Friday Catch Up

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Today we talk about some of the things going on around The Iron Tavern.

Social Media

First up, The Iron Tavern and social media. Many readers have found us on Twitter and Google+, but I finally started a Facebook page for those that use that as their primary social media outlet.

The Iron Tavern on Facebook: Our newest social media outlet, swing by the Facebook page and give The Iron Tavern a Like if you would.

The Iron Tavern on Google+: The Google+ page is not new, but perhaps under advertised. Pointers to the updates here at The Iron Tavern are regularly posted to the Google+ page.

The Iron Tavern on Twitter: I post updates to The Iron Tavern under my Twitter account, so another excellent way to keep up with what is happening over here. Stop by and say Hi.

Guest Blogging

Recently The Iron Tavern opened up the doors to some guest bloggers. This has worked out really well and has brought a different perspective and more importantly, posts on some different fantasy RPG systems! In case you have missed the guest blog posts, I wanted to take a moment to highlight them here again today.

UbiquitousRat has been covering the new Rolemaster Playtest for us and been doing an excellent job. His series will continue as he provides insights on the playtest and how he adapts the rules to his home setting of Heroic Mykenaea.

Shortymonster wrote an excellent post on OSR as a State of Mind. His premise that any RPG game can be played as an OSR game, it is just a matter of how you approach it.

Kelly Davis posted a great review on Dungeonslayers earlier this week. Dungeonslayers is a free fantasy RPG with a focus on lean, mean mechanics for an old fashioned RPG feel. Kelly covered the game in-depth and is well worth the read if you are considering your options for a free RPG or just need a change of pace.

The Iron Tavern still has room for a couple of more guest bloggers. If you have a series of posts you would like to do or even just a single topic you would like to cover, let me know. I posted information on how to contact me in a recent Guest Bloggers Wanted post.

Review: Dungeonslayers

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Dungeonslayers – So much for so…nothing.

Review by Guest Blogger Kelly Davis

While the dinosaur in the fantasy RPG room is going through yet another edition change, its former third party provider fills the void with an ever increasing pile of books, and yet others attempt to recapture the old school, GM focused days of yore – we the consumers are left with many, many options to satisfy our fantasy RPG cravings.   I don’t think we’ve had this many choices in quite some time.

While edition wars rage on, supplements fill the shelves and 70’s van art enjoys a renaissance – most of our lives haven’t changed. The economy still stinks, we have kids, demanding jobs, and houses under the curse of entropy itself.  Many of us simply don’t have the money to spend on another pile of books, or the time to invest in a game where fights take an hour or more to complete and you need to be an engineer to devise an encounter.

One German gamer apparently felt the same way, and unlike most of us, he did something about it. Christian Kennig made his own roleplaying game; his own FREE roleplaying game.  It’s on the web. It’s in PDF and printable, and most importantly, it’s under the Creative Commons. That means that not only can we play it, we can help contribute to its future.

It’s called Dungeonslayers and while the title may put the game into a box, the rules system does anything but. Designed to be simple, quick to teach and learn, and customizable; the Dungeonslayers rulebook clocks in at 170 pages, and only 10 of these are rules.  The rest is character creation, equipment, talent and spell lists, a bestiary, treasure, game mastering tips, a sandbox campaign world and a trio of adventures.

The Basics

The game only uses one die: The 20 sided.  It’s used a little differently than you may have used that die before. You are looking to roll equal to or under a target number, usually determined by combining a primary and secondary ability score (plus or minus various modifiers).  A success is a success, but you are really shooting to get as close to your target number as possible. Why?  Well, in combat – your roll, the one you used to roll to hit? That’s also your damage.

What’s that, you say?  Let’s say you have a melee attack score of 14.  You want to attack that goblin.  You roll your d20 and get a 12.  You do a potential 12 points of damage to the goblin. He gets to roll a defense roll, using his defense stat as his target.  He has a defense of 7. He rolls a 2.  That reduces your 12 by 2, or 10 damage. Since he only has 8 HP, he goes down!

Remember the joy of rolling a 20 in D&D?  That’s a critical hit!  Not so in DS.  A 20 is a fumble. You drop your weapon, your skill check fails, sometimes other bad things can happen – like your shield breaks. (Yes, you can fumble defense rolls too.)  If there are fumbles, you know there are critical successes, too.  They are called ‘coups’ in DS and it’s whenever you roll a 1.  When you roll a coup, you get your target number as a result. Have a 14 melee attack score, it’s like you rolled a 14.

DS doesn’t require a battlemap, figures, tokens or things like that, but it also works well with them. Everything is in meters. Dungeon maps use 1 meter squares, movement is in meters, so it’s pretty straightforward. There are optional rules for sighting, multiple opponents, wielding two weapons and more. So if you crave that tactical detail, you can have it.

