far as to completely eliminate XP for combat, but added a carousing rule to spend money for XP.  The rule book include several hundred compact monsters, and tons of random tables, covering everything from creating random player characters, to random monsters, encounter tables, NPC parties, spell mishaps, and tons of useful names and tidbits.  I see all you table-enthusiasts.

There are some distinct novelties here that either borrow from modern designs or represent the author's idiosyncratic musings.  For example, character advancement is random.  There's no progression table specifying all 3rd level fighters get X and all 3rd level wizards get Y, for instance.  You roll on a table instead.  Again, it's as if the author played one too many 5E sessions that was all about character optimization instead of emergent play in the dungeon, and finally said, "I've got your CharOps right here, you sub-class junkies... from now on everybody's advancement is random!"  I kind of love it.  I mentioned how spell levels are collapsed into tiers but didn't mention the biggest change - no Vancian magic or spell memorization.  Wizards and Priests roll to cast, and get to keep reusing their spells throughout the day until they hit a spell failure - you could have Cure Wounds for days or lose your healing on the first failed roll.  There are 1's and 20's for catastrophic failures and successes, too.  Shadowdark also suggests the use of a gauntlet for zero-level characters, another nod toward Dungeon Crawl Classics.  I'm interested in seeing how this works out in play - my sense is it will make low level Wizards and Priests a lot more interesting, while also keeping magic unreliable and less formulaic and predictable than the OG style.  Let's go, Lady Luck.

Perhaps one of the more controversial rules I've seen is the "torch timer".  I don't mean using the old BX procedure of tracking turns, where a torch lasts 6 turns, and every 6 turns the players just have to mark off another torch used.  In rules-as-written, Shadowdark expects the DM to start an actual clock and declare the torch is out after an hour of game play.  It sounds a little weird, but as they say, "hear me out".  Your players could cover a lot more than 6 turns with a single torch during exploration mode, so on the one hand this could let them stretch their light source; on the other hand, if the 1 hour mark comes up during combat rounds, it means the torch goes out right in the middle of a fight, putting the characters into pitch black, and the darkness rules in this game are unforgiving.  It's an interesting stressor.  I need to think about that one further and make sure I've grokked all the in's and out's.

The core mechanics will be very comfortable to 5E players - the ability score modifiers are similar to 5E, as is the concept of difficulty class and ability checks and ascending rolls.  Rolling with advantage and disadvantage is here, and that makes a lot of sense as a modern invention, and so is the concept of a luck point (similar to 5E's inspiration, although I think Shadowdark's "luck" might be a little stronger expression of the idea).

The author of Shadowdark is Kelsey Dionne.  I came into contact with her work through 5E, she was an independent designer who was doing horror-themed 5E adventures.  Some of them were homages to Edgar Allan Poe, which I quite enjoyed.  I've seen a few of her interviews on the YouTube and she talks about her influences - she grew up in the Lake Geneva area/southern Wisconsin playing Judges Guild and old school styles, played modern D&D and became a game designer, but never lost that itch for OSR-style exploration gaming, and voila - Shadowdark.  From everything I can tell, Shadowdark looks like a smashing success as a system - not revolutionary, but a smartly designed game that distills and synthesizes a number of influences to make a game that looks fun, plays fast, and delivers a classic adventure gaming experience, in a book that offers modern layout and design, succinct but evocative writing, and a compact one-book volume that hearkens back to the rules cyclopedia.  Seriously, how may games these days have a single "all-in-one" book for the entire game system?  

So yes, I'm super excited to take these rules out for a spin sometime in the next few weeks, then circle back with post-play observations.  But here's a question I've been pondering - there are a lot of OSR rules sets out there, so how and why would Shadowdark earn it's place on my game shelf?  I've got Lamentations of the Flame Princess, of course, because I like horror gaming and no one does the "weird twist adventure" better than that publisher.  Then there is Adventurer Conqueror King - ACKS - a game that takes the promise of BECMI, with domain play and economics, and dials it into Accountants and Aboleths.  I truly love ACKS, but my groups usually don't want to be building spreadsheets in between game sessions. Sigh,  It's tragic, I know.  I've mostly skipped playing OSE, Swords & Wizardry, Labyrinth Lord, OSRIC, etc - I own most of those original games, and still have all the BX and BECMI and 1E AD&D books on the game shelves, so I don't need the clones.  I look for innovations in new rules sets.  Shadowdark looks like it perfectly fits the niche of a BX style game, a beer and pretzels dungeon crawler, with lessons learned and innovations from modern fantasy games and design.  I think it will bring quality of life improvements to my OSR friends and may lure back some of the 5E players with the familiar mechanics.

