Mad Mashup: Bard

 And back to my series of classes for my mad mashup of various sources, but based on a B/X core.  

Bard

Some artists can literally tap into the music the Primal Ones used to sing Creation into being.  They can express this through song or stories or music or dance.  In any case, it grants True Bards powers beyond the abilities of mere entertainers.

Requirements

• Bards roll their hit points with a d6.  

• They save as Thieves.

• They can use any weapons but longbows and wear any armour except plate.  They may not use shields.

• Bards can only cast spells if they are at most Heavily Encumbered.

• A Bard must have Dexterity of at least 9 and a Charisma of at least 13.  If a Bard has Dexterity of at least 13 and a Charisma of 16, the Bard enjoys a 10% bonus to all earned EXP.

Abilities

• Every even level, they add a spell of any level from the Bard list to their repertoire.  To successfully cast a spell, the Bard’s player rolls a d20.  They add their Level to the roll and subtract the level of the spell.  If the result is 11+, the spell goes off without a hitch.  If they roll from 6 to 10, the spell goes off, but there’s a backlash.  If they roll 5 or less, the spell doesn’t go off AND they suffer a backlash.

• Every 5th level (5, 10, 15, etc.) the Bard adds another known Language.

• When trolling for rumours, a bard will gain one more than usual.  

• Bards enjoy a +1 bonus when rolling the reaction to an offer of employment to potential Retainers.  

• During fights, a Bard can perform instead of fight.  While they do this, all their allies get +1 to all attack rolls, saving throws, and morale checks.

• Bards can use the wands, staves, and wands that Wizards can use.

• All who watch a Bard perform for at least one Turn (10 minutes) cannot help but be affected by their skills.  When the performance ends, the audience must make a save vs. Spells or have their mood and emotions shifted according to the desires of the Bard.  For every Turn past the first, the saving throws are lowered by -1 to a max of -4.  (See the Apsara for potential synergies.)

A fun class for players who want to risk “bad” magical fumbles.  The combat performance option is also an easy choice for players who don’t enjoy being on the spot or suffer from analysis paralysis.

Art by NC Wyeth and from the manuscript Rudolf von Ems, History of the World, created around 1300.

Mad Mashup: Apsara

And back to my series of character classes for my mad mashup D&D game based on B/X but including rules from all over.  This time, a bit of Hindu myth that really, really harshes on what lots of folks consider a core element of the Old School vibe.

Apsara

Apsara are the handmaidens of the gods, divine nymphs who serve the powers of Order and Chaos equally.  Thus they must be Neutral in alignment.  They are also all female with skin in various shades of blue.  Each is an expert artist, and most favour dance, music, and the erotic arts.  

Requirements

• Apsara use d6 for their hit points.

• They cannot wear any armour or shields.  

• They can use any weapon.

• They can cast cleric spells, but only while at most Lightly Encumbered.

• They save and fight as Clerics.

• An Apsara must have a DEX and Charisma of at least 13.  If both are 16+, the Apsara gets a 10% bonus on all EXP earned.

Abilities

• Apsara can understand all spoken languages, and be understood when they speak.  They are, however, limited as normal in written languages.

• They are also immortal.  They do not age and they cannot die.  Only the most potent of foes or weapons can leave scars on the mind or psyche of an Apsara.  They can, however, be knocked unconscious, charmed, etc.  

• All who watch an Apsara dance for at least one Turn (10 minutes) cannot help but be affected by her grace.  When the dance ends, the audience must make a save vs. Spells or have their mood and emotions shifted according to the desires of the Apsara.  For every Turn past the first, the saving throws are lowered by -1 to a max of -4.  If they are being aided by a Bard or another Apsara, that penalty can go as low as -6.  

• Apsara can use all magical items designed for Clerics, as well as all magical musical instruments.

• 3rd Level: the Apsara can cast Charm once per day.

• 5th Level: Foes must successfully pass a save vs. Paralysis in order to target the Apsara with attacks or harmful magic.  This does not apply if the Apsara is inside a wider area-of-effect attack (like poison cloud or a fireball spell).  

• 6th Level: the Apsara can manifest a second pair of arms, allowing them to take a second action in a Round.

• 7th level: the Apsara can cast Confusion once per day.

• 9th level: the Apsara can cast Charm Monster once per day.

• 10th level: the Apsara can manifest a third pair of arms, allowing them to take up to three actions per Round.  

A fairly straight-forward support and social class.  Fun for people who really like to wield "soft power" and make others look cool.  

5.5 is 5 Finding Itself

 Having flipped through the first playtest doc for D&D 5.5 (as I’m growing more certain everyone is going to end up calling the new edition), and having actually created a character with them, I think what we’re seeing is 5e finding its focus.  I’m not going to shock anyone when I say that 5e was a bit of a flailing hot mess of a game, which is perfect if you want to make it your own, including what you want and leaving out what you don’t.  But the “all things to all people” language of D&D Next is missing from One D&D.  5.5 knows what it wants to be, and what it wants to be is a story-telling machine.

 

Now, first off, I absolutely do not mean a story-telling engine like those that came out of the Forge, obsessed with replicating the structure of stories through the game mechanics.  Quite the opposite.  The models for 5.5e are the streaming games like Acquisitions, Inc. and Critical Role.  They want to give you that beloved anime series feel of friends banding together and going on a crazy journey that mixes soul-rending drama with wacky hijinks, interspersed with a seemingly random fan-service session where they all go to the beach or dress up to attend a high ball. 

