devilghost

PC Infravision in OD&D

Delta asked about infravision, and how OD&D may be an outlier edition that denies infravision for player characters.

The idea that elves, dwarves, and NPC monsters in the party magically lose their infravision is fun. It’s quirky and game-y, and quirkiness is one of the things I like about OD&D. However, I suspect OD&D intended only that any visible light prevents the use of infravision.

From U&WA p.9:

In the underworld some light source or an infravision spell must be used. Torches, lanterns and magic swords will illuminate the way, but they also allow monsters to “see” the users so that monsters will never be surprised unless coming through a door. Also, torches can be blown out by a strong gust of wind. Monsters are assumed to have permanent infravision as long as they are not serving some character.

The key context here is light source or infravsion. Monsters in the service of player characters lose their infravision, but only around PC’s using a visible light source.

I take the statement in the “Characters (Additions and Changes)” section of Supplement I that player character elves and dwarves have infravision as a clarification rather than a change.

Alternative Experience Awards and Advancement

(I started thinking about this as a way to make XP awards in 5e come from all three “Pillars of Adventure” rather than just combat, but the system might work well in old-school games too.)

From a game design perspective, how do I want character advancement to work?

With good play, characters should gain a level every 3–4 sessions — maybe faster at low levels and slower at mid or high levels.
The less bookkeeping the better.
Players should know up front what things earn rewards. Those things should match what the players and referee find fun.
Realism or balance are secondary to fun.
Conform to existing book rules as much as possible, keeping house rules mostly on the referee’s side of the screen.

First, make a list of character actions to reward. Here’s my list:

kill, capture, or route all the monsters in a challenging combat
get a treasure (without killing a monster guarding it)
talk to a monster they haven’t met before without fighting it
exchange important information or aid with an NPC
discover a new dungeon level, wilderness lair, or hidden area
overcome an environmental obstacle (bridge a chasm, disarm a trap, navigate a trick maze)
engage with a new Weird thing (“What’s up with the glowing water in this pool? Let’s drink some!”)

Second, tell the players. Solicit their feedback. Agree on which activities will earn experience. Does the list include at least a few things each player finds fun?

Third, decide how quickly to advance characters. How many instances of the rewarded actions does the party need to rack up before the characters gain a level? My players probably do 6–8 of those things each session, so I’ll set the advancement target at twenty. Most of the characters will gain a level every three-ish sessions (3 × 7 = 21).

Can we do this with minimal bookkeeping and without breaking player-facing by-the-book XP? Yes, with some one-time prep.

After averaging the XP requirements for the core classes from Labyrinth Lord and Swords & Wizardry, I divided those per-level XP requirements by our “twenty things”. The result is the chunk of experience points to award for each desirable thing the characters do. At the end of a session, tally the number of fun things, multiply by the “XP award packet size”, and have each player add that to their character’s XP total. The players continue to use the advancement table from the book for their character class.

Level	Avg. XP	To Next Lvl	Size of XP Awards (20 as divisor)
1	0	1824	91
2	1824	1824	91
3	3648	3649	182
4	7297	7300	365
5	14594	13969	698
6	28563	26062	1303
7	54625	48250	2412
8	102875	87875	4393
9	190750	98000	4900
10	288750	110000	5500
11	398750	111250	5562
12	510000	111250	5562
13	621250	111250	5562
14	732500	111250	5562
15	843750	111250	5562
16	955000	111250	5562
17	1066250	111250	5562
18	1177500	111250	5562
19	1288750	111250	5562
20	1400000	111250	5562

So, for example, if a party of first-level characters wins four combats, finds and unguarded treasure, and negotiates an alliance with bandits, that’s six fun things in the session. 6 × 91 = 546 XP awarded to each character.

To monkey with the speed of advancement, tweak the number-of-things divisor by level to change the size of each XP award chunk. For example, to get quick early advancement, then progressively slower advancement:

Level	To Next Lvl	Divisor	Size of XP Award
1	1824	12	152
2	1824	12	152
3	3649	12	304
4	7300	24	304
5	13969	24	582
6	26062	24	1085
7	48250	24	2010
8	87875	24	3661
9	98000	24	4083
10	110000	24	4583
11+	111250	36	3090

Does this system ignore a few things? Sure. I decided to not care about the number of player characters in the party, for one. Sharing XP with henchmen is another. I give each henchman a half-share of XP in addition to that awarded to the player characters. Charisma already puts a cap on the number of henchmen a PC can attract, and we want to encourage henchmen in our old-school games, right?

Cantrips

I’m ambivalent about cantrips as a concept, but giving low-level magic-users small magic feats beyond their limited spells might be fun.

