The Bucket List for D&D

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quick Review: Backswords & Bucklers for Swords & Wizardry

Backswords & Bucklers is a variant off of the Swords &Wizardry Whitebox set put together by Tied to a Kite Games (you can get books 1 and 2 from Lulu).  The basic rules are free, and book 2 is less than $2 (pdfs).  It covers taking the basic Swords & Wizardry game and using it to play rogues, scoundrels and ruffians in Elizabethan England.  I got a recommendation to check it out the other day (thanks Von! - brilliant) as a low magic rules & setting, and liked it quite a lot.

The default classes are fighting man, scoundrel, and wise woman/cunning man.  There are no spell-casting classes just yet (the wise class uses a bit of dowsing and herbalism to achieve some game effects).  Equipment and money are Elizabethan.  There are some tweaks to combat - missiles and firearms are very deadly, and there's a neat rule around zero hit points and dying that makes rapiers and puncture weapons deadlier that could be worth pulling into any D&D game as a house rule.

However, the strength of the two products is in providing a campaign framework and advice for running urban D&D style adventures in lieu of dungeon delves.  Their term is "Tavern Trawling", and it's introduced in the first rules book but developed further in book 2.  The idea is to build a tavern environment as the home base, replete with regulars, occasional visitors, and patrons, and use the urban landscape for missions that take the place of dungeon delves.  It's very episodic and would feel quite a bit like a TV show in terms of ensemble cast and narrative structure.  Characters hail from the lower echelon of society, and the missions, adventures, and fictional interludes are in the picaresque vein, more like the fiasco situations that spiral out of control in a Tarantino film than the grand moments of high fantasy.

Here's why I went bizonkers over these books and wanted to do an immediate review - the techniques presented for generating the taverns and patron situations are very toolboxy and could be used in a wide range of settings for brainstorming urban adventures.  I could easily transplant the suggestions to any D&D game where there's the potential for city adventuring.  I'll definitely return back to this product sometime after the Black City, when I work on that future low magic/horror themed sandbox.  And for folks wanting to use the books to run their own Elizabethan urban crawl as is, there are like 12 scenarios in outline form and a full blown adventure ready to go.  The ratio of value-to-cost is really high and I'd recommend checking it out.

Note:  let me state the obvious - I'm aware of the Vornheim product, it's sitting in my "to-read" queue.  I realize the marketing has said it's designed for urban crawling, so it'll be interesting to compare and contrast the tavern-trawling structure when I get to it...

Defending The Horror

My band marches to a slightly different beat.  The games I run, and things I make, tend to feature a bit more horror and take their inspiration from similar sources.  The recent discussions around game art got me thinking - are my own ideas outside the D&D mainstream, too?

I'm not going to change anything, but it got me thinking why horror is such an important part of my game.  Let's say you think horror has no place in the game - as if giant poisonous spiders dropping down on characters and creating near-death experiences doesn't spike the fear and terror at the table.  You might say, demon-possessed serial killers going around doing vile things to innocent people is quite a bit different than running into a few horrible monsters in the dungeon.  There's a qualitative difference between fear and fear/disgust (oh - and check out Roger's excellent disgust articles for a deep dive)  I guess the concern is  that running a dark game is lurid and would arouse prurient interests or generate moral feelings of disgust.  "And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee…"

Melan said something on the "You're No Hero" post that really stuck with me - "The great moral dividing line in sword & sorcery stories lies not between altruism and egoism, law and lawlessness, or hero and antihero, but humanity and inhumanity… A roguish protagonist is not fundamentally different from one who respects law and order when we compare them to inhumane cultists and sanity-blasting horrors from beyond. "

And to steal a line from everyone's favorite peddler of shock and controversy, the darker the game world, the greater the light even a single candle will shed.

The Black City might have a few horror elements, like getting abducted and vivisected in the Tower of Pain, or drinking the wrong water and devolving into a mutated cannibal berserker.  Bah, mere occupational hazards.  I actually see the setting as a rip-roaring romp with totally awesome Vikings.  With big axes.  Fantasy Vikings = pirates, and what's more fun than being a pirate?  Am I right or what?  The ninjas may have real ultimate power™, but I'll take booty and wenches and rum (or in this case, mead) any day.

So make it horrible and dark, and put some squeamishness and icky stuff in your games.  Even amoral rogues that stand up against your horrors will seem "heroic" by comparison.  I'm not advocating role playing the icky stuff and running a "let's do snuff" game, but after all, a man's greatness is measured by his enemies.  Give your players something worthy of fighting.

