Dwarfhack?

I've still been playing a lot of Deep Rock Galactic, and it has me thinking:

There are a lot of B/X hacks out there, and they've been getting increasingly weird.

Maybe there's room in the world for a B/X / ACKS hack that gets back to classic fantasy, but with the twist that the party is mostly dwarves, with The Hobbit and Dwarf Fortress as its primary sources and a dash of Warhammer's dwarves.  At low levels, you dungeoncrawl dwarven ruins to recover famed weapons and build a name for yourself.  In the mid-levels, you travel further afield to older and deeper ruins while you start accumulating a bigger company/tribe/sept.  At high levels, you found or reclaim a fortress and defend it from darkness.  Eventually it falls and everyone dies and then you start over playing as your old characters' cousins and you get to reclaim your fortress.

I think the sort of players who play dwarves all the time are usually fun players, so I think such a hack might attract a fun playerbase.  Dwarf players have an extravagance in their warfare which makes them more like Titans than Olympians; only they are on the right side, though it is not the side that wins.

It also tickles me to consider Human as a race-as-class. 

Classes that could be lifted from ACKS with small changes:

• Vault dwarves:
• Vaultguard
• Delver
• Hill dwarves:
• Fury (or comparable "aggressive damage-oriented melee" class)
  
• Halfling Burglar

Classes that I would want to create / rework:

• Elf
• Get sort of ranger / bard / cleric with it; ranged weapons, divine-ish spellcasting with themes of light, nature, healing, enchantment.  A lot like this but with less/no divination.
  
• Cha, Wis, and Dex minimum ability score requirements should mean no more than 1-2 per party
• There's precedent in Dwarf Fortress even
  
• Human
• Ye Olde Fighting 2 / HD 1 / Thief 1?
• Horse-Men, Boat-Men, City-Men, and Hill-Men?
• Maybe with a "Wisdom no higher than 16, because they're a young and foolish race easily corrupted by darkness" restriction?
• Wizard
• Maiar-style outsiders, not really mortal
• Self-reincarnation (takes a month and you lose half of your XP, but you just won't stay dead.  No, wizards are not very filling, I see you dwarves of Clan Donner thinking about it)
• Int, Wis, and Cha minimum ability score requirements to limit availability even further than Elf
  
• What magic do wizards do, really?
• Gandalf knows things -> Divination, Sensing, Detect, Augury, etc
• Gandalf knows "people"
• The eagles
• Shadowfax
• Elrond
• Radagast
• etc
• So spells like Fellowship and Calling/Summoning
• You shall not pass -> Sanctuary, Protection from...  Maybe abjuration more generally.  Dispel Magic, Counterspell, Antimagic Field are probably in scope.
  
• That one time he lit pinecones on fire and flooded a river maybe.
• Basically a lot like this but with less/no healing, more Calling animal friends, and divine-style "you know the whole list" rather than repertoire management.
• Change up the spell list a little, swapping calling animals for summoning undead or demons and you have a great villain class, since they don't stay dead either.
  
• So we have these two caster classes and neither of them have Big Spike Damage to solve encounters.  Maybe that's OK and you have to rely on doughty deeds of arms, or maybe we find a dwarfy way to solve this
• Grenadier?  But I think there's something to the interpretation of Sauron as ambition / industry / abandonment of tradition (versus the dwarven cycle of traditional/ancestral grudges, of merely recovering what was lost rather than making anew) which might place explosives as "weapons of the enemy".  I'm OK with having "weapons of the enemy" be a choice (including with firearms and automatons, potentially), but I don't want to make them core / normalized.
• I don't know if there's room for a whole class around throwing military oil but hmm.
  
• Some sort of rune-flavored dwarf spellcaster?
• I don't want to use Craftpriest because it's a priest and in both Tolkien and Dwarf Fortress, the gods are silent.
  
• There's a runemaker class in HFH, but I don't really know that I want to deal with ceremonial magic.
  
• It would be on-theme for the "big spells that solve encounters" to be in support of your fighters, ie buffs, but I hate the way that buffs usually work where they give small numerical bonuses that you have to remember to add.  Using big "qualitative" buffs would help here.  Ex Haste, Giant Strength, Invulnerability to Normal Weapons, True Strike, Swift Sword, Striking, Flaming Sword.  But these are mostly pretty high-level.  So there's this low-level gap, where we'd need spells that let low-level fighters win small encounters without doing it through small bonuses.  Tricky constraints.
  
• Maybe some area-fear effects?
• Bless tools
• Making golems with the traditional "runes on the forehead"
• Definitely do have repertoire management, and then a focus of gameplay is recovering lost runes to add to your spell list. 
• Probably just Int as prime req
  
• Is there room / sense for a second Hill Dwarf class besides Fury?  Something lighter, parallel to Delver, maybe with a focus on ranged combat?  Houndmaster / huntsman / herder / caravaneer / messenger?

To a certain extent, this project is "mining the Heroic Fantasy Handbook for good bits and then simplifying them".

Reflections on Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress

This is not really a D&D-related post, except inasmuch as a lot of my OSR gaming has been Dwarf Fortress inspired.  It gets vaguely D&D / philosophy-of-games related below the bolded line.

I picked up Rimworld recently and it's almost very good.  My impression is that someone spent a lot of time playing Dwarf Fortress, thinking about all the things wrong with Dwarf Fortress, and how to fix them.  And then they went and did a very competent, moddable implementation job of it.

