Experience with Python

 

Well, it amused me to make it. (Inspired by my Facebook ads.)

But it did get me thinking about how Conan the Barbarian set the bar so high for 1980s fantasy movies, a bar that few others even approached. There are some films that I'm happy to recommend, such as Krull. There are others that are poor but have some charm, and those - such as Beastmaster - I would watch as a guilty pleasure but probably wouldn't suggest to a friend. And some, like Deathstalker, are just... terrible, not just in terms of production values.

That said, having really quite enjoyed Psycho Goreman I *am* looking forward to the new Deathstalker.

Playing in a World

As I return to blogging, I should pay more attention to what other people are writing. At one time, RPG blogs were the home of both great creativity and serious thinking about roleplaying games. Perhaps they still are. So, I thought I'd start regularly reading those on my 'blogroll' who are still active after all this time. This post is therefore little more than a link:

"Where I depart from those frameworks is in how I classify tabletop roleplaying. I don't view tabletop roleplaying as a game. It is a means for people to pretend to be characters having adventures in other places and times. The "game" elements tabletop roleplaying uses are not the end in themselves, but a crucial aid; they make the experience more engaging than Let's Pretend, and more accessible and entertaining for the average person to enjoy within the time they have for a hobby."

I think that this, from Rob Conley of Bat in the Attic - worth reading in general - captures something of how I *want* to approach roleplaying games and their unique capacities (yes, unique - the freedom and creativity possible in a roleplaying game cannot be replicated via computer games or boardgames). I want players to *experience* another world, and indeed I - as GM or referee - want to explore it with them. 

Pulp Title Trope?

From where does the graduated red-orange-yellow "pulp adventure" text trope originate? Is it as recent as Indiana Jones? Recent being relatively speaking - Raiders of the Lost Ark might have been released more than 40 years ago but it was itself an homage to the pulps and serials of 40 odd years earlier. Or is there an 'original' that the title presentation of Indiana Jones itself was aping? 

Extruded Fantasy Fiction

I expect others have pointed out that Dungeons & Dragons has gone from explicitly drawing on external references - from history, legend, and classic fantasy fiction - to self-reference, with decades of setting material to draw upon, including novels. Whether this is a good thing depends on whether you want your RPG to be a game for playing *fantasy adventures*, or whether you want it to be a method of playing *Dungeons & Dragons*. Of course, even the earliest, loosest editions had assumptions baked into the system, but these assumptions have accumulated to the point that "Dungeons & Dragons" is a thing of its own. Of course, as THE THING, as the incredible mass that bends the very space-time of roleplaying, there are many other 'things' that exist in close orbit.

But all that is neither here nor there, because what I wanted to talk about are a few of the novels that are published to support roleplaying games.  

For a long time the only Dungeons & Dragons novel that I had read was the Dragonlance book Test of the Twins. I would have read this in my relatively early teens, and I remember thinking that it wasn't too bad. While I'm sure my tastes have grown more discerning, I don't need all my fantasy to be - or aspire to be - *literature*, though I do increasingly ask myself why I am reading that novel when all those classics sit unread on my shelf (or on my wishlists), but I'll still choose some fun 'genre' fiction; not all reading is for self-improvement. So yes, sometimes I do simply want to read something that more or less conforms to the staples of fantasy as codified in the games that I have played.

A few years ago I did try The Legend of Huma, another Dragonlance novel, as was recommended to me on some forum or another. I didn't take to it and left it unfinished, but I didn't think it actually bad. But several months ago I spotted on a charity book stand a book the content of which I had wondered about - imagined even - for over thirty years; RA Salvatore's The Crystal Shard.

Of course I dropped a quid in the collection and picked up it. What a find! The book advertised endlessly in Dragon Magazine, and in the American comics that I bought. The book that introduced Drizzt Do'Urden to fantasy fiction, creating a cool, not-evil Dark Elf archetype that would find its way back from Salvatore's novels to being referenced in Dungeons & Dragons core rulebooks. Where once you were invited to understand character classes in terms of, say, Beowulf, the new touchstones recommended to readers are the likes of Drizzt.   

I had high hopes, expecting extruded fantasy fiction of the superior kind. Surely so, given the lasting influence of-

No!