I really enjoyed my Monday post on demonic possession in D&D - I'm kinda tired of retarded looking demons with vulture heads and gorilla bodies, and am going to spend some time working through a few alternate demons that follow the "immaterial, unclean spirit" approach, and play up the exorcist angle, too.  But I would be interested in hearing if folks think those kinds of articles cross any blatant lines about mixing real world beliefs with gaming.  I'd hope that you'd consider the comment section a safe place to dissent.  My own feeling tends to be, if it's used as a hideous monster in the movies, chances are I'll consider pulling it into a D&D game.

Carry on.  Make it monstrous, make it horrible, keep it Weird.

Planetary:  something about 'keeping it strange' just felt right for this post...

The Black City - the Well of Woe, the Sunken Vaults, and the Maze

The Black City is a ruined alien city in the frozen north that I'm building out as a campaign setting for eventual publication.  You can follow the project here.

The Well of Woe

A The Well of Woe
If a group follows the trail from Trade Town along the fjord they'll reach the sprawling ruins of the Black City, entering near the Well of Woe (letter A on the city map).  The Well was the first entrance found by the early explorers that accessed the sub-levels below the city - it's nothing more than a large, 30' across steaming hole in the ground, surrounded by rubble.  Descending the hole by ropes or ladder will place the group on dungeon level 1 (Well of Woe area) in area 1.

Last year, Bergfinn's Bashers created a small checkpoint to guard the hole.  They have a defensible shack made of rubble walls and a hide roof.  They keep a few ropes and rope ladders handy, and throughout the season send a crew of 4 guardsmen and a sergeant each morning to assist groups in and out of the ruins for a small fee (effectively 1gp per person, paid up front).  The detachment keeps a small fire going at the shack and also acts as an aid station.

The leader of the detachment is one of Bergfinn's veterans, a weathered seaman named Bluenose.  Bluenose tends to look disdainfully at new visitors to the ruins, and has an oft-repeated message for first-timers:

Failure to follow these simple instructions will cost you extra.  When you're coming back up, make a light so we can see you down there, bang your shields so we can hear you, then we'll drop the ladders.  Anything else is extra.  If we have to drop a torch to see you, it's extra.  We don't take chances, we drop rocks on anyone we can't see.   We don't do extractions - if we have to get involved in a fight, it's extra.  We don't get involved in disputes between parties, either - if we have to get involved, it's extra.  Any questions?  Good, no questions - answers would be extra.

Bluenose's crew will drop rope ladders for any paying customers seeking entrance to the dungeons via the 30' deep well (they don't allow non-paying customers to use this dungeon entrance at all while the shack is manned).  When a group returns to the Well from below, they'll need to make a loud noise to alert the guards to drop the ladders again.  Each evening, Bluenose and the crew haul the ladders and similar gear back to Trade Town.

Bluenose and his men are an excellent source of rumors about the ruins, as they see many adventuring groups firsthand, and they try and keep tabs on where some of the groups are going.  Of course, getting rumors out of Bluenose will cost extra.

C The Sunken Vaults
The vaults are a series of massive voids in the ground.  The holes themselves extend deep beneath the surface - some of them are 100' deep - but are almost entirely filled with ice.  Even the warmest arctic summers aren't enough to melt more than a few feet of surface ice, forming wet pools on top of the ice.  There's a series of 8 such vaults in the area.

Groups will be able to find stairs and walkways leading down around the outside of some of the vaults, leading to observation decks that allow some visibility into the murky ice through a translucent glass-like plastic.  On sunny days when the light reaches deeper into the ice, it's possible to see the shapes of large behemoths frozen in the depths.

D The Maze
There was a point in the city's distant past when this area passed for what would be meditative parkland to the ancients - a sprawling, black walled maze with periodic open areas set for reflection.  Used for instruction, the walls of the maze were covered top to bottom with the ancient Grey dot-matrix style writing, describing magical rituals and alchemical formulae for study by students.

Now the maze is strewn with rubble - many of the glossy black rock surfaces are chipped, cracked and ruined, and it's hard to find complete tablets amongst the rubble, but there are a few.  Each wall-sized tablet recovered from the maze is either a new spell or an improved version of a basic spell , but a group would need serious rock-moving equipment to move one of the 2-ton slabs out of the rubble.  Alternatively, they could camp in the maze and attempt to transcribe the new spells right at the dig site.

