Megadungeon to rule them all

I don't think that I really like megadungeons. Not as written, that is. I think most are designed too cleanly, in one way or another, and a megadungeon should be messy and wild.

Stonehell is a wonderful concept, but many of the areas feel too lived in for what is supposed to be living in its halls. Plus each map is too uniformly square, which doesn't really make sense with the history the place has.

The Ruins of Greyhawk are just, well, dumb. Too many things that are designed to hobble a specific playing style, and too many areas that seem disconnected from one another.

I'm GMing Dwimmermmount again, and I have found that the limitation of this dungeon is in thinking of it as a center of civilization. There are no wide corridors for troops to march down, there are no plazas for marketplaces, and there are certainly not enough bathrooms for the supposedly hundreds or thousands of people who once lived here.

I've repurposed Dwimmermount as an old wizard's school and laboratory. Instead of the remains and evidence of soldiers, we have former wizards. The Empire didn't stop the ascension of Termax, a schism of his own students did. This opens up so many more possibilities. The secret society that wants to re-enter Dwimmermount to resurrect Termax is competing with a rival secret society that wants to re-enter Dwimmermount to ensure Termax is dead.

Population
I've included the mountain's ecosystem as something to draw upon for random encounters. There is a magical explanation for why nobody moved in and out of the mountain for two centuries, but I rather like the idea that there are cracks through this magic and the lizards and bugs of the mountain found their way in to become natural prey for the predators surviving in dark hallways for two centuries.

The population is finite, however. There is no restocking of the dungeon happening here. There are 61 kobolds. Once they're dead, they're gone for good. Any result on the encounter table for kobolds should just be replaced with the next option down. In this way, I've also rewritten the random encounter tables, the most dangerous foes are the highest rolls. Kill, defeat, and displace everything that is weak on one level and the only thing that remains are the predatory threats who have run out of prey and food.

The rooms are not static
It's easy enough to just use the descriptions of the rooms and apply some common sense as to what might be in one. There are orcs on this level, so why is this room empty? Let's put some orcs here and have them cooking a snail and moss stew on a small firepit. Where does the smoke go? Nobody has asked, but there a small holes in the surface of the ceilings designed for ventilation. Too small to crawl into, unless you're an insect. Where do the vents go? All over the mountain, it's a three-dimensional maze that is virtually impossible to map!

That's a key trait that I just don't seem to have. If nobody asks, why bother coming up with an explanation for it? Because if I think of it, I need to explain it to myself and then I have an explanation ready.

Who wants in?
I've created a few factions that are looking for passage into Dwimmermount. They're all hanging out in the local town for now, but as soon as the PCs return with orc heads and stories of dungeon delving they'll be making their way up to the gates, and become instant rivals for the loot to be found inside.

The Order of Cytophim. A secret society of magic-users who wish to ensure that Termax is dead and never coming back. They vow to use magic to preserve the Law, and punish those who wield spells carelessly.

Termaxian Cultists. People who believe Termax is still alive, that his godhood is imminent.

Dwarven outfitters. They believe the mountain should belong to them. It was a dwarven home before Termax moved in and displaced them!

Sken's Rogues. These guys are awful!

Queen Ilona. A Thulian descendant who wants to reclaim Dwimmermount as her ancestral home, and rule a new kingdom from it. Inspired by the PCs from the last game I ran in Dwimmermount.

Wait! You're GMing a new Dwimmermount campaign?
Oh! Yeah. Didn't I mention that? I started a new campaign two weeks ago and kicked it off by giving everyone Dwimmermount as an adventure I'd like to run again. We're playing using the Freebooters on the Frontier rules, which is a sort of OSR-ified version of Dungeon World (itself a D&D-ified knockoff of Apocalypse World).

I really like the system for two reasons:
1) it randomizes everything very neatly and in a not complex way that is easy to GM on the fly
2) it is very deadly and careless PCs will get FUCKING MURDERED if they don't take care of themselves

So, I really like Freebooters and I incorporated some elements from the Black Hack into it, and that's what we're playing with. We had one session and everybody really successfully killed some orcs but they made enough noise to draw the attention of some giant spiders and now we'll get to see if they survive the second session.

This is the picture I used for Muntburg, I forget where I grabbed it from:

To summarize, my rules for GMing a megadungeon, or Dwimmermount, anyway:
Nothing is organized, the rooms and the creatures are wild and messy!
The population is finite, and can be killed off, displaced, or recruited/enslaved.
More people want to get inside!

the random spells of Freebooters on the Frontier

This Sunday we started a new game, a hack of Dungeon World called Freebooters on the Frontier that emulates the randomness of old school D&D fairly well.

I like the Spell Name Generator from Freebooters so much that I made a page for it on Abulafia. The Magic-User in the group rolled up two spells: Winyop's Door of Despair and Murzmut's Call of Steel

The beauty of the Freebooters system is that the spells can have a more malleable and open-ended use, provided you can fit what the spell does within the themed name of the spell. Right away, Murzmut's Call of Steel was being used to snatch swords away from enemies, fling weapons around in a magnetic tornado, and draw daggers out from small groups of kobolds so that they'd all stab one another. Winyop's Door of Despair was less useful in such a direct way, but I allowed the "door" it could create to drop magical liquid out from it so that the Magic-User could attempt to extinguish fires and scald enemies who were running from house to house, attempting to set the PCs' home village on fire.

I was drawing from the first chapter of Hoard of the Dragon Queen for inspiration, as I wanted the session to start with a tense fight. This is everything I wrote during the session:

the village of Galapagos (one of the players named the village)
dirt poor, steady population, no militia, resource (balsam-pears), safe (village has walls from a collapsed keep), remote (large dwarven population), oath (to Cold Cliff Keep)
Temple of Rheezele, goddess of nature (and trickery)
the One Legged Cat, tavern
dwarven pathways: when a dwarf or halfling tries to sneak through the cracked walls surrounding Galapagos, roll+INT. On a 10+, you get where you want to go without being seen or heard. On a 7-9, you get where you want to be but not without being seen or heard. On a miss, some stones collapse and you're trapped in the pathway.

Danger: Siege of Galapagos
✓ the keep is surrounded (half the kobolds have been routed)
□ the mill burns down (currently on fire)
✓ the dragon attacks
✓ the dragonkin commander arrives (he was defeated)
□ the temple is set on fire
□ the south wall collapses
Impending Doom: the village is overrun

cultists, HP 5, Armor 1, shortsword 1d6, set house on fire, call for reinforcements
kobolds, HP 4, dagger 1d4, surround an opponent, retreat and regroup
Cyanwrath - the dragonkin commander, HP 7, Armor 2, lead kobolds/cultists, challenge opponent

And that was enough to keep me busy. Next week I'll actually prepare some fronts to further this Hoard of the Dragon Queen adventure, but the critics are right: this adventure is not written well.

The PCs ended up capturing some kobolds, killing some cultists, and taking the blue dragonkin commander as their prisoner. When the keep was surrounded, Mirren and Matti routed the kobolds successfully. Gerda stole the dragonkin commander's sword before anybody was forced to fight him. The fire at the mill was extinguished, but when Gerda was forced to flee from the mill some kobolds set it on fire again. The dragon swooped around the village several times, and two sections of the village were set aflame by it's fire breath.

Just for fun, I also rolled up quite a few extra spells:
Ward of the Pestilential Boon, I imagine it could be used to bestow immunity from disease or infection
Cloak of the Bloody Curse, the first thing that comes to mind is a red cloak that permeates fear in others and/or causes harm to any who approach too closely
Binding Rot of Ingoth, paralyzing/destructive magic
Zza-leo’s Venom Blast, I would use this to spit poison at enemies or even trap objects to explode with a poisonous gas/spray

Character creation plus the PCs' home village being under siege was plenty of fun, and a welcome change from playing 5th edition D&D.

player responsibilities

"People behave very differently under gold as xp than under monsters as xp." I never played under that style of play, neither have I ever run a game that way. I always played in games where role-playing was the dominant force for xp rewards and during my 2nd edition days that's when I started to see players who would follow a plot that was spoonfed to them from a GM or follow a protocol of behavior that the same GM had established. Bowing to lords, currying favor with locals, haggling with shopkeepers, and asking for opponents to surrender mid-battle. However, some of the worst games I ever played in happened to be because the GM expected their players to role-play their way out of a situation rather than looking for alternative solutions or resorting to violence.

