Question Authority—Especially if that Authority is Me

I’ve noticed something about my own players and several others that I’ve shared a table with over the last two years, a phenomenon that I’ve not been able to deduce the whys and wherefores of. It might be a strictly local trend, one that doesn’t occur elsewhere, but it could also be indicative of the way the game has changed after the release of the 3rd edition. Maybe you’ve seen this happen too.

My players don’t ask a lot of questions in-game. This is completely alien to me because that’s all I ever do when I’m playing. Maybe it’s because I’m a referee or a designer or simply because I play these games to temporarily lose myself in the fantasy we create and becoming invested in the shared world makes it easier to do so. Most of my players, however, and others that I’ve gamed with are seemingly content to lay back and assume a completely submissive role in the play experience. Unfortunately, this can be fatal to their characters.

Here’s a recent example: I was running a quick filler game using the material I created for my Out of the Box campaign. It got off to a good start with the players going to the tavern and one making an inquiry about any recent goings on in the area. The barkeep revealed that some settlers had been attacked on the road recently, and had been kidnapped by forces unknown. I was happy. The guys were interacting with the campaign world at large, which was a big step forward for some of them. But then old habits kicked in.

They learned that the local temple couldn’t provide any healing potions, but heard a rumor that a witch in the woods might be able to. Rather than ask any more questions, they figured they’d just stumble around in the woods for a while and run into her. Things got worse after they decided to leave the safety of the keep and go dungeon-crawling. There were three options on a map that a local had, all of which were merely names on a paper. The party picked one at random and headed for it, not even pausing to see if anyone knew anything about the site they had chosen. As it turned out, the dungeon they picked was scaled for 3rd level characters and the expedition resulted in a massacre.

The same tendency occurs during the actual adventure. In my Stonehell game, the PCs occasionally encountered phenomenon or items that they didn’t recognize. Occasionally a player might ask something like, “Does my magic-user know anything about this?” or “As a dwarf do I recognize that?” When I answer “No,” they seem to take that as “No and you never will.” The thought of seeking out an NPC expert doesn’t even occur to them.

Compare this to my approach in the Labyrinth Lord game I’m participating it. We were running through the Village of Hommlet and the party, after learning of the Moathouse, decided to head out there and loot it. Immediately. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I cried. “Let’s see if we can’t learn a thing or two before we go out there.” My magic-user asked around town and learned of the backstory behind the Battle of the Moathouse and talked to a few soldiers who had been there that day. In doing so, he got a rough sketch of the exterior and learned that there was a single known dungeon level underneath the fort. He also got Rufus to kick in some troops and offer up a bounty for exploring the place. Sometimes knowing these little facts and whether you’re bound to run into goblins instead of orcs can save lives, especially fragile, 1st level lives.

After a bad run in with the frogs, my magic-user consulted with the local druid, thinking that if anyone could offer some advice about giant frogs, he’d be the guy. This lead to us getting a magic orb that created a cloud of monstrous flies and helped draw off some of the big batrachians in our path.

Maybe I’m just an exemplary player or perhaps reading all those “advice to the players” articles in Dragon back in the day stuck in my brain. Whatever the case, I’m just not seeing this trend in the gamers I’ve been playing with and I’m wondering why. Is it merely because they are “poor” players or is this symptomatic of a larger cause? Have video games that feed the players tidbits of information at predetermined points made gamers more passive? Did including a “Gather Information” skill make players think that the only way to get important information was to make a skill check and when that skill is missing from their plate of options they believe that information is unavailable? Am I a sucky referee who runs a game that provides no impetus for the players to peer beyond the surface? I really don’t know.

This had been on my mind a lot lately, mostly because I’m re-examining what types of games I enjoy running and because of some changes in my regular group. I look at Jeff Rient’s Twenty Questions and part of me wonders if it’s even worth answering them if nobody’s going to make those inquiries in the first place. This also explains my request that folks interested in play testing not “lay back and think of England” but get excited and get involved. A great deal of my lack of enthusiasm for continuing to run Labyrinth Lord comes from this absence of investment in the shared world we’re supposed to be creating around the table.

I’m not trying to be harsh or rude to my players, but it’s something that I have noticed in the year and a half we’ve been together. Not from all of them, but enough that it affects me and my own interest in running a game. And with my plan to introduce a new setting/game that I consider to be my most personal and immersive campaign ever, these concerns make me think that this is not the right time or group to do so.

Am I alone in noticing this trend in gamers, especially younger ones? Is this a singular phenomenon or has this affected your own games as well? I’d really like to diagnose this affliction and see what might be done to address it.

Third Annual NYC Arneson Memorial Game Day

This is a “Save the Date” sort of thing. More details as they emerge:

On Saturday, October 1st, 2011, the Third Annual NYC Arneson Memorial Game Day will be held at the Brooklyn Strategist to honor the life and accomplishments of Dave Arneson. As of right now, Tavis from The Mule Abides will be running Adventurer Conqueror King and I will be running a delve into Stonehell Dungeon. Others are encouraged to volunteer to participate by either running a game of their own or merely stopping in to play. More details will undoubtedly be posted here, over at The Mule Abides, or on this thread at the Original D&D Discussion Forum.

An Evaluation of Watchfires & Thrones: Year One

Please forgive the cross-posting as this article appears on both Archive of the Rotten Moon and The Society of Torch, Pole and Rope. It appears on the former since it concerns the Watchfires & Thrones campaign and has been repeated on the latter as it deals with old school roleplaying campaigns in general and may be instructive to those thinking of starting or at the beginning of a classic D&D game.

This Sunday marked the one-year anniversary of our Labyrinth Lord campaign. In the past twelve months, we’ve met thirty-nine times for a rough total of 150+ hours of gaming. The original intent was to have a game schedule of three weeks on/one week off, making for forty meetings a year. As you can see, we came very close to hitting that mark.

The Hard Numbers and Mechanics of the Campaign

When the campaign began, each player created two characters to help them survive the very lethal first two levels of campaigning. Many of those characters have come and gone, and with the exception of one player, no one has an original PC left on their roster. The largest experience point total for a single character is 14,848; the lowest is 2,500. We’ve had two players leave the group due to real life issues and a third player who had to take two extended leaves of absence for the same reason. Of the original three players from the first session, two remain active.

Player character deaths were rife in the early months of the campaign, but stabilized as the survivors advanced in level, a change was made to the critical hit house rule, and the players themselves learned from the mistakes of the past. There have been a total of twenty-two PC deaths (two of which were later raised from the dead) and three NPC deaths (including two dogs). The most PCs lost by a single player is nine.

The campaign itself has spanned two worlds: the original pulp sword & sorcery venue largely centered in and around the city of Rhuun and my traditional D&D campaign world of R’Nis. Between those two worlds the party has explored a dead sorcerer’s tomb, a temple dedicated to the Black Goat, a megadungeon that was built by aliens, Stonehell Dungeon, the ruined cellars of a wizard, a series of insect-infested caves, a ruined monastery holding the blood of a goddess, and (tentatively) a crumbling temple inhabited by hobgoblins. They’ve also participated in a street fair gone amok and defended a frontier homestead against an army of goblin raiders. Although many of the adventures have been homebrewed, other material has come from “The Ruined Monastery” by James Maliszewski, Night’s Dark Terror by Jim Bambra, Graeme Morris, and Phil Gallagher, The Horror on the Hill by Douglas Niles, Temple of the Ghoul by H. John Martin, The Veiled Society by David “Zeb” Cook, and “The Pits of Bendal Dolum” by Doug Lyons.

