Lost Colonies Returns

If you've read this blog in the past, you may have noticed that I have not posted any session reports on my Lost Colonies campaign for a couple of months. The reason for this is that this summer was an absolute disaster for the purposes of scheduling game time. Several of the folks I play with were out of town, on vacation, etc. and gaming fell by the way side. On the few nights we did get together, we often suffered very bad cases of Gamer ADD and opted for Villains & Vigilantes. [An interesting by-product of this experience: as much a I love V&V, I am at a point in my life where I am no longer much interested in using what time I have for RPGs on anything other than FRPGs, specifically D&D and those retroclones that emulate it.]

Now that summer is coming to close and every one is back in town, we decided to get back to playing the Lost Colonies campaign. Before I post any actual session reports, however, I thought I'd write a post about some of the larger issues that I found interesting about re-starting a campaign and what might be called a cultural conundrum.

The first big problem we all had was just remembering where everybody was, why everybody was doing what they were doing and what everyone was going to do next. We tackled the situation by taking turns telling our own versions of what was going on and asking questions of each other. I didn't try to do this on purpose (though I might the next time I run into a similar situation), it happened organically. Since there were details others remembered that I forgot, I was encouraged to allow as much collaborative remembering as seemed necessary. This went on for close to thirty to forty minutes. I consider it time well spent, in this case.

By the time play began, everyone was getting back into character and things progressed, if not smoothly, then forward far enough to get back into some kind of rhythm. One thing that helped was that we did two sessions in quick succession — less than a week apart. I accidentally created a sense of urgency by ending the first session on a cliffhanger — thus, everybody was eager to get back to it.

When I first started running this campaign, I did so as an experiment — what would happen if you introduced earlier versions of D&D to a bunch of 3.5 players? For the most part, they have all settled on the idea that B/X and its retroclone LL are as much as one needs in order to have a lot of fun sans all the prep time necessary with 3.5 (even if there are aspects of 3.5 that some miss).

I mention this because in running Lost Colonies, there have only been a couple of times that I was aware of a clash of culture between 3.5 play and old-school play. These sessions were one of them. As the two evenings progressed, I came to realize that there was a definite new-school vibe with what I was doing as a Referee.

Super-hero RPGs do not lend themselves to a sand-box style of play. By necessity, they are more plot driven. Even so, they can be run in a mystery/information gathering kind of way. When I ran V&V, I decided to have an overall campaign secret that would be revealed piecemeal over several sessions. Different pieces of the puzzle were available from different NPCs and their lairs. As the players encountered various villains, the information gathered could lead players in a couple of different directions to find another piece of the puzzle. I did this in an attempt to allow players to drive the plot more than my choices as a Referee.

I structured the current adventure for Lost Colonies in a similar manner. I had several different encounter areas that could yield a plethora of information about what was really going on. Depending upon where the players chose to go, how they reacted to these NPCs and how much they trusted the information there were all kinds of different possibilities. At least that was the theory.

In the middle of what I considered to be an interesting, tough but winnable combat, half the party went into what I might describe as a "new school-" or "3.5" mentality. A couple of players hypothesized that they were supposed to be captured — the assumption that this is the action that would further the intended plot. As a result, half of the party gave up trying to win the fight and allowed themselves to be captured. Only two players (the newest D&D player and the one player who came into the hobby with with 2ed) fought to the end. They proved my own assumption about the encounter and were rewarded with freedom.

The adventure had two factions in conflict with each other. One side was definitely evil. The other was alien, but neutral. The evil faction was interested in using the PCs to further their own agenda. The neutral faction was interested in allying with the PCs to eradicate the evil faction.

As each part of the party encountered one of the factions something really surprising happened (and one that I might blame on the "new school" mentality). When everyone managed to get together again, everyone decided that the evil faction was, if not exactly good, trying to accomplish a greater good and the neutral faction was evil and therefore was eliminated.

While wildly entertaining from my perspective, it does leave me in a bit of a conundrum. How much of the "new school" mentality lead to the players accepting the evil faction at their word? How much of that is my own fault? Further, the players have started to craft their own narrative about what they are trying to accomplish by helping the evil faction that radically differs from my own original plans. I happen to like their version quite a bit…and am quite happy to alter my plans to adhere to their expectations with a few of my own twists. The question is: should I?

5e and The Lost Colonies

When the current party I am GMing created its characters, I had yet to get my hands on the core books and was operating solely with my reading of the Basic version of 5e. As such, I limited the choice of classes to the archetypal four found in Basic: Cleric, Fighter, Rogue and Wizard. This made my life easier and, as I explained to my players, all of the other classes are really just variations of those four classes.

Having now read the PH and getting a better handle on both the system and the classes I have come to a rather surprising conclusion: if I were to do it all over again, I would have limited the class choice to three, but not the three one might expect.

I say three, because when I first started the Lost Colonies campaign world so many years ago that is exactly the number of classes I allowed (plus the race-as-classes of B/X). I got rid of the thief and wanted to see what the game would feel like with only the three classes of 0e. It worked surprisingly well. When new classes were introduced, it happened organically because of events within the campaign.

I also intellectually like the conceptual and mechanical balance associated with the three classes: Fighters fight, magic-users use magic and clerics are something in between (which, in practice, leaned more towards fighting than magic). This balance, however, does not really exist between the three core classes in 5e. While fighters still fight, the differences between clerics and magic-users have been blurred so much that it is hard to tell the difference without seeing the mechanics behind the special effects.

Thus, the three classes I would use in 5e to emulate that 0e feel I was going for when I first began using the Lost Colonies are:

• Fighter
• Paladin (in the place of the cleric)
• Warlock (in the place of the magic-user)

In the Lost Colonies, all clerics worship the same god. I don’t need different Domains to represent different pagan cults. The paladin better represents a monotheistic set-up. They also don’t get their spell-casting abilities until 2nd level, just like B/X and 0e. In addition, they have fighting skills like a fighter, but don’t have as broad a choice nor are as good at them in the long run as the fighter is.

The warlock is the best D&D representation of the idea that arcane magic is a dangerous thing. It also is the closest I have ever seen D&D get to one of my favorite magic systems — the Elric RPG where demons and elementals were bound into items in order to get magical effects and spells. In addition, this also is a really good analog for the idea that pagan clerics are really magic-users dressed up to look religious.

Obviously, the various patrons for PCs would have to be tweaked else the cleric (paladin) and magic-user (warlock) would not get along very well. My initial thoughts are these: The Summer Queen/Winter King (a variation of the Archfey patron), the Dragon Kings (ancient metallic dragons, which could be a variation on the Great Old One) or the Celestials (archangels, which could be a reverse variation on the Fiend). Since these arcane casters have cantrips and can be really good casters at first level, they are much better at casting than clerics (paladins) who get no cantrips. Thus, it better cements the cleric (paladin) as a tweener whose magic comes from a much different source than the magic of the magic-user (warlock).

For those who want to play a thief, I will provide a background called Thieves’ Guild which will provide all the skills and connections necessary to play one, while still being one of the three core classes. Ironically, this set-up probably does a better job of emulating Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser than any version of D&D ever did.

In the same vein, for those that want to play a barbarian, bard, druid, ranger or monk I will provide a background which will encompass all the skills and backstory necessary to play one.

BTW this is yet another reason I think the background mechanic for character creation is such a brilliant idea. I get to have a much simpler version of 5e by limiting it to three core classes and players can customize these three core classes to emulate all kinds of cool characters without hardly any mechanical shenanigans.

Lost Colonies Sessions 33, 34 & 35

You might have noticed that I haven't posted any Lost Colonies session reports for awhile. This is primarily because I've been fairly busy and the party has been doing virtually the same thing for the last three sessions. Thus, I've waited until now to write it all down.

I took (what I thought was) a big risk with my campaign. Dn. Goram was Geased to find and return the Two Swords to the Lost Temple underneath the Monastery of St. Urheim. Ahkmed the Dwarf has a map to some kind of dwarven treasure/lost colony (actually a slightly modified version Mr. Raggi's Hammers of the God). I had also recently bought Realms of Crawling Chaos and was eager to integrate ideas from it into my campaign. As a result, I decided to give Dn. Goram a clue to lead him in the direction of the Dwarves (who live in a mountain range to the southwest of Headwaters) and happily placed elements from RCC and Hammer of the God in the area. The risk: the Two Swords had been placed into another dimension by some monastic dwarves in order to protect them. That other dimension happened to be a spaceship.

Thus, the dwarven monastery occupied by white apes and their minions was full of RCC-derived stuff and sat upon the mountain where I placed Hammers of the God. The party succeeded in clearing out the dwarven monastery of its ape-like occupants, fended off an attack by some harpies and their slaves and proceeded to manufacture the formulae that would allow them to dimension hop. This required some uncomfortable ingredients — some of which they were able to find in the monastery, others they had to procure.

