Sandbox D&D gaming (with Pathfinder): some reflections

I have been running a Pathfinder ‘sandbox’ campaign for about a year now (I think – have lost track of time – I believe we started it late June 2010)….. and until last week I had been running it virtually every week…… Looking back on the game, I threw out some ideas to the guys on the email group we have for our gang…. Having gibbered on and off all day between three of us, I thought maybe our collective musings would be worth sticking on this here blog, if only as a warning to y’all about what not to do if running a sandbox. ;) Here is the transcript (with a few typos/ changes to make sure it makes sense!)

Me (BenTheFerg)
I think running the Kingmaker path has told me a lot about how to run - and not run - a D&D game.... Here are a few reflections.....for the next one we ever do (as in playing a sandbox game in which you clear out an area to create your own kingdom)....

1) You would have no backer/ patron. You'd be on your own, as your own mercenary band/ reclaiming your ancestral lands/ seeking your fortune in the 'wild west'

2) SLOW progression tracker - to make those low levels last a little longer... to keep up the sense of challenge

3) PC death. I wouldn't wish it, but I sure think it should happen. To keep the game with a level of realism, there would be need to be a supply of npcs who were affiliated to the pcs, eg a base camp of folks in your group (as in more npcs in your team - who remained at base camp whilst the pcs investigated. When a pc dies, you take an npc and they are seamlessly involved in the adventure. That's one solution anyway!)

4) a little more attention to rules on manufacturing of magic items...... I guess this would necessitate a discussion of Iron Heroes for the next such sandbox, or Pathfinder, but with class variants of spell casters which boosts them in other respects but tones down magic item creation.... (Kingmaker had massive time spans, allowing for the mage to create customised gear at half price – magic items lost their uniqueness, and the team are buffed to the hilt! Moreover, the rules on magic item creation are overly generous we now realise, and can be game breaking, like the permanent strongjaw gloves the monk uses)

5) more attention to smaller details, eg to your stronghold, npc guards, etc (for small skirmish warfare scenarios, assassination attempts, creating a feeling of threat and the need to counter that threat)

6) likewise more attention to various rival npc groups, local politics, local environments, hazards.........

7) level cap at 5th or at 10th? (when the pc has to retire and their kids take over?) or is that too arbitrary? :)

8) more small dungeons. More pot-holing and under-dark exploration. More difficult terrain situations, more environmentally hazardous battles. Diseases. Midges. Slavers. Traitors. Revenge. Mistrust.

9) disfigurement rules for massive blows/ physical traumas. A discussion on the limits of healing for damage from one blow above a certain value...... to make it more gritty. :) I think there are some in the GRR Martin d20 Game of Thrones rpg I still own. :) (and maybe in Black Company d20 rpg too.)

Just some thoughts……… I am thinking of running it as a homage to all things old school D&D (Keep on the Borderlands, etc etc)......

Kelvin (KelvinGreen), from now on called K:
The only problem with Kingmaker was that it had a very clear plot, and for all the hexmaps in the world, if you have a plot, it's not a proper sandbox.

Me:
Yes. This is something I would want to change – as in having rival groups all with their own agendas, who pursue their agendas, and try and find ways (through diplomacy, war, assassination etc) to get the pcs to do their dirty work (without you guessing of course – not that that would work!!)

Stuart (from the Great Game) – now called Stu.
Greg's old SLA Industries campaign was a bit like that. You could choose from a variety of missions (BPNs), but in addition, the team became increasingly embroiled with a number of competing factions, including Dark Knight and the Mob. At one point we even carried out a hit on another Slop (SLA Operative) for the Mob, believing we were on a legitimate mission!

We were constantly navigating the murky waters between what SLA wanted us to do, and what we could get away with in the interests of lining our own pockets and promoting the interests of our team.

But the key thing was there was not pre-scripted plot: after each session Greg would go away and decide what the various shadowy players would do in response to our own actions. We seemed to be constantly under investigation by internal affairs, always looking over our shoulders, characters took to sleeping with weapons under their pillows...all great stuff!

Thinking back, it WAS a sandbox campaign. Some missions were pushed at us, but we were not obliged to take them, and we had a number of sub plots (for instance the hunt for the serial killer Exsanguinator) running throughout the campaign.

K
Yes, it's one thing to have a plot develop through play, but what Paizo did was release something with all the trappings of a sandbox -- the hexmap, the wandering monsters, etc -- but then overlaid a standard adventure path plot on it, as I feared they would. There's nothing wrong with a plot, of course, but it's not a sandbox.

Stu
The question is, how does the sandbox evolve to keep pace with the increasing power of the PCs, particularly in Pathfinder, where the leap in power from 1st to 4th is pretty substantial. You want to avoid the "Oh yes, well, there is indeed a dragon in your basement, only he's been keeping very quiet up until now....because...er..."

Kingmaker does this by adding new territory to the campaign, with bigger challenges, like the more serious encounters to the south of the main map, and the undead cyclops empire on the second map. BUT, if the PCs by-pass something - like the derro lair - with the intention of returning to it later, the GM will need to do some buffing of the original encounter while keeping it credible.

(me: sadly every front cover had an image of what the Big Bad would be - as in the lich-cyclops opposite)

A sandbox dungeon is probably easier to manage in this respect, with some areas hidden, or only accessible once a boss is defeated, etc.

K
Well, the simple answer is that the players know from the start that the dragon is there, but they avoid it until later. If they leave it until they're much more powerful, then they'll probably squash it, but one could argue that this is just sensible -- if a bit dull -- play.

