Blog of Holding

grading the planes: 4e cosmology

February 13th, 2012

Planes of existence are just as good as the adventure opportunities they offer. I’ve always found planar travel pretty boring, but some of the new 4e planes have something to offer. Since the 5e devs are talking about returning to the Great Wheel cosmology, this would be a good time to take a look at the Feywild, Shadowfell, Elemental Chaos, Astral Sea, and Outer Realms.

Feywild: When you travel in the world of faerie, you should meet truly odd NPCs and encounter fairy-tale magical thinking where everything comes in threes. And you can use this awesome world map! The only problem is that it seems like it requires a superhuman DM to maintain the level of wonder that the Feywild promises. Grade: B+

shadowfell: If you have an idea for a spooky horror one-shot, might as well put it in a realm in the Shadowfell. That way the PCs can’t just leave if they get too spooked, and you can introduce implausible elements like the Land of Eternal Night and the Country of Graveyards that just don’t fit on your world map. I think the Shadowfell’s main city of Gloomwrought is insufficiently spooky, but that can be ignored. Grade: A

Elemental Chaos: 4e mixed all the planes together, so in the Elemental Chaos you might adventure on a burning iceberg or climb a lightning volcano. It’s 4x as exciting as the elemental planes of older editions, and it’s STILL too boring to use. It inspires in me ideas for interesting tactical encounters but no adventure hooks to go with them. The bottom of the plane is crawling with demons, so I guess that’s something. Grade: C

Astral Sea: The realms of the gods are islands floating on a silver sea. In theory, this is a really exciting setting. In fact, I doubt my ability to convey the wonder and awe of the lands of the gods. The gods and their realms are things you should be able to glimpse, and carry that sacred memory to your grave, but in 4e you can move to Hestavar, the Bright City, and become a greengrocer. If describing the realms of the gods sounds too ambitious for you, you can always have nautical adventures fighting Githyanki pirates on the astral seas. This would be better if I didn’t find Githyanki so boring. Grade: C

Outer Realms: People don’t go to the outer realms: they’re from there. They’re fun as a source of weird otherness and horrific threats. They’re a bit of an exception to my rule: even though there aren’t a lot of obvious great adventuring possibilities on the plane itself, it’s still nice to have it around: the threats from the plane can spark adventures. That’s kind of a cop out, so I’ll give the Outer Realms a B-.

Overall Grade of 4e Planes: B

Bonus rating: The natural world. It boasts a huge variety of settings, from tundra to desert to urban pubcrawl to dungeon; there are lots of NPCs; and you can throw in silver seas and lightning volcanoes if you want. Grade: A+.

And that’s always been my problem with the planes of existence. A world of magic is such a compelling fantasy that it never seems attractive to visit another, less varied world of magic.

Next time: I’ll grade the planes of the Great Wheel cosmology of earlier editions!

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intelligent residuum

February 10th, 2012

The other planets under Sol’s domination had been visited, or at least probed, and to some extent were being colonized and exploited–but on the whole they had proved disappointing. No life to speak of. No intelligent residuum.
-Emil Petaja: The Nets of Space (1969)

To take this phrase out of context, here’s an idea for 4e: INTELLIGENT RESIDUUM. When you melt down an intelligent weapon, you get this stuff. If it’s used to make a new magic item, that item gets the former weapon’s personality.

In powder form, the residuum still possesses intelligence. It can travel on its own, like a vampire in vapor form, and try to possess people for short periods (either to communicate telepathically or to dominate the possessed creature: it’s a Will attack to possess a creature, and a save ends the possession.) The vapor is immune to melee and ranged attacks, but bursts and blasts automatically kill it.

The residuum can, over time, exert enough force to pop the cork on an ordinary residuum vial, but any stronger form of containment will trap it.

What does intelligent residuum want? Well, it depends greatly on personality, but probably to be used in the creation of a powerful item.

Tags: everybook
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playing D&D with Mike Mornard: how did this get in the manual

February 8th, 2012

When I last gamed with Mike Mornard, I also him a few miscellaneous questions about OD&D: largely about where various game elements came from. Here are his equally miscellaneous answers:

Mike is thanked prominently on the Greyhawk supplement. What were his contributions? Mike and Rob Kuntz were big proponents of variable weapon damage, so that every weapon doesn’t do 1d6 damage. (They weren’t involved, though, in the change in PC hit dice from 1d6). Mike also suggested the acid-spitting giant slug, which is cribbed from a Conan story.

