Romance, Sex and D&D: Women are from Venus, Men are from Nowhere

I'm having a great time with my Thursday game. In spite of relearning old rules, exercising a few disused mental and gaming muscles, and a bit of player attrition due to the hassles of Real Life, things are rolling along nicely, and I'd like to thank my players for making it such a pleasant experience.

And now that I've done that, I'm going to tease them in public, in honor of the feast of St. Valentine. ;)

Seriously, we have a great cast of PCs to play with, and things are threatening to get even more interesting in the near future. I can't wait for next Thursday. And they also fell fairly closely into a pattern of character creation I'd noticed back in my college days.

Here's the relevant part of the character creation outline I posted:

What I absolutely need are the names and current whereabouts of your character's family, and what your character did before hopping on the boat to Pitsh.

Let's take a look at what I got in response, in no particular order, with names changed and other details omitted to protect the innocent:

Player A gave me a character descended from a long line of heroes who has just finished his training to take part in the family business. However, no names are given, nor do we know anything about the character's parents or siblings, if any.

Player B's character's mother “was a serving wench at a big city inn/brothel.” Obviously, figuring out who dad was in this case is clearly problematic. Mom, unnamed, passed away when the character was 14. The character's mentor, however, is named, and “has become a surrogate uncle” to the character. It was this uncle/mentor who sent our hero to the island of Dreng Bdan to seek his fortune.

Player C first asked me if these family would be nearby where the adventures began or far away, the only one to do so. Player C then named the home community, father, mother, and two siblings of the PC, and explained what those siblings were currently up to. The character's life of adventure was precipitated by a nasty quarrel with the PC's family, leading the PC to head for the horizon, vowing never to return, or, at least, not to return until the PC had proven there's more to life than what was offered at home. Player C also provided me with a mysteriously vanished relative.

Player D's character “is the third child of five from a reasonably wealthy family” but no members of this family are named or described. This PC is “still on good terms with” this family, but “has more interesting things to do.”

Ok, time to cue the music.

Now, keep in mind that I'm not saying anyone did anything wrong here. The differences between them are what make for great interplay between the PCs, and I love it when my players play with each other in addition to interacting with me and the world. And while I prefer to get characters more like Player C's, I'm more than happy to work with the others. After all, if you don't give me the details, I consider that carte blanche to fill in the gaps as I see fit.

But that's not my point today. My point today is that Player C is a woman and this falls right in line with a difference I've noticed in how women and men play RPGs.

Clearly, nothing like this is universal. I'm notorious for deluging my poor DMs with mountains of family detail and background info, and last time I checked I was a guy. And I've known gal gamers to have a great time playing Paranoia,where every PC is a clone with all the family life of a tube of toothpaste. But I have seen a trend in my horribly-not-scientific experience. Keeping in mind that the plural of “anecdote” isn't “data”, I think a lot of it has to do with the reading habits I've mentioned before.

Think of the novels by Anne McCaffery, Mercedes Lackey, Elizabeth Moon, or Jacqueline Carrey. The characters in these novels are either surrounded by family, or immediately work to make a new family once the old one is lost. Family is a source of strength and support, and even villains tend to have family of their own. Stories can become generational epics, with the children of the previous heroes picking up the torch and continuing on in their parents’ footsteps. In the past, this has been true of the women playing in my games, and I've seen it in others games as well. Relatives become resources, not just for in-game goodies, but also in a meta-game sense, becoming touchstones for dramatic RP or bringing the spotlight onto a player's character. And these women worked to create and maintain relationships in the game, fought over them, and worried about them.

And it's not just my games either:

Legwork begins. Rather than roll social skills on the handy-dandy legwork tables and assume a lot of networking has gone on, the girls decide to RP out their search for info. Randi comes up with the idea that Sasha's decker contact is her little brother. We have an awesome RP moment when we find out that Brian, who styles himself "Lord High Emperor of Ultimate Matrix Badasses" is at least as much playa' as Decka'. We meet him in a decker bar, surrounded by teenage weefle-runners held rapt by his descriptions of his most recent datasteal. He is very obviously putting the make on several attractive, illegal female decker-wannabes. In ten minutes of pure character development, we learn that Brian resents the hell out of his sister, blaming her for the mysterious deaths of their parents, and points out that since their party lost their own decker, whom Brian had been involved with, perhaps running with Sasha wasn't such a good idea. There's some verbal sparring about previous events between Brain and Sasha that could have been scripted, but were totally ad-lib. Very much the brother and sister. Finally, with promise of challenge and payment, Brian dismisses his entourage and asks what the girls want, making sure to sidle up to Tyna, who has obviously made him forget the young deckers from moments ago.

It's an amazing technique for massaging more out of a game. Not only has Sasha's player subverted the system somewhat, by making the contact more than just a contact and thus far more valuable an asset than she probably paid for in character creation, but we have a great moment of RP, a cool new NPC, and all sorts of hooks for interesting play in the future.

Most men don't create these opportunities, partly, I think, because the books we read don't really prepare us to think these sorts of terms. And while we all desire the closeness of family, all need to find a place where we belong and fit in, the mystique of the Man With No Name is heady stuff for guys. We all know exactly what Captain Jack means when he says, “But what a ship is, is freedom!” In the novels of Steven Brust, George R.R. Martin, or Robert Jordan, family is something to escape. The sins of the fathers are the torments of their sons. The characters constantly weave about, like moths drawn to a flame, wanting the closeness of intimacy, but constantly veering away, pulled by duty or fear or whatever else. Family is often something that must be escaped before the adventure can begin (as for Fritz Lieber’s Fafhrd) or so trivial as to be hardly worth mentioning (Robert Howard’s Conan). Heroes in these novels might see family as a spur or lash, a burden either dutifully or resentfully shouldered, which I see something of in Player A's character. But generally, family is the past, a point of origin from which the character's trajectory into the future constantly takes him further and further away. Compare that to Player C's character, where multiple paths for reconciliation immediately present themselves, and avenues are readily offered to include her character's family in the campaign.

Now, I'm sure some will say that people who create characters who have severed all ties with their family are just protecting themselves, and that past DMs have taught them to do this by using family as a way to screw with the PCs. To that I must ask, do you really think that makes a PC safe? Say, just to create an example at random, someone gave me a character sheet that read “family – all dead”, do you really think that would thwart a creative and sadistic DM? Or do you think I would find a way to make certain that this dead family came back to haunt them?

UPDATE: Spike of Ubiquitous Orcs has more thoughts on this theme.

Surveys of the Coast

Greywulf has linked to a survey apparently posted by WotC about their Insider website. Honestly, the way it's put together, I'm suspecting it's front-loaded to return data pointing to people not using it because they haven't been properly informed about what it offers. Follow the links and take a look for yourself.

Pitsh Interrupted

A rush-job came up, and since it pays real, hard cash, it must take precedence. Alas, this means my mapping of Pitsh must be delayed a bit. However, I leave you with this aside from tonight's game:

Rukmini: (Gnomish war gear?)
Adler: (Cute but deadly.)

There are spots open in the game, if anyone cares to join us.

Blatant Plug

Thanks to Taichara, I've just learned that Labyrinth Lord is available through Amazon.

Yes, I'm behind the times, so sue me!

(And this lil' Amazon linky thingy is kinda cool. May need to play with it to see if I can make the pic bigger. Wrapping the text around the pic seems to be beyond me, though. Drat!

That did the trick! Thanks, Szilard!)

Erol Otus Art Challenge at Fight On!

Just got this from the good folks at Fight On! magazine. Looks like a fun opportunity.

Otherworld Miniatures and Fight On! present the Erol Otus Art
Challenge!

Judged by Erol Otus and shown in the pages of Fight On!

All artists are invited to submit a picture on one of the following
themes:

-The Adventure Takes a Surprising Twist
-One Charge Left
- Overland

By Erol's Command, Any Style, Any Media, and Any Freaking Thing Goes!

Winning Entries will be published in Fight On! and awarded
PRIZES in separate Color and B&W categories, as follows:

1st Prize: Up to £ 50 worth of Otherworld's magnificent minis, or a
full year's (four issue) print subscription to Fight On!

2nd Prize: Up to £ 30 worth of Otherworld miniatures, or a half
year's (two issue) print subscription to Fight On!

3rd Prize: Up to £ 20 worth of Otherworld's fantastic figurines, or a
full year's PDF subscription to Fight On!

Honorable Mention: Free PDF of the issue of Fight On! in which
your work is published.

The six 1st-3rd prizewinners will also receive Erol's commentary on
their work, published along with the image in Fight On!
(Winning color images will be covers of upcoming issues.) That's six
top prizes in all, three in each category! You can see Otherworld's
product line at http://www.otherwor ld.me.uk/ , and check out Fight
On! at http://stores. lulu.com/ FightOn.

Better yet, all artists submitting retain ownership of their own
work. Fight On! asks only for the right to publish winners in
a future issue of the magazine and for artists not to post their
submitted work on-line in any form (including for sale in other PDF
products) for six months after the conclusion of the contest. They
may re-submit or re-sell to print venues immediately and to on-line
venues six months after the contest's conclusion, and in general
ownership and all rights except the delay in on-line
posting/publication and Fight On!'s right to publish your
image in a future issue of the magazine remain with the artist.