No, I am afraid that The Crystal Shard is not a good book, not a good book at all. I have got lots of by now long forgotten fantasy novels from the 1980s and 1990s that are not particularly original, that could easily be "Dungeons & Dragons" fiction with a few edits, and The Crystal Shard is bad even by those standards. It is juvenile, and by that I don't mean written for kids - as no doubt it was, despite the very rapey evil wizard - but in its construction; if you showed me an extract and told me is was by a bright GCSE pupil I would believe you.

But I haven't learned my lesson, as here is what I found on the charity book stand last week. 

By all accounts it is a bad novel even according to the judgement of those who read Dungeons & Dragons novels. I'll probably not get round to reading it - I am currently reading The Complete Lyonesse, close to finishing Suldrun's Garden - so if anyone wants Master Wolf, or The Crystal Shard, let me know.    

It seems an obvious point to make; that the best novels to read (to *consume*? ugh!) to steep your imagination in fantastical images, situations, characters, locations, plots, etc. to help you run a Dungeons & Dragons game are more often than *not* Dungeons & Dragons novels. Now, the same is true of Warhammer, even though Warhammer (Fantasy and 40k) has employed experienced authors and has published some books that can stand apart from their association with the games (and 'IP', again ugh!), but as time has gone on and Warhammer has, like Dungeons & Dragons, come to draw more on its own extruded fiction than its original influences, from Moorcock to Herbert to 2000AD. For the worse, I'd say.

I'll get around to highlighting some of my favourite Warhammer fantasy novels that are not Warhammer fantasy novels soon. 

Product of Your Imagination

I was reminded, when digging out the D&D Expert rulebook, that TSR had possibly the best slogan of any RPG company.

Products of YOUR Imagination. It follows on from something Gygax (presumably) wrote in OD&D: "why have us do any more of your imagining for you?" Well, as Gygax would learn, for one thing if the people who buy your rules have sufficient imaginative powers (and energy, and time), you only need to sell them one book. Ever. 

(There was a few threads on various fora about 'dead' RPGs - but a game is not dead that which can eternal be played.)

The Adventure Starts Here

As the chaos of the summer draws to a close and we come closer to the structured time of the school year (not only am I an academic, but I am married to a teacher and we two teenagers!) and rugby season (still going even as I dash towards fifty), I started thinking about planning for an autumn game for the family, and in doing so thinking about the bits and pieces of my own gaming history that revealed the promises and possibilities of roleplaying games. And this image here is pretty central.

So, sure, I had explored the Forest of Doom, the Island of the Lizard King, and had trekked across Sommerlund, but when it came down to sitting at a table and adventuring the vast majority of my time had been spent in funhouses full of straight lines; a universe in two dimensions, constrained by graph paper. We did not own any adventures, so that was how we played the Basic set. But then we got the Expert set - was Expert better than Advanced? I wondered at the time. 

And there was an adventure and it was classic. As with mapping the The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, I would hazard that exploring the wilderness of the Isle of Dread is an almost universal experience for gamers around my age. Pirates! Dinosaurs! Zombies! Kopru? Phanatons? Perhaps if we had had access to a Basic level such as The Lost City we would have already advanced our game to something that involved more than kicking in a door and killing everything inside, an analogue version of the arcade classic Gauntlet. But we did not, so the Expert Set was a revelation and totally transformed how we played D&D.

And a MAP! Every young fantasy reader's favourite part of a novel was the map, which promised the reader a bigger world that whatever sub-Tolkien quest they would read over the next 300 pages. You could look at the map and imagine what better stories were going on in those curiously named places. Well, now you could imagine them together!

And that is the sort of feeling I want to relive, and recreate for my players.

(Seriously, I got quite a thrill digging these out of my BECMI box in the cupboard. Kinda makes me regret that I have discovered better games...)

The Court is in Session

Have you ever run a trial in an RPG? Have your PCs ever stood before a magistrate, a judge, or a jury?

Despite how often PCs commit crimes, end up on the run, even imprisoned, I cannot say that I ever have. Nevertheless, these tables from the original version of Blacksand! for Advanced Fighting Fantasy had an outsized influence over what I understood to be the scope of a fantasy adventure game.

Viscera!

The particular proximate 'prod' that prompted me to resurrect this blog was - having temporarily stepped away from Twitter and reactivated my account at RPGnet for a less unhealthy social media experience - being asked by Andrew Wright (who blogs at Fantasy Game Book and has written several supplements for Advanced Fighting Fantasy) whether there was a working link to Viscera!, a little booklet of critical hits and other stuff that I wrote for Fighting Fantasy-based games nearly a decade ago. Ooof. 

