Synnibarr Sunday: paradrakes

April 24th, 2011

“…a small amount of gamma radiation was released and mingled with the radiations emitted by the damaged drives and the power plant within Synnibarr. This caused the creation of the first drake-type creature, the paradrake.

This creature was discovered by an Alchemist whose name is known only to his greatest creations – Lord Midnight and the 72-headed chameleon hydra. This Alchemist created several different species of hydras and drakes, intending to build a vast and powerful army. When he finished his last two projects, he found that the family of hydras were made all too well. They had learned that he was not overwhelmingly powerful after all, that inside he was actually quite weak. In a surprise attack, they dispatched their master and stole his books of knowledge.

Using this acquired knowledge, the dominating hydras (known as the midnight sunstone hydras) granted the other hydras and drakes the gift of intelligence and established a strict social order. This order lasted for 26,000 years, before The Great Rebellion of the Drakes.”

-The World of Synnibarr, introduction (page 2)
Highlighted passages make you go YEAHH!

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picaresque adventure pitch

April 21st, 2011

Here are the rules for my upcoming picaresque one-shot 4e game, using my item quality rules:

Welcome to Setine!

Setine is a beautiful desert city of gardens, beauty, and riches. The gardens and beauty are nice, but you’d REALLY like to get your hands on the riches.

Come to Setine with a level 1 character (or just show up and grab a pre-made character!)

 
Special Poverty Rules

Instead of the normal starting money (100GP) you start with 10 GP and a ragged set of clothes. You’re too poor to afford most normal equipment, but you’re in luck! For every piece of equipment from the Player’s Handbook, there is a “bad” version that costs 1/10 the price! Every piece of bad equipment comes with some flaw: bad weapons break on a natural 1, bad food has a chance to make you sick, etc.

Room and Board

Normally, D&D characters don’t have to worry about their next meal, but in Setine, you’re only a day or two away from starvation.

The Golden Grapes: A fine inn in the respectable Silver District. 7 SP per night or 30 per week.
The Ragman: A disreputable inn. Keep an eye on your possessions! Located in the beautiful Baths District, where all the streets are flooded with a foot of standing water. 7 CP per night or 3 SP per week.
Sleeping on the streets: FREE! But you won’t heal or get your daily powers back.

Traveling in the City

When traveling between neighborhoods, you can either take the high roads or the back streets. On the high roads, the guards will let you through if you have appropriate clothing (normal clothes for middle-class neighborhoods, fine clothes for rich neighborhoods). If you take the back streets, you might run into a gang or other unpleasantness.

Everything below here is optional! You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to!

OPTIONAL: Backgrounds

You can take one of the following 10 backgrounds, which give you unique advantages and disadvantages, or you can skip the backgrounds and come up with any backstory you want.

Traveler: You’re not from Setine. You might be a sailor, merchant, con man, mercenary, or any other type of fortune seeker. You heard that Setine was paved with gold, but that doesn’t seem to be true in your neighborhood. Advantages: You speak the Southern language. Also, please tell me about the moneymaking opportunity that drew you to town. It might still work out! Disadvantages: You’re not from around here. -2 to Streetwise checks.

Honest Guardsman: You work under incorruptible Captain Pike (“The Tarrasque”). You can barely survive on your guardsman’s salary. Advantages: Start with a free low-quality spear (breaks on a natural 1) and low-quality chain mail (breaks if you’re critically hit). You have access to patrol schedules, so you can always summon a guard patrol within a neighborhood. Half the guards are honest, and inclined to be friendly. Disadvantages: Half the guards are corrupt, and inclined to be unfriendly.

Corrupt Guardsman: You work under good old Captain Falstaff (“The Wine Cask”). You make a little money on the side, but that’s the only way to survive on a guardsman’s salary. Advantages: Start with free chainmail and spear and guardsman uniform. You have access to patrol schedules, so you can avoid the guards within a neighborhood. Half the guards are corrupt, and inclined to be friendly to you. Disadvantages: Half the guards are honest, and inclined to be unfriendly.

