Posts Tagged ‘fantasy’

Equipment Damage X in 6

June 10, 2025

“The dragon’s breath roars around the elf, roasting him in his armor until there’s nothing left but cremated bones … and his perfectly-intact bow, leather armor, and feathered arrows”

Wait. What the hell?

Depending on your edition and your gaming group, that’s a very normal situation. But in 1st edition D&D, you’d expect the elf who fails his saving throw vs. the dragon’s breath would have to begin rolling item saving throws for all his gear. The wood, leather, and cloth probably fries. This is part of the balance of acquisition in 1e, “easy come, easy go”, and is one way that wealth can exit the adventuring party. Players hate it. Not only when their own gear gets blown up, but also when their own blasting magic (which slays the enemy with ease) also destroys enemy gear which should become their loot after the battle is over. The DM doesn’t want to include too many blasting/crushing attacks lest his adventurers be left clambering around in a daze, naked and wielding the sharpest piece of trash available.

I came up with a house rule to make the item damage system in 1e more lenient, allow for PCs trying to get equipment repaired, for found equipment to come pre-damaged (the former owner suffering much worse), for cheap PCs to be able to buy low-quality or used equipment at a discount, and it ties in with a Shields Shall Be Splintered issue with magic shields.

Run the rules as written, until an item fails an item save. Then, it receives 1 point of damage out of 6 for every pip by which it failed its save. So, if you need a 15 to save but you rolled a 17, the item is now damaged 2 of 6.

  • Damaged armor and weapons operate at -1 to hit and damage and -1 to AC until repaired.
  • Nonmagical miscellaneous equipment that is damaged and then later put under stress (a rope being used to climb for example) must roll over its damage on d6 to work properly, else it fails. A failing rope snaps (but can be tied back together!), a failing lantern extinguishes and must be relit, a failing saddle slides off your horse. So, if your rope is damaged 4 of 6, it has a 4 in 6 chance to fail under stress.
  • Magic items must roll to see whether they operate magically during this game session, needing a roll over the damage count. If they roll equal or under the damage count, the item fritzes out and counts as nonmagical for the whole session. I’d be generous and give them their usual item save bonus as a magic item, and they detect as magical, they just don’t perform their magical functions.

You’ll normally not have a note next to your items. Only if they’re damaged! Then you’d write something like “1 of 6 dmg”. Items that reach 6 of 6 damage are destroyed.

“You dig through the wreckage of the battle and find a dull, bent shortsword. You do your best to straighten it but it needs a smith’s attention to fix properly. At least it’s better than your bruised fists. You see torchlight flickering from the intersection ahead.”

Repairs can be done in town by a craftsman, costing 10% of the item’s normal value per damage point restored. Yes, this makes magic items expensive to repair. The DM may decide that a master craftsman is needed to repair magic items, or that you need a spellcaster of a certain level (say 7th) to aid in the repairs, or they need extremely high-quality materials, and those are the reasons why it costs so much.

“The weaver wrings her arthritic hands, and behind her the silent Druid stands silhouetted in the open back door of the shop. You let your magic rope slip through your fingers, the fraying and nicks all gone. You wondered how they would find enough grasshopper legs at this time of year to fix it. The Druid, seeing your satisfaction, leaves without a word. The weaver gratefully takes the coins. It’s quite a pile, probably enough for her to fix the dilapidated roof.”

If you’re going to include item damage like this, you really might consider switching from a flat-rate upkeep cost for leveled characters of 100 GP / level / month as the 1e DMG instructs, and either make that amount lower, or just switch to itemizing expenses for when they stay in town. The money will be spent on repairs or replacements instead of generalized upkeep (and that general upkeep is hard to justify at high levels). Characters with little equipment, Monks especially, who should have low lifestyle expenses, will end up with low repair bills.

