Logistics

I've been thinking about grand strategy games recently, and it occurs to me that supply rules are a lot like encumbrance rules, in that they're a pain in the ass but also worthwhile because they convey the same concerns the character experiences up to the player.  A dungeoneer worries about how much weight he's carrying; a general worries about how to keep his men fed.  What's more, as Keegan's History of Warfare suggests, supply concerns dictated the largely-coastal structures of campaigns in the Hellenic era.  Without supply, you get all kinds of crazy long-term unsupported actions in the enemy rear (this is a problem I have observed in, say, the Civilization series of games).

But the difference between supply and encumbrance is that we're reached a reasonablish compromise between complexity and realism in our encumbrance rules, with encumbrance by stone or with Traveller's low-kilos threshold.  I don't know if supply is amenable to simplication...  but until I find a set of rules for it which are really light-weight, I expect that it will remain one of those much-begrudged rules which is ignored by the players whenever I forget about it.

(Been thinking about wargame campaigns again, since I'm back in Collegetown and one of my main wargaming opponents / buddies is still around)

Scaled Continent: Character Generation

I said I've have these ready, so here they are.

Stats: By the book - five sets of 3d6 in order.  I don't care if you use Str Int Wis Dex Con Cha or Str Dex Con Int Wis Cha as long as you decide beforehand and are consistent.  I will award bonus reserve XP ('karma') in an amount TBD (probably ~5000) to players who use Invisible Castle or similar verifiable RNGs to roll their stats, but I do not require it.

Trading statblocks is discouraged.  ACKS chargen is about using what you've got.  Play a class you've never played before!

All classes, races, and proficiencies in the core book are permitted, in addition to some cleric variants.  Some proficiency tweaks:

• Diplomacy permits a character to intervene after a reaction roll has been rolled and the results are known.  He rolls 11+ and 2d6+same modifiers as original reaction roll.  Should the proficiency throw succeed, the higher of the two reaction rolls is used; should it fail, he has bungled and the lower of the two is used.  This proficiency may be taken multiple times, at +4 to the roll per time taken.
• Goblin-Slaying is replaced with Lizard-Slaying, with bonuses applying to dragons, dinosaurs, crocodiles, giant lizards, lizardmen, crocodilemen, snakemen, and other land-dwelling four-or-more-limbed reptiles of human size or larger.
• Mapping lets you reconstruct a player-drawn map from memory on an 11+ should one be lost or destroyed, rather than producing perfect maps from memory.  It also permits illiterate characters to map.
• Seafaring provides a +1 bonus on checks to avoid drowning per level possessed, in addition to its normal effects.  Seafaring III provides a +/- 4 modifier to maneuver into a boarding position or avoid being boarded in addition to its normal effects.

Selecting a class requires that its prime and minimum stats be >= 9 before it is selected.  Once selected, prime reqs can be boosted by lowering non-prime reqs by 2 points per point of prime req gained.  In accordance with the rulebook, the two points should be from the same stat.  This makes doing this actually potentially expensive / a true decision, rather than lowing four 10s to 9s to boost your prime req from a 16 to an 18 with no real cost (as we've seen).

Characters begin play with 20000 XP and 16000 GP.  This puts most classes in the 4th-6th level range.  Prime requisite does not effect these values; if you have +prime req, you are assumed to have reached these values more quickly than your fellows, and may choose (after rolling your age) to subtract a year if you have +5% or up to two years for +10% if human, 2 or 4 if dwarf, or 5 or 10 if elf.  This is useful, as undead drain age rather than levels, but optional as it may drive you into youth, which carries ability score penalties.  See page 248 for aging rules.

Hit points are rolled as normal, except that the first hit die is the best of two rolls (much like L0 men get max(1d4, 1d8) when levelling into fighter, adventurers get max(1dn, 1dn) at first level).

Everything else is per page 253; arcanists start with their repertoires full of random spells (Exception: Phantasmal Force is replaced with Glitterdust from the ACKSPC.  Still an illusion, still powerful, but more clearly written, better-defined in its capabilities, and infinitely easier to adjudicate).  Gold can be spent on magic item rolls, henchmen XP, ships, labs, trade goods, horses, mercenaries, &c.  Henchmen use rolled but unchosen statblocks.  Statblocks used for henchmen are no longer available for use as PCs later.

Trading gold for magic items is a high-risk high-potential-reward strategy, and should be weighed against the purchase of low-power magic items sometimes available in towns.  Purchasing ships and trade goods for their base price may be smart moves.  Players may pool their wealth towards these ends.

Obsidian Portal coming soon, possibly with forum, calendar, and misc other ascendant features.  Likely accompanied by a grumpy post about their recent redesign.

Scaled Continent: Call for Players

In search of freebooters, mercenaries, mappers, hired bearers, mule drivers, local guides, and sundry others for the purpose of exploration, conquest, and plunder of a forbidding jungle continent.

Operational parameters:

System: Adventurer Conqueror King

Medium: roll20 and Obsidian Portal plus some subset of skype, google hangouts, jitsi, IRC, whatever.

Level: probably starting in the 3rd-4th range.  I would like a second shot at handling wilderness adventuring properly, and reaching Domains at War levels in some sort of reasonable timeframe would be fun too.  Starting from 1st is a charming idea, but awful slow.

Lethality: Probably.  Bring henchmen, 10' poles, and/or reserve XP.

Plot: A verb describing the actions taken by smart players between sessions

Playstyle: If low interest, single-party expeditionary play.  If more interest, Western Marches-inspired, but online and with more towns.  Cloud player base, irregular scheduling, single-session expeditions when possible so infrequent players don't get screwed by being out-of-position.

Player types liable to have fun: grognards, planners, repressed wargamers, Dwarf Fortress or Nethack players, greedy bastards who like treasure, pyromaniacs, players sick of riding the railroad.  We've also had good experiences with new players picking up ACKS.

Intended frequency: 0.5 to 2 games per week, depending on interest and with real life permitting.  Perfect attendance not at all expected; my quorum is 2-3 players + DM.

Intended duration: Some months, with breaks as necessary.

Number of players sought: Come one, come all, but probably no more than five per session or so depending on henchman count.  Primary intended audience is family and post-graduation-diaspora old friends, but general public welcome subject to available space.

Character generation details and house-rules in use will be consolidated hopefully by end-of-week.

Setting Generation - Parameters

I'm considering launching some play-by-internet ACKS for friends and family post-graduation.  This has naturally led me back the Setting Problem.  Upon further considering the Wilderlands and Midnight, I have concluded that conversion work is sort of a pain, and that there are things that I would like to have in a setting that I am to run which are not necessarily present in them.

So, switches I'm considering throwing during setting generation this time around / themes I would like to have:

• Crumbling Empire / Beastbarians at the Gates - a default assumption of ACKS is that there is a powerful lawful empire in decline.  I like it.
• Rival Houses - makes good sense as constituent parts of the empire that is coming apart.
• The Craplands - A lot of settings have these under names like the Shadowlands, the Chaos Wastes, and Beyond The Wall.  Places right-thinking folk don't tread.  Wonderful places for an adventure.  Also a very handy way for the DM to telegraph danger gradients to PCs, so they can make informed wilderness exploration decisions.
• Divine Elves - Per Micah Blackburn, because this is just an awesome idea.  Very Tolkien, and very in keeping with the elves as either 'firstborn and favored children of the gods' or 'fey folk of the woods', depending on the subset of the divine spells you give them.  Also makes 'seeking the wisdom and council of the elves' more sensible, since they get stuff like divination and augury.  Dark elves also very easily differentiated by a variant spell list (and maybe addition of the Zaharan After the Flesh / Death is Bad ability / drawback pair).
• Chaos cults - I love 'em.  There's something very pulpy about having 40 chanting cultists, a sorcerer leader, some summoned demons or giant snakes or other 'bruiser' baddies, and an innocent on the altar when suddenly, heroes!  Plus you get to make up ridiculous demon names like 'the tentacled goat' and 'the spider with seven faces' for them to worship.  A nice 'threat from within' for our crumbling empire.

There are a couple of other things that I'm not so sure about yet:

• Man Has Always Been His Own Worst Enemy - no beastmen, just humans and demihumans as your 'standard-issue intelligent foe'.  Baddies not marked for your convenience.  Would make things a little more morally ambiguous, but would require more effort on my part to differentiate ethnicities of humans.  Not something I think I really want to have to do, but it's something that's been on my radar ever since Iron Heroes.
• Cultural influences - not really sure about the time or place to set this in.  The ACKS standard is classically Romanesque, but I'm also sort of tempted by the Holy Roman Empire further north (bonus: chaos vikings), a Rokugan clone, or a Midnight-like crumbling alliance of races.  Mesoamerican influences also vaguely tempting; maybe the Craplands are the Crimson Jungles to the south, full of cannibals and worse.  Currently leaning slightly toward Holy Roman, though, for a sort of dark ages "plagues and huns and vikings" feel.  Also a good place to steal historical names from.

 So just sort of throwing this out here for comment by potential players.