And so, while you can access it (now) by clicking on the little link on the left hand side of blog, here it is again; just click on the image above. It *should* work. 

Andrew Wright has covered Viscera! in his thread "Exploring combat and other rule systems in Troika! and its relatives". In fact, if you want to keep track of when people are saying something interesting about Fighting Fantasy-based systems on RPGnet, do follow Andrew (greyarea13).

While I would likely revisit some of the stuff in Viscera! were I to produce a new version, or a "MyAFF3e", the thing I like about what I did produce is that there really is very little there, in terms of "crunch" at least. YOU are the Hero, and YOU can make this game, on the fly, at your table. If I were to produce a "MyAFF3e", that would be the principle by which I would try to check any instincts I might have towards the baroque.

My Monster Manual

Not quite, but here is a rare occasion where my professional life has *some* connection with fantastical, gameable content.

Later this year - just in time for your Christmas lists, hopefully - Routledge will publish a book I have written with Jamie Lewis on the sociology of Bigfooting.

To be fair, Jamie did most of the actual research, which involved well over a hundred interviews with Bigfooters - current, former, and even disillusioned - as well as a other people in the orbit of knowledge making re: Bigfoot - sceptics, academics, etc. What we have tried to do is reconstruct the rationality of Bigfooting as a knowledge making community, to treat it fairly and seriously, as Bigfooters themselves take the subject seriously.  

We published a precursor paper in Cultural Sociology last year, which is Open Access so anyone should be able to read it, should they wish.

The Magic of Familiarity

So what have I been playing over the past five years? Not a lot, at least not as regularly as I would have hoped or liked. I most recently ran OpenQuest 3e, an elegant distillation of d100 fantasy. I've run a few one-shots (even if it has taken us several short sessions) of Barbarians of Lemuria/Everywhen, one of my favourite systems. And in that time I did, of course, run a fair bit of Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2e, a system to which I will inevitably keep bouncing back, despite my desire to 'fix' it - or perhaps because of that.

I will have more to say about each of those games in time, but the one thing this sporadic gaming had unfortunately reinforced has been the advantage of familiarity. Oh, yes, I am like all of you; I am constantly distracted and tempted by the new shiny thing, or even some quite old shiny things - I have recently been rereading/skimming through a lot of Fate rulebooks, keen to internalise the game logic that promises that player characters, in all their complications and diverse sources of narrative agency, power the rhythm of the game. We will see if I get there.

But this familiarity is why Advanced Fighting Fantasy really rolls at *my* table in ways that even OpenQuest and Barbarians of Lemuria do not. I can knock up an adventure more or less on the fly, or at least with half an hour of preparation. I can, roughly, anticipate how long each encounter or node will take to resolve mechanically, how likely is failure, how heavy might be the costs of success, and how much fun it will be to play out. At least at *my* table. 

So just default to published adventures, yes? Let the familiarity of another GM guide your path. But published adventures - even very good ones - are dotted with places and events where the GM using the adventure has to divine the intention of the writer, else risk a cascade of GM interpretations, undoing the advantage of relying on the crystallised familiarity[1] of the writer. Roleplaying games are a *lively* experience, and the adventure writer is 'dead'. One of the first things I do with a published adventure that I plan to run is print a copy and, with my red fineliner, go through the text (after changing the names to ones that I can pronounce) marking sections where I need to think carefully - and produce possible answers - about the ways in which the choices of the players might unravel what the writer assumed might happen next.  

I am not just talking about situations in which the PCs murder an important NPC, or set fire to an important (and flammable) adventure location. The great wonder of roleplaying games is that they are open and unconstrained; players can always do something to surprise you (murder and arson are rarely that surprising). But when it is *my* adventure, I do not need worry about how to roleplay Lord Blackstone's reaction to the PCs' diplomacy, their theological arguments, their threats, or whatever. Of course I know what Lord Blackstone is going to do, how he is going to react, because he is me! I invented him, perhaps months ago, perhaps five minutes ago. And my familiarity with the world and the system *as a way of producing an adventure game* means that even if I somehow get Lord Blackstone 'wrong' I can, as GM, unfold the world in a way that stands a chance of being satisfying to the people at the table. 