I don't know if we can make a proper judgement on the power levels of Pathfinder at this point. Our current characters are rather overpowered, as we know, but that may not be the case for the game as a whole. Similarly, Kingmaker was a pretty poor sandbox setup, so I don't think we've had enough useful sample data, as it were, to decide if a Pathfinder sandbox can work.

Me
Thing is, I want there to be various plots (npc goals which they try to achieve) and for pcs to find ways around these…. And Kingmaker has done a great job I think in trying to do these. I have enjoyed running the game, where you have a good idea of possible threats and have used your resources wisely to circumnavigate the threats. As a player, this is what I prefer as well. It is not much fun to be stumbling around in the dark for long. Yes – pc strategies may fail (may have poor intel) but pcs can have a go.

I think there is a balance to be struck between narrative (which gives plot dynamic, motives, time pressures, cinematic material, great locations) and sandbox…..

I let us down by not understanding the delicate nature of Pathfinder, and thus the point buy has skewed the game (FYI I allowed a dice pool mechanic at pc generation which led to pcs having, by pure chance, awesome attribute scores, which made them tougher, I’d say potentially – by 2 levels) – and add that to a lack of prudence on the magic item creation front (mentioned earlier the issue of allowing for unique one-shot items to be made, which really made the pcs buffed up nicely, esp when the kitted out their cohorts gained from the leadership feat) (all newbie Pathfinder DM errors) and it made the sandbox too easy and not threatening enough. I have learned from my errors (I hope).

Paizo in publishing the setting have managed to create a scaled level of threat to higher level pcs, with the expanding map, and with events happening to trigger the exploration of those areas….. given space constraints, this was the best way forward given the market demand for a certain kind of look to a module.

Having teleportation, pegasi, and a Roc have made the hex map irrelevant in so many respects. Higher level play makes sandbox in such a limited setting pointless. Wilderness exploration is fine for lower levels. At your levels it should be more pc driven – we want to explore X, travel to the plane of Y to speak to Z to find where B is. Etc Planar adventuring is well suited to high level sandbox play.

Hopefully we have all learned a lot more about how to make Pathfinder work – and whenever we finally run Carrion Crown (or something else), I think we will all be keen from the outset to avoid errors we made with Kingmaker. Kingmaker is not over yet though- you have the tournament, and shadowfell left. I will abandon most of the sandbox from here on it- the tournament will be the last sanboxy part – in that who knows what you will do!! - let’s enjoy the ride of the story I think and hit that cinematic ending.

For your homebrew sandbox, one wants to use the approach of Vornheim – but for Wilderness exploration – to generate settings/ ideas on the fly, to complement other stuff.

Other things Kingmaker could have done better:
- rivalry between npc adventurers and yours
- more persistent npc foes
- foes who become allies against a bigger bad…
- more locations in a smaller area.
- A more claustrophobic feel

Will work on a setting starting this half term. Don’t know what sandbox wilderness ideas appeal….
1. Mythic wood (sentient) – emphasising the fey
2. a northern wilderness adventure (giants, northmen, dragons, and other mythic Viking/ norse creatures), with viking boat exploration, castle building etc – or of adventurers carving out a kingdom in the wilds in the north…..(beyond the wall/ somesuch)
3. an Al Qadim style game, of jungles, deserts, island hopping…

The smaller the setting the easier the task – so for 2) the idea of playing a bunch of pcs questing into the wilderness from a fort on the edge of civilisation (ala Keep on the Borderlands), to tame it, take it, would be easiest. BUT this is similar in premise initially to Kingmaker…..

Stu
Old school sandbox was a simple explore and purge mission, particularly in the first 10 levels or so. After that, the class descriptions seemed to assume players would start using the conquered lands as the basis for their domain - e.g. building castles, temples and thieves' guilds. But AD&D tended to skip over much of this - it could tell you how much an iron grill over a window would cost you, but not how to work out the tax base for a rural hex with eight farms and a human population of 150.

Plus, how did you run a dwarf domain? An elf one? The D&D Companion rules did address some of this, and the launch of Battlesystem did provide scope for bringing miniatures gaming into AD&D.

But once PCs get past 10th level, the scope for a sandbox wilderness and/or dungeon adventure becomes somewhat reduced, particularly if people start taking the Leadership feat. Then they begin plotting the downfall of other kingdoms, empire building or possibly planar adventuring. Is it still D&D in the classic sense of the word?

Much of the daily work of running a domain can be outsourced to NPC allies, of course, and the PCs can still expose themselves to danger in the form of high level adventures to meet threats to their own realms - e.g. a barbarian invasion like the one we had in Kingmaker.

"A pox upon the business of kinging it! It drained every last drop of a man's tissues, leaving him a querulous old hairsplitter without enough red blood in his veins to swing a broadsword. Surely, after twenty weary years of wearing the crown, a man was entitled to throw over honours and titles and set out toward dim horizons for one last gore-splattered adventure before Time's all-felling, implacable scythe cut him down..."

CONAN OF THE ISLES, L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, Sphere Books, 1974

K
Ah, the wisdom of King Conan!

Well that's another case of plot developing through play, which is absolutely in keeping with the sandbox ideal. The key is to have lots of this going on at once, so there's a meaningful player choice; where Kingmaker went wrong was in a lack of alternatives, so our choice was a binary one of choosing between following the plot or not following the plot, when it should have been between following Plot A, following Plot B, following Plot C, and so on.

The other issue it had was that its plots were more interesting than the alternative, so the campaign presented us with a barbarian invasion, but then said "or you can go and explore some hexes instead", and of course that's not really a choice at all.

