Gothic Greyhawk - What's it About?

We finally got to resume my long-running quasi-AD&D campaign this past weekend.  I say quasi-AD&D, because we're using basically the BX rules with Labyrinth Lord's Advanced Edition Companion - all the good stuff from AD&D without the dubious sub systems.

There are two good reasons for a quick overview of the campaign - first, it seems like two months since a campaign report, and second, the latest events in the campaign hearken back to the earliest days of the campaign, two summers ago.  Memories just aren’t that good for campaign minutiae.

Why Is It Called Gothic Greyhawk?
I have a deep respect for all the creative things touched by Gygax, despite my quibbles with some rules , so when the players clamored for a return to a traditional Dungeons & Dragons experience after our divorce from 4E, it had to be Greyhawk.  Most of these guys had never played the early AD&D modules and they specifically requested a campaign that featured the classics.  Ravenloft was also on the list.

My vision of Greyhawk was to treat it like a folkloric early Medieval setting, emphasizing a strong monotheistic church, devils and fallen angels, ghosts, faeries, vampires, werewolves, witches, and things that go bump in the night.  We set the campaign in the misty river valleys of the Earldom of Sterich, placed the hidden valley of Barovia at the headwaters of the Davish river, and unleashed a bevy of 1st level characters into a hex crawl sandbox centered on Mittleberg - this all began a year and a half ago.

Recent History
The last 6-7 months of the campaign took place in Barovia, where the characters matched wits with the vampire lord Strahd von Zarovitch.  Strahd was nuked by a Dispel Evil scroll about halfway through the time period, but the group spent months fighting a guerilla war against all the free-willed vampires, previously under Strahd's control, that now strove for supremacy over the castle and village.  Notable energy drainers appeared, such as The White Lady, The Top-Hat Man, sexy Gertrude and Helga, Sasha the Vampire Queen, and various minor vampire spawn - including risen PC's previously killed by the vampires, like the cleric Barzai the Wise.

Before the holidays, the group concluded the campaign against the vampires and were in sole possession of Ravenloft Castle (under new management); Mister Moore pledged marriage to the daughter of the previous mayor of Barovia, Ireena, and they've assumed the titles Lord and Lady of the new land.  They immediately started rebuilding the valley.

The next campaign journal resumes with the characters sending envoys out of Barovia, back down into the lowlands, to determine the state of the world.

Useful Background for Upcoming Journals
The big event that characterized the early days of Gothic Greyhawk was when the group released 13,000 hungry dead out of Death Mountain (the LOTFP adventure Death Frost Doom); the tide of zombies and ghouls swept into the river valley, overrunning the human settlements of Mittleberg and Poignard (see map here).  The player characters made a deal with the ancient vampire, Cyris Maximus, to avoid the horde, and they ended up going the opposite direction, deeper into the Joten Mountains.  Along the way they had encounters with a powerful witch, lycanthropes, and the dwarven citadel of Stonegate.

Another element that should be remembered as the story resumes is the conflict between the lowland Oeridians and the Flannish hill folk.  In the early days of the campaign, the lord of Mittleberg was supporting the Church in its effort to send missionaries into the high country to preach to the hill folk; when the latest missionary was murdered by the hill shamans, plans were drawn up for a spring campaign to march an army into the hills and sack the vales where the druidic shamans held sway.  The folk of Mittleberg were swept away by the zombie horde before this campaign ever happened.

The folk of the hills, in their high mountain vales, persisted.

Cast of Characters
Here's the crew - although I need to confirm the current levels are accurate.  Since the campaign started, we’ve had 16 character deaths.

Player Characters:
Mordecai, a Cleric-7: Adam
Forlorn, an Elf-5: Bo
Mister Moore, Magic User-6: Mike
Shy, a Fighter-6:  JR
Leonidas the Paladin-5:  Nogal
Digit, the Elf Thief-7:  Z
Konstantine, Magic User-5: Smitty

Henchmen:Ireena, a Fighter - 5
Phat Kobra, a Dwarf-5
Grumble the Smug, Halfling-5
Donavich, Cleric-4
Boris, Druid-3
Vlad the Inhaler, Magic User-1

Do you hear The Call… of Cthulhu? A New Poll.

A simple question for a Sunday, before I head out to do some chores and then settle in for the late afternoon football game.  D&D was the primary fantasy game I played in my youth, but we messed around with Gamma World, Traveller, and Call of Cthulhu.  Besides D&D, I kept up with Call of Cthulhu, and played a fair number of campaigns in the 90's and early 2000's.

