- Astarte (Ishtar+Artemis+Hecate+Eris)
- Cosmological domain: Earth
- Spheres of influence: Love, fertility, sex, wilderness, the hunt, fey magic, feminine wiles.
- Epithets: The Elf-Mother, The Pale Goddess, The Insatiable One, Queen of the Cats, She-Who-Chases
- Alignment: Neutral-leaning-good-side-of-chaotic; strife-inducing, life-giving, lustful chaos, along with capricious predation. Doesn't bear any particular ill-will towards mankind, though they are sometimes a convenient prey species.
- Natural disasters: Plague of rodents, plague of birth defects, predation of livestock
- Curses: Impotence, syphilis, leothropy, wild magic
- Smiting: Transform into antelope, goat, or other prey animal, castration
- Blessings: Fertility, good health, stealth, good aim, good hunting, navigation
- Gifts: Extended lifespan, bewitched chariot, magic bow and arrows, spellbooks and scrolls (usually enchantment or healing)
- Favored people: Elves; sprang fully formed from her womb, first to walk the world
- Worshippers: Amazons, witches, explorers, prostitutes
- Servants: Ents, animal spirits, sabre-toothed tigers
- Messengers: Wild ungulates, monkeys, housecats
- Shrine locations: Hunter's lodges, whorehouses
- Holy places: Peaceful glades, game trails
- Preferred sacrifices: Wild animals taken in the hunt, lovers of priestesses
- Symbols: Pouncing leopard and leaping antelope in circle
- Festival: Spring ('bring life back to the world')
- Dagnu (Dagon)
- Cosmological domain: Sea
- Spheres of influence: Fish, bounty, growth, luck, change.
- Epithets: The Hungry Tide, The Waiting Serpent
- Alignment: Chaotic; primal, capricious, scaly, deep and ravenous, but patient as only a creature of the ancient depths can be.
- Natural disasters: Tsunami, flooding, rain of frogs, rain of whales
- Curses: Rabies, scurvy, seasickness
- Smiting: Turned to pillar of salt, turned into fish, rapid hypertrophy and subsequent explosion, lungs to gills
- Blessings: Water breathing, scaled skin, growth and strength, aid of sea creatures, abundant crops and fisheries
- Gifts: Supernatural ship, magic trident, magic net, magic cloak that turns you into a fish on command
- Favored people: Merfolk, Thrassians (an old scaly god, Dagnu is... from his depths the Thrassians once crawled)
- Worshippers: Sailors, fishermen, thieves.
- Servants: Sea serpents, water spirits
- Messengers: Small lizards, dripping water
- Shrine locations: Below high-tide mark (made of driftwood), on bridges
- Holy places: Tidal bores, sea caves
- Preferred sacrifices: Heads, skin, guts, and bones of caught fish, drowned virgins and goats (tied to shrines at low tide), fishermen overboard
- Symbol: Sea serpents entwined around trident
- Festival: Autumn ('for bountiful harvest')
- Hadad (Baal)
- Cosmological domain: Sky
- Spheres of influence: Thunder, rain, wind, war, horses.
- Epithet: The Thundering Hooves, The Carrion-Feaster, Lord of Battle
- Alignment: Neutral; a patron of conquerors, a builder of empires, but not a preserver thereof. A god of the song of steel and saddle, and prone to stir up rebellion in times of peace, lest his children grow soft and unmanly.
- Natural disasters: Tornado, drought, lightning storm, hail
- Curses: Cowardice, haemophilia, berserker, feared by horses, harried by ravens
- Smiting: Lightning from a clear sky, carried off by a roc or tornado
- Blessings: Courage, skill at arms, good weather, good luck on campaign, battle-wisdom
- Gifts: Magic weapons, magic horns and banners, supernatural steeds, cloak of feathers that transforms you into eagle on command
- Favored people: Humans; born of union with Astarte
- Worshippers: Barbarians, nobility, farmers
- Servants: Rocs, winged men, air elementals
- Messengers: Eagles, hawks, ravens, whispering breezes, howling winds
- Shrine locations: Along roads, mobile yurt-shrines
- Holy places: Isolated mountain peaks, rookeries, old battlefields
- Preferred sacrifices: Livestock and dying warriors offered to the buzzards, a conquered enemy
- Symbols: Eagle with lightning bolt in talons, griffon
- Festival: Summer ('bring us victory on campaign')
- Kothar (Kothar-wa-Khasis, Haephastus, Prometheus)
- Cosmological domain: Sun/fire; every day cast out of sky for his ugliness and presumption to create the dwarves. Volcanos are where he has landed, the magma his blood, and gems his teeth.
- Spheres of influence: Invention, crafts, treasures, learning.
- Epithet: The Crippled Smith, The Illuminating Architect, The Law-Giver
- Alignment: Lawful; encourages the creation of lasting and beautiful works, though sometimes envious of his children's greatest successes.
- Natural disasters: Earthquake, volcano, rain of fire and brimstone, wildfire
- Curses: Lameness, feeblemindedness, insanity
- Smiting: Spontaneous combustion, petrification
- Blessings: Astuteness, protection from fire, endurance, tool-blessing
- Gifts: Automaton servants, magic armor, inspiration (often to spell-invention in transmutation or evocation), instant fortress
- Favored people: Dwarves; carved them from stone in shameful mimicry of the elves, for desire of Astarte and children of his own. For all his skill, he was doomed to create life in his own image.
- Worshippers: Smiths, armorers, inventors, scribes, engineers
- Servants: Golems, salamanders, fire and stone spirits
- Messengers: Badgers, bees, visions in flames
- Shrine locations: Forges, armories, gates
- Holy places: Volcanic gas vents, magma flows
- Preferred sacrifices: Masterful works of art thrown into magma flows, burnt offerings of mountain goat
- Symbols: A smoking mountain, a tower
- Festival: Winter ('bring warmth to us in these dark days')
- Melek (Moloch)
- Cosmological domain: Civilization, cities
- Spheres of influence: Trade, bargain, oaths, sacrifice, just desserts, dark deals, unpleasant truths, necessity.
- Epithet: The Honest Demon, The Laughing Master, The Damning Savior
- Alignment: Neutral-to-evil-side-of-lawful; subsists on civilization, patron of its vices. He is the darkness in the alley, the coins pressed into the magistrate's palm, and the monkey's-paw-salesman. He keeps his word, often to the detriment of his petitioners.
