My Attempt at Running a "Normal" Basic/Expert D&D Game...

So I volunteered to run 3 sessions for Red Box Vancouver this month, and as a change of pace from my regular DM style attempted to make a "normal" dungeon for the adventures.

First I whipped up some maps in my awesome graph paper Moleskine notebook during some lulls in a Mutant Future Game (during which Kronh the Slayer got to get down with a four-boobed mutant queen!), and roughly blocked out some areas with the awesome Tekumel underworld chart PDF (I've got to get my hands on a copy of the Pettigrew Selections ASAP!). Came up with a couple wacky things with the results, but they were well within the precedents of early TSR OD&D/AD&D output.

Next I worked on the monster lists for stocking the dungeon; somewhat unsurprisingly my attempts at normalcy went pretty much went out the window at this point and things took a pre-Wessex Rientsian turn... (I was planning on using the spiffy S&W Tome of Horrors Complete for this, but between the monsters I wanted to use and my preference for the Fiend Folio version of some monsters nope; maybe if they included Hoard Class and Morale Scores... ;) As an aside every post Fiend Folio version of the awesome Crabmen ignores two awesome things about the Fiend Folio version: A) They're nuts about silver & B) They carry off women.)

Regardless I soldiered on in my attempt to make a normal B/X D&D dungeon and stocked it using a combination of the B/X D&D dungeon stocking tables; the Appendices of the AD&D DMG; and the Awesome Tricks. Empty Rooms, & Basic Trap Design PDF by Courtney C. Campbell of the Hack & Slash blog. (I'm planning on giving the regions unexplored after tonight another go-over with the also-Awesome Old School Encounter Reference by Kellri; the Judges Guild Ready Refs' Sheets; and sundry dungeon tables by Zak S.)

I did the stocking in a two-hour period before rushing to meet the super-cool Red Box Vancouver crew at a far too crowded and loud coffee shop in a cool neighborhood (as opposed to the tumbleweed infested coffee shop we used to use...). Graham proceeded to generate a halfling hobbit with 18s in Dexterity and Constitution, and a Strength of 13-15(?) right in front of me and I swore that that sheet would end up on my DM Trophy Triumph Death Wall...

The session was pretty awesome; I failed in my quest to gut the Red Box Vancouver stable of badass PCs (for this week...) but I managed to:

A) Totally beat the living shit out of badass dwarf Gamgar with the first dungeon encounter, on the stairs leading down into the dungeon, with a very muppet-like, hunched and piteously whimpering, mother-freaking Stair Stalker! Which also totally freaked the fuck out of the players, who were also incensed and skeptical when they took the same monster's remains to a wizard to have it identified and were told that it was a monster called a Stair Stalker that rarely spontaneously generate on underworld staircases.

B) Kill one of the party's sociopathic thug retainers, Rhino Toronto of the Toronto brothers, between expeditions via random roll, when he cracked his head slipping in bloody cobblestones while bashing a farm boy's head into an alleyway curb.

C) Nailed Gamgar with a pit trap, and was a hair away from tossing him down another one a mere minute later before another player thought to check the floors.

D) Kill Merrigold Serpenthelm's two batshit-vicious rottweiler sized "war dog" pitbulls (that were always pissing everywhere and eating dungeon-dressing bones) via shambling "Blind Dead" ghouls that also spent several rounds attempting to lap up Columbo the double-18 stat hobbit's blood with their withered jerky tounges but were unable to claw through the paralyzed hobbit's plate mail. Fortunately the stupid blind dead all shambled through the magic circle hologram gate to Carcosa that the party was cowering behind.

E) Got Dino Toronto of the Toronto brothers cut in half by a dark Jedi's lighsaber when the party broke into Darth Vader's tomb.

F) Got the DM-infuriating statistically gifted hobbit Columbo's eye taken out by the same dark Jedi's lightsabre. It was awesome when Merrigold Serpenthelm tried to invisibly sneak up on the dark Jedi who was force choking a hobbit and knocking arrows out of the air, and of course the Sith dude just used the force to know where he was.

