Pretty much the curse of my life can be found in the phrase "go big or go home." I don't intentionally follow this creedo. I just always seem to end up following this creedo. It leads me to disappear from sight for long periods of time and then reappear with something huge which the world promptly ignores because tl:dr.
It's just the nature of the beast.
The internet is a roaring stream of information where even the biggest attempts to make a splash disappear in an instant. The only way to make it reach anyone is to drizzle small amounts of paint in the water and hope someone notices the streak. Hence the blog and the twitter and the facebook and the google+, all of which I hate (except for google+ strangely, yeah google's big failure is the one thing they've made that I regularly enjoy) but that's just me. I don't change easily but I am learning.
The big thing I've been working on lately is an attempt to bring to an end this quixotic quest of almost 25 years to create the perfect all-purpose tabletop role playing game. That's right, by finally bringing a single game to market I'm bringing a very long chapter to a close. This game has gone through numerous name changes over the years. Let's see if I can remember them all....
Theater of the Absurd, The ToAd, Tales of Adventure, Model Reality Kit, Agama.
Yup, that's it.
It has also gone through astounding changes of mechanics and philosophy where each of those titles barely resemble the other. The latest and hopefully last incarnation of it is going to be The Red EFT RPG. If you could imagine the Ramones coming back from the dead to rewrite GURPS into something that anyone could play, that is what the Red Eft is. It's designed to be fast and loud and fun. Is it the perfect tabletop role playing game?
Not by a long shot.
But it is pretty good. I wouldn't bother with it if it wasn't. I think the mere presence of all the thousands of different RPG's out there proves the point that perfection will never be found. And that's fine. The big thing that has me writing this godawful early morning (it's 7 am where I'm at) is that if I'm working on the Red Eft then I'm not being social. Of course, these days if you're not being social then you're busy sinking rather than swimming. So, for this blog, at the very least. I will try to keep pumping something into it by posting interesting bits and pieces from the Red Eft books as I write them. It'll give us something to do as the clock ticks down. And I'm always interested in feedback. Who knows maybe you'll stop me from making yet another disastrous mistake.
Doh! Too late.
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
Thursday, January 28, 2016
On The Value of Reality
"They quite literally make you harder to hit. But in most D&D and its derivative systems shields rarely offer more than a minor bonus to armor class. I understand this is done for the sake of balance and that realism isn't something that is of prime importance when it comes to fantasy RPGs - but this method always struck me as... well... wrong."That comes from a blog post about shield use in D&D and Spahn is on the mark but it's not the shield bit that interests me. It's the comment "realism isn't something that is of prime importance when it comes to fantasy RPGs - but this method always struck me as... well... wrong."
The truth about reality in RPG's is that we cherry pick the reality we want. Having shields work the way they do in real life matters. Gangrene? Not so much. Yet for some reason people can't bring themselves to see this. They always gravitate to one side of the issue or the other and seem to believe that the worst thing anyone can do is sit on the fence between the two. You're either dirty and gritty and calculating the ballistics of every shot, or you're riding pink unicorns across rainbow bridges in puffy cloud land.
My thought on the matter is that your opinion does not matter.
Not to yourself or anyone else because we all have this reality replicator inside our heads called an imagination which is always open to suggestion yet quite defiant when it comes down to matters of control. You can tell it to see shields operating in the traditional inept D&D fashion and your imagination will groan like Kip from Futurama and comply, but it won't stop thinking what a big idiot you are for believing that armor is more important than a shield.
So while it is good to have a game that runs smoothly despite having as little processing power as can be afforded by pencils, paper and dice, it is also good to aspire towards an accurate representation of the Real. It's what your mind wants, and it will keep your imagination happy, even in spite of yourself.
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
John Wick and the Toon of Horrors
Must be a slow news month, everyone is talking about John Wick and his decree that the Tomb of Horrors is the worst adventure of all time. Well? He's wrong, and his decree that Ravenloft is the best adventure of all time isn't right either.
It's all subjective. I remember playing both of them in Junior High and having loads of fun in the Tomb of Horrors and being bored to death by Ravenloft. Quite frankly I'm not a fan of Gary Gygax and when my friends and I played AD&D it was only because there was no better system which we all could agree upon. In a way, AD&D should be lauded for being as fraught with problems as it was. If AD&D had been perfect then so many people (myself included) would not have been inspired to go out and create much better games. We all would have just kept on playing AD&D.
The three things I remember most about Tomb of Horrors are people being teleported naked into various parts of the dungeon which was funny yet strange and probably best forgotten, somebody finding a hidden sapphire that they had absolutely no reason to know about which tipped me off to the fact that my players were reading the module behind my back (not happy about that but at least I didn't throw a hissy fit, Wick), and a TPK when what remained of the party finally encountered the Demi-Lich. Even with the forbidden knowledge of what a Forget spell might do to the demi-lich (as if anyone had a use for the Forget spell back in the AD&D days) they still got toasted. We used the sample characters out of the back of the module, so no one truly cared that we were basically paving the tomb with the bodies of deceased high level characters.
Oh yeah, and there was also a certain green devil mouth hiding a sphere of annihilation. Here's why it wasn't memorable....
Me (Junior Varsity DM Extraordinare): "At the end of the hall you encounter a large gaping green devil mouth with jaws spread wide, just wide enough for one of you to crawl inside."
Wizkid #1: "I shine my light spell into it."
