The Tragedy of The Drunken Troll

 Alright, game 2 of the new Roll20 campaign "Trade and Turpitude," taking place in the last caravan season of the year in the Southern Shires of the kingdom. 

Everybody showed up. Good sign. Though I won't usually consider it a campaign until after game three. Law of averages dictate somebody will drop out by then, but everybody seems to be having a good time and are interacting with the material in the ways I like them too. I think I come up with some interesting ideas here and there, along with lots of trope stuff. Something like 40 years of GMing will give you that. And my old experiences with "out in the weeds" stuff in the deep past; Arduin and Judges Guild and such, lets me interject some more wacky elements, but mostly keeping it D&D. I look to more modern sources for ideas, random tables and such, but usually if I think the hell out of something various angles and hooks emerge that I think will be interesting to an encounter. Hey, there is plenty to brag about when you pluck most of the ideas you integrate into play out of your own head. 

Haha, really, a DM's ideas should come from all over the place. Anyway, I was sort of having trouble coming up with some things. The first few games of this campaign will be travelling around with a small caravan of high-end merchants from the big city up north. Besides some village and town encounters already in my head, I need to come up with some incidental encounters that can occur along the way. Things to fit in here and there along the way when I need some filler. 

I look at various random tables online, road and country encounters. Most of them aren't very filling. Things like "you meet an old man who is not what he seems," or "You see a coffin up against a tree with the lid closed. Do you investigate?" OK, these are meant to be filled in, but are hardly things you can't think up with nice creamy filling on your own. I wish these examples were a little deeper. 

But if I mull on it a bit (couple refreshing adult beverages never hurt) I usually hit on something. For this game it was "..hmmm, what if the caravan comes across a troll laying across the road, passed out from drinking barrels of powerful whiskey." 

We were still in the tavern with the party meeting the caravan master, having finished the previous games encounters there. But off to the caravan grounds to meet the merchants. 

A wine merchant, a weapon seller/trainer, a music teacher and instrument seller, a bookseller, and a clothier. It was night, but the wineseller still had a few local lords tasting some wine. The party immediately noticed a heavy set, traveler shoplifting a couple bottles of expensive cabernet. "Fat Mike the Traveler," a professional thief and con man. 

Size increased to show texture.

It was an amusing little encounter, and the long and short of it was the PC's got a few gold richer by getting the wine back and extorting Fat Mike for some coin. A typical "give you my wallet? No, give me YOUR wallet" situation. 

Next day when the caravan got on the road for a couple hours, it was second encounter time. This time it was the caravan coming around the corner on a country road and almost running into a bit old troll passed out drunk and blocking the way. 

Size NOT increased to show texture. Nobody
wants to get too close a look at this. 

Clearly it as a troll who stole a cart of big whiskey barrels and he was passed out snoring in the road. Even had a nice big puddle of whiskey puke next to him. Ew. 

Turning the caravan around in the smallish area to do it would have been time consuming and noisy. Plus at least one character didn't want it on his conscious to have a hungover troll around for others to bump into. But what to do? 

Slit his throat and roll him out of the way? No way, man. He's a troll. You can cut a trolls head off and it will still be active, the head still alive and controlling the body. Trolls are very coup de gras resistant. Get some fires going? Well, everything was wet from light rain. 

Everybody, character and players, knew that they were no match for the thing if it got up and started laying into them. As they moved around trying to figure it all out, the troll seemed to almost wake up a time or two. The shadow elf ranger was a monster hunter, and he just wanted to start chopping into it. But the cooler heads gathered, torches and lanterns fetched from the wagons, and lantern oil was spread over the blacked out beast.  

With the wetness, and me not going old school napalm with the oil (I have always said; oil is for keeping lanterns lit, not for going all Apocalypse Now like so many neckbeards from times bygone like it too). But with the troll waking up, they had to go on the attack with what they had. 

In 5th edition any fire damage will keep the regeneration from working for that round. That combined with the characters getting some licks in before it could even stand up (with some advantage) helped. I mean, they were scared. My number one new player "M" sounded a little annoyed that I was hitting them with such a strong creature. But I certainly gave it disadvantage that first round. It all helps out. Because one solid blow could kill a 1st level PC. I did explain that I am old school and that characters need to be over their head now and again. At any rate, after the fact she apologized for doubting me when the encounter was won (though it's not really over even though they think it is). 

But they did alright. I mean, this was kind of a puzzle encounter, where the trick was to attack while you had as much advantages as possible. They did alright with that, and its hit points were plummeting down. "Zip" the commoner fighter made the spectacular move. There was still a full barrel on the cart. He opened it, set it aflame (I had it be strong dwarvish stuff), and the cart became an instant fireball. He turned it around and ran it right into the suffering troll. Woosh! That roll went up like an old dry Xmas tree. It was pretty cool. That took it right down, and as we were going late we had to end right there. 

