Posts from June 2009

... dammit, I hate writing these sorts of things.

Chuck Cuthbert passed away a couple of days ago. I met Chuck through Bret Boyd's gaming group, with whom I've had the pleasure of rolling dice a couple of times over the past few years. Those games all took place at Chuck's home - specifically, "the barn", which simply put was a gamer's delight. And Chuck was always the gracious host.

I was going to write some stuff about Chuck as a player (he was clever, smart, and just a ton of fun to have at a table) and a DM (one of the best I’ve known), but screw that stuff for a moment ... Chuck was just a really funny, really nice guy.

I guess one of the things that strikes me the most was gaming with him right around Christmas a few years ago. It was only my second time playing with the group, so while I liked everyone in the group a lot, I still felt a bit like the "new guy". When I arrived for the game, I found that Chuck had a present for me. It was nothing major - just a little orange twenty-sided die - but it went a long way towards making be feel like I was indeed part of the group. Little things like that are what made Chuck a truly special, caring person.

And now he’s gone.

Rest in peace, Chuck. We’ll miss you.

Continuing on the “Lost City” theme …

One of the best parts of “B4: The Lost City” was Tom Moldvay’s ingenious inclusion of factions. In the module, the city of Cynidicea fell into ruin long ago, cursed by the appearance of the strange beast Zargon. Over centuries, the descendents of the original inhabitants fell into madness, and separated into different tribes and factions, dedicated to worshipping the old gods of Cynidicea before the fall. The Brotherhood of Gorm, the Magi of Usamigaras, and the Warrior Maidens of Madarua were the three main factions (and the ones the player characters could mostly interact with, if so desired), and the Priests of Zargon were another (though they were mostly intended to be straight-up villains).

(A lot of this was probably inspired by the Conan classic “Red Nails”, but that’s fine. If you’re going to ‘borrow’, then ‘borrow’ from the best.)

Again, in very elegant and economic fashion, Tom Moldvay laid out the basic goals and characteristics of the various factions in half a page. He also laid out some quick guidelines as to what sorts of player characters might choose to ally themselves with each faction, and why. And that’s all the coverage he really gave the factions in terms of how they would interact with the player characters, apart from combat.

It’s an adventure design technique that I call layering. It’s something I learned from modules like “The Lost City” and “Castle Amber” (another Moldvay classic). If the DM wishes to ignore the faction material, and wants to treat all the Cynidiceans as bad guys that are meant to be killed by the player characters … that’s fine! The module works, and it works very well. It becomes more of a generic dungeon crawl, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

With layering, though, options get tossed on top of that base model. The factions in “The Lost City” are a great example of that. If the DM so chooses – and if the players choose to pursue the option, if presented – the factions become much more than “monsters to kill”. The players can ally themselves with one faction, and perhaps become the enemies of another. Or they can double-cross a faction to gain something better from a third. It adds a lot of roleplaying opportunities into a module that – on the surface – is a nice, neat little dungeon crawl. By roleplaying with the various factions, a short 28-page module becomes a campaign that can last a long, long time.

The nice thing about layers is that nothing happens if the layers get ignored. The DM can always work with the basic adventure structure, and just add the layers onto it like ornaments on a Christmas tree. With modules that are very complex and don’t use this technique … well, they’re structured in such a way that if you want to ignore something, the module usually suffers. If “The Lost City” required that the players needed to ally themselves with a particular faction in order to succeed at something, it potentially becomes more work for the DM if he or she wants to ignore that aspect of the module. I’ve found that it’s usually better if a module is set up in a simple way, with more optional complex features that can be added on to it, rather than in a complex way that needs to be stripped down to be more simple.

The same applies for games in general, not just adventure modules. One of the major reasons I’ve never run Exalted – though some of the players at my gaming table would love it if I did – is because aspects of the campaign metaplot are embedded in the rules themselves, and I’m not a big fan of the game’s metaplot. I have ideas for radically different I’d like to run using the Exalted rules, but that means manually stripping out those pieces of the metaplot from the rules, which is a pain. If there were a basic framework for the Exalted rules, with the metaplot stuff layered on top of that as an option, this wouldn’t be an issue.

