Universal Comics Movieverse 1

1: Analyze the Source Material

Saddening as it is I suppose I have to bow to reality and accept that comic books are less and less likely to be the primary vehicle for super-heroic adventures. The blockbuster movies that we had hoped for for so long have swallowed the comics whole and now much of the Marvel and DC heroes are much better known for their screen exploits than their page ones. (Plus as a child of the 70’s it’s been a long time since the big two publishers have produced something that strikes my fancy he way that the mid 70’s to late 80’s comics did – too much of it is decompressed and occasionally incomprehensible to me. Call me an old fuddy-duddy if you like.) Those movies, increasingly popular and no longer sneering at their source material, have become the way new gamers know the genre, and so I must turn my attention to adapting that to gaming.

Castle Mordha 12

12: The rest of the dungeon

I’m going to move to a slightly more abstract discussion of the levels because I’m not sure how interesting it is to read the room by room discussions, especially since I don’t have the maps up yet. That’s proving much more time consuming than I expected – the degree of pre-work needed for a dungeon is much greater than other games. I’ll have to see how much it pays off in actual play, but it did feel more labor intensive.

Musings: Aaaaaaaagh!

Now that we're nigh unto finished with the dungeon crawl portion of our program, I'm curious what the best trap or trick you've ever used or encountered in a dungeon has been. Ideally we're looking for something triggerable that the PCs could avoid, or a situation that the PCs have to Encyclopedia Brown their way through in order to get into a specific part of the dungeon or to a special treasure. No fair just referencing White Plume Mountain either.

Castle Mordha 11

11: Level 2 West
More requests for the players to not read further.

Full Metal Jackets

So last weekend, pre-vomiting bug, I took the family up to see the Higgins Armory collection in Worcester MA.The museum is closing down at the end of this year as it can no longer afford its building, though the collection is fortunately moving in toto to another local museum. Once there I not only marveld at the intricacy of the armor but of how little gaming (and movies and books) prepared me for the reality of people fighting in armor.

Castle Mordha 10

10: Level 2 East

More stuff the players shouldn't see

Castle Mordha 9

9: Mordha’s Town

It’s time, I think, for a little bit of detail on the immediate world. Mordha Town is notable for a few things: first, it’s the place that hired the PCs to deal with their bandit problem, which is why they’re here to begin with (and since the bandits are trapped in Castle Mordha the PCs will very likely fulfill that contract. The official terms of the contract were room, board, 5 silvers a day and any loot from the bandits (a strong incentive for the PCs to catch them, and it solves the problem of trying to return the loot to its original owners).

Mordha’s Town contains about 300 citizens, not a backwater even if it’s not huge. It survives based on three factors:

·   First, it is on the overland route between Shankill and Alboling., the other major settlement on the island, and there are still some people or objects that are better transported overland; Mordha’s town is a logical stopping point

·   Second, there are several jungle-provided products that are hunted and farmed here and sold to the coastal cities for profit. There are several other inland towns also act as aggregating points for the hunters and small plantations (here they’re banana farm, or more precisely plantain plantations, plus some coffee and chocolate). This gives the town a second income stream rather than just being a way-station.

·   Third, there’s inertia in that the town was here, has an existing infrastructure (including sewers) and enough natural resources to support a population. People are nothing if not resistant to change, and this is as good a place as any.

Since two of these three depend on trade the bandits are a real problem, and therefore the hiring of the PCs.

I start getting into plot stuff after this, so I'll ask the players to stop reading here. 

Musings: Sickbeds

We here at Casa de Kudzu have been laid up with a nasty vomiting bug this week, so this is a short post to discuss illness in RPG. How often have you used them? did you ever rely on the dread 'random chance of infection' table from the 1st edition DMG? What's the coolest one you've ever had in game?

In my cases the answers are 'seldom', 'not more than once before the players rebelled' and... well, there's a longer story to that.

Castle Mordha 8

8: Level 1 West

My but a single level is taking a while to stat out…. Alas I really want at least 50 rooms on a level to capture the megadungeon feel and to give the players plentiful options. 

Monsters, part 2

Back in the dim misty recesses of memory (i.e. nearly a decade ago now) I ran a V&V campaign that was set in Boston. After the first couple of sessions of generic super-hero city stuff the players requested a greater use of actual Boston geography. So I gave it to them in spades - they caused a ton of collateral damage in Faneuil Hall, they flew through the Citgo sign, they stopped the theft of rare artifacts from the MFA, they fought animated lions from the the steps of the public library, they even had someone hijack a Duck Tours boat. It was all good clean fun, even if it veered a little dark and villianous from time to time.

