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.

Who Cares What Non-Wargamers Think About Wargaming?

Karwansaray Publishing recently dropped a link to a low effort "scientific study" that used data collected by said publisher to reveal some surprising things about wargamers.  Did you know competitive people prefer competition games, and cooperative people prefer collaborative games?  You might have thought this, but thanks to the magic of science and with the gracious permission of our technocratice overlords we now have permission to say so - we now have that all important SOURCE to which  we can link.

So dumb.

Anyway, aside from the "no shit sherlock" portion of the "study", we also have the real impetus for conducting this research:

Read between the lines here and you'll find something a little more pernicious than the usual, "this needs more study, so make sure you hit that FUND button!" conclusion.  There is a strong push underway for the entire hobby to shift its focus from wargamers to non-wargamers, and down that path leads only madness.

Madness.

As usual, the people pushing this new narrative fall into two camps: those who see our robust, healthy, long-lived, fun, and exciting hobby as ripe for conquest, and those who are already in the hobby who stink of a desperate need for approval from outsiders.  So desperate are they for approval from people who want to radically and fundamentally change the hobby that they would burn the village to the ground to prove their worth to these outsiders.

As usual, this strategy - welcoming people who don't wargame to help define what it means to wargame - is being sold as a way to save the hobby.  From what?  Dunno.  We live in a golden age where we are spoiled for choice.  Rules, figures, paints, communities, you name it, we've got more than we can handle already.  It is a fun and exciting time to be a part of this hobby, and it's no wonder more and more people want to be a part of it.  The problem enters in when people who don't participate want to define what it means to participate.

Painting is a part of this hobby, sure.  Collecting is a part of this hobby, sure.  History is a part of this hobby, sure.  Math is a part of this hobby, sure.  Writing is a part of this hobby, sure.  But all of those aspects are buttresses that support the main cathedral of...wait for it...PLAYING THE DAMN GAMES.

You laugh, but people are already asking non-players what the hobby community should do to change the hobby to suit their non-playing desires.  The answer of course is that the hobby should keep on doing what it has always done, and those who don't like it can change themselves or go pound sand.

Because you are a psychopath.

The hobby is fine.  We don't need any johnny-come-latelies and hangers-on to tell us what we should do to cater to their whims.  These locusts will just move on once they've eaten all the seed corn anyway.

Just a warning that too few will heed.  I expect that wargaming will go the way of fantasy books, vidya, comics, TTRPGs, and a host of other hobbies.  The forces arrayed against her are too wealthy, too motivated, and too experienced to be turned back for long.

And you know what?  It's okay.  We built this hobby from nothing once, and we can do it again.  Hell, within the tabletop RPG community the BROSR is actively rebuilding D&D for the second time even as we speak.  (The first was the OSR, which failed to regress hard enough.  This time around we're reclaiming the Gygaxian method of complex games that never turn off.)  All we need to do is protect our tables and our conversations and our local (internet or meat-space) implementation.  We can build our own little redoubts, free from the brain-virus that has infected so much of our culture.  And when Big Mini crumbles, which will take some time but is inevitable, we'll still be here, plugging away in delightful obscurity and thumbing our noses at our would-be conquerors.

Gatekeep your hobbies.  Gatekeep your tables.  

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.

Not the Flex You Think It Is

Continuing thoughts about Rule Zero and yesterday's post about Theseus' RPG.

Item #1:

If you only ever used a third of a game, have you ever really played the game?  You might have been playing something, but was it really the game you say it is?  How much of a game can you carve out and still be said to be playing the game?

Take baseball. So you don't use the infield fly rule, fine.  But what if you use a big rubber ball that you kick instead of hit with a bat?  What if you run the bases counter-clockwise and use a cricket wicket on the pitcher's mound to stop the runners?  There are limits to these things, and everyone knows it.

From the chatter around the internet, RPGs do not.  The suggesting that the game can be improved by working within the limits imposed by the rules is met with outright hostility from many quarters.

A very strange thing.

Fortunately, there are a few players out there in the reality based community who believe in the games they play. 