What We Have Here is a Failure to Cooperate

Continuing the postmortem analysis of the ACKS game, I'd like to discuss an interesting emergent behavior that occurred, contrast it with what I see in other ACKS games, and examine its causes and consequences.  In my game, PCs established three distinct domains, with a minimum distance between each of 24 miles.  The first was had when the group knocked over the guild leaders of Opportunity, and the bard took control of both the thieves' guild and the town itself.  The second was won by the necromancer when he threatened the crocodile tribes of the eastern swamp into submission, and the third was established as a caravan outpost on the road between Opportunity and Ironbridge, and was ruled by the warrior Corinth.  At its height, the bard (and then assassin)'s domain controlled 3 six-mile hexes and I estimate around five thousand families, half of which were the urban population of Opportunity, though I do not have the exact figures.  The wizard's swamp domain achieved good rates of population growth via the assimilation of other beastman lairs, but had a very low starting point and never expanded beyond a single hex, while at the end of the game Corinth's domain at Camarone was just reaching a single-hex rural population sufficient for her to contemplate building a hamlet around her fortress to provide a market.  Corinth had a henchwoman to fill the role of spiritual advisor and use the worship of the peasants to fuel potion production, while the necromancer ruled alone, and the rulers of Opportunity somehow managed to wrangle the party and assorted henchmen, including Corinth and company, into clearing hexes for their benefit.  The other PCs set up small domain-like operations to make cash; the venturer owned a ship and sent a henchurer to trade on it, the wizard ran an unfortunately-successful spy network, and the last fellow organized a company of mercenary cataphracts and found employ under the Baroness of Opportunity.

Contrast this, if you will, with the apparent dispositions of the Grim Fist when they were in the early domain phase.  Only a single domain, albeit one of a size larger than the total of my PCs', was cleared, and the decision was made that the fighter with the high charisma (paladin?) would be Baron, the thief spymaster, the cleric patriarch, and the wizard guardian of the wood, in addition to continuing her duties as party treasurer on the domain level.  This "domain-level party treasurer" notion is very counter to what we did; each domain stood alone as an income source for its ruler and none other, by which he might earn many XP and advance his own ends.  I would and have argued that this led to a significantly less satisfying game; the aims of the various domain-owning PCs did not align with each other, since each wanted different hexes cleared, and these aims likewise conflicted with those of the non-landowning PCs, who found hex clearing dull and dangerous for low treasure.  In any given clearing operation, there was exactly one player who stood to gain significantly, and so interest waned.  Further, as each of the domain-level PCs were doing their own thing (and even the non-domained PCs had their fingers in many pies), party cohesion suffered.  I was effectively unable to get a single answer to "What are you doing next session?"; instead, I received a plurality of answers.  This made prep difficult, and in some cases I performed poor allocations of prep time which served a single player's interests rather than those of the group as a whole.

But the question remains, "why did the party fracture at domain level as it had not at dungeoneering level?"  I think an answer comes by way of the Fists, in this post:

[We received] an offer of vassalage if we finish clearing the mountain, since Iamanu technically owns this region, but isn't doing anything with it.
Technically, that translates to "won't kick us out." But it's STILL better than the half-baked ideas we were floating to keep Orléans or Atanung from taking the mountain from us once we do all the hard work of clearing it out.

It was about bigger fish; large domains with military and political interests and sufficient power to squash upstart domains.  I made it clear within the setting that there were no such domains in this apocalypse-blasted, monster-infested region of the world; the Dardantines to the south weren't going to bother conquering a backwater when they can already import anything worthwhile that is produced there, while the Myrmidian city-states to the north were busy in their own local struggles against the Skanucks and the Sorosi.  To the west lay dead Zahar, and to the east the ocean and the domains of the pirate princes who, again, had little interest in coming inland and conquering dirt farmers when there were proper riches out to sea.  This produced an environment without a unifying enemy on the domain level; yes, there were the witches, but for all of their lingering menacingly over the horizon, they took only one direct action against a player-held domain, and that was done by proxy and easily dealt with.  They were hardly threatening the player domains with imminent conquest (well, until provoked in the last session, but that is a story which may not be told).  While there were great and ancient powers moving in the region, towards the end of the game I was sufficiently overwhelmed with hex-stocking and trade management that I was unable to effectively play them properly.  And so any old PC with 12500 GP burning a hole in their pocket could build a tower and declare himself a baron, if he so chose and could get his fellows to help him clear the hex he wanted to build in.

The real consistency trouble here is with the presence of bandits.  A bandit lair in ACKS entails a 9th-level fighter, several lieutenants, and a great many men who fight as first-level fighters (much as the Hill Cantons tells it of AD&D).  In a land without liege lords, though, where a PC with the cash and some mercs can prop himself up as a domain ruler, you can bet the bandit chiefs are doing exactly the same thing.  One of the rules I like to follow is "Good for the PCs, good for the NPCs."  You want perma-haste items in 3.0?  Ooooh-kay, but don't be surprised when you end up fighting a perma-hasted great wyrm white dragon (true story; I was on the player end of that and took the lesson to heart).  This is also why I try my best to keep flexible illusions out of the game; it's not that I'm concerned about what PCs will do with them.  Monsters lose a lot, and I'm OK with simulating being illused.  The trouble is that if flexible illusions exist in the world, then NPCs will have them too, and I'll have to deploy them against the PCs, which, after playing under illusionist DMs one time too many, is something I'm unwilling to do.  In any case, the point here is that those bandit chieftains should have been doing the domain thing out in the wilderness, since they have the personal power and small armies to back their claims and provide some 'protection' to their local peasantry, if not proper hex-clearing.  This would have generated a somewhat different feeling to the setting; rather than an unsettled world ripe for expansion, we'd've ended up with a Border Princes vibe, with treacherous and shifting alliances between the PCs and bandit factions, which was much more in line with my vision for the setting at the outset (very Wild Westy, too).  Arguably, this would have been significantly more interesting than the way things actually went down.  The first event following the conquest of Opportunity should have been bandits knocking on the gates, testing the mettle of the new rulers and wondering why their old guildy drinking buddies were no longer in town.  Perhaps better still, bandits rolling in and treating the town as a neutral zone in inter-band feuds, but threatening to quash any attempts at domain expansion.  Many possibilities were missed, and this angle would have segued nicely both into resolving the first party's origin story (caravan guards lost in a sandstorm following an attack by bandits in the south) and developing Corinth's history with the Bandit King of the North.

Perhaps part of the problem was the relative dearth of Men on the random wilderness encounter tables I was using, or a dearth of bandits within the Men subtable.  But I kind of doubt that was the case; I distinctly recall the PCs meeting nomads once or twice, and in case severely offending them.  Those nomads were from a nearby lair, likewise led by a 9th level chief.  The offense given should have perhaps resulted in retribution against their domain in that area, and, had this happened in the early game, it probably would have.  Ultimately I think my list of "people who are after the PCs" just got too long to manage and I started dropping entries rather than using them.  Unfortunate.  Whatever the reason, the PCs lacked a domain-unifying threat, and so their domains split, management time exploded, and party cohesion disintegrated.

Space Hulk and Campaigns

(Forewarning - this applies only to first edition Space Hulk, as that is what I once scrounged the rulebooks from.  Maybe 2nd or 3rd have already done something of this sort; in particular I think I've heard that the marines usually win in 3rd, which was immensely surprising to me)

I had my brother over for Thanksgiving, and we got to talking about Space Hulk.  We really like the premise, but the odds being so stacked against the marines is hard because on some level, even the genestealer player (being a human) bears some sympathy for them.  Personally, I have the difficulty that I like the genestealer flavor ("we are legion and we will eat you"), but when I play wargames I kind of like to take the side with long odds against them, which pushes me towards playing the humans.

These two concerns got us thinking about changing up the scenario design of the game.  Normally, the Marines start strong but have to haul ass to an objective before they are overwhelmed by the genestealers, who keep spawning more-or-less indefinitely.  The genestealers do have strengths other then sheer numbers, though, namely speed, hidden information, and a huge advantage over the marines in melee.  This set of capabilities suggests several variants of the traditional Space Hulk idiom.  The natural extension, it seems to me, is to run a "hunting the hive tyrant"-type scenario with limited or no reinforcements for the genestealers.  One of their blips is the target (broodlord, I guess), and if the marines can kill it, they win the mission.  For the genestealer, then, this is a shell game - if you keep the target in the back, then it's clear that that is the objective (unless you're up against a canny genestealer who puts a decoy in the back...), but if you bring it forward in an attempt to conceal it, then you risk losing it.  You could try to spread your forces out across the map evenly so the marines have to engage each blip to find the target, but then you risk being unable to support the target once it's engaged.  In any case, creating a mobile, hidden objective for the genestealer's defense plays to their strengths of mobility and hidden information and makes it plausible to deny them their numerical strength.  I also considered the addition of trap-like tokens; something like an immobile ambush counter which might be something unpleasant or might be nothing, in order to aid the defense by serving much like minefields in other games.

An inversion of this scenario would put a limited genestealer force on offense against a group of marines with the aim of assassinating their sergeant, captain, or other leader.  Again, this plays to speed, melee offense, and hidden information, but puts a pretty severe limiting factor on the genestealer's ability to just throw more bugs at the problem.  For bonus points, allow the genestealer some number of ambush counters too.  Both of these missions probably entail some sort of turn limit to push Team Offense towards the enemy, and custom map arrangements to make them workable.

