Mountains and Valleys and the 30 Day Challenge

There is an old Japanese saying, 'yama ari tani ari' (There are mountains and valleys), which basically means everything has its ups and its downs. I am approaching a mountain in my work and studies, so my blogging will be low for the next month or two. Expect maximum a post a week.

I was glad that the 30 Day Challenge ignited my interest and enthusiasm. As much as I joked about its non-OSR taxonomy, I found it a great community building exercise for the OSR, and made me feel part of something while giving my mind something to chew on.

Anyway, all this blogging has revved up my writing muscles to where I feel I can blast through this next knot of work. I still have lots of gaming projects - finish my Stormbringer adventure 'Spiders & Angels', re-do my Palladium patch, playtest my DIY Robotech, and publish my D&D houserules (which will form the engine of Iceships & Inuit, my very own heartbreaker), among others. Once (If?) I pass my final mid-November work deadline I'll take a little break from everything and then find my way back here.

Until then, keep reading, writing, and most of all, gaming.

Tedankhamen

30 Day Dance Finale

30 Best DM

I’ve been lucky enough to have two ‘best’ DMs who show equally how different DMing styles can still make for a great game. Fred was my first long-term DM back in the early 90s, and was a technically brilliant game master. He knew every rule, had the adventure set in his head, and gave us a mathematical breakdown of the chances for every action we proposed. He was so good that I thought D&D a perfectly balanced and coherent system, until the 2000s when I went back and read my old RC to find it was a bit creaky in places. If Fred had any failing, it was that the gameworld as such was just a backdrop for the characters and the dungeon. Towns were nameless as were most NPCs, and served only to give us a place to procure or sell items and stash our booty. I am not sure if any of my characters even had names.

It was the 90’s, and we had no clue what we were missing. I knew lots of groups like us.

Last year I played a few sessions in Justin’s Vaults of Ur, and his style is almost the antithesis of Fred’s. Justin’s gameworld is rich and alive, every character has a name, and the actions of the PCs have repercussions on the web of power relations between groups in Fort Low, the Ruins and the Hive. On the rules side, Justin hand waves, or seeks input from players, or allows votes on houserules. He has also gone through a few rulesets for the same game – from a modded Labyrinth Lord when I played, to Stars Without Number by the latest reports. Justin’s DMing style immerses the players in his world – although I jumped in mid-campaign, I learned the party was intent on traveling to Orc Heaven to rescue the soul of their comrade-at-arms, Ripper. Since I had rolled up an orc, I immediately proposed my character as Ripper’s little brother, Digger, and joined the adventure (which inspired the art that graces this blog).

And I think that is what the OSR gives us (or rather asks of us) – to replay these old games, but add in the life experience and depth we missed when we were young. If you want to become someone’s best DM, know the rules without being a slave to them, and immerse them in a world grown from the seeds of your own imagination and experience.

OSR 30 Day Probation – 25 to 29

25 Fave Magic Item

A well-played Runesword is without doubt my favorite magic item. I stress “well-played” because all too often rune weapons are run poorly by DMs who don’t want to strip away a player’s agency. Taking Michael Moorcock’s Stormbringer as the model for the runeblade, we see that making the hero a pawn of fate is exactly what a runesword is intended to do. This is why in D&D runeweapons had their own Intelligence and powers the DM was supposed to keep secret from the players and use to undermine and manipulate them. The French rpg Bloodlust actually has the weapons themselves as characters, while even games like Stormbringer and the old Palladium FRPG had better depictions of the duplicity and menace of rune weapons. Basically, if a player is happy to get a rune weapon, you’re running it wrong.

26 Fave Nonmagic Item

Iron spikes, how do I love thee?

Let me count the ways:

Stopping doors for sleep at night

Or opening them to let in light

Dropped down a well to gauge a fall

Tapped in at intervals for climbing walls

For picking locks with DM’s permission

Or thrown to get rust monster attention

These examples are but a few

Of the reasons why I do love you

27 Character You Want To Play in Future

I’ve never sat down and just played a mage. This is partly because I dislike the vulnerability at lower levels, and partly because I find the D&D spell system an unwieldy and Byzantine nightmare. I figure that although my impressions are correct in general, I may have missed out on some insights by not having given the mage its due. I guess that’s my New Year’s resolution – play a mage in the next game of D&D I sit down at.

