Blog of Holding

the month door

July 29th, 2013

For all of Mira’s assurances, nothing was simple about entering the cavern, in Farideh’s opinion. First, there was a climb up a nearly sheer rock face, the stream that seemed to trickle out the broken door pouring down on her head. She hauled herself up onto the narrow ledge behind Mira, not wanting to consider how they would get back down.
–Lesser Evils by Erin M. Evans

One of the things I liked about Mike Mornard’s old-school dungeon crawl was that there was a significant cost to entering the dungeon each time. You had to negotiate past a mad wizard on each trip. This encouraged you to stretch your resources, which made things a little more tense.

You can’t come up with a gimmick like that for every dungeon, of course. But you can come up with a gimmick like that for a LOT of dungeons.

In the passage above, the difficulty is simply a dangerous climb to the dungeon entrance. That’s not bad at all. (In the book, there’s also time pressure on the dungeon excursion – another classic.)

Another way to increase the dungeon-entry cost is to institute, not a fixed cost, but a lottery. Every time you open the door, there’s a visible risk. In the simplest case, there’s a wheel-of-fortune roulette wheel on the door, and it spins every time you open the door. If you get double zeroes, something bad happens. Maybe a trap is spring, or maybe the dungeon just collapses, leaving you unharmed but burying any treasure you hadn’t looted yet.

Free-associating from the idea of an ancient roulette wheel, I’m thinking of one of those round calendars like the Mayan calender.

The Mayan calandar has 20 months – convenient for D&D random number generation! But luckily, a 12-month calendar comes with its own die as well.

In fact, I have a d12 with the months on it, just begging for its own house-rules subsystem. Maybe this is it!

In order to open the door, you have to spin the stone calendar disk on the door. We’ll associate a god or demon with each month. The evil god, or the scariest demon, is associated with January (or a roll of 1 on the d12).

We could further tie the dungeon to the die roll: based on the season you roll, the dungeon is altered. If one god is associated with lightning, then lightning crackles down the hallways and powers otherwise inoperable machines. Or maybe it’s based on the season. If you roll a spring month, the dungeon walls are covered with climbable ivy: some new areas are now accessible. In winter, snow and ice coat the floors, and you need winter clothes to avoid exposure damage. In summer, it’s hot, and the dungeon’s pools and rivers are dried up, revealing treasures and secrets. Fall? Well, fall is a time of death and decay. So, business as usual in the dungeon.

Tags: everybook
Posted in news, RPG Hub | 9 Comments »

my funny dice

July 22nd, 2013

Most DMs have a couple of funny dice and a couple of weird houserules to go with them. This is a tradition that goes back to Gary Gygax. In the First Edition DMG, he says,

The author has a d6 with the following faces: SPADE, CLUB, CLUB, DIAMOND, DIAMOND, HEART. If, during an encounter, players meet a character whose reaction is uncertain, the card suit die is rolled in conjunction with 3d6. Black suits mean dislike, with the SPADE equalling hate, while red equals like, the HEART being great favor. The 3d6 give a bell-shaped probability curve of 3-18, with 9-12 being the mean spread. SPADE 18 means absolute and unchangeable hate, while HEART 18 indicates the opposite. CLUBS or DIAMONDS can be altered by discourse, rewards, etc. Thus, CLUBS 12 could possibly be altered to CLUBS 3 by offer of a tribute or favor, CLUBS 3 changed to DIAMONDS 3 by a gift, etc.

I’ve read the DMG a couple of times and I didn’t notice that passage till recently. The dice sound cool – similar to crown and anchor dice but better because they have a sort of bell curve built in, with some suits more common than others. (For that reason, they seem like they’d be pretty useless for most card-game purposes.) I haven’t found these dice in an eBay search, but I’ll keep looking. Funny dice like these – dice with no official game rules attached – beg to be used, and so they stretch the fabric of the rules. The big tent of D&D becomes just a tiny bit bigger to accommodate them.

I already have a couple of my own funny dice and their accompanying funny-dice rules.

The danger die: I have a red die with a skull and crossbones on one side. In random-monster, random-complication, or random-unfortunate-event situations, I hand it to a player and say “Roll the danger die. Roll anything you want but don’t roll the skull and crossbones.” Over the course of our recent Isle of Dread playthrough, the players have come to fear the danger die.