As you can imagine the events at the Boston Marathon hit a chord with me because of that.

We gamers, especially those working in contemporary games, make a lot of use of violence as the story conflict. It's not necessary, but it's part of the hobbies formative period - it might not be in the dice's DNA but it's clearly the predominant environment. And sometimes that's good clean fun. Other times, well, we might want to look at a more extensive use of other conflicts to drive our stories. Romance. Mystery. Social Conflict. Exploration. My just completed Mech & Matrimony (the game of Jane Austen Romance and Giant Robot Combat) could, in retrospect, have skipped the giant robots and worked just fine with social concerns as the conflict. Hufflepuff & Ravenclaw is, for most of it, devoid or real violence but possessing a sizable threat of violence. One of my top sessions of my Star Trek game had plenty of threats of damage but none of violence as the USS Carter struggled to understand the plight of an alien species and then assist them. I plan on spending the rest of the year helping young kids learn to bash goblins and loot dungeons and I'm comfortable with that, as long as it's not all we ever do.

As for the events in Boston, I'll reiterate something I put on my Facebook page - terroist acts are attempts at being an allergen. They're designed to get society to turn its defenses on itself, to overreact, and therefore cause more damage to society than the otherwise limited terrorists could do on their own. The bombers are not monsters - they're criminals. Monsters are things that we fear. Criminals are things that we have civil strcutures to locate, neutralize and deal with in a way that keeps out culture intact. They WANT to be monsters.

Don't let them.

Castle Mordha 7

7: Level 1 center

Again, we hope the players honor forbids them from reading further

Castle Mordha 6

6: Castle Mordha Overview/Level 1 E

From here I get into the dungeon proper, and must ask players to not read any further.

Musings: Monsters

One interesting bit about the design decisions in OD&D and AD&D 1E was that for all of the monsters that exist in the game world - from dragons to mind flayers to drow - was that the most dangerous and powerful one in the generic game world was Humans. Seriously. Not the rank and file 1-4 HP commoners but the sheer power available to high level characters, especially high level spellcasters, that no other monster could reach. And with the inclusion of level limits on non-human races not even communities of elves - cool subterranean evil spider elves or not -  would match the power and versatility of a group of suitably high level PCs.

This was, by accounts I've seen, a deliberate decision by Gygax, and one of the places where the games pulp fantasy origins (were non-human protagonists were pretty much non-existent ) shine out over the Tolkien influence of mixed fantasy race parties. He wanted humans to be the focus of the game (hence the level limits for non-humans making them unattractive), and he allowed that this made them both the best heroes and the best villains.

Castle Mordha 5

5: Explaining the Changes

While I came into this with the intent of making a minimal number of changes I wanted to discuss why I made the changes I did and how I think they don’t deviate from D&D’s origins.

First and foremost, the original D&D Little Brown Books have lots of gaps in them (if you want to be fancy we can call them lacunae) where the GM is meant to develop their own rulings to cover what situations arose outside the rules, just as was done in miniatures wargames when people tried to do things outside the designer’s original ideas. The existence of those lacunae was expected by the people who wrote and first played the game, and led to a lot of different annexes built off the same house. This was what Gygax was trying to reverse in AD&D, but the Basic D&D rules set is still gleefully sparse.

My changes fall into 2 types: standardization & customization.

Tying in to reality

I find that when I'm running games set in the (ostensible) real world I have a strong desire to tie in parts of the real world to it. Players in my various V&V games are well familiar with my decision to set the games almost exclusively in the 1980's (or flashbacks, or time leaps forward) because that was when I started playing with the world. This gives me a lot of real world events to tie into, the ability to have people invent 'super tech' that's actually late 20th/early 21st century tech, and various other advantages. While I might lose some current world opportunities I think it's a pretty fair trade off. If I were to start a new supers universe I would likely have it run from late 2001 to 2012 to have the same effect - a decade where we know what major things did happen so everyone can see the effect the PCs (and other super-heroes) have on it.

Likewise when I'm setting something in an established genre property (not just aping the feel for it, as i have in the first two campaigns here) I get pretty obsessive about working within the lacunae of the canon (to give the players maximum freedom of action within the setting without violating 'history') and explaining away violations of same when I have to in designing  compelling story. The players in my Star Trek (Christopher Pike era) and Marvel Super Heroes (X-Men circa 1984) will doubtless attest to this insanity.

