DM Burnout

I have supposedly been running two simultaneous Labyrinth Lord campaigns for several years now. I say "supposedly" because my "home" game (played over Skype) has really been on hiatus for a year or more at this point -- the last two sessions (numbers 87 and 88) took place in June 2015 (on 6/8 and 6/15) and those came after a break lasting since September 2014. I love that group but I cite two factors that led to me losing steam and enforcing, mainly through inaction, a hiatus:

(1) I must admit that gaming over the internet, for me, is a pale shadow of gaming live, in person, at a table. No matter how good the technology gets there is, for me, a disconnect or a missing piece that rears its head in various ways online: less spontaneous fun chatter and humor takes place, some details get missed or talked over or need to be repeated, to somewhat lessened effect. The whole thing feels like a giant, three-dimensional, full-sensory experience being strained through a small, thin, partial, two-dimensional medium. It will do in a pinch but sadly I must report that online RPG'ing has ultimately been a disappointment to me. There are, of course, high points and much fun to be had, but also a lot of tiring pragmatics that drag the experience down for me.

(2) I am experiencing general DM burnout. As evidence of this, just this past weekend I also made official a hiatus for my public Labyrinth Lord game at Lift Bridge Book Shop. The group hadn't met for about a month anyway and "the group" in this case is really down to one guy. Or maybe almost two guys: one player who could show up on time, and another who came for the last hour of each session, unable to come earlier due to his work schedule. Then recently, even guy #1 started missing sessions due to the demands of a new job, so between my feelings of DM burnout and critically low attendance, it was time to give that campaign a rest, at least until summer but maybe indefinitely.

Meanwhile, somebody else I met through the bookstore -- who also happens to be a bookstore employee -- has started running an after-hours 5e game, which I have joined as a player. I am playing Ur, a dwarven barbarian, and having a grand old time fighting undead and the like. I think it is really crucial (at least for me) to take time to see both sides of the referee's screen. Playing in someone else's campaign is really freeing, fun, and rejuvenating. So thanks Christine for running such a great game!

That 5e game has been running a couple of months so far and last weekend we had our first session in which only two players showed up. Prior to that, we were averaging at least three players (in addition to the DM) each time. But never fear, the DM was ready -- she had prepared a short one-off scenario using the old TSR Marvel Super Heroes RPG -- the one that uses the brilliant FASERIP system. (If you love that game as much as I do, check out this site.) I had a great time playing -- who else?  -- Ben Grimm, while my comrade chose Spidey. So fun! It's clobberin' time!

Lift Bridge Game Updates

While most of the players have turned over since this picture was taken in Nov. 2012, this accurately depicts the space in which we play Labyrinth Lord at Lift Bridge Books in Brockport, NY.  

Much as I reported last March, I have been away from blogging (and may remain so) for awhile but am very busy gaming! Today I want to post a couple updates about my open-to-the-public Labyrinth Lord game that meets twice a month at Lift Bridge Book Shop.

Repurposing Classic Modules
The Lift Bridge-based group has been adventuring in central and eastern Ara, having found a dwarven artifact weapon called Whelm in the treasure horde of a green dragon they slew a few days east of Kaladar. A few sessions ago, that magical dwarven warhammer communicated to one of the party members -- an elven thief named Rux Joopy -- and offered him a chance to become dwarven champion and hero. Rux accepted, and instantly transmogrified into a dwarf. The party then marched north to Gannar and received the blessing of King Robert V, who charged them to seek out another missing dwarven artifact, the sword Skeenkarbulo, rumored to be held by the vile fire giant king Snurre in the heart of the mountains.

As those in the know will have deciphered by now, I have been having a grand old time using some classic TSR adventure modules as the basis for this group's recent exploits. I am not slavishly following all the directives in these modules -- turning the resting place of Whelm into a dragon's horde rather than (primarily) the haunt of a crazy wizard, for example -- but rather modifying them to fit our own ongoing pursuits. Fun!

They've been fighting a lot of these . . . 

. . . and today they fought one of these . . . 

. . . and saw a couple of these things mating!

Starting New PCs

When PCs die, or when new players join the group, I have been starting off the new characters that replace them at a higher level than 1st, since the bulk of the party is now up at 5th and 6th level on average (Voltage the Druid, the longest-lived and most powerful character in the party, hit 7th level at the end of last session). The rough guideline I used is:

Average Party Level                Starting XP

         4th - 5th                                    4,400

         5th - 6th                                   10,001

Not much else to report, just that we're having lots of fun.