After quaffing the first dose of the formulae, the party found themselves in a spaceship (though it took awhile for them to realize this, given my method of trying to describe things like plastic and computer screens). When it dawned on my players what I was doing, one gleefully exclaimed "We're playing a little Gamma World today!" Despite my trepidations for so blatantly breaking genre, my players had a terrific time. They encountered a number of slime-like creatures with a variety of special abilities and immunities (and proved to be quite a challenge for the party). The party was quite shocked when one such creature swallowed Dn. Goram whole. Fortunately for him, the four-hour-dimension-hop ended before he was digested.

The exploration of the ship required three separate trips. They found a variety of tools and food-stuff that was the equivalent of treasure as well as the remains of the crew that apparently died some time ago in a mysterious manner. In addition, they found a type of prison where a number of strange creatures were being held in stasis (including a shocking number of mind flayers). They found what they believe to be the Two Swords and managed to retrieve them both, but not before messing around with the ship's nuclear reactor. Their actions caused a meltdown which was going to destroy the ship and everyone on it. Fortunately, the party was prepared and cast a Dispel Magic to pull them back into their own dimension before the whole ship went boom.

These three sessions ended up being some of the most rewarding I've had during this whole campaign. It combined some of the things I like best about old-school play: exploration driving plot, deadly combat, genre bending locales and player freedom and creativity. My players really enjoyed themselves and wanted to know more about the mystery of the ship and what it was all about.

As a result, they decided to find the dwarves and report to them what they found. In process, they discovered that the Dwarves blame one of their own for the fall of the Thassalonian Colonies, of which the appearance of the Golden Masks was a consequence. They warned the party against pursuing Ahkmed's map (much to my own disappointment). The party did some trading and began to establish some economic ties to the Dwarves (who were extremely interested in some of the technology the party brought back with them from the ship).

Finally, Ahkmed found out he is now what the dwarven loremasters call a Bane-Bearer. His sword Hornet was forged along with several other weapons. Each is a bane of a specific race. They were created in an attempt to keep peace between the various races; however, an evil dwarf managed to collect them all and wreck havoc upon the races. Since his defeat, these Bane-Weapons had been lost — until now.

One final note: when I began doing these session reports, one of the things I was interested in observing was how a bunch of players who came into the hobby with 3.5 would react to old-school rules and play. After 35 sessions I can now report that all of the guys in my group have officially dropped 3.5 in favor of a variety of older rulesets (primarily AD&D and LL). Interestingly, one of them has gone out of his way to buy a bunch of Judges Guild stuff (having been introduced to their existence through my campaign). As he was excitedly reporting to me some of his finds, he exclaimed, "The old stuff is so much better than the new stuff!" To riff off ye auld bard, the play is the thing.

Lost Colonies Campaign

Recently, I have been running a Labyrinth Lord campaign with a group who primarily were introduced to D&D through 3rd edition. It has been an exercise in impromptu refereeing, on my part. I did not know what to expect, as far as a continuing campaign. As a result, I re-purposed a bunch of maps — I did not want to spend a lot of prep time on a campaign that might not last and part of me wanted to experiment with the concept. In fact, I have yet to use a map specifically created for this campaign. Interestingly, this has not hampered anyone's enjoyment of the game, and, as far as I am concerned, I've actually had more fun than I usually do as a referee.

For the curious, I am using a Judges Guild map for the campaign world, recast as a wilderness with the last vestiges of several colonies established by an empire that collapsed over a generation ago. The players began their careers in a town named after the fortress that protects it — Headwaters. It is the last stronghold of civilization, surrounded by a wilderness ruled by beings of Chaos. I placed several potential adventures, dungeons and megadungeons on the map, created a classic rumor table and had the players roll to see what their characters knew. After that, it was entirely up to them as to what they did — something they have come to really appreciate.

The area is sub-tropical and metal poor. This has put a premium on all things metallic and forced the players to be creative about how they equip their characters. More on that later. I've thoroughly enjoyed James' synopsis of his Dwimmermount campaign. In a similar vein, with an eye towards observing how 3.5 players adapt to old school play, I plan to write up my own synopsis of what I'll call the Lost Colonies campaign. Enjoy.

Towards an Arnesonian XP System Without the Gold

Anyone familiar with my musings on how to run a campaign is well aware of my long love-affair with Arneson’s rule of 1 gp of treasure spent = 1 xp. It is genius and it is the mechanical engine that makes a sandbox-style game purr. Handing over agency to a group of players is one of the true pleasures I have as a Referee because it guarantees an experience that I cannot get by writing short stories, novellas or novels: utter surprise. I had no idea stirge meat was a delicacy in the Lost Colonies until my players decided to ask a friendly monster NPC to cook one up. To this day, this fact and all of the various consequences that are derived from this fact are some of my favorite features of the Lost Colonies campaign world.

There is, however, one glaring weakness in Dave Arneson’s xp house rule: it assumes a gold-based economy in a post-apocalyptic world where treasure hunting is an inexpensive but lucrative (if dangerous) endeavor. It won’t work in the Third Imperium. Whereas there is a lost, ancient civilization, the locations of these ruins are often tightly controlled secrets or in places that are cost prohibitive to get to. In addition, the stuff that can be found is generally cultural and/or scientific, not monetary.

One of the reasons B/X is the one RPG I would choose if I could only ever play one RPG for the rest of my life is because it best expresses (and allows for) the madness of a sandbox campaign and players armed with the near-complete agency Arneson’s xp rule grants. One of the reasons I don’t regularly Referee games like Traveller, Call of Cthulhu and Champions is that these genres and systems lend themselves much less easily to the sandbox campaign (not that they can’t).

The discussion that followed my most recent rant about 5e and xp got me thinking about how it might be possible to marry the madness of Arneson’s xp rule and a sandbox campaign to another genres where Arneson’s assumptions about the world do not or cannot exist.

At the root of this whole issue is player agency. The way in which Arneson’s rule empowers players to advance exactly how they want to is a marvel to behold. The surprise factor and the world-building and world-altering factors are huge. Therefore, here is a stab in the dark at a framework upon which to build an experience system that could potentially give me the same kind of satisfaction in other games and genres that I get from Arneson + B/X:

There are six different methods of earning experience:

1. Party Campaign Goal: This is a task the players set for themselves as a group. The expected time necessary to complete this task should be around the 2-5 session mark. For example: The party decides that it wants to figure out where the Tomb of Horrors is located. This would have a value of 2(x) for each character where x is an arbitrary number used consistently throughout this thought experiment.
2. Player Campaign Goal: This is a task that the player sets for their character alone. Again, this is something they should expect to take 2-5 game sessions to complete. For example: The ranger decides that he wants to take out 20 orcs, while the Magic-user wants to visit the Great Library in the Capital City. Again, this would have a value of 2(x).
3. Party Mission Goal: Similar to the Party Campaign Goal, but is something the party wants to accomplish over the course of a single session. For example: The party wants to get to the Village of Sages in order to find out the most likely place to find a map associated with the Tomb of Horrors. This would have a value of (x) for each character.
4. Player Mission Goal: Similar to the Player Campaign Goal, but is something the player wants to accomplish over the course of a single session. For example: The Cleric wants to cast three utility spells that actually help the party. This would have a value of (x).
5. Secret Player Goal: This is something to help me notch up the surprise factor for both players and referee. All of the above goals are assumed to be public knowledge so that everyone has a chance to negotiate with the other players to maximize their ability to gain experience. At the beginning of each session, the player’s also write down a goal their character has for the session that no one else is privy to, including the Referee. At the end of the session, these goals are revealed to the table and experience is granted for those who pull it off. This would have a value of (x).
6. Referee Discretion/Secret Goal: This is also an attempt to up the surprise factor. The Referee could hand out (x) experience to players who showed exceptional bravery/cleverness/role-playing etc. and/or at the start of the session, the Referee could secretly write down a goal they hope the party accomplishes over the course of that session. This, too, would be worth (x) experience.

I think this would allow enough flexibility to just about any genre to pull off a sandbox campaign as well as offer enough structure to allow players to feel empowered on how their characters advance through the system and the campaign.

Running a Sandbox Campaign: Why a Random Event Isn't Random

By its very nature, a sandbox campaign has a lot of randomness. For me, this is one of its charms. Not only do I get to be surprised as a Referee by what happens in the world, but I am challenged every time I allow a random table to determine what happens next. One of the key principles that I adhere to when running a sandbox campaign is that nothing is random despite my wide and varied use of random tables and events.

This may sound like a contradiction (or a statement of faith) but it actually isn’t. Though the origin of an event or an encounter or a treasure might be a random result, its actual existence in the world must have a rational explanation. In other words, I am always asking the question ‘Why?’ Why are there lizardmen in this part of the jungle? Why is there a dragon here when before there wasn’t? Why are neanderthals exploring a lost temple that never belonged to them?