I'm not entirely sure why I do this. I think in part because my own sense of history is tied in to the fictions that I read set in and around history. Yes, I can tell the real from the fictitious, but it came to mind Monday when reading about Margaret Thatcher's death. My first image of her was not anything from her 'real' history, but her five panels in Alan Moore and John Totleben's "Miracleman". In my head it's all of a piece.

Gaming did this to me. Gaming and comics. And TV. OK, maybe I was like this already.

Castle Mordha 4

4: Further Mechanics & Setting

Tests

When a character tries to do something that is not covered by some other part of the rules it is a Test. The Player (or DM if the outcome is meant to be secret) rolls a 1d12 and applies any relevant modifiers. A score of 10+ indicates success. Many things in the rules specifically affect tests (such as Strength on Open Doors tests, a Fawn’s sneakiness on Stealth tests or armor modifiers on stealth, swimming and climbing tests) but in other cases it is up to the DM what modifiers apply at any time.

A test only determines if the task succeeded or failed. If you need to know how well the task succeeded roll a d8 if the task is inside the broad skills of the characters class, or a d6 otherwise. Again, the DM can apply any relevant modifiers to the roll. The higher the roll, the better the character did. In most cases this second step will be unnecessary, but the mechanic exists.

Castle Mordha 3

3: Magic

Clerical Magic

There is a big break between Faith and normal Clerical turning and spellcasting – my largest change from the BD&D as writ. I’m making the change because I want the spellcasting classes to feel different I how they play. While Magic-Users and elves keep the Vancian magic, Clerics have a more flexible system with a number of effects per day chosen at the time of use, with turning undead being one of those uses. There’s still resource management, but it’s of a different sort.

Musings - your strangest character

I suspect that everyone likes to design and play the occasional odd character. Of course your definition of 'odd' may vary from mine. Personally I still want to play in an Atomic Horror game where my character has the ability to summon musical sequences - he can swing his guitar off his hip and give everyone the ability to dance in a musical number of that wacky rock and roll. I'm not sure what the in-game benefit would be (it doesn't even have the get more done during time compression montage effect that a Disney Princess' 'summon musical number' power does(, but I just think it's cool in the genre.

Let see... in one fantasy game in which I was to be an intermittent player my PC was actually a personality inside an amulet that would possess whoever put it on for short periods. Whenever I wasn't there the body became a combat ineffective commoner who the GM would not feel obliged to role play or make combat decisions for. The other cool part was that anyone I explained this too took POW damage and potential insanity, which meant that I could be all strange and mysterious and say "don't ask questions you don't want the answers to" and then when someone insisted, Player Character style that I absolutely tell them I could say to the GM "I tell him" and he'd roll for damage and describe the PC collapsing into a ball of blubbering temporary insanity. I don't know why I found that ability to whack at someone who insisted on trying to remove my PCs aura of mystery so enjoyable, but I did.

There was also my character in Tom's Bureau 13 game, a Banshee who felt really bad about past actions but had attended a twelve-step program and internalized that her wail was a prediction and not something she was causing and had to feel responsible for. She also dressed like a male dandy and each session I would slowly find a use for each handkerchief, pocket watch chain, silk tie and so on until at the end she was inevitably in a state of deshabille.

Those are a couple of mine - what're yours?

Castle Mordha 2

2: Design mechanics based on analysis

All of these rules mods use the Moldvay edited D&DBasic as their starting point.

Open Game License

Since I'm spending this month working on a version of D&D I should provide a copy of the System Reference Document to make it completely legal. Let me take a moment to thank the people at WotC who set this up in 2000 to make it possible for me to do work on this system and to share it openly with others.

Castle Mordha 1

It’s time to kick it Old School

1: Analyze the Source Material

After starting this blog I found James Maliszewski’s blog Grognardia, dedicated to Old School Roleplaying (OSR). OSR eschews a planned story in favor emergent narrative, mixed with “Gygaxian Naturalism”: i.e. in a reasonably well-designed world any sequence of actions by PCs usually produces an enjoyable play session. OSR gleefully ignores modern genre boundaries, drawing instead on pulp traditions where fantasy and SF weren’t just kissing cousins but incestuous lovers with a passel of kids: ancient astronauts leave behind robots, world- jumping wizards carry six guns, modern people find lost worlds aplenty and everything and the kitchen sink is tossed into the mix. While Old School RPGs uses the pulps it doesn’t emulate them: it is sui generis, drawing its wargaming roots, the pulps and thousands of hours of the gaming at the rosy fingered dawn of the hobby to make something unique.