Solarpunk Traveller #1

 

I have a hard time considering running a Traveller game within the default setting because it is just so unrealistic. As I’ve already mentioned (in my four earlier Traveller posts, #1, #2, #3, and #4), the game is based on backwards-looking science and tries to recreate something like the British Empire in space. It’s fine if you are into that sort of thing, but I want something with more science fiction, less historical.

What do I want? What I am really trying to accomplish with these posts is to motivate someone to write a descent Traveller setting that I can then convince my Monday night gaming group to play, without me having to write it myself. If you are thinking of writing a forward-looking version of Traveller, please feel free to take any or all of what follows and incorporate it into your work. I want to play this game, not write it.

What is solarpunk? Like all fiction genera, solarpunk is ill-defined and means different things to different people, but it tends to cluster around a few core elements. I consider them to be:

Refusing pessimism: Solarpunk is not about accepting that all human existence must be miserable and dark. Instead, people can create societies that are functional and fair. Further, we can create technology that works for the benefit of people.

Sustainable technology: Solarpunk says that humans can create technologies that allow people to have a good life within these functional and fair societies. A lot of solarpunk focuses on renewable energy, but here we are talking about Traveller which assumes cheap and clean fusion power is easily available, so this is less of an issue.

Social equity: In order to have these fair and functional societies, we need to recognize the role of social equity. In my mind, this includes recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of all people. And we also have to recognize that wealth accumulation is a function of the rules of a society, and these are written by the collective will of the people.

The second issue with social equity is that we must recognize the fallacy of biological determinism (which I have posted about here). This becomes an even bigger issue when we realize that at relatively low Traveller Technology Levels people will be able to modifier the genetics of their progeny. So, for example, in my game Rubble and Ruin their are bad people who have intentionally created races of big, low-intelligence humans. Solarpunk Traveller is going to have to address this application of technology.

Do-it-yourself: Lastly is the idea that the ability to create and modify technology does not have to be controlled by oligarchs. Much of the idea that modern technology cannot be modified or repaired is created by corporate entities trying to force people to buy a new device rather than repair an old one.

This becomes critically important when you think about interstellar trade in a Traveller-like universe. In a Traveller universe, there are nearly infinite markets. You do not need to intentionally make a bad product to drive sales. In fact, if you want to sell something off-world, you need to have a reputation for being reliable and repairable.

I argue that DIY in the Traveller universe is the presence of transparency and technological standards. Transparency means that you have to say what things really are. No withholding important information. What is the thing made out of? What are the operating conditions under which it is intended to work? How is it designed and how does it work? And standards imply that others can build things that work with what you have built. If you make an electronic devise, I need to be able to know exactly what power supply it needs. We already do this on Earth. There is just a handful of electronic plugs and voltages that are supplied, and you need to make sure your electronic equipment conforms to those standards.

But more than that in Traveller. All your information technology needs to interoperate. Imagine not being ably to repair a starship because the navigation computer was made on Mora, and they use a different jump drive interface and the computer and the drive cannot function together. Now consider this for every two pieces of equipment that are supposed to work together. Imagine missiles fired from a starship that accidentally swing back and attack the firing ship because the targeting system uses the wrong measuring scale.

The most important thing that the Empire does is to keep the technology from one world able to operate on another. Any reader with a technology development background is likely say, “Of course, that is a massive and wildly important task”, while other readers are likely shaking their head and saying, “How trivial and boring.” In a sense, they are both correct. But most real conflict in a Third Imperium type world will come from conflicts over standards rather than over resources.

===== Getting Started =====

The Ground Rules. What am I keeping from the Third Imperium and what am I letting go?

The Map? Let’s start with the map. It is a silly, 2D hex-based map. I love it. When 2300 came out, everyone I knew loved the realistic 3D star map. Someone had already done the work of finding routes away from Earth that matched the space travel technology postulated by the game. It was great. But at the end of the day, for me, it neither enhanced play or immersion. I accept that some people will want a nice, modern 3D map, but I’m willing to not worry about it.

The Future History? What about the background? I’d like to keep the major events. The Ancients seeded many worlds 300,000 years ago. These scattered worlds have become the home to humans who have spread out across the nearby space. There are other alien races who have also developed space travel, and they are different from humans. That’s all works for me.

The Core Technology? Let’s keep it. Let’s keep the restriction that jump drives take a week to travel, independent of the distance they go. This is a great mechanic and it leads to an interesting situation where travel between human communities is once again long and dangerous. Let’s also keep the important fact that there is no faster way to communicate between worlds than to travel there.

Psionics? I vote no. I was there in the 1970s. Many, many people truly believed that psionics were a real thing and they were just about to become understood. This was a traditional that traced back to the dawn of science fiction. People honestly believed that magic was a real thing that we just didn’t yet understand—but it was coming soon. This hasn’t aged well and I think we can let them go. (As an aside, you find psi powers in all hard sci fi games of that time, Morrow Project, Aftermath, all of them.)

But we are going to need to add a modern understanding of biotechnology. And we will need to modernize the information technology. But those are separate issues.

For now, I think I am going to stop this here. I have a start. The next post will start with what I think a solarpunk Third Emporium will look like—or at least, what issues we need to consider. In till then, as always thank you for taking the time to read this and I always welcome comments, questions, or concerns in the comments below.

Putting the Hurt on Player Characters: the Early Years of HP

 

TL;DR. OSR style play captures one view of early gaming, but there are others. Here I explore damage systems in the early years of tabletop RPGs. It goes a lot deeper than just hit points and critical hit tables. We take a short look at the explosion of damage systems in the late 1970s and early 1980s including Runequest, Morrow Project, and Fringeworthy.

 Background. While scrolling along my social media feed I saw a Reddit post where an individual thought “hit points were too crude a system” and wondered if there was anything else you could do in a TTRPG. And I thought, “I bet there are people who would be interested to learn about all the neat damage systems people experimented with in the early days of gaming.

This is just my opinion, but I think the global gaming community is highly fragmented and that there are clusters of people who have been quietly playing together for years and that with the rapid expansion of 5e players over the last several years, many people who are new to the hobby don’t know what’s going on in these “quiet little corners”. Of all the problems facing the world today, this is not a big one—but it is one that I can spend a rainy Sunday morning chipping away at.

What follows is my recollection of the key points in the development of damage systems within the corner of the gaming world that I sit in. It is not a scholarly exploration, but rather a first-person recollection of the path I took. It is more nuanced than you might think.

