Play Report 6: Skeleton Attacks

 From Steph:

Spucky and Agartha follow the maps to the east, looking for the way out marked on the map. Suddenly, the distant thud of hooves is heard. Two skeletons on skeletal steeds thunder into view. One of the horses breaths a noxious gas at Agartha, causing her to be sick for a long time (the maximum possible rounds, in fact)... which is really bad, because Spucky's not much of a melee fighter, and while the skeletons aren't that accurate with their attacks, the horses are, and they're tough! Spucky gets kicked by a horse, and Agartha runs to give her a potion (splashing her with a little puke in the process). But the gnome is still being attacked. I decided to risk casting a healing spell, but got attack-of-opportunitied and Spucky wasn't any better off -- she did get the spell off, but after being attacked her HP wasn't any better. And Agartha was still going to be sick for a while. It was looking dire! I really thought we were going to die!

I decided the best chance was to try and fight defensively until Agartha got better, so Spucky took a few swings at the skeletons while attempting to dodge their attacks. Nobody hits anybody, but the rounds pass, until one of the horse belches out another poison cloud. Spucky has to move, and manages to get a short distance away from the horses, where she's able to cast Magic Stone while the skeletons focus on the poor heaving barbarian for a moment. Then -- amazingly enough, on the last couple of rounds before Agartha would have recovered and demolished them anyway -- Spucky gets off two Magic Stone hits in a row, killing both undead with a single bullet each. It was an amazing turnaround!

Without their riders, the horses become docile. Docile enough for us to get on their backs and ride! The tunnels fly by in a blur as the adventurers transport their still-unconscious captive. We round a curve and head north, hoping to reach the spot the map indicates is home to another Grim.. but before we get their, we run smack into Drusiphia, fleeing the other direction. She's being followed by Junior, and apparently hasn't copped to the fact that she controls him yet, because she's firing arrows at him. Before she can figure it out, Agartha grabs her, and Spucky grabs for her pouch, managing to recover the amulet and regain control of Junior. WHEW. Drusiphia is just about dead from exhaustion, and we tie her up with the whips and put her on a horse... good thing we've got the horses. And good thing the Grim is just ahead - although we don't know how the magic evil-destroying owl will react to our captives, we really need to rest and recover...

... Except the Grim, and the entire cavern its in, have been roasted to a crisp by something. The Grim's spirit arises and explains about a something called the Flame-Walker that's roaming around. Something we definitely don't want to run into! The party keeps heading north as fast as possible, hoping to make it to the exit, and we do. The door stands in front of us... sealed shut.

DM's Very Important Note: I didn't decide the door was sealed this way until they got to it. I was, in fact, stalling, because I had nothing particularly special planned for the end of this dungeon crawl, and no clue what was on the other side. I thought a stock moral dilemma would  buy me time... and it did. But it also causes an unintended and amazingly dramatic sequence to occur. When I confessed to Kitty that I made the door up last minute, she wanted to hit me.

Drusiphia helpfully explains that you have to sacrifice someone to make it open, and suggests the other captive,who she recognizes as someone called Trevor, and who she claims killed someone to gain entry in the first place. It may or may not be true, but should she really suggest killing someone at this point, after she tried to rob us? It sure wouldn't be Trevor who got stabbed! Of course, we wouldn't kill helpless prisoners anyway, and Spucky is just considering whether one of the skeleton horses would count when the tunnel to the west lights up. Junior moves into action, shielding the party - just as an enormous fireball crashes into him. A fireball big enough that the rest of us would have been vaporized on the spot if he hadn't been there. Then... the flame walker appears, a scythe-wielding skeleton with a core of fire. Spucky decides to stay back with the horses and let Junior handle it, but Agartha bravely steps forward to confront the creature.

Junior gives the flame walker a light pummeling, but the skeleton responds with a single deadly swing of its scythe -- a quadruple-damage critical hit which is enough to destroy even him. His noble sacrifice (okay, he's just a construct, but I'm anthropomorphizing, dammit) causes the door to swing open at the moment of his death, and the party escapes out the door, the horses crumbling into dust as it closes, trapping the flame walker in the caverns. We're out of the caves at last -- but where are we now?

DM: I'm endlessly in love with the effect of dice on a game. Seriously, almost nothing but a critical hit with a magic scythe COULD have killed Junior. And if that hadn't happened, the door would never have opened until one of the PCs died or killed someone.


Sure, Junior was a construct, so you might think he shouldn't count towards the door. My logic was that the door actually responds to the emotional connection to the sacrifice - the PCs certainly thought of Junior as part of the party at this point.

Castlevania is the Platonic Dungeon

I’ve been thinking a lot about dungeons. You know, the second noun in the title of the two-noun-and-an-ampersand game we play? It’s funny how rarely I’ve ever really used either in a game.

Mmm... dungeony.

Dragons, eh. But dungeons - my lack of experience with dungeons is evidence of my youth - old school DnD is all about the dungeons (as a figure of speech: I know there’s more to the old-school ethos than that, so put away the flamethrowers). Still, I’ve thought about them a lot, and I’ve read plenty of dungeon modules from the TSR years.

They weren’t any good. Bits were good, but I’ve never encountered the Platonic Idea Dungeon.

Save one. It was a video game.

I submit Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (and the further 2D games that were rooted in it) as the Perfect Dungeon, the closest we may ever see to the Platonic conception of Pure Dungeoness.

