In the Casbah

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Iron Tavern Guest Blogger

Something a bit different this time around, an adventure that is rather barebones, and not really an adventure.

Your party has arrived, on their way to something important, to a bazaar town, where a market fair is underway. Your part is to come up with about a dozen tradesmen and dealers and beggars and thieves and watchmen and soldiers and aristocrats and such like. The PCs need to pick up supplies, but instead of just going through the lists in the book, you play it out. What happens? Entirely up to your and your players.

Think of what happens when you go shopping, all the people you interact with, the things you see. Near accidents on the road, and attempts at shop lifting at the grocery. Unexpected meeting and be accosted by a friendly dog. Now add in the shady type selling baby kobolds, without a license. The brownie soliciting subscriptions to the local weekly. The mountebank and his shill, and the ogre mage hiding as a roustabout in his crew.

So here now are a few potential encounters. Stats etc. are all up to you.

Young aristocrat couple and their chaperon looking at amulets and charms (most fake, But one has the effect of drenching the wearer in wine from nowhere whenever they exclaim, “By golly!” Guess who says “By Golly!” a lot?

A man with baby kobolds to sell. Yes, there are uses for baby kobolds. No, not all of them are pleasant to consider. Yes, kobolds may be bought and sold for legitimate purposes. No, his customers are not interested in legitimate purposes. Yes, he does have a supplier.

A clerk looking for spices for a particular client. Said client wants to impress a potential business partner.

A game of three card monte, only it’s the cards who decide where the right card is. And they’ve been known to change their minds on occasion.

The rest is up to you, just remember the encounters you’ve had in real life, and the encounters in stories you’ve seen, and you’ll be good to go.

There is one caveat however, keep combat to a minimum. This is supposed to be a break from the usual session. Besides, the locals want things kept peaceful at their casbah, so whoever starts a brawl is apt to end up in a lot of trouble. Starting fires is especially frowned upon.

Remember above all that you don’t have to roll the dice to play an RPG.

Alan Kellogg. I am a blogger and a gamer, and I opine on various subjects and topics. I live in San Diego CA, have been gaming since 1964 (board games) and 1975 (RPGs). Have credits in Dangerous Journeys: Mythus and have helped out with a few other projects (Charlemagne’s Paladins for TSR for instance). Currently working on a revision of Mythus for possible publication.

Getting Your Players to Share the Load

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Iron Tavern Guest Blogger

The hard part about being the Gamesmaster is the building of adventures and preparation every week, fortnight or however often you play. Not to mention all the things that you need to balance in the game as well! Each week you should spend more time than your players thinking about the game and making decisions of what you will do in reaction to expected players actions. All the players need to do is show up with dice and a character sheet. Every now and again they also have to level up also. But that is not how it has to be.

Players are a great resource for you to tap into as a GM. It is a mistake to think that you have to do everything in a game alone. Preparation and story is largely up to you, be that in the form of reading a module or creating the game for each session but there is homework that the players can do that will assist you in cutting down some time on this component.

How to get your players on board

Why would a player do this though if it so easy just for them to show up, play and go home, nothing further to do? It is called bribery! You are the person in control of certain aspects of the game like hero points or experience or advancement. Whatever your game uses to make your players increase in skill. To encourage this “out of game” behaviour you can sit down and say that you are willing to offer up some of what they want for what you want them to do. the reward should be a token reward but also not so little that no one takes you up on it. My players all provided me with detailed backgrounds that made for a much more immersive experience for us all just for a single hero point!

The Journal

What you are seeking in a game is to have the players visualise their characters and the scenes that they are playing in. The first trick that can increase this immersion is to have some of the players write up from their characters perspective what happened in the previous game. There are websites out there that facilitate this (like Obsidian Portal) that enable the player to put up notes and stories revolving around the game and their character’s perspective. These stories are really valuable as it helps players refresh their memory of what happened last game and puts themselves into character as they hear it from another character’s perspective, not the player.

The Chronicler

So, you may have someone that likes writing updates or reading a journal before each game, but what if someone wants to record the details of the whole session and build up a dot point chronology? Great! I do this a lot in my games that I am a player in as I tend to get bored waiting for my turn so I sit with an open notebook and attempt to record the whole of the adventure in dot point format. I could then offer this up to the GM as a source of information that could be placed on the campaign website or just loose leaves into a folder that players can look back over and reminisce on. It is a great way to record all the awesome funny quotes and the like in such chronicles as well.

Initiative Monitor

You could argue as the GM that the previous two don’t really take much off your plate (they would for me) but here is a role that can save heaps of time. Have a player take over the role of recording and announcing turns via the initiative system in your game. There is no real need for you to have to manage this portion of the game and it is a serious overhead in game. If you are a GM that likes to keep the initial initiative of your creatures secret, just have the initiative monitor add them as they occur on first round!

