Five Torches Deep Review, Part 1: Contents

In this post: summary of the contents and subsystems of Five Torches Deep (hereafter 5TD), a 5e/OSR hybrid system.
Next posts: why I'm not a fan, in excruciating detail

The tl;dr of those complaints:

• Encumbrance and dumpstats:
  
• Encumbrance is unreasonably punitive for characters with low Str compared to both 5e and any retroclone I have ever seen
• Encumbrance's very sharp transition from "unencumbered" to "overencumbered with very degraded combat capability" removes meaningful choices around how much stuff to carry
  
• It doesn't make any sense to design systems to punish dumpstats when ability score generation doesn't allow you to dump particular stats 
• Supply and equipment:
• Supply is unreasonably punitive for characters with low Int
• Supply is full of weird dissociative behavior
• Equipment degradation is never worth the headache in a tabletop RPG
  
• Resilience, corruptions, and maiming 
• Resilience is unreasonably punitive for characters with low Con and will tend to disable and then kill them very quickly
• Corruptions are lifted pretty much straight from Lamentations of the Flame Princess, but they're much more deadly under 5e's save structure and high-level characters are not substantially more likely to survive them than low-level characters.
  
• The maiming table fails to perform the two essential functions of a maiming table: making penalties from near-deaths make sense within the game-world, and providing absolute, impartial fairness around death and penalties
  
• Unreliable magic
• Spellcasters in 5TD suffer (possibly-TPK-inducing) mishaps way more often than spellcasters in any magic system I have ever seen in tabletop gaming, including the Warhammer 40k RPGs
  
• Travel vs Exploration
• 5TD's rules for actually exploring sites in the OSR style, with choices about resource tradeoffs, are nonexistent.  There are lots of resources that suffer attrition, but very few choices about them built into the system itself.
• There is no formal noncombat exploration game-loop, which is one of the best parts of TSR D&D.
  
• 5TD's DMing and dungeon-building advice does not support long-term exploration of single sites in the OSR style.
• The Homesteads supplement  
• Feels incomplete; there's a clear place in the middle of the book where there should be a system, but instead it's left to DM fiat.  Little content for money.
  

It's cool that this hybrid exists.  I hope it will be the beginning of a genre of hybrids which surpass it.  Given how hard the 5e folks seem to be homebrewing, this seems a more likely outcome than that my fear about 5TD will come to pass.  I fear that it will succeed, and it will come to be seen as representative of the best (or even typical) ideas of the OSR in 5e circles.  I think 5TD does enough things wrong that this could turn a lot of people off from OSR ideas, and a lot of quality gaming might be missed out on.

5TD Chapter Summaries

5TD is 48 pages, including the cover, table of contents, and six double-page spreads of artwork at chapter boundaries, so only 36 pages of text.  This is quite compact, even by OSR standards.  The art is...  reasonably-well executed, but it doesn't show any player characters dying horribly, which is surprising.  And having a quarter of the book be art is an awful lot.

The first two pages after the table of contents are an introduction outlining design goals and core mechanic.  I disagree with some of these design goals, but I think 5TD mostly achieves them.  From the OSR, it cites "Danger is Real", "Cunning Over Crunch", "Magic Is Haphazard", and "Travel & Resources" as guiding principles.  In explaining its differences from 5e, the headings are "Weaker PCs", "Default DC 11", "No Dump Stats", and "New Mechanics", the most important chunk of which is "mechanics that reinforce the tropes of old-school games and the neo-clones that explicitly lean into the tolling [toiling?], souls-esque grindhouse."

Six pages are allocated to character building, races, classes, and leveling.  Humans roll stats on 3d6 in order and swap any two, non-human races have two stats set to 13 and then roll the rest in order on 2d6+3 and have access to some classes gated by high ability score rolls.  No player race has darkvision, so carrying lighting matters.  XP is earned for GP recovered, and XP to each level increases roughly exponentially (so if you die and have to start over from 0 XP, by the time the rest of the party goes from their current level to the next level, you will end up just one level behind them).  Max character level is 9.  Classes are very simple - each of the Big Four (fighter, thief, wizard, "zealot" / cleric) gets a single page and three archetypes (eg, barbarian is a fighter archetype or subclass).  Starting HP are lower than in 5e, and you get some random rolls on a table for your starting mundane equipment (rope, torches, etc).

I am on board with almost everything in this chapter.  My one complaint would be that some of the rules text is very compressed, to the point where its intent is not quite clear (eg, Fighter gets an ability "Orders: movement, ally can active action").  My other one complaint is that only assassins can get backstab / sneak attack and it's capped at +2d6.  I also have a few potential concerns/nits around other specific abilities but those are minor.

Four pages are allocated to equipment, encumbrance, supply, repair, and crafting.  The variety of weapons and armor available is significantly reduced compared to 5e (and frankly many OSR systems).  Weapon damage is mostly increased a bit from 5e, except for two-handed martial weapons (greatsword damage actually goes down by half a point).  There are some weird things going on with some of the weapon and armor mechanics - max possible AC is in light armor with high dex, rather than in heavy armor, and some weapons let you add weird stats to damage (halberd lets you add Int, and crossbow lets you add Wis).  No explanation is given.

The encumbrance system abstracts weight as points of Load, and you can carry Load up to your Str score.  Going over your Str by even a point of Load carries the pretty serious penalty of disadvantage to all checks and then increasing movement penalties the further over you go, but there are no penalties up to your Str.