I think it's that expectation of player behavior that makes a bad GM. However, there can be bad players too. Playing badly means following vague descriptors (of class, of alignment, etc.) and never looking for anything outside of the box that has been drawn for them, essentially a bad player is dull and predictable. A good player creates the game as they go and asks the GM to accommodate them, a good player throws creative punches. Rolling with those punches is what makes a good GM.

I once played a cleric-wizard in a game set in Waterdeep, the metropolis of the Forgotten Realms setting, where my character worshipped Gond, god of artifice. I started asking about who owned the land around certain areas and the GM never had easy answers. He finally asked me why I was so interested in who owned what and I told him of my plans to introduce a mass transit system to Waterdeep, utilizing both magic and machinery. I will never forget how he guffawed and said "Yeah, that'll never happen."

The younger version of myself soldiered on, but today if I heard a GM be that dismissive I would confront them with their buffoonery. I had just handed him a whole campaign worth of adventures on a silver platter - corrupt government officials, mobilizing labor, maintaining facilities, funding the construction, monetizing the finished project, attempts at espionage, disputes over property values - and he was more concerned with maintaining his status quo of experience points per session. The same horrible GM who would create impossible to solve problems to force us into role-playing our way out of them didn't want to bite into a veritable feast of role-playing potential that I was just handing over to him.

On the other hand, I've described the ingenious problems that could have arisen from this venture to many other players over the years and they all say the same thing: "Why don't you run that campaign?" and therein lies the problem. Most players don't even create their own goals, I can't expect them to follow one of mine.

I remember another game with another GM that had just as final a moment when it came to shutting down a player's goals. In a game where virtually any character was allowed, I asked to play an ogre and was allowed to do so. The ogres and dwarves of this world were locked in a centuries-long animosity. I don't remember what the two races fought over, but I remember that the GM often used it as a stick to beat my character with. Everywhere our party went we always ran into dwarves who took extra pains to be dicks to my character, and thus also the party. Since my ogre character traveled and adventured alongside another dwarf - a PC playing the only dwarf in the world who seemed to be polite and friendly - I mentioned that there must be friendlier dwarves and as soon as I found them I could forge an ogre-dwarf alliance that would shame the other dwarves. The GM just said "Good luck with that! The only friendly dwarves you're ever going to meet will be player characters."

I was still pretty young and I stopped playing with that group at that time because I took that oafishness personally.

As a player, I always create a lofty goal for my character. Maybe something that could be attainable, but often it is something that a GM could build adventures off of. I hate playing with GMs who expect you to share their goals, or follow their breadcrumbs.

As a GM I always try to foster a player creating goals for their character, and though I don't expect it, I am disappointed when a player would rather just level up then interact with the world. That disappointment probably makes me a weaker GM overall. When I run the Dwimmermount game I feel like the campaign skirts a fine line between role-playing and XP-gathering. The characters have goals and there are some inter-party conflicts brewing, but in relation to the dungeon itself it is just there as a thing for them to conquer rather than to interact with.

Undead PCs, a decade of gaming later...

Ten years ago I started GMing a 3rd edition D&D game set in the Forgotten Realms. One of my players had the crazy idea of playing this guy called "The General" who had been turned undead by a lich and could now remove his head from his body and use it to spy on people or search around corners. In truth, he confessed, the character was the lich but had been driven insane from his many years of lichdom and now was coping by denying that he himself was the lich. "The General" was just a fiction he had created for himself, or maybe it was somebody who had served him at one time but was now long dead and in his madness had adopted the identity.

Back then, I allowed the character.

I created secret caveats though. The player was already playing with madness and I used that to mess with him. I made the character a secret psionicist who didn't know how to cope with his powers, and rather than being an undead creature who could detach his own head, the General carried around a sock puppet head with buttons sewn on that he believed was his detachable head. At some point I retconned that he telekinetically flew around the sock puppet head and used clairvoyance/clairaudience upon it. But the first time he threw that head the other players were confused as hell, I let the player describe what the General was doing then said "Okay, that's what you believe you're doing" then turned to the other players and described what the other characters actually saw him do. It was a hilarious moment.

Today, I would still allow the character but would create no secret caveats.

The character would simply be as the player described, unless he gave me free reign to muck about with his backstory. But more than likely, I wouldn't. It's a unique and novel idea, and I rarely encounter players who have highly detailed ideas about what they want their characters to be. There are plenty of people who just play straight up classes with few eccentricities or no uniqueness, but it's a real treat to find a player who wants their character to have depth and a layered history before they even start playing. It gives reasons right away for a GM to engage that character into a story, and easy hooks to pull on.

This is a rule that every GM should live by: If a player comes to you with a character concept that they really want to play, let them play it.

.

.

.

Now I'm thinking about all of the times I had some rules-lawyering or campaign-minded GM who didn't let me play some unique character I had come up with, or found a way to cripple my concept within a session or two.
I don't play with any of those assholes anymore.

Tiamat!

These links are more for my own use. If I start GMing a fantasy campaign next week I might make Tiamat one of the big bads. However, you should totally use these links for great adventure fodder!

Zak Smith wrote up some awesome notes for the the Five Churches of Tiamat

Then Daniel Davis has written a bunch of great ways of making Hoard of the Dragon Queen interesting and fun

And finally, Courtney Campbell has been remixing and rewriting the chapters of the adventure to make it darker, deadlier, and delightfully fun to read!

Also, here's a review that eviscerates the adventure as written.

perception rumination

Something I've been thinking about a lot lately is how the GM can fail to give information to the players which can lead to the players taking actions they might not have otherwise taken. The characters' perception of events is only as good as the GM's ability to narrate the scene. This should be one of those obvious statements that begins every and any chapter of GMing advice, but it's surprising how many people just don't make the mental leap of how much the collective concept of what is happening in the game rests on one person's shoulders.

There are several games that use perception as a risk-taking procedure, and supply a rule that gives players a mechanic with which to gain an advantage or simply to be warned of impending danger. 3rd edition D&D invented the much abused Spot check, World of Darkness has a derived Perception skill check, Apocalypse World has the Read A Situation move, and many times I've seen a GM who in the absence of a rule for it simply has a PC make a saving throw or a luck check or similar oddity. Using these checks as ways of doling out information is where the inspiration for Trail of Cthulhu came from.

It's a two-way street though, it's important for players to ask questions and prod for more information. Generally, I've noticed that if players just take the scene as described it's because they think their GM gave them all the information they needed. As a player, I am always asking for more details "Is the ceiling a dome or is it flat? How far does the curve in the wall go, all the way to the ceiling? Does it look like there might be a crack or crease where the wall meets the floor?"

Character perception requires player communication.

I used to think that being able to separate what your character knows from what you, as a player, know is a sign of good role-playing, but as I get older I find that I don't like the adventure to take too long. If there is something there and I've asked the right question I just want to hear a "Yes" so we can get on with the game without fiddling with dice or wasting time. But then, what is the right question?

If a room is trapped, how do detect it if the GM assumes you will just roll dice to discover it? Different games handle discovering traps and pitfalls in different ways. In old school D&D you better have a Thief to search for traps, otherwise you're hosed. In 3rd edition and in Dungeon World anybody could potentially search for traps, some are just better at it than others since in both games it almost entirely relies on your Wisdom bonus. In Dungeon World the existence of a trap might be determined by the dice roll to detect it.

In this same vein, if an NPC is lying to your character how do you detect it? Depending on the GM they might make this obvious, no roll required, but there are mechanics in games for having this kind of interaction with a skilled bluffer. Deadlands made a huge (but broken) mini-game out of the Bluffin' and Scrutinize skills. In some versions of D&D this might just be a saving throw but it could easily be a Sense Motive roll. In Apocalypse World the Read A Person move becomes a catchall for this kind of interaction, which I have noticed most players don't even actually use unless they think violence is imminent.