The Mapper

If you use a lot of encounter based maps or have the players travelling through a dungeon or the like it can be good to have a mapper. With some accurate descriptions the mapper records only the parts of the map that the players have investigated. It saves you having to draw it out or clumsily cover the areas you don’t want them to see as you show them your copy of the map. These maps can also be handed over to the chronicler at a later stage to start forming the game’s portfolio!

The Accountant!

This is one that I had not thought about recently. The accountant records all the treasure that is found on a “ledger” and then records what went to whom. That way if one of the players says “What happened to the ring of doom that hobbit found?” the Accountant can take a quick look at the “ledger” and give an accurate answer. This saves you, the GM, having to then make copious notes about this stuff or wrack your memory and stop the flow of the game to consider the issue.

What about other roles?

There is no need to stop making roles. If the GM has a need and can think how the player could fill that role then go for it. This can even be situationally based e.g. a player falls unconscious so the GM might ask them to take on one or more of the NPC/Creature rolls for the battle to keep them occupied and to give the GM a bit of a breather in a complicated battle. Really, any roles that a GM can share will get the players more involved and give the GM a little bit of relief from all of the responsibilities to keep the game running! Give some of these a try and see how they work out!

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.

Who or What the Heck is That? (Describing Things With Aplomb)

Posted on May 31, 2013 by Iron Tavern Guest Blogger

When writing text for our games we often have to describe something in great detail. But detail is like the hole Alice falls down to Wonderland… Sometimes it turns into a black hole and we free fall forever. So today I want to focus on a technique for getting more sensory detail into your writing without falling down the rabbit hole

We all know the main senses, right? Visual (sight). Auditory (hearing). Gustatory (taste). Olfactory (smell). And tactile (touch). But we sometimes get so wrapped up in one of them (usually visual or auditory) that we tend to forget the others like we’re wearing blinders. How do we defeat that? With a random table, of course!

Here’s a simple way to offer some description without going overboard: the Sense Table. Get out your trusty d8 any time you want to stretch your skills to describe something and consult this table…

Sight
Hearing
Taste
Smell
Touch
Roll twice (re-roll on 6-8)
Roll three times (re-roll on 6-8)
Roll again (re-roll on 6-8)

For each sense you roll, come up with some descriptive text using that particular form of perception.

Here are a few examples:

I’m trying to describe a clue in the dungeon and roll a 1 – sight. “At first glance, the worn statue appears to be the open maw of a dragon…”
An encounter is coming up and I roll a 4 – smell. “The odor is the first thing that you notice as you enter the alley, with a scent somewhere between a dead fish and a dog fart…”
Or perhaps the party is tasting the local cuisine for the first time and you roll a 6 (roll twice), followed by a 2 (hearing) and a 5 (touch). “The natives believe that eating the fresh entrails of a dova beast grants the consumer strength and conviction in the coming days. But from the first time you touch the slimy viscera with your naked fingers, bring a piece to your mouth, and hear the juicy squish as you take a bite – you just know it’s not going to stay down…”

The trick of course is to be descriptive without being overly so. You want to provide enough detail to let an image start to form in the mind of your readers or listeners (whether it’s just yourself, another GM, or a group of players) and fill in the rest from their own imaginations. Sometimes it can be fun to go a bit overboard (like my last example above), but usually you want to strike a balance.

How do you do that? A couple of tricks come to mind. One is to write what you think works and put it away for as long as you have time to do so before getting it out again and reading it out loud. You might want to stop at the point where you start to get a picture in your head or when you think you’ve got enough of your point across. Or another simple way is to count the adjectives or descriptive phrases. If you have three or more, whittle it down a little until it feels about right.

It’s a fine line you’ll have to feel out on your own to see what works for you. Be sure to ask for feedback from other writer friends and see what your audience thinks about a particular section if it’s still causing you problems.

Brian “Fitz” Fitzpatrick is a Software Engineer who manages (or is that mangles) Game Knight Reviews and tinkers with writing game materials via his Moebius Adventures imprint. When he’s not writing about gaming, he’s actually gaming or at least thinking about gaming in some capacity. During the non-writing, non-gaming time he’s likely trying to keep up with his wife and two daughters or wrangling code for a living!