By continuously asking the question ‘Why?’ I am forcing myself to accept the un-randomness of random events and seeing these things not as something that a die-roll told me, but as part of the larger story and framework of my campaign world.

This is why, in my prepping for a sandbox campaign, I use broad strokes and various nebulous factions and background noise: they all give me a framework in which to fill in details with my questions of ‘Why?’

For example: as I mentioned in my last post, a die roll led to the adventure seed of a portal suddenly showing up in Akhmed’s house when he rolled a ‘6’ on a d6. After such a long time, why wasn’t his house done? Something catastrophic must have happened. What event in the campaign world could have caused this? The players had just recently travelled to a major Illithid city where they managed to wreck havoc and shatter a giant machine which let them dial in various portals to various worlds. This, then, could result in various rips in time and space around my Lost Colonies map. Why not in Akhmed’s house?

This places what was a silly random event into a much larger story arc that affects the entire campaign world. Should players start exploring this rip in time and space, various hints and clues could then allow them to figure out that the origin of this rip was, in fact, there own doing. Unfortunately, that never happened with the players in question, but I do have a solid background for why this portal exists in the first place.

It also opens up a framework from which I can start explaining the un-randmoness of other random events in my campaign. Various factions in my Lost Colonies campaign are aware of these rips in time and space. Each has had a different reaction to them. As a consequence, I can start explaining the existence of certain random encounters as consequences of these factions interacting with portals. Again, this ties everything together and leads players to gain more information about this major event in the campaign world and all of its consequences.

Thus, random events actually make my sandbox campaigns better, because I am forced to ask a series of questions which seek to understand exactly why a random event isn’t random.

Lost Colonies Session 56

As life has been less demanding of late, I have had more time to get together with my regular group and play. Unexpectedly, they wanted to run a session of Lost Colonies this week and I got to improv an entire session off the top of my head and had an absolute blast.

The last time we had a session (back in June), the party had gotten distracted from its pursuit of the slaad and his frogmen cavalry and lost two characters as a result. They did, however, survive a couple of combats within the bowels of the Black Tower they had no business getting into in the first place.

It is here that I have to admit something about the Black Tower. I have never mapped nor keyed this dungeon. Given the proclivities of my group, the Black Tower was never much of a priority until my players suddenly made it so (“Oh, crap — they are actually going to go in!?”).

I armed myself with three things:

1. A purpose for the tower itself — therein is the ability to transform oneself into a lich.
2. A really cool map.
3. An inspiring collection of monsters (The Tomb of Horrors Complete [THC]).

One of the things that I adore about the THC is that there are a whole slew of “themed” monsters — blood, sand, cold, clockwork, fire, etc. I was thus able to immediately determine that each “level” of the dungeon had a theme — each related to the concept of death and necromancy. I settled on sand, blood, cold and water.

Since the map itself suggested that there were four keys scattered about in order to open up the sphere at the center of the dungeon, I figured that these keys were necessary to get to the same location — where one could choose to become a lich. The instructions would be on the sand level inside the pyramid. Thus, the slaad was looking to take advantage of the location and secure himself some serious undead power before moving on to conquering bigger and better things.

What was left was riffing off the themes in order to make memorable-looking rooms that the players could interact with. I used a combination of fiat and die roll to determine where monsters and treasure were (sometimes the geography suggested an antechamber with a guardian in front of a treasure horde). When it was time to have a monster show up, I simply leafed through the pages to find whatever themed monster suited my fancy at the time and ran with it.

All-in-all it was a tremendous amount of fun for all. I got to be pleasantly surprised by the dungeon — I had no idea going in what was there until my players got there. My players got to experience a combination of a cool map, cool monsters and the creativity they inspired in me. I heard on more than one occasion “That’s so cool!” and “I’m stealing that for one of my dungeons!” (which I heartily endorse).

Some highlights:

• The blood level was coated in a layer of blood except for one particular area which appeared clean and dry. At the center of this area was a ginormous blood suckle bush (tree, really) to which I gave max hit points and double the number of attacks. My players don’t know this, but they really dodged a bullet here. My die rolls were really bad.
• In the cold level was a room half encased by ice. Inside the ice was a warrior guarding a treasure chest. I really enjoyed this for two reasons. First, it was really inspiring to my players. They got really creative about how to get to the treasure. Secondly, a die roll entirely transformed the room. The players cast Detect Magic, so I had to roll to see if the treasure horde had any. It did. The resultant two items changed the warrior from a passive guardian to an active one that (due to surprise) put some serious hurt on the party. The other item is a bane weapon.
• The first key that the party found was encased in a column of ice. What they didn’t realize was that the interior was hollow and full of flammable gas.
• One of the guys in our group has really earned himself a reputation for having his characters die on him (he is on character number eight in our AD&D campaign). Some of this can be chalked up to the fact that he is a newbie. Increasingly, however, the dice just seem to hate him. He lost two characters this session. Both times, he died because of residual damage (other players set off an area effect trap/spell) that on average should have been survivable. Both times, however, he failed a saving throw and my damage dice were just absolutely nasty. Fortunately, he has developed a really good sense of humor about the whole thing. He doesn’t even name his characters until they actually survive an entire session.
• The players found the slaad and the resulting combat was a lot of fun. The reaction I got from my players was truly precious when my first two actions were to use Power Word Stun and Gate in another slaad. But, as happens, the dice favored the bold and (while seriously hurt) the party managed to fell the two beasts without any casualties.

The party exited the dungeon with the bodies of the slaad to take back to Redwraith in order to help the city’s morale and demonstrate their good faith (having told the city that they would kill the slaad). The session ended with the realization that the party is currently being pulled in several directions at once (just the way I like it):

• The gate that now stands open over the Black Tower is incrementally getting bigger.
• There are still heinous things crawling around inside the Black Tower itself.
• The only means that the party has to control the gate is on the petrified figure of Ahkmed.
• Dn. Goram has urgent need of the party in the Elflands.

Lost Colonies Session 13

I should first explain that life has intruded quite a bit in the last month or so, which explains why I have not posted much. Lent, Holy Week and health issues have all been much more challenging than expected. Hopefully, life will settle down in the coming weeks and you will see more posts (for example, I have two more sessions of Lost Colonies to write...).

The beginning of this session involved finishing up the last of the puzzles I pulled out last time. It is one that I am particularly fond of and so I will share. As I mentioned last time, the room was covered in mosaics. On the far wall were three queens holding a chest. On the left wall, the three queens were dressed and ready for battle. On the right, two queens were standing, the third was sitting and all wore black. At the far end of the room were three life sized statues of queens armed with swords floating a couple of inched off the floor. In mosaic on the floor was a 6x6 checker board. The puzzle is solved (thus opening the chest) when the three queens are placed upon the checker board in such a way that every square is attacked according to the rules of chess. If the three queens are placed upon the board (and they are easily moved, gliding across the floor) in such a way that any spaces are not attacked by the queens, not only do the queens return to their original position in the room, but some kind of undead creature appears in each of the spaces not attacked by the queens and immediately go after the party.

Due to a lack of explicit directions, this room resulted in a lot of trial and error by the players and proved to be a bit more combat heavy than I expected, but was entertaining, none-the-less. When every player is pouring over possible solutions and sharing ideas, I figure a puzzle has done its job.

After the players solved each puzzle, the "chest" in the wall was opened revealing a bit of treasure and a rod engraved with writing similar to that on the Golden Masks they have been periodically running into. In addition, each was topped with a different 3D shape (pyramid, sphere and cube). Three significant finds happened to be in the chest protected by the queens: a tunic covered with Istenite iconography, a phylactery and a short sword engraved with the elven word for "hornet."

There was now only one part of the dungeon that the players had not been able to explore, due to setting off a trap that resulted in a lingering, acidic cloud. After solving all the puzzles, they returned to the site of the trap and found out that the cloud had dissipated. Beyond, they found a room occupied by some kind of fleshy construct covered in runes. When the characters considered attacking it, these runes appeared on parts of their bodies. The construct, however, did nothing until the party finally did make an attack (a Hold Person spell which failed to have any effect). What followed was a bit of a surreal combat. As Hamlen again stood in the breach armed with Liberator and boosted by Bless and Cure Light Wound spells, Arkmed the Dwarf was busily trying various key combinations in a dias in the room beyond the construct. As Hamlen found out that he shared any damage he did to the construct, Arkmed found that each key combination transformed the entire room into a portal to various unknown locations: a desert, a snow bound valley, an underwater city, an underground fungal forest, an unlit cavern and a featureless hallway marked only by circular iron door.

When the construct was finally defeated, Hamlen was near death and the party was loathe to risk walking through to any of the unknown locations. Thus, they returned to the surface. The session ended with a report of their success to Bishop Iova. Of note, Bishop Iova informed the party that the tunic they found is a bit of a relic. It was worn by St. Siors and bestows its wearer with an extra hit point per hit die and a bless spell usable once per day.