There have been many rule selections and changes over the past year, and some have worked better than others. The campaign began using the Original Edition Characters rules for Labyrinth Lord, but changed to straight Labyrinth Lord minus thieves after two sessions, mostly due to the fact that I wanted to have monsters with variable damage dice. Character generation was 3d6 in order and two rolls allowed for starting hit points. Once the PCs left the pulp campaign world, Advanced Edition Companion rules were added to the game and starting attributes changed to 4d6 arranged where desired. Thieves also became available to players at that time. Critical hits were initially handled as a “20” results in double damage. This rule changed around the middle of the campaign to a roll of “20” meaning full damage. This resulted in less PC casualties. Clerics cannot cast spells at 1st level and must wait until reaching 2nd level to access their first daily prayer.

My intention was to run an open sandbox campaign where the players could choose what adventure seeds to pursue against a backdrop of a vibrant, constantly changing, living world. The plan was that the PCs would build their fame and fortune and eventually acquire or build a stronghold of their own. This endgame would effectively bring this portion of the campaign to a close.

Evaluation of the Campaign and its Progress

In my eyes, the Watchfires & Thrones campaign has been a successful one. I approached the game with an equal mixture of excitement and trepidation. This was to be my first time in the referee’s chair for more than session or two in almost a decade. I was confident with my decision to use Labyrinth Lord as the ruleset, but simply knowing the rules cold is by no means a guarantee of success. There are too many X factors that can scuttle a campaign before it hits its stride and I was out of practice in how to handle them. To my relief, the rust came off quickly and I’ve been able to handle most of the in and out of game issues with aplomb.

It is the rare campaign that is 100% successful, however, and Watchfires & Thrones is no exception. Looking back on the past year, I can see several missteps that I wish I had avoided and paths I should have taken. These might not have always been noticeable to my players, but they were glaringly apparent to me.

My first mistake was succumbing to gamer A.D.D. on the cusp of the campaign’s start date. Although I had been preparing to run things in my longtime campaign world of R’Nis, I decided at the last minute to switch gears and do a more hardcore pulp swords & sorcery setting instead. This meant that I effectively put myself back to square one in regards to prep work, which would continue to haunt me during the early sessions. I felt that the setting never really came to life for the players as I myself had no clear understanding of the campaign world outside of a handful of idle thoughts stung together on the flimsiest of frameworks. I was constantly trying to do work on the campaign world and was barely a step ahead of the players at any given time, which if you’re trying to use your roleplaying game as a recreational escape is not the best route to take.

That constant scramble led to my making the decision to transport the entire party to my regular campaign world via a magical portal. This allowed me to keep the campaign moving with the established characters while giving me access to all the work I had already done. But there were unforeseen, long-lasting ramifications to that decision.

The swapping of campaign worlds also occurred not long after the release of Advanced Edition Companion for Labyrinth Lord. Since the world of R’Nis had been forged in my days of playing AD&D and its inhabitants skewed in the direction of those rules, I threw open the floodgates of character generation for all subsequent PCs starting play in the new world. This meant that formerly verboten classes like thief, assassin, monk, and others were now playable. It also affected the manner in which attributes were rolled. Rather than using the 3d6 in a row method, I allowed “roll 4d6, drop one and arrange.”

While this decision didn’t result in a gross unbalancing of the game, I personally feel that it didn’t add anything to the campaign either. I had been concerned that the campaign was missing something by reducing the probability of someone rolling scores good enough to play a ranger or paladin and I wanted to allow those classes to be played. But after representatives of those classes entered the game, I discovered that they really don’t bring all that much to the table and, like I discovered with thieves, a campaign can roll merrily along without their presence. After having seen both methods of character generation in play to compare and contrast, I’ve come to the conclusion that 3d6 in order is the superior method for classic style play and I will likely be sticking to that system of character creation from now on. I’ll also be limiting other material from AEC in future games as well, preferring to rely on homebrewed materials that make the campaign world more uniquely my own over “stock fantasy D&D.”

My other major issue was my failure to take the desires of the players into account when working on the campaign. I should have questioned the players more often and earlier to better determine what they wanted out of the campaign. The problem, to my eyes anyway, was that I had anticipated running this wide-open sandbox world, one where the players would be free to chose from any number of adventure seeds. I did a lot of preparation to allow for this once we swapped worlds, only to discover that the group was pretty enamored with Stonehell and would happily continue delving there until they reached name level, uncovered all its secrets, or the campaign collapsed—depending on which came first. As the old line states: “Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight…and don’t bring the whole sandbox when the guys just want to play in a hole in the ground.” It’s not a game-breaking issue by any means, but it does mean that I could have used my energies in a more productive manner by concentrating on my campaign tent-pole instead of the surrounding, never-to-be-visited locales.

There were (and remain) a few minor quibbles and reevaluations, but since this campaign was intended to get me back up to fighting weight, referee-wise, I’ve looked at these as lessons rather than problems. Amongst them are whether I will have future starting players roll up two characters and run them off and on. There are benefits to this, especially at starting level, but the dividing of experience amongst multiple characters makes for a slower level progression, which in turn limits me in regards to what fun monsters and magic I can throw at the party. I may allow a player to run multiple PCs in the future, but this would be by player choice rather than campaign design.

Somewhat connected to this issue is the use of training to advance in level, resulting in a time and money cost. I’m currently using training in my game, but I’ve come to the conclusion that this is baggage from AD&D that doesn’t have a place in original or basic D&D and their retro-clones. I’ve got a simpler system in mind, one that allows for more player choice when it comes to advancement, and I think my next and subsequent campaigns will do away with training completely if this other system works as intended.

One final problem bears mentioning as it is something every referee who runs a game long enough encounters: burnout. A few weeks ago, I was feeling this to great effect. My energy levels were running low and there was even one session that I really didn’t feel like having because I was at the end of my creative tether. I thought the campaign might be overdue for a temporary sabbatical as I recouped and regained my energy. However, I’ve continued to push through these feelings and it seems that I’m getting back into the groove of the game. The last two sessions have done wonders for my attitude, and although other real-life concerns remain to plague me and I have a tendency to want to do anything but sit inside and play once spring arrives, I’m hopeful that by continuing to work through the slack times the campaign will continue until it reaches its natural ending. My advice to other struggling referees: Keep pushing until you break on through the wall. It’s worth it.

Despite all these concerns, which may be more apparent to myself than my players, the Watchfires & Thrones campaign has been a great source of fun for the guys who come to the table each week. Some have stated on more than one occasion that this campaign is simply the best one they’ve ever played in. I’m prone to be modest in the face of such praise, but so long as everyone else is having a good time and keeps coming back for more, I’ll accept those compliments as intended.

I am a Meta-Gaming Referee

When WotC announced that they’re introducing the new Fortune Card marketing gimmick, some folks took it to be the final nail in the coffin of a game they once loved. Others saw it as the long-delayed inevitable step and wondered why it took this long to happen. I read about it on the blogs, shrugged my shoulders and went back to what I was working one.

I did this for two reasons. The first is because, other than the re-issue of Gamma World, nothing WotC does anymore affects my game playing or purchasing habits. As such, I’m no longer involved in any customer-publisher relationship with them, and outside of making the older editions available in PDF format again, I’ve no opinion on what Hasbro and the Wizards do with their products, money, and time. I do wish they displayed greater employer loyalty to their designers though.

The second reason was that I beat them to the punch by almost a year.

I’ve made note that I will sometimes award players with a certificate of commendation for reaching certain milestones or displaying exceptional growth in play. What I didn’t mention is that these award letters are accompanied by a chit or card good for use in game. All of these cards affect the mechanics of the game in some manner and they do so in a meta-gaming manner. It is the player who steps in the apply these award cards, much like using a “Get Out of Jail Free” card to avoid an unfortunate dice roll in Monopoly.