If you’re using the Shields Shall Be Splintered rule, consider how it integrates:

Shields Shall Be Splintered
When you’re hit by a normal blow, you can choose to let your shield absorb the attack and be destroyed. If the blow is from a large or magical source (a giant’s boulder, or a dragon’s breath) the attack is reduced by 1d6 damage and the shield is splintered. Magical shields are better at taking hits. Against large/magical attacks the damage blocked is 1d6 + shield magic value. And, when absorbing any blow, a magic shield is not destroyed but instead takes 1 point of equipment damage.

“You stagger back under the giant’s blows. Your trusty shield has kept you alive for the past five minutes of battle, and now when you raise it you can see his shape through the crack in the middle. A wet gasp comes where you expected another smash, and the giant hunches forward and falls, finally bleeding out from his wounds. You lean against the wall and gulp the air. You turn the shield around and see your family’s crest is battered but still visible.”

This means SSBS is not just a rule that people would only use with a nonmagical shield, because they can safely take up to 5 hits on a magic shield before it’s destroyed. It gets expensive repairing it! But notice how:

(1) a sword-and-board fighter has a nice option to use that’s defensive (so it thematically makes sense with their fighting style) while two-weapon fighters get their one extra attack with overall penalties, and the two-handed fighter gets a bigger weapon that deals more damage and has more reach.

(2) it turns a magical shield into both a passive magic item and a consumable with 5 charges – and a 6th if you need it to save your life.

CONCLUSIONS

I think the item saving throw / equipment destruction rules are valuable for a variety of reasons. I think it’s very much worthwhile to soften the blow with this item damage house rule. I think, then, a DM who wants the original item destruction effect just needs to goose up the amount of area-effect magic thrown out by the opposition – which is also great fun.

However, I can also see someone saying they don’t value the effects on their campaign enough to do the extra bookkeeping for some items that are damaged and not yet repaired. It’s definitely a tradeoff, and opinions will vary.

“The thief perched in the window. She could hear guards rushing from room to room, stabbing behind heavy curtains, slamming doors shut. The cool free air blew in, her rope tied off and dangling down to the ground a hundred feet below. But the rope was scorched by flames from the wizard’s trapped strongbox. Would it hold her weight? Would his dungeon cell be worse than striking the pavement and exploding like a sack of tomatoes? She wished she were a bird. She prayed, truly, for the first time in her life. She climbed over the sill and began to climb down.

She watched the window rush away from her as the wind struck her back and scattered her hair, the great starry sky wheeling above her. She spread her arms, and spread her fingers, and a moment before she met the earth she cried out and twisted about and flew away far over the hills and into the moonlight. And she was forevermore a creature of the wind.”

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The 1-Year Campaign Theater Part I

March 20, 2025

​I find that campaigns tend to run for a year before the seasonal break (whatever season it’s nicest to be outside in your climate). So it makes sense to scale a campaign to that timeline. Whether you actually complete it is impossible to tell; perhaps nearing the end of a campaign will encourage players to prioritize the game over fair weather.

I don’t write stories and try to estimate a 1-year progression. Instead, I write places and set up starting conditions, and how those will probably progress assuming the players don’t affect them. Because players have the freedom to wander, I prefer not to build a linear area because they could easily get off the developed path; a linear area works very well for a voyage if you include branching paths that tend to make their way back to the center at various points. Regardless, I call this large area a campaign theater (in the military sense).

THEATER SCALE
My 1-year campaign theaters are 30×30 miles of terrain on a map with 1 mile per square, on graph paper that’s 5 squares per inch. I prefer graph paper that comes with a blank border, because it looks so much cleaner, but you’ll have to look around for it. Engineers seem to use it, so you might pick up some branded for Boeing or whatever at a yard sale, but I’m sure they’re sold at stationery stores. I could use hexes, but it isn’t vital. It just helps with marking travel and making the map look more organic. Also tradition. An adventure site is too small to appear as anything but a dot on the theater map, but you can use different dot icons for different types of sites.

