A World-Building Experiment: Heroes & Homelands (pt. 1)

 

So I am starting a new campaign this weekend, and I have an idea for the world that I want to develop.

I've decided that, in order to get me producing more content for this blog I am going to do my campaign planning here on the blog.using tools I have presented in a number of my game hacking and experience design articles. I am going to discuss my world ideas first, then consider how they are going to be reflected in the game, and in the end, I will have what should amount to a pretty solid custom TTRPG.

But to do that I needed a starting place.

Tailoring a Campaign: My Player Resource for Running Hot Springs Island

I am in the process of setting up for my Summer game of Hot Springs Island. One of the first things I wanted to do aside from sending out the pitch document that I shared with you last week, was to write a guide for the players. This guide had to tackle some basic tasks:

1. Cover how to make a character
2. Reiterate at least some of the house rules in the pitch document.
3. Expand on the information in the pitch for players who have bought in.
4. Add in any new content relevant to the players.

So I started by reiterating my character generation process. I added in firearm rules cribbed from Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and a gear list that brings the characters into the 17th century, including some era-appropriate armour and equipment.

Open Culture OSR-ish Games

 I am not going to make too much comment on the folderol over OGL 1.1. I would rather develop a "wait and see"  approach. I've signed Grim Jim's petition on change.org, and opined a bit on Twitter.

Going forward, if OGL 1.1 is released, and looks like the io9 leaked document, I expect that some beloved OSR projects are simply going to be left as is, and no one will make further compatible material under their license, because their license requires inclusion of OGL 1.0a. Others will do a re-write to distance themselves a bit more from old D&D and put forward a new edition that is not under any version of the OGL, is released as a Creative Commons project, or with their own open license. After all, the OGL was always a voluntary inclusion.

Feycatchers BFRPG Setting (WIP)

Koffing & Weezing from Pokémon 
©️1997 Nintendo Entertainment 

 So, my oldest son caught a bad case of Pokémania this year. Pokémon cards, cartoons, dolls, and more are running rampant through my house and infecting his imagination.  I have been trying to dodge this phenomenon since he turned four. To no avail. It has been so intense that I am to the point where I have decided "If I can't beat 'em, I might as well join 'em."

But on my terms.

For Christmas,  among the Pokémon cards and Pikachu dolls, was a copy of Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game, and a set of dice from me.

I decided to make this gift a little more attractive, by tying it in to his new obsession. I decided to build a campaign world that mixed Pokémon, Fantasy Role-Playing, and a bit of Celtic Mythology. Into a new campaign setting. 

My Mystara Campaign that Never Was

Cover for GAZ-1 Gazetteer of the Known
World: The Grand Duchy of Karameikos

 I have run quite a few games set in the Mystara campaign setting in multiple editions of Dungeons & Dragons. As a kid I ran a few short campaigns in The Grand Duchy of Karameikos using BECMI. In Junior High I ran an AD&D2e mini campaign set on a few islands between Karamaikos and The Minrothad Guilds.  And I also ran a campaign that transitioned from BECMI to AD&D2e that was set ostensibly in Karameikos, the Broken Lands, and later The Isle of Dawn.

In 2005, I got nostalgic for Mystara and spent several days creating my own massive 3e conversion for it... and then disscovered the brnd new Vaults of Pandius had done a better job. Using a mix of my own conversion and theirs I ran a campaign I called "Mystara A-go-go" which involved the PCs freely travelling Mystara following clues of a dead treasure hunter from Karameikos to Minrothad to Irendi to the Five Shires, Darokin, Glantri, Norwold, and into the Thyatian Empire. (with stops in Pandius and Patera)

In 2007 I followed that one up with another campaign that strung Wrath of the Immortals, Adventures in Blackmoor, and Temple of the Frog into a single time-spanning adventure that covered  the entire secret history of Mystara from Blackmoor to the Cataclysm, to the creation of the Hollow World, to the Day of Wrath.

Recently, I've been getting the Mystara bug again, but I have decided to let it be. I have two campaigns right now that are taking up enough attention. But to scratch the itch at least a little, I wanted to share a campaign idea I was working on in 2005 that I never used. Maybe someone else will have use of it.