There's a significant intersection between Weird Horror D&D and Call of Cthulhu, so it's natural I've been thinking a lot lately about Call of Cthulhu and its relations (Trail of Cthulhu, Realms of Cthulhu).  What kind of experience do you have with Cthulhu gaming?  There's a new poll over to the right, and feel free to drop a comment.

I'm off to chainsaw some logs and split wood with a wedge and  maul - fun stuff.

Games Don't Need Plots to Have Stories

I saw a prominent blogger (JB over at the Blackrazor blog: ranting in the new year) taking the game to task for being low-brow.  JB is fun to read because he brings a lot of passion to his blog and isn't afraid to step on the soapbox.  Going into dark holes, kicking down doors, and stabbing monsters in the face is dumb; it doesn't tell the kind of story you read about in fantasy novels.

It's true, you don't see much looting in fantasy novels.  But games shouldn't worry about emulating fiction; they should worry about being good games, first and foremost.  Dungeons & Dragons is a very good game.  There's a reason it's endured in a sea of forgettable RPGs, each trying to tell a story.  When a game is good, and you play it over and over again, excellent stories emerge after the fact.

Let’s talk about another game that's just a big dumb game - Pro Football.

Here we are on the verge of the NFL play offs, and the beloved Broncos are a day away from getting crushed by the Steelers in the play offs (again).  It's a good time to reflect on the NFL season and how things developed this year.  Football is just a dumb game - a bunch of big dudes, with helmets and cleats, trying to jam an odd shaped brown leather ball across a line in a field of grass.  It's got some funny rules, and a referee.  No novelist or screenwriter sits down to script out how the NFL season is going to unfold.

Denver Post:  Tebowing

This year, the big story with the beloved Broncos was Tim Tebow.  Who saw that one coming?  Tebow was the 3rd string quarterback coming out of Broncos camp, and the new coach considered him a wasted draft pick by the previous regime.  Kyle Orton was the starter.  And then Orton's Broncos started the season 1-4.  The fans were restless.  Colorado has a strong evangelical presence and folks clamored to see Tebow hit the field; they even bought billboard space across from the stadium to campaign for their guy.  It was Tebow's chance to pilot the team after the bye.

The Broncos went and ripped off a string of 7 straight victories, many of them in dramatic, 4th quarter come-from-behind fashion with Tebow's late game heroics.  People started to notice.  A story about the Broncos began to emerge.  I would imagine even those of you who dislike sports have seen some kind of mention of Tebow over the past month; there was even a Saturday Night Live sketch with Jesus in the Broncos locker room poking some fun at the phenomenon.

This particular story took a nosedive when the Broncos finished the season 0-3, getting killed by the Patriots and Bills, limping into the playoffs, and now facing the hard-nosed Steelers in tomorrow's game.  I don't have high hopes, but it's been a fun and memorable season nonetheless.  Real stories don't need endings like books.

The lesson here is simple.  Football is a simple game, a bunch of big dudes smashing into each other and running around.  But when you toss in the high drama elements of competition, rivalries, grudges, egos, strong personalities, amazing athleticism, tactics, strategy, dynasties, history, the media, the fans, then the stories become larger than life.  Every minute counts in the NFL and there is no tomorrow.  These emergent stories are much better than anything someone could have scripted, because no one predicted them.  Consider how often you're watching something and can tell where a movie plot is going to end up, or how a book is going to finish?  Why would you want to copy that in a game?

The confluence of factors that come together in Dungeons & Dragons make it an excellent campaign game and thus an excellent vehicle for emergent stories.  Lairs, dungeons, wilderness hex crawls, and landscapes filled with petty rulers for toppling, are fertile ground for a player-driven campaign.  The character class structure of D&D fosters team work and group planning.  The XP for gold structure provides a built-in overarching objective.  Compared to the motivations that drive literary characters, looting wherever you go is a bit shallow, but it's very very good for ongoing gaming.

I find that when I let go of the notion of genre emulation, and let the game do what it does best, we don't lack for amazing stories.  My campaign journal is full of them.

Note:  The idea that games should stop trying to tell stories and just focus on being good games is not new or original; I remember hearing a Microsoft video game designer talking about the football and story analogy on a podcast and it made a huge impact on me.  I've never played Minecraft, but I hear similar things about it as a plot-less game.  Video games with their cut scenes tell the designer's story, but fail when compared to the amazing and original stories that emerge from a good tabletop sandbox game.

