Clerical Healing is the Best Healing

 

So the party is heading to a dungeon (taking several sessions to do so), and they leave Shire's End, the last settlement of the southern portion of the kingdom and head into the Grass Wilderlands of the South. 

NPC (non-precious) teen healing god cleric Evador is down in the dumps a bit, having gotten a bit wine tipsy the night before in Montigar Silverglen's tower, and unsuccessfully trying to seduce the almost 300 year old elvish legend. 

Evador grew up a rich girl in Tanmoor (her last name is "Del Tanmoor," and if you have "Tanmoor" in your last name you are from old money), had a year or so at the university studying literature, but discovered the religion of Billick the Healing god and joined the order not long ago. She has chosen to be on the "Blue Heart on the Red Path," which essentially means she is on an adventure quest where she might need to spill blood, maybe her own, to get quick higher status at Billicks great cathedral. Her chosen quest is to investigate the old "Meadowlands Dungeon" south of the kingdom. She is a lovely, tall, but physically awkward (DX 8) 19-year-old (in the last game she missed several attacks in a row on a giant ant).

Evador's troubles are very much compounded while on the road to the mining town near the dungeon area, when a Peryton attacks from the blue. It hits her hard, and she is down for the count and immediately going into Death Save mode. 

The party wins the day and destroys the beast, but Evador is badly hurt. She is one failed save away from death, but Ruvan the young sorcerer from the Riverlands, happens to have healing. I decide Evador is still going to be out for a while, but she is at least saved. 

My first little Roll20 campaign about 3 years ago involved T's elvish bard Xanthia, and she remembered the 20-something Billick cleric "Afina of Mercy" who was encountered on her own Red Path to the same mining town near the dungeon to set up a mini-temple to Billick. So, they haul her into the town and to the small temple that is now a wood building among a lot of tent cabins. 

Afina is encountered locking the building and heading out to dinner. When not clericing in the little temple, she likes to dress in the height of current upper class young person Tanmoor fashion (Billick seems to attract young city girls of wealth to the religion), even though the city is almost 200 miles away. 

Blue is the color of healing in my world

Afina has been successful in the few months since she last saw Xanthia the Bard. Though there is a small tent cabin temple of the fighter god "Diamonnis", the cleric there will only heal those injured in conflict, so Afina has seen a lot of donations from injured mine workers and town maintenance people. Her Red Path has been completed. She is officially high priestess of her own recognized temple (though she is only like 5th level).

So Afina inspects Evadors terrible claw/impact wounds. And there is the focus of this post. 

I don't know where it came from, but on the spot I got hit by a bolt from the blue. In my decades of running games, I never differentiated between styles of healing. Healing was healing. But for some reason I improvised some dialogue from the somewhat serious young cleric Afina. 

"These wounds. Who healed them (Ruvan the sorcerer had healed Evador for 9 points)? Certainly not a cleric much less a Billick cleric. So jagged and sloppy." She eyed Ruvan...

"Was this you?" Afina said. "Are you a sorcerer? 

"What of it?" replied the young caster.

"Well, I suppose you saved her life. We can be grateful for that. But she could be left with terrible scarring. But she still needs more healing, and I think with the blessing of merciful Billick I can help the scars be a minimum."

That was it. Out of the blue after a lifetime of the game I decided that there is different types of healing skill. Billick is one of the first gods I created for the setting as a kid, and over the years I often let Billick clerics have anywhere from a +1 to +1-4 to their heals. But now it is part of my world that you can tell by the leftover wounds and scars if somebody focused on heals did the deed. A sorcerer's heal would be just about saving the life. But a Billick cleric, or most clerics, would be about overall healing which would include a reduction of scarring. 

A very minor thing to be sure, but it's kind of fascinating to me that a DM can just add and alter his world with a whim based on a certain situation long after the world is established. Instant creativity that is unique to rpg's. Man, I love winging it. Even if it's for my own fun.

And at the same time I decided that a cleric of a war god won't heal a non-combat violence wound. 

Of course, clerics of different deities having different affects is nothing new. But for my setting I will be keeping an eye on clerics to seek out little ways to add flavor to them. To differentiate them with the Rule of Cool.  

Cheers.

Roll20 in-game chat makes me feel like a Twitch streamer

 

So, I think we are going on game 15 in my regular Wednesday night 5th ed game in Roll20. I could not be more pleased with how things are going. Despite almost everybody having more 5th ed and Roll20 experience than me, I have yet to lose a single player due to my shortcomings. I'd like to think its my old schoolish style and over 40 years of experience as a DM. But whatever it is I love this group. Good role players, respectful, friendly, funny, patient. It's all there. I may never have a group like this again, and it makes me want to get the most of it. 

One thing that is really awesome to me is the in-game chat box. I did not pay much attention to it for my first few games. But something it has come in really handy for is posting a spell or ability you are using, official text on the particulars. The player simply has to click on it in the digital character sheet and the spell or what not appears in the chat for me to look over. This along with the in-game compendium searcher has made it so I don't really need any books or paperwork at the table. And I use this as a learning tool as well. After a session I have one last beer (or three) and go over the chat box to bone up on the spells and things. 

And once I got in the habit of checking, I discovered something else the players are furtively doing there. They have an ongoing text chat during each session where they comment and discuss or make jokes on the current encounter or occurrence. You see, I'm too busy to always have that chat box open. When somebody makes a dice roll, I look quickly because that is where the modified number shows up. But I'm usually doing 5 things at once. 

But those chat comments. It's a special treat for me to go in after a game and see what the little dickens have been up to there. It's kind of a hoot, and a new thing I am experiencing, and extra pleasure, I never had in face-to-face games.

