Straying From the Path

I have been surprised with how much I've been enjoying Pathfinder. As I may have mentioned before, I've never really been a D&D player -- because, you know, Call of Cthulhu is better -- and I'd parted ways with the gaming hobby during D&D3's lifespan, so all I had to go on was stories of how popular the third edition was, how annoyed people were by the seemingly-opportunistic move from D&D3 to D&D3.5, and how the whole thing got a bit unwieldy under the increasing pile of rules supplements.

So when our group made the decision to move from D&D4 -- hereafter referred to as The Unmentionable -- to Pathfinder, I was wary, but I thought it was only fair to give it a try and see what it was like for myself.

The Pathfinder core book is a massive thing -- bigger than Rogue Trader, which was intimidating enough -- and the rules have a lot of working parts, and yet it remains quite fun to play. I suspect that this is because I've been playing as a monk, a relatively simple class; the two players who chose spellcasters are often wrangling with specialist rules and long periods of spell list preparation, all of which would be beyond my feeble mind. It's also perhaps significant that we've been playing for a while now -- we must be coming up for a year -- and we're still getting rules wrong, so it's fair to say we haven't mastered the game. Even so it has been fun, and I have no complaints, whereas by now I was ready to mutiny in our The Unmentionable game.

Paizo have just begun publishing a new Pathfinder campaign -- sorry "Adventure Path" -- called Carrion Crown -- I feel there should be a definite article there -- which owes more than a little to the old TSR Ravenloft setting, and as a horror fan, it did pique my interest just a tad. It was suggested that once we finish the Kingmaker cam... Adventure Path, we move on to this new one, and furthermore that I run it. This seemed like a fair idea.

Then I ran Carrion Hill.

What I discovered was that while I enjoy playing the game, I do not like running it in the slightest, as there's far too much stuff in there. Now, one might say that you don't have to know or use all that stuff, and that's true to an extent, but there is an undeniable feeling of obligation when you know that the rules are there, just waiting; what you get as a result is a tendency -- despite the best of intentions -- to pore through the massive four-billion-page Pathfinder rulebook to discover the correct procedure for applying fire damage to pickled gherkins, and then the game falls over dead. In other words, you could concentrate on getting the core mechanics of fighting, skills and magic right and just handwave the rest, but you'd know you were doing something wrong.

As such, while I would like to run (The) Carrion Crown, I would rather run it with something simpler like Swords & Wizardry or Labyrinth Lord -- the difference between them and D&D3/Pathfinder is more one of detail than mechanics -- but alas I know my group would never go for it, not in a month of Sundays. Not that I would use S&W -- for example -- as is; I'm quite fond of the options Pathfinder characters have, so my ideal situation would be to use the simpler game as a frame for all the major mechanics -- gherkins burn on a d6 roll of 5+ -- but front-load the complexity into the characters, perhaps even use the Pathfinder classes as they are, with minor tweaks for compatibility. I've even entertained the possibility of completely bespoke characters, so while there's no dhampir race or rogue class in S&W, I could build a one-off dhampir rogue for the player who wants one.

This would be the best of both worlds for me: lots of options for the players to mess around with, but the minimum of fiddly bits for me to wrestle with as a GM, so I can get on with the plotting and the silly voices. At the end of the day though, it's all theory and wishful thinking, as I don't think it'll fly with my lot. On the plus side, it means I get to play in (The) Carrion Crown; I'm considering a wererat barbarian or -- if I can get away with it -- some sort of zombie.

The Golfbag of Avalon

Here's a quick follow-up to the last post, with Guy providing some more data from his researches. He confirms that the first edition of RuneQuest has near-identical wording to the second edition regarding the experience system, but he has also been looking at the oft-forgotten stepchild of BRP, the wonderful and brilliant Pendragon:

Pendragon 1st edition (1985)
all skills: success + stress + referee discretion
- Requires success *and* gamemaster decision for adding a check mark: "There are times during play when the gamemaster tells the player to check one of his character's skills. This means that the character has used the skill in a time of crisis and may lean from the experience. This box is marked with a check-mark only when the skill is used successfully, and only when the gamemaster says the player may do so." (Experience Checks, Player's Book, page 39)

The second/third edition has almost identical wording, and my memory of the fourth edition is that it uses the same experience system, although I don't have a copy at hand.

Golfing: 78% (or, Familiarity Breeds Confusion)

One persistent criticism of Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying system in its varying incarnations over the decades is that of "Golf Bag Syndrome", but it's not something I've ever encountered in all my years of playing BRP-based games, so I've often been baffled by how pervasive the criticism is.

BRP works on a percentile roll-under system, so a character might have "Shotgun 57%" on their sheet, which means that the player must roll 57 or less on a d100 to succeed with that skill. The sheet will also have a little box next to that skill, and this tiny box is part of the subsystem used to simulate character development.

(I'll try to make this as not-boring as possible, but there's only so exciting this stuff can be.)

Under certain circumstances, this box is ticked -- "checked" if you're a Colonial -- and then at the end of the session or scenario,
the player rolls a d100 against any ticked skills; if they roll under the current value -- a "success", although there's no actual skill test being performed -- then there is no change, but if they roll over -- a "failure" by normal in-game rules -- then their score in that skill increases by a certain amount. This represents the character learning from their experience, in particular their mistakes, and the more competent a character becomes, the less they have to learn.

It's quite an elegant experience system, but it's been misrepresented or misunderstood over the decades, and it's this confusion which leads to Golf Bag Syndrome. The idea is that a player uses a skill, gets a tick, then pulls another skill out of their "bag", gets a tick, and so on until everything is ticked, and the game becomes some bizarre collecting exercise.

The thing which always confused me was how these players were getting ticks with such ease, when all the incarnations of BRP I knew placed all kinds of restrictions on how the ticks were awarded. I have three versions of the system to hand at this precise moment -- the Games Workshop-published third editions of both RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu, and Chaosium's fifth edition of the latter -- and all three are quite clear in stating that ticks are only given when a skill use is successful in a stressful or notable situation, and even then only at the GM's discretion. This is far from the automatic collection of ticks outlined by the Golf Baggers. Fifth edition Cthulhu suggests that ticks be given by default for a skill roll of 01 -- a critical success, more or less -- but that's also not quite the same thing.

(I was surprised to discover that Cthulhu doesn't give a tick for a critical failure, as it's something I've always done when running the game.)

It's not, I admit, an exhaustive sampling of BRP's many guises, but it's still interesting to see that there is no sign of Golf Bag Syndrome in these version of the rules. So where does it come from?

Stormbringer, apparently.