Photo: Daniel Petty, The Denver Post

Isgerd's Fury: A Sample Ship for the Black City

Spoken by Heidrek Palson, captain of the Isgerd's Fury:

Welcome to Thule!  We've made it across the whale-road, but before you run off half-aimed into the ruins, we'll set up a camp up the beach and unload the ship.  I'll give you some quick pointers about life on Thule so you don't end up feeding the ravens.

There to the north, where you see the rock wall and the weak smoke coming from a cluster of huts and wood halls - that's Trade Town.  It's run by a Jarl named Bergfinn, and his honor guard keeps the law.  Here on the beach, everyone is subject to Bergfinn's laws - and they're mainly in place to limit the feuds.  There's not much to the town, a mead hall and a smithy, and a place to barter and trade.  Bergfinn's crew arrives at the beginning of summer, same as us.  In return for safety and use of the beach, we give Bergfinn a cut of what we find.  There's a dusk-skinned wizard from the sun-scorched lands that lives in a tower up the cleft from Trade Town, and the wizard pays good silver for artifacts from the city.  They say he returns to his home in the hot lands each night, carried on the wind by a genie.

Look down the beach - you see another half dozen ships pulled ashore like us, making camps?  Most of them are Norwegians from Trondelag, but a few are from the south - Bergen, or the Vik.  From time to time you'll see some Swedes or Danes.  More ships may come as the summer waxes, and they'll start to leave as the captains lose people to the ruins, or run out of supplies.  Bergfinn's laws keep the peace out here on the beach, but it's different in the ruins.  Watch your backs or you'll feed the ravens.

The ruins are a few miles up the shore from Trade Town.  There aren't good places to beach the sea-steeds near the city, it's always misty, and there's always ice in the water, so we make camp down here.  Many folks head to the ruins with picks and shovels and try to excavate treasures right on the surface.  If you're brave, you might use the hole at the Well of Woe to climb down to the tunnels beneath the city, where the treasure is better.

Men that are clever and lucky are able to find sparkling gemstones, triangles of gold and platinum, and things with strange eldritch writings favored by the wizard of the tower.  Find stuff like that, and we'll all go home wealthier men.  But there are snow beasts in the ruins, and they say the dead come back to life in the tunnels under the city and hunt the living.  You'll have plenty of chances to prove you belong in Valhalla.  It's not any safer out here on the shore; the island is infested with the white bears, and they're not afraid of attacking a man.  Don't go anywhere without a good spear.

But first, we need to get camp set up, so we don't freeze to death and feed the ravens ourselves.  Pull the hide tents and wood off the boat, we'll build a covered shelter in one of these dugouts and start a fire.  It doesn't get much warmer all summer, so we bring enough wood and peat to keep a low fire burning the entire time we're on land.  We'll use the ship's hull as a wind-break.  Get a move on, you coal-chewers!

This is the type of background information that will show up in the player's guide for first time visitors to the Black City.  Isgerd's Fury is a default ship usable for one-shots, and Captain Palson makes for a good starter patron.  Either Palson or his first mate, Dag the Proud, are a sources of knowledge and rumors, as this is their second summer guiding a crew to the ruined city.

Below is a list of supplies brought along for a two-month stay on the island.  There's enough food for 16 weeks - 3-4 weeks there and back, and another 8-10 weeks for the summer exploration season.  For groups that are just interested in kicking open doors and bashing monsters, the DM can ignore the logistics and assume it's managed by the NPC's.  For groups that enjoy resource challenges, I'd take things a step further - it's necessary for someone to forage for local food at least once a week to stave off scurvy, as months of preserved rations are insufficient to stay healthy.  Foraging for fresh food includes fishing, hunting seals, walruses, whales, reindeer, and bears, and gathering sea bird eggs - eating fresh meats wards off scurvy.

