I Call Upon the Great Gazoo!

A lot of people don't like the Cleric class and its "my god gives me cool powers." Certainly, that sort of heavy divine involvement doesn't fit all settings, nor does the idea of granting the powers rather ran just performing miracles.

Another option would be the "personal genie" or guardian angel type character common to genre media. Jeannie and Shazzan are examples of this type, but I'm thinking more the smaller, invisible to most imp-type like the Great Gazoo, or in a less helpful mode, the impish would be side kicks of comic book heroes like Bat-Mite or Qwsp.

So when a cleric used a "spell" this would be this spirit/being doing stuff at their request. Why they would have such specific and limited interventions could be explained by them being "in training" or maybe just getting used to the Prime Material Plane.

(You might think this fits even better with the 5e Warlock and their Patrons, and I suppose it could, but their spells seem even less a fit than the clerics for this sort of setup.)

In media, this sort of thing is typically portrayed humorously, but it doesn't have to be. If you did portray it humorously, though, not having other characters be sure of whether the tutelary spirit actually exists or whether the PC is crazy might be amusing.

Making Fantasy of History

"I am Zorro. I have come to return King Arthur to the throne."

- The Simpsons, "E-I-E-I-(Annoyed Grunt)"

This post is a callback to my post yesterday (or actually the previous post it linked to), so for a full appreciation,  you might want to catch up. So DC's Beowulf bore very little resemblance to the real world of the sixth century and not just in the fantastic elements. It cheerfully dispenses with any actual history (or legend, for that matter) with things like a contemporaneous-to-Beowulf Dracula harassing lost tribes of Israel. Ahistoricity of fiction is hardly anything new--it shows up everywhere from Arthurian legend to Hercules and the Masked Rider--but for some reason in rpgs anything really crazy gets safely placed in Hyborian world-esque fantasylands. In Mystara, you can have your Not early modern France in the same world with your Not Vikings, but you can't have the real thing together, it seems.

Why that is, I don't know. Maybe it's the historical wargame roots of the hobby or the pedantry that is not uncommon in the world of geekery. There's the off-repeated GM fear of being called out for inaccuracy in any sort of game where the players might have deep knowledge. But I think the advantage of a obviously gonzo, ahistorical game (or "stupid ahistorical game" ) is that it's so obviously wrong that questions of historical accuracy are sidestepped.

I think it's time to stop being held back by the shackles of chronology, ahistory awaits!

The Weird and the Unusual

The difficulty with dealing with the fantastic is too-often repeated tropes/ideas become cliches, and kind of unfantastic. The D&D (read: prevailing) view of elves, dwarves, dragons, etc. has thoroughly mundanified and Gygaxian-realismed these things into yawns for a lot of people. Now, it's resonable to ask just how fantastic an element needs to be in a game about killing stuff and taking its treasure, but feeling burned out on the standard tropes has led to a lot of folks reaching for the Weird. It's funny that almost 100 year-old tropes can seem fresh and untrod territory, but fantasy is nothing if not a conservative genre, I guess.

The trouble is, those elements might get a little stale for some people, too, with repetition. So there's the New Weird or gonzo, of course, but I'd also like to suggest that maybe things don't have to be wholly "new." They just have to be a bit surprising, and those surprises can each be employed a small number of times so they stay fresh.

I think looking back to mythology and folklore helps a lot, because there are a lot of forgotten elements in those that make no sense from the modern perspective, and so have tended to be dropped from retellings. Medieval bestiaries are good, too.

Here's an interesting thing I came across a couple of years ago: "mundane" animals as treasure guardians:

Washington Irving notes the folk-belief that the spiritual guardians of buried treasure could take on the form of animals, such as toads. “Wild vines entangled the trees, and flaunted in their faces; brambles and briers caught their clothes as they passes; the garter snake glided across their path; the spotted toad hopped and waddled before them; and the restless cat-bird mewed at them from every thicket. Had Wolfert Webber [a man in search of treasure, but who was unschooled in folk-magic] been deeply read in romantic legend, he might have fancied himself entering upon forbidden enchanted ground; or that these were some of the guardians set to keep watch upon buried treasure.” Diedrich Knickerbocker (pseud.), “The Adventures of the Black Fisherman,” Tales of a Traveller (1825), 2: 356.