Guy Fullerton of Lord of the Green Dragons -- although everyone in the western hemisphere is a member of that blog -- and Chaotic Henchmen Productions did a very decent thing, and instead of following the standard operating procedure of the internet and throwing his toys out of the pram, went to his books and dug out actual quotes and references to the old Golf Bag. Guy's a veteran Stormbringer, er, guy, and he's seen this glitch in action many times over the years. With his permission, I'm going to relay his findings:

Stormbringer (2nd edition boxed, 1" thick box, 1985):
- "If … your player-character scores a hit, then your character will have a chance to improve his weapon skill with the weapon that scored the hit. If you score a hit, but it is parried, you did not truly hit, and so there is no improvement by experience in such cases." (Section 3.3.1.1, Players Book, page 37)
- "If your character uses a skill while playing a game of Stormbringer, note that he has done so, and when the game is over you will have a chance to see if his skill has improved." Note that the rule does not explicitly require a successful use; it only says "use". However, the example of improvement shows a character successfully using a skill. (Section 4.1.2, Players Book, page 50)
- I looked through the gamemaster sections for additional requirements/prerequisites for gaining of a chance, and I found nothing.

So, in 1985, Stormbringer was pretty lax on experience requirements. The next two editions are more or less the same, according to Guy, except these particular rules change their positions within the text.

The only version of the game I've played is 1993's Elric! which I've always liked for the unnecessary exclamation point. Of this edition, Guy says:

- Requires success and gamemaster decision: "Sometimes, but not always, your gamemaster will instruct you to check a skill just used successfully in play." (Experience, page 51)
- Offers guidance for the gamemaster decision: "When an adventurer succeeds with a skill in a dangerous or stressful situation, the gamemaster may grant the player an experience check on the adventurer sheet." (Experience Check, page 151)

This is very close to what Call of Cthulhu fifth edition says, which suggests that there was either some attempt to consolidate BRP in the mid-1990's, or this edition of Stormbringer borrowed its text from Cthulhu rather than RuneQuest; I do recall that the layout and format of this edition was quite similar to fifth edition Cthulhu.

Guy also has a copy of the bog-standard setting-agnostic BRP core rules from 1981, and its only requirement for a tick is a successful use of a skill.

Some more data, again from Guy:

RuneQuest 2nd edition (from 1979-ish):
- Weapon skill rolls don't require an unparried hit to garner a check mark; any hit will do: "During the bookkeeping phase of each melee round (see Chapter III) the player should keep track of whether the character managed to land a blow with a weapon (it doesn't matter if it does damage, bounces off armor, or is parried) or managed to parry another attack." (Learning by Experience, page 23)
- Other skills: "To learn a skill by experience, a character must use it successfully in conditions of stress." (Introduction, page 44)

Call of Cthulhu 2nd edition (1983):
- "When a character uses a skill successfully during play, the keeper may allow that character's player to put a check by that skill." (Rewards of Experience, page 15)
- There is no separate weapon skill section.

Basic Roleplaying (2002)
- Requires success on a skill for a chance of improvement: "… check over [the] character sheet to see what skills were used during play. If your character succeeded in using skills, they should have been marked on the sheet." (Experience, page 8)
- The rest of the text content of the book looks largely similar to the 1981 version.

One could argue that Chaosium were cracking down on the Syndrome by the mid-90's, but BRP's backtracking means that it's all a bit inconsistent, and it becomes apparent that there is a possible reason both for the prevalence of Golf Bag Syndrome as a criticism of BRP, and my complete inexperience -- heh -- of the phenomenon. I first encountered the system through Call of Cthulhu, which is more strict than most versions of the game -- although the 2004 quick start rules allow a tick on any successful skill use -- while Guy got in through Stormbringer and proceeded to Golf Bag his way through the 80's and 90's.

So it seems to be that BRPers tend to pick up their habits from the first version of the system they encounter, and carry them through to other versions. I have seen this in action: my first Cthulhu GM, despite using the fifth edition rules, kept on bringing in things from RuneQuest and Cthulhu's fourth edition, entirely without conscious knowledge. I wonder if the broad similarity between BRP flavours also has the downside of concealing the -- sometimes important -- differences between them?

(Of course, sometimes you do want to mix and match, and the close familial similarities are more helpful there; I use the Elric! serious wounds table in my Cthulhu games, for example, and the recent big yellow BRP book is a wonderful toolkit for players of any of the variants.)

So I wonder how many people out there think they're playing fourth edition Stormbringer but are really playing the second edition? Or think they're playing Call of Cthulhu but are really playing RuneQuest, only with librarians? Not that there's anything wrong with any of that of course, but perhaps we should be more observant and discerning when using our chosen rulesets, if only to avoid missing something cool; the upcoming seventh edition of Call of Cthulhu apparently has some clever new rules ideas in it, and it would be a shame if they were overlooked simply because BRP is so very familiar.

Thanks again to Guy for being a good sport and digging out all the data.

EDIT: There's been an update on all this, drawing in some data from Pendragon.

Tarzan of Lothlorien

James Maliszewski said:

Here's what I'd love to see propagate across the old school blogs: an example or two like the one I posted above about orcs. I love hearing how referees have made the raw materials D&D offers their own, especially if doing so draws on longstanding information or images associated with the game. The examples don't have to be long, unless you want them to be; all I ask is that they reveal a little bit of that do-it-yourself spirit I think is so representative of our corner of the hobby.

Now this isn't really an old-school blog, and I have an on-again-off-again relationship with D&D itself, so I'm probably not qualified to comment, but I do have one hat to throw into this ring.

I've never been happy with the traditional fantasy elf. They seem too easy somehow; they're fast, intelligent, better at magic than everyone else, and are usually immortal. It's Superman Syndrome, and like Superman, there's no edginess to them, nothing to grab and twist and make interesting; the closest you get is some ill-defined malaise, like the ennui which affects Tolkien's elves, the harmful decadence of Games Workshop's Eldar, or Moorcock's Melnibonéans -- though not elves per se -- which combine both. This is of course a sweeping statement, and I'm not nearly well-read enough to identify the exceptions, of which I'm sure there are many.

Even so, it's difficult to translate these social and psychological aspects into a game about kicking in doors and killing stuff, so my thoughts have tended to follow a different, more practical, path. Taking the forest-dwelling aspect as my starting point, I've expanded that along somewhat realistic lines, influenced in no small part by an old White Dwarf article -- in #69, by Peter Blanchard -- about how underwater societies would develop without access to metalworking (no fires, see) and other such markers of civilisation.