What about this Unearth Arcana cantrip?

Dampen (Evocation)

Area of Effect: 1 cubic yd.
Casting Time: ½ segment

When a cantrip of this sort is cast, the subject area is permeated by a fog-like dampness which leaves all material within it damp to the touch. It is useful for many sorts of things. It is hard on parchment, and it similarly makes it and like substances hard to set aflame. Those within the area of effect of the dampen cantrip will be enwrapped in a light fog, and objects in this fog, while still visible, will lose their detail. Verbal component is a low hooting or a hummed ditty, somatic is a hand gesture upwards with writhing fingers.

The only fun in that is imagining your player hooting and writhing their fingers.

5e includes cantrips that can be cast repeatedly without preparation. I like at-will cantrips, but the particular ones in 5e a too powerful for an old-school game.

How should cantrips work?

A magic-user knows three cantrips.
The caster need not prepare/memorize a cantrip.
Magic-users don’t forget cantrips, and can cast them over and over.
Casting a cantrip takes a full action — as much time as a first-level spell.
Unless otherwise noted, cantrips require no somatic, material, or verbal components.

What makes a good cantrip? A good cantrip should have little or no mechanical game impact, and not duplicate something easily done without magic. Ideally, the cantrip also wouldn’t be just a watered-down version of a higher-level spell.

Brand: The caster magically inscribes their personal sigil on an object. Only the caster can see it. They may erase the sigil with a touch.
Glow: Summon a light within 60′ of the caster with the size and brightness of a candle. It gives off no heat, but shines a few seconds with the caster’s signature color.
Jot: The caster magically scribes a brief note (a half dozen words) on any surface (parchment, wall, etc.). The writing vanishes as soon as anyone besides the caster reads it. In an alternate form of the spell, the caster whispers into a shell or empty bottle, and the next person who hold it to their ear hears the caster’s words.
Murmur: Causes one subject within 60′ of the caster to hear a brief, faint sound — a quiet tap-tap-tap, an distant murmur of voices, a soft shuffling of feet or feathers — seeming to originate from a direction of the caster’s choosing. The effect goes unnoticed in noisy environments.
Pet: A small animal appears. It obeys simple instructions from the caster, like “Run to Gary!”. The animal can carry weight up to the caster’s level in coins. If the pet takes damage, it vanishes in puff of smoke, though it may be summoned again — unharmed — on a subsequent turn.
Zap: Inflict 1d4 damage of the caster’s signature type (cold, fire, lightning) to a target withing 60′. The target gets a saving throw.

Delta’s survey of cantrips from various editions is worth reading. I sort of like second edition’s general Cantrip spell (and Proteciton From Cantrips).

Zak

The Mandy and Zak situation sucks.

I have occasionally defended Zak by pointing out that an abrasive demeanor doesn’t necessarily make someone a bad person or mean they’re arguing in bad faith. But being smart and creative doesn’t preclude someone from being cruel and dishonest, or even abusive, and a growing number of people who know Zak better than I do — people who have worked with him or known him offline — now disavow him.

So, while I don’t know first-hand what went down between Mandy and Zak, I know that people like Evlyn left the community because of Zak. That’s clearly bad. I should have paid more heed to warnings like Patrick’s. I believe Mandy.

Please treat each other with kindness. Make this an inclusive and welcoming hobby.

Welcoming intolerance is NOT just scene drama

James Raggi posted an endorsement from fascist icon Jordan Peterson, causing Kiel Chenier to quit.

Why do I care?

Raggi has produced excellent gaming products, and I want him to produce more. Furthermore, Raggi has chosen to work with a diverse group of creators, which helps grow a healthy gaming community by sending a welcoming message.
Raggi’s Peterson endorsement sends the opposite message — that the gaming community does not tolerate diversity. Whether what Peterson personally says and believes is good or bad (I’m not thrilled about governments compelling speech) what Peterson means to many people is clear: fascists are welcome and non-fascists are not welcome. Framing this as a free speech issue slams hard into the paradox of tolerance.

To dismiss this incident as scene drama ignores the tangible harm Raggi’s speech inflicts on our community by pushing away people like Evlyn Moreau.

Do we boycott Lamentations of the Flame Princess? Do we stop using the “OSR” label? Do we splinter into politically segregated subgroups? I don’t know. I love so much about our community that I hope better solutions emerge. I’d welcome a loud, explicit disavowal of intolerance from James Raggi.

Regardless of what happens with the OSR, I’ll continue to welcome any type of person at my game table — regardless of gender, age, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, or politics — except that intolerant fascists who disrespect other players can fuck off.