Grognardia Respawns

 After eight years and with little fanfare, new content is up on the site.

It's just a review of some Swedish OSR product for now, but James is a smart thinker, and I look forward to his thoughts on tabletop RPGs.  Hopefully we'll get more fresh content without another eight year wait.

Campaign Creation - Inspirational Shortcuts and Political Mnemonics

Chris, over at the Hill Cantons has a great post up about Special Snowflakes.  Really inspirational stuff.  Those of you who run games should take the three minutes to read it, if you haven't already.  he's quite the muse, that one.  Make sure to stick around for the comments - those guys play a little game that is directly relevant to the bulk of this post.

He's got me dreaming of building a sort of Herculoids-Thundarr-Barsoomian world of sword and sorcery that would range across strange vistas and wide swaths of alien wilderness.  A real swashbuckling weird sci-fi fantasy mashup, the likes of which ol' D&D was built for.

But.  I've never been good at politics.  Building enough factions and nations and parties and personalities has always daunted me and stymied me no end.  It would be great if there was an easy way to use a pre-existing set-up as a model.  That way, when something unexpected happens, you could just refer back to your source material, file off a few more serial numbers, and drop your source material into the game.

Now, this is no real revelation.  People have been doing this sort of thing since D&D first crawled out of the primordial swamp.  We've all heard the stories of Castle Greyhawk dropping characters into a not-quite-Alice In Wonderland, or the Barsoomian influence on the game.  What I'm proposing is a variation on that theme.

Indulge me for a moment.  Let me give you a campaign example, and see if you can figure out the real world analog.

Imagine a continent rising between the Tranquil Ocean and the Stormpeak Ocean.  This continent is home to 60+ nations, most of which belong to one of five Empires:

• The Stormcoast Empire to the east ranges all up and down the eastern seaboard.  It includes fourteen nations, and is widely considered the weakest of the Five Empires.
• The Southeastern Empire also encompasses fourteen kingdoms holed up in the southeastern corner of the continent.  Many consider it the strongest of the empires, but it's nations are inward looking, rarely venturing out of their home empire.
• The Tranquil Empire, anything but, spans the length of the western coast of the continent and consists of a dozen nations.
• The northern portion of the center of the continent is home to the Decadent Empire.  Again, fourteen nations, most of which cluster around the Inner Seas.
• Our campaign focuses on the southern portion of the continent - home to The Dozen, an empire that ironically only contains ten nations.  It once held twelve, but a generation ago it lost its northernmost kingdom to the Decadent Empire, and two of it's members fled for the Southeastern Empire.  It managed to sway a far flung kingdom of mountain dwellers from the Stormcoast Empire, leaving it with a nice round ten member states.
• There are also a small handful of independent city-states scattered throughout the continent, the most powerful of which rivals any of the other kingdoms.  It is the Kingdom of The Lady, and it stands proud and defiant, a holy nation right in the heart of the Decadent Empire.  It's people are fierce warriors who paint themselves before battle.

One more hint.  The people of this world share a love for a sport called Gridmatch, a simulated war in which armored players crash into each other in lines, each trying to force the other backwards into their home zone.  So popular is this sport, that the entire world celebrates the ringing in of the new year by honoring a great holiday on which they always play the world championship game.

Go on, take a guess.  Here's a pretty picture for spoiler space.

It's college football.  Those are the five major conferences, with Notre Dame the independent kingdom in the heart of the Big Ten.  Think about it - all the relative strengths and weaknesses, all the politics, all the national colors and regalia are right there, already built for you!  We already know that the Perditia, the Machinists, (Purdue Boilermakers) were once mighty but have fallen on hard times.  The Mishillinacs march to war under a maize and blue banner on which is depicted a Feralbeast - typically against their hated rivals, the scarlet and grey clad Ionian Bughuskers.  (For those of you unfamiliar with college football, that's the Michigan Wolverines and Ohio State Buckeyes).

All you need to do is file off the serial numbers and slap your own labels on.  Then most of the heavy lifting is done for you.  If somebody wants to know what's going on over on the other side of the world, you already know.

