Rift City catchup...

Well, I'm not doing well posting updates to the Rift City Campaign. Session 49 (August, the campaign's 4th birthday!) has been and gone - as have Sessions 50 (September), 51 (October) and 52 (November). Session 53 is almost upon us...

What can I say? I write fewer notes with the discord sessions, and then it's harder to reconstruct what happened after the event. This makes it far less likely that I'll actually start writing a blog post, and then the next session comes round and I have more to do with less information (and I've already forgotten half of what happened at the session before...).

What has definitely happened is that the PCs have abandoned the tunnels under the ruins that they were previously exploring, and therefore the search for the tomb of Riha the Bejewelled, and instead started exploring down the hill where they discovered an entrance to a different part of Level 6. They fought Salamanders (the PCs got very hot, and turned one of them into a rabbit); they found some Spectres, Berg charged in and the rest of the PCs stood by watching - as Berg was zapped by six Spectres, making her very dead indeed. RIP Berg, there was many a Dwarf that night crying himself to sleep over his beer I'm sure. There were also some 'evil Dwarves' as the PCs called them (they definitely were evil, I'm not going to lie - some were Chaotic Evil, some were Neutral Evil, a few weren't technically Dwarves, but it doesn't really matter - they were for sure hostile to the party and paid the price) in one of the rooms but they were wiped out and all their stuff was liberated for the forces of Light.

Further exploration in the same area over subsequent sessions has yielded some snake-chickens (Cockatrices that is) and some strange big-cats-with-six-legs-and-shoulder-tentacles, which are of course Displacer Beasts, but because I'm using a Labyrinth Lord monster generator (link here) they come up as 'Phase Tigers', which is a very cool name I think. Certainly, if I were a Phase Tiger, I reckon I'd be very disapproving of people calling me a 'Displacer Beast'. Then of course there were a couple of packs of Hellhounds, which Halvor in particular is theologically very against (his god is a kind of version of the Viking god Tyr, and his mythology has his hand being bitten off by a giant Hellhound. The Hellhound is in turn worshipped by Goblins as a great flaming wolf-spirit of the Underworld).

Image of Tyr from Age of Kings, which I don't think is the same of Age of Empires II, but might be. Anyway, this is 'Yrt', one-handed god of Lawful Fighting.

Halvor's divine interventions have proved particularly useful. 'Sticks to Snakes' (one of the spells Halvor uses most often) has allowed the party to considerably increase their muscle-power, as well as giving them poisoned attacks. It's a powerful spell - though, I ruled (because I can't specifically find a rule for it) that they couldn't successfully attack the Spectres that killed Berg.

Web, from Inarra the MU, has also proved useful. In the last session, when the party was attacked by Hellhounds, Inarra webbed them. This led to a discussion on whether Hellhounds are immune to fire damage, and it doesn't seem they are. The reasoning is that, if the Hellhounds' breath destroys the web, it also harms the Hellhounds. Effectively, they spent two rounds fighting themselves by burning themselves out of the web before confronting the party.

What else...? I'm not sure, I can't remember at the moment. If you want some better detail, Lyracian (whose PC is Halvor) has written up some of the sessions on his blog (link).

Changing the ending of the Lord of the Rings

I may have mentioned (just the odd time) that LotR is a big thing for me. I first read it more than 40 years ago and it has exerted quite a pull ever since. But actually, there are problems gaming it (see the 'Questing in Elfgames' label for some ruminations on that - I've mused about this pretty often).

One idea I've been kicking around recently is a 'what if?' pretty much directly inspired by two facebook memes and more generally by some ideas I've had for a while. I don't like the term 'synergies' but I think it is somewhat fitting in this instance. The coming-together of a bunch of fairly disparate stuff has almost tied itself into something coherent (coherent...ish).

The first meme was a pic of Cate Blanchett as Hela next to Carl Urban as Skurge, from Thor: Ragnarok, with some text along the lines of 'Did Galadriel take the Ring?'.

Didn't find the FB meme but this image illustrates the point - Karl Urban (Skurge, Eomer) and Cate Blanchett (Hela, Galadriel) - Marvel's evil versions of good LotR characters in Thor: Ragnarok?  - (c) Marvel 2017

The second meme was called 'When Elves Go Bad' and had a similar theme. There were pictures of Galadriel twinned with Hela, Thranduil paired with Ronan the Accuser from Guardians of the Galaxy, and Elrond paired with Red Skull from The Avengers.

Some random stuff from the net - originals (c) New Line Cinema 2001-2014 and (c) Marvel 2011-2019

These images (and the ideas they provoked) slotted into two bits of LotR 'alternative history' that I've been considering for a couple of years. For a little while, when Game of Thrones was becoming popular, people were using the LotR Boromir miniatures for Ned Stark, as they were famously both played by Sean Bean, cementing his reputation as the actor whose character died half-way through (sorry for the spoilers if you've not seen LotR or GoT), and prompting such famous memes as Boromir standing in the snows of Caradhras saying 'Winter is Coming', and another of Boromir at the Council of Elrond saying 'One does not simply walk into King's Landing'. I remember several GoT threads on Lead Adventures where Games Workshop's Gondor and Rohan soldiers were pressed into service in Westeros. In my own (rather small) LotR collection, there are several Gondor and Numenor soldiers who have had their distinctive winged helmets filed off and their 'White Tree' shields scraped so the design has been obliterated. These had come in an ebay job-lot I got a couple of years ago. I have a pretty strong hunch that they were originally intended for an abandoned GoT project. Not having great modelling skills myself, I put them aside, unsure as to what to do with them. Maybe I'm coming up with a plan... Anyway, the idea of 'what if Boromir survived and got married and had kids?' was something floating around in my brain for a while.

If Boromir survived... Ned and Catlyn Stark (Sean Bean and Michelle Fairly) in Game of Thrones Season 1 (c) HBO 2011

A couple of years ago, I watched a movie featuring Aaron Eckhardt (who I like) and Miranda Otto (who I really only know from the LotR films so it's difficult to have too much of an opinion on her, though I think she pulls off Eowyn perfectly well). It was called I, Frankenstein (Lionsgate, 2014) and though I don't want to give the game away too much (you never know, someone may stumble across this and decide they want to watch the movie... though I don't think it's very good, ask Rotten Tomatoes if you want a review), Miranda Otto plays Leonore, the Queen of the (Were-)Gargoyles in their war with (Were-)Demons. When I saw it originally, I thought 'hey, so this is what Eowyn gets up to when she goes to live in Emyn Arnen with Faramir'.

What Eowyn did next - Queen Leonore (Miranda Otto) in I, Frankenstein (c) Lionsgate 2014

So, already armed with mental pictures of what Eowyn did after LotR, and what Boromir might have done had he survived, and then the idea of Galadriel and Eomer as an evil double act, then corrupted versions of Elrond and Thranduil, I started to wonder how this could all be made to work.

The idea of Galadriel taking the Ring is key here. Her speech (the version in the film is slightly condensed but not, I think, significantly):

“And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!” (Fellowship of the Ring: The Mirror of Galadriel (c) Allen & Unwin 1954)

She then pledges to resist the Ring, to diminish, go into the West, and "remain Galadriel".

But what if she didn't?

If Galadriel took the Ring from Frodo in Lorien (freely offered, not forced) then perhaps the 'Queen' she sees herself becoming would become something like Hela. Ultimately of course - it wouldn't happen immediately. The Ring would have to corrupt her more than just giving in to a momentary weakness to take power when offered it, she'd have to start to actually do bad stuff... out of a desire to good, of course, as Gandalf says.

But what would this 'beautiful and terrible' Queen do?

It seems to me that the first thing she would try to do would be to neutralise potential rivals. Of these, the most important are probably Saruman and Elrond. Gandalf is 'dead' - no-one at this point knows he's coming back; Saruman and Elrond are the main loremasters who could in theory challenge Galadriel. Thranduil, Glorfindel, Cirdan, Radagast... are any of these likely to be able to mount a serious challenge to the new Dark Queen? I'd suspect not, and I'm sure Celeborn would not go against her either. Beyond their basic raw power, Saruman and Elrond also have more Ring-lore than any outside of the immediate ambit of Mordor - Saruman because he has studied it over centuries (to the point of obsession, madness and treachery) and Elrond because he is actually the wielder of one of the Three. So, a war with Saruman looks to me like Galadriel's best bet - especially if she can convince Elrond to stay on her side. Saruman has already shown himself to be a traitor to the White Council, and Galadriel, I think can make the argument that with Gandalf's death, swift action against Saruman is vital to stop Mordor and its allies triumphing absolutely.

