Blog of Holding

the ha ha

May 31st, 2013

The ha-ha is a bizarre architectural feature common in ornamental gardens: it’s a ditch that’s designed to be nearly invisible from one side. Presumably it gets its name from the garden-owner’s reaction when visitors stumble into the ditch.

In real life, ha-has are used to enclose livestock without breaking sight lines. In D&D, I presume that they’re a goblin invention. They’re named so because goblins find it so funny when human invaders fall into hidden pits.

In one game I ran, I gave the PCs a goblin-drawn map of a dungeon. The hidden pits were all marked as “ha-ha.” However, goblins find so many other things funny: sharpened pendulums, poisoned meat, patches of green slime on a green carpet: and they note them all with various onomatopoeia for laughter. On a goblin map, treat “ha-ha,” “har-har”, “hee-hee”, or “lol” as “find an alternate route.”

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our ghouls and ghasts are not as good as the originals

May 28th, 2013

On a Wikipedia binge, I learned the origin of the D&D ghast: Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. (I’ve read it before, but this detail never made an impression on me.)

The ghasts are a race of fearsome humanoids. They are much larger than a man and have a vaguely human face, albeit missing a nose. Their skin is rough and knotty. Their senses are unusually acute; they can see in the dark and have a strong sense of smell. They hop about on a pair of hooved, kangaroo-like legs, and are swift, strong, and agile. They have also been described as lacking a forehead. Ghasts prefer to dwell in complete darkness and have no tolerance for natural light — sunlight will kill them instantly.

That grotesque kangaroo-hopping detail is what gets me. Make these guys pack hunters who travel, say, twice as fast as the PCs, and, whether they’re chasing you across midnight plains or down pitch-black dungeon corridors, you’ve got a really creepy monster.

D&D ghasts, on the other hand, are like ghouls but they smell bad. As far as I’m concerned, D&D ghasts now hop like kangaroos.

Score: D&D 0, Lovecraft 1

Ghouls, of course, are from Arabian folklore (the earliest mention is in the Arabian Nights). Arabian Nights ghuls act a lot like D&D ghouls: they hang out in graveyards, eat human flesh, etc. “The creature also preys on young children, drinks blood, steals coins, and eats the dead, then taking the form of the person most recently eaten.”

Ghouls were already one of my favorite D&D encounters, but this is the detail they’ve been missing. A shuffling pack of ghouls, each with the familiar face of their victims, partakes somewhat of the horror of doppelgangers and somewhat of zombie-movie zombies, but it has its own special something. This isn’t a “this zombie was once my buddy” pathos moment, or a “my buddy was a doppelganger all along” chills moment; this is a “this ghoul ate my buddy’s face, and now he’s wearing it” rage moment.

In the past, I’ve had my ghoul-eaten PCs return as ghouls, but I think that from now on I’ll have the original ghouls take on the PCs’ appearances.

Score: D&D 0, Arabian Nights 1

Posted in fluff/inspiration, play | 4 Comments »

en garde!

May 23rd, 2013

If I had been reading Strategic Review 1.4 in winter 1975, this ad would have caught my eye:

EN GARDE! is Game Designers’ Workshop’s newest, and most unusual game. The 17th Century, with musketeers, and swordfights in the streets, comes alive as the 40 pages of rules, charts, and tables unfold. In EN GARDE! each player finds himself a person, born and bred for the swashbuckling life of a gentleman adventurer. Status is pursued above all else, even above money. Social climbing is a way of life. The world is inhabited by the likes of Scaramouche, Cyrano and Roxanne, Errol Flynn, Porthos, Athos, Aramis, Rhonda Fleming, Franco is Villon, and, of course, D’Artagnan. There are people to be used, lackies to be abused, the Cardinal’s Guard to be trounced, friends to be cultivated, enemies to be humiliated, the hearts of fair ladies to be won, the ear of the King to be gained!

All you need to play EN GARDE! is a pencil, paper, a six-sided die, the EN GARDE! rule booklet, an adventurous imagination, and some friends. . . Rules cover a complete 17th Century society in some hypothetical country, (oh, call it France, if you like). Specific rules include a complete fencing system (to settle those disputes you may have), character generation, social climbing, money, carousing, mistresses, gambling, influence, the military, advancement, everything you need to live a full life, and enjoy every minute of it.

Come with us to those bawdy, rowdy days of yore. . . Sharpen your blade. . . Sharpen your wits. . . Take care not to insult a small man with a large nose. . . All for one and one for all. . . Good luck, friend, and may your swash never buckle!

EN GARDE! $4.00 ppd.

I like the Three Musketeers milieu, and Scaramouche, Flynn, and the rest of them. (I had to look up Rhonda Fleming, and I’m still not sure why she was on the list.)

The promise of rigorous rules for “social climbing, money, carousing, mistresses, gambling, influence, the military, advancement,” and “everything else” would have been enough to part me from my $4.00 ppd. It’s a lot to jam into 40 pages, though; my guess is that the En Garde rules are about as sketchy as the OD&D rules, or more so.