Characters

The character choices are deceivingly simple. You pick from one of three races: Dwarf, Elf or Human. Each race grants you certain perks. They follow the expected tropes familiar to fantasy gamers. Dwarves are tough, Elves are nimble, Humans are skilled. Your choice grants you a bonus to your abilities, too.  If you feel too pigeonholed by only three races, there are race creation rules in the back of the book.

After you select your race you choose your class. There are three classes to choose from: Fighter, Scout and Mage. If you select mage, you must select from Healer, Wizard or Sorcerer (Think white, gray and black magic).  “Where is the ranger?” “What, no paladin???” you might be asking. Hold on. I’ll get to that.  Think of your character as your swim lane for future specialization. Right now choose if you want to be ‘fighty’, ‘shooty/sneaky’, or um…’magicy’.  Your class grants you yet another bonus to ability and helps determine what talents you can select as you advance in level (We’ll get to talents in a moment).

You have 3 primary Attributes – Body, Mobility and Mind. These values will most likely never increase.  Each attribute has two related traits. These 6 traits should sound somewhat familiar to most gamers: Strength, Constitution, Agility, Dexterity, Intelligence and Aura. These are the abilities that your race and class bonuses are assigned to, and you can increase through advancement.

There are also several derived stats called “Combat Values” that use cute little icons to help you identify them on your character sheet and in the bestiary. The calculations are explained both in the rulebook and on the character sheet and you may refer more to these than your attributes and traits while playing.   Things like Hit Points, Defense, Initiative, Movement rate, attack values and spell casting ability – some of which affected by the armor you wear.

In almost every action you perform in DS, you determine your target number by adding the values of an attribute and a trait, modified by conditional effects, equipment modifiers, and more.  So when you are choosing your race, class and assigning your abilities, you need to think about the typical actions you’ll be performing and adjust accordingly.

You also start with a talent (or 2 if you are human). These are somewhat like feats in some editions of D&D. There is a large list of talents, both combat and non-combat in nature, that grant bonuses to tasks. You can take some of these multiple times as you advance, increasing the bonuses.

Leveling

Advancement comes very fast at lower levels, you get experience from defeating enemies, exploring rooms, achieving adventure related goals and even some for roleplaying. When you level, you get points to spend to raise your traits, your hit points and gain/improve talents. When you reach 10th level you may choose to change to a ‘hero class’. These classes represent some of the traditional themes we love so much in our fantasy gaming. There are 3 heroic classes for each base class. Fighters can become Berserkers, Paladins or Weapon Masters. Scouts: Assassins, Rangers and Rogues. Each type of mage (Healer, Wizard and Sorcerer) have three as well, like Druid, Elementalist and Blood Mage!  Picking a Hero class opens up some talents unavailable to any other classes and really helps you define your character’s role in the party.

Game Mastering

The game master has a lot of help in designing adventures for DS. First, there is a large bestiary filled with some of the traditional creatures encountered in any good fantasy game. There are guidelines for creating tougher, more seasoned version of monsters. Each monster has a “Foe Factor” to help you determine if your adventuring party is ready to fight them and if so, how many at once.

Treasure tables abound, making on-the-fly gaming much easier, as you can roll random loot after the encounter. The monster ‘stat block’ includes suggested treasure table choices as well.

The rulebook includes a brief introduction to the DS campaign world “Caera”. It’s a small but varied world filled with all the types of locations you’d expect. The game designers intentionally made it a small world, to encourage you to run a forest game one week, a city game the next, a desert adventure after that – and avoid explaining how your characters trekked thousands of miles to get there.  There are lots of interesting little ruins and enticing locations on the map, guaranteed to start the seeds of adventure.

There are also three adventures in the book as well. Each one designed to be played in one session. On the DS website, there are about a dozen more adventures, each one page in length. Most are simple dungeon crawls and they provide a night’s entertainment.  The maps and icons are common among these adventures so they are easy to pick up and run without ANY prep time on the GM’s part.

Licensed to Create

The creative commons license (which basically says make what you want for this game as long as you offer it for free) really inspires people to design more cool stuff for DS. It’s been around in Germany for a few years, so there is a lot of material in German waiting translation. Some of the materials are promoted on the DS website. There is a whole new spell system you can try out, for example. In Europe, people have taken the skeleton of the DS system and used it for other classic RPG genres including: Zombieslayers (modern zombie apocalypse), GammaSlayers (mutant future apocalypse), and DS-X (an X-Files/conspiracy/MIB type setting).  I can’t wait to see these translated into English! Play with this system a few times and you will want to create something with it too.