So, I'm not streaming, but this little feature makes me feel like I am. And it's yet another thing making me feel, more and more, that this is the format for me to DM in for good.

Munchkin and Call to Adventure

 So far I've made posts about boardgames I had played the hell out of in the last couple of years. But on Christmas Day I was able to try two games that are new to me. 

With my nearest family members living hours away, and me hating any kind of holiday travel, I was going to stay in town and hopefully see some of the local friends I've managed to make the last couple years.

My besties B & L (a younger couple who kind of adopted me when I had first moved to my new town) came over to spend Christmas afternoon with me and eat slow cooker chili, drink beer, wine, and cider (maybe a little smokey smokey) and play some games. We had a certain window of time; whenever they would drive the half hour to my part of town they would usually come around 4 or 5 and hang till 9. But a powerful winter snow storm was due at some point. A predicted 4 inches. They have a big truck but currently live in a rural part of town that doesn't have priority for snow plowing. So they came around noon and we put the chili cooker on to bubble and settled in quick to try a couple of new games as snowflakes began to slowly accumulate outside.

Munchkin is of course an infamous game that I have wanted to try since impulse buying the deluxe edition a couple months ago. Call to Adventure was given to me by B & L on the Thanksgiving I spent with them and their local friends. Having not heard of it (it never appeared on the Will Wheaton Tabletop show where I was exposed to most games I currently love) I kind of had doubts about it. 

I spent a couple hours Christmas Eve trying to teach myself Call to Adventure. The rules are a wee bit hard to grasp on whole at first, but as soon as you know the basics you wondered why you thought it was complicated. Its not really. Besides the character/story building aspects, things like memorizing what various runes mean seem hard on the surface but in like two minutes you got it. The first game will go slower mostly from trying to correctly pick out the needed runes for your challenges. But after a couple of turns we were in full swing, not having to look up advanced rules until the need came up.

The second game goes much faster (game one was around an hour and a half, the second a bit less than an hour). 

It's a fairly quaint and dare I say maybe a bit elegant game engine. It goes from awkward to intuitive fairly quickly.  You basically start with an origin card (you are a hunter, farmer, merchant, etc), a motivation card (Bound by honor, seeking vengeance, etc) and a destiny card that spells out your final fate and what points you get at the end for various other cards you obtained that relate to the destiny card. 

Runes stand for the usual character traits; strength, dex, con, Widom. You cast runes representing how many of these you have to defeat challenges that get you more cards to expand your story cards. 

The character and story building elements, that you have a lot of control over, promotes role playing and storytelling by default. B & L are not community theater rpg types by a long shot. But they extrapolated their cards into compelling stories. 

What really struck me was the spirituality aspects built into the game. In my late teens and eearly twenties I had a period of exploring many religious, spiritual and occult things. So I was famiar with rune casting. And there is a lot about the relating of various cards here that reminds me a lot of reading tarot. Exploring the artwork imagery to expand upon the card relations even further helps foster the storytelling fun of the game. 

OK, the storm was on. Snow was coming in sideways. But it was not packing significantly. So my pals decided to stick around long enough to get in a game of Munchkin (it was around an hour).

I personally found it clunky at first. Pulling high level monsters you had no chance against, and constantly having to ditch cards. If you have too many you cannot discard. You have to give them to other players. So it seemed there would be a lot of crap cards going back and forth a lot. But very quickly things started tying together so you could use more cards, and as levels were gained the more powerful monsters you could fight. Just like D&D, how about that? 

It is an amusing RPG parody, but I think the game play has to potential to be kinda deep. I didn't think I'd like it much due to the level of the whimsy in the artwork, but the nods to D&D really won me over.

The storm deepened and B and L hit the road. Our exploring these new games was the highlight of my long weekend, and can't wait to play more. New Years weekend?

I need to play both of these games a bit more to have a final verdict, but they made for a fun few hours. A heavy role-playing game and a not so much one. I'll post more in the future about both games and will also try the solo feature Call to Adventure includes. 

Merry Chirstmas and Happy New Year!

The Lichway - "why are they here?"

 

The Lichway is a dungeon that originally appeared in issue #9 (Oct/Nov 1978) of White Dwarf magazine out of England. It was an old favorite of mine, and over the decades I've now used it probably 4 or 5 times. It would have been more than that, but my groups tended to be long lasting, years, and I could only spring it on an entirely fresh group of players. 

Many old schoolers probably are more about using Keep on the Borderlands and the Caves of Chaos multiple times (I've used them maybe twice since I was a kid). But while KotB is about as basic and vanilla as it gets (just fight endless caves of humanoids and maybe a nice-seeming cleric is a homicidal asshole), Lichway is an artifact of old indy style D&D like Arduin Grimoire and Judges Guild. The old school common dungeon elements are abundant:

The location has a gritty background (necropolis for deceased undead worshippers).

It has a shallow waterway running through it.

A deep variety of mostly offbeat monsters inhabit the area. 

There is plenty of grim mood and dungeon dressing (hundreds of open crypts, worms that will choke you in the fresh water sources, vampire statues, a long-ranging rustling sound emitted by a unique creature, a horrifying possible no-win scenario...think quick!).

But most iconic to me is the fact that several (and by several I don't mean like just 2) different groups/gangs are currently inhabiting the dungeon with for the most part no real goal or purpose other than await murder hobo's a'coming to call. I mean, there are a pair of Man Beasts (character class out of White Dwarf and another favored old school thing of mine)  just sitting around in a small enclosed hallway. Just like old school you need to inject your own motivations and reasons, whether the designers planned it like that or not (I suspect in most cases not. The style was just to give little description, because D&D was once a game about just killing monsters. Period.). 