Chainmail Played Theatre of the Mind

 This past Monday I put my Hellions of Xen campaign group in the capable hands of Stephen Smith for a fascinating experiment:

Could we play Chainmail with Theatre of the Mind?

My Monster Book Dilemma

Of Xorn and Gorgons...

I have a monster problem. Namely, I really love monsters. It is a weakness of mine for role-playing games. I know I can make my own in a pinch, but sometimes the flavor text or concept of a monster gives me something cool to work with.

I will ignore almost any other source book of role-playing game puts out, but I simply cannot resist a good selection of monsters. Even when I gave way most of my D&D 3E and Pathfinder 1e material, I held on to the bestiaries.

Unfortunately, Pathfinder bestiaries and the 5th edition Monster Manual and Volo's Guide to Monsters don't help me much now that I've moved back to OSR games, I don't really have a good monster book in hardcopy.

Basic Fantasy RPG has a great monster selection. So does Swords & Wizardry. And Low-Fantasy Gaming, with a little conversion. But they are all sections of a larger book. And sometimes flipping through to find what I'm looking for can be a little time consuming. They also both have some issues. Swords & Wizardry does not present a morale rating for monsters, for example. Basic Fantasy RPG has almost (but not quite-, nor consistently+) doubled the XP value of the monsters that are in the book, as Basic Fantasy relies more on combat and less on treasure.

And while I hate to say it, well the rules cyclopedia is the most comprehensive versions of Dungeons & Dragons around, it's selection of monsters is lackluster.. I have always felt that that was one of the greatest weaknesses of the Cyclopedia.

But, I do need something. I keep planning for monsters that I don't have the books for. Last night I planned encounters with Gorgons and Xorn, and discovered to my dismay I had statistics for neither in a format compatible with the game I was playing. I covered by opening up a website where I knew someone had copied the entire AD&D2e Monster Compendium, and thankfully my players didn't wander off that way anyway.

Update to Temple of Elemental Evil

Recent changes to Google's security protocols have forced me to change the link to my Temple of Elemental Evil 5e conversion. The file is now available here.

New School Adventures, Old School Game

Coming to you from the glamorous 
Mother-in-Law's Basement Studio
(Vacation gaming is awesome!) 

Tuesday night was my first full-length session playing a Candlekeep Mysteries adventure using Lamentations of The Flame Princess for my podcast. I found it quite revealing about the assumptions made between different editions of D&D 

(Spoilers ahead for "The Joy of Extradimensional Spaces" ) 

Now, keep in mind Lamentations of The Flame Princess is not a perfect analog to Basic and Expert Dungeons & Dragons. The classes have been tweaked somewhat. Elves cannot see in the dark, for example. And only fighters get better at hitting things.

At its core, however, it is still B/X with a Cannibal Corpse album sleeve painted on the cover. I feel safe in stating that playing it is close enough to B /X D&D to count for the purposes of this discussion.

One of the first things you know is that combat is assumed to be way more often in Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition . Rather than relying on things like reaction rolls, most monsters in the adventure entitled "The Joy of Extradimensional Spaces" attack automatically. Some to defend their owners property, some as a prank (nonsensically), some out of hunger. Even creatures with no reason to hang around and murder player characters attempt to do so.

And there are a lot of monsters. For a first level dungeon, this adventure included an imp, a quasif, two flying swords, one mimic, two fairy dragons, four crawling hands, one powerful animated library, and one swarm of animated books. I was rightly concerned that this could lead to a TPK with the average soft first level BD&D characters.

Candlekeep Mysteries cover Art
By Clint Cearly;
©2021 Wizards of the Coast

This adventure includes monsters that can only be hurt by magic, and assumes 1st level PCs have access to an infinite supply of attack Cantrips. It is assumes that there's going to be some healing available for the player characters. Neither are guarantees in older editions of D&D. My party had no healing available. While my players were lucky and rolled relatively tough characters that was no guarantee either. D&D5e is in essence a game that allows for players to charge in and overcome fairly tough foes without too much difficulty.

This is also reflected in the way the adventure rewards the PCs. If PCs are awarded experience for killing monsters primarily and level 1 requires only 300xp, then this monster a-go-go dungeon will have you half-way to level 3. On the other hand, if you are being rewarded for finding treasure, and fighting monsters is designed to have a low reward:risk ratio, and level 1 is meant to be a challenge, not a formality, this dungeon offers a pittance that doesn't even take a Thief close to the 1,700 they need for level 2.