When we were splitting our loot, which included a +1 shield and a couple of hundred gold, Mike said, “The process we often used for splitting treasure was this: everyone rolls percentile dice. The highest roller earns first choice of treasure.” This actually reminded me of the Need or Greed loot-rolling system which was reinvented for World of Warcraft.

The early books suggest that campaigns might have 50 people in the same world, but they wouldn’t all show up on the same night. Different groups would play on different nights. The cleric at our table was played by Alex of Bad Wrong Fun, who is setting up a similarly ambitious campaign in New York today.

Mike had a couple of tactical tips, which reminded me of this fact: OD&D “marching order” suggests that D&D parties march in formation, not the free-wheeling skirmish squads I’m used to from 3e/4e battlemats. OD&D parties march in squares, and it matters what rank you’re in. The second rank of fighters can use spears or other polearms. Handaxes are useful because you can use them in melee, but also throw them if the monsters are threatening a different part of your formation.

Also, said Mike, the OD&D thief is not a “rogue”, or lightly-armored damage specialist. As a thief, I was better off staying in the middle of the formation, or lurking in the shadows, and not gallivanting around the battlefield looking for opportunities to backstab. A thief could backstab in a pinch, but it wasn’t his bread and butter.

Finally, Mike says he doesn’t know why Gary didn’t record this fact in a book somewhere: when he modified the combat system he got from Dave, he was consciously imitating the battle in the Errol Flynn Robin Hood movie. A movie hero never goes down early with a lucky critical, but low-level guys can be dropped with one hit.

Watch the fight on youtube!

It strikes me that the designers of 4e recognized this goal and made it explicit with their rules for minions and boss monsters.

Tags: oldschool
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fools rush in (and lose a leg to a bear trap)

February 6th, 2012

For me, dungeon traps are an unsolved problem in 4e. I’d like something between a full-fledged 4e skill-challenge trap and the old-school spanking for not tapping every flagstone with a ten-foot pole. I’ve made attempts to solve the problem, but I haven’t been happy with any of them. (My favorite so far is the Mazes and Monsters rule: the Maze Controller cannot spring a trap unless he has announced that it “could be a trap”.)

The above panels from “Red Nails” in the 1970’s Savage Sword of Conan comic gave me an idea. Conan would TOTALLY have spotted that bear trap if he hadn’t been raging – and running.

How about this rule: Under normal circumstances, all PCs spot all adjacent traps – no Perception check required.

PCs only fail to notice traps when they’re running or charging (and maybe also a handful of other distracting conditions: dazed, stunned, or blinded).

With this rule, traps are most dangerous in combat, and in very specific circumstances like chases: in other words, they add danger to already dangerous scenes, instead of slowing down routine situations. It’s the DM’s job, as the roleplayer of the ancient dungeon architect and the kobold snaremaster, to put traps in places where PCs will be tempted to rush heedlessly.

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A canticle for leibowitz

February 3rd, 2012

And what makes you think the Memorabilia is completely free of pap? Even the gifted and Venerable Boedullus once remarked scornfully that about half of it should be called the Inscrutabilia. Treasured fragments of a dead civilization there were indeed-but how much of it has been reduced to gibberish, embellished with olive leaves and cherubims, by forty generations of us monastic ignoramuses, children of dark centuries, many, entrusted by adults with an incomprehensible message, to be memorized and delivered to other adults.

The monks in the post-apocalyptic sci fi novel A Canticle for Leibowitz are in approximately the same position as scholars in most D&D worlds. They’re inheritors of a fallen civilization they don’t fully understand. Whether your fallen civilization is 20th century Earth or Bael Turath, books from the past age are precious – and, in another way, irrelevant. A single ancient book of pre-cataclysmic magic might do the PCs no good, just as a modern book on electronics wouldn’t do a medieval scholar any good: in this book, too much knowledge is taken for granted.

A library, on the other hand, is a different thing. When I DM, I tend to put treasures in libraries, because that’s a natural place to find powers from past ages. I tend to be interested in mechanics for performing research, and in powerful wizard spells as treasure (as, indeed, they were in previous editions). I haven’t quite figured out the perfect mechanics yet, but I do want to find a way to make players greedy for ancient spells and secrets. For now, I plan to use my ideas for spells as treasure.

Tags: everybook
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rolling for hit points in 4e

February 1st, 2012

As you can tell, one of the things I miss in 4e is rolling your attributes. However, I have never missed rolling for hit points.