UPDATE

Raggi has made a couple of relevant statements on Facebook, which I had not seen.

From a few days ago:

[…]

So when I run into this guy [Peterson] and take the same funny picture I’d already taken with a band and would have taken with other celebrities had I remembered to bring the damn book with me when meeting them, I didn’t see it as any different. “Went to a show and got a pic with the person I went to see.” Same as I would have with Jimmy Carr last night had he been available to the crowd after his show. Same as if I randomly ran into OJ Simpson on the street if I had a book on me. The point was “famous person.”

But the thing is, LotFP isn’t actually just me. It actually is all these other people that work under its banner. Because their work is often as personal to them as mine is to me.

And Peterson represents to many of them something far different than he means to me.

And it is for their sake that I have deleted the post. It’s always going to be difficult for me not treating LotFP as a personal thing. That’s served me well, in many cases. But in this case, something personal to me turned out to represent my fellow creators in a way they did not want to be represented. And I apologize to them for that.

And this from a couple hours ago:

[…]

This isn’t the place to hash out opinion on transgender people’s identities, and we will remove people who insist that it is. If you are uncomfortable with using someone’s desired pronouns, use their name. The name they currently use. If even that’s too much for you, this isn’t the place for you.

Everyone is entitled at the very least to courtesy and basic respect in public. Even if you don’t believe someone is who they say they are, it doesn’t hurt you any to just go along with it, and it just might be incredibly harmful to them if you’re wrong. And how the fuck do you know the difference?

[…]

That goes for race, nationality, religion, etc. as well. Anyone that wants to be involved is allowed to be involved here without harassment or interrogation of their beliefs or identity.

So, that’s something, though more equivocal than I’d prefer.

The Return of Huge Ruined Scott

Scott of Huge Ruined Pile fame has shown his head at Cyclopeana after a long hiatus. He’s one of my favorite bloggers, so check out his stuff. Hopefully, he’ll stick around long enough this time to crank out some content (or maybe even play!).

U-Con 2018

I’m home from U-Con.

Years ago (when I last attended this convention) U of M hosted it in their student union, but it’s at the Ypsilanti Marriott now — a golf resort. Parking’s easier, though I enjoy walking around Ann Arbor more than the golf course.

A small vendor room sold dice, board games, and crafty stuff like embroidered dice bags, 3D-printed dice towers, and d20 pillows. One vendor carried a bunch of OSR stuff, like Labyrinth Lord and WhiteBox rule books, and several zines like Vacant Ritual Assembly and The Manor. I picked up a set of Gamescience dice.

Board games are popular at U-Con, maybe more so than RPG’s, and occupy a large ballroom. A number of non-board wargames were waged here too, including Battletech and the WWII game Bolt Action. The con lends a diverse library of board games for anyone who wants to borrow one. I’m curios about Root and Vast, though I didn’t get an opportunity to play them. The tables were packed all weekend.

I was pleased to see ConTessa prominently represented at U-Con, and I made sure to thank Stacy for their tireless work.

Thanks to all the friendly people who played and ran games at U-Con!

These sessions stand out in my memory:

Dungeon Crawl Classics, Sanctum of the Snail. This was my first time actually playing DCC, rather than just browsing the rulebook. The funnel concept works well as a didactic tool, and encourages a liberating amount of risk taking. The gonzo swords & sorcery flavor of the magic items and monsters hit my sweet spot. My one complaint is the preponderance of “roll against a number on your character sheet” skill checks, rather than relying on player skill. Like, if this was a non-convention, non-funnel game, I’d be annoyed with agility-check-or-die platforming challenge. Maybe I’m being unfair to call out the jumping challenge, since an alternate route also leads to that area. In fact, it’s one of the few loops in an otherwise mostly linear map. Still, I had fun; the flavor of the content carried the day, despite my design niggles.
Cats of Catthulhu, The White Stag. This filled a canceled session for me, and I didn’t know what to expect. Can mostly-mundane cats work as player characters? Yes. Can such a scenario end in any but a Cats of Ulthar way? Yes, more or less. The scenario is good, and the Catthulhu rules provide simple and effective mechanics. This was more story-gamey than my usual fare, but if your players are game to run with the concept, Catthulhu works surprisingly well as a fun one-off session. Cat puns encouraged!
Lamentations of the Flame Princess, The Incompetent Watchmaker. This session playtested Stacy Dellorfano’s forthcoming book from James Raggi’s imprint. Watchmaker invites adventurers into a plague-ridden canton of seventeenth-century Bern, where something unnatural lurks. The session offered gross, horrific, harrowing, demonic fun, and I suspect the setting will work even better over a multi-session campaign. We were apparently the first group to survive Watchmaker.
Neoclassical Geek Revival, The Gnomes of Levnec. This very solid adventure does the trick I most like by deciding on a simple but novel fantasy concept, working out the practical implications of that concept on a locale, then dropping the player characters into the middle without a expectation of what they should or shouldn’t do. I had enough fun in this session that — even knowing “the secret” — I’d like to play the scenario again.