As such, it became a scripted campaign with a hexmap, which is not the same thing as a sandbox.

Stu
Keep on the Borderlands was great for levels 1-3, and Isle of Dread for 4-6, but the key is what happens when you have a 12th level party....? I'm really enjoying higher level play to be honest. It's been fun taking characters from lowly 1st level novices and ramping them up into Schwarzenegger-like uber-heroes. The key is devising a sandbox that can challenge at 1st and at 12th, when people may indeed have flying mounts, the ability to teleport, etc. This is less an issue of points buy, and more what players are able to acquire through innovative thinking, class features, etc.

PCs will still be able to manufacture magic items; it may take them longer, but they'll still be able to come up with a magic carpet or find some way of winning the loyalty of a flying monster like a pegasus. Plus, you can't really ban spells like Invisibility, Haste, Fly, Enlarge, Summon Monster, Entangle, etc. all of which play a key role in our strategy.

I guess the solution may be a bigger sandbox, something the size of North Africa rather than East Anglia.

K
Well, as Ben suggested, you can also expand beyond the mortal realms into the other planes. You're still running around in a sandbox, but it's not about clearing forests any more.

Stu
That is definitely one way forward, because ultimately the planes can really be whatever the referee wants them to me. The PCs can do a bit of library research on them, but at the end of the day, it is another great unknown for the level 15+ character.
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There you have it. I have really enjoyed Kingmaker. I would concur with K’s gripe: not enough positive options. Not enough dynamic forces jostling for the same area – with possibly different reasons to be there…… Moreover as a ref I found the Kingmaker Path badly designed in combat terms for the team. Yes the pcs were more powerful than most – but generally speaking the fights were not designed well – this meant I had to work very hard to try and make them more challenging. The fight with the trolls in the troll lair was the most challenging, and only because I gave them all 2x their hps, and had them all converge on the pcs after they were discovered in the troll lair – so they were taking on quite a few at once…. The barbarian was nearly downed during that combat.

‘Owlzilla’ (a giant owlbear) was another dangerous one (I gave her 4x the hps) – she managed to pick up the rogue and use him as a club. Fun. 4e (which I know the boys don’t like) has a better encounter design philosophy. In future I will stick more to the 4e design philosophy, and make sure I have a buffer and controller type, as well as brute and artillery for every major encounter. Without a spell caster, my critters were doomed from the outset! However, these gripes are of another nature –not sandbox issues in themselves – although the very nature of wilderness encounters means that one encounter in the wilderness will often not stretch the party’s resources like 4 encounters in a dungeon will – making designing wilderness encounters that bit more challenging.

TTFN

Ben

One Page Dungeon Contest 2011

A couple of years ago, a group of gaming bloggers came up with the idea of the one page dungeon, which is -- as one might expect -- a dungeon map designed to fit on one sheet of paper, including all rules and statistics. It was designed to make building megadungeons easier, and the epic Stonehell was one of the first prooducts of the format, as fine a proof-of-concept as one could ask for. The Chatty DM goes into more detail on the history of the concept here.

Some bright sparks realised that the format could be used for simple one-shot dungeons too, and some other bright sparks decided that a good way to show off the format was to have an annual contest in which entrants could show how the format could be tweaked and twisted, and yet remain true to the original concept. The One Page Dungeon Contest is now in its third year and is going strong.

I've not entered before, and I had not intended to enter this year, but when the 2011 contest was announced, I realised I already had a one page dungeon, and so decided to submit it. I had no expectation of it getting anywhere, and to be honest, I entered it more so it would gain a bit of exposure to a wider audience; this worked well, as the number of downloads shot up soon after it was entered.

I was pleasantly surprised to wake up this morning and discover that this year's contest winners had been announced and that my scenario is among them! I suspect I may have won by virtue of submitting the only horror-themed scenario, and I'll have to buck up my ideas if I'm to enter again, but it's still an exciting bit of news.

Congratulations too to the other winners, and thanks to all the other entrants, who nonetheless worked hard to get their adventures done in time for the competition deadline. You can download all the entries in one pdf bundle from the contest page.

Token Effort

My gaming group has been playing a lot of Pathfinder of late and it's become quite a miniature-heavy game, as we have lots of followers and summoned creatures stomping about, and there's only so much one can keep track of without some kind of visual aid. Generic pawns are okay up to a point, and there's always something a little demoralising about pointing at a miniature and saying "I know it looks like a squirrel, but this is an otyugh".

As such, I've been producing some cardboard tokens for use during these more confusing moments, and as soon as I have enough of a single theme, I'll be putting them out as pdfs. First up are some bog-standard elementals in a variety of sizes; these should cover medium to huge elementals in D&D3/Pathfinder, but I'm sure they can be of use in any fantasy-type game. Click on the link below to get the file:

Elementals (3.5mb pdf)

I'll be producing these for use in our weekly game, so the monsters included will reflect that. That said, I'm open to requests or any other bright ideas to improve them.

Second Helpings

I've updated my introductory Call of Cthulhu scenario "Dinner With Susan"; I've made some minor tweaks to the text and formatting, and added a Creative Commons Licence, so if you've downloaded it before there are few differences, but if not, do give it a try and let me know what you think!

You can read a play summary -- not by me! -- of the scenario here and you can download the scenario itself here.

Vornheim: The Complete City Kit

Player: Fluffy the half-golem needs repairs! Where's the nearest alchemist?

GM: Err... [flips through three hundred pages of text] hang on, it's here somewhere...

Player: I'll put the kettle on.

