Small But Vicious Dog

As you may have noticed, I quite like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, so I'm very pleased to see that Chris over at the Vaults of Nagoh has completed the first draft of his WFRP/D&D mash-up Small But Vicious Dog.

Well, to tell the truth, I am both pleased and annoyed. Pleased because it's already a great piece of work, with solid mechanics and hilarious writing -- WFRP is supposed to be funny, and Chris understands this -- and annoyed because my group has just started a WFRP campaign, and I don't know how I'm going to get them to playtest it.

Still, that shouldn't stop you from downloading it and having a go, even if it does end with your player-characters all dying of trench rot in an alleyway while mutant rats gnaw on their faces.

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.

The Undying Sorcerer

This is my contribution to Zak's Secret Arneson Gift Exchange. If you want to see what it's all about, click on the link, but essentially it's celebrating the lives of the creators of Dungeons & Dragons by creating something new for the game.

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Aeons ago, when the continents had different shapes and long before mankind climbed down from the trees, the land was ruled by a proud and mighty reptilian empire, of which the lizardfolk of today are but the atavistic descendants. Their religion taught of a glorious afterlife, in which the dead would live again, and in the case of the nobility, complete with all their possessions, including their slaves.

This was a lie. The dead found a vast, featureless grey wasteland, where everyone was on an equal footing, and the riches gathered in their material lives would have been of no use, even if they had transferred over as expected.

One priest-lord decided to escape, and turning all its mystical learning to the problem, found a way back to the material plane, only to discover that millennia had passed, its beloved serpent empire had long passed into ruin, and its body had become a dry, withered mummy. Further long stretches of time passed, the priest-lord trapped in its old body, itself trapped in its tomb, surrounded by useless treasures.

But then the humans, inquisitive as ever, broke into its tomb and began looting the priest-lord's belongings. One of them opened its sarcophagus and reached in to pilfer its burial jewellery, brushing against the mummy's arid flesh, and the ancient creature sensed an opening, a connection.

And jumped.
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The Undying Sorcerer is the soul of an ancient magician occupying the physical form of some humanoid being. It has spent untold millennia trapped in a sterile afterlife and having returned to the material plane, wants nothing more than to enjoy life in the most hedonistic way possible. Having awoken in a tomb surrounded by wealth appropriate to a member of the nobility, it has found that it has lots of money to spend on the most exquisite depravities, and that modern human society is only too keen to participate; the Sorcerer is most often found not in some dusty tomb, but in high society, throwing decadent parties for the aristocracy.

Having seen, and performed, all kinds of horrors in its time, and having been trapped in a hell without sensation, life and colour, the Undying Sorcerer fears nothing but a return to that joyless afterlife, and will fight with ferocity to prevent such a fate.

(Game statistics are in Labyrinth Lord format, but should be easy enough to convert to other fantasy games of Arneson/Gygax descent.)

No. Enc.: 1
Alignment: Neutral
Movement: 120 (40)
Armor Class: By armour (varies)
Hit Dice: 9
Attacks: By weapon (varies) or Spell
Damage: By weapon (varies)
Save: C9
Morale: 11
Hoard Class: XVII

The Undying Sorcerer is usually equipped with the best armour and weaponry money can buy, but will try to avoid direct combat. It will be accompanied by 2d4 humanoid or trained animal bodyguards, each of at least 2HD, and 2d12 concubines, around half of which will be humanoid. Once per day, the Sorcerer can also summon up to two animal-headed demons (treat as gargoyles) to fight on its behalf; these return to their home plane by the following sunrise or sunset, or if killed. The Undying Sorcerer avoids lizardfolk, as it is disgusted by their decline.

The Undying Sorcerer casts spells as a fifteenth-level cleric. If druid spells are available, then the Sorcerer also has access to these, at the same level of ability.

As a form of undead, the Undying Sorcerer is immune to Charm, Feeblemind, Hold, Polymorph, Sleep, and Death spells (such as Power Word: Kill or Ray of Death). These immunities are mystical in nature, and apply to both its original and host bodies. It can be turned; a success forces its soul back into the original, mummified body.

The Undying Sorcerer's most potent ability is that of transferring its soul to a new body. It can transfer at will, and over any distance, to its original body, or to a nearby mindless vessel, such as a golem, but otherwise must touch or be touched by its target, then the target must make a save versus spells in order to resist the transfer. A living victim's soul may be simply overpowered, or it may be forced out of the body to another location, at the GM's discretion. The Undying Sorcerer has access to all innate abilities of its host body, but not spells or other learned abilities.