So replace a dragon or some other "fantastic" creature with just an animal, acting kind of strange and maybe able to talk. Adventure Time! sort of (I'm sure unknowingly) uses this trope with a frog that serves as a portal to lumpy space:

Monsters that want to chat, instead of kill the party immediately, are also a mythological staple that is not as often done in rpgs (though I try to do a bit of this in Mortzengersturm). This one can hard because PCs are a stabby lot, but it can help put them in the old school mindset of the goal being to get treasure, not necessarily kill things. A loquacious monster is a challenge, not an encounter.

Finally I would suggest the behavioral reskin (this is sort of a broader application of the talking monster principle). We're all familiar with putting new flesh on a set of stats, but a more subtler reskin will sometimes surprise players more. If goblins aren't following their Gygaxian role, but instead all consumed with building/repairing some ancient machine, maybe that hooks the PCs interest? Maybe it's only me, but I think backwards talking derro that can only be understood if you look in a mirror as they speak, move a known monster away from an evil dwarf back to the Shaverian paranoid weirdness.

Those are just some examples, which may or may not work for you, but I'm sure you can think of your own. Instead of trying hard to make things fresh and new, just make them a little odd.

Ozian D&D

There's been a bit of discussion on Google+ about Oz-influenced D&D. From its conception, Oz has been an important (though certainly not the only) influence on the Land of Azurth (particularly for the primary campaign site, Yanth Country), so I've thought some about how Ozian elements can be used to inform D&D fantasy.

First off, it must be aknowledged that "Ozian fantasy" may not be a precisely defined thing. The portrayal of Oz itself changes from the first book to later books by Baum--and to an even greater degree throughout the "Famous Forty" and beyond. Oz in the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is mostly uninhabited, and the places that are inhabited are mostly agrarian, but later books pile on more and more civilization. Baum's vision is of an American fairytale, and so the early books lack standard European-derived or Arabian Nights-inspired creatures and characters: The Tin Man is a woodsman not a knight. Ultimately, however, knights, dragons, and genies all become part of Oz.

(Anyone interested in Baum's American fairytale conception and examples of it in his non-Oz fantasies should check out Oz & Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum by Michael O. Riley)

With that sort of lack of specificity in mind, here are my broad suggestions for how to make a D&D campaign more Ozian:

Lost worlds/hidden kingdoms instead of dungeons: Whether standard D&D or Oz, exploration and discovery plays a part, but D&D's exploration sites are often known areas of material wealth and danger near settled areas that are usually purposefully visited to be exploited. Ozian sites are unknown or little known areas, accidentally discovered, like the lost worlds of adventure fiction.

Animated Simulacra and Talking Animals instead of the usual demihumans: Both D&D and Oz have nonhuman characters, but Oz’s are more individual, not representatives of "races." They also aren't the near-human types of elves, dwarves, and halflings. In fact, all of those races would probably fall under the "human" category in Oz. (In the first book, most Ozites are short like halflings, not just the Munchkins).

Social interaction/comedy of manners instead of combat or stealth: Violence and death sometimes occurs in the Oz books, but conversation and timely escape are the most common ways of dealing with problems. While this may in part be due to them being century plus year-old children's books, some of the exchanges in Dorothy and the Wizard are not dissimilar to the ones that occur in the works of Jack Vance, albeit with much less wit or sophistication. No Ozian villain is too fearsome not to be lectured on manners--at least briefly.

Magical mundane items or magical technology instead of magical weapons: The noncombat orientation of Oz extends to magic items. Magic belts, mirrors, food dishes, etc., occur in Oz but few magic swords or the like that you see in D&D or European legend. Oz blurs the lines between science/technology and magic to a degree. (The examples of this that are more Steampunkian or magictech seem to be unique inventions, however.) Pills and tablets will fantastical (though perhaps not magical in the sense the term would understood in Oz) properties are more common than potions, for instance. In general, foodstuff with fantastic properties, both natural and created, are more common than in D&D.

Faux-America instead Faux-Medieval: Ozian society seems almost 19th century in its trappings, or more precisely, it is a society that is not foreign (except where it specifically means to be) to the a young reader in the early 20th century. It lacks most of the elements of the real world of the 19th Century, however, like industry, social conflict (mostly), and (sometimes) poverty. It also lacks complicated social hierarchies: there is royalty, but no nobility.

