MAJUS: Marvin and Lord Rathmore are in. How about you?

Today's blatant plug of the MAJUS Kickstarter comes from Jim Wampler, Gygax Magazine Art Editor and creator of Marvin the Mage! We're seven days and $603 away from funding my magic noir game. Don't be left behind once the magic goes away. And for the record, I hate shilling, but it's a necessary evil sometimes. It'll soon be over, I promise, but it's going to get worse the closer we get to the finish line until we get those last couple of C-notes to finish the funding. Apologies in advance!

I’m Very Two-Dimensional

So “Of Unknown Provenance” didn’t fund, depriving generations of future gamers the chance to take a wander through the Night Archive. It’s this sort of hole in our shared cultural landscape that allows “The Jersey Shore” to keep airing, people. When society collapses, you’ll regret not forking over that $20.00.

In all seriousness, however, thank you to everyone who did contribute to the campaign and I’m sorry you won’t be seeing the adventure anytime soon. There’s still hope it may appear someday in some form, but I’ve got a heap on my plate to work through at the moment and projects with paychecks attached to them take precedence.

Even though my project didn’t make the final funding cut, I did get a piece of good news this week and it’s something very few other occupants of the OSR tent can list on their resume: I’ve been rendered in comic form in the latest installment of “Marvin the Mage!” Jim Wampler was kind enough to add a cameo appearance of myself in the midst of a tavern brawl. I think this means that the world of Marvin now contains two RPG writers and designers as residents—myself and Tim Kask. The place is certainly going downhill fast!

A very big “thank you” goes out to Jim for including me in a small capacity in comedic schemes of Marvin and his cohorts. You can check out the page here and play “Guess Who Mike Is?” for yourself.

Moseying

Well, not just yet, but this will be the last evening I'm online until Monday. See you all soon (some of you sooner than others)! Looks to be a great weekend of gaming, hobnobbing, and shilling. Be back with pictures next week.

Cauldron Spirits

Some magic-users eschew the traditional familiars and homunculi for another form of servant: the cauldron spirit. These beings are traditionally recruited from the ranks of the recently-deceased and bound within the mage’s primary cauldron, crucible, forge, or alembic. A cauldron spirit is part-magical item, part-living creature, and can only be created by magic-users or elves of name level or higher.

The creation of a cauldron spirit begins with the mage making contact with a dead soul. Usually this is accomplished with the assistance of the clerical spell, speak with dead, but negotiations with cognitive ghosts is another possibility. The soul to be used in the creation of a cauldron spirit must be willing to serve the mage, and will likely barter for a limited duration of service or some reward that might be of use to the spirit (assistance to living relatives, providing resurrection for the spirit after service, destruction of a hated enemy, etc.). Truly desperate or evil magic-users have employed trap the soul to gain the spirit they need.

Once an arrangement with the spirit has been made, the magic-user performs a ceremony to bind the spirit with its focus object. This rite takes 1d4 hours to complete and costs 5,000 gp in materials. Any interruption before the ceremony’s completion negates both the rite and the components involved, requiring the magic-user to start from scratch.

Each cauldron spirit has a loyalty score as determined by the spell-caster’s Charisma. This score can rise or fall depending on how the magic-user treats his spirit or abides by the agreement struck with the ghost prior to its employment. Any command the magic-user gives the spirit which goes against its nature requires a successful loyalty check for the spirit to comply and assist its master. A cauldron spirit who refuses to comply with its master’s command may be forced to follow directions. In order to compel the spirit to abide by its master’s orders, the magic-user must spend two complete rounds forcing its will upon the spirit. The cauldron spirit must then make a save vs. spells or concede to the spell-caster’s wishes. Each time a magic-user successfully compels the spirit to obey reduces the ghost’s loyalty score by one point.

The physical destruction of a cauldron spirit’s focus item or a successful dispel magic cast against the same releases the spirit from its bonds and negates the item’s ability to house another such ghost. For this reason, most magic-users keep their cauldron spirits safe at home. The creator of a cauldron spirit can free its ghost at any time by conducting an hour-long rite that employs 500 gp worth of materials.

