Lets Read... Mythus pt2.1

Comment posted by

Kelvin Green Feb 27, 2012 10:22 AM

No sample character? That's a shame!

Well, yes and no. There is actually a sample character in the Mythus Prime chargen chapter. He's introduced to us in the various How to Make a Character boxouts, but has such a silly made-up fantasy name - Kristof (*pshaw!*) - that I simply refuse to mention him. But, as the peanut gallery have demanded it, I'm going to waste some time and effort making our very own Mythus Prime HP for the enjoyment and edification of the readership.

Name: Chongo van der Bheetschtick (he's from alternate magicworld Holland)
Social Class: 5, Freeman landowner (rolled 4)

Vocation: Soldier (Chongo was not gestated in a sufficiently high-caste womb to be worthy of the Cavalier vocation, and I didn't fancy taking a drop in social class just to take the Mercenary career)

TRAITS
(120 divided as desired, min 20, max 60)

Mental:	35
Physique:	50
Spiritual	35

Our guy is pretty strong, but only average in the fields of finking or praying at things.

SKILLS
(all = base ## + 1/2 TRAIT)

Automatic Skills

Speak Native Language (M)	47
Perception (M)	47
Riding (P)	55

Career Skills

Combat, Hand Weapons (P)	55
Combat, HTH, Lethal (P)	45
Combat, HTH, Non-Lethal (P)	40
Combat, Hand Weapons, Missile (P)	40
Criminal Activities, Mental (M)	27
Criminal Activities, Physical (P)	50
Escape (P)	50
Gambling (M)	37
Streetwise (M)	37
Survival (P)	45

Free Pick Skills

+ 3 Physical Skills
Arms & Armour	35
First Aid	35
Mountain Climbing	35
+ 2 Spiritual Skills
Alchemy*	27
Metaphysics*	27
+ 1 Mental Skill
Appraisal	27

* Skill related to magic use

So, we've basically got a default adventurer type with hobby-level interests in chemistry and philosophy.

FINANCES

Net Worth:	10,000 BUC + horse of 7,000BUC value (127 Physique)
Bank Account:	2,000 BUC
Cash on Hand:	900 BUC
Disposable Monthly Income:	50 BUC

Thanks to the magic of "refer to Advanced Mythus" I have precisely no clue as to whether this amount of cash is good or bad. If the 1 BUC = $1 thing is taken as a given Chongo is doing well for himself if seen from the standpoint of a Gujerati dirt farmer.


GEAR
Sword (4d6), Spear (3d6), dagger (2d6)
Full Chain armour (12) and cosmetic shield
Hard wearing travel clothes
Rope, lantern, oil, paper and charcoal, minimal camping gear
Minor trinkets and curios

No kit list in Basic Mythus. This is just a default adventuring rig.


DERIVED STATS

Wound Level (3/4 of Physique):	37
Heka (sum of magic skills):	54
Attractiveness:	13 (Attractive/Cute)

So that's a Mythus Prime character.

The massive block of percentile skills reminds me a great deal of a BRP* or WFRP char sheet, and the numbers on offer are reminiscent of starting skills score in those two games. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does make me wonder: why not just play RuneQuest or WFRP?

Some of the skills are also a bit odd. The idea that criminal activity is a specific skill set - as opposed to just doing things in a way that the local Powers That Be don't approve of - is a bit strange to my mind. Similarly the sweeping generality of, for example, Criminal Activities, Physical or Mental stands in stark contrast to the very very specific distinctions of Combat, Hand Weapons vs. Combat HTH Lethal vs Combat HTH Non-Lethal.

Oh well, I'm sure it'll all start to make sense as I head further down the rabbit hole... (either that or I'll eventually be found gibbering and scribbling on the walls)

That said Zak's theory that Mythus was EGG's poison pen letter to the goggle-eyed clue lacker element of the gaming world ("...by 1992 Gary had received So. Much. Stupid. Mail. that he figured there were people out there who needed "sheet" defined and needed "how to roll dice" explained.") is beginning to have a certain horrible logic. I'd hate to think that Mythus was what AD&D was meant to be.

Let's Read... Mythus, pt2

Continuing this 'until I lose the will to live' investigation of Gary Gygax's Mythus RPG for material that might be useful for old school games.