- Natural disasters: Plague, rain of blood and sewage, transmutation of local coinage to lead
- Curses: Leprosy, death mark, swindling
- Smiting: Possession by evil spirit, delivery into the hands of an enemy
- Blessings: Protection from evil spirits, good luck in trade, protection from disease
- Gifts: Secret knowledge (often spellbooks or scrolls, typically illusion, divination, necromancy, or summoning), magic knives, ring of invisibility
- Favored people: Zaharans? Ratmen? Products of civilized decadence, lately blights upon the face of the world.
- Worshippers: Merchants, assassins, warlocks, desperate men
- Servants: Shadowbeasts, doppelgangers, invisible stalkers
- Messengers: Shadows, imps, speaking coins, speaking rats
- Shrine locations: West end of market square, hall of justice
- Holy places: Darkened sanctums of opulent temples in major cities
- Preferred sacrifices: A firstborn child, a man's honor, a secret unknown to any other living soul
- Symbol: Horned demon with toothy mouth holding a bowl of fire in one hand and merchant's scales in the other (gemstone eyes optional)
- Festivals: Ghost Dance in autumn, major market fairs in summer
Thursday, May 15, 2014
ACKS Variant Clerics - Deities
Been thinking about deities. Sort of want to keep the Old-Testamenty feel of the original cleric, without the same deity. So! Terribly-misappropriated-and-somewhat-modified deities of the Old Near East.
Thursday, May 8, 2014
ACKS Postmortem Eleventy-One: Wilderness Encounters
Tim and I were discussing the turnaround time on ACKS adventures - the time gap (in real life) from when you realize you're done in the dungeon and it's time to go home to when you're back at the mouth of the dungeon ready to kick some butt again. Tim opined that the turnaround time was long and painful after a crappy run with little treasure, and this was certainly a valid complaint; being chased by goblins all the way home is somewhat exciting when you have treasure to show for it, but rather disheartening when all of your encumbrance is used just carrying the bodies of the fallen. But Tim aimed this complaint at ACKS, arguing that it is a systemic flaw - this I think is incorrect. No, the long turnaround was a result of an error in my worldbuilding, and in our reading of the wilderness encounter rules.
Several errors, actually.
First and foremost: putting the dungeon(s) several six-mile hexes from town. I recall it being something like a day's hike each way. One consequence of this design was that anyone who came down with a mortal wound that needed healing within a day was probably screwed; you weren't going to be able to get them back to town in time, so it came down to party resources, which were typically lacking on the healing front. A "raise to 1 HP within a day" wound was just about as deadly as a "raise to 1 HP within a minute" wound. A second consequence of this design was that you were likely to get a wilderness encounter either on the way out or on the way back. For low-level parties, this is bas news. These dungeons were aimed at 3rd-5th level parties, who might've had enough resources to win a hard wilderness fight, but not to then follow it up with a successful dungeoncrawl. As a result, wilderness encounters on the way out were likely to result in calling off the expedition (and then having to do turnaround again), while wilderness encounters on the way home were liable to result in TPKs (never actually happened, but there were a couple that definitely could've gone that way without some clever lateral thinking by players).
The random encounter problem could've been ameliorated if I hadn't made another pair of errors, though. One of these was a worldbuilding error, the other a rules comprehension / inference error. I wanted most of the campaign area to be borderlands, for flavor purposes. As a result, I mucked with the concentric rings of civilization around the large towns out away from the rivers and coast, houserules that they generated borderlands rather than civilization. This resulted in rolls not on the relatively-merciful Civilized wilderness encounter table (which is mostly humans), but instead on Desert, Hills, and Swamp tables, which are mostly orcs and purple worms and wyverns and such. As a result, the individual wilderness encounters were more deadly than they should've been, given the proximity to town (though it was pretty funny when they lured the wyverns and giant scorpions into crossbow-shot of the city walls for the militia to deal with).
The rules-comprehension error related to the frequency of wilderness encounters in civilized terrain. This one is sort of ACKS' fault; as Alex has explained on the autarch forum, it's technically covered under the domain rules for monsters wandering into wizard-built dungeons. It's not the easiest-to-find place. But! Now we know, that in cizilized terrain you only roll once a month, in borderlands once a week, and in wilderness either once a day or once per hex travelled. So we were really overdoing wilderness encounters, even for borderlands. I think that borderlands would've been survivable with their usual encounter tables, provided that encounter frequency was a factor of seven lower and based on time travelled rather than distance.
Rather than a third-level party meeting an army of skeletons on their way to their first dungeoncrawl, and a pair of fire giants on the way back, you're supposed to start within the bubble of relative safety surrounding town, making expeditions to nearby dungeons, and only starting travel outside of civilized / borderlands regions when you're high enough level to deal with the threats inherent in those regions. At wilderness level, I'm not sure there's a good way to avoid turnaround time as a factor in play; dangerous travel is the name of the wilderness game, and such dangerous travel is inconsistent with reducing time from retreat to reentry of the dungeon. But I think that's OK; just another "play changes over level" sort of thing. By the mid-levels, you don't need to rely on town as heavily anyway. You have the cash to bring healers with you; after all, you were going to bring mercenaries to guard the horses, so why not just add some medics as well? You have Create Food and Create Water, so you can reduce the amount of supplies you need to carry per day and perhaps live off divine favor indefinitely for a small party in dire straits (also Tim - this is your fast-mode ACKS. Create Food and Water, Teleport, and similar spells that just cut out the annoying bits). You can bring a portable shrine for your cleric who can cast Restore Life and Limb. This is starting to look more like an armed camp outside the dungeon than leaving a handful of men-at-arms standing in the open with your mounts, isn't it? If it's a big dungeon and you're going to be back, it might make sense to build some more durable fortifications than basic trenches; the mercenaries were complaining about sleeping in the mud anyway. And if you're there long enough and doing construction, you're going to need a reliable food and labor supply. And the mercenaries are grouching about lack of women and booze again... Wait, the lizardmen from the next valley over have been stealing our tavern wenches? Unacceptable! We better go take them out. Maybe clear out the spiders that have been eating out cows too... Oh crap, the dungeon's tapped out. Well, I guess we could tell everyone to go home... or charge them money to stay? That's ridiculous, Thief, but just so ridiculous that it might work! And so a domain is born. A party-shared domain.