Earliest History. Hit points coming into TTRPGs through wargames. A player would have a unit of soldiers and as it was attacked, they would remove figures from the unit to reflect the damage taken. If there were five soldiers here and two were injured or killed, two figures would be removed leaving only three in play. When non-human monsters and super powered heroes were introduced, they would have “hit points” that would be lost as they were damaged. The figure would stay on the board until all hit points were lost, then it would be removed. (Note also that some early TTRPGs called the characters “figures”.)

My First Bifurcation. Two different ideas on how to make damage more interesting appeared in my life at about the same time. Recall that in the late 1970s, people living in rural communities didn’t learn about things as quickly as they came out, one idea might be older than another, but it still might not reach a kid living in the redwoods before an earlier idea does. But the two ideas are critical hit tables and damage locations.

Crit Tables. Critical hit tables first appeared in my life in the Arduin Grimoire. When a special hit was scored—a critical hit—the player would roll d100 and the GM would read off a table of special hits. These were famously graphic.

What is important here is that it gave a location that was hit, a special description, and bonus damage that should be rolled, along with permanent effects—like three fingers were cut off.  In another part of the country, the folks at Iron Crown Enterprises were devolving the “Law” system. The Law system (Arms Law, Claw Law, and Spell Law) where a complex set of critical hit tables which could be used with “any game system” and would give a much wider variety of damage effects, all carefully tuned to match the weapon or body part used in the attack. This went on to become Rolemaster.

But no matter how complex these systems got, there was always just one pool of Hit Points that damage came out of. In Arduin, you could lose a random percentage of your arm, you will die in 1d3 turns, but you also took an additional 4d6 damage. This contrasts with damage by location.

Damage by Location. As early as 1978 Runequest had the now classic seven hit location system. Each arm and leg was a location, the head (of course) and then the torso was divided into chest and abdomen. Each location had its own armor and hit points. In most versions of this system, a character also has Total Hit Points. It was your Total HP which would determine the HP for each location.

When a character was hit, a d20 would be rolled to determine location. The system originated with people who were familiar with the Society for Create Anachronism (SCA) which came into being in the same town as Runequest, and at about the same time. So, in true SCA style there was a Melee hit location table which was biased towards hitting limbs and a missile weapons table that was biased towards hitting the torso—these biases reflect the reality of the different weapon types. Bows and thrown weapons are more likely to hit you in the torso and swords and axes are more likely to hit your limbs.

This system used “absorbing” armor. So, you would roll to hit—if a hit was scored, you’d roll location and damage. The armor on the location hit would be subtracted from the damage and whatever is left over would be subtracted from both the character’s Total HP and the hit location’s HP. There were effects for what happened when a location went to zero. For example, you would lose the use of a leg when it went to zero, but you would be knocked out if it was your head.  And more rules for large amounts of damage etc.

The Morrow Project. A few years later the Morrow Project took this idea further. In this game, weapons did a fixed amount of damage and what was really important was where you were hit.

The first spreadsheet I ever made was to handle the damage location calculations for Morrow Project. (I still have a hard copy of it printed in dot matrix in my files.) The game was lots of fun and character generation and combat was fast and easy—except for all the calculations for each location’s HP. Once that was done, you were golden.

Aside from fixed damage, the system had another innovation. The human torso was broken into four “zones” based on how dangerous it was to get shot there. Zone 1 was deadly. Right in the center of the torso, nothing to hit but the things keeping a character alive—heart, lungs etc. Each zone had an instant kill percentage based on the damage taken. It didn’t matter how many HP you had, a bullet to the heart would kill you.

Psi World. This was an innovative game that is under appreciated in many circles and so I thought I would give it a little “shout out” here. It had a moderately complex HP calculation system where you would compute the number of dice to roll based on stats and it also incorporated the seven hit locations of Runequest.

One thing to note is that in all (or at least all I can remember) of the damage by location systems, characters did not gain HP during play. You could get better at avoiding damage (with improved parrying skills, for example) or get better armor, but you didn’t really get tougher as play went on. Beginning characters and experienced characters can stand side-by-side in fights and both survive—of course, the experienced characters would have to look out for the noobs, but it was not just “mooks die fast”.

Fringeworthy. A year or so after Morrow Project hit, Tri Tac dropped Fringeworthy. This game pushed “damage by location” to its logical limit. When a location was hit, there was a “damage path”.

If I’m remembering it correctly, you would read Arm 1,3 as “the first 3 HP are flesh, then 6 HP for bone (being the clavicle) then 2 more HP of flesh”. Any damage beyond 11 blowing through and not being counted. The Fringworthy setting was great and well ahead of its time—it was very much like the TV series Stargate. But the damage system was too much even for a simulationist like me. The one time I ran the Fringeworthy world, it was with GURPS rules. It was just easier that way.

Ending Thoughts. I mentioned that the world of TTRPGs is fragmented and that there are all these quiet little groups. Well, Runequest and Rolemaster are still going strong. I saw a new book for it my feed just before I sat down to write this. Morrow Project has followers, and I suspect so does the Law series.

But what is funny to me is that I was always a “damage by location” guy. I played games like Mythras and (of course) Rubble and Ruin. The damage by location system gives a game realism. Stories don’t have to be cinematic, in fact, most stories shouldn’t be. But in my current Work in Progress, something I’m calling Rustic Fantasy, I’ve gone back to total HP and a critical hit table. But with a modern difference. Someone and I don’t know who, but I first encountered it in Chaosium’s Magic World, invented the Major Wound threshold. This idea is that small wounds are just “lost HP”, but a single large wound is treated differently. What is nice about this, is that you still have the feel of real danger in combat—it is not just a Conan-esque, happy frolic at the expense of a bunch of mooks—but it is also simpler to play.

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this post and I invite you to post any questions or comments below.

 

Ready Gamer One, the Other Old School Gaming …

TL;DR. I’ve already mentioned that when I was a kid, we were not really fond of corporate backed game design, but as I think about it, there is more going on here than meets the eye. Just as biological organisms evolve over time, so have TTRPGs. And there are two branches of gaming evolution which trace their origins to the 1970s. The first is nowadays called OSR which stims from D&D and licensed products. And the second is represented by the d100 family of games which emerges from Runequest. This second branch has a very different OSR feel, but it is still going strong. The games of this family use the idea of “homebrew” as a positive element of gaming, rather than a negative.

