Major injuries: what doesn't kill you makes you stranger

In yesterday's game, one PC was rescued from captivity by the party, but not before undergoing some pretty severe torture. This presented me with a bit of a quandary: having him simply bounce back from such an ordeal after a couple of Cure Light Wounds spells felt wrong, but at the same time I didn't want the consequences to feel like a punishment. (The problem with most 'lasting injury' rules is that they make you weaker as a consequence for failure, which makes you more likely to fail again in future, which makes you even weaker... realistic, no doubt, but not what most people are looking for in fantasy adventure games!) In order to model what I think of as 'comic-book trauma' - the kind where undergoing severe physical suffering makes you different without necessarily making you less capable - I thus proposed the following off-the-cuff house rule:

1: When a character undergoes life-changing suffering (not just a regular injury, but an ordeal so severe that they will never quite be the same again), roll 2d6 of different colours. Declare before rolling which one is the good dice and which one is the bad dice.

2: The good dice shows how the experience has changed you for the better, as follows:

1. Gain +1 Strength permanently. Your ordeal has left you filled with a slightly crazed fury that drives you to train harder than you have ever trained before.
2. Gain +1 Dexterity permanently. Your experiences have left you jumpy and on-edge, sharpening your reflexes.
3. Gain +1 Constitution permanently. After what you've lived through, regular pain and hardship barely even registers anymore.
4. Gain +1 Intelligence permanently. Your experiences have made you hyper-vigilant, determined not to miss anything lest you expose yourself to further suffering.
5. Gain +1 Wisdom permanently. Your sufferings have given you a new perspective on life.
6. Gain +1 Charisma permanently. When your injuries heal, they leave you with the kind of scars that make you look cool and sexy and dangerous.

3: The bad dice shows how the experience has changed you for the worse, as follows:

1. Lose -1 Strength permanently, due to permanent muscle damage.
2. Lose -1 Dexterity permanently, due to permanent nerve damage.
3. Lose -1 Constitution permanently, due to permanent organ damage.
4. Lose -1 Intelligence permanently, due to permanent brain damage.
5. Lose -1 Wisdom permanently, due to lasting trauma and/or derangement.
6. Lose -1 Charisma permanently, due to disfiguring scars.

4: If you roll a double, then you've somehow passed through your ordeal largely unscathed. In retrospect it probably seems more like a bad dream than something that really happened.

(Naturally, in yesterday's session my player rolled a double and the whole thing was wasted, but we might use it again in future...)

Do note that using these rules freely enough will increase the chances of characters drifting towards the extreme ends of the stat distribution range, though this is probably pretty appropriate for people who've been through as many extreme experiences as they have!

Game-enhancing powers, game-ruining powers, and yet more magic items

I've been running OSR D&D more-or-less weekly for over five years, now, with a heavy focus on exploration, problem-solving, and diplomacy. Combat happens, but I learned early on that the kind of combat power-ups that most later D&D editions obsess over were almost irrelevant: when most fights are either one-sided ambushes or desperate fighting retreats, the shift from 1d8 damage to 1d8+2 damage is really not that big a deal. My players regularly forget which magical weapons their PCs are carrying. What they never, ever forget is exactly who is wearing the Ring of Invisibility to Undead. 

FORGOT WHO WAS WEARING THE RING.

Whether in the form of magic items or spells, I've tended to give my PCs access to lots of utility magic, in order to enable the kind of improvisational problem-solving on which such games thrive. But there's utility and then there's utility, and a power with too few limitations can quickly break a game. Previous games, for example, taught me the hard way that giving PCs high-speed at-will flight is a genie that's really hard to get back in its bottle once released, trivialising everything from difficult terrain ('I fly over it') to tripwires and pressure plates ('I fly over it') to melee-only enemies ('I fly over it and kite it to death'). And the Team Tsathogga game taught me that even the humble Charm Person could become hard to manage once the PCs had enough spell slots. ('We hide in the bushes and cast Charm Person on him twelve times! One of them's bound to work!')

Of course, these problems are context-dependent. A more superheroic game could probably have taken both flight and mind control in its stride. (Although maybe not: every Exalted game I ever played in ended up crashing and burning due to the difficulty of challenging PCs with near-unlimited powers of mobility, persuasion, information-gathering, and stealth.) But assuming you're after something resembling traditional fantasy, in which 'a castle' or 'a troll' is a dangerous but solveable problem to a clever and well-equipped party of adventurers, then here are my notes on the kinds of powers that make for good, enjoyable problem-solving tools, as well as the kind that can easily spoil things for everyone unless counterbalanced by significant downsides or limitations, and a handy list of magic items to go along with both... 

The Good Stuff - abilities that facilitate creative and intelligent play

• Levitation: Slow, vertical-only flight. Allows for all kinds of ingenious problem-solving but requires careful set-up, not particularly useful in combat, and generates hilarious mental images, especially if you allow levitating characters to be moved horizontally by party members pulling them along on ropes from below!
• Invisibility: This might seem very powerful, but if it genuinely is only invisibility - meaning that you still make sounds, leave scent trails, make footprints, etc - then there are so many potential failure points and counter-measures that it's more likely to be used as an ingenious component of a cunning plan rather than as a slam-dunk victory condition. Partial invisibility (e.g. you still cast a shadow) is even better. 
• Illusions: The power to create intangible visual and/or audible illusions enable more demented ingenuity than just about any other ability. Endlessly flexible, and the lengths that PCs will go to in order to make sure no-one reveals the trick by just touching their illusionary treasure / monster / whatever are the stuff that truly insane PC plans are made of.
• Tunnelling: Magical dig-through-stone-walls tunnelling can often short-circuit scenarios, especially in dungeon environments, but having a character with the ability to burrow through sand and loose dirt at semi-realistic speeds opens up all kinds of unorthodox approaches to break-ins, getaways, etc. 
• Light and darkness: These are good, flexible powers with a wide variety of uses relating to stealth and detection, most of which require a bit of set-up if PCs are going to get the most out of them. (If you're going to use darkness to cover your escape, how will you see while inside it?)
• Disguises: Powers that let people disguise their appearance to match someone else's are a particularly interesting form of illusion, because the potential pay-off is so large but the dangers of detection are so high. I feel that these are best when they perfectly mimic appearance but only appearance: when it comes to mimicking voice, gait, mannerisms, knowledge, etc, the PCs are on their own!
• Movement effects: Things like Jump, Spider Climb, etc - powers that let you get into places you normally couldn't reach. Allow problems to be approached from unusual angles, often quite literally. 
• Environmental manipulation: Things like creating heat, cold, fog, rain, etc - not inherently beneficial in and of itself, but capable of creating a new situation which cunning PCs may be able to turn to their advantage!
• Construction abilities: Essentially a subtype of environmental manipulation - the ability to e.g. rapidly reshape earth, construct barricades, etc. Anything that lets PCs reshape an area on the fly and thus shift the spatial dynamics of an encounter. 
• Water breathing: Like tunnelling, water breathing abilities open up new opportunities for getting into and out of places, and allow locations to be connected together in new ways via underground rivers, water pipes, etc. 
• Enhanced senses: Things like enhanced hearing, the ability to see perfectly in poor light (not total darkness), the ability to follow scents like a bloodhound, etc, opening up new and unexpected avenues for acquiring information. 
• Communication abilities: The more things your PCs can interact with, the better. Let them talk to monsters. To animals. To rocks, plants, corpses, water, air... As long as whatever they're talking to is not guaranteed to be useful or co-operative, giving them more opportunities for communication can only enhance their options for creative problem-solving. ('OK, how do we bribe the trees into helping us?')
• Temporary intangibility: The trick is to not pair this with invisibility, by either making it ghost-style phantom projection, or literal gaseous form. It then creates an interestingly asymmetric situation - you can see and be seen, but can't affect or be affected by anything you're seeing. Can be used either for scouting or for one-way infiltration - you can walk through the walls to get in, but then how are you going to get out?
• Very specific immunities: Complete immunity to fire, for example, or to falling damage. Abilities like these may be intermittently useful in combat, but they also allow situations to be approached in completely different ways. ('So I'll fly over the castle in a hot air balloon, jump out, drop a thousand feet down into the courtyard, and then open the gates from the inside...')
• Limited telepathy: Things like the ability to sense someone's emotions, or read their surface thoughts - just enough to give the PCs an exploitable edge in social situations without having to worry about every mystery collapsing on contact.
• Emotion control: Genuine mind control can easily become an 'I WIN' button, but the ability to scale up a specific emotion requires much more care to use effectively. 'I can make people feel really angry' is not, in itself, likely to solve many problems, but can easily be a component in such solutions...

