RennFest, Colonial Battlefleet, and Setting Work

Just what it says on the tin:

Had a good time at the Maryland Renaissance Fair(e) this weekend.  Rediscovered mead; much like honeyed whiskey, but with strong overtones of water.  The jousting at German renn faires was better, but this one had elephants and pythons and a cursing well which I am stealing for my upcoming campaign, so hey.

Also picked up a copy of Colonial Battlefleet from the wargame vault today.  Interesting system.  Their initiative mechanic and the roles mechanism are both interesting changes from Starmada, and the fact that they provide a Big List of Weapons should prevent some of the guncheese we had in Starmada: Admiralty. I don't like how they laid out said table (by weapon tonnage, rather than alphabetically by weapon name or weapon 'family'), but that is at least a useful ordering during ship contruction.  Their shields are also very different from S:AE shields (would be interested in seeing some non-forward-focused shields, but I'm happy enough as-is without the extra complexity).  I like the way they handled tech levels, mostly, except for Laser Weaponry, which I think they screwed up with regards to Screen role availability.  One thing that does torque me off a little is some of the really implausible faux science used to justify mechanics that are in place for game balance reasons - things like "When you teleport something, all inorganic chemical reactions in it cease.  As a result, you can only teleport marines, not bombs."  That grinds my gears a bit; you could've just said "You can't teleport bombs because the yield isn't sufficient for a man-sized bomb to damage a starship" (since scale is intentionally vague), or built a bomb-teleporter weapon, or left the players to not think of it like we didn't in six months of Starmada games with teleporter-marines, but no.  Instead you had to make something ridiculous up and call attention to it, which might produce a counter like "OK, that's cool, we're the Tyranids and we're going to build living bomb-marines with organic detonators.  Wheee-BOOM."  That said, upon running a test game against myself with some converted Homeworld ships, it was quick, bloody, reasonable simple, and overall satisfactory.  So if any of the old Starmada Crew is reading this, I'm down for some games over internet (it's hex-based, so should work fine with VTTs).  Fair warning, though - I have been growing out my beard since the weather cooled off... (for those unfamiliar, we observed that gamers with beards were significantly more likely to win at Starmada than were clean-shaven gamers.  The prevailing hypothesis is that this was due to the increase in planning efficiency acquired by stroking one's beard)

Oh yeah.  The editing is not fantastic, and some areas are lacking examples, but the intent of the rules is generally clear, so it's just sort of annoying rather than obstructionary.

Finally, ACKS setting.  Contemplated Wilderlands of High Fantasy, Northern Reaches (Western Marches into mythic Scandinavia), and Midnight in the Late 3rd Age.  Am currently settled on "The Scaled Continent".  The pitch:

In elder days, the children of squamous gods ruled the world, and man, elf, and dwarf suffered beneath their forked and envenomed lash.  But now their empire has fallen to ruin under rebellion and internal strife, and the men of Aura seek the reclaim the treasures that were once stolen from them and taken across the Sea of Tears, to line the jungled halls of the serpent-kings.  From the Isle of Voltager, their settlers and adventurers struggle against the environment, the natives, and sometimes each other for the riches of... the Scaled Continent.

Thematic elements:

• Settings: 
• heavily-trapped temples to bloodthirsty gods
• overgrown and ruined cities of the Old Masters
• human frontier settlements (incl. abandoned and overtaken)
• the Serpent's Tongue (major river)
• sailing ships anchored off the coast
• volcanoes
• Opposition: 
• Lizardmen, frogmen, toadmen, turtlemen, crocodilemen, &c
• With accompanying witch-doctors and guardbeasts
• Prehistoric and/or gigantic beasts 
• yes dinosaurs 
• also giant cockroaches 
• and dire armadillos carrying dire leprosy
• Monsters from South American and/or African myth and ecology
• (some research required, void where inaccurate)
• Dragons 
• Pirates
• Dragon-pirates
• not, however, from Ninja Island
• Screaming river-eels
• Wereleopards (forvalaka)
• Anything with scales that didn't fall into the above categories
• Ambulatory plant life
• Dysentery and worse jungle diseases
• Monsoon season
• Resources:
• Local guides
• Mules
• Dugout canoes
• Treasure maps of dubious veracity
• Steel and alcohol (as trade goods with the natives)
• Gullible henchmen (but when aren't those a resource?)
• Treasure:
• Golden idols
• Crystal skulls
• Rubies the size of a man's fist
• Holy grails?
• Spellbooks containing forgotten and forbidden spells of the reptile mages, written on halfling-skin vellum (demium?)
• Exotic spices and hardwoods
• Rescued slaves
• Cities of gold
• Fountains of youth
• Possible untimely death
• Modules:
• Caverns of Thracia
• DCC#16: Curse of the Emerald Cobra
• A source of fond memories from my youth
• Isle of Dread 
• Temple of the Frog (inasmuch as it is a ruined temple "in the city of the enemy")
• Thematic fiction:
• "Lost World" stories
• Heart of Darkness
• Pulp portrayals of the tropics (eg, King Kong)

 So!  Time to map!  Oh wait, I can just write "JUNGLE" in great big capital letters on a hexmap and be mostly good to go.  Just have to draw a coastline, some islands, a river, and a distant mountain range...