But I digress. In summary - as I have said before, the things that went wrong with my ACKS game of 2012-13 were largely my own fault. I also recant of this post - turns out surviving in ACKSworld is a lot easier than we thought, as long as you stay near population centers.
Several errors, actually.
First and foremost: putting the dungeon(s) several six-mile hexes from town. I recall it being something like a day's hike each way. One consequence of this design was that anyone who came down with a mortal wound that needed healing within a day was probably screwed; you weren't going to be able to get them back to town in time, so it came down to party resources, which were typically lacking on the healing front. A "raise to 1 HP within a day" wound was just about as deadly as a "raise to 1 HP within a minute" wound. A second consequence of this design was that you were likely to get a wilderness encounter either on the way out or on the way back. For low-level parties, this is bas news. These dungeons were aimed at 3rd-5th level parties, who might've had enough resources to win a hard wilderness fight, but not to then follow it up with a successful dungeoncrawl. As a result, wilderness encounters on the way out were likely to result in calling off the expedition (and then having to do turnaround again), while wilderness encounters on the way home were liable to result in TPKs (never actually happened, but there were a couple that definitely could've gone that way without some clever lateral thinking by players).
The random encounter problem could've been ameliorated if I hadn't made another pair of errors, though. One of these was a worldbuilding error, the other a rules comprehension / inference error. I wanted most of the campaign area to be borderlands, for flavor purposes. As a result, I mucked with the concentric rings of civilization around the large towns out away from the rivers and coast, houserules that they generated borderlands rather than civilization. This resulted in rolls not on the relatively-merciful Civilized wilderness encounter table (which is mostly humans), but instead on Desert, Hills, and Swamp tables, which are mostly orcs and purple worms and wyverns and such. As a result, the individual wilderness encounters were more deadly than they should've been, given the proximity to town (though it was pretty funny when they lured the wyverns and giant scorpions into crossbow-shot of the city walls for the militia to deal with).
The rules-comprehension error related to the frequency of wilderness encounters in civilized terrain. This one is sort of ACKS' fault; as Alex has explained on the autarch forum, it's technically covered under the domain rules for monsters wandering into wizard-built dungeons. It's not the easiest-to-find place. But! Now we know, that in cizilized terrain you only roll once a month, in borderlands once a week, and in wilderness either once a day or once per hex travelled. So we were really overdoing wilderness encounters, even for borderlands. I think that borderlands would've been survivable with their usual encounter tables, provided that encounter frequency was a factor of seven lower and based on time travelled rather than distance.
Rather than a third-level party meeting an army of skeletons on their way to their first dungeoncrawl, and a pair of fire giants on the way back, you're supposed to start within the bubble of relative safety surrounding town, making expeditions to nearby dungeons, and only starting travel outside of civilized / borderlands regions when you're high enough level to deal with the threats inherent in those regions. At wilderness level, I'm not sure there's a good way to avoid turnaround time as a factor in play; dangerous travel is the name of the wilderness game, and such dangerous travel is inconsistent with reducing time from retreat to reentry of the dungeon. But I think that's OK; just another "play changes over level" sort of thing. By the mid-levels, you don't need to rely on town as heavily anyway. You have the cash to bring healers with you; after all, you were going to bring mercenaries to guard the horses, so why not just add some medics as well? You have Create Food and Create Water, so you can reduce the amount of supplies you need to carry per day and perhaps live off divine favor indefinitely for a small party in dire straits (also Tim - this is your fast-mode ACKS. Create Food and Water, Teleport, and similar spells that just cut out the annoying bits). You can bring a portable shrine for your cleric who can cast Restore Life and Limb. This is starting to look more like an armed camp outside the dungeon than leaving a handful of men-at-arms standing in the open with your mounts, isn't it? If it's a big dungeon and you're going to be back, it might make sense to build some more durable fortifications than basic trenches; the mercenaries were complaining about sleeping in the mud anyway. And if you're there long enough and doing construction, you're going to need a reliable food and labor supply. And the mercenaries are grouching about lack of women and booze again... Wait, the lizardmen from the next valley over have been stealing our tavern wenches? Unacceptable! We better go take them out. Maybe clear out the spiders that have been eating out cows too... Oh crap, the dungeon's tapped out. Well, I guess we could tell everyone to go home... or charge them money to stay? That's ridiculous, Thief, but just so ridiculous that it might work! And so a domain is born. A party-shared domain.
But I digress. In summary - as I have said before, the things that went wrong with my ACKS game of 2012-13 were largely my own fault. I also recant of this post - turns out surviving in ACKSworld is a lot easier than we thought, as long as you stay near population centers.
Monday, May 5, 2014
ACKS: Variant Clerics
The other day Beedo was talking on the ACKS forum about cleric variants. This is a topic which is relevant to my interests, but Beedo and I didn't quite agree on what was desirable in a variant cleric. While most of mine have been modified primarily in weapons, armor, and proficiencies with small tweaks to the spell lists, Beedo was looking mainly for spell list rebuilds with small or no variation in the cleric core, and he was curious why few divine classes of this form exist in the ACKS blogosphere. I believe that this is because the divine spell list for ACKS, even with the Player's Companion, is remains confined to two main themes: the traditional sunlight-healing-fire Old Testament cleric list (including most Priestess and Bladedancer exclusive spells), and the more woodsy spells brought in for the Shaman and Witch. The reason we're not seeing significantly different divine spell lists is that divine spells outside of those areas don't exist.
... yet.
(Also, because balancing divine spell lists is a tricky and sometimes contentious thing)
So! If I were to build some cleric variants, complete with heavy spell list modification, what would I build? My players have shown some affection for knowledge-focused deities (Thoth, Volgrim, Odin?), which is unsurprising given that most of my players are engineers of some sort. Thor is a perennial favorite of gamers, and also offers a nice selection of well-known miracles to provide as spells (really the problem with custom spell lists is the high-level stuff; low-level clerics are liable to look somewhat similar across faiths, but it's the mid-high level Insect Plagues and Snakes to Sticks and Flame Strikes and whatnot that get a bit dubious). He's also reasonably close to the default cleric thematically, though. My father tends to strongly favor travel clerics whenever such an option is available (Ffarlaghn, Yaris, Hermes?). I for one would also like to see a deity of death and chaos or two, for use as opposition.
... and there I just lost half an hour reading wikipedia on the Greek pantheon, narrowing down to Hephaestus, the Kabeiroi, and Kothar-wa-Kasis. Spells another night.