The Bad Stuff - abilities that short-circuit play without significant limitations

• Unlimited flight: Trivialises too many kinds of obstacles and opponents, especially if it comes with perfect manoeuvrability as well. If you want to give your PCs access to flight, try to build in some serious limitations. 
• Unlimited intangibility: Genuine walk-through-walks-style at-will intangibility tends to trivialise information gathering, infiltration, escape, theft, etc - everything except combat, essentially.
• Mind control: This includes 'super charisma' powers of the 'I'm just that persuasive!' variety. Anything that means PCs can simply steamroller interactions with NPCs rather than having to actually work out how to befriend or manipulate them is likely to lead to much less interesting play. 
• Mind reading and lie detection: Short-circuits any kind of investigation or mystery and makes diplomacy much less interesting. 
• 'Sniper' attacks: Very powerful, very accurate, very long-range attacks can make for very one-sided, non-interactive combat scenes, and thus for very boring gameplay. This can easily become an 'everything looks like a nail' situation. 
• Unlimited information effects: The ability to commune with near-omniscient beings, for example, or powerful divination effects that always return accurate answers. It's usually OK if PCs are allowed just one question, but if this is a power they have repeat access to then it becomes very hard to maintain any kind of mystery, or even ambiguity. 
• Speed/mobility effects: When confronted with any kind of enemy, one question the PCs are always going to ask is 'can we just kite it to death?' This is a fair question, but if the answer is always 'yes' then the temptation to resolve every possible encounter in exactly the same way becomes very strong. I'd thus advise caution in granting mobility effects that allow PCs to engage opponents without ever allowing their opponents to engage with them: speed effects, for example, that let them move at full speed while still attacking. It's fun the first time, but it can become very boring very fast.

1d20 magic items for ingenious problem-solvers

1. Mat of Levitation. Anyone sitting cross-legged on this threadbare prayer mat can levitate at will by concentrating. If they stop concentrating for any reason then they fall. Only vertical movement straight up or down is possible. 
2. Ring of Near Invisibility. Anyone wearing this ring becomes invisible, but still casts a shadow. The ring itself does not become invisible, and may be spotted floating around by alert observers.  The ring does nothing to mask the wearer's scent, sound, or footprints.
3. Amulet of the Mole. This amulet permits its wearer to dig tunnels through sand or dirt (not stone) like a mole, at a rate of 5' per minute. Tunnels will only be wide enough for the person who dug them to crawl through on hands and knees. It does not grant any ability to see in the dark. 
4. Hatpin of disguise. Prick someone with this pin hard enough to draw blood, and the next time you place it in your own hat or hair you will take on their physical appearance until it is removed. (This is a visual illusion only, so if e.g. they have a beard and you don't then anyone touching your chin will realise something is amiss.) Your clothes and voice remain unchanged.
5. Armbands of the ape. Anyone wearing these chunky brass bangles gains the ability to climb and brachiate like an ape or monkey, rapidly scampering up trees or walls and swinging easily from branches, ropes, chains, etc. Wear them as anklets and you can swing by your feet, instead. 
6. A random weather bag.
7. A random emotion bag.
8. Tree Phrasebook. This enchanted book allows you to talk to trees... sort of. Reading from it gives you enthusiastic-tourist levels of ability to understand and be understood by trees, mostly by making alarming groaning noises with your throat. It does not make trees inherently well-disposed towards you, though they can be bribed with fertiliser or threatened with fire. Similar books may exist for communicating with rocks, rivers, etc. 
9. Thought interceptor earring. If anyone within your line of sight thinks a really big thought (e.g. 'OH MY GOD I LOVE HIM SO MUCH' or 'I WILL FUCKING KILL HIM') while you are wearing this earring, then you will 'hear' it as though it had just been shouted into the ear to which the earring is attached. Such thoughts are 'spoken' in the wearer's own voice and it will not always be apparent whom they are coming from, though context will often make this obvious. If you're in a whole crowd of people all thinking really big thoughts (e.g. a panicking mob trying to escape a fire) then the effect is simply deafening. 
10. Torc of water breathing. This golden torc is decorated with engraved gills. Wearing it allows the wearer to breathe underwater. It does not provide any swimming abilities, or the ability to see in the dark. 
11. Cloak of limited flying. Once per day, this bright red cloak permits its wearer to fly rapidly for 1d10 rounds - this ability is triggered by simply leaping into the air. The user is unaware of how long the duration is, and will only know the magic has stopped when they start dropping out of the sky. 
12. Ghost juice. Drinking this potion causes you to temporarily die and become a ghost for 1d6 hours. During this time you are intangible, allowing you to float around and walk through walls, but you are not invisible, and are clearly recognisable as a ghostly, ghastly version of yourself. You can talk during this time, though your voice is thin and tends towards wailing. You are immune to non-magical damage for the duration, and cannot cause physical harm to anyone else. At the conclusion of the effect you are sucked back into your body and return to life. 
13. A double-edged potion.
14. Divine Pass Note. Write a single factual yes-no question on one side of this enchanted papyrus, wait five minutes, and turn it over. God will have written YES or NO on the other side. Shortly afterwards, the note will spontaneously combust. Anyone trying to use this item to learn things that Man Was Not Meant To Know will find that they spontaneously combust, instead. 
15. Acoustic Amulet. Wearing this amulet enhances your hearing tenfold, allowing you to listen in on conversations thousands of yards away. Any kind of loud noise that occurs nearby while you are wearing them will be painful if not deafening. 
16. Hammer of the survivor. This worn construction hammer is stained with zombie blood. As long as suitable construction materials are available, it allows stockades and barricades to be constructed at twenty times their normal speed. 
17. Magic Feather. As long as this feather is gripped tightly, no fall from any height will cause any damage to the holder. 
18. FX Box. Looks like a complicated wind-up music box with a directional speaker. A wheel on the side can be set to any one of dozens of options (e.g. 'thunder', 'sounds of battle', 'screaming', 'birdsong', 'suspicious conversations', etc). When the crank is turned, the selected sound will be heard emanating from the place that the speaker is pointing at for as long as the user carries on turning the handle.
19. Black Breath Choker. Wearing this onyx choker allows the wearer to exhale huge clouds of blinding darkness, which completely block all light and dissipate like smoke (meaning that they'll vanish much more quickly in a high wind or similar). Each exhalation exhausts its power for 1d6 minutes. The choker does not grant the ability to see through darkness.
20. A bag containing 2d4 items from this list.

Meet the new boss: some thoughts on domain-level play

I've long since lost count of the exact number, but I'm pretty sure that my current 'City of Spires' campaign has now run for almost as many sessions as the 'Team Tsathogga' campaign that preceded it. This has prompted me to think a bit about the different shapes that the two campaigns have taken. 'Team Tsathogga' was, from beginning to end, an extremely freewheeling, even anarchic campaign, with the PCs roaming randomly around the map getting involved in whatever seemed most interesting at the time. In 'City of Spires', on the other hand, the PCs took over their city twenty-odd sessions ago, and everything since then has dealt with their ongoing attempts to cement their positions as regional power players. 

This has been a new experience for me as a GM, as I've never had to deal with this form of domain-level play before. The PCs in my long-ago AD&D games sometimes rose to become high priests and archmagi and whatnot, but their non-adventuring duties always remained firmly in the background. The Team Tsathogga crew regularly took over entire communities by accident, but they never stuck around long enough to actually rule them: they'd just appoint some viceroys and wander off. In City of Spires, by contrast, we now sometimes have whole sessions that are basically just 'upkeep', with the PCs checking in on all their various civic projects and trying to deal with whatever barriers they may have encountered. (One recent example saw them plotting how best to scam an ancient subway AI into lending them a digging robot through the use of rigged customer satisfaction surveys.) They've built bridges. They've set up trade routes. They've negotiated diplomatic marriages. They've organised the planting of stands of date palms and the digging of irrigation canals. I keep worrying that they'll get bored by all this SimCity stuff, but they insist they're really enjoying it. Mysterious wildernesses on the edge of the map remain resolutely unexplored in favour of yet more civil engineering. 