The other possibility that I considered was a system by which the players alternate sides, and a mission is iterated until the humans win or both players agree that it's quite impossible.  This started me towards thinking about a simplistic 'campaign system', which would provide a scoring bases for repeated games much like Starmada's Simplest Campaign System, but without resource management carrying between games.  Perhaps 'series' is a better term than 'campaign'.  In any case, the scheme I propose is as follows:

• Two players agree to play a series of chosen missions, and also agree on rules allowable (equipment availability, psionics, ambush counters, tactical marines, flavor of flamer (1e vs 2e), and so forth)
• For each mission, in order
• Each player attempts the mission with the default forces.  The loser of the previous mission chooses who will play which side first; in the event of a draw in the previous mission, flip a coin for who chooses.
• If both players win the mission as marines with default forces, the mission is a draw.  If only one does, then they have won this mission.  In either case, move to the next mission.  (Variant - if both players win with default marine forces, they instead move to the bidding step below, with a bid cap equal to the value of the default force)
• If neither player could complete the mission with default marine forces, they use the bidding procedure outlined in Deathwing.
• Whichever player bids lowest plays the mission with the forces that he bid.  If he wins, he has won the mission and the series advances.
• If the low bidder loses, then the high bidder must play the mission with the point value that he bid.  Should he lose, the two players may either declare the mission a draw and move to the next one, or they may re-bid.
• Should the high bidder win, the low bidder may attempt the mission with forces with the high bid in points.  Should he lose, the high bidder has won the mission, and if he wins, then the mission is a draw.  In either case, the series then moves to the next mission.
• Once all missions have either been drawn or won by one player, whichever player won the most missions wins the series.  If both players have won an equal number of missions, break the tie using the sum of the bid points they spent on their victories.  If it's still a tie, add another mission as a sudden-death tiebreaker or have a headbutting contest or flip a coin or something.

So, let's consider the incentives here. Winning with the default force is good, because it means you've accomplishes the mission under its intended parameters.  We favor the loser of the previous mission in selection in order to give them an advantage in this round; I expect typical behavior here will be to choose that the winner of the previous round plays marines, so you can watch their tactics and adapt them for your own run.  A lot of Space Hulk was getting to understand the tactical quirks of the map layouts; the first run through is extra-hard for the marines, in our experience.  If both players win with marines, then the mission is possibly 'solved' and you move on to the next one.  With the bidding, we give the low bidder one chance to win and another to draw; this provides a strong incentive to get the low bid.  However, the high bidder is prevented from bidding the maximum possible bid as a viable strategy, since if he does this then the low bidder will have the opportunity to draw his probable win.  It might be possible for a player who is leading in series wins to bid the maximum as a viable strategy; in this case, seeking to generate draws to maintain his lead.  If the trailing player realizes he is doing this, though, he could in turn bid the maximum minus 1, likely achieving wins while maintaining low-bidder status.  Thus, this issue may be self-correcting.  One other possible issue is if a single player wins the majority of missions before the series is completed.  In this case, the outcome of the series is clear, and whether or not to continue or start anew is uncertain.  Probably depends on the circumstances.

(Also, further work - generalization of this structure beyond two players)

Sooo...  yeah.  Hey Matt, up for some Space Hulk?

On Wargame Campaigns (and BattleTech)

As I read back through some of the BattleTech material I have around which has been collecting dust, I'm led to reflect on our experience with Starmada campaigns and with some of the campaign systems I've seen in other wargames.  Looking back at our attempts at 'mada campaigns, I can't help but think that we drastically overcomplicated them.  We built a grand strategic game system, not a campaign system - we had star systems with planets with their own productivity values and infrastructure and population and stuff, we had spies and treaties and hostile natives and pirates and research and all kinds of crap.  We had Master of Orion.  A wargame campaign, though, in its purest form, eschews most of these things.  You have some forces which persist through multiple scenarios, which you have to direct and allocate, and which grow, shrink, or otherwise change composition as a result of those scenarios.  Continuing the video game analogy, Homeworld is a good representative of this model - you're always trying to eke as many resources out of each scenario as possible so that you can carry it over to the next in the form of ships, and if you haven't completed all research available in the scenario when you finish, you sit around and wait for it to complete before declaring victory and hyperdriving out.  Starmada's Simplest Campaign System is a canonical example of this as well.

Moral of that story - when embarking on a campaign, make your intentions clear, choose a system that matches them, and make sure everyone's willing to carry through with the sort of time investment that the chosen system entails.

Before I move on to BattleTech, there's another campaign system I happened on once that I think is worth mentioning as interesting.  It was from MechWar '77, an old SPI hex-and-counter game portraying the Arab-Israeli War(s) of 1977.  It had a very curious campaign system.  You had two players, each of which had some pool of forces to secretly divide between each of three fronts - north, south, and center.  A single battle was then fought on each front with the forces each commander had assigned it, and the victor of the campaign was determined based on who had won which battles and to what degree.  I found this campaign system to be unusual in that it split battles and forces across space rather than time; most of the time when we think of campaign systems, we focus on the "over time" aspect, rather than the allocation aspect.

This brings us to the BattleTech bit.  I found, in the Combat Operations book, a very nice and fairly simple campaign system.  Each campaign turn, each player assigns each element (depending on the scale of the campaign) an order to Fight, Defend, Scout, Repair, or Supply.  The relation between the number of Fighting, Defending, and Scouting units then determines what scenarios are fought during that turn and between which units, while Repairing and Supplying units can fix damage or purchase new equipment and are vulnerable to combat only if the other side's attacking forces drastically outnumber and swamp their defending forces.  Campaign points are scored based on the degree of victory in each battle, and lost for defeat, with the three ways to win the campaign being to destroy the enemy to a man, to capture his base of operations, or to amass a sufficient morale and supply advantage by winning many battles, as represented by gaining enough campaign points.

Overall, I think this system strikes a good balance.  It has unit change over time, with units taking damage and being repaired between scenarios, but it also has MechWar '77-style unit allocation to different tasks; thus, but operational and tactical resource management.  In BattleTech, there is very little hidden information built in; hidden unit assignments does create a degree of hidden information, and turns the campaign into a light lateral-thinking game which the wargame itself is not.  It has a means of unit advancement, both through pilot improvement and using the Supply order to purchase new units, which limits the potential for Starmada Simplest-style degeneration (where each side ends up with units which are barely fieldable).  Finally, it seems that for a reasonable small force (say a company of four lances to each side), the game would likely be very reasonable to run, complexity-wise and in terms of number of games required to complete the campaign, especially if one limited the availability of supplies.  Salvage then becomes imminently important for getting ammunition and replacement parts - it keeps striking me as odd how heavily BT emphasizes salvage compared to other wargames, but I think I like it.  It emphasizes the "we just can't build stuff like this anymore" aspect of the setting from the early Succession Wars.  That might be another post, though.

But yeah - I think I might want to run one of these.  Heck, multi-faction might work too; the only really critical addition would be making Fight and Scout orders specify a target, though the scenario determination rules might need a bit of tweaking too, and with limited supply I feel like such a game might get very treacherous very quickly.  But I can kind of see it, if you replace the setting; in the ruins of post-apocalyptic Earth, the only units capable of operation in the blowing dust of the radioactive wastelands are ancient mechs, the likes of which can no longer be produced, and those who have such mechs war amongst themselves for control over those which remain...

Folklore, Rumors, and Legends of the Shieldlands

These are (mostly) actually from play.  Some are false, some true, and some of questionable veracity.

