Grenzland no. 6 appeared in my mailbox last week, and now can also be downloaded from archive.org. A harcopy can be purchased for 5 Euros from Wanderer Bill (as long as copies last that is). It features a mix of mostly English and partially German articles concerning OSR topics, including an expanded article on Campaign Events.
Information and Reconaissance in Domain Games by lkh is a meditation on information gathering in domain games, based on the experience in the Grenzland diplomacy game (see below).
Campaign Events by me (kyonshi): a longer article regarding Campaign Events, very much inspired by the tables from Oriental Adventures, but reworked for my own purposes.
Notes on a ShipCrawl Game by RThom: ideas on creating a ship-based campaign.
Bericht über die letzten Ereignisse in und um Akan-Lai by Mellen Darg by kiki: a game report about a more or less regular Worlds Without Number game (article in German)
The Grenzland Diplomacy Game by lkh: the rules and faction sheets for the concluded Grenzland Diplomacy Game (faction sheets are a mix of German and English)
Recently on Discord by cidney: struggling with the machine
Last week I found Wanderer Bill’s Grenzland 5 in my mailbox. Topic “Science Fantasy”. The zine costs 5 Euros for a hardcopy, but can be downloaded for free.
As the topic goes into the realm of science fiction there’s plenty of that in this issue. Most of the articles are in German, some are English though.
In the appropriately titled article “Piu piu!!” Alex Schroeder gives stats and rules for laser weapons in DnD.
In 46.656 Psychedelic Landscapes lkh gives a table for generating appropriately alien landscapes.
The Mini-OSR-Con Manifesto is a manifesto/advice on organising small mini conventions, some of which the authors of the article have tried to stomp out of the ground by themselves lately.
The German-language article Technosaurier talks about science fictionized dinosaurs, Aus dem Steinbru.ch gives three appropriate random tables, and The Droyne and Update Grenzland Kampagne are giving a faction sheet of the Droyne (from Traveller) as presented for the PBM game in lkh’s home campaign setting (in English), and an update and status report on the same campaign.
This is one of those things I did for campaigns before: a small newsletter/zine with infos, hints, and used rules about the campaign. It isn’t strictly necessary, but I always liked the idea to have a physical reminder of the campaigns I ran, even though the campaign itself has a wiki-page on campaignwiki.org.
Despite the font and the title (in antiquated German to boot), the newsletter itself is half-German, half-English, which I found more reasonable as I am not completely set on running only German-language games in this campaign. The crunch part of the newsletter is in English. Which in my opinion makes sense, as the reference rule book we use right now is Labyrinth Lord Revised from 2009, and not the German translation that came out beforehand. The revised version has some errata in there that make more sense. So as we already use the English rules when playing, additional rules and rules clarifications are also written in English.
If you want to do something like this for yourself, here’s a few hints:
don’t do game reports yourself. If you want game reports get the players to write them. Doing them yourself does not give the player perspective that you want (you want to know what they got from the game, not what you remember, of course you know what happened), and it’s way more work than is enjoyable
hardly a hint: you don’t have to redo everything all the time. It’s not a proper publication, it’s a just a campaign update. Just give a few new rumors/hints, update any characters and their levels, maybe remove bigger articles with rules so you don’t have conflicting versions floating about. Less is more.
Get your players involved to write stuff if they want. Let them interact with the zine. You want to advertise for new hirelings? Put an ad in. Maybe the scribe will pay a small amount for new stories and curiosities brought to him. Try to think how the rest of the world will react to what the characters did.
Print it out, staple it together or put them into a binder. Refer to it at the table. These are parts of your campaign material now. Let them become part of your rules.
…of Hessia and Thuringia that is. But that means in living memory the Iron Wall ran merely a few hundred meters away from the location.
And I swear I wanted to go there and make a proper picture but there was simply no time. I managed to play more during the last weekend than I did during some of the last few years.
I saw it happened last year and was miffed I completely missed it until pictures showed up online. So I made sure to plan for it early on this year.
The convention took place in a small manor house in eastern Hessia (Schloss Hohenroda), which makes for really central Germany. It ran from Thursday the 17th to Sunday the 20th.
I managed to get there by Thursday evening, much too late and tired to actually do much but talk a bit with people and watch them play a Braunstein game where I lacked context. This was an issue I will have to deal with next year when the convention is planned even further west: either I get someone else to drive with me, or I have to travel by other means. I am not used to driving this long alone.