Here's an inventory on what a Knarr might bring on a journey to Thule, to provision a crew of 16 for a summer-long stay on the islands:

Standard rations, 112 days
Preserved rations, 1680 days
Dry goods barrels, 36 barrels
Beverages - water, mead, beer, 1792 days
Fluid barrels, 36 barrels
Trade goods, 1 quarter ton
Lumber for ship repairs, 1 cord of ship lumber
Extra mast, 1 mast
Extra sail, 1 sail
Spears, 16 items
Axes, 10 items
Knives, 16 items
Blankets and bedrolls, 16 items
Wooden shields, 32 of them
Personal Armor (leather), 16 suits
Personal Gear, 16 backpacks
Winter Clothing, 16 sets
Sea Trunks, 16 trunks
Oars, 8 units
Rope, 10 50' lengths
Tents, 16-man capacity
Cooking Gear, 4 kits
Carpentry tools, 1 kit
Picks and Shovels, 16 tools
Block and Tackle, 1 unit
Wood/peat for fuel, 3 cords
Wooden dinghy, 1 boat

Excluding personal gear in the backpacks and sea trunks, a summer-long expedition would cost around 5,500 sp to outfit, using the silver standard, not counting the cost of the ship.  Once players are 3rd or 4th level, they're in a position to buy and outfit their own ship.  The cargo (including player gear) accounts for around 19 tons - a knarr could carry 25 tons, so there's even a little room to spare.

Isgerd's Fury is sponsored by a local lord back home, Hirsir Thorgeir Sigmundson, and he'll expect the ship's expenses to be paid, plus a share of the profits.  If the summer exploration of the ruins goes poorly, it's not unheard of to leave early and raid the coast of England for cattle and thralls to recoup some costs and build a reputation.

The crew consists of 14 sailors (player characters included), plus the captain and mate.  A knarr only needs a few rowers at any time to help the tiller keep the ship tacking properly, so most of the crew act as marines.  NPC sailors could also be mercenaries and hirelings.  The ship needs at least 4 sailors and a captain to survive to make it home; it's not unheard of for crews to band together late in the summer if their original ships have suffered heavy losses on the island.

One of the strategies the captain likes to use each year is to follow the Norwegian coast to Lappland, trading with the Lapps for fresh food, and then sailing for Bear Island (once again foraging for fresh food).  The stops along the Norwegian coast and at Bear Island allow for sleeping on land each night.  However, while the coastal route minimizes the amount of time on the open sea, it is fraught with pirates amongst the numerous fjords.

For campaign play, the trip along the coast to Lappland would take 10-15 days, depending on weather.  The captain's course to Bear Island takes 3-5 days, and then from Bear Island to Thule is another 4-6 days.

When My Blog Finally Grows Up…

I want it to be like Jeff's Game Blog.  I posted an AD&D poll about the most dubious AD&D rules a few months ago, and was delighted to get over a hundred votes.  Jeff posted a similar poll yesterday, and had over 250 votes in less than one day.  (I just checked back, and less than 24 hours it's at 320 votes).

I'm here to tell you, my friends, that is REAL ULTIMATE GAME BLOGGING POWER™!

This is not jealousy but outright admiration.  8 years of high quality, gonzo excellence - I can only hope the Lich House is even around 8 years from now.  That is an impressive run, man.  Jeff is the Iron Man of Game Blogging.  After just finishing only a year of blogging, I can appreciate the diligence of maintaining steady blog output for 8+ years.  I can think of handfuls of game blogs that popped up and crapped out just last year.  So I tip my hat off towards Jeff's place.

With that in mind, I'm thinking the Iron Man of the blogging world should have some Chuck Norris style facts… something like, "Jeff doesn't roll dice anymore, he snaps his fingers and they rearrange to the result he needs."  Or, " Jeff doesn't read game books to learn the rules, the texts read Jeff to learn Jeff's rules."

I'm dealing with a bad cold, hopped on the meds, and the work week is dragging on.  It would be delightful if any of you are inspired to add your own "Iron Man of Game Blogging" Facts in the comment's section.

I'm sure I'll see my way to a non-frivolous post shortly.

Vacationing at the Lake of Hali - A Carcosa Review

Carcosa is a 143 page PDF published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess; it's a setting that describes the forsaken planet of Carcosa and the Lake of Hali (the names of both locations hail from the Cthulhu Mythos and the Lovecraft circle of writers).  I had the chance to read the PDF version of Carcosa over the holidays.  The physical book is still on the way.

The PDF is nice looking and functional; the two-facing pages read very well on an iPad and the hyperlinks let you zoom all over the place.  As a publisher, LOTFP is distancing itself from the hobbyist side of the OSR by turning out progressively more polished products.

The artwork in Carcosa is amazing and it's a joy leafing through and soaking up the pictures.  Every piece is done by the same artist and he did a great job with all of the Lovecraftian horrors and scenes of high tech carnage.