Blogging again, now at devilghost.com

For months, I’ve been slowly moving entries from my old blog to my new blog. I want to escape Blogger both because of technology preferences (I like the idea of static site generators, like Hugo and Jekyll) and because I want the security of hosting my own content, safe from the whims of Google.

The imminent demise of G+ accelerated my plans. Where will the G+ OSR/DIY D&D community wash ashore — MeWe or Diaspora or somewhere else? The uncertainty is a good excuse to start blogging again.

Please update your bookmarks to https://devilghost.com/blog/.

Thanks, Evlyn Moreau

UPDATE: Evlyn is back! Cool. ~~I hear Evlyn Moreau is taking a break. That’s OK; I hope she feels better soon.~~

But I’ve really enjoyed her work, and I feel bad for not taking the opportunity to say so sooner and more loudly.

Check out her blog, Le Chaudron Chromatique!

Her stuff is really fun — full of ideas and energy.

1 comment:

Lum, July 28, 2016 at 3:58 AM

Cedric’s stuff is great. Gormand’s Larder was a blast to run-of course the art is good and the design/presentation is innovative. It looks like he’s working on similar stuff on his Patreon. I wish him luck!

D&D official PDF's available!!!

D&D official PDF’s available!!!

Wizards has made the OD&D booklets available as PDF’s. Buy yours now!

Why do magic-users create so many magic swords?

One of the questioned that troubled me in my youth: if only magic-users can create magic swords, and the creation of magic items is vastly expensive in terms of time and coin, why would there be so many magic swords?

Reflecting on this as an adult, the answer seems obvious. It’s the answer to so many questions in D&D: wizards are dicks. They’re a cantankerous and vengeful lot, who go to extraordinary lengths in pursuit of petty vendettas.

If I had spent more of my youth reading Vance than Hickman and Weis, this would have been obvious to me.

This also explains why intelligent magic swords are dicks, more interested in their own (i.e. their creator’s) agenda than the life of their wielder.

That magic-sword +1, +2 vs lycanthropes, with an 8 ego? Some magic-user was sick of his potion garden getting torn up by werehares, and wanted a local lughead to take care of the problem for him.

3 Comments

JDJarvis, December 13, 2015 at 12:22 PM

Oooh a +2/+5 vs dragons sword just laying here in a pile of treasure guarded by 6 hobgoblins, seems legit…

Scott Anderson, December 30, 2015 at 8:26 PM

Fighting Men who have achieved Name level may manufacture magic arms and armor (only) in their castles, as Wizards may manufacture magic items in their Towers, and by the same game rules.

Lloyd Rasmussen, January 16, 2016 at 9:51 PM

Also, cash money. Them fighter types rob everyone and has the cash to pay fer them orc-stickers.

Stonehell book 2 on sale now!

The long-awaited second volume of Stonehell dungeon is on sale now.

I’ve played Stonehell and run it. It’s a good time. It was also the first megadungeon to adapt the one page dungeon format.

Hidden Treasure of Lost Ahklop session recap

This is just a quick session recap, notable because we started a new campaign, playing fifth edition for the first time.

Beth was supposed to join us, but had to cancel for baby-related reasons. Ed played a human fighter and a human cleric. Karina played a hobbit rogue. Eric played a gnome wizard.

After finding a treasure map to allegedly un-looted ruins near the southern city of Ahklop, the party took a raft down the River Groob. Despite their curiosity about Ahklop’s giant lizard market and trade in psycho-active garum, they set out into the forest without delay.

Following a brief stop to test the waters of a purple-glowing spring that left the gnome wizard invisible and the fighter with an enduring longing for an alien dream-city, they found the ruins of a step pyramid.

The pyramid, unfortunately, was not quite as lost as our treasure hunters hoped. In fact, it was thoroughly infested by electric space snakes and their mind-controlled zomboids (once indigenous tribes-people).

