Challenges System adapted to LotFP combat

March 21, 2015, 4:50 pm

The Challenges Game System was an 8 page restatement of D&D written by Tom Moldvay. James Maliszewski has a brief rundown of the game here. The one place where Moldvay seriously complicates his otherwise streamlined system is with the attack table. It's an interesting one-roll alternative to fumble and crit charts, so on a whim I decided to rewrite it for Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

Putting the Hurt on the Monsters

Every character has a number called their net Attack Bonus or simply Base. This number indicates how effective you are when engaged in combat with some foe. It starts at +1 for all characters. Attack Bonus can be modified by many factors. Good factors, such as wielding a Magic Sword, increase Attack Bonus while bad factors decrease it, like fighting while suffering from one or more Wounds.

Every character also has an Armor Class (AC), indicating how hard it is for a foe to strike you in combat. A normal person in normal clothing has an Armor Class of 10, with higher numbers being better. Factors that can improve (increase) your AC include a high Dexterity score, putting on some armor, and using a shield. While some monsters also wear armor (which you can totally steal if you defeat them), other monsters often have an AC that reflects their scaly hide or supernatural invulnerability.

When you attack a foe you roll one twenty sided die (d20) add your Attack Bonus and subtract the foe’s Armor Class. The net number is your Attack Result. A higher number indicates a better strike to the foe, while a lower number indicates a weaker strike or an outright miss. To figure out the exact effects of your attack, subtract your Target Number from the actual Roll and consult the Attack Chart below.

Attack Result = d20 Roll + your (modified) Attack Bonus - foe’s Armor Class

Attack Result	Effect
Any roll of “1” on the die	Miss clumsily, forfeit your next attack
-10 or lower	Miss clumsily, forfeit your next attack
-9	Miss clumsily, roll save vs. Paralyzation or drop weapon, thereby forfeiting next attack
-8	Miss and automatically lose initiative next round
-7	Miss and take -2 penalty to initiative next round
-6	Miss and take -1 penalty to initiative next round
-5	Miss, no other effect
-4	Miss, no other effect
-3	Glancing blow does exactly 1 point of damage
-2	A weak Hit for half normal damage (round down, minimum 1 point)
-1	A weak Hit for normal damage -2 points (minimum 1 point)
0	A normal Hit, no other effect
+1	A strong Hit for +1 point of damage
+2	A strong Hit for +2 points of damage
+3	A strong Hit for +2 points of damage that also inflicts a Light wound (-1 to attack rolls, etc.)
+4	A strong Hit for +3 points of damage that also inflicts a Light wound (-1 to attack rolls, etc.)
+5	A strong Hit for +4 points of damage that also inflicts a Light wound (-1 to attack rolls, etc.)
+6	A strong Hit for +4 points of damage that also inflicts a Serious wound (-3 to attack rolls, etc.)
+7	A strong Hit for +5 points of damage that also inflicts a Serious wound (-3 to attack rolls, etc.)
+8	A mighty Hit for double rolled damage that also inflicts a Serious wound (-3 to attack rolls, etc.)
+9	A mighty Hit for double rolled damage that also inflicts a Critical wound (-5 to attack rolls, etc.)
+10 or higher	A mighty Hit for double rolled damage that also inflicts a Critical wound (-5 to attack rolls, etc.), plus gain an immediate extra attack
Any roll of “20” on the die	Take the result above OR a normal Hit plus gain an immediate extra attack

EXAMPLE: Brother Hubert (a first level cleric), Lucas of the Invisible Sigil (a second level magic-user), and Dulcia the Mighty (a fighter of third level) are exploring level two of the Festering Pits of Granfalloon when they find themselves face-to-face with 4 ornery gnolls. An attempted parley falls flat, largely because the Gnolls speak no Common and the party doesn’t know any Gnollish, but also because Hubert’s body odor offends the nostrils of the monsters. Weapons are drawn and combat ensues. The party wins initiative the first round of combat, so Lucas of course throws his remaining Sleep spell. Lucas rolls and gets a measly, pitiful 4 hit dice of effect, sending only 2 of the Gnolls to nighty-night land. Brother Hubert and Dulcia sneer at Lucas’ paltry spell, then move forward to attack the remaining pair of active Gnolls.

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Brother Hubert moves forward and attempts to brain one of the gnolls with his trusty mace. His Attack Bonus is +1 versus the Gnoll’s Armor Class is 15. Brother Hubert rolls a 12. 12+1-15 equals an Attack Result of -2. That’s a weak ass hit for d6 divided by 2. Brother Hubert rolls d6 for damage and gets a five, which is halved to 2.5 and rounded down to 2 points of damage. Dulcia rushes the other gnoll, swinging her sword with precision and force. Her total Attack Bonus, including a bonus from a high strength score, is +5. She rolls a 14, for a net Attack of +4. Her total damage is d8 (sword) +1 (high strength) +4 (attack result) or 13 points. That’s not quite enough to kill this tough 15 hit point Gnoll, so he also suffer a Light Wound (-1 on to-hit rolls, saves, etc.).

The referee now checks morale for the Gnolls, but dice say the dimwitted brutes stay and fight. The Gnoll fighting Brother Hubert comes at the cleric with a wicked axe. He has a Attack Bonus of +3 against Brother Hubert’s terrible AC 13 (Hubert’s wearing Chain but suffers a -2 Dex penalty, because he sucks) and rolls a pitiful 6. That’s 6+3-13 or an Attack Results of -4. That’s a straight-up Miss, no fancy pants extra effects. The other Gnoll attempts to cleave Dulcia in twain. She’s wearing chain with shield, for an Ac 16. Same Attack Bonus (+3) with a roll of 13. 13+3-16=0. But wait! Dulcia reminds the referee that thus Gnoll has sustained a Light Wound, knocking that 0 to a -1. That changes a normal Hit to a weak -2 damage Hit. The referee rolls 5 points of damage for the Gnoll, reducing it to 3 points. Dulcia has 16 hitpoints normally. She’s down to 14 at the start of this encounter due an earlier bite from an irate squirrel, so now she has 11 hp remaining.

Everyone has acted for round 1. Initiative goes to the Gnolls. The Gnoll going after Dulcia rolls a pitiful 4, for 4+3-16=-9. Not only does this poor bastard miss badly, but he blows his saving throw and sends his clattering across the floor of the dungeon. There’s a ledge nearby that leads down to the next level, so the DM rolls a 1 in 6 chance it goes over the edge. A roll of 1 sends the axe down to level three. The DM secretly rolls a wandering monster check to see if anyone down there notices. He lives for crap like that, but no monster appears. The other Gnoll, the one attacking the cleric, does much better, rolling a 12. That comes out 12+3-13=2. That’s a strong hit for a total of a whopping 9 points of damage. Smelly ol’ Hubert only has 6 points, so the DM rules he is chopped in twain from stem to stern, covering all other participants in a gruesome rain of blood and guts.

The wizard Lucas was going to slit a sleeping Gnoll’s throat this round, but seeing Hubert go down he opts to throw his dagger at an upright baddie. His Attack Bonus while throwing is +1, he rolls 14 for 1+14-15 equals zero. That’s a normal hit, no nonsense. Lucas rolls 2 for damage, but due to low Strength that get docked to 1 point of damage. The DM narrates some feldercarb about the Gnoll pulling the dagger out of his shoulder and licking the blood off with his hideous hyena tongue. Dulcia asks the DM if she can righteously avenge her good buddy Hubert. The DM knows this is a ploy to attack a threat rather than wasting a round with the now-unarmed, wounded Gnoll in front of her. Just to be a dick, he makes her throw a Dex roll to switch targets quickly, which she easily passes. Her attack roll against Hubert’s killer is a massive 17. The math for that is 17+5-15 for a Attack Result of +7. That’s a helluva a hit, for +5 damage and a Serious wound. The total damage is 12, which is enough to kill this Gnoll. That’s the end of round 2.

Initiative for Round 3 goes to the remaining Gnoll. The DM does not roll another morale check. He just rules the last guy runs like hell. Since he has a Serious wound, that grants a -3 penalty to stuff, the DM rules that he is moving 3 points slower than usual. The party could catch up, but they opt not to pursue. Hopefully that won’t result in a crapton of Gnolls coming down on them later in the adventure.

So that’s how it might play out to use this chart. As with any addition to D&D-style combat, it adds some complexity which will slow things down. But with the chart on your DM screen and/or the charsheets, it should be easy enough to integrate this stuff.

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iso-dungeonry

April 7, 2015, 10:23 am

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Lately I've been scribbling a lot of dungeon maps. I think because it's a stress reliever and this semester has been rougher than most. Anyway, I've farted around with isometric graph paper once before and my love for 3-D dungeon environments is pretty well-documented, but until today I never tried to combine the two. Composing isometric dungeons has always looked like harder work than the normal God'd eye view, but this morning I printed out some iso-type paper from here.

I thought I'd start by trying an isometric view of the sample dungeon from Moldvay Basic, with it's nifty maps by the one and only Erol Otus.

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Here's what I sketched out based on those two images:

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It's not a perfect replication of the information contained in the maps above, but I've got a better sense of how vertical layers interact now. Though I think the caves at the bottom look too flat.

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fun with treasure chests

April 11, 2015, 9:09 am

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I'm going to begin this post with an outright act of theft. Here's a pic I swiped from an old post from Mike Monaco's excellent blog Swords & Dorkery:

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Those are painted-up examples of Grenadier's old hirelings. I am normally inclined to obsess over which minis have torches and rope but these guys have been on my mind for the past couple of days. Most sessions I don't fuss over encumbrance, but sometimes when I'm feeling ornery I want getting that one really big haul out of the dungeon to be a whole adventure itself. In order to avoid fiddly accounting but give the players something to think about, here are some draft Treasure Chest rules.

Small Chest
Also called a coffer, cask, or strongbox, these containers hold 200 coins (same as a small sack) or else 150 or so coins plus miscellaneous small stuff like jewelry, keys, a treasure map, etc. Many of these boxes (say 4 in 6) have an integral lock. Some of these chests are gilded or made of a precious substance, like the Franks Casket. That would make them an item of jewelry in their own right, using whatever system you use for generating the value of jewelry. Thus the the box could easily be worth more than the contents, which may only be apparent when the thief blows the pick locks roll and the party gronk smashes the dang thing open.

Small chests slides easily into a backpack, though the DM may want the player who stores it this way to lose 2d6 items from it before it fits. A week of rations as a single item for this purpose. Alternatively, a small chest can be tucked under one's arm like a football carry. There's no movement penalty for carrying a small chest in this fashion, but you can't do anything else with that arm: no holding the torch, no using a shield effectively.

Medium Chest
These are more serious loot boxes, holding 2,000 coins or maybe coins plus an array of miscellaneous stuff. About 2 in 6 of these chests have an integral lock and only 1 in 6 are decorated sufficiently to give them value as art objects.

One adventurer can carry a full medium chest on their back or shoulder, as seen in the pic above, as long as they aren't weighed down by a backpack full of gear, their boss's golf bag full of magic swords, or any other big stuff. Nor can they hold anything else in their hand or even wear a shield strapped to their arm. Maximum movement rate for such a character is one category slower than the normal speed for their armor. A henchweenie in leather carries a medium chest at a 90' move, one in chain goes at 60' and a dude in plate moves at a measly 30'. A character carrying a chest is so burdened that they must spend a round putting their chest down. Effectively, they are surprised an extra round even when the rest of the party isn't surprised at all.