Guild thief: You’re a low-ranking member of the respected Thieves Guild. Advantages: Access to “safe houses” in each neighborhood, and a fence that buys at 2x the normal fence price. Disadvantages: Half the people and houses in their city pay their dues to the Guild, and you are not allowed to rob them.

Guild beggar: You might be a pretend cripple or a plucky street orphan. You work for Vomit, the eccentric leader of the Beggar’s Guild. Advantages: Free access to the sewers (from every neighborhood except the Baths, where the sewers are underwater). You can beg (a minigame that can make you money). Disadvantages: You start with 3 GP instead of 10 GP.

Struggling Artist or Student: You’ve been living in a garret working on your play/painting/translation/performance. If you could just get some rich backers, you could release it to the world and probably be a huge success! Advantages: If you can raise at least 300 coins, you could release your masterwork, which could pay you back ten times over if it’s a hit! Disadvantages: Success is based on your artistic skills.

Orc: Orcs are commonly used as bodyguards and mercenaries. You’re between jobs. (For orc, use the stats of either half-orc or goliath). Advantages: +2 Intimidate. Free entry to the orc camp. Once a day, you can get 1-6 orc friends to help you on a job. Disadvantages: Poor orcs are generally regarded with suspicion, because when they’re hungry they smash things.

Noble: You’ve sold your lands, pawned your heirlooms, and your friends are avoiding you. If you could just raise 5000 GP you could pay off your debts and get a fresh start. Advantages: Start with a set of fine clothes. You also have a masterwork weapon (+1 to hit), but it’s pawned. You can redeem it for 100GP. Disadvantages: Half the merchants in the city refuse to do business with you. Debt collectors are combing the city for you. If they catch you, prison is the best-case scenario.

Disgraced Paladin: The Order of Tima (the “knights in white satin” are a pretty easygoing group of paladins devoted to courtly love. I don’t know what you did to get under their skin, but they’ve kicked you out of the Citadel of Love. Advantages: You start with your uniform, a fine suit of white clothes that gives you a +8 AC bonus as long as it is immaculately clean. Disadvantages: Becoming Bloodied or travelling through the filthy Baths district has a chance of dirtying your uniform.

Illegal Necromancer: You’re a wizard or cleric who worships a certain god who is unjustly suppressed in these parts. You’ve been kicked out of your former church or wizard’s college for your progressive beliefs. Advantages: When you find a corpse, you can raise it as a level 1 skeleton or zombie helper. You can only have one helper at a time. Disadvantages: Necromancy is illegal; the guards had better not find out about your little helper.

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evidence that the mid-80s was a bad time to be a fantasy reader

April 21st, 2011

I went into a used bookstore recently, and I saw these three 80’s fantasy novels:

Sentenced to Prism


Elf Defense


Prince of Whales

Well, it was a golden age if you liked pun-based fantasy. You also had Robert Asprin and Piers Anthony, who were sure to keep you rolling in the aisles.

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Malcolm Gladwell vs. Ryan Dancey on the fate of TSR

April 20th, 2011

Mike Mearls, whose retrospective “Legends and Lore” columns always seem to be sidling towards a “We’re relaunching OD&D!” announcement, posted a link to an interesting Malcolm Gladwell TED Talk about the history of spaghetti sauce. Apparently, once upon a time, companies sought the One True Spaghetti Sauce Recipe, until a forward thinker discovered that people were different! And companies have achieved great success by splitting their product lines into different sauces catering to different tastes.

It seems obvious when put that baldly, but it also seems to contradict another seemingly obvious story that’s central to the modern D&D mythos.

There’s an analogy that’s commonly quoted to explain the death of TSR. I’ve seen it attributed to Ryan Dancey and Bill Slavicsek:

“Picture it this way,” Slavicsek says, “it’s raining money outside and you want to catch as much of it as you can. You can either make a really big bucket or waste your time and attention by creating a lot really small buckets — either way, you’re never going to make more rain.” In plain English, TSR, by putting out a lot of product lines instead of supporting the main Dungeons & Dragons line, fragmented the marketplace.

So the path to massive corporate success leads either through diversification or through consolidation. Which is it?

