The Recursion King

The Far Planet

2011-09-15T02:20:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I did any Flash work professionally, almost a year in fact, but I'm now back onto that after spending the rest of the time in .Net and JQuery. Anyway, picking up Flash at work to fix and extend other people's projects got me loading it back up at home in the evening, and so I began going through some of my old home brew projects, loading them up and running them.

Most of these projects are unfinished but some are in very well developed states. I tend to produce code the builds an engine, get really enthusiastic about how to solve all of the problems that need to be overcome to make it, then forget to layer the game on top of the engine. As a developer, most of the fun of writing code is solving problems, and by the time that the engine has been built, all of the really difficult problems have been solved. There are exceptions to this, of course, but a consequence of this way of working leads to lots of unfinished projects. Time is the other factor that works against you when you do things for yourself.

So there I was, loading them up and looking at them, realising how close to being a game some of them are, when it occurred to me, why don't I link some of these together, using a story of my own devising, to make a single game. Each of these unfinished projects would form a 'chapter' in the story of the overall game. This would provide a unique experience for the player; one chapter might be a flight sim while another could be strategy, for example.

And so the idea for 'The Far Planet' was born...

A new campaign!

2011-03-01T01:34:00.001-08:00

Well, I ceased running the old Labyrinth Lord campaign after it reached a logical conclusion and put down the role of DM for a few months.

Recently, I decided to take a look at the D&D Cyclopedia, which I've had ever since I was at school but have never actually used as a ruleset by itself. Seeing that the levels rose all the way up to 36 got me thinking... perhaps a campaign, using the Cyclopedia as the ruleset, would be fun!

So I began cataloging which optional rules we would use and made a decision early on; to try and run the rules as they were written with no house rules at all. I made this clear to the original two players of my Labyrinth Lord campaign and asked if they would like to take part. Both of them replied saying, yes, they'd missed the adventuring, and would love to.

Three sessions have now passed. I was originally thinking of running one session every two weeks, but so far, it's been one a week, although I may reduce it to one every two weeks in attempt to avoid any feelings of grinding (which would only really occur on my part). So ... it's a an early success! A one session experiment has led to three sessions... and I'm thinking of now starting the design of a mega dungeon to turn this into a fully fledged campaign.

I already have the setting: a desert area with the party members based in the City of Vultures, which is proving to be very flavoursome and unlike anything we've tried in the past. We've had more roleplaying going on that in the past, and the random encounter reaction tables certainly spice things up a bit, playing strictly by the rule set. The setting too is rich in content to explore, giving me ample space to insert the party guilds into the political groups and start the intrigue off. The party consists of a cleric and a thief, an interesting combination, and they'll be getting reinforcements from their guilds shortly. The thief has yet to find his guild, as finding your guild is one of the mini adventures that I put in for first level characters.

Anyway, ... the adventure is on!

The information age: What happens next

2010-11-16T04:54:00.000-08:00

Well it has been a very long time since I posted anything up here, but the other day, I realised what the future held for society and so I figured it might be a good idea to share that with others. It can be useful from time to time to stop and take stock of the rapid changes around us and see where we are heading; this post is that reflection.

Efforts are currently underway to digitise all books. They started years ago with Google and Microsoft but Microsoft pulled out of the endeavor citing costs. The idea is to create a digital archive of all books, works of art and so on so that future generations may enjoy them. A noble effort, to be sure.

There has recently been a change in the concept of ownership to licensing. Digital Rights Management has allowed middlemen who run store fronts to restrict the use of the goods that they sell, moving away from citizens owning the items they pay for and instead replacing it with a model where they are licensing it. This actually began much earlier, with software end user license agreements, but was originally unenforcable except through the law. Now, there is a direct mechanism in place that allows the very thing that transferred from the store to the citizen to disable itself if the company running the store orders it. An example of this is sort of arrangement occurs with the Apple iTunes store and with Sky and its HD boxes (if you cancel your account, they disable everything you recorded on the box so you can no longer watch it - thats because you never owned it only a right to watch it, as part of the subscription model).

Once all works have been digitised, which will take a long time yet, digitised versions and physical (real) versions will exist side by side for quite a while. Perhaps fifty years later, or maybe a hundred, the physical versions will be destroyed.

They'll be destroyed in two ways. The top down approach to their destruction will likely occur in secret, as big swatches of physical media are selected by those in power and incinerated, without anybody really noticing. There may be a few that voice complaints but it will be too late by then to recover them, but because electronic versions will exist, there will not be a strong argument to prevent this from happening.

The second way that physical media will be destroyed is via the bottom up approach, in other words, by the comman man. Books will become so cheap they will become worthless. People will no longer desire them a few generations after everything is digital and the publishers have figured out how to hook people into the new formats. Think about how the iPad today has convinced so many that it is a must buy with its flashy interface, the same goal being applied to electronic books. They'll eventually crack it and then the newer generations will only desire the newer electronic formats. Today, as I write this, selling videos is very much like this scenario that I am decribing. You can take video casettes to a second hand store and they'll give you a penny each. A penny! It's not worth the bother any more. So, instead of trying to sell them, people are simply thrown away into landfills. This is the second way that physical media will be destroyed; a natural process, if you will, caused by simple economics.

Once all physical works are destroyed and nobody owns hard copies of the words that are in these books, and merely rents them instead, the books themselves will be changed at the source to suit the needs of those in power. Being centralised, they will be able to be update them at will in order to censor, to subtly change meanings or even to insert new meanings. Who will know any different? Scientists will come out and talk about the fallibility of the human memory based on the latest research into psychology for anyone that swears that, for example, Darwin's origins of species did not say evolution through war is inevitable no matter what his eReader is telling him. The vast majority will believe the scientists especially when they rent their copy and their reader tells them it /does/ say that.

So, to summarise, once an entire civilisation's culture is digitised, it's hard copies will be destroyed and its culture edited at will by those in power. Perhaps its culture will even be deleted and replaced with something else; or simply deleted altogether by a hostile, foreign power as part of a future step by step genocidal process.

Welcome to what happens next, after the information age...

Seven Leagues - First impressions

2010-07-14T05:34:00.000-07:00

I fancied a change of game for our weekly sunday sessions and so parked our existing Labyrinth Lord campaign, with its array of tweaks, house rules and 8-th level characters and took a break for a few weeks. During this time, I looked at a number of different game systems and even started compiling my own house rules into a roleplaying game of my own.

I was wanting to do something a little less dark. I'd spent over sixty game sessions (a year and half) creating and running adventures that took my players into dank and dangerous ruins, sewers, pitch black caverns and so forth and it had reached the point where I wanted to do something quite different to that.

The idea of injecting colour into a dark and dreary scene was a strong motivation to do something different. Switching out the dungeon for a forest was one such idea and a lot of other ideas began to flow out from that simple tweak. I began writing up custom classes based on mythical beasts, collating house rules and so forth, and that got me part way to making my own roleplaying game.

And then I came across Seven Leagues.

Seven Leagues is an intriguing roleplaying game based around the idea of shared story telling, something we are all actively engaged in, to various degrees, when we roleplay anyway. The setting was fairy tale which matched somewhat with where I was going in my own mind anyway, as I was wanting more enchantment and colour in the world I was taking my players to. As I read the rules, I became even more interested: How can players play anything they want and the game not be just not broken, but that's how its supposed to work? Some very unique and innovative mechanics support this.

I have yet to play a game, because, alas, the session I set aside for this was taken up by character creation. Imagine sitting down with a group of players who are very familiar with D&D, World of Warcraft, Whitewolf games etc and telling them... right, you can play anything you want... all you've got to do is to decide what! As a consequence, character creation took a long time and became a bit of a collaborative process, not just with me (as DM, or in the case of Seven Leagues, the Narrator) and the player in question but between the players themselves. It was very interesting.

We ended up with a party of a Scottish Dragon, an English Alchemachanic and a ghostly Necromancer. Quite a mix... and highly original!

I can't wait for the next session when I throw them into my story, set in a faerie land of dream!

I wish I may, I wish I might... Wizards and wishes

2010-06-25T01:39:00.000-07:00

A quick post this one as I have something on my mind to put out there: do mages really need any spells other than Wish?

With wish, magic can do anything... and is... well magical again! Perhaps throw in minor wish for low level mages and restrict it to once per day per level (or once per week per level, or something of that ilk).

Perhaps this is all that's ever needed in a magic system....?

Fantasy magazine about to disappear...

2010-06-03T04:14:00.001-07:00

...it's looking for more lifeblood with some new subscribers or it may shut down for good. I stumbled across this story on Blackgate about Realms of Fantasy, a magazine for fantasy fiction, and feel it is a real shame if it comes to pass that it disappears.

I cannot recommend the magazine personally as I have not yet read it, but I've plumped down the money for a subscription because I did not even know that there were magazines offering new fantasy fiction still left. Perhaps it's because I am in the UK, or maybe I'm just a bit out of touch with these things. Anyhow if you think about many of the famous authors in the past that helped define the genre, they were writing their stories for magazines (Howard's Conan, Burrough's John Carter of Mars).

If like me, you enjoy original fantasy fiction, why not give it a try. It'd be shame for these things to disappear, we may just miss them when they're gone...

The Black Gate story about Realms of Fantasy.

Myth vs the Machines

2010-06-02T01:24:00.001-07:00

I had an idea at the weekend for a game where mankind is under attack by machines and its greatest heroes and mythical beasts assemble to fight them off.

I'd make this as a computer roleplaying game, throwing together a raytracer I have with a pixel graphic single screen battle engine for the fights and have it run through a web browser. It would be an old school type game at heart, but instead of utilising the familiar classes or their variants (e.g. fighter, mage, cleric, thief) you'd recruit from heroes of legend and mythical beasts.

Of course, I'd probably need testers for it.

The idea of android villians being melted by dragon fire and turned into scrap is strangely appealing to me ;-)

If only floating disc scaled...

2010-05-30T14:38:00.001-07:00

The description for the Floating Disc spell in Labyrinth Lord goes a little like this:

Floating Disc
Level: 1
The caster creates a slightly concave, circular plane of force
that follows him about and carries loads. The disk is 3 feet in
diameter and 1 inch deep at its center. It can hold 500
pounds. If used to transport a liquid, its capacity is 2 gallons.
The disk floats approximately 3 feet above the ground at all
times and remains level. It floats along horizontally within spell
range and will accompany the caster with an equal movement
rate. If not otherwise directed, it maintains a constant interval
of 6 feet between itself and the caster, and will follow the
caster without prompting to maintain a minimum of 6'
distance.

What a terrific spell. If only it scaled beyond its simple first level abilities, they'd perhaps be no need for the levitation spell and possibly the flight spell also. If somehow the distance to the caster could be variable, it could be used to do all sorts of things, such as to create a stepping stone across a chasm or a river. Perhaps it could be even be used, as is, to hold a door shut like the hold portal spell, as 500 pounds of force is quite a lot to bring to bear to shift the thing.

An Overkill penalty for D&D

2010-05-27T01:16:00.000-07:00

I recently read an excellent blog post about 'Overkill Penalties'. This is the idea of penalising min-max players to bring them in line with more casual players or players that want to concentrate more on the roleplaying of their characters instead of the roll-playing aspects.

In D&D, the type of person who builds a character around a concept instead of mechanics, for example, choosing on purpose to use a spear despite its d6 damage over a long sword that does d8, is at a distinct disadvantage to the player who only ever picks a bastard sword because it deals 2d4 damage. The post I've linked to talks about doing penalising these min-maxers, who are less interested in the game setting and only in generating massive numbers, in a more modern game setting or a futuristic one, but this general idea easily apply to fantasy ones too.

Here's a quick idea for how to implement it in D&D; anyone that takes an enemy to -10hp from a positive number of hitpoints, in one hit, unleashes the spirit of the fallen humanoid as a spectre that remains on the mortal coil because of the nature of its violent death. Feel free to tweak the 'spectre threshold' based on the edition of D&D you are using and so on. Why a spectre? It's not massively overpowered but is a hugely dangerous creature with its draining powers. It could always be swapped out with a wraith - or wight - at lower levels.

So why bother doing this or even considering it at all? It's about putting the emphasis on using the least possible amount of force to get the job done. It would help not just with min-maxers (i.e. people who try to game the system for purely mechanical advantage, often at the expense of everyone else) but also with situations that really should be handled with more delicacy. The party mage might be a bit more careful throwing his fireballs around, for instance and the paladin may not simply smite every enemy and then rest after his smites have all run out. You might even find players switching to subdual damage when a foe is running low on hitpoints, letting the enemies merely slip into unconsciousness so the party can continue on their way instead of slaying them outright.

What are the downsides? Depending on your rule set, critical hits could accidentally unleash vengeful spirits. You could always rule that they do not, they are exceptions, or leave it on, as an unexpected and unintended possible consequence of driving your sword right into the heart of an opponent and ending his life in a split second.

The danger of death

2010-05-25T02:12:00.001-07:00

As a DM to a regular Labyrinth Lord game, I often revise my encounter strategy for the adventures I create, continually trying to improve the experience. Both me and my players enjoy a bit of strategy in the battles and a bit of danger and excitement too.

I have discovered that short battles are generally better than long ones and often battles where the player is massively outnumbered by the enemy, or is able to gang up on just a few powerful enemies, work well. Surprise is a big element in battles going well so I often throw monsters in to the fights that have never been encountered before... and some of my players have been playing D&D for a very long time so it's always fun to throw something at them that makes everyone of them go 'what the hell is THAT?'

One of the things that has been going through my mind recently is the danger of death. I'm wondering, is there really any point in simulating battles that really have no chance of hurting the party? Might it be better to handle those fights with some simple narrative texts 'You quickly overcome the bodyguards, who prove no match for your skills, leaving you with the champion who slowly draws his glowing sword - and far from being cowed by your martial prowess - leaps right at you!' and simulate only the battles that might actually pose a real risk to the group as a whole?

All poison should be lethal

2010-05-20T04:38:00.000-07:00

The more I play D&D - and I play every week almost without fail - the more I experiment with bits and pieces of it. My combats are quite well known amongst my players for featuring bizarre creatures from all editions of D&D despite the ruleset I'm using being a mishmash of Labyrinth Lord and AD&D (essentially, I use Labyrinth Lord as the base and expand with 2nd and 3rd edition spells). I even throw in a few I have made up myself.

What happens is that various pictures of creatures emerge from different editions. In general, these are in line with what you might expect. Most creatures from basic D&D have far fewer hitpoints and limited damage ranges compared to creatures from 4th edition, which make for good boss creatures and leaders. However, despite the apparent deadliness of the monsters on paper, a lot of enemies I field at the players from later editions seem to have had the lethality drained out of them. By this, I am of course referring to poison.

When poison is save or die, there is real drama at the table. A character may have 50 hitpoints (quite a lot for Labyrinth Lord) and yet, here is a single damage point and the potential for instant death. And it all hangs on a die roll... That creates major panic. Its nullified somewhat by the party cleric keeping neutralise poison memorised and having a raise dead and a resurrect scroll... but everybody seems to understand that these resources are finite and the danger is there. It just doesn't have the same effect when the poison simply is inflicting hitpoint damage per round, and nor does it when I play a game like the Bard's Tale.

So, I may upgrade every single poision wielding enemy to the save or die type. My group has generally very nice poison saving throws on their characters, do have some antivenoms on them and there is the cleric too. I normally give an hour, when someone is infected by lethal poison and collapses into unconsciousness, before they will finally die of it. In that hour, panic rises...

Real old school CRPG's

2010-04-27T03:36:00.000-07:00

Here's a quick list of my top old school RPG's from yesteryear, largely inspired by my recent forays into Abandonware and a realisation that they don't make this style of game any more (except, perhaps, the recent Eye of the Beholder remake on the GBA, see below).

The Bard's Tale

So recently I was harking after a good dungeon crawl and I came across abandonware. This is where the company that made the game has gone out of business, so you can just download it. Using the DosBox emulator, I've been playing through this classic recently which I never completed first time around. Mangar's tower, I could never get into the damn thing. One thing about this addictive game is how hard it is. Not only are the masses of monsters trying to kill your weakest character all the time but the dungeons themselves are so fiendishly designed I've never played a game so difficult to beat. Areas of darkness put your torches out, sliding floor plates spin you around in areas you don't notice, invisible teleporters shoot you round to identical areas in the same dungeon level. Absolutely brilliant, but sometimes frustrating. Part one of a trilogy.

Pool of radiance

A great game on the Amiga this one, also with a city as a base like the Bards Tale, but with much of the city unsafe and needing clearing out of monsters to make safe once more. Tactical combat was great in this one, with positioning of party members becoming very important and the encumberance rules affecting movement rates. Part one of a series of five games, I think. I can remember playing the fifth at my friend's cousin's house, taking a couple of characters each between three of us!

Bloodwych

A two player dungeon crawl! I must confess, when I played this as a kid, I never quite got the combat and magic aspects. Sometimes I would completely hammer the enemies and sometimes I would get slaughtered. It featured some very interesting dungeon puzzles that would require each player to position his party in the correct place to say, open a portcullis. Good fun!

Eye of the Beholder (GBA)

Just look at these screenshots:

This really is an old school game, on a more modern platform. The beauty of it is that it also works on the Nintendo DS, so when I picked this up I gave it a thorough play through. It has one of the worst menu systems on the planet and a very confusing movement system (you move in the tactical combats by pushing diagonal) but, if you can get past that, the dungeon is very deviously designed. Not in the same league as the Bards Tale's by any shot, but much, much harder than more modern roleplaying games. There's something very old school about realising the dungeon itself is more than just a backdrop, but an obstacle that works against your progress. I'd recommend picking this up from eBay.

Wandering monsters

2010-01-26T01:25:00.000-08:00

Recently I added a simple stop watch to my sunday Labyrinth Lord gaming sessions. I set the timer for 45 minutes and start it going at some point during the game. Whenever the alarm goes off - no matter where the heroes are or what they are doing, I roll for wandering monsters.

This has led to some interesting encounters as you can probably imagine. One time the heroes were battling carrion crawlers in an abandoned temple and suddenly a bunch of skeletons and ghouls joined the fight.

I like the unpredictability of approaches like this. Imagine if the heroes were in a tavern in town and the alarm goes off. I have to work that into the story some how. Did the skeletons suddenly break through from the cellar, or is the town itself under attack? It is good to stretch yourself as a DM a little with things like this I find.

I've been thinking about expanding this idea from just wandering monsters. Sometimes in game sessions there is a lot of fighting already. On the previous game session, for instance, we had a pitched battle against fifteen bugbears because the heroes did not want to pay an extortionate amount of gold to cross a bridge and the following combat was against four efreets. In that session, I did not want to lengthen the combat further with more monsters arriving. So sometimes there is a need to do something else with the wandering monster results.

I have a trap dice and I think I will start including that in my wandering monster rolls, essentially, having the party run into a trap. Traps are encounters too, especially if they may be detectable before hand from either a thief or a clue in a description and can be fun to disarm or work around... providing they are of course not deadly.

This got me thinking further. As one definition for the word encounter is a problem, I wonder what other types of problems could be thrown the heroes way on a wandering monster roll. Social problems, the ones that you must talk through, spring to mind, and would require considerable thought but could be fun. I wonder what other classes of problem would be fun to throw into the mix?

D&D, religion and the cleric

2010-01-25T02:24:00.001-08:00

Some people wish to drop the cleric class from their games of Dungeons and Dragons. Some have already done this, folding the spell list into the magic user class whereas some have dropped it completely. Some people don't like the thief class either, because its inclusion in the system seemed to mean that other classes couldn't do stuff they could do before.

Dropping the cleric class is interesting, though. I considered it myself once, but only because the party of adventurers I take into my imaginary world of Summit on a sunday afternoon don't have one. We ended up solving that by keeping the class but turning one of the fighters into a 'blessed fighter' after he had a religious experience - he's now akin to a paladin.

One of the things that interests me about people wanting to drop the cleric class is their focus on the crunch i.e. the mechanics of the game. What I'm wanting to think about here, though, is the cleric's role in the world as a crusading man who channels the power of his god to further its purpose on the mortal plane. Viewed this way, the cleric's role becomes important within the game world, and he's not just reduced to a healer like so many computer roleplaying games do with him.

My big question though is this. If any of you have considered dropping the cleric from your games is it because you are atheist in world view? I suspect that atheists would dislike the cleric, and the game's focus on him and the DM building campaigns around him, despite the abundance of gods within the ancient world and medieval world that Dungeons and Dragons, and its inspirational fiction, is based around. In other words, if we didn't live in a mostly secular society, but lived in a parrallel universe with a theocracy running the show, might we feel differently about this and perhaps be thinking of dropping the magic user instead? In other words, does discussing dropping the cleric as a class reflect more on our own world views and less on the rules themselves?

Food for thought, if nothing else ;-)

Chasing the party into the jaws of crocodiles

2010-01-18T01:47:00.000-08:00

The game sessions continue on at a weekly pace, every sunday. I'm having great fun designing adventures and encounters for my little party of hereoes to face. I often think of designing villians as being like setting up bowling pins to be knocked over. I enjoy the drama of pushing the heroes towards their limits and the panic setting in, followed by the relief of victory as the enemy falls and the danger passes.

Yesterday, for example, I had a blast with an encounter I had designed. A dozen orcs came streaming out of a cave at the adventuring party, screaming and shouting. Their heads were covered with lizard like helmets. To get to this point, the group had progressed down a path in a forest and gone under three archways that were each carved to resemble dragons and painted white. The heroes fully expected to face a dragon, especially when they saw that three of the green skinned creatures, who they only suspected might be orcs but were unsure, were trying to pull on the leash of something to drag it out of the cave.

So the party fled towards a river crossing, driven there by the orc attack ... and straight into their trap. Straight into the jaws of crocodiles! What they had seen as bits of floating wood and detritus on the river surface were dangerous predators.

The three orcs were pulling a wyven out of the cave and then let it off its leash and all hell broke loose!

The orc leader ended up panicking due to a magical screaming arrow that the heroes fired at one of his men, who fell forward instantly dead, and ordered a retreat. The wyvern had been loosed, however and continued on its flight to the group but got caught up in the crocodile attack. It slew all of the crocodiles and almost killed one of the heroes, who fell back into the river and decided not to come back up for air to hide from the beast. The wizard hid from it behind a tree, using his magical cloak to help camouflage him.

The beast flew back into the cave and the heroes emerged from their hiding places and moved swiftly on. Only three orcs had been slain and it was a terrific encounter, despite the heroes being eighth and seventh level!

Both the heroes lived to fight another day, however and continued on their way to further adventure deeper in the forest. We had other memorable enounters that night, but for me as the DM, that was my favourite one. The players have expressed an interest in returning to the cave at some point soon, too :-)

Using Wizards 4E Miniatures in Labyrinth Lord

2010-01-08T04:08:00.000-08:00

Happy new year everyone!

I quite like Wizards of the Coast's miniature ranges. In fact, I have quite a few on display in my living room. The Gargantuan dragons are excellent, and I look forward to the day when I can put my group against them.

Not only have some rare monsters come out of the miniature lines but with each one you also get a nice little stat card for the critter, normally with stats on it for the D&D miniatures game and sometimes for the 4th Edition game itself. Now I don't play 4th edition, but I do like the stat cards. Why? Because you can use them as boss monsters and leaders.

I've devised a little system for converting the stats from the cards for the miniatures game, back into Labyrinth Lord. This has to be done because the base damage the creatures inflict is too high to be used as is (a minimum of 5 points is too high).

AC is the easiest one to convert. Simply take the value from 20, because the system begins at 10 and counts up. So AC 11 would become AC 9, AC 21 would become AC -1.

Next up is hitpoints. I don't know about you, but I'm happy keeping those the way they are. Nasty boss fights ensue!