I always injected a little of my own juice here and there since the first time I used it as a teen. It was easy just to assume the 2nd level Man Beast, a male, is training his lower level female follower, and a crypt with all kinds of creatures in it seemed like a good spot. 

I think that in all but one of the times I used it, the party manages to release the Sussurus, the ape-shaped thorn creature that emitted a windy sound that put undead in earshot to sleep. In my second to last use around four years ago back in LA the MU cast silence on it. So I've experienced that joy of playing out the party running away in chaotic "every man for himself" style through the part of the dungeon they hadn't explored yet to get away from hundreds of angry undead. Always a hoot. I think a player or two has been lost over the play through due to a bad decision or delay (describing a body being torn to bits by a howling mob of skeletons never gets old), but so far no TPK. but its come close almost every time.

So anyway, my first campaign in my new town the other year ended up geared towards Lichway. It didn't start out that way. This was an entirely new group and I was using 5th edition for the first time. To say I went into it NOT studied up on the rules in an understatement. Since all my players were newish to the edition, I used that as a way to learn. As the players learn while using their characters I would tap into that and learn along. 

And to be honest, on an old school note, I was able to wing things much more than I thought I could. Just tap into the stat base save mechanics for everything and you are good to go. Really, outside of magic use the system is pretty easy peasy. 

But since I was new to it I started slow. Running each game in sort of a simple episodic manner. At first not really looking to the future, but as time went by, the characters made contacts and friends in the way of NPC's, I had to start looking at a direction. And I knew I wanted to use an old school module, in part because I knew the players would not be familiar with anything I had from the old days. They were all a good bit younger than me. 

So first thing was to be prepared to use Lichway for 5th editon. No worries. Really nothing in there was too out of the ordinary. Man Beasts and the Susurrus were needing to be adapted. Not much else. 

But this time I decided to do something entirely different. This was a twist for me, and since it might be for you, you might want to consider it if you ever use this really excellent dungeon setting. What did I do?

Two things. First I decided to give all the groups in the dungeon an actual reason, and actual purpose, for being in the dreary place. A convergence of coincidence for good reasons.

Second, I would have the party, early on adventuring a hundred miles south of the Lichway in the big city Tanmoor prior to the Lichway delve, actually meet and interact with some of the inhabitants whom I had yet to set up shop in the Lichway. There would be a variety of things ahead of time that would set up the dynamic elements within the necropolis. And in so doing quadruple the feeling of gravitas once the location was reached. Sort of a prequel to Lichway as presented, starting  maybe a month before the actual dungeon delve.

I switched the female MU gang leader Dark Odo from a human to a young drow magic user. Highly charismatic and specializing in charm magic, the dark elf enchantress' gang was almost complete as shown in the module.. The Man Beasts were paid scouts and body guards working for Odo, hirelings more than charmed henchmen, while all the other members of the gang were recruited by Odo's considerable, manipulative charms.

Why would Odo go to the Lichway? And who where the unrelated thieves who were exploring the Lichway? Not to mention the former adventuring party that was slaughtered except for Odo's gangs captives. How did the character party get involved in all this? 

In my next post I'll lay out how I took my first 5th edition campaign towards the Lichway, and why all the NPC's are in it when the party finally shows up at the Korm Basin necropolis. 

Cheers

Kevin Mac

The Early D&D Pirate Ship

 Below is another of a series of articles I wrote a couple of years ago for a pop culture entertainment site.

The Smell of Wargamers is In the Air

It was a beautiful August day in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and a throng of men old and young were lining up at a sign-in desk at the entrance to the historical Horticultural Hall to sit at a table indoors all day. It was 1976 at GenCon, originally a tabletop wargaming convention that had evolved to cater more to the players of a new game: DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS.

Inside at the many tables set out for the event sat middle-aged WW2 and Korean War vets clinging to their historical wargames.

Geek Asgard circa 1976

Some scowled over at the nearby college-aged youths who in the last couple of years were invading the stodgy event, pretending to be elves and dwarves in the newish game Dungeons and Dragons.

Occasionally a paunchy, neckbearded wargamer would sidle over out of curiosity, and eventually ask a question non-D&D players would ask for decades. “How do you win?”  Each player had a different answer.

“Blah blah blah Hitler. Blah blah blah Napoleon. “

In one corner of the hall, not far from several seller’s tables, a blond, bespectacled 21 year old was hanging a fabric banner on the wall. The edges of the sign had been burnt and dirtied to give the impression of an old timey treasure map. On the banner were the words JUDGES GUILD.

Building A Pirate Ship

The young man’s name was BILL OWEN, and he was there to represent he and friend BOB BLEDSAW’s new game company, Judges Guild. Bob was back at home sick and could not attend, and they had forgotten to arrange the use of a merchandise table, but that wasn’t going to stop Bill. He and partner Bob Bledsaw had a product to sell, and it was to be a game changer.

Based on Bledsaw’s home D&D campaign, it was a beautifully designed and intensely detailed map of a fantasy city they called CITY STATE OF THE INVINCIBLE OVERLORD.

The map immediately evoked inspiration in even the most skeptical D&Der, with it’s dozens of buildings labelled as mundane businesses such as rope maker or bath house, to more fantastic shops such as wizards supply and monster hunter. It had an intricate system of alleyways and streets with names like Slaver Street and Misty Street. The maps were snapped up, but many buyers wondered about the details of the locations.

That had yet to be worked out; Bob and Bill had assumed Judges (what Dungeon Masters were called then) would want to add their own details. After all, Gary Gygax and TSR didn’t produce settings for the game yet, assuming there would be no demand. Bill thought for a second, then led any who inquired to his car, where he provided Bob’s address. “send us your address and 10 bucks, and we’ll put you on our subscription list for further info and releases.”

