It Begins

Remember when I said the following?

[W]hen a critical mass of people adopt [the lost art of Gygaxian campaign play] for their own table, you can expect a deluge of smart-boy posts from the Usual Crowds staking a claim to have "always known" about the glories of real-time and always-on gaming.

It begins:

This is another aspect of old school play that I think is forgotten nowadays: the play of multiple characters. In my House of Worms campaign, this is not unusual. Most of the players have several characters whom they can play at any given time, depending on what is happening in the session.

It's nice to see a recognition of the value of Gygaxian play.  Really looking forward to Jimmy Mal discovering the value of 1:1 timekeeping and having always used it but just never got around to mentioning it until lately.  Grognardia is also on the cusp of discovering the joys of faction play all on his own from reading the Big Three D&D books and just about ready to tell you all about his breakthrough realizations that he had all on his own. 

Not even being ironic or sarcastic here*.

The guys who have been pushing the D&D envelop and making Real D&D sing for the last year or so have been pushing back against some pretty stiff resistance.  To see others adopt and claim the OG (Original Gygax) for their own is gratifying.  While I can't speak for the rest of that crowd, I can speak for myself when I say that I'm not pushing this new/old style of play for my own gratification.  I genuinely want to make play better at your table, and if it takes time for these ideas to percolate through the culture deep enough for the smart boys to pick up the signal and run with it - great!

Heck, J-Mal probably doesn't even understand where this new shift in the conversation came from.  It's just...you know...this thing that's out there or whatever.  You can't explain it, it's just one of those "nothing can stop an idea whose time has come" things.  It's just what people who shall remain nameless because everybody is talking about it are talking about.  And hey, if it's an idea that needs somebody to jump in front of the parade dedicated to it, rest assured there are plenty of people trying to sell you products who are more than happy to jump in front of the band.

Meanwhile - you and me? - we know where these discussions come from.  We know who to watch to see what people will be talking about next month, and why.  We know why people are talking about last month's news.  As usual, we're one step ahead of the crowd and already turning our attention to deeper mysteries. 

*Okay, maybe a little.

Random Shots

 As we ease into the weekend, let's take a look at a couple of preview shots of battles coming up on The Joy of Wargaming.  First up a look at Osprey's "Black Ops" which features a surveillance fight gone wrong when competing espionage agencies arrive to gather blackmail from the same luddite professor's backwoods cabin.

And here's what a game of Patrick Todoroff's "Nightwatch" looks like when dwarves encounter undead in a high, rocky desert.

Both of these are parts of on-going campaigns featured on the channel.  They are great examples of the rich experience this hobby has to offer when you embrace long-term play with steady advancements and long-term injuries.

fun this weekend, guys.

Epic D&D Made Easy Through Faction Play

Jeffro spitting fire on the latest episode of Geek Gab:

There's a key moment where Jeffro points out that Modern D&D cannot handle a moment like that in The Two Towers where the Fellowship of the Ring breaks up.  Taking a broader view, I would contend that a truly Epic D&D campaign requires Chantisonian faction play.

For those of you out of the loop, Chanisonian faction play takes its name from a combination of Chanticleer, a notoriously hilarious Twitter firebrand, and Dave Arnseon, the man who married the Braunstein proto-RPG with Chainmail to create a style of D&D that seldom sees the table today.

The premise is simple:  Each player earns or is given a character with a clear goal and the resources to achieve that goal.  The goals for each player can be mutually-supportive or mutually-contradictory, but generally speaking no player has enough to "win the game" outright.  This forces players to work with and against each other to achieve their character's goals.  This is a style of play that embraces henchmen and hirelings, and encourages players to think not as a lone wolf, but as a member of a more heroic managerial class.

In practice it looks like this:  A city on the border of civlization, run by a corrupt Duke.  Player A is a climbed to the rank of Captain and earned a warchest before quitting the service of the corrupt Duke.  He wants to carve out a castle and small barony from the wilderness outside a border city.  Player B is a cunning thief who has backstabbed his way into leadership of the city's thieves guild.  He wants to take over the whole city government.  Player C is a druid who wants to check the growth of the city and preserve a sacred grove out in the woods perilously close to Player A's intended castle.  Player D is a cleric who has been appointed to the city to re-invigorate the flagging faith of the citizens.  

Throw them into a blender and see what happens. Does the merc make a deal with the druid to protect the grove with promises of pushing back against the city?  Does the cleric enlist the mercenary's aid, trading moral authority and combat buffs in exchange for muscle to push back against the thieves guild?  Do they all agree to work together to overthrow the Duke?

