Reflections of a Non Player Character

Posted on November 18, 2013 by Iron Tavern Guest Blogger

Of recent times I have been spending a good deal of my blogging time creating non player character (NPC) profiles for the Lords of Gossamer and Shadow RPG over on my blog. Due to this I have had a lot of comments from people regarding the way I make these NPC’s from the rules and how I have applied them right through to the themes I have used to create them. One comment in particular caught my eye this weekend and got me to thinking a little more in depth about the process I use to create all NPC’s in all of the games I run.

The comment was made to the FATE Core community on Google Plus and mentioned as an aside that the work I had been doing on my NPC’s had highlighted the importance of gear, magic items, allies and all surrounding material as a reflection on the NPC itself. This obviously was not a new concept to me as it is true, I was making the items, creatures, domains etc. all be reflective of the NPC as a whole. This is an important concept when building an NPC. If you want the players to accurately demise the archetype of the character, you use all of the character, not just their personality to reflect this. If I am after a big bruiser barbarian in Pathfinder I am unlikely to dress him in ceremonial robes of a peace god and arm him with a rapier. It is more likely that he will appear in the hide armor of a T-Rex (that he killed) and wield a massive two handed vorpal battle axe or something similar that evokes the reaction of the big bruiser barbarian with the players.

It sounds simple enough. Some might even say it is really a no-brainer that you use this method to create flavor and evoke feelings from players. But it is not in actuality all that easy when you are working with a complex system such as Pathfinder for example. The reason this becomes a much more complex problem is based on the complexity of the system. Let me take the big bruiser barbarian from above and explore the idea a little further.

Let us suggest our players are around 7th level and the big bruiser barbarian (henceforth known as Bob) is going to be their nemesis from say their current level through to around about when they are level 12. Bob is the mid-range foe in an adventure of Cthulhu worshippers the players are trying to shut down. If we take that description and think about our mate Bob for a moment I would suggest that we put him at 13th or 14th level as a Barbarian class, or CR 12 to 13 for GM speakers. From a simple building of the class perspective we find this is going to involve 3 ability score increases (easy – Strength or Con depending on starting stats), 8 feats (8 because Bob is a human. All the best monsters are human. This is a tricky one though because feats are very complex) and 6 rage powers (also not a simple solution based on the number of powers available).

We are really just dealing with the core build of the character here and we are already frowning and reaching for multiple rulebooks. Stats are an easy decision because any good Barbarian needs to be hale and healthy as well as capable of lifting a small moon should the need arise. But then we move on to feats and the complexity involved in those decisions can be a bit overwhelming. If you look at the core books alone (Core Rulebook, Advanced Players Guide, Ultimate Magic, Ultimate Combat, Ultimate Campaign, Advanced Race Guide, Mythic Adventures, Inner Sea World Guide) you can easily be overwhelmed by the number and complexity of Feat choices that you need to make. Of course as a fighter class we would expect to see Improved Initiative and Toughness as well as some weapon specific things like Weapon Focus, Improved Weapon Critical etc. but really there are thousands of options here and even more combinations that could be used so it really is up to personal knowledge and choice here.

Once we are past that we are then faced with a similar customization problem with barbarian rage powers. You could take an archetype suggestion and build Bob from that perspective or do you try to customize him yourself. Certainly there are far less options than feats in this regard but getting the right balance can be a difficult thing entirely. The good news is that once we are at this point we have a naked Bob with all of his personal functions dealt with. This is Bob when he wakes up of a morning and Bob when he goes to bed at night. But we need to look at the external things to Bob and how they reflect Bob to the external world.

What I am speaking about specifically is Bob’s equipment, allies, pets, magical items etc. This is what anyone wandering down the street who runs into Bob has to look at and reflect on to decide how they view Bob. Although most of the material that we have covered is how good Bob is, this is the stuff that we can flavor Bob with for the true purpose of role playing him in our adventures. We want the players to fear Bob (rightfully so when they first encounter him) and have him a recurring threat to the players for a good portion of the campaign.

But of course we are back to the same problem here as we were with feats. There is soooo much to choose from. If we want normal equipment we have the Ultimate Equipment guide, if it is magical then we are staring again at multiple (at least 4) books for the information. But each piece that we add to the character builds him up. A GM with a photographic memory will do this very well as they will remember the precise items they need but this search can take a long time for those of us that start to read magic items one at a time to get the right match.