Sometimes pulling out dice to determine the answer to a question can answer the question for the player, and since the act of rolling might give the players information their characters shouldn't be privy to then how do you imbue that dice roll with failure and success?

Careful scrutiny still requires the possibility of failure.

gaming should be fun

I used to play Arkham Horror every week. I have every expansion and I have followed the annual tournament reports, the forums, and the fan sites. I downloaded a program to make my own characters for Arkham Horror based on the members of my gaming group. That should be enough to explain how much I loved this game and how much my group played it.
Despite all of the expansions I own and all of the different ways we tried playing the game one of the guys in our group always played Ashcan Pete.

We played the game so regularly that I was starting to get annoyed that he always played the same character and never tried anything different. So one time we started setting up the game I surreptitiously slipped Ashcan Pete underneath the box. When he couldn't find the character sheet somebody challenged him to try playing something different and he looked crestfallen, like his favorite toy had been taken away. I echoed the challenge and revealed I had hid the character, hoping he would pick something different.

He said "I understand. You don't want me to have fun. I'll play something different."
At that, I felt bad. I handed Ashcan Pete to him and I never brought it up ever again because I never got annoyed by him playing the same character ever again. Even if I thought it was droll or uncreative or predictable, this was his fun, and why should I be critical of that? I shouldn't. Coming down on the way a person plays a game is a dick move.

I've been playing this character in Apocalypse World named Tully. Tully is a grotesque of indeterminate gender. Tully has this weird black slime that grows out of his skin, his eyes are lidless and milky green as if something is growing beneath the surface of the sclera, and he's scrawny and hunched like a corpse come to life. The "tarman" zombie from Return of the Living Dead is literally what I based Tully's appearance off of.
In all likelihood, Tully's gender morphs to be compatible to whoever is near him/her, but in truth I think of him as something entirely different, similar to Pie'oh'Pah from Clive Barker's Imajica. I call him "he" because I named him after Louis Tully, and also in my backstory for him he was declared a "he" by his parents despite their not knowing what he was. He accepts this because it is also easier for others to accept.

He's my favorite character that I've ever made. I've written him up in two different games. I will likely end up playing him again in other games if I'm given the opportunity.

I'm not sure exactly how long I've been playing Tully this time (three sessions? four?) but I know that I have firmly established that Tully does not fight. He is not aggressive or mean or divisive in any way. Yet Tully's hard has been highlighted in nearly every session I have played him. The first time it happened I said nothing, but made a note right under his hard stat on my character sheet "TULLY DOESN'T FIGHT" in all caps and yet, his hard still gets highlighted.

"Yeah I'm a pacifist, you wanna fight 'bout it?!"
Recently Tully was confronted by the presence of some nasty supernatural shit and in that moment Tully decided "This thing is not human, this thing is bad, this thing I will fight." But even in that scene where Tully decided to fight, there was literally nothing I could do. The creature that appeared was made of shadow and ephemeral so I didn't even get to roll dice. Let's forget for a second that making an enemy you can't fight is an obnoxious thing to do on the GM's part and focus instead on the fact that everything I've established about Tully is set in stone, I am not going to change Tully's relationship to violence. Tully doesn't fight, but his hard has been highlighted three times now.

The first time it happened it was irritating. The second time it happened was frustrating. Now it just feels antagonistic. I have a lot of fun playing Tully, but I also have a lot of fun expanding the character and giving him a wider range of options. That I should be distracted from this because somebody wants to see my pacifist get aggressive is annoying. The process of gaining experience and moving my character forward in a game where the characters are defined by the phrase "you are what you do" has become more alienating and challenging than actually playing the game. I am at the point where I've stopped moving Tully forward in a way that I want and I am considering taking moves just to be able to play the character the way I want to play him.

Tully is the third character I have made for this game, and the third pacifist.

The first character was Errol, a driver, who just didn't like conflict. I barely figured out exactly who Errol was when he got into an argument with the gunlugger in the group about how to intimidate people, Errol started a fight to prove a point (because his hard was marked) and a few missed rolls later Errol got killed. I didn't mind too much, but I did mind when I got called an asshole for following my highlighted stats.

The second character was Glitch, a 19 year old girl missing her left arm, also a brainer (with -2 hard). She's not very good with people, but she was also tortured physically growing up. I never established how she lost the arm. It was really easy to figure out who she was, but when her hard got marked I spoke up and pointed out that one-armed teenagers are not exactly fighters. I was, and have been ever since, essentially told to shut up.

The whole process of highlighting stats works in theory. You want to pick the stuff a character is good at, but you also want to see what else they will do. Getting a player to try out different approaches is not inherently a bad thing. Mark cool and hard for the Hocus and maybe he will get a little confrontational. Mark hot and sharp for the Gunlugger and maybe she'll try manipulating someone instead of just going in, guns blazing. It's okay to try things out, push the characters into new directions, and that definitely works really well sometimes. But when a character's philosophy is established firmly as one of peace - and Tully will never hurt other human beings under any circumstances, ever - marking a stat that would force me to change that philosophy and actively seek conflict in order to advance is just rude and unfriendly, if not downright hostile.

Success!

I've been thinking a lot about what a dice roll really means within a role-playing game. What it is meant to convey and how it is applied are usually two different things. Dice usually means risk of failure, not just chance of success. If there is a risk that something bad could happen then the dice come out, or if there's a chance that something really good could happen the dice come out. Or both.

Consider a player who says "I want to climb a nearby tree and try to get a better look at this valley."

GMs would handle this request differently, some might require a roll, and some might just let the PC climb a tree and draw a crude map without a roll. I'm going to focus on GMs who require rolls, and what that roll would mean.

First, there is a simple question of success or failure. Success is "you climb the tree" and failure is "there are no decent handholds, you don't climb the tree."
GURPS uses this method, though it also uses a complex skill system to determine where that success is achieved.

Second there is the chance of extra benefit or complications. Extra benefit might be "you climb the tree and make a rough map quickly and efficiently" and complication might be "you fall out of the tree and take some damage."
In D&D, and many of it's variants, this is frequently represented by rolling an unmodified result of '1' or '20'

This is usually where most dice rolling conventions end. But there's additional possibilities within the dice roll.

Consider the partial success, which I enjoy using. A partial success might be "you can climb the tree and make a map, but there is no safe way down and you'll have to fall most of the way" or "if you climb the tree, you'll expose yourself to pterodactyls circling overhead" or "you can only make it halfway, the branches above are thin and weak, if you climb any farther you risk breaking the branches and falling to the ground."
Apocalypse World explicitly uses the partial success.

Then there's extending the outcomes into an exacting range of "success with extra benefit," simple "success," "success with complication," "failure with extra benefit," simple "failure," and "failure with complications."
Venger Satanis' VSd6 system accomplishes this.

The results and methods of achieving them are diverse. The results however are almost always determined by the GM. The players drive the action forward but the GM lays down the roads that they follow. I think the best players are the ones who forget the roads exist, and that the best GMs are the ones who say "Where we're going, we don't need roads."

This is probably my favorite Traveller thing on the internet: Little Black Book cover generator
It's absolutely useless for gaming, but when I was running Traveller I would try to come up with titles for the sessions and would make LBB gifs for them. I can't find any of the ones I made, except for one. When I wrapped up my last Birthright campaign, and tied it into Traveller via the Flux, I made this just after the last session:
I don't remember if I ever shared it with the group.
Rediscovering this cute little toy makes me want to run Traveller again, or Stars Without Number, or just something in space. With a Little Black Book cover.

initiative

I've talked about initiative before, albeit in a slanted way, and I noticed while self-examining my GM style of DCC RPG that I no longer treat initiative as stringently and compulsory as I had in the past.

