Game preparation – Mister Monster's Workshop

D20 rule cheat sheet

Yesterday’s WoW: the RPG session got cancelled due to Adult Responsibilities (don’t you just hate those?), so no further reports on the kobold-infested mine for now. Instead, I thought I’d write up a very brief summary of the main rules that tend to come up in battles. Because let’s face it, I could use the summary myself, and it might be handy to have something to refer my players to, this being a lot crunchier than we’re used to.

So, to make a very short story of a long and convoluted system, here’s your options when fighting for the glory of the good ol’ Alliance:

ACTIONS

On your turn, you may take either:

One full-round action.
One standard action and one move action.
Two move actions.

Examples of full-round actions are:

Run (move 4x your Speed).
Charge (move between 2 and 2x your Speed squares, then make an attack with +2 to the roll; take -2 to AC until your next turn).
Withdraw from melee combat (move your Speed squares away from a threatened square without triggering an attack of opportunity)
Prepare an action to be taken if some condition applies before your next turn.

Examples of standard actions are:

Make a melee or ranged attack with a weapon you have readied.
Cast a spell.
Make an Aid Another action (make an attack roll or skill check against DC 10; if successful, give an ally +2 to a relevant roll or check on their next turn).
Use a scroll or drink a potion that you have readied.
Declare full defense (+4 to AC until your next turn).

Examples of move actions are:

Move your Speed (6 squares for Medium creatures, 4 squares for Small creatures).
Ready a weapon, scroll, potion, or other item.
Sheathe or otherwise put away a weapon or other item (just dropping it on the ground does not require an action).
Rise from prone.
Pick up something from the ground.
Load a crossbow.

In addition to your regular actions, you may also take a 5-foot step on your turn, moving 1 square in any direction. This does not trigger attacks of opportunity, even if you move out of a threatened square. You may only take a 5-foot step if you have not otherwise moved from the spot this turn.

ATTACKS AND DAMAGE

An attack roll is 1d20+attack bonus vs AC. If you succeed, you roll damage per the weapon you’re wielding. Rolling high enough (usually a natural 20, but sometimes lower numbers can count) causes a threat. If you roll a threat, roll again, and if the second roll is also a success, the result is a crit; roll damage twice and apply the sum. If the second roll fails, the attack merely succeeds as normal. A natural 20 on an attack roll is always a hit, and a roll of 1 is always a miss. This only applies to attack rolls!

Making a ranged attack against an enemy who is adjacent to a friendly character inflicts a -4 penalty from needing to make sure you don’t hit your friend. In addition, making a ranged attack through squares that has other characters in it gives the target a +4 cover bonus to AC. The same +4 to AC applies when making ranged attacks to characters who are otherwise partially hidden from view, such as ones that are shooting at you from behind the corner of a house or over a low wall.

When making a melee attack, you may declare that you fight defensively; this gives you a -4 to the attack roll, but a +2 dodge bonus to AC until your next turn.

A weapon must be readied before it can be used to attack. You can only have one weapon readied at the time. Note that you can ready a weapon before combat has started as long as that makes sense with the situation (“I draw my sword and slowly advance towards the cavern entrance”). It takes a move action to ready a weapon.

A crossbow must be loaded before it can be used to attack with. If you are carrying a crossbow, we will assume that you keep it loaded, so you don’t have to load it before firing it the first time in a fight. You have to load it before each subsequent shot, though. It takes a move action to load a crossbow.

Making an attack usually takes a standard action.

BLEEDING

When your HP is reduced to a negative number, you are unconscious and bleeding out. Every round on your turn, roll 1d100. If you roll higher than your Stamina, you lose 1 additional HP and must repeat the process on your next turn. If you roll equal to or lower than your Stamina, you stabilise and don’t need to roll again unless you take more damage. If you regain at least 1 HP from magical healing, you also stabilise, and also if someone performs first aid on you and succeeds on a Heal or Spirit check with a DC of 10+the number of HP you’re below 0.

If your negative HP ever equals your Stamina, you die.

THREATENED SQUARES AND ATTACKS OF OPPORTUNITY

(to be clear, threatened squares have nothing to do with rolling a threat, they’re just confusingly named)

You threaten a square if you are able to make an armed melee attack against it. If one of your allies is threatening the square that an enemy is standing on, and you can draw a straight line between yourself and the ally that crosses any part of the enemy, you get a +2 flanking bonus to melee attack rolls against the enemy.

Performing certain actions in a square threatened by an enemy triggers an attack of opportunity from that enemy. Common actions that trigger an attack of opportunity are:

Moving out of the threatened square in any way other than with a 5-foot step or a withdraw action.
Sheathing a weapon (but not readying one).
Picking up something from the ground.
Making an unarmed melee attack.
Making a ranged attack.
Casting a spell without casting defensively.
Rising from prone.

An attack of opportunity is resolved in all ways as a regular melee attack, and subject to all the same modifiers. You can not choose to fight defensively with it, however. If you fought defensively on your last turn, any attack of opportunity you make also has the -4 penalty.

A character must have a melee weapon readied to perform an attack of opportunity.

A character can normally only perform one attack of opportunity per round.

Note that reach weapons threaten squares 2 squares away from the wielder, but do not threaten the squares immediately around him.

CASTING SPELLS

Casting most spells require the use of one free hand; you can’t cast most spells with a weapon in one hand and a shield or torch in the other without first dropping or sheathing one of them. When casting a spell would trigger an attack of opportunity, you may choose to cast defensively.

When casting defensively, make a Concentration or Stamina check against DC 15+spell level. If you succeed, the spell takes effect normally and does not trigger an attack of opportunity. If the check fails, the spell slot is exhausted to no effect. The Combat Casting Feat provides a +4 bonus to the Concentration or Stamina check for casting defensively.
When hit with an attack of opportunity brought on by casting a spell and taking damage, make a Concentration or Stamina check against DC 10+damage taken+spell level; if you succeed, the spell goes off normally, and if it fails, the spell slot is exhausted to no effect.

Casting a spell usually takes a standard action.

MOVING

Once again, your options for moving are:

Spend a move action to move your Speed in squares. If you choose to take two move actions in a turn, you may use both to move, thus moving 2 x your Speed in squares.
Spend a full-round action to run 4 x your Speed in squares.
Charge as a full-round action to move between 2 and 2x your Speed squares and make an attack at the end of it (you can’t charge without having anything to attack).
Withdraw as a full-round action to move your Speed in squares without triggering attacks of opportunity.
Take a 5-foot step to move 1 square without triggering attacks of opportunity. This is a free action, but you may only do this if you have not moved in any other way during the turn.

As part of your movement in a turn, you may move through squares occupied by friendly units, but not through squares occupied by enemies; nor may you end your turn in a square occupied by another unit unless one or the other of you is Fine or smaller.