It is non-linear - you can tackle areas in almost any order you care to. What you do in one area can affect another (powerups that allow you to reach areas you could not otherwise - not a perfect example but close). There are traps and tricks that make you start examining the pretty scenery closer. There’s a variety of monsters, of course. Lots of loot, much of it weird and special. There are secrets out the ass. But most importantly, the place feels like a place, not a bank in the ground custom built for the sole purpose of being robbed. It feels lived in... or unlived in or whatever.

Some examples of what’s so fucking great about SoTN:

• The castle has art galleries, a library, a chapel, an indoor colosseum, a clock tower, catacombs, a mine and pretty much everything but a kitchen, all stocked with appropriate enemies (undead pit fighters in the colosseum, angel-like things in the chapel, books in the library). This gives you a sense that this really was a ruler’s castle before things changed. Living people went about their business here, once, long ago.

WHAT is this asshole's deal, anyway?

• In said chapel, there’s a confessional you can use. A ghost priest will come if you sit on one side, while the ghost of a woman will show up if you sit on his. They will either listen to you or confess to you, or try to stab you through the confessional grate. What an awesome trap.

• Sometimes there’s just random weird shit, like a zombie kung-fu artist that attacks you in a room. There’s only one of him, he’s not a boss or anything... he’s just this unique single thing.

• There’s more than one faction in the castle, sort of. The Librarian will sell you goods and info. There’s a ferryman that will take you across an underground lake. There are two other characters loose in the castle doing their own thing against Dracula, but not with you. One of them has been brainwashed by Drac’s minions. Beyond that, there’s a ton of bosses with hinted backgrounds and motives of their own.

He's called Yorick in the English versions. I know. Sorry.

• There are elements you can use against the inhabitants, like teleporters and elevators. Oh, lets count save spots, why not.

• Did I mention secrets? SPOILER WARNING: 50% of the castle is only accessible if you wear a special item, don’t kill the person that looks like they’re responsible for things, and instead attack a magic ball. Do this and an entire, upside-down version of the place comes out of the sky, where the REAL bad guy is. This is all completely optional.

• A giant floating ball of screaming corpses.

This image comes with a bonus asterisk! *

SoTN does something that is very hard for a video game - it makes you forget you are essentially on an obstacle course with someone waiting at the end for you to assassinate them. The thing is, this should be easy to do in an RPG. Just construct a dungeon with a sense of purpose beyond the PCs, be it "An evil monarch who would later become a vampire lived here" or "we buried an important person here and by the Gods we want them to stay there."

In short, publish a dungeon module that was more like Castlevania and less like “in the room, there is 50 gp and a ochre jelly” and I’m a customer. Since I’ve not seen one... I’ll just have to make it myself, won’t I?

* Disclaimer 1: This image is from a later game using the SoTN model, I just thought it was metal as fuck. Disclaimer 2: I am not metal and the above statement should in no way betaken as accurate. I'm not responsible if you call this metal and Eddie from the Megadeth covers kills you in your nightmares.

Have a Secure, Unmolested Sizzlepissmas!

In my household, we do not celebrate Christmas. There is no Santa.

There is only the Solstice Night, when the sun is swallowed up and then slowly regurgitated by Sizzlepiss, the Solstice Opossum. She crawls up your duct work to leave "presents" in your shoes. If you've been naughty, she doesn't leave coal - she chews open your gas lines. Place the rotting scraps of your heathen feasts by your trash bins now and you may yet please her.

Sizzlepissmas is also celebrated in the City-State of Carrow, where gifts are exchanged much you do for your holidays. In honor, here's a random table for you. Technically, I made it up for a post on another forum, but it's the thought that counts.

So the PCs have been captured by some subterranean "savage" culture, like gnolls or orcs. Instead of outright execution, the PCs are sealed inside the skull of a giant, which is then filled with either:

1. A mild acid (will ruin cloth and paper, removes all body hair, permanent scarring over entire body),
2. Cave Bees (like normal bees but deal with fungi spores instead of pollen),
3. Gnoll pups,
4. Cave Honey Mead (think bourbon with traces of LSD in it),
5. Blood,
6. Snakes and chicken eggs,
7. Snakes and live chickens,
8. Hallucinogenic Mushrooms,
9. Rotting meat,
10. A candle, some dice, a couple hunks of meat and a kobold who just happened to get caught the very same morning.

Gygaxian Democracy with your host, Zak Smith

I've been throughly enjoying the Gygaxian Democracy series over at Playing DnD with Porn Stars. Basically, Zak posts some kind of prompt - a table to fill in, a keyed dungeon to stock, a list of villians - and the rest of us provide the rest. Crowdsourced DM material, in other words. The results have been mostly fantastic, and I'm really proud of what Smith's prompts and the other contributions have inspired out of me. Here's a few of mine, but really, read the others as well.

1. For a list of villains, I choose to fill in the details for "giant centipede with excellent hygiene"
2. Shriekglass is made from the cries of dead virgins, and is being smuggled into town. Several parties are interested in it, including mine (which I used a Tarot deck to make up).
3. The King has lost his head. The Forces of Badness have made impostures, each of which has a different effect if put back on his body. Like inflating and floating away.
4. The Hammer of Exorcism exorcises things hammered with it. Unless it doesn't, in which case one of a number of things might occur. Like total protonic reversal.