A situation arose in my last game session where the PCs were confronted with a second monster at the tail end of a round where they just finished dealing with another monster, and instead of rolling initiative and bringing in the second adversary I let the players dictate what they would do before attacks were launched. It resulted in a temporary end to combat and a need to re-roll initiative later when it started again. A later scene in the same game had a player announcing his character's attack in order to initiate combat, and rather than roll for surprise or initiative, as the rules of D&D and it's many variants usually calls for, I had him roll his attack to see what would happen first. He managed to score a critical hit and ended the combat before it had a chance to begin.

I still think surprise and reaction rules have their place, but I just believe a game is more fun for everybody involved if the GM maintains that the players drive the action of the story. In purely mechanical terms, when a player declares an attack than they should be allowed to complete it before moving on to reaction, surprise or initiative rolls.

GameHoleCon

The first GameHoleCon concluded yesterday and it definitely wiped me out. I didn't look exhausted but when I got home my head hit the pillow and I escaped into an abyss of sleep for the rest of the day.


I've never GMed at a convention before and I was very nervous beforehand. I only signed up to run three events, two games of Apocalypse World (which were identical) and one game of Dungeon Crawl Classics. I think if I do this again next year each game I run will be different because the first game only sold 1 ticket and so I cancelled it. The second game only sold two tickets, but I had a friend at the con who said he had some time to kill and he purchased a ticket and became a third player. The final game, DCC RPG, only sold 2 tickets, but given the nature of that game's zero-level character funnel I made it work with only 2 players.

Here are the events I ran, along with their descriptions:
Apocalypse World: what's the name of this town?
An introduction to the Apocalypse World rules and suitable for anybody new to the game. Players will quickly make characters, help define NPCs for the setting, and then play through a number of scenes where outside forces try to tear down or destroy the community they live in. Apocalypse World is a game about dwindling resources, filled with territorial warlords, grotesque mutants, decaying environments, and brutish savages. What you do is who you are in Apocalypse World. So what are you going to do?
I've run this one-shot a few times now, and I always think of ways I could improve it. Every time I run this game something unique happens that simply cannot be prepared or accounted for. We had a Chopper, a Brainer, and a Savvyhead, and they managed to track down and eliminate most of the threats I have loaded into the love letters. This was the first time players formed a link between two of my threats which doesn't actually exist, and it was the only time the players found out about the big bad secret of their hometown without having any immediate moral quandaries about it. The game we played was grim and filled with blood. The apocalypse? Oh, you're soaking in it!
I found myself asking leading questions a lot and had to keep stopping myself in mid sentence in order to rephrase what I was asking. I also noticed that I've stopped describing the minutia of rules, one player asked about stats and I glossed over them by explaining the dice mechanic and handing out the basic moves playbook. I'm not sure if this a good habit to start getting into, but the newbies seemed to pick up the game really quick and fell into their characters with little or no hesitation. There was a spectacular gun battle which I had a lot of fun "announcing future badness" with. It was a real blast getting to see a Chopper in action from the other side of the table, but I feel like I fell short since I never went into a lot of detail about his gang.
Overall, I think I'm getting considerably better at bringing conflict into the center stage even if I have lost my subtlety in the process.

Dungeon Crawl Classics: Let's Kill a Giant
An introduction to Dungeon Crawl Classics. Players will get to choose from a stable of pre-generated characters and play in a brief adventure where their characters will explore a dungeon and attempt to slay the giant that is terrorizing their village, or die trying. Dungeon Crawl Classics is a streamlined version of 3rd edition D&D that pays homage to the literature listed in 1st edition AD&D's Appendix N. It emphasizes combat that is brutal, magic that is mysterious, and a world that is unforgivably deadly.
This game I was the most nervous about. I used information about a wizard lair from one low-level module and I took a simple cave map and it's denizens from another low-level module and combined them together to form a pretty straight forward 0-level adventure that involved killing a sleeping giant. There are lots of notes and charts and tables involved in a DCC game, so having an index readily available would have speeded things up, but I had a secret passage that I was not very well-prepared to use any of and of course the players found it before anything else. I don't think they noticed though.
After running Dungeon Crawl Classics side by side with Apocalypse World, I'm even more convinced that story-games and OSR go together like peanut butter and chocolate. The cardinal rule of GMing that I think I've learned from games like Apocalypse World is that a success should not have immediate downsides and a failure should create complications. However, I didn't want to deviate from the rules of DCC RPG but whenever I did I let the players know that I was doing something different from how the rulebook was written, like allowing them to use pages in a spellbook like casting from a scroll.
They were really inventive too! They got attacked by a summoned chimera and thought luring it into a cage they had opened might be the best way to simply contain it so they wouldn't have to fight it. One person lost their life getting the creature trapped, but otherwise it worked. We had two additional players who sat and joined the table for about an hour just to get a feel for the game. In the end, they succeeded in slaying the giant and the survivors came away rich.

The whole con was a lot of fun, and GMing was a real learning experience. I'll probably do it again next year.

Of Blood & Lightning / Apocalyscotia

I GMed a Dungeon World game for a few weekends, and then ran an Apocalypse World game for a few weeks. Both started with my own unusual take on character & world creation.

Dungeon World
When we started I didn't really have any ideas. I was a little nervous, and a little annoyed, because I was already playing in one Dungeon World game and I didn't want to be GMing a second one. I'd rather be playing Apocalypse World. Or just playing. But circumstances led to this game and I tried to put my best foot forward. As I said, I had no ideas, but that's a lie. I had one idea. Ancient pyramids. I planned on starting the PCs in a town, not a bustling city or a struggling village, but an established town. This town would have one dominating feature: an ancient pyramid.
I had ideas about that pyramid, about who put it there, about it's true purpose, and about what it held. All of that got thrown out the window. During the first session the players dictated the terms of the pyramid, it's magical properties and it's mystical significance, and I just rolled with the punches. I don't even remember what my original idea was anymore, except that it started with an ancient impenetrable pyramid that would lead to something bigger. Somehow the players outdid me by pushing the stakes of what was in play.
The 15-feet tall pyramids, for there are now more than one, are prisons holding extra-planar beings. Maybe releasing these beings helps the old god, Bartleby, but the spirit-wolves who guard the demiplanes of these pyramids don't want Bartleby released or else he will eat. He's so terribly hungry. "What does he eat?" somebody asked, but the question remains unanswered.

The real creative thrust for this game came a collection of strange images I had culled from deviantart and let the players look through. I asked them to define the deities of their world, and take inspiration from, these images. I made sure I had at least two images for every player. This was an interesting exercise because I noticed that each player would focus on a single image and expand details upon it, but would not define details about other images unless I asked pointed questions about the image directly to that player.

The artwork of Jeff Christensen, known as js4853, seemed appropriate to me. His images are dark, explicit, and leave enough explanation open to the imaginative interpretation of the viewer. Some of his images seemed like they could double as the portraits of gods:

The players first foray into one of these pyramids forced me to regurgitate out ideas as they sprang to my mind.

the space inside was much bigger than the outside made it seem

gravity pulled towards every surface inside, thus the walls of the pyramid were actually the floor where an immense maze simply led intruders around in circles

shadowy wolves stalked the PCs through the maze

strings of muscles and sinew sprang forth from the center of each pyramidal base and bunched together in the three-dimensional center of the pyramid where a mass of flesh pulsed with black ooze

a lightning storm swirled around the empty spaces of the pyramid and randomly struck walls and started fires

the center mass held the otherworldy prisoner within the center of the pyramid space, and the prisoner was revealed to be a blonde teenage girl named Aleph

After the PCs managed to escape the demiplane prison, I gave them all the option to learn some blood-based magical powers. Using the format of the compendium classes, I wrote a list of powers I would like to see used and edited them to fit in with the imagery of the place they had visited. I titled the little sheet of custom moves "Of Blood & Lightning"

Blood Magic became a theme for me after that, and the players were constantly dreading what disastrous consequences their actions might lead to. This player-fear overwhelmed the game in our final session which led to a split party. Only one character ventured into the second dungeon, another demiplane prison, something I did a considerable amount of work on during the previous week. Upon entering the demiplane the players would find they were developing telepathic abilities, using them would make them more powerful but would also cause them to become more paranoid and fear-stricken.