Summary

What can I say? I love this little game. I love that it’s one booklet, I love that it’s free, I love the open license, I love how quick it plays and what little time it takes to prepare for. There is absolutely no reason not to download this and let your gaming group know about it.  Will it replace all those other fantasy games out there that we’ve shelled out hundreds of dollars for? Maybe not, but I guarantee you that you will have as much fun (or more) playing it. It is a great ‘go to’ game for when your gaming group can’t all get together, or for when your GM needs a break, and it would make a great game to run at conventions. So what are you waiting for? Go to www.dungeonslayers.com today.

Bio

Kelly Davis has been playing roleplaying games for most of his 40 something years. Most of that time has been spent as a game master.  He works as a contract system analyst for General Motors and is happily married with two creative kids who he is hoping will take up his hobbies.  His favorite games include D&D (all editions), Gamma World, Savage Worlds and now Dungeonslayers!

Rolemaster: Introducing Spell Law

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The post below is written by UbiquitousRat, a guest blogger for The Iron Tavern.

Having had roughly 36 hours to read and digest (at the time of writing) the new Rolemaster rules, this article presents an overview of what Spell Law is all about.

Spell Law was the second book released for the new Rolemaster public playtest, and it sits alongside Character Law and Arms Law at the core of the rules.

What’s in Spell Law?

The top 10 cool features of Spell Law are:

  1. 171 Spells Lists, or roughly 4, 275 spells
  2. Three Realms of Magic
  3. Base, Open, Closed and Evil spell lists, helping GMs to manage the power
  4. Loads of utility and informational spells, not just combat magic
  5. Options for GMs which magnify the roleplaying aspects of magic
  6. Possible spell failure, making magic risky but manageable by clever players
  7. Cool and simple magic enhancement items
  8. Magic Ritual rules to allow for larger magical endeavours
  9. Spells for 15 of the 21 Professions in Character Law
  10. The possibility for even a Fighter to learn a spell or two

Spell Lists

It was with genuine glee that I printed off and poured over the 171 Spell Lists in the book. A Spell List is a collection of related individual spells which are learned in progression from the easiest rotes towards the most powerful effects.

Each list has 20 levels of spells, one through 20, and then additional spells at levels 25, 30, 35, 40, and 50. In short, you can cast a spell at the level equal to your Skill Rank in the related Spell List. Doing the arithmetic, you will see that Spell Law contains around 4, 275 spells. But that’s not all.

Spell Lists are also classified based upon their ease of learning and power. Open Lists are the easiest to grasp, while Closed Lists (and also Evil Lists) are the toughest to learn. Each magical Profession also has their own customised Base Lists, which are of medium difficulty to learn.

Realms of Magic

Rolemaster presents magic through three distinct yet interconnected Realms of Magic. These are the Essence, Channelling and Mentalism realms.

Essence is the classic Mage magic, utilising the raw energies of life to create elemental and other cool effects. The elements of Cold, Earth, Fire, Light, Water and Wind are all at the mercy of the Essence worker.

Channelling is all about pulling down power from an external power, usually imagined as a deity or other supernatural entity. Of course, as with everything in Rolemaster, this is up to your own setting and GM’s call, but the spells are tangibly different in feel to those of the Essence Realm.

Mentalism is the magic of the internal self, projected into the world, the power of the mind and will. Mentalists (yup, I still love that name) are all about influence and shaping perceptions. In some ways these are the most limited spells in terms of range and scope, focused on individuals or small groups, but their power can be profound.

We also need to mention that there are Semi- and Hybrid- spellcasters. Semi-spellcasters, like the Paladin, Ranger or Bard, mix their own Base Spell Lists with skill at Arms. Hybrid-spellcasters, like the Sorcerer, mix two of the realms of magic (in this case Channelling and Essence to make lovely destruction magic).

An All-Round Magic System

There are a lot of aspects to Spell Law that I really enjoy. At the risk of skimming over the details, here’s a run-down.

Firstly, I like that magic is risky and yet manageable through clever play. You need to make a Spell Casting Roll each time you cast, but you can decide how long you want to spend wiggling your fingers and chanting. You can decide cast fast at higher risk, try to cast with either hands full or your mouth gagged, or even try to be subtle and sly so that others don’t notice. All of these options are handled by simple modifiers to a basic Spell Casting Roll. One d100 roll, pass or fail. Spell failure gives you a roll on a nasty table tuned to your realm of magic.