The supply system lets you pack a number of Supply points of abstracted-away misc adventuring gear equal to your Int score, and you can use those points to replenish your consumables, like ammunition, torches, spell components, and rations.

Weapons and armor degrade with crit fails and critical hits by enemies, and you can spend Supply points to make rolls to repair them.  They have a variant of the Shields Shall By Splintered rule, but...  it only negates one or two points of damage instead of the whole attack, and shields give 2 points of AC instead of 1 like they do in most OSR D&Ds.  So this doesn't seem like it would see play very often (basically only when you expect a blow to kill you if you don't sacrifice your shield).

The crafting system doesn't specify how much Supply it costs to make stuff, and it takes four consecutive successful rolls, each of which takes half a day, so crafting anything takes about two weeks of work, in expectation.

Six pages are allocated to gameplay and mechanics.  Combat rules like initiative, types of actions, how to attack, damage, death, maiming, and morale get two pages.  Exploration concerns like timekeeping, traps, light, escaping the dungeon, evasion and pursuit, fatigue, and disease and poison ("corruptions") get the remaining four pages.

The death and dying rules require an ally to stabilize you, and then you get to roll on the maiming table.  This is a nice middle ground between B/X's "dead at 0 HP" and 5e's "you have like a >50% chance to just get back up with 1HP under your own power".  The maiming table has a small chance of death, a small chance of you're fine, and most of the entries are 1d6 damage to an ability score, loss of a body part, or disadvantage to all rolls until you rest.

Initiative is deterministic (no rolls), which is very odd.

Timekeeping during exploration is done in one-hour exploration turns.  This is somewhat loose compared to OSR games where 10-minute turns are the norm, but it saves 5TD from having to talk about combat movement speed vs exploration movement speed.

The evasion and pursuit rules don't provide much of an advantage to the smaller party (as individual pursuers can chase at their own speed), unlike most OSR evasion and pursuit rules which give small groups a pretty substantial advantage.  These pursuit rules are mostly written from the perspective of PCs chasing things rather than being chased, with PCs being chased as a note at the very end.

The "roll to return" rules are similar to Justin Alexander's Escaping the Dungeon rules, but very cut down.

You have to make a roll to retreat from combat.  I'm not really sure why.  It's also odd that this is way back in adventuring rather than with the combat rules.

The resilience system lets you adventure for 1 hour per point of Con score.  Go beyond that and you have to start making a roll every hour or collapse from exhaustion, with your move speed reduced to zero (0) feet and disadvantage to all rolls.  I'm...  almost wondering if 0' here is a typo, and it should be (say) 10', because you can't rest off exhaustion in an unsafe resting place (like dungeon or hostile wilderness) and healing magic can't remove exhaustion, and your party almost certainly doesn't have the carrying capacity to carry you out (not that weights for characters are provided) so I guess you just get left behind and eventually die.  But then why bother with an exhaustion status, instead of "you die of exhaustion"?

This is much steeper transition from "functioning normally" to "really messed up" than either 5e's or B/X's exhaustion rules.

The poison / disease corruptions inflict exhaustion and increasing ability score damage.  They strongly resemble Lamentations of the Flame Princess' disease rules, where after failing the initial save you just keep making saves until it's run its course or you're dead (at 0 in any ability score), rather than the effect ending after a certain quantity of successful saves (as in 3.x, presumably 4e, and to some extent 5e).  The text is rather brief and the one boxed text example ends in the death of the afflicted character so I think that's how they're supposed to work but I'm not 100% sure.

The magic system, including spell lists, gets four pages.  Spells known are pretty similar to B/X's numbers (so about half of 5e's), but you have to make a roll to cast and if you fail you lose access to spells of that spell level until your next rest in a safe place, and you have to roll on the mishaps table.  Mishaps are fairly severe and could easily swing a combat one way or the other.  There is an option to cast safely but it takes hours.

Number of permanent magic items you can use / be attuned to is sharply limited to between 1 and 4, depending on your Cha.  An average character can only be attuned to one magic item.

Spell lists are one page each for divine and arcane, including descriptions of spell effects.  Again, some spell effects are sufficiently brief as to be unclear and rely on prior knowledge of D&D.

Light cantrip is duration Concentration.  I like this a lot.

Invisibility moved to 3rd level and duration Concentration.  Odd.

Silence also moved to 3rd level and duration Concentration.  Odd again.

Sleep implementation is weird, scales up with level in ways that neither OSR sleep nor 5e sleep do.

Is the divine Reforge cantrip supposed to totally obviate the need for the weapon and armor repair subsystem?  I guess it only works on mundane items so you can't use it to repair magic gear, but it should make keeping gear in good shape a lot easier for most of the game.

Turn Undead is a 1st level spell like in LotFP.  Unlike in LotFP, it only affects undead of fewer HD than you have levels, so you can't really punch up with it, but no cap on total HD turned.  Sort of the obverse of sleep's changes, where your total HD slept are more limited but there's no per-creature cap.

So if I cast fireball (er, furyfire), I have to make an attack modified by Int and proficiency against my targets'...  armor class?  If the party fighter happens to be caught in the blast (surely an honest mistake), his plate helps him avoid a fireball?  Wat?

Retainers and monsters get six pages.  Retainers get one page, monsters get five.

Number of retainers you can have is capped by Cha score.  Still, 10 retainers is quite a few.

Henchmen (leveled retainers who work without pay) aren't available to the average character until 6th level (versus OSR games where they're usually available at like 2nd level and are really handy when you die, because you can just play your henchman and you're already in the dungeon and reasonably-leveled).