If the host body is killed or destroyed, the Undying Sorcerer will attempt to transfer to its killer, or a nearby vessel, but if not will return to its original body. Should this original body be destroyed, then the creature is flung back to the afterlife, even if occupying a different body at the time. The mummy is guarded at all times to prevent such a fate, and the Sorcerer keeps prisoners at close hand for a quick transfer if forced back.

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My brief for this was "A monster midway between a vampire and a lich in power. It should have spellcasting powers and other abilities that would place it at the peak of Expert-level challenge (14th level). An Egyptian theme is a plus."

I'm not that familiar with the mechanics of D&D, so I decided instead to focus on the fluff side of things and make the monster interesting and different enough that the rules didn't matter. I had a look at a lich and a vampire and went for something that was roughly between the two. Then I got to working on the fluff, which was much more fun. The Egyptian theme was easy enough to incorporate, but since it's a fantasy game, I decided to go further back than a mere human civilisation, and a serpent empire seemed suitably pulpy. One thing I noted about the higher-level undead was that they were all bog-standard evil masterminds, and I wanted to do something different there too, so I had a think about what else might motivate the Undying Sorcerer. I liked the idea of a being who had come back from the dead out of a genuine love of life, but to maintain enough of an edge to make it possible for the being to an antagonist, I settled on the idea of the ultimate hedonist, someone who wanted to live life to the fullest, because it had already seen, and rejected, what death had to offer.

Three Things I Have Learned From D&D Fourth Edition

I pretty much bypassed Dungeons & Dragons during my gaming "upbringing". My original group played a bit of everything, but mostly Shadowrun and Call of Cthulhu. We did have a brief go at AD&D2, running through the first book of Night Below, and we played a couple of sessions using the "Black Box" basic D&D set, and it was this version of the venerable game which caught my attention more than any other, although we never played it again after that.

My current group plays the fourth edition of D&D quite a lot, and while I enjoy it well enough, I do find myself longing for a simpler, more pure version of the game, and I keep thinking back to that black box. Of course, it is unavailable now, except through eBay and the like, but there is Labyrinth Lord, which is more or less the same thing (albeit based on a slightly earlier version), and completely free too. I've talked about the game before, but that was more of a discussion about mechanics, and today, I'm more interested in the more philosophical side of things, specifically how my experiences of the newest edition of D&D would now affect my appreciation and play of an older version. So here are three random musings of that nature.

1: Interesting Locations are Important
Fourth edition emphasises combat environment right from the outset, with player-character abilities often involving moving opponents from square to square, or making use of different kinds of area effect and so on. This isn't hardwired into the rules of older editions in the same kind of way, and as such, I think it can be easy to assume that it can't be done, and to thus overlook the importance of the shape, size and nature of the battlefield. So if I ran or played LL now, I would take time to created unique settings like this, and even though there are no pushing or pulling powers in the rules, they are a light enough framework that nothing breaks if a players wants to, say, forego damaging an opponent to instead push them down a hole.

2: Different Monster Roles are Important
This is related to the first point, as the older editions of the game gave, in most cases, a single block of statistics for each type of opponent. There would be one type of orc (AC: 6 HD: 1 Damage: 1d6), and that again makes it easy to just fill dungeon rooms with identical versions of that orc. Fourth edition makes a big effort (too much perhaps, forgoing the elegant third edition concept of the template in favour of a completely new stablock for each type of each monster) of showing how that same group of orcs can instead be made up of front-line bruisers, nimble archers and lightly-armoured skirmishers, and it is a good reminder that there is no reason at all why this cannot be imported back into an older version of the game.

3: Different Mechanics are Important
This is the biggest epiphany for me. For the longest time, I did not like the percentage-based thief skills of older editions, or the way finding secret doors varied based on class, and so on. As such, the universal mechanic approach of third and fourth editions appealed to the neat freak in me. Then I had a conversation with another gamer about how fourth edition perhaps goes too far in this other direction, and almost flattens the class differences out; what I came to realise was that although the specific mechanic will vary between a fourth edition At-Will fighter power and a fourth edition At-Will wizard power, they're both At-Will powers, and they both have the same kind of effect on the opponent. In an older edition, the fighter rolls a d20 to do what she does (hit an opponent, mainly), the wizard usually doesn't roll at all to use his abilities, but has a learning/resting sub-game built into the class, and the thief gets to bust out a whole different set of dice to use her skills; I had previously seen this as untidy, but now I understand it to have a positive effect on the game, because it emphasises the different roles and abilities of the classes at a more emergent level than raw rules mechanics. In other words, these are opportunities for the player themselves to do something unique at the table, rather than have the class differences be relevant only in the imagined space of the game.

