Temple of Elemental Evil - 5E Style - Experience Points & The Nodes

 

Ah, the Nodes  ... the most controversial part of the physical dungeon! If you've looked into online discussions of running the adventure - in any edition - you will find a lot of people either dislike the nodes or decide to drop them entirely. That's four separate dungeon levels in this place that many DM's decide to excise - but why?

The big complaint is that the nodes themselves are a slog. Some of them are much larger areas than the dungeon levels but only have 20-30-something encounter areas - and that's in this newest version where they took the extra effort to flesh out the nodes instead of making it a zone of purely random encounters. They can be tricky to get in and out of of as well depending on how your party is equipped and what they know. It's also entirely possible that your group may not have a great picture of what these things are for or why they should care about exploring them.

A secondary complaint is that these things are a serious hassle.  The whole area is slow to explore, some of them cause environmental damage just for being there, many of your spells are altered as far as how they work or even if they work in a given node. Also as mentioned it can be tricky to get in and out of them as the various gates between them are scattered around and must be located anew in each node. All of this ups the hassle factor a great deal and a party that's just spent months of real time clearing out temple bad guys may not think it's worth all of that. I get it.

For me personally I've run and played in several attempts on the Temple over the decades and none of them ever made it to the nodes. I don't think this is particularly unusual. They're mainly accessed from the 4th dungeon level and by that time a successful party will have basically wiped out (or be close to wiping out) the whole operation. If you destroy all of the factions and creatures in the place you've effectively ended the current threat. It's true that the seeds for a future revival of the cult will still exist but the heroes don't really have to venture into the elemental nodes to put this one in the win column. 

So why am I planning to keep them in my campaign right now? A few reasons:

• For one, Goodman Games put in the effort to make these a more traditional keyed map with specific fixed encounters in addition to a table for wandering monsters for each node. This is a big improvement in what we had before and makes it quite a bit more "runnable" from the DM side of the table.
• I think with the right setup these turn from a slog into a search for some items that are needed to accomplish the ultimate goal of the adventure - sure, you can wipe out the cult but if you go about things right you can destroy the whole temple and its source of power - ending this particular evil for good rather than just for now. 
• Most importantly these things put the "Elemental" in the Temple of Elemental Evil! A lot of the dungeon is not terribly heavy on the theme. There are main temples and shrines and things here and there but the environments and the opposition tend to be fairly "normal" humanoids and monster types. Players may be wondering "where is the fire"? - well, here you go - a chunk of the elemental plane of fire you need to investigate to implement a final solution - and it's full of fiery things and terrain and creatures and it's one piece of a 4-part finale to this big honkin' adventure! 
  
  It is interesting when you see people complain that the temple isn't "elemental" enough - and I agree with that to a point - as they also mention that the nodes are a boring slog that they are eliminating. I mean, how about we make those things less boring and use them to add a huge dose of "elemental" to the final section of our campaign?

I will grant that ideally the nodes would be more integrated into the main dungeon areas or at least there could be more elemental stuff in the main dungeons - this would be more on-theme - but it's important to remember that the elemental thing is kind of a scam too - the divine powers involved here are using it for their own ends and are not really elemental powers themselves. It's really more of a cover story and marketing for beings otherwise not all that appealing to the masses. 

I'll talk more about my thoughts on setting up the nodes for a better game in a future post - for now let's look at the numbers involved. I'll warn you now - it gets pretty silly.

• Air Node: There are 32 keyed areas here and it adds up to just over 85,000 experience points. If we take our theoretical 6-man party from the prior post that was at 23,000 XP and 7th level after clearing out the other dungeon levels (but has not defeated the Big Bad) we can add over 14,000 XP to that total - they will hit the next level at 34,000 so our new 37,000 puts them easily into 8th.
  
  Now that seems like a lot and it is but over half of it is wrapped up in 3 big encounters and two thirds of it comes with 6 total encounters so this area is going to be some big fights in some fairly open areas. 
  
  
• Earth Node: Here we have 24 keyed areas which add up to just over 68,000 XP. This means just over 11,000 per character putting us at 48,000 total XP which his just enough to hit 9th.
  
  Here too about half of the points come from about 4 encounters but this area is much more confined so this will be a more dungeon-like set of encounters in a set of natural caves. 
  
  
• Fire Node: This node has 36 keyed areas and yields just over 63,000 XP. Our 6-man party will add 10,500 to their total here and 58,500 is still well within 9th level. 
  
  This is another carved rooms & tunnels type dungeon area and looks a lot like the prior temple dungeon levels - just with more fire. Over half of the experience here comes from just two encounters so those should be exciting to say the least.  
  
  
• Water Node: In this node we have 24 keyed areas and an impressive XP yield of 96,000! That puts our party up to 74,500 which is over 10th (64,000) and halfway to 11th!
  
  This is a large open area and of course being able to breathe under water is significant here. Roughly two-thirds of this XP comes from just 3 encounters so there could be some big moments in this section. 

This is ignoring wandering monsters - many of which in the nodes are part of a lair anyway - but even with some additional XP from those I think 11th is still too far away to be achieved this way. 

However, this total does not account for defeating the big bad opponent in this adventure which is possible and awards a variable amount of XP based on the condition it is when the fight happens. There is also an additional XP award for destroying the temple itself and that can actually earn enough XP to make it to 11th for our party. That's not counting any side adventures or wilderness encounters or locations. 

One final XP note - a character could be as high as 4th level when they start this and while they might hit some levels earlier than starting at zero the numbers get so big that those initial few hundred or few thousand XP don't change the ending point of 10th or 11th level. 

Also a reminder  -this is pretty close to the maximum. Odds are an actual party playing through it will have somewhat lower XP numbers than this and of course the number of PCs will make a big difference here as well. My point in doing this exercise is to show that it's there if your party wants it.

There is also some variability here in how much XP one awards for not just beating down opponents. There are many opportunities to negotiate with opponents all through the temple dungeons and yes even in the nodes too. There are a lot of intelligent creatures in this one and they are not all fanatical cultists nor do many of them even like each other nor are all of them volunteers! This can be a delicate area as if your players find out they are getting less XP for talking through an encounter than they would for solving it with violence then the talking may go by the wayside outside of dire circumstances. I'm leaning towards keeping the full XP regardless as solving a problem is solving a problem but I need to think through it more.

