Choosing a Backdrop

To say the Realms is large place is an understatement, even if I’m confining myself to regions covered in the Gray Box and some of the supplements. Those poster-sized maps only hint at the scope of Faerûn and it’s not until you put down the transparent overlays and start counting hexes that you realize how much an area even a small section covers. Needless to say, I was going to have to zoom in on but a small part of its grandeur for the campaign.

My usual choices for campaigns are the Dalelands (Mistledale in particular; see my original campaign map of Ashabenford here), the Western Heartlands along the Trade Way, or somewhere in the Savage North. One of these years I’ll tackle Tethyr or the lands east of the Sea of Fallen Stars, but since this was an exercise in fun, I decided I’d keep to my old haunts. Having a backlog of previously-generated campaign materials for those regions doesn’t hurt, either.

Since I was coming off of Kingmaker, and as an old school DM I have a preference for such, I wanted to keep the campaign on the fringes of civilization, thus allowing me to play with some of the plot ideas I had in mind. This crossed the Dalelands off the list and I wasn’t feeling like managing the constant stream of traders and costers rolling along the Trade Way. Plus, I personally like mountains and forests. A return to the Savage North was in order.

Breaking out my copies of FR1 Waterdeep and the North and FR5 The Savage Frontier, I started re-reading them and looking over the landscape. Although a Waterdeep-based campaign would be fun, running an urban game requires a lot of work, and I discarded that idea. The same reasoning also removed Silverymoon, Neverwinter, Luskan, and other large urban sites from the list. Then my eyes fell on the Loudwater environs and the creative wheels started churning. A nearby fallen Elven empire, a large town, the biggest forest in all of the Realms, a Zhentarim-controlled village, an abandoned dwarven kingdom, and Hellgate Keep all in close proximity to one offered more potential adventure seeds than I could count. This had potential.

Following my decision to only incorporate Realms canon as interested me, I started looking for what was actually detailed about this area. None of it is covered in the Gray Box, so it was time to move on to secondary sources, namely the above-mentioned supplements. Loudwater and Llorkh garner a paragraph or two each in Waterdeep and the North, while Hellgate Keep and the High Forest each earn three. Hardly a treasure trove, but exactly the amount I felt like dealing with. The Greypeak Mountains have a paragraph in The Savage Frontier, and more detailed information for Loudwater, Llorkh, and Hellgate Keep is provided. The High Forest earns an entire chapter, but by this point, it’s become beyond the scope of my focus for the initial campaign adventures, so I can ignore that material for now.

What does catch my attention is a small entry covering “Other Woods” in FR5. It reads in its entirety, “This is not the name of a single forest, but includes the Lurkwood, Southkrypt garden, Southwood, Moonwood, and Westwood. These [sic] edges of these forests are logged by men, though their dark depths are largely a mystery.” Southwood (or South Wood depending on if you’re going by the text or the map) is located just beneath Loudwater and seems perfect what I’m thinking about: A frontier area close to a bastion of civilization but offering unplumbed mysteries.

I decided to consult a tertiary source—The North boxed set—to see if there was anything further I could use in there. As much of the material in that set is based (or copied outright) from both FR1 and FR5, it might or might not provide additional glimpses or inspiration. Luckily, there was a little more, but the entry was still sparse enough for me to monkey with. I’ll decline quoting it in case it spoils any surprises for my players.

Next, I started brainstorming and came up with the following background for the campaign:

After the transformation of Ascalhorn to Hellgate Keep, the elven kingdom of Eaerlann fell, and most of the moon elves fled down the Riving Shining to either travel to Evermeet or join the Fallen Kingdom near Ardeep Forest. A few, however, lingered in the Loudwater area, either joining the small mixed-race community or occupying the Southwood. These displaced refugees harbored dreams of resettling the ancient kingdom if the forces of Hellgate Keep were ever banished. For centuries, the elves claimed the Southwood as their own, a small domain of displaced elves dreaming of their former glory. This enclave dubbed themselves “Lanymthilhar.”

In 1235 DR, the Year of the Black Horde, a never-before seen force of orcs boiled out of the Northern mountains, rampaging as far south as Calimshan. One tribe, the Black Slashers, charged down from the Graypeak Mountains towards the River Shining. Forging a tentative alliance, the humans of Loudwater and the refugee elves of Lanymthihar battled the Black Slashers, breaking their invasion near the northern verge of the Southwood. After this defeat, an accord was reached between the Lanymithihar elves and the residents of Loudwater. The agreement opened the outer edges of the Southwood to human logging and settlement, but the forest interior would remain sacrosanct and protected by the elves. So long as this compact was obeyed and the loggers didn’t become greedy in their yearly felling of timber, the two cultures would pursue their own agendas separately and in peace.

The PCs would begin the campaign in one of the few forest edge communities, caught between civilization to the north and forbidden mystery to the south. A decision to play up the mystery of elven culture and the phenomenon known as “The Retreat,” led me to prohibit elves as a starting race for the PCs as mentioned previously. While not actual enemies, I wanted to explore the “alien” factor of elves, rather than making them pointy-eared humans. I hope to have fun with this aspect of the campaign.

After a quick trip of the maps through my scanner and importing the scans into Photoshop, I made minor changes and additions to the canonical landscape of the region. I also took a look through Volo’s Guide to the North to see if I could use anything in that book, and decided I’d incorporate one of roadside inns mentioned therein. Situated to the east of Loudwater, “The Nighthunt Inn” might come in handy should the PCs ever decide to travel toward Llorkh. I now had my regional campaign map.

Loudwater and Environs as Ed never imaged.

The next step would be zooming in even more to detail the PCs’ home base of Elf Water and the adventuring opportunities in their own backyard.

Establishing Boundaries in the Realms

Having decided to go ahead with a 2^nd edition AD&D game in the Forgotten Realms, my first task was deciding what to bring to the table and what to leave on the shelf. Between the various rules and campaign supplements available for 2^nd Edition and the Realms, there’s a small mountain of books waiting to be climbed. And I wanted this to be fun, not mountaineering.

Deciding my limits for the rules was easy. Although not my usual “go to” D&D rules, I’ve never had too much a problem with 2^nd Edition in its initial form. The core rules are close enough to 1^st edition in practice and don’t make for far-reaching changes to the original advanced game. I’ve found that it’s only once you start bolting on the supplemental material that the power levels start getting wonky and the wheels fall off.

So no problem here: I’d only allow the players the class and race options available in the Players Handbook. No “Complete Book of…” class kits allowed, no Tome of Magic spells, and especially nothing from the Player’s Option books! This kept it strictly in the classic AD&D family, and had the bonus benefit of freeing me from such troublesome classes as assassins, cavaliers, and barbarians. I had forgotten that 2^nd Edition removed half-orcs as a playable class, but that wouldn’t matter for what I had in mind for the campaign. And, of course, as the DM, I could make use of any of the verboten material freely. Sometimes it’s good to be boss.

Choosing the Realms material I intended to limit myself to required a bit more thinking. My introduction to the Realms—outside of Ed’s excellent Dragon articles—had been the “gray box.” Using that as the backbone was a no-brainer. But I’ve got a respectable collection of other Realms stuff I’ve accumulated over the years. Would say the material in The Dalelands supplement trump what was presented in the Gray Box, which was much less detailed or would I stick to the bare bones presentation found in the original set?  Would I make the Volo series my primary source for all things Realms? Was I going to concern myself with Realms canon?

I wrestled with these decisions a bit, and my original thought was to go all the way back and just utilize whatever information was given in the Gray Box, building my own campaign from that modicum of information. The designer in me loved the idea of such a challenge and I readily imagined myself pouring over the two slim books from that set, ferreting out small nuggets of information and implied hints at the larger world to build upon. But then I remembered the real purpose of the summer campaign: Let Mike have some fun for a change. This isn’t work, knucklehead!