The easy example from literature is Game of Thrones, but I'm already bored so let's look at a good fantasy epic instead. Most people think of Lord of the Rings is a pure good vs. evil tale, but if you look close you'll see that it is a factional story.  Sure, Sauron and Saruman are loosely allied and we all know Sauron will betray Saruman at the first opportunity, but those are still two factions.  On the side of the good guys you've got dwarves, elves, Rohirrim, and Gondorians.  Heck, even the trees represent a separate faction.  Yeah, they all want to beat back the Dark Lord, but they don't always agree on how or where.  There's a lot of negotiation that goes on in those novels.

The Fellowship acts as a wild card.  They run a few delves, and manage to take a few pieces off the gameboard (the balrog) or move pieces onto it (the army of the dead) to counteract other potential factions.  The army of the dead arise from a delve, and in the books do little more than negate the power of the Corsairs of Umbar.  Even the super-ghosts of Peter Jackson fail to insta-win the campaign.

If that's the kind of play you're looking to get out of D&D, then you've got to turn away from static parties and pre-written scripts and embrace the chaos of faction play.  In a lot of ways, it'll make your job as the DM a lot simpler.

Trollopolous Lives!

Things are getting a little crazy over in Trollopolous and her nearby provinces.  The besieging orcish army, leaderless after the capture of their demon-queen, has quit the field, and that only made things worse.

Jeffro's AD&D campaign-by-the-book has kicked into high gear with a week of Braunstein style faction play featuring a number of different factions.  This is an always-on game of D&D in which events are on-going, and most of the factions are run by actual players - even when they don't have a table-session character affiliated with that faction.  Yes, some of the players have characters that are working at cross purposes to each other. 

 It's bretty nutz.

I'm not a participant, just a guy fanning the flames, and here's what I've been able to piece together so far:

• Chaz The Elf is leading a massive elvish push to secure the city for the King of Elfland
• Somebody has stirred up the goblins by funding Goblin Lives Matter riots which routinely target the AEI stores (Adventurer Equipment Inc.) for looting and pillaging
• John Wick, Regent to Prince Elric, has vowed to secure the peace by any means necessary and has declared a curfew for the whole city exempting only the Trollops, the city's most important export
• Fluid the Druid is working to eco-nuke the whole city from orbit
• The United Caveman Federation is a federation of peace
• The Church of Saint Cuthbert has been quiet, but they are Up. To. Something. (And run by an actual, real-world, not-even-kidding Catholic Priest!)  [Edit:  Oops.  Wrong campaign.  That's in the Waterdeep Session Reports.]
• The queen of Mount Glovermore is an NPC with a faction out in the hinterlands
• There's something going on in the City of the Dead, but I'm not sure who runs that qurater or if he is even still alive...undead...uh, I'm not sure if he's still kicking

And frankly, I have no idea who to root for in this mess.

There are a few low-key wildcards out there.  For example, Rhedegar is a blade for hire currently keeping the peace at the Prancing Umber Hulk Inn.  SaruMachoMandalf has made an appearance, but I have no idea what he's up to.  And there are more out there that I'm missing.

There is no central location for information.  Just like the real world.  The Trollopulous News Network is unreliable.  Just like the real world.  And you have to sift through everyone's own personal biases to obtain any information that you can use in your own life.  Just like the real world.

Combine that with a wealth of meme-dumping geniuses and you've got the makings of the the most gripping RPG campaign currently being shared across sociable media.  

For a good time, click the links.  Do your research.  

Where We Go Fun, We Go All In.

Oh, and remember to watch out for Sarn Idh.  He keeps getting away with it.

A Tale As Old as Time

 Brace yourself for a revolution in table-top RPGs.

At last, after forty years of D&D and twenty years of instant and always-on communications, the two have been married to create a style that is a literal game changer:

But it ain't me.  It's Jeffro, the madman that redefined how to approach background research for D&D sessions with his ground-breaking literary analysis - an analysis so profound it was memory holed for five years before the woke crowd trotted out a low-energy goof to spoof Appendix N with a cheap and flaccid imitation.   

Here's the man with the plan himself:

Maybe we didn’t need to adapt seventies style rpg lore to eighties style module conventions. Maybe we needed to adapt ourselves to even more seventies era rpg lore! 1:1 timekeeping with multiple independent domain-level actors is fundamental axiom we have been missing. Here is what you get by implementing this one neat trick.

His latest post also features links to two other campaigns that are doing similar ground-breaking work.  Proof of concept, if you will.

• Every monster lair you hand over to a real player will necessarily generate a personalized and idiosyncratic encounter locations...
• When player characters need to interact with a domain level player, the DM does not need to improvise something to fit the type of adventure he is trying to run...
• There will be so much domain-level information being generated and no way to create fair or useful session reports that you will have no choice but to set up a news feed for your campaign...
• Similarly, your campaign will immediately begin spontaneously generating SECRETS...