The last thing I have to consider now is that having done the math is that my goal of moving on to "Against the Giants" after this is .. actually dead on. Tales from the Yawning Portal (which contains the 5E version) recommends starting it at 11th level so ... wow ... that works out very nicely.

Now of course I have to see how the chaos of a big group actually playing through this works out. It should be a lot of fun and I am looking forward to it even more now that I have run through this whole effort.

Temple of Elemental Evil 5E Style - Experience Points

 

I thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to check how much XP is actually available under 5E style rules (technically ToV but they are the same). Some of this is to help me figure out where the party should be as they make their way through the adventure in case I need to make adjustments. It's also to give me some idea of where they might be when they finish it up. 

This analysis will be from the Goodman Games two-book version of the adventure. 

A couple of other notes: 

• I am assuming the party will "defeat" all of the monsters in a given area or level. There are hidden areas in this adventure but I don't think there is a point to trying to calculate the chance they will or will not enter a given area. Let's assume they figure it out and go after everything and if they come up a bit short, well, that's on them. 
• I decided not to count wandering monsters in this exercise because you never know how much they are going to show up in play. I know some people use them and others don't. I do intend to use them but since both the frequency and composition of those encounters is tied to random chance I decided it was better left as potential bonus XP rather than counted as part of the fixed stuff. This applies to both the wilderness random encounters and the dungeon ones. 
• I am not including the fixed wilderness encounters either. The GG team added some interesting side treks in the area and I am sure a few of them will come up but I'm not sure how easily my players will be distracted from the Moathouse and the Temple so I don't want to assume which ones - or that all of them - will be investigated. My suspicion is that many of these will come into play when we are short most of the party. Again, I'll treat these as bonus XP.
• As a hopefully unnecessary note I am not tallying up Hommlet either. It's not that kind of campaign and I don't have that kind of player group.
• Finally I decided not to tally up money and magic items as part of this - yet. For one, Bullgrit did an excellent summary of this years ago and the treasure is not greatly changed in this version. Secondly I don't care that much how much treasure they pick up as it's not XP in this version and they aren't likely to be crafting magic items with it in this version either. I will look at magic items in a separate post as I may end up tweaking those too but for now I don't want to post up a "loot list" where my players might see it if they remember I have a blog where I talk about this stuff.

 So our first area is The Moathouse:

• The upper level of the Moathouse totals out to about 1,350 XP. If we figure a party of six  - I expect 5-6 to be my average - we can see that we're a few points short of the 300 needed to get to second level as we are coming in at 225.
  
  Now this is close enough that a random wilderness encounter might put them over the top. I also expect that some of them will not be at 0 XP as there are several ideas out there for "things that happen on the way to Hommet." I may also be running some prelude adventures with the part of the crew that is not tied up for the rest of the month. Outside of a raw new character coming in at 0XP and heading straight for the Moathouse I think it's safe to assume most of the party should hit 2nd level after this. Fifth edition and similar games are set up to make 1st and 2nd levels go by pretty quick.
• The Moathouse Dungeon totals out to 5,450 XP based on creatures and then there is some opportunity for a little more depending on rescuing prisoners etc. Assuming a party of six again that should be more than enough to get us to 3rd level (900 XP), even for a totally new character. 
  
  Prior XP, side encounters, wandering monsters ... all of that still nets out to a party at level 3 here. I do not see any real way anyone gets to 4th and that's fine. I think hitting 3rd as they finish up the Moathouse is perfectly fine. 5E/ToV doesn't really have an official "Quest XP" element like 4E did but I will likely award some kind of bonus here for clearing out the Moathouse which is the closest den of evil to the village. It's a big deal and hey - for years this was as much as you could do to fight the temple!

Technically the expected next area is the wretched hive of scum and villainy known as Nulb. There are things that can happen here but it's not really expected that the party is going to start clearing out the village - even this awful village. It's more about schemes and interaction and discovering clues. So I'm not going to assign a value here. There is likely XP to be earned but it could go in any number of directions or the whole place could be skipped entirely - who knows? We will just have to see.

Then we finally get to the temple proper!

The Upper Works:

Between the various spread-out encounter areas in this chapter there is 4,150 XP to be found here. All of this is concentrated into 3 main areas and bad tactics in any of those could turn into  a real challenge for the party. If we assume an average of six PC's at 3rd level by this point then they will still not make 4th at roughly 1600 total XP.

With a bunch of enemies in a small divided area - this area's theme for sure - the trick I think is to draw them out and not get pulled into a crushing melee where a small group could be overwhelmed. Smart use of barriers like pools of flaming oil could be important here too. That's my pregame assessment anyway - we will see how it goes. If my guys have eight 3rd-level characters when they hit one of these we may just see a brute-force collision as they try to simply plow through the opposition and it may work. This will be an interesting time. 

First Dungeon Level:

It is a big dungeon level, really big. There are 53 marked rooms and it adds up to just over 24,000 XP. Given a party of six that's going to put them at 5600 XP total which is 4th level (2700) headed for 5th (6500). There are two main areas on this level that look particularly dangerous - if you're familiar with the adventure then you probably know what I'm talking about:

• One involves an area with multiple groups of dangerous undead that could hit the group in waves and drain their ability to overcome the negative effects. I suspect we will see how tough ToV characters really can be here. I can see a range of results here from "that was a little sweaty" to "TPK". A cleric will definitely help here - maybe bring two! 
• The other is a group of fairly tough creatures in what amounts to their home environment that pretty much have to be dealt with to accomplish certain goals. This one has a lot of good treasure but it's not all obvious and getting it over their dead bodies will be something to brag about. Analyzing the opposition and playing smart will be important. 

Now that said one of the knocks on 5th edition is that characters are too powerful and the threat of death is rarely present. That may be true but it will be tested here and that is one of the beautiful things about running an old-style adventure with no apologies or concessions to balanced encounter design. They will be at least 3rd and possibly 4th by the time they hit these so they will have experience with what their characters can do.