A proper old-school GM cares not one jot for detailed maps of every street of every district of the City of Genericfantasyburg, because the old-school GM will just roll on a random table to discover what's round that corner or behind that door. I don't know him aside from his blog persona, but Zak S. -- it stands for Sabbath or Smith depending on which hat he's wearing that day -- seems to prefer this philosophy of generating random data and trying to sort it out at the table, but with Vornheim he suggests that even random tables aren't quite fun enough.

Vornheim also represents an explicit dissatisfaction with the rpg book as a format, that as game books, they're perhaps a bit too bookish and aren't nearly gamey enough. Zak wants them to be more than just containers for text -- this is reflected, consciously or not, within the city itself, where snakes are the medium of choice -- and as such Vornheim is a thing to be used, a bundle of mechanics and tools, a -- you knew it was coming -- kit that only takes the shape of a book, for lack of a better format.

Imagine I want to generate a city location, so in order to do so, I use the front cover of the book. I adore this. It's the author saying "I don't want the cover to just be the thing you stick the title and a pretty picture on, even if I am an artist; I want you to be able to get an actual use from the cover." The idea is to maximise game utility, because the prettiest painted cover image is of about as much use as a chocolate fire guard if your players want to know what's behind that green copper door.

So, I want to generate the location. I get a d4 and I roll it -- this only works with the pointy types; my fancy twelve-siders just roll right off the book, off the table and into the dark corners of the room, where the spiders dwell -- onto the cover of the book itself.

Vornheim is a city of towers, so let's generate one of those. The 14 to the right of -- and almost obscured by -- the die tells us that the tower has fourteen storeys, and the 2 below the die tells us that the tower has two bridges linking it to other towers. The number rolled, a 1, tells us how many entrances the tower has. This takes about a minute, start to finish, more if you faff about trying to find your dice bag.

It's not just cute and fun -- though it is that too -- as this kind of innovation is also there to make the generation of game data more useful and efficient; the exact same roll gives us a fighter with an Armour Class of 18 or 2 -- depending on D&D version -- of second level, and wielding a sword. The same chart can also generate an animal, monster, thief, wizard, group of city guards, inn, two types of internal room, two types of magical attack, and a poison. There's another very similar chart on the back cover, and the book contains a number of different pages that operate along similar lines.

Not all the material in the book follows the same format. There's some prose description, maps, a couple of keyed map adventures, and more than a few random tables, but these are all infused with the same sense of trying to do more with such tools, to not fall back on what is expected of a city-based rpg sourcebook. This informs and supports the general approach of describing Vornheim through examples, rather than present an encyclopaedia of every street, house and citizen.

That said, the GM is given the tools to generate such elements as and when they are needed, and more importantly perhaps, to make them interesting and dynamic when they do come up; Vornheim rejects the mundane, conventional and boring, and this attitude is apparent on every page. The stated goal of the book is not only to allow a GM to create a city on the fly, but to make it interesting, memorable and fun, and I would argue that it more than succeeds in that task.

It is rather D&D-centric and I don't run D&D, but that's not the fault of the book and it's not as if Zak's blog title doesn't make it very clear what his game of choice is. It's not a huge problem by any means, as the book uses so few actual statistics and rules that it's easy enough to convert to one's chosen system, and besides, my key interest was in how Zak pushed the boundaries of rpg sourcebook presentation, and that's something one can appreciate irrespective of the game system.

The book could have done with another editing pass perhaps, as there are some glitches here and there, such as missing table headers and a couple of cases of repeated and redundant information. In places, there's also some repeated and redundant information. Even so, these glitches are few and none of them have any negative effect on the utility of the book, and that's what counts at the end of the day.

To compare Vornheim to the perennial Best City Book Ever nominee Ptolus is perhaps not fair -- although I sort of just do that, oops -- as they're very different products with very different intentions, and to say that one is better than the other seems a bit pointless. Let it be said then that I prefer Vornheim, even as an infrequent fantasy GM, because it strives to be more useful than exhaustive, and because I admire and support the genuine attempts to do something different within the format of the rpg sourcebook.

Vornheim is a sixty-four page A5ish hardback book, more or less compatible with most versions of D&D -- even the Unmentionable -- and is available from the Lamentations of the Flame Princess shop for 12.50€. It's well worth every whatever-pennies-are-called-in-the-Euro-is-it-cents-I-don't-know.

Vornheim is Mine!

See?

Written by this chap and published by this fellow, Vornheim: The Complete City Kit is, as the title might suggest, a toolkit for running urban adventures, and over the past few months I have been waiting with considerable and increasing excitement for its release. Not because of its content, although I expect that to be of a high standard, but because of the ways in which that content is conveyed, presented and displayed; this may be one of the most revolutionary rpg products published in years.

A full review will follow, once I've read it cover to cover.

One Issue Campaign, UK Edition: Part the Second

Right, so in the first post, I went through White Dwarf #67 and pulled out most of the material suitable for use in a game; now I'm going to try to hammer it into a campaignish sort of shape.

Right away I realise I have a problem: I have no map. Of the games I have to hand, Rogue Trader has a starmap, but one that's already well stocked with detail, and I'm not that fond of the sample map in Labyrinth Lord; it's a decent enough campaign map, but I'm not getting the right feel from it in this case. Instead I'm going to see what I can build from the material in the magazine, which also lets me off the hook in choosing a system for all this, as I'm still not ready to make that choice yet.