... yet.
(Also, because balancing divine spell lists is a tricky and sometimes contentious thing)
So! If I were to build some cleric variants, complete with heavy spell list modification, what would I build? My players have shown some affection for knowledge-focused deities (Thoth, Volgrim, Odin?), which is unsurprising given that most of my players are engineers of some sort. Thor is a perennial favorite of gamers, and also offers a nice selection of well-known miracles to provide as spells (really the problem with custom spell lists is the high-level stuff; low-level clerics are liable to look somewhat similar across faiths, but it's the mid-high level Insect Plagues and Snakes to Sticks and Flame Strikes and whatnot that get a bit dubious). He's also reasonably close to the default cleric thematically, though. My father tends to strongly favor travel clerics whenever such an option is available (Ffarlaghn, Yaris, Hermes?). I for one would also like to see a deity of death and chaos or two, for use as opposition.
... and there I just lost half an hour reading wikipedia on the Greek pantheon, narrowing down to Hephaestus, the Kabeiroi, and Kothar-wa-Kasis. Spells another night.
Saturday, May 3, 2014
On the Dungeon Dimensions
So I read The Colour of Magic this morning, and was struck by a wonderful line about "the dungeon dimensions", which I am unfortunately unable to find at the moment (a hazard of reading novels in one sitting, and in paper). But, disregarding any Discworld canon that I have yet to read, I find the term inspiring for de-megadungeoning the Mythic Underworld dungeon. This is useful to me, since I have realized that megadungeons are significantly more difficult to put together than small dungeons.
So, the Dungeon Dimensions are an infinite collection of naturally-occurring hostile pocket universes. Any door in a sinkhole of evil (an area infused with evil magic as the result of corruption) may naturally become a portal to a Dungeon Dimension. Dungeon Dimensions are often thematically associated with the cause of the sinkhole; a sinkhole resulting from human sacrifices to the spider goddess will tend to yield portals to dungeon dimensions containing spiders both mundane and supernatural, as well as other servants of the goddess. Such denizens are spontaneously generated from the matter of the dimension and the souls of those sacrificed to the deity, demon lord, or other power responsible for the dimension. If the sinkhole is cleansed, the portals close, but the dimension remains, and should another portal appear due to a similar cause, it may be reachable again.
Internally, each dungeon dimension is basically what we'd think of as a dungeon level. These might be more to it outside the area reachable from the portal, but the potential infinitude of a dungeonesque can be ignored unless the PCs start bringing pickaxes and passwalls into the dimension. The walls between segments of the dimension might be passable to certain denizens, or there might be a cosmological reason that no reachable segment of a dungeon dimension can be larger than a sheet of graph paper, or dungeon dimensions might be able to contain portals to other segments or dimensions entirely. Such a structure would lend itself very nicely to a node-based megadungeon, and given that the portal network might change over time (as new areas are shadowed and old sinkholes cleansed, or as dark powers change things up out of malice and caprice), the addition of new portals between dungeon dimensions is readily explained.
Adventure possibilities:
So, the Dungeon Dimensions are an infinite collection of naturally-occurring hostile pocket universes. Any door in a sinkhole of evil (an area infused with evil magic as the result of corruption) may naturally become a portal to a Dungeon Dimension. Dungeon Dimensions are often thematically associated with the cause of the sinkhole; a sinkhole resulting from human sacrifices to the spider goddess will tend to yield portals to dungeon dimensions containing spiders both mundane and supernatural, as well as other servants of the goddess. Such denizens are spontaneously generated from the matter of the dimension and the souls of those sacrificed to the deity, demon lord, or other power responsible for the dimension. If the sinkhole is cleansed, the portals close, but the dimension remains, and should another portal appear due to a similar cause, it may be reachable again.
Internally, each dungeon dimension is basically what we'd think of as a dungeon level. These might be more to it outside the area reachable from the portal, but the potential infinitude of a dungeonesque can be ignored unless the PCs start bringing pickaxes and passwalls into the dimension. The walls between segments of the dimension might be passable to certain denizens, or there might be a cosmological reason that no reachable segment of a dungeon dimension can be larger than a sheet of graph paper, or dungeon dimensions might be able to contain portals to other segments or dimensions entirely. Such a structure would lend itself very nicely to a node-based megadungeon, and given that the portal network might change over time (as new areas are shadowed and old sinkholes cleansed, or as dark powers change things up out of malice and caprice), the addition of new portals between dungeon dimensions is readily explained.
Adventure possibilities:
- A portal to a dungeon dimension has opened in an innocent tavernkeeper's cellars. Clearly evil forces are at work nearby in town... but where? The dungeoncrawl takes on an air of investigation; what are the trappings and symbols present in the dimension? Can they be used to locate the source of the portal?
- An ancient evil is imprisoned in a dungeon dimension, and an evildoer seeks to open a portal to the particular segment where the ancient evil is to be found, in order to consult it, release it upon the world, or what-have-you. Unfortunately, he's not sure of quite the right set of atrocities to get the segment he wants, so he's proceeding experimentally...
- An fabled or important treasure has been lost in a dungeon dimension. If they seek to retrieve it, the PCs will either need to find or create a portal to it. Either approach is likely to entail occult research, to locate a site terrible enough or a group known to create that manner of portals, or in order to learn how to create such a portal oneself.
- A dungeon dimension with portals in known locations might be used as a means of perilous rapid transit. Mines of Moria, extraplanar edition.
- Cultists of one dark deity undertake the rites of another to open a portal to the dimensions of an enemy deity, in order to sack them. This throws the detectives off.
- An evil organization is using a heavily-fortified dungeon dimension as a base of operations. At low levels, the party fights cells trying to open portals in new areas to expand the organization's influence. At mid-levels, they raid bases with active portals, and must deactivate the portal before reinforcements can be summoned or arrive. At high levels, they storm the dimension itself.
- An irritatingly persistent portal in a local graveyard opens of its own accord during the last new moon of each year. The locals know to stay in on those nights, but the PCs might not (or they might go seeking). Perhaps they can close the portal once and for all.
- I like the idea of the mythic underworld dungeon, where monsters spontaneously generate, the doors are malicious, and the geometry is messed up, but I dislike the singularity of it. This approach changes the portal from The Gates of Hell to one of many gates to a tiny slice of an infinitude of hells. Sort of a DCC way to look at it.
