elves ate my homework

Congregation of Wizards

2012-01-12T14:08:00.004+01:00

Hello! I'm well and stuff. Took a long break from blogging in order to play more.
To amuse you here's a picture of three deans of some polish universities at some ceremony meeting. The guy on the right is the head of an art school, but you could have already guessed that.

Not pictured, the head of the computer school sacrificing a virgin.

Music Monday: Mutant Future Inspirations #2

2011-04-11T23:30:00.003+02:00

This is going to be a short one. Today, my lovely Julia showed me a brütal article about Botswana's metal heads. Whithout further ado, here's what my (and every other) post-apocalyptic setting lacked all along.

Here's a little sneak peak.

This guy's nickname is Maximum, probably cause you can't get much more awesome.

I still roam

2011-04-04T23:08:00.003+02:00

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like it's been almost a year away from blogging for me. Although I haven't planned this break to be so long, it was the right thing to do.

Several things have changed in my attitude towards blogging. I no longer feel compelled to post at any regular rate, not to mention the daily rate of the OSR core, though I will try to drop a few during a month.

On a side, note my personal life is in perfect order, thank you.

Now, since it's still Music Monday...

SAVIOURS

They are a really awesome old-school metal band, very appropriate for the old-school RPG community. I saw them live last year and they really kicked ass. If you like the Sword (minus Warp Riders), early Slayer and Witch, I'm sure you're gonna love them.

Their last record Accelerated Living has a quite hideous cover (unlike their previous release). But somehow it reminds me of old D&D art.

Enjoy and see you soon.

Music Monday: Ugelmann

2010-08-10T00:23:00.004+02:00

This weekend I went to Krakow to see Converge and Kylesa. It was areally good show, and we got to be at the front of the stage when Kylesa played, Julia even managed to get Laura Pleasant's pick.

However this post will be a about the first supporting act - Kvelertak (Norwegian for "stranglehold").

Imagine how AC/DC would sound, if they were from Norway and that's really it. They are a fun mixture of punk, hard rock and black metal, covered in a sauce of viking themed lyrics sang in a clattering language. They can put on a really good show and instantly won the full appreciation of the audience.

Here's how they sound (and look):

What I really found interesting is, that for a reason unknown (at least to me), they have an owl thing going on. There is an owl on every piece of their merch, as well as on the Baizley designed cover of their debut album.

The owl theme goes so far, that at some point of the show, their vocalist put a rubber owl mask on his head. It was really weird, but also kinda cool.

Since there is no photo, just try to imagine the dude from the vid wearing this.

I like owls and I like the folklore surrounding those birds. So here is what I brew up on the train:

Ugelmann

A man with a head of an owl. I see him as a norse rendition/commentary on the minotaur myth.
He lives deep in the forest, perhaps in a natural cave or rock labyrinth. The sages and tale spinners from villages on the borders of the forest say that he was once a powerful warrior-wizard who was cursed by the gods of nature. Others claim he is a man who was elevated by the Mother Goddess to be her husband...

It is uncertain wether he is a positive or evil entity. Some legends say that he is an immortal protector of the forest, other picture him as a mischevious being who follows his duty only because of a powerful curse. Whatever the truth is, some bits of information are present in all tales of the Ugelmann.

A random sighting of the Ugelmann is an omen of near death (of the person or a close relative). Ugelmann's curse or blessing is that upon laying eyes on any humanoid, he sees how it will die.
It is widely believed that he posses great knowledge and that some seek him out to gain insight into the future. Anyone who seeks out the Ugelmann can ask him one question, but will be asked for a favor in return. This favor is an oath and anyone failing to fulfill it will be killed by the Ugelmann.

It is often believed that Ugelmann observes people living on the forest borders, this is why many mothers prompt their misbehaving children, by saying: "Be good, or the Ugelmann will take you!".

Music Monday: Mutant Future Inspirations #1

2010-08-02T23:09:00.003+02:00

I am behind with posting my second SAGE request, but since I wasn't the only one writing it and I'm kinda tired and decided to leave it for tomorrow.

Instead, I give you the first of my planned series on my MF campaign inspirations.

Since it's Music Monday (the alliteration day) here are some videos that are both visually and sonically responsible for how I play MF.

Let's start with something weird and perhaps unexpected for those familiar with my previous music references. If you can't stand synthesizers or electronic music, I recommend muting the vid (but do watch it).

Here's something completely different, though the video is also animated. I once heard or read that "Queens of the Stone Age owe as much to Black Sabbath as to Beach Boys". I agree. And that's exactly why they are here. I chose this particular song, because to me, a MF adventure should have the dynamics of a drug trip. It should be really weird and full of surprises while possessing some twisted inner logic. Some fear and joy should also be added into the mixture.

A good MF adventure should have at least one pair of tentacles (or at least tendrils) in it. As an aesthetic statement. It should also be a bit like a b-class horror movie.

This is a very obscure, yet very good band called Fiend Without a Face (after a 50's s-f flick). It's a side project of Mastodon's guitarist - Brent Hinds. They play a very weird mix of surf, psychobilly and grind? They put out only one record, which has been out of stock for a long long time, but I think it's downloadable somewhere off their myspace. Definitely worth checking out!

Speaking of Mastodon...

As I said before, I really like to build my MF sessions on both - the retro-stupid fun and post apocalyptic horror. Here's a band that really helps me achieve the second thing. I really like Grails, they're like Pink Floyd, just less radio friendly and more intelligent.

Finally, this list would be incomplete without this brilliant vid.

SAGE #1: The Horror, The Horror

2010-07-27T02:09:00.005+02:00

This is the first of my two Secret Arneson Exchange Gifts. You can find the second one here.

I was asked for: "I d love for someone to write me some cool horrific scene. Though more the subtle and disturbing horror (think Ringu) than simply gore."

And I thought, cool! I also thought, why just write a scene? Why not give everyone some tips and tricks on how to build tension and scare the shit out of players?

There seem to be several methods of scaring, that I have read about and used throughout my career as a DM. I will try to describe 3 of them. Each will be illustrated with an in-game example, or a scene.

1. Level and Point technique.

This is a very simple and useful technique and is often used in movies. It's based on gradually introducing plot elements that raise the level of fear and tension in players.

One example of such method of building levels of fear would be locking the players in an dark chamber/house/mansion/dungeon. In the middle there is a single burning candle with a letter/note which reads:

"When the candle burns out you're all gonna die".

This is a sort of a fear perpetum mobile. At first the players will feel safe and explore the possibilities open to them, but as the candle gradually burns down their efforts will become more hectic and chaotic.

When the DM decides the level of fear is high enough, he can use the Point Technique by introducing a sudden event that will instantly and unexpectedly bring the fear level to the maximum. Ex (assuming the players are in a chamber):

DM: "Suddenly, the door's open. A gust of wind blows the candle out!... You are now in complete darkness."

Get it?

Here's a more narration based implementation of the Level/Point method.

Layer one (mild, should spread over several hours): The players watch morning news and hear about strange and brutal murders happening in town. Later one of them reads a cover-story in some local newspaper on the same topic. They see flayers about a missing person, etc.

Layer two (more on point, but still vague and long): Players leave a bar where some drunk guy told them a story of a strange wolf that killed his friend many years ago. He seems to have seen it again a year ago in the mountains.

Layer three (short, intense):

DM: " You are walking home and it's cold. You start to miss the warmth and cosines of the bar. Suddenly you, you feel a horrible smell... A smell of something... Animal... Inhuman....

Point (DM plays a cassette with a wolfs' howl): A howl comes from the ally you've just passed!

Please note: once you decide to introduce another layer and turn it up a notch, it's very difficult to keep up the tension. One method I recommend is using a second point. For example: After the players fight the werewolf or whatever it was in the previous illustration, the tension will naturally fall. Let the players feel victorious for a second, make them think it was the end. And than strike. In the above example, after the players defeated the monster, this should follow:

DM: "You are breathing heavily, looking from one to the other. You're alive, you won. it's all over... Suddenly you hear a howl, than another and another joining in... Whatever you killed, it wasn't alone!

2. DM Acting

If you really want to scare your players, it's important to learn to act well. And I don't mean acting out Torgo.

What I understand under the term, is using the words and voice together when narrating. It's not just about what you say, it's about how you say it.

Try to use your voice like an instrument, learn to use it's dynamics to your advantage. Whisper and make the players move closer to hear you and shout when something sudden happens. If you want to make the players feel the pressure speak fast and leave them little time to decide. Finally, use rhetorical questions and play with them.

For example, the players are escaping a horrible monster through some dungeon.

DM (fast): Suddenly the tunnel splits in two, right or left?
P1: Right!
P2: Left?
DM (rising his voice): The grunts behind your are getting louder! You turn back, and you can almost see the beast's shadow around the corner!
P1: Right!
P2: No, Left!
DM (shouting): It's there! It's right around the corner, you can see it's shadow and the outline of it's tentacled head!!!
P1 and P2: RIGHT! WE GO RIGHT!
DM (softly with an ominous smile): Are you sure?..

3. Breaking the 4th wall.

This is the method which is already present in the previous example. But really, this is just an augmentation of the two previous methods, since it doesn't work on it's own.

The point is, to do something unexpected. As you might have noticed, throughout this post I was talking about scaring the players, not their characters. This is because I believe that any true attempt at scaring and building horror, must appeal to the players themselves and not their characters.

Even the most basic type of fear present in RPGs - the fear of dying, is not really role playing the PC's emotions, it's the player's fear losing the character. So why not go further and simply scare the players themselves? That's what breaking the 4th wall is all about.

Here is a real life example from the game of Cthulhu, that I DMed a few year ago.

The players were investigating a strange murder case in the Cracow of the 20's. We played at night, with candles. In game they just broke into some apartment. Inside there was a single candle burning. With a note. As they read the note (exactly as in point 1), I put all the candles in the room out. Except for one.

The atmosphere got really creepy and I started speaking in a hushed voice. The candle flickered as they went through the room looking for clues. When I felt they were about to do something to release the tension, I screamed that the door opened and blew out the last candle.

In the silence that followed, whispering, I started to describe the horrible stench they felt coming into the room. When one of them was about to speak, I suddenly reached across the table and touched his cheek, shouting that something just moved next to him!

It was a rampage, the guy got up throwing the chair back, shouting about how he tries to get out of the room, the other one followed and freaked out when I grabbed his arm.

After that one scene, they had to stop and smoke a couple of cigarettes. We finished the game that night. With all lights on.

___________________________________________
Discalimer: The point and level examples aren't mine. I did use them in game as described, but they are taken from an article written by Michal Marszalik and published in Magia i Miecz, in 2000. It was the main inspiration behind this post.

The Beloved Rogue*

2010-07-21T22:54:00.011+02:00

So there is this thing about thieves. Some OSR people think they are completely disposable, others will defend the rogue or 'specialist' with their lives.

In my opinion this feud seems to be a bit on the stupid side. Thieves are fun and they bring more variety to the game since they allow players to do something else than only fight, cast spells or cast spells while fighting.

The usual objection to the use of thieves is their Find Traps skill. Many seem to think that it tends to kill the "player's wits over character's skill" vibe often associated with old school game-play. I think it's a largely artificial problem that can be easily overridden by modifying the player's attempts at finding traps depending on the description of their actions.

The point is I like thieves (though I'd rather call them rogues). Period.

What I'm really getting at is that I also like bards.

In my 3ed days (and earlier) I often played bard characters and really enjoyed it. I also remember that I was shocked when long time ago, while reading Zak's blog, I found this:

"(...)but the idea of a D&D class defined by the fact that it plays music seems fundamentally dumb to me. Just be a thief/fighter multiclass and be over it. You can have whatever job you want when you're not killing monsters."

For a long time I couldn't understand why someone would hold such a bizarre opinion, since for me - playing a bard was always fun. It allowed me, as a player, to cast illusions, stand my ground when fighting, and on top of it all, charm NPCs into my bidding.

On the other hand, I always hated the portrayal of bards being trained at colleges and being part of specialized organizations. Seriously what a load of bullshit. My bard characters would always represent the oral tradition archetype, be it a Norse Skald, a Celtic Bard, or a Greek Aoidos.

Only recently, triggered by a cheap pulp novella I was reading on the train, did I realize why I really like the bard. The truth is, that it's not the class that I really like. It's the idea of poetry/music/art having magical powers that allow the artist to actively alter reality. It's the humanity old myth of the artist (in this case a musician) as a creator, that really inspired me to pick up the bard class in the first place. Interestingly enough, it's not really present in the class itself.

This is because the bard class is mostly based on the Magic User/Wizard mechanic. The "bardic" element is usually specified by the ability to use, what 3ed dubbed, Bardic Music, which has never been done well and in the 3rd and 4th was just dumb. The class itself doesn't really introduce a new minigame, or a new set of opportunities. It just emphasizes the role playing element of the game. And you don't really need a new class for that.

This is why I decided to abandon the bard and stick with the rogue. In fact any class can be "the bard" if it's built around an idea to role play it as one. The fierce Skald from the north might be a figther, while a Celtic Bard might mechanically be a druid. It's all fine with me.

The before mentioned novella helped me to stick with this decision, as it features Francois Villon as a background character. Now, I am well acquainted with his poetry and it's socio-cultural context, but I have never really investigated the biography of the poet himself.

Turns out, little is known about his life. But what little information survived is enough to illustrate my point. The point is, that the greatest poet of 15th century France was a backstabbing, dagger slinging and gold stealing rogue. So why can't the player characters be (mechanically) rogues with (role-played) love for some dirty verse?

____________________________________________
*The title references this. I highly recommend it.

Mutant Past

2010-06-29T23:45:00.008+02:00

This is a writeup of a session that happened over 3 months ago! I wanted to do it for a long time now, but been unable due to my laziness/schedule. Still, it was so much fun that, even after so long, it still feels like it happened just a week ago.

It started with me and Julia trying to convince our friend Adam to play some D&D with us, since we knew he has played RPGs in the past. He said that he would like to, but is afraid that he's gonna kill it, since he always had problems with immersing into the game world. I told him that random jokes and bursting into laughter is nothing bad, but he wasn't quite convinced.

That is when I devised a master plan to lure him into gaming with us.

Since I was already pretty stoked about playing some Mutant Future I decided to kill two pigeons with one rock (or whatever that idiom is in English) and use the gonzo atmosphere of the game to convince Adam. Knowing what he likes, I showed him one illustration form MF handbook (the 50's astronaut sheriff riding a giant spider-chicken from page 23) and said: " Hey dude, look at this! Maybe that's what you'd like to play?"

He obviously laughed and said it's an awesome idea, but he was still kinda nervous about it. I told him not to worry, that we're gonna have loads of fun. Finally when an opportunity appeared, we met at my house.

We started in a most peculiar way. By rolling a joint (another step in my plan to make us feel relaxed and comfortable) and deciding when to order pizza, since the time pepperoni hits the gaming table is crucial to the whole evening. Order it too early, or too late and the game might be delayed/interrupted/suddenly ended by the heaviness caused by the cheese. We settled to eat and smoke in the break between making characters and playing.

And so character creation begun, while the joint lay on the table like a loaded Chekov's gun.

It soon became clear that we won't really need it. Choosing races and rolling mutations was enough to bring us to our knees and laughing to tears.

Adam quickly picked a synthetic android (though I tried to tempt him into making a robot on custom rules), but Julia couldn't decide whether to make a mutant plant or an animal. I decided that they can create two characters each and pick the one they like better, keeping the other as a back up since I still felt a bit uneasy with new monsters and not knowing how fast they can kill the party (a party of only 2 mind you).

Julia ended up with a nameless palm tree (thanks Jeff):

Str: 14 Dex: 17 Con: 16 Int: 14 Wil: 12 Cha: 10
Hp: 49 AC: 7

Mutations:
• Aprehinsile Tendrils (Dex 10)
• Radioactive Emissions (150ft./10d6)
• Pituitary Deformation
• Density Alteration
• Meta Concert
• Echo-location
• Unique Sense (smell water for 1 mile)

Pretty badass, isn't it? Her second character was no less awesome. It's a wolf, with wings and Vampiric Field, Killing Sphere and Control Weather mutations!

Adam was less successful with his rolls (and yes, I made him roll for mutations, cause it's funnier that way). He set out to create an assassin android, but this is what he ended up with:

Mr. Apple, Synthetic Android

Str: 14 Dex: 15 Con: 13 Int: 13 Wil: 11 Cha: 6
Hp: 50 AC: 7

Mutations:
• Chameleon Epidermis
• Optic Emission (3d6)
• Aberrant Form (large legs, twice the speed)

In other conditions, this would be a great character, but compared to Julia's doom bringing dendro-carnivores, his was kinda weak. I was trying to cheer him up by telling him he's rolling mutations that are in line with his original idea of an assassin, but than he rolled those damn funny large legs. He ended up drawing a huge all-star sneaker as his character pic.

His other character was also quite on the other side. It's a duck that spits napalm!

After we finished filling out character sheets and buying useless equipment (like a dog for an android, about which we forgot instantly), we took the aforementioned break. We ordered pizza, chilled for a couple of minutes and smoked that damn joint... This was a mistake.

You see, I especially made it extra light, so that it would just loosen us up and not send us flying under the ceiling. But the moment we started playing and eating pizza, all hell broke loose. In a good sense. Though I was the DM, I felt like watching Mutant Big Lebowski (and not because of drugs).

My players simply blew me away. The dialogues between the Palm Tree and Mr. Apple (aka the cowardly assassin android) were just pure gold. Every several minutes we would all roll on the floor laughing, because of something we would say. It was also the first time in my life I was afraid someone might choke to death on pizza.

Still, I feel that drugs had nothing to do with it. Mutant Future is just a great game and after the game we agreed we didn't need any superficial help in having ultimate fun.

I won't reveal much of what happened during the session, as I used some great stuff from this blog and my players might go back there. Let me just say, they were running away from giant anthropomorphic ants.

What I can say though, is that they solved a mystery of who's killing people in a small mutant western town, run by Roby - a sheriff that's a blend of those two guys.

Everything played out great. There were moments of genuine tension when the players where investigating an abandoned, supposedly haunted house. And some comedy relief when they found out that the strange creatures living underneath the house are actually cowardly Cockroachoids who will sell them the information they need for a nice load of shit.

In the end, both Julia and Adam were screaming for more and that's what is a measure of a good game. I think that, with the exams out of our way, I will try to go for a full on session in a bit darker tone. Still, for retro-stupid gaming, MF is probably unbeatable!

Session Quotes:

Me: " You see ...."
Julia: " I HAVE NO EYE'S DAMMIT!"

2 minutes later

Me: " You are walking down an old, squeaking staircase, it's pitch black and you can't see..."
Julia: "For fuck sake man!"

close to the end of the game

Julia: "Hey man, what happened to your dog?"

Another Lame Entry

2010-06-27T12:48:00.002+02:00

After making bold statements about my posting plans, it was obvious that I had to fail, . Somehow I didn't realize how tired I will be at the end of the exam session. Still, I have prevailed and so did Julia. We pretty much owned everything.

To celebrate I cut my hair, changing it from something like this, to something that can be most closely described as half mohawk.

I was surprised to find that it enraged my father to the point of telling me that if I want to continue living in my family house, I will have to pay rent. And that's just ridiculous.

So I am on the verge of finding a stable job and moving out. And being fucking poor...

Still, I am in high spirits. I feel that, paradoxically, this is a healthy turn of events.

I am also planning on finally keeping this blog up to date, though some minor fallbacks will surely occur due to my present situation.

Next post: Mutant Future!!!

