Dungeonskull Mountain

Unholy Matrimony

2011-08-25T10:36:00.005-04:00

Hey look, more Adventurer Conqueror King content!

As I was a "Visionary" contributor to ACKS' original Kickstarter funding project, I was given the opportunity to place an art order for an illustration I'd like to see in the final product. Not long after I pledged my support, Ryan Browning, the lead artist for the game, contacted me and asked what I'd like to see. I had recently read a section of the draft rules document that detailed the creation of crossbreed monsters -- something that high-level mage characters can attempt in the Adventurer Conqueror King system -- and asked to see some part of that process.

(By the way, the crossbreeding stuff is just one small example of how ACKS goes out of its way to explain and support the backdrop of classic fantasy RPGs in its rules system: we now know why there are all these bizarre composite monsters roaming the countryside.)

Working with Ryan to nail down the exact image we wanted was a pleasure. We ended up with the illustration you see above: a giant centipede/shark hybrid bursting from its creation vessel, lunging out at the viewer. A new terror unleashed!

The Autarch crew recently posted a detailed account of Ryan's artistic process. As you can see, he did a fantastic job of working from my vague guidelines and turning them into something fun and dynamic. I'm proud to be a contributor (in my own small way) to ACKS.

Selling More Stuff

2011-08-04T10:13:00.006-04:00

The closet-cleaning continues. I've got more RPG material for sale. Much of it should be of interest to OSRites.

As before, prices are in USD. I recently learned the hard way that USPS charges more for media mail service than it once did, so I now have to ask for $5 for shipping. I will ship via other methods (or internationally) if you're willing to pay for it.

Dungeons & Dragons Creature Crucible series:
PC1 Tall Tales of the Wee Folk $12
PC2 Top Ballista $12
PC4 Night Howlers (cover has been neatly cut in two, along the spine) $10
buy as a bundle for $30

HackMaster Basic:
HackMaster Basic (rulebook, like new) $15
Frandor's Keep (big setting/adventure module, like new) $18
buy as a bundle for $30

RuneQuest II Core Rulebook (Mongoose Publishing hardcover, like new) $20

Fallout: New Vegas (Xbox 360) $12

Alternately, I'm interested in trading this stuff for a few things I'm interested in. Yes, I realize many of these are ridiculous long shots, but what the hey:

~~AD&D 1st Edition hardcovers (especially the Fiend Folio and Monster Manuals, but pretty much any of them other than the Manual of the Planes and "Adventures" setting books)~~

Lesserton & Mor
Vornheim: The Complete City Kit
Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Grindhouse Edition

Other OSR stuff (make me an offer)
Legends of Anglerre
OpenQuest
A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplay: Campaign Guide
DC Adventures Hero's Handbook
DC Adventures Heroes & Villains
ICONS
Crusaders of the Amber Coast
Barbarians of the Aftermath
Pathfinder Gamemastery Guide
Pathfinder Ultimate Magic
Pathfinder Ultimate Combat

Drop me a comment if you're interested in buying or trading, if you have any questions, or if you want to haggle. Thanks for looking.

I feel slightly ashamed (but only slightly) for temporarily turning Dungeonskull Mountain into a clearinghouse. I promise I'll go back to having actual gaming content on this blog one of these days.

You Have My ACKS

2011-08-02T08:54:00.002-04:00

I've mentioned Adventurer Conqueror King on this blog before, but I probably did a bad job of describing it. I'll let Tavis Allison tell you what the deal is:

The way the Autarch crew has involved all of its supporters in helping to critique and shape the game is a smart move and will certainly result in a better game. There are already supplements in the works, both from Autarch themselves and from luminaries like Chris Kutalik of the excellent Hill Cantons blog.

I'm happy to be a backer of this project and can't wait to get my hands on the book. (It doesn't hurt that backing it at practically any level gets you cool goodies.)

Selling Some Old Stuff

2011-07-28T10:30:00.008-04:00

I have some RPG things for sale. All are in that "neat but I'll never use it" category for me. These should be of interest to OSR-minded folks, which is why I'm posting them here first.

Prices are in USD. I usually charge around $3 to ship USPS media mail, but I'm happy to ship another way if you're picky and willing to pay more. Likewise, I'll consider shipping them outside of the US if you're willing to pay extra for shipping.

If you have questions, or want to barter, say so. Here's what I've got:

Central Casting: Dungeons (Task Force Games, 1993). An impressive dungeon generator in the fine, hyper-detailed Central Castings tradition. It's in good shape, though the cover has some corner dings and general buffing. $20. SOLD.

Cities, 2nd Edition (Midkemia Press, 1981). "A guide for all role-playing games - City encounters - City populating - Character catch-up". This book has seen considerable interest in the old-school blogosphere of late. I'd say it's in very good condition - the pages are slightly yellowed from age, and there is a very small stain on one corner of the cover. $15. SOLD.

~~Best of Dragon Magazine, Vol. III (TSR, 1983).~~

Best of Dragon Magazine, Vol. IV (TSR, 1985).
Best of Dragon Magazine, Vol. V (TSR, 1986).

Check the links for the details and articles compiled within. There's some fun stuff here, including some nice rules for ruins, demihuman gods, modern weaponry, and notorious character classes like the death-master. All of the Dragon collections are in very good condition. Volume V looks like it has some warping to the bottom of the pages from moisture, the other two are in excellent shape. I'll sell all three for $10. SOLD.

RuneQuest II Core Rulebook (Mongoose Publishing, 2010). Mongoose's acclaimed revision of a Chaosium classic. An excellent, near-mint condition hardcover; I did read it, but you'd never be able to tell. $20.

Thanks for looking.

Back to the Island

2011-07-26T09:06:00.005-04:00

Courtesy of my good friend Bret Woods, here's the revised and beautified map of the Isle of Cosk, where most of the action of my campaign setting, The Bladed Earth, will take place. As you can see, the northwestern chunk of the island is a good deal more fleshed out than the rest.

(The original, ugly version is here.)

If anybody's interested in checking out what I've got written up so far, check out the Bladed Earth wiki. It's being worked out in a very haphazard fashion thus far, and it's sort of on hold while I figure out if I want to keep writing it with Labyrinth Lord in mind, or if I want to use the Adventurer Conqueror King system.

Since I became a backer of the game, I have to admit that I'm leaning toward the latter. ACKS looks like it's going to support the style of game I want to run a little more readily than Labyrinth Lord does. Obviously this means that most of the LL-based house rules I've posted to the wiki won't apply.

Anyway, if you'd like to have a look, feel free.

Adventurer Conqueror King

2011-07-07T10:44:00.004-04:00

There's a new old-school RPG in the works: Adventurer Conqueror King.

ACK is a retroclone in the sense that Lamentations of the Flame Princess and the upcoming Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG are retroclones. That is to say that they take the mechanics of classic D&D as their starting point, and then tweak them to suit the style of play the game is intended to encourage. In this case, the focus is on "providing integrated support for play across all levels of a campaign". To put it another way, it's built from the ground up to support things like domain building and that old-school D&D "endgame" people love to talk about.

Autarch, the publishing partnership working on Adventurer Conqueror King, includes luminaries like Alexander Macris (of The Escapist fame) and Tavis Allison (of The Mule Abides and numerous D&D products). The game is currently in its Kickstarter phase but it's evidently well fleshed out already, rules-wise, and also looks like it's going to be top-notch in the production value department.

I recommend checking out the design blog for a better idea of what the ACKS (Adventurer Conqueror King System) is all about.

Meekrob the Multi-Talented

2011-07-02T21:58:00.007-04:00

I'm not currently running Labyrinth Lord. In fact, I'm not currently running anything at all (though it looks like I'm going to be playing Pathfinder soon). OSR kids like to say that houseruling old school games before you even play them is usually a bad idea.

Too bad. I just spent several hours writing house rules for my as-yet unstarted Labyrinth Lord campaign, formerly known as Cosk but recently renamed "The Bladed Earth" when I started working on the wiki I mentioned a while back.

Specifically, they're multiclassing rules. Oh yeah. A lot of people hate multiclassing. I go back and forth on the idea, but I have to admit that in my youth I made plenty of multiclassed characters. (I also usually gave them goofy thematic names like "Jaxxus Two-Fisted". I think the example multiclassed character in the AD&D 2nd edition Player's Handbook had a name like that. I blame Zeb Cook.)

Anyway, a thread over at the New York Red Box forum got me thinking about multiclassing, so I started to write down the ideas I'd had when I started my wiki and before I ran out of steam. For the most part, it's all by-the-book Labyrinth Lord/Advanced Edition Companion multiclassing, which is not identical to the way it works in AD&D. My additions are heavily influenced (read: ganked unceremoniously, at least in part) from the AD&D 2nd edition-inspired-but-not-really-a-retroclone Myth & Magic RPG. My rules are slightly campaign-specific, but those bits are easily ignored, I think. They are also probably broken as all get out, which is why I'm posting them here. Tell me what needs fixing.

Multiclassing and Switching Classes

Multiclassing

Human characters may multiclass using the rules in the Advanced Edition Companion. Note that in The Bladed Earth, demi-human characters cannot multiclass.

Switching Classes

Human and demi-human characters also have the option of switching classes. To do this, a character must meet all the requirements of the new class and must declare the intention to switch classes when reaching a new level of experience. At that point, the character does not progress in the original class - he is regarded as being "in training" for the new class. The character must still accrue enough XP to reach the next level in its original class, at which time he begins the new class at 1st level, gaining all the advantages of the new class.

For example, Farkas, a human fighter, accrues 8,125 XP, which would make him 4th level in that class. Instead of advancing to 4th level in the fighter class, his player announces that Farkas will switch his class to magic-user. He remains a 3rd level fighter (with all the abilities of such) until he reaches 16,251 XP. At that point, he becomes a 1st level magic-user, adding that class' advantages to his fighter abilities.

As when multiclassing, the saving throws and attack values of a character that switches classes are equal to the best values available for all of the character's classes. Likewise, the notes on conflicting abilities from the Advanced Edition Companion's multiclassing rules apply to characters that switch classes.

A character cannot go back to advancing in a previous class after switching classes.

Demi-human characters cannot switch classes until reaching the maximum level available to them in their current class. (For training purposes, assume that race-classes, such as "elf", reach the next level at half again as much XP as it took to reach their maximum level.)

For example, Goldfinch, whose class is elf, accrues 600,001 XP and reaches 9th level, the maximum for that race-class. He would have to train until he reached 900,001 XP to switch classes.

Demi-human characters cannot switch to classes forbidden to their race.

In all cases of multiclassing and switching classes, the Labyrinth Lord has final say on which class combinations are allowed.

The Ultimate God and Others

2011-06-07T11:50:00.004-04:00

If you haven't already seen the latest post on Monster Brains, do so now. Aeron Alfrey has put a much-deserved spotlight on the artwork of Sidney Sime.

Sime was probably one of the finest popular illustrators of the 20th century. He contributed his artwork to stories by luminaries like Lord Dunsany and William Hope Hodgson, among others. In a dream world, my fantasy RPGs would be illustrated by Sidney Sime and Ivan Bilibin.

Anyway, if you find yourself in need of inspiration, do yourself a favor and take a look.

Low Gaming

2011-05-30T20:56:00.005-04:00

I'm suffering from low gaming.

I haven't played anything in months. Well, actually, I've played some video, board, and card games here and there, but no RPGs of any kind since I left New York in late January.

I've attempted to find a new gaming group here in Gainesville, but so far, haven't found anybody playing anything other than D&D 4E. I already know how I feel about that particular incarnation of the game. I've got no interest in playing it again.

It's tough to maintain anything like enthusiasm in a gaming drought like this one. I had intended to submit something for the random table contest I posted about not long ago, but ultimately I couldn't think up anything I felt was worthwhile. Likewise, the wiki I talked about starting up is, well, a non-starter.

Then to top it off, "Macho Man" Randy Savage died.

Ultimately, I have more important things to worry about right now. Finding a job is high on the list, as is concentrating on my graduate work. Still, I hope I can game again sometime soon.

Mountainskull Dungeon

2011-04-26T20:23:00.003-04:00

I've been feeling pretty uninspired lately, so I'm lucky that there's somebody like scottsz out there. He's been going over classic modules with a fine-toothed comb in his Cold Text File series at the Lord of the Green Dragons blog. His latest post on Gary Gygax's classic module, The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, uses my header logo as a sort of instructional aid toward understanding the ancient language of the Aztec people, the ways in which it was recorded visually, and how it's used in an old D&D module.

Trust me, it makes more sense if you just read the article.

So, that logo my brother designed for me isn't just cool to look at, it's educational. Bet you can't say that about your header image.

Fight On! Random Table Contest

2011-03-25T09:29:00.003-04:00

I try to avoid posts like this one, but the idea behind this contest is too damn brilliant to ignore. Not just what it's about, not just the prizes, but the way the prizes are determined. I say again: brilliant.

Random tables are a big part of what I love about RPGs. I'm already trying to think up a decent submission or two.

Wikity Wack

2011-03-20T21:52:00.003-04:00

I haven't had a game session for a couple of months now, and I'm fiending for an RPG fix pretty badly. Since I'll be starting grad school (and hopefully finding work) soon, I'm worried I might not have time to play for a while. Still, I need some kind of creative outlet.

I'm thinking about writing up my D&D mini-setting, which I've been calling Cosk thus far, in some detail. I don't want to go overboard with it - as a more prolific blogger recently pointed out, providing a lot of setting detail is problematic at best. Too often, that way lies tedium for anyone involved besides the author. But occasionally a potentially neat concept or an interesting tidbit of information will pop into my head, and I want to start scribbling them down someplace.

At the moment, the best way to do this seems to be to create a wiki. New York Red Box's DMs use one to keep track of campaign notes, character stats, house rules, and setting info, and for the most part it works well. Scott Driver also put together an impressive wiki for his Wilderlands of Darkling Sorcery setting. The advantages of organizing setting notes (and the potential to keep DM and player information in the same place if I actually get to run a campaign with it someday) seem to outweigh any drawbacks.

Unless somebody knows of a better way to do it, I've more or less made up my mind to launch a wiki for Cosk (though I'll have to come up with a more impressive name for it than that). The real question is this: is anybody interested in reading the wiki material here on the blog, or should I just post a link to the wiki once and leave it at that? I seem to be gaining followers even though my posting has slowed, so obviously, somebody's interested in what I have to say, but I don't want to clog up the blog with the details of traditional swamp goblin ear-hair braiding in the Maggele Slough if people are just here for random tables and witty commentary on old module covers.

Thoughts?

Unearthed

2011-02-18T18:11:00.003-05:00

Over Grognardia way, James Maliszewski reminded us of the existence of a line of AD&D-branded stationery and binders produced by a company called St. Regis in the early 1980s.

It turns out these were illustrated by a man named Alex Nuckols. It's beautiful, classically rendered, and downright classy work that gives my beloved Greg Irons-illustrated AD&D Coloring Album a run for its money. I know many gripe about the merchandising of D&D in the early 80s, but in my opinion, some of the best (if not the best) D&D-themed artwork of the era wasn't being produced by TSR at all. Nuckols' work for St. Regis is a perfect example.

There's a gallery of several Nuckols-illustrated St. Regis products at the Tome of Treasures forum. A lot of the scans and photos are frustratingly blurry, but even this limited glimpse is well worth your time if you're into D&D fantasy art in the least.

(By the way, I'd be more than willing to bet that some of these images - including the one posted above - were originally intended to depict scenes from J.R.R. Tolkien's work. That looks like Bard of Laketown slaying Smaug to me, and I'd be shocked if the "Death Rider" art wasn't supposed to be one of the Ring-Wraiths seeking out Frodo and company.)

The Serpent Was Subtle

2011-02-13T18:09:00.004-05:00

It appears I spoke too soon when I wrote of the untimely demise of the Dragon Warriors role-playing game:

Dragon Warriors, the classic 1980s dark-fantasy RPG recently re-released by Magnum Opus Press, is moving to new British publishing company Serpent King Games.

From 1st April the game will no longer be available from Magnum Opus, which had published Dragon Warriors through Mongoose Publishing’s Flaming Cobra imprint.

Serpent King Games will keep the existing Dragon Warriors books available, and will publish new supplements for the game. The first new release will be the Dragon Warriors Players Book, in July 2011, with another two releases planned for the first year.

It would be bad form to repost the entire announcement, so if you're interested, there's more detail at the Serpent King Games website. Considering the individuals involved, the game appears to be in very good hands, and I'm more than happy to help spread the word.

I won't directly benefit from any of it, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Dragon Warriors' previous publisher, Magnum Opus Press, is selling all of the PDFs of the game line at less than half-price, and that Mongoose Publishing (the game's former distributor) has also reduced the price of the hardcopy books significantly - including an "ultimate bundle" that includes all seven books released thus far for $79.99. All indications are that the new Serpent King Games material will be fully compatible, so if you're thinking of checking out one of the UK's finest old-school fantasy RPGs, now is the time.

Cosmic Caprice

2011-01-30T19:33:00.003-05:00

The last six months have been tumultuous for me. I relocated to New York, struggled to find work, and joined an excellent gaming group. Sadly, one needs more from life than fun and games, and as a result my wife and I eventually elected to return to our home state of Florida.

Before I left, I managed to cajole the esteemed Tavis Allison into running a playtest session of Goodman Games' Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, which has been the subject of much blogosphere discussion of late. I had a blast rolling up and playing Mortigaunt the Necromancer (and his 0-level followers, Lucky Lorinc and Goodwife Cump). If you want to know more, you should check out Tavis' rundown of the session over at The Mule Abides.

I think people who are writing the game off as yet another retroclone are going to be very surprised with the final product. Mechanically, DCC was satisfyingly wild, and felt like a strange (and wonderful) amalgamation of classic Dungeons & Dragons and my beloved Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. In feel, it's much more like pulp fantasy or sword & sorcery than "vanilla" D&D. Magic (which followers of this blog know is one the areas where I feel D&D could use some extra spice) is refreshingly dangerous and exciting, and many of the concepts around which DCC's magic system is built mirror my preferences strongly. I'm very much looking forward to putting the game through its paces when it goes into open beta testing later this year.

(I signed an NDA which I believe keeps me from blabbing overmuch about the mechanics of the game, but suffice it to say that I was quite impressed with what I saw. Of course, my fellow players and I perceived a few wrinkles here and there, but I think we brainstormed several potentially useful solutions to them... which is the point of playtesting, after all.)

It's too bad my grand NYC experiment didn't work out, but now that I've relocated, I have a lot to be excited about. I'm looking forward to concentrating on my return to grad school, and, of course, finding another group!

An Untimely Demise

2010-12-31T16:25:00.004-05:00

Bad news: it looks as though Magnum Opus Press has lost the rights to the Dragon Warriors roleplaying game. This has evidently been known for some time, but since I didn't see it reported on any blogs I follow, I didn't learn about it until recently. The exact details are vague, depending on who you ask, but the end result is that James Wallis is no longer involved - a result I find disappointing.