Apocalypse World
This game had a little more structure starting out than the previous one. I knew it would be set on the coastline of Nova Scotia, Canada. The game would focus on having a creepy, horrific atmosphere. The playbooks that were available starting out were mostly custom playbooks made by the Apocalypse World community, and these playbooks were all creepy, weird or horror-themed characters:

the Beast Master = in control of a monster
the Damned = vampiric sin eater
the Grotesque = a mutant
the Haunted = talks to ghosts, makes more ghosts too
the Horseman = rides an evil horse
the Last Child = a portentous child with a wicked family
the Orphan = a child with a not-so-imaginary friend
the Radio = psychic broadcaster
the Sorceror = a magician with a magical companion
the Turncoat = member of a secret society

Almost all of the playbooks start with NPCs in contact with the player or controlled by the player. Or possibly controlling the player (the Turncoat). The two that don't have NPCs are both creepy and weird (the Damned and the Grotesque).

After the players chose playbooks and we had gotten past the History distribution of character creation, I pulled out a string and laid it across the far length of the table. I instructed two players to define the coastline and to decide which side had water on it. Then I handed out pictures I had taken from the Nova Scotia tourism board's website and one at a time I asked people to declare where along the coastline these places were. When this was done I took a picture and this became the map of the region which all of the characters would be familiar with.


There was one player left and I gave him three pictures of creepy artwork and said "Tell me which one is a true image."


He chose the bottom picture and we discussed what these weird things were, one player named them Plague Children, and I had a dream about them a few nights later which helped me to define exactly what they were and what their presence signified. There was one town on the map that was overrun by these Plague Children and the locals called the place Bad Mojo. The final session involved the Plague Children in Bad Mojo getting stirred up and being led back to the town where most people lived and congregated, though the game ended before we got to see what would happen when the Plague Children arrived.

indie vs OSR, and the winner is...

I was just thinking about wandering monsters and how most of the time they are pointless and don't make sense. I was thinking about my last Dungeon Crawl Classics game which came to a screeching halt when the party got surrounded by jackals from a wandering monster table and there was literally nothing they could do to survive such an overwhelming encounter except by rolling their ice really well. I was thinking back to previous experiences where wandering monsters were simply used to soften up the party. I was trying to think of times when the wandering monster was used to help layer the atmosphere of the locale and I was coming up empty.

Then I remembered a wandering monster that was fun to fight. For me, at least.

It was one of my early gaming experiences, when I was too young to really know the rules and too naive to know how "the best" way to role-play was. I was gaming with older people, who perhaps tolerated my presence but otherwise didn't support it. My character was a wizard and a bear had broken into our camp. He was smashing tents and gouging his claws into horses and people. Everyone was running around, gathering weapons, and keeping their distance. The main fighter in our group got pinned and was being mauled, he needed to make a Strength check to break free at the start of his next turn, and my turn in the initiative came up.
"Can I jump on the bear's back and drive my dagger into it's shoulder blades?"
The surprised looks I got, and the advice afterwards, I look back on it now and think those people were fucking idiots and if I had known better I would have found a different group. "Wizards don't really rush into combat like that." "You don't really have the stats to pull it off." "A spell would probably be a better course of action." and similar such things.
I didn't care. "But can I? How hard would it be?"
I remember the DM saying "If you roll really high I'll let you do it, but that bear will probably turn on you next." Everybody was discouraging me from acting. I rolled high, an 18 or 19, impossible to deny success on such a roll. I was on the bear's back and I could roll damage, a whopping 1d4.
Most of the players clucked their tongues or shook their heads, because now the bear was going to attack me, but the fighter got free and in two more hits the bear was down and out. I had saved the fighter, taken a few licks myself, and turned the tables of the fight, all because I didn't follow some pre-programmed narrative for how I should play my character or what my skills were best suited for.

That group really sucked.

I think that the experience of playing indie games has helped rekindle my OSR gaming nostalgia far more than some of the other OSR games I've played. Dungeon Crawl Classics does a really great job of bringing back that old school flavor to a set of rules, but the "story first" dictates of Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, Itras By, Lady Blackbird, and Monsterhearts is far more evocative of the time in my life when I could play a wizard and think it was totally appropriate for me to distract a bear from mauling the fighter by jumping onto the bear's back and trying to jam my dagger into it's ear.
What I'm really saying is that there is very little difference between the OSR and indie games. One is perhaps a little more brutal where the players are accepting of that inherent brutality as part of the story, and the other is more focused on survivability so that the same characters can thrive throughout the story. One is no better than the other, and each can be slightly tweaked to change the survival-brutal axis on which it sits.
As a GM or a player I want to be in a game that has the depth and details of an OSR game but with the flexible mechanics of an indie RPG. I believe a happy medium can be reached between the two.

announcing future badness

For lack of better terminology, I think every role-playing game can be broken up into two categories: physics engines and narrative engines. Some games bridge the gap between the two better than others, but overall a game is either a physics engine or a narrative engine. Sometimes a narrative engine will have a physics component but conflict resolution still falls into a declared narrative, and sometimes a physics engine will have a narrative component but conflict resolution still falls to a declared ability.

Physics engines are concerned with determining standards for the physical reality the characters inhabit. Dungeons & Dragons, GURPS, Shadowrun, and Battletech are all good examples of physics engines because the characters will have stats like Strength or Agility or Intelligence which give in-game mechanics for the limitations of those abilities. A character with 14 Strength can simply lift more than a character with 9 Strength in D&D, and much of the gameplay resolves around how much damage that stat applies to your weapons. Characters with high Strengths have to take the front lines of combat, characters with high Reaction should become Riggers in Shadowrun, and characters with high IQ should pick up lots of mental skills in GURPS.

Narrative engines use abilities to push the story forward, or give the players authority to dictate a new direction for the action to take. How much damage a character does when they punch somebody is usually an after thought.

GURPS is a pure physics engine. You can trip an opponent, but you'll have penalties unless you were trained in a Martial Art that allows that combat maneuver because then the penalties are lessened, and if you purchased that specific combat maneuver then you get no penalties, and if you're specialized with that maneuver then you'll get a bonus too. After you've checked for all of these factors on your character sheet, then your opponent might have abilities that penalize your trip maneuver. You roll for you maneuver and then your opponent might be able to Dodge, and if they do the blow fails to connect.

Dungeons & Dragons is a physics engine. You can't trip an opponent unless a DM specifically gives you that opportunity (1st and 2nd edition), or you have a feat which allows you to make the attempt (4th edition) usually at a penalty unless you've taken a second feat to improve your ability to trip people (3rd edition). If your opponent has a feat that allows them to avoid the trip then they might roll against your roll, or against a flat target number.

Aberrant is a healthy mix of physics and narrative engine. Anyone can attempt to trip somebody using abilities that all characters start with.

Apocalypse World is a narrative engine. You can declare you're trying to trip somebody and depending on the result of your roll you might cause them to trip, make a compromise within the scene to cause the trip or abandon it without penalty, or fail egregiously and suffer somehow.

Amber is a pure narrative engine. You can create a world with Pattern where you can trip anybody pretty easily unless somebody with a stronger Pattern goes seeking you out and stops you from tripping them, if you even end up fighting them.

In a couple of weeks I'll be attending PAX East, and I made plans with my friends there in Boston that I would GM a one-shot of Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) for them. At the time the plans were made I was a few weeks into running my DCC game and I was pretty excited at the prospect of playing an OSR game. DCC is also a physics engine. Over the last few months I've been playing a couple of role-playing games (mainly Apocalypse World) that give players a stronger narrative control over the action that appears in a game. It's difficult for me to actually get my brain to go back into an older physics engine style of game without feeling compelled to hack it into something I want to play. My appreciation for old school renaissance (OSR) games is still strong, but I think my main difficulty is with the old pass/fail binary mechanic. I really like the idea of a partial success too much and I want to incorporate it into all future games I might GM.

I know my friends are eager to try DCC as well and I've been thinking about this a lot. I could run the game in one of two ways:

1) Physics: straight by the book
in most situations they would have a target number and rolling a d20 they would add an attribute bonus, the result is a binary pass/fail outcome, and I would roll dice for my monsters, traps, etc.

