Rift City Session 12

Has it really been a year? Not only have we managed to keep running a genuinely open session on the second Sunday of the month for the last year (except one Sunday when I was busy and the guys said they'd rather wait a week for me to DM than have someone else run a 1-shot 😍 - or maybe no-one else was prepared to do it!) at the same venue (except one month when the Comedy Festival was on and we de-camped to Galen + Berg's house), I've actually managed to blog about it after every session too (even if some of my reports have sometimes been a bit sketchy). No way are those last reports of the other two campaigns (Naked Gaming and The Tower of Zelligar AKA New Old Campaign) ever going to see the light of day. This is the one I've put the commitment into - because in theory at least, it's the only one any of the people who read this blog might turn up at (I'm looking at you JensD!).

So, Session 12...

Slightly reduced party this week - no Berg, no Gene, no Gwynthor... so the roster looked like this:

Bonjella the 1st Level Elf (this was the new character that Polly's player brought to the table this month, and like most other PCs she's in plate - unlike other PCs she's also completely skint, couldn't even afford breakfast);
Cnut the 1st Level Fighter;
Galen the 1st Level Elf;
Gibbet the 2nd Level Thief;
Karenza the 1st Level Elf;
Shazam the 1st Level Elf.

Very strong on Elves this party. Bonjella (apparently it's pronounced something like 'Bon-haya') and Shazam, AKA 'Bonj and Shaz' went up front, the humans in the middle, and Galen and Karenza at the rear.

Making it to the cave entrance that the party went to before, there was some discussion about where next. To the left, the caves that the PCs have been to before. To the right, a path down to another entrance that would likely get them to Cave Level 2. Ahead, a rocky outcrop blocked sight what was further down the path.

This has been causing me a few problems. While I have something like 200 rooms on the First (and part of the Second) Level fully detailed (they just require upkeep to make sure the Orcs that the party killed yesterday are removed and something new may or may not take their place, instead of the PCs turning up to find an identical bunch of Orcs to the ones they killed 'yesterday'...) the next 400 or so rooms are not so well sketched-out (they may say '9 Orcs' with no other details or they may just say 'MONSTER'). I haven't created the whole megadungeon, just the bits that I thought it most likely that the PCs will visit. Deciding to go off-piste means I have more creation to do. So I spent a couple of days working on new rooms, new maps, new connections, new wandering monster tables... just in case the party turned right instead of left, went into Cave Number 6 or 8 instead of 7.

The multiplication of possibilities means I can't accurately predict what I have to work on, so I pretty much have to work on everything in a reasonable radius. This is one of the problems of a non-railroad, non-quantum structure. Would the players know if I'd just done one second-(sub-)level and dropped that in? No, but if they find the treasure-map then they'd know I cheated. So now the four closest parts of Level 2 are done. Would they know if they went into Cave No. 8 but got the content from Cave No. 6? Probably not, but the passageways and staircases would line up with things that weren't there, and not with the things on Level 2...

Anyway, they decided to go past the area they've been exploring the last few sessions and push on down the path to Cave No. 6. This is ironic as it's the one part that I'd done months ago, so the extra work was unnecessary for Sunday's session anyway - kinda. It helps me get my head around what's where though, and I found a few bits that needed tidying up.

So Cave No. 6... this was a section originally generated using Donjon's Random Dungeon Generator here. What I do with these is generate the dungeon, but use this only as a skeleton (as it were); I change monsters and rooms as seems most sensible, knowing what I know about the rest of the dungeon, and delete room descriptions that are obvious enough for the players to remember they've had it before ('this room is hot' or 'a mist covers the floor' is OK to be repeated I feel; 'a set of demonic war masks hangs on the north wall', not so much).

So, anyway, Cave No. 6... who lives in a cave like this?

This Donjon generation was where the name 'Temple of the Wraith Princess' came from. It's a great name - it became the name of the area immediately to the east of here, and indeed inspired the necromantic cult that hangs out in that vicinity. Bits of stuff pertaining to necromancy gravitated that way and viola, I had a theme for that area.

There's still some undead in this area, but the name has gone. Now, these are the Caverns of Ulfang the Black (not in any official way, just because I needed to call them something). Ulfang has been mentioned a couple of times in the city as a Kobold warlord on the rise, who lives in this area. The PCs did run into some Kobolds - but more of that later.