Over the course of these sessions, I've developed a set of rough-and-ready principles for running games which devote a lot of time to domain management. I don't claim that this is the best or only way to handle such situations, but this is what's worked for me, at least so far...

1: Keep the focus on problem-solving.

I think that one reason people often shy away from domain management is because they worry it will make their games dissolve into a morass of tedious accountancy and logistics. In reality, of course, such logistics are absolutely crucial to running a successful polity. But they're also crucial to running a successful military unit or long-distance wilderness expedition, and we never let that stop us when running normal D&D!

If you were running a wilderness trek, you probably wouldn't keep the focus on the exact logistics of pack animals, trail rations, and so on. Instead, you'd focus on the moments of crisis: how are the party going to get themselves and their supplies over this raging river? How will they sneak them through this hostile territory? Running a domain is just the same. Of course, you need a general sense of what kind of resources the community does and does not possess, to keep decision-making grounded in some kind of shared imagined reality. But for the most part I've found it helpful to assume that the day-to-day stuff just proceeds at its own pace in the background until it hits a specific problem, at which point the PCs have the option of stepping in. They're not project managers - or maybe they are, but that's a role they play off-screen. When they're onscreen, it's because they're acting as troubleshooters. 

2: Keep the problems OSR-style

The general principles of OSR encounter design - 'an encounter that can be solved by simply crossing some resources off your character sheet is a bad encounter' - apply here, too. The problems the PCs encounter should never be the kind that can be solved by just throwing more resources at them. Instead, they need to be qualitative problems, the kind of things that act as potential bottlenecks for the whole project. 'You thought you'd need X amount of lumber, but then a fire destroys some of it, so now you need Y amount of lumber instead' may be a serious problem, but it's not an interesting problem. You can assume all these sorts of things are already 'priced in', and are being dealt with by the local management: that the mine foreman, for example, knows perfectly well how to deal with normal problems and setbacks involved in running a mine. It's only when his crews accidentally mine their way into a haunted subterranean city, or when a tribe of goblins cuts off the roads that the ore is carried down, or when flooding cuts off production just before a time-critical deadline, or whatever, that he'll come running back to the PCs to beg for help, because he knows that they're the kind of people who can be relied upon to come up with creative solutions to otherwise-intractable difficulties. 

(Important addendum: this doesn't imply that every time the PCs attempt something, no matter how routine, you should throw some kind of intractable difficulty in their way. If it's the sort of thing they have the resources to straightforwardly accomplish, then just let them have it. But if it's something more ambitious, then they should have to overcome obstacles to achieve it - and the more those obstacles are qualitative rather than quantitative, the more rewarding the resulting play is likely to be.) 

3: Make sure the PCs have access to lots of highly specific assets

So the PCs set a project in motion, and it works fine until it hits a problem that threatens to derail it, at which point they have the option of stepping in to sort it out. Again, the normal principles of OSR-style problem-solving apply: an encounter that has only one correct solution is a bad encounter. Problems should be amenable to PC agency in lots of different ways, enabling plenty of out-of-the-box thinking. 

I've written before about the importance of giving PCs heaps of stuff to try solving problems with, and the same principles apply here, just on a larger scale. In the same way as dungeon encounters are much more fun if PCs are trying to work out how to deal with them with the aid of a fishing rod, a wedding dress, and a box of fireworks, solving domain-level problems will be much more interesting if the PCs have non-standard tools to work with. 'A unit of soldiers' is fine, but boring: if the problem could be straightforwardly solved by just sending in the troops, the middle management would already have sorted it out by now. But if the PCs have to solve problems with the aid of a malfunctioning robot eagle and a sleepy cannibal giant instead, they'll get much more creative, and will feel much better about themselves when they come up with some loopy solution that actually works.

You don't need to tailor specific assets to specific problems. In fact, you should actively avoid doing this. Just make sure that the PCs a bunch of random stuff to work with, all with potentially powerful applications and potentially crippling limitations, and leave them to work something out. Some of these resources can pass into their hands when they take over their domain, and some can be acquired on adventures, or be given to them in tribute. However, much of it will probably already be there, waiting to be used, because...

4: What were once threats are now resources

The PCs are now the masters of their domain. The dungeons that they once fought their way through fearfully, one room at a time, have now been mapped and cleared out. And that means their resources are now available for the taking.

If your PCs are anything like mine, then by the time they acquire a domain of their own they'll already have done plenty of more traditional wilderness exploration and dungeon-crawling, encountering all sorts of weird and dangerous nonsense in ancient ruins and accursed tombs. But while, from the perspective of an adventurer, an enchanted lake of acid is a dungeoneering hazard, from the perspective of a ruler it's a resource. Just think of what you could accomplish with all that acid!

If you're like me, you'll probably feel an instinctive resistance to the idea of PCs taking things that were once expressions of the Mythic Underworld and turning them into military-industrial assets. Resist that instinct. The PCs earned their access to these things, access that they paid for in time and hit points and dead characters: it's only fair to let them enjoy the fruits of their exploits. Let them turn the Heat Metal room into a power plant. ('Hey, free energy!') Let them weaponise the monsters and traps and curses they've long since learned to evade. ('What if we kite the zombies all the way to the frontier?') Let them redirect that river of screaming ghosts out of the dungeon and into the moat around their castle. ('This'll keep the barbarians out!') In this way, all the weirdness they've encountered in their adventuring career so far becomes the kind of highly specific resources that allow them to come up with creative solutions to their civic problems, solutions that would never have occurred to anyone other than a D&D PC. 

5: Simplify factions

When my PCs took over their city, the first thing they did was organise a grand council of all the other local power players to help them run the place. I tried to run a full meeting of this council, with all the dozens of NPCs involved in it, exactly once. Never again. 

When PCs are on the outside of a power structure, it makes sense to play out each of their interactions with it individually. But once they are the power structure, and everyone else has to come to them, trying to play it all out would be madness. Logically, they'll need to talk to every single local stakeholder about each new development: but for sanity's sake it's much easier to simplify all these groups into a few main coalitions, and reduce what would actually be a long series of interactions into a handful of conversations with their spokesmen. All those weird and idiosyncratic bandit chiefs they had to negotiate with back when they were ruin-crawlers can now merge into the Bandit Coalition, with one representative who speaks on behalf of all of them. Otherwise you'll never get anything done.

(PROTIP: The representative for each coalition should be whomever the PCs have the most history with, even if they're not actually the coalition's most senior member. This both makes in-world sense - the person appointed to talk to them will be the person who knows them best - and makes interactions more meaningful, because of all the shared history they have behind them. I have loved seeing relationships that began with cutthroat encounters in the ruins end up taking on institutional significance. 'Hey, remember when you tried to kill us with hellfire? Good times. How's the literacy project coming along?')

6: Don't overestimate the powers of the state

Compared to modern states, most pre-modern polities are ramshackle as fuck. Remind your players early and often that just because they have 'a government' doesn't mean they have anything resembling a modern bureaucracy, with a police force and a civil service and so on. They probably have a stronghold, an army, a treasury, a bunch of advisers, spies, and informers, a network of local 'big men' who can be expected to semi-reliably enforce their edicts as long as they are kept in line with threats and bribes, and not a whole lot else. Their writ may run along the roads and the rivers and the major agrarian areas - but in between, in the woods and the swamps and the deserts and the mountains, there are going to be all kinds of places where state power barely functions, and where adventures can consequently continue to flourish. There are still lots of situations in which having an army isn't actually all that useful, and where it might consequently still make sense to get the old adventuring team back together for another journey into the unknown.

7: Let the PCs enjoy the fruits of their success

If your players have gone to the trouble of building a real powerbase, it's probably because they're interested in actually having and using power. So let them. It's totally OK if the rise of the PCs to power mean that a lot of things that were previously threats for them can now be trivially dealt with. The level of power they wield in the world has just increased by an order of magnitude: 3d6 goblins in a cave just isn't going to cut it any more. 

D&D PCs tend to be powerful, highly competent, individualistic, and more than a little crazy, so if a bunch of them have just seized hold of a domain, then that domain is probably going to be in for some interesting times. Let your PCs make changes. Let them make big changes. This doesn't mean that everything they attempt should succeed, but everything they attempt should have consequences. If their domain has been changed beyond recognition within a few years of them taking over, then that's a good thing. 

You know all those crazy lords and wizards in the backstories to D&D scenarios, the ones who are always building weird strongholds and meddling with arcane forces and making pacts with inhuman beings and bringing about lost golden ages and magical cataclysms and so on? Well, now your PCs have the chance to be those people. Let them make the most of it.

