Black City Game 17 - Pig Knuckles

The Spitsberg Pirates - that's the name of the player's Viking adventuring company -  took some well deserved rest and relaxation back in Trade Town, resting, healing, spending loot, and taking in their experience points.  For instance, Brick had been dealing with a case of dungeon lice after sifting through a monster lair , and needed to spend some time scouring himself in the brisk salt waters of the fjord.  Valens Lascarius, the Byzantine representative of the High Hermite of Byzantium, was eager to hear if any of the Russian Elves or disciples of Himerius were able to find new sources of magic.

The players were keenly interested to see how "Pig Knuckles" was going.  I may have mentioned it here and there, but a long term project for them has been to establish a regular gambling hall back at camp; they scavenged knuckle bones from old skeletons in the dungeon and turned them into dice; they scavenged materials to make gambling tables; they hired guards; cut a deal with the jarl Bergfinn; bought supplies of ale; promoted a key retainer, Skoldig, as the main dealer that runs the games.  I built a spreadsheet to calculate nightly results taking into account who runs the games and the competition along with random factors, and then it nets out the winnings after taking out wages and the jarl's 25%.  After a few weeks of running the game while they were in the dungeon, the henchmen, retainers, and fellow ship mates have made an extra 400-500sp.  By the end of the summer, the captain of the player's ship needs to be able to pay back their lord back home in Zealand who funded the voyage, so this is another way they're accumulating enough cash to make the expedition profitable (note: NPC gambling winnings don't count towards XP).

When all the errands in Trade Town were finally exhausted, they planned another delve.  This time, the route was to bushwhack back to Central Command on the surface, take a look at the holo crystal they were carrying while in Central Command's domed structure, then descend to the transit tunnels, and journey north and resume exploring the adamant dungeon.

The holocrystal was another "new employee orientation video" showing the working of some apparatuses in the eastern adamant dungeon; with a skilled weapon-smith, there might be a chance to forge some of the raw adamant they found into weapons.  (They filed that information away for now, and stuck to their original plan.  Adamant weapons sound pretty good to me, though.)

Back in the adamant dungeon, they started pushing further south into the western wing of the dungeon, clearing a few small chambers and some minor fights, and then discovered a storage area that held a bunch of thulium discs and cylinders.  The players don't know all the uses for thulium yet, but they have learned that the discs can activate some of the machinery, like tokens, and learned just in this session that the cylinders act as batteries for other devices (like a wand of magic detection they discovered, or a rod that depowers other items).

One of the recurring monsters in this part of the dungeon are these flying "shockers" - they're like wingless dragonflies, with whip-snap tails that zap anyone they hit.  In one of the last rooms, they found a control room overlooking a large chamber with various vat-like capacitors, and a colossal shocker (the mega-shocker) was coiled in this room, slurping electricity from open conduits.  Nodules all over its body were buds forming new regular sized shockers, and a handful of the smaller versions clung to the mega-shocker like remoras on a big shark.  After noticing the players characters, the mega-shocker reared up and smashed the glass separating them from the overlook chamber; they players chose to flee, running down a passage to give themselves time to think.  The players were in this part of the dungeon on another mission for Odin, and their destination required them to get past the mega-shocker, so we'll start this week with an interesting problem.

This was our last game before Christmas, so it was appropriate for some exciting toys to be revealed.  Earlier in the evening, while exploring the room where they unleashed an extra-planar entity a few weeks ago, they discovered a few suits of elf-sized plate armor made out of that light-weight adamant.  Futuristic and form-fitting, this stylish segmented armor instantly transformed the two 1st level Russian elves into tanks.  Timur and Vitaly were ecstatic.  I guess it's a happy coincidence that elves are built similarly to space aliens.  As far as the players know, Santa was just taking care of some of his elves.

Cast of Characters
Agnar Beigarth, a Northman fighter (L2)
Mustafa of Arabia, a scimitar wielding desert warrior (L3)
Brutok the Strong, a dwarf (L2)
Borghild, a Norse cleric of Odin (L3)
Timur, Russian Elf (L1)
Vitaly, Russian Elf (L1)
Dominicus, Byzantine magic user (L1)

Retainers with the party:
Tribunas, Byzantine magic user (L1)
Brick Bunnybreaker (halfling L1)
Bottvild (cleric L2)
Visin Thorsteinson (fighter 3)
Hunlaf the Saxon (specialist 2)


* Visin and Hunlaf were members of an NPC party that ambushed the players, and were taken prisoner for ransom.  After spending a lot of time in tow with the players, Visin grew to have grudging respect for Agnar's leadership (particularly after observing the group's capabilities - two clerics, multiple spell-casters make them a formidable bunch).