The town of Badwall under attack
The next few days were filled with lots of gaming, as games started right after breakfast and were only interrupted by meals (and sometimes ran into the mealtimes as well). It was fun, it was nice having people around that actually were talking the same things I was interested in, and which understood what I was talking about. Even with other RPG conventions that’s not necessarily a given. It was also fun doing some really nice creative gaming that did not involve following some sort of railroad for the sake of it.
On the other hand it also showed the audience of the hobby definitely trending towards the bearded old guy demographic (and considering how early I went to bed I definitely feel like I’m part of it).
Chainmail naval battle
Games I played
2 games in Wanderer Bill‘s Grenzland campaign (ODnD White Box+Chainmail). Different characters though, because the one from the first game was time-locked (and the one I played previously in his campaign safely back home…).
The campaign is running in real time, and when the game moves ahead the characters are out of commission for further games until it catches up. Which meant when we started venturing out in the second adventure the big fight of the first scenario still was in the future.
In the goblin market, miniatures not to scale
Our first adventure we were supposed to explore south of the campaign base Blaufahr to find new people for the depopulated settlement. The last few months in the campaign seem to have been quite rough. So we were given money to find new people and opportunities.
Instead we decided to go to the dungeon to loot. We rescued a few goblins from bandits and tried to establish friendly relations with the goblin king. Unfortunately the goblins at the local goblin settlement were wary of us, and when one of our MUs decided to steal an ancestral artifact the whole situation went sideways. Our fighters heroically managed to behead the goblin king and show off his head to his people. Then they were slaughtered by his enraged citizens.
(There was in fact a chance they’d crown one of them the new king)
We spellcasters instead headed to the exit when it started to go wrong and managed to survive largely unscathed.
The second adventure was a scouting mission northwards, to figure out where a group of orcs that had attacked recently had their settlement. Through some smart play and good die rolls we befriended some scouting elves, hitched a ride on their ship, found the settlement, mowed down a patrol, then took their leader prisoner. All without casualties.
Then a random encounter with cockatrices hit us hard and turned the adventure into fantasy-vietnam, as our decimated party tried to hurry through unknown territory, getting the prisoner back to Blaufahr.
The four petrified elvish men-at-arms we left behind are now a permanent fixture in the ongoing campaign, at least until someone with a stone-to-flesh scroll comes by…
And that’s all exactly the weird off the wall gaming experience I love when playing ODnD.
baexta had a session of Albie Fiore’s The Lichway (from White Dwarf #9) on offer, run in ADnD/OSRIC, and I decided to take part. Especially as I realized I had forgotten everything about the scenario from running it… 12 years ago? Well, not everything. I remembered the central conceit. But the GM telegraphed that early on and the others figured it out and I didn’t have to feel bad about it. He also offered The Halls of Tizun Thane, and while I would have loved that one as well I just prepped that recently.
This was also the first time I actually properly played ADnD 1st ed. by the book, and I realized my view of it was correct: it’s a good resource to take parts from, but I do not care about the complexity itself. And ADnD is not actually all that complex, just more so than I like for this kind of game. I think there’s other games that do the complexity better.
It also was the first time I played Old School Essentials proper, as in another game we went down to The Jeweler’s Sanctum from the OSE Adventure Anthology I. Despite OSE being basically just a restatement of B/X with clearer design it also oozes some dark fairy tale vibe that seems quite different from standard B/X DnD. The game bore that out, even though it was quite the standard dungeon crawl: we were to explore an improbably large dungeon under a jeweler’s workshop. The scenario whittled away our resources with smaller encounters (giant centipedes and rats) before hitting us with a near TPK in the form of grey oozes. Our GM daeman managed to present this all quite well (he has a knack for using minis and terrain… and printing them out), but I can’t help but think that the scenario itself has issues. On the other hand we clearly didn’t figure out some of the stuff in the dungeon, so I might just be missing the point.
The last one I took part in was The Veiled Vaults of the Onyx Queen, a DCC funnel presented by le moule intello as a basic DnD scenario. It seems he wanted to run it as a DCC scenario as well but received some negative feedback about that before, so decided to switch it to DnD on the fly. Which… I don’t know. I signed up for the game when it was advertised as a DCC game, and so did daeman (see above), and I think we both wouldn’t have minded to play DCC instead. And I think it would have worked oh so slightly better because the magic system of DCC seems more geared towards this. That said, it still worked the way he ran it.
A funnel is a scenario concept where you start with multiple 0-level characters and develop them during the game for use in a later campaign, or you lose and replace them. Your characters might come out with some useful skills or magic items, and a proper backstory.