 

Keeping in mind that the plural of anecdote isn't data, my experience has reinforced this.  The "kids these days" seem quite happy to toss the settings and rules and use D&D to run Narnia or Hogwarts or this really cool thing they came up with themselves that combines the Mandalorian with the Inheritance Games set in a distant corner of Tal'Dorei.  (Exactly like we played rangers with the double-barreled crossbow from Lady Hawke teamed up with a thief wielding the glaive from Krull and the psychic winged-
snake Pip, hunting color-coded ninja through the post-apocalyptic world of Thundarr the Barbarian.) 

 

The playtest doc they've released kneecaps the Rules Masters by basically banishing any sort of best-combos of race and class from 5e.  It's all about letting you play that runt orc who ran away from home to become a wizard, the tiefling rock star, the human kid abandoned as an infant and raised by fairies. 

 

I'm almost willing to bet real money that milestones become the de facto default advancement mechanic.  I'm not at all being sarcastic or mocking when I say that I'll bet they wish they could remove death from the game almost entirely, since nothing is more disruptive to a long-term storyline than PC death. 5.5 is gonna be weird, but I think most of the fans of 5e are going to love it.

The Return of Gleemax!

So if you watched the trailer for the next “edition” of D&D, now called One D&D, you’ll have noticed that half of it was devoted to their upcoming virtual tabletop.  (For those of you playing developer-speak bingo, it was described as “robust” but they did not actually use the word “scalable.”)  With DRAGON emagazine vanishing once again, you’d be forgiven for thinking this feels awfully familiar…

I, for one, welcome our new digital overlords!  One of the big disconnects in the RPG hobby has been that the publishers are called publishers for a reason; they make their money selling books, not necessarily by getting people to play the games.  Appealing to the collector/completist has been a financially superior strategy over people actually playing the game.  

That this is a horribly bass-ackwards way to run an industry should be obvious.  If WotC can pull off the VTT this time, it might not revolutionize the industry, but it ought to revolutionize the publishing plans for D&D.  We might even see the books become loss-leaders, funneling people towards the monthly subscription of Gleemax 2, where the real money will be made.  

In addition, while One D&D might smack of the same sort of marketing BS as D&D Next, Ben Milton thinks they may mean it this time.  The more they integrate the rules of D&D into their VTT, the more expensive it will be to change those rules.  They’ll also avoid bifurcating their audience (which, according to Ryan Dancey, was what happened every time they released a new edition during the TSR era).  And, as Milton points out, if Curse of Strahd is still a viable adventure in 30 years, they can release a big, deluxe anniversary edition for the nostalgia sales with little effort or expense.  

However, just launching a successful VTT won’t be enough.  Lots of groups have already invested the time and effort to learn how to play via Roll20.  TaleSpire already has the 3D virtual minis thing going strong and has alliances with virtual market heavyweights like Heroforge.  I am absolutely certain WotC can lean into D&D’s domination of the TTRPG market to overtake those competitors who’ve already stolen a lap from them, but I suspect it won’t happen overnight.  

I just feel really sorry for One More Multiverse, who just announced full integration of the 5e rules into their VTT the literal day before this all dropped.  The timing on this has got to smart.  

A Most Dangerous Library

 

This... actually kinda exists in one of my campaigns.

One of the new cool things in the 5e MM is that green dragons don't just hoard art, they hoard *artists.*  So I had a green dragon obsessed with books.  His name was Namzugingal, but most called him Vermillion.  His library was rumored to be the largest in the world, and his slave-librarians could find the answer to nearly any question... if you were brave enough to dare Vermillion's lair to ask them.

Three Swords and a Mask

Here are some magic items that have made an appearance in some of my gaming recently.  They're designed for D&D 5e (because that's the game we were playing at the time), but can be used in TSR-era D&D with little tweaking.

Swish

Swish is a +1 swept-hilt rapier with a blade fashioned from gleaming mithril and tower engraved on the pommel.  For every opponent personally attacking the wielder of Swish beyond the first, Swish grants its wielder a +1 to AC up to a max of +5.

The Lady

The Lady, so the joke goes, is disarming.  Swish is a +1 rapier with a silvered blade, orichalcum swept hilt and pommel, and an ivory grip.  Whenever the wielder of the Lady makes a successful attack with her, the wielder can choose to forgo doing any damage and instead attempt to disarm the person they attacked.  The target must roll a Strength save with a DC of the wielder of Lady’s spell save DC (or their Dexterity bonus + 8 + their proficiency bonus if they don’t have a spell save DC) in order to keep their grip on the weapon.  Otherwise, it is tossed 5d4 feet away from the wielder in a random direction.

Polydipsia

Powers

Polydipsia is a +1 longsword that thirsts for blood.  In addition to its usual +1 to attack and damage rolls, when used against a living creature with internal fluids (blood, ichor, etc.), the blade does an additional 1d4 necrotic damage as it sucks these fluids into itself.  Against constructs, most undead, and other creatures that lack internal fluids, it simply works as a normal longsword +1

If Polydipsia is ever sheathed without drinking blood, it will bite whoever sheathed it for 1d4 necrotic damage.  

If Polydipsia ever deals the finishing blow on a creature it can drink from, it gorges itself on the creature’s fluids.  Until the wielder’s next long rest, it acquires an additional +1 to attack and damage rolls.  The DM may decide that gorging this way on particular creatures (angels, demons, mindflayers, etc.) might grant the wielder additional, one-use powers.