The map is marked across the left side with numbers, 1-30, from top down. Across the top we mark A-Z from left to right, and after Z (the 26th square across) go with AA, AB, AC, AD. This lets you write down coordinates like Excel cells.

You will build an index. Just list all your adventure sites and their coordinates. Now copy that list and to the side make a copy. Sort the left index by coordinate, the right by site name. Now you can look at your map and get coordinates and look at the index to tell you what is there, or you can look for a site name on the other index to get its theater map coordinates.

DUNGEON SCALE
Within that the dungeon / hazard zones are two-page dungeon format (map and key on left page, room details on right page) with 300’x300′ maps (30×30 10′ squares). I like this because you have everything you need without flipping pages. If it’s a simpler or smaller adventure site I’ll revert to One Page Dungeon format and make sure I put another OPD on the facing page, so every other site preserves its two-facing-pages structure. If it’s a multi-level dungeon it helps to line up the stairs down on one page with the stairs up on the next, as you flip.

A village can be on one of those dungeon-scale area maps but maybe with a scale of 50′ per square, so we’re drawing building footprints but no interiors, we get small roads and streams, and farm plots delineated. The whole village is thus up to 1500′ across (~1/4 mile) but probably a lot of rough undeveloped area around the outside. It really helps to make all your village maps the same scale as each other so you instantly get a feel for them in comparison. And you can draw the village as a roughly one-quarter square on the 30 mile theater map.

A small town with a wall will tend to have a lot of denser development inside, meaning that large population can still fit within the same scale map. The walls can be near the edge of the mapped area, with indications of roads leading away which correlate with marked roads on the 30 mile theater map. Also show the nearest edges of the nearest farms, extending out away from the town. If the players head out there and explore/interact with a family just stick with broad strokes. A fenced area, some animals and crops (enough to be self-sufficient), beehives. A walled compound with a big house, animal pens, chicken coop, a big tub in the yard for washing clothes. Watch a little footage of Kingdom Come: Deliverance for what I’m envisioning.

CITY MAPS
A larger city of thousands needs a larger map. There’s probably just one city in your theater, but even if more, it’s okay to use a different scale for them. Try to change the header at the top of the page to make it clear this is a big city, to point out the scale difference. You might use 100′ per square. At this scale you’re drawing city blocks rather than individual buildings.

Your city map needs the same coordinate system as your theater map. You might also consider putting down icons for inns, shops, and guard posts/barracks (so, just three icons) on the map to identify these locations that tend to be very important to players, and also use those icons in your index next to the buildings. In Word, you can insert an image, and I’ve been able to use an image as a custom bullet point icon, but the latter screws up on reopening the file so it’s not ideal.

Another way to depict your city is at the same village scale but with multiple sections. This can feel a little artificial, but this city-block system was used for the city of Phlan in the Pool of Radiance computer game and described in-game as being done for defense, with each section walled and with its own few entrances. Make each section 30×30 (smaller is ok but you want to take advantage of the happy medium of 5 square-per-inch graph paper), at 50′ per square, and you can draw individual buildings.

A more organic way to depict neighborhoods might be the old Lankhmar method, where the city map shows each district (and in this case tiny buildings) and then you don’t get details on anything until you reach the district map. The Tenderloin District for example would have a more zoomed-in map marking building locations and their details. The downside with this is that often the districts are separated by major streets, which means you’re flipping between two districts to describe what’s on the left side vs. right side. You could build your districts so the separation line is some back alley or side street that’s little-traveled and has no keyed buildings along it.

POPULATING THE THEATER
There’s a lot of advice online about populating a hexcrawl. Look at a typical regional map and you’ll find, when comparing the scale, that there’s a LOT of empty space. You want players to find wandering around rewarding enough to do it sometimes, but also you’ll often get them taking a different path on subsequent trips and so they end up seeing different things. Or they can get lost and end up seeing new stuff.

I want to push this off into the next post, though.