The final releases for Magnum Opus' Dragon Warriors line are a revised printing of the core rulebook (incorporating the errata to which I contributed after it was first released) and the scenario compilation In From the Cold, which should be of interest to any fans of the early days of White Dwarf magazine.

Perhaps most frustratingly, this development means that the upcoming "player's book" for Dragon Warriors, which was intended to introduce several new character careers (including the much-needed Robin Hood-esque Hunter) is apparently going to be scrapped. This is a major disappointment, especially considering that by all accounts, the book was near completion. (Jon Hodgson even showed off the book's cover artwork - which I've used as the image for this post - several months ago.)

Whatever their reasons for revoking the license, the game's owners have expressed their desire to see Dragon Warriors continue, so there may be some hope yet for what is one of my favorite old-school fantasy games.

This Is Relevant To My Interests

2010-11-19T10:49:00.003-05:00

I should probably pick this module up soon, considering... well, you know.

I must apologize for the lack of updates recently. I had been concentrating all of my energies toward finding either gainful employment or admission to grad school.

Okay, job-and-college-hunting and playing in an excellent New York Red Box D&D campaign, which has been so satisfying that I've felt less motivation to post here. Good for me, bad for the blog. I'll work on that.

The good news is that I recently got a job at a local university, so I should be able to do things like purchase RPG books in the relatively near future.

Fifteen Games

2010-10-19T15:51:00.004-04:00

There's a thingy going around where bloggers list the fifteen games that have meant the most to them, all in fifteen minutes. In my case, "meant the most" means "played a lot, or had a big impact". Since the goal is do this quickly, there are probably tons of games that belong on a "top 15" list that I've overlooked.

Anyway, here are mine, in no particular order:

1. Rifts

2. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons

3. Marvel Super Heroes

4. Earthdawn

5. Cyberpunk 2020

6. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

7. Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game

8. Dragon Warriors

9. The Palladium Role-Playing Game

10. Talisman

11. Final Fantasy Tactics

12. Final Fight

13. Wrestlemania 2000

14. Ultima: Exodus

15. Cadash

I play few of these games today. Practically all of them speak to my gaming heyday in the late 80s to mid-90s. A few are scorned, or regarded as guilty pleasures at best. I think that sums my tastes up pretty well.

Gaining Mastery

2010-10-18T18:20:00.003-04:00

Is everybody sick of reading about spell mastery yet?

Too bad.

Here's the first draft of my spell mastery house rules. They're a bit clunky, and I'm open to suggestions on how they might be improved. Here goes:

Magic-users can achieve spell mastery. Any spell memorized by a magic-user can be replaced at will by a mastered spell of the same level or lower.

Magic-users who wish to master a spell must first find a mentor. Mentors are hidden mysterious beings - ancient, inhuman, possessed of alien intellects and appetites - that seek to advance their own goals, which most mortals find inscrutable. (None are of lawful or chaotic alignment.) Those that dwell in the material world are invariably found in inhospitable, near-inaccessible locales. Others must be entreatied in the otherworldly realms where they reside, be they nightmarish hells of impossible angles or gauzy opiate dreamlands. Though no two mentors are the same, they are universally temperamental and notoriously difficult to approach, each one first requiring a particular set of cryptic gestures, obscure passwords, outre offerings, etc. before any requests are entertained.

Furthermore, no mentor knows all of the spells in existence. (For example, Three-Headed Oul-Balam grants mastery in spells dealing with visual illusion and invisibility, while Glatth, Eater of Doves gives instruction in spells of travel, movement, and teleportation.) To research the means of finding a mentor capable of teaching mastery in a specific spell requires a significant investment of time and money.

The first time a magic-user attempts to find such a mentor, he must first invest 1500gp per spell level and one week per spell level desired, then roll under or equal to his Intelligence score on 4d6. Subsequent visits to a mentor who the magic-user has previously contacted cost 750gp per spell level, and the Intelligence check is made on 3d6. If the Intelligence check fails, the money and time are lost, and the magic-user must start again. If the Intelligence check is made, the magic-user has successfully contacted the mentor, and the chart below is consulted.

(The money and time represent mystical research of the proper etiquette, the purchase of the required offerings, and either an expedition to whatever inhospitable place the mentor inhabits, or the rituals - magical, drug-induced or otherwise - necessary to visit an otherworldly one. At the Labyrinth Lord's option, the costs in time and money may be waived if the magic-user and his PC companions agree to undertake an adventure in search of a hidden mentor.)

Spell Mastery Attempt Table (2d8) For a particular mentor, each roll below 12 provides a cumulative +1 modifier to future rolls on the table, until the result is 12 or higher. Once a result of 12 or higher is rolled, the modifier is reset.

2-3 What is the meaning of this? PC has offended the mentor somehow. Roll on the Spell Mastery Mishap Table below.

4-5 This should suffice. Mentor teaches PC a new spell of the Labyrinth Lord's choice. New spell is of the level in which mastery was desired, but is not mastered.

6-8 Is this what you seek? Mentor grants mastery in one spell currently known to the PC, but not the one the PC wanted (Labyrinth Lord's choice). If none of the PC's spells are those in which the mentor can teach mastery, see "This should suffice", above.

9-11 What have you done for me lately? Will grant mastery in exchange for a favor from the PC. Roll 1d6: (1-2) valuables (3-4) magic (5-6) mission. (The Labyrinth Lord should make the cost proportionate to the spell's power.) If the PC is unwilling or unable to pay the price, see "Get thee gone" on the Spell Mastery Mishap Table for consequences.

12-14 Very well; I shall show you the way. Mentor grants mastery in one spell of the PC's choosing.

15-16 You have long been a favorite of mine. Mentor grants mastery in two spells of the PC's choosing, and marks the PC physically in some fashion. (The Labyrinth Lord should devise a physical change that relates thematically to the mentor.)

Spell Mastery Mishap Table (2d6)

2 This I command. Mentor places a quest or geas spell on PC (no saving throw). Even if the mission is carried out successfully, mentor will not grant mastery.

3-5 The stars are wrong. Mentor refuses to grant PC audience. PC can try again in 1d8 weeks.

6-8 Get thee gone. Mentor ejects PC from premises and will provide no aid for 2d4 months.

9-11 Darken my door no more. Mentor casts PC out, will never be found by PC again.

12 I must despise you now. Mentor casts bestow curse on PC (no saving throw) and drives the character out, never to be found by PC again.

(These tables are based in part on Jeff Rients' "Suffer Fools Gladly" table in Fight On! #3.)

Paths To Mastery

2010-10-07T12:31:00.006-04:00

(For those who don't feel like reading this entire post: Yes, I'm still brainstorming my house rules on magic and spell mastery. No, I haven't got anything concrete yet.)

In my previous post, I introduced a concept I call "spell mastery", which allows magic-users to spontaneously cast certain spells. The rule, lifted from 3rd edition D&D and modified, seems workable enough, though it hasn't yet been playtested. I'm still trying to figure out exactly what process characters will have to undertake in order to gain spell masteries, but I do have some ideas.

I thought about awarding a set number of masteries based on the character's experience level, but that feels a bit dull, not to mention that it would mean that literally all magic-users would have mastered at least a few spells. I want spell mastery to feel more impressive than that. (Still, I'll probably give starting characters a mastered spell or two, most likely based on their Intelligence score.)

I also dislike the idea of creating schools or domains of related spells from which a character would have to choose. I thought long and hard about it, and in the end I feel that imposing a classification system on D&D's already reliable and mechanistic way of handling magic is just making the whole thing feel even more like a science (or worse, a technology). I've got no problem with players choosing to master spells that are related thematically, but I'm not going to force them to - if somebody wants their character to master ventriloquism, anti-plant shell, and teleport, I'm not going to object.

So, I'm thinking about making characters seek out a mentor in order to master spells. These mentors wouldn't just be old wizards that charge for magic lessons, though. I'm picturing something more like Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser's mentors, Sheelba of the Eyeless Face and Ningauble of the Seven Eyes: mysterious and inhuman figures whose goals are often inscrutable. Or they could be like the "Spirits, Partly Evil and Partly Good" described in the old demonology tract, The Goetia, who impart specific knowlege and abilities to those who call upon them, but are inherently unruly and untrustworthy (and will often seek to harm an unprepared or arrogant student).

Seeking a mentor would not be a quick or easy task. I could handle such a thing as a full-blown adventure - "Quest for the Cave of the Hidden Master" or what have you - but then I risk making the magic-user and his acquisition of spell masteries the subject of the entire campaign, relegating the poor fighters, thieves, and the rest to the role of bodyguards and henchmen. (There's already an RPG for that: Ars Magica.) My current thinking is that the best way to handle it might be something like the carousing table, to be used in the downtime between adventures, in order to keep one character's spell-questing from distracting from the meat of the campaign. Some kind of formula that lets characters convert earned gold and invested time into a chance at spell mastery, with a nice random mishap chart, I think...

Thoughts On Mastery

2010-09-27T07:03:00.000-04:00

Good news, everyone! I've just created a house rule that will outlaw clerics forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.

Well, sort of.

Not long ago, I discussed a number of fiddly ways to handle my proposed removal of the cleric class from Dungeons & Dragons (or Labyrinth Lord, if you prefer). You may recall that by the end of it, I was ready to give up and just let the cleric stay. After all, what right had I to just rip one of the original classes out of the game, with no respect for its legacy? It's not as though I'm a stranger to backpedaling, especially when it comes to tweaking the core assumptions of D&D.

I'm backpedaling on my prior backpedaling. I'm reverting to my original idea: putting all the cleric's spells (and maybe the druid's and illusionist's, too) in the magic-user's basket.

There were a number of objections to this idea, most of them centering around the cleric's iconic status, the setting implications of its removal, and other issues of flavor. Frankly, none of these really bothered me, which shouldn't be surprising considering what I'd proposed in the first place. I have a pretty solid idea of how religion, faith, and priesthood work in my setting. It's not that these things won't exist in it; it's just that none of them are inherently magical. In Cosk, the gods don't just hand out spells to their faithful, in other words. (You might have priests that use magic, but in game terms, I think you can guess what class they'd be in my setup.)

The comment that was most troubling to my initial "lump 'em all together and let the player sort 'em out" idea was this one, from my fellow New York Red Box player Naraoia:

"The only problem that I can see is that it puts too many hats on the poor M-U's head. Is he going to be the guy who casts fireball, or heal serious wounds? Especially at low levels, it's tough enough to pick spells. If the DM is evil enough, every M-U is going to have to take cure light wounds as their first spell. And memorize it every single day."

Spell memorization! That's the problem, of course. Clearly, the answer is to just dump it! Easy, right? Well, no. I'm trying to put together a campaign that's recognizably old-school D&D here, and I've already made up my mind not to chuck Vancian magic in the bin, no matter how badly I may want to at times. So, what to do?

My idea is this: Let magic-users have "spell mastery". Any memorized spell can automatically be replaced by a mastered spell of the same level or lower. Let's say your magic-user knows three spells: charm person, magic missile, and cure light wounds. He's mastered charm person. He heads into a dungeon with cure light wounds memorized, in case somebody gets badly hurt. As it turns out, his companions find some healing potions in the dungeon, so nobody really needs that memorized spell, but it would be useful if the magic-user could charm a goblin they captured in order to learn the location of some treasure. Remember, the magic-user has mastered charm person, so he can automatically trade that memorized cure light wounds spell for charm person and proceed to make a new best friend.

(Anybody who's played some version of 3rd edition D&D will recognize this as a warped version of the cleric's "spontaneous casting" ability. I happen like this mechanic a lot, and think it's worth stealing.)

Obviously, the next step is figuring out how magic-users get masteries. I could just hand out a certain number per level. I could make characters spend money for training, much like weapon mastery in the D&D Rules Cyclopedia, or use something like Jeff Rients' well-received carousing rules to determine whether a spell was successfully mastered. I've got a few ideas as to how this could work, but first, I'd like to see what repercussions my idea would have on the way the game is played. So, let me know what you think.

The Answer

2010-09-17T12:49:00.004-04:00

To the question:

The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album, expertly colored by my older siblings, was the first D&D book I can remember looking through. Later I picked up the Monster Manual and Monster Manual II, purchased at a WH Smith bookshop in Edinburgh, and later still the AD&D 2nd edition Player's Handbook, but it's this cover image that pops into my head when I hear "Dungeons & Dragons".

More On Magic (or: Moron Magic)

2010-09-13T16:38:00.002-04:00

My last post outlined my plan to merge the magic-user and cleric spell lists. Upon further reflection, and taking into account some of the excellent points raised in the comments, I'm pretty sure that I am going to head in a different direction, namely: to remove the cleric class and then create something else to stand its place.

I've had a few different ideas on how to accomplish this, many suggested by commenters on the previous post:

I could simply create a cleric variant that is closer to the magic-user in terms of its hand-to-hand combat effectiveness - weapons, hit points, and the like - but retains the same spells. The "flavor text" of the class would be changed from an armored servant of a god to a magician specializing in spells of protection and healing.

Another possible course of action goes like this: Eliminate the spellcasting classes as they currently stand. Lump all of the spells in the rulebook together and then reassign them to new spell lists, each with its own class. My guess is that there would be at least two, possibly three or four classes when all was said and done - maybe a "white mage", a "black mage", and a "witch" with illusion and nature powers? This solution is one I've considered before, but it's not without its own potential pitfalls. For one thing, I would have to figure out exactly what kind of spells the ranger and paladin classes receive at high levels. Also, I'm worried it might be overly complex. Something about the idea smacks of 3rd edition D&D to me. That's not the feel I'm going for.

More or less independent of these possible courses of action, I'm also thinking about creating a "universal" spell list - a dozen or so 1st-level spells that any magic-using class would be capable of adding to their spellbook and casting. I'd like to make it so that even an attack-oriented class like the "black mage" would be able to cast a simple healing spell, and that a "white mage" could likewise zap a foe if need be.

An even more radical idea would be to split up all of the spells into themed lists, like "fire spells", "detection spells" or "healing spells" and give spellcasters a choice of one or two lists (possibly with access to more as they increased in level). This is similar to the approach taken in Rolemaster. It's also reminiscent of the cleric's "spell domains" in D&D 3rd edition. This idea appeals to me on a mechanical level, because it would make D&D magic work a lot more like some systems that I've enjoyed in the past, but again, it'd add a lot of complexity and might be wrong for the old-school feel I'd like to evoke. It would also mean a lot of tinkering with the classes, and frankly, I don't know if I'm up for that. It'd take time and expertise that I'm not sure I have at my disposal. (The irony that it would mean I had basically turned the magic-user into a cleric, rather than the other way around as I had originally proposed, is not lost on me, either.)

I'm a little worried that these are all potentially game-breaking ideas, and I have to admit that I'm starting to wonder if I wouldn't be better off just leaving the classes as is...

The Guy What Uses Magic

2010-09-03T08:00:00.002-04:00

I hit the same stumbling block every time I start making a setting for D&D. I map the place out, I come up with a basic idea of what the theme is, a vague idea of history, religion, culture, and all that good stuff. Then I start thinking about magic.

This probably won't endear me to the OSR community, but I kinda hate D&D magic.

All right, "hate" is a strong word, but I've played a lot of fantasy role-playing games, and I'm not exaggerating when I say I liked the magic systems in every single one of those games better than D&D's. This is the reason why practically every D&D setting that I think up gets moved to a different RPG when it really starts to take shape: the assumptions inherent in the D&D magic system rankle me. (My idiosyncratic Freed Lands setting, which will probably never see any actual play at a game table, was originally intended for Castles & Crusades. But now that it's taken the weird shape that it has, it would hypothetically use BRP or RuneQuest II.)

Anyway, I'm resisting that urge this time around. I'm not going to rip out the so-called "Vancian" spellcasting system for this one - frankly, it's just too much trouble, and I'm intentionally trying to make something that's recognizably D&D. Cosk is set up for a relatively traditional old-school adventuring model, so I want to keep the races and classes recognizable, for the most part. (No trisexual lizard people or egg-laying naked mole rat dwarves this time around.)

Still, even after I make my peace with Vancian magic, I still have beef with another weird idea D&D introduced. I'm talking about the cleric/magic-user split.

Accounts from people who played with Dave Arneson when D&D was in its nascency say the cleric wasn't one of the initial character types. The class was introduced when somebody wanted to make a character who could take down a vampire PC who had been causing a lot of trouble. Beyond the interesting fact that player vs. player infighting wasn't frowned upon, I'm intrigued by the idea of how the game worked before this Van Helsing character class was introduced. Was there magical healing at all? Resurrection spells? Turning the undead? Man, the undead must have been scary as hell without the cleric's turning ability.

At some fundamental level, I don't get the cleric. Apparently, sometime between its introduction at Arneson's table and the publishing of the original Dungeons & Dragons game, the class morphed from its Peter Cushing undead hunter roots into some weird, heavily armored, spellcasting healer-guy that can only use blunt weapons. I know the edged weapon prohibition was based on some historical individual whose name slips my mind, but D&D's cleric isn't exactly a strong fantasy archetype, at least at the time it was published. It's certainly become one thanks to the game's wide-ranging influence on the genre, but that's beside the point. (I can't help but wonder what would have happened if it was the vampire class and not the cleric that made it into the little brown books.)

I'll cut to the chase. The idea's pretty simple: I'm considering taking the cleric spells, giving them all to the magic-user, and dumping the cleric class entirely. (Since I'm using the Advanced Edition Companion for Labyrinth Lord, people who really, really want to make a crusading warrior-priest can make a paladin.) There's something appealing to taking the magic-user - the class that would later become known as the wizard - and giving him all of the magic, making its name more accurate in the process. The magic-user would be the character class that uses magic.

Given some of the truly crazy stuff the magic-user as written can already do, I can't imagine that letting them heal people is going to break the game, mechanically or thematically. I don't want to be rash, though. Despite years of playing D&D on and off, I'm far from an expert on the minutia of all those spells. I'll admit that I have no idea how this would actually work in play, but I'm sure I'm not the first to think of this. (In fact, I think James Maliszewski has discussed trying this very idea, but I'm not sure if he ever has, as I know he's not as big a fan of sweeping rules changes as I am.) So, if anybody out there has tried this, or something similar, how did it work out?

(And since I am using the Advanced Edition Companion, what do I do with the illusionist and druid spells? Give them to the magic-user too? And how would this affect the elf class? Hmm.)

The Isle of Cosk

2010-08-30T23:24:00.009-04:00

Almost immediately after I finished drawing my campaign map, I hurriedly typed the following description:

Situated at the mouth of the RIVER WULE, the port town of GLYGON is where the bulk of the ISLE OF COSK’s importing and exporting is conducted. Ships from across the SEA OF UNTHICOR unload their wares here and bring raw lumber, spices, and other goods back to ERSIS and THAMSH, or take on supplies before continuing eastward. Increasingly, companies of chartermen (as well as free lances) are disgorged from these ships to seek their fortunes further downriver.