Sailing stones gather no moss

2010-06-12T23:57:00.010+02:00

I'm back! Though the exams aren't over yet and there is still some work ahead of me, I decided to come back to my blog and give it a bit of a makeover.

The other reason for this and the upcoming entries is that I accumulated a lot of ideas over the past month and I don't want to loose them. Thus, I'll gradually try to improve my posting rate over the next two weeks.

Here is a quick one, that came to me while I was customizing my template.

I've found the new title photo on Julia's tumblr. It pictures the phenomena known as Sailing Stones. Here's what wikipedia has to say on the subject:

"a geological phenomenon where rocks move in long tracks along a smooth valley floor without human or animal intervention. They have been recorded and studied in several places around the Death Valley, where the number and length of travel grooves are notable. The force behind their movement is not understood and is the subject of research."

Awesome?! Hell yes, but it get's even creepier:

"Speed is an unknown variable. Since these stones are rarely transported and nobody has witnessed the movement, the speeds at which the rocks travel are not known."

That's right, nobody has ever witnessed it, even though there were many attempts to observe or record the stones movements.

For me it sounds like:

The Secret of the Sailing Stones

Long time ago, a powerful being of unknown origin ripped the veil of time and space, entering the material plane. Scholars still argue about the origin of the being and it's impact on the world. Some say it was a god, others claim it was a demon and few claim it was neither. Though the dilemma has long been labeled as impossible to solve, it is agreed that those long gone events were the source of an ancient legend, that a Great Evil has been turned into stone and than shattered into a million pieces, so that it could never regain it's power.

To this day, magicians and foolish merchants embark into the Clay Desert to collect blocks of black stone-metal. The stones are said to move in mysterious ways drawing strange shapes on the surface of the desert. Many have died in search of the moving Death Stones (as they are often called) and it is said that some men have been found crushed in their sleep by stones that moved overnight, while others, blinded with greed, chased a single stone for days using up supplies left for the journey back.

In common speech the material from the stones is known as Death Metal. It is rumored that it can produce blades that can cut through steel as if it was flesh. However, few such weapons exist as it is widely believed that Death Metal is cursed and any weapon made out of it will eventually betray it's wielder and get him killed. Stories about slabs of the material disappearing over night, or weapons moving on their own only strengthen the fear and prejudice against anyone in possession of such artifact. It is a common saying that "No man can wield death itself and live".

Music Monday: The Heart Of The Sun

2010-05-25T00:35:00.003+02:00

Finals, essays and my father's broken collar bone are still kicking my ass. I So I'm gonna just share some inspirational music with you.

And a modern rendition:

Now back to academics...

Music Monday: Power Octet?

2010-05-17T21:12:00.007+02:00

Ever since I hit it with my axe stated airing I was wondering: how long one does one encounter last at their table? Zak answered it the other day:

"On the other hand, a combat round is about a half-hour real-time of moving and deciding and rolling (twice that when Frankie is playing)"

Yup, just as I've suspected. Even if you are an octopus DM, it's simply impossible to have fast combat when playing with a lot of people. It made me think about my experiences with various group sizes. I came up with this analogy. It's stupid, but illustrates the problem well.

Gaming groups are like music groups.

Yeah, you saw it coming, didn't you? However, if you have any music playing xp, then you know it's true.

If you're in a band, it means you have to go to band practice regularly, same with a stable gaming group. Needles to say, everyone should be excited and stoked about sitting in a small, stinking practice room, otherwise the "band" won't last long. The Golden Rule of Everything also holds. You don't want dicks in your band, just like you don't want them at your gaming table.

If we take this analogy further, we'll arrive at the notion of the DM as a producer. He is the guy who should pull the strings and set up the playing environment in such way, as to get the best out of each person in the room.

Just like there are many types of producers, there are many types of DM's. Some like to partake in the creative process, give hints, or even play instruments. Others step back as soon as the shit starts rolling. They let the musicians do whatever they want, while they take care of the technical/logistic side of things (we call it sandboxing).

However, weather we are talking about a bunch of musicians or just some friends sitting at a gaming table, in the end it all boils down the dynamics of the group/band. Every single person should know their place and let others do their own thing, while still having fun and expressing themselves in their own voice.

So here's how I think the dynamics of a gaming group might change depending on the number of people involved. Please note, I don't count the DM.

Solo

Going solo might be the hardest of all possible configurations. The spotlight is on only one person and either she has balls of steel and cool ideas, or everything crumbles into oblivion.

What's more important, this type of gaming seems more intimate than the others. Both, the person running the game and the participant, should trust each other and feel comfortable with what they're doing. Especially since the player is forced to act, for if he doesn't participate no one else will propel the game.

Duo

On one hand this configuration is easier than the previous one, since the DM doesn't have to hire any "session musicians" to help out the players. It also takes the responsibility of being the only player.

On the other hand, DMing for two people doesn't differ much from running a game for one person. Most of the problems are still very similar and game balance is still an important issue, especially when running it old school.

However, one thing that may become present in a duo game (and is completely absent from a solo game) is the ego factor. For example, an experienced player my push a newcomer from the spotlight. Still, from my recent experiences I can say, that a pair of good friends at the table can be a recipe for a very successful game.

Power Trio

This is probably my go to line up. Both musically and in D&D. It offers versatility and enough space for everyone to make themselves comfortable. One person can play many roles without limiting the choices for others. The one thing I noticed is that there seems to be the least problems with ego in this configuration. Even if someone gets out of control, the two remaining players team up to put him back into his place.

Quartet, Quintet

Pretty much the same as a power trio. The only problem specific to such a line up occurs, when two, or more players occupying the same slot in the group start competing. The problem is that it's hard to provide two traps next to each other in order to keep two thieves entertained etc. Such situation has to be simply talked over, many solutions are at hand.

Sextet, Septet, Octet...

The problem is that the more people are at the table, the more likely is there to be an ego conflict. The DM has to divide his attention between all the PC's equally and this may often lead to people actively "marking" their willfulness to act by shouting, waving, hurling dice etc. It's very amusing, how mentally stable individuals can transform in a group.

The other problem is that fights (and here we go back to the Zak's quote) become super slow. The strategic element usually is exaggerated and people tend to get bored while waiting for their turn to roll. Additionally game balance is once again compromised (and I don't mean it in a 3ed sense). The problem is that a party made up of seven first level characters has huge "firepower", but can't take much damage. And rerolling characters for 4 people can really kill the whole session.

The bright side is that the case of several people sharing a class isn't a problem anymore. Why? Because almost everybody in the party has a double!

Big group gaming isn't for me apparently. And yet, there are people who can pull it off. I salute you.

I have heard rumors that in the old days before the empire, there used to be parties of 12 people? Seriously? What was the largest group you've ever played in?

The Imagination Dealer

2010-05-12T00:12:00.005+02:00

As you already know, Frank Frazetta died yesterday. He passed away leaving behind a huge body of work, that will outlive most of us and continue to inspire generations to come.

Frazetta, like no other visual artist, awakened my childhood imagination and influenced my approach to the RPG hobby (even though I didn't know it was him at the time, back then I was only familiar with his Conan covers). Although his paintings are full of epic themes and pulp adventure, I think it's important to take some time and look closely at some of his works. Because the fundamental question is:

How the hell did he paint that moss?!

Music Monday: It gives me the Shiver

2010-05-10T21:43:00.006+02:00

I feel quite bad for not updating this blog as often as I'd like, but since the end of the academic year is closing in, I don't really have much choice.

I will try to catch up with writing up my recent Mutant Future games, but I will only do it as a break from writing papers on academic subjects, so the posting rate might be very slow.

Moving on to a more pleasant subject.

This weak I decided to share a very obscure band and record, namely the San Francisco's Shiver.

Very little is known about the band or it's members. All I could find, is that the band was "brought together" by an Austin born drummer, who moved to San Francisco. Apparently they had a strong street cred and played for both - the Haight street hippie fairs and Hell's Angels biker parties.

Although the names of the band members are nowhere to be found, this little fun fact somehow survived the test of time:

"At one point they even had a singer with an iron hook for a hand, which he could use as a slide for his guitar, or for more violent purposes."

How cool is that?

This obscure band managed to produce only one album - a live, 1972 street show performance, that was recorded onto a 2-track and than pressed vinyl! Without any studio mastering or overdubbing!

Thanks to such primitive treatment, the record sounds super raw and has a punk intensity, without losing it's psychedelic dimension.

Here's a clip with the opening track, however it's quality is much worse than of the record, so I highly recommend looking it up on the net.

This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along.

2010-04-27T23:41:00.003+02:00

Yesterday, when I was adding your comments, some of the already existing ones disappeared. They came back today, but it made me think that the whole comment moderation is utterly useless.

The blockade is off, but play nicely... or daddy will have to punish you!

Music Monday: Scary Monster (A Super Creep)

2010-04-26T23:14:00.015+02:00

I really like David Bowie, but he gives me the creeps. Maybe it's in the differently colored eyes, his ageless androgyny, his aloofness? For some reason, he always seemed like a being from a different plane of existence (planet?), who came among us for reasons inconceivable by our primitive brains.

And what's with those alter egos? Perhaps Ziggy Stardust and The Thin White Duke were just means of concealing the fact that David Bowie himself is just "an alter ego" for something more than just David Robert Jones?
Still, the past decade or two, seem to pose he is a human after all. The last couple albums are by no means a match for his canonical works. Time seems to have finally caught up with him, but even as his looks start matching his age, a strange grin of satisfaction becomes more and more visible.
What I am aiming at is that David Bowie is a perfect elf. Or at least he suits my vision of elves perfectly.They are beautiful, intelligent and talented in magic, yet they seem to be cold, unemphatic, inhuman. They are respected as much as feared. They can produce wonderful works of art for which many would, and indeed - do kill, even though those objects seem deprived of passion and are rumored to push their human owners into depression and bipolar states.

Bowie's career seems to form an arch parallel with the history of elves in my game world. From the unknown and obscure beginnings, through the rise to power and a plunge into decadence. As you might remember, my elves lost their immortality and age, here are some pics illustrating the process.

Finally, rumors circulate about The Sons Of The Silent Age. A powerful organization of elves, who haven't abandoned the cause of The Supreme Being.

I hit it with his axe

2010-04-14T22:49:00.003+02:00

In this post, Zak Smith asked us not to judge I hit it with my axe until episode 5 airs.

It just did.

And I liked it. I liked all episodes except for the first one.

I think that the biggest strength of Zak's show the fact, that it's a documentation of D&D is played. While any session report is a (more or less literary) retelling of the game, so in fact - a re-narration of a past narration, the show is a straight up account of how actual game play looks.

And I must admit that, the first time I watched it, I was amazed at how similar his and mine games are. It was very uplifting to see, that even with all his insight and superb writing skills, he still plays the game in the same way.

Finally, I think that the DIY, chaotic way the show is put together only adds to it's appeal and adds to the feeling of observing real game play, instead of watching some prearranged, polished tv theater.

Music Monday: The Green Manalishi

2010-04-12T22:07:00.007+02:00

It's one of my favorite Melvins tunes. It has awesome dynamics and tension, feels kinda claustrophobic and dusty, yet remains catchy. And most of all - it fits in perfectly with the rest of the album (The Maggot, 1999).

Yeah. So apparently it's a cover of a song by Fleetwood Mac. It even has a nice, psyched story behind it.

Peter Green claims that he wrote the song after experiencing a drug-induced dream, in which he was visited by a green dog. He understood that the dog represented money and the devil.

"It scared me because I knew the dog had been dead a long time. It was a stray and I was looking after it. But I was dead and had to fight to get back into my body, which I eventually did. When I woke up, the room was really black and I found myself writing the song."

Still, to me, the only Green Manalishi is the Melvins one. And, as much as I like Green's story, for me the song brings more otherworldly and dark imagery.

Perhaps it's just the green in the title, but in my head this song got irreplaceably bound with this page from Mike Mignola's Hellboy (click to enlarge):

It's a whole pulp adventure right here!

A new sect becomes popular among the nobles. It leader is a traveler from distant land, known as the Green Manalishi. He claims to have unlocked the secrets of an ancient civilization. When a heir to one of the biggest fortunes in the state starts suffering from an unknown desease, the Green Manalishi is called.

He claims he has to take the boy on a pilgrimage to a secluded abode in the Horn Mountains. "Only through this holy journey will the boy conquer his illness" he says and the two set out.

After several months, the boy is found in front of his father's mansion. Dirty, dressed like a beggar, changed.

"We tried to talk to him sire, but he keeps repeating one thing over and over again" says the chief of the guards to the boy's father.

"What is it?!"

"The God! The God with the Two Pronged Crown is here!"

Easter NEStalgia

2010-04-03T13:52:00.011+02:00

I dunno how you are spending Easter, but I will be eating loads of fat, traditional food and listening to my grandfather lying to me about how he helped conquer communism.

I can't even play D&D because Julia went away to do the same thing as I am, just at different geographical coordinates.

So how to keep boredom at bay!?

Answer #1:

Yes! The ultimate gaming console of all, the one and almighty NES!

I must confess I have never seen it live, not to mention owning one. However I am very well acquainted with it's "polish equivalent" the infamous Pegasus Family Computer:

Here is what Wikipedia has to say about this wonderful and obscure device:

In the early 1990s, the Pegasus system gained massive popularity in Poland, probably due to the fact that until late 1990s there was no official distributor of Nintendo products in Poland. The Pegasus consoles were mass-marketed by most of the major and smaller electronic stores, where buyers even received warranty cards for the product. Numerous VHS rentals offered an option to rent or exchange Pegasus cartridges, as well as entire systems. Pegasus and its revisions received a wide coverage in Polish video game press. This, along with the system's surprisingly high reliability led to a false claim that Pegasus was an "official" video game system manufactured by a "major" company, and as such was considered by many to be an official Nitendo product. To meet its growing popularity a number of obviously pirated NES games were reviewed on regular basis by, Top Secret a major Polish video games magazine. Pegasus was even officially advertised in press and on TV Nintendo took legal actions against system's importer and distributor, right after officially establishing sales of licensed Nintendo products on Polish market in 1996.

So basically it's a NES but with an eye patch and a hook for a hand. Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, I never owned one. Thus I had to relay on my friends, which, from today's perspective, might have been even more fun.

Right now you're probably asking yourselves: "why the fuck are you taking us on that sentimental journey!?"

The answer is simple: because I am bored and I found this site. It's basically a portal which let's you play all the 8 bit classics (even old gameboy and dos games) in your browser window. How awesome is that? And those aren't some crappy flash conversions, it's the real thing!

Answer #2:

Listen to the Advantage

The Advantage (yes, they're named after this) is a band founded by Spencer Seim, an awesome dude who usually plays syncopated, angular guitar riffs in Hella (here he plays drums). As you might might have noticed by now, they play covers of old NES tunes and they're pretty good at it.

Apparently there are more bands playing this type of stuff. Perhaps it's due to hipster and nerd culture mingling together over the last decade. There is even some Japanese heavy metal band which plays solely Final Fantasy tunes, but I never checked them out (for obvious reasons).

But let's not go so far. The Advantage is much more than just a band covering Nintendo music. They are really skilled and have a unique approach to interpreting those seemingly simple melodies. I recommend checking their second album - "Elf Titled". It might be hard to buy, but should be easily downloadable from the net.

How's that for Old School!

The Transparency Question

2010-04-02T22:27:00.007+02:00

Evaluating my playing style and the way I tend to DM has brought my attention to one topic, that was not covered in my last post.

Let's call it The Question (or Problem) of Transparency.

The issue is quite simple and I'm sure that many of you already suspect what I have in mind. It's the question of how transparent should the gaming system be to the players? In other words: should the GM conceal the game mechanics, or should he expose the game structure and exploit it?

Before I provide some examples, I'd just like to say that I am not concerned with the very old argument of "storytelling games" (like WoD and Cthulhu) vs. "rolling games" (D&D, WFRP). This quarrel has and still is taken too seriously in Poland and to me it is based around stereotypes and completely artificial divisions.

Ah, yes! So what I am concerned with is: how transparent (concealed) should the game mechanics be at a D&D table?

I must say this question came to my head only recently, mostly because of this post and due to some confusion at my own kitchen table.

Sow how do the two models actually differ?

1. An example for the concealed mechanics DMing would look like this:

DM: A troll walks out from the cave, it looks like this and...
Player: I HIT IT WITH MY AXE!
DM: Ok, ok, roll your dice.
P: 18
DM: You score a hit, roll damage.

2. This is how the same situation would look, if the DM decided to expose mechanics:

DM: A troll walks out from the cave, it looks like this and...
P: I HIT IT WITH MY AXE!
DM: He's AC is 17
P: WHAT?! In that case you all see Turg grab his axe and prepare to charge, but after a brief moment of hesitation lowers his weapon and pretends like nothing happened.

I must confess that I used to think that method one is better (perhaps because of my WFRP background, since there are no target numbers and all players roll against their % abilities). It might have been due to being constantly exposed to the more dice means less atmosphere rant?

Whatever the cause might be, I'm starting to think that it's all bull shit and that in fact (as is said in the Year of the Dungeon post linked earlier) the exposed mechanics approach is more fair to the players. Especially to less experienced ones, like mine.

I might describe a monster all day and they will be scared (at least afraid of loosing their PCs), but will still attack it. The exposure of the beasts AC (once the players decide to kill it) doesn't reduce the strength of my description. In fact, if anything, it might force the players to rethink their strategy, or (if the fight is inevitable) make them really fear for their favorite characters.

A good example of using this device to DM's convinience has been posted by Zak in the early days of his blog. Here.

However, I see one case in which the exposed mechanics don't really cut it (at leas for me).

It's the traps!

Somehow, I can't see this conversation taking place:

DM: bla bla bla (describing a trapped floor segment).
Player: I see. I'm trying to block the floor tile with a piece of wood so it can't be pressed... (and so on.). What are my chances of disarming it if I do all that?
DM: about 30 %.
P: Ok. forget it. Guys, we have to find another way.

Yeeeaaah... Not very believable is it? My intuitions are, that with some traps, you've can never be sure whether you disarmed it properly until you try and walk on that fucking rigged floor tile.

I think it forces thief wielding players to role play and describe disarming attempts more thoroughly (in order to get some positive modifiers) And to me, makes playing a thief more thrilling.

Summing up: Exposing is oldschool and good, but let's keep those sappers in uncertainty.

Entschuldigen aber ich konnte leider nicht rechtzeitig kommen, weil ich keine Uhr habe*

2010-04-01T00:18:00.004+02:00

I'm really ashamed about my posting rate. But as you will find out today, it's not the only thing I'm ashamed about.

This is the second part of the post promised a week ago.

The last Session Recap might seem like an interesting game, but it was not. And for some time now, I am asking myself the same question. Why?

I know that there are those sessions. The ones that don't work out because many, at first glimpse, insignificant things happen. I had them and I'm sure all of you had them. (Right?!)

In fact, many such "unfavorable occurrences" took place that day. Katja came tired straight from lectures, we ordered Vietnamese food and got stuffed with it before playing (again! quoth the Raven: nevermore!), finally Julia was sleepy throughout the game. Perhaps the air pressure was low? The fuck if I know.

One thing remains sure. All those things shouldn't have prevented us from having much more fun than we actually did. And for that, I blame myself. Cause I am the DM.

It follows from my strong belief that the DM, as the privileged participant of the game, is the Protector of Fun. He's not solely responsible for everyone having fun - that's a collective effort. However, I do feel that the DM is in a way the person who, due to his privilaged position, is able to max out the amount of fun at the table.