This "trade roads" portion of the campaign seems to be going well, and the theme feels like it will remain even after they are off the road. But what was going to be a couple of game portion of the campaign is probably going to be more like a 5 or 6 game portion before I get them to my version of Apple Lane and Gringles Pawnshop. It's going so well and there is great character development here. 

I don't plan to post about every session. Who needs that, right? And there are other aspects to the Roll20 experience I want to write about. I'm loving it, and in all honestly it may be my format for good. Player M said she is done with the face to face group experience, and I kind of feel the same way. I don't really like having people who are not close friends in my place, and I don't always like to schlep to another persons house, especially as you cannot really control the gaming environment in that. But online I have all the control. Its awesome. 

But however I do it, it feels great having a full group. My besties B and L, my boardgame buddies I talk about all the time here, are wanting in on some Roll20 as well, so my player pool is for sure deepening. I'm so glad I took another chance on getting a group going from that sketchy Roll20 forum area. I finally lucked out! 

Cheers

Nazi's of Tekumel

 

Hardly a subtle title for a post about an obscure game/setting that after several decades is getting more chatter than it ever did, though not for reasons (most) of its fan base is happy about. 

A focal point of the sudden controversy is over at the blog Grognardia, where blogger (often pejoratively referred to as "The Pope of the OSR") James Maliszewski has, since his return from his abandoned Kickstarter debacle years ago, been making the occasional post about his long running Empire of the Petal Throne campaign online. Though the setting has its fans, the posts about his gameplay seem not as welcome as his posts on old gaming magazines and Dungeon Master Guide snippets such as hit point generation and henchmen concepts. 

Maliszewski even did a post not too long ago seeming to lament the lack of comments on these entries and threatened to stop posting them. "Oh no!" cried his faithful. "Please don't!" OK, maybe not so much. But this campaign he does, along with posting long (quite dry IMHO - I rarely could get past a couple paragraphs when I tried to follow them) entries about the gameplay, seems of prime importance to him. But now his heart is broken. Sundered. He is bewildered and lost. Naw, after the weeping and gnashing of teeth he started posting again chop chop. Will he continue his campaign? Perhaps, but I might hazard a guess he'll stop posting about it. At least one of his posts following the wake seem Tekumel related. 

FYI this post seems to be about Grognadia only because the blog kind of seemed to have more Tekumel stuff going on than other places. Though I didn't look too hard. I'm not real in touch with what is going on in Grognard circles these days.  Tenkar's Tavern seemed to have a video post about it, and no beef with The Tavern, but I can't get past a minute or two of most OSR related videos anywhere on the net. His are no exception.

OK, enough potatoes and on to the meat. Apparently, MAR Barker, creator of Tekumel, is an unabashed Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite, as evidenced by some Sci Fi book he wrote while still living, extolling the virtues of Nazi ideals (and perhaps even ripping off decades old Marvel Comics Captain America plotlines regarding a "4^th Reich").

The big takeaway for this image is
Jane Weidlin from The Go Go's
has a blog about comic books

 Ouch. Not just that, but that the Tekumel Society, (Made up of his fans? Family members? I dunno), has known about it for a long time. 

I don't know about Nazi, but Barker
could have a Blofeld/Goldfinger
 thing going on here...

Maliszewski is shaken. His readership pop up in the comments to offer support/unsupport. 

My heart breaks for you. May you find peace with your relationship to Tekumel and all the joy and belonging that it has helped you find.

This really must be the utter worst for fans of Tékumel. It's bad enough when a favorite author turns out to be a bit of a prat, but in the RPG setting you feel like you've been walking around inside the mind of the author. I'm sure people in online fora will be debating and relitigating for years over whether Tékumel is "tainted" by its author's views. Just a sad situation all around.

I refuse to join in with an outrage mob of barbarians seeking to destroy all art and civilization.

It's really awful, and I sympathize with your situation as a "name" in the fan-community. 

OK, I'm not here to make fun, though acting like a family member died over finding out some fairly unknown game/setting/fictional language designer turned out to be a skinhead at heart is.. I dunno. Nothing I can say in that regard won't sound bad. Sure, James at Grognardia was in love with this stuff, and even had a fanzine going, so I guess you can feel bad for him. But, you know, campaigns end. You stop liking some stuff. I read LOTR 3 times growing up, and loved the films. But if I found out Tolkien ran around secretly setting homeless people on fire it would Surprise me. But overall, my reaction would probably amount to "...ah well. That sucks. But I was probably never going to read the Trilogy again anyway." Sure, if I did I would look at it differently. But it wouldn't ruin having hobbits in D&D for me. Oh well, there but for the grace of God go I.