The last one I convert is damage. I do this like so:

5 points = d4
10 points = d8
15 points = d12
20 points = 2d8
25 points = 2d10
30 points = 3d8
35 points = 3d10
40 points = 4d8
50 points = 2d20
100 points = 4d20

This is till very nasty, in terms of raw damage output, but not nearly as bad, especially as the average damage pulls it towards the middle of the range. For example, 4d20 will average 42, considerably less nasty than 100 points. Of course, I don't expect to wield a creature like this in an encounter until the party hit maximum level.

The to hit rolls are fairly easy for me, since I can translate them back to THAC0 by simply taking away from 20. In my group, it's even easier, as I get my players to roll defence rolls (sort of a reverse attack roll, a d20 minus their AC, a modified higher roll is better for them) and can use them as is with that system.

Also speed is nice and easy for me since we fight our battles on a hex system, built using the Heroscape tiles, so I can directly relate it to hexes per round.

Living used to be a whole lot cheaper

2009-12-28T00:58:00.001-08:00

Not so long ago, being alive didn't cost much money.

Fruit grew on trees, meat was to be found on wild animals and water just fell from the sky - a gift from nature (or the gods). Houses were found in caves or built from trees, possibly by a parent for a child. Travel was very cheap because we just used our legs, or sat atop an another animal as it moved. When people did things for each other it was out of kindness, or love, or necessity, or possibly to trade favours.

Now, however, for us at least, almost every aspect of life has been successfully monetised by someone, somewhere... and so life is a hell of a lot of expenses.

The mindless; the enemy of the sentient

2009-12-23T01:57:00.000-08:00

Sometimes crazy ideas come to me in fits of creativity and I feel like sharing them through my blog to get other opinions. This is one of those posts.

Wandering monsters are often sentient creatures, but really, why are they? They arrive, mostly fight the party and hopefully are defeated. So why not make all wandering monster lists mindless creatures? By mindless I mean vermin, oozes, zombies and so on.

I'm considering going down this route and seeing what happens. I can even tie it into my light vs dark campaign mythology. Perhaps, the mindless are creatures of the dark, making most sentient races creatures of the light. This might give my campaign a lovecraftian feel as a consequence and it might fit in well: the heroes of the light and its sentient races trying to hold back a tide of the mindless dark and its evil, intelligent manipulators.

WOTC going after the WOW market

2009-12-22T04:38:00.001-08:00

So I heard today that Wizards of the coast is gunning for the World of Warcraft market and this helped shape the design of the fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons. Now, I don't know how true this is - and I don't play 4th edition myself, although one day I may give it a spin.

Assuming this is true, this strikes me as being very silly indeed. D&D has been the number one roleplaying game for 35 years. It was the first roleplaying game and I know first hand that there is magic in this game. I can't quite say how it is invoked, but it's there in play, captivating us as players and keeping us coming back for more. Some people have been playing it for decades. So does Wizards of the coast perhaps not have faith in its own product any more - that it can't stand on its own legs and must instead copy another game which itself wouldn't exist if it weren't for their own game?

I'll let you into a secret. In thirty five years, all the computer hardware that people are playing World of Warcraft on will be relegated to landfills and museums. The servers will have long ago been switched off or will be running some other game, the next big thing on the massively multiplayer front. World of Warcraft will be remembered fondly but it will be /dead/.

But in 35 more years, there will still be people playing Dungeons and Dragons, picking up polyhedral shaped dice and simulating throwing fireballs around at supernaturally regenerating trolls, kicking doors down and searching chests for traps.

If what I've been told is true, then Wizards of the coast have it all backwards and need a reality check. Competitors to D&D have always experimented with different formats, rules systems, become popular and come and gone. Some of them are still with us, but then so is D&D... because it really was sprinkled with magic by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson all those years ago.

First encounter with a dragon

2009-12-21T02:45:00.001-08:00

We've had a sudden flurry of snow over the past few days and many of the roads weren't gritted. This caused transport problems for most of my players, meaning I ran a solo session last night for the player who lives within walking distance of my house. It was a good session, memorable for a few reasons, but mostly for an encounter with a dragon.

The elf was making his way through the Overgrowth - a vast, overgrown and dangerous forest that the locals reckon has been overrun by demons. A mysterious fortress sprang up almost over night within the Overgrowth but a week previously. A visit to a sooth sayer confirmed that the fortress and Rendclaw - a demon that the party mage released from his icey prison - are linked. Vowing to sort this mess out, the elf ventured off alone into the tangled mass of undergrowth and tree branches.

Within this place, he fought many battles and overcame numerous obstacles. He found a trail with large, clawed animals tracks running down it and recognised them as belonging to a dragon. Unperterbed, he continued down the trail. The trail began to grow cold, the briars and bracken becoming freezing, his breath becoming visible in front of his face. The elf, wearing the Mantle of the Ice bear, was unaffected by the cold, and continued on.

Now the party have an average level of seven, about the right sort of level to drop a dragon into the adventures and see what happens. So, this is what I had done and this is what I was about to find out.

The elf continues down the icey path, noting how sudden the temperature has changed. The path opens out into a clearing and the elf makes himself invisible to animals. He then spies a white, reptilian beast eating a wolf. It looks up and he's unsure if its seen him.

The player considers what to do. He looks at his character sheet, his spell cards and his weapons... and decides to try and fight the white dragon - on his own!

He entangles the dragon. Tree roots, plants and vines wrap around the great beast, holding it in place, and he fires an enchanted arrow from his magical bow at the creature. His aim is true and he scores an injury. Then, it opens its mouth and a great blast of incredible cold issues forth like icey death, freezing plants and chilling the elf to the bone. He rolls out of the way but still takes some of the damage.

The player panics and runs away as fast as his legs can carry him!

This is the first encounter any of my group have had with a dragon... the elf may not have defeated it, but he lived to tell the tale!

New spell : Detect Weapons

2009-12-15T03:24:00.001-08:00

Detect Weapons
Level 1
Sphere: Divination
Range 10' per level of the caster
Area of Effect 30' square

This spell is often employed by court wizards and mages that are hired by the royal court, to provide an extra layer of security for rulers. Some High Temples also employ hedge wizards who use this spell, from the shadows, too.

Upon casting, the all weapons within a thirty foot square area will immediately glow a bright red that shows through clothing. In addition, the caster will instantly know what weapons all within the area have in their possession, concealed or not. He will not know if a weapon is magical (i.e. it does not identify it), nor how much ammunition is possessed if a weapon requires it. If a weapon requires assembly and is not assembled, then if any of its parts would be considered weapons (for example, an iron pipe could be wielded as a club) then these will be revealed to the caster, too.

Proof against scrying may defeat this spell at the DM's discretion.

Heroes falling in love... with the villain!

2009-12-14T03:40:00.000-08:00

The other week I ran a solo session with one of the players, who uses an Elf character. In the session he had cleared a cave system of nasties and fought his way through a mansion that belonged to a Succubus... he was doing very well, until he set eyes upon the Succubus, that is!

The Lady Gwendolyne is no ordinary succubus, she's an ancient evil that the ancients trapped in ice to rid the world of her. Ossiric, the party wizard, in his infinite quest for knowledge, freed her and since then she's been a naughty girl, seducing powerful men, toying with them, robbing them blind and then introducing them to various gruesome ends. Being an evil manipulator of men, any man that sees her risks becoming charmed and worse: they risk falling in love.

Which is exactly what happened.

Now things started to get complicated! Gwendolyne asked our hero to hand over all of his valuables; which of course he did, to please his love. She then sent him on a quest to get the treasure from the Dire Eel tunnels, which meant lots of swimming through submerged passages to get very old valuable items for her. He did this too, finding some neat magical gear in the process, but all for the love of an otherworldly woman.

The session ended with the player stating he wasn't going to tell the rest of the players that he was charmed, but let them find out later. This was going to be interesting!

In my session yesterday, all the players were back (except for the party's thief). The elf cooked up a story for them, stating he hadn't met the succubus who the party were supposed to slay. Before all of this had taken place, they had made a deal with the Serpent Queen wherein she had provided aid to kill the Ghoul King but in return the Queen wanted the Succubus dead, for she was jealous of her beauty. Being honour bound by duty, the party had set off to do just this.

However, the Succubus had also imparted to the Elf the knowledge of how to leave the Deep Dark, to return to the surface (which is the overall campaign goal!). She had done this when she ordered the Elf to get more gold for her; he was supposed to raid the nearby port town and return. So at the start of the latest session, he's in the raft ready to sail out of the great cave lake in the Deep Dark. He finds it pretty easy to convince the group to go along with his plan - i.e. to sail to the surface.

All is going to plan until the Serpent Queen got involved. To leave the Deep Dark, the group had to sail along an underground river, going right past the Serpent City. Unfortunately, the Serpent Queen had blocked the river with two trireme warships. After showing the party that the Succubus lived, by letting them peer into a crystal ball to see for themselves, she ordered them back to fulfil their end of the bargain. The Succubus had to die or she wouldn't let them out.

So, the party return to face the Succubus... and in the confrontation, they discover that the Elf is in love with her! Not only that, but he will let no harm come to her. To make matters even worse, one of the fighters becomes charmed by her; splitting the heroes in half: two for her, two against.

Undaunted by this recent turn of events, Ossiric the wizard and Brigette the fighter cook up a plan to get rid of her anyway. The mage uses his magic and casts fear upon both the elf and the Succubus - an ingenious solution so they do not have to hurt friend, instead he cowers in the corner of the room and they move past him - while the fighter pushes past the charmed one. This brings the charm to a head: will Boris Blood hurt his friend Brigette Wyvern Hunter? He gets an additional saving throw because of the dilema. He makes it! This breaks the charm and the party go in for the kill on the Succubus. They make short work of her now her powers have been rendered ineffective - she has already played her ace cards. Finally, the world is rid of this ancient manipulator of men, and the elf's love fades as the female demon's life does.

A brilliant conclusion to a complex scenario! :-)

Social networks - genius

2009-12-11T01:39:00.000-08:00

If someone came to your door and said, show me all of your photos, tell me everything that you've been doing and everything about yourself, would you?

I know I wouldn't. I'd send the stranger on his way and close the front door quickly. Yet that is exactly what we are doing with the social networking websites. We are telling them everything about ourselves.

But who are they? They are strangers, private corporations who exist to make money (as all businesses do). Their business model is to make money from data. And they go much further than just my simple example above, its more like they come over to your house and photocopy all of your photos and information (simulating how some social networks, such as Facebook, do not ever delete your data even if you close your account).

I used to work for a company that made its entire revenue from selling data. Data is worth money, lots of money. I'm a little disturbed by how easily social networking websites have found it to trick us into surrendering private information to them.

Perhaps that is the real genius of the social networks; you wouldn't tell a stranger you had never met the same information you tell the web... but are happy to tell a faceless corporation the same things because your friends are.

Be careful people. Big business has its own interests at heart.

Finding my own style - a years journey

2009-11-30T06:50:00.000-08:00

I began in a similar way to most old school Dungeon Masters when I started playing Labyrinth Lord over a year ago, in that I would use just a few notes and go from there, expanding them in play to bring them to life, but have since allowed my approach to drift and so have now developed my own style.

When I began, I ran some unconnected adventures, some of which were really bare bones and some of which were fully fledged boxed or printed products. Sometimes I would even run random dungeons. I connected them together very loosely so the campaign emerged as a result of play, rather than being structured up front. However, when my players hit 4th level, I felt it was time to shift things up a gear. So, I began thinking about a campaign, one that wasn't simply emergent, but had a beginning, a middle and possible endings.

I now run a campaign of very tightly connected adventures and quests. However, because I am still writing the campaign as we play it, week by week, I can make adjustments as necessary based on what the party does. I find this to be a very effective technique and would recommend it. I am 150 sides of A4 into it so far, without including the maps themselves, and there's yet more to come.

I'm finding a great approach that works for me is to begin with just a map. Sometimes I make one myself and other times I pick one from a published book. I then use only the names of places, how the bit looks on the map itself and the context within my own campaign as a starting point for what will actually be there. This frees up my imagination, helping to unhook it from game mechanics and standard roleplaying conventions, letting me think more clearly. I can then begin thinking properly about what should be there, why the location exists even exists in the first place, what (if anything) populates it... and so on. All the while I bear in mind the quest... but because the map wasn't actually designed to support the quest in the first place it ends up having little bits here and there that exist because they do and not because they were created to support the quest itself. I find that players respond to this quite well. Sometimes they will spend time trying to figure out something as though it is a puzzle when it isn't - I put this down mostly to the way computer games are designed (like a corridor with nothing to do but go onwards and every obstacle has to be overcome in order to keep going), something I do not want to replicate! However, the areas feel interesting, there are mysteries that never get solved and the places feel more real.

We're having a blast and I thought I would share this approach with you, because if you're anything like me, you might enjoy learning about other styles of Dungeon Mastering that work a treat.

The Spells of Retep, the astounding, the crazy

2009-11-20T05:39:00.000-08:00

These are the spells of the master mage Retep, penned by his own hand devised by his own incredible mind... but... whatever happened to the Astounding Retep?

Retep's Contagious Dance with the Fairies
Level: 1
Upon casting, the mage suddenly begins an uncontrollable dancing jig. There is no music - well at least that anyone else can hear, but nevertheless the caster continues to move in the most spasmodic, disjointed and downright disturbing way for 2d4 rounds. During this time, she is extremely hard to hit and gains a +6 AC bonus but cannot do anything except this strange, alluring dance except maybe accompany it with grunts, oohs, aahs and perhaps a little singing.
Anyone who attacks the mage risks getting caught up in the magical dance. They must make a saving throw vs wands or be compelled to join in the dance for the duration of the spell. Dance partners - as they become - cannot act, only dance, adding their own weird movements into the mix. They too gain a +6 AC bonus and any who attack them risk joining the frivolities too.

Retep's Massive Frog Jump
Level: 1
Range: 15'
When cast, the mage can make a single jump up to fifteen foot upwards and across, while gribbeting like a frog. The leap can be over obstacles and other creatures and the caster always lands safely, albeit in an embarrassing heap!

Retep's Spinning Bastard Beard
Level: 2
Duration: 1 round per level.
Upon completion of the spell, the caster's beard grows to extraordinary lengths and hardens into sharp points at the end and begins whipping around like a propeller. The Spinning Bastard Beard grants an extra melee attack per round to the mage, which inflicts d3 damage and automatic knockback on any enemy it hits. If the wizard forgoes all other attacks, he may powerswing the Bastard Beard.

Retep's Flash of Inspiration
Level:3
Many people suffer from a lack of ideas when confronted with an unusual problem. In such a situation, this spell proves invaluable. Upon casting, the mage faces the dumbfounded individual in question and lifts (or opens) his robes. Something, previously hidden, is revealed!

Whatever happened to Retep?
Level: 4
Range: 100'
The mage points at a target after completing the spell and says simply 'You... or me?'. Roll a d3. On a 3, the target is instantly and irrecovably destroyed and can never be raised and is replaced with a bowl of petunias. On a 2, the mage and the target simply switch places and there is a distinct whiff of Old Spice in the air. On a 1, the caster is instantly destroyed, except for her boots, which simply smoulder.

Mimic vs Smoke monster

2009-11-16T05:36:00.001-08:00

My most recent game session, last night, featured some crazy but cool moments. Recently, the party mage and thief had pulled a couple of artefacts from a dream world into the real world (a dagger that can poison anything and an orb that can imprison souls). The most recent session 's star of the show was probably not a player, but the orb.

The group entered a room with a chest at the back of it. The room was clearly an armory as it was lined with racks of weapons. As they entered the room, one of the fighters accidentally stepped on a trip wire. A bladed pendulum swung downwards, hitting the hero, but he survived. This understandably made the group nervous of other traps within this room, so the wizard decided to release a skeleton that he had previously trapped within the Orb of Dominion, further into the room, to set any remaining traps off.

Everyone else in the group left the room and the mage did indeed do this. Three quarters of the way down the room, the skeleton appeared and came running at the mage to attack him (the imprisoned creatures emerge in a berserk state!). Prepared for this, the mage dispatched the skeleton and trapped it back inside the Orb. Now happy that most of the room did not contain traps, he decided to do the same thing again, but this time to place the skeleton next to the chest.

What the group did not know, was that the chest was a mimic, so when the skeleton appeared bang next to the chest, the mimic attacked! A mouth formed upon the chest and it gobbled up the skeleton!

That was a funny moment!

Cue the rest of the group storming in to the room to fight the mimic, who was then imprisoned with the Orb. A little later, in a fight against a dozen Vokes (smoke monsters) the mimic was released and began gobbling up the enemies. Another funny moment!

After all the monsters had been killed, the party re-defeated the mimic and the wizard once again trapped it within his Orb. I wonder what will face the party's pet mimic next ;-)

Dm interpreted magical items

2009-10-23T03:14:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest problems with roleplaying games and magical items is that they are not really magical. They are more like appliances of science (e.g. technology) where the science behind the device is not known. Sort of like Arthur C Clark does magic items.

Magic really needs mystery to feel right. A wand of lightning bolts, for example, is infinitely cool and does provide some roleplaying possibilities, but it is too predictable and known to ever feel magical. In fact, its more like a sort of cannon that a wizard carries around with him.

Numerous attempts have been made in the past to address these issues, like for example nerfing the identify spell so it doesn't identify the mechanical attribtues of magical items. This is quite good, as the players do not necessarily know everything about an item; although knowing an item is a wand of lightning is pretty much all they need to know to figure out everything about it because they already understand the lightning bolt spell.

I'm wondering if the problem is not the players, but the source material. The item flows out of the pages of the rulebook to the adventure, the DM and finally the player. But what if the item text was very different?

Instead of saying a wand of lightning, what if it simply said a wand that hums with static? What does that mean? The onus would be on the DM then to create something new and unique. Does it throw lightning bolts, electrocute people, create loud noises like thunder, power devices ... or something else? The DM would be forced to make decisions, appropriate for the players, as to what the item does, what it is called and how much information identify can give about it.

Magical items might just feel magical and unique.

A year of Labyrinth Lord

2009-10-19T01:13:00.000-07:00

So it's been a year since I starting playing Labyrinth Lord now, woohoo. I've been DM'ing for it ever since with a fairly steady gamer group, and have been running it every sunday evening, give or take a couple over the whole year.

What a blast it has been too!

I've run adventures against the white skinned Morlocks, tempted the party into a den of carrion crawlers and into old ruins populated by ghouls. The party have been snowed in and forced to take refuge in a haunted monastery, have ventured inside a nest of giant ants, have explored ancient elven ruins, have freed a village from a curse that turned them into lycanthropes, have journeyed across crystal fields deep underground and accidentally freed ancient evils, have cleared out the city of spiders, have entered the tower of the Ghoul King and reduced half his reserve army to dust, have stormed the city of serpents and finally, have adventured within a dream realm to try and pull a powerful artifact back into real life. Phew!

There have been casualties along the way. Many brave heroes (and foolish ones) have died. We even had one total party kill against goblin spider riders in the wilderness once. We've had many, many near death experiences where one more die roll would have ended a heroes life... and yet it didn't. Perhaps fate does smile on these heroes after all (I roll my dice out in the open and do not fudge them)... a fate which is more powerful than the DM!

The heroes are now 6th-7th level and well capable, in their own right, of defending themselves. It's been a terrific journey to this point... when the party decided to save the world from a potential orc tribal alliance was one of my highlights as a DM and led to a terrific battle to play out, too.

I'll leave you with one of the scenes from last night as a parting thought. The heroes hear a scratching noise in a room as they approach it, but as soon as they open the door, the noise stops. They never hear it again, nor can they find any sign of its source. It bugs them so much that, after they have explored the whole level and the one above it, they come back to investigate once more. Still finding nothing, they decide to douse the walls of the room in oil to burn the green moss that covers all the surfaces in the dungeon and reveal what it is underneath. Four flasks of oil later, they find the charred stone under the moss... and still they do not find the source of the sound. Still, it made me laugh, imagining the mighty heroes attacking some humble moss with burning oil, discussing how much they might need and then working out if they needed to somehow cover the ceiling too... all because they heard a little noise... ;-)

Soulceror

2009-10-15T01:38:00.000-07:00

While I was off work last week I made a little card game in flash because my girlfriend couldn't get the time off work at the same time. It's a fantasy themed card game where you play a wizard and must defeat the enemy player who is also a wizard, by playing heroes against him. He then plays monsters, traps and spells to try and get rid of your hero; then he tries to play a hero on you and you do the same back.

Anyway, here it is if anyone wants to take a look and see how many victories over the computer player they can rack up:

http://www.third-impression.com/

Best played with sound to hear some of the amusing voices!

Betraying the ghoul king and living to fight another day

2009-09-28T01:24:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's game of our Labyrinth Lord campaign has changed the dynamic somewhat. In the previous week, the party moved up the tower of the Ghoul King, clearing it out floor by floor. Literally two hundred skeletons were smashed to pieces and another fifty zombies went the way of undead to plain dead. The party was feeling good; the Ghoul King's reserve army was not exactly in good shape - it was no more!

Yesterdays session went a little differently, however. In the first real battle against enemy mages, the party kicked the door in on the Ghoul King's council chamber and attacked the council. The leader of the council arrogantly ordered their immediate surrender - which they didn't do. The party leader was hit by magic missile after magic missile and in one round went from full health to being pounded to the ground and knocked prone. That was a shock to the system!

The party rallied quickly, however, with the party mage passing on his broach of shielding to negate the effects of further pounding. Battle commenced for real now, with the council members proving to be no match for the fighters at close range. The party mage even went one on with his quarter staff and started cracking skulls. Mirror images did not help the council, soon they were all dead. The group learned an important lesson here though; No matter what your armour class - even though the Wyvern Hunter's is -2 - doesn't matter a jot against magic missiles!

A little later, the party entered the throne chamber of the Ghoul King himself. Guarded by a skeletal dragon, the party were happy to talk with him a while, discovering he intended to 'emerge from the shadows with his army and sweep upon the world like a plague of rats'. I think this probably confirmed to the players that they should get rid of this guy. However, they did not feel they were in a fit state to attempt this and so made a deal with the Ghoul King. He would let them live, if they agreed to steal his ally's dark magics. His ally is the Queen of the Serpent City. The group agreed to this and rested up to full health in the tower.

Now at full power, they stormed back in to the Ghoul King's throne room and attempted to rid of the world of this guy once and for all. It went disastrously wrong for them!

The two fighters got within ten feet of the skeletal dragon and hit its aura of fear. Two failed saving throws later and both are cowering in fear on the floor. The dragon then advanced and began clawing and biting one of them, bringing him almost to death.

The party immediately surrendered, having been well and truly humbled. They received a prompt telling off from the Ghoul King after he ordered his dragon back to his side and the party once more agreed to steal dark magic from the Serpent City for him. After resting up, that's exactly what they set off to do - well at least it was their destination - as they now intend to tell the Queen that her ally is betraying her and come back with some Snakemen to help finish him off!

Starting ages

2009-09-26T03:43:00.000-07:00

As I am now adding level draining monsters to my random encounter tables (shock!) I'm considering swapping the level draining rules for instant aging rules, ala ghosts. I'll probably go with one level drained means you've just been aged by five years, and have some stat decreases on hitting specific age milestones. This means I need tables to work out how old the characters are when they begin their adventuring careers.

Class based characters are not created equally. That is to say, I can see that characters of differing classes will start at different ages. The mage, who locks himself up in the library, studying spells, is very likely to be older (and consequently frailer, which the mechanics of the system do bear out) than his fighter friend, who may have just ended his military service. With this in mind, I have created the following table:

Class...	Starting age...	Learned trade in...
Fighter	d8+18	Military school, guild or in battle
Magic User	d20+30	Library, apprenticeship or in self study
Thief	d6+14	The streets, thief's guild, or the marketplace
Cleric	d12+25	Temples, holy tomes or in silent contemplation

Note that I haven't included ages for demihumans on the table, at the moment we have none in the party and I'm a little unsure about their lifespans. I suppose I could consult my 2e PHB which I still have from all those years ago, but for the moment, this should suffice.