I make no apologies for this behavior. I find them enjoyable and the players love having this additional resource at their disposal when things start going incredibly wrong for them. Such an obvious “gamist” element might not meet with everyone’s approval, but if you are the kind of referee who likes giving the players another factor to consider when deciding their actions, you can download a PDF copy of the chits I use in my Labyrinth Lord campaign here.

Welcome to My World

Since I’ve taken a good look around me and realized that I have a literal box of books that I’ve purchased in 2010 and have yet to crack open, I’ve decided to catch up on my reading. Some of that reading includes the more recent issues of Fight On!, since I got sidetracked somewhere around issue #6 and haven’t had the opportunity to enjoy that publication as of late. However, rather than dive right back in, I started with #1 again and I am slowly working my way forward.

While the premier issue still holds up and contains more than a few nuggets worth mining, what really caught my eye this time around was the editorial written by good old Ignatius Ümlaut, publisher and editor of the fanzine. Entitled “In the Time of the Broken Kingdom,” it is, amongst other things, a love letter to the open game of yore, the sort of campaign where anyone at anytime could stop by, pull out a character from their overstuffed briefcase, and spend a few hours as a guest in an ongoing campaign world.

That is a rare thing these days. As a whole, the hobby has become a place where, to quote the editorial, “we often content ourselves with smaller communities: our own group’s game world, the fandom of worlds like Tekumel, Glorantha, Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Arduin, the Forgotten Realms, the World of Darkness, and so on, communities devoted to the particular ruleset we like best, even communities of game designers.”

The way we play these games has changed since they first blossomed out of the organized chaos of the sand tables of the Mid-West. If I may be so vainglorious as to quote myself from the intro to The Dungeon Alphabet, the hobby, like the dungeon, “is no longer the unexplored country it was in its youth. And, like any unexplored land, it has lost its wildness and unpredictability with the arrival of more and more people and the laws and rules that a population brings with them.” Things have been “mapped and codified, rendered predictable with familiarity. It is no longer the Wild West or the lawless high seas.”

It is almost difficult to imagine, as the clock slowly winds down on 2010, that the campaign world was often a much more fluid place, one where people came and went depending on the whims of their schedules and travel times. The gamer of today might be hard pressed to imagine this scenario described in an article from a 1980 issue of New World entitled “It’s Only A Game…Or Is It?”, by Moira Johnston and quoted in the Fight On! editorial:

The liberal immigration policies of [Deanna Sue] White’s D&D-based ‘open universe’ allows characters to visit from other worlds and universes, making Mistigar an intergalactic entrepot. “Whenever I’m in L.A., I call to see if Deanna’s having a run,” says Clint Bigglestone, Bay Area fan and producer of the FRP convention, DunDraCon. His characters adventure through Mistigar, returning to the Bay Area with wounds and stories that spread Mistigar’s network of contact…The FRP network has become so sophisticated that it is now possible for jealous, upstart worlds from all over the country to attack Mistigar. Two attempts to subvert her world have already been thwarted, one by Bigglestone, whose characters discovered, while campaigning through Dave Hargrave’s world near San Francisco, that evil members of Hargrave’s Black Lotus Society planned to attack Mistigar. Loyal to White, Bigglestone’s characters attacked and killed the plotters.

As the date of the article suggests, the situation described above was not an uncommon one even as the hobby entered the boom years of the early 1980s. I remember playing in several campaigns in junior high which featured characters hoping from one world to another in the school cafeteria depending on whose turn it was to referee, bringing their grudges and artifacts of unbelievable power with them for the journey. This style of play was to fall out of fashion as the years progressed and campaign worlds became more insular in nature. Ironically, the open campaign went into decline as the commercial campaign setting began to ascend, a product that, on paper, would seem to make the open campaign more accessible to gamers around the world.

This editorial got me thinking about the way things once were and what they are no longer. There have been and continue to be attempts at “organized play,” moderated events that do what White and others did without the benefit of an overseeing committee or communication methods more advanced than the mailed letter, mimeographed fanzine, or telephone call. Outside of a brief membership in the RPGA back in the late 1980s, I haven’t been exposed to these efforts and I can’t claim to know if they do an adequate job of recreating or maintaining this level of campaign openness. But what I can do is undertake efforts to make my own campaign world more accessible to visitors.

I’m not proposing some OSR-wide organized play: that way leads to madness. Instead, I’ll be taking steps to make my own personal campaign setting, the Kinan-M’Nath or “the Uncertain Lands” that forms the basis of my Labyrinth Lord game, a place where people can occasionally come, experience Stonehell Dungeon first-hand, gain some treasure, and depart with “wounds and stories”…and maybe a bit of loot.

I’ve been thinking about this since I reread the FO! piece and it seems to be a logical step for my own campaign. When I was younger, I always envisioned that I would someday have a massive campaign world of my own, one detailed down to the smallest little square foot. As I grow older though, I see the sense in quality over quantity and it’s becoming quite clear that any and all of my future campaigns will be set in the same small(ish) region that I’m currently playing in. Since the Kinan-M’Nath is based on both an original play map (Outdoor Survival) and original rules (D&D via Moldvay via Proctor), why not go whole hog and assume the original play style as well? I would much rather have more visitors to a well-detailed region than a vast world that rarely gets visited by tourists.

The fact that Stonehell Dungeon has become a popular visiting place for adventurers also makes an open campaign style of play sensible. With a pre-existing axis mundi to rest cross-campaign travel on, it’s a small matter of extending the idea of many Stonehells scattered across the multiverse and allowing travel between worlds (although I claim rightful possession of the Ur-Stonehell!).

Lastly, I run my campaign in a public setting, one where anyone can walk in and see the campaign unfold. And although I may not live in a transportation hub, I am located a short train ride from the most magical city on Earth. One never knows who might be in the area and looking for a game to play during their visit.

Like any nation, my campaign world will have some laws regarding visitation and immigration, and I’ll get to those in posts next week. In the meantime, let it be known that the borders between worlds have grown a little thinner in the Kinan-M’Nath. Should you ever find yourself headed to the New York area, be sure to pack a character sheet or two. I might need help defeating the Black Lotus Society.

Illustrating A Crazy, Cool Idea

I’m spending the long weekend working on the myriad little projects that always seem to clog my mental inbox. One of those is to get caught up on my copies of Fight On! magazine. Since it’s been awhile, I’ve started at the beginning, rereading #1 and working my way forward. One of the articles in that magazine got me thinking and I want to do a more in-depth post on my thoughts in the weeks to come. I’m going to introduce something and I’d like to have an illustration to go along with it.

I’ve posted a rough diagram of something below. As you can plainly see, my artistic talents are limited to the written word (and there are those that would debate even that claim), so I would be very interested to see what someone with some talent could do with the below sketch.

Normally, I’d say send me an email if you’re interested it cleaning this doodle up, but, for my latest crazy idea, I think the more variations on this theme, the better. Therefore, I’m open to as many takes on the sketch as people are willing to submit. It actually works to the idea’s and the upcoming post’s benefit to have plenty of options.

If you are so interested, please take the attached drawing and run with it. You can recreate it as is, take the rough idea and elaborate on it, or just use it for the most meager bit of inspiration. Work in any medium you wish. When you’re happy with it, send me either a copy of your creation or a link to where I might view it. I will post your picture here in conjunction with the article giving you full credit for your work. If it takes a bit for you to finish up, and you do so after the post appears, please send it to me anyhow and I’ll post follow-ups to the original from time to time.

I’m not out to make any money on this idea and the article the illustrations accompany will be posted here for all to see. I can only give you the opportunity for your work to be seen by a fair number of individuals in return for your efforts.

I think my idea has some merit and I’m hoping others will jump on the idea and embrace it once it’s revealed. Please help me with your own talents. You can contact me at poleandrope (at) gmail (dot) com to submit your work or make other inquiries.

