roleplaying – Page 2 – Mister Monster's Workshop

Mörk Borg

Due to my intense desire to avoid reading more of Daggerheart right now, I’ve decided to instead take a serious look at another one of these new-fangled roleplaying games that were written after my beard had already started going grey (specifically, it was published in 2020 – which is new-fangled compared to almost every other game I talk about here, you must admit). For the purpose, I have chosen Mörk Borg (“dark fortress” – the “mörk” part is pronounced like in “murky”). I’ve had my eye on that one for some time, but I’ve never quite been able to figure out if it’s an actual game or if it’s just some sort of practical joke – when you read through it, most of what’s on the page looks more like some sort of edgy modern art piece than a coherent game. Still, people assure me that it’s good, actually, so let’s embrace the Nordic doom and gloom and dive in…

Immediately we are informed that the end is nigh, no one has seen the sun in years, people are leaving their children to fend for themselves because they’re too busy making human sacrifices to apocalyptic gods, reality and nightmare is mixing and blending. Some people think they might save the world, but honestly, they’re probably dead wrong.

The main religion of this dying world is the Two-Headed Basilisks, who worship two god-monsters: SHE, who dwells in the mountains of Bergen Chrypt and has spawned and slain many young, of which the only survivor is HE, who makes his lair in the Valley of the Unfortunate Undead. They both have two heads. HE has Verhu, who is an arrogant prophet whose dire predictions always come true, and Gorgh, who is full of bitter resentment of his more famous brother. SHE has Lusi, who “looks up and down. Yet all shall be well” (?) and is associated with denial, and Arkh, who claims that Verhu’s prophesies are actually ones he has stolen from her.

The Two-Headed Basilisks rule the city of Galgenbeck in the land of Tveland. They enact a brutal Inquisition that captures sinners and heretics and tortures them without letting them die, because they believe that only those who face the final day alive and harrowed will get to go to the paradise of the Shimmering Fields; suicides, in particular, are despised. The head of the order is Arch-Priestess Josilfa, who might have made a bargain with the evil god Nechrubel for eternal life. Nechrubel is “the shadow that covers all… melancholy, crop failure, conflict and war.”

In the north of Tveland lies the sinister forest of Sarkash, which has started growing a little too fast for people’s comfort. In the center of Sarkash is the cemetery of Graven-Tosk, and in the center of Graven-Tosk stands a gothic ruin called the Palace of the Shadow King. The Shadow King who rules there has many sons who wander the palace grounds and playing tricks on commoners.

East of Tveland, across “the bottomless Múr” and connected to the mainland by three gargantuan bridges, is the kingdom of Grift, ruled by King Sigfúm the Kind. He is preparing his people for the time when they will all commit mass suicide by leaping from the cliffs. The Two-Headed Basilisks consider him a vile heretic.

West of Tveland is the land of Kergüs, and in the northern-most part of Kergüs lies Alliáns, the spire-city where the wicked Queen Anthelia rule. Anthelia is eternally hungry for life, colour, and warmth, and she drains them greedily from anyone who offers them to her.

South of Tveland is Wästland, where King Fathmu IX rules from the gaudy city of Schleswig. He is a selfish and greedy monarch who endlessly sends his army out to loot and plunder and sends his taxmen out to bleed the peasants dry. Wästland is also where the mountains of Bergen Chrypt and the Valley of the Unfortunate Undead can be found. Suicide cults gather in the Valley to escape the pain of their lives or to seek out Verhu and try to convince him to change his prophesies.

Beyond the these lands is only the Endless Ocean. Everyone who has tried to cross it have returned, some of them even alive.

Okay. This is all a bizarre jumble. But I can’t deny that I get a kick out of how relentlessly bleak it is. Why, it downright fills me with patriotic pride to know that Sweden, who once gifted the world with Kult, has not lost the knack for out-glooming absolutely everyone else ever!

Heading into the mechanics section, the first thing we get told is that every in-game morning, the GM has to roll a die. Which kind of die depends on how long the game is meant to last, from a d100 to a d2. If the result is a 1, a randomly determined line of prophesy comes true. They are all rather cryptic and poetic, so the GM will have to do some creative interpreting. Once six prophesies have been fulfilled and the GM rolls another 1, the world ends and you are instructed to burn the book. No way, man, this thing costs 450 crowns! I’m not too nihilistic to also be cheap!

For character creation, you can either start as a completely nondescript character with fully randomised gear and stats, or you can pick one of six classes. If you do the former and happen to get one or more “scrolls” (which are used to cast spells – you neither need to or can learn a spell by heart, spells are effectively gear in this game) with your gear, then you roll lower dice for weapons and armour. Weapons vary between a femur bone used as an improvised club (1d4 damage) and a mighty zweihänder (1d10 damage). Armour subtracts a die of damage taken, from 1d2 for the lowest kind to 1d6 for the heaviest.

You roll 3d6 for your four Abilities of Strength, Agility, Toughness, and Presence (charisma/willpower) and translate the result into a modifier between -3 and +3. If you chose a class, you get some modifiers to the roll for Abilities. To do stuff, you roll 1d20+an Ability modifier and try to beat a Challenge Rating from 6 to 18. Your starting hit points are 1d8+your Toughness modifier, minimum 1.