Two characters can share the burden of carrying a medium chest. They can wear backpacks and whatnot and move at the normal rate of the slower of the pair. They can carry stuff in one hand or wear a shield on their arm. They are subject to extra surprise as above, unless they opt to drop the chest, which gives a 1 in 6 chance of breaking the chest and spilling the contents all over the dungeon floor.

Large Chest
A large chest holds 5,000 coins or 4,000 to 4,500 plus miscellany. They tend to be heavily padlocked rather than possessing integral locks and rarely are decorated.

No normal character acting on their own can lug a large chest out of a dungeon. This is a two person, four handed operation. The maximum move of this team is one category lower than the slower member of the team. They are subject to an extra round of surprise as above. If they drop the chest there is a 1 in 6 chance they or someone nearby will suffer a debilitating foot injury in the process.

The size of large chests can also be an issue when going through tiny secret doors, around narrow spiral staircases, etc. Say a 2 in 6 chance of the chest getting stuck at least long enough to cause a sufficient fuss that the DM gets to make an extra wandering monsters check.

Final Thoughts

All these ideas can be found summarized below in a handy-dandy chart form.
The coin capacities I've given are based on reading threads on the subject on paizo, enworld and various other dungeonnerd fora. You may want different numbers if you think a backpack should hold way more than 400 coins.
You'll be able to tell if you are using these rules right if the players argue over who has to carry the chests or if they pester you with questions about how much extra stuff they can cram into the chest. A total victory on the part of the DM would be for the PCs to expend a resource like a potion of giant strength just to get the loot out of the dungeon.

CHESTS

	Small	Medium	Large
Capacity, coins only	200	2,000	5,000
“ , coins w/stuff	150	1,500	4,000
Integral Lock?	4 in 6	1 in 6	no
Decorated?	2 in 6	1 in 6	no
Fits in backpack?	-2d6 items	no	no
Carry, one man	Use one hand	Uses 2 hands, no backpack, move slower	no effing way
Carry, two man	silly	Uses 1 hand each	Uses 4 hands, no backpack, move slower
If dropped	2 in 6 chance destroyed	1 in 6 chance destroyed	1 in 6 chance crushes foot

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Ten Foot Pole Q&A

May 10, 2015, 3:14 am

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If you've got a better answer, please leave 'em in the comments below.

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Sutherland ill from B1 In Search of the Unknown

Q1: What is the function of a 10' pole?

A1: The main idea is to find the traps before the traps find you. I've seen two main methods for how to make this happen. The first is to post one or two guys at the head of the marching order. As the party moves down corridors at dungeon exploration speed, these guys sweep their poles back and forth, tapping the floors. The goal is to reveal hidden tripwires, pressure plates, etc., by triggering them while at hopefully a safe distance. In a universe where even some lifeforms evolve to fit the 10' graph paper grid, it's nice to be able to say that you are, at worst, at the very edge of the 10' effect. I once met a guy who, to make assurance doubly sure, always got custom-made 11' poles.

For this sort of duty you probably want lightly armored and unencumbered characters, thieves or henchweenies in leather armor. You need these guys to be able to drop their poles and clear the way for the fighters to engage with wandering monsters. In an ideal situation you don't want the party tanks on this duty, because then you give the DM an opportunity to be a dick about the time needed to drop the poles, draw weapons and ready shields.

The other key thing you can do with a 10' pole is to poke stuff. Specific dungeon features can be probed. Is that green stain just dungeon dressing or actual green slime? Is that an ugly statue or a gargoyle playing possum? Exactly what sort of horrible vermin is hiding in that trash in the corner? Obviously the DM isn't going to play ball every time (e.g. this particular gargoyle isn't ticklish), but it's safer than daring the bard to touch the spooky thing.

Finally, some DMs will allow the 10' pole to bear some weight or be used to apply leverage. I've seen them used to pole-vault over walls and across gaps, usually by high Dex thieves And I've at least heard players discuss hauling a goblin prisoner around like Han Solo captured by ewoks. (This scenario never actually happened, by the way. The players just slit the goblin's throat. As always.) You might want to talk to your DM before trying this sort of nonsense, as it relies on a specific model of the material properties of the pole.

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Q2: Does using a 10' pole in these ways actually work?

Personally, I think there are plenty of situations where the 10' pole treatment ought to just plain work, no die throw. If the guys in the front rank are sweeping the hallway, they should set off trip wires and locate simple pit type traps with no real difficulty. A poke in some acid or a viper nest ought to provoke a useful result. Only for more complicated situations would I throw dice, like finding out if contact is made with a small pressure point. In such a scenario whatever chance there is of a PC setting off the trap would be the roll I would use to see if it was set off before the PCs got there. On the other hand, if the party is actively tapping every surface with a wooden pole, they might make extra noise and take extra time. Maybe throw an extra random monster check every once in a while to compensate.

Note that I don't believe that a 10' pole would make a good implement for vaulting, but I'd give anyone a 2 in 6 chance to do just about anything under the right circumstances. The house wins in the long run under those odds, but I love to see players attempt the improbable.

Q3: Why not just use a spear or quarterstaff?

I hear this one again and again when people are buying equipment. First, there's the economic factor. In OD&D a 10' pole and a spear both cost 1 gold each, but later editions got smarter. In BX a spear is 3gp, a quarterstaff 2gp, and a ten foot pole is 1gp. In the AD&D1 Players Handbook the cost difference between spear and pole is one gold piece versus only 3cp. LotFP shows a similar gap. I've heard players blithely remark that they can just go to the woods and cut their own pole, but I've never seen anyone do it. Which is probably good, since someone with a fancy title and oathsworn knights and catapults probably owns that tree.

Then there's the length issue. Per the AD&D1 PHB a quarterstaff is 6 to 8 feet long. A spear can vary from 5' to 13' or more. You probably don't want to argue about the length of your spear after the DM tells you a 10' diameter puff of gas shoots out of a hidden nozzle.

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more Sutherland, more B1

More importantly, if you want to stick one of your weapons into a pool of mysterious liquid, I say bring it on. I'd be happy to relieve you of that spearhead. Or if you want to sweep hallways with a metal blade I'll be thrilled to blunt its point or let it make some extra clangy noises. Maybe it can even kick up a couple sparks in a room with an excess of flammable gas. Sounds like my idea of a good time.

Q4: Any downsides to using 10' poles?

I think it would be really interesting to purchase a ten foot length of PVC pipe and try to go about my day hauling that sucker around. I imagine fitting through doors, on elevators, tight turns on winding staircases, etc., would be a gigantic pain in the ass. Yet another reason to leave the ten foot polling to the henchweenies.

Also, unlike spears and staffs, the 10 foot pole is clearly not intended to be useful as a weapon.

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we need more giant hogs

May 14, 2015, 4:10 am

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Giant hogs were on the OD&D wandering monster matrix. This is why.

"Before the rules for D&D were published Old Greyhawk Castle was 13 levels deep. The first level was a simple maze of rooms and corridors, for none of the participants had ever played such a game before. The second level had two unusual items, a Nixie pool and a fountain of snakes. The third featured a torture chamber and many small cells and prison rooms. The forth was a level of crypts and undead. The fifth was centered around a strange font of black fire and gargoyles. The sixth was a repeating maze with dozens of wild hogs (3 dice) in inconvenient spots, naturally backed up by appropriate numbers of Wereboars. The seventh was centered around a circular labyrinth and a street of masses of ogres. The eighth through tenth levels were Caves and caverns featuring Trolls, giant insects, and a transporter nexus with an evil Wizard (with a number of tough associates) guarding it. The eleventh level was the home of the most powerful wizard in the castle. He had Balrogs as servants. The remainder of the level was populated by Martian White Apes, except the sub-passage system underneath the corridors which was full of poisonous critters with no treasure. Level twelve was filled with Dragons. The bottom level, number thirteen, contained an inescapable slide which took the players 'clear through to China', from whence they had to return via 'Outdoor Adventure', It was quite possible to journey downward to the bottom level by an insidious series of slanting passages which began on the second level, but the likelihood of following such a route unknowingly didn't become too great until the seventh or eighth level. Of the dozen or so who played on a fairly regular basis, four made the lowest level and took the trip: Rob Kuntz, now a co-referee in the campaign went alone and three of his friends managed to trace part of his route and blunder along the rest, so they followed him quickly to the Land of China. Side levels included a barracks with Orcs, Hob-goblins, and Gnolls continually warring with each other, a museum, a huge arena, an underground lake, a Giant's home, and a garden of fungi."

from "How To Set Up Your Dungeons & Dragons Campaign Gygax,"europa 6-8 April 1975.

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The sensational character find of 2015!

May 14, 2015, 7:19 am

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White Dwarf #46 (October 1983) isn't one of my favorite issues of that venerable gaming magazine, but it does have some neat stuff in it. The three Traveller patrons are quite nice. There's an installment of Irilian, the AD&D city that came out in bits and pieces. But as I was flipping through the issue last night I spotted something in an add that I hadn't noticed before.

I love the ads in White Dwarf. Part of it is drooling over products I never saw in the U.S., part of it is the slightly different feel of fantasy gaming in Britain, a little more of a black humor edge. And part of it is just plain old geeky Anglophilia, as I delight at seeing game companies and stores with addresses in places like Lancashire and Manchester. That's ordinary stuff for folks living in Britain, but a little part of me will never quite stop believing in a magical land on the other side of the sea.

Anyway, here's the advertisement I took a second look at last night:

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Ah, yeah. That's the ticket. A nerd shop with a cool name and a super rad logo. You got planets lurking in the background, your basic spaceman with a bubble helmet and laser rifle, a comely sorceress type, Axebeard Rustbutt the Dwarf, and...

Waitaminute, is that an orc with an Tom Selleck moustache?!?

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All hail Mustache Orc!

Maybe not an orc, but some sort of muscled-up humanoid at least. The ears are pointy but no elf I know has fangs like that. If he isn't an orc, he at least has me asking why so few orcs are depicted with sweet-as-heck facial hair.

"Worlds Apart" and this art would make for a neat add for a sci-fi fantasy campaign. Something like this:

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Jeez. Now I want to get my table into playing some Encounter Critical. Also, while scanning the cover and the ad for this post I think my hand slipped and I may have accidentally scanned and uploaded my favorite article from this issue. Oopsie.

