AD&D's Artifacts (or Relics?)

I'd been meaning to take a closer look at the 1e DMG's section on artifacts after noticing during my previous skim that there were a bunch of blank lines that looked like they were meant to be filled in by the DM.  I finally got around to it today and what I found was even wilder than I expected.

Surprise #1: you can roll artifacts on the random treasure tables.  A 17 on the d100 on table III.E.1, Minor Miscellaneous Magic Items, is "Artifact or Relic (see Special table hereafter)".  And then you roll a d% on table III.E.Special and an 01 is the Axe of the Dwarvish Lords and a 100 is the Wand of Orcus and everything in between is on that same level.  Since rolling on the main magic item table has a 3% chance of going to table III.E.1, any magic item roll has an 0.03% chance of yielding an artifact - about 3 in 10,000.

That doesn't seem like a crazy-high probability, and it's pretty awesome that you can roll them randomly at all.

There is a note that if you the DM don't want an artifact in your campaign you can instead replace it with a Bag of Beans, an actual minor magic item.  Which I'm sure many DMs did, but I imagine that letting the dice even suggest an artifact at random would probably increase how often we see them in play.  I also like this bit (emphasis mine):

Regardless of how any of these items come into your campaign, only 1 of each may exist. As each is placed by you or found by player characters, you must draw a line through its listing on the table to indicate it can no longer be discovered randomly— if the dice indicate an item no longer available, you may substitute a clue as to its whereabouts or simply ignore the result so that no magic item is found at all.

And in a big 1:1 timescale campaign game with patrons, "where it might be found" might well be with some other player's character.  The Teeth of Dahlver-Nar also seem much less insane when considered in a large-campaign context.  This is a set of 32 artifact-tier teeth and the more of them you collect the stronger the effects get.  Hunting down 32 teeth individually as a single cohesive party would be a huge slog, but if you have multiple adventuring parties operating in parallel across timespans of years, accumulating a significant number of these seems much more plausible.  This is probably true of the other "set" artifacts like the Regalia of Might and the Rod of Seven Parts as well.

Anyway, what's up with these blank lines with roman numerals in each item's description?

Because of the unique nature of each artifact and relic, their powers are only partially described. You, the Dungeon Master, must at least decide what the major powers of each item are to be. This prevents players from gaining any knowledge of these items, even if they happen to own or read a copy of this volume, and it also makes each artifact and relic distinct from campaign to campaign.

(Again, emphasis mine)  This too is awesome.  And then there are long lists of candidate entries for each roman-numeral type.  I and II are minor and major benevolent powers, III and IV are minor and major malign powers, V are prime powers, and VI are Side Effects.  The balance here seems a little uneven; some of the minor benevolent powers seems competitive with some of the major benevolent powers, and the Side Effects are a very mixed bag, with some rather brutal curses and some pretty neutral or maybe even useful effects if clever.  The prime powers are ridiculous.

Other possibilities include the ability to cast resurrection 7 times per week, meteor storm once per day, finger of death with no save once per day, wish once per day.  We're not in Kansas anymore.

The counterbalance to these are the Major Malign Powers, which trigger when a prime or major benign power are used.  These are also excellent.  "User is instantly killed but may be raised or resurrected", for example.  Many of these feel unreasonably punitive for some of the major benign powers (ex Speak With Monster 2/day), but for keeping Prime Powers in check, yeah, these seem appropriate.

Another interesting thing here is that these lists aren't rollable tables; they're labeled with letters (and then doubling up, X, Y, Z, AA, BB, CC, ...).  This has to be intentional.  Gygax doesn't want you rolling randomly a "wish 1/day" item.  Gygax also doesn't want you to roll an Axe of the Dwarvish Lords that kills you every time you use it to cast Speak with Monsters.  Gygax wants you to stop and think about these superweapons you're considering handing out.  Apparently this is where the line gets drawn for random generation.

The section on destroying artifacts is also pretty good.  Some of them involve killing gods or demon lords.  And since gods and demon lords have stats in the 1e Monster Manual and are on the random encounter tables, this could actually happen in play.

The term "artifacts and relics" is also interesting.  Relics in real life are "the physical remains of a saint or the personal effects of the saint".  "Relic" is a much tighter noun than "artifact", and captures the nature of a lot of the artifacts well (for certain values of "saint").  It's kind of a bummer that "artifact" caught on as the term here.

I think the relationship with sentient swords here is also significant.  These are sentient swords turned up well past 11.  Sentient swords zap you for damage if you're the wrong alignment; some of these relics will save-or-die you if you're the wrong alignment (or just low-level).  Some of them have ego and intelligence scores and will have personality conflicts with you just like sentient swords.  But they seem like they might have the same job as sentient swords, of giving non-spellcasters access to limited spellcasting capabilities, of helping balance high-level fighters with high-level MUs, but at the very high end.  The big difference is that sentient swords are lower power and balanced primarily by Ego to keep high-power swords out of the hands of low-level characters, while artifacts are all high-power so that Ego balancing mechanism falls by the wayside and is instead replaced with permanent costs/risks to the characters using them.  Which is also why you can get away with single characters using multiple artifacts when they could only use one sentient sword at a time - multiple artifacts give you more options, but you still have to pay the Major Malignant price each time you use one.

I'm now rather curious to go see if OD&D had artifacts.  I don't recall them from the LBBs or Greyhawk.  It sounds like they were in Eldritch Wizardry but their effects may have been underspecified.  I'll have to give it a look I suppose.

In conclusion: lots of good stuff to steal here.

Magic Swords, Proficiencies, and the 1e DMG

This is actually like three short posts about magic swords rolled in to one.

• I've been thinking about trying to organize some in-person D&D, and OSE is probably an easier sell than ACKS in this part of the world.  So in the absence of proficiencies, my previous post about magic items in place of proficiencies has been back on my mind.
  