Old School Two: Make the game follow your vision, not the vision which provides the greatest profit to the corporate IP holders.

 

Background Links. I’ve already talked about how in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as Northern California gamers, my friends and I were not big fans of corporate-sponsored games. If a game was published by TSR, it had to work harder for our acceptance. They were the mega-corp of gaming just as cyberpunk was taking form. Here are the links to my old posts on this.

Old-school Leftcoast Gaming. 

Magic systems. 

I think this attitude has had an important influence on the development of TTRPGs over the last half century, an influence that can still be seen in games today.

But, hang-on kids, our writer is a science nerd, and he’s going to make his point in his own way.

A Primer on Evolutionary Biology. Stay with me, I think this is important. When most people think of biological evolution, I suspect they think about mammalian evolution, or really almost any large, multicellular eukaryotic organism’s evolution. There is a slow change of a complex organism as it adapts to changing environment. Populations get isolated and eventually change until one population is different enough from the other that they are considered separate species. The normal stuff that most people learn in Highschool. There is a nice wiki page on it.

But there is another kind of evolution. Something called reticulate evolution (reticulate means basically “net like”). This is when two or more organisms merge large parts of their genetic material and create something new. It also has a nice wiki page, but it is shorter.

Complex multicellular organisms have a really hard time experiencing reticulate evolution. This is because developmental biology is really highly tuned. The slightest mistake can lead to a completely dysfunctional organism.  Our developmental programming locks us into a ridged state where we can only make tiny, little changes.

But single celled bacteria don’t have this limitation. They can change their genetic code wildly and still be a viable cell. Bacteria of very different linages—different species—even further apart—like to swap genes with the folks the met, at least from time to time. And this lets them explore a much wider range of living states.

In a sense, this is exactly what happens with TTRPGs.

Copyleft. In the 1980s, particularly in Boston and the Pacific Northwest, there was a strong sentiment against copyrights. Particularly with software. This is when we see the Free Software movement and the Berkely BSD license and so much more. This would eventually lead to modern open-source software and Linux and so much more. I suspect, but I don’t know, that it is even the earliest development in the modern Open Science movement.

So as a teenager in Northern California, this was a real thing. We understood that copyright, as it is usually represented, was a corporate thing. Cyberpunk was king, and copyright is what the corps do, copyleft is what the punks do.

And this showed in out TTRPGs!

Early Leftcoast Games. The first real Leftcoast game (that I can think of) was the Arduin Grimoire. But, let’s be honest. It was never a stand-alone game. It didn’t have enough rules. It was always meant as an extension for D&D. It was, in effect, a massive homebrew. You could grab bits and pieces that you liked and add them to your game. The background tables, of course. Kill Kitties, maybe. Phraint, sure.

And Arduin’s author David Hargrave famously had a falling out with the other big name of Northern California gaming Greg Stafford (who I never met). But both these authors worked in a much more left-leaning environment than our corporate friends at TSR.

And their games have evolved differently.

Evolution of Games. We can make an interesting comparison between the ways different games evolve. Early D&D (until it was bought by the Leftcoast company, Wizards of the Coast) was controlled by an American Midwest corporation that locked the game into a profit-driven evolution that resembles that of multicellular eukaryotes. Slow, structured change with minor variants being tested to determine their profitability. Those that win move on and those that fail are abandoned.

Hargrave’s work hasn’t moved on much—reasons. But Stafford’s games, and those published by his Bay Area company, Chaosium, still represent one of the largest, most popular family of games in the world.

“But Richard,” I hear you yell, “The d100 games represent hundreds of different games, published by countless small and mid-sized gaming companies. They don’t represent any ‘one thing’.”

And that is because the d100 games have always been advancing with reticulate evolution. Games like Call of Cthulhu and DragonBane and Mythras at first blush look to be completely different (and all appear different from my Rubble and Ruin). But they are not. With the d100 world of games, we take parts that we like and kludge them together into a functioning system. If you look at Basic Roleplaying  (The Big Yellow Book) it has countless optional rules that are included or excluded as the GM sees fit. And over time, more and more options have appeared.

But the underlying skill-based structure remains unchanged. Characters are not forced into roles based on “class” but rather develop organically with skills going up during play as independent of any corporate-ordained structure.

The Second Old School. I have a WIP, a new game I’m putting together. I call it Rustic Fantasy and it is the game I wish I had in 1980. The rules are a combination of a number of open RPGs, most are ORC Licensed, including Mythras Imperative, BRP, and Open Quest. And I would say this game is strongly in the second Old Scholl.

In the second Old School, you take the parts of all the games that you have, and you assemble something new and unique. Frequently you are creating a world and the rules that go with it. You, as a GM and invested players, are trying to fulfill a vision and make that vision come alive.

The current best example, in my mind, is DragonBane. This game is currently hot. I bought my copy at a local, independent bookstore. Didn’t need to special order it from my FLAG.

But it is just a form of Basic Roleplaying that has undergone decades of reticulate evolution. They’ve divided skills by five and added D&D “Advantage” and “Disadvantage” on rolls. And they have added new elements to match their vision. It’s a great game. A buddy of mine is running it on Monday nights and I’m really enjoying it. It is one strand of a net of games that are now and have always been popular.

Homebrew is Old School. Some folks use the term “homebrew” in a derogatory way to refer to games that are not run according to the rules written and approved by the corporate owners of the intellectual properties of a given game. I argue that this is where “the art” is. This is where the creativity comes in. Corporate games are so automatable that if you want to experience D&D 5e you can go play Baldur’s Gate. To me, the interesting part of the game is when you start changing the mechanics to reflect a different imagined reality.

Old School Two: Make the game follow your vision, not the vision that provides the greatest profit to a corporation.

We’ve been doing it since the dawn of gaming. It’s popular. It’s fun. If you haven’t, give it a try.

As always, thanks for reading my posts and I invite comments and questions below.

 

A Little TTRPG relief from this Crazy World

 TL;DR. I drew some maps that I think are neat, and I’ve added some text describing a low-key fantasy setting that could be used as a starting point for something like an OSR Dragonbane or Mythras game or could act as a center point for either a low-stakes politics or cozy fantasy campaign.

 

I’ve been kind of quiet for a while, so I wanted to show you one of the things I’ve been working on. It is the type of fantasy setting my friends and I would have played in in the late 1970s. Would would have used Runequest rules and would have had much worse maps. Enjoy.