Me: "Um. Nothing. The magical light is swallowed by the impenetrable darkness."
Wizkid #1: "Hmmm, could be a darkness spell. Could be drow hiding on the other side."
Wizkid #2: "I prod into it with my ten-foot pole."
Me: "Well, your ten-foot pole is now a two-foot pole, charred black from where it hit the darkness."
Wiz-kid #1: "Ah, let's not go in there. I check around the mouth for secret doors."
Gee John, now was that so hard?
If anything, the main problem I had with Tomb of Horrors is that it caused within the group a case of ten-foot pole sickness. Ever afterwards somebody would always be out in front tapping everything with a ten-foot pole. The floor, the cieling, the walls, the Evil Viceroy, the Queen of Spiders. It put some serious crawl into our dungeon crawls. I think I finally forebade the use of the ten-foot pole with the promise that I would simply ignore all traps. In truth, it's been so long I can't remember.
Which kinda sucks, because traps are fun. They're fun to think up and plan out (and read about in countless Grimtooth books), but they are very hard to implement, and that is because one thing which was missing from those early days was the ability to depend on the GM to tell you everything you perceive.
AD&D had no perception check. Instead you had the thief and the hairfoot would go into a room, check for traps and be done with it. It was an annoyance but a small one. Tomb of Horrors gave us traps that could not be detected and players responded with a barrage of ten-foot poles being tapped about like a blind-man's cane. In a way it was a unconscious admission that the PC's cannot see where they are going because they no longer trust the DM to show them what is there.
Later editions of D&D would "solve" the problem of the ten-foot pole by replacing it with the perception check. Now, instead of tapping everything to see what is there we had players making perception checks out the wazoo. It didn't actually solve anything. It just turned the ten-foot pole tap into something more dream-friendly yet still agonizing to have at the table.
With the game I'm (nigh-endlessly) designing I've settled on the "Save Vs Traps" event. It's more than just a die roll. It's almost a contract. The GM doesn't have to describe everything a player encounters but whenever a trap comes into a game, even the most oblivious of characters should be given a chance to roll the dice and detect the trap before it has a chance to go off. The players do not have to state that they are searching for anything. It is just assumed that their minds are always thinking and their senses always perceiving, and if they know what to look for they will get a bonus on the save roll. If they succeed they notice the trap before it has a chance to spring, fail and it hits them.
Which is not a perfect fix.
Won't people go back to tapping everything with a ten-foot pole to avoid having to make the Save Vs Traps roll? Yes. Which is why I say that it is a bit of a contract. If the players choose to do this then they don't get the Save Vs Traps roll. You can use one or the other but not both. Which is good because options are good.
I think back to that encounter with the devil mouth in the Tomb of Horrors and in truth, I prefer the way we did it. It would have been a disappointment to have the players simply roll the dice and detect the trap and move on. But. Tomb of Horrors is a special dungeon (hence the module designation), it is one where you should crawl through it, constantly tapping ahead of yourself with a wooden pole, one where you should have a rope tied about your waist and a bunch of people holding onto the other end just in case some some portal decides to suck you into it. Tomb of Horrors should not be taken as precedent for the way the game should be played. Too much of that and you get Steve Jackson's TOON which may seem like a simple cartoon-based RPG but was actually created out of frustration with people thinking too much and doing too little.
Don't let TOON happen to you!
Although actually do because TOON was a riot to play and one of the best games SJ Games ever produced. If I ever find the free time I'd love to rewrite Tomb of Horrors as the Toon of Horrors. Complete with falling anvils and sticks of dynamite. I wonder if John Wick will playtest it with me?
Muhwhahahahahahhahahahahhha-ha!
Friday, December 4, 2015
On Living 10,000 Years
There is an established narrative in fantasy fiction and gaming that Elves and Humans cannot relate because one lives so much longer than the other. This is total bullshit. Utter Poppycock!
It's like saying that humans cannot relate to dogs and cats because our pets only live a fraction of our expected lifespan, or that children don't matter because they haven't been around long enough. Okay, for some people this is true, cold bitter people, but for most of us it is poppycock! (And no, I just can't let pass any chance to use the word poppycock! Doh! There I did it again! Poppycock!).
For the most part we exist in our short-term memory. We can project a few days ahead of ourselves. We can easily remember backwards for a couple of hours, but after that all we have is long-term memory. Those memories - our proof of our prior existence - these we need to ask our minds to dredge up. The older they get the more decayed they become, the more questionable their accuracy.
I sometimes think that this is the driving force behind the twenty-year nostalgia cycle, that twenty years is the freshness date on human memories. We celebrate them as one last hurrah to their reality. After twenty years we lose our personal connection to them. They are still there in our heads but the vibrancy is missing, the dialog absent, the impact gone. It is almost as if it all happened to somebody else, except for the fact that we never leave the scene.
My point is that until we find some way of expanding the barriers of time which pen in our mind, we are all pretty much twenty years old. Which is not to say that we all act like a bunch of twenty year olds. We are what are memories tell us to be, which is constantly backed up by the physical state of our bodies. Progeria is a genetic disease that causes rapid aging in those who have it. Take a youngster with progeria, force them to live for two decades as a senior citizen in a retirement home, and while they will be able to tell you their age and logically believe that they are only that old, I would be willing to bet that their psyche would test to be no different from the actual senior citizen surrounding them.