There's a free version of the game available that would likely support levels 1-3, and there's an introductory adventure as well:  Shadowdark Preview.  Check it out.

Shadowdark: The Kids Will Be Alright

The large American gaming convention (Gencon) just wrapped, including the annual Ennie Awards.  The game Shadowdark cleaned up a bunch of awards - best product of the year, best game, best rules, and best layout and design.  They ran a million dollar kickstarter last year, and now this thing has become a movement.  They achieved that critical escape velocity that let them leave the fantasy heartbreaker planet and reach the stars.

I haven't played it yet.  When our current LOTFP campaign wraps, I think we'll do a one-shot to see what all the hype is about - there's a free adventure in the free start rules called "Lost Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur" that gives off a Cretan vibe and would fit the bill as an intro adventure.  Shadowdark looks like a rules light or minimalist OSR type game, with a heavy focus on exploration, dungeon crawling, resource management (torches and encumbrance), and XP for treasure, with a few modern design features (like advantage or luck points) while restoring some of the danger and mortality that 5E has eschewed.  The art and aesthetic gives off a Russ Nicholson Fiend Folio vibe - black, white, and a little grotty.

I don't know much about the fandom (yet), but it looks like they have a burgeoning 3rd party marketplace for the game, a reddit sub, Discord, and Facebook presence, and a positive helpful community.  I'm familiar with the author's earlier work (Kelsey Dionne) as I had picked up some of her 5E adventures well before the OGL-apocalypse, back when she was dabbling in 5E adventures with an Edgar Allan Poe influence.  I like how Shadowdark has completely broken from the OGL and is using a creative commons license to enable the 3rd party community.

Shadowdark feels like a bridge between the 5E and the OSR.  It's carrying forward some of the things we loved about 1st edition or BX, the dungeon-crawling and exploration, the class-based characters, the focus on resource management and treasure, and ported them into a game easily recognizable to 5E players. Even a cursory peek into some of Kelsey Dionne's interviews reveals someone deeply familiar with the roots of the hobby and wanting to perpetuate old school, exploration based play.  She said her first roleplaying experience was with The City State of the Invincible Overlord; how many readers of the blog today even remember 19070's Judges Guild, the Wilderlands of High Fantasy, or The City State of the Invincible Overlord?  Those names take me back.  Anyway it's really heartening to see younger designers bringing forward exploration-based OSR stylings and then mopping the floor at Gencon.  (The memes have been rich).

I'm looking forward to checking out the game, a little of change of pace in between our edgelord LOTFP games.  Maybe Shadowdark will even stick.  If you've played it, let me know what you thought about it - thanks!  I'll post more once we get some time behind the wheel.

Death Frost Doom and The Pillories - Part 1

 I like this adventure quite a lot - Death Frost Doom.  It showed how an adventure module could be game-breaking, campaign-breaking, in a way that wasn't really done before.  Sure, Tomb of Horrors could nuke a 14th level party, but it's not like the stakes included Acererak leaving the tomb and wrecking their home town.  I struggle to recall a TSR adventure, or even a WOTC-era adventure, that fundamentally altered the state of the campaign if the players pulled the wrong lever or opened the wrong door.  Since 2009 there have been quite a few LOTFP adventures that can wreck your game world, but this was the first, the OG.

Naturally I wanted to make it the capstone to the Pillories campaign, our York 1630 game.

How'd we get here?  The early adventures involved the characters collecting materials for a secretive patron, The Doctor, who was researching the story of a Roman Empire era military adventurer in Caledonia, who fought against a tribe of death cultists.  The Doctor betrayed the adventurers, they killed him and took his stuff, including his notes, and now they're trying to complete his quest - to find a path towards eternal life (and loot a really old place at the same time).