There's an orders subsystem where you can give a mass of retainers orders in combat for some bonuses.

Renown score is calculated purely from level and ability scores, no influence from actual deeds.

Reaction rolls exist, but they're on d20 instead of 2d6 and they're not modified by Cha, only renown (and that seems at DM's discretion).

Four pages on building or converting monsters.  I would not have ordered these pages the way that they were ordered - the page with instructions on how to use the table of monster stats by HD comes last.

Monsters go up to 18HD.  The "average HP" numbers are not the average you'd get if you actually rolled the stated HD; they err slightly low across most of the HD range.

Recommendation to halve HP of 5e monsters that are being converted.

The whole monster building system leaves me sort of ambivalent.  It's very concerned with the tactics of monsters (roles, techniques / special abilities, mixes of roles that you could use for encounters - reminds me of 4e's philosophy of monsters though I haven't read enough 5e to rule out the possibility that that philosophy is still mainstream), not very naturalistic (nothing resembling Number Appearing or % in Lair, for example), nor very concerned about associativity of monster mechanics.  Frankly the only things that feel OSR about this system are that there is no conception of challenge rating and that you don't have to assign ability score values for monsters.

Guidelines on treasure are very cursory.  Alignment makes a brief appearance but it's basically "supernaturally evil or not supernaturally evil".

One page of worked-out monster statblocks.  Hobgoblins are 4 HD, much higher than in either 5e or OSR systems.  Monster entries have no XP values, so I think killing monsters gives no XP, only recovering gold and magic items.

Almost to the end now.  Four pages of DMing stuff.  One page on structuring campaigns and sessions, one on principles for making rulings, one page of random...  plot? generator table, and one page of using a Rubik's cube to help generate dungeons, which gets points for novelty and for the amusement value of watching them studiously avoid saying "Rubik's cube".

The advice on structuring sessions is...  more narrative than how I do things.  It gives much more truck to narratively-bookending sessions and placing PCs in "dramatic situations" than to letting them explore environments at their own pace, but it does caution against trying to tell a particular story and instead encourages letting PCs make choices between eg factions to ally with.  So it could be worse, especially for DMs coming from environments where "repressed novelist" is prevalent.  And it's not like the old-school source materials didn't have their own share of this problem (the infamous Dragonlance modules spring to mind).

The principles for making rulings are mostly pretty decent.

The random connections table is OK, the random descriptors table seems too high-entropy to be very useful.

Two pages of quick reference, including the only copy of the table for rolling starting mundane equipment.  It doesn't appear in the equipment chapter or the character generation chapter.

Next post(s): My big structural and philosophical issues with 5TD.  There were some little nitpicks in this post.  Next post's complaints will not be like that.

The Ecstasy of Gold

ecstasy, noun: an emotional or religious frenzy or trance-like state.

Once upon a time, I held an ounce of gold in my hand and reflected on it for a couple of minutes, and I heard its song.  This post was prompted by hearing that song again recently (well, that and worrying about inflation).

I think there's more to the valuation of gold than the economists think.  I think it speaks to people on a primeval level, once you've tasted it.

It is one thing to have been told that gold is dense, and to know it numerically.  It is another to feel its weight in your hand.  Physics gives an inherent gravitas to it, a seriousness.  It isn't easy-come-easy-go; the effort of picking it up forbids it.  You can't light cigars with it or "make it rain" at the club.  In your hand it has the feeling of a solidly-made tool, of a good hammer or your grandfather's fixed-blade hunting-knife.  It feels durable, permanent, faith-worthy.  But it is a faith which demands works, the bearing of burdens.  It is a faith that demands care, that your purse is kept well-mended and free of holes.  An old-style faith, of the keeping of covenants.

The color is that of warm sunshine; neither the pale cold sun of winter nor the killing white sun of the desert.  It is a life-giving color, the color of grain ready for harvest, of baked bread, of beer, of calories against the cold, of abundance, and of the weather under which crops are abundant and one relaxes in simple contentment.  To laze in the sun is not an instinct exclusive to man, but shared with the animals (particularly cats, among man's companions).  Gold calls to mind this universal experience.  Gold-worship is sun-worship writ small.

Can you impart these feelings to your players, through verbal description?  I dunno.  Maybe.  Seems worth trying.  It certainly makes a lot of sense of the willingness to go into dark holes in the ground and fight terrible things to get it.  I do think maybe D&D cheapens the value of gold by making it the standard currency, and one could make silver the standard and have gold replace platinum to boost its impact.

I could also see a fantasy coinage scheme where you name your coin-types celestially; gold suns, silver moons, copper planets, iron stars.  If you wanted a more supernatural take on it, you could make gold literal fragments of the sun god, which would explain why magic research consumes it in great quantities.  This could also be spun to provide in-world justification for "1 XP per GP".

Bug-Orcs

Much ink has been spilled over the ethics of killing orc babies.  I have a solution.

Pig-men just aren't viscerally disgusting enough anymore.  Man has never met a mammal so horrible that he wouldn't rub its belly if he thought he could get away with it.  Make mammal-beastmen neutral; they're self-interested and short-sighted but at the end of the day we can come to understandings with them.