2) Narrative: variable difficulty resolution where I don't roll dice, except for damage
the normal d20 rolls would be replaced with a set difficulty of 12 and 18
an 18+ is an unequivocal success where they would always have a choice as to the results of their success
a result that falls between 12 and 17 is a partial success where I offer a choice between two options: accepting a good failure, a bad success, or a tough choice
a failed result of 11 or less means something bad happens or an opponent sees some form of success

The adventure I plan on running is pretty straight forward with few monsters, though the monsters are real killers, so I'm thinking of applying the narrative rolls to non-combat resolution and then doing combat by the book. Or maybe I'll just give people the option from the beginning of the game to use narrative rolls instead of physics rolls.

In any case, the concept that I learned from Apocalypse World of "announcing future badness" sticks with me, and as a result I don't think I can ever use Perception checks ever again. It's the most versatile ability that a GM has and I think should just be used as a principle of GMing, being able to say that a thing is about to happen unless the player takes action without explicitly stating "Hey! This fucker is about to brain you if you don't prepare to defend yourself."

Calling for a Perception check in D&D was always a simple way of saying "Hey! There's something here." to the players, but a good role-player who failed their roll would continue on into the danger or simply not find the clue, neither of which is interesting. Now I've come to regard Perception checks as useless. Why call for a Perception check at all when it's too ambiguous as to what the check could be for? Either there's something dangerous and you give the players an opportunity to discover what it is and react to it, or there's something hidden to be found and they find it.

"You are a failure!"

Nobody likes to dwell on their past mistakes, so I'm going to give you the opportunity to revel in some of mine. I've fucked up plenty of times as a GM, whether I was having a bad day, or railroading a plotline, or not effectively communicating with the players, there have been plenty of times where I've done something at the gaming table and looked back on it thinking "Why did I do that? What is wrong with me?"

The empty crypt!
I ran a fantasy game for a long time where the PCs had set themselves up as pseudo-permanent guests in a castle far off the common trade routes. I had established that before the castle was a farming outpost it had been initially constructed as a prison, and the lower cells had been sealed up. In one particular session there was a big, bad magical field that sprang up out of the castle's ground, however it was invisible and only the resident wizard could see it. (In my notes I had written that this was a pathway to another realm and weird ghostly entities were now squeezing through it.)
The players decided they needed to know where this thing was coming from and wanted to stop it. Since it wasn't really coming from anywhere I didn't have any information to give them, but fumbling about led them to the blocked off prison cells and in my notes I had an elf ghost laying dormant down there. They spent at least an hour at the table and a couple of days in game time trying unblock the prison pathways and all of my efforts to make the attempts fruitless went unheeded and ignored. Eventually I just gave up at trying to make it hard and said "Look guys, there's nothing down there. Your solution is elsewhere."
What I should have done: Is run with it. I should have chucked my notes aside and just let them find something causing the rift. It didn't need to be movable, and it didn't need to be indestructible either, but it would have been something to discover that would have made their time worthwhile and it would have given them a new focus.

The mini-nuke
I ran a GURPS sci-fi game for about a year where one player had min-maxed his stats starting out so he had tons of money and equipment. He asked if he could purchase a mini-nuke from the Ultra-Tech sourcebook and at first I balked then I re-considered and said "Sure! Why not?" all the while thinking "It doesn't have to be a working mini-nuke." The player would always refer to his mini-nuke as a last ditch weapon that he could use, but at the same time his character kept it secret from all of the other characters. Eventually I got tired of him bringing up it's existence and a psionic entity probed his mind, discovered where it was, and stole it from him. He wasn't pleased.
What I should have done: Give him a reason to use it. I had already established in-game that a well-funded group of criminal scientists were hiring assassins to take them down. This was a planet-hopping science fiction campaign, so I could have easily put them in a situation where they were outgunned by other starships chasing them and he could have finally had an excuse to use his mini-nuke and save the day while destroying all of the enforcers this group was sending after them.

The poisoned patient
I ran another sci-fi game, a much shorter one, where the PCs had just given refuge to a dissident from a cult. Before they could leave, another cultist had poisoned the defector and after they left the planet the poison began to take hold. His condition became noticeable when he began to suffer from mania which eventually turned violent. The PCs sedated him and put him in sick bay hoping to rid him of the toxins coursing through his system. He was an unimportant character and I narrated that he was dead, but one of the characters was a medic and wanted the opportunity to save him. I allowed a dice roll and success after success kept the patient going. I think we rolled the dice six times and he just wouldn't die, until I made a Luck check for bringing him out of stasis and he finally bit the dust. In that moment I forgot about serving the needs of the players and was focusing on trying to get the game back to where I wanted it to go.
What I should have done: Just let the bastard live. He wasn't important in the grand scheme of things and could have easily just disembarked the ship at the next port, but I was being short sighted, because the character could have also become a reliable NPC contact for the group later on.

Nothing happened today
I ran a Deadlands game once where I planned out all of the events surrounding the players and I would write then print off the front page of the local paper to show them all what was happening in their town. Except I never had anything interacting with the players, and I relied upon them to interact with the town and create drama. I realized a little too late how boring that could be.
What I should have done: Let the players be the stars, not the spectators. This was an early attempt at GMing and at that time I believed I had to create elaborate stories and backstories for all of my NPCs and the events around them. Instead of letting it fall out of the playing organically, I had written a script which the players could interact with but really couldn't change anything. In that sense, I was merely showing off.

Roll to climb a rock
One of my very first experiences as a GM, I had people rolling dice for everything. There was a chase in a tunnel and the PCs had to climb over a rock to keep going. I made them roll dice, and when somebody failed their pursuers caught up to them and I suddenly didn't know what to do because they were being chased by violent guys who could easily kill them. The whole session lost steam halfway through because I broke out the dice for, literally, everything.
What I should have done: Not be so nervous. I really wanted to impress everybody at the table and I could tell I was making the game exciting, but the excitement of the players fed into my nervousness and my brain just started to shut down. If I called for a dice roll then that meant I didn't have to think, until I was faced with the ultimate worst possible result of one of those dice rolls.

After I first started GMing, I ran a D&D game for several years, but for the life of me I can't think of anything specific I did that was bad. But from what I can remember, I can't imagine it was a very fun game and I don't understand why any of those guys played with me for as long as they did. At least in high school when I ran a game there was seemingly nobody else to play with.

The 5 Rules for GMing

I apologize that these have a strong fantasy flavor to them. I initially wrote all of this in a series of emails as advice to fellow GMs who run D&D or OSR games. I've rewritten it, tried to polish it up, and put it into a concrete list of rules that I can quote later primarily for my own edification and use. I've been GMing wrong for a long time, and I think I'm finally beginning to understand how a good GM operates.

#1: The rules, and the dice, are to be ignored whenever it is necessary.
When Joseph Goodman wrote "Let the rules bend to you not the other way around" he encapsulated a key philosophy in playing a tabletop RPG without actually giving it lip service. We're all here to have fun. If the rules get in the way of that fun, then they deserve to be ignored. Rolling for everything is bad too, because sometimes a character should just succeed. Every time somebody wants to do something, ask yourself "Would failure here be fun for them?" and if the answer is "No." then skip the roll. Climbing a tree to get a better view of the forest? Navigating the southern coastline? Studying to find a vital clue? Or even, examining the mountain range to find the best place to camp for the night and avoid an ambush? Ignore the dice and just get on with the game.

#2: No adventure survives contact with the players.
An oldie but a goodie. Don't construct an elaborate meta-plot meant to be uncovered over the course of a campaign, just chuck it all out the window. You might start with an initial plotline or story or threat, but if the players are smart enough to come up with something that seems like a reasonable (or better) explanation for everything you've already established then just change things up mid-game and use a twisted version of what they think up. No heavy lifting necessary, and the players will think they're brilliant for guessing something that turned out to be more or less "correct." Don't ever expect the players to follow your path or go for your bait either. Their ingenuity in the face of conflict should drive the story, not a list of bullet points you wrote five weeks before they all made characters.