Their travels took them from York to Carlisle and across the river into Scotland, traveling through Langholm and then into the nearby mountains.  There were fisticuffs with Scottish brigands, some whiskey was tasted, a truce with Clan Armstrong forged, and the malign history of the place was recounted by a parish priest who asked them to leave sleeping horrors alone.

Death Frost Doom embraces many of the tropes of classic horror - dire warnings not to trespass from a crazed hermit, a foreboding locale with frozen graves and an ominous hanging tree, and unsettling haunting effects that make the players question their faculties and doubt their senses.

I ran Death Frost Doom a decade ago with a different group, using the original printing.  This time I'm using the 2014 update, primarily because the cartography is a higher quality and the new maps look better on a virtual table top.

Here's an aside to modern designers; please consider having sanitized or VTT friendly versions of your maps available for download.  There's an OSR design trend to load the maps with GM information and reminders right on the map, which is laudable, but it creates extra work when you're converting the map to a virtual table top and you don't want to immediately spoil the players.  Besides "fog of war" and other obfuscations, the referee needs to hide secret doors, traps, and similar concealed features, usually by editing the map image in a graphics program or hiding it somehow in the VTT.

The Pillories have been sufficiently impressed with the eerie qualities of Cold Mountain (the name of the mountain top in this game world).  An eerie humming sound suffused the peak, emanating from around and beneath the endless frozen cairns and graves surrounding the lonely cabin on the mountain top.  They found the body of a man who had fled the cabin in night clothes, having died of fright or exposure in the dark of night.  (They would return to the corpse later and discover it was beginning to reanimate, fingers twitching, faint zombie groans emanating from its lips, and one of the henchmen, Wood, beheaded it with his battle axe).

The cabin had plenty of its own weird effects, whether it was a haunted harpsichord, the ancient painting from hundreds of years ago that depicted the player characters perfectly, or the weird mirror that didn't reflect the magic user or elf (which our player/sketch artist captured here, where the halfling, Remi, can't see the mage Allister or the elf Yuri in the mirror, even though they are standing right behind him).

Eventually they went through the trap door that led down into the ancient dungeon beneath the cabin.  They encountered additional weird an unsettling things, such as the room of severed skeletal left hands, the chapel with it's haunting murals, cursed altar, and weird unholy basins full of human teeth in sickly black water.  There were moments where the players were a little dumbstruck and just said, "what the f*ck?"  It's a referee's dream to stop the players in their tracks and make them say "what the f*ck?"

Zeke, the crazed hermit, had warned the players not to sleep on the mountain, a warning they took to heart after finding the frozen corpse of the guy who ran out into the night after bedding down in the cabin.  As their first day on the mountain got late, they collected his gear and headed down the mountain.  They had also been transcribing all the Duvan Ku writing they encountered, and planned to use a Comprehend Languages the next day to translate it all; our group is a mix of level 3 and level 4 characters at this point, and Allister had researched that spell during their long months of in-game downtime between Strict Time Records Must Be Kept and the start of this one.

This ended our first foray into Death Frost Doom.  More to come.  

Retrospective and Review - Strict Time Records Must Be Kept

The premise of Strict Time Records Must Be Kept is that the player characters have been dosed with a slow-acting, fatal poison while isolated in a trap-filled mansion, where they search for doses of antidote.  The set up involves a wealthy patron betraying the group, ostensibly to create entertainment value for haughty, wealthy guests.  When I conceived the concept of the York LOTFP campaign, a year ago, I sketched a spine for the campaign that included a wealthy patron that could play the role of "the Doctor" and invite them to his mountain home for the fatal meal.  Starting with Tower of the Stargazer back at level 1, the Doctor has been in the background, arranging jobs, sending them letters of encouragement and small gifts, and ultimately hiring them to raid the church vaults detailed in The God That Crawls.  Now they were invited to the Doctor's remote mountain home for a fabulous meal, a well-earned reward, and a chance to hear where the Doctor's glorious plans were leading.  They were completely blind-sided when he announced to them over dinner that they'd all been poisoned.

Here's the scene:  the players traveled several days to the Doctor's mansion, where they were put up in one of the many small cabins surrounding the estate, and they arrived in time for the big dinner, dressed in formal attire (meaning limited armor, limited weapons).  They mingled with the Doctor's rich friends as "guests of honor" while the first courses were served in the dining room.  Uniformed servants with bone-white masks painted with red dots on their cheeks moved amongst the room re-filling glasses and placing the main courses.  The Doctor began to talk about his "great project", for which the player characters were being paid in gold for the part they played... Two of the masked servants brought a coffer to the end of the table to show off the player's reward, payment for retrieving a Roman text from The God That Crawls.