As the Mistress of the Ring, who also has a close connection with the last bearer of one of the Three (Elrond is of course her son-in-law) I think it might be possible to persuade Elrond of this course of action. So a direct alliance of Lorien and Rivendell against Isengard seems a possibility. Should Elrond be reluctant, perhaps Galadriel could count on the power of the One Ring to sway him, but that's not certain. The power of the One over the Three is sketchy. Certainly there is no suggestion that Sauron was ever able to influence Galadriel, Cirdan, Gil-Galad, Elrond or Gandalf. But, he was their sworn enemy; Galadriel is Elrond's friend, kinswoman and ally. It might be possible to use the Ring's influence to persuade him... for the greater good, of course.

Sauron meanwhile would be in the dark. The Ring-wraiths have been banished for the time being and the trail of the Ring-bearer was lost at the Ford of Bruinen. Sauron must suspect the Ring was taken to Rivendell but probably not more than that. Saruman is perhaps no better-informed - his agents lost the Hobbits when they left Bree, and though he may have suspected they would go to Rivendell but what else might have happened he can't know. He may wonder if perhaps the Ring would be taken to Lorien, but he cannot be at all certain of this.

Anyway - a surprise Elvish attack on Isengard is my assumption as to 'what happens next'. Lorien would provide the main component of this force, but perhaps Rivendell would provide some support. Tolkien has Elrond send Elrohir and Elladan with the Rangers of Arnor to help Aragorn and perhaps some similar (maybe even larger) force could be a component of any putative Elven attack. Whatever Rivendell's contribution I expect Lorien to be the main gainer in this adventure. Jackson has Haldir lead a collection of Elves to Helm's Deep and something like this can be envisioned as forming a significant part of the Lorien army.

The attitude of Rohan, and I think perhaps perhaps particularly Eomer, can explain the Eomer-Skurge connection. Without Gandalf, Theoden is still in Saruman's power, but if the attack from Lorien were rapid enough, Theodred might not be dead yet, and Theoden may not be utterly in despair (which was of course one of the reasons Grima and through him Saruman were able to gain power over Theoden). But whatever Theoden's attitude, Eomer is already implacably opposed to Saruman. He may think allying with the Sorceress of the Golden Wood against the White Wizard is a good bargain (all for 'the greater good' of Rohan of course), even if it means rebellion against his King... and may even make his 'becoming' Skurge more likely, as he is potentially now even more cut off from his kin - his King is of course also his uncle. Perhaps this even opens the door to a rift with his sister. All in all, it looks like the alliance between at least a faction of the Rohirrim led by Eomer and Galadriel's anti-Saruman Elf forces is a distinct possibility.

Assuming some relative success of Galadriel's assault on Isengard, she is likely to have come away with a greatly-increased armoury both in terms of materiel and knowledge, as well as magical items such as the Palantir. With a Palantir and her own Mirror (that she insists isn't 'magic' but that's  semantic quibble I think) she would be in a much more powerful position to challenge Sauron directly than any of the main actors in LotR. This of course would be her ultimate goal, though I'm sure she would rather Sauron exhaust himself on other enemies (like Gondor) rather than attacking Lorien directly.

But, Galadriel would need further allies. And then, what to do with Nenya? My supposition is that she would make a gift of it to Thranduil, one of the few of the leaders of the Elves who could make immediate trouble for her. With Elrond a potential ally, and also positioned to protect Lorien from any attack from the West (by Cirdan, Gildor or other unknown lords of Lindon who may not share her new ambitions - though, of course, she may persuade them too), Galadriel I think would want to make her north-eastern approaches secure, so a gift of one of the Great Rings to Thranduil makes perfect sense, especially if the idea of potential influence through the power of the One is accepted.

Over time, the corruption of Galadriel's purpose would be mirrored I think in those who would by now have become not just allies but accomplices - Elrond and Thranduil, completing their transformations into Red Skull and Ronan the Accuser. A lot hinges on her being able to persuade them, but hey-ho, I need some process that corrupts three Elf-lords!

Of the other characters in and around the Fellowship - well, if the party didn't sail to its breaking at Amon Hen, then Boromir doesn't need to die there and there's no reason he can't survive, marry and start a family, living something of the Ned Stark trajectory.

Eowyn can certainly survive; she could even become Queen of the Rohirrim. It's not necessary in this timeline for her to meet Faramir, but she may, in which case, perhaps depending on what happens to Aragorn, she might have some role in Gondor too.

Legolas's alternative life is a bit tricky. His transformation into a pirate I'm not so sure about. However, in LotR his journey in Gondor unlocked a 'sea-longing' in him so something similar may have happened in this alternative timeline. Orlando Bloom has been in many other things, but the recent (you know, last 10 years or so) version of The Three Musketeers he was in is even less LotR than Pirates of the Caribbean is.

Mystery female companion and Legolas Greenleaf on the shore of Elvenhome? - Elizabeth Swan and Will Turner (Keira Knightly and Orlando Bloom) in a scene from Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End - (c) Disney 2007

Not been able yet to track a post-LotR career for Gimli, but this pic may show him in a pre-LotR flashback, when it looks like he was involved in a digging project in Harad:

Gimli's early career? - John Rhys-Davies as Sallah in Raiders of the Lost Ark (c) Lucasfilm 1981

Haldir also might have a dark career in this new timeline, as Craig Parker played the villainous character Darken Rahl in Legend of the Seeker. I don't know much about this but it would perhaps be possible to fit something along the lines of Haldir becoming Galadriel's governor of some possibly southern province conquered by Lorien.

Haldir gone bad? - Darken Rahl and Kahlan Amnell (Craig Parker and Brigit Regan) from Legend of the Seeker - (c) ABC-Disney 2008

Then, there's Gandalf. Of course Sir Ian McKellern is probably as famous for playing Magneto in the X-Men films as he is for his portrayal of Gandalf. Again, he's a Ring-bearer, and if the idea of Galadriel being able to corrupt the bearers of the Three is accepted, it may be that she could do the same to Gandalf, weakened as he is after his near-death experience at the hands of the Balrog. 

Evil Gandalf? - Sir Ian McKellern as Magneto (c) Marvel 2000

I'm now trying to find other fantasy, sci-fi and superhero flicks and TV series that LotR actors were involved in to fill in some of the other possibilities. It'll be difficult for the Hobbits particularly I suppose. Even if I find some they're unlikely to be 3 feet tall. I'm not sure what Aragorn is bringing to this party as I don't know enough about Viggo Mortenson's career to find a suitable image to shoe-horn into the new timeline; equally, the further exploits of Arwen (Liv Tyler), Theoden (Bernard Hill) and Celeborn (Marton Csokas) remain to be discovered. Perhaps If I can discover suitable films I can put in some further speculations on the alternative timeline.

One other character perhaps does have at least a sketch of a further career. Talking to a work colleague recently about some of this stuff, he pointed out that Faramir also appears in Van Helsing - if you've not seen it, Wolverine and Selene from Underworld team up to fight vampires and werewolves in Transylvania, accompanied by Faramir who is a kind of Vatican monk-cum-quatermaster of bizarre equipment (a bit like Q in the Bond films). It is, I think, an enjoyable romp, but doesn't owe much to Bram Stoker's Van Helsing. It can perhaps be regarded as a prequel - Van Helsing in the film is  younger than in Dracula (the film is supposedly set around 1888, a few years earlier than the novel), so maybe it's his earlier experiences with vampires that lead to his appearance in Dracula as a seasoned vampire-hunter. Anyway, the monk character, Brother Carl, in that movie is played by David Wenham, that's the point.

David Wenham (Farimir) as Brother Carl, from Van Helsing, (c) Unviersal 2004 

Perhaps then, if Boromir doesn't die, and the Ring never comes south, and Aragorn doesn't go to Rohan, then Eowyn and Faramir never meet, and Faramir becomes something like Brother Carl, a member of a secret order of monster-hunters - presumably in Gondor - while Eowyn becomes something like Leonore? Events in Gondor presumably take a very different turn if the result of Galadriel taking the One Ring is that Boromir settles down to raise a family and Faramir becomes a monk, but maybe I need to think a lot more about how that happens!

Rift City campaign - session 47

 Well, once again I have failed to do the write-up of the session before the next one has arrived. However, Lyracian has done a qrite-up here. It contains the bare bones of the story - captured Orc seemingly tries to lead the party into a trap, fight with insects and then a confrontation with some death-cult clerics.

I have to agree, I thought it was a fun session too! What tomorrow will bring... well, I'd say 'watch this space' but if you want your info hot off the press, maybe you shoud watch Lyracian's space, he's much quicker off the mark than I am.