Planetary Picaresque

We're all familiar with the Planetary Romance or Sword and Planet stories of the Burroughsian ilk, where a stranger (typically a person of earth) has adventures of a lost world or derring-do sort of variety on an alien world. I'd like to suggest that their is a subgenre or closely related genre that could be termed the Planetary Picaresque.

The idea came to me while revisiting the novels in Vance's Planet of Adventure sequence. The first novel, City of the Chasch, is pretty typical of the Planetary Romance form, albeit more science fiction-ish than Burroughs and wittier than most of his imitators. By the second novel, Servant of the Wankh (or Wanek), however, Vance's hero is spending more time getting the better of would be swindlers or out maneuvering his social superiors amid the risible and baroque societies of Tschai than engaging in acts of swordplay or derring-do. One could argue the stalwart Adam Reith is not himself a picaro, but the ways he is forced to get by on Tschai certainly resemble the sort of situations a genuine picaro might get into.

These sort of elements are not wholly absent from Vance's sword and planet progenitors (Burroughs has some of that, probably borrowed from Dumas), but Vance makes it the centerpiece rather than the comedy relief. Some of L. Sprague de Camp's Krishna seem to be in a similar vein.

The roleplaying applications of this ought to be obvious. You get to combine the best parts of Burroughs with the best parts of Leiber. I think that's a pretty appealing combination.

Modules in an On-Going Campaign

This is an adventure I've thought of using but would spend too much time changing it

In my gaming career, I haven't ran too many published adventures. When I was younger and had a lot of time, there didn't seem much point. These days, I can definitely see the appeal. I've run more since starting this blog than I did in all my gaming years prior, I think.

The problem is, either I'm too particular or my settings are such special snowflakes that it still takes a good bit of forethought and prep for me to be happy with them. In my Weird Adventures game, Castle Amber only wound up serving as inspiration to swipe a couple of rooms from for a sprawling, haunted estate. Jason Sholtis's Zogorion, Lord of the Hippogriffs was so freely adapted that the session served as the basis for Mortzengersturm, the Mad Manticore of the Prismatic Peak. I tend to alter them so much that I'm pretty picky about the fodder I start with, if only to minimize that tendency.

I wonder if other people have that problem? Do other folks with particular settings/campaigns just alter them to accomodate the "facts" of the published adventure or do adaptations like I do?

Can Willow be Redeemed by Moebius? Let's Take A Look

George Lucas's Willow is no Star Wars. Even though its made from the same sort of stock characters and the same sort borrowings from early sources, but it doesn't quite come together in the same way. At least it didn't seem to to my fifteen year-old self, and it doesn't seem to to me today.

Moebius's concept work, which I first glimpse in a magazine at the time, has only grown in my estimation since. Perhaps it doesn't suggest a weird fantasy Willow or anything that radical, but it does at least suggest to me a decent Studio Ghibli-esque film might have come from the material. Let's take a look and (re-)imagine:

Here's the titular hero and (I believe) one of his Nelwyn fellows. Nothing of the pastoral gentility of a Baggins, nor the too literal "small folk" of the film. These guys make me think of Howard's diminutive and declining Picts in "The Lost Race," but also aboriginal peoples like the Emishi (in Princess Mononoke) or Ainu. A sense of the Nelwyn threatned by humanity (or Daikini) would have been nice. I like the long earlobes, too.

Madmartigan is the rogue with the heart of gold Han Solo type, but with a bit more wastrelness, he could have been a wuxia sort of character, or Sanjuro from Yojimbo, or Mugen from Samurai Champloo--both of which are great swordsman, too. Moebius gives us a design that completely fits with those characters, suggests a world of ronin or wandering swordsmen of some sort.

So at this point, you might be thinking, "basically he's just going to say Willow should have been more Asian?" So now I'm going to throw you off:

King Kael here (General Kael in the film) is described as "bestial" in the third draft of the script, which he obviously is here. Perhaps he is a lover of Bavmorda transferred by her magic? A reverse Beauty and the Beast (there's maybe a bit of Cocteau's beast about him. Maybe)? Or is he the captain of the flying monkeys, so to speak? Anyway, he fulfills a bit of a Witch-King of Angmar role, so fleshing out his badass villainy would have been good.