After all, just think of the dungeons they'll leave behind them!

Dissecting the frog: Team Tsathogga in retrospect

My long-running B/X D&D campaign ended this week, after three years, 70-odd sessions, and about 200 hours of actual play. It's the second-longest campaign I've ever run, beaten only by my old secondary school AD&D game, and the first that I've run on strict old-school principles. For the most part it was enormously successful: both I and my players had a huge amount of fun, and we've come away from the campaign with a treasure trove of scenes and characters that I'm sure I'll remember forever, or at least until I succumb to permanent senility. The Glasstown job. The salvation of Qelong. That time the PCs tried to fool a snake-man by putting on an improvised radio play. Adopting a dungeon full of skeleton death cultists. Inventing the giant projectile maggot vomiting zombie vampire toad. And more, so many more, that never made it into any of the actual play write-ups... the old sticky arm trick. The time Sophie pretended to be a noblewoman cursed with contagious amnesia. The insane fake legend of Anthrax and Judacus, which just kept getting more complicated as the campaign went on. It's been a really, really good campaign.

The terrible Wall-Eyed Frog, dread symbol of Team Tsathogga. Awful Latin also became one of their trademarks.

I found it an enormously liberating game to run. I had a world in my head, and the PCs ran around it messing things up. There was no need for 'plot' or 'story' or 'balance' or 'structure'. I didn't need to worry about problems or obstacles having preplanned solutions: I just laid out whatever made sense in context, and let the PCs figure out their own way of dealing with it. If an antagonist was much to weak or much too strong for the PCs, then so be it. If the dice said that someone lived or died, then so it was. If the PCs made friends with everyone in the dungeon instead of fighting anyone - and that happened repeatedly - then that was just what happened to happen. I was usually able to do all the 'planning' needed for each game in the half hour it took me to get to that week's session. After this, I think I'd really struggle to go back to a rule- or plot-heavy game like some of the ones I've played in the past.

All this said, however, there are some things that I think I could have done better, or should have done differently. So here's my list of lessons learned.

1: What you gain in breadth, you lose in depth

I started this campaign during my first gust of enthusiasm for oldschool D&D, which I embraced with the zeal of a new convert. What's the absolute opposite of a pre-scripted railroad? A game where you can go anywhere and do anything! The game-world sprawled endlessly in every direction, and I was absolutely committed to letting the PCs go wherever they liked. If, at any point, they simply abandoned whatever they were doing and lurched off in a random direction, I would be ready for them. (This came in handy after the whole skeleton adoption business, when that's pretty much exactly what happened.)

Over the course of the game, the PCs roamed back and forth across an entire continent's worth of geography. But the flip-side was that many of the places they visited were pretty sketched in. They lacked the dense specificity of the game's more thoroughly detailed areas, like Qelong, or the Purple Islands, or the underworld beneath Bright Meadows. I'm still absolutely committed to the idea of a free-roaming campaign: but next time I run one, I think I'll try to keep it much more geographically contained, allowing each region to be explored in much greater detail, and ensuring that everything is close enough to connect to and impact upon everything else.

2: NPC development takes work

The game featured a lot of NPCs, but there were relatively few who I felt really came to life. Titus the necromancer did, with his corpse obsession and his doomed romances and his horrible chewed-up face. Bat-Man Ron, with his combination of intelligence and naivety and his tragi-comic aspirations to be the saviour of his people. Vaud, with his passion for freedom and his total lack of volume control. Maybe Hallgerd, with her cheerfully amoral mercantilism. Maybe Elder Amelia, with her endless catalogue of secrets. Maybe Sophie's dim-witted college friend, Becky. Maybe Grick, Grak, and Gruk, the party's comedy goblin sidekicks. And maybe Sad King Nath.

But for every NPC who came to life in play, there were dozens who never really managed to be anything more than plot functions with a few mannerisms attached. Captain Matthew, who loyally ferried the PCs around the world for years on end, might as well have just been a 'map loading' screen with some stock art of a sea captain on it. Dara, the refugee Qelongese novice who introduced the golden lotus flower to the Purple Islands: what was her deal? What about Vem the huntress, who became queen of her people? Titus's ex-wife, Zenobia? The archivist of the tunnel-dwellers? We knew what they did. But who were they?

In many ways, this was a side-effect of point 1. After every scene, I always asked the players what they wanted to do next, and the answer was never 'have a heartfelt chat with Captain Matthew about how he really feels': it was always about moving onto the next item on the agenda. The NPCs who were able to become actual characters were the ones whose personalities were able to emerge through action: everyone else just faded into the background. In future, I can see that I'll need to be much more proactive about staging scenes of character interaction if most NPCs are to end up as anything more than placeholders. Much broader characterisation would probably also help.

3: B/X characters change fast (and change genres)

By the standards of modern D&D, character advancement in this campaign was glacially slow: the characters started at level 0, and seventy-odd sessions later they were levels 7-8. But their accumulation of power didn't feel slow to me. It felt like a massive accumulating snowball that increasingly threatened to crush anything in its path.

I'd say that the game went through three distinct phases. At levels 0-3, the PCs were desperately fragile, perpetual underdogs who had to rely on stealth, trickery, diplomacy, and rank cowardice. At levels 4-5 they started to feel like fantasy heroes, able to wade into battle in the knowledge that they had enough hit points and healing magic to see them through most situations. By levels 6-8 they were starting to feel superheroic, characters who had largely outgrown the world around them, able to resolve most situations through brute force. They became positively reckless, trusting to their spell lists, hit point pools, and saving throws to see them through all but the very worst of disasters. What fear can a man with a knife inspire in a woman with 51 hit points?

I didn't begrudge them their strength. They earned it, and they paid for it, and their road to power was strewn with the bodies of the PCs who didn't make it. But after the desperate striving of the first six levels or so, the high-level stuff felt a bit like a kind of extended epilogue or victory lap - especially given the complete freedom that the PCs possessed to travel the world, and thus to pick their battles, allowing them to smash through situations like a wrecking ball when their lower-level selves would have had to spend months patiently building solutions. They were never invulnerable, and threats like the marsh giants, the Ghost Drummers, Hild the blood-witch, and the robotic guardian of the Pools of Life still managed to give them a run for their money. But if I was going to do this again, I think I'd be more proactive about building in dynamic high-level threats that would move against the PCs once they attained a sufficient level of power, thus compelling them to more frequently pick on somebody their own size.

4: Caster vs. non-caster balance is tricky

Something that I didn't foresee, but probably should have, was that the kind of free-roaming, player-led game that I was aiming for, coupled with the Vancian spell-slot system of B/X D&D, would hand a massive advantage to spell-casting characters. D&D is balanced around dungeon environments, with the assumption that each delve is going to be a brutal battle of attrition, and spell slots a scarce and treasured resource. But with the PCs usually free to move at will, free to pick their battles, and free to choose when to strike and when to retreat, situations in which they were forced to have two or more 'encounters' in a single day were the exception rather than the rule. This, in turn, didn't matter much when the casters only had two or three spells each: but by level 5 or so there was often little to stop the PCs scouting a situation, retreating, preparing a specialised spell payload, resolving the situation in a blaze of magic, retreating again, using another full day's worth of spells to heal from the previous encounter, and then moving forwards fully restored and ready for the next challenge.

Under these circumstances, the advantages that non-casters would normally possess - resilience, combat skill, non-magical skill sets - were increasingly sidelined. Your attack bonus doesn't matter when the mage can alpha strike your enemies into goo on the first round, and being sneaky and charming isn't worth much when the wizards can just load up on Invisibility and Charm Person spells. By the end of the campaign, the party were in the habit of 'charm nuking' high-value targets by hitting them with ten or more Charm Person spells in quick succession, thus virtually guaranteeing success regardless of the target's saving throws. The fact that one of the fighters had Charisma 18, which had frequently been a lifesaver at the start of the campaign, became a virtual irrelevance by the end.

In this game, we dodged the problem by giving everyone two characters, usually one caster and one non-caster: a solution not dissimilar to the 'grogs and magi' set-up from Ars Magica. But I do feel that I should have done more to encourage some level of parity, partly by giving the players less ability to control the tempo of the situations in which they found themselves (although I'm wary of reducing this too much), and partly by giving more powers to the poor old fighters besides just escalating hit points. One quick and dirty fix that I'm considering is to let each fighter pick a new area of noncombat competency every time they go up a level, so that by level 8 or so they're less 'meat-shield' than 'Batman', although mastering entire new fields of knowledge every few months does rather strain my disbelief. The real solution is probably just to use more dungeons.