If the wielder of Polydipsia gets into a heated confrontation, the blade will murmur and whine thirstily.  If Polydipsia’s wielder gets into a fight but doesn’t draw Polydipsia, the wielder must pass a CR 12 Charisma saving throw or use the blade to deadly effect.  Some of Polydipsia’s wielders have taken to chaining the sword in her sheath.  While chained, while Polydipsia can’t force her user to wield her, she will rattle and hiss.  (Chaining the sword in its sheath requires a full action to get Polydipsia free.)

Polydipsia cannot be used to deal non-lethal damage.  Wielding Polydipsia while she is still chained in her sheath will allow for non-lethal damage, but she’s treated as a club and her magical powers are negated until she is free of the sheath.

Description

Polydipsia looks like an elegant longsword with graceful cross guards that curve gently towards the sword’s point and set with small, smokey garnets between the grip and the blade.  The octagonal pommel is decorated with obsidian plates and the grip is wrapped in shark skin.  

The ricasso has two thorn-like projections in line with the edge of the blade.  The ricasso also bears a maker’s mark, identifying it as the work of a particularly skilled but mad swordsmith.  The blade itself is delicately engraved with a roses-and-thorns pattern.

The Mask of Falier

Powers

While carried, the Mask of Falier allows the bearer to cast the Minor Illusion, Prestidigitation, and Thaumaturgy cantrips.

While worn, in addition to the above powers, the mask confers the following benefits on the wearer:

Targets of Vicious Mockery had disadvantage on their saving throws against it.

The wearer can cast Alter Self on themselves once per hour.

The wearer can cast Blur once per day, the power recharging at dawn.

The wearer has advantage on Deception, Intimidation, and Sleight-of-hand skill checks.

The wearer has advantage when resisting any sort of gaze attack or magic, such as the gaze of a vampire or medusa.

Description

The mask has the ability to transform itself into any shape the wearer desires, but it must remain a mask.  It always looks like a mask, so while it can form itself into a caricature of a known person, it cannot imitate their exact look.  The mask is immune to mundane damage.

Exactly who Falier is has bedeviled generations of historians.  Some say Falier was one of the nomes de guerre of the half-elven illusion most commonly known as Kmikle.  Others claim Falier is the true name of a demon who is bound inside the mask.

A Great Deal: Monty Haul #1

Monty Haul is a sweet little ‘zine written for 5e D&D but with its feet firmly planted in the Old School cool. It gives off a bit of an ‘80s DRAGON vibe but is a lot more friendly with a stronger personal tone. TL;DR: some neat stuff to make spell-slingers more S&S/Lovecraftian eldritch, plus other goodies worth checking out.

Disclaimer: I backed the Kickstarter and got a sneak peek at #1 so I could help with proofreading. More than that, Mark Finn is an awesome guy I used to hang out with every chance I had when I lived in Austin (which mostly meant seeing him at conventions like ArmadilloCon). He's a literal raconteur of exceptional skill. And his brother was my therapist for a while. I think Mark rocks on and off toast.

More importantly for this discussion, Mark is a widely recognized Robert E. Howard scholar. (And yes, Amazon gives me a kickback if you buy from that link). So when he talks about Swords & Sorcery, he knows whereof he speaks. And he worked for Chessex in the ‘90s. The dude has been around and he has some stories to tell.

So, what is Monty Haul? Mostly material Mark’s created for his home game: homebrew rules, world-building, monsters, and other fun stuff that isn’t what you’re finding elsewhere.

Monty Haul #1 is dedicated to spell-slingers, specifically wizards, warlocks, and sorcerers. Because he’s writing for 5e, this means subclasses. Because it’s Mark, they’re not the usual sort of stuff. For instance, he’s got a new warlock patron, the Yellow King, who gives your warlock the power to blast enemies with mind-jarring visions of Carcosa. There’s a new sorcery origin, eldritch ancestry, that allows you to pick from three different flavors of eldritch horror (the Black Goat, which is all about chthonic deities and tentacles, the Void Dweller who are all about warping time and space, and the Deep Ones with their aquatic powers). My favorite bennie for these comes at 6th level: whenever you take physical damage, your eldritch birthright boils out from under the thin shell of your ruptured flesh, allowing you to deal greater unarmed damage to your attackers. The more hits you take, the more wrongness erupts through the holes in your skin, and the more dangerous you become. There’s also a new school for wizards, That Which Man Was Not Meant to Know, that starts off giving you some AC bonuses (due to your extreme paranoia) and ends at 14th level where the simple act of casting your spells causes psychic damage to those who can see and hear you.

There’s also a trio of “monsters” designed to plague spell-slingers specifically. I put monsters in quotes because these things have no stats; if you can see them, you can squish them pretty easily. But each is a parasite that infests the body. The ear worm is a sort of anti-babble-fish, translating the words you hear into a random language you might not understand. There’s also the mind mite (aka the brain cloud) that eats spell slots.
If you’re not into spell-slingers, there’s still some good stuff for you, including a nifty melding of the TSR-era reaction table with 5e’s social skills that I’m now using in my campaigns.

My favorite section is probably the Design Notes for a Magical City. This is not a keyed map of a magical city, but instead ideas Mark has used to make one of the city’s in his homebrew campaign more magical. This makes them very easy to slap a new coat of paint on and drop into your home campaign.