This is well discussed osr OSR and not really news. But there is a flipside to this I had to see played out to understand.

Modules written for modern Dungeons & Dragons don't assume cautious, strategic play at all.

Alternate Magic Systems

Image by Kentos78 from Pixabay

In my campaigns, Magic is usually pretty rare; while I like running the odd high magic setting, I generally default to one where magicians are either initiated members of secret societies of wealthy elites or they are isolated mystics that hand their secrets from Master to Apprentice or in small cults. They may be familiar with one another, but usually only by reputation or correspondence.

In such campaigns, spell craft is an exceptional talent. Magicians make up less than 1% of the population, and 70% of those are hedge magicians, alchemists, and cultists who might only cause magical effects through the creation of objects, brewing of potions, or lengthy rituals. Only a gifted few can cast spells, and they are unique and strange. 

To keep magic feeling magical, I like having a few alternative systems on hand to allow a PC or important NPC to have strange surprises. In a world where no two Magic-Users are guaranteed to use the same list of spells - or even spells at all, no one really knows what to expect from a magician.

Right now, I keep a few options to use with my fantasy games. 

The first is the Pact Magic system that I lifted from Pacts & Blades and twisted to be a little more compatible with vanilla B/X-based systems.

I also have jacked an Alchemy system from Pathfinder 1e and toned it way down for B/X-derived systems to serve as an alternative healer to the Cleric. 

More recently I have borrowed an ultra-free-form Sorcery system from The Dozen Dooms and adapted it for Low Fantasy Gaming. 

(You can see that in PDF here.) 

Yesterday, I read a fantastic article from Ian Slater at Dweller of the Forbidden City on a specialized class he designed called the Gyre. Like both the Pact Magic system above and the Sorcery system it does not use spells, and is fairly free-form, but each Gyre is bound to one conceptual magical focus. Read it Here. 

This last one is perfect for creating a broad range of hedge-magicians, sorcerous priests, and psychics, each unpredictable and different. And none of them are bound by the typical Vancian structure. 

Book Review: The Dozen Dooms

The Dozen Dooms cover: "Swamp
Dragon"by Bob Greyvenstein. C 2020
Bob Greyvenstein, Grim Publishing

Book Review: The Dozen Dooms 

Author: Baldrage 
Publisher: self-published
Marketplace: DrivethruRPG
Engine: OSR Compatible (B/X) 

First off, I want to say two things: Curse you, Baldradge, for beating me to such an awesome book idea! And curse you, Professor Dungeon Master, for being so damn good! 

The Dozens Dooms is a book rule hacks and modifications to apply to B/X Dungeons & Dragons or its clones to create a faster, more flexible, and in some cases, more granular TTRPG experience.

While it is not a retroclone unto itself, it is designed so that if you applied all of the rules in The Dozen Dooms at once to something like OSE or Labyrinth Lord, you'd have a unique and cohesive play experience that would definitely it's own role playing game. 

However, all but one section of The Dozen Dooms is presented modularly and always in such a way that it can be applied to an OSR game without relying on any of the other rules in the book. Where he rules do work well together, The Dozen Dooms has notes on how to use them in tandem.

The Dozen Dooms as a set of rules most of their inspiration from Dan "Professor Dungeon Master" DeFazio and his channel Dungeoncraft, which is one of my favourite YouTube channels. Is dedicated to a mix of designing minis and terrain, and modifying Dungeons & Dragons, both 5th edition and earlier editions to play much more smoothly, and have a more gothic, grimdark feel.

I will not be able to go into every alternate rule or hack here. there's simply too much in this book to give that specific a review. Instead, I will pick out the standouts, and make some honourable mentions aside.

TTRPG Rules Hacking in Action

Image by PIR04D from Pixabay 

I thought it might be helpful to give an example of a rules hack I did last year that I was particularly proud of as a follow up to my four posts on rules hacking and customization. The previous ones are:

• What Are You Looking For?
• ... And What to Do When You've Found It.
• Game System Hacking 101 (pt. 1)
• Game System Hacking 101 (pt. 2)

And I wrote my recent review of Blades in the Dark as a lead-in. 