Magic Item: The Ring of the Fox

2009-09-21T01:44:00.000-07:00

The ring of the fox looks like an ordinary gold ring, save its face is carved in the shape of a fox. It radiates cunning animal magic if detected.

The wearer gains +1 to AC and has her hearing improved drastically. Listen checks gain a +2 bonus while the ring is worn. However, there is a side effect. The wearer begins to crave chickens - and will steal them if able to!

Tricky situations: earning souls back and being captured

2009-09-14T03:22:00.000-07:00

The last game session in our Labyrinth Lord campaign was a pretty tricky one to DM - or at least I thought it would be - as it involved the capture of the characters. I thought it would be tricky because no one likes to lose their freedom, nor their gear, nor to surrender to an enemy... especially if they believe they can beat that enemy. But, I'm getting ahead of myself here.

The party cleared out the spider city and brought the head of the queen back to Rendclaw, the Demonic Regent of the Darkened Hells who had previously claimed their souls as his own unless they performed this task for him. The downside to freeing ancient evils is that sometimes, they take things from you and make demands! On giving Rendclaw the queen's head, he relinquished their souls and gave the party a warning; that there was one down here in the Deep Dark that was amassing an army that threatened their surface world, one known as the Ghoul King. After that, in a thunderclap the Regent was gone.

The party took to their raft once more to attempt to sail out the cave lake and perhaps escape their cast underground place. Luck was not with them, however, for near a vast supporting column a trireme sailed towards their little amateur crystalline boat and they were hailed, being ordered to surrender their vessel. This is where the tricky part was. I had spent some time before hand wondering how this would go and thinking of alternate scenarios for how the party might react. Whoever was shouting at them from the deck of the larger vessel was ordering them to surrender to him.

They did not surrender. Because of this, their boat was shattered into pieces on meeting the trireme's battering ram at high speed. Nets were cast overboard from the trireme and the characters were hauled up out of the cold waters, and onto the main deck. Suddenly they were face to face with a literal skeleton crew, and again being told to surrender.

A brief amount of parlaying ensued, during which the party discovered that they were going to be taken to the ghoul king as slaves and then ritually sacrificed to become part of his army. Needless to say, the characters did not like this plan and did not surrender even when the captain of the boat said to them that there were fifty skeletons on the ship ready to fight them.

A fight did indeed ensue. Now the outcome of this was by no means certain. It *is* possible that the party could have overcome fifty skeletons... but pretty soon the party mage was out of mirrored images and running into major problems. He surrendered. A blade was put to his throat by one of the skeletons, forcing the rest of the party to also surrender. Their gear was taken from them, except for jewelry.

The warship headed sailed back to the large column, which became obvious as they approached that it was actually a tower. On a dock, a sort of exchange was seen, where skeletons handed over women to snakemen who in turn handed over men to them. The women were loaded onto another trireme which pulled away. Once their own ship was docked, the characters were frog marched off the ship while manacled together and thrown into a prison cell. Their equipment was taken somewhere else, further up the tower.

At this point, I was quite relieved. Probably the trickiest encounter in a number of sessions had gone off without many complaints at all. Now all the party had to do was escape and get their stuff back... which they managed to do by overpowering the ghoul guard when he entered their cell to paralyse them and soon after they found their sacks of gear. They freed the other slaves, some of whom are now fighting by their sides against the undead.

Overall I think we all had some good fun and the whole thing hopefully created a memorable experience. It's not everyday you get captured by a skeleton crew ;-)

Trading levels for magic items

2009-08-26T07:42:00.001-07:00

A random thought occured to me today for a really simple way to handle magic item creation for items with plus values. Allow a player to trade a level from their character, to create a magical item (using their own life force) of a plus value equal to the number of levels being traded.

Example; a level 3 character could make a sword + 2 and go back to being a level 1 character, or a sword +1 and go back to being level 2.

Another example: a level 20 character could drop to 15 and get a sword +5.

Other, more special items (that do not have + values) would have to be handled by a different system, or the DM could flat out disallow the creation of them, perhaps all special magical items were made by an ancient civilisation and the art of creating them has now been lost.

The best villians...

2009-08-24T01:02:00.000-07:00

...are the ones that the players release themselves.

In our last game session, the party freed three evils that had been trapped in ice for millenia. The reason they freed them is that information was needed about how to get out a megadungeon that they are themselves trapped within. I was quite surprised that all three villians were released, as each were entombed in ice, in different chambers, beyond a chasm with no way across it that was initially guarded by a wyvern. A strong deterrent - or at least the builders of their prison, centuries ago, had thought.

The three villians, in the order they were released, were Gorrononogria (a gargantuan elder black dragon who wants to rule the world), Lady Gwendolyne (a Succubus who desires all the riches of the land) and Rendclaw (regent of the Darkened Hells and master of the thousand Soul Eaters). Even better, the heroes are now on a mission to reclaim their souls from Rendclaw, who claimed them upon being freed ('Freeing me was unwise!') by bringing the head of the ruler of the Spidercity to the demon. The elder black dragon is now who knows where, presumabley heading for the surface to submit the land to his rule and the succubus is now heading for the city of Blackport after the party mage informed her that the richest man he knew ruled that place of thieves and scum.

The campaign just started to heat up!!

The first level drainer encountered

2009-08-10T01:23:00.000-07:00

I used to DM for a group of friends, as a teenager. During that time, we played a homebrew campaign and threw in a few modules for good measure. We had a blast and from time to time we still talk about those times even now. It created some good memories (like the time the party's thief split from the party, was ambushed by goblins in a forest and left tied to a tree naked!) but during all of that time, I never deployed level draining undead. I always operated under the assumption that they were overpowered and that players hated them. I would never put them into any encounter, assuming that they were completely unbalanced.

I was wrong.

I picked D&D back up last year after reading a little about the retro clones, and with a different group of people, I now DM a Labyrinth Lord campaign (I actually started with only one player and have picked up some more along the way). I run another (completely different) homebrew campaign with modules dropped in at various points to add some variety. Anyhow, I decided to make an encounter deck for night time encounters that included a lot of undead. The best time to encounter the undead is at night, right? ;-)

When selecting what should go into this deck I had to make a choice: use level draining undead in there, or not? I deliberated over it for a bit and then figured, what the heck, let's give it a try and test my assumptions. What a test, I know. Going from one extreme to the other... never using them, to adding them to the random encounters sure is one hellova way to test my assumptions!

Last night was our weekly game session and guess what, we had a random encounter occur at night. The party member that was on watch, Boris Blood, noticed an incorporeal figure advancing on the camp, wearing a suit of armour. It's face was frozen in a contorted look of horror. He roused the group, who tried to hail the apparition, but it ignored their attempt to parlay and continued to advance on them. They readied their weapons and fought the thing.

The party is mostly made up of 4th level characters and aside from one of their henchmen panicking and almost fleeing the battle field, the fight went very well. The wraith was defeated, although the group panicked when they found it could fly and it was going straight towards the party wizard (it was a funny moment to see him sprint away as fast as he could!), but overall, nothing unbalancing happened at all.

So now I've realised, level draining undead aren't so bad after all.. but perhaps best not to deploy them against really low level characters (say, levels one to three).

Balanced on a knife edge

2009-08-03T01:18:00.001-07:00

The last game session of Labyrinth Lord we held was a full house, a rarity these days as its hard to get everyone in on the same week. I mostly run with one or two players down for sure, but last night had everyone and it was a great session.

There were three main encounters in the session, one against a bunch of trolls that the party's friendly sage warned the heroes about. The heroes, of course, ignored the warnings to collect eleven suits of platemail from an abandoned outpost that had been overrun by orcs, but since cleared out, and ran into the trolls. Much fun was had as the party's resident tank went from 35 hp to 6 hp while the party mage was berrating everyone else for being the only one who had bought any oil flasks and torches! At a couple of points in the battle, the heroes ran into trouble with these regenerating beasts from nightmare, and the battle started with a critical fumble on my initiative roll meaning i had to morale check all of the enemies (a new house rule) to see if they held - they did!

Another of our new house rules was put into play on this session: knockbacks cause knockdowns unless a save vs breath weapon is made. This worked beautifully, buying the heroes some extra time to win the fight!

The second encounter was with a talking bridge which the heroes were walking across. Much amusement was had when one of the fighters was thrown off the bridge for insulting it! You have to love the whimsical nature of some of the creatures in D&D!

The third encounter of note was against some shape changers. The party were hugely outnumbered by them and the sixth level thief was almost killed by one of them before one of the fighters saved his life. It was a good fight on a bridge, with the other fighter cleaving multiple opponents at once with a bastard sword (our powerswing house rule in action being put to great effect).

A good session was had by all - the encounters are balanced on a knife edge. The fights got very tense in places.... I don't think I could repeat this level of balance and challenge if I tried!

Avoid trouble: Cycle the party leader

2009-07-20T01:22:00.000-07:00

One of the things we do in our game sessions is cycle the party leader. If the party leader changes during a game session, it's reducing the likelihood of bad leadership screwing things up, not to mention how it reduces players sending each other off to take stupid risks instead of thinking them through themselves (because they won't stay as party leader for long). It also helps limit the effect disruptive players can have on the group as a whole.

At the start of every session, I have all the players dice to become leader. This involves all of them rolling a d20 with the player with the highest roll becoming the leader. This is similar to what happens when we find treasure that more than one player wants that cannot be divided between them, in that circumstance, the players who want the item dice for it. A tied top result leads to a reroll for the players who are tied as they dice against just each other.

Party leader gets final say on any decision that needs to be made, but because of the nature of the cycling, the players tend to ask for input from others. The last thing they want is to cause trouble for the other players as it won't be long until they are subject to another's leadership - perhaps even the player in question.

So when does the leader get cycled? Simple. After every combat, cycle the party leader by moving either clockwise, or anticlockwise, away from the current party leader. We always rotate anticlockwise in our game sessions, but so long as you pick one direction and stick to it, it will not matter which way you go.

As an aside, we also use a house rule that means the monsters will always go for the party leader in battle (if they can) which leads to interesting tactical situations. The party scramble to protect their leader (whoever it is). Particularly dangerous for the party mage (although now he's fourth level and has mirror image he has some room to breathe now) but on the plus side it encourages team work and helps the group gel as a whole.

Raise Dead as an Entry into the Underworld

2009-07-10T09:14:00.000-07:00

Some people deal with magic that raises dead characters back to life (e.g. raise dead, resurrection) by making it very rare, some by making it expensive, some by throwing their arms up in the air and saying 'hey, its a agme, who cares if it breaks believability'... but I have another idea.

D&D is famous for its dungeon crawls, so why not make raise dead open up a portal to the underworld and have the rest of the party jump into it. Make whole thing into an opportunity to rescue the dead character's soul from the dungeon of the afterlife. Death of the party members in the underworld would force their souls to remain in the underworld until rescued too...

Success would be no means assured - in fact it would be a challenge. Enter the dread underworld and re-emerge with your buddy - if you can?

High character turn over rate

2009-07-06T01:41:00.000-07:00

One thing about 'old school roleplaying' (I'm playing Labyrinth Lord) is that there is definitely, in my campaign at least, a high turn over rate of low level characters. Last night, for example, we lost two characters and would have lost a third if it were not for a house rule that states that any character above level one that is taken below 1 hitpoint, can make a save vs death, to be only unconscious instead of dead.

We play by letting the dice fall where they may, and this includes me as the DM. I roll all dice in front of the players so they can see it is all completely above board and fair.

We lost the party fighter to the future King of the Orcs, who had found a magical spear that could unite the disparate orc tribes that the party were also looking for (to keep it out of their hands in fact). The group had left the citadel they were exploring to restock their supplies and train up, even though they knew they were only an hour behind someone else who was sneaking around in the ruins. When they returned to the ruins, there was an orc host emerging from the citadel with much fanfare! One of the orcs was holding a spear aloft that glinted in the light. All told, there was a robed figure, a wolf, four orcs, an orog and two kobolds. After a little debate, the party decided to attack and remove the threat to civilisation. It was in this fight that the fighter fell to the orc with the dread spear, certainly, an honorable death.

The next battle they fought had the most surprising results. It was against merely six orcs who were skulking around the courtyard in the citadel. They had probably heard the party's bard who was breaking crates into pieces and hammering bits of them over the doorway of the room that the party was going to rest in. On spying the orcs, the adventurers attacked! However, one of their henchmen was cut down in a vicious melee, then the party wizard was brought down by two orcs with short bows and a similar fate was waiting for the bard. Luckily the wizard was only knocked unconscious, but the bard was slain.

In both cases of character death, the players just rolled up new characters and the game carried on. So instead of a fighter and a bard, we now have a cleric and a fighter. Attrition rate is proving to be high - but that goes hand in hand with an appropriate danger level for the campaign. Also, in both cases the party did not have to fight, but chose to anyway. That, I think, makes all the difference!

Neither player complained, they got 3d6 out and started rolling up new characters - one of which has an 18 - our first natural 18 on 3d6 in 8 months of playing!

Initiative fumbles!!

2009-06-29T06:39:00.001-07:00

In my most recent game session (yesterday), I floated an idea past my players when I rolled a one when dicing for initiative. We're currently using Labyrinth Lord's default system, which calls for the monsters and the party leader to dice to see who goes first each round. The idea I had was initiative fumbles which would occur on a natural one on the d20 initiative dice.

These fumbles would be random events that affect the entire side and could reflect the ebb and flow of battle or on the other hand, affect direct it.

Some examples of events I have thought of are:

Panic sweeps through the side! Anyone not controlled by a player must make a forced, instant morale check to remain in the fight.
Side goes berserk! Something triggers fury within the side. The only action that the side can take for the rest of the battle is to close for melee; all ranged attacks and spells are abandoned to the red mist for one round.
Bring out the big guns: The side deploys its biggest attack / most powerful spells that it has during this round, pushing the battle towards its climax!
Take him down! The side picks an enemy at random and every combatant breaks off from what it was doing to try and kill this target. This is done at any cost, without regard to individual combatant's safety!

Can you think of any other random events I could use?

Experience points for class goals (revised)

2009-06-26T01:38:00.000-07:00

I've since been working this idea (experience points as class rewards) through some more and made a few changes to it... thinking about it from the idea of class goals: What is it that the class is really about?

I'm thinking of giving the mage a big chunk of xp (say 500) for each new spell he copies to his spell book, simulating his desire to gather new knowledge of magics. This would mean mages do not teach other spells, but that they can only be found in dusty dungeons. There might need to be a limit on this, as finding a spell book could grant massive experience point rewards. Then again, the mage does need a lot of xp to advance, so maybe that's fine.

The thief gains 200 xp per successful use of an ability that overcomes an obstacle on the quest. E.g. picking a lock on a door that needs to be opened. This simulates him using his expertise. I had thought about giving him xp for stealing things per se, but that causes too many issues.

The cleric gains 200xp per undead he sends back to the grave - his duty to rid of the world of these abominations.

The fighter gains 75xp per killing blow he inflicts on an enemy he defeats by strength of arms (i.e. in melee). Dwarves gain 1xp per gp found in a treasure hoard. Everyone knows Dwarves love gold.

Halflings gain encounter experience for each encounter they resolve using anything but combat. This goes well with their hiding ability, I think, but plenty of opportunity for role-playing with such a noncombat class as the halfling.

Elves I'm not 100% sure about, perhaps they can gain from magic spells and from combat, or from some nature activity. Or perhaps they get the fighter xp bonus for killing blows, but with a bow.

Numbers are subject to change, of course, this is preliminary thinking.

All of these are only awarded if its a quest relevent task.

What do you think?

Experience points as class rewards

2009-06-25T08:28:00.000-07:00

I was reading a blog entry recently Meta-Plot Special! Why EXP is the Ultimate Meta-Plot Device and it got me thinking, what if experience points were ONLY awarded as class rewards that advanced the quest?

Fighters would gain it for defeating creatures that stood in the way of solving the quest, through strength of arms.
Thieves for picking locks, climbing walls and using any other abilities to overcome obstacles that stand in the way of completing quests, or for sneaking past enemies so they do not need to be fought.
Clerics would gain for using magic to aid the party and for turning undead.
Mages would gain them for using their magic to overcome obstacles and enemies.

There would certainly be less fighting as fighting by itself wouldn't net a specific reward, except to the fighter - and even then only for defeating enemies that were part of the quest at hand. Thieves could gain the same experience for using their sneaking and hiding skills to avoid that same fight, or for backstabbing. Clerics and mages would only gain if they used their skills in the same combat to overcome enemies; e.g. turning undead, cause light wounds, magic missile, etc. But overall, I think it would de-emphasise combat as a means of advancement for non combat focussed classes and let them concentrate instead on what they are good at. What do you think?

Pledge to the Light

2009-06-16T01:38:00.000-07:00

Following up from yesterday's post Recasting Law and Chaos - the Light and the Dark, in which I replace the alignments with allegiances, here is the pledge that all that follow the Path of the Light have made:

I forever serve the Sister reveling in Her golden Light,

Defending the Oath with the Shield of Courage

Wielding the Iron of Justice forged in Fires of Fury,

No mercy for the Darkness. No mercy for the Darkness.

It is the duty of all who are pledge their allegiance to the light to one day forge a weapon of iron and to use this against those who serve the Dark Brother.

Recasting Law and Chaos - the Light and the Dark

2009-06-15T06:13:00.000-07:00

In my home-brew labyrinth lord campaign I recently recast the classic D&D alignment system into an allegiance one. This is because the very ideas of law and chaos are nonsensical; who's law are you following, exactly, when you are lawful? One man's freedom fighter is another's terrorist, and so on. It just doesn't work on an individual level, probably because it wasn't really intended to.

Law and chaos seem to be being used in the old school community to represent the grand ideas of two philosophically opposed sides. This is because the origin of D&D's alignment system is in wargaming (i.e. Chainmail). There, having a reason why two units will (or won't) exist in the same army, makes a lot of sense, but when applied to roleplaying, makes little sense.

It's probably why AD&D uses a 9 segment alignment system, adding good and evil into the mix and calling 'neutral neutral'true neutral. This is clearly intended to add some complexity to an overly simplistic system that was being used to represent morality ('a lawful character wouldn't do that!').

I think that recasting law and chaos in the frame of Light and Dark solves a lot of the inherent problems with the labels of law and chaos. Humans, elves, dwarves, giants and so on make up the contingent of the Light, while orcs, goblins, trolls and such make up the Dark. Light races cooperate with each other and may even war with each other, but put their feuds aside when threatened with the Dark. The same applies to those who's allegiance is to the Dark. There are members of each species who are traitorous and are allied with the other side, working from within to bring about its downfall.

The Light and the Dark are not just diametrically opposed, those allied with either have a moral responsibility to rid the world of the other side, which is working equally hard to do the same to them. There is no to be no quarter given, no bargaining done, unless it is a trick. Each side is striving to utterly annihilate the other. It is said that on doomsday, the issue will be decided once and for all, with each side having its own prophecy stating it is they who will emerge victorious. Each side inspires fanatical devotion and neither are above poison, forbidden sorceries, raising the dead and breaking any 'rules' to achieve victory. Both believe the end justifies the means.

Amidst these two hateful, warring factions are those who have no allegiance. These are people and creatures who either run and hide when the great confrontations of the Light and Dark occur which shake history to pieces, or sell themselves to the highest bidder, or join whoever has the most powerful magics. Those of no allegiance care little for the outcome on doomsday, so long as their own skins are not hanging from the wall in another's trophy room. They have not pledged their soul to either the Light Sister of the Dark Brother nor the pantheon of gods and goddesses under them, nor the peoples who worship those, nor those who further their interests.

Against this backdrop, it should be pretty easy for heroics to occur. When Dark races meet the Light, there is an obligation to fight... a destiny to be answered!

Labyrinth Lord computer game

2009-06-10T05:42:00.000-07:00

My mind got to wondering recently about exactly what you can - or can't - do with Open Gaming Licensed content. I've recently been in contact with Daniel Proctor, the author of Labyrinth Lord, to see what the possibilities of using Labyrinth Lord rules in a computer game are. I got talking to him and some other members of the Goblinoid Games forum about copyright and other legal issues, as the last thing I would want to do is step on anybody's toes.

Anyway, the upshot of this is that we could be seeing an official Labyrinth Lord computer game, free to play and running in a web browser, in the near future...

Heaven bait

2009-05-29T02:37:00.000-07:00

Here is a quick short story that I knocked up... I hope you enjoy it!

Heaven bait.

Summit: Robbing the ghouls

2009-05-27T02:11:00.000-07:00

I've decided to start prepending the titles of blog posts that are write ups of our weekly Labyrinth Lord game sessions using the word Summit, which incidentally, is the name of the game world we are all adventuring in.

This week, I'm also playing around with the format, briefly mentioning the highlights rather than doing a linear report. This way, I won't get any complaints from my players if I leave something out, because I can just use the excuse that it wasn't a highlight, heh heh.

We started the session with a couple of players down, but I have so many now that it doesn't really matter any more. I'm also no longer adverse to expanding the group further for this very reason - the more players the better.

So this week there was Ben, Chris, Nick and Joe. Chris and Nick had to roll up new characters because of their untimely deaths last week and Joe decided to retire his Gnoll in order to do the same. We ended up with a new psychic, fighter and mage. The party consisted of those three, a thief and a dwarf.

The party journeyed back to the courtyard, to finish clearing it out for Baron Thorvid. Highlights of the night included the characters finding a secret door where Chris and Nick knew there was one the week before, but their previous characters couldn't find one. It was with great relief and exclamations of 'I knew it!' that the dead end in the caverns below turned out not to be...

Through the secret door, they find a dead body. The psychic uses his Bone Divining ability to find out who this body once belonged to and learns that it is Gerald Red himself! He learns he was ambushed by troglodytes and then eaten by them. He also learns that Gerald has a magic sword, still on him and a magical ring he is still wearing. Needless to say, these were both taken, one by the psychic and one by Stone Wolf the fighter.

Venturing into the cave proper, the party see a large pool of water. Edging around it, to the back of the cavern, they are ambushed by five stinking troglodytes! In this battle Stone wolf slays four with his magical sword!

Later, the party realise they have cleared the courtyard and return to Castle Thorvid for their reward, which they receive. On the way, however, there is an amusing incident where the party spies three ghouls and a wolf skeleton attempting to cross a river. One of the ghouls is carrying two little boxes, so Terder the party thief decides to try and rob it! A risky strategy!

However, a succeeded pick pocket roll later and he has them! The party ride far, far away before they are spotted and enjoy the spoils of their ill begotten gains.

The night ended with them being hired as guards for a merchant caravan that is travelling south. The gold reward for this is not high, but the distance is short and its almost all on the roads, so the risk should be low. More to come, next week.

Magic Item - The Hilt of Bastards

2009-05-27T00:35:00.000-07:00

This appears to be an unbladed hilt of a bastard sword, that is to say, if it were bladed it could be wielded one or two handed. The pommel is jewelled and there is a runic inscription along the hilt that translates as 'Bladeless'.

Any blade that is attached to the hilt, to make a full sword, will shatter within one day and laughter will be heard.

Once per day, when the command word is spoken, a magical shimmering blade appears, turning the Hilt of Bastards into a fully fledged weapon. The blade can be of differing sizes depending on what the wielder wills it to be: either as a short sword or bastard sword. If the blade is to be short sword sized, it functions as a short sword +2. If bastard sword sized, it functions as a bastard sword +1. The blade glows faintly in the dark but not enough to be used as a light source and cannot fumble in battle.

This blade lasts until another command word is spoken which causes it to vanish, or one year passes, or it is wielded against a female opponent.

Total Party Kill!