I tried the layering effect to a certain extent when writing the Dungeon Crawl Classics module “Dreaming Caverns of the Duergar”. In that module, the player characters stumble across a small band of duergar searching for an underground tomb. The duergar are led by Itharnos Cyvorak, a half-duergar/half-dragon mercenary who has his own agenda. The rest of the duergar don’t trust Itharnos, but they need him to locate the tomb. Additionally, there’s some other duergar priests and warriors that have their own agenda in that little band.

Does all this intrigue amongst the duergar matter? It depends. It’s possible to play the entire module and never find out anything about these various agendas, or ever know that most of the duergar hate each other. “Dreaming Caverns” can be played as a simple dungeon crawl, with “duergar = bad guys”, just meant to be fought, killed, and looted. However, depending on how the DM runs the adventure, and how the players choose to react to the duergar, the characters may find themselves allying themselves with one duergar, plotting against another, making arrangements to betray a third … it’s a lot of roleplaying opportunity, should the folks playing the adventure want to use it, but if they don’t, it doesn’t affect the adventure.

And the inspiration for this, of course, came from “The Lost City”.

In a certain amount of irony, I’m currently working on a “Lost City”-styled adventure at the moment with a very gifted co-author. I’ve been consolidating a lot of rough notes and background material for the adventure over the last week or so, and one of the bullet points included in these notes is “Factions”. I don’t know if it can be done as cleanly as Tom Moldvay did it for “The Lost City”, but ideally, I’d like to include a similar sort of network inside the upcoming adventure. I'd love to feature various factions and groups in the city, each with their own plans and agendas … and then have all of it be optional. Just another layer of the adventure, to be added or thrown away as the DM wishes.

I’ll let you know how it progresses.

And someday, hopefully you’ll be able to tell me if it measures up to the original “Lost City”.

Which is a high, high standard indeed.

The following was inspired by a post on James Maliszewski’s wonderful blog over at Grognardia. Thanks, James!

I first started playing D&D in 1983. I never DMed the game, though, until three years later.

The first adventure that I ran was B4: The Lost City.

One of the two best adventures ever written, in my opinion.

And a perfect adventure for a newbie DM.

I was in middle school. At the time, I was a painfully shy, scrawny, socially awkward, nerdy kid, just about one rung up the evolutionary ladder from Waldo in the Van Halen “Hot For Teacher” video … but not by much.

You couldn’t get me to speak in public if you put a gun to my head. I did my best to be little more than a shadow in the corner in every class, saying nothing and trying not to be noticed. The very idea of performing in front of others – which is exactly what a DM must do – was a frightening thought indeed. I was still a few years away from the point in high school where I basically snapped one day, decided that I didn’t give a fuck what anyone else thought of me, and went from being a shy, skinny little nerd to … well, a skinny little in-your-face punk who, deep down, was still kind of a nerd.

But I really liked D&D.

And I wanted to try running the game as a DM.

Somehow, I overcame my inhibitions and convinced a few kids I knew to try playing D&D with me. We all assembled after school in our English teacher’s classroom – she usually stayed late after school, and agreed that we could use the classroom for gaming for an hour or so after school let out. So all that year, once a week, I led my new group of gamers through the wonders of “The Lost City”.

And in the process, I learned a lot about gaming.

“The Lost City”, written by the wonderful Tom Moldvay, kicks off as a standard dungeon crawl. The characters, traveling through a desert, seek refuge in some ruins while caught in a sandstorm, and find themselves descending into the remains of a pyramid, down into the darkness of a vast, ancient, depraved civilization called Cynidicea. Most of the various factions of this civilization are ruled and controlled by a beast of great power simply known as Zargon.

On the one hand, the adventure is very straightforward. In the early stages of the module, adventurers go from room to room in the pyramid, kill monsters, take treasure, and explore a lot of rooms. And that’s exactly what I did as a newbie DM. “Roll Initiative!” was a phrase uttered often, and hack-and-slash ruled the day. However …

Anyone familiar with Tom Moldvay’s modules knows that the man could pack more solid ideas for campaign background and additional adventures in four pages of a module than most 256-page campaign sourcebooks do today. He very elegantly laid out how the various tribes and factions found in the Lost City beneath the pyramid interacted. He managed to fill the module with a dark, moody atmosphere, chock full of pulp fantasy. A lot of “The Lost City” is quite reminiscent of the best works of Robert E. Howard.