And you can use all sorts of things for this.  Other sports would work fine - Major League Baseball gives you six nations with five kingdoms each.  You want two kingdoms?  Use Microsoft and Apple.

You could even use this technique for religious wars.  Imagine crusades sweeping across the world as wars rage between the followers of The Jester the Caged Clown, the Monarch, the Crimson Queen, and the General.  We already know that The Jester's forces are huge, but poorly trained, the Monarch's forces are salty (so much salt!), and the Crimson Queen allows her followers the most freedom, and the General can marshal powerful mystic forces, what with his ownership of a secret compendium, a scroll upon which is written the very words of creation themselves.  One might say they hold the spice of life, if one doesn't mind giving up the game to his players a little to easily.

Something to think about the next time you feel daunted by the time needed for world building.

Old School Skirmish

The best local game shops in town is one of those cramped little shops crammed full of all sorts of odds and ends the store owner has collected over the last two decades.  It's all too easy to while away a full hour digging through boxes of random game titles published since the early 1990s.  This store has a shelf of Paranoia supplements, ICE's MERP books, and more old wargame rules than Carter's got liver pills.  One of those shelves holds a hundred or so small press wargame rules covering everything from ancients to sci-fi and every scale of battle from skirmish to massed battle.

On a whim, I bought a late-Renaissnce skirmish set called Sword and Pistol by a bloke named Richard Stevens.  The copyright on this set of rules is January 1985, making it an interesting look back at the times.  For example, the introduction states that the set was designed for a fast moving game, that "usually lasts for two or three hours".  There was a time where two or three hours was considered fast.  That amuses me.  These days the guys touting their rules as fast are clocking in at less than an hour a game.

So how does it play?  Well...can't say as I'll ever find out.  It's just way too fiddly for my tastes.

Sword and Pistol uses written orders for movement/attack. It classes figures into eight different grades that can move at five different speeds - you can only move up or down two speed classes per turn, so you've got to track that.  There are rules for accidental collisions - even between people on foot.  Each of the eight figure classes has different to-hit chances with the fourteen different missile weapons, given to you in a chart.  There's another chart that does the same thing for melee. Add in charts for morale, quirky costs for figures that turn while moving, and so on, and the whole thing just gets way too complicated for my tastes.  Even with just the 8-12 figures recommended you're looking at spending a lot of time on book-keeping rather than playing.

Don't get me wrong, the rules could be a lot of fun if you're looking for a sort of poor-man's-wargaming-version-of-Squad-Leader. This may be one of those games where having a GM set it up and walk you through the complexities could make for an enjoyable afternoon.  But it's not for me.  I'll stick with the modern skirmish sets like the Song of... series or the Two-Hour Wargame titles.

Moldvay Gems

The cool kids all seem to be raving about the offerings over at dndclassics.com, especially the Moldvay edition of Basic D&D.  Being the tech savvy luddite that I am, I scored a hard copy of those rules via eBay.

As is the custom, having read these rules cover to cover, allow me a post to point out a couple of  details that had escaped my notice lo these many years.  We'll skip the big and obvious things - a quick run around the blog-o-scape reveals that I'm not the first - and talk about just three of the many rediscovered wonders in this tight little book.  Others have pointed out quirks like inheritance, cure light wounds negating paralysis, and the variable bonuses for CHA vs. the other five stats.  These are the three things I haven't seen discussed elsewhere.

1.  Dwarves as race.  It's not what you think.  Fans of Basic D&D know there are four races of players (human, halfling, elf, and dwarf), but according to the rules as written, dwarves are also people of color.  Page B9 states, "Their skin is earth-colored and their hair is dark brown, gray, or black."  The conjures images of the faerie-folk like master craftsman of Norse myth moreso than the Warcraft style stocky vikings with Scottish accents.  It's not a big deal, but it is yet another indication that early D&D owes less to Tolkien and more to the myths that Tolkien himself drew on.  Speaking of which...