From the above six paragraphs I have given you a basic understanding of the complexity that can come of making a simple NPC for a game. The larger the ruleset the more likely you are to find the complexity shoots through the roof. I actually intend to do a series of Pathfinder NPC’s for my blog in the near future and I already know that I will be spending a lot more time on them because of the complexity of the system. Believe me, complexity of a system does not necessarily mean that you will end up with better NPC’s overall either. The NPC’s that I have worked up for the Lords of Gossamer and Shadow have such a small rule base to choose from but the rules are really aimed at storytelling conventions and thus each is very different from one another, even those that have a similar focus.

So back to how we make our NPC reflective of what we want. The very first thing is have the concept. We have Bob the big barbarian bruiser and we want players to be fearful of him. Why are they afraid of him? Is it because he is deadly, or just intimidating? I want to go with an intimidation style for him so I think about how that looks. T-Rex armor mentioned before would be cool, but what is cooler and scarier looking is a suit of magical bone armor! Perhaps the bones of a T-Rex instead. His weapon needs to be large and differentiate him. When I want a weapon that stands out I normally choose a flail, and in this case I think that is what I will do. A big double headed flail with spiked heads that has some kind of magical enchantment. I would like an amulet of bone or something similar, but he already has the bone armor, so perhaps we work on a magical amulet (probably natural armor or something similar) fashioned from the shriveled T-Rex’s heart? Take the above three items and apply them to a mental image right now. He is an intimidating guy. Now, just for flavor add the crisscrossing of many scars to his exposed body and a scar that starts at his right brow and marks its way all the way down to his left cheekbone. Nice.

By considering the character first and what you want to achieve you can peel away some of the complexity. Make the weapons and armor be custom magic items and you can build them how you want. Decide what you want in a magical item (such as the amulet) and then backwards fashion it. An amulet of natural armor is normally made from bone or beast scales. I don’t care, lets make it a T-Rex heart, it is all good!

Regular equipment is normally not that flavorable. Of course you can make it a little more intense with description but this tends to delude the player into thinking things are magical (if it has a description it is magical to a player) so it is best not to be too descriptive of other material. But then consider if they ride a dragon (Bob doesn’t but wouldn’t it be cool if he did!) or have a troll hound as a pet. What about his generals that surround him? What are they like? Are they strong and confident or sniveling and scared? All of these factors build up an impression for the players.

The next thing to do is to plan how the players come across Bob. It is much better to layer an NPC onto the players. The first time they meet Bob have him making off with a magical treasure they were sent to collect. He is by himself and he fights and defeats them making off with the treasure. Then the players do some surveillance and to their surprise they find him at the heart of the enemy camp, seemingly surrounded by sniveling lieutenants, suggesting he may be of importance.

This layering of the NPC builds the tension and the sweet success the players will feel as they finally defeat him after a string of interrelated adventures. You use other NPC’s and the NPC’s gear to be reflective of the character as a whole. That way they do not necessarily need to talk to Bob to realize he is the big bruiser barbarian. Of course it is nice to work against archetype once in a while (e.g. Bob actually sympathizes with the players and becomes an ally in the long run) but these twists should be used rarely or otherwise the players will always expect the unexpected from your NPC’s and rightfully so.

Crafting an NPC is an important role and I hope the points above help you to consider a few things you may not have in the past. Simply getting the class and stats right is only one half of the job, if that. Players will judge based on how the NPC looks and how they act. They rarely know that Bob has Strength 22 but they do know he just cleaved that Hobgoblin right in two with one hit. Consider your NPC’s from every angle and make sure they accurately fit the bill that you need for your game on game night. Keep rolling!

Mark Knights is 39 year old guy living in a small rural town called Elliott in Tasmania, Australia. I have been role playing since I was 11 years old playing the original versions of Dungeons and Dragons, MERP, Elric, Dragon Warriors and the like amongst other genre games. I played D&D 2nd Edition through the 90′s but I ran Earthdawn for my fantasy setting and loved it as a GM. When 3rd Edition came out for D&D I tried it but found it too heavy on rules. I ignored the 3.5 edition of DnD in favour of Earthdawn (big mistake) as I thought it was just a money spinner. When 4th Edition DnD came on my players and I gave it a red hot go but hated what it had dumbed the game down to be. On a trip to Melbourne to buy some 4E stuff from a hobby store an old mate of mine pointed me at Pathfinder and in a Fantasy setting I have never looked back.

Stonehell: Base of Operations

Posted on November 15, 2013 by Jeffrey Tadlock

Late in October I asked for some megadungeon advice. I’ve dabbled in Barrowmaze and had Stonehell on order when I made that post. I have not read all the way through Stonehell just yet, but from what I have read so far I think it would work quite well for a megadungeon campaign. There is enough going on to keep things interesting and for the GM to play off of.