So artists - let's see what you've got! Please send submissions to
iggyumlaut@gmail. com by Sunday, May 3, 2009 to be considered. Thank
you!

Tyranny and You

Chgowiz today discusses a post over at ars ludi describing "the benefits of tyranny". Riffing off both, I just want to make a few comments on old versus new school gaming.

Mr. Robbins points out that the tyrannical DM is actually shouldering a large chunk of work, and can be described as taking one for the team:

But with the tyrannical GM, you have one person who steps up and says “this is my game, it is my creation, I’m in absolute control and make everything happen. I resolve all disputes and I make sure all players are entertained.” Which means you, the player, are completely off the hook. You can be as selfish as you want, or as rude as you want, or as lazy as you want, because the GM has taken responsibility for making the game work and taking care of everyone at the table.

I think that's a tad extreme, but not entirely off the mark. However, I also think there's a marked difference between what is accepted tyranny in old school play and new school play, and that this leads to some, if not most, of the friction between us RPGers.

Old school tyranny is best summed up in the phrase "rulings, not rules". The old school DM has the final say on what can and can't happen. Can Rukmini sew a bag from scavenged sail cloth to keep the enchanted jade eggs safe in? Old school versions of D&D don't have skill systems, so it's entirely up to the DM to decide. However, this is great freedom for the players. They don't have to worry about what the rules do and don't cover. If they want to try to disguise themselves, or kick sand in the face of an enemy, or distract the guards with a Punch & Judy show, they can just dive in and do it, letting the DM worry about how such things intersect with the rules.

New school tyranny is a different sort. Ok, first off, let me say I don't have a copy of Keep on the Shadowfells handy, so I'm working off memory here. If I'm wrong about something, someone please tell me so I can eat crow, but...

The new school tyranny is the tyranny of plot. The DM has a plot, a story, that they expect the players to play through, just like in a computer game. Minor deviations might be permissible, but if you go off the reservation, you risk derailing the entire evening's gaming, because the DM isn't prepared for it. Take a look at Keep on the Shadowfells. There's some wiggle-room in the order in which events take place, but not a lot. First this ambush, and then that ambush, and then into the tunnels...

The players, for their part, don't need to look for action. It's up to the DM to point them towards the next way-station in the plot. They show up, interact with whatever the situation is, and then move on to the next. It's pretty low-impact, and if you're digging what the DM has planned, it's pretty much guaranteed entertainment.

Now, compare this to Keep on the Borderlands. The first thing some folks notice about KotB is that the people in the keep are described with stats and treasure. Yep, that's right, if the PCs decide to, they can kill everyone in the keep and take their stuff. Some, of course, scoff at this, saying it plays right into the fight-and-loot myopia of old school gaming. But, in truth, it opens up all sorts of possibilities for play. Yes, the PCs can fight the monsters in the Caves of Chaos and use the keep as their base. But they can also decide to become burglars, breaking into the homes of the keep's denizens and stealing their loot. Or they join the evil cult and lead an army of monsters against the keep. Or they can play the monsters and the keep off against each other, Yojimbo-style.

But what if the players want to try something like that in 4e's Keep on the Shadowfell? The poor DM is all on his own. The adventure as published assumes the players will fight the cultists and their monster minions on behalf of the town of Winterhaven. If you want to loot and pillage the town instead, you've gone off the rails. The DM has to come up with stats and treasures without much help from the game at all. I suppose you could use the Human Rabble and Guard monsters from the Monster Manual to flush things out, and then (speaking of tyranny) use the 4e treasure system to dictate what the players can loot. But I wouldn't call that optimal.

Building Pitsh

Wherein Trollsmyth waxes anal-retentive and probably humiliates himself by screwing up some very simple maths. ;)

Pitsh is the largest “civilized” community on the island of Dreng Bdan, where my Thursday night Labyrinth Lord game is currently taking place. The PCs are likely to find themselves there on our next game, so I thought it might be a good idea to think about what the place looks like.

Normally, I don't bother with maps of cities. It's usually good enough to know vaguely where things are, and what is available. This time, however, I thought it might be interesting to do at least a rough map of the place.

Most of the following information is public knowledge, so my players should feel free to read on, without it causing problems in the game.

First, a bit of history: the current Pitsh is the third community to exist on the site. The first was a small elven port town destroyed during the Third War Against the Monsters. Most of the ruins are now under the bay, though you can find the occasional pot shard, bit of jewelry, or foundation in the city.

The second community was built at the height of the Second Lizardfolk Empire. Many buildings still show their architectural influence, and the fan-and-palm motif that was popular then. It was abandoned during the Coming of the Ice, when the water levels fell and left the port high and dry. By the time the sea returned to the city, the Second Lizardfolk Empire was already in decline.

The current city takes its name from its previous incarnation. It was founded by pirates and adventurers, looking to plunder the ruins or prey upon shipping in the Turquoise Sea. Following on word of the ruins, the god Uban sent an expedition to see what other secrets might be found. They based themselves in Pitsh and soon discovered that the entire island was a trove of lost wonders. The expanding base turned into a temple, and it served as the nucleus of the reborn city.

Today, Pitsh is home to some 10,000 souls, mostly human with a few lizardfolk, dwarves, and goblins. Within the walls, most of the buildings are baked brick and stone. Outside, walls are fashioned from woven reeds stretched on frames of bamboo and thatched with palm and banana leaves. The primary industry is supplying goods for the temple of Uban and the numerous adventurers who sell the priests whatever junk or treasures they manage to spirit out of the jungles. Shipping is the second largest industry, since Pitsh imports a lot of grain, cloth, and metals. The temple defrays some of their costs by exporting spices, fruits, and nuts.

That's a good start. I came up with the 10,000 number by using The Domesday Book. That number is based on northern Europe, so it's probably a bit on the low side, but we're still talking about a community based on peasant farming and muscle power, so I doubt it's that far off. The page also tells me that my city is roughly 165 acres in size. But what's in those 165 acres?

Finding data on the dimensions of Iron Age dwellings is an exercise in frustration. First, these places were not exactly built to plan or firmly regulated codes. But beyond that, nobody really seems to talk about it. However, I do have the Handbook to Life in Ancient Mesopotamia by Stephen Bertman. Yes, ancient Mesopotamia is a mostly arid environment, and Pitsh is in a jungle, but the basic architectural style, “a central roofed courtyard around which smaller rooms would be grouped”, is pretty similar to what's been the fashion in India for thousands of years. So I feel pretty good about using this book as a resource. If you feel strongly about it, feel free to buy me the Mayan one, or preorder the Indian one. ;)

Anyway, the book I do have says this about the dimensions of these houses:

In ancient Babylon, such a courtyard might have measured something like 8 by 18 feet or as much as 17 by 45 feet, giving the overall house plan a rectangular shape.

Ok, not everything you might like to know, but it's a start. If we assume the courtyard is a third of every dimension, that gives us buildings that range from 24' x 54' up to 51' x 135'. These are probably on the large side, honestly, but we'll go with them for now.

Here's some interesting math based on this. If we assume our city is laid out in a perfect grid, with 6 feet of clearance on every side of a house for streets/alleys (and simplifying our dimensions on the smallest dwelling to 30' x 60', making each 1,800 square feet), our 165 acre city can hold up to 3,993 of the smallest homes, or roughly 2.5 people per home. Obviously, there's going to be a LOT more to this city than just small homes.

Ok, so how many people did live in one of these houses? Unfortunately, my handbook doesn't say, so I'm going to go ahead and say that a man and woman who marry are expected to move out on their own; no extended families in the same home. Besides, with much of the population moving to Pitsh, rather than having grown up there, the rest of the family is probably back in the old country. So these families will tend to be small. Within the walls, the average burgher family will be eight strong: the burgher and his wife, their three children, plus two apprentices and a servant or slave. Outside the walls, it's probably six, with the married couple having four children but no servants. There will, of course, be lots of folks who don't live this way, larger and smaller families, plus the priests, the freebooters, and larger slave gangs that might work the docks or for architects. So within the walls, we're looking at something like 875 families. If we round the footprint of each family to 2,000 square feet (just to keep the math easy), we end up with a total area of 1,750,000 square feet, or a little over 40 acres making these homes take up roughly a quarter of the city. That leaves lots of room for markets, docks, warehouses, orchards and fields, temples, brothels, taverns, inns...

But we don't need to make much room for workshops and the like. Most of these burghers probably work out of their homes, with space set aside for practicing their trade. The Domesday Book page gives us a nice spread of trades that might be found in our city, but Pitsh isn't your usual sort of place. The primary businesses are supporting a priesthood dedicated to knowledge and learning, and supporting the ships that bring necessities from civilized lands. So I'm thinking that papyrus farming is probably a bigger business in Pitsh than demographics based on northern Europe are likely to represent. But they'll still need buckle makers and sandal makers, tailors and fishmongers. Actually, there are likely to be more than the usual 8 fishmongers, since this is a coastal port city.