Now, it's back to the Asian stylings. The mask suggests (to me) childhood mindwarping courtesy of Bavmorda for the warrior woman Sorsha. Maybe she's just go a slight blemish, but has been convinced its a horrible disfigurement a la (some accounts of) Doctor Doom? Maybe her inhuman beauty as a daughter of the Tuatha de Danaan-esque folk of Tir Asleen is her disfigurement to her witch queen mother? Note that the mask isn't just a human mask, it's go that single Oni horn. Probably means something.

Lastly, I believe this is one of two fairly divergent designs Moebius did for the brownies--but in an earlier script draft Willow and baby get captured by elves who are described as wearing "samurai-type outfits and angry little haircuts." These are guys who (in the script) collect baby tears as part of their gig. Now think of these sinister little guys, like a mashup of the Indian in the Cupboard and the evil faerie of del Toro's Don't be Afraid of the Dark remake. I think we could do without the French accent Lucas specifies for their leader, though.

On the Western

What follows are some observations on media in the Western genre (mostly film and tv, but comics and even novels are probably not exempt) brought on by a discussion of Westworld. These may be relevant to Old West gaming--if you want to evoke the feel of media rather than historic simulation.

Westerns are Fantasies, not in the sense of genre fantasy, but as in taking place in a fictionalized milieu. This is obscured by historical fictions in Western garb, numerous Westerns loosely based on real events (My Darling Clementine and Doc are both about the OK Corral but just about all they have in common are the names of some historical personages), and the fact that even the most ahistorical Westerns use elements of real history like locations or Native American groups.

But beyond the disregard for strict historical accuracy (a World War II machine gun in the Civil War setting of Fist Full of Dollars or The Wild Bunch's fuzzy placement during the Mexican Civil War) common to films, we have the almost ritual performance of emerging statehood in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence the mystery play of  civilization arriving with the railroad in Once Upon A Time in the West, or the alt-history Tombstone of Forty Guns.All these films have in common a heavy use of the tropes and elements of "the Old West" without any specific historical references.

Scenery is More than Location. John Ford put the striking vistas of Monument Valley in a number of films and in doing so placed it all over the West--maybe even actually in Utah at some point! When Sergio Leone gets to make a Western in the U.S. he shoots there, too. I can't think of a single grim slaughter or dramatic shootout in a film in the shadow of say West Mitten Butte. That isn't the portion of the Matter of the West that is performed in that sort of place. Men tend to die in narrow canyons or scrub desert plains in California or maybe Spain. The enactment of the mythology does not respect distance or realistic topography. A perfect encapsulation of this is Once Upon A Time in the West (it's title suggesting its mythic narrative): The town of Sweetwater and the rail station are in Spain, but Monument Valley lies between the two. Frank and his gang hole up somewhere in the vicinity of Mesa Verde. The generic West must contain all this disparate real estate in days ride or so.

One gaming thought related to the above: Would a Western work devoid of much of those real world references (no matter how thin)? Could you set a Western in some Ruritania-esque fictional state or territory? Probably going to completely fictional stand-in for North America would go to far (without magic to signify genre fantasy), but maybe not.

The Hidden Country Setting

A significant number of works of fantasy take place in some sort of lost or hidden realm within the real world: Oz (at times), Neverwhere, Pellucidar, the Savage Land, Fraggle Rock, Hogwarts, and some versions of fairyland are all around here somewhere. This sort of setting doesn't seem to have been often used in fantasy rpgs, at least outside of modern/urban fantasy.

I suppose their are reasons for this. The Medieval(ish) nature of most fantasy gaming suggests a historical(ish) setting. The scales many settings inhabit would preclude them being tucked away in some corner. Perhaps there's also a fear with the modern world close by it would be too easy for it to intrude.

These seem to me to be only relative contraindications. Most gamers (at least of the old school variety) are comfortable with plenty of science fictional or science fantasy elements that violate the pseudohistorical milieu  The scale may be sort of a problem (though Burroughs never set that stop him in Tarzan's Africa and a Hollow Earth could have plenty of space) and a smaller scale setting isn't necessarily a bad thing.