Among the canyons and foothills of the mighty SPIRES OF SLOINE yawns the gateway to the legendary STONEHELL dungeons, “liberated” over a century ago yet somehow still infested with all manner of monstrosities, many of them human. The often venal needs of its would-be plunderers are served by the mercantile inhabitants of FULCRUM, a shanty-town that sprung up seemingly overnight.

Farming homesteads dot the fertile expanse of the PLAINS OF HEALOTH to the south, the largest of which is the village of WATTEM, situated at the edge of LAKE RUMIC. Their bountiful crops are carted north to Glygon, and south to CRADOUN for shipment to GHOOR-AMPAVA, THRONE CITY OF THE ICONESS. From here, many who find their dreams of riches thwarted by the terrors of Stonehell hire themselves out to the elves of the Spires, becoming the latest soldiers to serve the feuding clans and the multi-generational grudges they call the Mountain Wars.

Little of the precipitation that sustains these settlements reaches past the Spires, and much of it trickles back westward, filling the rivers and creating vast expanses of boggy earth. The sweltering heat of the MAGGELE SLOUGH is unpleasant enough, but further south, the RIVER STRELB has its start in the foul swamp known as THE CYSTLANDS, a veritable breeding ground of abominations. The neighboring FOREST OF MOTOMB is hardly more welcoming, overrun as it is with sinister creatures. The crusading zealots of Ghoor-Ampava have their work cut out for them here.

Yet the settlement of NEW FIESSEL sits at the edge of LICRETTO BAY, only a few days’ travel from the heart of Motomb. Their proximity to that dread forest (and to the mysterious, fey-haunted SHANDAWOOD) leaves these devout souls, driven out from the increasingly debauched cities of Thamsh, left practically cut off from the outside world, a situation that seems to suit the townsfolk well.

Across the Spires of Sloine lie the arid, rocky WASTES OF SPHAURG, unexplored - except, legend says, by the unspeakable cultists who constructed the TOWER OF PRIDE at the salty shores of LAKE DYFOI in ages past. None know the name of the being (god? demon?) summoned here, but the stories say it is trapped within, and maddened by the passing centuries. The GAUTVAS REACH and the strange island fortress dubbed the BASTION OF BLYCH remain likewise ancient and largely unknown, except to the pirates that harbor along its rocky coast and cavernous islands. The people of the nearest settlement, PHAWN, rarely travel south, content to fish the RIVER AFTRYDE.

To the north, where the SHAILOR MOUNTAINS branch off from the Spires, sits the abandoned dwarven outpost men call BLEDSPAR’S FOLLY, believed wiped out by plague. The dwarves that survived travelled east, building a nigh-unassailable fortress at SKOSTALM TOR and virtually sealing themselves within. The SCIDIAN PENINSULA, to the far northeast, does receive some small amount of rainfall, and the cutthroat town of PORT CANCIARE serves as eastbound ships’ last port of call before crossing the OMMULTIC OCEAN to the far-flung lands of QUING and QAYEDESSA.

(Looking back on it now, it's a bit of a mess. It's certainly not very evocative, but I was mostly trying to write down my concepts before I forgot them. Many of the details will undoubtedly be changed as I continue to develop the setting, but I feel I'm off to a decent start.)

Strong On His Mountain

2010-08-29T00:57:00.004-04:00

I'm back, I'm in New York, and I'm unemployed.

With any luck, this will be a temporary situation. As uncertain and unsettling being jobless can be, it's not without its perks. It allows me plenty of time to become accustomed to my new home. I've also had the opportunity to find myself an excellent new gaming group.

Even better, my creative batteries are recharging. This afternoon I found myself sitting down with my copies of Labyrinth Lord, Renegade Crowns, and Stonehell Dungeon, some percentile dice, and a pad of graph paper, with the intention of sketching out the environs surrounding the dungeon. Before I knew it, four hours had flown by and I had a fully-mapped island drawn up: rivers, mountains, towns, dungeons. I don't think I've done that since I was thirteen or so. It's a quite a feeling to look over a map and know what's lurking on every square of that paper.

Bledspar's Folly.

The Shandawood.

Ghoor-Ampava, Throne City of the Iconess.

Skostalm Tor.

The Cystlands.

Licretto Bay.

Port Canciare.

The Wastes of Sphaurg.

Feels good.

Dearth and Paucity

2010-07-16T13:16:00.002-04:00

As followers of Dungeonskull Mountain have no doubt noticed, there has been a distinct lack of content on the blog in recent months. There are a few reasons behind this (in addition to general sloth, which is an ever-present factor):

My face-to-face tabletop gaming group hasn't met in quite some time.
I'm feeling burned out on my play-by-post Dragon Warriors campaign, and put it on indefinite hold.
I'm preparing to move to New York City at the end of this month.

So, there you have it. The good news is that after such a long break, I'm really starting to feel the RPG itch again, so I should be ready to post more regularly once things calm down a little. I am hopeful that I'll be able to find a good group in New York. I might even be able to find a decent old-school game. I would really like to get some Labyrinth Lord in...

We've Got Crab Legs

2010-06-16T22:59:00.003-04:00

A deadly and treacherous creature, no doubt. Clearly, the chefs at this restaurant are not to be messed with.

To Valhalla

2010-05-10T16:29:00.004-04:00

I would tell you to rest in peace, Frank, but something tells me you'd prefer to kick some ass.

Help Me Out Here

2010-04-29T09:44:00.004-04:00

Tell me that I what I think is happening here isn't really happening:

Because it sure as hell looks like an elf is about to shoot a terrier point-blank in the face with an arrow. "Drop the hammer or the dog gets it!"

Farewell To a 4end

2010-04-15T21:17:00.004-04:00

Running Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay for the past few months made me realize something: I don't like Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition.

Actually, that's not exactly right. I had some fun with 4E and I won't say I never will again. But it doesn't do the kind of fantasy game that really appeals to me. As I've said before, 4E is a game of high-powered, ass-kicking heroes that carry so many magic items their teeth glow. That's fun - for a while, at least - but it quickly gets old for me. I like my fantasy games to be a bit grittier, and by "a bit", I mean a lot.

I spent nearly a year playing 4E, and most of that time was eaten up by running fights. I know there are people out there who swear 4E combat runs faster than any other edition, but that certainly wasn't the case for us. Fights took hours. They always felt fun at first, but I got bored with them in short order, whether I was running them or participating as a player. In fact, when I think about memorable fights I've played in the past couple of years, only one of them happened in 4E, and it was one where the DM was handwaving a lot of things. The fights that stick out in my memory happened in games like WFRP and Rolemaster (which suggests I really need to play more games that have detailed crit charts, but that's a subject for another time).

There are a lot of things to like about 4E. I like the way they evened the playing field between magic-using and fighting classes. I like the way they simplified skills. I like the concept of the Feywild. I like the idea of ritual magic (though in play, we practically never used them). There are a lot of changes that 4E made that I thought were good ones. But when the system is built entirely around combat, and I find combat boring, that's a problem.

(Plus, a lot of the artwork is terrible. It's actually a step back from the previous edition's artwork, which is just weird. I mean, look at the pic I posted up top. I know art's not everything, but dammit, it is important to me. I need visual aids to help me imagine the action, and when those aids look like half-assed comic art from the 90s, well... that's not good.)

Anyway, the point is this: I sold my "non-core" D&D 4E books not long after we stopped playing last year. Today I sold the rest of them.

But hey, the good news is that RuneQuest II is pretty damned good.

Street Fight

2010-04-01T23:36:00.002-04:00

I ran Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay tonight, largely by the seat of my pants, and it went pretty well. We're nearing the final stretch of Terror In Talabheim scenario. I'm deviating massively from the adventure as written at this point and loving it.

Really, though, I just wanted to show off the awesome homemade street scenery we were able to use for the big fight against Clan Skryre's elite Stormvermin troops (along with a Warpfire Thrower team), thanks to the artistic efforts of one Kent Bonifield. Too bad Rick's character lost a leg, but hey, it's not a WFRP adventure until somebody gets horribly maimed. Right?

Once More Into the Breach

2010-03-17T14:04:00.005-04:00

I'm recruiting for my forum-based Dragon Warriors play-by-post game once again!

Since I started the campaign some time last year, we've had a few player dropouts. At the moment, the game is on hiatus. I've only got three active players, with one potential recruit looking over the rules. I'd like to pick up one or two more and get the ball rolling again.

I'm looking for people who fit the following criteria:

Like the Dragon Warriors game and have access to the rules (either the original Corgi digest paperbacks or the new Magnum Opus version - the changes are minimal).

Don't mind playing through (tweaked) published scenarios, many of them at least partly dungeon-based.

Are able to post to the forum at least a few times per week.

So, if that's you, and you think you'd like to give it a try, leave a comment to this post. Thanks.

[UPDATE: I've got enough players for now. Thanks, everybody!]

Changer of the Ways

2010-03-10T12:41:00.002-05:00

This blog has always been somewhat stream-of-consciousness in nature. It's largely become a receptacle of little ideas that never really get used much in my own gaming time. I constantly spout half-baked campaign concepts or fiddle around with books I've acquired, but I haven't talked much about what I'm actually playing right now. So here goes.

First off, after a long love affair with the game, I've finally somehow managed to get my group to give Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay a shot. I'm using the 2nd edition of the game, since I own literally everything that was published for it. There are a couple of people in my weekly group who I think were a bit skeptical about my insistence on random character generation, but we're now two sessions into the Terror In Talabheim adventure scenario, and the players seem to be having a good time rooting out a Skaven plot to poison the inhabitants of the nigh-impregnable fortress that is the Taalbaston. As much as I talk about wanting to run this campaign or that, I often find myself freaked out and frustrated once I'm actually behind the screen, but happily, I've avoided any such crises of confidence thus far. Maybe my love for WFRP overcomes the usual jitters, or maybe it's because the current plan is to run just this one scenario, relieving some of the pressure?

Then we've got my online forum-based Dragon Warriors campaign. I recently discussed some of the difficulties I've run into, both with the play-by-post format and with a rather poor choice of adventures I had made. We've finally slogged our way through The King Under the Forest, but the nature of the adventure combined with the fact that the characters started it just as the holidays were upon us has pretty much killed the campaign's momentum... and a good deal of my enthusiasm along with it. At the moment, I've put the game on hiatus until I'm finished with WFRP. When I start it back up, I will need to recruit more players (since one of my regulars dropped out), so if you're interested in playing a Dragon Warriors play-by-post campaign, keep an eye on this blog.

Lastly, I continue to participate in my good friend Bret's forum-based OSRIC campaign, set in his homebrewed (and wonderfully detailed) "Realms of Lakoria" sandbox setting. The AD&D rules have been a lot of fun to work with, and I have been having a great time playing a grumpy ranger character in that ruleset. For whatever reason, OSRIC really seems to get people into a fun, not-too-serious, old-school mode of play that's much different from the style I'm used to. It took a little while to get used to, and I sometimes think our party has been going about things in a more gonzo way than our DM anticipated, but it really is a blast.

And as a last random note, I just got a bunch of Creature Crucible D&D supplements in the mail yesterday. I picked them up on eBay with the inkling of ripping them off for use with Labyrinth Lord. We'll see how that works out.

So, yeah, a happy gaming time for me. Hope yours has been good as well!

Gloomspear's Saga: Part Five

2010-03-09T18:31:00.003-05:00

In Central Casting: Heroes of Legend, the twists and turns of a character's life have an effect on their personality, represented by Lightside, Darkside, and Neutral traits. Considering all the crap Gloomspear's been through, you'd expect him to have a pretty negative take on life, but apparently not: the winding road to adulthood has left him with four Lightside, one Neutral, and two random personality traits.

Lightside traits first, then. I turn to table 647: Lightside Traits and roll 2d20 four times, resulting in scores of 13, 14, 32, and 10. This means Gloomspear is Pious (which the author defines not-too-subtly as "reverently devoted to worship of God"), Honest ("always gives what is due"), Benign ("gentle, inoffensive"), and Trusting ("trusts others to behave correctly"). So Gloomspear's a big pussycat, considering everything he's been through. Too bad about that berzerker rage.

Gloomspear's Neutral trait, rolled on table 318B: Neutral Traits, is Grim - "unsmiling, humorless, stern of purpose" - a roll of 28 on 2d20. Well, that's more like it. Even though Gloomspear is strong of conviction and generally morally upright, he's not cheerful about it. That makes the Lightside rolls easier to swallow.

Last, I need to make a roll on table 318A: Personality Trait Check to see what to do with his random traits. My first percentile roll of 99 indicates that I need to roll up an Exotic Personality Feature on table 649. First, I need to figure out what type of exotic trait he has by rolling a d20... and I roll a 20, so "Several Features manifest themselves. Roll 1d3+1 times on this table." All righty, I get a 4, so that's 3 more rolls: 18 (Sexual Disorder), 11 (Behavior Tag), and 10 (Allergy). All right, Gloomspear's getting weird...

Deep breath. A quick glance at table 649F: Sexual Disorder shows me that it's definitely the product of somebody who's not particularly open minded: transsexualism, bisexuality, and homosexuality are all listed as disorders, and it's explained in a sidebar that "All Sexual Disorders are considered to be Darkside personality traits by most societies, fantastic or otherwise." Nice editorializing there, Jaquays. I guess the description of the Pious trait should have tipped me off. But we've come this far, so let's see what happens, shall we? I roll 2d8 and get "Too Prude: Convinced that sex is bad in any form. Despises all who lower themselves to it, including self." Well, that could sort of make sense, considering that Gloomspear's cursed to cause the death of anyone he loves, and who knows what happened to him (or what he witnessed) when he was enslaved or imprisoned as a child? I'm now directed to roll a d8 to see if his prudishness is an attempt to hide his own sexual disorder, and thankfully, it isn't.

That gave me the heebie-jeebies a little.

I still need to roll Gloomspear's Behavior Tag and Allergy. I roll a d20 for Behavior Tag and get a 4: "Distinctive Possession". I'm to select an object "for which the character is well known and which he may not wish to be parted from". I'd say it'd make a lot of sense if this was his cursed spear. It's given him his moniker, and he actually can't get rid of it - not that he'd wish his curse on anyone else. The Allergy is pretty unremarkable, as my roll of 5 indicates an "unusual food type", with a 1 for its strength, meaning it's a mild allergy. So, Gloomspear has a mild allergy to... let's say frog meat. Underwhelming, as I said, but they can't all be telepathic tamarins and wondrous wizards, right?

One last random trait to go. I roll an 86 on d100, meaning it's a Darkside Trait. (Hopefully it's not something really monstrous, like being gay or having premarital sex.) I roll 23 on 2d20, meaning Gloomspear is Angry: "spirit always unsettled, never at peace". That directly contradicts my earlier roll of Benign, but hey, that's how the cookie crumbles. I'll take Angry over Benign, anyway - it just makes more sense for this character.

You're instructed to total up your Lightside, Neutral, and Darkside traits, and assign the character an alignment according to whatever you've got the most of. In this case, Gloomspear would come out as a Lightside (i.e., "good" or "lawful") character, but I've already written in Neutral on my character sheet. Next time I'll make the character after using Central Casting, as I think that would make more sense.

That's it for Gloomspear! Overall, I'm impressed with how this worked out, despite the prejudices of the author and a few rolls that were contradictory or not to my taste. The subtitle of the book, Heroes of Legend, turned out to be very appropriate to the results I got. Gloomspear feels like a big, high-fantasy tragic hero, maybe a bit more AD&D 2nd Edition than Labyrinth Lord, but still pretty damned cool.

Gloomspear's Saga: Part Four

2010-03-08T20:40:00.004-05:00

Having escaped from slavers and befriending a dwarf and a wizard, Gloomspear is ready for adulthood (or so we hope). Table 217: Significant Events of Adulthood works a lot like the Childhood & Adolescence chart, right down to the number of events: 1d3. I get a 4 on my roll, so Gloomspear has two events. This time, I roll 2d20 plus his SolMod. My results are 15 and... 15! This means that I need to roll on table 544: Exotic Events twice. Gloomspear will also have to roll up two more Lightside Traits later.

My first Exotic Events roll is a 16: "The character and another player character become acquainted with each other." Cool - this reminds me of the random cooperative character generation that Mongoose's new versions of Traveller and RuneQuest use. I roll a d10 to see exactly how they're acquainted. I get a 9: "One saves the other's life." A roll of a 5 on d6 indicates it was Gloomspear who saved the other PC's life. I like this. Adult events work a bit differently than Childhood & Adolescent ones in that you pick at what age they happened. Let's say this one happened when he was 20 years old.

I roll a 12 for Gloomspear's second Exotic Event, a long and detailed entry which explains that Gloomspear discovered "a waterlogged old chest" with "an apparently drowned animal" inside, that then awakened and became his pet. Well, that's definitely exotic. So, I have a roll on table 759: Unusual Pets up next. A roll of 7 on d20 indicates that it's a monkey, and another roll on table 760: Special Pet Abilities tells me that it's "Telepathic - Can communicate by mental speech." 19 seems like a good age to find a half-drowned psychic monkey, right?

I notice at this point that I was supposed to roll "Noteworthy Items" for Gloomspear's friends, the dwarf and the wizard, by using table 114: Parents & NPCs. Obviously, you wouldn't want to roll up a detailed history for everybody Gloomspear's ever met, so instead, each of his friends will get d3 rolls on the table. The dwarf gets one roll, and the wizard gets two.

To make a long story short, the dwarf (a male) is "persecuted or villainized" for "being involved in illegal activities", namely "organized guild thievery". Gloomspear befriended a notorious dwarven thief when he was a slave. The poor guy was probably in the clink with Gloomspear when the prisoners' amnesty was declared, and ended up enslaved alongside him.

Gloomspear's wizard friend (a woman) is forever telling "tales of a legendary treasure" and has vague hints as to its location. Interestingly, she is also believed to be the destined mate of "some unheard-of god from another land". The wizardess disagrees, but is still harassed and annoyed by this god's followers. Well, whatever else you might think, you can't say this book doesn't provide some colorful results.

Next, I'll finish up Gloomspear, roll up his personality traits and post some final thoughts about Central Casting: Heroes of Legend.

Gloomspear's Saga: Part Three

2010-03-08T12:22:00.007-05:00

When last we left our unfortunate hero, he had been released from prison at the tender age of 12, only to be enslaved by a conquering force that reduced his home city to ashes.

Table 539: Enslaved! is one of the more complex entries in Heroes of Legend. First of all, you have to generate your character's owner. So, let's see who bought poor Gloomspear. I roll a d6 to determine gender (getting a 6): a female owner. Next, I roll a d10 to see if this woman is from a different Culture, and get a 3, meaning she's also from a Civilized-Decadent background. Then I have to generate her Social Status by rolling a d20 and adding 83, then checking table 103: Social Status. I get a total of 96, meaning she's Wealthy, but not Nobility. Finally, I need to determine her Occupation on table 423D: Upper Class Occupations. I roll a 7, indicating that she's a Merchant, and then have to roll on table 425: Merchants to see what sort of business she's in. I roll a 16. She's a Slaver.

