Moses is a 16th Level Cleric

Charlton Moses

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

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

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

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

Colonial Hex Crawling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ode to Karameikos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

A Review of the Black Drop

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book of War Comes to Gothic Greyhawk

It's been a few weeks since we had a game session - we reconvened this past weekend.  Our last game ended with the player's receiving a messenger pigeon with a note explaining how  a distant battle turned out - but I decided it would be fun to let the players command both sides in the battle, and play it out this week, using Delta's Book of War rules for miniatures.  Their own actions would determine the course of the battle, and thus the contents of the note.

First - a step back, to orientate readers.  I'm calling this current campaign arc "Race for the Demonomicon".   It began when the characters learned, while trading horses with hill men in the Sterich Valley, about their old enemy, the Witch, marching off into the wilds with her army of orcs.  She was seeking a foul book, the Demonomicon, and had claimed to have learned a clue regarding its resting place - the horde of Iggwilv, at THE LOST CAVERNS OF TSOJCANTH*.

The players researched the book back at the well-stocked library they inherited from the vampire, Strahd, and learned that Iggwilv (a legendary Greyhawk villainess) had compiled her multiple lifetimes of demon lore and demon magic into a famous grimoire, the Demonomicon.  They gained additional clues as to the location of the lost caverns, and set off into the mountains on their own expedition.  This was many game sessions ago.

On the DM's side of the screen, a number of powerful forces at work in Greyhawk have also launched expeditionary forces to be the first to find the book.  Based on their starting locations, I've been plotting their progress and identifying when they'll be in the area of southwest Sterich on the calendar.  There are many interested parties after the book.  While the characters were on a side quest to THE FORGOTTEN TEMPLE OF THARIZDUN, their gnome allies had a small force guarding the area of the Lost Caverns when the witch - the first seeker of the book - arrived in the area.

I set up two sample forces for the battle between the gnomes and the witch's orcs.  The gnomes were heavily outgunned, but the player's goal was to inflict some losses on the witch (knowing, as metagame knowledge, it would make their ultimate job a little easier since they might eventually have to face the witch themselves).  Enter, Delta's Book of War.

Book of War
Book of War is a supplement for OD&D that provides simple rules for running large scale miniature battles using D&D math around armor classes and hit dice.  I put together two basic forces for the players, added some scenario rules, briefed them on how to play, and then helped referee the skirmish.  (I'm going to put together an actual review of Book of War sometime in the next few days).

The players randomly made some terrain roles for the battle map, rolled for sides (the two 10 year olds ended up with the witch's overpowered forces) and away we went.

The gnomes fielded 8 Infantry Units, 3 Archer Units, and a parcel of magic weapons on one of the units.  The witch's side had 6 light Orc units, 3 Orc Archers, 5 light Evil Men, a Gargoyle unit (5 gargoyles), and a Troll hero.   I swagged the point totals, but I had it loosely at 50 to 75 in favor of the witch, a big gap.

Here's the set up (using little wooden blocks and discs for the troops - each block or disc is 10:1, so the 8 gnome infantry blocks at the top of the picture represent 80 gnomes, with 3 blocks representing 30 archers nearby).

Book of War is easy to play, so the kids quickly moved out their forces, even learning how to "wheel" their orc infantry.  We discovered the leather-clad orcs, with movement 12, had a significant movement advantage over the heavily armored gnomes, which only moved 6.  The dad's side had a few rounds where their archers, on the high ground, rolled nothing but low numbers - it already wasn't looking good for the grown ups.

The kid's figured out if they attacked the archers with the flying gargoyle unit, the magic items were too far away to help (and my test scenario is horribly flawed!).  Continuing their unchecked aggression, the kids charged their evil men over the hill, and finished wheeling the orc spearmen to bring them in on the gnome flank.  It was all over.

The guys really liked Book of War, it plays fast and fun, and they liked having something less abstract than War Machine, which we've used in the past.  We'll have to work in more Book of War opportunities (with evenly matched sides).

Meanwhile, back at THE FORGOTTEN TEMPLE OF THARIZDUN, the players read the note that contained the account of the gnomish rout they just played.  They spent a long time considering their next move.  Their last major action was a 3-week epic battle (3 weeks of game sessions) at the entrance to the Forgotten Temple, in which they fought wave after wave of humanoids and giant-kin.  They were exhausted and spent, but they had the strong belief that the dungeon was drained of armed resistance, and they'd soon be able to moon-walk around the dungeon from one unguarded chest to another, looting.

Unfortunately, the excursion to the temple was meant to be a side trek for them, and the witch and the Lost Caverns were their original goal.  Do they abandon the empty dungeon, leaving all that possible treasure unguarded, to hurry back to the gnomish vale and take on the witch?  It would be a 3-4 day tough march back to the vale, and who knows how many days further north would be the actual Lost Caverns?

On the other hand, if they stayed to explore the Temple, they were giving the witch unfettered access to the Lost Caverns, and a huge head start on finding the Demonomicon ahead of them.  A true dilemma.