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The Chimera Is The Best They Could Do

February 13, 2025

You’ll see an extremely common theme in mythological beasts, the combination of different animals or of animals and humans. I feel it must be the easiest (and thus first and most frequent) approach to describing mythological animals. Wikipedia categorizes this under the “hybrid beasts in folklore” page. There’s an entire separate discussion to be had about human/animal hybrids, especially the ones with a human body and animal head such as were extraordinarily popular in Egyptian art, but were widely popular elsewhere. These mythological creatures could conceivably spring from the practice of wearing animal masks in ritual, which were often worn to portray a spiritual connection to the creature or inhabitation by such a spirit. And so these human-hybrids have another layer of anthropological nuance.

But what if, in a D&D setting embracing the mythological tradition as literally true, these ancient people are trying their best to use the linguistic tools and natural references available, to describe a monster which does not look literally the way they’re describing?

Here’s an antique depiction of the Chimera, the Chimera of Arezzo, c. 400 BC, from Wikipedia.

Here’s a more modern Grenadier miniature of the Chimera, 6004(a), image from the Lost Minis Wiki. Remember the Grenadier miniature is 1/30th the size of the Chimera of Arezzo!

Here’s what the Chimera looks like in the 1e AD&D Monster Manual, and in 5e respectively.

The influence of the Chimera of Arezzo upon the Grenadier miniature is obvious. At some point depictions began to change to show the necks sprouting from the same set of shoulders as in the Monster Manual images.

What I think is clear is that these stories come from an older period. We can portray the originator as either inventing them or seeing something that looked weird and they were verbally describing them. It’s very possible the person didn’t have the artistic capability and materials available to create a high-quality image that looked as close as possible to what they saw or imagined. So the description passed on to other people, perhaps many transfers and much time, and at some point an image was made that became the standard.

Was that original witness / author seeing a creature and trying to describe it as closely as possible using the comparisons available? “A four-legged creature with a body like a lion, and a lion’s head, also a goat’s head, and there was a snake coming off of it too – and wings like those of a bat?” You could draw that a variety of different ways.

And we did. European bestiary-writers would get secondhand descriptions of real animals and draw something fantastical that looked very little like the real thing. Here’s a snail (looks a bit like a pig trapped in a coiled tube) by Jacob van Maerlant, and a beaver (which looks to me like a dog-bodied weasel with a fish tail) from Platearius.

And those aren’t the worst ones; people just combined a lot of creativity with a lot of confidence. This person tried to draw a horse, which they had presumably seen before:

What I find unsatisfying about mythological hybrids is that they tend to look stupid. Just jam a zebra’s head on a hippo’s body and attach a few extra limbs, and you’ve got a good campfire story that becomes heraldry and myth, and then possibly religion. In D&D the jammed-together depiction is taken as true and all kinds of explanations for the poor quality are given like wizardry, genetic experiments, and the meddling of uncreative deities. On the eighth day, He woke, but with a blistering hangover, and really phoned it in for a bit until the coffee and aspirin kicked in.

But what if the creature actually looked like a reasonable and uniform animal, but it was just outside the witness’s experience? “The head of a goat” might mean something completely different that actually looks decent. When describing the body, did the witness say it was like a lion because of its general shape, or because of the way it moved, or its hair, or the catlike leg structure with big haunches in back?

I’m no artist. And I believe we need to pay artists instead of publishing books with AI output. However, I don’t make money on this blog, so commissioning art is out of the question. So I threw a prompt into an AI generator (A chimera made up of a leonine body and a leonine head, plus a goat’s head, and a snake’s head, with a leonine tail. But painted as if it were a holistic and uniform natural creature instead of a combination of jammed-together parts of different animals. It should look like a living creature and not include any undead, skeletal, artificial, or robotic elements.) and it produced the following:

Interestingly, it moved in a direction I thought about earlier, where you combine elements of the different creatures. What if the verbal translation was something like, “It had a head like a lion, like a goat, like a serpent” and the artist interpreted that to mean 3 heads, when it was actually just one head with some of each of those elements?