Second Dungeon level:

This one has 46 marked areas and yields about 49,000 XP. For a party of 6 that's another 8000 XP each which puts our party at 10,700 or 5th level, halfway to 6th. I don't see as many potential problem areas on this level - it feels like things are a little more broken up. There are a lot of humanoids but there are also a lot of named NPC's running the show here and creating opportunities to get involved with some factional warfare. 

Third Dungeon Level:

This level is a little weird as it is setup differently than the others. There are 52 marked areas and if the party fights through all the critters on this level it adds up to about 48,000 XP. So, 8000 each for our hypothetical party which puts them at 14,700 or just over the line for 6th (14,000). 

Now what I left out of that total is that the major opponent of the adventure is on this level and if defeated awards from 33k-50k XP - there are things the PC's can do to affect the toughness of this fight and the easier the fight the less XP we get. Now this confrontation may not happen at the same time as much of the rest of the level so I've broken it out separately but that is a big chunk of XP hat could push the party to almost 7th. Let's track that separately for now. 

Fourth Dungeon Level:

There are only 35 marked areas on this level. Now on this one especially my numbers may be off a bit as there are a lot of notes on creature X is here unless an alert is sounded in which case they go to X and these other creatures move from Y to here. So I may have not counted enough of one thing and counted too many of another but I think it's pretty close. The number is right about 54,000 XP or 9000 each for our party. This would bump them to 23,000 XP or right at 7th (which is achieved at 23000). 

Now that's not accounting for the big bad thing which could add another 5500-10K which would put them at the halfway point or more but not all the way to 8th.

Conclusions:

We're going to pause here and tackle the nodes in tomorrow's post but this covers all of the set encounters from the Moathouse down through the 4 conventional dungeon levels and gets our hypothetical 6-man party to 7th level. 

This does not include wandering monsters (some of which are accounted for in fixed location numbers and some of which are not) or wilderness locations out in the countryside around Hommlet, Nulb, and the temple. It also does not encounter for any side treks the DM decides to drop in as I will likely do when attendance is low for a session. There is enough XP out there for the taking to potentially make a difference on when your PC's level but I think the total is still going to top out around 7th.

Valiant Swords of Greyhawk - Session Zero

 

Feels like it's official now.

So we had a little get-together last weekend and talked through the new campaign and enough details that it effectively turned into a session zero for the game. Decisions that we made (taken from the summary email I sent out afterwards):

- Point Buy for stats

My group is not terribly concerned with balance between PC's but this was the one option everyone could agree on. It should be fine.

- No alignment (other than for your own thoughts on your character). It's not mechanically present in ToV anyway so it doesn't hurt anything game-wise.

In general I am not in favor or pulling alignment out of D&D type games as I think it's one of the building blocks of the genre but this system does not include it so it's not really a mechanical issue. We opted to leave it as an optional shorthand for describing things - because 40+ years of habit will not go away quickly  - but we're OK not having mechanics for it. How very modern of us.

- Replacement characters if you die will be same level min XP. So if you're a 5th level character with 10,000 XP and you die then your replacement PC is 5th level with 6500. 

A lot of my more recent games - mainly Savage Worlds -  have taken the very modern (soft) approach of handing out XP every session and keeping all characters at the same number regardless of attendance and keeping your XP total if your character dies. This simplifies things for the party and for the DM  but I wanted to incorporate some old school approaches this time and to change up the XP awards I had to loosen up the "dead character" policy a little.

- We will use a "get out of the dungeon by the end of the session" rule. There is a %chance to get out if we don't actually RP it and if you fail t he roll there is a table for things that could happen to your character. I will modify the one we looked over last night to take out the off-screen death result.

This is something that's been around for a while on various blogs like The Alexandrian and Jeffs Gameblog but I've never actually tried it out myself. The idea is to provide a strong incentive to get your characters out of the dungeon by the end of a session. This is another piece of "restructuring" how we play. We run almost every week but not everyone is going to make it to every session. If you stop in the middle of a fight or 3 levels down in the dungeon and then the mix of players is different for the next session you have some re-working to do. In the past we just handwaved things but this is not always satisfying and in the Battletech game I was running it could really change up the situation. For this campaign I would like to start every session "back in town" so that the group can go in whatever direction they want each time. I did agree to change any lethal results - likely to a "captured" type entry - as no one wants their character to die offscreen to a random roll. My guys like to get their characters killed by their own decisions! This also enables some other changes discussed below.

- Using this approach lets us start every session fresh regardless of who was there last time or who is there this time. I think this will be easier to manage. This also means we won't be doing automatic XP every session. We may get some level differences in the party but I don't think that will be a big problem. Characters who aren't there can use the Downtime system to try and accomplish something even if they aren't fighting evil that week. There might be some timing issues there but we will work through them. We will also look at Downtime if I have to cancel a session.

Individual XP! If you don't play you don't level! Having an actual Downtime system gives those PC's something to do when they miss but it's not an automatic XP boost.

- The backup game will be side quests in this same game. If we only have 3 people, say, then instead of diving into the Temple you might want to investigate rumors of a bandit camp or a haunted cave nearby - something that might not need the full resources of the entire group but could still be fun. This might also lead to making a few side characters back at 1st level as the party levels up.

We've had fun with various backup games, often ICONS or Marvel Heroic, but by going with this "out of the dungeon" approach then even a small group could go out and accomplish something within the same game - so we likely won't need a backup game. I love being able to change things up but it is a huge pain as the DM to find out the day before - or the day of - the game that we are too short to continue the main campaign and I need to switch out to another game. I mean, I've done it, but it makes for more work and less fun going in. This approach may not solve everything but I want to try it out and see.

- Henchman & hirelings are also a thing in this campaign. In old school D&D you could pay for "hirelings" to join your crew and you could also acquire "henchmen" which were more like friends & allies and were limited by your charisma stat. This is an old school adventure so there are people in Hommlett and in other places that may be willing to join you for a share of the loot or sheer gratitude in some cases. It's something to think about, especially for those nights when we have lower turnout.