Thank you very much in advance.

“Egads, there are a lot of you!”

The Watchfires & Thrones group has developed a glandular condition and grown to an unnatural size. Last Sunday’s game saw me staring out at a sea of faces crowded around a single kitchen table. With the return of one player who had been away for two months on personal business and the addition of a new player, our formally tiny little band is now nine people (eight players plus me behind the screen). This tread seems to be continuing, too. Next Sunday, we’re going to have a guest player (a gamer who’s up visiting and will be playing the dwarf hireling) and possibly introduce another regular player to the group. It seem like just a few weeks ago it was me and one other player meeting up at the FLGS to try and drum up interest. We we’re looking for two more players to start with because, as I said back then, if we could get three, we could get more. My oracular powers are truly astounding.

But it’s an often-repeated fact that while size does not matter, being entertaining does (case in point: the 1998 version of Godzilla). This has been my number one concern since our group first began to show signs of growing robust. This campaign has been my first true refereeing gig since my brief turn behind the screen to playtest Stonehell—a session that revealed to me exactly how out of practice I had become during my time away from the hobby—and I’ve been anxious not to screw it up. Yet, from all indications, my players are seemingly having the time of their lives. The phrase “best campaign I’ve ever been in” has been used within my earshot on at least two occasions so I must be doing something right (either that or my players have suffered through a long string of completely abominable games before meeting me).

I’m continuing to fine tune the game as we go, allowing it to develop organically through play and by where the PCs’ interests take them. Some house rules continue to be modified (we had a change in critical hit protocol last session) and others wait in the wings to be unleashed (counterspelling is going in the first time the adventurers meet up with spell-throwing enemies). I’ve planted the very first seeds to get people thinking about the D&D endgame now and to start casting their eye towards the frontier.

The biggest issue I’m wrestling with is when and if to say, “No more.” There is part of me (a very big part) that says, “Keep ‘em coming. I can take on all challenges,” and see if Watchfires & Thrones ever reaches the mythic numbers of Eld that required a Caller to keep things running smooth. I can’t lie: having a huge group of people playing old school D&D would be amazingly cool, especially since there’s plans underway to greatly increase our FLGS’s available gaming space so that it could accommodate a large group playing a single RPG. However, I’m not so self-deluded that I fail to see that my own ego is largely behind this desire.

Another option would be to investigate the feasibility of splitting the group into two separate parties that meet at different times and/or days. I’m not certain everyone would agree to this because the camaraderie of the players is one of the reasons to attend each week. Having to divide the players would impact the social aspect of the game now that we’ve gotten comfortable with one another over the last eighteen sessions.

The last course is to firmly set our limit and to turn away any newcomers. That number should be one lower than the amount of players I feel I can't comfortably handle. Unfortunately, I won’t know that number until I reach it. Back in college, I ran a very short-lived World of Cockamamie Darkness game that had either ten or eleven players running all types of critters from WoD titles. I’ve organized LARP games with thirty-plus players, but that sort of controlled chaos doesn’t really compare to sitting everyone around a table and keeping things flowing. The number of players I can handle in a Labyrinth Lord game remains an unknown. However, the fact that I spent all of last Sunday’s game literally on my toes (refereeing standing up) suggests that we might be getting close to that magic number.

All this brings me to the Number One Lesson I have learned since February of this year. It’s a pretty harsh-sounding one and some people might misinterpret my tough love for simply being a dick, but here it goes:

With very few exceptions, if you’re not playing the game you want to play, it because you’ve made the choice not to.

That’s a solid truth, people. If you want to play a certain title, go out there and make it happen. Don’t stop trying until you find the absolute minimum number of people you need and then start playing. If that group falls apart, find another one. Just keep at it. You might have to make some compromises (play online rather than face-to-face, letting the complete stranger who hangs out at the game store sit in on a game, coming out of the gamer closet and asking some non-gamer acquaintances if they want to try, or meeting once a month rather than once a week), but you will be playing the game you want to. To give up before you reach your goal is a choice on your part and you only have yourself to blame for it.

Jim Raggi’s got some excellent advice on how to go about drumming up a group. I’ll admit that I thought he was being abrasive in his presentation when I read the piece a long time back, but, after being out there and playing the game I want to play, I’m now in complete agreement with him. You’re the reason for your predicament, pal. Take this as your wake-up call and do something about it.

I no longer expect to ever be not playing the game I want. Should I find myself in a position where I’m not playing the game I wish I was, I’ll take steps to rectify that situation, and should I fail to do so, I’ll know that that is because I either consciously or unconsciously made the decision to. In some cases, that decision might be the correct one (like in the case of having a newborn baby or having to meet financial necessities), but it is still a choice I made.

Fencing the Loot

In my youth, I always had issues with the way we handled gems and jewelry. Not with the fact that you could pay for a room at the Ol’ Pig Sty Inn with a 5,000 gp diamond and the innkeep would have change— that was fine since we had little idea about market economies or business overhead and the like. Instead, it was the manner in which we would cash in gems, jewelry, and objects d’art that troubled me.

Back then, if Hugo the Fighter found a 100 gp gem in his adventures, he knew he could always visit the jeweler or moneychanger back in town and get exactly 100 gold pieces for it. Even at a young age, I knew something was amiss with this system. How did this benefit the jeweler or moneychanger? There was no profit to be made so was he simply providing a community service? Once I learned about things like luxury taxes and the like, this method of equal exchange made even less sense.

If you’ve been following this blog long enough, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that I’m not a simulationist by any extent. Although I do make friendly nods to reality most of the time, I’ll readily jettison reality if it gets in the way of a good time or a great game. Nevertheless, perhaps since I’ve had this peeve for so long, I wanted to come up with a quick and easy system of dealing with gems, jewels, and art objects once the PCs hauled it back into town. And, since I hail from the school of thought that “Charisma is not a dump stat,” I settled on the following:

Whenever the PCs visit a merchant to sell or exchange non-coin treasure, I have the PC doing the negotiations roll 2d6 modified by their CHA reaction adjustment and other nebulous modifiers. I then compare the adjusted roll to the list below. The final result determines what percentage of the item’s actual value the merchant is will to buy it for.

2 – 100% of actual value
3-5 – 90% of actual value
6-8 – 80% of actual value
9-11 – 70% of actual value
12 – 60% of actual value.

Think about it: A grizzled, muscle-bound guy who hasn’t bathed in a week and looks like he slept in his armor comes into Gerry the Gem Merchant’s shop and wants to sell this sapphire he claims to have found in those caves just outside of town. You know, the ones that nobody ever seems to come back from? He’s got nothing to prove the jewel’s provenance other than his word—maybe that of a couple of other gnarly looking characters if he’s lucky—and he’s looking for some fast cash so he can buy a horse to ride off to his next “adventure”… or so he claims. If you were Gerry, would you really give this guy the full value of the rock?

For all you know, this guy swiped this rock from some powerful warlord or wizard and is looking to ditch the loot ASAP. You’ll probably have to sit on it for a few weeks just to be safe or work it into a new piece to disguise its original appearance. That’s time and effort, both of which cost money. Unless he’s really, really persuasive or you’ve dealt with him in the past, you’re going to offer a fraction of its real value.

Although the PC’s CHA adjustment plays the largest role in modifying the dice throw, I do allow adjustments for roleplaying (usually -1 to the roll) and for repeated dealings with the merchant (again, usually -1 but I will go higher if the party maintains good relations with the same dealer over a long period of time). These relationship adjustments are fickle, however, and can easily change if the party isn’t careful. Just recently, the PCs visited their usual merchant and weren’t satisfied with the deal he was offering. There was some debate about marketing the gems around town to try for a better deal, but they decided to take the offer in the end. Had they started trying to move the stones through another dealer and their usual guy found out about it, he would have been less likely to give them a good deal in the future and the die roll would be adjusted accordingly.

