Category Archives: Dungeons And Dragons

Fiendish Friday: The Tale of Ged the Mother

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“Once upon a time the land was flowing with beauty and love. Ged was its Smiling Goddess, and she bore all things edible for her people the Hu Pi. Her animals and plants fed and clothed the people in great abundance.

One day the Serpent King arrived in the land, and presented her with a present. A Green Scaly Egg. He said “Ged sit upon this egg and warm it with your womanly hips. For I am cold and can not breathe life into it. If you do this thing you will birth a God like yourself and he will bring you great joy!”.  So Ged who was loney sat sat upon the scaley egg that the Serpent King had presented. She sat a long time.

Then suddenly one dawn the egg cracked open and out jumped Nar-Garum! Ged was amazed! Then she was amazed a second time as Nar-Garum jumped up and bit her womanly parts, causing warm blood to pour into the land. The Serpent King did a swirling dance and mixed the mud of the land with the blood of wounded goddess and turned it into poison. In her pain her smile turned to a grimace as she saw how the Serpent King had used her own spawn against her to poison her land. Worse was to come as she started to birth grey mewling spawn. “What is these weak and pathetic things” she cried in disgust. “Why mother they are the product of our painful incest. I will take these Cruns into the dark and teach them such pain that they will plague the land!” And Nar-Garum so he did, and the Cruns and the other poisonous things that the land now begat meant that Ged and the land of Honey were truly befouled. “

Ged is a fertility goddess from the time of the Hu-Pi (see Blood of the Dragons for more details). Pre-Serpent War she was known as the Bounteous Smiling Goddess. The locals of Gont still worship her although these days she requires blood sacrifices to ensure her Bounty, as a replacement for the blood she lost from Nar-Garum’s birth.

The Cruns

A  sub-human group who originate from Serpent Men experiments in crossing Humans with lizards in ancient times. They appear as semi-naked humans covered in hard grey scales. They are usually feeble of intellect and of average strength and their only way to improve themselves is through worship of their Father-God Nar-Garum the Pain Giver.  They  live in small communities on the stink rivers, treated as vermin by all that encounter them, but occasionally one of their number will return from the Other World as a Pain Giver and they become are a plague upon the Stink River pouring out from their lairs..

Crun Ac 7[18] (Scaley skin) HD1-1 HP 4 ATT 1 Dam 1 Stone Club (1d6) of Claws (1d4) SR Immune to Poison Save 19 CR/XP B/10

Sandboxes

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Double posted from the oringal thread over at the Tavern.

I used to be all over this style of play in my teen years. Mainly when I was playing Basic/Expert D&D and AD&D 1st ed. Heck I even wrote a three levels of megadungeon, which is imho the ultimate sandbox. Happy hours playing through Isle of Dread. Here’s a piece of hexpaper and off you go.

Problem was that I always felt the players missed all the good stuff. I started getting peevish about it. Ok so you are going to miss the Ancient Red Dragon in the Volcano which I’ve put in plan sight, I’ll put five in your way on my latest hex crawl :P Playing Griffin Island during the generic pre-Glorantha Games Workshop RuneQuest years was probably my last hurrah for Old School Sandbox play.

So eventually I tired of that and suddenly its the late 80s and we’ve gone all Railroady story telling. Rapidly got disillusioned with that and struggled through a Narrative wilderness (HeroQuest etc) in the early 2000s. Now blissfully back running more open ended adventures, with lots of potiential plot hooks and big cast list of interesting npcs. Are they Sandboxes? Not in the classic Old School sense (Hexcrawls/Megadungeons) and in comparison they are smaller and more tightly controlled in the sense I don’t put boring stuff in. Its all made of win because these days with my limited gaming time its time to GO LARGE OR GO HOME every session ;)

My current game FAE Cowboys & Dinosaurs is a Sandbox, that takes in the whole Hollow Earth, but the players are unaware of it. They are just hitting the trail and having fun times :)  Also I’ve got unfinished business with the Spires, the setting of which I revealled but a small corner of it the Blood of the Dragon for Crypts & Things (watch this space).

So Dungeon World

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In the summer of 2012 I kinda blundered into pledging at the hard cover level for Dungeon World Kickstarter. It was a hazy decision I kind of half remember. The pitch talked about monsters, classes and Dungeons. It enthused about modern rules for an old school feel. The pictures were bright and dynamic, I was bedazzled. I was even getting a cool graphically designed T-shirt of the logo. Awesome dude! (picture Newt having a Rufus moment with Bill n Ted over this, high fiving and shouting Station with excitement).

"So Dungeon World?"

“Dungeon World is this most Excellent version of D&D!”

