Gleefully Late to the Party, Again

Reading Dungeon World.

But lo, mere reading is not enough. I must share its goodness with others (most of whom will probably say "Dude, we know" in Henchman 21 voice).

Gripes

• the layout of the free pdf is a bit wonky (section headings at the bottom of the page? No! Bad layout monkey!); 
• the idea of structuring adventures around Fronts ("...a collection of linked dangers -- threats to the characters specifically and to the people, places, and things the characters care about.") and Moves (IGOUGO as a dungeoncrawling mechanic?) is a bit unusual; 
• the use of Warhammer-ish ability keywords in the statblocks might not be to all tastes. 

But!

Raves

• the writing is clear and entertaining; 
• there's at least one instance of "wish I'd thought of that" on every page; 
• it has the kind of 'obvious in hindsight' GMing advice I'd have killed for back in the day; 
• this is what the writers think of as an entire stat block:

Ankheg 
Group, Large
Bite (d8+1 damage) 10 HP 3 Armor
Close, Reach
Special Qualities: Burrowing
A hide like plate armor and great crushing mandibles are problematic. A stomach full of acid that can burn a hole through a stone wall makes them all the worse. They’d be bad enough if they were proper insect-sized, but these things have the gall to be as long as any given horse. It’s just not natural! Good thing they tend to stick to one place? Easy for you to say--you don’t have an ankheg living under your corn field.
Instinct: To undermine

• Undermine the ground
• Burst from the earth
• Spray forth acid, eating away at metal and flesh

That's it. Next! (I especially like the inclusion of monstrous To Do lists for all.)

In conclusion: Dungeon World, my face when: 

"Ermagerd! So gooood."

Pic Source: the famous Dorf Fortress fun image.

AtoZ April - Y is for Yew

Day 25, and migellito cunningly wrong foots me with that classic biology exam nightmare question "Discuss trees".

Of vast circumference and gloom profound
This solitary Tree! -a living thing
Produced too slowly ever to decay;
Of form and aspect too magnificent
To be destroyed.
[...]
...beneath whose sable roof
Of boughs, as if for festal purpose decked
With unrejoicing berries -ghostly Shapes
May meet at noontide:
-- Yew Trees, William Wordsworth

Uneasy lie the dead in the soil of the Wilds. Even those buried with all due ceremony sometimes return to haunt and harry the living. Since time immemorial the people of the Wilds have warded against the malice of the departed by erecting yew trees - renowned in both superstition and sacred lore for their connection with dead - at the entrances to graveyards and necropoli.

Over the long years of their lives these trees sometimes grow strange and active ...and more than a little house proud.

"Hoom-hoom-baroom-hoom. Get back in the ground you!"

The Warding Idho
The gnarled and ancients yews found at the entrances to graveyards have a curious habit of growing faces in knots and recesses of their broad boles. Locals will swear that particular faces are "the spit and image of old so-and-so, who died a few years back", and many come to regard the Idho as the caretaker of the graveyard it stands in. The presence of an Idho tree doubles the effectiveness of speak with dead spells, provided the interrogated dead is buried in the graveyard the Idho wards.

On rare occasions Warding Idhos have been known to rouse themselves to restore orderly peace to their homes. Funerals and sincere mourners have nothing to fear from the wrath of the Idho, but grave robbers and persistent vandals are terrorised and given a stern thrashing. Interloping undead are regarded as a significant annoyance, and will be forcibly returned to their rightful (dead) state with a minimum of fuss.

Treat Warding Idho as Treants able to turn undead as clerics of half their HD.

Pic Source
Samhain Yew Portal by Paul Atlas-Saunders

Roll a d10 and Blog Puny Human!

Random table of bloggydoitnowness? Sounds like the rumble of a bandwagon to me.

Random.org tells me to do number 2. (dammit! I was hoping for 10)

"Add something to the wiki, then explain why it was influential enough to you that you added it."

I took the liberty of adding a link to Dave "Sham" Bowman's OD&D Cover-to-Cover posts.

It might not seem directly applicable to a lot of people's games, but I found it a useful exploration of why (often otherwise unexplained) different game mechanics work the way they do in later editions of Classic D&D.

Dave's extended close examination of the original texts is classic Renaissance behaviour in the best sense. Go back to the original sources and re-examine what they actually say (not what received wisdom says they do), then decide if you should do things differently based on your new insights.

I commend this series to the House.