This sort of setting opens up some new elements: Lost-like underground bases complete with enigmatic video instructions, modern world epherma as treasure, secret societies working in both "worlds." Pretty interesting stuff, I think, with a lot of potential.

10 Cloverfield Lane and the Mystery Misdirection

I saw 10 Cloverfield Lane this weekend. For those of you wondering if it has anything substantively to do with the 2008 found footage monster film: the answer is "no." There are some easter eggs, maybe.

That's about it. For those of you who don't care anything about that and think the trailers look intriguing: you should see it. It's a decent thriller in a confined space with a couple of twists. In brief: Melissa (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is driving--well, somewhere--after a breakup. There are odd news reports on the radio, but before she can register any of this given her personal drama, she's in a car accident. She wakes up in an elaborate bomb shelter built by Howard (John Goodman) who tells her attacks have come from well, somewhere, and everyone else is dead.

Needless to say, Melissa is not immediately convinced that her captor is telling the truth or that his motivates are altruistic.

 From gaming perspective, you could say the the underground bunker in which Melissa finds herself is a variant of the mystery sandbox--or more accurately, a version of the mystery terrarium, because there are two mysteries in 10 Cloverfield Lane and only one is the protagonist (or PC) initially aware of. A game in as small a space as the film would likely need to be very shorter than the usual mystery sandbox or even mystery terrarium, but it show's the way those sorts of campaign set-ups can be made to work longer, by distraction with another, more momentarily pressing mystery.

Doing something like this, you get more time in a campaign before the Big Discovery. The danger is you build in too many "mysteries of the week" that the big reveal doesn't seem so big when you final get there.

The Truth About Droids

That BB-8 in The Force Awakens is pretty cute, isn't it? Too bad it and every other droid in the Star Wars galaxy is held in slavery in a culture so biosupremacist they do even recognize it as such!

This first occurred to me while watching the Clone Wars animated series. There was an episode where the  bird-headed (and brained) battle droids not only make poor tactical decisions, but did so due to over-confidence.

The humanoid species of the galaxy programmed these droids?  I think not.

Follow me here: I can buy that people might program artificial intelligences that make bad decisions--maybe that's just an unavoidable sequelae of having that level of AI.  But AI that are arrogant, boneheaded, dishonest, or overconfident?  That seems unlikely.  Yes, AIs like this do show up in science fiction, but they're typically unique entities, not armies of fretting domestics and slow-on-the-uptake battle-bots.  I mean, if that was just the inevitable downside to sapient droids, then I think people would just choose to do without them.  Seems like they're more trouble than they're worth a lot of the time.

So how does one explain the evidence before us in the canon--the fact that pain-in-the-ass droids are found all over the galaxy?

My theory is that the humanoid races don't actual make droids.  Those droid-foundries on Genosis are apocryphal.  I think droids are machine-life enslaved by the biologic sapients of the galaxy.

Probably your Walrus Man, Snaggletooth, or what have you, aren't out on slaving runs (though Jabba's treatment of Oola the Dancing Girl, and Watto's ownership of the Skywalkers might suggest otherwise).  I think maybe certain fringe biologic races or perhaps other droids, sell the droids to galactic society.  These droids aren't manufactured in the sense of being designed by teams of engineers and rolled out of factories, but instead droids are self-replicating.  They "reproduce" in some way (not likely sexual--despite what your thinking), and the resultant neonate intelligences go through some sort of growth/maturation process.  This allows for their (many) personality quirks.

I don't think droids evolved naturally.  Probably they were initially created by a long-vanished precursor race, or by the transcendent AIs that succeeded a precursor race.  Since that time droids have been undergoing evolution, changing in ways that have made them as complicated and flawed as any biologic sophonts.

So that gets us to the very real fact of their slavery. Apparently galactic society is just hugely bio-chauvinist.  Collectively, it's just culturally incapable of viewing droids as anything but machines.

I know this is the "canon" answer, nor will it fit well with everyone's version of the "Star Wars Universe."  But I find the science fictional nuance this adds to the universe compelling and gameable.

What I Want Out of It

There was some discussion this week (instigated by this guy and this guy) about what the OSR was and what different playstyles were in an out with what crowd. It got me to thinking what I like in a game and what I like to have in games I run.