Secondly, I love the way that Rolemaster helps the GM to make magic more believable as a roleplaying issue. For example, spellcasters learn spell lists as they ascend in level. However, the GM is reminded that the spellcaster needs access to the spell list within the context of the setting in order to progress in their learning. Thus, as a GM, I am reminded that I can arrange for spell books to be stolen, lost or destroyed if I want to frustrate the linear development of magic for the heroes. This kind of detail is not onerous, is also optional, but is written right into the fairly “Old School” tone of the rules.

A third thing I enjoy is that there are cool rules for Magic Rituals too. These involve multiple casters working in concert. They also allow for slower-to-cast effect with altered parameters. One example would be casting the Level 4 “Concussion’s Way” spell, Heal III, for up to a x5 healing effect; this makes 15 Hits recovered into 75 Hits healed, all for the trade-off of visiting the local temple and getting the priests to perform the ritual over a few hours. This gives the GM all manner of roleplaying options, and the players have incentive to use local priests and temples even if they reach high levels.

Overall, I like that this is a system geared towards all-round spellcasting, not just combat casting. Anyone can learn a spell or two (if you allow it in your campaign) but magic reaches into all aspects of play, not just the combat scene.

Last Words

Spell Law excites me because it puts a lot of options back into roleplaying. Instead of simplistic generic effects conveniently labelled as “magic”, this book gives you a coherent magic system which feels magical.

Spell Law is available as a FREE download for the duration of the Rolemaster Public Playtest. Why not grab the .PDF and have a look for yourself?

Bio

UbiquitousRat is a long-time roleplayer and gamesmaster who has a history with gaming going back to 1979. In 1994 he joined Games Workshop, spending 12 years in the gaming industry at the coal-face of tabletop wargaming. In 1998 he founded the Friday Night Roleplay group at his home in suburban Nottinghamshire, UK, and ever since has been the primary GM. The group was involved in the playtest of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition and Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay, as well as giving air to the development of 6d6 RPG. The core five players are all looking forward to the new Rolemaster and everyone is excited to be sharing the story in The Iron Tavern. Oh, and he’s also a high school teacher during the daytime.

Review: Through the Cotillion of Hours

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Author:  Daniel J. Bishop
Publisher:  Purple Duck Games
Art: Scott Ackerman
Price: PDF $3.50 / Print(+ PDF) $7.50
Pages:   15

Through the Cotillion of Hours is Purple Duck Games third release in their Adventure Locale line supporting the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG and the second written by Daniel Bishop. The Adventure Locale series of adventures written to be dropped into nearly any DCC RPG campaign with minimal prep. One of the unique characteristics about this particular release is it can be used for any character level and any number of characters.

As noted in the blurb text for the adventure, sleeping characters are invited to a masked ball of the Dreaming God, Somnus. Donning masks the characters are granted entrance to the palace where they are left to find the Dreaming God Somnus to possibly ask him to grant them some request. Best be careful though as not all requests are met with pleasure.

The adventure can be run as a drop-in as it can occur while characters sleep. That keeps a DCC RPG judge from having to work it into the current campaign as it can literally happen at anytime in a campaign path.

I mentioned earlier the Adventure Locale series are designed to be run with minimal prep and dropped into existing campaign worlds. This adventure truly delivers on the drop-in factor. Given that it can be run with any number of players and any level of character, it really is quite flexible. I could easily see prepping this and having it ready to run for nights that we are a couple of players short. This module could certainly save me from needing to cancel a session due to last minute cancellations. All I need is for the characters to sleep and I have an adventure for them to take part in.

The other nice thing about this adventure is that they might not complete it the first time through. That isn’t an issue as it can become a recurring dream. So if I were to run it for a couple of players one night I could always pick it up again on another week where we were short some players.

The prep factor of this one is higher than the first two in my opinion, mainly because the judge needs to learn the dream world and how things work there. The adventure is also timed and the judge needs to be ready to track that time and know how to advance that “clock” forward. The previous two adventures I could literally run after a brief skim of the PDF. This one needs a slightly more thorough reading to be ready to run. The time needed is well worth it in my opinion, but it does need a bit more prep time.

Another thought that kept passing through my head as I read this one was the tie-ins to Coliseum Morpheuon from Rite Publishing. I reviewed Coliseum Morpheuon here at The Iron Tavern several months ago, but it covered a whole dream world as well. It could be an interesting area for a DCC RPG judge to explore if they chose.

All in all another solid adventure from the Purple Duck Games for DCC RPG. This one will be nice to have in the back pocket for times we have a couple of players cancel. I look forward to the next in the Adventure Locale series.

Rolemaster: An Evening with Character Law

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The post below is written by UbiquitousRat, a guest blogger for The Iron Tavern.