Now I am down to trying to decide which ruleset to use. I am a big fan of Swords & Wizardry. But if I get this off the ground – this campaign is supposed to be a short term winter time campaign and I am looking for the path of least resistance – which means maybe I should run it in Labyrinth Lord to avoid any conversion whatsoever. I want the time I spend on the campaign to be building threads of intrigue – not conversion, regardless of how easy it is to convert between OSR systems.

Comments are welcomed on the S&W versus LL decision that needs made.

As I write this the first snow of the season is about to be upon Ohio. If I am going to get this winter campaign going I need to get moving! The first thing I needed was a large town to be the base of operations. Feeling a little guilty for running a published adventure instead of writing my own, I attempt to remedy that by creating my own town for the characters to work out of.

I had a rough idea of what I wanted and drew up a map. With map in hand I did a short write-up on the town. I like to have just enough framework that I understand the town, establishment, NPC, etc that I can run with it on the fly. So the write-up briefly touches on the town’s history, what makes it thrive today, and establish a general feel of the place. By putting these thoughts down I am much better prepared to handle things on the fly during a game session.

I present you the Town of Thassel!

Thassel

Thassel, a large town, sits south of the Ironcrag mountain range along the Silver River. Thassel’s population numbers around 5,000 residents, though the number fluctuates based on the mining season.

Thassel has existed along the river for centuries. With the downfall of a great kingdom centuries past it struggled as a small mountain town for decade after decade. Ten years ago rich mineral deposits were found in the Ironcrag mountains bringing an influx of people to the town.

Damaged buildings and city walls were repaired as the town was shortly returned to a time of prosperity. The flow of mining revenues and associated services soon had the town bustling with activity as merchants sold their wares and mining companies established bases of operations for their activities in the mountains to the north.

The Mining Companies

Within two years two predominant mining companies had solid footholds for their business in Thassel. Ravenflight Mining maintains the majority of their holdings in an area of mountains northwest of the city. Rusted Hammer Mining maintains their stakes in a northeastern portion of the range.

Ravenflight Mining was one of the early companies to establish claims when richer deposits of silver and iron were discovered. They organized quickly and staked out several mining areas in the easier to reach slopes and canyons of the mountains. Using these as their basis they expanded into harder to reach portions of the mountain range. They protected their claims vigorously, and are not beyond using physical intimidation to keep other miners – both organized and independent away.

Rusted Hammer Mining formed out of a trio of independent mining groups struggling to work their claims as Ravenflight Mining grew in size. With mines northeast of town in the Ironcrags transport of the mined ores was problematic. These three banded together with the idea of combining resources and floating their excavated product doe the Silver River. Met with skepticism the newly formed Rusted Hammer Mining company did just that. Soon the river was busy with their boats working their way up and downstream. So successful were they in this means of moving the ores out of the mountains by water they quickly rose to be the other prominent mining company in town.

While Ravenflight Mining and Rusted Hammer Mining are competitors, the Ironcrag Mountains offer enough ore rich deposits to keep the rivalry between the two from escalating too violently. Both honor each others claims for the most part and save for an occasional brawl breaking out in a tavern between intoxicated workers the relations are peaceable enough.

Government

Thassel is governed by a council of five members. Ravenflight Mining and Rusted Hammer Mining each have a representative on the council. A third spot is held by a merchant guild who oversees many of the market booths. The fourth position on the council is held by one wealth, selected during an annual banquet in the government district of Thassel. The fifth and final position is held by a person selected by the popular community, also during an open meeting once a year. Many suspect the fifth position is simply a facade and pre-selected by the other four council members prior to any open meeting.

Despite a bias towards the mining industry and commerce in general, the council has served the town of Thassel well. The mining companies have kept a steady influx of residents employed and the monies earned typically flow back through town. Thassel is in better shape than just a decade ago and continues to thrive as long as the ores in the Ironcrags continues to be mined in a profitable quantity.

The council maintains a city watch, supplemented by volunteers. At least some loose sense of rule and law is maintained in the town. While tavern fights spilling into the street may go unpunished, murders and anything above petty theft is bound to be met with some form of punishment meted out. Activities that interfere with either mining operation are apt to be dealt with more heavy handedly.

Thassel and Stonehell

Thassel was once a city-state within a kingdom of authoritarian rule over a century ago. The kingdom fell, its people liberated from their ruthless and often sadistic potentate. Thassel struggled in the time that went by, finally beginning rebuilding as ores were found in the Ironcrags north of the town.

