Kalten's Keep and Jenny Greenteeth

After the TPK in the Caves of Mykonos, and a time playing other games over the summer (including playing Tower of the Stargazer, which I hope to write about later, with a different group of players) we re-booted the D&Dish campaign with a pretty simple, straightforward adventure. Kalten fitzKalten, a fat, rich young man who claims to be the heir to the seemingly extinct Kalten family, hired the party to clear the old Kalten Keep of its occupiers. Kalten's Keep is Castle Caldwell, from B9, with a few of the rooms moved around and a rationale given for the range of occupiers; the band of GOBLINS had been running the place as a 'hotel' for travellers who have some reason to stay off the roads and away from towns such as Gateways. Gateways is 'my' Threshold - I've enjoyed offering the players the chance to send their characters shopping in Gateways.  The party of eight PCs (two per player - intended to mitigate against the chances of a TPK driven solely by a couple of poor rolls and to allow the players at least the hope of levelling - a key part of the D&D experience. Plus, have you seen how many PCs are expected by older modules?) took two sessions to clear the Keep. We don't play that long; the time between getting the kids in bed and tiredness overwhelming us isn't that long.

The first session, they took rooms in the 'hotel'; their Goblin hosts unsuccessfully trying to confiscate the party's weapons. After being shown to their rooms - which contained debris that once was a bed, at most, they began to investigate the Keep. Sensibly - and surprisingly, this was the same group of players who managed to get surrounded by Goblins for their last TPK - they didn't launch into any combat. The BANDITS told them to get lost, in less polite terms. The KOBOLDS yipped and yapped at them. Calisteri the CLERIC, dedicated to the Screaming Saint (a cult dedicated to the intolerance of all other Men-Kinds - she could only stomach staying in such a contaminated place as just to south of the Keep there was a centuries' old shrine to Humanity Undivided), invited the all Human party to take devotional prayers with her. Of course, sooner or later the party were going to run into their hosts, and, given that some of the PCs could barely walk they were carrying so many weapons, this was bound to lead to tension, and sure enough it boiled over into conflict. The party quickly cut down the GOBLINS, split, as they were, into two groups of four. Hearing (and in some cases seeing) this carnage, the rest of the intelligent inhabitants of the Keep barricaded their doors and made plans to leave - their accomodation had been invaded by a gang of murder-hobos!

All except Calisteri, who offered to help heal their wounds, as they were clearly here to do Holy work. As it was, the bandits, the Kobolds, and the MERCHANTS, all got out of the Keep with their treasure. The animals that infested the Keep, including STIRGES, FIRE BEETLES, a GIANT SHREW, a SPITTING COBRA, and WOLVES took a bit more effort to deal with. The party rested (in the rooms that had been occupied by the merchants, which contained beds!) lugged their first haul of coins back to Gateways, leaving it guarded by Juan, the Cleric, who had been blinded - which was not as unsafe as it sounds. He had a loaded crossbow - there's no class-based weapon restrictions (so far) in this game) and the party were stopping at the Headman's Axe, a particularly secure inn, the landlord of which is Goryn, an OGRE (humanoids are not exactly accepted in My-stara, but attitudes are a little more varied than simply, 'exterminate the brutes') who was the state executioner for the previous Duke. Buying a mule, in the (sadly misplaced) expectation of more treasure than they could carry, the party returned to the Keep and engaged in a battle with the Fire Beetles, in which (I hope) they learned the value of a good Armour Class. Most of their opponents had been AC7 (13 in the ascending system that I favour). The chitinous exoskeletons of the beetles, however, gave them AC2 (18), and as the battle dragged one, 3 PCs fell. Using Chris Kutulik's Death and Dismemberment table, with a -1 modifier for each HP below 0, we saw a broken leg, two fingers ripped off, and a very nasty facial/head wound. All that for 30xp. These injuries will need up to twelve weeks of recuperation, so we'll be seeing a couple of new characters join the campaign in the meantime. 