They're both sort of top-down city management games, where you have a set of characters who have their own likes, dislikes, skills, happiness, and quirks, who you can sort of manage but not really control.  In Dwarf Fortress, you start with 7 dwarves and your fortress can grow up to a couple hundred.  But I've always felt the sweet spot in Dwarf Fortress was closer to 30; with 30 dwarves, you can keep track of everyone's quirks, you have enough people to cover most of the necessary job functions and skills, and it isn't an insane amount to manage.  Rimworld compresses that population range, starting you with 3-5 people and capping out closer to the 30-50 range, right in that sweet spot.  Rimworld also makes this lower population viable by compressing the total number of available skills - in Dwarf Fortress, brewing beer is a separate skill from cooking is a separate skill from butchering animals; in Rimworld those are all just the Cooking skill.  So this means that you need fewer people to cover your needs competently and redundantly.

You also have a lot more control over when and how you get new guys.  In Dwarf Fortress, migrant waves arrive seasonally, and the number of migrants you get depends on your fortress' wealth.  They arrive with random skills and often they aren't what you need.  I have distinct recollections of getting waves of migrants that were like 60% fishermen or cheesemakers.  In Rimworld, you don't have this problem, because you recruit mostly by taking prisoners in combat and then convincing them they your settlement is actually a nice place to live.  If you capture an adversary whose skillset you don't want, you just release them.  Or let them bleed to death in the field.  Or make hats out of their skin to send as gifts to their tribe.  Either or.

(While Dwarf Fortress' developer has always been somewhat uncomfortable with the emergent atrocities committed by the playerbase, like capturing and farming mermaids to butcher because the value of their bodyparts was very high, Rimworld's dev seems to take a different view.  Rimworld makes it straightforward to do cannibalism, organ harvesting, and manufacturing addictive drugs to dump into native markets - but there are almost always consequences.  Most colonists are pretty unhappy about cannibalism and organ harvesting.  Some colonists have tags like Psychopath or Cannibal that let them ignore the happiness penalties from doing these things, but they come with their own penalties; Psychopaths, for example, don't get mood boosts from socializing.  As for drugs, some colonists have a tag that makes them ignore you drug policy and do drugs for fun, even when forbidden, so if selling meth to the natives is your business of choice, that limits your selection of colonists to adopt).

The graphics are an obvious change from Dwarf Fortress and part of the reason that I did not initially recognize it as Fortress-like.  They aren't ASCII.  They're not fancy, still just two dimensions, but they're a little fancier than even the fanciest of Dwarf Fortress tilesets, in part because the engine was built with them in mind.

There is no digging / vertical elevation component to Rimworld's maps.  This is a definite simplification and I'm mostly OK with it; it would be hard to make a simple 2d interface clear with elevation levels (and two dimensions with no z-axis was how older versions of Dwarf Fortress did things anyway).  Not being able to dig defenses is an interesting change and not one that I have really adapted to yet.

The combat system is better than I expected.  There is some weirdness in it (such as bolt-action rifles having only about 1.5x the range of a pistol).  Much of the anatomical detail of Dwarf Fortress combat is still there, but a lot of the jank around inventory management and ammunition is gone.  You also don't draft by squads, which is nice; every colonist is draftable independently, so if you just need one marksman to come deal with a rampaging alpaca you don't need to call up the whole crew.  It also isn't tick-based like Dwarf Fortress', but the slow/normal gameplay speed is quite slow so it's easy to pause, issue an order, unpause, wait for it to be completed, and then pause again before something else goes wrong (there are also some faster gameplay speeds, which are nice when you're waiting for stuff to happen, vs Dwarf Fortress' fixed clock).  The gameplay of moving your shotgunners and melee guys forward from cover to cover while your riflemen pin down enemy ranged units, or of moving your melee to intercept enemy melee while your riflemen try to evade, is quite good.  I do wish you could give your guys secondary weapons though.

The job management UI is excellent and a big part of why I feel like Rimworld's developer must have put some time into Dwarf Fortress.  It's a big grid, with a row per colonist and a column per job type, and you can put priorities in each cell.  It's very similar to Dwarf Therapist, a third-party tool that presents comparable grid-like UIs mapping dwarves to functions, but then edits the memory of running Dwarf Fortress processes to actually apply changes.  Managing large fortresses without Dwarf Therapist is excruciating.  In Rimworld it just comes stock, no memory-editing required.

One unpleasant surprise I had was around deconstructing buildings.  In Dwarf Fortress, when you demolish a workshop, say, you get all of the materials back that you put into building it.  This is not the case in Rimworld.  This is especially bad because there's a big bottleneck in the early-midgame economy around Components, little bits of precision-manufactured metal and circuits.  Many buildings need a couple of Components, and demolishing these buildings does not get you all of the Components back.  I found myself in a Components crunch in year 2 and had to take some risks to get myself out of it.  It was interesting gameplay, but lossy construction and deconstruction is an unforgiving surprise on new players in a game which is otherwise much more approachable than Dwarf Fortress (there's even a tutorial and then an in-game system to continue to show you tips for quite a while after).  Sure, you can savescum (another affordance present in Rimworld and absent in Dwarf Fortress), but did you save at just the right time in your construction effort?

In order to get out of my components crunch, I had to figure out how to use the caravan system.  This is actually rather neat; it lets you send out parties onto the world map, to go to destinations and trade with (or raid) them.  I had a good tailor, so I picked my colonist with the best speaking and shooting skills and sent him across the map to sell hats to the nearest friendly village and buy their components.  He did, in fact, get ambushed en route home, but fortunately was able to fight his way out.  I also set up an orbital trade beacon and was able to buy components from a passing starship.  This beacon cost me components to build, but paid for itself and more.  I like that I had to take some risks / make some calculated gambles here.