So my forest elves would be agile and stealthy, as comfortable in the canopy as they are on ground, somewhere between the alien in Predator and your average wuxia showoff. They probably wouldn't have metalworking, since mining seems out of character and you don't want to be setting up furnaces if you live surrounded by trees; so there's no elven steel, no mithril, or any of that extraneous bling. There might be the odd item that they've stolen or traded, but for the most part these elves are using sharpened stone, bone, the odd bamboo spear here and there, and probably their fists too, as unarmed combat seems a logical consequence of a dearth of proper weaponry. On a similar note, they'd probably be nomadic, as carving homes into the trunks of trees seems too destructive, and the typical Ewok village type treetop construction would be saved for the odd meeting place rather than each and every settlement. I want them to wander the forests and not be tied down, so that when outsiders come into the woods, the elves seem like ghosts, difficult to pin down and predict.

So essentially my elves would be barbarians -- with a touch of monk -- in D&D terms, one part archetypical jungle savage, one part Princess Mononoke.

Despite their long lives, they'd have a society based around impermanence, with little in the way of metal and probably no paper, although they'd probably make use of standing stones and the like. They would be shamanistic and their magic would be based on illusion and druidery, with a fair smattering of earth-based spells in there. I'd also place more importance on their alliances with other forest dwellers, such as earth elementals, shambling mounds and even sentient animals, again like Princess Mononoke. Their utter rejection of the --literal -- building blocks of human society would make them seem more alien than the usual Immortal Skinny Bloke, and I'd consider giving them penalties when in urban situations, and perhaps full-on panic attacks when in a dungeon.

I'd keep the immunity to ghoul paralysis though, as I've always liked how strange and unexplained it is.

Oh, and no dark elves, sorry. The idea that you can tell the a "good" elf from an "evil" one just by looking at them appals me -- yes, even in a game about kicking in doors and killing stuff -- and I won't have it. You can tell my good elves from the evil ones by seeing whether they frighten off the loggers, or just skin them alive on the spot.

Pending

I have a number of useful resources to share with you all, but alas they're all tied into my upcoming Savage Eberron scenario, so I have to keep them under wraps for the moment. Look out for scans of my game notes, a handy play aid -- I don't want to say more about this one now as I want to surprise my players -- and what will, I hope, be a fun little subsystem.

Here's a hint:

Savage Eberron: Dragonmarks (Part 2)

Following on from the first part, here's the second instalment of my rules for emulating Eberron's dragonmarks in Savage Worlds. This time, I'll be looking at the individual marks and their game effects.

I've followed the general advice given by the Savage Worlds core book and have tried to use existing rules rather than create new ones. As such, most of these abilities are covered in the Savage Worlds Explorer's Edition (SWEX); a smaller number come from the Fantasy Companion Explorer's Edition (FCEX) -- which I'd recommend to anyone running a fantasy game for the system -- and two are borrowed from the Hellfrost Player's Guide (HFPG).

Each mark has two abilities: one general Trait bonus that is always active, and a special spell-like ability that can be activated at least once per day.

MARK OF DETECTION

• +2 Notice.
• Detect/Conceal: as Detect/Conceal Arcana (SWEX, p89), except limited to a specific object, which must be specified at the time of activation.

MARK OF FINDING

• +2 Tracking.

...I must admit I failed to find an existing Savage Worlds equivalent to the original Mark of Finding, and I am reluctant to simply build one. If any Savage Worlds fans out there have a suggestion, do let me know in the comments.


MARK OF HANDLING

• +2 Ride.
• Beast Friend (SWEX, p86).

MARK OF HEALING

• +2 Healing.
• Healing (SWEX, p89).

MARK OF HOSPITALITY

• +2 Charisma.
• Feast (HFPG, p88).

MARK OF MAKING

• +2 Repair.
• Reconstruct: as per Healing (SWEX, p89), except it only works on items like barriers, armour, weaponry, and so on. It also works on warforged and constructs.

MARK OF PASSAGE

• +2 Survival.
• Speed (SWEX, p94).

MARK OF SCRIBING

• +2 Charisma.
• Speak Language (SWEX, p93).

MARK OF SENTINEL

• +2 to resist Taunt/Intimidate actions.
• Armour (SWEX, p86).

MARK OF SHADOW

• +2 Streetwise.
• Darksight (FCEX, p33) or Obscure (FCEX, p40)

(One might want to split the two powers between Houses Phiarlan and Thuranni, but it might be more interesting and organic to not do so.)


MARK OF STORM

• +2 for Agility tests involving balance.
• Environmental Protection (SWEX, p90).

MARK OF WARDING

• +2 Notice.
• Lock/Unlock (HFPG, p90).

Savage Eberron: Dragonmarks (Part 1)

Ever since I got it in my head to run the Eberron setting using Savage Worlds I knew I had to one day try to fit dragonmarks into the game. It was fortunate that none of the players requested a dragonmarked character, which has allowed me some extra time to come up with the following rules. These are the general guidelines for using dragonmarks in Savage Eberron; specific rules for the individual marks will appear later.

Dragonmarks are purchased as Edges, per the usual Savage Worlds rules, and there are four varieties: Least, Lesser, Greater and Aberrant. A character selecting an aberrant mark cannot ever choose another type of mark, nor can a bearer of a standard mark ever pick the aberrant mark.

Similarly, those with a standard mark chooses from one of the twelve dragonmark families and can never change or choose a second mark at a later date. While dragonmarks work like Arcane Backgrounds in some ways, there is no such thing as the Arcane Background: Dragonmark Edge, and the bearer of a mark may also choose an Arcane Background as normal.

Each of the standard marks provides a bonus to a Trait roll, as well as a magical ability which can usually be used at least once a day; aberrant marks lack the Trait bonus, but do bestow a magical ability. In both cases, this ability costs no power points, uses no components and operates as if the minimum number of power points had been spent; for example, the Mark of Handling bestows the Beast Friend ability as if 3 power points had been expended. Dragonmark abilities use their own skill and have no linked attribute, just like superpowers; this skill starts at 1d4 and can only be increased by upgrading the dragonmark itself.

Bearers of the standard dragonmarks are almost always members of one of the great dragonmarked houses, but receive no special treatment unless they also have Edges like Noble or Connections. On the other hand, it is possible to have Connections within a dragonmarked house without yourself manifesting a mark.

LEAST DRAGONMARK
Requirements: Novice; Human, dwarf, elf, gnome, half-elf, halfling, half-orc.
Choose one of the twelve available dragonmarks; you gain the bonus associated with the mark, and may also use the mark's spell-like ability once per day.

LESSER DRAGONMARK
Requirements: Least Dragonmark; Seasoned.
Your mark is more powerful than normal. You may choose one of the following effects:

• You may use your dragonmark ability once more per day.
• You may increase your dragonmark skill by one die type, up to d12.
• Your ability is enhanced; increase the duration or effect as if one extra power point were spent.