Gevensthorp is a small, fantasy settlement located on the shore below some highlands at the end of a long, narrow bay. It is (at first glance) a peaceful place, but it is secretly brimming with low-key political, cozy, or even OSR fantasy adventure—depending on how you want to play it.

1. The Thorp

Along a road that connects the bustling village of Redworthy and the villages, castle, and mines on the northern headlands, there is a small settlement composed of a few stone houses built from the obvious remains of an old fortification.

A. The Blemished Boar. Run by Geven the Younger (who is now in his 40s) and his wife and children, this is a small inn/tavern/roadhouse that is always busier than it should be.

B. The Houses. Across the road, there is a row of stone houses. The northernmost house is the home and shop of Geven the Elder, an accomplished blacksmith.

 All the other homes are occupied by his children and their families and friends.

C. Farms. Geven’s oldest daughter and her family manage a small farm which doesn’t provide enough to feed the whole community, but it does well for its size.

D. The Old Bridge. At the south end of the settlement is an ancient stone bridge built in the style of the Old Empire with a small two-story toll booth and home built on one side. There hasn’t been a toll in generations, but the home is usually occupied.

Secrets.

1. The oldest, and best kept secret is that Geven the Elder was once the armorer to the King and his wife was the Captain of the Queen’s Guard. They eloped and ran off together and settled in this out of the way corner where they lived a peaceful life and raised their family. Their youngest daughter, Crystal, still lives at home and has no idea of her parents’ past.

Occasionally, strangers still come to call and once a year or so Geven the Elder will craft a sword for one of them. The family lives a rustic life, but they never seem to want for money.

2. Just south of the village there are trails which head up into the highlands. They go to some old ruins, but they also connect across the highlands to the Eastmark. Although there is currently no open hostilities with the Eastmark, they are not part of the kingdom and trade with them is regulated. None the less, every week or so, a small pack train of mules comes from the mines laden with ores. These travelers stay the night at the Blemished Boar, and in the morning head into the highlands. When they return, they are usually loaded with crates and barrels.

2. The Tower of Laricus the Wise. A crumbling old castle, with the great hall and main tower burnt, the thin, outer walls in ruins, is just of the highland trail. This is the home of two mysterious, old wizards and their apprentices.

3. Chestnut Springs. A magical hot spring, and ancient and sacred pool, and a small grove of spirit-infested oaks form an unusual temple at the headwaters of the stream.

Three possible sites of adventure are just north of the settlement.

4. The Long Barrow. Long before the arrival of the Old Empire, which itself was long ago, someone built a massive stone structure and covered it with earth. Why? And what is inside? Maybe a small dungeon. Maybe a necromancer’s lair.

5. The Sea Cave. A deep, sea cave is cut right at the waterline. Is it the home of a sea hag, or some other creature? Have pirates built a secret lair to hold their treasure?

6. The Abandoned Toll-Bridge. Although the bridge is crossed weekly by pack trains, and once or twice a day by legitimate foot traffic, it is possible that the abandoned toll-house has attracted visitors. Maybe brigands looking to lay low or maybe a goblin or orc looking for trouble.

 1A. The Blemished Boar.

To the trained eye, the barn of the Blemished Boar was once a royal long house. But those style of structures fell out of use at least a century ago. Now it is just a well-made stone barn. Likewise, the unusually strong outer wall is clearly the remnant of an even older fortification. Most evenings the Boar is crowded with locals and a few guests. It is rare that there are more than half a dozen people staying the night, but it is not uncommon for folks to travel the few miles from Redworthy just to enjoy a visiting entertainer or a good batch of local ale.

 2. Tower of Laricus the Wise.

Laricus the Wise and the School of Esoteric Magic. A short walk from Genensthorp is the burnt out remains of a castle. The structure was a lightly fortified house, perhaps as recently as a century ago, but now the partially destroyed building is the home of several eccentric spell casters.

Laricus the Wise is an ancient man and a master of arcane magic. He may have an identical twin brother Daricus, or he might have a personality disorder. Reports differ. Either way, they never physically leave their tower. Instead, they spend their time exploring the mysteries of the Ethereal plane and those existences that can be found beyond it.

They maintain a small compliment of students who are mostly self-teaching themselves magic, but they do receive an hour or two of instruction from the master’s every week or so. In exchange, they have access to some of the items the masters collected before retreating into their tower. Generally, the students like the arrangement and are loyal to their teacher (or teachers).

A. Wizards Tower. When the masters hold class, they do so on the lower floor of the tower. The upper two floors are windowless and unseen by anyone other than the wizards. The lower floor has a chained library, a permanent magic circle and other items useful for learning magic.

B. Guest Tower. The wizard’s advice is often sought by outsiders, and the base of a small tower survives and has been converted to a guest room.

C. Tall-Tower Cellar. The main structure was once a tall tower next to the great hall. Both structures burnt a long time ago, leaving the hollow, stone shell which extends several floors upward and the cellar or ground level which was made completely of stone. The base of the tall tower has the only surviving entrance and the heavily vaulted room has been converted to a meeting room. Since the Masters will only see people (typically) one morning a week, when visitors arrive, they are usually first met by the students. And this is the space where they meet them.

D. The Kitchen. Once the kitchen for the entire castle, this space is now the common area for the students. They prepare their own meals, manage their own supplies, and generally use this space as their common room.

E. The Museum. The wizards have a bunch of stuff that is stored in this central space. Nothing of epic-power, but lots of small items that are useful in understanding the nature of both the physical and magical worlds. The students call it the museum and are often in here searching for clues to understand this or that rune or arcane formula.

F. Student Space. Once specialized storage areas for the castle, these small, stone-vaulted chambers are now the sleeping and practicing spaces for the students. Typically there are three to eight people studying magic here and the level of harmony withing the student population often reflects how crowded these spaces are.

G. Kitchen Cellar. Under the kitchen there is a dark and cool cellar that was formerly used to store food for the castle. The first section is still used for this purpose, but the students have taken over the back sections to serve as additional practice space.

 

3. Chestnut Springs

Nestled on the slopes up to the highlands, in a small and sheltered valley, there is a grove of ancient oak trees partially surrounding a mystical hot spring and a sacred chestnut tree. The site was once popular for the healing properties of its spring water, but the scattered ruins nearby attest to the decline in visitors over the last few decades. There are typically one or two clerics who tend to this holy place and depending on their nature, they may also be students of the wizards just down the trail.