Even better, the first section is Mark’s design notes for all the different sections, the why’s and wherefore’s of the choices he’s made. Since you know why he made the choices he’s described, you’re in a better position to judge how useful his work is for your campaign and how you might want to tweak it for optimal performance at your table.

You can get Monty Haul #1 at drivethrurpg.com as a .pdf. I’m not sure if there are options for getting it in dead tree form if you missed the Kickstarter (you might contact Mark directly if that’s something you’re interested in).

Stat Blocks and Table Space

On a post from 2015, Ruprecht recently asked:

I'm curious what people think about the way the modules are handled. They just say Knight (for example) and the DM is expected to look up the Knight statblock in the back of the monster manual. This is brilliant to save space but seems less useful at the table.

This is easily one of the areas where OSR publications stomp all over WotC's stuff: ease of use at the table. An A5 size book with a good binding is easy to use and doesn't eat up nearly the table real estate that 5e's core books and adventures take up. Plus, in the best OSR stuff, the stat blocks and maps are all there on one page for you.

Compare to trying to run an official 5e adventure. You'll have the adventure itself, a big coffee-table tome with the adventure itself. And you'll be flipping back-and-forth because the maps are pages away from the keyed descriptions. And, as Ruprecht points out, you'll also want the MM with you to look up any foes the PCs might encounter.

But wait, there's more! Because you'll also need the PHB so you can look up the details on the spells everyone is going to be casting. And maybe Xanathar's as well, if someone is using stuff from that book. Luckily, you'll only need to flip back and forth in the MM if the encounter includes more than one type of monster. You'll be flipping a bit in the adventure book, and a LOT in the PHB. (Gift idea for the DM in your life: a pad of post-its they can use to mark important pages in all these books!) Which means your DM is going to be taking up twice to three-times the space of a player. Oh, wait, but we forgot about any notes the DM might have written down. Or space to roll dice!

This is extremely sub-optimal, but unlikely to change. Current RPG tastes dictate the complex stat blocks and rules, as well as the honkin' big books as the standard for AAA RPGs (and this is after WotC made a big deal about simplifying D&D).

Due to the extreme unwieldiness and generally meh contents, I've not felt the need to run one of the official adventures. But I do know people who are, and I can probably get some more info from them on how they're finding it.

From One Generation to the Next

So people are talking about the generations of D&Ders. And, as usual, I don’t really identify with what the author is writing about.

Part of that is my near total lack of running into any friction for my gaming. Nobody teased me about it. I was encouraged to bring my gaming books into school. My 8th grade English teacher used the NPC generation tables in the 1e DMG as part of a creative writing exercise.

But more than that, I don’t think the level of acceptance of D&D in the culture at large had a huge effect on how we played the game. Rather, I think it was the assumptions we brought to the table.

If you look at Grognardia’s Ages of D&D, you notice that the Golden Age doesn’t even look like D&D as most people know it. Players didn’t invest with their characters the way they’re encouraged to do so now. You rolled 3d6 in order to generate your character, meaning you had no idea what you were going to play until after you’d rolled your stats. You probably had a handful of characters ready to go at any time, and might play your cleric or your wizard depending on factors like which was too busy training up to their next level (something that didn’t happen automatically) or what the group was likely to need tonight. Taking your character on vacation with you and playing in a game across town or across the country was a completely natural thing to do.

But above all of that, D&D was a game about exploration. Monsters were not opportunities for EXP but resource sinks; every fight limited how much longer you could spend in the wilderness or dungeon. Barely any effort was made to balance encounters. Carefully mapping the dungeon unlocked opportunities for finding unguarded or lightly-guarded treasure which was the key to gaining those first few very precious levels.

Unfortunately, early D&D did a poor job of explaining itself. The assumption was that most would learn the game from someone who could trace their learning of the game back to Gygax’s group. Even the Basic boxes fumbled here; the clues were there but not everybody connected the dots. “Why should my characters become better killers from gathering treasure?” was a commonly heard refrain.

2e muddied these waters. The advancement mechanic moved to class-specific criteria: wizards and clerics earned EXP for casting spells, thieves earned EXP for acquiring treasure, fighters earned EXP for slaying things. Even more transformative was the stuff coming out of DUNGEON magazine. Gone were the funhouse dungeons like Castle Greyhawk or thematic ruins that were all about place. The adventures crafted by the Hickmans like Ravenloft and the Dragonlace series, already described as classics, were seen as the model. Everything had to be about story. The assumption that the PCs would be accompanied by a small army of henchmen, something obvious to the first generation of DMs, now seemed weird. You never saw Strider or Raistlin or Elric hanging out in a tavern, interviewing mercenaries to see who would go into the dungeon with them. Charisma transformed from being one of the most important stats in the game to being everyone’s dump-stat.

By the time TSR hit financial troubles, few still played the way that first generation did. The game was about story now, which meant actually killing characters became a hassle. Steps were taken to insulate characters from death, like going unconscious at 0 hit points instead of just dying, giving PCs max hit points at first level, and making resurrection spells more common.

When 3e came out, you could easily see that perceptions of the game had transformed drastically. Now D&D was seen as a game about combat. You earned most of your EXP from killing things, which meant wandering monsters stopped being a threat and started to be a boon to characters who needed just a few dozen more EXPs to level up. The game became more about mechanics; we got all sorts of new ways to differentiate our characters with numbers, like feats and skills. (And, suddenly, nobody’s character could tie knots or swim anymore.) The DM was given tools to balance encounters so that fights were more likely to be “close calls” or, at least of “reasonable” challenge. And to aid in this, each monster got massive, page-long stat blocks, allowing the DM to craft their own monsters using the same rules the PCs used to make their characters. The chains of feats and class abilities made character creation a mini-game, on par with deck-building in games like Magic: the Gathering.