GREATER DRAGONMARK
Requirements: Lesser Dragonmark; Veteran.
Your mark is among the most powerful known. The effects of this Edge are identical to, and stack with, those of the Lesser Dragonmark Edge, above.

ABERRANT DRAGONMARK
Requirements: Novice; Human, dwarf, elf, gnome, half-elf, halfling, half-orc.
Your mark is strange and unusual and resembles none of the standard twelve dragonmarks. Your mark mimics one of the following powers (roll 1d6):

1. Armour (Savage Worlds Explorer's Edition)
2. Detect/Conceal Secret Doors (SWEX; as Detect/Conceal Arcana, bar the obvious difference)
3. Elemental Manipulation (SWEX)
4. Fear (SWEX)
5. Light (SWEX)
6. Wall Walker (Fantasy Companion Explorer's Edition)

It's not all good though; here's a Hindrance to go with the Edges:

DRAGONMARK OUTCAST (MINOR)
For some reason, your connections with your dragonmarked house have been severed. You may have been thrown out for some indiscretion, or perhaps they are simply not aware of your existence. You cannot call in any favours from the family, but other houses will still see you at best as a rival and at worst as a spy, so you cannot go to them either. When interacting with the dragonmarked houses, you operate as if you have the Outsider Hindrance.

Sun, Sea and Cyberware

Well, I wasn't intending for this to be Shadowrun Week at the blog, but what the heck.

When Tim went off to university and took his Shadowrun campaign off with him, I attempted to fill the gap. We played a few generic, disjointed sessions, but in the end we moved on to different games, and my custom setting never saw the light of day. The notes are long lost now, but I can put together the basic elements from memory.

Since I was barely out of my teens, all vim and swaggering arrogance, I decided I wanted to subvert the usual gloomy trappings of the cyberpunk genre, and as such swapped the dirty alleyways and torrential rain of the urban sprawl for the sub-tropical splendour of Bermuda.

Perhaps taking the infamous Triangle as inspiration -- which strikes me today as being quite clever, although I'm not sure I intended the metaphor back then -- I set up a three-way power struggle. Before the Awakening, the Bermuda Triangle was known as one of the world's hotspots of the weird, but with the return of magic to the world in 2011 (!), the weird became manifest. Storms of unnatural strength and size battered the islands and cut them off from the outside world, while strange things fell from the clouds and crawled from the sea.

Prior to 2011 (!) Bermuda was an important offshore financial centre for many corporations, a result of its favourable taxation system. As such they were quite keen to get back in touch with their offices there, and when the eldritch storms finally subsided, the mega-corporations raced each other -- and the British government, as Bermuda was still a British territory -- to the islands, only to find them wild and lawless, and ruled -- if that is the right word -- by a cadre of newly-empowered and quite militant shark shamans.

Today, Bermuda is officially under British rule once more, although stable government is confined to a few key locations, most notably the northern islands of St George's and St David's, with much of the rest of the land a wild zone full of wandering Awakened creatures and independent settlements. The capital -- and all that valuable financial data -- is in the hands of the shark shamans, and negotiations continue between the shamans -- who demand an independent magical state like those seen elsewhere in the Awakened world -- and the British, with the mega-corporations waiting on the sidelines, their impatience growing by the day.

There you have it, as best as I remember, anyway. There's potential for the traditional Shadowrun political and corporate intrigue, with a number of factions jockeying for position, but with all sorts of weird stuff slithering in from the Bermuda Triangle, there's also a chance for a good old-fashioned monster hunt. There's even room for some D&D-eque ruin exploration, as those abandoned corporate facilities are bound to be full of the kind of stuff that would command a high price on the shadow markets.

And of course, there's always room for speedboat chases.

Maybe That Dragonlance Movie Wasn't So Bad After All

After watching this, why wouldn't you want to play Shadowrun?



If only so that you could do it better.

Thanks to sirlarkins for the link!

Running From the Past

I blame the internet.

Stuart started it in his review of Interface Zero; a casual mention of Shadowrun got me thinking about the game again, but it wasn't until JB started a series of posts on the game that I caught the bug and dug out my copy of the second edition.

Shadowrun was my first proper role-playing game. I'd played a bit of the multiplayer Fighting Fantasy, and I was aware of the hobby, but I was more interested in Games Workshop wargames at the time. My main gaming buddy at the time introduced me to Tim, who showed us this box of miniatures he had; they were fantasy types, orcs, dwarves and the like, but they had sunglasses and machine guns. Tim told us that they were from a game called Shadowrun, and invited us to play. From that point, we played Shadowrun for about three years, although oddly enough, I don't think we ever used the miniatures.

Through Shadowrun and Tim, I discovered more games, including my first -- and until a couple of years ago, only -- encounter with D&D, and a disastrous dalliance with Traveller: The New Era. Somewhere in there, I fell in love with Call of Cthulhu, but Shadowrun was always a constant, and it was only really Tim's departure for university that ended our time with the game. I played a bit of the third edition when it came to be my turn to enter higher education, but it didn't click with me and I left it behind. Up until a couple of days ago, that was the last time I looked at a Shadowrun book.

Looking at it now, I'm surprised at how much of the system we didn't use. It's what would be called "crunchy" nowadays, in that it does not attempt to have a rule for everything, but goes into great -- and likely unnecessary -- detail on the situations it does cover. Given my tastes of late I'm almost certain that if I ran it today, I would not make use of this detail, but that's not to say that I wouldn't run it at all, as there's still a lot to like.

The central mechanic is elegant and quick, one result of which is an unobtrusive close combat system which does its job without fuss. The drain mechanic -- the downside to spellcasting, in which casters risk taking damage from their own powers -- is a great idea, and is perhaps my favourite part of the entire system. The second edition also contains almost -- there's no adventure included, which is a shame -- everything you need to play, and all in a book about the same size as a D&D player's handbook; now Shadowrun was also the first time I encountered power creep, and Tim had a stack of supplements about a metre high, each of which gave one type of character an edge over the others, but none of them were necessary, and the game runs just as well from the core rules alone.

Except for decking. The computer hacking system in the second edition rules is a mess and while it was improved by subsequent sourcebooks, it never quite worked, and I can see why so many GMs just dumped the entire aspect of the game. It's a shame, as it's one of the key topoi of the cyberpunk genre, but the game is perhaps better off without it.

One other criticism of the game, in particular the older editions, is that it's dated, and it is true that there's a definite 1980's feel to the setting, but to me that is part of the charm.