2.  Elves are short.  Again, from page B9, "They are 5 to 5 1/2 feet tall and weigh about 120 pounds."  These aren't tall, willowy beings that peer haughtily down their noses at the stumpy humans.  They are elves of the old world - another detail that's been lost through the decades.

3.  Monsters move really slowly when they aren't in combat or chasing food (i.e. meddling adventurers).  Let's look to the movement section where adventurers move at a sedate 120 feet per ten minute turn.  That seems slow, but it accounts for, "mapping carefully*, searching, and trying to be quiet" (page B19).  Monsters are given movement rates on a per turn basis as well (page B29).  Because they also move carefully, map, and search?

Probably not.  This is most likely a hold over from the earliest Gygax days when any player could have a character of any race. The grognards report that ol' Gary would let folks play level 1 monsters of any stripe, but that the characters started out the lowest HD of that type.  If you wanted to be a vampire, you started as a skeleton, advanced through zombie, and so on until you hit Vampire HD.

I could be wrong, but it makes more sense than the idea that the goblins that ran into the party were mapping the dungeon, searching for traps, and trying to keep quiet. Those bad boys are on their home turf here.

*Incidentally, this line in the book is what leads me to interpret searching for secret doors as an "always on" ability; the first time a party passes by a secret door they have a 1 in 6 chance of noticing it (2 in 6 if a dwarf or elf is with them) even if they don't state they are specifically looking.  If they state they are doing so, they get a second chance where the player rolls the die.  It makes it a little more likely that doors are found, which is fine by me - secret doors are part of the fun of exploration, and I don't put them there to not be used.

(Finally) Back to the Dungeon

Over a year ago, I showed you lot a map of my version of the Lost Temple of Laun Phien (link), and we finally got around to playing through it.  Last night a small but plucky crew headed out into the grasslands to explore/loot the haunted barrow mound of a long lost norseman berzerker king.  Remember them?  These are the guys chased out of the empire by the evil wizard Bargle.  They are on their way to raising an army to march back and overthrow him - overthrow him onto the sharp end of a pointy stick.

A warrior, cleric, and two elves set out from Cornerstone Keep, and after a couple days stumbled onto a band of orcs tormenting a poor wounded wolf.  They saved the wolf, now named Toby, and descended into the dark a few days later.  They scared off some skeletons, fought through traps, discovered lost libraries and laboratories, and were thoroughly confused by the ever changing nature of the caves.

[I had an egg timer set for 10 minutes - every time the bell rang, the dungeon configuration changed as discussed in the link above.  Searching for secret doors, which takes 10 minutes, the same thing happened and the timer reset.]

The kids figured out what was happening pretty quick, but they haven't made a concerted effort to figure out the pattern just yet.  For their first foray, they were just glad to find the way out.  Here's the map they came up with.

Two hours after entering the dungeon, they confronted the spirit of the norse king - a skeletal figure in horned helm who put down the warrior and cleric and wolf, before a rain of silver arrows dropped him into a burbling vat of black poisonous tar.  The plucky heroes loaded a couple of grand in gold onto their mule, Jerry, only to find that the quick walk back to the loot had once again changed.

Tired, hurt, and running low on food, they made their way back to the Keep where they fended off the queries of other would-be grave robbers, rested up, divvied up the gold, and generally prepared for the next big adventure.

Happy Birthday Alex!

This post is brought to you by my son's 13th birthday.  Everything I'm doing here, I'm doing in preparation for his party in which he and a party of friends will enter a dungeon...and they'll do it old school.

The last decade or so has witnessed countless attempts by your humble author to build a sprawling mega-dungeon fit for an insane wizard or alien evil godling.  Every effort failed miserably because I was too caught up in numerous new-school problems.  What do these guys eat?  How do they get in and out?  What is the poltical relationship between these orcs and those rock apes?  How the heck am I going to fully detail and flesh out over a hundred rooms?