Your Speed is 6 if you’re a Medium character, or 4 if you’re a Small character. Wearing armour or carrying a heavy burden can reduce your Speed.

Remember that moving through threatened squares trigger attacks of opportunity unless movement is a 5-foot step or a full-round withdraw action.

PREPARED ACTIONS

As a full-round action, you can define a standard action or move action that you will take if some condition occurs before your next turn. You may choose any condition you like, but the GM is the one who decides whether it has in fact occurred or not. If the condition occurs, you take your action (you may not choose to abort it) and it is resolved normally. If the condition does not occur before your next turn, nothing happens.

Examples of prepared actions are:

“If an enemy within my range becomes unengaged in melee, I will fire my crossbow at it.”
“If there are no friendly characters in the line of fire, I will cast Burning Hands at the nearest group of enemies, trying to catch as many of them as possible.”
“If a friendly character within my reach takes more than 5 points of damage, I will cast Cure Light Wounds on them, casting defensively.”
“If an enemy begins to move towards me, I will move away from them in the straightest line possible.”

The initiative count on which the prepared action triggered becomes your new initiative. Thus, after a prepared action riggers, you have to wait a full round before taking a new turn.

You can only perform one prepared action in a round; further triggers of the condition have no effect.

You may include a 5-foot step in a prepared action as long as you don’t otherwise use it to move from the spot.

World of Warcraft: the RPG: Kaboom, Baby!

Previously in this World of Warcraft: the RPG campaign:

When we last left our heroes, they had fought a bunch of kobolds in a tin mine and witnessed the appearance of what seemed like a ghost. This time, they set about exploring the rest of the mine with admirably methodical zeal. It’s just a shame that the dice were once again not on their side.

It started out okay. I had puzzled over what to have them discover on the kobolds that would keep their GP-to-XP ratio within recommended levels, and I’d decided on a miner’s helmet with a glowing yellow crystal in it that also protected the wearer from fear effects – a sort of exaggeration of the way that Warcraft kobolds feel braver as long as the candles in their helmets are burning. The Tinker put it to good use, being the only one with a kobold-sized head to wear it on. He’s a bit worried that it’s cursed, though, so maybe I should make some ominous references to how it feels like it’s dampening his emotions or something, hee hee hee…

Anyway, after that they ran into a trap baited with some fairly crappy treasure. And to their credit, they actually looked it over carefully and noticed that it was a trap. But then the Tinker tried to dismantle it and rolled another one of those really inconvenient failures, so parts of the ceiling fell on them. The Mage’s rat familiar needed urgent healing to avoid expiring.

After some inventory management to find room on the steampunk autodrudge for the treasure, they pressed on, only to be ambushed by a grenade-flinging goblin. The Mage’s rat familiar needed urgent healing to avoid expiring again. That’s the third time this campaign. That rat is just plain death-prone. Mind you, the fact that I keep throwing in area-of-effect attacks probably has something to do with it – no one is going to bother to specifically attack a rat, but whenever the Mage is in a blast radius, the rat is in the blast radius with her.

The goblin made a run for it while the Druid was frantically applying some magical CPR (the rat wasn’t the only one who was in bad shape), but her wolf companion chased him down and killed him. He was just a level 1 Rogue, which makes the fact that he almost knocked out the whole party kind of funny – again we see that technology is a great equaliser! Not to mention playing merry havoc with Challenge Ratings.

Somewhat annoyingly, I had to backtrack a little since I realised I’d forgotten that the Mage had Mana Shield up, so she should have gotten the chance to burn spell slots to mitigate the damage. That meant that she was up and awake when the goblin made a dash for it, but she declared that she was just going to let him go rather than get stuck in a fight, so it didn’t change the outcome. There’s a lot of different bits and pieces to keep track of in this system, especially with two casters in the party.

So that was that, mostly. The players poked around a little more and recalled that Njall Bashboulder, the owner of the mine, had mentioned that the only other tin mine in the hills was owned by the Venture Company, so finding a goblin with expensive high-tech weapons sneaking around in there was suspicious. Still, the mystery with the ghost remains unsolved, so the players are going to have to go back in next time, after spending the night resting and refreshing their spell slots.

This of course means that I’m duty-bound to come up with ways that the denizens of the mine are preparing for the players’ return. Only I should probably try to avoid having them lay any more area-of-effect damage traps… I’m starting to feel sorry for that damn rat…

World of Warcraft: the RPG: Rats and Revenants

Previously in this World of Warcraft: the RPG campaign:

This week, our trio of intrepid adventurers sat down with Njall Bashboulder, the dwarven owner of the Bashboulder Mine, to discuss his labour problems. He explained that the mine seemed to be haunted, and that his employees were most cravenly letting a little thing like horrific spectres from beyond the veil of Death stand between them and his profit margin. The players managed to notice that he was being a bit shifty about it… and then completely ignored it in favour of negotiating a share in the mine’s profits, in perpetuity, in return for busting the ghost.

The last part was the players’ own idea, but it actually suits me just fine. For one thing, getting a regular income means that they’ll have some incentive to actually settle in and have some downtime, which I have been trying to figure out how to encourage. And secondly, now every time something goes wrong with that mine, they’ll have to run over and deal with it to protect their investment. Which means that while they might have ignored the deeper currents of the situation this time… well, let’s just say that I’m going to get some use out of that entire plotline, if not right now then further down the road! Mua haha!

Anyway, they were excited to do their very first dungeon crawl in however many years (I am not prone to serving them up; for one thing, I’m all about the True Roleplaying, yo, and for another, I can’t be arsed to draw all those maps! But as you may have noticed from what I’ve been talking about here recently, I’m trying to dip my toe in it a little at the moment). They immediately set out, flickering lamps in hand, and ran straight into a quintette of kobolds who attacked them with cries of “YOU NO TAKE CANDLE!”

Those kobolds were actually an experiment for me. In theory, five kobolds are more than three third-level adventurers are supposed to handle, but I was betting that I knew better, especially since the players have a decent amount of area-of-effect attacks and kobolds have very few HP. Well, it turned out that I was right, though I probably should have considered that kobolds also have very high AC, so there was a lot of swinging and missing before they finally resorted to Burning Hands. Still, that took almost the whole gang down, and of course it helped that the tunnel was too narrow for all five to get at the players at once. Again I note that encounter balance in this system is extremely circumstantial and dependent on a lot of things that it’s hard to come up with hard and fast rules to estimate. Still, it looks like I’m getting a better feel for it.

With only one kobold left standing, I unveiled a ghostly apparition of a tragically beautiful woman moaning and wailing up near the ceiling. The kobold screamed in terror and fled. I had actually been keeping the “ghost” in store for if the battle went too heavily against the players, to have an excuse for the kobolds running away. As it was, it served as a nice way of hinting that the kobolds, while trespassers in the mine, weren’t actually the source of the haunting – wouldn’t want the players to decide that they’d fixed the problem and head back out prematurely, after all.