Whenever that will be. Sigh…

28 Character You Will Never Play Again

Probably a ranger, because although I love the IDEA of the class, the execution always leaves something to be desired. Either his outdoor skills are useless in the dungeon, or he’s out of his element in the city, or on another plane, etc etc. I once played a ranger who was a failed druid, and that is now how I always see rangers – nature lovers who were just not good enough to unlock the mystical bond with nature they needed to protect it.

29 The Number You Always Roll on a d20

Thirteen or twenty, rarely anything in between. Sounds like my life – some unlucky setbacks, no major fails to date, and the occasional big win.

Hoorah!

The Heart of Dorkness Day 23-24

23 Least Favorite Monster

I touched on this earlier, but plant monsters suck. Or more accurately, I have no idea how to DM them.

With any other monster, they move as do the PCs, and so encounters are a collision of forces. Plants… not so much. They’re just there. If you enter the garden/jungle/arboretum, you have willingly stepped into their territory. Most murderhobos at this point go Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore and tell the DM they’re on double secret alert and start dropping napalm everywhere. If anyone wants to share how they DM plants, feel free to tell me below.

Although I probably still won't use 'em....

24 Favorite Energy Whatnow?

This is some reeeeal non OSR post-2E sheeot going on with this question. Alright, I’ll let Johnny Rotten reply for me:

HERE

A Day Late & A Dollar Short – 30 Day Thingamajig, 19-22

19 Fave Plant/Elemental

Plant or Elemental? Plemental? I think Shambling Mound (a la Swamp Thing) is the only thing that fits this definition. I also think whoever started this 30 Day OSR Hot Mess might have wanted to save some monster categories for next year. ; )

Oh well, let’s go with plant monster. Can’t beat Myconid (mushroom men). They’re there underground, minding their own business, tending to their mushroom fields, then someone pisses them off and BAM spore attacks, healing shrooms, etc etc. Fun stuff.

I always had problems DMing ‘normal’ plant monsters – tell players their characters are in a garden or jungle and they insist they’re always on alert, or start lobbing flaming oil or chopping at every vine. Besides having a stationary plant monster guard a treasure or small passageway (and again being burnt out), I never found much use for them.

20 Humanoid/Natural/Fey

Again with the multiple post-2e monster taxonomy. I dunno what ‘natural’ even signifies, and as a proud grognard I ain’t about to find out.

Let’s go with fairies, specifically Sprites. Aside from the good soft drink associations, whenever a sprite randomly cursed a player character back in the day I felt like D&D was actually fulfilling its promise of emulating fantasy literature and escaping its wargame roots. Alas, the cure was often a few thousand GP to the local cleric, when a quest would have so much more fun and added magic to the playing experience. Oh well, when I DM I try to put as much unexplainable magic and wonder back in my games, and quests to break enchantments beat the vending machine mentality of getting an X level poobah to cast a spell any day of the week.

21 Dragon

I disremember if this existed in D&D, but I loved the Shadow Dragon from Darksword Adventures (remember that paperback-sized game by Hickman & Weiss based on the novels? Always wanted to run/play that…). As the colors multiplied, D&D dragons kind of lost their ethereal, force-of-nature quality, and became another set of attacks and abilities. Shadow dragons were part of shadow, and shot down stars from under their wings if I remember correctly. Good, atmospheric stuff.

22 Fave Monster

Favorite monster overall as opposed to all the categories of monsters we’ve traipsed through already? Yeesh!

OK, my favorite monsters are those that the players cannot beat in a stand up fight. In video games like Resident Evil (specifically 2 & 3), zeds and lashers soon lose their menace, but those hulking horrors in trenchcoats that can’t be stopped? When you hear their BGM your pulse races. Ditto The Thing for movies – you can kill parts of it, but if even a cell escapes, the world is toast. The old Deities & Demigods even made gods mortal by giving them stats, which I found a terrible thing, and would use to represent avatars, not the deities themselves. The book also gave killable versions of Lovecraftian & Elric Mythos’ creatures, while Chaosium kept them in their primal, unbeatable and thus more fearsome form. In Stormbringer, if you see a herd of colossal metal oxen come your way, hear the dread voice of Bellbane in the mist or the tentaculared horror of the Kyrenee, you run, regardless of whether you have demon arms and armor or not. Even in Call of Cthulhu, access to the awesome destructive power of guns and explosives will most likely only hasten your demise.

