The Map for my Current DnD Campaign

So maybe two months ago, when we all realized that lockdown wasn't just going to last a couple of weeks, a number of us agreed to try playing a Dungeons and Dragons game over Zoom with myself as the DM and a party of five PCs. I didn't really have anything readily on hand, but I had recently bought the 5E adventure compilation, Tales From the Yawning Portal, which has a bunch of adventures. The Sunless Citadel is the first adventure in the book, a 5E rebuild of a 3rd edition adventure, and it is designed to take 4-6 characters from 1st to 3rd level. Works for me!

We jumped in right away with no idea really of the world around us. I can discuss the adventure another time (and you can do a search for the adventure to find a million walkthroughs and reviews), but while it was going on, I decided to cobble together a campaign setting that was fairly limited in scope, but provided a bunch of different adventuring opportunities. In the past, I'd either drawn out my campaign maps by hand, in Google Draw (really, it works!) or I'd used Campaign Cartographer, which is a great program, but the learning curve, at least for me, is somewhat steep. As I just didn't have the energy for re-learning the program and spending endless hours carefully crafting the map, I poked around the internet a little and found a web-based program called Inkarnate (click here to see). There's a limited-options free plan and a paid yearly plan with a lot more content, so I just went for the paid plan, as it wasn't that expensive.

Inkarnate isn't perfect, but for my needs, it's good enough. Lots of good map pieces to drop all over, and the learning curve isn't much at all. I figured out everything there was to figure out in an hour or so of fiddling around, and then got down to business. Here is the map I put together with maybe 6-7 hours of work, and about a third of that was me micro-managing the positions of hills and trees and such so it looked cleaner.

Click on the image, then right-click on it again and select "View Image" for a larger version.

One of my favorite campaign settings of all time is Thunder Rift, a limited-scope setting for the Basic Dungeons and Dragons game, circa 1992-ish. It was designed to be a drop-in setting you could either place into an existing campaign world like Mystara, or a region of your own homebrew setting. It had three towns and various regions the PCs could explore, a nice little isolated sandbox setting that was small enough for people to focus on without an entire book's worth of background material, but large enough that you could have many, many sessions of gameplay and not have to leave the valley.

So, that was the vibe I was going for in building the Canton of Lanark map. The scope of the map is such that a character could probably walk the King's Road from one end to the other in a week, so many of these locations are only a day or two away from some kind of safe haven, but enough things are there which might not necessarily be threats, just "places for adventure". I figure there's enough territory here to get players up into the 10-11 level range, before they'd just be so powerful that there's nothing in the region so big they couldn't walk over it. But I think that's fine - I rarely ever think of a DnD game going so long that I need to worry about double-digit campaign levels!

That's it for today, folks. I really like Inkarnate and for the price and what it offers, I'm happy with what I got. I want to play around with some of the other features for other maps, and if I do, I'll post them here. If I adjust / recycle this map for something else, I'll rename Oakhurst and the Sunless Citadel area, but other than that, nothing on that map is proprietary to DnD or any other property.

Still Working on this Role-Playing Game Because I am an Idiot

The title pretty much sums it up. Don't have much to add here, but with the whole COVID-19 thing I've found myself at home a whole lot more, started a D&D 5E Zoom campaign for a few friends, started working on a short novella based around old-school fantasy gaming tropes, and that kind of dragged me back towards pecking away at the Tankards & Broadswords RPG.

Because Google docs make me happy I haven't lost any of my older material, and I began re-writing some of the material I last worked on in 2013 (!!!). I think I found a better mechanic for bonuses and penalties because I was never really happy with what I'd decided on before. Also brutally streamlining weapon types down to Light, Medium, and Heavy. Same thing with armors. I've cut out almost any form of money mechanics in the game because I've decided that coin-counting is to me antithetical to adventure gameplay.

I also want to focus a lot on what I am loosely referring to as "Tavern Play", which is pretty much how to turn hanging out in Ye Olde Tavern from that boring part in the beginning of the game where you meet the mysterious wizard, into an actual interesting play space where your characters might enjoy hanging out while drinking, flirting, gaming, brawling, gossiping, and in general living the good life.

Fundamentally, I feel like this game isn't so much for me to do a dance and proclaim that I'm now an "indie game designer" so much as it is a platform for me to write my personal gaming manifesto. Pretty sure there isn't much of a market for that, but we'll see. The whole thing is going to be free whenever I get around to putting it someplace because it already beggars belief that I get paid for my fiction writing. I can't imagine anyone paying for my game-related work.

So, we'll see. I'll post more as time goes on.

Thoughts on My First Fifth Edition DnD Campaign

Last night I wrapped the twelfth session of my summer-long Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Since one of the players goes back to working nights during the school year, and the rest of us have fairly busy weekend schedules, this game is going to go from almost-weekly to probably one weekend day every six to eight weeks, if it doesn't peter out entirely. Sad, but I'm glad we got in twelve sessions in about fourteen weeks, and I was able to take a four-player party from first to fifth level.

With the regular sessions of the campaign behind me, I wanted to compile some thoughts, in no particular order.