In addition, most jewelers have a personal quirk regarding gemstones and, if the PCs can figure these personal likes and dislikes out, they can use them to their benefit. For example, the party has recently learned that their regular go-to jeweler, Seno, has a particular love for pearls and is always willing to pay top dollar for them.

I should mention that, regardless of what the party gets for this type of loot, I always award them experience points equal to the items real value. My intent is to mimic the fluctuations of the market and to try and keep the PCs money-poor for as long as possible, not retard their level advancement.

The above chart is just for legitimate dealers and plundered loot. I have a second one which is reserved for fencing stolen goods, but it also does double duty when the characters want to sell their used armor and other goods after they’ve upgraded. It works the same as the above table, but the percentages are much reduced.

2- 50% of actual value
3-5 – 40% of actual value
6-8 – 30% of actual value
9-11 – 20% of actual value
12 – 10% of actual value

Referee, Entertain Thyself

There is a central mystery in the Watchfires & Thrones campaign: A secret whose origins lie in the long-forgotten past and, if revealed, could answer some of the big questions that humanity and the other races ask about themselves. If the answer to the mystery was to become publically known, existence itself might change forever. However, unlike many other campaigns I’ve both ran and played in over the years, it doesn’t make a lick of difference if the players choose to never so much as glance at the clues strewn in their path. They’re simply there to amuse myself.

With our tenth game session on the horizon and the first major chapter of the campaign completed, I’ve taken the time to look back on what has occurred so far in order to judge what worked and what didn’t, to see where I can improve my referee style, and consider what kookiness I might want to try next. The result of all this navel gazing is that I’ve realized that this is the most fun I’ve had running a game in years.

As some of you might remember, I literally threw my former campaign setting and a year’s plus worth of prep work out the window at the 11th hour to run a pulp sword & sorcery-style campaign. I went from my plan to allow more than a dozen classes as player choices to restricting them to a mere five. As I mentioned just last week, even the list of monsters that will appear in the campaign has been stripped down to a specific list with albeit vague membership requirements.

The result of all this self-imposed limitation is that I’ve never felt like I’ve had more choices and the gaping holes in the rule material have led me down creative paths I would have never considered travelling if I was still trying to run the same sort of “typical” D&D campaign I’ve been running on and off for almost thirty years. I’ve come to realize that I owe a much greater debt of gratitude to the OSR community than I ever imagined. Had I not spent the last two years being exposed to the creations of almost everyone involved in whatever the hell it is we’re trying to do here, I might never have realized that the definition of “what is D&D?” and what can be shoehorned in under its auspices is so mutable that it need not be a game based around a pseudo-medieval/Tolkien-influenced worldview. In retrospect, I realize that I have no one to blame for this preconception but myself, but I’d point to TSR’s attempts to market the game and establish a brand as being very responsible for encouraging this preconception. But that’s all blood under the bridge of bone, so let’s not dwell upon it. I’ve since been rehabilitated,

To get back to my original point, all this jettisoning of expectations has put me in the position to try out some crazy schemes to see if they’re even possible to do in the context of fantasy role-playing. It’s too early to tell if they will work or not, but the mere fact that I’ve been able to play with them in an unorthodox setting has given me great joy. This enjoyment has naturally led to me maintaining a high interest in both the campaign setting and our weekly meetings. I’ve also discovered that, by letting the players call the tune, I’m usually only dancing a session or two ahead of them, which means there’s a lot of thinking on my feet and conjuring on the fly to be done—both of which really push my Wahoo! button. In short: I’m having a blast.

I’m really blessed to have the players I do at this time. They’ve been willing to go along with my harebrained scheme and to give my offbeat rule additions a try. They’ve persevered under a crushing number of PC deaths (not all of which are completely my fault) and slightly slowed level advancement to start becoming “real” characters in a world that’s still cooking on my intellectual stovetop. As a friend of mine mentioned last week, I got incredibly lucky with this lot considering it was a pickup group of people who’ve mostly never played together before—and that’s somewhat difficult to achieve in this hobby sometimes, as anyone with a “let’s recruit down at the hobby shop” horror story might tell you. I forget which blog I read it on, but someone put forward the advice to simply be the type of gamer you want to attract. So far, that’s worked out well for me. I can only hope everyone is as lucky and is having as much fun out there as I am.

Object Lessons and Dead PCs

You’ll notice it’s been a little slow here at the Society this week. Now that I have a regular game of my own to run, I find that I have more of a desire to write for that game than about it, which naturally leads to things quieting down here if I have to divide my time between activities. However, the happenings at last Sunday's session need commenting on and I’d like to get that done before the events of tomorrow’s game move to the forefront of my mind.

Time for a confession: I hate killing characters.

Truth be told, I get attached to the personas that explore my imaginary world and help to breathe life into what would otherwise be a lonely illusion. I root for them as they confront dangerous monsters or try to puzzle out a fiendish trap. After all, if they succeed, they earn experience, advance in level, and gain more power. That means I get to add even more neat stuff to my world and I get to play with new ideas and build more interesting sites for them to explore. Therefore, it’s in my best interests if the adventurers survive.

On the other hand, I’m not a big proponent of the “Everybody gets a trophy” school of thought either. Better minds than mine have argued that when everybody’s a winner, winning means nothing. That’s an attitude which I’m very much in agreement with. I’ve worked damn hard for the things I’m most proud of in life—which is the reason I’m so proud of them in the first place. Our recreational activities should be no different. There is really no point in playing if you’re assured victory because, for me at least, avoiding defeat is half the fun.

I’ve learned to balance these two facets of my personality by simply giving the players enough rope to hang themselves and then waiting to see what happens. This is exactly what happened last Sunday.

If you’ve read the recap, you’ll know that four members of the party died at the hands of fungal zombies when they delved into an undercroft beneath the temple complex. While I can’t say that I planned this, in the interest of full disclosure, I can’t say I’m surprised either. That room was purposely assembled as an object lesson and it did exactly what I hoped it would.

The primary purpose of that encounter was to serve as a litmus test to see how greedy and cocky the players and their characters could get. The answer was too much of both for their own good. Everyone seems to have forgotten the First Rule of Zombies: “They’re no sweat when there’s just a few, but if you let them overwhelm you, you’re screwed.”

The party had no trouble knocking them down when they were popping up in twos and threes. Before long, the entire chamber was crowded with zombie bodies. So many, in fact, that one of the players asked if I wanted him to start removing the knocked over miniatures from the grid map. He should have suspected something when I said, “No,” but that’s all part of getting comfortable with a new group: you have to learn what everyone’s capable of in their roles as players and referee. I bet the players will take notice in the future if I start leaving “dead” miniatures on the board.

When the zombies started springing back to “life”—first one half of them, then the other—the players started cracking jokes about staying down there and “grinding XP ‘til we hit 5th level.” That plan changed once the PC with an armor class of 1 got torn to pieces. Of course, by that time, the way to the single-file ladder that exited the chamber was blocked by a horde of toadstool-sprouting zombies. I hope that my second purpose for this set piece of an encounter was sinking in at that point: “Although boldness pays off in D&D, sometimes it’s best to quit while you’re up in chips—even if it means possibly leaving a bigger pot behind.” More of the PCs could have escaped if they hadn’t been so determined to make sure all the loot had been found.