I feel that I have neglected this responsibility. That is why over the course of last few weeks I came up with a number of things that I think are lacking/faults of my DMing style:

The first issue that came to my mind is the fact, that we are playing in English. Somehow I felt compelled to run the game in English, since I knew it's the first language for both of my players and Julia would feel less vulnerable playing in English. Now I'm having second thoughts. Even though I consider myself to be a fluent speaker (after all I do study Philosophy in English) I feel that my vocabulary might be lacking in terms of providing rich descriptions and creating atmosphere.

The second issue are the aforementioned descriptions. I do feel I need to prepare and remember about them. The language barrier is not an excuse. I feel that the lack of detail has made the game 2 dimensional and boring.

This might be partially the fault of me being dependent on the materials scavenged from the net (especially the one page dungeons). Instead of using them as a guideline and making them my own or simply plundering for ideas, I just fell back on them. This has led to my initial setting losing flavor and reinforcing the bad D&D tropes. This has happened partially due to the fact that being unfamiliar with retro clones I was unsure of how to balance the game. Luckily this is no longer the case.

The last issue is the one which really lies in the heart of this whole clusterfuck. I didn't prepare enough. That's it. There are many reasons for it, but there is no excuse.

So yeah. How do I straighten myself up? Well I came with a number of ideas.

First of all: PREPARE! This also means exercising in the way Zak has described in his comment for this entry.

The second thing is: make up more of my own shit. I do need to get around to writing a good dungeon and generally exercising my creativity more. The pornstars blog is a great example of how you can reconstruct used up stereotypes and create something interesting and fresh.

Thirdly: play more. I had quite a long break from gaming and I do want to play a lot now. That is why I am fiddling around with running a game of Mutant Futures (a thing I wanted to do since I discovered Jeff's sessions) as well as running some solo sessions for Julia.

Well, we'll see how it goes.

*this is the sentence that my German teacher in jr. high made me say every time I came late to the lesson.

Session Recap #3

2010-03-22T23:59:00.009+01:00

It seems like it's high time to post something about actual game play. I've been putting off the writing of this post for some time now, mostly because I still don't know how to constructively re-approach the last session.

Because of this this post will be divided into two parts - a short session recap, followed by my thoughts on my DMing. Here's the actual game bit:

Session Recap #3
The session started with the PCs descending beneath the city of Adamask. As it turned out, the passage discovered in the Iron Sword's cellar lead to the sewers/remains of a much older settlement.

Since the whole session was primarily composed of just wandering around, I'll try to provide the key events in the form of bullet points.

Shortly after descending into the sewers, the girls made their way into a passage filled with webs and spider eggs. Although they got ambushed by 4 giant spiders, they managed to survive (and torch the eggs) and press deeper into the spiders' lair, just to encounter a gargantuan (and I mean it in the literary sense) black widow, which proved to be a formidable foe. Though dangerous, the fight was short. The players lured the spider into the narrowest passage so that it wasn't able to turn around. There rest was simple - while Kai and Winston were facing the beast, Juchi performed numerous back stabs. In the spiders lair the players found a helmet shining a blue light and a passage leading into a forgotten gem cutters workshop.
Later they encountered a small group of juvenile delinquents who took them into their hideout. The thieves' lair proved to be populated by three more grown men. After some crude role playing from both my and the party's side, a fight broke out. It was short and messy, with two of the thieves decapitated while crying for mercy. The group of street youths decided to not interfere, so when the fight was over, they offered their services to the party (they tried to deceive them and get them killed, but in the end just ditched them on the surface).
For some reason the girls thought that their main goal is finding out where the rats are coming from. I must say that I found this quite amusing and probably will dedicate the whole post to this issue. Anyway, I did put some were rats on the map so eventually, that's where the girls got. It turned out that within the sewers a group of wererats built a shrine for worshiping some weird god. Inside there was only one rat priest with several rodents, all of which were quickly disposed of due to the extra muscle provided by the street gang.
After destroying the shrine the players ascended back to the inn in order to finally get some proper sleep. One of them woke up at night hearing screeching noises coming from the ground floor. Soon all three were awake and going down to inspect the main chamber. Down stairs they found two wererats (in the shrine there were signs of 3 inhabitants) dragging the unconscious tavern boy, who began changing into one of them (due to an earlier leg bite)! Needles to say, the ratmen and the half turned boy were dead in no time and the innkeeper, who got woken up by the fight, was crying over the boys body...

Also, this exchange took place:

Julia: looking quite tired from across the table "Can we go to the tavern now and get some spells and rest?"
Katja: "But we rested in the gem cutters workshop!"
Julia: Yawns, " We did? Then why am I so sleepy?", puts head on the table.

____________________________________________
art by Lucas Hardi

It is your destiny!

2010-03-22T01:23:00.007+01:00

I promise to keep this short. James Maliszewski claims that Episode IV is the best part of the trilogy*, because:

A friend of mine once said that Star Wars is the only one of the series that didn't take place within the Star Wars universe.

and

Star Wars is the only one of the series that simply tells a story rather than telling a story about Star Wars. To varying degrees, all of the sequels and prequels exist, at least in part, to tell us more about the characters, places, and events of the original film.

And I agree. However, I must note that this assessment doesn't state anything new, it simply follows from the fact that Star Wars is the first film in the series ( which btw. wasn't planned until the movie turned out to be a huge success). As such it had to be a stand alone work of art, constructed around a closed story arc and with no lose ends sticking out.

James also writes:

Certainly there were lots of details established in the first film, but most of those details existed primarily to advance the story it was telling rather than to flesh out the setting of the story. It's the only film of the series that's like that, which probably explains why, even after years of interminable "expansions" to the original through movies, TV shows, comic books, novels, and other media, it still retains a freshness and vibrancy that the others lack.

I disagree!!! While it might be argued that, indeed the other two movies are a kind of an appendix to the first one, it's still The Empire Strikes Back, which holds the lead as (in my opinion at least) the best movie.

Why? Because it's probably the episode that has the most dramatic tension, as well as plot and character development. In fact, compared to the other two movies. it could be seen as not only being numerically and chronologically in the center, but also as the true culmination of the saga.

And I'm not even mentioning the multitude of cultural tropes and motifs which make that movie (and the whole trilogy) one of the most postmodern works in history of cinema.

Blah blah blah

Here is the real reason for this post.

*to me there will always be only 3 Star Wars movies

11 best doom/drone albums to play while playing

2010-03-16T00:51:00.018+01:00

I wanted to write this post for some time. A few days ago Zak reminded me of it, so here it is (in no particular order).

11 best doom/drone albums to play while playing:

Witch, Witch
This is the side project of J. Mascis from Dinosaur Jr. If you don't like his first band, don't worry Witch sounds nothing alike. This record has a very strong 70's/stoner vibe and is filled with melodic songs about seers and occult.

Sunn O))), Monoliths and Dimensions
This is the newest release from what might be the most famous doom band. Their whole discography is superb and it's difficult to choose one album. Monumental, atmospheric and mad. A must.

Electric Wizard, Dopethrone
Another classic doom band. This album is often listed as genre defining. To me it sounds like the perfect Warhammer game - witch hunters, satanism and the wizzaaaard...

Eagle Twin, The Unkindness of Crows
A recently formed duo consisting of experimental metal veterans. Features nice Tibetan/Mongolian throat singing and very clever compositions. Saw them live supporting Sunn O))) - they kicked ass.

Boris, Amplifier Worship

To me it's the best band to ever emerge from Japan. One of the last truly original bands in the world. Their discography is huge and spans over many genres, styles and moods. This album is a fine specimen of awesome dooming and droning.

Fun Fact: one of the vinyl editions had a

Green jewel box with a gummy worm in the spine; at time of release, there were rumors that said worm had hallucinogenic properties akin to those of LSD when eaten; these rumors have been denied by Southern Lord, the band, and people who actually ate their worm

Sunn O))) & Boris, Altar

A one of a kind collaboration. Just look at the fucking cover. Sounds like crawling in search of an old hag living in a labyrinth of earth, tangled roots and worms. Side note: be sure to get the B side - SatanOscillateMyMetallicSonatas.

Melvins, Bootlicker

This album is probably the calmest in their discography. Although it can be called "laid back", I feel it has a strange tension present throughout it's length. I'd recommend it for building suspense by contrast with other records from this list.

Boris, Akuma No Uta

Another album from the best power trio out there. It's a fine mixture of slow and fast riffing, full of 70's feel. In my opinion - one of the best metal albums ever. Have I mentioned they have the best female guitarist of all time?

Earth, The Bees Made Honey In Lion's Skull

This is the latest effort from the doom/drone precursors. Heavy, but delicate and laid back. For me it's a very relaxing record. Good for calmer moments and as a break from more brutal stuff.

The Sword, Gods of the Earth

Both Sword albums are really great. Their awesome riffs and tons of old school hooks make me feel like I'm 15 again. An ideal illustration to the original Conan stories (in fact, some songs are referencing Howard's works).

Eight Hands For Kali, Himalayan Necromantia

If you ever wondered how the call of Cthulhu really sounds like - this is the answer. Space, madness, a dark ritual with cries of dying people in the background. This sounds - how I felt when I first played DOOM.

The Lame Entry

2010-03-14T23:55:00.004+01:00

It's been a while since I posted anything. In fact last month wasn't exactly a flurry of posts. There are many reasons for this, one would be me being sick, the other one - me taking a break from the blogosphere.

The time away from my blogger dashboard made me realize something important. The OSR (or whatever you want to call it) really is too big for one person to grasp. I know this is no news to any of you, however, after a week of not reading blogs, I realized I can't keep up with the few I'm following. I know amongst the entries I "missed" are some really good ones, ones that will really make my creative juices flow. However there are also many, that I will dig through simply out of duty. I'm not even mentioning how much time it will take me to read all of them (including the links etc.).

Don't get me wrong! I'm not trying to be condescending or negative. I'm not very happy with how this blog looks and often have second thoughts about it's usefulness to anyone. There are many posts that now seem unnecessary and in fact even the best blogs have many posts I could live without.

After all, I started it as a kind of scrapbook, hoping it will motivate me and help me order my loose ideas, as well as improve my writing in English. But now I find myself spending more time reading other blogs than thinking about their content or writing my own entries. I became less creative and started being responsive. In fact, sometimes I want to write a post in response to someone's entry, but the pace of discussion moves so fast, that I feel my opinion becomes completely redundant.

It all comes down to the fact that I want to keep this blog and I want it to be good. Mostly for my own enjoyment. Unluckily I've fallen into the trap of ever adding one more blog to my read list and now I can't navigate through them.

That is why I decided to narrow down the amount of blogs I'm reading.

Once again, it's not because any of those blogs suck. On the contrary, some of you take so much of my attention that I stop imagining my own things.

I really hope you all understand and keep blogging.

A challange for artistically handicaped

2010-03-05T15:48:00.006+01:00

It's good to have friends who aren't artistically retarded because, even though I draw like a 4 year old, I can always ask someone to draw something awesome.

So last week my friend Adam felt inspired by demonpig. I found his interpretation extremely amusing and asked him to make a drawing of a creepy wizard.

So here it is. I give you: Membrious the Mad!

I still can't decide which one is better... I fucking love the green light (which in my opinion is the creepiest kind of light possible) and the wooden leg is just a stroke of genius!

So.. now it's time for A CHALLENGE!!!

WRITE A BACKGROUND HISTORY OF MEMBRIOUS!
The only rule is: It has to be one comment long.

Ready,

Steady,

GO!!!

____________________________
art by Adam Banaszek

A dungeon from my head

2010-03-03T22:57:00.006+01:00

It is a happy day. Why? Because today I got my medical results and I don't have brain cancer, tumors, diabetes, or any kind of neural damage! Yay! I've also felt good for the longer part of the week and there is no sign of my problems returning.

So what was it? I dunno. Truth to be told, no one knows. The most probable hypothesis claims that it was an inflammation of the Membranous Labyrinth.

Now go to this link and look at it! Isn't it awesome? We carry a nice dungeon in our heads (actually two of them. dungeons, not heads).

In honor of our labyrinths, here's a little something to celebrate my well being. Enjoy.

Membrious Parasitic Dungeon

This micro dungeon is the home of Membrious the Mad, a magician of old times who seeking solitude and peaceful environment for his mystical inquiries and strange experiments, moved to live in a pocket dimension.

Membrious arranged his artificial plane in a very peculiar manner. He formed it from usual construction materials - stone, metal and wood, but decided to fill a large portion of the dungeon with a live symbiotic organism that would filter the air and water.

Needles to say, as many powerful (and mad) magicians, Membrious was extremely paranoid about his security. That's why he decided not to anchor his solitude to any particular place in the actual world. Instead he created a magical mechanism, which allowed him to randomly connect his dimension to one of the already existing dungeons.

This means, that every time the mechanism was activated, it "moved" the dungeon entrance (which looks like a normal, iron reinforced, wooden door) into another dungeon from the list of dungeons known to Membrious at the time of creating this apparatus. Unluckily, the mechanism is now malfunctioning and changes the placement of the entrance at random.

The map and descriptions:

1. This is the entrance. After stepping in, the visitors will enter a long spiral corridor. The walls are made of old, copper colored metal, kind of like a big metal tube. The strange thing about it is that no matter which side the players move - in or out, the corridor will always seem to lead down. The DM should place some kind of a pit trap near the entrance.

At the end of the corridor, just before the door, the PC's will encounter a camp of hobgoblins... They are discussing their plans and if the players won't kill them at first sight, they will explain that they entered the unknown door from their dungeon, but now the exit leads to a different place. Moreover, their leader took 3 of their companions and went to investigate the strange place. They are confused and presume he is dead, if the players show some initiative, the hobgoblins will be willing to join forces.

2. The main door. They are made of coppery metal and have a gargoyle face on the surface. They aren't locked.

3. The mechanism. The walls of this whole room are filled with strange instruments and containers. Looks kind of like this. It is also the home of Membrious' clockwork golem.

He was created to keep maintenance of the mechanism, but now the lifeless body of armor lies on the floor covered with some king of plant growth. If the players remove the growth and menage to heat up his body, or put a electrical discharge to it, the golem will awake and demand explanations. He's perception is quite limited and so is his intellect. The players might gain his assistance at restoring the mechanism to its proper state, by (for example) claiming that one of them is Master Membrious, or came to see him. On the other hand if the players bring him back to life and don't come up with something creative, the golem will attack should they try to descend further into the complex.

4. A small corridor leads past a small bathroom and into the hall. The toilet sink restores 1d4 hp after washing hands. On the other hand, the toilet might scare the players by demand "feeding" in the hoarse whisper of an old woman.

5. This is the main hall. All the wall surface of this tall room is filled with book shelves and cupboards containing strange and bizarre objects. The only exception is east wall in the passage to area 7, where a large painting, similar to this one hangs. Some of the PC's may feel like they caught a glimpse of movement within the painting. Perhaps the girl smiled as they were passing by, or winked when one of them was turning his head away? The room is lit by an elaborate organic structure hanging from the celling, supporting several glowing globes. If the players manage to obscure the light, or turn it down in any manner, they will be able to see the true image of the girl in the picture. Should the room be completely dark, she will leave the canvas.

6. Kitchen and dinning room. The players might easily mistake it for an alchemists lab. Cooking utensils, skinning devices, strange glass containers and so on are scattered all over the place. There is a high chance, that any food the players find is poisoned or has hallucinogenic effects. Similarly, any containers with liquids have equal chances of being either heeling/boosting or narcotics/poison. There is a large hole (crawl space sized in the wall) with an acidic substance constantly flowing out and into an elaborate basin.

7. Those are the workroom (on the right) and the bedroom (left) of Membroius. They are mostly filled by many strange memorabilia, some examples:

a vampire's coffin
a jar with mind flayer's head that will try to communicate telepathically with the players
an enchanted lute with a spirit of a bard trapped inside - he will speak only after a skilled musician plays the instrument

In the bedroom lies a concealed entrance to a secret escape tunnel (8) which leads to the main hall (the exit is hidden behind a book shelf).

The workroom, apart from a huge desk with many secrets compartments, contains a weird chair that looks something like this. It's the place from which the mechanism is operated. To change the "location" of the dungeon, one has to place a copper pin ended with a HUGE ruby in one of the holes in the copper tablet map, that is fixed to the wall over the desk. At the moment of entering the dungeon the pin is inserted in one of those places, however until the mechanism is repaired it won't work.

The chair is occupied by the body of Membroius. The remains of the once famous mage look as if something sucked all the water out of his body... The players might notice a thin cable-like thing lying on the floor, connecting the body with a hole in the nearby wall. If they fail their spot checks, the mages carcass will attack them when they are near (for example, when they are searching the desk). He is now controlled by the symbiotic organism, that provides air, energy and water to the dungeon. This organism mutated for unknown reasons and became hostile. Treat him like a powerful construct, that has some of the abilities of the mage he used to be.

9. and 10. those are two "pipes" big enough to crawl in. Pipe number 9 looks like a polished copper pipe with constant flow of an acidic liquid. Pipe number 10 is made of stone and is covered with polyp like tissue, that moves and gives a small breeze. Both lead into space 11.

11. This is the chamber in which the dungeon's "parasite" dwells. The floor is covered with an organic tissue which serves as the organism's digestive surface. It is covered with acidic mucus that is meant to melt any organic mater before it is fully ingested. The half melted remains of the hobgoblin leader and his companions can be found on the floor (perhaps he had a fine magical axe, that is now lying in the acidic fluid). Needles to say, the players standing in the substance will suffer damage to their gear and eventually to themselves. Any contact with naked flesh will cause serious burns.

The parasite itself is somewhat similar to a roper or anything else that is tentacly and scary. I leave the details to any DM. One thing is sure, it is vulnerable to fire. Perhaps he is resistant to non magical weapons? Or maybe he is fully resistant to magic and that is why Membrious got killed? WHat will happen when the organism is dead? Will the lights go out and the vampire/monster/girl from the painting wreck havoc?

I leave this and many other matters (like treasure, stats and touch-ups) to the rest of you.

Sometimes you need just one word to trigger your imagination into full overdrive

2010-02-25T00:57:00.004+01:00

Demonpig

Think about it...

Totally miniless

2010-02-20T23:55:00.003+01:00

Zak's last entry (which btw. is super awesome) made me realize that I've never used miniatures in D&D (or WFRP for that matter).

Why?

I dunno. I had friends who played Warhammer Fantasy Battle and they had loads of miniatures, but somehow it never occurred to us to use them in a RPG game...

I started thinking about this strange phenomenon and I came up with three reasons:

Minatures in Poland are expensive as fuck, especially that, until quite recently, Games Workshop was owning 90% of the market. Even today few shops sell miniatures made by other companies...
We were fully satisfied with hand drawn maps on which we marked our positions using pencils, dice or coins.
I've never met anyone using minis in their games.

And this is how I got used to playing the game. When I fist learned that in the west people use minis for RPGs - I couldn't comprehend it. Why would anyone spend money for that, when you can just use your imagination?!

All in all, I was very content with the mini-less way of playing RPGs. And never had any second thoughts...

Until I saw this. And than, this.

Perhaps I was missing something? I can't tell... All I know is I've never seen something like it and it sure does look like limitless amounts of fun!

Zak's styrofoam castle made me also think about how popular playing D&D with minis really is?

The stereotype propagated by the WotC books is: ANYBODY playing D&D should do it using minis (from WotC), dungeon maps (from WotC) and terrain models (from WotC).

This is obviously a cheap marketing trick, but still I wonder...

Logic would indicate, that old school players should have a soft spot for minis because of the game's Chainmail origins. But is it true?

Take this poll and let's see for ourselves!

The destination will remain unknown

2010-02-17T22:36:00.003+01:00

As you might have noticed, Destination Unknown is no more... If I'm the first to break the sad news, visit The RPG Corner or The Underdark Gazette for more info.