These unbeatable threats not only keep the thrill and uncertainty alive, they also force players to be more creative in finding solutions and can also further the narrative. Want to stop a Tarrasque ravaging the kingdom? You could quest for a Wish and all the other junk you need to kill it, but you might need to find a sage first to find this stuff out, or you could just try to lure it through a gate to another plane, or find its natural enemy (a la the Grahluk and Elenoin from Elric), or any other number of solutions. As a DM, just keep quiet and let players run through a number of plans – they may surprise you and add some invaluable, magical adventure to the game. Look at the end of Death Frost Doom – no way the players can fight what they’ve unleashed head on, so now they’re forced to think waaaay out of the box to solve the problem they’ve caused.

(Or move to another continent and take up mushroom gardening…)

Month O' Blogging Defiance – 16, 17, 18

16 Favorite Aberration

The nomenclature here is a bit puzzling, and I suspect that players of later editions are more conversant with the rigid stratification of creature types and templates, but I take an aberration is a monster whose very alienness marks it as monstrous. In that case, although the otyugh and aboleth are strong contenders, I’d have to go with the unsung doppelganger.

Dopplegangers aren’t that tough head on, but add in their shapeshifting, the magic items they’ve stolen or claimed from victims, and the general mayhem they can cause, and they have serious potential to wreck an entire gameworld or turn it to their whims.

DMing a doppelganger sometime soon? Go and watch John Carpenter’s The Thing, then read The Things by David Watts. That’s the level of headgame mindfuckedness you should be aiming for.

17 Favorite Animal/Vermin

Animal or vermin, which is it? Once again, my D&D knowledge roll is a failure. I’ll go with animal and say I always liked the idea of cave oxen, herds of musk ox-like herbivores roaming the ginourmous caverns of the underdark. Adventurers are prone to see them as a food source, that is until a stampede of these creatures cause a TPK or something near it.

18 Favorite Immortal/Outsider

I have no idea what an outsider is (Ralph Macchio’s Pony-Boy comes to mind), but as for immortals, there was a monster that looked like a blue-skinned Mr. T from 2e D&D that I loved. I forget the name, but they were like the cosmic merchants called the Devourers from the old Fafhrd & Grey Mouser tale ‘The Bazaar of the Bizarre.” 

Although some of my friends didn’t like idea of some mystic giants setting up stores and cafes in a dungeon as it was ‘unrealistic’, I think unrealistic is a critique that falls pretty flat in a game about dungeons and freakin’ dragons. It was also a fun way to have a ‘save point/store’ in the middle of a tediously long delve.

30 Day Challenge 14 & 15

14 Favorite NPC

This is a toughie, as none really sticks out in my mind. I guess Fafhrd in a Lankhmar game I once played in my teens. 

He showed up when I was trying to get my character lucky with a barmaid under the table in a bar (I know, lame teenage gamer move), and Big Red smacked my character upside the head and gave him a lecture about treating the ladies. Sure it was a Mary Sue moment, but well done and a bit of a ‘life lesson’ inside the game about how we should comport ourselves outside it. The DM ran it well and it sticks with me as a good example of how to use famous NPCs especially – not to steal the limelight from the heroes, but to make them even more heroic.

15 Favorite Undead

Has to be Liches. Zombies and skeletons are really iconic at low levels, but when you’re ready to face a lich, you know you’re in the big time. 

I have a dim recollection of sitting in on a session at the end of Tomb of Horrors, running a thief and being exhorted by the other players to throw a gem at the lich to finish him off. I still dunno why this worked, and thought this a bit of a lame meta gamey deus-ex-machina, but overall the idea of a lich or crypt-thing waiting in their tomb, plotting and evilly intelligent is one of the scariest concepts in the sometimes absurd world of fantasy games.