Following cautious scouting by the invisible gnome wizard, the party decided that a frontal assault was the best course of action (??). They charged the big mama space snake, which was defended by electrified rolling golden orbs. The hobbit rogue put her acrobatics skills to good use, firing arrows at the orbs mid-backflip, while the fighter and cleric engaged the giant snake. The space snake used her electrified Jacob’s-ladder-like tail to taze the fighter unconscious and bit the rogue out of mid-air. Both would have died if not for the timely intervention of the cleric, but by that point the space snake had been hurt enough that it attempted to withdraw.

The snake would have gotten away, but as it slipped down a narrow staircase, the recently revived fighter shoved his halberd in its gut. It disemboweled itself, plugging the staircase with giant snake meat.

They mopped up the rest of the dungeon, and made off with a few hundred gold pieces, a golden mask with gem eyes, a vial with glowing green fluid, a small crucible filled with semi-solidified gold, a Remove Curse scroll, and a letter that seems to implicate the Grand High Potentate of Ahklop in a nefarious back-room deal to sell her own people out to the space snakes.

Impressions of 5e after this first session:

5e runs more simply than an initial reading lead me to fear.
It’s easy for characters to almost die. Intelligent monsters might target clerics?
We didn’t remember to use advantage/disadvantage as often as we could have. I’ll have to work on that, since it’s my favorite 5e mechanic.
The skills got used quite a bit. I’m not sure they enhanced play much beyond what we’d get with simple ability checks.
Players found creative uses for the liberal allowance of cantrips. We saw more clever Mage Hand stuff than repetitive zap-zap.
I still prefer OD&D or Basic, but I have no problem playing or running this. Fifth is a solid D&D.

1 comment:

Jay Murphy, September 17, 2015 at 7:47 PM

Seriously, you have the best avatar ever.

Sketch of goat-ish thing

A quick lunch hour doodle. I’m trying to spend more time drawing.

R.I.P. Christopher Lee

Welcome back, Huge Ruined Scott

In case any of you missed it, Scott, formerly of Huge Ruined Pile, has again take up blogging again.

2 comments:

Scott Driver, June 5, 2015 at 12:09 PM

Thank you for mentioning this. I’m pretty out of the loop and don’t have contact information for most people.

Paul Gorman, June 5, 2015 at 12:41 PM

Zak S. mentioned it on G+, so you should see some traffic.

Simplified encumbrance, movement, and wandering monster checks

One appeal for me of old-school D&D is that the rules are loosely coupled. This is less true of encumbrance, movement, and wandering monster checks. The relatively tight coupling of these systems makes them more fiddly to run, less amenable to house-ruling, and often ignored at the table.

Wandering monster checks are made every turn (or every N turns). Turns, like in chess, are a matter of tempo — the productivity of a turn of movement is determined by encumbrance. Moving more slowly per turn results in more monster checks while exploring a given area.

Do you count the number of squares over which the characters move to determine when a turn ticks over? Do you make wandering monster checks based on that? Or are the rules fiddly enough that you eyeball it? I admit that I often feel my way through these things, rather than keeping a careful account.

How do we simplify this at the table, while keeping the relationship between encumbrance, movement, and wandering monster checks?

First, encumbrance. We simplify it by eliminating gear counting. Armor is the single heaviest bit of standard kit, and it also has the greatest mechanical importance of any piece of gear. So, we simplify encumbrance by making armor the only piece of gear considered.

Very simple encumbrance:

Armor Worn	Base Movement
None/Shield	18″
Leather	12″
Chain	9″
Plate	6″

Shields don’t affect encumbrance.

Use common sense. If the characters haul something very bulky or heavy, movement drops to the next lower movement tier. A fighting-man in plate dragging a statue, for example, falls to 3″.

We have one further consideration. The Original edition measures all equipment weight in terms of coins. This may seem odd and fiddly, but it nicely encapsulates the idea that every ounce of rope, spikes, or candles a character carries comes at the cost of one gold piece they don’t have strength enough to remove from the dungeon. To preserve that idea, we add one wrinkle to our very simple encumbrance system:

Every 250 coins of found treasure carried drops the character’s movement by one tier.

What about wandering monster checks? Even with our simplified encumbrance, we don’t want to be counting squares on the map. Instead, make one wandering monster check per real hour of play time.

Armor Worn	Base Movement	Odds of A Wandering Monster per Real Hour
None/Shield	18″	1 in 6
Leather	12″	2 in 6
Chain	9″	3 in 6
Plate	6″	4 in 6
+Encumbered	3″	5 in 6

Add an additional check at 1 or 2 in 6 when the characters do something that might attract monsters, like noisily bash down a door or roast a kobold.