• If I also wanted to keep cleaving in an otherwise mostly-stock B/X game to give fighters some of their OD&D multi-attack mojo back and help them scale into the high levels, that might also be a good thing to attach to magic swords.  At first wag, something like three cleaves per round per point of bonus seems likely to keep pace with 1 cleave per HD at least up to name level.  This has a number of other interesting properties:
• Fighters and thieves almost certainly get cleaves sooner than clerics as a consequence of the treasure tables being magic-sword-heavy.
• Non-champion low-HD humanoids are unlikely to cleave.  Might want to grant bigger monsters some inherent cleaves, much like how they have magic weapons for the purpose of damaging other invulnerable monsters.
• This also creates an interesting qualitative distinction between "mooks who could easily be humans in rubber masks" and "supernatural monsters who can kill everyone in a mead hall in a couple rounds".
  
• Mid-level rival NPC parties with magic weapons are cleave threats.
• On the downside, antithetical to "Steel isn't strong, boy.  Flesh is stronger...  What is steel compared to the hand that wields it?"
  
• Second, there was a discussion in discord recently about sentient swords.  Thinking about magic swords through the lens of "class proficiencies for fighters and thieves that clerics and MUs don't get", sentient swords are actually a restricted form of spellcasting for non-caster classes.  I think they're really important, that using them should generally not be a hassle, and neglecting to roll for them is a contributing factor to caster superiority.  The whole ego / conflict of wills mechanic is to keep high-level powers out of the hands of low-level fighters, and to keep fighters from amassing too many spell-like abilities by having multiple sentient swords. 
• I've been skimming the 1e AD&D DMG recently, because it also keeps coming up in various discussions.  I went and looked in the treasure tables because I was curious about how it handled sentient swords, and several things struck me:
• 25% of swords are "unusual" (sentient).  This is in the same ballpark as B/X's 30%, but much higher than ACKS or later editions.
• "All abilities function only when the sword is held, drawn, and the possessor is concentrating on the desired result."  This isn't "ask the sword nicely to use its powers".
  
• AD&D computes willpower score differently - sum of a character's Int and Wis scores plus their level (with the level bonus reduced by damage taken).  This means that cap for character willpower/personality score is basically unbounded!
  
• A "typical" random sentient sword has about 13 Int, empathic communication, two detection abilities and an Ego of 3 or so, and is reasonably useable even by a low-level fighter of average mental stats.
• "N.B. Most players will be unwilling to play swords with personalities as the personalities dictate. It is incumbent upon the DM to ensure that the role of the sword is played to the hilt"
• har har
  
• Reading the 1e DMG's magic swords, I was also struck how a number of them had effects that activate on a natural 20.
• This wraps back around to limiting the scope of proficiency-like exceptional cases by making them magic items.  Rather than taking Weapon Focus in order to get the ability to crit, it's a property of some swords.
  
• Making crits a property of magic weapons means monsters aren't critting PCs, which is the usual trouble with critical hit rules.  Except for that tiny subset of monsters with eg Swallow Whole abilities that trigger on a 20 - it's probably OK to have it as an exception for, again, big scary supernatural monsters.
  
• It also means you can have a variety of critical hit special effects, like vorpal's save-or-die vs the sword of life stealing's level drain on crit, without needing a complex critical hits table or system.  These effects can also be quite fantastical, since they're magical in origin.
• This might also be a reasonable way to handle combat-maneuver like effects.  Magic hammers that sunder weapons on a natural 20, axes that break shields, rapier of disarming, magic shield that knocks foes down when they nat 1 against you, ...
• Magic swords might also be a reasonable way to sneak backstab multiplier scaling into B/X, where even a max-level thief only does x2 damage.  idk whether I'd want to make just particular backstabbing swords that boost it, or something as simple as "a thief backstabbing with a sword +1 multiplies the die roll by x3 instead of x2, +2 -> x4, +3 -> x5".
  

ACKS: Countering Sleep

There's been some discussion lately about how low-level MUs are extraordinarily dangerous to low-level parties; just as sleep wipes a beastman gang, so too does sleep wipe a group of first or second level PCs.  Even adding a save doesn't help that much, because low level characters have terrible saves.  So the discussion has mostly turned to initiative and disrupting casters.

There was another discussion about how magic missile is really useful for this, to the point that there exists a spell designed primarily to counter it (shield), with accompanying magic items (brooches of shielding).

If sleep is dangerous enough that high-level wizards keep losing their best apprentices to other schools who cast sleep, maybe they'd solve this problem with magic, in the same way.

So kicking around the Player's Companion's rules for protection spells, here is a spell that might be useful for low-level characters expecting to go up against wizards:

Igmund's Insomniator

Arcane 1

Range: self

Duration: 12 turns

Creatures within a 7.5' radius of the caster are immune to the spell sleep for the duration.

(Points: immunity to sleep 5, range self x0.75, 7.5' radius x1.5, duration 12 turns x1.75 = 9.8)

There's a little room here to fiddle with the duration/radius tradeoff.  7.5' radius won't cover the whole party, but a good chunk will still be standing.  The other edge of the sword, though, is that enemies who are up in your face are also immune to sleep (which is very consistent with my feeling that arcane magic should over-solve problems).

Another fun avenue, of course, is potions.

Potion of Wakefulness

This dark brown, bitter potion prevents the drinker from falling asleep by any means, mundane or magical, for six hours.  For the first hour after drinking it, the imbiber gains a +1 bonus to surprise rolls due to hypervigilance, but takes a -2 penalty to attack throws due to jitters.  Characters who use Potions of Wakefulness more than once in any given week halve the duration for each potion after the first (second potion lasts 3 turns and 3 hours, third potion lasts 1.5 turns and 1.5 hours, etc).

A final option for dealing with sleep in NPC hands might be the friendly fireball approach.  OD&D's text for sleep is predictably ambiguous about targeting, but "The spell always affects up to the number of creatures determined by the dice" could certainly be read to mean that once it has put the monsters to sleep, if it has any HD left over, it tries to put the party to sleep.  Changing ACKS' sleep to operate in this way moves it from "a spell to solve almost any non-undead combat encounter on the first two dungeon levels" to something you have to be a little careful with, because if you use it on too small a group and you roll high you could put your entire party to sleep, and then you're probably toast.  And if you want to have multiple henchwizards all casting sleep in the same round, so that any one disruption doesn't stop it from going off, then you have to worry about what happens if none of them get disrupted.

Magic Items = Stealable Proficiencies?