The PCs explored a bit and found some skeletons hanging on a wall (there was a big discussion as to whether they were 'skeletons', as in bits of dead people, or 'Skeletons', nasty bony adversaries that surely should have realised that they had already died). But they were the first sort and didn't do anything more sinister than hang manacled to a wall (thereby demonstrating that they weren't completely skeletal, they must have had some connecting bits too... as some of us are archaeologists, there was a danger of this degenerating into a discussion of disarticulation of human remains). There were plenty of tracks in the dust, of small humanoid feet, animal prints, and parts where it looked like something or things had been swept over the floor.

Venturing further into the caves, the PCs disturbed a rats' nest. The party went for the rats, and mostly missed them (except for a single spectacular rat death). The rats then swarmed at Bonj, but the quick action of Gibbet with a torch scared them away again.

After the rats fled, the party searched the room. Among the bones littering the floor, they found 600 silver pieces, a lump of crystal that turned out to be worth 30gp, and a broken metal box, which sadly turned out to be pretty worthless.

Very shortly after this however, they became aware of a noise behind them - Orcish voices! Quickly hiding, the party staged a highly-efficient ambush and slaughtered some wandering Orcs who sadly had little by way of loot. Some swords went into backpacks and that was that (the Orcs came from a source that specifies that they were 'scavenging for food and treasure', rather than say 'patrolling', which to my mind says they were not so much a military unit as a working party - I decided that they had probably come hunting the rats for the pot back in the Orcish kitchens, wherever they are).

The party didn't seem terribly impressed with the loot so far. Thinking that perhaps more riches were to be had further on, they pushed further into the caves, ignoring multiple side-passages. After a short time, they came upon an area where the caves were lit with torches and someone actually seemed to be living there, with a tapestry hanging from the wall, attached by iron spikes. Going a little further, they triggered what turned out to be the main encounter of the day.

For reasons I don't intend to divulge at the moment, I placed a low-level Magic User in the caves. I generated a MU character using an online NPC generator (again from Donjon I think) and copied her stats over. She's Chaotic, wears blue robes (this is what had been sweeping the floor), and has a CHA of 17. I thought she'd be a bit of a change of pace from the usual - in this part of the dungeon, that's mostly humanoids, some undead and lots of crawly things. Maybe someone with a bit of magic would be a different challenge for the PCs.

Things turned a way I didn't expect. The first unexpected thing was how completely the PCs got the jump on her. The dice completely went their way - all the dice. She was surprised, they weren't; that led to my second surprise.

Instead of attacking, one of the two female PC Elves (can't actually remember if it was Bonjella or Karenza, the former I think) said 'hello, are you a prisoner'?

OK, I thought, reaction dice it is then... oh, 12 (I did say all the dice went their way), 'Enthusiastic Friendship' - didn't expect that...

Shazam: 'I hit her with Charm Person.'

OK, roll for Save... missed it (do I need to belabour the point about the dice going their way at this point?)

Ningal the Chaotic MU: 'Helloooo! Lovely to see you all! What can I do for you? Come in, come in, I'd say sit down, but I don't really have any chairs, I'm not used to visitors really, I say you're very handsome aren't you...?'

In the end she told them a bit about the caves, how she'd found some interesting things in the tombs to the east (she showed them a kind of stretchable rope that the Ancients had left, and a kind of powder that fizzed and flashed when flame was brought near it), drew them a rough sketch-map of the caves (luckily I had one of those on standby for an as-yet-unrevealed purpose), and generally acted as a lovely but slightly absent-minded host. She ended up giving them the fizzing powder when they left.

Ningal's dungeon sketch-map - her cave is in the top left between/beyond 'rats' and 'spyders'

This then led to one of the weirdest bits of the evening. In a brief out-of-character moment, I said to the PCs that they'd been very lucky that the encounter hadn't gone differently, if she'd been hostile and got to use her Sleep spell on them it would have been very different.

'Not really,' says one of the players, 'Elves are immune to Sleep.'

Silence. Like actual hear-a-pindrop silence.

'What?' says I.

'Elves are immune to Sleep,' says first player. 'Elves don't need to sleep, so they're immune to it,' says another player.