Though I suppose if I was running some long campaign in Middle-Earth it would give me more cause to think. But getting all verklempt over it? Naw. Life is too short. If you can move on from a lost loved one, you can move on from an RPG to another. There are plenty of setting and genres to love (shit, there are guys like Erik Tenkar who appears to love and play them all). Many not put together by a modern Nazi. That we know of, anyway. 

 I have my own history with Empire of the Petal Throne. Not deep in experience, but deep in time. You see, as a youngster I hung out at Aero Hobbies in Santa Monica (famous in OSR circles for its mention in Playing at The World), and here I was exposed to early RPG's at around the time they came out. When I started playing there the owner Gary and his crew were pretty much past playing D&D. They were playing Bushido, Runequest, Traveller, and even a bit of Chivalry and Sorcery. And also some Empire of The Petal Throne. I think I only played a couple of sessions. It had a dungeon crawl element, which made it a lot like D&D. But other than that it was very different. I appreciated that in a way. Its even possible I tried a session or two with my friends, though If I did it clearly did not stick. 

Big time EOTPT fan. I get the feeling this
guy isn't too worried about the 
nazi stuff

In Tekumel, Culture and such were very different. There were oddball aliens races. And it had a very complex history involved that I found fascinating at first. An advanced resort planet out of Star Trek or Dr. Who or something. Indigenous races rounded up into reservations so visitors from outer space could enjoy Space-Disneyworld.  The whole shebang getting lost in a dimensional vortex and smooshed together on one interdimensional planet devoid of stars. And THEN the apocalypse begins. Flash forward ANOTHER 60,000 years and hey presto Sci Fi world is now a fantasy world. Hmm..Ok, that all does sound pretty cool. Assuming I got it right. 

Like I said, fascinating at first. But these concepts did not hold my interest for long. I was far more interested in other batshit and perhaps more lowbrow stuff like Arduin or Wilderlands of High Fantasy. City State of The Invincible Overlord. This stuff was not the type of setting implied in early D&D. But I could grasp what it was. More or less easily described to players, if needing described at all. I don't remember my first time as a player in Empire of The Petal Throne. In fact, the older dudes briefly all wrapped up in it at Aero probably didn't even bother to describe the background to a young teen. But I can imagine there was something like "Your fighter of the single Gammahydron, "Umaoprah", arrives on the shores of Whatasnozz, and exits the boat. A large Sar'to'nack approaches you and hands you a moldy purple plum. This is your invitation to fight in the labyrinth of Gr'in'zel'mort for prestige, honor, and a shot at becoming a fighter of the second Gammahydron.."

Ok, it's been over 20 years since I read the book. But I'm sure a lot of names were all Ch'alty. 

 Arduin and Wilderlands were far more accessible. And they were full of variety. They were chaos really, and as a very young person I did not need more explanation than that. And I don't think it was less serious than some far flung, mushed together pocket dimension, high tech as magic setting such as Tekumel. Now, decades later I learn more and more about Wilderlands and Glorantha, that makes me wish I appreciated those even more back in the day. Wilderlands was a setting at the end of its days, a land made up of layer upon layer of civilizations that lay under our sandaled feet in the form of endless ruins, and a place still reflecting the remainders of ancient interstellar war. That was at least as awesome to me as what EOTPT had going in terms of background IMO.  And Glorious Glorantha, which I loved perhaps most for its divided map of "in Column A you get ancient Ireland/Germany and in Column B you get ancient Middle East...with a topping of ancient Greece." Great stuff, mostly just lacking made-up languages. Unless somebody did that. I'd like to know what Praxian sounds like. But again, more accessible. 

I suppose many consider Empire of The Petal Throne is more for the "intellectually" inclined. If you are like James at Grognardia and say "indeed" a lot, then I guess that's for you. 

So back in the day during its brief run at Aero, I got a copy of the game. I don't know when the boxed edition was available, but mine was pretty much the rules and a map in a plastic bag. For decades it was in my collection, occasionally pulled out to look at and wonder if I should try to run a campaign, or just stare at it like the oddity it was.  But I usually ended with a "nope," and playing something else. So many good things to play. 

Around 2000 I put up a lot of my old unused game stuff on Ebay. Bunnies and Burrows, early White Dwarf issues. And EOTPT went as well. Don't even recall what I got for it. But while I regret not holding on to that adorable old copy of Bunnies, I never missed Empire of The Petal Throne. Thought to be honest I'd like to look at it now. 

