Best of the Web: Old Persons Game, Selling Dragons, and Monty Pythons Goblins

Old Person's Game
Dragons Are Real has an RPGaDay post called Evolve that ends with "I wonder where this will lead us in the next 45 years…I may not be around to see that but I think the hobby is save and will continue to evolve."  I've thought about this subject for some time and it will be interesting in the coming decade or two as the original grognards who started playing in college or younger start to retire and suddenly find they have lots of free time again.

I think a large part of the OSR has been the cultural divide between the young (who Wizards courted with increased complexity in 3e and 4e) and the old as grognards who have hit a spot in their careers that allowed for more home life and a returned to the hobby (they wanted to play what they knew instead of starting over). The number of new gamers will just increase, possibly ten-fold, as old timers start to retire.

I suspect the number of players will increase as well. Folks in a retirement home are less concerned with looking cool than they were back in high school, they might be a lot more willing to give the game a go.

Selling Dragons
Dungeon Fantastic has a post called Selling Dragons - did it come up in your game? in which he talks briefly about just that. I've never had players try to subdue a dragon but then the opportunities have been few and far between as I have always preferred low level play. Still the post got me thinking about how much fun it could be to have a campaign in which the characters go out and acquire rare beasts and monsters for the arena, or for the Wizards school, or whatever. They could be told where the things are by experts, and be provided with an appropriate cage and some bits of knowledge (some accurate, some sketchy), and then off. They have to track, capture/subdue the thing and get it back to get paid. And of course there are those that would want to kill the beast in revenge, and other groups interested in the cash to complicate things even further. Could be lots of fun.

Monty Pythons Goblins
I was reading through blogs and some commenter posted some images from the East German version of the Hobbit. The images were drawn by Klaus Ensinkat and I find them a fascinating as they were created before Rankin Bass and the Brothers Hildebrandt and Peter Jackson solidified the images of different creatures into our collective memories. The first are the three trolls.

The second are Orcs (or Goblins) in pseudo-Samurai gear.

I find these illustrations captivating for some reason and thought i'd post them somewhere that I can find them again.

Best of the Web: Clerical Heresy, Sounds of D&D, Foodies, and Backpack Background

Clerical Heresy
Long ago a poster named The Grey Elf was going through the AD&D DMG and posting their thoughts on the RPG.net forum and they had an interesting thought about the Day-to-Day Acquisition of Clerical spells that got my mind thinking.

"Third through fifth level spells are granted in turn, not by the deity itself, but by powerful servitors of the god or goddess--angels, demons, yochlol, devils, archons, and other supernatural minions impart these abilities as mediators between the cleric and deity. This is of great interest, since now the cleric needs not only follow the strict tenets of the deity, but has to avoid pissing off or foiling the personal ambitions of its all-too-free-willed minion as well. Nobody ever said being a cleric should be easy.
This also opens up really interesting options for play; what if a cleric violates the tenets of his god, but the deity's angelic minion has fallen madly in love with the cleric? That minion could, feasibly, still grant powers.

This got me thinking about the reverse situation. Imagine a Cleric is a staunch defender of the tenets of their deity but some of those angelic minions go their own way, a heretical split in the religions. Where does the Cleric stand when his connection to the God doesn't appear to be acting on behalf of the deity? Are they cut off from their deity or will new minions be sent to grant them powers.

Are other clerics of the same deity cut off as well? Do they know who is cut off and/or why. So much potential in both lines of thought that its amazing this sort of thing has never been explored before (at least to my knowledge).

Sounds of D&D
Monsters and Manuals has an interesting post called Sounds of D&D. It got me thinking about the soundtracks for different campaign worlds.

• Carcosa = Slipknot?
• Forgotten Realms & Pathfinders Golarian = Enya
• Glorantha = Woody Guthrie
• Greyhawk = Excalibur soundtrack
• Harn = Robin of Sherwood soundtrack (Forever free...)
• Mysteria = Rush
• Old World of Warhammer = Gwar

Totally pointless and arbitrary but it makes me wonder if those that create campaign worlds shouldn't decide on the sort of soundtrack that matches the expected style.

Dungeon Foodies
Skerpies at Coins and Scrolls has a problem with his players eat monsters and he's created a madly brilliant set of posts detailing the flavors of various  monsters. Monster Menu-All Part 1: Eating the AD&D Monster Manual and Monster Menu-All Part 2: Veins of the Earth.