• 5E is my favorite edition/flavor of D&D thus far. It has now beaten out Castles & Crusades as my favorite "flavor" of D&D, mostly due to the flexibility and depth of the character options, and the very loose, yet well-structured way in which pretty much everything is handled (more on the system below). This edition was easy to pick up for old hands and new players alike (one player had essentially never played a pen-and-paper role-playing game before, while another last played 8+ years ago in college). All seemed to enjoy the system, and had no major complaints as to how the mechanics operated.
• We had four players who took their characters up through fourth level (the end of the twelfth session saw enough XP to get the party to 5th). The party consisted of a Half-Elven Rogue who took the Assassin path, a Half-Elven Wild Magic Sorcerer, a Human Paladin who took the Oath of Vengeance, and a Human Monk who took Way of the Empty Hand. Upon reaching fourth level and ending one adventure arc, the Monk's player switched characters and began playing a Human Warlock with a pact to a Great Old One. The mix of magic and muscle served us very well, especially in the last four sessions where we had two spell-casters and two melee experts (the Paladin mostly used her limited spell-casting ability to power various "Smites" in melee).
• I'm glad 5th edition seems to largely set aside the need for multi-classing by allowing variant class paths that enable the use of magic, and has enough race/class combos that you can create a wide blend of magic and non-magical abilities. IIRC, the Barbarian class is the only one that does not have some option or path for casting spells, which makes sense based on the class concept. Everyone else has some way of getting spells if they want.
• I like the power level of Cantrips in this edition. While the Old-Schoolers might balk at a Magic-User that has unlimited access to a few minor magical abilities, I think it does a good job of letting a spell-caster continue to cast minor spells which still have an effect in the game once their big bombs have all been used. And really, a spell like Light or Fire Bolt isn't breaking the magical bank here. There are probably players who'll find ways of "breaking" cantrips, but so far, I am happy with how they work.
• I think the decisions made to eliminate a lot of circumstantial modifiers in favor of Advantage and Disadvantage was the right one. I was leery of the idea at first, but after playing for several months, I found it to be pretty straightforward, and it helped eliminate a lot of that "modifier math" that bogs things down right when you want them moving fast and loose. And, I appreciate that such thinking was really applied system wide, keeping the number of "plusses / minuses" to a minimum. From the way skills work to the mechanics of two-weapon fighting, the mechanics become more of a very fast yes/no logic tree, rather than multiple modifiers all stacking on top of one another to arrive at a modifier that might change by +/-1 every round of a combat.
• I liked how the first two character levels are priced very cheaply, XP-wise. Some DMs might not like it, but I think it lets you put the brakes on throwing first-level characters into the meat grinder too quickly, allowing you to pit them against some very low-powered creatures, of which there are plenty of options. And, if you *do* toss them in the deep end fast, the survivors earn the reward of fast leveling. The biggest complaint I've always heard of D&D is that PCs spend way too much time in the minor leagues, and campaigns end too often before "the good stuff". I think the leveling curve right now works to address this better. I'll note that while it took 12 sessions to get to 5th level for my party, our after-work games were pretty short, maybe only 2 1/2 hours a session, and didn't always have a "big battle", so if those sessions had been longer and more involved, I could easily see the PCs at 6th or 7th at this point.
• I really appreciated the current system's focus on character - the discussion of and variety of races and sub-races, the many and varied classes, as well as the background options available, and even the "trinket roll" made upon character creation. Every player rolled up a unique trinket, and a couple of them took those trinkets and incorporated them into their backgrounds pretty deeply. For example, the Paladin got a small cage with a dead sprite inside it, and built her Oath of Vengeance around a story which came out of this item. Yes, veteran or more creative players don't necessarily need such things written into the rules, but for more novice players (like we had), it was a great springboard for character development.
• Also, in general, I was impressed with the quality of the three core rule books, both in terms of production values as well as content. I think they were really well done, especially in comparison to the 4th edition books, which I'm not all that impressed with, at least content-wise. I also like that WotC is taking their time and not spamming us with "splat books" every month. There's already forty years of material out there, and it's better to put out small numbers of great quality resources than flood the market with garbage "option" books. If we want all those things, there's always...THE INTERNET!

In conclusion, this was a fun campaign, and I hope to keep gaming with this group, at least on an irregular basis. One of my players is already prepping to run her debut campaign as a DM with another group of our friends, so I'm eager to try out the rules from the other side of the DM's screen. Also, there's a lot of good compare-and-contrast with the 4th edition campaign I'm currently playing in, which I hope to write about in the not-too-distant future.

My RPG Publishing Malaise

Thinking back, I have been pondering the notion of "homebrew" role-playing game systems since I started gaming around 1993. I don't remember the specifics, but I do remember getting the "Amazing Engine" universal RPG system from TSR around that time, and it was my first real exposure to what you might consider a "generic" role-playing game system, one that kept a stable core but could be adapted to meet the needs of most any genre.

Later on in college during the mid- to late '90s, I would often pick up interesting one-off RPGs at the local gaming store and read through them, pondering their mechanics and feeling the beginnings of an interest in designing my own game. In fact, around 1999-2000 I did begin serious work on my own simple gaming engine, one I called SCORE (Suitable for Creating the Optimum Role-playing Experience). There were a couple of early versions that used a 2d10 bell-curve, one of which I used to run a 1920s-era horror game that went for a few sessions until I decided to switch setting gears, and baited the party into a TPK (Total Player Kill - I wiped out the entire party).

Eventually this crime against humanity was forgiven, and I ran a couple of fantasy campaigns with a new incarnation of SCORE, one that used a Rolemaster-esque d100 + rating system. Those games actually went quite well, and we had a lot of fun playing right up to around the end of 2002. I still have most of my notes for those games, along with character sheets, and I still think the system works, at least for a game written at the turn of the century. It's not the sort of system I'd use more than a decade later, but I think it worked well enough.

Soon after that game came and went by the wayside, I decided to work on a game with a very strong "Sword & Sorcery" bent, originally named "Legends of Blood and Iron". This game had a lot of good heart, and a lot of flavor to it, but I think mechanically it was a bit of a mess. The world-building portion of the game, and the discussion of what made up a proper S&S campaign, it still I think relevant, and perhaps one day I will dig a few gems out of the work. This was also around the time I found and devoured Ron Edwards' Sorcerer and Sword, a supplement for his Sorcerer RPG. I have no love for the core product, but his supplement is, in my mind, the single best treatise on "Sword & Sorcery" role-playing games I've ever seen.

Over the many intervening years, I have tinkered with a myriad of RPG designs and concepts. I've run a few one-shots here and there to test one mechanic or another, but nothing done with enough time and substance to form any true window into whether or not a specific whole rules set "works" or doesn't work - in short, nor real formal playtesting beyond one or two sessions. I've probably achieved "80%" finished on whatever it is the Tankards & Broadswords RPG might one day be, but that last twenty percent is a real bitch.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder about this RPG publishing malaise. For several years now, the urge to design a game and run a campaign was supplanted by my writing career, which - lets be honest - pays far better than I would ever imagine an RPG might pay. On the other hand, after spending so much cumulative time working towards the nebulous goal of releasing my own RPG - a goal that is easier to achieve than ever, thanks to all the print-on-demand and self-publishing options out there right now - I find it somewhat vexing that I can't approach the goal of writing and publishing an RPG with the same assertiveness that I can approach writing a novel or short story. If I can write a book that gets read by multiple thousands of complete strangers, why can't I write a RPG that might wind up in the hands of - let's be realistic - a few dozen?