2009-05-17T14:13:00.000-07:00

We were down a number of players on our latest Labyrinth Lord game session, as Mike couldn't make it, and our newest player Kat and finally Ben dropped out at the last minute. On the other hand, we were rejoined by Nick and my old friend Chris. Small gamer groups like this are actually a mixed blessing; they are certainly easier to DM for but it does significantly weaken the party, as we shall see, in the following account of what happened...

The party did some trading, magical item identification and scroll copying in the elven town of Bramble and then set off for the courtyard, deciding (wisely) to stick to the roads as much as they can. They passed through Dewton, Lyorel and Veleye before finally going cross country in the Everleaf forest. Straying from the roads in Summit is dangerous - much of the country is wild and untamed whereas the roads are regularly patrolled by soldiers.

Travel is difficult. The weather has taken a turn for the worse, with high winds blowing and cutting movement rates down. Ranged attacks are harder to make on target for the wind is constantly blowing. Everywhere are leafless trees and dying flowers - not what is expected of spring. Perhaps something else is afoot...

The party come across a recent campfire, still smouldering, and see tracks that lead away from it, deeper into the forest. Thal (the Elf) discovers that the tracks are of different sizes but cannot determine what creatures have made them. The party decide not to follow them. The following day, as they set up camp, they are attacked by two torch wielding bandits!

A magical trident wielding barbarian and scimitar slashing dervish woman attack the party, given away by the light of the their torches which foil their ambush!

The bandits cause a lot of damage to the heroes but are beaten back. Afterwards, Akern (the mage) detects that the trident, which is made of bone, is magical and hands it to Thal to use in future battles. The party drink healing potions and continue.

The group reach the courtyard building and enter it. A careful search of the top floor reveals nothing amiss since they were last here - although the bookcase they placed over the trap door has fallen over. How did that happen...

Descending into the cave system below the courtyard, the party enter a large cavern with a pool of water occupying the center of it. The strange smell from earlier is a great stink here. As the party move to exit the cavern through one of the passage ways, two troglodytes, who were blending perfectly with the cave walls, step out of the shadows, snarling and attack!

Trogolodytes in the cavern!

A good fight ensues with the heroes using the terrain and their bows to good advantage. The party did not like the three attacks each trogolodyte had, though!

In a short time, the party emerges bloody, but victorious.

In another cavern, the entrance of which was blocked by a large stone, the heroes find two coffins surrounded by an array of items. These coffins are both locked with heavy padlocks on the outside. Nosing through the various stuff on the floor, they find garlic, stakes, a silver dagger, a wooden mallet, various holy symbols and some vials of holy water. A debate is held over what to do - should they break into the coffins?

Thal, as party leader, says yes, so breaks the first padlock and opens the coffin. Inside is a dead body, which he quickly stakes - and nothing else. He then proceeds to the second coffin and breaks the padlock off of it, too. Inside, is another corpse, which he quickly stakes. The party breathe a sigh of relief!

Inside another cavern with a floor full of assorted junk, the party begin to sift through it, when it begins to self assemble into a massive wood golem! Quickly, Thal pins it against the wall with his magical trident and destroys it in one hit!

The party get some good loot from this room, which Akern detects is almost all magical gear. There is a wand, a shield, a staff and a golden goblet. Thal identifies the staff as being a staff of healing - very nice. Akern uses this on Ginsese to get her back up to good fighting status and the staff runs out of charges!

The group decides that at this point, its a good idea to get Akern to the Tower of Sorcery so he can train to level up as he now has the required experience points. The courtyard is left for the second time and a journey is begun.

While passing through the Everleaf forest, the party realise that they are being tracked. They make out goblins in the trees, a wolf and giant spiders being herded by the goblins. The heroes could easily ride off, but Thal spots a couple of the goblins are carrying treasure chests and orders that the party stop and fight their hunters.

Our heroes ride out and meet the enemy they are being tracked by - a very brave decision indeed!

That is Ginsese on the camel by the way, she inherited it from a mage from the east when he died on a previous quest.

The enemy, arrayed against them, before the chaos of battle messed up their formation.

Quite a challenge, I'm sure you'll agree. I don't think we've had a battle quite like this one before. The heroes stayed mounted but did not use their mounts much and instead got pinned against the edge of the board and this was eventually their undoing.

To begin with though, things went amazingly well for them. Akern used his magic to create a vast illusionary fire engulfing the enemy. Almost all of the foe believed it was real and many of the goblins died of heart attacks, thinking the fire was killing them. Many of the spiders were injured, believing the fire was real and one did indeed die.

Ginsese was the first to fall to a spider's venom, collapsing off her camel after one of the spiders leapt at her and planted its fangs into her throat. That effectively destroyed the front line of the party, as she was the only one who had advanced on the enemy. The enemy closed in on the remaining two heroes and as Thal struggled to hold them off, Akern fled from the battlefield on horseback. Thal was overwhelmed by the remaining foes, splintering his shield in a vain attempt to stay alive, but was overcome by spider bites. He succumbed to their venom.

Akern returned to the battlefield, trying to sling the enemy from a safe distance, but a goblin sprinted over to his location and took one swing with its morning star, embedding it into the wizard's head - and creating our first true Total Party Kill.

Courtyard Clearance

2009-05-10T14:38:00.000-07:00

I'd like to extend a hearty welcome to our newest player - and first female player in our weekly Labyrinth Lord campaign - Mike's friend Kat. On sunday we were down a mage and a gnoll but now had gained a fighter.

What follows is an account of said game session...

As the party of heroes approach the courtyard building, which they have been hired to clear out by Baron Thorvid, they see it is flanked by large pillars. A wide staircase leads up to the entrance of the building and at either side are large barred windows. From behind the pillars, two wolves emerge, slavering and howling! The heroes finish them off without too many problems.

Once up the stairs and inside the building proper, Falador the fighter triggers a trip wire which causes a portcullis to drop but luckily he avoids impalement by the skin of his teeth!

A strange odour seems to permeate the entire place, an odour that none of the character's can place. In one of the rooms, with a barred window to the south of it, an arrow thuds into Terder's (the thief) back! The party turn to see an orc outside of the window, taking aim at them with a bow. Before they can react, another arrow speeds towards the thief! Thal the Elf and Korm the Dwarf both nip into an alcove within the room while Falador rushes the Orc, intent on stabbing it with his sword, but the bowman steps back out of range of his stab and continues to rain arrows into the room. Falador resorts to throwing his short sword at the orc in desperation. Other party members, including Mirana, return fire with ranged weapons and eventually the orc is brought down.

Falador moves to leave the room to collect his short sword, opening the door to reveal five more orcs waiting in ambush! A vicious melee ensues with Korm taking most of the punishment on his platemail armour and glowing magical shield. A short while later, there are lots of dead orcs and most of them have fallen to Mirana's deadly arrows.

The heroes stumble into a study and load up their mule with stolen books on range of topics from battlefield tactics to business. There is even a spellbook - but without the read magic spell, no one can read it to tell what spells are inside. Inside a chest of drawers Falador discovers a few keys and a map of the level; Terder spots a funny symbol on the map and realises there must be a secret door in here. After a quick search they find it! Under a carpet is a hidden trap door. Lifting it up, they find stairs going down into a pitch darkness...

Thal, having infravision, can see that the stairs lead to some kind of cave system so he gingerly moves down them alone. The strange odour from earlier gets stronger. At the bottom, he sees the passage splits and decides to return to the rest of the party. A bookcase is moved on top of the trapdoor to seal it shut and the group continue to explore the courtyard building.

The group come across a door that won't open, so Falador attempts a flying kick at it. Unfortunately, the door remains shut. Miranda attempts her own flying kick - there is a crack as the door splinters open! The door had been barricaded shut by a bunch of kobolds that inhabit the room, they had wedged a bed up against it. The party draw weapons and attack the kobolds.

One of the kobolds leaps onto the bed and is knocked off by a punishing arrow shot. It pulls itself back onto the bed and is knocked off once more by another arrow! Slowly, it climbs once more onto the bed and Terder, who has climbed the wall above the door, swings down through the door way and stabs it with his daggers! It drops off the bed for its third and final time, now being dead. Next, Terder reaches down and grabs another of the kobolds. Its feet dangling in the air while it struggles with the thief's grasp, so Thal shoots an arrow into it!

In pretty short order, the kobolds are all dead.

Through a secret door that was also marked on the map that the party found earlier, they come across an old armoury. There are two weapon racks: one has been ramsacked years ago; the other contains intact weaponry. However, this rack - and the entire wall - is covered with a strange yellow mold. Thal goes to smell the mold, to see if the strange smell originates from it and gets a face full of spores that almost kill him!

The party retreat from the room while Falador rips up bed sheets and wraps them around the heads of his crossbow bolts. He lights them and fires them at the mold, putting it to the torch, but in so doing he accidentally destroys all the weapons except for a mace. Needless to say, the fighter takes the still smouldering mace.

Later, the group happen upon a kitchen containing much broken furniture. A stove sits in the corner and above it, a rusty exhaust pipe that leads to a leaky ceiling. Thal decides to look inside the stove and disturbs four stirges that are nesting within the pipe! They fly out and attack. One of them jabs its proboscis into the Elf and begins draining his blood. Thinking quickly, Thal uses his Spell Rune and passes through rock, moving out of the room and into the corridor beyond. The stirge's proboscis cannot pass through and so the stirge is left in the room. Thal lives to fight another day!

One of the stirges flies at Korm and inserts its proboscis into his neck. He stabs with his mithril tipped spear and kills it. Another dies in the chaos of melee, leaving two on Falador, who draws his two handed sword The Leveller from the baldric on his back. This is the first time he has wielded the ancient rune covered relic in battle... he powerswings it at both stirges that are attacking him, cutting each in half with the same blow! He has ended the danger to the party.

The group enters the courtyard itself from the spectator area, among seating high up above the overgrown artificial battle ground. In this courtyard are two skeletal warriors, fighting. They feint, thrust and swing yet never defeat each other. The heroes watch for a while, shout a few insults down but the skeletons continue to fight. Falador throws his short sword, smashing the ribs of one of the boney gladiators, but their strange dance continues unabated.

He hammers his rope into the seating area with an iron spike and climbs down, searching. He finds a ring with an R inscription on it amongst the weeds. Then he smashes one of the skeletons to bits and immediately the other begins bowing to the crowd, over and over and over again. Falador grasps its skull and pulls it off its neck, but still it continues to bow. So, with great effort, he pulls its legs off and finally smashes it to bits.

At this, the party realise they have explored all of the above ground level of the courtyard, leaving only the underground portion, so they set off for the elven village of Bramble to get the Elf trained for level two. En route, they see the remains of a grass fire and numerous nasties in the wilderness including a four headed hydra! These are all avoided by galloping away from them as fast as their horses can. Finally, they arrived at Bramble, the Elf is trained to level two, items are traded and our evening was wrapped up. How quickly five hours goes!

Low ability scores

2009-05-06T08:07:00.000-07:00

Here's an idea for dealing with players who attempt to game the system by placing low ability scores in their wisdom, charisma and intelligence attributes so they can maximise their physical ones, but then do not roleplay these below average scores...

When in a dangerous situation, have the character with the lowest wisdom in the party test against it on a d12. If he fails, he then does something very unwise. For example, if there is a vat of acid nearby, he touches it with a finger and takes damage from it.

When faced with a problem, have the character with the lowest intelligence in the party test against it on a d12. If he fails, he then does something stupid to make the problem actually worse. For example, when faced with a puzzle like a riddle that says only five guesses are aloud to solve it, he uses three of them up instantly.

When faced with an encounter with intelligent, have the character with the lowest charisma in the party test against it on a d12. If he fails, then he says something inflammatory at the worst possible moment...

Athan and the waters

2009-05-05T02:15:00.000-07:00

Here's a little bit of pulpy fiction for you that I wrote yesterday... Athan and the waters

The Leveller

2009-05-04T04:06:00.000-07:00

What follows is a brief summary of the last session of Labyrinth Lord, one in which Terder Caji and his bodyguard Korm Tigertooth rejoined the party, while Thromm the Gnoll, Thal the Elf, Ginsese the Half Orc and Akern the mage left it. That's bank holidays for you! So the party consisted of Farador (a fighter), Terder (a thief) and Korm (a dwarf).

The evening began with me having a quick run down of the four phase initiative system and asking the players to write down their initiative values and then we were off adventuring once more.

The session began proper with the party exploring the rest of the cavern that they were in earlier and pretty soon they came across a treasure chest, wedged up against a small collection of stalagmites. The thief quickly found a it was trapped with a little blade that would strike at the hands of anyone who didn't know how to open the chest properly; he disarmed this, picked the lock and popped the chest open. Inside, he found a clear jade statue of a preying mantis.

Down another passage, Korm slipped on some loose gravel and sprained his little dwarven ankle. The passage turned out to be a dead end, meaning the only place left to explore was down a fifty foot drop, so the party decide to head to the nearest village - because get this - no one has a rope!

Outside, in the surrounding woodland known as the Everleaf Forest, the heroes notice that the leaves on the trees are turning brown. This is highly unusual for early spring time. Instead, its something you associate more with autumn. In addition, its freezing (sub zero) cold. Falador the fighter suspects evil wizardry is at work in the land.

On their journey to the village, they pass through an ancient crumbling ruin and decide that this could be a good place to rest. One of the ruined buildings has four of its walls mostly intact and a great oak tree going in the middle of it; the party decide this is the place and begin to barricade the walls up while the thief climbs the tree and acts as a lookout.

A gale force wind picks up and the thief holds on tight to the oak. He spies three figures moving through the trees, trying to sneak up on the dwarf and the fighter while they are barricading the walls. He whistles a signal to them and they fall back into the ruins, preparing for a fight!

The winds interfere with the ranged weaponry and not a single blow dart from the thief or arrow from the bandits strike their targets, forcing the real battle to close quarters. The bandits are summarily dispatched, proving no match for the party.

The following day, the party arrive at the village of Veleye and restock their supplies. Items are sold, the market place is explored and winter gear bought for the journey back. Also, a rope is purchased!

On the way back to the caves, the party decide to stop off at the ruin again and sleep there. They bury some gear (including a short sword) here and the thief again climbs the old oak tree. He recoils in horror part way up when he realises he has just put his hand into some green slime! He drops to the ground in shock and begins to turn green... it is wiped off him just in time, before he becomes some green slime himself! That was a close one...

The following day lanterns are lit and the cave is revisited. The drop is found once more and with the use of their new rope, the party safely descend. The party continue to explore the cave system, illuminated only by the flickering of their lights then reach a cavern with two skeletal figures at the edge of their vision. One of them carries a large sword with runes that run down the blade. Both figures are closing in on the group.

The heroes stand their ground and do battle with the undead. Strangely, the skeletal figure does not wield the runic sword against them, instead, worms jump from its skull and attempt to bury themselves in the heads of the heroes. After much smashing of bones, the skeletons are defeated. The fighter claims the two handed sword as his own.

The cavern has no other exits - the party realise they have explored the whole cave system! So, they journey back to the village of Veleye and at least now the temperature in the land is not cold, the weather is just low lying clouds and fairly mild.

Back in Veleye, the sword is identified as the Leveller and is an ancient artefact beyond the skill of many (if not all) who are left alive to forge. It carries a powerful enchantment and proves particularly deadly to a certain type of dragon. A rare find indeed!!

The party journey to Castle Thorvid, during which time it actually snows. The weather is becoming increasingly unpredictable. Once there, Falador trains with the Fighter's Guild and levels up (now he is level 3!). Also while he is there, he is given an order by the baron - clear out the courtyard of a strange wizard. Falador accepts - it is an order after all from the guildmaster himself, and he has been offered 2500gp on completion. The party set off on their journey to this courtyard.

Part way there, they are waylaid by a pack of snarling wolves!

One is instantly shot dead with a crossbow bolt in its eye before the wolves close in on the fighter, thief and dwarf.

A bloody battle is fought.

Terder gets chewed up pretty badly before the battle is finally won by the heroes!

That wrapped up our evening.

Four Phase Initiative

2009-05-04T03:48:00.000-07:00

At last, I think we have it!

Our last Labyrinth Lord session was the testing ground for a new initiative system, designed to fulfill the following goals:

1). Cope with mounts and mounted opponents.
2). Allow lightly armoured combatants to move and attack quickly (provide the opportunity for combatants to trade defence for offence).
3) Be quick and easy to use (must not get in the way of the game).

We have tested a number of initiative variants over the past couple of game sessions, as we hit the limit to the continuious initiative system we were using when we wanted to include mounts into it.

So without further ado, here it is, the Four Phase Initiative system...

Each round is divided into four phases. The phases are Mounts, Scout, Infantry and the second Scout phase.

In the Mount phase, all mounts move and some (like the warhorse) which are trained to fight, may attack. A mounted knight can also strike with his lance in this round, although doing so means he must switch to a melee weapon to continue fighting but cannot do this til the following round.

In the Scout phase, any combatant wearing studded leather or lighter armour can act, providing he is not using a ranged weapon. Note that the scout phase occurs twice in a combat round. This allows scouts to move quickly through terrain and potentially make two melee attacks per round as they are unhindered by heavier armour. Of course; they put themselves at increase risk by not wearing heavier armour. Note that a scout may throw items in this phase, he just cannot use a bow or crossbow in it.

In the Infantry phase, anyone wearing heavier armour than studded leather OR using a ranged weapon, gets to act. The majority of characters will end up in this phase.

Within any of the phases, the combatants act in an initiative order. The combatant with the highest, gets to act first. It is calculated like so:

Base move rate (12 for most races or 9 for dwarves and halflings)
- Dexterity modifier
- Intelligence modifier
- Armour modifier (chain -0, banded -1, scale -2, splint -3, plate -4)
-1 if using a shield
-4 if dual wielding.

Example: Boris is a human. His initiative order value is 12 -1 [Dex mod] -2 [scalemail] -1 [shield] = 8

Note that there are no 'weapon speed' modifiers to any of this. This is because weapon reach would probably cancel out any benefit of a small, fast and light weapon. A man with a dagger against a man with a longsword must somehow get inside the swordsman's reach to use his dagger, elminating his speed advantage.

Ranged weapons are always used in the Infantry phase because they must be aimed before they can be fired. We do have a house ruled exception - in the very first round of combat, crossbows may be fired in the scout phase but after this may only be fired in the infantry phase. We house rule this to represent the fact that a loaded crossbow can be fired before most people can act when battle begins.

Cave delving

2009-04-26T14:27:00.000-07:00

Another sunday, another Labyrinth Lord session and another evening well spent. We were still down a Ben, as he's on holiday, but he should be returning very soon. In the mean time, the rest of the players were there (Mike, Chris, Joe and Nick) and a good time was had by all. During this session, we experimented with different initiative systems and also applied the Strain Point spell variant system to the Elf from an early Dragon magazine.

The players started by getting a consensus to leave the tomb they were currently exploring, believing that it must be too challenging for them after the initial carrion crawler battle. Instead, they headed for a nearby cave where previously they had dug a pit and killed some kind of zombie kobold with it. This was a long time ago now, probably five months of real time, but they remembered the location and finally had decided to explore it. After a little travel, this time through the day, they arrive at the correct location and venture inside. They descend about forty foot, the initial passage leading down at a sharp thirty degrees, into the bowels of the earth.

A short battle against some giant rot grubs and a giant fly occurs a inside, during which the elf fumbled. After this, the party discover that they are in a fairly large cave complex. The first thing of note they see is that the cave is both dripping wet and the interconnecting passages are narrow and winding. They often drop to only five feet in height too, not a problem for most of the characters but definitely a problem for the Gnoll.

The second thing of note that the party came across was a series of handholds, in a large vaulted cavern, that led fifteen feet up to a ledge. They ignored this and carried on down the passage way instead, noticing a number of cracks in the walls of the passages. Much searching is done for secret doors by the elf at each of these, but alas for him, none are found.

The party pass an area with broken weapons and arrows scattered around. A battle must have been fought in that place, a long time ago. Beyond this, they stumble into a vast cavern that extends well beyond their lantern light. Venturing forwards, they see much of the cavern is flooded and the flooded area is so large they cannot see where it extends to. As they are circling it, shambling figures stumble into their torchlight, advancing towards them. The party backs up quickly, into the passage way. There is a splash as one of the figures enters the water. Moments later, the figures are spotted again and the party readies itself for battle.

The slow moving figures turn out to be a hardy form of zombie - but not hardy enough as their slow movement translated to them being peppered with arrows and sling bullets until their battered rotting bodies fell to the ground in bits, twitching. During this battle, the elf fumbled.

The party ignored the water pool and pushed forwards, finding a corridor whose roof dropped to only two and a half feet above floor level. They diligently crawled through it, passing equipment to each other as they went. However, the passage way led only to a dead end, which the elf searched for secret passages and found none. Down another passage was a small grotto containing a chest; opening this, the gnoll discovered some jewelled chainmail and a pouch containing four dried frogs.

This left the party with a choice: wade through the pool and see where it goes, or climb the ledge from earlier. The party choose the latter.

They found themselves in another cave. Following one of the passages out of it took them to a mysterious room. A strange mystical symbol is painted on a wall, below which lies a large stone slab with metal hooks in each corner of it. Around this are arranged a number of stone 'seats' - for want of a better description. There is dried blood on the central stone. The wizard took a sketch of the painting, presumably to have it checked out later.

Backtracking a little, the party discover that the corridor suddenly takes a very steep decline and the gravel and loose stones scatter down into the darkness in front of them. A rope would be required to take this route safely - but alas - the party does not have one! I'm going to have to get the players onto a basic adventuring course over this oversight!!

The party turned back and decide to explore the pool of water instead. Relighting their lanterns on the way, they decided to wade into the smelly liquid, discovering that the cavern walls narrow and then widen again, effectively taking them into a new cavern. Out of the underground lake, they spied a boot with a leg bone inside it. Near that, was a helmet with a skull and near both was a breastplate, still worn by only a rib cage. Bits of flesh stick to each. Whatever did this, was something nasty...

Warily, the group continued.

They came accross a number of dead rats that had been spiked into the ground and tiny little footprints in a jumbled, confused mess. Whatever had put these rodents here had left its dinner in a hurry...

Still, the brave heroes continued.

They make out figures at the edge of their torch light and instantly went into battle. They were up against a zombie (like before), the skeleton of a wolf, a skeleton with worms that move around its skull and two giant bats. An epic fight began. The party's real muscle is Ginsese, a half orc woman they hired a while back who fights with no fear of her own death. Which suddenly, she came almost face to face with, as her brain was ripped out of her head by the zombie. She sank to the floor and begins reciting tavern songs. She was promptly dragged away by the wizard who force feds her a healing potion - her head healed up and she jumpped back in to the fray! During the fight, the elf fumbled.

The enemy were finally defeated and that wrapped up our game session. We tried out two different intiative systems (a modification of our continuous initiative system and the default labyrinth lord one) and while both work, we weren't really happy with either. So more experimentation is to come, methinks.

Hitting the limits of continuous initiative

2009-04-22T02:28:00.001-07:00

You might recall my continuous initiative (CI) system that I blogged about here and here . If not, here's a quick recap. It's a system designed to simulate how lightly armoured characters with quick weaponry can get more strikes in than a heavily armed and armoured one, in the same space of time.

It has served us well, giving the players interesting tactical choices and allowed them to experiment with some of the lower protective armours (effectively trading defensive for offensive under this system). However, we've hit the limits of it what it can do now.

The system works really well for attacks, but where it falls down is in movement. I would often put fast moving creatures into the gold initiative band, to reflect the fact they could cover lots of ground quickly. This, of course, meant that they attacked frequently too, but this is generally ok as many fast monsters have multiple attacks on their listings anyway to reflect this under the normal D&D rules. So I would simply tweak the number of attacks down when using CI. You can see the start of the problem occurring at this point.

Dwarves and halflings can't move as quickly as humans so we just downed how many hexes they could move per action, in line with their reduced movement rate. This worked fine, but gave us two different ways of handling movement - one in hexes per action and one in the initiative band. Despite this, it worked very well.