Building Your Own Campaign World – Part 2

Posted on May 28, 2013 by Iron Tavern Guest Blogger

Photo By Colin Smith

Welcome back to part 2 of building your own campaign world. Last week we chose a hook, probably a world map (or at least a map of the nearby area) and a village or settlement that the characters can call their own at the very start of the campaign. Today we will look at how we inject some life into our village and also set some rules around the seed we created. We will get to the point today where we will be ready to design our first adventure which we will handle in next weeks post. Also, just to give you a heads up, I have preordered Paizo’s Ultimate Campaign addition to the Pathfinder range and when I get my copy (which normally takes a few weeks living all the way around the world from America) I will give it a good review here for you all.

Revisiting the Seed

The first thing that I need to look at after last week is put in place some mechanics to help facilitate the players life after death status should they happen to shuffle off their mortal coil on their first outing. As the idea largely forms around the character taking on the form of a ghost after being killed I check the entry for the Ghost creature in the original Bestiary for Pathfinder on pp.144-45. They already have rules for creating a ghost which on the whole are pretty good although I want to take away the idea of the ghost being a malevolent one. To do this I take away the option of it having a special attack (this could still be used if creating a ghost proper in game but for purposes of a player it does not fit with the theme of the campaign). Also I remove the requirement to change the Hit Die (as it causes unnecessary bookkeeping mid game) along with the changes to skills. The player may keep their Strength and Constitution scores intact though be considered for all intensive purposes to be able to use it only on other incorporeal creatures.

So with a mechanic in place for my hook I consider what effect this might have on the wider game. In the world I want the idea of people becoming spirits after death to be a normal thing. Therefore there are some changes to the wider game that I need to make, especially in regards to the Cleric class. As written in the base rules of Pathfinder the Cleric must choose to channel negative energy if evil in alignment. However this notion that all deaths result in a spirit form coming forth could, and does, turn this concept on its head. I foresee there being temples where wounded spirits go to be healed by kind, caring clerics that have to channel negative energy to do so. Also evil clerics may now wish to eradicate the spiritual remnants of beings and channel positive energy to do so. Thus I change the requirement of channeling negative or positive energy to be a complete choice for the cleric, regardless of the alignment.

This leaves a few loose ends to clear up in regards to this new mechanic. The first is who does cross over in this spirit form? Does it happen to every living thing? The answer here would be no if I were running this. It would happen to any Neutral or Good intelligent creature. I would likely tie this to one of the Gods on my mind map from last week as a reward, perhaps Elethna, Mistress of the Harvest deciding not to reap the crop that has served her in times of need. How long has the spirit got before Elethna harvests them and delivers them to her sister Delta, Goddess of Death? I would put a year and a day time limit on this creating for some interesting roleplaying situations if the player wants to go it in spiritual form. Finally, does this mechanic alter any of the Raise Dead, Resurrection, Reincarnate etc. type spells? Only in the way that if one of these were used that the spirit ceases to be and becomes corporeal again. Also, some of those spell requirements like needing a portion of the body to be bought back could be altered so if the spirit is present and willing then that could be enough to bring them into being (just in case their remains got dissolved by a large ooze or somesuch).

Not all seeds are going to require as much of an alteration as the one I decided to lead with. In fact the seed itself may simply add flavour to the setting rather than needing to be catered for with rules. However if your seed does need changes, consider the longer term effects of those changes. Some seeds require base assumptions to come into question (like the change to Cleric) and so rules must be put in place to cover them. But you have to consider why those rules were there in the first place. Good Clerics channel positive energy and can heal people is a no brainer in most campaigns but as this one turns the idea of who Clerics may be required to serve on its head I had to change the ruling here. It has no long term effects that would break the system and is logical so it is OK and I went ahead and changed it. But you will notice that it is still a choice though, the Cleric does not get to do both types of energy so they must choose if they serve the dearly departed or the living. Remember, the rules are a guideline, if they need to be bent to suit your idea for the campaign world then bend away. Just make sure players are fully informed of any rules changes when they sit at your table to play the campaign.

Giving Dante’s Rest Some Life

The last thing that we need to do before we start to build an adventure or some encounters into our campaign world is to breathe some life into the village that the players are set to start in. Dante’s Rest, the village atop a bluff said to house the remains of the only mortal who had lain with a God… Sounds cool but without preparation it is just another dot on the map. You could draw a map of the town if you wanted to which will assist the players to identify various landmarks. I have only ever drawn a map of a town once in my Earthdawn campaign and it saw little use. I find if you prepare a few descriptions of local stores and homes that the players become more involved. I may use a nice picture to represent a few things (such as Dante’s Mausoleum) but description and feeling draw the players in.