• It's widely believed that elves choose their gender upon reaching adulthood, and that some never choose at all.  When asked directly, elves generally change the subject.
• The nomadic Yezidi horsemen are ancestor-worshippers, and believe that the deities of other groups are actually powerful evil spirits.  They believe that resurrection is a trick to bring demons into the mortal world in human guise, as no Yezidi soul would return from the paradise beyond, where there are more goats than a man can eat, endless seas of fresh water, and the worship of one's living relatives.
• Rust monsters are unusually friendly beasts who bear no ill-will towards mankind, greeting people carrying food (metal) with a happy burbling noise and a companionable headbutt, much like one would expect from a cat looking to be fed.  Sadly, most humans don't perceive it quite the same way.  This problem is only exacerbated by the belief that the flesh of the rust monster is delicious; gourmands purport that it has the best qualities of both lobster and steak.
• The rat-men worship a death god named Hao-Dee.  For a non-goblin to utter his name is a blasphemy most terrible, and warrants a holy war seeking their destruction.  Some linguistic scholars believe that the utterance of "Howdy!" in greeting among Shieldlanders originated as a means of signaling mutual enmity towards goblinkind.  Most Shieldlanders are quite unaware of both this hypothesis and the fact that saying "Howdy" to goblins will greatly provoke them.
• A dwarf's beard is the source of his stonecunning, and if he shaves, he loses this ability until his beard grows back.  Thus, shaven beards are seen only among the nobility, for whom it is a symbol of not needing to know their depth beneath the earth.  That other races' women do not have beards leads to all kinds of confusion as a result, when uninformed dwarves mistake them for nobility.  Female dwarves do have beards, which in addition to imparting stonecunning are often woven into slings for hands-free carrying of their children.
• Ghouls are either very stupid or rather cunning, depending on who you ask.  They can also climb, and sometimes lurk on ceilings.
• It is widely believed that hollow, circular tubes which are open on both ends serve as conduits for dark forces.  This conveniently explains the complete lack of sewer systems in the Shieldlands.  The fact that most Shieldlander plumbers are slightly mad and promote an air of the occult doesn't help matters.
• The elves call their progenitor sun goddess Amaterasu.  The Zaharans call it Ammon-Ra in its destructive male aspect.  The humans bastardized the Zaharan name to Ammonar.  The typical reaction of elves to this mispronunciation is one of gentle disappointment with the folly of the short-lived races, occasionally accompanied by mockery and derision.  If one persists in this after being repeatedly corrected, however, they will eventually become deadly serious, and may challenge the offender to a duel.
• It is said that residing on holy ground delays or reverses the terrible aging caused by the touch of the restless dead.
• The orcs of the Shieldlands have an aversion to the color red; ever since the utter destruction of the orcish Red Horde at the hands of Ancaglon the Black, to use the color in a tribal name is to invite defeat.  The same is true of painting a shield red, and the one way in which the orcs respect hygiene is that they are very careful to scour blood from their weapons and armor after battle.  They also prefer targets who wear red, believing them to be easily vanquished.
• Every spring, the town of Opportunity celebrates All Thieves' Day.  Any thefts successfully committed on this day within city limits and without the victim's knowledge are not prosecutable.  If the victim discovers the theft before sunset, though, then he has until the end of the next week to recover his possessions before they become the rightful property of the thief.  Tradition holds that the celebration began one spring after a particularly harsh winter with the stealing of food stores.  Merchants, and most other wise folk, tend to avoid the town on this day, but a bustling market develops outside the gates.
• Gnolls can't help but laugh.  Sadly, this means that they find laughter unpleasant (much like we do sneezing) and are somewhat touchy on the subject.  As they already have short fuses by nature, there is no surer way to end up fighting a gnoll than to tell a joke, and gnolls bear a remarkable hatred for bards and halflings.
• The Judge of Deal has suffered injuries that would kill most mortal men, and none know his age; many believe that he is immortal so long as the town of Deal stands.  Sages scoff at this notion, and make a hobby of proposing alternate explanations.
• Witch-hunts are traditional in the Shieldlands, occurring in the weeks preceding the two equinoxes and the two solstices.  During these periods, witches hunt for fresh components for the rituals they perform on those days of unusual power.  Many children partake in scavenger hunts during these weeks out of imitation, and some witches arrange such hunts as a means of finding promising children for either apprenticeship or sacrifice, depending on the disposition of the witch in question.  Adults, on the other hand, are unusually polite towards witches during these times, as the witches are often in a hurry and apt to turn obstacles into newts.
• The elephantmen never forget.
• A dwarven creation myth holds that in the beginning, Armok created the dwarves, but grew bored when they failed to war amongst themselves and instead spent their time mining and creating works of art.  Thus, Armok created dragons to go forth and devour the dwarves, and strengthen them in the crucible of dragonfire.  As a result, dragonhunting is regarded as a sacred act of worship among the dwarves.  To rear a dragon, however, is sacrilege, while to ride a vanquished dragon is an expression of utmost divine favor and right to rule.  Shieldlanders who know of this myth generally have a different take, blaming the dwarves for the dragons who eat their livestock.  When a dragon appears to menace a township, it is not the virgins but the dwarves who are first offered up to it by the fearful human populace.  Dragons, for their part, do seem to prefer humanoids with beards who smell of alcohol, but are not picky as to the actual species.  It is also believed that this origin is the reason that dragons love gold.

Anything I'm forgetting, gents?

News in Opportunity

We're picking ACKS back up after a...  three week? hiatus this Sunday, and things in the world have not been idle.  Some of the headlines coming to the attention of my players recently include:

• A number of peculiar and vague scribblings have been found on the back of the Zaharan Fort map.  After being deciphered from elvish, they seem to suggest that there is (or was) an oracle of some sort at the fort.  Likewise, one part of the message appears to be garbled, beyond merely its language...
• The ankhegs which have been terrorizing the populace of Opportunity have been expanding their territory, since their primary competitors, a nest of giant scorpions, were eliminated last month by the Company.  Fortunately, they do not appear to have increased in number, but the length of their spawning cycle is anyone's guess...
• The Orphans, who are closely allied with Garwyn's Perfectly Legitimate Government, report curious black-clad figures snooping around the Guild district, but they're not recognized as guildies...  They seem to be fairly skilled, and the Orphans have been unable to determine just how many of them there are, though estimates tend to fall in the five to seven range.
• A bedraggled wizard arrives from the South and seeks an audience with Garwyn's court.  His demeanor suggests that he bears ill tidings.
• Garwyn's spy in Deal reports that Crowfeed fled from justice, but the direction of his flight is uncertain.  Freeport seems the most likely destination, but Crowfeed is a wily opponent, as the PCs have learned the hard way once before...
• Carcophan's tower of black basalt is erected deep in the swamps of the crocodile-men he now rules.  He takes his first apprentice, Garwyn's henchman Scrud, junior alchemist and survivor of opening the flask containing the Potion of Cloudkill.

A Reflection on My Origins and Supplement Bloat

Freshman year, I tried to run a game that would go back to my roots.  D&D 3.5, 1st level PCs, 4d6 drop and assign with utterly newbie players in the Sunless Citadel.  I expected it to be a blast, and it almost was.  The druid's animal companion was a bit strong, but other than that, things could have been OK.  Except that I had one of Those Guys...  a WoW veteran who went straight for the CharOp boards and ripped through supplements, and ended up running an area control Tome of Battle crusader with a spiked chain.  My official policy on supplements at the time was "anything goes"; I had a fellow who wanted to play a warlock, and what's the danger of supplements for newbies, anyways?  They were having enough trouble getting their heads wrapped around core that I wasn't concerned.  Man, did that backfire.

So that game dissolved, and I started DMing for a group of established gamers.  I guess I took away the wrong message; I thought it was just a problem with That Guy, and people like him.  There was some cognitive dissonance going on, because I saw in him a mirroring of myself, and that led to my first post on powergaming.  But in any case, when I went to run True20 for the veterans, I once again allowed supplements - the Warrior's and Adept's Handbooks (the Expert's Handbook was a terrible affront to True20's design ethos).  And so we had one canny, sneaky thief...  and an absolutely unstoppable warrior and a wizard who was immune to basically everything I could throw at him.  That campaign died when I finally threw up my hands and went "Look, the only thing that can actually threaten Mr. Wizard here is a caster of like 6 higher level than you guys, using True20's Disjunction equivalent.  There aren't many of those in this setting, and I don't have time to prep that ones that do exist.  Also, if they come after you, they will bring a horde of orcs and you will all die."  So we killed that campaign and converted to Traveller.

But during the post-mortem discussion for True20, we as a group realized that supplements were probably the real problem.  The thief was skilled, and could sneak or lie his way out of anything, but was terrible in a straight-up fight.  In short, he was what a thief should be.  The warrior and the wizard were absolute monsters, and the pieces of their designs that enabled that power came primarily from supplements.  So, for the Traveller campaign, we came to a consensus as a group to make things from supplements available only under the GM's purview, and introduced into the game in the manner of his choosing, rather than being driven by the players.  And with that rule established, the Traveller campaign was pretty damn awesome.  We've been running core-only Traveller and Trailblazer ever since, and those campaigns have likewise gone pretty well; none of them have folded over rules interpretations or inability to prepare for PC combat capabilities (though I think we're pushing the limits of Tim's willingness to prep in the current TB game...  :\.  )

My recent musings on playing with newbies brought to mind my own time as one, and how awesome it was.  And I started wondering, "Wait...  how did I get to be a terrible powergamer?  I know I wasn't like this at the beginning."  And I looked back through time.  My first campaign was the 3.0 starter box.  Went great, except for when my fighter died, but hey, that happens.  Second campaign was right after we got the actual 3.0 books, and went fantastically; many dragons were slain, much treasure gotten, and much fun had by all.  We had access to the A & B 3.0 supplements (Tome and Blood, Sword and Fist, and so forth), but we didn't take that much out of them.  No prestige classes, and I don't think any feats, though probably some spells.  After that...  things started to go down hill.  There was the 20th-level game where we went "Let's see what 20th-level characters can do...  holy shit", the Midnight game with Thagg the feral half-orc half-dwarf giantblooded orc-tosser, the X-Crawl gestalt ubergenerics game, the Savage Species monster-gestalt game, our travesty of a Vampire the Masquerade game (featuring Olaf the Brujah lumberjack berserker), the True Sorcery thought experiments...  urgh.  Notable high points were several low-level games with my friends from high school (rather than my family), and my brother's Eberron game, which was distinctly more sane (though still quite high-powered).

And after a bit of reflection on this descent into insanity and powergaming, when I run ACKS over the summer, I don't think I'm going to be allowing stuff from the Player's Companion.  Nothing against the ACKSPC, but...  class and spell construction systems are really more GM tools, anyways.

A Short History of Tim's Campaign World, Mondial

Tim's Trailblazer campaign has recently resumed, and we've picked up two new players from the Traveller game.  They've been...  somewhat confused, though.  Here's a brief summary of everything we (the players) know about Tim's world (I'll add a map if and when I can get a scan of Tim's paper map).