Bill had just invented Judges Guild’s subscription model. With few hobby shops specializing in role playing games yet, this turned out to be a winning move. The Judges Guild pirate ship had launched, matey.

“Avast there, me dorkos!”

Flash back a few months. 32 year-old Bob Bledsaw, who had fallen in love with D&D almost as soon as it came out, had been running a locally popular campaign for some time. He and young player Bill Owen had talked a lot about producing game materials, and Bob’s incredible map design skills made them decide to visit TSR Hobbies in hopes of convincing Gary Gygax to agree to let them produce game materials for D&D.

They were unable to gain audience with Lord Gary, but D&D co-creator Dave Arneson was happy to meet them. TSR didn’t think game setting products would sell, assuming everybody was happy doing their own homebrews. Dave went ahead and gave verbal permission, and Judges Guild was born (Gygax would much later say he would never have made the agreement).

The Ship Launches

The City State map proved wildly popular, and in order to fulfill the first subscription requests, Bob whipped out the details of the city he created. The vibe he instilled in it would be his gameworld standard. Bob’s personal home game setting was Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, but this new location could not be more different from the lands of Bilbo and Aragorn. It was totally gonzo.

The style was part ancient Greece, part Hyperboria, and part Lankhmar, the city of Fritz Leibers Fafhred and Grey Mouser. The city was designed as an outdoor dungeon, and walking the streets could lead to random monster and villain encounters. Walking into a shop and roughing up the haberdasher could be unwise; he might just be a 10th level sorcerer or even a demi-god.

Interesting to note, The City State’s Pegasus-riding Overlord was himself unabashedly evil, as well as 90% of his advisors and council.

Years of campaign play could be enjoyed without the characters ever leaving the city. This was not a setting for wanna be novel writers. It was pure sandbox. Characters were supposed to wander the city and encounter non – player characters who would react to them.

There were charts and tables describing random encounters and events, and each shop location featured it’s own rumors being discussed by customers and shopkeeps. If players heard a rumor that a dolphin had appeared out of thin air at a bathhouse, characters could hightail it over to see what was going on. It was up to the dungeon master to wing it and adjudicate the situation.

Bob continued expanding his City State setting. Calling his lands THE WILDERLANDS OF HIGH FANTASY, many adventure modules and packets containing maps and info on other locales and city states in the setting were gobbled up by the new Judges Guild faithful. The tropes of The Wilderlands included having it’s city state communities exist in isolation in the middle of howling wildernesses, with little real power outside their city walls.

A Gritty Sandbox to Play In

The Wilderlands were lands in decline, full of ruins of older civilizations, with little in the way of usable trade roads or safe havens. Bandits, monsters, mutants, and even aliens could kill you as you journeyed. If you were a resident of a town in the lands, a ten mile hike to visit your cousin was a suicide mission. Much like The City State, populations of all sizes (at least the human dominant ones) tended to be evil in nature. In most fantasy settings there were pockets of evil. In the Wilderlands, it’s good that is hard to find.

The brutal Wilderlands made Westeros look like Tolkien’s Shire.

Another labor of love of Bob’s was Tegel Manor, a haunted super-mansion set in the Wilderlands, a dungeon chock full of ghosts, ghouls, vampires, and an endless variety of threats. With many gags, tricks and traps, it was a total funhouse dungeon. Playing in the mansion was like being on Disney’s Haunted Mansion ride, except you have to fight everything you see. It featured over 150 rooms, and a maze of hallways. It was both deadly and goofy as hell. At the main foyer you might be greeted by a butler in the form of a Balrog’s ghost, or you might enter a room to witness several zombies bowing before a large white rat wearing a plumed hat. In typical Bledsaw fashion, single sentence descriptions were the norm.

It was up to the haggard DM to decide why the hell zombies were bowing to a rat.

The manor halls were adorned with a hundred magical paintings of former residents with mystical affects.  There’s no evidence that Bob Bledsaw was a coke hound like Gary Gygax, but he sure came up with some wild-ass stuff.

Fans of Judges Guild ate it up. It seemed the perfect weird fantasy world to D&D in.

Bill Owen would leave the company in 1978 for other pursuits (his true love before and after the Guild was the travel industry). But The company continued to expand, gaining the ownership of Dungeoneer Magazine, a fanzine-like product chock full of new monsters, magic items, and new adventures to add to the growing Wilderlands.

Sailing Along

Judges Guild produced over 250 products related to D&D, and by the early 80’s employed over 40 people. Not bad considering many of these items were poorly edited, very often contained fairly generic and unappealing artwork, and almost always were printed on poor and flimsy paper stock. And this was one of the reasons The Guild was heading into a decline to rival the decaying civilization of The Wilderlands.

Gary Gygax and company over at TSR had wised up and realized there was a demand for settings and adventures. The items they began to produce were well edited and typeset, done up with high grade paper stock and hard covers, and professional artwork. Judges Guild rejected these notions.

“But the sign in front of my office is bitchin’!” – Bob Bledsaw

Also the Guilds ideals of dungeon gauntlets, jokey puns and gags, and devotion to gonzo concepts were already becoming old. The D&D fanbase was changing and becoming more sophisticated. Ironically, players of a game where you pretended to be elves faced a growing realism movement.

“Realism will make our dorky elf game legit!”

Sunk

Judges Guild lost it’s license from TSR in 1982, and this proved to be the nail in the coffin. After a few last gasps (The Guild had a few licenses with other companies), the gangplank to the pirate ship was pulled up in 1985.