2 comments:

Nick P. Cooper, August 31, 2015 at 11:41 AM

Thank you, Paul. This is the simplest but most efficient means of tracking movement, encumbrance, and random monsters. Thank you. I will integrate this into my games with ease. I appreciate your hard work on behalf of OD&D. I will copy and print out the Players Reference documents and I’m using your house rules/Bill Webb’s rules in my own DMing. Nice work, Paul

Skj, August 31, 2015 at 7:56 PM

I echo the sentiment: thanks for the great ideas.

The Road Not Taken in D&D Art

It’s not far fetched to imagine D&D might have started with a different artistic direction when we look at book covers of the period, including those from the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, Penguin Science Fiction, or Arkham House.

Wargames of the era offer similar examples, including one from Gygax.

While thinking about this, I wrote:

Game art is largely illustrative in function. The text describes an idea, the art shows it. Realism as a technique is more accessible and less open to interpretation than abstraction. For game rules (but perhaps not other game products?), accessibility and specificity are generally more desired than difficulty and ambiguity.

That’s obvious and not absolutely true, but it gave me two further thoughts.

First, abstraction is used extensively in wargame design for the sake of clarity. Tokens evidence this especially, probably necessitated by their small scale; abstraction in this case is taking away inessential elements, like Picasso’s bull.

Second, the little brown books of OD&D are often described as difficult and ambiguous. What if the game was graphically as abstract?

10 comments:

Doug Anderson, February 9, 2015 at 9:08 AM

We could posit an alternate history where Avalon Hill buys out TSR in 1975, gaining their library of game titles including Cavaliers & Roundheads and a weird little game with no board and no counters called Dungeons & Dragons. D&D gets reissued as an Avalon Hill game, with punch-out counters and AH’s sleek, stark aesthetics.

Or you could just pretend that D&D was published in 1930: http://blueboxerrebellion.blogspot.com/2013/06/artifact-dnd-boxed-set-from-1930.html

Zenopus Archives, February 9, 2015 at 10:18 AM

Great post & selection of covers. I prefer paperbacks from the 60s-70s because of this style of art. Children’s books from this period had a similar style of cover art.

Timothy Brannan, February 9, 2015 at 10:43 AM

I love this time period of book covers.

Paul Gorman, February 9, 2015 at 11:13 AM

Good observation about children’s books, Zenopus. I think there’s something there about pop culture and high art and aspirations, but I haven’t worked it all out yet.

Stefan Poag, February 9, 2015 at 12:00 PM

This is a topic of interest to me; I was dissapointed to learn from Gary Gygax that he didn’t hire artists like Otus and Trampier because of their aesthetic; he hired them because they were willing to work for less. I think that much of the early TSR illustration has a vitality and style lacking in the later more photo-realistic work. I think some people want the illustrations to serve as documents that show the precisely correct numbers of fingers and toes on the goblins or the correct eye color on the earth elemental, etc., so any sort of license is frowned upon. I really enjoy when players draw their own characters on the character sheet… even if the player doesn’t really consider themselves an artist. The results are often surprising and full of character. As fra as those symbols on the AH game counters go, I assumed they came from military use since they usually represent units of infantry, cavalry, artillery, etc. Perhaps they came from Kriegspiel. Jon Peterson (Playing at the World) probably knows.

Stefan Poag, February 9, 2015 at 12:10 PM

Oh, and many of those book covers are fantastic. I particularly like the Quartermass cover, the Worm Orbouros and the Clark Ashton Smith covers.

charles mark ferguson, February 9, 2015 at 6:32 PM

Thankyou Paul. Interesting idea, especially (for me) the thoughts around function of art inside rpg products (Strange Stars has got me thinking about this too).

On a tangent: when I read “D&D might have started with a different artistic direction” my strong and immediate reaction was “Impossible!” My brain literally recoiled against the idea that seminal D&D could be truly represented with art so different from what it ended up with. My second thought was of course “Well, why not.” But the first reaction shows how powerfully a product can be linked with the way it’s represented (assuming I’m not a total outlier here). I think this also ties into the whole “D&D is now a genre” thing which I also find intriguing.

Bobjester, February 11, 2015 at 2:55 PM

I recall the not-so-recent outrages among some D&D players modern and old school that Greg Bell’s 0e art offerings were s***, but, I never held to that particular ideology, because as a fledgling artist in the 70’s & 80’s, I could not have done much better, and I’ve always tried to maintain that “if you could’ve done better by TSR in 1974” I’d accept your critique of Bell’s art as legitimate, if not functional.

Of course, when measured against today’s fantasy aesthetics, Bell’s critics have a lot more leverage, but I guess that depends on which set of lenses you’re wearing when looking at D&D as a pastime. I still look at it through 70’s tinted lenses, not because I’m nostalgic about the game, its that this version still evokes the same spark of creativity in me from my favorite period in fantasy & science fiction, a trend that still continues to influence me.