All in all, a pretty decent session. The system is really nice when you have the right prep for it, and of course it’s always rewarding when the players take initiatives and integrate themselves in the setting. Who knows, this campaign might be the story of how they became the unrivaled business tycoons of Duskwood… For next time, I need to flesh out some of the other locations and encounter I have sketched out for the mine, and decide what sort of loot four kobolds might be carrying – the players might have a steady income now, but they’re still going to need a little extra to pay for all those modification to the steampunk auto-porter that the Tinker is planning on making…

Monstrous Mishaps Story: Setting up act two

So, we have now outlined the first act of our Monstrous Mishaps Story. Our heroes have, hopefully, a more or less seaworthy raft to enter into the race, and our two main antagonist groups have been introduced. Now we need to take a step back and set up some pieces for the race itself.

Firstly, the judges. There’ll be three of them, starting with Mrs. Frederica von Fjomp of the Committee for Maintaining Pleasantness in Gooberville. She’s a prim and proper middle-aged woman who likes everything to be neat, clean and official. She’ll take a liking to the lawyers, who are equally bland and boring, especially that nice Mr. Harris who never contradicts her (mostly because he is often unable to speak due to his Mister Cellophone Outsider Bane, but never mind). To make Frederica an especially tough sell, we’ll make her the target of Joachim’s Hell’s Fury Jerkass Bane. We can say she cut in line at the supermarket last week, and this is of course unforgivable! He needs to punish her somehow or he’ll be docked GP at the end of the Story; at the very least, he should try to push her in the water or something.

The second judge is Mannfred Mope, the Town Elder. Mannfred is really just in his fifties, but everyone swears he seems older – in fact, sometimes when you glance at him from a certain angle, you could swear that there was moss growing on him! This is because he’s a Grouch, a sort of Monster who embodies the idea of the immortal who’s crossed oceans of time. What that amounts to is that he disapproves of everything, especially things that prevent him from taking long naps. He’ll probably award extra points to whichever team makes the least noise.

The third judge is teenage malcontent Stanley Snottnowse, chosen representative of the senior class of Gooberville High. This is actually the result of a prank on the part of the rest of the student body, because Stanley hates everything that’s lame and boring, and few things are more lame and boring than the annual Race of the Rubber Duckies. He’ll sulk through the whole proceedings but may take a shine to any team that cheats blatantly and entertainingly. Barry and Siegward, being at least aspirationally antiheroes who scoff at civilised rules, may get his vote.

As for the rival teams, we’ve already been over the lawyers and their vessel, the Billable Hour, at some length. They’ll run a clean race and observe all the rules in the book, though they may loudly call foul on any miniscule breach of those rules the players might be guilty of. If the players sabotaged the Billable Hour, Bonefatius will use his Ice Ice Baby power to freeze the water around the raft, effectively sealing any holes. This will, however, so exhaust him that he goes catatonic for the rest of the race, with his colleagues being hampered from having to drag his inert carcass along. That said, they are probably the team most likely to win if the players don’t stop it – two out of three judges are predisposed to like them, and after all they’re supreme go-getters.

The Slayers Barry and Siegward are fielding the Ship of Theseus, a model trireme with a long of Styrofoam oars that may be used to hit competitors over the head with. They’ll cheat at every opportunity, and Siegward’s abilities as a Lout actually makes him a decent sailor. They are also not trying to win, only make the players lose; if they can sink both of their rafts at once, they’ll call that a victory. On the other hand, they suffer from the drawback that no one else likes them enough to be on their team, so they’re strictly a two-man operation.

The town’s premier fast-food dive, Papa Pastrami’s Pizza Palazzo, is joining the race on the Extra Cheese, formed like a slice of pizza with rubber pepperonis. Papa has Mama Pastrami, Figlio Pastrami, and Cugina Piccola Pastrami with him for the ride. None of them are great sailors, but they are hoping to make up for it on style by loudly singing opera at every opportunity, especially when their competitors are trying to concentrate on something.

Finally, the Gooberville chapter of the Bitter Losers Club (remember that one? I’m actually considering renaming it The Mildly Ashamed Boys, but it feels a little overly convoluted…) have listlessly thrown their hat in the ring with the Just My Luck, a vessel whose crowning glory is a giant plastic head that will spurt gushing tears and make a sobbing noise (“boo hoo hoo! Boo hoo hoo!”) when someone is working the pump. The Losers aren’t trying to actually win, as that would be against everything they stand for – they just want a chance to complain about their miserable lives to a ready-made audience. That said, if the players, the lawyers and the Slayers sabotage each other enough that neither of them wins, the GM should absolutely have the Losers beat them, just for maximum humiliation.

All right. That should give us plenty to work with. Next time, we’re dealing with the first stretch of the trek down the river.

World of Warcraft: the RPG: Everyone Hates Elves, Apparently

I had today’s session planned out reasonably well. I was going to have the players’ night-time camp approached by a trio of miners from the tin mine they’re heading over to investigate. I figured I’d call for some Diplomacy checks to represent that people in Duskwood are very wary of strangers, but once they were passed the miners would warm up a little and maybe share some information about just what’s going on with that mine. Then, if no one set a watch for the night, I was going to have one miner accidentally punch another in his sleep, leading the second miner to wake up with a bloody nose and claim he was attacked. I thought it’d be fun to have the players run around looking for invisible assailants – light, breezy stuff, in between the grueling ogre fight last time and the actual mine investigation later on.

Eeeeeexcept the dice had other ideas.

The Druid started out greeting the miners. The Druid is a night elf. And the funny thing about the Warcraft setting is that elves, despite being sexy, willowy beauties as per usual, aren’t actually the social masters there. In fact, they get penalties to social rolls, because they’re weird and eldritch and frankly kind of snooty in the bargain. The super-charismatic ones are the gnomes, because they’re just so damn friendly and cheerful. But anyway, the Druid and her negative Charisma modifier managed a result of… 0.

I had decided that the miners were going to be Unfriendly to start with, so a result of less than 5 meant, per the rules, that they turned Hostile. I didn’t feel like it would make sense for them to immediately start swinging, though, so I decided that Hostile just meant that they started demanding to know what the players were doing up in the hills, lurking in the dark next to a rumbling gnomic contraption (it makes sense in context, honest!). The Druid tried to appease them, so I had her roll again…

She managed a result of 2 this time. Ehehehehe. What’s worse than Hostile?

I had the most belligerent miner get in the Druid’s face, now completely certain that she and her Tinker buddy (the Mage had cast Shadow Meld on herself when the miners approached, so she wasn’t taking part in the discussion) were up to no good. The Tinker, being a high-Charisma gnome, quickly decided to take over, so I allowed for another roll to save the situation…

Result of 5.

