DUNGEON23: The Dry River

The bandits have been using the edge nearest their tents as a latrine.  Anyone trying to sneak up to the camp through the dry river during daylight hours will almost certainly be seen by the bandits standing guard on the ziggurat.

Machinations of the Space Princess: What it Is

For reasons I don’t really recall, I was recently reminded of Machinations of the Space Princess, “Grim” Jim Desborough’s science-fantasy remake of the Lamentations of the Flame Princess RPG. 

So that makes it a remake of a remake?  Yeah.

First off, this would not exist but for Raggi’s attempt to do a shotgun spread of new projects on Kickstarter lo these many years ago.  Originally, Machinations was intended to be a single adventure.  But the shotgun spread idea backfired; with so many cool projects, I think only two got funded.  The rest diluted the pledges too thinly, and Machinations was one of those that didn’t get funded.

So Desborough teamed up with Satine Phoenix and took his tin cup to Indiegogo where he asked for a cool kilobuck US to make it happen.  He got over $4k and so we got a game full of full-color art by Phoenix.

I heard something about this via the G+, but I didn’t pay it much mind at the time.  Partly because I didn’t really realize what Desborough was up to.  While I wasn’t expecting a one-to-one port of LotFP to sci-fi, with lazer swords and plasma crossbows and psion-elves, I was at least expecting MotSP to keep what I saw as the coolest innovations and themes of Lamentations.  This included the character-sheet based encumbrance system, the strong focus on human characters, the weird and disturbing magic, and a general theme of survival horror that is the hallmark of LotFP adventures.

That is (mostly) not at all what Desborough and Phoenix created. 

I was expecting Saturn 3 and ALIEN and Pitch Black and the ’72 Soviet Solaris.  Not really my bag beyond one-shots and the like (though I do rather enjoy the Free League ALIEN RPG, much to my shock).

But that’s not what we get.  What we get is something more like Buck Godot: Zap-gun for Hire meets Barbarella meets Flash Gordon meets The Sword’s Warp Riders. 

And that is totally my thing.

Now, this is not some giant stops-bullets book like Lancer.  This is a “mere” 240 pages in a 6” x 8” paperback format.  This is a construction-set of an RPG, very much like Star Siege or GURPS.  However, unlike those two games, Machinations doesn’t really give two flips for balance.  MotSP doesn’t pretend to know what your games are going to be about.  Your game could be about blaster-slinging space cowboys, a team of highly skilled mercs taking on the most challenging jobs in a galaxy dominated by heartless megacorps, swashbuckling radium-cavaliers living and dying for honor and love, tomb-raiders cracking open the trapped vaults of the Elder Races, or super-powered psions staying one step ahead of the Psi-Pstasi.  MotSP isn’t here to tell you how to play your game.

And so Machinations doesn’t lose much sleep in crafting a fully “balanced” experience.  It’s very Old School in this respect.  Sure, there are some nods towards niche protection, echoes from B/X D&D in what your character is good at and how quickly they go up levels and stuff like that.  But there’s nothing stopping you from cobbling together a Frankenstein’s monster of abilities and powers. 

Take, for instance, race creation.  There are dozens (maybe over a hundred) options for racial characteristics you can use to build your character’s race.  The list of race traits you can pick is 20 pages long and might be the longest single section in the book.  They’re organized by theme, but you don’t need to stick with the theme; there’s nothing to stop you from taking the blob-creature’s ability to rip off chunks of itself and send them scurrying about as miniature versions of you, and combining that with the ammonia-based life’s slow metabolism ability and the reptile’s scales. 

If you love lots of character options, this is your game.  Want to craft a team of bizarre creatures who band together to bring peace to a fractious galaxy?  Want the flexibility to build a tentacle monster with poor understanding of personal boundaries or a Space Pirate Amazon Ninja Catgirl who carves said tentacle monsters up into calamari?  Want the challenge of crafting the ultimate mechanical bad-ass by pushing the rules to their limit and then hurling your creations into the deadliest dungeon the GM can devise to see who emerges victorious? 

Machinations can do that.