5: Structure, or the lack thereof

This was a campaign which deliberately, and indeed defiantly, lacked any kind of overarching structure. There was no 'main plot'. Nobody had a 'character arc'. It didn't build towards any kind of epic climax. It was just a bunch of stuff that happened, and then kept on happening, and then stopped.

In a lot of ways, I absolutely loved that. I have become so tired of 'epic' and 'awesome' finales, of scenes in which everyone gets together for One Last Battle, of heroes and villains punching each other on the edges of exploding buildings or erupting volcanoes, of scenes in which The Fate of The Universe Rests On Just One Man, of characters completing their Emotional Journeys and then dying tragic but emotionally satisfying deaths. I have become increasingly interested in raggedness, incompleteness, and incoherence, because the stories that we make and the victories that we achieve seem to me to be much more meaningful when there's no hand of destiny moving in the background, forcing them to occur. The adventures of the PCs, much like most people's real lives, was just a series of events that happened to happen. It didn't add up to anything more than the sum of its parts.

But there are drawbacks to that level of shapelessness, too. The two main threads running through the campaign were the discovery of the secret history of the world, and the demon / snakeman threat, and over the course of the campaign each of them got... maybe three-quarters resolved? As a result, the end of the campaign felt very arbitrary, like a TV show that suddenly got cancelled in mid-season, rather than like the logical end-point of the story of these characters, who would surely have wanted to continue uncovering the truth about their world instead of just randomly flying off into the sunset. But given the shapelessness of the campaign, playing all the way through to a full resolution of both strands would have taken years. 

I think the lesson learned here is to either go all-in with player-led hexcrawling, with no stories or structures whatsoever beyond those that the players choose to build for themselves, or have the Big Story tied to something dynamic, making it possible to force a resolution whenever the campaign nears its end. I did enjoy the whole campaign, and in many ways I felt that its anticlimactic non-ending was absolutely perfect. But part of me is still kinda frustrated that the players never got to finish figuring out their world's secret history, and that the sealed door beneath Bright Meadows remained stubbornly shut from the first session all the way to the last.

What did it conceeeeeal?

Anyway. It's been fun. It's been more than fun. It's been glorious and hilarious and utterly unforgettable, and easily one of the highlights of my gaming career to date. Thanks to all the oldschool writers and bloggers whose ideas I stole, whose advice I followed, and whose adventure modules I took apart for raw materials. A massive thank you to all my players, past and present, for coming up with more demented plans than you could shake a giant projectile maggot vomiting zombie vampire toad at. Shine on, you crazy diamonds. So long and thanks for all the beer.

Or, as the goblins would say...

Blood for the Frog God!

Zak Smith and associated awfulness

Probably everyone who reads this blog has already heard about Mandy Morbid's revelations that her ex-boyfriend, Zak Smith, abused her (and other women) for more than a decade. On the off-chance that you haven't, you can read her account of event here, which she has asked to be shared as widely as possible:

https://www.facebook.com/amandapatricianagy/posts/10215845527064252

(13/2/19 edit: Vivka Grey has now also posted an account of Zak's abuse of her, too, confirming and extending Mandy's narrative. You can read it here.)

I'm in the relatively fortunate position of being someone who's never worked with Zak, never gamed with him, never publicly defended him, and honestly never much liked him. (There's a reason I never added his blog to my blogroll.) But I did buy and read his books, and I did recognise his importance to the 'artpunk' wing of OSR D&D. I shall certainly not be purchasing any of his work hereafter.

Disturbingly, James Raggi of Lamentations of the Flame Princess - Zak's chief publisher - has maintained a deafening silence since the story broke. Raggi has published some of my favourite RPG books in recent years, and I have recommended Lamentations and its supplements to people many times, in many contexts. But as long as he continues to promote and publish Zak's work, I can no longer do so in good conscience. I appreciate that it sucks for a small publisher to invest heavily in an author, only to discover that he's actually a serial abuser of women. But he that toucheth pitch shall be defiled.

This has been a bit of a final straw moment for me, and the eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that I've removed the word 'OSR' from my blog's title. I still believe in the value of OSR playstyles, and I still prize the creativity to which OSR D&D has given rise. I still think that people like Scrap Princess, and Patrick Stuart, and David McGrogan, and Luka Rejec, and Zedeck Siew, are doing fantastic work that deserves to be widely read and richly supported. But so many leading figures in the OSR 'movement' have turned out to be awful people that I just don't really want to associate myself with it any more.

I applaud Mandy for her strength and courage in going public with this, and I hope that her life gets much easier and happier from this point onwards.

I'll have a post on Small But Vicious Dog up soon.

Echoes and Reverberations 4: Lamentations of the Flame Princess

If Shadow of the Demon Lord positions itself halfway between WFRP 2 and D&D 3rd edition, then Lamentations of the Flame Princess stands between WFRP 1 and B/X D&D. Its kinship with WFRP is obvious from its seventeenth-century Northern European setting, its fantasy-horror themes, and its focus on PCs as doomed, crazy low-lives rather than epic heroes of legend. WFRP and Lamentations share a common language of evil cults, body horror, and black humour, and many Lamentations adventures could easily be repurposed as WFRP scenarios, or vice versa.

There are, however, important tonal differences between the two games, as Lamentations is much more nihilistic than WFRP ever was. The Warhammer chaos gods are sometimes described as a form of 'cosmic horror', but a comparison with Lamentations shows just how humanistic they really are: they're all rooted in richly human feelings of lust and rage and disgust and ambition, whereas Lamentations mostly deals with completely impersonal cosmic forces that inflict death and suffering either by accident or just because. Chaos is all about the dark side of humanity, and confronting it is about confronting our own willingness to see other people as things to be sacrificed in the service of our own bloodlust (Khorne), pleasure (Slaanesh), survival (Nurgle), or lust for power (Tzeench). The antagonists in Lamentations, by contrast, tend to see people as just so much interchangeable meat. The chaos gods love us: Khorne loves killing us, Tzeench loves fucking with us, Slaanesh loves actually fucking us, and so on. But the beings in Lamentations just really don't care. (Do U?)

This tonal difference has some important knock-on consequences. The default Lamentations adventure pitch is 'get rich or die trying' rather than 'save the innocent from evil'. WFRP characters are plugged into the society around them by their careers: Lamentations characters are mostly assumed to be rootless wandering killers, with few if any connections to other people. WFRP scenarios tend to be human-scale, all about protecting individuals or communities, whereas Lamentations scenarios often include situations that can casually destroy the world, or at least depopulate large parts of it, in order to emphasise just how small and insignificant human lives are compared to the forces they depict. WFRP adventures are often very social affairs, all about understanding the relationships at work within settlements and organisations, whereas Lamentations adventures are usually much lonelier, set in desolated spaces where virtually everyone is already dead or worse. WFRP cultists tend to be driven by warped ambition, whereas Lamentations cultists usually just hate everyone and want us all to die, which makes their scenarios much more chilly and alienated than most WFRP adventures. Whether you view this tonal shift as an improvement or a weakness is going to come down to personal preference, but it means that several Lamentations adventures which seem on the surface as though they would be ideal WFRP fodder - No Salvation for Witches, for example, with its seventeenth-century setting and its demon-summoning coven - actually turn out, on closer examination, to be driven by very different themes.

Lamentations has been around for a decade, now, which is a long time in RPG terms, and its most WFRP-esque material was mostly released during its earlier years. Since 2016 it has increasingly focused on more experimental material, rather than on the early modern fantasy-horror that characterised its earlier output - and much as I love books like Veins of the Earth or Broodmother Skyfortress, I think you'd struggle to find a place for them in most WFRP campaigns. So what follows is a few notes on some LOTFP adventures that could be easily adapted for use as WFRP adventures, instead, insofar as they are fantasy-horror scenarios that should still work if the PCs are WFRP-style vagabonds rather than D&D-style 'adventurers'.

(I should note before I begin that I'm a year behind with LOTFP, and have yet to read any of their 2018 books, which are thus not included in this survey.)