#3: No lying, motherfucker!
You can have deceitful contacts, betraying employers, and allies with their own greater self interests. But the players deserve honesty. You can have secrets, but you can't have tricks. You can have traps, but their spider-sense should be tingling. You can have double-crosses, but they should know they couldn't trust that back-stabbing bastard! Always drop plenty of clues about the real intentions of your characters, you don't need to tell players outright what you're planning, but they should have plenty of opportunities to notice that something smells fishy.

#4: Don't make hard decisions when the players or the dice could do it for you.
You really want that noble to survive this assassination attempt. You don't want the players to fell your boss monster quite so quickly. You don't want the players following those gypsies to the west because what you have planned lies in the east. We've all felt these moments as GMs where what we have planned, or what we expect, is not happening the way we would like. Our story is being twisted, our awesome NPC is about to be killed, or our plot points are being ignored. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, now abandon those feelings. They're wrong. We're not sitting at this table to hear your story, or reach the foregone conclusion that you've decided between sessions, we're here to create a story together. In those moments you need to sit back and let the players' actions dictate the course of the story. Your prized NPC may die, but they have family that might seek revenge, don't they? Your dragon has just been killed and his treasure plundered, but nothing paints a target on somebody's back like spending a lot of money, right? If you abandon the story too much the action will begin to falter, and if the players aren't decisively plotting a course for themselves then you'll need to break out the dice and start cracking some skulls.

#5: Be a fan of the players' characters.
This comes from D. Vincent Baker word for word. Your job as a GM is not to be adversarial, your job is to make things fun and interesting. You can do this more effectively by giving them difficult decisions and adding consequences to their actions than you can by simply challenging them with dice rolls or taking away their stuff. Let the characters bask in glory and never deny them the success they've earned. When they've changed the landscape through their actions let those changes radiate out into the world. You're not playing from an "official campaign guide" so you can let your world adapt to the PCs in positive ways when they succeed and in worse ways when they fail, and even if you were using some "official campaign guide" that thing is just a guide not a bible. Put the fucking thing down once in a while! When the PCs do something important then every threat should be seeing them with fresh eyes, either appraising their new strengths and giving themselves pause or finding respect in their accomplishments and forgiving past grievances. Your world should be a dangerous place, but they don't need you constantly headhunting them too.

This is a personal preference more than a rule, and doesn't really need to be heeded
#6: Magic is unpredictably strange and deadly, let it be both without being crippling.
This is pretty self-explanatory, even if it is a longer rule, and a little confusing. Magic is the ultimate hammer for any nail, but it's a hammer that can only ever be swung wildly. If a player uses magic, they should get what they expect out of it, sometimes more than they want or expect. Fireballs should incinerate things, and set nearby objects aflame, and little contrails of sparks should shoot off of metal objects. IT'S A FUCKING FIREBALL! EXPLODE SOME SHIT WITH IT! Detect Magic should detect magic but maybe it's also detecting cheese around here, or detecting the last time somebody bathed. Invisibility seems to work but any nearby dogs end up curiously following them around. WARNING: If you're playing some version of D&D, magic is a scientific formula that players will rely upon with the precision of a calculator. Just tell them they're in a wild magic zone where weird things happen or some bullshit explanation like that. You might end up running an entire adventure where the PCs just try to find out where all of the wild magic zones begin and end, and man, if that happens, you should look at that as an opportunity to constantly fuck with them!

What the Gods want...

Generally I don't have any complaints about clerics themselves. I do, however, think that their role as a part of fantasy worlds' society is greatly undervalued. When you have somebody who can, as a beginner in his line of work, completely heal at least two to four commoners of injury every day then the meaning of risk and injury takes on new meanings. In a magical world clerics are essentially foolproof and risk-free doctors, or combat medics depending on the deity they worship, and a mundane understanding of medicine will never flourish or progress if society has a subset of people who can merely pray for injuries to be healed. This isn't even taking into account that at higher levels healing powers become astronomical in how much can be doled out, a high-level cleric could keep a single village alive all on their own, and two high-level clerics in the same village will have enough healing to spare that regardless of the village's worth it will begin to prosper and grow.

I'm not just picking on this discrepancy in D&D, many other game systems allow for healing on a massive scale and never show any effects upon society as a whole for these walking hospital clinics being the go-to people for injury, disease and poisoning. In most campaign worlds, clerics are servants of the deities so it might be rightly assumed that the gods themselves have reasons for not turning their clerics loose as all-purpose healers for their community. But this assumption is just that, an assumption. Nothing is ever explicitly stated about the gods object to this kind of behavior, and from the gods' point of view this might actually be the best thing for their priests to be doing since having agents who can touch people and instantly fix a broken bone or banish leprosy would make that deity quite popular.

I've heard an argument once that a deity wouldn't allow healing to be doled out to just anybody and that the cleric would probably only be able to perform these kinds of duties for people who specifically followed his own deity. But this argument fails because the deities of pantheons are usually described as working together to fight against a single evil god, or small group of evil gods. In a pantheon of deities that work together it simply doesn't make sense that they would withhold magic from followers of their compatriots. "If you Heal my follower today, I'll Wind Walk yours next week." In a more realistically selfish pantheon, like the ancient Greek gods, it could be justified since the old pagan gods were quite jealous, vengeful and arrogant.

Then you have to wonder about each individual deity's goals. Wouldn't they want their clerics healing as many people as possible because then they're potentially picking up new followers, and new clerics? It's a feedback loop. I could see a deity manifesting at a farmer's house when he gets a toothache and 'cure' him just so he grows more food and shares it freely with others all in the name of said deity. Instant worshippers! If others start seeing that the followers of this deity never go hungry and never suffer the aches and pains of living then it would be on a fast track to being the the most powerful and influential god around. Screw the adventuring heroes! Let them get eaten by dragons! If a deity needs to smite something to protect their followers it'll just show up and do it on their own!

All of this assumes that deities' want followers. If a deity has no need to be worshipped then a lot of this logic falls flat. Check out The Primal Order if you can find it, it's rules for role-playing deities.

The cracks in the foundation (long)

In the early 1990s I was purchasing Dark Sun books and there was this itch in my brain that some things in AD&D simply didn't make any sense, and I was always trying to force a level of realism onto my games which they could never quite muster or live up to. Something just seemed off about the setting, EVERY setting. I think back on it now and the cause of my doubts was actually rooted in the apparent design fr the game itself.

When I eventually stopped playing AD&D and started playing other games, like Deadlands or GURPS, it wasn't because of the rules but was just my brain branching out and exploring new worlds. As I look back upon my GMing experiences as a young adult, and the games I picked up to play when I abandoned GMing, I am struck not by how dissimilar the rules or the conventions of the settings were, but of how different the GMs handled these worlds when trying to craft living, breathing spaces for their players to interact with.

In short, the settings for AD&D were static. They never truly changed and nothing really ever progressed. Even in the supplements and sourcebooks of the 1990s there is this concept that no matter what the players do the countryside remains relatively unchanged, the kingdoms do not fall or expand or shift policy, and there are always evil minions of oppositional gods moving in to the last dungeon that was cleared out or the last territory that was freed from tyranny. You don't have to look very far to see these signs of nothing ever changing.

1) Keep on the Borderlands was a signature adventure module that was released with the basic D&D boxed set of rules in the 1980s. In 1999 a sequel was produced, which showed little changes to the keep after twenty years and largely put the keep in greater disrepair while simultaneously just redistributing enemies among the local cave system to give players familiar with the original module some new surprises.

2) As first described for the Forgotten Realms, Elminster was a powerful wizard who lived in the countryside and could be hired as a sage. There were hints that he was a major player in the regional fighting that went on between the Red Wizards of Thay, Cormyr, Shadowdale, the lords of Waterdeep, etc. He was sometimes described as the magical equivalent of Leonardo da Vinci, yet he never invented anything or actually helped anybody in any meaningful way. Before the first novel had been written about him he had already been imparted outrageously high-level powers and trumps that would easily defeat any player who got it into his head to kill him off. The extant of his powers seems to reach godlike levels despite the fact that he isn't actually a god, and even though his alignment is officially listed as "chaotic good" he doesn't really do many things that could be considered either "chaotic" or "good" - he's actually very "neutral" since he's been in Toril for over 1000 years and yet he hasn't bothered using any of his vast magical powers to build sewing machines or distribute soap, either of which might be considered "good" for a land perpetually stuck in the middle ages.