I will miss reading Christian's blog, but I'm happy to see he's still commenting on blogs and I hope all of his plans work out.

Since Destination Unknown was swarming with a lot of good music, I've decided to honor Christian's blog with a truly old-school vid.

Peace!

Session recap 2

2010-02-16T23:15:00.007+01:00

As some of you might have gathered from my previous session recap, I've played the second session of my new S&W campaign over a weak a go. I was eager to go over that game and post a short recap, since it proved to be a great tool for ordering what happened during the session, as well as the progress of my players - both in game and on the meta-game level.

Unluckily I've been struck down by some weird illness that gives me vertigo so strong that for a few days I was barely able to walk, not to mention using a computer. I feel a bit better now, but after a weak of visiting doctors, there's still no clue what's wrong and I still can't spend too much time typing - this post took me 3 days to write!

But anyway, since I feel a bit better and can finally do something constructive - I give you the second session recap!

The next morning after the happenings of the first session, Kai and Juchi decided to leave the town of Stillwater and head south for the nearest city, where they hoped to coin some of the goods they retrieved from the caves underneath the shrine of Skaghe.

As soon as they decided to leave the tavern they met Winston - the young boy that helped them in the caves and who was eager to join them on their adventures. He lied (of which they did not know) that his father gave him permission to go.

The girls noticed that the boy was wearing a viking-like helmet, a farewell present from Thorson. The former adventurer decided that the several times he got wounded in the caves was too much for his old bones and gave away his lucky helmet.

The girls accepted the boys company, but only after they made sure that he was wise enough to prepare his own traveling rations. And so they set out into the wilderness...

That was the point where I pulled out a white sheet of hex paper... As I was preparing for the session I decided to make it a hex-crawl during which the players will draw their own map. Using the hexographer I made myself the outline of the terrain, but decided not to mark any specific locations. Instead I created some random charts that would determine what the players might encounter, thus filling the map with dungeons, encounters, villages, etc...

Here are some of the things that happened during their travel through the wilderness:

1. A day of travel from Stillwater, the girls saw a line of smoke emerging from distant ruins. The whole party managed to sneak to the ruins, despite them being located in open sight and on top of a small hill. Within the partially collapsed walls of a small keep they saw three Norse males sitting and chatting...

Kai, filled with joy of meeting her kinsmen, neglected any common sense and came out of hiding. The three men immediately attacked the warrior-woman, proving to be bandit berserkers. The fight was short and the party was cooking warm stew before the bodies got completely cold.

2. Few days later, the party came to a river. As they were following the road, hoping it will take them to a bridge or a brood, they came upon the remains of a burned village. They were examining the ruins, trying to make out what had happened, when the other river bank started swarming with goblins.

Julia and Katja decided to face them. The encounter was long, with the cowardly goblins sending deadly rain of arrows, nearly taking Winston's life... Finally, the girls decided to retreat and try to find another crossing up the river.

I noticed a drop in mood, but i hope they learned to judge their foes more carefully...

They circled the forests for a few days and found themselves returning to the village, hoping that the goblins are long gone ("It's not like they're sitting there waiting for us"). Turned out the goblins left some guards, since the bridge was the only crossing in miles. However there were few guards and the party manage to safely cross the river.

3. On the next day they came across an old burial ground, but weren't interested in jumping into the open mouth of danger again.

4. Few hexes to the south the party had to stop, as the road was cut in half by a canyon-like rift in the ground. The road seemed to continue on the other side, prompting that perhaps the hole in the ground came into existence quite recently.

Kai and Juchi decided to look for a way around the rift. They lost one day traveling west where they found this Elder construction. I was hoping that after they defeated the enemies they'd flee from the monster without barring the doors, but they proved to be more thoughtful than I suspected. Since the little dungeon wasn't a path to the other side of the rift, the party decided to head East.

5. After two days they've found the "end" of the rift and decided to get back to the road. They didn't want to loose another day for following the ledge and so they went straight through the woods, hoping their path will cut the road at some point.

This took them to a hex occupied by a goblin war camp (probably belonging to the same goblins that raised the village), but the party decided to sneak by.

6. After that they finally made it back to the road, just to enter into the middle of a fight - two merchants wagons fighting off bandits. The brigands proved to be no match for party's skill and soon our heroes were offered a lift on one of the wagons.

The merchants were quiet and didn't ask many questions, nor were they asked any by the party. Somehow no one voiced any suspicions about the place where the merchants were encountered... They were traveling south, but they were just a day away from the rift and no other trading rout was visible. Was their travel north interrupted by the appearance of a new geological formation, making them turn back? or was it the goal of their travel?

Whatever was the answer to those questions, the rest of their travel went smoothly and just three days later, after almost three weeks of traveling, they made it to the city of Adamask!

I must admit, that I didn't expect the party to get to the city during this session, not to mention exploring it! However, ever since being beaten by goblins, I sensed that girls got weary of the wilderness, so at some point I decided it's time to risk letting them reach Adamask, with me being completely unprepared. Luckily, the game took off anew once they crossed the city walls.

Once in, they were very interested in the market (here I could put something about women and shopping, but I would feel a horrible hypocrite as I 've seen male players spending hours haggling with traders). Juchi managed to get a good deal for preparing the wolf hide and both girls took some time to flirt with a tall, black southerner trading in fine silks and exotic wares.

Later they stopped at the fine artisans street and visited an old jeweler (role-played by putting a beer bottle-cap in my eye), with whom they haggled really hard and managed to make a nice profit on gems they found in the goblin caves. They also briefly stopped at a blacksmith, who directed them to a good tavern. Before they left he mentioned that he's the innkeepers friend and perhaps they'd find some work there.

The Iron Sword turned out to be a small and modest inn, run by an old mercenary called Drognar. After a short conversation he told them of his problems with rats and offered a free meal and room for the night. When asked, why he hadn't settled it himself, the man told them that he ordered his tavern boy to take care of the rats, but one of them bit him badly and now the wound was turning bad. After giving it some thought, Kai and Juchi promised him, they'd look into it first thing in the morning.

After a good meal, the girls talked a bit with the innkeeper and asked him about good brothels!!! He told them, that hearty adventurers like themselves would probably feel best in Warrior's Rest.

As they were about to leave, they noticed little Winston trying to sneak out. They told him it's dangerous to wonder the city alone at nighttime and inquired where was he heading? The boy tried to sell them a story about "leaving to get some air", but to his embarrassment they saw through his bluff and managed to pull from him his true destination. The boy was off to a brothel himself! After laughing about "itching virginity" they promised to take him with. Needles to say that only made the awkward boy more uncomfortable.

Warrior's Rest proved to be a jolly and crowded place. The bartender, who the clients call simply Bob (an anagram for his long and complicated name), turned out to look and sound like Jack Black.

The girls told him their business and the innkeeper offered Winston "a go for half a price". Kai also found some pleasure in the arms of a woman, while Juchi waited in the main room drinking the surprisingly good beer...

After the curse of Winston's virginity had been lifted and everyone met back at the bar, I asked whether the girls want to party Conan style and exchange some of their coin for experience. To my surprise they were reluctant, but after some thinking decided to take a roll on the party table, Winston included.

The next morning was a painful one, exactly as it should be! Kai woke up bruised up, with a black eye. Juchi smelled literally like a pig, vaguely remembering getting into some argument with an old woman. But the biggest surprise was yet to come. As they descended into the main tavern room, Drognar welcomed Winston with curses and shouts. As it turned out the boy got so hammered, that he peed all over the tavern's main room...

After this was settled with some coin, the party bought themselves a big breakfast, and still a bit hungover, decided to descend into the cellar. There they encountered four giant rats. The fight was short, but Kai got bit by the only infected rat. Julia almost neglected that, as the girls found a crack in the wall and wanted to explore more of the city's underground. Luckily, in the end she decided to go seek help at the temple of Skaghe.

At the temple they were offered some cure potions, but the temple pharmacist told them that three portions will take a day to prepare. The party decided to go easy on themselves and spend the day on sight seeing, until the medications are ready.

The next day they received the promised medicine and descended beyond Iron Sword's cellar, deep into the darkness underneath the city of Adamask...

Stories instead of Skills

2010-02-08T01:36:00.006+01:00

In my last session recap I mentioned using a special table to establish characters pasts. The idea was partially inspired by Warhammer's professions table and partly by reading a similar thing here. However, unlike Akrasia, I decided not to add any specific descriptions and make the whole thing as open to interpretation as possible. The reason for this is very simple, I decided to use character past as a guideline for ruling what skills the PCs posses.

Instead of including another elaborate system of rolling for stuff, I decided that it's way better to just roll once and gain some character depth along with the information about the skills they acquired before becoming adventurers.

For example, in my game there is a cleric of Skaghe who used to be a jester on a court of some northern lord. Not only is this funny, but also grants her some knowledge and abilities other characters don't have.

Perhaps she's able to juggle extremely well, or perhaps when the need comes, she might remember something about the heraldry of northern noble families?

In other words, anytime the player of the jester cleric feels her background can aid her, she can try and play that to her advantage. I might ask for some kind of a story from the characters past (that the player will have to improvise) to justify such use of this rule, or I might just say no.

Finally, here's the aforementioned table:

Character Background Table:

1-2 Slave
3-4 Tax collector
5-6 Acolyte
7-8 Bandit
9-10 Farmer
11-12 Armorer
13-14 Whore
15-16 Circus artist
17-18 Healer
19-20 Squire
21-22 Fisherman
23-24 Gladiator
25-26 Messenger
27-28 Candle maker
29-30 Miner
31-32 Jester
33-34 Bartender
35-36 Medium
37-38 Gravedigger
39-40 Card Shark
41-42 Hunter
43-44 Bounty hunter
45-46 Artisan
47-48 Wagon Driver
49-50 Sailor
51-52 Rat catcher
53-54 Nun
55-56 Potter
57-58 Mercenary
59-60 Thief
61-62 Barbarian
63-64 Noble
65-66 Cultist
67-68 Scribe
69-70 Bodyguard
71-72 Forester
73-74 Servant
75-76 Scout
77-78 Minstrel
79-80 Guard
81-82 Grave robber
83-84 Ferry man
85-86 Tanner
87-88 Blacksmith
89-90 Beggar
91-92 Bastard
93-94 Smuggler
95-96 Torturer
97-98 Wizards apprentice
99-00 Roll twice

Am I a Paladin or a Cultist?

2010-02-06T13:31:00.004+01:00

Last week a D30 giveaway was held by Sniderman on his Mutant Future dedicated blog - The Savage Afterworld. Guess what! I won!Now I'm entitled to this:

If you haven't heard about The Order of D30, check this link.

Session recap 1

2010-02-04T19:44:00.007+01:00

SOoOoOoOoOo!!!!

As you may know from my previous posts, last Friday I finally got back on the line with some D&D!

I haven't mentioned it before (or have I?), but after a long time of searching for some players, Julia (aka fishlemons) came up with an idea, that maybe her friend - Katja, would like to play with us. Katja proved to be intrigued enough to check my blog. After she read it (along with D&D with porn stars - thanks Zak) she got really amped about playing, to the point of buying her own set of dice a week early. Cool!

We decided to meet on Friday. We first made some pasta and, with our tummies full, decided to roll up characters. I had to take a small break beforehand to print all the spell lists, the dungeon map and so on. During that time girls got a bit restless at the kitchen table and I got really stressed out. My biggest fear was, that the girls will find the game boring and won't play ever again...

Luckily, seconds after we started to roll up characters, the atmosphere got joyful and we had a lot of laughs. Character creation took us quite a lot of time, since I had to explain everything and both players proved to be very inquisitive (which is obviously a good thing).

After everything got cleared up, the girls decided what race/class they want to play. Katja was very excited about my take on halflings, so that's what she decided to play. Julia, very in touch with the old school tradition, decided to play a half-elven cleric of Skaghe - a strategic choice aimed at the party's survival (apart from being an aesthetic one).

The most memorable moment of characters creation was a discussion that followed my question about the sex of their PCs.

K:"Hmmm, perhaps we should play men characters... They might have some special abilities..."
J: "What special abilities?! Peeing standing up?!"

More joy ensued, when I asked them to roll a d100 (on a special table that I made) to find out what their characters were doing before they decided to change their qualifications. And so we found out that Julia's PC used to be jester, while Katja's halfling was a candle maker (which btw. led her to quickly come up with a story that the nomadic halflings of my world make candles and lamps out of pony poo)

Here are our heroes (in order of appearance):

Juchi (Katja)
halfilng scout (thief) HP 5
STR 12 DEX 16 CON 15 INT 8 WIS 10 CHA 9

Kai (Julia)
half-elf, cleric of Skaghe HP 8
STR 17 DEX 12 CON 13 INT 8 WIS 16 CHA 10

As you can see, both characters are rather powerful. After rolling and all that stuff, girls went shopping with the S&W manual and I must say, that once again, they behaved like veterans of the game - buying ropes, rations, grappling hooks etc.

And so I played Goblin for the mood and our adventure begun.

We started out with a little prologue in order to clear up why both characters decided to travel and fight together (instead of risking crude roleplaying of good friends pretending they are complete strangers getting to know each other).

Turns out that the half-elf Kai was tired of serving as a Jester on the court of some northern Jarl and decided to hit the road in order to become someone respected - like a cleric of the powerful and feared Skaghe! After she got to one of the mountain monasteries, she had to wait outside for several nights and days, in order to prove she's strong enough to become a cleric-warrior. Of course, her motivation was strong and she got accepted into the order.

Skipping all that time, we moved on to the final day of Kai's apprenticeship, when an old monk called her and said that for the last trial, she has to travel south to a small village of Stillwater. There, there is a small shrine devoted to the Axe Wielder; where a statue holding an axe was protecting the land. Now it has been desecrated and Kai has to set things right. The old priest also informs her that on her way to Stillwater she should join arms with the first person she meets outside the monastery... Needles to say, that someone turned out to be Juchi.

After that introduction we started playing. The PC's were just a few hours away from Stillwater and slowly cold winter night was approaching. Kai and Juchi decided not to stop for the night and try rush for the village. I rolled for a random encounter and it turned out that a lone hungry wolf decided to prey on the party.

The fight was short, the wolf managed to wound the cleric, but Kai made him pay by splicing his head open with her axe (That's right. Clerics of Skaghe wield axes! DUH!). After that she decided to heal her leg with a Cure Light Wounds, while Juchi made a successful attempt at skinning the dead animal.

The adventurers finally got to the village, heading straight for the only tavern. Inside they let themselves get ripped-off; renting a very small room for 1 Gp. However they managed to get some quite good food included in the price of the room. They also decided to pay extra and take a warm bath.

As Juchi was washing Kai was approached by an old man named Thorson. He turned out to be an old adventurer and offered to take them to the old shrine of Skaghe, for a small price of course.

Next morning, while eating their breakfast (which the girls managed to haggle into the price of the room) they were approached by Winston, a boy who wants to be an adventurer, offering to aid them in their escapade. Since the boy was cute and annoying, the girls decided he could be a live shield and agreed to take him with them (little did they know that if they boy died during the adventure, his old father would turn the village against them). After that they met up with Thorson and set out.

The shrine turned out to be a small, a bit neglected building in the woods, just two hours away from the village. Juchi tied her pony and decided to enter in first. When she opened the door a huge log fell from the ceiling, speeding at her. Luckily she made her save and dodged the trap.

It turned out that the floor of the shrine collapsed, opening a huge hole in the ground, possibly swallowing the statue. As soon as the party descended into the darkness, they were ambushed by goblins.

I won't detail what exactly happened underground. I think it's enough to tell you that I took the dungeon from Chgowiz's One Page Dungeon pdf (it's called The Lost Staves of Maurath and was written by R. Lawrence Blake).

The main highlights were:

a giant frog, that scared the players a bit (apparently I acted it out quite well, although I think it was mostly Julia's frog-phobia) and they were afraid to kill it, leaving it for the end, setting it on fire by making it swallow a fire beetle's abdomen.
an Ogre, that also scared them a bit. Julia managed to roll well, beheading the beast and finishing the fight quite quickly. Old Thorson almost got killed when the huge body collapsed on him.

And that was pretty much it. Although no one died, the party got pretty roughed up and had to rest quite bit.

After clearing the dungeon and finding the aforementioned axe, everyone returned to the village. This is where some confusion set in - no one knew what to do next. To me it seemed obvious that the players are ment to rebuild the statue and place the axe on it, but I realized those were the instincts of an old player, not someone used to the railroady nature of computer games and etc.
I quickly managed to introduce an old fisherman, who noticed the party drowning their confusion in beer and suggested rebuilding the shrine.

The adventure ended after a few days of work. The party repaired the old statue (which smashed on the floor of the cave below the shrine) and replaced the axe. When they were about to leave, the old fisherman turned up and revealed himself as the same priest who sent Kai on her quest. He congratulated the party and told Kai that now she's officially a priestess of the order.

I'm not completely happy with the way I handled parts of the game. I also think some of my role playing was kinda stiff, but I hope it's all part of me warming up.

Now, if you excuse me, I have a game to prepare for tomorrow...

Stuff to do, people to roll with...

2010-02-01T23:44:00.005+01:00

Finally, I have a moment to update!
For the past 6 days I was distributing my time among:

Metaphysics Of Science Workshop
Enjoying my winter break
Preparing a game
Playing D&D!

So yeah, it was quite a busy weekend.

As to my game, I will try to post the characters and a short recap tomorrow or the day after (since tomoro I'm going to see Lucio Fulci's Zombi II). Enough said, we're playing again this Friday!

Behold The Obelisk pt.3

2010-01-27T00:14:00.003+01:00

First, two important things happened while I wasn't writing:

1. I finished my semester tests, so hopefully, there will be more time to write,

however...

2. It seems like I'm finally gonna roll some dice THIS WEEKEND!!!

and that means there are some important preparations to be made!

Ok... But this post was actually planned to be about something else, so let's get to the point.

As you might have gathered from my previous post the City of Obelisk is influenced, more or less directly, by some classical pulp and D&D locations, that I intended to mash into one, that will prove useful to me..

Here are my three (quite obvious) inspirations:

1. City-state of The Invincible Overlord

I learned about Wilderlands from OSR blogs. I think I have read a review of the d20 version of the setting once, but otherwise I was completely ignorant. Until a few months ago. All the gripping tales of that supplement made me want to find it and submerge in the old-school vibe of the whole thing.

Finally, after some struggle, I obtained the City - state book. As much as I like it, I instantly felt, that it won't exactly fit into my setting and thus decided to modify some tables.

But why just mod the tables, when I can actually loot the City-state for ideas and make it my own?

2. City of Thieves

I feel that the Howardian "unnamed city" was the main influence behind the City-state. I love the roguish and adventure friendly character of this location, but who doesn't?!

When I look back at the history of my gaming, I can clearly see that all cities I've ever depicted in my games, were in some way reminiscent of this one.

3. Waterdeep/Undermountain/Skullport

Even though I really dislike Forgotten Realms, I must admit - I do like the concept behind this gaming region.

When I first thought of turning the Palace of Culture into a game location, it was quickly followed by the idea of adopting it's infamous tunnels into a Undermountain like location.

This opens a lot of possibilities for adventuring, as well as a reason for random monster appearances in the city. You get the idea.

Ok. So this is it. I just felt that this post is a necessary addition to my Obelisk general overview.

If you have some city location ideas that could compliment my vision, you can drop them in the comments. All will be appreciated!

Behold The Obelisk pt.2

2010-01-22T00:47:00.005+01:00

The Free City of Obelisk is a very peculiar place. It's one of the few cities in the world, that was built on the ruins of an Elder settlement. Until this day it remains unknown whether the site used to be a city or a temple complex of which the famous Obelisk was part.