Combat! At the start, the GM rolls 1d6. 1-3 means that the enemies go first, 4-6 that the players go first. Players roll with Strength to make melee attacks and with Presence to make ranged attacks. Enemies don’t roll to attack, when an enemy attacks a player the player rolls with Agility to parry or dodge instead. Natural 20s are crits, granting extra damage on attacks and a free attack if you were defending, natural 1s are botches and causes you to lose your weapon on attacks and to take extra damage when defending.

If your HP ever goes negative, you’re dead. If your HP reaches exactly 0, you’re “broken” and have to roll to see if you’re just knocked out, if you’re mutilated, if you’re dying, or if, never mind, you are in fact dead. A short rest restores 1d4 HP, a long rest restores 1d6. If you have an infected wound (which you can get from the attacks of certain enemies) you can’t regain HP from resting but in fact lose more HP daily.

Enemies have a morale value that they have to roll under when their leader is slain, when half their numbers are slain, or when they lose more than half their HP. If they fail they break and run.

Characters change when the GM says they do, which usually happens when they’ve accomplished something of note, like found a treasure or slain a big-ass monster. When they change, they try to roll over their maximum HP with 6d10, and if they succeed that maximum increases by 1d6. They also roll 1d6 for each of their Ability modifiers, and if the roll is higher, they increase that Ability modifier by 1, but if it’s lower they reduce it by 1 instead. They can also randomly stumble on some silver or a scroll.

Scrolls are as mentioned effectively spells you can cast. They come in the form of sinister black magic “unclean scrolls” which hurt or disorient enemies, and slightly cuddlier white magic “sacred scrolls” which heal, influence, or provide communication. You can attempt to use scrolls 1d4+Presence modifier times per day, and you need to succeed at a DR12 Presence roll to get a spell off. Fail, and you take a bit of damage, get dizzy and can’t try casting again for a few minutes. Botch, and some extremely creative and horrifying miscast effects take place (e.g., “five twisted, skeletal arms burst from your back. The hands are mischievous, violent, and terribly cruel”).

There’s a table of “the Basilisks’ Demands” which read like some kind of freaky spell component (e.g., “a sliver from a sinner’s grave”), but I can’t find anything that references them. Okay…

We get introduced to “Omens,” which are a sort of hero points (only obviously not called that, because this isn’t a game for heroes!). You can spend them for rerolls, extra damage, that sort of thing. When you run out completely and then take a long rest, you regain a die’s worth of them (1d2 for most people, but some of those classes that are coming up get more).

Next up are a whole bunch of tables – very, very colourful ones – for random traits you might assign your character. Examples include having “very recently murdered a close relative. Very recently” and “rotting face, wears a mask.” Eeeeuuuuuurggggghhh. Don’t get me wrong. I love it. But eeeeeeuuuuuuuurrrrgggghhhhh.

Okay, here are those classes, and no points for guessing that they won’t be quite your usual fighter-caster-rogue set… The first one is the Fanged Deserter. He’s a fighty type, and also, he has a special bite attack. He also can’t use scrolls, ever – “if you begin with one, reroll, eat it, or use it as toilet paper.” He can pick from a bunch of special assets including a horseshoe that can be flung like a boomerang and might have come from Death’s own horse, or a sling woven from the long hair of one of your fallen mates. Heeeeee.

The Gutter-Born Scum is a fighter of a more roguish type, getting by on dirty tricks and luck. Less Strength, all Presence and Agility rolls have a lowered DR. Can choose among such special assets as temporarily blinding people by spitting on them and having a chance to escape certain death because the Reaper himself would prefer not to have to deal with you.

Okay, I am coming around to the idea that this game might just be awesome.

The Esoteric Hermit is the closest you get to a pure caster. He automatically starts out with a scroll, and can also choose a special skill that lets him randomly generate temporary single-use scrolls at the start of each day. He also gets extra Omens, all of which being at the cost of having very low HP, crappy weapons and poor Strength.

The Wretched Royalty has apparently been either overthrown, exiled, or maybe just gambled away his kingdom. Either way, he isn’t good at very much, but he can have some special assets with him that he’s managed to hold on to, like a talking horse that’s smarter than him and a court jester who distracts his enemies.

The Heretical Priest is kinda-sorta-but-not-really a cleric or paladin – they don’t start with any scrolls, but they can use scrolls while also wearing medium armour, unlike everyone else. Otherwise, they have good Presence but poor Strength, and can choose to start with assets like a “list of sins” that apparently reveals any evil-doers. In this setting I’m thinking it would probably reveal almost everyone, but I guess it’s all relative and some things are surely worse than others… Like the Hermit, the Priest also gets extra Omens.

The Occult Herbmaster, finally, does not get any starting special skills like the others, but instead finds ingredients to brew two randomly determined potions or poisons per day.

All the classes come complete with an unnerving backstory that you can roll randomly for, letting you determine such things as the Gutterborn Scum being born from a dead woman hanged at the gallows and the Esoteric Hermit having just sort of sprung into being in a ritual circle somewhere, without anything to explain where he came from. I am actually beaming as I type this. Also, many of the background items mention specific places in the setting, which I approve of; they slot you right into the world you’ll be adventuring in instead of letting you be a generalised adventurer.