Okay, so young Gloomspear is enslaved and sold to a slaveress. Next, I'm told to roll a d6 to determine the duration of enslavement. I roll a 4, meaning Gloomspear serves this woman from age 12 to age 16. This also means that some Adolescent Events, which I still haven't gotten to quite yet, might happen to Gloomspear while he's a slave. I also roll a d3 to determine how many "Enslaved! Events" I need to roll up, and get a 6! (Jeez, Zocchi, are you sure these dice are "more random" than the competitors'?) 3 events on the chart, d20 roll for each: 17, 13, 5.

17 means "Character is branded." On a 5 or a 6 on d6, the brand is large and unmistakably a slave brand. I roll a 5. Great. Gloomspear is now literally, rather than just figuratively, scarred for life. Now I have to go to Table 867: Body Locations to see where his mistress had him branded. I roll another 17 on d20, indicating the brand is located on his left hand. I could roll to see when this happened, but it just makes sense to me that he'd be branded as soon as he was bought, so that's age 12 again.

My roll of 13 indicates that Gloomspear was "promoted to a position of authority", and determine that this happened in his third year of slavery by rolling a d4. Gloomspear evidently served his mistress well, and was rewarded with a better position at age 15. Creepy.

"Owner dies" on my roll of 5, and I'm going to assume this happens in Gloomspear's final year of enslavement (age 16). I'm to roll a d6 to determine the consquences, and get a 3: "The owner's last request is that all of his or her possessions be interred in his or her grave. The character escapes." I'm then directed to roll a d8 for the fallout of the escape, getting a 2: "1d6 slaves accompanied the character." Upon learning their mistress' morbid last will, 5 slaves escaped with Gloomspear - possibly ones for which he was in charge.

On to Significant Events of Adolescence! I roll a 4 on d3, meaning Gloomspear gets two rolls on this table. My first roll of 12 indicates that Gloomspear gains a friend, generated on table 750: Others. I also add a Lightside Trait to be rolled later. Finally, Gloomspear gets a break. I roll a 19, indicating "A Nonhuman", determined on table 751: Nonhumans. I roll a 7, which means he befriended a dwarf. 12+1d6 to see at what age he made this friend gives me a 15, so Gloomspear met his buddy when he was still a slave. Presumably, this dwarf was a slave, too, and was probably one of the five that escaped with Gloomspear the following year.

My second roll is also a 12: Gloomspear gains another friend! Certainly beats being cursed or enslaved, right? Another Lightside trait to be rolled later, then. This time Gloomspear befriended somebody at age 18 (the end of his adolescence). I roll a 4 on table 750: Others... it's a "wielder of magic". What kind of spellcaster? I roll a d4, getting a result of 1: "A wondrous wizard." Things started off sword & sorcery for Gloomspear, but his life is getting pretty high-fantasy lately! Heck, he's basically got an adventuring party already.

Next, we'll see what happens when Gloomspear the boy becomes a man...

Gloomspear's Saga: Part Two

2010-03-07T16:17:00.003-05:00

Picking up where I left off, it's time for me to roll up Gloomspear's childhood. We already know he spent a good chunk of it on the streets, even spending a couple of years in prison. Nevertheless, table 215: Significant Events of Childhood & Adolescence ("where the action begins," according to the author) instructs me to roll a d3 for the number of events in childhood. I roll a 5, so I've got to roll up three events. For each event, I roll a d20 and add Gloomspear's SolMod of -3, since he's Destitute. My final results are 4, 8, and 2.

My roll of 4 means that Gloomspear learned an unusual skill, generated on table 876: Unusual Skills. I roll a 2 on d20: "Professional gambling." Well, that certainly makes sense, considering his background. My roll of 4 on the Significant Events chart is also annotated with an [N], which apparently means I will later need to make a check for a Neutral Personality Trait later on. Fair enough. Finally, I'm told to roll a d12 to determine at what age this event happened, and get an 11. This means Gloomspear learned to gamble while he was in jail. Works for me!

That roll of 8 indicates that Gloomspear had a religious experience, also at the age of 10 (while he was in jail, learning to gamble, natch). This gives me a check for a random Personality Trait later, and I'm directed to table 541: Religious Experience. I roll a 16, which means that Gloomspear "uncovers the activities of an evil cult" while in prison. I roll a d6 to see what that means, and get a 6: "Others shun character because of this, possibly out of fear of the evil cult." So, I'm thinking Gloomspear found out about some kind of nasty secret society among the inmates, and his fellow prisoners preferred not to know about it. Interesting.

My third roll for childhood events was a 2: "A Tragedy Occurs." This entry has an [R] after it, which means I'll have to check for a random Trait later. I'm directed to table 528: Tragedies, and roll a d20, plus Gloomspear's SolMod, resulting in a 17: "War ravages the character's homeland." This happens when Gloomspear is 12 (almost out of prison), and I have to roll a d6 to see exactly how tragic this is. I get a 5, which means Gloomspear suffers 1d3 additional Tragedies. Man, this kid could not catch a break! I roll a 4, so I get two more Tragedies. Here we go again, d20 + SolMod: 5, 11. 5 means the "town where the character lives is wiped out". Normally, if the character lives in a city, only the neighborhood where he lives is destroyed, but on a roll of 6 on d6, the entire city is razed. I, of course, roll a 6. So, I guess that amnesty was declared because the city was doomed anyway. That roll of 11 indicates that Gloomspear was sold into slavery! So, the kid gets thrown into jail, and then when the war starts to go badly, amnesty for all prisoners is declared just in time for the conquerors to slap the chains back on him.

Next up, we'll see what table 539: Enslaved! holds for Gloomspear...

Gloomspear's Saga: Part One

2010-03-06T17:23:00.006-05:00

Previously, I introduced you to my fighter, Gloomspear. Now it's time to see where he's coming from. I've unbagged my battered copy of Central Casting: Heroes of Legend and broken out some Gamescience dice for maximum randomness. Let's get to work.

I can skip the first table, 101: Character Race, because I already know my character is human. Kind of a shame, really, because the chart has a couple of interesting possibilities (like Beastman or Reptileman) alongside the usual Elf, Dwarf, and Halfling. Ah well.

Next is 102: Cultural Background. I roll and get a result of 10 on a d10 - Gloomspear is from a "Civilized-Decadent" culture, and is native to the Urban environment. "Fictional examples of decadent Culture include: Robert E. Howard's Stygians, Michael Moorcock's Melniboneans, Fritz Leiber's Lankhmarites and Raymond Feist's Tsuranuanni of Kelewan." Never read any Feist myself, but nice! Gloomspear's a city boy. This gives me a Culture Modifier Number (or CuMod) of 7, which "will be used later to modify other die rolls". Right on. Gloomspear would also get a -10% chance of going insane, and some urban survival skills if he were being created for a game that used such things. Since Labyrinth Lord doesn't have systems for skills or insanity, I can ignore these modifiers, but can keep them in mind for roleplaying purposes.

I roll a 32 on d100 for table 103: Social Status. Even with my CuMod of 7, this nets me a result of Poor. I have a -1 Social Level Modifier (SolMod), but my survival skills increase, and I'd get a chance to get Dagger and/or Brawling skills, if applicable to the system. So, Gloomspear's from the mean streets of a decadent city. All well and good.

104: Birth Legitimacy is up next. Rolling a d20 and adding my CuMod of 7, I get a total of 15. Your character is illegitimate only on a modified roll of 19 or higher, so he's legit. Gloomspear has no LegitMod.

Since Gloomspear is of legitimate birth, I skip to table 106: The Family. It's d20 + CuMod again, and get a total of 24. "None known - left to fend for self. Change Social Status to Destitute." All right, so he was of legitimate birth, but spent his childhood as a homeless street urchin. Going back to the description of Destitute, he automatically gets Dagger and Brawling skills, and (being from a Decadent culture) has a 60% chance of having Underworld Experience. I roll a 40, so yep, I'm going to be rolling on that table next. I'm assuming my SolMod would also change to -3, the default for Destitute Social Status, though it's not explicitly stated as such.

So, since Gloomspear has been caught up in the world of crime, I'm directed to section 534: Underworld Experience. 534A: The Wrong Path will tell me what led Gloomspear to this lowly state. A simple roll of the d10 gives a result of 9: "The character is forced into a life of crime by criminals who threaten his loved ones." Well, Gloomspear never knew his family, but apparently somebody must have been taking care of him for his early childhood. This is a little weird, but workable.

Next is 534B: Type of Crimes. A 1 on d6 gives me "Petty theft. The character and several pals steal things they want or need. They act in violation of any organized thieves guild." I'm envisioning a sort of Oliver Twist situation.

Finally, I'm to roll on table 534C: Underworld Events d3 times. I get a 6 (three events!) and then roll 14, 18, and 8 on a d20. 14 is "The character discovers that several items taken in a recent heist are 'cursed'. No fence will take them and even the owner is making no attempts to recover his property. It seems impossible to dispose of these items or even lose them. Select 1d3 items on Table 863: Gifts & Legacies, then determine the alleged curse on the owner of the items on Table 868: Curses." Damn. Well, I'll get to that in a minute. 18 means "The character's thieving skills improve by one Rank." Gloomspear's a fighter, not a thief, dammit, and this indicates to me that if you're not using a skill-based system, it's probably best to pick your class after using this book. (Maybe I'll use the Advanced Edition Companion rules to multiclass him as a fighter/thief.) Anyway, my last roll of 8 indicates that "The character is imprisoned for a crime. Select the crime on Table 875: Crimes, then determine the length of imprisonment. After being freed, the character goes straight, but maintains his underworld contacts." Wow. All right, so I've got a lot of rolling to do.

863: Gifts and Legacies is going to tell me what cursed things Gloomspear stole. I roll a 4 on d3 (2 items) and so roll a d20 twice: 18 and 20. 18 is "A sealed trunk. There is a 60% chance that it contains 1d3+1 additional items from this table." 17. Yep, it contains (roll of 6 on d3) four freakin' additional items. All right, fine: 15 ("A musical instrument"), 5 ("A tapestry"), 10 ("A sealed bottle, determine contents") and 20 ("Roll again. The resulting item defnitely has both magic properties and some great significance to the character's destiny and the over-all scheme of things"). Jeez! So I'm rolling for two magic items, one that was in the chest, and one that was separate. Okay, I get a 12 ("A bound wooden staff", whatever that means) and an 8 ("A locked or sealed book"). Let's say the book was in the chest. Clearly, Gloomspear robbed a wizard, and nobody is willing to touch his ill-gotten (and reputedly cursed) magical wares.

And what exactly is that curse? A roll of 16 means "Character is subject to fits of berzerker rage" and gives pretty detailed rules on exactly what that means in combat (it's pretty similar to the barbarian class' "rage" ability from 3rd edition D&D). I'm told to roll a d10 (getting an 8), which is the "strength of the affliction", meaning that if I roll under that number on d100 when combat begins, Gloomspear flips out Wolverine-style. I also have to make this check any time he's wounded, a companion is wounded or killed, or if Gloomspear or a companion is insulted during combat. Yikes.

I still have to roll up Gloomspear's time inside, starting with table 875: Crimes. We already know he's been involved in petty theft and robbery, but let's see what landed him in jail. A result of 6 on d20 means it was "Offending an influential person." This means he's imprisoned for d10 years. I roll 9. Nine years in the clink.

Time to head to table 540: Imprisoned! I'm a little unclear as to exactly when this happened in Gloomspear's life, though. Normally, you only start rolling for this sort of thing when you're generating the character's Childhood and Adolescent Events, but I was directed into this whole Underworld Events sequence before I even got that far. I'm going to go ahead and say Gloomspear is imprisoned in childhood, and am directed to roll a d12 to figure out how old he was when this happened. It turns out that he was locked up at age 10. Damn. I get d3 rolls on the Prison Events table, and roll a 6 again. Three events rolled on d10. My first roll is a 2: "The ruler of the land declares a general amnesty. The character is freed after serving only 1d10 X 10% of his sentence (do not make any more rolls on this table)." I roll a 3, and Gloomspear lucks out, only serving 30% (roughly three years) of his sentence. He is released before the age of 13 by a kindly decree from the local despot, and so is spared some of the cruelties of prison life.

Whew. So, after stealing some cursed items from a sorcerer, then being sentenced to jail for insulting his betters, Gloomspear's been scared straight. Where was I again? Oh, right, I was rolling up his family, and it turned out that he didn't have one. The next applicable table is 109: Time of Birth, but the reader is directed to make his own table if he deems it relevant. I don't.

Table 110: Place of Birth is next. I roll a 14, which indicates Gloomspear was born "In a cave" and gives him a Birth Modifier (or BiMod) of 5. Interesting, considering he's a city boy. I'll have to come up with a reason for that. The next table is 112: Unusual Births. I'd say being born in a cave is already interesting enough, but let's see what happens. A d100 roll of 77 plus Gloomspear's BiMod of 5 yields two Unusual Occurances, to be generated on the next table, 113: Unusual Birth Circumstances. I get d100 rolls of 32 and 74. The first indicates that "Water froze or boiled by itself" and the second that he was "Born with a curse (go to Table 868: Curses)." Foiled again.

So, back the Curses chart for Gloomspear. I roll a 3 on d20 this time, meaning that the poor guy "will be responsible for the untimely death of his lovers. When an event indicates a love affair, go to Table 545: Death Situations to determine the cause of death." Maybe this is an allusion to the destiny-affecting magic "bound wooden staff" he later stole? Could this curse at birth be tied to the berzerker rage curse he later acquires from robbing the wizard? Is he doomed to kill the people he loves? Hey, maybe the cursed staff's actually a spear? (No wonder they call him Gloomspear!) I'm getting a real "tragic hero" vibe from this guy now; too bad I gave him that goofy smirk on his character sheet.

Next is table 114: Parents & NPCs. Remember, Gloomspear never knew his parents. However, we know that somebody he loved was being threatened to force him into a life of crime during his childhood. So let's say that somebody found this cursed, abandoned child in a cave, then brought him to the Decadent City and raised him there, until he ended up on the streets. I get a roll of 9 on d20 for table 114A: Occupation, which means this kind soul had one occupation. Another roll on 423: Civilized Occupations (which has the inexplicable Ayatollah Khomeini illustration I referred to in my previous post) indicates he or she had a Middle Class Occupation, to be rolled on table 423C. A roll of 13 on d20 means that Gloomspear's caregiver was "An overseer". Another roll on 423A to determine what type of workers he oversaw directs to yet another table (422A, Barbarian Occupations). I roll an 18, indicating that they were Craftsmen. Yet another roll, this time on 424A Craft Table I, will tell me what type of Craftsmen: 10 on d20 means they were "Rope and Net Makers". Yeesh, that was a lot of rolls for a meager result. I should have just handwaved it and said he was a kindly puppet maker or something.

Still, I'm impressed: Gloomspear's already pretty damned interesting. Next post, I'll get into his Significant Childhood events, as if he hasn't already had enough of those...

Introducing Gloomspear

2010-03-05T15:00:00.010-05:00

This is Gloomspear the fighter, a character I made for Labyrinth Lord. I rolled 3d6 in order and named him using my Core Names table. Check him out:

So far so good, right? Sure, his Hit Points roll could have been better, and he looks kind of like Saladin as played by Inspector Gadget, but his stats are well above average. He certainly seems to be a cheerful guy. His future is wide open, but it's his past that he needs to worry about. Why?

He's about to go through this:

"This book contains everything you need (except dice) to create detailed character histories and includes guidelines and rule materials to accomodate any FRP game system."

Yes, that's right, this is Central Casting: Heroes of Legend, Paul Jaquays' batshit crazy lifepath book, which I recently managed to pick up for a song on eBay. I don't know much about it, but I do know it has a picture of Ayatollah Khomeini in it for no reason whatsoever.

So wipe that crooked-eyed smirk off your Saturday-morning-cartoon-looking face, Gloomspear. Things are about to get real.

Black and White and Red All Over

2010-02-28T15:36:00.003-05:00

Over on Grognardia, James Maliszewski recently made a post lauding the look of Labyrinth Lord. (Ahh, alliteration!) I have to agree with him. Though they lack the slick, glossy look of most RPGs these days, they really are striking books, and look especially good if you have both the core rules and the new Advanced Edition Companion.

Tough Steve Zieser's artwork certainly has its charm, I think the real strength of these covers is the color scheme; or rather, the lack of one. The choice to go with red type on top of high-contrast pen-and-ink work was a good one, I think. Though I doubt it was the intent of the creators, they remind me of the gritty, DIY aesthetic of early punk album sleeves, like something the Subhumans would use as an EP cover.

Interestingly, the image I posted here is the only RPG cover my wife, who is something of an ex-punk, has ever said anything positive about. Makes me think that Zak Smith might have been on to something when he suggested "DIY D&D" as an alternate name for "old school" or "homebrew" games...

I Have a Dream

2010-02-19T08:57:00.004-05:00

Goblinoid Games' Labyrinth Lord is a retro-clone of "basic" Dungeons & Dragons.

Goblinoid Games' Mutant Future is a Gamma World-inspired RPG that is fully compatible with Labyrinth Lord.

Mutant Future has stats for laser guns.

You realize what this means, don't you?

Brothers and sisters, at long last, the age-old dream can be realized.

Lorded Over

2010-02-09T13:32:00.005-05:00

The siren call of which I spoke almost a year ago is something I'm hearing again. Back then, it spurred me to set up a Dragon Warriors play-by-post, which has been a lot of fun to run, but has its own problems.

With my recent acquisition of quality old-school style products like Labyrinth Lord, Stonehell Dungeon, and The Dungeon Alphabet, I'm back to seriously considering running a Dungeons & Dragons campaign again, but this time using the Labyrinth Lord rules (based on the "basic" version of the game) rather than 4e. Specifically, I want to run a game focused on a megadungeon, the boomtown surrounding it, and rivalries among the bands of adventurers delving into its depths. I have some neat little ideas that I think will give my own spin on an well-worn concept.

What I'm currently trying to figure out is how to do it. I could try running it at the local comics and games shop, but I'm about to start playtesting something that will take at least a few weeks (that's literally all I can say regarding that subject), and I also want to give the new Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space game a fair shot. I wouldn't be running Who, but it's difficult to see how I could finagle running a game on one night and playing on another in the week. Players have enough difficulty pulling off one night a week, myself included, and that's assuming they'd even be willing to give something so old and crusty a shot. I doubt they'd be interested for even a short game, let alone a setup that would require as much long-term investment as I'd hope to be able to get.

What to do...?

Gamma Gamma Hey

2010-02-04T09:27:00.005-05:00

I've seen a good deal of buzz around Wizards of the Coast's upcoming D&D "red box", which apparently attempts to simplify 4e for new players and will follow a release strategy similar to that used by TSR with the Mentzer-penned version of basic D&D.

This October, Wizards of the Coast is releasing a "D&D Genre Setting" boxed set for Gamma World, using the 4e system. Oh, and there will be booster packs of randomized Mutation and Tech cards.