The Doctor's creepy servants

"There's just one thing", the Doctor said, after tinking a glass to get everyone's attention.  "I'm not going to get into the details of the project until later, after tonight's entertainment.  Let me tell you about the entertainment... my honored guests, the Pillories, have all been poisoned.  Their entrees were laced with a tasteless concoction of my own devising, which will kill them all painfully in 12 hours.  However, in the interest of fair play and sport, there are antidotes in small vials that look like this..." and the Doctor held up an empty vial, "hidden around the mansion or locked away in nefarious puzzles.  And we get to watch them stumble around looking for the vials while their symptoms get worse."

"Except for you, Ignazio - I poisoned you as well, because we needed a demonstration."  At that point, one of the rich guests started violently convulsing and went through a wave of gross symptoms, previewing for the players what would befall them over the next 12 hours.  "His dose was far more virulent than the rest of you, you still have 12 more hours.  Chop chop."

So that's more or less how you kick this one off.  One of the rich guests got sick and fled the room (Sergio Ortega).  Dame Thatcher started laughing uncontrollably at the character's predicament with tears streaming out of her eyes, and the Dread Pirate Roberts put some money down betting that the adventurers would all make it out alive.  The players said "Screw all you guys, we cast SLEEP."

In our version, the rich guests never got the chance to spectate as the characters stumbled around the mansion because their unconscious bodies were all trussed and bound in the dining chamber.  Captain Roberts wasn't affected by SLEEP (too high level) so he wished the characters well; he was going to retrieve his things from the upstairs and potentially help them if they met up again.  His NPC arc didn't work out as he hoped; his room was trapped with a blunderbuss, he took a chest-full of shot, and he also ended up with a heightened dose of poison.  He crossed paths with the players a few times as they explored the mansion, but once it was clear to him he was caught in the Doctor's poisoned web and experiencing spiraling symptoms, he returned to the dining hall and slew the bound socialites before melting from the poison - not just mostly dead, but dead-dead.

As if all this doesn't sound fun enough, the servants and hunting hounds out in the yard were all dosed with rage-inducing drugs and would jump-scare the players from around corners or behind doors as they crept through the mansion looking for antidote.

Strict time keeping is a recurring feature in these LOTFP adventures, whether it was managing light and food in The Grinding Gear or plotting the course of the slime monster turn-by-turn in The God That Crawls.  Here, the countdown takes on ominous life as the players begin to dread the tolling of the hours which signal the next wave of saving throws against ever-more debilitating poison symptoms.  Pressure builds as the players try to cover more ground in the house, even as their characters lose function.  Every time they succeeded in finding an antidote dose, there would be a tense moment around the table as they tried to justify who should take it, based on a combination of saving throws, symptoms, who had the most valuable skills, and so on.  (They ended up saving their Specialist first).

The Pillories eventually found the Doctor's secret lab in the basement, where they were able to synthesize the final antidote that was needed using the Doctor's notes.  They rescued someone named Geoff from the Doctor's prison, and Pastor Blackburn recruited him to be a henchman, setting up an interesting future problem when they rescue the next Geoff down the line and I need to decide if all the Geoff prisoners are clones.  By morning, the players had survived the poison, the rage-servants had died of heart attacks after the rage drugs wore off, and the wealthy patrons were either killed by the vengeful Captain Roberts or taken out by other traps within the house.  We had a post-mortem game session where the players took the next 6 months or so of game time leveraging the deed of the house and several adventure's worth of loot to fix it up, hire all sorts of staff, and claim the mountain retreat as their new headquarters.  They transported their library from York to the house in the Pennines and the spell casters used the time for magic research... including researching a "Comprehend Languages" spell so they could decipher a certain cryptic set of writings on a cave face deep beneath the Doctor's house, where a skeleton made of stone was half emerged from the rock face.  If you own this adventure, you know the room I'm talking about, and the players laughed for several minutes about how close they came to letting the halfling smear blood all over the thing the first time they found the room, before they knew what the inscription meant.  Their halfling, Remi, has leveraged his robust saving throws to become the party's instigator.  Every campaign needs someone willing to pull levers and stir the pot.