And it doesn’t stop at race-building.  While there’s relatively little customization in the four classes (Killer, Specialist, Scholar, and Psion), everything else oozes with customization options.  For instance, each weapon category, from Small, One-handed Close Combat Weapons to Rifles/Shotguns is further divided in what amounts to a Small, Medium, and Large category.  On top of that, you can pile on the added modifications, from concealable to larger magazines to a selector for different damage types to “vicious” levels of damage.  In short, there’s no list of races with pseudo-clever names like Ignians and Reptiliods, or guns like ARES Predator Mk II or AK-97.  What we get instead is a fun tool kit you can use to build your own universe.

Want to build the ZF1 from Fifth Element with the net launcher, poisoned arrows, rocket, flame-thrower, and “all new ice-cube system?”  Yeah, Machinations can do that, too.

As you’d expect from something built on the LotFP chassis, the mechanics are a mish-mash of stuff.  We’ve got D&D 3.x’s d20-roll-higher for attacks, LotFP’s d6-roll-under for skills (of which there are many more in this game) 5e’s a-save-for-ever-stat and your choice of roll over or under for saves.  Your poor dice won’t know which way to go!

And on top of that we’ve got psionics (complete with a randomly chosen “witch’s mark” that can either be a (usually pretty weird) boon or bane), a wide array of cybernetics (which can cause psychosis if you take too many), and vehicles ranging from one-person bikes up to space battleships. 

What surprises is the stuff left out.  Most especially, encumbrance.  Not even mentioned.  Ditto for logistics; ammo is managed by saving throws (you need to reload when your weapon fails its save) and most tech doesn’t appear to need recharging of any kind.  The cigarette-pack standard-energy-clips of Star Frontiers are nowhere to be found here.  Because it’s Desborough, we do get some rules for dealing with exposure to vacuum or radiation (that doesn’t include a mutations table), but the guidelines for generating planets are all about what sort of adventures you can have on them, rather than orbital radius or axial tilt.   

The result is a rules-lite, cinematic game that you could go beer-and-pretzels with but has enough heft to it for long-term campaign style play.  Don’t play it if your group isn’t united in their goals; munchkins can craft real curb-stompers from the race options while your story-gamers will devise original and shocking personalities that are mechanically incoherent.

But do play if you’re looking for something flexible and not very demanding.  You can pick up all the mechanics in an afternoon and you can craft your first adventure over a lazy weekend (be sure to give yourself time to create gear and aliens and maybe a ship or two).  If you and your players love sharing world-building responsibilities, you’re going to love all the options available to you.  And if you instead want to keep firm control over the setting and factions, it’s easy enough to build a cheat-sheet for the players and some pre-made races and go to town.

In short, it’s as flexible as B/X and possibly even more rules-lite.  Character creation isn’t as quick but offers greatly expanded variety.  If you’re looking for a science-fantasy rules set to craft your own fun on, check this game out.

Trollsmyth Does the Borderlands

Yesterday, my wife and I were talking about choice in D&D, and that lead to a chat about dungeons. Apparently, she’d never experienced the classic dungeons. Her experiences with early D&D were largely of the cloaked-guy-in-the-tavern-sends-you-into-the-dungeon-to-retrieve-a-Maguffin-and-you-get-to-keep-everything-else-you-find sort. And where the monsters just waited patiently in their rooms for the PCs to kick in the door. That sort of thing.

And while I’ve played in campaigns like that, I’m not sure I ever ran one like that. My model was the Caves of Chaos. So I dug up my pdf of B2: Keep on the Borderlands and ran it for her.

And I still can’t quite say she’s experienced a classic D&D dungeon. Not quite.

We played with 5e rules; could have done my old mish-mash of B/X and 2e, but we had 5e books at hand. She made a half-elf wizard with an entertainer background. Her character was headed to the borderlands to get a jump on his wizarding skills by searching for long-lost treasures of the ancient and wicked empire of Acheron (because yes, I’m totally up to stealing from R.E. Howard when asked to DM at a moment’s notice). Feel free to skip down to the end for my final thoughts if you want to avoid spoilders, because SPOILERS FOLLOW:

So with some favorite name-generators from the internet and a meh-quality pdf of the adventure pulled up on my laptop, I started her character off outside the keep. He was soon at the tavern (which I’d combined with the inn to make a single establishment called the Tipsy Cockatrice), negotiating a deal with the owner to perform in the evenings to defray some of the costs of room and board. He then wandered around the outer bailey, hearing about the strange monk (Gimha) and caravans that had gone missing, noticing the shops, and the temple to Astarte. At the fountain, he encountered a half-orc warrior whose sword bore marks of ancient Acheron.