At that point, I realised that I could either have a tragic, meaningless fight to the death break out, or I could give up all pretense that dice results had any bearing on my railroad plot whatsoever. So I bit the bullet, declared that the Tinker had inadvertently taken a step forward when speaking up and that the miners, already on edge, took it as a threatening move and began hacking. So we had ourselves a fight against superstitious peasants caused entirely by tragic misunderstanding and unthinking prejudice. I felt a little like I had tried to run World of Warcraft: the RPG and somehow ended up running Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

It wasn’t much of a fight, for obvious reasons. The Mage decloaked and Burning Hands’d all three of them, the Druid smacked the belligerent one in the head with her +1 mace which brought him down to negative HP, and one failed Will save later, the last two were fleeing in terror.

Hoping to salvage some good feeling, I pointed out that the downed miner wasn’t actually dead yet. The Druid had spent all her spell slots on healing everyone up before bedtime, but I checked the book, and apparently the Heal skill can be used untrained in this game. So the Druid rolled to stabilise the guy while I quickly started planning a moving scene where he grappled with the fact that the “donkey-eared fey folk” he had distrusted had nursed him back to health after he had attacked them, and how that might change his entire outlook on life, and…

She rolled a natural 1.

Yes, I know that there aren’t actually any botches in this game. I know that technically, she should have been able to roll again and again at increasing difficulty until she succeeded, he expired, or he stabilised on his own. But honestly… my heart was no longer in it. I ruled that he was dead on arrival.

So, after having found an alternate camp site for the night in case the miners came back vengeful, the somewhat demoralised players arrived at the mine and found the workers on strike, with the owner berating them. So the Mage strode up to them, all high elven dignity, and asked what was going on. I called for a Diplomacy check, because she’s actually got ranks in that, so I figured it was time for some competence.

Natural. Freaking. 1.

Well, the good news is that with her ranks, a natural 1 is still a result of 7, so no one’s attitude worsened, but it still meant that everyone’s attention was on the players and no one was very friendly about it. Thankfully, at that point the Tinker stepped up and actually managed to roll well enough on his untrained Diplomacy check to improve attitudes from Unfriendly to Neutral, so that the owner became willing to at least speak civilly to them about what the problem was.

Well, “play to find out,” as my beloved Powered by the Apocalypse games are wont to say – certainly I proved myself willing to roll with the punches, so that’s a nice little polish to the ol’ ego. But it was honestly kind of stressful, and it highlighted the drawback with these crunchtastic rule systems – when something happens that you haven’t planned for, putting something together in a hurry suuuuuuuuuucks. I ran myself ragged for a few minutes trying to find the rules for NPC classes, since I figured the miners would be, like, level 3 Commoners. And even then I think I miscalculated their HP (though not enough that it would have changed anything). In a perfect world, I would of course have had their stats ready, but since I meant for them to be a pure roleplaying scene with some token die-rolling, I had spent my prep time coming up with personalities for them instead.

Oh well.

The only other observation I have for tonight is that I think my system of dealing out XP should probably be simplified. I’ve tried tying it to the Challenge Rating of the enemies the players fight, but as I noted last time, those Challenge Ratings are rough rules of thumb at best – change the situation a little, give the players something that they have or do not have the right tools for, and it drops or soars unpredictably. Likewise, I’ve handed out out-of-combat XP for passing skill checks of increasing DC, but that doesn’t really work either. Whether something is an easy roll or a hard roll depends too much on things like racial bonuses and synergies and a ton of other fiddly modifiers.

So, my new and simplified XP system is:

100 XP for winning a laughably easy fight, the sort of that gets resolved practically in a single round.
250 XP for winning a fight that took some effort but where the outcome was never in much doubt (e.g., the fight against the miners this time).
500 XP for winning a fight that was a nailbiter and which could easily have gone the other way (e.g., the fight against the ogre last time).
100 XP for succeeding at some meaningful out-of-combat task that either advanced the story or provided some other non-mechanical to the characters (e.g., finding a better campsite this time, or getting in nice with the mine owner).
250 XP for completing a formal quest of some sort.

Yeah. I think that fits with how much XP I’ve been handing out in practice, so far. I’m still grappling with how to get the treasures and gold to keep up, though – at the moment, I am about 1000 gp per player behind on where they should actually be about now. And while I have decided to trust Challenge Ratings less, I still want them to be able to serve as some kind of guideline for what I can throw at the players – it’s hard enough to know already what is too dangerous and what is too easy, given that this is a setting where Grom Hellscream (who’s just some regular-sized dude) took down Mannoroth (who was roughly the size of a bus). And those Challenge Ratings assume that the players have level-appropriate gear, not to mention that casters have to pay for learning spells in this system. Uff.

Well, while the story took a turn for the senselessly tragic, the session as such went pretty well. Let’s see if next week becomes more the stuff of noble adventure.

World of Warcraft: the RPG: Trigger-Happy Ogre

Yesterday, we ran another session of our World of Warcraft: the RPG campaign. Last time, the players had taken on a job to go check on a tin mine in the hills and find out why it wasn’t shipping any tin to Darkshire, so I set up a random encounter.

Having already included wolves, giant spiders, worgen and the undead, I figured I should use the last remaining form of mob that’s native to Duskwood in the video game, namely an ogre. Since the players had just hit level three and a single ogre was thus a level-appropriate encounter for them, it seemed the thing to do, especially since ogres – especially the two-headed variety that keeps arguing with themselves – are one of the more iconic Warcraft elements. Who can forget “BUUUURP!” “He did it!” “No, he did it!”?

Since I also wanted to include some steampunk elements, I armed the ogre with a blunderbuss and had him lying in ambush on a ledge above the road the players were walking. However, since starting the group within the blast radius of a blunderbuss seemed overly cruel (those things pack a punch!), I also made the ogre’s heads prone to talk to each other, so the players could make him out with a fairly easy Listen check.

A certain amount of back and forth followed as the players tried to figure out just what was waiting ahead of them. In the end, the Druid sent her wolven animal companion to scout (the ogre threw a rock at him for 1d4 damage to make him go away, poor thing) and then used her daily Speak to Animals domain power to ask what he’d seen. The Mage climbed up to the higher ledge and went to spy on the ogre while the Druid and the Tinker tried the same and fell on their asses. They eventually made it up by means of a Summon Nature’s Ally hippogryph, but by that time the Mage had already failed to divert the ogre and was fleeing back towards them.

The ogre appeared before them, huffing and puffing, and unloaded the blunderbuss! The Mage went down with negative HP, and things looked decidedly dicy for a while there. But the Druid managed to heal her up, and a combination of crossbow bolts from the Tinker, Arcane Missiles from the Mage, and a black bear courtesy of another Summon Nature’s Ally from the Druid dropped the ogre while he was still reloading the blunderbuss.