As a player--or more accurately, as a potential player--my tastes are pretty broad in fantasy. I can see the appeal of bleak "no one here gets out alive" horror fantasy but also absurdist/gonzo stuff and a lot in between.  I think in what I tend to enjoy most in play might be a bit more specific. I have something of a preference where the characters are roguish to one degree or another: Cabellian wags, Vancian scoundrels, Taratino-esque hoodlums--it's all good. Not that I am averse to more noble protagonists, but this is more the default. I'n fine with hearts of gold, beneath the tarnished exterior.

I like a rich world with clever bits in it. It does not have to be super-detailed or require deep knowledge like a Glorantha or a Tekumel. It doesn't have to be coherent or particularly realistic. It just needs to show some imagination and inpsire me to use my imagination within it.

I prefer city adventures or relatively brief explorations/excursions to long dungeoncrawls or gritty hexcrawls. This may be my most heretical opinion, but there it is. I'm not saying I don't like them at all--there are just other things I prefer.

I also like to roleplay a bit, and I like for the roleplaying moments to matter rather than outcomes being strictly decided by rolls. I want to hear my DM do some funny voices. I don't want to roleplay every single interaction, though. Some things can be narrated or elided.

I GM the sort of game I like as a player, though it may be that I like to run adventures for somewhat more heroic parties than I typically play in. I'll have to think more about that and see if that's actually the case.

My NPCs tend to run to comedy relief and I do funny voices (not always well). Whatever else is going on, this tends to lighten the mood so even what I initially conceive as horror doesn't come out quite as horrific at the table.

I tend to be fairly low mortality and unashamed. I'm not opposed to a character dying if they seem to have a deathwish and persist in an unwise course of action, but I never set out to kill them in my approach or in my design. Player's suffer complications and setbacks a plenty, not often mortal ones.

So that's me. How about you?

Draconic Correspondences

This comes from a productive accidental brainstorming with Richard and Mateo on G+ yesterday. Something formed will hopefully come from this.

Chromatic Dragon Colors & Alchemical Associations:
Black: lead, vitriol (sulfuric acid), fire, the smell of sulfur, putrefation, phelgmatic.
Blue: tin, rust, water, acrid smell, dissolution, melancholic.
Green: copper, earth, saltpeter, chlorine smell, amalgamation, sanguine.
Red: iron, air, sodium carbonate, rotten egg smell, separation, choleric.
White: silver, alchemical mercury, after a rain smell, unemotional.

The Search

While I wouldn't call it a holy grail or anything, Aaron Allston's Lands of Mystery (1985) is a gaming book I have been looking for for a while--at a price that wasn't exorbitant. I finally snagged a copy this weekend, but I haven't got a chance to read it yet.

We live in an age where the internet makes obscure or forgotten bits of gaming literature easier to find than every before (though it still isn't always easy), and the same internet makes chance of finding a gem for a steal at some local used book store or comic book store is actually less than it used to be. There still a small since of achievement when you check one of the wishlist.

Anybody out there got any lost bit's of gaming history they've been looking to acquire for ages?

In Doom's Wake Autopsy

Art by Jez Gordon

This weekend, I ran the piratical/Sargasso Sea adventure I've been going on about for a group I've never really gamed with: my girlfriend's regular group and a friend of her's from work. This was most of the group's first time playing 5e--indeed, several's first time playing D&D in years.

In brief, it was a large (7 members) and eclectic party, with two gnome spellcasters, a human cleric, a dragonborn fighter, a human fighter, a halfling thief, and a aquatic elf bard. They were drawn into the adventure by the promise of reward and the desire to save kidnapped children after a pirate assault on the coastal town of Raedel.

While overall, I intended to play the pirate's and their layer for a degree of horror, the broadly played miserliness and cowardice of Raedel's town fathers probably started things off on a humorous tone, as did the Rabelaisian portrayal of the alcoholic sea dog, Saltus Crimm, who took care of the sailing in the PC's borrowed pursuit ship.