A. The Long House. Built of salvaged stone, but in a style usually reserved for the people of the north, the long house accommodates both the clerics and any guests.  It can easily accept seven guests but is seldom called upon to do so anymore.

B. The Chestnut Pool. An ancient chestnut tree sits on a small (likely artificial) island in the center of a pool feed by two aggressive hot springs and partially enclosed by the old oaks. The site is understood to connect directly to the divine, but only the most devout will enter the upper pool due to its heat.

C. The Pool. During the centuries that the Old Empire ruled, a large wading pool was built. Here, the water has cooled enough that it can be enjoyed by those seeking healing or spiritual growth.

D. Pixie Pool. Small, natural pools have formed from the out-flow of the main pool. Some people believe that this site attracts pixies who live in the oaks, but others disagree. Either way, they are called the Pixie Pools.

The remaining sites are left undefined so that GMs can customize the location for their own games.

As always, if you have read this far, I thank you for your time and welcome any comments or questions below.

Rustic Roleplaying: Runequest before Glorantha

Tl;DR. An old guy writes a bit about playing Runequest in the late 1970s,early 1980s. He describes the game as having “organic character growth”.

 

People seem to be interested in reading about what my friends and I were doing with our RPGs “back in the day”, so I thought I would write a few words about a game we liked, and about what we played while others were in being “old school”.

Call of Cthulhu was first published in 1981 and by 1982 my mother was dying of cancer, I was a nerdy teenager, my social life and gaming world was shifting and everything in my life around then can be broken into “before mom passed” and “after she passed”. And one of the last things before mom passed was “Will’s Runequest game”.  

There were a few stores in the next town over that would have a rack or two of roleplaying books, and whenever I could I’d head over to one or the other and search out new and exciting things. This was before the advent of the information age. There was no way for me to know what games were coming, or even what games already existed, except what was on these racks. I was only occasionally able to afford gaming magazines, and it would be another few years before I discovered Berkley Games down in the Bay Area—which I might get to once a year if I was lucky. So I just discovered games on these racks.

And I still have a flash memory of discovering Runequest. There was a short-lived hobby store in Old Town (the tourist part of the city of Eureka) and it was a beautiful sunny day—so it must have been summer—it only rains once a year in Humboldt County, starting in October and ending in April—so if it was sunny, it was summer. In one of those old, rotating magazine racks, just below a sealed plastic bag containing White Bear and Red Moon, which was a military board game and therefore definitely of no interest to teenaged me, was the original, staple-bound Runequest.

I remember it took me a while to save up/acquire enough money to buy it. My memory was that it took forever, so realistically it was probable only a week or two. But I got it. Still have most of it. Here’s a picture of what is left.

An aside about my other copy. Greg Stafford is said to have bought the first copy of D&D directly from Gary Gygax, don’t know if it is true or not, but I’ve heard that. But Chaosium was definitely an early player in the RPG world and is an old and major company. But Ken St. Andre did publish the second ever RPG, Tunnels and Trolls. And when he was downsizing his life a few years ago, he sold a lot of old things. He was sharing parts of his collection of memorabilia from the origins of this hobby. And I bought Ken St. Andre’s original copy of Runequest. And I think that is a neat little piece of gaming history.

Here is a picture of the inside. I asked, and he graciously agreed to sign it for me. (Thanks again Trollfather—for everything you have done.)

Will’s Runequest Game. Chaosium has re-released this version as Runequest Classic, so if you want, you can pick up your own copy cheap. By modern standards it’s not a complete game and a lot of what it is lacking is what made Will’s game so much fun. Will Handrich was my best friend for several years there (I was basically his nerdy side kick). He was a classic working-class intellectual. Studied languages, read the classics, and played classical music on both piano and recorders. He passed too early a few years ago. Eventually he became deeply involved in the Society for Creative Anachronisms and move on from being an avid TTRPG player, but not before this one campaign.

The first edition of Runequest missed one thing. One important thing. There was no pre-game character development. It had a great combat system, very nicely reflecting SCA combat—the Society for Creative Anachronisms was developing just walking distance from Chaosium down in Berkley and Oakland. It had a metaphysics based on “real world” animism. Characters could become priests or priestesses, shaman, Runelords, all sorts of wonderful things. But characters started as, what we would today call, “new adults”. You had your attributes, your base skills, but nothing more.

Further, although it was implied, Staford’s famous world of Glorantha wasn’t explicitly in the book. It was generic. As a GM you were to create your own Bronze Age world. Later, I would run mine, Telemeta, for several years. If Will named his, I don’t remember.

Organic Character Progression. Runequest is a skills-based game. No classes. No races. Just roll up a person, note their starting skill percentages and drop into the world.

“Hey, there are bandits camped down by the river. We’re going to attack their camp and drive them off before then rob the town.” And off your characters go.

The skills you used in play were the skills that you rolled to improve at the end of the session. And as they improved, you were more likely to use them in the next session. Characters didn’t start as fighters or thieves; they evolved into them. I wanted a sneaky thief but just couldn’t get one. I would miss my sneaking rolls and get into fights. My characters became pretty competent fighters, but never sneaky.

In D&D I always tried to play Magic Users (the old name for wizards). In Runequest I could never get there. My best character eventually learned a little Battle Magic from a spirit, but never any deep magical secrets, but she got wicked-good with a staff.

Characters over Roles. For me, this was where characters started taking over from roles. (A wrote about roles before characters here.) This character wants to become a magic user, so whenever there is anything happening that might help me down that path, the character is up in front leading the way.

“Let’s try and figure out what these old scrolls say.”

“Let’s investigate this ancient magical site.”

If you had a role you wanted your character to develop into, and since skills mostly only improved by using them, you had to drive your character’s story towards doing things that would allow your character to become the person you want them to be.

It was great fun in-play. Given that we were all “new adults” at the time, it was easy for us to accept untrained characters. And I think “driving your story towards doing things that allow you to improve the skills you want to become good at” is actually solid life advice here in the real world.

As always thank you for taking the time to read this, and I always invite you to leave any comments or questions below.

 

 

Old-school, Left Coast Gaming

 

TL;DR: My lived-experience as a young, Northern California gamer in the late 1970s and early 1980s did not venerate TSR and their licensees but rather vilified their corporate practices while still playing a few of their products.

