Get 'em while they are hot!

I'm right on the verge of publishing The Magician's House and Lark Fantasy to DriveThruRPG. So if you're one of the handful of people who reads this blog and you're interested in getting copies, do it now if you want the free copies! Well, Lark will be PWYW, but the rest of the line will probably cost somewhere from $5-$10 for the adventure.

The attitudes of NPCs towards the supernatural in a fantasy RPG

Hey folks, it's been a while. The Magician's House (new link) is nearly ready for publication on DriveThruRPG! I just received the third party license approval for Goodman Games, but I'm also putting out editions for Lamentations of the Flame Princess and 5e.  

Is this a baby disposal door or a baby retrieval door?

On top of all that, I'm putting out an edition for my own homebrew RPG called Lark. I'll release that game for free; it's a lightweight alternative to d20 with an old-school sensibility.

Anyway, while that's coming together, I had some random thoughts about GMing. There are so many situations in games like DCC and Lamentations, to name two, where PCs are liable to stroll into town with marks of the uncanny, like tentacles growing out of their flesh, miniature stormclouds that constantly follow them, tears of blood...that sort of thing.

Well, how do NPCs react to all that? The GM is mostly left to wing it, which is ostensibly fine, but it's one more thing to remember to account for every time players step into a new village. Hence, the article below. Note that this is system-neutral; it's suitable for pretty much any high-to-mid-magic FRPG.

The Magician's House - a free DCC adventure!

As usual, it's a bit bigger on the inside

Well, here it is: a complete DCC adventure written by yours truly - The Magician's House! I'll let the opening words of the brilliant author do the talking:

The city of Blackrock is in peril!  Demon cultists march inexorably closer, less than a week away from putting its people to the knife.  The Duke puts out a call: brave and resourceful heroes are needed to recover the sacred words that will unleash the power of the Sealing Stone.  Words that have passed beyond the world - and so these adventurers must pass beyond the world, into...The Magician’s House! 

The Magician’s House is designed to challenge the party and delight the players with its whimsy.  Within its enchanted walls, they will find doors that open to strange vistas: faerie gardens, abandoned cities behind the mirror, libraries of boundless size and crystal domes on the moon.  They will encounter beings that interrogate and imperil, beguile and betray, entreat and entertain; children and ogres and aliens and magical statues.

Review: Mutant Crawl Classics Role-Playing Game

Anyone who regularly (or periodically) visits this blog knows that I'm a big fan of DCC.  I've reviewed DCC materials in this blog, not to mention the fact that I went to Gen Con last year to GM a bunch of DCC sessions (and I'm slated to do it again this year).  

So you'd expect me to be the ideal customer for Mutant Crawl Classics, Goodman Games recent RPG set in a post-apocalyptic world.  Heck, I Kickstarted it last year, pledging enough for a hardcover rulebook plus a print block of the first eight adventures/supplements.  So I'm all in, right?

Fun in the PA

Well, I've got some bad news for you.  Cutting to the chase: I'm not very happy with MCC.  It's not unsalvageable, but if you expect MCC to be the ode to role-playing perfection that is DCC, then you will be woefully disappointed.

What is this?  Say it ain't so!  Sorry, folks, it's so.

Human-as-class

So I took part in an interesting thread on the DCC G+ group today.  It's one of those perennial OSR discussions about "race-as-class," which is all fine and dandy, but Von Ether half-jokingly raised the idea of "human-as-class"...and that gave me a bunch of ideas.

Basically, humans tend to be the individualistic and practical explorers in a lot of sci-fi...you know, Space Americans. Other races are assigned these far more specialized and homogenized cultures that represent only small facets of our lifestyle. I'm talking about lazy Star Trek tropes like the eternally-warlike Klingons and coldly rational Vulcans.

Watch out for Space Americans, man

The same is often true of various demi-human races in fantasy settings, to an extent.  So not only are these mythological entities scrubbed clean of mystery by allowing players to run them, but they are further constrained by unimaginative stereotypes.  Dwarves are grumpy, greedy, industrious and proud.  Elves are elegant and aloof, often advanced but in decline. These lazy cliches have had all the life stamped out of them since Tolkien.

But what if humans were the strange and threatening aliens who belong to a heavily-stereotyped culture?  I proposed two possibilities in the thread: humans-as-orcs and humans-as-elves.