Gamer ADD: Toward and Old School version of 5e Part 2

One of the things that drives me batty about 5e has nothing to do with either the system or the mechanics. I really despise the presentation and layout. Awhile ago, I did an experiment to see if I could to a “Player’s Guide” for my Lost Colonies campaign world for 5e. It was a nightmare. Trying to figure out what a class can do at any given level is a chore that can result in looking up several different references in different parts of the rulebook. The process was so headache-inducing that I gave up trying.

When my Gamer ADD-addled brain started thinking about treading down the 5e road again, I did not want the published core books (or any other books) involved. Dealing with just the SRD (while still too complicated in its presentation) makes things easier to deal with.

Thus, when thinking about an Old School Hack of 5e, I want the presentation to be simple and easy to digest. One easy editorial decision that will make that process easier is to limit the number of levels covered in the game. 0e covers Fighters and Clerics up to 10th level and Magic-users to 16th. I have been playing this game since 1979 and I have only seen two characters make it to 9th level. I played one (a bard in 3.5 that retired at 9th level) and the other was a PC in my Lost Colonies Campaign (LL). Thus, from a practice experience POV, having a game only cover levels 1-10 seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Of course, my experience is almost exclusively with xp being awarded according to older rule-sets where xp is not only harder to come by, but 1xp=1gp is the primary means of gaining xp (and in some cases it’s Arneson’s 1xp=1gp spent). Thus, in order to make levels 1-10 feel like a complete game, the xp needed for each level is going to need a slight overhaul.

In 0e an 11th level Magic-user needs 300,000xp. Conveniently, if one were to use that number for the xp needed to get to 10th level, halving that for each level (effectively doubling the xp needed for each level) the xp needed to get to 2nd ends up being 1000. This number is half as much as what is needed in older editions of the game (thus, making leveling faster/easier for the modern gamer context) but is much higher than the 300 needed in 5e as written (which helps placate my own old school proclivities).

Given this info, here is a rough draft of the kind of layout I have in mind for this project:

Yes. That is ONE page for everything needed to play a fighter from 1st-10th level.

Note that there are a couple of changes from the SRD for the fighter:

• The Proficiency Bonus progresses slightly faster. I did this to make Fighters better at fighting in the long-term than Clerics and Magic-users.
• I replaced the 7th level Martial Archetype power “Remarkable Athlete” with the mechanics of the 7th level Barbarian ability “Feral Instinct” — advantage on initiative. I did this to keep the fighter class more focused on fighting prowess.
• I replaced the Martial Archetype power at 10th level with an Extra Attack (which would be granted normally at 11th level). Again, I did this to keep the focus of the class on fighting prowess.

Lost Colonies Session 14

Over the weekend, James over at Grognardia wrote a meditation on the Referee as a player. An integral part of this is the use of the random die roll for such things as encounters, treasures, wondering monsters, reactions, etc. because it allows for the Referee to be surprised. As I've recently admitted, the Lost Colonies campaign depends far more on random rolls and ad hoc decisions than it does on any kind of pre-planned plot or narrative. There is an overall background "theme" that evolves over time, especially as it reacts to the actions of the player characters, but it doesn't dominate the campaign, unless the players make choices to allow it to. For example, this session was almost entirely the result of a random die roll.

The players surprised me somewhat this week. After discussing their options, they decided that Headwaters had a larger claim on their interest than the portal they found beneath Trisagia (aka the City). Thus, they equipped themselves for the 10 day journey. I was actually kind of pleased by this turn of events, because the decision is the result of the players putting down roots in the small town. For example, Hamlen has made plans to build a tavern (and has even made his first hire — he offered a better life to the one-armed prostitute he garnered information from when they first arrived in Trisagia).

On they way back, I rolled a random encounter and came up with a werewolf along with some wolves. The party then used their newly purchased war dogs to track down the lycanthrope's lair. I pulled out a map of a "haunted house" that had a nice surreal and creepy ambiance. None of the encounters were necessarily dangerous, but it did allow for the rest of the werewolves to show up as the players were exploring the house in a kind of grand entrance. During their investigations, they found several knicknacks — including some highly explosive "oil" — as well as the main treasure trove hidden inside a bag of holding. The highlight of the evening was an encounter with a mummified head. In an ad hoc decision, I gave the thing the ability to talk. It claimed to have a vast amount of knowledge, but would only divulge such information if a favor was granted. Although the party was greatly tempted, they refused — given the creepy environment.

All of this was virtually made up on the spot, using a combination of my library of maps and adventures, die rolls and my own creativity. This is fairly typical. As such, I rarely place items in order to solve a problem later on in an adventure. Yet, my players often think that I do. As a result, they assumed that the explosive oil was for the purpose of ridding the world of the talking and mummified head. So, they proceeded to have a "Mythbusters" moment and blew the whole house to kingdom come. We all had a lot of fun with it.

I realize that several old-school modules from back in the day placed treasures that help parties later in the module to survive one or more encounters (a silver weapon for lycanthropes, potions of water breathing to deal with an underwater encounter, etc.); however, I wonder how much more evident this practice became in later editions of the game. In other words, is this assumption by my players that I place items to solve situations later in the adventure typical in every era of the game, or is it more prevalent in the narrative "story telling" adventures of later editions?

Finding My Own Personal Proto-Game

Recently, I read the news that Frog God Games is releasing a new "complete" edition of Swords & Wizardry. Though I do not currently play any edition of S&W, part of me really wants to. So, in order to find out what this new "complete" edition was all about, I started searching around for reviews and ran across this lovely bit of fandom.

This got me thinking about my own recent experience with Ye Auld Game and my attempts at exploring the roots of this hobby. This has primarily involved running my Lost Colonies campaign, which began as an experiment on two fronts.

Firstly, I was interested to see what would happen if I introduced an older edition of D&D to a bunch of players who cut their teeth on 3.5. In this sense, the experiment has been wildly successful. The campaign has been going on for 18 months(!) and has outlasted three concurrent 3.5 campaigns played by the same group of players. In addition, several of these same players have started running their own older-edition games.

Secondly, I wanted to reach back beyond my own experience to try and find an edition and a way of playing the game as it was somewhere in the late 70s. In this sense, my experiment has had mixed results. The campaign started with just the three core classes, and a few wrinkles based on the Chainmail rules. Both of these have long since been jettisoned. Something interesting happens on the way to the gaming table from the intellectual exercises that try to imagine a "purer" version of the game. In short, everyone at my table is more interested in having fun than adhering to some kind of rigid definition of what is "D&D." In process, we all gravitated toward that wonderful space that exists somewhere between the LBBs, Holmes, AD&D and B/X.

Which brings me to the real point of this post. For a variety of practical and fiddly reasons, when I chose to begin this experiment, I opted for Labyrinth Lord as my ruleset. At the time, I saw it as a compromise with my players that I wasn't entirely happy with (mainly, because it didn't meet with the exacting parameters of my own intellectual exercise). This decision, however, has turned out to be a huge blessing.

If, as has happened over the course of our play, by either design or by accident one wants to find that proto-D&D one might have played somewhere between 1977 and 1983 that shamelessly borrowed from the LBBs, Holmes, AD&D and B/X, Labyrinth Lord is a fantastic vehicle to get there.

The genius of Dan Proctor's design is modularity. Taken together, Labyrinth Lord (LL), Original Edition Characters (OEC), Advanced Edition Companion (AEC), Mutant Future and even (hopefully soon) Starships & Spacemen offers a plethora of compatible options for a slew of different campaigns. It is a very easy matter to use the OEC Cleric with the AEC spell list as written. There is no need to convert anything, no need to house-rule this stuff — it is all there in black and white just ready for anyone to mix and match.

In other words, LL is very capable of re-creating whatever version of D&D we old grognards played as kids. I know this because it is this proto-version of the game that has emerged from playing LL with my Lost Colonies campaign. I had almost forgotten what this proto-version was over the course of all these years since my mom came home from Target with the Holmes edition. LL not only made this kind of game possible, but easy to find.

Playing with Abstraction (5e and BX)

There is an interesting pattern that exists in the way 5e describes armor and the way that BX presents armor. 5e has three categories: Light, Medium and Heavy. BX has Leather, Chain and Plate. Although 5e does have variable Armor Classes to different types of armor within each category, I think it very useful to abstract armor in the way that 5e does for the purposes of hacking 5e ideas into BX.

If one replaces leather, chain and plate with Light, Medium and Heavy armor with the same corresponding AC, it frees players and referees to describe armor anyway that they want to. Traditional D&D (including BX) is largely driven by the martial traditions of medieval and renaissance Europe. Abstracting armor to the broad categories of 5e suddenly allows a very simple way for players to imagine their characters from radically different martial traditions. For example, in my own Lost Colonies campaign, Medium Armor is crafted from the scales of giant fish from the Endless River and Heavy Armor from the chitin of giant insects.