Also of note: “40 pages of rules, charts, and tables.” This was a time when people made a selling point of the quantity of their charts and tables. RPG design has sure changed over 35 years.

According to En Garde’s own wikipedia page, En Garde was mostly a play by mail game. I also noticed that Loren Wiseman was listed as one of the designers. That name was familiar to me, since I had just read it in the same 1975 issue of Strategic Review containing the En Garde ad, in this hilarious cartoon:

Apparently En Garde is still around and in its fourth edition. It seems to be mostly a play by email/messageboard game. It’s fun to see this list of all the currently-running En Garde games, so similar to the Players Wanted sections in the 70’s game zines or the Strategic Review list of all the DMs looking for players. I’m kind of tempted to try one of the En Garde games out.

Posted in legacy D&D, other systems, RPG Hub | 10 Comments »

unnamed Gygax and Grubb campaign setting

May 20th, 2013

This week, two exciting, unpublished TSR settings collided in my head to form a third setting.

setting 1: Jeff Grubb project

On the latest WOTC D&D podcast, Steve Winter talked about the great campaign-world books that came out of Second Edition D&D. He said that, for every kick-ass setting like Planescape or Al’Quadim, they had a bunch of ideas just as good – they just didn’t have time to print them all. Prompted, he described one of the settings that he’d never forgotten:

There’s one that always comes to mind: it was proposed by Jeff Grubb, and I forget what the name of it was, but the idea was, it was a world where there were all these mountain ranges, and all of civilization – the good part of civilization – has been driven up to the tops of these mountains, and then there’s a tremendously thick cloud layer, so wherever the sun shines is where good exists. Everything beneath the cloud layer has been overrun by evil. There are cloud ships that sail out from these mountain-top cities across the clouds, and the adventurers rappel down to the world where they go raiding the ruined cities that used to be down there, looking for gold, metal, and all the kinds of things that they don’t have in these mountaintop cities.

As Steve Winter says, that idea isn’t quite as fresh as it was in the late 80s (he’s seen elements in anime, and it reminds me of Final Fantasy) but I think it’s still an evocative and inspiring world. I’m ready to play it! But, since all we have is a podcast sound bite and not a campaign book, I’m left with a lot of questions: exactly what kind of evil lurks in the cloudy lowlands? What does the wilderness look like?

setting 2: “The Original D&D Setting”

Here’s the other great setting I read this week: The Original D&D Setting, a series of blog posts by Wayne Rossi. This teases out the weirdness that you get if you take the original OD&D books and play its assumptions to the hilt. Griffin-riding Arthurian knights wait inside sinister castles, swamps crawl with dinosaurs, there are Martian creatures in the desert, and undead shamble through cities.

Wayne Rossi provides a “campaign map” of this strange wild land: James Mishler’s version of the Outdoor Survival map that Gygax used for his wilderness adventures. When I took a close look at it, I noticed that three areas had little snow-capped peaks – presumably impassable. That’s when the Steve Winter idea crash-landed into the setting. What if those white-capped peaks aren’t covered with snow, but shining with sunlight? What if they’re the only safe places in the setting, and the PCs descend from the mountains to explore the misty lands of Wilderness Survival?

A couple of nice things happen when we combine these settings:

getting lost

Getting lost is a big deal in Wilderness Survival, and in the OD&D exploration rules. If you roll badly, you can end up wandering north when you think you’re going south. I’ve always wondered how getting lost by 180 degrees can happen on a sunny day, when you always know which ways East and West are. But suddenly, in this setting, it’s possible! Beneath the cloud cover, you can’t see the sun or the stars, and navigation is much harder than it is in a traditional outdoor adventure.

cities

Even if you’ve played a campaign on the classic Wilderness Survival map before, this setting inverts it. Usually, peaks are impassable and towns are your home base. Now, peaks are safe in a way that no valley village is. Cities will be places of horror: mockeries of safety.

In OD&D, in a city encounter, 50% of the time you roll on the “men” subtable and 50% of the time you roll on the “undead” subtable. Even in straight OD&D, there are way more undead in cities than we’re used to from later adventure settings. It really makes sense in this below-the-clouds horror setting, where, as Steve Winter says, the ruined cities are the primary dungeons. Since it’s always cloudy, you’re never safe from sun-fearing undead like vampires. Maybe the cities are filled with vampire lords who keep humans (the “men” encounters) as their cattle; maybe anyone who dies down here becomes undead, so cities are amoung the most dangerous places in the world; maybe the cities are straight-up dungeons ruled by necromancers and evil high priests (who together form 1/6 of the encounters on the “men” subtable).

Wayne points out that the arrangement of the cities is odd: there are five in a cross in the middle of the map, and the central one is in the forest. If we’re saying that ruined cities are the main dungeons of the settings, the central one, overgrown by eerie forest, is probably the scariest and most dangerous dungeon.

castles

Most OD&D castle encounters, with wizards and clerics who enslave you and high-level fighters who challenge you, fit squarely into Steve Winter’s description of the wilderness as “overrun by evil.” While cities are the megadungeons of the settings, castles might be the bite-sized minidungeons that the players can try to clear in a single adventure.