None of these are rule changes as such, although the first two do lead to a bit of tinkering with what is already there, and I think that, for me, they would enrich the playing of something like Labyrinth Lord, capturing what I like about fourth edition and combining it with a ruleset which is much more to my tastes.

Some Labyrinth Lord House Rules

I've not been gaming much of late, and my Call of Cthulhu campaign seems to have withered, hence the lack of updates. So I thought I'd instead share some ideas I had for a Labyrinth Lord game I was going to run, and still may one day if there's interest. Labyrinth Lord is more or less a clone of Basic/Expert Dungeons & Dragons, one of my preferred editions of the venerable game but even so, there are some bits I don't like so much, and these are my changes and additions.

• Armour Class is flipped, so AC0 represents no armour at all and AC14 is as armoured as you get, which makes much more sense to me. Essentially, this means that at first level, a character's to-hit target number will be 10+AC. I won't go as far as a 3.Xe unified mechanic, but I like high rolls to be better, and the old add/subtract AC/to-hit system hurt my brain; I think THAC0 may be the main reason behind me abandoning AD&D 2e for other systems.
• "Skills" are similarly amended to roll high, so an elf, for example, detects secret doors on a 5+ rather than a 1 or 2. Same probability, more sensible to my mind.
• The Big d30 is an idea I've stolen from Jeff Rients. Once per session, each player may roll a d30 instead of the normal die, whether it be a d6 to discover a secret door, or a d20 in combat, or a damage die for a weapon or spell. It must be declared beforehand, and is not a reroll, and it cannot be used to roll for statistics or hit points. It also only replaces one die, so if a player wished to use the d30 on a 2d6 roll, they would instead roll 1d6+1d30.
• Thief Skills are rolled on a d6 instead of a d100, mainly because I've never liked that d100 chart. I've converted the probabilities, which has led to a bit of fudging, but it's close enough. A thief can use The Big d30 for these rolls. As an aside, I subscribe to the school of thought which says that any character can attempt to pick a lock, or climb a wall, and so on, but only a thief can pick a lock without leaving signs of entry, or climb a sheer surface.
  
  
  
  
  

  Level	PL	FT	PP	MS	CL	H	L
  1	6+	6+	6+	6+	2+	6+	5+
  2	6+	6+	5+	5+	2+	6+	5+
  3	5+	6+	5+	5+	2+	6+	4+
  4	5+	6+	5+	5+	2+	5+	4+
  5	5+	5+	5+	5+	2+	5+	4+
  6	4+	4+	4+	4+	2+	5+	3+
  7	4+	4+	4+	4+	2+	4+	3+
  8	3+	3+	3+	3+	2+	4+	3+
  9	2+	3+	3+	3+	2+	3+	3+
  10+	2+	2+	2+	2+	2+	2+	2+

  
  
  
  
  PL is Pick Locks, FT is Find Traps, PP is Pick Pockets, MS is Move Silently, CL is Climb, H is Hide, L is Listen.

The latter is the change of which I'm most wary, since the probabilities have been changed; I don't think it breaks the game, although I do think it will change the way thieves work in play. Until I actually see it in action, I won't know for sure, so if anyone wants to use this (or any of the other bits) in their Labyrinth Lord or D&D games, and would like to let me know how it works out, I'd be grateful.

Fight On! #4

Fight On! is a magazine for fans of "old school" Dungeons and Dragons, presenting articles, house rules and full scenarios; there's even some campaign setting stuff in there, including a mega-dungeon presented one level per issue. There's a particular focus on Original D&D, but there are enough similarities between the various versions of the game that the contents of the magazine are useful for any edition up to 3rd, and even that's probably workable. And of course, the contents are fully compatible with newer retro-cones such as Labyrinth Lord and Swords & Wizardry.

Anyway, it's a solid magazine that's improved with every issue, and to me it feels a little bit like White Dwarf before that publication turned into a miniatures catalogue; Fight On! has that same sense of enthusiasm and creativity that made WD such fun. Like the older magazine, not every article is a winner, but there's so much content that the individual GM is bound to find something of use in its expansive 100 pages.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I have some art printed in this issue, but I'd recommend it even if I were not involved, and I've got no input into the first three issues, which are also well worth a look. You can buy it (and previous issues) in print form here, and a pdf edition will be released soon.