'Improved' spells have a 25% greater effect than the standard spell, but will be the same level.  An example of an improved spell would be an improved magic missile that does 3-9 damage instead of 2-7 (d6+3 instead of d6+1).

There is a drawback to using an improved spell that won't be immediately obvious to players.  Repeated usage of improved spells will slowly reduce the character's spell slot capacity, effectively removing one of their level 1 spell slots for each 5 improved spells they memorize and cast.

Unknown to the players, each improved spell carries in its spell formula a mental virus that leaves behind spell fragments in the caster's memory; after 5 such fragments are left behind, the fragments recombine into a new spell.  When this happens, the character will know a new spell has formed in his/her memory but will have no idea what the spell does; it's a viral implant put there by the ancient master that crafted the improved spell in the first place.

There is a simple chart for determining what actions some of these viral spell implants perform; note that the effects of some of the viral spells might be of a higher level than the character would have been able to memorize on his own.  The character may eventually choose to cast the unknown foreign spell just to clear his memory and get the spell slot back!

Setting vs Rules

Thinking about the last post, I'm wondering if folks have a preference for which rules support different styles of play better or worse?  Standard versions of D&D do fine in the High Fantasy and Swords & Sorcery space.  D&D and the clones are fairly high powered and need some surgery to work in the low magic space - those green 2E historical books always had a healthy chunk of things to cut out to make the game more grounded.

Regarding the new games, DCC RPG looks to live in that Swords & Sorcery place, with the wizard pacts and moral ambiguities that come across in the rules.  I can't see Gandalf slashing his arm to spill blood to Blodbu…  - whatever the frog god thingie is in DCC -  to empower one of his spells, despite how awesome it would be.  (Although as an angelic Maiar, maybe his patron would be a being of light - what do I know?)

LOTFP goes after the low magic style, with grittier combat and toned down spell lists.  Note that both games ditch the 9 point alignment scale to work with Alignment as Allegiance and not Alignment as Ethics, further getting away from the good vs evil vibe of standard D&D.

As a DM, I choose low magic more often because I can model more elements from the real world (ie, general DM laziness) without needing to project the massive changes to society that would come about due to Raise Dead, common magical healing, Plant Growth for mega crops, Continual Light, and all the other reality-bending things we can't even predict.

Players, on the other hand, want Swords & Sorcery.  They'd prefer loose alignments (if any) to maximize freedom of choice, tons of race and class options, and more powerful options all around.  Just generalizing, mind you - your players might be different.

Just an aside - does anyone know of a setting or treatise that take magic to it's logical conclusions in a D&D setting?    The closest ones I can think of were in the Known World Gazetteers - Glantri and the Empire of Alphatia.  Both were ruled by wizards, had magical construction on a wide scale, flying ships, changes to agriculture and the social structures due to magic, etc.  But the Known World (Mystara) also postulated meddlesome gods (immortals) that kept the world in line and reacted if any group got too powerful.  I never read Eberon, but I I know it featured quite a bit of magic-as-technology.

Your Turn: Low Magic, High Fantasy, or Swords & Sorcery?

Moving on from the discussions about heroism and D&D, rules sets, and taste in art.  One element I see lurking behind the discussion is the style of play and the type of setting you run, since that sets the tone.  Besides, it was time for a new poll!

Here's my attempt at characterizing the settings types.  Drop a vote on the poll about which setting style you prefer.

The High Fantasy Setting
Most folks understand high fantasy - big, sweeping storylines that tell an epic story of good vs evil.  Morality tends to be black and white and is supported by a supernatural cosmology.  The bad guys are easy to identify because they look evil and use lots of humanoids and other disposable servants that can be killed in great numbers.

Magic is not rare.  Demihumans like elves and dwarves (and even more fantastic races) are common, and the power curve extends from the human to the superhuman.  Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, and standard D&D stuff is all high fantasy - you've got the Elminsters and Manshoons, the Iuzs and Mordenkainens all running around.

The Low Magic Setting
A low magic setting usually mirrors a fantasy version of a historical period on earth.  The morality involves lots of shades of grey.  Magic is limited - troublesome, world-changing spells like Raise Dead or Continual Light are cut.  Wizards and spell casters are mistrusted, if present.  The world is human centric - characters fight other humans, and demihumans exist on the fringe of society, if at all.  I consider the various AD&D 2E historical books as examples of this type.