Wayne Rossi makes the point that, according to the number of castles on the Wilderness Survival map and the castle-inhabitant charts, you’d expect three of the castles to be controlled by good clerics. I have my eye on the three castles in the mountain pass near the largest mountain peak area.

Wayne suggests that these good clerics are all part of one holy order dedicated to recapturing the land from evil. This makes sense to me. We can say that, while the surface of the world is nearly overrun with evil, there is one little area where a holy order has a foothold. This is the likely starting point of the PCs’ adventures: these castles control the only safe way to ascend to the mountain peaks. From the southernmost castle, it’s only 4 hexes to the closest city. That will undoubtedly be the first dungeon that the PCs tackle.

rivers

OK, there’s something I haven’t figured out. According to OD&D, rivers are just swarming with buccaneers and pirates. Who are they preying on? Each other?

Steve Winter said that cloud ships travel from mountain peak to mountain peak. Maybe the buccaneers and pirates are based on the river, but their ships can ascend to the clouds to attack cloud shipping. Maybe the pirates even have flying submarines.

That said, if pirates can fly, why do they spend so much time on the river? Maybe someone can solve this for me.

Another thing: there are a lot of flying monsters in the original OD&D encounter tables – dragons, griffins, chimerae. Can they threaten the mountain settlements and cloud ships, or are they confined to the lowlands?

This week I’ll try to delve more into the implications of this setting.

Posted in fluff/inspiration, game design, legacy D&D, other systems, RPG Hub | 20 Comments »

why you want Domains at War

May 17th, 2013

There’s about a day left in Autarch’s Adventurer Conqueror King: Domains at War kickstarter. I was lucky enough to get a Domains at War war-game playtest with Tavis Allison. It’s very impressive for the same reason Adventurer Conqueror King is impressive: it marries simple D&D mechanics with rock-solid behind-the-scenes mathematical rigor. That may not sound like much, but that combination is a rock on which many RPG-design ships have foundered. I still can’t believe that ACKS has pulled it off, and I keep peeking behind the curtain, only to find that the system is even more solid than I expect.

Let me tell you two stories: the first is why you should have ACKS on your bookshelf, and the second is why you should back Domains at War right now.

Ask Adventurer Conqueror King: How many knights per square mile?

Right now I’m reading Charles Oman’s A History of the Art of War, a giant volume that, according to Jon Peterson, was a primary text for Gary Gygax’s Chainmail. I’m reading a chapter chock full of the meaty medieval economic information I love:

We have seen that “knight-service” and “castle-ward” were ideas not altogether unfamiliar before the Conquest, and that the obligation of every five hides of land to send a mailed warrior to the host was generally acknowledged […] A landholder, knowing his servitium according to the assessment of the vetus feoffamentum of the Conqueror, had to provide the due amount of knights. This he could do, in two ways: he might distribute the bulk of his estate in lots roughly averaging five hides to sub-tenants, who would discharge the knight-service for him, or he might keep about him a household of domestic knights, like the housecarles of old, and maintain them without giving them land. Some landholders preferred the former plan, but some adhered, at least for a time, to the latter. But generally an intermediate arrangement prevailed: the tenant-in-chief gave out most of his soil to knights whom he enfeoffed on five-hide patches, but kept the balance in dominio as his private demesne, contributing to the king for the ground so retained the personal service of himself, his sons, and his immediate domestic retainers.

OK, this seems pretty clear: each knight needs five hides of land to support him. Problem is, what’s a hide? Apparently, it’s an extremely variable amount: the land needed to support one farming family. Its area is most often given in old texts as 120 acres.

Given this information, I extrapolated two useful pieces of information: how many families can be supported by a square mile of farmland, and how many knights defend it? (Stuff like this can be very useful for D&D worldbuilding, whether you need to know, for instance, the size of a country’s army or, conversely, the size of the country needed to support the army you want to use.) According to my initial calculations, a square mile of farmland, 640 acres, contained about 5 hides: about 5 farming families and one knight.

I thought I’d compare this to ACKS. I discovered that each hex of civilized land contains, according to ACKS, about 4x as many peasant families as I expected. I had a feeling that Autarch hadn’t missed a trick here. I emailed Tavis and Alex to see if they could unravel this riddle for me. Alex responded:

It’s quite confusing because a hide is not a fixed area of land. It’s 60-120 acres, but the acres in question are “old acres”. ACKS uses “modern acres”. A hide is about 30 modern acres. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medieval_land_terms. […] Now, 1 6-mile hex is about 32 square miles, which is 20,480 acres, which translates into 682 peasant families. At sufficient densities I assume a surplus that includes non-farming craftsmen, so we end up with the cap of 750 families per 6-mile hex in ACKS.

In any event, 5 hides supports 5 families in ACKS. Each peasant family generates on average 12gp per month in revenue for their lord. 5 x 12 gp = 60gp. The monthly cost for a knight is 60gp (see Mercenary Wages, Heavy Cavalry). So each 5 hides can support 1 knight, as per The Art of War in the Middle Ages.

