Goblins, or Why Use Humanoids

(Note: this post contains spoilers for my Sunday morning game.)

The first time I ever played D&D, I took a piece of graph paper, sketched some rooms on it, and stuck a few goblins in them. Two players went through them, beat the goblins, got the treasure and some XP. I've enjoyed goblins ever since.

I feel like there's a particular prejudice against using default humanoids in OSR games. I think that two points from Bryce Lynch's review standards sum up the reasons why.

• Non-standard monsters.
  • The party should not know what to expect. What are it’s attacks and weaknesses? Mystery, wonder, and fear!
• Go light on the humanoids, or even replace them with normal bandits, etc.
  • If all it’s going to do is swing a sword and die then it can be a human. People can do can pretty disgusting stuff.

I've actually tried using this approach in my games for a while, and switched between humans and odd monster races (beastmen, Selenites and others) for my main monsters. But I keep going back to goblins. Why? Well, frankly I don't think a gang of bandits is necessarily a better match than a horde of goblins, and having the option to use either makes the game a bit richer. Sure, the bandits might eventually say "Stand and deliver," but I feel like they're possibly more of a cliché in my game than goblins are.

(As an aside, I'm not picking on Bryce; I like his reviews and I think his standards are good, I just find them a useful statement of an attitude I see in a lot of places.)

When it comes to humanoids, I think the key is to focus on a single type of monster. In my Sunday AM game, there is an influx of goblins in the Fazren Hills, so they'll be a piece of the low-level games. I don't intend for the goblins to act as a step on the cursus honorum before the PCs get to orcs and hobgoblins etc, but rather to use them as one of several factions in a larger sandbox.

For the goblins in the Fazren Hills, what the PCs will find out as the game goes on is that the goblins who are now pushing into human territories have been exiled from the Fae realm. Many of these goblins have links to that realm, and one of the things I need to work up is a chart of minor effects of this exposure – minor illusions, short-range teleportation, conjuring minor items, strange features, and so on.

I particularly want to play with this idea because I love the notion that goblins are really bogeymen, in the old fairy-tale sense. There was an element of this in the bugbear, but there's a reason that we talk about ghosts and goblins, and bugbears was a vocabulary word until Gygax decided to make each thesaurus entry into a monster.

I think a sandbox game needs strong factions, and ruling out humanoids cuts off a whole category right off the bat. The problem with most humanoids in D&D is that they're just an entry in the monster zoo, the ordered thesaurus that the PCs have to kill to get the treasure. I'd say that a good faction in an adventure or sandbox campaign has the following:

1. A strong hook
2. A tangible goal in the game
3. Something that distinguishes them from other factions

Overusing humanoids and overusing humans alike make #3 more difficult. My feeling is that one of any given type of monster makes it easier to do #3 both in terms of the factions, and in terms of making it stand out. If everything is special and different, then it all goes into a kind of sameness. Taking an established monster and tweaking it is a good way to make them stand out but still keep the game familiar and grounded.

At the end of the day, I just like goblins. But I do think they can fit into creative old school play in a way that I don't think is properly acknowledged.

Ready Reference: Curiosities in a Bandit Lair

Curiosities Found in a Bandit Lair (1d20)

1. A deck of playing cards with a second ace of spades.
2. A pair of dice, one weighted to the 6, one weighted to the 1.
3. A neatly folded piece of parchment with a picture of a naked woman.
4. A good wool coat.
5. A bottle of local rotgut whiskey, half-full.
6. A talley stick that, in the right village, can be exchanged for a goat.
7. A small stone that, on close inspection, contains a trilobyte fossil.
8. A small glass bottle of a musky cologne.
9. A small bag with dried mushrooms of mild psychedelic effect.
10. A sewing kit with bone needles and thread.
11. A collection of painted flat discs used for playing a board game.
12. A small manual on sword fighting (stances, strikes).
13. An intricate wood carving less than 6” long.
14. A pipe and attendant smokeable stuff (usually tobacco or marijuana)
15. A hard piece of cheese wrapped in cheesecloth.
16. A wooden flute or recorder.
17. A double sided wooden comb.
18. A pet weasel that will be loyal to a master who feeds it meat.
19. A spinning top.
20. A seditious political tract.

Ready Reference: What Kind of Mushroom Is It?