Glub glub

But, A Legacy Among the Faithful

Many years later Bob would briefly team with others to reprint some old Guild items, keeping his name in the gaming loop. Bob passed away in 2008 (the same year as Gary Gygax), but to this day his legacy carries on, through his son Bob jr. teaming up with small press game companies.

Original printings of Guild items sell for high prices on Ebay and Amazon.

The pirate ship is long gone, but the gonzo lives on in the hearts of Judges Guild faithful, like yours truly.

Roll20, where've you been all my life?

 

Until recently I had almost zero experience in playing RPGs online. That's mostly because I had zero interest in it. With the exception of a handful of times in my life I was always able to get some kind of group together for face to face. My most recent long term groups lasted about 10 years. We played 1st edition D&D, Call of Cthulhu, Champions, Runequest, etc. But in the end it disbanded as I made the move out of Southern California. It took awhile to get a Group together in the new town, and even that only after I made the dreaded switch to the newest edition. I sailed along with That for awhile, but the couple who helped me start the group moving away, combined with The apocalypses, shut that down. 

A local DM suggested I try out Roll 20. It seemed like time to give that a shot. But rather than try to get in on a game to experience it from the players side, I dove into learning enough about the system to get a campaign up and running. As cornerstone players I tapped a guy who was going to join our face to face game right before The Virus hit, and an old player of mine from my home town Los Angeles, and recruited a couple of others and got it going. 

Though I was a Roll20 noob, I just started small and used each session as a chance to learn a bit more each time. I marveled at the way I could yoink a map out of a google search and lay it right down and put squares on it. The first couple of games were set in the hobbit shires, so I just needed country roads, farm fields, and hobbit houses and cottages. 

I discovered a token maker, and loved it. I could put any creature or NPC into a cool little ring. Players pointed me out to artwork online and I whipped up tokens for them. 

Suddenly buying and painting miniatures seemed like a real hassle (I never loved it... the process was a necessity). With the tokens the sky is the limit. Just put some keywords into your Google machine, use a stamp app to make it look like above, and get on with it.

Players are granted control of their token. DM has his. Move them around the map you laid out (maybe going that extra mile by locking the grids in properly for ease of tactical movement). The majority of the rest of the work is using your actual books next to you. Or use PDF stuff if that floats yer boat. Find a map online that suites your encounter then slide it into a page and place grids on it. Wow. 

The above video is of my "Control Center Alpha." My set-up for game night. The music in the background is live from a college radio station, playing from my alma mater Santa Monica College's radio station KCRW, and what is playing was totally unintentional but so appropriate for the moments before everyone logs on to play. When I'm in the "command chair" I feel a lot like the guy running games from behind the scenes in Larry Nivens D&D based novel Dreampark.

Man, I'm loving it. I want more. This may be an unpopular opinion, but I may like it more than face to face. My DMing is more concise, focused, and this format appeals to my episodic style. I keep it tight now that I'm not right in front of faces waiting on my next utterance. Not seeing the players has helped me open up in a way. I know, right? Somehow impersonal is making it more personal for me. Yeah, its weird. 

Spider Spider, Burning Bright...

 Seeing as years ago Grognardia was my inspiration to do some rpg blogging, it makes sense that I can still get inspired by posts there to make my own posts on related subjects. But in this case James' post about spiders reminded me of a game related spider thing that happened earlier this year. Early in the campaign the characters were travelling through hobbit lands, and killed a wayward giant spider on a rainy night while taking shelter in an old cottage. The local governess was pleased, and let them stay at her estate in cozy, round halfling guest cottages.

The dead giant spider was placed by and Ettercap, who called upon all spiders large and small in the local area to descend on the domiciles and attack the party. The characters awoke in the dark covered in small spiders, and ran outside to face a half dozen of the giant variety. It was a nasty fight, but the PC's prevailed. 

Later after the game, the players had logged out and I was cleaning things up. That's when I notices something odd. A spider on the 50 inch TV screen I use for running the session. A small spider, about the size of "O" on your keyboard, was just running around. 

I like spiders, and heard long ago it was bad luck to kill one. So I tried to knock it into a glass but nothing happened. It was immune to my touch. A ghost spider? OK, this may sound silly, but for a few seconds I thought (being new to Roll20) that the program could mess with you with animations depending on what you did in the game. Maybe just based on the word "spider" in text somewhere in token notes. But good sense prevailed, and I realized quick that a little spidey had gotten inside the screen. Wow. This had never happened to me before. 

Odd, right? I mean, I'm running a spider based session and I spider invades my game map. Anyway, here is cell phone video I captured it with.

You'll notice the fellow runs through a door into the domicile, past a couple of swarms of spiders, then out a small round window. Clever little guy.

Old School vs. New School

Yeah, I was a pretty tried and true 1st edition guy. I can nail down a handful of reasons for spending decades NOT trading up to newer edtions:

1)  it's what I knew for most of my life. 

2)  It was easy not having to memorize the DMG. Just proclaim "rule of cool" and wing everything. 

3)  Who wants to learn a new system?

4) Who wants to buy a bunch more books?

When rejecting 2nd edition back in the day it was easy to just say "its not Gygax." But even then it was more about the 4 points above. 

In the 90's it was easy to stick with 1st ed. 90% of my player pools would be friends who wanted to play but had little experience with it. So no rules lawyers or power gamers. They were happy to play and didn't care about system. Those were the salad days. Long, amazing campaigns of a half dozen genres. 