On the flipside, imagine an elf who still has the body of a twenty year old despite having lived for 10,000 years. Considering that the elven brain has the same capacity and limitations as a human one, how do you think that elf would act? There would definitely be some very old memories bouncing around down around the bottom of the corpus callosum, and the idea of having another 10,000 years to live will definitely change the way one plans for the future, but plans are just hopes easily forgotten (unless we saddle ourselves with a constant reminder of them). When the elf's guard is down, when not acting ones age for the expectations of everyone else, that elf will have a personality primarily defined by the last twenty years of experience.
As do we all.
It's like saying that humans cannot relate to dogs and cats because our pets only live a fraction of our expected lifespan, or that children don't matter because they haven't been around long enough. Okay, for some people this is true, cold bitter people, but for most of us it is poppycock! (And no, I just can't let pass any chance to use the word poppycock! Doh! There I did it again! Poppycock!).
For the most part we exist in our short-term memory. We can project a few days ahead of ourselves. We can easily remember backwards for a couple of hours, but after that all we have is long-term memory. Those memories - our proof of our prior existence - these we need to ask our minds to dredge up. The older they get the more decayed they become, the more questionable their accuracy.
I sometimes think that this is the driving force behind the twenty-year nostalgia cycle, that twenty years is the freshness date on human memories. We celebrate them as one last hurrah to their reality. After twenty years we lose our personal connection to them. They are still there in our heads but the vibrancy is missing, the dialog absent, the impact gone. It is almost as if it all happened to somebody else, except for the fact that we never leave the scene.
My point is that until we find some way of expanding the barriers of time which pen in our mind, we are all pretty much twenty years old. Which is not to say that we all act like a bunch of twenty year olds. We are what are memories tell us to be, which is constantly backed up by the physical state of our bodies. Progeria is a genetic disease that causes rapid aging in those who have it. Take a youngster with progeria, force them to live for two decades as a senior citizen in a retirement home, and while they will be able to tell you their age and logically believe that they are only that old, I would be willing to bet that their psyche would test to be no different from the actual senior citizen surrounding them.
On the flipside, imagine an elf who still has the body of a twenty year old despite having lived for 10,000 years. Considering that the elven brain has the same capacity and limitations as a human one, how do you think that elf would act? There would definitely be some very old memories bouncing around down around the bottom of the corpus callosum, and the idea of having another 10,000 years to live will definitely change the way one plans for the future, but plans are just hopes easily forgotten (unless we saddle ourselves with a constant reminder of them). When the elf's guard is down, when not acting ones age for the expectations of everyone else, that elf will have a personality primarily defined by the last twenty years of experience.
As do we all.
Thursday, November 26, 2015
The Original Palace of the Silver Princess
Ever open a box of Celestial Seasonings to find a bunch of severed fingers hidden in the wax paper wrapper? Me neither. But that is kinda what it feels like reading the original orange-backed copy of B3 Palace of the Silver Princess. I don't own a printed copy but the pdf is freely available on the internet. Finding the time to read it over was a much bigger challenge.
Spoiler Alert! Read no further if you plan to play either adventure.
In case you didn't know, B3 is a Dungeons and Dragons module written by Jean Wells in 1980. It contained some questionable material, most notably a full page illustration by Erol Otus of some three headed, three armed hermaphroditic cave creatures called Ubues who just happened to have faces resembling prominent TSR staffers. This was caught just before the release and the entire print run was taken to the town dump. I suspect it was probably also the last time Erol Otus would work for TSR. A few of the orange backed modules survived making it the most valuable D&D product a collector can get ones paws on.
But is it any good?
The module was given to Tom Moldvay for a quick clean up which would turn it into the green backed module most commonly known as B3 Palace of the Silver Princess. Although Moldvay did completely rewrite the adventure, many of the same concepts remained (the Ice Harp, the Ruby Sword, Princess Argenta, etc), and to the map only minor changes were made, yet the end result are two very different adventures.
If you're looking for something fun to run with your friends or for your kids the green B3 is an excellent choice. Moldvay's adventure is an engaging, tightly written experience possessing a sense of purpose which is missing from the orange B3. The ruby called "My Lady's Heart" is actually the "Eye of Arik" and belongs to a demonic entity trying to find its way into our dimension, something the PC's are there to stop by destroying the gem. No, it's not the most original plot in the world but at least it is something. In the orange B3 we are told the legend of the ruby and the dragon rider who destroyed the land but that story is over and done with. The princess and the knight are long dead. The ruby is just another gem stone, one described as being disappointingly small compared to the tales told of it (I believe it's only 1" across). From the PC's point of view we are not really doing anything except pillaging an old palace that fell into ruin centuries ago. There is no going back, no returning the realm to its past prominence. The fairy tale world the palace one lorded over was irredeemably lost eons ago.
Or so it seems.
But not in a good way. For an "introductory module" the orange B3 does do a decent amount of hand-holding for the new DM but it also does a lot of information with-holding. Often I found myself wondering why Wells brings up all that she does. Unlike the green, the orange module starts with a lengthy description of the countryside and neighboring villages. And then it's gone. It might as well not be there. Two NPC's "The Tinkerer and his Daughter" are given a full page of description as well as an excellent Jim Roslof illustration, but they don't do very much. They are just there as a vehicle for the rumor table. It is hinted that they may have some greater involvement in the whole story, especially since the tinkerer possesses what sounds like the armor and dragon saddle of the knight mentioned in the legend, but that too just stops. At first I thought the tinkerer was supposed to be the knight from the legend but later it is revealed that the knight as well as the princess are now ghosts haunting the room the ruby is in. To a degree these feel like creative prompts designed to give the DM interesting directions in which to take the adventure. Still though, it would be better to know the whole scheme of things before considering its tangents.