It's more a product of its time than an accurate prediction of the future, but that doesn't make it of any less value as a setting, just as the outdated notions of the 1930's and 50's don't make a rockets-and-rayguns setting any less fun today. Any game which lets you play a grenade-launcher-wielding elven rock star or a motorcycle-riding ork wizard is just fine by me.

Savage Eberron II: The Jewel of Galifar

Last summer, my regular group decided to devote a weekend to gaming. The event came to be kown as "BenCon", because who can turn down a good -- or bad -- pun? Over the two days, we played a big game of Twilight Imperium, were introduced to the wonderful Cold City, and got in a couple of sessions of Savage Worlds, one of which was my experimental mash up of that pulp-flavoured ruleset with the pulp-flavoured setting of Eberron. While the two seemed to work well together in terms of tone, I wasn't satisfied with how the game went.

As it became clear that our schedules would align to enable another gaming day, we decided to have a Winter BenCon during the Christmas break. This slipped back as real life got in the way, but we managed to organise one solid day of gaming to take place in the new year, and three games were arranged: Stuart was set to run a RuneQuest scenario using Mongoose's samurai sourcebook, and I'm sure he'll be reporting on that soon enough, while Dave was going to run us through a Trail of Cthulhu investigation, and I had planned a sequel to the earlier Savage Eberron adventure. As it turned out, Dave had decided to move back to Vancouver and so was neck deep in packing, unable to devote time to preparing a game; as a result, the schedule for the day was curtailed and became a simple double bill.

My scenario was a loose sequel to the earlier game, not a direct continuation but a new adventure featuring the same player-characters, although the format did allow for new characters. As such, we welcomed Galaxy Jones, a halfling dinosaur rider with the personality of a Blaxploitation character, complete with afro hairstyle and leopard-skin coat. Galaxy turned out to be something of a glass cannon, dealing out massive damage from the back of his mount, Shep, but proving to be quite fragile when unseated. Stuart developed Fibulon, a professional duellist, and passed his previous character, warforged soldier Tactica-206, to his son Sebastian. Aside from Tactica-206, also returning from the previous episode were Dave's half-elf bushwhacker Kawa, and Ben's deaf dwarf artificer Stones McGuffin, while Manoj was unable to attend due to illness, so his half-ogre vuvuzela-toting bard stayed at home.

The party had been hired by a self-titled "collector of curiosities" named Jobar Lenskin, who had heard rumours of an item called the "Jewel of Galifar". This was a treasure of which he'd heard nothing before, and his regular sources and contacts were also baffled, all of which made him want this Jewel even more. As such, he tasked the player-characters with finding out more about the item and if possible to retrieve it for his collection. The characters followed their leads to the gnomish nation of Zilargo, and the canal-crossed city of Trolanport. There, they headed to the home of a local businessman named Arno Salvatore, as they'd heard that he might know more about the Jewel.

The game began with the player-characters in a boat outside Salvatore's front door. They knocked and, receiving no answer but hearing the sounds of someone running within, broke the door down. Inside was a courtyard with what looked like some disused boats covered with tarpaulin, and steps heading to an upper level on which could be seen an open door. The team went for the stairs, only for the tarpaulin to be flung aside, revealing a huge warforged with four spider-like legs and massive stone axes instead of hands. A short fight ensued -- despite its high stats, the warforged was an Extra and required only two hits to incapacitate -- and the party rushed upstairs to find a small library on fire and a tall, athletic man standing by the window. He smiled at them, gave a mock salute, then leaped out the window, across the canal outside, and on to the roof of the building opposite.

I had designed a fun parkour-like chase across the rooftops which would then evolve into an elemental speedboat chase along the canals of the city. What in fact happened was that every single character who attempted the jump made it with ease, and they caught up with their quarry in short order. A quick tussle on the roof ensued, but with no way out, the man surrendered, and the complex map I'd drawn out on the tabletop went unused. Sigh. During the brawl a crowd had gathered in the piazza below and Kawa decided to pose as a member of the Trust -- Zilargo's secret police agency -- in an attempt to explain the party's unusual behaviour.

Dragging their captive -- who claimed to be Arno Salvatore -- back to the house, the player-characters went through the documents he had attempted to destroy, and also had a go at interrogating the man himself. He proved resilient, and it seemed as if he was more frightened of someone else than he was of the characters, but they did manage to find out that while he did have the Jewel at one point, he had passed it on to his associates, who had either taken it to, or were based at, a location in the forests to the south of Trolanport. It was also implied that he did not know what the Jewel was, as it was sealed inside some kind of container.

Dave then attempted to derail the adventure further when an agent of the Trust came snooping around and his character Kawa decided to not only threaten said agent, but knock off his impressive stovepipe hat to punctuate said threat. The players were convinced to allow the agent to speak to Salvatore, and although the captive attempted to paint the player-characters as villains, the gnome seemed to know that not all was as it seemed. He indicated that he had some previous connection to the characters' colleague Eddie Stone -- Rick's character in the previous game, a changeling private eye with a shady past -- which was enough to save their lives, but that they should leave town if they valued their ongoing health. A couple of the party members had spotted evidence of what might have been snipers surrounding their current position, so the group decided that the gnome's advice was sound, and leaving Salvatore in his custody, they headed to the docks and boarded a ship heading south.

A day or so later, the characters were dropped off at a nondescript stretch of coastline and headed into the forest. After a while they found the tracks of a group of humanoid travellers and followed them until they picked up the sounds of loud voices talking in the goblin tongue; McGuffin knew a little bit of the language and thought that the goblinoids seemed to be drinking and having a laugh, and were not on high alert. There was some brief discussion on whether or not to rush the camp, but in the end the party decided that the goblinoids were not an immediate threat and that since their own destination was in a different direction, a fight would be an unnecessary diversion at that point.

The trees began to thin out and ahead of them, across a stretch of featureless terrain, was a small two-tier fortification. It appeared to be a remnant of the old hobgoblin empire and despite being thousands of years old, was still in fair condition; McGuffin assured the rest of the group that no goblinoiod structure could possibly last so long and that dwarves must have had a hand in its creation, but it sounded to them like the typical ravings of a Hobgoblin Denialist. The player-characters didn't think running across all that open ground in broad daylight was a good idea, so sat down in the cover of the treeline to observe the tower, picking out a number of green-clad guards patrolling the battlements.

Night fell and a rain storm swept in from the coast, all of which was deemed enough cover to make a move on the tower. Galaxy and his dinosaur went first and made it to the outer wall of the fortification, then the woodsman Kawa followed, but something about his approach alerted a guard and a crossbow bolt flew out of the darkness, striking the half-elf and bringing him to the ground. At this, the rest of the party abandoned stealth and charged up to the walls.