Here’s something that Ryan Dancey said about the death of TSR:

No customer profiling information. No feedback. No surveys. No “voice of the customer”. TSR, it seems, knew nothing about the people who kept it alive. The management of the company made decisions based on instinct and gut feelings; not data. They didn’t know how to listen – as an institution, listening to customers was considered something that other companies had to do – TSR lead, everyone else followed.

On the other hand, Malcolm Gladwell says: “Assumption number one in the food industry used to be that the way to find out what people want to eat – what will make them happy – is to ask them. […] People don’t know what they want. A critically important step in understanding our own desires is to realize that we cannot always explain what we want deep down.”

I think the takeaway from Gladwell’s quote is not that companies should ignore surveys (and message boards and blog posts); it’s that they shouldn’t be used as road maps. I think TSR was right to make a lot of decisions on instinct and gut feelings. No one would have filled out a survey and asked for D&D before it was invented.

Perhaps the purpose of the customer survey is not to tell a company what to do: it’s to tell a company what NOT to do. While no survey can tell a company to “make D&D”, a survey could plausibly say “stop making Dragon Dice”.

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3 Badass Haunted Rooms

April 19th, 2011

A week or two ago Paul asked me to write some quick room descriptions to use for a Haunted House in his campaign on the off chance his players decided to enter it (despite being warned not to). I wrote up the following rooms. They are all non combat puzzle type encounters.

Room Number 1: This room is shrouded in darkness. No light source illuminates the area. A long table sits in the center of the room, set up with the remains of a feast long since eaten. There are utensils, broken plates, tureens, and mostly empty platters on the table. The entire room smells of decaying trash. Indeed, the floor appears to be covered in trash: rotten fruit, broken pieces of furniture, and tattered pieces of paper. Less savory elements are also scattered about the room:  a chunk of wet meat, a human hand, and a skull still moist with flesh and skin! The room is littered with human body parts.

If anyone is determined enough to root through the slurry of rotten decay (Easy Perception Check), they recover a potent cursed magic item: A tome infused with the blood of those who died here that communicates with its bearer by writing. The bearer may ask it questions, but it always tells the bearer exactly what it thinks they want to hear, which may or may not correspond to the truth (Hard Insight Check to tell when it is lying).

Room Number 2: This is a small nursery, complete with all the trappings. There is an infant in its crib in this room. It is crying and shrieking at the top of its lungs. Strangely, its crying could not be heard outside the door to the nursery. If someone picks it up, it stops crying immediately. However, should it leave that persons grasp even for second, it immediately begins crying and shrieking again until it is back into that person’s grasp. Only finding the baby’s original mother and giving it to her will wean the baby off of its rescuer and break this strange enchantment.

Room Number 3: This room is bare, save for a thick rope hanging in the center of the room tied into a noose. There is a trap door in the floor right under the noose that swings open if anyone puts their head in, killing them instantly (No Check. This is some old school D&D shit). However, the trap door reveals a small cache where a VERY potent magical weapon is hidden, perhaps an artifact of some kind.

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Mazes and Monsters: Monsters!!!

April 18th, 2011

Here’s the M&M bestiary from levels 1 to 5, from the lowly Pixie to the mighty Mazosaurus Rex. The Mazosaurus Rex is not SPECIFICALLY attested in the movie, but I think it can be inferred from the awesomeness of Mazes and Monsters.

Download Monsters PDF

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Synnibarr Sunday: Steelbreeze

April 17th, 2011

“By the time they reached the Terra Isles, there was only 1 week left. To the humans it seemed hopeless, and indeed it might well have been if not for the courage of another Mutant named Steelbreeze. His powers were Invulnerability and Super Speed. He ran the distance between the Terra Isles and the Antarctic and found and entered The Womb. He then braved deadly radiation and fought off several mutated monsters until he reached the main control room.”

-The World of Synnibarr, introduction (page 2).
Capitalized proper nouns are in bold.

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The Key to Rebecca

April 15th, 2011

The Key to Rebecca by Ken Follett

The Key to Rebecca by Ken Follett


The desert was carpeted with flowers.
“It’s the rain, obviously,” said Vandam. “But…”
Millions of flying insects had also appeared from nowhere, and now butterflies and bees dashed frantically from bloom to bloom, reaping the sudden harvest.
Billy said: “The seeds must have been in the sand, waiting.”