One spot where the orange module does excel is in the matter of description. Inside and outside of the text boxes (actually more outside than in them) Well's writing shines with a literary flair, often feeling more like a deconstructed novel where Moldvay's is more like a DIY cartoon. She had a good eye for detail and is quite skilled at making the palace seem like a fairy tale grown decrepit with time, often fluctuating between dreamy fancy and musty cob-webbed rot.
The Ubues. The Ubues are a head-shaker. According to an interview with Wells they were inspired by a joke one of her gaming friends used to abuse at the table, meaning it was probably inspired by the three headed knight from Monty Python's Holy Grail. Yet in the module they are far more feral and degenerate. They were hideous long before Erol Otus decided to illustrate them. The whole bit about ubue shaman killing off baby ubues when too many are born? Back in the 80's? Knee deep in the Satanic Panic? It's no wonder management threw a shit fit when they saw it.
Management also had a conniption over "the illusion of the decapus" which presents a nearly naked woman hung up by her hair and being tormented by wild men and their swords. The editor wanted to know why they were putting S&M in an adventure meant for kids. Wells and crew didn't know what S&M was. She explains the illusion as being there to get the paladins to rush into the room.
Two interesting side notes: there are no paladins in B/X D&D, and TSR management did know what S&M was. Beware of supervisors bearing ball gags.
Probably the strangest thought I had while reading the orange module is just how much it resembles Kubrick's The Shining with the palace standing in for the Overlook Hotel. Both are haunted by many spirits (and the orange version is far more haunted than the green). The palace also, possibly because of all the rooms which are described but left empty for the DM to fill with monsters and treasure, has a very vacuous feel to it. Like the Overlook it tends to easily fluctuate between elegant and decrepit. At one moment it feels like something beautiful and ornate. The next moment it's littered with corpses. An undue amount of attention is given to bathing and how water works. In room 10 on the upper level, it is in a bathroom with magical hot and cold running water that we first encounter an ubue, possibly a parallel to the ghost of the woman in room 237 from the Shining - both of which are totally hideous.
Then there is Travis. This crazy old guy is a first level fighter with AC 7, four hit points, and a meat cleaver for a weapon. Gamewise, he's not even an orc's worth of challenge. Yet his presence dominates a number of rooms in his wing of the palace. He even has a writing desk containing quill and ink and empty scrolls of parchment. If given the chance I wonder what he would write?
All work and no dungeon crawl makes Travis a dull boy.
All work and no dungeon crawl makes Travis a dull boy.
All work and no dungeon crawl makes Travis a dull boy.
All work and no dungeon crawl makes Travis a dull boy.
All work and no dungeon crawl makes Travis a dull boy.
All work and no dungeon crawl makes Travis a dull boy.
All work and no dungeon crawl makes Travis a dull boy.
All work and no dungeon crawl makes Travis a dull boy.
All work and no dungeon crawl makes Travis a dull boy.
All work and no dungeon crawl makes Travis a dull boy.
All work and no dungeon crawl makes Travis a dull boy.
All work and no dungeon crawl makes Travis a dull boy.
All work and no dungeon crawl makes Travis a dull boy.
The Shining was released in May of 1980. Palace of the Silver Princess went to press somewhere around December 1980, so it's not a far stretch to imagine one influencing the other. However, if so, then Wells missed one of the movie's best moments. The palace would do well with an iced-over topiary filled with haunted hedge rows that attack those PC's moving through them.
But is it any good?
It's hard to say yes, and it's hard to say no. Personally, I feel that adventure modules should be a bit like an elegant meal with everything on the plate and off working together to create a memorable experience, so I don't care for modules like B1 In Search of the Unknown which gives you a framework and invites you to stock it. If you want to do that you might as well get out the dungeon geomorphs and roll some dice to randomly stock the rooms.
Of course, with this said, you can't fault Well's for taking this approach. It's a level 1 to 3 adventure. Leaving the palace at its default level of emptiness is probably the only way a small group of first level adventurers will survive their way through it. Also, if you want to do a more story-orientated game, possibly your own version of the Shining with Travis chasing a bunch of frightened 1st level adventurers through a largely abandoned palace - it can do that. B2's The Caves of Chaos cannot.
For every flaw that the orange B3 seems to have there is also some justification for it. The Ubues? The world of child-like wonder and innocent glee grown decrepit from the passage of time, hopelessly lost to a hard-scrabble existence? All of that would work great with a Lamentations of the Flame Princess campaign. Is it something I would run for a bunch of 12 year olds, such as I once was when my Mom first ran it for my friends and myself?
Oh hell no. Hand that Moldvay version over here.
Which makes me wonder about the nature of B/X D&D circa 1980. My copy says "For 3 or more Adults. Ages 10 and Up." When was the last time you saw adulthood described as starting at age 10?
I've always thought that D&D was not a kids game and never intended to be one. It was made to be played by adults and only marketed to kids in the 1980's because that's where the money was. Management probably tacked on the Ages 10 and Up fully intending for the box sets to be something they could sell on the shelves of Toys-R-Us sandwiched between Stratego and Monopoly. Meanwhile the game designers pushed for For 3 or more Adults since they learned it as adults and found it to be best played among adults. Jean Wells mentioned Paladins, which is AD&D, the D&D for grown-ups. The one they probably would have called "Adult Dungeons & Dragons" if only management didn't believe it sounded too much like S&M.