This was just a reminder that these are a thing and are very present in this adventure (Temple of Elemental Evil). We talked about it a little bit and this could also help with how those sessions go when we are short on players as well. Another old school piece that can help alter the feel of the game. I remember many sessions back when that involved hirelings, sidekicks, war dogs, horses, and mules and I'm going to try and push them in that direction a bit.

- In general if there's something we need that's not in a ToV book yet (like hirelings etc.) we will fall back on the 5E DMG etc.

Just establishing the precedent here. We are keeping strictly to Tales of the Valiant for character options but as the DM if there's a number or a system I need I will go to the 5E book until the ToV book arrives sometime in August.

Characters so far:

Grognard Mike: Bard

Battletech Terry: Ranger

Paladin Steve: ?

Boom-Gun Brandon: Fighter

Shootist Will: Mechanist 

Variable Dave: Cleric (War)

Former Apprentice Blaster and Next-Gen Patty were not at the session and have yet to chime in. Mike had multiple character concepts ready to go while Steve was all over the place - maybe a Paladin? Maybe a Rogue? Who knows? I suspect he will end up going Paladin though.

It's an interesting mix - no wizard so far, just a Bard on the Arcane side of things. Mechanist is ToV's crafter type class and it's not exactly an Artificer as it does not cast spells - it makes gadgets that have some magical power but does not have a spell list. It does look interesting and we will see where Will takes it. 

So that's where we stand right now. It will be a few weeks before we start playing as half my players run the annual convention they are involved in but there will still be some chatter and obviously there are some more character decisions to make. I expect those to be settled before session 1. I will also be setting up an Obsidian Portal page for this campaign and I will link it here too.

Campaign Decisions - The Next Game is ...

 

So, after poring through multiple older school and newer school rulebooks - the ones I mentioned here, mostly - I ended up deciding to run this campaign using Tales of the Valiant. I think this is the best mix of the new and the familiar for my crew - just enough new to make it interesting without having to learn an entirely new system. Most of those other systems I checked - like 13th Age, Level Up, PF2E - are all candidates for something down the road but this is the plan for now. ToV is probably 75% 5th Edition so it's easy enough to fall back to those rules if I encounter a gap and feel the need but I don't really see that being a problem.

On the setting side I decided on ye olde Temple of Elemental Evil, set in Greyhawk, pretty much following the original setup. I'll be using the Goodman Games 5E adaptation as the main document but I will play around with using the ToV Monsters where they are relevant. 

My players are excited and already looking at character options  even though the start for the campaign is a month away. I've warned them that even though it's a 5E version the caretakers at GG did not go through and rebalance the encounters - if there were 12 Ogres in a room on the second dungeon level in the original then they are still there now - just with updated stats. We played through Goodman's B2 and X1 a few years ago so they know it will be different than a modern WOTC adventure. This should balance out to some degree as I have 8 players and even if they don't all show for every session odds are I will have at least 6 most of the time. 

I am excited too - I haven't run Greyhawk in quite a while and I last ran the Temple in 4th edition - hard to believe that was 13 years ago - and I am looking forward to re-introducing the world and the adventure both. Greyhawk was the setting for a lot of my 3rd edition games - including a lot of time spent with Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil - and at least 3 of my current players were around for those days. 

So there's the new thing for us. I'll be posting more about here as I prepare and as we get going.

Figuring Out the Next Game - Fantasy Options

 

So I have two problems to solve: 

• What do I run for my reduced group of four in July while the Con Crew is busy?
• What do I run for the full group as the new Main Game after July?
• Is the bigger game a "next few months" kind of thing or an "into next year" kind of thing?

July might be a good time to test out a new system or refresh on an old one, especially if it's a candidate for the bigger game. The main issue there is that with only 4 players available it's fragile - one person cancelling means it starts getting tricky to run things in most systems. Not impossible but tricky. I pretty much consider 3 the minimum to run outside of some very specific games - usually superheroes of some sort. July might just turn into a month of board and card game nights if it leans this way. With July having holiday and vacation options built in attendance just may not be terribly reliable.

Beyond all that though I'm thinking it's time for some fantasy RPG options. Outside of one special D&D session in 2022 and a session of WFRP last year I haven't run or played anything fantasy since at least mid 2021 and that's a long break for our group. 

Considering the fantasy options I need to figure out system and setting. One easy option would be 5th Edition D&D. The top of the options list for 5E is this:

• The Temple of Elemental Evil - I have the Goodman Games double hardback edition (brief run through here) and I think it's a great adventure and a great way to jump back into Greyhawk which has been another itch of mine lately. Plus it might eventually lead into the G-Series and then the D-Series and eventually Q1 - a classic run of adventure modules that would certainly put a capstone on 5th edition for us.
  
  
• Dungeons of Drakkenheim - I need to do a writeup of this one here at some point but the short version is that it's a D&D-ification of the Mordheim game by Games Workshop from about 20 years ago. We have a fantasy city hit by a comet which is a pretty big disaster on its own but this comet also happens to be made of warpstone which is sort of solidified chaos and thus both very dangerous and very useful in casting and crafting magic. This draws all sorts to the smashed ruins of the city and exploring it for warpstone to become rich and powerful becomes the hot new thing.
  
  This was a great concept for a skirmishing miniatures campaign game - it was effectively a fantasy version of Necromunda if you know that one - and allowed for all kinds of weird factions and monsters and things. It should only work better for a D&D campaign and the thing seems to be fairly well-regarded online. I'm still working my way through it but I am very interested in seeing where it could go. There are some mechanics to the fog poisoning the ruins that mean the party cannot sleep "in the dungeon" and has to get out of the dangerous stuff which is very conducive to varying party configurations. There is a lot of potential here
  
  
• Published 5E Campaigns: I have most of them and have run very few of them. High on the list here would be finishing Storm King's Thunder, the Undermountain one, maybe Tomb of Annihilation (dinosaurs, ya know?). Baldur's Gate Goes to Hell might be fun but looks like it needs a lot of work. I also have the 3rd party Odyssey of the Dragonlords where we got about a third of the way through and there might be some interest in finishing that. Honestly the first two items in this list (above) interest me more but I might need to look a few of these over again to be sure. 
  