The beginnings of the City's history are somewhat hazy. Because of the fear of the Obelisk, the fertile land lying in it's shadow remained unclaimed for a long time after the Fall. None of the surrounding kingdoms wanted to take it, as it was said to be cursed.

However, as the trade between the new kingdoms intensified, it became clear that the old Elder roads could handle more traffic and are faster than the new paths. Soon a small group of traders decided to take the risk and lead their caravan near the Obelisk. This granted them an advantage over other traders, however their joy didn't las long.

After few trips near the Obelisk, their secret was spilt by some drunk caravan guards. Others started thinking of taking their rout, however most of them lost their enthusiasm when only one person returned from the original caravans next voyage. This nameless man claimed that the traders felt over confident with their success and decided to break their rule of not spending the night in the shadow of the Obelisk. The man who lived to tell the story died soon afterward.

Some years later, emerged a man with a plan. He wanted to be wealthy and powerful and he knew how to do it. He sold all his possessions to buy equipment and hire people for his journey. The aim was to build a settlement near the Obelisk, where the caravans could safely spend the night. He knew the venture was risky, but succeeding would mean securing a profitable monopoly. And since his wife and children had passed away, he had nothing to loose.

He succeeded in establishing a small stronghold. At first it was just a palisade with a bunch of tents inside. But with time, the settlement grew. First a watchtower was built, than a wooden house for the leader. When the leader was dying, the outpost was already more than a hundred people strong. However, since he died childless, a problem arose, who should be the next leader...

By the decision of all the dwellers, the 9 remaining members of the original, founding expedition would choose the next head of the village. This is how the tradition, that the council of the 9 oldest trader families chooses the next head of the city, came into being.

This is the legend of how the Free City of Obelisk was founded.

Today the City is ruled by the 33rd of the elected leaders, one who took the title of the Magistrate. The agglomeration is one of the larger human settlements and perhaps the most famous place throughout the know lands.

It attracts all kinds of adventurers, traders artist and anyone who dreams of fame and fortune. It is said that the Obelisk Market is the largest trading place in the world and offers any item known to man, be it silks of the far east, frost steel from the far north, or illegal spells and powders from the south.

The Free State is also infamous for it's organized crime, drug trafficking, slavery, but most of all - religious cults and Elder past. The Obelisk attracts all kinds of zealots, flagellants and future sect leaders. Many new comers, who became charmed by one of the new orders, ended their lives sold to slavers.

The fact that the City is built on the old Elder ruins is also not easily forgotten. Although during the day, the traffic on the streets creates the illusion that the city is twice as populated, few are bold enough to roam the streets by night for in the Obelisk City a lone traveler can easily disappear, suffering a fate far worse than life in chains...

Behold The Obelisk pt.1

2010-01-19T01:58:00.004+01:00

Few days ago I was rushing to the University, when I looked behind me at the mighty stature of Warsaw's most recognizable landmark - The Palace of Culture.

It was half submerged in the mist, looking like some ancient construction, a tower perhaps, from atop of which the undying gods rule their city and amuse themselves, toying with our everyday lives.

You get the picture.

This is how it looks from a pigeon's point of view:

I won't go into much detail, since crucial info can be obtained here.

However, what's most important for this post is not covered by the wiki article. You see, almost everyone here has an extremely strong opinion about the building. Some hate it and postulate it being demolished as it's "the everlasting mark of the dark times of communism and Russian supremacy", others praise it's original architecture (if I'm correct only Kiev and Moscow have similar buildings) and try to promote it as Warsaw's logo.

Over the years the Palace of Culture has accumulated a number of myths and urban legends. For example, it is officially known that underneath the building and it's adjacent neighborhood lies a whole system of cellars and underground passages. However, officially no plans exist, nor are civilian tours admitted. This has led to many speculations what the "dungeons" were originally designed for and weather they really are as defunct as it is officially stated.

Anyway, here it is...

THE OBELISK

The Obelisk is a gargantuan construction standing in the middle of the Free City of Obelisk.
It is built out of black stone and has no windows, doors or visible entry ways. Most of it's surface is covered with sophisticated spiral symbols and runes. It's undoubtedly the largest architectural landmark in the known lands.

No one knows what the Obelisk is, what it has been constructed for, or even why it's called that way (since it's clearly not shaped like an obelisk). It is still widely disputed wether it's a temple form the time of the Old Empire, or a much older construction. Some claim it has been built in time before time, others say it was the palace of the Elder Emperor. There are also those who claim that it's a prison, protecting the world from unspeakable horrors locked within.

One thing remains a fact, no one has ever managed to get inside and return.

Whatever is the origin of the Obelisk, the dwellers of the Free City got used to it and treat it just as a famous landmark. The big stone square that surounds it has been turned into a lively market that attracts traders and religious zealots from all around the world. It is said that on the Obelisk Market religion is just a good for sale.

Though the city's population got used to the sight of the black tower, newcomers are always thirsty for new stories about the Obelisk. More than one bartender is ready to spin a tale of how he lost a limb descending into the legendary tunnels that run underneath the city, presumably connecting it with the alien structure.

little BIG Men

2010-01-18T00:23:00.008+01:00

As you may or may not remember, I discarded halflings in one of my first setting creation posts. However a few days ago an idea, how to detolkienize halflings, suddenly popped up in my head.

Think halflings = Mongolians.

Stupid? Perhaps, but take look for yourselves:

You should know that me and my friends have a soft spot for everything Mongolian and that's why I think this somewhat ridiculous idea might click with them just fine.

Anyway. I was toying with this concept for some time asking myself two questions:

1. Do I really want halflings in my setting?
2. How small would a halfling bow have to be, in order to make it useful from horseback and not cramp the style of eastern-archer-horseman-barbarian?

Few minutes ago I read Zak's post, which reminded me that sometimes you have to just let the creative juices flow and make up explanations later...

So yeah, there are nomadic, horse riding halflings in my setting.

Here are some facts about them:

they are bigger than the halflings of the Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk
they don't have hairy feet, nor do they have curly hair
they are proficient riders and archers (in my world, they are the inventors of composite bows)
they use war ponies that are much tougher than normal horses
I picture their culture as somewhat similar to Scythian
they tattoo their bodies in colorful and elaborate ways in order to distinguish their social position
they are divided into many clans and tribes that are constantly waging war against each other
their religion is an animistic one
they do not have written language and their culture is entirely based around oral tradition
they have a brutal law and are not a race of chubby morons
they are not called halflings (not even by other races), they refer to themselves as Zotharians ( but we say one Zohar)
they inhabit lands far enough that I don't have to worry about them on a day to day basis

Enough said.

I might not use it at all, but it's here in case anyone wants to play one.

Not only does my axe do d10 damage, but it also kills fascists

2010-01-16T00:17:00.009+01:00

Some time ago James Raggi posted an entry on awarding experience. I read it with pleasure, however I found myself disagreeing with some of his points. I've thought about this post for some time and here it is:

My own mandatory XP post!

As my game is coming closer, I'm asking myself, what should I award Xp for? Should I go with monster Xp only? Maybe I should preserve the old school Gp=Xp rule?

I came up with an analogy...

My starting point is: adventurers are in many ways like rock stars. They travel a lot, spend a lot of time away form their homes, have to cope with obstacles, addictions, etc. Their goal? Mostly to become rich or die trying (Paladins are like indie musicians. Their aim is to produce something good and they might succeed, but even if they are remembered, they do die in poverty).

Just like an a group of adventurers starts from killing kobolds and later proceeds to kill orks, ogres, trolls, and consecutively more dangerous monsters, a rock band starts from playing to just themselves, then moves to playing small gigs that no one gives a shit about, then they build up an audience, go on a world tour and hopefully play great shows to thousands of people. You get the idea.

Now let's look at a well established guitarist like Jimi Hendrix.

At some point of his career Hendrix secured a one million dollar record deal - a sum unheard of for that time. Did the sum of gold pieces he was offered reflect his talent, skill and experience as a musician? Perhaps, although as we can observe on MTV - skill, experience and quality are not mandatory to make money through making music.

In my opinion, the money that Hendrix got was just a result of his adventures - hard touring, playing for more and more people, being inventive, tackling obstacles like exploding amplifiers, racist freaks, plaster casters, and so on. He got the money because he was an amazing performer and a high level musician able to do things unheard of before (in other word it's the Xp=Gp and not the other way round).

On the other hand, the fact that he had a lot of money led him to more "adventures", many of them dangerous, like being kidnapped (or maybe even murdered).

All that is supposed to illustrate two things - why I will award gig...er... monster Xp and why rather than just use the simple Gp = Xp calculus, I will make my players use the table of Extended Carousing-Mishaps whenever they want to exchange their gold for experience.

On the other hand I think that players should be rewarded for good playing - both in game decision making/problem solving, as well as role playing. I also think, that they should be awarded every time they manage something extraordinary and one of a kind, like being the first to climb Mt. Everest, or win a duel with a famous duelist.

I know it's completely arbitrary and subjective, but I am convinced that Jimi, regardless of his level, did get Xp every time he unexpectedly burst into a great, face melting improvisation.

I dunno about you, but my great axe deals d10 damage!

2010-01-11T23:16:00.005+01:00

It seems like this post has stirred some discussion over the topic of weapon damage in D&D.

Here are some loose thoughts explaining why I like different types of dice for rolling weapon's damage (or why I oppose the idea of all weapons dealing d6 damage).

I believe that different damage dice are useful because, at least in my opinion, D&D has no other way of showing the advantage of wielding one weapon over another (somehow I never cared for weapon speed tables and etc.).

Let us imagine a fight in which one of the warriors is armed with a dagger and the other one with a long sword. The advantage of the second combatant is obvious and that's where different damage dice come handy. It's simple, one of them takes more damage since he's wielding an inferior weapon, which puts him into disadvantage. If they both were wielding daggers, the fight would have been even and they'd just slowly stab each other to death. In the first example, the dagger wielder dies faster because his opponent's weapon allows for better in combat performance, than his own weapon.

Some might say, the example with the sword vs. dagger works good, because it's obvious which one of them is inferior. But what about weapons that are completely different? Like say a sword vs. an axe?

It's true that the sword is a faster and a more useful weapon (in combat, not in every day life!). However in this case, the difference is simply in damage. An axe is a crude weapon that deals a lot of damage. A sword wielder might deliver several lighter slashes, but when the axe armored barbarian lands a blow - he hacks. It's much easier to hack some one's arm off with an axe than with a sword.

So this is my small rationalization of weapon damage. Even though I don't think my interpretation was the original reason for introducing varying weapon damage, it works fine for me.

Most of all it's fun!

I'd rather see those 10 and 8 sided polyhedrons roll as players hack their way through enemies, than count weapon speed and what not.

How high is your Resistance to absurdity?

2010-01-07T02:29:00.010+01:00

Some of you show interest in learning more about Krysztaly Czasu (Time Crystals).

I decided to quench your thirst and provide an overview of the game. Please note, that I tried to translate things as accurately (not literally!) as possible. However, if something seems weirdly formed, it's probably because I tried to keep the spirit (the difficult, pseudo-historical/scientific/poetic language) of the original.

The Setting

The name of the system comes from a myth within the game world. It is believed that somewhere within the game universe powerful objects (or even entities), known as the Time Crystals, exist. They are said to be more powerful than magic, gods, or the world itself (that's pretty fucking powerful, if you ask me). Those who will come into possession of the Time Crystals will have an almost unlimited control over reality.

The origins or the reason for the existence of Time Crystals remain unknown and many, often clashing theories circulate. Some say they are artifacts from a different universe/dimension, others claim they were made in "time before time", or that they are the remains of the first matter known as the Monolith. Finally some believe they are beings secretly plotting and controlling the world...

The world in which the game takes place is known as Orchia. It's inhabited by typical fantasy races: elves, dwarfs, hobbits [because the game was published in the early nineties, when polish law of intellectual property was liquid, Time Crystals often "borrow" from the fantasy classics] reptilians and orcs.

Orchia is probably bigger than Earth, but the game takes place only on a 4th. part of it's surface, where the Lands of 10 Archipelagos are located. There is 9 so called "close" archipelagos and one "scattered" among them... Some of the islands are very small, others are the size of whole countries or subcontinents. Each of the archipelagos is meant to have a different climate and culture.

It is said that long ago all known lands were parts of a huge super-continent, but due to some events, perhaps a divine intervention, it was scattered.

Adventures usually take place on Orchia's Central Archipelago, most often on it's biggest island - The Great Orcus. It's the homeland of orcs [duh!] and is believed to also be the cradle of all intelligent life.

The game takes place in the time when the orcish empire rules throughout most of the known lands. Though no country can match it's economical and military power, the empire's reign is becoming weaker and it's aristocracy (originally named Uruk'hai) grows more and more decadent.

I don't go into any other details, because there are no interesting ideas concerning culture or the different states. It's the usual, all over the place medieval-fantasy vibe.

Mechanics and Character Creation

The game is based on percentile tests made using a d100.
Each character has 10 primary attributes:

Liveliness
Physical strength
Dexterity
Speed
Intelligence
Wisdom
Magical Abilities
Charisma
Presence
Faith

Additionally each attribute has a secondary one called Resistance, which works a bit like a saving throw. Here are the ridiculous names, each is a Resistance to...
• to illusions
• to psychology (!!!)
• to curses
• to shock (meaning psychological shock)
• to unnatural effects (my personal favorite)
• to diseases
• to exhalations (or reek, in polish it's the same word)
• to temperature
• to electricity
• to polymorphism

As you can see, the authors were not resistant to stupidity.

Apart from those (20!) attributes, there are some additional ones, which are based on two or
more of the above attributes, each with equally fabulous names. Among them are: LifeEnergy,
Magical Potential, Spotting and (the best character attribute ever) Normality.

Of course there are also lists of skills, languages, weapon proficiencies, jobs, special abilities one might be born with, special abilities one might learn, etc...

Finally we come to character classes. They are divided into castes, but characteristically for this systems treatment of language, meaning of the word "caste" is reduced to "group". Of course additionally characters belong to different social classes and shit, but I won't go into it, since
there is nothing useful or amusing to be found.

Class castes:

Warriors Caste: fighter, ranger, guard,barbarian, mercenary
Knights Caste: knight, paladin, black knight
Rouges Caste: thief, assassin, merchant, bard
Priests Caste: priest, druid, astrologer, half-god
Wizards Caste: mage, warlock, illusionist, alchemist

So here you are! Now imagine many, many unofficial or semi-offcial supplements, articels, rules and stuff like that. When the company publishing Magia i Miecz (the magazine in which this game was first published) decided to make a book edition in 1998, no one knew what to take, what to change and what to throw out the window. The end product was very poor (not that there was much to start out with) and literally killed the system.

Now few crazy hermits still uphold the tradition and publish unofficial materials (so called 3 edition) on the internet. They are...

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art by Jarosław Musiał

Going Solo, or why the polish gaming community sucks

2010-01-05T01:03:00.009+01:00

Happy 2010 everybody!

I felt shitty after the Xmas and decided to take some time off in order not to cramp my style any further...

But now, I'm back! Hopefully with a vengeance!

During my week off, I was thinking about my main problem with this blog - the fact that after almost two months, I'm still not running an old-school DnD game! Why is it so?

The answer is (unluckily) simple: I can't form a gaming group. It's not that I haven't been trying. I think everyone here knows how difficu lt it is to get a group of nice people (who have lives and problems of their own) together and play but here in Polandland, it seems twice as difficult! At least for me!

The reason for this, is the fact that the gaming culture developed differently than in the west. Let me elaborate...

The hobby arrived in Poland in the second half of the eighties and bloomed in the early nineties. The late beginnings shouldn't be a surprise, only with the fall of so-called communism and the introduction of the free market was it possible for small publishing companies to emerge and game materials be printed and freely imported from the west.

The golden age of Polish gaming could be linked to the appearance of the first gaming magazine called Magia i Miecz (Sword & Sorcery) in 1993. The first issues were devoted solely to publishing the first* Polish RPG game called Kry sztaly Czasu (Crystals of Time), which was an extremely rule heavy AD&D clone.

Over the course of time, the magazine became more and more popular, covering more systems and the subjects linked to gaming, fantasy and sf. In 1995 Warhammer Fantasy Role Play was published, becoming a default "entry" system for the next 10 years. Not long after, other popular systems followed - all the World of Darkness, Call of Cthulhu, Earthdawn, Cyberpunk 2020 and finally even AD&D (which was in house print circulation for a long time, but was published quite late)...

This is where the going might get weird for all the dungeoneers - D&D never made it into the Polish public consciousness... And what I mean is that, in Poland, when people who have vaguely heard about the hobby want to address the subject, they will usually speak of "playing war hammers" or something like that. Of course, DnD is acknowledged by the gaming community as the ancestor, but is generally looked down upon (along with Warhammer) as simplistic and "not-serious", sometimes even addressed as "primitive"...

To be fair, this has changed a bit since in 2004 the Polish edition of 3.e, followed by the new Warhammer, were published. But that introduced a new generation of gamers, rather than changed the attitude of the "old' ones.

But back to the point!

This short outline is meant to give you some background on why I find it so difficult to explain why oldschool DnD is cool.

Because the tradition of playing DnD does not exist, few people understand what kind of atmosphere I want to invoke! And explaining isn't so easy! Usually when I get to the point of explaining how OSR postulates using rule light game and the flow of the story/adventure over loads of pseudo mimesis, people either look at me like I'm crazy**, or ask why not use "a better rule lite-system like FATE" (which, btw. I like a lot). Not many people see the old school elegance of the DnD rules and fall for their charm. In fact I'm close to explaining it by playing people this vid, which in my opinion really captures the spirit of OSR.

Finally there is a problem of the Polish Cult of Role-playing/acting. Somehow the presumption that good playing is synonymous with good acting is extremely strong. Few people here understand that good acting during the game doesn't stand in opposition to being silly, introducing Tables of What Happens When You Are Drunk and keeping in mind that what you are doing is playing an artificial construct of rules according to which you get Xp for gold just because it's cool.

So yeah, getting people to play is difficult... Especially that I have an adventure laying around for some time now and feel that both I and fishlemons are getting restless!

Maybe I'm just trying to make it too perfect! I really don't know now... Maybe I should run it gonzo-style like Zak does? But for that you still need a set of right people, or at least so it seems to me...

Recently I've even started thinking about running a solo introductory adventure for fishlemons (mainly because of this post). Still, it's gonna be her first time and I'm not sure if that's a good way of introducing her to the hobby, which after all is mainly a social activity.

NOW DISCUSS!!!

*the question of what system was really the first polish language one remains disputable. The first officially published game was entitled Oko Yrrhadesa (Yrrhade's Eye, this is how the 1995 book version looked like), it came out as an article in the 1990 issue of the magazine Fenix. However, there are legends about first drafts of Time Crystals and a home translation of AD&D Player's Handbook circulating as early as 1987.
**somehow "realistic"rules are extremely popular in Poland and the belief that mechanics should describe the game as accurately as possible is quite widespread. On the other hand all the oldschool random tables, which I find entertaining on the meta game level, are discarded as something primitive!

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all art by Jarosław Musiał

Avatar! WHAT THE FUCK!?!?!

2009-12-28T13:18:00.006+01:00

Because of all the Christmas crap, I didn't feel like writing anything. It seems, like this holiday was tailored specifically to drain all my energy and leave me feeling like a zombie, with a few gifts as a pretend make up for all the horrors...

But anyway... Today I was planning to go see Avatar with fishlemons...