Bug-men though.  Fuck 'em.  If you've ever woken up with termites on your face, or felt despair after months of failing to get rid of the moths in your pantry, you'll get it.  How can such tiny, stupid, horrible things best us?  Imagine if they were 100 kilos and clever enough to use equipment, but just as totally food-and-reproduction focused and utterly ambivalent about inflicting suffering.  Locust-men carpeting the plains in a crawling horde once every hundred years, leaving a barren wasteland.  Towering termite-man cities of baked mud, ancient when man had yet to discover fire, filled with a million pale blind crawling things, stripping forests bare and then burrowing beneath human cities to steal the wood.  Wasp-men with paralytic venom, ovipositors, and a -4 penalty to reaction rolls.  Flea-men leap from ambush to drain your henchmen dry, and take mammals as livestock for blood, not distinguishing between sentient and animal.  The ant-men are more discerning in their slavery, subjugating farmers as they once did aphids, and eating those who fail to produce enough.  The mosquito-man shamans work plague magic.  The bee queens allow passage through their acres of flower fields, but kill any who try to enter their hives.  Beetle-ogres strong enough to lift elephants wander the countryside eating cattle and peasants alike.  Roach-goblins come out of the sewers at night to steal and eat grain, pets, and infants.

Bugs are super cthonic.  They burrow in the earth and live in the darkness and shun the light.  If bugs had gods, what sort of gods would they be?  Deified queens for the communal insects, perhaps.

And then the question of orc babies becomes more like "If you're playing an Alien RPG and you find alien eggs, do you burn them?  If you're fighting the zerg, do you kill the larvae?"  Of course you do.  If they got their mandibles on a daycare, they sure wouldn't hesitate.

Money Up Front: Henchmen

Continuing the theme of turning money-over-time problems into up-front costs [1][2] in support of loose-consistency open-table ACKS games: henchman wages.

What happens if, instead of a monthly wage, we take the monthly wage and multiply it by 30, as an up-front hiring cost?

Level	Up-front Cost (gp)
0	360
1	750
2	1,500
3	3,000
4	6,000
5	12,000
6	24,000
7	48,000
8	90,000
9	217,500
10	360,000
11	1,050,000
12	1,800,000
13	4,350,000
14	10,500,000

Magic items and fiefs can be used to pay this cost, at an appropriate effective gold piece value (and indeed, for high-level henchmen, there may be no other way to hire them).

When a henchman levels and fails a loyalty roll, their hiring player can offer them a raise to the pay grade for their new level for a re-roll.  On success, the player must pay the difference between the cost that was paid at hiring (or previous level-up re-roll) and the new level's up-front cost.  This cannot be used to retry failed loyalty rolls due to calamities.

Eg: Varimir levels from 2nd to 3rd and fails his loyalty roll.  Varimir was hired as a L0 man and previously demanded a raise when he leveled from 1st to 2nd.  Varimir's hirer offers to pay him 1500gp to retain his services (3000gp, the price of a 3rd-level henchmen, minus 1500gp, the wages Varimir demanded on attaining second level).

Nice properties of this proposal: the primary aim is to not have to track campaign time on the game-calendar.  Additionally, paying henchmen up front means that players are more likely to view them as long-term investments to be recouped rather than expendables.  It may also limit henchman-spam somewhat, where some players hire many many henchmen.

Problems with this proposal: 360gp is too expensive for an L1 adventurer to hire a L0 man at the beginning of the first session.  War dogs get even more attractive when henchman expenses are more immediate.  There seems to be a gap between these wages and the cost of henchmen created generation of characters higher than 1st level (who cost 1GP per XP - about 33% more).

There's probably some really interesting math to be done in terms of balancing henchman expenses with mercenary expenses, and it's easier to do when they're both lump sums.  An nth level fighter has x XP and 0.8*x total GP earned, which means we can estimate a PC's budget for henchmen and mercs at a given level.

The reasonable thing is probably to just pay henchmen for sessions played (but then it gets weird with henchmen who sit out - if I show up to a session and don't bring a hench on the adventure, I have to pay them, but if I don't show up to the session, I don't have to pay them).  But if you only pay henchmen for adventures worked, then building big stables of henchmen is encouraged.  Maybe that's fine?  Maybe we need a table for "what sort of trouble did your henchman who didn't go on the adventure get up to while you were away?"

Additional (tangential) proposal: Henchmen receive a quarter share of both treasure and XP.  Why?  Three reasons: this makes the math simpler (1/6th shares are a pain in the butt to do in your head), 1/4 share of XP instead of 1/2 share means that slow-leveling classes with fast-leveling henchmen are less likely to be outleveled (and most of the time henchmen will converge to party level minus 2, which is still useful, and places them appropriately to be lieutenants at any mass battle scale where the PCs are qualified to be commanders), and 1/4 share of GP instead of 1/6th share helps make up for their reduced effective-monthly wages (which may now lag their level).

Domains at War: Beastman Domain Units

This post sat as a draft in my queue for a looong time, so it may be a little outdated, but a discussion in the Discord brought it to mind so I figured I'd press the Publish button.

Previously, I examined tribal goblins, who due to poor organization and a lousy manufacturing base end up relying very heavily on beast cavalry, scavenged weapons, and unconventional strategy.

But goblins, being weak, are natural candidates for domination by orcs and chaotic domains.  Here I consider the sort of units one might see in a semi-industrialized chaotic domain, Mordor-style.  There's a case to be made that Mordor, in Tolkien, represents the forces of modernity in the mid-20th century, with crude artifice, callous science, and forbidden knowledge applied to slaughter and conquest.  I'm not going to go so far as The Last Ringbearer in apologizing for Sauron - I assume the Dark Lord is probably a bad dude, and his servants likewise.  But evil doesn't mean stupid, and if you have the knowledge and power to train and compel beastmen to forge weapons, their products may be without beauty, but quite functional.