Ultimately, I made what I feel is the wisest choice and decided that the only limitations I’d place on myself was “Is the ‘canonical’ material in X entertaining, inspiring, useful, or fun? If so, use it. If not, forget it.” This gave me a lot of leeway while still maintaining a game which would be easily identifiable as the Forgotten Realms to anyone playing or observing it. Sure, a die-hard Realms aficionado might take me to task for fudging a few dates or adding new places, but last time I checked, I didn’t need anyone to vouch for the orthodoxy of my home games.

And speaking of dates and orthodoxy, this led me to my biggest alteration of the established Realms’ timeline: The Time of Troubles.

It never happened, folks.

I started running my first Realms game back in 1987 when the Gray Box was released. Reading that set completely changed how I approached world design. In fact, the experience of turning the pages of that set remains such a developmental milestone for me that I can still remember what food I ate and what was playing on my tape deck as I paged through Cyclopedia of the Realms (if you’re interested, I’ll always associate the Gray Box with port wine cheese, Paul Simon’s Graceland, and Eddy Grant’s Killer on a Rampage.)

So when the Time of Troubles happened, it needless to say had a great impact on my vision of Faerûn. Although even then I realized it was a marketing ploy to steer gamers towards the 2^nd edition of the game, I made a half-hearted attempt to adjust my own version of the Realms to accommodate the changes inflicted by the Time of Troubles. But it always stuck in my craw a bit. Years later, it seems that most of the world-shaking changes that Time of Troubles wrought have vanished (Bane’s been back for a while now), so why bother? Let’s just pretend it never happened and excise any obvious Time of Troubles-related material from the campaign setting. It’s surprisingly easy.

Removing the Time of Troubles was also a breeze due to my choice of when to set the campaign. Rather than keep the game relatively current to the established timeline, I went back to the beginning. This campaign takes place in 1358 DR, the Year of the Shadows (and interestingly not “Year of Shadows” as later supplements would refer to it), the suggested starting year in the original Gray Box. So technically and temporally, somewhere out there in the Realms, the campaign I ran in 10^th grade is currently underway with a much younger Michael at the helm. Maybe I should finagle a crossover event between the two groups?

The last limitations I needed to establish were campaign ones, boundaries stipulated by the focus of the campaign. I had a few possible themes and potential plots I wanted to introduce (which I’ll cover in a forthcoming post) that would be best done if I drew a few lines in the proverbial sand. In the end, it came down to demi-humans in character creation. With a small group, I wanted humans to equal the number of demi-humans (if not outnumber them) in the party. Originally, I was looking at three players, and decided only one person could play a demi-human, ability scores allowing. At the last moment, we picked up a fourth player, so I relaxed that limit to two non-human PCs in the party. But there was a catch to this: To quote a famous ad slogan for Talislanta, “No elves!”

What? No elves in a Forgotten Realms campaign? You’re mad!

There’s a method to my madness, gentle reader, one I’ll explain in a future post.

Back to Faerûn

Ah, summertime! The season where one can relax a bit, spend time with long-neglected friends, go to concerts, attend barbeques, and enjoy a momentary escape from the workaday chores of modern life—that is, unless you’re a handsome, gregarious, freelance designer and writer struggling to keep the bills paid and the wolves away from the door for another month. Then summer is pretty much like any other time of year, except more humid and mosquito-filled.

As many of you know, I came back into gaming after a prolonged absence, returning to the role-playing fold about the same time the OSR started gaining momentum in the back alleys of the internet. I was lucky enough to return with a minor splash, one that swiftly moved me from hobbyist to professional, and, before I knew it, I was working as a freelancer as a second job. While the upswing of that development is that people actually pay me to use my imagination and I get to share my creations with a wider audience than I ever imaged possible, the downside is that there’s no longer a dividing line between recreation and vocation for me when it comes to role-playing games. I know: cry me a river.

Still, it remains a fact that what I once did for fun and personal enjoyment is now labor and there are many times when I wish—if just for a little while—I could treat RPGs as a pleasant pastime. I’ve been running a lot of DCC RPG on the convention trail, which is just play-testing in the guise of fun, and even my semi-regular home Pathfinder campaign is more of an exercise to familiarize myself with the mechanics and design needs of the industry’s current 800 lbs. gorilla in hopes that it’ll pay off with more work down the line.

At the end of April, one of the players in the Pathfinder campaign informed us he received a summer scholarship to study out of state for the summer. The Pathfinder campaign I’m running is the Kingmaker adventure path, which if you know Paizo’s APs, is designed for four players. The campaign had also reached a pivotal point and I (and the rest of the group) thought it be best if we put the campaign on hiatus until the departing player returned, and then pick things up from there.

That left us with the summer to play something else. I originally proposed that we’d spend the summer months doing a playtest of my Shiverwhen game and anticipated giving it a thorough shakedown and chronicling it over on the Shiverwhen blog. We got as far as the players generating characters and me doing the initial prep work when cold reality hit: this was going to be more work than I felt like doing. The problem with running a game you’re currently developing means there’s always something that need attention, sometimes even built from scratch to fill gaps. It quickly dawned on me that the last thing I wanted to do was spend the summer with an even greater workload. I’ve already got a lot on my plate between crafting new DCC RPG material and sewing the final parts of Stonehell 2 together. I didn’t need more work masquerading as recreation.

I told my players of my revelation and my desire to scrap Shiverwhen before it began, but that meant we had to find a replacement game for the summer. I gave them four options of what we could do: 1) DCC RPG (a chance for me to playtest and develop material); 2) OD&D (beer & pretzels dungeon crawling that’d be easy for me to write and keep everyone entertained through the summer); 3) Pathfinder (a non-adventure path to keep us in fighting shape for fall and allow me to further try my hand at designing for the system); and 4) 2^nd Edition AD&D set in the Forgotten Realms (just because it had absolutely nothing to do with my paying design work).

To my surprise and delight, option #4 carried the day.

So for the last three weeks, I’ve found myself back in Ed Greenwood’s world running a game using a system I’ve not really touched since 1990 or thereabouts. And I must say I’m having a wonderful time. Long time readers know that I remain a fan of the Realms, despite everything that’s been done to the poor place over the last (can you believe it?) twenty-five years. Returning there has been a joy, like falling back in with old flame or seeing someone from your youth and reminiscing about days gone by.

In the weeks ahead I’ll be posting more about the Realms campaign, sharing the work I’ve done with it, displaying maps, and boring you with the occasional actual play reports. For the first time in a long while, I’m having fun as a DM and designer again, and not viewing my time in front of the computer as work, but an engaging and entertaining process. This blog’s been too much of a marketing venue and it is past time to utilize it as a means to disseminate “fun stuff” and frolic in the shared happiness of these strange games we play.

More to come.

Submitted for Consideration for Your Next Campaign

I'm still getting settled into my new home, new job, and let's face it, new life, but I wanted to share something with you all that I see every day on my drive to work:

Graymoor either lies to the southwest of the Egg of Coot or exists in a parallel plane of existence. In either case, it is a land where sword & sorcery meets film noir. A land of shadows and mist, conspiracies, paranoia, trench-coated adventurers, and sultry femme-fatales. Sounds like the perfect cure for the high fantasy blues!

Or, it's a lonely county along the Atlantic coast (on either side of the pond), where the waves crash against the jagged rocks, crumbling manors cling precariously to the edge of cliffs, and the nights are broken by the sound of screams or howls that may not be animal in origin.

White Box to the Rescue!