Then in the 2000's after some years off I entered a period of years where most of my players were seasoned 1st edition wonks. Here I was forced to be more rules wary, or what passed for rules in 1st ed. Forum folk would argue that it's a sound system. But they are wrong (IMHO). Its a mess.  So open to interpretation all it leads to is argy bargy and rules lawyering. So many "damned if you do and damned if you don't" situations. It could get annoying. I mean, all you want to do is present a fun game. That thing right there is not even in the top 3 list of what many 1st edition enthusiasts want out of it. 

Dissatisfaction with old school D&D and the people who were the most into the edition  lead to me running anything but D&D for around three years. And I was happy for it. Some Metamorphosis Alpha, Cthulhu, Runequest, and even Champions filled my gaming needs.  

The group suddenly got an influx in its last year or so, of younger dudes who were 5th edition guys who had zero 1st edition experience. I ran a somewhat short campaign1st ed, using the environs of Tegel Manor. It was some brutal scenarios and a couple characters died, which the newbs were unfamiliar with. Though I think this campaign was some of my best DMing ever, they wanted to play 5th edition. So we decided to give it a go with a more or less noob DM. 

I ran a bard. What struck me the most was how pretty much every character class is a magic user of sorts. I found that very odd. A bard casting thunder wave? But there were things I liked, such as the standard stat modifiers. Not having to have the hit tables handy was nice. But I wasn't really sold. In all honesty it may have been the ability of the DM that kept me at arms length, but at any rate I wasn't ready to make the full move to the new edition. Though there were good points for doing so:

1) straight up rules so you have less arguing about them. 

2) You don't really need all that many books. The PHB and Monster Manual will do (if you don't have power gamers). 

3)  there is a far far far far far far far greater player pool if you want to start a group. And they skew 20-40 years young. And, heaven forbid, lotso grrrrls..)

4)  you can still run games with an old school feel and mentality. Its still D&D if you think of it as that.  D20's. Rangers. Elves. It's D&D as you want it to be, dog. 

Along the lines of this post but also as an aside, a couple of years before leaving LA I had a shot at putting a Champions group together with a lot of people who weren't in my regular group. I love running Supers campaigns so I gave it a real go, but my Grognard attitude about edition got in the way. I wanted to use the old Hero 4th edition, the one that was a sort of all inclusive system for all comic book stuff, not just superheroes. I even had multiple copies.  But the folk I was looking at running for where insistent at using the newest Champions edition, so I demurred on the whole thing. If I had at least tried to learn a newer edition I'd maybe have had some great games of Champs. 

When I moved into my new town the other year, I started an old school rpg meetup and tried to get some 1st edition going. Though the meetup had a lot of folk join it, there just was not that much interest in actually playing it. 

So I got involved in a new campaign at *gasp* a game/comic shop. Dungeon Crawl Classics seemed super popular, but I got involved in some D&D after a few fun games of DCC. The 5th edition DM I played under for a few months was a good guy, and a sort of unofficial community leader, but he was inexperienced. Though fairly talented at running from material he did not prepare all that much (the revamped Keep on the Borderlands), for me the lack of prep shined through. Lots (and I mean lots) of reading the text box descriptions out loud. And actual role play was about zero. In one session the other players would be gung ho wanting to kill all humanoids, then the next would have all this sympathy for them and be anti-killing. It was all fairly annoying, though to be fair many of them were more or less noobs. One guy, a young redneck construction worker who showed up covered in drywall dust, was a jackass at a nuclear level.  When at some point I asked the DM what a particular statue represented and he replied, annoyed,  "it doesn't matter"I knew I was more than ready to get out of the shop and get my own hand picked group going. Something like that should matter to a DM, not to mention a player actually showing some interest. If you are unprepared with the material just make something up that makes sense. You don't have to look at it as art, but put a little work into it. 

So I did with the help of a couple I met through the local game shop Facebook page.  They actually became my besties in general in town, also getting me involved in a local poker group. I got to do a bunch of great games (centered around that old classic The Lichway, which I'll probably talk about in another post) but then the whole virus thing hit.  So I started looking into running games on Roll20, with some helpful remote guidance from  the comic shop DM I mentioned above. 

OK, its all kind of off topic from the title of this post. Getting back to that I guess my point is a transition to a newer edition was fairly easy. I find it enjoyable because I can inject my old school philosophies, such as they are. Noobs at the shop didn't want to hear about it, and maybe they were right. Stop talking and just run new edition games and find my old school nostalgic joy within what I bring to the table as a DM. 

More play injected with my old school style, less reminiscence. Walk the walk.

Cheers

Temple Of Demogorgon – 3 Years and still underachieving

As usual, a day late for my own party. Yesterday, Saturday, marked the 3rd anniversary of this most humble, somewhat under the radar and highly underappreciated gaming blog. I’m obviously not keeping a real keen eye on things like that. I’ve never really felt like this was a “vanity blog.” I hardly ever talk about my life outside of games. Having a big, noticeable voice in the online community was never my goal (less than 175 followers after three years is fairly pathetic). I don’t work at all at it, or try to be on a lot of blog rolls. What would even be the point of that? You don’t get paid to blog with under 10,000 readers. You don’t get prestige in any circles that matter for shit in the world at large.

I mean, this is a community that rewards blogs with huge followings because the particular blogger is a skeeve who happens to know some low end sex workers (poor me always having females in my games who were mostly legit actresses and entertainment industry people, professional artists, or successful business women of one kind or another), or made his bones by posting fairly droll commentary of various kinds 3-5 times a day. I don’t constantly post charts and tables (I stopped having time for coming up with that shit when I got out of high school), or focus on corny-ass old school cartoon dungeon mentality that tries to recapture the vibe felt by a 14 year old playing D&D in the late 70’s. I don’t make post after post of “Mr. Nice Guy” gamer fluff that is about as interesting as watching flies fuck. I don’t laser focus on any one thing, like games about Mars or Cimmeria. I don’t try to be especially wacky, refined, literary, or insightful.