And this post is already huge, so we'll stop here and talk about drawing the actual map tomorrow. Unless I run out of time. ;p

Who are the People in Your Neighborhood?

I was a little surprised to see this over at Grognardia:

There can be no nameless NPCs, not even the guy at the general store who sells you iron spikes and bullseye lanterns. He needs a name, a personality, and at least a hint of a life outside of his interactions with the PCs. All of that is the stuff from which future adventures can be written and are every bit as important as stocking your megadungeon.

I can't say why this surprised me, but it did. I've been playing this way for decades now, allowing the PCs to build personal webs of association and alliance (and antipathy) with the people who live and work and love and fight around them. It makes the world feel more real, it gives the PCs something to care about and allows me to craft conflicts that the players will actually be interested in.

Poor Oddysey got a session-full of meeting the locals last Thursday. It started with her making this observation: “I continue east, though with the luck we've had so far, civilization will consist of a horde of angry bandits or something.“

She wasn't far off the mark. East of where they washed up was a hidden cove where a large gang of pirates had built their base. The good news was that most of the pirates were away on their ships, pillaging and plundering and all of that. The bad news was, that still left over a hundred women, children, and semi-retired pirates to hold down the fort. More than enough to handle a dwarf all on her own on a strange shore.

After skillfully dodging the small scouting party sent to investigate the funeral pyre the heroes had lit the day before to consume the body of a fellow traveler slain in the storm that shipwrecked them, Oddysey's dwarf came upon the base itself. Now, I'd envisioned the party maybe trying to steal supplies from the pirates, or just going around them, pushing deeper into the jungle to avoid being seen (and quite likely stumbling upon jungle-dwelling kobolds in the process).

Players, of course, never do what you expect. Rukmini marched right into the village and asked if she could have some water and maybe trade labor for a place to stay.

Yeah, I should have seen that one coming. She had no idea they were pirates; it's not like they had a big sign over the place saying “Seekret Pirat Baz” or something. And maybe Oddysey had read about the influence of Anne McCaffery's work on my campaigns. Regardless, Rukmini got to meet Myret, matriarch of the base and de facto leader while the captains are away, work with Jebin the peg-legged blacksmith, and get a promise from his grandson Kip to teach her the rudiments of sailing.

Now, Labyrinth Lord, like Moldvay/Cook Basic/Expert before it, doesn't come with a built-in skill system. But Rukmini is a dwarf with a family background in brewing. So it made sense to say she could help Jebin repair a few broken machetes and other iron tools, as well as do a bit of work on their still. It also made sense that she wouldn't know much about sailing. No rolls were made on any of this. They simply were not needed. The smithing was very basic stuff, just minor repairs that any apprentice should have been able to handle on their own. And, after a brief '80s style montage, Rukmini will have mastered the basics of sailing and will have increased her knowledge of knots, weather, seabirds, fishing, and the like.

Finally, she helped the locals fend off an attack of angry snappers, aggressive turtle-humanoids, so it wasn't all drinking rum and singing sea-chanteys. (The village, by the way, got very luck in that attack. Two-dozen snappers should have been enough to level the place, but they rolled poorly and attacked without any sort of organization. Which is probably just as well.)

Next week, we'll start the game with Rukmini working with the pirates. Just how strong that relationship is remains to be seen. The dwarf brings some useful skills, but can she be trusted? And is she ready to trust a bunch of pirates? Only time will tell...

Fairytales and Hamsters

I've just added a new blog on the list to the right: A Hamsterish Hoard of Dungeons and Dragons. I'm not quite sure what the adjective "hamsterish" means in this case, but I do find the content very interesting. It's new goodies for BECMI/Rules Cyclopedia D&D, primarily monsters, but sometimes spells or other treats.

That would be neat enough on its own, but I'm also intrigued by a theme I'm noticing in the recent posts. I have no idea if this is temporary, or even a conscious decision on Taichara's part, but where most of us playing with older versions of D&D are embracing a more Swords & Sorcery motif, or wallowing in Dark Fantasy, Taichara's creations have a strong fairytale feel to them. Here's an example of a new magic-user spell that illustrates what I mean:

Vine Truth
Range: 0
Duration: 1 turn
Effect: One conjured flower for divining truth

This spell produces a small coiling vine that wraps around the wrist of the Magic-User, ending in a showy blossom held between the fingertips. Until the spell's duration runs out, if an individual within 30' of the Magic-User knowingly tells a lie, a petal will fall from the blossom to signal the untruth.

And check out this description of the thorn dragon:

Their name comes from their scales: mottled brown and rust-red, edged in green and rose -- and each one's tip drawn out into a long, curved thorn.

I can't quite see Frazetta illustrating this beastie, as most of his monsters tend towards the smoky and dreamy, and glisten wetly. But I could certainly imagine what one of the Pre-Raphaelites might make of it.

Romance, Sex and D&D: the College Years

(Part One of this series is here.)

Things changed radically in the game I ran in college. My college crew was probably the best group I've ever played with. Their skill at the game was exceptional, their styles (mostly) meshed very well with mine, and their interests took the game in directions I'd never considered before.

The biggest difference, I think, came from the girls outnumbering the guys. Most of them were already very familiar with 2e (this was the early '90s) and at least a few of them had experience with 1e as well. They also came from different literary traditions. The guys I played with in high school were fairly avid readers, and we'd enjoyed most of the same books: Tolkien and Brust, Moorcock and A Young Boy's King Arthur, Lovecraft and Rosenberg. We were not nearly as steeped in “the classics” of the Old School as some (I didn't read any Lieber until college), but we had our literary models and struggled hard to bash D&D into a shape that could play them, as the whim took us.

The ladies of my college game brought a different literary background with them. They shared a number of the classic influences like Tolkien, but added names like Bradley, Hambly, McCaffrey, and Lackey. I'd read from a few of those names before, so I had some ground to stand on there, but what really rocked the boat was what they brought with them from romance novels.

Romance is the number one selling genre in bookstores. It dwarfs even combined sci-fi and fantasy sales. Today, most nerds have a passing familiarity with the conventions of romance, thanks to folks like Joss Whedon, Stephenie Meyer, and the emergence of paranormal romance, which have brought them more into the mainstream (or, at least, what passes for mainstream among nerds). It wasn't so much the case back then, but the process had already started.

Gents, if you haven't cracked the cover on a full-blown romance novel, understand that you are missing an entire world of story structures out there. Romance novels have their own styles of pacing and conflict, an entire vocabulary of emotional states and expected conventions for their ebb and flow. And these books are not the halcyon daydreams you might imagine they'd be. Your female junior high classmates were reading books chock full of all the topics you've been taught to avoid in polite company: rape and incest, blackmail and character assassination. Yes, some are light-hearted romps, but others delve into a level of brutality that might even eclipse the other Brian Murphy's Top 10 Fantasy Battles list. (The historical romances tend to be the worst. I read one based on the life of William Shakespeare which described in agonizing detail the experiences of a character who is buried alive.)

So when I knocked down the walls and, in effect, announced that the campaign was sandbox-style (though we didn't have that vocabulary back then), sex and romance took prominent roles in the game. No longer relegated to a few laughs while we celebrated in town between adventures, time and effort and detail were expended on pursuing or luring the opposite sex. What are his interests? What is his favorite color? What sort of women does he prefer for marriage, and what sort for a tumble in the hay? What is his favorite scent?

And we went very Old School with this. The dice nearly disappeared as we played out the give-and-take of romantic conflict, a conversation of blades played out with social conventions, fashion, politics, and raw sex appeal. (Anonymous, this is a critical point in understanding the difference between 4e and Old School play. In 4e, this sort of thing might be boiled down to a single skill roll, or perhaps a skill challenge. Was the way we played it out time consuming? Absolutely. But “non-fun”? Oh, Hell no! Detailing the outfits and buying the presents and planning the parties was the fun! But I'll have a more detailed post on the topics you bring up over the next week or so.)

We still rolled for pregnancy, but now some of the PCs were trying to get knocked up. Issues of fertility, birth control, and motherhood came into the game. What do elves, who have so few children, think about a mother or father who leaves an infant with family in order to save a human city from destruction? Can a polymorphed dragon get a human woman pregnant? What happens to a pregnancy if the mother drinks a potion of speed? What if she contracts lycanthropy?

Anything and everything was pretty much fair game for that campaign. Some of the PCs were bisexual and others strictly hetero. Some eagerly played the field while others sought exclusive relationships. Virginity became a noteworthy (as in, we noted it on the character sheets) stat as we played with ideas on why dragons and unicorns find it important. And we explored topics that would make Carcosa look like a Sunday School coloring book. (For example, near the end of the campaign, one of the PCs ended up marrying the arch-lich Vekna for political reasons. But that's a whole story in itself...)

Keep in mind that none of this was the primary focus of the campaign. The PCs still foiled the plots of scheming wererats, battled orc raiders, dared the hidden fortresses of necromancers, and slew dragons. They played an important role in returning the rightful High King to his throne. They hoarded treasure and leveled up. The campaign lasted for years, even beyond our graduations from college. Level limits were reached and railed against. Orcus was slain on his home plane and a god was destroyed. It was D&D in every way that anyone who has played the game would instantly recognize. But it also warped into something so very much more than the ordinary.