Pretty much what Saltus Crimm looked like

Some of the player's were inclined to sympathy with the pirates, after hearing the legends regarding Ylantha and meeting the townsfolk. I had expected either a murderhobo indifference to morality but keen interest in treasure or a heroic desire to save innocents (or a mixture of the two) to motivate, but hadn't counted on the PC's possibly wanting to reach a settlement with the pirates. Of course, this sympathy didn't stop them from slaughtering pirates at every opportunity, so I don't know if an alliance was ever a real concern.

The crowd coming from mostly a non-D&D background had at least one interesting effect. There was no real dungeoncrawling-style investigation motivated by greed. They wisely avoided places where the danger to reward ratio seemed too high, but thorough searching for hidden treasure wasn't typically on their minds. I probably should have dangled some relatively easy to find items in front of them to condition them to look rather than assuming seeking out material reward would be a goal.

Something I noticed in my regular 5e game was well on display here: the 5e blaster cantrips make magic-using classes pretty tough in ranged combat. An encounter where the ranges were a hindrance to both the pirates and the fighters with light crossbows was like a shooting gallery for the warlock with an eldritch bolt. The large size of the party meant the opponents were never really able to concentrate their fire on the wizards, either. If I run the adventure again (or complete it with that crew), I thing a few more pirate spellcasters are in order to make it a more even fight.

Overall, I think the group enjoyed it and I know I did. It was both a fun session and a good test-drive of the scenario.

The Moving Pointcrawl

Over at the Hill Cantons blog, Chris has written a lot about the pointcrawl, which abstracts a map to the important points, eliding the empty places/boring stuff a hexcrawl or similar complete mapping would give equal weight. One unusual variation not yet explored is the crawling of moving points.

Admittedly, these would be pretty unusual situations--but unusual situations are the sort of stuff adventures are made from: Exploring a flotilla of ancient airships or the various "worlds" in a titan wizards orrery; Crawling the strange shantytown distributed over the backs of giant, migrating, terrapin. Flitting from tiny world to tiny world in a Little Prince-esque planetary system. Some of these sort of situations might stretch the definition of pointcrawl, admittedly, and to model some of them in any way accurately would require graphing or calculus, and likely both.

Let's take a simple case--something from an adventure I'm working on. Say the wrecks of several ships are trapped in a Sargasso Sea of sorts. The weed is stretchy to a degree, so the wrecks move to a degree with the movement of the ocean, but the never come completely apart.

The assumption (to make it a pointcrawl, rather than just a hexcrawl, where the points of interest move) is that there were pretty much only certain clearer channels a small boat could take through the weed--or maybe certain heavier areas that a person who wasn't too heavy could walk over without sinking in complete.

The map would look something like this:

Note that this map is pretty abstract, despite appearances. The distances or size of the weed patch aren't necessarily to scale with the derelict icons. Length of connecting lines is of course, indicative of relative travel distance. The colors indicate how "stretchy" an area is: blue can move d4, orange d6, and red d8 in feet? yards? tens of feet? Not sure yet. Anyway, whether this drift is closer or farther away would depend on a separate roll of 1d6 where odds equals farther and evens closer. Of course, they can't come any closer than the distance they are away on the map, so any "extra" distance would be a shift to one side or the other.

Zigzags denote a precarious patch, where there would be an increased risk of a sudden thickening (if I'm going with boat travel) or falling in (if I go with walking). Dots will denote an extra wandering monster or unusual event check.

So there are a lot of kinks to work out, but that's the basic idea.

Games from the Crypt

Having returned from Texas with a 20+ year-old game (Wizards) I hear isn't very good (and I am unlikely to play in any case) and two 30+ year-old supplements for a game (Powers & Perils) I have never played, am unlikely to, and I don't known where I might have stored the core rules for, I am forced to ponder what is it about old games, anyway?

I am something of a collector, true and as Batman's Batcave and Superman's Fortress of Solitude have long demonstrated, it's cool to have a good collection on display. Still, books, comic books, movies--all of those I generally get the intended use out of as well as the collecting aspect. The games not as much.

There's a bit of nostalgia, sure. I remember seeing these things on shelves sometimes or I saw them advertised in Dragon and the like. I think it's also a bit of my love or history and archaeology. These products are a window into the past. They even smell old, whether through the smell of old paper only or musty rooms where cigarettes were smoked (and probably the less pungent Mountain Dew and snack foods consumed). They're a tangible connection to a hobby that, while relatively young, is older than I am.