As Thassel began to flourish again, the tales of Stonehell, now a crumbling prison, began to spread amongst the townspeople. Stories of the horrors that occurred there over a century ago and the rumored atrocities that still occur at the hands of a myriad of occupants.

The stories of Stonehell spread and with them came an influx of adventurers and risk takers. Many seeking riches, some seeking fame. Some adventurers never return from the prison, some return changed, and others come back through buying drinks for any at their tavern of choice.

Stonehell resides a six hour journey from the town of Thassel, a spur of a worn path turning from the main mining camp route to the west and heading north into the narrow canyons of the Ironcrags.

Bandits are said to live in the forest at the base of the mountains, the same ones that prey on payroll caravans to the mining camps in the mountains. When the problem becomes too bad the Thassel council and mining companies out up an amount of gold and sellswords head that way to deal with the problem. Sometimes they chase the bandits from their hideouts, sometimes the bandits turn the posses back. Other times Stonehell itself claims another set of victims.

Whisper & Venom Map Arrival

Posted on November 14, 2013 by Jeffrey Tadlock

On Saturday this past weekend the postman brought my poster-sized map from the Whisper & Venom Kickstarter over the summer. Checking the Kickstarter updates it seemed my penchant for skimming such things was my downfall as it was clearly announced they were beginning fulfillment for the poster maps!

I love maps, but typically I don’t go in for large maps as they just end up rolled or folded up rarely seeing the light of day. I made an exception this time because of course, Alyssa Faden! Her maps are awesome. More like art than maps! Second, with Whisper & Venom being more of a boutique product (and knowing Zach’s attention to detail), I thought this map would be either a great candidate for hanging at work or the den once I get that sorted out. I was not disappointed.

So whether a fan of Whisper & Vendom or Alyssa Faden, here are some pictures of the map.

: Shipping Tuber

: Full Map

: Close-up of the Mounains

: Close-up of Whisper

: Signatures: Zach and Alyssa

World’s Largest Dungeon

Posted on November 13, 2013 by Iron Tavern Guest Blogger

In 2004 AEG came out with the World’s Largest Dungeon. It is an interesting idea and with a $100 price tag really got the attention of gamers as being expensive. But a lot of people were curious about what it was. It is not a book one could just flip through the pages as it came shrink wrapped because it came with free standing maps that needed to be attached to the book somehow.

It was met with a wide range of opinions and eventually a small selection of players started posting they made it through the behemoth dungeon. I was not originally interested in the book until I found it for about $30 at Origins. I read through it and while it had some interesting encounters it was also a huge single level dungeon with not a lot of promise. There is a backstory and different sections of the dungeon can be expanded on to make it a more cohesive story. That’s what I did and I ran it all the way through. It was fun, there was work involved to make it better, and I’m pleased to say I have no need to do that ever again. There will be some spoilers to follow so be aware of that though I don’t see as many people wanting to use this these days.

It was never my intention to run this. It wasn’t the first huge RPG book I bought with no intention of using and it most certainly was not the last. A friend saw it and expressed interest and I came up with some ground rules for running it knowing player and DM burn out for something like this would be high.

The dungeon was originally a prison. Characters that go in will find it very difficult to get out. I wanted my players to know that before we started. Teleportation and other magics do not work there and again I made sure the players knew this so there were no characters that were going to get overly screwed over by the new found rules.

Some players and DMs will not like restrictions and feel it is cheating. In my view the game breaks down so easily with high level magic that restricting them is one of the best ways to keep the game fun and manageable. The dungeon is ridiculously huge and while mapping it out and getting lost is very much part of the experience I eliminated it. I did not want to spend sessions with the PCs lost walking around trying to find something of interest. I gave them the maps. There was no in game explanation for it. I also told them the dungeon is basically sixteen different sections and we will only handle one section at a time. If they left a section that would be the end of that night’s adventure as I wanted to prep each section when they came to it. It allowed me to connect the different sections better than the module does and to include better NPCs and not make everything a combat encounter. The best rule we did though was not start at first level.

Not a lot of the backstory is explained to the PCs so as usual I came up with a way to make them more aware of what was going. As they enter there are hints of guardians and deities, so I expanded on that and made sure the backstory fit in with most of the goings on in the different sections. Section A is mostly empty and has some other beings like kobolds and goblins that have found their way into the Dungeon and cannot get out. They are warring with each other. The most awesome thing about the campaign happened when the players decided to broker a peace between the groups and unite them as allies. All of a sudden this was not just an exploration module, but a rescue mission in which the PCs stuck to and made friends and kept alive as many different people and monsters as they could that were willing to work together. The PCs had created for themselves a basecamp and support team. It allowed me to develop some more NPCs and since they were introduced so early we had NPCs that lasted the entire campaign.