Tomorrow's session will be the 48th programmed session of the Wandering Monster Table, which I'm chosing to regard as quite an acheivement.  We've only cancelled two session in the last 4 years, re-arranged two for the third Sunday of the month,and had to move venue for a few (generally to Berg and Galen/Halvor's players' house, so thanks for  that) - not bad to be honest given that the idea was to bring an open table campaign to Leicester. I think we can be somewhat proud of how we've managed to do that.

Who knows, maybe for our actual 4th birthday (8th August is the second Sunday in August and is therefore our 4th birthday, even if the opening session was 13th August, the second Sunday in August 2017) we may even be able to meet physically for the first time since March 2020...

Rift City Campaign - Session 46 and beyond

Well, what is there to say? Lyracian at Playing Dice with the Universe posted up a write-up of this session the day it happened, and I have little to add to that report in terms of events of the session. 

I did indeed completely fluff the whole 'summoning the elemental' thing. Not in control of my sources, that's the problem.  I rarely have much idea what the players are going to attempt (I thought they were heading back to Level 5/6 where they've been adventuring, but they decided to go back to Level 1 and attempt a Summoning instead) and I was flipping between different pdfs and files for rules and location information and maps and what-have-you, realising that I hadn't updated these locations for months (effectively there were still corpses lying about from the party's last visit) and also that I couldn't find some important notes that I know I wrote but couldn't access; meanwhile, trying to re-stock the dead monsters on the fly, I discovered that the Mithril and Mages Monster Stocker (my favoured place for grabbing a quick stat-block) was down... anyway, I was unable to keep everything running smoothly and fluffed some vital processes. Sorry guys, but there's nothing to be done now. Oh well.

I've been pondering XP in the wake of Session 46. The PCs (who are mostly, I guess, 6th Level now, though as I haven't seen their character sheets for more than a year they may be more) have been mollocking around for the last few sessions in a Level 5-Level 6 area. This I feel is more-or-less 'level appropriate'. That's where they should be. Last session they went back to Level 1 and fought a Goblin patrol and some Orcs. Otherwise, they avoided two Insect Swarms. This is not, to my mind, 'appropriate'. The PCs are big heroes now, they should I think be doing more than grinding on low-level monsters.

I've changed how XP acquisition works twice already while the campaign has been going on (close to 4 years now). After about 6 months of playing 'by the book' awarding XP only for monsters and treasure, with a very occasional small bonus for some good piece of play, with very low XP acquisition and everyone still on First Level, I instituted an 'exploration bonus'. This was a bonus based on rooms explored - I can't remember what I gave out but maybe it was 10XP or 50XP for each new room the PCs explored. However, that started to get a bit creaky when different people would come to different sessions - is the room 'new' if half the party members have already been there in a previous session? Do they get the bonus? Do the people to whom it really is a new room not get the bonus? I gave up trying to remember who had explored which room and instead adopted an idea from BECMI (in the Rules Compendium I think), where an exploration bonus of 10% of the average needed to reach the next level is given out to everyone.

This leads to several anomalous situations I think. In the last session, the PCs killed, captured or evaded approximately 120XP-worth of monsters, between I think 6 of them. They took about 300GP of treasure - even if that isn't right, I don't think it was much more than that - some SP, some GP and some gems I think, certainly not thousands of GPs' worth. For the sake of argument, the PCs got something like 80XP each from 'monsters and treasure', which given how B/X is set up are the two main ways to gain XP. At the same time, they each gained an 'exploration bonus' of something like 8,000XP (100 times their 'actual', earned XP!) for rooms that some of the PCs (not to mention all of the players) had already visited. That doesn't seem right to me. I don't think the players should be able to use the 'easy' caverns as a way to lever XP out of the fact that they're already high level. At the moment, all they have to do is take their 6th or 7th Level characters into a Level 1 dungeon and kill a few Goblins, then harvest thousands of XP by dint of the fact that they're already six levels 'higher' than the dungeons they're exploring. They get high XP just for existing.

Another anomalous result of this way of distributing XP is that low-level characters are seen as a drain. This is because the 'open table' format imposes some problems in terms of assimilating new party members, necessitating some minimum level for new players to join at. Up until now, new PCs started at the lowest Level of PCs currently in the game. When Shazam was left to die (no attempt at Elementary Staunching by the other party members, apparently because the bonus is better if you let low-level characters die) I began to wonder if this would break the campaign, with players killing off low-level PCs to get an upgrade for the next session. It hasn't quite worked like that but I think I need to trim how things work. Now seems as good a time as any to put some changes in place to prevent what I would see as 'meta-gaming' the system.

First, I think that any time a party member dies (and this will include being turned to stone and not turned back), there will be no bonus at all. Ascribe it to PTSD or something but I think that when a party member is killed the rest of the party should not be rewarded. It should be a traumatic event. They can still get the XP from monsters and treasure, but not the bonus. It's a kind of 'trauma tax'. This might have the result of making PCs more risk-averse in the future, but I'm prepared to chance it.

Second, when a new PC comes along (because of PC death or because a new player joins) I am no longer going to start them at the lowest Level in the party, I'm going to start them at the lowest XP. If the lowest Level PC is, for example, a 5th Level Cleric with 12,500XP and a new player joins, they could under the current system start with a 5th Level Elf. If the XP total is taken as the basis for the new PC, however, 12.500XP is enough to have a Cleric at 5th Level but only 3rd Level for an Elf. That seems like a better way to do it - though to be honest, I'm not sure why, it just does.

Third, the exploration bonus should be level-dependent. I'm going to try dividing the Dungeon Level the PCs were on by the Character Level they have, and applying that to the bonus. So, if PCs are (like the party now) around 6th-7th Level, but go adventuring on Level 1, their bonus will by 1/6 or 1/7 of the potential bonus. This (working with the second change, mentioned above) would mean that low-level characters would level up faster than higher-level characters - in the example above, if the 3rd Level Elf was adventuring with the party on Level 1, they would get 1/3 of the bonus, whereas the 5th Level Cleric would only get 1/5: so the 8,000 (potential) XP each PC would have got from exploring on their own Level would be trimmed to 2,667XP for the 3rd Level Elf and 1,600XP for the 5th Level Cleric. Conversely, if they go exploring on Level 7, they would gain 18,667XP (3rd Level Elf) and 11,200XP (5th Level Cleric). This (somewhat counteracting the first change, above) might make the party bolder in pushing on to lower levels, or at least, less keen to hang around at the 'shallow end', because it would be less worth their while for the purposes of XP harvesting. So between the 'no bonus for dead comrades' and 'reduced bonus for the shallows, increased bonus for the deeps' I think I'm hopefully balancing the making the party more risk-averse with an incentive towards riskier behaviour.

I hope, anyway. Of course, if I find through the Law of Unintended Consequences that things are still not right I can still tinker with the system.

Rift City Campaign - session 45

Once more unto the Rift, dear friends...

On Sunday 11th April the Wandering Monster Table had its 45th session, with Halvor, Berg, Inarra and Kate deciding they needed to stock up on silver and magic weapons to fight were-creatures in the ruins in the Rift.

At last everyone was equipped with something that could do damage to lycanthropes and other similarly-enchanted creatures, and they set off for the ruins, under which they encountered the were-creatures in previous visits. Ostensibly, they were there to rescue some adventurers that had been captured by Ogres and enslaved (or worse) by the lycanthropes.

Ironic, given what happened.

Lyracian at the 'Playing Dice with Universe' blog has already written up the session (link here). All I have to add is that the adventure was proceeding in distinctly un-lucrative fashion until killing an NPC party gave the PCs a bonanza of magic items; and, as I just hinted, slaughtering the NPC party was a pretty bizarre end to a session in which our 'heroes' (I use the term very loosely) were supposed to be rescuing some NPCs...

Rift City Campaign -- Session 44

Well, the PCs had another go under the ruins in the Rift. Halvor the Cleric, Berg the Dwarf, Kate the Halfling, Brigham the Cleric and Gibbet the Thief once more ventured in search of excitement, adventure and big piles of loot.

The first thing they did was finish up exploring the tower. They've been there on two previous occasions and had failed to find the room with the trapdoor down to the lower levels. They also hadn't made a map and ended up exploring some of the areas they'd been before.

In one of the rooms, they came upon some undead presences. These proved a little tricky as the PCs don't all have magic or silver weapons. But with Berg taking two hits and losing two levels, and Gibbet losing one, they did manage to overcome the entities before they were all back to First Level. 