'OK,' says I, flipping through my battered copy of Moldvay, having never heard any such thing. 'Shadows are immune to Sleep and Charm, says so in the monster description... Skeletons are immune to Sleep and Charm, says so in the monster description, let's check the monster description for Elves... nothing about spell immunities there... let's check abilities of Elf PCs... immune to the touch of Ghouls... nothing about Sleep there. Right, I don't know where you've got this from but Elves are not immune to Sleep.' Apparently (because the player who originally said it looked on his phone) in AD&D Elves had something like an 80% immunity to Sleep. Not to my knowledge in any game I ever played though, and certainly not this one. But this seems to have come as something of a surprise to some of my players. Who knew? Not me for sure.

So in the end they said goodbye to Ningal the Crazy Magic Lady, promised to give her professional greetings to Gisuintha back at the city, and went on their way with their flashpowder. They encountered some Kobolds when they did, but the firepower of the party, both physical and magical, is pretty heavy, so the Kobolds didn't really stand a chance. A Sleep spell from the party put them down to have their throats cut, but again these chaps weren't carrying much - the biggest treasure was a handful of coins. I used the table from '20 Things to Loot from a Dead Kobold' here from Raging Swan Press. As there were six PCs and six Kobolds I used the 'treasures' (I use the term loosely) numbered 1-6. Bonjella, who has no money for food or equipment, was happy with the dead rat I think.

And that was it - three short fights, a little bit of treasure, and an actual role-playing social encounter that has - unless they do something to jeopardise it - made them a new ally in the caves. All in all, a very curious session indeed, that raises a lot of interesting questions. Primarily - will the PCs want to capitalise on their good relationship with Ningal to get as much info/leverage out of her as possible? If so, how will they do it? I'm interested in how this plays out for sure!

Questing in Elfgames III - character backgrounds

Some of this is re-capping and re-casting conversations I've had in several places over the last few weeks. If you've seen some of this before, please bear with me (especially you Jens!), it's all part of the process of trying to understand what's going on in my head. I've been particularly considering how to connect the epic with the pretty mundane stuff that most PCs do which is effectively being pest-controllers for the local nobility/communities. My thinking on this has lead to character backgrounds and how they can relate to the game-world.

Many variants of D&D use tables to determine backgrounds. Well, no such thing in B/X or BECMI obviously but I do remember having discussions with Jens over at the Disorientated Ranger when he was starting to get Lost Songs of the Nibelungs going about using 3d6 to suggest background.

In the discussion with Jens, I insisted to him that all heroes should be orphans brought up by Dwarves. I was exaggerating but the point I was trying to make is I think valid and deserves looking at. Jens was keen to have PCs rooted in the world and I think he's completely right. PCs need links into the world - it's their world after all, they should have features in their personal history that link them to the wider history. They should know where they were when they heard King Kenneth had been assassinated (or their parents should know), they should remember the War of the Two Towers, they should have a view of the Bretexian rebellion against Eutopia. They have family backgrounds and have had personal lives that exist inside a rich social tapestry. The PCs inhabit a social space, and there should be a way of generating some kind of information about where they are in society, maybe even a social position statistic.

I've been thinking about taking 3d6 rolls apart - this post some time ago talked about having three sets of stats to cover early childhood, later childhood and adolescence. In B/X I think there's a roll that can do something to say not just what events shaped your early life (as in the suggestions about using stat rolls to suggest events that may have affected you) but also your place in society too: the roll players make to determine starting gold. Taking the same idea that the first d6 represents 'inheritance' and the next d6 is what you get from your upbringing and the last d6 is how you've been living immediately before the beginning of your career as an adventurer, you roll your 3d6 and get 1,4,1 which means an early life of poverty, a later childhood of around-average wealth and teenage (or Elven, Dwarven and Hobbitish equivalents thereof) years of poverty again. Perhaps you were from a poor family but your parents worked hard and became successful (farmers, craftspeople, traders or whatever) but you rejected them and fled from home to become a wandering vagabond (or maybe they were killed when the Beastlord invaded causing you to flee, whatever the cause you ended up washing pots or working as farmhand somewhere, if that third roll of '1' is any guide).