To management everything looks like S&M. It's the nature of the beast.
Now, if you'll excuse me I have to pedal this Big Wheel really fast before the wandering Ubues catch up with me.
Spoiler Alert! Read no further if you plan to play either adventure.
In case you didn't know, B3 is a Dungeons and Dragons module written by Jean Wells in 1980. It contained some questionable material, most notably a full page illustration by Erol Otus of some three headed, three armed hermaphroditic cave creatures called Ubues who just happened to have faces resembling prominent TSR staffers. This was caught just before the release and the entire print run was taken to the town dump. I suspect it was probably also the last time Erol Otus would work for TSR. A few of the orange backed modules survived making it the most valuable D&D product a collector can get ones paws on.
But is it any good?
The module was given to Tom Moldvay for a quick clean up which would turn it into the green backed module most commonly known as B3 Palace of the Silver Princess. Although Moldvay did completely rewrite the adventure, many of the same concepts remained (the Ice Harp, the Ruby Sword, Princess Argenta, etc), and to the map only minor changes were made, yet the end result are two very different adventures.
If you're looking for something fun to run with your friends or for your kids the green B3 is an excellent choice. Moldvay's adventure is an engaging, tightly written experience possessing a sense of purpose which is missing from the orange B3. The ruby called "My Lady's Heart" is actually the "Eye of Arik" and belongs to a demonic entity trying to find its way into our dimension, something the PC's are there to stop by destroying the gem. No, it's not the most original plot in the world but at least it is something. In the orange B3 we are told the legend of the ruby and the dragon rider who destroyed the land but that story is over and done with. The princess and the knight are long dead. The ruby is just another gem stone, one described as being disappointingly small compared to the tales told of it (I believe it's only 1" across). From the PC's point of view we are not really doing anything except pillaging an old palace that fell into ruin centuries ago. There is no going back, no returning the realm to its past prominence. The fairy tale world the palace one lorded over was irredeemably lost eons ago.
Or so it seems.
But not in a good way. For an "introductory module" the orange B3 does do a decent amount of hand-holding for the new DM but it also does a lot of information with-holding. Often I found myself wondering why Wells brings up all that she does. Unlike the green, the orange module starts with a lengthy description of the countryside and neighboring villages. And then it's gone. It might as well not be there. Two NPC's "The Tinkerer and his Daughter" are given a full page of description as well as an excellent Jim Roslof illustration, but they don't do very much. They are just there as a vehicle for the rumor table. It is hinted that they may have some greater involvement in the whole story, especially since the tinkerer possesses what sounds like the armor and dragon saddle of the knight mentioned in the legend, but that too just stops. At first I thought the tinkerer was supposed to be the knight from the legend but later it is revealed that the knight as well as the princess are now ghosts haunting the room the ruby is in. To a degree these feel like creative prompts designed to give the DM interesting directions in which to take the adventure. Still though, it would be better to know the whole scheme of things before considering its tangents.
One spot where the orange module does excel is in the matter of description. Inside and outside of the text boxes (actually more outside than in them) Well's writing shines with a literary flair, often feeling more like a deconstructed novel where Moldvay's is more like a DIY cartoon. She had a good eye for detail and is quite skilled at making the palace seem like a fairy tale grown decrepit with time, often fluctuating between dreamy fancy and musty cob-webbed rot.
The Ubues. The Ubues are a head-shaker. According to an interview with Wells they were inspired by a joke one of her gaming friends used to abuse at the table, meaning it was probably inspired by the three headed knight from Monty Python's Holy Grail. Yet in the module they are far more feral and degenerate. They were hideous long before Erol Otus decided to illustrate them. The whole bit about ubue shaman killing off baby ubues when too many are born? Back in the 80's? Knee deep in the Satanic Panic? It's no wonder management threw a shit fit when they saw it.
Management also had a conniption over "the illusion of the decapus" which presents a nearly naked woman hung up by her hair and being tormented by wild men and their swords. The editor wanted to know why they were putting S&M in an adventure meant for kids. Wells and crew didn't know what S&M was. She explains the illusion as being there to get the paladins to rush into the room.
Two interesting side notes: there are no paladins in B/X D&D, and TSR management did know what S&M was. Beware of supervisors bearing ball gags.
Probably the strangest thought I had while reading the orange module is just how much it resembles Kubrick's The Shining with the palace standing in for the Overlook Hotel. Both are haunted by many spirits (and the orange version is far more haunted than the green). The palace also, possibly because of all the rooms which are described but left empty for the DM to fill with monsters and treasure, has a very vacuous feel to it. Like the Overlook it tends to easily fluctuate between elegant and decrepit. At one moment it feels like something beautiful and ornate. The next moment it's littered with corpses. An undue amount of attention is given to bathing and how water works. In room 10 on the upper level, it is in a bathroom with magical hot and cold running water that we first encounter an ubue, possibly a parallel to the ghost of the woman in room 237 from the Shining - both of which are totally hideous.
Then there is Travis. This crazy old guy is a first level fighter with AC 7, four hit points, and a meat cleaver for a weapon. Gamewise, he's not even an orc's worth of challenge. Yet his presence dominates a number of rooms in his wing of the palace. He even has a writing desk containing quill and ink and empty scrolls of parchment. If given the chance I wonder what he would write?