  
• As a kind of wild card here I've been struck lately by an interest in running the old Age of Worms campaign from Dungeon Magazine most of 20 years ago. It ends up traveling all across Greyhawk visting some iconic locations with some interesting opponents and an unusual major villain behind it all. It was written for 3.5 but I could fairly easily convert it to 5th and I know none of them have come anywhere close to it before. This one has a ton of potential too.

The biggest obstacle with 5th is that a lot of my players are tired of and bored with 5E D&D. They've played a bunch of it between me and other venues in the earlier years of the game and 5th alone is not going to get anyone too excited. There are other options though.

Besides 5th edition pure there are some variants. Kobold Press' Tales of the Valiant is out now and I did the Kickstarter so I have those rules. I also decided to look over ENP's Level Up Advanced 5th edition. More to come on those. There is also a Drakkenheim supplement that adds a lot of adventure-related character options that might liven up 5th for my players as well. I need to look some over and maybe try them out in July to make this work.

Beyond current D&D there are more options and this comes back to figuring out what kind of campaign I want to run and then figuring out which system I want to run.

Pathfinder 2nd Edition is one I'd like to spend more time with and it just got re-revised so why not? The goal a few years back was to run it set in Ptolus for a big fantasy city campaign (a non-comet-smacked city this time) and that's still a decent idea. I think that Age of Worms could be easily converted to this as well. I'm not terribly concerned with running PF2 published adventures with it but more using it to do my own thing.

I also might finally run some 13th Age both to try something different and as a warm up for the second edition and a possible campaign there. This would probably also be my own thing rather than published stuff.

There are some fantasy options for Savage Worlds as well but I don't think we are quite ready to jump back into that one just yet. 

There is of course a ton of OSR material out there and while it's fun for short runs I'm not sure I want to sign on for 6 months to a year of Labyrinth Lord or OSE or Dragonslayer etc. We could go megadungeon here but I think I'm more interested in one of the other options for now. 

As you can see I still have a lot of thinking to do but this is the start. More to come!

Interesting Times - Part 2

 

As more came out about the OGL situation and various responses to it I thought most of it was pretty encouraging including WOTC's final back-down on the whole thing. A bad decision was made, the people/customers spoke, and the decision was altered based on this. That's how it's supposed to work, right? Ideally you stay in tune with your fans well enough to avoid the whole bad decision thing in the first place but sometimes companies think they know better or that people will just go along with whatever they decide. In this case I expect there will be some long-term damage but the general outcome is looking pretty good.

Even as this was taking shape though I was seeing a lot odd takes. In particular I saw several versions of "well now with the ORC/Black Flag/C7d20/etc. we can finally have an alternative to D&D" 

Say what?

Really?

I was seeing this mostly in comments on social media posts which just reinforces my opinion on the usefulness of those as a forum for discussion. 

How does someone play D&D for any length of time and not hear about Pathfinder ... of any edition? If you knew enough to care about the OGL kerfluffle how do you then -not- know about the vast majority of games released under it which are someone's version of D&D? I hardly ever see a conversation about D&D anymore where "OSR" does not make an appearance in some way. Outside of all of those there are Conan and Lord of the Rings (5E-flavored and non-5E flavored) and Forbidden Lands and Runequest and fantasy options for Savage Worlds, GURPS, and Hero. Dragon Age? Warhammer? Pendragon? Legend of the Five Rings? Palladium Fantasy? Chivalry and Sorcery? Some of these are fairly new and some have been around for decades. 

This ignores all of the non-fantasy options out there too that I went on about last time. 

We knew about a lot of other games out there back when our only sources of information were Dragon magazine and the local game stores. How does one remain ignorant of these things 25+ years into the age of the Information Superhighway? Going back to the days of 3rd edition WOTC itself published a different RPG with Star Wars  -surely some of the people playing now were around for that? Let's not even mention when TSR published multiple other RPG lines from old west to superheroes to sci-fi to post-apocalyptic alongside two -different- versions of D&D.

I suppose it boils down to a question or maybe a viewpoint - is your hobby "D&D" or is it "roleplaying games"? That's been a potential division for as long as I can remember but I always felt like the trend was for people to start with D&D and then branch out as they became aware of other options and things caught their interest or addressed shortcomings they found in D&D. I'm wondering if that flow is not as present these days. Maybe for a lot of people the pull of D&D is more of a social thing than recognizing the coolness of the RPG concept. 

I don't know. It's disheartening to some degree to think that this big influx of newer players over the last 9 years may stay in that "casual" state, never exploring beyond the current version of D&D. This light attachment does make me wonder how an edition change will go over with them. "Oh there's a new Player's Handbook? Can we just keep playing what we have"? I suspect that will be a common conversation next year. 

When you do something like a new edition of a game system it's an opportunity for players to look around and see what else is out there. When a new version of 40K is released there's always a fair amount of chatter about other miniatures games, for example. I hope that this mis-step by WOTC and Hasbro has at least started some conversations and exploration of things that might come into play when someone's current campaign wraps up or when "OneD&D" launches and people are thinking about making a change anyway. Time will tell I suppose.

The New Year's Eve Post for 2021

2021 was not a bad year here. Personal and family stuff was good and that's about all you can ask for these days. Hobby-wise ...

• I ran a fair amount of 5th edition D&D earlier in the year. One of these days maybe I will write those sessions up. That campaign was paused but I suspect we will come back to it down the road. It gave me a reason to spruce up the monster miniature collection and clean up the storage for it too. 
• The campaign that closed out the year was a new Deadlands campaign I discussed here. One of the goals for the new year is to put up some session summaries here and then keep up with it going forward. it's been a long time since we've had a sustained western type campaign and I do like the Savage Worlds rules quite a bit so it's been nothing but good. It's been on hold for the holidays and my convention crew but we will pick it back up in Jan/Feb. 

Looking back I don't think I ran any other RPGs this year, even one-shots. That's pretty light for me. I suppose I should look at it as maintaining focus at a higher level than usual but it still feels a little weird. I certainly added enough new ones to the pile and of course there are ideas for way too many campaigns buzzing around my head but my players are happy with what we are doing so I feel like I'm doing something right. 

