TSR-East Classes: Hwarang

My "heartbreaker" house rules document is named Treasures, Serpents and Ruins. It's got a nice acronym, what can I say? It's Classic D&D (BE of BECMI mostly) with some AD&D and later additions that I like. 

I mentioned the other day that I've started a more general Asian fantasy themed set of classes for TSR. The first class is the Hwarang. Historical Hwarang were a sort of aristocratic youth organization of the Silla Kingdom in ancient Korea (1st century BC to 10th century AD). Because the aristocrats made up the armed forces (or at least the officers), many of the hwarang were soldiers. Over time, the idea of the hwarang evolved in legend to sort of a "knights of the round table" type group. That's probably not historically accurate, but it's how some people remember them today. And that's good enough for my purposes of naming a class which is a strong, dependable warrior type.

Based on the Dwarf class, I dropped the dwarven detection abilities and infravision. Instead, all weapons are fine for them, and they can maximize their damage a number of times per day equal to their level. TSR uses AD&D hit die types (d10 Fighters, not d8 as in BX/BECMI) so these guys also get a d10. I think I said all this the other day. And they also get the very good Dwarf saving throws. They aren't flashy, but they are tough. 

I've listed an English name and alternate names for each class, by the way. Some names are Chinese, some Japanese, some Korean. I should probably add some Mongolian and Vietnamese as well... So if you don't want to call them Hwarang, you can use one of the others.

Here's the class as it stands right now:

Hwarang (Knight) AKA Zhànshì, Bushi

Requirement: Con 9

Prime Requisite: Str [13 +5%, 16 +10%]

Hit Die: d10 to 9^th level, +3/level after

Arms: all weapons, all armor and shields

Special Abilities: maximize damage, multiple attacks

Hwarang Advancement
Level	XP	BAB	Abilities
1	0	+1	Maximize Damage
2	2200	+1
3	4400	+1
4	8800	+3
5	17,000	+3
6	35,000	+3
7	70,000	+5
8	140,000	+5	2 Attacks
9	270,000	+5
10	400,000	+7
11	530,000	+7
12	660,000	+7	3 Attacks
13	790,000	+9
14	920,000	+9
15	1,050,000	+9

Maximize Damage: When a hwarang hits in combat, instead of rolling for damage they may automatically deal their maximum damage for that weapon. This ability may be used a number of times per day equal to the hwarang’s level.

Multiple Attacks: A hwarang may attack twice per round at 8^th level, and three times per round at 12^th level. 

	Hwarang
Save Level:	1-3	4-6	7-9	10-12	13-15
Death Ray/Poison	10	8	6	4	2
Magic Wand	11	9	7	5	3
Paralysis/Turn to Stone	12	10	8	6	4
Dragon Breath	15	13	11	9	7
Rod/Staff/Spell	13	12	10	8	6

Mentzer Basic Cover to Cover: The Dwarf

Today, we start in on the demi-human classes with the Dwarf.  My brother's main character when we played back in the day was a Dwarf named Larry.  Later, his brother Gary also joined him as an adventurer.  My brother liked the Dwarf class a lot.  For a while, I couldn't remember actually playing a Dwarf back in our old games, but then I remembered I did play a Dwarf named Doli (also taken from Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles), but I don't think he lasted very long.  Either he bit it in some unremembered dungeon, or I lost interest and stopped playing him.  In AD&D I've played a few dwarf characters, but it's never been a race I've been particularly called to play.  I do use them fairly often as NPCs, though. 

So, what did Frank Mentzer have to say about the dwarf as a fantasy trope?

They're pretty much described as what has become the stereotype.  Take Tolkien and Snow White, mix well, there you go.  Short, stubborn, practical, hard-working, hard drinking, rowdy little dudes.  And their women-folk have beards, don'chaknow.

As a class, we're told that they should behave like Fighters, so go read the Fighter class entry for tips on how to play.  We're given a rundown of their basic abilities, including their restriction to small or "normal" size weapons.  Of course, it's not until much later, in the Masters set or maybe the RC that we finally get anything like weapon size categories.  The text itself prohibits two-handed swords and longbows.  Lances and pole arms are allowed (confirmation of the lance comes in the Expert Set, where Dwarves are allowed to make a charge for double damage with a lance).

One thing I notice that's lacking is explicitly pointing out that Dwarves have amazing saving throw scores.  It's really their biggest advantage, IMO.  And it's something I never actually paid any attention to until much later.  Maybe my brother noticed it way back when?  Nah, I think he just liked the concept. 

For special abilities, we get a concise description of infravision (repeated on the next page for the Elf class).  If it's hot, it's red.  Cold, blue.  Room temperature, it can faintly be seen.  60' range.  Simple.

For the detection abilities, we're given a description of the things they can look for, but aside from traps (which is obvious) and to an extent sliding walls (how are they different from secret doors?), it's not obvious why sloping passages or new constructions would be relevant or not.  The rules were formed with the megadungeon environment in mind, but by the time these rules were written, the lair or scenario dungeon style was becoming more popular, so as a beginning DM I didn't take advantage of these abilities in scenario design. 