 

Then I went away and forgot about. Or I would have done if it wasn’t for the constant stream of excited updates from the designers. Most were reassurances the book was coming. One even announced that one of the co-authors had go married! Of the remainder links to the draft of the game and various stretch goal mini-supplements where posted. All good fun which helped keep the buzz going in my head.

I finally bit the bullet and ran the game after getting the final pdf, which was also bundled with a Kindle version from which I learnt the game reading it off my smart phone’s screen on the way to work.

I then proceeded to play the heck out of it in a combination of home based face to face, a convention game or two and a short mini campaign of Google hangouts.

I could go one about this game since its impressed the heck out of me but here’s a bullet point list of its pros and cons.

What DW does good.

  1. Its a very accessible game. All the rules are summerised on two Moves sheets (Basic Moves- things every body can do and Special Moves – things that crop up occasionally like what happens when a character faces death) and on the Hand out Character Class sheets which tell you all the rules. I’ve played it with a combination of people completely new to RPGing, die hard D&D players and pedantic Storygamers  and once they’ve settled down in to the groove of the game with its give and take, they’ve all effortlessly got on with having fun.
  2. Its a good at supporting improvisational play. The GM presents a Starting scene say “you are standing outside the skull gates of the Mountain stronghold of the Order of Black Assassins” and then the players take it from there by telling the GM why their characters are there and what they are doing next. Play flows fast and furious  from there, but its always in response to what the players do since they get to Move first and the GM only gains the ability to initiate moves when the players fail dice rolls or under special circumstances as dictated by the rules. Detractors may say this leads to a non-fun game from the GM’s perspective, but all its doing is reining in the GM and giving the players an equal share of the game. It also has very robust GM guidelines that support the GM while they adjust to the paradgim shift of perspective that the game requires. I found very easily the the mega-dungeon from when I was a 15 year old AD&D DM effortlessly sprang onto the table, and worked this time, in a ten or session mini-campaign we’ve played on and off via G+ or face to face since I’ve got the game. For me it makes a very good stand in game since its GM techniques makes it very easy to play self contained games, at the drop of a hat.  
  3. It looks at class abilities and is not afraid to make them fun. Not being D&D directly, means that the authors have deviated from normal expectations and revised the class abilities, called Moves here, from the ground up. This quite frankly has lead to some Maximum Game Fun choices 🙂 The sub-classes especially benefit from this: Lawful Neutral Paladins modeled after a certain staring character from 2000AD, Heavy Metal Bards, Druids who can shape change into Bears 🙂
  4. Very fast play. Normally its just a case of common sense and saying Yes to small details and NO when a character can definitely not do something. When you do need to roll dice its 2d6 + ability modifier + any mods for your character’s class Move. The results are never ambiguous, because generally its 6 or less and you fail (and the GM may decide to make a Move for a monster or the environment), 7-9 you succeed with complications, 10+ you succeed flawlessly.
  5. Its an All in One rule book, which in my space limited world (both in the physcial and mental space) is a good thing. However its a thing 300+ book so I’m glad I got the Limited Edition as part of the Kickstarter 🙂

What DW does Bad

  1. Book presentation can seem a bit superficial and silly at times.  Some of the art (big gonzo comic book art) and tone of book in places supports this to a degree.  Don’t get me wrong I do include a hefty bit of humour along side the grim in my games, because after all its meant to be fun, but disruptive tedious “hey lets play old school d&d and have a bit of a laugh at it” effect that some players bring to the table before they settle down really grinds my gears some times.
  2. Its a New paradigm for GM to get head round. Sitting back and let players ‘move first’ . Reacting not Acting.  Good that it prevents overbearing DMing, bad if players don’t do anything, and takes practice for the GM not to butt in.  This is where the game through no fault of its own will fall flat on its face for some people. Which if I’m being an old misery leads me on to ….
  3. Its not real D&D. I miss bean counting and some of the familiarity of the rules, and survivability of characters ramped up. If I’m being critical and all nit picky this can really sour me on the game, and I pick up a real version of D&D. However if I accept that what DW does really really well is that it captures the ESSENCE of all those fun moments in D&D really well, then I am happy as Larry once again 🙂

In summary though its an excellent game who’s praises I can’t sing highly enough of. It really strips down the clutter that some incarnations of D&D accrue and is not afraid to go off in new directions.

Further info

 

Too much D&D

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So the free version of D&D 5th Edition is out, and I fell strangely underwhelmed. Reason why? Well its probably because in the last four years or so I’ve picked up a small bookshelf worth of D&D Variants.