While it wasn’t necessary to use any of this information – the player characters could simply fight everyone, take their treasure, and move on – it added a new dimension to the game that I’d never used before – roleplaying. As in, social interaction between player characters and NPCs.

Go figure.

So as the game progressed, the player characters wound up making alliances with one of the Cynidicean factions, which thereby automatically made them sworn enemies of another. The heroes couldn’t just walk into a room and wantonly slaughter everything in sight anymore – they needed to be savvier than that, and do a little sleuthing. Battle preparations become more carefully planned affairs, rather than “draw swords, throw magic missiles, and hope for the best”. The game wasn’t the most sophisticated thing in the world, but it slowly evolved to something far beyond a mere hackfest and into something more well-rounded, featuring combat alongside diplomacy, explorations, and investigation, which proved to be much more interesting to the players.

Additionally, Moldvay put in a lot of areas in the module that weren’t detailed on the maps. Rather, there would be a corridor leading off the map, and the module would state “this corridor leads to the Temple of Despair”, or something like that, and a sentence or two about what might be found there. Towards the end of my “Lost City” adventure/campaign, I began writing up the details for things like the “Temple of Despair” on my own. This sandbox approach by Tom Moldvay allowed enough tools and guidance for newbie DMs to start creating their own adventures, and he managed to do so with a remarkable economy of words.

“The Lost City” was my first attempt at running a campaign, and after all these years, I still think it’s one of my best.

I’ve had the opportunity to write several modules of my own over the past few years. In all of them, I’ve done my best to try and emulate that sandbox approach of “The Lost City”. While I’m not nearly as succinct as Tom Moldvay, my goal has always been to provide additional, optional campaign ideas in an adventure in case the DM feels like expanding things, and potential opportunities for a lot of roleplaying, even in the middle of an adventure that is meant more as a dungeon crawl. If a gaming group reads one of my modules and doesn’t care about any of that extra stuff, they should be able to skip past it and go straight for the meat of the hack-and-slash dungeoneering. But hopefully, in case a DM is looking for more, there’s at least some ideas to grab, and to develop, and to make his or her own.

“The Lost City” has had a tremendous an influence on me as a game writer and designer. Sadly, Wizards of the Coast lost their damn minds (again) and have stopped all PDF sales of their out-of-print products, so it’s no longer easy to get of copy of this module. But if you’re a game writer, and you can find a copy on eBay or elsewhere, by all means do so. It’s worth your time.

I’d really like to run “The Lost City” again someday. It remains a true classic to me.

When I was younger, most of the guys (and girls) in my gaming group were slightly older than myself. This never was really a problem until my senior year in high school, when they were either attending local community colleges, or working all sorts of jobs with weird hours. As a result, a lot of games got played in the middle of the week, during the middle of the day, when I was supposed to be in school.

I say “supposed to be” because given a choice between school and gaming, I ditched school. My priorities were a little warped back then.

I thought of this early this week, when I blew out of work early so I could go play in a game during the middle of the day. Chris Doyle, one of the esteemed authors of Castle Whiterock, was running a Pathfinder-ized version of Whiterock, and there was no way I was missing that. (Especially since the other esteemed author of Whiterock – Mr. Adrian Pommier – was participating in the game as well.)

Apparently, my priorities haven’t changed much in the past 20 years.

The game turned out to be my first real in-depth exposure to the upcoming Pathfinder game, which is derived from the rules for D&D 3.5. I’ve been freelancing for Paizo on a few small Pathfinder projects over the past few months, and I’ve read many times through the Pathfinder Beta rules that I acquired last summer … but this was the first real chance I had to see if my preconceived notions of Pathfinder matched up with reality once the dice hit the table.

One of the more prominent differences I noticed came during character generation. The power level of Pathfinder is more substantial than that of D&D 3.5. Low-level characters in Pathfinder have access to more feats, and are a bit stronger and tougher than their 3.5 counterparts. In rolling up Ravnir, my 3rd-level half-elf rogue, I found myself with a lot of feats and additional abilities I wouldn’t be getting with an analogous character in 3.5. I also found the options for “builds” much more accessible at lower levels – I was able to make Ravnir much more of a find-and-disable traps burglar even at 3rd level than I normally would be able to do in 3.5

Pathfinder also streamlined some of the more clunky elements of 3.5 (grapple, I’m looking at you!). A new mechanic – the Combat Manuever Bonus, or CMB – captures how characters accomplish a variety of different actions in combat, such as bull rushing, or tripping, or the aforementioned grapple. It makes figuring out these maneuvers much easier. Additionally, various skills like Spot and Search got consolidated into simpler skills, like Perception. It makes the game run a little smoother.