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Make your own List of Kings

May 16, 2015, 3:50 pm

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So I've been looking at the length of reigns of the Kings of Wessex/England through to 1139, the first year of the Wessex campaign. There's about 50 monarchs in that period and a little math shows they reigned on average for about 13 years, with a breakdown something like this:

16% of Wessex monarchs reigned less than 2 years
30% of Wessex monarchs reigned 2-7 years
26% of Wessex monarchs reigned 8-19 years
12% of Wessex monarchs reigned 20-29 years
12% of Wessex monarchs reigned 30-38 years

That doesn't add up to quite 100%, which is why I work in literature and not math. But it allows me to make a chart for randomly generating the length of a reign of a monarch. I cracked open my first edition DMG to pages 13-15 to look at the ages of demi-human races and cobbled together this chart:

roll	monarch reign
1	d100 weeks
2	2 or 3 years (50/50 chance)
3	d6+3 years
4	d6+9 years
5	d12+15 years
6	d12+28 years
7	d20+40 years
8	d20+60 years
9	d30+80 years
10	d30+110 years
11	d30+140 years
12	d100+170 years
13-15	d100+270 years
16-17	d100+370 years
18-19	d100+470 years
20	d1000+570 years

Humans roll d6 on this chart, halflings d8, dwarves d10, gnomes d12 and elves d20. The basic idea is that longer lived races can have longer average reigns, but the normal vicissitudes of war and politics can also cut them short just as readily as they do humans. If you are big on alignments you might use the better of two rolls for lawful societies and the lesser of two rolls for chaotic ones.

You can also grant each monarch on your list a 1 in 6 chance of something really memorable happening to them. Here's a draft chart for that:

d12 roll....deal

Ruler either establishes a new dynasty or reestablishes an old one.
Ruler has the same name as a previous ruler.
Ruler introduced significant religious innovations (1-2), a fundamentalist revival (3-4), or an entirely new religion (5-6).
Ruler known by some epithet like "the Great" or "the Bald" (1-3 positive epithet, 4-5 neutral, 6 positive)
Ruler's reign split by a temporary ursurpation by another monarch.
Some (1-5) or all (6) of reign spent in contention with a noble with a better claim to the throne.
Ruler married into dynasty, leaves another branch with a strong claim to the line.
Reign ends with vaguely-reported scandal or ridiculous accident.
Reign ends by assassination.
Reign ends by abdication.
Ruler under some sort of magical curse or affliction.
Roll again twice

Someone else can probably expand that to a d20, d30 or d100 table with a little work.

If, like I do, you want to map these rulers to a real-world timeline, just throw d% to find out how far a monarch is into their reign at the start of your campaign history. Example: The Wessex List of Kings begins in 519AD. The first gnome king I generate has a reign of 45 years and I roll 23%, so his entry in the Gnomish List of Kings would begin 45*.23 or 10 years before the first Wessex king. Not that the gnomes have their own monarch in my campaign world; they're all vassals/slaves of the immortal Crimson King. That's why they wear the red hats.

But the elves and dwarves of Wessex have their own monarchs. Using my own dwarf name generator and this elf name generator I googled up, here are my lists for them.

recent Kings of the Upper Dwarf Realm (the one closest to the surface)

Oyfur, r. 388-503, founder of new dynasty

Gili, r. 503-503

Ori, r. 503-515

Thwalin, r. 515-521

Dworin, r. 521-653

Fombur, r. 653-750

Bili I, r. 750-817

Bili II, r. 817-819, founder of a new dynasty

Gin, r. 819-822 [starting now in my world the drink is named after this guy!]

Doin, r. 822-874

Owalin, r. 874-888

Bhorin, r. 888-917, spends part of his reign fighting a descendant of Bili I

Nori, r. 917-993

Bili III, r. 993-994

Thifur, r. 994-1026

Korin, r. 1026-1129, reestablishes dynasty of Bili I [Is this the guy who fought Bhorin, or maybe his son?]

Gifur, r. 1129-1132

Bwalin, r. 1132-1136

Oomdur, r. 1136-present

Thanks to creatively interpreting some randomly generated stuff, I now know that two dynasties have fought for the dwarven throne since at least the year 817 and that the present king of the dwarfs has only worn the crown for a few short years. Neat stuff!

recent Queens of the Elvish Realms

Tûr, r. 71BC-421AD, reestablishment of old dynasty

Mindonel, r. 421-434

Ceven, r. 434-474

Lagorúthes II, r. 474-519

Bronwe, r. 519-866, accursed & abdicated in favor of Cerendelil

Cerendelil, r. 866-956, also accursed

Hithfaerphen, r. 956-964

Melil, r. 964-present

The two cursed queens in a row is super interesting. Could this be the work of that spooky jerkwad the Crimson King or is some other treachery afoot?

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Check this out

May 18, 2015, 11:14 am

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So over Mother's Day weekend my mom insinuated that she would like it if my Amazon wishlist was populated with more things that weren't books. Today the thought occurred that maybe one could buy 25mm figures via the big A. Every few years I consider getting back into minis and trying to put together a set that would allow me to run at least some straight vanilla BX dungeon crawling. So I've been search Amazon for variations of the term "25mm." I found a couple of things I wanted to share, both from a company called Litko Game Accessories. The first is an item they call a "Horde Tray."

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Clik here to view. Horde Tray 12-25mm circles (1)

This accessory allows you to move an unorganized rabble of goblins, orcs, peasant levies, etc, as a group. The circular depressions are supposed to fit their 25mm round bases. These trays come in a variety of sizes of shapes, so no two hordes need to be laid out the exact same way. I like the idea of pushing a mess of orcs across the table using something like this.

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Clik here to view. Horse, Character Mount Marker, Brown, 25x50mm Base (1)

Horse, Character Mount Marker, Brown, 25x50mm Base (1)

Not enough figures come with mounted and unmounted versions and these markers allow any standing figure to be easily marked as on their horse. Litko also makes dire wolves, bears, boars and even pink unicorn varieties.

And check out these torch bearer markers! Hot damn!
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Anyway, just thought I'd share this neat find.

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Are we doing minis wrong?

May 26, 2015, 3:21 pm

≫ Next: passing remarks on giants

≪ Previous: Check this out

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I recall using 1" squares to represent 5 foot of dungeon floor going at least as far back as '86 or '87, when I ran Keep on the Borderlands for what had to be the third or so time. Dave ran a barbarian named Bubba, using a local version of the barbarian class built using Paul Crabaugh's golden "Customized Classes" article from Dragon #109 and Eric played an elf that was always blasting stuff with attack spells. I don't recall the rest of the party. Anyway, we drew out the floor plan of the Caves of Chaos on a battlemat. I've ran way more games without maps and minis than with, but whenever I've done D&D with figures I've always used this scale.

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Since then the 1 inch = 5 foot rule has been practically set in stone for anyone playing D&D with a tactical display. The "five foot step" of 3rd edition rammed that scale home a dozen times or more every session. But back in the first edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide is another way of doing it. Uncle Gary writes:

"Figure bases are necessarily broad in order to assure will stand in their proper position and not constantly be falling over. Because of this, it is usually necessary to use a ground scale twice that of the actual scale for HO, and squares of about 1 actual inch per side are suggested. Each ground scale inch can then be used to equal 3½ linear feet, so a 10' wide scale corridor is 3 actual inches in width and shown as 3 separate squares. This allows depiction of the typical array of three figures abreast..."
(page 10, emphasis mine)

Before I started taking the battlegrid super seriously in 3e, my dungeon maps had a fair number of crappy little 10' by 10' rooms. But a four by four square is no place to have a battle. 3 x 3 is slightly better in this regards. Also, a smaller scale means that doors that are one square wide aren't so dang massive. And the prospect of a three abreast down 10' corridors changes the dynamic of dungeon crawling. You could put a henchloser with a ten foot pole in the middle, flanked by fighters, for example.

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By the way, Empire of the Petal Throne conforms to this approach. In EPT three abreast in a 10' corridor is standard, with three exceptions. If a character is using a two-handed weapon only two will fit. If that weapon is a two-handed sword only one character has room to operate in that rank. And wimps like spellcasters can actually squeeze in four abreast in 10'. Small characters like halflings probably also fall into that category.

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passing remarks on giants

June 23, 2015, 6:06 am

≫ Next: Loosening up on BX Race-as-Class

≪ Previous: Are we doing minis wrong?

One of the things I’ve always found interesting about the BX/AD&D1 split is that the monsters aren’t quite the same. A few iconic D&D monsters don’t appear in BX, such as the beholder, while the BX lineage has a few weirdoes of its own, such as the thoul. Then there are the cases where the monster looks the same, but there are striking differences if you look closely. One example of this case is the shadow. In AD&D a shadow is an undead. In BX it is not. With its ghostly creepiness and Strength drain attack it sure as hell looks like undead, but the damn thing can’t be turned.

Another case where first edition AD&D and the 1981 Basic/Expert rules diverge is the way giants are described. I don’t use a lot of giants in my D&D games, except for the two or three times I’ve run the classic module series G-1-2-3 Against the Giants. But today I want to attempt to nail down the differences, particularly the non-mechanical ones. I don’t care that much that an Expert set Hill giant has 8 hit dice while the Monster Manual version has 8+1-2 points, or that an MM fire giant has a point better AC.

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HILL GIANT	Expert rules p. X32	Monster Manual pp. 44-45
Height	12’	10½’
Description	stupid, hairy brutes	reddish brown skin, brown or black hair, red-rimmed eyes
Equipment	animals skins, clubs, spears	hides/skins, any weapon but favor clubs
Allies	none	dire wolves, giant lizards, ogres
Other	no mention of stone-throwing	throws stones like all other giants

In my mind Hill Giants have always been oversized neanderthals, and I think much of the art in the hobby (illos and minis) bears this out. I’d be more inclined to paint a hill giant honky white rather than reddish brown, but that has as much to do with Ringo Starr in Caveman as it does to any hard data. The MM line about hill giants using “any form of weapon available” makes me want to give one a laser cannon sometime.

STONE GIANT	Expert rules p. X32	Monster Manual pp. 44-45
Height	14’	12’
Description	grey, rock-like skin	grey to grey-brown skin, dark-grey to blue-grey hair, metallic silver-steel eyes, rock-colored garments
Equipment	stalactite clubs	stone weapons
Allies	cave bears	cave bears
Other	May live in crude stone huts. Why are these guys bald, anyway?	Seriously, have you ever seen a stone giant with hair? What is the deal with that?

Uncle Gary’s MM description includes greyish or bluish hair, but I can only think of maybe two cases where I saw a stone giant that wasn’t a chromedome:

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I think that’s from a Forgotten Realms product, but what I know is that those giants are BAD ASS.

Here’s the only other stone giant I know who doesn’t suffer from male pattern baldness.

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You can check out that adventure here, by the way.

Final thought on stone giants: If you run BX and your overland map lacks a quaint pastoral village of 14’ tall rock people living in stone-thatched huts then you need to rethink your life decisions.

FROST GIANT	Expert rules p. X32	Monster Manual pp. 44-45
Height	18’	15’
Description	pale skin, light red or blue hair, full beards	dead-white or ivory skin, blue-white or yellow hair, pale blue or yellow eyes
Equipment	furs and iron armor	as per “northern barbarian”
Allies	polar bears, regular-type wolves	winter wolves
Other	live in castles	live in castles or caverns

These guys are my favorites, because they are totally Giant Sized Marvel Hella Vikings #1. What is not to like? The only thing missing from the official description is the known scientific fact that in midwinter these guys ride giant longships to plunder villages along the southern coasts.

Here’s my alltime favorite depiction of frost giants:

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Awww, yeah. That’s the stuff. My love for the work of Erol Otus is undying, but who’s betta than Frazetta? NO ONE THAT’S WHO.