I guess my essential contention is that the primary deficiency of beastmen is organizational, rather than intellectual (of low and evil cunning).  So here I'm assuming a tech-base comparable to humans, but army organization still hampered by the natural aggression of beastmen.

Anyway, starting from the bottom of the totem pole:

Goblins

Goblins benefit greatly from being part of a chaotic domain, primarily because their weaknesses in melee are covered by their stronger counterparts.  They remain useful as cavalry and make for adequate archers.

Goblin Arbalestiers: 1/2/3 IF, AC 2, HD 1-1, UHP 6, ML +0, 2 shortsword 10+, 3 arbalest 10+

Crossbows are great for goblins for the same reasons they were great for human peasants historically: compared to longbows, they're easy to learn to use, they hit hard, and they don't rely on upper-body strength.  Any goblin qualified to use a sling or shortbow could use an arbalest to greater effect, and goblin arbalestiers are available as goblin bowmen.  The arbalest's no-move-before-fire and great range are perfect for low-speed goblins, and if you're at range, having lower HP than orcs is fine.  This frees up fast, tough orcs with carrying capacity for armor to get into the melee where they belong.  It's a win-win.  Wages are about 9gp/mo (cheaper than orcish crossbowmen), company TCO is around 1.5kgp/mo, and their BR is around 1.25.  If your setting has guns, Goblin Musketeers are good for the same reasons.

Goblin Grenadiers: 1/2/3 IF, AC 2, HD 1-1, UHP 6, ML -1, 2 torch 10+, 5 thrown military oil 10+

In addition to advanced metallurgy, Mordorian beastmen have discovered the refining of naphtha.  Some poor sods get to be the delivery mechanism for that volatile oil to the enemy, and goblins, being the lowest of the low, are often stuck with this duty.  A unit struck with a thrown oil attack must immediately check shock, as fire bears a visceral terror.  On a roll of a natural 1 with a thrown oil attack, the goblin grenadiers take 1UHP of damage and must check shock, in addition to gaining a depletion marker.  Goblin grenadiers take double damage from fireball, fire breath weapons, and similar effects, as the oil in their packs ignites.

Goblin grenadiers can also be employed against terrain.  If there are no units within their range (2 hexes) and forward firing arc, they can throw fire on the ground instead.  It takes 3 successful military oil attacks against AC0 to ignite a hex properly.  Most terrain becomes rough and obscuring when so ignited - units must move carefully around the fires, and the smoke blocks line of sight.  As the oil floats on top of water, even mud and lake hexes can be affected.  Forest and swamp hexes lit afire become impassable, as burning underbrush and falling limbs become serious hazards.  Ignited hexes burn for a least 10 minutes, which is longer than most battles will last.

Goblin grenadiers' thrown oil attacks also deal 5 SHP of damage per hit to siege towers and wooden structures.  As a result of these abilities, goblin grenadiers are useful in sieges, both defensively (igniting siege towers) and offensively (igniting hexes to block lines of sight and allow other units to advance to the walls).

Goblin grenadier wages are 3gp/mo, and their company TCO is about 1kgp/mo (accounting for the expensive oil that they use).  They require little training, and are available as goblin light infantry.  Their nominal BR is 0.75, but much of their utility is not captured by the BR calculation.

Goblin Spider-Knights: 2/4/6 Irregular Mounted, AC 7, HD 1-1, UHP 6, 2 lance and shield 10+, charge 2 bite 9+ and delayed poison (save at +2) (and bonus lance damage), ML +1

Goblins don't benefit much from the availability of advanced armors, because of their low carrying capacity.  This is less of an issue for cavalry, however, and giant spiders have tremendous carrying capacity, allowing them to carry an armored rider while heavily barded themselves.  This is a unit of goblins in plate with shields and lances mounted on giant crab spiders barded in lamellar.  While not as fast as wolves, they're much better armored, and their poison charge can really hurt high-HD units, and also inflicts shock.  They can climb sheer surfaces like cliff faces and castle walls.

They are, however, hideously expensive, with wages of around 71gp/mo per spider+goblin pair, and a company TCO of 8.25kgp/mo, for a battle rating of only 2.75.  Still, they're a fun idea.  Maybe spider-chariots make more sense - a pair of giant crab spiders (or a single giant black widow) can pull a heavy chariot, which can carry four goblin archers in heavy armor.

Of course, while we're on the subject of spiders as warbeasts, we may as well go all-out...

Elephant Spider

This was my first time using the Lairs and Encounters monster design rules; mostly I wanted to see just how much an elephant-sized spider could carry.

Concept: enormous spider
Type: Vermin
HD: 22
Saves: F11

Hmm for a gigantic (elephant-sized) spider, I need it to weigh at least 8000 lb, so I'm retroactively going to maximize BME to 1.68.  That gives me a mass of 4500lb, still insufficient.  To hit 4 tons, I need 22HD.  So that's what we're doing - 18HD, BME 1.68.  We're also going to maximize CCF, at 0.426 - these spiders are bred primarily to be enormous and to carry heavy things.  Using the cube-square rule, we get a carrying capacity of 1512 stone (by comparison, an elephant's carrying capacity of 180 stone).

AC 4
1 bite, 44 average damage -> 8d10, plus save-or-die poison (save at -2)
XP 5500 (HD 22*)
Treasure P,K
Spiders are pretty smart for vermin, with training mod +2 (but training period 1 year).  Given that this thing is enormous and selectively bred, I think Animal intelligence makes sense.
Natural lifespan of around 45 years.
You know, I don't see anywhere to calculate morale for monsters in this build system.
Trained value per L&E is something on the order of 121kgp, wages on the order of 3680 gp/mo.
BR per DaW is...  really annoying to calculate for individual monsters, actually.  So let's do a behemoth cavalry unit and derive it from there.