To a limited extent, 5e also suggests a similar abstraction with weapons in context of Monk weapons usable with the Martial Arts feature of that class. 5e doesn’t bother to list nunchaku or kama in their weapon list. Rather, they offer the following advice:

[Y]ou might use a club that is two lengths of wood connected by a short chain (called a nunchaku) or a sickle with a shorter, straighter blade (called a kama). Whatever name you use for a monk weapon, you can use the game statistics provided for the weapon in chapter 5.

In other words, use the stats for existing European martial weapons and re-imagine them as a weapon from another martial tradition.

This got me thinking about taking this abstraction to the level of the armor abstraction. In other words, have broad categories of weapons, which are modified by weapon properties in order to provide generic stats to describe whatever kind of weapon the player or referee wants.

5e provides three of these categories: simple weapons, martial weapons and the subclass in each of ranged weapons. Simple weapons can be categorized as weapons that can be made of wood and/or stone. For example: clubs, hand axes, daggers. Martial Weapons are those that require the use of metal. For example, swords, polearms and heavy crossbows.

Each category would then have a base cost, which would be modified by weapon properties. The least expensive simple weapon (the club) in BX costs 3 gp. The least expensive martial weapon (warhammer or short sword) costs 5 gp or 7 gp. The most expensive melee weapon is the two-handed sword at 15 gp. Bows range in price from 25 gp to 40 gp

From this one could abstract weapons in the following ways:

• Base price of a simple weapon = 3 gp
• Base price of a martial weapon = 6 gp
• Each additional property = 3 gp for simple weapons and 6 gp for martial weapons.
• Ranged weapons have a short range of 10 feet which is doubled for medium range and tripled for long range. Every 10 feet added to the short range costs an extra 5 gp. For example: a short bow has a short range of 50 feet in BX. That would be an extra 40 feet for (4 x 5 gp) 20 gp. Having no other properties and being a simple weapon a short bow would cost 23 gp, which is comparable to the 25 gp cost in BX.

This system creates a set of properties that describe abstract ideas about a weapon which then can be used to create any weapon that a player or referee desires to exist in their campaign world. Since all damage is based on class, this system doesn’t punish players for wanting an exotic (non-sword) weapon.

For example, there are weapons in my Lost Colonies campaign similar to the macahuitl from the Aztec martial tradition. It is a simple weapon, being made of wood and stone, and has the Versatile property being able to be wielded either one-handed or two-handed. Thus, it would cost 6 gp.

The only wrench in this abstraction is the sling. According to this system it would cost 18 gp (3 for being a simple weapon, 15 gp for having a base range of 40 feet). In BX they are the cheapest weapon at 2 gp. If one is willing to include training in the abstraction of a weapon’s cost (because using a military sling isn’t easy) than this still works overall.

In the end, I am willing to live with hiccups like the sling if it gives me the freedom to imagine all kinds of weapons and have a simple way to mechanically describe them and assign a monetary cost to them.

Saintly Saturday: Synaxis of the Twelve Apostles

Today is the Synaxis of the Twelve Holy Apostles: Peter, Andrew, James & John the sons of Zebedee, Phillip, Bartholomew, Thomas, Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus, Jude the brother of James, Simon & Matthias. As I have mentioned before, the word Synaxis means gathering. It refers to the gathering of the saints associated with a feast, and is celebrated the day after that feast. Yesterday was the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul — the Paramount of the Apostles. Therefore, today the Orthodox Church gathers together the Twelve.

The word Apostle means The One Who is Sent. In context of Christianity, of course, one is sent to preach the Gospel; however, in context of RPGs of every genre, the PCs can be sent by a Patron to complete a specific task. These tasks, of course, can have world-affecting consequences.

The Twelve, as is well known, travelled all across the known world (and beyond) founding local churches as they went. Since ancient times, local churches would trace the linage of their bishops to the Apostle who initially founded their Church. For example, Rome goes back to Peter, Constantinople goes back to Andrew and the Malayalam-speaking Christians of south west India go back to Thomas.

In context of an RPG campaign, such a wide-spread and long-lasting effects require a long-running campaign world that persists enough for players to have multiple characters in multiple games/campaigns. To anyone who regularly reads my blog it will be no surprise that, like most gamers, I am very much susceptible to Gamer ADD. My imagination flies off in a myriad of directions at the slightest provocation. If, however, I allow Gamer ADD to preoccupy my actual gaming, I would never experience the joy of past character action affecting current PC play.

If there is one old-school product that caught my attention more than any other, it would be the original Rogues Gallery. Therein, I found all of these fascinating characters that obviously emerged from actual play. Now, I do have my own collection of favorite characters that I have played over the years. Unfortunately, they all exist in separate worlds, genres and rules. Indeed, my youth was dominated by Gamer ADD impulses and I never really got to experience the reality depicted in Rogues Gallery. That is, until now.

Through forces that I don’t completely understand, a great deal of patience and focus on my part and a willingness to forgo all of the various opportunities to pursue supposedly greener pastures, my Lost Colonies campaign persists despite sporadic play, a changing cast of players and my own inadequacies as a Referee. As a result, there are now a Rogues Gallery of characters that populate a single world and that affect our current play.

Even in death, the original group of PCs looms large and the menagerie of characters that they left in their wake makes my Lost Colonies campaign live in a way that I could never have accomplished on my own. The fun part is that it is this very Rogues Gallery that keeps me coming back over and over again. I look forward to the way new characters will not only interact with what has come before, but what they will leave in their wake. I only have a finite amount of time to dedicate to actual play, and continuing this campaign has a far greater pull than any new fancy toy that might briefly take hold of my imagination.

In other words, continued play is something I have always aspired to and have oft wondered if the rewards were as great as I imagined. I can now attest that yes, indeed they are.

More Gamer ADD: Re-skinning The Caverns of Thracia

At present, I am rather badly afflicted by Gamer ADD. I’ve spent time meditating on a couple different campaign ideas in my last couple of posts; my Lost Colonies campaign just had a rather climactic event (of which I will write later) and my players are looking for a little break from the fantasy genre over the summer; and my eldest daughter has been bugging me about letting her and her brother play.

The latter occurred after she found an old FRPG accessory I bought back in the late eighties. After Gygax was booted from TSR, he had an imprint called Gary Gygax Presents: Fantasy Master. To my knowledge it only produced a few accessories, of which I own Aesheba: Greek Africa by Robert J. Blake, Frank Mentzer and Jeff O’Hare.

Though I think it a very good product, in the long run it is something that will never be anything other than an accessory to steal ideas from, because I am not much interested in playing in a fantasy world primarily influenced by Greek paganism. I would, however, be interested in playing in a world influenced by a fantasy version of the Byzantine Empire. Since virtually all of my extent campaigns (especially Averoigne and Lost Colonies) have a heavy dose of horror that I feel is inappropriate for my kids at their age, Aesheba is a great jumping off point for a campaign for my kids.

Aesheba posits a version of Africa that is isolated from Europe and Mesopotamia, giving the authors plenty of room to fiddle with history and add fantasy elements. This suits me just fine, not only because of the leeway, it also affords me the opportunity to add two things that I feel obligated to include in such a campaign for my kids: dinosaurs and pyramids.

When asked what they want to be when they grow up, my two oldest will answer paleontologist and egyptologist. In order to accommodate these interests in the campaign, I am going to grab the assistance of Paul Jaquays and re-skin his very excellent classic The Caverns of Thracia.

For those that are not aware, The Caverns of Thracia is a module published by Judges Guild in 1979 and has one of the best conceived maps for a published module of all time. It has multiple ways into and out of various levels. There are secret sub-levels. There are teleportation devices. There is an underground forest and mansion. It is stunning and inspirational. It is, however, something that I would only run as written with a much older and experienced group.

Therefore, I am going to re-skin it. Originally, the history of the Caverns has three basic stages:

1. An ancient pre-human reptilian race that eventually devolves into lizard men.
2. A Mycenaen/Cretan human civilization that (in part) is dedicated to Thanatos, the god of death.
3. Beast men who had been enslaved by the humans and had risen up to destroy and drive out their former masters.