30 Day Challenge Catch Up – 11, 12 & 13

Favorite Adventure You Ran

The only published scenario I have ever run faithfully is ‘The Hall of Risk’ for Stormbringer. Wish I still had a copy.

I tried some small D&D dungeons (forget which ones) but there was no spark. When I ran ‘Hall’, it was like lightning in a bottle.

‘Hall of Risk’ is a gonzo ‘special episode’ type of adventure that is far removed from the dungeon. Adventurers go to the gaming hall of Balo, Jester of Chaos, and play such games as craps, chess using themselves as pawns (about 15 years before Harry Potter did it), and some other things I disremember, for the chance of getting Chaos-tainted powers.

It was a laugh riot, a micro-dungeon that really hit the aesthetic of Moorcock’s Elric novels and allowed Stormbringer to step out of D&D’s shadow, which prior scenarios like ‘Tower of Ykrth Florn’ did not. It also showed me that my mind worked better with freeform mini-sandboxes, which basically describes the adventures I have successfully run since then.

Favorite Location

Which brings me to my next answer – NOT the dungeon. I don’t loathe dungeons, but I don’t run them well, so don’t often try. My mind works better grasping a whole gameworld or even multiverse loosely than trying to get the details right of a small locale like a dungeon. My players seem to enjoy when I do this, as do I, and I even enjoy playing in someone else’s dungeon. But I don’t usually run them. I am hankering to run B2 or White Plume Mountain just for the experience, but more drawn to sandboxes like Isle of Dread.

I even submitted an adventure to Chaosium back in the day that was kindly rejected by Lynn Willis. In it, players worked for a treacherous exiled Melnibonean nobleman aiming for the throne of Imryyr, and had to travel from Melnibone, to the Plane of Air, to the Shadow Realm, to World War Two Italy, and one or two others I forget to get materials needed. The scenario is lost to time, but when I read Rogue Mistress I thought how much better my adventure would have been.

Favorite Trap/Puzzle

I guess another reason I dislike running dungeons is that I feel old D&D traps are somewhat cheap or gimmicky. Roll or die. Lose three PCs on a chest with 30 copper coins in it. Fall in a pit. Yawn, isn’t this supposed to be a game/fun? Grimtooth’s traps were fun to read, but drew cries of ‘Unfair!’ when they mashed adventurers to a pulp with no real chance of escape.

I think for traps/puzzles to work (i.e. to add to the enjoyment of the game) they need to have two elements, namely 1) risk and 2) reward. And as the risk gets bigger, so should the reward. The pit in the 1^st cave of B2 is basically roll or fall in, with no real reward and lots of risk. That’s lame.

Which takes me back to ‘Hall of Risk.’ It has both these elements, and players willingly risk their characters for the chance of a reward. In other words, the puzzle/trap of ‘Hall of Risk’ is a mini-game itself, and players who know the rewards will willingly throw themselves into it again and again. In D&D, the dungeon itself is a successful trap/puzzle itself, drawing adventurers who risk death for coin and experience. Where D&D sometimes falls down, in ALL editions from what I’ve seen, is posing arbitrary traps with little knowledge of what’s at stake and the chances of success.

30 Day Challenge 9 & 10

And the train rolls on!

Day 9 – Favorite character you haven’t played

Wow, this question is really indicative of gaming. Everyone has had the experience of rolling or ruling up a good character, then have the game or campaign evaporate without a session.

We all feel that pain.

I’d have to say that my Retro Spacer from a GURPS Space vaporgame back in the day was the biggest disappointment in this regard. While all the other players made up cybernetic enhanced, Traveler style spacers with fission powered spacecraft, my guy was from a colony that had developed a 1950s style futurism. Fedora hat and suit in a big clunky diving-suit style spacesuit, with a computer that took up half his rocket’s compartment space. He made up for this by having mad engineering skills and ray guns.

Day 10 – Craziest thing

Where to begin? I think anyone who’s been gaming any length of time has a boatload of crazy stories – it’s half the reason why we play games.

In D&D, we had a year long (in real time) game derailed when the PC who drew lots to get the Divine Magic Weapon Thingy (I forget, maybe a Bow of Light?) needed to defeat the Destroyer of World had, unbeknownst to us, drawn from a Deck of Many Things the day before. His card? Next magic item is destroyed. The player couldn’t tell us, and so his PC touched the bow, it went poof, and we switched to Rifts after that, I think.