Play Report 5: The Chase

I don't have a lot to offer this time, except to toss up the maps they found. From Steph:

Drusiphia offers to take the first watch, and she seems like she might not be that trustworthy. Hmm. But Spucky tells Junior to keep watch too, and to stop her if she tries anything sneaky. Also, she sleeps on the medallion to make it hard to steal. And surely even a thief wouldn't rob near-penniless adventurers in the middle of a dungeon when she's been promised a share of the treasure they're owed when they get out, would she?


Well, it turns out she would! Dan-dan-dan! Drusiphia steals the medallion and Spucky's pocket change during the night and runs off with Junior. Oh dear! She leaves a note saying not to follow her, but come on -- as if! For one thing, she's probably headed to the exit. Plus, she just guardian-jacked us, and that's not cool! I was gonna give her part of my treasure, too! Although in fairness to her, the medallion might have been worth the lion's share of it anyway.


First, I recover my spells. This time I pick Magic Stone instead of Goodberry ... I don't think we're going to find any berry bushes down here! In fact, we are totally out of food. That might be a problem! Drusiphia said the purple mushrooms growing everywhere could be eaten "in a pinch", but that they cause hallucinations, and anyway, who knows if she was telling the truth?


We follow her trail for a while and eventually find somewhere where she seems to have lost one of her horns and fallen down some stairs. Spucky takes the antler, maybe she can sell it to a wizard? Further on, we hear the sounds of a fight. Spucky tries to sneak up an see what it is (not that she has any ranks in Sneak, but it's worth a shot.) A big black dog appears, growling!


But it's not here to attack - it's one of those padfeet that the owl mentioned, another Grim. It reports that Drusiphia ran by with Junior, using him to protect her from the Grim. Ah, now it begins to make sense that she didn't want to travel with us, she would certainly have run into trouble here if she had. And even though she managed to get away, the Grim took a nice big bite of her anyway. I like this Grim, he reminds me of Chops.


There's a dwarf skeleton covered with orange mold here, too. The Grim says that the spores of the mold are deadly. Spucky leaves it alone and we continue on to the south, following the trail of the thief. Soon we hear something in the distance, fwoosh, fwoosh, fwoosh. It gets closer and closer, screeching and screaming. It's a gigantic bat! Aaa!

Front:

Our attack kept missing and I started to get a bit worried - maybe we should run? I think I was a bit nervous because of Chris' vivid description. It was very scary, like a big wingy train barreling down the tunnel! However, we eventually manage to land a few hits - as usual, Agartha does most of the damage. And the bat is killed! After checking it for poison, we cook it. So much for being out of food - for now at least.

A crazy-looking person dressed in rags appears from the way we came, covered in orange dust and laughing hysterically. Looks like mold spores! Spucky uses Create Water to wash them off, and it seems to work, but the weirdo attacks anyway. We knock him out (he's not very tough). Chris asks if we want to eat him - ha ha. No, but we do go through his pockets and find some old maps written in Dwarvish shorthand. Looks like our nutty friend was messing around with that dwarf skeleton back there. Luckily, Spucky can read Dwarvish (along with Common, Gnomish, and Sylvan) and can read the directions on what places to avoid and how to get to 'the Crypt', which seems like the way out.

And Back.

Spucky takes along a lot of bat meat, in case we can't find anything else, and we also carry along the crazy mushroom spore guy, in the hopes that when he wakes up he'll be less insane. He's tied up, though, just in case. He got past the Grim all right, so he's probably not evil. Alternately, he could be evil and very powerful! We'll just have to hope he doesn't turn out to be another bad egg!

Crunchy Corner: Called Shots

In DnD your Armor Class, or AC, reflects your ability to get out of the way or deflect a blow harmlessly. It's a combination of bonuses given for dexterity, armor, shields, magic effects, etc.

Your attack bonus in 3rd Edition, be it for a melee or ranged weapon, is pretty simple - how good you are at hitting something with that thing.

Here's what happens in a giving combat turn: I try to whack you - I roll a d20 plus whatever my bonus for my whacker is. I'm trying to match your AC - I either succeed and thus you are whacked, or I failed.

Why did I fail?

Well... that's open to interpretation. You could have dodged, ducked, sidestepped, or I could have failed to even swing at the right area of space-time you occupy. Or I could have struck your shield, or you batted my weapon aside with it. Maybe I hit you, but your armor did what armor does. If you are some kind of monster, I may have simply failed to penetrate your rough hide or natural armor.

In the rules, straight as they are, there's no way to tell. The DM has to make up what happened. I usually go by how close the roll was - did you roll just under their AC? Armor or a shield, then. Miss it by 3 points or more and they probably dodged. More than 10 and you apparently mistook a stray dust mote for your foe, three feet away.

But what does this mean for a player that wants to hit a specific body part? Or an object held or worn? A "Called Shot" as you will. I was surprised to learn there is no rule for this in the official Player's Guide or the DMG for 3e. What's up with that?

First, there is a rule for trying to disarm an opponent, which involves striking whatever they're holding. There's also rules for hitting objects carried or worn.

The primary thinking I've encountered is that the system of Critical Hits is supposed to cover "hitting something special." In other words, you aren't allowed to aim for the neck, or shoot someone in the knee. Instead, if you roll a critical hit (let's remember that in official by-the-book 3e that means the critical range of that weapon followed by rolling the critical range AGAIN) you are THEN allowed to assume you hit the neck or a knee or something.