Romance, Sex and D&D: the High School Years

James Edward Raggi IV (who has the most fun name to say in all of gamingdom) recently waxed verbose on the topic of Sexuality and D&D. He then invited comments on the topic, posing a handful of interesting questions. Of course, mention was soon made of the juvenile antics of teen boys playing the game, which made me think of the halcyon days of my own youth. And that made me question certain assumptions about our gaming from those days.

The assumption appears to be that sexuality is played as a lark and a joke, and works to further the power fantasies of young men with easy conquests of exotic beauties. Much could be written about that, but, at least in our case, it wasn't true, and judging by some of the stuff I've seen on the 'net, it wasn't terribly true for others, either.

First of all,yes, romance was all but non-existent. When it did happen, it was between NPCs, and was the subject of much lampooning and MST3King (long before there was an MST3K). And yes, it was all about casual romps (“hook ups” as they call 'em these days) and yes, it was pretty much governed by a series of dice rolls. But the results of those rolls bear a bit of investigation, I think.

First was the seduction roll. Do you manage to sweet-talk the object of your affection into bed? (We had one female player in those games, so it wasn't always the barmaid or Duke's daughter being wooed.) Sometimes that was followed by a roll which described the quality of the experience. But after that came an entire series of rolls that just invited disaster. Rolls for disease, rolls to see if she got pregnant, followed by a roll to see if you woke up alone with all your coin or a random magic item stolen.

Sex, in short, was dangerous.

And this pretty much mirrored how we saw it back then. Like delving into dungeons, sex was thrilling and risky, a matter for much preparation and planning, but to be tackled with swashbuckling abandon and enthusiasm. The rewards were found primarily in the daring of the deed rather than any outcome to be expected from it. It was hardly the stuff you'd assume to find in male teenage fantasies and yet it fit the character of our games perfectly. Maybe it was the risky nature of the games we played back then, or just something about the '80s that shaped the character of our games. Maybe it's different today?

Dawn Treader to Sail After All

AICN reports that Fox is picking up where Disney left off in the Narnia series. However, it's not all sunshine and roses:

I’m sure many will share my level of excitement as the studio behind “Eragon” is now helping to steer the adventures of the plucky Pevensie clan.

The first Fox entry in the saga will be “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.” Fox and Walden are aiming for a $140 million budget, considerably less money than was employed by the two Disney chapters.

I'm cautiously optomistic, considering how much fun the first two were.

John Carter of Mars News from AICN

"Quint" of AICN has posted some "John Carter of Mars" news from the Santa Barbara Film Festival:

I was able to attend a luncheon before the panel and sat with Tom McCarthy and Andrew Stanton. Of course John Carter of Mars had to come up. He also elaborated on the panel, but here’s what’s going on with JOHN CARTER OF MARS:

- It is live action.

- “It is huge, it is exciting, it scares the crap out of me. It’s either going to make me or break me.”

- It is NOT a Pixar movie, rather a Disney film. However Stanton’s creative team from Pixar are all still involved.

- The style is going to be very real, not highly stylized. He said that 20 some years ago that version could have been made, but since Star Wars and a whole glut of science fiction and fantasy films have ripped off giant portions of JCOM over the years the only option he sees is doing a straight up, realistic version of the story. He described it as if it was a National Geographic crew that stumbled across a preserved civilization while exploring a cave. Very real, but awe-inspiring.

- He is not planning nor wanting to shoot it 3-D (thank God… I love James Cameron, and I think AVATAR is going to be amazing, but I’m getting tired of every big event movie being 3-D), but thinks Disney might want to push him towards it.

- Stanton has been a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs since he was a kid, so while he won’t have the same kind of development time on this one as he had on his animated movie he looks at it as him living with the story in his brain for 40 plus years instead of the 6-8 of his animated films.

- He has his second draft done and will be casting soon.

- John Carter WILL be a Civil War soldier.

He's got more on general screenwriting and like topics from the festival.

I Wanna Story...

This started as a reply to Aaron Nuttall's latest post on his blog “Like Being Read to From a Dictionary”. Like Mr. Nuttall, I'm always sticking in story where it doesn't belong. I'm the guy who loses a game of Settlers of Catan because I start thinking about how the farmboy in my second village, named Chatterins, is pining for a wealthy burgher's daughter in my first village, now a city called Umberlin, while she secretly plots her revenge against the Black Baron who killed her favorite uncle... And suddenly Kimm has the longest road and wins the game.

I love board game night, but I'm not sure why the others let me play with them. Maybe because I don't win?

Anyway, Aaron is running into similar trouble with his Old School Swords & Wizardry game:

The problem with this in old-school play--or any play, I suppose, where the characters haven't got "plot immunity"--is that the characters are going to die. A lot. If they're no longer around to carry your plot threads what happens to your game?

It fizzles, stumbles, stops. Or, that's what happened last night. So what I have to figure out now is how we can think about the PCs and their roles in the game so that their deaths don't hollow out the whole affair--so that there is something left behind when a character's motivation is lost.

I don't think you need to toss story overboard when you're playing an Old School game. What I do as DM is adopt a more reactive role. To do this, you have to let go of the reins, stop trying to craft the story, and instead be the little kid in your footie pajamas saying, “I wanna story with a witch and a troll and a gerbil princess!”

Or you can think of yourself as Drew Carey in the American version of “Whose Line is it Anyway?” You throw a bunch of props and situations on the stage, then sit back and laugh as the players entertain you. ;)

The key is to give up any semblance of “directorial control”. You're not the author, you're the instigator. You set things up, but the players create the story from the bits and pieces you've left laying around for them.

The old adventure B2 – Keep on the Borderlands is a classic example of how to do this. The area described by the module includes the Keep, a mad hermit, some bandits, and the Caves of Chaos. The Caves themselves are a sprawling mish-mash of different humanoid and human threats, most inimical to one another. The entire module describes a terrain rife with conflicting interests and goals, with various groups on the verge of violence against one another. It's like a giant pile of fireworks doused in petrol. And into this volatile environment, you unleash the PCs to wreak havoc and chaos.

Your job as DM in this sort of thing isn't to make sense of the PCs actions, or to plot out arcs of rising and falling action. You instead focus on your characters, the NPCs, and how they react to what the players do to mangle the NPCs' carefully cultivated status quo or clever plans. Some may try to recruit the PCs. Others may try to kill them. Maybe they'll try to send the PCs to savage their foes, either by bribery or trickery. Maybe they'll turtle, hoping the storm raised by the PCs will pass, or maybe they'll try to run away. What the NPCs will do should probably depend rather heavily on what the players do. Usually, a disaster for one faction is a boon for another. Since you don't know what the PCs are going to do yet, you have to pretty flexible, ready to think on your feet and shift direction at a moment's notice.

And yes, the results might be a nasty mish-mash that doesn't look anything like a traditional story. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. The goal, as always, is to have fun. You and the players work together to find out what happens. They are not passive recipients of story and neither, really, are you. Chaos and uncertainty will be rampant, but because the story is greater than any one character, you don't need to worry about granting anyone plot immunity. As in the real world, the cemeteries of your fantasy realms will be full of “indispensable” folks. The loss of one is just another random bit of chaos, certain to change the plans of everyone involved.

Playing with Hit Points

As an introduction to his tinkerings with armour class, Matthew Stanham of Silver Blade Adventures has quite a bit to say about the vagueness of hit points:

In fact, the truly abstract nature of hit points allows the game master the freedom to determine the extent to which realism will be a concern. When a character loses twenty of thirty hit points to a single attack, it is up to the game master to describe the event, and also to decide if there are any effects beyond their loss. To put it simply, the value of the abstraction is in its ambiguity.

I've tried to embrace this vagueness in my Moldvay/Cook/Labyrinth Lord hack game, starting with my own riff on Robert Fisher's Classic D&D Injury Table. But a lot of these little details depend on how you play the game, especially in a text-chat game.

One source for the assumption that every roll of the d20 represents a swing of your character's weapon comes from what we call that roll: a to-hit roll. Right there, I think, is the source of most of our assumptions about "swings" and how hit points are a measure of physical trauma and the like. I can't do much about the decades of labeling TSR and WotC have used, but when I gaming I try to remember to call it an attack roll, and not a to-hit roll. It's a little thing, but I hope it helps to set the right tone and expectations.

I take this same attitude to describing what happens in a fight. Here's an example from Thursday night, when our heroes faced off against a pair of massive, turtle-like humanoids:

The second, smaller creature hisses angrily as it charges at the human. It stabs at him with its spear, again with surprising speed and dismaying strength, and it's all Maythur can do to ward off that sharp flint point with his shortsword. (Maythur loses 2 hit points.)