The dragon die and the dinosaur die I have a d6 with a dragon on one face. When inside a dragon’s territory, I’d have a player roll the danger die and the dragon die for every random monster check. On various occasions, the dragon die resulted in either panicked flight from, or victorious conquest of, the legendary black dragon from the recent Legends and Lore column. I also have a d6 with a different dinosaur on each face, That saw occasional use on the Isle of Dread. Outside of the Isle, I have a feeling that the dragon die is going to get rolled a lot more.

My dice box is the tin for a peg game called “Yachting: An Exciting Game.” “Y:AEG” is almost worthless as a game, but it came with two cool dice: a d6 with a lighthouse on one side, and a d8 with the cardinal and intermediate directions: North, Northwest, etc. I use these dice all the time.

The weather die: I don’t always roll for random weather each day, but our Isle of Dread campaign featured a druid whose lightning storm spell was much more powerful in stormy weather. Every morning, he’d ask, “What’s the weather today?” and I’d hand him the weather die. (6 means an appropriate-for-climate storm, and the 1/lighthouse means calm and possibly fog.) The result was that there was a lot more weather in the game than I’m used to; and the characters spent a lot more time slogging through mud than they were probably used to. I liked the added layer of detail from checking the weather, and I like that the mechanics of the druid spell makes the weather relevant to one of the characters, and thus, the group.

The direction die: A d8 direction die is built into 1e D&D game rules (both for wind speed and for “grenade-like missiles”). You’re supposed to use 1 for north, 2 for northeast, etc. It’s nice to have the directions right on the die. As a group, we don’t throw a ton of grenades, but we tend to play a lot of naval adventures, so this die gets used all the time.

Little d6es: I don’t always have the energy to go digging for appropriate miniatures for every encounter. About half the dice in my dice box are from a colored assortment of mini d6es. They’re a great mini substitute, and the colors and pips are good for marking factions and hit points. The high point for the mini d6es was during our gonzo epic-level 4th Edition battle against Tiamat. Handfuls of white, black, red, green, and blue d6es each stood for dragons of the appropriate color.

Other dice: I’ve got plenty of other weird dice still waiting for their opportunity to come into their own. I’ve occasionally used the pig die (when the PCs were searching for wild game, and as a stand-in mini for a particularly tough and fat evil cultist) but I haven’t found use for the unicorn, letter, month, or Tower of Gygax die yet. I’m gonna hold on to them all though. A funny die is a house-rule generator. I’m sure all these dice have a use. I just haven’t figured it out yet.

Posted in fluff/inspiration, RPG Hub | 6 Comments »

tree of wisdom and other hazards

July 15th, 2013

My random forest monster chart includes a bunch of plant monsters, and in the Mearls sidebar game we ran into most of them. Here are the details of the dangerous flora of my elven forest.

Tree of wisdom: This dangerous willow tree is also called a Tree of Death. Elves may seek it in moments of crisis.

Glowing pollen sifts from the tree. Its dim golden halo can be seen 200 feet away at night or 20 feet during the day. There are humanoid and animal bones under the tree, and there may also be treasure (1 chance in 3) and/or passive living creatures (roll d6. 1: normal animal, 2: magical animal, 3: humanoid, 4-6: none).

If you go beneath the tree’s leaves, you feel peaceful and happy. You must make a Wisdom check/save (against enchantment) any time you try to leave the tree, initiate combat, or stand up. If you fail the save, you sit beneath the tree and won’t willingly perform any actions for an hour.

When you first sit down, and after every hour sitting under the tree, you have some spiritual breakthrough (DM: come up with a wise-sounding epigram!) and gain 30 XP.

After six hours spent beneath the tree, you make a death/Will/Wis saving throw (depending on edition). If you succeed, you permanently gain a point of Wisdom. Furthermore, you gain serenity and resolution about a sorrow or dilemma you’re facing. From now on, this tree has no effect on you. If you fail the save, you die.

Red bell ring: – All the trees around a clearing are hung with red bell-shaped flowers. If any creature larger than a fox passes into the ring, or touches a bell, all the bells ring (stealth and invisibility has no effect). The ringing of the bells forces a wandering monster check, prevents surprise, and wakes sleepers (including magical sleepers). Red bells are easy to spot unless you are hurrying.

Cobra vine: You’ve ventured from the path and are wandering through the elven forest. As your foot touches the ground, 2 glowing eyes snap open on an otherwise normal-looking vine. It instantly readies an action to strike (it has the stats of a poisonous snake), at anyone within 10 feet who moves or attacks it. You can try to move out of range slowly enough not to trigger it (5 consecutive rounds of easy dex checks, moving one foot per turn) or try to dodge/attack it (it gets the first attack) or someone outside the range can throw something large enough to distract it (you can escape while it’s attacking something else).