Sunday morning, I woke up with the feeling that someone snuck up on me while I slept and poured a gallon of quick-dry cement into my head. I awoke feeling completely uninspired, not the best way to start the day when you’re facing your regular Sunday gaming group in a few hours. I had intended to whip something up for my play test game sometime between Saturday and Sunday morning, but never got around to it. I’m sure many referees know the feeling. And when even my morning constitutional failed to get the blood flowing and the creative juices juicing, I wasn’t looking forward to the game.

Getting ready to leave the house, I contemplated my options. I could grab my Labyrinth Lord book and Stonehell and adjudicate another delve through my homebrewed megadungeon, but I wasn’t up to dealing with all the baggage that Stonehell has accumulated with my regular group. I could snatch Zombies!!! off the bookcase and turn the day into a board game session, but having spent Saturday night doing that already, the idea didn’t have much luster. Finally, at wits’ end, I grabbed my OD&D White Box set and tossed it into my backpack.

With a half-hour drive ahead of me, I started quickly patching together a few ideas for what to do with White Box. About half-way to the game site, Ronnie James Dio started telling me about a rainbow in the dark over the radio and I was getting into the D&D vibe. A few ideas percolated up from my reptile brain, and I pulled into the driveway with a fuzzy grasp of a new dungeon in mind.

We were down a player, but one of my regular player’s wife and another mutual friend were at the house, preparing to head out to do some shopping. I pitched the idea of doing an OD&D game and not only was my usual players up for it, but so were the two ladies. It seems that White Box can trump a shopping trip if presented with the right degree of enthusiasm!

A half-hour later, index cards had become character sheets, a few minis rustled up for marching order, and the five-strong party entered the Gloomcroft, a series of ancient halls dug under the mountains by the giant ancestors of the kobold race. In the four-hour session, chambers were explored, monsters fought, killer pollywogs outwitted, puzzles solved, and a new word (“widdershins”) was learned. One of the PCs was slain by a stirge-crow mashup monster, but the party exited the dungeon with a few gold coins, a jeweled holy symbol, and a magical cloak. Much fun was had by all and everyone is raring for another trip into the dungeon as soon as schedules allow.

The session reminded me of two things that I truly love around the gaming table. The first is a mixed gender group of players. As we all know, men and women think differently, our thoughts colored by our experiences, upbringing, and genetics. After almost two years of an all-male gaming group, which is actually a bit of an anomaly for me, having three men and two women at the table was a great pleasure. At the risk of feeding into stereotypes, the ladies used brainpower, taking clues from the campaign world to think around problems rather than booting in the door and hewing down everything the party encountered. The guys were awestruck on a couple of occasions by the questions being asked and the useful information those query revealed. I think everyone’s play experience was improved by having a mixed group and some valuable lessons learned in the process.

The second pleasure was having players relatively free of the expectations and preconceived notions that long-time players fall prey to. One of the ladies had some experience with RPGs through her husband, but the other had played in just a single session of Vampire: The Masquerade. With White Box D&D, a lack of experience with RPGs is beneficial. The novice players didn’t feel constrained by what was written on their character sheets—or rather what wasn’t scribed on them. Experienced players sometime fall into the trap where if they don’t have a skill or a feat or a power that says explicitly that “You can do X” they can’t try it at all. Novice players seem free of such constraints and that makes for a perfect fit for bare bones OD&D.

I’m looking forward to the next time I can break out White Box and play. I hope this spur-of-the-moment group has more adventures together and that we get the opportunity to build upon this world I threw together at the last minute. Many mysteries presented themselves yesterday and the freedom I experienced running White Box is very, very alluring. There are few better ways to spend a chilly Sunday afternoon than with simple rules, a few dice, and good friends.

Kingmaker

Congratulations to Paizo: Their Beginners Box has effectively cast its spell upon me and is working as intended. As I mentioned in a previous post, I was very impressed with their introductory boxed set for Pathfinder and, after reading it, I decided to dip my toes back into the often-times muddied pool of 3.5-based gaming.

Ever since Paizo released the Kingmaker Adventure Path back in 2010, I’ve had a lingering itch to play it. When a friend lent me the first module in the series, I read it halfway through before putting it down. Not because I was disgusted with it, but because I really hoped that one day someone would run it and I’d have the opportunity to visit the Stolen Lands for myself. After a year and a half of holding onto that hope, it finally became apparent that nobody was going to run it for me and I’d have to take on that burden for myself. And thus, my latest campaign was born.

The other reason I decided to run Kingmaker is that I’ve been looking to do a campaign that has a beginning, middle, and end. Most of my games have tended to be open-ended, but I know from personal experience that my interest in a specific campaign wanes after time, leaving me looking for the next “big thing.” Hopefully, Kingmaker’s structure will allow me to avoid that. It also has the benefit of getting to the “D&D endgame” much quicker than traditionally happens. By the second module, the PCs are already involved in the domain-building and administration process, and Kingmaker has some interesting mechanics to adjudicate that.

My original intent was to simply use the materials in the Beginners Box to run it, but after I read deeper into the campaign, I realized that running a primarily wilderness-based adventure without allowing the players access to classes like ranger and druid would be cruel. And since I already owned a copy of the Pathfinder Core Rules, I instead opted to limit the campaign to the races and classes included in that tome. I sank the cash into a Pathfinder Bestiary and I’m now ready to roll.

One of the great things about having a campaign world that is not completely detailed, quantified, and mapped is that it is extremely easy to pick a blank section of the map and plop down whatever I feel like running into that portion of terra incognito. And so it was that the Kingdom of Byrsk came to be placed on the far side of the aptly named Wayfarer Mountains that border the Eastern Reaches in the world of R’Nis. Its placement confirms something I’ve long suspected: my campaign world has definite “zones” where specific game rules hold dominance. The eastern edge of the major continent is home to 3.5 and Pathfinder; the central region around the fabled Ring Sea is AD&D land; and the western coasts are where B/X and Labyrinth Lord hold sway.

Last Monday, I gathered with a new group of players to officially dive back into old but somewhat unfamiliar territory. This group is composed of players from several diverse gaming groups I’ve played in over the last few years. One is a veteran of my Labyrinth Lord game, two I met during my D&D Encounters experience, and the last comes from a group I’ve played in on and off for several years. All in all, it appears that they are more interested in just hacking and slashing and crawling through dungeons, which is something I’ve been trying to avoid for a while, having led to my lack of enthusiasm with the old Labyrinth Lord campaign. Amongst the four of them, they rolled up a half-orc barbarian, a human cleric, an elven ranger, and a human wizard. The mix looks good and I’ve made the goals of the campaign very clear from the get-go. This is going to be a campaign about nation-building and all the fun and tragedies that accompany such ventures.

Currently, we’re running through the sample dungeon included in the Beginners Box. I wanted to run a prelude adventure that would allow the party a reason to be adventuring together, give then some experience and magic, try out their various character builds, and allow myself a chance to become acquainted with the Pathfinder rules. They’re halfway through the Caves of Gold Light and we should finish that delve at Thursday’s session. After that, it’s off to the Stolen Lands to forge their legacies.

It’s my intent to run this as a true Pathfinder game and try to avoid my prejudiced attitudes about what D&D is. I’ve accepted the high magic aspects of the setting and familiarized myself with the skill system and DCs as best as I can in the limited time available. I’m making rules notes in my campaign notebook as they crop up in play. I figure that since I’m always on the lookout for new freelancing opportunities, becoming fluent with the rules for the other 800 lbs. gorilla in the industry can only be a good thing. Of course, fun and cool always trumps mechanics, so we’ll see how often those aspects come into conflict as the campaign goes and make allowances when they do.

With a new campaign rolling, I’ll likely have to start updating the Archive of the Rotted Moon again. I’m not certain how detailed my session reports will be, but a running log of events is always useful to my increasingly decaying brain. It looks like I’ll need to write up my last few Stonehell forays and start chronicling the Kingmaker campaign there as well. I’ll mark the posts as applicable so folks can read or avoid them depending on their interests.

Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG Beta: 6/8/11

Word on the street is that the Open Beta of Goodman Games' Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG begins on Wednesday, June 8th. You can grab a PDF of the rules off of the Goodman website on that day, and then on June 18th, go down to your FLGS for Free RPG Day to pick up the DCC RPG Adventure Starter module. Then go home and see what all the fuss has been about.

S&W WB Acquired

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who contacted me in regards to my White Box search. Deals have been made, swag negotiated, and arrangements...er, arranged, so I'm all set. You guys are indeed the greatest role-playing fan base in existance today. I'm proud to be a part of the OSR, whatever that means this week.


Some of my regulars know that I'm a slave to whimsy and odd ball ideas. My latest has me thinking of projects to tackle once Stonehell is complete.

That vein of thought has managed to merge itself with a discussion I had with someone a few weekends ago, and I'm now thinking of coupling it with Swords & Wizardry White Box.

I'm aware that the WB rules remain available, but part of my idea involves taking a seed and nurturing it to its ultimate end--for weal or for woe. Thus, BHP White Box is almost ideal for my purposes.

Having just missed an eBay auction for one, I thought I'd cast my net upon the waters of my readers and see if someone has a gently used set they'll never find a use for. If so, before you put it up on eBay or offer it up to Noble Knight, drop me a line and we'll see if we can come to terms in either cash or swag.

The Acererak Caper

Once upon a time, I caught some forgotten comedian’s bit about men and heist films. His contention was that, deep down inside, men want to participate in a heist. There is some primal, masculine allure to the idea of hanging upside-down in an air vent, spraying aerosol to detect invisible trip beams while another guy sits in a van three blocks away screaming “They changed the code!” into his headset mike. The challenge of defeating the undefeatable and walking away with a fortune is tempting no matter how law-abiding one is in everyday life, which is why the heist remains a popular crime genre in both fiction and film.

As I was out walking yesterday, The Tomb of Horrors burbled up to the surface of my thoughts for some reason. As my readers undoubtedly know, that module is largely considered to be the most challenging dungeon ever written. In fact, the Tomb of Horrors is so notorious that I’ve had younger gamers, ones who’ve never even seen the module in the figurative flesh, tell me with complete and utter sincerity that it is unbeatable and that everyone who enters the Tomb dies. They don’t believe me when I tell them otherwise.

Personally, I’m of the school of thought that there are no truly unbeatable dungeons or deathtraps—provided one has a fair referee and enough time and money to spend. I maintain that the Tomb can be navigated with greatly reduced risk if a) the referee is neutral, and b) you’re willing to take a financial and magical loss on the venture. Again, when I mention this, these younger gamers assume I’m talking about buying every last sheep in town and driving them ahead of the party to serve as mine detectors when they explore the tomb. Not so, my friends.

The key to defeating the tomb is patience, money, and research, not livestock. One of the great things about the Tomb is that, when inserted into a campaign setting rather than used as a one-shot, there is no time limit present when confronting the lich’s crypt. This gives the smart and cautious player all the time in the world to plan his foray before he gets within sight of that skull motif hill.

In a world where sages can be paid vast sums to dedicate all their time to researching the past and unearth forgotten scraps of information, why not do so? When priests quite literally have access to the knowledge of the gods, who wouldn’t consult them to inquire what lays beyond the entrance to the Tomb? Genius mages can cast spells that access other planes of existence or delve into legend to retrieve scraps of knowledge, so it would be foolish to not hire their services. And in a milieu where magic items exist that can detect traps, contain spells of augury or divination, see through illusions, detect poison, magic, and evil, reveal secret passages, and otherwise access the unknown and unseen, why wouldn’t you take as long as was necessary to buy, beg, borrow, and steal those items to take with you?

It then occurred to me that all this prep work was the fantasy equivalent to putting a crew together in a heist film. Why not make the entire campaign one big heist job with the Tomb of Horrors as the once-in-a-lifetime score?

The set-up would be simple enough. First, figure out what treasure makes the players drool and stash it in the Tomb. Staff of the Magi? It’s in there. Hammer of Thunderbolts? Acererak stole it. A diamond the size of a baby’s head? The lich has six of them.

Then start the players off at first level and let them know exactly what’s in the Tomb. Give them a scrap of information to get them started and then let them figure out how to get it. They’ve got 10-14 levels to plan their heist.

The result would be a sandbox-style campaign with a definite end game. The players would have to determine what information, equipment, magic items, favors, assistants, etc. they would need to breach the tomb and then figure out how to get access to that material. This would lead them to tracking down the possible resting places of a gem of true seeing or a wand of secret door and trap location. They might have to do a few favors for the Great Oracle in order to gain her favor so she will contact the gods to see within the tomb. A council of mages might need pacification before they’d agree to use their crystal balls and legend lore spells to peer beyond the veil. And, of course, the Thieves Guild is going to want in on a heist like this…

To make it true to the heist genre, you could even start the campaign with a single PC and have him decide who to recruit. As he puts his list of needed accomplices together, the other players come in as possible candidates, leaving it up to the first PC and his player to best determine how to go about recruiting them to participate in the caper. Now would also be the time to slip in a mole or secret rival too.

Like any sandbox, this would require a lot of prep work for the referee, but with a predetermined campaign goal to consider, he could concentrate his efforts on people, places, and things related to the ultimate heist. No need to design a ten-level megadungeon, just lots of little dungeons that hold secrets and heist-related magical items, for example. You could even use James Raggi’s The Grinding Gear as a low-level dry run to give the PCs an idea of what sort of challenges lie ahead.

One thing that would be required of the referee is complete 100% fairness. The Tomb’s a tough nut, and with it as the focus of the campaign, he might even want to make it 25%-50% more deadly ahead of time. Although, once that’s done, he can’t toughen it up again later on down the line if the PCs become better prepared than anticipated. If the players are smart and take steps to learn and overcome the Tomb’s dangers, they should be rewarded for doing so and not have to face a Tomb “adjusted for their challenge level.” On the other hand, if they fail to make the correct preparations, there’s nothing wrong with the campaign ending with the death of everyone.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I think I have the concept for the next Labyrinth Lord campaign I run.

“Roont Urt”

The mental auditions to choose what game I intend to run after Watchfires & Thrones runs its course continue. It was my original intent to run Gamma World, but, although that continues to be the front-runner, a few dark horses have entered the race. Whether these go the distance or are mere phantoms conjured by Gamer A.D.D. remains to be seen.

Assuming I continue with the Gamma World plan, I intend to run it as a wide-open sandbox. My re-acquaintance with the rules has shown me not only how suitable Gamma World is for this type of campaign, but it actually seems to be the default setting for the game—something that escaped me in my youth. With more wisdom and greater experience in this type of campaign, I foresee a heck of a lot of fun in exploring a post-apocalyptic sandbox.

I’ve started doing the initial planning for a Gamma World sandbox by following Rob Conley’s incredibly useful step-by-step process. Although certain other projects got in the way of progress, I have completed the first step: the initial conceptualization of the larger world in which my sandbox will be located. Although a simple one-page sketch map is suggested, I’m more of a poster paper/colored pencils man. After all, why settle for sketching when you can create art!

I didn’t worry too much about pinning down scale at this point and size. This map is more in preparation for the day the characters find a bubble car and start zooming around the lower atmosphere (intentionally or not) and set down in some unknown region of the world, henceforth known as “Roont Urt” rather than the more prosaic “Gamma Terra.” If things look a little askew, that’s completely intentional…and part of the fun of exploring the campaign world. The initial sandbox would likely be set in the orange region in the lower left-hand portion of the map, right around where that mountain chain ends in a “Y”.