Leisure Reading and Domains at War

Finally got around to reading more of the Black Company series; previous attempts at the Books of Murgen left me cold due to perspective shifts, but making good progress this time.  Read Bleak Season last friday night and then She is the Darkness on sunday (aside: the kindle as a device is terrifying in its ability to enable bibliophilia).  Have postponed starting Water Sleeps until I have recovered from the late nights resulting from the last two bouts of bookserking.

Having run ACKS, however, puts a slightly different light on them.  The line "Combat is mostly fear and fear management" stuck out at me in particular following our Domains at War: Battles playtesting, where morale is how battles are won and lost.  Which has got me thinking...  how hard would it be to set up some of the battles from the books as DaW scenarios?  Two troubles, naturally, are the near-omnipresence of powerful spellcasters who operate outside the Vancian paradigm and copyright complications.  The caster problem is probably surmountable, but I haven't looked too deeply at it yet.  That the BCCS' casters are so damn durable further irritates the problem, though I suppose most of their durability is on the strategic scale (in that the Taken can be killed, but it's hard to keep them dead).  Finally, it might be easiest just to seek out battles where caster presence on either side was fairly minimal; the siege of Dejagore, which got me thinking along these lines in the first place, seems a prime candidate.

I suppose it also might be worthwhile to just model them as high-HD casters / monsters with casting abilities and give that a shot as a "good enough first stab".  The main thing is that when we were playing DaW:B, we lacked enthusiasm due to lack of context within a setting.  Stealing battles from an existing setting might remedy this (and also might provide some good 'sample' DaW:C scenarios too).  Granted, most fantasy literature does not provide good estimates of troop strength or even good maps, which makes this something of a matter of interpretation.

In unrelated news, setting creation progresses.  More to follow.

More Notes from the Road

So it turns out that once you start taking notes of names, it becomes a fun habit.  Here're some more:

Places:

• The Crazy Mountains
• White Sulfur Springs
• Bear Canyon (gee, I wonder what lives there?)
• Pipestone
• Tobacco Root Mountains
• Anaconda
• A town called Opportunity
• Gold Creek
• Bearmouth Recreation Area
• Beavertail Hill
• Sapphire Mountains
• The town of Superior
• Dry Creek
• Lookout Pass
• Spirit Lake
• Treaty Rock
• Fishtrap
• A town called Deal (sounds like Bartertown to me...  this one is definitely seeing use)
• Stampede Pass

NPC names (towns in real life, but probably better as NPCs for my purposes):

• Absaroka
• Tarkio
• Mullen
• Cataldo
• Kootenai
• Kittitas
• Kachess

I've also started reading the Black Company series.  There were two primary reasons for my interest here.  I first encountered mention of the series through True Sorcery, which is a standalone version of the magic system found in the Black Company Campaign Setting.  That there was a setting which had magic resembling TruSorc intrigued me, but wasn't quite enough to push me to pick it up.  What did that was Daztur's Combat As War post on EnWorld, which cited the Black Company's exploits as canonical combat as war material.  I finished the first book last night at around 2AM PST / 5AM EST, and I was not disappointed.  It started with combat as war, then gradually shifted to focusing more on the high sorcery of the Taken.  Particularly interesting here is that the 'PC' wizards of the Company appear to be around 5th level by TruSorc's standards (focusing mostly on Sense and Illusion), while the Taken are in the 10ish range (with powers like Shapeshifting, Healing, and Air Lore; I really liked Stormbringer, since I quite enjoy building True Sorcerers who do that), and the Lady seems to be in the 10-15 range (the Ritual of Taking, at the very least, should require Create Undead, and she definitely has Telepathy as well).  Given that the Company's wizards have already had their lives extended by magic, and the Taken are kind of undead, this means that reaching high levels takes a loooong time in this world.  Combined with the way these level ranges match up nicely with ACKS', this pleases me.

TODO: write True Sorcery Lite for ACKS.   Yeah, that's happening...