We had a lot of fun with this one, as far as a review rating that's the best thing to say about an adventure - it was well worth our time.  It was a little challenging managing all of the NPCs early on in the first evening, but that got sorted out fairly early.  I knew this would be a central fixture in the campaign and introduced the Doctor, and his manservants, early in the York campaign.  During the lead up, they knew the Doctor was eccentric and weird, and didn't trust him, but didn't distrust him enough to refuse a dinner invitation and chance to collect their money.  But I think Strict Time Records Must Be Kept could work even better with a convention game, where the referee could be stingy on the number of antidotes and see who survives at the end.

Like many of Kelvin's adventures, there are gratuitous puns and pop culture references which break up the horror and give momentary relief to the tension.  An example was the room of chains and hooks with the metal puzzle box, with its razor sharp edges, holding an antidote... my players are all products of 1980's horror movies and started quoting the original Hellraiser, "We have such sights to show you" and "Your suffering will be legendary, even in Hell" and that kind of stuff while someone wrestled with the puzzle.

Speaking of movie references, one of their favorite moments (captured in the sketch below) is when they discovered the Doctor's henchmen had captured one of their friends from York, a homeless chap that lived in their alley they called "Sandwich Sam", and the Doctor sewed something into Same's abdomen (a box with an antidote).  They were fond of Sam and had to weigh attempting a surgery vs keeping Sam alive... they ended up doing the surgery but using magic to keep Sam alive.  (Unfortunately Sam was murdered later in one of the game sessions by a homicidal butler).

This one was a great adventure, with an interesting premise, that made great use of time pressure, and I had enough forethought to incorporate it naturally into the campaign backstory.  Physically the book is a high quality LOTFP hardcover, 80 pages, with art, maps, and writing by Kelvin Green.  I find Kelvin's puns and culture references entertaining to read and fun to work into the game, so his adventures work for me, and this might be the best of the bunch.  It was certainly the adventure I was most excited to put through campaign play first.  The other one that's definitely in our future is Bee-Ware, since Ambersham Mead has been a recurring game reference since the early days of this campaign.  The players even re-opened a tavern near the new mansion property and want to stock it with Ambersham, necessitating a visit in the near future.

As for the campaign York 1630, in the long months they were rebuilding the mansion and making it their own, the players deciphered the Doctor's notes and fully read the book they bought for him, the Words of the Dead.  Between the account of the Roman legate, and the medieval notes the Doctor had gathered, they determined the holdfast of the ancient death cult was at a place called Cold Mountain somewhere north of Carlisle, in Scotland.  It's there they will pierce the ancient cult's secrets of immortality and finish the Doctor's "great project".  Next game report, we'll recount how they set off to begin Death Frost Doom (now in the year 1631).

The God That Crawls Retrospective and Review

It's been a minute since I've posted here at the Dream House.  My corporate alter ego has been busy - my company is merging with a French business, and acquisitions are busy times anyone in IT.  It's been good though, I've enjoyed visiting Reims and trying to pick up French.  My gaming group has been diligent about maintaining the LOTFP campaign, and the players have a few new adventures under their belts.  Let's get caught up with "The Pillories".

By way of refresher, this campaign is centered around the city of York in 1630.  There's a healthy number of LOTFP early-modern adventures either directly placed in England or easy enough to put there, such that there's no lack of interesting things for adventurers to do.  The player character patrons have included a local crime lord, Billy Brewer, a mysterious figure named Garvin Richrom, and a collector of rare things called "The Doctor".  The Doctor was introduced in person last game report, and he's since hired the characters to retrieve a valuable codex from a secret vault of the Catholic church (the locale of The God That Crawls).

Our characters include Pastor Blackburn, a Solomon Kane-like puritan monster hunter; Remi and Yuri, a halfling burglar and elf wanderer; Toby and Wood, the two henchmen; the group's leader is Allister, an Oxford scholar and dabbler in the mystic arts (a magic user).  They call themselves The Pillories.  The campaign is basically a "best of" for old LOTFP including Tower of the Stargazer, the Grinding Gear, and now The God That Crawls.  (On the near horizon sits Strict Time Records Must Be Kept and then Death Frost Doom).