The different sections of the dungeon do have different themes. One goal of the writers was to use each monster in the monster manual that was part of the Open Game License and they succeeded in that. There is one area that is a large garden so many of the plant and fey creatures are found there. One is the headquarters for the celestial guardians that stayed to operate the prison. One that is neat as they used the creatures drawn from Greek Mythology and placed them in a section together. They mostly stayed with good challenge ratings to make sure that different sections had a level recommendation for them. It worked and made the different areas easier for me as DM to polish them up and use their themes to make the adventure shine.

In the end it is a mammoth of a book that took some work and some ground rules for us to enjoy it. I don’t think we would have gotten beyond the first section if we tried to run it as they have it presented. AEG also made a book called the World’s Largest City which I found also deeply discounted and it lies in a box or on a shelf somewhere still in the shrink wrap.

Chris Gath. I’ve been gaming since 1980 playing all kinds of games since then. In the past year I’ve run Pathfinder, Dungeon Crawl Classic, Paranoia, and Mini d6. My current campaign is mini d6 and we are using that for a modern supernatural conspiracy investigative game. On some forums I’m known as Crothian and I’ve written a few hundred reviews though I took a sabbatical from reviewing for a few years as it burnt me out. I was also an judge for the Gen Con awards (ENnies) six times. Jeff, the owner of this blog, is one of my players and a good friend.

Teach Your Kids to Game Week – 2013

Posted on November 12, 2013 by Jeffrey Tadlock

DriveThruRPG launched their Teach Your Kids to Game Week on Monday this week. With today’s digital assault of TV, video games, tablets, and such – this is a perfect time to keep the RPG fires burning and teach your kids, nieces, nephews, or any other kid you know the fun of RPG gaming. Where the options are limitless and not constrained by what the digital 1’s and 0’s can do.

Teach Your Kids

I hear a lot of folks saying they will teach their kids to game when they are a little older. As someone that has taught kids about RPG games at an early age, you might be surprised at just how soon they are ready to take on some form of RPGs. You can read about some of my experience with how my kids started in last years ‘Teach Your Kids to Game’ post.

DriveThruRPG List

To help you out DriveThruRPG has a three page list of games available if you want something tailored to gaming with children right here. There are a variety of systems if you feel you want something geared specifically for kids.

I wrote an adventure or two contained in the Argyle and Crew’s adventure supplement. A game played with sock puppets! And a great way to teach the really young kids about RPGs and possibly even coach them through life experiences!

Another interesting product it the Dagger supplement, an OSR approach to teaching kids to game from Brave Halfling Publishing. I don’t have much experience with this system, but its advertised approach looks quite interesting and it is hanging out at four out of five stars at the moment.

Or Don’t Underestimate the Kids

The list above is useful if you really feel the need to have a kid specific product to intro kids to RPGs. But I think we sometimes underestimate kids and we can just “water” down an existing ruleset and make it playable by kids quite easily. As I have noted in the past, I’ve taught my kids to play with D&D 3.x or Pathfinder before there were actual starter sets for them. I just made sure to handle the heavy lifting of the specifics for them.

A lot of us started gaming when we were just kids. Self-taught perhaps around the age of 9 to 11. I know I taught myself Basic D&D from the Moldvay boxed set. Just think of what your kids can do with just a little bit of coaching and a similar rules set. I often think the best way to teach your kids to game is take the system you are familiar with, ask them what they want to be or what they see their characters doing and then apply a class to that and start playing.

Teach the Kids

Regardless – the important thing to take away from this week is to start teaching your kids to play! My kids love it and have been exposed to several different rule systems by this point. So whether it be simplifying your current favorite rules system or picking up a made for kids from the list above – take a few hours this coming up weekend and teach your kids to game!

Handling Social Awkwardness

Posted on November 11, 2013 by Iron Tavern Guest Blogger

If your games are designed anything like mine your players will face the reality of having to do social interactions to find out key pieces of information. Even if the Barbarian beats the NPC to an inch of his life and then intimidates him it is still a social interaction right? Now I do not want to tar everyone with the same brush but it is true that there are a lot of socially awkward people that exist in our hobby.

Take me for example. I am a good writer (great when I can be bothered editing what I write), intelligent, a good teacher and trainer and great public speaker. BUT put me in a party where I have to talk about my self or about socially acceptable things and I clam up. I can’t stand large social gatherings. I get angry and upset at myself which turns into a brusqueness that people mistake for me being a complete and utter ass. I also am recovering from depression so mixing alcohol with that mix is a recipe for social awkwardness at best.