 

What now? I was doom scrolling the other day when I saw images of long, rantie posts by someone claiming to have been a mover-and-shaker in the early days of gaming. The individual was going on espousing how he hated modern, politically Left, “woke” game publishing and that in the “old days” gamers of all backgrounds got along fine working for “Christian” corporations. This was not my experience, so I thought I should document my relationship with published modules and publishing companies.

Backstory.  I started playing D&D in the 1970s and moved on to other TTRPGs by the early 1980s and have been a life-long gamer, and more recently even producing some small content. Here, I will jot a few paragraphs of my lived-experience just because it was different from that of this other person.

Left-coast boy. I self-identify as being from the Left Coast. That is, from a rural, coastal California town with strong ties to the political Left. (After I left my home town, I believe they were the first city in the US to have a Green Party majority on the city council.) I am definitely what the political Right would call “woke”. Have been all my life. Never regretted it. And I’ve been playing table-top Roleplaying games for the last half century.

Early D&D. I had an Eric Holmes Basic D&D set that did not come with a gaming module, instead I had what Google tells me where Dungeon Geomorphs. It was a set of tiles you could mix-and-match to create mega dungeons. I don’t think I ever used them but played around with them when I was bored.

We had the idea that you were supposed to come up with your own adventures. At that time, I looked down on pre-written adventures. The idea was that you were supposed to create your own adventures. (And I was the worst of snobby nerds as a teenager.)

We played a lot of D&D until about 1981 or 82, when we switched over to other games, but TSR sanctioned adventures were never a big thing for us. I am just now running B2 Keep on the Borderlands for the first time in my life. I bought a pdf a few months ago and have converted it to Mongoose Legend. I have set up a world with B2, B5 Horror on the Hill, and U1 Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh (Here is an overview of what I’m running, for those who care). My current group has just finished exploring the haunted house in Saltmarsh and are heading off to rescue a missing NPC from the Caves of Chaos in B2. This is –almost – the first time I’ve ever touched the modules. We didn’t play “corporate made” adventures. We made our own.

Almost.

Early Module Experiences. My brother James would buy some Judges Guild modules and start them, but we never got very far. He had Judges Guild’s Tegel Manor and we started it. We maybe got two or three adventures in. The problem was the architecture. It came with a large, fold-out map that was really cool, but there was no rhythm or reason for the layout of the building. It was a dungeon that was supposed to be a building. We loved the big map, but we couldn’t get over the implausibility of the building. Anyway, we drifted away from that.

And then there was the time we started U1, Saltmarsh. I think Will Handrich was running it. I know we were using AD&D. We had a largish group and we encountered kobolds setting traps on the way to the haunted house. We played one or two sessions but never got in the building.

There were two modules that we did like. T1 The Village of Hommlet and Apple Lane. Both of these modules provided a base for your adventures that you could drop into whatever dungeon you were planning.  They each did get a little bit of play in my early days. Of course, Apple Lane is for Runequest.

Somewhere along in here—and I forget exactly when—news reached us that TSR had sued our beloved Arduin Grimoire.  The word was that Hargrave had to go through and remove the words “Dungeons and Dragons” from the text of his books. So he did and replaced it with “Other Games”. I have a memory of seeing one of these later versions and—this was before computer typesetting—there was white space on either side of the words. I’ve tried to find this to check that the memory is true, but I don’t have my old Hargrave books, and I don’t know what happened to my brother’s copies when he passed. (So, it might not be true.)

But true or not, that did change my view of TSR. From then on, they were the evil corporation—just like in the emerging cyberpunk stories of the time. Myself, and many of my friends, viewed them as corporate bad guys out to make a quick buck. The fact that they ended up being gutted by a multinational toy company matches my expectations.

Mid-1980s. By the time we got to the mid-1980s I was active in a gaming club at the local university (which, last time I looked, it is still running). We would meet on Friday night in a university building and there would frequently be around six different games running. We would write on a blackboard whose games were running that night, what room each game was in, and if it was accepting new players.

I only have two memories of anyone ever running a published module. I could be wrong, I was deep into Aftermath at the time, and not attending too closely, but there was one time when a fellow ran Snakepipe Hollow over the summer—I didn’t get to play, but I heard it was fun. And one night we played a Top Secret one-shot.

Late 1980s. In the late 1980s I moved to Carbondale Illinois for graduate school. I might as well have been moving to a different world. Gaming here was very different. We also had a gaming club—it met on Saturdays—and you could float between a multitude of different games. But Judges Guild, which had been headquartered just a few hours away, had (apparently) just gone out of business and every used bookstore in town had three or four boxes of various Judges Guild products, still wrapped, at massively reduced prices. One of the shop owners told me that someone had traveled all over the region selling full boxes of books, and he had bought three.

It was here that I got a copy of Ravenscrag. Can not recommend this module enough! If I had had it back in my D&D days, it would have totally changed my relationship with pre-made adventures… but I didn’t. I still haven’t had a chance to play it.   

In summery. Myself, and I think many of my West Coast friends, did not have our gaming experiences driven by the products coming out of the Midwest publishing houses. We would occasionally shift through published adventures for good ideas we could add to our own works, but in general we created our own adventures and, for the most part, our own worlds.

Thank you for reading this far. If you found this interesting, I have a few other posts related to my early gaming experiences you might enjoy. As always, please feel free to leave questions or comments below.

Roleplaying before Character Playing

Same Revisited

Why is combat in my games is so boring! And how do I fix it.

I already know the answer. Once upon a time, a long time ago I would run Aftermath games and I would, easily, have a dozen people at the table, all of them paying close attention during fight sequences. Everyone would be fully engaged, and a good time was had by most--at least they would come back next week for more.

That was back in the 1980s and maybe I was just a better GM back then, but considering I was primarily an anti-social nerd, that seems unlikely. So, after careful consideration I've determined that I must have run a game that was more fun to play. I've looked back and given this a lot of thought, and I think I know what's missing.

Simultaneous or interfaced action. Modern games (at least the ones I play) tend to model cinematic action.  Take a DnD 5e game. Combat runs like a MCU movie. 

Now it is the Barbarian's turn. All attention is focused on that character. They take an action, and a bonus action, and this triggers a response from their opponent which has another action… then they have a magic effect which triggers that other thing. Then attention shifts to the next superhero--sorry, I mean the next character. 