The group traveled to Dover, stayed at an inn and got their bearings, before going to Shepperdswell, a small hamlet that was home to the parish church beneath which were the lost Catholic vaults filled with terrible secrets and dangerous items.  The Pillories met the pastor of the church, Father Bacon, and be-friended a local farmer who let them stay in his barn for a night.  It was Halloween night, and they ended up infiltrating the vaults through a hill-side entrance and quickly got lost in the tunnels.  There was lots of screaming and running through a maze while they were tracked by an immortal shoggoth-like monster, the "god that crawls".

A few of our artist's renditions of 'the god' chasing the characters

After a lot of trial and error with mapping and figuring out how to navigate the maze, they found a circular shaft leading up into the church.  Unfortunately, right after two of the characters climbed up and out, the monster came along and chased the rest of the group away from the exit.  So they got split up - two characters (Toby and Yuri) were up in the church, while everyone else plunged back into the dark maze, trying to outpace the monster.  It was great fun.  It eventually devolved into a full fiasco when dawn broke and the party still hadn't reconnected, but now the thief and elf needed to deal with people waking up in the church and finding intruders.  The next day was All-Saints Day and there would be a mid-day service in a couple of hours with all the villagers coming to church as well.

All's well that ends well.  The other players finally got out of the maze, the Father and his acolytes were put to Sleep, the Father was Charmed, and the players concocted a story about being agents of the church sent to verify the secrets were safe, and what a great job Father Bacon was doing keeping it all secret and safe.  They had their book they were sent to recover, the Father was calmed down before mid-day services, and they were able to head out without anyone summoning the nearby nobility and law enforcement.  They did collect a bunch of other "weird items" to mess with in the future, but never did find the secret vault with the overpowered artifacts.  However, they left with a map and have resolved to come back at a later time to see where it leads.

I never ran this one years ago when it first came out, and wasn't sure how the whole "chased by a monster in a maze" would play out at the table.  It worked remarkably well in actual play and wasn't hard to manage as the referee.  I don't think I gave it enough credit back in the day, and we truly had a grand time.  Most classic D&D or fantasy game adventures fall short when it comes to mazes and getting lost, but James Raggi did a fine job with maze construction on The God That Crawls and designing an interesting setting around it.

My players are scattered about these days, so we're playing online using a virtual table top, which makes manipulating maps and revealing / hiding sections of a map easy with online tools.  I have both physical books and PDFs for most adventures, so while I'm referencing a print copy for myself and flipping pages, I use the PDF in advance to create images of the maps and load them into the virtual table top for the online gaming and mapping.  The referee does need to do some prep work on the maps hiding secret things and whatnot, which is my biggest accommodation switching from books designed for in-person gaming to online gaming.  I wonder, post-COVID, how many groups actually went back to 100% in-person play?

To wrap up, this one is about being chased by a shoggoth-like monster through a multi-level dungeon maze while trying to find some horribly unfair cursed items.  If that sounds like an enjoyable proposition, this adventure delivers the goods.  There's enough weird history and tie-in to the real world of the setting that it was reminiscent to me of a Call of Cthulhu adventure, but playable with familiar d20 mechanics and classic fantasy classes and rules.  The God that Crawls - an old one but good one.

Next time we'll turn our attention to a much newer adventure, Kelvin Green's Strict Time Records Must Be Kept.  Stay tuned.

LOTFP Review: The Curious Conundrum of the Conflagrated Condottiero

This capsule review will have spoilers.

Here's some boring facts about the book up front to avoid diving right into the spoilers.  The Curious Conundrum of the Conflagrated Condottiero (henceforth referred to as "4C" for the rest of this review) is 26 pages, with Kelvin Green doing the writing, art, and cartography, as he is known to do.  It's 26 pages and you can get the PDF here: 4C on DriveThruRPG - where apparently it's a gold seller.  Okay, have we given the spoiler-averse enough time to bail on this review?  Good, let's get into it.