It may make sense to conceptually at least split these all into 7-year blocks. Under Roman law in my understanding, children up to 7 were regarded as 'infans', which I believe means something like 'without speech'. They had no real rights and were not seen as 'people' - just the property of their parents (which is why infant burials are common inside Roman towns, even though the law forbade burials inside the city limits). So 7 years might reasonably mark the point where a child acquires legal status. In both the 'Gold' example above, and the stats examples from the post about character creation, the first lot of numbers can be seen as what happens up to 7. This broadly equates I think to an idea of 'inheritance' - what you get as your start in life (for stats it could be genetic and/or based on your 'early years'; for social position, it's where you are in the pecking order when you're born).

The second block would then represent what we might conventionally regard as 'childhood' - when a person is legally recognised as a person rather than a thing, but isn't yet really self-sufficient. This would be from 8-14 in this scheme.

At 14 children in the middle ages were often apprenticed out - again traditionally for 7 years, leading to finishing apprenticeship at 21. The alternative of course is going into the church and getting an education. The first degree also generally finished around 21 (as it still does in many places). So 'around 21' (or its equivalent for other races... I'm sure I can stop adding that qualifier now) could be the effective starting-point of a Level 1 character. In this case the last roll reflects what you've been doing more-or-less by choice - in the earlier post I thought for example higher STR might be because the PC has been doing lots of exercise or training, high INT would mean they'd been studying or whatever. Here, a high roll would indicate that the character was doing something lucrative/prestigious. This might mean serving in the household of a lord or having a part in some heroic deed that was rewarded or something of that nature.

So, this conceptually at least produces a character aged 21 for a Human. I've generally used a semi-random system for generating ages, something like 16+d6, if it's ever been important. It seems like the right ball-park - somewhere around 18-21 seems like the right kind of age for D&D adventurers... because going to University is like descending into a labyrinth of homicidal monsters, or something?

Anyway, in basic terms the 7 3d6 rolls that players make to determine their characters can be read in this sort of way to produce background. It can at least give you an idea of emotional, physical, financial and intellectual 'ups and downs'. Jens suggests getting the party to create characters as a group and connecting them together based on their rolls, using repeated numbers as points of contact. This is a great idea, but not one I think I can port over into my current campaign structure, as it has a large 'drop-out' rate. We've had something like 11 players and around 16 PCs so far; some of the players have only played 1 or 2 out of 7 sessions, and there have been several fatalities. In theory it's an open table so anyone can at any time join the group: this means the idea of rolling characters together at the beginning is a non-starter. I'd love to try it out with a small stable group for a more focused campaign, however.

So - what's the point of all this? I need another way to connect PCs together and to their world in a post-hoc way. The PCs are already given, and I need to be able to find ways that the PCs can have a connection the the world that will generate quests and missions and 'plot'.

Returning to Lord of the Rings for a moment, the members of the Fellowship are predominantly 'important' people in their societies. Aragorn is the heir of the Isildur and foster-son to Elrond, himself the heir of Turgon and Gil-Galad, son-in-law of Galadriel; Legolas is the son of Thranduil, King of Mirkwood; Gimli is a kinsman to Dain Ironfoot, the King under the Mountain, and Balin, Lord of Moria; Boromir is the eldest son of the Steward of Gondor. Even among the Hobbits, Merry and Pippin are the sons of the Master of Buckland and the Thain respectively, and Frodo is the heir of Bilbo, a rich and famous Hobbit who is well-connected both inside and outside the Shire. Only Sam is a relative nobody, though he is the nephew of Andy Roper, who is at least somewhat famous in Hobbit-circles.

Taking other fantasy stories we can see that there is a plethora of lost heirs, unknown youngsters with the potential to become powerful wizards, and others whose background has destined them to an extraordinary life. Frodo has extraordinary adventures because he inherits the Ring; Harry Potter (to move across genres a little) has extraordinary adventures because he inherits secret magical powers; Luke Skywalker likewise inherits secret magical powers, and meets Merlin who gives him Excali... no wait, meets Gandalf who gives him Nars... no, wait, I'm sure I know this... anyway there's Elof and Pug and Garion and Taran and Aldric and Ged and any number of others who have something - some gift or talent or secret or family tie or friendship - that throws them into adventure. Colin and Susan have a family heirloom that attracts the attention of a witch. Even Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy have adventures because their uncle has a magic wardrobe (though I'm not sure he's actually their uncle).