We start this post with a two page b+w art spread of humans in 'exotic foreigner' costume posed before fantasy architecture. Pretty cool, would befit Tekumel, Talislanta, Jurone or suchlike. Nice work by Janet Allusio? Big bold headings inform us that, for better or worse, we are entering The Mythus Prime Rules Player Section.

Chapter 1: Creating Your Heroic Persona
Eight pages of chargen? Ok, I've seen entire games with less pages of rules, but we'll persevere. At least the tables and sidebars (complete with faux frayed parchment box edges) break up the relentless blocks of text.

1: Determine Socio-Economic Class (SEC)
OK, this is a little odd to someone habituated to D&D, but makes a kind of sense in an Unearthed Arcana-ish, game-as-simulation-of-fantasy-society way. Social station determines a lot of life chances, and Mythus seems to be a very crunch-heavy, simmy game. Roll 1d6+1, 2 = peasant, non-free, 7 = non-titled aristocrat. No explanation of what use this will be later; no reference to later sections. 2/10 Must try harder.

2: Generate Traits. Sorry, that should read TRAITS
Characters have three TRAITS (allcaps as original): Mental, Physical, Spiritual. 120 points divided between the three, min 20 each, max 60. We get a table that explains 26-35 is Average, while 56-60 is "Incredible! You are as smart as a rocket scientist, as strong as a champion weightlifter, or as full of faith as a saint." We're also introduced to Knowledge/Skill (K/S) areas (aka "skills" to Earthlings), which are related to one TRAIT or another. It takes the better part of a page to explain this.

3: Choose a Vocation
Two columns of blah blah, including a paragraph about how children learn. This is where we first encounter the acronym STEEP (study, train, experience, education, practise), the derivation and meaning of which has bugged me since I bought Epic of Aerth nearly 20 years ago. There's also one small table that contains the information you actually need: 7 classes, their primary TRAIT, and their minimum Socio-Economic Class (SEC) requirement. The next page introduces you to the classes: Alchemist, Astrologer, Cavalier, Merc/Soldier, Mountebank, Thief, Wiseman/-woman. These are pretty self-explanatory to any fantasy gamer.

4. Select K/S and STEEP Points
No, I'm not joking. That's the actual title of the "Pick Skills" section. Mythus loves it some acronyms.

K/S and STEEP are explained again. Then there’s a master skill list. Eighteen Knowledge/Skill areas per TRAIT. Most of the skills are pretty self-explanatory: Boating, Gambling, Smithing, Street-wise, etc. You also have a bunch of less obvious fields like Aptropaism, Dweomercraeft, Tolerance or Charismaticism. There are no actual skill descriptions; those are 50-odd pages away in the Advanced rules, which is massively helpful to a new player. Basic Mythus: SO basic it doesn't include half the information required to play. Was 'crippleware' a word in 1992?

Each class, sorry, vocation gets 10 of these 50-odd skills at a set base score to which is added half the character's score in the related TRAIT. So pretty prescriptive, given the restrictions on TRAITS. Quite how you manage to spread a list of ten skills per vocation (oh, and the news that everyone gets 6 additional skills at 10, as well as Perception, Speak and Ride at 30) over four pages escapes me.

5. There is no section five.
Either there's a chunk of the chargen rules missing, or T$R's legal team claimed that use of the number five was a distinctive property of their most popular RPG, or the Editorial staff were asleep on the job. The error speaks for itself. Let us pass on with no more said.

6. Establish Finances and Possessions
Again, the actual title of the "starting money" section.

A sidebar introduces the concept of the Base Unit Coin or BUC, which is the default coin of whatever setting you're in. One BUC = one buck, and prices are generally based on real world prices. OK, but this does mean that starting cash is going to be a couple of orders of magnitude too fiddly for most people to care about.

How much money do you have? Well, there’s no absurdly simplistic "3d6x10gp" here. *snerk* Oh no. Starting characters have Net Worth, and Bank Accounts, and Cash on Hand, and Disposable Monthly Income, all determined by random rolls derived from their social class, sorry, SEC. On top of this they also have their Basic Possessions: Dwellings, Clothes and Furnishing, Misc. Gear, and GM's Option. We're also told to refer to the Advanced Mythus rules for even more(!) detail.