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mysteries of the clouded lands

July 8th, 2013

In a previous post, I talked about two awesome TSR campaign settings that never got their own boxed set. 1) Jeff Grubb came up with a world of perpetual cloud where the forces of good had been pushed up to sunny mountain peaks, and cloud ships plied between the mountaintops. 2) Wayne Rossi has pointed out that the implied world of the OD&D books is actually not like any published setting, ever, and has reconstructed a bizarre and wild land of dinosaurs, cavemen, and flying Arthurian knights.

I propose that these two settings be combined, and that it all happen on the classic map from Wilderness Survival: Jeff Grubb’s “forces of good” live in the few hexes of mountain peaks, and the cloudy lowlands are overrun with OD&D Gygaxian weirdness.

These ideas together don’t constitute a full campaign setting. There are a lot of mysteries for us to solve. There were a lot of good suggestions in the comments last time; let’s tackle some new questions.

where do the clouds come from?

I have no idea. The only thing that I’m sure of is that the cloud layer rises a little higher every year, maybe as little as a foot. That gives the mountain peaks a nice doomed Atlantis feel. I like to think that the sages of some mountain peak, preparing for the worst, are building a Babel-like tower on the top of the highest mountain.

The adventurers may well be trying to halt or delay the advance of the clouds. In that case, the source of the clouds determines the kind of adventures the PCs will embark on. If we want to run a megadungeon campaign, the mists are rising up from some unknown source at the bottoms of the dungeons. If we want a mass combat campaign, then the mist is somehow generated by warlords in castles. Maybe the warlords have magic gates to a smoky dimension of fire mercenaries, or maybe the clouds are created by supernatural evil itself.

Or the source of the clouds could be a mystery, or an unexplained given in the campaign world. What do you think?

who lives outside the cities?

In this old post from Swords of Minaria, Evan notices that “The original world, tucked away and hidden in the white box, is one of fierce nomadic bands of humans and humanoids that scour the badlands.” Furthermore, based on the size of the Wilderness Survival map, he calculates that

By terrain type and encounter odds, this indicates the whole map contains an average of 44 large hordes of men and 41 small parties of heroes. Of the hordes, about 17 are bandits, 12 brigands, 7 nomads, 6 berserkers, 2 dervishes, 2 cavemen, 1 buccaneer and 1 group of river pirates. The heroic parties are equal numbers of fighting-men, clerics and magic-users with an average of 8 individuals per party. All told, this indicates there are 7,588 men roaming the countryside.

The wilderness is home to 7,500 human warriors! Whether the settled areas of the Wilderness Survival map are the towns (as in OD&D) or the mountain peaks (as in the Jeff Grubb-inspired setting), the civilized folks probably have far fewer soldiers than that.

It strikes me that, while OD&D presents the world as a battle between Law and Chaos, and Steve Winter mentioned good vs. evil in his cloud-world pitch, this setting is really about farming folk vs. nomads. In this case, the good/lawful guys are the farmers, and they’re losing. The PCs are armed, wandering war bands defending civilization – Seven Samurai fighting their own kind to protect farmers.

What’s up with all the nomads? Are they predominantly evil? Warlike but essentially neutral transhumant pastoralists, escorting their cattle from one grazing land to another? Noble barbarians? A mix? What kind of animals do they herd, and, in this world of dire and flying monsters, what do they ride?

What’s up with the bandits and brigands, two groups which form 2/3 of the wandering bands? Can their numbers possibly be supported by the smaller population of herders and farmers? How do they live? Or are they slowly starving? These questions are relevant for any OD&D White Box campaign, not just a White Box-sky pirates mashup.

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Random Dungeon video game

July 1st, 2013

Technically, the Random Dungeon Generator as a Dungeon Map kickstarter is complete. I’ve delivered everything that I said I’d deliver. However, I do have one more Dungeon Map-related project that I’d love to finish.

One of the Kickstarter rewards was a board game where you play a dungeon explorer, navigating the poster and trying to stay alive. Another reward was an interactive, online version of the poster, to help people generate Gygaxian mazes. The obvious intersection of those two projects, and one that I’ve been working on for months, is a Random Dungeon roguelike video game.