Other hijinks included:

- An inexplicably Italian accented cowardly hobbit, who had a key to the service entrance to an abandoned wizard's manor handed down to him by his great-great-great grandfather who was a cook for the aforementioned wizard.

- Dino Toronto being apprenticed to Merrigold Serpenthelm by an elderly half-deaf, senile, drunken guardsman in a powdered wig as court-appointed punishment for inflicting random ultraviolence upon farm boys instead of him being tortured by virtue of the party intervening and feeding booze and gold to the "judge".

- Merrigold being able to identify by smell a pool of dog urine in the dungeon by virtue of his batshit massive pit bulls pissing everywhere for the past week.

- The party looting Darth Vader's suit of plate mail from his sarcophagus.

- The party killing a four armed white ape and than finding magic hologram gates to Barsoon and Carcosa.

- Retainers consistantly cowering from monsters and danger.

I can't wait for next Wednesday's return to The Manor of Kalapron!

Semi-Variable Weapon Damage Houserule

I've always been a variable weapon damage guy...when I first got my Otus Basic Box and I was perusing the rules, when I came to the part about how variable weapon damage is an optional rule, and that you can use 1d6 for all weapons I scoffed, "What a load of horseshit!'

Nowadays, I'm intrigued by the concept. I'm all for simplicity, encouraging flavourful weapon choices, and experimenting with the different systems throughout D&D's history. And, like many have said, a knife can kill you just as dead as a Dwarven Double Great Axe. It's not like D&D's variable weapon damages are based on any rigourous, true scientific realism or anything. Plus, non-variable weapon damage solves some firearm conundrums.

Now, the following is inspired by both the frequent house rule I see among OD&D types that all weapons inflict 1d6 damage, but for a two-handed weapon you roll twice and take the higher roll, and also the weapon notes in the awesome Terminal Space that suggest using a similar method for energy weapons and the like.

Blair's OD&D & B/X D&D Semi-Variable Weapon Damage Houserule
- Weapons inflict 1d6 damage on a hit.
- However, as many have been already doing, roll two dice for two handed weapons and use the higher roll. This may be applicable for heavy crossbows.
- But, when using a dagger/knife, club, sling stone or improvised weapon (chair, rock, broken bottle), roll two dice and take the lower of the two rolls.

And here's a similar system for use with the Carcosa variable damage dice rolls.
- Use the Carcosa dice type table to determine what kind of dice to use for weapon damage on a hit.
- However, when using a two-handed weapon, roll twice on the aforementioned table, and use the higher of the two results.
- And when using a dagger/knife, club, sling stone, or improvised weapon, roll twice, as above, but use the lower of the two rolls.

I'd probably use the above methods in conjunction with the OD&D Greyhawk Weapon Vs. AC Modifiers, just to be idiosyncratic (I love weapon vs. AC modifiers!).

I've been lax with the music lately...here's a great, classic track by a band that you all should be listening to instead of The Sword... ;)

Blair's Big Dumb Planet Algol Megadungeon

Apologies for the lack of posting lately, I've been sick and somewhat run down. Work and illness have been interfering with my gaming, and the latest Fallout installment has been sucking up a lot of my attention as well.

But I've been a doing a bunch of work on my Algol megadungeon. At this point, I have the following mapped out:

Level 1 - 143 rooms
Level 2 - 144 rooms
Level 2.B - 39 rooms
Level 3 - 82 rooms
Level 3.B - 9 rooms
Level 3.B.3 through to 3.B.7 - 34 rooms
Level 4.A - 28 rooms
Level 4.B - 22 rooms
Level 4.C - 22 rooms

The level labeling system is kind of funky right now; the oddball named levels are sub-levels or sub-complexes within the megadungeon. Of course there are byzantine interconnections between the levels.

I've paid attention to the erudite Gabor Lux's past works analyzing dungeon construction and flow, and the big levels are designed with that in mind by incorporating "loops" within the dungeon avenues. In effect there are several "neighborhoods" within each main level, as well as "freeways," complexes of corridors that allow one to travel throughout much of the differing areas of the level without having to deal with doors or major barriers; thereby allowing the giant worms and flying jellyfish means of traversing the dungeon.