Death Frost Doom (2009, revised 2014): This is one of the all-time great 'evil temple' adventures, and perfectly suited to games about bands of adventurous misfits getting in way over their heads. The antagonists here exemplify my point about the tonal differences between Lamentations and WFRP: they revere death and pain in an abstract, almost clinical fashion, far removed from the red-blooded messiness of the chaos gods. It could still probably be used in a WFRP game with some minor rewrites: you could swap the ice for bloodstains and use it as a Khornate temple, or else rewrite it as the base of a necromantic cult who revere Nagash as a god. Probably best to leave out the mountain-sized giant underneath it, though.

No Dignity in Death (2009): This odd little adventure from the early days of Lamentations is a pretty minor work. It is, however, very WFRP-esque in tone, being set in an isolated little town full of self-righteous nobodies, brutal authority figures, weird customs, and dark secrets. Could be used almost as written as a refreshingly non-chaos-based interlude in an ongoing WFRP campaign.

Tower of the Stargazer (2010): This adventure is very D&D-ish in its assumption that 'the wizard's tower might have treasure in it, let's go and loot it' will be a sufficient hook to set the PCs into motion. It's a good wizard's tower, though: it could easily serve as the home of some batshit insane Celestial wizard in the depths of the Empire, and the emphasis on exploration and investigation rather than monster-hacking means that it would be much easier to translate into WFRP than most traditional D&D dungeons. Just put something the PCs need inside it and point them at the door...

The God That Crawls (2012): An anonymous commentator suggested this one in the comments thread. I felt that all the ultra-weird and world-destroying artifacts in the catacombs weren't a very good fit for WFRP, and that if you took them out then all you'd be left with was a blob in a labyrinth, but Anonymous points out that the basic set-up of a Sigmarite cult guarding a maze full of relics they'd rather keep hidden would be a perfectly viable basis for a WFRP adventure, even if none of those relics actually have the power to destroy the world. And I have to admit that getting chased around a maze by a giant slime-monster is a very WFRP-y concept for an adventure!

Death Love Doom (2012): Fair warning: the body horror in this adventure is more extreme than in any other Lamentations book, which is really saying something. It's much, much more horrible than anything that's ever appeared in a published WFRP adventure, and not at all recommended if you or your group are likely to be disturbed by scenes of appalling physical suffering inflicted upon innocent victims, including children. That said, the structure of this adventure is pure WFRP, with the house of a wealthy merchant declining into horror under the influence of a cursed artifact. Most of it could easily be adapted for use by any WFRP group with sufficiently strong stomachs.

Better Than Any Man (2013): This adventure is very WFRP-esque insofar as it's about cults and witches in the middle of the Thirty Years War, but as with Death Frost Doom the specifics are actually quite different: the anti-human omnivorousness of the insect cultists here is quite unlike that of any WFRP chaos god, and one important part of the storyline revolves around an ancient empire of evil halflings, who have no obvious WFRP equivalent. Still, a bit of work could probably turn this into an adventure about a witch re-establishing an ancient cult devoted to the worship of a bound demon prince of Nurgle who happens to be really, really fond of flies and maggots, against the backdrop of a civil war between two Imperial provinces. I'd probably remove the time travel elements if I was running it in WFRP - I'm fine with my level 1 magic-users getting bounced into the last ice age, but I prefer my artisan's apprentices to stay a bit more grounded in reality - but YMMV.

Scenic Dunnsmouth (2014): This isn't a traditional adventure: instead, it's a mechanism for using a deck of playing cards to randomly generate an awful little village in the swamps, complete with a lurking monster and an evil cult. The tone of wretched rural deprivation is very WFRP-esque, and whether you actually follow the instructions in the book or just go through picking out all the bits you like best you're pretty much guaranteed to end up with the kind of blighted, squalid little community that would fit perfectly into any backwater region of the Empire. Once again the cultists are death-worshippers rather than chaos-worshippers, but this would be an easy change to make.

Forgive Us (2014): I suspect this actually was a WFRP adventure, or at least an adventure by someone who had played an awful lot of WFRP. Thieves in an early modern city accidentally steal the wrong treasure, which ends up unleashing a magical disease that causes horrible mutations. Just add the word 'Nurgle' in a couple of places and you should be good to go.

The Idea From Space (2014): This adventure deals with an aristocrat whose ship is stranded on a remote island, where the passengers and crew swiftly fall under the sway of the feuding supernatural forces that reside there. I think this could be run in WFRP as easily as in D&D, and would resist the temptation to replace one or both of the supernatural beings on the island with chaos gods: they can just be weird things in a weird place. The New World is an under-utilised region in WFRP, and this adventure is the sort of thing that could easily fit into it.

A Single, Small Cut (2014): Theo suggested this one in the comments thread - I somehow hadn't read it before. A crazy wizard and his hired bandits murder a priest and his congregation in order to steal a demon-summoning artifact from the crypt, only to discover that they have no way of controlling the resulting beast. The PCs arrive just as the carnage starts. It's more of an encounter than an adventure, but would be very easy indeed to translate to WFRP.

England Upturn'd (2016): Stephen and Jon suggested this one in the comments thread. It's set in a seventeenth-century marshland region, complete with witch-hunters and swamp-monsters, which could very easily be used as the backdrop to a WFRP adventure. I initially left it off the list because the main story is a bit big - flipping a whole chunk of the world upside down, creating a massive tidal wave in the process, in order to unleash the evil elves of the Hollow Earth just isn't the sort of thing that happens in WFRP. But a scaled-down version, built around (say) flipping over a single hill in order to release some medium-sized threat from the underworld, could probably work pretty well.

The Cursed Chateau (2016): Stuart suggested this one in the comments thread. This adventure depicts a haunted mansion, complete with undead servants and hidden sacrificial chambers in the caves below, all of which could easily be adapted for use in WFRP. The only way out, however, is to sufficiently entertain the ghost of the sadistic aristocrat who once lived there, which seems to me to cut directly against WFRP's themes of class struggle. Add some way for the PCs to turn the tables and send the fucker straight to hell and you should be fine.

A brief word on some recent online controversies

I don't use social media, so I get to live most of my life in blissful ignorance of what people are currently yelling at each other about. Years back Dave McGrogan suggested to me that I should start uploading my posts to G+, but I very seldom use it for any other purpose, so all the debates that take place on it are invisible to me. It's only when controversies filter down to the level of actual blogs that I usually become aware of them.

I have become aware of this one.

I'm generally pretty sceptical of internet politics. Social media is very good for grandstanding and blacklisting and rumour-mongering and getting people to hate each other, but it's much less effective for actually getting anyone to change their minds about anything. That said, I have come to care about this weird monster-baby of a creative community that we call the OSR, and it saddens me to hear that a growing number of people are apparently coming to associate it with intolerance, far-right politics, and other forms of ideological awfulness.

If you endorse or encourage racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic views, then you are an awful person and you should stop doing that.

If you think that you're just tragically misunderstood and all these people are being so unreasonable and complaining about nothing, then please consider the possibility that actually being [black / female / gay / trans] may have given them a better insight into what constitutes [racism / sexism / homophobia / transphobia] than is easily accessible to others.

If you believe that a shadow army of evil totalitarian SJW snowflakes are trying to destroy gaming, and that it is your right, nay, your duty to be as offensive as possible in order to defend our freedom, then get a fucking grip. Your actual ideological opponents don't give a fuck about your fantasy game. All you're doing is harming random bystanders and alienating people who might otherwise have been your friends and/or customers.

If you are Venger Satanis, then you appear to be in the middle of a highly public meltdown. (You 'took issue with both sides of the Charlottesville political protest'? Seriously?) Get help, dude. Get help.

The OSR movement has benefitted enormously from the contributions of trans gamers and creators such as Scrap Princess, Evlyn M, Gennifer Bone, Bardaree Bryant, and FM Geist. Anything which makes them feel less welcome among us can only leave us all much poorer as a result.

Be kind to one another. For fuck's sake. It's not that hard. Just be kind.

I'll try to post about the WFRP 3 adventures soon.

Bringing Down the Hammer part 8: Companion, Renegade Crowns, Lure of the Liche Lord

Onwards to glory!

WFRP Companion (November 2006)

Bog Octopuuuuus!