That said this scenario was more linear and basic than I might have liked, and seemed very specifically intended to introduce people to the hobby. And for that it might be very useful. It just also drops the players into a very specific Heavy Metal-style setting where nobody questions a queen living for 300 years and regularly sacrificing her least liked subjects to some eldritch being from beyond.
Other things…
Blackrazor wrote a tournament module for the convention (“Children of the Sea”), and I originally wanted to GM it, but didn’t find the time to look into it before. And when I signed up for it I either mistook the time slot or the game disappeared, so in the end I didn’t even play in it. It seems to have been quite fun though.
There was unlimited coffee. Unlimited coffee!
Also a free candy bar for brain food.
I received a Nibelung Saga game and the new issue of Grenzland on the Convention, but I will have a look at those in separate posts
I wonder if I really need to do a session report all the time. Maybe I am going to make this a short regular thing where I am going to go through all the sessions each month and just briefly run down who played, what happened, who died, and what notable things they got.
Session 2 had them delve into Castle Dyson again, at first somewhat hindered by a pack of wild dogs that decided to make a feast out of the goblins they left lying around the week before…
(ohhh, I need to define them better, I see it now, it’s a special breed of dogs that came after most humans left the area after the fall of the Empire… They are called Glimmerdogs, and clearly they are hardy enough to survive in the horrendous wilderness of the Glimmermark)
… but they were quickly shooed away, and made no problems, full of goblin meat as they were.
Below they started to investigate the other direction than last time when they killed the local goblins, managed to hide away when some more goblins came by, despoiled a gravesite, and fought a group of half-formed skeletons.
In the end they came away with quite a lot of treasure.
Session 3 started similar, only they noticed someone had at least moved the goblin bodies to the side. They delved a bit further into the first level, despoiled some more graves, tried to find some treasure, fough a rather hardy zombie/mummy hidden in a sarcophagus, and then decided to explore deeper into an opening of a cave system where they found another exit, and a group of easily killed giant rats. There also was a some hissing sound when they tried to go a different direction, but that they left alone for now. They left through the lower exit, with rather less spoils altogether (mostly a bunch of copper and silver coins), although they gained their first magic weapon from the one undead they fought.
We were using mipui for mapping, which was fine, even though it was a bit fiddly. Dyson’s maps are a bit difficult to map at the best of times, and this one had a natural cave system with dimensions that were simply not easy to describe and/or depict in mipui. In the end it worked, but it took somewhat longer than it could have.
One of the things I find nice about the games on the Grenzland server is that they are generally time-limited to just two hours, which fits much better with an adult’s life than a lot of games that go longer, but just need more time commitment. In comparison to the standard 3-4 hours of my Shadowrun game these games are much less draining for me. Now don’t get me wrong, I love roleplaying, and I like DMing, but a normal roleplaying session is emotionally exhausting for me. This particular style of gaming is much less so.
Open Table: If you are interested in a very basic OSR-game, this game is intended as an open table, and iI try to have one session each week on Tuesday (sometimes Wednesday), so maybe sign up for it on the Grenzland Discord server or our IRC network.Games are German or English, 120minuts, and take place at 8.15pm
I have mentioned it in my previous article, Dungeon and Dragons did not manage to make a proper impression in the German roleplaying scene in when it finally was translated.
Now, that’s not to say there were no fans. People had been bringing over the game since the 70s, I have written about one game which might have been the earliest RPG played in Germany from around 1976 before, and there seem to have been games run by a few people all over (Western) Germany, or at least in the big cities, but there was no translation until 1984, about the same time that Das Schwarze Auge appeared and “blew DnD from the market”. I have recently come across an interesting thread on the Acaeum, a website mostly interested in DnD collecting, that had some interesting insights into the history of the German DnD publications from the 80s. (a few parts are synthesized from other sources)
now, the beginning is of course this: in the early 80s Werner Fuchs and his brother-in-law Ulrich Kiesow spent a rainy holiday in Denmark playing Dungeons and Dragons. They already were busy in the scene, but they decided that they could translate the game into German and bring it to the German-language market.
There was mention of a previous attempt to translate the game made by Gygax in an interview beforehand. This failed because his friend in Switzerland who was supposed to translate it didn’t have time.
Fuchs and Kiesow talked to TSR on the Nuremberg game fair, with the strong argument that they were fans AND spoke fluent English. Fuchs also was an editor for Droemer Knaur and brought them in. Droemer Knaur brought in Schmidt Spiele. For a while they were working and translating rules and modules for TSR.
At one point around the Nuremberg games fair in 1983 the whole business fell apart: TSR demanded royalties of 24%, which had Schmidt Spiele balk. According to Fuchs 24% was basically what Stephen King could demand, considering the additional translation work Schmidt Spiele wasn’t willing to go over 12%. Keep that in mind, it comes back later.