I swear, this rule set is not great for my nerves! Every single fight seems to have the potential to turn deadly. Maybe it’s because I keep trying to make the baddies stack the odds in their favour? I mean, I take a pride in not having fights take place in a featureless white void, but if the Challenge Rating system assumes a featureless white void, that might be the reason. Giving the enemy the ability to strip the entire group of players of something like half their HP was probably a bit excessive…

Yeah. That’s almost certainly it, now that I think about it. If the ogre had just charged them with its greatclub across a plain field, they’d have fared considerably better. I should keep that in mind – trying to be cute means making things more unpredictable. Pity, though. I want to get to the cool stuff already. I love playing low-powered games, but when GMing I want to enable some heroics. I’d have started the players out on a higher level here, but it seemed inadvisable since we’re none of us used to the system and things get more complicated the higher up you go.

Anyway, having survived the ogre, the players strongly considered retreating back to Darkshire, but eventually decided to just make camp and try to heal up some more. I sort of hinted ominously that there might be random encounters in the night, but my actual plan is just to have some disgruntled workers from the mine, that my original plan had them meeting on the road, stumble on their camp instead. Maybe one of them will try to steal from them? Either way, I’m not going to start any more fights. I don’t want to actually kill them, after all.

All in all, I guess the session went pretty well. Certainly the players seemed to relish a hard-won victory… and the Tinker is already thinking of mounting the ogre’s blunderbuss onto the automaton pack mule they got as a reward from their last quest. We’ve got a new session scheduled for this week. More later, hopefully.

Monstrous Mishaps Story: Adventures in raft-restoration

My Monstrous Mishaps Quickstart Story has so far featured melancholic store clerks, stampeding mall rats, overly friendly dogs and elderly gentlemen turned inept barbarian heroes. Now we rejoin our hapless heroes as they return home, hopefully with their needed supplies (and maybe even their intact dignities, but I wouldn’t bet on it). So how do we make restoring a raft an interesting scene?

Well… let’s say that the players’ in-need-of-some-TLC used raft, the Noodly Appendage, is haunted. In fact, having been made into the image of atheist meme “the Hovering Pasta Beast,” it has been possessed by the spirit of that strange creature. Now, the Hovering Pasta Beast is a deity that seeks to make you stop worshiping deities, so that spirit is deeply perverse and contradictive. As such, when incarnated as a raft, it becomes a raft that doesn’t want to be sailed. It’s a landlubber per excellence, and it’s going to fight back against any attempt to put it in the river!

In Monstrous Mishaps, this is called a Haunting, and it has a bunch of possible abilities called Phenomena that I have also added, in a simplified form, to the Quickstart. Let’s say that the Noodly Appendage has three Phenomena: Illusions, which lets it cause one person to see something that’s not there, Poltergeisting, which lets it move a material object, and Weather Control, which lets it, well, control the weather. All of these can only be used once every couple of hours or so, so the Haunting tends to be as tactical as possible with them.

Thus, the Noodly Appendage will wait until the players have put a fresh coat of paint on it, at which point it will use Weather Control to cause it to start raining. It won’t be able to do it suddenly – rain clouds take a while to form – so if the players are actively stating that they’re vigilant for rain, they might head it off in time assuming they can pass a Basic Camping Challenge (so Bradley could do it easily, and Zelda or Marissa with the expenditure of a Grit Point). Anyone who isn’t as outdoorsy as all that will just be told that, well, there are some dark clouds, but who can say?

If the players are caught in the rain (and without even any piña coladas to go with it), they’ll need to scramble to get some tarp over the raft. Some Doom powers might come in handy here; Winnie might use her Nose for Gold power to get drawn around the corner to where the neighbours have some sheets drying on a clothes line that might be used as a stopgap measure until more watertight alternatives can be produced, or Joachim could use Tools of the Trade to declare that he had previously prepared for this very eventuality by bringing a supernaturally resistant length of fabric. Failing that, the players will have to run and flail as best they can. Fitness Challenges to race up the stairs to their respective apartments might come up, or Keenness Challenges to find those sheets without the use of supernatural instincts, or Camping Challenges to declare that of course you were rugged enough to have anticipated this problem. Whatever they do, the Haunting will try to interfere at the least opportune time by using Poltergeisting to temporarily animate one of its plastic tentacles to wrap around someone’s ankle or fling off a cover that someone has placed on it.

If Lisa is around, it will also use Illusion to send a vision of warning. Once everything has settled down, Lisa will therefore earnestly insist that the Hovering Pasta Beast has forbidden the raft from being launched. Since Lisa also talks to her dead grandma regularly, the players may be justifiably skeptical. If Lisa has gone off to sulk or is otherwise not available, one of the players can have the vision instead, but it’s probably better if they can’t be sure whether it’s something real or Lisa just being weird again.

If they do consider the possibility, Winnie has enough of a Weirdness Level to vouch for it being very possible that the raft is Haunted, and to suggest that an exorcism might fix the problem. Klaus, Joachim or Marissa could do the same by spending a Grit Point. Either of those people can also come up with an exorcism ritual, but in Monstrous Mishaps, magic always has a price. Thus, to work a ritual that banishes the spirit of the Hovering Pasta Beast from the raft and keeps it from causing trouble during the race tomorrow, the players must accept the following:

They need to hold the ritual at exactly the stroke of midnight, and it will involve a lot of yelling and shouting – they will not be popular in the neighbourhood afterward.
The one holding the ritual will suffer for it; he’ll spend the rest of the night vomiting pea soup, even if he hasn’t eaten any pea soup the day before or indeed ever in his entire life. This will cause him a sleepless night and make him start tomorrow with 3 Health Points and 3 Stamina Points less than he had during the ritual (and without restoring any of either from a night’s sleep).
The ritual will draw heavily on the caster’s will; Klaus, Joachim or Marissa will have to spend 3 Grit Points to cast it, while Winnie (having a better Hocuspocus Score) will have to spend 1. Zelda or Bradley can’t even attempt it; they simply don’t have anywhere near the kind of mojo it will take.

What the GM will not tell the players is that there is a hidden, fourth cost: the ritual will banish the Hovering Pasta Beast, yes, but as a final “miracle,” it will cause anyone present at the casting to spontaneously manifest fake beards, eyepatches, and big black hats with skulls on them whenever they’re not looking. These decorations can’t be permanently removed, but will disappear if removed and then reappear on the players again a short while later. While they don’t necessarily get in the way, they will result in subtracted style points during the race, since the judges don’t see what dressing up as pirates has to do with pasta beasts (the players can however get around this by educating the judges on the exact lore of the meme and passing a Lawyering Challenge).