Although not intended, I think it will be some time before we start splitting up the party again, even if it’s just “We’ll be in the next room.” The fact that half the party was upstairs when the zombies sprang back to life was bad news to those guys still down in the hole. However, this development did teach me a bit about the players and their characters. I learned who was brave enough to risk death (and in one case, find it) by rushing in to help their comrades-in-arms when it would have been easy to stay upstairs where it was safe. I’m always on the lookout for such selflessness and usually reward it on a later date in some manner.

I usually place one or two of these object lessons/set pieces in any dungeon I construct at the start of a campaign. This is especially true when I don’t know the players all that well and would like to learn more about their individual play styles and such, as well as showing them what kind of game they can expect from me as a referee. The fungal zombie room was one such encounter and I hope the players learned something from it. I know I did and I intend to use that knowledge to customize the campaign so that both myself and the players get as much enjoyment out of it as we can. I think such a noble aim is worth a few dead PCs at the start of the campaign. Hopefully everyone else will too.

Despite what some people might think, you don’t need to be playing some "new school" role-playing game that features drama points, constructed narratives, flashbacks, cut scenes, dice pools, etc. to both instruct and learn about the players. Sometimes a big room of fungus-covered zombies and a fistful of twenty-siders works just as well.

The Body Count Grows

I'll probaby have more to say about this session in the near future, but the recounting of Sunday's events is now up on the wiki's adventure log. Six party members died over the course of the day's explorations: four at the hands of the aforementioned Wrecking Crew and two underneath the tender caresses of animated statues.

I am not a referee who gets any pleasure from the deaths of characters. I really am the players' biggest cheerleader, but unfortunately characters do die, hopefully leaving the survivors a bit wiser in the process.

Watchfires & Thrones Session #3

We were down a player this week so my recap of yesterday's game is slightly longer and more detailed than previous efforts in order to keep him aware of the events missed in his absence. That write-up appears here.

Another player joined us yesterday and yet another came over to ask about the session during play. After a post-game exchange of emails, it looks like he'll be joining our ranks in three week's time, bringing the number of players up to seven plus myself. I still consider this our shakedown period so if we lose a player or two, that's no big deal, but so far most everyone seems to be having a good time despite the fact that I'm populating and detailing the world as we go--which can lead to the occasional "Let me get back to you on that."

The intent to move our sessions to a more private venue remains on the table but we keep getting new faces interested, which means putting off the move until everyone is comfortable with the player roster. If interest in the game remains on a continued high, it may be months before we make the move. But if it stimulates interest in the retroclones and OSR, I can handle such a delay.

Intellectual Stickup Artist

In some dimly-remembered science course during my college years, the topic of an “open universe” versus an “oscillating one” was discussed. To briefly summarize, the open universe theory postulates that the universe is expanding ever outwards and will continue to do so. The oscillating theory surmises that, if there is sufficient matter in the universe, this outward spread will eventually slow, then reverse direction as matter collapses back in upon itself and returns to the densely compact point it was prior to the Big Bang.

For the record, I’m hoping it’s an oscillating universe: the idea that this universe may just be one turn of many on the cosmic wheel speaks to me on a deep level. But the other reason I’m an oscillating universe fan is what it might mean for time. Although we obviously can’t know for certain, there is one theory that, as the universe contracts, the flow of time will also reverse itself, perhaps allowing that which has once been to be yet again.

It’s a fun theory, one good for cocktail parties or in between bong hits and I’ve never forgotten it (despite the cocktails and bong hits). I’ve long wanted to do something with it in a game, but since I’ve never been one for GURPS Time Travel or the Doctor Who RPG, the opportunity hasn’t appeared—at least, until now.

As T.S. Eliot wrote in a review that is forever being misquoted or paraphrased: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” Now, I may be mature or immature, but I’m certainly going to be stealing from all those authors who I listed as influences to build this new campaign world. The trick was trying to decide how to squeeze all the bits that interest me into a single setting without cluttering up the place. The oscillating universe theory allows me to do exactly that.

This new setting is one where the universe is contracting and the previous ages of the world now are being replayed. From the pinnacle of evolution and scientific advancement, the world has now devolved into a new ancient period; a time when civilization was still a new phenomenon and the world a much rawer place. Because of the collapse of linear time, empires that are simulacra of previous eras have risen again and the events that have occurred long, long ago are being reenacted with new roles cast in the cosmic play.

As the world resurrects its ancient empires in new guises, it’s also become a temporary sanctuary for beings from the stars that have fled their planetary homes ahead of the inward collapse of the universe. On this world, some of these races hide amongst the teeming masses, some raise themselves as gods, and others merely gorge themselves on the unwitting inhabitants.

Because of the fluid nature of time, most of the world is completely unaware that the cosmic clock is winding down. Time still seems linear, although the past has become a muddied thing. Those wise enough or mad enough to perceive that the universe is in its death throes have fled this world to other dimensions, universes, or at least worlds closer to the universal center. In their wake, they’ve left behind the gates, platforms, and portals that lead to these unexplored places. Most of these portals were one-way, but a few have allowed things from other dimensions to walk in this world unannounced. And as time continues to break down, relics from previous ages begin to take the stage again. Maybe a cluster of dinosaurs has returned to play out that epoch in some peaceful valley or dark jungle.

I think I’ve just about stolen from everyone with this setting. Dying world? Check off Vance and Smith. Ancient empires that look familiar and exist side by side? There’s my nod to Howard’s Hyboria. Aliens from the outer black terrorizing this world, hiding amongst us, or being worshipped as gods? Paging Mr. Lovecraft. I think you can squeeze Burroughs’ Martian tales in with either the dying world, the relics from other times, travel to other worlds, or—oh! Did I mention this world is hollow? I don’t quite have a suitable Moorcockian antihero vibe going, but I’ll leave that up to the PCs to explore. They’ve got a good start on “shades of grey” Leiber urban fantasy motif.

The one thing that I don’t want to do is make this too much of a sci-fi setting dressed up in magical armor. Others are already doing a much better job of that. The pulp swords & sorcery theme allows me to throw a bit of sci-fi in if I so please, but it’s not going to be a recurring event (other than the alien angle but that’s more of a “look what came here by flying through cold vacuum” thing than “Hey, a saucer just landed!”). This is why I latched onto universal collapse instead of nuclear war as the reason for a return ancient civilization levels. There’s less rayguns and hard radiation hanging around that way.

Of course, this is all just a framework for my benefit and none of it really impacts the characters. They’re just adventurers out for coin, fame, and glory. Having this sort of structure in the back of my head serves me by providing loose guidelines as to what I can include and yet still have an overall pattern to the mess. Even that is tertiary to the players’ and my own enjoyment.

It’s not the greatest campaign concept ever but I’m not looking for that. I just want to find an angle that keeps me and the players excited and coming back for more. This one seems like the perfect balm for a soul weary of a pseudo-medieval fantasy setting and I’m looking forward to building on this framework and eager to see what the players (and their PCs) do with it.

Under the Influences

The prime reason for the last minute switch of campaign worlds was my own changing tastes. The world of R’Nis has been part of my D&D lexicon for most of my years playing this game—perhaps not quite as realized or textured as it’s become, but the germ of the world was always present. As such, much of the creative bedrock upon which the world is founded was formed during my adolescent years. I was not quite as well-versed in genre literature at that time, nor had I had a chance to experience other role-playing games not produced by TSR. And while I was later able to bolt more mature elements and influences on to the campaign, I did find that I was limited by some preconceived notions and world history. The result was a patchwork quilt that didn’t always please me.

If boiled down to its essence, R’Nis drew much of its influence from Tolkien (both the books and the various animated features based on his work), the King Arthur cycle of tales, the first two Dragonlance trilogies, with a dash of Gygax’s first two Gord novels. It was a world biased towards high fantasy. My teenage years saw me using the Forgotten Realms as a campaign world, which also hews close to the high fantasy tradition so there wasn’t much happening to expand my tastes in genre.