This, in my opinion, robs the players of agency and I fail to see how that improves the game.

I've not settled on a solution, but here are my thoughts.

Hitting a body part... just consider the size of the part, add that bonus to the other stuff (most things will be +4 or +8) and give the target an attack of opportunity.

Also, don't make hitting a special place too big a deal, as a DM. If chopping heads were as simple as overcoming a +8 bonus, a lot of PCs will take advantage of that. Maybe if they make the roll and get a natural 20. Otherwise, there's a feat for that.

Play Report 4: Exploring the Underworld

And now on to the megadungeon. Using Maptools, I did this an unusual way. I made a large scale map of the tunnels, with each square representing an hour of walking. Each hour, there was a 1/6th chance of an encounter. I had previously made a chart of possible encounters - some vicious, some innocuous. So it was sort of like an old 16-Bit JRPG video game - walk around the map until there's a sound and you're in a battle!


This way, the story evolved very organically. The Grims were on the list, as was Drusiphia (one of my favorite NPCs) and some other characters. There's a lot I designed that was never even approached, or rolled. This is, of course, good - it means I'm kept on my toes just as much as the players, and it means their choices and luck really have an impact, instead of stuff just thrusting its way in front of them.


Here's Steph's report:

Mostly this one was a series of dungeon encounters as we followed the tracks of the mine cart. People digging up rocks usually want them brought to the surface, right? Or at least to some sort of city. So we head along the tracks. First, we encounter a large talking owl called the Grim, who informs us that it's a guardian placed to help cleanse the dungeon of evil -- and that, as good creatures, we're safe around it. That's good to know! There are other Grims in the dungeon, including some "padfeet", but it doesn't know the way out. Too bad!

Traveling on, we find some mysterious things on the ceiling. Spucky throws a rock and skeletal bats swoop down to attack! We make short work of them, especially with Junior around.

Farther along still, we come to a watery area with a lot of puddles. One of the puddles hulks up into some sort of humanoid form made of living blood, and here it comes! Agartha and Spucky bat at it a bit but the real heavy lifting is done by Junior again, who hits it once and splatters it messily. Junior makes things a bit too easy, truth be told, but since I don't have Chops with me, I'm glad to have him! Spucky saves some of the blood in an empty flask (from a healing potion, taken off one of the gang, which Agartha chugged earlier). You never know what might be useful.

The tracks end at a vast underground lake, where they seem to have collapsed. Whoops! I guess we're not getting out that way. The cavern is huge - we can't see the ceiling, and we're too high up to get to the lake. Agartha chucks a rock, and there's a flash of something mysterious and humanoid in the lake. Then, suddenly, the lights go out, and Agartha is almost stabbed from behind by a mysterious assailant. She manages to grab them instead, though - turns out that it's a woman named Drusiphia with horns on her head. Even though she just tried to attack us, she seems to be stuck in the dungeon too - she claims to have been on the run from flying heads for a while. Hmm, can we trust her? Spucky probably would -- their aren't many evil gnomes, and she hasn't been in big-people land too long. Besides, when lost in a dungeon, we can use all the help we can get, and Drusiphia says she knows the way out. So she comes along, even though there are some suspicious things about her. For instance, when Spucky shows her the bottle of blood, she grabs it and drinks it!

DM: Specifically, Dru has two deer horns on one side, and a ram's on the other. I introduced her because I wanted another living being lost in the caves, but she became so interesting to me that I'm basing a novel around a (un-DnDified) version of her.

Soon the flying heads Drusiphia mentioned catch up with the party. Vargouille attack! The tiefling puts her fingers in her ears just before they let out a paralyzing screech. Sheesh, thanks for warning us about that! Agartha is frozen, while Drusiphia and Junior each take out one vargouille each, and even Spucky manages to down one with a couple of bullets from her sling. It doesn't take long, and when the battle is over Agartha is angry at having missed it.

We decided to end the session here, so the party prepared to make camp. It was still late afternoon in-game, but we'd been hiking around all day, and Spucky was totally out of spells, so we agreed to stop for a while and eat our rations.

She's right about Junior making things too easy. It's a good thing they rolled Drusiphia when they did.

TIC... TOC.... TIC...

An awesome but hard as hell exercise from Zak Smith's blog: Stock a dungeon with 15 rooms in under 2 minutes.

Follow the link to see the map - I don't think it matters, though. Any layout of 15 rooms will do. Here's mine, but I'm really bad at telling time* so I think I accidentally went over:

1. Statue of a basilisk and a flock of cockatrice locked in deadly combat. Not real.
2. Stoned Flock of cockatrice, real, trap tile unstones them.
3. Stoned Basilisk, real, but actually stoned: bleary eyes, etc. Gaze half effective due to red eye
4. Two elf women that won't stop singing (can't?)
5. Bannana trees
6. floor covered in redworms
7. floor covered in teeth
8. Giant tapestry made of woven spider silk
9. caged spiders
10. spider milking apparatus
11. WC
12. Kid pounding head against floor, wound keeps healing
13. comfy chairs
14. kitchen
15. library, all the books are blank 

*Not kidding - I don't know why either.

Just some stuff I drew.