Links to the wider world are a way of providing plots. The PC has a brother - what is the brother up to? Kidnapped by a wizard? Leading a rebel army? Sitting at home dreaming of going to wizard-school? Fishing with the Lizard People of Storm Island? Joining the Thieves' Guild or the City Watch? Running for Mayor? Quietly tending the herb-garden of a monastery?

Who taught the PC Magic User to cast a 'Sleep' spell? How did the Cleric come to receive the blessing of the Lord of the Forest? Who trained the Fighter in the use of the longsword? Was it their mother or grandfather or an aunt or a wandering monk or a local hoodlum that taught the PC their skills? Were they inspired to adventure by tales of a heroic ancestor or watching their brother executed for a crime he didn't commit or seeing their village destroyed by the ravages of the Beastlord's armies?

Those option and possibilities took as long to write as to think of. Any could get the PC involved in something. All of the party members should have these sorts of links back to the world around them. Ties of family and background to events and people that have bearing on the world, and the things happening in it.

But how to implement this, in a campaign that is already in progress? That's the question I suppose, and I don't yet have an answer.

More to come, I think. I've been talking with Jens today, and he very kindly sent me Lost Songs of the Nibelungs in so far as it exists at the moment. I have some reading and thinking to do on the systems he's using there. I have also been thinking about how to have an 'epic quest' when the party itself is such a flexible beast - in the 7 sessions of my current Rift City campaign, for example, I'm the only constant. All of the players have missed at least 1 session, and even some of the players that have been to around 5 or 6 sessions have lost PCs. But perhaps there's a way. I shall think on that too.

In defence of Ritual

I don't usually post about archaeology, but I am an archaeologist and as such was somewhat taken with a post a couple of days ago over at Realm of Chaos - an Oldhammer blog of some repute - and it got me thinking about that much-maligned term that archaeologists seem to come out with whenever they don't have an explanation for something - 'ritual'

I'm going to defend the 'ritual' interpretation, but with a caveat. I'll start by saying that it sometimes seems that archaeologists use 'ritual' as an excuse for not thinking. It might seem that way - but I think it isn't so. Honestly, archaeologists think loads, and some of the thinking is amazing. What they (or maybe we) don't do some of the time is communicate that thinking very well.

The separation of spheres of activity into 'religious' 'political' 'agricultural' 'meteorological' 'psychological' and so forth is a product of a very modern mind. If you read the plays of Shakespeare even, you see that the wrong king on the throne makes (the) God(s) angry, the weather bad, crops fail, people and animals go mad etc. Shakespeare was only writing 400 years ago, the Egtved Girl that's the subject of the post at Realm of Chaos was buried more than 3,000 years ago, after what seems to have been a short life (she was between 16-18 when she died) that involved several journeys between South-west Germany and Denmark, covering perhaps 3,000km in the last year or so of her life and being buried it seems in the summer of 1370BC.

There is an intrinsic connection between our behaviour and the workings of the universe. I think this was accepted by people in the Bronze Age as much as by people that have actually left us written records - the Egyptians, Jews, Greeks, Romans, Medieval Europeans and up to the Early Modern period, as well as people from further afield that Europeans only really found out about later - and of course, some people still believe that there is a connection between microcosmic and macrocosmic systems or no-one would ever say a) that God told them to run for President or alternatively b) that using the wrong lightbulbs will make the sea level rise. This is the context I think in which archaeologists, but probably not non-specialists, think of 'ritual'. When we say it, we mean something like 'part of life bound up with ideas of the relationship between community and the cosmos' or 'codified actions designed to facilitate the smooth running of the universe'. We mean the actions that people take that are regarded as 'right behaviour'. Archaeologists tend to believe that 'right behaviour' is culturally-specific: what is 'right' in 18th century East Africa would not be appropriate in China in 500BC or Milan in 1450. Though the details of the rituals change, human societies have rules about what is 'right behaviour' in terms of death, birth, coming-of-age, establishing family units and such like. We send each other cards for passing driving tests or getting new jobs. Archaeologists call that 'ritual'. If all you had was a pile of cards saying 'congratulations' and 'sorry you're leaving' archaeologists would still have to try and reconstruct what they meant. Probably they'd come up up with some explanation about rituals involving socially-defined stages of life in the community. And if they did, they'd be right, because that's what those things represent in our society.

