Differentiating Weapons in Flat Damage Systems

FLAT WEAPON DAMAGE AND WEAPON CATEGORIES

One of the interesting things about the Little Brown Books of 1970's D&D is how weapon damage and Hit Dice were modeled with flat D6 damage.  The difference between weapons was non-existent until the game embraced it's "alternate combat rules" and added varied damage and varied hit bonuses against certain types of armor, corresponding directly to certain Armor Classes in 1975's Greyhawk - booklet number 4.  The now standard variable damage and Hit Dice a rather large change that has been adopted wholeheartedly by the game, while the more complex weapon vs. armor rules are largely abandoned.  

I enjoy the simplicity and low HP totals that D6 hit dice and weapon damage provide, as the low values make combat more risky for players and far quicker.  The system seems to hold together better into the mid-level game as well with flatter damage and lower HP, as any attack has a good chance of removing a full Hit Dice from a creature or character.  With variable HD and damage low-level characters are more fragile (many monster and fighter attacks do D8 damage vs. lower Hit Dice totals) while higher level creatures are far stronger with their larger hit-dice.  Additionally I have a suspicion that injury from dungeon perils was never adjusted to be in line with the variable damage and HD system, and that D&D has carried the ad hoc nature of this change ever since.  My only real evidence for this is the way falling damage remained set at a D6 per ten feet up to the game's second edition.  Whatever the game balance advantages (real or imagined) of flat D6 Damage and Hit Dice  the simplicity of it and the way it flattens power levels of both monsters and characters is very appealing.  

I want to make player weapon choice matter however, without the fiddly weapons v. armor table or the implied vanilla fantasy setting it creates with its armor types.  It's been popular in the OSR/DIY/old-school D&D blogging community to discuss how to do this, to maintain the spirit of the Greyhawk weapon v. armor table, while using more interesting and simpler rules for some time.  I endorse this idea, and have tried to work varied additional effects into play during my games with the goal of providing combat options and spaces for some tactical decision making in purely narrative (that is without game boards/combat maps or tokens) combat. 

Having played in my OD&D based version of HMS APOLLYON for some time now I have discovered that the weapon effects are often ignored by players (and the GM) in the excitement of the combat turn, and that certain rules are less convenient/intuative to use. I have made some changes to the weapon effects/classes (originally pulled from several sources and authors) below, and I intend to use these categories for monster attacks as well, so the pincers of a Crayhound (horrible 1/2 lobster 1/2 dog beasts) will be crushing while the tentacles of a Roper are certainly and entangling attack.  

WEAPONS AND THE APOLLYON

All attacks aboard the Apollyon, like all Hit Die, are D6 based.  A dagger in the hands of a skilled user is just as deadly as an axe and both do exactly the same damage. Only two handed/heavy weapons do more damage, inflicting 2xD6 pick the highest (what some call the advantage mechanic).  However, to make weapon choice interesting I have created the following categories of weapon which each have a different combat effect.

Common Weapons Aboard the HMS Apollyon

The Fantasy Starting Village - Player Generated Campaign Setting

LAZY SETTING GENERATION

"The town of Gongberg is nestled amongst muddy green fields of rye and barley.  The seasons have been wet and the grain rust thick of late, and as always the waking dreams of ruin and fire haunt all those who depend on the tainted grain.  A lull in the interminable wars of the border lairds have filled the countryside with grim mercenaries, brigands and well armed madmen."

The 'fantasy starting village' is a cliched element of tabletop games, computer games and even fantasy fiction - some sort of homey place that defines the stepping off point for protagonists into the world of adventure.  While in video games and novels the fantasy village is a wretched and boring convention, it does offer a real advantage in tabletop games, where, unlike video games and novels, the world building must be a collaborative process as the players can both change things through their in game actions, the GM can leverage player creativity to make the world more interesting and an openness to player generated content can promote player buy in.  The Fantasy Starter Village is a great way to set the stage for this, and makes the GMs job easier.