Maybe it is because while the majority of readers are just that - readers - who zip through a book once and basically give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down, I find that many - if not most - RPG players are constant rules tinkerers, and obsess over almost any aspect of a game. Only a small handful of readers are ever going to pick over any one of my novels to the degree that MOST gamers would pick over a game. So, I feel, the inevitable level of scrutiny - as well as their natural inclination to say "well, if *I* designed this game, I think XYZ should have been ABC..." - keeps me from pulling the trigger.

I don't know. As I type this, I ponder the writing of a small, specific RPG premise. I think that would be the best way to start. From there, if the idea was interesting and well-received, maybe it'd give me more confidence to tackle a larger, more interesting project. It would be a shame to never have a formal sharing of all this idea fodder, but at the same time, there's a right way and a wrong way to do all that, so I need to pick and choose my battlefield carefully, so to speak.

Tankards and Broadswords Awakens!

So...yeah! It's been a couple of years since I posted, but I'm resurrecting this blog because of a number of developments in the Fantasy / Gaming front going on over here. Many thanks to those of you who've kept me in your feed - comments here are always welcome!

In January of last year, I published a Swords & Sorcery novella, Spiders and Flies. It was largely written back in 2001 as an homage to pulpy S&S fantasy fiction a la Robert E. Howard and the like, set in a world I had created as a campaign setting for my SCORE homebrew RPG system. So far, sales have been slow, but I get a nibble now and then, and reviews have been overall very positive, which is quite nice.

The story follows four adventurers as they trek into a nearby desert wasteland in order to plunder the abandoned temple of a mostly-forgotten spider god. As you might guess, things don't go as smoothly as the treasure-hunters anticipated! There's a lot of adventure and bloody violence, and it is a short, quick read of about 20,000 words, enough to entertain you for about a hour's reading pleasure. It is available on Amazon as either an ebook or a paperback.

My friend and fellow author Dan Eldredge has published his second novel, The Grand Masquerade. This is the sequel to his debut work, The Pirates of Alnari, which I posted about two years ago.

If you like brutal, very realistic high-medieval combat, diabolical political intrigue, massive land and sea battles, and plenty of adventure, these books are a must-read. If you combined the coolest aspects of the Game of Thrones books and Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin novels, you'd get this series.

The Grand Masquerade (as well as The Pirates of Alnari) is available in ebook and paperback formats from Amazon. Click on the cover photo to go to the book's Amazon page.

In addition, I've put out two more COMMANDO novels since this blog was active - Operation Cannibal and Operation Dervish. Both are available on Amazon in ebook and paperback formats, and you can find them by clicking on the links provided to the left of this post. There's also my Western novella, Renegade's Revenge, and my '70s era men's adventure novel, San Francisco Slaughter. Both of these are also available on Amazon in ebook and print versions.

Beyond my writing, I've started gaming again. I'm running a 5th Edition Dungeon's & Dragons campaign, and I'm playing in a 4th Edition campaign. All I have to say is, WOW - the differences are enough to give you mental whiplash! More on this to come in more followup posts.

Tankards and Broadswords RPG: Playtest Session 2

Last night's game was supposed to have a third player, but he wasn't able to attend, instead, I quickly whipped up an NPC Captain of the Blue Tower Guards, a warrior named Alcarn.  One goal of the game is to make sure creating an NPC is quick and painless; I use the "monster" format for these sorts of NPCs.  Attack, Defense, Reflexes, Athletics, Detection, and Stealth for skills, plus Peril checks, Health, Damage, and Armor rating.  It's 12 quick values, no skill focuses, no Statuses.  Mail armor, battle axe, two daggers, and a shield.  Maybe not QUITE as fast as throwing together a B/X D&D henchman, but pretty darn close.

In case you didn't see the first session post, here it is.

The PCs have been asked by the Blue Tower to go into the edge of the Cthonian Wood and investigate an abandoned wizard's tower that has been located.  The Tower of Arion was well outside the wood before the Cataclysm struck and sent a ravaging storm of magical destruction across the land.  Now, the Cthonian Wood is much, much larger and its border has swallowed up many now-forgotten towers and villages.  The PCs are going to set out on a "fact finding mission" to the rumored location of the tower and see if it is worth sending a larger expedition.  Alcarn will accompany them as a representative of the Blue Tower.  The PCs are offered any form of basic gear they wish.  Marikh takes some mail armor and a shield, while Jayne grabs up a crossbow, a warhammer, grapple and rope, and a deluxe healer's kit.  The party are given horses as well as food, torches, and so forth.

The party rides for one of the many roadside forts located between population centers.  Think something along the lines of a frontier stockade; a tall wooden palisade with an elevated walk, a bunkhouse, stable, well, and a fire pit.  There's a heavy timber gate that can be barred as well.  When the PCs get there, no one is occupying the fort, so they settle down for the night.  Watches are set, and near the end of the second watch, Marikh makes a solid Detection roll and notices that a lot of the night sounds have died away, and that the horses are beginning to act nervous.  Jayne's cat (while enjoying the hospitality of the Blue Tower, Jayne used her Beastmaster spells to acquire an Animal Ally in the form of a stray cat) tells her it smells like "bad meat" out beyond the stockade.  With everyone awake, Marikh and Alcarn take to the battlements, while Jayne remains in the center of the stockade with her crossbow ready.

Hunkered down behind the palisade, Marikh suddenly finds himself face-to-face with a ghoulish creature that'd silently scaled the outside of the wooden wall.  It swipes for his face with its taloned hand, but Marikh fends it off with the hilt of his sword, then proceeds to bisect its head with his first stroke.