The outer walls were ruined in places, allowing easy access into the yard within, where the team discovered a group of guards -- I described these as wearing green ninja-like pyjamas, because a horde of ninjas is almost as good as a bunch of Nazis when you're running a pulp game -- and a handful of snipers atop the battlements of the tower itself. The party tore through their opponents -- as expected, as they were Extras -- with Galaxy Jones and Shep proving quite deadly, and gained entrance into the tower. More of the green-clad warriors were stationed on the stairs and landings within, and so began a running battle up to the roof, with only a brief pause to block the door to the battlements, trapping the snipers outside in the storm.

Up on the roof, the party encountered more of the warriors, as well as one who wore a carved metal facemask instead of the cloth masks of his followers, and who stood alongside an iron casket covered with runes and decorative carvings. By this time, the rain had become torrential, and in a bit of an old-school touch, I threw in a bit of randomness by declaring that when the four of clubs was drawn from the initiative deck, a bolt of lightning would strike the tower, centred on the character of the player who'd drawn the card. I did not expect this to come up much, if at all, but it happened four or five times during the battle. Apparently, it was quite the storm.

This became something of an epic confrontation, with bennies being spent left, right and centre, and the player-characters' luck failing them at key moments. Highlights included Kawa's knockdown brawl with a bog-standard mook, a fight which lasted the entire length of the battle and beyond; the arrival of a manticore just as the player-characters thought they might have the upper hand; and Fibulon sliding along the rain-slicked stones of the roof, between the legs of the combatants surrounding the casket, tripping up the leader, and just catching himself on the edge by one hand. In response, the masked figure used the Havoc spell -- from the Fantasy Companion -- to knock the player-chracters around and send the duellist over the edge. Fibulon survived the fall, landing on the lower battlements, right behind the snipers the party had left trapped there! There was a brief moment of uncertainty as Fibulon and the surprised crossbowmen eyed each other, then the duellist leaped off the lower battlements -- again suffering no damage -- and began his ascent back up to the fight above.

Reaching the roof, Fibulon got his revenge on the masked mage by running him through, but the manticore battled on, as did the nameless minion tussling with Kawa and, by this point, Stones McGuffin. Fearing defeat, the player-characters changed tack and got the casket off the roof and down the stairs; the manticore, too large to follow, took flight and disappeared into the thick cloud cover, while the lone henchman dodged through a number of attacks to follow the casket. He would likely have followed the party all the way home had Tactica-206 not shoulder-barged him off the stairs to his death two storeys below.

Safe if only for a moment, the party stopped to catch their collective breath. Galaxy Jones' dinosaur mount had been killed, he had suffered serious injuries, and he'd laso been blinded by the manticore's venom. The half-elf woodsman attempted to administer first aid, which resulted in the halfling bleeding out and suffering permanent organ damage, losing one level of his strength attribute. Nonetheless he survived the medical attention and was just about fit enough to make the mad dash across open ground to the relative safety of the forest. Luck was on their side, as the crossbowmen remained occupied with their attempts to get off the lower roof, and while the manticore had returned to track them from the air, it lost sight of them as they got deeper into the forest.

The team made it to a small village, and from there obtained passage back to their base of operations, where the injured could recover and McGuffin could examine the casket. The old dwarf figured out that it seemed to be under the effects of a permanent Time Stop spell, and rigged a device which would interrupt the magic long enough to open the container. Inside they found a girl, little older than ten and in a deep sleep. She seemed familiar somehow, and some of the party members thought she had a noble look to her features. When the girl woke, she seemed confused by her surroundings, and claimed she was Jenna ir'Wynarn, the oldest child of King Jarot, the ruler whose children's disagreements over the proper order of succession had led to the century-long Last War. All of which was very interesting, as there was no historical record of a Jenna ir'Wynarn.

If her story was true, then the girl would be a person of great importance to the whole of Khorvaire. The party decided to keep her existence secret until they knew more, so sealed up the now empty casket and delivered it to Lenskin, who seemed disappointed that the Jewel turned out to be a unique but unexciting magical item.

---

I enjoyed this session much more than the game I ran at the summer event, I think because I managed to better capture the pulp feel of the setting. I was disappointed to lose the chase sequence, but the battle up and atop the hobgoblin tower was worth it, with the tide shifting a number of times, and all sorts of unexpected and unique events occurring over the course of the fight. The players were challenged, and there was a serious danger of characters -- perhaps the whole party -- being killed if the team hadn't made the wise decision to get the casket -- and the focus of everyone's attention -- out of the picture. This caused the manticore to withdraw to reconsider its position, and allowed the party the breathing room to escape.

The big fight atop the tower did go on a long time, and the session ran over by ninety minutes, in part because the manticore was so difficult to hurt. Its Parry score was not impressive, but it had a Toughness score of eleven, which soaked up all but the most damaging effects, although in fairness it had used all its bennies and had suffered a wound by the end of the fight. The players, Dave in particular, were cursed with poor damage rolls in the later stages of the battle, and found themselves unable to put down a nameless mook, let alone the big boss monster; as such I'm reluctant to put the grind -- I say "grind", but I don't know if anyone really felt like that, as everyone seemed alert and interested -- of the fight down to a flaw in the Savage Worlds system. In the previous adventure, the players chopped through all their oppenents at great speed, so I'm almost certain it was just bad luck. We'll see how Savage Eberron III goes!

Savage Sneak Peek

Notes for my upcoming Savage Eberron game, entitled "The Jewel of Galifar" and which sees the adventurers visit Trolanport, the gnomish city of canals.

What's in a Name?

Presenting, for your enjoyment or utility or both, one hundred words pulled from Blogger's comment verification system. If you're ever stuck for a name for a corrupt wizard, a decadent city or an exotic island, just roll a d100 on the the table and you're done. It's a bare bones file, with no fancy formatting, but one day I might tart it up a bit or even expand it to a d1000 table.

Blood Bowl (Nintendo DS)

Games Workshop's Warhammer is a juggernaut of a franchise. Its runaway success has changed the company from a single hobby shop in Hammersmith to an international corporation, and the game has expanded beyond the tabletop into board games, role-playing games, video games, MMORPGs, novels, comics, and even, in the latter stages of 2010, a straight-to-dvd film, although reviews haven't been too good on that last one.