Now, while I’m totally willing to forgive B2 its unnamed Castellan and innkeeper, because it’s easy enough for me to name them myself and give the keep the character I want it to have (in this case, a wee bit Howard’s Aquilonia), all the featureless +1 swords do start to get on my nerves pretty quickly.

So the sword I gave this half-orc warrior named Lagakh was fashioned from a variation of my old weeping iron. (This version was just like that except it was weeping steel because I’d forgotten which I’d called it originally.) Tindomé the half-elf wizard was intrigued and asked about it. Lagakh let on that she and a warlock had plundered a before-now-undiscovered ruin and found the blade there. Lagakh was now hurting for money because she’d spent her coin to refurbish the grip and scabbard, so she was willing to lead Tindomé to the ruin in exchange for half of whatever treasure they recovered, or 10 gp if there was no more treasure to be found.

While I was inventing an Acheronian enchanter named Ilerius whose mark was on the blade (but who probably hadn’t actually made it, because the blade didn’t have Ilerius’ trademark soul-stealing enchantments on it), I realized that I was inviting Tam’s character to go on adventure I didn’t have prepped. Now, coming up with a ruin that had a secret portion that Lagakh and her companion hadn’t found would have been easy enough, but the idea here was to introduce Tam to some classic dungeons. And I don’t think I’d ever run the Moathouse from Temple of Elemental Evil. Which was perfect; nearly two-thirds of the dungeon under the moathouse is separated from the rest by secret doors and it has its own exit to the outside world. So it was a piece of cake to say that Lareth the Beautiful was a priest of Apophis in league with the priestess running things in the Caves of Chaos. And because old-school D&D is so wonderfully simple and easy to run, it took me a half-hour to find my copy and prep it.

So Tindomé and Lagakh went to the ruins of the Moathouse, which I repurposed as a final-days-of-the-Empire Acheronian fort. That meant aging everything outside the secret area by about a thousand years, but that wasn’t a big deal. I got rid of the brigands, said Lagakh had already slain the spider, and left the snake in its room (which Tindomé and Lagakh choose to ignore). A very high roll on a history check revealed the secret door in the “Black Chamber” where the brigands were to have holed up. I also removed the zombies, ogre, and captives from the area in front of the secret portion.

The first inhabitants of the place encountered by Tindomé and Lagakh were the gnolls who were feeling ill-used. A reaction roll said they were wary, but considering their feelings on their situation and relationship with Lareth, they were hesitant to get into a fight. Tindomé said they were here to meet with “the New Master” (I forget how he came up in the conversation) and the gnolls, disappointed, pointed them to where the New Master could be found (and warned them about the trapped doors, though they did not explain how those traps worked). After wandering about for a bit and finding some orichalcum I’d placed in the mechanism of the trap, as well as the guards protecting the passage to Lareth’s quarters, they then found the secret exit. There they discovered a bit of a torn sack that had contained barley with a mark on it that made it likely it was from a missing caravan. One the way back, they discovered even more: one of the caravan’s wagons, abandoned with a broken axle and still holding four sacks of flour. They returned to the Keep with the sack and requested an audience with the Castellan.

What they got was an audience with the Bailiff of the Outer Bailey, Arus Dun. He brought in the Priestess of Astarte to discuss the situation. Arus pointed out that bandits raiding the caravans almost certainly had spies, probably at the Keep if not at the other end of the route. Tindomé mentioned that they’d walked in with Lagakh lugging the sack of flour over her shoulder; it was likely word of their find and what it meant were all of the Keep by now. He suggested they lock down the keep, do a quick census to see if anyone had fled, and then use Zone of Truth and his own Detect Thoughts to root out any spies.