UPDATE 9/22/14: Glancing over an old set of House Rules from my "home" campaign, I was reminded today that the Lift Bridge Campaign adopted a new ongoing ruling yesterday: During chargen, attribute scores are generated by rolling 4d6, discarding the lowest die roll, and assigning the result to each attribute in order: STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS, and CHA. 

The Village of Hommlet As Adventure Locale

I am a big fan of pilfering ideas, maps, and locales from various published adventure modules and gaming publications. While the Lands of Ara is to some extent a full-fledged game world, with many basic assumptions built in and many others organically accruing over time, it has always also been a place into which I can ungraciously shoehorn a modified map from a Gygax module, a random encounter idea horked from Jeff Rients' blog, and/or an entire megadungeon by Michael Curtis. To me this "sampling" is absolutely integral to my DM'ing process: not only do I enjoy buying, reading, and raiding other creative people's RPG'ing products, but I am also a fairly half-assed and slapdash preparer, so when the PCs suddenly decide to visit a place I haven't yet mapped, it is great fun for me to just choose an old TSR module and use (parts of) that. In short, I like allowing significant input from outside sources, sometimes randomly generated, sometimes deliberately planted, to infuse Ara with elements that exceed the limits of my own imagination.

Along this line, last summer there was a spat of creative blog talk about using TSR's 1979 adventure module, The Village of Hommlet, as a launching point for different types of campaigns. Of course, James Maliszewski has succinctly assessed why Hommlet makes such a rich foundation for old-school adventure in general, but in particular I refer to two separate posts (here and here) on James Smith's previous blog, The Underdark Gazette.*  scottsz in particular gets going in the comments of the first post above with a proposed 'alternate' version of T2, T3, and T4 -- and it rocks! Here are some excerpts:

[Given] how Furyondy and Veluna take such an interest in events of the Temple, characters at 2nd level could take a trip to a garrison to report their findings and make contact with more forces of Good/get more background about the history of the Temple. They might ask an 'official' historian (and not some Hommlet druid) what happened. Perhaps they'll get the truth or another part of a mystery. A full 'city module' isn't required - people of importance would want to prevent any panic about the Temple's resurgence.

If module T2 - Temple of Elemental Evil was targeted for levels 2-4, involved a lot of investigation and 'mood buildup' and led to a Temple visit, PCs still aren't likely to get inside - but at least PCs get there. T2 could culminate in rooting out and nullifying the Greyhawk influence of Temple operatives outside the Temple, even if such influence was to powerful entities in Furyondy or Veluna.

T3 - The Elemental Keys could be about finding (a) particular artifact(s) allowing entrance (perhaps Goldenskull wasn't kept inside the Temple but safeguarded elsewhere!), and wouldn't require railroading if the characters were already (falsely) accused of 'treason' and being hunted.

T4 - The Lady of Fungi begins with entrance to the Temple and reaches Zuggtmoy. Throughout the 'T' series, the assumption is that the 4 classical Greek elements are what are referred to by Elemental Evil - an assumption that proves to be dangerously incorrect!

And then there's James' own proposal to mash-up some of the Hommlet premises / adventure seeds with fungi-based zombies for what he's calling Death Fungi Doom:

I didn't want "T2" to be a megadungeon. I wanted it to be T2, not T2-4 and suitable as a follow-up to T1. Also, T1 is taking place before the Giants/Drow modules, as those events are going to be in play, whether or not the players decide to investigate.

The fungal dead are human corpses whose bodies have been overtaken by a virulent strain of unwholesome fungus. These alien spores animate their non-living hosts into a nightmarish semblance of life and seek to spread the colony into new, recently-deceased corpses.

And of course, instead of a Vampire, down there, we have Zuggtmoy, needing the PC's as much as they're going to need her! And a certain bizarre, keening/humming plant creature, which puts fungi into a stasis, instead of undead. Crypts? Or, maybe thousands of dead combatants, strewn about the dungeon. Put into stasis right before the demonic fungi, was ready to activate their corpses.

Maybe old Zeke has been making forays into the place, taking out bodies one by one and burying them. Unawares, of the quiescent evil, of all that sickening growth. I might need to tweak the timeline, a bit. Maybe decide that St. Cuthbert's followers believe all bodies must be buried. An anti-cremation doctrine might fit well, with old Cugel-dudes historical inspiration.