Here’s a neat alt-version of frost giant coloration, unsupported by the canon.

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Gotta say I’m digging that pale blue skin. (Warning: Do not read any D&D books by Rose Estes unless you are a fan of stuff that sucks.)

FIRE GIANT	Expert rules p. X32	Monster Manual pp. 44-45
Height	16’	12’
Description	red skin, dark black hair & beards	broad like dwarves, coal black skin, flaming red or bright orange hair, deep red eyes, yellow orange teeth
Equipment	copper, brass or bronze armor	armor or dragon hides, huge swords
Allies	hydras, hellhounds	hellhounds
Other	dwell in low thick-walled castles of black baked mud reinforced with iron	dwell in castles or caverns

Here’s another spot where the Expert rules provide a thumbnail sketch of an adventure locale you totally need to be using. More importantly, the Expert and MM versions of Fire Giants seem to be totally different species. One is 25% shorter than the other, the taller ones have red skin and black hair, while the shorter, stocky ones have black skin and red hair. Additionally, I assume all dragons hate the shorter dudes, since they prance around in dragonhide armor. And neither of them look like the cool blue-skinned version on the cover of G-1-2-3:

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CLOUD GIANT	Expert rules p. X32	Monster Manual pp. 44-45
Height	20’	18’
Description	white or grey skin or hair	pale blue white to light blue skin, silver white or brass colored hair
Equipment	pale robes	jewelry, great clubs
Allies	giant hawks, dire wolves	spotted lions
Other	neutral aligned	neutral good or neutral evil

Man, I just can’t get worked up about cloud giants. Maybe that’s why I wrote a module that reinvented them as horrible slobbering beasts. I’m crossing my fingers that thing ends up published before the year is out.

So this is the third giant species in a row that could be blue-skinned if you wanted them. Maybe frost, fire and cloud giants should all be branches of the same bluish family tree in your campaign world. PCs could get involved in giant family poilitcs, like fights over inheritances when a giant king dies without an heir, or a frost giant Romeo running off with a fire giant Juliet.

STORM GIANT	Expert rules p. X32	Monster Manual pp. 44-45
Height	22’	21’
Description	bronze skin, bright red or yellow hair	pale light green skin w/dark green hair, emerald green eyes OR violet skin w/deep violet or blue-black hair, silvery-grey or purple eyes
Equipment	none specified	none specified
Allies	griffons, giant crabs	rocs, griffons, sea lions
Other	lightning bolt attack	lightning bolts

These guys are just weird. I’ve never used one, though I did have a PC fried by a wrathful storm giant back in the eighties. Ah, to be young and piss off creatures with more hit dice than your entire party. Aside from fiddly spell mechanics and skin color they are basically identical.

Since storm giants are among the good guys, a fun way to draw them into the campaign might be via unintended consequences. For example: the giant crab infestation the PCs cleared out happens to be the breeding grounds for the storm giant’s pets.

Finally, I wondered how all these giants should look standing next to 1/72 figures, like the 11th century crusaders my folks just bought me for my birthday (thanks folks!). As a reminder, at 1/72 scale, a 6 foot tall dude is represented by a 1 inch tall figure.

Giant	Size	1/72 scale
MM Hill Giant	10½’	1¾” ~44mm
Expert Hill Giant	12’	2” ~50mm
MM Stone Giant	12’	2” ~50mm
MM Fire Giant	12’	2” ~50mm
Expert Stone Giant	14’	2⅓” ~59mm
MM Frost Giant	15’	2.5” ~64mm
Expert Fire Giant	16’	2⅔” ~68mm
Expert Frost Giant	18’	3” ~76mm
MM Cloud Giant	18’	3” ~76mm
Expert Cloud Giant	20’	3⅓” ~85mm
MM Storm Giant	21’	3½” ~89mm
Expert Storm Giant	22’	3⅔” ~93mm

I wonder if anyone ever made a dwarf with a sword and platemail in the 2” to 2⅔” range? That would make a great fire giant.

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Loosening up on BX Race-as-Class

June 24, 2015, 2:19 pm

≫ Next: Overclock Your Damage

≪ Previous: passing remarks on giants

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Over on the Google Plus fellow traveller Paul Schaefer asked me an interesting question and with his permission I'm going to answer it here rather than in a private discussion:

As a Basic D&D DM, since it has race as class, what do you do if a player wants to play a race but also wants to use a weird class from another source such as Arduin, Field Guide, Arcanum, or what have you?
Do you just sort of eyeball it, try to balance the race and class abilities?

There are several strategies a BX Dungeon Master can employ when a player makes this sort of request. Which one you use depends largely on your comfort level and your vision for the campaign.

Option 1: Just Say No

As I was just discussing with Jeffro Johnson, there's nothing wrong with insisting that this is a game with a specific ruleset and all dwarves, elves, and halflings follow the same simple rules. You've got to run the darn thing, so you're responsible for deciding when the rules as written will bend. Rather than go the typical route of class/race editions, where you hang your hat on being a Halfling Sewer Assassin or Dwarf Poisonmage or Elf Tree Idiot, the way one distinguishes oneself in such a game is to play the Best Damn Halfing Ever, The Most Memorable Dwarf We Ever Encountered, That One Elf Who Didn't Suck, etc.

Option 2: Add Race to the Class

Under this scheme the class is the basis for the rules pertaining to the character. Adding the race selection only grants the character two things, 1) the items listed under the relevant SPECIAL ABILITIES on pages B9 and B10 and 2) the race-based saving throws.

Modify they experience needed for second level for the class using the chart below, then recalculate the rest of the chart.

Demi-Human Costs for Weirdo Classes

Halfling ... +150xp

Dwarf ... +250xp

Elf ... +250xp

Elf would be little higher than dwarf, but I'm assuming the level racial caps (H9, E10, D12) are in play.

You can use this for the standard classes as well, if you need something like a Dwarf Cleric or Halfling Thief. In fact, since it's so popular an option, here's my proposed chart for the latter combo.

Halfling Thief XP chart

1st level ... 0xp

2nd level ... 1,350xp

3rd level ... 2,700xp

4th level ... 5,400xp

5th level ... 10,800xp

6th level ... 21,600xp

7th level ... 43,200xp

8th level ... 80,000xp

Note that I rounded the XP amount for 8th level down slightly, as in the original chart.

This option ought to work well if you've got a clear understanding of the new class and how it will impact your game.

Option 3: Add Class to the Race

So you've decided you're going to allow a Halfling Techno or a Dwarf Alchemist or Elf Bounty Hunter. In this option, you start with the Race-As-Class as your basis and layer on freakish class abilities. Keep the hitdice, saves, special abilities, and attack progression of the default race. Look at whatever the weird class needs to get to level two. Subtract 1,200 from that amount. Why 1,200? That's what thieves need for second level, the canonical BX class with the fastest progression. (Because they suck.)

Add this amount to the figure for the dwarf, elf, or halfling in question and recalculate. For example, say you got a player who wants to be a Halfling who is also an Arduin-style Merchant. According to the original Grimoire, a Merchant needs 2,250 XP for second level, or 1,050 XP over the thief horizon. The XP chart for a Halfling Merchant would look like this:

Halfling Merchant XP Chart
1st level ... 0xp
2nd level ... 3,050xp
3rd level ... 6,100xp
4th level ... 12,200xp
5th level ... 24,400xp
6th level ... 48,800xp
7th level ... 97,600xp
8th level ... 200,000xp

The result is a character that follows all the Halfling rules and gets all the special abilities of a Merchant. Note I used a little judicious rounding for 8th level, just like the normal halfling chart on page X6. Only I rounded up because I'm a jerk.

You may also want to drop some features of the base to bring down the XP totals a bit. I'm thinking particularly of curtailing the ability to wear heavy armor (halflings in plate mail have always irked me anyone), the wide weapons choices, and possibly elvish spellcasting. Do the math for second level as above, then modify according to this handy-dandy chart I just made up:

Discounts for Surrendered Abilities
No Plate ... -50
No Plate or Chain ... -100
No Armor ... -200
Restricted Weapons ... -75
No Spells (elves only) ... -1,000

By "limited weapons" I mean something comparable to the cleric's lame selection. If it's more like a magic-user's lame selection, double the discount. Note that those numbers may seem small, but they will really add up as the XP needed doubles from level to level.

This option will probably end up costing the PC more in terms of XP needed for progression. But if its a weird class and you aren't sure how its going to interact with the BX demihuman rules then it may be a good thing to put the brakes on a little bit.

Option 4: Build it From Scratch

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Paul Montgomery Crabaugh's article "Customized Class: How to Put Together One-of-a-Kind Characters" from Dragon #109 (pages 8, 10-13*) is my go-to source for puttering with BX classes. In recent years at least two people have put work into improving Crabaugh's method. One is my buddy Nick on his blog Of Dice and Djinn. He's also built a crapton of cool classes using his system. Perdustin over at Thoul's Paradise has also written at least four articles tackling the subject. Both those blogs have great titles, by the way. (True fact: I almost called this blog "The Half-Orc's Lair," quoting from Uncle Gary for the tagline "Half-Orcs are boors. They are rude, crude, crass, and generally obnoxious." (DMG 16) But then I realized that would only encourage me to act like a jerkbutt on the internet. So I put my real name at the top instead.)

Option 5: Go Find Your Class

This option eschews fiddling with XP and instead turns the whole problem into a quest. "You want to be a dwarf alchemist? Fine. You start out as a regular, well-adjusted dwarf. Now find an alchemist who will take you on as an apprentice." This option works really great if you're playing in a big sandbox. Just pick a few places where the PC might be able to get the training they want, then sprinkle the map with a few more places that have leads for the PC. Then once they find an alchemist (or whatever) willing to take them on, the PC has to finish another adventure to Prove They Are Worthy.

At that point, award the PC with the abilities of a first level whatever-it-is. Then every time they gain a new level in their regular gig they also have to complete a side quest assigned to them by Master Yoda to also level up in the new class.

Option 6: Ignore the Problem

Not a terrible option for games with a good PC body count. An elf with berserker abilities/berserker with elf abilities isn't that much harder to murder at 1st level than an elf or a berserker. At least if you try hard enough.

*Page 9 of Dragon #109 is a full page ad for the global throwdown simulator Supremacy. Never played it, but I always loved the fact that it came with tiny plastic mushroom clouds.

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Overclock Your Damage

June 25, 2015, 1:00 pm

≫ Next: XP and Alignment

≪ Previous: Loosening up on BX Race-as-Class

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This is one of those ideas so simple, I'm certain someone else came up with it. Maybe I read it and forgot about it.

So in many D&D versions, both official and house-ruled, there's this weird thing when you roll one number to see if you hit the orc and another to see if you chop its fool head off. This means you can end up with a range like this:

1 ... Miss! (maybe it's a fumble if the DM is cruel)
2-11 ... Miss!
12-17... I hit! Alright!
18-19 ... Argh! So close to a critical!
20 ... Yeah, baby! This orc is toast!

That 18-19 range is my concern today, or really any number that's less than a critical but well in excess of the minimum needed to hit. Tom Moldvay tried to smooth out the transition from normal hit to uber crit by adding in a chart of extra effects. What I'm about to propose here gets you an extra effect for a better hit while dispensing with the rigamarole of tracking who is carrying what penalties to their actions.