Timeline (dated YBN - Years Before Now):

>5000 YBN - The Chromata, a group of five dangerous artifacts, are created.  We have one of them - Mavrilith the Spelldrinker, a black blade.  Also known are a white shield (Breath of the Dead), blue suit of mail (don't remember name, illusion properties), green something (the Gentle Master - enchantment of some kind), and red something (the Mind's Anchor or something similar).  Each is, at the present time, guarded by a dragon of the same color, except for black and white.  We slew the black dragon and took the black Chromata, and the white shield is known to be in the hands of the enemy (more on him later).  Art objects recovered from the hoard of the black guardian predate recorded history, but also bear the likenesses of forgotten human emperors; this gives rise to speculation that the chromata are of human origin, and lays to rest earlier theories that they might be draconic in origin (which stemmed primarily from the fact that their guardians were dragons).

~5000 YBN - The Elf-Gnome War.  High elven masters of enchantment vs gnomish masters of illusion.  Both civilizations effectively destroyed during a prolonged war of tricks and deception.  The region of unstable magic known as the Impasse is created as a last gnomish superweapon illusion.  It's a funky place.

5000 > x > 40 - Other civilizations develop.  City State of Dehlia founded by humans.  Kathras Deep founded by dwarves.  Araduin Hills settled by halflings.  Duskvale, Malas Farngrey, and Mekbah founded by humans.  Lizardman empire of Sol Magnar founded in the southern deserts (believed to have been founded earlier than these others, as they possessed data on the chromata in their libraries).

~30-40 YBN - The Goblin Wars.  Goblins invade the settled southlands from the Nordham Reaches; dwarves largely repulse them from their territory.  Halfling homeland of Araduin Hills burns, primary population center moved to fortified Hollowtown of Three Rivers.  The involvement of the humans of the City-State of Dehlia is uncatalogued, but there's a reason the city has some pretty serious walls, I suspect...

~20 YBN - Kathras Deep burned by Anaximath the Red Terror, who sets up a lair there.  Fjolkir goes mad, lives out in the woods.

~5 YBN - Gygas the Black crushes the town of Duskvale, sets up a lair there with his brood.

~1-2 YBN - Information on the Chromata surfaces.  The Black 13, a splinter cabal of gnomes who survived the war outside the Impasse, becomes aware of an elven artifact of significant power.  They use their ties with Malakax University of Dehlia to send Ythir, a human illusionist, to go get it for them.  Ythir gathers a band of companions including Qual, a surviving (but largely clueless) high elf, and retrieves the artifact.  Upon its return to the Black 13, it devours one of them and transforms into the High Elf King, kills several more, laughs maniacally, and teleports to parts unknown.  Ythir is contacted by Two of the Black 13 and told of the Chromata; he makes their acquisition his goal (I believe in order to fight the elf king...  not really sure though).  This is also the first time that rumor of the chromata appears, historically; there is speculation about a mysterious force implementing a time delay of some sort on the dissemination of this information.  For more information, see this post.

~0.06 YBN - Three Fists of Dehlia form. Two, alias Adam the Bard, creates several faux Rods of Wonder and uses them to erase the memories of several parties of adventurers.  He sends these parties, each working under the name The Fists of Dehlia, after the chromata.  Fists 1, comprised of Barradin Took, Fjolkir the Beardless, Somak the Druid, and Alonso the Thief slay Gygas, then manage to defeat the Rod and Two's influence, claiming the black chromata for themselves.  Ythir appears and tries to take it from them, but is likewise defeated (but permitted to live).  Alonso disappears mysteriously, and Somak sacrifices his life to close a portal to hell after regaining his memories.  Fists 2, comprised of the Mighty Shin-Yao, Karath the Quiet, and several unknown (deceased) others, slays the white guardian, but are subsequently defeated by Two / Adam; the white chromata falls into his hands.  The target, composition, and success or failure of Fists 3 is unknown.

0 YBN - Free Fists of Dehlia formed when Barradin, Fjolkir, Shin-Yao, and Karath meet by happenstance in Malas Farngrey, City of Temples, and decide to join forces.  They choose the green dragon of Helheim Woods, believed to guard the green chromata, as their next target.  The Elf King is discovered to have taken control of the City of Dehlia, and is believed to be using mind control magics on its population (due to reports of willing cooperation of criminal elements with the new regime).

So that's the timeline we're working with...  Here's a list of PC-threat dangerous NPCs expected to recur:

Ythir the Illusionist - He's after the chromata, and probably has some kind of devious master plan.  Thanks, Jared.  Illusionist 9 when last a PC; when last encountered by PCs, most potent traditional spell (ie, not Tim handwaving) witnessed was Resilient Sphere, so no clear increase in power.  Expect this to be remedied when next we meet him.

Adam / Two - Gnome bard / illusionist or something...  Appears to have distributed copies of himself via the Rods of Brainfuck.  Also has the capability to erase and modify memory.  Believed to have two 'copies' on the loose; one has the white shield taken from Fists 2, the other is expected to be with Fists 3.  As with all distributed systems, I expect he has at least one more backup somewhere...

The Elf King - Capabilities largely unknown, but disintegration and teleport suggest spellcasting of >= 11th arcane caster level.  And since it was technically a quickened split ray disintegrate, possibly much, much higher...

Hethras the Vampire - Vampire Monk; energy drain unarmed strikes urrrgh...  He knows we have the black chromata.  Combat opportunist; has aided us previously when it was in his own interests, but has also showed up at inopportune times to try to kill us and take Mavrilith.  Expect him to show up for bossfights and possibly backstab us.

Somar the Savage - Somak's half-brother, an orc barbarian / druid chieftain (have witnessed Wild Shape + Rage, so we know he's at least Druid 5 and Bbn 1).  Responsible for the burning of Druidtown, possibly with aid from Ythir (last known possessor of the Black Lotus Dagger, which Somar used during his assault).

Seche Peret - Dehlian halfling mob boss.  Formerly a (dangerous) patron of sorts of Aluna the Sorceress (believed to have been a member of Fists 2; her last stated objective was to acquire the white chromata.  Possibly deceased, possibly future ally.  She and Barradin would get along splendidly), now believed mind-controlled by Elf King.

Asmir the Assassin - Last known to be hunting Ythir; expected to reappear, but unknown whether as an ally or an enemy.  Rogue 5 / Assassin 4 when last a PC.  Master of disguise; could be anyone we meet.

Anaximath - Not technically a recurring hostile, but expect to fight her.  Mature Adult or stronger red dragon.  's gonna be a good one.

Mavrilith - Come on guys, it's a sentient black sword that thirsts after all magic.  How can this possibly not come back to bite us in the ass at some point?

Possible high-power NPC allies (mostly good-ish aligned PCs from last campaign):

Qual High-Elven - High elf ranger, and last of the (known) high elves besides the Elf King.  Original creator of Qual's Feather tokens.  Unfortunately, he's forgotten a lot in his 5000 years...  Last known objective was going south across the sea in search of old elven libraries for data on Chromata.

Miranda - Dwarven paladin from the Hammer Temple of Dehlia; child of dwarven refugees from the burning of Kathras Deep.  Last known objective was to aid the Singed Brigade in the containment of Anaximath.

The Interstate Model of Campaigning

Source: http://shell.deru.com/~gdt/pics/fall2003.shtml

While was plotting the route for my summer migration, I was reminded of a realization I had during a previous move.  It occurred to me that the optimal structure for a modernish narrative-style campaign is not that of a railroad, but rather of an interstate.

When you're planning a trip via interstate, you figure out where you are, where you want to end up, and any particular sites you want to stop at along the way.  You get out on the road, and find things aren't quite as you hoped; there are traffic jams, police, road work, and detours.  Not all of these interactions are negative, though - sometimes you get behind an 18-wheeler who knows exactly what's up with the traffic and is good at pushing people out of the way, and you can draft off of him for a while.  Eventually, you realize there's something you need in order to keep going; gas, food, sleep, or bodily relief.  Then you get into the interesting decision-making; this stop looks really sketchy, but the next one isn't for another 30 miles...  will I run out of gas before I get there?  Do I want to take the risks inherent in this stop, or the risks inherent in continuing without stopping?  What if the next station is closed?  Most of the time, we choose well enough, get what we need (maybe for a higher price than we'd hoped), and we eventually make it to our destination.

Contrast with the railroad experience.  You get on the train, and it goes wherever it's going.  You don't worry about getting resources, or making good time despite obstacles; you sit back, relax, and just let it roll.  Eventually maybe you have to change trains, but that's fairly straightforward most of the time.  Sometimes the train slows down and stops mysteriously, which is frustrating, but there's nothing you can do about it.

We've all seen campaigns that run like railroads, and many of us have seen sandboxes too...  but I don't know that I've ever seen an interstate campaign compromise between the two.  The real point there is to give the PCs some agency - you need a +n widget to fight the dragon.  There are a couple ways you could go about getting a +n widget; there's rumored to be one in the Tomb of Terrors (risky, but probably workable), or you could try to get the dwarves to make you one (safe, but expensive), or you could try to steal the Lord of Argros' +n widget (dangerous, but gives the social and thiefy classes a good time).  Let the PCs choose how they handle the rest stops, and how they circumvent obstacles.  And maybe it turns out that the path they chose isn't viable; the rest stop is closed, the Lord of Argros' widget is a fake, and you're suddenly in trouble for trying to steal it.  This stuff happens.  Choices and actions have consequences...  they can delay your arrival at the destination, and maybe imperil the trip as a whole.  But likewise, a good choice may speed things up or make the end goal more likely ("Hey, we found a thing that may be useful for the final objective in the Tomb!  Awesome!").