The PCs eventually came to a room they hadn't been before, as it was behind the only door they've found that they hadn't opened. Not in some Quantum Ogre sense, just because it was the furthest from the entrance. In the room, sitting on a rug that turned out to be top of the trapdoor, were a couple of prisoners and some Ogres. They Ogres died pretty quickly, the prisoners did not. Their names were Aben (a female Halfling) and Hames (a male Elf); they begged the PCs to rescue their friends (more prisoners had been taken down into the tunnels, it seemed), and agreed to come and help.

So, everyone rolled back the rug and opened the trapdoor, where they found a staircase heading down to the south. They followed it to a landing where stairs went east and west. The east stair smelled bad (probably Troglodytes down there) so they took the west stair. This opened into a wide E-W hall with various doors and corridors off. Taking a door on the north wall, they found themselves in a room where a man dressed in black was playing a lute and singing to to a female human, a female Ogre, and a couple of Giant Rats The female human was one of the captured NPCs, a young woman called Miranda, and there seemed to be some sort of magic going on. A fight rapidly ensued with the music-man being Held (then killed), the Ogre and the Rats being killed, and Miranda falling unconscious when the music-man died (and his spell was broken). On regaining consciousness, Miranda told them that the other prisoners had been added to a group already in the tunnels but that 'the man with the dark eyes' had taken a fancy to her and told the Ogres to hand her over to him. She agreed that coming with the party (given Aben and Hames were with them) was a good plan. So they looted the room as best they could and, after setting what was left on fire, they left.

On the way out, they ran into a couple of rough-looking fellows who seemed to be some sort of wandering guard patrol. Unconvinced by the PCs' explanation, the guards resolved to 'check with Eldwin' (the music chap with rats and women in his thrall, now dead and in a burning room). As they passed the party, a quick attempt at a surprise backstabbing was made... and failed. These guys too were immune to normal weapons apparently... so a short and vicious fight broke out between the PCs (five of them) and their NPC allies (three) on the one hand, and the two guards on the other. The only problem was that due to the lack of magical weapons, only about 4-5 of the PCs could fight anyway. But obviously, the PCs could deal with a pair of lycanthropes even so. Looting the bodies netted some sacks of low-value coins and a couple of pieces of expensive jewellery.

Deciding that by this point that is really was time to head back to the City, they made their way back to the exit. Heading out through the ruins, however, they ran into another patrol - this time 6 more lycanthrope guards. Again the fight was brutal but eventually 6 dead werewolves netted another 300GP for the coffers - and no-one from the party's side died. No-one was infected with lycanthropy either, though it was pretty close in some cases. 

High-tailing it back up the forest path the party was back in Rift City in time for tea and the division of spoils. What will happen 'tomorrow' is anyone's guess...

Faith + Magic = Reality

I have too many things on the go... but this will I hope be quick. Then I can get back to writing about 'Labyrinth' or something.

Reading a book at the moment, called 'Coldfire Pt.1: Black Sun Rising' by Celia Friedman. I'm rather enjoying it. It contains what I think is a great idea. The action takes place on a planet where a magical force, called 'fae', sort of sloshes about in tides and streams... in some ways, it's a bit like weather. It means that some places are both easier to cast spells in, and magically more fraught, because with great power comes, well, greater chances for things to go wrong. Magical tsunami sweep the continents, vortices of magical currents swirl around and earthquakes of thaumaturgical energy batter settlements and the brains of the magically-susceptible.

It also affects the local flora and fauna. First, there can be an interaction between fear and fae, which means monsters are literally born of people's imaginations. Fears manifest themselves physically. Imagine a creepy grinning skeletal figure with a paralysing touch, and a ghoul could actually appear behind you.

Then, it can affect evolution. What is believed becomes real so if people think that geese are fish that grow into birds from barnacles (as was believed in Medieval Europe for instance), then, I guess, that's what starts to happen. Over time creatures come to evolve to be the way people imagine they are.

I like the idea that belief shapes the world around us. It seems like it could work well in game terms, for at least two reasons. The first is, suddenly, all those weird monsters in the Monster Manual and Fiend Folio and the pages of White Dwarf make a particular kind of sense. That monster over there with the legs of a giant moth and a trunk and the body of a hyena seems improbable... doesn't matter, someone imagined it in a fever-dream. Who cares if dragons can't fly? If people believe they can fly, then they can. It is, if I can coin the term, a very Pratchettian way of looking at things. Faith + Magic = Reality. This I think has some relationship to what Jens is talking about over at 'The Disoriented Ranger' here, where he talks about how people in different societies pattern reality, and how stories emerge (also of course something Pratchett talked about a lot). Obviously, Dwarves and Trolls and Dragons aren't real for us... and aren't real for us, even 1500 years ago. But they were real for the people who believed the stories about them in Northern Europe during Volkswanderung, the period Jens is exploring in Lost Songs of the Nebelungs. Our lack of belief doesn't change the nature of the world they inhabited.

The second way it works is, it gives you a great excuse to make things suddenly weird, which is sometimes good. I don't think it's fair to do it all the time: if everything is weird, then nothing is is weird, it's all just confusing and I guess quickly stops being fun... the players lose all agency because if there's no apprehensible (spellcheck doesn't like that one) logic then there's no basis for decision making and nothing has meaning. But, perhaps, the weird builds up (in a measurable way) until it breaks through into reality and changes things. I'd love to work on mechanisms for this. Instead of Wandering Monsters, a sort of Magical Mishap table. Of course, if the PCs' fears can create monsters, maybe this is the best justification for a Wandering Monster turning up (see above). 

But, and this is one place I'm having problems with the application of this concept, if the Wandering Monster has actually been created from a PC's fear, it should probably be something that the PC fears... and that might require either knowing in advance what the PCs are scared of (in which case someone I'm sure will claim to be scared of being captured by the very attractive clerics of a sex-god/dess, or maybe suddenly finding huge amounts of money... again, Pratchett talks about this... the 'unexpected money Goblin' or something), or alternatively, it means listening very hard to what the players are saying and incorporating that into the game - so when they go "I hope we don't run into any trolls down here", the next thing they encounter should be trolls. But my feeling is it's difficult to pattern a wandering monster table on the basis of 'whatever the PCs said 2 minutes ago'.

I guess most of us who use wandering monsters have some sort of system like 'roll 1-2 on a d6 every 2 turns, more (frequently, or just a bigger number) if the party is being noisy/careless with lights/setting fire to things/leaving food lying around etc. Instead, this would be more like applying Magical Mishaps if the party did something ritually 'wrong', or if they were tired or distracted, if they had misread the flows of magic... I remember The Angry GM describing the use of wandering monster dice that are stacked up in front of the players so they'd know how noisy they were being or how much time they were taking (in this post here). Perhaps the 'fae detection' could be similar - a kind of 'charge' that builds up depending on the players' actions.

The ability to use magic (possibly even including 'safe' magic like potions or weapons) would maybe require something like a saving throw to be successful. This could be augmented by such things as an accurate map of the magical currents, or maybe something analogous to a miner's canary or Universal Indicator Paper - something that detected fae energy to help with knowing safe levels and places. All of this may require extra systems to check or it could be as simple as a Save. But the effects of (conceptually at least) 'failing' the Save?

I shall be considering this more, no doubt.

Rift City campaign - session 43

 The party made their... what, let's call it '43rd' visit to the caves in the Rift (it's not really, we missed a couple of sessions due to work issues, and on some sessions, they've made multiple visits, leaving after a good quick haul and going back 'the next day' during the same session... but about 43rd) on 14th Feb. 

Yes I know that's Valentine's Day, but as it turned out, the four players who came to the session are two couples. 

No I didn't do anything particularly Romantic for the session, but in line with some of my recent musings, I made extra-sure to use Reaction Roles and Morale rolls. I know I should do that anyway, but... I made extra-sure.

Anyway... Halvor the Cleric, Berg the Dwarf, Gibbet the Thief and Brigham the Cleric (that was the marching order) made their way towards the towers that they'd found last time. They'd got a treasure map at the last session that looked something like this:

In case you can't read the text, it says "In the Rift there is the Fortress of Skile, two towers with a gatehouse between. Beneath the eastern tower, a stair leads down to a crypt where lies the Fabled Hoard of Riha the Bejewelled. Gems without count and fabulous jewellery are there, adorning the bones of the last of the Sorcerer-Queens. From the tower, take the staircase, and at the landing, turn west. Foul things lurk in the darkness of the eastern stair. In the Deeps, we came to a great room with six corners, but this was a false chamber – we never found the real burial chamber beyond."

Trying to find the place where the jewels might be stashed, they headed down the path, past the spot where they killed the Giant at the last session (his corpse was still there, somewhat chewed by local scavengers, but substantially intact, so the party, deciding they didn't want a Zombie Giant rampaging around and mindful they were supposed to burn corpses, set fire to it using a barrel of oil they had in the Bag of Holding).