Next step: Naming regions.

Anyone Need a Motto for 2011?

Some years ago, I worked in a wine & liquor store (two of them, actually, but never mind that). I had to acquaint myself with various vintages of potables to better serve the customer base that would come in looking for the perfect grape to accompany their dinner. In the process, I gained some familiarity with both the Wine Spectator and oenophiles (or as we called them, “grape nuts”). And although my palette never quite developed to that of a connoisseur, I did acquire a working knowledge of the grape.

There is a saying amongst wine aficionados that goes, “Life is too short to drink cheap wine,” and one must admit that there is a certain wisdom in those words regardless of whether you imbibe or not. Our time here is limited and we already spend much of it doing things we’d rather not have to. So why on Earth would we settle for anything less than the best when it comes to the things we do enjoy? It is with this mindset that I present to you a motto for 2011:

“Life is Too Short to Play Bad Games”

I’ve spoken briefly on this subject previously, but I think it bears repeating, especially with a brand new year ahead of us. You should all be out there playing the game you want with the group you want and should never settle for anything but the best in your gaming entertainment. You can be playing the title you want with the players you prefer—provided you’re willing to put the effort into making it happen. Some games might be easier to find groups for than others, and you might get lucky with the first gaming group you build, but it’s much more likely that you’ll eventually find who and what you want to be playing with if you keep up the effort.

Need proof? Look no further than fetish websites and forums (and by “look” I mean that figuratively if you’re at work right now). There are a whole bunch of people in this world whose freak flags flutter in some pretty bizarre winds, yet they’re finding people to play their various games with. By that measure, your desire to play that wonky home-brewed Castle Falkenstein campaign you made up that time you dropped acid isn’t quite so unlikely now, is it? You might have to make a few attempts to get the perfect mix, but nothing comes easy in the world and you’ll find the effort is far outweighed by the reward.

I’ll mention that when I say “bad games” I’m not making any value judgments on what title you enjoy. What gets me going might not do the same for you and vice versa, but all that means is we probably shouldn’t be playing in one another’s groups and be out finding our comrades in dice (or chips or cards or whatever). In any case, I wish you luck and may you find your perfect group of gamers and most excellent campaign in 2011.

Background for Tomorrow's "Out of the Box" Game

I just got finished assembling everything I'll need tomorrow for my experimental "Out of the Box" game--which is a sure indicator that I won't have enough players to actually run the damned thing. We shall see what happens tomorrow between 11 AM and noon. Worse comes to worse, I've got a Fight On! piece out of the prep work.

Here's the one-page background sheet. Everything above the "***" is me; the rest is minutely changed Gary.

Eons ago, the world was a place of wonder, a dreamland unimaginable to those who now toil beneath the uncaring skies. It was said that Man knew magics then that rivaled the gods, and that hunger, suffering, and war were unknown.

Then came the Dragons.

Screaming from out of the void beyond the stars, they came to the world without warning, burning all they encountered and poisoning the land with their caustic breath. Cities were incinerated, the seas became choked with ashes, and the skies blackened with smoke. Mankind took up their arms—weapons of unimaginable power—and struck back at these unworldly foes, bringing their awesome might to bear against a near-indestructible enemy. The legends call this time The Burning, an era which almost brought about an end to all life.

The destruction was catastrophic. Both the dragons’ breath and Man’s weaponry shattered the world in a desperate attempt to destroy one another. Mankind fled back to the caves that birthed them as the dragons reveled in the ruins they had created. The world plunged into an endless winter and small bands of desperate survivors huddled around fires as ice reclaimed the world.

The dragons, with nothing left to burn and little to devour, turned on one another, wreaking further destruction as they battled. Finally, when only the strongest of wyrms remained, they laid clutches of eggs in the ashes and returned to the void from whence they came.

That was three millennia ago. Man and his cousins—the elves, dwarves, and halflings—struggle to reclaim their shattered world. Much has been lost and many wonders will never again be seen, but civilization is again rising from the ruins. Through hard work, constant struggle, and endless vigilance, Man has again left the caves behind to reclaim the world it once owned. And although the Great Dragons have fled, there are other threats to Man’s future.

When Man emerged from the safety of the mountains, he found that a new enemy awaited, one spawned from the primal forces of Chaos that roiled across the destroyed paradise he once called home. In the lands to the East arose the Cruels, beings of dark and malicious power who wish to keep the world embroiled in turmoil and strife. Locked in constant struggle with the forces of Law, it is now these Chaotic Lords that threaten the Realm of Men.

***

The Realm of mankind is narrow and constricted. Always the forces of Chaos press upon its borders, seeking to enslave its populace, rape its riches, and steal its treasures. If it were not for a stout few, many in the Realm would indeed fall prey to the evil which surrounds them. Yet, there are always certain exceptional and brave members of humanity, as well as similar individuals among its allies - dwarves, elves, and halflings - who rise above the common level and join battle to stave off the darkness which would otherwise overwhelm the land. Bold adventurers from the Realm set off for the Borderlands to seek their fortune. It is these adventurers who, provided they survive the challenge, carry the battle to the enemy. Such adventurers meet the forces of Chaos in a testing ground where only the fittest will return to relate the tale. Here, these individuals will become skilled in their profession, be it fighter or magic-user, cleric or thief. They will be tried in the fire of combat, those who return, hardened and more fit. True, some few who do survive the process will turn from Law and good and serve the masters of Chaos, but most will remain faithful and ready to fight chaos wherever it threatens to infect the Realm.

You are indeed members of that exceptional class, adventurers who have journeyed to BLUESTONE KEEP in search of fame and fortune. Of course you are inexperienced, but you have your skills and a heart that cries out for adventure. You have it in you to become great, but you must gain experience and knowledge and greater skill. There is much to learn, and you are willing and eager to be about it! Each of you has come with everything which could possibly be given you to help. Now you must fend for yourselves; your fate is in your hands, for better or worse.

Ahead, up the winding road, atop a sheer-wailed mount of stone, looms the great KEEP. Here, at one of civilization’s strongholds between good lands and bad, you will base yourselves and equip for forays against the wicked monsters who lurk in the wilds. Somewhere nearby, amidst the dark forests and tangled fens, are the Caves of Chaos, the Shunned Stronghold, and the Haunted Keep where fell creatures lie in wait. All this you know, but before you dare adventure into such regions you must become acquainted with the other members of your group, for each life will depend upon the ability of the others to cooperate against the common foe. Now, before you enter the grim fortress, is the time for introductions and an exchange of information, for fate seems to have decreed that you are to become an adventurous band who must pass through many harrowing experiences together on the path which leads towards greatness.

Engaging the Weird Gear

I’ve been very neglectful of my tertiary web project, Secret Antiquities, as of late. I’ve been more concerned with getting projects finished, running Watchfires & Thrones, and playing in the radiation for next year’s Gamma World campaign. It is October, however, a month that has historically been one of great creativity for me and an all-around enjoyable time of year.

To celebrate October and to train myself to be more attentive to my weird history project, I’ve challenged myself to make thirty-one posts over on Secret Antiquities between now and Halloween. I’m trying to formulate some parameters for my planed GORE project in 2011 and I need to flail about wildly for a bit to find where my creative boundaries lie. Therefore, what will be appearing over on that blog is a potpourri of strange ideas, intellectual artifacts, and dream relics come to light. I can’t promise everyone’s going to be a Maserati of creativity, but hopefully the signal-to-noise ration won’t suck too badly.

Stop on by if this sort of thing sounds like your cup of ichor.

Countdown to Armageddon

The Labyrinth Lord game is gradually reaching the point where it is almost self-perpetuating. With the amount of game prep slowly dwindling each week, I’m finding I have more time to dedicate to a “fall cleaning,” wiping out a laundry list of multi-tasking attempts that have inhibited me making advancements. Many things are still outstanding, but progress has been made and I feel like I’m gradually getting a handle on my life again. Maybe I can get back to writing posts of greater substance again soon.