Warhammer is the company's core product, but there's also a horde of lesser games, lost to the mists of time and commanding high prices on eBay, stuff like Chainsaw Warrior and Lost Patrol. Somewhere in between is a middle tier of games that have never been huge money-spinners, but have remained popular enough to remain in production, on and off, throughout the company's life. Blood Bowl is one of these, a Warhammer-ised version of American football, with orcs and goblins beating seven shades out of dwarves and elves, and with maybe a touchdown or two thrown in. In the game, players take it in turns to advance their teams up the pitch, seize the ball, and through applied brutality, agile footwork, or dead-eye accuracy, attempt to get the ball into the end zone to score. Their chances of doing so are modified by their teams' skills and statistics as well as a significant amount of luck, as generated by the rolling of dice.

In 2009, Blood Bowl was released to a number of video game platforms, including this DS version. It lacks the 3D environment of the PC and console releases, opting for a isometric viewpoint; while some may view this as a negative, and it does at first glance seem like a retrograde move back to the 16-bit era and a waste of the DS' capabilities, the viewpoint works in the game's favour, allowing for a wider field -- pun intended -- of vision, as befits what is, after all, a game of strategy.

Similarly, the lack of a real-time mode turns out to be a missing feature which is not missed, as the end result is something which is more or less a straight translation of the board game into electronic form. The original board game is strong enough that 3D graphics and arcade-style gameplay are not improvements but unnecessary distractions, and for whatever reason they were removed from the DS edition, it has resulted in a better game. The fidelity to the source material also means that those players who want a quick game of Blood Bowl, but can't find an opponent or don't have the space to set up the board, can instead whip out the DS and indulge. There is also a rudimentary local multiplayer option, as well as a "hot seat" mode, which may be a misnomer on a portable system.

All that said, some features are indeed missed, such as the wilder players and options some of the teams bring along with them, and while eight types of team are included it is disappointing that evocative races such as the dark elves and undead have been overlooked. It is possible however that only those familiar with the original game will miss these bells and whistles, as the core gameplay offers plenty of complexity to keep strategic thinkers happy. On the other hand, those same strategic thinkers may not be quite as happy with the difficulty of the game; while the single-player mode will prove a challenge due to an aggressive CPU, the AI does on occasion seem to engage in some wild and hare-brained schemes, such as sending players to the far corners of the pitch to await passes which are never likely to come, or withdrawing strong blockers from the front lines, and so on.

The game benefits from good graphics, with good designs and smooth animation, although it would have been nice to have some variation in how the players moved. There are some neat cut scenes during the game, with the referee stepping in to conduct the opening coin toss and adjudicate fouls, and so on, and there are is a brief appearance from the game's commentators, familiar to those who have played the board game. Perhaps the most important cut scene of all is that which plays when a touchdown is scored, and alas this is the most disappointing, with dodgy-looking cheerleaders and no variation in the animation at all; it would have been a neat touch to have included burly orc cheerleaders, ethereal elven cheerleaders, bearded dwarven cheerleaders, and so on. The game also lacks much in the way of music, with only one or two tunes in evidence, although perhaps a wise move to shun in-game music, which could have become annoying with individual matches taking up to an hour to play.

This lack of polish can sometimes be an annoyance, but the game survives. There are some glitches in the code that may prove to be a more fatal issue. Outside a match, the game can sometimes take a long time to move between screens, which could be put down to loading times were it not for the simple fact that Blood Bowl is a cartridge-based title. At times, the game can lock up during these pauses, necessitating a restart and the subsequent loss of data, most annoying during a league game where a team has built up money and experience over a season. Other editions have been fixed by updates, and a new version of the game was released in 2010, but neither have made it to the DS alas.

All in all, Blood Bowl on the DS is a very basic game, and the lack of features and polish can be a bit disappointing at times. That said, the core gameplay is strong, a faithful adaptation of a great board game and at the end of the day, it's the gameplay that matters most.

What a Carrion

Last night, we wrapped up the Pathfinder one-off we started last week, with the player-characters successful in rooting out the cult activities in Carrion Hill and defeating the eldritch abomination the cult had summoned.

As I mentioned before, I found the Pathfinder ruleset to be far less intimidating to run than I had anticipated, but even so I think it's too bitty -- in the sense that it has a lot of working parts -- for my liking, and if I were to run a D&D variant again in the future, I think it is likely to be something a bit more loose and interpretative like Swords & Wizardry or Labyrinth Lord. The move in D&D3 -- and thus Pathfinder -- to codify everything has I think led to a situation where exploitation of the rules has become more possible, rather than less; a good example of this is the idea of an optimum character build, something which is almost unknown in earlier editions. I don't begrudge the playing of the system in this way -- indeed my monk in Ben's game is an example, with his five attacks a round and his inability to be hit -- but I do wonder if the game as a whole is unbalanced in loading all this on the players' side. Much as I hate to admit it, but the Unmentionable Edition is perhaps more robust in this regard.

I'm sure it is possible to head off the exploits and level the playing field, but I suspect it takes a familiarity with the game that I am never likely to have, and that it would be easier to achieve in a simpler system. We shall see, as I have already been asked to run something under Swords & Wizardry.

I also wonder if these issues would have been as prevalent if the adventure had been better. I was quite impressed by Carrion Hill as I read through it, as it has a clever time-sensitive element as well as a neat modular structure reminiscent -- perhaps deliberately -- of the classic Masks of Nyarlathotep. The players are thrown into a situation, but can tackle the next sections in any order they please, which in turn can affect the climax of the scenario. The problems arose in the details, and these only became apparent in play.

The adventure suffers from a lot of glaring bottlenecks in the plotting. For example, the vital clue which lets the players know what to do next and unlocks that modular structure is written in Aklo, a language most characters are unlikely to have, and which is not even represented among the included pre-generated characters; the party got around this by having the cleric spam Comprehend Languages for a whole day, but that led to them falling afoul -- if only a little -- of the time limit. On a similar note, there are far too many sections where high skill values in Knowledge (Arcana) and Disable Device are required to progress, which can end the scenario right there and then unless the GM fudges things. The scenario more or less demands that a wizard and a rogue are in the party, but nowhere is this mentioned, and again the pre-generated characters don't measure up and are unlikely to hit the numbers required.

Furthermore, nonsensical situations abound and only exacerbate the bottlenecks. A building with an epic-level lock on the front door is bad enough, but for the same building to be made of thick stone, to have no windows and for the doors to be made of the same thick stone stretches credibility. Is this a fortress, perhaps? Or a gold depository? No, it's a brick factory. The whole adventure seems to be designed in this negative, passive-aggressive fashion, where everything is there to hinder the players, as if this were not a game, as the whole point of it was not for people to have fun. That said, some faults lean in the players' favour, such as the villain who occupies a room too small for the whole party to enter, which would be fine if he were a close-quarters fighter rather than a magician. Or the big final monster of the scenario, which is so big that by the rules as written it should not be able to get out of the first location, let alone get close enough to the player-characters to menace them at the climax.