In BX all standard weapons do d4, d6, d8 or d10. That's a 2 point jump in max damage for every die size increase. So here's my basic idea: for every 2 points you exceed to to-hit target, bump your die up one size. If applied to the monsters as well that's going to make it easier for high hit die monsters to mangle the PCs.

Before trying this one would need to set the maximum die size. You could cap it at the largest die actually in use for weaponry, the d10. That means under the right circumstances a dagger is as lethal as a polearm, but nothing is actually more deadly than the normal standards of BX play. Alternatively, you could use this rule as a low-complexity, high-damage alternative to crit rolls by allowing the max die size to get ridiculous. There are many more possibilities once you decide you're not bound by the notions of propriety held by mere mortals:

d10 becomes d12 becomes d20
d10 becomes d12 becomes d20 becomes d30
d10 becomes d12 becomes d20 becomes d30 becomes d100

Or use some funky dice like the DCC rpg folks. The sequence d10 -> d12 -> d14 -> d16 follows the +2 max damage progression, but you could always tack on -> d20 -> d24 -> d30 -> d100 for extra insanity.

Easy to implement (if you can subtract the actual roll from the target roll) and your players will love it (until it kills them).

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(I will readily admit to not actually knowing the technical definition of the term "overclock.")

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XP and Alignment

July 5, 2015, 5:08 pm

≫ Next: Old wine into new skins

≪ Previous: Overclock Your Damage

Idea #1 - XP for rescue and assistance

Maybe rescuing someone from the clutches of the bad guys ought to be worth some XP. 100xp per level of the person rescue might be a good starting benchmark. Count low level but important people as higher level for purposes of this calculation. (E.g. the richest merchant in the land might be a 1,000 point rescue, even though he's a 9 level chump.) Whether this XP is in addition to or in lieu of XP for reward money is up to the stinginess of the DM. If the PCs mistreat or further endanger the poor wretches, XP ought to be reduced.

"Assistance" is worth half as much as rescue, and could be interpreted broadly. Help a treant find the missing piece to the 5,000 piece puzzle he's spent 150 years trying to complete would be worth treant HD x50.

Idea #2 - XP multipliers by Alignment

Lawfuls - Double XP for rescue and assistance, double XP for chaotics defeated (suddenly, a reason to be lawful!), half XP for lawfuls defeated

Neutrals - Double XP for treasure, double XP for any monster defeated by non-combat means

Chaotics - Double XP for Lawfuls defeated, double XP for any treasure not split with other party members

Obviously all this doubling is going to speed up advancement. More importantly, by giving characters different goals it forces the party to negotiate over why the heck they are even in the dungeon.

↧

Old wine into new skins

May 4, 2016, 12:11 pm

≫ Next: klutzing around with the Dungeoneer/Journal

≪ Previous: XP and Alignment

Hey, remember me? The semester is over and I have half a minute before my summer class begins, so I decided to write about a little something. This is an idea that’s been brewing since January when that venerable institution the Guardian ran a story titled “Fairytales much older than previously thought, say researchers.” Yeah, I read the Guardian sometimes. I usually treat inflamations of my chronic anglophilia with a bottle of Newcastle and old Doctor Who reruns, but sometimes I need stronger medication.

Any, these researchers da Silva and Tehrani did some big data type analysis to a corpus of international fairytales and basically built a family tree. Here’s the key chart from their paper:

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The three columns at the bottom look like they’d make pretty sweet band names.

What you’re looking at is a family tree of fairy tales grouped by language family. The thing that blew me away about this chart is the small box at the top, which suggests that humans have been telling and retelling the same four stories since French and German and English and Spanish and Slavic and a whole bunch of other tongues were all the same language. That puts the origin of these fairy tales around 2500 to 4500 BC. Some folks identify the original speakers of this Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language as the kurgan (barrow)-builders living in the region between the Black Sea and the Baltic. You know, like the villain from the one and only Highlander movie.

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“I have something to say: It’s better to burn out than fade away!”

The kurgan fairy tales then spread with the Proto-Indo-European language as it migrated and diverged into the dazzling array of linguistic variety we see today. Here’s a map of the initial movement from the center:

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Back in 2010 (when this blog was still a daily thing) I wrote a five part series on D&D set in this long lost era called Imperishable Fame. Today I want to talk about incorporating the four Proto-Indo-European fairy tales into a typical faux European vanilla fantasy setting.

First, let’s talk about the tales themselves. They’re identified in da Silva and Tehrani’s research paper like so:

328 - The Boy Steal’s Ogre’s Treasure

330 - The Smith and the Devil

402 - The Animal Bride

554 - The Grateful Animals

The Smith and the Devil is bolded because the researchers are flagging it as an even more likely component of the PIE corpus than the others. My basic idea here is that we should be mining these tales for plot elements to our games. After all, they represent our joint heritage in the exact sort of mytho-poetic imaginative nonsense we engage with in D&D every day. I’ll get to some ideas of how to do that at the end of the post. For now, I want to give some details on these four tales.

The numbers for each of the fairy tales on da Silva and Tehrani’s are what is called their ATU number. That stands for Aarne-Thompson-Uther. Folklorists Aarne and Thompson put together a huge ass taxonomy of hundreds of structurally similar stories and a cat named Hans-Jörg Uther later revised it into a four-volume work called The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography. For a similar work on a smaller scale, see S. John Ross’s The Big List of RPG Plots.

I spent the better part of this semester getting my hands on Uther’s book, so I could get the details on these tales beyond their names. About the only library in Illinois that has a copy is at the University of Chicago, and they are not very good sharers. My school is part of a consortium of 84 schools and academic libraries in Illinois that allow for easy inter-library lending. I get books shipped in from all over the state quite regularly. UC’s library is conspicuously not a member. I finally ended up having to get Iowa State University’s copy shipped to me, which is slightly embarrassing. As a native inhabitant of Illinois, I have been inculcated from birth to look down with disdain on neighboring midwest states that lack a Chicago.

Anyway, let’s look at these tales. Or rather, you might call them meta-tales. They’re the raw plot elements out of which fairy tales are built.

328 - “The Boy Steals the Ogre’s Treasure”

In this ancient tale a group of brothers (numbers vary) arrive at the house of an ogre, or possibly the devil. For some reason they stay the night. The ogre/devil decides to murder them in their sleep, but the youngest brother (occasionally the kid sister of the brothers) somehow foils the plan by swapping caps with the daughters of the monster.

Later the brothers take service in the king’s court. The brothers, jealous of the young hero, claim to the king that the youngest sibling can steal the ogre’s/devil’s treasure. (Some versions dispense with this intro and instead start out with the youngest sibling seeking out the ogre for revenge of past mistreatment or to help a friendly king.) Possible treasures include a magic horse, bedspread, carpet, parrot, lamp, sword, musical instrument, or some sort of poultry. The magic treasure may be made of gold and/or silver. The youngest sibling acquires the treasure by cunning and guile.

Later the brothers, now presumably more jealous than ever, claim that the youngest sibling can kidnap the ogre or devil. The hero puts on some sort of disguise and somehow persuades the monster to lie down in a coffin to measure it. The youth nails the coffin shut, trapping the monster. The youth is given a princess for a wife.

As you can see, there is a lot of room for variation here as these tales mutate over time to better fit local needs. For instance the classic English tale of Jack and the Beanstalk is considered a major variant of ATU 328. Incidentally, Jack and the Beanstalk is one of the key inspirations (along with its RPG successors, the Against the Giants series and the more obscure Judges Guild module Under the Storm Giant’s Castle) for my adventure Broodmother Skyfortress. Last I heard that project is finally going to be printed just in time to not make it out for GenCon.

330 - The Smith and the Devil

In this tale a smith sells his soul, sometimes because he is impoverished. The buyer of the soul is typically the devil, but it could also be death itself. Later this smith gives shelter to Christ and St. Peter as they travel the earth in disguise. [Obviously these characters would be different in a pre-Christian telling.] As a reward for his kindness, his divine guests grant the smith three wishes. St. Peter warns that the smith should use one wish to get his soul out of the devil’s clutches and into heaven instead, but the smith ignores him. Instead, the smith wishes up three magic items. The first two are a tree and a bench/chair to which people stick like glue at his command. The third item is usually a knapsack that can draw people into but sometimes it is a pack of cards with which the owner always wins and occasionally it is something else entirely.

When the devil or death shows up to carry the smith off to his eternal doom, the smith tricks him into sticking to the bench/chair and the tree. In order to be released from this trap, the devil/death agrees to terminate the contract for the smith’s soul. In some versions trapping the devil/death like this results in a period where no one can die. After freeing the smith’s soul, the devil/death winds up inside the knapsack, which is placed on the smith’s anvil. The devil/death is pummeled with the smith’s hammer. Later, the smith discovers that he cannot die. Neither heaven nor hell will admit him. He grows tired of life and eventually tricks his way into heaven using the knapsack or cards.

In some versions of this tale the hero isn’t a smith, but an allegorical figure such as Misery, Envy, or Poverty. These versions focus on the intentional gaining of immortality by tricking the devil into trapping himself inside a tree.

402 - “The Animal Bride”

A father, possibly a king, cannot choose among his sons (usually three of them) to inherit his property/kingdom. He sends all of them on a year-long quest. In some cases the quest is to learn a profession. In others it is to bring back a special object, such as textiles (yarn, linen), fine chain, a ring, a horse, or the smallest dog they can find. At the end of the year, the father will name as his heir whoever best succeeds at the task.

The youngest son, who is sometimes explicitly a fool, goes into the forest and enters into the service of some sort of animal. Cat, rat, frog, and mouse are the common options. As payment for his service he is given the most beautiful example of the object that the father requires. Owing to the jealousy of the older brothers, two further tasks are set. The final task is to bring home the most beautiful woman or to bring home the most beautiful bride.

For each subsequent task the young fool returns to the animal, who promises to help. Some event disenchants the animal (burning, mutilation, decapitation, or simply crossing a river) and the animal resumes its original form of a beautiful princess. In most versions the young fool and beautiful princess return to the father to win the final task. In some variants they first trick the parents, either the son returns in rags and is ridiculed or he returns dressed as a prince and is not recognized until a mole identifies him. Or else the trick is that the princess arrives in animal form and yet wins the tasks assigned to the brides to determine which is best. The last (third) bride task is to attend a feast, where the animal turns back into her human form.

In some versions the son renounces the inheritance and goes with his bride back to her realm. In some others the young fool burns the animal skin in hopes of preventing his bride from resuming animal form. She is offended and abandons him. He must go out on a final quest to win her back.

554- The Grateful Animals

This tale appears to have atrophied over the millennia and now tends to appear in the record as part of another story.

In it a traveller meets three animals. One is avian, one aquatic, and one terrestrial. Each of them is in trouble and the traveller aids them. In some versions it is the traveller’s brothers, who accompany him on his journey, that are the source of the distress. The traveller either prevents woe of some sort befalling the animal or compensates for the misdeeds/carelessness of his brothers. Each animal promises to help the traveller later.