So next time you're thinking about running a railroad, look at what the PCs may need along the way, and try to provide them with a couple ways to get it; one risky, one expensive, and one really risky but quick and cheap.

As a personal aside and retrospective, it's kind of amazing how to me how far I've come since I had this idea.  That was less than two years ago, and now I basically run and play in sandboxes as a matter of course, with little planned plot and lots of player agency.  I think this may have been one of the first steps on my path towards sandboxing...

Spring Break D&D (or Lack Thereof), and the Virtues of New Players

I must admit, I'm a pretty bad college student, socially speaking.  Don't drink, don't party, not involved in any student organizations...  that kind of thing.  One of my favorite sins against expectation, though, is that I quite like staying at school over spring break, as I'm doing right now.  It's quiet, inexpensive, and I can both sleep and get a lot of work done, if I can find the motivation.  It's a good time for taxes, haircuts, and doctor's appointments, too.

But, because everyone else is gone, there is no gaming.  This troubles me, because given the amount of free time available, there could be lots of gaming.

So I think next spring break (and perhaps next Thanksgiving break, if I feel like giving it a trial run), I'm going to see if I can gather a group of newbies and run a couple sessions.  And hey, if it goes well, might even get another group out of it.  But I want to target people who have never played before, in particular.  There are a couple reasons for this:

• New players are entertaining - the rules don't yet constrain their thoughts, as 3.x / 4e do with many of their players.  As a result, in my experience new players often try wacky things, some of which are actually good ideas ("I poke the hole in the floor with my spear..."), and some of which are not.  In turn, dealing with these creative ideas can make one a better GM by breaking one away from rules-as-written GMing.
• New players are less likely to powergame - min-maxing is a learned tendency, I find.  The one new player I've met who was a hardcore powergamer from the start was an experienced WoW player; his first reaction upon exposure to the 3.5 chargen rules was to find and read the old WotC CharOp forums.  That, however, is the exception; most new players try lots of suboptimal things, and I find that endearing (and certainly easier to manage than a fully powergamed 3.x party).
• New players are the future - There's been much to-do about the death of the tabletop RPG industry.  Theories vary, but many blame video games for a reduction in incoming players.  Me, I think Wizards and 4e had a strong hand in it, by fracturing the base and killing the OGL (though in truth, I should also thank them for making playing other systems more common and killing the OGL product glut)...  but in any case, new players are good for the hobby and the industry.

At this point, you might be saying "Well then John, why haven't you gathered a group of newbies already, if they're so awesome?"  I know I'm thinking it, myself, but there are a couple of reasons.  My Operating Systems partner would be greatly wroth with me if I tried to GM a game this semester, I think.  I also have unfinished business with Fjolkir the Beardless, which must be concluded with the current group.

Finally, there's something safe and familiar about playing with the usual suspects.  I can rely on Drew to cause trouble, Matt to fireball it, Jared to act as the voice of morality (usually) and to pay attention to clues and setting elements, Alex to act as the voice of optimism, and Tim to use illusions.  They're good friends, and I am loathe to abandon them...  but I must wander.  My time at college is running out, and I fear I will not get as good a chance to gather new players again.  We are also too many - DM+5 is hard at mid-levels with 3.x, while DM+4 or even +3 works much better.  As a result, I think that after this semester, I will take the plunge and go in search of newbies.

Games I Want to Run 3; also, Why Traveller Psionics Are Better Than d20 Magic

School starts up again tomorrow.  This may or may not mean the death of this blog, since free time is about to get a lot scarcer.  I do still intend to run Wilderlands or something along similar sandboxy hexmap lines, but at this point I'm looking primarily at systems.  Here are the contenders:

• Trailblazer
• Legends and Labyrinths Beta
• LBB9: Adventurer

All three of these have features and bugs.  Here's the rundown:

Trailblazer is already known to the folks I've been playing with, and is well liked as 'fixing most of the problems with 3.5'.  On the DM side, I'm still itching to try out their monster upgrade rules and possibly their simplified encounter budgeting as well.  A previous post of mine proposes a magic item replacement that would work nicely for TB in the Wilderlands.  The main issues here are that it's a heavy system, with kind of slow combat, complex monster statblocks, and NPCs that take a while to assemble.  There's also my lingering trepidation over their action points and rest rules; on the one hand, APs are a balancing factor for casters, but on the other, they introduce per-level resources, which I really hate, and the rest mechanic is terribly suited for overland travel where random encounters are fairly frequent (in that those random encounters don't actually cost anything in terms of party resources due to rapid rest availability).

Justin Alexander released the L&L Beta a few days ago, and my copy came in this morning.  I've given it a skim, and there are some good things and some bad things.  The design goal here was a very stripped-down 3.5 derivative that remained backwards compatible.  The monster design rules are a real standout; I am fairly confident I could put monsters together during play with it, and that they'd be about right in terms of CR.  That's an awesome thing in a 3.x derivative, and while I'll still probably buy the TB Monster Book when it comes out (hopefully soon...) for what I imagine may be a better-researched monster design system along with a pile of 'Trailblazered' classic monsters, this one has the speed for use in play.  The hazard design system is also very cool, providing a quick way to generate CRs for all manner of traps, perilous crossings, and environmental hazards.  The stunt system provides a mechanism very similar to Traveller's task chains, as well as flexible combat options; I wasn't impressed on first read, but going back for a second, it actually looks pretty slick.  The skill system is kind of nice and simple; you're considered at max ranks for all of your class skills.  If you have a low Int, you choose a number of class skills equal to your penalty to not know.  Very straightforward, and it means that you're good at the things your class is supposed to be good at; similar to Iron Heroes' skill groups in that regard, but a damn sight less complicated.  Other highlights were some notes on wilderness adventures, good rules for hirelings and henchmen, and a number of unusual slimes and molds which didn't make into the 3.0/.5 DMGs (think along the lines of green slime, but different).

On the other hand...  man, when he said he was going to strip down the classes, he really, really stripped down the classes.  Only Barbarian, Fighter, Cleric, Rogue, Wizard, and Sorcerer made the cut, for one.  Feats are gone, but at levels where you would get one, you get a pre-selected one based on class (for example, Barbarians get Power Attack at 6th).  He seems to have dropped the first-level feats, though...  likewise, humans kind of got the shaft and stepped on the half-elf's toes, since that bonus feat got converted into a racial bonus to Diplomacy and Sense Motive.  I'd be happier with a +3 to any one skill.  This solution would be on par with 3.5 Skill Focus, works with whatever class you might happen to be, and reinforces the 'versatile' nature of humans.  Finally, he doesn't appear to have really touched the balance issues underlying 3.x; Clerics, Sorcerers, and Wizards will still dominate, since casting still works as normal, unless he nerfs the spell lists pretty hard (updated spells aren't in the beta).  Granted, this move makes sense in the light of his stance on balance in general.  Iterative attacks are still at the old -5, and rogues are still running at 3/4 BaB, so they're going to have a rough time hitting, especially since they never get Weapon Finesse (though they do get Vigilant Shot, which allows readied ranged sneak attacks under some circumstances, making ranged rogues much more viable).  The feat selection on some of the classes is...  questionable, with Rogue being probably the best example.  No finesse, no TWF, just ranged feats.  Barbarian also picks up Expertise, which is an unusual choice for Barbarians in my experience...  I guess as long as one keeps in mind that those feat selections are really just suggestions, and could be swapped out for other 3.5 feats, things should work OK.  Otherwise, I would foresee rioting.  Likewise, while multiclassing is still around, the problem of base save multiclass stacking persists.  At least this time there are fewer classes to multiclass between...  It also doesn't address caster multiclassing like TB did.  I guess the thing here is that if I decide to run L&L, I'd have to Trailblazer it (yep, it's a verb now).  This would basically entail switching iteratives to -2/-2 with decreasing penalties later, chosen good saves at character creation, combat reactions rather than stock AoOs, Combat Tactics for the rogue, upgraded turning on the cleric, BMB for casting...  I think those'd be the big ones.  And allowing players to choose their feats, too...  the classes with pre-chosen feats seem to be primarily a resource for new players and for DMs who need an NPC in a hurry.  Used with that understanding, I think the system in general would work pretty nicely.

Finally, there's the black sheep, Adventurer, over at Crawdads and Dragons.  Adventurer is basically the Classic Traveller rules converted to run OD&D.  This has the advantage of being pretty rules-light; statblocks are small, simple, and easy to assemble.  It also avoids the 'ever upward' problem of D&D in all its incarnations, where the numbers just keep growing, because skill training is still fairly slow (they do introduce some faster rules for it than Mongoose's version, though).  Being essentially Traveller, it has a number of random tables for things like dungeons and areas of wilderness, which goes beautifully with the style of Wilderlands.  But...  on the minus side, it's a conversion of one old, quirky, non-standardized system to run another old, quirky, non-standardized system.  There are tables of attack DMs based on your weapon type vs. your opponent's armor type.  That kind of thing.