As I mentioned some time back, it has become my intention to follow up the Labyrinth Lord campaign with a Gamma World game sometime next year. To that end I’ve had to make a decision regarding what edition I’ll be running before I can start the groundwork needed using Rob Conley’s step-by-step sandbox generation scheme. Normally, picking an edition of a game is not too large of a task. After all, even the oldest of rpgs has only four editions to choose from, right? If you follow the party line, that is.

Not so with good old Gamma World, for I own every edition of the game that’s currently available. For those of you ill-versed in Gamma World’s publishing history, that consists of roughly seven versions (with an eighth on the way). There’s the 1978 original by Ward and Jaquet, which was followed by a clarified second edition in 1983. Three years later saw a 3rd edition that made use of one of those universal colored result tables which had infected nearly every game TSR was putting out at that time. In 1992, a version that introduced character classes and 2nd edition D&D-esque rules was released (including what I believe was the first use of ascending armor class—that favorite old school beating horse—in a TSR game). In 2000, a Gamma World source book for the Alternity rules was released—one month after Wizards of the Coast announced it was killing the Alternity line. Gamma World would see two versions released in 2002. One was a d20 mini-game called “Omega World” that appeared in the pages of Dungeon/Polyhedron magazine in September. In November, Sword & Sorcery Studios released a d20 Modern version of the game. Next month, WotC will be releasing a version that looks to be based on the 4th Edition D&D rules with a collectable card element. As you can see, this gives me quite a selection to choose from.

In addition to official Gamma World editions, I also own two versions of Metamorphosis Alpha: the revised 1st edition PDF by WardCo and the 25th anniversary edition produced by Fast Forward Entertainment. And then there’s Mutant Future as well.

Luckily, despite the plethora (“It’s a sweater!”) of choices, for my purposes it actually just boils down to two: 1st or 2nd edition. The 3rd edition’s color chart wasn’t a favorite back in ’86 and Gamma World with classes just feels wrong to me, which removes 4th edition from the running. I’ve never played Alternity and I’m not about to start now, and my avoidance of d20 systems in whatever form easily dismisses Omega World and Sword & Sorcery’s take on the tile. Plus, I never really kindled to SSS’s version of Gamma Terra.

So with two editions in the running, what am I to do? Rather than pit them against one another in Thunderdome (which would be appropriate, but costly to construct and the attempt to get two inanimate books to fight might earn me a trip to the Shady Valley Asylum), I’m currently doing a point-by-point comparison of the rule systems to see where they diverge. This effort has been rather eye-opening and surprising.

I initially thought that I’d run 1st edition with a few elements of 2nd edition thrown it. I figured that by starting with the earliest true edition of Gamma World, I could go down my own path and “imagine the hell out of it” like we in the old school seem fond of doing. In truth, the differences between the two versions aren't all that many and the 2nd edition does do an excellent job of clarifying certain rules without altering them too much. It seems that it would be far easier to adopt the few rules from 1st edition that were cut from the 2nd rather than try things the other way around.

The only change that rankles me was the alteration to the reaction table between the two systems. The original edition uses what became the Moldvay 2d6 chart, which I can adjudicate in my sleep, while the 2nd edition uses a d20-based table. I considered swapping the two, but after breaking down the particulars and various modifiers, it’d be easier just to stick with the table as is in 2nd edition.

Amongst the discoveries I found in carefully re-reading the 2nd edition of Gamma World was the fact that I was incorrectly rolling random mutations back when I played this version in the ‘80s (it turns out you’re supposed to add your CON score to the d% roll when determining your initial Physical mutations and your INT score when rolling for Mental mutations, which is something we never did.) There’s also an extremely simple but effective rule for knocking out opponents, one that can easily be used in D&D if you’re tired of house ruling or using the tables in the DMG to adjudicate such matters. As much as I love the flow charts for figuring out artifacts from 1st edition, I will admit that from my own testing the 2nd edition version is simpler and cleaner (and possibly a bit more lethal).

Despite my decision to use the 2nd edition as the default rule system, you simply must expect that I’ll be bolting on what I consider the missing pieces to it. Combat fatigue, missing from 2nd edition will return, as will experience points. I intend to keep the Rank system of 2nd edition, but that will measure the PCs status and renown in the wasteland. Experience points will affect level and the associated bonuses gained randomly from advancing.

I’ll be cherry-picking from the other versions as well. One of the things that I did enjoy from the 3rd edition was that mutated plants became an official character choice. I intended to reintroduce them, but wasn’t looking forward to trying to convert them from the CSR table to standard rules. They appear in 4th edition which makes them closer to the base line, but there’s still too much extra information for my taste. Thankfully, Mutant Future has a version that works almost perfectly with 2nd edition, as well as providing rules for android PCs that will also be stolen. I prefer 4th edition’s increased number of Tech Levels (from 0-VI over I-III in 2nd edition) so I’ll be using that method of grading technology and settlements’ knowledge and possession of such. The Alternity version has some nice maps of settlements and encounter sites that I’ll be taking, and I’m sure I find something from Sword & Sorcery Studios splat books to steal (maybe that Maliszewski character has got something useful to contribute in Out of the Vaults). I will most certainly be utilizing every random post-apocalyptic “treasure” table from all the editions.

I actually very excited about this prospect. I’ve had a half-baked scheme for years about dismantling Gamma World’s various versions to build my own comprehensive homebrewed mutation and now it seems like it will finally come true. To document both this process and my building of a radioactive sandbox to play in next year, I intend to do occasional posts regarding Gamma World. Not only will I cover my efforts to follow Rob’s step-by-step sandbox creation method, leaving out certain information to avoid spoiling the campaign, but I’ll be looking at various sources of inspiration and may even give a complete cover-to-cover break down of 1st and 2nd edition Gamma World for those of you wishing to know the strength, weaknesses, and differences of both systems. All of these posts will appear under the header of “Countdown to Armageddon” (ain’t I a wit?). Look for more in the near future starting with a re-evaluation of The Godfather of post-apocalyptic movies, The Road Warrior (or Mad Max 2 for you non-Americans).

Stocking the Hexmap

Over the weekend, I prepared a rough hexmap of the immediate territory surrounding the campaign’s starting city. After placing the terrain, settlements, and dungeons, I now need to flesh out the map with lairs, ruins, and other interesting features. The problem is that I’m uncertain as to how to go about it. Looking through my books, I can’t find any guidelines as to how often these sites should be encountered, let alone a helpful Moldvay-style random stocking table.

In lieu of such tools, I’ve been experimenting with various types of dice to see what the results spread would be if I decide to randomly stock the map. I divided the map, which is 17 x 25 hexes, into five sections comprised of 85 hexes each (five columns of 17 hexes). I then when through the sections rolling a different type of die for each hex found within. On a roll of 1, I made a note that a ruin or something similar is found in that hex; on a result of a 2, a lair would be encountered. What follows are the results for each:

Method I (d6): 25 events (30% of the total hexes)
Method II (d8): 23 events (27% of the total hexes)
Method III (d10): 17 events (20% of the total hexes)
Method IV (d12): 15 events (18% of the total hexes)
Method V (d20): 12 events (14% of the total hexes)

Leaving out castle and citadels for the moment, I’m thinking that Methods III & IV give me the nicest percentage for a pulp sword & sorcery campaign. I don’t want the PCs tripping over something every few hexes, but don’t want to make overland travel uninteresting. Does 18%-20% of the map sound about right to you folks? Anyone know the Wilderlands breakdown off hand?