Backpack Background
Desks & Dragons has an interesting post about using a characters starting backpack as a way to create background for the character. The post is called Your backpack is your background and it is a brilliant idea I need to roll around in my head a bit. The blogger wrote it for his own game Dungeonsnack (wasn't that the last post?) and I'm not sure how it might tie into mine but I like the background story coming out of the trivial, if the players want to unspool it.

Best of the Web - How to Business, Wizard School Generator, & City Generators

Blessings of the Dice gods has a series of posts providing business advice for gamers:

• How To Business Primer For-Gamers
• How to Business Part I: Basic Cash Accounting
• How to Business Part II: Marketing & Pricing
• How to Business Part III: Negotiations
• How to Business Part IV: Strategery
• How to Business Aside: Call for Cases

Ice and Ruins has a nice Wizard School Die-Drop Generator based on Harry Potter series. Don't know about the die-drop aspect but the normal tables are fun, especially the Oddities table.

& Magazine has a wonderful settlement generator that doesn't create map of the settlement but does generate business complete with name, owners, & menu of stuff for sale. This makes a brilliant companion to the Watabou  Fantasy City Generator.

Fantasy Heartbreaker: Spells, Domains, & Fumbles

Crypts & Things removed clerics entirely and bundled their spells into one grand list of spells. I liked this idea a lot. In the Conan books and Kane books and Elric books the cults seemed to use wizardry, not actually blessings or the power of their gods (which always seemed pseudo-Christianity). If they wanted the power of their god/demon they tried to summon the god/demon.

Crypts & Things also divided the spell list into Light, Grey, and Dark. This gave flavor to the three domains of wizardry but I wanted to go a step or two further. I wanted more domains, the more the better.

I love fumble tables. Casting a spell should not be automatic, and it should have some risk. I didn't want a different skill roll for each spell but dividing the spells into domains and having each domain be a skill roll worked. This also meant I could give each domains worth of spells its own fumble table, giving each a bit of color without overwhelming everything. I wanted weirdo spellcasters as in the card game Epic Spell Wars and this seemed a good way to go about it.

But what about the Clerics & Druids & Anti-Clerics? Well my campaign hasn't had any yet, just NPC. I use the old Chaos/Neutral/Law alignment and spellcasters just use Wizard spells. They may think the power comes from their Gods/Demons or spirits they worship but its the same basic stuff as the Wizards use.

Fantasy Heartbreaker: Vancian Spells vs Spell Points & Charging Spells

The Gygax school of games use Vancian magic. That is magic that is prepared for the day and gone once used, at least until the next day. Although I like some of the explanations of this, especially GROG games which describing each spell as a daemon which makes me think of spells leaking out of spell books in Hidden University in Disc World, I didn't like the mini-game of guessing what spells to use for the day and then forgetting them once cast. I prefer other limitations on spell usage.

Back in the day in RuneQuest casting a spell reduced a characters POW. Then in the third edition of those rules they added Magic Points so that POW stayed the same. OpenQuest used Magic Points as well. I liked the system but wanted more risks to casting so I decided instead of using Magic Points, or even POW (a characteristic I chose not to use) to track that spells I would use HP and eventually CON instead. That way casting has a noticeable limitation, it tires you out and makes you a easier to kill in the short term. The Wizard is taking damage for spellcasting.

OpenQuest  also allows a Wizard (well anyone can use magic in OpenQuest, but I scuttled that idea) to charge a spell with extra magic points to make it more powerful. Instead of Cure Light Wounds and Cure Critical Wounds being two different spells they have a Heal spell that you charge using magic points to cure the amount of damage you like. I vastly prefer this sort of thing. It makes the spell list smaller and more adaptable. It also makes things a bit confusing. I decided to allow for the flexibility but to add it as a feature using feats. Go up in level and you learn to increase the duration of your spells, or the range, or whatever. This seemed a more controlled way than just allowing any adjustments at a price.

GLOG does a similar thing in that when you increase the power of a spell you cast another die and if you ever get doubles its a fumble of sorts and triples is super-bad. So bad that most casters are unlikely to charge a spell with 3 die worth to avoid the repercussions. I love this dynamic but have opted with a Fumble system (later) instead. What I have done is every 'charge' a Wizard adds to their spell not only costs a HP , but it also adds a +1 to the skill roll which increases the chance of failure (but not too bad, unless you really want to power up that range or something).

Fantasy Hearbreaker: Major Wounds

OpenQuest has a system in which if you take 50% of your total HP in one round (or is it one blow) you take a major wound. There is a fun major wound table and everything. If you are reduced to 0 you die. Black Hack has a Major Wound table as well but it didn't excite me.