What followed was a fairly brief battle against half a dozen more of these ghoulish Flesh Hunters.  Some quick observations about the combat:

1. Wearing armor made a huge difference.  Marikh and Alcarn were both wearing mail, and while they took some damage apiece, it would have been far worse without the damage absorbing abilities of the armor.  Rolling 1d + Balance for damage, several of the Flesh Hunter's successful attacks were completely ineffective damage-wise thanks to the mail armor worn by these two characters.
2. Combat maneuvers made things a lot more interesting.  Faced with two opponents several times, Marikh used "Web of Death" to attack both at the same time.  He also suffered a Charge Attack from one of the Hunters, and whiffed his Athletics check badly; the resulting huge bonus for the Hunter allowed it to deliver Marikh's only real wound of the fight.
3. You have to really pay attention to Initiative.  Because every attack is an attack roll vs. a defense roll, it is easy to forget who actually attacked in a round and who only defended.  I found writing down everyone's order of operations, then checking off their number when they acted was a helpful visual aid.
4. The Healing Skill works almost too well.  A good healer with a deluxe healer's kit tests against a BP of 7, and a starting character with Medicine of 3, +1 for First aid, +1 for the deluxe kit, essentially can't fail a healing check.  When I make my post-playtest changes, I may remove the extra 1d from healing and just make points recovered equal to the Balance of the roll.

After the stockade battle, the players make their way to the Verdant Keep, where they spend the night enjoying the hospitality of the forest-wardens stationed there.  The PCs are told the Hunters have been emerging from the Bone Wastes in larger numbers lately, possibly the work of the Red Wizard's Tower.  They are also cautioned to leave their horses at the Keep before going into the Cthonian Wood; the forest is just too dense and the mounts would spook too easily.

The next day the PCs set out and make it to the edge of the Wood by late afternoon.  Wisely deciding to stay the night outside the border of the forest, the night is uneventful except for a few "movement sounds" from the forest.  Entering the Wood the next morning, the PCs find it pretty rough going (poor Athletics checks) and take more time than they should getting through the thick undergrowth.  What's more, they get lost (poor navigational Survival checks) and turned around, and don't find Arion's tower until mid afternoon.  The tower is about sixty feet in diameter and about that high, made of dark stone and windowless as far as can be discerned.  The whole tower is covered in thick ivy, vines, moss, and other vegetation.  The doors are opened a bit, and no movement can be seen or heard.

The PCs decide to move inside.  Within, they make out a semi-circular room about thirty feet deep and close to twenty feet tall.  Flanking the doorway there are a pair of statues depicting a well-dressed man and woman, but the statues are overgrown, cracked, and broken.  The room itself is filled with vegetation and plant growth, almost to an unnatural degree; both corners of the room are completely overrun with vines and what seems to be small stunted trees growing right out of the stone floor.  Marikh goes to investigate the overgrowth to the left of the door, when the plants seem to rustle and some noises are discerned.  He backs off, only to hear the same from the right, and soon, five Winged Apes burst out of the two locations.  The battle is short but fierce, leaving the PCs triumphant with only a couple of minor wounds.  Marikh did try a Feint maneuver and his opponent failed miserably to detect it; the resulting attack bonus let Marikh kill the creature with ease.

The evening was getting late so we called the game at this point.  Plenty more of exploring to be done, so next time we'll begin to get into the heart of the tower.  Playtest-wise, so far so good...

Neverwinter Nights: D&D 3E Done Right

So after writing my Sword & Sorcery short, I started jonesing for some kind of video game hack-and-slash action.  I had played Neverwinter Nights Diamond Edition a few years ago, but didn't get all that far in it.  I decided to get back on the wagon and play again.  I of course created "Nanok the Barbarian" and gave him a Weapon Focus in Greatsword (like you do).  I put the game on Easy because smacking the crap out of AI goons is just that much more fun, and I began to loot and pillage to my heart's content.

For those not in the know, Neverwinter Nights is a video game that came out a while back that uses the D&D 3.0 rules to run everything.  It is actually explicitly 3.0, not 3.5, so certain things might seem a little odd if 3.5 was your 3E of choice.  I'm not a huge computer game person, but I do like the occasional FPS or RPG-style computer game (Deus Ex is one of my favorite CRPGs of all time).  When I do play a game like this, I am one of those people who gets really "crunchy" with my character - what weapon do I take, tweaking stats, skills, etc..  I'm not a WoW or other MMO type player, so don't get that far into it, but I do like the ability to "fiddle" with my character like that.

One of the more pervasive criticisms, I felt, of D&D 3.X was that there was far too much crunch - people wanted more customizability, but not THAT much more.  With class and race abilities and mods, skills, feats, various types of bonuses, and so forth, if you weren't more of a hardcore "crunchy gamer", and just someone who wanted to build a character to beat up orcs, you were faced with something of a choice-explosion.  What's worse is that, if you weren't at least semi-intelligent as to how you created your character, you could really do yourself a disservice and make choices that definitely dropped you down the backward slope of the power curve.

Now, I'm not going to go on a tirade about how this is why older editions were better or why 3E sucks.  I actually enjoyed a lot of my 3E gaming, but I can see arguments for and against.  It was a "modernization" of the D&D mechanics, which I didn't have a problem with, but I think it just got over engineered; Castles & Crusades, in my mind, is a much better approach and still makes the game a lot more "modern" (unified core mechanic, so on and so forth).

But for a CRPG, D&D 3.0 is great.  It provides the computer with a very tightly-woven, crunchy, almost-every-situation-covered rules framework, something that a lot of CRPGs were already going for at the time and the player based love it (see Deus Ex...).  Also, because of the way a computer can offer up (or hide) information to the user, a lof of that "choice-explosion" goes away.  When it's time to pick a feat, it only shows you feats that you can actually take.  When you pick up a weapon in the game, you're told immediately whether you can use it or not.  You can see all your relevant modifiers worked into the final bonuses or penalties without doing the math yourself. 