Sword & Sorcery
If low fantasy and high fantasy are the extremes, Sword & Sorcery splits the middle.  It takes the moral grey areas and rare magic of the first type of setting, and pairs it up with a more fantastic world that doesn't emulate any real world history.  Sword & Sorcery doesn't care about a global struggle of good vs evil or big storylines; the stories are episodic and involve action, adventure, picaresque rogues, and a bit of swashbuckling.  Most D&D games seem to follow a Swords & Sorcery narrative structure (episodic stories) but use higher magic than the source literature because the game itself is high magic.  Despite the name, I think of the Wilderlands of High Fantasy as the best S&S setting, and Dark Sun was S&S as well.

Mythic Monday - Unclean Spirits of the Wilderness

A look at using demonic possession in your D&D game.

…Immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit… And no one could bind the man anymore, not even with a chain, for he had often been bound with shackles and chains, but he wrenched the chains apart, and he broke the shackles in pieces. No one had the strength to subdue him…  And Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “My name is Legion, for we are many.”
-The gospel of Mark, chapter 5

The Exorcist, The Rite, Fallen, Paranormal Activity, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Dominion, Rec 2.  There are a lot of creepy exorcism movies out there to fire up the imagination!  Although D&D and the cleric have strong roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the original designers took a radically different approach to portraying demons and devils in the game - they're basically big monsters with tough AC and hit points, meant to be smacked around with swords.  Not really how demons are portrayed in real world story and folklore.  Let's fix it!

In the "real world", demons are immaterial spirits and you need some Holy Power™ on your side if you're going to stand a chance.  Here's a quick look at the demon possession phenomena and some ideas on using demonic possession in D&D.

Demonic Possession
The chapter in Mark quoted at the top lays out the prototypical demonic possession - it's worth a quick read if you're not a Biblephobe.  An "unclean spirit" inhabits a human, and the person begins to act unnaturally - they might be harmful to themselves and others, demonstrate super human strength, fly into a rage at anything holy, appear to be insane.  In horror movies, the demon possessed are often serial killers!

Some of the tests used by the Catholic church to differentiate possession from mental illness include whether the victim is demonstrating special knowledge, or fluency in languages not known by the possessed.  Special knowledge is things only the demon could know - secrets about other people in the presence of the possessed, foretelling future events, descriptions of things happening far away.

And in the best spirit of film and movie, the possessed should be able to manifest physical changes - stigmata or lesions, scars and spontaneous injuries, green vomit and walking around double jointed like a human spider!  Yeah, that's the stuff!  Horrible!

Using Unclean Spirits in the Game
Demons can't be fought traditionally - they're immaterial and immortal.  If you're using the traditional cosmology - the Nine Hells and the Abyss - then I'd keep devils as devils, Abyssal demons as demons, and use these entities as they're called in the Bible - "Unclean Spirits of the Wilderness" - fallen spirits from an outer plane that now inhabit the Prime.  But I suggest keeping the cosmology vague and have NPCs call everything 'demons'.  A peasant isn't going to differentiate between types of extra planar entities - a demon is a demon is a demon.

Demonic possession is a plot device and not a great monster encounter, although killing the victim could be part of it - the victim would have greater than human strength and be difficult to grapple.  A murderer or serial killer could be demon-possessed, or you can go with a common horror approach and involve possession of an innocent - poor Linda Blair.  A section of dungeon could be demon haunted, or a lonely ruin in the wilderness.  There are excellent sequences in Stephen King's Dark Tower series where a jawbone is demon possessed, or Roland must deal with various demon haunted locales while traveling Mid-World.   An object could be the demon's vessel - the Dresden series features a collection of silver coins each bearing the soul of a demon that possesses the owner of the coins - the 30 pieces of silver given to Judas.

The demonic attack is basically a form of Magic Jar, with the demon whispering promises and exerting mental pressure to "get in", and the failed saving throw representing a moment of weakness leading to the possession.  If possession happens to a PC, it's a good opportunity to take the player aside and let them know to start fomenting mayhem.  Demons are destructive and evil, after all.  Otherwise, the demon can choose to take control and override the host's actions at any time; the demon knows everything the host knows, but can't use any of the host's special abilities (like spells).