- I also like the idea of the interplanar campaign a la Planescape or Magic the Gathering, but I have enough trouble mapping one universe at continent-scale, nevermind multiple. By providing pocket dimensions or segmenting infinite dimensions, I can keep things at comprehensible and preparable scales. Also provides a good stepping-off point to further extraplanar adventure; the Dungeon Dimensions might be easy to reach from the Prime, but they needn't be the only other dimensions in the multiverse.
- My dungeons are entirely too believable. Sometimes I include plumbing for cromsake (sometimes that plumbing is relevant to the game when it is full of green slime). This approach liberates me from the shackles of naturalism while also not really changing much else.
- Allows very nicely for dungeons in urban environments without interfering with the sewer system.
- I like themed dungeons but have a hard time reconciling them with my naturalist sensibilities.
- Reusability. When the door to the dungeon moves and the population reinforces itself even while the dimension is sealed, a segment could be reused in a completely different overworld context.
Monday, April 28, 2014
Traveller, Travel, Cat, Other Games, ...
Things that have happened since last post:
- Alex's Traveller game kicked off! So far we have stolen ships and fought androids. Twice! Misc notes:
- Turns out there's a rule at the very end of the combat section that on a hit with effect 6+, you always deal at least one point of damage regardless of target's armor! Snipers fighting enemies in battledress, rejoice!
- We considered abolishing our houserule that failed first aid checks cause damage equal to 2 * (the negative) effect of the check.
- Traveller's rules for shotguns bother me, but I don't really know of a better and easy solution.
- Traveller's VR goggles are TL13. I am bemused.
- Had a fearsome dream about being sucked out of my apartment into vacuum. First time in memory I've woken up with elevated pulse. Thanks Matt. Particularly odd because I was only asleep for 20 minutes. Need to get back on my lucid dreaming training.
- Kerbal Space Program. Got the asteroid update, started a new career mode game, observed three asteroids on impact trajectories with Kerbin, at 45, 60, and 70ish days from game start. Tried to race up the tech tree to the Claw to redirect them, but the pressure was too great (started juggling multiple ships en-route to Mun/Minmus at the same time to reach my science goals in time). Also learned that docking is hard.
- Dominion - Cornucopia and Dark Ages go pretty well together, since spoils, shelters, ruins, madmen, and mercenaries are distinct cards. Dark Ages and Hinterlands' discard cards work well too, since you often have a lot of junk-in-hand in Dark Ages. I really underestimated Stables when I first met it.
- Saw Ghost in the Shell with coworkers. There was a lot more soliloquy than I expected. Did think it was interesting that an Eastern take on cyberpunk would cast government agents as the protagonists rather than traditional lowlives.
- Travelled to Tennessee for work. Gained like five pounds during five days on perdium. Went on a hike in the Smoky Mountains and an awesome tour of Oak Ridge. Discovered Corsair Triple Smoke whiskey, and with it that smoky whiskey can be tasty.
- Kitten continues to grow. He is getting slightly mellower with age but is still pretty playful and very hungry. He has taken to hunting stink bugs (sigh). Hand for scale.
- I read a book on the use of snipers in urban guerilla warfare. The essential method ("Fire on security forces, trying to incite an overwhelming response that causes collateral damage to civilians. This collateral damage tends to make civilians angry at the SF rather than you, and brings them to your side.") made me some combination of sad and angry. I'm still human! Hooray!
- Played Cards Against Humanity with coworkers. Any karma generated by sadness at sniping was almost certainly wiped out (I did not score many points, but generated a number of "oh god that's horrible" moments).
- I found this video highly amusing. Not vihart's most educational work, but quite entertaining, from a certain point of view. Further vihart videos have caused me to consider taking up algorithmic composition again.
- (Also - rorschach blot screensaver on one of my home machines. Almost everything is bugs or spaceships)
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
On Stars Without Number
I've been reading the Stars Without Number Core in varying passes to varying degrees of detail and just finally managed to put my finger on what was bugging me about it.
This is not a simulationist game. At all. It has neither the engineering grunge nor history-simulating character generation of Traveller, nor does it go into the sort of economic considerations that ACKS does (which would, admittedly, be a lot harder in a science fiction setting).
Does it look like a fine, fun, fast-paced, deadly fusion of TSR D&D and Traveller? Certainly. But it is OSR of the Golden Age, rather than the Silver Age which I favor.
There are some rough edges on the merger, too. I'm not really sure how I feel about ascending D&D-style HP in science fiction, for example, and I don't think I like what a strong skill system like the one SWN borrows from Traveller does to the assumed "permitted unless implausible / apply gear, solve problem" competence of the OSR D&D character (as exemplified by the application of the 10' pole to the trapfinding problem - this does come up in the GMing chapter, but I'd rather it be front and center in Using Skills). I also quite dislike the max-skill-value-by-level rules, which mean that you can't have low-level "civilian" masters of a skill unless you're willing to have NPCs play by different rules from PCs (which is a valid approach, but not one I favor because inevitably they're going to recruit the guy who breaks the rules as a henchman and then someone will die and try to play him as a PC and then things can get messy. I prefer for PC-species to be more consistently modeled).
Other thoughts:
(Introspective moment - why do I prefer simulationism to narrativism so strongly, anyway? A topic for another post at a more reasonable hour, methinks)
This is not a simulationist game. At all. It has neither the engineering grunge nor history-simulating character generation of Traveller, nor does it go into the sort of economic considerations that ACKS does (which would, admittedly, be a lot harder in a science fiction setting).
Does it look like a fine, fun, fast-paced, deadly fusion of TSR D&D and Traveller? Certainly. But it is OSR of the Golden Age, rather than the Silver Age which I favor.
There are some rough edges on the merger, too. I'm not really sure how I feel about ascending D&D-style HP in science fiction, for example, and I don't think I like what a strong skill system like the one SWN borrows from Traveller does to the assumed "permitted unless implausible / apply gear, solve problem" competence of the OSR D&D character (as exemplified by the application of the 10' pole to the trapfinding problem - this does come up in the GMing chapter, but I'd rather it be front and center in Using Skills). I also quite dislike the max-skill-value-by-level rules, which mean that you can't have low-level "civilian" masters of a skill unless you're willing to have NPCs play by different rules from PCs (which is a valid approach, but not one I favor because inevitably they're going to recruit the guy who breaks the rules as a henchman and then someone will die and try to play him as a PC and then things can get messy. I prefer for PC-species to be more consistently modeled).