So, back to Threshold, er... Gateways, for the party. The game this Tuesday (which might well have involved beginning to play a modified version of Rahasia - the party found an Elf babbling away about 'the Rahib' in the Isle of Lost Dreams, a Black Lotus den) was cancelled as most of the players couldn't make it (except my wife, who struggles to pull out of a game played at our dining table). One could, and he asked if we could play a mini-adventure, and, despite my misgivings about the dynamics of just two players (and a DM), I rolled up a short one-session adventure; a merchant's boy has gone missing while fishing just downriver from Gateways. The locals seem to think that he has been taken by Jenny Greenteeth... 

I like to offer my players more options than, 'here is the adventure', but at short notice, what else can you do? Here is my prep:

Oh, to be able to map like Nicholson...

 

Only, that last player (excepting my wife) then cancelled, so we'll be playing tonight. Do not enlarge the photo, Dave, you cheat! The rest is in my head. Not many locations, but as I said, we aren't able to play for all that long these days. I think that is why I'm keen to build resource management - a key part of D&D - into the space around the adventures, by making sure that healing takes time, living costs are deducted, spell research takes time and money, etc. Of course, there's nothing wrong with running multi-session adventures, in which managing resources during an adventure figures more heavily, but absent players can quickly choke the momentum from a campaign when everyone is waiting to pick up from where the party left off last time. With injuries like the ones suffered exploring Kalten's Keep, whether we like it or not we'll end up with a broad 'cast list', presenting the option of running parallel adventures with a different set of characters.

Gods on the Moon

That the old gods of Hammerstein! (and My-Stara) are exiled on the Moon is an idea that draws on a number of sources. Of course, the Moon has been associated with one god or another, or with the supernatural, in most human cultures. That something lives on the Moon isn't a particularly Modern myth either; Lucian of Samosata, in the second century AD, wrote a story of Ulysses' journey to the Moon. Flying boats, eh? I told you that they were cool.

Mystara has its own Moon dwellers, the samurai cats of Myoshima. Not the Samurai Pizza Cats (my wife refused to believe such a thing ever existed, until I showed her the YouTube video [warning: awaful theme tune]). But the real superhumans on the Moon that I'm referencing are these:

Kirby also drew The Mighty Thor (and the rest of the Asgardians), and characters such as Hercules also find a home in the Marvel Universe, and so the idea that the once Gods of the world of Hammerstein! exiled on the Moon is meant to evoke these kind of characters. Superhumans, immortals (some of THE Immortals of Mystara, perhaps), but diminished greatly since the era in which they made the world from clay, now trapped in their Olympian domain. Some still worship them, for sure (some of the Vikings of the Northern Reaches are confirmed Lunatics), but the main religious focus in the Modern Age is the Church of Humanity, and its myriad saintly cults.

P.S. My vision of extra-planar travel has always been VERY Kirby...   

Hammerstein! Demihumans

In the world of Hammerstein! (and in what I’m calling My-Stara, the heavily modified version of Mystara that our group is currently exploring), Humans are the oldest sentient race. They were created by the by the trickster god Humaman. They were made in the in image of the Gods, and they shared their passions and vices, though on a mortal scale. At first, the Gods were amused, and congratulated Humaman. They walked amongst the humans and played with them, damaged them, and disposed of them as a spoiled child does with his toys. 

But Humaman’s joke wasn’t intended to offer the Gods amusements to idle away the eons. It was a vicious satire that built to a terrible punchline. While the Gods played at being Emperors and basked in worship, Humans got on with making History. Without an eternity to while away, mortal Humans are creatures of action and progress. Ages passed, countless generations, but eventually Humans built a civilization that rivalled the power of the Gods – the First Empire of Humanity – that wielded great magic and constructed enormously powerful machines. Having mastered the world, the First Empire made war on Heaven.

The war destroyed the world spanning Human Empire, buried cities, rent great wounds in the landscape, and left magical residue that brought into being all manner of Men-Kinds; Beastmen, Goblins, etc. and the proliferation of monstrous creatures. 