Given how much these things cost, it would be dumb to not armor them in plate (7200gp, 60 stone, +5 AC).  A gigantic war howdah costs 240gp and only weighs 18 stone - there's no way we're going to use up 1500st of carrying capacity on this thing.  We can put 12 orc lancers in plate in that howdah if we pack them in; if each orc weighs 20 stone and has 10 stone of equipment, we've used up a total of around 400 stone, well below even half carrying capacity.

So a unit of 5 of these has 60 orcs in plate packed into howdahs (AC 8, THAC0 14+) and five enormous spiders.  Speed is 120', translates to IM 2/4/6 (...  not actually faster than orcs on foot).  AC 8.66 -> 9, UHD 34, UHP 11.  The spiders generate 12.6 attacks, the lancers generate 4.95 attacks, for a total of 17.55 attacks, rounded to 18.  The spiders have THAC0 -4+, while the riders have THAC0 14+; the weighted average by number of attacks is 1+.

Morale is tricky.  Base morale of 0 for the spiders is not unreasonable, but then they're war-trained for +2.  The orcs are beast-riders and have ML +2, so the average ML is +2 regardless of weighting.  They are, however, unpredictable.

So here's how it all rolls out:

War Elephant Spiders: 2/4/6 Irregular Mounted, AC 9, HD 34, UHP 11, 18 lance and poison bite 1+, ML +2 unpredictable

So that's a hell of a unit.  BR is 18.25 before poison, which contributes about 3.5 points of BR, bringing it up to 21.75.  A single enormous spider with 12 orcs has a BR of around 4.25, and should demand a balanced monthly wage of around 3.1kgp, which is a bit under the wage L&E gave us of around 3.7kgp.  Anyway, 4kgp/mo is probably adequate to account for rarity, equipment, and riders.  Add in some specialists, supplies, and slop factor and you're probably looking at around 22kgp/mo TCO for a company of five of these things.  22kgp/mo is about four and a half companies of wolf riders at BR 6.5 each, or three and a half of boar riders at BR 8 each.  So in terms of BR/gp, superspiders aren't great compared to existing beastman cavalry.  They are, however, much more consistent on offense - four and a half companies of wolf riders can generate 29 attacks if they all charge, but on a non-charge turn only generate 9.  Given that they're irregular and can't disengage, charging multiple times is pretty rare.
The spiders get 18 attacks (at better THAC0) every round, forever, and can be expected to consistently kill one human unit per turn, and to shock even heavy infantry phalanxes, beastman heavy infantry, and giants (who are also very vulnerable to their poisonous bite).  On the other hand, four and a half companies of wolf-riders are honestly a lot harder to kill, with a total of 90 HP to the superspiders' 11.  High AC is nice, but if they're plowing through the center of a melee line they're going to start taking attacks from the side and rear, and some of those will hit eventually.  The spiders will also have trouble with cavalry (especially light), and have no answer at all to flying units.  I suppose there's really no reason to not give the orcs bows, besides not wanting to redo the BR math.
Probably plays a lot like an OGRE; you can clean up mainline units or make a run for the commanders, but eventually the enemy's light units will wear you down, so you must hurry.

Since they can climb walls, they're pretty useful offensively during sieges.  You could put catapults on their backs instead of orc lancers, but...  really you want these guys to be up in melee, clearing the tops of the parapets in advance of your ladders.

I guess at this point we've already really moved on to orcs from goblins, though.

Orcs

Orcs benefit substantially from the availability of heavy armor because their speed doesn't degrade until they're carrying 7 stone of gear, per Domains at War Campaigns page 35 (humans start to slow down at 5 stone).  The only reason not to upgrade the stock orc units is cost.  As a forward-thinking Evil Overlord focused on military modernization, up-armoring my orcish legions is a top priority.

Orc Armored Light Infantry: 2/4/6 Irregular Foot, AC 5, HD 1, UHP 8, ML +0, 2 spear and shield 10+ or 2 sword and shield 10+, 2 spear 10+ ranged.  Equipped with chainmail, shield, spear, and scimitar.  Wages 8gp/mo, TCO 1.25kgp/mo, BR 1.75.

Orc Armored Heavy Infantry: 2/4/6 Irregular Foot, AC 5, HD 1, UHP 8, ML +0, 3 polearm 10+.  Equipped with banded mail and a polearm.  Wages 11gp/mo, TCO 1.75 kgp/mo, BR 2.

You call that heavy infantry?  I'll show you heavy infantry.  Honestly the light/heavy distinction for beastman infantry is sort of artificial, since it's all Irregular Foot.

Orc Seriously Heavy Infantry: 2/3/4 Irregular Foot, AC 7, HD 1, UHP 8, ML +0, 2 spear and shield 10+ or 2 axe and shield 10+, 2 spear 10+ ranged.  Equipped with plate, shield, spear, and battle-axe.  Wages 13gp/mo, TCO 2kgp/mo, BR 2.25.

May as well upgrade the archers and crossbowmen too, even.

Orc Armored Bowmen: 2/4/6 Irregular Foot, AC 5, HD 1, UHP 8, ML +0, 2 battle-axe melee 10+, 2 shortbow ranged 10+.  Equipment: banded mail, shortbow, battle-axe.  Wages 9gp/mo, TCO 1.5kgp/mo, BR 2.5.