After much debating, the following viewpoint won out:  The Witch was "lawful", and served the devils, not the demons; the group theorized that she wanted the Demonomicon to keep it away from Orcus and his minions, and wouldn't use it herself.  They knew where she had her lair - Witch Mountain, of course - and figured the worst case was they'd have to besiege her mountain to get the book if she beat them to it.  But their main bit of rationalization was that the forces of the Forgotten Temple were previously a major threat to their allies, and they owed it to the gnomes to make sure the place was properly pacified.  They also believed that a Holy Sword awaited them in the dungeons.

They descended into the dungeons of Tharizdun, experiencing black obsidian floors, and walls of mauve with ropy purple tentacles writhing just beneath the surface of the stone.  Each next room was asdisquieting and bizarre.  Minor treasures were found, and a bronze ladder was discovered in a secret room.  It descended down a shaft into the endless dark, only a cold draft coming from deep below to hint at what lay below.

The players are convinced the purple striations are evidence of the Mind Flayers, and the awful tentacle motif is more evidence that this place was an illithid temple.  The bronze rung ladder surely leads to the Underdark.

We needed to end for the night shortly thereafter, with many unanswered questions.

*Proper Gygaxian etiquette requires the capitalization of all vintage AD&D TSR products, just like in the DMG.

The Headless Jotun

One of the areas I was revising for the Black City campaign last week is the Great Glacier.  The city is cut in half by a glacier that's pushed through the ruins, calving off ice chunks into the fjord along which the ruins sit.

A curious item to be found in the dungeons is the severed head of a jotun - the never-ending ichor that oozes from the neck has formed a pool which spawns nasty frost mites and other pests in the dungeon.  The headless body, on the other hand, is still frozen in the glacier…

The Headless Jotun
The jotuns are mythological ancestors of the races of giants, semi-divine beings dwelling beyond the world in their realm of Jotunheimr.  The passage beyond Midgard was once near the icy north of Thule.  This jotun's head was sliced off by an energy beam from the city's defense system, the Face in the Ground, and the ichor-covered head quickly melted into the glacier.  The headless body dropped onto the glacier - it radiates extreme cold and has long been covered by ice and snow.

Characters searching in the hex [I'm redoing the map, so I'll add the hex number later] have a chance, equal to finding a secret door, of noticing the 20' tall, blue, headless body, buried under 5-10' of ice.

If the Jotun Head is dug out of the dungeon and reunited to the body, the jotun's power is restored and the being will come back to life.  Roll a standard reaction to determine if the jotun immediately starts eating characters; if the reaction roll is positive, perhaps it offers a divine boon before stalking off to the north.

One other thing - the Face in the Ground may have been reactivated during excursions into the ruins; if so, it's entirely likely the Jotun is attacked all over again.

Fornjot the Jotun
AC as plate and shield, MV 18, HD 20, Atk By weapon or smash, damage 7d6, ML 11, AL C.

The jotun radiates extreme cold when angry, causing 1-3 damage per round to characters in melee with it.  The Jotun can cast magic user spells as a 13th level magic user, preferring spells of illusion, wind, or cold.

Note:
I always loved the part of Princess Mononoke where the mercenaries are running around with the head of the forest god of the wood, so I'm amused to have a bit with Vikings carrying around the head of an immortal giant.  I'm sure players will wonder what a jotun's head is worth, and it could lead to interesting problems if brought back to camp.

Cthulhu Gaming Patronage

Pagan Publishing had an amazing run of hit books starting in the late 1990's culminating with their Delta Green setting for  modern Call of Cthulhu.  I keep hearing on the message boards that an update to Delta Green is in the works, as well as a move towards publishing their books in PDF through One Book Shelf.  In the meantime, a few of the authors that contributed to Pagan's catalog have some related kickstarters to check out:

The Sense of the Sleight of Hand Man
This is a Dreamlands campaign starting out in 1920's New York.  Pagan's previous forays into the Dreamlands are more on the nightmare side than Lord Dunsany, so there's no doubt this will be a darker interpretation of the Otherworld.  Dennis Detwiller is a creative double threat here, writing and drawing the campaign himself; he has a lot of cool stuff on his blog to check out:  Nothing Can Stop the Blog.

Bumps in the Night
John H. Crowe III wrote and contributed to a number of Pagan's early Cthulhu books, like Mortal Coils and Coming Full Circle, and is the author on this collection of 5 non-Mythos horror scenarios for COC, Bumps in the Night. Pagan still has a loyal following and this one blew through the goal in less than half a day (both of these kickstarters are going pretty strong).

Pelgrane Press:  Night's Black Agents
Not a Pagan update, but since I'm on the subject of promoting horror gaming:  the next Gumshoe book, Kenneth Hite's Night's Black Agents, is in pre-order and is targeted for this summer (I'm hoping by GenCon).  Players take on the role of spies and ex-military in a shadowy world of vampire conspiracies.  The spy thriller genre is a great fit for Gumshoe's resource management - it should handle secret identities, hidden weapon stashes, underworld contacts, all that spy thriller stuff, really well.  I can see myself using this to do a mash-up of Trail and Delta Green and Night's Black Agents - alien vampires guiding the world towards the nihilistic ascendance of Nyarlathotep.