Likewise, there's a whole book devoted to spells.  Part of what I liked about Traveller was that its psionics served an essentially different purpose from magic in D&D.  In D&D, magic is the main and exclusive activity of many characters, and the system encourages this by making spell slots readily available at mid-to-high levels, and by providing mages with very little else to do.  In Traveller, while it is possible to try to make psionics your sole activity, it is neither efficient nor necessary.  First, the resource behind Traveller psionics is distinctly limited; the more you use, the lower your psi score drops, and the harder it is to use more of it.  This is in contrast to d20's magic, where you know exactly how much magic you can put out per day, and running low on slots doesn't make any of your remaining slots less effective than they were at the beginning of the day.  Thus, Traveller's psionics are categorically weaker than d20's magic in this 'declining ability' sense.  Further, Traveller's psionic recovery mechanism is non-boolean; rather than resting for eight hours and then being fully recharged, psionic strength recovers gradually across hours as long as no further powers are used.  This again encourages conservation.  Finally, when you look at the things Traveller psionics can do, and the prices on them, it becomes apparent that they fill kind of a 'special projects' role; they can do things that you just can't do otherwise, but it's hard to pull off and expensive.  Further, most of the Traveller psionic powers seem to be intended primarily for non-combat use; sure, you could teleport in combat, but it's really expensive and the benefit is probably minimal.  They're not built with combat as the first consideration, whereas most d20 spells definitely are.  d20 mages are multibarrel weapons platforms that carry loadouts specified at the beginning of the day, while a Traveller psion is more like a solar-powered multitool.  However, the need for psions in Traveller to be able to rain hellfire and lightning down on their enemies is significantly less than that of their d20 counterparts for two reasons.  First is that it's really hard to generate a Traveller character with no other combat-useful skills, both given the skills on the tables, the group skill package, and the connections rule.  In d20, if your wizard is out of magic, he's stuck with a crossbow and an abominably low base attack bonus.  In Trav, if you have Gun Combat 0 and a decent Dex, you're in reasonable stead for combat as far as offense goes, and then it's just a question of keeping your head down.  Second, Traveller in general places a lower emphasis on combat than modern d20 does, meaning that combat prowess is less necessary, and therefore characters who aren't focused on combat are significantly more viable.

This all kind of leads up to the implicit fourth option: hack my own system together based on Mongoose Traveller, with a similarly 'fuzzy' magic system.  The things necessary to achieve this task would be:

• Updated (er, downdated) skill list.  Remote operations and astrogation aren't really things in fantasy settings.
• New background term tables and careers.  3.5 has 11 core base classes, which would fit roughly into 4 careers of three branches each with one new one.  The expanded education column might be used for a prestige class relevant to each branch.  I think Warrior (Barbarian, Fighter, Paladin?), Thief (Rogue, Bard, Ranger?), Priest (Cleric, Druid, Monk), and Mage (Sorcerer, Wizard) would be traditional ways to split things up.  Alternatively, ditch D&D classes as specialties and make things more interesting.
• Races should be very straightforward.
• Medieval-era gear selection would need expanded significantly, as well as rules for magic items.  To be honest, a lot of magic items could just be standard Trav gear - a potion of Cure Disease is not so different from a Medicinal Drug, for example.  Likewise magic weapons could be modeled as weapons with expert computers.  This may not be the best course, but it's an option.  The other would just be to cook up magic gear, hand it out, and see what happens.  Naturally, that sounds more fun.
• Magic proper is the hard part.  I need maybe 3-5 'schools' / skills for each of arcane and divine, each of which has about 4 fuzzy, non-combat-centric effects of varying difficulty.  Tricky.  I'm actually tempted to go with the four classical elements, plus life and death, and nix the arcane / divine divide, but then things like summoning and teleportation get lost in the noise.  Alternatively, the five colors of Magic the Gathering might work very nicely...  They're familiar to a lot of gamers, sufficiently general that I only need the five of them to cover most any effect that could come up, and reasonably clear-cut in most cases.  Heck, I was going to have four caster specialties already; it's trivial to map each to a color and its two allied colors, and to introduce a fifth specialty for that last one.  Cleric gets white, druid is green, sorcerer is red, wizard is blue, and necromancer is black.  Then it's just a question of intuiting difficulties and mana costs for each attempted effect, which is not significantly harder than assigning difficulties on the fly to tasks run by other skills.  Boom magic system complete.

So, with those points in mind, I do believe it's time to hack together a system.

Tale of Ythir Minicampaign Finished

The prequel campaign / Tale of Ythir came to an early finish this Wednesday due to scheduling conflicts; one or more of our players are going to be out of town at all times for the rest of the summer, so Tim decided to wrap things up quickly.  Here's a short summary of the whole run, along with some of the people we met and things we learned.

Session 1:
Party formed.  Ythir is directed by a mysterious benefactor to acquire an elven artifact from a ruin in the south.  He meets with Seche Peret, the Man Who Knows Everyone, to see if they know this benefactor, but Seche does not.  Seche does, however, send Aluna the sorceress with Ythir to retrieve the artifact.  Asmir the assassin has had a mysterious dream of Ythir; typically this means that Ythir is his target, so he follows Ythir from Seche's place, then convinces the party to let him join up with them under the guise of a thief / wizard who is in it for the loot.  Miranda the paladin receives a letter from the city council directing her to retrieve the artifact as well; she meets the party at the city gates.  There is much tension within the party.
The party proceeds south through the fringe of the Impasse, a place where strange magics happen.  Random monsters fall from the sky but are slain.  A village trapped in a time bubble is passed through quickly / nervously.  The elven lands are reached, the ruin found, puzzles solved, and the artifact, the Rod of Duplication, is gained.

Session 2:
The ruin collapses as the party leaves, and mummy guardians awaken and attack.  Qual, the elven ranger of feather-token fame, and the Avenger, a monk / paladin wandering vigilante, appear and come to the party's aid.  The mummies are put to rest, and it is revealed that it was Qual's task to guard the rod, which Ythir was disguised.  More elven ruins are explored, but little is gained except the knowledge that the high elves and the gnomes of old fought a great war of trickery and magic, and Qual was left behind when the elven host sallied forth into the area that is now the Impasse.  The party returns to Dehlia circumspectly, by back wilderness roads, because Ythir is loathe to give the artifact to his benefactors, who he believes to be gnomes.  A teleporting mage ambushes the party, but is promptly grappled by the Avenger and then beaten to death by everyone else.  The party re-enters Dehlia; Ythir and Aluna make separate reports to Seche Peret, Miranda seeks his protection, the Avenger is tricked into his employ, Asmir evades his notice by disguising himself as a peasant porter for the party, and Qual tries to sell him a walking stick.

Session 3:
I wasn't here for this one, but the way I hear it, the ambushing mage was revealed to be Ace of the Black 13, a cabal who name their members after cards.  The party (sans Asmir and the Avenger) also slay Three and Four of the 13.  They find the Black Lotus Dagger and a mighty hammer of throwing in the crypts beneath the temple of Miranda's order, and use the Black Lotus to escape Dehlia through various creepy hell dimensions (something about flowers?...  I have no idea).  They end up stranded in the frozen tundra to the far north when they return to the material plane, and give battle to a tribe of orcish barbarians led by Somar.  The session ends with them out of slots, hidden in a Leomund's Tiny Hut to avoid hypothermia.

Session 4:
Asmir realizes that the rest of the party has disappeared, and dreams of a man in black robes numbered Five.  He slays Five of the Thirteen at his desk in his home, then disguises himself as Five when a vague man comes knocking at his door.  He teleports with the remainder of the Thirteen to the party's location in the tundra, where the orcs are revealed to be in league with the cabal, and Ythir is forced to give up the Rod of Duplication to the Thirteen.  King tries to use it, but is transformed into the king of the high elves; the rod was actually a trap.  He slays Queen and Jack of the Thirteen trivially, gives an ominous monologue, breaks Asmir's disguise, and teleports out.  The remaining members of the Thirteen flee, and the party escapes the orcs using the Black Lotus again.  They return to the material in Malas Farngrey and pass off their abrupt appearance in the Temple of Ffarlaghn as a magic trick gone bad.  They decide to head south to the dwarven lands, both to see Miranda's heritage and as a route to the empire of Sol Magnar beyond the mountains.

Session 5:
The party begins at the mouth of the dwarven caverns, and encounters the Singed, exile dwarfs who have devoted their lives to containing the dragon (mainly by getting in the way...).  They try to bar the path, but are convinced otherwise.  The party sneaks through the ruined city of Kathras Deep, and slays many salamanders, but avoids attracting the red dragon's notice.  They arrive in Sol Magnar, the empire of the lizardmen, and make a beeline for the library, which contains much knowledge lost in the lands of men.  Adam the Bard appears, revealing himself to be Two of the Thirteen ("Twos are wild"), makes Ythir an offer of membership, and reveals the nature of the Impasse, as well as that the Elves were fond of enchantment magic.  He also states that he is hunting the Chromata to fight the elf king, and that we might do the same.  Ythir finds a working description of the Chromata, and a hunt for those artifacts as a means to defeat the Elf King begins.  The Black Chromata is the spelldrinker; see Fjolkir's journal.  White gives the gift of eternal life and death, Red is a tether to reality against illusions and in dreams, green allows mind control but the target's mind bleeds into the user's, and blue allows the user to create a perfect disguise which can only be broken by speaking his (the user's) name.  The party decides to split up; Miranda returns to the dwarven lands to join the Singed, Qual heads south across the sea to find the elven libraries (I think...  I may not be recalling that bit properly), Aluna reports back to Seche and then seeks the white chromata, Ythir starts a general hunt for them, and Asmir decides to continue accompanying him in case he gets the 'terminate' order.  Also disturbing is the revelation that the gnomes knew about the Rod for the last 5000 years, but only now got around to retrieving it; the possibility is raised that there is a time-delayed 'egg' of some sort, possibly the dragons guarding the chromata.  Uncertainty abounds.  Shortly after the session ends, Asmir receives the kill order, and it is presumed that he is still hunting Ythir in the sequel campaign.