Click here to learn more about this one weird trick and what it can do for your table.  

Once people try this, and decide they like it, you can expect a lot of fascinating discussion on the what, the how and the why.  Jeffro has barely begun to scratch the surface of this fundamental mindset shift.  There is a lot of room for more input, experimentation, and discovery here, people. It reminds me of the earliest days of the OSR, when people were falling all over themselves to discover and reinvent the minutiae of Moldvay-style D&D, but this time it's even bigger than a retreat and reskin of the easy mode of the 1980s.  It's a complete renovation from the ground up.

And finally, as always, when a critical mass of people adopt this style for their own table, you can expect a deluge of smart-boy posts from the Usual Crowds staking a claim to have "always known" about the glories of real-time and always-on gaming:

Or maybe not.  This system of spontaneously generated adventure doesn't lend itself to the subscription model that keeps the grifters in business.  It's inherently a table-directed style that doesn't rely on the imagination of others.  It's a focus on the hobby side of the game rather than the consumer side of the game, and without a clear path to profit the guys with dollar signs in their eyes might just continue to play the role of Baghdad Bob, insisting that there's nothing to see here, that everything is fine in D&D-land, and whatever you do, just ignore those guys laughing riotously and enjoying long-lived, robust, and authentic D&D campaigns over there near the wieght machines.

More Campaigning for the Best Campaigns

 Got another big blog for you fans of old school tabletop RPGs.  This time around we're taking a look at a longish game of ACKS, Autarch's excellent Adventurer, Conqueror, King.

This is another one of those new-old campaigns that takes advantage of certain lost secrets to present a style of gaming that fell to the wayside early in the hobby.  A constantly changing roster of active PCs.  Faction play.  Real time.

BDubs and Dragons is up to seventeen sessions as I type this, making now a good time to jump on board.  There's enough to help you kill a slow day at work, but not so much as to feel intimidating.

Written by one of my favorite Twitter follows, it features a rotating cast of characters, many of whom are inspired by notorious internetizens.

The Dawn Age Pervert.

The Dude but he's a cleric.

Hags.

You know, all the usual internet types.

He usually starts off each post with some little gem of observation about the game in general, what he tried that worked, and how he rolled with the punches thrown by his spastic and unpredictable - and all the more fun for it - players.

Here's a taste, gotta click for the rest:

Is prep a waste of time? I haven't ran my game for three weeks and spent some of that time preparing for the players to go off to a new dungeon. I thought about making a bespoke dungeon but instead chose a one pager I had lying around and will re-purpose its monsters and mise en scene as needed. This is because there's not a huge chance the players will go there any time soon. Why spend an hour or two drawing it up?

I also drew up the treasure map the players found last session, using my kids' crayons. The players never asked about it.

I also ran a two week mass combat military campaign with my dad which echoed into the region and the players hooks and options. Worldbuilding through wargaming! But this didn't come into play much this session either.

Games that cross the boundary into other games?  Are you allowed to to that? 

Honeybadger BDubs don't care.

Cleanup On Aisle Linkage

 Clearing out the chaff from the wheat of my link list this week, and it occurred to me that some blogs need more than a quiet pointer.

Around here, we believe that ACTUAL PLAY >> game theory, and today I've got one of the better AD&D session report blogs for you.  A lot of things are churning in the depths of the tabletop world, memes and ideas percolating their way up into the mainstream.  Within a few years, these thoughts and ideas will be commonplace and Johnny-come-latelies will be crawling out of the woodwork to sell you advice on "this great new playstyle that I just kinda thought up".

If you want to get ahead of the curve, you should be reading Waterdeep Session Reports.  It's already a long-running campaign featuring 21 sessions of thick and rich AD&D goodness, and one that incorporates a lot of the old ideas that have been rediscovered now that the serious thinkers have moved on from the OSR and turned their gaze upwards toward the heights of rules as written AD&D.  Even the OSRIC guys, bless their hearts, quailed before that challenge and produced a simplified and half-measures version of Gygax's masterpiece.

No spoilers - the Waterdeep Sessions are experimental, and go in some really interesting directions.  The best I can offer you right now is the promise of a campaign that is intricate and steadily grows from the ordinary into something very, very different.  Solid recommend!

Edit to add:  This madman has a second blog where he posts a "town cryer" style update on all the doings that are afoot in Waterdeep.  THE WATERDEEP WAZOO.  No spoilers, lots of extra bits, but a must-visit for his players, and a must-visit for anyone who wants to stay up to date on the campaign.  Good stuff, Maynard.

Primordial D&D

 Been thinking about this a lot.

Ever since watching this movie.