During and shortly after a heavy rain in the desert (an event about as common as a rare planetary alignment, which is to say once during the PCs’ career), giant, extravagantly colored flowers carpet the desert. Bees, butterflies, and flower fairies seem to be everywhere. For a day, it looks more like the feywild than the desert. The flowers are called desert blooms, and the PCs will make a fortune if they harvest and preserve them. They’re a magical ingredient coveted by wizards. The PCs will have to hurry, though, because the blooms will have disappeared in a few hours. Desert blooms hold water like cups, so for a short time, the parched PCs will have as much water as they can drink.

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Ask an Atheist Day and D&D!

April 13th, 2011

In honor of Ask an Atheist Day, I thought it would be amusing to consider what atheism means in D&D. I suspect that whatever it means, it’s pretty great or at least hilarious!

  1. You don’t believe in ANY gods: SO MUCH HARDER IN D&D, where it seems pretty obvious that gods exist. For example, when a cleric or paladin prays to a god, they are granted awesome mystical powers. Epic level adventurers may even meet the gods! However, with that said, the average commoner might not have that much to go on to prove gods exist. Sure, magic exists, but how do they know that divine magic isn’t just another variation of arcane magic? Also, when those epic level adventurers meet up with these gods, maybe they’re just D&D’s equivalent of super powered space aliens, right? It doesn’t necessarily follow (to the PCs) that some being with awesome powers created entire races of people, after all. Maybe they’re just kind of bad-ass. Anyway, I understand Paul once played an atheist cleric, and it was AWESOME!
  2. You don’t care about the gods: This is a lot easier to get away with in a D&D world. The gods exist, but so what? Sure, Bahamut sounds like a nice guy, but in the end, it doesn’t seem like he actually does that much in the mortal world, aside from bestowing some followers with divine powers. So in this case being an atheist more means you don’t worship any gods or even feel particularly beholden to them. So a little different from how we’d normally look at the term, but close enough, right?
  3. You Worship Some Demon or Something: Demons aren’t gods and neither are evil creatures from the far realm, but people in D&D worship them all the time. I guess they aren’t technically atheists, because they usually worship them as gods, but let’s not get too bogged down in semantics here. I would be happy to clasp their non-god worshiping hand as a fellow atheist any day (well, not really)!

Have YOU ever played an atheist character in D&D?

Can YOU think of any other hilarious ways a character might be a D&D atheist?

Do YOU have any questions for ME, a real honest to God ATHEIST who plays D&D?

Then please respond with questions or comments!

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Table Cost

April 13th, 2011

Next time you design a new rule or game element, calculate its Table Cost. That’s a measure of the strain it places on the players around the table, in terms of time, brain stress, and suspension of disbelief. Rules with low Table Cost are less annoying to use. Rules with high Table Cost are more annoying to use, and they’d better have something else going for them, or they Get The Axe!

Recall Cost
+0: Not easily forgotten, because it’s obvious when should you should use it. (“I need healing, let me see what healing powers I have left!”)
+2: Somewhat easily forgotten. Your CHARACTER could be reasonably expected to remember it. When it’s not the focus of attention, you don’t have to think about it. (“I can activate Fire Form to get through the lava!”
+5: Easily forgotten. The PLAYER has to remember it, because it’s based on a generic or a meta-game trigger. May require something to be tracked from round to round. (“I became Bloodied, so my Animal Fury kicks in!”)

Speech Cost
+0: You don’t need to bother anyone else with the details (you roll 3d6 extra damage when flanking)
+2: Requires you to specify a game term aloud (“…and I do 15 fire damage”)
+5: Requires you to specify a game term aloud EVERY TURN (“…and I’m using my minor action to sustain the Flaming Sphere”)

Belief Cost
+0: Provides a vivid mental picture (“I slam into him and push him back a step”)
+2: Abstract (“When I hit this guy with my mace, I give you an AC bonus”)
+5: Defies imagination (“So I guess the fog is prone?”)
Read the rest of this entry »

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