I was thinking about how it's a huge pain in the ass to generate leaders for brigand camps, because they might reasonably be expected to have ability scores, class and level, proficiencies (feats), and magic items.  And that's just for the fighters.

And I was thinking, what if we halved the work, and either picked standardized proficiencies for all 9th level brigands and then rolled the magic items, or picked standard magic items and then rolled the proficiencies?

For a second there they seemed sort of equivalent, with the major difference being that you can steal magic items (or pry them from cold dead hands).

And that brought to mind something that had confused me about OSE: the Basic magic item generation rules, which generate an abundance of high-powered magic items like crystal balls, but from a very limited list.  That didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, giving these powerful items to low-level characters.  But if there are no proficiencies, I could sort of see it.  If each PC ends up with one significant magic item by 3rd level or so, then that's sort of like the class proficiency they'd be getting around 4th level.  And then the restrictions on which classes can use which items also start to look a bit like class proficiency lists - wizard-only item, wizard-only proficiency, tomato, tomahto.

The balance between proficiencies/feats and itemization is interesting to consider.  In ACKS, magic items dominate proficiencies in terms of numerical bonuses and eventually availability.  A sword +3 is like... six proficiencies?  Sort of, since you only get the bonus with it and not other weapons?  Arguably ACKS' proficiencies provide smaller but broader bonuses, like +1 to hit with a variety of weapons.

In 3e, magic item bonuses were also mostly bigger numerically than feats', but I'm not reaching any good conclusions on breadth (a +2 sword is a bigger but narrower bonus than Weapon Focus+Weapon Specialization, a circlet of intellect +2 is a comparable but broader bonus than Spell Focus, Cloak of Protection +1 is basically Luck of Heroes).

I could definitely see shifting the balance between these two back further towards magic items (though 5e may have, for all I know - making feats optional might have that effect if they're really seldom used).  Under the conditions that the magic item market is very small and you seldom get them during character generation, a magic item is a reward for something that happened in play.  It's like the "backstory is what happened to you before 6th level" line - instead of writing something on your sheet during levelup, go out in the world and kill some brigands and take their stuff.  Want a horn of blasting?  Go talk to a sage and find out about a local hero who had one, and went to a particular dungeon and never returned.

(It's a bit funny to contrast this with my position from 2011 on getting rid of "standard" magic items and replacing them with inherent bonuses.  I suppose I would rather be inconsistent with my past self than stuck and not evolving.  There is a common thread here though - any standard component of a "build" formulated and achieved off-table, be it feat or magic item, really is boring)

Magic items are also sort of heritable proficiencies, if your next character was your next of kin.  So it's a form of progress which can be preserved across death, much like henchmen.  Having preservable progress lessens that sting.

Looking at magic items like proficiencies might also help explain sentient swords, with their suites of weird powers.  They're a way to give a whole package of special abilities to people other than clerics and MUs (most importantly, fighters and thieves).  It looks sort of like having a higher rate of proficiency acquisition for sword-using classes if you tilt your head just right, squint real hard, and have two drinks (above and beyond the much higher availability of magic swords than other magic weapons, of course).  It's also interesting that in both ACKS and OSE 70% of sentient swords are Lawful - they're clearly meant more for PC hands than the hands of their opponents.  It's funny, because the prevailing culture and expectation around sentient swords tends to be in the Stormbringer vein, where they're usually evil.  I think I gave my players a Lawful sentient sword in the Bjornaborg campaign, but as a player all of the sentient weapons I've found were evil (and I'm 2 for 2 as "Designated Bearer of the Evil Sword" in our parties, which always ends well).  It's also not a 3.x-ism, by rules as written; checking the 3.5 SRD, it looks like 50% of sentient weapons were good, 15% evil, and 35% neutral on the good-evil axis (20% chaotic, 25% lawful, 55% neutral on law-chaos).

This whole thing reminded me of a post from long ago where I noted that henchmen in OSR games sort of fill the role of multi-classing in newer games - they slow down your progression in your main class, but get you a broader range of abilities.  It's sort of funny how that also moved from "a thing that you have to find in the world" to "a thing that you choose during character generation and level-up", in parallel to the shift from magic items to feats.

I can't escape the impression that it has been players, aided and abetted by publishers, pushing to sacrifice No Homework in exchange for control over their customization.

Eyes of the Eagle

I dug up a pair of old binoculars to bring on the Dungeness Spit hike, and have since started going to local parks and using them to watch boats.  It's generated some good, first-person qualitative data for the wilderness vision distance question.

Observations:

There's another park across the lake from the park I go to.  It's about two miles of water.  With 8x magnification, on a clear day, I can count the cars in the parking lot, clearly make out the portable toilet, and can tell one person (or person with dog) from two people from five-ish people, but can't really discern anything about them other than that they're bipeds.  With the naked eye, I can often make out the glint of metal or glass from there on a sunny day but otherwise would be hard pressed to tell it apart from a field.

It is also easy to make out the contours of mountains about 40 miles away (I think, that's about where the range begins), and which parts of the mountain have snow on them, again provided clear weather.  To the naked eye, the view is still pleasing but I would be hard pressed to make any plans off of it.

With 8x magnification, I can sometimes make out the tail art on airliners coming and going from the airport about 15 miles south of me as they pass overhead, but I have been unable to observe the flight numbers.  I was able to identify an F-18 as such, and to see that an H-60 helicopter in the distance had its side doors open (I could see sky through it).

I was able to observe a pair of helium party balloons (lost from a party I presume) ascending about a mile north of my position, though I couldn't see them with naked eye so I stumbled on them accidentally while watching an eagle.  They were silhouetted against the sky or I don't think I'd've been able to see them with magnification either.

Sometimes I can read the numbers on the sails of boats; I don't actually know how close they were or how large the numerals were though.  Generally reading the names of small boats off their bows is beyond me unless they're quite close, but I have been able to read the names of two large tour boats off of their bows at maybe half a mile of distance, one in twilight.  Sometimes in the evening the air over the water shimmers like hot pavement and it gets hard to make out details of anything.  The lights from houses across the lake twinkle like stars.

