Jubilation

Jubilation is my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

In case anyone missed it, we lucky few, we band of brothers - i.e. Great Britain and the Commonwealth - have been celebrating the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.  On balance it's looked a lot jollier than Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.  Judging from the pictures, de rigeur behaviour for that was to stand very quietly in the streets in case a sudden noise brought the celebrations to a quick end.

It's been all go here.  Processions, parties, flotillas of boats on the Thames, beacon lighting and bunting.  Lots of bunting.  I ran across an agitated man attempting to buy some at the end of last week only to be told by a sad shop assistant that he couldn't.  She placated him with England bunting, but you could tell he didn't think it was the same thing really.  

In the best traditions of England, the weather cooperated, dropping a further river all over the Thames, but then cheering up long enough to let everyone mow their lawns.  Then it rained again and hasn't stopped since yesterday morning.

Truthfully, however, I've done very little in the way of actual Jubilee celebrating.  Mostly I've been catching up on sleep and fighting my way through a new set of Renaissance patterns.  Oh, and sorting out my computer.  Conveniently that decided not to work on the day I had set aside for catching up with all my online games.  Dave from Mumbai was his usual helpful self, but in the fault lay, as so often, with the weather.  Or my SLder tendencies.  Or a combination.

At any rate, I am now back after a partially enforced absence and am embarking on a D&DNext playtest via Google+.  As a monkey.  Just because.  He's called Fuyuki.

Ninja Monkey by Loam.  From Deviant Art

More home game

Recuperating from the cold-type thing I brought on myself.  Sleep and fluid are working their wonders.  Slowly, but steadily.

Baldwin having a contempletative moment

A bit of an update then, on the home game.  At present, we only have the one running.  It's a small party and we've just hit level 4.  This means we're starting to hit the gaming sweet spot - i.e. a lot of the stuff we do works and we can do major kicking if we have to.  That gives us a bit of extra confidence (or foolhardiness) going into situations and as a result we're more relaxed about trying out new things. 

Roger the Feegle, our Pixie skald.  Normally resident on Baldwin's horns for day to day travel.

I've got a vested interest in this campaign (apart from playing in it) because it is the sole creation of my son.  He does not have a particularly high opinion of Wizards of the Coast's adventure output, so he's built his own homebrew, complete with an entire bestiary.  This is fairly normal.

Where it gets interesting is his encounter design.  He tends to use his encounters a pieces of drama.  There is no such thing as an encounter existing in isolation.  Each is a mini-story.  A bit like a well-structured stage fight, we're learning more about our opponents and our own characters every time we run into people.  Encounter, in this context, does not necessarily mean a fight.  Our last session saw no combat at all.

All this makes the campaign feel very organic.  As a fellow GM I know what he's up to and admire it.  As a player I sit back and enjoy, knowing that whatever Baldwin comes up with will feed into the whole story.  Very satisfying.  What we do has consequences.  Unpredictable ones.

The cthonic water sample we decided to bring with us to examine at a later date might have been a mistake, mind you.  Asking about it has already got us turned out of a shop and brought worried looks from the local high priest.  Now we have to find some way to get rid of the stuff.   That and it seems to be alive and trying to escape.

The boy done good.

Misguided Mushroom person

Adding to the gallery of ludicrous, yet potentially lethal monsters, I present the Myconid. 

They were the most dangerous opponents the Den of the Slave Takers players met despite the inherent hilarity of fighting off three giant mushrooms.  Their spore attacks are no joke.

X is for XP

X

XP stands for experience points.

Experience points are a way of keeping score in an RPG.  Earn enough of those little bunnies and your character gets better, stronger and more awesome.  Win enough XP and you gain a level and get harder to kill.

Easy.

Or not.  As with many niche hobbies, there are a multitude of loudly voiced views on XP and the earning thereof.   The idea of course, is to encourage players to do things they might not otherwise consider doing.  Deadly and dangerous things.

Back in the early days of D&D it was extremely simple.  If you killed a monster, you earned XP.  If you picked up treasure, you earned XP.  Under the rules, only the person who delivered the killing blow earned any XP.  This lead to a lot of very grumpy fighters who had spent ages swatting at a monster to reduce it enough for the killing blow to be delivered by someone else entirely.  It also lead to the kind of larcenous behaviour that gets role players a bad name.  "Ooh, we're at the inn.  I take the candlesticks!  Worth 20XP."

Gaining levels was nigh impossible for classes who didn't kill things or steal things, especially as not all classes gained levels at the same rate.  A fighter only needed 1000XP to go up from level 1 to level 2, but a magic user needed 2,500.  Bit of disparity there as your average magic user was completely useless until level 3 and it took an eternity to get there.