If you read the reports from our sessions, you'll see we have quite a few travels across the land and wilderness encounters. Mounts therefore get used to speed up travel. Some mounts could be used in a battle, such as a warhorse, but we don't, because if everyone has a mount then how does it fit into our CI system? If they move a character to the gold band, then he gets additional attacks all of a sudden; and if we put the mounts on the list then we have just doubled up everything we need to track. Also, if mounts are in gold, they are going to be deadlier than the heroes most of the time when they attack. Neither option really works.

I don't want to deny the party the use of mounts in outdoor combats, in fact, I'd rather encourage it. It opens up new options and new tactics for the players. So I've been thinking about ways to allow for this. One idea was to split a round up and have a movement phase, and an attack phase. Mounts and characters would move in the first phase, while fighting would occur in the second. While discussing this briefly with my brother he mentioned that two attack phases might be good, to simulate how you can swing a sword quicker than using a bow.

I've been playing around with how all that might work but now I'm thinking about something completely different. I did enjoy dicing for who goes first ala Labyrinth Lord's default initiative rules. So I'm also considering folding the whole thing up into that because its simple and fast.

Raising an eyebrow at the Silk Runners

2009-04-19T23:55:00.000-07:00

I would like to say a hearty welcome to Nick, who joined our Labyrinth Lord session on sunday - another new player! Later in the game session, he saved the whole party, but I'm getting way ahead of myself!

We were actually down a player as Ben is on holiday for a couple of weeks, depriving the party of its assassin and his dwarven bodyguard. That knocks quite a lot of power from the group in one fell swoop.

Nick decided to roll up a mage, a good choice because party is generally quite low on magical abilities (there is only the elf with his nature magic). You may recall that the party had hired a mage last week but that he had inhaled some poison gas - this gas was slowly killing him.

The Gnoll and the Elf both rejoined the party, having visited their homes. Thromm had been back to his tribe for training, returning to the group on elephant-back (the only animal strong enough to carry a 450 pound, 8 foot tall tower of muscle that he could find!), while the elf had been shopping for a few more elven bows.

The party decide to travel through the night, desperately attempting to take their hired sorceror back to the nearest village before he died. However, within a few hours he begins coughing up blood then finally gives up the ghost. Falador seems disappointed, Khamsin had proved himself in battle and now he is dead. The party take his camel, which Ginsese now rides and Falador takes his curved eastern dagger. Such is the way of chaotic parties!

They continue their travel through the night, but change their destination to their original one: an old tomb they had stumbled across a long time ago. During their travels, they are ambushed by three Silt Runners, little orc like creatures that come screaming out of the night at the party from different directions, no doubt to scare the heroes to death and than loot their bodies. The party is made of much stronger stuff though and fights back!

Farador, the party's fighter, took a beating from one of the Silt Runners, which is then cut to pieces. Another is beheaded by an elven arrow through the neck! The third and final enemy, who seems to be hanging back waiting for an opportunity, is brought down by the Gnoll's bow. The arrow removed its hand at the wrist and it collapsed into unconsciousness out of shock. At both these events, Thal the elf raises his eyebrow.

Searching around, the party find that the Silt Runners had a chest. The chest is locked, but between them, the group managed to bust it open. Inside are some expensive silks. This gives us all a laugh - they're not Silt runners - they are Silk Runners!

At length, the party rests, sleeping through the day and again travelling at night. They are close to the tomb now, but in a small ruin they spy a couple of Gnolls and another Silk Runner. Both groups are surprised to see the other. The Gnolls each carry a chest over their shoulder, but when they put them down and draw weapons, the party prepare for a fight. The elf in particular wants whatever is in the chests...

The Silk Runner is brought down instantly in a hail of arrows and sling bullets!

Ginsese, the party's hench-woman, charges the two Gnolls while the rest of the party hides on a nearby island in the flooded grasslands, but with no support it proves to be her undoing and she is battered back. She beats a hasty retreat to safety and the Gnolls are brought down by missile fire, but she did do a lot of damage with her mace before she was overwhelmed. Brave Ginsese ended up with a broken voice box for her troubles.

Both of the chests are locked and the elf detected that one has poison in it. Both chests were taken and placed in saddle bags but not opened at this point. Instead, the party continue their search for the tomb in the dark. Using the thief's maps, they find it.

Inside the tomb, the rooms are remarkably clean. A stone sarcophagus, shaped like a knight or kingly figure, is discovered. Falador keeps watch while Thromm heaves and with great effort, slides the lid off. Inside it is a skeleton, slowly crumbling away due to the ravages of time (which promptly gets two crossbow bolts in its skull), a bottle with some liquid inside it and a scroll case. The skeleton also wears a ring, which is quickly swiped. The Gnoll decides to drink the liquid, but on opening the seal, smells that the liquid is a healing potion and decides to give it to Ginsese instead as she is badly hurt. The mage opens the scrollcase and carefully pulls out a piece of parchment - it is covered in elven runes and so must be an elf spell. Thal takes the scroll, but he has not got the read magic spell and so will have to wait to find out what spell it contains.

Confidently the party venture further into the tomb. They happen across a room with odd holes in the side walls. Suspecting a trap, Falador throws some items into the room, and when nothing happens, he throws his short sword in too. Thal attempts to push Thromm into the room but is unsuccessful. Falador moves into the room, retreives his shortsword, then he freezes, hearing a scuttling noise all around him. Suddenly, emerging from the holes, are multilegged worm like creatures, pulling themselves into the room, intent on eating him!

Carrion Crawlers close in on our heroes after Falador the fighter beats a hasty retreat - but in a brilliantly creative move by the party mage - the crawlers are foiled by illusionary pits!

This saves the party from almost certain death and pretty much makes it a massacre for the carrion crawlers as they are shot (and polearmed) to pieces from the safety of the other side of the pit.

That wrapped up our game session - I'm not sure if the party will be brave enough to venture any further!

At last - a map of Summit!

2009-04-14T00:17:00.000-07:00

At last, I've done it - I've made a map of Summit for our homebrew Labyrinth Lord campaign in photoshop!

White lines represent roads, while black lines outlined in blue are rivers.

Hills, mountains, forests, swamps, lakes, the sea and grasslands are all represented in the hexes and should be fairly easy to discern.

Places of interest:

Apolis: A large, well defended and well populated city.

Blackport: A den of villainy, they say the Black Hand can be found here, operating with the full consent of the tyrant who rules.

Bramble: An elven village ruled by a reformed dark elf who happens to be an amazing swordsman.

Castle Thorvid: Lord Thorvid trains fighters from his imposing castle, while prize fighters duel for his entertainment in the arenas within.

Cavestone: A dwarven mine that was recently plagued by attacks by gnomes.

Dagger Forest: A dangerous place of wolves and who knows what else.

Dewton: A small farming village with good trade links.

Everleaf Forest: Teeming with elves, unicorns and fairy folk, but be wary, the Everleaf conceals other secrets and not all of them are nice...

Lyorel: A small fishing village built around a lake that some say is falling under the spell of a mysterious cult.

Meister's Mansion: They say the Meister is a great songsmith and teacher of bards.

Mongrelmen Tribe: A tribe of gnolls who trade frequently with the men of Summit - but also eat them!

Monrag Swamp: The home of witches and other foul things; few would travel through here willingly.

Mount Red: A red tipped mountain that some say is the entrance to the realm of Fire.

Shadow Wood: A place of fell sorcery where the dead walk. There are rumours of a vast underground complex beneath it.

Splinter Hills: A range of hills peopled by wandering nomads and bandits.

Temple of the Western Angels: The seat of power for the Druids, who loosely rule the land.

The Great Northern Hills: A vast expanse of hills that surround the craggy mountains.

The Haunted Lands: Said to be ruled over by the mysterious Yellow King, a man not known for his curtesy to strangers...

The Labyrinth: They say it contains great treasure... and the odd monster or two ;-)

Tower of sorcery: Only mages can ever enter the tower, seeking its powerful secrets to bolster their own knowledge.

Twisted Tower: Said to be in need of assistance as danger bubbles up from below...

Undermound: A sleepy halfling town built into the hillside.

Veleye: A religous town they say is home to a dark cult.

Getting around
In a day, 12 movement points are available for travel...

Movement costs by terrain and mode of transport:

Terrain	On foot	Horseback	By boat	By Air
Grasslands	6	4	Impassable	2
Forest	12	6	Impassable	2
Swamp	12	24 (1/2 hex per day)	6	2
Hills	6	6	Impassable	2
Mountains	12	24 (1/2 hex per day)	Impassable	4
Road	1/2 cost	1/2 cost	Impassable	No effect
River	+2	+4	4	No effect
Lake	24 (Swimming, 1/2 a hex per day)	Impassable	6	2
Sea	36 (Swimming, 1/3 of a hex per day)	Impassable	6	3 (high winds)

Never try and rob a thief!

2009-04-13T05:16:00.000-07:00

Our weekly game session kicked off last night with two of the party members leaving to find the Mongelmen Gnoll Tribe for get some training for Thromm; if they stay on schedule they should rendezvous with the rest of the the group next week. In the mean time, the rest of the party had an eventful evening!

Arriving back in the small town of Dewton, the character's witness something falling from the heavens leaving a trail of firey smoke in its wake. It strikes the ground accompanied by a crash of thunder. Going to investigate, they discover an upside down metal pyramid, wedged into the soft earth. With a low humming sound, an opening appears in one of the sides and a man wearing some form of platemail steps out. He is Falamor, a space marine, who has crashed landed on Summit. None of his high tech gear functions except for his heads up display which plots trajectories of projectiles, predator style, giving him a good chance of dodging incoming attacks. He joins the party as Tarantio leaves it, setting off for his chapel in Lyorel on foot.

With their strange companion in tow, who has to abandon his wrecked armour for a suit of chainmail (ouch!) the group hire Khamsin, a sorceror from the east who's camel is stabled in the White Horse inn. After much discussion, they decide that further adventuring into the giant insect caves may prove too dangerous without their other companions (an elf, a gnoll and their hench-lady) and instead that they should head for a tomb that they discovered by chance on their travels some weeks earlier. They buy a horse and a mule, then take the road to Lyorel. They plan on passing through there, then turning north, then leaving the road to head cross country til they reach the tomb.

Half a days travel down the road and they begin to smell smoke. As they crest a rise, they see a great pillar of black reaching to the sky. The grasslands are burning - and they are downwind! The fire moves at an incredible rate towards them, so they kick their horses into a gallop and at length, outrun the grass fire.

They arrive in the small fishing village of Lyorel as the sun is going down, but rather than head for an inn, our chaotic heroes look for a darkened street and a house with no lights on. They divide up, most of them being used as lookouts, while the thief gets to work on the lock of a small cottage. With a slight click, he unlocks the door and creeps inside. The floorboards creak and he is joined by the marine, who when he realises is making more noise, retreats back to the doorway. The thief makes his way through the dark, quiet house. The ground floor is dark and still. The upper floor has two bedrooms, neither occupied. He searches the place quickly, finding two pearls and very little else of interest. The whole party leaves the house as quickly as they came.

Spending the night in the local inn, the a local pickpocket gets into some trouble when he picks the wrong target. Korm Tigertooth is not amused when he realises a local has his hand in one of his pockets and breaks the man's nose. 'A ready smile...' He says to him, '...and a ready fist!' He kicks him out of the common room and into the gutter, where he belongs.

The following day, the party decide to speak to Tarantio but he has not arrived yet, for he was on foot, so they decide to wait for him. They have cooked up a plan where the cleric will give a sermon, distracting the town watch, while they break into every house in the town and rummage through their belongings. In the mean time, they explore the local shops and market place. They take particular interest in a man selling coal in the market place, asking where he buys it from, considering that they could perhaps sell it up at Cavestone to the Dwarves for a profit. They settle on arranging a meeting with this trader in a few weeks to see what sort of deal they can make.

At length, the cleric Tarantio arrives and they run their plan past him. He refuses because it is opposing his own agenda - he wishes to corrupt the locals to join his religion and there won't be any locals if no one wants to live here. He will have no part in it. The party see he has a point and abandon their plan and instead, continue their journey northwards.

They reach the north part of the road and leave it behind, moving cross country now with grassland all around them. They approach a mysterious pile of bodies that reeks; these bodies are rotting under the heat of the sun and have been there for some time. They do not stop to investigate them but continue on their way. They spy a group of skeletons on undead steeds, with bats circling above them, up ahead, moving to intercept them. The party decide to avoid this undead group and take a path that will push take them away; the undead lose interest and the party continues on.

At night, after they have set up camp, the marine is on watch when suddenly he comes face to face with a mounted skeleton not ten feet away. The skeleton stops his horse, which is ghostly, and the two just stare at each other. There is an eery silence. The skeleton of a wolf runs out of the darkness and stops at the skeleton's side. Then, the skeleton turns his mount away and the undead move off into the night.

The following day, the party are almost at the edge of the Everleaf Forest when they spy three figures moving outside of it. There is a dwarf, a man and some kind of forest nymph. Both sides have seen each other and this unusual group changes its path to intercept the party. There is some parlying when the groups come within ear shot: The human demands that the party surrender all their gold, or they will die. The party say they have no gold, at which point the human bandit demands all of their armour, weapons and gear instead.

The marine snorts in derision and makes motions to ride off; at which point the dwarf launches a crossbow bolt at his steed but it whizzes past harmlessly. The party fights back... we have a combat! Between the marine's own crossbow and the wizard's magical rays that fly out of his fingers they kill the woodland creature almost instantly!

The bandit falls to a single shuriken from the thief, which is thrown with such force it removed his arm at the elbow!

The dwarf is shocked by magical rays from the wizard, twice before Korm Tigertooth closes him down and rams his mithril tipped spear into his neck, then operates it like a saw, cutting his head off!

Searching around, the party find a treasure chest. The wizard opens it - there is the sound of a glass vial smashing and poison gas escapes from the chest! There is much coughing and spluttering but only the wizard himself is affected; he begins to feel weak...

Inside the chest is nothing but a hat. The marine and the thief try it on and find that their appearance alters based on what they are thinking about - a magical hat!

And that was the end of the session.

For gold and glory!

2009-04-05T15:14:00.000-07:00

What follows is a brief report on our last Labyrinth Lord game session, which was quite action (and humour) packed...

The party were approached in a tavern by a dwarf wearing an animal skull for helmet who demanded to know if the thief was Terder Caji. A little evasion was made by the thief but when he learned that the dwarf was from Cavestone and had come to pledge his mithril-tipped spear to the thief's service (as the only one in the land who had a higher kill count than himself!) and the thief accepted, getting himself a pretty cool bodyguard in the process.

The elf scanned the tavern patrons to see if he could spot anyone else worthy of being hired and spotted a half orc woman who was playing dice with some of the regulars. The elf and gnoll joined in, while the thief went round the back of her to prevent cheating. A few games were played; small money was won sometimes by party members and sometimes by the regulars. The stakes were increased, then further by the gnoll. Then, when the regulars had all dropped out of the game, the elf put a proposition to the half orc. He said, if they win, she must adventure with them, but if she wins, she gets their stake. She agreed and won the dice game. That was quite funny!

After this, the elf asked how much to hire her and she replied with the cost of three hundred gold pieces. They declined and she left the tavern, but with a little discussion amongst the party they decided they could afford that after all and went looking for her. Asking around town, they learned she had gone to another tavern, so they entered that and hired her on the spot.

Finally, everything in town was taken care of. The party set off back to the caves, for gold and glory.

They travel for a while and then set up camp, when they see Odin and his host of wolves and ravens running at breakneck speed across the sky, surrounded by flashing lightning and leaving a trail of fire. The god is travelling south; the barbarians must have called to him for aid - Thorgrim's war must be driving the Great Hoard out of their swamplands and into the deserts, the dwarf informs them. The party is astonished at what they are seeing. Soon, he disappears over the horizon, they set up camp. The night is otherwise uneventful and they continue their journey the following day.

Ambush!
As the party crosses a bridge over a wide, fast flowing river, a manticore appears at one side and a chitine at the other! A furious fight breaks out; the chitine falls to the thief's backstab in one swift attack and the manticore is eventually brought down by a barrage of blows from basically everyone. It heavily injured the half orc and the undead ant, though.

The cleric releases the undead ant from his service (which instantly crumbles to dust) and attempts to raise the manticore from the dead. It twitches momentarily, but stays dead. The cleric is not yet powerful enough!

He rests and raises the chitine from the dead. The party set off, reach the gold mine, light a torch and a lantern and head inside.

Two giant ants are attacked by the party in a large cavern; the cleric and dwarf engage at point blank and are backed up by the elf, gnoll and thief with ranged attacks. Amusingly, later in this fight, the elf snapped his own bow and had to pull out a sword and charge in! Also, the thief had climbed a stalagmite and attempted to throw a shuriken from his lofty height, slipped and fell off!

After defeating the giant ants, the party came across a pool of mysterious water with a strange fog hanging over it... which the cleric then cast 'destroy water' on and that was the end of the mysterious water! Nothing was revealed under the water, no was there anything unusual about the cavern. This left the party with only one way to go; back tracking to an ant thoroughfare

Here, by attaching the arm from a zombie onto the end of a rope the party were able to attract four giant ants down a narrow corridor, so they could face them one on one. Using the cleric as a shield, they successfully fended the ants off, even though two of them scaled the walls and came at them two at a time, but some credit for this also must go to the half orc who took some heat off the party too. The gnoll scored some good hits with his polearm, although he did manage to break one of them! Luckily for him though, he had another one strapped to his back. The thief also fell off the stalagmite in this cavern!

Another amusing thing happened in this combat. The gnoll had lent his bow to the elf and said if you break it, you will die ... and the elf managed to damage the weapon by fumbling with it! At least it wasn't broken but it was a hilarious moment!

Within a dead end cavern, the characters spot a strand of gold in one of the walls. Using a hammer and chisel, they carve it out, then smash it into four bits and distribute it amongst themselves. Quite a nice find that!

The bravest fight of the night; with the gnoll as party leader three of the heroes dared to go one on one with an equal number of giant ants that were tunnelling; literally chewing their way through the cave walls. This would have been very risky - or impossible - were it not for the henchmen who each took a lot of damage. The dwarf even downed his magical shield to fend off a second critical hit from the ant the party faced.

Those were the events on the night. The gnoll is now ready to be trained to second level, and Mike has expressed an interest in swapping his cleric out for another character in his roster (likely to be either the psychic or the prize fighter), but we'll wait and see what happens...

...almost to the limits of the living room!

2009-03-29T16:02:00.000-07:00

The group expands... almost to the limits of the living room!

We were joined by two new players in our latest Labyrinth Lord session, my old buddy Chris and his elven year old son Joe. Joe has never played a pen and paper RPG before (same with Mike and Ben when I started running this) but he seemed to do fine, even though his Gnoll had only one hitpoint, amazingly, he's still alive at the end of the session. I'm not sure if he'll make it to level two though, time will tell.

The party awaken and the Gnoll screams in horror - their equipment is crawling with scarab swarms! Cue a battle that almost destroyed an undead elven archer - that the dark cleric commands - as the scarabs swarm over its rotting flesh, reducing it to a skeleton!

With four players now I can really only fit one more on the settee in the living room so I'm almost at capacity. It's quite tricky to judge what level to bring new characters in at, especially with the party cleric being fifth and the party thief being fourth, but I figured lets bring them in at first and see what happens. Certainly, if they can make it to second level, they stand a fair chance of gaining a few levels as they higher level (relatively speaking) character's advancement slows down. It worked out ok, with the vulnerable characters being protected by the strong.

Tarantio is attacked during the night by a pesky elven archer and his very big pet bird. See if you can spot the thief, who is trying his best to hide in shadows ;-)

We'll see what happens as they continue to explore the caves with the giant insects in. I'm going to recommend to them that they consider taking some hired help with them as the party is quite low on straight combat muscle (a cleric, a thief, an elf and a gnoll). Overall though, the game session went really, really well :-)

Animate dead is awesome!

2009-03-22T15:28:00.000-07:00

The party fights the hardest battle they've ever fought - voluntarily too I might add; 40 hit dice worth of giant ants that are crawling all over a bridge and stripping it of wood! Up against the insects are a 4th level cleric, a 2nd level fighter and a 4th level dwarf; they've funneled the ants into a tunnel and the ants can only come at them one at a time. After the fight is over, only the cleric still lives but the experience points push him to level five... he retreats from the nest and back to the local town to train.

He pays the fee and trains to become fifth level. In so doing, he gains access to the level three cleric spells and decides to memorise Animate Dead. He's joined by his psychic companion, a prize fighter with a bunch of phobias that include fleeing from darkness and screaming around clowns and the mage who has now invented her own brand of fire magic and returns with a whole bunch of unique spells. The motley crew goes back into the nest, fights a couple of giant ants (which the prize fighter defeats by knocking both of them off the aforementioned bridge and into the chasm below with his flying kick attacks) and then retreats back to rest. This group is lower level than the previous and very ability based; the psychic has used up all of his power points and the cleric and mage most of their spells, so they figured resting would be a good idea.

During the night though, they are ambushed by two elven archers. They archers have been tracking them for a while and are in the employment of the Druids of the West, sworn enemies of Tarantio. The Druids are the embodied of Law in the Land, whereas Tarantio and his dark cult embody chaos. There is a brief parlay where Tarantio attempts to talk his way out of the situation but the Elves powers of divination and lying detection spells undo his attempt - a fight is on!

The Elven archers try to bring the cleric down in a hail of bow fire but it does not work; instead, they are themselves shot by arrows and sling bullets. Then, the most awesome thing happens. Tarantio uses his animate dead spell. On the Elves that were sent to kill him. Only now, they are zombies that serve him. Do you want to know the duration of the spell? It's permanent. They will serve him forever. This is just too good for words. I think we've found one of the most awesome spells in D&D!

The psychic character class - for Labyrinth Lord

2009-03-18T07:11:00.000-07:00

This is a new character class for Labyrinth Lord and is a reimiganing of the second edition AD&D version. To use this class you will need either the psionics handbook or the psionic spell cards. I myself purchased the cards, then knocked up this character class based on those cards.

The psychic was born with a brain capable of manifesting supernatural powers. As such, his are available from birth or as soon as he becomes aware of them during adolescence. He does not acquire new psionic powers over time; instead, he becomes better able to control and manifest them. He gains d6 hit points per level and uses the Elf advancement table and saving throws. He has an initial starting psychic power point score as his total Wisdom and Intelligence combined which he uses up when he uses his psionic abilities. These psychic power point's are recovered at a rate of 40 per day (providing a good nights rest was gained - 8 hours - otherwise only 20 are recovered). Upon levelling up, d10 extra are gained.

The psychic has an ability from each psionic discipline, determined at random. The psionic disclipines are:

Psychic Contact: The contacting of other minds by the psychic, sometimes in a hostile manner.
Psychoprotection: The defences against contact by other psychics.
Clairsentience: Expanding the senses beyond their normal limits.
Psychokinesis: Affecting other external objects in the world.
Metapsionics: Boosting psionic powers and abilities.
Psychometabolism: The psychic affecting his own body - or the body of another living creature.
Telepathy: Knowing - or changing - the thoughts of another.

To determine them at random, take the cards and sort them into these disciplines, then shuffle each deck. Split the cards and the top power is the one that the psychic knows. Do this for each school. Psychic contact contains the psychic attacks and psychoprotection contains the defences. Ignore the psychic combat cards, these will not be necessary. Alternatively, make some random tables from the psionic handbook. There were very few powers I had to remove from my campaign to make this class work; I recommend removing all healing and magical effect type powers (e.g. melting metals and such).

To manifest a power, the psychic spends the required power points but does not have to make an ability check. Instead, if the power operates on another, the other gets a save vs spell and any magic resistances apply, to resist the power.