In game though I expect, and am expected to, run characters with social confidence. I can do this because it is a hat that I can put on that is not me but others may struggle to do this because of their issues. So, as a GM how do we handle a player’s ability to handle social interactions. Nearly every game has a social mechanic added to it and suggestions on how to handle that social nature of the game.

Inside each of these games there are suggestions on how to handle this material. Some games suggest if the players are comfortable then role-play it out. Others suggest players may not be as charismatic as their own characters and that is why the mechanic exists as it acts as an equalizer for the party. Of course there are a number of options that exist in between in many games and I think I have tried most of them over my gaming career. But which works the best.

It may or may not surprise you that it depends on two things. The first is the makeup of the party and the other is you, as the GM and your capabilities. The first thing you really need to look at is yourself. This is the one thing you have the most control over and hopefully the most understanding of. You need to do some self reflection and work out why you want to run a game that is at its heart a social game. It is all about the to and fro interaction between yourself and the group and how that dynamic works.

I do not want to scare you, especially if you are a new GM. But you must know your limitations. If you know you are going to struggle with social interaction, or more importantly, the roleplaying of social interaction look to the system you are using and get familiar with the system. Because it is the great equalizer. You can say to the players “The guard asks you for your identification again even though you have told him you don’t have any. This is going to need a bluff roll to get past.” That is all great. It equalizes things, especially if you have really experienced players who are trying to hog the limelight and railroad you into letting their honeyed words convince you.

The second piece of advice I have for you is this. Being a GM is wearing another hat. It is a role you can inhabit. NPC’s are other people you can play to. As a GM it is expected that you will act in these roles and it is your time to be able to inhabit the mind of someone else. Ham it up. Use this time to build your confidence and know that the longer you do this role the easier it gets. Sure it is demanding and people will look to you as an authority but you are also human and it is OK to muck up as well.

The second thing you need to look at is your group and the mix of players. There are a bunch of different player types that I don’t want to confuse you with here (but if you want, read my post about it at the Pathfinder Chronicles) but I need to say you will have players that enjoy a different style of play. Some of these players may be more socially capable than others so look to their characters as well. If a player is roleplaying their half-orc barbarian with a charisma of 3 as a fluent, socially capable character trying to convince a princess to give up some information, something is wrong.

This is also where the system can act as a great equalizer. With a mechanic then all players are equal. That said, though your group may roleplay to the character and you may be comfortable enough to run the roleplaying freeform. It is likely to cause you quite a bit of trouble over your career as a GM before you work out where that line exists in your game. The longer you run games, the quicker you will adapt to situations and be able to run game with different groups successfully, but you really need to know all the different styles out there for this type of material.

So, in short, my best advice is take a look at yourself, at your players and experiment. It can be daunting and it can also be fun but get in and give it a try. Put the hat on and GM like a demon and listen to your players. You will soon work out what they like and don’t. Keep rolling!

Bundle of Holding – OSR Style

Posted on November 7, 2013 by Jeffrey Tadlock

Regular readers of The Iron Tavern know I tend towards an OSR style of game these days. I run a weekly DCC RPG game and dabble in running other games under various retroclones such as Swords & Wizardry and Labyrinth Lord. Maybe you’ve been curious or maybe you just need to fill out your collection of OSR products, but this week’s Bundle of Holding has gone OSR!

What is a Bundle of Holding? Bundle of Holding is a gathering of variously themed products and offering the bundle for one low price for the PDFs. 10% of your payment is sent to charity. For the OSR bundle your 10% will be split between the Cancer Research Institute and the Parkinson Foundation.

In addition there is the core offering and the bonus offering. The core offering is a very low minimum price that gets you a certain set of products. The bonus offering is yours if you pay above the current average price for the bundle.

Here is what is currently in the core offering of the OSR Bundle of Holding:

Swords & Wizardry Complete
Swords & Wizardry Monster Book
Eldritch Weirdness
Tomb of the Iron God
OSR Toolkit (a bundle in and of itself with Labyrinth Lord (no-art version), OSR essays, graph paper, etc)

Now a couple of the above are already available free for download, but with a minimum to pickup for $4 and helping a charity – still a good deal!

Moving into the bonus material is where it gets interesting. To get these products you need to pay more than the current average (just shy of $14 now).