Beware the might of the magic user

The theory here was that high-level magic users were so dangerously powerful that they had to gain their goodies slowly.  Tales abounded of magic-users who could demolish the entire campaign with a well-chosen spell.  Fighters, clerics and thieves became progressively less useful as they went up in level compared to the magic-user.  Those variable XP tables were intended to level the playing field.

Old school gaming has a lot of things going for it, but longevity of characters isn't normally one of them.

Later iterations have taken a wider view of how XP can be earned.  Quick thinking, disabling traps, cunning plans and fast talking are also valid methods of gaining those cherished points.  These are also open to abuse, of course, but it is a fairer system.  It encourages players to build more varied characters good at more than one thing for a start.  It encourages GMs and adventure writers to provide a buffet of challenges beyond killing things and taking their stuff.

Most games now allot XP equally to all players, regardless of the contribution they made to the encounter. The fighter who flubbed her diplomacy check at a crucial moment is not penalised any more than the cleric who failed to land a blow against the dragon.  Equally unfair you may say, but so much depends on the dice - and we all have horrible rolling days.  Or months, in my case.

Personally, I'm tending to bottle out of XP allocation altogether and decide when the players have done enough to gain a level.  In a PbP that works out at an average of five enounters.  In a table game, probably 9-10.  Encounters being any kind of interactive situation.

That covers a multitude of sins, but allows me to reward creatively minded parties as well as the more mainstream groups.  I currently have two parties traversing the Tomb of Horrors (the 4e version).  One party are currently earning their XP in the traditional way by wiping out the denizens of a dungeon and surviving traps.  The other group are prancing around Freeport with a brass band and a box of slaad eggs.  Both are earning XP.  They're just doing it in their own special ways.

I is for Iggwilv

I

Iggwilv has never yet appeared in any game I've either played in or run, but she's a character I've always wanted to get into a campaign.  Possibly because she's bound up with so many bits of myth, partly because she just looks so much fun.  Evil, to be sure, but intelligent and never completely out of the game.

Iggwilv - by James Ryman.  An iconic image.  I've never been entirely convinced by the green lipstick, but this isn't someone you're likely to argue with.

Baba Yaga - possibly mid adoption process

Iggwilv is a lady with a mighty arcane pedigree.  Showing magical talent from an early age, she attracted the attention of Baba Yaga, no less.  The Witch's Witch.  Baba Yaga of the chicken-legged hut.  Baba Yaga of a thousand creepy tales and permanent frightener of Russian children.  Also, as it turns out, nurturer of  daughters. 

Iggwilv's cosy childhood home

Later in her career, Iggwilv developed an interest in demons and the Abyss and typically did the thing thoroughly.  Attempting to capture the Demon Lord Graz'zt, the pair fell conveniently in love.  It is not to be expected that two such beings would settle to a life of quiet domesticity, and so it has proved.  Variously betraying and double crossing each other, they have parted, but seem to retain some fondness and respect for each other.

Iggwilv and Graz'zt by Wayne Reynolds

Iggwilv can now be found behind many Abyssal plots.  It is unknown how many of them involve her ex love or her adopted mother, but some connection seems likely.

In my head, I see her living in comfortable luxury, writing new appendices of her mighty work, the Demonomicon.  Always to hand will be her notepad, her chessboard and her faithful messenger ravens as she berates publishers, hunts for fresh worlds to conquer and looks for opportunity.

One day we'll meet in a game somewhere.

C is for Cybernetics, Costuming and the deadly Catoblepas

C

My father was a cybernetician, so I couldn't really let C pass without mentioning it.

My father, doing his imitation of a rogue pixie. 
Photograph (c) Paul Pangaro 1985 (with apologies for not adding that before, but I had no idea who took it)

I admit that I also had a sneaky hope that few others would pick this as their letter C.  It was not to be.  The talented Suze over at Analog Breakfast got the jump on me.  Go over there, read her piece and starting pinging each other.

G (my dad) will get more mentions in due course.

Elsewhere in the in the land of C, we find costuming.  Regulars will know that I have an ongoing fascination and frustration with sewing machines.  An enforced purchase of one back in January and a deep-end plunge into doublet-making has borne fruit.  I no longer assume turkey when an instruction tells me to baste.   I can put in darts and I know the difference between on grain and bias cutting.  It is a whole new arcane world to explore and I am (much to my own surprise) enjoying it.