It was only during my college years that I got the opportunity to sample from a much broader array of fantasy literature. For some unknown reason that I’m extremely grateful for, my college library had the entire Gray Mouser and Fafhrd books in its collection. Prior to this I only knew of the twain from my dog-chewed copy of Deities & Demigods (although that was more than enough to stoke my interest in learning more). Remember that this was still a time when the Internet was a strange new thing and Leiber’s work was hard to find in print, so uncovering the complete series in an academic library was something of a minor miracle. I sat down and promptly devoured the books.

The result of this bibliomantic feast was that I completely changed my attitude about what I thought D&D should be about. Being a young man at the time, I was already predisposed towards a fantasy atmosphere that was a bit darker, a bit grittier, and a lot less highfalutin than I’d been using for years—I just didn’t know how to invoke it. Leiber started me down that path and remains one of my top five influences on the game.

After Leiber came Lovecraft. Again my college had a sizeable Lovecraft collection, mostly stemming from the fact that Robert Waugh, a Lovecraftian research of some renown, was (and remains) a member of the college’s English department. I had the pleasure of taking a poetry course taught by Professor Waugh during my undergraduate career and his occasional Lovecraft aside reintroduced me to Howard Philips.

Moorcock follow Lovecraft, and a second-hand copy of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ second Martian Trilogy showed me that he could do more than Tarzan, but it would be several more years before I experienced pure, unadulterated Two-Gun Bob. I never read the Lancer/Ace editions of Howard’s and other’s Conan tales when I was younger, experiencing the barbaric tales of the Cimmerian through Marvel’s Conan comic book and later The Savage Sword of Conan. I witnessed the Schwarzenegger film once it reached cable (having to wait until everyone was asleep before viewing such verboten video), but never experienced undiluted Howard until the recent Del Ray editions. Damn near criminal of me, I know.

I never heard much about Jack Vance other than he had some influence on the D&D magic system, so when I purchased Tales from the Dying Earth omnibus in 2000, I was again both pleasantly surprised and furious with myself for missing out on Vance’s prose for so long.

But the ultimate influence still remained to be discovered and the route to it was a roundabout one. In 2001, I walked into a used bookstore in Long Beach, CA. On a dusty shelf at the dim rear of the store, I chanced upon a copy of Shadows Bend by David Barbo. The novel is pure fiction, postulating what might have occurred if the Cthulhu Mythos were real and Lovecraft and Howard teamed up to battle them. I was acquainted with Lovecraft and Howard at this point so the novel was entertaining in that aspect. As the events in the novel unfurl, the two writers find need of further wisdom and seek out the Bard of Auburn, Clark Ashton Smith, for assistance.

At the time that I purchased the book, I had just returned to L.A. after spending nine weeks in Auburn, CA. Due to my unfamiliarity with Smith, I didn’t know the significance of that town until after I read Shadows Bend. Of the three writers in the book, it is Smith that is portrayed as the most level-headed and well-adjusted of the Weird Tales Trio. With Howard’s mother issues and Lovecraft’s numerous peculiarities as a counterpoint, Smith ends up displaying all the qualities one would normally associate with the hero of the tale, even to the extent of bedding the love interest that Howard is too insecure to woo and Lovecraft too disinterested. This portrayal of Smith, which I later learned to be an accurate one, piqued my curiosity and I wanted to learn more about an author I had previously only associated with Castle Amber.

It would take until 2008 before I finally got my hands on The End of the Story, the first volume of his collected works. I was absolutely stunned by Smith’s imagination and wordsmanship. My only disappointment was that, despite living the longest of the Howard-Lovecraft-Smith trio, Smith only wrote fantastic fiction for such a brief period. I wish the well of his fantasies was a much, much deeper one to draw from. Smith is the second-biggest influence on my believes as to what a fantasy campaign could and perhaps should be, and only misses out on being number one because I’ve not yet had the chance to fully digest his tales and assimilate them into my own imagination.

Influence-wise, I’ve gone from Tolkien, White, Weis & Hickman, and Gygax to Leiber, Moorcock, Vance, Burroughs, Lovecraft, Howard, and Smith—the two groups are almost polar opposites. With this in mind, you’ll have a better understanding of why I took the dramatic step of throwing away the entire world I had previously used to game with. It just wasn’t going to support the style of play and the imaginative elements that I wanted to experience this time around.

I’ll be following this post up with an overview of the campaign world. In it, you’ll see that I’m not at all ashamed to blatantly steal from my fantasy heroes, especially since it ends up building a world that excites me so much that the energy I’m radiating hopefully becomes contagious to the players. Such are the signs of an excellent campaign and the everpresent hope of the referee.

In Which Mike Does Something Rash

Yesterday was the first meeting of my new Labyrinth Lord game, the one I’ve been harping on, creating a wiki for, and spent almost the last year-and-a-half writing notes for. It was this campaign that would feature Stonehell as the “tent pole dungeon” and whose geography would be based on the Outdoor Survival map. We’d be using Labyrinth Lord as the rules engine, but a modified version that included some of my homebrewed ideas that have appeared on this blog such as new classes, random tables and charts, and other bits of miscellanea that have accrued since this site first came into being. Yes, one could say that I had the lion’s share of background work completed for the game.

I trashed all of it 48 hours before the game began.

It started simply enough. A few days ago, I briefly mentioned the importance of finding (or rediscovering) my “referee voice”: that which makes my own game sessions unique from someone else’s. This got me thinking about what fires my imagination and stimulates my creative energies. As I pondered this, I realized that my likes and dislikes have changed over the years. I won’t say evolved, as that implies that they were once inferior to those I possess now, which is not the case. They’re merely different.

Unfortunately, my longtime campaign world is very much reflective of my older tastes. Having been my default homebrew world for more than a decade, it was a place greatly influenced by what I was playing and reading in the years prior to its creation. And while it remains a place close to my heart, it just wasn’t conducive to the elements that interest me at this period in my life. Certainly I could make them fit, but it would involve a great deal of smashing round pegs into square holes.

The other strike against my default campaign setting was that it was too easy. Not for the players and their characters, but for myself. I’m very much at ease in that world and running a game in that setting seemed lazy to me. The whole purpose of this new Labyrinth Lord campaign is to stretch my creative muscles and see what might develop as we examine a “history that could have been” of the game. That simply wasn’t going to occur using my established world. So Friday night, I threw the whole thing out the window and started anew. And, all praise to my players, they were crazy enough to go along with me.

When we sat down today to make up characters, I told them what was on my mind and left the final decision in their hands. If they wanted to go on with the campaign as promised, I would do so without as much as a look behind us. If they were willing to trust me and go along with this crazy scheme of an almost completely undefined world, however, they might find themselves in for a much better experience.

Here’s the kicker, though: I even threw out the planned rules.

OK, maybe not really, but I decide at the 11th hour to use the Original Edition Characters rules instead of straight Labyrinth Lord, effectively trimming the allowed character class list to five instead of my proposed nineteen (I threw halflings from the OE rules under the proverbial bus).

So that’s how yesterday saw me starting a new campaign with only an inkling of an idea, a handful of literary references to use to sell this crazy plot, and an introductory scenario that I started writing at 9 PM on Saturday night and finished an hour before the game.

You know what? I think I made the right call. Not only did the players not mind, but I feel 100% more secure and excited about future sessions. I’ve got a ton of work to do in the next two weeks before we meet again, but the prospects look good. Even the characters turned out to be pretty interesting (Note to self: when clerics make up a third of the party, the undead aren’t a big challenge).