Dragonfly Township will undoubtedly lead to Vanilla fantasy or perhaps something a bit more anime.

The Fantasy Starting Village is a great alternative to building out a setting, and while crafting elaborate setting material and background is a joy for many GMs it has certain disadvantages as it eats up time and encourages railroading (even good GMs want to show off the content they've created).  Worse there's nothing more disappointing then designing the basics of a full campaign setting and having players who only want to play a session or two before moving on.  For me the three sentences above about Gongberg would be almost sufficient to start a campaign. The party can find themselves in this starting village, collect a few rumors about what's going on in the countryside and go from there. 

I wouldn't want to start with less information though, unless I were to start with the other classic "You wake up naked in a cell" campaign starting point.  There are more flavorful variations on this hook as well - slave caravans heading to the temple of sacrifice, characters pulled from the freezing ocean onto a haunted miles long ship, shipwrecked on the shore of some foreign land, but all of these hooks take an extra step to both make the characters completely blank slates and explain why they have in in game world knowledge.  The Fantasy Starting Village  however provides a few clues, and better encourages the players to believe that characters have knowledge of the world around them.  A few evocative clues in the description are almost all one needs to help the players build a world and to constrain player world-building to a degree as well. Using the example of Gongberg above, one can extrapolate a few setting details, but they are hopefully vague enough to allow the players to take the information in a variety of directions.

2015 One page Dungeon

The Walking Mountain

The One Page Dungeon Contest is upon us all again, and I've been thinking of some possibilities.  Below are the five ideas I've been toying with.  So far I'm leaning towards No. 1, but it might be far too big a concept for a single page...

1. The Crawling Mountain - A doom of cities out of strange Vheissu comes.  Encrusted with the Dolmen and temples of dead cities it the thunderous cracking and crash of it's coming drives civilization before it.  Can it be stopped? Can it be turned from it's path of destruction? Can the riches and secrets of the cities and towns it has crushed, scattered across the Mountain's snowy flanks be plundered?

2. The Fallen Throne - One of the celestial thrones has fallen, and lays cracked and tumbled in the meadow lands.  The edifice is cracked but sound and the celestials within a hive of furious wrath.  Winged babies and alabaster hounds roam the countryside defacing or stealing anything beautiful they discover, for the Angelic Thrones are jealous and declare that all grace, and all refinement are theirs alone.  Singers are made voiceless, the winsome faceless and the graceful lumpen. The Throne must crumble and the host within be banished or destroyed.

3. Collector of Ships - The Azure Ladon has always been a threat to shipping, but recently the petulant sea serpent has committed the most notorious outrage by crushing the funeral barge of the Basileus within his spined blue coils and dragging the dead ruler's body and treasures back to his floating palace of broken and lost ships. 

4. Down and Out in the Capitol - Within the Favelas of the lower city there are all manner of desperate goings on, depraved violence and nefarious ignominies for the proper people to ignore.  It's not you job to ignore them though, it's your job to go into the infamous maze of Panhass Alley and take part in the dirty deeds there.  Powerful forces are willing to pay for theft, rescue, assassination, arson within the crumbled tenements that cover the alley, but the local Vigilant Ant Set criminal organization is numerous, territorial and fond of brutal violence 

5.You get the Shaft - Crime you didn't commit? Crime you did commit?  It doesn't matter, the public loves to see strangers forced into "The Shaft" and hear their cries as they beg for forgiveness and succor. Stripped naked and loaded into the buckets of the ancient works, each turn of the capstan drops the condemned lower and lower, while the villagers above get drunker and drunker in the spring sunshine. While it's law that those who go down the shaft do so with nothing, tradition holds that there's nothing wrong with tossing useful items in after convicts who debase themselves for the crowd in amusing ways.  Can you survive the Shaft, find the tools you'll need in the darkness and foul miasmas and make your way back to the surface?    