Long term I will end up with a wardrobe full of costumes ready to dump on unsuspecting cast members.  At the moment, I have a room full of fabric and several doublets and floppy hats in various stages of construction.

C is a rich mine as it turns out.  My final entry is a shout-out for the Catoblepas.  This noble beastie appeared in early bestiarys looking like this -

Early form catoblepas

It seems the original incarnation was a mistaken view of the gnu or wildebeest.  As with many mythical beasts, the creature subsequently found its way into RPGs in a rather more malevolent form.  My first introduction was through D&D when a huge stinking harbinger of doom arrived during one game and killed us all.  You never forget your first catoblepas.

Monstrous catoblepas

Pictures are on the tiny side, but you get the idea.

Ultimate slaad

Ah.  This is what I wanted this morning before I was thwarted by Google.

Tony diTerlizzi's interpretation of slaad.

This chap is both hilarious and obviously dangerous.  It was partly his illustrations that made me fall in love with Sigil and Planescape in the first place, so now when I think of slaads, I think of this.

And a swift edit to add another superb image of slaadi - thanks, Chris :)

More diTerlizzi slaadi

Slaadi and artistic rehabilitation

The slaad is much on my mind of late.  Creatures of chaos, lovers of entropy, beings with an unknown (and probably unknowable) agenda, slaadi are enjoyable nutbars.

They come in various flavours, and in the interests of finding a good image for this post, I googled them.  Hilariously, image search came up with the following as its first choice:

According to Google, this is a slaad.

Controlling my hysteria, I now present you with what I had in mind:

Actual slaadi, not actual size

There is something very beguiling about an utterly chaotic creature producing such a very random image. 

They are delightfully dangerous critters.  Part of their charm, of course, is that they look slightly daft.  Indeed, in the early days of DandD, they were regarded as a bit of a joke right up to the point that they infected you with some unspeakable disease.  Later incarnations spent quite a bit of time emphasising their horribleness despite their appearance, with successive artists working on making them menacing.  Largely succeeding as well.

This is a good trick if you can pull it off.  The immortal flumph is still waiting to become truly menacing, despite some good recent efforts.  For those unaware of this dungeon denizen, I present the original incarnation:

Flumph.  It falls on your head.

Not terribly scary.  The main danger has always been that an adventuring party is going to endanger themselves more by falling over laughing.  A more recent incarnation does somewhat better, but even so, the original is hard to shake.

Flumph you might be more worried about.

Returning to the original point of this post, one of my groups has just met a slaad.  We'll see how it goes for them.

The home game

The home game is on the go again, which is a source of happiness.  Much as I love my PbPs, there is still something special about playing face to face.  It's the social aspect and the chat and the cheers and groans and general interactiveness that is so wonderful.  Nothing says D&D like rolling out the map, finding the biscuits and using random bits of tat to represent monsters.  We discovered long ago that anything edible is a bad idea.  "I'm sorry, I think I just ate kobold 7".  "Was the paperclip you or the enemy archer?".

Thanks to UK Games Expo and GenCon, we now have many more minis and paper models around.  In theory at least, it should be easier to identify who is who, but despite some serious attempts at labelling, combat is often held up while we hunt for the bag of orcs we know someone put somewhere safe last week.  After 5 minutes or so, we substitute.  "So, these kobolds are rats and the purple worm is a troll.  Everyone clear on that?"

Due to the various family commitments of the original players, the group is currently down to four (five if work permits) and son and heir is GMing it.  He's very good and the campaign is a lot of fun.  Son writes a lot of his own monsters.  I rather like this.  It adds a big element of uncertainty and makes sense of using knowledge checks.

Our group of four contains the following.  Anandor the eladrin wizard.  He lurks.  He lurks really, really well as he has a high Dex and his favourite tactic is to lean against a wall and pretend it isn't him firing magic missiles at minions.

Brian Flowerbuds the battlemind is our melee specialist.  Also, for some incomprehensible reason, our diplomat.  This makes no sense at all as his player nearly got us all killed by the Thieves Guild when we went on a polite visit and he diplomatically offered to fight them all.

Roger the skald is our healer.  As a pixie, he spends quite a lot of time riding around in backpacks, but when the dice start rolling, he charges into battle screaming warsongs.  It's terrifying.  He is clearly a feegle.

His best friend is the satyr pictured above.  Baldwin is a warlock.  His sole ambition for many years was the acquisition of a wine cellar.  Sadly, he and Roger were captured by agents of Vecna and spent some time not quite themselves.  Since their return, they have a strong interest in finding out exactly what happened to them.  They'd quite like whatever it was to not happen to anyone else either.

Thus are adventuring parties born.