Let the wailing and gnashing of teeth begin!

But hey, it's nice to see the boxed set making its long-delayed comeback, right? And between these boxed sets and the impending release of Dark Sun, it sure looks like WotC is trying hard to win over fans of the TSR era.

(Honestly, I'm not sure what to make of this announcement. On the one hand, if you were ever going to make a game with randomized player abilities on cards, Gamma World would be the one with which to do it. I will admit it appeals to my love of randomness. On the other hand, I have never been a fan of "booster packs". I also wonder how, and if, this card-based character generation would integrate with the D&D Insider online tools.)

Alignment II: The Backpedaling

2010-01-28T09:31:00.004-05:00

Well, that didn't take long.

Last night, after a long and satisfying Call of Cthulhu session, I came home with my brain firing on all cylinders and realized yesterday's post about alignment in basic D&D had some flaws. Foremost of which was that it wouldn't work.

Specifically, I'm talking about the very strict definitions I devised for Law and Chaos. While they make sense on a purely structural level, they're pretty much garbage as far as being used as motivations for characters to act upon. I mean, you could do a game that's about guys that like eternal permanence fighting guys that like absolute entropy, but it lacks a certain oomph. There's no real way to get involved in such a conflict, because neither side really stands for anything. They're just forces. It'd be like Gravity vs. Electromagnetism, or something. You could have it as a backdrop, maybe, but it'd be hard to get excited about either side.

So, yeah. Unless I can come up with something more workable from an RPG standpoint, I'd be better off just sticking with the original "Law good, Chaos bad" version, or just dropping alignment altogether, I think. Still, I guess it was a valuable avenue to explore, if only because it made me realize that the alternative I came up with wasn't the greatest.

Move along, nothing to see here.

Redefining Alignment

2010-01-27T12:39:00.007-05:00

Thanks to my recently acquired copy of the excellent Stonehell Dungeon, I've had "basic" D&D - be it the Moldvay/Cook edition, the BECMI boxed sets, the Rules Cyclopedia, or Labyrinth Lord - on the brain a lot lately. Basic D&D uses a simpler set of alignments than AD&D or its descendants. You have three options: Law, Chaos, or Neutrality.

The lack of a Good/Evil axis makes things problematic or interesting, depending on your point of view. Personally, I like the implications that spring from that starting point. What I dislike is that Lawful beings are described as believing in "truth and justice" and "the greater good", and Chaotic ones tending "to act in evil ways". What this ends up meaning is that Law is Good, and Chaos is Evil.

I understand the reasoning here. Making Law vs. Chaos the same as "good guys vs. bad guys" isn't such a bad move. It's simple, it's easy to work with, and as so often is the case with easy, simple things, after a while it gets boring. I'd like something a bit more interesting. So, I've been toying with the idea of redefining the alignments, and in so doing, I find that I've been thinking about redefining alignment itself.

Instead of using alignment as a descriptor of a character's philosophy on life or moral code - something I think it does pretty poorly, by the way - I want to use alignment as an explicit setting element. I want a game where beings that have an alignment have literally sworn themselves to furthering the causes of either Law or Chaos. What are those causes, you ask?

LAW: Stability, permanence, rigidity, predictability.
CHAOS: Flux, entropy, mutability, randomness.

Needless to say, most thinking beings don't swear themselves to abstract concepts such as these. (In truth, even the most fervent adherents of Law and Chaos cannot embody either principle in a truly pure fashion.) The vast majority of people are "neutral" in that they do not attempt to live their lives purely by axiom, or subject themselves completely to the whim of chance. Neutrality, however, is not an alignment; not a principle to which one aligns oneself. Rather, it is the lack of an alignment.

This sounds a little half-baked right now, but I'm going to run with this idea and see what happens. I realize that I've made something that sounds a lot like Allegiances from Chaosium's licensed Moorcock game, Stormbringer. Nevertheless, I like the way I can warp some of the assumptions inherent in D&D with this scheme, so I think I'm okay with that. I like the idea of a setting where "good" and "evil" are more subjective than they are in vanilla D&D, and where a more stringent application of the "Law vs. Chaos" angle might alter some of the old, traditional setup, which I'll examine more in future posts.

(Did Gygax lift the alignments from Moorcock in the first place? I think I've read that he stole the good Law vs. bad Chaos angle from Poul Andersons' Three Hearts and Three Lions, but surely he read some Elric, too.)

Xvart-Art

2010-01-20T08:11:00.013-05:00

I was flipping through my copy of UK2: The Sentinel the other day and found a post-it note (complete with workplace logo) stuck on the inside back cover.

I only dimly remember drawing this guy.

I always thought the drawing of the xvart in the Fiend Folio was kind of cruddy. Looks like I took it upon myself to reinterpret it.

He's got kind of a bat thing going on, which I guess works okay, and it looks like he's having a pretty good day. Not sure about that earring, though.

(For comparison, I've also posted the original Fiend Folio version. It's not the worst piece of art in the book, but up against the Russ Nicholson illustrations it definitely suffers... I don't know if mine's any better, mind you. You can see I did try to incorporate some of the more notable features, though.)

The Puzzle Question

2010-01-19T12:15:00.005-05:00

For several months now, I've been running a forum-based (PBP) campaign of Dragon Warriors.

Since the game was published in the mid-80s, I'm sure many proponents of the Old Ways (TM) would decline to describe it as a true "old school" game, but as it resembles nothing so much as a British version of Basic D&D, it counts as one for me. This being the case, I've done my best to run it in an old-school fashion; which is to say that I take published scenarios, tweak them to fit my tastes, and then let the players muddle their way through as best they see fit.

Much like Basic D&D, DW lacks systems for searching, spotting, outwitting traps, solving riddles, and the like. The GM is expected to ask players to describe what they're doing with a given obstacle, rather than asking for an attribute check or skill roll. In this way, we are told, old school RPGs become more a test of player skill than they are a demonstration of character skill. Players used to tossing some dice to find out if they notice a loose flagstone (rather than having to declare that they're looking for it) can find it difficult to adjust.

The scenario I'm currently running for my players is The King Under the Forest, the first adventure written for Dragon Warriors. Having been published before the setting of the game, Legend, was even fully conceptualized, it is considerably different in tone from the gloomy, mysterious scenarios that followed: in this adventure, the players investigate what would best be described as a magical puzzle dungeon. There are traps and riddles and enchanted fountains and rotating wands and a room with an honest-to-god dragon in it.

Now, with a group largely unaccustomed to the old-school mode of play, tackling the dungeon in question would be a time-consuming and frustrating process even if we were all sitting around the same table. Trying to run it in the often-sluggish play-by-post medium, especially when two of the players live in different time zones from the rest, has proven to be what I think could fairly be described as a quagmire. Some players expressed disgust with the nature of the dungeon as soon as they divined it, others are just having a hard time figuring out what to do. Frankly, I am unsure if I'd be able to do a better job of running it if we were all in the same room. At any rate, for now I'm throwing out a lot of hints, and am using the Stealth/Perception mechanics from the game as written to govern "spot checks", but I'm a little uncomfortable with that.

I know others out there, including self-proclaimed "leader of the Old School Taliban" James Maliszewski, have some experience with running old-school dungeons via play-by-post. Is the issue I'm running into something others have noticed?

Inspiration Dump II

2009-12-16T15:12:00.005-05:00

As a deck-clearing exercise, I'm going to post some images that are sitting on my hard drive, doing nothing worthwhile:

I hope to have the time to post something more substantive in the future.

Choose Your Weapon

2009-11-20T11:23:00.002-05:00

I was looking at my copy of the D&D Rules Cyclopedia the other day, and trying to think of a way to expand the selection of weapons available to the various classes. I understand that D&D, at least in that incarnation, is to a considerable extent a game of playing archetypes. At the same time, as a guy who understands the urge to do something that just looks cool, I came up with a simple houserule:

Any class can use any weapon, but if it's not on their list of allowed weapons, it inflicts either the damage listed for the weapon, or their class hit die in damage, whichever is lower.

This allows you make that sword-swinging wizard you always wanted to play - Gandalf used a sword, right? - without stepping on the fighter's toes. Your magic-user can use that sword (or battleaxe, or glaive-guisarme, or whatever) as much as he wants; it just inflicts 1d4 damage instead of the damage listed.

It's a pretty sloppy solution, and one I'm not entirely happy with, but if you're dead-set on making a sword-swinging magician, it allows you to do so. I think I prefer this "damage cap" to dealing with the attack penalty ascribed to using weapons not normally allowed to your class. Still, if I was really going to start gutting the Rules Cyclopedia, I'd probably do a full-scale overhaul of the way classes use weapons, based on the weapon mastery system.

Spread Thy Tentacles

2009-11-12T15:25:00.005-05:00

Though it was originally conceived as a fairly by-the-numbers D&D style campaign for Castles & Crusades, the more I think about my Freed Lands setting, the more Cthulhu Mythos-influenced it becomes. I don't know if that's a byproduct of my reading a lot of Chaosium material since the BRP rulebook was released, or just a natural outgrowth of my conviction to have it be a setting more about terror and the unknown than one about magic.

I'm learning to embrace this tendency, but I think I'll stop short of going for full-on Yog-Sothothery for Freed Lands. I'm not interested in doing a fantasy Cthulhu game. I'm just reading a lot of the excellent Malleus Monstrorum, an encylopedic monster sourcebook for Call of Cthulhu, and letting some of the cooler entries influence my ideas about the place of the monstrous in my setting.

Fundamentally, though, it's still going to be a game about exploration of the unknown, rather than sanity-blasting things from beyond. Primarily, anyway: I'm not saying there's no place at all for sanity-blasting things from beyond. Just that it's not the focus of the campaign.

Yes, this is something of a vague post. More on this topic later.

After Lovecraft

2009-10-29T15:25:00.005-04:00

My friend Rick Dakan, author of many fine books (including All Flesh Must Be Eaten and the Geek Mafia novel series) has returned to RPG publishing with The Horror at Red Hook: The Cold Case of Robert Suydam. As the title implies, this Call of Cthulhu scenario involves characters picking up the pieces after Lovecraft's short story of the same name.

I'm lucky enough to game with Rick almost weekly. It's also illustrated by my longtime friend and gaming buddy Kent Bonifield, whose art has been featured here on Dungeonskull Mountain before. But I'm not just plugging this scenario here because two friends worked on it - no sir! I playtested this adventure (playing a streetwise hobo named Brown Bottle Bill) and so can vouch for its coolness. In fact, my group's characters are included as pregens (though the names, I'm told, have been changed).

You can grab it in PDF format here. Or, if you're a Luddite like me, order it in print here (or at any other fine gaming establishment, be it brick-and-mortar or online).

Folio Imbroglio

2009-10-28T11:19:00.007-04:00

I think that a lot of the illustrations in the original Fiend Folio are begging for New Yorker-style captions.

"Have you heard the good news?"

Now, I love me some gorbel, but that picture's hardly the only one worthy of captioning. Anybody else want to try?

Your Sorcerous Ways

2009-10-27T13:57:00.005-04:00

Although I haven't mentioned it in quite a while, my homebrew fantasy setting, the Freed Lands, still percolates away in the back of my mind. I sometimes hesitate to post about it, since I get the impression it's largely of interest to myself alone, but this blog is too long neglected, so let me raise for discussion an idea that I hope will generate some commentary:

Fantasy without spells.

That's right - I'm coming to the conclusion that I'd be happier if my setting didn't have magic, or at least didn't have what RPGs generally describe as "spellcasting". The more I think about what turns me off about D&D-style western fantasy - a magic sword for every warrior, wizards chucking lightning bolts at their foes with impunity, priests healing the injured several times a day - I just don't like the idea of mere mortals having that kind of power, least of all on a reliable, predictable basis. I want magic to be scary and incomprehensible. I still want monsters, though.

In a lot of ways, the feel I want is what's depicted in the ultra-violent manga series Berserk, around the time of "The Golden Age" story arc. (The series ramps up the D&Disms shortly afterwards, with the main character befriending an elf and a wizard, among other things.) But early on, the world of Berserk is much like Europe during the 13th century or so, with mercenary bands doing the business of war and terrorizing the populace when work is slow. Whenever anything supernatural occurs, it's monstrously demonic in nature, and met by most of the protagonists with disbelief, confusion, and abject terror. That's more or less what I'm going for.

So, for the moment, I'm thinking of a human-dominated world, where magic is a fantasy, but horrific monsters lurk at the edges. There's still room for a sorcerer or two in this world, I suppose, but they'd be more monster than man.

You know, this concept has a lot in common with the so-called Cthulhu Mythos. I could say that's because BRP's currently the system I'm planning on using for the setting, but I think it's really just the influence of the aforementioned Berserk along with Princess Mononoke and similar films.

Perchance To Dream

2009-10-23T16:08:00.003-04:00

I am beginning to think that I want to run a fantasy campaign for which no game system exists, which is simultaneously frustrating (because it means that I can't just pick up a book off the shelf and run it) and liberating (because it means I can quit looking for something already in print and figure out how to put it together myself).

I want it to have the following:

Subtle magic (i.e. no fireballs or bags of magic swords)
Detailed and deadly combat that is fast-paced, with use of minis as an option
Systems for conquering and managing lands
Hirelings/followers as an integral part of the game
Support for large-ish battles (involving about 20 to a side)
Ways to mechanically differentiate one "warrior" character from another
Non-dicepool
Characters that can fit on an index card

Does such a game exist? I think not, but I'd love to be proven wrong. I have been thinking of cobbling it together from bits of BRP, which is a close but not exact fit. I am open to suggestions.

You Blew It Up

2009-09-23T13:14:00.003-04:00

I generally don't want to be associated with what has become known as the "old school renaissance" movement. Now, I don't harbor it any ill will. In fact, I enjoy reading many of the blogs of its proponents, and I do have an affection for old editions of D&D, but that's about the extent of it: affection. I definitely don't feel that any old edition of Dungeons & Dragons is the "true" one, or even that D&D is my favorite RPG. I like a lot of things about it, but I dislike just as many. That goes for pretty much any version of the game.

Nevertheless, with the announcement of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay's 3rd edition, I'm starting to understand how D&D grognards felt when 4th edition was announced.

WFRP3 is drastically different from the previous two incarnations of the game, both in presentation and in mechanics. I can certainly understand why, from a business standpoint, Fantasy Flight Games would seek to make an RPG that includes lots of funky dice and cardboard doodads that come in a big, attractive-looking box which costs $100. If you want to look at it in a positive light, FFG is just playing to their strengths as a company best known for its high production value boardgames. If you want to look at it in a more negative light, they're trying to make as much profit as they can while simultaneously making the game difficult to pirate (something Wizards of the Coast have had trouble accomplishing).

Either way, I don't begrudge Fantasy Flight Games' desire to use a sound business model for their new game. As somebody who liked WFRP 2nd edition a whole lot, bought everything released for the game, but never got a chance to play it, the announcement of a 3rd edition was a little unsettling for me. I have to admit that as I read more and more about the mechanics, my gut reaction is to squeal "but that's not WFRP!" I mean, I know that as the current holders of the license, Fantasy Flight can define WFRP as whatever they want it to be, but there's something deep in my core that is bummed out when I read that the Halfling and Ratcatcher are not in the starting boxed set, or that you can be a High Elf, or that the feel has been brought even closer in line to that of the wargame. Yes, it all makes sense, but it's not what I want, dammit.

So unless somebody buys me the 3rd edition box as a present and I somehow end up loving it, I think I just became a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay grognard. Somebody give me my name badge.

The Doldrums

2009-08-15T22:00:00.002-04:00

Bleargh.

I need to take a break from reading RPG forums and blogs for a while, I think. The rampant negativity surrounding practically everything I read lately is just, like, bringing me down, man.

This isn't directed at anybody in particular. I get that the internet is the place people go to vent and express themselves, but dammit... I like RPGs, and I like talking about liking them, not hating them.

Ah, well. I guess I need to grow a thicker skin. Time to get back to playing RPGs instead of bitching about them.

WTF, D&D!?

2009-07-30T09:03:00.004-04:00

This is kind of a cop-out as far as real posts go, but I wanted to point everybody towards the WTF, D&D!? series of articles at Something Awful. Zack Parsons and Steve "Malak" Sumner offer hilarious commentary on classic D&D releases (oh, and the original Rifts rulebook, too).

Check them out here.

(Sorry for the scarcity of posts recently. I'm about to start a new job, and beyond that, have been too busy actually playing games to write about them much. I hope you'll forgive me.)

Death, Destruction, Or Worse

2009-07-22T10:35:00.003-04:00

Recently, I rid myself of some games that were either never going to be played (Lords of Creation) or actively stinking up the place (DragonRaid). I don't feel bad about unloading any of it, but now, for some reason, I feel that I must tell you what I purchased with that credit:

D&D 4th Edition: Eberron Campaign Guide
D&D 4th Edition: Divine Power
Rifts Ultimate Edition
Rifts Book of Magic
Rifts Game Master Guide
Rifts Adventure Guide

Those first two will be the last D&D 4e books I get for a while, I think. I'm a little bit burned out on the game, since I've been playing it every week since it was released, but more to the point, I have an annual subscription to D&D Insider, so I have digital access to all the crunchy bits from the 4e books anyway.

Our plan is to wrap up the campaign we've been playing since last year, and do a few short adventures with new characters, so we can try some of the myriad new classes and races that have been released since we started. We're also hoping to alternate and get in some non-D&D gaming. A few games have been pitched with no decisions made as yet - my fingers are crossed that we'll avoid anything using the Storyteller system. I'm most excited by the prospect of (possibly) finally playing Call of Cthulhu.

But to get to the point, you can probably see that my love of Rifts, which has been in remission for at least a decade, has flared up again. I know the system, clunky as it often is, like the back of my hand. Many gamers my age started with Palladium games, for better or worse, and it's tough to shake the siren call of familiarity. Rifts was my game of choice throughout my adolescence, and despite the game's many warts, it's hard to be mad at it when it provided me with inspiration and enjoyment for over six years straight.

My good friend Kent is currently considering running a Rifts PBP, with (most of) our original gaming group. As soon as he mentioned he was thinking about it, I found myself bitching about power creep, Kevin Long's Dead Boy armor vs. Vince Martin's Dead Boy armor, the Siege on Tolkeen and the relative damage capabilities of plasma cannons and the Wilk's 457 laser rifle like nothing had ever changed. I hope Kent's PBP comes to fruition. Even if it doesn't, I might end up doing something like it myself.

So, I guess this is my "old-school renaissance".

Crabman Attack!

2009-07-16T09:36:00.003-04:00

WARNING WARNING CRABMAN ATTACK

CRUSTACEAN CONTROL TECHNICIANS HAVE BEEN MOBILIZED

CITIZENS ARE ADVISED TO AVOID THE CRABCLAW CAVERNS AREA

ON AUTHORITY OF GALDOS CLAWCRUSHER

Death And The Devil

2009-07-09T09:05:00.005-04:00

I'm pleased to report that my Dragon Warriors play-by-post campaign is chugging along quite well. Our band of heroes is now probably about two-thirds of the way through the introductory scenario, "The Darkness Before Dawn". They're holding their own quite well so far, and the players all appear to have gotten a good grasp of the feel of Legend very quickly.