Going on a bit further past the smouldering corpse, the party noticed a flock of ... somethings ... flying above them. They weren't sure what they were so the PCs hid in the undergrowth for a bit. Turns out that the flying things were hippogriffs, and there were 15 of them. The party was undecided about what to do - Berg, Gibbet and Brigham kept hiding, Halvor decided to try and attract their attention. Then Berg threw out some beef jerky for one, which took it, but then the flock decided that it would rather go and investigate the burning Giant so flew off.

The party headed on to the ruins of the Fortress of Skile and found their way in. Remembering there was a pit trap, but not exactly where it was, the party unfortunately triggered it again. No-one was seriously hurt however. Now they've outlined it in chalk so perhaps they'll find it easier to avoid next time.

Making their way inside they turned to the left to try and find the entrance to the lower levels. The first room they came across seemed to be deserted, but the second contained a hideous spider-type entity.  Conscientiously rolling for the spider's reactions, the dice came up snake-eyes so straight into a vicious combat. To be fair, there's only so much interaction I'd be able to role-play as a Giant Spider I think. When they searched the room, they found a chest with some money in it, but unfortunately ripped the old tapestry hanging from the ceiling.

Pushing on, the PCs found a room decorated with a frieze of faces. Searching these carefully they found that one was hinged to come away from the wall. Behind it was a kind of safe - trapped, which Gibbet disarmed (they still don't know what the trap was, but Gibbet detected a trigger mechanism and disabled it) - and containing a potion-bottle and a bag of cash.

They'd reached the end of the corridor, but I reminded them that there were other corridors and rooms they hadn't explored in the other direction (this time they'd entered and turned left; last time they turned right). I don't often do that sort of thing but I thought it was justified in this instance. It was a month ago that the players last explored the dungeon, but for the PCs, it was yesterday. I think that the PCs would perhaps remember that there were further unexplored passages to the right even though the players didn't. So, they started to make their way back to the areas they'd explored the game-day before.

On the way they encountered some 'grey worms' - Caecilia from  the Expert rulebook. These were actually fairly straightforward to deal with, in the end. Somewhere, and I'm not certain where now, they also encountered some Giant Weasels, but as I have no real recollection of this fight I'm not sure they really gave the party much trouble either.

Having retraced their steps, they moved off to the right (east), back through some rooms they'd explored previously, and then on to new territory (actually, they may have run into the Weasels here). This led them to a room of Ogres, who the party, probably sensibly, decided would be a serious threat and a fight ensued. Halvor made good use of his Sticks to Snakes ability (the snakes this time were Spitting Cobras, which blinded several of the Ogres) and the Ogres (6 of them) were disposed of without too much damage coming to the party. However, the fight had alerted other Ogre guards and 5 more then barged into the room when the party were searching. The snakes were still around and had been tasked with guarding the door so the Ogre ambushers were themselves ambushed and soon defeated.

By this time it was the end of the session. The PCs had searched about 90% of the tower but not yet located the steps mentioned on the treasure map. I guess, they'll be heading back here next session... but one never can tell, they often end up going off in all sorts of unexpected directions.

Gaming the Labyrinth - the inhabitants

I started posting about 'Labyrinth'. I've made a few notes about the general idea of trying to game it and some of the trickier aspects of how to translate something like the film to something like D&D, or possibly my newly-acquired game, Blue Rose (earlier post linked here). Photos have all been taken from the blog 'The Labyrinth' which seemed like a handy source. I tried to use the pics at IMDB, but they were all tiny so I gave up. It seemed really tedious to find more pics from different sources so I just went there and used what I could find. All photos are (c) TriStar Pictures.

Some of the inhabitants of the Labyrinth, Goblin City and Castle are pretty straightforward to translate into D&D terms. For Blue Rose, maybe not so much, but I'm sure I'll be able to find some ways to do at least some of it when I'm more familiar with the system. I've checked up what some of the characters are called, so will use the IMDB nomenclature.

Jareth

Jareth "is an Elf" in my notes. Seems obvious, and specifically, a Dark Elf. Also, sometimes disguises himself as a little old lady, or turns into an owl. He seems to sometimes use this latter ability to travel long distances (so it's a real transformation, not an illusion): at other times his mode of long-distance travel is not clear, but I'm going to assume it's always owl-form. He has crystal balls (steady at the back) which can become a peach with a forgetting spell (which wastes time, a vital resource in Sarah's quest) or a kind of floating bubble. He also has some illusion skills - he seems to transform a bubble into a crystal into a snake into a scarf, possibly then a Goblin... which (if any) are real is difficult to grasp (and the scarf may just fall on a Goblin already there). So they could be actual transformations or illusions. He possibly uses the bubbles to transport others to and from the Castle, but perhaps this is illusion too. If he's an Elf, he has a pretty direct Blue Rose equivalent - he could be some kind of corrupt(ed) Vata (a race similar to Elves; there are two sub-races called Vata'an and Vata'sha. Jareth is probably a Vata'an as they have pale skin and silver hair, which is more like Jareth than the Vata'sha, who look similar to D&D Drow, with dark skin and light hair). Alternatively, he could be a Human with arcane powers, in either Blue Rose or D&D. But he looks like an Elf to me.

Hoggle

Hoggle is a Dwarf who works for Jareth; one of his jobs is as a pest-controller in the garden. He's a coward. He has a spray that kills fairies, likes plastic, and has a (worthless) bag of charms that he values highly. He also has a kind of 'Portable Door' (which he only uses once, maybe only usable once, or perhaps once per day) and knows where to find rope. There may or may not be other Dwarves called Hogwart, Hedgewart, Heggle, Hoghead and Hogbrain. There are no Blue Rose Dwarves.

There are Fairies that bite (no pic of them on the blog where I found the rest of the photos). Hoggle has killed 60, he claims, but we don't know over what time period. He kills about 5 while Sarah is talking to him. A swarm of 10-60 is a possibility, I suppose. We do not know if they're truly intelligent. In D&D they could be something like AC9, Mv 90' (30') flying, hp1, save E1, Att 1 (bite), Dam d4, Ml 9 Al N, I would think. 

'Dennis', the Worm

There's a talking worm, that I decided is called Dennis (he isn't named it seems) who has a wife, drinks tea and knows the way to the Castle. He helps Sarah to identify what we might think of as 'secret doors'. On IMDB he is called "Worm".

Tilekeepers

There are tiny people (about 3" high?) that change the flagstones after Sarah has made marks on them. I have since discovered that these are called "Tilekeepers", but no-one has a credit as a 'Tilekeeper' on IMDB. They are perhaps related to Fairies (they seem to be about the same size) but do not have wings. They do seemingly have language and purpose however.

Goblins

There are Goblins - many and of different sorts, but they boil down to small and tall (mechanically these are probably many Goblins or even Kobolds, and a few Orcs or Hobgoblins, D&D terms. Blue Rose has no real equivalents to Goblins, just large Orcs, who are called Night People). Some Goblins have sticks with small bitey things attached to them. Two small Goblins are 'the Cleaners', who ride a kind of bicycle-powered boring machine. Others are the Goblin Guard, and come in Infantry, Cavalry and Artillery varieties. The Cavalry carry spears and ride two-legged lizards; the Artillery have cannons and machine-guns, and the cannons seem to fire tiny Goblins. Most Goblins are armoured - at least, the ones in the Labyrinth and City. There's also a giant-sized mechanical construct piloted by a Goblin. However, it's probably best to consider this in relation to its location.

Ludo with Sarah

There's Ludo, a kind of Horned Troll with the ability to call d100 rocks (in 13 hours he does it twice, perhaps he can do it 3 times a day).

Fireys

There are Fire Spirits or "Fireys" - there are five of these (No Appearing d6+2?). They may be some kind of weak fire-elemental. Pretty sure I can find some sort of analogue in both D&D and Blue Rose.

Sir Didymus

There is Sir Didymus, an anthropomorphic Fox-knight (other people think he's a dog, but I think he's a fox), who rides Ambrosius, an Old English Sheepdog. Sir Didymus is brave, but somewhat blinkered. Ambrosius is a bit of a coward. Though Blue Rose has rules for animals with psychic communication, it doesn't have rules for foxes that dress like 14th Century Landesknechts, talk as if they're human and hold weapons. In D&D, I might use the rules for Haflings (not as crazy as it sounds... honestly).

Wiseman and The Hat

There is a sage-type ("Wiseman"), with a talking bird hat ("The Hat"); the sage utters gnomic wisdom (or not), the bird-hat is sarcastic.

Trash-Lady

There is a kind of bag-lady ("Trash-Lady") who pushes memories as a distraction (which again waste time).