Concepts in game mechanics

Any serious GM is always going to have a few ideas about gaming stewing at once, and inevitably some of the ideas will relate to game mechanics.  So let's talk about a few of those.

Super-simple die systems

I'm always obsessed with the idea of simple mechanics.  When I can identify some mechanics that reduce complexity without sacrificing simulation, I'm happy.  I'm also trying to find ways to make the hobby more accessible.  One way that role-playing games can be a huge turnoff to a lot people is the complexity factor.

Rolling the old D2

Reading Blades in the Dark (see my pre-review) has helped me figure out some of the final details on a super-simple die mechanic. The idea is that it boils down to a single D6 roll.

A new DCC class: The Murderhobo

The idea behind this class is to take an obnoxious concept - a backstabbing jack-of-all-trades powergamer - and make it something fun and balanced. Functionally, the murderhobo is a bit of a twist on a magician/thief dual-class. From the thief, he only has stealth and backstabbing, and from the magician, he only has a small stock of first-level spells.  On the surface, this sounds pretty lousy.

Especially arson...there's always arson...

However, there are a few twists that I get a kick out of.

More mini-reviews! The Pirates of Drinax, A Field Guide To Hot Springs Island and Enter The Dagon

It's been a while, hasn't it?  Of course, I'm keeping busy.  I haven't had much actual gaming lately, but (correction: I wrote that part of the sentence before Gen Con, so it is no longer true) there's been plenty of writing.  And as the title of this post suggests, I keep up a steady diet of OSR reading.

Well, is definitely arguable whether or not Traveller is considered proper OSR, and some people even argue against DCC's inclusion.  Oh well!  Who fucking cares?

OSR puts some lovely ideas out there, but I get the feeling that the movement is slowly losing steam.  I see fewer new adventures and blog posts as time goes by.  If I use forums as a guide, I'd say the peak of OSR interest was probably around 2012-2013, and I got on this train a little late.  Not that I'm particularly dissuaded, but it's sort of disappointing to hear the air hissing out of the tire.

Maybe it doesn't really matter.  OSR has contributed something extremely valuable to tabletop role-playing, and even if the "true" OSR community is waning, you can see its influence ripple outwards.  The reprint of so many old titles and properties, as well as games like DCC that take a step forwards while being mindful of their roots...and the elephant in the room, 5e itself.  Anyone who bothers to look can see OSR fully embedded in D&D 5e's DNA.

OSR is all about pillaging lost treasures of the past

I got off-topic!  Let's talk about cool games!

Gen Con 2017 - Judging for DCC

As I mentioned a-ways back, I signed up for Goodman Games' offer to Judge (GM) four Dungeon Crawl Classics sessions at Gen Con 2017 in return for hotel and convention passes.  I just got back a few days ago, and this post isn't going to cover it all.  To do that, I have to put together a bunch more media resources.  In fact, I really have to first get back to some of the people that I met at the convention.

Saw the cards, didn't see the Quinns...too bad, since I'm a fan

Summary: A great experience!

Blackrock!

I'll keep this post brief: I decided to change the name of my adventure setting, as well as the product as a whole.  They are one in the same: Blackrock!

My thousands of loyal readers may recall that Blackrock is the name of a suburb of Punjar in my monthly DCC campaign.  But I came up with that, so I feel justified in repurposing the name.  Not only that, but "Blackrock" is such a perfect name for this project.

A hot commodity?

For one reason, it's thematically appropriate, because the town was once the site of a human basalt mining settlement that was enslaved to giantfolk.  And since I'm now thinking beyond the bounds of the singular heist, calling it "The Cursed Sword" or "The Vault of Blades" just didn't seem appropriate anymore.  In light of that, "Blackrock" is a much better title for the project than "Hoblington."

That's all for now.  I'm still mulling over a candidate for review (there are so many...the addiction continues).

Learning to crawl

I've always loved GMing.  When I was a kid in high school, I was enamored with the prospect of inventing my own imaginative and immersive worlds, and using them to fill my players with wonder.  These days, the emphasis has moved away from the idea of showing off my creativity, and towards a fascination with engaging my players.

There's a certain egotism to the practice of GMing

That isn't to say that I've entirely given up trying to come up with cool stuff. For instance, that DCC adventure I've been working on.  Well, one thing led to another, and the idea has snowballed into something a bit larger.  That doesn't sound good, does it?  An excess of ambition can kill a hobbyist project faster than anything.