Consider where you, if you were a player that had a level in every class, would want to go in the village;

Blacksmith
Inn
General Store
Temple
Apothecary
Village Commons
Village Hall

Now you have that list, write an evocative short paragraph that describes each location and its owner or NPC that is to be tied to the location. I will do one to give you an example. I look to my Village template from last week and start with some of the important NPC’s listed there;

You approach the Smithy whose open verandah stares out over the Village Commons and see a small plume of smoke rising from the rear. Seeing this you know the door to the store will likely be locked as Terran will be creating some new masterpiece. You try the latch on the red cedar door to find it locked and walk around back. Under a large area of canvas you smell the rich smoke of myrtle burning to coals. Terran is there carefully considering the glowing red tip of a short sword that he has been working on. The scene is almost comical as the ruddy faced portly blonde halfling manipulates the blade that is too big for his own hands. The spirit of his wife stands behind him telling him how things should look but you see that Terran has tuned her out as he admires his craftwork.

The above gives a nice description that will help the players get the feel of Terran, the Blacksmith shop and the idea of the seed with his dead wife nagging him as he works. Next time they visit you could have the store open instead and it will give the players the idea that it is a living breathing village. Past that they might come across Terran in the Inn after a hard day. Remember he is an important NPC so he will likely know the PC’s if they are local and may be a source of employment. To illustrate this we will apply an NPC template to Terran. Looking at the cast of NPC characters in the GM guide so I grab the NPC Codex and find details of an Expert Blacksmith. It is a Dwarf but with a few minor alterations we can change it into Terran the Halfling Smithy.

In essence you now simply need to go through your list of places and follow the same example as above to create some interesting places in your town. Once you have that done, consider fleshing out the town with a few more NPC’s that you would have in the town. We know that rumour is rife in the town so you may have a rumour-mongering elder who gets involved in everyones business, asking uncomfortable questions just at the wrong time. Have some local kids that are familiar with the players and have some brief descriptions for them. A guard or two from the Mausoleum as such an important place would definitely be protected and generic stats at least for the most important of these NPC’s, at the very least a detailed description.

With these portions of the town noted down you have created a vibrant, dynamic place for your players to begin their stay. You could now start building up some hooks for the locations of the town but in reality that is more a form of designing your first adventures so we will cover this next week as we build up our first adventure. The campaign will develop through these adventures and through exploration of the areas around their initial locale. As they reach further afield you simply need to repeat the process you have done here to create exciting places to adventure in and visit. Some places (e.g. larger settlements) may require a lot more work but the process is the same.

There are a bunch of different approaches you can take to making a campaign and I am attempting to present the most systematic and user friendly version here for you to work on. This version works well but if you want to explore some of the more advanced versions of campaign building have a look at my blog where I have shown a few of the variant options that people use to build campaigns over this past week. But back to our way of dealing with things.

License Plates as Name Generator

Posted on May 24, 2013 by Iron Tavern Guest Blogger

openclipart library

How many of you sometimes have issues coming up with names for your campaigns? If you’re anything like me, probably more than a few of you. And I’m sure you have your solutions to that problem. Techniques such as phone book surfing, online random name generators, Scrabble tiles… They all work. But I’m going to give you one more option.

Do you find yourself frequently driving or riding somewhere along a city street or highway? Maybe you take public transportation, travel by taxi, or are stuck in traffic during rush hour every day on your commute? If so, I have an idea for you.

Every standard license plate involves a combination of letters and numbers to uniquely identify the car as registered with a government somewhere. Could be a state. Could be a country. Doesn’t really matter. What matters is that combination of letters and numbers.

Glance at a license plate (safely of course, not endangering yourself or others) and see if any of the letters on it tickle your fancy. Does it hint at a word? Or a name? Acronym? Phrase? Anything? If so, write it down or remember it for later. If not, glance at another one.

Here’s a few I came up with the other day:

Out of this list of 10 different groups of letters, I quickly came up with: Saxon, Werwick, Rizza’j, Dygga, Nyx, Wibbix, Hava, Ehtu, Kirgum, and Rie. And I’m sure I could come up with more if I randomized the list a bit. But I’ll be content with simply writing down 10 more another day and figuring out how my brain wants to arrange the letters to make up names.

Any of these names could be used for NPCs, places, monsters, items, and more…

So the next time you’re on the road, take note of a few license plates. If you’re on a long trip, you can even use that time to generate tons of names for your next campaign so they’re ready to go.

Brainsqualling Techniques

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Iron Tavern Guest Blogger

Photo by Leszek.Leszczynski @ Flickr

Brainstorming. The term is thrown around enough these days you’d think it would solve all your problems while cleaning your house and cooking you a gourmet five-course meal. It can be done alone or in groups and be quite effective. But it boils down to thinking, talking things out, or doodling on paper or on the computer to come up with or flesh out ideas.