There is an antagonist section. Some of the monsters in it are a little nondescript, basically standard fantasy mooks with some extra gore, but you also get things like you needing to kill any goblin that wounds you within 1d6 days or you’ll turn into a goblin yourself, and trolls growing bigger and stronger every time they get wounded and survive, meaning that they come back for payback tougher than the first time. Also, apparently King Fathmu is really interested in finding the cure for zombie bites, for some reason.

There is one thing called an Undead Doll that results from the Tvelandish custom of punishing “relic thieves, defamers and corrupt clerics” by imprisoning their children in porcelain doll shells and letting them starve to death. The kids commonly return as angry undead, I can’t imagine why.

There are hirelings for players to pick up, but it’s noted that they don’t work for pay but out of a pathetic need to belong. Also, they are cowards who’ll run away at the first sign of trouble, so you get what you pay for. The four kinds are Earthbound (one quarter human, three quarters dog), Wickheads (freaky things with lanterns for heads), Prowlers (regular human crooks) and Pale Ones (who are just weird and no one is sure where they come from or what they are).

There is a sample adventure called Rotblack Sludge, or The Shadow King’s Lost Heir. In it, the players get pulled off the execution block in the Palace of the Shadow King (whether they were guilty of anything seems to be up to themselves to decide) and informed that they can get clemency if they head into a local dungeon and get hold of the Shadow King’s eldest son, Aldon. The players do so and find plenty of skeletons, an old guy sitting catatonic in a high seat who randomly wakes up and starts chatting cheerfully before drifting off again, and the titular Rotblack Sludge which is a burning-hot underground river with a monster called the Gutworm living in it. There are pillars in the middle of the Rotblack Sludge where skeletons are standing eternally playing the violin. This has no bearing on anything, it’s just there.

The players can find Aldon, but they’ll have to drag him out, because he’s a lazy ass and thinks prison is fine since he gets fed and no one expects anything of him. There are also other prisoners who plead sweetly for help but attack the players if they’re set free. The master of the dungeon is a “cannibal warlock” named Fletcher, who is feuding with another dungeon resident named Lesdy. Lesdy is trying to take control of the Gutworm away from him, and Fletcher was hoping that he could hold Aldon for ransom and make the Shadow King deal with her for him. Presumably there is some kind of bargain that’s possible to strike there…

So, all in all? Yeah, this is pretty darn cool. There are like a hundred blank spots that the GM will have to fill out himself, and like a thousand ambiguous wordings and unclear rules that he’ll have to make his own judgment calls on, but that honestly seems to be meant as part of the appeal. I got admit, as someone who is perpetually chasing Completeness and never manages to achieve it, it’s kind of liberating to see a game absolutely refusing to even try…

And of course, one of the many things that the game does not allow itself page count for? Safety Tools (TM). Yeah, I know I have an unhealthy fixation on those, but for real, they make me genuinely miserable to see, and here I am just so, so, blissfully… unmiserable! Joy of joys, there is still room in this world for people who want some spice!

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.

Vampire: the Masquerade readthrough: The Player’s Guide

Previously in our Vampire: the Masquerade readthrough:

I’m sorry to say it, but this was the first book in this series I didn’t like at all. Any supplement called a “Player’s Guide” or “Game Master’s Handbook” or whatever tends to be underwhelming, to be honest – usually it’s just a big bundle of material that wasn’t deemed important enough for an actual book. And this one shows some early signs of what the game would eventually devolve into, all droning on about abstract concepts with no hint of the deliciously sordid realities that these early installments thrived on.

And also, the art is ugly. And I have approximately zero visual taste – if I can see that the art is ugly, then I can only assume that it must be absolutely atrocious!

But let’s see if there is any value to be mined from it.

We start out with a long piece of in-game narration, written by a Catholic priest named Alfonso Rialto, describing what he knows and believes about vampires. Most of it is right, some of it is wrong, and all of it is decidedly slanted towards his world view. Alfonso is clearly not a very nice man, making casual references to vivisecting and torturing vampires, and blaming them for such modern evils as sex education, interracial marriages, and fluoride in the drinking water. Apparently he used to be with the Inquisition, but they have since kicked him out, because apparently even they think he’s gotten too damn creepy. There is also a note from a Camarilla Justicar, reporting that all known copies of the text have been recovered and anyone who came into contact with them killed.

And okay, this is fine as far as it goes, and it does seem to be the first-ever example of the World of Darkness’ trademark “everyone sees things from their own incomplete and biased perspective” shtick, which is one that I’m quite fond of. But I’m also not sure it’s particularly fitting for its place, seeing as this is a book meant to focus on pimping out your PC, and your PC is going to be a vampire, not a nutty over-zealous warrior priest. Hell, the Inquisition, for all that it gets mentioned a lot, hasn’t even featured much into the game yet – the vampire hunters who show up tend to be solitary operators.

Next up is another new thing fated to become a tradition, namely premade characters. Here, we’re presented with a finished character for each of the seven Camarilla clans, each one being intentionally stereotypical and meant to be used when you just want to play “A Gangrel” or suchlike. So the Brujah is a street punk with strong political opinions, the Gangrel is an introvert who prefers to hang out alone in the woods, the Ventrue is a corporate go-getter, and so on. The one that stands out a little is the Malkavian (because it’s hard to make a “typical” Malkavian), who is described as basically being a cheerful nutcase who likes poking things to see how they’ll react. Oooooh dear, I can see decades of fishmalks spawned by this single page…

Merits and Flaws – advantages that you can purchase with your freebie points at chargen, and disadvantages that give you more freebie points at chargen – are introduced for the first time. I hate Merits and Flaws. The charm of the Storyteller System is supposed to be that it’s nice, simple and easy to push out of the way to focus on the True Roleplaying, but White Wolf could never seem to leave it at that but absolutely had to keep adding wrinkles and subsystems and “realistic” mechanics that were invariably as broken as they were fiddly.

