Games Night: Veins of the Earth

So last night I rolled up a couple of characters to take through a dungeon based on Patrick's Veins of the Earth setting/sourcebook. This was kind of a playtest I guess - I don't know if I'm the first person to encounter some of these creatures and situations in the wild - but it was all new and different and weird to me.

Game Night: Murderous Ghosts

Last night Patrick and I played Murderous Ghosts. The short version: it's amazing, really quite a remarkable, fun, scary and plain good game. We had time to play two games, so both got to play as MC and urban explorer.

Some thoughts:

• It works really well as a role-playing game for two people. The playbooks are helpful and not intrusive - it provides you with steering but leaves things up to the imagination of the people playing - and prompts the MC to be as scary as possible.
• Playbooks are really good: each person has their own "choose-your-own-adventure" book.
• The general set up is just great: the MC is the abandoned place and the ghosts, and the other player is an urban explorer who has lost their way. Each moves according to what their place in the playbook says.
• Randomness is in the form of each player drawing cards from a regular deck. The mechanism is somewhere between blackjack and the Apocalypse World under-7/7-9/10+ dice-rolling. It really works. It's a little tactical: if you ace one situation, you will not succeed as well on the next one (statistically).
• It didn't matter that we died (on both occasions). The horror and scares were really satisfying. Dying felt inevitable, surviving was great while it lasted.

Also: Patrick is good at weird scary stuff. My character found himself in an abandoned and haunted animal testing lab. The next forty minutes were terrifying.

Final Thoughts: I wonder how the blackjack/AW mechanic would work in other settings... And I wonder how simple it would be to fashion a "haunted house" game from the basic structure, i.e., a game for more than two players...

Making a Dungeon

After recent fun experiences playing both noisms Yoon-Suin setting and Lamentations of the Flame Princess with Patrick DMing, I've been thinking about (eventually) running something a bit old school myself.

I'm trying to come up with my own homebrew dungeon and have some ideas for (hopefully) novel traps and situations; I'm wondering what people would recommend doing/thinking about when creating a dungeon. There are great resources out there of course:

• I got Vornheim a few months back and am really enjoying that.
• noisms linked to this guide to putting a mega-dungeon together, and that seems pretty cool.
• When I get it (maybe for Christmas), LotFP will help me put some numbers to things.

But nevermind those: what do you think is important to think about when designing a dungeon? Are there particular tropes that should be followed? And are there cliches that should now be avoided?

The Vornheim Question

Just a short post: I mentioned last week that I had a really great games night on Thursday with Patrick, who was DMing LotFP with the Vornheim book for part of the proceedings. In particular I know that the mission/quest for the evening was based around a character and location featured in Zak's book. Thursday was great.

So here's the problem: should I get and read Vornheim, given that I thought the details Patrick used were really cool and I want to see what the rest of the place is like, or as a player in a campaign that I dip my toe into occasionally, am I cheating Patrick - as DM - of the opportunity to run a session, given that I might pick things up that could provide me with "spoilers"?

#nerdworldproblem

Games Night Redux

A few days ago I forgot to include a few things from our Yoon-Suin game that had really tickled me. Patrick, in writing about the game that he is DMing and which my nephew is a player in, reminded me of the importance of great lines and player strategy that come out in play, and which really should be recorded.

Here are some notes I made from last week's game; apologies if they make little sense to anyone else out there. They were perfectly reasonable at the time.

Patrick, thinking like a giant lungfish (whose stomachs were filled with silver pieces): "I'm so hungry, have you got any coins?"

(honestly, why am I even posting this, why would anyone care??? I had to hold my head and pinch by brow to stop myself from crying with laughter at the feeding habits of dungeon dwelling lungfish)

Eki Ulele, my slug-man magic-user, has a reputation for going all red mist-y around the edges whenever someone tries to get one over on us. His standard reaction is to burn the village and salt the land with the widows' tears. When the others talked him down from killing an unarmed prisoner it made me realise: "I'm like a slug Jack Bauer!"

noisms, the DM, as we set forth on an improvised bamboo raft across a dungeon lake: "You float off into the Dark Sea of Doom."
Everyone else thinks: "I've made a huge mistake."