All work and no dungeon crawl makes Travis a dull boy.
All work and no dungeon crawl makes Travis a dull boy.
All work and no dungeon crawl makes Travis a dull boy.
All work and no dungeon crawl makes Travis a dull boy.
All work and no dungeon crawl makes Travis a dull boy.
All work and no dungeon crawl makes Travis a dull boy.
All work and no dungeon crawl makes Travis a dull boy.
All work and no dungeon crawl makes Travis a dull boy.
All work and no dungeon crawl makes Travis a dull boy.
All work and no dungeon crawl makes Travis a dull boy.
All work and no dungeon crawl makes Travis a dull boy.
All work and no dungeon crawl makes Travis a dull boy.
All work and no dungeon crawl makes Travis a dull boy.
The Shining was released in May of 1980. Palace of the Silver Princess went to press somewhere around December 1980, so it's not a far stretch to imagine one influencing the other. However, if so, then Wells missed one of the movie's best moments. The palace would do well with an iced-over topiary filled with haunted hedge rows that attack those PC's moving through them.
But is it any good?
It's hard to say yes, and it's hard to say no. Personally, I feel that adventure modules should be a bit like an elegant meal with everything on the plate and off working together to create a memorable experience, so I don't care for modules like B1 In Search of the Unknown which gives you a framework and invites you to stock it. If you want to do that you might as well get out the dungeon geomorphs and roll some dice to randomly stock the rooms.
Of course, with this said, you can't fault Well's for taking this approach. It's a level 1 to 3 adventure. Leaving the palace at its default level of emptiness is probably the only way a small group of first level adventurers will survive their way through it. Also, if you want to do a more story-orientated game, possibly your own version of the Shining with Travis chasing a bunch of frightened 1st level adventurers through a largely abandoned palace - it can do that. B2's The Caves of Chaos cannot.
For every flaw that the orange B3 seems to have there is also some justification for it. The Ubues? The world of child-like wonder and innocent glee grown decrepit from the passage of time, hopelessly lost to a hard-scrabble existence? All of that would work great with a Lamentations of the Flame Princess campaign. Is it something I would run for a bunch of 12 year olds, such as I once was when my Mom first ran it for my friends and myself?
Oh hell no. Hand that Moldvay version over here.
Which makes me wonder about the nature of B/X D&D circa 1980. My copy says "For 3 or more Adults. Ages 10 and Up." When was the last time you saw adulthood described as starting at age 10?
I've always thought that D&D was not a kids game and never intended to be one. It was made to be played by adults and only marketed to kids in the 1980's because that's where the money was. Management probably tacked on the Ages 10 and Up fully intending for the box sets to be something they could sell on the shelves of Toys-R-Us sandwiched between Stratego and Monopoly. Meanwhile the game designers pushed for For 3 or more Adults since they learned it as adults and found it to be best played among adults. Jean Wells mentioned Paladins, which is AD&D, the D&D for grown-ups. The one they probably would have called "Adult Dungeons & Dragons" if only management didn't believe it sounded too much like S&M.
To management everything looks like S&M. It's the nature of the beast.
Now, if you'll excuse me I have to pedal this Big Wheel really fast before the wandering Ubues catch up with me.
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Hurts So Good!
Adventure modules these days tend to get poked with the ugly end of the ugly stick.
That was me writing about adventure modules somewhere online this morning, and it's sad but true. Out there in the gaming community not only are adventure modules despised but it's seen as cool to despise them. As if real GM's not only refuse to eat quiche but they also go it alone when it comes to running their adventures, often making it up as they go along. I don't have a problem with this, but as someone who grew up loving adventure modules, often far more than the books which ran the games themselves, it does sadden me somewhat.
I think that people forget just how monumental these titles were. How just the mere mention of Tomb of Horrors or Hall of the Fire Giant King could leave a player quaking in ones Keds. The monsters were ancillary to the adventures themselves and if you survived an Expedition to the Barrier Peaks then bragging rights were yours. If you could find my old Star Frontiers Volturnus modules you would find the phrase "Solved and Conquered" written on the inside cover, presumably as a reminder to myself that they had been played and were not to be played again, but more likely just as a flat out brag to whoever happened to find them. Like Bill Murray in Ghostbusters - "We came. We saw. We kicked its ass!" - it was just a very 80's thing to do.
And I don't think I was alone in this. It may explain the fun-house-like nature of early gaming modules. White Plume Mountain and Ghost Tower of Inverness are two of the goofiest most non-sensical adventures ever written, but man were they fun to run on a snowy afternoon. It wasn't about character. It wasn't about story arcs. It wasn't about scrabbling together experience points and leveling up. It was about getting together with your friends and accomplishing mighty feats of valor. It was the same mentality which during the summertime would send us swarming towards theme parks, looking to ride the worst roller coasters we could find, seeing who could take the hyperbollic twists and turns and drops and still keep three corn dogs stuffed in ones gullet. Even when you did puke you still felt strangely better about yourself for doing so.
Another aspect often overlooked with modules is the matter of antagonism. Don't get me wrong. There were fights. We're talking Junior High, Dungeons & Dragons, and the early 80's. You'd have to remove all three of these aspects to not have a fight break out. With a few notable exceptions aside we were pretty good about it. Not too many fights happened, and when they did they were usually about the rules and not the adventures themselves. Although the GM or DM was often there as an antagonistic force, when things went seriously sour the module was to blame. Don't hate the DM. Hate Gary Gygax. He's the one who wrote most of this stuff. And it worked! Some of the time.