Mystery solved! My estimate for peasants per mile was off by a factor of 4 because the area of an acre had increased 4x! Furthermore, I was delighted to see that five families exactly supported one knight, as Oman suggested.

That’s one of the big selling points of ACKS for me. I like to do historical research and tweak my game accordingly, but if I want to double-check my answers, having ACKS on my shelf makes things easier. And if I consistently fall back on its prices, domain rules, end economic model, I’ll end up with something more plausible than what I could cobble together on my own.

Domains at War: Richard and Saladin

A few nights ago I went over to Tavis’s house for a playtest of the Domains at War system. I hadn’t read the rules, but I was deep in Oman’s descriptions of the major battles of the Crusades, and I’ve read a lot about medieval tactics. I figured that my ignorance of the Domains at War rules was actually a boon for the playtest. If I could command an army using only the tactics described in historical battles, and get plausible results, without knowing rules, that would be a win for the system.

On the train ride over, I’d been reading about the battle of Arsouf between Richard the Lionheart and Saladin. I think Tavis had some other playtest planned, but after I enthusiastically recounted the battle, he said, “That sounds fun: let’s play that.” Oman gives a rather detailed troop breakdown of both sides, including the generals in charge of various divisions of the Crusaders. D@W includes rules for subcommanders, each with their own initiative and attributes, so the wings of my army were led by their historical commanders: King Richard at the center, King Guy of Jerusalem in the rear, and the Duke of Burgundy in the van. I put the Bishop of Bauvais, a cleric, at the head of the small band of heavily-armed Templars at the fore. Although D@W includes rules for battlefield heroics by PCs, King Richard and Saladin never met for a decisive D&D-encounter showdown.

The Battle of Arsouf is exceptional because the Crusaders, for once, held their ground and stuck to their game plan instead of charging disastrously into traps set by Saladin’s more mobile cavalry. I set myself the same challenge: could I maintain discipline and resist the temptation to charge Tavis’s skirmishers?

NO!

After a few turns of being peppered by arrows, I deviated from King Richard’s strategy. I saw an opportunity to send my cavalry into the flank of Saladin’s wheeling cavalry. It was worth it to see how beautifully my rolling cavalry charge checked Tavis’s advance and sent a few of his units fleeing for the woods.

After a few turns of opposed cavalry charges and countercharges, I was rolling up Tavis’s left wing while my own left wing was close to routing. We’d each taken a lot of casualties. Tavis needed to kill only one more of my units to force a potentially game-ending morale check; I needed two. And in real life, it was well after midnight. We played one more turn. On my left wing, Saladin concentrated his forces on one of King Guy’s cavalry units, trying to force it to flee, but it held. Meanwhile, on my right wing, I chased down and defeated one of Saladin’s light cavalry units, and sent a thundering charge into a second, but, bad luck for me, it made its morale check. Night fell on the battlefield, ending the battle inconclusively after a tense final turn. I got home around 3 AM on a work night – the sign of a good game.

As the game went on, I found myself trusting the rules more and more. If I had just role-played the part of King Richard, I think the game system would have given me the victory. In fact, I role-played the part of an undisciplined, impetuous Crusader cavalier, and, as they so frequently did, I nearly turned victory into defeat. Maybe Tavis will give me a rematch sometime. This time I’ll stick to the plan.

Posted in game design, news, other systems, play, RPG Hub | 3 Comments »

a moment of dread on the Isle of Dread

May 14th, 2013

The 5e playtest version of Isle of Dread encourages the DM to spindle, fold, and mutilate the original adventure. The module suggests (spoilers ahead) having NPCs who visit the jungle center of the island return as undead, possessed, or otherwise corrupted versions of their former selves.

I went with this idea: the natives of the friendly village warned that explorers often come back “wrong:” not undead, but with an imperfect memory of their former lives and with a cunning tendency to act normal until they found a way to kill as many of their fellow villagers as possible. Therefore, the villagers had instituted a password and security-question system for letting explorers back in the village.

When the PCs met some native villagers walking around in the jungle interior, they somehow forgot about these hints. They trustingly hired the natives as guides: furthermore, they insisted that the villagers keep watch at camp so that all the PCs could go to sleep at once (including the high elf, who insisted that “I don’t NEED to sleep, but I LIKE to sleep.”)

That night, the corrupted villagers tried to creep up to the sleeping PCs and slit their throats. Only a series of improbably high PC Listen checks prevented a sleeping TPK. The PCs killed the corrupted villagers and then finished their rest.

The next day, surveying the carnage, the PC druid had a horrifying thought. “What if the villagers were sneaking up to put mints on our pillow or something? What if we’re the ones that are “wrong”? They went through the checklist: do we leave piles of their bodies in their wake? check. Are we remorseless? Check: this was the second night in a row the PCs had gone blissfully to sleep among corpses of their own making. Do we have poor memories? Sure, they’d forgotten that natives in the jungle might be dangerous. Besides, PCs never remember any plot points from week to week.