As a further complication, the night will not pass quietly even without any exorcisms being performed. Starting at nightfall, Nutty Elmir, the town’s resident crazy religious guy, starts yelling in a megaphone at odd intervals. The subject of his outbursts are varied, ranging from the finer points of Latter-Day Church of the Holy Hollering dogma to his renditions of popular show tunes to the latest sports result; his intention is just to keep the players awake the whole night and thus in bad shape for the race, the lawyers having slipped him a fiver for the service. He switches position between each rant to make it harder for the players to find him and shove that megaphone down his throat, possibly resulting in a number of night-time chases through the neighbourhood. This of course also means that if the players start making a ruckus at midnight for that ritual, the neighbours will assume that they and Elmir are in cahoots. Note also that Marissa may not be present to help deal with Elmir, if she wants to spend the night indulging her bad habit of sleeping on super-soft beds at the mall.

All right. That’ll do. I will now allow myself to take a break for a week, and I’ll hopefully be back in two weeks to outline the race itself. Time to tally up all those Modifiers!

Making my first Shadowdark dungeon

All right, I want to get my Shadowdark play-by-post up and running, so it’s about time I got serious about some preparation. I have rolled up three different dungeons to start with, so I just need to develop them properly and I should be good to go. Well, aside from that I should probably roll up a village for the players to hawk their loot in, but that can wait a moment.

I’ll start with the smallest and simplest dungeon, the one I plan to start the game with the players entering the first room of. Thus, I give you:

THE CRYPT OF THE CHORTLING BANDIT

Kresh Skullgrin, the Chortling Bandit, once terrorised travelers through the Folbrun Forest. While never more than a local pest, he had enough success that upon his death of choking on a turkey bone, his band buried him with honours in the cellar beneath a remote mansion he’d once put to the torch. There he might well have stayed, but for Lofflun, new Grandmaster of the Tailor’s Guild in Sabrum. Kresh was buried with his collection of skulls taken from the people he had killed, and one of them belonged to Lofflun’s grandmother Gloda. A man of sentimental attachment to his family history, Lofflun has offered a reward of 100 gold pieces to any adventurers who can delve into the Crypt of the Chortling Bandit and bring him the skull. It is meant to be easily recognisable by the leaden eyeteeth that should still be in it.

It sounds like a nice, simple mission for a group of newcomers to the delving trade. What could possibly go wrong?

The dungeon is laid out like this, based on the five dice I rolled. We ended up with a treasure room (5) protected by a trap room (4) and two empty rooms (1, 3). The last room (2) got inhabited by rival crowlers, who I rolled up and gave a mysterious reason for being in a dungeon that’s really far too low-level to be worth their while. Perhaps they will make another appearance later in the campaign?

The danger of the crypt is Risky: various giant vermin keep getting in and nesting here, so things like rats, bats and centipedes might turn up if a random encounter is rolled.

ROOM 1: ENTRANCE

The door at the bottom of the narrow stone stairs has been pried open, revealing a room made from rough stone, with the broken remnants of benches scattered across the dusty floor. Four large, matted-haired bodies, rats the size of hunting dogs, lie dead in pools of blood that glisten in the light of the players’ torches. There is a faint light coming through a crack in the murky wooden door to the west. There is also another closed door to the north.

There is nothing of interest here, but it allows the players a chance to realise that there’s someone already in the dungeon and that they need to plan their approach accordingly.

ROOM 2: TROPHIES

A long room stretches out before you, the walls hung with rotted tabards and helmets dented and rusted beyond all use. There are two doors, one to the east and one to the north. A small pool of light spreads from a lantern placed on the floor, and in its glow a bearded man in silvered mail is binding a shallow leg wound of a large-eared goblin in a faded-blue, mud-stained robe. You recognise them as fellow members in good standing of the Crawler’s Guild; Jin, Templar of Saint Terragnis, and Fronl, a Conjurer of some skill. You recall that they haven’t been seen for over a year – what are they doing here, in a site of little promise that should be beneath their skill? As you watch, Fronl gives off a yelp of alarm, and Jin turns around to face you, scowling.

Jin and Fronl have in fact been prisoners of a wicked sorcerer who only released them in return for dire oaths to go on a quest for him. In service to it, they needed to find one of the skulls of Kresh Skullgrin’s victims and interrogate him using Jin’s Speak With Dead spell. Having done so, they are taking a moment to catch their breath before leaving the tomb.

Their shameful bargain aside, Jin and Fronl are men of honour and aren’t interested in harming the players. If they are provoked or threatened, Fronl will attempt to cast Sleep on the players before the pair withdraws from the dungeon. If the players instead deal with them politely, Jin will warn them of the trap in Room 4 and the giant dung beetles in Room 5. They will not help beyond that, however, as they are in a hurry, and nor will they willingly reveal their reason for being here.

JIN THE HUMAN PRIEST: AC 14, HP 13, ATK 1 mace +2 (1d6, close), MV near, S +2, D +0, C +0, I -1, W +2, Ch +1, AL L, LV 5
Templar of Saint Terragnis. +3 to spellcasting, can cast the following spells: Cure Wounds, Light, Turn Undead, Cleansing Weapon, Blind/Deafen, Speak With Dead

FRONL THE GOBLIN WIZARD: AC 11, HP 11, ATK 1 throwing knife +1 (1d4, near), MV near, S -1, D +1, C +0, I +3, W+1, Ch +1, AL L, LV 4
Conjurer: Can cast the following spells: Charm Person, Sleep (always cast with advantage), Light, Detect Magic, Invisibility, Web.

ROOM 3: WINE CELLAR

A long passage spreads out into the dark, lined with stout barrels. The air is filled with the bitter stench of spoiled vinegar, competing with a sharper, fresher manure smell. At one spot on the wall, the rough stones have collapsed, opening a gaping hole into the dirt; too low for a humanoid to walk through, though crawling through it might be possible. A dark, reeking trail stretches from the aperture to a half-open door in the eastern side of the room. There is also an open door to the south, and a faint, flickering light is coming from the room beyond it.

There is nothing here of value or interest, but if random encounters are rolled, they’ll likely originate here.

ROOM 4: TRAP

The room is small, square and covered in raised, square cobbles. There are three entrances, to the east, west and south. A dark, reeking trail stretches between the half-open door to the west and the empty doorway to the east. The bare stone wall by the eastern doorway is chipped and broken in a way the other three walls are not.

Kresh Skullgrin’s followers set up a trap in the form of a row of automated crossbows here, and it has already been triggered several times in the dungeon’s history, mainly by the dung beetles from Room 5 (though they are too low to the ground for the bolts to hit, so the bolts have just shattered against the opposite wall instead). If someone searches on the floor, they find rotten and shattered remnants of wooden crossbow bolts. If someone searches the wall directly opposite to the exit, they find a series of small, round holes (the crossbows are mounted inside the wall, constructed so that they slowly reload themselves between shots. They can each fire four more times, after that they will be out of arrows). If someone walks straight to the exit without checking for traps, everyone currently in the room has to make a DC 15 Dexterity roll to avoid being struck by crossbow bolts and take 1d6 damage.