Boxed text designed to be read aloud when the players enter a room is another boon from the past which is about as sexy these days as a pair of over-sized granny panties. People seem to think that if you have half a brain you should be able to pull something as good or better out of it. Granted, a lot of bad writing went into those text boxes, yet at the same time I think they gave us a certain liberty which you don't get with ad-libbing. Freedom from self-consciousness as well as words which are there but taking their sweet time getting around to ones mouth.
Now I'm so much older. I haven't played an adventure module since the 21st century began. And the adventures have gotten better, more intelligent, less gamey, and with fewer characters who are simply pack-mules for magic items named "Bob1" and "Bob2" and "Bob4" (there was no Bob3 because we were cool like that).
Still, like John Cougar Mellencamp I do long for those young boy days with a module like I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City, or X4 Master of the Desert Nomads. Talk about hurting so good!
That was me writing about adventure modules somewhere online this morning, and it's sad but true. Out there in the gaming community not only are adventure modules despised but it's seen as cool to despise them. As if real GM's not only refuse to eat quiche but they also go it alone when it comes to running their adventures, often making it up as they go along. I don't have a problem with this, but as someone who grew up loving adventure modules, often far more than the books which ran the games themselves, it does sadden me somewhat.
I think that people forget just how monumental these titles were. How just the mere mention of Tomb of Horrors or Hall of the Fire Giant King could leave a player quaking in ones Keds. The monsters were ancillary to the adventures themselves and if you survived an Expedition to the Barrier Peaks then bragging rights were yours. If you could find my old Star Frontiers Volturnus modules you would find the phrase "Solved and Conquered" written on the inside cover, presumably as a reminder to myself that they had been played and were not to be played again, but more likely just as a flat out brag to whoever happened to find them. Like Bill Murray in Ghostbusters - "We came. We saw. We kicked its ass!" - it was just a very 80's thing to do.
And I don't think I was alone in this. It may explain the fun-house-like nature of early gaming modules. White Plume Mountain and Ghost Tower of Inverness are two of the goofiest most non-sensical adventures ever written, but man were they fun to run on a snowy afternoon. It wasn't about character. It wasn't about story arcs. It wasn't about scrabbling together experience points and leveling up. It was about getting together with your friends and accomplishing mighty feats of valor. It was the same mentality which during the summertime would send us swarming towards theme parks, looking to ride the worst roller coasters we could find, seeing who could take the hyperbollic twists and turns and drops and still keep three corn dogs stuffed in ones gullet. Even when you did puke you still felt strangely better about yourself for doing so.
Another aspect often overlooked with modules is the matter of antagonism. Don't get me wrong. There were fights. We're talking Junior High, Dungeons & Dragons, and the early 80's. You'd have to remove all three of these aspects to not have a fight break out. With a few notable exceptions aside we were pretty good about it. Not too many fights happened, and when they did they were usually about the rules and not the adventures themselves. Although the GM or DM was often there as an antagonistic force, when things went seriously sour the module was to blame. Don't hate the DM. Hate Gary Gygax. He's the one who wrote most of this stuff. And it worked! Some of the time.
Boxed text designed to be read aloud when the players enter a room is another boon from the past which is about as sexy these days as a pair of over-sized granny panties. People seem to think that if you have half a brain you should be able to pull something as good or better out of it. Granted, a lot of bad writing went into those text boxes, yet at the same time I think they gave us a certain liberty which you don't get with ad-libbing. Freedom from self-consciousness as well as words which are there but taking their sweet time getting around to ones mouth.
Now I'm so much older. I haven't played an adventure module since the 21st century began. And the adventures have gotten better, more intelligent, less gamey, and with fewer characters who are simply pack-mules for magic items named "Bob1" and "Bob2" and "Bob4" (there was no Bob3 because we were cool like that).
Still, like John Cougar Mellencamp I do long for those young boy days with a module like I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City, or X4 Master of the Desert Nomads. Talk about hurting so good!
Saturday, August 23, 2014
Why Create A World
NOTE: This is an excerpt from the Developers Guide to the MRK which I was working on this morning. It's still a bit rough, but I'd love to hear what you think.
Here is where tabletop RPGs are different from all other forms of entertainment - books, music, movies, tv, video games, etc. - in creating these other forms of entertainment is a process which moves from a point of inspiration to a finished product, a state that must be reached before anyone can enjoy it.
With a tabletop RPG you go from a point of inspiration to a point of competency with “finished” left far off on the horizon. This is not lazy or wrong. It's a good because the play of the game, from beginning to end, session to session, campaign after campaign, makes up that other half of creation.
The whole traditional pre-game setup. The rolling of dice for abilities. The choosing of race, classes and equipment. All of that is like an artist setting up an easel, assembling ones paints and sketching out an idea of what to paint. It is not until the game gets rolling that actual paint hits the canvas and the strokes are made which will flush out a character and give it life. If you bring to the table a character who is already fully described, illustrated and advanced in level, a character who is 99% finished? That character might give you 1% play, if you're lucky. Detail adds weight and weight makes a character unwieldy, hard to shoehorn into a game it did not organically grow out of. If the character is a delicate flower of dependencies and multiple conditions then it can only go downhill as the action of a game breaks it to pieces.