The random method has also produced a few groupings of results, where two or more lairs/ruins lie next to each other. I’m thinking about turning those results into a single, large ruin or lair rather than numerous smaller ones. Right now, however, I’m still experimenting with the results.

For those of you who have stocked hexmaps of your own, how did you go about it? Did you use a random method, perhaps one suggested in some rulebook that I’ve overlooked, or did you just place sites and encounters as you saw fit? Or maybe some combination of the two? I’d be very interested in exploring other options so please comment away.

A Post By Lord Byron

Darkness

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires--and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings--the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,
And men were gathered round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other's face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contain'd;
Forests were set on fire--but hour by hour
They fell and faded--and the crackling trunks
Extinguish'd with a crash--and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the wild birds shriek'd,
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd
And twined themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless--they were slain for food.
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again;--a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought--and that was death,
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails--men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devoured,
Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answered not with a caress--he died.
The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they raked up,
And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other's aspects--saw, and shriek'd, and died--
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful--was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless--
A lump of death--a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirred within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp'd
They slept on the abyss without a surge--
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon their mistress had expir'd before;
The winds were withered in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them--She was the Universe.

One of the benefits of having an English Lit degree is being well-versed in poetry. I was searching out "Ozymandias" when I rediscovered the above poem by Lord Byron. I'm certain old George Gordon didn't know it at the time, but he graciously gave me the name of the new campaign in this piece--to paraphrase line 10, the campaign will be known as "Watchfires and Thrones," both of which appear in abundance in the sword & sorcery literature that I'm drawing inspiration from.

Course of Empire

While doing my readings on the wilderness, I came across a reference to a series of paintings done by the American artist Thomas Cole. This series, entitled "Course of Empire," depicts the rise and fall of an imaginary city over the course of five paintings, each showing the city at a different stage in its development. The city is merely a symbol of civilization on the whole, and Cole's series reflects popular American opinon at the time of its creation (1833-1836).

The series had a sizeable impact on my decision to swap campaign worlds. Not only are they wonderful pieces of art, but they inspire me to explore that very same topic of the rise and demise of culture.

The Savage State



The Arcadian or Pastoral State



The Consummation of Empire


The Destruction of Empire


Desolation

Intellectual Stickup Artist

In some dimly-remembered science course during my college years, the topic of an “open universe” versus an “oscillating one” was discussed. To briefly summarize, the open universe theory postulates that the universe is expanding ever outwards and will continue to do so. The oscillating theory surmises that, if there is sufficient matter in the universe, this outward spread will eventually slow, then reverse direction as matter collapses back in upon itself and returns to the densely compact point it was prior to the Big Bang.

For the record, I’m hoping it’s an oscillating universe: the idea that this universe may just be one turn of many on the cosmic wheel speaks to me on a deep level. But the other reason I’m an oscillating universe fan is what it might mean for time. Although we obviously can’t know for certain, there is one theory that, as the universe contracts, the flow of time will also reverse itself, perhaps allowing that which has once been to be yet again.

It’s a fun theory, one good for cocktail parties or in between bong hits and I’ve never forgotten it (despite the cocktails and bong hits). I’ve long wanted to do something with it in a game, but since I’ve never been one for GURPS Time Travel or the Doctor Who RPG, the opportunity hasn’t appeared—at least, until now.

As T.S. Eliot wrote in a review that is forever being misquoted or paraphrased: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” Now, I may be mature or immature, but I’m certainly going to be stealing from all those authors who I listed as influences to build this new campaign world. The trick was trying to decide how to squeeze all the bits that interest me into a single setting without cluttering up the place. The oscillating universe theory allows me to do exactly that.

This new setting is one where the universe is contracting and the previous ages of the world now are being replayed. From the pinnacle of evolution and scientific advancement, the world has now devolved into a new ancient period; a time when civilization was still a new phenomenon and the world a much rawer place. Because of the collapse of linear time, empires that are simulacra of previous eras have risen again and the events that have occurred long, long ago are being reenacted with new roles cast in the cosmic play.

As the world resurrects its ancient empires in new guises, it’s also become a temporary sanctuary for beings from the stars that have fled their planetary homes ahead of the inward collapse of the universe. On this world, some of these races hide amongst the teeming masses, some raise themselves as gods, and others merely gorge themselves on the unwitting inhabitants.

Because of the fluid nature of time, most of the world is completely unaware that the cosmic clock is winding down. Time still seems linear, although the past has become a muddied thing. Those wise enough or mad enough to perceive that the universe is in its death throes have fled this world to other dimensions, universes, or at least worlds closer to the universal center. In their wake, they’ve left behind the gates, platforms, and portals that lead to these unexplored places. Most of these portals were one-way, but a few have allowed things from other dimensions to walk in this world unannounced. And as time continues to break down, relics from previous ages begin to take the stage again. Maybe a cluster of dinosaurs has returned to play out that epoch in some peaceful valley or dark jungle.

I think I’ve just about stolen from everyone with this setting. Dying world? Check off Vance and Smith. Ancient empires that look familiar and exist side by side? There’s my nod to Howard’s Hyboria. Aliens from the outer black terrorizing this world, hiding amongst us, or being worshipped as gods? Paging Mr. Lovecraft. I think you can squeeze Burroughs’ Martian tales in with either the dying world, the relics from other times, travel to other worlds, or—oh! Did I mention this world is hollow? I don’t quite have a suitable Moorcockian antihero vibe going, but I’ll leave that up to the PCs to explore. They’ve got a good start on “shades of grey” Leiber urban fantasy motif.

The one thing that I don’t want to do is make this too much of a sci-fi setting dressed up in magical armor. Others are already doing a much better job of that. The pulp swords & sorcery theme allows me to throw a bit of sci-fi in if I so please, but it’s not going to be a recurring event (other than the alien angle but that’s more of a “look what came here by flying through cold vacuum” thing than “Hey, a saucer just landed!”). This is why I latched onto universal collapse instead of nuclear war as the reason for a return ancient civilization levels. There’s less rayguns and hard radiation hanging around that way.

Of course, this is all just a framework for my benefit and none of it really impacts the characters. They’re just adventurers out for coin, fame, and glory. Having this sort of structure in the back of my head serves me by providing loose guidelines as to what I can include and yet still have an overall pattern to the mess. Even that is tertiary to the players’ and my own enjoyment.

It’s not the greatest campaign concept ever but I’m not looking for that. I just want to find an angle that keeps me and the players excited and coming back for more. This one seems like the perfect balm for a soul weary of a pseudo-medieval fantasy setting and I’m looking forward to building on this framework and eager to see what the players (and their PCs) do with it.

Campaign Kickoff

I’m not going to make it a habit of doing post game reports. My intention is to update the adventure log on the wiki with important notes and the bullet points for each section, but the idea of doing a short novelization of each week’s session is too much additional work.

But, just to give you a general sense of where the campaign stood on Sunday afternoon and to introduce the PCs who may be referred to in future blog posts, here’s a brief recap of the first session:

The PCs

Bannath: Hunted cleric of Yg, Father of Serpents. The Yg sect has been all but eradicated in these lands—a development Bannath intends to correct.
Danek “Armbreaker”: Dim-witted man-at-arms. A charismatic warrior once you get past the mouth-breathing and slack-jawed stare.
Malbane the Green: A novice magic-user whose talent for climbing comes in handy in a scrap.
Mordakis the Silent: A horribly scared dwarf. As if his scars weren’t bad enough, Mordakis’ tongue was cut out, leaving him mute.
Reddannon: Red-headed cleric of Uun the Unknowable (until we flesh out his religion that is).
Syl: A fighter who pursues his vocation with quiet competence.