The benefits of having a cauldron spirit are threefold. Firstly, all spell-casting times (if used) are reduced by half. Secondly, the cost of creating magic items and researching spells are reduced by 25% as is the time required to create them. Thirdly, a cauldron spirit can “store” spells as if it were a magic-user equal to half its master’s level rounded down. These spells are typically utilitarian (detect magic, read magic, dispel magic, etc.), but some spellcasters trust their cauldron spirits enough to allow them to hold offensive magics in case their laboratories should come under attack. These spells are cast as if by the magic-user, himself. There are no innate restrictions keeping a cauldron spirit from turning its stored magic upon its master, however, and magic-users are advised to keep this in mind before gifting their magical servants with powerful, destructive spells.

“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.

Hip-deep in the Mainstream

Although it's easy to disparage such MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft or Everquest, one can't deny that they have introduced the formerly enigmatic terms and concepts of roleplaying into mainstream culture. Even at the height of the D&D Boom of the 1980s, to see the following in a mass market syndicated comic strip would have been unimaginable. Behold Friday's The Wizard of Id:

The only thing about the above which saddens me is that, while there is a larger percentage of the population than ever who now gets that joke, only a fraction of it understands where those terms originated. And of that percentage, many of them would never consider playing a pen-and-paper roleplaying game and would be insulted if it was suggested that they share the same heritage of those so-called "nerds" who were indulging in this form of recreation more than three decades ago.

It's hard to be a trend-setter.

Happy Halloween

When Humor Passes its Freshness Date

I found this comic in the back pages of issue #2 of Gryphon, a game magazine that I never heard of until I picked up this copy during my distillation of gaming material last month. They say that true humor is timeless, and if that is the case, this comic is most certainly low on the "Ha Ha Funny List of All Time." Lacking a suitable test audience of the appropriate age, I can only imagine the confusion this comic would instill in the mind of anyone who wasn't around to witness a Wisk commerical during the '70s.

Even more unsettling is that, should George Lucas have his continued way with our cutural heritage, even Darth Vader as depicted in the original trilogy may one day be excised from the minds of young Star Wars fans, replaced by Animated Ankin Skywalker.

File Under “Things I Wish I Had Said”

Leave it to Red to sum up my feelings at the moment. Man, am I beat.

This week was pretty much shot to hell, but in a good way. I managed to continue to beat the book into submission and I can see the end of the path through the forest of prose now. I’m confident that I’ll everything but the crying done by the end of the month, just in time for me to enjoy a nice break for the Fourth of July. I’ve even managed to start in on this next mysterious project and, after the literary knife fight which the current book began with, the manner in which this one is rolling off the fingertips is an oasis in the Drast of Creative Desolation. I have a good feeling about this one. Hopefully, I won’t be the only one.

GWAR was an unfortunate disappointment and if the show hadn’t been cheap and local, I’d be mighty pissed. The problem was mostly with the venue and with the people I was forced to share my quadrant of it with. I was glad that I finally got to experience them live, as it confirmed something that I’ve long suspected: GWAR is one of those rare bands which is much more smarter than the majority of its audience. If only some of those knuckleheads at the show realized that the butt of the joke was them… Luckily, it looks like Mike’s Punk Rock Summer 2010 has gained a new date, for Blondie’s playing in the city come August. GWAR and Blondie in one summer; one can’t dispute that I have a wide range of musical appreciation.

I haven’t so much as looked at the swag I got on Free RPG Day. I wish I had snagged a copy of D-Infiity, but I missed that it had Mutant Future content and put it down as another indie and 3.5 RPG game mag. I did walk away with the Harn quick start and adventure. Since I’ve had absolutely no experience with the system or setting, I’m looking forward to reading it…as soon as I get a free moment, that it. So, September, maybe?

I’ve got a few things on the line for next week, possibly a piece of news or two to reveal, but we’ll see where we end up after the weekend. I still need to polish up a few things for my Watchfires & Thrones session on Sunday and I’ve got a handful of minis that have been begging for a coat of paint—so I can unleash them on the players in the next session or two.

Enjoy your weekend, folks. I’m off line until Monday.