Of course we have some real jammed-together animals like the platypus, which is just ridiculous.

Video game and movie aliens are often depicted with exactly the same methods. How many slimy, black and purple, tentacled aliens exist in SF? How many are a pulsating biomass that infects and alters human victims like in Dead Space (2008) and System Shock (1994)? Arrival (2016) was a fine movie but its aliens were basically just big squids (see also Cthulhu). The Blob (1958) is an amoeba or slime mold. The aliens in Starship Troopers (1997) are much like a cross between a spider and a mantis. The Thing (1982) et al feature shapeshifting aliens that take on elements of whatever they absorb. And an eyewatering number of “aliens” in SF are just humans with rubber foreheads, even in novels where the effects department budget is not a concern.

Let me give you the description of “Jean Jacket” (?!) the creature from Nope (2022), from Screen Rant [https://screenrant.com/best-sci-fi-movie-aliens/], reproduced here for an academic purpose and commentary:

“Jean Jacket from Nope is a clever reimagining of the classic UFO as an organic extraterrestrial creature that takes on several forms. Jean Jacket most prominently appears as a simple gray flying saucer the size of a medium aircraft with a gaping hole underneath, which it uses to suck in its prey or spill out its liquefied food. Jean Jacket can also unfold onto translucent strands, resembling an angelic floating jellyfish the size of a building. Jean Jacket can also mimic a cloud in the sky to hide from its prey. …”

You can describe an El Camino as a vehicle with the front of a sedan but the rear of an open pickup truck bed, and in reality it does not look like you cut two vehicles in half and welded the car front to the pickup rear. An airplane is a cylinder with a row of windows along both sides, two large wings about at the middle, with the cylinder ending in a sharp point at the rear and a rounded point at the front, and the rear also has a pair of small wings sticking out of the sides and a small wing rising from the end of the tail. I bet you could imagine a weird depiction that an artist could create based on that description if they had never seen an airplane before! Yet when we see a real airplane, it looks like a well-designed object, its parts all well-fitting and coherent.

What would your chimera look like if you drew it with that in mind? What would your centaur be like? Your pegasus?

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The strengths of Strength

October 6, 2024

I can tell you why, from a design standpoint, 1st Edition AD&D STR attack and damage bonuses are lower than other bonuses at a given score value.

(1) You want ability scores to all be about the same usefulness. Yes it’s true that for some characters WIS is not very important, but that’s also true of STR for some characters. The existence of an ability score’s derived modifiers should signal to the DM what to include in the game. If WIS seems like a dump stat because all it gives most people is a save bonus against mind-affecting magic, perhaps the DM should include a little more mind-affecting enemies (note that many mind-affecting spells seem to be save-or-lose such as Hold Person and Charm Person and appear on low-level spell lists, so when you do encounter them a saving throw is highly impactful).

(2) STR does a lot of things. Attack bonus, damage bonus (both in melee with narrow exceptions), carrying capacity, Open Doors, Bend Bars / Lift Gates. Because it does so many important things, if it gave all those things the full bonus (+1 at 15, +2 at 16, etc) it would be a very powerful ability score. Note too that while Monks in 1e PHB don’t benefit from the STR score, that doesn’t mean they use some other stat in exchange.

That 3e stuff doesn’t exist in 1e. There’s no Finesse weapon using DEX so you can follow a DEX-monkey build with 5 dump stats. If you’re physically weak, that makes you suffer in melee combat, as is true in reality.