The view of the moon is very good, especially because it is full right now.  I could make out some craters that were at an angle to the sun, and to see the shadows inside their rims.  I have never seen the moon like that before.  I was also able to observe some satellites, as basically dim stars moving on smooth tracks.

Remarks:

I really wonder how fleets coordinated their actions before optics.  I feel like making out semaphore at a mile without a spyglass would be really hard.  Did they just sail in really close order?  Did captains just have a ton of autonomy?  I was reading about the audible range of hunting horns and elk bugles a while back and I recall those being about a mile or so depending on terrain, but I would guess that auditory signaling might be hard at sea with the wind carrying it away.

ACKS' description for Eyes of the Eagle has them giving 100x magnification, which is pretty nuts.  Low-powered binoculars are 7-8x, high-powered are 10-12x.  Spotting scopes for long-range shooting are generally 24-60x, and that lets you observe groupings out to hundreds of yards.  100x is in an awkward spot between high-power spotting scopes and low-power astronomical telescopes.  With 100x magnification, I think it would be pretty easy to count individuals a mile or two away (but your field of view would also be obliterated - there's no way you could just wear 100x magnification binoculars like contact lenses in your daily life, never mind dungeoneering).

Amusingly, none of the other rulesets I checked (OSRIC, S&W, 3e, PF, 5e) listed a magnification for their Eyes of the Eagle.  3e, Pathfinder, and 5e did have a nonmagical spyglass though, with 2x magnification for 1000 gp, which is a little funny since they weren't definitely invented until 1608, well into the Gunpowder Age, and since Galileo also developed 8x and 23x telescopes by 1609.

I was surprised how much atmospheric effects mattered even over this fairly-short distance of two miles.

"The glint of metal" is probably a fine way to introduce a distant wilderness encounter with sentients.

Two Thoughts on Loot

On from my player Alex:

WRT magic items; I feel like one thing we may be missing on the ladder to domain level is selling off some of the bling...

And damn if he isn't right.  We ended up with a veritable armory of swords +1 in the last campaign I ran, and in Alex's game last semester, we were so loaded with swords that we stacked a pair of +3s...  on a henchman (admittedly, we had next to no fighters).  A sword +1 resells for 5kGP, +2 for 15kGP, and +3 for 30kGP and XP, all of which add up quite nicely when your party's collection of magic swords gets to the point where you need a wiki page to keep track of them all.  The "sell before use for XP" rule makes a lot more sense when PCs actually, you know, sell magic items...

The other thought: as I'm rolling up things that treasure maps point to, I've hit a number of fairly serious magic items.  Permanent effect, trope-bearing, multi-use stuff.  And I had a good laugh at myself when I had the thought that, "You know, a ring of wishes would be less trouble, since I can more-or-less count on them burning it out fairly quickly for avarice, rather than it becoming a long-term source of non-XP power."  Still, it'll be interesting to see some powerful gear other then the boring old Sword +n in PC hands, and they do still have to do the dirty work of finding it...

Quality Software Design

As noted previously, I have been writing scripts to automate parts of ACKS.  One of those scripts is a treasure generator, for which I designed a configuration file language (really it's a random table description language, but the treasure generator is the main thing I use it for).  I've gradually added in support for rolling dice of dice ( (1d6)d6 and such) and other esoteric features to support hex-stocking, but that's not something I use all that much (well, not recently).

Today, however, while deciding to condition scroll contents on scroll language, however (so that dwarven spell scrolls are always divine, or turtleman spell scrolls have a chance at unique / Player's Companion turtleman spells, or so forth, as part of my grand designs to customize my treasure tables), I ran into a failure in my own foresight in design.  While loading giant lists of spells-by-race-and-level into my main treasure table config, I realized that said file was starting to get a bit lengthy...  up towards a thousand lines.  Not a technical hurdle for my Text Editor of Choice, but somewhat inconvenient to dig through.  And here I had failed to add a #include, import, or other "let me load this other file" feature into my description language!

The danger in actually using a thing you designed is that you might find bugs in it.  This hazard is even more probable if you let other people use a thing you designed.

(And yes, players, I know I should be working on a dungeon instead.  But you haven't told me which dungeon to build first!  I did figure out where the elven treasure map (er, letter) points, though, so that's a thing prepped)

Of Nethack and Item Identification

During some downtime last week between finals and graduation (also - yes I am graduated!  Now taking a break at home before job and lease start), I decided to take up Nethack.  It turned out to be a wonderful hybrid between Dwarf Fortress and TSR D&D, and I had quite a bit of fun (including DF-grade 'FUN') right up until I found and ID'd a wand of wishes and suffered a crippling case of decision paralysis.  But the whole experience did tickle some brain cells on a problem that has bugged our ACKS group before - how to identify items?

Really the problematic items here are the command-word items (wands, staves, swords of charming, those sort of things) and some of the edge-case passive items like rings of fire resistance.  Potions are easy enough to get with Alchemy, scrolls are quickly deciphered with Read Languages, and we tend to let people determine the bonus of a suit of magic armor or a weapon after sparring with it some (we assume fighter-sense and combat experience provide a fairly good sense for how much better than normal those sort of things are, and I'm way too lazy to keep those secret in use for any longer than I have to).  But I think the keys to handling charged item identification are suggestive descriptions and blind activation.

To say that Nethack's wand descriptions are suggestive would be quite misleading, as they're random, but they are at least consistent and got me thinking about charged-item description, which we have to far slacked on pretty hard.  Perhaps all detection wands have a small crystal ball embedded on the end of a stick whose type is appropriate to the type of detection, or offensive wands appeared charred, or so forth.  This lets players get a general idea of the type of a wand, but not its exact function.

Blind activation is something which Nethack does do well, and it is one of the standard ways to identify wands.  ACKS, however, has no clear facility for it.  Upon a re-reading of the magic item identification rules and the wands, staves, and rods rules, it's not entirely clear whether the user needs to know a command word or just sort of points and clicks.  Given the sort of hilarity that building experimental wand-testing setups can result in, I'm inclined to rules in favor of blind activation (particularly with the caveat that a blindly-activated staff will use one of its capabilities at random).  Limiting blind activation to Magical Engineers and Arcane Dabblers (both at -4) might also be reasonable (also wow, I never realized bards got Arcane Dabbling for free...  that's a pretty serious proficiency at mid-to-high levels).  In either case, there's still a trade-off; running a full identification will tell you how many charges it has, but will take time and money, while a blind activation takes maybe a turn but burns a charge and has a chance of frying your whole party if it turns out the copper stick with a piece of amber on the end that you thought was a wand of treasure detection is actually a wand of lightning...