There’s a gazillion new Abilities. I hate them all. Ability bloat almost invariably make it impossible to create a character who has basic competence in anything, because wherever you place your points, it’s going to be so hyper-specialised that it’s vanishingly unlikely to come up. Oh, you are trying to race after the bad guys in a Volvo? So sorry, you put your points into Driving: Fiat, so you’re useless. Lost in the wilderness and trying to get some use out of your survival skills? Ah-ah-ah, you picked survival in lightly forested areas, and this is a densely forested one! Look, I get that this is Realistic, because the real world is demoralisingly complicated and we all suck at everything that’s half an inch out of our comfort zones, but that’s precisely why I play roleplaying games so I can experience what it’d be like to be functional!

Disciplines get outlined from level six to ten. I hate them. Players are never going to have this kind of power, so the only use these rules are going to get is for statting up uber-NPCs, and I hate uber-NPCs. And even if you’re going to insist on handing out ridiculous abilities to your pet NPCs, why do you need them carefully outlined? They’re plot devices, just treat them as plot devices.

Okay, fine, fine, I guess there is some value in seeing what the logical extension of each Discipline is… Top-level Animalism lets you become one with entire herds of animals. Auspex lets you see pretty much anything, anywhere, including the thoughts inside people’s heads. Dominate lets you empty out someone’s mind and fill it with yourself, so that you basically have a second body walking around. Obfuscate lets you go Spider-Man: No Way Home and cause the entire world to forget that you ever existed. Presence lets you go The Call of Cthulhu and give the entire world screaming nightmares at once. Protean lets you turn into living fire (and nicely immune to anything that would normally burn you, including sunlight). Keep in mind, by the rules as written, only the Antediluvians have these powers, because they’re the only ones who can raise a Discipline (or any other stat) to 10.

There are new paths for Thaumaturgy that are at least somewhat useful. Conjuration lets you create stuff. Neptune’s Might lets you control water. Spirit Thaumaturgy seems to be taken straight from The Succubus Club, it’s still about seeing and commanding spirits, as well as putting the evil eye on people and astral-projecting. Elemental Mastery is about commanding inanimate objects, summoning elementals, or even transforming into an object (so beware of sitting down in any strange chairs when there’s a thaumaturge around, I guess). Corruption lets you distort someone’s body or change their minds – it’s terribly creepy.

There are more thaumaturgical rituals, which I guess is handy since there weren’t that many of them in the core and only a few have trickled into the supplements until now. Of course, they go all the way up to level ten, which again I hate for the aforementioned reasons. So far the game has been about scrambling for survival and gain on the mean streets of Chicago, when am I going to need to know what sort of rituals Tremere and his personal childer can pull off?! (for the record, the one level ten ritual that exists makes you immune from fire and sunlight for a few years)

The next chapter is about Kindred society, and it starts by introducing the new Background of Status. Given that Status was given as a Background you can take in the core but was left out of the actual Background descriptions, I’ll grudgingly admit that this was needed. It also provides some guidelines for what happens if you diss a vampire with higher Status than yourself, which is definitely useful, because that is totally a thing that a lot of players will do plenty of. Also, we get informed that Kindred love doing each other favours and are in no hurry to call in their markers, because as long as someone owes you a favour they’re expected to be nice to you no matter how much they hate your guts, and that’s a lot more fun than just getting a one-time service. Heh. Okay, that’s suitably horrible and toxic.

It then introduces the concept of “Harpies,” though, which I hate. See, a Harpy is really just any Kindred who hangs around the power players and spread vicious gossip about them. So… that’s about any Kindred at all, then, because let’s face it, they’re all a bunch of gossipy hens. We didn’t need a special term for this! It just makes things more confusing by implying that there is some particular class of Kindred who’s tasked with passive-aggressively judging people! Gaaah!

We get a new Background called Clan Prestige, which is kind of like Status except it’s how well regarded you are within your clan, so it’s more specific in some ways but more wide-reaching in others (the idea being that Status is particular to a single city, while Prestige extends world-wide if it’s high enough). Fine, I guess. It’s noted that all clans have some concept of Prestige, and that it’s quite similar in that it’s mostly about the oldsters making sure the youngsters behave, but that they’d never in a million years admit as much – we lovingly discipline our young to make sure they become decent people, they just thoughtlessly abuse theirs as a twisted power trip, that sort of thing. Heh.

Then we get a breakdown of how each clan is organised, and things get dumb. It starts with the Tremere, who are ruled by seven Councilors, who each rule over seven Pontifex, who each rule over seven Lords, who each rule over at least seven Regents, who each rule over some number of apprentices, and we are now up to something like ten thousand Tremere in a setting where there is meant to be, in total, something like sixty thousand Kindred in the world. The Tremere, I might also point out, is meant to be one of the smaller of the thirteen clans. Aaaarrggghhhh, this is why artsy-fartsy goths shouldn’t try doing math!