My re-skinned version will assume the following:

1. The ancient reptilians will be one of the many serpent-like people available in various monster catalogues throughout the hobby. Three things of import: 1) theirs is a world where dinosaurs still exist and which some have been domesticated; 2) when humans show up, the serpent people enslave them; 3) either as a means to control the humans or as part of their native culture, they serve Set.
2. At some point the humans rise up in rebellion against their reptilian masters. This rebellion is fueled by a new religion — Atenism. Personally, the pharaoh in whom I am most interested in is Amenhotep IV, aka Akhenaten. He led a failed religious revolution that did not survive him. This religion had trappings of monotheism focused on Aten — originally an aspect of the sun god Ra. One of the things I find fascinating is how it parallels early Judaism. Indeed, there are scholars who find a great deal of similarity between the Great Hymn to the Aten and Psalm 104.
3. After the rebellion, the serpent people retreated, but not without some of their human slaves. In order to make them more pliable and to ensure that they would not again rebel, the serpent people started to do magical experiments on their remaining human slaves in order to create various beast men (kobolds as dog men, gnolls as hyena men, lizard men, etc.). These will be primarily based upon the various anthropomorphic Egyptian gods. Once enough of these had been bred, they sent an army of beast men to crush the Atenist rebellion. The beast men are now in control of the dungeon.

This campaign will also necessitate two other significant changes from a traditional D&D campaign:

Firstly, the Byzantines did not think well of wizards and sorcery. Thus, magic-users as written would not exist; however, there was a sci-fi/fantasy book I read a couple decades ago that postulated a version of the Greek/Roman Mediterranean where all the laws of ancient science worked instead of the laws of modern science. It had a very cool pseudo-magic/science feel. Thus, the magic-user will be replaced by the philosopher — a class that studies the sciences to create machines and devices with the same effects as magic-user spells.

Secondly, elves, dwarves and halflings all really have their origins in northern european mythology rather than Greek/Mediterranean/African mythology. Thus, they are getting re-skinned as something that resonates with the feel of the campaign:

• Elves will be substituted with Kemites — humans in the serpent peoples’ sphere of influence. They are akin to OD&D elves — able to adventure as either a fighter or a philosopher.
• Dwarves will be substituted with white apes — an intelligent ape race.
• Halflings will be substituted with pygmies — short humans that are really good with missile weapons.

Lost Colonies Session 49

I have not had a very good couple of weeks in terms of gaming. I’ve been ill, the Pathfinder campaign I am playing in hit a major speed bump which probably should have resulted in PCs killing each other and when we re-started the Lost Colonies campaign, the session ended with one of my favorite PCs permanently biting the dust. Though I am an advocate of lethality in my games, I do not necessarily relish in killing off PCs, particularly ones that have had a large impact on my campaign world.

When we last left the party, they had managed to escape certain death in the Brainlasher City by jumping through an inter-dimensional portal which they then managed to destroy. Unfortunately, they found themselves deep beneath the earth in one of the lower levels of the campaign’s megadungeon.

As the party explored, they came upon what amounted to a drug factory. Fungus was being grown and processed to create a highly addictive additive to food stuff that had been shipped across the inter-dimensional portal to help keep the Brain Lasher’s slave population under control. The party efficiently moved through this section, cleared it and then destroyed the facilities (though not without Raine, the party Thief, getting herself addicted).

As they continued to explore, they found the lair of the creatures responsible for the production — toad men. They talked their way into the lair and met with their leader. Unfortunately, the players made a miscalculation and revealed that they were an enemy of a toad men ally and a big fight ensued. Things went rather well for the party until a demon showed up. At this point, Hamlen realized that several party members were unable to have any real effect upon the fight, so he went toe-to-toe with the demon so that the rest of the party could escape.

Considering, he did extremely well — so much so that the party was eventually able to finish it off. In the end, it came down to an initiative roll. Sadly, the demon won and Hamlen was slain. Dn. Goram cast a Speak with Dead spell to determine his final wishes. He distributed his goods among the rest of the party and, being satisfied with his life and his death asked not to be raised.

As I said, this is how the session ended, and (at least for me) was a real downer. I really liked Hamlen and what he had become for my campaign. His death may very well have long term consequences, if for no other reason than I want his influence to continue.

ACKS and Class-Based Damage

After my brief foray into looking at the Basic Rules for 5e (which led to the unfortunate conclusion that it's unplayable as-is), I have shifted my focus back to my own RPG comfort zone — some iteration of B/X (and my favorite B/X retro-clone, Labyrinth Lord). Since I do not have the luxury of playing at the moment, and the only way I can decide whether or not hacking 5e is worth my while is by playing it, I am simply going to go back to hacking the version of the game I know I love to play.

To that end, I would like to highlight the one RPG-related purchase that I have spent more time using in the last year than any other — the ACKS Players Companion (ACKS PC). As with all things B/X, the guys at Autarch reverse engineered all of the core classes (minus the halfling) and then came up with a system with which to create all kinds of classes, including those same core classes. It is rather ingenious, actually, because it is now possible to create campaign-specific classes for a B/X-type of game.

This is important for me, because when I started my Lost Colonies campaign, I only allowed Fighters, Clerics, Magic-Users, Dwarves and Elves. As the campaign evolved, not only did players want to explore different class options, but the campaign world itself demanded it. At the time, however, I didn’t have a lot of options for dealing with these needs other than introduce Advanced Edition classes, which didn’t quite fit.

With the ACKS PC, I am now able to create those classes exactly the way I want to and still have them express some kind of balance according to the logic of the B/X core classes. There is only one issue with the whole system that I am struggling with: weapon damage.

ACKS elegantly divides weapons into various categories where each has a one-handed, one-and-a-half handed and two-handed version. These do from 1d6 to 1d10 damage. This isn’t an issue if the world can logically supply all these types of weapons; however, Lost Colonies is a metal-poor setting where iron, especially, is quite rare. Swords are normally bronze and there is no such thing as a long or two-handed bronze sword. This throws a kink into the ACKS damage system.

To boot, I also normally use universal d6 damage at my table for a variety of reasons; however, using weapon selection is a key element to the custom class design presented in the ACKS PC. Therefore, I need to somehow make weapon choice or damage meaningful in order to properly implement the custom class system.

The ACKS PC has four levels of weapon selection:

• Restricted (as with a Magic-User)
• Narrow (as with a Cleric)
• Broad (as with a Thief)
• Unrestricted (as with a Fighter)

When it comes to weapon damage, there are those who like to emulate Gandalf, the sword-wielding magic-user. They advocate damage by class, where every class can use any weapon, but the damage will vary from class to class:

• Magic-User = d4
• Cleric/Thief = d6
• Fighter = d8

With a little tweak, this class-based damage system can be ported over to the ACKS PC weapon selection:

• Restricted = d4
• Narrow = d6
• Broad = d8
• Unrestricted = d10

This would be a simple solution save for a couple of concerns. I wonder if d10 damage too powerful? Elves and Dwarves would also do d10 via this system and, in the case of elves I do think that is too much.

There are three solutions to this potential problem:

• The first would be to dial back all the damage by one die, where Unrestricted is d8 and Restricted is d3. That poses the question of whether or not the magic-user and cleric are too weak.
• The second option is to use the ACKS PC system to hack the fighter, elf and dwarf to have Broad d8 damage with some kind of weapon specialization/combat bonus; however this would add to the XP total necessary to advance. Fighters would need 2150 XP, elves 4150 and dwarves 2350. It doesn’t seem like much, but especially with elves it certainly feels that way.
• The third option is to use Unrestricted = d10, etc. for human characters and Unrestricted = d8, etc. for demi-humans.

So, my question (especially to those of you who have used class-based damage) which of these options do you like best?

Lost Colonies Sessions 16-18

As you might have noticed, I have not posted anything about my Lost Colonies campaign in a while. This is in part due to my own crazy schedule of late, my own laziness and due to the fact that the party has spent the better part of three sessions inside the "funhouse" dungeon I designed awhile back. After successfully placing the "red dragon" in a bag of holding, and taking care of several backlogged projects (including getting a prothetic arm made for Grak), the party rounded up an expedition of several henchmen, camels, carts and enough food and water for a deep desert exploration in search of the Eye of St. Gabriel. After successfully finding the place — three giant lion heads peaking out of the sand with mouths agape (a la Disney's Aladdin) —the party decided to go through the door in the center mouth, behind which death and mayhem awaited.