Apologies for the ramble, going over what it pretty old ground. Stuff about actual games soon, including some more stuff for AFF2e.

[1] I am using 'familiarity' here to mean something different to the way I would use 'system mastery'. It is not so much that a GM can resolve situations at the table with minimal rules reference, but that a GM has a intuitive feel for the logics and rhythms of the game - encounter, session, adventure, campaign, etc. - and player and GM *experience*. I think that you can have system mastery with a low level of familiarity, and given how often I check the rules for magic and priestly powers in Advanced Fighting Fantasy, I think you can have a high level of familiarity with imperfect system mastery. I possibly need a better term than 'familiarity', but I am wary of inventing new terms in my professional, academic writing, so I will not do so here.

Five years, my brain hurts a lot

"I cast 'Resurrection'."

<Rolls 'System Shock'.>

<Succeeds.>

Blood Sundown Review

I've actually been running games recently! Bully for me. I decided that I'd start reviewing the products I actually use - this was my first review on DrivethruRPG.

I've been running the sample adventure in Blood Sundown for the past few nights for players who are relatively new to RPGs and it has worked a treat. Everywhen's simple mechanics with little bookkeeping or arithmetic make it ideal for new or casual players, and the range of pregenerated characters included mean you can be up and running almost straight away. The sample adventure could probably be played in an evening if players most fast, but it'll have taken us three sessions of 2(ish) hours. The adventure itself is a good introduction to a 'Weird West' setting, and while everything needed is there on the page, there's no reason a GM couldn't put extra meat on the bones and turn the conflict between Dr Vitale and the townsfolk of Bliss into a longer campaign. The adventure does contain a section that implies some pretty basic information is hidden behind a dice roll, which is something that I try to avoid at all costs as a GM - player agency requires some information, even if it isn't complete or entirely correct - but that's an easy enough fix. You still need to reward characters who have, for example, the 'keen eyesight' boon or high Mind scores, but the reward cannot be the basic information required for action. That said, the adventure doesn't require the PCs to any particular thing for it to work, but that doesn't mean it is a railroad - Dr Vitale has his own plans and will put them into action if he can.

The rest of the book is a very good sourcebook for running a Western game using Everywhen. It doesn't have to be 'weird' - it'd be perfectly possible to run a 'historical' or 'Spaghetti' Western game using Everywhen and Blood Sundown, as long as it affords for competent protagonists (and even here, to add more grit to the game simply lean the balance of NPCs away from Rabble and towards Toughs and Rivals). The book includes a range of setting appropriate careers (as you'd expect from any Barbarians of Lemuria adaptation) some new equipment and setting appropriate rules (such as advice on how to handle a fast draw shootout), as well as a discussion of Faith and Magic appropriate to a 'Weird West' game, which would be well suited for 'weirding' other historical settings too. There's a fairly slim, but perfectly adequate bestiary of mundane animals and supernatural creatures.

I can recommend this both on its own terms, and an example of an Everywhen 'build'. I was a little underwhelmed by the examples in the core book, but that is par for the course when it comes to a system that aspires to be 'universal'. As an example build - and this, I expect, is true of all the recent Everywhen releases - Blood Sundown shows GMs what they can do fairly straightforwardly with the Everywhen engine.

As a final point; the layout is clean, the page decoration uses only greys and blacks, and the art is perfectly good black and white work and it all prints well. While I have stumped up for the PoD, before that was available I printed it 'booklet sized' on my home printer and found it worked well.

Troika! review/overview

As an avowed Advanced Fighting Fantasy fan, I've been a big fan of Daniel Sell's Troika!, even though I've STILL not got it to the table. It's a really terrific 2d6 fantasy game built on the Fighting Fantasy chassis but very much doing its own thing. There are tons of reviews out there, but I'd like to point YOU (if I was to trust the visitor data, the YOU these days is mainly adult webcammers) in the direction of a nice little review by Jakob Schmidt HERE.