Other than that, though, the Tremere section is okay. The Tremere have always been described as being an insular organisation as much as an extended family, so getting some details about just how it looks is useful. It’s also stressed that for all their observance of seniority and rank, they secretly fight like cats in a sack and breaking the rules is actively encouraged if you’re clever enough to get away with it.

Next is the Ventrue, who are supposedly organised like a corporation, with each city having a council known as a Board. No, it does not. Stop lying. Chicago has nothing like that. We’ll see later that Milwaukee and Hong Kong have nothing like that. In fact, up until now we have gotten zero sense that the Ventrue – unlike the Tremere – is anything but a large, sprawling family whose members only faintly acknowledge some connection to each other, and then only in the sense of at least being better than that other riffraff.

Further, all Ventrue in a city have a Board meeting the the first Tuesday of every month. What the ever-loving…? This is precisely what I’m talking about! This is what ruined the game in the end – this insistence that there were big, broad, setting-wide facts that had to be brute-forced into place everywhere! I do not believe, not for one second, that the Ventrue as described up to this point are capable of being this organised, and definitely I do not believe that this sort of mono-culture crap could possibly work across the whole setting! There will be cities where there are two or three Ventrue, and there will be cities where there are dozens of them – I’m supposed to believe that they have the exact same organisation everywhere, never mind practicalities, never mind local culture, never mind the oversized personalities that invariably seem to dominate?

This is dumb. This is ridiculous. This is poison to everything I’ve liked in the game up to this point.

All the Toreador in a city also meet once a month, on the full moon. Bite me. On the slightly brighter side, we are introduced to the concept of Artistes (Toreador who can actually create art) and Poseurs (Toreador who can’t, and instead try to pass themselves off as having impeccable taste in the finer things) and the bitter feud between the two. Okay, that I’ll buy as a thing that just organically happen whenever two or more Toreador find themselves living in close proximity.

The Nosferatu have regional organisations called Broods, and I still don’t believe you. These people hate socialising so much that they hang out in the sewers, no way do they go out of their way to keep in touch with each other. They are also described as being downright sickeningly nice, with Elders and Neonates interacting in mutual respect. Okay, Nosferatu always did have that “look more monstrous than other Kindred but are actually less monstrous on the inside, because that’s Ironic” thing going, but I feel like that’s laying it on a little thick.

The Brujah get divided into Iconoclasts (who just want to smash things up), Idealists (who try to be inspiring leaders for some political project) and Individualists (who also have some lofty goal, but who are pursuing it all on their lonesome). Again, that’s a general enough description that I can see how it might in fact be near-universally applicable.

Bla bla bla, the Malkavians and the Gangrel aren’t particularly prone to regular schedules, but somehow they still have regular meetings, yeah, whatever.

The four independent clans get introduced for the first time. The Assamites are peerless assassins who operate out of a mountain base somewhere in the Middle East. They are all about lowering their generation and used to be great diabolists because of it, but the Tremere got together and did a ritual that made them incapable of the act. Not sure why the Tremere can’t do the same thing for the other twelve clans, then, and give Elders a lot less to worry about? But anyway, they now take on assassination jobs and demand low-generation vitae as payment, and when they get a large enough store of it, they can use it as a substitute for diablerie and lower their generation one step. They have the unique Discipline of Quietus, which lets them muffle sound, poison their blades, weaken their opponents, and just generally be super-assassins.

The Followers of Set claim that they descend from a vampire in ancient Egypt, called Set or Sutekh, who was probably an Antediluvian. He fought another Kindred called Osiris who tried to conquer all of Egypt, but he was cast out and swore that if he was to be banished to the darkness, then darkness would rule supreme. Then he dedicated himself to corrupting every institution ever and getting people hooked on every imaginable, despicable vice that anyone could make up. He disappeared in 33 AD (that would be the date usually listed for the Crucifixion, which is probably not a coincidence) but his descendants are still running around dealing drugs and peddling prostitutes and funding terrorist organisations and just generally being bad for the sake of being bad. Honestly, I kind of love the Setites just for how much they’re a bunch of immature edgelords. Their unique Discipline is Serpentis, which lets them turn into giant snakes. Even though it never helps.

The Giovanni started out as a Venetian necromancer cult that got embraced by an unnamed vampire and thanked him by diablerising his ass, so now they’re crooked Italian necromancer merchant vampires. They still keep everything in the family, with some kids being raised to be embraced and some being able to earn the embrace through a lifetime of service, and it’s all very creepy and incestuous. Their unique Discipline is, unsurprisingly, Necromancy, which lets them summon and control ghosts or even raise zombie minions at the too-high-for-PCs levels.

The Ravnos are cheerful scoundrels who wander the world and steal from people. They’re pretty chummy and loyal to their mortal families, who are usually Romani. There isn’t terribly much more to them than that, to be honest. Their clan Discipline is Chimerstry, the power of illusion.

We also get a description of the Salubri, who used to be a clan but are now just a bloodline, since the Tremere wiped most of them out, along with their Antediluvian Saulot, as part of their turning themselves into Kindred. There are only ever seven Salubri in existence, because each one only sires a new Salubri after achieving Golconda, and then quietly offs herself. Also, they have a third eye in the middle of their forehead (though it is barely visible when closed and can be passed off as a scar or blemish), and they take damage when they drain blood from an unwilling victim. Their clan Discipline is Obeah, which gives them power to heal both bodies and souls. Okay, cool, I guess, but I’m not sure how much use you can get out of them given how few there are and how low a profile they apparently keep…

There’s an interminable section where each of the writers of the book waffle self-indulgently about The True Meaning of Roleplaying. Aaaarrggggghhhhh go away.