Other thought - Alchemy II is kind of a bummer, and given how potion miscibility works in ACKS, it would be cool if there were a way for players to pre-identify the 'potion countdown' (potency?) of a given potion so that they could better plan their imbibing.  I'm sort of thinking potency identification on 18+ for Alchemy 1, then +4 extra per further rank (as usual) so that taking Alchemy II lets you more than double your ability to do it.  On the other hand, alchemy is already quite good on the whole, and allowing methods to pre-determine potency generates more paperwork / record-keeping.

I also sort of want to build an extensive themed potion descriptor table for parties lacking an alchemist, but given how often that prof gets taken and how effective it is, I'm not sure it's worth the effort.

ACKS Scripts - Magic Item Availability

One thing which can sometimes be annoying in ACKS is when your players ask "Well, what magic items are available in town this month?"  When it comes to most goods like war galleys and military oil, indexing into the availability table and rolling the percent chance isn't so bad, because there just aren't that many things.  But depending on how you count scrolls, there are close on 300 magic items in ACKS Core, which can make playing the "magic item availability guessing game" a right royal pain in the arse if your players have a long wish-list of low-probability items.

So I automated it.  Here's a python script that checks availability for each item in this text file based on price and market class.  I'm reasonably certain it would work on Windows if you passed the input file in with Windows-style path separators, but don't actually have any (working) Windows machines to test it on :\ .  Works on linux, though.

Writing and running this script has also made me realize that scrolls are much more available than we thought, though the selection of available spells is pretty random.  This has a number of interesting implications.  First, wizards can use bought scrolls to expand their spell selection with a bit more control than learning from a master, and with a higher rate of success than doing research (as long as the spell is one available on bought scrolls, ie in Core).  Likewise, high-power scrolls of Death Spell, Disintegrate, Flesh to Stone, and similar are a nice (if pricey) way for a mid-level party to add some one-shot punch.  On the other side, high-level cleric scrolls of Restore Life and Limb, Remove Curse, Remove Disease, and Neutralize Poison can provide super-healing in the wilderness for a high price (something I know the Grim Fist has done; I kind of wondered where they had gotten two RL&L scrolls...).  Finally, with scrolls more readily available, the thief and bard ability to read scrolls is suddenly much more useful than when they were only found as random treasure or crafted.

In any case, this is the most recent of a decent pile of scripts I've written for ACKS.  I'll release more as I clean them up.  Others of interest include a treasure generator (there's already a good online version but I needed to write a recursive parser anyway, and didn't want trade goods in hoards by default), automatic hex-stocker (needs expanding with the recursive parser from the treasure generator, more monster data files), a henchman generator (needs naming, proficiencies, and hench magic items, but does choose class intelligently based on stats and generate wizard spells known), and one that takes in a text file containing information on a region's towns and their relative locations and generates all the mercantile demand modifiers (needs waypointing to cut down on the number of links you have to specify - all traffic from the Mediterranean to ports on the Atlantic has to pass through Gibraltar or Suez, so it would be better to specify distance from each Med port to Gibraltar and Suez and each Atlantic port to Gibraltar and Suez, but as it stands you'd need to specify the distance from each Mediterranean port to each Atlantic port, which is a real pain).  And I guess I should get a github or something for storing these, rather than throwing them in a web-public directory...

Roll Your Own Treasure Tables II - Dungeon-Specific Treasure Tables

To Part 1

The natural extension of the notion of creating custom treasure tables was to do so in a per-dungeon fashion, much as people do with random encounter tables.  This, however, seemed like it was going to be a ton of work, especially if I wanted to keep something resembling the original probability distribution for magic items.  Further, there are problems of variety with this approach.  It's reasonable for monsters for be very similar in a localized area, but finding a bunch of the same magic item strains the suspension of disbelief a bit; in particular, it seems like it could lead to some variety of an MMO-like "farming" ethos, where if you want item X you go to dungeon Y where it is known to 'drop'.  And that is something which I wish to avoid.

I think I have something of a solution, however.  Instead of building absolute lists for each dungeon, where an item can be found in the dungeon iff it's on the dungeon's list, I'm leaning towards instead building a "favored items" list for each dungeon.  In this case, the procedure would run as follows:

• For each magic item, roll to see if it's a favored item with a ~20% probability at the same time that you roll for item type.
• If the roll comes up unfavorable, roll as normal on the standard tables.
• If it comes up favorable, check the dungeon favored items list, and see if the dungeon has a favored item of that type.  If it does, that item appears (or one selected at random from the set of favored items of that type).
• If the dungeon has no favored item of the rolled type, proceed to the normal tables for items of that type.

This would let me add a degree of magic-item characterization to dungeons with little extra prep work, and with one additional roll made concurrently with the roll for item type.  Consider, for example, a list of favored items for a ruined temple of Artemis:

Potions: Animal Control, Healing
Ring: None
Scroll: Favored spell scrolls are Divine, written in Auran, and chosen from Bladedancer spell list, favored ward scrolls are against Lycanthropes.
Rod/Staff/Wand: Staff of Healing, one-time only.  None favored after Staff of Healing rolled.
Sword: None
Misc Magic: Eyes of the Eagle, Quiver of Many Arrows.  Both are one-time only.
Misc Weapons: Roll 1d20 on the Misc Weapons table (always magic arrows of some sort or another)
Armor: Favored armor is always Leather

So yeah, that took me about five minutes to throw together, and should do a nice job of somewhat altering the treasure distribution of the dungeon without turning it into a farm for a particular type of item (except possibly magic arrows, but the 20% chance of being favored is certainly not in the farmer's favor).

Roll Your Own Magic Item Tables

This was going to be a post extolling the virtues of rolling random treasure and countering the arguments you sometimes hear against it.  There were going to be anecdotes and laughs and such.  And as I was writing that post, I ran up against a realization that I realized was maybe more important than trying to participate in the conventional dialogue.