Strange Stars

Strange Stars

Trey of Sorcerer's Skull has put out another book, though not the long awaited follow-up to his pulp/fantasy 1920's Americana setting book Weird Adventures.  While Trey's most recent book is system agnostic, even more so than Weird Adventures, it is a sci-fi setting book, much larger in scope then Weird Adventures that offers a combination of pulp Buck Roger's style Space Opera and more contemporary post human sci-fi - something a bit like Glenn Cook's "Dragon Never Sleeps" or the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks. There appear to be plans to release some likely free rules for Strange Stars using both FATE (written by John Till of FateSf) and Stars Without Numbers, which is my personal favorite OSR sci-fi ruleset (it's a B/X mod, and very excellent).

Alternate, unused Strange Stars covers

As a product Strange Stars maintains a very high quality, with a great deal of excellent art (so much that it sometimes overwhelms the writing), good design and a very polished appearance uncommon in small press or solo publications. The content within provides a sweeping view of a game universe that is a standard enough science fiction setting, with some interesting tweaks and changes.  Nothing as bold as Weird Adventures, but then the fictional ground of galaxy sprawling space opera is a lot more well-trodden then that of 20's fantasy pulp (which I think is limited to the Silver John stories by Wade-Wellman).  With this Constraint does a good job and is a fun read, though I wish it was a little less overarching and a little more narrowly focused on adventuring within the Strange Stars.  At the heart Strange Stars is a gazetteer, though not in a detail oriented manner that lists trade goods and populations.  The book lays out outlines for cultures scattered about in a mostly post-human space, provides a sense of history where the possibilities for adventure includes both ancient wreck hunting and space mafia schemes. 

Luceat Lux Vestra - Making Light Management More Interesting in Old School Games.

LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS

In the dark gulfs beneath the earth, the ancient places where thick darkness wells up a hungry oil of ebon malice the greatest weapon of the brave explorer is not sword or axe, but light.  Each guttering torch and cheap tin lantern is a tiny fragment from the world above, a piece of the sun. Without light the soft creatures of the overworld have no hope; the sharpest blade cannot cut the horror it doesn't see, and the stealthiest pilferer cannot find the bright gold and jewels concealed in the gloom without a telltale glimmer.

THE OLD SCHOOL BASIS

Looking through the old 1974-79 edition of Dungeons and Dragons (Original D&D or The Little Brown Books) one finds an interesting passage about dungeon exploration on Underworld Adventures, page 9 about lighting and surprise. A pair of short paragraphs are the only mention of how light works as a rules mechanic in the Little Brown Books, though torches, lanterns and oil flasks are mentioned as items for purchase (though without a given encumbrance weight).

"In the underworld some light source or infravision spell must be used. Torches, lanterns and magic swords will illuminate the way, but they also allow monsters to "see" the users so that monsters will never be surprised unless coming through a door. Also, torches can be blown out by a strong gust of wind. Monsters are assumed to have permanent infravision as long as they are not serving some character." Underworld Adventures, Page 9, Gygax & Arneson (1979).

William Blake, 1794 - A standby for creepy game imagery

A second short paragraph reiterates the surprise rules a bit down the page.  These rules are interesting in that they assert a necessity of light sources for dungeon exploration, assume infravision is a spell (and so a limited resource) and radically change the way encounters run in the underworld, because the party cannot surprise its enemies unless they are opening a door, and monsters still have the 1/3 chance of surprising the party.  When getting the drop on explorers monsters will almost always attack under these rules so light sources balance out the relatively generous reaction roll table.

Yet these rules don't discuss visibility range, light source exhaustion or anything else beyond how light effects the denizens of the depths. However the rules in Underworld Adventures do remind the reader that light works as a two way interaction, the underworld can see well illuminated players long before the players can see the creatures of the depths.

NEWER INFLUENCE

I am not really that beholden to old school D&D, and there's plenty of good ideas about how to run tabletop games that have come along in the past forty years and expand on the sparse and clumsy beginnings.  One game that I don't especially love (though I've only played it once) was Torchbearer, my complaints were with the implicitly vanilla fantasy world that seemed baked into some of the rules, and the Storygame tendency to reduce player creativity and problem solving to simplistic min-maxing mechanics through a bonus stacking system.  Yet, Torchbearer has some neat rules about supply and resource exhaustion, with abstract turns that rapidly eat up light resources and clear status effects as a result of being lost in the darkness. 