And we cycle through everyone in the fight in a given order, Each character getting the attention for an amount of time based on their attributes/class features/magic powers. It's cinematic. Literally, it is just like a movie. But when my character isn't the center of attention, it can be a little boring. And it’s not particularly realistic. Combat should be a chaotic mess with people's plans constantly shifting and everyone constantly in motion.

And Aftermath did that very well.

Aftermath! During the 1980s, I was the Aftermath guy. We had a university gaming club with several dozen members. People coming and going. Games starting and ending. And one of the constants was Rich's Aftermath game. It was basically Rubble and Ruin but with very complex game mechanics.

I mean really complex, simulationist mechanics with lots of number that feed into other numbers, and everything had a three letter abbreviation. MNA was maximum number of actions and BDG was bullet damage group and PCA was phases consumed in action. And more and more…

And there was a core group of players who enjoyed it. They came back week after week for years. But most of these players were not math nerds. I was. As the GM I would handle all the math in my head. There was one or two other regular players who would follow along and point out when I made a mistake. But most of the regular players did need to know all the intricacies of the mechanics—they could just follow the action of the story and figure out what they wanted their character to do.  

And there were many other people who would play if something happened and their favorite game was canceled, and there were others who just dropped by. Now I have never been a great GM, but I did have fun people in the game, so maybe that was why people kept coming back. But I also think it is because when combat broke out, and it almost always did, it was interesting and fun to play. Because action happened simultaneously. 

Phases and Phases Consumed in Action. In an Aftermath Combat Round, characters had three numbers, Base Action Phase, Maximum Number of Actions, and Phases Consumed per Action. When a group of people are fighting, you would start with the highest Base Action Phase and count down. Each character had a number of actions they can perform in a round, and each of their actions were interlaced with the other combatants. 

Consider Albert who starts at Phase 15 and get three Actions. Each of his actions take 5 Phases. (That’s BAP /MNA, round down, or 15/3=5.)  Likewise, Bob starts at Phase12, but he gets 4 Actions. Say they are Each using melee weapons which get one attack per Action. Albert will declare his first action on Phase 15, and resolve it on Phase 13 (halfway through the action). He'll make his first attack roll before Bob even starts. But Bob starts on 12 and his actions only take 3 phases (12/4=3). His attacks will be resolved the phase after he declares them. So on phase 11 Bob resolves his first attack and the following phase Albert declares his second action. Bob gets more actions but he starts slower. Albert gets an initial edge, but once Bob starts going, he’ll grind out attacks. Now scale this to a table full of players fighting a large number of bad guys and you get an exciting evening of play.

Lots of Numbers. One of the reasons this worked is that Aftermath had two primary statistics that related to a character’s swiftness. The first was Speed. Literally, just how fast the character could move their body. Speed was on a scale of (roughly) 1 to 40, divide it by two (rounding up) and that’s your Base Action Phase. Characters also had a “Dexterity” attribute which determined their hand-eye coordination and the like. This stat would generate the maximum number of actions they could take in a round. This would typically yield a value from 2 to 5 with 2 or 3 being the most common.

The games I play these days don’t have as many numbers kicking around, and for the Aftermath approach to be interesting, there needs to be an offset. Sometimes two characters will be going on the same phase, but not often, and certainly not all the time.

Solution. Most modern D100 games, Mythras, Mongoose Legend, OpenQuest , Classic Fantasy, and it’s likely even buried in Basic Roleplaying, there is a mechanic for the maximum number of actions a character gets in a combat round. This is a simple look-up based on the character’s DEX and (interestingly) it runs from 1 to 5 with 2 or 3 as the most common. We don’t have a second number for Speed, but we don’t really need it. Let’s just say there are 12 phases per round. (There is a neat history going back thousands of years as to why we would pick 12—basically it divides by whole numbers into whole numbers.)

Here is a table of when each character gets an action based on their Maximum Number of Actions.

"But Richard", he screams in his best Jenna Moreci voice. The problem of always starting on the same phase is that now all the characters with 3 actions will be declaring their actions at the same time and then resolving them at the same time. But! We have a lot of characters—at least at my table—who like to use two weapons while others go sword and shield. So now you have characters that get one attack per action versus others that get two attacks.

Why wouldn’t I always take two weapons and get the most attack rolls? Because now there are Free Phase Actions. These are little shifts—moving towards or away from your opponent. Small, tactical actions that keep you engaged with the game. On every phase, every character can potentially do something.

Couple this with restoring to polearms the ability to attack between the front-line fighters and suddenly you have a team-based, tactical combat where every player is constantly thinking about what is happening and what they should be doing. Large changes in the way the characters are arrayed take place slowly, incrementally, with each player trying to do their part.

I’m writing a game with the working title of Rustic Fantasy which is a modified form of Mythras Imperative (coupled with some elements from several other Open D100 games, notably OpenQuest and BRP).

Here is a link to the draft Combat Chapter which details how to use the fancy table above and lists all the different combat options. I think Mythras or Runequest GMs could easily use it as is – with a few little tweaks. And if nothing else, it might inspire you to develop your own interlaced combat system.

As always, thanks for reading this and feel free to leave any questions or comments below.

(All artwork here is in the Public Domain) 

Is it time to go back to coding orcs as fascists?

 

TL;DR. When I gamed in California in the late 1970s, orcs were coded as fascists. It wasn’t until later that I encountered them being coded as people of color. Maybe it’s time to explicitly add minority representation to humans and go back to orcs being fascists.

 

Back in the day orcs were evil, and they were fascists.

I think my TL;DR at the top pretty much catches what I’m going to say. When I started in what we now call “fantasy” in the mid-to-late 1970s, orcs were a timeless evil creature that helped some big-bad destroy all that was nice. They were sort of a rot that was destroying the world. Over time, TTRPGs recoded them to be various minority or – I think, more commonly – as a generic “visible minority”. Of course, once you do that, you need to stop making them inherently evil, and they should have normal intelligence, and all that. But you lose the central conflict of the world, the idea that some powerful people are manipulating the masses for their own gain and building armies of thoughtless people to enact their villainy.

Of course we have to separate these two things. We need visible minorities in games—but they should just be humans. Because… well, do I even have to say it? But we also need a cancerous evil that creeps through humanity—of all types—which needs to be fought and defeated.