After two pages of this a disclaimer says "Don't worry about figuring out every last item your HP has right now; all you need to have immediately is a very general idea of what the character owns." *headdesk*

7. Finish Any Miscellaneous Information
A paragraph suggesting that you describe what your PC, sorry Heroic Persona, looks like, and there's a table on which you can roll the Attractiveness of your HP (2d6+8, 1 = Nasty, 10 = Average, 20 = Stunning). Note: no HP is ever less than averagely attractive.

And now we've got our character: 3 stats, a slack handful of skills, and a very, very specific breakdown of net worth. Almost like the game was written by a former insurance adjuster or something...

Chapter 2: Conducting Actions
Two actual pages of text to say "roll d% under your skill K/S or stat TRAIT, or just GM fiat it" and to explain that timekeeping is important. No actual details on travel times: apparently we should refer to the Advanced Rules for those. That is already becoming an annoyingly familiar refrain.

Game time is divided into the Action Turn (5 minutes), Battle Turn (30 seconds) and Critical Turn (3 seconds): HPs can cover 1000:100:10 feet in those periods walking, or three times that running. Easy to remember, and the names are really helpful, because there's no way anyone could ever mix up the names of those three scaling turns in the heat of play.

Any correspondence of these nested turns to the time measurement system of AD&D is obviously purely in the imagination of the reader.

Next Time: Heka, Mystical Force of Magickal (sic) Castings, Combat and XP

Now far into this are we? 20 pages? Oh sweet Raptor Jeebus, that's only 1/20th of the way in.
"Bring us the finest wines know to humanity!"

Untimately's 20Qs

Answering this mainly for my own satisfaction. And coz, hey, bandwagon!

If you decide this stuff early, you are less likely to have misunderstandings and more likely to all be on the same page.
Truer words never spoken.

1. Ability scores? 
3d6 in order.

2. How are death and dying handled?
0 hp = down. GM has a "Dead, Dying or Malingering?" table which is rolled on at the end of combat.

3. Raising the dead?
Can be done. Has complications. You tend to bring things back with you...

4. Replacement PCs? 
Promote your senior henchman to PC status. Else 0xp, 3d6 in order

5. Initiative: individual, group, other? 
Group.

6. Crits and fumbles: how do they work? 
Nat 20 = attack again.
Nat 1 = foe ripostes (gets to attack you again)

7. Benefits for wearing a helmet? 
No, but not wearing one makes your head AC9, and I understand you keep important stuff in there...

8. Can I hurt my friends if I fire into melee or do something similarly silly?
Yes, oh god yes. Please, fire into melee, make the GM's day...

9. Run from some encounters, or kill everything in our path?
Invest in running shoes. There's always someone bigger and nastier out there.

10. Level-drainers: yes or no?
Yes, Con drain.

11. Can one failed save result in PC death?
Yes, because actions have consequences.

12. Encumbrance tracking: how strict?
I use the nice and simple LotFP Enc. rules (25 items max, bulky items count for more), so things are pretty self-regulating.

13. What's required when my PC gains a level? Training? Do I get new spells automatically? Can it happen in the middle of an adventure, or do I have to wait for down time?
PCs gain levels only when they return to town and integrate their hard-won experience as life lessons and new techniques.
New spells/lvl = Int mod. You can sub in potion formulae instead...

14. What do I get XP for?
You get XP for killing, theft, drinking heavily, and seeing/doing new stuff. The last is in accordance with Jeff Rients' XPloration rules.

15. How are traps located? Description, dice rolling, or some combination?
Description. If you don't say you're looking, then you probably walk right into it.

16. Are retainers encouraged and how does morale work?
Retainers are heavily encouraged, unless you fancy starting at 0xp when your PC goes "Blargh! I'm ded". Morale is pretty much by the book.

17. How do I identify magic items?
Magic items tend to look magic IMG: the more powerful an item is, the more awesome it will look.
You have to attune the item (takes 1 turn) and then attempt to use it. Command words must be researched (interrogating sprits, sages, monsters, etc.)

18. Can I buy magic items? Oh, come on: how about just potions?
Potions, scrolls and minor charms (+1 to something), yes.
Major stuff, not a chance! You have to take major magic off someone/-thing who already has it.

19. Can I create magic items? When and how?
Scrolls at L1, potions when you learn the formulae. Magic items at L9.

20. Splitting the party?
You can if you want. But expect to spend half your time listening to other people having cool adventures...