Chaosium games have also given us some memorable craziness. We had a group TPK in Stormbringer after an ill-conceived raid on a fat merchant with 2 Weeping Waste bodyguards, which ended in our Swordmaster with a broken sword, our Hunter with a broken Bow, and a Sorceror who fumbled with a demon sword and got run through.

Crazier still, we switched to Call of Cthulhu and the same group of players had a TPK after an ill-conceived raid on a construction site to steal dynamite ended with a merciless fusillade from the night watchman whose dinky pistol let him shoot twice as many rounds as the PCs heavy guns. Even a pop gun is dangerous if it has double the chance to hit and do damage.

los jeugos de rolas sont locos...

30 Day Challenge 7 & 8

Lucky 7! What edition do you prefer?

Easy! 4th edition is the best!
The old Games Workshop green cover with the great painting of Elric atop ruins as he destroys the Young Kingdoms. You have some rules clarifications from preceding editions (demon summonings & skills), and it adds in the material from the Companion.

Oh. We're not talking about Stormbringer? D&D? Oh, then definitely NOT 4th edition.

I played 4e once. ONCE. Two hours to build a character. Made me want to cry.

I've read 3e, seems needlessly complicated. The Midnight campaign setting I'd easily poach, though. Damn good. Easily portable to Basic Roleplaying, hell there's even a BRP retroclone called 'Age of Shadow' that tacitly does this.

I played a whack of 2e games back in the day. Lots of fun, and tons of great settings. Planescape is basically the Multiverse. Spelljammer and Dark Sun were nicely gonzo and deserve retro-clones. Mazatlan and Al-Qadim were interesting experiments. You could also play a whole campaign out of the Vikings, Celts, or Rome splatbooks. I dunno why they didn't do one for every major culture's mythos. Even Lankhmar got some adventures & sourcebooks.

Never played 1e - by the time I was gaming in earnest, people had moved on to the cleaner 2e rules.

I started with D&D, but I'll be damned if I know which book. Most probably a mishmash of BX and BECMI.

I'm dying to try Swords & Wizardry Whitebox, maybe with Age of Conan. Peanut butter and chocolate.

I'd have to say my favorite edition is whatever I'm playing at the moment. The differences before 3e seem really inconsequential to me. My recent Labyrinth Lord experiences with Vaults of Ur felt the same as all that came before, and markedly different from the 4e I suffered through. And I'd have to chuck in some houserules (mainly skills) anyway, so it's all good.

8 - Favorite Character You Have Played

Funnily enough, all D&D characters I have played were ill-defined, probably because 'world-building' was never a big thing back in the day. The gameworld in the late 80s and 90s was more like that endless loop of scenery in the background when Scooby and Shaggy were hightailing it from some suited goon - just a means to get to the dungeon.  I noticed how things had changed when I played in Vaults of Ur last year - Justin's gameworld was incredibly vivid and detailed. It takes a bit more player investment and GM work, but I think it is a great development in the art of gaming.

Enough digressions - my favorite fantasy character I ever played was Emile (Eh-meel), deposed King of Wallachia and Bard.

It was in a GURPS Fantasy campaign back in the day. While everyone maxed out fighting skills, Emile was good at rapier, but a master in singing, dancing, storytelling, and just about any other social skills. He also was deluded and believed he was deposed king of the non-existant kingdom of Wallachia, which appeared on no maps. He seduced barmaids and queens, sent minions into dungeons while he lounged around the tavern, and was finally assassinated by a powergamer who HATED the way I subverted the game.

I consider that a thing to be proud of.

30 Day Challenge 5 & 6

Not sure if this challenge thing is improving my blogging muscles or taking time away from projects & life, but it is a nice bit o fluff so let's keep at it.

5 Favorite dice. Hmmm, I have to admit being not much of a dice aficionado, and lacking in dicing superstition. I have my old long tube of yellow dice with extra green d6s so you can roll attributes - they are functional and unlovely and therefore my go-to dice when gaming.

