Back from HelgaCon

Back from the weekend HelgaCon, and it was flat-out awesome! Here's a quick summary in pictures -- more to come later:

Screen setup for my Friday night OD&D (Original Edition Delta) game, "G2: Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl" by Gary Gygax:


First round of the Book of War Round Robin Tournament:


Saturday afternoon "Siege on the Borderlands" (using Book of War):


My character for BigFella's Labyrinth Lord game, "Thousand Year Sandglass: The Fallen Obelisk" (lives again for 2nd year running, and so does his brother, run by Paul. Note to self: Get my magic spear back before next year!):


The table for Paul's run of the Advanced D&D adventure, "Into the Forgotten Realms" by Ed Greenwood (with the snacks that my CN war-god cleric referred to as battle cheese -- like Swiss but embedded with gunpowder, courtesy BigFella):

Off to HelgaCon

Leaving this weekend for HelgaCon 2011 up in Massachusetts. Forecast today in Boston is for an unseasonable spring snowstorm. Appropriate for the day I'm scheduled to run Module G2, Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, yes?

(Photo by D Sharon Pruitt.)

OED Update (v0.8)

Getting ready for some D&D games at HelgaCon 2011 this weekend, I went and updated my Original Edition Delta house rules (now version 0.8). Some refinements, edits, and clarifications. Folded in some miscellaneous house rules, and also the fighter Feats that I use. Added some tables to make some things clearer.

See the mini-website here. Or get the PDF directly here (5 pages). Or see the updated player-aid card here.

One thing that rather surprised me as I did my editing process was the rule for archery that I decided to use (based on prior blogs discussing things like indoor missile ballistics and archery range penalties). What I decided to run with was this:

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Bows: Bows can be fired every round; slings and crossbows take one round to reload between shots. Underground, missile weapons all have an effective range of 30" (assume 10' ceiling). Attacks are −10 to hit at medium range (over 1/3; 50') and −20 to hit at long range (over 2/3; 100'). Note: Thieves can only use a sling or light crossbow.

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In the past I didn't think I'd use that option (from the indoor ballistics article), but as I did my pass-through tonight it seemed really elegant and attractive. It's short. It's accurate to the physics (at a 1"=5 ft scale). It's trivial to remember (one number for all missile weapons indoors). It gets rid of one of the tables you'd otherwise need. It's easy to divide into range increments (10/20/30 inches). It's simple to eyeball on a 10'-scale-map (50/100/150 feet). Coincidentally, the penalties are actually the same as the range increments: -10 at 10"; -20 at 20" (which then suggests the idea that you might just apply a -1 per 1" penalty; although it really shouldn't be linear like that, maybe it's close enough).

So that seems like a lot of reasons pulling for it. We'll see how the players respond to it this weekend (or if they even notice a difference). More to come...

On Cold Weather Clothing

This Friday (the first night of HelgaCon 2011), I'll be running the classic Gygax adventure G2, Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl. So this past weekend I thought I'd brush up on some of my cold-weather knowledge.

Thanks to Google, I found one of the most awesome pieces of research I've ever seen on this subject in my many years of looking after it -- Proceedings of the Journal of Fiber Bioengineering and Informatics, 2010 edition. It starts with testing recreations of the different clothing used by Scott and Amundsen in the Antarctic, and Mallory on Everest, with gobs of great data. Then there are lots of other remarkable articles testing both modern and traditional materials (like Tibetan robes) on thermal manikins, etc. Several designs for computer simulations of this stuff. I found it be fascinating. (Looking at the graph here, keep in mind one detail: Amundsen was relatively sedentary riding a dog sled, while Scott & Mallory were both very active in their modes of travel, so it was reasonable for them to need less total insulation. That said, the latter two did both die in the wilderness.) You can see the JFBI paper here.

And a couple of other things. The replica Mallory gear (8 layers of fitted wool, silk, and a Burberry coat) was actually worn on Everest a few years ago, with complimentary reports on its protectiveness and freedom-of-movement (lighter than modern gear).



More pictures from a gallery at Gizmodo.com:





And here's a discussion at MyArmoury.com by some people that have worn replica armor in really cold weather, and what their experiences were. Some interesting observations there. Obviously, you need a thick undercoat with no contact between skin and and metal. I'll let you read the rest of it, if you want.



(Picture above linked from a post last month at The Armour Archive.)

So: Layer up your wool and gaberdine, it's cold out there!

Continental Orcs

So, James Mal suggested that people post some stories about how they've "re-imagined one or more iconic D&D monsters" in their campaign at some point.

Now, truth be told, I haven't done a heck of a lot of that stuff (although I heartily support the principle involved). I tend to be a very axioms-definitions-theorems kind of guy, i.e., I tend to run things as close to the written text as possible (and if that's a challenge, so be it). Much more so in the past than these days.