Then there are lots of guests at a ball. These appear to be human, but there's an outside chance they're Elves (or Vata) like Jareth. Again though, no pics at The Labyrinth blog.

There are also other sentient beings - the 'Helping Hands', the 'False Alarms', the door-knockers and the 'logic guards' who don't know how their answers work - but these seem to be tied to particular locales. Of course, those above may be too - perhaps the Fireys cannot be found outside the jungle, or the Wiseman outside the garden, but we don't really know. I've pretty much assumed that those with some obvious means of perambulation might move around, those who don't (or whose job keeps them in place like the four guards who either lie or tell the truth) do not and are more like features of the location.

Locations will be what I get onto in the next post, I should think.

Questing in Elfgames X - Are the PCs special?

Another post I've neglected then re-discovered as I've been thinking about some of this stuff again. This one is on the question of what the PCs represent in the world they inhabit.

Are the PCs supposed to represent normal people in extraordinary circumstances, or are they in and of themselves extraordinary? I think there's a general feeling among what could vaguely be referred to as 'old-school' gamers (though some people I know are beginning to reject that label... I just don't have a better one) that PCs are not special. The assumption is PCs will die fairly often and as a result there's a certain disposability about them. This is the flip-side of the criticism that we (ie 'old-school' gamers) have about millennial snowflakes and their over-precious 3E+ characters who aren't allowed to die. "If character death isn't a possibility, how do the PC's actions have meaning?" we howl. "If you can just re-spawn in 5 minutes, how does PC death have meaning anyway?" the millennial snowflakes reply somewhat baffled, and they really do have a point. If we just pick up another character sheet and say 'and there's another adventurer coming at you round the corner' then... so what? How is that any better? I used to do that when I was playing 'Japs and Commandos' (this is what we used to call it, I believe it's now called 'LARPing') as a 7-year old. We'd 'get shot', fall over going "aiee!" and then we'd get up and say "and now I'm another one". That's basically how we treat a potentially endless succession of replaceable PCs. In one of my recent campaigns, when one of the PCs (a Dwarf called Harald) died, his player wrote 'son of Harald' under his name and he turned up the next day saying 'has anyone seen my dad?'. I thought this was perfectly reasonable.

But, I think this idea that PCs are not special is a mistake. Firstly, because even blacksmiths, among 'Normal Men' in the Moldvay rulebook, only get 4hp and NM saves (and you have to assume that blacksmiths are about as hard as 'Normal Men' get). 'Normal Men' are approximately as tough as a single Kobold and it's a weak PC that can't take a Kobold in a stand-up fight. They are pretty much the weakest thing that PCs will go up against (OK, normal bats, normal rats and insect swarms are pretty weak too... as befits actual things from the real world). So, the PCs can do things 'Normal Men' cannot and if this is true of Humans, I think it's safe to assume that PC Dwarves, Elves and Halflings stand in the same general relationship to their respective races as PC Humans do (though perhaps not quite as starkly, 'monster' Demihumans are a bit tougher than undifferentiated 'monster' Humans). Anyway, mechanically, PCs go beyond the 'ordinary', so by definition, they are extra-ordinary.

Secondly, and this is kinda more to the point in terms of the design-philosophy or ethos of D&D, it is arguable that it is in some way supposed to mimic the episodic adventures of Conan, Bran Mak Morn, Kull and other picaresque pulp-heroes. I read (years ago, and I went looking for it but can't find it now) an exposition of the idea that D&D is rubbish at epic fantasy (à la LotR) because it is set up for dirty episodic picaresque fantasy (à la Conan). This may not be true - there's certainly a decent argument (that I don't actually agree with but I do think the argument should be taken seriously) that D&D is a wargame and nothing to do with fantasy literature at all. Whatever - some people believe that D&D is set up to simulate picaresque fantasy, and that's good enough for me, for the purposes of this argument. The point being that Conan and other pulp heroes were 'special', in so far as they had, at least, extra-ordinary skills, drive etc. And PCs, to my mind, are already special too (due to point 1 above).

If this adventuring lark is supposed to simulate fantasy literature then PCs need to be special. This is an important aspect of my wondering why we aren't telling the stories that we are reading (if that's what we're trying to do, which it may not be). Also, ten years ago now, Beyond The Black Gate had a post outlining a seven-step approach to building an epic-quest-style escalation into (something like) a sandbox - The High Fantasy Campaign. I think it's neat. It left me with the distinct impression that it is possible to use 'old school tools' to make something a bit more epic than what I have previously described as 'shopping at the local cave-mall'.

Hence looking at how to do 'quests' and how to create 'Mentors' a while back. Both mentors and quests are part of epic fantasy literature in particular (not so much the picaresque Conan-style adventures) and somewhat missing from D&D. But there's something else missing from the equation I think, and that's the notion that the PCs are somehow important in the world.

Frodo is important because he has inherited the Ring from Bilbo. Without the Ring, there's no reason for Hobbits to be involved in the grand events that bring the Third Age to a close at all. It could be possible that Aragorn still went to challenge Sauron and re-unite the kingdoms (maybe, because in a dungeon-bashing expedition from Rivendell with Elladan and Elrohir, he stumbled on Gollum and the Ring himself). Aragorn is important of course, but he might have died in the struggle with Sauron. Then another 'Heir of Isildur' would have to be found... But the point is, Frodo was important because he was the Ringbearer. Aragorn was important because he was the Heir of Isildur. It's not just the things they did that were important, not just the actions they took and the choices they made (though of course these were important, and in game terms, this is what the PCs are doing), it was something about who they were (and this means 'how they fitted into the history and relationships of Middle Earth').

If (I said if) D&D is supposed to simulate the literature, the PC then is by definition important in the scheme of things. However, the protagonists of D&D games frequently die (unlike the protagonists of fantasy novels, who only die occasionally), so declaring one of them 'the Last Scion of the Kings of Old' or 'the Last Heir of the Mystic Masters' or whatever makes little sense. The world must continue even if the PCs die. Circle of life, and all that. More PCs must come along and continue to believe there's a point to what they do, so like open-ended quests, binary pass/fail conditions are not appropriate. Determining that the PC is a Scion of the Kings of Old or an Heir of the Mystic Masters is good enough. If the PC reaches 9th Level and has been on some grand adventures, the potential existence of other Heirs and Scions is not relevant. If the PC dies in a cavern surrounded by Goblins while still 1st Level, other Scions and Heirs can continue the good fight and the world has not fallen into unending evil as a result of their death. Perhaps there is a prophecy - but as many of us assumed JK Rowling would make more of the prophecy that could relate to Harry or Neville, prophecies should be ambivalent enough to allow for the death of the one that the prophecy relates to. They may not be the only baby born under the Wandering Star, or with a grail-shaped birthmark, or the only child of the Last Hope Gone Bad - they may have a sister. That heirloom may not be the only mark of kingship or magical power, the favour of the gods or the bloodline of the master-thieves of old, or whatever it is a sign of.

This is something I've apparently been puzzling about for a long time now without really getting anywhere, if this post from March 2018 and a follow-up from October 2018 are anything to go by.

What I haven't managed to work out is a procedure for doing this. There are a few possibilities I think.

The first is just making a massive list of possible heroic secrets. This is fine, but is hard work and a bit 'flat' somehow. Also, there's the problem of 'using up' entries... should the same option be open to more than one character? If I have (say) 100 entries I think they're probably going to be quite specific (1, orphaned heir of House Nyleth brought up in secret; 2, flame-haired child prophesied to bring about end of reign of Ice-lords, etc).

The second is just to get the players to do it, as I tried to do some time ago in the Rift City campaign (see the post I linked to from October 2018, above). This can be complicated, or maybe I was just unclear. Either way, it was much messier than I thought it would be, but there is still some mileage in the way I have done it in the Rift City campaign - the PCs who have given me something to go on have had some hooks to do with their family secrets. Perhaps more will come out.

The third option is to try to come up with a table using something like the idea expressed in the post from March 2018 that I linked to above, about using story elements and recombining them. This seems to me to be the way that will produce the most flexibility, but it's also probably the most complex in the end. Whether it's possible to do this in relation to the numbers that make up the stats and gold that a character rolls on creation is I suppose the Holy Grail here. It would link right back to the conversations I was having with Jens years ago, along the lines of 'roll a 1 and you're an orphan brought up by Dwarves...' which ties you to the world by giving you a backstory and you a potential mentor in the lord of the Dwarf-hold you come from... but it will be a complicated business coming up with a 7x6x6 grid of possible combinations.

