Low-Level Play

What I am about to say will not shock anybody who's gamed with me over the past, what, ten years? But I must press on.

I love low level play in Dungeons and Dragons. There! I said it!

WOT?

Not for me are the bizarre tales of level 32 Fighters dual-wielding the Hammer of Thunderbolts and a +5 Sword of Dragon Slaying, tackling a squadron of githyanki pirates riding spider eaters, nor of level 25 Wizards reshaping the world as they see fit. There's nothing wrong with that game, of course, but it doesn't do it for me.

What I like are the tales of the little men. I have a copy of The Decameron, an interesting hodgepodge of stories told by a group of tale-spinners from the year 1348, full of tales of clever rogues, vengeance, and humor. The stories involve common men and women who find themselves in unusual situations and (generally) get the better of a more dull-witted rival through deception and cunning. It's a fascinating read, and extremely enjoyable. I recommend that you take a peek. It's worth every penny of the $7.95 I paid for it at Borders. Seriously. It's awesome.

It's the same way in roleplaying games. The story of how Napoleon conquered a good chunk of Europe is pretty interesting, and similarly with Alexander and Genghis Khan. Masterful conquerors, valiant warriors, and interesting people every one of them. But they're not interesting because they were powerful- what's interesting is what makes them tick.

For example, knowing that Alexander had an awful temper and was prone to hot-headedness is interesting- you can imagine what it'd be like to meet this warrior-king. We've all met fiery, passionate, driven people before, and we can relate. His megalomania and paranoia are interesting. Who hasn't felt like they ought to be the ruler of the known world? Who hasn't wondered if there aren't secret conspiracies amongst us? The fact that he conquered so much of the world is interesting, and the accounts of his battles are interesting, filled as they are with brilliant strategies and incredible insights.

But you'll notice that this is all historical. This actually happened, with regular people. Interesting, larger-than-life people, yes. But regular people nonetheless. Genghis Khan didn't have to have a magical sword, enchanted greaves, or a wand of fireballs to ravage the world with his hordes. He did it by being smarter, meaner, and tougher than anybody around him.

And that's how D&D should play. You can be the roughest, toughest, meanest motherslapper in town. Cool. But you're still going to need to be smart to get ahead. You can't lean on your magical weapons, armor, scrolls, potions, and staves to carry you through. You can't plow through an army of level 1 soldiers, because they're "merely" wearing plate mail, mounted on mundane horses, and wielding "boring" lances. That's insane, and that's just not right.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't get tougher, or that you should always face the same enemies in your games. I'm not saying you shouldn't progress, or that if you're playing a different way then you're wrong. I'm just saying that there's no reason that "mundane" is boring. There absolutely isn't. Nothing could be more exciting.

Character Backgrounds

In honor of my last post, which my friend Mr. Joesky the Dungeon Brawler would say makes a "blahblahblah" sound, here's some free stuff you can use.

Fighter Backgrounds
When you make a fighter-type character, you may choose to roll 1d6 and gain the following backgrounds:

1- Veteran: When you were conscripted into the army, the recruiters laughed and shouted "More meat for the grinder, boys!" and the rest of the soldiers laughed. That was almost a decade ago. Even before embarking on an adventuring career, you've seen things that would make other men's insides turn to jelly. Hellish, horrible things that haunt you to this day.
Benefits: You gain a suit of chainmail and the weapon of your choice for free from your military service. You also have 500 bonus experience from your many years of service.
Penalties: You often have a thousand-yard stare, remembering the events of wars past. When something causes stress, you have a penalty to notice things and situations. When extremely stressed, you may enter a comatose state, and be unable to be budged for 1d6 minutes.

2- Brigand: You were once a marauder of the forests, mountains, or snows. You have turned from a life of crime and murder to a life of looting and slaying. A minor change, to be sure, but certainly less stressful on your countrymen at least.
Benefits: You have an additional 1d6x20 gold to start with, booty from your theft. You also have a bow, free of charge.
Penalties: You are wanted in your home region by the law and are recognized as such. There is a bounty of 1,000 gold on your capture, and 500 for your head.

3- Blacksmith's Son: Work for years slaving over some hot iron for meager rewards? No thanks, says the Blacksmith's Son. He's seen world-weary travellers, heavy with gold and with word of their adventures, and cannot stand the thought that he'll spend the rest of his life in a hamlet somewhere, arming the free-spirited folk and never having his own adventure.
Benefits: You have the ability to work metal, able to produce your own arms and armor for 3/4 of the normal cost, as long as you're willing to spend at least a week per 100 gold total. You can also repair your own arms and armor for the same cost. In addition, you have a great and heavy one-handed hammer for free.
Penalties: Being a blacksmith's son, you have little experience handling weapons that aren't broad and heavy hammers and suffer a -1 penalty to attacks with such weapons.