This is just a dude who was out of gaming completely for almost a decade, and fell ass backwards into a host who was willing to help put a regular group together and lived fairly close to me and was looking for a 1st edition DM. Luckily we found some folk who were (mostly) not hopeless, catpiss-smelling nons or disturbing geektards. It was a perfect storm that swept me up into putting hours of precious time back into this hobby. And some of that time went into this blog. Yeah, it’s weird, because before that I had zero interest in blogging.

But I sometimes do tend to over think things, and starting this blog may have been an offshoot of that. It’s mostly because I actually enjoy writing down my thoughts, but I really felt I had a lot to say, and had a lot of unique situations from back in the day to talk about. My early, often shitty experiences as a youngster playing in a filthy game shop full of older weirdo’s; girlfriends who played in campaigns (once again non-skanks, sorry); friendships gained and lost. Growing up on onward all while gaming on the sidelines of a fairly full, non-nerd life.

A couple of times doing the blog felt like it was overshadowing the games, especially with my less than satisfactory exploits trying to get involved in the local gaming community outside my comfort zone of a regular group of hand-picked non-cretins. But earlier this year I had an epiphany and decided my focus would be on playing and not writing about playing. That is what it should be about, no? Enjoy the fruits more than you study their roots. Having a bunch of people read your words is great, but having 6 people in front of you hanging on your words and laughing, moaning, bitching, begging, cursing, and yelling is priceless.

So this last year big changes at work and in my career, a couple of somewhat regular relationships including one at work (Sam Adams might tell you that is NOT always a good decision) and some other good life things gave me less time to post. It comes and goes of course, and through the holidays up to right now I’ve had more freedom to post more often. But the fact is I’ll probably post less again. I’m going to try and struggle through a few Runequest games (one game and I already want to houserule half the shit) so I’ll want to post on that a bit just because it’s new. And hopefully I’ll get some Call of Cthulhu games going, and I know from past experience that will be worth posting about. But again, I want the actual gaming to be more important than reading my own thoughts and sharing them with a small, closed community.

So going into another year of this, and who knows how far it will go. Another three years? That’s a long time when you are getting into middle-age. Then again, my doctor tells me because of my outstanding Scottish genetics I could get back close to high school shape in a year if I skipped a few beers and got back on my mountain bike on weekends. Miracles can happen. In two years I could be married, have kids, working harder to make even more money. Who knows. I still want a beach house and a super-model as mother to my future children. Weirder things have happened. Just look at the very existence of an OSR. Who would have thought 30 years ago that this was a possibility.

Thanks for your support and best of luck in the new year!

My Two Pence on Dave

Even though I have been a gamer for around three decades, I do not consider myself any kind of expert in the history of RPG’s (one of the reasons I decided to take a more low-brow approach in my blogs). I was mostly about the gaming, not the “Behind the Music” stuff. But I am old school, and I did love Blackmoor like I did so many books and supplements of my youth. But 99% of what I know about the man behind Blackmoor, I learned in the last few months.

I am indeed a child of the white box, and I owned the Blackmoor supplement in Jr. High. I didn’t know a ton about the dude that put it together, I just knew I loved what was inside it, including that Temple of the Frog. I probably used that setting a half dozen times when I needed a quick adventure. I probably only used “The Lichway” from White Dwarf magazine more for first level games.

Most of my friends had gotten into the game a couple years after I discovered it, and by then were picking up the newer, larger box Dungeons and Dragons books, so Blackmoor was my little secret. It had already been around for quite a while by the time I got my own group together. Before that, it was all about reading those original booklets, and day dreaming of the adventures to come (I also played in solo games “run” by the dickwad who got me into the game, but he didn’t own any books. He just had dice and made it up as he went along (You can read about this in my first post at my secret blog mygaminghistory.blogspot.com).

So outside of that, I didn’t know much about Dave. What little I did beyond the Blackmoor book I probably overheard at Aero Hobbies in Santa Monica when I hung out there. Let’s face it, Gygax was the man. To me and my friends, he was the God of D&D. I didn’t know that Gygax was the “money man” who handled the biz, and also that Gary wasn’t all that fond of what made Dave’s games great (I imagine, anyway) – Gary was a rules guy, and Dave was the role-play guy.

Now I have to say, I just gamed over the decades and didn’t put much effort into learning the behind the scenes antics. But as an adult I love that stuff, and so in the last year or so have learned so much about Gary and Dave, and others who made the hobby what it is. My minor heroes included Dave Hargrave and Paul Jaques, but Gygax and Arneson got the boat sailing.

It seems that Gary was more into the mechanics of things: encounter charts, stats, lists, various minutiae. But Dave was the true role-player with the unique voicing of NPC’s and getting deeper into characterization. The role-play aspects are what I love the most; the power of bringing a personality to life. So really, I guess in that respect Dave H. is my father of role-playing. That he was a true wargamer, but softened up to include personality and warmth into his gaming style, says a lot for the guy. A certain openness that I think was in my genes as well as a DM. Gary G. was into a lot of the details that I chose to leave a lot out of my game. What Dave was into was a lot of what I loved and chose to build on. I could not get enough character growth in my game.

Even so, Dave came up with a couple of my favorite mechanics – those of hit points and AC. He was a wargamer at the core, and these details came from a civil war wargame he had worked on. These were the concepts we used the most outside of games. Got hurt in the football game and was bleeding from the lip. “Shit, I think I’m down 3 hit points.” Or somebody throws something at you and you dodge it easily “You can’t hit my AC dude!” The only things we came close to using so much in real live was saving throws (“I got a cold, failed my save”), and alignment (instead of asking a chick her sign, we’d say “Hey baby, what’s your alignment?”).