There is a chapter on equipment. Some games might benefit from a chapter filled with nothing but gear porn. Vampire… is not one of those games. There is no reasonably plausible situations in which I am going to need stats for an Apache attack helicopter in this game about gritty urban intrigue, yet stats for an Apache attack helicopter there are. I hate this book.

There are stats for different animals that you might conceivably ghoul. Fine, I guess that’s slightly more justifiable.

There are four sample Havens, which are kind of neat because – and I know I come back to this a lot – they anchor it in specifics and tell you about the particular Kindred who have these Havens. There’s a Gangrel who just sinks into the earth down in a park every night, a Ventrue couple who live in a mansion full of cutting-edge security systems, a group of Brujah who live out of their RV, and a Nosferatu who has made his lair in the sewers.

The book ends with a second in-character monologue as a bookend to the first one, this one from a vampire who tells you all about the practicalities of being a vampire. This is a little more useful, but it’s awfully dry and boring, and again, it’s dreadfully non-specific. Bleh.

Well, this was painful and I do not wish to go through it again. There were a few useful bits, and of course it was fun to see the origin of the independents, but for the most parts, it felt like a lot of stuff that got left out of the core rules for the very good reason that they weren’t particularly useful or interesting.

Next time I’ll do Awakening: Diablerie Mexico. It’s a great deal more entertaining, as I recall.

Torg readthrough: The Possibility Chalice

Previously in our Torg readthrough:

Last time in Torg, we had ourselves a rollickin’ adventure across the world, fighting corporate ninjas, Egyptian storm troopers, and something called a Cyberknight that I’m still not quite clear on what it is. This time, the story continues as the players follow the map they spent last time tracking down, and run into even more complications along the way.

So, the players have the Destiny Map, having possibly traded a nuke to a supervillain to get it. Which is still kind of insane if you ask me, but anyway. The map, it turns out, points to a location off the coast of Thailand, the area having been flooded since the Map was drawn. Ooops. There is a Kanawa oil derrick on the exact spot the temple is meant to be at. Ooops again.

We get a description of an unnamed Thai village on the coast that the players are assumed to be making their preparations in. It is mostly hostile to outsiders and several prominent villagers are on the Kanawa payroll and will report suspicious outsiders. There is also a temple of “Kra Buddhism” which, if the players visit it and ask some questions, will serve up a bunch of cryptic clues for overcoming the obstacles of the temple.

The derrick itself is fully automated and has zero actual human beings on it, but it does have a bunch of guard robots (big, clunky ones; picture the ED-209 from the first RoboCop movie, and you won’t be far off), and the players will likely have to show some tech know-how to figure out what the derrick is actually doing and how to make use of it. It turns out, it mainly serves as a launching point for more robots who are constructing a pressurised dome on the sea floor surrounding the temple. 3327 doesn’t actually know that it’s the site of the Possibility Chalice that he was chasing in the last adventure, but one of his survey teams tagged it as a place of mystical importance where one might conceivably find Eternity Shards, and he’s nothing if not thorough.

The players have to dive down somehow, dodging laser-firing robots along the way, and enter the temple. Here, they are meant to follow the clues from the Kra Buddhists and a) address a goddess statue to get a glowing orb, b) shine the light from the orb on the magical squiddy thingy guarding the way, c) move across a patch of floor in the dance shown to them at the shrine, d) approach another god statue on their knees and pick up a mask, and e) wear the mask to grant them sight in a magically darkened room. There are ways to brute-force it all, though, or even to bypass much of it by looking around for an alternate entrance (since they’re coming in from a different spot than the temple was laid out to allow for anyway – the temple being underwater, they can just swim in through an upper floor window).

Oh, and in the course of it all, they might get forcibly converted to Kra Buddhism, at least if they don’t have any existing faith (though atheism counts as a faith by Torg mechanics, incidentally). Also, they might learn a nifty new miracle for clear sight, so I guess that’s nice? Still, I’m not sure how I feel about the game being able to force a religious awakening on you…

Anyway, once they get to the resting place of the Possibility Chalice, it’s gone, because of course it is. Turns out, a pure and noble knight back in the middle ages managed to find the temple, passed all its tests, and made off with the Chalice under the belief that it was the Grail. He went home to England and the Chalice ended up in a museum. Well, crap.

Still, the game throws the players a bone. See, an English scholar named Babbidge has been converted to the Aylish axioms and made the most of it by learning magic. He’s also always been interested in the mysterious Chalice, so once he learned some mojo, he used it to send a spell to the Chalice’s place of origin inviting anyone who made it there to come to him and talk about it, since apparently they are geeks of similar interests.

So the players get back out of the drink and make their way around the world to England to look up Babbidge, and… he’s missing, presumed kidnapped. Well, crap again.

The players are met at Babbidge’s home by Lady Ardinay’s Home Guard, led of course by Tolwyn of Tancred. I swear this chick is the breakout act of the original novels, she turns up whenever we’re in Aysle and she’s the only one of the surviving protagonists who ever does. Don’t get me wrong, I like her fine, but I’m kind of curious what Dr. Hachi Mara-Two or Father Christopher Bryce are up to these days, you know?