The world is my sandbox!

It's been a while since my last post, but that's mostly because I was away on vacation in Europe for two weeks, followed closely by a visit from my mom.  All of that was great, but quite exhausting, and not particularly conducive for writing about my great love for role-playing games.

That doesn't mean that I've been completely idle in the world of elfgames.  Far from it, my friends!  Let's see...so I didn't really do much related to gaming in Europe, although I did plow through Charles Stross' Laundry Files (well, at least the five main books).  I've enjoyed a couple of Stross' other novels (Accelerando and Glasshouse both managed to impress), and even when they have suffered from prioritizing "big ideas" over characters (something I've encountered more in British sci-fi, for some reason), they have been rife with gameable ideas.  

My favorite of the covers

The Laundry Files also has plenty of game-ready ideas (in fact, it's been covered (DriveThru)), and also manages to have some appealing characters and well-paced plotting.  It's certainly not meant to be taken as seriously as some of his other works, but not everything has to be high-art.  And we were talking about elfgames, right?

But that's not all.

Cool news for yours truly!

Hello loyal reader...s?  Anyone out there?  It doesn't matter at all.  This is a public record that I keep for private purposes.  It's sort of like yelling from the top of my lungs on an abandoned street.  I have no problem with this.

Anyway, like the subject says, a bit of good news for me: I'm going to by GMing at Gen Con 50!  Goodman Games was looking for a few people willing to Judge (that's DCC for "GM") a few slots, ideally four or more.  I signed up for the requisite four, so I could get a badge and hang with the crew.

Not my first choice of venues, but that's not why you go

DCC session report - Blackrock Manor #5

In this installment of Blackrock Manor, we return to our intrepid band of monster killers and treasure hunters, standing over the body of a slain construct of metal and glass in an otherworldly trophy room.  So far, their expedition has made good decisions and possessed good fortune.  The former would be remain the case, but not the latter.

Vanquished at the end of last session

The trophies in question occupied metal plinths, some of which were surrounded by strange fields of light, of which some were stable and others flickered unpredictably.  With little difficulty, the party was able to obtain all the artifacts that weren't protected by constant fields.

Let's pause a moment to take the roll call, in alphabetical order, no less:

• Brendan, doing his best to prove with Gregh the Warrior that might makes might
• Gareth, offering the sage judgement of the Wizard Sizarius, and getting the hell out of Gregh's way
• Stan, whose Courve the Thief always erred on the side of Not Dying
• Steve H., bravely rescuing fellow dwarfs with his Rune Priest, Martine
• Steve W., insuring that Grognard the Dwarf gave Martine plenty to do
• Xavier, pushing Archimedia the Thief's luck to nearly-tragic ends

So what treasures did our gang liberate from this forgotten museum?

Review: The Well of Souls and The Treasure Vaults of Zadabad

This is technically two reviews, since we're talking about two adventures; The Well of Souls is billed as an introductory adventure, and The Vaults of Zadabad is its immediate sequel.  Both are sold by Stormlord Publishing, with both being penned by Carl Bussler, with Eric Hoffman on Treasure Vaults. You can find them on DriveThru, but The Vaults of Zadabad has versions for DCC and Swords and Wizardry.  I have both adventures for DCC, in PDF format, and that's what I'll be reviewing here.

More house rules for DCC - swords and crossbows

One of my very few nit-picky issues with DCC is how they categorize swords. They go with the old set of categories established back in the TSR days (I'm told 5e improves on this, which is IMO a good thing).  In those days, there were five swords types (that I can remember): short, broad, long, bastard and two-handed.  DCC does away with broad and bastard.

It was never entirely clear what the difference was between long and broad swords, and some rules (IIRC) permitted bastard swords to be used one- or two-handed, giving slightly different characteristics for each usage.  I could be wrong about that part, or it might just be edition dependent.  But the thing that irks me the most about this is that these names seem completely arbitrary, and create confusion when people talk about actual swords.

See, longswords are held in two hands

On top of that, most FRPG rules I've learned have left me a bit cold where crossbows are concerned.  In this department, DCC is quite the offender.  There is quite a bit of variation in crossbow damage, range and reload speed, and DCC only has one crossbow.  On top of that, somehow it has a range in excess of a longbow!

You aren't loading and firing this in one round!