BONUS: Adventurer Conqueror King
BONUS: Demonspore
BONUS: Stonehell Dungeon (plus supplements #1 and #2)
BONUS: The God That Crawls
BONUS: Vornheim: The Complete City Kit

I actually only had the Stonehell product as it is the direction I am leaning for my winter megadungeon campaign. But, ACKS, Vornheim and the others are ones I have been quite curious about, so this is a good opportunity to pick them up!

There is still just under 4 days to pickup this bundle. And keep checking back to the Bundle of Holding website as they may continue to add more bonus materials along the way.
This is a great way to help out a couple of charities and either start your OSR collection or supplement!

Treasure Hunting at Half Price Books

Posted on November 6, 2013 by Iron Tavern Guest Blogger

In Columbus Ohio, where I live, we have a few local gaming stores and for various reasons I have given up on all of them. The reasons range from bad service, to disgusting and smelly stores, to false advertising, and fraud. It’s odd but price was never a reason, even though now that I don’t use them I get all my books much cheaper. I use Amazon for some things, but not as much as one might imagine.

Mostly I use the five Half Price books stores in the area. Half Price Books is a chain of used book stores where most of their items are half price. It is not a place to get the newest hot release in gaming, but a great source for older material, and not all of it is used. Each store has a good sized gaming section and one never knows what they will find there. I have gotten some amazing deals there for which Jeff, the owner of Iron Tavern, constantly gets mad at me for because he never seems to find the same deals I do. Sadly, none of the items I picked up were awesome deals. Each was under $10, but there is still the chance I over paid for them.

The first item I picked up was Role Aids Demons box set by Mayfair Games. It was published in 1992 or 1993 – the box has one copyright on it and the book has another. Either way it puts it in the days of second edition D&D when the names of monsters like Demons and Devils were replaced. It makes me wonder if this was written as a direct response to that.

It has some cool ideas, the best dealing with the classic making deals with the devil kind of things. In here the demons have an agreement with the gods on how they may interact with mortals. The best thing about the book is a 64 page player handout of an ancient book on Demon lore to help the players handle and deal with Demons.

The book has some hit and miss classes, spells, and magic items that seem creative but difficult to tell rules wise how they fair. I would just translate everything from here into a different gaming system. Another cool idea they have is a small table that gives examples of Demonic presence. It has suggestions on how people behave if they have made a deal, how the environment reacts to these other worldly figures, and in general it is a cool starting point to add some awesome flavor into the campaign. If I ever run a fantasy campaign again this is defiantly a resource I would like to make use of.

Another item I bought is the 1981 box set Bushido by Fantasy Games Unlimited. It is the third company to make the game in three years and I have no idea what, if any changes were made. It is credited with being the first RPG to focus on the Orient. It is a complex mess especially by today’s standards. I’m sure I would have loved it if I had the game thirty years ago, but not sure after seeing it now. While there are some really cool details and setting information, it seems like there is not much that can easily be pulled from to use elsewhere. It certainly is not a game I would want to try to learn to play. It will make a nice conversation piece next to Space Opera which is what the game reminded me of most because of the dense text and complex game mechanics. I was able to get the box set cheaper then what the PDF sells for, so there is that.

The last book I purchased is Chill RPG by Mayfair games from 1990. As horror RPGs go it is not too bad. I also don’t think it does a lot to separate itself. Even after reading it I’m not sure what makes a Chill game a Chill game. One thing the book does well is it comes with a small introductory pamphlet. This sums up the game very well and is easy to copy to hand out to players. It has a decent GM section for running horror games and offers some interesting and different takes on monsters and presents some that I have not seen elsewhere. I think it can offer some good inspiration but just does not stand up with other horror games these days.

Even though these are older out of print books that have seen their best days go by it doesn’t mean they are totally worthless. I pick up old books and games for inspiration for my new games. Sometimes it is fun to read them and see how things were done twenty and thirty years ago. I was gaming at the time but for whatever reason these books and box sets where completely unknown to me at the time. That is one of the reasons I like hunting for things at the local used book stores because I never know what I am going to find.

Free: Swords & Wizardry Complete PDF

Posted on November 5, 2013 by Jeffrey Tadlock

As noted here at The Iron Tavern and other popular OSR blogs in October, the folks at Frog God Games were going to release the S&W Complete PDF for free if their The Lost Lands: Sword of Air Kickstarter hit 400 backers. This isn’t a stripped down, sans art PDF – but the real deal with artwork and all.