A Sensational Atlas

I was thinking about the bullet point format that has been (was? I'm well out of the loop these days)  discussed in OSR circles for a while now - basically digesting the sort of information found in the much maligned 'boxed text' (which I think is incredibly useful for new/rusty/tired GMs, but that's another post) and text for the GM's down into a series of bullet points. Sometimes these are presented as nested bullet points, so that the GM can see at a glance how one piece of information leads to another. Perhaps the extra information is revealed with time, by player questions, or through character action. I think this is an excellent format. [I can't find the original posts that got me thinking about this, but I'll add links if anyone points me in their direction]

This is done at the level of a dungeon 'room' or 'encounter location'. But years ago, running a WFRP game, I reflected on the 'placelessness' of my GMing. By this I mean that each inn, each city, each forest, each river etc. were almost utterly interchangeable. Except for 'plot elements', so to speak. Now, I'd like to think that I'm doing myself down, but I don't think I'm missing the mark by too much. And you could say that the 'plot elements' are what is important and that too much 'colour commentary' will mislead the players and take their focus off the important stuff. Perhaps. Nevertheless...

Nevertheless I want the players to get a sense of place, and movement, of travel when we play. To remember a place as more than just "where we did x or y". I am reminded here of a post from Monsters and Manuals - which again, I cannot find - in which he talked about the descriptions of travel and the countryside in LotR. I don't think a GM should try to ape this, but a GM can produce a pale, but effective simulation of the effect. To do this at the table, when I begin my next game I am going to assemble a 'sensational atlas'. This will be incomplete and ever changing, but in essence it will consist of a deliberate effort to identify a stack of descriptive words and phrases that can be used *without a great deal of thought* to evoke a particular location. Nothing else to get in the way. Just an index card for each location with smells, sounds, sights, even tastes and more tactile sensations when appropriate. 

So a jungle might have:

Emerald shadow of the canopy

Smell of rotting leaf litter

Thorny vines catching on your tunic

Constant hum of insects

Sweat dripping into your eyes

Trunks as broad as a cottars hut holding up the green

Vivid reds and yellows of sickly smelling flowers

Hooting, echoing calls and replies from the heights of the trees.

Thick undergrowth pulling at your boots

Sprawling ridge-like roots

Swarms of tiny flies crawling into your nose

Sucking mud of a boggy hollow

Crumbling, fallen log crawling with fat squirming larvae

and more more more, but no fat, nothing that isn't descriptive or, by my own low standards, evocative. 

And so on, and so on. I'm no poet, but that doesn't matter at the table. A different card for each town, for each environment, and even, when possible, between different iterations of each environment. And these would build up during play, of course, as new descriptive details are added at the table.  I bet *you* already do this. But I need to formalise this process to ensure better GMing practice.But at the table, I could do with this kind of aide memoire, this kind of prompt sheet, to keep the game *in the world*.   

Uncaring Cosmos

I will soon - hopefully - be getting a B/X D&D (or at the players' end, Labyrinth Lord as the pdfs are free) game up and running, playing via voice chat on Discord. I'll admit to some nervousness, as while I've run games online for people I already knew, I'm only been a player in online games with people I know only through their online personas. As a face-to-face GM, I rely so much on watching the players - are they excited, are they paying attention, as they exchanging glances. But that's a post for another day.

This post is simply to direct your attention to the cool "British Old School" blog Uncaring Cosmos, which not only covers some of my favourite games, it also looks cool. Check it out.

Look, Robot: Stanislavski Vs Brecht In Tabletop Roleplaying

I was looking for Greg Costikyan's Bestial Acts, his sketch of a 'Brechtian' RPG, but instead came across this interesting essay by Grant Howitt, Stanislavski Vs Brecht In Tabletop Roleplaying. I especially like the fact that it begins, "This is going to get pretty wanky, here, so brace yourselves", before thinking seriously about what we are doing, and what we should be trying to do, when we play our PCs. This includes section titles such as "Play your PC like an NPC" and "Don’t compromise your character’s motivations, but do get them into trouble". I certainly don't agree with everything, and find the closing passage to be inimical to 'old school' style play. 

"Remember that time you had fought your way down to the bottom of the dungeon, and you were low on healing potions and all injured and you saw a dragon in front of you, laying on its hoard, eyes glinting through the thick darkness? And collectively, even though your characters and tired and beaten up and abused and could easily go home, hire an army, come back and kill this thing with minimum risk, you say – “Fuck it, let’s do this. Imagine the stories.”"