And that is that you (yeah, you) should build custom magic treasure tables for your world.  And by "you should" I mean I should, but I think you might benefit from it too.

In the writing of that other post, I realized that the main issue people seem to have with random treasure is that it sometimes yields items which are unsuitable for the type of game being run.  The fear is that it'll give them something which is either useless, or a terrifying gamebreaker like a Ring of Three Wishes.  I've seen the first one before - we once found a Murlynd's Spoon in a dragon's hoard in a combat-heavy, tactical Trailblazer game where we didn't track rations or encumbrance (at least not for practical purposes).  It was just the most useless thing, and we complained about it.  But in retrospect, it made me realize that the problem is not that the tables give you items that either your players don't want or that you don't want your players to have, so much as that the tables were developed to give items which made sense when people were playing the Old Style.  When rations and encumbrance are issues, Murlynd's Spoon is pretty neat actually.  Likewise, a Ring of Three Wishes is not a game-ender in this style - your PCs will use it to summon castles and fantastic wealth, as is expected normal behavior in the Old Ways, rather than to kill your main villain and derail your plot.  It accelerates and furthers the game, rather than destroying it.

But the main point, that "the tables may not suit your game so tweak them" is ultimately more interesting.  People build their own random encounter tables, even in 3.x, on a reasonably regular basis.  It's something that people have heard of or thought about at least.  But throwing together custom treasure tables is not.  I've seen new treasure tables published in sourcebooks full of treasure which very rarely got used, and a few schemes at Telecanter's for generating unique magic items, but for me as a DM to roll my own that were well-suited to my world simply didn't occur to me until, well, yesterday.  Perhaps I'm just dense.  That it provides a fairly clean solution to the objections against random treasure is neat, but personally I'm more excited about using it as a creative exercise over winter break. 

How much new, but sensible, treasure can I come up with, and how am I going to vary the probability distributions of various treasures within the world?  Remains to be seen.  Currently I'm looking forward to adding:

• Magic ballista bolts and catapult shot to the misc weapons table
• Heck, maybe magic ballistae and catapults proper
• Magic banners and standards which provide a bonus to troops in formation for mass battle purposes
• Books that answer questions, a la Grognardling
• Magic item recipes (kind of a booby prize, but useful nonetheless)
• Magic shields that do things other than just being +x
• Winged shields
• Floating shields
• Mirrored shields
• Lifeward shields
• Ironwood, adamant, and mithral armors
• A "what flavor of sword is this" table to go with the armor weight table, including flavorful terms like "dirk", "scimitar", "sabre", and "kris" (so far I've been giving out ho-hum magic longswords, except for one gladius) 
• Possibility for magic weapons to be silvered, adamant, or other special materials 
• Ideally at least one interesting or iconic variant for each of the main weapons; javelins of lightning, axes of hewing, daggers of poison, and so forth.
• More wands of other spells
• Potions of things other than spells (like these)
• Artifacts, with low, low probability

Anything else you think I should add, Internet?

Random Books

Riffing off of Query-Based Reconnaissance, Grognardling, and the Dungeon Dozen, I decided to come up with some books for fantasy campaigns, along with topics and number of questions.  I think I'm going to do something like "For each day of study, a reference work allows you to ask one question about its topic, up to a maximum of n plus your Intelligence modifier.  These questions need not be asked immediately, and may be asked during combat without taking any time."

And so, books!

1. Manual of the Black Lotus: An Assassin's Formulary.  A thin black book with no writing on the exterior; provides up to five questions on poisons.  Often written in obscure, secret, or malevolent languages (Zaharan, Infernal, Assassin's Cant, &c).
2. Drums in the Deep: The Memoirs of Durik Thalagrim, Goblin Hunter.  A formidable tome bound in unadorned brown leather and written in a clear style, providing up to seven questions on goblins or subterranean navigation.  Almost always written in Dwarven.
3. Of Gods Most Foul.  A thick book, with an iron cover and a lock.  An exceptionally complete work on the deities of the monstrous races, this tome provides nine questions on the theology, worship, and rituals of such gods.  Compiled and written by a militant inquisitorial arm of one of the major good-aligned churches, typically in a Church Latin-equivalent language and in a writing style similar to the historical Malleus Maleficarum.
4. A Compleat History of the Broken Wands.  A scholarly treatise on the history, membership, tactics, and campaigns of a famous company of mercenary wizards, as well as the opponents that they fought.  The book provides up to five questions on these topics, and may additionally provide a few tips or suggestions for spell research to combative mages.  Often written in Elvish, and considered a canonical volume by Elven war-wizards.
5. The Saga of Ingbold Norviksson, as Compiled and Translated by Imris the Scholar.  Typically found as an illuminated manuscript, though the first editions are rumored to be on scrolls of sealhide, the Saga provides up to seven questions on the gods, heroes, myth, and culture of the Frozen Northlands or other viking-equivalent culture (should such exist in your campaign world).  Typically written in common, but in the style of the historical Prose Edda, and often with very confusing metaphors.
6. Shortbreads, and other Hobbit Cuisine.  A cookbook, typically bound in green, and providing five questions on cooking or hobbits.  Typically written in Common, as no respectable hobbit would be caught reading a book with such a terrible title.  It's rumored that the original author was ostracized from his shire as a result of the publication, and became the first (and perhaps last) adventuring hobbit.
7. On the Creation and Descent of the Beast Races.  A weighty tome with a wolf's head on the cover, written by a clearly unbalanced wizard with a good amount of personal experience with beastmen, On the Creation is still a useful reference work for those interested in hunting them.  It provides six questions on the habits, societies, religion, and arcane methods of crossbreeding to the astute reader.  Written in an odd rambling style, typically in an obscure arcane language.
8. The Unabridged Travels of Alain of Murdosh.  A blue-bound volume of fantastical stories of the sea by a retired deckhand-turned-pirate captain.  Some of them are even true!  Most useful to adventurers, however, is the section on managing a crew of rowdy pirates.  As a result, the book provides four questions on nautical superstition and the practice of piracy.  It may be used for a further four questions regarding other fantastical locales mentioned, but the answers to these have only a 50% chance of being correct.
   