4C is a revenge piece about an implacable undead hunting its murderers.  From the back cover:  Five men went to war.  Four men returned.  Now something is burning them to death.  We learn that the five men found a treasure cache during the war; after a disagreement over the treasure, the four murdered their compatriot and buried him in a shallow grave, then returned home with the loot.  There are several ideas on getting the players involved shortly after the time the first murder happens, and most of the adventure takes place in the environs of the small German village of Schwartzfuß where the players will get to put on their best Scooby Doo impersonations and unravel the mystery.  The village is briefly described, with a focus on a few key NPCs and some red herring side plots.  Like many books in the LOTFP canon this is meant to take place in the 1630's in and around the 30 Years' War.

As I was reading this, I kept thinking about 1980's horror movies like John Carpenter's The Fog with its theme of vengeful dead (in the case of The Fog, they are drowned lepers betrayed by the villagers).  In the afterword Kelvin relates The Fog was indeed a primary influence for 4C.  In the movie The Fog, the undead are terrorizing the town of Antonio Bay on the 100th anniversary of its founding and the event that drowned the mariners.  The original The Fog is a low-budget movie but I think it's held up well, highlighting the uncomfortable fact that many of our settlements or historical founders (hello, America) committed horrific things we've either suppressed or forgotten.  At the same time, watching an implacable foe exact revenge on "innocent" generations removed from the original crimes is also unsettling.

From that perspective the targets in 4C are less sympathetic (they're the actual murderers, not some distant descendants).  I don't believe it's mentioned, but there could be an opportunity to place the first murder or appearance of the revenant on the anniversary of the crime or murder pact, tying it to some kind of auspicious date where old crimes resurface to plague the living.

I suppose I've said enough about this one. There's no dungeon to be found here, so let's take a moment to acknowledge the wags who'll gripe about a Call of Cthulhu style horror investigation published for a class and level D&D style rules system. I'll conclude by saying I liked the premise and the set up of this one and will consider using it, perhaps in a future LOTFP campaign placed in the Holy Roman Empire.  By now I believe there's a critical mass of official and unofficial LOTFP adventures set in Germany.  Nor would it be hard to transplant it to ye olde England with the aid of a name generator, so we may not have to wait for a future campaign after all.

Thanks for reading.  As I work backwards through the LOTFP catalog our next visit will be to The Obsidian Anti-Pharos.

Catching Up with the Pillories (York 1630 Campaign)

 I've been away a while - 6 weeks!  I have several alter egos, in one of them I lead a global IT department and spent the last month of the year focused on "landing the plane" - making sure we delivered annual commitments and finished the critical projects.  Then the kids came home from college (I have two in college right now!  A senior and a freshman) and then it was off to Mexico to spend time with the hippies on the beach at a music festival (another persona).  But table top gaming continued apace, it was only the blogging that fell by the wayside.  Now the year has started afresh, the rum and tequila have worn off, the tie dyes are put away, let's look at what's been going on with our Lamentations of the Flame Princess York campaign.

Since it's been a while, here is the cast of characters: they've named themselves The Pillories, and include Allister (an Oxford scholar who used the library's forbidden books section during his tenure there to learn charms and enchantments); Father Blackburn, a Solomon Kane-like puritan monster hunter; Remi Knotwise - a halfling burglar; Yuri - an elf wanderer from Central Europe; Toby and Wood, two war veterans and former bandits, now henchmen (a thief and fighter, respectively).  I've kept demi-humans in my alternate 1630's setting.  Halflings are creatures of comfort that live in southeastern England, although some are employed keeping the gardens at Cambridge.  Elves are ill-trusted creatures of sorcery, banished to the dark woods of Eastern Europe and unwelcome in Christian society.  Yuri spends most of his time disguising himself.  We haven't met any dwarves yet in-game.

The character along the bottom - left to right:  Wood, Allister, Remi the halfling, Yuri the elf, Toby, and finally Father Blackburn

These players were all new to Lamentations of the Flame Princess, so the campaign has been set-up as a bit of a "greatest hits sandbox".  The first adventure they did was Tower of the Stargazer, out on the Yorkshire Moors.  They learned of a mysterious patron, "The Doctor", who collects oddities and curiosities.  They were lured north and west to a challenging puzzle dungeon called The Grinding Gear.  The last game report was about halfway through The Grinding Gear (all the previous ones are here:  York 1630 game).