Now, as an added bonus, I can throw a few scary undead encounters into the dungeon. :)

This all was and is very exciting and inspiring. How fortuitous for me that I ordered module T1 around the same time as these posts (July 2011), and have since had a chance to plant its titular village somewhere in the Lands of Ara.

--
* The Underdark Gazette has been taken down from public view, and therefore my links may not work for you. However, James told me that anybody interested in seeing the old material directly may request access by contacting James via email at dmkastmaria at gmail dot com. See also his current blog, Dreams of Mythic Fantasy.

Reflections on my Top 5 TSR Modules List

Interestingly, the Top 5 list I posted yesterday clearly reveals the effect of the OSR blogosphere upon my thinking about published modules. Before starting this blog (and reading other folks' blogs) in September 2009, I would not consciously have known the difference between a "funhouse" dungeon like S2 and a "hexcrawl" type like D3. I would not have been able to see WHY Moldvay's B4 is possibly the most amazing module ever, even though I read it in my early days and was impressed (if a bit intimidated) by its account of how factions work in the Lost City of Cynidicea.  Now I do understand these things and I think my game is better for it.  These days I have a better grasp of the type of DM I am and the kinds of published materials that will work best for me.

I have posted before about how I came of age in the RPG hobby during TSR's "tournament module" publication phase in the early 1980s, and have admitted that therefore S2 White Plume Mountain was an early favorite module of mine. Yet my Top 5 list doesn't include White Plume, except as a possible runner-up to Tomb of Horrors for spot #5. Why?

Because despite the influence of nostalgia upon my Top 5 TSR Modules list -- e.g., B2 is the first module I ever played so has a special place at the table for me -- nevertheless it is not primarily a list about nostalgia, but a list about how I approach D&D now. And the OSR blogosphere has exerted quite an influence upon what I currently value, or perhaps has helped me to obtain better clarity about what I have valued all along.

What is clear here is that for me, it is all about the sandbox, which is probably why -- modules or no modules -- I have always been such a big fan of wilderness travel and wilderness adventures.  I prefer open-ended, location-based adventuring and, S1 and S2 aside, this has more or less been true all along.  In fact, despite early exposure to (and great love for) the "GDQ" series of modules, which could be seen by some as a kind of proto-"adventure path" (and therefore not very old-school), what stands out for me about that series are a few of its key locations: the Shrine of the Kuo-Toans, the Vault of the Drow, Lolth's Demon Ship, maybe the frost giants' Glacial Rift.  My taste in what makes those modules really cool (big, open-ended locales like the Vault) vs. less memorable (the dungeon-crawly G1 and G3) tells me a lot about my own burgeoning preferences as a DM, my own leanings toward skeletal "plot" structures, collaborative adventure creation, and spur of the moment in-game improvisation. 

As fellow 2nd Generation D&D'er James Maliszewski has written:

"What I advocate is that modules should be made more, well, modular and that means providing lots of options and alternatives that a referee can then use to make its contents his own rather than someone else's. [. . .] What modules gave me [as a young referee] was a structure -- map, room descriptions, game stats, etc. -- onto which could hang the story my friends and I created as I refereed their adventures. What I think has happened over the years is that, because "adventure module" has become so strongly associated with the notion of a pre-made adventure story, gamers now simply recoil at the notion of having to "make up the story yourself." They see it as too much of a chore, when, in point of fact, creating a plot/story is the easiest part of being a RPG referee, not the hardest."

Indeed! Like Maliszewski, I just need some basic structures -- a lawful Keep near some chaotic Caves, a big underground Vault with warring factions, a Lost City with the same -- and I can hang all manner of stories and plots and adventure hooks upon it. So my Top 5 module choices represent adventures with a lot of that quality of modularity and, well, the ability to be flexible enough to have things "hung" upon them. In fact it is this same impulse which led me to include Q1 on my list, because I view it a very useful old-school refereeing sourcebook, if not a spectacular module strictly as writ. But to an old-schooler, a few basic skeletal ideas that can be run with and variously modified are as (if not more) valuable than a tightly scripted, coherent, stand-alone adventure in many cases.

Allow me to close with another Maliszewski quote, this one taken from his review of Dwellers of the Forbidden City, a TSR module I am more or less completely ignorant about but that came up in yesterday's comments:

"Dwellers of the Forbidden City is only 28 pages long, so it's necessarily brief when it comes to describing its titular locale. Yet, that never bothered me. Indeed, I think it's probably one of the great strengths of the module and the reason I was able to use it so often: it was easy to make and remake the City to suit my present needs, whatever they were."

