Looking for Orcs in All the Wrong Places

I've been thinking about wilderness procedures and the issue around the 15 minute wilderness day.  Here's the quick recap if you didn't read the other post:  wilderness encounters tend to be infrequent, often days apart, so powerful groups can "go nova" and destroy the encounters by blowing all their Vancian magic and then rest, very similar to the 15-minute adventuring day.  It's especially problematic if the wilderness encounters are "balanced for level".

With that in mind, a simple approach is to use wilderness charts where "anything goes" similar to what you see in AD&D.  It doesn’t avoid the 15 minute wilderness day per se, but does lead to encounters where even a veteran group is going to have to think quickly and do something other than wade in swinging each time.  For example, the AD&D wilderness encounter for orcs is 30-300.  (-C posted examples at his place how those original wilderness tables could lead to some challenging encounters:  The wild wilderness).

What about this idea I have that wilderness encounters are spaced too far apart, always allowing rest and recovery?

I decided to step through the travel procedures for a few of the D&D versions I use to see how the systems differ.  There are striking differences.  For purposes of the examples, let's say the group is traversing a large forest - a trip of 30 miles, which should take a few days.  I tend to use 6 mile hexes, a BX standard.  The group is hoping to run into some orcs while they cross, so I included the default chance of meeting orcs using just the standard tables, too.

AD&D
In AD&D, a group can move through a forest at 10 miles a day, so it will take 3 days to cross.  In AD&D, there are 6 encounter checks per day, but each check is only a 1 in 10 (assuming this is the wilds).

Math isn't a strong suit for me, but I'm thinking that 6 checks at 10% gives a 47% chance each day of at least one encounter happening - so the group should meet something every other day.  More specifically, there's a 35% chance of one encounter, 10% of two, and 1% or lower of 3 or more encounters.  But this something that's important - an unlucky group in AD&D could run into a string of encounters each day of travel!

The other thing about AD&D is the chance of getting lost per day is 70%.  That's massive.  Without a guide or following a river or trail, the AD&D party will take longer than 3 days to make it across the forest.

The chance of actually running into some orcs using the standard tables is low - only 5% for meeting humanoids, and then a 20% of rolling orcs on the humanoid table, seems to be 1% or so.  Gah, I wish I paid attention in statistics.  You'd think a gamer should know probability.

BX D&D
Our BX party moves 12 miles a day through the forest (fairly close to the AD&D rate).  They should clear the forest in 2.5 days, assuming they don't get lost like the AD&D group.  The chance of getting lost in BX without a trail or guide is 33% per day, so they have a much better chance at clearing the forest quickly.  There's only one encounter roll per day, and it's a simple 33% chance.  I think that means a 55% chance of an encounter every two days or so - so the group has a good chance of making it through without a single encounter, and there's no multiple encounters a day unless the DM house rules it.

The chance of actually meeting orcs is also pretty low - 1/8 followed by 1/12 (compared to AD&D's 1/20 followed by 1/5).

ACKS
ACKS is influenced heavily by the BX style of D&D with refinements; it uses uses a 33% encounter chance for forest, just like BX.  However, the encounter chance is rolled per hex, not per day; our party travels 12 miles a day, clearing 2 hexes, so there's two encounter chances a day - a 55% chance of at least one encounter each day, and a slim chance of two encounters per day (also making the "15 minutes wilderness day" a risky proposition).  ACKS using the same chance of running into orcs as BX - 1/8 and then 1/12.  The ACKS procedures for getting lost are a bit different, since ACKS has a lightweight proficiency system; the default chance in woods is around 30%, fairly similar to its BX roots, but having a woodsman with navigator proficiency knocks it down to 10% chance of getting lost.

The Orc Encounter
How about if the group actually does meet some orcs in the forest?  How many is the group meeting?

In AD&D, the Monster Manual calls for 30-300 orcs (3d10 x10, I'm guessing) putting an average number somewhere near 165.  There's a 35% chance they're in the lair, which means there would be females, young, and various lair monsters there, too.

A BX wilderness encounter with orcs is only 10-60 (1d6 x10) - an average of 35 - and no differentiation between a lair or not.  In ACKS, the monster encounters express a hierarchy between dungeon encounters and dungeon lairs, and wilderness encounters and lairs.  The smallest orc unit is a gang (2d4 members, average of 5) and a wilderness encounter is a war band of 2d6 gangs (lets say 7 gangs, meaning around 35 orcs).  This is right in line with BX.  However, ACKS went back to including "percent in lair" language like the original monster manual, so the orcs are 35% in lair like in AD&D; this bumps the number up to include 1d10 war bands in the lair, making an ACKS orc lair encounter at around 190 orcs.  The ACKS lair encounter also includes the females, young, and lair monsters like AD&D.