Miniatures-wise we played a reasonable level of 40K and I got a -lot- of painting done so that feels like a total win too. Close to wrapping up the Necrons and I am very happy with that. Simple paint scheme, as terminator-ish a look as I can give them. It's pretty much silver/chrome, red eyes and gun parts, and desert type basing. I won't quite finish them by the end of the year ... errr ... tonight ... but some of that is due to weather as you can't spray that final clearcoat if it's too cold, or too wet, or too windy and we will cover all 3 of those this week. 

• The Blood Angels were also a big focus later in the year and I do now have a couple of Sanguinary Guard squads and enough Death Company to field a squad or two. This also pulled me into working on the BA dreadnoughts I've had laying around, the assault terminator squads half-built for a couple of years, some old unfinished tac squads and dev squads, and also finally figuring out the rhino & razorback situation I've had with them as not everything can have a jump pack or be dropped out of a Stormraven. It feels good to have these guys rounding into shape as my other major marine army

• I added some stuff to my Crimson Fists - a landspeeder with two more almost done, a pair of stormtalons that have been "almost done" for a few years now - now they are "really done" - and I finished up some leader types - rebased, decaled where applicable, touched up, and clear-coated. There is more to do ... I suspect there will always be a backlog with these guys because they are my "normal" marine army and there is always new stuff coming out for marines, but they are in a good place for now. 

• I played my Grey Knights early on but I haven't played them with the new book yet.  I have some units to build and tweaks to make and I need to focus on them for a while to do it - that will happen after the current wave is handled. 

• I played the Imperial Guard early on as well and my force needs some tweaks (and a more experienced commander). All I really added was some more demolisher cannon turrets  - hopefully they stay good - and the lascannon gunship (Vulture? Vendeta? I don't know but it seems nasty) because I could and I'd like a flying tank destroyer to help protect my own tanks. I'm really kind of waiting for a new Guard codex to dive back into this army and tune it up.

• I played my Orks in a Crusade campaign before the new codex came out and it is a really fun way to play the game. I got hammered pretty hard by Blaster's Ultramarines primaris gunline force but my warboss managed to wreck his redemptor dread regularly and to crunch his captain a few times too so it was not completely one-sided. With the new book I have added some bikes and since I mostly run Goffs I have the new Ghazghkull in the painting queue now too. I need to take a month next year and just play my orks only through a few games and I'll get them done. Also: The Great Re-Basing will happen as I have the base expanders sitting on my workbench to bump all the old boyz up to 32mm. not super exciting but it's a chance to change up how I base these guys and considering a lot of my army dates back to 2nd & 3rd edition I'm looking forward to it.

I did dive into Flames of War early in the year as this year's "miniatures game I will dive into hard and end up not playing" ... which is exactly what happened. At some point you might think I would learn but hope springs eternal. A few years ago it was Bolt Action, then it was Star Wars Armada (though we did play a few games of both) then Age of Sigmar ... I have played enough Kings of War that I don't count it as a non-starter but it was quiet this year too. Check in tomorrow for next year's candidates!

I did work on building an Undead army for Kings of War ... and also for Sigmar as that book came out while I was feeling it and so progress was made but not completed on both. I held off on 3rd edition AoS as we haven't played since 1st and I'm trying to be better about throwing resources at rulebooks I may not use. Armies - sure. We can play a few games with the old rules if we can get some armies together and make sure it's something we want to expand. 

Overall the miniatures situation is better then last year. I got a lot done and I also took the time to reorganize my work space  - cleaned out the workbench completely, picked up some new drawer/organizer things, and went through a bunch of paints and tools and supplies and got rid of a lot of clutter. I've enjoyed it more the last few months than I have in quite a while so I'm calling that a win. 

Then, last week of the year, the big surprise - we ended up playing Battletech of all things. We haven't played BT since the boys got interested years ago so I decided to go back to the original source and we played with the original BT boxed set, mechs, and map. This all came about because Paladin Steve's oldest son was asking about the 40K miniatures again when he was over for our boardgame night and rather than try to explain all that we started talking about how if he want to have giant robots moving around and punching and shooting each other Battletech was a better bet than 40k. It's also cheaper to get into if he really liked it. Paladin Steve hadn't played in 20 years but he was interested in dusting it off - so that's what we did. One mech apiece ... 3025 tech ... one original map board and we ran for several hours. It was a lot more fun than I expected - even when my Wolverine went down to a punch in the face that crushed my cockpit. 

Going through all of that old material hit me with a pretty heavy nostalgia wave. All those custom mech sheets, some sheets that still have damaged marked on them from battles 25 years ago, and even re-discovering old Mechwarrior character sheets ... we spent a LOT of time playing Battletech in the 80's and 90's. I have a ton of painted BT miniatures some of which I painted back in the 80's and it always feels good to put those on the table again. 

It was a ton of fun and Apprentice Boom Gun was already asking when we could play again before we finished the first game. That's a good sign. It was a nice way to wrap up the gaming year. 

The Lost City - Goodman Games Edition

 

I picked this one up a while back and thought I ought to discuss it a bit. 

I've run the Goodman Games versions of B1/B2 "Into the Borderlands" and X1 "Isle of Dread" and enjoyed them immensely as did my players. Returning to those old stomping grounds from the beginning of the 80's in the current edition with a group of players where a few of them were around for those early days but most of them were not was a blast. Watching some of them search for a plot - when the secret is there is no plot - was entertaining along the way. GG is doing these right.

The third release was S3 Barrier Peaks but it has a much higher level range so I have not tried to run it yet - one of these days. 

B4 though is a starting adventure so I could fire it up at any time really. I have to admit up front though that while I've owned a copy of the original for decades I've only tried to run it once and it didn't last long. I played in it once before that and it didn't last long then either. It had been a while since I read through it but this book includes the original version and an updated 5E version with some expansion material which makes it easy to compare the classic versus the new. 

Reading through it my old feelings crept back in from way back - I just don't like this adventure all that much. The original felt like half a module as it sketches out a massive underground city but it only details part of a dungeon, a ruined pyramid/temple, only fully details half of that structure, and then gives a page or so of ideas on what's in the rest of the city.