Which is great.  A must-watch for anyone interested in learning more about the evolution of tabletop wargaming and/or role-playing games. It's a deep dive into the roots of the hobby, and surprisingly even-handed.  But I can't shake the feeling it doesn't go back quite far enough.  This is no slight on the film, just a bit of wistful musing about the movie might have looked like had it been made by Brits as eager to discuss Featherstone and Bath as the film-makers are to discuss Arneson and Gygax.

Spoilers: the right answer is - no one invented fantasy campaigning, and everyone did.

Expect to see more on this subject when time permits.

Not Even Joking

Inspired by a deeply cogent comment left at "The Joy of Wargaming":  Tabletop role playing games, properly played, ARE wargames.

Let me take my troll face off and address your comment with more sincerity.  When RPGs branched out from the wargame hobby, they left a lot of money on the table.  Some solid scholarship is being done today to work back to that fork in the hobby road and see what happens if we take the path less travelled.  I am gearing up to run another solo campaign in this same style, but using a more Classic Gygaxian approach.  Not just the same campaign but with orcs.  We're talking about something much deeper.  An exploration of how Silvestri's work might help us understand how Chainmail can be used not as an addendum to RPGs, but as a foundational framework.

Exciting stuff, but we have to be patient.  Our forefathers left us very few guidestones, and what we have are occluded by years of overgrowth.  It will take some time to clear the vines and get a better look at the road.  

There is a deep and abiding power lurking in those time-shrouded woods.  This is no slight against today's gaming culture, merely a recognition that much of what we think we know about the Time Before just isn't so.  The only way to sort the history from the revisionist history is to go back and walk that ground ourselves.

Nightwatch: The Solo Campaign

So I ordered a copy of this based on the recommendation of a viewer over on the channel, Justo Perez, and it's been a real struggle to read.

Not because of what's in it, but because life is hammering away at me with reckless abandon.  Not sure why, but every time I grab this book there's an emergency that drags my attention away.  Very strange.

And disappointing, because there's some real potential in this book.  It's a smallish skirmish game that looks designed to be played by a single player.  You would think that could be said most skirmish games, but we live in strange times.

You'll take two to four heroes, each of which has stats a bit less complicated than what you'd find in a Warhammer Quest style game.  They look to be more on par with what you see in Frostgrave, which is nice because you can also plug in a handful of less powerful and hence less-complex allies.

Then you've got to handle the hordes of enemies, whose stats are (mostly) single dice.  The bigger named entities stand out with more actions and more special rules that complicate matters, but it still doesn't look unmanageable for a single player. 

We'll have to play through a game or two to know for sure.

For now, I really like what I see.  It's specific where it needs to be specific, vague where it needs to be vague, and just open-ended enough to allow for some exploration.  And how about that tagline?

In a grimdark world where everyone is falling all over themselves to wonder who are the real bad guys, where Disney keeps trying to explain that witches are cool, actually, and literal satanic pedophiles exercise global power, it's nice to find a game that admits...

It's the monsters.

Monsters are bad guys.

Go kill them.

More to follow after this game meets the tabletop.

Feelz Good Man Strikes Again

 If you're still on the fence about it, or haven't given it a chance, The Joy of Wargaming is going like gangbusters.

But don't take my word for it:

We're doing a long-form series detailing a logistical and strategic campaign using the book shown in the picture above.  It's got a lot of surprises and the action kicks off here:

My Dream Game - Early Stages and Advice Needed

I'm looking to recruit a few friends to play national leaders and strategic commanders of a continental scale game.  I'm getting into horse and musket for the first time ever, and it's long been a dream of mine to play an actual campaign with more depth than a narrative campaign.  I'm hoping that they'll enjoy the strategic level game, and that it will generate some organic and unusual tactical battles that I can play through solo on the tabletop.   

Figures by Irregular, painted by Nik Harwood

It will be a horse-and-musket era campaign in the Ruritanian/Elbonian style.  The strategic game would be run largely as a PBEM or online game among friends, so it can be pretty loose, but it needs enough structure for the players to be able to make informed choices.  Preferably something with a map that we can push counters and armies around on, and that opens up the possibilites of ra bit of strategic maneuvering.  The battles will be run using some fast play rules scaled for Corp level using 2mm figures.  Maybe throw in a few skirmishes if the strategic game allows for the chance to have some "Richard Sharpe" level fun missions, but that's for later.

The prospect of running such a campaign is a little daunting, particularly given that my horse and musket gaming is largely limited to participating in games hosted by men with a lot more experience in the era and a lot more brains than myself.  

Any of you fine fellows have a recommendation for reading, or for strategic level rules that wouldn't suck up all my game time with logistics and fiddly number crunching?

[Cross-posted from the Lead Adventure Forum]