Orc Armored Crossbowmen: 2/4/6 Irregular Foot, AC 5, HD 1, UHP 8, ML +0, 2 battle-axe melee 10+, 3 arbalest ranged 10+.  Equipment: banded mail, arbalest, battle-axe.  Wages 16gp/mo, TCO 2.25 kgp/mo, BR...  5.5?  Jesus.

Orcish Armored Boar Riders: 2/4/6 Irregular Mounted, AC 7, HD 6, UHP 24, ML +2, 2 spear and shield 10+, 5 bite 6+ on charge.  Equipment: giant boar (30st carrying capacity), orc (15st), spear (1st), shield (1st), plate armor (6st), chain barding (3st).  Wages 51gp/mo, TCO 7kgp/mo, BR 13.

Orcish Incinerators: 2/4/6 Irregular Foot, AC 5, HD 1, UHP 8, ML +0, 2 torch 10+ melee, 5 thrown military oil 10+ ranged.  Equipment: Banded mail, 3 torches, 8 flasks of military oil.  Wages 8gp/mo, TCO 1.5kgp/mo, BR 3.5.  All the special rules that apply to Goblin Grenadiers also apply to Orcish Incinerators.

Once that reform is in plate (so to speak) and my iron-clad grip on the realm has stabilized, I'm going to want to start selectively breeding orcs for martial virtues like discipline (as well as desirable physical characteristics like increased toughness).  The end result of this orcgenics program is basically hobgoblins, but with 120' speed.  They are in no respect inferior to man, and they shall inherit the earth.  Saruman's uruks and Warhammer's black orcs are both in this mold.

Elite Orc Skirmishers: 2/4/6 Loose Foot, AC 5, HD 1+1, UHP 10, ML +0, 2 spear and shield 9+ or 2 swordsword and shield 9+ melee, 2 spear or 2 javelin 9+ ranged.  Equipment: Chainmail, shield, sword, spear, 3 javelins.  Wages 15gp/mo, TCO 2kgp/mo, BR 4.

Elite Orc Pikes: 2/4/6 Formed Foot, AC 5, HD 1+1, UHP 10, ML +0, 3 polearm 9+ melee, 2 javelin 9+ ranged.  Equipment: Banded mail, polearm, 3 javelins.  Wages 18gp/mo, TCO 2.5kgp/mo, BR 5.

Elite Orc Heavy Infantry: 2/3/4 Formed Foot, AC 7, HD 1+1, UHP 10, ML +0, 2 spear and shield 9+ melee or 2 sword and shield 9+ melee, 2 javelin 9+ ranged.  Equipment: Plate, shield, spear, sword, 3 javelins.  Wages 20gp/mo, TCO 2.75 kgp/mo, BR 5.5.

Elite Orc Bows: 2/4/6 Loose Foot, AC 5, HD 1+1, UHP 10, ML +0, 2 sword 9+ melee, 2 composite bow 9+ ranged.  Equipment: banded mail, sword, composite bow.  Wages 27gp/mo, TCO 3.5kgp/mo, BR 6.75.

Cavalry...  hm.  On the one hand, horses do not fit the orc / realm of darkness aesthetic at all.  On the other, they're so much faster than beastman mounts, and that really starts to matter with Loose Cavalry units.  There really aren't that many options for mounts that won't make you Irregular (by dint of being carnivorous).  Giant boars are actually viable for Formed Mounted, but they're so slow.  I dunno, I'll worry about this later.

Ogres are another unit worth up-armoring.  They're slow, but not getting any slower.  I'm not really clear on how to price armor for large humanoids, but I'm not going to lose any sleep over that.

Ogre Armored Infantry: 2/3/4 Irregular Foot, AC 9, HD 4+1, UHP 21, ML +2, 5 polearm 6+.  Equipment: large plate armor, big polearm.  Wages 100gp/mo, TCO 7kgp/mo, BR 14.75.

Ogres also have the carrying capacity to personally carry and use light ballistae (a human has a base carrying capacity of 5st and can wield a 1st arbalest - an ogre has a carrying capacity of 40st, and should be able to wield a 5-7 stone light ballista).  Since ogres count as two men for unit composition purposes and are much stronger, I have little doubt that they can effectively crew such weapons personally.  At 60 ogres per unit, and 10 light ballistae per human ballista battery, a company of ogres each armed with a ballista would have firepower comparable to 6 human ballista units.  One might reasonably argue that they're not trainable as Artillerists and should take a -4 to-hit penalty, which might be fair.

Ogre Ballistiers: 2/3/4 Irregular Foot, AC 9, HD 4+1, UHP 21, ML +2, 4 sword 6+ melee, 12 light repeating ballista 6+ ranged (range 8 hexes, no volley overhead penalty, no move before fire, see DaW:B page 61-2 for more details) and 1 reload token.  Equipment: large plate armor, light repeating ballista, sword.  Wages 130gp/mo, TCO 8.75kgp/mo, BR...  well my spreadsheet is telling me their BR is 59.25.  Use at your own risk, I suppose.  Honestly they might be more useful in smaller units - 12 attacks all on one target is going to be overkill a lot of the time.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) the next ballista up the chain is 80 stone, and not even giants have the carrying capacity to use one as a hand-weapon.

I suppose this would've been a fine place to apply Orc Chieftain Abilities for some chieftains and lieutenants.  Maybe next post.