So what don't I like about Rimworld?

Rimworld has an AI "storyteller" system as basically part of its difficulty settings.  The storyteller setting (mostly) determines how often threats to your settlement appear.  Two of the three settings alternate between windows when major threats can appear and windows when major threats can't appear.  Under the third setting, all events are on the table at random at all times.

These "threat windows" became apparent to me after some time in game.  There's a graph you can look at of colony wealth that also shows when you were attacked by raiders, and there was a clear pattern, an interval, at which I usually got two raids in fairly close succession.  The only time I didn't get a second raid in that window was when my caravan was ambushed instead.  It wasn't tied to the logic of the game-world; it wasn't about in-game seasons, or having accumulated wealth (though that influences size of raiding parties I think), or having repelled the previous raid with different degrees of success, or having befriended particular tribes.  You can make friends with all the tribes but one, you can kill all their raiders every time, and they're just going to keep raiding you at the same frequency they always did.  It isn't like they figure out "oh this settlement is a hard target, we need to wait a while and gather our forces and then make bigger but less frequent raids rather than squandering our manpower piecemeal".  It just...  doesn't feel right.  It's very obviously artificial.  I found myself anticipating the trouble window and planning around it, and not enjoying it.

I get why it's there; the amount of strain you put on the colony is tightly-controlled and you don't get stacking catastrophes leading to cascading failure as much as you do in Dwarf Fortress.  But that graph annihilated my suspension of disbelief.  So say what you will about Dwarf Fortress' obscurantism, but the fact that there is no graph of when the goblins attacked might actually be a really important feature for sufficiently anal players (who are probably over-represented among players of this genre...).

It leaves me feeling like I can't expect Rimworld to yield reasonable consequences for any of my strategic / macro decisions now.  I was leery about settling near roads because I expected that having a site that is easier to get to would lead to more raids.  But now I'm pretty sure it doesn't (nor more visiting merchants).  I chose to settle near the headwaters of a river instead, because what sort of sensible person, given the choice, wouldn't want to settle near a nice clean water source, for drinking, for cleaning wounds, for irrigating crops, for fishing, for disposing of waste, for carrying bulk cargo downriver in canoes?  And who wouldn't be nervous about settling too near a river, due to possibility of flooding?  But it turns out that rivers don't do any of those things.  Rivers are good for 1) building water wheels for power, 2) slowing down melee enemies trying to cross it, so you can shoot at them more easily, and 3) giving your dudes the Soaking Wet mood penalty.  That's it.  There are mods to make rivers do most of the things that I expected them to do, but none of that is in the base game.  I can forgive when Dwarf Fortress omits things like that, because Dwarf Fortress isn't (and hopefully never will be) finished, and I have faith that the Toady One wants to do those things eventually; he just hasn't gotten to them yet.  But Rimworld is a complete, finished, game, and also not free like Dwarf Fortress.  It makes these obvious omissions less forgivable.

What I want from the "AI storyteller" subsystem isn't a predictable pattern of rising tension interspersed with breaks.  It isn't the total randomness of the third storyteller mode either.  I want it to take the state of the world as input and make sensible things happen.  If I settle up near a bunch of hostile villages, I should get raided more!  If I settle out in bumfuck nowhere, I should get fewer visiting merchants!

My other complaint is likewise around a macro mechanic: difficulty levels.  Besides the three storyteller settings, Rimworld offers a list of difficulty levels to choose from, which influence resource production, injury infection chance, baseline colonist mood, raid size, etc.  I can see why Rimworld has them - the existence of easy difficulty levels makes the game accessible, while hard difficulties exist for the deep fanatics.  But reflecting on Dwarf Fortress, I think I like its approach better.  Dwarf Fortress has no difficulty settings.  Instead it has a wider variety of biomes.  If you want an easy game of Dwarf Fortress to learn how to play, you settle in a mirthful (blessed) temperate forest far from goblin towers.  If you want a stupid-hard Dwarf Fortress game, you settle on a haunted glacier near a necromancer tower with no source of flux for making steel.  So the range of difficulty is there, but it's purely within the game-world; it isn't messing with things like infection chance or goblin raid size.  Or when it does mess with goblin raid size, that's because you settled near a goblin civilization and it's decoupled from everything else.  There's a certain...  reality to Dwarf Fortress.  Dwarf Fortress is opinionated.  It's not afraid to say "these are the rules of the game, the rules of the world; here is the minimum bar for any fortress in any biome."  It doesn't bend to you, and I think that's part of why people admire it (and its developer).  Part of the magic of Dwarf Fortress is that when you conquer Dwarf Fortress, even in an "easy" biome, it feels like an accomplishment, and you're like 80% of the way over the difficulty curve.

Maybe it's weird to say that you "conquer" Dwarf Fortress, since every fortress falls eventually.  There is no win condition.  But you can feel that you have put the fortress into a stable state, one where it can resist, say, any two concurrent shocks (like a goblin siege and a forgotten beast at the same time).  Such a fortress is likely to survive until you get bored.  Rimworld adds a win condition.  I haven't gotten there yet, but I'm not sure how I feel about its existence.  Dwarf Fortress was kind of a stoic exercise, or a zen garden; you spend all this time and care building this fortress and minding the troubles of all these little people in it with the full knowledge that it will eventually burn down.  And at a certain point in your life as a player of Dwarf Fortress, the burning down becomes the most interesting part.  That's where the surprise is; you have dealt with all the typical threats and then some combination of circumstances sneaks up on you and you go "Oh!  It's time!  I didn't expect it to happen like this!  Neat!  Let's watch it all unravel."  Having a win condition...  I don't know, it sort of feels like it changes the meaning of the game.  The Rimworld is something to be escaped, something to achieve a lasting victory over, rather than just something to be survived for a while.