Like most of my projects, this one has succumbed to “featuritis” – it’s a lot more ambitious now that it was when I started programming. Here are some of the features I didn’t know I needed until I added them:

You can get yourself a pet. Unlike Nethack, you don’t start with a kitten or puppy. You have to earn it. If you find a whip, you might be able to tame a giant lizard or a carrion crawler. Some characters might one day gain the capability to raise undead minions. Or, if you prefer human henchmen, you might be able to hire them back in town – once you’ve built an inn. Speaking of which:

Unlike many roguelikes, you can leave the dungeon and return to town. The town’s economy is dependent on your success in the dungeon. When you start, there’s not much available besides a handful of weapons for sale at the market, a graveyard to commemorate all your dead characters, and a few other buildings. But as your characters loot the dungeon and retire as independent yeomen, wealthy bishops, or even nobility, new buildings will spring up, and new treasures will become available for sale for new characters.

The Dungeon Robber game is about what happens before your first game of Dungeons and Dragons, before your character has fighter or wizard skills and can afford decent equipment. But if you’re successful enough to retire as a merchant, a thieves guild moves to town. If you retire as a knight, you’ll be able to start your next game as a fighter. Eventually, when you’ve unlocked the four original D&D classes and starting equipment, you’re actually playing D&D.

So will I even finish this game? No promises, but I think I might. I have a deadline in mind. My wife and I are expecting our first child in early August. I’ve heard that babies are a lot of work, so I’d really like to get a beta of the game done in late July.

Posted in legacy D&D, news, RPG Hub | 14 Comments »

witches are hobbyists

June 24th, 2013

My random forest monster chart includes witches, which don’t usually get a stat block. The Hag isn’t the same thing. The important thing about witches is that each has her own cottage industry.

Despite the fact that witches gather in covens, and despite the misguided Hansel and Gretel movie where witch mooks are mowed down with machine gun fire, D&D witches are most interesting as lone monsters. Each witch should have a unique and cruel form of magic.

Hansel and Gretel’s witch makes gingerbread. Circe has a pig farm. The witches in the seminal work on witchcraft, Nick Cage’s Wicker Man, keep bees. The Macbeth witches are political wonks, and probably have a Nate Silver-style blog. Each witch has a horrific twist on their own hobby*, but they’re all hobbyists nonetheless, following the dictates of their own peculiar imaginations, and therefore spiritual sisters to D&D players. Some witch probably plays a twisted variant of OD&D where the players suffer the fate of their characters. “Bad luck, your character stumbled into a trap! Roll on the random trap chart! ROLL ON IT!”

When your players randomly encounter a witch, you should take a few seconds to come up with some unique pastime. Or roll on this chart (when you roll an entry, cross it off and write in something new):
1: baker (we used a witch baker recently in the Mearls sidebar)
2: shoemaker (collects feet for study so that the shoes will fit better)
3: mason (turns the victims of her trickery into stones; has a pretty big castle by this point)
4: playwright (captures friend/family groups and compels them to enact horrific Shakespearean tragedies)
5: cooking contest judge (mystery ingredient: pieces of yourself!)
6: randomly choose from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hobbies – so many good ones to choose from! B-boying, RC car racing, and parkour witches are all great possibilities.

Witches and gender

Because medieval Europeans were weirdos, traditional witches are female. We don’t need to reject this powerful archetype, but we don’t have to be bound to it either. As far as I’m concerned, a witch is a person who seems civilized, but who uses guile and magic to destroy travelers in terrifying ways. Bluebeard is a nice example of a male character with witch-like characteristics (his particular hobby is serial monogamy). Inside the game world, he might not be called a witch, but I’d use witch stats for him.

*I didn’t see the movie, so I can’t say for sure that the Wicker Man witches had a particularly horrific style of beekeeping. I can only hope that they did, and that it involved Nick Cage getting stung, a lot.

Posted in advice/tools, fluff/inspiration, RPG Hub | 8 Comments »

pray for paris

June 20th, 2013

I saw a dude in the subway wearing this t-shirt. My first thought was “What happened to Paris? Medusa attack?” Turns out Pray for Paris is just a fashion T-shirt line. Paris is just fine. Fleshly as ever.

Got me wondering, though. In a magical D&D world, when some magical catastrophe strikes a city (which must happen, like, every other week) would we see the same outpouring of concern and charity that we do when a natural disaster hits a real city? Is there a Clerics Without Borders in a world with isolated nations and city-states? Would Athens care if something bad happened to Sparta?

Athens and Sparta is actually a good example. I suppose that warring city-states would react to a monstrous threat the way Athens and Sparta did to the Persian invasions. Athenians are foreigners to the Spartans, but the Persians are even more foreign, so the two city-states unite. An army of medusae would be more foreign still.

