Establishing Boundaries in the Realms

Having decided to go ahead with a 2^nd edition AD&D game in the Forgotten Realms, my first task was deciding what to bring to the table and what to leave on the shelf. Between the various rules and campaign supplements available for 2^nd Edition and the Realms, there’s a small mountain of books waiting to be climbed. And I wanted this to be fun, not mountaineering.

Deciding my limits for the rules was easy. Although not my usual “go to” D&D rules, I’ve never had too much a problem with 2^nd Edition in its initial form. The core rules are close enough to 1^st edition in practice and don’t make for far-reaching changes to the original advanced game. I’ve found that it’s only once you start bolting on the supplemental material that the power levels start getting wonky and the wheels fall off.

So no problem here: I’d only allow the players the class and race options available in the Players Handbook. No “Complete Book of…” class kits allowed, no Tome of Magic spells, and especially nothing from the Player’s Option books! This kept it strictly in the classic AD&D family, and had the bonus benefit of freeing me from such troublesome classes as assassins, cavaliers, and barbarians. I had forgotten that 2^nd Edition removed half-orcs as a playable class, but that wouldn’t matter for what I had in mind for the campaign. And, of course, as the DM, I could make use of any of the verboten material freely. Sometimes it’s good to be boss.

Choosing the Realms material I intended to limit myself to required a bit more thinking. My introduction to the Realms—outside of Ed’s excellent Dragon articles—had been the “gray box.” Using that as the backbone was a no-brainer. But I’ve got a respectable collection of other Realms stuff I’ve accumulated over the years. Would say the material in The Dalelands supplement trump what was presented in the Gray Box, which was much less detailed or would I stick to the bare bones presentation found in the original set?  Would I make the Volo series my primary source for all things Realms? Was I going to concern myself with Realms canon?

I wrestled with these decisions a bit, and my original thought was to go all the way back and just utilize whatever information was given in the Gray Box, building my own campaign from that modicum of information. The designer in me loved the idea of such a challenge and I readily imagined myself pouring over the two slim books from that set, ferreting out small nuggets of information and implied hints at the larger world to build upon. But then I remembered the real purpose of the summer campaign: Let Mike have some fun for a change. This isn’t work, knucklehead!

Ultimately, I made what I feel is the wisest choice and decided that the only limitations I’d place on myself was “Is the ‘canonical’ material in X entertaining, inspiring, useful, or fun? If so, use it. If not, forget it.” This gave me a lot of leeway while still maintaining a game which would be easily identifiable as the Forgotten Realms to anyone playing or observing it. Sure, a die-hard Realms aficionado might take me to task for fudging a few dates or adding new places, but last time I checked, I didn’t need anyone to vouch for the orthodoxy of my home games.

And speaking of dates and orthodoxy, this led me to my biggest alteration of the established Realms’ timeline: The Time of Troubles.

It never happened, folks.

I started running my first Realms game back in 1987 when the Gray Box was released. Reading that set completely changed how I approached world design. In fact, the experience of turning the pages of that set remains such a developmental milestone for me that I can still remember what food I ate and what was playing on my tape deck as I paged through Cyclopedia of the Realms (if you’re interested, I’ll always associate the Gray Box with port wine cheese, Paul Simon’s Graceland, and Eddy Grant’s Killer on a Rampage.)

So when the Time of Troubles happened, it needless to say had a great impact on my vision of Faerûn. Although even then I realized it was a marketing ploy to steer gamers towards the 2^nd edition of the game, I made a half-hearted attempt to adjust my own version of the Realms to accommodate the changes inflicted by the Time of Troubles. But it always stuck in my craw a bit. Years later, it seems that most of the world-shaking changes that Time of Troubles wrought have vanished (Bane’s been back for a while now), so why bother? Let’s just pretend it never happened and excise any obvious Time of Troubles-related material from the campaign setting. It’s surprisingly easy.

Removing the Time of Troubles was also a breeze due to my choice of when to set the campaign. Rather than keep the game relatively current to the established timeline, I went back to the beginning. This campaign takes place in 1358 DR, the Year of the Shadows (and interestingly not “Year of Shadows” as later supplements would refer to it), the suggested starting year in the original Gray Box. So technically and temporally, somewhere out there in the Realms, the campaign I ran in 10^th grade is currently underway with a much younger Michael at the helm. Maybe I should finagle a crossover event between the two groups?