Picture This... 

This is from an ICRPG Core 2e fantasy campaign I ran in 2020. It was, by this time approaching 140+ hours and 34 sessions into the game. 

The PCs are mercenaries hired by a merchant-prince to equip and train bronze-age shepherds with 14th century weapons and Armour so that they can defend themselves from an invading tribe of cannibalistic Demon worshippers who've built hidden war camps in the unsettled bush around the shepherds' lands. 

The PCs are leading a green militia on their first foray against one of the invaders' war camps. Just as they are an hour out from striking distance, their advance scouts learn that the encemped war-band is striking out towards a village about five hour's wak away., leaving only enough guards to keep the invaders' captives in line and prepare for the return. 

The PCs wait two hours then strike, letting a few escapees to alert the main enemy force of the attack. This gave the PCs several hours to prepare an ambush for the returning invaders. 

The PCs have significantly smaller numbers and mostly green recruits, but better technology and time to prepare. Not to mention tactical acumen & exotic magics. 

You Can't Play PARANOIA with Cypher System: Why Mechanics Matter

Cover: "Expanded Psionics Handbook"
(C) 2004 Wizards of the Coast

In 2015, a few days before my oldest son was born I decided that I wanted to grab something to read in the hospital to help distract me from the constant swirl of worries going on in my head. And to help me pass what I knew were going to be sleepless nights. I find game rules and really take up a lot of cognitive load when you are learning them, so I scanned Humble Bundle and saw the name of Bruce Cordell attached to a role playing game entitled The Strange.

I knew Cordell's name from one of my favourite books for Dungeons & Dragons 3.5, the Expanded Psionics Handbook. The bundle had a half-dozen books in it, and, while the website was absolutely useless, the art for The Strange looked fantastic. I grabbed the bundle, and started skimming the introductory text as my wife and I played the waiting game for her to go to into labour

As you can imagine, I got very little actual reading done. At least, not until my son was almost ready to come home from the hospital.

I fell in love instantly with The Cypher System that served as the backbone for The Strange. It was smart, light, and easy to run. It focussed a great deal on DM Fiat and building trust between players and Dungeon Master. It also included a few of the story game innovations that I actually like, like on-the-fly character building. 

"The City of Juvanom,"  
TM and © 2019 Monte Cook Games, LLC.

I actually found The Strange was, in practice, hard to run. Its so broad in scope and it can be hard to figure out how you are going to have your Estate agents get into the trouble that will take you to the reality of your choice. When the generic Cypher System Role-Playing Game came out a few months later, I bought it within an hour of it going live on DrivethruRPG.

(I have also since become addicted to setting books for Numénera.) 

Cypher System is by far one of the cooler role-playing games I have looked at in the last few years. Very early on, I did a number of game adaptations  using the Cypher System. For example, I had players who had never played the original Fallout game, so I played it as a Cypher System scenario for them. I also created a "Cypherrun" document that adapts Shadowrun for play in Cypher system because I love the 6th World, but hate the game engine it runs on. I have also done janky adaptations of Deadlands, the video game Bastion, and Rifts using the Cypher System. I'm put a lot of effort into trying to adapt classic role-playing games to it over the last few years.

Around the same time that the setting-neutral Cypher System came out, Humble Bundle did a PARANOIA bundle that included most of the manuals from 1st and 2nd edition versions of PARANOIA. Paranoia was a game I had heard about frequently, and have wanted to try for years. Now that I had acopy, I was disappointed by the clunky confusing mechanics, even as I absolutely adored the setting and the tone.

Naturally, I tried using my go-to engine to build a better PARANOIA: I started tinkering with building a Cypher System adaptation. And I failed miserably.

Here's the thing: PARANOIA is a game about being completely out of your depth. You are incompetent, under-equipped, uninformed, surrounded by back-biters, and answerable to a deranged computer that will kill you for incompetence, excessive competence, grievous stupidity, or being too clever. Much of the fun of the game is that PCs are reduced to smouldering ash with insane regularity, only to be replaced by a near-perfect clone. Racing to see who can get whom disintegrated by passing blame is a core part of PARANOIA's entertainment value.