That said, instead of “storm,” I prefer the word “squall.” Storms can last hours or days and may affect larger areas. Squalls pop up quickly, affect a smaller area, blow things around, shake things loose, and rattle the walls… then they’re gone just as fast. That’s more what brainstorming is to me.

So let’s call it “brain-squalling” for now, shall we? And yes, I am getting to a point.

How do you come up with ideas for your adventures or campaigns? Inspiration? A muse? Alien transmissions? And what happens when those sources dry up and you are generating material for the next session? Does the world suddenly stop? Probably not. There’s always another session to plan for!

What I want to cover here is three different techniques I use to rattle things loose in my brain pan when I get stuck… Mind maps, lists, and talking to myself. Hopefully they’ll help you generate ideas as well.

Let’s start with mind maps. In case you’ve never heard of a mind map, here’s a good description. Basically it boils down to using a bit of a graphical approach to draw on both sides of the brain, combining art (circles and lines, so don’t panic) and words (or phrases) and discovering relationships between them.

It’s really easy to get started. Get a piece of paper. Write down a word (let’s start with “dungeon” here) and draw a circle around it. Think of the first thing that comes to mind about a dungeon and write that down somewhere close to “dungeon” and draw a circle around it. Then draw a line between “dungeon” and your second term. If more words come up for “dungeon”, add them and circle them. If a word comes up for one of the secondary terms, write it down and connect the two via a line. Eventually you’ll end up with prickly beasts of words surrounded by circles and connected to other circles. Each connection denotes a relationship of some sort. And before long you might have your idea for a dungeon or a session or a whole campaign.

Here’s a sample mind map I came up with for a dungeon (using FreeMind – a free mind map tool)…

Next up… Lists. They’re everywhere. Whether it’s a list of names, items, or words; or a list of questions to get you thinking about a topic from another direction – sometimes we just need that spark to get us going. Do a quick search on the Internet for “world builder questions” and you’ll come up with a half dozen lists right away including the exhaustive Patricia C. Wrede Worldbuilder Questions or 13 Worldbuilding Questions from Veronica Sicoe (a little more recent), you should get somewhere quickly by coming up with answers for yourself. If you’d rather look at some of the awesome products from Lee’s Lists at DriveThruRPG and other folks – everything from prophecies to monsters, names, artifacts, food, and more.

And there’s always the classic list – Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How? If you’re designing a dungeon, here are a few questions you might ask yourself:

Where is it? Above-ground, below-ground, mixed?
What’s it made of? Stone? Brick? Wood?
Who built it? Miners? Slaves? Contractors? Priests?
Why was it built? Honor the dead? Hide treasure? Secret lair?
When was it built? Is it ancient? New?
How was it built? By hand? Magic? Alien technology?

Lastly, I’ve had great results just talking to myself out loud. There’s something about how the brain processes spoken language vs. how it processes written language that gets entire chunks of the brain in gear that don’t always fire when you’re just reading and writing. I don’t recommend doing it in a crowded place or you may get a few funny looks from your unintended audience, but if you have a few minutes of alone time in a place where you can talk openly it’s made a difference for me.

Use some of the different techniques together… Why not mind map the answers to some of the questions that you’ve asked yourself out loud? Looking at a single problem from multiple angles sometimes reveals interesting creative tidbits.

Hopefully you’ll find one or more of these techniques useful. And if you do use them, let us know how it went!

Encounter Environment

Posted on April 26, 2013 by Jeffrey Tadlock

How big of an impact does environment play in your games? I frequently think of it in hindsight or halfway through a battle when it seems a little late to suddenly introduce a potential hindrance. When it comes to dungeon delving the environment can be such a huge factor, yet I often forget to enforce the environmental surroundings.

The Rat Warren

In a Dungeon Crawl Classics session I ran earlier this week the environment turned a battle with giant rats into a very deadly affair. Deadly to the point that a 3rd level wizard lost his life to the rats in their warren. None of the rats encountered were anything spectacular. Averaging around 4hp and doing 1d4-ish damage and a relatively low disease save. Their AC sat around a 13.

What made the rats a challenge was the terrain. The rats were defending their warren, a network of small tunnels, only 3’ high in most places and several squeeze points that required Agility checks to squeeze through. This led to characters being able to only get people into the tunnels in single file. Sometimes they would get stuck, while the rats could squeeze right through. Once a place was stuck they could spend the next round trying to work themselves free, but it took a full round to do so. The rats would relentlessly attack.

In this case the characters tried to be smart and clear out the rat tunnels with a choking cloud. But as fate would have it, the spell failed and was lost. Figuring it was only a few rats they headed in (they needed a key the rats made off with). Soon the wizard was two squeeze points in and stuck. A rat came up behind the wizard and began attacking. Between a combination of poor rolling by him and good rolling by me, his character was dead. The party worked quickly to save him, but the healer was on the other side of the squeeze point. The groans were audible by the players while they tried to figure out whether to risk an agility check by the healer or try to get the body to the narrow opening for the healer to reach through.