Maybe that's suitable, really, for a science fiction game; the theme that things could be otherwise, that they could improve, as opposed to the fantasy of return to myth, of recurrence, the perpetual turning of the wheel of Armok.  I haven't actually played Dwarf Fortress in a long time; every now and then I open it, generate a world, pick an embark site, and then get to gear and skill selection for my dwarves and go "no, no I don't think I want to deal with this again today.  I stand reminded."  It is very much a cycle.

I suppose in ultimate judgement, it might be fair to say that Rimworld is probably a better game than Dwarf Fortress, but a worse simulation.  It thinks about things like narrative structure, rather than trying to simulate a fantasy world (in excruciating detail) and letting interesting stories emerge from the randomness.  It is certainly more accessible, more humane, more marketable, with finer attention to the core gameplay loop, but...  there's a certain elemental quality, a primal sincerity that Dwarf Fortress has that I think Rimworld lacks.  Dwarf Fortress strikes me as the better device for building character in its players, while Rimworld's focus on creating tuned challenges is more gamist, more like my thoughts on creating dungeons intentionally to be challenging, rather than to make sense in the world.  But if I have difficulty respecting it because it is too transparent about that game, maybe challenge dungeons are similarly misguided.

...  apparently it was Valentine's Day today.  Ha!

Dwarf Fortress a la ACKS

"Study your successes, not your failures.  If you study your successes, you learn how to succeed.  If your study your failures, you learn how to fail." - Richard Hamming, You and Your Research.

I'm not actually proposing to run another ACKS campaign.  This is more like a thought-experiment derived from the previous (relative) success of the Bjornaborg campaign, after which my players remarked positively on their relative ownership of the world and their dwarven engineers.

Part of the issue with ACKS is that I never want to map a dungeon ever again so long as I live.  So the question - can I get players to do it for me?  The answer, I suspect, is yes.  Previously I've had several players take great pleasure in designing and mapping their castles in ACKS.  "Reverse dungeon" is already a thing, with the players running defense.  This would look a lot like that, but with some base-building aspects on top of it.  Coming at it from the ACKS side, it's extremely granular but benefits from single-domain-for-entire-party, which should be good for cohesion (if you can get buy-in on the idea at all).  This is like, domains for third-level characters.

You get a population of dwarves.  Cut it up into pools of anonymous Laborers, Craftsdwarves, and Soldiery, with a small number of named NPCs (eg, veterans / heroes, master craftsdwarves, sages).  Each laborer can produce 10gp/mo of food (provided space to grow it), construction, or mining.  Craftsdwarves can supervise construction as engineers, produce goods for export or use, or build traps and siege weapons at about 20gp/mo.  Soldiers, of course, train, patrol, and fight (or labor).

Let's do some math.  We're going to assume Absolutist Survivalist Autarchy Juche Dworth Korea economics with no useless children as our baseline, from each according to their ability, to each according to the whims of the player characters.  I'm also going to take a few gross liberties with ACKS' math.

Farming - one laborer produces 10gp/mo (9 really, per the Labor proficiency, but 10 for ease of use).  Per Campaigns, supply costs for infantry are 0.5gp/wk/individual, so one farmer supports himself plus four others.  Great.  The really interesting question is "how much land do you need to do that?"  This is something that Dwarf Fortress is really bad about; farmland is rarely a problem except in the early game in certain embarks (glacier, salt water, &c), because productivity per unit of farmland is very high.  I'm sure ACKS has the answer to this question, and that answer is almost certainly "even with mushroom crops, there's no way in hell you're going to manually dig a farm large enough to support anybody".  So you're probably left with surface farming or cavern farming, and those are both areas you're going to need to secure by force and fortification.  Looking at the Axioms Peasant Economics issue (goddamnit) they have 30 acres of land producing ~160gp/year of food (but with more labor), so ~5gp/acre/year, so if you're producing 10gp/mo you're looking at like 22 acres.  An acre is ~44000 square feet, or a 210' x 210' area.  So...  yeah, if you want to farm underground, you're going to need to do a lot of digging.  You could probably get into some decent surface-world Civ-type gaming if you had the right hexmap scale; a half-mile hex contains 24 farms, a quarter-mile hex contains 6, so somewhere in that range is probably about right.  A nice feature of operating at this scale is that rapid response is possible; if goblins are burning the outlying farms a mile from the fortress, it takes news 10 minutes to arrive at a run, a few minutes to reach the PCs in the fortress, and then 10 minutes at a run to get to the action...  which means some peasants might still be alive.  That is, if you have roads and bridges, of course.  Maybe faster if you have lookout towers and soldiers on duty; because hey, you can see smoke from a long way away!  So the PC choice structure / play loop here looks like "choose which hexes to farm, where to build logistics and fortifications so we can defend them, defending them when they get attacked, tracking the attackers back to their lair, and clearing it."  Depending on how complicated you want to get, you could also get into like, building huts for your peasants and clearing woods for raw materials.  Might also make sense to have no surface farm production during winter, so you want to shift mining labor to farming in the summer / fall, stock up food, and then shift farming labor to mining in the winter.