I’m going to argue that we should just make sure TTRPG worlds recognize different ethnic and minority groups and then return orcs to being pig-head, low intelligence bad guys that need to be defeated before they destroy all that is good in the world.

History of the word, orc. I’m not the best person to do a deep dive on the origin of the word orc. But Tolkien did not invent it, instead he grabbed an Old English word that meant something like demon-spirit or specter or goblin and also sounded cool (he picked it for “phonetic reasons”) and used that for the servants of various evil Dark Lords. Tolkien scholars say that he was inconsistent in his notes about where they came from. Sometimes they were bred by the Dark Lord, other times they were elves corrupted by one or another Dark Lord, and even occasionally they were elves who were corrupted “in the wild”. Wikipedia covers this.

However they came to be, they were creatures of good who became evil. Now Tolkien definitely implied that modern human minorities are in some way associated with the orcs—and he wasn’t very charitable towards women either. But I still feel that he portrayed the orcs of the Third Age to be cruel, obedient followers of a powerful and evil individual.

Tolkien Apologist? It is easy for me to not get stressed over Tolkien modelling his orcs on minorities. I am certain that he did. We all have limitations. My father hated Germans, but he was very fond of African Americans. He was a working-class guy from downtown Detroit. He appeared to get along swell with American minorities, but he hated Germans. Of course, there was that time that a German fighter pilot strafed the bridge he was working on and left him with two holes in his legs which never healed. My father, like Tolkien, was an imperfect person who suffered through the trauma of war. Tolkien is an imperfect person, like myself, my father, and everyone else I know, but with his fiction he was trying to make comments about the nature of human conflict. It is the positive elements of that message I would like to focus on, well recognizing that there are negatives that should be addressed.

Don’t forget half-elves. In Tolkien’s world elves and humans lived mostly apart, except (I think) there were two cases where an elf and human got together and created half-elves. I have already written about how all this is driven by the idea of biological determinism (it is here), and how creating these fanciful different “races” with their separate origins is not doing anything good for gaming. But it starts with in D&D, with half-elves. They are an early entry. The first appear (as I understand it) in Greyhawk in 1974. By 1978 they are a standard feature of TTRPGs. This is when the half-orc enters the gaming world. So, by 1978 we are already seeing some gamers switching to “race” as ethic minority.

My Lived-Experience. I started war gaming around 1977 (about age 12) and by 1978 I was deep into TTRPGs. I was in a remote, university town and spent far more time playing in ancient redwood forests and along rock seashores that I ever spent in cities—and I had no idea of the breadth or scoop of the gaming community. But I had access to Runequest, Original D&D, Basic D&D, lots of Metagaming MicroGames including Melee and Wizards, and the AD&D Monster Manual.

How were orcs portrayed? And I don’t remember orcs ever being “stand ins” for people of color or any recognizable minority. Instead, they were fascists. I grew up in a house with multiple disabled veterans who had all been involved in fighting fascists—we all knew what and who they were. At least in my childhood home, the fascists were low intelligence, mean people who loved law and order, as long as they got to make the law and bully other people around.

How were orcs coded? For me, the orcs of D&D were always, basically, the same as the “mutants” of Ralph Bakshi’s movie, Wizards who were definitely fascists.

But let’s look at the early works. In The Arduin Grimoire, we are told that orcs have Intelligence and Wisdom limited to 4-11 (p.6, on the same 3-18 scale of D&D), so lower than human, but we are also told (p.11) that they, like elves, are immortal, they are savage and treacherous, as well as warlike, quarrelsome, and love to kill. And, interestingly, they are listed as chaotic evil.

In the MicroGame The Fantasy Trip, Melee, Steve Jackson says it most succinctly, “An orc is just like a human figure—except evil”

In the early Monster Manual, orcs (p.76) were common, pig-headed people with pinkish snouts who are brown or brownish green with a bluish sheen. They are bullies and the stronger will always intimidate and dominate the weaker. They are lawful evil and only live for 40 years.

I would argue that for TSR, even by 1978 (the year they released the Monster Manual) they are already starting the shift of orcs being coded as minorities and not immortal evil. We are told they have “unpleasant” brown or brownish green skin, and they have a short life span. But even for TSR in 1978, they were still lawful and evil. They were some hybrid of the outsider and the fascist. They were low to average intelligence pig-headed people who kept slaves and loved torture, but they are brown skinned and prolific (which I would argue are stereotypes held of by many whites of the African American community, and thus consistent with coding orcs as minorities).

Let’s make fascism evil again. Whatever their history, at least for a while in at least one place, orcs were fascists. They were low intelligence individuals who hated outsiders, who followed their leader unquestioningly, who opposed those that were not of their tribe. They were mean bullies and slavers. They were an ageless evil threatening our peace and security.

Let’s bring that back!

What I am Doing. In my current fantasy game, mean and evil people are transformed into orcs and goblins. Through the magic of the Evil powers, the worst humans give themselves over to evil. As they do, they transform physically and gain certain advantages which they covet. In this setting, orcs are not an ethnic group, they are people with similar moral convictions. They are people who give up elements of themselves for various reasons, in order to be free of needing to respect the rights of others.

Additionally, since the early 1980s, I have always tended to play d100 games which—mechanically—replace the D&D idea of “race” with cultures and ethnicities. Instead of different fantasy races or species or whatever they are, there are ethnic groups that reflect more accurately the variation in human backgrounds.

Here is one of my old Runequest worlds that I ran through much of the 1990s. There are three ethnic groups mentioned on the map, the Lomaran, Mnar, and the Loskalm. None of them exactly map to any modern groups, they are just the groups of humans in this world. In this world there were never any playable non-human races. These groups created the variation available to the players.

Racial and ethnic mixing in modern communities is for most of us a common element of our life. Historically, such mixing occurred, but there were also large homogeneous areas. Personally, since it is a fantasy world with dragons and wizards and magic and all that other stuff. I’m happy to just have all my humans be of a heterogeneous mixture of humans and not even worry about why or how. Half the town are black skinned, others are different skin tones, and others are white. I’m not worrying about why there are dragons, why the F should I care about why there are black skinned people in a medieval European-themed setting.

But what I do care about are the fascists. And yes, the Evil Overlord is raising an army. And yes, he (or she) is a threat to all that is free and good. And his pig-headed followers are a threat. They have and will continue to kill and enslave those weaker than themselves, and yes, your heroes are free to attack them on sight.

As always, think you for reading this and please feel free to leave any comments below.