Anyway, Tolwyn can tell the players that Babbidge had some serious wards protecting his place, so she can think of only two ways that someone got through them – either it was a demon, since the wards didn’t cover those, or it was someone who had a Core Earth talisman that could project a low-magic axiom under which the wards weren’t possible. It’s possible to look into the former possibility by letting her wizards send them off to the demon plane, or the latter by going to a dreary part of London called Chislethwaite and asking around for anyone who might have handled the snatch-and-grab.

If the players go for the former option, they’re transported to the demon plane. It gets a little complicated here, because a plane is a sort of parallel dimension, but of a somewhat lower order to a cosm; a cosm can have more than one plane in it. Anyway, the demon plane is this weird, chaotic realm of shifting realities, populated by demons that aren’t really described but who (from the artwork and the references in the text) seem to be your typical goat-footed, horn-headed, chubby little devils. The players can run into a particularly nerdy one who they can save from a bunch of demon bullies. Heh, I love it. Anyway, he can then assure them that no one from the plane has kidnapped any wizards.

Chislethwaite is where it’s at. It’s a Core Earth hardpoint, for some reason, and it’s also been quarantined from the rest of London to keep all the scum and lowlifes from running rampant. Okay, again I am noticing a certain high-handedness in the way Ardinary governs, and I’m still not sure whether it’s meant to be intentional or not. Regardless, going there the players have to deal with street gangs, Cockney goblins, and a big rat that snatches a scrap of their clothing – the last of which Will Be Relevant Later. They eventually learn that Babbidge was indeed snatched by some hoodlums from Chislethwaite under cover of a Core Earth talisman, and that it was on the orders of a dark wizard called Amethyst who operates out of an abandoned missile base in York. They also handed over a weird magic chalice along with him.

So off to York it is, where they find the missile base partly transformed to match Ayslish reality – it’s part wooden buildings and stockades, part concrete and electric fences. It also contains Lance the metal golem, who is actually a transformed Lance missile. He fights for Amethyst, but he can be disposed of by pushing a button in his lair – that “launches” him, and he stomps off in the direction of Leningrad. Heh. Amethyst also has some trolls, a pack of mastiffs, and a whole bunch of human warriors, some of them with modern weapons that they’ll use until they trigger a contradiction. In the end, the players find him to have fled with the Possibility Chalice but to have left Babbidge behind to be rescued.

The players chase Amethyst to the coast, where he sets off to sea in a Viking longship, hoping to reach Norway and give the Possibility Chalice to Uthorion there. The players can commandeer a boat of their own, and the race is on. I feel that a race by sailing ships is a little less high-octane than the multi-participant car chase we got last time, the fact that Amethyst is cheating with magical winds and throwing fireballs at the pursuers notwithstanding…

Anyway, the players quickly attract some help in the form of Uvwe seal-shifters. It says to find more information about them in the Aysle sourcebook, but I can still swear that there is not a word about them there! They’ve got green skin and webbed fingers, apparently, and their spokesperson is a hot nekkid chick, because this was the early 90s and game designers didn’t even try to hide that they were horny.

Amethyst summons a water dragon to attack the players. The players can fight it alongside the Uvwe, at the cost of letting Amethyst flee into a hastily conjured mist, or they can be Hard Men Making Hard Decisions and let the Uvwe sacrifice themselves against the dragon so they can push on. If they do the former, they’ll need to find the longship in the fog somehow, but once they do the Uvwe can sneak them onboard pretty easily. If they do the latter, Amethyst rolls multiple 20s (the book freely admits how unlikely that is, but Torg never shrinks from railroading, and I think the writers really wanted to punish players who tried to be Hard Men Making Hard Decisions) and manages to throw a fireball that sinks the players’ boat, forcing them to swim to the longship and get on board.

So then it’s fight-fight-fight until the players manage to bring down Amethyst and nab the Possibility Chalice. Amethyst doesn’t really want to fight them but will try to cast an illusion to appear as a run-of-the-mill Viking warrior, then cast a flight spell to escape when no one is watching. Still, presumably the players can outsmart him and get their hands on the goodies. Whew.

Got to admit, this one was a step down from the last one. It’s not terrible, but it feels kind of drab in comparison. The first act is mostly about fighting Nippon Tech, which we’ve already spent a lot of time doing, and after that it’s all Aysle, all the time – and it doesn’t even use Aysle to particular advantage, mostly just sending a lot of big guys with swords at the players instead of utilising the rich selection of critters that Aysle has to offer. I think I’d rather have had the temple be located inside the Orrorsh realm, so we could get that flavour in, and then have Amethyst flee towards the Cyberpapacy and run into whatever Malraux has for a coast guard. Spice it up a bit – one of the cardinal rules of Torg is that nothing should ever be simple, and most of this adventure felt pretty simple.

But oh well. We’ll see what happens next time, when the story concludes in The Hidden City.

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.

Paranoia readthrough: Clones in Space

Previously on our Paranoia readthrough:

Moving along through the first edition of Paranoia, we reach the point where Alpha Complex was officially not large enough (or at least, not diverse enough) anymore, and the game felt the need to explore brave new horizons. Specifically, it ventured into Earth orbit. Funny thing, that was the first place Cyberpunk went off to, too, when it came around a few years later… Anyway, there will, naturally, be bug-eyed monsters and evil computers (well, more evil than usual). And explosive decompression. A lot of that.