Thiefless D&D

(being some musings on simple universal skills for a D&D world devoid of the Thief class)

There's a school of thought within the OSR that holds that all D&D characters are rogues, and that the introduction of the Thief class was the beginning of the slippery slope to class 'role protection', and ultimately to the detriment of the game. OK, then. Why not gank the thief archetype and divvy up his stuff (notably thiefly skills) up among the remaining classes?

Here are my half-formed thoughts on the matter:

Standard Dungeoneering Skills (retained as is)

Hear Noise	1 in 6
Find Traps	1(+Int) in 6
Find Secret Doors	1(+Int) in 6
Open Doors	2(+Str) in 6
Surprise	2 in 6

New Universal Skills

Pick Pockets	0 in 6
Move Silently	0 in 6
Hide in Shadows	0 in 6
Pick Locks	0 in 6
Remove Traps	0 in 6

All characters add +1 in 6 chance to any two of these skills at each level gained.

Above 5 in 6 you have the "5+1, 5+2..." house rule (note: I'm afraid the originator of this escapes me, but the rule basically allowed a 2nd roll at "+n in 6" if the first die came up a 6). Possible skill level maxes out at 5+5 (~97% success rate). There are no sure things in the dungeon...

Non-humans
They keep their special racial rules.

Dorfs	Detect Slopes/New Construction/etc	2 in 6
Ratlings	Hide in Woodlands	5 in 6
Elves	Hear and Sniff Secret Door	+1 in 6

Why have I bothered with this? Well, it lets your Fafhrd or Grey Mouser types mcgyver things, root through other peoples' pockets and lurk in the shadows all noir-like without the players and DM having to resort to games of "mother may I". Conan and Kull get to sneak up on the villain, rather than blundering about like heavy-footed fools. Gord? He's a fighter type in Elvish Chain who uses Akrasia's weapon schools house rule. ;)

Backstab? Thanks to your newfound ghost-footed 1337 ninja sneaking skills you probably have surprise. Make the first hit count!

Thoughts? Objections? Contempt for my mechanics fetishism in a player-skill game?

(picture credit: Jollyjack)

What I'm Geeking Over

Proof positive that the British book-buying public are philistines with no taste. Found reduced to clear in a remaindered bookstore in Newcastle:

The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun
by J.J.R. Tolkien

Here's a random, flip-the-pages-poke-a-quotation sampling from Tolker's retelling of the Elder Edda:

Dread shapes arose
from the dim spaces
over sheer mountains
by the Shoreless Sea,
friends of darkness,
foes immortal,
old, unbegotten,
out of ancient void.
-- Upphaf, Stz. 3

Tell me that is not pure game fodder?! No? Ok, here's another:

Dark hung the doors
on deep timbers;
gold piled on gold
there glittered wanly.
The hoard was plundered,
helm was lifted,
and Grani greyfell
grevious burdened.
-- VII Gudrun, Stz. 17

This book is so rich with evocative imagery and wordplay, you could probably use the flip-and-poke method as a random plot generator or alternative to "Say yes, or roll" for your game.

Erm. Did I just go a bit Everway/Forgey there for a second? Oh dear. I'd better commit some sort of Old Schooliban penance... (*has teh shames*)

Gygaxian Damage Reduction

One of Gary Gygax' OD&D house rules (spotted at Cyclopaetron):

When taking damage allow -1 HP per character level

There's a case to be made that this is just Gary's "Characters are only unconscious at 0 HPs. For each level a character may have a minus HP total equal to the level, so a 1st level PC is dead at -2, a 2nd level at -3, etc." house rule restated in another form.

But how about taking it as read?

Characters deduct 1hp/level from all damage sustained. This rule would effectively give all characters 3E-style damage reduction, allowing them to laugh off nicks and scratches as they grow in level.

OK, it might harm verisimilitude that the Orcs of the Lowly Beatstick tribe can no longer mob and gang pound Lord Slashstab when he reaches a certain level, but it appears to be in keeping with the source material for D&D. Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Elric, Kane, [your preferred S&S hero here] are hardly ever in any real danger from single unnamed lowbies getting in a lucky blow; it takes memorable and major threats to concentrate the minds of such bad-asses.

I might have to give this a try IMG...

Unintentional Frugal Gaming

Dave the Frugal Gamer set a challenge for these financially straitened times early last year. To whit:

pay less, play more, and try new games.

I'd like to take a moment to see how I stack up as a frugal gamer. Please indulge me (or leave abuse in the comments).