Afile, self-proclaimed daughter of the Raven herself

A map of the region east and south of Carrow

And another map contradicting it on key points.

The Carrow Campaign: Play Report 2

Agartha, by Steph Cherrywell

In Which the Players Encounter Drugged Crazies, Cows and Crossbows. Take it away, Steph:

Spucky and the monks are headed to town to find someone who can cure Toby's poisoning, when the way is blocked by a somewhat deranged guard. His name is Sven, and he's not letting anyone through, not Spucky, not the monks, and not Agartha, the human barbarian who's also here. Before the situation can escalate too much, another guard, Carraton, appears. It turns out Sven is just total bonkers nuts, and has been ever since he went to investigate a nearby farm. With Sven subdued and sent off to town with the monks in the hopes that the healers can help him as well as Toby, Carraton hires the two adventurers to investigate the Awlstone Farm. I finally got around to picking Spucky's spells (detect poison and magic, create water, and cure light wounds) somewhere in here, which was good, because they came in very handy later!


DM: Enter Kitty’s PC Agartha and my first hopefully reoccurring NPC, Captain Carraton of the Gibbering Gap Guard. What’s a Gibbering Gap? “It’s a rock formation” Sven told them, while Carraton told them it was the last major trading post between here and the great city state of Carrow.

Agartha is a human barbarian. She is very big, and very strong. As we soon learn, even a level one player can do massive amounts of damage with a great axe and a rage-enhanced strength.

Old MacDonald had a farm... OF DEATH

The farm is quiet on the approach. Carraton notices a tripwire attached to a crossbow trap, and sneaks around it. She approaches through the underbrush with Spucky following. There are digging sounds coming from inside the barn. Suddenly, someone starts shooting a crossbow from the house! Carraton runs around the side of the barn, while Spucky takes cover behind some firewood. (I was a little unclear about where things were for a while, because the 'fog of war' option in Maptools made it hard to tell which building was which!) [I’m starting to find Maptools’ Fog of War more trouble than it is worth - DM] Agartha runs towards the house as attackers pile out of it. A little girl runs out of the barn wielding a crossbow -- Spucky doesn't know if she should attack a little kid, so she stays put. Meanwhile, Agartha goes into her barbarian rage and turns everyone around her into chunky spaghetti sauce. An oaf (well, that's what his icon looked like) runs out of the barn and attacks Spucky and Chops. Chops jumps him and the world's supply of oafs is messily decreased by one.

Spucky comes out from behind the woodpile, hoping the girl will surrender. She didn't -- instead, she fires a crossbow bolt. What a brat! Spucky tries to bonk her with the sling, but not kill her. (But as I was quickly learning, at level 1 it's pretty hard to hit as it is!) It's a miss! Fortunately, Carraton had been busy stampeding cows, and one of them lumbers right over the obnoxious little punk and knocks her senseless.
Another child, a twin of the first, appears and runs up to shove some mysterious black moss into the unconscious girl's mouth. The sole remaining adult enemy also doses herself with the moss and immediately drops like a rock, but Chops manages to keep the second little girl from taking a dose by non-lethally chewing the hell out of her legs. We've got three prisoners now, and search them to find a few blue potions and some more of the black moss as well as some crossbows and daggers and whatnot. Also, one of the cows wanders into the tripwire and gets itself killed with a crossbow bolt. [Actually the bolt just poisoned it with a sleeping drug, but there was no way to tell unless you examined it. - DM]

This is DnD so the treasure is completely safe to touch.

Investigating the storm cellar under the house, we find the last member of the gang, who's poured oil on the Awlstones and is holding them hostage with a lit torch. Hiding behind Agartha's mighty leg, Spucky creates water on the torch. Poof! He dies with the look of surprise on his face (Agartha got him, I think.) The Awlstones are grateful to be free, even though Spucky makes the faux pas of suggesting they eat the cow that died (they're vegetarians). Apparently the gang is here looking for a rumored barrow with something valuable in it. They tricked the Awlstones by having the girls put on the ol' innocent act, then taking them prisoner and claiming the farm for themselves. About this time, one of the other cows finds the hidden barrow, by falling into it. It's an underground room filled with bones and treasure, as well as a giant statue and a laid-out giant's skeleton. Spooky. But treasurey!

The cow is brought back safely to the surface. Everyone enjoys a nice home-cooked meal, except for the gang - we're going to interrogate them tomorrow morning!

Meet the Players

Spucky Conkerbucket - Art by Steph Cherrywell

My online campaign has now progressed across four sessions, two of them one-on-ones with the individual players. So who are these illustrious players that have felled giant trapdoor spiders, hit little girls with rocks, and dodged mad cows?
On her laptop a few feet away, trying not to peek at my giant monitor(s), there's Kitty Lowrance. One trick to playing online, when two of you are actually in the same room, is being careful to type anything game-related in chat so as not to exclude the other player. Thus we have two conversations going at once - Kitty, your turn. "You hungry?" I'm go to swing my greataxe at the dark-haired guy. Um, what do I add to that roll? "Yeah... let's make popcorn!" Since you're raging? I think it's + 6. "Okay. After my turn I'll go start it."

Kitty plays Agartha Daggath the "barbarian." Her background and motivation remains a cipher, but her personality had quickly developed - hot-tempered but nobody's fool, mildly self-interested, argumentative. Without realizing it my wife is role-playing the same archetype as Han Solo.