I made a couple of table rulings on these matters, but they didn't quite sit right with me later, and they weren't properly explained.  So after giving it some thought, I revised my ideas a little and wrote them up for my players in an email.  That's what I'm going to talk about here.

DCC session report - Blackrock Manor #3 and #4

It's been a while since we visited that blasted suburb of Punjar, Blackrock, and its eponymous brothel - although, it should be noted that its owner, mistress Archimedia of...what was the name of her family, anyway?  Anyway, her - she renamed it "Blackrock Manor."  And why not?  It's no less a manor than a brothel.  The reality is neither; it is the rat-infested and rain-sodden guildhouse of a budding adventurer's guild.

That's nothing new, just a bit of a background recap.  Except for the part about the new name.

Anyway, when last we visited our intrepid adventurers, they were emerging into the sun, blinking furiously and too parched to form words.  As they greedily eyed the babbling brook, looking to slake their collective thirst, a peculiar troupe of imps had emerged from the forest path bearing an unconscious priest.  Upon sighting the party, they had laid down their recumbent cleric as a disembodied voice bid them to feast on your flesh.  That's pretty much where we left off.

DCC supplement review: Hubris

Hubris (full title: Hubris - A World of Visceral Adventure) is a new DCC supplement that I heard mentioned in a couple forum posts just a few days before it popped up in DTRPG.  It's written by Mike Evans on behalf of his own (suitably-named) DIY RPG Productions, and what you're getting in 347 pages is a complete Appendix N setting for DCC.  This includes cultures, creatures, gods, patrons, classes and other bits and bobs that make up a fully gameable world.

Pretty visceral!

The question is, of course, is whether it's a good one.  As usual, I won't keep you in suspense with my overall verdict: it is quite good.  In fact, if you're looking for an out-of-the-box straight-up Appendix N setting for DCC (more Appendix N that Aerth), then this should be near the top of your list of things to consider.  Hubris has one foot firmly planted in the school of Conanesque low fantasy, with bloody swashbuckling against evil priests, and serpent men with their armies of slaves.  The other foot is rooted in science-fantasy, borrowing from the imagery of steampunk, post-apocalyptic mutations and cybernetic body horror.  There are no Clerics or Tolkienesque demi-humans.  Like I said, très Appendix N.

All that being said, it's not my perfect supplement.  Instead, for me, Hubris in an excellent source of ideas, and perhaps a place my players could visit if the party gets sucked through one of those random portals that adventurers seem to run into.  Despite my own misgivings, it may work perfectly for you, so read on to discover what the hell I'm talking about.

Thoughts about Super Science

As I mentioned in another post, one of the little projects that I'm working on is to design a Super Scientist class for DCC.  My objective here is twofold.  First, I want the class to play very differently from all the base DCC classes, to not merely be a Wizard re-skinned with gonzo science-fiction trappings.  That sort of thing is lazy, and represents an excessive blurring of lines between literary magic and literary science.

My other objective may seem to be at odds with my first: I want the Super Scientist class to be "arcane" enough that it could easily be a stand-in for a more fantasy-oriented magician like an alchemist, or something even less defined.  It is enough that one called "wizard" has access to weird powers and strange trinkets.  We want to find a place between magic and science fiction, whereas the DCC Wizard is (mechanically) firmly rooted in fantasy.

There are a lot of settings and concepts that could accommodate the class, as I envision it.  Consider the bizarre "wizards" of The Land of One Thousand Towers, in Patrick Wetmore's Anomalous Subsurface Environment.  These power-mad tyrants each control fragments of a ancient technologies, technologies so advanced as to accomplish wondrous things.  One has learned how to produce armies of obedient dog-men, while another is able to build powerful firearms that bind their wielders to his will and gets around in a giant flying metal head the shoots lasers from its eyes (of course).

There are examples closer to home, like the Venture Bros., Hannibal from the A-Team and even that 80's TV classic, MacGuyver.  The point is that we can conceive of this class as something that straddles the divide between art and science.  The Super Scientist is able to do extraordinary things, and the outcome of his endeavors is always affected by chance.

How, then, is the Super Scientist different from the standard DCC Wizard?

Irresponsible acquisitions!

This is going to be a short post.  I wanted to mention that I've picked up a few DCC adventures since Journey to the Center of Aereth.  There's been a lot of intriguing materials lately, much of it from DCC publishers Goodman Games.

Let's see what I got...