This dragnet of course caught Gimha and his two acolytes. They nearly killed the Priestess of Astarte with a snake staff and multiple sacred flames, and did manage to kill a few guards and nearly Lagakh with Spiritual Guardians. Our heroes triumphed in the end, capturing one of the acolytes alive to rip his knowledge out with Detect Thoughts. A bit of Speak with the Dead filled in the holes.

Before they’d left for the Moathouse, Tindomé had spoken with Gimha who’d suggested they gather a party and travel to a series of caves used in the era of Acheron as cells for ascetic worshipers of Apophis famed for their powers of prophecy. Tindomé thought it was a splendid plan and agreed to go as soon as he and Lagakh got back from the Moathouse. Now they knew Gimha’s plan was to lure as many of the adventurers (especially the spell-slinging ones) away from the Keep and into an ambush. And that the Priestess of Apophis in the Caves of Chaos was all but ready to unleash her humanoid army on the Keep. Gimha didn’t know how they planned to succeed (it was with the help of summoned earth elementals) but knew the hour was fast approaching.

Tindomé finally got his audience with Castellan. He gave Tindomé and Lagakh some coin and an invisibility potion to scout out the caves. Which they did.

First, Tindomé had Lagakh help him disguise his scent. They avoided going in the caves of the cult (feeling too creeped out by the entrance), then did a pretty good job scouting through the orc and bugbear caves, a bit of the gnoll caves, and the goblin caves. They nearly got nabbed by the magic in the minotaur’s caves, never got past the door into the hobgoblin caves, and decided the owlbear and ogre didn’t need to be disturbed. They got caught in the orc’s net (and escaped with the help of a well-timed Unseen Servant) and then later fell into the kobolds’ pit trap. Another Unseen Servant “opened” the pit for them to crawl out, but there was a mob of kobolds there now, and through sheer numbers they put more than a few holes in poor Tindomé. He passed out, but Lagakh was able to carry him out and pour a healing potion down his throat.

The two then high-tailed it back to the Keep to make their report. The High Priestess of Astarte told them that the Priestess of Apophis was using an ancient altar upon which various humanoid chieftains had pledged not only their obedience to the cult of Apophis, but also that of their descendants. It was the great-great-great-great-so-many-greats-grandchildren of those long-ago chiefs who had brought their tribes to the Caves of Chaos so the cult of Apophis could capture the Keep.

Tindomé and Lagakh agreed to infiltrate the caves and desecrate the magic altar with holy water in hopes of breaking the hold of Apophis on the humanoids. An Adept of Astarte named Zaret went with them, and the Bailiff with some mounted archers went as well to supply a diversion.

T, L, and Z infiltrated the cult’s caves and, after nearly desecrating the wrong altar, got the job done and then ran like hell to escape the wrath of the cultists and their undead minions. The humanoids either started fleeing or turned on their erstwhile masters.

The Castellan is planning to hit the caves the next day. By then, most of the humanoids will have packed up and left. The cultists might still be there; I haven’t decided yet. Either way, most of the treasure will be gone.

END OF SPOILERS

Which brings up an interesting point about how EXP interacts with player choices. What T did was perfectly valid and effective in so far as foiling the plots of the cult. However, Tindomé liberated only 50 gp worth of treasure from the whole affair which he’ll have to split with Lagakh. If it wasn’t for rewards from the Keep folk, the entire affair would have been at a loss after you count in the used healing potions (worth 50 gp each themselves). By the time the soldiers sack the place, there’s barely going to be any treasure left to speak of that isn’t cursed. If we were playing by B/X rules, my wife’s character wouldn’t have earned enough EXP this way to get anywhere near 2nd level (and we started Tindomé off at 3rd since we were using 5e rules and she was playing solo).

GP-for-EXP certainly encourages more aggressive and mercenary play. Whether that’s a bug or a feature will really depend on what your goals are. I have to say that what happened certainly felt like something out of a Conan or a Thieves’ World story, so I’m pretty happy with what did happen, and my wife very much enjoyed herself. If we continue, I’ll probably send her Tindomé to the small farming hamlet of Orlane, a vital source of food for the Keep until they can get their own farms productive. Papers recovered from the cult will show that the servants of Apophis are making headway in their designs against the town, thanks to the aid of a mysterious personage called Explictica Defilus.