At 5' 10" and 270lb, Agartha swings a greataxe the size of a halfling with murderous strength, and when she goes into a rage, she's already shown the ability to drop typical level 1 opponents from full life to -10 HP in a single blow. The Barbarian is not just a weaker version of the Fighter.

"She picked someone to be... she picked somewhere to be from...."

One's a 3e character sheet, the other is IRS 1040-EZ.

Is character generation a barrier to potential new players?

When I first heard a description of the new D&D Essentials character generation rules, I was... taken aback. Essentially, you go through a choose-your-own-adventure type scenario, and  each choice you make impacts your character.

"So they turned it into a quiz from a teen girls' magazine," Kitty says.

"Yeah. Or a Livejournal 'What Hogwarts House would you be in?' type of thing. 'What is your favorite animal? A: Snakes, B: Ravens...'"

But then, last weekend, I walked a couple friends through creating their first characters. In any role-playing game ever. It took the entire evening, even using 3e's "quick start" packages, after which everyone was too tired to actually play a game.

Ten Things that Might Be in a Goblin's, Gnoll's, Orc's or Troll's Pocket

1: bag containing 16 meaty sticks fried in tallow. Each contains three small bones and a hard bit at the end. Can be eaten in place of a day's rations.

2: Phosphorescent, foul-smelling green sludge packed into a small tin. The being carrying it has some smeared over a partially-healed wound. Will clog bleeding wounds immediately, and speed natural healing 50%. However, the wound will scar terrifically and a Fortitude check must be made for every point healed. If a check fails, the scar tissue grows deep enough to be a source of constant distracting pain (1 point permanent Charisma loss). After a save is failed, no more checks are required and there is no further Charisma loss for the duration of that application. There's only enough salve left for three applications.

3: A red, a blue and a purple mushroom. The red mushroom is the only antitoxin the the poisonous blue mushroom (no save, immediately begin "drowning" as throat constricts). Eating the purple mushroom grants the ability to tell the effects of all fungi at a glance for 1d4 rounds, but renders you colorblind for the same amount of time so that the mushrooms are the exact same shade of grey - the player can specify "the poison mushroom" or "the antitoxin mushroom" but isn't told which is blue or red. The blue and red mushrooms are exactly the same in all ways except color, and each are big enough for four doses, but the purple mushroom is very small and it only works once.

4: A torch that has been soaked in something improper. A spot check DC 20 will show a funny tinge to the tar. A wisdom check DC 17 means the PC notices a strong chemical smell. An attempted alchemy check DC 15 will reveal the substance contains several dangerously explosive ingredients. If a small bit of the tar is "tested," see below.

Whoever tries to light it must make a Reflex save or take 1d6 damage, with a 25% of catching fire (hair, a shirt, something). Regardless, anything that can ignite will if the torch lands on it. The torch burns hot enough to melt iron, but will exhaust itself in 10 seconds leaving nothing behind (besides any fires it inevitably started).

5: An ugly black stone with a frowning face carved into it. Every 12 hours there's a 35% chance anything flammable and in contact with it will catch fire. If held or worn when the roll is made, it will do 1d6 points of fire damage.

6: A thick white liquid in a vial. It's a healing potion, restoring 6 HP but also dropping your WIS, INT and DEX scores to 3 each, or 6 on a Fortitude save, as you collapse into a heroine-like high.

7: A screw-top jar with a spider in it. Every so often the spider simply vanishes, then reappears in the jar. It's actually a baby phase spider - the jar has an equal presence on the ethereal plane because a suicide once drank poison from it.

8: A fine blond wig, some lipstick, various colors of eye shadow and a charcoal pencil like the kind fashionable ladies and fops use to line their eyes. The wig is remarkably well-kept. All together the set is worth about 50gp. Also, a comb carved from a humanoid pelvic bone and a highly-polished silver plate. The plate's worth 25sp.

9: A rabbit pelt sewn back together to make a crud hand puppet, with a little wooden dagger tied to its paws and thick leather stitching for eyes.

10: A living, Tiny chunk of ocher jelly in a bottle. Can be thrown as a grenade-like - will break on contact and do an ocher jelly's acid damage in a splash-pattern. That will dissipate the jelly enough to kill it, though.

Of course the imaginary dragon in our fantasy game shouldn't talk. I knew we were doing something wrong.

SHHHHHHHH!!!

After being unable to sleep, I got up the other night and saw Zak Smith had just posted this. A quick exerpt for the lazy:

Even though it has little to do with the bottom line, once in awhile the pyrotechnic display of bigotry, sexism, self-righteousness and can't-be-bothered-to-google-ignorance that I periodically get in my inbox in response to this TV show that the Escapist pays us to make about our game kind of makes me despair for humankind.

The post is mostly to thank his readers for being intelligent and bolstering his mood against the ionic-fuckwit-pulse emanating from his inbox each time a new episode of I Hit It With My Axe goes up. What followed was an outpouring of support from his readers and the old-school-gaming community. Later on, Mandy Morbid, one of the stars of the show and Smith's girlfriend, posted:

I honestly can't say my experience doing the show has been altogether-especially-positive (due to the massive sexism issue and the amount of exposure I opened myself up to--knowingly) but everything you all are saying helps heal whatever regret I have and makes me feel like I'd like to continue with it given the opportunity.