So, what have we got? There's some setting information in the adventure A Murder at Flaxton; aside from the titular village, we're told of the towns of Brecor to the north and Zerler to the south, as well as another nation across the sea, called Veridor. So that's the starting point, and I think I'll also use that advert for Games Workshop stores -- the one with the parachuting pygmy orcs -- and convert the seven shops into settlements in the game world. Quick and dirty campaign map below!

I've already identified hobgoblins and orcs as major humanoid races in the setting, and there are enough dwarves in the magazine to make them the third racial group. Humans are conspicuous by their absence -- although I suspect distant Veridor is a human nation -- but we've got a barbarian culture to put somewhere, so let's make them humans.

For some reason, D&D hobgoblins have this east Asian -- Mongolian usually -- aesthetic, so let's use that and combine it with the samurai and ninja miniatures we uncovered in the previous post. Our hobgoblins then are generic Oriental types, which ties in with the Peking Duck adventure; we'll set that in our capital of Ravenscourt, which is cosmopolitan enough to have a hobgoblin restaurant, and the Tongs in that scenario are now a hobgoblin criminal gang. Let's also turn the scenario's mafiosi into dwarves; we'll call them the "Iron Ring" and their chief enforcer is a dwarf nicknamed "The Juggernaut" for his special ability to smash through any obstacle with ease.

The head of the Iron Ring is a dwarf named Silenjax, who has made many an enemy in his time. What follows is an actual classified advert from this issue:

Rukin, hobbit extraordinaire, seeks vengeance on Silenjax, dwarven scum. May your beard grow lice and wither, you disgusting relation to Jock the American.

These in-character small ads were a much-loved part of the old Dwarf, and they reappeared in the mid-1990's with the gaming magazine Arcane. Did Dragon have something similar?

Ravenscourt is also abuzz with talk of the upcoming election. The current Lord of the Living Stone -- essentially the dwarven king -- is developing a reputation for being rather addled and absent-minded, with the Stone Parliament grumbling incessantly -- behind layer after convoluted layer of etiquette, of course, because it just wouldn't be seemly to openly criticise the Lord -- about this or that gaffe he's made. The Iron Ring have no wish to lose the freedom they've enjoyed under the incompetent rule of the current Lord, so they'll attempt to rig the election so he stays in power.

As an example of the government's impotence, a village not two days' ride from the capital has been the subject of raids by a mysterious warrior, and the populace has had to resort to hiring mercenaries such is the lack of decisive action from the government. We'll slot Thrud and Lymara in here.

To the north, Broadmarsh is the site of the Monster Colosseum, where all manner of exotic beasts are brought to fight in the arena for the entertainment of the crowds. People travel from all over the kingdom and beyond to watch and take part, but there have been grumblings -- again, not open criticism, for we are dwarves, not uncouth barbarians! -- of late that the prices for entry are too high; a number of interested parties, including both hobgoblin Tongs and the Iron Ring, are looking to get involved in a rival setup, and players could take advantage by capturing monsters out in the wilderness and selling them to the highest bidder. They might even get involved in setting up their own arena. The smugglers/slavers from A Murder at Flaxton are probably involved somewhere too, and the highest bounty of all has been offered for the legendary, possibly mythical, Jabberwock.

Recently, two adventurers named Critchlow and Harrison, one a warrior and one a wizard, went to capture a green dragon for the colosseum. The manager of the arena took it as a bit of a joke at first, but is now a bit worried about them, particularly as the wizard Harrison is an impulsive sort given to random and unpredictable behaviour; we'll work up some kind of random table for him.

The dwarf kingdom exists in an uneasy peace with the hobgoblin nation -- which we will call the Western Court, after the location of Games Workshop's Birmingham branch -- while the human barbarian tribes wander about in the southern regions, and orcs roam across the northlands; the orcs have of late been using unusual tactics -- such as parachutes -- in their raids, the result of one of their chieftains being possessed by an insane spirit that is trying to turn the greenskins into an army of conquest. I'm thinking that it's the spirit of some old crackpot inventor who was never taken seriously in life, and is now exacting vengeance through weird science and gonzo tactics. The orcs don't mind that old chief Jukka -- name pinched from the classified ads -- has gone a bit funny, because the raiding and pillaging is even more fun as a result.

That spirit is not the only one causing trouble across the land. A banshee plagues the town of Arndale, her cries causing a death each night, while across the mountains in Goodramgate, the people not only have to contend with parachuting orcs, but also a spectral black hound with fiery red eyes and a tendency towards PSYCHIC VIOLENCE. Further south, not even the famed soldiery of Broadmarsh can do anything about the malevolent Will-o-Wisps haunting the town's outskirts, driving away trade and leading travellers to their doom. Even the capital itself is suffering, as poltergeist activity is on the increase in Ravenscourt, yet another crisis for the Stone Parliament to watch unfold, powerless to intervene.

These baleful undead should be trapped on another plane, locked away by the magic of the Vivimancer Agaard -- name borrowed from Paul Agaard, Games Workshop's new (in 1985) events manager -- but the Vivimancer has grown bored of his lot and has let these beings go loose, in the hope that they will be tracked back to him in his lair on the plane of Elysium and he can be given a final death. Agaard's house servant is a centaur called Cowley. Cowley likes to wear a bowler hat as he attends to the Vivimancer's flower gardens, and I imagine him to be your typical snooty and superior Jeeves type, only a centaur.
 
As an aside, I discovered that The Gameskeeper is still there today, so well done to them!

As luck would have it, deep in the barbarian lands to the south is a portal to other planes and dimensions. It is in the control of a beautiful but excessively violent woman named Ashley who goes to battle sky clad and swinging twin broadswords; she has managed to get the portal to work in one direction, plucking warriors from across the multiverse -- here are our GURPS lot -- to fight at her side, but her true goal is to use it to escape this world.