The Introductory Scenario

The characters had arrived several days ago in Rhuun, a trade outpost on the edge of the Desert of Demons. For different reasons, each was looking for the anonymity and opportunity that this wasteland settlement could provide. Unfortunately, a three-day-long dust storm effectively closed the town down, making sleep and finding employment almost impossible.

Just as things were about the get desperate, each of them were visited by a sending from the sorcerer, Jathal the Hexmaker, who promised them work and coin if they arrived on his doorstep before the Hour of Scorpions the following day.

The next morning saw our six PCs standing on the portico before Jathal’s house. After brief introductions and confirmation that they all received the same sending, the six were granted entrance by the sorcerer’s seemingly mute slave.

Inside, the lanky wizard offered the assembled adventurers 50 gold jitais and his good favor if they would provide him with the skull of Athkul, a sorcerer of modest repute whose tomb lay in the Hills of Scowling Bones just northwest of town. Eager for coin, the sextet departed after gathering their gear and filling their wineskins.

From a map provided by Jathal, they had no difficulty finding the lopsided pyramid that served as Athkul’s tomb. Venturing within, they found a large temple chamber which seemed empty aside from peeling frescoes, pillars inscribed with an alien alphabet, and an unearthly idol placed in a niche above an altar of volcanic rock. At least, it seemed to be an idol.

When the black-bronze and bat-winged thing launched itself from its perch to fall upon them, the PCs unleashed a hail of missiles at strange creature and striking it down before it could injure any of their band. Having proven their merit in battle, the six continued to explore the tomb, uncovering a large cell haunted by skeletons (which proved little threat with two clerics in the group), a room full of religious accoutrements (where they lifted some silver candlesticks and decided to don the midnight-blue robes they found there”just in case”), and a empty study /library that was overseen by the mosaic of a bald, bearded man. Despite a thorough search and the fact that the mosaic seemed to be focusing its attentions on a certain stone table, nothing was discovered therein.

Finding the stairs to the tomb’s lower level, the party ventured deeper into the complex. A walled-up niche was broken open to release a desiccated corpse that even the clerics’ mighty faith could not dispatch (but spears and axes could) and which held a well-made falchion of possible enchantment. A fight with a few more skeletons (quickly turned) and a giant scarab beetle (quickly squashed) left the party facing a door that leads still deeper into the complex…

Under the Influences

The prime reason for the last minute switch of campaign worlds was my own changing tastes. The world of R’Nis has been part of my D&D lexicon for most of my years playing this game—perhaps not quite as realized or textured as it’s become, but the germ of the world was always present. As such, much of the creative bedrock upon which the world is founded was formed during my adolescent years. I was not quite as well-versed in genre literature at that time, nor had I had a chance to experience other role-playing games not produced by TSR. And while I was later able to bolt more mature elements and influences on to the campaign, I did find that I was limited by some preconceived notions and world history. The result was a patchwork quilt that didn’t always please me.

If boiled down to its essence, R’Nis drew much of its influence from Tolkien (both the books and the various animated features based on his work), the King Arthur cycle of tales, the first two Dragonlance trilogies, with a dash of Gygax’s first two Gord novels. It was a world biased towards high fantasy. My teenage years saw me using the Forgotten Realms as a campaign world, which also hews close to the high fantasy tradition so there wasn’t much happening to expand my tastes in genre.

It was only during my college years that I got the opportunity to sample from a much broader array of fantasy literature. For some unknown reason that I’m extremely grateful for, my college library had the entire Gray Mouser and Fafhrd books in its collection. Prior to this I only knew of the twain from my dog-chewed copy of Deities & Demigods (although that was more than enough to stoke my interest in learning more). Remember that this was still a time when the Internet was a strange new thing and Leiber’s work was hard to find in print, so uncovering the complete series in an academic library was something of a minor miracle. I sat down and promptly devoured the books.

The result of this bibliomantic feast was that I completely changed my attitude about what I thought D&D should be about. Being a young man at the time, I was already predisposed towards a fantasy atmosphere that was a bit darker, a bit grittier, and a lot less highfalutin than I’d been using for years—I just didn’t know how to invoke it. Leiber started me down that path and remains one of my top five influences on the game.

After Leiber came Lovecraft. Again my college had a sizeable Lovecraft collection, mostly stemming from the fact that Robert Waugh, a Lovecraftian research of some renown, was (and remains) a member of the college’s English department. I had the pleasure of taking a poetry course taught by Professor Waugh during my undergraduate career and his occasional Lovecraft aside reintroduced me to Howard Philips.

Moorcock follow Lovecraft, and a second-hand copy of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ second Martian Trilogy showed me that he could do more than Tarzan, but it would be several more years before I experienced pure, unadulterated Two-Gun Bob. I never read the Lancer/Ace editions of Howard’s and other’s Conan tales when I was younger, experiencing the barbaric tales of the Cimmerian through Marvel’s Conan comic book and later The Savage Sword of Conan. I witnessed the Schwarzenegger film once it reached cable (having to wait until everyone was asleep before viewing such verboten video), but never experienced undiluted Howard until the recent Del Ray editions. Damn near criminal of me, I know.

I never heard much about Jack Vance other than he had some influence on the D&D magic system, so when I purchased Tales from the Dying Earth omnibus in 2000, I was again both pleasantly surprised and furious with myself for missing out on Vance’s prose for so long.

But the ultimate influence still remained to be discovered and the route to it was a roundabout one. In 2001, I walked into a used bookstore in Long Beach, CA. On a dusty shelf at the dim rear of the store, I chanced upon a copy of Shadows Bend by David Barbo. The novel is pure fiction, postulating what might have occurred if the Cthulhu Mythos were real and Lovecraft and Howard teamed up to battle them. I was acquainted with Lovecraft and Howard at this point so the novel was entertaining in that aspect. As the events in the novel unfurl, the two writers find need of further wisdom and seek out the Bard of Auburn, Clark Ashton Smith, for assistance.

At the time that I purchased the book, I had just returned to L.A. after spending nine weeks in Auburn, CA. Due to my unfamiliarity with Smith, I didn’t know the significance of that town until after I read Shadows Bend. Of the three writers in the book, it is Smith that is portrayed as the most level-headed and well-adjusted of the Weird Tales Trio. With Howard’s mother issues and Lovecraft’s numerous peculiarities as a counterpoint, Smith ends up displaying all the qualities one would normally associate with the hero of the tale, even to the extent of bedding the love interest that Howard is too insecure to woo and Lovecraft too disinterested. This portrayal of Smith, which I later learned to be an accurate one, piqued my curiosity and I wanted to learn more about an author I had previously only associated with Castle Amber.

It would take until 2008 before I finally got my hands on The End of the Story, the first volume of his collected works. I was absolutely stunned by Smith’s imagination and wordsmanship. My only disappointment was that, despite living the longest of the Howard-Lovecraft-Smith trio, Smith only wrote fantastic fiction for such a brief period. I wish the well of his fantasies was a much, much deeper one to draw from. Smith is the second-biggest influence on my believes as to what a fantasy campaign could and perhaps should be, and only misses out on being number one because I’ve not yet had the chance to fully digest his tales and assimilate them into my own imagination.

Influence-wise, I’ve gone from Tolkien, White, Weis & Hickman, and Gygax to Leiber, Moorcock, Vance, Burroughs, Lovecraft, Howard, and Smith—the two groups are almost polar opposites. With this in mind, you’ll have a better understanding of why I took the dramatic step of throwing away the entire world I had previously used to game with. It just wasn’t going to support the style of play and the imaginative elements that I wanted to experience this time around.

I’ll be following this post up with an overview of the campaign world. In it, you’ll see that I’m not at all ashamed to blatantly steal from my fantasy heroes, especially since it ends up building a world that excites me so much that the energy I’m radiating hopefully becomes contagious to the players. Such are the signs of an excellent campaign and the everpresent hope of the referee.