It was at this point I went from feeling merely sympathetic (having dealt with massive waves of hatemail all the time in previous jobs) to just goddamn angry that a group of people should get so much flak for such blindingly stupid reasons it makes them seriously consider not continuing to get paid for playing a game.

Then you have to consider the actual positive impact the show has had - either via first or second-hand accounts, there are women gaming now specifically thanks to watching the women on the show have fun doing so. One commenter mentioned how the blog and show helped them with their own marginalized status as a queer gamer.

Furthermore, should they not accept the opportunity to keep doing the show (if offered), it will deprive me of something I enjoy. I do not appreciate being deprived of things.

More importantly, I don't appreciate the world being deprived of things that are good for it because the tumors of humankind managed to extend their pustules within range of a keyboard.

Unfortunately, it's one of those situations where there's little to be done besides not being the thing you hate. The very fact Smith's original post has over 60 comments, all of them positive, shows that at least this corner of the old-school-gaming community has the right idea. That's really, really good to know.

Scalable NPCs

Responding to the idea of "NPCs as Artifacts" on Telecanter's Receding Rules:

I like the idea of having some scalable NPCs handy. These are villains you can pull out that are more interesting than "Bandit Leader" but with plug-and-play features so the are just as fair a threat to level 1 PCs as level 20.

I specifically want to avoid just adding more underlings. I am cool with upgrading equipment or spells, but it should be iconic stuff - the evil sorcerer with a fetish for electricity would have some better, stronger electricity-based spells. I specifically do not mean that, if the NPC is reoccurring, they should scale - there are reasons when you might want to do that, but usually it cheats PCs out of the pleasure of going back and kicking the ass of the putz that sent them packing last time.

Not sure if this concept fits with Telecanter's original idea, but it's something I've been chewing on and the Artifacts thing made me thing of it.

Without further adue:

Phillip the Culler

Phillip's body is as tense and knotted as corded rope, and he has the charisma of a coiled viper. Few who knew him as a boy would be surprised to learn he became a highwayman, and a good one. When Phillip's crew are working a stretch, it's with a methodical grace that's yet to fail him. Phillip has established a near-mythological reputation for himself as "Phillip the Culler," through the clever combination of a fear-inducing poison, his talent at sneaking and hiding, and his expertise at fighting with the twin sickles handing from his best. His overriding preference for his iconic weapons may be his most exploitable weakness in combat.

Scaling: Phillip should always fight with his twin sickles, but how good he is at it is up to the DM. Without any help, a character is severely handicapped in most rulesets when they fight with two weapons. Increasing his skill with the weapons, with dual-weapon fighting, and the quality of the sickles themselves all incrementally strengthen Phillip's threat. The actual effect of his poison is also worth tinkering with - simple morale penalties, up to forcing characters to drop weapons and flee, or cower, on a failed save are all possible.

Undead Gundam Zombie Mechatech! (Bicycle Panda Rollerskate)

The following was generated using Zak Smith's Mad Libs Dungeon Generator. I take no responsibility for the stupidity of any of my answers.

Acid, smacid - Try reading this scroll, man!

*Kandinsky, Yellow, Red, Blue

The idea that a moped is safer than a motorcycle is insulting, because the only difference is that one goes faster: Therefore, you are saying the rider is too irresponsible to drive a safe speed on the motorcycle, whereas the moped just limits his or her ability to get out of the way.

There. An argument. Now, Joesky's Rule.

Synesthasia:

You probably know that synesthasia is the state of experiencing one sense or perception as another. Tasting colors, seeing sounds, etc. What you may not know is the condition has many interesting variations. Several of them could be very entertaining after-effects of miscast spells, potions, fungal spores etc.

Here's three I thought would be fun as temporary effects:

Skype-hunting

Dear Readers,

So, I'll be running a D&D campaign over the internet soon, which I haven't done before. I'm sure someone reading this has - any advice? Preferred software?

My main concern is how to handle combat since minis are out.

Thanks!

This one's for Joesky

I've been made aware that Joesky's Rule is now in effect. Unfortunately, this means my last post was in direct violation, and I'm pretty sure that means I'll get socked in the gut with a fistful of nickles if I don't correct it.

Sorry, Joesky. Without further adieu:

RANDOM RUMORS TABLE: Random crap people are whispering around that town or village.

1: A witch hunter is in a nearby hamlet, and her methods are simple: All the citizens must take their turn sleeping on a oil-soaked pyre. If nothing happens, the citizen is not a witch. Thus far the pyre has burst into flames every night at the same hour.

2: Goblins are actually born from eggs, which are laid in the bellies of kidnapped children. This is believed because a local boy who was lost in the woods for a week returned shitting one obsidian orb each day.

3: One of the PCs is thought to be a famous pirate, dangerous but loaded with gold and worth a considerable bounty dead or alive. On a 1 or 2 a merchant will lower prices 25% out of fear. On a 3 or 4 they will raise them 25%. All taverns contain 1d4 drunks who think they can take the PC. (The actual pirate is of the opposite gender, a halfling who is short even for halfings, broke and hundreds of miles away).

4: There's a party of NPCs in town that have been claiming to be the PCs. Everyone likes them better, even if the truth is revealed.

5: "For a good time, pay a call on Leanna." (Leanna turns out to be a giant spider with an attractive woman dangling in front of its maw angler fish-like.)