Specifically, the following wonderful full page map from Dyson's Dodecahedron.  (He has lots of other pretty little things, you should visit his blog, too.)  Look at that thing, sprawling, interconnected, lots of fun little nooks and crannies, and enough chokepoints to carve it up into a bunch of separate mini-dungeons. Three times I've tried to fill it up and failed, but now I think I've finally figured out how to do it right.

My recent dive back into the old ways brought me into contact with some lovely blogs (links on your left) that helped me realize that I don't need to answer those questions at all.  There's one over-riding rule that I'd forgotten over the years:  It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to be fun.

With that in mind, the seed for a campaign was planted.  What if the dungeon was really a physical expression of an ancient entity forcing its way into our reality?  Thus was born the idea of The DungeonGod.  That alone wasn't enough.

It was Philotomy's musings that poured water on that seed and really helped it germinate.  In that link he quotes the original rules on doors. To whit, the dungeon isn't just the place where the monsters happen to live - the dungeon is itself a monster with a will of its own - a will set against that of the characters.   More to the point, it's a place where the boundary between the fantasy world and the other (even more alien) fantasy world are thin.  The normal rules do not apply.

Generally, doors will not open by turning the handle or by a push. Doors must be forced open by strength...Most doors will automatically close, despite the difficulty in opening them. Doors will automatically open for monsters, unless they are held shut against them by characters.

That also ties in well with another idea malingering about in my head, that monsters aren't just another (all too often categorized as misunderstood) race.  They are monsters.  They are evil incarnate.  They don't enter this world the way humans and dwarves and elves do.  They aren't raised from birth by loving families and clans that have hopes and fears for them. 

B1 - Caves of the Unknown Pool Room

Monsters are malicious creatures of pure malice crawled forth from the belly of blackness to bring pain and misery into the world. They are literally spawned in pools of foul ichor, sprung forth whole from the mind of the DungeonGod complete with armor and implements of pain.  And in a terrible twist of genius, they spring forth laden with gold and other valuables - birthed by the DungeonGod to entice greedy men into entering its domain.

Men like the party of adventurers who now need no more motivation to enter a deathtrap than, "We know there's monsters in there that need killing and lots of gold there for those willing to do it."  If, along the way, they happen to stumble onto one of those pools and destroy it with holy oil and water and powerful magicks? So much the better.

And that's how you justify not having to justify every little thing that happens in a dungeon.

Fore Warned is Four Armed

Woah, that's a lot of hits my One Page Dungeon post generated this week. Hello to all you Campaignwiki people.

It looks like this blog is slowly morphing from a miniature wargame blog into an old-school D&D blog.  Even to the point that my post titles directly tie in to high school memories of old edition modules.  Skip the italics here if you ever plan on running through S1 - Tomb of Horrors, or don't, it's been so long I'm probably remembering it wrong anyway.

So we had penetrated this far into Acererak's Tomb.  A dead end but for this mysterious statue.  Somebody gets the bright idea to put a few gems in the three hands of the statue.  Kr-r-runch!  The gems are turned to powder.  "Do it again," I tell the party skinflint.  Three more gems. Kr-r-runch!

"Obviously this means something, do it again," I tell the party skinflint. At this point I just wanted to see how much money he'd throw away onthe gem crushing statue.  Never found out though, after something like 5,000 gold worth of gems, a magic seeing-eye crystal appeared in the broken arm on the floor.  In a way I was disappointed.  We probably could have talked him into parting with another 10,000 gold before he gave up.

So if you're not into the whole D&D thing, or the meandering tales and 'show prep' of a middle aged sad sack dungeon master don't interest you, check back once in a while for the minatures.  Those aren't going anywhere.  But we're going to be doing some pen and paper dungeon delving.  I'm building a mega-dungeon for the boy, and you get to come along for the ride.

Old School Renaissance for the win, baby.

That's not such a bad thing, though. After all, what is D&D but a glorified war game anyway?  There's plenty of overlap between the two, and the one should keep my ADD from distracting me from my AD&D. Okay,technically, it won't keep me from my Rules Compendium 1991 update of the Cook/Moldvay rules for Basic D&D, but that joke doesn't have the same lilt to it.