When people outside of archaeology hear us taking about 'ritual' however, I think they often assume we mean 'some irrational mumbo-jumbo of which we are guessing at the details'. They then conclude that archaeology itself is a 'ritual' in this second sense, as it seems to be merely irrational mumbo-jumbo of which they can only guess at the details. It isn't, but if we don't communicate what we mean very well, it's hardly surprising that sometimes people think we're just making it up out of nothing.

I had the privilege to see the Egtved Girl's burial when I went to the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen earlier this year. It was one of my main reasons to go to the museum (one of the others being to see the Trundholm Sun Chariot - I would have linked to the National Museum of Denmark's web-pages on these but when I do so it crashes my internet connection for some reason) and I'm really glad I did. It is an amazing museum (and city, and country from what I saw which admittedly wasn't much). The displays helped me towards some new insights about prehistoric societies, about anthropology in general I suppose, and I like to feed that stuff back into gaming. Thinking about how society worked, what people's beliefs might have been, in the European Bronze Age or Ancient Egypt or Late Antique Italy (or whatever/wherever) helps in thinking about how a community works in Carcosa or Thyatis or Gondor. In fact, my specific interest in the Egtved Girl came from finding out about her because I was interested from a gaming point of view to find out what people were actually wearing in the Bronze Age - research for some way of adding a bit of verisimilitude to a 'barbarian' settlement led me down a rabbit-hole of fascinating information about the 'Nordic Bronze Age' (by the way, apart from the Egtved Girl, Denmark has some other really well-preserved prehistoric clothing, some of the best examples in Europe, and a goldmine of information for anyone wanting to re-imagine what a low-tech 'barbaric' society might look like).

The research into isotopes trapped in her hair that has been carried out also has thrown up really interesting questions about society in Northern Europe 3,300 years ago. It seems the the Egtved Girl was probably born in South-West Germany, in the Black Forest region, and travelled to Denmark when she was approximately 14-16 years old. Then, after a short period, she went back to Germany. She stayed in Germany for a few months and then journeyed back to Denmark. A short time, maybe about a month, after she arrived back in Denmark, she died, aged around 16-18.

I've long been a supporter of the notion that there was a lot of moving about in prehistoric societies. Not so much the idea, prevalent in English-speaking academic circles up to the 1950s, that 'waves of X-people drove out the less-advanced Y-people with their new technological innovation of the Pointed Stick and introduced Pottery and Cricket', but not 'no-one before the invention of the horse ever went more than 4 miles from the place they were born' either. I'm pretty sure that people knew that 'those islands over there' were where the tin/gold/amber/wine/furs or whatever came from and that 'those people up the river' were really good at making rugs but beyond them 'the other people' sang strange songs but had mad skills with doing archery. I'm from Britain (so I think that this bit is important), and Britain is thought to have been the major source of tin in the Mediterranean Bronze Age. There's an awful lot of Bronze Age bronze, so people in the Mediterranean must have known about Britain even if only as a source of tin (though that doesn't seem likely to me). Likewise (as I mentioned it and we're talking about Denmark) almost all European amber comes from the shores of the Baltic, which is quite a hike from the Mediterranean, and yet amber turns up in a lot of places in southern Europe. Jet, obsidian, particular sorts of axes or other objects turn up a long way from their sources. Beakers, a set of forms of pottery vessels, are part of a cultural complex that stretches from Morocco to Denmark, Hungary to Ireland. 4000 years ago, people were engaging in long-distance travel around the coasts of the Mediterranean and Black seas, out into the Atlantic, up the rivers... it was an interconnected world. And I think that's really interesting.

So anyway I don't know whether I'm saying 'go to Denmark, they've got great museums' or 'read some anthropology/archaeology/history books, they might spark gaming ideas' or probably a bit of both. I'm pretty sure I'm saying 'don't be too hard on archaeologists, they have to get unfamiliar ideas over in 10 seconds on the news or some popular history programme, there's probably more to it than it seems'. And it can be both fun and intellectually rewarding to find out what does lie behind the headlines.