Patrick's PC, Anil, is a cleric who serves Manpac (rearrange the syllables); Manpac is apparently the god of mazes, the eater of ghosts and his servants chant wakka-wakka-wakka as they do his work. When Patrick exclaimed "fear the might of Manpac" I thought I was going to die laughing.

But here's the thing: the repurposing of Manpac is AWESOME. If I was a cleric in another world, another time, I can totally see "the God of Mazes, the Eater of Ghosts" as a being who is to be feared and obeyed.

And Games Night is tomorrow.

Games Night: OD&D/Yoon-Suin

Last night we had another trip to Yoon-Suin, ably DMed by noisms. Patrick, Whimsy and I headed for the dungeon with three retainers to soak up some of the damage. We were cautious at first; we had arrived at the entrance to the dungeon in the late afternoon, and so our plan was just to have a quick explore so that we could get the lay of the land, see what the entrance was like, get a feel for the place.

Then we met the hostiles.

noisms described them as humanoid, grey-skinned, red eyes, dressed in rags and with long, lank hair: there were a lot of them, and they attacked in groups, armed with spears, clubs and slings. There were three or four skirmishes in all; they tried to flank us several times, but we were always able to stay one step ahead of them, more or less.

In the end, we killed all of them, but not without paying a price: we lost Patrick's character Damodar.

Damodar was awesome. He was always stood at the front of a fight, always keen to jump in; his INT stat was low, but Patrick played that really well by having Damodar ask naive-sounding-but-clever questions. Being the only fighter in a party of magic-users meant that he had to be the guy at the front; plate mail can only do so much, and Patrick effectively played the odds all night: hit after hit from slings, spears and clubs didn't connect, until they finally did.

Luckily, once we had killed all of the creatures in that party, we were able to "rescue" a 1st level cleric that Patrick was frantically rolling up. Damodar and one of the retainers were buried just outside the entrance of the dungeon, and the next day we decided to head back to Silaish Vo to lick our wounds and rethink our strategy.

It's my first time playing a magic-user, and I hadn't realised just how restricted options were in terms of combat: as a 1st Level I have only one spell as well, and none of my options are offensive in nature. I just about killed some of the grey-skins with my staff, and I had wits enough to make flame-bombs from flasks of oil. I'm hoping that I can level up (safely) over the next session, and possibly start the path towards offensive capabilities.

Having more than three hit points would also be handy.

Games Night: Isle of the Unknown

Two weeks ago my brave and Lawful Specialist Charley Shortbread was almost killed by a brutal cut from a lizardman chief; during the session that I was absent from last week he was mostly perched on top of a cart recovering.

So we return to the Isle of the Unknown, and find ourselves meeting up with another shipwreck victim (noisms joined the game), and then proceed to carry out a plan that had been set in motion in our absence: to dispose of some war chimps that had acted as bodyguard to a magically locked safe, and then take the safe to the local castle.

There was some potential crazy background deals going on, but that all went south when we disposed of the bodies at a local churchyard. There was a lot of intra-party disagreement on how to proceed, an NPC civilian got killed (ironically, they were the town's healer, so no recovery at the end of the session!), and both Charley Shortbread and Glister (noisms' PC) had to leave town via the river, then come back around to the main gate, and pretend to be travellers, shipwreck victims, struggling through the night and seeking sanctuary.

Of course, this only worked so far, as Charley was known by the gatesmen (in my absence he had been seen around with our other PC, a swashbuckling and incredibly lucky fighter called Klaus); but the Force was with us, and the gatesmen and everyone else that I met believed that they had met my now absent IDENTICAL TWIN BROTHER. From that point on, goodbye Charley, hello Henry. Henry Shortbread.

Cut forward to more disagreements in a dungeon beneath the town, some thief slaughter, Klaus summoning his demon dogs and then falling into a pit trap through carelessness, and Henry and Glister being seriously wounded. We ended the session with just enough good fortune to get XP, some healing, some respect from the towns-people and an idea that all is not as it seems in this strange town... And the head of the castle guards is very suspicious of us (and rightly so).