See that map? Fires up some ideas, right? Well, the original module covers the top half of the Step Pyramid in the traditional keyed room with description style, then gives a more basic rundown with monsters and maps for the lower half, the one page of notes on the actual city ... and that's it! The rest of the map is up to the DM. I remember feeling kind of ripped off when I read it way back when that while it's titled "The Lost City" the actual adventure is "The Step Pyramid" plus a page of notes. 

(This is -not- Goodman Games fault - its how the adventure was published originally)

I so wanted to like it - it is one of the most Conan D&D adventures ever published. The party gets separated from their caravan crossing the desert, finds a ruined city, discovers a secret entrance into a large structure, then finds an underground realm inhabited by various masked and possibly crazy people belonging to different factions with different agendas which is ruled by a monster/demon/thing that has set itself up as their god. It's potentially a great "contained sandbox" as it is underground but the players can do whatever they want - join a faction, try to fight the demonic ruling thing, establish their own power base and take over, or just do some exploring - and possibly looting - and move on.  

At least, it would be a great sandbox if there was more there to hang stuff on. I think it over-details the pyramid and then misses out on the rest. You get ten small dungeon levels with pretty much one stair or ladder connecting each level to the next so the level design is not complex. The factional material is interesting - there are 3 old gods of the city whose followers are trying to overthrow the cult of Zargon, the ruling entity of the city - but the space is so constrained that I'm not sure how much alliance-building the typical dungeon crawling party is going to do. 

The big bad guy Zargon lives in a one-room level at the bottom of the pyramid. He's likely too tough for a party to take on even with some help (12HD, AC0, 7 attacks/round 6 of which do 1d8 + one at 3d8) and it's just a weird place to put him. Shouldn't he be in a temple of some kind in the actual city? Maybe on the island? Maybe over by the volcano? You know, closer to the sacrifices he demands? Perhaps not in a 40x40 foot room all by himself?

I really wish the original had made the city the focus and spread the encounters out amongst the rest of the map. Make the pyramid a 3-level dungeon that gets the players up a few levels, ends with a temple to Zargon, and then lets them descend to the city for the rest of the adventure. Even with a fair amount of the city left undefined an encounter table and some specific locations equivalent to a single dungeon level would have made things much more interesting and given the factions room to breathe. Imagine rallying the various factions to take on the cult ending in a fight against his weird form on top of a step pyramid in the city or on that island that would be the cult's big stronghold.  

Now the good thing is that the new super-edition from Goodman Games has a similar take on things. They do not change up the original section with the pyramid other than updating it with 5E stats etc. as that is the mission statement for these books: update what's already there then expand around it:

• There are encounter tables for the desert the PC's will be wandering prior to entering the temple.
• The lost city itself gets a keyed encounter map - including a stronghold for each of the three factions plus a big temple to Zargon, and an encounter table!
• The rest of the underground areas on that map also get some attention including the island, the volcano, various caves in the underground area, and the catacombs under the city itself. 

Beyond this there are new spells, new items, and new monsters as with the other volumes in this series, plus a small set of handouts/illustrations for the players. A nice touch is having all of the maps - and there are quite a few - collected at the end of the book in one big section which ups the playability in a nice way.

The notes suggest that PC's could end up at 6th level or high playing through all of this material and I can see that happening as with all of this material it becomes a mini-campaign all on it's own. The flow might involve some circling back in and out of the city, I think, for the best experience and I would definitely move Zargon out of his hidey-hole in the pyramid down into his temple in the city but there is a lot to work with here - straight-up fights, factional encounters and negotiations (I can see some dedicated bard players going nuts here), and lots of exploration covering wilderness, dungeon, and general "underground spaces" type terrain and locations. 

I loved the idea of the original but thought the execution let it down. This version finally lives up to the potential I saw in the original and I can see it leading to a lot of fun for a new adventuring party. If you want a somewhat different way to start a campaign this is definitely worth a look. 

Next Year's Campaign - Temple of Elemental Evil 5E

 

So yes - next year (after Deadlands at least) I expect to dive back into 5th Edition with something big. To me the biggest advantage of 5th is the ease with which a lot of old school stuff translates into it without a lot of recalculating and Goodman Games has been doing it right with this series. In an interview I saw one of the writers on this project mention that if the original version had 17 goblins in a cave the new version has 17 goblins in the same cave. Sure, they will have 5th edition stats but they didn't go through and try to reconfigure it to fit 5E's encounter standards and to me that's a feature - heck that's the right way -  not a bug.

It is a straight-up linear presentation. Starting with the introduction, essays, and interviews - including one by Jon Petersen going through the saga of Gygax and TSR and the temple -and then moves right on into a reprint of T1, then a reprint of T1-4 ... so yes you get Hommlett twice, effectively. This takes up 220+ pages in the first volume and if you do not own a copy of the originals this is as good a version as you could ask for. 

The 5E version starts in Book 1 and then continues into Book 2 with the monster and magic item conversions at the end. 

I have only skimmed it at this point but I know this adventure fairly well and it looks solid. Fleshing out the elemental nodes alone is a big improvement.  I played parts of it in 1st and 2nd, ran some of it in 2nd, ran "Return to" in 3rd, converted it myself and ran a chunk of it in 4th ... it's been a part of every edition in some way for me. 

Now I am not one of those people who will claim this is the best adventure ever made. It does have flaws. It can turn into a grind with 4+ dungeon levels in the main temple. That said the beginning (Village + Moathouse)is a great start to a campaign and the temple itself gives you an epic quest to attempt and a helluva story to tell if you pull it off. Treating the temple itself as more of a death star infiltration at first rather than a frontal assault can be a lot of fun for the players and the DM both. There is the whole mess of the Zuggtmoy/Iuz/Elder Elemental God thing the DM needs to think through as well if you want it to make sense in your head but it's been run many times without that breaking it so maybe that only matters to me. 

I do have a Deadlands campaign to run - more on that later - but I am looking forward to sharing this monster with my current group.