For a while, the players seriously entertained the notion that I was acting as an unreliable DM narrator, and the players had “gone wrong” and were killing innocents. And I? I cursed myself for not thinking of it. If I’d planned it, and managed to pull it off, this could have been The Creepiest D&D Game Ever.

OK, I don’t 100% encourage you to try this trick in your own Isle of Dread run. It could go horribly wrong and really alienate all your players. But on the other hand, it could go horribly right. Either way, it’d be a memorable campaign, and I’d like to hear about it.

Posted in play, RPG Hub | 3 Comments »

de vetula, the 13th century d&d poem

May 10th, 2013

I was amazed when I read in Playing At the World about De Vetula, the 13th-century poem that addressed the most important problem of science: how likely are you to roll an 18 STR?

De Vetula is a real poem, and amidst the gambling adventures of its protagonist, it really has probability calculations for 3d6. I love that the world’s first accurate discussion of probability is so directly applicable to D&D. This plus the Roman d20 almost makes you think that there’s been a secret society of D&D players throughout history (the Brontes were probably members).

I decided I’d track down the relevant section of the poem. Here’s a page of the manuscript:

That’s a bell curve there, and along the right side, you see the familiar 3-18 range familiar to D&D players. This doesn’t look much like a medieval poem. What it looks a lot like is the beginning of the 1e Dungeon Master’s Guide:

In case it’s of interest to D&D players or people interested in probability, here’s Nancy Prior’s translation of the relevant section of the poem:

Perhaps, however, you will say that certain numbers are better
Than others which players use, for the reason that,
Since a die has six sides and six single numbers,
On three dice there are eighteen,
Of which only three can be on top of the dice.
These vary in different ways and from them,
Sixteen compound numbers are produced. They are not, however,
Of equal value, since the larger and the smaller of them
Come rarely and the middle ones frequently,
And the rest, the closer they are to the middle ones,
The better they are and more frequently they come.
These, when they occur, have only one configuration of pips on the dice,
Those have six, and the remaining ones have configurations midway between the two,
Such that there are two larger numbers and just as many smaller ones,
And these have one configuration. The two which follow,
The one larger, the other smaller, have two configurations of pips on the dice apiece.
Again, after them they have three apiece, then four apiece.
And five apiece, as they follow them in succession approaching
The four middle numbers which have six configurations of pips on the dice apiece.
The small table set out below will make these things easier for you:

18 666
17 665
16 664 655
15 663 654 555
14 662 653 644 554
13 661 652 643 553 445
12 651 642 633 552 543 444
11 641 632 551 542 533 443
10 631 622 541 532 442 433
9 621 531 522 441 432 333
8 611 521 431 422 332
7 511 421 331 223
6 411 322 222
5 311 221
4 211
3 111

These are the fifty-six ways for the numbers to fall,
And the number of them can neither be smaller nor larger.
For when the three numbers which make up the throw are alike,
Since six numbers can be matched up with one another,
There are also six configurations of pips on the dice, one for any number.
But, when one of them is not like the others,
And two are the same, the configurations of pips on the dice can vary in thirty ways,
Because, if you duplicate any of the six numbers,
After you have added any of the numbers which remain, then
You will come up with thirty, as if you multiply six five-fold.
But, if all three numbers are different,
Then you will count twenty configurations of pips on the dice
For this reason: Three numbers can be successive
In four ways and non-successive in just as many, but
If two are successive and a third non-successive,
The figure set out below for your perusal makes this clear:
You will discover from the one side twice three ways and from the other thrice two ways.

666 555 444 333 222 111 665
664 663 662 661 556 554 553
552 551 446 445 443 442 441
336 335 334 332 331 226 225
224 223 221 116 115 114 113
112 654 543 432 321 642 641
631 531 653 652 651 621 521
421 542 541 643 431 632 532

Again, if one looks more closely into the configurations of pips on the dice,
There are some which have only one way of falling,
And there are others which have three or six, since the ways of falling
Cannot be different when the three numbers in question
Are the same. But, if one of them should be unlike,
And two the same, three ways of falling emerge
After a different number turns up on top of any of the dice.
But if they are all unlike, you will discover
That they can vary in six ways, since,
When you give any position to one of the three, the remaining two change places,
Just as an alternation of the configuration of pips shows. And so
They vary in fifty-six ways in the configurations of pips on the dice,
And the configurations in two hundred and sixteen ways of falling.
When these have been divided among the compound numbers which players use,
Just as they must be distributed among them,
You will learn full well how great a gain or a loss
Any one of them is able to be.
The table written out below can make this clear to you:

How many configurations of pips on the dice and ways of falling any compound number would have
3  18  configurations of pips on the dice  1  way of falling  1
4  17  configurations of pips on the dice  1  way of falling  3
5  16  configurations of pips on the dice  2  way of falling  6
6  15  configurations of pips on the dice  3  way of falling  10
7  14  configurations of pips on the dice  4  way of falling  15
8  13  configurations of pips on the dice  5  way of falling  21
9  12  configurations of pips on the dice  6  way of falling  25
10 11  configurations of pips on the dice  6  way of falling  27

Thanks to Jon Peterson for letting me know that this poem existed!