The environment made this encounter with a handful of giant rats much more challenging than if it had occurred in an open cavern or tunnels of normal size. Granted it was a series of bad rolls that ultimately led to the wizard’s death, but the terrain made the encounter memorable.

Other Environmental Challenges

The above was just one example of how the environment really helped make an encounter exciting and more than just “I walk up to the rat and attack it.” I frequently neglect to take environmental conditions into account when running games. As the session earlier this week proved, I need to get better at enforcing enough of the environmental challenges to spice up encounters.

For example, light sources are huge in underground romps. In many games certain character classes lose the advantage of even having darkvision or infravision if the GM forgets to apply the disadvantages from the lack of light. Many times it comes up as an afterthought, “okay, who has the torch?”. A character answers they had the torch, even though they were just firing a bow one round ago making holding the torch difficult. Torches and lanterns might help shape what weapons are carried or even closer attention to who is where during exploration.

Terrain height or terrain difficulty can have a big impact on encounters. Maybe the cave floor is slippery or full of rocks and boulders. Movement is slowed. Perhaps the encounter here has the enemies on ledges with greater mobility as the party tries to pick their way through. If the GM forgets about terrain the group is in it becomes a completely different encounter as the PCs move effortlessly across the cavern floor – instead of picking their way across while avoiding the arrows of their enemy.

Remember the Environment

There does come a point where getting too lost in the minutia can slow things down, but forgetting it altogether changes a major component of the game. I need to work on finding the in-between to help make dungeon crawls I run a little more exciting. Playing up the environment effects can really help bring a dungeon or cave to life. It can make what are normally typical encounters into something memorable.

The next time you run an encounter, highlight some of the terrain and environment features that might give it a distinct feel. Play those up during the combat. Watch your players and listen to them. Does it build up the excitement? Does it get them thinking of how to work in those confines? If so, you will have seen how remembering the encounter environment makes for a more exciting encounter!

Tales from the Sunken City

Posted on November 16, 2012 by Jeffrey Tadlock

I have been running a Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG campaign online via Google+ Hangouts and Roll20. The game has been going since the first of August and we typically play for 2 to 2.5 hours on Tuesday nights. We have had a couple of canceled sessions due to crazy lives, but have had a pretty stable campaign overall.

I started the campaign with The Perils of the Sunken City from Purple Sorcerer Games, a 3^rd party publisher for the DCC RPG system. Several of my players were familiar with the Goodman Games modules already out which was a factor in choosing to start with the Purple Sorcerer Games products.

I liked the initial setting because it included a decent sized, but financially poor city and a large area of swamps to the South of the city. The swamps were vast portions of the city reclaimed over the centuries as the city was forcefully migrated northward by nature. The setting also includes a “sending stone” which acts like a randomly teleporting stone. Prospective adventurers place their hands on the stone and they are transported to some location. I thought this would allow me to use a myriad of modules that might not otherwise link together well.

Essentially, the modules offered a starting point with enough detail to hit the ground running, but enough white space for me to shape it into anything the players or I wanted.

The first module went quite well with some overland exploration in the swamp followed by a rather lethal dungeon for the ending of the adventure. The Perils of the Sunken City served quite well for a 0-level funnel and really helped shaped the character development of those that survived.

With the group surviving their first foray into the Sunken City they returned as heroes to the little settlement just outside the city walls proper. The group took about three months of in-game time to determine their path forward (i.e. class) and spend their hard fought gold. Two of the players also selected their patron from an entity featured at the end of the module. I ended up doing a complete patron write-up for that patron which both players have been using.

From here I wanted to run The Ooze Pits of Jonas Gralk for the group. It made use of the same sending stone for a start and further reinforced my base of the Great City and the Sunken City in the swamps to the south. I blended the storylines a bit and offered a possible option for controlling the sending stones instead of submitting to its randomness via an item that would be found at the end of The Ooze Pits of Jonas Gralk.

It took us six session (2 hours each) to play through The Ooze Pits of Jonas Gralk. I am sure other groups have played through this faster. I tend not to steer players too much, so I let their investigations go and handle things on they fly when they take actions outside what might be outlined in a module. If they want to chat with someone they encounter, I am always happy to carry on that conversation instead of brushing it aside. I think that is a good thing as long as it helps get them information they desire. But it does add time to play through the module. In fact, though we are pretty much done with the module as written, they have a few things they still want to wrap up.