Right, the other option is farming caverns.  I'm going to assume comparable land productivity between surface and caverns for ease of us (actually a terrible assumption, because power per square foot on the surface is way higher due to sunlight, which is why there isn't a whole lot of biomass density in caverns IRL).  Unlike the surface, caverns are mostly closed, so instead of a hex map it might make sense to just use a graph of connected nodes, each of which has some size in arable land, and each edge of which has some distance for travel purposes.  In the spirit of jayquaying, throw in a smattering of surface-cavern links; very reasonable places to build fortifications.  Could also very easily do multiple layers / depths of caverns, underground rivers, &c.  PCs explore caverns, locate monster lairs and desirable special features, choose which caverns to clear and secure via fortifications, and play reactive defense.

Mining - Mostly we're interested in mining for space, although mining for raw resources is also worth thinking about.  ACKS has somewhat conflicting numbers for mining for space; in Core, a 10x10x10 section of dungeon hallway costs 500gp, which is 50 dwarf-months of labor.  Ouch.  In DaW: Campaigns, though, the cost of siege-mining is 1gp per 20 cubic feet, or 50gp for the same volume, a mere 5 dwarf-months.  I guess the important difference here is the flagstone floor you get in the dungeon hallway.  Let's go with the 50gp/cube estimate.  So if you have, say, 25 laborers, you can allocate 5 to farming a quarter-mile hex (producing 50gp/mo of food, which supports 25 dwarves) and the other 20 to mining, and dig four 10x10x10 cubes in your fortress per month.  If you happen to have an ore vein, this can also produce raw materials of value (would probably steal a note from How to Host a Dungeon here, and figure out ore vein locations by dropping dice on graph paper).  Given that it takes about 5 dwarves to dig a cube, and about 5 dwarves to farm a quarter-mile hex, five dwarves producing 50gp/mo might just be the right size to track labor in.

Labor is probably going to be a limiting factor of construction, generally.  Given the presence of surface-cavern links, it might make sense to secure that initial cavern and fortify all the links out, even if those fortifications are just wooden palisades, because then you don't need to dig out living space (huts-in-a-cavern are cheaper, but less defensible, than excavation).

Craftsdwarves - assuming a mix of apprentices and journeymen, I'm willing to call it 20gp/mo of production per craftsdwarf for ease of use.  That production can be finished goods for export (cut gems, enameled beer steins, whatever), weapons and armor, siege weapons and ammunition, traps (per Player's Companion...  though traps are crazy-expensive), or "Specialist" support for military, which is a cost of about 1gp/soldier/month.  Craftsdwarves are scarcer than laborers and more productive, so you probably want to house them in or near the fortress.  They may or may not need workshops and tools, depending on the detail you want.  Again, very nice to manage in groups of 5, for 100gp/mo production.

TODO seasonal or annual check to see if a craftsdwarf turns into a named master craftsdwarf.  Might involve Fell Mood, PC quest for unusual materials.  Not that it would be worth the hassle, because master craftsdwarves don't improve production that much...  unless you make them grandmasters from the Heroic book and let them start making masterwork / semi-magic items.  That it might be worth worrying about.

Soldiers - this is kinda the easy one, since there's so much material already in Domains at War about them.  Comes in two flavors, heavy infantry and crossbow (and maybe furies).  Need both food / supply from labor and specialist upkeep from craftsdwarves.  Station them in fortifications or watchtowers, send them on a regular patrol route through certain hexes, keep them close at hand so they can support PC actions, whatever.  Probably can't have more than a third of the militia or so on watch / available at the drop of a hat, but should be able to bring the whole force to bear with a day's notice.  Nice to group into 6-dwarf squads (for fighting in 10x10 squares) or 30-dwarf platoons.  Combat against beastmen (goblins and orcs) is probably going to be on warband / platoon or even squad scale.

TODO occasional check to see if a soldier turns into a named / classed hero, subsequently available for henching; might only happen through combat.  Heroes can train laborers to be soldiers, per Campaigns (and then you use craftsdwarf labor to equip them).

TODO priests?  Sacrificing food and goods for blessings.  Prevent disease and undead?  Praise be unto Armok!

TODO morale, consuming excess production for a morale bonus.  In the case of excess food, this is a festival; in case of excess crafts, it's gift-giving and private property.

Caravans - every season except winter, a caravan arrives and you can trade them stuff; useless tchotchkes, excess food, goblin prisoners, smoked chimera meat, whatever, and purchase weapons or food, or hire labor from them, in return.  Since we don't pay anyone wages, arguably the "fair" / ACKSonomically sound thing to do would be to convert excess production into migrants at slave-labor rates, of 33 times their monthly wage.  Since we have to produce the goods we're using to pay that price, we can take three months of production and use that to pay for a migrant, so for every 11 dwarves allocated just to exports for an entire season we could get a new dwarf.  That's kinda harsh; I expect casualties would outpace population growth.  Another option is that you export some goods and then the amount you export earns you a certain number of rolls on the Migrant Table...  as well as on the Monsters Table, with results including goblins and dragons, of course.  Fame for production is a double-edged sword.

So that's all pretty straightforward.  The real remaining trouble is PCs.  What do they do?  How do they earn XP?  Why do they care about this hole in the ground full of dwarves?  We've broken the core adventuring heist "get the money and get out" gameplay loop of ACKS by making the game largely defensive.  Could award XP for fortress / domain production, consumption, or exportation, plus cash earned from fighting and killing monsters I guess.  In terms of class mix, Vaultguard, Fury, Craftpriest, and Delver are all very reasonable classes.  A dwarf surface-explorer counterpart to the Delver's underground exploration might be reasonable.  A dwarf ceremonialist from the Heroic book might be reasonable too, to get some effects that you can't with divine magic.  Human bards, mercenaries, scholars, and monster hunters are not unusual long-term guests, and there's even precedent for elves leading dwarf fortresses.  So maybe party composition is not that big a deal.