The other barbarian tribes are either unaware of Ashley's plans or are busy with other concerns; the fifty-year-long autumn is due to come to a close, and the druids and shamans are turning their spiritual energies towards preparing for the Long Winter to come, as they cannot merely flee underground like the dwarves. They also have to deal with a beast they call Hiihtajantie -- name again stolen from the classified ads -- a vast purple gargoyle-like thing which has of late been stealing livestock and even the odd tribesman. Hiihtajantie is the size of a dragon, and the glowing lights which orbit its head are said to have a number of magical effects, including hypnosis. As the barbarians are an insular sort at the best of times, the arena owners up north haven't yet heard about Hiihtajantie the Disco Beast.

That's enough to be getting on with, I think. I've used almost everything from my initial list, and I've discovered some more bits and pieces while doing so. I'd start the campaign off with A Murder at Flaxton, then there are plenty of options for the players to explore. They could get involved with the organised crime element, engage with the politics of Ravenscourt, or spend their time monster hunting for the colosseum. At some point they might run into the ghost problem, which would then lead on to some planar travel and a big fight with an astral hippie. As for a system, I still haven't made that choice, although I'm leaning towards some kind of BRP variant, perhaps RuneQuest or maybe the core BRP book itself. That said, there's enough common ground between BRP and D&D that one could convert the Call of Cthulhu and RuneQuest material over with relative ease.

So that's that. I have too much gaming on my plate as it is, so I don't think I'll be using this any time soon, and as such I release it to the community. Do with it what you will!

One Issue Campaign, UK Edition

I've decided to have a go at Jeff's brilliant idea. First of all, here are the rules:

1. Start with set of core rules, preferably one a small amount of setting material or a strongly implied setting. Too much setting info will spoil the soup I think, while none whatsoever will serve as an insufficient basis.
2. Get a single issue of Dragon or some other gaming mag.
3. Squeeze every possible of iota of usable information out of that magazine and nothing else to flesh out a campaign for your ruleset.

I don't think I've ever owned a single issue of Dragon, so I'm breaking the rules already. Delving in my rpg box, I have uncovered White Dwarf #67, from July 1985, somewhere in the middle of the magazine's Back When It Was Good period.

In this post, I'm going to go through the magazine and pull out the most useful material as it strikes me. In the next post, I'll try to meld it all together into a playable campaign.

Let's start with the cover, by Mark Bromley. We've got a warrior -- perhaps a proto-Warhammer Chaos Warrior -- bursting through a wooden door, only he's not. From his pose, we can see he's not moving forward with any great speed, and yet the door has been smashed to the ground, and one of the metal hinges has been bent out of shape. This suggests either that the warrior is moving through a gap someone else has already made, or he's of such great strength he doesn't have to take a run up to annihilate a wooden door. It's also not clear if he's human; there's an element of dwarfishness to him, but the door also seems to be scaled to his size.

Jeff's cover star became the main villain of his campaign, but I don't think this fellow is destined for that. Instead, let's say he is a dwarf, and let's also say that he's possessed of some kind of Juggernaut type ability with which he can deliver massive kinetic blows without a run up. Behold the Juggerdwarf!

Inside, we've got adverts for what appears to be a Games Workshop edition of Middle-Earth Roleplaying as well as Grenadier Miniatures' UK division. There's not much there to steal, although the Grenadier page has a photo of a samurai taking on two ninjas, and that's worth importing.

After that, there's a nomination form for the Games Day '85 awards, including an award for "Best Games Magazine"; given where the form is printed, and that Games Day is run by Games Workshop, I'd be surprised if the Dwarf did not go on to win this one. It does give me the idea of including some form of -- potentially rigged -- election or contest in the campaign.

After that there's the contents page and a superficial editorial from Ian Livingstone -- perhaps the above election is to install or depose a limp figurehead -- then a three page article on ghosts in Call of Cthulhu. Since this is actual game material we should use it, but it's also quite detailed, so ghosts will be a big part of the campaign and they'll have lots of special abilities as per the article. I am not turning down the chance to use a power called "Psychic Violence".

More adverts follow but there's little to swipe, aside from this delightful fellow from a strange graffiti-inspired advert for the UK series of D&D modules:

I'm not sure if this beast appears in any of the scenarios, but he's in the campaign, disco lights and all.

Reviews follow, for Star Ace, the second, third and fourth Dragonlance scenarios, and Monster Coliseum [sic] for RuneQuest. There's not much to borrow from most of the reviews, but the colosseum is in, so somewhere in the campaign setting will be a place where characters can fight captured monsters and perhaps gain employment; someone has to go out and capture the things in the first place, after all. Reviewer Oliver Dickinson has a moan about the price of the boxed set -- £16.96, or just over £40 in today's money -- so that'll be a feature of the campaign colosseum too; while it's a popular entertainment, it is considered expensive, but then it's the only game in town... until the players get involved.

Dave Langford's book reviews are next, and the most interesting thing here is the review of Brian Aldiss' Helliconia Summer, which makes me want to include great big century-long seasons in the setting. The next article is a piece on barbarian magic in RuneQuest, so we'll borrow that too, which means that we have to make room for a barbarian culture somewhere.

Thrud the Barbarian -- king of the aforementioned culture? -- follows, with Lymara the She Wildebeeste using her ample curves to distract some opponents before beheading them. That's all there is to the strip, but I'm sure we can find a space for Lymara and Thrud in our campaign. After that we have the first of the issue's scenarios, Peking Duck, a multi-faction brawl set in a Chinese restaurant in modern-day London, and with statistics for Champions and the mighty Golden Heroes, now known as Squadron UK. This may be difficult to include in a fantasy campaign without considerable modification.