Choosing to start with the Purple Sorcerer Games Sunken City line has proven to be a good start for us. I feel like we have a solid set of characters now, some backgrounds and themes starting to show through and the start of a campaign world to play in. With the use of sending stones it will also be relatively easy to work in other adventures from other publishers as well. There is a whole area of exploration behind how the sending stones came to be and are they really limited to just taking you to portions of the swamp?

For those interested I do keep an Adventure Log at the Obsidian Portal site I use for this campaign. While I don’t post detailed session reports here, I do try to keep the adventure log updated. Feel free to check it out. I caution you that you will run into spoilers for The Perils of the Sunken City and The Ooze Pits of Jonas Gralk over there as you read about our group’s adventures.

Heroic Mykenaea: Making Rolemaster Fit

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Iron Tavern Guest Blogger

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

Heroic Mykenaea was conceived just ever so slightly before we decided to sign up to the new Rolemaster public playtest. Our group had been going through a bad patch, having abandoned Dungeons & Dragons 4e and drifted through a short campaign using GURPS. What was missing was a sense of commitment to a setting, something that would allow me as a GM to commit to writing and the players to commit to turning up regularly. With this need in mind, it was a series of short steps that led us to Rolemaster.

What is Heroic Mykenaea?

Heroic Mykenaea is a swords & sorcery genre fantasy campaign loosely based on the myths and stories of Mycenaean Greece (Achaea). It is a world mixing Greek myth, magick, Olympians, Chthonic Cults, heroic action, and swords & sorcery fantasy themes.

Mykenaea was born from the suggestion of a player that we use real-world maps upon which to base our own setting. At the time we were talking about a post-Apocalyptic world and the idea was quite novel. Unable to agree on a game system, however, we began to discuss other setting ideas.

Just as I was considering using the excellent new Hackmaster rules, and actually began to plan some NPCs using those rules, the news broke about a new edition of Rolemaster. After a consultation with the group it was agreed to sign up for the playtest. The first campaign maps were drawn from a Google Maps image pulled from the web, and you can view some of the cartography that developed from the idea on the wiki.

Adapting to Rolemaster

How do you adapt a setting to fit a game before you’ve seen the rules? Truth is, you can’t.

Mykenaea was designed making decisions based loosely upon the earlier editions of Rolemaster. We knew that the core of the game, whilst being re-designed, was also seeking to remain faithful to the 35-year or so history of the system.

We decided that, while the setting would be Greek-inspired, we would not allow history to limit our vision. Consulting a summary of pre-Classical history it was apparent that what is known about the “Heroic Age”, prior to the 5^th Century BCE, is relatively limited to the stories of Homer and some sketchy archaeology. This was fertile ground for an alternate universe in which magick was mixed with the heroic mythology of Homer and others.

As GM, I made a series of decisions and then began to draft the background (available on the wiki) that I felt would get the players started. These decisions were:

To set the adventure in the period just prior to the classic Heroic Age heroes, with the first major campaign event to be the destruction of Thera.
To allow as wide a selection of magick as possible in the setting… but making it secretive and hidden.
To use as many of the Rolemaster character Professions as possible.
To emphasise an old-school and sandbox style over our usual story-driven approach.
To commit to using as few House Rules as possible.

How have we adapted so far?

We meet once a fortnight on a Friday night. We’ve had two sessions since the release of Character Law a month ago. Session One, which formed the basis for “An Evening with Rolemaster”, was all about character generation. Session Two began our campaign.

Rolemaster is a generic fantasy RPG system so it fits to any setting quite readily and is designed to be flexible. Each decision made as GM has been recorded on our Rolemaster Player’s Guide for Mykenaea. It has been really simple to adapt.

We’ve left out only one Profession from the core rules: the Monk. This is because the Eastern-inspired martial arts stereotype is too much even for my warped vision of ancient Greece to handle. That being said, it has been fun to adapt some other staples to the setting.

A good example of this adaptation has been the inclusion of the Paladin, chosen by one of the players. Here the heroic idea for the character has influenced the setting: our Paladin, being the outcast eldest son of a king, is a true Scion of Zeus; he is blessed and favoured by the King of the Olympian Gods and destined for… something cool. The Paladin is simply referred to as the Scion, conjuring images relevant to the period instead of the classic mediaeval vision.

Magick in Greece?

Erm, yes. Like I said earlier, this is a fantastical vision of Greece.

It’s loads more fun to include magick (the spelling is deliberate) than to leave it out. Partly we wanted to playtest all the Rolemaster rules… but mostly, we love magickal heroes. Looking at the party created, we only have one non-spellcasting Profession: the lone Fighter. The others are the Ranger, Scion (Paladin), Dabbler and Mentalist.