Delving deeper

2009-03-08T15:14:00.000-07:00

The party began the session by leaving the caves and returning to the town of Dewton, where they run a small business (they own a tavern). They sent Aeon, the witch into training so she could level up and she returned with the ability to use magic and not just mix potions and some knowledge of superior potion making. Torvig, the dwarf, got his dagger identified and it turned out to be an enchanted dagger +1, so he gave it to Aristcritus, the low level thief. They then hired two henchmen to accompany them back into the cave system: Soc Kal (a humble woman wielding a bastard sword and wearing, of all things, a chain bikini) and Eirronsand (a foolish man with lots of energy who wielded a mace and wore chainmail).

On the way to the cave, the Gnoll shapeshifter transforms back into his Gnoll form and gives Eirronsand a real shock. He had already insulted Gnolls, back in the tavern where they met him, by calling them hyena headed idiots. Luckily for him, this Gnoll hadn't taken offense at that. Back at the cave entrance, they leave their wagon, and all their possessions on it, in the hands of their new hench-lady Soc Kal. Risky for someone they've only just met! Within the cave, Eirronsand insulted the dwarf when Torvig tried to tell him to be careful; that he had lost a foot to one of the beasts down here, but Eirronsand was undeterred, saying dwarves have tiny, fragile ankles. Later, he also insulted Railia, too, but she too choose restraint.

They re-enter the cave system proper, rapel down the ropes they hammered in with iron spikes, and continue their exploration. The bodies of the giant ants they had slain, and the giant beetle, are gone, but Railia cannot find any blood trail, even with her tracking skill, so they set off to explore at random. They find many passages that the dwarf notes slope downwards and backtrack each time til they have come across a cavern which a gigantic stag beetle, intent on eating them, emerges from.

A battle commences!

The elf fires rays of frost out of her finger tips into the beetle!

All is going well, until Raila joins the fight in close quarters and has her stomach ripped apart by the gigantic beetle. She collapses foward, dead and the beetle is hammered into oblivion by the remaining party members. Then, they cut the beetle up and carry bits of it with them in case they run into any giant ants.

Exploring a little deeper and hopefully to get some more gold, it is not long before the party happen across a giant mantis devouring four giant ants! The creature turns to regard them with malevolent, alien eyes and the party panics! They drop the pieces of the giant beetle and retreat quite a way. They are not followed.

They begin to make plans for how to defeat the giant preying mantis, knowing full well it has just slain four giant ants so it must be powerful. During the planning Aeon interrupts, explaining that she has phobia of insects and wants no part in fighting a giant preying mantis. The party agrees to leave her out of the battle, makes a plan involving burning oil and a bunch of spells, then prepares to fight.

The party move in on the mantis, intent on its death!

Eirronsand proves the bravest, fighting against it alone until he is joined by Torvig. The two thieves are scaling the walls and throwing shurikens into the beast, which turns its attention on the dwarf and scythes through his armour as though it were paper.

Tarantio joins the fight after the throwing the mythical Hammer of Dawn at the creature and also takes a heavy beating and is knocked backwards by the force of the injuries. Frantically drinking healing potions, both the dwarf and the cleric try to recover some of their strength, while their henchman Eirronsand is eviserated.

Eirronsand is dead, cut to ribbons by the preying mantis and its scythe like appendages! Tarantio attempts to put the fear of god into the creature with a spell - but it resists. The elf summons a pit viper to fight the mantis, but she can only keep it in this plane of existence for one round - not enough as its strike does not pierce the armour of the beast. Tarantio attempts to delay the mantis with his magic; to make it hesitate at critical moments - and it works!

The mantis bangs its head on Torvig's axe and is dazed - just the break the party needed! The gnoll, who has been battling it with a scythe in each hand, has one of them broken and pulls out his trident to try and stab the beast. Then, he switches to his net and tries to net it, but alas, his throw was not on target and it fails. Desperately, he throws his broken scythe at the beast - and decapitates it! Finally - the giant mantis is defeated.

The players decided that they best thing to do would be to retreat back to Dewton and sell their loot to raise two thousand gold pieces to have Raila resurrected. They make just enough and she comes back to life - but with a disorder. She now has an under the bed fetish, meaning she will never sleep on a bed, only under it! Still, it is much better than never learning anything, which was what she had been afflicated with the last time she was brought back to life.

In addition, they drag the carcass of the mantis to the smithy and ask if any armour could be made from it; Giles says yes, names a price but they cannot afford it yet. However, he agrees to preserve the body for much less and will make them a suit of armour that is stronger than platemail when they can afford it later.

The Prizefighter - a new Character Class for Labyrinth Lord

2009-03-06T08:18:00.000-08:00

The Prizefighter is a fearless bare knuckle boxer who is lethal with his bare hands. This brawler uses them frequently and without warning. He sneers at anyone who goes into combat using weapons, preferring to literally pummel his enemies into submission with his hardened fists and lightning reflexes.

Restrictions:
The Prizefighter cannot wield weapons of any kind except to throw daggers and darts at opponents; he is otherwise exclusively an unarmed fighter extraordinaire.

Abilities:
Advances as a fighter, with fighter hitpoints, experience points and saving throws. His prime ability is also strength.

Level one
May kick an opponent for d3 damage and the opponent must make a save vs paralysis or suffer the effects of a knockback* if the opponent is mansized. If the opponent is smaller, the opponent suffers a -4 on his saving throw.

May strike with both fists in a round but the second attack counts as an off hand attack and occurs with a -4 penalty to the attack roll**. If both fists strike the target, the Prizefighter is allowed a third fist attack, at no penalty to hit.

Level two
The Prizefighter may follow two successful fist strikes in the same round with an immediate kick attack.

The Prizefighter gains an immediate counter attack against an opponent who misses him with a melee attack; this counter attack is made as a normal attack roll and is a single fist strike. Rings of protection, if any are worn, grant an attack roll bonus of +1 for each point of protection, for the counter attack to-hit roll.

Level three
May elect to follow two successul fist attacks immediately, by locking an opponent's limb, or he may use this ability on a prone or stunned opponent. Locking limbs works on humanoid, living opponents only and on opponents of lesser level than the Prizefighter. The opponent must make a save vs paralysis or have his limb restrained by the Prizefighter. The opponent must then make a save vs paralysis every round, with a -4 penalty, or be unable to act. At will, the prize fighter may attempt to break the limb by making a successful strength check, causing d6 points of damage and forcing the opponent to make a save verse paralysis or be stunned for 1d4 rounds. Opponents who have a limb broken must instantly make a morale check. If the opponent is larger than the Prizefighter (e.g. an Ogre) she receives a +4 bonus to all saving throws mentioned.

Level four
May elect to follow a successful kick attack immediately with a knee attack. This attack deals d2 damage, and the opponent must make a save vs paralysis or be stunned for one round. This can be in addition to being knocked back; in which case, she is knocked prone. The opponent must be man sized or smaller, humanoid and living (e.g. not magical or undead).

Level five
If both fists strike an opponent in the same round, the Prizefighter may elect to follow them immediately with a head butt attack, inflicting d4 damage if it hits. This attack is made with a +4 to bonus.

Level six
Counterattacks may also be made with kick attacks, at the Prizefighter's discretion.

Level seven
If both fists strike an opponent in the same round, the Prizefighter may elect to immediately follow them up with a neck break. In addition, a neck break may be attempted on a prone or stunned opponent. This works only on man size opponents or less and on opponents of lower level than the Prizefighter. The opponent must make a save vs paralysis, or have her neck snapped like a twig. This effectively puts the combatant out of the battle and will paralyse her for life. Neck breaks also inflict d10 damage on an opponent.

Level nine
Counterattacks with fists are now made with both of them as two attacks, but no subsequent combos may be chained on the end of this.

Level twelve
Neck breaks may be attempted on unaware opponents. The Prizefighter does not inherently have any supernatural move silent ability like the thief - this ability will never apply in a combat situation. The victim must be heavily distracted or otherwise engaged or will become aware of the Prizefighter before the attempt is made, automatically foiling it.

Level fifteen
The Prizefighter gains his full complement of attacks and options when counter attacking an opponent. For example, he may hit attack with both fists, then if they are successful, follow it with a kick and if that was successful, a knee. However, the first miss breaks the combo completely.

*Knockbacks push an opponent five feet directly backwards. If the opponent cannot be pushed back because the way is blocked, she takes an additional point of damage instead.

**Unless wearing a cestus on the off hand, which is designed for off hand fighting and therefore incurs no penalty on the attack roll.

New Equipment

Knuckle dusters, 1gp, elevates all unarmed damage to lethal status. i.e. unarmed attacks will kill and not knock out an opponent.

Gauntlets (come with platemail, scalemail, chainmail and splint mail armours). Increase unarmed damage to d3 points for the Prizefighter only.

Cestus, 5gp, 1lb, d3 damage and no penalty to hit when used in an off hand attack.

The DM is encouraged to throw some magical variants of these into his treasure troves, from time to time.

The adventures of Tarantio

2009-03-01T15:06:00.000-08:00

Now I have a name for my campaign world - Summit - I thought I might blog about the game sessions as well which I started doing here. So expect a few of these in the blog from time to time as we play sessions ;-)

Tarantio is a fourth level cleric who follows the dark and mysterious Malevolent Malice. He is accompanied by Torvig (a 3rd level dwarf), Terder (a 4th level thief), Aristcritus (a 1st level thief), Raila (a 2nd level fighter), Aeoen (a 1st level witch now ready to level up when she can train), Phluru (the unprouncable 1st level elf) and Frhurg (a 1st level gnoll shapeshifter) - a motley crew of veterans and new recruits form the party. The newest members are the elf and the gnoll who have been brought in to replace two others who died (who also were an elf and a gnoll) in the previous rescue of the cleric. Not that the two new party members were told that, of course ;-)

The party is essentially flat broke. They scraped enough money together to raise Raila from the dead (another casualty of the followers of the Druids who tried to burn Tarantio at the stake). Alas the resurrection was not perfect, as none of them ever seem to be, and now she can never learn anything new ever again. Note to Mike - stop rolling a 13 on the resurrection side effect table! So, being broke, the party decide to explore something unusual they discovered on their travels. A cave with a locked gate.

On finding the cave again, the party checked around for tracks but found only their own. Terder and Aristcritus each tried to pick the rusty padlock on the gate but neither could do it, so the nine foot tall Frhurg literally pulled the padlock apart with his bare hands and the rusty gate swung open...

Inside was an entrance hall, not a cave, with murals of dwarves on the walls. Past this was a long tunnel with a railway track down the middle of it and an upturned cart. It was clear they were in an old abandoned mine.

Within one of the rooms they spoke to a ghost who warned them of a 'great danger' and not to listen to the 'betrayer'. After a short conversation the ghost vanished.

In a locked store room, they came across a family of giant rats living off the contents of a few crates and barrels and were attacked by them!

Giant rats!

Well, the ones marked by green poker counters are anyway - the rest are normal rats.

The cardboard circles are crates and barrels - can you believe I still don't have miniatures for those (yet!).

As you can imagine, this encounter went completely in the party's favour!

After fighting probably the easiest battle the party have ever faced, they continued exploring. At length, after passing many cave ins, they came to a room with a mural on the wall of a dwarf battling a crowned goblin. The mural depicted him winning the fight and wielding a glowing dagger. In front of the mural, on an alter, was a metal box. Aristcritus detected that there was a mechanism in the lock that was likely a trap. Terder successfully picked the lock; but how to open it without triggering the trap? They settled on using an arrow to hook onto the clasp and a rope to pull it. Success! The clasp opened and a poisoned dart hit the wall harmlessly. Within the box was a dagger that Terder, with his experience of handling stolen property (much of which is magical) could tell was magical. Torvig, the dwarf, quickly took the dagger and placed it in his boot for safe keeping.

The party discovered a lake of bubbling fire in one of the caverns, about a hundred feet below the precarious ledge that they were standing upon. This was the Magma Pits - Dwarves in Summit use these for cremation purposes and most Dwarven settlements have them. The group hurriedly headed back.

Later, they came across a spectral dwarf who said to them 'None shall pass, from either direction!' Although his form was incorporal, the weapons he wielded were completely solid. Torvig decided to paylay with him and learned that this dwarf believed he was surrounded by thieves; that everyone had been stealing from the mine and that he was going to put a stop to that and had been doing to anyone and anything. Torvig, cleverly, informed him that there were thieves near the entrance, stripping the mine of its valuables and the spectre left to find the non-existent thieves, allowing the party to continue on its path.

They passed a barricade that had been erected but was incomplete and easy to climb over, to find a cavern with strange vertical shafts in the walls. There were also two lines of gold in that they chiselled out of the surrounding rock; these were very valuable. Hammering a rope in with two iron spikes, Raila went down one of the vertical shafts a full twenty five foot to a cavern below. The rest followed her lead and into a cave system proper.

The party headed for a passage that wound downwards and came face to face with a giant ant that suttled towards them out of the darkness! Rather than turn and flee the party fought bravely but things started to look bad when Torvig had his right foot chewed off! However, the rest of the party hammered the giant ant into oblivion. Torvig realigned his foot to his leg and drank a healing potion to reattach it while Aeon the Witch brewed up twelve more. Torvig then explains how the giant ant eyes are like gems and are valuable and implores the rest of them not to smash the eyes next time!

A little further into the cave system and the party hears more scuttling ahead. Terder climbs the cave wall and peers into the cavern and is joined by Aristcritus doing the same thing. They see an unusual spectacle. Four giant ants are fighting with a giant stag beetle. As they watch, the beetle is killed but it decapitates one of the ants in its death throes.

Three giant ants carry away the carcass of a giant stag beetle.

At this point, the party decided to attack. Notice the two thieves on the walls; from their position they rain down shurikens onto the ants.

As the party decide to fight, the ants turn to kill their attackers. The thieves believe they are safe until one of the ants heads right for Terder and it suddenly occurs to him that they can climb too, so both he and Aristcritus climb back to the safety of the main group.

The giant ants surround Tarantio but already two are injured and one has been temporarily blinded! When Tarantio had shattered his shield, to prevent a critical hit, one of the splinters got into a giant ant's eye and blinded it!

After the ants closed in on the cleric, the thieves once again climbed walls and took up positions at the far sides, raining shurikens down onto the enemy.

After defeating the ants, that wrapped up our game session for the evening. What else could be down in these caves, the group are no doubt wondering....

Psionic powers and ability checks

2009-02-27T03:08:00.000-08:00

I recently picked up the psionic ability cards and threw together a psychic class for my labyrinth lord sessions. Not having the psionic rules, I knocked a few together myself based on what I saw on the cards and my own feeling for in-game balance. I removed some of the cards which were clearly magical or healing in nature (I do NOT want to make the mage class redundant, nor the cleric and have since removed most of their ESP like abilities too, to give the psychic a nice niche).

So far so good, we had a psychic rolled up in the last games session and he proved useful in play - one of the characters that the player wants to keep in the party. I'm aware that my implementation of the class is probably very different from the core rules, too, so it fits in nicely in with all of our custom classes in terms of power (and of course, the core ones too).

One thing has occurred to me though. With every ability costing psionic points to use (I total Wisdom and Intelligence for starting points on a first level psychic, then increase by d10 per level), why does the psychic need to make an ability roll to pull the ability off? Especially as if he fails it, he still burns the points? I'm thinking of replacing this with automatic success (i.e. losing the ability check) but giving the target a save vs spells to resist the effects. Points would still be burned if the target resists or not, similar to the wizard and clerics still losing a spell even if it didn't work. Also, I'm toying with magic resistance affecting psionic abilities, too.

I was wondering, can anyone with experience of psionics let me know what they think of these ideas? It seems to me that psionics may be putting too much stock on characters having high ability scores, as is.

Character death and multiple characters

2009-02-23T00:37:00.001-08:00

Since our current group started playing Labyrinth Lord in late October, right from that first session, I thought I would try something different. I used to play D&D about twelve years previously, acting mostly as DM for a group of school friends and we had some great sessions. Back then, it was much more 'traditional' in that each player had one, and only one, character. I thought I might try breaking that convention this time around by allowing the players to use multiple characters and ever since our first game session that's exactly what we have been doing.

This has a number of interesting effects on play. Firstly, you have to set a maximum party size limit to prevent the players from abusing the privilege. I set our limit to eight characters in the party, but it can be expanded sometimes for quest specific NPCs. Hirelings and animals such as war-dogs take up slots just like characters. I may have to rethink this aspect as hired help has never been used to date except as non-combatants, such as hiring a tracker to ensure the party do not get lost.

Secondly, it almost completely solves the problem of character death. D&D has always been a merciless game where first level characters are only a single two handed weapon sword away from death; until they reach third level you have to be a little cautious with them and pick your fights with care. Players simply don't mind this aspect of the game so much when they can keep playing with their existing characters that have survived the encounter in which another was brutally slain. Death needs to be an ever present threat to keep the players on their toes. It's much closer to the spirit of the original game that Gary Gygax envisioned in the first place, when it plays out this way, I feel.

Defend the horses! A photo from our recent game session where the party's horses (which pull their wagon, here represented by two plastic bubbles - alas, the wagon model didnt make it to the session!) were under threat from two hungry Rocs...

Thirdly, you have to determine where new characters can be generated. In my campaign world of Summit I only allow it to happen with towns, villages and cities. This means that the party can be whittled down in size while travelling the wilderness or exploring deep and dark dungeons, falling prey to hideous monsters and deadly traps, a facet that adds to the tension and danger as a quest nears its climax.

Fourthly, there is a negative effect. It's harder to roleplay multiple characters, by definition. As players have less 'ownership' of any one character (by virtue of managing multiple ones) - at least until they reach higher levels anyway - this naturally affects the amount of 'flesh' that the player adds to his character's underlying mechanical 'bones'. A way to alleviate this problem a little is for player's to roll up vastly different characters (at a minimum, different classes) but this problem tends to wane with time as characters climb levels anyway. The longer a player uses a character, the more that character exists within her imagination.

In conclusion, I would recommend trying this if you fancy a change in approach to roleplaying games. Its a useful approach if you only have a small gamer group, too.

Class systems vs skills systems

2009-02-20T06:53:00.000-08:00

I've never been overly fond of skill based systems, probably because I like class based ones so much. Class based systems are about the team; if the game system is designed correctly then no single class is a match for all challenges. This forces players to work together and becomes the spirit of the roleplaying experience - cooperation.

Skill based systems, on the other hand, are more about the opposite - the individual. Players will instinctively attempt to cover all bases when choosing skills, minimising their dependences on others and essentially making their character as independently powerful (as opposed to being powerful when operating as part of a group) as possible. Skills based systems are a good fit for single player or low player games I think.

Normally skill based systems are fairly balanced at the start of a characters career then go a bit haywire when a character hits the higher levels, so I've been avoiding using one in Labyrinth Lord. Until now. I've changed my mind because there is a side effect to skill based systems which can be quite desirable ... variety.

When the players roll up characters, ability scores alone are not enough to differentiate two characters of the same class. They can be roleplayed differently and a variety of equipment bought for each; but after you've done this a few times.. well a fighter is a fighter and isn't too different at level one than the next one. So now I'm thinking, lets bring a skill system into play.

One criticism of skill systems which I agree with also is that they can be exclusive. For example, if you make a riding a horse a skill, it tends to prohibit players from attempting to do it that don't have the skill and the rules may explicitly prevent this also. So skill systems can detract from the game experience for this reason, too.

I've been thinking of a way around this situation. Take my riding skill as an example. Say it was based on your dexterity attribute when you had to make a riding check. If the skill was rated in points, it could add to your dexterity score to make it more likely you pass the test. Characters without riding could still ride but would be relying on their natural dexterity (with no skill bonus) when tested, such as when jumping an obstacle on horseback. Clearly, this would still be inclusive - not exclusive - and provide a benefit to the skilled characters. I've not got it mechanically sorted out yet, but say you test on a d30, you could assign a +5 for a character with riding skill and allow it to develop still further as the character levels up and assigns skill points to improve it. I think this might work.

The rescue of the cleric

2009-02-15T15:38:00.000-08:00

Earlier this evening, we played another session of Labyrinth Lord. The party had been told, quite a few sessions ago, that their High Priestess had a task for them, when they were ready, but that it would only be given to the cleric character, who was currently in a chapel in another village, corrupting the locals. The party did a few subquests and spent some time traveling on their own accord and eventually, this evening, decided to go get the cleric so they can attempt this quest.

When they arrive at the sleepy lakeside village of Lyorel, they triggered one of my little subquests, unexpectedly for them. They witness their cleric being dragged out of his chapel by his hair and being rendered unconscious with a blow to the back of the head, then thrown onto the back of a cart. Soldiers spill out of the chapel, bearing the white dragon symbol of the Druids of the West. The Druids are the party's nemesis; they seek to end the dark religion that the party is trying to spread in the world of Summit and so are in direct opposition to their long term goals.

The party form a line just before the battle begins, attempting to prevent the kidnapping. The ensuing battle is pretty much a massacre of the Druids of the West's men, with some amusing moments like when their captain threw his longsword up in the air and accidentally caught the wrong end!

The party make short work of their opponents and, after a few trips to shops to sell some ill begotten gear (that the watch turned a blind eye to being collected), they give chase. Their trail leads them to a copse and within this copse is a clearing within which the followers of the Druids are gathered. Gathered around their cleric. Who is on a pyre, about to burnt alive as a heretic. Cue battle!

This battle went very, very differently from the previous one. The party were up against seven soldiers, a powerful barbarian, their mysterious leader and a massive four armed beast he was keeping on a leash. This powerful creature was the worse thing the party have ever faced - 8 Hit dice and 4 attacks - but for some reason the players thought they could send one character in to fight it and it would be enough. Well, it didn't work, it literally beat the life out of their Gnoll shapeshifter, who in a quirk of fate after being resurrected before had no personality at all, had some amusing final words.. something along the lines of 'well, that was expected!'

The soldiers also had good luck with picking off a few of the other first level characters and the party were in disarray. They had a crazy idea of putting gunpowder on a sack and convincing one of their characters to run into battle holding it - that it would bring good luck - which he actually fell for but was soon cut down. A flaming arrow was sent his way but missed and after that, the party was too split up and the thief was in trouble without much help but somehow managed to hold his own and kill two soldiers, face to face, toe to toe. This was partly because we play using my continunous initiative house rules which let fast characters act more times than slower ones (see link).

The main battle begins, the cleric is the upturned figure at the far side, next to the four armed aberration.

The mighty dwarf was knocked about by the barbarian til the unarmoured two handed sword wielding mountain of muscle fell, overwhelmed. The strongest character, a fighter, literally pulled the cleric out of the flames taking massive damage in the process. After this, she charged at the four armed beast but was slain. The four armed aberration was looking like it would take a few more characters apart when some fumbling took it out of action for a few rounds - just enough time for the surviving party members to finally bring the monster down.

That left the leader of the enemy as the only one alive, probably because he'd managed to stay uninvolved while his troops and pet fought, but was forced joined the battle and started wearing the dwarf down with attack after attack. The cleric was revived, and wielding the mystical Hammer of Dawn, joined the fight. Surrounded on all sides, the leader danced out of the way of blow after blow, seemingly invulnerable, slowly whittling the heroes down - until the thief arrived and stuck two daggers into his back which proved fatal. Finally - the battle was won!

But at what cost? Four characters were killed in this epic fight, fully half the party (three first level and one second). This was the first run in that they have had with the Druids of the West - an enemy that has proven to be highly dangerous and quite surprising. But, on the plus side... their cleric is safe and did not get burned alive and, of course, the plans of the Druids have been thwarted!

To be chaotic or lawful?

2009-02-06T08:28:00.000-08:00

A fairly recent blog post about evil campaigns It’s So Good To Be Bad! on Dungeon Mastery had a comment added to it by "GiacomoArt" that has really got me thinking about alignment in D&D.