Mailbag 4: Trailblazer and OSRIC

Big six magic items: The 'big six' items in 3.x D&D are items which provide a constant effect bonus to one of your core statistics - ability scores, AC, to-hit, and saving throws.  They're called the big six because there are six of them:

• Magic weapon
• Magic armor / shield
• Ring of Protection
• Amulet of Natural Armor
• Cloak of Resistance
• Ability score booster for your primary stat (or stats)
• Gloves of Dexterity or Gauntlets of Ogre Power / Belt of Giant's Strength for physical classes
• Headband of Intellect, Circlet of Charisma, or Periapt of Wisdom for casters

They're considered the big six because they're arguably the best magic items in the game; they're always on, so you don't have to burn actions to use them.  They never run out of charges.  And they provide bonuses to things that you will use in the vast majority of combats. Even better, for everyone but Wisdom and Constitution based classes, you can use all six of them at the same time because their magic item slots don't overlap; divine casters and monks have to choose between natural armor and a bonus to Wis.  Constitution is a similar case; anyone can benefit from the Amulet of Health's Con bonus, but natural armor is generally the preferred choice.

There's a lot of complaining about the Big Six because they're optimal, but boring - you never have to activate them, they don't do neat things, and generally they go one your character sheet, you add the bonus in to your stuff, and then you forget about them.  I've addressed this previously and at more length here.

3.5 reserve feat source: Reserve feats first appeared in Complete Mage, but there were also several in Complete Champion, I believe (including one that provided free healing up to half of the recipient's maximum HP, which was quite nice for taking a really torn-up party and bringing them back up to some semblance of fighting shape).  They were a neat idea, but some of them were not particularly well thought out.  Since it looks like a similar mechanism will be core in 5e, I'm hoping they'll do a better job there.

Base magic bonus: In Trailblazer, base magic bonus is a measure of a character's total magical prowess, much like base attack bonus is a measure of their fighting ability.  BmB serves as your caster level for all spells that you cast.  It's also how TB managed their elegant solution to multiclass casters; BmB from multiple classes stacks, but the maximum level of spell you can get from a particular class' spell list is limited by your total BmB from the class.  Fighters, Rogues, and Barbarians have 1/3 BmB (so +1 for every 3 complete levels), while Monks, Rangers, and Paladins have 1/2 and full casters have 1/1.  Bards have 2/3 with an odd caster-level hack.  As an example in usage, a Fighter 6 / Ranger 4 would have +4 BmB total; +2 from his six fighter levels, and +2 from his four ranger levels.  Since he has +2 from ranger and an effective caster level of 4 total, he can prepare and cast 2nd level spells from the ranger list (though TB actually has them using the Druid spell list).

Similarly, a Sorcerer 3 / Cleric 3 has BmB +6, and 3 from each class, so he can prep and cast 3rd level spells from both lists.  When he levels, though, and becomes a Sorc 4 / Clr 3, he can now cast 4th level spells, since he has BmB 7 and hence 7 caster level...  but only from the Sorcerer list, since he doesn't have 4 points of BmB from Cleric.  I refer you to Trailblazer itself for further information, and my 3/4 BmB full-caster hack, should you decide against using action points.

fun magic items for first level characters: Not something I've ever investigated thoroughly - at first level, every magic item is fun (well, unless it's cursed).  Al wrote up a few a while back, though; while they're nominally for old-school usage, they'd work OK in 3.x except for the thieves' tools, which you could easily swap out for masterwork thieves' tools per the SRD.

OSRIC random dungeon:  I may not be the most qualified to speak on this, since I only ran one session in it, but I did generate a random dungeon under OSRIC's rules.  My roommate has also done so (and more extensively than I), and I believe wrote a program to help with it by generating room contents...  Overall, I'd say that the random map generation is fairly weak (but it always is), while the random room contents are pretty good.  If I were to populate a 'random' dungeon, I'd probably pop on over to Dyson Logos', borrow one of his many many excellent maps, and then stock it with the OSRIC room contents tables.  Wizards' old map of the week archive might also have some good ones; I haven't been through there thoroughly in a looong time.

OSRIC introductory adventure: Sadly, I can't say I've found one yet.  Free intro module support in the OSR seems to be fairly weak, as Al of Beyond the Black Gate discussed way back in '09.  In other news, maybe I should write one for ACKS...  OSRIC as a system, while interesting, is more complex and less to my tastes (and, I suspect, those of my players) than ACKS.

Interesting Magic Items

"It is not the sword, but the hand that wields it."

A significant portion of Trailblazer's analysis of 'the spine' is motivated by the desire to prove that "The Big Six" items are not necessary for game balance.  For those unfamiliar, the Big Six are magic weapons, magic armor and shields, rings of protection, cloaks of resistance, amulets of natural armor, and ability score boosters like the belt of giant strength and the headband of intellect.  These items are all distinguished by 1) requiring no actions to activate and 2) applying bonuses to the core combat stats of a character (mental ability score boosters are an odd case, in that they increase the save DCs for spellcasters, but are significantly less useful for noncasters).  As TB's analysis shows, these items contribute significantly to a character's power, especially in regards to defense; of the big six, three exist for the sole purpose of boosting AC, while only one exists solely for boosting attack and damage.  Further, the cloak of resistance is critical in boosting poor saves to a reasonable rate of success, especially as character level increases.  Poor saves grow at 1/3 of character level, while monster special ability save DCs grow at 1/2 of monster hit dice.  As monsters of CR n often have greater than n hit dice, and sometimes as many as 2n hit dice or more, player character poor saves are rapidly outstripped without some kind of extra bonus (namely the cloak).

Trailblazer uses its analysis to suggest that there may be alternatives to using the Big Six, namely Combat Reactions, Action Points, and similar.  Though I don't remember seeing an explicit motivation for this move, I have inferred several.  First, getting rid of the Big Six combats the "Christmas Tree Effect", namely that player characters are so decked out in shiny magical items that they look like Christmas trees done up in tinsel and glowing ornaments.  This is a problem both because it generates downright silly character portraits (see some of the art from the Epic Level Handbook, for example), and the concentration of wealth involved stresses the economics of the campaign world.  Removing the Big Six also eliminates magic item turnover.  We've all seen it; you find a +3 sword and all of a sudden your +2 sword, companion for many long adventures, a named and storied weapon, falls by the wayside.  The final complaint that I see about the Big Six is that they're boring.  They're uninteresting and don't feel magical.