Today the Kickstarter hit 401 backers and true to their word have released the S&W Complete PDF for free as announced over on Matt Finch’s blog. I don’t want to reproduce his content from his blog here, but for his own words and the caveats associated with it (primarily don’t make changes to it and that they still retain copyright to it, so don’t lift the art from it) – visit his blog:

Mythmere’s Blog Post – Swords & Wizardry Complete Rules Now Free

The Frog God Games site will be updated shortly, but in the meantime permission has been granted to redistribute the S&W Complete PDF.

The Iron Tavern will act as a short term host for now and post a copy for download. As Frog God Games gets caught up and updated, I will likely remove as it makes more sense for folks to grab the most up to date copy from Frog God rather than a potentially out of date copy here.

Swords & Wizardry Complete PDF Revised

Are you wondering why Swords & Wizardry? Check out a post I did for S&W Appreciation Day earlier this year – ‘Is Swords & Wizardry the One?’

Also – don’t forget to check out the Kickstarter that is responsible for this. There is still time to get in on it!

Dungeon Crawl Classic Campaigns

Posted on November 5, 2013 by Jeffrey Tadlock

I have seen various comments and questions about campaign play in Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. DCC takes its inspiration from Appendix N books and stories. And really, a lot of the Appendix N stories originate from short stories written for fantasy periodicals of the era. Short stories lend themselves to minimal periods of travel and whisking the reader from point of adventure to point of adventure. And sometimes there are unknown gaps of time between stories that are not connected in any one way.

Appendix N Foundation

For example, Conan stories cover very little travel. Conan is just in the country or situation the story merits. The action moves quickly and he is quickly embroiled in the core elements of the story with just enough setup to get the reader up to speed. In addition, going from one story to the next the reader is left not knowing what events have transpired between each story. This works very well for stories that used to appear in magazines over the course of several months.

Another component I have noted with Appendix N literature is that even when the book is a novel, things move quickly. In one 200 page book one can be taken from arriving at a new city, journeying off across the sea, getting stranded on an island with a gigantic creature, to getting rescued to learning more about the first city, to a daring raid on that city. All in 200 pages. Appendix N stories move fast, very fast. More major events can happen in one book than happen in some trilogies.

DCC Adventures

Back in the land of Dungeon Crawl Classics. A lot of the adventures that have been released are also self-contained (for the most part) adventures that setup the plot, and get the characters into it quickly. Compared to the favoring of Adventure Paths that are popular today, that seems a bit unusual to players and judges who have not formed their roots on joining disparate adventures or their own crafted adventures together to for longer running campaigns.

The nature of many of the DCC adventures seems to lead a lot of people to being curious about how DCC works for a longer based campaign. We’ve all heard the roaring success of DCC in a one-shot – either at cons or perhaps as a break for established gaming groups. But just how does a campaign work in DCC?

My Experience

I have been running a DCC RPG campaign online for well over a year now. Same core group of players and a continuing campaign. I have run almost exclusively published adventures. We have a mix of levels in the campaign now, 5th level being the highest and we had some hirelings level up to 1st level (I think one of the characters is amassing an army for an as of yet undisclosed reason).

I started with Purple Sorcerer’s The Perils of the Sunken City to kick the campaign off. It gave me a city to work with if the campaign stuck and a unique way to include a variety of adventures that might not otherwise fit together (for those unaware, the Sunken City has an interesting mechanism to facilitate quick and sometimes random travel).

Since then we’ve explored more portions of the Sunken City, the Great City proper, mountains off to the east and northeast and into the sea waters west of the city. I have not really had a specific path in mind, I’ve been letting the characters sort of take me where they want to go. Then I try to work in a lead-in to certain modules or look for modules that sort of fit what the group is up to at the moment. It seems to have worked out pretty well for us so far.

From my time judging I think the key thing to keep in mind going into it is – expect the unexpected. Trying to plot out a lengthy campaign arc all ahead of time is quite difficult in DCC. There is just so much randomness built into the system that trying to predict what your game will look like in three months is an exercise in futility. Embrace that and you are ready to run a DCC RPG campaign.

Spell corruptions, vengeful patrons, curses, and other afflictions all start influencing the characters from day one of the campaign. Even players that thought they knew how they wanted to see their character progress are thrown loops from the randomness of these events.

Bend your game to fit these random events and you will find yourself able to piece together a successful DCC campaign. Just don’t expect to go into it with the Adventure Path mentality (not meant in the negative, I’ve run and played in my share of adventure paths!) and think you have the next 12 months of gaming figured out. You don’t.

By trying to remain flexible, saying yes to the character’s ideas, and molding the hooks for published adventures to the current state of the game it does not take much to weave a campaign together. Just some duct tape and baling wire!