The war also damaged the Gods terribly, and they fled the world to their city on the Moon. But before they left, they created the Elves and the Dwarves. The twin gods of Time, Moment and Eternity, took the Man Rune, first carved by Humaman, and used it to create races that were meant to hold Humans forever in check. 

The Gods were alarmed by the ability of Humanity to create History. Moment, created the Elves in order to distract Humanity. Moment set the Elves down on the back of a LEVIATHAN, upon which they built their homeland, ELVENBONE (in My-Stara these Melnibonean Elves replace Alphatia). Moment gave the Elves the impulse to explore every sensation that can be experienced in mortal life. Experiments in food, art, sex, drugs, and violence fill their lives, and the lives of the Humans that they live among, with anything and everything other than the drive of History. They are agents of CHAOS.

Face it. He's a Elf. An urban/e one.

And this guy is an Elf too. My-stara's version of Alfheim will be a bit more... punk.

Eternity created the Dwarfs as a conservative check on Humanity. Eternity set the Dwarfs down within IRON MOUNTAIN, and gave them a complaining, suspicious character. The Dwarfs took the task of recording all of History within their great mountain vaults. Eternity ensured that the Dwarves would be a force for LAW. If there is one thing a Dwarf dislikes more than change, it is progress. If things must change, they should change slowly. That is the Truth every Dwarf is taught.

Unfortunately for the Gods, and for all the Men-Kinds of the world of Hammerstein!, some Dwarves became ever more extreme in their pursuit of Law, in ordering the world, while whole communities of Elves took to the worship of Chaos itself. The very essence of the world had been damaged during the war between Humans and Gods, and through these wounds crept the alien intelligences of primal Law and Chaos. Under the influence of an Angel of Law, the Human’s built a Second Empire of Humanity, a terrible continent spanning death cult, which only ended when the barbarian king, Hammerstein Heartbreaker, stormed the Ziggurat of Permanent Order and killed the demon, bringing into being the current era of free men and petty kingdoms. 

Nothing New Under the Sun

In our games of D&D (or whatever it is) I had been using the long trusted method of dealing with natural 20s and 1s in combat; double damage and a 'fumble' respectively. Of course, under this system a high-level fighter has exactly the same chance of scoring a critical hit as an clumsy child, and they both stand the same chance of dropping their swords. And it is more than a bit implausible to have even high-level fighters dropping their swords once every twenty combat rounds. In the past, we've played combats with these kinds of fumbles and have had swords flying all over the shop, bowstrings snapping like elastic bands, and sling stones scattering all over the slippery dungeon floors. Funny, for sure.

So for fumbles, we've just adopted the rule of two - a natural 1 leads leaves the unlucky dungeon delver with one round -2 across the board penalty, to hit rolls, armour class, saving throws, and anything else that might pop up. So everyone over stretches themselves once every twenty combat rounds, but the more able characters are more able to cope with the effects.

As for critical hits, I've seen houserules that try to emulate the RuneQuest critical system, where higher skill=a broader window of scoring a critical on the attack roll. Most of these involve rolls a certain number over the target number being a critical success, i.e. the lower the THAC0, the better the chance of striking a critical. Those systems look too fiddly for D&D. So I took my guide from WFRP1e, which allows the d6 damage dice to 'explode', so long as a second roll against Weapon Skill is made, and decided that a natural 20 would prompt a second attack roll. In other words, a natural 20 might cause 'double damage', but only if the attacker is skilled enough to 'hit' again. Another natural 20 results in another attack roll, and so on. But the chances of a series of natural 20s are microscopically small. Sure, you might kill a dragon in one blow, but only once every century or so... 

And then I sat down yesterday with my Rules Cyclopedia, my AD&D1e PHB and DMG, and my AD&D2e PHB and DMG, all to try to work out what I'd make my D&D players pay as upkeep costs. I didn't want them scrabbling for coppers in vein of our WFRP1e games - this was meant to be D&D(ish), after all - but I didn't want the game to completely ignore these things. My AD&D2e DMG is a much travelled book - it was posted the Dominican Republic to me for my birthday in the early 1990s, came back across the Atlantic to sunny Scotland, and since then has followed me around the UK - so it is no surprise that several pages are loose. One of these loose pages described the optional critical hit systems. And one of these systems was the system described above.