The basic counter to demonic possession is the 5th level cleric spell, Dispel Evil.  However,  I'd allow for the existence of an Abjuration spell (as a 4th level cleric spell) with a limited scope - basically the same effect as Dispel Evil, but only effective against demonic possession.  In fact, an AD&D 1E version of Abjure is described in S4 The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth as part of the Demonomicon of Iggwilv, and AD&D 1E has an Exorcise spell.  Your world could also have Abjuration in a special book or holy text, unavailable through regular prayer - something like the church's Roman Ritual - the Rituale Romanum - De exorcismis et supplicationibus quibusdam.

I also like having Abjuration/Exorcise as a 4th level spell for the following reason - if you're using traditional class titles, a 7th cleric is a Bishop, and bishops in the Catholic church are given power over determining when exorcisms happen.

When an Unclean Spirit is cast out via Abjuration or Dispel Evil, it has to go somewhere.  Once again looking to mythology for inspiration, let's say the cleric performing the exorcism spell can indicate a nearby vessel for the spirit - another human, an animal(s), or a specially prepared object.  This lets us loop in the dramatic twist of the Exorcist movie (the priest takes the evil spirit into himself); the animal involvement of many Biblical stories - the swine of Mark's Legion story; and the Medieval folklore around 'trapping the Devil in a box'.  Entire monastic orders could be built around an ancient exorcism that resulted in an Unclean Spirit trapped in a physical vessel, and the order has existed ever since to keep the evil one under lock and key, sealed from the world.

The Protection from Evil and Protection from Evil 10' spells could be helpful here.  I see the potential for high drama as the group corners the demon-possessed madman who's been hacking apart villagers, and now they need to restrain him and Abjure the spirit, trapping it in a specially prepared metal flask and protecting themselves with Protection from Evil so they don't get taken over in the meantime.

Finally - there is the name of the spirit.  Most of these accounts have a dramatic moment where the priest or prophet demands that the creature reveal its name - "Pazuzu", "Azazel', or "Legion", for example.  I'd probably make this something a cleric could achieve by succeeding with a simple Command spell , and if the spirit is forced to reveal its name, it takes a -4 to the saving throw against Abjuration or Dispel Evil to reflect the power the cleric now has over it.

Demons - Unclean Spirits of the Wilderness  (flavored for Labyrinth Lord)
No. Enc.: 1
Alignment: Chaotic
Movement: as human host
Armor Class:  as human host, +1 to AC
Hit Dice:  as human host, +1 per hit die
Attacks: by weapon, +3 to hit
Damage: by weapon +3
Save: C10
Morale: 11
Hoard Class:  nil
XP: 2400

Abilities:
Superhuman Strength
The victim possessed by the demon will have an effective strength of 18 and increased speed and toughness.

Possession
When the demon is not in a host, it can perform an attack similar to Magic Jar once per round versus one target within a 120' range.  Unlike magic jar, the demon doesn't displace the possessor's soul; it dominates the victim and can override the victim's actions at will.

Immaterial
Demons are immaterial spirits, unable to move unless possessing a host.  When not possessing a victim, the demon is rooted to a locale or physical object.  Such an object or locale would radiate powerful evil if a Detect Evil spell is used.

Vulnerabilities
Demons can be turned; an immaterial demon can't flee, but would be suppressed for the duration of the effect.  A possessed victim will flee a cleric that turns it.  A demon takes a penalty to saving throws (-4) versus a cleric that know it's true name.  The spells Dispel Evil and Abjuration* (new level 4 spell, or use AD&D's Exorcise) are effective at freeing a victim of demonic possession.  When one of the spells is used in conjunction with the demon's true name, the caster can indicate a vessel for the demon when it is driven out of the previous host.

Closing Thoughts
The tradition of Unclean Spirits goes back to the beginnings of civilization and begins with the ancient Sumerians; demons originate in the lonely deserts of the world and are brought back to more civilized areas hitchhiking inside people.  I would recommend including a bit of archaeology into the back story of each demon as well as notes on the demon's "personality" - some might be murderers, others hedonists, others with a completely different (but evil) agenda.

The demon will have the benefit of thousands of years of experience, and demons should have a range of intelligences.  A genius level demon running rampant through a city as a serial killer could be a challenging opponent for high level characters because of its ability to jump hosts and elude capture.

The actual removal of the demon is mechanically simple (ie, using the right spells and being prepared), so the challenge in using this kind of antagonist is in identifying the work of a demon, tracing the history, finding the possessed victim, and isolating the thing for the exorcism.