Hope this brief survey is interesting to people - it was useful for me.  Going back to my original "problem", the 15 minute adventuring day, here are my conclusions:

The default wilderness tables in AD&D (and the ACKS clone) are plenty dangerous, but the humanoid encounters in the BX tables likely won't challenge a mid-level party.  In addition, the encounter frequency in BX supports a single encounter a day, unless the DM house rules something like "blood in the water" where a loud combat encounter triggers another check.  On the other hand, both ACKS and AD&D provide the chance for multiple encounters per day, dialing up the risk and challenging the 15 minute wilderness day.

It's clear the situations I noticed the 15 minute wilderness day happened because I was using straight BX encounter chances as written, or running The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, where wilderness encounters are intentionally paced far enough apart to allow players to go nova without a risk.  Running the wilderness AD&D or ACKS style should eliminate the issue.

Here's a follow up question - if you play AD&D, how closely do you adhere to the AD&D rules on getting lost?  70% chance of getting lost per hex seems to imply a significant amount of backtracking and remapping!

One tool that's been very successful for me was coming up with aids to help me identify the local terrain and what the party is doing at the moment an encounter occurs - some tables I put together back in December get frequent use during our hex crawls:  Too Busy Looking at the Map to Notice the Monsters.

Dracula Meets Cthulhu

"You play Conan, I play Gandalf.  We team up to fight Dracula."*

D&D is a kitchen sink game - the core books and monster manuals are an eclectic mix of genres, mythologies, cultures, and legends that create a generic fantasy soup where anything goes.  The Cthulhu genre has a different aesthetic - man is alone in a hostile cosmos inhabited by inimical alien beings.

It always seemed a bit odd to me that the Call of Cthulhu book had stats for vampires, werewolves, and ghosts, supernatural monsters from the gothic tradition.  Traditional monsters never seemed to fit into the alien cosmos implied by Lovecraft's mythology.

On the other hand, a few tales cross genres; Dreams in the Witch House features a "satanic" witch, driven off by a crucifix, and rites to the Black Man (a persona of the devil).  It's an odd tale for Lovecraft; explicit references to Christianity or Judeo-Christian mythology are conspicuously absent throughout Lovecraft.

One of my upcoming books I'll be looking at is Shadows Over Filmland, the collection of Trail of Cthulhu stories that take the gothic monsters of 1930's Hollywood movies and presents short scenarios featuring them, each with a Lovecraftian twist that attempts to blend traditional (romantic) gothic horror with the Mythos.

That seems to be a common approach for inclusion  - allow the "traditional" monsters but give them an origin or explanation that ultimately aligns with the Cthulhu Mythos or eldritch sorcery.  These days, I also find myself putting more traditional monsters in Cthulhu games, but developing my own explanation for them.

There's a big problem with overthinking it, a trap I often fall into - the trap of explanation, the trap of classification.  Monsters don't need explanations or justifications; they just exist.  The players don't need to know where they come from, and it's usually better if they don't. Our need to classify and explain and have a "grand unified model" undermines the sense of wonder and terror.  Keep it WEIRD.  I need to come up with a pithy motto along those lines, tape it to my monitor when I'm writing.

Anyway - today's woolgathering was inspired by a more articulate post over at Ephemera on mixing demons into a Cthulhu game; (Hauntings the Final World). Ephemera is an intermittent blog that features excellent ideas for Bookhounds of London (for Trail of Cthulhu).

*The immortal description of everything awesome about D&D, from Jeff's place.

The 15 Minute Wilderness Day

I'll be upfront in this post - I don't have the answers today, just pointing out what I've experienced as issues, and hoping to get a sense from experienced DM's if they see the same thing as a problem, what they do about it, and so on.

Here's the problem statement:  The infrequency of wilderness encounters means that a party can unload all or most of their expendable resources against each encounter; it turns every wilderness encounter into a 15 minute adventuring day.