With 4e, D&D had completed its transformation into a game centered around combat. Only, it turned out, that wasn’t really what the fans wanted. And with 5e, the focus was moved back to stories.

Unfortunately, the chassis of the game is still built around the exploration model of the original game. So it does story in a rather clunky way, requiring all sorts of bizarre tweaks (like ubiquitous resurrection magic) to smooth out the rough patches.

Ok, but how does this history help us make sense of D&D’s multiple generation gaps? Well, each generation comes to the table with its own expectations and assumptions. The oldest Grognards play a game about exploration and personal challenge. They want to use their own brains to overcome the challenges and fully expect to use their real-world knowledge of things like physics as well as the rules of the game to triumph. They approach combat as a war and expect to need to use every clever idea they can muster to just survive. Character death is just part of the game to them. They don’t invest in their characters as much, and might not even name them until they’ve reached 3rd level.

After them come the Voyagers. They wallowed in the crazy imaginative worlds of TSR from the ‘90s like Planescape and Dark Sun. They want simple rules that will keep things consistent but don’t get in the way of telling their stories. They love having entire sessions go by without touching the dice and really want to delve into the orc warlord’s backstory. Hacking the rules of the game to better fit the strange settings they love creating is very common. Meta-knowledge is something to avoid. Fights can be tense and dramatic, but not really why they came, and most discovered, sooner or later, that they were best served by the Basic/Expert rather than the Advanced rules. If the DM’s world is described as “Game of Thrones in Oz” or the player has an original character race with a detailed description of how its biology evolved, you’re probably dealing with voyagers.

3e engendered a new generation that reveled in rules mastery. They expected intricately balanced encounters that utilized the rules in new and challenging ways, but they viewed combat in the game as a sport, to be played within a certain set of bounds. The solutions to every challenge was on the character sheet; 10’ poles and using spilled wine to find hidden passages were replaced by skill checks and character abilities. DMs obsessed over encounter design, always seeking to create unique circumstances that conformed with the rules of the game, but did so in new and surprising ways. For some groups, story became simply a path that strung together one gorgeous set-piece battle or skill challenge after another. Crunch reigned supreme and everything else was just fluff. If you hear grumbles about how D&D doesn’t allow enough mechanical differentiation between characters (or, how you really ought to be playing Pathfinder), you’ve got some Rules Masters in your group.

We have a new generation of players coming to D&D today thanks to streaming games. They thrill to the roll of a natural 20, but they seem to be just as much about story as the second generation, perhaps even more so. They’re not as excited about exploring strange and alien worlds; rather they seem to prefer the tried-and-true high fantasy that’s considered D&D’s default. They also don’t appear to be as interested in kit-bashing the rules as the story-focused gamers of old, beyond crafting new backgrounds, races, and classes. They want to play the “real” game with as few tweaks as possible. And they apparently love the idea of not really earning EXP at all, but rather going up levels when their characters meet milestones in the journey of their personal and group stories. If you’re group uses “Milestone leveling” instead of awarding EXP, or the DM bends over backwards to avoid character death, and most especially if they only started playing in the last three years, you’re probably playing with Epic Stream players.

If you want to talk about generation gaps, discussing expectations and desires seems a far more useful taxonomy than simply Old vs. New, or even TSR-era vs. WotC players. And keep in mind, few groups or even players are purely one or the other. While I started in the “Golden Age” with the Grognards, I was self-taught and started the game with many of the Voyager’s assumptions. And, on top of that, most of my groups are dominated by players who are new to the game, so there’s a lot of Epic Stream influence in my games as well. How much mileage you’ll get out of this discussion will depend largely on your exposure (or lack thereof) to people with alternative expectations. When you find someone at your table making odd assumptions, it’s time to start asking questions. From my (terribly not scientific) experience, you’ll likely find the source of those assumptions comes from when and how they started playing the game.

Retail Déjà Vu

This is going to look familiar to those of you over 30. You may remember when D&D was sold in Sears stores. I actually never got any of my stuff from Sears, but I did buy the Sear's exclusive poster from Larry Elmore last year at GenCon.

If you needed any further proof that D&D is experiencing a Renaissance, I think this Target exclusive boxed set is another hefty data-point to consider. This, on top of the Stranger Things box, means there are now three different "beginner" boxed sets to get you into D&D. I'm wondering if we're going to see a Critical Role boxed set soon?

I'm also curious if the rules are different from the Basic pdf. The ad copy implies that they've been re-written from the other boxed sets to now "on-boards players by teaching them how to make characters". And that implies that it doesn't use pre-gens. If you've got more info on this box, I'd love to hear about it.

The Dice of Generations

Back when G+ was still a thing, this is the sort of stuff I'd post on it. I really don't have much to say about this piece, but it's sweet and useful and interesting:

The Dice of Generations

D&D Movie Musings

Yep, they’re making another one. And Paramount could use a successful franchise now that Star Trek is (at least in movie theaters) wallowing in face-plant.