Again, I don't talk about gashed wounds or near misses. This is ten seconds of combat, a series of dodges and ripostes, feints and slashes. And my models, as much as is possible, are the pulp greats of yesteryear, such as REH:

Her sword darted past a blade that sought to parry, and sheathed six inches of its point in a leather-guarded midriff. The man gasped agonizedly and went to his knees, but his tall mate lunged in, in ferocious silence, raining blow on blow so furiously that Valeria had no opportunity to counter. She stepped back coolly, parrying the strokes and watching for her chance to thrust home. He could not long keep up that flailing whirlwind. His arm would tire, his wind would fail; he would weaken, falter, and then her blade would slide smoothly into his heart. ("Red Nails" - 1936)

The danger with this sort of thing is being too vague. Does the following passage convey that the turtle-man has lost more than three-quarters of his hit points?

Rukmini's attack blindsides the enraged turtle-man, and her first strike bites deep. Within moments, it is now on the defensive, fending off attacks from both of you. The creature, however, seems to go into a berserk rage, slamming its bulk into the dwarf in retaliation and slashing at her with it spear. (Rukmini loses 5 hit points.)

The nice thing about numbers is their lack of ambiguity. Everyone can tell the dwarf is hurting, and just how badly. But I don't think it's very clear that her foe is on his last legs, but one more strike away from death. This is one of those things that constantly challenges the DM in a game like this, and you have to always be honing your technique and varying your style, both to keep things fresh and find new ways to convey what's actually going on, without allowing things to devolve into "You miss, it hits for 5, you hit, roll damage..."

I Was Drowned, I Was Washed-up and Left for Dead...

Huzzah! Bang the drum and sound the trumpet! My Moldvay/Cook/Labyrinth Lord hack game finally got started on Thursday night. I'll leave it to the players to decide how much of a success it was. I certainly had fun playing with them. (And yes, there are still spaces available. Email me at trollsmyth-at-yahoo-dot-com if you can play between 7 PM and 11 PM Central time on Thursday nights.)

Starting a sandbox game is always a challenge. It's too easy for the group to be paralyzed by the limitless potential of wide-open spaces. So sometimes it's best to narrow their focus a bit. For this group, I started with a classic ploy from the pulps: a shipwreck.

Nothing too original there, and I'll be the first to admit it. All the great pulp heroes were shipwrecked at least once in their careers, from Conan to Elric to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. A shipwreck, though, gives the group a certain amount of direction, without limiting their choices. There are things they must do: find food and water, secure shelter, and find out where the heck they are. Then they need to get back to civilization, if possible, and if they can't, then they need to prepare to live without it.

That all said, their options for tackling these challenges are nearly limitless. They have all the ocean's bounty, plus whatever can be found on the land they've washed up on. Do they fish? Try to build a new boat? Strike inland? Hug the shoreline? Do they build a sturdy shelter, or just scavenge enough bits to make minimal but portable shelters? Do they light a signal fire and hope help finds them, or do they try to remain unnoticed? It's the best of both worlds: survival demands they focus and work together, but doesn't dictate their actions. There are choices to be made, and most of them are of the common-sense or creative-thinking sort that don't require dice rolls, which is perfect for Old School play.

Still, mere survival is not the stuff adventures are made of, so you need to be sure you've got a little something fantastical nearby, to remind them that this is a world of mystery and magic and danger. The shipwrecked heroes of the pulps didn't have to wander far before they found a new adventure to challenge them, and your players shouldn't, either.

So there we are, shipwrecked, with their first foes defeated and their first treasures looted, though not without some hit points lost. And, oh dear, the cleric didn't survive the shipwreck. We can only wonder what fate (aka their sadistic DM) has in store for them next week...

A Bit of Old School Awesome

So after my last downer post on the Old School, how a bit of Old School cool? Keeping in mind Jeff's recent post on destroying artifacts, check out this post at RPG.net from Sac2:

And can you believe it? The paladin is already asking if there is a holy sword there. My response?

"Don't get ahead of yourself. An item like a holy sword is a quest all unto itself, and ye won't be finding one in the temple. And ye certainly won't be able to handle such a quest until you are level 10 or so, and that's with lots of allies."


In my mind I'm already thinking I'll make his quest for a holy sword go something like this:

Go to White Plume Mountain and acquire Blackrazor. Manage to escape the efreets with it, the whole time not touching it. Then travel to the frozen mountain lair of Frostbyte, an ancient white dragon. Get Frostbyte to breathe on the sword and shatter it with a hammer blessed by Foresetti. Take the pieces to the high temple of Hephaestus where a new sword will be forged. Out of pure evil a new sword of holiness will be created.


All in all, the one thing that I forgot about the most about my old skool D&D days? Often one of the members of the party or the party itself will do something that sparks a whole new side adventure and I'll be quick to modify or outright ignore large portions of the module itself. Ah, the way Gary intended....

Bad DMing the Old School Way

Badelaire over at Tandards & Broadswords has a few things to say about the dice-are-evil style of gaming:

However, one argument that I will make for this older approach is the old adage that you only take a gamble when the stakes are worth it. In other words, leave to chance only that which you must leave to chance, and find ways of making sure everything else is a "sure thing'. If you can figure out how to find the hidden widget or talk your way past the palace guards without leaving it up to a potentially disastrous roll of the dice, so much the better. It'll require more engagement from both the Players and the GM, but in the end, isn't "engagement" in the game part of the fun?

I certainly agree, but there are hazards to this sort of play, and they're not always obvious. For instance, Darkwing (of Arcadia Prime fame) comments:

If I tell the DM I want to do X, Y, and Z, and he says "doesn't work, doesn't work, doesn't work" it gets frustrating. Even if he intends to railroad me, the act of making me roll to see if I succeed at least provides the illusion that there's a nonzero chance of success.

Yeah, that would be frustrating, but it's hardly the biggest risk you face with that sort of gaming. There was another sort of DM we all learned to recognize and avoid back in those days who were even worse than the “doesn't work” sort. When playing with this sort of unpleasant DM, you'd lay out your idea and the DM would just nod, letting you know that your plan was in action. And then, at the worst possible time, you would find out that something that should have been blatantly obvious to your characters rendered your plan inoperable. Maybe the soft sand of the seaside caves was too weak to hold your tripwire, or the door you needed to keep the minotaur out was flimsy and rotted through. Sometimes this was our fault. We just hadn't been paying enough attention when the DM described the room. More often than not, the DM would simply shrug at our protests and say, “You never asked what sort of shape that door was in.”

There's a fine line between being thorough and pixel-bitching. Itemizing every object in a room and going over it with a fine-toothed comb might be a smart move for the CSI team, but fun adventuring it is not. There's a reason the TV show reduces such scenes to a montage. Sometimes, yeah, it makes sense to pay a bit more attention to the evil baron's desk, or the floor leading up to the ancient altar upon which sits the golden idol. But not every room or door deserves such scrutiny. If there's something that ought to be blatantly obvious to the most casual observer, then the DM should mention it. And if the players seem to have forgotten that fact as they put their plan into action, the good DM will point it out again, making sure they understand the implications for their cleverness.

Note that this is not the same as saying “doesn't work”. Instead, the DM is saying, “so long as this condition exists, your plan won't work.” Sometimes, the players can change things so the plan does work. Sometimes, they'll have to come up with a new plan. But the DM doesn't just say no. And the good DM doesn't smirk behind the screen while something that should be blatantly obvious unravels all the clever thinking of the players.

Trollsmyth Plays 4e

Surely this is one of the signs of an an impending apocalypse, no?

Seriously, I had fun. The occasion was the monthly meet of The Austin Dungeon & Dragons Meetup Group. Nobody else volunteered to run anything, so a friendly gent named Christian volunteered to run a short game using 2nd level characters. Many of us didn't come with characters in hand, and a few of us had no practical experience playing 4e, so the pregens he had were a great help.

Now, I can't call this an adventure. We played for roughly five hours and that was enough time to almost finish two combats. Keep in mind, however, that some of us were very new to the game, and there were nine (!!!) players that poor Christian had to run a game for. So it's certainly not his fault things moved so slowly. I can understand why they say 4e is optimized for parties of five to six. Luckily, I got to sit next to a very knowledgeable and friendly gent who was glad to share with me the tricks of getting the most from my eladrin ranger.

And I'm extremely thankful for his help, because otherwise, I was utterly lost. This was not D&D as I've known it. Keep in mind, this was just a bit of combat versus kobolds and then dragons. We really didn't have time for an adventure per se. Just some fights. So I'm certain that colored my experience.

That said, let me give you an example. At one point, my ranger was claw-claw-gored by a very young blue dragon. This took me to -12 hit points, but that's not enough to kill you in 4e. Thanks to the quick help of a cleric, I was back up to +13 hit points next round. If I'd grabbed my bow and jumped to my feet, I couldn't shoot arrows because I was face-to-face still with the monster. However, I could use one of my At-Will powers, Nimble Strike, to shift a square away from the dragon before attacking with my bow. Shifting was important, because if I'd just moved, I would have incurred an attack-of-opportunity. However, the guy helping me figured out that if, instead of standing up and moving, I just used my eladrin teleport power to bampf myself upright and five squares away, I would be able to invoke my Twin Strike power, allowing me to attack twice instead of just once that round.