The last limitations I needed to establish were campaign ones, boundaries stipulated by the focus of the campaign. I had a few possible themes and potential plots I wanted to introduce (which I’ll cover in a forthcoming post) that would be best done if I drew a few lines in the proverbial sand. In the end, it came down to demi-humans in character creation. With a small group, I wanted humans to equal the number of demi-humans (if not outnumber them) in the party. Originally, I was looking at three players, and decided only one person could play a demi-human, ability scores allowing. At the last moment, we picked up a fourth player, so I relaxed that limit to two non-human PCs in the party. But there was a catch to this: To quote a famous ad slogan for Talislanta, “No elves!”

What? No elves in a Forgotten Realms campaign? You’re mad!

There’s a method to my madness, gentle reader, one I’ll explain in a future post.

“Out of the Box” Game Summary

Despite a much smaller turnout than I’ve become used to for one of my gaming sessions at the FLGS, the “Out of the Box” experimental session did indeed take place yesterday. I’d rate it in the 65% successful category whereas a usual Labyrinth Lord session is 85-90% successful (for me at any rate). Only three people attended and it was not the ideal mix for a game, but I forged ahead nonetheless.

Most of the afternoon’s exploits occurred around the Keep (of Borderland’s fame) and the Haunted Keep (from the sample dungeon at the back of the Moldvay rulebook). The session ended with three-quarters of the party dying and the last member escaping with all the loot—about average for an 1st level party right out of the box.

While the adventuring portion of the day was only average, the point of the “Out of the Box” experiment—to see if it was possible to revisit the game without succumbing to the preconceived notions that come with thirty years of involvement in the hobby—was by far more successful, surprisingly so, in fact. Having re-read Moldvay Basic with what I hoped was a pair of novice’s eyes, I came away with fresh notions and a few house rules that I would never have considered otherwise.

The biggest joy of the process, however, was reacquainting myself with the Keep. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve bothered to look back on that stony edifice, but, once I did, what I found surprised me. The Keep gets a lot of flak from folks who’ve never actually experienced it firsthand or did so only in their youth. The lack of names for its inhabitants is often cited as one of the flaws of the place. Having returned to the Keep with more mature eyes, I can only say that it is one of the finer examples of “home base” design I’ve encountered. Gary certainly knew what the hell he was doing when he put that place together.

In my youth, I remember looking at the Keep and wondering why all this “useless” information was provided: details about guild fees, storage of trade goods, the habits of residents after-hours, and the like. Now I found all this to be an immense springboard for not only future possibilities of conflict and adventure, but as a means to bring the location to life.

In yesterday’s session, the thief decided to see if it would be possible to rob the chapel, perhaps acquiring some of its overly-priced holy water as well as cash. That heist, as unsuccessful as it was, was a joy to run as a referee because I had all the pertinent information at my fingertips: the layout of the church, the probable positions of guardsmen, the surrounding buildings and their heights, and information as to whether or not there would be any cash in the donation box in the event that the thief got inside.

When it comes to refereeing style and advance preparation, I’m definitely more in the “free-wheeling, it’ll come to me when it’s needed” school, but the Keep showed me that there is something to be said for sparse, yet precise, game notes. It got me to reconsider, if not revamp, my style of game prep and I’ll be making some adjustments to my notes over the holidays before the Watchfires & Thrones game recommences next year. Even with thirty-years of gaming experience under my belt, Gary can still run rings around me when it comes to game design. Here’s one student who will undoubtedly never surpass his master.

The “Out of the Box” experiment allowed me to walk away with two nifty house rules. One was a complete surprise. With me reacquired novice’s eyes, I came up with a system that determines a PC’s social class, previous profession, connections to other characters, and, optionally, reason for adventuring in a single action. I was impressed with my own creativity and I’ll be fine-tuning that method and submitting a piece on it to Fight On!