So what is Carcosa like?  It's a singular piece of fevered imagination that brings me back to flipping through Heavy Metal magazine and gazing at Omni covers at my cousin's place down the street when I was a kid.  Carcosa is what happens when your Call of Cthulhu investigators fail to stop the return of the Great Old Ones, and the world is plunged into horror and madness.  Failure is an option, and that option looks like Carcosa.

The setting describes a distant planet ruled by the Great Old Ones of the Cthulhu Mythos, where humanity is the bottom of a food chain that includes alien horrors, ancient serpent men, elder gods, mad robots, and cyborgs.  Humanity is hopelessly fractured into different colored races of man, and the monstrous sorcery used by the inhuman sorcerers of Carcosa uses men as components in horrible rituals.  It's a bleak setting ideal for horror gaming or adventure gaming with lots of horror elements.

What I Liked
Carcosa thrusts difficult ethical choices into the foreground, and if your table enjoys mature discussions on that level, you'll enjoy Carcosa.  Standard D&D type gaming allows players to happily stab the orcs, goblins, and kobolds in the face and loot the bodies;  moral dilemmas in the dungeon can be minimized by distinctions of race and alignment.  Carcosa removes the distinctions; there are two types of opponents - other humans, on the one hand, and all the inhuman aliens and Great Old Ones on the other.  Carcosa's approach to humanity reminds me of ER Eddison's The Worm Ouroborus, where the different races of humans are called Goblins, Demons, Ghouls, and so on, living in Demonland or Goblinland, but they're all people nonetheless.  The names are just labels.  I could probably write a lengthy post on how Carcosa's use of color generates such interesting questions - it's like the Trek episode with the black and white faced guys who hate each other irrationally - only on Carcosa, it's the whole planet.

The other element that creates ethical  problems on Carcosa is the sorcery.  The recommended magic system for the setting uses ritual magic to conjure, bind, banish, imprison, or torment various eldritch entities.  It's reminiscent of the magic system of Call of Cthulhu, where a player needs to think long and hard before choosing to learn and use magic because of the costs.  On Carcosa, all rituals require human sacrifice.  If you enjoy the high drama of Faustian bargains and deciding when the ends justify the means, this is for you.

Beyond those two points, there are lots of neat little mechanical items to recommend Carcosa.  There's a hex crawl that covers 400 hexes (2 encounters per hex) - 800 encounters.  That's a lot of coverage.  There are tons of new monsters, stats for all the Great Old Ones, rules for psionics, robots, cyborgs, and plenty of artifacts.  I can see many of the artifacts making it into my own campaigns immediately.

Issues
I have some issues with the material that I'd likely change if I were to use Carcosa as a complete setting.  First, there are a series of suggested rules that require rerolling various hit dice and damage dice at the start of each combat; even psionic talents vary from day to day.  I haven't play tested those rules, but my sense is they would create a lot of swing and reduce the player's ability to calculate and plan; a difficult foe could roll badly on their hit dice and be within the player's range, or roll well and be far tougher to beat; you wouldn't know until combat started, and that's too late to plan.

The randomness applies to players as well - the beat stick fighter could suddenly find himself with d4 hit dice.  This system would work  for horror gaming by keeping things uncertain and nerve wracking, but I'm cautious whether it's actually fun for D&D style play.  Enabling planning and calculation of resources is an important part of how I approach old school gaming.  It certainly creates a sense of uneasiness and uncertainty in a visceral, physical way, and might be okay for short forays into Carcosa.

The Great Old Ones are fairly bland in description; the barest mechanics and damage are provided, but not much about their cults or how they interact with the world.  Folks with a background in the source literature wouldn't have a problem filling in the gaps.  I'm loathe to criticize statistics for literary creations, because so much of it is taste and interpretation; I see enough of that fanboy grief in the Heroclix world (I can't believe Superman can beat the Hulk!).  I didn't agree with a lot of the stats in Realms of Crawling Chaos, either.

Will I Use Carcosa?
Absolutely!  I can say with total certainty that Carcosa becomes one of those places a party can accidentally end up by going through the wrong dimensional gate, and be forced to trek around the hex map trying to figure out a way back to their world.  Carcosa is that doomed dimension, just out of phase with our world, a sign of things to come if the Old Ones aren't stopped from gaining a foothold here, and plunging the world into madness.  There's too much awesome stuff in the book.  But I find the setting a bit too bleak to imagine running a campaign 100% start and finish in Carcosa.