(To be fair, D&D 4E did a lot of this sort of consolidation as well, and also for the better.)

Most importantly, I found the game play in Pathfinder to be very close to D&D 3.5. The style and feel of the Pathfinder game was virtually identical to the various 3.5 games I’ve played. Granted, there were some minor changes, but I didn’t find myself going “whoa, that’s different”, or feeling like I was playing something very, very new. If you like D&D 3.5, then I think you would like Pathfinder. For all of the differences that can be found between the games, they’re relatively minor once the games are being played.

That being said, there are differences. Despite streamlining a lot of the bloat of 3.5, Pathfinder also added some bloat back in with some new rules and options. Some work very well, in my opinion (sorcerer bloodlines = win), and others not so much (barbarian rage points = meh). Between the new rules, options, and scaling up in power level, I’d probably be hesitant to drop Pathfinder characters into a stock D&D 3.5 module without some serious tweaks of the adventure. And considering one of the original design parameters of Pathfinder was supposed to be “backwards compatibility” between Pathfinder and 3.5 … I’m not exactly seeing it right now. The Pathfinder game plays the same as D&D 3.5, for the most part, but it’s a stronger game.

This is based on game play using the Pathfinder Beta rules, though. I know Paizo’s plan was to throw some more experimental ideas in the Beta rules, and refine accordingly for the final rules, which are scheduled to be released this summer. Though I have a few reservations about things I’ve seen in the Beta rules, they’re minor issues at best, and I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the “official” rules in a few months.

Oh. Right. As for the game …

… lots of fun. The highlight of Ravnir’s brief adventuring career was an encounter with orc slavers, and a particularly nasty orc leader. Attempting to take advantage of a spell that dazed the leader, Ravnir stepped in with his short sword and dealt out a ridiculous amount of sneak attack damage. He then dealt out some more damage the following round, just as the leader regained his senses … but it wasn’t enough to take down his foe. So the orc leader got a critical hit, dealt out a ton of damage, and Ravnir got relegated to the realms of the permanently dead with -12 hit points.

If Ravnir had just inflicted 1 more point of damage on the orc leader, he would’ve dropped the orc instead.

Still, a great time. My thanks to Mr. Doyle for running a fine game, and to everyone else at the table as well. I had a blast.

Definitely worth playing a little hooky.

Been very, very busy the past few days. I've been writing stuff involving giants, lost cities, strange puzzles, and river kingdoms ... and sneaking in some honest-to-goodness gaming as well. The next post will probably cover my long-overdue return to the gaming table as a player, but suffice it to say it involves Pathfinder and Castle Whiterock.

And a few thoughts on playing hooky as well.

In the meantime, something short and sweet - I've managed to acquire a curious little edition to my gaming collection.

Yep. Chainmail, which is the predecessor to all things Dungeons & Dragons.

It's a short and interesting game. At heart, it's a tabletop combat game - you move troops around a field of battle, with terrain affecting your ability to move and attack. Everything's determined by rolling six-sided dice. Roll high (5 or 6) and you destroy your foe. Depending on what sort of troops you have, you get more dice to roll during an attack.

You also get heroes. Some of them have familiar roles - heroes, wizards, dragons, and so on. Though they don't really have a lot of detail to them (a dragon, mechanically-speaking, is a catapult that can fly and move over impassible terrain), you can see basic elements that would show up prominently in the White Box D&D rules, the 1st edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, and even Boot Hill. And there's some elements that even carry to the modern version of the game - heroes fighting troops in Chainmail is very, very similar to a fighter taking on minions in 4E.

I'm definitely going to have to try playing this at some point, just to see what else I discover. Reading a game is always good, but I always find that playing it gives you a far better idea of how things work.

(And I may have to gank the jousting rules from Chainmail for other games that I run - they're very simple, very clean, and works brilliantly.)

Just need to find some time to step away from the computer and roll some dice again.