Gaming the Labyrinth - some thoughts

 

It was my birthday a few days ago. That's not the point but it comes into the story. There are two reasons for mentioning my birthday - the first is a treat, the second is a present. It's also 5 years this month since David Bowie died. That's not the point either but it may explain some coincidences.

I was thinking that I was going to force my family to watch Labyrinth, because on your birthday, you can maybe insist that people do things that maybe they're not super-keen to do but you can say it's your special treat and they should just humour you.

But, I didn't have to. Two days before, Mrs. Orc was flicking through the channels and suddenly there was David Bowie in his surprising hair and even more surprising trousers, so we settled down to watch it. She didn't mind, she thinks it's a good movie too, and we thought we'd let Orc Minissimus off to do whatever he wanted. He can watch it any time he likes (we have the DVD). And, TV being what it is at the moment, with companies desperate to provide content to captive audiences, four days later it's on again right now as I'm typing up this part of the post. Possibly it's on because, as I say, Bowie died 5 years ago and somebody thought it was a good excuse to put one of his movies on telly.

From https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/labyrinth-review/

Anyway, I started making notes on it because I want to run the Labyrinth (or something like it) as a D&D setting. I tried to note locations, personalities, magic items and whatnot to construct some kid of dreamworld or pocket universe with a similar logic or framework or whatever. I'm not thinking of running this as part of my regular gaming sessions, I think this would have to be a little side-project.

No-one reading this, I assume, is unfamiliar with the film. But just in case you've been living in a pocket universe of your own for 35 years... Sarah's baby brother, Toby has been taken by Jareth and his Goblins. Sarah has 13 hours to rescue Toby from Jareth's Castle beyond the Labyrinth, or he will be lost forever.

One of the most important parts of the film, which perhaps is a bit difficult to get across in gaming, is 'time'. Sarah is on a time-limit and Jareth keeps altering the rules. There are various distractions that eat up time. I suppose, one way of doing this would be to run this as a self-contained session: the Labyrinth must be solved by the end of the session or the PCs fail in their quest. So, turning Labyrinth (or, Labyrinth-like, maybe) into a one-shot.

Obviously, Sarah and Toby come from our world. Not sure how to game that in D&D terms, whether it would be easier to assume that all of this happens 'in universe' or to have a framing where the PCs are actually brought in from outside. I've been thinking a little about portals - (link here). Co-incidentally (maybe not, the point is that it mirrors fantasy literature), 'portal fantasies' are mentioned in the game Blue Rose - this is the birthday present I mentioned earlier, because I have now got a copy of the game. I will be reading it carefully to see what I can draw from it to either inform my D&D gaming or whether it might be better to jump in with both feet and run a game using the Blue Rose rules.

Is it possible to run something like Sarah's journey using Basic D&D? Possibly. But there's a certain amount of what might be called 'alliance-building' that goes on that is difficult to simulate exactly. Sarah's relationships with Hoggle and Ludo, particularly, look easier to 'role-play; than 'rule-play' and that is sort of the point, but also sort of not. Especially for NPCs, reactions should be 'rulable'. All else being equal, if Sarah is kind to NPCs, they should be well-disposed to her. If she is not, they should not be. Jareth may in the end be her enemy but Hoggle, Ludo, Sir Didymus and the other more minor characters should be friendly or not depending on their own motivations and Sarah's interactions with them. There should be a way of constructing systems for developing friendships. Again, Blue Rose has 'Relationship' rules - these I think are more intended for longer-term relationships than the ups and downs of a single session's adventuring, but perhaps there are things to be gleaned from how they handle it. Certainly, part of the charm (for me at least) of Labyrinth is the inter-relationships between the characters that help Sarah to grow as a person. Her relationships with Hoggle and Ludo help her to be less selfish - she's kind to them, and in return they help her on her quest (not it it's about 'returns', because virtue is its own reward, but... having a friend that can summon rocks is certainly helpful). Anyway - alliance-building is a key theme of the film. But whether it's possible to game that in D&D, using the Charisma,  Reactions and Morale rules is something I'm going to have to think about. Several years ago now 'Against the Wicked City' blog had a series of posts (using the tag 'Romance') looking at some of this stuff. I've been re-reading them and hope they'll help me to work out a way forward (there's a metaphor there somewhere). 

There are some things that it's not clear to me yet how to solve. But the inhabitants of the Labyrinth, Goblin City and Castle however are pretty straightforward in terms of their physical abilities (certainly for D&D, I haven't really assimilated Blue Rose yet) - I'll put them in their own post.

So, that's what I'm thinking about at the moment...

Portal Fantasy

This post has been dragged out of the oblivion of 'Drafts', for reasons that will probably become clearer in the not-so-distant future. It's is a continuation of my thinking about how to make D&D more like the literature that inspired it and also the literature that people who might be interested in playing could be reading. 

However, I may be a bit off base here as I don't really belong to the age-bracket or cultural context that didn't read LotR and Howard and Morcock as a youngster... because I did. So I'm not the best judge of what exactly would be high on the reading/watching list of the people who aren't playing but might be... I'm not so familiar with that literature, so in some ways I'm going into this a bit blind.

Anyway, one of the things that is part of a lot of the fantasy literature I do know about is portals, which I mentioned in the linked post. The idea that people from our world venture (often by accident) into another is a mainstay of fantasy literature, TV and film from Alice in Wonderland and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant to The D&D Cartoon and Stranger Things.

So I'm kicking around some aspects of this question of using portals. I'm looking at the notion of bringing people from our world to the fantasy world to start with.

How does someone from the modern world survive? Classing modern people in D&D terms is tricky.

People from our world will generally be human - unless they have also been transformed while being transported, in which case anything is up for grabs. I can't think of a work where someone's body changed by going through the portal, perhaps there are. More likely that the journey releases unknown abilities (you can't do magic in our world but maybe you can by travelling to 'Fabulosa'? Can't think of any works where that specifically happens but it seems like there would be some. Certainly in the Fionavar Tapestry there is a certain amount of 'magic acquisition' but I'd have to re-read them to work out the particular causes). That might have  a bearing on what class you could be in the new world.

I can't think of a single portal fantasy where the transportee(s) did not speak the language. Red Moon Black Mountain, the Fionavar Tapestry, Chronicles of Narnia, Labyrinth, Magic Kingdom for Sale - SOLD! and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (which to my chagrin I've never even read... though in my understanding the film doesn't depart massively from the book) wouldn't work if Mr Tumnus, Oliver, Loren, Dorothy and so on couldn't communicate. So for starters, the transportees speak 'Common'. Any other languages one might speak in the real world are superfluous. So what if you know English, French, German and a bit of Spanish? Only one of those equates to Common, the others don't exist. Dwarves don't speak Icelandic, Elves don't speak Gaelic. Probably. Though as they're both pretty conservative languages perhaps if the portal takes you back to 10th-century Norway or 5th-century Ireland, maybe the Dvergar and Tuatha de Danaan do speak a recognisable language. But, if you're in 10th-century Norway or 5th-century Ireland, you probably still speak 'Common' - which therefore would probably be Old Norse or Old Irish anyway.

What about skills? Most things modern humans know would be utterly useless. However, we have a much better understanding of stuff like communicable diseases and infection than people living in our own past and that might be a useful survival skill if transported somewhere Earth-like. Most of us I guess know a few things that might be considered somewhat arcane in a different world, like how to make steel by adding carbon to iron, or how to distil vodka. In general terms we might know more about meteorology, astronomy and such like (especially as regards Earth - portals to completely different world would render such knowledge more problematic) but in practical terms we would know less. 

Generally, non-physical skills are a bit more problematic than physical skills. Things like Mixed Martial Arts, archery, and various types of sword-fighting might equate fairly well (though if you're trained with an epee and then get a broadsword maybe not), and some things like being able to chop down a tree with an axe or hunting in the forest would be good for many 'fantasy' settings but otherwise, the sorts of skills that it would actually be beneficial to have are often going to be non-gaming ones. Woodworking and such like, though very practical in a real-world setting, are not exactly skills that feature high in character classes for D&D.

Thief skills are not really a problem. Picking pockets is picking pockets (and sleight-of-hand and misdirection play a part here too I think). The Thief skills seem to be among those that it might be reasonable to directly import.

Unless (see above) the transportation process sets of latent magical talents, Magic Users and Clerics will not be applicable here. Could a devout religious person from our world, whether through faith as an internal mechanism, or from an external source (some god), derive power that enabled them to be a Cleric? Maybe. But I can't see how a Magic User could exist.