Despite some quibbles, it's a 5 out of 5 on the Beedometer - the scope is far beyond anything I'd home brew, and the presentation, art, and quality of the PDF advances the state of OSR publishing.  Looking forward to seeing the actual book.

Now that the holidays are behind us, the finances should level out and I can make some more gaming purchases.  I'll be doing some upcoming reviews of Anomalous Subsurface Environment, and Book of War, and hope to pick up Weird Adventures and some of the latest S&W/Frog God stuff in the coming weeks.

Hello 2012. Best of the Lich House, 2011

I learned a lot in a year of blogging.  The discipline of writing about your games forces introspection and reflection.  Beliefs are held up and examined, the underlying thought structures are tested.  Criticism is more constructive out here on the blogs; there's more of a spirit of gamers helping each other to run better games.  It was a fun year.

Here's a quick look at five of my favorite posts, and then the five most popular posts in terms of internet traffic.  I picked these five mainly because they embody themes I returned to at various times on the blog, and which I'll likely continue developing next year.

Some of My Favorites
Horror in Dungeons & Dragons
I love the horror genre; it tests the DM's skills to create horror situation, and horror moments usually involve challenges on multiple levels for the players.  This post listed ideas on incorporating horror into your D&D game by borrowing common horror themes.

Winter is Coming, and so is Gamer ADD
I frequently suffer from the Gamer ADD - my past is littered with campaigns ditched when something new and "better" came along.  This post laid out strategies (culled from project risk management) on managing your gamer ADD so you don't blow up your campaign every time a new idea comes along.

Say Yes - Skill Checks in a Rules Lite Game
A challenge in running old school games is adjudicating all those situations not covered by the rules; this post promotes a collaborative/cooperative style of DMing to maximize player engagement in skill rulings and avoiding being an arbitrary DM.

The Sandbox Triangle
I am keenly interested in player-driven games and structuring my campaigns as a sandbox; the challenge in the sandbox is balancing player freedom, with the amount of detail and effort required by the DM.

The Drowning Fairy
I read a lot of myth and folklore and like to pull inspiration for monsters from real world sources.  Faeries and ghosts are often indistinguishable in folklore, and this monster involved combining the drowning fairy motif - Peg Powler or Jenny Greenteeth - with the Ringu type of ghost.

Most Popular
You can't take post-counts too seriously; if one thing is clear, it's that odd ball traffic through the Google can spike traffic to a minor post.  Most of these "popular" posts have racked up hits from non-gaming sources looking for something else.

The Demon Azazel
Unclean Spirits of the Wilderness
Ape Men of the Black City
Monsters as Plastic Army Men

Azazel and The Exorcist are the two most popular searches from non-gamers - people love googling the demonic possession.  The Black City picks up visits from folks looking for white apes.  And I'm always getting hits from people looking for stuff about plastic army men.  They should play some D&D instead!

I bet there are a few blogs out there where "hot elf chicks" is their top post.

I Just Nuked Gothic Greyhawk
Die, Strahd, Die!

These are the two most popular gaming posts; I'm glad they get a lot of traffic because they demonstrate key points about my DMing philosophy.  Player choices matter, I'm not going to fudge the dice, and I'm not afraid to let things rip - for good or ill.  NPCs are meant to die, there are no Mary Sues in my campaigns, and the players need to earn their successes without any dice fudging by me, too.

The Gothic Greyhawk post got a ton of traffic after it was linked from James's LOTFP blog, when my group unleashed 13,000 hungry dead on our campaign world while I was running Death Frost Doom.  It wrecked their homeland, but made the campaign way more interesting.

Die, Strahd, Die became an OSR rallying post - it illustrated that letting the players develop their own plans and strategies, and playing it straight with the dice, will lead to a more interesting result than forcing a scripted story line to fit a sense of drama.  Besides, unless you're Al Pacino, players know when you're fudging.

Goals for this Year
I expect in 2012 to continue to discuss ways to build player driven games and run sandboxes.  Other goals this year are pretty simple - I'm hoping to read another 10 Appendix N type books, continue running a weekly D&D campaign, publish the Black City, and incorporate regular blogging about Call of Cthulhu and its siblings to this year's mix of stuff.  I should be able to get in some Cthulhu one-shots along the way as well.