A big influence has been Empire of the Petal Throne's Underworld and megadungeon innovator M.A.R. Barker's work. For my own game, one of the tentpoles of the megadungeon monster stocking will be from D&D variant EPT. The other three tentpoles being Carcosa, Arduin and the original Fiend Folio (including White Dwarf FF content), with some cherry picking from Talislanta. In any published version most such critters would be replaced with original or OGL content, but in my own game I get to use Gorbels without turning them into little exploding, clinging toddler-robots first.

As an aside, I've read previous online musings about using the Fiend Folio as an alternate Monster Manual instead of the aforementioned MM, and I have to say, I can see it working. There's definitely a nice range of humanoids in the kobold-equivalent to ogre-equivalent spectrum. Plus, forget everything you know about Gibberlings and read them with through a pulp Swords & Sorcery lens.

I'm going with a sparse monster distribution, with 1 "encounter" for every six rooms or so; with allowances for some encounter groups controlling several rooms. The general vibe I'm going for with this aspect is vastly ancient, abandoned decrepitude punctuated with moments of terror. With pockets of really bad areas.

At the 1-to-6 monsters placement-to-room ration, it works out to 24 monster encounters for the first two levels...which is quite a lot, and leaves me with a lot of room on my plate for the Tekumel/Arduin/Carcosa/Fiend Folio buffet...

Some Cool Stuff Forthcoming; Working On Introductory Algol Adventure; & Red Box Vancouver

Holy freaking crap, Geoffrey McKinney, the genius responsible for Supplement V: CARCOSA, is working on another awesome sounding campaign setting booklet that is supposed to be "...an outre mingling of D&D and Clark Ashton Smith."

As well, Aos of The Metal Earth has stated "...eventually in an explosion of hubristic abandon, I'll release a digest sized book for The Metal Earth." Man, that book is going to have some killer illustrations!

CAN'T.FREAKING.WAIT

Now if only Gabor Lux/Melan would translate the rest of the Kard & Magica/Fomalhaut material into English. From what I could figure out via an online translator, there's a hell of a lot of very cool monsters and items in that Hungarian text!

Anyways, I've been working on writing & playtesting an introductory Planet Algol adventure, "The Autarch's Voluptuary:"  

"A remote, small, agricultural dome inhabited by virtuous plebeians; terrorized by small humanoids...but is there something sinister behind these raids? Their caves are but a short distance from the virtuous outpost..."

Fuck. No. It's something absolutely different..although it is a "dungeon." I have several goals with this thing:

• Presenting an atmosphere of "baroque decrepitude" and insight into the nature of the civilization of Algol.
• An attempt at avoiding traditional D&D adventure cliches.
• Emulating classic genre greedy fortune seekers bringing their doom down upon themselves.
• Ripping offPaying tribute to Gene Wolfe's post-historical literature.
• And Weird-Fucking-Shit.

Half of the time I'm thinking it's coming together; the other half of the time I feel like it's a sloppy, inelegant, contrived trainwreck-abortion of a mess. Which is good, hating my creation motivates me to hammer and burn the impurities and weakness out of this thing!

This past Monday I also DMed a Planet Algol session with the Red Box Vancouver crew trying out the LOTFPWFRPG rules (which are quite elegant!); I really dig this local Red Box thing! A year ago I would have sworn that there would be no way in hell that I would ever play or DM in a public place like a coffee shop; now I'm DMing in a neighborhood coffee shop, not even knowing who is going to show up, and my only concern is that the radio is on the godawful new-country station instead of the oldies channel!

As always with Red Box Vancouver I had a great time killing two PCs, and I wholeheartedly recommend others to:

• Drop in if they're in the Vancouver area
• Check out their own community's equivalent if they're not in the Vancouver area
• Or start their own local, open, Red Box group equivalent.

As I said before, if we want old-school D&D style gaming to survive, we've got to do our part to help the hobby and community grow and flourish.

Now who am I going to rope into "trying out D&D" next?

Assorted Algol Related Material & SPACE!