Who'da thunk it?

Nothing original.    

Nothing to see here. Just the story of a gamer finding that everything he thought of had been first invented over twenty years ago. It is funny feeling like one of the designers of D&D Next, eh?

p.s. Tenkar's thoughts on Attacking the Darkness certainly bear thinking about as an alternative fumble system, mind. They seem original, but who knows what rules are hidden in my gaming cupboards?

Playing it Wrong

At the moment, we’re playing Lamentations of the Flame Princess (LotFP). And we’re doing it wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Why? Because we’re using the core mechanics of LotFP and playing classic D&D with it. That isn’t what James Raggi wanted, is it? But it is a compliment.

The core mechanics of LotFP are D&D made elegant. I love them. The combat rules (this is the game that converted me to ascending AC), the streamlining of weapon options, the d6 adventuring rules, the rules for spell research and the creation of magic items… and the Specialist! A classic D&D Thief that doesn’t suck! LotFP is the version of classic D&D that I want to play. But I want to play classic D&D with it. I want the tone of the Mentzer Basic/Expert sets mixed with some Brit-fantasy to darken the mood. But it’s laughable thinking that a dash of Titan, a pinch of Lone Wolf, and a sprinkling of Warhammer will ‘darken’ a game when LotFP provides the possibility of mis-casting a Summon spell and have a party compelled to genitally mutilate each other? Actually, the mis-casts of the Summon spell are BRILLIANT. But they’re not part of the game that I’m after at the moment.

I’ve got my Rules Cyclopedia on my table as we speak, and my BECM (never did get I) books sit in a box alongside my collection of Gazetteers, modules, and assorted classic D&D accessories. But RC/BECM (or Labyrinth Lord, which I use as a proxy to avoid having tea poured all over my precious, precious RC) it isn’t exactly the game I want to play either. It lacks the elegance of Raggi’s system, and it’s power scaling is all wrong. 36 levels?! Back when I began playing D&D I had the Basic and the Expert set, and that was the system. 

So my house rules try to use LotFP to play D&D. All classes increase in attack bonus (though much, much more slowly than the Fighter. Not every monster is a unique Cthulloid entity; we’ve got Kobolds and Goblins, Trolls and Treants. The spells are mix of LotFP (Raggi’s interpretations of the classic spells are often extremely well done) and classic D&D (well, actually, for ease of reference at the table, I’m relying on Labyrinth Lord quite a bit). And I’m using D&D Treasure Tables – a mechanised Experience Point system that runs on loot demands a mechanised loot allocation system. In other words, I’m doing Raggi a terrible insult, stripping away the deliberate and consistent tonal qualities of LotFP to leave myself with the skeleton of the rules.

I'm worried about tea? It looks like they'll fall apart of their own accord soon enough...

The thing is, I appreciate the tone that Raggi strove for when writing Lamentations of the Flame Princess. It’s something that I’d be happy playing as a player. Strangely, it’s a game that I'd probably be happier playing that running. But right now, we’re dungeon delving and monster bashing. And, when you end the first adventure with a character blinded by a SPITTING COBRA, and three characters (a serious head wound, two fingers severed, and a broken leg)  needing lengthy spells of recuperation thanks to some FIRE BEETLES (oh, and Chris Kutalik’s Death and Dismemberment table), you know that you’re not playing too light and breezy a game.     

Oh, and of course, the Rules and Magic books for LotFP are available free. They're art free, but if want some cutting edge art criticism, try HERE. God knows what I'll do with my FOUR Rules and Magic hardcovers when they arrive (thanks to the Indiegogo campaign), but I'm looking forward to the Ken Hite adventure. And Kelvin's.