The TSR representative was later sued by TSR for embezzling money. It seems he sold the rights to the Japanese publisher with a clause that entitled him personally to a cut of the proceeds.
Schmidt Spiele decided to pay Kiesow and Fuchs to come up with a game system of their own. This of course soured their relationship with TSR. TSR instead went with ASS Altenburger Spielkarten, a traditional publisher for playing cards. I guess this also explains some of what happened later.
Get your mind out of the gutter, Ass in German simply means Ace.
ASS created the subsidiary FSV, the Fantasy Spiele Verlag GmbH, specifically to publish Dungeons and Dragons. They would initially use the already existing translations and later translate more.
FSV never reached the market penetration that Schmidt Spiele was able to achieve. They just did not have the standing in the market, and their products were more expensive. They did try though, publishing quite a lot of rules and adventures for the short time they were active, and also tried to build a community with a first small convention (marred by promises that Gary Gygax would make an appearance, which did not happen), and by publishing Drachen magazine, a German version of Dragon.
It seems one of the main issues with further products was the cost of translation. From the memories of one poster FSV did not figure the cost of translations into their initial cost calculations , which lead them to basically take on everyone they could as a translator. This included the poster, who was a 15 year old student (and who they tried to scam out of his pay) and famously in one case just someone who translated the equipment list by doing word for word substitutions via dictionary. (Torch translated as Taschenlampe/electric torch)
In the background the person who snatched DnD for ASS also was embezzling money from ASS and slowly hollowing out that company. ASS went bankrupt, and after a few years in limbo was sold to Schmidt Spiele, just before they went bankrupt.
The guy who seems to have been responsible for the demise of ASS also bears a bit of mention. It seems he was a German who studied in the USA, came back to Germany but kept wearing cowboy boots and hat, then later moved back to America, got himself adopted by the last scion of an extinct German noble house, and now is making money by doing commencement speeches as a German prince. I mean. Wow.
Hans Joachim Alpers sucked as a scenario author, and the reason I say this at the very beginning is because level 1 room 1 of the adventure has the following riddle:
Q: what do Robert Zimmermann’s nineteenth nervous breakdown and an avalanche have in common?
A: the Rolling Stones.
No. Seriously. That’s in there. A riddle that not only uses obscure real world pop culture references, but in the German text also only works if you translate between German and English in multiple places.
This is grade A condescending bullshit. This doesn’t belong in a roleplaying scenario. I bet he read that somewhere in English and decided to directly put that into his module because he’s oh so smart. It doesn’t even make sense as written.
Ok. So this was the first room.
Ok, deep breaths.
The scenario continues on from the last one. In fact, instead of writing a new intro we get most of the one from the previous scenario, then a short reference to what happened in there.
It turns out 6 of the magic goblets made from the legendary sword Siebenstreich (Sevenstroke?) are hidden in various places in H’Rabaal. 3 of them are beneficial when someone drinks from them, 3 are harmful. The bad guys want to reforge the sword Siebenstreich from them, but luckily they’d need a seventh goblet.
Which we just brought.
Why did we do that?
But we have to find them, and they are each hidden in a room in that temple complex.
And how do we know that? Wasn’t it the bad guys who stole them and brought them here? How do we have that much intel about their operation?
Beats me. But the intro says its like that.
Later on we get more information about that benefit/harm property they have, and it’s… stupid. It is is completely random which goblet does what, and once you drink from it it loses that property for the rest of the adventure. Which leads to a probability game that’s really an exercise in practical stochastics.
I like the setting of the lizardman temple in the jungle. I like the whole idea of the seven goblets who are actually a magic sword. I even like the basic ideas of a lot of the encounters. There’s a really old school feeling one where the characters have to get a goblet from a pedestal, but every step up shrinks them by half, until they come into conflict with the otherwise harmless ants crawling around here.
There is an encounter with a giant ape that with some good roleplay can be brought to the characters’ side and literally move obstacles out of the way later.
In another bit of condescending real world bullshit intruding into this fantasy world the ape also has a job offer from Dino de Laurentiis to play King Kong as long as he brings one of the goblets to supplement production costs.
So, pro: a giant ape who actually is a fleshed out NPC with his own motivations. Negative: it’s a stupid motivation.
Like the stupid riddle from the first room this both was excised from the second edition the same year, but the fact it was in there at all speaks for a disdain the author had for his audience.