I have to admit I always liked the dice that came with Heroquest - the shield, skull, and tusked ones. Rounded edges with aesthetically pleasing B&W art. I feel lots could be done with dice like that, and although I have seen some nice geomorph dice, I don't think anyone's really capitalized on specialized dice for gaming - they're still just number generators, even the Zocci ones that seem to be the rage.

6 Favorite Deity. Once again, as a dude who games lamentably but few times a year, and often non-D&D games, I am neither that conversant nor interested in a setting's gods, as they are all-too-often handwaived and not as clearly DMed as they should be. Being a proud atheist and believer in the general suckiness of clerics, this tendency is reinforced in my life and gaming preferences. If I had to choose, I'd say Izrador from the Midnight campaign setting is the baddest ass of them all. Sure he is a knockoff of Sauron from LotR, but any god who locks out all the rest and turns the world into his own dumping grounds is cool in my book. The fact that killing his legates and defiling his temples and smashing his mirrors feels so GOOD is another mark in his favour. All around good example of how a god should contribute to the setting and character motivation.

30 Day Challenge 3 & 4

Day 3 - Favorite Class

This is a toughie, since I normally play an Elf, who are either multi-classed or are their own class. I guess in a pure-human campaign I've always gone for Ranger. Maybe it's my upbringing in the wastes of unknown Labrador, or maybe the coolness of Aragorn, but Rangers are eminently playable. Even when transported to an urban environment, they become like Frazer in 'Due South', an in tune survival expert who always pulls through on their inner strength. Quite the opposite of Thieves, who exploit others' weaknesses.

4 Favorite Gameworld

Has to be the Young Kingdoms of the Elric novels. I've played in the Realms, Eberron, and Mystara, but they've never seemed real to me. That said, an AD&D 2e game I played in Lankhmar felt right, so maybe I just find gameworlds stemming from fiction more appealing than those made for a game. Truth to tell, although I started playing with D&D, Stormbringer RPG was my first true love. I've never played, just GMed, and the emulation of the bleakness of the early novels hits me as just right. I'm almost tempted to do up a D&D retroclone in the YK based on the old Melnibonean Mythos from Deities & Demigods and the godawful d20 Dragonlords of Melnibone. Maybe send any profits to Mike to make up for the screwing he got from Chaosium & Mongoose.

30 Day Challenge 1 & 2

I initially wasn’t going to get into this 30 day challenge, but the posts I am working on (2 scenarios & some minis rules) are taking longer than expected, so here goes. I may post 2 or 3 at a pop as I have things to do these days, but it should be good for a laugh.

1)      How did I get started roleplaying?

Although I had read RPGs earlier in the 80s, I didn’t have the mental development (i.e. I was a space case) or the group of friends necessary to get seriously into gaming until the end of the decade. In 1989, I was 19 and had just failed out of uni, was working at a crappy convenience downtown midnight to 8 am to make the measly extra 50 cents an hour for fighting off robbers and serving trannies coming out of the gay bar (NB: no big deal for me as I had solid LGBT friends and went to gay bars myself, but the boss & clerks were homophobes and so I was happy to get the extra money). I had an uber-cool, death cookie girlfriend named Naomi who looked a lot like Death:

Anyhoo, Naomi would disappear every Sunday into a room with three guys for hours, and wouldn’t talk about what went on. Of course, I got jealous and demanded to see what was happening in there. Were they making porn? What was the secret?

They were playing D&D, of course. The girlfriend was a Valkyrie, Mike played a Dwarf, Damion a Wizard. I rolled up my first character and was in.

2)      Favorite Race?

That first character was an Elf, and without a doubt, Elf is the race (or class) I gravitate towards. That sweet combination of fighting and spellcasting is just is so much more compelling than a fighter who is toast against the arcane or a mage who can never get his hands dirty. My first character carried two swords (NB: although the first Drizzt Do’urden book supposedly came out in 1988, it didn’t get to my town for a few years, so not a clone of him, although possibly very Elric inspired), had no name I can recall, was chaotic and got banned from the game after 1) setting loose some bone golems, then locking the other PCs in with them (thank you Haste and Wizard Lock), and later 2) setting afire a library we were looting and escarping before the dry papers created a firestorm taking out the other characters.