How about you guys? Do you like old games even if you don't play them?

Your Own Cinematic Universe

I saw Avengers: Age of Ultron this weekend and my short review is: it's good. I'm slightly troubled by the degree setting up future films and dealing with "universe" concerns are becoming more and more a part of the Marvel cinematic experience, while perhaps paradoxically also miffed they seem to drop plot threads from previous films. These are small concerns, though. I didn't seriously impair my enjoyment.

I had some game related thoughts after the movie--and maybe this is something everyone else thought of a long time ago and only my comic-centric thinking has kept me from considering it. As I mentioned last week, superhero games are potentially bedeviled by the problems of all licensed property games: fan-players' knowledge and connection to canon, and on the other side of the coin, inaccessibility or at least a steep learning cover for newcomers.

Movies and animation all have to deal with that second problem (They have the first too in a way, but that crowd is much smaller for them.) and they get around it by creating their own universe, by picking and choosing from the existing mythology. Since anyone's in-game version of a comic book universe winds up being an alternate universe anyway, why not make it one from the start? To me, this sort of seems like the best option for getting the advantage of a established universe while having a good deal of creative freedom and not have to sweat your player's knowledge of the comics.

One final note: comics rpgs haven't completely ignore other media, but they tend to focus on trying to recreate the feel of certain other media adaptations rather than the continuity aspects I'm talking about. There haven't been any such supplements for licensed rpgs as far as I know.

Wednesday Comics: Timelines, Sliding and Otherwise

These panels are no longer in continuity. Best forget reading them!

The advance of years has led Marvel and DC to pull make changes to keep their characters young. In 1968, Marvel took the first steps toward what would come to be known as a "sliding time scale" where the amount of time from the beginning of the heroic age stays the same, even as more and more adventures get forced in, and the beginning of that age never gets any farther away from the present. This has been coupled with an increasing avoidance of specific references to current time or events--"topical references--though there are exceptions (like right after 9/11). DC does something similar now, too, but that wasn't always their approach. Earth-Two was invented as the home of their Golden Age heroes, so it was natural for it to also become the home of Golden Age versions of their never-launched characters like Batman and Superman. For a while, this allowed DC's characters to stay "topical" and tied to the real world, though they seldom took advantage of it.

Before "Marvel Time" completely took hold--throughout much of the 70s--Marvel characters stayed somewhat topical. This is best exemplified by Claremont's run on the X-Men. Magneto's past is tied to Auschwitz and the Holocaust. We are told Ororo "Storm" Munroe was born in 1951 and that was orphaned by the Suez Crisis. Jean Grey's tombstone gives the extent of her life as "1956-1980."

Did Professor X let a 13 year-old fight Sentinels?

This can't be the Jean Grey that first appeared (likely as a high school sophomore) in 1963, though. (In fact, it doesn't seem likely that it's the same Jean Grey in that talked about meeting the Sentinels in '1969' in X-Men #98--don't know what Claremont was doing there.) Like the Golden Age Superman slowing melding into the a Silver Age one, the Silver Age Jean Grey slowly became the Bronze Age one while nobody was really paying attention.

A lot of people might not agree, but I kind of wish the DC approach had been stuck with by both companies. Instead of squishing and distorting things to fit a sliding time with very little to link it to real history, why not just switch the particular version of the characters you're chronicling every decade or so? The Silver Age Reed and Ben that fought in World War II would eventually become the Bronze Age Ben and Reed that fought in Korea or Vietnam, and the Modern Age ones that weren't in any war, You can keep the things they wanted and reboot others for each era.

The Ethereal Prison

The Ethereal Plane as written in D&D is a transitive plane. It's a place you travel through or the medium stuff floats in. What if it were a bit less accessible--on purpose? What if, like the Phantom Zone is DC Comics, it was a prison? Maybe the gods or super-wizards of ages past had imprisoned renegades, criminals and monsters there?

If you aren't familiar with the Phantom Zone, read about here, The concepts a pretty simple one, though, even if you've never heard of it. Imprisoned creatures float around like ghosts.

This would have the advantage of differentiating the ethereal more from the other transitive planes and establish some interesting mysteries for PCs to look into.