So both these guys came together like chocolate and peanut butter to make a game that has taken up a lot of my life. I love them both. I just wish Dave had appeared in that Futurama episode right next to Gary, rolling a D20 to see if it’s “a pleasure to meet you!”

Joke Games/Joke Characters

I guess this is another concept I have a love/hate relationship in my gaming history. Mostly hate.

James M. over at Grognardia posted the other day regarding an old TSR module called Castle Greyhawk. Having little to do with Sir Gary’s original Greyhawk setting, it turns out (I had never read it) to be a “lighthearted send-up” of Hollywood – great, just what I wanted in a D&D setting.

OK, so Gygax was not exactly “Mr. Serious” when it came to his gaming. Despite being inspired by a lot of good, serious fiction, GG put a certain amount of goofiness into some of this stuff. Making a level out of Alice in Wonderland was just one example of his silly nature when it came to games. But for the most part, his stuff seemed timid compared to some of the jokey Judges Guild products (a lot of which I loved).

But for me in my adult life, the laughter in a game tended to come mostly from the pathos and irony that often pans out during gameplay, and players witty and intelligent verbiage that gets the whole group belting out guffaws. Like last year when I had a new player use my generous stat rolling rules (best 3 of 4 dice, move them around, switch a couple of points, etc.), and he still had shit rolls. Had him try another set, still shitty, Let him move some stats around, still shitty. By the time he said that this was the norm for him when rolling up a PC, the other players and I were ready to pass out from laughing. And not at him - his attitude was so great about being a stat sad sack. Now that’s humor, without injecting Star Trek and cartoon monsters into the mix.

But my serious nature about my fantasy was not always so! Like most people who start D&D as a kid, the characters and games were almost instantly stupid. I mean, what would you expect from 14 year olds? But when I got up in my teens a bit, and had a fantasy world that was starting to grow and flesh out, I wanted my games to be more like the stories I loved – high adventure, romance, and grim determination.

But up until my 20’s there was still a bit of jokey jack joke joke stuff in my games, and I thought I might brainstorm on some examples from the past:

*Something that really stands out is the point around 1982 when a couple friends and I made up the Three Stooges as our characters (I got to run Moe!). We included various attacks, like the “two-finger eye poke” and the “block two-finger eye poke.” Hmmm…forbears of Feats and talents?

*A friend and I ran the kitchen of his father’s pub in Santa Monica. There was a crotchety old guy that hung out there, and a flaming young gay dude, “Gay Bob” we called him, The old guy would get so mad at Bob, and chase him out onto Main Street. Yeah, me and my buddy made up characters for that, except that the crotchety old guy was made into the pseudo dragon familiar of wizard Gay Bob. And Yeah, I painted wizard Bob with flowers on his robes. Sigh. At least they didn’t last more than a game or two.

*A buddy had a character in my game called “Cadille,” a huge black eunuch (get it? Cadillac?). He sounded like a cross between a 70’s pimp and Uncle Remus. Needless to say, not very sensitive. Around this time we seemed to be in competition to come up with the most lame jokey PC’s and NPC’s.

Characters were one thing, but I rarely made entire game sessions a joke (not on purpose, anyway). Not for D&D. “Funhouse Dungeons” sounded interesting too me, but never ran one, and never played in one. I did have a short Champions campaign that I had set in a funny animal world, but even that had real world physics (as opposed to “Toon Heroes” or whatever).

I guess one exception was the first Tegal Manor setting I ran, in which I remember having placed Radium rifle-packing Green Martians from John Carter in the main ballroom for some reason (I think I had some great old figures for them, so I must have wanted to use them). I made up for that by running some great, mostly serious games in the manor years later.

I think the place I had the hardest time keeping things serious was City State of the Invincible Overlord. I ran it apart from my regular D&D world, and had characters start out at high level. I ran it as-is, winging it on anything that was not in the little book that came with the maps. It almost always devolved into the characters causing some major shit (somebody even killed the dolphin that appeared in the bath house) because they were high level and didn’t give a fuck, and running like hell from the city when the real badasses showed up to deal with them.

I remember a memorable Monsters! Monsters! Game I ran. Originally a Tunnels and Trolls game, I used the concepts for D&D. The characters were a hill giant, an intelligent gorilla, ogres, and such. Attacking a small town was big fun. Great images of the giant reaching into 2nd floor bedrooms of sleeping people to squash them, and the gorilla raping women in the barn. Sheesh. It all ended with the monsters attacking a walled city in the second game. Being only 2nd level, the young monster gang were quickly finished off by guardsmen arrows. T&T was sort of made to be a joke game, but that MM based game was just nuts.

By the late 80’s, I kept things fairly serious as far as characters and situations. I could come up with a pun like the next guy, but I’m not wired to find that super-entertaining. How about just having an adventure where the laughs come naturally, from gameplay involving smart and fun people? It never really works to force humor in real life, so why attempt it in a game, where most players enjoy a fairly serious adventure and prefer the humor to be natural – even if they are running a bit of a jokey character (many people don’t realize they are doing so!).

Almost always the “humor” probably sounded better on paper than it did in action.

So how about you? Especially as a youngster, did you indulge in a lot of the jokey stuff? Tell me about the embarrassing character ideas you and your friends came up with, or your experiences with some “Looney Manor” style dungeon. Do you still encounter a lot of this (if you go to lots of conventions, my guess is you will say “YES!”). Do you like it, even prefer it? What factors made a joke game fun for you?