I have been very reluctant to try and give a good account of what three sessions inside a funhouse dungeon look like. Suffice it say that the party ran into and triggered quite a number of traps, encountered countless constructs and undead, got separated and lost most of their NPCs. As a Referee, I really enjoyed running the thing and it seriously challenged my players. Having run enough of these over the years, I recognize mental exhaustion when I see it. So, in place of three long-overdue posts, I'll give you some of the highlights from the last three sessions:

• Feeding the dragon. Part of the equipment bought by the party was several sheep and goats, specifically for the purpose of giving their "pet" dragon live prey. They very carefully open the bag (an earlier attempt resulted in the near death of an NPC) and the dragon has enough room to reach out a grab a bite to eat. They carefully worked out a pattern so that everybody (including the dragon) knows what to expect.
• Maze Madness. The characters very quickly found themselves caught inside the Minotaur Maze. One of the rooms has a arena with a pair of mechanical gladiators. Once two characters entered the room, a mechanical king and queen split the party into teams to fight along side one of these gladiators. Characters could not damage the gladiator on their own side, nor the king and queen. Once one side had won, the room would reset after the party left the room and would start all over again once two party members re-entered the room. This became hysterically funny when this aspect of the room was first discovered. Hamlen was trying to recover from having stepped in some green slime. He managed to climb up to a bridge crossing a pool of the stuff after losing one of his spiked boots, which got slimed. As the rest of the party was trying to figure out how to join him up on the bridge without likewise getting slimed, a Coffer Corpse attacked Hamlen. He clubbed it for over 6 points of damage, it "died" and he kicked it off the bridge. One round later, it revived. All but the dwarf and one NPC (neither of which had magical weapons to damage the Coffer Corpse) failed their saving throws and ran in fear — back into the arena where chaos ensued.
• The Climactic Battle. After making their way through the Minotaur Maze, the party confronted what they believe was Xerxes. They weren't entirely certain, because he was wearing the Mask stolen from the Church in Headwaters. This minor detail, however, didn't stop the party from fighting the kind of desperate fight that happens when you run into an arch-nemesis. I love to run these kinds of battles. The energy level on the table is infectious and the ingenuity and creativity of players trying to survive an onslaught of spells and special abilities is always a wonderful thing to see. When Xerxes had survived just about everything the party could throw at him, someone remembered that they had a dragon in a bag. Everybody retreated except for Hamlen, who opened the bag in the general direction of Xerxes. Although extremely happy to have survived, the party soon discovered the downside of this particular strategy. All those magic items Xerxes was using are now in the bag with a very angry dragon who regenerates.
• Choices, choices. The party set off a trap that allowed a rather large amount of acid to seep into various parts of the dungeon. In process of running away from this very real threat they found a room with a puzzle that promised riches or death. They knew that by the time they figured out the puzzle, the acid would block their way out. This didn't stop them from seriously considering staying and going for those riches anyway.
• It is always a good night when players lift up their hands in triumph because they got out of a dungeon alive.

Some observations:

• The 3.5 veterans had a hard time with this adventure. They knew in their bones how dangerous it was and it scared them (a quote I heard several times during the adventure: "We are never going underground again!") They also had a difficult time justifying why a funhouse dungeon would exist. ("Why would anybody build something like this?") Whereas some of the younger guys or the guys that are new to the hobby loved it.
• The Minotaur Maze was far more difficult than even I imaged it would be. The players had to keep track of rations, because starvation became a very real possibility.
• No identify spell means cursed items actually have a chance to get used.
• It is funny how a pattern of random rolls can create a narrative that becomes true even though it was never intended to be true. The party own a magic bow that gives no bonus to hit or damage, but does allow the user to shoot twice per round. Several characters have tried to use it, but when they hit, the damage die always seems to come up 1 or 2. Thus, the characters are convinced it is cursed — and a new magic item is born.

Up next: Hamlen wants to bring a carnival to Headwaters to throw a party.

Running a Sandbox Campaign: Player Expectation

A couple of years ago, I wrote a series of posts about Prepping a Sandbox Campaign. I have also mentioned that I am currently running a 5e campaign ostensibly set in my Lost Colonies campaign world; however, due to the various choices by the players, the bulk of the campaign is actually taking place on a brand new map that I have never run before. The experience has reminded me of some of the fundamental assumptions that I make when running a sandbox campaign and I thought I’d write some of these down and share them.

Player Expectation

As you may have noted in my series on Prepping a Sandbox Campaign, I don’t do a whole lot of detail. Most of the things I prepare are broad brush strokes so that I have enough information that I can wing it if necessary, but not so much that I have wasted a whole bunch of time on something my players have no interest in. This gives me a lot of freedom to shape the campaign to fit my players.

This reality and point of view became very important when I started my most recent campaign. My players are all young and have little or no experience with pencil & paper RPGs. If I imposed a bunch of my own expectations for how this campaign was going to be, I wasn’t likely to succeed in showing my players just how cool RPGs can be.

Therefore, I carefully listened to them when we created characters. I made sure I had an idea of what each person expected their characters to able to do. Some of these are far-off goals for when their characters are much higher level. As a consequence, I knew that some of these expectations were not going to be fulfilled in the short-term; however, I could tease them so that they knew that what they wanted was possible in the long run. Listening to my players and their expectations don’t stop at character creation, though.

One of the adventure locations that I had in place for my new campaign was Akhmed’s old house. For those who don’t know, Akhmed was a long-time PC in my last Lost Colonies campaign who played a central role in developing several key characteristics of the world: Bane Weapons, Lithic Elves and the fact that dwarves are neither male nor female.

At one point during the campaign, Akhmed had hired some Bronze Dwarves to build him an underground home in Headwaters. It was my standard practice to have long-term projects like this take one or more sessions. When a players asked, I would have them roll a d6. On a ‘1’ the project was finished. Each time a player rolled (each session that went by) I would subtract one or more from the roll (depending on the scale of the project). Akhmed had been rolling for several weeks on his project, but never seeing the end. When it was time for the project to be finished, I had him roll and it came out a ‘6.’ On a whim, I informed him that the dwarves had found something that scared them and they boarded up the house and refused to work anymore. It was an adventure seed, because it gave me the ability to place a rip it time and space in his almost completed home that could potentially be something the party explored. For a variety of reasons, that seed never played out in my last campaign. In this campaign, however, it has been the center of my player’s attention.

When I first conceived of the idea of a portal, I had in mind the Portals of Torsh by Rudy Kraft and published by Judges Guild. I had taken part of the provided map, and hashed out some of the broader ideas in much the same way I did in my series on Prepping a Sandbox Campaign. It didn’t go much farther than that, even when my players started poking around (literally).

When my players discovered the portal, I described that it looked like the Aurora Borealis. I also described that it changed color, doing so to let my players know that times was passing as they argued with each other about what to do next. The color change, however, caught their imaginations. They started poking the phenomena. So, I went with it and had the thing change color any time it was poked.

As the campaign progressed, the players started hypothesizing that each color represented a different destination. Since I wasn’t married to the idea that the portal led only to one place, I decided to go with it and began making up different end-points for each color. The players then decided to see if they could get more colors by poking more at the thing. I indulged the idea, and began rolling dice to see if they would get any other result. The dice said yes, and the number of colors and destinations went from one to three to five. Subsequently, this portal to many places has become a key factor in aiding the party on the quest they have all decided to undertake. In other words, I allowed their expectations for my campaign world to shape the world and the campaign itself.

One could quibble with how I allowed player expectation to enter into the game, but I believe it is important for two reasons:

1. It subtly invests the players in the campaign world and can give a sense of accomplishment even in the face of failure. Even if the party is driven away by a superior force of monsters, the object/place is out of reach, there is no treasure or a character dies, the players can still walk away knowing that their hypothesis was at least partially correct. Such success invites the players to make further guesses at how the world works and what is in it. When such guesses start to be at least partially correct more often than not, it encourages further exploration and further guesses. The players begin to talk about the game outside the game and the campaign begins to have a life of its own.
2. It provides a certain amount of surprise for me. One of the things I love most about a sandbox style of campaign is that it provides me with the unexpected. I never know which direction my players are going to go or what puzzle they become determined to solve or how they are going to go about doing just about anything. If I also allow player expectations to color how I respond to such choices, it forces me to be surprised by my own world. For example, I never expected the portal to go anywhere but to a lost temple on another world. I never expected it to be a key locale in a strategy to imprison an ancient dragon. Such are the wonders of allowing player expectation to color a campaign.

I would argue that the sandbox campaign is uniquely able to accomplish fulfilling player expectation because by its very nature it must be flexible and flexibility is key in allowing player expectation to shape a campaign.

Lost Colonies Session 38

When I started writing session reports for my Lost Colonies campaign, one of the things I was interested in was seeing how a group of guys that were introduced into the hobby by 3.5 would react to old school rules, thinking and playing. As I recently reported, the reaction has been overwhelming — these guys now exclusively play older editions and retro-clones. Therefore, that impetus for writing session reports no longer really applies.

I can't remember now on which blog I read it (was it part of the how to do a sandbox meme that has been floating about the last month or so?), but someone somewhere suggested that those of us who do session reports do so from the perspective of how I play this game. In that spirit, I plan on going in a slightly different direction with my session reports in order to try and scratch that itch.

This session opened with a very interesting discussion that realistically could have ended the campaign. Hamlen's player was meditating on character death and had decided that he would rather move on with another character, lest character death be meaningless; however, this was not the message that he had given Dn. Goram via a Speak with Dead conversation they had at the end of last session. In the meantime, Dn. Goram's player was trying to take on the task of new party leader by adopting several of the prejudices (good and bad) of his dead brother…this included a ban on elves. Ahkmed's player then explained that his "dwelf" would have no interest in adventuring with a party that banned elves, particularly since Kavella, the NPC magic-user now reincarnated as an Elf, had approached him with the desire to follow a Bane-Bearer.