Then we have an episode of The Travellers -- see a digitally remastered version here -- involving an NPC patron with arbitrary, dice-based reactions to the protagonists. Of course this is in. Facing this is a single page article on social customs in Traveller; it's basic stuff, but it prompts me to decide that social rules and customs will be a big part of this One Issue Campaign.

More adverts follow, then a mystery scenario for AD&D1, A Murder at Flaxton. Or rather, the first page of said scenario, then an early pull-out Citadel Miniatures catalogue. It features Citadel's The Lord of the Rings range -- I'm not sure if we can use that -- as well as some great hobgoblin and orc miniatures; as such, hobgoblins and orcs will be the major humanoid races in the campaign. As an aside, a set of three Citadel miniatures would have set you back between £1.50 and £1.95 in 1985, or about £5 in modern coinage. Hobgoblins are 60p each!

A Murder at Flaxton is an investigative scenario involving dwarf smugglers -- as in smugglers who are dwarves -- slavers and pirates. It's a low-level scenario, with the NPCs hovering around third level, but it might make for a good starting point. Aside from the maps, the main illustration is what looks like an early John Blanche piece showing dwarves drinking from bottles of Bugman's Best Rum, implying that the scenario is set in the Warhammer world. I don't think we'll go that far.

Even more adverts follow, including one with a picture of a nude woman with very 80's hair, make up and earrings, covered in blood and wielding two glittering swords. As a modern enlightened male, I of course deplore such horrible, exploitative cheesecake, but as a gamer I recognise that it's so over-the-top that I have to include it somewhere. After that there's the letters page, which like every other White Dwarf letters page in history is full of people moaning about how wrong White Dwarf is getting pretty much everything; the campaign will feature a bunch of grumpy old dwarves who can't stop going on about how rubbish everything is. They may be involved with the rigged election.

Following that, we have two pages on various different ways spiders in AD&D1 can kill a character. I doubt anyone has ever used this in the twenty-five years since it saw print, so let's be the first and make spiders a major hazard in this One Issue Campaign. Then we have more adverts, including one showcasing Games Workshop's seven -- yes, seven! -- shops, and featuring pygmy orcs with parachutes:

Holy Hecuba in a hairnet, these little chaps are definitely in.

The next article is the good old Fiend Factory but instead of the usual gonzo monsters, we're given the Vivimancer, an odd sort of prestige class for high level AD&D1 characters. It's not clear if this is intended for players, although since they are barred from the Prime Material Plane and only increase in level once every fifty years, I'd guess not. They seem to be a Neutral Good equivalent of the lich and use enchanted flowers to focus their magical abilities; even so, I think we have found our campaign villain.

More adverts follow -- and people say it became a glorified catalogue only after Games Workshop booted out all the rpg stuff -- but one has a picture of a centaur in a bowler hat, so he's in. Then there's Tabletop Heroes, which would eventually become the regular 'Eavy Metal modelling and painting pages, and is here hosted by Joe "Lone Wolf" Dever, although John "John Blanche" Blanche is hovering about in the shadows. There's little of interest here, although one of the figures covered is a Citadel Miniatures Jabberwock, and they're such great monsters that I have to include them in the campaign.

Then there's an article on magical backpacks, all of which have some kind of minor teleportation ability, and I can definitely see them getting some use. Then there's an advert for GURPS which is just pictures of a superhero, a Viking, a British "redcoat", a knight, two stetson-and-sixgun-toting Western characters, a Roman legionnaire and a couple of brutish monsters; this mismatched group will find their way into the campaign, I'm sure. After that, there's a news page, more adverts, the ever-popular small ads -- which could be a whole blog post in itself, although I will note for now that Jonathan Welfare of Tavistock Road is offering the all-new gladiator character class for the bargain price of £1 plus a stamped-addressed envelope -- then two colour adverts, one on the inside back cover for Citadel starter sets -- adventurers and monsters -- and one on the outside for Citadel's D&D miniature line; there are no examples of the latter, although the artwork looks like early Blanche again, and features a warrior and a wizard in mêlée with a green dragon. This pair of idiots may very well make it in.

So there you have it, White Dwarf #67 more or less cover-to-cover, with most of the playable material stripped out. Next up, I'll try to turn that lot into a campaign. I will also be choosing a ruleset, which I should have done at the beginning, but I'm a maverick, and if the pencil-pushers at City Hall don't like that, then they can shove it!

---

EDIT: The second part of the exercise can be found here.

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).

The Ministry of Blades : The Madness of Angels, episode 5

Prentiss flattens a steward; Curruthers shoulders the load.

Played

3rd February 2011.

Dramatis Personae

Lady Antonia deVore - a Heavily-armed Aristocrat (player not present).
Captain Benson Curruthers - a Military Policeman.
Doctor Zephaniah Pleasant - a Sinister Surgeon.
Miss April Sharpe - a Self-taught Inventor.
Jack Prentiss - a Dodgy Pedestrian.
Mr Erasmus Rooke - the Boss.
Henderson - a Dedicated Cryptologist.
The Chief Verger of St Paul's Cathedral.
Several Members of Staff at the Capitoline Club.
Lewis - an Unsuccessful Burglar.