Before I get into any details, I must state: I'm not a fan of James Cameron or the premise that stands behind the making of that movie, but in order to judge the movie I do need to see it. And in this particular case, to see it as it was meant to be seen - in 3D. So, if you love Cameron or movies like Alexander, you should probably stop reading this now.

You can't really blame me for not linking Cameron. After all, he's the man who gave the world Titanic. Even Terminator and Aliens can't redeem him (let's face it, compared to the original, the sequel to Alien is shit).

I decided to see Avatar knowing the plot is probably gonna be addressed to the same average viewer as Attack of the Clones. A movie with a budget of 237 million $ has to make at least twice as much in order to satisfy people who invested in it and that means it can't feature any controversial ideas, or even hint anything that might be thought as offensive, inappropriate or otherwise unsuitable for anyone who's 12 (interestingly enough, it can feature people shooting each other in the faces).

Apart from that, with the economy and all, spending such amounts of money on making an animated movie with actors acting, but being animated in order to look like they do in real life, seems kinda inappropriate. The first Star Wars cost 10 million, and made much more money than Avatar will ever make. Why not try to go that way, and give the rest 227 million dollars to all the people that lost their houses and life savings?

Still, non above really matters since, instead of going to the cinema, I ended up writing this rant! How did that happen? I tell you why!

THE TICKET IS FUCKING EXPENSIVE!!!!

Really... As I went online to check the screening hours, I found out that a student ticket (here in Poland we have a good custom of giving University students a discount on cinema and public transport tickets) costs twice as much as usual!!! Not only that, but you also need to "rent" the 3d glasses for an additional, "symbolic" fee...

Summing up, the ticket price for Avatar (including the glasses rent) is equal to a new book!

I won't pay that amount of money for a movie that I probably won't even like... That's why I'd like to ask all of you, who perhaps have seen the movie, IS IT REALLY WORTH THE MONEY???

...or should I just get myself sth. good to read?

Btw. I promise my future posts to be of more substance.

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the painting is "Saturn devouring his son" by Goya

10 ideas that never made it pt.4

2009-12-24T03:58:00.002+01:00

3. Running a superdupermetagame of Forgotten Armies, Mage or Call of Cthulhu.

The idea is to play a game that would be more like a LARP than a typical table RPG game.

The way I imagine it happening would be, that I first do the typical character creation with charts and other typical shit, then start the game. It's set in present day Warsaw, revolves around places that me and my players/friends know.

The first session doesn't involve any dice and at the end of it I take away the character charts (never to return). During the game I role-play some NPC's and one of them tells the players to contact him via e-mail.

When players do contact him ( players writing an email as their characters), he replies that something happened and he needs to see them, gives place and date of a meeting...

So one of the players goes there, I'm already there in character. I give him/them a note and, blabbering about danger and shit, run out of the place...

The note has information about what to do next, the players have to seek out a book in the library (the one thing the University of Warsaw does have, is a very nice and spacious library). Eventually one of them rents out the book mentioned in the note, in it is a hidden message (prepared by me beforehand, e.g. written in pencil on random pages)...

I think you get the idea... The players meet me and can never be sure, if I am in character or just to hang out and get some beer. Ideally, one of the players works with me and "decides" to betray the rest at some point... The possibilities are endless...

Why I've never done it should be obvious! It's too much work... And you can never be sure if your players will react positively to this kind of shit...

The biggest obstacle is the story itself. I never came up with a story that would be interesting enough to put so much effort into developing it. The other problem it would, most likely, have to be created in real time, or be super ingenious, so that the players do what you want, without realizing it...

Overall, this is (most likely) the Impossible Game!

10 ideas that never made it pt.3

2009-12-22T02:16:00.005+01:00

4. Using/playing Arrk

I'm really happy that I've never bought the 3e. Forgotten Realms Handbook. However, my friend did and I borrowed it. I've nearly read the whole thing, trying to scavenge it for ideas, locations and NPCs...

Now I can say with full conviction: I hate Forgotten Realms. I used to just hate it's "literary offspring", but after reading the handbook, I'm certain it's not R.A. Salvatore's fault it's unimaginative and boring. Flavorlessness is it's premis.

The only NPC I liked in the whole book, was Arrk. Who is Arrk? This is who:

Arrk's a troll, who left his kin in order to become a mercenary. He's a typical bread and butter adventurer... except for the fact, that he's what adventurers usually kill.

The handbook doesn't say much...

"He sells his services anyone with money as long as the job's doesn't take more than a tenday, for Arrk has a short attention span and tires of other people quickly. He has the unnerving habit of licking his bleeding [due to a curse] sword when he grows bored or nervous, and his hygiene is no better that that of a common troll, so civilized folk can't tolerate him for long.
Despite these faults, Arrk can be counted on to hold up his end of bargain. Given that he tends to eat people who steal from him or refuse him his pay, other folk deal with him honestly."

... but I'm sold!

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image by Matt Wilson

10 ideas that never made it pt.2

2009-12-21T00:44:00.004+01:00

6. Creating a blind mage

We were to play Warhammer and the idea was simple: there was a mage who went blind. Because he couldn't cope with his disability he implanted himself new eyeballs made of warp stone...

To other people he would look like his eyes were missing, his sockets being just black holes sucking out the light. The other thing was how the eyes would actually work. All the perception was distorted by the warpstone in such a way, that the mage couldn't read any written messages, but would perceive emotions of the author in the process of writing. Same would happen to his perception of people. He could read auras and emotions, but lack the ability to actually see faces clearly...

If you know anything about WFRP, it's not a surprise that the DM wasn't enthusiastic...

5. The elf barbarian

Once we were to play 3e. D&D. I was sooo amped. As I was thinking what character to play, I saw an image of a raging celtic warrior wearing only body paint. The image was so evoking that I decided to play a character who was a tattooed berserker and an elf (I really have no idea where that elf came from, but it was a must!). I started thinking how the fuck could all those things come together. And you know what? I think I came up with quite nice character background!

It all started in a small, peaceful elven community that was being raided by drow. At first the attacks were sporadic and infrequent. But with time, the dark elves became more persistent, launching regular raids, ambushing the hunter groups, slowly depriving the community of warriors and anyone able to defend the village.

Finally, it was clear that not enough men are left to effectively defend the community and that the next raid will be the final one. Compelled by the duty to his people, the druid (who was also the leader of the community), decided to sacrifice his own child in order to save the village and avenge the dead elves.

He prepared a ritual in which a dangerous demon, a Strzyga, would be bound in the body of the young elf. He knew that after his child destroys the drow, he will have to be killed. His heart was crying, yet he did not hesitate.

Soon, at the full moon, the ritual commenced. The young elf screamed in pain as mystical wards, ment to chain the demon's soul, were engraved onto his body. After many hours of torment his consciousness gave out. As the ritual was coming to an end and last runes were scribed, the drow struck...

When the boy woke up everything was in blood. Bodies of slaughtered elves, both drow and village, were scattered all around him. Something must have gone wrong... HE was still alive, body covered with mystical signs and a new strange feeling of alien presence following wherever he would go...

He knew what had really happened, but failed to acknowledge it, or perhaps something or someone didn't want him to acknowledge. With passing time the boy became a man. He wandered the wild territories becoming a formidable fighter, avoided settlements, since a simple tavern quarrel would often lead to fleeing the town, not remembering what followed and how a simple misunderstanding ended in a brutal fight...

Man! I wish that game did work out!

10 ideas that never made it pt.1

2009-12-19T13:01:00.006+01:00

It's really cold here, -13 degrees Celsius (8.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Somehow the Melvins' Boris helps to keep me warm.

It might seem strange, but I often come up with my most creative/weird ideas in the shower. Today I thought about gaming ideas that I had in the past, but somehow never got to realize.

Here's my first installment of...

10 ideas that I always wanted to realize, but failed or forgot to:

10. Playing Shadowrun

I bought the main handbook and always wanted to use it, even though I could never imagine how all the pieces came together. I know people who played the game extensively and had lots of fun... I guess my experience running the shadows is yet to come!

9. Wladir Lennist and Karel Merx

This idea actually kicked off pretty well, but ended shamefully. Wladir Lennist and Karel Merx were characters created by me and my friend for a fantasy game of non decrepit origin (also known as the "anything goes" type).

I was playing Lennist, an elf, who with his gnome comrade Merx tries to start a revolution against the feudal lords. Merx was the brains and face of the duo, giving out fiery speeches and creating magical bombs. Lennist had a horrible burn covering the whole side of his face due to a bomb misfire. He was the muscle of the operations, skilled in fencing and acrobatics, assassinating the enemies of the people (usually by blowing them up).

By this point you probably noticed that our main inspiration for those fucked up PCs were Lenin and Marx, followed by the whole bunch of 19th century anarchists...

At the beginning things were running smooth. However, we haven't foreseen the fact that our gaming group would incorporate a VERY irritating guy (seriously imagine this guy as a player)... At first staying in character wasn't difficult, but with the passing of time, my in game goals shifted. I didn't want to liberate the people of the state, I wanted to kill the irritating player. I wanted to torture him in every possible way, throw his preposterous character (it was a dark blue skinned vampire with black angelic wings, which was supposedly "the chosen one" of his race, blah blah blah) into a meat grinder...

At this point I should probably say, that I am a bit ashamed of what I did, as it was an example of extremely bad gameplay, but I don't regret it.

What happened is: after his 4059 stupid remark my character simply started attacking the irritating vampire schmuck. To my surprise this polarized the party (i think people simply decided not to act out of character) and a huge fight broke out. Needles to say it ended with a TPK ( I think, I blew myself up just to kill the last enemy) and the DM treating us like a bunch of idiots.

I still think the characters could have been fun to play, although that was probably the first and the last time I tried to incorporate a modern political concept into character creation.

8.Goblin Campaign

Ever since I encountered a review of Orkworld in the only Polish RPG magazine, my imagination was filled with dreams of running a campaign wit PCs being goblins, orcs, trolls or things like that.

We even created some characters. My favorite was a small goblin, who in a conanesque fashion was trapped in a cave that turned out to be a tomb of a long dead king. There he acquired a Powerful Great-sword.The only problem was, the poor gobbo was barely able to lift the thing.

I still feel sad about this idea never working out.

7.Creating a Cube-like dungeon

This idea was inspired by the movie Cube (duh!). The main point wasn't to create a dungeon that would look like the place from the movie, but for the layout of the dungeon to change in an organized pattern.

Such a dungeon would need to have a very thought out and logical construction. The pattern in which the rooms layout would change is also very important. It shouldn't be random, since the main point of the adventure would be for the players to crack the pattern in order to get out (as opposed to getting out by means of some magical device in the dungeon etc.).

I think it's not a very fresh idea, but surely a inspiring one. I never got myself to actually do it because it's extremely demanding both from the players and the DM. My biggest issue is the pattern of the dungeon transformations. A complicated one might prove to be too difficult for the players, one that is easy to break would simply kill the whole adventure...

Kneel before Skaghe!

2009-12-18T00:04:00.009+01:00

So! WE have chosen the name for the barbaric, northern, axe wielding god!

I think the poll experiment worked very well. I'm happy with the name that won and I think it fits the flavor of the setting well!

Here are the results:

Hákon 5 (14%)

JóR 5 (14%)

KilfiR 2 (5%)

Wyr 6 (17%)

Skaghe 13 (37%)

Úlfr 3 (8%)

Vöttr 6 (17%)

Özurr 6 (17%)

Ögmundr 6 (17%)

Thank you all for participation!

Here's your prize from Skaghe!

And here are links to the gods that were already posted on this blog (in order of appearance):

The Mother Goddess

The Hungry One

Skaghe

The Supreme Being

The Robe

____________________________________________
art by Thomas Denmark

THE GOD OF DEATH!

2009-12-17T01:45:00.006+01:00

I finally came up with a god of death that will suit my needs!

Here are my two biggest inspirations.

Listen to this while reading!

The Robe (also The Black Judge, The Master of Dreams)

This deity is the personification of death. It is the most wide spread religion among human lands.

The god of death is most commonly presented as a human figure covered in a black robe, no face visible from under it's hood. Often statues of the Robe can be seen with large, black swords.

It is believed that no living thing can ever see the face of this god, as he IS death. It is often said that a person who passed away "saw the Robe", or "had seen the face of Death".

Similarly, the Black Priests (or the Priests of Death) should wear their robes at all times, never showing their faces, or revealing their true identity to anyone outside of the order. It is said that upon donning the Black Robe the priest "dies" to the world, becoming an anonymous agent of death.

Revealing a priest's true identity to a person from outside of the order is thought to be a sign of a great friendship, but also a burden to the person who knows it, as the priest has the right to claim his or her life, if his name is revealed to anyone else.

According to the dogma of the Order of Death (or the Black Brotherhood), the Robe is also the patron of sleep and dreams, as these are thought to be a preparation before the "final crossing". It is believed that sleep is caused by the god spreading his robe over one's bed.

The cult's priests are know for their ability to speak to the dead and summon dead souls, as well as perform elaborate divinations. On the other hand hey are strictly forbidden to bring the dead back or to create any forms of undead. One of the main commandments of the religion is to destroy any undead or necromancers, as they disturb what the order believes to be the foundation of the world.

Finally, the priests of Robe also holds responsibilities for handling executions, which they address as "assisting in the last crossing". Although each priest is trained in using a black great-sword, in case he is asked to "assist", executions remain a responsibility of the common clergy members and not the high ones. It is important to note that Black Priests are strictly forbidden to perform any tortures or take any slaves/prisoners of war.

The cult is quite numerous, well organized and has a temple in almost every city. Usually the order takes care of the cemetery, very often the temple is situated next to it. Common folk visit the temples for healing, as the Robed Priests are well trained in making healing potions and known to posses great knowledge of human anatomy.

Although in casual talk people refer to the Robe, as a male, members of both sexes are accepted to the clergy. Both wizards and clerics are common in the order.

Saves, not "safes"!!!

2009-12-14T23:18:00.008+01:00

This is probably the last post on modifying S&W saving throws (here is the first and second entry on the subject).

Below is my proposition of two new save progressions. On the side there is the % chance of succeeding depending on the bonus from the ability linked to the save.

Save progression #1

Level	Save	Chance, no mod	Chance + 1	Chance +2
1	16	25%	30%	35%
2	15	30%	35%	40%
3	14	35%	40%	45%
4	13	40%	45%	50%
5	12	45%	50%	55%
6	11	50%	55%	60%
7	10	55%	60%	65%
8	9	60%	65%	70%
9	8	65%	70%	75%
10	7	70%	75%	80%
11+	6	75%	80%	85%

Save progression #2

Level	Save	Chance, no mod	Chance + 1	Chance +2
1	17	20%	25%	30%
2	16	25%	30%	35%
3	15	30%	35%	40%
4	14	35%	40%	45%
5	13	40%	45%	50%
6	12	45%	50%	55%
7	11	50%	55%	60%
8	10	55%	60%	65%
9	9	60%	65%	70%
10	8	65%	70%	75%
11+	7	70%	75%	80%

So as you see, the base save values are now a bit lower compared to the original ones, but thanks to the addition of the ability modifiers there is more variety.

The idea is to give each class one save throw based on progression #1 and two based on progression #2.

Let us see how it would look in the case of a level 2 cleric, with stats:

16 WIS (+2 mod)
11 DEX (no mod)
13 CON (+1 mod)

His "main" saving throw is Will:

Fortitude Save: 16 (+1 on the roll from CON)
Reflex Save: 16
Will Save: 15 (+2 on the roll from WIS)

He's chances for a successful saving throw would be: Fort: 30%, Ref: 25%, Will: 40%.

Additionally the original rules state that the cleric class has a special +2 bonus on saving throws against poison and paralyze (which would here belong to Fort save).

If you compare the saving throws of that 2 level cleric with the original save table for clerics, you will see, that altho his "secondary" saves are lower than they would be according to the original rules, his "primary" one is much higher.

The bottom line is , that even though I'm not completely convinced by my save house rules, they do seem to bring a bit more variety into the game. I'll try to go with them for now...

If you see a good reason why this post sucks, please inform me. I will greatly appreciate any input!

Roll against html tabels! or How I spent the weekend

2009-12-14T03:00:00.008+01:00

Disclaimer: today's post contains a lot of numbers and math, even some %. Read on your own responsibility or skip to the end.

I will continue my musings on the problem of saving throws in S&W. I've decided to at least try to transform the single saving throw into a triple saving throw system like in 3.x e.

But first let's look at the original saving throw of S&W. There are two advancement tables, the first one is used by fighters and dwarfs, the second - clerics and magic users:

Level	Save#1	Save#2
1	14	15
2	13	14
3	12	13
4	11	12
5	10	11
6	9	10
7	8	9
8	7	8
9	6	7
10	5	6
11+	4	5

In order to be saved from doom you have to roll a d20 and get a number even to, or higher than the save score. It means that at first level the chances of successful save check are respectively 35% and 30 %. On level 11, the chances are: 85% and 80%.

Now. What I want to do:

divide it in to three save categories called Endurance, Reflex and Will,

each based on an advancement table similar to the above, but additionally modified by the abilities - Con, Dex and Wis respectively.

Yes, so basically it was already done in 3 e. I know. Move on.

So, let's suppose that I count ability modifiers like this:

3-4	-2
5-8	-1
9-12	0
13-15	+1
16-18	+2

And let's suppose that I use the S&W save progression #2 for Will saves of a character whose Wis is 18. Here's how that character's chances of making a successful save would look like:

Level	Old Chance	New Chance
1	30%	40%
2	35%	45%
3	40%	50%
4	45%	55%
5	50%	60%
6	55%	65%
7	60%	70%
8	65%	75%
9	70%	80%
10	75%	85%
11+	80%	90%

Ok. I wrote that shit down, because I'm a mathematical retard and this whole table clears things up.

As we can see, my idea is overpowering the players (duh) significantly. And as much as I like to awesome up players, making them invincible is a short path to boredom.

All this boring stuff leads us to one conclusion: in order to make this thing work, I to make need new save advancement tables...

The real question behind this conclusion is, is there any point?

Ok that was really boring!!!!!!!

This anecdote comes from fishlemons blog ( the other one):

" (...) so we ended up going to this lame party where some of our amusing friends were. yay. we smoked the joint walking up to the main door of the building and rang the door-communication-bell-thing, i take a drag as someone answers and squidman suddenly jumps up to it and says
- "Police!"
-*silence* *click*
i stare at him and he rings again quickly
-"no! its just me! Chri-!"
-*Click*

we look at each other, shrug and i give our friend who is at this party a call to tell her to let us in. (its freezing cold out there) This entire exchange has taken less than a minute... at the inner door we are met by some guy, who might have been the host or not, whatever. and only then does he realize that it really is only us. We walk into the middle of an eerily quiet party, because people are apparently HIDING. people managed to flush a substantial amount of weed down the toilet in that tiny amount of time.

god people are stupid.

turns out the entire party is a total of about 12 people, all but 4 of which are playing poker. with poker chips and a green felt table thingy and for money. .... seriously?
we found our friends (the 4 people not playing poker) in a room deeper in the apartment that was full of instruments like Mongolian violins, miniature banjos, lots of African drum things and guitars. Adam is cradling the banjo and plucking randomly to the beat of whatever strange electronic music is coming from the computer speakers.
there were some amusing moments when we lost 2 of our group to poker and just 4 of us played silly songs from J's ipod and we danced like strange, retarded, stoned and tipsy prehistoric birds. or something. (...)"

Roll your save against the poisonous darts shooting from the holes in the wall!

2009-12-12T14:07:00.008+01:00

So now I'm a bit stuck with the process of creating my pantheon...