In terms of adventuring activities, there's actually a mix of reactive and proactive possibilities.  Reactive adventures include stopping monsters from killing all your peasants and seeking out rare materials for fell moods.  Proactive adventures include cavern exploration, treasure maps?, and clearing out monster lairs that have raided you previously.  Probably a reasonable place for clocks - if you defeat a raid, it's only a matter of time until there's a stronger follow-up.  Likewise, over time Monster Table results build up, and those lairs may merge.  So a proactive policy of taking care of threats before they get worse is probably wise...

Oh yeah, and the endgame - fortress falls to darkness, and a new party gets to explore / loot it.

ACKS Classes: Dwarven Muleskinner

 

 M☺

(yes, that was a Dwarf Fortress joke.  But do you know how hard it is to find a picture of a dwarf leading a mule?)

This class grew out of some thoughts on the Explorer and the Venturer, combined with a goodly dose of silliness and perhaps some slight influence from Dwarf Fortress.

Dwarven Muleskinner

Prime requisites: Str, Dex

Minimum stats: Con 9+

Hit dice: 1d6

Maximum level: 11

While the adventurous humans have their explorers of faraway lands, and the elves have cadres of rangers dedicated to defending their forests, one does not usually think of the folk-under-the-mountain as having much skill in the wilderness.  Indeed, there are but two sensible explanations for a dwarf taking up overland travel.  The first is that he has been cast out from his clan holdfast for some deeply shameful act, as sometimes happens when the alcohol flows too freely.  The second is greed; a dissatisfaction with the metal and stonework of the mountainhomes, a desire for the finer things in life as produced by the surface races, or a lust for the wealth that a life of trade might bring.  Most muleskinners claim to have begun their careers for the latter reason, though their companions often suspect that the former is closer to the truth.

Dwarven muleskinners are accustomed to defending themselves and their caravans as they journey across many miles of trackless and monster-infested wilderness, and so they advance in attack throws and saves at a rate of two points per three levels, just as a fighter.  They are skilled in the use of all one-handed melee weapons and all missile weapons except for longbows, which they may not use due to their short statue.  Muleskinners may fight with a weapon in each hand, with a one-handed weapon used in both hands, or with a weapon and a shield.  They eschew armors heavier than chainmail, as these restrict their movement and prevent them from keeping up with the mules or running for their lives.  Like explorers and rangers, muleskinners prefer to engage their enemies at range, and gain a +1 damage bonus with missile weapons, +1 more at each level divisible by 3.  They may use any magic item usable by fighters.

Muleskinners have a sense of direction well-developed by extensive overland journeys, and so begin play with the Navigation proficiency.  They are also responsible for keeping their pack animals out of dangerous terrain, and so are skilled at Land Surveying.  They are as stubborn as the mules they lead, and exhibit exceptional Endurance in harsh conditions.  The nature of their charges means that every muleskinner is familiar with the basics of the care and training of mules, and so they gain Animal Husbandry and Animal Training (Mules) as proficiencies (if you have a merciful Judge, he may extend Animal Training to 'pack animals' rather than mules specifically).  Further, an exceptional few muleskinners (those worthy of the class, rather than just being L0 dwarves) develop a preternatural bond with their animals and an excellent understanding of animal behavior in general, gaining the Beast Friendship proficiency.

Of course, being merchants, muleskinners must cultivate a second set of talents for once the journey is at its end.  They are Shrewd Bargainers, with skills earned through the sale of thousands of lead figurines and the acquisition of tens of discount mules.  Most successful muleskinners also take care to develop a Network of Buyers and Suppliers which permits them to lower the effective market class of settlements which they have already visited at least once by 1, as the Venturer ability.

Finally, as dwarves, muleskinners gain a +1 to surprise rolls while underground.  All are fluent in Dwarf, Gnome, Goblin, and Kobold, and they may detect traps, false walls, secret doors, and other such constructions while underground on a roll of 14+.  Due to their natural hardiness, they gain a +3 bonus to saving throws vs blast and breath, and a +4 bonus to all other saving throws (and so they save as a Dwarven Vaultguard of the same level).  As a result of their attention to detail, they gain a +2 bonus to proficiency rolls (including, from their skill set, Animal Husbandry, Navigation, Land Surveying, and Beast Friendship throws).

Upon reaching 5th level (Dwarven Mule Whisperer), the Dwarven Muleskinner masters the Secrets of the Carrot and the Stick, which motivate all mercenaries, mules, and henchmen that he personally leads to great acts of valor.  Through howled threats of the lash, promises of great rewards, and gently whispered reassurances, he provides his followers with +2 morale when he personally leads them.

When he reaches 9th level (Dwarven Caravan Master), the Dwarven Muleskinner may establish a fortified trading post, ideally located along a trade route through forbidding wilderness.  The trading post must be built in an area which is civilized by neither humans nor dwarves, and attracts a mostly human population, since few dwarves wish to be ruled by so eccentric a lord as a muleskinner.  Additionally, when the post is constructed, it will attract 1d4x10 0th-level human mercenaries, 10 1st-level dwarven vaultguards, and 1d6 1st-3rd level dwarven muleskinners, all seeking employment.