ROOM 5: THE GRAVE

A small room with a single door. At the far wall is a crude stone table, and on it lies a skeleton with its hands clasped on its chest. It’s wearing a long, dark-lacqured chainmail shirt, and twin hooked daggers are placed by its side. By its feet is a small, golden bowl with a sprinkling of dully gleaming gold, silver and copper coins in it. A long shelf stretches around the length of the room, and human skulls line it, eyeless sockets staring blankly above eternal leers. The room stinks, only faintly of rot but strongly of manure. Two glossy-black beatles the size of fat hogs stir from a nest of solidified dung beneath the table, horns sticking out threateningly.

Two giant dung beetles have made their nest here and will attack intruders. Jin and Fronl encountered them, but preferred to cast a Sleep spell on them to killing them; they are now stirring. Kresh’s modest treasure includes a gold bowl worth 15 gp and another 9 gp, 22 sp and 80 cp in loose coins, along with two nondescript daggers worth 1 gp each and a surprisingly fine suit of chainmail worth 60 gp. The bowl and coins are worth 1 XP between them, and the armour another 1 XP. One of the skulls along the wall has a leaden eyetooth and is the one Lofflun wants. Giving him the skull will earn a reward of another 100 gp and 1 additional XP.

GIANT DUNG BEETLE (x2): AC 13, HP 10, ATK 1 horn +1 (1d4 +knock), MV near, S +1, D -1, C +1, I -3, W -1, Ch -3, AL N, LV 2
Knock. DC 9 STR or pushed a close distance and fall down.

Monstrous Mishaps Story: The law firm of Connive, DeSieve, Bamm-Boozle & Harris

Continuing my effort at building an introductionary Story for my most eminent roleplaying game, Monstrous Mishaps, today I am going to sketch out a visit to a law firm. The worthy solicitors of the law firm of Connive, DeSieve, Bamm-Boozle & Harris are competing with the players for the honour of winning the Race of the Rubber Duckies, and the players’ friend Olive will insist on trying to sabotage their raft. If the players agree to help her, this scene will play out.

The offices is a two-story building with glass walls, looking a little like some giant urban lumberjack chopped down a skyscraper, leaving a stump. The firm’s name is emblazed above the front entrance, along with its motto, Innocent Until Proven Unprofitable. There is a yard in the back, surrounded by a wire-net fence. There, the lawyers are working on their raft, the Billable Hour. It is shaped like a giant watch, with hollows at the 12, 2, 5, 7 and 10 marks for passengers to sit in.

Getting to the raft requires either climbing the fence or making it through the offices. The latter option has the obvious drawback that you are fully visible while climbing, and the lawyers can and will sue your shorts off for trespassing if they spot you. Going through the offices takes a little more doing but lets you potentially stay out of sight. You’ll need to pick the lock, break a window, or otherwise gain access first, but it’s not exactly Fort Knox; most people will be able to get in. Passing through the somber legal halls will however require you to deal with the office mascot, Feegle the Legal Beagle. Feegle isn’t a fierce guard dog by any means, but he gets very excited at meeting new people and will bark happily and try to knock them over so he can stand over them and lick their faces. The ruckus may well draw the attention of the lawyers. If Klaus is present, things are of course a lot easier – he has the keys to the offices, and Feegle is used to him and so will only greet him with a dutiful wag of the tail.

Having eyes on the raft, the lawyers need to be absent for a moment so the players can work their dirty scheme. There are three of them working on the raft – senior partners Miranda Bamm-Boozle and Angus Connive, along with the secretary Shirley Shine. From time to time, one or two will leave to pick up more supplies, go to the bathroom, make a call threatening to sue someone, or similar necessity, but one always remains with the raft at all times. If the players are willing to make this a nightly raid, the raft stays in the yard under a tarp, but the lawyers will watch it in shifts all through the night. Some sort of diversion will thus be required.

Sabotaging the raft takes some finesse. If the players just smash it to rubble, the lawyers will complain to the judges of the Race and be allowed to race using a regular rowboat, with bonuses to make up for the loss in style points. Since they’ll be a lot more competitive that way than when trying to pilot their homemade monstrosity, the raft needs to be messed with in a way that allows for plausible deniability. Drilling some holes in the barrels and then filling them with saw dust is an option, and so is emptying the cans of sealant the lawyers are using and replacing it with common oil. Zelda or Bradley will have the easiest time thinking of such methods, though Klaus might also come up with them in a pinch.

If Olive tries to sabotage the Billable Hour on her own, or if the players let her take the lead, she bungles it completely. Her plan is to climb the fence and ritually sacrifice a spotted gerbil before the raft, thus inflicting a dire curse on it. However, not only does she get spotted by the lawyers, but the gerbil bites her hand and makes a break for it and just the wrong time (and the spell wouldn’t have worked anyway – Olive only believes that she’s a great sorceress). The lawyers complain to the judges and the players’ team gets demerits (and a big fat lawsuit later on). On the other hand, if Olive’s sabotage plans are forcibly vetoed, she will sulk for the rest of the Story and point out at every setback that all this could have been avoided if the players had just listened to her. Thus, the players need to in some way humour her, either by suggesting she perform an equally ineffectual spell from a distance (she’s likely to believe a claim that a player has found an alternate incantation, especially if they can show her a believably yellowed parchment scroll containing it), or by going through the effort of cheating competently.

All right, this is shaping up. Next week, I will attempt to deal with the players’ attempt at putting their own raft in order, which will include dealing with the raft’s own opinions on the matter. Stay tuned!

Creating a World of Warcraft: the Roleplaying Game adventure

A couple of months ago I happened to mention to my players that there is in fact an official World of Warcraft TTRPG, and two of them – WoW veterans both – got really excited. So I dusted off my old PDFs and set about creating a campaign. Hey, you gotta give the audience what it wants, right?

And truth be told, I have my own fond memories of Warcraft. I lived and breathed Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness when it came out, to the point where my first attempt at writing fiction was this weird sort of fanfic based on my vague and incomplete grasp of how the setting worked (having missed the first game almost entirely aside from playing it once at a friend’s house didn’t help). I wasn’t quite as enthused about Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, but I played it through along with the expansion The Frozen Throne all the same.

And once WoW came around, I was deeply hooked. Me and a friend of mine spent hours upon hours running around the lands of Azeroth and doing odd quests. I levelled my Troll Mage first up to 60, then 70 in the first expansion, then 80 in the third before it finally lost its appeal and I dropped out. Over the years I played, I got mauled by bears on the verdant banks of Loch Modan, flung fireballs at centaurs among the kodo graveyards of Desolace, and soared on a flying carpet above the frozen lands of Northrend.