So I thought to myself, "Hey, let's follow Trailblazer's lead, get rid of the Big Six, and make some magic items that are interesting."  I've got a couple ideas along these lines.  TB suggests items with spells per day; I'd actually done this before reading Trailblazer's suggestions in this regard, by giving a party a Cloak of the Cat, which allowed the wearer to use of Cat's Grace and Catfall each once per day.  That was kind of interesting, though to be fair it was a bit underpowered at the level I gave it out.  I'd probably make some such 'buff items' usable as swift actions, so that as with the Big Six, they don't have a huge impact on the action economy of a combat.  I also considered various conditional save boosters, like an amulet that grants a bonus to saves against poison, or a bonus to will saves, or a bonus to just your poor saving throw(s).  Again, less bland than normal, and not complex enough to bog down play.  Magic weapons with spells per day that gain charges under certain conditions, like a bloodthirsty weapon that gains a charge when you slay a living foe with it, or one that gains a charge on a critical threat, might also work.  A little more complex, but they're primarily a tool for melee classes, whose gameplay and choice sets tend to be simpler than those of casters.  If we can trust a caster with a pile of wands, each of which has charges, it seems reasonable to trust the fighters similarly.

But this post isn't really about those interesting magic items.

Because I realized, as I went to write that post, that nearly every fantasy RPG blogger and their brother has a post like that, either lamenting the lack of interesting magic items, suggesting how to make magic items more interesting, or giving a few examples of their own.  Likewise, all those interesting things slow down play, confuse new players (or if they're situational bonuses, like a bonus against poison, they're forgotten and wasted), and increase book-keeping.  Plus, it's possible those guys playing fighters wanted to avoid the kind of resource management that casters have to do, and really don't want to deal with spells per day or charged swords.  It's all fine and good for the DM to be handing out interesting items, but it's the players who have to deal with actually using them.

Which brings us to the crux of things - D&D is a game that we play for fun.  "Are the Big Six items fun?" is, in a sense, a more important question than whether they're interesting or boring or balanced or anything else.  Likewise, are 'interesting' magic items fun?  Sure, it's nice to have an oddball magic item now and then, as Tim's use of the Stone of Alarm, Horn of the Tritons, and Forn of Hog showed in the sequel campaign.  But I get the feeling that if every damn magic item operated like those, it would get kinda overwhelming...  unless you had fewer magic items.

Which led me to the conclusion that the best way to handle the Big Six is to make them inherent / innate bonuses.  I'm considering two schemes, but they both work very similarly.  In the first, when you level, you get a budget of astral gold pieces that you can 'spend' on inherent bonuses.  In the second, you spend literal gold pieces while carousing, and this boosts your inherent capabilities.  If you're boosting your Constitution, it might be that you literally drank thousands and thousands of gold pieces worth of ale, and your liver has turned to steel, rendering you more resistant to attacks.  Natural armor bonus from expensive ritual scarifications, Intelligence bonus from concocting expensive elixirs which boost your brainpower, Wisdom bonus from sacrificing gold to your deity in exchange for guidance, attack and damage bonus from getting into many many barfights and paying for damages, and so forth.  Gold gets spent, you get permanent enhancement bonuses to things at the same rates it would have cost you normally.  Pros and cons of these inherent bonuses:

• On the plus side, they can't be stolen from you.  On the minus side, when you die, the other PCs can't take them off your corpse (which, in turn, doesn't screw with party wealth when people die.  So it's really a plus, from my perspective, but players might be less happy about it).
• On the plus side, they apply regardless of what weapon you're using or armor you're wearing, increasing your versatility in that regard.  On the minus side, they can't be changed once chosen - if you invest umpty thousand gold pieces in boosting your strength, but realize later that you should've gone with dexterity, you can't just swap your gauntlets of ogre power with the rogue's gloves of dexterity.
• On the plus side, they can't be dispelled - they're part of you.  On the minus side, they don't stack with buffs or any Big Six magic items you might find; if you have +4 to strength by this scheme, it's a +4 enhancement bonus, and Bull's Strength does you no good at all.  Likewise, if you have a +2 weapon bonus, a +1 sword is no help (should you happen to find one, which is unlikely).
• On the plus side, you get to choose whatever you want, rather than finding a +1 ring of protection when everyone in the party has +2s, and you can choose to specialize in unusual ways.  If you have a melee mage, you can get the +3 weapons without stepping on the fighter's toes.  On the minus side, you only get these things between adventures; you no longer have the possibility of going "Ooh, I grabbed a random wang from the dragon's hoard, and it's +n!  I stab the dragon with it!"
• On the minus side, you can't take these things off of dead NPCs.  On the plus side, this gives me an excellent excuse to hand out tons and tons of gold pieces.  When was the last time the dragon's hoard was actually enough gold for the dragon to sleep on?  Those days are back, baby.

And finally, it lets me give out magic items that aren't awesome because they're +n, but because they have interesting properties.  You might find a flaming sword.  It's just flaming.  That's it.  And it'll grow with your fighter, because you keep boosting your personal enhancement bonus.  Sting?  Just an orcbane shortsword with some history.  Excalibur?  Holy vorpals, batman.  Also expect to find wands, potions, staves, and wondrous items that aren't Big Six.  And maybe some of the interesting stuff I mentioned earlier will work its way in.  But the really neat thing, to me, is that this scheme should let a high-level character, naked and armed only with a rolling pin, kick an amount of ass comparable to the amount he would kick if properly armed and armored.  Yeah, he'll miss the +5 armor bonus from his breastplate, but he'll still have a high enough AC, to-hit, damage, and saving throws to have a chance against a high-level foe.  He doesn't need a ton of bling to do his thing, because he is badass.  Did Conan need armor to kick ass?  Didn't think so.  Why should your barbarian?