6: Slips of parchment are being handed out, saying that if presented at the local weaponsmith your purchase is 50% off. They weren't made by the weaponsmith, who would be driven out of business if they were honored. Angry customers may riot.

7: The PCs are vampires. 50% of people encountered at night believe it. 25% of people encountered in daylight do. 5% of vampires do.

8: A local barkeep, Fish-Faced Floyd, is a mummy. (He is.)

9: A local shopkeep, Slow-Eyed Sue, is a lich. (she isn't.) [she is a night hag]

10: If you look at your reflection in the water left in wagon tracks after a rain, your blood and the rainwater will switch places, killing you instantly. This is a children's "urban legend" that (you guessed it!) came true for one young man.

I Now Pronouns You Gender-Neutral Anonymous Entity

Sometimes, small things are important.

According to Zak Smith, who helped edit it, Lamentations of the Flame Princess uses exclusively male pronouns when referring to an indefinite person. Since by far the most important point of Smith's post was "Hey, awesome independent game now available for preorder!" I didn't want to start a big conversation in the comments about this. There were some, enough for James Raggi to clarify his position (he saw downsides to all options and went with what was most comfortable to him) and I'm fine with that.

But I do want to talk about pronouns here.

It's some time in the late '80s. You just pulled the 2e D&D Player's Handbook off the shelf at... wherever the hell you bought RPGs in the late '80s. What spells can a player choose as a level 5 wizard? According to the book, he can pick from the following list. Is a fighter proficient with a greatsword? Yes, he is.

Now, several of the pictures are of women. Presumably, anyone playing the game could be female. Did the writers just assume no woman would play D&D? No. In the front of the book you'd actually find a disclaimer. I can't find the exact text, but the gist was: Centuries of use have "neutered" the male pronoun, so it's okay to use it exclusively.

So they felt the need to warn you: "Hey, we're going to assume you're male unless otherwise stated, because male is the new andro, except when it's still male." The premise that male pronouns have been "neutered" is demonstrably false the moment you find yourself needing a disclaimer to say so. [EDIT: I've removed a line here that could be misconstrued as comparing sexism and racism. That wasn't the intention: I think such comparisons are inevitably toxic because all forms of discrimination are equally foul, yet fundamentally different. Since I don't think the line was necessary to the argument, it was easier to cut it.]   

It obviously occurred to the writers that some people were going to be bothered by the it and those people were probably female. It's entirely likely, from the art direction and other clues, that the authors wanted these women to play. Otherwise, they wouldn't have run a disclaimer defending their position. What I don't understand is: Why was that so much easier than just saying "his or her"? Or alternating?

Why does it matter?

I write copy for a LGBTQ porn site, and part of my task is to look at the model's bio and use accurate gender identifiers in my writing. Sometimes that info isn't there, and I have to play it safe and use NO pronouns. If you try to guess, you will almost always be wrong. The difference between a transgendered man and a woman who is genderfucking but still identifies as female isn't something you can tell by site. Some models prefer neither pronoun - they want to be known as it, their or they ("it's not just genderfucked, it's grammar-fucked!"), or a modern "invented" neutral pronoun like ze and zir.

It may also sound like nitpicking political correctness* but to these people, it matters. They've struggled with their identity all their lives. Their government - supposedly the most democratic on Earth - denies them basic rights on a daily basis. A majority of their fellow citizens - in this "freest nation in the world" - mostly think they are perverted, insane or hellspawn that it is okay to murder. They've fought really, really fucking hard to claim their identity and when I have the ability to ensure they are referred to as who they are or in the very least not alienated because I found it easier to just assume a status quot? I'm damn hell going to give them that respect.

Likewise, when a woman reads "he" when a book refers to someone they may very well be, the message is clear even if unintentional. This book is not for you. It is for the norm, which is male - that is why we assume a being is male first unless specified otherwise. Thus it has been in medicine (at the cost of untold women's lives) and really every human endeavor for a very long time. You are not the norm. You are other. Put this book down.

Not the message you want to send when trying to diversify and expand your hobby.

It would actually be more accurate to assume an anonymous party to be female. Statistically it is more likely. Also, in the womb we all start out on the same trek - towards a female body. At a certain point those destined to be male develop a divergent anatomy, with some vestiges of the female left over (look down, boys. Notice anything pointy and pointless on your chest?). Plus we have centuries of use of the male pronoun to make up for.

Things have gotten better. That disclaimer was in 2e. Today, D&D 3e and 4e proudly use mixed pronouns, alternating between "he" and "she." They also catch flak for this in some quarters. Personally I think this is one of the better advancements of the game, besides getting rid of the seven million saving throws. The ire of a few trolls, and maybe a bit of extra effort when constructing a sentence, are small prices to pay to make people feel like you want them playing your game.

---

* "Political correctness" as a term was actually first used in the modern sense by the New Left to describe leaders who "talked the talk but didn't walk the walk," so to speak. Think "Racist Senator Pretends to Like Jazz." It was also used by feminists to describe the anti-pornography movement's attempts to appropriate their ideas for their own agenda to define and narrow female sexuality. It wasn't until the 90's that clueless right-wingers used the term, which more often than not was used as a pejorative against themselves, to label any attempt to actually care about the effect of your actions upon other human beings.

In other words, if you think calling me "politically correct" will invalidate my argument, fuck your grandpa.