I've had conversations about stuff like this all the time when playing a wargame. My brief flirtation with Warhammer 40k was chock full of this sort of thing. But I can't remember ever discussing things like this when playing D&D before. The emphasis in 4e is clearly on the G of RPG. I'm not sure that getting to play through a skill challenge would have changed this impression, because those seem to be a lot of the same thing: looking to the rules of the game, rather than the setting and situation, as both a source for challenges as well as the means for overcoming them.

Don't get me wrong here. I'm not saying this is bad or wrong or even badwrong fun. It's just not what I'm thinking about when I'm looking to play D&D. A lot of this stems, I'm sure, from starting the game with Moldvay's Basic. The dice were evil in that game. Every time you rolled for initiative, chances were very, very good that a PC was going to die. That's just the way the game was built back then. And we, knowing that, did everything we could to avoid rolling the dice. The mechanics were what we turned to in those odd moments when they were needed. They were not the bulk of play, even when we were in a dungeon. And when we did get into combat, it was only after lengthy preparations to make sure all the advantages were with us. We didn't roll dice or use the rules to set up our trip-wires, dig our pits, or block doorways with chairs or tables or various dungeon detritus. So this straight-up, charge in with swords swinging and arrows flying was bizarre enough for me without wondering how many standard or move actions my attack would use.

Would I play again? Yep, I had fun. The group was great too, lots of friendly folks, ready to lend a hand or answer a question. (And I understand that not everyone in the group is all about 4e, and that older versions are also played from time-to-time.) But 4e isn't likely to become my go-to game for fantasy RPGs. It's just doesn't mesh with my preferences. I'm not surprised, either.

I also ran into a very old friend who had almost as much influence on how I game today as Ed Greenwood. He's running 3.5e and just had an opening appear in his group. I'm very curious to see how that game compares to 4e, since I gave up on 3e back before 3.5 was released.

Catspaw is Back!

Catspaw, Storn Cook's swords-and-sorcery comic strip is back on the intrawebs! Things fell apart at its old home, so he's moved it over to WebComics Nation. He's doing a page a week, and he's started over from the beginning, so he hasn't quite caught up with where we left off last time. But it's still a good place to either refresh your memory or start reading it for the first time.

Playing with Languages

I just sent the following info to my players in my hacked Moldvay/Cook/Labyrinth Lord game.

The primary language spoken throughout the world is Common, a trader language based heavily on he languages of the Lizardfolk empires. This was started by merchants, but has acquired the aggressive support of the gods who hope to use it as a way to forge closer ties between all the peoples and nations of the world. All PCs start off speaking Common.

Human characters probably also speak their native tongue. There are dozens of human languages scattered across globe. Finding someone else who speaks the same language, however, is pretty rare once you travel beyond a few hundred miles from your home town.

Common Fey, or just Fey, is spoken by all the races of Fairy. These include elves, gnomes, pixies, nixies, centaurs, satyrs, dryads and the like, plus trolls. If your character is an elf or gnome, they also speak this language. Many human magic-users learn Fey, since a lot of work was done on the arcane sciences during the age of the Empire of the Elves.

High Fey was the courtly tongue of the Empire of the Elves. It is an extremely complex and nuanced language. It was primarily used for legislative communications and decrees. However, it also is useful to magic-users wishing to learn more of the secret magics of the elven emperors.

The lizardfolk have their own language, unified at the time of their first great empire. There are many dialects and local slang, but generally, if you speak Lizardfolk, you can talk to anyone else who speaks it. This is the second most popular language, after Common.

Nagpa is a dead language, mostly because all the Nagpa are supposed to be dead. These vulture-headed humanoids were spawned by Tiamat to organize her children before the Third War of the Monsters. The Nagpa were obsessed with magic and plundered all the peoples of the world for their magical secrets. It's thus a very popular language among magic-users, especially those who live on the shores of the Turquoise Sea.

Beyond her experiment with the Nagpa, however, Tiamat was never really big on unity or organization. So her other children almost all speak their own languages. The most common of these are Orc (spoken by orcs and ogres and most giants), Goblin (spoken by kobolds, goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears), Gnoll (spoken by gnolls, ghouls, and ghasts), and Dragon (spoken by dragons, wyverns, and the more intelligent hydras). Most of the rest of the monsters who can speak have their own language. On the island of Dreng Bdan, goblins and orcs are the most common creatures seen. Tribes of gnolls are known to live on the mainland of Idumma.

Addendum: Two things I forgot to mention. First, High Fey is spoken only in royal courts or other rarefied social strata. No character gets High Fey for free.

Second, yes, there is a Dwarven tongue and script. While the dwarves do use a more archaic form of their language for formal occasions, it's not so different from their vernacular as to comprise its own language.

Playing with Equipment

I just sent this as part of an email to the players in my Moldvay/Cook/Labyrinth Lord game. I'm not posting the entire equipment list, because it would be at least as long as my post about magic.

The equipment list is mostly compiled from 2nd edition AD&D sources, because 2e had the most extensive equipment lists. When running a game with one foot in the traditions of Old School gaming, you can expect the players to ask about buying the most outlandish stuff, from nets and block-and-tackle to bags of fine soot and ornate jade jars of khol. It's just easier if we've got a large list of prices right out of the gate, because no list will, in the end, be extensive enough.

And so the list sent to them has the usual metal mirrors and backpacks, as well as cosmetics, triremes, and eunuchs. Because you just don't know...

Finally, here's the list of generic equipment your characters can expect to buy whenever they're in a relatively large city or port. Obviously, many of these things won't be available in small villagers or the wilderness.

A few things bear mentioning. First, you'll notice a lack of horses. No horses in this world. Instead, there are a handful of beasts that are ridden or used for transport. Camels, mammoths, and elephants probably don't require much discussion. The kimimutsch is a large, flightless predatory bird. Think giant carnivorous ostriches with bad attitudes. If you saw the movie "10,000 BC", you know what we're talking about here. If not, Google phorusrhacids. The tschal is a large, plodding, four-footed herbivorous lizard that generally stands 4' at the shoulder. They're not very fast, but they are incredibly strong and are used primarily for pulling carts and working the fields. Warcats are saber-toothed tigers that have been trained to accept riders. They are not generally known for their loyalty; if a warcat and its rider starve, the warcat generally starves last.

Use the weapon and armour costs from the Labyrinth Lord book. You can reduce the cost of any of these items by 10% if you purchase bronze rather than steel versions. Bronze weapons and armour, however, have a tendency to break or fall apart. This generally happens when the DM is feeling malicious. ;)

There are slots still open in this game, and I just lost a player whose schedule was not as open as he thought it was going to be. If you're interested in jumping in, either this week or next, drop me an email at trollsmyth-at-yahoo-dot-com.

Some Things Old are Cool Again

Tuesday seemed to be a day for old heroes to rise again. In addition to Mr. Maliszewski's promising news about the Barsoom movie, we also get the promise of a new Buck Rogers series.

I find the whole webisodes phenomenon very promising. It's long been my opinion that sci-fi and fantasy fans hungering for visual entertainment wwould be best served by doing it themselves rather than waiting for TV networks and movie studios to "get it". Sure, we're teased with a spot of occasional brilliance, like Babylon 5 or Star Wars, but for the most part, we get painful abortions like the Dresden Files or foot-shooting shenanigans of the sort that surrounded Firefly.

We've always said we could do better. Now we've got some folks actually putting their money where their mouths are. Movies and TV shows are complex productions, but that complexity is not insurmountable. I hope this is only the beginning of a new wave of entertainment, divorced from the restraints of the past.

Faster than a Speeding Arrow

Darn it, I keep finding stuff I didn't finish before starting my Moldvay/Cook/Labyrinth Lord hack.

Last night, we rolled up our first two characters. One of them has throwing daggers in his equipment list. And I never said what I was doing about ranged weapons.

In raw Moldvay/Cook, you get one shot per round. With 10 second rounds, that means you get to shoot one arrow every ten seconds.

I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that's a bit ridiculous. Even AD&D's two arrows per round is too slow.

On the other hand, I don't want to let people roll handfuls of dice every time they fire their bow. So here's what I'm doing:

Every ranged weapon has a rate-of-fire which basically says how many you can toss or shoot in a 10 second round. For every additional weapon launched at the enemy in a round, you add +1 to your to-hit roll. If you hit, you roll damage once, no matter how many missiles were used.

Here are the rates-of-fire for standard ranged weapons:

bows: 4 (damage is 2d4)
daggers: 5
hand-axes: 3
spears and javelins: 2
slings: 3 (damage is 1d6)

I'm not listing crossbows because I'm not sure if I'm allowing crossbows in the game in order to reinforce the early Iron Age feel I'm aiming for.

If this means Theophage needs to carry more throwing daggers in his bandoleer, that's just fine. Just don't go crazy (link so NSFW it's a thing of beauty).

Visiting the Tribe

I finally got around to visiting Tribe Comics & Games today. I'd first heard about the store in mid November, but at the time Life was raining great gobbets of flaming poo on my head, and I didn't have time to visit. Today, I took a small wad of Christmas money by the store and burned through it rather quickly.