The public playtest of Rolemaster began a few short hours before our regular Friday Night Roleplay meeting. To be honest, I was holding out hope that this would be the case because I’d been bigging-up the start of our new campaign using these rules for months. The hour was here and this is an account of how things went down. This is slightly longer than usual, but we’ve got a lot to cover.

The Rolemaster Books

Two of the five core books for Rolemaster got released in the first wave: Spell Law and Character Law. The latter book is what we spent time using at our first session, although the guys did dip into Spell Law a tiny bit to choose Spell Lists. We’ll drop you another article on Spell Law just as soon as we’ve explored it in depth.

Character Law covers the core rules relating to creating and running a hero in Rolemaster. In addition to the material dedicated to a step-by-step walk-through of designing a hero, you also get chapters covering Equipment, Experience and Advancement, Maneuvers and Movement, and The Environment. Combat, for the curious, is found in Arms Law which (at the time of writing) is expected to release to playtest in a few days.

Character Law

Overall we were mightily impressed with Character Law. Bearing in mind that we received the rules a scant 2 hours before meeting, we managed to build four heroes (with four players involved) in around two hours. This included about 30 minutes of time spent by the players writing notes in answer to the background questions in Chapter 3 (of which more in a moment).

The book is nicely laid out over 77 pages, with two columns of text. Even without art it looks neat and is very accessible. As far as playtest documents go, it makes the usual “Word file turned .PDF” look laughably cheap.

There is a very nice introduction and overview of character creation to draw you in. In terms of style, this is a very clean read which is clear. The only problems we had with understanding it were due to players (and me) trying to speed-read sections; on a proper read the text seems very clear. The game comes over as simple to understand and play, but certainly not simplistic.

Making Heroes

We dived in the deep end. Certainly my players are nervous about whether they have made appropriate choices but, as GM, I’m going to allow some tweaking of the numbers after a session or two of actual play. Overall, however, everyone seemed happy with the rules and seemed to grasp the main concepts readily.

The nice thing about Rolemaster is that it begins character creation with a chapter entitled, “Background”. Here you are invited to think through a strong concept for your hero with a series of relatively easy-to-follow questions. The text explains the process of thought quite nicely, and my players set to reading and scribbling down thoughts for around 20-30 minutes. This was reportedly a positive experience, and really set them up for the next series of steps. For me, this was refreshing as most games tack the background thinking on at the end. Not so with Rolemaster: characterisation and story are front and centre.

Stats and Potentials

There are 10 Stats, exactly as veteran Rolemaster players will expect. Everything plays off of a d100 or d10-based roll. So far, we’ve not had to roll another die type. There is a choice of random or points-buy system for choosing your Stats.

We chose to points-buy and I am REALLY pleased that we did so. Rolemaster uses a really cool system whereby you choose the Potential value of each Stat – i.e. the best your hero will ever be in that ability – before you choose their current Temporary value. The players, although initially taken-aback, quickly reported that they liked this because it meant that they immediately envisioned the hero as he or she will ultimately be.

Essentially, Rolemaster sets the expectations of the players and draws them towards wanting to play their way to their potential. Actual starting values are relatively modest, meaning that you are a slightly-above-average hero to begin with. That being said, GMs have options to raise or lower the power level of their campaign by altering the starting points allowed.

As an aside, min-maxing seemed very much harder to achieve because the players realised that everything is important… and the first rule of Rolemaster, to my mind, is that you can choose anything but you are always making sacrifices of other stuff.

Races

Rolemaster offers Dwarves, Elves, Goblins, Halflings, Humans, Orcs and Trolls as character races. It also gives the GM rules for designing their own races, which is a very simple process. Each race is balanced with the others through the one-time blessing of extra (never reduced) Development Points, used to buy Skills and Talents.

Each race modifies your Stat bonuses (not the Stat), Resistance Rolls (think: Saves), and other core details such as how many Concussion Hits (think: Hit Points) you begin with.

My players loved the choices available and really seemed to get a kick out of the Height and Weight chart. We also introduced the first Optional Rule from this chapter: Individual Stride, wherein the hero’s height affects how quickly they can move. Easy to implement and something my rules-wary players asked for. Amazed? I was.

Culture

Next you select a Culture, which is a sort of background package of free Skill ranks. There are loads of cool choices, including Reavers and the Underground culture, both of which we found to be very cool. Rules are also there for GMs to add their own Cultures, and this looks very simple to implement.

In short, the guys thought that this was a good no-brainer choice to round out their heroes. As GM I could see that this side-steps the need to encourage players to take a minimum of 1 Rank in Body Development, and other such bare minimum Skill levels, and adds flavour for the characters to boot.