4- Deserter: You signed up to serve your kingdom, not spend your days cooped up in some garrison, sharpening swords and looking wistfully at the horizon. In the cover of nightfall, under some false pretense, you escaped with your sword, armor, and horse, and never looked back.
Benefits: You have a normal sword, suit of scale mail, and a decent-quality horse. The armor is clearly identifiable as belonging to your former army, and you may be identified as a scavenger, deserter, or a member of the army you left behind, depending on their familiarity with your former allegiance.
Penalties: While your former compatriots aren't on the lookout for you, desertion is punishable by death by hanging, and if found out, you will be brought to justice and killed. You are generally paranoid about being discovered, and are always looking over your shoulder.


5- Marine: You were a soldier-sailor, one of those who would fight pirates and other men on the high seas, boat to boat. You're rough, tough, and more than a little scarred and capable of putting up a good fight regardless of the conditions. Once you were released from service, you quickly realized that the free food, shelter, and drink came to an end and decided to continue doing what you always did best: fight.
Benefits: You have the great reaving axe you carried and a suit of studded leather armor. In addition, you are capable of maintaining and sailing most kinds of watercraft, and are a passable navigator. Finally, you're able to drink most anybody directly under the table, useful in seedy waterfront bars.
Penalties: You are physically dependant on alcohol, having drank more than your fair share while out to sea. When not under the influence of some liquor or another, you suffer a -1 penalty to all rolls. Recovery, if possible, is likely long and hard and fraught with missteps.


6- Nobleman: You are the son of a minor noble who's caught wanderlust. Having been born to hear tales of chivalrous knights, dragon-slayers, and heroic battle. While never having been in an actual battle, or seen one, or even knowing what one smells like, you're awfully eager to spill some blood.
Benefits: You have a full suit of plate mail from your parents' armory. It is relatively ill-fitting, having been designed for a man larger and stouter than yourself, but you make do.
Penalties: You are naieve and haughty, and suffer a -1 penalty to your Charisma score for having and retaining henchmen. You treat them like common servants and stable-boys, and they resent your superior attitude. You are also likely to get on your compatriots' nerves, never satisfied with anything less than the finest food or sleeping arrangements, and complaining heartily that today's adventurers aren't nearly as heroic as the legends of old. In short, you're spoiled badly.

Otyughs and Saving Throws

Saw this picture on rpg.net the other day, in a post about posing "old school" images, or rather, images that suggest old school to you. This one struck me as particularly hilarious, and very, very telling.

One of the things I tell my players before every session (especially when they're new, or we haven't played in a while) is that I'm not going to fudge rolls, that some monsters may be too tough for you, and that you may very well die in the first battle you get in. There are traps in the dungeon that might slay you, and there is a very real possibility that you'll all be ambushed and killed by a band of kobolds. And looking online, it feels like I'm in the minority.

To be entirely honest, the online place I was thinking of was Enworld, which is perhaps not the best source of information, but it is an enormously popular site and the topics that (when they aren't OMG LOOK AT THIS NEW DRECK WOTC IS PUTTING OUT HOW MANY COPIES WILL YOU GET) are at least brain-tickling, even if for the wrong reasons.

One of those brain-ticklers is the debate between save or die, and how apparently they're a horrible, horrible blight on the state of roleplaying. Anecdotes on both sides abound, while my tiny comment goes unnoticed. I said, and I quote:

"Saving throws are your last chance as a player to survive, given to you when you messed up so bad that you deserve to be dead, paralyzed, or worse."

Obviously, the debate went right around me, since people were more interested in point-by-point debating over what amounts to either semantics or preference in playstyle than actually talking about save or die effects, but that's fine. Let the little pedants have their fun because I know what I'm using.

I'm using, and have been using, save or die effects in my games, and I can't think of why I wouldn't. I asked one of my longtime players, the man known on here as T. Hamingston, and he said he liked them for the same reasons I did: They let the player live. They give the player another chance, when they should have been caught by a fireball, or incinerated by dragons' breaths, or horribly disintegrated. And that's something that's overlooked.

Which is sad, because that's pretty much the whole point of them. That's entirely what they're for, and for nothing else. Some of the people on there get upset, saying, "It's just not fair! Players shouldn't be able to die from random monsters, they should be the heroes! Heroes don't die from basilisks!"

Not even a 20 foot tall basilisk?

But that's another subject for another day, about why people need to play the world-saving heroes in a system originally designed to simulate tomb-robbing, mercenary rogues. We'll get to that. Today, it's about Saving Throws. Show me the part in any of the player's sections in any game where it says "The players are Heroes and deserve better fates than to be eaten by Otyughs in a nameless dungeon at third level." If there is a part like that, I've been playing it wrong all these years. Silly me! I've been making my players earn their heroism. I wasn't aware that players need to be coddled, protected, and handed big piles of gold and experience or they won't want to play. I must have been confusing my players with adults, who think that things that aren't earned aren't worth anything (to reuse an analogy, picture the award you got from winning a footrace against five-year-old children).


But seriously, what is it with everybody wanting to be an epic, save-the-world-before-breakfast hero these days? Half of the posters on EnWorld expect their players to be on a slow march towards inexorable victory, and view any sort of deviation from the inevitable end-game campaign as some sort of mean-spirited deviation. What? Challenges are unfair? Expecting players to be intelligent is mean? I think I'm going to release a game today: if these whiny 4th edition DMs are any indication, it'll be the most popular game in the world.