As a Game Master, the world is your character. While there is something to be said about the fun of reading source books and studying the complete and fully flushed-out worlds of others as if they were vacation destinations, these same worlds can be absolute hell to game with. Remember, the players make the story and your job is to react to what they do. With a pre-fabricated setting, especially one that your players already know, your options are limited. Granted the MRK gives you the final word on everything, but that is not going to stop the bad feelings from flowing when some player tells you with definite authority that in the year 356 AC Lord Typhus defeated the Hoolerans at the battle of Crisis Ridge and although the Hooleran were obliterated under Lord Typhus's might their castle was not demolished and still stands to this day, supposedly with a dungeon chocked full of golden goodies to be plundered.
Because you haven't read that section of the source book, and had no intentions of going there tonight. You will have to tell them that – no - they cannot go to the castle of the Hoolerans. Because of the MRK they will have to agree with your decree, but quietly they will sit there and simmer and psychically sting you with accusations of rail-roading the game. For you it would have been better if Lord Typhus never existed.
If you create your own world then you only have to answer for what your players have already encountered. In this case the story lawyer can go from being your worst enemy to your best friend, helping remind you of what the party knows as opposed to telling you what you should have already known.
Creating your own world also brings back to adventure gaming something that has been lost over the years of splat books and source tomes (or is that tombs?) which is the thrill of exploration. For the game world you may have a blank canvas in your head, but the players don't know that. As player characters they assume there is something out there worth seeing which they haven't encountered yet. And there is! You just haven't yet encountered it either. Which is why it is not the worst thing in the world for these games to move at a less than speedy pace and with sessions which are days apart. While at work, or cooking dinner, or mowing the lawn - ideas will trickle in. This is yet another reason why the MRK has a website with a “Scribble Page” for quickly jotting down ideas without having to worry about making them fit.
Your friends will do this too, which is why the MRK has sharing and gifting. It's not just a matter of being friendly, it's an easy way for players to say, “hey the game needs this, I've put in my two-cents can you clean it up and make it work?”
World creation seems like a big task, but ultimately it is a group effort without a deadline. It is something you do while playing in the world. When done right, it becomes a part of the game and doesn't seem like work at all.
Here is where tabletop RPGs are different from all other forms of entertainment - books, music, movies, tv, video games, etc. - in creating these other forms of entertainment is a process which moves from a point of inspiration to a finished product, a state that must be reached before anyone can enjoy it.
With a tabletop RPG you go from a point of inspiration to a point of competency with “finished” left far off on the horizon. This is not lazy or wrong. It's a good because the play of the game, from beginning to end, session to session, campaign after campaign, makes up that other half of creation.
The whole traditional pre-game setup. The rolling of dice for abilities. The choosing of race, classes and equipment. All of that is like an artist setting up an easel, assembling ones paints and sketching out an idea of what to paint. It is not until the game gets rolling that actual paint hits the canvas and the strokes are made which will flush out a character and give it life. If you bring to the table a character who is already fully described, illustrated and advanced in level, a character who is 99% finished? That character might give you 1% play, if you're lucky. Detail adds weight and weight makes a character unwieldy, hard to shoehorn into a game it did not organically grow out of. If the character is a delicate flower of dependencies and multiple conditions then it can only go downhill as the action of a game breaks it to pieces.
As a Game Master, the world is your character. While there is something to be said about the fun of reading source books and studying the complete and fully flushed-out worlds of others as if they were vacation destinations, these same worlds can be absolute hell to game with. Remember, the players make the story and your job is to react to what they do. With a pre-fabricated setting, especially one that your players already know, your options are limited. Granted the MRK gives you the final word on everything, but that is not going to stop the bad feelings from flowing when some player tells you with definite authority that in the year 356 AC Lord Typhus defeated the Hoolerans at the battle of Crisis Ridge and although the Hooleran were obliterated under Lord Typhus's might their castle was not demolished and still stands to this day, supposedly with a dungeon chocked full of golden goodies to be plundered.
Because you haven't read that section of the source book, and had no intentions of going there tonight. You will have to tell them that – no - they cannot go to the castle of the Hoolerans. Because of the MRK they will have to agree with your decree, but quietly they will sit there and simmer and psychically sting you with accusations of rail-roading the game. For you it would have been better if Lord Typhus never existed.
If you create your own world then you only have to answer for what your players have already encountered. In this case the story lawyer can go from being your worst enemy to your best friend, helping remind you of what the party knows as opposed to telling you what you should have already known.
Creating your own world also brings back to adventure gaming something that has been lost over the years of splat books and source tomes (or is that tombs?) which is the thrill of exploration. For the game world you may have a blank canvas in your head, but the players don't know that. As player characters they assume there is something out there worth seeing which they haven't encountered yet. And there is! You just haven't yet encountered it either. Which is why it is not the worst thing in the world for these games to move at a less than speedy pace and with sessions which are days apart. While at work, or cooking dinner, or mowing the lawn - ideas will trickle in. This is yet another reason why the MRK has a website with a “Scribble Page” for quickly jotting down ideas without having to worry about making them fit.
Your friends will do this too, which is why the MRK has sharing and gifting. It's not just a matter of being friendly, it's an easy way for players to say, “hey the game needs this, I've put in my two-cents can you clean it up and make it work?”
World creation seems like a big task, but ultimately it is a group effort without a deadline. It is something you do while playing in the world. When done right, it becomes a part of the game and doesn't seem like work at all.
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