3) The ultimate status quo of evil in D&D never pushes any boundaries, the bad guys are always repopulating at the same speed and always have the same goals. The ultimate slap in the face to consistency was the Blood War of the Planescape setting, in order to justify that the hordes of evil didn't overrun the planes of existence a protracted civil war between The Abyss and The Nine Hells was devised in order to keep evil fighting one another, because in a very simplified cartoonish world "evil always turns in on itself."

Let's forget these examples, which are only the first three that spring to my mind, and focus on a generic setting. No campaign, no sourcebooks with special rules, just a blank map, a rulebook and a GM trying to create a world. The rules, in all of their iterations, have had classes of enormously powerful magnitude for the level of technology that the world should exist in.

Just think about the potential of a 1st-level cleric. I'm assuming a completely average cleric with no extra special abilities beyond casting spells and turning undead. In almost every edition of the rules a 1st-level cleric can cast 'Cure Light Wounds' a minimum of three times every day. Most commoners are 0-level or 1st-level (depending on the edition) and rarely have more than 8 hit points, which means that a single 1st-level cleric is a walking hospital who is able to potentially save three lives every day. EVERY DAY! Yet in almost every D&D campaign there are always sick, wounded, dying people. From a mechanical standpoint, even low-level clerics are incredibly valuable people to have around. In 3rd edition D&D this gets even more ridiculous with feats that improve spells and give access to more spells.

This is just the average world of D&D.

Your doctor has powers granted to him by his deity, goblins occasionally try to raid your town, and you trade in gold. So imagine walking in to the doctor's office because you have a stomach flu only to be told he's off exploring a cave to the north because he wants to kill some goblins and find some gold. You would be utterly pissed off at his stupidity. You would look at his secretary and say "But I have gold pieces right here, and he only needs to use one-third of his powers for the day!" and his secretary says "But he wants to have more powers, that's why he's off killing goblins." You would think "Why? Hes already making money by being a doctor!" A 1st-level cleric who leaves his village to go off adventuring would be vilified for abandoning his neighbors.

Let's go back to those goblins, let's say your local cleric gets killed and the goblins think "Oh, that town might be ripe for the picking now, they just lost their doctor." and so the six goblins who were living in that cave trundle down to your town, conveniently forgetting that a wizard lives in town. Again, assuming it's a 1st-level wizard who can only cast three spells a day, he potentially has a vast arsenal of weapons to help defend the town with: Charm Person, Burning Hands, Mage Armor, Magic Missile, Mount, Obscuring Mist, Sleep. And again, that's just off the top of my head. Your town has the equivalent of a gunslinging sheriff and he wears a pointy hat with stars.

So, given that D&D has these powerful archtypes, why isn't everybody trying to excel to become a cleric or wizard? Sure, sure, you want to tell me there's game balance and levels and whatever. I'm not talking about that! If D&D were a real world, there's no such thing as levels. In the real world, if somebody could instantly cure three people every day of their illnesses, broken bones, bruises or scrapes, with no long-term repercussions from either the injury or treatment, life expectancy would sky rocket! How many magic colleges exist in the Forgotten Realms? There's one described in every major city and there's even a country that's known for it's red wizard army! In Waterdeep, the rulers are all 30th-level clerics, paladins and wizards, but the ridiculousness of these levels is not limited to the Forgotten Realms. In Greyhawk the setting's central city has nine 20th-level wizards living in it and devoted to the prosperity of the city (and in later supplements there are more than nine of them).

More importantly, in a world where even very weak people can shoot magical energy from their fingertips and put others to sleep with a word and a nod, why is there never any progress? Why are the worlds of D&D perpetually stuck in a pre-Renaissance malaise? This was once the main reason why I stopped playing D&D, the static unchanging worlds feel frozen in time where nothing ever changes or nothing ever really happens.

This is also a real problem for me as a player because I tend to construct characters whose goal is to change things. I don't know how many times I've told the story of my mage-cleric who wanted to build mass transit for Waterdeep only to be hamhandedly stopped by the GM because he personally didn't think the setting should be changed. (This is actually something I have tried to do in every game of Forgotten Realms I've played in since, and the GM involved always prevented me from making progress on it because it would "change the game world" - bollocks to that, I say!) But realistically these thinkers and innovators have to exist in a world where magic is part and parcel of everyday living. This idea that the status quo needs to be maintained and NPCs will not like change is blinkered and stunted.

My 1st edition Waterdeep sourcebook has a whole chapter dedicated to the guilds of Waterdeep, there are 42 of them geared towards protecting their guildmembers and turning profits. If a single wizard comes along to one of these guilds and says "Hey, I would like some steady work improving your (guild focus) with my magic." and promptly starts improving business for several guild members, then there is not going to be a consortium of people attempting to stop the changes. Especially if the changes are profitable. And why hire several hundred gold pieces worth of guards and wagons to transport a few tons of goods when a skilled wizard can teleport the goods for half the price? The first reaction of competitors will not be "Let's kill all the wizards!" or "Let's make magic harder to use!" - it would be "Let's get our own wizard!"

There's no monopoly on magic. Power struggles and the segment of sovereign rulership that would resist change aside, society might not revolutionize automatically because of magic but change would be an eventuality. Some fictional magical histories last for hundreds or thousands of years and to assume that magic doesn't alter civilization out of the perpetual middle ages is just short-sighted. Our own Earth managed to have a dark ages that lasted for about 400 to 600 years, and that's without the benefit of magic.

ego booster rocket #1

Sometimes during a gaming session people will reminisce about games played in the past, and we will sit and listen to somebody share an anecdote about a game that was played previously even if we have already heard the story, even if everybody at the table was present at that particular event. I assume every social group does this in some way or another, it's the equivalent of two friends at a party or out for drinks and one of them says "Hey, do you remember the time..."

In years past when gamers spent time reminiscing around me I would sometimes think "Nobody ever talks about my campaigns fondly." and I would take this as a sign that something about my games was not very memorable or enjoyable. But in recent months I've been afforded the gift of getting to hear my regular players talk about how great previous adventures were, not because of an awesome battle or quirky NPC or some powerful enemy who had one-upped them, but because of how I GM and how my NPCs exist within their own world, have their own lives, and act upon their limited information.

Let me set the stage for you:

The players had been tracking a criminal organization from planet to planet and every time leaders of this group tried to interact with the PCs they got killed. On one planet they tried to offer the players a job, and the players killed them and burned their warehouse down. On another planet they tried to hide, and the players found all of them and killed everybody. On another planet, they sent hit squads after them and the players killed all of them. Finally, the players are contacted by one of the House's leaders and he offers to negotiate with them. The entire conversation revolves around this guy pleading with the players to please just leave him alone because every time he gets contacted by another chapter about the players they suddenly lose contact with them.

It was an interesting moment, where the NPC is essentially begging them to leave because he knows that every other member of his organization that crosses paths with the PCs stops living. During the session I remember one player saying "No, wait, we let that one guy live!" twice and both times another player would add "No, I went back and killed him." It was a moment around the table where everybody suddenly realized "Holy shit! They must think we're some elite assassination squad!" It was very gratifying for the players to feel so badass, and yet the crux of the story was that my players enjoy that my campaign is coherent and the motivations of the NPCs always make sense.

Something so simple, but I'm proud that I've reached this point as a GM.

the Random Esoteric Creature Generator

I wrote a review for the Random Esoteric Creature Generator by James Edward Raggi IV, you can read it by following this link.

The highlights: Amazing and invaluable! A real treasure for any GM who likes to keep their players guessing.

The Random Esoteric Creature Generator published by Goodman Games, $12.99