Rolling your attributes helps throw some randomness into your character concept, and randomness is usually an aid to creativity.

Rolling for hit points doesn’t spark creativity. It has the potential to sabotage a character you like, and it’s such an important roll that, for me at least, it encourages cheating as little else in D&D does. It just doesn’t seem fair that my cool paladin leveled up and rolled 1 hit point.

Here’s a suggestion for those who would like to roll HP in 4e:

1) Start with your normal 4e HP – or a little less.

2) Roll a HP die at the beginning of every level. This is a special pool of bonus Wound Points. If you have any Wound Points left from last level, they’re gone – they don’t stack.

Wound Points can be used instead of HP at any time: typically on an attack where you would go below 0 HP. (But you always have a choice to save your Wound Points, if you don’t mind falling unconscious.)

Wound points cannot be healed in any way. You only get them when you level.

This rule lets you “roll hit points” every level. It also solves a common 4e objection that an extended rest cures all injuries. There are some wounds that only time can cure.

You can also use it to model semi-permanent injuries. If you are ever at 0 Wound Points, you can be considered to have some nagging injury. I’d play this entirely as a flavor thing, but other DMs could hang some random penalty on it if they wanted.

Tags: uncanned
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playing D&D with mike mornard: henchmen and hirelings

January 30th, 2012

When a spider dropped on my loyal teamster, Pedro, I was on the other side of my mule and too far away to rush to his aid. But, hey, at least the spider hadn’t dropped on me. That seems to be the main reason why people have hirelings and henchmen, and mules for that matter. They provide tasty alternatives for hungry spiders.

I started this D&D session wealthy. The last time I had played with Mike Mornard, we had found a giant cache of gems, and my thief, Roger de Coverley, had earned enough gold and XP to level up almost to level 3. In this game session, I was joined by all-new level 1 PCs, with 30-180 GP each. Some of them were smart enough to suck up to me. I sprang for new suits of armor for the fighting men played by Andrew and Tavis, each of whom swore fealty to me and wore one of my garters as a favor.

I also decided that I should get into the spirit of OD&D and get a few NPC hirelings. It ended up costing less than 100 GP to get a level 0 man at arms named Baldric, a teamster named Pedro, and a mule. The mule’s main job was to carry the rest of my wealth (which, at 1/10# per GP, weighed more than 300 pounds).

I never ordered my man at arms, Baldric, to do much, and he never volunteered to jump into combat. The mule was more useful. I used him several times as a shield, or skulked behind him when I was in danger. Pedro the teamster was in the thick of things. He was the first target of the first spider who attacked us.

One of the other PCs recognized our dungeon as the sample dungeon from the 1e DMG, which has a few filled-out rooms and a bunch of uncharted areas for the DM to fill in himself. I don’t know if Mike was winging it or if he was using a premade adventure key, but we quickly fought our way through the initial spider attack, survived an ambush by giant camel spiders, avoided the deadly save-or-die yellow mold spores on the grain sacks, and made it into unfamiliar territory. Terrifying unfamiliar territory.

Tavis at The Mule Abides describes our antics pretty fully, but I’d like to spend some time on my first interaction with henchmen and hirelings.

First of all, Charm Person is a pretty cool spell, as it unlocks a new sort of pokémon-collecting henchmen acquisition system at level 1. You might not get a castle and followers until level 10 or so, but you can, like Mike’s level 1 magic-user Lessnard in Gygax’s game, pick up a fifth-level fighting man as a bodyguard if he happens to fail his saving throw. In OD&D, Charm Person can be long-lasting or permanent, but Mike emphasized that it didn’t do more than the name implied: it made someone your buddy, not your slave. If you didn’t treat your new friend fairly, they might not be your willing ally forever.
Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: oldschool
Posted in legacy D&D, play, RPG Hub | 4 Comments »

playing D&D with Mike Mornard: it’s all about context

January 27th, 2012

This is Karl Marx, not Mike Mornard. Mike's beard is shorter.

I played another game of D&D with Gygax and Arneson player Mike Mornard, who, always quotable, said, “Understanding history is all about context. When Karl Marx was writing his first essays, Germany was a feudal state. In some ways, he was closer to the 11th century German peasants than he was to us in 2011.”