What kept me coming wasn’t the gameplay, which was even at the time somewhat repetitious. No, it was the immersion, the feeling of inhabiting a wide, colourful world that was sometimes melodramatic, sometimes comical, and always lavishly detailed. Everything had lore to delve into if you wanted to – I tell you, questing in Stranglethorn Vale hits in a whole different way when your main is a Troll and you realise that those ruins you walk through were built by your ancestors back when they were the dominant power of the world, before they fell on hard times.

So once I had decided to run a game, I went in for refreshing my memory in a big way. I replayed all three of the RTS games, which still hold up pretty well, and reread all the manuals for the lore bits. I read some of the tie-in fiction, which is pretty bad, and watched the movie, which is worse. I even signed for a WoW subscription so I could level a Human Mage to level 30 in Classic and get a feel for Duskwood (because of course I decided to set the game in the most Gothic part of the setting. Hey, I gotta be me!). It was all a lot of fun, and reminded me of why I fell in love with this ridiculous franchise in the first place.

DEALING WITH THE RULES

Still, eventually I had to stop geeking out and actually look to staging the game. The first thing that needs to be noted is that the rules, which are slightly tweaked D&D 3.5, are really not very fitting to the setting. In Warcraft, even the meanest foot soldier is at least somewhat sparkly, with oodles of stalwartness and pride, and probably a name like Tristian Highcastle. That doesn’t fit too well in with D&D’s tradition of starting you out as someone who is maybe one tiny step above a peasant with a stick and making you spend the next ten years of real time working your way up.

Still, we work with what we’ve got, so I made a few adjustments. Instead of having the players roll for stats, I had them assign stats of 15, 13, 12, 11, 10 and 8 among them, so they could definitely start out decent at their area of expertise. I also ruled that PCs get the maximum amount of HP every level instead of having to roll for it. Even with that, I was sweating bullets for the first couple of levels, knowing that my campaign was always one string of bad rolls from ending with a TPK!

Another issue was XP. The rate at which PCs are meant to earn XP is really amazingly slow, by my standards – a level-appropriate encounter at level 1 is apparently meant to give each PC about 75 XP, with 1000 XP being required to reach level 2. Maybe that works better in real-time play, but I play online, over chat – a single level-appropriate encounter will take literal hours to get through! I implemented some house rules whereby it’s perfectly possible to rake in 500 XP per session, though that lead to some other issues with loot. See, the players are meant to acquire gp at about the same rate as XP, but by my system that put them on a fixed income – they’ll make the same hourly rate at level 5 as at level 1, which makes it seem like no one in Azeroth is willing to pay for expertise. Oh well. I decided I could probably make it work with some improbable windfalls at the early levels (among other things, I had the players accidentally stumble on a submerged treasure chest with magical weapons in it – as well as a cryptic, mostly-decayed message hinting at a possible plot hook that they ignored completely, but oh well) while getting increasingly stingy as time went on.

I also had some fumbles trying to teach my players the rules while learning them myself. The mysteries of the Attack of Opportunity gave me some trouble – for one thing, I missed that unarmed opponents don’t get to make them. I also assumed that the magic system had the same Vancian casting as D&D 3.5 Wizards and Clerics, but as it turns out, it has the semi-Vancian casting as Sorcerers; you still have “spell slots,” but you don’t need to assign spells into them at the start of the day; you can do that the instant before casting them. That certainly fits closer with the video games’ system of tracking Mana, but the wording is a bit confusing and I kind of wish they’d just broken with the D&D nomenclature and called them “mana points” or something instead of spell slots.

WRITING UP THE FIRST ADVENTURE

As usual, I started typing up a really simple adventure, and as usual, it grew on me and turned out longer and more complicated than I meant. This once, though, I don’t think that was a bad thing – it led to a fairly nice and moderate five-session introduction to the game where the players got to try out a bunch of different things.

My original idea was that a Duskwood peasant hired the players to drag his father-in-law, who’s risen as a zombie, back to his grave since he’s gotten tired of the guy hanging around the farm and moaning disapprovingly at him all the time. That seemed like the silly and faintly morbid sort of quest you’d get in the video games. To this end, the players had to first ask around at the local tavern, then search at the zombie’s old favourite fishing spot, before finding the walking corpse and leading him back to the cemetery.

To this, I added some wrinkles. Some drunken louts at the tavern got violent after the players failed a Diplomacy check and prompted a combat tutorial with non-lethal damage. Later, they ran afoul of worgen in the woods and had to flee from them in a panic, something that the WoW veterans proclaimed to bring back all sorts of memories. Heh. At the cemetery, they found an apprentice necromancer unearthing a corpse for some dark purpose and took him down. Having gotten their reward from the peasant, they set out for Darkshire, but along the way they witnessed an ornicopter crashing down in the woods and had to save the injured pilot from one of her automatons, which had gotten its circuits scrambled by the impact and now thought she was scrap metal to be recycled. Finally, now at level 3 and with some money in their pocket, the players made it to Darkshire and stocked up some better weapons and armour and a couple of second-level spells. To be continued.

THOUGHTS

This game is different from any that I’ve run for a while. For years now, I’ve tended towards rules-light, low-prep, play-to-find-out games, games where I just needed a few general ideas to improvise from. That’s not going to work with this rule system. It’s very much a mid-school game, from the Age of Simulationism. Before you run any scene, you need to think through the physical reality that the players will encounter, because just about every part of it will become relevant to some extent.

For example, at one point during those first five sessions, I had the players get attacked by a pair of murlocs while one of them was diving into a stream for that submerged chest I mentioned. I decided that one of the murlocs would attack the player in the water, while the second murloc would try to distract the other two players by throwing nets and javelins at them. So I had to look up the rules for swimming, for holding your breath, for fighting under water, for surprise attacks. I had to check how entangling weapons like nets work, and how ranged attacks can trigger attacks of opportunity. And of course I had to consider how the players’ spells and other special abilities would tie into it all – whether you could use Burning Hands to affect a target submerged in water, for instance (I decided that you probably couldn’t, but that Arcane Missile should work fine).

It’s a lot of work. But I do admit that it leads to a strangely vivid experience. Details matter. The world isn’t just a stage with some cardboard props on it, it’s a rugged obstacle course that insists on its independent existence. It has texture in a whole other way than in my regular semi-storygame fare.

And of course, I still love the setting, and I think my players do too. Quirky gnome inventions going haywire, murlocs gurgling battlecries as they come charging out of the water, necromantic spells making holographic skulls appear over the target’s head – it’s all gloriously cheesy, and as comfortable as a pair of old slippers. We’ll see where it goes, but I definitely hope that we’ll be able to continue this campaign for a nice long while.