According to The Hashtag Show, things have been off to a bumpy start. They still don’t have a director, though they do appear to have a script they’re happy with. Michael Gilio’s other screenwriting credits pretty much begin and end with Kwik Stop, a quirky little indie film that garnered rave reviews and some awards, apparently. Gilio was called in to “rewrite” a script by David Leslie Johnson whose credits include multiple episodes of The Walking Dead, Wrath of the Titans, and Aquaman.

That implies to me that the script is fairly safe B-list fare (though I haven’t seen Aquaman yet and may be selling it short). This doesn’t exactly change that equation:

Once things get rolling, Paramount hopes to land an actor from the following list of talent: Will Smith, Josh Brolin, Chris Pratt, Vin Diesel, Matthew McConaughey, Jamie Foxx, Joel Edgerton, Dave Bautista, Jeremy Renner and Johnny Depp.

Seriously?!? No, I don’t think it’s serious; I think they’re trying to raise buzz for the project because about the only thing those actors have in common is that they’re male. Imagine a role you’ve ever seen one of these actors in and try swapping them out. Either the lead is a complete cypher (which doesn’t speak well of the script) or they’re not serious about this list.

If they’re still aiming for a ’21 release, that probably nixes Brolin and Bautista (who will be filming Dune), and, as much as I’d love to see him in this, Vin Diesel (who has a whole slew of projects listed on his IMDB page, including F&F9 and xXx4). Pratt is probably on this list because he’s hot in nerd media right now. I have a hard time wrapping my mind around McConaughey (as much as I loved him in Sahara) or Depp in the lead for this movie. Put a gun to my head and I’d guess that, if this is an actual list of actors they’re looking at, it’ll most likely be Edgerton or Renner, and I’ll bet you Edgerton’s cheaper, so…

(Smith and Foxx would be interesting choices, but if this is a B-list movie, they’d almost certainly be the only non-white character with a name. The script clearly isn’t written to explain who this character is as an outsider in the local dominant culture or we’d see fewer gringos on this list. So yeah, wouldn’t hold my breath for either of those, though they would be interesting choices.)

So, what does that tell us? Well, none of these guys are exactly young; we won’t see some young man in a coming-of-age story here. Most likely, that means our lead is a grizzled human warrior. His primary weapon will be a sword. We’ll probably get a five-man band that includes a comic-relief axe-wielding dwarf as “the Big Guy,” a brash and blond Viking-esque dude with a massive sword who’s an old friend of our hero from way back as “the Lancer,” and a spell-slinger who won’t cast any spells you recognize out of the PHB who will supply exposition as needed in the role as the “Smart Guy” (salt-and-pepper or grey-haired if it is a guy, or a bland, dark-haired ice queen if female).

If the writers know much about D&D and wrote an actual D&D movie, the “Heart” will be a cleric (and the “Lancer” will be an effete warlock who always seems to be on the verge of betraying the party, and you’ll probably replace the dwarf with a half-orc or, if the budget can support it, a dragonborn). That said, it’s probably more reasonable to expect a sword-wielding princess who constantly reminds us that she’s as tough as any man and is also in constant need of rescuing (think Kate Beckinsale in Van Helsing).

Of course, this is the Marvel Age, where LotR and The Hobbit each got green-lighted for their own three-movie deals and comic book movies are both good and summer tent-pole events. So it’s possible I’m completely wrong (possibly even likely), and we’ll end up with something decent. If so, I’ll happily eat crow on this. But, right now, I’m thinking Critical Role’s half-hour cartoon is a much safer bet for a fun D&D movie.

War and Remembrance

On this day, 11 years ago, the 2008 Fantasy RPG Wars began. And we won.

By “we” of course I mean everyone who plays RPGs. Paizo shocked WotC into going back to basic principles and discovering that their fans don’t want 80 lbs of rules, nor is a new giant stack of character classes, etc. every few months or even every year a good way to support an RPG.

And now D&D has shocked Paizo into improving their games further, seeking to be the more mechanically complex game, but streamlining it to make it accessible to new players. At the Paizo booth at the GAMA Trade Show, one of the Paizo folks said, “We want Pathfinder to be the game you graduate to.” That sounds like a good place for them to be.

I used to think that WotC would eventually sell the license to D&D in order to keep the IP alive and save themselves the expense of making the game. I no longer feel that way. D&D is healthier than ever, and this rising tide appears to be lifting most, if not all, the boats.

Make the most of it, folks.

Art by Wayne Reynolds.  The genesis of Pathfinders goblins can be read here.

Go and STAHP!

So, Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes is, as I’m sure you’ve heard, like that Volo’s book but different. Where Volo’s was more “Who are the People in Your Neighborhood,” Mordenkainen’s is a 30,000-foot view of the default multi-dimensional politics of D&D. The first section is the Blood War.

Now, straight up, the Blood War is one of my least favorite bits from Planescape. It’s just not that terribly compelling to me. It’s an endless, eternal war with no real prospect for major movement, forget climax. The way it’s described in Mordenkainen's makes it clear that, should either side actually achieve any serious victory, it could very well cascade into a rolling series of conquests that result in the end of everything, everywhere.

This is perfect if your game is all about the PCs trying to prop up the status quo by running around putting out little fires. To me, it feels way too much like Joss Whedon stomping on your face with the “Reprise” episode of Angel forever. Anyone who scratches at it even a little will see the nihilism-filling under the candy shell. It’s the antithesis of everything in Rients’ Broodmother Sky Fortress. If your idea of a good time is unleashing the PCs on your poor, unsuspecting worlds and watching them actually change things and knock stuff over or build their own stuff, the Blood War could serve as the outer bounds of that sandbox, but it threatens to become a wet blanket to smother the whole thing.