I love D&D, and it’s that love that makes me, a fourth edition player, so delighted to delve into the secrets of OD&D and Dave and Gary’s campaigns. As Mike said, understanding history is all about context. There are so many charming, inexplicable mysteries in D&D, from the baffling stone head in Greyhawk to the puzzle of what the heck hit points represent. I can bring my own context to them, but I think I need to have some understanding of those first games in order to know just what the heck my D&D is about.

It’s hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, they’d end up playing nine different games.

Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game – possibly in the first Gen Con in Parkside in 1978? Gary Gygax was DMing nine tournament teams successively through the same module, and whoever got the furthest in the dungeon would win. You’d expect this to take all day, and so Mike was surprised to see Gary, looking shaken, wandering through the hallways at about 2 PM. Mike bought Gary a beer and asked him what had happened – wasn’t he supposed to be DMing right now?

“It’s over!” replied a stunned Gary Gygax.

Gary described how the first group had fared. Walking down the first staircase into the dungeon, the first rank of fighters suddenly disappeared through a black wall. There was a quiet whoosh, and a quiet thud. The players conferred, and then they sent the second rank forward, who disappeared too. The rest of the players followed.

The same thing happened to the next tournament team, and the next. Players filed into the unknown, one after another. And they were all killed. The wall was an illusion, and behind it was a pit. Eight out of the nine groups had thrown themselves like lemmings over a cliff; only one group had thought to tap around with a ten foot pole. That group passed the first obstacle, so they won the tournament.

Gary and his players couldn’t believe that the tournament players had been so incautious. But, to be fair, none of those tournament groups had played in Gary Gygax’s game. They had learned the rules of D&D, but they had no experience of the milieu in which the book was written. Of those nine groups that had learned D&D from a book, only one played sufficiently like Gary’s group to survive thirty seconds in his dungeon.

In OD&D, there’s no guarantee that things are fair. One of Gary’s and Rob Kuntz’s favorite stories, says Mornard, was Clark Ashton Smith’s The Seven Geases, in which (spoilers ahead) the hero survives a horrible death at the hands of seven different monsters only to die meaninglessly slipping from a ledge. That was one of the seminal texts of D&D, said Mornard, and one of the stories it was designed to model. “The story that D&D tells,” said Mike, “is the story of the world. Heroes aren’t invincible.”

That’s a long way from the Fourth Edition ethos. In 4e, it takes a long time to make a character, and so you’re invested in him before he’s downed his first kobold. If your 4e character is killed, you can be sure he’ll get a chance to put up a good fight first.

Not in 0e. Characters died all the time. That’s why Gary Gygax’s characters got names like Xagyg the wizard and Yrag the fighter, and other players contributed Melf the Elf, or (if I remember Mike’s anecdote correctly) Bellus of Telefono. It was the sixties and seventies. Life was cheap, and heroes died.

That’s all scary stuff to hear from your DM right before he runs your thief through a dungeon.

Next blog post: My thief explores one of the classic D&D dungeons.

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Feather boat, leveled

January 25th, 2012

Raven Feather Boat: if a dead person is put at the helm and the boat is sent adrift down a river, it will, after several hours, take all inhabitants to the shadowfell.

This feather boat’s power is discovered only when the PCs find the one black feather on the swan boat’s body.

My old houserules for leveling magic items mean that every piece of magical treasure has the potential to gain power in ways that the players can’t predict. Furthermore, WOTC recently invented the concept of the “rare magic item,” but we don’t yet have lots of examples.

While some items may get mechanically better (for instance, a +1 sword becomes a +2 sword), it’s more challenging to improve items that don’t have numeric bonuses. I thought I’d go through the Wondrous Items in the 4e Player’s Handbook and give examples of how each could gain powers that reflect their history.

Feather Boat of the Northern Mists: While the feather boat is in motion, the boat’s steersman may use a minor action to render the boat and all its passengers invisible. If the boat stops, or any of the boat’s occupants make an attack, it becomes visible for the next five minutes.

The northern barbarians know the secret test which must be performed to unlock this special power.

Swanmay boat: Besides a feather token and a boat, the token can also take on its true form once a day for up to an hour: a swanmay, a fey woman with swan wings. The swanmay can fly, has defenses of 26, and, if hit, returns to token form. In swanmay form, the token is under no obligation to follow orders, but may help the PCs if she trusts them. In swanmay or boat form, this token can speak elven and common.

The boat’s swanmay form is discovered only when the swanmay first chooses to show herself.

Tags: equipment
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