The reasons are two fold:

1. Now that I have defined some of the gods, my field of movement got narrower. I still have vacancies like: The Death Diety or The God of Magic, but can't rush things since those are important aspects of the world and the way I handle the gods responsible for them will influence to feeling of the whole setting.

While employing some ideas to fill out those empty spaces, I need to put them into connection with the existing gods. How do the religions interact, what are the relations between the deities in the mythology?

2. I had a shitty day and writing comes as a kind of struggle.

All this is not bad though, since it allows me to write about some rules, a thing I was ment to do for some time now.

Saving Throws

To me it seems that there are three approaches to the problem of how to handle saving throws:

The pre 3e. approach, which has been well analyzed by Jeff Rients on his blog.

The 3.x e. approach, which employs three saving throws: Endurance, Reflex and Willpower, all are class and level dependent. Additionally each is modified by an Attribute, namely: Constitution, Dexterity and Wisdom.

The Swords & Wizardry approach, here each class has one universal saving throw.

The first solution is most in touch with the flavor of the OD&D, yet strikes me as the least intuitive one, as well as being a bit rules heavy. I never understood why death rays and poison should fall into the same category, why staffs and wands should be two separate ones and what is the resistance to petrification dependent on?

The last solution is mechanically the polar opposite of the first one, yet it's equally in tune with the spirit of OSR and possesses some aesthetic allure. Still, I can't get completely convinced.

Perhaps, my uneasiness comes from the fact that I actually liked the 3e. saves. I think the division between the three categories is very clear, functional and most of all - logical. You avoid a fireball by dodging it, you are protected from poison by your body's endurance.

All that thinking that I've done, has led me to rethinking the single saving throw used by the S&W core rules. I think I'm gonna change it into 3 categories just like in 3.x e. D&D.

Still, I'm not exactly sure how to do it as I think there are two ways to introduce the triple saving throw mechanics to S&W:

1. Keep the original saving throw as a base value modified by an appropriate ability modifier like this:

END: Save + Con

REF: Save + Dex

WIL: Save + Wis

(of course the modifier is added to the d20 roll for save, not the save value itself)

2. Make a new save table for each class...

Now I'm really keen on the idea of keeping the original saves and just moding them with ability modifiers. Still I'm not sure, if it will work properly? Will it overpower the players?
And what about PCs with negative ability modifiers?

And finally, maybe I'm just a little bitch and should keep things as they are in the book?

Some god, some history

2009-12-10T01:28:00.010+01:00

Today's dish is another "evil" deity.

I've already mentioned that in the history of my setting there was an Empire created by elves (or more accurately - the predecessors, whom from now on I shall just call the Elders). As you know from my previous entry on how my elves work, the Elders subjected themselves to a massive experiment/ritual, that was supposed to make them "ascend" into what they thought would be "godhood".

However the ritual proved to be a mistake which killed most of the race, deprived the Elders of their immortality (or more accurately agelessness) and changed them into hermaphroditic beings. This has led to a quick demise of the Elder (or simply Old) Empire.

Slaves, servants, previously overpowered allies and barbarians quickly took the opportunity rising from the initial chaos. In just a decade, ages of work have been destroyed.

However, most of what happened after the Fall wasn't simple pillaging. Many have died from protective wards, traps and weapons wielded by golems and undead guarding the estates of their now dead lords. Even though the oppressors were practically all dead (the "newborn" elves quickly abandoned the city fortresses and retreated into the forests), the powerful magic that was the foundation of their rule remained.

To this day, several hundreds of years after the fall of the empire, few dare to venture into the grim ruins of the Elder's cities, as even fewer are said to return.

But what led a powerful and seemingly immortal race to risk the existence of their entire kind and jeopardize their reign over the world?

Turesius, one of the prominent scholars, claims that the immediate cause for the demise of the empire was the appearance of a new cult devoted to The Supreme Being. In his works, Turesius observes, that even though little is known about the cult, it spread surprisingly quickly (which means some 300 to 400 years), overthrowing all other religions.

He also puts forward a hypothesis, that the seemingly immediate (in comparison to the Elders lifespan) overtaking of the state by the new religion was caused by decadence and boredom, which gave birth to many secret societies. Turesius presumes that the cult originated from those societies.

The Supreme Being

Little is known about this deity, as it is thought to no longer posses worshipers. The only fact known for certain is that it was a monotheistic religion calling to overthrow all "false gods".

It is also known that by the Fall, The Supreme Being was worshiped as a state deity of the Empire and the last Emperor held the title of the cult leader - Overlord.

Apart of that it is unknown how the religion was organized or even if it had any priests or temples, as almost all images and places of cult were destroyed immediately after the fall.

Turesius of Kal'thar, the acclaimed famous wizard and scholar claims that the religion's main dogma was based on introducing reason and claiming that all beings are imperfect images of the deity. He is also known to have deciphered part of the lore of the cult which claims that it is possible for the living beings to ascend and seize control over other living beings, the text however doesn't specify how one can achieve that.

It is important to note, that present elves don't want to be associated with the Empire or it's religion, and refuse to talk about those matters with non elves, referring to them only as the Great Shame. Many scholars interested in the subject suspect that elves hold some knowledge of the cult, yet refuse to share it with anyone, calling the Supreme Being "a cult that should have never been".

PS. some of the links may at first glance seem not related, yet I promise you, they are. They're worth reading if you want to fully get what I was after.

A poll in god's name!

2009-12-07T23:13:00.009+01:00

I can't imagine a pulp fantasy settings without raging barbarians and berserkers in horned helmets!

Ok, I can imagine it, but what's the point?!

Once in a while everybody feels the need to just create a character that's a half naked barbarian-thief, fast like a panther and strong like a boar. And to enjoy such a character, you need a god with a cool name, one you will call upon when in trouble (even though he doesn't give a shit).

Crom is the real shit, but let's be honest, no one will take your badass barbarian seriously if you call Crom in the middle of the game.

Odin or Thor maybe? Nah... It's not a bad solution since the amount of awesome Thor has might last for the next thousand years. However I'd feel like I'm cheating if I just took the existing gods and transplanted them into my setting (I know that's exactly what Howard did, but he was a pioneer of the genre).

I came up with a nice (a bit generic, but that was the point) story for a god, but I'm helpless when it comes to names. I looked at many old nordic names, narrowed down my choices but can't really choose one (maybe they're all lame)...

I Want Your Help!
I'll post a POLL. It will hang here for circa 10 days, please vote on the name that in your opinion is the coolest, or leave your proposition in the comments!

Now to the meat!

The Lord of Winters, The Old Wolf, The Guardian of the Dead

"His body is covered in a white bear's skin, a horned helmet rests on his head, covering eyes in the color of a burning charcoal. He sits on a throne made from the skulls of his enemies. (...) An axe with a blade forged from the night itself leans on the side of the throne, the one eyed wolf sleeps by his feet..."

This is how one of the old chronicles describes the god of thunders. Although he clearly hails from the northern regions, he's a deity, whose cult spilled all over the continent.

He is believed to have been the one responsible for creating the earth and the sky, by splitting the world in half. His throne is said to stand at the top of the world, guarding the entrance to heaven and hell. There he battles lost souls and demons who wish to break out. The lightning is said to be caused by the swings of his axe, the thunder is his battle cry.

The barbarians of the north believe that their tribes originate from his union with the Mother Goddess. Dwarfs claim that his beard is made of steel, iron and mithril. They claim that the ores are simply single hair that he had lost during many battles.

The Lord of Winters is believed to have control over wolves, according to the legend he battled the first wolf with bare hands, knocking out the beast's eye. However he was so impressed by the beast that instead of killing it, he befriended it. The barbarians of the north believe that he then used the wolves to teach people how to fight and organize war parties. because of that killing wolves in the north is strictly forbidden, unless it is done without the use of man-made weapons.

Both druids and clerics can be priests of this deity, the first would be the shaman-berserkers from the northern villages, while the latter - representatives of the more organized southern church.

Your mother was right! RPG's ARE SATAN WORSHIP! BUAHAHAHAHHAAH

2009-12-06T02:12:00.006+01:00

As much as I value originality and making up weird shit, I think it’s really important not to forget about some images or symbols that are deeply rooted in the human cultural subconscious.

A fine example of a symbol that has the same connotations in many (if not nearly all) cultures would be associating snakes, toads or dragons (which fall to the snake category) with evil and fear.

I think a play on such re-emerging cultural motifs is essential when we want to make the players feel scared or at least uneasy.

And what else should an evil deity do, if not address peoples imagination and fears...

That’s why, when I was thinking of introducing evil deities and cults to my pantheon, the first thing that came to my mind was the image of the Baphomet.

Maybe I’m just weird from watching too many old horror movies, but I just love the long black robes and satanic imagery (seriously, who doesn’t?) even tho it got so overused.

Thus when an image of a goat headed starved man came to my head, I couldn’t resist...

The Hungry One (also The Bringer of Plague, the Master of Flies, The Starved One)
The Great Rapist is an evil deity. In iconography he’s usually portrayed as a thin, starved, naked man with small genitals and a goats head.

He is said to have been brought to life as a lover/slave by the Maiden. However he fell in love with her and became jealous of the many other men with whom he had to share his mistress. With time he changed from a merry youngster into a bitter and vengeful man. Finally, mad with jealousy, he came up with a plan to imprison the Goddess.

He crept up into her chamber woven from the roots of the Tree of Life and wanted to tie up the sleeping Maiden. However the Goddess wasn’t to be surprised so easily and a fight broke out.

Driven by madness and desperation, the lover decided that if he can’t capture his beloved one, he will kill her. In a furious struggle he managed to bite off the Goddess’ left nipple and cut her face with a dagger, taking away the sight in her left eye. In anguish and fury the Goddess cast a curse upon him, deeming him to a fate worse than death.

The spell made his genitals rot away and his head transform into that of a mindless goat. Endless thirst and hunger fell upon him. He is to wander for eternity, tormented by his lust but never knowing any satisfaction

The Hungry One is seen as the god of lust, jealousy and gluttony. He has no church or clerics, however shrines are built, in them people are supposed to leave gifts of food, money, drink or clothing which are than redistributed (usually by the clerics of some other cult, that also takes care of those shrines) to the poor.

It is said, that secret cults devoted to The Hungry One exist. Some of them have been heard to be societies for nobles seeking forbidden pleasures often of a sexual nature.

The Maiden, The Mother, The Crone

2009-12-02T23:47:00.009+01:00

The main reason for the two previous posts about beliefs and religion is that I find them a very important part of every setting. It tends to be treated rather lightly by many game designers, which I think is a huge mistake. In the history of our world, religion and the way people approached it, often mirrors the spirit and atmosphere of a historical period.

That is why I want to create a pantheon that will have a dark, mysterious atmosphere. From the beginning I knew I wanted at least one religion to have a feeling of primitive, wild power embodying the forces of nature.

I somehow started thinking bout Luke Skywalker's visit to Dagobah. You know, swampy, dangerous surroundings, heavy mists. A place where players might feel powerless in the face of nature... That reminded me of a comic book which has a similar atmosphere, namely Slaine (specifically "Treasures of Britain", read it if you haven't). Here are some great illustrations by Dermot Power (click to enlarge):

Now I will have to digress, but believe me, I am closing to the main point of this post.

More or less at the same time as I started to think about religions in my world, I read something about druids. I always thought that D&D druids were somewhat tasteless and lacking character. The thing that especially bothered me was the idea of them being neutral(but I think that's a topic for a different post) and "worshiping" nature. I never really bought that. I was always wondering what their religious practices look like, is there any hierarchy or organization? I never came across an interesting idea or description of druids background, but that's not the point here.

Somehow I started thinking of druids and linking them to the swampy, secretive atmosphere. I also stumbled upon this blog entry and started listening to The Sword, who have a song entitled Maiden, Mother, And Crone.

By now you should be able to deduce what happened in my mind. I linked all ideas together arriving at druids worshiping the Mother Goddess.

The Cult of Goddess:

The Great Mother is considered to be the mother of gods and all living beings. She is the embodiment of the primitive forces and laws of nature. The Mother is said to be both generous and treacherous. She feeds all beings and all things alive are her children, but she favors the strong and cunning, and will not hesitate to kill the weak. However she is a fair mother and distributes her gifts equally among all, even if we may think otherwise.

The cult of the Goddess is thought to be the oldest in the world. However it seems that there is no larger organization than that of independent sacred groves located deep in the forests. Less than a dozen such places are known.

The Goddess is worshiped in three aspects - the Maiden, the Mother, the Crone. Each representing different aspects of nature. The Maiden is the embodiment of sexuality and strength of youth. She is often mentioned in rituals as being both a virgin and a whore. The Mother represents fertility and motherhood. The Crone is a mad, blind old woman who is thought to hold the fate of each living being, thus no man can know when to expect death. She is also said to know the future.

Each of the druidic groves is run by women. At any given moment there must always be three women being the embodiment of The Goddess. They are also the spiritual leaders of the order. On acquiring the "title", they are stripped of their previous identity and can only be talked of (or refer to themselves) as "the Mother" and so on...

Men are prominent in the cult and are the actual priests leading most of the rituals, except the most important ones. All male priests might be chosen by the priestess being "the Maiden" to be her partners, however upon taking the title of "the Mother" a priestess has to marry one priest who becomes her husband and they live in a monogamous relationship. "the Mother" has to become pregnant at least once. The High Priest is supposed to be the embodiment of an ideal husband, he also is administrating the grove.

It is said that in the middle of each grove there is a mystical "Tree of Life". Those trees are said to have been planted upon “Seeds of Life”, however nobody knows whether that is true. Many scholars think it’s a metaphor for places of power or magic knots.

Gods, Demigods and Atheists

2009-12-02T01:37:00.010+01:00

Often in my gaming history have I came across players not caring about religion and gods of the setting, easily asserting their characters are atheist. I always found that disturbing, since it seemed to me that such players couldn't alienate from their own beliefs , or didn't care much about the setting/game/character.

In fact, when we look at the evolution of religions and human beliefs, the idea of atheism appeared relatively late and even then it was present only in philosophy. I think that we can safely assume that the popularization of the view that no god exist took place on the break of the 19th and 20th century.

Knowing that, I am very reluctant to allow people to claim their characters are atheist. I simply find it impossible that a down to earth fighting man or a thief would deny the existence of gods, especially since they are surrounded by clerics casting spells and other supernatural phenomena.

However I can imagine a philosopher or a high level wizard, who had contact with demons and other supernatural beings, claim that the gods have merely the same status as demons, or that they don't exist (or really being convinced of anything else). I can (and probably will at some point) make my players encounter a demon claiming that he is a god and making them believe that in serving him, they are filling the will of a deity.

But even then I will make sure they won't easily share their views with other people, especially clerics, since openly sharing claims of the non existence of gods will meet at best with being called "mad" and in the worst case with imprisonment or court punishment (in a theocratic state for example).

Don't get me wrong, but I just feel that if someone wants to play an atheist character, he should have a good, interesting idea instead of being lazy.

Talking about ideas...

... vaguely connected with the previous topic, I wanted to say that in my efforts to create an interesting pantheon of gods, that would fit my idea of gaming world, I have tried to seek inspiration in Deities & Demigods handbook (3e). Let me say: THIS BOOK IS THE WORST RPG HANDBOOK EVEEEEEEER!!!

Seriously! I found no useful information about creating an interesting pantheon or about historical pantheons that have actually existed. It seems that the people who wrote that book were completely devoid of imagination or any creativity.

Moreover, what I did find is a table telling me how many spells per level (!WHAT THE FUCK!) a god can cast!

I'm sharing my outrage, because that handbook is an embodiment of everything that is bad in the gaming industry...

It seems to me that it has been written purely to steal money from people who are new to the hobby without giving them anything, literally ANYTHING (apart, maybe, from a 1 kilogram heavy, bound pack of paper) in return.

Death To WotC!

Long live OD&D Revival!

Religion, magic and rules in D&D

2009-12-01T00:48:00.005+01:00

I've got the race thing out of my way! Yay! Now I'll move on to the next stage - religion.

I think there are two general ways most fantasy settings handle religion:

1. Gods are almighty beings that walk the earth, influence the course of history and can reevaluate the fundamentals of the world.

2. Gods don't influence the setting directly and even though other supernatural creatures do exist, the existence of gods is often disputed.

Forgotten Realms and Dragon Lance would represent the first category, while Conan stories would belong to the second one.

As I've said before, I'm not interested in "high fantasy(whatever that means)- we are saving the world cause we were chosen by gods" adventures. That's why I'm obviously leaning towards the second category. However this solution isn't completely compatible with the D&D class and magic rules. Let me elaborate.

I think most of you will agree that in the actual world (the one we physically live in) there is no such thing as magic, or to phrase it more precisely, the existence of such a force is highly questionable. The most obvious difference between our actual world and the fictional world of my game is the fact that in the latter one the existence of magic is undeniable. In our world the existence of magicians, wizards or sorcerers can be disputed unlike in my game world.

This leads us to the problem of D&D mechanics concerning the cleric class. According to the rules of D&D clerics are not only magic users but also their magic comes directly from the gods and thus is different from the "other", arcane magic.

The thing is, in our actual world religion is based on faith, not on empirical evidence. In the fantasy world governed by the rules of D&D it's the opposite case. Clerics can summon up staffs and hammers made of pure energy, heal broken bones by touch and bring people back from the dead. In the world following from the rules of D&D there can be no dispute over the existence of gods, since the clerics and their deeds give a living proof of their existence.

So it seems that the D&D rules are in serious inconsistency with my idea, of how I'd like my game to look. However the solution to this problem is very simple. Abandon the divine magic. By that I don't mean abandon the cleric class.

Since I assume magic simply is the undercurrent of my game world's reality, it seems quite useless to divide it into two "kinds" or "categories". This solution seems simply inelegant and aesthetically crude. It seems much simpler to say that there is one magic, but two different ways of learning and using it.

Wizards (magic user class) are learning magic intellectually, through studying books, learning formulas, discussing concepts and theories. I see them looking a bit like the first greek philosophers or first physicists, trying to describe the world and rules that govern it.

Whereas Clerics undergo a more mystical training, pass through religious rites and learn to use magic with the strength of faith rather than pure knowledge. They also use formulas, but see them as prayers rather than magic theorems.

Cool. So i have rules out of my way.

The other thing I find very important in making my world seem more pulpy fantasy is establishing the fact that gods don't have direct, obvious impact on the game's realia.

By that I mean, that clerics and religious organizations have impact on the game, however the gods won't ever step in and interact with the game world or worse - the PC's themselves. This seems to be an important premise in Howard's stories and I think I should keep it.

In the upcoming posts I will discuss my world's spiritual and religious background in more detail. Until then!

Tonight Half-orcs vs. Halflings

2009-11-27T00:31:00.006+01:00

So I've got elves and dwarves relatively out of the way. Mind you, they are not finished ideas, but for now they will do.

Ok, so it's time to tackle the little races, half-orcs and anything else I might allow for players.

Round one

Half orcs are really easy to get out of the picture. They are sterile, so there is no chance of multiplying and they are either killed at birth by humans, or brought up by orcs, and than they are simply treated like orcs.

Half -orcs aarrrre out!

Round two

I have a strong objection to halflings for the same reasons as J. Maliszewski. They are just too Tolkienesque. You can call one Mustakrakish the Bloody and in the minds of players he will still be a little furry hobbit (maybe covered with blood, but that's all).

The one noteworthy attempt at changing this state of affairs was Dark Sun, but since I want my game closer to the od&d, I think introducing dinosaur riding cannibal midgets as a player race might kill the whole effort.

Halflings arrrrrreee out!