Your World in the Balance

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

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

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

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

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

D&D Professional Skills

From time to time the DM might need to determine if a NPC professional succeeds at a difficult technical skill or craft - does the blacksmith make a suitable masterwork weapon on the first try, can the sage answer an obscure question, that kind of stuff.  As I collate notes for my future (Caribbean-based) saltbox setting, this extends to solving for skills like sailing, navigation, and gunnery.

I've seen the simple 2d6 reaction chart from classic D&D turned into a skill resolution chart.  It assumes a modifier scale of -3 to +3 using ability scores.  (Historical note: Charisma was capped at +2 in the Moldvay rules, but this was changed for Mentzer and the Rules Cyclopedia).  For professional skills, I'm using the following descriptors to determine appropriate "ability modifiers":

Professional Experience:
Skilled:  +1
Expert:  +2
Master:  +3
Unskilled:  -2

Unskilled characters may not even get a roll in some cases.  The basic reaction chart goes like this:

Skill Resolution (roll 2d6):
2  serious failure
3-5 failure
6-8 partial success
9-11 success
12 great success

An example usage: if the players hire a skilled navigator instead of a master navigator for their ship, they'll pay less in salary or shares, but there's a higher chance of getting lost on the way to that hidden island.  As I develop the nautical rules, I'll work on specific guidelines when hired experts would make checks and how the dice results translate into specific outcomes.

For basic D&D, I like decoupling professional skills from the class and level system and treating them as background skills for NPCs; it keeps the major emphasis for class advancement on adventuring and developing adventurer capabilities.  Nonetheless, I can see the players asking if they can develop any degree of professional skill (especially these nautical skills) if they spend enough time on a boat.

This post from an older blog (Skills: The Middle Road) provided some recommendations for education around professional skills, so I'll use those values as a starting point and will see how it goes:

Learning a Profession:
Skilled - 1 month, 1000gp
Expert - 3 months, 3000gp
Master - 6 months, 10,000gp

If a player character commits to spending time in the rigging, learning how to furl and unfurl the sails, close-haul a ship, tie the right knots, swab the deck, and so on, they can be a skilled sailor after a month of effort and a bit of money on the side.  (For sailing, assume the money goes to gambling, carousing, repairs, clothes, basic gear, dues, and so on; ordinary folks pick up the same skills at a slower pace without all the money spent).

Alternatively, I can look at a hybrid game like ACKS, that bolts a new-school inspired feat and proficiency system onto the old school chassis.  Navigation and Seamanship are already represented as choices in ACKS, and Gunnery is easy to add.  ACKS also addresses when someone would be qualified as a "master" by stacking extra picks on a proficiency.  I'm not sure the high-fantasy tone of ACKS is what I'm going for, so the actual decision on rules flavor is for sometime down the road.

I Changed My Mind

Why should I keep blogging?  That is the question I'm asking myself this week.  I recently passed a 2nd year anniversary, of sorts, two whole years of steady posts at The Lich House.  Have my games gotten better?  Is there some element of the craft that has improved?

There is a side benefit to the effort of writing… it challenges you to express complex ideas with simplicity and brevity.  Writing forces organization on those voices in your head, turning them into a narrative for transcription.  Sure, that’s valuable.

But have my games gotten better?

I do a lot of things at the table differently these days.  My table manners have changed.  I don't use a game master screen any longer, and I used to mandate them.  I keep my notes  or map off to one side, but I'd much rather be present in the player circle during the action.  I roll all the important dice in the open these days.  I don’t alter any rolls; there's an immediacy to the results, and it's very clear when someone is going to live or die, or when the monster just got wrecked by a player's massive roll.  I used to think the DM knows best, and I'd discretely alter the results for dramatic purposes.  Ironically, the games are far more dramatic and interesting now.  I also stopped requiring backstories as much as possible, figuring that if the information was important, it would come up at the right time.

On the other hand, I'm a lot more open-minded about scenario structures; I've come to view it as finding the right tool for the job; in some types of games, an adventure path or plotted narrative or "mission of the week" is warranted, and a sandbox style won't work.  That's an improvement over my opinion a few year ago, which was 'if you're not running a player-driven sandbox, you're doing it all wrong wrong wrong.'  See that?   A modicum of maturity and growth.  I prefer site-based locations and a sandbox format, but I understand the need to deviate.

As the calendar moves into January, I'm going to sift through the blog's back catalog and pull out those ideas here and there where I've noted changes in my approach or identified something to distillate.  Blog posts are ephemeral and fleeting - I think it's fair to ask the question from time to time, is the blogging worth the effort?  But this is rhetorical, since I'm not closing shop.