I did not interfere much, other than to adjudicate what was player knowledge vs. what was character knowledge and to keep everybody's timeline straight. My players are man enough to know the difference and where quite congenial as they discussed the possible end to their adventuring party and the campaign. Fortunately, everybody came to an agreement as to how they could justify character action that would result in moving foreword.

For my part, I tend to agree with Hamlen's player; however, from very early on reincarnation and raise dead have been part of the campaign (though not easy to get). Each has a price, and I had decided to offer the players an opportunity to raise their fallen comrades at a price (more on that later). Part of the reason I am comfortable with these realities in my campaign world is that in the Orthodox Christian world, making pilgrimages to holy sites (especially with those that have relics of the saints) in order to pray for healing is more than normal. Indeed, the miracles that have resulted are countless. My own wife was the recipient of one such miracle as the result of one of these pilgrimages.

When it comes to Wilderness Encounters, I only do them if the party is explicitly exploring, going into known wilderness or if I really want to (there are times when I'm in the mood to add another random element to the tapestry of my campaign or simply need a delaying tactic in order to give me more time to come up with something because the party has gone on a decidedly unexpected path). I especially ignore random encounters when I and/or my players are really intent on getting on with things — getting to where they need to be in order to accomplish/do what they really want to do. This was the case here — onto the Monastery of St. Urheim!

What then ensued would have been rather funny had not the evening began as it did — Dn. Goram's player had never had to lead and therefore had never paid much attention to the maps that the party had of the monastery. Those that knew where to go wouldn't help because the characters that would know were dead. Thus we spent a lot of time with the party trying to get oriented as per their map.

When running dungeons, I tend to only stock a few important rooms and then create some wandering monster tables. As the players begin to explore, I'll roll for every room they go by to see if there is a monster therein. This not only reduces prep-time, but makes things interesting for me because I have to figure out context on the fly.

These encounters were quite sparse over the evening. In part, because the die rolls deemed it so, but also because there were times when I just wanted to get on with things and the re-orientation process and getting lost was getting in the way of what everybody at the table was interested in doing — completing Dn. Goram's quest to return the Two Swords and seek the aid of St. Urheim with their deceased comrades.

Thus, when the party ventured into an area that they had cleared of evil influence (a spring that had been corrupted by dark fey and an evil, magical gem), and I rolled an encounter, I decided to have some fun. In the absence of dark fey, I deemed that the level was re-occupied by seelie fey that were inclined to tolerate and even help the party. Thus, they began to be followed by Tulip, a pixie who loves honey. After much chaos (including a short dice-fight among the players), the party managed to get enough information out of Tulip to get them going in the right direction.

This put the session back on track, and the party got down to exploring a part of the dungeon they had not yet explored. The most entertaining bit of the evening was when Tyrd (a goblin cook reincarnated as a magic user) managed to cow a bunch of gnolls with a phantasmal force spell of a troll. The party then had them lead them in the general direction they wanted to go (because the gnolls had no idea that there was a chapel any where on this particular dungeon level). They then encountered a group of werewolves led by a Golden Mask who were trying to open one of the secret doors to the chapel.

When I run combat, I don't normally use miniatures; however, when geography, the placement of combatants, etc. gets complicated and/or vital to the outcome, we do break out the minis and this allows the combat to move forward without the confusion that can ensue when I try to describe these complex situations. This combat was one of those, mainly because there were three different groups of combatants (the party, the gnolls, and the werewolves), there was a spell effect that was in place (the illusory troll), the party was interested in casting a lightning bolt and no one won initiative the first round. While it did take some time to set things up, it allowed for every body to clearly understand and communicate what was going on. It also sped up combat tremendously.

Upon returning the Two Swords to their proper place, Dn. Goram was able to have a short conversation with St. Urheim about his brother Hamlen. He was informed that his brother could be raised; however, there were things said and done that were preventing that from happening. If he so chose, either he or his brother could be tested in order to overcome this reality. If Dn. Goram took the test, it would be easier, but he would have to do so without his brother. If Hamlen took the test, it would be harder, but he would have Dn. Goram at his side. Dn. Goram chose to take the test himself.

I did not inform the players what this test would be, because I wanted it to be mysterious (and I hadn't yet filled out some of the details because I didn't know which direction Dn. Goram would go). Here is my thinking: both Dn. Goram and Hamlen have been rather prejudiced against elves. This is in part due to the player's own dislike for the race (both of them prefer dwarves and gnomes over elves) and is also born of the campaign itself. Most of the elves they have encountered during the campaign were either annoying or pathetic. The test either one would have to take would be to face down their own prejudice. Hamlen's would have been harder, because he would have had to walk a mile in another's shoes — he would have come back as an elf and would stay that way until such time that he travelled to the elf-lands in the south and do the bidding of the Elven king.

As it is, we ended the session with the party returning to Headwaters, where they found a contingent of elves waiting for an audience with Dn. Goram (they arrived about the same time Dn. Goram chose his test). His path will include investigating some undead coming out of the sea and a choice as to whether or not to help/allow the destruction of the Elven kingdom or make some kind of sacrifice in order to help them...

Religion Art Right Here

JB of B/X Blackrazor asked a very interesting question (to me, at any rate) in his recent post "Religion Where Art Thou?" Given my own proclivities toward the subject, I thought I'd take a moment to demonstrate several easy ways that religion (a psuedo-Christianity) can be injected into a campaign to add that little bit of depth that only a religious world-view can bring to the table.

• In my own games, I tend to follow in the footsteps of C.S. Lewis, who uses Aslan as an analogue for Christ. I've done this before, but for my Lost Colonies campaign, the fictional Christ-figure is called Isten.
• Symbols have power, especially when they convey a story. There are three holy symbols available to those who follow Isten:

Wolf Hook: This symbolizes suffering. Isten was hung upon a mountain-side by a pair of wolf hooks jammed through his shoulders.

Blood Eagle: This symbolizes both sacrifice and the single person of the God-man. When the wolf-hooks did not kill Isten, he was subjected to the blood-eagle — two slits made in the back through which the lungs are pulled out like wings. The holy symbol always features a two-headed eagle, representing both Isten's natures (God and man) in one person.

Blood Drop: This symbolizes sanctification. Through Isten's suffering and sacrifice, which resulted in his blood being shed, the world is sanctified and made new in him. [This, by the way, is the favorite holy symbol among my players].

• I use bishops and priests as patrons. This is built into the way I use the Cleric class. All adventuring Clerics are deacons and are attached to a bishop. This serves to feed adventure seeds to players as well as put a religious spin on adventuring.
• I use saints...a lot. Every church and temple is dedicated to a different saint. Divine magic items are associated with/named after various saints. Religious relics behave like magic items. Characters will be visited by visions of saints and every now and then by the saints themselves. This adds a nice level of detail to the world and elevates humdrum everyday magic items into religious relics with their own unique back story.
• A major theme of the campaign is the recovery and restoration of lost religious sites. The tent-pole megadungeon is an abandoned monastery. There are lots of religious iconography, symbols, vestments, etc. that have been desecrated/left to rot. This place isn't simply a place where monsters live. It is a place which was lost.
• On the flip side, the major villains of the campaign represent and embody the seven deadly sins. Thus, these aren't just monsters the players are fighting against.
• Bonus spells for Clerics are determined randomly. This provides for a self-fulfilling prophecy. Isten gives his clerics these spells because he knows they will need them. The players want to cast them (especially utility spells that never seem to have a use) so they can get another spell. Therefore they are always looking for (and finding) a creative way to cast them — proving that they needed the spell.
• Any time my players do something religious or something out of faith, I reward them. These rewards are not mechanical — I don't roll a die or add a bonus. They are story-driven. A classic example is my players encountered a pool of acid that a chaotic tribe of humans was using to dissolve their sacrifices to a demonic image (as a rite of passage, they would cut off their own arms, which they would then replace by grafting on giant insect limbs/claws etc.). One of the clerics cast a Purify Food/Water spell (one of those bonus spells) on the acid and another non-cleric player decided to throw his holy symbol into the pool. This bit of religious action was rewarded by the pool being destroyed — it cracked and the acid drained out. Not only that, but it won over a hostile NPC who still loyally adventures with the group.
• Finally, I don't try to re-invent the wheel. Scripture uses metaphor all the time and Christ spoke in parables. In other words, these stories are applicable no matter what the context. As long as the metaphor remains the same, you can easily substitute names, items, etc. for virtually every story in the bible to make it relevant to any campaign world.

Most of these things are done passively with very little effort on my part. Yet, my reward for that small effort is a group of players who see religion and religious action as central parts of their characters — even those who aren't clerics. It makes for a very rich campaign world without having to write up a detailed history of everything.