First D&D in its OSR forms was explored in great detail. Then after that was exhausted I moved onto modern forms; Pathfinder, Dungeon World (a story telling game not 100% mechanically related but definitely in spirit) and recently 13th Age was purchased.  Pedants beware this not an exhaustive list of D&D variants, just one coloured by my personal experience.

The Originals

D&D Cyclopedia: I started off with red box Molday and quickly moved onto blue box expert so this has it all in one book (sans the illustrations, examples and solo tutorial) + the bits from Companion/Masters that I never got round to buying (because I’d moved to AD&D land by then). This is the book I wish Wizards of the Coast had republished even as a limited run, because my copy threatens to disintegrate every time I lovingly touch it.

AD&D 1st Ed: If D&D was my early teens AD&D was my mid-late teens and was still being occasionally played into my early 20s. So lots of memories here, and even though I probably use OSRIC (see below) at the game table, the core three books of AD&D have a lot of nostalgic power.

Straight Retro-clones

OSRIC (=AD&D) I love this big hardcover book. Its the AD&D 2nd ed I wanted back in the day, a simple reorganisation of the rules into one coherent whole. The combat chapter makes sense! Its strangely humble, saying its merely a rules index so modern publishers can put out AD&D compatible adventures under the Open Gaming License (which it is published under in its entirety), but I’d use it any day of the week as my AD&D at the gaming table.

Labyrinth Lord (=B/X).  A very clever clone of Basic/Expert in one slim volume. Made me realise that I’m not interested in that style of play however.  Also available is the Adv. Labyrinth Lord supplement which works on the premise that back in the day we learnt with basic/expert and then simply added the bits (Classes, Monsters, Magic items etc.) we liked from AD&D. Which is certainly how I did it.

Swords and Wizardry (=OD&D).  The premise from this one is that its based of the Original white box D&D  from the 70s with its supplements added, cleaned up and made comprehensible, I love this stripped down back to basics approach presented here. Finally a version of D&D that I can keep in my head! The S&W complete crams in a complete comprehensive version of D&D that is comparable to later big three book versions of D&D in one slim volume.

Basic Fantasy (=B/X with bits of AD&D). Notable for two things. A more straightforward and clear interpretation based on the idea that you use D20 Systems Resource Document (the Open Gaming version of D&D 3rd Ed released by Wizard’s of the Coast) more closely, keeping its clarity of rules but building in the Old School flavour. Secondly if you see OSR rule sets as an almost Linux expression of D&D, Basic Fantasy is a distro that keeps most actively to that idea of it being free and community supported (yes I know S&W does but for me BF does it slightly better).

Retro-clone inspired

These games use one of the above clones as a base and then takes it from there.

Lamentations of the Flame Princess: LotFP is basically a  Horror and Weird take on D&D, using Basic Fantasy as a base. I’ve seen this one grow up from its initial incarnation , with some very dodgy photo shop art, through its Grindhouse box set incarnation, were that art was largely replaced by the cream of OSR Artists old and new and the game was focused to razor sharp proportions, to the current high quality two book format Rules & Magic (available now) and Referee’s book (crowdfunded but still in production).  I think its a classic game that takes the premise of old school D&D and runs out of the park with it, while cunningly never forgetting where it comes from.

Woodland Warriors: Uses the Swords & Wizardry as a base, simplifies it and only uses D6s, and gives it a child friendly setting all in one small slim book. Its genius makes me weep.

Crypts and Things: My own take on OD&D using Swords and Wizardry as a base and putting it in the blender with early White Dwarf D&D, Fighting Fantasy, 80s UK FRP & inspiration from the Howard/Lovecraft/Ashton-Smith/Michael Moorcock. The result a gleefully dark Swords and Sorcery game, where the players get to play Elric, Grey Mouser, Fafhrd and Conan, in a game referred by Clark Ashton Smith 🙂

Modern D&D

Pathfinder: I love Pathfinder, it does big book D&D and is clear and expressive while it does it. For me it comes packed with a big friendly DM I call “Bob” an impressive bear of a man, with a big bush beard and a deep friendly US accent that calmly guides me through the 1000s of pages. The online PRD was revelation when I sat there GMing it for the best part of the year in 2012 (and the reason I’ll be doing an online SRD for OpenQuest soon).  Its just not the D&D that comes anywhere my preferred playing style (rules lite and pacy) and there’s no way that  I’m memorising all the moving parts. But perhaps one day Bob will quietly persuade me to have another go, and it was certainly a variant of D&D that my players, all self proclaimed Kings of D20, highly respected.