The traveller falls in love with a princess. Her father sets three impossible tasks that must be accomplished before he will permit their marriage. The traveller calls upon the aid of his animal friends, who help him complete his task.

So here we have these four echoing voices from the linguistic dawn of Western civilization. What can we as DMs do with them? As much as I am onboard for the “here’s a dungeon, stop asking stupid questions” mode of D&D, a little bit of backstory to hang a campaign on can be really helpful.

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Oops! There goes my anglophilia flaring up again.

If you need a little raw material for your campaign, why not start with the oldest stories we have handy and build from there? These stories possess that oddly familiar strangeness that undergirds many fairy tales, that sense of the uncanny that Freud discusses in his essay Das Unheimliche. Below are six thoughts per story, thumbnail sketches of what they can do in your campaign.

The Boy Steal’s Ogre’s Treasure

If nothing else, you can introduce one or more treasures into your campaign, magic items in the form of a golden/silver horse, bedspread or carpet, parrot or poultry, lamp, sword, or musical instrument. With the exception of the sword, those are some pretty out of the ordinary magical treasures. On top of that, you know at least two previous owners, an adventurer who married into royalty and possibly the devil himself. Sure the Golden Chicken of King Koraz is the best magic item in the campaign world, but it’s annoying as heck all the people who want it back.
The devil apparently has several daughters. What is their deal, anyway? Do they want dad’s magical silver lamp back? Did one or more of the brothers sleep with one or more of them, leading to a race of half-devils?
The brothers may have made off with the caps belonging to the devil’s daughters. What strange properties are possessed by diabolic sleepytime headgear?
Somewhere out there is a coffin that has been nailed shut. Inside sleeps the devil himself, or some campaign equivalent thereof.
If the devil has daughters, who is their mother?
Are the brothers still in the service of the king? Are they even more annoyed now that their kid brother (or sister) has married into the royal family?

The Smith and the Devil

Like the previous story, having the devil stuck somewhere seems like a fun opportunity. Can he trick the PCs into chopping the tree down with a magic axe or maybe a herring?
Who is this smith? What has he made? Perhaps he is one of the great artifact-crafters of your campaign world. He traded his soul for magic smithing powers. Maybe he made the magic item(s) in the previous story.
If the story is over, what happened to the smith’s magic items? Maybe his knapsack or pack of cards made it back to earth.
What kindly divinities go about your campaign world giving out wishes in exchange for a little hospitality?
What other strange events might have been triggered by the day/month/year when nobody died?
The PCs need some critical magic item made or repaired and only the legendary Wandering Smith, unable to die and unwilling to live, can do the job. Can they find him and convince him to assist them?

The Animal Bride

Hey, man. Have you heard? The new king’s wife is a lycanthrope!
If everyone thinks something like the One Ring or the Ring of Gaxx is in your dungeon, then all the brothers might be leading or sponsoring NPCs parties to get it.
On the other hand, a bunch of pain-in-the-asses princes scouring the campaign world for the smallest dog they can find is a really funny concept. Maybe one of them wants to hires the PCs for an expedition to the fabled Isle of Minimals?
I’m fond of the ending where the hero tells dear ol’ dad where he can stick his stupid contest and goes to live happily ever after in his wife’s magic animal person kingdom. Maybe the old man wants the PCs to track junior down to deliver a royal apology?
Then there’s the endings where the hero pisses off his new bride and she leaves him. Could the PCs help locate the Hidden Queendom of the Swanmays?
How is this band of brothers related to the ones that visited the ogre? Is the king here the hero of that tale grown old and somewhat silly?

The Grateful Animals

Even if he possesses no other powers, surely there’s some hash to be made of an NPC who is friends with a bear, an eagle, and a shark.
Ordinary animals talking may be a step too far for some groups. It might held to make the three animals into magical semi-divine rulers, like the King of Snakes, Duchess of Eagles, and Mayor of Fiddler Crabs.
The three animals of three types theme lines up a bit with the shapeshift powers of some versions of the druid. Perhaps the animals taught shapeshifting to the hero, who is now the Druid King.
If we’re in shapeshifting animal territory anyway, we might as well posit the animal bride of the previous story as one of the animals. Does she whisk off to aid her totally platonic adventuring buddy at the drop of a hat? And how do their spouses feel about that?
Seriously, what is up with all these douchebag older brothers? Is it a natural consequence of the fact that it’s the runt of the litter that must rely on social skills like storytelling to survive, thus all older brothers are memorialized as envious bullies? Maybe every bard in your campaign needs a couple of mean older bros.
We’ve got three stories with three beautiful princesses. Are they sisters? Are they the same princess? What are they up to while all this crazy stuff happens around them?

So, off the top of my head, those are the ideas I can squeeze out of the fragments of these old, old stories.

Fairy tales may come and go, but Clancy Brown is forever.

↧

klutzing around with the Dungeoneer/Journal

June 5, 2016, 5:46 am

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The Dungeoneer #19/Judges Guild Journal #22 is an odd duck of a magazine. The Journal was the flagship periodical of the Guild, while the Dungeoneer began life as one of the early D&D fanzines, this one launched by the great Jennell Jaquays and friends. Jaquays et al. produced six issues before they sold to Bob Bledsaw. (JG also reprinted the first 6 issues as a single book usually called Dungeoneer Compendium, though the cover says its The Dungeoneer: The Adventuresome Compendium of Issues 1-6. Whatever you call it, I rank it right up their with the first 3 Arduin Grimoires as one of the best supplements from the good ol' days.)

The Guild decided to merge the two publications and this is the first issue of the merger, hence the two half-covers. Take a moment to enjoy the cover art. I don't know which I like better, the spell lady magic missle-ing the hand that created her, or the party looking up into the hole in the ceiling, not knowing some red gobliny dudes are waiting up there for them. (Extra nerdy note: The character sheet in the top illo is clearly from an OD&D game that used Supplement I: Greyhawk. Score an extra nerd point in the comments by explaining how I know that.)

After this weird hybrid, the next three magazines put out by Judges Guild would be issues 23 through 25 of The Dungeoneer Journal, followed by issue one of Pegasus. The latter magazine ran 12 issues. An issue #14 came out in 1999 and #15 was, I believe, a PDF only from around 2004. Did Pegasus #13 ever get published? I honestly don't know. What I do know is that while I've never been a collector of Judges Guild campaign installments or Journals, I've never been disappointed with issues of Dungeoneer, Dungeoneer Journal, or Pegasus. As a whole, I give these periodicals two hearty thumbs up.

I'm not going to run through everything in this issue, because I intend to focus on one article. But here are some of the other cool things inside.

"Critical Hits and Funbles on Non-Humans" by Glenn Goddard. Two functional looking percentage charts, similar in many ways to Dave Hargrave's charts. My fave result for sheer gruesomeness is probably "spine ruined."
"Dungeons Diseases" by the great Lewis Pulsipher. I'll admit this one disappointed me intially. I was hoping for disgusting fungal infections, orc rot, rectal bees, etc. Instead it's a comedy piece commenting on certain kinds of players. Example: Mapitis in which the "victim becomes more interested in maps than monsters. He incessantly asks questions about angles and distances."
"Jewelry" by the also great Steve Marsh. One page of charts of various things that can be jeweled.
The regular Monster Matrix column includes a nifty critter called the Balloon Beast by Gregg and John Pittenger. It's a shame that this monster has not been folded into the umpteen varieties of beholder variants. The Waldweibchen by Kurt Smeby is a great example of the kind of grumpy and mercurial fairy that D&D needs more of.
"Mac's Packs" by Thomas A. McCloud is another example of the "fast pack" concept. 4 pre-packaged sets of adventurers gear in a container (backpack or sack) sold at a discount. Personally, I lean towards charging more than regular because of the premium on convenience. Still, neat stuff.
"Adapting the Book of Demons" also by Lew Pulsipher. I can't leave something with the words "Book of Demons" off this list, but it's about making a demonology game product work better with bog standard D&D assumptions. I'm not certain, but I suspect the work in question is the same Book of Demons that ended up bundled into Gamescience's The Fantasy Gamer's Compendium. At the moment I can't locate my copy of the latter to confirm, but, as I recall, one of the reasons I've never made much use of this Compendium is that all of its components seem written for a fairly idiosyncratic campaign. Pulsipher seems to be dealing with that exact issue in his article.
"Metallurgy and FRP," also by Steve Marsh, is a one column piece on considering how the rise and fall of demand brought on by new technologies can impact the relative value of metals in your campaign.
"Dungeon Generator" by Charles L. Evans is exactly what it says on the tin. It resembles the one in the Gamescience product The Book of Tables, but I can't confirm if they are the same just now. My guess is that both Gamescience products are sitting next to each other on some bookshelf or another.
"Traveller Rumors" by Bill Paley is one page with 13 adventure seeds for any campaign. I'm pretty sure that the planets mentioned in the text (Pickering, Salivarius II, Credosh III, Bendex III, Krestmast, Samelos XII) do not appear in any known canonical sector.
"The Old Hill" is an adventure by Steve Marsh written for Chivalry & Sorcery. It is set in a pocket universe called a Garden World, one of "a series of interlocking planes of existence... They were the lesser hearths of each of the Vali or Star Powers summoned by the Norns when they wove the world... Then came the blight of Upharsin and many things changed." This isn't the first time I've really grooved on Marsh's sense of cosmic history. In the adventure itself PCs can be struck by the literal Wrath of God as well as fight an angel, a daughter of Lilith, and a really grumpy tree. I also live this bit from the introduction: "Some of the inspiration for this came from Ed Simbalist and from William Glenn Seligman. An Erol Flynn movie ran as background for the typing and mapping. I especially want to thank Lee Gold for her helpful comments." Lee Gold is the matriarch of Alarums & Excursions, the long-running D&D apa-zine. Ed Simbalist is one half of the team that created Chivalry & Sorcery. And Bill Seligman is the author of one of the best Dragon articles ever written, "Gandalf was Only a Fifth Level Magic-User."

None of those articles or the ones I haven't mentioned are why I started this piece. Instead I want to talk about Kevin Fortune's "Using Klutz Factors." This is a short piece in the long tradition of making magic-users roll dice to cast spells. I've tackled this sort of thing before myself, as have many others. What I want to give to you today is NOT a simple transcription of Fortune's system, but a slightly spruced-up version. My two main objects with the system as presented are 1) too many percentile rolls and 2) some multiplication of percentages. By switching to mostly d20-based rolls and adding an extra chart to remove the math, I feel like the result preserves the spirit of Fortune's system while trimming the fat considerably. I've also limited myself to the first 14 levels of experience and 6 levels of spells. Gandalf may have been higher than 5th level but I don't care much about anything higher than Expert level anymore.

Revised Klutz Factors

after Kevin Fortune, Dungeoneer #18/Judges Guild Journal #22 pages 7-9 (Aug/Sep 1980)

I. What You Gain

No magic-user likes limitations on their power and this system, which requires a casting roll for every spell, is pretty limiting compared to a lot of versions of D&D. However, it comes with one big advantage for MU's: you may keep casting the same spell but the Klutz Factor doubles each time, until a Klutz effect (a fumble) prevents you from casting again. This system actually sounds like it would work well for those BX referees who stick to the hard version of the spellbook rules, which say that if your MU can cast 2 first level spells a day and 1 second level that is the maximum number of spells allowed in your book (see page B16). Some DMs might even want to forbid players from doubling up on spell memorization under this scheme (e.g. no 2nd level MUs memorizing 2 sleep spells).