Memorable Moments from Games Night
Klaus: No-one's going to miss an old woman. Old women go missing all the time.

Charley/Henry: 1HP equates to losing an eye?!

Patrick (DM): I'm gonna be the hippy art teacher DM...

And finally, a moment that perhaps you had to be there for, but which caused a lot of laughter around the table. Remember, we play this in a gaming cafe, i.e., in public. Glister was on -1HP, and I asked Patrick if I could perform any kind of first aid or stabilisation. On the fly (I think) he said that I could, if I described my actions and then shouted "Don't you die on me man!" in a cinematic style.

Me: Really? Like I'm McCoy or something?
Patrick: Yeah, "don't you die on me man!"
Me: OK. So I do this and that and pound Glister on the chest and shout "don't you die on me man!"
Patrick: ...Louder.
Me: What?
Patrick: Louder.
Me: Don't you die on me man!
Patrick: Do you want to save him or not?
noisms: Yeah, do you want to save me or not?!
Me: Sigh.
Patrick: He's not looking good...
Me: DON'T YOU DIE ON ME MAN!
Patrick: Hmmmm-
Me: DON'T YOU DIE ON ME MAN!!!!!!
(Patrick and noisms are both, of course, laughing their asses off by now)
Patrick: ...So, Glister wakes up...

More Microscope

My friend P, from our gaming group, has put together a timeline of the space-time continuum that we built on Tuesday playing Microscope and posted it on his blog. Go and check it out, it's particularly cool I think, especially for paragraphs like this:

Karl-4 the Hyper-Neanderthal President of Humanity is persuaded to let Echelon VII lead the Ontological-Warhead strike by Stanislaw Brock the Grand Hierophant of Earth. Echelon VII will encode humanity in the Sun's Corona then seed Jupiter with self-creating nanoswarms that will transform the Jovian mass into a Hypermind that can re-constitute and recreate mankind. Sigmund Ross - Chief Warlock, and mutated psychic, and Augustus Schwarzkopf, 11-Star General of the United Military of Mankind, decide not to accept the offer and will stay and to fight to the death.

(yes, that really is how things played out; we took every single half-remembered hard sci-fi idea we had ever heard and spewed them out over the course of three hours)

Really looking forward to our first one-shot game in this shared universe now!

Getting Dice All Random

In my first post I mentioned that I had started to get interested in the maths of RPGs from the probabilities in Apocalypse World. There was something else that started me thinking, which is when one of the regulars in the gaming group I play with asked a question on his tabletop role-playing game blog, False Machine.

P was looking at randomly generating an island from a series of entries in a table. He had come up with a means to do that, but only on a computer, which meant while the island was randomly generated the setting would be determined ahead of his session. To him, the problem was, as he put it at the end of the post:

I need a dice method that can randomise 343 hexes

I've always had a strange little fascination with powers of numbers, so this jumped out at me as soon as I saw it. 343 is 7*7*7, which means that you could have seven tables, with seven rows and seven columns; you could then get any entry out of the 343 in your master list by rolling three d8s and re-rolling any 8s.

Problem solved! Until P realised later that there were actually 330 entries in the table for Isle of the Unknown. But this wasn't a problem either, if we imagined the entries arranged in ten tables, each with three columns and 11 rows. Roll a d10 for the table, a d3 (or d6/2 if you must be formal) and a d12 with re-rolls on the 12s. Again, problem solved!

Which got me thinking...

GMs who like to make things up through random tables could possibly have a large number of random encounters or random elements that they would like in tables. 330 or even 343 entries could be quite small. Is there, in general, a sensible schema that we can use for producing sets of random tables for game data, that we can index with dice? Let's assume d4, d6, d8, d10, d12 and d20s are available.

To put some bounds on this, let's assume, for now (although it may be easily extendable, who knows) that we want to consider for sets of random tables with up to 400 elements in total. I'm going to have a think about this and let you know what I think over the next week or so, as well as share a small random table of my own for In A Wicked Age.