Professions

Professions are not “classes” but it’s easy to start with that misconception. Professions are what your hero is funnelled towards being good at without constraining you like classes might. We chose to create a Fighter, a Ranger, a Mentalist (we LOVE that one!), and a Dabbler. There are 21 Professions to choose from.

Your character can train in any Skill, but your Profession makes some Skills easier to learn than others. Profession sets up the cost (paid for with Development Points) for your Skills. Each level you get new Development Points and can upgrade your Skills by purchasing Ranks. Each Skill Rank is worth a percentage bonus to your skill, starting with 5% increments. Professions also have nine “Professional Skills” to give you a small top-up bonus each time you buy a rank in each of them.

Buying Skills was the slowest part of the creation… and initially it confused my players. That is, until they read the text instead of just staring at the cost chart. Timing the process, it took about 30 minutes for each totally new Rolemaster player to complete spending their Development Points. What was great, however, was seeing them interact and advise each other.

Thinking about it, I don’t know many games where I have seen quite so much group discussion of which Skills or Talents might best fit another person’s concept. It was really cool to listen in on.

Talents

Talents are one-time bonuses and abilities that don’t fit the Skills list. Examples include bonuses such as Ambidextrous or Darkvision, and Flaws such as Mumbler or Blood Shy. These are simple to implement (bought with Development Points) and really colourful. There are just enough to make it tough to choose but not too many. My players just seemed to pick one and smile knowingly.

Overall?

As a GM this rules set excites me. But then I was excited about it anyway.

My players’ reactions were mixed but overall positive. The guy who fears the grind of “roll-play” was nervous about the arithmetic in totalling up Skill Bonuses (which totals five numbers for each skill), but also admitted that he was tired after a long day at work. Nobody seemed to struggle with this, however, and the other three guys seemed to feel it was acceptable.

What did we like? We like Stat Potentials in this rules set (which I hated in previous Rolemaster editions) because it sets you up with a “target” vision of your hero. We like the choice of Races and Cultures because they are not rigidly paired to force stereotypes. We like the choice of 21 Professions, including Warrior Monks and Sorcerers because they are all pretty appealing.

Overall, we also like the ease with which we have started playing. Two and one half-hours of play time is not bad for a serious RPG character session, and we spent 2 hours doing the details. We have four very cool-looking and totally unique heroes, and we are ready to play.

The only fly in our ointment was that there is not yet an official Character Sheet, and it’d be useful if a decent one comes out soon.

If you fancy taking a look at the playtest rules for Rolemaster, they are free to download once you agree to the basic terms of the test. Check out the Iron Crown forums article, “Director’s Briefing – the Rolemaster Playtest”. Just please don’t be a jerk and file share… get your mates to grab their own copy too.

Game on!

Bio

UbiquitousRat is a long-time roleplayer and gamesmaster who has a history with gaming going back to 1979. In 1994 he joined Games Workshop, spending 12 years in the gaming industry at the coal-face of tabletop wargaming. In 1998 he founded the Friday Night Roleplay group at his home in suburban Nottinghamshire, UK, and ever since has been the primary GM. The group was involved in the playtest of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition and Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay, as well as giving air to the development of 6d6 RPG. The core five players are all looking forward to the new Rolemaster and everyone is excited to be sharing the story in The Iron Tavern. Oh, and he’s also a high school teacher during the daytime.

DCC RPG: Fast Zombies

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Art by welovethedark on Flickr, used under Creative Commons

 

Background

Zombies have been on my mind a lot recently. I started listening the We’re Alive audio drama a couple of weeks ago and have been catching up on all of the episodes so far. In this drama there are several types of zombies – ones that can move extremely fast, behemoth sized zombies, jumpers, climbers and smart zombies. I’ve found myself intrigued by fast zombies before and other systems do have fast zombies. With that as my spark I wrote up a fast zombie creature and the framework of a ritual to go along with it. After all these things have to be created somehow!

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The Ritual

Lost to the passage of time in an ancient necromancer’s laboratory is the rite of ritualized magic to create powerful undead. Within these dusty tomes are rituals thought by many of the art to be impossible. Combining the dark arts of wizardly and clerical necromancy the tome details a three-day ritual by both to create this breed of fast zombie. The ritual frees the animated zombie of the chains of rigor mortis while retaining its mindless obedience and its ability to sustain devastating amounts of damage before its destruction.

Wizards and dark clerics who study these long lost tomes over time will decipher the ritual and learn the tools, words and movements to complete the ritual. While the majority of the ritual needs to occur near a cemetery or suitable burial ground, the final portion of the ritual must occur under the phase of a new moon at the burial ground. Several of the required components are not trivial to obtain, further complicating successful completion of this ritual. Components can vary depending on slight variations of the ritual and what is available. Several ounces of quicksilver or mercury are always required for the ritual.