As GM, I decided to limit all the Closed Spell Lists (see the Spell Law article for details on what that means) and allow only Base and Open Lists to be chosen. This allows me to introduce Closed Lists (which tend to be the most powerful spells) later in the campaign, and on a need-to-access basis. The players like this limitation… and have to justify their inclusion of powerful spells. One player has already got me to allow a lone Closed List as part of his hero’s background.

Races and Cultures

It’s worth mentioning the Races and the Cultures too.

I’ve dropped Halflings from the setting but included something called Pel-Dimini, which are a kind of Half-Elf. Rolemaster provides Elves and Dwarves, so I absorbed those rules to fit the Dimini and the Sesklo races respectively. The system provides me with the tools to create the Pel-Dimini so I’ll be adding them to the setting at the moment I first need them.

As for Cultures, these allowed me to have different Human groups. The native rural and urban Pelasgian Men are different from the cosmopolitan Achaean Men; the Minoans are seafarers and cosmopolitan too. Even the non-Human races can fit into their homelands using the appropriate Cultures… and I’ll be making a Greek-style Slave culture as soon as I need it too, using the rules in Rolemaster to facilitate it.

Verdict?

So far, so good. It’s been really easy to adapt the new Rolemaster to my setting. In fact, the new system has inspired some decisions too… like how magick works.

During the most recent session we decided to use some of the simplified gaming options, such as the Simple Rounds optional rule (which makes combat run quicker). What is great is that Rolemaster provides such options as part of the system. This has meant that, so far, we’ve only generated one House Rule… and even that might be something that the playtest renders obsolete if the suggestion reaches the designers.

All in all, it’s been the easiest setting build I’ve ever worked on. The players seem to be getting into it too… and I’m itching to run the next session.

Ghouls, anyone?

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 2^nd 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.

House Rules

Posted on October 26, 2012 by Jeffrey Tadlock

Early last week I posted a poll here at The Iron Tavern about reader’s usage of house rules. There were four options in the poll:

No house rules at all, rules are rules
Minimal house rules, more like table clarifications
Some house rules, change things that need changing
Lots of house rules, my house rule doc is more than 2 pages

Based on this poll, everyone house rules at least a little. No one chose the no house rules option. 31% chose the minimal house rules or the more like table clarifications. Table clarifications could be tweaks to starting gold, hit points gained during leveling and items like that. 54% went with some house rules stating that if something needs changing, then they would change it to work for their game. And the final 15% confessed to house rules breaking into multiple pages.

The poll question was sparked by my reading of the Castles and Crusades Castle Keepers Guide the weekend before. Right up front there is section that plainly states that if the rules are impeding your fun, amend it or change it, but do not let it impede your fun. This got me thinking about the amount of house rules I use and whether I bend to the rules or if I bend them to my game.

I have frequently run Pathfinder games in the recent years. Some of the games I have run are for my local group where I have lots of flexibility and other times I run Pathfinder Society games under the organized play umbrella. There really isn’t room for house rules under organized play, as one needs to provide the same experience from one GM to another. But my home game has no such restriction.

Even for my home game I fall into the minimal house rules category. The things I rule on are much more like table clarifications. Things like rolling hit points being if you don’t break half on the die roll, take half. Or possibly just a clarification of a frequently debated rule with how we interpret it for my campaigns. I really don’t dig inand house rule things very much. I could fit it on a half a page I bet.

I was the same way with D&D 3.x as well. I did not make a lot of changes to the rules. I pretty much played by the rules as written save for the minor table modifications.

After reading the Castles and Crusades rules I am feeling more of an urge to tinker, to really play with the rules and mold them for my group. That isn’t a slight towards the game, it is more like a feeling of liberation, like I’ve been given the blessing of modifying the rules.

Why is it I feel more able to modify with Castles and Crusades versus something like D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder? Even the Pathfinder Core rulebook mentions some flexibility with the rules, though more in the vein of making quick rulings when the interpretation of the rule is unclear. Castles and Crusades comes straight out and says change the rule if you don’t like it.

I think it is more than that as to why I feel more willing to modify or house rule something like Castles and Crusades. I think systems with more rules, while trying to help the GM judge decisions actually end up restricting the player’s freedoms. Everything they want to do is regulated by a feat, skill or some other mechanic instead of common sense. In the end while it can make things more black and white, I think it can be restricting.

With a more rules-light system there is a lot more room to tinker while still staying within the system. This tinkering can include adding in some house rules to keep things consistent between game sessions.

I think as I spend more time with Castles and Crusades and other rules light systems I will move from the ‘table clarifications’ response to my poll to the ‘change things that need changing’ portion of the poll.

So what do you think? Does the system you play have an affect on how much you house rule?