I'm surprised at how well running a game via an internet forum is scratching the Dragon Warriors itch. Sure, it's not exactly like a face-to-face tabletop game, and real life can slow down people's ability to participate regularly, but the PBP format has certain strengths. Foremost for me is the encouragement for players to stay in character more consistently.

You see, I find that during my face-to-face game everybody tends to, well, bullshit a lot more than I'd prefer. I'm as guilty of it as anybody else. It's largely because it's the only time many of us hang out with each other "IRL", and so we naturally want to goof off and joke with each other, since we don't get much of a chance to otherwise. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but I do often miss the deep roleplaying one could find themselves getting into in the old high school days. PBP largely removes my temptation to quote Ghostbusters and ramble about Saints Row 2 when I should be getting into the game at hand.

The other day I was thinking about future Dragon Warriors releases and what they might entail. I know the game's current steward, James Wallis, has mentioned possible books on the Fay and the Church, but for whatever reason I ended up pondering what a DW-based megadungeon might look like. I thought back to William Cobbett's disparaging nickname for London, "The Great Wen", and felt that it would be a pretty cool name for an underworld site: a great swelling of the earth, like a massive boil caused by some sort of subterranean malignancy. A place where Hell seems not far from the world. Frame it in terms of a Crusade, and have adventurers drawn to it for the same reasons people took the cross in medieval times - some for glory and profit, some for religious fervor, some because they seemingly had nothing better to do. You could have your usual shanty town - complete with camp followers, apothecaries, blacksmiths, and sellers of indulgences - sprung up around the site, to cater to those that come to ransack it.

Okay, yeah, it's vague, and possibly not entirely in the spirit of the game or its setting, but if there's any game where you could make a dungeon and put the Devil at the bottom of it, it's Dragon Warriors.

Jim Holloway Makes Me Smile

2009-07-01T09:27:00.005-04:00

The first RPG books I ever bought were the AD&D Monster Manual and Monster Manual II. I had played AD&D a little with my older siblings, but I didn't buy the books because I thought was going to use the rules. I bought them for the pictures.

To this day, I'm fascinated by illustrated, encyclopedic books that list lots of creatures or character. If you looked at my bookshelf during my childhood you'd find things like Donald F. Glut's Dinosaur Dictionary, The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, and any number of illustrated wildlife guides and encyclopedias. The Monster Manuals were a natural fit.

Monster Manual II was my favorite, for a variety of reasons. First of all, it contained a lot of really inventive creatures - though they crop up on "dumb monster" lists these days, I loved weird stuff like the executioner's hood or the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing. Secondly, it had the boggle, which was a favorite of mine, since my brother's long-running AD&D character had been reincarnated as one. Third, I just plain liked the artwork more.

Now, don't misunderstand me. These days I've found plenty to like in the original Monster Manual, not least of which is the fantastically cool artwork of Dave Trampier. But at the time, the guy whose art really appealed to me was Jim Holloway. His work was clean, clear, and it popped off the page. More to the point, I felt like his monsters had personality, and as they say in Pulp Fiction, "personality goes a long way". Holloway's grippli had a serene sort of smile on its face that, as an eight-year-old, instantly made me want to hang out with him. His tasloi stepped out of the shadows with a mischievous smirk. His stench kow looked downright displeased with itself. I loved it (and still do).

I also appreciate the art Holloway's done for various adventure modules. His characters look like D&D player characters should. They carry chipped swords, battered shields, and mismatched, scavenged armor. They drink, laugh, goof off, make rude gestures, shout battle cries, chop monsters down with bloodthirsty sneers, and flee in terror. It's fun stuff.

I recently found Jim Holloway's site and while it's a bit clunky, it's worth visiting. I'm especially impressed with some of the revamps he's done of his original monster illustrations (they're about halfway down the page). Check it out.

Onward, Dragon Warriors

2009-06-25T11:10:00.003-04:00

My longtime friend Kent Bonifield drew an excellent sketch of the player characters from my Dragon Warriors PBP that I had to share. From left to right, we've got:

Iblis Smythe, a.k.a. "Ib the Pale", Assassin (played by my brother Chris)

Taebryn Kayatlaen, Barbarian (played by Bret)

Tobias Strangwald Wroxley-Nott, Sorcerer (played by Kent)

Olethros, Warlock (played by Keith)

Sir Yezekael of Rozhan, Knight (played by Dave, a.k.a. noisms)

Kent's art will soon be gracing the pages of at least one professional RPG publication (which I'm not allowed to mention by name just yet), but until that day, you can see more of his work here.

Tinkering With Initiative

2009-06-23T10:00:00.004-04:00

So, after about a week of running my Dragon Warriors PBP, with only one combat, I'm already messing around with the rules.

Dragon Warriors has fairly straightforward and simple rules that often remind me of gamebooks like Lone Wolf and Fighting Fantasy. One of the things I ran into as I was reading the rules again that I thought would bother me was the way weapon damage is calculated, or rather, isn't. If you hit an opponent and roll over their Armor Factor, you inflict a set amount of damage based on the weapon being used.

As I said, I thought this would bother me, and the editors of the revised rulebook must have anticipated this, as they included an optional chart telling how to roll damage for different weapons. However, when I started running the game, I decided to stick with the original rules as written before I started mucking around with them. First, I wanted to understand the system and the intent of its authors, Dave Morris and Oliver Johnson.

As it turned out, the fixed weapon damage didn't bother me at all. What did bother me was the way you determine the order in which combatants get to take their actions: they go in order of their Reflexes characteristic score, highest to lowest. Combatants with the same score go at the same time. Now, there are a couple of stumbling blocks here, at least for my taste.

One is that monsters don't have Reflexes scores. You're told to roll 3d6 once for all of the monsters in the fight, and use that for their Reflexes (for this purpose, at least). This means that if you're fighting five feral dogs, all the feral dogs go at the same time. This is a little unrealistic, but realism isn't really a major concern in role-playing. It does keep things streamlined and simple, so I'm willing to go with it.

Another, bigger problem for me is that this system means the player characters will always go in the same order, every single time they get into a fight. To make matters worse, characters with identical Reflexes scores will always act simultaneously, in every combat. It's workable, but quickly becomes repetitive and silly when you're describing battles in narrative form, as I'm doing for this PBP campaign, especially when you consider that the player character party we're currently using has the following Reflexes scores: 14, 14, 14, 13, 10. Our Barbarian, our Assassin, and our Knight would always act simultaneously under the rules as written. That would get old fast.

So, here is my simple fix: all combatants (including groups of opponents, at the GM's option) roll a d8 and add their Reflexes score to determine the order in which they take action. I'm using the d8 because I think a d10 or higher value die will add too much variability, and because I think the d6 is boring. The variability thing could be complete bullshit - I suck at figuring out probability curves and don't really care to improve. But we'll see how it works soon enough.

I imagine that as time goes on I will continue to tweak Dragon Warriors. House ruling is fun!

At Long Last

2009-06-17T10:24:00.006-04:00

Sorry for the lack of updates recently, but I finally got my Dragon Warriors play-by-post up and running! I guess a slight delay is to be expected when you're using a ruleset most of the players aren't familiar with, but I thought I was going to lose my mind waiting for everybody to finish up their characters.

The good news is that everybody's on board now, and we've got a nice mix of professions and personalities so far, both in terms of characters and players. I'm also excited to be playing with my older brother Chris again. He's the one who ran my first RPG sessions, and it'll be fun to turn the tables on him after all this time.

I've had a couple of people ask if they can lurk on the campaign forum, but for now I'd like to keep it private. I may well post occasional updates here on the blog detailing the characters and their progress, though.

Welcome to Legend, travelers... hope you survive the experience!

HackMaster Basic Preview

2009-06-11T08:46:00.004-04:00

Kenzer & Company have released a PDF preview of the new edition of HackMaster on their forums, downloadable here.

Yeah, the PDF is essentially an advertisement, but you know what? This version of HackMaster sounds pretty cool to me.

I used to own most of the HackMaster rulebooks and almost really liked them. The players-versus-DM attitude kind of put me off, and the humor wasn't really my style, but I thought there were some cool ideas in it. Ultimately I thought it would probably work better as an AD&D supplement than as its own game, but I have no gameplay experience to back that snap judgment up.

Anyway, the new game certainly seems to be toning down the blatant (and formerly contractually required) goofiness while still retaining a sense of fun. I like that the mechanics are AD&D-inspired but still willing to go off in different directions - combat, especially, looks like it will be pretty interesting. I get a cool "let's take what AD&D did right, and go from there" vibe from this I haven't felt since I got into Palladium Fantasy when I was a teenager. That's exciting.

Between this and Aces & Eights, Kenzer is definitely starting to intrigue me.

(Yeah, I just preordered it.)

Recruiting For Dragon Warriors

2009-06-09T09:29:00.006-04:00

If anybody is interested, I'm recruiting for a play-by-post Dragon Warriors campaign. I have three players so far, and am looking for two more. You don't have to have the new book, but access to some version of the rules (old or new, print or electronic) is a good idea.

I'm not vastly experienced with PBP games, but have been having a good time playing in them recently and figured I'd give it a shot. This will also be my first time running Dragon Warriors. I'll be using published adventures, mostly, so if you've already read them (or played them) you might want to sit this one out.

It's still in the early stages, but I will be setting up a dedicated forum specifically for the campaign in the near future. Comment on this post (preferably with your email) if you're interested in giving it a shot and we'll talk.

Looks like I found my two players. Thanks!

Judge Not

2009-06-03T21:47:00.005-04:00

Over the past couple of days I've been sitting down with my copy of DragonRaid, with the intent of reviewing a game I've been talking about since I started Dungeonskull Mountain. I had every intention of giving the game a fair shake, but I'm afraid I can't.

As I've mentioned before, DragonRaid does have some admirable qualities. It is presented in a very attractive, colorful box with excellent production values. It contains some interesting ideas, like having characters' combat statistics be based on the "Armor of God" passage in Ephesians, or a magic system that uses memorization of Scripture for its core mechanic.

Unfortunately, I simply can't make myself objectively review a game like DragonRaid. This is a game that puts a race that does good deeds "for the sake of helping people, rather than for the glory of the OverLord [Jesus]" in the monster section. A game where creatures on the heroic side are called "Victims". A game where the idea of recreation is portrayed as sinful in the introductory book.

I hope nobody thinks my own atheism is overly coloring my opinion, but this game... this is not my kind of game.

I will leave it at that.

New School Sandbox

2009-06-02T10:54:00.005-04:00

Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition's default feel of over-the-top magical superbadasses hitting monsters in the face with big glowing things isn't necessarily my preferred style of fantasy - I tend to go for the mucky stuff like Warhammer Fantasy, A Song of Ice and Fire or Dragon Warriors - but lately I have been finding myself getting into it again. And by "getting into it" I mean doing something more than playing it every week, which is what I have been doing for about a year now.

I find myself thinking about running 4e again a lot lately. I mean, I actually took a test to see if I could qualify as a RPGA "Herald" Dungeon Master yesterday afternoon. Now, I didn't pass (yet), and I was mostly doing it in the hopes of being able to grab the RPGA-exclusive revamp of The Village of Hommlet, but the effort is there.

One thing I was thinking about was that the encounter-design structure of 4e makes it hard to do a traditional, Wilderlands-style "sandbox" (or "hexcrawl") campaign. You know, one where the characters are plunked into a detailed area with lots of site-based adventures from which they can pick and choose. On the surface, it seems like D&D 4e makes that difficult, since encounters are constructed specifically for your characters, based on experience level. But it's always been possible in sandbox play for players to wander into things way above (or below) their characters' ability to handle. I mean, yes, you're going to get your butts kicked if you decide to take on an Exarch of Orcus at 5th level. How is that any different from the way D&D worked in the past? You take your risks.

Now, another stumbling block is the absence of any sandbox-style setting supplements or adventures for 4e. (There are rumors that Wizards' upcoming Revenge of the Giants super-module is going to be site-based, but that was supposed to be a boxed set, too, and that's looking less and less likely as time goes by.) But if you take a look at the Dungeon Delve hardcover, you've got tons of mini-adventure sites for a variety of different levels. Just lay a hex grid over a map of the Nentir Vale and place the delves where you want them. Combine your new sandbox Vale map with the published modules, the DMG, and Dungeon PDF magazines, and there's a whole mess of trouble waiting for your wandering PCs.

Yeah, I want to give this a try.

Fighting On

2009-05-27T19:12:00.003-04:00

I'm happy to announce that issue #5 of Fight On! (the fanzine of the old school renaissance) is available now from Lulu. Along with a bunch of other cool stuff, this issue contains the "Dungeon Motivations" random table Bret Woods and I put together a while back, greatly expanded from Jeff Rients' original.

This is the second gaming product I've managed to get my name on. (The first was the errata document for the new version of Dragon Warriors.) I hope people are able to get some use out of my goofy little contribution.

Maybe I'll use this as an excuse to reorder that copy of Barbarians of Lemuria that I had shipped to the wrong address...

I feel pretty good about this. Movin' on up!

Thief Of Names

2009-05-27T10:53:00.005-04:00

I recently found that I have a nasty tendency to steal names without even realizing it. When I first started working on my eternal back-burner setting project, the Freed Lands, I unknowingly stole the name of one of the major civilizations from RuneQuest's Glorantha, gave my lizard men a name swiped from Etruscan mythology, and named another culture after a city in Cyprus. Even though I doubt anybody would have really cared, I felt like I had to go back and change them, and I still catch myself thinking about them under their original (stolen) names.

As I continue to read A Distant Mirror, I'm struck by how awesome the names of some of the cities of medieval France and Switzerland were. If I wasn't being careful not to pilfer real-world names, I'm sure Thann, Olten, and Solothurn would pop up somewhere.

These days, I've resorted to cribbing stuff from the random word verification system used right here on Blogger... and have gotten some pretty awesome names, I might add.

(And since I don't have any relevant images, please enjoy this nice Angus McBride orc attack I had saved on my hard drive for some reason.)

Review: Ultimate Toolbox

2009-05-20T10:02:00.002-04:00

I am a big fan of random rolling. Don't get me wrong: I like making stuff up whole-cloth as much as the next guy, but if there's one thing that I've learned over my years of gaming, it's that rolling randomly often gives me fun results that I never would have come up with on my own.

It should come as no surprise, then, that I jumped on AEG's new supplement, Ultimate Toolbox, as soon as I learned it was available. The back cover blurb describes it as "400 pages of the best charts, tables, and seeds of gaming adventure." It's a massive expansion of their well-received Toolbox sourcebook, released for the d20 system several years back. Ultimate Toolbox cleans that product up, removes the d20 gaming statistics, and adds a whole lot more random tables.

As can probably be gleaned from the book's cover, which appears to depict a cleric of the new default D&D death goddess, the Raven Queen, Ultimate Toolbox is still aimed at those running and playing D&D-style fantasy. The book organizes its charts into seven chapters: Character, World, Civilization, Maritime, Dungeon, Magic, and Plot. Each chapter contains around one to two hundred d20 charts that can be used to generate a bewildering variety of useful information that one might need to produce on the fly (or any time inspiration is needed). Here are some sample tables that I've randomly flipped to:

Druidic Orders (Character chapter)
National Calamities, Magical (World chapter)
Power Behind the Throne (Civilization chapter)
Ship Names (Maritime chapter)
Potion Tastes 2 (Dungeon chapter)
Command Words, Healing (Magic chapter)
Gossip About a Group/Guild (Plot chapter)

Naturally, the real question here is "how good is the stuff you can roll up?" Well, they're generally pretty good. Results can be dull ("Ranger" under Ranger Titles), anachronistic ("Bring it on!" under Battle Cries 1), ornate ("Scarlands of the Bladed Earth" under Desert Names), or inspired ("Pretty wife of an ugly man said to be magically animated statue" under Local Legends 1). There is a lot of material here I would probably never use, but I think the point of this book is to help you out when something you thought would never come up in your game suddenly does. I found that the World and Plot chapters, especially, would be useful if one needs to whip up an adventure background when their player characters elect to wander off the map.

As far as drawbacks, there are a few. Ultimate Toolbox is a project that likely exhausted its authors, and while most of the results you can roll up are pretty interesting, as I mentioned earlier, sometimes you can roll up a dud. This is probably inevitable when you have three people creating over 700 charts, but it should be mentioned. Also, as in many RPG products, I noticed quite a few typos that easily would have been caught with even a simple spell check - "steppe" is consistently misspelled as "steepe", for example. If you're a person who likes a book packed with glossy artwork, look elsewhere - there are a few pen and ink illustrations here and there, but nothing that will knock your socks off. Finally, the book is pricey - $49.95 for a black-and-white softcover.

Nevertheless, I'm glad I picked up Ultimate Toolbox. It isn't perfect, but it does deliver what it promises: piles and piles of random tables. If you're the type of gamer that enjoys such things, as I am, it's a purchase worth considering.

Gutting The Rules Cyclopedia

2009-05-14T10:28:00.004-04:00

I have previously mentioned my love of the D&D Rules Cyclopedia here on Dungeonskull Mountain. I did recently acquire the much-admired Moldvay/Cook D&D sets from the early 80s, and they do have a lot of charm, but the RC remains my favorite incarnation of "basic" D&D, mostly because it's got literally everything you need (and then some) in one place. It collects pretty much all of the info from the Basic-Expert-Companion-Master-Immortal series (except, sadly, the art and layout, which is a step down from both Moldvay/Cook and BECMI).

Still, it's far from perfect. There are tons of things there that don't make much sense to me. I imagine Aaron Allston, the person who compiled the RC, might have been tempted to fix some of the problems, but that wasn't his job. Many people houserule old-style D&D pretty heavily, usually supplementing it with stuff from AD&D. I'm no different: there are a lot of things that I would tweak, rearrange, and dump entirely. Off the top of my head, here are some changes I'd make:

As written, neutral fighters can become knights at 9th level. You get nothing for being a knight, other than having to do what your king tells you. Compare that to what lawful and chaotic fighters get, and the knight quickly looks pretty lame. If paladins and avengers get neat tricks, knights should get them too. Maybe look at AD&D's cavalier for ideas?
Dump the cleric and the magic-user as written. Put all their spells into a pile, then divide them into "white" and "black" magic. Write two new classes - let's call them "magician" and "sorcerer" for now - based around those revised spell lists. Make sure neither of them are armored holy fighting guys... that's what the paladin does.
Rework thief skills somehow.
Either let the demihumans reach the same level as humans using the optional rules in the appendix, or drop them entirely. None of this half-assed "enforce a human-centric world by dicking over non-human player characters" garbage.
Give elf characters access to the druid's spell list, instead of the magic-user's.
Either drop the druid, or make it a class you can enter at first level.
Drop the mystic class. It's mechanically borked and doesn't really have the right feel anyway.
Write up a ranger-type class - probably one without spellcasting abilities.
Tone down weapon mastery a little, but KEEP IT. Maybe make it exclusive to fighters, or make it so knights get more masteries?
Keep skills, but make the skill list about 75% shorter.
Define alignments as sworn allegiances to the otherworldly powers of law or chaos. The vast majority of humans are neutral. Change the alignments of a lot of the monsters accordingly.