Dungeon World: I accidentally blundered into the Dungeon World Kickstarter one bored hot afternoon at work and a year later ended up with a hardback and a T-shirt. Its a version of D&D completely rewritten from base using the Apocalypse World storytelling game engine. I love it. Once I got my head round its terminology and structure its the fast pacey flexible game of D&D that I want to run and it errs on the side of Mega Gaming Fun for the players ( the sub-classes especially get a big up in the fun stakes).

13th Age: To be honest I’ve not read too far into it, but I like what I see so far. Like DW its a more story orientated game, but its not so much a rewrite from the ground up being based on the existing D&D 3rd edition SRD,  simplified with storygaming mechanics/assumptions.

Torchbearer: Make no mistake about it this is a cleaver and very focused book by the same people who bought you Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard. Presentation wise it reminds me fondly of  AD&D 1st. However its fallen down the cracks because for me it asks me to think about Dungeon Crawling far too hard to be taken seriously. When its designer Thor Olavsrud says “This is a hard game” early on in the first chapter I started loosing interest in this book. Baz King of RPG Treehouse fame kept with it and his read through can be read on UKRoleplayers.com.

If I was to have to keep on from each category (which to be honest given the mess my office has descended into may have to be the case) these would be my winners.

  • Original: D&D Cyclopaedia
  • Retro clone: Swords and Wizardry
  • Retro clone inspired: Lamentations of the Flame Princess (I’m taking it as given I get to keep copies of my own games so C&T survives the cull 😉 ).
  • Modern: Dungeon World.

Fiendish Friday: The Bone Collector

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The Tale of the Bone Collector
“You see Ulmak just had to collect them all. Tall ones, short ones, skinny ones and just plain odd ones. Skeletons of all shapes and sizes. Said it helped him in his healing. See Ulmak was a ‘kind’ sort, wouldn’t hurt a fly and gave healing to anyone who came to his hut. That was his undoing. You see one day those bad Bonedancers came, with their wounded leader. Wasn’t Ulmak’s fault that mad dog died right there and then. Even the Kindly Ones have their limits. So the remaining Bonedancers, tie him up, torture him some, and send him just plum crazy. Then bad things start to happen. He made his bones ‘dance’ and turned them Bone Dancers into that sack he carries with him. Then he left Bone Guard, and started stalking the bone fields building up a collection. Some say he’s building an army, but I reckon he’s a shadow of a man whose just following his habit.”

A Sorcerer in a dark black robe, who is busy collecting the bones of the dead, which he places in a bulging sack made of human skin which he carries over his shoulder. Occasionally the bag stirs as if there is a live animal within. He prefers complete undamaged skeletons and will pay handsomely, at 10 GP a complete set of bones. This deranged and insane individual is collecting the bones to make the ultimate skeleton army. He has 3d6 Skeletons in his sack, which is magic and animates the bones of any complete skeleton placed within. The only drawback of this bag of bones is that the skeletons are not under the control of the owner and attack any living thing once released from the bag. The Bone Collector usually tosses the opened bag at any one who physically threatens him

The Bone Collector
Crazy Magician

AC 7 [13] HD 5 HP 20 Attacks: 1 Dam: Bone Wand Dam 1d10 + Save  or suffer Necrosis (additional 1d10 damage from flesh death). Special Rules: Knows Raise Dead, Can animate any skeleton, 1d6 per round, also Cure Moderate Wounds (old healing power that uses if character can touch his buried humanity)   CR/XP 7/600

Fiendish Friday: Five of the Worst

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The latest in my occasional Friday column for Crypts and Things, I present five adventure seeds revolving round five conflicted non-player characters.

The Hunted & The Damned
“Help us, help us please. They are after us.”

Situation: Pale and ghost like a brother and sister couple plead that the characters help them escape a hunting beast that is on their tail.

Twist: The pair are powerful sorcerers from the Other Worlds, and the beast is retribution for them killing an entire world.

Waiting to Wake Up
“I no longer know my name”

Situation: The characters find a sleeping barbarian who if woken up thanks them for waking him from a magical sleep and then pledges to serve them.

Twist: The barbarian is actually a pretender of the throne of some ramshackle Northern kingdom, cursed by a rival’s sorcerer and dumped far away from home. Initially he doesn’t remember and is happy to dumbly follow the characters. Each dawn make a Saving Throw for him. if he makes it  he fully remembers his past, and suddenly demands that the characters follow him as his minions to retake his birth right!

Soul Sucker
“Its so good that you’ll be my friend”
Situation: The characters meet an  defenceless ancient man on some abandoned pathway, each day without fail he gives them each 10 Gold Pieces for them to protect him as they take him somewhere “safe”.