Posted in legacy D&D, RPG Hub | 3 Comments »

how to get the PCs to the Isle of Dread

May 7th, 2013

A lot of people are probably running (or have recently run) the Isle of Dread adventure that comes with the last 5e playtest packet. The module encourages you to start in media res, cast away on the Isle with a few days of food, possibly after an encounter with pirates. As a DM, I can’t bear to defeat the PCs in an off-screen cutscene. I wrote an introductory mini-adventure to get the PCs to the island, with a slight chance of avoiding castaway status. In case it might be useful to you, here it is.

The Notebook

The module says that the PCs have found a notebook which led them to the island. However, it provides little information about the contents of the notebook. There are a few paragraphs of exposition about the fact that there is a friendly native village and dinosaurs. Furthermore, “this log can also contain rumors and details you need to give the players to influence the characters’ decision about how to explore the island.” I wrote out some journal excerpts and gave them to the players. (I decided that one of the PCs had inherited the journal from Marcus Silverhand, an Indiana Jones-like Fourth Edition character belonging to the same player.)

Here was the handout I provided:

You are a great great grandchild of Marcus Silverhand and the inheritor of Silverhand Manor. Among Marcus’s 100-year-old notebooks: one containing references to the legendary Isle of Dread. Marcus was shipwrecked on the way home from that expedition, and his journal is nearly ruined, but his sketch of the island’s coast is in good shape. The other thing Marcus saved was a giant egg, which hatched into Matthew, the loveable bronto which guarded Silverhand Manor for more than 100 years. It died when you were small.

Here are the legible passages from the notebook:

————–

…beam of light struck a point on the map 1000 miles ESE of the Misty Isles. The Isle of Dread is there, I’m sure of it!
March 6: We hid in the abandoned tomb until the guardian…

…May 3: Our ship is at Port Lily, outfitted with three months of provisions, and all crew is aboard. We set sail tomorrow!
May 4: As we left the shipping lanes behind us, we spotted a mysterious gray sail following us. Belloq again?
May 24: Land ho! The island is just where I knew it would be! We’ll follow the coastline and survey the coast.
May 27: The island is big – 200 miles long perhaps. We’ve reached the southern harbor. Sketch of the coastline: [map] There’s a friendly village by a ziggurat. They’re open to trade. We’ve traded our cargo for 5 giant emeralds. Each is engraved with a Supernal rune I’ve never seen before. The village is cut off from the island by a giant wall, 50 feet high. What’s it keeping out?
May 28: There are indeed Supernal runes on the ziggurat. First rune on the south side is “Stone”, I don’t recognize the other two. The natives tell me that there are many more on the ruins in the interior. Apparently the “City of the Gods” is at the center of the island and contains many treasures. However the villagers never travel very far beyond their great wall. They send their zombies…

…made camp at the ruined temple.
June 12: Awoke to find Belloq and his thugs smirking at us, swords …
five emeralds. The stones were worth 1000 GP each, but the loss …
Museum is incalculable. They headed west. I don’t know if they …
sheer cliffside, but we’ll follow…

…June 15: Bordag says that we’ve stumbled over a gold vein. If …
mining equipment we’d be able to make a fortune. No sign of…

…The natives say that a stranger swam to the taboo island. Belloq…

…June 25: Hold filled with treasure, and my new lightning whip on my belt. Set sail for home. Discovered Belloq’s ship in a cove. Unfortunately he and his gang were not aboard. We burned the ship to the waterline. He may still have the emeralds but I don’t know how he’ll get them home!
June 26: A dragon has been sighted over the island, heading for our ship. If it’s hungry, we’ll give it a fight.

Getting to the island

We had a pretty big D&D group, half of which came with already-made characters and half of which would be making their characters at the session. I decided to “reward” the more-prepared characters by giving them some logistics choices which would influence their chance of reaching the island with useful gear. I brought three constructible pirate ship minis from the Wizkids Pirates of the Spanish Main game. The players would be able to hire one of the ships. Here’s the handout I prepared:

You’ve put together a company to explore the island. You’ll share alike in its profit.

You’re at Port Lily, the southernmost port in the Misty Isles. You have enough money to hire and provision a merchant ship for three months (1000 GP). You could also get a better ship, but you’d have to take loans from the Bank of Tiamat (you’re pre-approved for up to 10,000 GP, 10% interest quarterly).

Ships available:
1,000 GP: A merchant cog, the Butter Churn. A pretty average merchant ship. Master Rudrick and 10 crew.
2,000 GP: A blockade-runner caravel, the Gull. Can outrun anything in the navies of the Free Coast. Captain Draco T. Farnsworth and 20 crew.
5,000 GP: A warship, the Lily Queen. A galley rowed by devils and crewed by the men who captured them from hell. Captain Jill Smith, 30 fighters, 30 hellish rowers.