The Road to Victory

I think we can now unilaterally declare the OSR a success. Starter boxed sets are a thing once more, with both Pathfinder and D&D 5e having one. The 5e team not only reached out to OSR bloggers shortly after announcing 5e, but paid them to consult on 5e. In his design of 5e, Mearls openly embraced simplicity over completeness and the venerable Caves of Chaos were offered as a playtest testbed for the rules. OSR works have received the highest accolades of the industry and fandom, and we even have a few folks making a full-time living at this stuff. So I think we can safely say that, yes, from an outside perspective, the OSR has been shockingly successful.

Notice the caveat up there? From an outside perspective. That’s vital.

I’m writing this because I’m seeing other groups that appear similar to the OSR and have clearly been inspired by the OSR. Yes Pulp Renaissance folks (or whatever you’re calling yourselves), I am very much talking to you here. Because there’s one key aspect of the OSR that is vital to the success of any similar movement (and as I love me some Howard, Leiber, Wagner, etc. I’d really love to see you folks flourish).

As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back—
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.

From the OSR’s inception, before Maliszewski started Grognardia, before anyone was even saying anything like “Old School Renaissance,” the OSR was about one thing: having fun playing RPGs. Fun, of course, is a very particular thing; what floats my boat might sink yours. Each of us was pursuing our own individual fun. Sure, we did it in groups (RPGing is largely not a solo activity), but those groups had very different ideas of fun. Maliszewski had his very Appendix-N-driven world-building with a strong emphasis on dungeon exploration while Raggi pursued a horror vibe in a pseudo-historical setting. Some pursued Gygaxian Naturalism while others preferred a more metaphorical experience via delving into a Mythic Underworld. Games were opened up to the whole world (well, all of the world that could get on Google Hangouts) via the Flailsnails linked campaigns while others were carefully cultivated walled gardens, specifically designed for the enjoyment of a small few. Some wallowed in the excesses of Gygaxian descriptive writing while others embraced the simplicity of the One-page Dungeon. Thieves were excised from games, or modified, or the original design was strictly adhered to. Some embraced the entirety of Appendix N for inspiration, others picked just certain portions (Dying Earth stories or Swords & Sorcery) while others looked to video games or anime.

Within the very loose framework of the OSR, each of us pursued our own fun. Each of us pushed the boundaries of what the OSR was and then we’d get together to discuss what worked and what didn’t. We tore apart the old games to see how each individual piece worked, how they interacted with one another, and then tried new combinations to see what would happen. When something worked and was fun, we shared it with each other. And so our toolboxes of fun-building grew, our games became more fun to play, and we had great times.

The reason for the caveat above, about an outside perspective? That’s because whether or not the OSR succeeded or failed hung entirely on a single question: did you have more fun playing RPGs? The OSR succeeded and failed hundreds of thousands of times for every individual who gave it a whirl. Nothing else really mattered. If we were not having fun, things were not right and had to be changed. So we changed and explored and each of us found our individual fun.

So far, so good, at least as far as those of us finding this personal success were concerned. But enthusiasm is infectious, and it’s easy to be enthusiastic about something that’s fun! The more fun we had, and the more we talked about our fun and shared it, the more other folks wanted a piece of our action. That’s what created the success of the OSR as an influential movement in the larger sphere of RPGs. Not any attempt to strongly codify what the OSR is, or an internally coherent logical structure, or deeply penetrating philosophy. Jeff Rients set the tone early on; fuck pretentious bullshit. Is it fun? Then do more of that!

Were there fights with outside groups? Yep. Internal fights that grew rancorous? Of course. That happens, especially when you lose sight of how individualistic the whole thing was. It wasn’t all fun and games. But the core of everything vital was, in fact, fun and games. The success of the OSR, both for the individuals doing it as well as the movement as a whole, was entirely built on a foundation of playing games and having fun. Everything worthwhile and good grew from that.

UPDATE: a variation on this theme from Zak.