At the end of the day, 3.0 might have been passed by these days, but I still think that generation of D&D rules were perfect as transition fodder for moving people back and forth from video games to RPGs and so on, because the rules could work in both media quite well, and one reinforced the other.  I'm curious (because I don't know) if there have been any video games based around 4E rules - my guess is no, but if someone can say for certain, I'd appreciate it.

Tankards and Broadswords RPG: Playtest Session 1

So last night I ran my first playtest of the TnB rules.  It went well, better than I expected actually.  I'll provide a brief rundown of what happened and a few observations at the conclusion.

There were only two players in last night's playtest, Scott and Grace.  Both had been exposed to the rules before through casual discussion and a few much older tidbits, but this was the first time either had put pen to paper. 

Scott settled on a Fighter archetype, putting 4 ranks in Melee with a Focus on Longsword.  He also took a Defense of 3 with a focus on Armed Parry and a Reflexes of 3 with a focus on Melee Combat.  His Carousing of 3 had a Focus on Drinking, and Persuasion 3 with a Focus on Diplomacy.  In his Scholar skills his only real standout was a Research of 2.  There were other skill ranks scattered here and there but those were the really notable skills.  Interestingly, he gave his character 3 ranks in Resist, 2 in Endure, and 1 in Avoid, meaning he'd be quite resistant to mental attacks.  Finally, he put a single point in Wealth and two points in Infamy, giving his character a bit of a bad(ass) reputation.  Overall, Marikh of No Place in Particular was a young disenfranchised minor nobleman who was skilled with a blade and the ways of a noble's court.

Grace went the opposite route.  She settled on a Scholar, and put 3 ranks apiece in Healing (First Aid), Arcana (Magic), Linguistics (Magic) and Research (Magic).  She also took 3 ranks in Carousing, also with a Focus in Drinking, and two ranks apiece in Stealth and Thievery, and in terms of combat, put two ranks apiece into Defense, Ranged, and Reflexes.  Once the skills were squared away, she distributed her Peril ranks evenly across all three options, then put all of her Status ranks into Wealth, giving her a max of 3.  All her freebie Character Tokens went into a Magic skill of 3, and she picked up three Magic Books: Healer (which became her Magic skill Focus), Beastmaster, and Infiltrator.  In essence, her character is a Magical Healer/Thief, an interesting combo that complimented Scott's character quite well.

At the beginning of the game, I asked both players to make Intermission Rolls.  This is a random roll that provides the character with some boon or danger at the beginning of an adventure, carried on from their time in between "episodes".  In a lot of heroic fantasy, the story begins in medias res, with the character fleeing from some danger, or flush with victory from some event off camera that provides a hook into what is about to happen.  Since I had almost no idea of where I wanted the characters to go or do for their first adventure, I decided to leave the decision in the hands of the dice gods.

And the Dice Gods delivered, big time.  Both characters rolled 2d and got results of 9: Pauper.  This means the character starts the game with no starting currency and gets nothing from their Wealth stat.  Normally, at the start of every adventure, the character only begins with Signature Items; these are weapons or other pieces of equipment that the character has bought at character creation which are effectively part of the character - think Xena's chakram, or Elric's Black Sword.  Every other piece of gear is up to the whims of fortune as to whether the character will have it or not; the player rolls 2d6 and adds their Wealth rating; the result are the number of Treasure Tokens they have to spend on armor, weapons, and so forth.

Well, Pauper prevents you from doing that - you've got your Signature Items, and nothing else.  For Marikh, that was a longsword; for Jayne, that was just her spellbooks.  With their Carousing Focuses in Drinking, we decided the perfect way for them both to start the game would be to wake up bleary-eyed and penniless, sitting in a tavern at the crack of dawn.  They had agreed to start in Urgh, a very "Lawful-Neutral" city-state where there is a fine, tax, fee, bylaw, etc. for everything.  I related to the players that Urgh had such things as vagrancy fees, unemployment fees, and so forth, so it wasn't a good town to get caught in while penniless; the fighting pits, slave labor camps, or some other unpleasantness would be their fate.

So the PCs decided to make a break for it.  Outside the tavern, they ducked into an alleyway and stepped over a drunk; Jayne picked the drunk's pocket and found a coin.  They discovered the wooden manhole cover to the sewer, and Jayne used her Book of the Infiltrator to cast "Lockwork", popping the lock.  Both of them scrounged to find tools; Marikh fashioned a torch from a broken crate and straw, while Jayne got herself a makeshift club.  Down into the sewers they went, and after a couple of Survival rolls, aligned their bearings well enough to head for the outflow grate by the docks.

Down into the sewers, eh?  Doesn't sound like a particularly safe place to wander.  After splashing around for a while, neither PC noticed a large, predatory shape gliding through the sewer waters towards them.  With full surprise, a massive sewer alligator leaped from the water and latched onto Jayne's leg, hurting her badly.  Marikh jumped to her aid, plunging his sword into the creature's back, and causing it to turn on him, biting and inflicting an even more savage wound.  Jayne tried to cast a healing spell on Marikh, but the spell fizzles.  The Alligator strikes again but misses, and this time both Jayne and Marikh make contact; Jayne beats on it with her club, while Marikh hacks its head off with his sword.  Jayne takes a few rounds to heal them both, and they continue on to the sewer grate, and escape the city of Urgh.

The two characters make their way north along the shoreline, determined to seek the Blue Wizard's Tower and offer their services for employment.  During the day they both find sufficient food and water, and even discover a body washed up on shore, wearing a dagger and carrying a purse with two coins.  At nightfall, unable to find a good shelter, they decide to build a campfire on the beach and stay there the night before heading inland. 

In the middle of the first watch, Marikh hears the "flapping of leathery wings" in the air around the camp, and wakes Jayne.  Fears that it might be a larger creature are dispelled, and assuming they are bats, Jayne uses a Beastmaster spell, Beast Speech, to try and talk to them.  However, all they get are hisses and cackles from the air.  Deciding to make a break for it, they move away from the fire and head inland, only to be immediately pounced on and attacked by a pair of winged apes.  Jayne is badly mauled by one, but Marikh quickly kills his opponent, and after Jayne drubs hers with her club, Merikh slices it in half.  Further spellcasting brings Jayne back to full health.