There aren't a lot of plants that grow naturally in caves and underground locales. This is generally because plants, as a rule, require light. But where there are moisture and food (which may include fecal matter), it is possible for fungi of various sorts to grow. (Conveniently for hexcrawlers, they grow in forests as well.) Mushrooms are great and interesting things, and can have all kinds of effects when introduced into the human body. This chart is for when PCs find mushrooms, and maybe do something about it.

(For the curious, the mushroom on the left is the death cap, the most toxic mushroom for humans; the one on the right is the fly agaric, which causes hallucinations.)

d100		Description
01-30		Harmless but inedible. The mushroom is too tough to eat or indigestible, but trying it will not make a human sick.
31-35		Bioluminescent. These mushrooms are neither edible nor poisonous, but they give off light. It only illuminates 2' from the mushroom but they will be visible from as far away as 120' if there is a clear line of sight.
36-55		Edible but not incredible. This type of fungus has nutritional value, and eating enough will give some basic semblance of nutrition, but it tastes bland and spongy. They can be gathered and sold for 1 GP per pound.
56-59		Delicious. Not only edible, but tastes very good, cooked or not. In town these can be worth up to 10 GP per pound of mushrooms.
60		Rare gourmet mushrooms. These are the finest mushrooms, or perhaps truffles. They are extremely rare and nobles or merchants will easily pay 100 GP per pound.
61-75		Mildly poisonous. These mushrooms cause retching and vomiting; a character failing a saving throw will be disabled for 2d6 turns while they deal with the effects.
76-80		Extremely poisonous. A character who eats these and fails a saving throw versus poison will die. Success entails 2d6 turns of retching and vomiting.
81-90		Psychoactive. A saving throw against poison should be made; the result determines how much control the character eating the mushroom has. They will experience hallucinations, visions, perhaps even synesthesia, but if they make a saving throw they can act normally through the experience. Failure means the character is inactive for 2d6 turns. Each mushroom can sell for 10-20 GP in town.
91-00		Magic mushroom. The mushroom is literally magical. Suggested effects include growth up to 50%, shrinking up to 50%, healing 1-3 hit points per mushroom eaten, invisibility, bioluminescence, growing mushrooms, polymorphing into a random animal, or reversing any of these effects.

Pit Trap Generator

It's become a thing to have generators on your blog. This is one for pit traps. Click the button below and it'll generate a fresh pit trap for the next time your PCs need something to fall into.

(This is based on my article from Fight On! 14.)

Special Abilities Tables

California in 1975-79 is an interesting place in the early history of the roleplaying game. It brought us Alarums & Excursions, Warlock, Arduin and Runequest – and as a result, the biggest and best documented locus of non-Gygaxo-Arnesonian gaming from our hobby's dawn. It was a place where pre-RPG entertainments had laid fertile soil for gaming, as documented in Playing at the World; Coventry and SCA and different life experience all added up to a scene which was totally different from that in the upper Midwest.

One of the things that we can look at historically from this period is the idea of a special ability table: a chart where dice are rolled to give each PC some distinctive characteristic. It's not exactly revolutionary, but it was one of the earliest common house rules.

The Arduin Grimoire features such a table in its early pages, or rather, one for "warrior" types, one for "magical" types, a third for "religious" sorts and a fourth for "secret" types. Each has a percentile dice roll, and options that follow from it. Many are bonus/penalty combinations, such as a warrior's "+1 with norningstars, whips, bolos and slings, -2 with all swords." Others are pure negative, like a magical type's "-1 on all character abilities, -3 versus all spells or magic." (Hargrave always underlined the word "all".) Some are all positive, like "Taught by a true weaponsmaster, get +2 with all western weapons." And some are just odd, like the magical sort's "Flesh tastes so bad to monsters they spit you out 95% of the time."

Arduin's chart is just plain odd, but it's a good illustration of something that was popular at the time. Most of Hargrave's abilities are just pluses or minuses, with some minor bit of rhyme or reason behind them, but others are backgrounds. These are sometimes imbalanced (a religious type can get "Mountain man. plus 2 to strength, agility and dexterity. Climb as a thief.") but nevertheless add a bit of appeal to the characters.

The AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide has a "Secondary Skills Table" that is used to determine background skills for player characters; the difference is that it doesn't really add much to the characters other than to say that they have an unspecified skill. It does seem to be in a similar vein to the California tables, though nowhere near as wild and wooly as they were. 18% of results give no skill at all.

What I like about the idea, if not the execution, of the old tables was the idea of leaving characters up to chance. Much like 3d6 rolled in order, a bonus ability that isn't known in advance is a good method of generating characters who will make you think a little outside the box to define who they are.