And that's just for starters! Judging from what I read of other people's "basic" D&D campaigns, I imagine the choices I'd make aren't the ones many would go with, but that's the beauty of houseruling.

(On an unrelated note, I got my DragonRaid boxed set yesterday. I haven't read any of its contents yet, but I can say that it is BIG.)

Revenge Of The Boxed Set

2009-05-12T09:55:00.003-04:00

That staple of the 80s and early 90s RPGs, the boxed set, may be making a comeback.

Back in what some like to call "the day", a lot of the RPGs on the market came in boxes. You'd usually get a couple of pamphlets of rules, maybe a map or a cardstock character sheet, possibly some dice, and some ads for whatever company published the game. It was pretty awesome.

Boxed sets were shrinkwrapped. I think I bought a lot of boxed sets specifically because I couldn't see what was inside them. I flipped through plenty of rulebooks for perfectly good games as a youngster, but didn't get them because they looked boring. (I passed over getting the "deluxe" RuneQuest book multiple times for this very reason.) With a boxed set, I was never sure what I was getting into. That element of not knowing was maddening, and I often ended up buying something just for that reason. Sometimes they led to hours of play (TSR's Marvel Super Heroes, for example), and other times they led nowhere, but to this day, I still pick up old boxed sets just on the principle that they look cool.

Anyway, for whatever reason - most RPG companies cite manufacturing costs - boxed sets have more or less fallen by the wayside. I think that's a shame, as there was something about them that made first-timers want to try them out. A couple of smaller publishers, like Troll Lord or Fiery Dragon, still do them from time to time, but the "big" guys almost never did... until recently.

Wizards of the Coast have a boxed module called Revenge of the Giants due later this year, which is a change from their previous policy of only using the boxed set format for their sorta half-assed D&D Basic Sets. White Wolf recently published Dreams of the First Age, a big boxed expansion for Exalted (though apparently it didn't do as well as they'd hoped). Green Ronin's recently announced Dragon Age: Origins tabletop game is going to be a boxed set aimed at new gamers and distributed in book and video game stores. Cubicle 7's Doctor Who RPG is going for the same demographic and distribution pattern.

It obviously remains to be seen if any of these boxed sets will be met with any enthusiasm or success, but one can hope, right?

The Work Of Demons

2009-05-07T14:55:00.003-04:00

The book I'm currently reading, A Distant Mirror, is proving to be endlessly inspiring, especially for quasi-medieval games like Dragon Warriors. The following passage from Tuchman's book is a near-perfect summary of the mindset that I believe the setting of Legend seeks to evoke:

"People lived close to the inexplicable. The flickering lights of marsh gas could only be fairies or goblins; fireflies were the souls of unbaptized dead infants. In the terrible trembling and fissures of an earthquake or the setting afire of a tree by lightning, the supernatural was close at hand. Storms were omens, death by heart attack or other seizures could the work of demons. Magic was present in the world: demons, fairies, sorcerers, ghosts, and ghouls touched and manipulated human lives; heathen superstitions and rituals abided among the country folk, beneath and even alongside the priest and sacraments. The influence of the planets could explain anything otherwise unaccounted for."

Of course, in Legend, the flickering lights really are the work of goblins, the seizures are the work of demonic forces, and the fissures in the earth lead to underworlds dreamlike and nightmarish.

Must... run... game... now...

Sealed In The City

2009-05-06T15:28:00.008-04:00

Sorry for the lean posts lately. I'm engrossed in reading A Distant Mirror, and it's a dense read that leaves little time for reading RPG books. It is, however, an excellent examination of the medieval world - in all its glory and nastiness - that is greatly intensifying my itch to run Dragon Warriors.

But hey, I've been picking up some pretty decent fantasy place names from lyrics lately. Thanks to my iPod, I've got:

The Tower of Pride
The Tower of Strength
The Temple of Lies
The Corridors of Desire
The City of Nine Gates
The Chasm Gaping

These all seem like they would fit on the Divine Right map pretty easily. Best of all, none of these come from the metal genre (that would be too easy) or songs having anything to do with fantasy themes.

You FOOL!

2009-05-05T12:14:00.002-04:00

I was wondering where my copy of Barbarians of Lemuria ended up, so I checked Lulu's website out of curiosity. Lulu had my old shipping address stored, and I didn't notice. It was sent to the wrong house.

With the way USPS operates in my area, it's unlikely it will ever make its way back to me. So, that's... what, about $25 (including shipping) down the drain?

Crap.

News From The Front

2009-05-04T13:42:00.010-04:00

I am happy to report that I finally managed to win a used copy of DragonRaid, the evangelical Christian RPG released during the height of 80s anti-roleplaying hysteria. I anxiously await its arrival. Rest assured that I will be giving it a thorough read, unless I find its content absolutely unreadable - an unlikely prospect.

If nothing else, it looks like the game's artwork is pretty good, and might even be useful to me as inspiration for a quasi-Crusader "order against chaos" campaign idea that is forming in the back of my head, this time sparked by thoughts about B/X D&D alignments, my current reading of the classic Keep On the Borderlands module, the historical narrative A Distant Mirror, the D&D Rules Cyclopedia, and Scott's new setting, the Ordained Dominion of Vologes.

Inspiration Dump

2009-05-01T09:51:00.005-04:00

These images aren't doing any good just sitting around on my hard drive!

Arthur Adams draws himself a mean sexy snake-lady. I was thinking of writing up D&D stats for this one, but then decided that between lamias, yuan-ti, mariliths, and succubi, it'd be pretty redundant.

This is a prehistoric animal whose scientific name escapes me at the moment. The image is called "Suthirinodon", but that was from a Japanese site, and they always butcher scientific names when translating them into katakana and then back into Roman characters. Anyway, "moleratpig" seems like an appropriate description. An animal like this would be the ancestor of the snuffling, tusked, xenophobic dwarves of the Freed Lands setting.

Jeff Rients posted this bad boy long ago. I am a big hobgoblin fan, but more than that, I love the Miyazaki-esque feel to this guy. This is literally one of my favorite RPG-related images, ever, and I wish I could find out who drew it.

Found this guy on a Russian-hosted site about a Forgotten Realms campaign. Looks like it might be D&D 3e art, but it looked vaguely Central Asian/Eastern European to me, so I saved it for Freed Lands inspiration.

Spoiling The Broth

2009-04-29T10:29:00.005-04:00

I really need to learn to buy (and read) one RPG rulebook at a time. Having too many cool books laying around is wreaking havoc with my gamer ADD.

In addition to the 4e Wilderlands concepts I discussed yesterday, I've got a Thundarr-style post-apoc setup for Barbarians of Lemuria, the Elven Crystals adventure for Dragon Warriors, an A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying noble house a buddy of mine and I rolled up the other day, an urge to set a kitbashing of the D&D Rules Cyclopedia that I thought up years ago into motion, curiosity about the upcoming HackMaster Basic game and whether it would work for something I call "Frazetta Greyhawk", ideas for the actual 4e campaign I'm playing in, and a vague desire for some sort of Lords of Creation/Basic D&D mashup struggling for control over the battlefield of my brain.

And all the while, Freed Lands lurks in the shadows, biding its time...

Sword & 4thery

2009-04-28T10:14:00.004-04:00

I've been thinking about sword & sorcery again lately, having recently purchased the RPG.net darling Barbarians of Lemuria from Lulu and the decidedly nasty new comic Viking from my local shop (which doesn't have any sorcery, but gets me in the S&S mood anyway). This, in turn, got me thinking about injecting more of the genre's flavor into the game of high-magic asskickery known as D&D 4th edition.

Soon I was reacquainting myself with Bob Bledsaw's Wilderlands of High Fantasy setting, which, despite the name, is more of a S&S-flavored pulp fantasy mashup than "high fantasy" in tone. I am a proud owner of all of Necromancer Games' d20-based Wilderlands material. Though I don't plan on running D&D 3rd edition ever again, I will probably hang on to those books (and especially the Wilderlands boxed set) until I keel over.

Anyway, I was flipping through the Player's Guide to the Wilderlands the other day with an eye towards using it with a system other than 3rd edition, and I actually think it'd be easy to use 4th edition for it without eliminating any of 4e's core elements, since the Wilderlands setting is chock-full of weird D&Disms in the first place (having been designed for that game, after all).

The 4e classes, really, fit just fine. Sure, having a bunch of friendly spellcasters running around with the fighter-types isn't very S&S at all, but as I said, I think the Wilderlands are more about putting a Frazetta veneer over D&D than anything else. If you wanted to make things more true to the genre, you'd probably want to dump a few of the newer, crazier classes - like the swordmage or artificer - but if you can have a crashed Soviet MiG in the mountains, I guess you can have a guy who shoots acid out of his sword.

Even "non-traditional" 4e races like tieflings and dragonborn are a surprisingly easy fit. The existing Wilderlands history already includes references to "Orichalan dragon-lords". Dragonborn are easily recast as a former servitor race of the Orichalans, or maybe even as degenerate descendants of the dragon-lords themselves.

Likewise, the Wilderlands already include an entire region to the south controlled by infernal powers and a shadowy race called the "demonborn". Using the 4e stats for tieflings, you have an easy stand-in for the demonborn, who are pretty much overpowered as written in the Wilderlands Player's Guide anyway. Or you could just use tieflings as-is and tie their backstory in with the demonborn.

You would need to write up a new Amazon race for 4e, though. Making a race that doesn't use much armor is tricky in any system, but at least there's already the beastmaster ranger build, so it'd be easy to have the archetypal Frazetta spearwoman, complete with smilodon friend.

I have a feeling that adapting the Wilderlands gods would be as simple as reassigning the various Channel Divinity feats from the 4e deity to Thor or Armadad Bog or what have you. There are already plenty of them between the 4e PHB and the Forgotten Realms Player's Guide, with more coming in Divine Power.

It... could... work!

Caldwellian Unnaturalism

2009-04-27T10:30:00.002-04:00

OH GOD NO CLYDE NOT AGAINPUT THE PIPE DOWN CLYDE PLEASE

Spoke Too Soon

2009-04-24T09:13:00.003-04:00

All right, I took a closer look at the 1st edition Dungeon Master's Guide last night, and I will revise my opinion accordingly: the book's only half useless to me. The appendices are pretty handy - in addition to being able to roll up a dungeon layout or a wilderness region (with settlements!), you can randomly generate the physical appearance of a monster or the type of prostitute a character picks up. Oh, and there's an awesome Dave Trampier illustration of a dead displacer beast being eaten by wild dogs. This is the sort of thing I can get behind.

As a side note, I was telling my wife - who has never played a tabletop RPG - that I got more comments yesterday than for any previous post. She asked what it was about, so I told her. Her response:

"Wait, wasn't that a 1st edition book? So... you were talking shit about 1st edition? Even I know you don't talk shit about 1st edition!"

I still don't think I was "talking shit", but point taken.

Old School Newbie

2009-04-23T09:35:00.011-04:00

I received my 1st edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide yesterday. I should note that I have never previously owned the book, but have heard for years that it is a must-own for any real RPG aficionado. I'd probably flipped through a copy at some point in the past, but it didn't leave much of a lasting impression on me, so it was with some excitement that I cracked it open and began to read.

I think I hate it.

I've read Gygax before, but his writing style here is pedantic to the point of incomprehensibility. This is no Monster Manual - the artwork consists primarily of cartoons and Sutherland stuff, which is not to my taste. The DMing advice, as far as I can tell, is almost exclusively negative. The author tells you not to change the rules, not to allow monster player characters, not to alter the tone of the game... well, not to do lots of things. I didn't see much in the way of telling a DM what he or she should do, but plenty of reflexive "if you do this, you're playing my game wrong" admonishments.

What you do get are exhaustive sections on subjects as esoteric as casting spells underwater, footnotes telling you that a roll of "mastodon" on the Pleistocene marsh encounter table actually indicates a shovel-toothed relative of the mastodon, and charts telling you how much damage a wereboar takes if he changes into boar form while wearing plate mail. There's a certain insane appeal to the bewildering degree of attention paid to the pointless minutiae of situations that will probably never occur in the typical D&D game, but I'm afraid that for me, it's not enough. Except for the sections on generating wilderness environments, settlements, and dungeons, this thing is almost completely useless to me. Still, I know a lot of people love this book, and that's great. Maybe one of them will want to buy my copy.

(To be clear, I'm not taking a dump on AD&D 1st edition or Gary Gygax. I own plenty of AD&D stuff, much of it written by Gygax, and have enjoyed reading it. I just strongly dislike this particular book.)

In happier news, I like the fun, freewheeling attitude of the D&D Basic and Expert Rulebooks a lot. So, what I've learned is that if I'm going to go for "old school" D&D, I should probably stay away from AD&D and stick to Basic.

Okay... now that I have probably enraged or alienated most of my readers, I am going to prepare for the onslaught.

Jeff Easley 3:16 Says...

2009-04-22T10:00:00.003-04:00

...you just got eaten by a Triceratops.

Buckling Bookshelf

2009-04-21T10:10:00.004-04:00

My 32nd birthday came and went a couple of weeks ago. I got a ton of loot, thanks to my lovely wife (and a few gift cards from other people), as follows:

A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying, which is something of a dry read, but thus far seems to do a bang-up job of emulating George R. R. Martin's brutal, intrigue-ridden fantasy series. I am especially impressed with the game's focus on players sharing and running their own noble house. Shame about the errata, of which there are many.

Career Compendium for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, 2nd Edition. I've only given this a quick glance-through, but it's definitely nice to have all the careers from all the books (plus a few new ones) together in one place. I do like the added notes on the different careers' places in the Old World. So far FFG seems to be doing a solid job with WFRP2.

Talisman Revised 4th Edition and The Reaper Expansion, also from FFG. I played a lot of the previous edition of Talisman, and was lucky enough to give the new version a try this past weekend. I'm happy to report it's easily as good as the old game, with some interesting tweaks, and is physically a much sturdier, more polished product than it was in the past. I intend to pick up the next expansion, The Dungeon. (Anybody want to buy my 3rd edition stuff?)

The Elven Crystals. This is another very good revision of old adventure material for Dragon Warriors, with clearer maps than Magnum Opus' previous adventure book, Sleeping Gods. The original adventure felt wackier and more high-magic than what the rules implied, but Adrian Bott did a great job of making it all feel a bit more logical and grounded.

I also have a ton of stuff on its way in the mail, all gotten on the cheap:

Arcane Power. I'm playing a wizard in D&D 4e and am looking foward to revamping him - I'm already leaning towards getting a tome implement and a familiar. (Do you care? No.)

AD&D 1st Edition Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide. I have owned the former in the past and wasn't that taken with it, but it came in a bundle with the latter, which I'm told I must own, so let's see what it's like.

D&D Basic Rulebook and Expert Rulebook. These are the Moldvay/Cook versions; another case of "let's see what the big deal is".

Lords of Creation. Another Moldvay-penned RPG. I've owned this one before, but sold it when I was hard up for cash. I'm looking foward to reacquainting myself with it, especially since I could hardly figure out what the heck it was about the first time I owned the boxed set.

Fantasy Wargaming: The Highest Level of All, an early-80s British fantasy RPG notorious for giving stats for Jehovah, Satan, Jesus, etc. It seems this was available from a book-of-the-month club at some point, which means used bookstores are overflowing with cheap copies. Still, it apparently does contain reference information about the medieval world and lots of folkloric monsters, and has been cited by more than a few as a useful resource for Dragon Warriors.

Good thing I just made some room on the bookshelves.

A Revolutionary New Approach

2009-04-17T11:56:00.005-04:00

I don't really buy modules for D&D anymore, but this kind of paradigm shift in product diversification bodes well for the future of the hobby. Kudos to Goodman Games!

It's oddly heartwarming to see the skank-riffic art of Clyde Caldwell make its triumphant return to D&D.

Seriously, though, I appreciate Joseph Goodman's willingness to poke fun at his own products, and I like the attitude of Goodman Games a lot. Their Dungeon Denizens book for 4e has been getting a lot of use in our campaign, and I'm looking forward to flipping through their new print magazine, Level Up.

The Siren Call Of "Old School"

2009-04-16T11:00:00.010-04:00

I'm still thinking about running a campaign.

Currently, I'm leaning towards trying my hand at something "old school", in the fantasy genre, simple to prep and easy to run. This approach seems to be in vogue right now, so I do feel like I'm hopping on the bandwagon a bit, but I'm not going to let that stop me from exploring something in which I'm genuinely interested. I own a few games that potentially fit the bill:

Dungeons & Dragons (Rules Cyclopedia version). I like the RC a lot, and obviously have been spending a good deal of time thinking about D&D lately. This particular version of D&D has plenty of compatible supplemental material. It's a familiar system that would be relatively easy to tweak. The problem with that idea is that players have certain expectations of what they're going to be getting when they play D&D, and I think my tweaks and play style might not be in line with those expectations. Also, I have a feeling most people wouldn't get why I picked "basic" D&D over AD&D, v3.5, or 4e.

Tunnels & Trolls (5.5 edition). I'm currently playing a character in Scott's play-by-post T&T game and having a good time with it. It's a neat game, but a little too cutesy for my default approach to fantasy, at least as written. I guess you could say it falls a little too far on the Otus side of the Erol Otus-Dave Trampier continuum for me. There's lots of support for T&T, though I'm not a huge fan of how it handles combat - I prefer a bit more granularity than just saying "add up the dice on each side, roll, and see who wins."

Dragon Warriors (Magnum Opus Press version). In case I hadn't already made it clear, I love this freakin' game. The rulebook is simple yet comprehensive like the Rules Cyclopedia, the setting is right up my alley, the published adventures are pretty cool, and there is a modest (but growing) amount of fan support available online. I've been wanting to run this game for years, but nobody I've shown it off to has seemed particularly interested, so I'm not sure how easy it would be to recruit players.

All right, so it seems like I've pretty much made up my mind to run Dragon Warriors. Now I just need to figure out the logistics of when/where/how/with whom I'll be running it.

Freed Lands: Wheruls

2009-04-15T09:56:00.006-04:00

Wheruls are my wild and crazy barbarian horde race. You know, the ones whose approach is heralded by a huge dust cloud on the horizon and who leave devastation in their wake.

Their origins lie in the savannah of Hafe, to the south of the Freed Lands. Wheruls had been ravaging the Morven Ghannem region for centuries before the elves of Immovenst conquered it. The elves attempted to spare their new territory from further attacks only by providing the wheruls with quality arms and armor, and encouraging the wherul raiders to demonstrate their prowess with them further south. The wherul hordes happily took the elven weaponry, but never stopped testing the borders of Morbenhann, ensuring that the elves (and their subjects) never lowered their guard.