Some DMs might not recognize that STR does multiple important things, if they improperly de-emphasize encumbrance, Open Doors, and BB/LG. Thief skills are useful largely to overcome specific adventuring challenges (locked doors, traps, elevation change) and establish surprise. Fighter-types, especially those with exceptional STR, are good at overcoming stuck and locked doors and chests. Picking vs. bashing are two valuable approaches to some of the same challenges, with their own benefits and drawbacks. Picking takes longer but is quiet and failure doesn’t alert the enemy on the other side, and can’t be used to lift a portcullis or dislodge a stuck door for example. Bashing is an immediate blow-through that can use multiple people at once, but entering like that uses those people’s actions on that surprise segment so they can’t immediately take advantage of possible enemy surprise – while bashing with just 1 person reduces success chance and a failed bash alerts enemies inside before you can try entry again. The point is, if the DM isn’t making a large minority of dungeon doors “stuck” or including a few bars to bend or portcullises to lift, they’re not including enough of that challenge type and it’s unsurprising that players ignore that column of the STR chart.

Encumbrance is the old bugbear of D&D paperwork, and there are tons of creative ways to make it easier and integrate it better into other gameplay. Note that Gygax’s game design telegraphs to players that treasure was the objective of the game by setting the XP tables to assume the award of 1 XP per GP, and carrying capacity to “how many coins can you carry out”. If the DM ignores encumbrance by handwaving it, or giving everyone Bags of Holding AND ignoring it, it detrimentally impacts so many other aspects of the game that it shifts the entire thing. It’s as impactful as playing Monopoly without money. It’s also common for a DM to short-circuit the encumbrance puzzle by making treasure very light. By design, it’s not until mid-levels (when PCs’ carrying capacities are also higher) when treasure starts showing up that’s very value-dense such as gems, jewelry, and magic items. At low levels it’s piles of gold coins, heavy silver ewers, furs, nonmagical arms and equipment, etc. The DM must also include environmental difficulties that make transporting the heavy loot back to civilization a compelling puzzle, such as vertical climbs, tight squeezes, gaps like pits and crevasses, resetting traps, monster activity, and wilderness treks with terrain and weather – and the possibility of getting lost or unwisely sidetracked at any point. Having great carrying capacity is thus highly valuable to an adventuring party, not only because far more equipment can be brought in per trip, but because far more treasure can be hauled out.

The second, separate issue with rationalizing STR attack and damage bonuses to the same progression as other ability scores, is that an attack bonus increases average damage output. If you have +1 to hit, your average damage during that campaign will be about 5% higher. A Longsword +2 gives average damage 6.5, but with 3e’s 18 STR modifier of +4 to hit and damage from STR that would become 12.6 (+4 for the damage bonus, +20% for the additional hit chance). If we use the 1e STR modifier at 18 of +1 to hit and +2 damage, it’s only 8.925. The average damage bonus gained from an attack bonus applies to all other damage modifiers, too, so inflation in damage is exacerbated by inflation of attack value. The missile attack bonus from DEX is higher than the melee attack bonus from STR, and also doesn’t include a missile damage bonus. This is not an oversight. Note too how DEX in 1e offers multiple extremely valuable benefits, so its bonus progression is slower than INT, WIS, or CON.

As for CHA, DMs should really use the reaction adjustment and loyalty rules, and encourage hireling and henchmen use by portraying them in the campaign and including their costs in the player equipment handout alongside rope and horses. But you’ll notice that when comparing the CHA modifiers to other ability scores’ by converting to d20 odds, the CHA bonuses are very high, with an 18 CHA giving a +8 in 20 to reaction adjustment and +7 in 20 to loyalty base. CHA is an incredibly powerful ability score, if the DM is using the tools laid out for them!

To compare 1e AD&D with Basic’s 1991 Rules Cyclopedia, which uses the 3e-style combined ability score modifiers (albeit with a slightly slower progression to +3 at 18 and a MUCH slower progression thereafter up to +20 at 100 in the Immortals set). Combine that with a slower THAC0 progression, and different rate of attack by Fighter-types. It’s difficult for me since I’m no Basic expert, but it feels like removing EX-STR and nudging everything else regarding melee combat around, was a pretty good design choice.

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