Goodman Games - Temple of Elemental Evil for 5E

Well, this was announced over the weekend. I'm in.

I have their first 3 books: Into the Borderlands (B1 & B2), Isle of Dread (X1), and Expedition to the Barrier Peaks (S3). I've run a group all the way through Borderlands, and the same group through most of Isle of Dread and they are excellent - if you like those old adventures.

I do not have the 4th - The Lost City or the 5th - Castle Amber. I don't think they're actually available just yet but those don't carry the impact for me that the others do. I liked Lost City but I didn't play it as much back when and it's kind of a self-contained campaign all it's own. Castle Amber was even less "my thing" back then - I didn't really care about puzzling out the politics of a family of crazy people when I could be doing .. .well ... pretty much anything else in a D&D game.

But this ... ToEE is potentially a cornerstone adventure for an old school campaign - particularly a Greyhawk campaign. Most of my 5E experience has been running old school adventures so this would make for a nice second campaign option in that vein. I've been running everything in the Realms thus far and I would probably do the same with this. For the Realms I already worked through whether to put it in Impiltur, settled on the Dalelands, and then agonized over the backstory. So a lot of the work there is already done.

There is some temptation to open up Greyhawk here, though I'm not sure it's worth the separation from the other campaign. Placing them both in the Realms opens up some crossover potential and other interesting possibilities.

Ah well - it's a good problem to have. More to come I'm sure. 

Catching Up - RPG Burnout

There are a variety of reasons for the blog going silent last year. I wasn't playing as much tabletop gaming and I wasn't playing as much online either (I burned out on City of Heroes after about 4 months) so I did not have as much to say. The single biggest reason though was that for the first time in 40 years of playing RPGs I ... burned out.

This was a new experience. I've never gone more than a few months without playing or running something, and I've usually also worked in some prep work or some board or miniatures gaming even in those gaps. This time I let almost all of it go for roughly six months.

The last couple of years I've mostly been running 5th Edition D&D and playing in a Pathfinder campaign and a Savage Worlds 50 Fathoms campaign. There have been some smaller runs and one-offs with other games mixed in there but those 3 have been the core.

The 50 Fathoms game has been steady but hits bumps sometimes. We aim for weekly and sustain that for a bit and then hit stretches where we're lucky to play once a month. It's a weeknight game so it's especially vulnerable to schedule issues. It was frustrating at times but it's been a lot of fun and we should wrap that one up later this year.

The Pathfinder campaign had been running for over 5 years, theoretically once a month, but had gotten really spotty over the past year and 2019 was not really going any better. We had 5 players and it seemed as though it just was not a priority for any of them. After months of rescheduling without actually playing a couple of us finally told the DM it was time to let it go and he eventually agreed. It was not the way any of us wanted it to go, but that's just how it worked out. Regardless, I felt bad about how that went.

My campaign ... let's talk about that. I had been running Keep on the Borderlands intermittently with several players as our intro to 5th Edition. I've run it in every edition of the game so why not keep that going? A few years back with some variation in player availability I started running Storm King's Thunder as the "other" 5E campaign and scheduling sort of depended on who was available on any particular weekend. The SKT game was eventually sidelined as we regrouped and everyone decided to focus on the Old School game. I picked up Goodman Games "Into the Borderlands" super-version of B2 and used some of that material and then we moved into Isle of Dread - also guided by Goodman Games new-at-the-time-super-hardback-edition.

Things went well at first - enthusiasm and attendance were high and it felt like we were really accomplishing something. Then in the second half of 2019 it felt like we hit a wall. We were playing every other Friday, I had six players in the campaign, and vowed to run as long as 4 of them were available. Well ... pretty soon we were regularly having 3 or more unavailable. This jammed up the schedule, frustration grew for all of us, and I finally threw up my hands and said I was done even trying to run thru the end of the year. This was one big reason for the burnout - running a campaign as an adult means facing schedule conflicts and I've been doing it for years but last year it just exploded and all of our games were getting kneecapped by scheduling issues.

The other major thing was that some of the shine came off of 5th Edition D&D for me. I've been a fan of simpler rulesets for RPGs for a long time now but 5E is maybe too simple. After 20 years of 3E, 4E, and Pathfinder I've come to expect a certain level of crunch in my fantasy RPGs. While it does play faster than those other versions it is ... really really simple. I know it's super popular and tons of people have come back to the game this edition and I've not been a system mastery snob for a very long time but ... there's just not a whole lot there mechanically.

Character progression is really simple - you have a lot of choices those first 3 levels but once you've chosen your sub-class at 3rd most of your choices have been made. About the only customization you have left is the option to pick a feat at 4-8-12-16-19 but the game recommends you just stay with the stat boosts - how boring is that?

Monsters are mostly bags of hit points with 1 or 2 ways of doing damage and that's it - there are very few interesting monsters in the published book. In interesting here meaning they give the DM something to do besides roll a d20 and tell you how much damage you took. After 4E and Pathfinder I expect more - inflicting various conditions ... forced movement ... team-up abilities ... there are so many ways to challenge players in interesting ways beyond "The ogre hits you for 10 points". I'm pondering a post to illustrate this in more detail but for now most of the 5E monsters feel like a let step down from what we've seen before.

Bonus negative thing: I realized I am tired of running other people's material. My 4E stuff was almost all loose homebrew conversions of older material and I was very happy with it. My Pathfinder and 5E campaigns have all been published stuff and it is time to get back to writing up my own adventures.

So yes, the combination of disrupted schedules in all of our games, to the point of permanently ending one, plus the lowered enthusiasm about the main game, plus just a general frustration with the whole thing led me to "cancel the season" last fall and set the whole RPG hobby aside for months. I've gotten better since then, played some more, and even run a few sessions of  Pathfinder Second Edition to see if that satisfies that mechanical need - and so far it does seem promising. Now of course we have Ultimate Virus Lockdown as a worldwide status effect and that is this year's schedule killer.

Despite that, I'm planning to get some things moving. Interest has returned and as the year moves along I expect a return to at least one regularly scheduled campaign. I will also be getting back to keeping up the blog on some kind of regular schedule as well.

It's time to get back to work ...