The Grinding Gear Wrap-Up

There's a point half-way through The Grinding Gear where the party can become trapped in the dungeon, and it's critical the group has been keeping records of food, water, and light resources.  This isn't a game like 5E with infinite light or "we're all mutants with darkvision"; darkness is an actual obstacle and the players need light to solve puzzles and escape the dungeon.  When the Pillories got trapped they had 2 days of water, rations, and 16 hours of oil for their lantern, and a small number of torches.

If the players have been reasonably astute along the way, navigating The Grinding Gear's remaining puzzles isn't terribly difficult.  Early on in the campaign, they adopted the practice of avid note-taking, using a shared Google sheet to track marching orders, supplies, XP totals, handouts, in-game notes, etc, and it's really helped with game recaps and memory.

However, my players couldn't resist playing the organ, they were sure something good would happen - see the picture below.  It could've been worse; several characters were rendered deaf for a few hours, but the effects weren't permanent.

Play that organ!

Beyond the puzzles, there's a trick sarcophagus that hides something important, captured here in another sketch by one of the players.  All-in-all, the Pillories were able to escape the Grinding Gear with 8 hours of cushion on their light sources, having found the principal rewards left behind by the dungeon creator, Garvin Richrom.  (Garvin Richrom will be a recurring character in the campaign, there's a lot that can be done with him).

Yuri and the sarcophagus

The LOTFP rules enable magic-users and clerics to write scrolls in their downtime, and The Pillories have discovered the benefits of investing profits into their library, which enables scroll writing, so downtime between adventures is not idle time.

The Downtime Interlude

There were several items founds in The Grinding Gear that the players didn't know how to use right away; the magic users needed to research and develop an Identify spell, and then there was trial and error to figure out the command words.  For instance, they had recovered a wand that belonged to the Medieval alchemist Sylvanus Fulgur; with Identify, they learned the wand could paralyze or immobilize a target.  Fulgur's manuscripts were in Latin and Greek, so Allister spent weeks working through all the different ways a Medieval alchemist might say "freeze" to find the triggering combination to activate the wand.  At one point he was luring in destitute people off the streets of York to practice on them.  "Would you like a sandwich, you look hungry?  Just step into my parlor while I point this innocuous looking shaft of rowan at you."

Allister trying to figure out the command word

Father Blackburn learned the workings of a gnarled staff of almond, like that carried by an Old Testament prophet.  In fact it was a staff of healing, and each time he uses it, his hair and beard grow long and flowy like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments.  So he carries it but hasn't used it much.

Also during the interlude, they met The Doctor.  I've introduced The Doctor as an actual physician, apothecary, and lecturer at Cambridge, in addition to a collector of rare curiosities.  He hosted the player characters at his estate near Harrogate, where he studies the healing property of the nearby baths.  His time in the library at Cambridge brought a reference to a pre-Roman cult that had discovered the secret of immortality, that which eluded his Medieval predecessors, and was looking for a book that contained a reference to the location of the cult.  Correspondence between two 16th century bishops alluded to a place of safe-keeping beneath an English church, from before the Dissolution of the Monasteries.  He wanted the player characters to be his agents in finding the church, discovering if there actually was a secret store of hidden books beneath it, and finding the book in question.

The Doctor:  apothecary, madman, flautist

He showed them an arcane symbol they could expect to find on the cover:

The players spent some time calculating costs for the expedition - per diem for the overland trip to Dover and back, and reasonable wages.  The Doctor is only interested in the death book; if they find other treasures beneath the old church, they can claim salvage rights.  Of course he'll disavow them if they get caught breaking any laws.  Furthermore, he expects the death book (Loqui Mortuis) to point towards the mountaintop stronghold where the Romans overthrew the death cult that was terrorizing the surrounding highlands.  There could be further opportunities for the players on such an expedition to western Scotland if they handle this part of the operation well.  A deal was struck, and our characters set out for Dover.

If you know the LOTFP canon well, you'll recognize the pre-Roman death cult as an arrow pointing towards the adventure Death Frost Doom; the items sequestered beneath a church in the English countryside lead to the adventure The God that Crawls; the Doctor himself is the mastermind behind Kelvin Greene's Strict Time Records Must Be Kept, although perhaps that adventure is still some way in the future.

This is a good-sized recap for today, we'll resume with how the players have been faring in The God That Crawls.  Spoiler:  It's been great fun.  We'll be back soon.