II. What You Need to Track

Each MU has a Klutz Factor for each level of spell they can cast. This is a three variable factor, so in a 2-d presentation like this screen, it'll take two charts to get to. Every time your MU changes INT or their level, you'll need to look this back up. Use Tables 1 and 2 to find your character's Klutz Factor.

Table 1: MU Level versus Spell Level

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The A's in parentheses are spells someone of that level shouldn't be able to cast. They don't figure into Fortune's original tables, but I added them in case you wanted someone to fumble a high level scroll under this system or something like that.

Once you have the letter code for each spell level you can cast, cross index the result on Table 2 to find the Klutz factor for each level of spell your MU can cast. You should probably record this number adjacent to the spells/per day indicator on your character sheet.

Table 2: Intelligence to Klutz Factor

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This Klutz Factor is a d20 thing. When an MU fails to cast a spell you've got to roll over this number to avoid a spell fumble. Every subsequent time you cast the same spell in a day, this number doubles. That looks absolutely disastrous for low-INT magic-users, but you need to blow the casting roll to even reach this point in the process.

One of the downsides of this system, probably the one that trips me up the most, is that you need to look this stuff up for NPC magic-users. Since I'm super lazy about such things, here are all the Klutz Factors for an MU of 11 Intelligence.

Table 3: Typical MU Klutz Factors

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Example: Andrigal of the Weeping Beard, a 3rd level MU, attempts his second web of the day. His normal Klutz Factor, as a default Int 11 NPC, is 6 for second level spells. Since he has attempted web once today, his Klutz Factor is doubled to 12. His chances to cast are the same as always (see below), but if he fails the casting roll then he will fumble the spell on a second d20 roll of 1-12. Note that his 3rd and subsequent web spells of the day are all going to be fumbles IF he blows the spellcasting roll, but he can risk it as many times as his shriveled heart desires.

III. The Casting Roll

Before the Klutz Factor comes into play, Fortune's system calls for a casting roll similar to that employed in Chainmail, but d20 based and expanded to cover a wider range of levels. On the chart below an I indicates Instantaneous success (the spell goes off), a D indicates a Delay, the MU must keep chanting and gesticulating for d3 rounds before the spell goes off (d3 turns for non-combat spells), and an N indicates No Effect. According to Fortune's system only when a No Effect occurs is the Klutz Factor check made. Though I'd also consider using Klutz Factor rolls for when someone took damage while working through a Delay effect.

Table 4: Spellcasting Chart

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For many campaigns, it would make sense to allow the players to record these numbers for their character. But when I've tried a similar system before I kept this sort of info behind the screen because I like to keep some of the workings of magic a mystery to the players. Note that a system like allows for a campaign where high level casters don't necessarily reshape the world in their image. Wizards know that high level spells are unpredictable enough they should only be used in emergencies.

I've added the numbers that are highlighted/in parentheses for situations like a low level MU casting a spell directly out of some higher level character's spell book.

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IV. The Klutz Effects

Okay, so your favorite pet magic-user has rolled an N effect on their casting roll and then rolled high enough on the follow-up d20 that a fumble has occurred. Throw a d10 and consult the chart below to see what actually happens.

Table V: Klutz Result Chart

1. Spell has normal effect, but on the wrong side of the conflict.

2. Spell has reverse effect on target.

3. Spell has normal effect, but only on Magic-User who cast it.

4. Spell has no effect and caster Mind Blanked, unable to cast for rest of day.

5. Spell has normal effect but Magic-User drained 1-4 points of Intelligence for rest of day.

6. Spell has no effect and Magic-User drained 1-4 points of Intelligence for rest of day.

7. Spell has reverse intended effect on wrong side of conflict.

8. Spell has reverse effect, but only on Magic-User who cast it.

9. Spell negated and Magic-User loses ability to cast a random spell for 1-4 days.

10. Spell klutzed so badly that Magic-User is scared to use it again.

Obviously once you have the whole system in place this last chart is the sort of thing that can be added to and/or modified to suit the spirit of the campaign. Also, Fortune includes a few lines about overcome the fear effect of number 10, but it references the mechanics "Bravery,""character roll," and "Conversion Chart" without explaining what those things actually are.

So there you have it. Another system for making MUs more complicated and a bigger pain in the ass to play. I'm normally pro-MU and anti-complication, but I'm also pro-rolling more dice and anti-magic is as reproducible as a grade school science demonstration.

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You, the universe, or both have gone very wrong

August 17, 2016, 8:02 am

≫ Next: Ard times for MU's

≪ Previous: klutzing around with the Dungeoneer/Journal

Why did you become an adventurer? (d30)

Early one morning you saw the sky crack, then break, revealing strange worlds behind the sky. You haven't been able to live an ordinary life ever since.
You came home one day and the sister you buried a year prior was alive and well. No one else in the family remembers her illness or death, yet her tombstone still stands in a nearby graveyard.
You used to work as a computer technician in a futuristic domed city, but woke up one morning the idiot child of the village blacksmith.
One day the bucket of the village well brought up blood instead of water. No one else seemed to mind, but you sure as hell did.
After the eclipse everyone else spoke a different language. You're pretty sure the folks back home thought you'd been possessed by a babbling demon. You've only now just picked up the basics of your new native tongue.
Returning from a visit to a distant kinsman, an ancient forest covers the exact spot your village used to occupy. You turned around and the trail you followed was gone.
You were caught up in a war between shadowy angels and titanic metal gods. At the final battle you took a blow to the head. When you came to you were still on the same charred and bloodstained field, but everyone and everything else was gone. None of the locals remember the war or its combatants, yet you have a dozen scars from it.
One night you came home after a long day in the fields. The womenfolk wailed and the menfolk cowered. Your own brother drove you out of the house with a cleaver in one hand and a holy symbol in the other. Later you found your own gravestone. According to it, you've been dead 3 years.
You worked up the nerve to ask the elder of the clan what had happened to the shadows. Why were they no longer a luminous rainbow glow, but instead dark and spooky? Without answering, he had you driven out of the community.
On the day after midsummer everyone you knew started calling you by a different name, as if it had always been your own. They also began blaming you for a wide variety of petty crimes. Then you realized your face had changed as well. Who are you?
You used to live by the sea until one night a brass galleon with a skeletal crew slid into the harbor. A skeleton prince wearing a flaming crown blew a silent note on a bronze horn. Everyone in your village marched aboard the galleon, as if in a daze. It sailed away, leaving you alone forever.
In all your dull life you never expected to see an aerial battle right above your village. Dragons and demons and flying ships exchanged strange fires and multi-colored lightning. One of the dragons fell. Only then did you realize how far up and how huge the combatants were. The dying dragon crushed everyone and everything you ever cared about.
You used to be a dog. Slightly smarter than most dogs, but just a dog. Your young owner treated you cruelly. Then one day you and your owner swapped bodies for no discernible reason. The dog ran away--no doubt fearing revenge--but you had to run too because you couldn't successfully imitate your former owner.
One day you awoke in a mass grave. It was only after you climbed out of a pile of rotting corpses that you realized you had no idea who you were or how you got there.
No one else back home can see the hole in the sky or the baleful gaze of the hideous cosmic beast that watches us through it. You couldn't work in the open fields any more, knowing it was always looking over your shoulder. You had to flee. It still watches.
You used to be the whole universe, one vast ecstatic cosmic consciousness. But then more and more of your all-body became numb and alienated. Now you're just this tiny lump of ambulatory meat and you don't know what happened or why.
You don't know on what strange battlefield it received its wounds or whether it was a giant or a god or something else, but it stumbled into the village green and promptly died. Everyone else in the village entered into some weird frenzy, gleefully tearing the corpse apart and devouring it raw. As you fled in horror they started to change into unhuman things.
Twice a year every year you had taken the old ferry, for as long as you could remember. This time when you reached the far bank of the river it was a totally different place. You turned around and the ferry was gone. So was the river.
You used to be a professional circus freak, the Hideous One-Headed Four-Limbed Abomination. Then one day the sky flashed a weird color and suddenly everyone else was deformed just like you. The poor bastards don't even remember their former three-headed, six-limbed glory. You're not a freak anymore, but you're out of a job and still kinda feel like one.
One day you started growing at a prodigious rate--or perhaps everything else shrunk--until your head cracked open the sky. You grew and grew until you were normal size in a much bigger universe outside your old one.
You were born with a special gift: You can dimly remember your past and future lives, as if your consciousness were a tangled thread in the weave of time. People back home thought you were a witch. Maybe they're right, but the whole burning-at-the-stake thing they tried was still super rude.
One day the earth shook and the land shifted. Your home and all your kin sunk beneath the waves, which was surprising seeing as how you lived a hundred leagues from the sea. You'd have drowned, too, if not for that log you clung to.
One day cracks opened in the sky. You suddenly fell upwards and landed someplace else.
One day you noticed an extra door in your home. From the darkness beyond a gnarled green hand beckoned. You're still not sure why you followed or who that goblin was.
You used to be an astronaut. Your single seat orbital spacecraft passed through a strange energy field and you lost all contact with mission control. You splashed down in a world that doesn't seem to be Earth.
The block of ice you were frozen in thawed out. Apparently your home civilization has been gone for a whole ice age.
Back in the day you were a glorious 7-dimensional hyperbeing. Then the war in heaven came. An omega angel wielding a meson blade sliced off a 3-dimensional appendage, which fell down to ordinary spacetime. You may look like an normal person, but you're really a living amputation in a fallen world.
The glowing blue rain turned everyone else in your home village into hideous snake people. They told you they still loved you, even though you're now the local freak. But you couldn't cope and fled.
You were a footsoldier in the last of the Psychic Wars, but an Oblivion Bomb has scrambled most of your memories of the conflict. Your not even sure how you ended up on this particular planet.
You used to be a god. Your whole pantheon fought in Ragnarockaggedon, but your side lost. To escape the Cosmic Regulators and the inevitable trial for Crimes against Divinity, you dispersed your god-power and implanted your essence into a mortal body.

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Ard times for MU's

November 5, 2016, 4:17 am

≫ Next: The Deadliest Page

≪ Previous: You, the universe, or both have gone very wrong

So this exchange appeared in my tumblr feed yesterday:

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That's pretty darn great if true, but a citation is lacking, so I hit up the online Oxford English Dictionary. Here's the entry for the suffix -ard:

-ard, suffix

Etymology: < Old French -ard, -art, < German -hart, -hard, ‘hardy,’ often forming part of personal names as Old High German Regin-hart Raynard,Ebur-hart Everard; also in Middle High German and Dutch a formative of common nouns, generally pejorative, whence adopted in the Romance languages. Used in French as masculine formative, intensive, augmentative, and often pejorative, compare bastard, couard, canard, mallard,mouchard, vieillard.