Realistic Fantasy

Monsters and Manuals is back with a post about the quixotic quest for ‘realism’ in fantasy adventure games. Noisms makes the point that even convincing works of fantasy fiction are set in worlds that are only as ‘realistic’ as necessary for the suspension of disbelief. I think this is an important thing to consider when engaging in world building for fantasy gaming, but I think that a distinction must also be drawn between the veneers of 'historical credibility/accuracy' that work for fiction, and the veneers that work for a game, particularly a fantasy adventure game such as D&D.

A work of fiction can get by with very rare monsters, just one site of adventure, or even just one adventure - because the whole thing is a massive railroad. I've tried playing Lord of the Rings like a Fighting Fantasy gamebook, but I still haven’t got the bit where I can make a decision. A fantasy world made for fiction can have a more convincing veneer of ‘realism’ because most of the world can be filled with the mundane. Adventure doesn’t need to be everywhere, it doesn’t need to be in lots of places, it just needs to be in the one place the characters go.

They've taken the railroad to Isengard! To Isengard! To Isengard!

A game such as D&D needs adventure to be everywhere. It needs to be in enough places that the exercise of player character ‘freedom’ does not depend on quantum dungeons appearing wherever the players go, or years of in-game mundanity while the player characters traverse the world without coming across the Lair of the Spider Queen, or the Crypts of the Last Men, or… These travels might involve peril, even opportunities for interesting roleplay, but not for fantasy adventure.

In the end we are back to my post on Titan – and I promise to switch to another topic soon; we’ve been playing using the elegant mechanics of Lamentations of the Flame Princess, but with the tone of the game taken from D&D read through Titan – which in summary, even if you don’t like adventurers as ‘rock stars’, is that a world for fantasy adventure needs to be a world packed with fantasy adventure. If accurately representing medieval demographics, economics, politics etc. gets in the way of this, then these have to be done away with. OR, the inconsistencies have to be glossed over – this is the cost of playing a fantasy adventure game in a pseudo-historical setting.     

This used to be a place...

Chris Kutalik of Hill Cantons has written a couple of posts [here and here] ostensibly talking about Greyhawk’s population density, and comparing it to what we know of Medieval Europe. Shorter: Greyhawk is largely empty, at least given the demographics that Gygax proposed. Whatever Gygax’s intentions – and it seems to me that Greyhawk is intended to be much more populated, settled and civilized than the population densities imply – this produces a suitably post/near apocalyptic world, in which settled peoples are living on a knife edge, in which to play D&D style games.

Why is this world covered in ruins and packed with lost treasure? Why are all the lords 9^th level fighters, all the archbishops 9^th level clerics, in a world/system in which that degree of advancement can only be gained by a life of great danger? Why is there anything adventuresome at all for lowly 1^st level characters to do? Well, as Edgar Johnson says in the comments, “this used to be a place once, but now it's not”, which is the best summary of what a D&Dish setting should be. Sure, for a game in which character advancement can be achieved by engaging in diplomatic plots, or subtle schemes, etc., a well settled, civilized place is fine. But if the game system describes a world in which personal (and political) power is derived (only) from adventuring, from risking great danger and looting the remains of dead societies, the world that accompanies such a system needs to be one of ‘howling emptiness’.

This is what is wrong with Mystara as a D&D setting (even as Mystara is lots of fun, and a perfectly decent setting for a system that doesn’t rely on the same method of character advancement) – so much civilization makes D&Dish adventuring implausible. Most fantasy settings are too settled, indeed, it is one of the mistakes I almost always make when engaging in world building (embryonic worlds that mutate and are reborn with each campaign re-setting TPK). That is why I wrote myself a Titanic Lesson Plan – with point 5 “Pay no attention to real medieval settlement patterns. Civilisation exists as pockets of light amid the fantastical peril. Culture can vary tremendously within a short distance - European inspired fantasy can sit alongside fantastical names inspired by a trip to Thailand”. I did this to remind myself that in order to remind myself that I’m not writing novels, I’m creating the locations for fantasy adventure gaming, and ‘game’ has different demands to ‘story’. The setting has to fit the game, and if the game is D&D…

Adventurer, Conqueror, Queen? They look like late 1980s, early 1990s D&D adventurers, don't they?