Other thoughts:
- Interesting psi system. The psi healing rules in particular lend themselves nicely to long adventuring days interspersed infrequently among weeks of downtime, which is a nice inversion of the standard approach to resource management. The ability to master powers for unlimited use at the cost of versatility also handily differentiates this system from traditional magic systems, as does the "one spell per school per level" thing, which limits psychic versatility. Well done.
- Gear - conveniently straightforward encumbrance system. Descending AC, though, of which I am not the biggest fan. Firearm vs. melee damage is always a fun topic, especially with abstract HP. Sniper rifle save-or-dies. Revenant Wiring is rad. Starship construction is very straightforward - pick hull, apply upgrades (which cost money, tonnage, power, and hardpoints), apply modifiers to stat-line, sum costs, done. None of this "distributed hull or semi-streamlined?" business. Starship weapons are a bit more exotic than Traveller's ("Reaper Battery" vs "Particle Beam") and the general feel from the gear lists is a bit softer sci-fi. Sandcasters no longer useful for scattering lasers - just anti-fighter weapons.
- Systems / Combat - PC exceptionalism in initiative betrays the narrative focus of the system. I kinda like the saving throw categories, though - clearer cut than OD&D's. Radiation is not as permanent as in Traveller, though xenoallergies are a nice touch. I would totally graft ACKS' death and dismemberment chart onto these injury rules, rather than "dead at 0". Natural healing is pretty quick. Has the "reroll total HD at each level and take best of previous HP or newly-rolled HP" rule, which means you're not going to have the fighter whose primary character trait is "glassjaw" unless he's got bad Con. Starship detection rules look pretty good, though I'm not sure we've ever actually played Traveller's sensors by rules-as-written. SWN treats starship ranges much less mathematically than Trav.
- GMing - Fairly good but relatively basic sandboxing advice. Also good advice on handling a skill system in the OSR style, though I'd've rather seen it up nearer the skill section, in the player chapters - part of the problem with skill systems, from my point of view, is that players whose characters have skills on their character sheet tend to use them as their first resort, rather than seeking clever ideas. No economic system to speak of in the core book; put off to Suns of Gold.
- World Generation - all of the rolls for atmo and temperature and whatnot are unlinked, rather than linked like Trav's. I do like having a biosphere roll, though, as well as a chance of an alien population rather than humans. No government roll, which saves the lookup on the Table of Curiously Quaint Future Governments That I Can Never Remember. World tags serve the same purpose as the Cultural Differences table in MongTrav, but better (you're going to get more / better adventure seeds, and less Unusual Customs, which can be entertaining).
- Factions - I skimmed this chapter on the most recent pass. The rules seem reasonable, but they're not really something I feel like I need. If I'm just trying to generate news bullets, I can get away with less, and if my PCs are leading the Rebel Alliance against the Empire, I'd rather use something closer to ACKS' degree of detail. My players, of course, might disagree, and therein I expect this subsystem might find its intended use. Campaign-style wargames aren't everyone's cup of tea, I suppose. I guess the takeaway here is that these are domains designed to keep the focus tighly on the PCs even into high levels, whereas in ACKS the individual PC becomes less mechanically significant relative to his domain as level increases (there's been some discussion on the fora to the effect that "at really high levels, mass combat-relevant proficiencies (feats) are probably the most influential mechanical bits of PCs. When you're fighting at legion-scale, your class or spellcasting abilities don't matter much."). I expect I'd find much the same 'tightly-PC-focused domains' in An Echo Resounding.
- Adventure Creation - mostly skipped. Average rewards per adventure and a Calibrating Combat sidebar again show narrativist leanings. Good d% table of hooks, in a mad-lib form similar to the adventure templates in Suns of Gold, though.
- Aliens - I very much like the lenses here; I think it nicely captures Nivenesque alien psychology. I also like how "Party-Butchering Hell Beast" is an entry on the alien critter base chasis table. Much less ecologically interested than Traveller, though - more like Star Wars-style wildlife. I am also amused that the planet Kant orbits around star Schopenhauer, but I suppose Kantian Javelin Lizard rolls off the tongue better than Schopenhauerian anything, really. Pirate captains are only 4HD?
- Robots and Mechs - the AI rules look like they'd make for rather playable PCs! It's basically point-buy for mental ability scores, skills, save and to-hit progression, and ability to use various hulls, ranging from a box equipped with a speaker up to a 4m tall four-armed killbot with an anti-vehicle laser. Unfortunately, no rules for ship's AIs. The mech rules seem reasonablish for a mech-centric game, but as with starship construction the rules are not very engineery.
- Societies - I enjoyed this chapter, and would steal from it for fantasy games. The structure of "founded for X reason, had Y government which was altered by catastrophy or time to Z government, two or three interesting traits A, B, and C, and now there's internal social conflict D" seems like a good one-paragraph need-to-know actionable summary.
- Design Notes - Accurate documentation of design decisions; good insights into other chapters. Some of my notes are derived from them. Wish we saw more chapters like this one in other RPGs. Would also have done well nearer the beginning of the book - design decisions up front!
- GM Resources - good name tables, may steal. The corporation name generation's entertaining too. Could see borrowing the Quick Heresies stuff for Midnight.
(Introspective moment - why do I prefer simulationism to narrativism so strongly, anyway? A topic for another post at a more reasonable hour, methinks)
Thursday, April 3, 2014
Review: Suns of Gold
Following my reading of Red Tide and favorable impression thereof, I realized that I had a bunch of other Sine Nomine material on my hard drive that I hadn't read yet! I recall skimming the Stars Without Number Core at some point past, but I do not remember the details. I was reasonably excited about Suns of Gold, so I decided to read it first and see how much I could infer about SWN from the sourcebook, and keeping its status as a competitor primarily with Traveller in mind throughout (I've read CT's Book 7 - Merchant Prince, but I don't have Mongoose's version).
Chapter 1: Five pages of introductory material and history. I dig the Exchange of Light and particularly their Context Assassins. This chapter sets up some very different expectations from those in most Traveller sectors - things are pretty rough, civilization is trying to pull itself out of a dark age kicking and screaming, and the locals would love nothing more than to off yon far trader and steal his ship and cargo. Establishes the grand context, the place in history, of the far trader after the Scream. I can work with this.