As absurdly designed as PARANOIA's game engine is, it does what it does very well. Shootouts are wacky and incredibly lethal, PCs are bungling, the violence rapidly becomes cartoonish, fumbles are frequent and funny, characters fail forward, and death is a good mix of silly fun and a deterrent from being a total fool.

Cypher System cannot readily replicate that. Characters in Cypher System are assumed - and structured - to be confident. Players are in control of the narrative through XP expenditure. The XP-sharing system takes away the incentives for treachery. Moreover, the way damage is handled makes disintegrating a Cypher System character in stray laser fire pretty difficult. By the time you separate the resource pools from damage, strip out the Intrusion system, write a collection of character descriptors that allow for bungling, add in a fumble mechanic, and change the way weapons work, you don't have much of Cypher System left. You are better off just using PARANOIA.

My playtests of "Cypher-noia" tended to turn into gruelling PvP death matches that dragged on too long. And you found yourself asking why you didn't just gun down your superior officers. The lies and deceit practiced at a PARANOIA table became resource bidding wars about who was willing to spend the most Intellect points to be believed.

This was a revelation for me at the time. The engine of the game wasn't just a tool for resolving uncertain outcomes to the game: it subtly sets the tone of the game. It facilitates the style of play.  The wrong combination of engine and setting strips the fun and functionality out of the game.

As I have moved into OSR gaming and began looking for ways to balance gaming and the demands of parenting, I have also noticed that the right mechanics vastly improves play. The newer 2017 edition of PARANOIA, for example, uses bluffing card games, character generation that is designed to encourage a mildly adversarial climate, and a character advancement system that rewards conniving. The mechanics complement the game play, and make the game play experience more immersive.

This might be the next imperative in RPG development: focusing not just on which engine or rules we want to use, but which mechanics best create the game play and experience that we want to offer our players.

I think that is some of the genius of both the OSR and PbtA (and, for that matter, Tunnel Goons) developer crowds: they are taking familiar games and figuring out which rules and hacks help them create a streamlined experience appropriate to the genre and experience they are aiming for.

So the big question worth exploring becomes: How do we know which rules promote our ideal game experience?

Solo Game Journal: Pacts & Blades

The Vaults of Gloomy Chaos

This is a journal of my second solo game using Pacts & Blades: Moorcockian Fantasy (see my review here). I wanted to showcase it as a  way to discuss some of the cognitive processes that occur as you are engaging with TTRPG material.

For managing movement and initiative, I will be using OSRIC as supplemental rules.

First, the characters. I am running the game with just two characters,  because I want to focus on the two things Pacts & Blades does best: combat and magic. I built them (if they can be said to be built,) to each specialize in one or the other. They are named after characters from the Dungeons and Dragons-themed indie cartoon "Doraleous and Associates."

The Module Writing Grind

"Self Organization" Sculpture by Courteny Brown (C) 2020.
Currently on display at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art. 

Right now I am putting together my first module for publication. I am using a dungeon that I built both to coach players in OSR thinking and put ICRPG Core 2e through its paces. 

I have another one coming fast on its heels, and, while the articles need editing, The House of Amber Lanterns is also in process of being put into module format. A fourth DCC RPG module needs one more playtest and some art.

Up until now, I have had  the luxury of just using scribbled bullet form notes and mind maps when playing D&D. My Temple of Elemental Evil conversion is the closest I have ever come to writing a module. 

My 5e Temple of Elemental Evil Adaptation

Six years ago, when Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition was new and fresh, and I still had time on my hands, I decided to put my gaming group of the time through the entire Temple of Elemental Evil experience. I was also, at the time, a regular at several mainstream D&D fora as Goon-for-Hire, and had a reputation for coming up with creative ways of resolving problems that other DMs were having. I wanted to share insights on the conversion of older D&D material to modern D&D.

I took a few weeks and carefully went through the module room by room, looking at each encounter, and painstakingly rebalancing them to use the modern CR system. I believed at the time that just using the module as is would never work given the significantly different hit point and action economies of D&D 5e.

Moreover, I made detailed notes about the hows and whys of the conversion choices that I made. This conversion was made as a road map for the conversion of AD&D / OD&D material to D&D 5e. It certainly has been popular, with on average over one thousand file accesses per month last year and several translations to other languages.

You can download it here.

(File location updated Sep. 25, 2021)