Even worse, it takes WotC something like 2,000 words to basically say that the demons and devils are engaged in near-constant warfare on the banks of the river Styx, primarily where it flows into the first layer of the Hells. The war is trapped in a deadlock where vast hordes of ravening demons smash against the highly organized and disciplined defenses of the devils. Both sides scour the multiverse for a way to break the impasse, thus creating all manner of opportunities for PCs to thwart cults, treasure-hunters, etc.

That up there is less than 100 words and gives you just about everything in the 2,000 words from the book. Paying writers by the word is a sickness that needs to be stamped out.

Now, we do get some fun stuff on demonic and devilish cults, the big personalities of the Hells (which is new for 5e) and the Abyss (which is largely lifted from the Out of the Abyss adventure) as well as fun random tables for creating cults and the like. Lots of useful stuff here for DMs, especially if you’re running a sort of PC-Inquisitors-vs.-Cults-of-Evil campaign. There are ways to customize cambions based on who their otherworldly parent was. We also get some tiefling sub-races based on the heavy-hitters from the Hells. Alas, there’s nothing in there about Abyssal tieflings. Boo!

The section on elves is probably the most useful for players. It’s nearly 30 pages long and gives us what may be the most Tolkien-esque version of D&D elves to date. It’s laced through with that melancholy sense of doom, this time cast as family drama, with the elves eternally longing for the acknowledgement and acceptance of a father who never really wanted them and can’t set aside his jealousy long enough to forgive them for wanting something he had no interest in giving them or helping them acquire. (Seriously, everyone comes out of this looking like self-centered jerks.) We get a nice big elven pantheon, and then we get new elven subraces, including sea elves, shadar-kai, and yet another version of the eladrin (this one kinda being four sub-races in one, as your eladrin character can shift between four seasonal versions depending on their general mood that day).

This is followed by shorter sections on the dwarves (including the duergar subrace), the giths (including playable versions of both gith-kind and an excuse for gith of both kinds to cooperate temporarily), and finally a section on halflings and gnomes (including rules for the sverfneblin sub-race).

This stuff could be nifty-keen if:

1. Your DM reads this stuff and agrees that it describes how it works in your campaign, and…
2. Your players read this stuff and incorporate it into how they play their characters.

The shortest of these sections is 12 pages long. There was a time when I would have read these entries with the obsessive eye for detail of a medieval scholastic. But that was junior high, and I was weird. For most of us, we might incorporate some of the sub-races listed here, as well as some of the fun random tables. Otherwise, there’s a lot of stuff that you might read once and then promptly forget.

In spite of all that, if you’re a DM, you want this book. Why? Because it has some of the best monsters ever officially produced for the game. The very first monster, the allip, is what happens to a scholar who learns cursed knowledge. The only way to escape the curse is to basically infect another scholar with a manic episode in which they scribble out all manner of nonsense that also includes the secret that cursed you. Flip the page (past the Astral Dreadnaught) and you find the balhannoth, a teleporting tentacle monster that uses illusions of your deepest desire to lure you into its traps. There’s the boneclaw, the result of a botched attempt to transform into a lich and which bonds with someone with “an unusually hate-filled heart.” They might not even realize they now have a talon-fingered undead slave eager to fulfill their most blood-curdling revenge fantasies, resulting in all manner of Carrie-esque hijinks. The cadaver collector is an automaton that spears corpses on itself and then raises the spirits of those corpses as specters in combat, which alas is mildly overshadowed by the more versatile corpse flower which kills you before adding you to the flower-like arrangement of corpses in its tangles, which it later uses to power its magical abilities.

And that’s just the first handful of pages from the bestiary. It doesn’t include the various sorts of deathlock, warlocks who have gravely offended their patrons and paid the price, or the alkilith, demonic fungus that grows in broken windows and open doorways, transforming them into portals to the Abyss. We also get the duergar hammer and screamer, mining machines with punished duergar strapped inside, which feed on the pain of their tortured occupants. There are the very Harryhausen eidolons, guardian spirits that animate sacred statues. There are the elder elemental kaiju, and the trapped-in-armor elemental mamluk myrmidons. We get horror-movie-esque baddies like the giant nightwalker and the body-snatching oblex. We get wargamey ogre variants: battering-ram, bolt-launcher, and howdah. We get some interesting variations on old favorites. The retriever is now a drowish automaton that scours the Demonweb for demons to enslave. Grue are now a version of the star spawn, cthulhuish monsters analogous to demons or fey. The grey render is the very embodiment of Kiel’s “Good Boys.”

Alas, the failings of the first part of the book do intrude in the bestiary. This shows up most strongly in the devil and demon entries, most of which read like units for a wargame. Still, there’s a ton of fun stuff for DMs in the monster section. If you’re a player, you can probably give this book a pass, especially if your DM uses bespoke settings and will allow you to use the Unearthed Arcana versions of the sub-races in this book.

Back to B2

Lady-love wanted to play some D&D this weekend, something quick and dirty without much prep. So she rolled up a gnome wizard botanist/inventor and I dusted off good ol' B2: Keep on the Borderlands.

I don’t remember the last time I ran this module. It was absolutely back in the 20th century. Shock and surprise: it holds up really, really well. I considered giving it an early Iron Age feel but didn’t pull the trigger on that; might still, but might not, also.