Many of us are going to be less fit than people in the past, but conversely - perhaps - more healthy. We often do not lead such active lifestyles as people even 30 years ago, let alone 300 or 3,000. But we don't have anything like the prevalence of rickets, scurvy, polio, leprosy, smallpox or numerous other diseases or other complaints. A year into a global pandemic it seems odd to claim that we're healthier than previous populations but if you went back to Europe in 1349 and talked about a plague that killed 1/1000 of the population, the 60% of the population that survived the Black Death would think you were very, very lucky.

But perhaps some of this is not so relevant. Sarah only stays in the Labyrinth for 13 hours (actually less as Jareth keeps advancing the clock so maybe it's more like 9 hours). Yes, language is pretty fundamental to interact with the inhabitants, but perhaps disease resistance is not so important. The Fionavar Tapestry is perhaps the most 'realistic' attempt at the portal fantasy I can think of, but even then the 'party' (for want of a better term) don't all come down with cholera from drinking polluted water.

So there are problems to say the least with using D&D as a baseline for how you could do this kind of thing in a game, in terms of character generation and classing. Probably not a problem to establish basic stats: STR, INT etc are fairly generic categories, but if you've ever tried to convert D&D to be a space-game engine, for example, it's maybe a bit limited. However, 'how to do magic' is a problem that needs addressing for those classes.

There are a lot of other considerations around portals. I'm sure I haven't even considered a bunch of important factors.

A fundamental question - Who or what has brought the PCs to this world?

a Good Deity
an Evil Deity
a powerful Good Wizard
a powerful Evil Wizard
an accident
an ancient spell
a book or scroll
an ancient magical device
a secret portal (mirror, pool, wardrobe etc)

Not sure if this list is particularly exhaustive. Sometimes there can be more than one answer. An accident, for example, may involve an ancient magical device or spell gone awry. The PCs might be the unintended passengers of a spell meant for someone else, either from a good or evil entity. An Evil Wizard may use a spell or device to trap a questor, etc. Alternatively, an ancient magical device may have been created by an Evil Wizard. So the point of this list is more a 'first cause' than a set of exclusive possibilities. It's probably worth delving into deeper levels of answer that depend on the initial one.

I've just acquired a copy of the game Blue Rose which has a section on using portals in games - I'm going to be reading that section with some interest (along with the rest, of course - I didn't want it just for that section!). I hope, as it's actually part of the fabric of the game, that it might be easier to sort some of this stuff out

So, yeah... portals... they're a thing. Not a huge part of what I'm thinking about right now but I guess connected. It's sometimes difficult to know exactly where to put all the speculation.

Rift City Sessions 41-42

I didn't get round to putting up December's session (Session 41) so this is partly about that - what I can remember - but I guess it's really going to be about what I recall of Session 42 (which was only a couple of days ago).

The first thing that happened was that three new PCs joined the party. These were (alphabetically) Helvor, a Cleric; Inarra, a Magic User, and Kate Short For Bob, a Halfling. This is because of the deaths (or at least temporary petrification) of Karensa and Kraghelm, and the retirement of Galen. About 3 years ago, I asked the PCs to come up with a fact about their PCs. Galen's player told me Galen was seeking to restore his family's fortunes so he could marry his lady love. Having amassed 20,000GP he's taking that back to the Elf-lands to hire retainers and give some presents to local dignitaries to re-establish the clan's standing. So, Helvor, Inarra and Kate joined Berg (Dwarf), Brigham (Cleric) and Gibbet (Thief) to brave the caves.

The first thing the party decided to do - and I have no idea why - was go to the Level 1 cave of Ningal the Magic User and kill her as a witch. They seem to have decided that she's the one who was controlling the Undead, but having killed her, they found her journal that said she'd been having problems with them too, so that wasn't it.

Then they went back to the cave where Kraghelm and Karensa had been petrified. Nosing around there they found a peculiar upside-down pit trap: it was a patch of water on the ceiling, and Kate failed a saving throw and fell 'up' into it.

Now; things that look easy to grasp from my side of the screen look somewhat different from the other side. I thought it was pretty obviously a gravity-reversal trap, limited to a very small area. I expected the rest of the party to throw a rope so Kate could climb down (or, 'up' from her point of view).

But they didn't. They thought it was some aquatic (or at least watery-looking) ceiling-monster with a paralysing/levitating attack - so Inarra the Magic User fireballed it, with Kate still sitting in the puddle. Having done that - bear in mind Kate has now taken d6 damage from falling 'up' 10', and 5d6 damage from the fireball (half if she made her save, I guess she must have done or she'd probably be toast) - the rest of the party decided they'd then dispel the effect, causing Kate to fall again and take another d6 damage. Poor Kate, but honestly, it was hilarious. It also took about an hour before all this was done. Not bad for something from a room description that had originally read, I think, 'the water is on the ceiling'. I don't really want my PCs to know my sources but rest assured, room generator, I am very grateful, those 6 words generated a lot of gaming content. 

It took up so much time that I think there was only time for a fight with some Giant Ants and the PCs decided to head for home.

For Session 42, they decided not to head back to the Medusa Caves, as they're too difficult to map (being a bit wiggly, again, I don't want to reveal too much about my sources, thanks Dyson Logos).

So, instead, they headed on down the path to find another cave entrance.

Now, I haven't designed this area beyond a few rough notes. There is a ruin further down the path, that the party found rumours about 3 years ago (and have probably forgotten).

However, what has been established already is that the wilderness will get more unforgiving beyond the bend in the road. Given the division between 'Basic' and 'Expert' rules, this seems to me to be a reasonable way to conceptualise moving further from civilisation. We joked at the time when Gibbet went up to 4th Level that now the Wilderness could attack him, but having zones of increasing wildness makes more sense. From the Edge of the Rift to the First Bend, is a kind of liminal zone - not completely wild, not completely tame; but beyond the bend, civilised writ does not run. So, a short way down the path, the party encountered some humanoids, at some range. As Berg the Dwarf went to investigate, and the humanoids in question were Goblins, arrows soon started to fly. The party charged the Goblins and saw off about a dozen or so, either dead or chased away.

Again, not really wanting to give too much away but I looked at my maps for the 'next level past the Medusa Cave' and realised that in fact there are no cave entrances to that level. Not that I have established anyway. So they kept on going until they arrived at the ruins.

I knew that at some point the PCs would get here but did not expect to have to flesh them out 'on the hoof' as it were. I had a map and some room descriptions - but the original had 5' squares that made no sense. There is a pit-trap that is only 5' square in a corridor - I can't see what would prevent some even relatively-tall human (it was Helvor who triggered it) from just grabbing the lip at the far side to stop themself falling, or at least slowing their descent so they could hang from the edge and just drop the last few feet.

I told them the squares were 10'. That seemed to solve the problem. It meant all the room descriptions were off and I had to convert everything on the fly. The descriptions were also for a Level 1 dungeon, so I was pulling monsters out and substituting ones of a more appropriate level. As it was, the only monster I remember them finding in the ruin was an Ochre Jelly. It was a little while before they found out that fire was their friend, but they did manage to fireball it and its spawn eventually.

After that (they'd only searched a couple of rooms of the ruin) they decided to head back to civilisation, with not very much loot. But from my point of view it seemed reasonable that they could have another encounter in the wilderness on the way home (one possibility in the morning, one in the evening... both came up).

Consulting the tables it was a Frost Giant (1-2 appearing). Well, it was only one that appeared, looking for 'its' Goblins. When the PCs cheerfully admitted they'd killed some Goblins, the Giant got angry and started throwing rocks at them. The PCs being PCs charged (someone was injured by a rock but I can't remember who) and Helvor saved the day by turning some sticks (that he'd said he was collecting at the previous session) into snakes. The spell is a bit underwritten so I decided to dice for the properties of the snakes - turns out, he'd made 11 Pit Vipers. 3 of them managed to make attacks on the Giant, and of those the giant saved one throw... so, as far as I can tell, the Giant died. Cue looting the corpse where, in the treasure tables, the giant has a 25% of 3 magic items plus one scroll. I can't remember what I rolled but it was less than 25. So I told the PCs that they'd found some cash (the best haul in the session, obviously), and also that they'd found a scroll. Then I rolled the first random magic item... a scroll! And the third magic item... a scroll! And the fourth magic item... a scroll! So four magic items, all scrolls... consulting further rolls these were two scrolls of Protection from Undead, one of Protection from Lycanthropes, and a treasure map. I'm so glad they found that at the end of the session, now I have a month to knock up some sort of map for them to go and investigate for the next session...

What I'm pretty certain is that it will lead to the Sepulchre of Riha the Bejewelled (thanks Donjon for I'm sure at the very least you gave me the name!)

I really don't know where this session would have been without loads of internet content out there - thanks to all I haven't mentioned too, but some at least will have to be kept under wraps until my players have pushed on a bit further.