Simple Domains: XP Up Front

For most of 2019, I was wrestling with squaring the circle of open table vs campaign play.  One of the central issues is "stuff over time" - expenses over time, income over time, etc.  When you don't keep very strong, consistent track of time between adventures, this stuff gets annoying.  I had a partial solution to problems of this form using ACKS' magic time-discounting ratio for mercenaries, turning them from an expense-over-time into a one-time cost.

It hit me a while back that the same could be done for domain income and, perhaps more importantly, domain XP.  Take the monthly net income, multiply it by the time constant of 30, and there's your XP value for conquering this domain, just like a monster entry.  No domain XP threshold, but the exponential XP curve sort of makes it work out - taking a (civilized) barony might give you 60k XP, but if you're high level that's not going to do much for you (might be worth extending the exponential progression up over 8th, instead of switching to linear progression - big domains yield a lot of XP).  And if you lose it, you lose the XP.  Sometimes this big lump of XP will be enough for you to level multiple times.  We already have a mechanism for dealing with big lump sums though - "you can only level once per adventure".  The same would work fine here - you can get better training by ruling a domain, but you need to go out and apply it in order to turn it into levels.  Maybe allow mass combats to also count as adventures.  This makes inheritance by a low-level character work out pretty cleanly; it doesn't take them from 1st to 8th overnight, it's still a gradual process, but a much-accelerated one that should bring them back to parity with the party relatively quickly.  Inherited domains could almost serve as a replacement for reserve XP as a power-floor for replacement characters.

If the party as a whole takes a domain, I see two ways to handle it.  One is to split the rulership XP among them equally, and then as they get more domains and start assigning them to individual characters you stop dividing it.  Another is to make class-specific stores of domain XP.  So maybe your civilized barony has 60k general rulership XP, 15k cleric tithes XP for whoever the spiritual leader is (works out about right, 500 families * 1gp/mo * 30 months), some amount of thief XP based on market class...  and then wizards are hard.  The thing I like about this is that when you move to personal domains, you can fill those slots with henchmen (if your hench repertoire is diverse), and level them up for rulership when you need vassals.  I'm not sure it's worth the complexity.

So then the primary benefits of domain rulership are XP and a captive market, and the focus in the domain game is on taking them from other people.  If you need cash from your domain, you can exploit it, which is sort of like self-pillaging and permanently reduces the XP value of the domain by an amount equal to the gold pieces extracted (and 1 peasant family per 120gp, not that we're modeling that here).  This seems like the right place to plug in a domain morale system that matches my assumptions, that for the most part your average peasant is never going to be terribly fond of his adventurer overlords and is mostly ambivalent until you start squeezing him.  So exploiting your domain (and other catastrophes and exceptional circumstances, like failure to address an invasion or donning a helm of alignment change) triggers a morale roll with immediate consequences like bandits or revolt, and otherwise domain morale is assumed to be apathetic.

I haven't looked at syndicates yet, but I think they'd be amenable to the same treatment, and if I abstract syndicates, then I can enforce the assumption that they're not made up exclusively of 4th-level spies, and then the math will be much saner (and if you use a syndicate to push beyond its normal limits, then you get into exploitation and popular morale).  Cleric domains should be fine.  I suppose I should turn my attention to magic research next, and figuring out how that would work in a system with loose timekeeping.  The other next thing to do would be to redo the Simple Domains entries with lump sums of XP.

Greek Elves

In the same vein as The Elves of Hazzard.

Historical Rome drew a lot of philosophy and culture from Greece.  If you have a human Rome-alike empire in a fantasy setting based on classical antiquity, it makes a lot of sense for there to have also been a Greece-alike that they drew a lot of their philosophy and culture from.  And if you're going to have that, then it makes a lot of sense for that Greece-alike to be elves.

Elves always have that precursor thing going on, and are a natural fit in that regard.  If you look at Greek tragedy, it's often about hubris and unavoidable doom, which are both appropriate for elves - hubris is a natural sin when you're the firstborn, and unavoidable doom links nicely to the fall of the Eldar and (in some systems) their inability to be resurrected.  Nietzsche's argument that Greek civilization was an odd synthesis of Apollonian law and Dionysian chaos also makes sense with the awkward balance elves strike, between golden firstborn and natural sorcerers.  The fractious nature of the Greek city states plays nicely with the chaotic and neutral tendencies of the elves, and helps explain how they were conquered by not-Rome.  Alexander's empire could also be mirrored, and then its disintegration into the warring diadochi on his death also makes sense with that fractious nature and explains how an elven empire could fall apart despite their individual long lifespans.  In an early/republican Rome setup, some of those successor states might remain viable rivals - it would not be hard to imagine Carthage, with its child sacrifice and its Moloch, as a dark elven state rather than Phoenecian in origin, especially if Greek elves picked up Athenian seafaring tendencies.

This setup also has the nice property that the elven homeland is long part of the human empire and relatively integrated, so elven PCs and human PCs probably get along OK.  Where you put dwarves, though, I'm not sure.  I sort of like the idea of Hittite dwarves with the tall hats.

Bonus: no need to construct an elven script, just use greek letters.

Things that don't fit so well: the Greeks were not big on archery, and Keegan argues that they more or less invented heavy infantry.  But this is no problem for the B/X elf or ACKS' spellsword, who both do just fine in heavy armor and don't get any particular bonuses to archery.  The Greeks had big manly beards and elves don't.  The mental image I have of Greece is more dry and rocky than forested, but looking at satellite imagery it seems that there's still quite a bit of forest, and there was probably more where there are now farm fields.  Still, more mountainous than one usually thinks of an elven homeland as.  Who are the Persia-equivalent that the elves held back?