I really saw this problem when we dabbled in 4E, because there were these uber "daily powers" and players would dump their dailies against wilderness encounters while traveling.  I didn't play a ton of 3E, but I know 3E moved away from random encounters.  In our current 1E game, the group is mid-level (levels 6-7) and the magic users and clerics have serious firepower.  They can brute force most encounters, knowing that hit points will quickly be restored through magical healing, and the mages can dump magic missiles and lightning bolts with little risk.

The referee has a couple of levers and dials to adjust the pace of wilderness adventuring:

• The frequency of wilderness encounter checks
• The probability of wilderness encounter checks
• The difficulty of the encounters

Let me cite a recent example of failure - the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth.  The wilderness trek could be an exciting part of that adventure, but the encounters are a) staggered to each occur a few days apart, and b) set around the same challenge level of the party.  The result is that a group can go "super nova" on each encounter, and the encounters are basically speed bumps and time killers.  S4 Tsojcanth was originally a tournament adventure, so perhaps that's why the wilderness piece is crappy - either it was bolted on later, just for publication, or the wilderness encounters were just meant to delay groups before reaching the main structure.

Coming up with an effective approach to managing encounters in the hex crawl is a fundamental requirement.  Wilderness encounter tables are "implied setting" - they should not be overlooked.  It seems terribly important to me to get them right.  Tosjcanth is a fail.

Anyway, this is what I'm thinking about right now in the D&D space.   I don't know that anyone has done a survey on how the frequency and probability of encounters has changed over time, but it's an interesting subject to me.  Default classic had a 1d6 check per day, with a 4-6 indicating an encounter when out in the barren wilds; there were lower chances in settled areas.  The Rules Cyclopedia added a 1d12 check while camped or overnight.  ACKS has a random encounter check occur for each new 6 mile hex.

Think of the variability in the types of encounters, too - there's a big difference between tables that include mundane encounters (like peasants) versus only monstrous encounters.  Consider also the variability in difficulty; running into a weak group of goblins in one encounter, and then fleeing a wandering giant the next encounter, creates a much different experience than having most encounters in the same difficulty range.

I'm going to shift around the books and do some research.  I have a high opinion of the ACKS effort, their conclusions have seemed rational so far, so I'm curious to see how their approach to wilderness checks compares to the editions.  The ACKS hardcover just arrived, and I can research in a brand spanking new hardcover.  Behold the glory:

New books make for a happy Monday

I love me some shark-headed giant centipedes

A Review of Stunning Eldritch Tales

We're kicking off our New York City pulp detective campaign for Trail of Cthulhu later this week, so I've been reading through some books I had previously overlooked in the Pelgrane Press catalog.  Let's start with a look at Stunning Eldritch Tales (available at the Pelgrane Site: Stunning Eldritch Tales).

Stunning Eldritch Tales is a Robin D Laws book, 82 pages, and covers four scenarios featuring different themes in the pulp style of adventure.  Here's the blurb on each from the Pelgrane site:

Devourers In the Mist
A rugged adventure tale in which the survival of island castaways is tested not only by the elements — but by the twisted shapes of half-seen, sadistic entities who haunt the atoll’s jungled interior!

Shanghai Bullets
Guns-blazing danger portends and international intrigue unfurls in the city of conspiracy, the licentious, opium-infused Berlin of the East. In the shadow struggle between nations, no weapon is more fiercely coveted than the star mirror. It brings blood-draining death from beyond the stars!

Death Laughs Last
When philanthropist and gadabout Addison Bright is found bizarrely murdered in his own New York mansion, only a team of doughty investigators can protect his reputation—and the sanity of mankind—from the awful truths lurking in his tragically colorful past.

Dimension Y
A scientific experiment yields the promise of a glimpse into an adjoining reality, a repository of man’s dreams and memories. But when the heroes peer through this window… they find cosmic horror peering back at them!

We played "Devourers in the Mist" as a one-shot a few years ago, and it works really well in that capacity - it's short, self-contained, comes with pre-generated characters, and super deadly.  I'd dare say it would be difficult to fit into an ongoing campaign without stretching credulity.  It has a strong theme of man-against-nature, with hideous monsters.

"Shanghai Bullets" introduces an element of underworld treachery, smoky nightclubs, and frequent betrayals and reversals.  "Death Laughs Last" involves big city criminals and a masked vigilante in the style of the 30's pulp action heroes.  "Dimension Y" is weird science run amok.  While "Dimension Y" is creepy and stressful, the Mythos is very much a secondary element to "Shanghai Bullets" and "Death Laughs Last" - these are pulp adventurers first and foremost, with a side serving of horror.