I have bought two of Paizo's adventures. One was so awful that I knew it from a read through, but Carrion Hill surprised me. If I am to use their scenario materials again, it will be as a source of ideas rather than something to be run as is, as the convenience of a pre-written adventure is outweighed by the poor writing.

Found

With our regular Pathfinder campaign paused in order to give GM Ben a bit of time to recharge, we've been taking the opportunity to try some new games. Last week Stuart blessed us with another excellent Cold City scenario -- it remains a brilliant game -- and last night I picked up the baton and ran a one-off Pathfinder scenario, as Ben had mentioned that he was keen on seeing what it was like to play the game from the other side of the GM screen. I picked Paizo's Carrion Hill, as all my games seem to turn into Call of Cthulhu at some point, and this gave me an excuse.

I think I ended up running the thing by default, as no one else was in a position to volunteer, and I have to admit I was a bit concerned. My tastes in game design are for more simple rulesets, not the five hundred page monster that is the Pathfinder rpg, but I think it turned out okay. While the game does seem to have a rule for everything, in most cases you can get away with picking a target number, and getting the players to roll a d20 and add the result to whatever ability you just decided on a fraction of a second before.

One might think that having a prepared scenario helped, but I've discovered that Carrion Hill, which seemed so strong on a read through, has some real problems. I won't go into them now, as we're only half way through and I don't want to spoil anything for next week, but suffice to say that it has some serious design flaws, some of which a half decent editor should have spotted.

All that said, my first attempt at running the game didn't seem to be as huge a disaster as I'd imagined it would be, but I'm still not sure it gave Ben the experience he wanted! He has been nudging me into running Swords and Wizardry or Runequest though, both of which are much more my kind of thing, so we'll see what, if anything, happens on that front.

Savage Eberron: Bards

In my Savage Eberron game earlier this year, Manoj played a half-ogre bard. At the time I did not have access to any official rules for bards in Savage Worlds, so I made some up; since then I've got hold of the Fantasy Companion, which has the Troubadour Professional Edge, but I prefer my version, as it's a bit simpler.

Bards are arcane spellcasters, and follow all standard rules for Arcane Background (Magic), with the following exceptions:

• A bard's arcane skill is Perform (Spirit), and this skill may also be used for mundane performances. A bard's Charisma modifier may be added to skill rolls for both mundane and arcane purposes.
• A bard may only cast spells through the playing of a musical instrument, singing a song, orating an epic poem, performing a dance, and so on. If the bard cannot perform this action, they cannot cast the spell.
• All spells are available to the bard, as long as they could plausibly be cast through one of the above methods. For example, an inspiring song might have the same effect as Boost/Lower Trait, but it is more difficult to explain how dancing could generate a Barrier. Common sense and GM discretion apply.

On the Boil

I can't recall ever having so many gaming projects on the go at once. Back in my wayward youth, I'd concentrate on one game or setting for months, before moving on to the next game and doing the same, all of which often came to naught as the group decided to play something else anyway. I'm sure this is not uncommon within our hobby.

I am working on three unrelated projects at the moment, but on the plus side, much of the work is already done for two of them:

• Our Pathfinder GM has expressed a desire to experience the game as a player for once. In fairness, this situation has arisen because he's always so full of enthusiasm for running his latest idea for a D&D-variant game, so we let him get on with it. Even so, I've volunteered to run a scenario so he can try the game from the other side of the screen; I have chosen Paizo's Carrion Hill, which is rather appropriate, as whenever I run something it seems to end up as Call of Cthulhu, and now I have an excuse.
• In the summer, I finally got a chance to run an Eberron game, albeit using Savage Worlds as the ruleset. At some point in December, I'll be running the sequel to that: Savage Eberron II: The Jewel of Galifar. Most of the work is done, but I've taken Stephen King's advice and have put the scenario away so that I can come back to it with fresh eyes in a few weeks. My plan is to run these once or twice a year, as a series of linked adventures, but not quite a campaign.
• Most recently, I've been brainstorming ideas for a return to my Rogue Trader game. I now have a good outline for the plot of the next chunk of the campaign, which will be a bit more linear before returning to the sandbox of the first "season". Players being the special snowflakes that they are, I expect it to be nowhere as direct a journey as the word "linear" implies.

In other news, we hit seventh level in our ongoing Pathfinder campaign last night, although since I've been blessed by Nurgle I decided to stay away and play via Skype. Which was fine until the camera cut out at their end and the microphone cut out at mine -- so I could only hear them and they could only see me -- and communication consisted of me attempting to figure out what was going on from their discussion and holding up handwritten notes to the camera in response.



From what I could tell things got a bit hairy, with at least two characters into critical condition -- perhaps Stuart can provide a more detailed synopsis -- but the party emerged from the troll caverns victorious and with a sizeable haul of treasure, including a +2 thundering great sword for Stuart's barbarian Artemisia, further nudging her towards the Weapon of Mass Destruction prestige class.

Super Dungeon Explore

I'm sorry. I know I shouldn't approve of such things, as role-playing games are a Serious Business, and things like this make our hobby look silly and immature, but I don't care. I ran a D&D4 cleric using a Lego Indiana Jones as my miniature -- both characters had hats, which was enough for me -- so that should tell you where I stand on such matters.

On a more serious note, the Japanese console rpg is a big part of gaming culture now, and is likely more influential than the tabletop hobby, so it's only fitting that the visual style of the former should cross over into the latter. I'm only surprised that it's taken so long. The miniatures come from Sodapop, and are part of their upcoming Super Dungeon Explore board-role-playing-hybrid game, but will be available separately.

One Page Horror

Here's a little something to celebrate my favourite holiday:

When the village of Haddonfield discovered that the wizard Langenkamp was engaged in dark magic, they raised a mob and burned down the old windmill in which he dwelled. With his dying words, Langenkamp laid a curse on the villagers who sought his doom, a curse which would have come to nothing had Cropsy, a young farm labourer, not sneaked into the mill for a nap and been caught in the conflagration. The death of an innocent provided the mystic fuel for the curse, and now the people of Haddonfield are trapped with no hope of rescue.

It's a short piece, based on the One Page Dungeon concept, so should be easy to slip into an existing game or to run as a one-shot for Halloween. It lacks system-specific rules, but there should be enough information to make generating appropriate statistics easy enough. The scenario is more or less setting neutral too, although a general mediaeval fantasy feel is implied -- and easily changed if desired. It's also packed full of shameful puns and references, as is usual for me.

You can download Horror Comes to Haddonfield here. If you do run it, let me know how it goes!