Wheruls respect displays of power, but never bow to it for long. That power will be tested time and again until a weakness is discovered and exploited, and the wherul is once again revealed as supreme. Wherul society places might as its highest virtue. Wheruls exalt in strength of arms and personality, and believe to risk life and limb is to live. A wherul horde will rob, sack, and pillage, true, but this is an only an expression of their near-pathological need for supremacy. However, they are not a conquering race. Once that horde feels that it has established that supremacy, it returns to the wherul homelands - the sunny plains to the south that are their unquestioned domain. There, they rest, rebuild their numbers, and prepare their next demonstration.

Wheruls have no religion per se. There is a perception that they worship spirits of nature, but this is a mistaken one. They may pause to admire a waterfall or a great canyon, or to respectfully observe a tiger bringing down its prey, but they are not animists in the true sense. They are just as likely to divert the river for their needs, or to kill the great cat for food. Wheruls have no concept of agriculture or domestication, but they take pride in capturing and training wild animals, especially predatory ones (many of which they bring along on their raids).

Wheruls are reptilian in appearance, but are warm-blooded, and bear live young. They begin life as quadrupedal creatures very similar in appearance to a monitor lizard, but upon reaching adolescence, changes begin rapidly as the young males engage in violent (but non-lethal) combat for the right to breed with the wherul females.

After mating, the winners begin a rapid transformation into a massive, semi-quadrupedal form covered in iridescent scales, with a heavy tail used for balance when using the forelimbs to manipulate objects. Males are physically powerful, capable of running at high speeds for great distances, but are considerably less mentally capable than the females, and serve as hunters, warriors, and (during long-distance travel) mounts for the smaller females.

The females, after bearing young, become fully bipedal, with roughly humanoid proportions. Unlike the males, their mental faculties are not dulled by the maturing process, and thus they take up the planning and leadership of their yearly raids.

The males that lose the breeding combats become neuters - dull brown, sterile humanoids similar in appearance to females. Wherul neuters develop highly sophisticated vocal chords capable of reproducing sounds outside of the human range of hearing, which may be amplified to very high volume by their inflatable throat sacs. The wherul battle language makes use of these far-travelling frequencies, enabling them to secretly give complex orders across great distances.

The wherul mouth is designed only for biting prey and eating flesh, and thus, wheruls lack the ability to speak words in the fashion of other races. The lizard-like face of a wherul displays no emotion, and their language consists of strange barks, chirps, and hisses. When dealing with other races, wheruls rely instead on their neuters' talent for mimicry to communicate in a strange, broken syntax of words and phrases, perfectly copied from the speech of others that they have heard. The sight of a neuter wherul "speaking" in this fashion, switching voices in the middle of a sentence without moving the lips, can be unsettling.

(Much of this will be familiar to those who followed my old Freed Lands journal, but there's a good deal that has changed. It's my hope that the style of this entry gives you a better idea of the way I'm approaching races in this setting: I'm going for a sense of realism and originality without turning into a biology text or going completely off the wall. We'll see if I can do the same for some of the more typical fantasy races.)

Shadow Of The Screen

2009-04-14T11:36:00.004-04:00

I've got a problem. I haven't run anything in almost a year, and I miss it.

When D&D 4th edition came out last year, I was excited as hell, and appointed myself the DM for the first module, Keep on the Shadowfell. I think I did a mediocre job running it, but everybody seemed to have a good time learning the new rules. I liked the game, yet felt like I wasn't really challenging the players - though a lot of that was probably just part of dealing with a fairly bland module and a new ruleset.

At any rate, I decided I'd probably have more fun as a player than as a DM, and handed off the reins to a more interested member of the group. (Since then, the guy who took over has handed it over to yet another member of the group. Both of them did a great job.) I am still having a lot of fun playing D&D, but the urge to run a game has only gotten stronger as time goes on.

My problem is that almost every time I start running something, I quickly get burnt out. I feel like I'm not doing my best at every session. Basically, I think I'm a pretty clumsy DM/GM/Referee/what have you, even though I've been gaming since I was but a wee tyke. But I love RPGs and want to get better at running them and writing for them... and I can't do that if I'm just playing them.

(Another problem is that I feel like I'm unprepared if I'm not using some sort of published adventure, yet I am almost always dissatisfied with my game when I do - even if I really liked the module when I read it. Obviously, that's something I need to figure out for myself.)

My current gaming group is cool as hell. I have absolutely no desire to scrap my participation in our exciting 4th edition D&D campaign in favor of my trying my hand at running something and very possibly having it not work out. Gaming twice a week with the same group is unlikely at best, especially given my shaky GMing track record, and I don't want to suggest alternating games week to week. So what I'm left with is starting a second group playing a game of my choice, with as many of the same people as are interested and able, and finding someplace to do it.

I guess this is where I figure out what to run, make a cheesy flyer, and post it at the local comic shop?

You Will Come Out No More

2009-04-13T08:47:00.004-04:00

Maybe this isn't a revelation to everybody, but it just hit me the other day: Big Trouble In Little China is an old-school dungeon crawl.

You've got a couple of fighting types, a magic-user, and a bunch of nameless cannon fodder making repeated trips into a bizarre subterranean complex with the eventual goal of saving the girl(s) and slaying an evil wizard. Don't even get me started on the beholder-thingy, the "black blood of the earth", and the big centipede-creature that pops out and instantly wastes a bunch of the henchmen. I could go on and on - it's all there.

Even the attitudes of the characters, especially Jack Burton, are pretty gamer-ish:

"Hollow? Fuck it."

(I still have an overwhelming desire to play an Egg Shen-style adventuring alchemist.)

I doubt there are many people following this blog who haven't already seen the movie, but if you haven't, you owe it to yourself to check it out. And if you have seen it, try giving it another viewing through the lens of the dungeon crawl.

Keith Parkinson Was Awesome

2009-04-10T12:13:00.002-04:00

Exhibit 1.

Exhibit 2.

Exhibit 3.

Your honor, ladies and gentlemen of the jury: I rest my case.

Another Master

2009-04-10T09:55:00.004-04:00

Over the past year or so, too many of the RPG hobby's greats have passed away. The likes of Gary Gygax, Bob Bledsaw, Erick Wujcik, and N. Robin Crossby are now joined by Dave Arneson.

Others have written eloquently about Arneson and his massive contributions to fantasy gaming, and I honestly have nothing to add other than to say that I regret that those contributions were not better recognized during his lifetime.

Non-Humans In The Freed Lands

2009-04-07T09:01:00.005-04:00

One of the things I like about Chaosium's games is that they're human-centric, but that the way monsters are written up makes it easy to use them as player characters. It's a strength of the BRP system, and it reminds me a lot of the one which, for better or worse, I still know best: the Palladium system. 10 years at least since I played a Palladium game, and I can still eyeball the stats and instantly tell what's hideously overpowered and what's even more hideously overpowered.

Anyway, before I go off an a tangent about Palladium games, the point I'm trying to make is that BRP's default treatment of non-human player characters dovetails nicely with what I intend to do in my Freed Lands campaign: start with human characters only, but keep open the option of introducing non-humans as the campaign progresses. My plan is for the initial setup to involve a group of human outlanders, probably all Brinthine, entering and exploring the newly accessible region of Morbenhann for the first time.

Part of my intent with Freed Lands is to avoid making it "D&D in another system", so I try to make setting elements at least somewhat plausible. More accurately, I don't want at any point to say "a wizard did it" to explain anything unusual present in the setting. Still, I can't shake my Palladium-bred love of having lots of intelligent species running around in a fantasy campaign. The compromise I came up with was to indulge my own tendencies towards quasi-scientific speculation, so I try to come up with ecologically and evolutionarily plausible explanations for things.

For example, instead of having your usual orcs created by an evil god rampaging across the landscape because they were born that way, I've got wheruls, a sapient, reptilian race descended from tree monitors that were forced onto the ground when a climate shift changed their habitat from forests to savannahs. Seeing over the tall grasses that subsquently covered the plains meant that they began to stand upright, freeing their front legs for other uses, and eventually you've got an exploding population of lizard men who need more food. My goal is to create similar backgrounds for the other "races" of the Freed Lands setting - dwarves, ogres, and hulderfolk. (Elves don't count, because they're magic. Yes, I realize that contradicts the whole point of this entry.)

Ultimately, I realize that this approach doesn't produce results that are especially realistic, from a scientific point of view, but I find it a satisfyingly different angle from which to attack a "classic fantasy" setup. Since worldbuilding is something personal, that's enough for me.

The Lay Of The Freed Lands

2009-04-02T14:40:00.010-04:00

Thanks to the old and clunky Arr-Kelaan Hexmapper program, I have a (very) rough map of the region I plan on covering in my Freed Lands campaign.

Obviously, this is vastly simplified. The pass through the Black Peaks is not that big. Also, the terrain types displayed here don't really correspond to those I envision for the various realms. Hexmapper doesn't offer a huge variety of terrain hexes - here, they're chosen mostly to differentiate them visually.

Morbenhann is the "Freed Lands" region for which the setting is named, and the focus of the vast majority of what I have planned. As discussed in my earlier post, it's inaccessible from the rest of the continent of Bridion because of the massive Black Peaks mountain range to its south and east. There are a scant few eastern mountain passes, all clustered into one small area, and all under the strict control of various temperamental dwarven clans. Passage is technically possible to the south of Genthi, but that way lie the plains of Hafe, homeland of the savage, reptilian wheruls. Once a frontier province of Ghannem, Morbenhann was conquered by the elves of Immovenst several centuries ago, which has had major and lasting effects on the language, culture, and customs of its human population. It is predominantly a heavily forested region with a cool, temperate climate, though the southern reaches bordering Hafe are somewhat hotter and drier. The people of Morbenhann are known as the Hannese, and are left in confusion and turmoil now that their elven masters have inexplicably fled back to Immovenst in what is known as the Retreat, or the Ebbing of the Tide.

Ghannem is a large, landlocked empire beyond the Black Peaks. It is one of the oldest human civilizations in Bridion, and it reached its apex long ago. Ghannem has been in decline for centuries now, yet its Empress still marshals the largest and most powerful armies on the continent. Recent slave uprisings, peasant rebellions, radical schisms within their once-monolithic church, and border raids from her Genthaine rivals have thus far prevented her from retaking Morbenhann. Ghannemites often seem rigid, stodgy and out-of-touch to foreigners.

Genthi is not a nation proper, but a collection of squabbling city-states to the southeast of Morbenhann. Most have ancient rivalries against the others, but all still identify themselves as Genthaine, and there are certain unifying cultural characteristics between all of them. The Genthaine cosmology includes a bewildering array of spirits, with new ones seemingly being invented by the day. Most citizens can't be bothered to keep track of all the rites and sacrifices required by each of these small gods, so people of all cities pay their respects to the wandering recondite ascetics that do it for them. Notable city-states include Chrand, the so-called City of Companies (home to the best-trained mercenaries in Genthaine); Saughor, the City of Colleges (a place famed for its libraries, learned men, and lechery); and Reyaeri, the Kingdom City, which controls an unusually large portion of Genthi and whose ruling family has been struggling for generations to unite the region.

(Apologies to those who read a lot of this information on the old Livejournal setup.)

My Homebrew (Let Me Show You It)

2009-04-01T18:37:00.007-04:00

Like a lot of RPG enthusiasts, I have a homebrew setting I've been working on for quite a while. Like many of those settings, it's "not done yet", which often feels like a euphemism for "never going to be finished". I call it Freed Lands, and I'm currently planning on using the BRP ruleset - if I ever get around to running it. I occasionally feel the urge to write about my setting, but not enough to devote an entire blog to it. (I tried that in the past, and didn't get far.) However, Max's recent post asking about people's personal settings got me thinking about it again, and so, here's a quick primer.

The realm that would become known as the Freed Lands lies to the west of the homelands of humanity, beyond the Black Peaks, a mountain range that is practically impassable. The first humans to settle there came from Ghannem, a nation young by the standards of the dwarves that controlled the mountain passes. Ghannem was rich in coin but overpopulated, so, they paid the dwarves for right of passage and settled in the lands beyond the mountains, which they named Morven Ghannem, or "Western Ghannem".

Humanity's development and refinement of agriculture - and their subsequent rise to supremacy - soon began to disturb the natural balance of the newly settled region. Eventually, it caused a schism in elven culture. Many elves argued that if they did not take up the new ways, they would be destroyed. Traditionalists scorned the subjugation of nature as an abomination and drove these elves to the islands of Immovenst, but were themselves soon forced into hiding by rampant human expansion, along with numerous other indigenous races. The dwarf clans sealed their mountain passes against humankind, and as decades passed, the men of Ghannem learned to forget about their western brethren beyond the Black Peaks, and instead turned to squabbling with their human neighbors - the newly ascendant Genthaine people - and each other.

Centuries later, the elves of Immovenst returned, armed and armored with steel and riding massive elk bred for war. After a brutal struggle, they conquered Morven Ghannem, and ruled for hundreds of years, reshaping it into the elf-ruled territory of Morbenhann. Eventually, a force they were unable or unwilling to identify to their subjects attacked their homelands and forced them into the Retreat. The vast majority of the elves returned to Immovenst, leaving the conquered to fend for themselves.

Now, Morbenhann has fallen into chaos - bandits and mercenaries alike declare themselves princes and prey on the weak, cults driven underground centuries ago practice their rites in the open, unknown horrors prey on travelers, and old races forced into hiding emerge once more. Ancient spirits are angered, plague sweeps across the settlements of men, elves, and even dwarves, and rumor says the once-impregnable pass is unguarded. Now, the rulers of Ghannem - and their Genthaine rivals to the south - turn their gaze to these newly Freed Lands, hoping to add them to their own.

I hope that sounds at least potentially interesting, because I intend to revisit it here on Dungeonskull Mountain.

Who?

2009-03-30T11:00:00.008-04:00

I don't know why, but it really seems like nobody can get the owlbear right. It's a simple concept, really, but practically all of the official artwork makes it look more like an eaglebear. Look at this guy to the right, for example.

I mean, what's the first thing you think of when you think of an owl? I don't know about you, but I think of big yellow eyes. Am I weird?

I've seen miniatures and fan drawings that get the idea, but TSR, and later Wizards of the Coast, didn't seem to be able to hire artists that did.

This is the kind of stuff I think about all day. Maybe I need help...

Children Of The d100

2009-03-27T10:52:00.003-04:00

Like a lot of kids in the early 90s, I was obsessed with Marvel Comics. Since I was already playing RPGs (Robotech and AD&D at the time), picking up TSR's Marvel Super Heroes game was a no-brainer. These days I prefer the SAGA system-based version of the game that came out in the late 90s, but the original had many charms, and we played the hell out of it. In fact, it's probably my second most-played RPG, just behind that other mighty monolith of adolescent power-fantasy games, RIFTS.

One of the wackier things about MSH was its character creation system. You rolled stats randomly, which was normal for the time, but you also rolled your "hero type" (alien, mutant, robot, etc.) and even your powers randomly. If I remember correctly, the rulebook did say that you could pick them out with the Judge's permission, but all the example characters were random-rolled. It was kind of fun, but also kind of stupid. I mean, one of the sample pregens was LEOPARD, a guy in an Iron Man-style battlesuit that turned into a cat. (The battlesuit/animal transformation combo seemed disturbingly easy to roll up - I once randomly generated a power armor guy who could transform into a bear and control fire. Obviously, I named him "Smokey".)

Some of the characters my friends and I created and ran for a mutant-focused campaign included:

Flamestrike, a flying guy made of fire. With claws.
Flux, a telekinetic who could control time.
Unleash, a guy who could steal or nullify powers. He could also shoot force bolts. Oh, and he was slightly resistant to electricity.
Chrome, a guy who could transform into a liquid metal jaguar that shot razor-sharp chunks of itself at people.

Okay, so Flux wasn't too bad.

One of the supplements for MSH, the Ultimate Powers Book, featured even more vast and bizarre random character generation tables. My group lusted after that thing. I have a PDF of it now, but in those pre-internet days, we were never able to track it down. Based on the ridiculous stuff we made with just the old boxed set, I think that may have been a good thing.

Impending Doom

2009-03-26T11:12:00.007-04:00

Larry MacDougall (a.k.a. "Doog") was one of my favorite fantasy RPG artists back in the 90s. These days his art is a bit more fairy-tale than the grimy sword & sorcery stuff he did for Earthdawn and Palladium, but he still does some great work. (Incidentally, I think his current style would be a great fit for Dragon Warriors.)

I especially like "No Quarter", seen here. It's rather whimsical, but there's still a sense of tension and menace. After well over a year of playing big, cinematic action games, this painting - along with that AD&D Coloring Album - has got me longing for something with a higher risk factor for the characters. I think I miss really worrying about my character getting killed.

(I also love the guy in the middle with the axe, well behind the shieldbearers and spearmen.)

Prismacolor D&D

2009-03-25T09:26:00.005-04:00

I recently re-acquired a copy of The Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album, something one of my older siblings owned when I was but a wee tyke. I bought it mostly for nostalgia purposes (well, that and the fact that the artwork is pretty great), but it's actually ended up being a worthwhile purchase for other reasons.

The Coloring Album (I guess "coloring book" sounded too kiddy) contains more than well-rendered images to fill in. There's a prose story written by Gary Gygax, linking all the pictures together, and while it's not great literature by any stretch of the imagination, it does grant some insight into Gygax's vision of the AD&D game, circa 1979.

Some of the elements of the book that I found interesting:

The party of adventurers that heads into "the ruined castle keep" is big. At least a dozen people, probably more like twenty, including a magic-user, a cleric, a ton of dwarves, and more than one halfling thief. This is way beyond even the hireling-heavy, exploration-based adventures I've played in my (very limited) "old school" D&D experience.
The motivation for their sortie into the keep is greed, plain and simple. There is no mention of stopping an evil overlord, rescuing a princess, or anything noble like that. They're just looking to get real paid. (In the end, it turns out that they've been manipulated by a ki-rin into removing a big nasty from the world, but that's beside the point.)
The adventurers get their asses kicked a lot. Before they even get to the dungeon, a couple of people get killed by a bulette, and that's just for starters. There's a lot of screaming and dying in this coloring book, and it seems like the poor dwarves - like Ergwhi, pictured above - get the worst of it. Gary might have never used miniatures, but he sure hated miniature people.
The party runs away a lot, or uses spells and magic items to avoid combat entirely. In fact, they don't really win a single encounter, if by "win" you mean "kill all the bad guys and take their stuff."
Practically everybody has an awesome beard and/or mustache, elves and halflings excluded. Also, halflings don't look like hobbits here - they're skinny little guys with pointy noses, pointy ears, and pointy shoes.
A female ranger is apparently called a "rangeress".

Oddly enough, I think the Coloring Album might be the best encapsulation of an "old school" D&D adventure ever made. It certainly gives a more accurate glimpse of the game than any of TSR's novels ever did.