Anyone worth telling a (non-comedic) story about has a dark side, but the biggest problem with “evil” campaigns has nothing to do with logistics or morality, but with the very psychology that compels gamers to call them “evil”. You can tell lots of interesting stories about “antiheroes”, but however wrongheaded, selfish, or desperate an antihero may be, he ultimately sees himself as reasonable and justifiable, not “evil”. You can be sure that even Adolph Hitler, arguably the most evil individual in the history of the history, saw himself as a hero. What we call evil, he would have called, well… ANYTHING else. Something along the lines of “pragmatic” or “expedient”. Evil is something that the other guy does. So call them “dark” campaigns, or “gritty” or “edgy” or even “sadistic”… but calling them “evil” just turns the whole thing into a self-conscious farce.

I agree wholeheartedly with this point of view.

When Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson created Dungeons and Dragons, it was pretty clear that the view of the universe they want with was absolutely black and white in terms of alignment. They had three types: Law, Neutral and Chaos. Law, supposedly represents your good guys and Chaos your bad guys, while Neutrality are animals and anything else that doesn't fit. Which, if you try to map this back into anything you can relate to, would put *everyone* into neutral.

Perhaps this was why later editions then added alignment subtypes: good, evil and neutral. These then get appended on to the end of the original trio of types to form nine types; e.g. you can be Chaotic Good, meaning something like you will break laws to perform good deeds. Or something. Maybe this is Robin Hood. Who knows. Its only a game and who cares if it doesn't really match reality... only after accepting this for years and years, I now think its completely flawed. As the above poster points out, no one sees themselves as being *evil*.

I suspect that the original trio of alignments are based on the philosophies of natural law which is based on their idea that there is a sort of ultimate good and ultimate evil in the universe and all good and evil flows from that. Well, that's a loose description of it anyway. I don't think many of us subscribe to such a simplistic world view though, daily life is much too complex to be shoe horned into such a simple philosophy.

Why does Lawful equate to good anyway? Who's laws are being followed, exactly? If they are the suppressive laws of a brutal tyrant who delights in torture and human sacrifice, lawful is not a good thing. Chaotic would be. Perhaps that is why the original alignment trio were expanded - but it's still too simplistic. Perhaps it needs replacing with an allegiance system or broad morality or ethics rating. I'm still thinking this through.

As nobody ever thinks of themselves as being evil and following laws, or breaking them, doesn't make you one or the other (just clean or a criminal within the society being modelled in the game world), I wonder what could replace this system to give a basic idea of a character's motivation and / or morality?

Difficulties with miniatures and dungeons

2009-02-01T14:36:00.000-08:00

Earlier I blogged about how to successfully combine miniatures with playing dungeons and dragons, specifically about how to keep the imagination fired up by having players describe their character's actions - and rewarding them for it. Today though, I'm going to blog about a different problem that I have experienced with miniatures - representing the dungeon itself.

I looked at various different options. My wilderness battles are just fantastic with the Heroscape hexes and I wanted to get something equally good for the old school dungeon crawls too.

Here is one such outdoor battle from the session tonight. Here, the party return to their wagon to find it surrounded by a patrol of six gnomes with Dire Badgers - they fight to get their wagon back! The battle went well for the party, with the Dire Badgers causing surprisingly few problems (good tactics from the players paid off).

I considered using scenery from Dwarven Forge for dungeons but, while it looks incredible, its just too expensive. Anyway I'm not really sure how useful it is to have walls in 3D... doesn't that get in the way of moving the miniatures around?

I decided to give some ceramic tiles a go that I picked up off eBay. There were 300 of them and just over an inch square, I spray painted them brown and glued a few together to make corridors easier to lay out and we played a couple of sessions using them. They are quite cool, you can effectively make any layout with them but not so good at large rooms ... and we had to keep packing them up and starting over as the table we play on isn't exactly massive as the party explored the levels. They did prove useful for the caverns that the party were crawling through at the time as they were quite nonstandard shapes, but a lot of set up time and work involved with clearing them up to layout new areas.

So, I figured I would try something else. Last week we used a roll up square map that you can write on with non permanent markers and this was quite good - however, I'm not sure if it was the pens we used but erasing them (both wet and dry erase markers) left smudge marks. Also, the square size was exactly an inch, meaning we couldn't really put doors or scenery on the map and some miniatures with slightly larger bases would push other miniatures slightly off their squares. It was pretty far from ideal for these reasons - and also, in quite a few of the battles, only two characters (of eight) would really get involved in the fights due to problems with narrow corridors and the layouts.

Which brings me to what I tried tonight and my final solution. I figured, what the hell. Who really cares if the battles scenes don't exactly match what is down on the map, if its abstracted a little, I can make the rooms and corridors a little larger and start creating opportunities for more tactics and also for other characters to get involved in the fights a bit more. Plus I like hex systems [blame Heroscape!], you don't require stupid half moves or whatever for diagonal movements. So I thought about what I could do to implement a similar system but for dungeons / indoor fights.

I took out my Lexan terrain mat and wondered about perhaps putting walls on top of it. It might look a bit odd, I thought, as it features a very nice water effect (you can see it on the pic above, its below the hex tiles), then by chance noticed that upside down, you can still see the hexes. Perfect! All I needed were some lowish walls to use as dungeon walls...

So here was the first battle fought in this way, in a medium sized room in the gnome stronghold. The figure with the casino chip under him is injured and is one of the enemy gnomes. At the side, are lots of dead gnomes lol. The four bits of scenery were representing beds, which currently I don't have, and are from Heroquest. Note my new dice tray for the players to roll dice into!

Here the (anti)heroes burst into a blacksmiths in the gnome stronghold and begin their assault. By this point, it was becoming clear, this new approach was paying off - most of the characters were getting involved (actually, they all did).

Finally, here's one from the party's perspective - the storming of the command post which went well, except for the loss of the gnoll to one of the gnome sub-officers that is; all in all, clearing out the stronghold cost the party two war dogs and the gnoll shape-shifting character.

Combining miniatures and roleplay

2009-01-19T12:11:00.000-08:00

When you use miniatures with roleplay game you take something out of the imagination and give it a solid, unchanging form - a battlefield with representations of the heroes and monsters on it that you can see and touch. When they exist only in your head and the heads of other players, they can truly be as as magical and monstrous as anything words can evoke. So why would anyone really wish to try using miniatures and what is effectively a board, for battles?

There are many advantageous to using miniatures to help resolve combat. You can use tactics on the battlefield (great for fighter types) when you can see exactly where everyone, and every terrain feature is. You can quickly resolve issues of who can do what and where - in other words, the positions, facings and obstacles are all very tightly defined. In some way ways, tightly defining these elements would seem to be anathema to the tension and resolution of using dramatic narrative alone - on the surface at least.

A battle from our last game session where the party fought a gigantic python that snaked out of a well and attempted to eat them (the enemy is in the centre of the pic).

One way around this is to try and bring some of the roleplaying narrative elements back into the game again, while still leveraging the strengths using miniatures for resolving combat. To encourage this with my players, I have started offering 5 experience points for describing an action. I vary the amount based on how good and dramatic the description was. This has been having the desired effect - the players pretty much describe everything now! Sometimes the players jump in to help each other out or expand on each other's descriptions. Of course, I describe the actions of the enemies too and the effects of the character's actions on them.

This has proven to be a great way to get some of the roleplaying back into combat that uses miniatures and combines the strengths of both ways of resolving combats.

Healing in an evil campaign

2009-01-18T00:00:00.001-08:00

Running a campaign where the party is evil throws up all sorts of problems, many of which are ethical. Evil isn't just diametrically opposed to good, its also extremely destructive. As a DM this is very hard to deal with and design a campaign for such that the characters do not destroy everything in the campaign and its also a challenge to set things up so that the players do not desire to wreck everything in the first place. Evil for its own sake is no good; it needs a purpose. See my previous post about running an evil campaign.

Evil also presents a challenge to the players too. Evil clerics may only cast the reverse of their spells that are reversible. So they are denied the use of all healing spells as a consequence and must instead use the spells which cause harm to their opponents. Bless and light are also not granted to them, they may only curse and create areas of darkness, putrify food and drink not purify it and so on.

Not being able to get instant access to healing causes lots of problems for my gaming group. They run from combats which they think may cause them issues and even flee in the middle of combat (well, fighting withdrawals to more tactically advantageous areas or get most of the party out of the dungeon while the highest level character holds the enemy off - this one happened with a fight against lizard folk in a cave). Its quite surprising for me when I know they can win the encounter but they're not so sure and so try and avoid it.

No healing means they have to return to town and pay the local temple, or get some rest, to recharge their hitpoints. In my game, rest recovers 2 hitpoints per day. It's purposefully slow to reflect that injuries do not heal over night. This means the party does tend to rest for a few days after a heavy encounter that has damaged the party (we have eight characters in the party). The party also stocks up on healing potions in towns, although these are quite hard to find in shops, there's an alchemist in one of the villagers who sells them and the thief can tap the black market and his contacts to get hold of them (an ability he gets at third level as a house rule).

There are some more mundane items that the players can use to help with the healing process too. I allow them to buy and apply bandages to a wound. A bandage can be applied after a battle to a wounded character and will recover one hitpoint, applying multiple bandages per battle has no effect. Bandages cost two gold pieces each. There's also a soothing ointment they can pick up from a shop in one of the villages (Oilly Olly's - he sells oil, acid, oil that burns for longer and such things) which they can apply to their injuries before rest to regain one extra hitpoint during the night.

Healing will always be an issue for an evil party but these extra items help alleviate the problem a little without taking away this weakness so feel free to use them in your own campaigns if you wish. Evil parties are supposed to have these problems but giving players some extra options is something they will like.

When Gods walked the land

2009-01-08T04:10:00.000-08:00

Wouldn't it be fun if you dropped a god into your campaign world with his own agenda and just ran it as a subplot? That's what I'm going to be doing.

In my game-world, Tharg is a kind of Norse god of battle equivalent; the god of war. He's going to pop up somewhere in the lands to the south and start calling those Free People with fire in the their veins to him to form a vast army, and then he's going to attempt to crush the Great Hoarde into dust.

The players will learn about this as rumours in taverns and so on - "a man is gathering an army to him in the deep south!", "there is a rumour that Tharg himself is walking the land, preparing for a Great War" until one day they bump into a man who works for a man who works for someone else who is claims to be working for Tharg himself, bearing a message: Stand beside the God of War and make bloody battle with him against his enemies.

This will be completely and utterly optional. Its likely the party will have too many quests and obligations to do this, but I don't mind if they decide to join his army and swear fealty to him to participate in an epic battle featuring hundreds of thousands of warriors.

If they don't, they will hear how the great war goes as it happens. They learn through rumour whether the great lord of war defeats his equal and opposite in single combat while his huge army battles the great hoard in a valley stained with blood. I'm sure it will add spice to the campaign and will help the players realise they are not the centre of everything that happens...

Miniatures and D&D - a few game sessions

2008-12-29T03:11:00.000-08:00

So I got asked by a commenter recently if I was still using the Heroscape tiles for combat with Labyrinth Lords and the answer is that yes, I am. They have been a tremendous asset for building outdoor battlescapes. I had inserted a small wilderness adventure to break up all the dungeon crawling that the party were doing and now they've been exploring so much of the wilderness the balance has swung the other way, so they have been a very valuable asset. Last night, we played another session and I took some more photos so you can see how useful they can be...

This is a battle at the edge of the Monrag Swamp, a dangerous place. It is against wild boars, but alas I do not have miniatures for these enemies yet and so had to use my giant rat ones - slightly odd but it kind of worked. The mat underneath is a Lexan water terrain map, ideal for the wet terrain type were simulating. The party lost two characters in this battle; they had no idea that wild boars were 3HD creatures and were not afraid of facing five of them. They deployed badly too and I exploited that weakness - a combination of me going for the front of their wagon (a model they have built themselves!) and the water terrain ending their movement meant they were unable to bring their toughest (fourth level characters) to the front to save their beseiged weaker party members in time.

This is a shot of a battle at the edge of a graveyard. The underlying mat does line up but we set up the battle in haste and its slightly off in the photo. The ruined walls also come from the Heroscape game. This battle went very well for the party; the 4th level cleric rebuked the undead causing most of the skeletons to cower in fear of his dark god. There was an amusing moment where one of the skeletons fumbled (and drawing a card from the critical fumble deck) we discovered he had become blinded; he must have somehow got mud into his empty eye sockets and spent the rest of the battle wandering around like a drunken idiot until its eventual demise.

This last image shows a much smaller battlefield and was a combat that occured because the party had got wind that there was something nasty in a nearby cave and so dug a pit trap then hid and waited for something to fall into it. Something did indeed - a ghoul and the pit trap killed it. So they were resetting their trap, when out of the cave two more ghouls shambled, taking them by surprise. The area on the right is the cave entrance. Notice how the Heroscape hexes stack on top of each other very well, allowing you to create high and low areas with ease. This was a major factor in why I picked the game up to try them out - increased height complicates the battlefield and allows for more tactics in battles. In short, I think it spices up the combats. The party did very well in this encounter; one character got paralysed but the ghouls were quickly cut to ribbons.

The hexes have proved very flexible and are popular within the group so we are going to continue to use these hexes in all outdoor and wilderness encounters . The extra tactical considerations are great for fighter types and also for weapon selection (e.g. weapons can have reach and some weapons can power swing).

Running an evil campaign

2008-12-22T04:17:00.001-08:00

Right from the start, Mike wanted his characters to be chaotic. Back then, we used a random dungeon generator from the net, as I had no modules for preparation, and it named the dungeon the something or other of the Malevolent Malice. One of the rooms it generated was clearly a shrine of some sort.

The next session, Ben joined us and rolled some characters up. As Mike had found this shrine, we concluded the session and said that he had cleared out a temple of an old evil god that had been overrun and that his clerics worshipped it and it was the religion of the village they were from. That was how the Malevolent Malice was born and helped to tie together all of the loose disparate parts of what had happened and why his characters were chaotic.

A number of adventures later, which are fairly standard stuff in that the characters had might as well be good and not evil, and I'm reminding them that chaotic characters dont put themselves in harms way to save others, even if they are friends or companions. Theres a discussion about whether their characters should kill everyone in a village, as the characters are evil after all, to get some artefacts back for the High Priestess, that have been stolen. We leave that session with me stating that if they do, karma can be a bitch.

Which left me with a bit of quandary. The characters are all chaotic. Its perfectly reasonable for them to leave a trail of slaughter and destruction wherever they go. In the game sessions we had played, we hadn't played up the evil part of the characters at all. Giving it some thought, I decided, evil is the reverse of the coin and what are the reverse of the usual monster lot they fight? It would be good races such as men and elves and fairy folk. Sure, they can fight evil too (and they will be doign), but its not to get rid of it *because* its evil, it would be because it threatens them in some way. They would fight good *because* it is good. An interesting thought, I think.

The game session last night had the first truly evil act occur in it. They were responsible for the demise of one of the Angels of the West, a protector of the land. In the process, they have made enemies with the Druids that serve them. An evil themed campaign could be quite fun I think. It would really be all about power. They don't know it yet, but they are going to be rubbing out the guardians one by one til the Malevolent Malice is in a position to build an army to take on the Free Peoples. If they are successful, the game world will be a much, much nastier place. Maybe after that, they could roll up some good characters to try and put the mess right. But thats a long way off, the characters vary in level from 1-4 at the moment. This is going to be a very different kind of campaign.

Experimenting with miniatures

2008-12-09T04:31:00.000-08:00

Over the past two gamer sessions with Labyrinth Lord, we've been experimenting with using miniatures in the combats as the players expressed an interest in trying this out. I did some extensive looking into what options are out there for the week before and since the adventure the party were about to start was a wilderness based one (the first they have ever done) my focus was on outdoor battles.

My findings included printing out battle maps from PDF's, paper and card based maps that are pre-printed, battle maps that you can write on with marker pens and then erase afterwards and finally interlocking hex tiles from a game called Heroscape. I settled on this option and ordered the game, then pilfered the pieces from it. I particularly liked the Heroscape solution because the hexes also stack on top of each other to give height which then creates extra tactical considerations involving higher ground.

I picked up some trees from eBay too for obstacles then hunted around to find whatever miniatures I still had from back when I was at school and found very, very few, a real rag tag odd bunch - mostly hero types - and decided I needed to look at getting some more. Miniatures have sure got expensive. I don't remember them being this expensive. So I ended up buying some counter packs which work out much, much cheaper, for enemies and getting a dozen wolves and six frogs. The wolves were for an encounter in a forest and the giant frogs for one in a swamp.

The first gaming session went ok but we had some trouble adjusting what was once entirely in our heads into a more rigid and well defined ruleset (mostly house rules) and I was left unsure, but the second session went much better and we started to flow with it and become more inventive with the descriptions of what was going on and solutions to problems. So the second session became more like how we used to play; but everyone could see where everything ones. I also played to one of this style of handling combat's strengths - larger, more epic fights.

Here is the setup from the battle to take of the Frogman King and his Fishmen, which the party decided to do for a bunch of witches in the swamp so they could stay the night in their house...

As you can see, the counters are for the enemies and there is a lot of them. We wouldnt have been able to track that many enemies without using miniatures, so it definitely has its place and I think we'll continue to use them. The party won the fight - in an amusing moment, the Frogman King was knocked backwards off his lofty pedestal by a slight bullet and ended up in the water with an almighty splash - although it was a pretty close fight for them.

The evolution of the desktop

2008-12-02T02:16:00.000-08:00

Been a while since I did a tech related post but I spotted an interesting news story that I thought I would share with you... a new OS called Good OS that lets users boot into a web browser and run pretty much every day tasks without loading up windows.

I see this as being the logical next step.

The desktop paradigm made sense when we all used floppy disks to move data from point to point and we needed big bulky programs on our machines to get stuff done. Now, however, we can get a hell of a lot of that same stuff done using a web browser (and often free) online services. So the desktop has reached out and embraced the web; but how long before we no longer need the desktop with its multi gigabytes of garbage, I wonder, and just have a thin layor that takes us straight to the web. Of course, you have to nail privacy and security issues, but say you do and you may well be looking at the future of computing. I already use the web for my email, documents and so forth. Now if only my dev tools ran online... ;-)

Continuous initiative example

2008-12-02T00:36:00.000-08:00

About my Continuous Initiative house rule post, a commenter asked...

I'm intrigued, but having a really difficult time envisioning how this works. Can you post an example?

So I figured why not, lets post an example of how this works and how it benefits lightly armoured characters using three household fantasy characters - Gandalf, Gimli and erm Jeffry.

My scanner is currently out of commission so I cant show you the chart I drew, but imagine the below list of 'phases' draw into a sort of square with arrows connecting them to show a clockwise direction and you will have what I used in the game session.

Anyway, here is a quick example, between three combatants.

Gandalf the grey has no armour (G) and for some reason has forgotten his magic staff today and is instead using a dagger (G). This puts him in the GOLD category.

Gimli the Dwarf is wearing chainmail (S) and wielding a handaxe (S). This puts him in the SILVER category.

Jeffry the Uruk Hai is wearing platemail (ST) and wielding a scimitar (B). Steel is the lowest band he is in, as it is the closest to copper, so it determines that his initiative band is STEEL.

Recalling that the phase order is:
G,S,B,St,C,G,S,B,G,St,S,C,G,B,S,G,B,S,G,St,C,B,G,S,St

Combat would go like this...
G = Gandalf can act
S = Gimli can act
B = No one, skip it
St = Jeffry can act
C = No one, skip it
G = Gandalf
S = Gimli
B =
G = Gandalf [so fast he acted twice before Jeffry could act!]
St = Jeffry
S = Gimli
C =
G = Gandalf
B =
S = Gimli [now even Gimli has got an extra action in over Jeffry!]
G = Gandalf [and not to be outdone, so does Gandalf!]
B =
S = Gimli [three!]
G = Gandalf [three!]
St = Jeffry
C =
B =
G = Gandalf
S = Gimli
St = Jeffry
[Start sequence again.]

Towards the end there, the benefits of continuous initiative really come into play for both Gandalf and Gimli. That's if they've survived that long into the combat, of course, as light armour means they can be hit easily as per the normal rules. Also, remember that two opportunities to hit a highly armoured low AC character are not the same as two opportunities to hit a lightly armoured one, in the first case two hits are unlikely whereas in the second, two hits are very likely.

Continuous initiative

2008-11-29T13:06:00.000-08:00

Back when I created Necrotech (a computer roleplay game which was itself loosely based on the setting I made for Snapshot 3000 - a game which only my oldest friends and family ever got to play) I implemented a round based combat system into the game. The game played out a little like a Final Fantasy battle, except for one crucial difference - actions took time to complete. Actions and times were displayed together in a menu format so that the player could make informed decisions about what to do - should he risk two snapshots with his pistol or go for one aimed shot instead?

Recently, in our D&D sessions, I decided to resurrect the idea of a continuous initiative system. Continuous initiative means just that - it is continuous - and does not have a one person acting per combat round order. The order is determined by how high the initiative values are (like normal) but then instead of going back to square one after all have moved, the higher initiative combatants may be acting multiple times over low initiative value combatants. This fundamentally changes combat.

Part of my reasoning in trying this out was because we have a number of house rules which we agree on (me as the referee and the players) and its fun to try new ideas out and see which ones stick. The other part is that if the players ever wanted to create a character like Conan the Barbarian, as it is, the game system would completely punish them for this choice. Note that I am playing classic D&D here (Labyrinth Lords ruleset) where platemail and shield is preferable any day to being unarmoured. Unarmoured characters drop like flies. Not necessarily so with a continuous initiative system, however. Read on...

First of all, when thinking about changing or updating combat in a table top roleplay system, anything that gets introduced needs to be simple. Really simple. It mustn't interrupt the flow of combat or it will cease to be fun. So I decided on five initiative bands that combatants can fall into. These are: Gold, Silver, Bronze, Steel and Copper. Gold is very fast while Copper is very slow. Both extremes are fairly hard to get into and bronze is the one that most characters will end up in.

To determine what band a character is in, look at his encumberance first, then his armour type, then his weapon. The 'lower' the band (the closer to Copper) any of these is, becomes the band he or she will act in.

GOLD: Padded or no armour. Club, Dagger, Dart, Light Hammer

SILVER: Leather, Studded Leather, Chainmail. Using a Shield. Light Pick, Light crossbow, Quarterstaff, Shortbow, Spear, Shortsword, Trident, Shuriken, Nunchak, Flail, Hand axe

BRONZE: 41-60lbs carried (lightly encumbered). Scale mail, Banded mail. Battle axe, Morning star, Heavy crossbow,Heavy Flail, Longbow, Heavy Pick, Scimitar, Longsword, Polearm, Two handed sword, Bastard sword, Torch, Oil, Sling

STEEL: 61-80lbs carried (medium encumbered). Platemail, Splint mail armours.

COPPER: 81-160lbs carried (heavily encumbered).

You now need a Continuous Intitiative chart. A chart is helpful because you can draw it out and then place a marker on it to show where in the sequence you are, then move the marker to traverse the sequence. The chart must show the following steps, in order (note that G=Gold, S=Silver, B=Bronze, St=Steel, C=Copper)...

G,S,B,St,C,G,S,B,G,St,S,C,G,B,S,G,B,S,G,St,C,B,G,S,St

When in combat, anyone in the marked sequence can act as normal. You may note that there are seven golds, six silvers and so on down to only three coppers. This means that Gold gets to have just over twice the amount of actions as copper - but its quite difficult to get into copper (you have to be encumbered, or a zombie). Gold to silver, for example, is only one extra action - although that could prove crucial when fighting for your life. Also note that initially, every band gets to act early on, which was crucial for keeping heavily armoured characters in the battle when I was looking at balancing this.

I share this with you now because the Continuous Initiative rules proved to be a big success in the game session we tried them out. Even the heavily armoured heroes (in the Steel category) did not complain and the mages certainly enjoyed being in Gold, making them far more useful in combat than ever before. The players have sinced started to outfit their characters with secondary, quick weapons (daggers, shortswords), I presume, so they can switch out of bronze if facing an exceptionally quick opponent which is definitely quite interesting!