I’ll be writing about this new campaign world in future posts. You’ll be learning about the campaign in real time along with me, because, right now, I’ve only got a few stray threads of ideas and a whole lot of good intentions. I aim to weave those all into something that challenges me as a referee, a designer, and, most importantly, as an entertainer. If my players are satisfied at the session’s end, I’ll consider myself a resounding success.

New Beginnings

This is a week for new beginnings, a time of both excitement and terror. Today is the first of March, which means that my pleasant post-Stonehell rest period has officially ended and it’s time to get back on task. Work officially begins on the sequel as of now. You will hopefully be seeing the finished product around November, which is the same time the first book was released last year. I know what goes into writing a book of that size now and that knowledge will help cut back on the production time—I hope.

My return to Stonehell actually began earlier this week. In preparation for the Eldritch Frontier campaign, I’ve done a little remodeling and rewriting of the surface and first level of the megadungeon. Two of my future players own copies of the commercial release of the dungeon, so I’ve put the kobolds to work rearranging the place and ordering new monsters. I’m obviously not redoing the entire dungeon, but the tweaks will create something the substantially different from the book. For those of you keeping tract, this means I’m now on the third iteration of the dungeon.

Speaking of Stonehell, rmckee78 of the Circle of Dar Janix is running his players through the dungeon using OSRIC. He’s been posting session reports on the blog and this week his players finally started poking around the Gates of Hell. As much as I enjoy it when people take the dungeon and run with it, as the designer I also get a kick out of when things happen as you imagined they might—which is exactly what happen to this crew.

Still, the biggest beginning of the week is that it looks like the Eldritch Frontier campaign is a go. Yesterday’s meet up resulted in the group reaching a total of three players—the minimum I was requiring before starting. On top of that, I’ve got another player joining up in just a couple of weeks. Four is a nice number but I’m still keeping the “vacancy” sign lit for now. Next Sunday will be game session #1, meaning that I’ve got some work that needs to be done on top of the Stonehell sequel launch.

Ever since we confirmed the start of the campaign, I’ve been thinking a lot about the tone of the campaign and my referee voice. Perhaps it’s my literary background but finding one’s referee voice is as important as an author finding his or her writer’s voice. Every referee needs to do their damnedest to cultivate a unique style, atmosphere, setting, and method. To create both a way and a world that is easily recognizable amongst the many. Humorous, unsettling, or gonzo—it doesn’t matter so long as you find it. Since it’s been awhile since I’ve spent more than a few brief moments behind the screen, it’s going to be interesting to try and find mine again. I’ve done a lot of thinking about this hobby of ours over the last year-and-a-half and I’ve personally undergone a lot of changes since I last did a steady ref’s gig. My new voice is likely to be very, very different from my previous one. The quest to find it anew will undoubtedly be exhilarating and downright terrifying.

I can’t wait.

Creating On My Feet

The Stonehell session gave me the opportunity to put into practice something I’ve written about but have never been able to field test until now: creating at the game table rather than at the desktop. I’ve been guilty of the crime of doing too much advance world-building and fluff-spinning, as well as creating minor campaign details and obscure house rules long before they’re needed in actual play. Like my attempts to devolve my dungeon notes down into something less than novella-length, this is a work in progress.

Getting back behind the screen two weeks ago made me put my gold pieces where my mouth was. I could no longer safely philosophize that this was the way to do things from the safety of my Daern’s instant soap box. I’d have to see if I could really allow house rules and world design to occur in an organic way. I’m pleased to report that I can and did do just that.

Although it was just a single game session, I did manage to take two things away from it. One has to do with the cult responsible for the Temple of Evil™ the PCs explored. In the notes for Stonehell, the cult behind the temple is left undefined, as is the deity venerated in that ancient place. The reason for this was to allow any referee to customize his or her version of Stonehell to their particular campaign and to cut down of the word count for the one-pager. Considering that I’m the guy who created the dungeon, you’d think that I would have some idea of who the temple was meant for, at least in my own campaign. Unfortunately (or perhaps, fortunately), I didn’t. I figured I’d make it up if it ever became important.

When the characters began exploring it in game, I still had no concrete notion as to the divinity behind the temple. But as the hilarity and the over-the-top evil décor of the place came out during play, I began to get a notion. After the game, I toyed around with that notion a bit more and - oh yes- now I know who was once worshipped in that fane. Without revealing too much, it’s a new deity for the campaign; one that draws heavily upon Baron Samedi and spiced with a dash of the Comedian from Watchmen. Evil with a profound sense of gallows humor. I think he/she/it and those devoted to this entity have a lot to offer my little fantastical world. Time to think of an adventure seed to sow somewhere…

The second result of creating on the fly was a new house rule involving doors. Since I was running B/X, an open doors check was required to bypass any closed portal found in the dungeon. This has always been one rule that I agree with in theory but am often disappointed with in practice. I see the purpose of it: the dungeon is a hostile environment (a Mythic Underworld if you will). The characters can never be assured that they can rush into a room and take their enemies by surprise. Perhaps the dungeon itself is out to get them or it might just be the general state of disrepair that thwarts them.

In actual play, however, what sometimes happens is this: the strongest or second-strongest fighter attempts to open the door. He fails his open doors check. The next strongest gives it a shot and he fails. This is followed by a third attempt and continues on down the line until the scrawny magic-user lucks out with a 1 and the door pops opens. Comments are made that the strongest guys “softened it up” for him. The party then enters the room and the game continues.

I was looking for a way to be true to the intent of the rules, yet keep things moving in the game. I landed upon a solution during the Stonehell session. Dimly remembering reading that up to three people may make an attempt to open a door, I’ve decided that adventurers get three chances at a portal. If all three attempts fail, the door remains sealed until either A) the party employs tools to bypass the door (crowbars, mauls, axes – anything that creates a god-awful amount of noise to summon wandering monsters to dinner), B) the party exits the dungeon and attempts to try the door at a later date (maybe those monsters who can open every door have used it in the meantime and it’s no longer as tightly sealed), or C) magic is used on the portal.

The “three person rule” does exist and it’s mentioned in the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. Of course, its intent in that tome is to address the fact that most doors are 8’ wide and only three characters can fit into that space to make the attempt. The rule as read is that up to three characters may attempt to open a door at a single time. I just prefer to read it as three attempts total.

I’m hoping that this house rule will keep the game moving and will goad the party to move on unless they really, really want to find out what’s behind Door #1. It gives them a reason to re-explore sections of the dungeon previously visited too. I used this ruling during the game session and there remain three crypt doors that have not been breached. Given the bounty discovered behind the rest of the doors, I’m certain the party will return with crowbars, jars of lard, or whatever else they might think would allow them access to whatever may wait beyond. It seems like a fair compromise between the dungeon and its explorers.

One last observation from the Stonehell session is this: I refereed on my feet much more than I ever did in the past. In my younger days, I’d often spend the entire evening with ass planted firmly in my chair when I ran a game. I even mastered the art of using the referee’s screen as a prop, leering at the players from over its top or peering around its edges to simulate ambushing foes. For my return, I wanted to try a change of pace and brought a landscape format screen to use during the session. I thought being more visible would engender more trust with the players.

To my surprise, after the initial intro to the dungeon, I don’t think I sat down again until I calculated experience points at the end of the night. I have a theory as to why this change occurred. Prior to my exodus from the hobby, my last gasp at refereeing was a long series of live action games, which by their very nature require the referee to be constantly moving around. I think I might be retaining that physical memory and my body now needs to be standing in order to adjudicate. My other thought is that we were using a dry-erase map grid during the game session and having to update the grid and move miniatures probably led to me spending most of the evening upright. It’s probably a little of both. Whatever the case, I must say that I enjoyed doing it that way and it certainly cut down on the amount of liquids I drank and the subsequent bathroom trips, which were much less than when I’m in the role of a player in a session.