Bat from Ancient Vaults & Eldritch Secrets freakin' Blows My Mind ...and also may have unintentionally provided a potential solution to an Interplanetary Castaway Situation in my own game...

Il Male of The Doomed Wasteland provides us with Random Robot Generation; Random Cults and Societies in Standard Fantasy and Weird Science Fantasy flavours; and a table for Generating Rough Hexmap Hex Contents.

This blog post is actually a set of bookmarks for when I get more ink cartridges for the money pit printer...

Also:

Put up with first 1:45 or so, it's worth it...

Somewhat relevant to the above video.

My Boxed Set Has Arrived!

Oh sorry, not the Swords & Wizardry boxed set (although I do want one of those!), but one of Lester/B Portly's Authorized Limited Edition Carcosa Box Sets (#4 out of 10)! It's missing Fungoid Graden of the Bone Sorcerer and Obregon's Dishonor on account of me not owning copies of either (I'll buy them soon).

All of this awesomeness is in addition to printed digest sized copies of Encounter Critical and Savage Swords of Athanor courtesy of the same madman...I can't wait until he does a proper Encounter Critical boxed set!

Lester always had great ideas and advice for the Planet Algol gaming & publishing endeavors, I couldn't imagine gaming without him after only a few months of him at the table, and hopefully someday he'll help me produce something really special...*

* (sorry, I feel douchey being all coy about a great idea, but nobody we know of has done this and it's so obvious once you think of it...)

Apologies for the crap photos, I couldn't find the "good" digital camera and I'm in too impatient today to muck about taking good photos and photoshopping them.

Aside from the "object fetishism" of this boxed set, it's actually quite practical. I can throw my copy of Savage Swords of Athanor, digest-sized Swords & Wizardry Monster booklet, and one of my playtest-draft copies of Planet Algol 1 into the box, and I have a complete tiny package of gaming goodness (One of the Carcosa booklets is the "Men & Magic" section of the Swords & Wizardry rules) that I can take anywhere, perfect for vacations, long car rides, lunch breaks, whatever.

I am now an eminently portable dungeonmaster!

Carcosa and "The King in Yellow"

I'm a story and a half into The King in Yellow, having already read The Yellow Sign in an anthology, and already my imagination fevered with unspeakable visions and unwholesome inspirations.

I've already been tossing around this idea of the setting presented in Supplement V: Carcosa being a post-"Call of Cthulhu"-apocalypse setting. The investigators all died or went mad, the stars were right, Nyarlathotep does his Randall Flagg routine and pre-maddens the population before Cthulhu rises and utterly destroys humanity's works and minds. The blasphemous prehuman races run wild on an utterly reshaped planet and eventually, millions of years later, Earth is now Carcosa.

While reading The Repairer of Reputations this idea emerges that Carcosa is this parallel reality, located in "The Abyss," "Outside," "The Outer Dark," what have you. And it's trying to pull Earth into it. Trying to bring about a reality-shattering apocalypse. I'm coming around to the idea of the King in Yellow being an aspect of Nyarlathotep, with the spreading madness and all (admittedly that is par for the course with pretty much any one of the sanity-blasting Mythos big-boys) and I'm never been that fond of Hastur.

Does Leng serve as a gate between our Earth and Carcosa? The High Priest Not to Be Described appears to very much resemble The King in Yellow.

I am now officially a "Ready Referee..."

Ready Ref Sheets $5 at Core Games and The King in Yellow $6.95 at "Vancouver's Source for Appendix N," the always excellent Pulpfiction Books. The sad thing is that when I saw The King in Yellow I gasped and than did a victory fist pump.

A Realization - I Don't Like The Great Race of Yith

"What! Um, yes, our books do actually look like your normal, twentieth-century, everyday, human books. We're actually kind of embarrassed that we couldn't make them more bizarre looking. If you saw our toilets you'd be really disappointed."

I've come to realization regarding Lovecraft mythos creations in Dungeons & Dragons. This occurred to me while I was perusing Carcosa for material to use in my Planet Algol campaign. Robots? Yes! Snake Men? Yes! Primordial Ones? I loves these guys! The Great Race? Those guys piss me off.