I mean, in my book, that's a TPK right there. And a deserved TPK, in which the players have made decisions aware of the risks (and potential rewards), rather than something sprung on the players and their PCs by a poor GM. Trusting a GM to fudge in order to make a good story is corrosive to the 'game'. There are, I presume, systems which would facilitate and reward these kind of decisions, but for me, the important point is that it is the contract of the game and its procedures that does this work. And, why can't trying to recruit an army willing to venture into the depths of a terrible dungeon be an adventure in itself?

Nevertheless, the essay is an interesting read for a Friday afternoon.     

Social Status in AFF

Okay, you've assigned points to SKILL, STAMINA, and LUCK (and MAGIC)[1]. You've assigned your Special Skill points and selected your Talent. If you are that way inclined you have selected your Spells or Miracles[2]. You've thought up a name, a description, and you've done the most boring bit of any character creation process - you've gone shopping. Your Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2e Hero has the expertise and equipment and is ready to Dungeoneer!

But wait. What's this? Social Status?

Heroes start with a Social Status of between 0-6 (chosen as per character concept), with 7 and 8 available to starting Heroes who take the appropriate Talents.

What's this for? Do the GOBLINS in the Forest of Doom care whether or not my Adventurer is a dirt farmer from Hick Town or the son of King Salamon himself? Well, actually, they just might. But yes, I'll concede, as far as the rules go, Social Status isn't of any great importance.  In fact, the only place I can find a mention of using it is on p51, in the Social Actions - Reactions[3] section, which reads:

"Social class should also be taken into account if the difference between the two parties is more than 3 or so. A beggar talking to a Lord may well get an unfavourable reaction, but a Lord talking to a beggar will be very different!"

So all a bit loose and freeform. And "3 or so" seems like a rather large gap to begin with; the difference in social rank between a 'senior priest' and a 'master craftsman' ought have some effect in most pseudo-Medieval settings, even if the difference in Social Status is only 2.

But it *could* be used by enterprising Directors to add an impression of depth to their campaigns. First, and most obviously, Social Status could be used as a modifier in social situations. So you're asking your Heroes to test their Leadership, their Etiquette, their Bargain, their Con[4] Special Skill? Surely all of these could be influenced by a PCs Social Status? I wouldn't recommend rolling against Social Status, unless you want failure to be the norm - and perhaps that's right, that leveraging your Social Status is something that can only be reliably done by people of the knightly classes and above. But as the rules suggest, the power of social rank to affect a situation is relative: a Sir Therfax can reliably browbeat a peasant, but a king can impress his will upon the Sir Therfax. It is also not simply one directional. Horgun the dockworker has a much better chance of making useful contacts in the Block & Tackle Inn than does Sir Therfax.

So the rules are right, difference in Social Status matters, and should be applied on a case-by-case basis to 'social' Special Skill tests. Sometimes the Heroes Social Status will be being measured against that of an NPC[5]. Sometimes the bar will be set by the setting - a Director can assign different 'Social Status' scores to different parts of a city (or even different parts of a Castle, a Palace, or a Temple). So a knightly hero (Social Status 7) might have +3 modifier when attempting to impress their will upon a the town clerk (Social Status 4). But such a character roleplayed as leaning on the little people might also might suffer a -4 modifier when attempting to make friends with a sergeant of the town watch. A few points on the dice can be a way to reinforce the colour of the setting. There is no reason why Social Status cannot be used to add more fun (yes, fun!) to the Hireling, Mass Combat, and Holdings rules in the Heroes Companion. It is up to the Players, through their choices, statements of intent, and description of their Heroes' actions[6] to determine quite how their Social Status would effect the game world, and for the Director to make a judgement. 


[1] I've written before (and I'm not the first to say so), that AFF, being such a simple, robust system, is well suited to the addition of extra 'stats', or the replacement of the existing stats (usually MAGIC, but I could imagine replacing LUCK too). Stellar Adventures does this, adding TECH for Robot characters (which interestingly replaces LUCK) and PSIONICS for Space Monks and other Psychics (replacing MAGIC). Other examples from the solo gamebooks would be FEAR (House of Hell), HONOUR (Sword of the Samurai), WILLPOWER (Beneath Nightmare Castle), EVIL (Dead of Night), though I'm pretty sure that there's others scattered through the books. Add whatever is thematically appropriate for your setting and campaign. CORRUPTION? Go ahead. SANITY? Sure, and get all 1920s pulp hero investigating what needs be done by renaming SKILL 'COMPETENCE' and STAMINA 'GRIT' too.