Building off these ideas, some members of the online old school game community (principally Brendan over at Necropraxis) have come up with an expanded Random Encounter die that I like to call an Exploration Die, and that includes not only the chance to encounter wandering monsters or environmental hazards, but acts as a random check for resource exhaustion (light, hunger and long-term spell effects).  This has the advantage of removing time tracking as a burden on the GM, and I find it both useful and fun in a less heroic fantasy setting.
A strict encumbrance system based of significant items slots (number of items carried is equal to character strength) helps make the choice of what equipment to big into the dungeon meaningful, as taking one item usually requires leaving another behind.  This means that the decision to bring enough torches or lanterns is a meaningful one, and that there is a possibility of exhausting a party's light supply even in a short session.  Additionally, equipment will need to be abandoned to make room for treasures. These rules also have the advantage of being harder to misuse then a weight based system, and are much much simpler to track.

Forty Fallen Empire Magic Items

MAGIC ITEMS OF THE NORTHLANDS 

Alpine Unicorn

Here’s a list of 40 magical items for my Fallen Empire Setting, specifically the Talpidy Lands along its Northern Border with the Pine Hells.  The first 20 items are from the North and use the shadow or more natural magic of the Pine Hellsman while the last twenty are from the Empire and its fading, rotten tradition of high magic and marvelous arcane manufacture.

I've also included a picture of an Alpine Unicorn, a horrible ghost eating predator of the Pine Shears that enjoys venting its considerable malice on human travelers.  

New Fallen Empire Project

I started up a new project the other day, a regional series of small adventures set on the Northern Border of my Fallen Empire setting.  House Talpidy is one of the few clans of Imperial nobility with drive and ambition, or at least some sense of stewardship for the residents of their land, which sits on the border with what were once the Northern Provinces, but are now known as the Pine Hells or the Ice Kingdoms.  Under an ambitious and active heir the Talpidys are hiring an army of mercenaries and fortune hunters from both sides of the border to deal with threats in their lands and reclaim their patrimony, potnetially including:

1) The Sword Barrow (See Below)
2) White Catherdral (A monumental series of salt mines infested with feral arcane machines)
3) Tilpady Husk (A near collapsed Imperial factory hive, still haunted by its degenerate workforce
4) The City of Alpanie (Ruined mountaintop city, long ago sacked by Northerners)

Below is the teaser and intro for the Sword Barrow with a map and some art.

SWORD BARROW

The Sword Barrow

Review - Wonder and Wickedness

WONDER & WICKEDNESS?

The Cover Includes this Cut Beastie

So Brendan of Necropraxis has released a product into the OSR o’verese, and this makes me very happy.  I can’t say this is a completely non-biased review, as I have great fondness for Brendan as a creator of game content, have played in many of his games and plunder his ideas with Mongol like ferocity and persistence.  All that said I am not always a fan of every rule change Brendan proposes and his relentless drive to pare everything down to its minimal mechanical elements (I suspect the man may dream in game mechanics) doesn’t always gladden my drunken baroque heart, so I feel I can pass judgment on Wonder & Wickedness as it is deserved in this review.  I paid full price for the product (as I tend to do), so it’s not as if my ethics have been suborned by the offer of free game product (could they be?  I really doubt it).

WHAT IS IT?

Wonder & Wickedness is effectively a modular "bolt on" spell system for your older style fantasy roleplaying game, composed of unleveled spell lists and an efficient minimalist approach to gaming magic that emphasizes the fictional idea of magic as inherent creepiness, chaos and corruption while trying to use the most elegant and simple rules possible.  It’s some spell lists, a magic system, magic items and an ethos.  Wonder & Wickedness would likely work best for a game based around OD&D power levels and mechanics, but is not exclusive to any system.  The book is also worth reading for other fantasy games, because mechanically it’s simple and evocative, meaning those who prefer more mechanically complex systems may have to adapt it, but they won’t find anything that is tied to another system and will find plenty of good ideas about running magic as a scary, powerful art with a distinct undertone of mystical foulness.