Twist: The man, who can no longer remember his name, was a court sorcerer for one of the Ancient Emperors which he half remembers and babbles on about. In this past he summoned an Other World parasite, a worm like creature that lives within him. It is like a Maggot Master, identical in stats, but with the additional special ability that any character within twenty feet of it looses 1d6 Sanity every hour on a failed Saving Throw. The sanity loss feels like a depression, with thick black clouds coming over the character’s mood. The old man dithers and wants to be stay with his new friends.

Fearless Doomed Hero
“We go Kill Vampire Lord now!”
Situation: An angry young youth, armed and armoured to the teeth, crosses the character’s path and wants them to join his one-man crusade against the evil Vampire Lords!

Twist: The young man is actually a pawn of the Vampires, sent to find new victims by eliciting sympathy for his cause. The youth is completely unaware of this, due to an evil enchantment cast on him when the vampire’s captured him as he tried to rescue his older sister – who may or may not be a Vampire by now.

Dead, Dead and Dead again.
“I’m Igmorogil the Indestructible!”

Situation: A wild eyed berserker, called Igmorogil, runs out of nowhere, attacks the characters and If they kill him he raises from the dead after one to six hours, even if the characters burn his body.

Twist: This tribesman was cursed by a Witch to die a painful bloody death THREE times. On the third time he dies for good. Each time he dies, he comes back a bit more insane and crazed.

Oriental Adventures the one that got away

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I remember getting this purple tome when it came out with great glee. For you see the martial artists of Japan had exploded across my teenage brain, with an invasion of Japanese films and TV (Monkey & Water Margin stand out, ironically both Chinese in origin) and me taking part in a Shotokan Karate class at the time.  The idea of Fantasy FRP with Oriental elements had been firmly thrust into my mind by the fantastic Talisman of Death Fighting Fantasy game book. Upon reading I was excited but some what befuddled at the same time. The non-weapons proficiency system (a skill system by another name) was a cool concept, “Now my fighter can do other things!”, but a bit of a let down when those things were paper making and arrow fletching 🙁  The classes were cool though; a bizarre assortment of warrior-monks, religious soldiers, Buddhist priests, sorcerers, sword specialists, Yakuza as well as the familiar (and expected) Samurai and Ninja. But they were firmly rooted in the design philosophy of Unearthed Arcana, in fact the Barbarian class given a oriental coat of paint appears in OA, which in my opinion was over powered and illogical (I feel a post entitled “How Unearthed Arcana broke my game”brewing). There is a whole raft of new races, based mainly on the idea of animal spirits taking human form, which desperately could have done with some illustration as a frame of reference. This is a problem with the whole book. I know the old AD&D 1st ed books aren’t exactly overflowing with art, but I can easily someone being tight with the budget on this one. It feels like there is only 5 bits of art in the whole book. A complete let down when there are so many unfamiliar elements in the setting.  However the text is golden and doesn’t feel like a wall. Instead its a like a gate to a whole new world. As well as the new classes, and a host of tweaked and new spells, there’s a raft of new rules that emphases that we are no longer in Oerth any more. My favourites are the Family/Clan generator, the Honour system and the Events generator. The first two systems gives some real reason for the players to roleplay their characters and the latter system really lends itself to improvisational/sandbox play, since it gives meaningful Yearly/Monthly and Daily events to inflict upon the players. I had a grand time playing with it solo to create mini-time lines for Campaigns that I never run. Why? Well this is were the gorgeousness of OA fell down. It was a hard sell to 15 year old players who were obsessed with the get rich quick/powergaming ethos of 15 year old D&D (another subject I should post “Why its ok to play D&D now, we’re not 15 anymore”). The sheer alien detail was enough to shake them When I explained the new subsystem of Honour, they worked out that their characters would be having to commit sepeku very quickly ( the fate of characters who are reduced to 0 Hon through a series of dishonourable behaviour ) due to their ‘naughty’ style of play ( combination of shoot first ask questions later, and steal it if it isn’t nailed down ) and vetoed the idea.

I held out for another release, the box set of the offical TSR setting Kara-Tur.

The first book of this had the Chinese influenced land of Shou-Lung which introduced to me the excitement of Chinese Kung Fu and mythology, which appeals more to me than the Land of the Rising Sun.  My pedantic teenage mind then nailed the final nail in the coffin that was actually playing the game, because I realised as much as wanted to run a game in Shou Lung I didn’t want to do it with the so obviously Japanese character classes. Doh!

However this was one of the lead ins to me reading Journey to the West (aka Monkey) and finally writing my rpg Monkey 🙂

More information

Shameless plug
If you have ever been curious about Monkey: The Storytelling Game of the Journey to the West, its part of the current Bundle of Holding, which contains a fine selection of Asian themed RPGs at a low pay what you want price 🙂