Before anything else, we get one of those choose-your-own-adventure portions that have sadly gone out of fashion. Awww, that’s nice.

The adventure proper starts with the players needing to escort a traitor to his execution while he spouts cryptic-yet-ominous phrases. The book cheerfully tells you that this has nothing to do with anything that will follow, but it’ll drive the players crazy trying to figure out how it all factored in. Heh.

The players then get sent after traitorous High Programmer Bette-U-LYF, who is actually a recurring character – she was one of the shadowy figures screwing with the players back in The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues, though none of that has any relevance here (especially since that one likely ended with Alpha Complex blowing up, and is thus even less canon than anything else in Paranoia). She’s escaped to orbit, where a bunch of old space stations are still floating around.

Since the players won’t have access to the CRUD system introduced in Send in the Clones up there, they get their full clone families sent along with them, which is kind of like trying to herd along a class of hyperactive children. The GM is instructed to act out each player’s most annoying habits, though that sounds to me like it might breed genuine and non-fun ill-will… Still, it’s an interesting variation, and like the game points out, it does put the players to the choice of whether to execute some of their clones to restore order when needed, even though that uses up their “extra lives.”

So up the players go, into the first space station. It’s a relatively harmless one, where most of the dangers are in the form of schmuck bait – the players, after all, don’t even know that the Earth revolves around the sun, or indeed that the sun exists, so they have approximately zero knowledge of how to safely navigate a space station without accidentally blowing themselves out an airlock. In the course of their explorations, they’ll encounter a hatched alien egg and accidentally trigger a very life-like (as in: they will have no way of knowing that it’s not real until it ends and they realise that they’re not dead) simulation of the station crashing to the ground.

They eventually manage to catch a shuttle to the next station. There are two unhatched alien eggs in the shuttle. They actually won’t hatch while on route, but they’re located in the dark behind the passenger seats, and they keep pulsating and making creepy noises. Muahahaha.

The second station is a bit more dangerous. It’s populated by bots who have set up their own society, complete with different backbiting factions – one who wants to bring their broken-down controlling Computer back online, one that wants to prevent that from happening, and one that just hates humans on general principle. The latter isn’t quite as much of a problem as it seems, since the bots are under the impression that the players are “androids,” but of course that means that they might try to perform “maintenance” on them, which will include replacing some of those highly obsolete arms and legs with the latest model…

Also, the Computer-loyal bots have gotten it into their heads that the players are the Chosen Ones who will awaken their master from its “slumber” (it’s in pieces all over the floor, so that’s unlikely to happen, but that’s why you call it faith). Which, as it turns out, is less of a cushy job than it sounds, since they’re meant to awaken it by being ritually sacrificed before it. And then the other factions attack. And the alien who hatched from the egg back at the first station. So mayhem, basically.

The players hopefully manage to limp along to a third station, which is run by a functioning Computer that is even more of a hardass than the Alpha Complex Computer. It’s got a problem, though it won’t admit to it – it keeps getting boarded by these annoyingly bulletproof aliens called the Shmegegi. Those eggs that keep turning up aren’t theirs, incidentally, but they are laid by a species they use as servants and attack dogs. Anyway, the station Computer decide that the players can probably fix the whole thing somehow and throws them at the alien ship.

The players stumble through a weird alien menagerie of bizarre creatures (galactic travelers who have bought passage on the Shmegegi ship) before finally encountering the Shmegegi themselves. Who are stuffy British stereotypes, only with lots of tentacles. They are here to steal Earth’s women, their own having gone extinct, but they are too uptight and proper to do anything as uncouth as force themselves on them, so their plan is more about awkwardly courting them in old-fashioned ways. They’re keeping Bette-U-LYF captive for this purpose (she originally hoped to broker some sort of deal with them to get back in the Computer’s good graces, but it hasn’t worked out).

The Shmegegi “torture” the players by subjecting them to tacky and low-brow subjects, which the Shmegegi consider the most painful thing imaginable. When that doesn’t work, they are brought before their leader, the McShmegegus, who rants at them about how they will take over the world and how the players have a chance to be first among their servants. The players can accept, but then they’re fitted with brain implants that blow up their skulls if they so much as think about being disloyal to the Shmegegi, and sent back to Alpha Complex, where they’ll somehow need to convince the Computer that they’re still its loyal citizens. It probably won’t work, is the uptake.

The alternative is to follow Bette-U-LYF’s lead and escape to commandeer some “pie fighters” from the last platform, in which they can engage the alien ship in battle and eventually drive it off. Having done that, they have saved the Earth, at least until the aliens invariably return… but of course, they have no way to get back down there, and will inevitably starve to death unless they think of something really brilliant. If they do think of something really brilliant and get back to Alpha Complex, of course, the Computer rewards them with an even more fatally dangerous mission.

I got to admit, I love this one. It really manages to hit every single space-adventure cliche in the book while still being fun and surprising. It probably does herald the game’s drift away from Alpha Complex in the later half of the second edition, but honestly, I’m not sure I care enough about Alpha Complex to be overly bothered by that. We’ll see if I end up eating my words.

The next one is Orcbusters, where… the players are magically transported to a fantasy dungeon crawl. Okay, wasting no time there, I see…

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.