Dwarven Muleskinner Class Proficiency List: Alertness,  Ambushing, Animal Husbandry, Animal Training, Bargaining, Bribery, Combat Reflexes, Combat Trickery (Incapacitate, Wrestling), Command, Diplomacy, Dwarven Brewing, Fighting Style, Gambling, Illusion Resistance, Intimidation, Language, Leadership, Mapping, Mountaineering, Naturalism, Passing Without Trace, Precise Shooting, Riding, Running, Skirmishing, Sniping, Survival, Trapping, Weapon Focus

Fur Trader Template: This pre-generated template represents a small-time fur trapper and trader from the borderlands.  This template is ready for adventure.
Proficiencies: Alertness, Trapping
Equipment: Leather armor of uncertain providence (smells like mule), leather boots, broad leather belt with copper buckle with clan markings, hooded cloak, crossbow with 20 bolts, hatchet (hand axe), boot knife, tent, flint and tinder, hand-whittled whistle, two weeks' iron rations, mule, saddlebags (large sack x2).  Unusually successful fur traders may have some amount of furs or a fancy hat.

Build math: Fighting 2, HD 1, Thief 1, Dwarf 2

XP to L2: 600 dwarf 2 + 450 fighting tradeoffs + 500 HD 1 + 1000 fighting 2 + 200 thievery 1 -> 2750

Winter Break To-Do List

(Semi-gaming relevant) things I need to do over winter break:

• Tabletop:
• I need to resolve something like 4-5 months of ACKS stuff - basically all of fall and winter.  This is likely to be done in small groups over skype throughout break.  Fortunately, I remembered to bring my hex map (though I left my dice at home due to baggage / space constraints...  guess I'll be using perl's RNG).  I need to resolve a bunch of trade for Matt, Alex wants to explore the caverns beneath Fort Camarone, Tom wants to clear some hexes around his tower, and Jared I believe is recruiting a company of cataphracts to hire out to Drew to clear the hexes north and west of Opportunity.  Then in the winter, Alex and Tom will likely be doing research while Matt does more trade and the domained fighters collect income.  Also need to generate some NPC stats and motivations for the coming Witchwar.
• Install a pdf editor (xournal, maybe) and use it to put bookmarks in the ACKS core and Player's Companion pdfs.
• I expect Matt and I will be trying to play Space Hulk at some point.  We'll see how it goes; it's hard to do this properly with digital tabletops because some of the hidden information is either lost or hard to verify.
• I'm curious to take a look back at Wardogs (MJ12's Starmada-based mech game).  I've kind of concluded that BattleTech is probably a bit too...  heavy, and while I don't like some of the components of Wardogs, like the melee subsystem and the huge number of weapon traits, I feel like it would work quite well for an established universe where you're just converting in units.  In particular, I'm curious to try it on 40k's universe.  It could also work well, I think, if the permitted build options were strictly limited; here's a list of available weapons, here's a list of permitted vehicle traits, and you can only design with these things.  A compromise position between the perfect freedom we had with Starmada design and the lack of design in games like 40k.
• Traveller.  I've been following In Like Flynn's Traveller sandbox design project (and reading the Schlock Merc archives), and they've got my Traveller gears turning again.  Might be nothing comes of it, or I may post some material since I don't expect to be able to run Traveller again before everyone goes their separate ways.
• Tim and I split for a copy of Microscope at some point last spring, and it seems like a game that I might be able to get my brother to play while I'm at home.  For bonus points, combine with Traveller.
• Computer games:
• Dwarf Fortress - to elevate the fortress of Treatycaverns, home of the Circumstantial Hatchet, to prominence, preparing it properly for siege after I turn invaders back on.  I finally got splintermind's Dwarf Therapist fork set up properly and it's wonderful, so that should help in this.  I recently discovered that my chief medical dwarf, though a qualified doctor and surgeon, really hates helping other dwarves, and therefore hates his job.  He's since been replaced; while still on call for cases when an actual trained surgeon is necessary, he no longer has to deal with minor ailments on a regular basis, and is much happier as a result.  I would never have noticed something like this without Dwarf Therapist's assistance.
• Get the Steam beta up and running on my xubuntu laptop.  Then, TF2.  Also, filing bug reports.
• Playing with computers: 
• Build and learn to operate an Arch linux VM.  I'm not sure I like where Ubuntu is going with Unity and the shopping lens integration and such (and the network manager memory leak is just awful), but I don't want to jump to Arch without trying it out a bit first.  If the VM tests go well, then I'll maybe think about carving a partition out for it (I'd prefer to run a livedisk test too to make sure it likes my hardware OK, but I'm not sure Arch puts out livedisk trial images).
• Upgrade this laptop to 16 GB of RAM.
• I should probably try to get through a couple more levels of smashthestack, or start playing overthewire instead.  I like how overthewire at least tells you what the levels are before you get to them...
• This ARM assembly course looks informative and potentially useful
• There's this one crashing program that I want to investigate further to see if it's exploitable.  Can't say more, because this might turn into a CTF problem or something.

Praise be to Armok! - New Dwarven Craftpriest Spells

I am sad to say that I had a Dwarf Fortress relapse during the parts of Thanksgiving when I did not have guests.  In between eating leftovers, experimenting with surface farming, and pondering what to do with the two owlmen caught in my cage traps, I was struck by the fact that ACKS' dwarf craftpriest uses the same spell list as their standard cleric.  This is somewhat ridiculous, given that Bladedancer use a different spell list, and it hardly seems reasonable for the folk-under-the-mountain to worship some surfacer sun god.  So I got to thinking about what some suitably dwarfsome spells would be, and while I don't have full descriptions or levels, the rest should be fairly doable.