I never thought to compare Bell’s (or the other 0e artists’) 0e art with his novel cover artist contemporaries. I’d say that D&D in 1974 not only brought out a new style of gaming, but they were also on the cutting edge of packaging their product through the artistic visions of Greg Bell & company! In fact, I think that some D&D products could have been presented with art more abstract, but I think that D&D without DIS & DAT, Otus, Dee, Bell et al, would have been a mistake. Even some of Otus’ wilder pieces weren’t used in D&D (to my knowledge), that I particularly like and would love to use as illustrations in my games.

Charles Akins, March 3, 2015 at 6:50 AM

This post is really good! I added a link to it in my Best Reads of the Week Series for February 8-14, 2015.

http://dyverscampaign.blogspot.com/2015/03/best-reads-of-week-febraury-8-14-2015.html

TheShadowKnows, April 13, 2015 at 12:55 PM

I do feel some of the work by Otus is vaguely reminiscent of those paperback covers, but the overall aesthetic of early D&D is certainly not.

Stonehell Risen!

It’s been a long time since I last ran Stonehell, but on December 21st the party finally returned to those night-haunted halls. Back in 2012, I was a bit lackadaisical about campaign reports, so I might have missed a couple at the end. The following, played more than two years(!) after the last report, is probably session eleven or twelve of the campaign.

Our dramatis personae include party leader Slim Charles, the Conjurer; Pope Leo, the Village Priest; and Balian, the Swordsman. Joining them are henchmen Derric, Gilgrim, Nartan, and Colwin.

The party searched several stone-doored crypts on the first level of Stonehell. Pope Leo succeeded in turning a ghoul, and found a concealed coffer containing a large amount of silver, some jewelry, and a couple of blueberry-colored potions of salty taste.

The party descended to the second level of Stonehell. They delivered there in tribute the erotic tapestry promised to the intelligent apes as tribute. In thanks, the apes warned them (Slim Charles speaks Ape) that the faerie ring in the theater to the southeast leads to a strange area with great risk and great reward, and that the duplicitous faeries had already charmed a member of their party.

To the south, the party found a large room with several collapsed columns. After defeating the giant spiders lurking in the darkness of the high vaulted ceiling, the party discovered its first major magic item: boots of levitation.

This was a short session, but a good start to our new, resurrected Stonehell campaign.

Robot Lovecraft writes technical documentation

Somebody fed Puppet documentation and H.P. Lovecraft stories into a Markov chain generator to produce The Doom that Came to Puppet. This particular type of nonsense really tickles my fancy.

“Parameters are defined essentially exactly the same way since a surprisingly early time in earth’s history—perhaps over fifty million years.”

“Additionally, the machine(s) acting as reverse proxy (usually 127.0.0.0/8) will need to be able to reach the basement out of which the abyssward aperture opened.”

“During the Jurassic Age the Old Ones had perhaps become satisfied with their decadent art—or had ceased to recognize the superior merit of the older (activerecord) backends in a multi-master environment.”

“Puppet can also be used to demonstrate things here, but it is not wholesome to watch monstrous objects doing what one had known only human beings to do”

New LotFP releases, including Zak's Red & Pleasant Land

New LotFP releases, including Zak’s Red & Pleasant Land

The Lamentations of the Flame Princess store has new books available, including Zak S.’s Red & Pleasant Land. I hear it’s selling quickly, so you should order soon if want one. I found that the now-diffucult-to-find Vornheim was much better in hard copy than PDF (and I like PDF’s), and R&PL looks super-deluxe.

Bells

From the excellent Cabinet Magazine:

Until the middle of the sixteenth century, English church bells, like other European bells, had a variety of uses: some sacred, some secular, and many that were both. Bells called congregations to church, and told them to flee if there was a fire; they rang to signal a death in the parish, and they rang to help the passage of the souls of the dead through purgatory. Other bells, or other ways of ringing the same bells, commanded people to say a particular prayer. Bells were incredibly well-loved by their parishes and were often baptized and given godparents; their individual tones were voices that spoke to the communities over which they rang. They were among the loudest sounds in the soundscape, making up a language that its parishioners could understand.