So this is something that can happen in a D&D city. Word arrives of some horrific magical disaster or attack in a foreign land. People pray. (Clerics leading thousands of believers in prayer probably has a concrete D&D spell effect, maybe casting Stone to Flesh at a distance). People donate coins and iron rations. A band of clerics sets off on a mission against the medusae.* Church bells toll. And maybe the king hires an adventuring band or two.

*This is the source of the famous “Clerics of Paris” statue garden.

Posted in fluff/inspiration, RPG Hub | 1 Comment »

random forest monsters

June 17th, 2013

In the D&D game we’re running in the sidebar, we just spent two real-time months running around the Elven Forests. Early on, I realized I needed random monster tables for forest encounters. The ones I’m most familiar with (the OD&D table and the various Challenge Rating-based 3rd edition tables) didn’t appeal to me: not enough variety, and not enough bizarre encounters. Here’s the one I wrote for myself. It’s responsible for all the woodland battles in our D&D game: the moon girls, the white stag hunt, the green dragon. New monsters are marked with an *asterisk. For these new monsters, I started with just their names, and detailed them only when I required them.

Elven Forest Encounter Table
1 Unique monster (You must invent it on the spot, or pull it out of some sourcebook the players have never seen. The PCs will never meet another one of its kind.)
2 elf (Remember, not all elves are friendly. You know, it would be nice if drow weren’t color coded.)
3 fairy (any of dozens of small fey that all want to mess with you)
4 animal (wolf, boar, bear, panther, snake, spider, etc)
5 manimal (centaur, satyr, werewolf, werebear, etc)
6 snooty white steed (white stag, unicorn, pegasus, white elephant, paladin mount, etc)
7 redcap goblin (and its cursed treasure)
8 dangerous flora (*red bell ring, *cobra vine, *tree of death, *pearl plant, *fairy ring, assassin vine)
9 dire animal
10 invaders of the woodland (orc, human, *axehand ant, *the Blight)
11 defenders of the woodland (treant, druid, ranger, dryad, *bog mummy)
12 underworld entrance (pit trap, cave, or hollow tree leads to caverns or elf hill)
13 sinister lair (castle, cave, villa, tower, circus tent, tomb)
14 *sinister child
15 sinister tribe (troll, ogre, shadow, bugbear, owlbear, *screamer, *redface)
16 *green coat man
17 *moon girl
18 witch
19 green dragon
20 wild hunt

The party ran into several of my new monsters. Here are some details on a few:

Moon Girls: Packs of luminescent wild women who leap through the forest, fleet as deer. During the day they act like deer, and have basically the same stats (speed, HP, etc). At night, under the moon, they act like, and have the same stats as, wolves. In the darkness, because of their glowing pearly skin, you can see them coming.

Moon Girl’s glowing blood is prized by healers. Being treated with Moon Girl blood cures 1 HP of damage.

White Stag: This is a prominent monster in Pendragon, and it’s probably been statted up somewhere in D&D, but it’s not one of the standard D&D monsters. Here’s my take:

While it’s not aware of you, the White Stag has the same stats as a normal stag, but while it’s running it has +10 AC and +10 feet of speed. If it gets out of sight, you’ll have to make a tracking or Wisdom check to see where it went.

An old legend says that “if you aim at its heart, and let the beast go, that arrow will kill when it flies from your bow.” (To aim, make an attack and damage roll as if you had shot an arrow. If the attack would have killed the stag, your arrow gains the stag’s blessing. The arrow turns white. The next time you fire it, it automatically critically hits. One blessed arrow per customer.)

What if you shoot the stag instead of letting it go? That’s the dark path. You gain the same blessing on the arrow, but the arrow turns black.

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RPGTable and GameTable Online Kickstarter!

June 13th, 2013

The company I used to work for, GameTable Online, launched a Kickstarter in May to fund new games and improvements to their site! Included in the reward levels are discounted premium subscriptions to GTO’s other website, RPGTable Online, which is an online virtual table for playing tabletop roleplaying games, such as Dungeons and Dragons. So if you’re looking for a good virtual table for RPGs or you just like playing online versions of fun board games, such as Axis & Allies, Battle Cry, Guillotine, Robo Rally, 1960: The Making of the President, and Tigris & Euphrates, it’s definitely worth checking out and a good way to support both sites.

See GameTable Online’s Kickstarter page HERE.