[2] Actually, the magical abilities granted through worship of the gods of Titan are described as 'powers' in a section entitled 'Priestly Abilities', but I like 'Miracles' so that's what they are in my game!

[3] AFF2e has no set mechanism for 'Reactions'. I use something very like the 2d6 Reaction Roll of Classic D&D, adjusted by whether the NPC/Monster disposition is Friendly, Neutral, Unfriendly, or Hostile - the categories given to us in Out of the Pit. I tacked it onto the end of my Viscera! supplement.

[4] And why are there no Persuade or Orate Special Skills? Want your Hero to have one - write it in! There is, please note, a Silvertongued Talent which adds a whopping +3 (on a 2d6 curve, that's a LOT) to these kind of social skill tests. 

[5] Note that I advise that Directors do not listen to the AFF2e rulebook here. Way back in 2015 I wrote:

"AFF is meant to be a simple game. The master merchant should have SKILL 4 STAMINA 5, which adequately represents him as a combatant, and on the same index card you scrawl 'PCs attempting to bargain with Marco Columbo suffer a -4 penalty to their effective SKILL'. Instead of opposed tests - which require NPCs to be statted out as if they were PCs - non-combat 'contests' are then conducted as unopposed tests based only on the PC's SKILL and Special Skills, plus or minus modifiers, with the capability of the NPC to frustrate the aims of the PC being expressed as a simple modifier. The NPCs are treated just like any other feature of the world of Titan that might affect the PC's chances of achieving their goals." 

[6] i.e. Roleplaying, but so many take that to mean more speaking in a funny voice than making choices on behalf of your character. You don't have to put on a posh voice to have your adventuring prince bully the town guard, you just need to say that that is what he intends to do and describe how he will do so. And then we might roll the dice.  

Speaking of Random Tables

The other day I mentioned the importance of random tables in generating a dynamic world in which the GM can feel like they are also playing the game. 

Well, popping up one my 'reading list' is Konsumterra of Elfmaids & Octopi with "d100 Horrible Dungeon Decor". And some of the entries really are fantastically horrible - in a good way (I guess) - that will really make your 'underworld' a little more than a narrow stone corridor that is handily the dimensions you've assigned to the squared paper that you are using.

This is not quite the sort of random table that produces a 'living world' - that's more the domain of tables designed to be used in play, at the table. But it (along with the vast quantities of other tables that Konsumterra produces) are a great way to kickstart your old, idea-free GM head.   

The GM is a player too...

There is always a steady trickle of people landing on this blog via my 'Pathetic Aesthetic' post. I sometimes check and see if someone new is misinterpreting it as a manifesto to be a 'dick GM', if someone new is reading the title (and the title alone) as if I hate 'Old School' games, if someone new can't spot the (what I thought was) obvious self-deprecation and exaggerated partiality, etc. Sometimes it takes me back to old discussions that I had forgotten, such as this one on the now defunct Porky's Expanse. In there, I noticed that I'd make a contribution to the comment section, which I think is worth repeating here:

"We often forget though that the GM is a player too..." I agree. And funnily enough I'd make a case that games that don't shy away from the PCs 'enjoying' pathetic fates are best for reminding us about this. NOT because these pathetic fates are the result of 'dick GMing' determining pathetic fates by GM fiat. But because, by making the fate of the PCs a result of the interaction between the mechanics, the setting, and player choice, the GM can enjoy the unfolding play without worrying about trying to rescue the PCs or put them back on track to the correct solution.

And as for 'awesome'. I've got nothing against the word. I want *some* things in my games to be awesome. And when the PCs come across these things, take part in them, or even are them, I want there to be some sense of awe."

I think that stuff like random tables, wandering 'monsters', rules for 'getting lost', reaction rolls, morale rules etc. all make the game dynamic for all the participants. In fact, I'd say that a key task for any GM engaging in world building is putting together the random tables - of encounters, events, NPCs, reactions etc. that will make the game a living thing in play. 

Fighting Fighting Fest 3

Fighting Fantasy Fest 3 is on Saturday the 31st August at the University of West London.

Unfortunately I can't go - I'll be at the Wales v Ireland Rugby World Cup warm up match in Cardiff that weekend. I'll not be playing, though I am Welsh qualified, having played for a club in Cardiff for a few years, so I best take my boots.

YOU should go to Fighting Fantasy Fest, though.