Upon successful completion of the ritual the casters are able to animate fast zombies.

The Zombie

Zombie, Fast: Init +2; Atk bite +3 melee (1d6+1);AC 12; HD 3d6; MV 40’; Act 1d20; SP un-dead, on critical hit also gains additional attack; SV Fort +4, Ref +2, Will +2; AL C

Fast Zombies are terrifying opponents and frequently catch unsuspecting adventurers unaware. Bearing remarkable resemblance to the more typical zombie, the fast zombies have remarkable speed that often takes their opponents by surprise. Few can out distance a fast zombie who will pursue untiringly after threats. The fast zombie does this while retaining the toughness of slow moving zombie.

High Level Characters, Low Level Adventure

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My local group recently finished up Council of Thieves. I did not run the campaign, the other GM in my group has been running it. This past week we started in on Serpent’s Skull. That sounds typical of a lot of Pathfinder groups I am sure. Finish one Adventure Path and then move to the next. The difference in this case is that our GM let us bring our characters from Council of Thieves to the Serpent’s Skull campaign. 10th level characters tackling a 1st level adventure.

My local GM has a habit of trying unusual things with his games. Our first game with him many years ago had the 1st level PCs finding a 150,000gp treasure hoard. Back in the 3.5 days he used to give us a feat every level. This time it is letting us carry over high level characters to a lower level adventure.

He has been planning this transition for several months, he mentioned it even towards the beginning of Council of Thieves. As the previous Adventure Path wrapped up he mentioned again that he was going to give us the option of carrying our characters over. Of the four of us, three chose to continue with their character. The three that chose to continue with their characters include a bard, rogue and inquisitor. The fourth had an urban ranger and did not feel he would fit in, so re-rolled an oracle. The fourth is entering the campaign at 1st level.

I have a lot of faith in our GM to pull things off like this. We have a good group, we trust each other and so far our GM’s experiments have typically been successful. The other advantage he had going for him was the premise of the initial module of the AP involving a PC losing nearly all of their gear. He had a built-in way to separate us from all of our magical gear. Prior to the session he advised all of us to redo our character sheets without any of our gear except for one item of our choosing.

The GM had a hook to blend the APs together by taking an object we found amidst the Council of Thieves and needing to take it to the Mwangi Expanse to destroy it.

With the adventure underway the group found ourselves on an island minus a lot of our gear. Immediately we faced our first combat encounter with some crab-like scorpion things. The creatures obviously had their hit points boosted as it was taking several hits to kill them. They were still easy to hit, so the AC was the same. They were able to cause poison damage and that DC was left alone, though a combination of poor rolls still left 10th level characters feeling the effects of the poison.

Afterwards the GM confirmed with me my suspicions. All he had done to the creatures to ratchet them up a little was increase their hit points. The lack of gear really reduced the power of the characters and a few bad rolls still made the creatures somewhat of a threat.

Survival on this island is another component of the initial Serpent’s Skull adventure. Even this has its moments of challenge. The survival rolls are pretty easy, but there are only two characters, one of which is an NPC, that have decent ranks in survival. There are still several logistics of survival on the island to figure out that require us to think as players regardless of level. So even with high level characters this element of the AP still retains its fun. Granted our party’s make-up has some influence on this as we lack a wizard or cleric.

We are only one session in, but so far the experiment seems a success. By stripping us of our gear and boosting the hit points of the creatures we face, the element of fun is still there. It has been an interesting blend of Adventure Paths and I look forward to seeing how the rest of it plays out.

DCC RPG Limited Edition Cover

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When Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG was released it was available in two different covers, the “normal” cover and a gold-foiled limited edition cover. I was a little behind getting into DCC RPG. I knew about the Beta but did not pay much attention to it as I was happy with my Pathfinder game. So I only ended up with the “normal” cover.

Recently there have been rumors and talks of a second limited edition cover for the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. To make it even better it was going to include a few small fixes and an index the second printing of the game received. A black-and-white sketch was posted of the cover as well.

Yesterday the pre-order opened for the second limited edition book and a picture of the cover was released. It simply looks great! The art is done by Doug Kovacs who really has the “feel” of DCC RPG art down. He has another winner with this cover as well. The book is now available for pre-order from Goodman Games website.

DCC RPG Limited Edition Cover

OSR as a State of Mind

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The post below is written by Shortymonster, a guest blogger for The Iron Tavern.

Every RPG could be an OSR game, it’s all a state of mind.