If you're looking to spruce up your game session, or give players a reason to use a lightly armoured character, why not give them a go?

Random Beastie Maker

2008-11-17T05:47:00.000-08:00

As you may know, I put together a little script for my random generator program that can create unique critters for roleplaying games. I posted one of those up in the blog entry here "Random Monster Generation and the Feathered Monrer" and since then I had a couple of requests to make it available for anyone to use... so here it is people, I hope you have some fun making truly unique and bizarre monsters :-)

Random Beastie Maker

PS if any of these monsters should make it into any type of published product, please give me a credit!

Banning magic weapons and armour

2008-11-13T03:01:00.000-08:00

I'm thinking of removing magical weapons and armour completely from my campaign setting and from my random charts and so on. This would have a number of effects.

The most obvious effect would be that magically overpowered characters would be a lot rarer. Characters that are powerful would be so through their innate abilities, or other means such as politically. This would make strongholds more desirable goals for high level characters.

The second effect is to de-emphasise combat and make players think on their feet a bit more. Facing off against a dragon is much tougher with a normal sword than a +5 sword of dragon annihilation. Players would have to be very inventive about dangerous combat situations and may even avoid them.

The third effect is that plot-centric special items would be incredibly special. Instead of their being a mass of +2 swords lying around, there could be one Excalibur that adventures and the plot would flow around. Who wields this mythical blade has serious significance. Perhaps only the gods can craft these items and it is beyond the ken of all mortal men, although the knowledge is sought after with a passion.

The fourth effect is that magical items would be highly sought after instead. Suddenly, by way of example, finding a flying carpet is a massive deal to even high level adventurers. Of course, I would need a very large assortment of magical miscellanea to stop the same lot from repeating over and over, but that would be quite fun to come up with, I think, especially if the items are not directly combat or stat bonus related. It could add a lot of spice to what might otherwise another run of the mill campaign.

What's even better is that I could probably get away with it. All the player characters are currently either first or second level and so do not currently own anything magical anyway, the adventures that they have been on so far have not uncovered any. Valuable trinkets, yes, but so far, nothing magical.

Random Monster Generation and the Feathered Monrer

2008-11-10T04:21:00.000-08:00

Recently, I've knocked together a random generator program in Flash to help add some spice to the classic D&D game I'm currently running for a couple of friends. I designed it to be data driven and the data format itself to be extensible (think tables, sub-tables, looping and so forth - the program uses recursion [surprise!] so that any number of sub-tables can be traversed from any other ones, even allowing multiple rolls on the same table).

Anyway, I've added charts for things like creature deaths, misses, wandering monsters and so on all of which prove useful when you have to think on your feet. E.g. What is a miss? Oh it's an overhead swing that bounced off the opponent's helmet harmlessly! How did that goblin die? He was cleaved in two!

I generally have the players describe their attacks as it adds fun and a bit of drama to the game but this helps me with describing the enemy.

Another chart that I have put together is the random creature generator. I spent most of yesterday adding things to this (it now uses a lot of charts), testing and tweaking it - and I'm very pleased with the results. Here is the first monster I've had it generate, along with my descriptive text. Feel free to steal it and have it find its way into your own campaigns, I even put a suggestion for how it can be encountered in there...

Feathered Monrer (the Corridor Cleaner)

This small creature has no head and is covered in grey vulture feathers. Its two legs are also covered in a darker set of feathers but its four arms are actually completely featherless, revealing a jelly like fleshy substance, and terminate in bird like claws. The Monrer can use these four arms as either arms or legs, preferring to rear up on two legs in combat and travel on all six of its limbs when moving. It looks a little like a 4 foot long feathered centipede in shape, rearing up to 3 feet tall in combat.

It normally scavenges for food and is quick to steal carcasses from other denizens of the dungeon and is able to make a quick getaway. Its bones are extremely small and the jelly like substance that makes up its flesh is some kind of extreme fat that its body produces. Without a head, it appears to have no way to consume its food, but in fact it is able to consume food through its claws. Without eyes, it is blind but navigates using some form of internal echo location system and seems to key on the smell of blood, although how it does this is not known.

The feathered Monrer is one of the creations of Tarjan, the Mad God to clean up his catacombs of dead adventurers. Since then, they found their way into many dungeons throughout the realms. Suggested encounter - when a character falls in battle have up to six of these little critters run swiftly in and attempt to drag the body away into the darkness of the dungeon!

Attacks: 2 claws (d4, d4)
AC: 5
HD: <1 hp:1-4 (-1 damage from blunt weapons because of its jelly like flesh)
Size: S
Movement : Quick (125% of normal)
Morale: 7
Diet: Carnivore (Niche: Scavenger)
Alignment: Neutral
Number encountered: 1-6 (3d6)

Ah, the joy of random tables lol.

Labyrinth Lord sample adventure notes

2008-11-03T02:15:00.000-08:00

Here were my notes for the recently played sample adventure from Labyrinth Lord for anyone that might find them useful. I pretty much went through every event in the adventure and jazzed it up with some descriptive text. Anyway, here are the notes...

Approaching the mine

As you approach the location of the old mine, the forest reveals skeletal remains to you here and there - skeletons of humanoids that have had their gnawed clean by misshapen teeth. The once boisterous forest holds its tongue more and more until you reach the hill itself, a hill that is shrouded in an oppressive silence. Not even bird song is heard around here, or the howl of distant wolves. You catch site of a bloody maw set into the hill side - a large thirty foot hole lined with sharp stakes and leading into a total darkness. Surrounding it are cacasses of deer and people, scattered haphazardly as if thrown there by a bored giant.

The cave

Light illuminates the cave only for a very short distance and then the passage is thrown into a total pitch black. The cave has a high ceiling that is hung with glistening stalagtites and the floor is uneven and wet. The chittering of what you assume to be bats can be heard from time to time and you can see your breath in the cold air.

Area 1

You step into the alcove and are peering at an odd green fungus that is growing amongst the stalagmites when suddenly, with a wet glooping noise, a mass of dark green jelly ooze drops from the ceiling onto [character with lowest wisdom]. He lets out a stuttering, muffled cry and tries to throw this rubbery mess off of him! [dex check or automatic damage from acid if wearing a helmet - otherwise automatic damage!] Damage - X screams in agony as acid burns into his flesh!

Area 2

Your flickering torch light illuminates many figures standing stock still in the pitch darkness, but as you approach you realise that they are but stalagmites - You are not being observed dozens of dark figures. The cavern is littered with gnawed bones and other stinking refuse. Whoever - or whatever - has left these bones here appears to be absent. A large crevasse is visible on the other side of the room, past the gravelly floor.

* Slipping - X slips on the loose gravel and disappears into the pit with a scream that ends as abruptly as it begins!

Area 3

Trap - There is a slight cick and then a loud crash as part of the ceiling comes down without warning, crushing any who are under it and masking their cries of pain! Dust billows out from under the rock fall. [It may alert the denizens of area 4 who will send a single soldier to investigate]

Area 4

You hear footsteps and grip your weapons nervously! Almost a half dozen of the Pale Devils come running at you from inside the darkness of this large cavern; their teeth bared, their dead eyes a piggish pink and their skins an odd white. Their wet muscles glint eerily in the torch light. They carry small sharp blades which they wield clumsily, grunting and shouting as they do so, closing in on your party surprisingly quickly.

The door is a Large Double door.

Area 5

This is a room and not a cave - it is man made and must be part of the old mine system proper. There is a tattered and faded curtain at the back of the room.

Albino ape - surprised. A large colourless muscular creature is ripping into a the body of a man with powerful jaws and looks up at you as you enter. Its large black eyes narrow and then widen as it throws down its meal onto the dirty floor. It rears up to its full height - some eight foot in all, beats its fists against its mighty chest then lets out a loud bellow as it lumbers towards you!

Albino ape - unsurprised. As you enter, a muscular creature without colour that is about as large as any bear you have ever seen beats its fists against its mighty chest. It snorts in what could be derision as it eyes your party up and down, then comes clamboring towards you on all fours with frightening speed. It rears up on its hind legs as it reaches you, gnashing its disfigured teeth together hungrily before emitting a bone chilling bellow.

Albino ape - slain and party in good shape. As the mighty beast falls, the cry of something else reaches your ears as a pallid figure charges into the room through the southern archway and joins the battle! Behind it, standing ominously in the doorway, is a cowled figure who's eyes burn with a seering hatred and whose long white fingers fidget to an unheard tune. It roars something unintelligable in a deep and commanding voice!

Cowled figure - cause fear success - The pallid figure mumbles something you cannot quite make out and then places a withered hand against a patch of your bare skin. A rare panic comes over you as this happens and you run for your life hysterically, as far away and as fast as you can - all you know is that you must escape this unknown enemy for it is pure terror that envolopes you.

Cowled figure - cause light wounds - The hooded figure utters a word and its fingers dance across your flesh nimbly, withering wherever they touch and you recoil in horror as your flesh blisters!

Cowled figure - cure light wounds - The robed one's pink eyes flash briefly with divine power and suddenly the Pale Devil's wounds are regenerating!

Area 6

Beyond the curtain is an even muskier stink. Whether it comes from the carcasses of half eaten sheep or from the stained sleeping mat is not known but what is evident is that this is where the great beast you faught must have spent much of its time.

Area 7

You step into a room with a half dozen straw beds in it. A musky smell emanates from them and you turn to leave in discust when you realise you are not alone; three groggy looking pallid figures are stirring in the beds, grunting as they rise, reaching for nearby weapons and rubbing their odd pink eyes as they do so.

Area 8

A low whimpering can be heard from the left as your eyes follow the wall along this long but narrow hallway. There are four days interrupting it and there is blood and hair on the floor. [400 xp for rescuing the acolytes, treat as level zero clerics]

First door - Whimpering female teenage Acolyte (Caley Dugan daughter of Grant the Soothsayer, daughter of Cornell , daughter of Bryant )
Second door - Stairs down?
Third door - Higher order babboon that has been captured by the Morlocks but not yet trained up to fight. Its fur has been painted white in patches as though they have tried to make it albino.
Fourth door - Second teenage acolyte (Cocidius Haren son of Channon the Soldier, son of Nolen , son of Farrell )

Area 9

You cough from the dust that you have disturbed in this room, which appears empty save for a single small wooden box.

Area 10

You enter an an oval shaped from the north side.

[Not alerted] A cowled figure kneels in prayer in front a of statue of an ugly female brute holding a dagger with three skulls strung around her waist with a cord. Startled, the figure rises to his feet and you see a mad glint in his pink eyes. He is surrounded by an aura of fey and fetid power. He quickly barks an unintelligable order and from the other side of the room, where there is a grotesque male statue with its arms in the air holding head of a dwarf by its beard, another of the Pale Devil's rushes to fulfil his dark master's order.

[Alerted] On the west side of the room is a grotesque male statue with its arms in the air, holding the head of a dwarf by its beard and on the other side of this oval shaped room is another statue; this time of an ugly female brute holding a dagger. Somene has strung three skulls around the statue's waist - but of more immediate importance to you is the cowled figure and his Pale Devil body guard that stands beside him. Both have drawn wicked looking blades and are growling in the gloom. The robed one barks an unintelligable order and the other moves in front of it and utters what can only be described as a gutteral war cry!

Area 11

Pit trap - X steps onto a flagstone and suddenly disappears into a dark pit, crying out briefly as he quickly disappears from view!

Pen and paper online dice roller

2008-10-29T16:17:00.000-07:00

Hope some of you out there playing pen and paper RPG's might find this useful which I knocked up a few days ago - its a program that rolls dice for you. All dice are included, can be rolled in multiples and are even totalled up at the right hand side.

Some thoughts on Tomb Raider Anniversary

2008-10-27T03:01:00.000-07:00

I picked up Tomb Raider Anniversary the other week after getting the adventure game itch. What I really wanted was a good old fashioned dungeon crawl game to sink my teeth into and was looking to pick something up to scratch that itch on the Xbox 360, but alas, did not find anything. However, what I picked up instead was Tomb Raider Anniversary as I have very fond memories of being blown away by the original Tomb Raider on the Playstation. Shame about the sequals though, either I never really 'got' them, or they never really 'got' what Lara Croft is really about. I'm not sure which way around it was.

Tomb Raider Anniversary is the original game but brought up to date with next gen graphics, essentially its in the new Tomb Raider (Legend) engine. Although this is a review of an older game as there is a new Tomb Raider game coming out imminently with even better graphics, but at the time of release, this was as good as it could get for Lara and her polygons. She also has an increased repertoire of moves available to her, such as swinging from a magnetic grappling hook, which was never in the original. So some of the puzzles have been redesigned to accommodate the increased moves at her disposal and it gives the game a very fresh appeal.

Although, that said, I'm really not happy with what they did with the Tyrannosaurus Rex. To bring it down you must master an adrenalin dodge a number of times but the game in no way communicates to you that this is the key to success. Mindlessly blasting away with the pistols does so little damage that you're left wondering what to do and scanning the arena where you fight in reveals no environmental hazards to take advantage of. OK I get its supposed to be hard but not hard by withholding information. Every creature to that point I had brought down the old fashioned way, I had no idea that there was even an advantage to using this new combat mechanic let alone that it would be the only way to bring a boss creature down.

That said, combat wasn't ever really what Tomb Raider was about and I'm glad about that. Kind of like the Silent Hill games, this is about something else - there is combat there, it is kind of awkward. If Lara Croft were a D&D character, she'd be the thief. She can climb walls, she steals from tombs, shes extremely acrobatic. Thieves are generally not very good toe to toe fighters.

I think the D&D comparison is apt and brings me full circle. I think the original Tomb Raider - and this remake - work *because* they are essentially dungeon crawls with an acrobatic thief character. The same air of mystery is there that you get from venturing further and further into a dungeon in an RPG as you figure out how to get Lara deeper and deeper into the tombs. I believe this is the key ingredient that was missing from the sequels that I played, the bit they lacked that you could never quite put your finger on. Tomb Raider is, and always should be, a dungeon crawl!

The Anniversary addition is tons of fun. I'm not sure if its better or worse than the original really; it feels more like the original has been expanded upon. This is no bad thing. I would definitely recommend it for anyone looking to revisit fond memories or who wants to play a modern adventure game. Its really nice and refreshing to load a game up and spend forty five minutes gradually working your way through an elaborate environmental puzzle and having nothing shooting at you or trying to kill you while you do it. Here's hoping that Core have learned something from bringing their masterpiece back for the masses and that the next Tomb Raider game will have this at its heart.

You know what, Lara's still got it ;-)

The illusion of security

2008-10-23T05:57:00.000-07:00

Security is - and always has been - really just an illusion. The most secure vaults can be broken in five minutes, the most secure countries have been the victims of terrorist attacks and the most secure computer systems have been hacked. In fact security is generally not supposed to be impenetrable - that is impossible - instead its measured in how long it would take to beat the security system in question. That's why most of are happy to put a lock on the doors to our houses, even though locks can be circumvented with ease by a locksmith or a thief with the right tools and similar know-how, and why we dont padlock, chain and dead bolt our doors at night. A lock is good *enough* for most situations. That same level of thinking goes right the way through security decision making.

So security is just an illusion and it always has been. Here is yet more evidence of this - Keystrokes can be recovered remotely. That's right folks, your keyboard gives off electromagnetic waves when you type that can be measured up to twenty metres away and decoded back to what was typed. So kiss your passwords goodbye if you type them and someone is 'listening in' to those waves.

Presumably, it is better to send those same keystrokes over an encrypted wifi connection as the wifi network itself must be cracked before they can be read. Or maybe Bluetooth. But I seem to recall Bluetooth being hackable too. He he

Video game pitch meeting from 1979

2008-10-19T16:37:00.000-07:00

This is just amazing and hilarious.... Video game pitch meeting from 1979

A recommended play list for coding

2008-10-16T06:17:00.000-07:00

If anybody is wondering what is currently on my iTunes when I'm knee deep in code, here is one of my play lists and it comes highly recommended ;-)

Avenged Sevenfold - Almost easy
Disturbed - Indestructable
Nightwish - Wish I had an Angel
Echoes of Eternity - Lost beneath a silent sky
Firewind - Breaking the silence
Papa Roach - Between Angels and insects
Paramore - Misery Business
Trivium - Anthem (we are the fire)
Metallica - The Judas Kiss
White Zombie - More human than human

Truly astonishing - revisiting the birth of RPG's

2008-10-06T08:46:00.001-07:00

I came across this online recently and it truly is astonishing - the magic of the original roleplay game... D&D0. A must read for any RPG fan.

Items, items, items

2008-10-06T02:08:00.001-07:00

When I started on the items for Dungeon Creep I went down the usual route, that is, coming up with weapons of different types, armours that protect various hit locations, and so on. I came up with over two hundred items to be exact and all was going well.

Then I scrapped them. All of them.

You're probably wondering why. In the Pit of Penance, there is really no reason for weapons and armour to be down there. The Pit a horrible place where the Law Lords throw criminals to die; society does not care what happens to them so long as they are out of the way. These criminals would not be armed when being banished into the Pit, after all, there are no spectators - it's not a form of entertainment like a gladiatorial arena. There is no baying mob. No crowd favourites. Those sentenced to the Pit never return.

So I began thinking about weapons and armour from a very different perspective. What could be found, scavenged and used for the purpose of survival? Could weapons and armour be assembled together out of bits of other things, almost like primitive societies did? Suddenly, designing this became a lot more interesting than thinking up another suit of platemail armour. What sort of everyday items would be down there? What could they be assembled into?

This led me into thinking about the other side of creation too: destruction. Breaking items apart to get other items out of them. Fun stuff to think about. Perhaps taking a chair and busting it apart to get the legs, then adding nails to make a spiked club. That sort of thing.

This is how Dungeon Creep will work, the hero will be combining and breaking items to make improvised weapons and even armour. This concept totally suits the brutal and gory nature of the combat. It was worth redoing my item system to get this in there, even if it did set me back a few days of development time.

Genre reclassifications

2008-09-30T07:45:00.000-07:00

Here are some thought provoking articles that make me wonder if we need to have some genre reclassifications within the video games industry.

The first one, Does survival horror still exist? asks the question is survival horror really evolving into something else entirely while the second The New Role Playing Games dares to suggest that Rock Band is actually an RPG.

Interesting stuff!

The World's worst installer

2008-09-01T02:32:00.000-07:00

I'm not really sure what the world's worst installer actually is but I've got a pretty strong candidate for it. Adobe's Creative Suite 3 Web Premium (Jesus H Christ what a mouthful) takes about a billion years to install and then, even worse, when you want to get rid of it its not very clear how to. There's no remove program link on the start menu, in add/remove programs it isn't listed under Adobe, or Creative Suite 3 or Web Premium. In fact its semi hidden under the words Add or Remove (not that intuitive).

Then when you do start the uninstall process, it asks you to close down practically everything running. It ordered me to shut Firefox, Excel, Windows Live Messenger, Flash 8 (which isn't even part of the creative suite, its the previous version) and then finally, when it was happy all I had open was Notepad, it took ten minutes to uninstall. So I sit and stare at a progress bar, willing it to move forwards pixel by pixel, as it has reduced my machine to having no programs running at all so I cannot do anything.

For gods sake, who coded this mess. All it has to do is delete a bunch of files, their folders and remove some registry entries. The only way they could have made this any worse - yet still work - would be if it forced me to reboot the machine afterwards. Well, it tried to make me by "recommending" it but at least it didn't force it to happen.

The return of graph paper

2008-08-18T02:02:00.000-07:00

In a surprise twist that no one could have predicted, graph paper has made a surprising return to my life. It all started last week when I realised that roleplay games had not advanced in game combat narrative in years, if at all.

Essentially, the writeup of combat in modern roleplay games is often one of the following... a number that drifts above a combatant's head that represents the damage dealt or sometimes the word 'MISS' or a some text that says something along the lines of 'A attacks B and misses' or 'A Attacks B and hits for 10 damage'. Often this text isn't even visible til you switch it on. Obviously in game animations representing this has come on in leaps and bounds, but the text hasn't.

In fact, its taken a step back.

The original Bards Tale (a classic game from 1986) at least played around with the verbs a bit. E.g. a zombie might grope your hero (a description I still find funny, to this day, although I bet that isn't what is intended) while a berseker might try and pummel the hero. This was something, at least, which opened it up a little in my imagination back when I was a kid playing these games.

It seems to me that modern games have forgotten that all the good stuff really exists in our heads and not 100% on the screens. Not that I'm against modern games (just check my gamer profile to see I play the latest and greatest regularly, and often do complete them). A trick that good directors of horror films know is to give the viewer a brief silhouette of the nasty and let the mind fill in the rest of the details.

Along the same kind of lines, I was fortunate enough to sit in an accessibility demo by a blind person, showing how he used windows with a screen reader. This was very educational especially when he loaded up a number of games designed for people with no sight. These games are all sound based. I bet they are quite immersive too because most of what is going on is in the imagination of the player. Like how games used to be before we were forced to view the same animations, over and over (think Final Fantasy type games where the battle animations are initially impressive but pretty soon you wish you could skip them).

All this got me thinking. I reckon that in game combat narrative can be improved immensely if real writers get involved. So I'm putting up some of my own money to get a prototype together to see if my ideas will work, which I'm pretty excited about.

But back to the graph paper. I downloaded the Bards Tale 2, Destiny Knight, as part of my research and got playing it using a DOS emulator on my macbook (hehe, who'd have thought). Its just as addictive as I remember the first one being back when I used to play it on my trusty Spectrum. But its impossible to navigate around the dungeons without mapping them. So I've had to dig out my old pad of graph paper, a pencil and an eraser to avoid getting lost. It has been literally at least a decade since a game made me do that.

It will take 100 years for the U.S. to catch Japan

2008-08-14T01:58:00.000-07:00

In broadband speeds, according to this article from TechNewsWorld. Quite amusing, although, I'm not really sure how accurate that statement really is, hehe.

Microsoft buys Truespace, makes it free!

2008-07-25T03:13:00.000-07:00

Yep you read that right, according to this article, Microsoft has aquired the respected 3D modelling package Truespace and re-released it as a free download. Yes let me repeat that. A free download. Microsoft, it has been a long time, but for this, I applaud you.

Artificial Intelligence test

2008-07-24T02:30:00.000-07:00

Last night, myself Chris and his young son Joe gave the latest build of Magefire a playtest. We were mostly testing the artificial intelligence routines that are now completed for independent creatures (see the earlier blog post Fun and games with designing AI for more details). It took me a while to program these because of the unusual approach I took that supports emergent behaviour, but it was well worth it. Some of the complex behaviours I wanted to be in there have indeed emerged. For example, because of the ruleset for the game, creatures that are next to each other become engaged and must fight to the death. The exception to this are flying creatures, who never get engaged to their enemies. So a valid a strategy for using flying creatures is to fly in, attack and then fly away again. This kind of behaviour was the sort of thing I wanted to emerge from the AI and it has, so I'm very happy with the results.

The overall playtest went well for the first game (which took place in my specially designed Deadly Arena level where pretty much nowhere on the level is really safe) but the following two games were marred with raising the dead bugs (in the game, Dark Imps can raise the dead as skeletal minions) so some work needs to be done on areas that we thought were already working. We managed to get a computer controlled wizard in there too, who uses the independent creature AI, but as predicted he didn't really perform too well. The next big step in the AI development is planning and unit coordination, both areas that the independent creatures do not require as they do not cooperate (except by accident).

So overall, the independent AI has been a big success and complex behaviours and strategies for individual units do indeed emerge.

Confessions of the Nuclear man

2008-07-22T03:33:00.000-07:00

For anybody that might be interested, I have posted a new short story to the Creative Chasm blog, a long neglected creative outlet of mine.