Their Kickstarter is ending Sunday. They’ve already met their initial goal for an online version of Tsuro of the Seas, itself a Kickstarter, and some initial improvements to their site. Their first stretch goal is to fund an online version Conquest of the Empire, which is a fun classic war game by the designer of Axis & Allies, Larry Harris. Personally, I prefer it to Axis & Allies, and I feel it has interesting mechanics, particularly with regards to balancing short-gains from mobilizing a strong army versus the long-term benefits of building roads and citadels to connect and defend your empire. In fact, one of the cooler add-on rewards GTO is offering is copies of Conquest of the Empire autographed by Larry Harris!

If you aren’t familiar with RPGTable.com, I’d definitely reccomend checking it out, as it’s a great tool for playing online tabletop rpgs. I’m a little biased because I helped design and test it while I worked at GTO :), but I do think it has a lot to offer:

It’s free to play. All the core features, from a healthy set of tiles and tokens, to the dice roller, grid map, initiative tracker, built in voice, and all the other the tools for running a roleplaying game are totally free. As mentioned, there is a premium subscription for unlocking community sharing, cloud storage, and other useful features. There are also micropayments for unlocking additional content, such as new tokens and tiles. But from the start you get a lot of functionality without paying anything.
It has a ton of D&D support (if that’s your bag). Specifically, it has a lot tools that are optimized for 4th edition, but it is quite well suited for running earlier editions of D&D and for Pathfinder as well. That isn’t to say you can’t use the more generic tools for any rpg, but it really shines when it comes to D&D. So it can allow you to track conditions, spend healing surges, tell you if your attack hits against an enemy’s AC, and deal automatic damage, along with a lot of other supported functionality to make your life easier when playing D&D.
It’s easy. No big downloads. No uploading a bunch of mods or maps to get started. No hours of tutorials. Just register a free account at GameTable Online, log-on, and jump into a campaign. From there you can use a preloaded selection of tiles and tokens to build an adventure that your friends can jump into through the website as easily as you did.

Posted in 4e D&D, RPG Hub | 7 Comments »

when adventurers aren’t adventuring

June 13th, 2013

The more I read Mike Mearls’s latest column about downtime as a resource, the more I like it. (That’s not that surprising; I’ve suggested something similar in the past.)

Mike says that you will be able to spend weeks of downtime (and money) to do non-adventuring things. As examples, he offers:

Craft an item, such as a suit of plate armor or a sword

Take a job or practice a craft to earn money

Study or practice a craft to become better at it

Develop social connections and alliances

Build, create, and/or manage a castle, business, temple, or similar institution

Manage your followers

Raise an army

This could provide a framework for a lot of things that have been left out of recent D&D editions. For instance, I’m excited about having official rules for castlebuilding.

Time-as-a-resource is something that old editions actually did quite well. As Mike Mornard has reminded us, Gygax said that “you cannot have a meaningful campaign without timekeeping.” You spent specific amounts of time and money on tasks like research and building. Returning to a similar system does allow a Gygaxian sort of campaign where everyone has a stable of characters, and specific characters drop in and out of adventures depending on their time commitments. That’s very different from how I’ve ever played, but it could be interesting to try.

As fun as that sounds, the thing that’s most intriguing about Mike’s suggestion is that it solves a couple of specific D&D problems I’ve had in my game.

What is money for? In old editions, money is for getting XP, and for paying the exorbitant expenses the DM levels in order to motivate the PCs to further adventures. In newer editions, money is for buying magic items to increase combat effectiveness. None of these are quite satisfactory to me. I can imagine that, in this system, money is used to vote on what kind of adventures you want to have. Investments in castles or in spy networks or in mystical research are all ways that the player can drive the campaign towards a destination of their choosing.

How do you balance combat vs noncombat abilities? I’ve often complained about the D&D feat system, which balances, say, learning a language vs. +1 to hit. I’d like noncombat/story resources to be drawn from a separate pool from combat abilities. I’m fine with feats and such as the combat pool, and I actually like time and money as the noncombat pool. The article doesn’t suggest this, but I’d like language-learning and similar skills to be part of the downtime system.

What to do with all these pizza toppings? These rules could address one immediate problem of crucial importance. In our weekly Isle of Dread game, the players have gotten it into their head that they want to start a pizzeria. Every herb they discover and every monster they kill is turned into pizza toppings. They’ve clearly voted for the next installment of the quest to involve commercial enterprise. I’d love to have a rules framework on which to hang the next adventure.

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