I want to start by saying that I do not consider myself to be a part of the Old School Renaissance (OSR)  movement; when I came into gaming it was with such systems as Vampire: the Masquerade, Cyberpunk 2020, and a mate’s home-brew system heavily inspired by Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series. All these were quite crunchy systems, and as a new gamer, I liked that. It was comforting to know that if I wanted to try something out that there was a rule to cover it, or at least a guideline to give the GM a position to adjudicate from. As time moved on and I grew as a player, there was always a room in my heart for games like this. I’m still using CP2020 as a system for my next campaign, and although the World of darkness has fallen out of my favour, I still like Gothic horror games with a bit of crunch, such as Unhallowed Metropolis.

What has changed however is that I’m spending more and more of my time as a GM to the point that I spend more time running games than playing in them. Quite often these days I feel the need to ignore rules in favour of maintaining the flow of the story. Some may think this might not be in the spirit of fair play to my players, but I promise one thing, if I drop a rule for them, that same rule drop applies to all the NPCs too, and vice versa. Often I’m not dropping a rule because it doesn’t work, or because leaving it in gets in the way of me telling the story I want to tell, but because it gets in the way of the free flow of play. This is something that should be just as much of a concern to me as it is to my players, but they should never have to deal with, in fact it should happen so seamlessly that they shouldn’t even notice it.

This to me is the essence of the OSR; finding a set of rules that allows – nay, encourages – the GM to make on the spot decisions about character and NPC actions without having to check through countless chapters and tables to get the answer from the rules. This doesn’t mean the rules should be ignored unilaterally, just that they can be put aside when they become an inconvenience. Quite often, they wouldn’t exist in the first place to slow things down, as the game designer could trust the GM to make the right calling. So, why don’t fans of OSR just run any game they choose like that?

If I didn’t like the combat resolution system in CP2020 I would ditch the needlessly complicated rules and come up with something that allowed faster resolution of a fight but didn’t get in the way of my players performing the actions they think they should be able to. And you know what, I don’t like it, so I did change it. My way is way quicker, easier to explain, and opens up combat for the players to take a bit more of the initiative with what they would like their characters to do. This seems to be in line with a lock of hacks I’ve read about, people taking a setting they like, and retro-cloning the rules the fir an easier or more comfortable play style.

To be fair, a lot of the adventures I run don’t have much in common with what most people think of when you mention OSR. As an example, I don’t do dungeon crawls. I find them a bit boring and they only exist for me as a way of having a laugh at the expense of the preconceptions of the genre. I will be running Something Went Wrong for instance, but not because I like dungeon crawls; because I love the multi GM aspect and the fact that it makes fun of the genre in a pleasingly light-hearted way. For the very same reason, I’m a big fan of the Munchkin card game.

So, to fans of OSR games, and I know there’s a load of you out there, I would like to say that I love what you do, and the effort you go to just to keep your ideal play style and rule sets going – when I see free RPGs out there in an OSR style, I grab them up quick and love reading them and thinking about what I could do with them – I think I’ll just keep playing whatever game I choose, and keep the OSR feel going by how I run the game, and how my group plays it. And a big thank you to folks of a like mind out there, who keep on hacking things to fit the way want to play; you’re saving me a ton of work.

Bio

Shortymonster is new to this blogging lark, but if you have enjoyed what you’ve just read, head on over to his own site and take a look at his thoughts on a variety of subjects across the spectrum of role playing games.

Review: Crawl! Issue #4

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Crawl! is a fanzine for the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. The fanzine is wrangled by the Reverand Dak and is only available in paper form. In the day and age of electronic distribution that last point might sound a little odd. But it is quite refreshing to stroll out to the mailbox after work and find the most recent issue there.

The typical issue of Crawl! includes additional options and rules for DCC RPG. These can range form tables that expand the current game, new spells, patrons, and similar content. The most recent issue of Crawl! deviates from that content line-up and presents a full adventure.

Issue #4 includes a 5th level adventure written by Yves “sheriffharry” Larochelle, a detailed village with NPCs, a forest, a new dragon, a dungeon, new magic items and more. The layout of this issue was done in a way that allows people that are not necessarily in the market for a new adventure to “steal” bits and pieces and use them separately from the adventure itself.

While I have not been able to play-test the adventure in this issue, it reads well and should be an enjoyable session or two of fun. As mentioned before there are several things in this issue I could easily drop into my existing campaign. From monsters to NPCs to populated dungeons the issue proves very useful to an judge running DCC RPG.

Scott Ackerman does much of the artwork in this issue. If you are a fan of DCC RPG you have probably been seeing more and more of his art pop up in some of the 3PP products. Scott really seems to catch the Appendix N feel of DCC RPG with his art depicting twisted creatures and scenes.

If you play the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, you should check Crawl! out if you have not already.