It appeared in Middle English in words from Old French, as bastard, coward, mallard, wizard, also in names of things, as placard, standard (flag); and became at length a living formative of English derivatives, as in buzzard, drunkard, laggard, sluggard, with sense of ‘one who does to excess, or who does what is discreditable.’ In some words it has taken the place of an earlier -ar, -er of the simple agent, as in bragger, braggar, braggard, stander, standard (tree). In some it is now written -art, as braggart; in cockade, orig. cockard, corrupted to -ade suffix.

The OED's first definition of wizard ("A philosopher, sage... Often contemptuous") confirms this negative connotation.

My conclusion is that etymologically wizards are close to mad scientists, in that both concepts express the fear that there is such a thing as too much knowledge. That's basically what I do in the latest version of my Wessex campaign already. Magic-users are twisted by their secret knowledge into cosmic conspiracy kooks. Their paranoid insights into the universe are considered blasphemies against the established order of the universe, even when they are true.

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The Deadliest Page

November 8, 2016, 3:51 pm

≫ Next: Apparently PCs are very sound sleepers

≪ Previous: Ard times for MU's

So it's early into the evening of Election Day here in the good ol' U.S. of A. and the present political climate has me sufficiently freaked out that I have started drinking. So please forgive me if parts of this post are incoherent.

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Anyway, I wanted to take some time before I get fall down drunk to tell you about the Deadliest Page of the original Dungeon Masters Guide. There are several pages in the DMG that will severely ruin your PC's life. My favorites include page 28 (where we find out that not wearing a helmet will FUCKING KILL YOU), page 225 (the gods damned ENCUMBRANCE RULES), and page 80 (the item saving charts will WRECK ALL YOUR COOL MAGICAL SHIT). But the deadliest page of the first edition Dungeon Masters Guide is page 182. Imma explain why.

There are two rules for wandering monsters on this page that I have NEVER seen applied. Not in my own campaigns and not in anyone else's. (If you've used them, please let me know!) Rule the first is the Psionic Encounter rules. The basic idea seems to be that psionic monsters are attracted to psionic powers or--and this is the kicker--spells that resemble psionic powers. A lot of low level spells appear on the list titled Spells Resembling Psionic Powers: cure light wounds, detect evil, detect magic, charm person, feather fall, enlarge, ESP, invisibility just to name a few. The upshot of this rule is that if your party casts ANY of these spells there is a 1 in 6 chance that the next wandering monster comes from the Psionic Encounter Table rather than the normal wandering monster matrix. This table is no joke. Not only does it include all the standard psionic monsters like intellect devourers and mind flayers, but all the sundry denizens of the Seven Hells and the Abyss also show up on it.

This means that under AD&D1 rules as written it would be theoretically possible for a 1st level cleric on their first adventure to cast detect evil and find nothing, only for Demogorgon to show up a few rounds later.

The other, and I think more important, section is Patrols. The DMG asks DM to designate all outdoor areas as either inhabited or uninhabited. One of the key differences between the two is that inhabited areas are patrolled. In fact a full 25% of wandering monster encounters in inhabited areas will be with patrols. A patrol looks like this:

Commander: a fighter (or ranger, if appropriate) level 6-8
Lieutenant: figher (or ranger) 4-5
Sergeant: figher 2 or 3
2-3 first level fighters
(All of the above have plate, shield, lance, flail, and longsword, mounted on warhorses
12-24 zero-level soldiers with chain or scale armor, bow or xbow, and some hand weapon, mounted on riding horses
either a cleric 6-7 or an MU 5-8

In other words, 1 in 4 encounters in inhabited areas involve a shit-ton of cops trying to ruin your murderhobos' day.

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Apparently PCs are very sound sleepers

November 9, 2016, 7:29 am

≫ Next: Broodmother is a real thing.

≪ Previous: The Deadliest Page

Here's a crowdsourced thing from G+ I wanted to preserve for posterity.  The challenge was to come up with cool alternatives to the "wake up in a dungeon cell" method of starting a scenario.  Thanks to everyone who contributed!

How do we start this crazy adventure? (d100)

01-02 PCs wake up in a mausoleum inside a haunted graveyard.
03-04 PCs wake up at the starting inn, but it is on fire.
05-06 PCs wake up getting shaved and tattooed and branded, before being hung up to give transfusions to diseased cultists. =)
07-08 PCs wake up in a wagon during a high-speed chase.
The PCs wake up hungover after a bacchanal
09-10 PCs wake up slung and tied over a horse.
11-12 PCs wake up on a sinking ship.
13-14 PCs wake up standing over their sleeping bodies.
15-16 PCs wake up tied to the belly of a boar
17-18 PCs wake up washed up on a beach after a shipwreck
19-20 PCs wake up falling from an airship
21-22 PCs wake up on a tower during a storm
23-24 PCs wake up during surgery... alien surgery.
25-26 Wake up with a knife to their throat
27-28 Wake up in a village, only they are still alive.
29-30 The PCs happen to be travelling down the road together when a horse-drawn carriage comes barreling around a turn towards them.

31-32 PCs wake up in a wizard's laboratory, decapitated. Fortunately for them they are being magically kept alive and just need to find their bodies. Also somewhere nearby there is a single golem that follows voice commands.
33-34 Pcs wake up in the inn. Water surrounds their beds. The inn is floating down river on a flash flood.
35-36 They wake up in individual coffins
37-38 They wake up strapped to various torture devices in a dungeon. Good way to introduce themselves as the torturer interrogates them.

39-40 PCs wake up each holding a fragment of a treasure map. Between them they do not have the whole thing.
41-42 They wake up in each other's bodies. Sally the halfling thief is now playing a dwarven male fighter. They have to find each other in the city.
43-44 They wake up in a pitch black room that smells, and they are waist deep in acid. Something splashes nearby (they are in a giant's stomach, it unfortunately has worms. Big worms).
45-46 Being dragged from the sea by strange man-frog fishermen in walrus leather.
Wake up in a crater, smoking.
47-48 PCs wake up (unarmed and without their gear) with a headache, in a caged wagon, including an armed guard escort, and they are traveling in place they are not familiar with.
49-50 Same as above above, except they are traveling through an unfamiliar village and while being insulted and mocked by villagers, and being pelted with rotting vegetables and waste. They are quite aware of the shouts of "Witch!, Burn! Warlock! Demon Worshipper! Burn!" that can be heard amidst the other slanders, taunts, and insults
51-52 PC's wake up to find a rather large dragon attacking. As each pc is slain, they wake up once again, only they are not anywhere near their home,. They are all in a strange outdoor place with a glowing extra-dimensional gate or portal that is quietly powering down. The summoning wizard/wizardess is standing immediately before them.

53-54 PCs wake up in the menagerie garden of the Emperor
55-56 Wake up in a conference room with Dr. Doom.
57-58 PCs all wake up (with hirelings too) naked in bed together. A big bed.
59-60 They wake up underwater, surrounded by a maze of coral and seaweed. They have gills.
61-62 Wake up in hot air balloon that is descending
63-64 Wake up inside Kansas farm house In a tornado, tumbling through sky.
65-66 Wake up at your moms house, have an existential crisis, realize you need to go kill something and take its gold.
67-68 They don't wake up. They never sleep. Insomnia has been constant for a month and now at four a.m. the dark sends a strange guest
69-70 They wake up outside of an already raided dungeon, unfamiliar magic items in hand
71-72 They hit middle age and none of their dreams ever happened and there are dragons out there and the bills are getting higher
73-74 They emerge spontaneously from the forehead of Zeus
75-76 They reverse-nirvana out of oneness with the universe and somebody in a dungeon did it
77-78 They wake up mid-brawl with each other. A neat sum of XP is offered the sole survivor. They were pregens, they roll up characters who were placing bets. The survivor won the privilege of guiding them into a dungeon

79-80 PCs wake up covered head to toe in unknown rune-tattoos
81-82 They wake up in a mesmerists room in Victorian London. He says that was a pretty good session but they need to regress again to find out where the special snowflake treasure went. They wake up in a dungeon.
83-84 They go to sleep on the night of the equinox and pass through The Gates of Ivory and Horn...
85-86 Waking up in a morgue has been done by Torment of course, but it has more applications than that.
87-88 They wake up under an upturned, burning wagon
89-90 The players (not the PCs), wake up naked in this strange temple. There is an old person in priestly robes staring at you
91-92 PCs wake up in the tavern, but the village is completely empty of other people. Half-eaten meals and cooking fires still burning. Footprints end mid-stride.
93-94 Wake up inside tubes full of fluid, which are slowly draining while an alarm sounds.

95-96 PCs wake up shrunk to 3 inches tall and inside an iguana terrarium.

97-98 PCs wake up naked in the Sultan's harem as scimitar-wielding eunuchs enter the chamber.

99-00 PCs wake up chained to barrels of gunpowder, longs wicks sizzling towards their doom.

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Broodmother is a real thing.

November 30, 2016, 7:50 am

≫ Next: the Broodmother cover, a better look

≪ Previous: Apparently PCs are very sound sleepers

Hey all! I must pause in my preparations to teach the youth of America a second day on how awesome Beowulf is in order to provide a brief update.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Photo: Gangsta. . . . . . . . . I haven't opened them up and checked them yet, but unless I make a frothy, raving rant in 15 minutes assume they will be at Dragonmeet on Saturday and then go on sale on the webstore on Tuesday. Broodmother backers will get a PDF tomorrow.

Photo: Gangsta. . . . . . . . . I haven't opened them up and checked them yet, but unless I make a frothy, raving rant in 15 minutes assume they will be at Dragonmeet on Saturday and then go on sale on the webstore on Tuesday. Broodmother backers will get a PDF tomorrow.

This menacing figure is none other than game designer and publisher James Raggi, of Lamentations of the Flame Princess infamy. In his hand he holds some sort of flintlocky pistol (is it a prop? a toy? an actual firearm? I don't really know) and 2 books.

One of those books is Blood in the Chocolate, an adventure by cool guy Kiel Chenier that, as I understand it, is all about Willy Wonka taking a break from murdering children to spend time murdering your PCs instead. Good, clean, wholesome fun. Everyone reading this post should buy one.

The other book is nothing less than an actual copy of Broodmother Skyfortress, the adventure I wrote quite a while back now. A few copies will be on sale this weekend at Dragonmeet, a convention in London. Copies for all the wonderful people who put up money before I even wrote the thing will start shipping shortly thereafter.

I want to thank everyone who pledged, for both their initial faith in me and their patience. And to everyone who emailed me over the years to ask when this darn thing was coming out, I thank you for accepting my vague promises. I am so super-pleased that you will be getting your long awaited book soon. It honestly fills me with joy to know you'll soon be holding your own copies. And I hope you all like it.

By the by, the original design spec in the IndieGogo campaign called for a 32 page adventure. The adventure actually runs longer than that and there's a bunch of bonus content in the back. The last version of the PDF I saw ran 162 pages, or more than 5 times the content you were promised. I hope that serves as a little apology/bonus for the absurd amount of production delays.

Also, if you haven't read Beowulf, you should totally get a hold of a good translation. It's one of the wellsprings of modern Western heroic literature. I teach R. M. Liuzza's more scholarly edition, but there are lots of other good ones. The Seamus Heaney version is easy to find and quite popular. A new edition of Tolkien's translation came out not too long ago as well.

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