What kind of things do you do differently since you've encountered the blogosphere?  The internet often seems like tribes of angry folks yelling at each other across a room, and no one ever changes their mind.  (See also, Edition Wars et al).  I've changed my mind about some things.  How about you?

Journey of the Magi

It's hard to avoid "nativity scenes" in America around this time of year - the poor parents with their newborn in a manger, surrounded by animals, the 3 Wise Men kneeling before the child and forking over the gifts.  Bah, I discount the whole scene - it's a conflated mess, pulling ideas across sources, piled on with sentimental embellishments from centuries of tradition.  Even the authoritative source for the Magi story (the book of Matthew 2) implies that the Magi visited Jesus when he was a child, in a house, quite some after the birth.  When the jealous king Herod declares the slaughter of the innocents, attempting to slay his prophesied rival, he starts with 2 year-olds!

Don't think I'm hating on the Christmas - I love the season, and fully embrace it as an important time of the year to reflect on faith, beliefs, and family.  I admire the folks in my life that have taken up a religious calling in service to others.  But I also can’t help turning a critical idea to the sources of ideas, customs, and traditions.  Santa is a representation of Odin and the Wild Hunt, Jesus wasn't born in December, and the Wise Men never showed up at the manger.  But you probably knew all that already; gamers are a discerning bunch.

Nonetheless, the journey of the Magi is an amazing story from the perspective of the mythic themes involved.  The end of an age and the beginning of a new one is a time of signs and portents; the idea that foreign astrologers and esoteric masters from far away places have read the stars and come on a lengthy pilgrimage fires the imagination.  What if a bunch of exotic and powerful strangers showed up in that muddy village your D&D characters call "home base" and suddenly proclaimed the bawling toddler of a serf down the road was the new king of the world?  Hah.  Interesting things would ensue, would they not?  What would the players choose?

People in power fight to maintain it, and the "slaughter of the innocents" as an attempt to defeat prophecy is a theme that appears elsewhere in literature and fantasy, too.  It has historical antecedents in the birth legends of both Sargon the Great and Moses, other children that escaped murder attempts in response to prophecy.  It's a motif that was featured in the film Willow and that Sword of Truth TV series (based on those Terry Goodkind books).

Of course, I can't discuss the Magi without reflecting on the knowledge they brought home with them of the impending changes to their world.  Tradition has the Magi visiting from Ethiopia, Arabia, and Persia, although the term "Magi" comes from Zoroastrianism, a predecessor to Christianity.  Imagine the alienation one would feel after learning the prophecies were true, and the traditional world-view would soon be eclipsed by a new religion that would sweep the ancient world and overturn the old order?  I've been reading a lot about the conquistador's role in Latin American history and the role of prophecy in the downfall of the Aztecs; we just passed our own "apocalypse" of sorts - that Mayan 2-21-2012 excitement - apocalyptic thoughts have been in the air.

I'll close this brief meditation with excellent words from the poet TS Elliot.  Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, all!

"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The was deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires gong out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices.:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

TS Eliot; The Journey of the Magi

Black City Game 16

We took a "Hobbit Holiday" last weekend for a mix of Christmas prep, and letting folks get out to the movies to see "An Unexpected Journey".  Since we skipped gaming, I'm tardy on the last game report from two weeks ago - but since we play tonight night again,  here goes.

The crew had just survived the vicious ambush by Visin Thorsteinson and company, and then spent some time in a secure series of rooms resting and healing.  In a previous week, they had promised to return to Odin within 9 days, and the days were growing short.  ("Odin" is an otherworldly  entity they discovered on the other side of a portal in the top of a lonely spire in the city).

During the long march down the Transit Tunnels, they took a detour up to "Central Command", a domed structure on the surface, accessible from the deep tunnels by a ladder hidden behind a secret door.  The party was carrying an irregular "holographic crystal" which fit a device only found in Central Command; they also knew that it would be quicker to exit the ruined city by going topside rather than continuing through the dungeons, so this was also a shortcut.

Unfortunately, a detachment of rubbery alien servitors was waiting for them.

During a game sessions weeks ago, while they were in Central Command the first time, they had inadvertently opened a hailing channel (like a video call) to various control rooms in the depths of the complex, and some servitors were dispatched to "quell the unruly bipedal mammals that were abusing the delicate equipment".  There were a pair of strong guys, a stretchy guy, and a hypno-unit that was able to put the mind-control whammy on the "primitive hominid cortex".