But one thing I was sort of pleased with is this: Back around 2000-2005 I was part of a regular weekly 3E D&D game in Boston with rotating DMs. For some time my girlfriend Isabelle played with us, running a greataxe-wielding half-orc barbarian named Boudoin. Wierd name for a half-orc, you say?

Well, two things were at play here: First, my girlfriend is, by birth, French. Second, she was playing the only PC half-orc in the party. Who wound up having (naturally) a made-up but French-sounding name. So when I DM'd, I started riffing on that -- orcs in this campaign wound up being a really weird mixture of standard chaotic humanoid barbarism, and classy French cultural influences. Maybe a bit like Asterix comics with orc skins, if you will.

Orcs had villages with giants goats for herd animals. Orcs were fond of dishes with heavy cream sauce. Orcs spoke Common but poorly, in deep-throated monosyllables. Orcs wanted to throw off human imperialism. Orcs drank lots of wine and staggeringly intense cheese. And of course, the native Orcish language was represented at the table French, to whatever degree a handout would get garbled from a run through the Babelfish translator (which only my girlfriend, playing the only orc, could translate for the rest of the party). It was kind of unique and I think it worked very well.

One thing that stuck with me from this experiment is the desire to use real-life foreign languages to stand in at the game table for different racial languages in the game (using modern online translators to quickly create handouts as desired). Of course, this uniquely depends on your particular locality and what counts as "foreign" and what your various players are going to be familiar with. (That said, my current lineup would be something like: Dutch Halflings, German Dwarves, Italian High Elves, Russian Orcs, etc.)

On Bags of Holding

Observation: Bags of holding are really a rules hack to patch over the broken D&D economy system.

D&D Basic Economy Bug #1 -- D&D set its price list in units of "gold pieces" (OD&D Vol-1 p. 14, etc.). Historically this is incorrect; basic items would really be bought with silver coins. So, broadly speaking, the indicated prices are about ×10 too high.

D&D Basic Economy Bug #2 -- D&D set the encumbrance for its "gold piece" at 1/10 of a pound weight (OD&D Vol-1, p. 15, etc.). Historically, this is also incorrect; actual coins have always been much smaller. So, broadly speaking, the coins here are about ×10 too large/heavy.

Putting these together, the value of carryable treasure (in terms of purchasing power) is only about 1/100th what it "ought" to be. If you carry from the dungeon a back-breaking, seam-splitting sack full of silver (say 100 pounds) then in D&D you can buy, say, 25 gallons of wine with that; while in reality it should be more like 30,000 gallons. If the sack is full of gold, then you can buy 30 draft horses in D&D; when in reality, it should be more like 2,000 such horses. Stuff like that. (See here for documentation on real medieval pricing.)

So, bags of holding are really a necessary fix to let adventurers carry out enough treasure that they can actually do something useful with it (buy a ship, build a castle, outfit an army -- or gain a level). And they're one of the most universally recognized D&D magic items because every PC adventuring party basically needs one.

(This has been mentioned in passing in prior blogs on D&D money.)

Sunday Night Book of War

Trying to tighten things up for a public release, and also get ready for the tournament I'll be running at HelgaCon in a few weeks. Another game at 200 points with the new large terrain pieces:

Start -- Opponent at top of map has all horse archers and longbows (in small units of 3-4 figures, hoping to leverage flexibility in actions/attacks/morale). My forces at bottom are light infantry, heavy crossbows, and heavy cavalry. (I know opposition likes horse archers, and armored crossbows are a good counter; and I've taken the hilltops with my first move.)



Turn 2 -- Up to end of turn 2, primary engagement has been missile-fire in the middle. My crossbows have just been destroyed by standing horse archers. In return, they've routed one part of the enemy longbows. Heavy cavalry has taken one hit from longbows; light infantry has been ignored thus far.



Turn 5 -- Two-and-a-half-turns later, my knights (charging off the hill) and flanking infantry have destroyed all of the remaining longbows. Horse archers got bogged down in the marsh, taking an attack from my screening light infantry (scored 1 hit) before turning and galloping out. Other horse archers have taken the hill and killed one of my cavalry figures with bowfire.



Turn 6 -- My light infantry and heavy cavalry (reduced by one more figure from missiles) have each caught a unit of horse archers, and look at those attack rolls! (To-hit was 4 or better on any die.) This eliminates 4 of the remaining 6 enemy figures, routing one of them. And on the next turn the remnants will be cleaned up. So that's all, folks!



In summary: I may have hit on a pretty good army composition, heavy armor combined with light infantry as "pawns", too cheap for the enemy to spend time getting rid of. And the enemy got their horses mired in bad terrain, having to reverse course mid-battle.

On the other hand, it's possible that my girlfriend Isabelle was distracted because she's knitting furiously all the time between turns -- she's had an ambitious art project accepted to try and "clothe" as many trees as possible this summer on NYC's Governor's Island, using knitted, recycled material from plastic bags. So that's mostly what she'll be doing (with public participation) between now and the fall. More at her blog for that project: Knit For Trees.