Thanks to Brendan for setting these out.

Let's Read... Mythus, part 1 of ???

Dangerous Journeys/Mythus: the 400+ page magnum opus fantasy heartbreaker created by the King-in-Exile of RPGs after his ousting from the kingdom forged by his own hand. This here is the first of a semi-regular series of posts chronicling my delving of this ... creation ... for ideas that might be usable in Classic Fantasy Role-Play Simulacra Games.

Why am I doing this? 50% coz I need a break from battering my head against the ever-mutating hydra of GCX; 50% coz Mythus has a kind of "is he serious?" car-crash fascination. It's almost like watching a much-loved celebrity have a massive public breakdown.

Expected outcome?

Quick note on nomenclature:

• Dangerous Journeys - EGG's post-TSR universal RPG system.
• Mythus - fantasy RPG using the DJ system.
• Mythus Prime/basic Mythus - Dangerous Journeys lite. Trimmed down by Dave Newton.

Part the First
In which our hero dips his toe into the pool.

Gary Gygax's Dangerous Journeys Mythus FRPG
Big fat book. Elmore cover. Back cover blurb talks a good fight. So far, so early 90s fantasy.

After the credits and frontispiece proceedings open - in accordance with tradition - with the contents pages. Yes, pages. Two of 'em, in dense two column layout. Numbered chapters broken into sections, then into subsections. This is the antithesis of Chill's posh restaurant menu minimalism and seems comprehensive, if a little overwhelming at first glance. Big bold headings inform us that the first 55 pages (Chapters 1-9) are the Mythus Prime system rules. After that you've about 300 pages of Advanced Mythus rules split across chapters 10-17. Rounding things out are Appendices A-to-M, then several pages of indices.

Next up, the Editor's Preface by Lester Smith. This sets the tone for the whole book by being a dense, unrelieved textwall which causes my eyes to glaze over 2-3 times per column. ("Oh, this bodes well", he said.) The introduction openly compares/contrasts Mythus with AD&D. Supposedly Mythus "...is like a jam session in which one mythic vision provides the unity, but the individual musicians are free to improvise upon that theme -- and any sort of musical instrument is allowed." There's quite a bit of this, but boil away the verbiage and it comes down to: D&D is class-based, Mythus is 'descriptive' (aka: a skill-based RuneQuest clone).

A brief, ranty aside: was textwall really the state of the art in game books in the early 90s? I remember Palladium books of the period being similar in their layout (two column, b+w, fugly fonts), but not so bloody dense. A bit of checking indicates that two column b+w was pretty much an industry standard, but there doesn't seem to have been a universal ideological aversion to paragraph breaks. The spacing and typeface of the Mythus rulebook says trenchant things about GDW's typesetting and editing departments circa 1992. ("Show us on the doll where whitespace touched you...")

Enough of that. What new horrors wonders and delights await?

Page 6: Welcome to the Mythus Game in a big fat heading. I feel duly welcomed. And then night fell and the textwalls attacked me. Three paragraphs of author introduction before we even get to the industry standard What is an RPG? section. This is followed by a section on The Gamemaster which dangerously asserts that "...a GM must have material prepared for game action spanning days, weeks, months and possibly years of roleplaying activity by the player group."

No! Bad Gary! Stop poisoning the well!

I will speak from bitter experience and say that this sort of thinking is BAD ADVICE that lead me astray in my younger days. It's the gaming equivalent of someone telling you to spend several years at a conservatory of music before starting one's knockabout garage band. Over-preparation kills campaigns in the cradle and discourages starting GMs: anyone who recommends it is not your friend!

It's not impossible that this "first spent a decade creating your world from scratch" advice was actually written by Dave Newton, but I doubt it. The echoes of the thunderously magisterial "...YOU CANNOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT." (AD&D DMG) are classic Gygax.

This shocking piece of sabotage - however well-intentioned, poor advice is still poor - is thankfully balanced by this: "...the time required is dependent on how well the player team operates, how well it uses its creativity and imagination in problem solving." Creativity? Imagination? Is that player skill I see being emphasised? OK, I can live with that.

Page 7: The Roleplayers - introduces the idea that you play Heroic Persona, which is Dangerous Journey-ese for Player Character. Game Premise: A potted introduction to Aerth, an alternate world where all myths are true. Supposedly the myths and legends of our world are bleed-through of actual historical events on Aerth. That's potentially cool.