Pay Less
Switching from high production value, high street games (WOTC 3E, WFRP) to the less glossy, but often more useful, hobbyist products of the OSR has definitely shifted the spend/play value ratio in favour of play. As for price, totting it all up (books, pdfs, minis and plastic monsters) I come out with a grand total spent on gaming for the period Jan-Dec 2009 of:

£81 (and change).

£81?! That's chicken feed! It works out at about £6-7 a month (a bit less than the price of a paperback or DVD here in the UK). To put that into a more hobby-specific perspective:

• a Games Worshop starter army box is £50 retail,
• the D&D 4E Core rules set is £75-80 (although WOTC's new Essential D&D Essential Starter Essential Series releases might lower the ticket point to play in their particular walled garden a little),
• the new Space Hulk and FFG's WFRP(INO) are £75 and ~£100 respectively.

Of course, thanks to the generosity of the grognosphere I did get for free a lot of stuff that, by rights, people could fairly have charged for. But hey, their insufficiently lauded generosity* is my gain. I'm too busy filling my boots to look the gift horse in the mouth. ;)

Play More
We certainly seem to be. Games are still only weekly, but we're getting a lot more done in the few hours we can steal from the world of tedious grown up concerns.

The various labour-saving devices created or rescued from obscurity by the efforts of the myrmidons of the OSR (sandbox hexcrawls, one page dungeons, random tables, the aforementioned buckets of good free content) have allowed me to DM smarter, faster, and with less wear-and-tear on the old grey matter. Cheers lads!

Of course the single biggest liberator of my time was switching my primary game from the multi-volume monster that was D&D 3E to the quick-and-easy joy that is Labyrinth Lord. Swapping a version of D&D which utilised several hundred pages of rules for one that uses a single 128 page book was, in retrospect, a no-brainer decision. I've become quite the evangelical little bore about it. I wouldn't go back, not for all the lotus in Stygia!

Cost per hour of play? £81 (the sunk costs of the 20 year of gaming stuff I have lying about isn't being counted here) divided by 4 hours of serious play/week for 50 weeks = 40p/hour. Pretty frugal, non?

Try New Games
Being a contrarian stick-in-the-mud by habit and preference I've chosen to try old ones. That said, I have developed a new appreciation for a couple of 'old flame' games.

I've recently nabbed a copy of coopdevil's Axles and Alloys revival playtest, and might start mucking about gluing guns to corgi/matchbox toys in the near future. What can I say? My recent re-reading of GW's old Dark Future novels has been fun, and Gorkamorka ("Mad Max" -Aussies +Orks) is an old fave in our circles. It's the right game at the right time.
Anticipated cost: £5 for toy cars + whatever a sprue of GW weapons is going for these days.

I've also found an old toy soldiers vs dinosaurs mini-game (*GRAR! dakka-dakka-dakka ARGH!*) in an old issue of Dragon magazine that simply /begs/ to be played on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Anticipated cost: about £3 for a couple of packets of dinosaurs and army men.

Oh, and we have to start playing Mordheim again! Anticipated cost: the price of printing gang sheets and tables. The minis, terrain and suchlike were paid for years ago.

-----

* People who should be charging for their stuff. Just off the top of my head I can think of:

• the pre-release version of Doug Easterley's Athanor,
• Greyhawk Grognard's ongoing Castle of the Mad Archmage project,
• Amityville Mike Curtis' pre-publication versions of Stonehell and the dungeon/city alphabets,
• Sham's What Price Glory and OD&D Cover-to-cover insights,
• Beyond The Black Gate Al's dungeontastic musings,
• kellri's map geomorphs and CDD#1-4 quick reference guides,
• dysonlogos' geomorph-a-day output and excellent BD&D/LL character sheets,
• Taichara's exquisitely described and innovative BECMI monsters and items

(apologies to the sundry deserving names omitted. The fault is in my poor memory, not in your excellent work)

Oh, and WOTC. I'd have been happy to carry on giving you money for old rope (the content of your pdf back catalogue), but you decided my money was no good. So yeah:

AD&D 2e: Virtues of the Ginger Stepchild

Although I came into D&D just before it was released (heck! the first few Dragon magazines I ever bought had full page ads for the shiny newness pictured to the right) I've never been a great fan of AD&D2E as a rule set.

Even when our avowedly neophile neophyte gaming group made the move from the classic orange spine 1E books to the newer (and thus - to our teenage minds - self-evidently better) black spine 2e books we were really always playing the same old cargo cult mash-up of BD&D/1E during the 2E era that we had been before. We couldn't have given you page references for anything other than the most obvious stuff, and we certainly couldn't have discoursed learnedly on the differences between editions 1 and 2.