HMS Apollyon Player's Manual - Alchemist Subclass

Alchemy

The practice of Alchemy is at once one of both the most practical and the most mystical of the schools of magic.  A rigorous academic study Alchemy seeks to transform and modify the objects and elements of the everyday world (as opposed to controlling, binding and allying with their essences – the goal of elementalism)  for the benefit of the Alchemist’s individual body and soul as well as the creation of the “Magnum Opus”, a great work, most often an artifact of great power: The philosopher’s stone, offering eternal life, the universal solvent, capable of dissolving the bonds of magic and reality or Azoth, a universal medicine capable of raising the dead and curing any ailment.

Beside their contributions to the great work, Alchemists practice a form of magic less dependent on syphoning power directly from ley-lines or their own will and capable of using less power to gain similar effects by magically altering everyday objects.  Where an elementalist would bind a fragment of fire to an enemy causing him to burst into flame, and an thaumaturge lash out with a hard won tendril of pure unreality as a weapon, an alchemist will fling a specially enchanted dagger or sling bullet that seeks out and strikes the target (perhaps triggering some sort of chemical combustion reaction on impact).  As a result of the importance of mundane items in their work, Alchemists have many useful skills related to machinery, poisons and technology.  The Alchemist’s practicality is often lampooned by other magic PR actioners, and the caricature of an Alchemist, crushed under the burdens of his tinker’s tools, engineer’s kit, chemist’s glasses and disorganized research notes is a stock one amongst the schools of academic magic, mocking those with lesser talent for wielding raw power  but perhaps greater adaptability and genius.  It is a rare group of scavengers that doesn’t prize an Alchemist’s presence as his magic is no less effective for being tied to mundane objects and his broad knowledge of the sciences is often proves more helpful at avoiding danger then the puissance of a more focused sorcerer.

Again with far more legible PDF

The Haunted Dungeon - a series of tables

IN THE SHADOWS   OF   THE   DEAD

One of Goya's creepier etchings

Sarin the Mambo immediately knew something was wrong as the familiar hatch swung open. The pair of Shrine Fanatics, their unarmored bodies covered in devotional tattoos of ancient mechanical schematics - meanings lost, but the ancient clean lines still a lure to protective spirits of the vessel - could even sense something uncanny.  The two men, emboldened by the priestess' presence, cranked away at the hatch’s manual override wheel, but their loud chanting of the 537^th sutra to the Prime Engine shrank to a whisper. Beyond the hatch, the formerly domesticated companionway leading to a slaughterhouse and several large, elementally powered meat freezers was wreathed in fog, fog and utter wrongness.  Sarin’s various fetishes of the Winding Gear, her patron, felt as if they were vibrating atop her armor and her frail elderly hand tightened involuntarily on the cord that held the heavy mace to her gauntlet.

Sarin didn’t even need to borrow the eyes of the Winding Gear spirit that “rode” her and filled her with its power to see that there was foul magic beyond the hatch.  It was as if death, hate and sorrow were pushing out from the peeling wall papers of the companionway beyond, weeping from around every bent rivet in the companionway walls beneath, and dripping like curdled oil from the ceiling.  The fog was the worst of it, light from the lanterns held by the Mambo’s companions would not penetrate more than a few feet into the shifting miasma whose swirls and eddies gave an impression of intentional, malicious movement.

The slaughterhouse had gone bad, and those who had died within had not merely risen as common revenants or individual spirits, but instead corrupted the whole of the region, the fear and horrors of their deaths leaking into the walls and fixtures of the slaughterhouse to turn the entire area into an expression of hate, fear and a deep abiding sense of betrayal that sought with inchoate fury to punish the living for its multitude of deaths.