Each ship has room for 20 extra people. Besides yourselves, the following are available for hire:

Each extra crewman, and their supplies for 3 months, take 1 slot of room.
-Each 2-person ballista crew: counts as 5 people. Costs 125.
-Each 3-person mining crew: counts as 4 people. Costs 100.
-Each soldier: counts as 1. Costs 25.
-6 months of stores for 1 person – counts as 1. Costs 25.

The PCs mulled over that for a while and ended up taking a small loan, hiring the Gull, and equipping it with extra provisions and soldiers. Then they headed to the island. Here’s what I prepared for the journey:

The journey to the island

The Ships:

The Butter Churn has no interesting secrets. Its captain and crew will not fight and will panic in a crisis unless the PCs lead them. The ship has no armaments. The journey will take 3 weeks.

The Gull is more of a smuggler than a blockade runner. Captain Draco is wanted by most of the local navies and will run from any navy ship. Luckily, his ship is fast. It mounts 1 rear ballista. Its crew will fight to defend the ship if they can’t escape. The journey will take 2 weeks.

The Lily Queen is actually rowed by tieflings captured from the Isle of Fear (the crew claims they are devils). The tieflings are kept in bad conditions – you can smell the ship from half a mile away. Captain Jill wants to know where you are going before she agrees to sail with you. She’s allied with the evil pirates on the Isle of Dread. If you agree to sail with her, she’ll promise to deliver you safely to the island. If you tell her your destination but end up hiring someone else, she’ll follow you and try to capture your ship. If you sail with her, she asks you not to go near the devils rowing her ship. During the journey, a few tieflings will die at their oars and be thrown overboard. The journey will take 2 weeks. Captain Jill has a magic lamp that, when lit, lets her communicate with the leader of the pirates on the island.

Whichever ship you take, the journey to the island will trigger 2 random encounter checks.

RANDOM ENCOUNTER CHECK 1 (after 2 weeks)

Have the players roll a d6, telling them not to roll a 6. On a 1-5, nothing happens. On a 6, roll again on the following table:
1 green dragon: from area 22 in the adventure, demanding either 5000 silver pieces or 1000 GP (it prefers SP for some reason) or it will attack the ship.
2 pirate attack: only a danger to the Butter Churn: the Gull can outrun it and the Lily will signal it to leave.
3 storm: the captain will give the PCs 3 tasks to help out (DC 10 for Lily and Gull, 15 for Butter Churn): climb up and cut a sail free (Dex), hold the wheel steady (Str), and pump water to keep the ship from sinking (Con). Each character can lead a task, and each leader can get aid from one other character. 1 failure: the ship will be delayed for 1 week. 2+ failures: the ship is destroyed, the PCs and 1d6 sailors escape on a raft with 10 days of food. They land on the island in 5 days.
4 wreck: at night, the ship runs aground on a hidden shoal. It takes 6 hours to launch boats and build rafts before it sinks. If the ship is the Lily: Jill and the crew will get in the lifeboats. The players will not be allowed on without a fight. The PCs must build rafts (1 per hour) and the tiefling rowers will be allowed to drown unless the PCs rescue them.
5 bull whales: Aggressive horned whales (stolen from Titan: the Fighting Fantasy World) who can be heard bellowing before they attack. Unless the PCs can kill the charging whales in one turn, the ships have a 50% chance to escape (25% on the Butter Churn). Failure: The ship is wrecked, as 4 above.
6 sirens: Enticed by the beautiful music, the crew jumps overboard, and the PCs must make saving throws to avoid doing the same. If all the PCs fail, they’ll be enslaved by the sirens for an adventure or two. Otherwise, the PCs must figure out how to sail the empty vessel (lots of skill checks, and a good chance to get lost or run aground on the way to the Isle of Dread).

RANDOM ENCOUNTER CHECK 2 (1 day before landing)
In the second encounter, the ship is sure to be greeted by either the pirates or the island’s green dragon, both of which are patrolling the seas. The results of encounters are different for the three ships. Roll 1d6:

BUTTER CHURN
1-3: attacked by pirates, who easily board the ship
4-6: attacked by dragon, who demands tribute as above
GULL
1-3: pursued by pirates (the Gull can outrun them easily unless they have been joined by the Lily Queen)
4-6: attacked by dragon, as above. Cannot be outrun.
LILY
1-3: no encounter (pirates will not bother the Lily Queen).
4-6: Green dragon will shake down the PCs as above. Jill has an understanding with the dragon and will insist the PCs pay but she knows that she and her ship are safe from the dragon. If the PCs fight, the crew will attack the PCs nonlethally “to save the ship.” In any case, if the PCs have discovered that the rowers are tieflings, Jill will have the PCs marooned on a random part of the Isle of Fear in a boat with 5 days of food, to preserve her secret. “I promised to see you to the island safely so I won’t kill you now.”

My players, who hired the Gull, had no trouble getting to the Island of Fear. They met the green dragon and sent it fleeing back to the island after a few rounds of missile fire and a critical hit with the Gull’s ballista. Now they’re ranging over the island looking to finish the job.

My players got to the Isle of Fear with an intact ship, so they have more supplies than the adventure expects them to, but I think that’s a fair reward for good play and good luck. You can steal this adventure intro if you want to give your players the same chance.