The second house rule was a simple method for determining and tracking wear and tear on a character’s arms and equipment. That’s not something I usually pay much (read “any”) attention to, but when the Keep’s description mentioned that there was a smithy that repaired such items, my novice brain told me I had to come up with a way to keep that poor guy employed. And frankly, in a world where a suit of plate mail runs you 60 gold pieces, anything that causes the characters to continue to spend money on arms and armor is a good thing from the referee’s point of view.

The method I developed was this: Whenever a PC rolled a “1” on an attack, his weapon became worn and I had him put a mark next to the item on this character sheet. After three such marks, the weapon broke and became useless. It would have been possible to have some of the damage repaired (have all but a single check removed since you can’t get a weapon back to “new” status) for a fee at the smithy. For armor, I used a similar method. Any time an opponent scored a “20” on its attack against the PC, the player made a mark next to their armor and the rules above applied. It was a simple yet elegant solution to the problem—provided you’re not already using ones and twenties for fumbles and critical hits. I’m on record as being against those things anyway, so it works fine for me.

Nevertheless, I realize that some people expect that there will be critical hits in D&D—nearly forty years of house rulings tend to do that. But I wanted to do something different with the way I adjudicated such blows in the “Out of the Box” game. In a response to this, I came up with a “floating critical hit” idea.

In my Labyrinth Lord game, I’ll tell the players what an enemy’s AC is so that they know what they need to hit the beast. In theory, they have their attack matrix written down at the bottom of their character sheet so it’s a simple matter of looking down to see that they need “X” to hit AC “Y”. I say “in theory” because I have a player or two who still rolls their attack die and then looks at me like a deer in headlights while they wait for me to tell them if they succeeded or not. That drives me up a wall.

So to avoid that, I decided that critical hits would be a result of a d20 roll that resulted in exactly the number they needed to hit their opponent’s AC. It would be the same 5% chance as rolling a natural twenty, but that “20” would change from AC to AC. So, if as a 1st level character, you need a 13 to hit AC 6, a roll of “13” (not counting modifiers) meant that the attack bypassed the opponent’s armor completely and did maximum damage. As one little wrinkle to this, only fighters and demi-humans could score a critical hit. That was my little way of rewarding the otherwise overlooked fighter.

As of now, I doubt that “Out of the Box” will become a recurring campaign. I may return to it as a one-shot from time-to-time, but I think I have too much already invested in my Labyrinth Lord campaign setting to branch off into a second fantasy campaign. It’s much more likely that I’ll take the lessons I learned and some of the neater ideas I came up with for that setting and import them over to the Kinan-M’Nath. Despite this reluctance to return, however, the concept of an “Out of the Box” game is a good one and I’d recommend it to anyone who digs crazy thought experiments of this sort. Revisiting old ground with fresh eyes is a fascinating experience, even an instructive one, for jaded old referees like myself.

The Devil’s in the Details: Gnomes

Those of you who’ve had the opportunity to peruse the early issues of Fight On! are no doubt aware of the excellent three-part series written by Kesher of Sandbox Empire called “The Devil’s in the Details.” For the uninitiated amongst you, the series featured a set of random tables intended for use when a player rolls up a demihuman PC (or when the referee wants to flesh out an NPC). Although some entries on the table were unique to the author’s home campaign world, most were broad enough to be used with any D&D game.

I’m intending on using these tables (with a few substitutions) during character generation this Sunday. Unfortunately, the original series only covered dwarves, elves, and halflings, which wouldn’t be a problem if I was running a by-the-book game. But my campaign world also offers three additional races as player character classes: the gnome, the orc, and the hurg (a “hairy man of the forest” which owes equal debts of gratitude to old episodes of “In Search Of…” and the article “The Wuuky!” by Moritz Mehelm and Frank Ditsche from Fight On! #5). Therefore, I’ve had to come up with three more sets of tables done in the style of the originals.