For my part, I greatly enjoyed playing the stereotypical greedy rogue as a cover for a whole different beast.  None of the rest of the party had any clue until the last session where I let a few hints slip...  I'll probably post Asmir's stats as of endgame in the next day or two.  It was a good run.

Games I Want to Run, Part 2

So the votes are in among the options I posted here, from three players from last semester.  One vote of "Fields of Blood would be cool if you can fix the caster issues, but Western Marches would also be badass", one vote of "Fields of Blood would be awesome if you added rules for fighters training units and such, but Wilderlands / episodic would be awesome too", and one that was primarily for Wilderlands.  This input leaves my predicament ultimately unsolved...  but that's OK, because the purpose of asking for feedback wasn't to resolve it, but to get some thoughts from third parties.

So...  Fields of Blood got a good bit of support, but it was all predicated on shrinking the strategic advantage casters get as a result of FoB's increased scales.  First, I'm not sure that's doable; non-casters have no equivalent to spells to be researched, nor an equivalent to items to be created, and they just can't do the strategic-level movement and reconnaissance that teleport and scrying permit.  Craft Fortification, letting individuals boost unit training rates, Command as a class skill, and solo missions into enemy territory are all well and good, but I really don't think it's fixable.

There's also a kind of timing problem - I don't know how long Tim's current campaign is going to run into the semester.  If it runs long, then FoB might end up starting up towards the end of the semester, and then I foresee it dying on Thanksgiving and Winterbreak.  Since FoB would require a lot of work to prep, that would be kind of a shame and a waste.  The episodic structure of Wilderlands would be more likely to survive this kind of thing - as long as I keep a one-adventure buffer prepped and ready to go, Wilderlands could almost be run on a spontaneous basis.  Tim also mentioned today that alternating DMing / co-DMing would make everybody's life a lot easier; as it stands, we have more players than a single DM can run a game for.  Having two DMs who kind of work in parallel, allowing players from the other game into their own game would allow each of them a little more slack.  There is much potential here.

Finally, Western Marches.  I had an epiphany last week, which was kind of disappointing to me...  It was prompted by an observation Ben Robbins makes in the last post in his Western Marches series.  To quote:

You could have a “solo” West Marches game with just one group doing all the exploring, and it would probably be a fun and pleasant affair, but it’s nothing compared to the frenzy you’ll see when players know other players are out there finding secrets and taking treasure that they could be getting, if only they got their butts out of the tavern.

 So: to capture the awesome that was WM, I'd need to have a big playerpool with multiple groups.  This means that I can't run WM during the summer; there just aren't enough people around.  Likewise, to run it as well as possible, I'd also need to have multiple, competing groups meeting regularly at different times.  This implies that I'd need to have a couple nights free a week to run games for different groups...  and I don't see that happening during the semester.  So there is basically no time when I can run it.  After college, I imagine I may have trouble finding a playerpool of sufficient size...  so I think that's a dream which may never come to fruition.  Saddening, but I'm going to keep it in the back of my brain nonetheless in case an opportunity presents itself (say, spring of senior year maybe).

So, conclusions:  Wilderlands it is for the parts of next semester when I'm not playing in Tim's game (I don't think I'll be able to commit to both running and playing regular games, and I really want to finish Fjolkir's grudge against the dragon).  Now the task becomes tweaking Trailblazer for the episodic style of play, studying the setting, and coming up with good hooks and opposition.

Games I Want to Run

I have an awesome problem going into next semester: there are more games that I want to run than I could possibly actually run.  So I'm going to toss them up here and see if I can get some feedback.

The first I've been considering is Fields of Blood.  For those unfamiliar, FoB is a sourcebook devoted to letting players rule and run realms under D&D3.5.  As far as setting goes, I'm considering a Norse / Germanic / Northern European land of Black Forests and grim peaks, where the cunning nibelungen dwarves of Niflheim can craft whatever you desire for a dread price, and the Fey Folk of the woods are dying out as the power of the realms of men waxes.  To the north is the Grey Sea, and to the south lie the Howling Hills of the wulfen beastmen.  The realms of men are fractious, tenuously united beneath a High King, but with each of the noble houses scheming for its own advantage.  Notable source of inspiration of the Song of Ice and Fire, as a lowish-magic northern European highish-lethality setting. The PCs enter this milieu as landless humans, disinherited second or third sons of minor lords, minor knights, upjumped peasants, highwaymen on the run, that kind of person, probably around 8th level, and proceed to carve out lands and titles for themselves.

The advantage of the FoB approach is that it solidly grounds the PCs in the gameworld.  Their actions have consequences, and there are incentives for involving themselves in local affairs.  They take squires, lead crusades, hold castles, marry ladies fair or strapping young knights, and have children who grow to be the next generation of PCs.  On the other side of the same coin, though, is the necessity of a well-detailed setting for the PCs to go conquer, as well as the addition of an extra 'realm layer' of mechanics for me to keep track of and prep.  I also expect that balance issues may be magnified in FoB as compared to 3.5; a 9th-level wizard can decimate an army with fireballs and teleport out if things are going badly, while a 9th-level fighter simply can't, to say nothing of realm-level capabilities like scrying and other powerful divinations.   Timescales are also a problem; time in FoB is measured mainly in weeks.  Casters gain here, as well, from the increased availability of time for things like spell research and item crafting; fighty-types have no similar 'downtime'-burning mechanics.  Finally, it isn't very flexible as far as player availability goes; if the General of the Armies can't make it to one session, you're kinda hosed.

The other approach I'm considering inverts these advantages and disadvantages.  I found a used copy of the Necromancer Games version of the Wilderlands of High Fantasy Campaign Setting, and want to run an episodic game set there, played in the open-table style.  Basically, play would be divided into short, one-session adventures, corresponding to a single episode of a TV show or a single short story in an anthology.  I intend to draw on the Thieves' World anthologies and Fritz Lieber's Lankhmar anthologies for inspiration (though I should probably also read up on Conan as well).  A typical session runs as follows: I prep a hook and a session's worth of opposition.  Players show up, with veteran players assisting new players in rolling up characters at an established 'baseline' level (probably in the 4th to 6th range) while I do a little more prep.  The Heroes assemble in a seedy tavern in the City State of the Invincible Overlord, get their hook, and go do their thing (along the lines of the Beyond the Black Gate post linked above with the word episodic).  The session ends with them back where they started, but richer and more experienced.  XP is awarded by the numbers, so players who show up more often tend to level faster.  I'm considering using one of the old-school "Spending GP on ale and wenches gets you XP" rules so that leveling doesn't end up being terribly slow (13 encounters per level is a few too many for me...).

The open-table part comes in with the easy entrance and exit of PCs; if you have a new player (or if somebody dies), they get a new character.  If somebody decides not to show up one day, no big deal; larger shares of loot for everyone else (if they survive).  If somebody decides never to come back, it's bad, but the campaign goes on.  This allows new players to 'dip their toes in', so to speak, without committing to spending n hours a week on the game.  This style of play also saves me prep time; prep consists of rolling up a random objective, assembling some opposition from one or more monster manuals, and embellishing as I go.  This style of play has another advantage, in that it parallelizes well; if I need a week's break and I know another decent DM (and I dare say that I do), I might be able to hand a week's session off without giving away any big secrets or burdening them with a huge amount of work.  Heck, I could even alternate weeks of DMing (or, better yet, roll each week for who's DMing), and play in the campaign on my off-weeks.  There are two obvious disadvantages here, though: the first is the inverse of FoB's boon, namely that the PCs are terribly disconnected from the world.  They're itinerant sellswords doing dirty work for gold, not holding castles and leaving grand marks on the world.  The second disadvantage is of down-time; with no standardized (and probably not even any specified) amount of time between episodes, item creation and spell research suddenly become hugely ambiguous.  I'm considering turning item creation feats into 'per-episode' resources; for example, Brew Potion might, at the beginning of each episode that you show up for, let you roll up 2d4 random potions that you brewed since last episode.  You get 'em at no cost, but they spoil at the end of the episode.  Scrolls could work similarly, but wands would be much trickier; perhaps a variant of Crafting Points as a per-episode resource would work.

The third and final option that I've been tossing around for a year and a half now is to run a derivative of Ben Robbins' Western Marches campaign.  This, however, would be a ton of work for me, and I like the Wilderlands as a setting well enough to run that instead.  Then there's the other crazy option, which is to run Fields of Blood in the Wilderlands, but then I lose the flavor that I want in FoB and have to put up with the craziness of the Wilderlands.