As Gumshoe adventures, the collection does an excellent job of presenting the strengths of the system, blending core clues, investigation, and resource pool spends to navigate complex plots with lots of non-player characters.  Using "investigative spends" is one of the more free form areas in the rules, so it's valuable seeing how the designer suggested them in his own published scenarios.

I previously bypassed running the other pieces in Stunning Eldritch Tales because they were so action-oriented compared to my regular tastes; my usual approach to Cthulhu gaming has been with "accidental investigators" like professors or antiquarians or unlucky journalists stumbling unwittingly into the world of horror investigation.  But the new campaign is going to feature a lot more "badges and guns" action, and I'm finding the tone of this collection is perfect for inclusion.

What goes around comes around.  I wouldn't have recommended this book when it came out a few years ago (not bleak enough, I guess...) but I appreciate that Cthulhu gaming is diverse and supports different styles like "pulp" or "purist".  Now I find it's an absolute perfect fit for the new campaign since I'm running something on the pulp side of things.  I'm glad to see there are plenty of scenarios out there to support the style - a few of these stories are going right into our queue.  The investigations in Stunning Eldritch Tales are intricate, sophisticated, full of action, and effectively capture the pulp vibe implied by the title - I recommend the collection to fans of crime novels and 1930's action serials - or if you just want to put more bullets and fists into your Cthulhu gaming.

Launching the Colonial Hex Crawl

After a positive reception to Monday's post on a 'colonial hex crawl', I started sketching out the ideas this week for it, and I'm really warming to the idea as a mini-project.

I like hex crawls that involve mostly human encounters, because of the wide open possibilities for negotiation and parley in lieu of fight, fight, fight.  The American wilds in the early 17th century had a scattering of frontier forts and trading posts of the Dutch and French, colonies for the Dutch, English, and Swedish, and larger French settlements in Quebec and Montreal.  The native Algonquin and Iroquois populations are both allies and antagonists, and the two nations themselves were made of tribes that competed with each other.  I'm envisioning a wilderness where common encounters could involve patrols of soldiers associated with a fort; fur trappers; traders and merchants; natives of many types - farmers, hunters, traders, and warriors; various Christian missionaries - English Protestant or French Catholic.

The frontier suggests a portable alternate to the gold piece economy - animal furs and pelts were the major currency between Europeans and the natives.  There are plenty of sources that lay out the value of beaver pelts vis-à-vis common goods.  Returning home with stacks of pelts instead of gold pieces and gems is flavorful.

It's easy to map standard classes to period archetypes - fighters and specialists are soldiers, hunters, trappers, outdoorsman, and native guides; clerics are missionaries or native shaman; magic users represent witches, warlocks, and hermetic scholars that have engaged with the dark powers.  (They should probably stay away from Plymouth, or Salem.)  I don’t have strong opinions on the demi human classes, yet, but will probably make them Old World rarities or isolated throwbacks.

Okay, great, I have an idea to make an early modern period work as a frontier hex crawl - what makes it over the top?

The exciting bit is to create an American horror mythos that works for the older period - something like Lovecraft's New England or Ramsey Campbell's Severn Valley, but set in 1630 and heavily flavored with Native American folklore.  The mundane challenges of foreign nationals and hostile natives contrasts with exploring the wilderness and discovering slumbering monsters and awful gods.  Meanwhile, the colonists and traders themselves bring their own civilized horrors with them - the curses of vampirism or lycanthropy cross the ocean with the colonists, escaping into the wilds and preying on peoples not accustomed to dealing with them.  Those two themes - "modern" people encountering ancient horrors in the wilds, and "native" people dealing with the blight of civilization - that's what makes it really interesting for me.


*The awesome Wendigo interpretation is by Monkey Paw on deviant art

Angry Mutant Apes of the Black City

I was working on the ape men colony in the Black City's ruined arena, and had some fun with worm madness and the ape men.  Here's the simple version so you don't have to go back and read stuff from a year ago:

The ape men were slaves of the aliens in the city, white haired hominids like the Australopithecus, created for labor and servitude.  The aliens bred them by devolving early humans down along the genetic tree to a more primitive state.  The other factor to consider is worm infection.  The Greys bioengineered a parasitic worm that mutates and enrages its host (roid worms)- if you want a blast from the past, here's a whole article about worm infection: Worm infection and berserkers.  So what happens when a white ape gets infected with worm madness?