It's a great little store, and we certainly need one down here, since gaming and comics stores have become rather rare in south Austin (motto: We're all here because were not all there!). It's only two months old so they don't have a big stock of older stuff, but if you really want that sort of thing, there's a great Half Price Books just across the street. The gaming selection at the Half Price is hidden beneath their music, but it's got a nice variety, including a number of 1st edition AD&D books.

Right now, Tribe has the major standbys: D&D 4e, White Wolf's World of Darkness and Exalted, and SJ Games' GURPS. The very friendly gent behind the counter said the turnaround on ordering games they don't have can be as short as 24 to 48 hours. They've also got a lot boardgames, miniatures games, and all the other sorts of things you'd expect in a store like that. And they've got a nice selection of mainstream and indie comics. It's one of the few places where I've asked for Finder and they've known exactly what I was talking about.

I forgot to ask if they did any gaming on the premises. The store seems a touch small for that, but I could see them moving a few of the displays around and opening up the middle area for tables. It's certainly not crowded, and as we've come to expect in the Austin area, the store is well-lit, clean and inviting. They were doing a steady trickle of business the entire time I was there, which bodes well for its future.

If you're on the south side of town, maybe eating at Kerby Lane South Lamar or shopping at Sun Harvest, be sure to stop by Tribe and check them out.

Playing with Character Creation

Things are moving along nicely for my new Moldvay/Cook/Labyrinth Lord hack game. There are still a few spots open if anyone wants to join in. If you did email me already about joining the game and I haven't replied to you, that may mean I missed your email. At least one reply got dumped into my spam folder. Please email me again (trollsmyth at yahoo dot com) or post a reply to this blog entry.

I just sent my players the following message:

Hello,

Thanks again to each of you for your interest in this game. Here follows an outline for character creation. You don't need to follow these steps in order, of course, but I do need each of these steps completed by Wednesday the 14th if at all possible.

Rolling Dice
I've got three options available. Option 1 is meeting with me in OpenRPG to roll the dice using the software's built-in dice roller. This is my preferred option as it gives us all a dry-run on the software, so we can work out any difficulties with the system before we actually start to play. I'm thinking right now we might try to get together this Sunday the 11th at 8 PM central (9 PM eastern). If you'd prefer or need to meet me some other time, let me know and I'm sure we can work something out. We'll be rolling 4d6 and dropping the lowest die rolled for each stat, and then you may arrange them to taste. If you want to do 3d6 in order, I certainly won't stop you, but I'm not requiring it at this point in the game.

The second option, if you don't have time to fuss with OpenRPG, is to let me roll the dice for you. I'll roll with 4d6 and let you know what the scores are.

Finally, if rolling dice is just too much risk for your blood, you can apportion 63 points between the six stats as you see fit, with no stat below 3 and no stat above 18.

Be warned, once you make your choice, you're stuck with it for this character. Future characters, however, can utilize any of the three methods. And yeah, I fully expect that we'll be creating at least a few new characters down the road. More on that later.

Picking a Class
This works pretty much as it's described in the book. There are a few hacks I've made that you need to be aware of, however:

- no thieves or halfings

- dwarves use Constitution, not Strength, as their primary stat

- you may also pick my rogue or gnome as your character's class

- if you do play a magic user, elf, or gnome, keep in mind my hack to spells

- if you decide to play a cleric, you'll need to pick a god. If none of these gods appeal, let me know and we'll work something out.

Give your character the maximum hit points for their class and Constitution bonus. In spite of this and the somewhat forgiving Injury Table I'll be using, I fully expect characters will die in this campaign. So be warned. (Also, in the example, I think I added the character's Constitution bonus to the roll. I won't be doing that in the game.) I do not consider a TPK to be a failure on anyone's part, mine or yours. Heroic last stands have been epic moments in my gaming history. So have been terribly painful and humiliating Oops-es. In either case, we roll up new characters and begin our adventures anew.

Pick an Alignment
This is very different from what's in Moldvay/Cook/LL. More than abstract terms, alignment is a matter of personal alliance. The gods who walk the world are the champions of Law. They wish to impose order upon the world in order to create a golden age of prosperity and peace. Those who feel the gods are a bunch of self-serving tyrants (or, if well-meaning, still not clearly up to the job) rally to the cause of Chaos. Yes, those who follow the gods tend to be more law-abiding, honest, and forthright than those who oppose them, but this is hardly something to be relied on in every case. Those who don't have a strong opinion one way or the other are considered Neutral. There are no alignment languages.

If you don't want to be a Lawful cleric, let me know, and we should be able to work something out. Unless you want to be a Neutral cleric, and then things get very tricky indeed.

Pick a Name
Fairly self-explanatory, I hope.

Give Me a Physical Description
Don't need to go crazy here. Height, weight, sex, hair and eye color, and any distinguishing features, scars or tattoos will do.

Give Me a Background
Again, no need to go crazy. If you really, really want to let your inner Charles Dickens run rampant across the page, feel free, but I make no promises about what I will and won't use.

What I absolutely need are the names and current whereabouts of your character's family, and what your character did before hopping on the boat to Pitsh. Again, you don't need to go into exacting detail, but feel free to elaborate if you want. Here are some quick guidelines.

Humans – Humans are scattered across the world and practice a variety of different cultures and traditions. However, this world is young, and there have not yet been any large human kingdoms or empires. Most humans live in small villages or the city-states that the gods are trying to forge into a unified empire of Law. Some, however, might be refugees from the collapsing Second Empire of the Lizardfolk, where most humans lived as second-class citizens and slaves. Beyond those strictures, however, feel free to let your imagination go wild with this one.

Dwarves – They're not as widespread as the humans, but wherever you'll find mountains or hills rich with ores, you'll probably find a community of dwarves. While the gods seem to favor humans at this time, the dwarves are the most loyal supporters of Law.

Elves – Some elves might be old enough to remember their own great empire. It was destroyed when Tiamat shattered their cities during the Third War Against the Monsters. As punishment for her wanton viciousness, Tiamat was imprisoned within the Red Moon. However, the elves never recovered. Most live in the wilderness, in the places where the Earth and the world of the Fey overlap, and consider the loss of their empire as a caution against hubris. Thus, most elves stand for Chaos.

Gnomes – The gnomes came to the world after the Third War Against the Monsters. Not as long-lived as the elves, none still live who remember their journey from the realms of Fey. They maintain that they came to heal the Earth from the wounds Tiamat inflicted upon him. Even so, there are sometimes surprising tensions between the elves and gnomes. Most gnomes are Neutral, but some are strongly Lawful, and believe Tiamat's children, the monsters, must be eradicated before the Earth can fully heal.

Don't Pick Equipment
I'm not sure yet what equipment list I want to use, but the one in the LL book seems too short to me. I'll let you know about this ASAP. I'm also fiddling with the languages list.

And that should do it, I think. As always, feel free to email if you have any questions.

- Brian

Silver Age Goodness

James Maliszewski has dubbed the period just after what he considers the apex of D&D to be the “Silver Age”, as opposed to the Golden Age that came just before it. Among the hallmarks of this Silver Age is an emphasis on realism:

This is very evident in the pages of Dragon from the period, which, if looked at today, would no doubt seem unduly obsessed with minutiae, such as a "realistic" method of calculating a character's height and weight based on his ability scores or determining how far a character could jump up or across based on the same. "Realism" was a watchword of the Silver Age.

I won't argue with this, and I'm certain it had a strong impact on how I play the game, even today. My first issue of Dragon did have a Holloway painting on the cover, and with articles on how to part heroes from their horded wealth, it's likely the Silver Age was already in full swing by the time I started reading that magazine.

Much of the derision aimed at the Silver Age now appears to focus on the mechanical excesses of the age: using computer software to generate the minutiae of local weather patterns or “not one but two different articles on the physics of falling damage”. There can be no denying that such things filled the pages of Dragon back in those days. But the quest for realism took may different forms.

Among my favorites are the various articles by Katherine Kerr on actual, real-world history. “Who Lives in that Castle?” (#80, December '83, with a cover by Caldwell) described how castles were run, the various roles of their inhabitants, and what you might expect to see them doing on an average day. It was, in short, what happened in the castle after a PC had built it. If the 12th level Lord decided to muster an army and make war upon his neighbors, you could turn to Ms. Kerr's “An Army Travels on its Stomach” (#94, February '85, cover again by Caldwell, but so different from his usual work that you wouldn't guess that from a casual glance) for a primer on muscle-powered logistics. And if you want this army to clash with barbarians from beyond the borders of the civilized world, you might want to peruse her “The Real Barbarians” (#72, April '83, cover again by Caldwell in his more traditional style) for some ideas on how historic barbarians, in this case primarily Goths and Celts, did things.