Come the morning the two journey inland, and encounter no more troubles along the way.  Eventually they reach a mile-wide clearing and see, in the center, the thousand-foot high, hourglass-shaped blue crystal tower of the Blue Wizards.  Concerned that just walking to the tower might be ill advised, the duo make their way around the clearing to a watchtower at the point where the road to the tower enters the clearing.  Approaching, they are hailed by a half-dozen guards, each bearing a long sword, shield, and mail hauberk, and wearing the blue surcoat of their masters.  The duo introduce themselves, and Scott decides that Marikh will attempt to use his Infamy as an "in".  He rolls very well, and the guards have heard that "He's that guy, who did that thing, to that other guy, and the blood never came clean from the walls...".  The Sergeant-at-Arms decides to put Marikh to a little "test" and engages in a little swordplay; Marikh parries with laughable ease and knocks the Sergeant into the dust with the flat of his blade.  Credentials confirmed...

To conclude the evening, the chagrined Sergeant orders to of his men to escort the duo to the Tower, where they are given a change of clothes, allowed to clean up, are fed and watered, and provided any comforts they need.  An hour later, they are escorted to an audience with Herik, Wizard of the Fourth Circle, who welcomes them as guests and offers the two of them accommodations for the day, and an audience with his superior the next day.  A servant was assigned to handle their needs, and they were dismissed. 

This is where we ended the session.

A few observations...

1. The Intermission Roll couldn't have worked better.  I designed them to be a possible jumping-off point for adventures, and in this case, that's exactly what it provided.  I came to the table with almost no idea of what the adventure was going to be, but the Pauper result for both characters gave us exactly what we needed; an impetus for action.  Perhaps it wouldn't happen every adventure, but the players liked the idea that it we were able to weave the result into their Carousing skills, which made everyone happy.
2. Combat, while ill-equipped, can be very dangerous.  Only Marikh had a real weapon, Jayne had no offensive spells, and neither character was wearing armor.  The result was that in both fights, against opponents who weren't terribly powerful, one or both of the characters got mauled.  Typically it was because the attacker got a really good attack roll and the defender rolled terribly, giving the attacker a very high Balance for the attack, which gave the damage roll a massive bonus.  Having no armor to soak some of that damage hurt...a lot.
3. Being able to give very generic skills much narrower skill Focuses helped make the skill feel more specialized.  Marikh wasn't just a good Melee fighter, he was a swordsman.  Likewise, focusing all of Jayne's Scholar skills towards magic, and her Magic skill towards Healer, kept a lot of flavor in the mix.
4. I need to draft up some form of encounter rules.  I was just rolling 2d6 and if it was a really high roll, "something happened".  Having a 2d roll that went from "nothing", to "friendly", "neutral" and "dangerous" would help this.
5. There was little problem with leaving most skills open to a broad interpretation.  Survival becomes crucial for any cross-country travel, useful for scrounging, navigating, finding food, water, and shelter - you name it.  And we were clearly able to differentiate between Survival and Naturalism; one was living off the land, the other was an academic understanding of the land, flora, and fauna.
6. Aside from being dangerous, combat moved smoothly.  We would have to see how larger fights work out; perhaps having a Reflexes roll just once at the start of the fight would result in a lot less bookkeeping.
7. One of the players was a little disappointed when told how long it takes to progress skills after character creation, but as the characters can start off with up to 4 ranks in a skill - "Veteran" status - the need to advance more quickly isn't, in my mind, much of an issue.  We'll see how that attitude fares later on in the gameplay.

Overall, I think things went well, and the players really enjoyed the session.  We may play again in ~2 weeks; once we do, I'll have another report.

New Campaign Map Made in Google Docs

I'm a big fan of Google Docs - I use it for pretty much everything I do that isn't work related.  The ability to keep everything online where I can get to it from anywhere is a huge advantage for me, and especially the ability to share and collaborate with other people.

In preparation for my Tankards and Broadswords RPG playtesting tonight, I worked on a campaign map yesterday, and decided to make it in Google Docs' Drawing feature.  I've used this feature before to make UML diagrams and other drawings for coursework and personal use, but I've never tried it before as a map-making tool; I've always used Campaign Cartographer instead.

While CC is an excellent program, and what you can make with it is light years agead of what Google Docs provides, I still think the results were...okay.  Maybe a little too bright and technicolor for some people, but it will suffice for some friendly, casual high-adventure gaming:

Google Docs has a "publish to web" feature, that generates a .png file from your most recent saved work, so any time you modify your work, the new version is what people see. For those people having trouble viewing the .png in their browser, here's a static JPG:

Anyhow, I'm happy enough with the results.  One of the nice things about the Google Docs Drawings is that you can very easily expand the canvas out; handy for those games where your PC start with the "local area" map and then as time goes on, you pull back the zoom, so to speak, and add more and more to the surrounding areas.

Tankards & Broadswords RPG: Revisiting the Mess

Looking at my Google Doc page for the T&B core rules, it tells me I've not done anything to the rules in a year and a half.  I have put together "Quick Start" pages, and I hope this week to do a little playtesting; a couple of players are going to make characters and take a tour through a small tomb to do a bit of grave-robbing.  Fun times for all concerned, no doubt.

Off and on, I've worked on this rules set in one form or another for close to 10 years.  I know I'm terrible at finishing anything, but I'm feeling renewed motivation these days.  My hope is to create the rules set so that, at least in one version, it is available as a Kindle e-book that is well-indexed and interactive enough so that a reader can move around from one section to the other without much fuss.  This is actually a lot easier in a touch reader like the iPad, where you can just tap a hyperlink to follow through.  I don't know if this will be a successful experiment or not, but I think it is worth persuing; e-books are definitely here to stay, and I think it is possible and advantageous to produce a RPG book as a Kindle-style e-book.

I'm not sure when I'll have an update; hopefully next week I can discuss how the playtesting went and what lessons came about from the session.