Chapter 2: Eight pages outlining the obstacles confronting the far trader and the realities of doing business. Discussion of factors, currency, customs, and some initial advice for setting up a campaign. Elaborates on difficulties mentioned in chapter 1 while narrowing the scope down to "how's this trading thing play out in practice?".
Chapter 3: Eighteen pages of trade rules. We're in to the meat of it here. A couple of things stand out in contrast with Traveller's approach. First, friction and trouble mechanics model losses from bribes, taxes, theft, and mishaps, but can be circumvented via appropriate adventures. This reinforces the gritty themes of the setting, but more importantly it ties trading to adventuring. While Traveller's trade system in our experience is largely a bookkeeping exercise used to fund other endeavours but not particularly entertaining in its own right, this inverts the formula and makes trade a cause of adventures and a source of fun. The goods tables have less variance per ton than do the Traveller tables, with rare and exotic pre-fall maltech immortality devices capping out at 400kCr per load (compare with Traveller's Radioactives at 1MCr / ton). The world-type trade good tables are simpler to use than generating available cargos for a world in Traveller, though the trouble tables are disappointingly uniform in their effects (varying primarily in degree). While these rules fail to address the Golden Pair problem just as most Traveller rulesets do, this is perfectly justifiable within the post-apocalyptic setting outlined in Chapter 1. The Holdings rules felt slightly out-of-place in this chapter, inasmuch as some holdings that influenced Morale or Supply were confusing without knowing that colonization rules were coming. That said, the holding rules are neat and something I haven't seen in Traveller outside of maybe the Mercenary supplements, where their effects haven't been particularly memorable (I suppose Dynasty probably has something similar, but probably at a higher degree of abstraction). They also sort of set up the possibility of Great Ambitions - why yes, as a matter of fact, I would like a Fleet Command and some space-battleships. Maybe I'll read Skyward Steel next...
Chapter 4: Fourteen pages, mostly of world-tags. These don't actually influence the trade mechanics (though attaching a handful of purchase/sale modifiers to each might produce some interesting variety), but do provide good ideas for authority figures, antagonists, places, and objects for use in adventures on said worlds. Again, without having used it, the tag system looks like it should be a useful prep / organizational tool. There are also some sample worlds in this chapter, some of which are entertaining (I liked Axiom, Boreline, and Inget Station) and almost all of which are wonderfully cynical in one way or another.
Chapter 5: Fourteen pages on running trading adventures. The first major chunk of this chapter is a set of adventure-templates. These are sort of similar to Traveller patrons, but about two steps further abstracted; I think the closest thing I've seen in another RPG product were the adventure templates in WHFRP's Renegade Crowns (another supplement from which I have derived utility despite not playing the system it was written for). You start with a general objective - Establish Holding, Kill Target, or Do A Favor, for example. Each of these has a d6 table of mad-libbed plots, with blanks reading Antagonist, Authority, Thing, Place, Hostiles, Thief, and so forth, and subsequent supporting tables with random hostiles and conflicts and such. I'd be a little concerned with some of these table results becoming expected or par for the course, but I think this is probably avoidable, and this looks like a useful tool. These are followed by a section on running mercantile campaigns, which has at least two things I could see stealing for any sandbox game (the A Pattern for Inquiries sidebar and the Goal Pyramid structure), as well as a good verbalization / concretization of an unspoken difference in style in trading campaigns, between the "Space Truckers" style and the "Merchant Princes" style, and suggested rules variations for each. Some of my prior thoughts on Traveller are relevant only to the Space Trucker style, while my prior play experiences have mostly been of the Merchant Prince variety. Nice of Crawford to give me terms with which to express this dichotomy.
Chapter 6: Eight pages on founding colony worlds. Now some of the holdings make much more sense! Again, a wonderful example of a Grand Ambition for a Merchant Prince-style campaign. These rules look eminently usable, and are rather economically-informed ("You're allowed to hyperinflate your colony's currency... but it's quite bad for morale, and after a month prices have adjusted for it."). Again, we have a Trouble Table that serves as a source of adventures. Also, he named the sample colony Bastiat. I approve.
Chapter 7: Six pages of gear, ships, and ship fittings. I will admit that I skimmed this one. Gotta love having nuclear dampers and weapons for sale to PCs, though, and the Exodus Ship warms the cold, Homeworldy parts of my heart.
Chapter 8: Tables, maps, stats for likely hostiles, a world trade record sheet. Useful GM things, and closing with a very stripped-down index that nevertheless seems to hit the sort of things one would likely look for in play (gear, adventure templates, the quick-reference pages for buying and selling cargo, &c).
Other considerations: The art is sparse, but pretty good, in a black-and-white pencil style which reinforces the themes of the setting. None of the art made me go "WTF", and where the art was clearly supposed to be representing a person or thing, it did a good job (the factor on page 10 and the rival trader on page 7 look appropriately supportive/friendly and ominous, from their body language, for example). The editing was superb - I did not notice any significant typos, though there were some instances of odd diction (while I've never used "confect" to describe building an adventure, as used on page 45 it is entirely appopriate). From his diction, attention to editing, comprehension of economics, and references to Bastiat, Heinlein, and other authors, I get the impression that the author is well-read (probably better than I). I like that. The style is not that of the commercial writer, churning out word-count for a paycheck; it is that of the enthusiast, with extensive knowledge and deep love of both the genre and the RPG form, who wants to share these with others to the best of his ability.
So, in conclusion: at two-thirds the price and 77% of the pagecount, Suns of Gold absolutely blows away any of Mongoose's Traveller supplements that I've yet read. The subsystems are well-thought-out, varied, and inspiring of player ambition, there are sandbox GMing tips and structures that are liable to be useful in even fantasy games, the editing is excellent, and there is no glut of either player options (careers, gear) or of repeated minor variations on subsystems. The only accusation I would consider levelling against it is that the trade is somewhat derivative of Traveller's, but this is readily forgivable given that the changes made to Traveller's trade, while small, are significant in their changes to the structure of play, well-thought-out, and sensibly implemented. It might even be seen as convenient that it is so close to Traveller's trade, since this makes back-porting it to Traveller very possible.
Well done, Mr. Crawford and Sine Nomine. Maybe I ought to go read the core book...
Chapter 1: Five pages of introductory material and history. I dig the Exchange of Light and particularly their Context Assassins. This chapter sets up some very different expectations from those in most Traveller sectors - things are pretty rough, civilization is trying to pull itself out of a dark age kicking and screaming, and the locals would love nothing more than to off yon far trader and steal his ship and cargo. Establishes the grand context, the place in history, of the far trader after the Scream. I can work with this.