• Detect Treasure - Dwarves love gold, and their priests have perfected means for locating it.
• Detect Ore - Like Detect Treasure, but lower level and somewhat less utile.
• Plague of Cats - Summons 3d4 cats which harass, distract, trip up, and reduce the frame-rate of the target.  A long-term Curse version is also available, whereby the subject suffers a +4 to reaction rolls with cats, cat-like monsters, and cat owners, and is forever plagued by their unhelpful presence and 'gifts' of dead animals.
• Fell Mood - A uniquely dwarven Curse with Geas-like attributes, the target of a Fell Mood must save vs spells or be driven mad by an obsessive need to construct an utterly implausible work of art.  Should he fail to do so within six months of the casting of the spell, he goes irrevocably insane.  Should be succeed, however, he becomes a master of his craft.  Sometimes used as a means of trial among the dwarves along old Medieval "trial by superstition" lines; if he succeeds, he must be innocent.
• Deforestation - Kind of an inverse of plant growth; sends a wave through the earth which uproots trees and other plants in the affected area.  Originally designed for fueling the furnaces of industry, later discovered to be good for depriving those accursed goblins of their cover too.
• Speak with Stones, Stoneshaping, Burrow, and similar earthy spells
• Water to Ale - seriously, why do you think they keep these guys around?  Arguably just a reflavoring of Purify Food and Water.
• Create Ale - A similar reflavoring of Create Water.
• Bless Tools - A possible replacement for the ability of high-level clerics to create holy water with the Bless spell.  What blessed tools do, I don't rightly know.  Maybe +2 on the next proficiency roll using them in the next unit time?
• Beard of Iron - Grants the subject's beard the strength of steel wool, providing a bonus to AC and to mortal wounds rolls against the chest and head for the duration.  When applied to a subject without a beard, causes severe facial itching instead.  Might work as a replacement for Shimmer on the Bladedancer list.
• Stranglebeard - Causes the subjects' beards to attempt to strangle them, much like multi-target Choking Grasp that only works on targets with beards.  Applications in the dwarven justice system are again clear.  An improved version instead strangles the target using the caster's beard.
• Vulcanism - Flame Strike, but from below rather than on high.

The bladedancer spells Vigor and Flame Blade (er, Hammer) also seem plausible, as well as the Player's Companion spells Call Dragon and Summon (Dwarven) Berserkers.

Dwarf Fortress and the OSR

I've been a little quiet around the blogosphere lately with reading and commenting.  There are two reasons for this.  The first and most acceptable is that there's only about a month of school left, so it's crunch time.  The second, more problematic reason is that I spent a massive chunk of the last three days playing Dwarf Fortress.  It's been a long time since I played any videogames (since I came back this semester, actually, and I didn't really play any last semester either), and DF hit me pretty hard.  It's a terrifyingly complex and detailed game with ASCII graphics, headache-inducing levels of micromanagement (or maybe that was a side effect of the graphics), no ways to win, and many, many ways to lose.

In short, it's amazing.

And in some sense, it reminds me of older versions of D&D as opposed to modern versions.  When you start playing DF, it generates a world through a simulation of geological processes, then a history of the world with a host of elven, human, dwarven, and goblin civilizations.  These then interact during the course of play.  The worlds of older editions tended to be similarly living, breathing sandboxes in contrast with modern adventure paths.  The ASCII graphics are in some sense analogous to ungridded combat; you're not exactly sure what's going on, and in some sense the details don't matter (though DF does actually simulate hit locations and anatomical injuries to a degree that would not be feasible in any tabletop game).  They may also be comparable to the stylistic choices present in many OSR products; dwarves can't be wizards in OSRIC, no halflings in ACKS, and so forth.  Micromanagement goes hand in hand with the careful resource tracking often present in old school play, as opposed to the handwaving of ammunition, rations, and torches more common these days.

But the losing is really where the parallel strikes me.

There is a tragic element present in Dwarf Fortress; you know that eventually, your fortress will fall.  Your gates will be shattered, your dwarves will die or be driven to barbarism and madness, and your works laid to waste.  And yet...  you play anyways, and you fight like mad to keep things fortified and in working order.  And when the end comes, you watch in horrified fascination as your peasants flood out to the ramparts to watch the  besieging goblins only to be perforated by crossbow bolts, or as your mines cave in, or the undead attack and animate your dead against you and your best carpenter is beaten to death by his wife's headless corpse, or your crossbowdwarves go to battle but die without firing a shot because you made them crossbows and bolts, but no quivers.  And you curse the pathing AI, or bad luck, or your own foolishness, but at the same time you celebrate, because part of the fun is watching everything burn in ways you never expected.  And then you go, "Well alrighty then.  Next time, I'm making quivers."  And you get stronger.  You learn about how the world works by losing.  This, if I understand it correctly, is closest to the OSR mode of PC death.  Sometimes you were dumb, sometimes you were unlucky, but it doesn't matter, because now you're dead.  Learn from this, and enjoy it.  Curse and laugh in the same breath.  And if you chose to die, if you went "Fuck it, the useful half of my population is dead.  Open the gates and let the goblins come!  We fight to the last dwarf!  I always did wonder how well those traps I installed in the great hall would work," and died fighting the good fight, then more power to you.

But, for now, I must swear off Dwarf Fortress.  There is code to be written, and soon!  Perhaps come summer, I will play again; I foresee many, many more hours of joyful failure to be found in DF.