One last interesting note.  In the section on level titles, we're told to call the character Rolf the Warrior, not Rolf the Second Level Dwarven Fighter.  Yet the class is called Dwarf, not Dwarven Fighter.  And the level advancement table puts "Dwarven" before each of the Fighter level titles. 

Movie Review - The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

My wife and I dropped off our son at his grandparents' house this morning and went to an early showing of The Hobbit.  We saw it in 48fps (no choice, a buddy in Japan told me it's only available in standard 24fps there) 2D.  We considered IMAX, but it was IMAX 3D and we are not (as you'd probably guess if you read most of my movie reviews) not fans of 3D, especially for a three hour movie. 

Standard Warning:  Due to the title of this blog, I get lots of web search hits from people wanting to know if there are "curse words" in movies I've reviewed.  Rest assured, parental unit types, this is from Tolkien so there are no curse words in the movie.  That said, this is also from Peter Jackson so there are plenty of lopped off body parts (the reason our 4-year-old stayed behind).

Now on to the review.  I doubt this will be spoiler free, because I assume most of my readership has read the book.  But we'll see.  If I get to the end and didn't spoil anything, I'll delete these sentences.

Did you like Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies?  I sure did.  Yes, they don't follow the books as closely as they could even considering the liberties that need to be taken to transfer a book to film.  If you liked LotR, you'll get more of the same from The Hobbit (at least from this first part). 

Technical stuff first.  The 48fps took a bit of adjusting to.  At first, there were lots of fast camera sweeps and the high frame rate made them very blurry, but my eyes seemed to adjust after a little while.  The images were - how to best describe it? - crisper than a normal 24fps movie.  I wonder if this will indeed become the new standard or not.  It might require higher CGI budgets for romantic comedies to hide all the little blemishes on the actors and actresses! 

The cinematography was gorgeous.  Again, very similar to LotR.  A few locations "in the wild" even seemed like some of the locations from LotR (of course The Shire, Rivendell, and the road between did cover the same path).  The amazing New Zealand landscapes alone make it worth the price of admission IMO.  The fact that we're getting Professor Tolkien's works put up on the big screen in a loving manner is just icing on the cake (OK, hyperbole there, the landscapes are the icing on the Tolkien cake).

Some people have complained that there are too many dwarves and that they aren't all distinguishable.  Well, I say read the book.  Ask me to tell you about the dwarves in The Hobbit (the book) and I can tell you off the top of my head on any given day:
Thorin is the pompous ass
Balin is the resourceful and sensible one
Filli and Killi are the young brash ones who seem to do all the work
Bombur is the fat one
Gloin is... um, Gimli's dad
The rest are there...
Now, as for the fact that many of the dwarves don't look like typical dwarves, this is a good thing!  These dwarves seemed more real by not all having long ZZ Top style beards.  Just like the actors playing hobbits were more or less as varied as typical humans (counting all the extras in Hobbiton in LotR), we see that dwarves are "people" even if they aren't human. 

Now, on to the story.  It's good.  It more or less sticks to the book, and I can see why certain changes were made for the screen.  The pacing was good for an action movie, but this is one of the movie's failings, I think.  The Hobbit is not an action story, it's an adventure story.  PJ added in lots of extra fighting to make it "more exciting" but that's not the sort of story Tokien told.  The Hobbit (the book) really shows JRRT's fondness for Haggard's Alan Quatermain stories.  The basic pacing is travel-explore-action.  By splitting the story into three parts, they felt the need to ramp up the action.  Likely they would have ramped up the action anyway, but if they'd kept it to one or two movies, they could have condensed to just the action scenes if that's the way they wanted it played out.  Oh well, the movie's not perfect, but it was still pretty good.

One good thing about stretching the movie out was that they were able to include some unnecessary but cool scenes, like for instance the Stone Giants.  Of course, PJ kinda overdid it, but it was fun to watch.  Reminiscent of the Moria staircase. 

Another thing they could have done away with was the frame story, with old Bilbo telling Frodo about how Smaug came to Erebor, which is of course shown with Bilbo's narration over it.  Cool, and they kept Smaug mostly off camera - gotta build up excitement for the next installment! - but since we learn all of that stuff in the story as Bilbo learns it, it was kinda unnecessary. 

Some of the other additions, like making Azog the Orc actively hunting down Thorin and Co. and the scenes involving Radagast the Brown and his jack rabbit sled adds more of a sense of continuity for those unfamiliar with the book, I suppose.  It also allows for more fight scenes.  I'm sure that when we get to The Battle of Five Armies and the White Council's battle with the Necromancer, these now apparently extraneous set-ups will pay off.

Despite the flaws, the movie was exciting, beautiful, funny, and moving.  And it's not even a complete story!  While it ended at a fairly good place to end action-wise, with the party just past the Misty Mountains on the borders of Wilderland, as far as the emotional development/character arcs go, it was sort of a lukewarm ending. 

I really enjoyed this first chapter of The Hobbit.  And as I said above, if you enjoyed PJ's take on Middle-Earth in the Lord of the Rings movies, you should enjoy this.  If you didn't like PJ's LotR, you likely won't enjoy this one either.  As for me, Dec. 2013 and "The Desolation of Smaug" can't come soon enough!