There has been debate for ages about at what point a character dies. Do they die at 0, -5, -10?

The range of every characteristic is 3-18. As mentioned in previous post CON acts as a characters flesh & blood. I decided to go with this and instead of remembering when a Major Wound occurred I would have the Major Wound table applied when CON was reduced below 3. CON reduced to 0 equals death. Simple, and it makes sense with the otherwise arbitrary characteristic range.

Fantasy Heartbreaker: Initiative vs Strike Rank

Strike ranks never did it for me. Rolling initiative once and having everyone attack in that order again and again never did it for me either. One minute long rounds seem super-long. Most initiative systems seemed overly complicated.

Back in the day we rolled group initiative every round and it worked very nicely. This gave you the chance to destroy an enemy before they had a turn but made the potential for an enemy to go twice in a row a real possibility which could be a nightmare.

My group took this system over to RuneQuest and HarnMaster in turn. I figured I'd adapt the same system to my heartbreaker except that instead of  having the high initiative win I'd go with low initiative wins. We were using a roll under system for skills and all so this would make for better consistency.

I settled on 10 six-second rounds in a minute. Having a six-second round matched the six possible results on the 1d6 which had a nice symmetry and allowed a GM to match each point on the die to a specific second if necessary.

So each side rolls 1d6, lowest roll goes first. Roll again each round.

Quick, uncomplicated, and with serious risks.

Best of the Web - Cantrips and Liches

Cantrips
Red Dice Diaries has two posts on Cantrips.

• Cantrips in OSR Games in which he provides an overview of Cantrips
• Cantrip comparison in which he compares cantrips against similar low level spells.

Delta's D&D Hotspot has a short discussion of cantrips and other non-combat spells through the various editions of D&D in his post Spells Through the Ages - Unseen Servant and Cantrips. It's a bit older but I know I'll want to find it again so what can you do.

Remixes and Revelations has a nice OSR: Lich Generator to help create interesting and unique liches.

Planet Algol has a post listing the various monsters restricted by the OGL that have been reproduced by OSR products (at least sort of) in Open Content Analogues.of WOTC Non-OGL Classic D&D Monsters.

Hack & Slash has a nice post On Failing High Level Play that has good design ideas for all levels.

Fantasy Heartbreaker: Armor Absorbing, HP & CON

Everyone from the Gygax school of games thinks of AC as armor helps you avoid being hit. Yeah a hundred hits might actually occur but they are misses, because a vulnerable spot wasn't hit the blow just bounced off. Those from the RuneQuest system think of armor as absorbing damage. Hits are more common but the armor absorbs the damage. The real difference is that the Gygax school means a lot of misses and then a blast of damage and the RuneQuest school has lots hits but then the fun is taken away as the armor absorbing it all and you find out you didn't do any damage after all.

OpenQuest use Dodge or Parry to deny a successful hit. Again, it takes away a successful hit. Gygax used  HP as an abstract way to represent dodging and increased AC to represent Shield parries. The info was built into the hit or miss roll so that success equaled damage of some sort instead of rolling back the success. The OpenQuest way might be more realistic but it slows combat and I hate when a successful roll is taken away.

Newt Newport (the fellow that wrote OpenQuest) wrote the OSR game Crypts & Things. A version of Swords & Wizardry with a Sword & Sorcery flavor. The two things that jumped out at me in this game were the treatment of spells (I'll cover that later) and the use of CON as the flesh & blood of a person while HP represented dodging, fatigue, and skill of not being hit. Gygax hinted at something similar once while explaining away increasing HP as a character gains levels. The idea of using HP for fatigue and dodging, and CON for flesh and blood is brilliant in that it allows a logical line of where dodging ends and wounds begin. A logical line of what might heal quickly with rest and what will require long term hospitalization.

So you could hit the target and do damage in the name of HP damage, but not actually cut and slice them up. You wear the enemy down, you don't have your success taken away. I liked how that worked.

The only issue with shields. Should a shield increase AC by a point, or by more, as Gygax did? A some point using a shield makes it impossible for damage to get through so that doesn't really work. I decided attacks against a shield would be made at a disadvantage (that is roll twice and pick the worst result). This represents the shield totally blocking some, but doing nothing when improperly placed and prevents the denial after-the-fact of a successful attack. This needs more play testing but like it in theory.