This turned into a great, edge-of-your-seat fight, where the probability of a TPK loomed large.  The alien servitors started attacking as the player characters cleared the top of the ladder, and the players were hard-pressed to clear space to let more folks get up the ladder.  The heavy fighters paired off with the tough-guy aliens, while the hypno-alien used mind-control to take some of the guys right out of the fight.  The stretchy guy would reach long distances with his oversized hands, snatch a character out of the melee, quickly wrap them up in a bear hug, and then secrete acid and dissolve whatever he was holding.  It was nasty. Ayerick the Fighter was killed by the stretchy guy, and Vitaly the Elf narrowly escaped getting dissolved into elf-soup a couple of times, slipping out with lucky rolls.

After surviving the fight, the group decided not to mess around with the holo crystal.  They had less than a day to get back to Odin, and I guess they didn't want to risk any kind of sidetracking.

The rest of the game was getting back to the top of the Tower of Astronomy, stepping through the magic portal to "Asgard", and consulting with "Odin".  Odin's powers were greater after the group had reconnected power conduits to Central Command in a previous week, and he gave them some new ideas for additional missions while they negotiated potential rewards.  They also learned about opponents with powers similar to Odin, such as the rogue god "Loki" who was trapped in a strange blue obelisk, and the villainous Zoltan the Welder, who was also scheming to extend his power in the undercity.

One of the players is pretty much convinced that "Odin" is an alien supercomputer, and wondered if these other "gods" are more of the same.  I can neither confirm or deny such speculation.

After what seemed like two months in the dungeon (6 or so game sessions) the group finally returned to Trade Town, a chance to rest back in their permanent camp and take a few days to score experience points.  They now have a level 3 cleric, a level 3 fighter, a retainer advanced to henchman status, and Ayerick joined the campaign dead pool.

Cast of Characters
Agnar Beigarth, a Northman fighter (L2)
Mustafa of Arabia, a scimitar wielding desert warrior (L3)
Brutok the Strong, a dwarf (L2)
Borghild, a Norse cleric of Odin (L3)
Timur, Russian Elf (L1)
Vitaly, Russian Elf (L1)
Dominicus, Byzantine magic user (L1)

Retainers with the party:
Tribunas, Byzantine magic user (L1)
Brick Bunnybreaker (halfling L1)
Bottvild (cleric L2)
Ivar the Bow-bender (specialist L1)

Dead:
Ayerick the Young:  melted by acid

What's on Devil Island?

This is a follow up to yesterday's post about the Isla del Diablo, where rumors of a wrecked galleon promise a fortune on the sea floor.  What else do we know about it?  The island is a rugged place, with jungle covered slopes and a deep valley cut by freshwater stream; a church was built along the northwest hill sometime in the 16th century, in the lee of the central hills.  There are catacombs beneath the church where a buried secret lies, and there are remains of camps or a village in the jungle.

Does anyone live on the island?  Here are a handful of ideas for stocking it:

1. Homicidal Tribesmen:  Descendants of the insane lunatics marooned on the island in the past have formed a dystopian society like something out of Lord of the Flies; they follow a madman named "the Colonel".
2. Cannibal Cultists:  Corrupt mainland natives invaded the island some time ago when they were driven off by the Spanish; now they practice their inhuman ceremonies and cruel rites on Isla del Diablo.  Ia! Ia! Cthulhu Fhtagn!
3. Unclean Spirits:  There's an unavoidable experience of being watched, followed, and stalked any time an explorer steps into the cool shade of the jungle.  Disembodied planar entities hunger for new vessels to posses and finally escape the island.  Is that dog head speaking to me, telling me to kill them… kill them all?
4. Alien Ghosts:  Those mentally deranged castaways were under the influence of alien intelligences stranded on Earth; the entities have used the years on the island to begin the construction of a space craft or beacon to return to the stars, but they've been stymied as their original hosts die from age or disease.  They'll feign friendship to lure visitors to their village, bringing new hosts into proximity of their brethren awaiting fresh bodies.
5. Ritual Murderers:  A few survivors of the Spanish shipwreck made it to the island, but the baleful influence of the dark Loas that inhabit the place has turned them into serial killers, each staking out a different territory.  One of them stays near the lowland swamps, and uses poisoned arrows and deadly snakes; another lays deadfall traps in the central hills; the jungle stalker slits throats in the night.  The signs and trappings of evil voodoo hang all around the island.
6. Abandoned:  Roll again, but the island is uninhabited now, and all that's left are the eerie remains of the previous group.
7. Buccaneer's Camp:  Rowdy French buccaneers are behind all the (false) rumors of Isla del Diablo, to divert attention from the secluded inlet on the western shore they use to careen their ship and launch attacks on the mainland.
8. Cimaroons:  Escaped Africans form their own societies all over the Caribbean when they slip the slaver's yoke, and Isla del Diablo is home to a free colony of escaped slaves.  They will fight to retain their hard earned liberty and slaughter any Europeans that learn of their presence.

Of course, I might just end up using all of these ideas, spread across different islands.