The opportunities for RP are excellent. Our PC fell in with a certain visiting priest and his two acolytes; if you know the adventure you know the fellow I’m talking about. Plot-balls are already rolling nicely.

The adventure badly needs a set of player maps. Of course the first thing PCs with access to the sleep spell are going to do is capture some goblins and interrogate them. It could also benefit from some NPCs or NPC generators. But maybe not; I’ve got access to so many of the things they’re hardly necessary.

The bare-bones structure also creates minor issues. The Caves of Chaos are insanely close to the Keep; even with my saying the CoC crew plans to take over the Keep and move in, the distance is frightfully small. There are some questions about the diets of the monsters, where they came from, how the location calls out to them, but if you’re a halfway decent DM that’s just opportunities for world-building. Ditto with the lack of names and interior details.

All-in-all, I’m really happy with how it runs even after all these years. We’re using 5e and not having a hard time at all with the conversion. Once again I’m tempted to run an old-school game with Moldvay/Cook built on old published adventures. Maybe if we find a group after the upcoming move.

Down-time Ding!

I recently dropped GP-for-EXP in one of my 5e games. It works great until about level 5. At that point, on a 1-for-1 basis, it starts getting silly. 6th level requires 14,000 EXP. I was saying PCs get 1 EXP for each gold piece they spent, and they could spend it on anything they wished. Unfortunately, 14,000 gp is insane. That’s individual, not total, so if four players pooled that kind of cash (56,000 gp) they could buy two warships, five longships, 50 spyglasses, 140 warhorses, 280 elephants, 1,000 camels, or 746 hand crossbows. Which would be great if the PCs were trying to start the world’s biggest circus or bankroll a small war. But keep in mind that this is only going from 5th to 6th level. Each character going from 9th to 10th level would need to spend 64,000 EXP, so its more than each of the things listed above before they’d pool their money.

Now, it’s entirely possible to organize a game to work with these sorts of numbers. According to the DMG, 5th through 10th level play is described as “Heroes of the Realm” tier play, so you could totally have the PCs involved in political shenanigans that would warrant those sorts of expenses: outfitting mercenary forces to supplement their liege lord’s border defenses against a rampaging orc horde, for instance, or an expeditionary force to a distant and exotic locale. From 11th to 16th level (“Masters of the Realm”) the PCs could be funding their own colonies on the edge of the wilderness old-school style and paying the upkeep on their own personal armies. And that’s a fun way to play, and fit our expectations of the game back in ‘80s. So yes, I think 1 EXP earned for each gold piece spent can work. But it does require the campaign to scale up sharply as the PCs level up.

Unfortunately, the campaign in question was a far more intimate thing, dealing with the politicking of neighborhoods and guilds. Granted, this was in a massive city, and reading about the history of the Roman Republic (Amazon Associates link) has given me some ideas on how the gold could have been spent to further that sort of play. In fact, studying this more closely I’m now kinda jonesing to run a game with that sort of structure. But that’s not how things were set up for this particular campaign, or how we’ve been playing the game. So it’s gone off the rails and I now reward levels on a completely subjective basis.

So yeah: new ideas for a new campaign. What’s new, right? 😉 But alternatively, I’ve also been tinkering with an alternative leveling-up system that would keep things on the small and intimate side. This system would allow the PCs to level up whenever they wanted (and could afford) to take the time. It would work like this:

Whenever the players wanted to level up their PCs, the PCs would have to spend at least one week preparing for and then actively studying/praying/communing with totems/etc. They would need to spend their normal costs-of-living amounts (bottom of page 157 in the PHB) plus 20 gp per level they wished to attain (so 100 gp to go from 4th to 5th level) per week. At the end of that week the player would roll a d20. If they rolled 20 or higher, the character leveled up.
If this isn’t the first time they’d spent a week trying to gain this level, they get to add +1 to the roll. For each two contiguous weeks they spend, they add another +1 (so spending four weeks in a row to gain a level gets you +2 on the roll). They might also get additional bonuses for having a mentor who is at least the level they wish to attain, special materials or the like.

Players can attempt to level-up their characters anytime they have the cash and time to do so. However, they must be in a relatively safe and civilized place, somewhere where they are not actively adventuring or traveling. Small, short events don't interrupt this training (getting mugged, attending a ball, rescuing kittens from trees), but being forced to travel more than six miles in a single day or spend most of a day in life-or-death situations (that isn't the training) will ruin it. Also, each week must be seven contiguous days of studying; it can't be broken up. Once the have leveled up, they can’t do so again for at least twelve weeks.

This sort of scheme absolutely demands down-time. If you run the sort of campaign where it’s a cliffhanger every week and players hop from crises-to-crises, this ain’t the leveling-up system for you. However, if you love slice-of-life sort of play, where you can actually delve into what else is happening during that down time (politics at the cleric’s temple, rivalries with warlock’s patron’s other warlocks, etc.) you can have a lot of fun with this sort of thing. If you want to slow things down and enjoy the scenery more, this is probably a good fit for your campaign.

The big caveat here, however, is with the random rolling it’s entirely possible you’ll end up with characters spread across levels, with high-rollers two or three or more levels advanced from the unlucky. You can absolutely weight things for those who’ve rolled poorly by offering them resources to help out. It might also make sense to extend the length of time that has to pass between a successful leveling-up and the next attempt in order to slow down the lucky. Or you can dictate that a character automatically succeeds if another PC is at least two levels higher than them.