If you're the DM, roll 2d6. If you're the player, you can roll whatever you want, because you're going to win anyways. Sit still while the DM tells you how cool it was.

That's two of them there
square fellers.

2d6 RESULTS TABLE
2: Tell the players about some cool stuff they did. For example, they descended through the center of the earth, drop-kicked a dragon into a black hole, or talked a king into letting them ride griffons around the world and into the next dimension! Don't forget the Rule of Cool: Everything needs to be awesome, at all times.
3-5: Play a two hour game of watered down Warhammer Fantasy Battles. Make sure the encounter is balanced or the players might lose, and you'll have to contrive a victory out of it anyways!
6-8: Skill challenge time! Roll a d20 at least five times. If you get more odds than evens, they win! If you get more evens than odds, try again.
9-11: Time for some loot! Let your players write the loot from their "Wish List" onto their character sheet, and then have them write a new "Wish List." It can be whatever they want; after all, they've earned it!
12: Uh oh, time to save the world! Roll a d20 behind your DM screen. Whatever it was, tell the players it was a 20, and that they've saved the world! Congratulations!

Wishy-washy DMs look out. I've just rocked your world through subtle sarcasm.

Dark Skies Above Us

A Crayonian Sorcerer, perhaps?

You may not have noticed, but I've started working on V2: Dark Skies Above Us. It's in extremely preliminary stages at the moment, little more than a couple of ideas floating around in my skull. With any luck, it'll have more juicy goodness without all of that overly crunchy crap, and it'll probably be a little more dungeon-crawly. V1: Servants of Plague didn't have much dungeon crawling at all, featuring a more open-ended, go wherever you want sort of area with slight limitations. (For example, I added a key to get above the giant garbage pit of the first floor that was being carried by the patrolling Orc Sergeant, since my players blitzed the keep and I didn't want them to ignore all the rest of the stuff.)

Since this seems like as good of a place to say it as any, my Player Character Hack is also almost done. It really needs a name, which is unfortunate, since nothing really seems to fit it well. There's just something about names... If my home campaign world had a name, it'd be easier, since then it'd be "GAMEWORLD COMPANION" instead of being called absolutely nothing, or worse, "Crayonian Classes." How pretentious can you get?

Anyways, the part that's taking so long is replacing the art I'd taken from sources on the internet and from my hard-drive's art archives, and replacing it with free, open-domain woodcut art. It takes a while, especially when there isn't really any art for wizardly type guys unless they're being hauled off by demons or some other such silliness. I suppose that could work, technically, but I'd be much happier with some other line art like the art I've been using, such as the nice artwork that I've used at the beginning of this blog post. Anybody know any kind-hearted fantasy artists?

Death by Mold / What's Next?

One of my players the other week died because they set foot in some yellow mold. The mold, being a weaker variety than normal, dealt less damage than it normally would have. After being burnt a little by its acid, they took note and decided to drop a torch on it.

Normally, it would have resulted in a normal bit of damage, but this mold happened to be underground in an extremely arid environment. The fire spread out, and burnt both the players for a tiny bit of damage, which unfortunately was more than the Minotaur ("reskinned" fighter) could bear. He died, leaving the cleric to flee back to the surface where the Minotaur's brother was waiting for the two of them to come out. When only the cleric returned, Minotaur II vowed to finish his brother's works.

Just a quick anecdote on one of my favorite player deaths. Set ablaze by a yellow mold's corpse! Classic.

Servants of Plague Released TODAY!

Even though it's my birthday, I'm giving you guys a present: The long-delayed Servants of Plague pdf, available now from Scribd. It's designed for a small low-level party, and it's a fairly minimalistic set of notes, clocking in at under 20 pages. That's despite there being stats for three new monsters, a couple of new magic items, five or six diseases, 20+ areas, and two maps. If you're looking for a quick bang-for-your-buck deal, then Servants of Plague has got your number. For the low, low price of free, you can have a 20-page quick-playing adventure for you and your buddies.

Even though it's up on Scribd, I'm still not sold on the cover layout or the two-column style of the text on the inside of the pdf. Let me know what you guys think- good, bad, or in between.


I hope you like it as much as I liked writing it!

The link: http://www.scribd.com/doc/35352402/Servants-of-Plague

The forum link is here.

The German-language version is here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/35878497/DieDienerschaftderSeuche

Secret of Steel Notes II: Sorcery!

Sorcery, and indeed all magic, is a difficult thing to put into one's game. By its very nature, Sorcery must have its own rules. Sad, indeed, is the magic system that is a mere extension of the game's skill system, level system, or some such. There have been entire games devoted to mages, wizards, and the like, where the magic system is what the game revolves around. Ars Magica, for one, and Mage: The Awakening for another. One could, of course, argue that the magic system is the star of the show in 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons as well. 

But in a more pulp-fantasy, sword-and-sorcery adaptation of the idea, where does sorcery fit in? How powerful is it? Who can use it? What is its price? These are all things that must fit together for a comprehensive use of magic in any game.