Would I run it? I guess. Maybe not. I dunno. If I did it would be as a museum piece. I don't really tend to hold up classic game designers on pedestals. Gygax, Perrin, Peterson. I loved the games but most of the time don't think much of the men behind them besides basic historical context. For the most part these guys despite often being the catalysts were just part of the ultimate stews they made, especially as time went by. But Barker was the sole dude behind EOTPT. It makes a difference. Yeah, I'm not Nazi, but I'd maybe run a short campaign of it if give the opportunity. Mostly if I didn't have to study the ins and outs of the backdrop. And I guess I would have to. And that combined with the Nazi stuff would probably make me "nope" and save the (probably pirated) PDF onto one of my old external drives. 

YMMV, as they say. 

Verisimilitude, Dude

OK, I’ll admit that although I was always an excellent reader, “Verisimilitude” is a word I was fairly unfamiliar with until my return to gaming the other year. I’m pretty sure I read James at Grognardia using the word first in relation to gaming, and I’ve been using it ever since. A big word I have used for a long time in relation to gaming is “Gravitas.” I’ve known that big word for at least a decade (but my source was dubious; I think Howard Stern and his crew were goofing on a sound bite of Keiffer Sutherland saying that was his favorite word. I then looked it up). I’ll say something that sounds profound such as “I like my game world to have a certain amount of gravitas.”

But verisimilitude is what I say now. Me like that big world. The big “V” word is sort of philosophical in nature, so it can be expressed to mean a variety of related things. Officially, it is a philosophical concept that denotes amounts of truth or degrees of error. Articulating what it takes for one false theory to be closer to the truth than another false theory.

In games terms, it’s about doing what you can for your game world to feel real in terms of it’s own qualities. Back in the day all you could say (unless you were an encyclopedia of big brain words like Gary Gygax seemed to be) was “I want my game to be realistic” followed by boos and jeers from your gaming fellows who chided sarcastically (in the Comic Book Guys voice) “It’s a fantasy game man. Fantasy isn’t supposed to be realistic.”

Bullshit. If you just want to have your world be no more than a tavern, a supply shop, and a dungeon, or you are just playing the original Chainmail wargame, then fine. That is sort of how I approach my White Box games. But even then, I cannot help but want things to feel as real as possible, even in a dungeon as mythic underworld. Just go all wacky baccy like Arduin Grimoire or The City State of The Invincible Overlord, then you are getting closer to a fantasy world like Alice’s Wonderland, or The Beatles Pepperland. Cool fantasy worlds, but not one’s I want to seriously run a character in.

I know it is all ultimately silly fantasy. But to make my world feel like it has a little weight to it for a non-existent thing, I like to have a little versimilitude-itude. See that? I took a big word and the word “attitude” and made my own cool word. You can use it if ye like.

Earthlings in your Fantasy Soup

I started thinking on this after reading a recent Grognardia post.

People from Earth ending up in fantasy worlds has an ancient legacy. “The Blazing World” of the late Renaissance, regarded as the first true fantasy world/science fantasy story, featured an Earthling stumbling into a strange world of humanoid animals. And Earthlings, even lepers and dumbass English kids who get locked in wardrobe cabinets, have been going to fantasy land ever since.

So how do I feel about a connection between my fantasy world and Earth? Well, over the decades I have been of differing minds on the matter. I still use the same game world I came up with as a kid, “Acheron.” But in those early days I was up for almost anything. Things like the multi-universal Arduin and The City State of The Invincible Overlord inspired me to do all sorts of wacky things with my world.

In those few short formative years I had gods from Earth myth as the gods of clerics; Thor, Odin, Zeus, etc, just like The City State did. It wasn’t until my mid teens when I started coming up with gods for my world from whole cloth, or expanding upon gods my players created, that I started rethinking that. Eventually I would eliminate those Earth gods from my world and stick with the original ones, so in thinking upon those early days I cut my young self some slack. But into the adult years of gaming I only very rarely had any sort of Earth connection with Acheron. When I did, it was not to use any normal sort of Earth human or Earth setting. It was my futuristic Hero Systems/Champions setting that I used.

In the 80’s I had a brother of my major ranger NPC (my first true D&D character, actually, that I ended up using for my own world) get trapped in my Champions setting, and become a sort of rustic superhero in that. So clearly I had established a link between worlds. And once or twice I had dimension hopping characters from my Champions games spend brief times in Acheron when I felt it was appropriate and I wanted some fantasy elements (in one case, heroes chased down some dimension-bending super-hunters who were going to Acheron to kill unicorns and other cutesy creatures).

But just having some d-bag professor or leper or whatever show up to dick around in Acheron? Naw. It isn’t that interesting to me. Maybe because I found Thomas Covenant and Harold Shea to be total bores. It has to be something very appealing to make me break that line between worlds, and the typical “Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” type stuff seems pretty played out to me now. Just a busted, old concept.

These days, I just like to keep my fantasy world pure. I do, however, like chocolate in my peanut butter. That will never change.