Angry Mutant Apes.

When the ape men see first signs of infection in a member of the band, they dump them in the pits, a series of warren-like passages beneath the tunnels where they lair.  There's a ramp leading into the arena from the pits, with a grate barring the way, and the ape men lift the grate to release the hungry mutants whenever the area is invaded.  I figure it's like Barsoom with snow and ice.

Angry Mutant Ape
AC as leather armor and shield, MV 12, HD 4, Atk 2 claws, 1d4/1d4, and see below, ML 7, AL N.

The ape men have learned to avoid infected water sources like the well in the Transit Tunnels, but there are still pools on the level 2 Warrens that have worm infection.  When a white ape is infected with worm madness, the unstable DNA of the ape men combines with the worm infection to transform the white ape into an actual 4HD carnivorous gorilla monster; 50% of them mutate further and gain one of the attributes from below.

1  Extra Arms - the mutant ape can make 4 claw attacks instead of two
2  Horn - a huge horn grows out of the mutant apes skull, granting a gore attack (1d6)
3  Vicious Bite - the mutant can bite for 1d8 damage
4  Oversized (extra HD) - the mutant is 5HD instead of 4HD
5  Sharp Claws - each claw attack is 3-6 damage (1d4+2)
6  Fast Healing - the mutant regenerates 2hp per round
7  Purple!  - 8HD and fist pounds that do 2-12 damage per fist
8  Gore slathered:  AC as unarmored, +2 attack/damage, morale 12, roll again
9  Super Intelligent:  has used low level telepathy or empathy to turn the other mutants into its followers
10.. ?

This table can easily be expanded.  What's your favorite ape mutation that belongs on the mutant white ape table?


* The picture is a mash-up of Trek, Congo, and the four-armed white apes from the Jon Carter Movie.

Review of Book of War

Last week, we spent about half our regular game session running a play test mass combat using the Book of War rules - here is the actual review.

Book of War is a short pamphlet (24 pages) that provides simple, easy to use rules for war game style miniatures combat with D&D troops, mercenaries, and monsters.  It's published by fellow blogger Daniel J Collins (Delta of Delta's D&D Hotspot).  In the foreword and design notes, Delta calls out three goals - to faithfully abstract the math and probabilities behind D&D combat, to create a war game that could be used during D&D or stand on its own as a side game, and to strive for a degree of Medieval realism.

The core rules are really simple to pick up - units attack with a d6 and a simplified armor value, and the rules around movement, formations, and the turn sequence cover about 5 pages.  The scale is 10 to 1.  Advanced rules in the same booklet cover things like units with special abilities and monster units, along with heroes and wizards.

Besides using Book of War to model military units in a D&D game, the book is set up for use as a stand alone game. Costs of units are balanced so that players could each build a force for the same points total, randomly generate terrain and weather, and play a table top game of movement and combat in lieu of a regular D&D session.  The author's blog features quite a few recaps of table top battles using various point builds.

One area where Book of War varies from attempts in other D&D mass combat systems is it diminishes the effect of leveled characters on the battle, unless the character is well above name level.  The concept is that when using the large numbers and averages calculated into Book of War's simplified dice, mid-level characters don't sway the outcome; it's how the math works.  For a party of player characters against special groups of monsters, the most satisfying approach for the players would be to have a hero versus monster side-battle using the standard D&D rules, rather than reduce their survival to a single d6 roll while embedded in a unit of troops.

The players really enjoyed this approach to mass combat.  The rules are simple enough that our 10 year old players could pick them up during the game, and start making their own moves (with nudging from one of the dads).  We've used the abstract combat of War Machine in our campaigns in the past, and this was greatly preferred - the players enjoyed be able to do table top maneuvering, and use terrain and tactics.  War Machine is basically "build a force, show up, make a single dice roll" to determine the results of a battle.  That being said, they recommended using War Machine for off-screen battles involving NPC kingdoms, and to use Book of War for player-facing combats.  One of the players does a lot of 40k Miniatures, and felt it was familiar, but simplified for fast play - thumbs up.

I'd recommend checking out Delta's blog; there were quite a few design notes last year that analyzed the math, and new units are added from time to time, expanding the selection of choices.  For instance, Delta recently covered lesser undead to provide stats for units of skeletons and zombies.  The book is available at Lulu in pdf version or print.