Plot

Following their rebuff by the President of the Capitoline Club, Captain Curruthers and Prentiss determined to enter the premises by other means, opting for the hitherto-unheard-of disguise of workmen making a delivery. Acquiring some work clothes from a nearby shop, along with a long crate, they returned to the rear entrance to the Club. Knocking on the door, they informed the steward who opened it that they had a delivery for the Very Reverend Greenfield. When the confused young man disappeared off to confirm this, they sidled in and, using the crate as a cover, headed towards the front of the building. Finding their way up to the first floor (lounges and games rooms) and then the second (bedrooms), they were caught trying door handles by one of the stewards. Their attempt to explain that they were trying to make a personal delivery was justly ignored as they were ordered back downstairs. Prentiss lost interest and knocked him out. They dumped the unfortunate man in one of the bedrooms they’d discovered, taking his keys, but further explorations proved pointless as they were unable to discover anything new.

Curruthers and Prentiss returned to the Ministry just as Miss Sharpe and Dr Pleasant returned from their own excursion. Meeting with Lady Antonia, they found she had continued her research and had turned up some interesting information concerning Wren’s interest in sacred geometry, although it seemed he was less interested in using it for power, more as an architectural aid. They discussed the day’s discoveries and learnt of the collapse of another Wren church, before being interrupted by the somewhat manic appearance of Henderson, waving some paper about. It transpired that he had decoded some of Greenfield’s notebook, having solved a kind of enciphered shorthand. He had broken his usual habit of waiting until he had finished the whole job before reporting the results, realising that this was quite urgent. Looking at the most recent entries first, he had discovered that Greenfield had been suspicious of the activities of one Dr Jacob Sorenson, the Head Choirmaster, who had been appointed about six months earlier. While Dr Sorenson had acquitted his duties as Choirmaster admirably, he had also taken a very intense interest in the structure and history of the building. He was forever being encountered in obscure corners of the galleries, taking rubbings or drawing sketches; once or twice, he was found knocking on wooden panels and listening to the echoes. He did nothing that was actually inappropriate, at least by the [INDECIPHERABLE]'s standards, and Greenfield had been advised to wait and watch by his colleague 'ER', but then his name turned up authorising a docket for work on the walls: Greenfield had been a bit bemused by this, as that should have been the Verger's responsibility. The last entry in the diary mentioned his plan to investigate the site of the works after the masons had gone home to see if there was anything odd about them.

The team now realised that Greenfield had merely discovered the plot, not instigated it.

With time ticking on to their appointment with the employer of Lewis, they collected the luckless criminal from his cell and headed for the indicated tavern. Upon entering, they seated themselves around the lounge so as to have all fields of view covered. Curruthers then became aware that a familiar figure was trying to catch his attention from an inner doorway: it was Erasmus Rooke. Bringing them all into the private room, he paid off Lewis and sent him home. Sitting down, he explained that he had been the one that hired the burglar. Rooke and Greenfield, it appeared, were both members of a group dedicated to keeping the world safe from supernatural dangers, although Rooke refused to give any more information on this. Realising that Curruthers’ investigation would lead him to search the Dean’s home, and believing that the regalia associated with the organisation would cause an unnecessary and pointless diversion, he had arranged to remove them. Unfortunately, Lewis had been caught before he could finish the job, instigating the very situation his employer had been trying to avoid. With the most recent reports from the team indicating the scale of the situation, Rooke had decided to reveal what he knew. Between his information and what the team had discovered, they figured out the story.

It appeared that Sorenson had realised that an archangel was bound to the cathedral, in order to prevent its elaborate structure from collapsing. That archangel was also lending its strength to the rest of Wren’s London churches. Over two centuries of captivity, however, the archangel had become somewhat insane and was trying to escape. Sorenson wanted to release it and bind it to his own service, which would both collapse the churches and give him great power - assuming the archangel didn’t break free and lay waste to London first.

The team decided it was time to track down Sorenson. Heading immediately for the Cathedral, they contacted the Chief Verger, discovering that Sorenson had vanished the day the Dean died. Obtaining his home address, they gained entry to the premises, finding that they had been deserted. Curruthers did discover a map, with a crude pentagram drawn out on it, centred on Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

Suspecting trouble, they gathered weapons and headed for Holborn becoming aware of choral singing as they arrived. Venturing into the park, they saw torchlight at the bandstand, which was surrounded by choirboys, while two hooded figures were chanting in the bandstand itself.

Finding their lines of fire obstructed by apparently innocent choirboys, the team closed for hand-to-hand combat. Pleasant did his best to put the choirboys, who appeared to be possessed, out of the fight bloodlessly, while Prentiss found himself engaged in a fistfight with the larger of the two hooded figures. Curruthers brought down the chanting Sorenson with a double shotgun blast, in spite of his magical protection, but it was too late, as a misty figure began to form over the carved stone block at the centre of the ritual. Miss Sharpe’s orgonator now became useful as it wore down the spirit’s still coalescing physical form, allowing Curruthers to disperse it with a final blast from his firearm.

With the choirboys apparently safe and both villains under control, the team returned to headquarters with the stone, apparently the focus for the spirit’s bindings. The heroes passed on responsibility for the stone to Rooke who ultimately returned it to the church, in order to shore up the cathedral until it could be strengthened physically.

Notes

This episode started out fairly rushed, as I had promised to finish the whole thing this week. This meant that a number of investigations had to be completed in quick succession and I was worried it wouldn't be possible. Luckily, despite the vast amounts of exposition, the players put the details together very quickly. The final fight was nice and quick.

Next time, my investigative plots will be better planned: I'd got so far with this one, then dropped the ball, having to play catch-up. Given that the original idea was to not railroad the players, it came dangerously close towards the end.