Below are the tables for gnomes. Like Kesher’s originals, a few entries are unique to my world but they’re mostly suitable for any traditional D&D campaign. I’ve purposely tried to return the gnome to his roots as a woodlands and forested hills resident and not the technological wiz kid he’s since become. Although I have no problem mixing technology with fantasy, I just don’t think the gnome is the way to do it.

d20 Roll (Roll 3 times or pick 3)	Many Gnomes…
1	Have skin the color of walnuts or rich loam.
2	Know all the animals that live near their homes by name.
3	Believe that the mastery of puzzles and riddles is a noble goal in life.
4	Have trouble growing facial hair.
5	Do wear red caps, but of the stocking variety not the pointed kind.
6	Find practical jokes to be the highest form of humor.
7	Know hundreds of different knots.
8	Are fascinated by gemstones.
9	Keep family journals dating back generations.
10	Build their burrows near rivers and lakes, enjoying boating in the warm months.
11	Can create woodworking wonders.
12	Enjoy spirited debates and will only end an argument after it has been sufficiently discussed.
13	Tend to secret gardens in the forests and hills.
14	Share a burrow with their extended family.
15	Despise trolls and trollkin for their enslavement and mistreatment of gnomes.
16	Enjoy bowls as a sport and take matches between villages very seriously.
17	Treat elves as if they were kin, only taller.
18	Look at dwarves as respected father figures and big brothers.
19	Like humans but wish that more of them respected the natural world.
20	Enjoy playing practical jokes on hurgs.

d16 Once	Some Gnomes…
1	Wear wooden shoes as daily footwear.
2	Never speak while above ground, preferring to revel in the sounds of nature.
3	Can detect hidden springs by scent alone.
4	Have a small mammal as a companion.
5	Are envious of dwarven beards and grow wispy chin hairs to compensate.
6	Husband glowworms to light their burrows.
7	Can speak the language of badgers and hedgehogs.
8	Have a fear of heights.
9	Succumb to the lure of Chaos and dwell in the deep places of hill and hollow.
10	Have a fondness for halfling pipeweed.
11	Pan for gold and gems as a hobby.
12	Attract butterflies when walking about the woods.
13	Take up portraiture and painting landscapes.
14	Have metallic-colored hair, with silver and copper being the most common of these hues.
15	Dedicate their lives to find a single, perfect gemstone.
16	Are constantly dirty, as they find earth, leaves, and flowers to be the finest smells in the world.

d16 (1d3 times)	Common Traveling Gear
1	A red stocking cap.
2	A hedgehog companion.
3	A saw-back dagger.
4	A knife-handled walking stick.
5	A brass lantern inscribed with intricate designs and holding numerous glowworms.
6	A parasol.
7	A waterproof poncho of many interior pockets.
8	A coil of rope they can knot in seconds.
9	A jeweler’s loupe.
10	A long-stemmed, clay pipe.
11	A set of paints and brushes.
12	A chapbook on beard fashions throughout the ages.
13	A wooden puzzle box.
14	A case containing carpentry and woodworking tools.
15	A gold prospecting pan.
16	A pair of wooden clogs.

The Ten Families

A couple weeks back, I wrote about the idea that I had had about creating a list of famous families and then having human characters roll on that table during character generation to see which bloodline they’re part of. I’m skimming Herodotus’ The Histories again for something I’m writing, so it seemed like a good time to put that plan into action while the inspiration for the idea was in front of me. I started sketching out ideas and very quickly compiled a list of ten families. I figure that’s a good number to start with and I can always add to it later. The table is a bit too big to reproduce here on the blog so I’ve settled on a screen grab of the first page. You can click the image for a larger version. If that’s still not enough for you, you can check out the complete .pdf here.

The table’s pretty self-explanatory. The only thing that might need clarification is the “Bloodline trait” column, which is rolled for after the character’s family has been determined. On a 1 in 6, the character has especially strong family blood and possesses the trait - either positive or negative - which is commonly associated with that bloodline. Originally, I had the chance at a 1 in 4 but I’m currently of the mind that that may be too much. I want to add a little randomness to the process but not have it become a tremendously common occurrence.

In sticking with my ethos of the illusion of depth, I’ve got very little clue as to what most of the events mentioned in the table actually are, nor am I worried about it. If a player sees something that catches his interest though, I’d be eager to sit down and think more on the subject, perhaps if only to produce a few threads for the character to follow.

It’s a germ of an idea and I like it in concept. I’ll need to take it out for a test run before I decide if this is something that will be a boon or a bane to the shared world experience, however.