As a result of leisure reading and traveling, though,  actual prep work for ACKS has suffered.  Now I have names and ideas, so things should go faster.  Hopefully?

Still Alive II: Electric Boogaloo

Finals complete, and now I'm just waiting for mechanical checks on my vehicule before I ship out for the summer.  As often happens during studying for finals, I came across a few distractions during the last week:

• First, a fine gentleman by the name of James Jeffers put together a web app for generating random map regions for ACKS in pdf format.  Got me some no-terrain maps with a nice smattering of towns and dungeons in thought-provoking patterns (line of towns?  River, coast, or main road.  Area devoid of any settlements?  Inhospitable desert.  Cluster of dungeons?  Giant cave system).  Excited to by finally actually mapping stuff; sometimes a little inspiration via random table is all you need.
• I was looking for this Black Company for summer reading, but found this Black Company instead, along with its knight-commander Florian Geyer.  He seems the historical instantiation of a PC if ever there was one.  This started a little more research in to the German Peasants' War, which also turned up Götz von Berlichingen, who is similarly very PC-like.  It looks like historical 1500s Germany would be a hell of a setting...  Guess I'll add that to the "To Run" pile, down there with Iron Heroes and Legend of the Five Rings...  (Whatever happened to historical settings, anyways?  That's probably its own post, but it'll take a little research first)
• There's now a Stack Overflow equivalent for RPG-related questions.  It's mostly 4e and Pathfinder, but also a smattering of other systems and general GMing questions.  If you feel like imparting wisdom, or are wondering about something ("Why does the darkness spell block infravision, anyways?"), it's a good time.
• Printed a copy of the ACKS pdf at 1AM while I was working on a research poster in a building with a printer, then picked up a pair of binders for it (one for the players section, one for the DM section).  I'd forgotten how nice gaming books in paper can be.  Need to print a second table of contents for the DM binder, and I should really graphics-up some covers for them (but that's tricky business without a mouse).
• The ACKS Player's Companion draft 6 released on Kickstarter; more on that below.

But yeah...  I've started mapping for ACKS.  Guess we're playing in the Shieldlands; areas not detailed so far will likely get paragraph-length blurbs and class templates. 

I've also stumbled across a few balancing features for some of the Player's Companion classes which lead me to think that they might actually be balanced!  Notably, the Dwarven Delver, while better than a Thief at its various skills, able to use better weapons, and possessing better HD, lacks two important features: the ability to disarm traps with a roll, and the ability to backstab.  Likewise, the paladin, while receiving a number of supernatural features that fighters don't, has only d6 HD and is not proficient with ranged weapons.  Medium hit points + melee only...  looks like you might need Lay on Hands for yourself, never mind your friends.  Dwarven Fury compels me to allow it out of sheer force of dwarfsomeness (it's basically these guys minus mohawks) and, while powerful, has a pretty hefty XP-to-level, so it might be OK.  I also quite like the Priestess; better-than-cleric divine casting on a mage chassis (no armor, low HP, weak weapons).  There's definitely a niche for those.

Finally, a recent addition, the Venturer, intrigues me as a character concept.  It's not dissimilar to Traveller's merchant career; you get social bonuses, price cuts, and market class bonuses.  And d4 HD, thief to-hit, and not much in the armor and weapons department.  Such a character is a strategic asset, able to secure henchmen and needed equipment with ease, but a tactical liability.  Sounds like fun, and I'm really interested in how it fits into ACKS' mid-level region; I think at low levels, it'd be tough to survive and be useful, and at high levels I suspect that they become a bit less useful, but in that 4-8 range I think they could be a lot of fun.  As with all 'support' classes, they'd make good henchmen, too (though they drive a hard bargain in hiring...).  Kind of a pity they got stuck with a bland name, though.

There are a couple that I'm definitely not permitting, though: Gnomish Trickster and Thrassian Gladiator.  Reason: infravision.  None of the core races have infravision, in order to keep the party on the same level of light-usefulness (else elven nightblades would utterly outclass thieves, for example).  This stance makes light management a definite part of the game, regardless of party composition, unlike in 3e where most of the party would end up with low-light or darkvision except that one guy who played a human and ended up having to carry his own damn torch.  Gnome and Thrassian damage that dynamic which was solidly established in core, which is something I kind of want to preserve.  The other classes in the Player's Companion mostly leave me kind of eh, except for Barbarian, which has a very neat class feature regarding the Mortal Wounds table.  Said feature might make a very nice class proficiency available to most fighting classes, though; it hardly warrants the addition of an entire extra class.

And today, we fight the dragon, and Fjolkir finally dies (or worse).  Exciting times.