This book describes itself as 'A Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Miscellany', and that's pretty accurate. Probably the easiest way to summarise its contents is by listing its chapters:

1. Freaks, Thieves and Travelling Folk: eight pages on travelling carnivals in the Old World.
2. Life and Death on the Reik: Nine pages on the River Reik. Introduces the new careers 'Stevedore', 'Foreman', 'Wrecker', and 'Riverwarden'.
3. Advanced Trade and Commerce: sixteen pages on trade, trade law, and merchant's guilds, and rules for PCs who want to try making money through trade.
4. Star Signs and their Meanings: Seven pages on the star signs of the Old World.
5. Medicine in the Empire: Eight pages on medicine in the Old World, mostly based on real-world medical history.
6. Social Conflict and Advanced Criminal Trials: Ten pages of rules for 'social conflict', which look as though they would mostly reduce social interactions to a dice-rolling exercise.
7. Sartosa, City of Pirates: Seven pages on a generic pirate city. You've seen Pirates of the Caribbean, right? It's like that.
8. Tobaro, City of Sirens: Eight pages on a Tilean city-state, which I think is the most detail Tilea ever received in WFRP 2nd edition. Lots of good, playable details make this my favourite part of the book. Includes the Deepwatcher career, for characters who patrol the caves and tunnels beneath the city. (Of course Tobaro has a vast unmapped underworld. All WFRP cities have vast unmapped underworlds.)
9. The Cult of Illumination: Five pages on a chaos cult who are basically evil Freemasons.
10. Pub Crawling: Six pages of pubs and the people who run them. 
11. Bring Up the Guns: Seven pages on the Nuln Artillery school. Includes the Artillerist career. 
12. Gugnir's Blackpowder Shop: Four pages on a gun shop and the dwarf who runs it.
13. Perilous Beasts: Seventeen pages introducing sixteen monsters. Features the welcome return of the Amoeba, Bloodsedge, Bog Octopus, Chameleoleech, and Doppelganger from first edition, and addition of naiads, mermaids (who are actually more like classical sirens), giant eels, giant fish, giant crabs, and giant whales to harrass PCs during nautical adventures.

Overall, the book feels like it adds up to less than the sum of its parts. Tobaro and a few of the new monsters are the only things that stuck with me.

Renegade Crowns (December 2006)

When I first looked through this book, I thought it was nothing special. Instructions on designing a small sandbox setting in the Border Princes. Lots of tables to roll on to help populate your sandbox. Discussion of how ambitious PCs might rise from common sell-swords to take over their own micro-state, and of how to run 'domain-level' games involving the management of petty kingdoms, and handling relations with their equally petty neighbours. Nothing I hadn't seen before on dozens of OSR blogs, right?

But then I stopped myself, and thought: this was published in 2006. How many people were playing like that back in 2006, in the waning days of the D&D 3.5 era, with D&D 4th edition just around the corner? Well, if this book is anything to go by, apparently David Chart was. Renegade Crowns prefigures a huge amount of what would, over the next decade, go on to become OSR orthodoxy: sandbox settings populated via random tables, a grubby and inglorious world of petty kingdoms and robber barons, a tone of relentless grimness made palatable by ample use of black comedy, and an assumption that the PCs will be amoral freebooters trying to murder their way up the rungs of the feudal system rather than gallant champions of all that is right and good. If you're reading this blog, then this book probably has little or nothing to teach you, because you'll have learned it all years ago from other OSR bloggers. But even though David, as far as I can tell, has no connections with the modern OSR movement, I rather feel that he deserves some kind of honourary OSR status for writing it, back in the days when almost everyone else was busy arguing about exactly which combination of feats would allow their Illumian Swordsage Bloodstorm Blade to generate the maximum average damage output per round.

Lure of the Liche Lord (February 2007)

Despite the name, this adventure has nothing to do with the first edition Terror of the Lichemaster adventure. Instead it describes an area of the Border Princes, and the giant inverted pyramid full of undead buried beneath it. Like Karak Azgal, it's basically a giant dungeon plus some information about the situation on the surface. Unlike Karak Azgal, the situation on the surface is actually very dynamic, with a whole bunch of feuding factions, and the dungeon beneath is fully mapped and described over the course of sixty-three pages. The whole set-up is very open, which is refreshing after the clumsy railroading of some of the earlier adventures: but fundamentally it is what it is, and what it is is a seven-level Egyptian-themed dungeon full of traps and undead. If you happen to be in the market for one of those then by all means try this one, though as with Karak Azgal I rather feel that all this dungeon-crawling doesn't really play to WFRP's strengths.

The value of raggedness

Despite the tribalism of their respective fans, OSR games and modern storygames have a lot in common. They both arose as responses to the same problem: the bloated, railroaded, rules-heavy, metaplot-infested RPGs of the later 1990s and early 2000s, which promised such vistas of wonder through their rules and settings, but delivered such disappointing experiences in actual play. As a result, they share an emphasis on clawing back genuine agency for their players, and on ensuring that 'story' is something that gets generated live at the table, instead of being written down in advance by some frustrated novelist turned GM. But they approach this objective in different ways: and while most storygames aim to simulate fictional genres, OSR games aim to simulate fictional worlds.

For as long as D&D has existed, there have always been players who have pushed back against its world-simulating tendencies. 'A game of D&D is supposed to be like a fantasy epic, right?', they say. 'So how come my heroic paladin can get killed by a stray arrow fired by some random goblin? Isn't it awfully anti-climactic to get all the way down to the big boss and then lose because of some bad dice rolls? And why do the rules punish me for fighting fair and charging bravely into battle, even though that's exactly the kind of thing that epic fantasy heroes do all the time?' In the early days, such players either played D&D with lots of house rules and fudged dice rolls, or else wrote their own fantasy heartbreakers which did a better job of reflecting how they felt the game 'should' work. These days, many have gravitated instead to games which are built from the ground up on the premise of emulating genres rather than settings: games in which the fact that heroic protagonists will never be killed by nameless henchmen, and that epic confrontations will always ultimately save the day (although often not without cost), are actually written into the rules.

There's a lot of clever design floating around in contemporary storygames. The crude ones simply mandate that this is the way things will work; the more subtle ones provide notional freedom, but weight their rules in such a way that, over time, genre-appropriate outcomes become increasingly unavoidable. If you want a game in which a heist is more-or-less guaranteed to play out like an actual heist movie, or one in which a magical quest is almost certain to play out like a fantasy epic, or whatever, then they're great. Even the later editions of D&D work towards this to some extent by giving PCs 'death saves', 'healing surges', and so on, thus reducing the likelihood of 'undramatic' events such as major characters dying at the hands of random minions. Fans of such games sometimes express confusion as to why anyone would prefer to use systems, such as B/X D&D, which do so little to guarantee genre-appropriate story outcomes. Why not use a game which ensures that every campaign will actually resemble the kind of fantasy narratives on which D&D is notionally based?

Now, there are a bunch of potential answers to this question. The three most common ones are probably a preference for games which test the skill of the players rather than those of the characters, an interest in exploring settings as if they were just as real as the PCs rather than mere backdrops for their adventures, and a commitment to truly open and emergent play within which any attempt to determine the direction of a story in advance would be viewed as tantamount to cheating. I have a lot of sympathy for all three, but recently I've been wondering whether the 'raggedness' of OSR play - by which I mean the way that it often maps very imperfectly onto the conventions of the genres it supposedly models - might also be potentially valuable in and of itself.

A genre is, by necessity, a system of simplifications. There's only so many pages in a book, only so many minutes in a movie, so foregrounding one kind of material inevitably means leaving out others: and one of the key reasons for using the trappings of genre is to advertise to potential audiences which kinds of content are likely to get foregrounded, and which ones are likely to get left out. But the constraints of RPGs are very different: an RPG campaign can easily run for dozens or hundreds of hours, and while films and genre novels usually have to hold themselves to a very tight narrative schedule, RPGs can (and often have to) incorporate substantial ebbs and flows as people arrive, leave, get tired, get inspired, get bored of things, have new ideas, and so on. If you view the objective of RPGs as genre emulation, then you probably view all that as a problem to be managed, in the name of keeping the game on-track and in-genre: this is one reason why storygames often lend themselves to very short campaigns. But if you see the objective as world-emulation, then you can embrace them. You can take advantage of the fact that RPGs make it not just possible but easy to tell the kind of weird, rich, ragged, unconventional stories that are normally found only in the realms of self-consciously experimental fiction.