Pretty much anything from the Cthulhu Mythos, aside from the more sad-sack pastiche creations, is fair game for consideration in use in my games. But I've never considered using the Great Race of Yith. These prehistoric communist invertebrates coldly, casually hijack peoples bodies for entertainment, and then just abandon the mess that ensues when the Flying Polys escape by kicking out the souls of a race of bugs people who are the only intelligent beings left in Earth's future. Callous! Their attitude just rubs me the wrong way, damn pompus, self-righteous rugose cones!

Thoughts on Dinosaurs.... and their Hit Dice?

Notice how those two adventurers, presumably 4th level, have a real "not going to get involved" attitude going on. "Looks like the breeze is picking up Silverleaf, let's get the fuck out of here!"

I love dinosaurs, I have since I was a child, so it makes sense that I love dinosaurs in my D&D. Whether it's The Isle of Dread, the old Warlord comics, Carcosa, or a forgotten prehistoric age of swords and sorcery, dinosaurs work for me. One interesting thing about dinosaurs in AD&D and B/XD&D is that they were absolute monsters, both hit dice and damage wise. You could totally see a Tyrannosaurs get the jump on a dragon or giant and rip it to shreds. If you incorporated them into your random encounter tables, they were going to be one of the Alpha predators.

I call this the "Skull Island Effect," reflective how, in both the original and the Peter Jackson versions of King Kong (speaking of dragon killing Tyrannosaurs!), dinosaurs were bad-ass. A group of tough adventurers were going to have to be large, well organized and willing to take casualties to take one of these behemoths down. Reminiscent of old giant monster movies as well as Lin Carter's city-block sized "Thongor" dinosaurs.

Hohoho! I think that poor dumb bastard is going to get shredded by a cute ole' brontosaur! How humiliating. "It was hell! Joe got disemboweled by a triceratops, Sam was swallowed whole by a tyrannosaur, Pete was carried off by a pterodactyl, and Mike, well um, a brontosaurus bit Mike's head off. He wasn't even messing with it, just hiding in a tree. Yeah, I dunno, I thought they ate plants too. Maybe it though Mike was a tasty shoot or some kind of fruit?"

As an aside, one of things I love about Carcosa is that when you get into the hex descriptions you've got all these cthuloid monstrosities, war-machine robots, whacked out cyborgs and packs of dinosaurs, many with mutations like tentacles or blasting radiation beams out of their eyes, suddenly Carcosa makes me think of Kaiju and especially Monster Island! Think of all of those Spawn of Shub-Niggurath, robots, cyborgs and dinosaurs as giant fucking building crushers in rubber suits shooting radioactive laser blasts. It certainly works with the bucked load of hit and damage dice that AD&D and B/XD&D dinosaurs have.

Oh this? Just one of my snapshots from that vacation to Carcosa. Just another boring day watching mutant dinosaurs fight from a village of funny colored people with a dictator named "The Ultimate Warrior" or some shit.

The original, scrapped cover for Supplement V: Carcosa. Brink of destruction? This crazy shit's going to continue for billions of years on Carcosa!

On the other hand, there is a different, yet "genre appropriate" view, taken in works like the Carcosan Grimoire and Athanor. In these works dinosaurs are tough, but not the upper tier behemoths of classic D&D. I call this the "Warlord Comic Book" effect.

"For fuck's sake! Every time I get some one-on-one time with a hot chick in a crazy bikini one of you scaled cockblockers has to jump out of the bushes!"

Sure, when a slavering carnosaur comes bursting out of the jungle at the party it's no walk in the park, but Travis Morgan and company are able to easily dispatch the beast without any casualties. Hell, Travis Morgan can usually kill a dinosaur without wasting any of his pistol ammunition!

These lower hit dice dinosaurs are a different, interesting approach than the 20 hit dice tyrannosaurs of the classics, and I think it would work, especially to emulate a classic "comic book" style, or a campaign where the player characters are supposed to be kicking dinosaur ass left and right, such as a Turok inspired game...

Think that Indian is in trouble? He did that shit day-in, day-out for 28 years, this is his equivalent of a morning jog.