In the end we have gathered all the goblets and we put them into the purple magic flame in the last room and they are all magically transported back to where they belong.
What sort of resolution is that supposed to be?
I have the suspicion that he really took too much inspiration from DnD’s tournament modules. This reeks of it. It’s such a gamey situation where you know all the stakes and goals, and you have to deal with a bunch of different puzzle rooms that all seem rather dangerous. RPG tournaments never really took off in Germany, and were a bemusing oddity about the American scene whenever they were brought up in the 90s. But of course some of the tournament scenarios made it over. This does have a certain thematic closeness to The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, so maybe that was what Alpers was working from.
TLDR: I do not like this scenario. There are a few good ideas in here, but making them work would mean scrapping a large part of the scenario and replacing them with my own. Which is a pity, because in later years some ideas that were introduced in here were made central parts of the metaplot. It would be nice to introduce them like this. I just really don’t know if I ever would want to play this.
Luckily this was Alpers’ second to last adventure scenario, and the last one is a solo, which uses different writing skills.
*Imagine dramatic cue here*
Notes:
This scenario was published in French, Italian, and Dutch as well.
The DSA Wiki points out that nearly all illustrations in the scenario are either wrong, or depict things that do not happen in the scenario.
Spent literally hours trying to debug a #network issue in my home network and did just not manage to get it working.Websites wouldn't work, unless they already were in the cache of the pihole.Network was there, but dns resolution was timing out all the time. Restarting of the machines did not do anything, but I could access the machines remotely.The culprit turned out to be (of course) the one unmanaged switch in the setup. One restart of that later and the network was working as it should.
sigh.*reads job ad again*"Your responsibilities:"..."Collaborate across Private Compute teams to align on dependencies and co-ordinate execution plans, identifying and implementing opportunities for automation, velocity, and simplification."sigh.I feel like I need to start drinking again.
by the way, my Erasmus love story isn't even unique in the slightest (except for me of course). I noticed that whenever I meet a German guy here there's a 90% chance they moved here for a girl.The other 10% are creepy.
this is very convenient for whatever right-wing nutso is in power, because Germany as a state does not give a rat's ass about some Polish citizens in Poland, and largely isn't even aware they exist. So they can get some points with their nationalist voters for showing their strength to those evil Germans, while Germany at large doesn't even notice.
just a thing I was just thinking about: do you know there is a German minority in Poland?I mean, besides people like me who moved here for their Erasmus love.There still is a minority of Polish citizens with German heritage and language, which have been here for hundreds of years, largely in Silesia.They are a favorite punching bag for right-wing governments who always make their life harder when they are unhappy with Germany.#poland #germany #german https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_minority_in_Poland
Had to block an asshole. I don't do that all that much but he was just too much of a turd.Turns out he's the mod of his instance. What do you think? Check the instance if they're rotten or just block all of them?#fediverse
honestly, aren't reboots going a bit too far by now?#movieshttps://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/paddington-4-escape-from-new-york-reboot-studiocanal-1236562975/
having a single Kanye West concert in Poland, in walking distance (more or less) from Auschwitz is... certainly a choice.#music #rap #nazihttps://glamrap.pl/kanye-west-oficjalnie-w-polsce-jedyny-koncert-w-chorzowie/
So I'm in a beastly mood today and while talking about the most stupid decisions ever my mind wandered to Brexit. Not even Brexit itself, but does anyone else remember when during the Brexit negotiations the British side was found completely unprepared and openly discussing their goals with the British press, only to be surprised the EU side was able to read English newspapers?What the hell was that about? Grandstanding? A humiliation fetish? What?!#brexit
As an additional bonus they got fedexed a handwritten (!) "Change account details" form from India, and got told they cannot be paid until this was sent back, despiteA) having the same account for over a decadeB) the account being on their invoiceandC) it not being skin of their nose if someone else's production line stands still
My wife just told me one of their local customers outsourced their whole accounts payable department to India, without ever training the people there in the details of Polish accounting.They now are in dire need of the product her company sells (as in: they cannot produce anything without it), but can't get it because for the last six months they couldn't figure out how to pay for the previous shipment.(Mind you: this concerns a Polish company paying another Polish company)#business
At one point someone's gonna write a book about JD Vance and call it "The Grim Reaper" and it's gonna be the most hardcore thing anyone ever said about him
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3 responses to “[The Dark Eye] Retrospective B4 Die Sieben Magischen Kelche (The Seven Magic Goblets, 1984)”
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3 responses to “[The Dark Eye] Retrospective B4 Die Sieben Magischen Kelche (The Seven Magic Goblets, 1984)”
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