5 Best TSR Modules Ever (For Now)

Here is my list of the five best TSR modules ever. I am deliberately doing this from the hip, not letting myself overthink it, just going with what feels right.

1. B2 Keep on the Borderlands
As James Maliszewki and Justin Alexander have pointed out, Gygax's B2 is a totally classic example of old-school module design, with the Caves of Chaos acting as a kind of introductory megadungeon (in a feat of "implied expansiveness" as Maliszewski puts it) set in a wilderness locale.  What is not to love about that?  This is an endlessly customizable and modifiable module, thus achieving very high re-playability value.  And it has the advantage of being the first module I ever played or DM'ed -- it came in my Holmes boxed set -- so it surely set the tone for EVERYTHING that followed in my RPG'ing career.    

[EDIT: Read this post (and also this comment) for a really sharp, spot-on deconstruction of the usual assumptions made about B2.]

2. B4 The Lost City
I am so hot to play this one that it will very likely be the first scenario I trot out for the upcoming public Labyrinth Lord Game at my FLBS in September.

3. D3 Vault of the Drow
This one has always haunted me, it describes such an evocative and adventure-pregnant place.  Vault of the Drow is essentially another sandboxy hexcrawl, with political intrigue, factions, and the like built in to the various locales in the setting. I submit that this module represents the true climax of the G1-3 and D1-3 series, and could easily be used as the central locale for an entire underground campaign.  Note that it was somewhat difficult for me to choose this one over D2 Shrine of the Kuo-Toa, another personal favorite, but in the end it is the expansiveness of the Vault itself (and the spookiness of the Fane of Lolth) that gets me.

4. X1 The Isle of Dread
The coolest "lost island" hexcrawl. Badass dinosaur on cover. Lots of replay value since encounters can easily be modified or swapped out. What's not to love?

5. Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits
This last is a controversial choice because I am not really judging Q1 on its merits as a module alone, but more as a demonstration of what an extraplanar adventure can be. As I have discussed before, Q1 is not so much a module I want to run as a module I want to keep around as a reference and inspiration, to be read, pilfered from, and re-skinned in other guises -- more of an idea generator than a full-blown adventure. Looked at this way, even the map of the Demonweb alone is worth the price of admission! Maybe if we called this publication The Planar Travel Handbook and thought of it as more a sourcebook than a module, people would appreciate it more.

To be fair, if I were judging the Top 5 only in their functionality as playable adventure modules, I would toss out Q1 and give fifth place to S1 or S2, probably the former.

Image copyright 2009 Evil Brain Jono.

What I Have Learned
The above list tells me that I like sandboxy wilderness hexcrawls, and seem to prefer dungeons that either mimic such hexcrawls in an underworld environment (D3) or else directly provide them (X1, B2). It also shows my age, as I clearly prefer the "old classics" that I grew up with -- all my Top 5 modules were published before 1983. 

Please note that of my Top 5, I have only actually played one of them, i.e., The Keep on the Borderlands.  It is therefore possible -- perhaps even likely -- that some of my module choices here are based upon my desire to finally play them rather than a verified-by-real-game-play knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses.  Perhaps my next task will be to connive ways to run and/or play in all of these modules at some time or another in the near future -- or at least the first four.

The Limits of My Knowledge (and Sample Size)
To fully grasp the limited relevance of my current Top 5 list, one must know what a pitifully small "sample size" of TSR modules I chose from in making these selections.  I have actually owned, read, and/or played a relatively tiny fraction of all TSR's published modules -- to say nothing of other old-school third-party publishers like Judges' Guild, a company whose work I know hardly at all.

To remedy the small scope of my current "classic module" knowledge, one of my new projects is to slowly acquire some of the old, out-of-print classics and read them, maybe even play them. Along this line I recently ordered T1 The Village of Hommlet from Noble Knight, and I look forward to finally laying eyes on a module of which James Maliszewski and Joseph Bloch think so highly.

But as you will see below, my need to make up for knowledge gaps in this area is rather great -- as I said, the number of published TSR modules I have actually used or even read is woefully small. I guess that's what happens when you start world-building: you get lost in your own game-world and use published modules less frequently.

So:

TSR Modules I've Played
B1
B2
S1
S2
G1-2-3
D1
D2

TSR Modules I've Read but NOT Played
A1
X1
X3
B3 (both versions)
B4
D3
Q1
C1
I3
I6