Page 8: Continuation of Game Premise section.
Heka (magic energy), the underworld of Subterranean Aerth, the interior Hollow World, Faerie and the NetherRealms are introduced. And somehow all that potential coolness just oozes away through the cracks. The forthcoming Mythus Magick and Epic of Aerth products are plugged. Division of Basic from Advanced Mythus is emphasised ("...almost two separate games, in fact!"): Basic is for beginners, Advanced for 'veterans'.

Another aside: Epic of Aerth is all kinds of not good. It's an alternate Earth fantasy setting with no sense of the fantastic. Yes, there are elemental gems, but they're nothing remarkable beyond going up to 11 on the Moh's scale of hardness. Yes, there is a Hollow World, but all the dinosaurs are logically coralled by geological era. Yes, Atlantis, Lemuria/Mu and Lyonesse are all in there, but they're either made as dull as ditchwater or given a lazy-ass 'lick-and-a-promise' treatment. And there are - no word of a lie -16 pages of tables determining how the quality of education in your home country modifies your ability to learn magic.

But back to the matter in hand.

Page 9: Common Vocabulary
A page-long Introduction to Mythus jargon, and to the physical impedimenta you will need to play the game.
Personas: Heroic Personas (HPs) are PCs. Other Personas (OP) = NPC. Evil Persona (EP) = villain character. "There are many other types of OPs as well -- see Chapter 15 of the Advanced Mythus rules for details." I'm not sure if this change to the established nomenclature of the hobby is an end run around T$R's legal department, or if the Cosmic EGG considered it a necessary and useful innovation.
Sheets: a definition of a sheet as a sheet of paper. I am not making this up. There is a paragraph about sheets of paper and how they can be used to record character information. Also an invitation to look over the character sheets in the back of the book when you "...want to take a moment from reading text". Sady this flickering glimmer of self-awareness is soon quashed and we're off to explore the wonderful world of:
Dice: the system uses d10s and d6s, which is nice and simple. But then we get the better part of a page explaining how to roll a d%, d3 or d5. Very... thorough, is the nicest thing I can say about this.
Useful Items: "Besides dice, pencils are necessary for play, of course." *facepalm* Recall that this book was published in 1992, nearly two decades after D&D became a household name. There's handholding, and then there's insulting the intelligence of the reader.

And that's the endless preambling over with. Several thousands of words of text relieved by two generic heroic fantasy illos: a dragonship at sea (by Ellisa Mitchell) and a half-naked barbarian fighting a writhing dragon (subtly credited to Ellisa Mitchell, and thanks to faoladh the Magnificently Chappeau-ed for the catch). These are technically well-executed b+w line work and seem to (intentionally?) echo the style of the 70s Savage Sword of Conan comics.

Nine pages in and we've not even scratched the surface. What was the editor doing when he was supposed to be trimming verbiage?

Next up: Character Generation and Conducting Actions

And it looks like I'm definitely going to need more booze...

Let's Read... Mythus - Prelude

I'll just leave this here, kk?

Draft rules for a Dangerous Journeys/Mythus drinking game.

• Every needless acronym in place of a plain English word (K/S, STEEP, BAC, FAC, MRCap, FPM, TAD, ACE, etc.): take a drink.
• Every neologism used in place of an existing piece of gaming lingua franca (HP in place of PC, Battle Turn for Combat Round, Weretherion, Unmortal, etc.): take a drink.
• Every instance of thesaurus abuse (Heka <=> vril <=> orgone <=> mana): take a drink.
• Every instance of naked "Increase Your Word Power"-ism (e.g. Agathcacological, Therimorphy, etc.): take a drink.
• Every paragraph of tangential haut gygaxian verbiage that doesn't actually have any use in play: take a drink.
• Every column of wordswordswords that could have been precis-ed down to one paragraph: take two drinks.
• Every page of wordswordswords that could have been reduced to one simple rule: take four drinks.
• Every clever or useful idea you spot for your game: drain your glass.

The horror begins Monday and ends, well, whenever my sanity finally snaps like a twiglet.

Pic Source: Loneliest Drinking Game drunkenly swiped from endlessorigami.blogspot.com