Getting Back into the Gaming Groove

Coming back to RPGs after a year or more of being on hiatus is weird, but I'm beginning to enjoy the process again.  One of the things I've started working on is actual playtesting for the T&B RPG.  I'm developing a magical "post-apocalyptic" mini-setting, which I'm calling "The Mad God's Sandbox".  I'm populating it with a lot of less than bog-standard fantasy races; ratmen, lizardmen, birdmen, inscect-men, sentient undead and golems as non-human PC races.  I'm trying to come up with some fun adventures and interesting ways in which I can play with the rules and see how they help or hinder gameplay.

The response I've gotten from the Delta Green adventure was very positive, and I hope to have a follow-up adventure in a few weeks.  The players all seem to be attached to their pre-gens in one way or another, so at most I think there will be a little skill-tweaking and re-shuffling.  Hopefully that game will continue on in a happy fashion.

I'm also trying to get back to working on my 40K miniatures.  It has been over a year since I've played a game of 40K, but I've made some new gaming contacts and it'd be nice to get a game up and running soon.  I recently went through and took stock of my models and what needed to be done to make some improvements, so I have my "work orders" planned out for the next few months.

Also, my old Castles & Crusades gaming group may be finally getting back together after more than a year and a half hiatus.  That should be a lot of fun - if we all remember what we were doing when the game ended last time!

Anyhow, just wanted to pass along some updates and let the world know that the blog is still alive and kicking!

Finally Running a Delta Green Campaign!

So after taking a long hiatus from RPGing in general, both development and gameplay, a friend of mine talked me into running a RPG campaign for a bunch of relatively new tabletop gamers.  This crowd had varying levels of experience, from "a short D&D 3.5 campaign and that's it" for one player, to someone who'd basically made a Serenity RPG character...and that's about it.  All of them had a good deal of board-game and miniatures gaming experience though, so they all understood things like using dice, how to process rules, and so forth.

I was worried when the subject of what kind of game to run came up, and I received the typical "I dunno, I don't really have a preference" responses.  In my experience, when people give such an answer, what usually happens is that something is put together that about half the players don't like, and interest quickly flags after the first session or two.  So I fired off a couple of e-mails detailing a few ideas, and the idea of a "modern conspiracy game akin to the X-Files" stuck.  Hello, Delta Green!

I'd had the DG reprint (with the D20 rules, not that it really matters) for a couple of years, but my current gaming group hadn't really expressed any interest in running this game.  On the other hand, I'd been itching to run a modern day occult/weird conspiracy game for ages, and now was my chance.  I put together some writeups on the sort of world DG was set in, glossing over a lot of the Cthulhu-heavy aspects of the setting (most of the players are only passingly familiar with the Mythos anyhow).  We decided to have a one-shot adventure with pre-generated characters, to see what people thought of the game play before diving into the conspiracy itself.

As a one-shot, I decided to hand the characters a "nautical adventure" and by that, I mean a "ghost ship" of sorts.  A freighter drifting into the Boston harbor islands, boarded by the Coast Guard only to find the crew slaughtered.  Of the six players, we had three FBI agents, two Boston Police Harbor Patrol, and one Coast Guard security specialist.  The pre-generated characters were really only "half-gen"s; I rolled up the stats and assigned some points to skills, but then let players distribute the rest to their liking.

Quick back-up; I settled on Goblinoid Games' GORE RPG as the system of choice.  I preferred BRP to the D20 system my edition of DG uses, but both the original CoC rules and the generic BRP rulebook I considered too involved for a bunch of almost complete RPG newbies.  The GORE rules are simple, straightforward, easily tinkered with for any desirable results, and of course, mesh nicely with all the other CoC material I have on hand. 

We played the adventure out in about three hours.  There was some good investigation, and the players all immediately began asking good questions, falling into their respective roles, and everyone got along very well.  As no one at the table knew any more than half of the other players, I was expecting at least one bad pairing, but overall the group chemistry seemed to flow smoothly.  By the end of the game session, those people who didn't have to immediately run all went out for dinner and drinks, which is always a good sign.

As for the adventure, I think it went quite well.  Turns out that three members of the ship's crew were exposed to a dangerous chemical being transported in one of the cargo holds.  The tank of chemicals, along with a lot of high-tech scientific equipment, was being shipped from Europe to a research think-tank in the Boston area.  Somehow, that tank was punctured (a strange, five-pointed puncture mark was found on the ruptured tank...) and the three crew members suffered the most direct exposure.

These members of the crew went psychotic, destroying the ship's propulsion controls, navigation, and communications gear, and then slaughtering the rest of the crew.  Of the three, two were killed and one captured; the surviving crew member had barricaded himself in the chain room, huddled in a hastily drawn, pentagram-like circle, raving about the devil being trapped aboard the ship, and about preventing the ship from getting to shore.  The game ended with the party dropping that crewman with a non-lethal beanbag round from a shotgun, and taking him off the ship.  As for the "devil", the Coast Guard security team did find some strange scratch marks on the hull and railing of the ship...

From here on out, the game will have a mix of government conspiracy coupled with a heavy dose of the "weird".  We'll only be meeting once a month, but I think this game is going to have some good promise.

Commando RPG Update

Between a new graduate class and working towards acquiring a new job, I haven't been able to get much accomplished in terms of RPG work over the last two weeks. I will provide some updates, though:

- I've been watching World War II movies like a madman. The Operations Manual is going to have a pretty extensive section on resource materials, and one of these is going to be a rather sizable filmography. I'm not going to focus on every single WW2 movie ever made; for the purposes of the core RPG, I'm focusing primarily on movies that take place in and around the European / North African theater, and involving mostly small unit, commando, or espionage actions. If / when I do supplements, I'll develop a separate section of reference materials for those.

- I've always thought of them mostly as "Books to get your Napoleonic Soldiers in the right uniform color schemes", but the Osprey military series of books have been an invaluable resource. I've been buying them just about as fast as I can read them right now. Also, apparently they are releasing a new series of books on individual weapons that had a great impact on military history - very cool.