Round three

As much as I dislike halflings, I love gnomes. I find several reasons to include them in my setting:

- having kicked halflings out, I feel I need to fill the hole somehow, so that the players have what to choose from;

- they actually appear in germanic mythologies (altho mostly used as a synonym for dwarf) and don't make people think of only one piece of work like halflings;

- I like the idea of them being a magical-technical race surrounded by a shroud of secrets and I think it goes well with the idea that they are mostly illusionists;

- since they are illusionists I see no reason why they can't be famous for their thievery skills, thus replacing halflings in case someone can only play little race thieves;

- putting them into my setting gives my a safety hatch, allowing me to introduce whacky magomechanics without blowing up the setting;

Having said all that, If I want to have gnomes I need to make them mysterious, exotic and secretive. Which is fine with me. For now I have little idea about their background, hopefully I'll come up with something interesting.

Gnomes win the match!

Dwarven culture in a few difficult words

2009-11-25T00:47:00.006+01:00

Ok, today I'll try to focus solely on the topic of dwarven culture. My idea of how it should be organized is a quite complicated one, but bare with me, as I hope you'll find it rewarding.

As I've already stated the dwarven society is a matriarchal one due to the small number of females. No one knows why the number of females being born is significantly smaller from the number of males, but it should be obvious that this long lasting phenomenon has led to a society in which women are highly privileged.

Here are some ideas I have about their society:

The society is organized into clans, which follow the rule of matrilineality , meaning that the lineage is established through the mother and maternal ancestors.

Dwarves cultivate polyandry. That is, one woman may take many husbands (in this case the maximum is 3), each of them however has to pay a dowry (or a lobolo if you prefer) before he is accepted as a husband.

The tradition has it, that such a fee must be payed only in what a male can carry by himself (counting what he wears). This might have given a beginning to the strange concept of dwarven money, which are shaped into spheres of gold, silver or copper, that are worn on display by being thread into beards, or worn as necklaces.

Dwarves are also avuncular. This means that a child is brought up not by it's father but maternal uncle. There are several reasons for that, the main one being to secure that all fathers will treat the child equally well (which of course doesn't work so well in real life) and to create a stronger bond with the clan, than with the family.

To avoid incest, dwarves are forbidden to marry into their own clan. This rule also secures the strong connection between the clans.

There exists a dwarven king, however his role is mainly representative. He is the leader of the Council of Clans, which appropriately to it's name consists of all the clan leaders (or their representatives, each of the clan leaders can bring all her husbands to join the discussion) with each of the council members, including the king, having one vote. The king also holds the title of the First Warrior. It means that in case of an armed threat to the dwarven kingdom, he becomes the leader of the armed forces, since the counsel has no word in matters of war.

The last thing is the problem of half-dwarves. It's obvious that my previous idea for that race doesn't fit this concept. Thus I need to turn it around a bit. Indeed half-dwarves aren't shunned by dwarven society, however as they can't participate in the reproductive cycle, their social status is rather low. Marrying outside the race is not forbidden, but it carries some social disadvantages, as the dwarf marrying a non-dwarf looses the privilege of being able to use the clan vaults and has to raise their child on their own.

The End

not yet! I wanted to say one more thing that I forgot to add. The slavic and nordic dwarfs stay, simply some clans lean one way and some the other. Is based on geographical location. That's all!

Dwarven Oddity

2009-11-23T01:51:00.006+01:00

Today I'll speak about dwarfs and also continue some of the topics that surfaced in two previous posts.

The first of them is the problem of race-as-class. I've presented the main argument (apart from the one that it's the OD&D way of doing things) in favor of this rule when I was talking about elves. It simply underlines the difference between humans and fantastic races. Today I'd like to present the argument against the rule, which again helped me shape another demi-human race.

The argument I have in mind is the fact of homogeneity of demi-human cultures. Some might ask, what the fuck am I talking about?! What I want to say is that somehow we are stuck for better or worse with the stereotypical view of "one race = one culture".

You may object, by saying that many RPG's and settings have a lot of variation when it comes to demi-human subtypes. But a race subtype like for example drow, is often (correctly) called a sub-race, that is, one of the different races that together create the race group/category of elves, or so it would seem system wise.

A good example of this way of thinking is the treatment of elves in the Forgotten Realms 3e Handbook. We have 5 elven races, each with it's own distinct ability modifiers, however the descriptions point more to the difference on the cultural or lifestyle level, more than to any important morphological* differences, which would in my belief justify the ability mods. The exception here are the drow, due to their significantly different environment. The other problem is that the descriptions of different elven cultures are at leas laconic and amass to something like: "yellow elves are yellow and are scholars, green elves are green and fight, wood elves live in woods...", which isn't really any useful information to me.

I also find this whole approach unsatisfactory because it's logical continuation would be providing different ability modifiers for human nations. This solution is for me a dead end for three reasons. First, it's an unnecessary complication. Second, I don't see any significant morphological differences between the British, the French and The Germans and finally, I'd feel I might be getting dangerously close to racism.

But let's get back to the problem of cultural homogeneity.

I think that creating sub-races is the lazy approach that gives the illusion of variety instead of real choice. We might come up with an endless number of "dwarf types", call them Shield Dwarves, Doom Dwarves, Monkey Dwarves and so on... And even then 99% of players will end up role-playing all of them as an archetypical dwarf.

All this (and this ingenious post) led me to think that perhaps there are two cultures of dwarfs in my world. One are the classical nordic/tolikenish dwarfs, the other are the slavic dwarves. There is no morphological difference between them, thus they are treated equally in terms of mechanics.

The reason for introduction of those cultures is that I'm tired of having all the same dwarfs all around. Also, since I'm Polish and so are my players, the slavic dwarfs will be right at home, being a cultural archetype easy to relate to for all of us.

I've decided that, as a legend has it, at the beginning there were two brothers, who split the mining duties between themselves. One decided to go dig down into the mountains to find precious stones and unknown metals, the other decided to stay close to the surface, building quarries, coal mines and so on. There is no antagonism between two dwarf nations and all are considered equal, helping and trading with each other.

The last problem is of dwarven females. They exist, but in very small numbers, thus it's quite obvious that some dwarves have decided to marry human females thus bringing half- dwarves to the world. Unlike half-elves, their dwarven counterparts are accepted by their society, however they remain infertile.

The last thing is, because of the shortage of women, dwarven society has developed a very complicated matriarchal clan system. The head of each clan is a woman. I'm seriously considering introducing some kind of polygamy...

More on that to come!

*I mean the scientific term, as used in physical anthropology

Half life of elves

2009-11-22T02:33:00.002+01:00

Ok, so we know my elves are hermaphroditic, cool... Now what? Well... Before I give half-elves donkey heads and shave off dwarven beards I'd like to come back to the elves.

I've been thinking what impact my idea of elves might have on game play. I imagined my friends role playing an elf, about whom the rest of the party thought as being male, until the fertile phase starts, and the elf kicks into being a flirting woman! You see, to me it sounds like fun and a way of relieving tension. I also know that my friends will be treating the situation gently, with no vulgarity. However as I was looking at it in a wider perspective, I thought that perhaps not all people who want to play elves are comfortable with them being gender ambivalent.

Thus I want to implement a security buffer. Mainly, because the elves' hermaphroditic status is an effect of an experiment, there are still some cases of elves being unable to enter the gender-active phase as both sexes. This means, that for that time in the month, when their gender functions become active, they are always only a man, or a woman. This poses no true problem and is easy to hide in the elven society (since due to pheromonal negotiation the partner automatically will take the other sex), but can be looked down upon by other society members.

Ok. So simply, if you want your elf to be only a man, you can.

Now that we have this problem out of the way. Let's move to what this post is really supposed to be about.

Half-elves

I always wondered why the question of half-elven fertility isn't clearly answered in RPG handbooks. In Erthdawn or Shadowrun, the case of fantastic races cross breeding is resolved in a clever and simple way, the child of such union will just be the same race as one of the parents. As much as I like that solution, I don't think it will serve my world right.

Thus, the I've decided there are half-elves in my world, they are rare, not fertile and generally looked down upon by both elves and humans. Because of their elven ancestry there is rather small variation in the way both genders look, with males having very little, weak body hair, with a kind of gentle charm and females having no body hair, small breasts and generally being attractive in a way that some call alien.

I also consider giving half-elves an attribute bonus to charisma. My reasoning is that in my game, humans think of elves as weird and alien and not as beautiful. However I thought it would be interesting to make half-elves generally charming, but lacking in social status.

Next post -> Dwarfs

Those strange Elves

2009-11-20T01:53:00.006+01:00

As you might know from my previous posts, I've assumed that in my development of a D&D setting, the themes of the setting itself will help me choose the rules I want to use. It seems that I was wrong. Since I last decided I'm leaning heavily towards OD&D, I've been doing some thinking about the race-as-a-class rule.

When I first came into possession of several D&D retro clones, the race-as-a-class idea was bothering me. I was always aware that it existed in the original game, but I guess just because I was used to not treating races as classes, the idea seemed simply unattractive and limiting.

Some time later, as I was reading some Grognardia, I found this article in which the author states:

"Aside from mechanical simplicity, what I really like about race-as-class, at least in the case of elves, is that it helps emphasize their differences from humanity."

It is a point I totally agree with. This and an other very good post from the same blog got me on the track of thinking how to differentiate demi-humans from other races.

Today I came up with the solution. It's not a revolutionary one (at least for me, I can imagine there are people that would behead me for what I'm about to say), as I've first encountered it in the 2ed. of WFRP, where the only elven deity is a hermaphrodite. There, I've said it. My elves are hermaphrodites.

The true source of the idea is one of my all time favorites "Left Hand OF Darkness" by Ursula K. Le Guin. One of the themes investigated in the novel is the problem of how sexuality and gender influence culture and political life. One of many strengths of the book is a very interesting depiction of the hermaphroditic race. Here's a quote from wikipedia:

"The inhabitants of Gethen are sequentially hermaphroditic humans; for twenty-four days of each twenty-six day lunar cycle they are sexually latent androgynes, and for the remaining two days (kemmer) are male or female, as determined by pheromonal negotiation with an interested sexual partner. Thus each individual can both sire and bear children. It is hypothesised by the first representatives of the Ekumen to explore Gethen that their unique physiology arose from a genetic-modification experiment."

I think the idea to apply this description to elven race is a very good one, especially that I've already found a way in which it might serve my "prime" setting assumptions. Namely, the experiment mentioned in the above quote, will be performed on the race by itself. I can easily see my image of eternal elves conquering the world, just to decide that it's not enough for them and since they are already immortal, they will try to ascend into godhood. However the experiment went wrong in the end also depriving the race of it's close to immortal status.

So there. I know it might be too much for some of you. And I don't blame you. This solution brings many problems into my setting, but I always liked to put "difficult topics" into my games...

Oh. Btw. I'm still not decided about race-as-class!

Little misunderstanding

2009-11-18T00:31:00.003+01:00

I thought some time will pass, before I can say anything constructive about mechanics and yet, here I am.

The reason for this post is my latest blog discovery, which addressed many game-play/mechanics issues I was troubled with.

The set of custom house-rules presented is simple and well constructed, augmenting the basic Sword & Wizardry, which to my taste, seemed a bit too bare and (dare I say)too primitive(in the best OD&D sense).

Even though I don't agree with all the custom house rules presented in that package, it made me realize that my previous statement about mechanics was too hasty.

So to be clear: (for anyone reading this blog and for myself) I am much closer to adopting old-school rules than I thought. As I am an opponent of feats and list based skills, my D&D might actually be much closer to OD&D than I previously supposed.

That's All Folks!

If you want to make an apple pie from sratch, you must first create the universe

2009-11-16T23:06:00.008+01:00

Yesterday I decided to make a set of, more or less, custom mechanics that will suit me best. However, I think I will need to give myself more time before I can post anything else on the topic, as I want my mechanics to be well thought out and coherent.

That is why I will start creating the game setting first. Hopefully the process of gradually building up ideas and putting them in order will also influence writing mechanics, clearing some controversies and making it fit the setting.

As I've stated before, my biggest influence now is the OD&D and it's roots in pulp fantasy fiction. I've also decided to take the approach of just outlining my world's realia and overall atmosphere without filling out many details beforehand. This seems to be the method that fits me best, since it enables me to give my players the feeling that I want our game to have, without over intellectualizing it or creating artificial political and cultural constructs that my players may never encounter.

Don't get me wrong, I like making stuff up, I just think that letting things develop organically is much more effective and in the end will make the setting feel more real (whatever that means).

Below are the basic assumptions for My World, (I'm not so good with names, any help would be greatly appreciated), please note that they might be subject to later change.
In no particular order:

1. Magic exists, however there is no division between arcane and divine magic. I see it as a flowing, chaotic undercurrent (dynamic, prime substance) on which the material world (static) is founded. This assumption leads us to the conclusion that clerics and wizards in fact don't use two different kinds of magic, but apply two distinct ways of shaping it.

I think that my wizards will be kind of a blend between Howardian evil sorcerers and pre-socratic philosophers.

In the social context, magic will be a power feared by common folk, often associated with evil practices and so on. There will be at least one state, where wizardry is banned.

Even though I want it to have quite a dark feel, I'd also like it to be rather widespread, as I don't want to deprive PCs of magic objects. That is why I came with the story presented in 2.

2. I want my game to take place in a dark and dangerous world that has it's best days behind it. I'm thinking of a transition period, where everything is seemingly cool, yet everyone knows that life is harder, people less trustworthy and the time of great empires and truly great deeds is gone.

I've also thought that I want my world to have some old ruins that will be cursed but filled with magic items and treasures that everyone is afraid to steal, being a great theme for adventures.

That is how I arrived at the idea of a great Empire that fell under it's own hubris and gluttony. They will be an equivalent of Roman Empire or the Ottoman Empire in my world. I'll also make it highly magical, thus giving the explanation why magic is quite popular yet feared (they won't be well remembered). I think that magic will also be the reason for the Empire's end, I have some magical über catastrophe or curse, wiping their power away, though I have no idea what it could be.

Also, I'm not too keen on the Vance'ian feeling of "Holy shit, the sun might die any minute now". Think more early medieval times, maybe 8th century Europe.

3. I quite dislike the idea of gods walking the earth in rpgs, but on the other hand, I'm not a fan of settings completely devoid of deities (they can sometimes prove conceptually interesting).

I also dislike the way many game designers treat gods, as if they are a mere addition (a good example would be 3e and 4e players handbooks), thus closing them in simple categories like god of war or goddess of love.

I think, that looking at the history of western culture (and in fact history of our world overall) religion took a very important place in shaping cultural behaviors and the way people thought for centuries. Thus I decided to create my own pantheon, that I hope will be more complicated than being a simple collection of Odin and Thor rip offs.

4. The last factor, is the presence or lack of demi-humans and in fact most fantastic races.

In the early moments of outlining my ideas in my head, I seriously considered dropping all demi-human races, but than I read this. That made me realize, that in fact, I would be needlessly limiting my players. So what I really need to do is to reinvent the classical tolkienish races.

My first thought was to place elves as the race that built the Evil empire (however I discovered that someone had already done that and now i feel stupid), that would give me a good excuse to place elves in seclusion in the woods, give them an inbuilt guilt and back to the roots profile, as well as limit their population in the world.

I also thought that because of the fall of their Empire and the magical curse/cataclysm, the elves had become not only mortal, but burdened with the problem of aging in a horrifying manner (altho their life spans would still be much longer than human).

The other problem are the dwarfs, since from my experience players tend to view them through one archetype (which is sad, but difficult to change). I've found J. Maliszewski's take on dwarfs very nice, but I'd feel super bad about copying that (since I already feel a bit guilty about the elves).

As to Halflings or Gnomes, I have no ideas yet. I thought about dumping them in favor of a race of frog-men which I came up with some time ago, but I'm not sure if it wouldn't be better to use them as an addition...

Anyway. Those are my basic ideas for the game world. In posts to come, I plan on discussing them in more detail.

_______________________________
art by Frank Frazetta

This is where I'm at...

2009-11-15T23:48:00.005+01:00

As I said in the previous post, before my game begins, I would like to outline the setting my adventure will take place in and the system of mechanics I will use. Since I was reading a lot of blogs bout D&D, I was certain I want to play that system in some kind of a fantasy setting. But before I went on to establish more details, I asked myself what atmosphere and flavor will my game have?

Do I want a game revolving around combat, or storytelling?

Should the setting be a high magic one or a low magic world?

Do I want epic, high adventure, where characters save the world from great evil, or should they be mere mortals, struggling to survive in dark, difficult times?

The answer came from discovering the old school D&D revival movement. The idea of bringing D&D back to it’s roots instantly clicked with me. Even though I’ve never played the original D&D, the experiences of the modern day gaming industry - the present trend of overemphasizing rules and copying mmorpgs (damn you 4e.!), is enough for me to sympathize with anyone who stands by the old ways.

As I was digging deeper into the OD&D scene, I stumbled upon some great articles (namely here and here) outlining the literary inspirations behind the original game. I found the concept of a pulp fantasy game, created by James Maliszewski, especially useful in putting my mind on the right track (the right track = reading Jack Vance, digging up my long forgotten Robert E. Howards). Thus I’ve decided that I want my game to have a darker, raw feel, much in the atmosphere of early Conan adventures, with PCs having to stand against an unfriendly and dangerous world. I’ve also pondered on how magical my world will be. I’ve decided that magic will be much feared and more associated with danger and evil, but all in all not very difficult to find (I do want my players to get magical treasure). Having accomplished that and having read Jack Vance’s Eyes of the Overworld, I came up with an idea of a world that is already over it’s prime, one that used to be populated by some powerful magical civilization which failed and fell under it’s own hubris. I think that is enough for now.

On the mechanics side of things, the encounter with Grognardia made me look for OD&D retro clones like Swords & Wizardry and OSRIC. I’ve dug through them and decided that in fact being unaccustomed to these rules, using them, as they are, would be unintuitive and might in fact slow the game down, instead of making it simpler. I gave that problem some thought, went through all D&D editions available and asked myself; what would be the most intuitive solution for me and my gamers? I arrived at the conclusion that most of my future players are well accustomed with d20 mechanics, it also struck me that using one dice for most rolls and checks would be least confusing to new players. However, my distaste for such 3e. table sprouting features as feats and huge lists of skills, led me to thinking that in fact the 3e. needs a lot of modifications. The final (I hope) conclusion is that I’ll try to make up my own d20 system, which will be more in tune with my recent old school interests.

Summing up. In posts to come I will try to focus on the description of new mechanics, that I am going to use in my game, as well as the description of the game’s setting.

Come with us now for a jorney through time and space

2009-11-14T19:47:00.003+01:00

Elves ate my homework is my take on the idea of a gaming blog. Truth be told, I've never thought that blogs could be of any use to me... That is, until fishlemons told me about Zak S' blog. I read it and got instantly hooked. That blog is well written, contains loads of super ideas and is very enjoyable. It also became a gateway to other gaming blogs, opening me up to a community I've never realized existed. All the great material I've been exposed to has reawakened my interest in playing RPGs, a hobby I thought "I grew out of". Having read Grognardia and other blogs, I've realized that I still want to play D&D, I just don't have the right people to play with. Luckily that has changed too, as fishlemons became interested in playing (mainly thanks to Zak S).

So, now I'm preparing to once again lead a game. As I'm trying to put together a group of people who will be as enthusiastic to the idea of playing D&D as we are, some questions have arisen.

What will the setting be?

What rules/edition to use?

Will I suck?

I want this blog to serve as a platform for sharing and discussing ideas and solving gaming problems. I will also update on my game's progress, once it gets started.