The potential I see for them is that, if you generate a really high quality list of minor modifiers (say, for instance, bonuses and penalties within the D&D system – saving throws, all those checks rolled on 1d6, etc – you can create an interesting incentive to be a human: just declare that only humans get a roll on this chart. Demihumans have the special abilities allotted by the system in the first place.

Just a little something that's been percolating. I think it has potential, and I think it could be disastrous, or gonzo fun – all depending on the execution.

DCC RPG, Charts, and the Pareto Principle

A recent post on Tenkar's Tavern has me thinking about why I object to the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG's use of charts for each magical spell. Given that I love charts, it comes down to a statistic sometimes called the Pareto principle.

According to Pareto, 20% of causes are responsible for 80% of the effects in a given system. This is an interesting general rule that has some broad applicability. Here I want to apply it to RPGs and specifically to random tables. Specifically: in an ideal RPG design, 80% of the time I'm referencing charts, it should be to a core 20% or less of the charts in the game system. For instance, I don't mind referring to a combat chart, the experience table, a wandering monster chart, or the turning undead chart - they are all core activities. I'm able to optimize my access, whether it's through memorizing the charts, or knowing where they are, or having copies or a GM screen.

DCC's spells break that efficiency, because you're stuck referring to them every time the spell is cast. People wind up playing where spellcasters have "spellbooks" with photocopies of the spells they're actually casting. Because everything's a fairly long description, it's a pain to memorize them; you probably have to look back at the chart every time.

They're also not useful in the sense that each chart applies to only one spell. This is a poor contrast to, say, Spellcraft & Swordplay's spell retention table, or one of the better touches in 2e AD&D, the Wild Surge chart in Tome of Magic. Even critical hit charts have better ability to be spread across multiple uses than spell charts that literally affect only a single spell.

If we apply the Pareto principle to gaming, 80% of charts should be things that are not referenced during play. These can be as particular and picky as you like - stuff like dungeon dressing, monster creation, magic item customization, and other "off-screen" details. The 20% of charts designed for play-time reference should be lean, mean, and memorable. You don't need to master the potion miscibility table, but you should have an understanding of the basic combat table that makes it easy for you to adjudicate it quickly. DCC is forced to virtually the opposite - 80% of charts used are one-off things, rather than the clever high-usage ones it does have such as the "turn over the body" chart.

This rule of thumb, I think, is a good guideline for making reference charts for RPGs. Most should be aimed at the prep time, and those should feel free to be as intricate as you like. Only a minority should be true "everyday" charts, and these are the ones that need optimization so they can be both interesting and have results that can be memorized.

What Trap Charts?

The title of this post references a classic Alarums & Excursions zine that ran in the very early issues. Certainly in my heart I hope it was an evasive denial of real trap charts.

I love charts in RPGs. One of my favorite gaming aids is the Judges Guild Ready Ref Sheets, and I've always loved the heaps of charts in the Dungeon Masters Guide. Some of the best products of the old school renaissance are the Dungeon Alphabet and the Random Esoteric Creature Generator for Classic Fantasy Roleplaying Games and Their Modern Simulacra.

I also love traps. I think Jim Raggi's Green Devil Face is fun, and I contributed to it. My first OD&D game included what I affectionately refer to as the "bear trap" (a room with a bear in it, which provoked a ton of discussion that I cut off by pointing out that there was a bear coming at the PCs). Even the cheesy fun of Grimtooth's Traps appealed deeply to me.

So I've decided on a project: trap charts. These are going to be detailed charts to give a wide variety of options for traps. Mainly because I want to use them myself, and I've been thinking of ways to spice up traps beyond arrow, pit, arrow, pit, teleporter, etc. These essentially boil down to a simple set of options; roll or pick from the charts, and now you've got a trap with 4 knives that fire from behind a tapestry when someone makes a noise in the room.

These charts are probably going to come down somewhere from 16-20 pages without artwork, and I will want to publish them. They're pretty system neutral and I'm not worried about what system you use or branding. So three questions:

- Would you be interested in buying these (almost certainly as a Lulu publication)?
- Would you be more interested in a "Trap Charts" product, or as a chapter in a broader product called "Old School Miscellany"?
- What should I do for the art (if anything)? I can't draw but my wife can, although she isn't exactly a D&D enthusiast, but I don't exactly have an art budget.