- I recently downloaded and skimmed through the WW2 RPG "Behind Enemy Lines". I downloaded my PDF through DriveThruRPG, and it's a Mystique Enterprises reprint of a 1982 FASA RPG. Wow. At some point I'll have to write a more comprehensive review of this game, but it is a perfect example of those early 80's, high-realism, rule-for-everything, extremely over-engineered RPGs. I think it's a well-made RPG, but hopelessly complicated in terms of what I'd want to play. Still, contains a lot of good information.

- Although I only purchased and played through it once this summer, I went back and replayed most of Call of Duty 2 a week or so ago. It was good to play it again after doing so much work on Commando, because I could eye the game from the perspective of "How does this video game relate to what I'm creating"? As an example, take rifles. You've got the British Lee-Enfield, the Kar 98K, and the Springfield 1903 - all bolt action rifles of relatively similar size, caliber, and operation. If a soldier of any of the three main armies picked up any of these, within a few minutes he could fight with it without much confusion at all.

In a game as "big-grained" as mine is, the tiny little nuances that differentiated these three weapons from each other are pretty much meaningless. A full-powered bolt-action military rifle is pretty much going to do the same thing the same way as any other full-powered bolt-action military rifle. Much the same will go to the many various pistols and submachine guns that will be available; some will have slightly different stats one way or the other, but none of these weapons will be particularly ground breaking; the idea is that they are different because one is a German MP-40 and the other is a British Sten MK II, not because of some difference in damage ratings or combat ranges. Ultimately, this means that the sorts of weapons a character picks are based less on "which submachine gun does the most damage" but rather "which is the coolest / fits my character best".

- I have debated long and hard over just how to "package" this game. I will probably release it as a PDF, since that's simple and easy to do. The major debate in my mind is whether or not to design the PDF for printing or for use on a computer screen. And, if for printing, should it be 8.5" x 11", or done as a book fold? Questions questions. I'm thinking the initial release might be done as a computer-formatted PDF, complete with (at least some) internal and external hyperlinks. At the very least, it could be printed out in an awkward manner. And yes, I will avoid using Courier New as the body font. Instead, I'll probably use a neat typewriter font (like the teaser poster uses) for titles and headers and the like, and do the rest in some other more readable font.

What do people think? For the initial release (the "1.0" version), should it just be a computer-friendly PDF, a print-friendly PDF, or something else entirely? I did have an idea at one point to make a pure "Notepad-formatted" .txt file just for the fun of it (courier new whether you like it or not), but that might get me thrown out of the party...

My New RPG Project

Many apologies for being absent from here for over a month. Work has been busy (training a new co-worker), and I've been working on doing some fiction writing over the last few weeks, as well as plunging headlong into a whole mess of Netflix rentals and going back to watch a few DVDs from off my shelves.

I've also been working on a new RPG project over the last couple of weeks. It sort of grew out of my current writing project, but it's really been in the back of my mind since I passed over my draft of the T&B RPG to Rob Lang at the Free RPG Blog. Rob's biggest criticism of the game was that, when all was said and done, there was very little to make it interesting or special, nothing to set it apart from all the dozens, nay hundreds, of "medium crunch generic fantasy / general purpose role-playing games".

I had to agree with Rob, and have been spending a lot of time pondering a suitable vehicle for the rules, ideas simmering on the back-burner of my creative stovetop. Something that hasn't been seen a lot, something that'd be fun to play, use some interesting rules, but not over-burden or over-complicate matters.

I think I've finally found that game.


More to come...

The Ram Has Touched The Wall

Or, more specifically, the Ram of writing a short story for possible publication has touched the Wall of me having an externally imposed deadline.

Games Workshop's Black Library, which is the publishing arm that handles all of the Games Workshop fiction for Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40,000, is now in the beginning of it's 2010 fiction submissions window. BL does, in fact, accept unsolicited fiction submissions, and people do, in fact, get published and eventually go on to become regular BL authors. The deadline for submissions during the 2010 window is July 31st, and I've decided to submit a short story, come hell or high water.

Like I've mentioned before, I have very poor follow-through when it comes to self-imposed project deadlines. I tend to get all fired up about an idea, work fervently on that idea for a few weeks, and then as another idea comes into my mind, the first idea slowly falls by the wayside until it's finally forgotten. I might have ideas for deadlines, but since I'm the only one who cares about the deadlines, blowing through them doesn't affect anyone but my own sense of progress, which is notoriously poor to begin with.

On the plus side though, I've got what I think is a pretty good idea for a short story, and I've made some decent progress. I've decided that rather than just banging out 10K words, I'm going to approach this little project in a very concise manner, and I've begun writing short summaries of the major characters, as well as a breakdown of all the events that take place in the short story. By mapping everything out, I hope to encourage my writing by treating the short story not so much as creating the entire thing from whole cloth when I write it, but fleshing out the outline through prose, with actual narration and dialogue.

Other projects and such currently in the queue:

- I've got Pete Nash's BRP-centric gaming sourcebook Rome: The Life and Death of the Republic, on deck for reading and review. I picked it up on BN.com for a good price (Pete, sorry if that bites into your royalties...), and it's a great looking book that really is going to need a weekend of me curled up on the couch with a tumbler of something honey-colored and on the rocks to do it justice.

- In a similar vein, I just finished reading Caesar Against The Celts, and I intend to read Caesar's own memoirs on the campaigns in the next week or so.

- This is all wrapped up in me having just bought a bargain copy of Rome: Total War. I wasn't all that fond of Medieval: Total War, as I found moving and arranging units to be way too time-consuming. Moving units in R:TW seems to be a lot easier and not quite so complicated.

- I'm beginning to paint not one, but two Warhammer: 40,000 Space Marine chapters; Space Wolves and Crimson Fists. Right now I'm just beginning to work out the paint schemes, but I hope to have photos of some completed units at some point soon.

- I didn't want to jump on the Frazetta bandwagon like everyone else has over the last two days, since it would just be another "tribute post" in a sea of the same, so I'll just say I'm sorry to see the man pass on, but greatly appreciate everything he's done. I own two prints of his that hang in my home office, and it's always inspirational to look up and gander at them whenever I need suitable inspiration. Cheers to you, Frank.