In the Injunctions issued by the ten-year-old king Edward VI in 1547, these many and varied uses for bells were drastically reduced. Only one bell was now allowed “in convenient time to be rung or knelled before the sermon.”2 Bells were so useful that a single one was still to be used to call the godly to church, but in this new post-Reformation England, their other uses were no longer officially approved. The dead didn’t need help through purgatory, because it no longer existed; there was no need to command anyone to say popish prayers such as the Ave Maria by ringing the Angelus bell, because these prayers were now deemed useless. But parishioners had such affection for church bells that this particular injunction was never seriously enforced. They went to great lengths to keep their bells, sometimes by burying them until the zealous storm had passed.

1 comment:

Adam Cirone, September 11, 2014 at 4:58 PM

Some of the uses of bells reminds me of Poe’s poem “The Bells.”

Blobogix

Only a couple of players showed up for this Sunday’s game, so we tried an idea I’ve been considering for a while. Each of us took a half hour to write an adventure with d6 rooms, then we ran each adventure.

In the adventure I wrote, an invasive alien displaced a local god and enslaved the priests at the shrine. This is a common problem on planet Zerapis. The players managed to free most of the priests from Blobogix’s mind control (minus one or two they shot full of arrows), saved several villagers scheduled for human sacrifice, and acquired a powerful but unwieldy ray gun that freezes people by sending their minds to a barren alien world. Unfortunately, they made a dangerous enemy by letting Blobogix escape with his enormous pulsating egg.

As a player, I found that I’ve become more conservative and risk averse; I’ll take a modest treasure and leave the dungeon without pulling the tantalizing but obviously dangerous shiny lever. Especially when the adventures are so small, I feel bad about it — like I should play with all the things.

Maybe I just need some fresh blood in my face-to-face group. It’s hard to get a small set of busy adults in the same room on a regular basis.

2 comments:

Adam Cirone, August 25, 2014 at 5:14 PM

That’s a neat idea for doing some quick one-shot adventures. Did you each play the same characters for each adventure?

Paul Gorman, August 25, 2014 at 6:08 PM

Yes, we played the same characters. We also agreed that treasure, experience, and deaths wouldn’t be finalized until the end of the session, after we had played all the adventures. So, the chronology was slightly uncertain, like a selection of Conan short stories. It was pretty entertaining.

Gruesome Chops for OD&D Fighting-Men

I haven’t had a regular game in a few months, but that hasn’t stopped me from tinkering with my house rules. This is an attempt to give 0e fighting-men a bit more oomph. What do you think?

Gruesome Chops

A roll of 20 to hit or a roll of maximum damage gives the Fighting-Man the opportunity to make a Gruesome Chop. The player chooses the hit location; here are some examples:

Eyeball run through. Monsters with hit dice fewer than or equal to the fighting-man must Save or be kebab’d. Monsters with more hit dice lose an eye* (-2 to hit, cyclops -4).
Neck slit. Monsters with hit dice fewer than or equal to the fighting-man must Save or suffer beheading. Monsters with more hit dice loose their voices, and must Save when using a breath weapon.
Limb chop. Monsters with hit dice fewer than or equal to the fighting-man must Save or be dismembered and bleed out. Monsters with more hit dice (and four or fewer legs) are reduced to zero movement.
Bifurcation (horizontal or vertical). Monsters with hit dice fewer than or equal to the fighting-man must Save or be bisected.
Evisceration. Monsters with hit dice fewer than or equal to the fighting-man must Save or spill their guts.
Ribcage crush. Monsters with hit dice fewer than or equal to the fighting-man must Save or suffocate.
Sever artery. Monsters with hit dice fewer than or equal to the fighting-man must Save or BLOOD SPRINKLER!
Break the monster’s sword, splinter its shield, sunder its sandals, etc.
Force the monster to fall back ten or twenty feet to the spot you want them (over pit trap, under portcullis, etc.).
Impale. Monsters with hit dice fewer than or equal to the fighting-man must Save or wriggle in grotesque death throes. Monsters with more hit dice are pinned (movement zero).

Any monster that survives a Gruesome Chop immediately checks morale.

N.B. — Most monsters do not make Gruesome Chops, but enemy Fighting-Men do.

4 comments:

Scott Anderson, August 9, 2014 at 11:11 PM

Thisfeels like something that should be a Referee’s narrative call. A 20 or max damage ought to result in something gruesome.

Paul Gorman, August 9, 2014 at 11:14 PM

Yeah, I can see that, but I’m a lazy DM; I’m happy to delegate narrative authority at the level of granularity of the result of a single hit.

Lum, August 10, 2014 at 2:31 PM

Nice. Comparing Fighter level to monster HD the way you are is cool, and super easy to remember.

Jayson, August 12, 2014 at 7:19 AM

I like it.

Death in the Iliad

Check out this excellent group of infographics on death in the Iliad. I’ve long maintained that spears need a more prominent place in D&D.