All of these articles were extremely light in terms of game mechanics. In those days, Dragon was still the magazine of the RPG hobby and not yet a full-time house organ for TSR. Ms. Kerr's articles were clearly written to be used with any game system, and most fell more heavily on the RP side of RPG. There were no stats falconers nor were there random tables for food spoilage. There was, however, a wealth of useful information a DM could use right at the table. Who might have been near the east tower when Lady Maggion was assassinated? Do the PCs have enough time to take the long way around Gritterwood and still arrive before the legions of the Iron Duke? Will a chieftain of the Mammoth Clans better appreciate a gift of iron spearheads or gold jewelry? Sure, you could always make it up if you really needed to, but it was nice to have something to start with, some key to spark the imagination. And for those of us who love verisimilitude, it was handy to know that Charlemagne's ox-drawn wagons rarely bettered an average of twelve miles per day, while the blazingly fast Roman legions could manage closer to twenty.

UPDATE: Similar thoughts from Sir Larkins, with illustrations.

D&D the Trollsmyth Way

Time to get this ball rolling!

I'm going to run my Moldvay/Cook/Labyrinth Lord hack online. I want to do this in real-time text chat. I haven't decided which software I want to use. I'm leaning towards OpenRPG, but I'm also open to suggestions. The best day for me at this point is Thursday nights central time, maybe 7:00 PM till 11:00 PM or so. I'd like to make this a weekly game, or fortnightly at the very least.

I'll of course be using most of the hacks I've discussed here, including dropping thieves for my rogue class, replacing halflings with my gnomes, using my weapon and shield rules, and my hack to magic-user spells. I think I'm going to run cleric magic just as it is in the book for now.

I discovered D&D during that period that Mr. Maliszewski has dubbed the Silver Age. That being the case, while I enjoy hanging out and chatting with the Old School crowd, this won't be a pure Old School game. Orcs and goblins have children and cultures and all of that. Funhouse dungeons will be very, very rare, and will have reasons for being as they are.

That said, this won't be Dragonlance, either. This will be a sandbox campaign in a living world. If the players don't get involved in something, events will run their course. If the PCs do get involved, then anything can happen. I'm aiming towards exploration and dungeon-delving right now, but if the PCs decide they'd rather spend their time in cities or playing politics, I'm game for that as well.

As for tone, I love verisimilitude, but if you've read this blog much, you already know that. If this were an American movie, it would probably get an R rating. I like to challenge my players by tossing moral dilemmas at their characters. The world, especially the monsters in it, know nothing of modern, suburban morality, and care about it even less. No, it won't be Carcosa, but it won't be the A-Team, where hundreds of bullets are fired but no one ever gets hit, either.

The setting is a young world, shared between the gods and titans, though friction between them is always on the rise. Humanity's fortunes are also on the rise, and mankind spreads across the world with the sanction and active aid of the gods, building their cities with, and atop, the ruined masonry of the still-collapsing second empire of the lizard folk.

Across the shallow Turquoise Sea, standing like a sentinel before the hellish continent known as Idumma, rises the jungle-shrouded island Dreng Bdan. The fortress-palace of the short-lived Empire of the Monsters, it was later colonized at the height of the lizard folks' power, when they used it as a base to launch their raids on the wealth of Idumma. Today, it is covered with the ruins of three empires, sheltering all manner of Tiamat's spawn who still seek to free her from the reddish moon that imprisons her. Pirates lurk in Dreng Bdan's coves, plundering the wealth of all peoples who seek to use the Turquoise Sea for trade. Fabulous treasures and the wisdom of fallen empires are horded by pirate lords and twisted monstrosities alike. Adventurers, thieves, and mercenaries now sail for the port of Pitsh on Dreng Bdan's northern coast, eager to claim their share. And that's where our adventures will begin...

If you're interested in playing, drop me an email at trollsmyth-at-yahoo-dot-com, letting me know why this game interests you and what sorts of characters you'd be most interested in playing. I'd like to hold the first game on January 15th.

Steampunk Surprise!

If you look at the artist's links on the right side of this page, you'll see one labeled The Overlord Project. It contains some of the works of a very talented friend of mine named Michael Van Slyke. There hasn't been much action over there until recently, when he published these neat pics of steampunk pistols he crafted (scroll to the bottom). If you haven't taken the time to peruse his page, it's definitely worth a few minutes.

And Now for Something Completely Sartorial...

Some in the non-gaming-blogging world are not too keen on men wearing pointy shoes:

Watching a grown man trip down the sidewalk in court-jester shoes made me giggle. And these style mavens were soooo serious, dahling...

Have men become a group of effeminate elves? The shoes curl up at the point. It’s embarrassing for women to wear those sorts of shoes. On men, it takes 50 million years of mammalian evolution to suppress the primal urge to laugh and point.

Fashion, however, is utterly a matter of taste, as is most of what we call masculine or feminine. As far as this native-born Texan is concerned, you can take my pointy-toed, 1.5 to 2-inch heeled, decoratively embroidered boots after you've pried them from my cold, dead hands.

Fashions change. Today, the Utilikilt folks are waging a guerrilla marketing campaign to convince Americans that kilts are manly. The ancient Romans of the early Republic would have needed no convincing, however, as they felt that "bifurcated" garments like pants were feminine. They also felt the toga was the final word in conservative, serious clothing and wore socks with their sandals. Sometimes, the more things change, the more they really do, in fact, change.

Clothing and fashion are fun to play with in RPGs, too. Want to make a place seem a bit alien? Have people dress oddly. Pierced noses, formal tattoos, body paint, and odd headgear can all lend an air of the exotic. It's even more fun if those odd twists of fashion actually make sense. Things like pattens or chaps make sense in the right environments.

Unfortunately, you can take it too far. Nobody wants to read your five pages explaining the fashion faux pas of the various lands and cultures of your campaign. Dribbled in as these different places are visited, however, can be fun. As with all else, moderation.

Yeah, I know, the players assuming that the wonky LotR movies' bizarre waistcoats-and-cloaks fashion is all the rage in your campaign world can be very annoying. But it is their game, too, and too much oddness makes the game impossible to invest in. If your players are a bunch of anthropology majors and fashion mavens, sure, go hog-wild with sadors and philactories. Otherwise, less is probably more.

So Let it be Written, so Let it be Done!

Here's a neat post from a guest-blogger at Chatty's blog. Gaming via text-chat in real-time (meaning, not play-by-post or email) has long been my preferred method of gaming, and Mr. Salazar hits on a lot of the reasons why. All the things I'd like to do, and linger on, in an RPG, are just easier in text. The small nuances, the subtle points of conversation or locale, the intricate puzzle presented as an ornate piece of jewelry, all are far easier to do in text than speech. And I love having recorded logs of the action.

It is a slower way to game. Even if you're not doing the play-by-post thing, play-by-text-chat is still far slower than speech, even if all the players are experienced typists. But the pros far outweigh the cons to me. I'm seriously considering running my Moldvay/Cook/Labyrinth Lord game this way, with something like OpenRPG or maybe just an IM client.

I'm looking forward to seeing what else Mr. Salazar has to say on this topic.

Sussudio

Lots of chatter these days about music to play in the background while you game, or just for inspiration, including some rather, er, odd choices. I mean, yeah, it's catchy, but I'm not sure if it's the music I'd want to listen to while I was gaming.

But then, I should talk, because my players were always dropping in my Murphy Brown collection of Motown hits. Aretha Franklin beltin' out "R-E-S-P-E-C-T! Find out what it means to me!" doesn't exactly invoke images of stalwart heroes delving into the depths of orc-infested ruins.

And what music really gets me in the mood for gaming? It's purely nostalgia, I'll admit it, but it's '80s pop, especially Phil Collins. Why? Because that's what was on the radio when I was really getting into the game. I remember exploring the Palace of the Silver Princess while Men Without Hats' "Safety Dance" played on MTV in the background. We heard Madonna's "Live to Tell" in the hobby stores we visited.

(I'm apparently not alone in this. When discussing Scylla and Charybdis, a friend of mine first thought of "Wrapped Around Your Finger" rather than Homer.)

At the same time, though, I listened to Thistle & Shamrock every Saturday night. I was really into Celtic music back then, and that also heavily influenced my gaming style. That was the music I imagined in the background when I looked at the art of Elmore, Parkinson, and Whelan. I wasted quite a bit of time trying to reproduce the stories of King Arthur with AD&D. It was a poor fit, but I kept plugging away at it, since I was too cheap to buy Pendragon, and the music of the Boys of the Lough, Silly Wizard, and Clannad was usually playing in the background.

And today, as I work on my Moldvay/Cook/Labyrinth Lord hack, with its ancient and tropical setting, I'm pulling up a lot of Oriental and Middle Eastern influences: the Dhol Foundation, Dead Can Dance, and Ofra Haza. I still pop in some Phil Collins when I need a little hit of those days-gone-by, though.

Defending the Indefensible

Neil Gaiman talks about Freedom of Speech, and its limits, here.

Good stuff, important stuff, especially for those of us who indulge in imagination and the fantastical.

How to Make Your Significant Other a Gamer

Yeah, ok, so I said I wasn't going to post much, and my heart is breaking and the world is tumbling down around my ears, and then I see this.

Hope it puts a smile on your face, too.

Weathering the Storm

Sorry, folks, but blogging is going to be light, if not non-existent from now until probably the new year. Bad stuff happening in the troll household, but we'll get through it.

'nuff said. Game on, and have a great time, y'all.