Fantasy Heartbreaker: Chaos & Alignment

I could be wrong but I believe most D&D games have moved away from the idea of alignment. RuneQuest games never had alignment but they did have an ever present 'Chaos'. I've never liked alignment as a guideline for role playing. I like Alignment as an alliance though. This way we can have Chaos and anybody that has read any Warhammer books knows how much fun Chaos can be. Chaos provides a great villain and awesome reason to adventure. I see the breakdown as follows:

• Law - Civilization. When it comes to religion they tend to be monotheistic and opposed to magic and chaos as disruptive elements. Some might even take that opposition to Spanish inquisition lengths as most believe Chaos threatens entire worlds. 
• Neutral - Those that are unaware of the Law vs Chaos dynamic or who think the forces of Law overstate the problem. These last folks will agree that some nasty beasts side with Chaos but not all users of magic want to conquer worlds or tear down the multiverse and bunching them all together is puritanical and wrong. From a religious point of view Neutrals tend to be polytheistic. 
• Chaos - Luckily worshipers of chaos rarely get together long enough to form a lasting force. Most folks that side with chaos are nasty things that want to watch the world(s) burn.

The alignments are used to create factions among the beasts and to create complications and advantages with various magic items, many of which were created specifically for this grand war between Law and Chaos. Alignment isn't about personality. Not. Even. A. Little.

Fantasy Heartbreaker: No Classes, Just Skills

As stated in the last Fantasy Heartbreaker post, I don't particularly like classes. After reading a lot of skills for the GLOG game I've changed my mind a bit. It seems that creating the classes has been a big part of the GLOG community. I like how everyone multi classes really easily and how classes have been used for Curses (which could easily be extended to poison or disease in interesting ways).

But I still don't like classes that much. All those wonderful GLOG classes fill the game with mini-sub-systems I prefer to avoid. However, I don't mind previous history the way they did in RuneQuest 2 or Harnmaster. Previous history is a nice way to differentiate characters at the start, by providing a pre-set grouping of skills and perhaps a bit of backstory. Then once the character has started they advance as they please.

I did need one class though. I didn't like the OpenQuest system of everyone starting with magic and felt I needed to limit that. By having previous history set up the characters I could ensure that if you didn't have Wizard as your previous history you weren't going to cast spells. So its a class, but not really. Then by dividing magic into different Domains I could create variety among wizards.

Fantasy Hearbreaker: Blending Two Systems

Like everyone else remotely associated with the OSR I've been cobbling together my own version of the different rules. Most games are a stew of parts tossed in and blended to the GMs satisfaction. If we didn't want to tinker we'd be playing Pathfinder or something.

So I thought I'd layout some of the framework and design considerations that I've been working with while creating my Fantasy Heartbreak I call Medieval Mayhem. I think the best place to start would be with the fundamental mechanic of the system.

Originally I used the OpenQuest system. OpenQuest used skills with a roll under percentile system. Percentiles are easy to grasp and OpenQuest had a limited set of fairly broad skills. It was skills done simple. Then I read the Black Hack. It was even simpler, but in a very elegant way.

I didn't like the way Black Hack had skill tests against characteristics and experience increased those characteristics. I prefered the OpenQuest skill list.  Skills could be increased through experience while leaving the characteristics themselves alone. The two systems combined beautifully.

OpenQuest was based on RuneQuest, and in RuneQuest type games they have lots of bonuses and penalties to show how difficult some tasks are. OpenQuest simplified this to a broad bonus or penalty which I liked. Black Hack did that one better (well D&D 5e did and Black Hack adopted the system). Instead of having bonuses or penalties  you have disadvantages and advantages. If you are at a disadvantage you roll your d20 twice and pick the worst one. If you are at an advantage you roll your d20 twice and pick the best. No math, and easily extendable if you want (severely disadvantaged the GM could have you roll 3 times or 4 times).

I divided skills into primary and secondary (secondary skills are 1/2 the average of two attributes, primary are the average). Depending upon your previous history some skills will be primary, most secondary. I was looking for simplicity and elegance and this was it. As far as experience points both systems simplified things greatly.

There was only one question left. Black Hack uses classes and OpenQuest does not. The idea of classes never sat right. I understand them as a shorthand to make character creation quick, and I understand folks enjoy the leveling up that occurs occasionally (and enjoying creating new classes), but the idea of a class defining a character for the bulk of their career felt artificial and more like a straight jacket and I didn't like it.

In a previous draft of Medieval Mayhem I had it so players could purchase feats to get special abilities. The way I did it was overly complex but the idea was a good one. You could get the same leveling up skill with limited power feats and I could do so without sticking to classes so much.