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what level is king joffrey?

May 3rd, 2013

In D&D, kings are often statted up as high-level characters. How you level them says a lot about your D&D fantasy politics.

If you think that cream rises to the top, you might stat King Robert (who fought his way to the throne through hand-to-hand combat) as high level, and Joffrey (who’s never had to do much of anything, and who isn’t related to King Robert) as low level.

If you think that cream is injected into the top, through high-level tutors and opportunities for military training, you’d say that Joffrey was at least mid-level, despite his youth and lack of any redeeming talents.

If you think that the rich can buy the cream, you’d stat Joffrey as high-level because, hey, 1 GP = 1 XP. (Littlefinger is, like, level 50.)

If you think that cream is just as common in the peasant’s cows as in the royal herd, you’d say that Joffrey is lower level than, say, Arya’s friend Hot Pie, who has at least mastered a skill and who has seen some real adventures.

I’ve always tended towards the last approach, so there are plenty of level 1 kings running around in my game world. But this quote from Crescent Throne got me thinking:

“But why?” Zamia asked. “Why would any man—even a cruel man—do these things? What could he possibly gain?” “Power,” the Doctor answered without hesitation. “The same thing that a man gains when he murders one of his fellow men. The same thing that a ruler gains when he sends his armies to kill and die. Power and the promise of a name that will live forever.”

Reading it, I thought, “It would be cool if there were some game representation of this ‘Powwah!’ that evil guys are always yammering on about. Like, by performing dark rituals, or merely by exercising political clout, you got some game benefit that made you more dangerous.”

As I thought about how to represent “power”, I discovered, as often happens when I re-examine a potential house rule, that the concept is already built into D&D. Levels.

What if the mere act of channeling power gave you a level minimum? Whatever his personal XP total, for instance, a king always has the HP, class features, etc. of at least a level 10 character. Channeling the eldritch might of some evil dimensional vortex gives you the abilities of a level 20 character – as long as you keep the vortex open.

Whoever holds the real power gets this benefit, of course. There are no level 10 babies. The regent is level 10 until the king is old enough to take the reins of power. This translates political struggle into D&D’s vernacular. Cersei and Joffrey are squabbling over who gets to act like they’re level 10.

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my poster on Wired

April 29th, 2013

My Random Dungeon Poster kickstarter was featured in a video on Wired:

It’s fun to be in Wired, although the video is of the “look at these silly people” variety familiar to D&D fans. The tagline for the article is

How do you define something like Kickstarter? Well, here’s one option: “An opportunity for your nutty friends to realize their nutty dreams.”

Whether or not it’s meant as a compliment, I’ll wholeheartedly embrace the definition. As D&D fans, we’re proud of pursuing our nutty dreams. I imagine we’ve all been told something like “You must have WAYY too much time on your hands.” For creative people, that’s never true. I bet most DMs have way more campaign ideas than they have time to run them, and that usually extends to other areas of life as well. For myself, I may never finish my Mazes and Monsters RPG, or my board game in which the players are Italian Renaissance art patrons, or any of the dozens of web games half-finished on my test server. Who knows if I’ll even start my orcs-and-elves online hockey game (“Hack and Slash”), or my fanfic rewrite of Brideshead Revisited with all Harry Potter characters, or my sequel to Quest for the Crown (Quest for the Ruby Emerald).

My hope is that I’ll always have some new inspiration: some new thing I want to make just for myself, and the luck to find some other people who just might like it too. That’s my wish for you, too, whether you’re a DM, a writer, an artist, or the inventor of a bad-ass automatic drummer.

In that spirit, I’d like to pass on some of the awesome projects of my nutty friends:

Today is just about the last day to jump on nutty friend Stephan Pokorny’s Dwarven Forge kickstarter. It’s way past a million. I’m backing this to the hilt, and I can’t wait to recreate my dungeon map poster in 3D.

Nutty friend Anna Raff illustrated World Rat Day, a book of poems about “real holidays that you’ve never heard of”, like World Rat Day and National Sloth Day (each holiday made up, I presume, by nutty friends I haven’t met yet). I’m proud of my autographed copy.

Nutty friend Jason Hurst of Two Kings Games and Gygax Memorial Fund is organizing a RPG convention near Macon, Georgia, with board games, card games, and RPGs, including his Gygax-inspired D4: Basic game.

From my nutty poet friends: Kate Durbin’s got a new chapbook, Kept Women, a poetic tour of the Playboy Mansion. Marisa Crawford’s 8th Grade Hippie Chic, about what other cool people were doing in jr. high while I was rolling dice. Becca Klaver’s Nonstop Pop features an elegy to analog TV and crazy user testimonials about the book “The Secret” (which has so much magical thinking in it it’s practically a D&D manual).

Nutty musician friend Chris Warren is inventing some crazy electronic music techniques that are going to change music. If you’re a musician, you should check it out. Also, its name, Echo Thief, sounds like a pretty awesome 3e prestige class.

What have I missed? Plug your creative projects in the comments! I’d like to check them out!

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