Chapter 2: Eight pages outlining the obstacles confronting the far trader and the realities of doing business. Discussion of factors, currency, customs, and some initial advice for setting up a campaign. Elaborates on difficulties mentioned in chapter 1 while narrowing the scope down to "how's this trading thing play out in practice?".
Chapter 3: Eighteen pages of trade rules. We're in to the meat of it here. A couple of things stand out in contrast with Traveller's approach. First, friction and trouble mechanics model losses from bribes, taxes, theft, and mishaps, but can be circumvented via appropriate adventures. This reinforces the gritty themes of the setting, but more importantly it ties trading to adventuring. While Traveller's trade system in our experience is largely a bookkeeping exercise used to fund other endeavours but not particularly entertaining in its own right, this inverts the formula and makes trade a cause of adventures and a source of fun. The goods tables have less variance per ton than do the Traveller tables, with rare and exotic pre-fall maltech immortality devices capping out at 400kCr per load (compare with Traveller's Radioactives at 1MCr / ton). The world-type trade good tables are simpler to use than generating available cargos for a world in Traveller, though the trouble tables are disappointingly uniform in their effects (varying primarily in degree). While these rules fail to address the Golden Pair problem just as most Traveller rulesets do, this is perfectly justifiable within the post-apocalyptic setting outlined in Chapter 1. The Holdings rules felt slightly out-of-place in this chapter, inasmuch as some holdings that influenced Morale or Supply were confusing without knowing that colonization rules were coming. That said, the holding rules are neat and something I haven't seen in Traveller outside of maybe the Mercenary supplements, where their effects haven't been particularly memorable (I suppose Dynasty probably has something similar, but probably at a higher degree of abstraction). They also sort of set up the possibility of Great Ambitions - why yes, as a matter of fact, I would like a Fleet Command and some space-battleships. Maybe I'll read Skyward Steel next...
Chapter 4: Fourteen pages, mostly of world-tags. These don't actually influence the trade mechanics (though attaching a handful of purchase/sale modifiers to each might produce some interesting variety), but do provide good ideas for authority figures, antagonists, places, and objects for use in adventures on said worlds. Again, without having used it, the tag system looks like it should be a useful prep / organizational tool. There are also some sample worlds in this chapter, some of which are entertaining (I liked Axiom, Boreline, and Inget Station) and almost all of which are wonderfully cynical in one way or another.
Chapter 5: Fourteen pages on running trading adventures. The first major chunk of this chapter is a set of adventure-templates. These are sort of similar to Traveller patrons, but about two steps further abstracted; I think the closest thing I've seen in another RPG product were the adventure templates in WHFRP's Renegade Crowns (another supplement from which I have derived utility despite not playing the system it was written for). You start with a general objective - Establish Holding, Kill Target, or Do A Favor, for example. Each of these has a d6 table of mad-libbed plots, with blanks reading Antagonist, Authority, Thing, Place, Hostiles, Thief, and so forth, and subsequent supporting tables with random hostiles and conflicts and such. I'd be a little concerned with some of these table results becoming expected or par for the course, but I think this is probably avoidable, and this looks like a useful tool. These are followed by a section on running mercantile campaigns, which has at least two things I could see stealing for any sandbox game (the A Pattern for Inquiries sidebar and the Goal Pyramid structure), as well as a good verbalization / concretization of an unspoken difference in style in trading campaigns, between the "Space Truckers" style and the "Merchant Princes" style, and suggested rules variations for each. Some of my prior thoughts on Traveller are relevant only to the Space Trucker style, while my prior play experiences have mostly been of the Merchant Prince variety. Nice of Crawford to give me terms with which to express this dichotomy.
Chapter 6: Eight pages on founding colony worlds. Now some of the holdings make much more sense! Again, a wonderful example of a Grand Ambition for a Merchant Prince-style campaign. These rules look eminently usable, and are rather economically-informed ("You're allowed to hyperinflate your colony's currency... but it's quite bad for morale, and after a month prices have adjusted for it."). Again, we have a Trouble Table that serves as a source of adventures. Also, he named the sample colony Bastiat. I approve.
Chapter 7: Six pages of gear, ships, and ship fittings. I will admit that I skimmed this one. Gotta love having nuclear dampers and weapons for sale to PCs, though, and the Exodus Ship warms the cold, Homeworldy parts of my heart.
Chapter 8: Tables, maps, stats for likely hostiles, a world trade record sheet. Useful GM things, and closing with a very stripped-down index that nevertheless seems to hit the sort of things one would likely look for in play (gear, adventure templates, the quick-reference pages for buying and selling cargo, &c).
Other considerations: The art is sparse, but pretty good, in a black-and-white pencil style which reinforces the themes of the setting. None of the art made me go "WTF", and where the art was clearly supposed to be representing a person or thing, it did a good job (the factor on page 10 and the rival trader on page 7 look appropriately supportive/friendly and ominous, from their body language, for example). The editing was superb - I did not notice any significant typos, though there were some instances of odd diction (while I've never used "confect" to describe building an adventure, as used on page 45 it is entirely appopriate). From his diction, attention to editing, comprehension of economics, and references to Bastiat, Heinlein, and other authors, I get the impression that the author is well-read (probably better than I). I like that. The style is not that of the commercial writer, churning out word-count for a paycheck; it is that of the enthusiast, with extensive knowledge and deep love of both the genre and the RPG form, who wants to share these with others to the best of his ability.
So, in conclusion: at two-thirds the price and 77% of the pagecount, Suns of Gold absolutely blows away any of Mongoose's Traveller supplements that I've yet read. The subsystems are well-thought-out, varied, and inspiring of player ambition, there are sandbox GMing tips and structures that are liable to be useful in even fantasy games, the editing is excellent, and there is no glut of either player options (careers, gear) or of repeated minor variations on subsystems. The only accusation I would consider levelling against it is that the trade is somewhat derivative of Traveller's, but this is readily forgivable given that the changes made to Traveller's trade, while small, are significant in their changes to the structure of play, well-thought-out, and sensibly implemented. It might even be seen as convenient that it is so close to Traveller's trade, since this makes back-porting it to Traveller very possible.
Well done, Mr. Crawford and Sine Nomine. Maybe I ought to go read the core book...
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