An OSR D&D game will sometimes be one in which brave heroes slay wicked monsters in dark places and retrieve fantastical treasures. But it will often also be one in which whole expeditions grind to a halt because no-one remembered to bring enough iron spikes, or where the fighter ends up spending the whole evening gambling with bored watchmen in the local pub because he's a few coins short of being able to afford a new suit of armour, or where the Dark Lord of Disaster can leap out of his tomb, trip over a rope trap left by the party, and promptly fall to his doom down a bottomless pit. I love that. It's real. It's human. It's kind of sad and kind of funny and quite a lot like real life. It's less about 'realism' in the sense of modelling physics or biology, and more about just conveying a sense that the world is strange and complicated and unpredictable and often slightly absurd. I can never really believe in Mighty Heroes Slaying Evil, but I can totally believe in a wicked high priest getting randomly crushed to death after a couple of wily villagers dropped a boat on him.

Now, maybe the limitless complexity of human life is the last thing you want to model when you sit down for an RPG session. Maybe, for you, the whole point is to create a shared fictional universe in which the genre-appropriate thing always happens at the genre-appropriate time, precisely because it almost never happens that way in reality. But what I hope I've articulated here is that it's entirely possible to view the free-flowing randomness of the average RPG session, and the 'raggedness' of the narrative outcomes generated by 'old-school' RPG systems, as a feature rather than as a bug. If I just want to experience a story about epic fantasy heroics, I can watch a film, or read a novel, or play a computer game, or even play one of those D&D board games I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. But stories in which the vivid strangeness of fantasy is used to highlight the oddness and resilience of ordinary life, rather than just to heighten yet another operatic grand narrative, are very much rarer: and for those purposes, for me at least, there's still nothing quite like OSR D&D.

Dungeoneering fast and slow: some thoughts based on D&D board games

Thanks to the magic of ebay, I recently acquired copies of two D&D-themed board games at knock-down prices. The first one was the Dungeons and Dragons board game, published by Parker in 2003. The second was the Legend of Drizzt board game, published by WOTC in 2011. They share the same basic concept: each models a band of heroes exploring a dungeon, and each uses the same kind of board game technologies to accomplish this, including miniatures, map tiles, and treasure cards. But their conceptions of what the dungeon is, and how the heroes interact with it, are very different.

The 2003 Dungeons and Dragons board game.

In the 2003 game, the dungeon is essentially conceptualised as a series of discrete challenges. Each room contains a determinate number of threats, some of which - the nature and locations of the monsters - are revealed to the PCs, while others - the nature and locations of the traps - are hidden from them. There's no time limit, and no incentive to deal with more than one room at a time, but the PCs have a strictly limited amount of resources (hit points, magic points, items) with which to defeat the dungeon as a whole. A a result, optimal play consists of  slowly and methodically clearing the dungeon, room by room, until the objective is attained.

The 2011 Legend of Drizzt board game.

In the 2011 game, the dungeon is the kind of free-flowing, danger-filled environment you might expect to see in the climactic scenes of an action movie. Rather than a series of discrete rooms, each area flows into the next. Threats spawn continuously: everything is constantly exploding, the heroes are always under attack, and the dungeon is constantly damaging the players just for being inside it. The players have a lot more tools than their 2003 equivalents for controlling combat - how much damage they deal, how much damage they take, how often they hit, etc - but far fewer options for controlling their environment: traps just happen rather than being determinate obstacles that can be located and disarmed, and monsters surge abstractly from one zone to the next rather than having to move through specific squares that the players can target or block. Optimal play consists of racing through this murderously dangerous environment as quickly as possible, trying to reach your objective before it kills you.

At first, I instinctively associated these two dungeoneering styles with 'old-school' and 'new-school' D&D, respectively. The 2003 game has the very OSR-ish idea of the dungeon as a logical and logistical puzzle - it even has encumbrance rules! - while the 2011 game, with its focus on tactics rather than strategy and its emphasis on cinematic action, reminded me of more recent editions. But in other ways, the 2011 game actually reminds me more than the 2003 one of the old-school idea of the dungeon as a 'mythic underworld', innately hostile to human life, in which everything wants to hurt you and the pain just keeps coming until you leave or die. It was the new-school editions, after all, which did away with the emphasis on timekeeping and wandering monsters, thus permitting PCs to explore dungeons at their own pace rather than always keeping one eye on the clock.

OSR bloggers often write about taking very measured, systematic approach to dungeoneering: explore everything, search everywhere, accumulate knowledge and use it to deduce the positions of traps, treasures and secret doors, master the environment and manipulate it to your advantage, and so on. It's a natural response to the relative fragility of OSR PCs: you can't just outfight the monsters, so you have to out-think them instead, and that's hard to do if the dungeon doesn't let you gather enough information to base your plans upon. But back when I used to run D&D 3.5 games, I'd sometimes run dungeons in the opposite way, as a kind of stream-of-consciousness nightmare in which the threats never stopped coming and the dungeon was there to be sprinted through rather than meticulously explored. The fact that D&D 3.5 PCs were more resilient than the OSR equivalents made it easier, of course. But it did make me wonder whether the same effects could be achieved within a more planning-and-logistics-focused OSR context, as well...

Imagine a dungeon environment so hostile - so hot, so cold, so poisonous, so infested with aggressive creatures, whatever - that just being inside it would rapidly wear you down. Descending into it would be less like spelunking than pearl-diving, with each dungeon-delving expedition lasting not hours but minutes: a frantic dash into the darkness and then back to the light before the environment destroys you, hopefully with a new fragment of knowledge or progress to show for it. The objective for a delve might be no more than 'see what's at the end of the south corridor', or 'rig up a rope bridge across the chasm to the north', and success would be a matter of gradually linking together the meagre gains from each of these dashes into a strategy for actually accomplishing whatever it was you came there for. Obviously, such a dungeon (or dungeon sub-area) would have to be pretty small, and the PCs would need to have a very good reason for going into somewhere so horrible in the first place. But, in a very literal way, it might make for a entertaining change of pace, pushing PCs to consider a different set of logistics to the ones they normally have to manage. How many of their standard adventuring procedures will need rethinking when proceeding at normal dungeoneering speeds would kill them all within an hour?

'I really wish we'd come down here in more sensible clothes!'

Here are six possible 'hazard zones' that might lend themselves to this kind of 'fast dungeoneering':

1. There is no floor. The whole area is an abyss, and awful bat-winged things surge up from below at irregular intervals. Each expedition would aim to attach a few more hooks, ropes, and pitons to the ceiling, gradually expanding the area which could be explored in relative safety - where 'relative safety' means 'fighting bat-winged monsters while dangling from the ceiling on a loop of rope', as opposed to 'being eaten alive by bat-winged monsters while hanging from the roof by your fingertips'. Would not work with a party that has access to flight.
2. There is no air. The whole area is flooded. Lamps and torches won't burn down there, and your exploration radius is limited by the time for which you can hold your breath. Also there are probably piranhas. Progress would be about locating air pockets and gradually extending longer and longer breathing tubes from the surface, allowing air to be pumped down to people exploring new parts of the complex. Would not work with a party that has access to water breathing magic.
3. Everything is on fire. Even in fire-resistant clothing, the heat will rapidly kill you, although it doesn't seem to bother the fire-monsters who live down here. Each expedition is a rapid dash through the flames and back again before you die of heat exhaustion, gradually allowing you to construct a map of the complex. Would not work if one or more of the PCs is fireproof.
4. Everything is frozen. Each expedition is a race against hypothermia. Also everything is slippery as fuck, so a big part of each delve will need to be devoted to hammering in more ropes and spikes to make it easier to retrace your steps next time. There are probably wampas or something down here, too. Would not work if one or more of the PCs is immune to cold.
5. Everything is poisonous. The air is heavy with poisonous gas, and staying inside it for too long will mean absorbing a fatal dose. Visibility is also terrible. Each expedition will mean simply mapping out a little bit more of the complex hidden within the fog, and maybe figuring out ways to improve ventilation of specific areas, all while dodging the inevitable poison-gas-exhaling zombies stumbling around within the clouds. Would not work if one or more of the PCs is immune to poison.
6. Everything is haunted. This whole area is infested with angry ghosts which howl in the minds of all who enter, causing hallucinations, panic attacks, and poltergeist activity. The longer the PCs remain within it, the higher their risk of succumbing to possession or insanity. Assuming they have a cleric with them, progress means dashing into the zone, consecrating a tiny area to keep the ghosts out, and then dashing back again, gradually building up a network of 'safe zones' from which the area can be explored. Of course, some of the ghosts take the more direct approach of possessing corpses or objects and straightforwardly attempting to murder the intruders...