Sure, a lot of the organisational issues and odder rules holdovers of the AD&D 1E rulebooks were 'rationalised' by the 2E books, and the Monstrous Manual - when finally released - was probably the definitive D&D monster book of all time. But we still always had the sense that 2E was just a revision and reprint, rather than an entirely new game system. Even as teens we could tell that 2E was really no more than "AD&D, revised and reprinted". It certainly wasn't the mental revolution that later edition shifts were.

In my opinion the greatest virtue of AD&D 2E wasn't the clarification of the core rules, and it certainly wasn't the interminable stream of largely interchangeable "Complete" splatbooks that regularly dropped steaming from the cloaca of the TSR release engine. The true jewel in the crown of 2E was its settings.

Yes, yes. Purge the heretic! Burn the unclean! Bury him in his own sandbox that his evil might not warp the minds of others. :p

All edition snobbery aside, the numerous campaign settings released during the 2E era (1989-1999) were some of the most imaginative, thought-provoking settings ever released for D&D. For the purposes of this argument please disregard the splatbook bloat that ultimately afflicted the various settings and helped to destroy TSR as a force in the gaming industry, and just look at the initial boxed sets for Spelljammer, Planescape, Dark Sun, Birthright, Al-Qadim, etc. in isolation. Each of these boxes offered you the chance to extend your D&D game in ways that the core rulebooks only ever hinted it:

• Did you love Expedition to the Barrier Peaks? Here's a whole setting full of space-borne wackiness we like to call Spelljammer. Go nuts!
• Did you always look forward to the playing house / fantasy battles elements of the D&D endgame? Here stands Birthright, ready to serve.
• Hankering for a bit of Arabian Nights / Sinbad magic in yer D&D? Al-Qadim is here to service all your orientalist cliche needs effendi.
• Want more sword-and-planet pulp adventure and Dune elements in your game? Dark Sun! I choose you!

I will concede that mixed in with the life-enhancing, game-changing, mind-stretching stuff there was also some real 'thrown together to meet a deadline' drivel. Jakandor, Maztica, and the wholesale sack-and-pillage of the D&D Known World setting spring to mind as being among the more egregious crimes-against-gaming of the late TSR era; and the less said about the eminently forgettable Council of Wyrms the better IMO. But I can honestly say I believe that if Dark Sun, Al-Qadim, Spelljammer, or even woefully metaplot-afflicted and mechanically kludged Birthright had sported a Judges Guild imprint on the box instead of a TSR brand then they'd be appreciated for their true potential by grogbloggers today.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I feel a plundering spree coming on. Time to get the old boxed sets out of storage.

Jack Vance Offers a Little Salt with my Words

Reading Jack Vance's Emphyrio at the moment. I have to say that, against my own expectations regarding my previous experiences of Mr Vance, I'm really enjoying it. It's probably something to do with the weird future culture he's created. But then I love the kind of 'lots of inferences' baroque sci-fi typified by Frank Herbert's Eye collection, Zelazny's Lord of Light (read right before I started in on Emphyrio) or Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality stories.

Unlike the Dying Earth stories I really get a sense of depth and scale in the back story of Emphyrio. I think it was Bruce Sterling who - after Arthur C. Clarke - called this kind of thing the 'unwritten book' of the author's research and world building. You never actually see the stuff in the unwritten book (by definition), but you can certainly infer its existence from the content and style of the written book.

So, yeah. Vance. I'll be cooking me some humble pie then...

In other news:

• Batting about some ideas about polearms and Babylonia recently. Hopefully the grogosphere hivemind won't pip me at the post on these.
• Giant centipedes don't get enough love. They need a random table of their own they do. I shall see that this injustice against our shoe-bankrupted insectile friends is rectified!
  
• Currently looting the One Page Dungeon competition pdfs for all they're worth. There's more delicious braincustard in there than you can waggle a serving spoon at.
  
• Percentile thief skills make no sense in a game where almost nothing else uses %ages. Dyson Logos has given me much food for thought...
• The Octopus class by Amityville Mike (he's quite mad you know) is now canon for the Vaults game
  

In Honour of One Who Has Gone Before

RIP Dave Arneson
One less prince down here;
one more saint up there.

...and I bet there's one heck of a reunion dungeoncrawl on in Gamers Valhalla right now.